The Photographic Object, 1970

Hauser & Wirth's proximity to Madison Avenue's glittering shop windows puts the gallery visitor in a browsing mindset appropriate to the bright array of domestically scaled objects presented in The Photographic Object, 1970, an amended recreation of an exhibition curated by Peter Bunnell at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and organized by Olivier Renaud-Clement for the gallery. Following three years after MoMA's jolting New Documents show, the original exhibition stepped away from our traumatized nation toward cool, impeccably crafted, and plastics-heavy sculpture produced by artists, photographers, printmakers, and educators primarily from California and Canada. One wonders how this adventurous project, so fixed in its moment, was initially received; very few of the twenty-three artists in this exhibition had experienced much visibility, and their reintroduction was both a discovery and something of a cautionary tale, in that even as exalted a platform as MoMA is no guarantee of a place in whatever history we choose to recognize. An easy read of The Photographic Object, 1970 was that of a rapidly achieved synthesis of trendy minimalism and modern design with recent developments in fine photography. This is partially correct; the dominant overall sensibility, however, was the polished, daylight-catching transcendence of Los Angeles's Light and Space movement with the tinted cubes of Larry Bell referenced throughout. The market in affordable objects and multiples was being tested and plastic was everywhere in 1960s art; the Tanglewood Press published Seven Objects In A Box (1966), featuring a decadent freestanding Andy Warhol silkscreen on plexiglass along with one of Tom Wesselmann's nudes on vacuum-formed plastic, presentation techniques repeated throughout this show. Visually elegant if a bit on the clinical side, The Photographic Object, 1970 was contradictorily rife with permissive West Coast tendencies that allowed degrees of pleasure (wit, poetic assemblage, the surrealist encounter, straight-guy sexuality) deemed provincial by the critics that mattered here. It was striking to see the indexical black-and-white print, still the unquestioned conveyance of truth, sealed, colored, stuffed, suspended, sliced and diced, and contained by vacuum-formed plastic, plexi, vinyl, mirror, chrome, and brass. Before the lamented de-skilling of education in the 1970s, photography, printmaking, 3-D design, and illustration programs expected rigorous Bauhaus school problem-solving from students whose production functioned as advertising for the institution in glossy admission catalogs, often exciting demonstrations of craft in the service of an idea. Typifying this work ethic were the enclosed box and frame constructions of Carl Cheng, Michael de Courcy, Andre Haluska, Doug Prince, Dale Quarterman, and Michael Stone. Black-and-white images were frequently printed upon transparent material and displayed, usually through layering or by slotting image over image, producing a shifting illusion of fictive three-dimensional space. The pristine final object engages the viewer through miniature tableaux; Quarterman's precisely modeled boxes have a let's-get-naked countercultural feel, while Cheng stages intricately trimmed picture scenarios (two California state bears get affectionate) molded in plastic within a fossilized theatrical space boxed again and enclosed within a vitrine. Haluska's Self-portrait with Images (1969, restored in 2011) is a refined, sentimentalized example of American collage as derived from Joseph Cornell, the grandfather of so much in the exhibition, via Robert Rauschenberg (who produced many works on plastic from the early 1960s on). A self-portrait, the moon, clock gears, and tree branches collude as if frozen into the frame. Like Prince's intimate Kitchen Window (1972) or Winter Funeral (1970) there is a literary/poetry magazine delicacy to these frigid constructs, even if gift shop art glass kitsch is never too far away. …

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