One of a Kind: Contemporary Serial Imagery

44 Pages·1989·39.071 MB·English

by  Edward Leffingwell, John Coplans

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ONOE F A KIND

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 3
Introduction byEdwardLeffingwell 4
History byJohnCoplans 2
Definition byJohnCoplans 9
Gail Barringer 16
Larry Bell 18
John Coplans 20
Mary Corse 22
Richard Jackson 24
John McCracken 26
Eric Orr 28
Pauline Stella Sanchez 30
Leonard Seagal 32
Rena Small 34
Nicholas Wilder 36
Catalogue of the Exhibition 38
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Associates 40
City of Los Angeles 40
One of a Kind: Contemporary Serial Imagery
December 6, 1988 —January 15, 1989
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
at Barnsdall Art Park
4804 Hollywood Boulevard aes 3
5 i ©1988 Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery Associates
BosAngeres, Galliomia 90027 John Coplans’ text ©John Coplans
213/485-4581
Texts by Edward Leffingwell and John Coplans
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Catalogue design by Jerry McMillan
LosAngelesMunicipalArtGallery LithographybyTypecraft,Inc.,Pasadena,CA
One of a Kind: Contemporary Serial Imagery Typography byType Works, Inc., Pasadena, CA
Library of Congress Catalogue number: 88-83490 Catalogue set in Helvetica
ISBN 0-936429-12-7 Catalogue printed in an edition of 1000
Acknowledgments
The organization of this exhibition and catalogue has
been a truly collaborative and rewarding experience. We
particularly wish to acknowledge the artists, Gail Bar-
ringer, Larry Bell, John Coplans, Mary Corse, Richard
Jackson, John McCracken, Eric Orr, Pauline Stella San-
chez, Leonard Seagal, Rena Small, and Nicholas Wilder,
for their commitment and involvement throughout the ex-
hibition’s development. Their insights and observations
have been of great value to the curator. For their courtesy
and support, special thanks are due the artists’ repre-
sentatives: Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, Rosamund
Felsen Gallery, Richard Green Gallery, and Kiyo Higashi
Gallery, all of Los Angeles; James Corcoran Gallery and
HoffmanBorman Gallery of Santa Monica; Galerie Le-
long and Max Protetch Gallery, New York. We are in-
debted to John Coplans for permitting us to reprint his
valuable texts, and to Jerry McMillan, designer of this
publication, for the sensitive quality of his design and di-
rection. For their continuing commitment to the pro-
grams of the gallery, we wish to thank Judy Weinstein,
Dorothy Garwood, andthe dedicated members ofthe gal-
lery’s board of Associates. A number of funders have
been most generous in their support of this publication,
and we are pleased to acknowledge Bettina Bancroft,
Jack Glenn and the Richard Green Gallery, Elyse and
Stanley Grinstein, Burnett Miller, and Frederick R. Weis-
man. |!am grateful toAdolfo V.Nodal and Rodney Punt for
their encouragement and support, and to Henry Hopkins
for his ongoing commitment to this institution. Critical to
the implementation of this exhibition have been Marie de
Alcuaz, Steve Clugston, Carla Fantozzi, Sidney Taylor; the
gallery’s education department; our fine staff of prepara-
tors. Itis also appropriate to here thank our colleagues in
General Services for their assistance in carrying out the
first stages of gallery renovation. We are indebted to Ty-
pecraft, Inc., and Type Works, Inc., of Pasadena, for the
production of this document. Finally, to those contribu-
tors to the exhibition publication who wished to remain
anonymous, and to those whose names were not availa-
ble at the time of this writing, our sincere appreciation.
