Minimalism with a Credit Card

James Turrell and David Novros

Aspects, Forms, and Figures

James Turrell still unites Minimalism with something an Abstract Expressionist would admire, but now in the form of gadgets and tchotchkes. He creates sheets of color from holograms—a device associated with illusion, but also with commerce. Is it still Minimalism or merely a parlor trick? Maybe both, but he and David Novros in their early days showed how much Minimalism probed the limits of perception.

Clement Greenberg famously opposed abstraction to kitsch. Postmodern critics continued Greenberg's critique of capitalism, but by seeing fine art as part of the problem. Now, the market has all but taken over, and it is not bringing utopia. Not unlike Turrell's outsize credit cards, a group show helps trace love of the humble object. "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" seeks a beauty akin to abstraction in the things of this world.

Two sides of the picture plane

A wedge of light by James Turrell has two aspects. It exists as an heir to abstract painting and as Minimalist sculpture—both in their most grandiose mode. It transforms the space of a gallery and it depends on the viewer, for an illusion, after all, exists only in the eye and mind. Yet it does not offer a space for a viewer to enter.

One can see it as the two sides of the art object in late Modernism. Call that object the truth in painting. Call it a sculpture. Either way, it unites volume and the picture plane, and it offers a space for contemplation and delight.

With his recent work, Turrell does something new. He divides that unity into two bodies of work. That brings his output a bit too close to a commodity for comfort, but it also allows one to see the elements of his technical wizardry up close.

My first exposure to them came just as spring's gathering daylight extended past museum closing hours. Long sunlit evenings mean late sunsets, and they shut down his installation at P.S. 1 until fall. Visitors there may have to settle for a wall of light or mist by Olafur Eliasson, but those who need a light fix in winter may need their Turrell fix elsewhere.

As with that square opening in a rooftop, he still exploits symmetry, simplicity, and transparency, and he still invites comparisons to Mark Rothko. Sunset turns visitors to Long Island City into Moonwatchers out of Caspar David Friedrich. Again, too, he insists on the sensation of light as occupying real space, like Dan Flavin but with natural or ordinary gallery lighting. As with both traditions, he plays with painting and architecture—again envisioned as plane and volume.

Before anything else, however, Turrell does something else again: he plays the illusionist. He has also long aligned illusion with his sculptural side. He reverses one's associations of painting with illusion and Minimalism with the literal. For all his interest in Romanticism and Modernism, that marks a real break, in the direction of Postmodernism's theater.

Boxes of light

For these reasons, Turrell may attract the same friends and critics as a dramatist like Bill Viola. New-media illusions in white light from younger artists may try even harder to overwhelm the eye. However, they also insist on industrial processes rather than the Romantic sublime. Anthony McCall and Terence Koh both update Flavin's fluorescent tubes updated for Hollywood studio sets. As it happens, Barry Diller has just opened his Chelsea offices, covered with bulging volumes of frosted glass by Frank Gehry.

With "Light Leadings," then, Turrell goes high tech, in order to pull apart the components of vision. The largest works manipulate neon and LEDs like pixels, rather than leave changing patterns of light up to the gallery and the night sky. These dwell on his Rothko side, and they assert control. Visitors sit in front of them, while pale, swollen rectangles embedded in large monitors slowly shift in placement, intensity, or color. As with his open ceiling, it takes time to realize that anything is happening at all. I cannot swear that I have described any of the patterns or their evolution correctly.

Smaller works allow the image to change according to one's movements, while the geometry itself remains fixed. These develop Turrell's illusionist side. At first one may see a diagonal line in electric green against a black field. As one walks past or turns one's head, the line becomes a plane in depth.

If one does not recognize these works as holograms, one may imagine that the planes occupy dark, shallow niches cut into the wall. The glass could outline cabinets in a museum of natural history. I have seen one-color holograms before, although never so dark, crisp, and intense.

Turrell still asks one to contemplate real space. The large gallery and its winding partitions have by no means become incidental. However, his reliance on technology alters his output from single installations. So many discrete art objects may invite charges of selling out, and his devices may make him seem more of a one-trick pony than ever—if maybe now with two tricks. The departure from fixed geometry in the LEDs and the diagonals in the holograms also reduce his grounding in formalism. He may have become more derivative, only this time of science more than art.

However, one can see more clearly than before his roots in painting, both as a skill and as an analysis of vision. One can see again, too the more modern idea of painting as physical object. As with the trendier light boxes of Jeff Wall, the work closest to Rothko sticks out and weighs the most. Perhaps the cuts in a wall approach his cut in a ceiling after all.

Two Perceptual Puzzles

I could try to convince you that Turrell is still a minimalist after all that. You might even believe me, but it would have little to do with why people flock to his work. They go for the wow factor. They go for the illusion. Do his fields of color really have anything at all in common with early color-field painting, like that of David Novros?

Consider, though, what Turrell had to do with Minimalism in the first place. I mean aside from his age and his postminimal interest in earthworks out west, like Roden Crater underway in Arizona. He long made the visitor's presence part of the theater, as on sunsets at P.S. 1. One shivers with the winter chill as a rectangle cut in the ceiling becomes a cloud of light. He also called attention to the spaces of a gallery, from nothing more than their readymade materials. Carl Andre does the same with steel plates or Dan Flavin with industrial lights. Holograms, in contrast, are by their very nature a finished work and an illusion.

