bluebookwizard

INTRODUCTION

This C Space Memory project is the first exhibition to be
curated under the auspices of the New Museum. The New Museum,
begun in January, 1977, is a not-for-profit organization
formed to exhibit work and disseminate information about
art and artists from 1970 on.

We intend to show works of art which have not yet gained
public visibility or acceptance and to present them within
a critical and scholarly context.

The New Museum’s first priority is to focus on living artists
and the work they make; to this end, we are providing
information about lesser-known artists on a national level.
We intend to move from our present office to a temporary
exhibition space by the end of the year.

THE NEW MUSEUM

office:
Fine Arts Building
105 Hudson Street
New York City, N.Y.
10013

(212) 966-4317

open by appointment only

Contributions are tax-deductible

Staff

Marcia Tucker, Director
A.C. Bryson
Susan Logan
Michiko Miyamoto
Allan Schwartzman

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Don Dudley for his expert assistance with
the installation; Tim Yohn for his careful editing; and Allen
Goldring for printing the catalogue--only one of the many
ways in which he helped us.

MEMORY

Memory is common to us all. It can be considered, if not
completely understood, in scientific, pyschological, or
poetic terms, but it is our primary means of understanding
ourselves, sorting information, and sharing our lives
with others.

Every work of art addresses the subject of memory either
directly or by alluding to it in some way. The title of
this series of exhibitions is applicable to a wider variety
of work, but the eight artists in this portion of the
exhibition were selected because of an intuitive, rather
than specific, relationship to the subject. The work ranges
from drawings which address intensely psychological aspects
of recalled experience, to paintings which deal with
elusive, poetic visual phenomena--analogous to the fleeting
sparks of remembered images.

For Brenda Goodman, memory is narration, translating private
events into readable, intimate notations. Her work is
figurative; it utilizes a vocabulary of organic forms which
are the visual equivalents of specific events and exchanges
between people. These organic shapes are located on the
page in an illusionistically depicted space which stands
for the real space of the original event. In her drawings,
Goodman delineates not just the actual events but the
emotional and physically sensate states which accompany
the reconstruction of the events. Her work is always
specific; the edges of her drawings contain notes, times,
dates, names--personal, diaristic reminders, like psych-
ological shopping lists--which locate the events.

Martin Silverman’s eccentric, evocative clay figures,
ambiguously situated in relation to their surroundings,
also seem to refer to the memories of situations or tensions
between people. The moment of encounter or dislocation is
frozen, but its edges are softened by distance. Like
Giacometti’s figures, Silverman’s remain at the same
distance from us no matter how physically close or far
away from them we are. Like memories, they seem to exist
neither in real time nor actual space, but are pervasive.
Small in size, firmly rooted by gravity, and modelled in
a fashion reminiscent of 1930’s WPA bas-reliefs, these
mysterious and poignant figures have a primordial silence
and timelessness about them.

Earl Ripling is the only artist in this group to use a
photographic image. His pieces are sequential, concerned

in a humorous and yet formal way with spatial memory; spatial
perception, intrinsic to the work, is dependent upon the
artist’s manipulation, rather than upon the viewer. In
these serial pieces, images appear and disappear, because
they are examined from a different vantage point each time.
The author of the images, photographing himself as subject,
looks at parts of his body—-usually his feet--so that occurrences
are revealed through changing points of view. this is akin
to the memory process; the memory of an event changes
according to the perspective from which one recalls it.

Katherine Sokolnikoff’s small structures are drawn
specifically from a store of archeological forms. The
houses, granaries, funerary monuments and temples of Africa,
ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece are used by
Sokolnikoff not as representations of the original forms,
but as prototypes for sculptural interpretation. The
pieces themselves, in part due to miniaturization, are
non-functional, poetic evocations of other cultures and
periods of history. They are intimate, structurally
complete, and minutely detailed, but their surfaces retain
the touch of the hand and the generalized, absorptive light
which reminds us of an entire landscape. the condensation
of large, functional forms into compact, tiny ones is
analogous, in one sense, to the condensation of time required
in the act of remembering.

Ronald Morosan’s small, vulnerable wall pieces and the
larger, but no less enigmatic “tables” are occassionally
suggestive of archaic structures, but they have an aura of
dark magic about them; the memories involved (traces of
former physical activity) are confounded by the disappearance
and re-emergence of parts in a new configuration. Although
the sculptures themselves are non-illusionistic, even
deadpan in their awkward vulnerability, an atmosphere of
occult, mysterious ritual and game playing can also be
felt. Relationships appear that do not make sense, except
in the way that memory, from time to time, orders events
that could not otherwise be ordered--that is, by collapsing
and reordering them sequentially. Here, perhaps, the
possibility is that memory exists as the White Queen in
Alice in Wonderland suggested, both backward and forward;
any moment in a sequence has its antecedent and successor,
so that the memory of a moment might be not only the
reconstruction of past events but the intimation of future
ones as well.

Kent Hines’ rice paper wall pieces also involve metamorphosis
and transformation--that is, the elusive moment. Here, the

focus is on the quality of changing light, the embodiment
of the fleeting instant, the shadow of a gesture. They
capture the moment between light and shadow, movement and
stillness, when a form (or an event) is percieved rather
than actually seen. In one way, the quality of Hines’
work expresses the sensation of deja-vu, of particularized
physical memory which, at the moment of its recapture,
becomes fragile, weightless and transient.

Another way of remembering, more evolutionary in nature
and concerned not with the transient moment but with change
itself, is found in Steve Gwon’s exquisitely precise serial
drawings, which are presented either in book form (that is,
one at a time, as pages to be turned) or on the wall in
linear fashion, to be “read” from left to right. Because
the evolution of form from drawing to drawing is slight,
imperceptible except over a considerable number of drawings,
visual or eidetic memory is necessary to apprehend a
series. One must remember in order to understand both the
preceding images as well as to anticipate the subsequent
ones. In this sense, Gwon’s drawings, although non-objective,
are narrative, since they involve the evolution of an
event in time and space.

The most abstract paintings of the group are those of
Sarah Canright. Consisting of one or two linear marks on
a near colorless ground, they are visually elusive. The
ground appears as an area of luminosity upon which lines
seem to emerge from the depths of the paint and, at the
same time, appear to have emerged as negative spaces not
covereed by the field. Because the work appears to be straight-
forward, even simple, we take for granted our mental ability
to retain the painted image when the painting is out of
sight. What remains in the mind, however, is not a gestalt,
but a delicate atmosphere of remembered feeling which is in
tension with the seeming logic and clarity of first impression.

Memory is at once selective and all-embracing; we are the
inheritors both of personal, individual memories and collective,
archetypal ones. We carry our lives with us because we
remember events, people, feelings, relationships, places.
We transmit them in an attempt to share ourselves--as we
were, as we are, as we might become--with others. Each artist
in the exhibition transforms this aspect of the human organism
into a language for the eyes.

Marcia Tucker