Edward Leffingwell
Director
referential, sequential, developmentally related work, as
distinct from the related issues of editions and multiples,
or modular structure. For purposes of this exhibition and
to clarify the distinct qualities of serial production, itis a
condition that each of the objects in a series is singular
and independent as object. The serial artist has a spe-
cific interest in this association, and the freight of that
interest makes for a clear and what may appear to be al-
most inevitable path. Itis more than a question of signa-
ture stroke or mark or patina or form. Serial art has the
characteristic of self-consistency, encompassed, or sub-
sumed, as Coplans writes, in the overall structure of the
series. The production seems more often than not ab-
stract in nature, but not exclusively, and may conflate the
Introduction
issues of painting and sculpture, or mediate between
painting and sculpture, even when the medium is photog-
Inthe gestation of this exhibition, as the elements of the raphy.
overall structure began to come together, the precedent The repetitive structure or form in the work of these
and rigorous nature of John Coplans’ 1968exhibition for artists is evident in each work of the artist’s production.
The Pasadena Art Museum, Serial Imagery, became a The relationship between objects is consistent, no mat-
sort of touchstone and corrective for curatorial enthusi- ter how many works are numbered in the series. The in-
asm.'l came to consider that seriality, which seemed sud- Sstallation of probably no less than three distinct and
denly everywhere a concern for a large number of related objects is necessary to the communication of se-
contemporary artists of several generations, might be in riality as a factor of conception and production, although
some ways characteristic, or somehow indigenous, to work inthe form of a grid may be both self-contained and
the artistic production of California. serial. When these objects are exhibited together, the re-
John Coplans generously agreed to permit the re- ciprocal nature of the artist’s work becomes more evi-
printing of his essay, ensuring its distribution to another dent, and the exhibition space itself becomes a factor in
audience and providing a focus for the examination of the series’ legibility. Installed in the group format, the in-
the artists included in the present exhibition. He also in- dependent nature of each artist’s work is enhanced by
dicated that by 1978, he had come to amend his under- differentiation, while establishing a harmonic to the work
standing of the history of serial imagery, which he now of the others, separate but interactive, one of a kind.
dates to the work of the pioneer California photographer,
Carleton E.Watkins, preceding Monet’s series of views of Coplans writes:
Gare Saint-Lazare (1877)by more than a decade. A Cali- There are sufficient indications in the emergence of Se-
fornia phenomenon, Coplans suggests, might be traced rial Imagery over the past decade in the United States
through this history. that the rhythms attendant upon the Serial style ritually
ONE OF A KIND includes the work of artists whose celebrate, if only obliquely or subliminally, overtones of
evident concern is the continuing, open-ended produc- American life. In various ways Serial Imagery reveals a
tion of singular objects whose formal or imagistic con- local color thatidentifies theambience of its origin.?\tis
tent refers directly to a larger body of the artist’s worthwhile to consider the work of these artists in this
production. Represented in the exhibition are Gail Bar- light, the diffused, bright, literal light of the Los Angeles
ringer, Larry Bell (who was also included in Coplans’ exhi- basin.
bition), Coplans himself, Mary Corse, Richard Jackson,
John McCracken, Eric Orr, Pauline Stella Sanchez, Edward Leffingwell
Leonard Seagal, Rena Small, and Nicholas Wilder. The
Director
exhibition concentrates on the continuing viability of se-
rial process for artists associated with the Los Angeles
‘John Coplans. Serial Imagery. Exh. cat. Pasadena: Pasadena Art Mu-
art scene. seum and The New York Graphic Society, 1968.
In some ways, most artists participate in self- 2lbid.,p.18.
Monet painted the classic prototype of Serial Imagery:
the twenty nearly identical views of Rouen Cathedral.
With eloquent insight the French writer and politician,
Georges Clemenceau, on viewing the exhibition of the
Cathedral series in 1895stated: “With twenty pictures the
painter has given us the feeling he could have .. .made
fifty,one hundred, one thousand, as many as the seconds
in his life... Monet’s eye, the eye of a precursor, is ahead
of ours, and guides us in the visual evolution which ren-
ders more and more subtle our perception of the uni-
verse.”
Inthe ensuing decades Bertrand Russell elaborated
morefirmly onthe Dedekind-Cantor theory of serial order,
first in Volume |of his Principles of Mathematics (1903)
and then jointly with Alfred North Whitehead in the sec-
ond and third volumes of Principa Mathematica (1912-13).