With a little more effort, I could make the case for these, too, as Minimalism. They represent nothing but themselves, one's own presence sets the colors in motion, and they use a technique as ubiquitous as a credit card. They leave only an industrial sheen up close—except when they dissolve into a rainbow washing over one's head. Mostly, though, they offer a polished work of art and an illusion. Planes slice outward like light sabers, and colored shadows follow one from a distance, like the eyes in an old-fashioned portrait. Turrell calls his latest series "Large Holograms," but they in fact approach the scale of easel painting.

So can I take back some of my praise already? I distrust them, but they wow me just the same. I shall look at my VISA bill with new respect. And yet while getting over my chagrin, some actual art from the late 1960s does not wow me—and a good thing, too. Where a post-Minimalist like Turrell creates perceptual special effects, Novros presents a perceptual jigsaw puzzle. He even assembles it for one.

It is long, long overdue. Novros painted just as abstraction and Minimalism were converging into color-field painting, and he pursued its rigor with a vengeance. His sober colors avoid the drama of Barnett Newman, while capturing his human or superhuman scale. Murano glazes give acrylic the texture of oil without its hints of depth. Stretched canvas supplies the sole compositional element. By comparison, Brice Marden or Sean Scully can seem traitor to the cause.

Sometimes Novros assembles the rectangles into larger ones, and sometimes he turns them into a cryptic alphabet. Side by side, they dare one to detect a loss of symmetry. They identify painting at once with the wall and the painted object. One loses that perceptual paradox at Paula Cooper, where the vast gallery flattens stretchers of quite different thickness. The very same dealer displayed his work back in 1969 in a smaller space. Maybe there, too, Minimalism had its wow factor.

The thing itself

As with Turrell and Novros, art can offer moments of contemplation or transcendence, an intuition of something unseen. The very term abstraction implies a movement away from the concrete and toward the essential. Yet one can feel that same movement in a pair of stones, a broomstick, a broken glass, or a tangle of string. One can attend to light reflected off plywood or shadowy impressions on paper, a bookshelf's arrangement of memories or remnants of a cigarette break. So, at any rate, might run an abstract of "Aspects, Forms, and Figures."

The stones appear in a photograph by Adelina Lopes, Anthony Pearson's shadows derive from objects placed on photosensitive paper, and Alice Könitz's Circle Lamp of polished plywood and paper would look at home amid Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus. Mostly, however, the group show turns on assemblages of humble materials. Jonah Groeneboer's string traverses a corner of the ceiling, but it resembles a game of cat's cradle more than an Eva Hesse. Carol Bove's shelf of books, driftwood, and a found image reassembles a cheap apartment into a miniature museum of natural history. For all his smooth, black stone, the sculpted man by Nathan Mabry can barely suppress a smile. Even Christopher Deeton's black-and-white paintings derive their symmetry less from Ad Reinhardt and Reinhardt's black paintings than an ink blot.

The show's success lies in its humility and a healthy sense of humor. I suspect the curators want something more—more than a Rorschach test for the buyer's esthetic impulse. João Ribas and Becky Smith describe a search for the "archaic, noumenal, and totemic." Oddly enough, they quote Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto sits atop a broomstick thanks to Stephen G. Rhodes. Marx is describing how an object acquires an aura by becoming a commodity, not a bad lesson for the art market now. He does not see the commodity fetish as continuous with religious rituals, although he has equal contempt for the illusions in both.

Modernism had its seekers of the "perfect moment," and many abstract and figurative artists alike still know when to capture the light. Many still go to art for a Romantic's sense of beauty, or else they whine about its loss. However, abstraction long ago lost its literal meaning, and today abstraction can include imagery. If anything, abstract artists after Minimalism have had their hands full struggling against a fixation on the object. One or two here, too, struggle too hard. The token older works, by Jack Goldstein and John McCracken, look particularly out of place, although McCracken's usual leaning plank gets a helpful, almost comical splatter of paint.

More often, the show's sense of proportion saves it from any number of dogmas, including its own. Lopes smashed her two panes of glass and then carefully reassembled them. I imagine her afraid of leaving too big a mess or too much reverence for Robert Smithson. Könitz's Table for a Family of Three Smokers consists of ashtrays set out according to a spare, off-kilter grid that Peter Halley might have drawn. All in all, enough objects lie about that one might quote William Carlos Williams after all: "No ideas but in things."

Marx might not find himself all that happy with any of these exhibitions, and each in its own way might agree with him. Is art a conspicuously upscale object of consumption? Bauhaus explained how to make art on the cheap, Turrell to substitute an illusion for the art object, and Bellwether to turn it into a thesis topic. Each, in turn, projects an idealism I can only love but cannot so easily share. Is the market making us stupid? Not necessarily, but it is putting a lot of pressure on art to know when it is selling out.

jhaber@haberarts.com

James Turrell at PaceWildenstein on 25th Street through April 28, 2007, and through October 17, 2009, David Novros at Paula Cooper, through September 26, 2009. "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" ran at Bellwether through March 10, 2007.