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Carter Ratcliff

Autore di John Singer Sargent

77+ opere 912 membri 3 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Born in Seattle in 1941, Washington, Carter Ratcliff grew up in Michigan and Ohio. In 1963, he earned a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago. By 1967, he had settled in New York. His books on art include John Singer Sargent (Abbeville Press, 1982); Robert Longo (Rizzoli, 1985); The Fate mostra altro of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996); and Andy Warhol: Portraits (Phaidon Press, 2007). (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno

Opere di Carter Ratcliff

John Singer Sargent (1982) 321 copie
Andy Warhol (1983) 82 copie
Komar and Melamid (1988) 21 copie
Aperture 91 (1983) 16 copie
Pat Steir: Paintings (1986) 16 copie
Red Grooms (1984) 16 copie
Alex Katz: Cutouts (1979) 12 copie
Robert Longo (1985) 10 copie
James Rosenquist (1995) 9 copie
Bernar Venet (1994) 5 copie
Castillo (1984) 5 copie
Johnnie Winona Ross (2007) 3 copie
Give Me Tomorrow (1983) 3 copie
Arrivederci, Modernismo (2007) 2 copie
Venet (1998) 2 copie
The Unacknowledged Equal (2020) 2 copie
Astrom, Austrom, Astroem, Astrom (1998) — Autore — 2 copie
Lucas Samaras: Sittings (1980) 2 copie
Bryan Hunt (1983) 2 copie
David Shapiro 1 copia
Futura 2000 Futura 2020 (2020) 1 copia
Tequila Mockingbird (2015) 1 copia
Sight Site 1 copia
Botero 1 copia

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Informazioni generali

Data di nascita
1941
Sesso
male

Utenti

Recensioni

review of
Carter Ratcliff's Out of the Box - The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 11, 2013

This is the 1st quarter of the review. In order to see the whole thing go here:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/346664-review-of-carter-ratcliff-s-out-of-th...

In the author's bio on the back inner jacket fold-over of this bk it states: "Carter Ratcliff is a leading art critic and contributing editor of Art in America." On Art in America's wikipedia p he's not listed as an editor but as a "Notable contributor". Whatever the case, he's obviously seriously steeped in the art world he writes about. Out of the Box - The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975 covers a plethora of artists, many of them of interest to me at some point or another, & a few that I was previously unfamiliar w/.

As for Art in America? I found 3 issues in my personal library, all from the period under discussion in this bk: January-February 1966, July-August 1969, July-August 1972. This latter being the only one I've read in its entirety - probably b/c it's a special issue on the American Indian. Not really remembering what Art in America is like, I was ready to criticize it as being really Art in New York City Because No Place Else is Important but given that the American Indian issue has an article called "Black Mesa: Progress Report on an Ecological Rape" & that there's a newspaper article reproduced in another issue titled "No Abstract Art In White House" as well as Hans Richter's "In Memory of a Friend" re Marcel Duchamp, I'm finding myself more interested in them than I expected. The 3rd issue even has a nice 4pp article on Concrete Poetry AND an article called "Art in Central America Today". [As an aside, I still tend to interpret things like this: "Born in London, he [Peter Hutchinson] moved to the United States when he was tweny-three. After studying art at the University of Illinois, he moved to New York in 1961, and by the mid-1960s was known for the quirky elegance of his abstract paitnings." (p 245) as meaning that if he'd stayed in Illinois instead of moving to NYC his "quirky elegance" wd've been of almost no interest to just about anyone.] I'm hooked.

Nonetheless, I've always preferred magazines w/ few or no ads - impractical tho that may be for a magazine published in NYC, the land of bilk & money - at least from the landlordian or "lobster" (as Jack Smith may've called landlords) perspective.