At this time Marcel Duchamp made his only Serial con-
struction, Three Standard Stoppages (1913).Always the
supreme master of irony, Duchamp intended in this piece
to attack logical reality by setting up an arbitrary para-
digm of the laws of physics. The greatest irony may be
that Duchamp to this day is very likely unaware that his
scientific parody in 1913 accorded perfectly with the
most advanced mathematical principles of the day.
Another aspect of Serial Imagery manifested itself a
few years later, however, this time in poetry. Gertrude
Stein’s famous poem, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,”
written in 1922,is a classic Serial structure — and a strik-
ing antecedent to Andy Warhol’s endless Series of identi-
History
cal Brillo boxes which appeared some forty years later.It
is not known whether Stein was aware of Monet’s Serial
A paradox of art is that despite the artist’s strange antilo- work; but she was familiar enough with Whitehead, (an
gical existence, his thinking often coincides with and early theoretician of Serial order) to name him one of the
even anticipates major discoveries in science or philoso- three geniuses of the time (along with herself and Pablo
phy.The use of Serial Imagery in anything like the forms Picasso).
we know it today began with the work of the major Im- Over the next two decades in northern Europe exper-
pressionist innovator, Claude Monet; and to a remarkable imentation with Serial forms emerged in the work of sev-
extent the Serial’ aspect of Monet’s art parallels the most eral artists and one musician, each working
advanced mathematical concepts of his time. independently of the other. In1914,the Russian-born Ger-
In1872the first half of the pioneer Dedekind-Cantor man Expressionist painter Alexei Jawlensky, a self-exile
mathematical theory of the continuous independent vari- in Switzerland at the outbreak of World War I,began with-
able appeared with Dedekind’s publication of Stetigkeit out apparent reason his extraordinary series of land-
und irrationale Zahlen.2 The second half of the theory, scape Variations. Jawlensky was to continue painting
Cantor’s Beitrage zur Begriindung der transfiniten various Series up to 1937. In the early Twenties Arnold
Mengenlehre,? was set forth in 1895. In the period be- Schoenberg, the German musician, began the sophisti-
tween these two publications Monet produced his first cated use of Serial forms inhis twelve tone scale musical
extended series, the seven views of Gare Saint-Lazare compositions. At approximately the same time in Hol-
(1877),followed bythe series of fifteen Haystacks and the land, Piet Mondrian standardized the components of his
series of twenty Poplars, painted and exhibited in 1891. pictorial structure. Essential to Serial forms is the prop-
And in 1894, still a year before Cantor’s publication, erty of self-consistency, a discovery on which Schoen-
berg and Mondrian based all their future work. Mondrian traced between the evolution of these various artists, in-
was well aware of Monet’s Series. Inhis self-education as cluding Schoenberg, there is at least one thing they hold
an artist at the turn of the century he painted his way in common: their impulse towards abstraction. Music, of
through Monet, Munch, Van Gogh, Matisse and later Ana- course, is in any event an abstract art and Schoenberg’s
lytic Cubism. Between 1902and 1908there are constant fascination with Kandinsky’s circle is understandable.
echoes of Monet in Mondrian’s work, especially of the Nevertheless, in view of the vitality of the intellectual cli-
Poplar and Haystack Series. The idea of stabilizing his mate of Germany up to the point of its destruction by
structure first appears with some consistency around Hitler, and given Kandinsky’s impulse towards abstrac-
1914 in Mondrian’s ovoid-shaped Pier and Ocean Series tion, it seems inevitable that the significance of Monet’s
of charcoal drawings. Prior to leaving Berlin for America Serial paintings would have been noted bythese men and
in 1931,Josef Albers began his series of Treble Clefs, us- incorporated in their art.
