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Up in the Air
John Haberin New York City
François Morellet, Fred Sandback, and Minimalism
A title by François Morellet tells you everything and nothing. That alone marks him as a rarity, a Minimalist with a sense of humor. After a winter show of Fred Sandback and other Minimalists in Chelsea taking to the air, he seems more of a lightweight but maybe also more fun.
Across and through
From Un Tableau 78°–12° et un Angle Droit en Néon + Fil Electrique 8°–98°, from 1992, you can expect a canvas set at an angle to the wall, but not why that particular angle. Another work specifies only a rotation, but here you at least you get to play with numbers. 
You can expect a right-angled neon light (blue, it turns out), set at another angle, with the electric wire a nice bonus—because art for François Morellet always has in mind something more. You can think of just a part of it as a painting (and tableau is the ordinary label for just that), but maybe or maybe not the whole. Minimalism in France was always more traditional than elsewhere and yet also more playful. If it also lacks a certain bite, he set his mind on higher things.
You may not get the point from a title for another reason, too: your eyes glaze over. That can happen with titles as instructions for a wall painting by Sol LeWitt, too—and it places Morellet firmly in time, when Minimalism was just getting underway. He helped found Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, or GRAV, in 1961. I dare not say that Minimalism was just getting off the ground, not when floor tiles by Carl Andre pointedly refuse to do so. But Morellet took more and more to the third dimension and into the air. A brief survey at his Upper East Side gallery takes him almost to his death at age ninety, in 2016.
He began in the 1950s with strict geometry on canvas, like the nestled outlines of squares and diamonds. A fussier design of angled black lines looks like Op Art without the visual activity. Fortunately, though, he was just getting going. Dan Flavin introduced fluorescent lights, but holding their place along a horizontal or in a corner, so that only the light itself would fill the room. So much for that. Morellet is too much a traditionalist to accept the room itself as theater, with the viewer an actor. He is taking to the air.
It is never as hard as it looks. He leans a large white square against another, itself leaning back from the vertical, and you might look behind it to see what sustains their delicate balance. It was right in front you all along. Robert Ryman had already made clear that supporting elements like bolts count as part of the work, much like Morellet's electric wire—or, here, a slim metal rail. It runs across the top of the first square and ends neatly in the far upper corner of the second. He relies on given shapes and objects, but the whole is anything but a class in plane geometry or hardware.
Conceptually, too, he wanted more. Art, he said, is a thing in itself, deriving from the intentions of the artist. Yet it also belongs to a system that takes over from the lone object and artist alike. Never mind that the system could be his intention, too, just like those angle measures. Morellet spoke, too, of the roles of fixed procedures and sheer chance. He called his wall paintings trames, which means grids, a word that Americans like LeWitt revered, but also webs, as in the web of life.
Four smaller squares cross a wall, each divided into a field of color and a field of white. Each recalls abstract art's aspirations to rigor back in the day. They tilt progressively, though, like a single square in stop-action motion. Its tumbling lifts the object into time and space. And the four dividing lines are part of a single horizontal. It unites the work, even as it cuts right through.
Museums have begun to revel in a maximal side to Minimalism, as with Donald Judd at MoMA, and to see beyond New York to Lee Ufan and Mono-ha in Japan. More for Morellet also meant a setting free, and he called some reliefs relâches, literally an intermission or a loosening. Still, he could go only so far. His wall paintings, of thick angled black lines, never manage either LeWitt's rigor or, even more, his frenzy. The traditionalist does best when he cuts across and through, with that rail or that horizontal. With two right-angled neon tubes, four right-angled strips of wood and canvas, and one canvas rectangle, one relâche seems to burst out of its frame—but then what held it in all along?
A space odyssey
Any thread for Fred Sandback runs from floor to ceiling, but how often does anyone follow it to the ceiling? Maybe not often enough. One can take for granted that Sandback has his formula—and watch as it plays out. How, he obliges you to ask, can thick threads function collectively as at once a barrier, a sculptural object, a found object, and near-empty space? How much can they lend their color to the air itself, and how far can you enter so that the air becomes yours? As for their spans, one can take for granted that an artist so established will command a space with suitably high ceilings, and one can for granted, too, a gallery's or museum's white box.
Not this once. I almost failed to look up, to find that a portion of the ceiling at David Zwirner angles up toward a window, to allow strong but indirect natural light—without the ceiling open to the sky by James Turrell at MoMA PS1. The work and the architecture bring out something new in each other, as a thread or two extends into the light. The newfound vertical also plays off against the work's horizontal progression. A row of paired threads splits in two, ending in groups of three or in a thread alone. You may see a progression or a theater in the round. Either way, Sandback redefines the gallery by thinking outside the box.
Not that it pays all that often to dwell on Chelsea architecture. One might just as soon forget how a posh gallery can afford such things, like Pace's seven stories and open terrace—even as Hauser & Wirth finishes off its new building and another for Zwirner is under construction around the corner. Art and architecture can be downright toxic when coupled with money, as a few blocks north at The Shed and Hudson Yards. Here, though, four rooms for just four artists allow a break from crowded group shows and big names showing off. You can take your time, for once, to think about what goes into each of four works. You can see, too, not only what they have in common, but also a variety that you may not associate with Minimalism.
A show here just last year of Judd was all about maximalizing Minimalism, timed to overlap his MoMA retrospective. Now he has a room once more, for eye-level metal boxes along the walls, each crossed by Plexiglas. Its color plays off their cool confinement. They never quite leap off the wall or take on a collective rhythm, but they do have one asking how much to take them as a single work. One can ask the same, in retrospect, about many a Judd installation. One can ask, too, about Flavin and John McCracken.
Flavin's light fixtures almost always stand alone, coloring a corner or dissolving into light. Here half a dozen sets of three fluorescent tubes run horizontally, across from another half dozen on the facing wall. None are all that long, and the ones in the middle are shorter still—perhaps half the size of the outer pair. Together, they focus attention not just on the fixtures or the surrounding wall, but also the space within. The outer tubes may overpower the flat metal of the central tube's support, drenching it in their light, or adjacent lights may blend. The space between yellow and red may thus become pure yellow or orange, and its glow stands up to the tubes themselves. Simple colors take on unexpected variations, with your movements alone to define how they unfold.
Formalism is no longer news, and neither are four dead white males. McCracken, though, recently made it into the news thanks to a metal pillar that appeared out of nowhere amid the red sandstone of a Utah desert. Some guessed that he placed it there before his death in 2011, while his estate argued back, until four men claimed it for themselves while hauling it away. McCracken's room in Chelsea could almost come in response—and in response to those, like me, skeptical of his West Coast "Light and Space" Minimalism and those planks that used to turn up seemingly everywhere, leaning up against the wall. If you really want a monolith, he looks back to the most famous of all, the black slab in the film 2001, with six of them free-standing at the center of the room. From floor to ceiling and from wall to wall, Minimalism has its own space odyssey.
François Morellet ran at Hauser & Wirth through April 7, 2021, four Minimalists at David Zwirner through February 20.