Ratcliff is very methodical in his explication. The progression of his chapters builds from a clear beginning thru obvious steps:

"Apodicticity
"From Box to Plane and Line
"Line Continued
"Line Enlarged
"Line Erased
"From Line to Grid
"Grid Continued
"From Grid to Room
"From Room to Maze
"Maze Continued
"Irony
"Dread
"Disintegration
"Absence
"Absence Revised
"Beyond Absence
"From Box to Behavior
"Behavior Continued
"Danger
"Beyond Danger
"Fact to Fiction
"Fiction Continued
"The Reinvention of Art"

The introduction's entitled "Smashing the Minimalist Enclosure" &, indeed, the bk heavily references the Minimalist object & the post-Minimalist reaction to it. The Minimalist object is presented as "apodictic": clearly established, beyond dispute - perhaps one might say: 'axiomatic' - altho Ratcliff doesn't. I can't claim to know much about Minimalist Art - I saw what was probably a Donald Judd wooden box at the Baltimore Museum of Art long ago & was impressed by its craft b/c it had subtle angles & tightly jointed seams - it wasn't exactly square. Judd's quoted, in the epigraph that begins the "From Box to Plane and Line" chapter, as saying: ""Boxes are fairly complicated things. You've got eight edges."" (p 15) I also read the Gregory Battcock edited Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology long ago (see my paltry review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3189448-minimal-art ). I know much more about Minimalist Music. At any rate, I'm not that interested in either at this point.

About the Battcock anthology, Ratcliff writes: "In 1965, Donald Judd declared, "A work need only be interesting." Toward the end of that year Barbara Rose said, in "ABC Art," that if "you are bored" when faced with objects like Judd's, "probably you are intended to be." [..] "When Rose reprinted "ABC Art" in Gregory Battcock's Minimal Art anthology in 1968, she left out the section on boredom. By then, the topic had been dropped. Unfriendly sensibilities found it too boring to pursue, and it was too knotted for Minimalism's admirers to unravel." - p 126

In the Acknowledgments, Ratcliff writes: "My task was to show the power and variety of the strategies that liberated art from the box as exhibition space and, just as important, from the box as geometric object. I would like to acknowledge, as well, that this task has been performed already, even as art was making its escape from its minimalist confinement. I'm referring to the work of Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar, who launched the magazine Avalanche in 1971". (pp iv-v) This immediately endeared me to this bk b/c I have issues Number Six (Fall 1972) & Number 12 (Winter 1975) & they are very dear to me indeed - esp Number Six wch is dedicated to the work of Vito Acconci.

From Tad Crawford's Introduction:

"In "Anecdote of the Jar," Wallace Stevens writes of a jar placed in the Tennessee wilderness that "took dominion everywhere" and ordered what had been wild and untamed.

"In the art world of the 1960s, Minimalism offered a structure not unlike that jar, an ordering principle, Platonic and powerful, that subdued all manner of opponents. Yet no sooner had Minimalism carried the day than the energy of the wilderness asserted itself with the hunger of maggots feasting on the rot of the vanquished dead until new, previously unimaginable forms rose unruly, polytropic, hydra-headed, and with the devouring-creating force of the many-armed Shiva wrapped in his garland of skulls."

[..]

"Against the impersonal, systematic, minimalist endgame, these younger artists redefined the possible in art. Emotion, mystery, voice, explosions, landscape, memory, burial, story, trees, masturbation, speculative thought, physical motion, the hand, subjectivity, and so much more emerged from repression with the sudden, elemental shock of a tsunami." - p vi

& I agree, sortof, except that I'm not sure it's ever completely valid & accurate to place all art w/in the confines of a lineage - as is done esp in the case of avant garde art. In other words, while it's generally 'respectable' to most art critics for artistic theory to be taking into consideration predecessors & to be propounding why this particular theory supercedes its forbearers, it doesn't necessarily always work that way. In a sense, such an approach always reduces theory to being the latest reactionary trend - wch may very well be what most art theories are but there are always 'outsider' exceptions - & by 'outsider' I don't necessarily mean people ignorant of these art world trends, just people who exist outside of them - possibly b/c of indifference to the lineage.

Each chapter begins w/ an exemplary instance of the chapter's theme. Hence, the section entitled "Out of the Box", wch follows the Intro & precedes the 1st chapter per se, sets the tone w/ this: "One afternoon in October, 1969, Barry Le Va stood against a wall of the art gallery at Ohio State University, Columbus. Then he ran as fast as he could toward the opposite wall, fifty-five feet away. Crashing hard, he waited for a moment and then retraced his steps, again at top speed, and again, he was halted by the gallery wall. After repeating this action for an hour and forty-three minutes, Le Va was done with the first stage of Velocity Piece #1." (p x) Of course, he cd've just left the box-as-restrictive-exhibition-space behind by walking out the door or thru some other window of opportunity but it wdn't've been so dramatic.