ing a repetitive image based on the sign placed at the As aconsequence of the rise of Nazism and the out-
beginning of the musical staff. Albers did not finish this break of World War IIboth Albers and Mondrian were to
Series until after he had settled in the United States; it find their separate ways to the United States, Albers in
was to play a major role in his subsequent evolution. 1933(toteach at Black Mountain College in North Caro-
Although on the surface there is no link, beyond a lina) and Mondrian in 1940 via England to New York,
unitary geographical location, to this extraordinary emer- where hedied in 1944.Although the foundation of Albers’
gence of Serial concern in several artists and a musician art was laid in Europe, it matured in the United States. A
from Germany, these events are not as coincidental as major precursor in the use of Serial Imagery, Albers re-
they appear. The principal connection between mains the most important contemporary link with the
Jawlensky, Schoenberg and Albers was their friendship style’s crucial origins.
with Kandinsky. Jawlensky and Schoenberg were both Whatever admiration for the quality of their accom-
members of Der Blaue Reiter; Schoenberg exhibited a plishment as artists existed in America, neither Albers
number of paintings in the 1911 exhibition along with nor Mondrian were to have a direct influence on the es-
Kandinsky. Kandinsky prior to World War |was the domi- tablishment of the New American Painting,’ for a variety
nant avant-garde artist inGermany and his initial impulse of reasons. Unlike Hans Hofmann, who also immigrated
towards abstraction was occasioned by his encounter- from Germany in the early Thirties, Albers never became
ing a Monet Haystack at an exhibition of Impressionist identified with the emergent generation of New York post-
painting in Moscow around the year 1895.Unable to rec- World War IIpainters. Hofmann’s approach to painting
ognize the motif in the painting, and puzzled, he con- and his gregarious instincts as an artist allowed him to
sulted a catalogue for the title. The splendor of Monet’s assimilate more readily into the American scene; thus he
painting, however, obscured its represented object and is now acknowledged as a founding contributor to the
convinced Kandinsky that the object was no longer an New American Painting. Though Albers was never ig-
indispensable element of painting. Kandinsky main- nored as a painter, within the American art ambience he
tained an interest in Monet’s art thereafter; in 1901 in Mu- has invariably been considered more European than
nich he founded the Phalanx group and exhibited American, despite the fact that his art flowered in this
Monet’s work.®Grohmann mentions the similarities be- country. His famous, endless Series, Homage to the
tween Kandinsky’s painting technique in 1903 and the Square, which he still continues to paint with incredible
phase of Monet predating the Haystacks.’ verve at the age of eighty, was conceived and begun in
Inaddition, Kandinsky was a continuous and close 1948 at approximately the same time the New American
friend of Jawlensky in the years prior to World War |and Painting had established its identity — or at least its
thereafter when Kandinsky was teaching atthe Bauhaus. quality. For the most part Albers has bychoice, it seems,
There can be little doubt Kandinsky noted the constant been an isolated figure, standing aloof, obsessively pur-
seriality of his friend’s work after 1914. suing his own path. Yetone of the ways in which new art
Albers was a student and later ateacher at the Bau- authenticates itself and demonstrates its inherent radi-
haus and knew Kandinsky well. It is worth noting that cal quality is the manner in which it enforces a re-evalua-
Jawlensky called his first Serial works Variations, a title tion of past art. And just as the New American Painting
common to music and one used several times bySchoen- has forced a rehabilitation of Claude Monet and brought
berg for his compositions. Albers similarly named one of his art back into the prominence it so justly deserves, an-
his later Series Variants. Ifno didactic connection can be other,younger generation of American painters now com-
pels a reevaluation of Albers’ art; it is to be hoped that De Kooning and Kline all painted in series at one time or
with recognition of Albers’ key contribution to the evolu- another, to paint in series is not necessarily to be Serial.
