8.8.25 — Hooray for Hollywood
Richard Van Buren might seem the least likely artist to call a show “Hollywood High,” but look again. If the high wears wore off soon enough, that’s show business—and some serious art. It should have you thinking about the state of abstract art today as well.
Van Buren found his voice at the very peak of late modern art, and an exhibition spanning his career shows how much and how little has changed, at Garth Greenan through August 15. The same dilemma of old and new faces many a younger artist, too: oh, that again? Contemporary hybrids of media and genres can seem invigorating or simply exhausted. Either way, they are everywhere, with some of the most creative down in Tribeca—and I work this together with a gallery tour from earlier this year as a longer review and my latest upload, but first van Buren. As the song goes, “Hooray for Hollywood.” 
Born in upstate New York, Richard Van Buren studied in San Francisco, about as far Hollywood’s “screwy ballyhooey” as California can get. I quote the old song, from the 1930s musical that also brought “That’s Entertainment,” but Van Buren is hardly a mass entertainer. He has since settled down in Maine, where an expectant film audience could hear the silence. He is a bit old to relive high school at that. His show repurposes work from 1969 and 1970, when he was already in his thirties, along with the new. Early and recent work could be downright jarring set side by side, but watch what happens as you follow the course between them.
Born in upstate New York, Richard Van Buren studied in San Francisco, about as far Hollywood’s “screwy ballyhooey” as California can get. I quote the old song, from the 1930s musical that also brought “That’s Entertainment,” but Van Buren is hardly a mass entertainer. He has since settled down in Maine, where an expectant film audience could hear the silence. He is a bit old to relive high school at that. His show repurposes work from 1969 and 1970, when he was already in his thirties, along with the new. Early and recent work could be downright jarring set side by side, but watch what happens as you follow the course between them.
I have skipped over a few years. For much of his creative life, he was a true New Yorker. The gallery calls him “inextricable from the creative firmament” of the city, where he taught at the School of Visual Arts (or SVA). It goes on to compare him to Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson—not someone from LA for whom Minimalism means a one-car garage. Yet he found his own path from the machine made to seashells and costume jewelry. They bring his work closer and closer to trash for its own sake while nurturing art as object, and he calls it sculpture.
Bare or stuffed to the gills, it still hangs on the wall, and it is still for me a kind of painting. Not that it needs much in the way of paint when it can have fiberglass and polychrome resin. It starts with subdued colors, only to add glitter to tart reds and blues. In the process it moves from relief to assemblage—and from Minimalism to “pattern and decoration.” Industrial materials become transparent casings to keep art in its place. It stresses hand assembly while seeming never quite at home.
It relies on geometry all the same to give shape to the spectacle. Early vertical slabs jerk aside at the end, like feet that have forgotten how to dance. A shift in color at the edge might pass for a cheap metal frame. Slightly later work adds a second slab or wiggles along the vertical. Van Buren is struggling against his own formula and liking it. It runs to half a dozen or more pieces before breaking free.
By then the stuffing is its own spectacle, in direct violation of the old demand from Frank Stella: what you see is no longer what you see. You have to work to decipher what Van Buren he painted, if anything, and what he assembled. How can such bright and shiny art cast only gray shadows? But wait, there are also light blue shadows—except that they are not shadows at all, but feathers. The busiest work, with what must be more than thirty shorter pieces, fits them all into a circle.
What, though, governs his choices beyond the glitter, and whatever happened to Hollywood? An artist who once shared a gallery with Morris is nowhere near as visible, only partly a matter of physical distance from New York. Are Minimalism and “pattern and decoration” too out of fashion—or too hard to fit into a single story? There is, though, a story asking to be heard about abstraction. Van Buren is still exploring geometry and color.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.