One of my biggest beefs w/ this bk is w/ its illustrations. The bk designer apparently thought it was a nice idea to put an offset square or rectangle behind each of the pictures. This effectively reduced the amt of space available for the pictures themselves - wch are already too small. Add to that the tiny font size & dim grayness of the captions & the reader's in for a squint fest. A case in point being the installation view foto of "Nine at Leo Castelli" (p 17). The foto's 3& 3/16ths x 2&1/8th inches & shows the work of 5 artists. Even w/ a magnifying glass, it's pretty reductive. Picky so'n'so that I am, I also noticed that Robert Morris's "Untitled (Slab)" & "Untitled (Cloud)" are both labeled as being "12 x 96 x 96 inches" (p 2) when they look pretty clearly to be more like 12 x 48 x 96 inches.

I'm constantly pleasantly surprised by references to Avicenna, a Persian polymath who lived from c. 980 to 1037. I 1st came across mention him when I was creating Thought Experiments for my orchestra named HiTEC to perform. Here's one result: "Avicenna's Floating Maori": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOFMfbtRmc. In this bk, there's a repro of a Frank Stella painting called "Avicenna" from 1962. Ratcliff quotes Carl Andre writing:

"Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting.

"Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting.

"Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting." - p 4

Now I find statements like the above to just be sensationalist. Andre's one of those artists I found interesting for a few moments only b/c of the unexpectedness of some of what he's done. But it almost immediately became of no interest to me. These manifesto-like proclamations might grab attn in the art world for a while but in the end they're just shallow dogma to me - of little or no use for anyone's creative praxis.

I'm more interested in Walter De Maria. De Maria just died in the summer of 2013. Not only was he an artist, he was also a musician in The Primitives, a band that preceded The Velvet Underground. "Busy drawing lines on the Nevada desert, De Maria supplied the catalog with a picture of mile-long, parallel lines he had drawn in the Mojave Desert the year before." (p 12) "De Maria planned yet another: two mile-long bulldozer cuts, one in Africa, another in India, and a mile-square cut in the United States. The elements of this Three Continent Project were to be oriented so that, when photographed by satellite, their juxtaposed images would form a cross within a square. Only the African cut was made, in the Sahara Desert." (pp 50-51)

"Like Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria had drawn lines on the desert floor, which could be seen in full only from an aircraft. In 1974, he began to build The Lightning Field (1974-77), a grid a mile long and a kilometer wide, and thus big enough to escape the ratios of scale which define an object as miniature, or monumental, or something in between. In its immensity, The Lightning Field is simply the size that it is". - p 78

"First he planted thirty-five poles in the desert near Flagstaff, Arizona. Three years later, he planted four-hundred poles spread in a gridded pattern across a stretch of western New Mexico". - pp 78-79

Don't really agree that "The Lightning Field is simply the size that it is", it seems monumental to me. Whatever. I HAVE wanted to visit this monster since I 1st heard about it, probably in the late '70s, & I still haven't gone there yet. It wd've been nice to've done it when De Maria was still alive.

I'm not the least knowledgeable person in the world about contemporary art but I'm always happy to learn about artists I wasn't previously familiar w/. The "From Box to Plane and Line" chapter introduced me to (or reminded me about) Bill Bollinger & Richard Tuttle. In a later chapter, there was Patrick Ireland & Fred Sandback. Alas, I didn't find any of them to be anything special. &, also alas, that somewhat characterized much of this. While I'd certainly credit Ratcliff w/ thoroughness, I often found the way he wrote about the many artists whose work he mentions to make me less interested in them than I'd ever been before. Somehow the excitement is drained out - or, to be fair, I'm so much more jaded now than I was 35 or 40 yrs ago when I 1st read about many of these folks that it all seems flat to me these days. Nonetheless, I'm truly grateful to Ratcliff for adding to the literature re this area.

Of the ones I wasn't familiar w/, Mary Miss caught my attn a bit: "During 1968-69, she used wooden stakes and lengths of rope to mark off stretches of terrain. This was a sort of drawing on the earth and sometimes in the air above the earth, though Miss never imposed a motif on a setting. Rather her patterns of rope always responded to the shape of the site. Ropes/Shore (1969) reached along the edge of Ward's Island, New York, for over a mile, echoing its contour." (p 34)

I've had an interest in Tom Marioni b/c he did a performance where he pissed from a ladder into a metal bucket & b/c he started The Museum of Conceptual Art. Interestingly, there's now a Museum of Conceptual Art online created by one Earl Vickers. Here's a description of something he did at the Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco in 1972:

"Genesis 1.20 tells of the fourth day, when fish are created "and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." To celebrate this verse, Marioni placed his sheet of paper high on the wall, out of reach.