tion of Serial Imagery, his position and seminal contribu- Newman's series of Fourteen Stations of theCross areall
tion to American Painting will be more realistically painted in black and white — but they are linked by a nar-
assessed.° rative theme. Motherwell’s many Spanish Elegies, De
A special condition of the American scene (signifi- Kooning’s Women, Kline’s black and white paintings and
cant to the generation of the New American Painters) his multi-colored paintings, along with Newman’s paint-
was an attitude which rejected any distinct stylistic affili- ings are classical instances of theme and variation. Gott-
ation to a particular painter or movement. While it is true lieb, in a number of his later Blast paintings, becomes
both Gorky and Pollock owe an enormous debt to Pi- more systematic; but again, these paintings are insuffi-
casso, they worked their respective ways through Pi- ciently rigorous in the handling of syntax to qualify as
casso, and finally rejected falling into his orbit; indeed, Serial.
they proceeded to first raise and then paint a series of Initiated byAlbers, the adoption of Serial Imagery by
objections to Picasso’s art. This process was eventually American artists began tentatively in the late Fifties and
to unleash their own unique vision. Moreover, ifthe stylis- spread rapidly in the Sixties. No single event determined
tic variety inherent to the New American Painting is this change of climate. The American development of Se-
closely observed, it can be seen that every major Ameri- rial Imagery is quantitatively weighted in favor of ab-
can painter who broke through in that epoch employed a stract art, but not exclusively so; Andy Warhol, for
similar procedure vis-a-vis the dominant Twentieth Cen- example, has contributed richly to the use of Serial Imag-
tury European art. Itmust be emphasized that the Ameri- ery with a literal subject. Concurrent with the first Serial
can painters were looking to the overall range of activity in the United States an isolated European figure
European art within the first half of the century. In this curiously emerged: the French painter Yves Klein, who
manner they maintained diversity of outlook without later elicited the respect of a number of American paint-
eclecticism. The influence of Mondrian, orfor that matter, ers. Klein’s approach to Seriality, however, failed to influ-
of Malevich, Kandinsky, Picasso — or any specific style ence the European scene. Moreover, the development of
or movement such as Surrealism or German Expression- his work was prematurely cut off by his untimely death in
ism — was therefore oblique. Itis precisely this sense of 1962at the age of thirty-four.
objection, or reaction, to any highly influential artist’s Apart from Albers who had been working in Series
work that accounts for the vigor of American painting since 1931,the first American painter to adopt the Serial
and invalidates any attempt to ascribe direct influences format was Ad Reinhardt, in the mid-Fifties.’° (Reinhardt,
of a fixed lineage to stylistic developments within recent by virtue of the length of his painting life which began
American art. prior to World War II,belongs to the generation of New
Another aspect in the New American Painting pre- American Painters; he was a close friend and associate
vented the absorption and use of Serial structure. Essen- of painters of that group and an original contributor to
tial to the morphology of Serial Imagery is the this phase of American painting.) Inthe early Sixties the
abandonment of the conspicuous uniqueness of each use of Serial Imagery proliferated, and Albers and
painting. The New American Painers, on the contrary, Reinhardt were joined by Morris Louis, Frank Stella, Ken-
neth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol and the sculp-
part of their esthetic, the unique identify of each individ- tor Larry Bell, to name only a few."'A number of younger
ual painting. Small changes inthe overall size of acanvas sculptors on the American scene use or have used series,
— even an inch ortwo —as well as differences indegree but either the Serial syntax is not a central concern to
of color saturation, changes in hue or texture or density their art, or their structure is basically modular, that is, of
of paint, were used to avoid standardization and to en- a micro-order. Although the work of such sculptors as
hance singularity. Many paintings by Newman, for exam- Donald Judd has been described as Serial, this is incor-
ple, are similar to one another — yet at the same time rect. Judd, for example, replicates parts by having identi-
each painting is vastly different from any other. Each as- cal units manufactured; they are then positioned to form
serts adifferent solution and expresses adifferent mood. one sculpture, one unit. Judd’s images have a modular
One painting may be somber, even dark; another, highly structure, and his range of similar sculptures relate more
keyed. The colors are rarely repeated. to sculptors’ traditional use of editions than totrue Serial
Although it is true Newman, Gottlieb, Motherwell, forms.
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