Opening the Field - "As Painting: Division and Displacement", Wexner Center, Columbus, Ohio

Abstract painting in the wake of Minimalism, with special attention given to French art of the 1960s and '70s, was the focus of a recent show at the Wexner Center.

At first glance, the vision of abstract painting offered in Columbus, Ohio, by the Wexner Center's recent exhibition "As Painting: Division and Displacement" seemed to be thoroughly familiar. Visitors found painting redefined, deconstructed and stripped down; painting masquerading as sculpture, photography and architecture; painting taken off the wall, spread across the floor and hidden in the mind. Interesting stuff, but hardly breaking news. For much of the last decade, the permeable boundaries of painting have been the favored stamping ground of many artists, critics and curators. Indeed, one only had to look as far, as a show that preceded "As Painting" at the Wexner (a collaborative installation of digitally generated motifs on translucent vacuformed plastic created by painter Fabian Marcaccio and architect Greg Lynn) for evidence of how ubiquitous cross-disciplinary redefinition of painting has become.

And yet, as one began to examine "As Painting" a little more carefully, it turned out to be a show that was full of surprises. What made it so was the decision by the curators--Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon and Stephen Melville--to include a substantial number of French artists (13 out of 26 participants). Because French art of the last 40 years has been consistently overlooked in the U.S., this meant that alongside some very well-known figures such as Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman and Robert Smithson, "As Painting" included many artists whose work is almost never seen in American museums and galleries. There was also work by one French-based American, the reclusive James Bishop, whose delicately reductive paintings are also rarely seen on this side of the Atlantic. For the most part, the lesser-known French-made work not only offered interesting new artistic realms to explore, but held its own against the big guns of New York and Cologne.

Notwithstanding the presence of a few recently created art works, including a gorgeous new floor piece of dyed fabric swatches by Polly Apfelbaum, some elegant freestanding painted-wood sculptures by Anne Truitt and a colorful mixed-medium wall work by Christian Bonnefoi, "As Painting" was largely focused on the past, in particular on the 1960s and '70s. (The Apfelbaum and Bonnefoi were commissioned for the show by the Wexner.) AS Stephen Melville observes in a densely theoretical catalogue essay, from one point of view the show could be seen as an exhibition "about the situation of painting in the wake of Minimalism." (For Melville, this emphasis on Minimalism accounts for the show's "considered lack of interest in the varieties of overtly self-referential painting that have been particularly prominent in American art over the last decade or so"--a polemical aside that is a little hard to understand in the presence of such relentlessly self-referential painters as Daniel Buren, Mel Bochner and Ryman.) But "As Painting," which seemed to enjoy eluding easy definitions or limits, also dipped back into the pre-Minimalist world by including works by affichistes Francois Dufrene (1930-1982) and Jacques Villegle, whose subtle torn-poster compositions occupy a zone between gestural abstraction and the Duchampian readymade. For the curators, Dufrene's practice of presenting the undersides of posters relates to (as Armstrong puts it) "the play of recto and verso that appears in numerous places throughout `As Painting.'"

More "recto-verso" action was clearly evident in Bonnefoi's late-'70s paintings made with semitransparent gauze and in Jean Degottex's Pli x Pli III (1980), a stretched canvas designed to be shown from both front and back, the better to reveal the subtle striations of pigment produced from a process of folding and unfolding (here it was displayed face forward). An artist who began showing in the 1950s as a calligraphic abstractionist, Degottex (1918-1988) subsequently turned to a more structurally oriented brand of painting. HIS development underlined one of the show's chief concerns: to chart the advent in France of a more materialist approach to painting. Contributing to this approach were philosophical developments such as phenomenology and structuralism, the "theoretical practice" advocated by influential French Marxist thinker Louis Althusser and, in more strictly artistic realms, a tendency among French artists to emphasize materiality over opticality when assimilating the influences of Jackson Pollock and Color Field painting.

One of the most exciting aspects of "As Painting" was the opportunity to view impressive groupings of work by prominent French artists like Degottex and Martin Barre (1942-1996), whose work has been at best a rumor in this country [see A.i.A., Apr. '82]. Barre's paintings, six of which were included, seem at once nonchalant and highly deliberate. Usually working on unprimed canvas, he favored somewhat shaky, truncated lines that set up economical visual dialogues with the edges of the painting. Barre also developed a number of unusual painting protocols. He created the isolated marks on his early paintings by squeezing pigment directly from the tube onto the canvas, after having first emptied out the tube in order to refill it with colors he had mixed himself. He even filed down the tops of the tubes to achieve the kind of marks he desired. In subsequent works, he created permutating, off-centered grids with spray paint applied through stencils.