"I had to jump to get to it. I would circle the gallery and then run parallel to the wall, and while I was in flight, like a hurdle jumper with a pencil, I'd make that mark. I kept doing that all day long. . . . The marks were a record of my attempted flight, and the end result looks like a wing, this arced bunch of lines." - p 21

I'm grateful to Ratcliff for writing about this b/c it's such an obvious precursor to Matthew Barney's considerably more celebrated "Drawing Restraint #10" (2005). Marioni, in turn, found inspiration in the "ritualized performances by Yves Klein, the French painter, he began to think of Pollock's dripping less as a way to make a painting than as an action valuable in itself." - p 22

Robert Barry's another artist who's interested me b/c he took things further than most:

"Color becomes arbitrary. I started using thin transparent nylon monofilament. Eventually the wire became so thin that it was virtually invisible. This led to my use of a material which is invisible, or at least not perceivable in a traditional way.

"Barry used several imperceptible materials: radio waves of various frequencies, microwaves, ultrasonic sound waves. Emitting rays neither harmful nor detectable by the unaided senses, Radiation Piece, Cesium (1969) made itself known only as a plaque stating the name of the piece and the physical characteristics of its material." - p 31

I started thinking that the bk was really getting 'out-of-the-box' when it came to this: "Group shows usually look cluttered. In the spring of 1969, the critic Lucy Lippard invited a crowd of more than three dozen artists to do their best to leave the Paula Cooper Gallery looking empty. Douglas Huebler, Stephen Kaltenbach, Dan Graham, and many others placed books on a table that stood near the dealer's office. Hans Haacke's work was a current of air from a small oscillating fan. With one shot of an air rifle at a gallery wall, Lawrence Weiner made a nearly imperceptible antiobject." - p 32

Rosemarie Castoro is another artist whose work has interested me that I don't often run across info about. I 1st encountered her in the excellent Ursula Meyer edited Conceptual Art (see my little review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/177439.Conceptual_Art ). I'm grateful that there's much more about her here:

"One night in the spring of 1968, Rosemarie Castoro rode a bicycle along a circuit encompassing twenty square blocks of midtown Manhattan. "I had a gallon of paint attached to my bike, with a hole in the bottom," she recently recalled. "As long as I kept moving, there was a line of drips. Once, when I had to stop at a red light, a man in a car pointed out that the paint had begun to puddle. Actually, I used quite a lot—four gallons—and it took me three hours. Afterwards, I went to Max's, which was the artists' bar in those days. Also, St. Adrian's, which was further downtown. Anyway, I went back the next day to photograph the drips. It was part of a series called Streetworks, organized by Scott Burton and John Perreault. We would just do them and run away."

"Usually, Castoro's lines were solid: long strips of aluminum tape applied to a floor or the city pavement. "These were my Cracking Pieces," Castoro says. "The idea was that the line would crack open the floor or the city, and things would emerge. I even stuck a length of tape to my own face."" - p 38

Have you ever seen a dripped line of paint on the streets? I have, quite a few times. I've often wondered whether they were put there deliberately. It seems like they probably were. Was Castoro the 1st in a long line of such painters? Ah.. the expansion of the line..
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
This substantial volume opens with An interview with Robert Storr which includes discussions about Katz's approach to his work. This is followed by Survey, The Art of Alex Katz by Carter Ratcliff in which he conisders the artist's work from the 1950s to the present.; In Focus, Sylvia by Iwona Blazwick she concentrates on the one painting. The Artist's Choice, is a selection of nine works by the New York Poets; and The Artist's Writings range from 1959 to 2002. The book includes an illustrated Chronology and a Bibliography.

Although a paperback, with its heavy dust jacket this volume feels more substantial; it is thoughtfully laid out and well illustrated throughout with around 140 works, all in full colour and the majority up to full page. There are further comparative illustrations of other artists' work and in addition the illustrated Chronology.

It all adds up to an interesting and often illuminating survey of the artist's work and outlook, and a fine collection of his output.
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
presto | Apr 24, 2012 |

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77
Opere correlate
5
Utenti
912
Popolarità
#28,117
Voto
4.2
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3
ISBN
75
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