Viewing page 33 of 107

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

RR84

"Summer Groups" (Castelli, 142 Greeme Street): This is an all-star event. Dan Flavin is represented by a tight, vertical installation of eight white flourescent bars dedicated to the Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin; Donald Judd by a row of four plywood boxes, each 29 1/2 inches square and divided by a diagonal partition, and Richard Serra by five rectangles of Cor-Ten steel. Arranged like upended playing cards, Serra's rectangles are modified along their bottom edges to accommodate two steel cylinders, which repose beneath them. All the foregoing date from the 1970's.

The remainder of the show, works from the 1980's, consists of "Curve XXI," Ellsworth Kelly's exquisite fan form, crafted of birchwood ply 15 feet across; a white plaster relief from the "Hyperotomachia" series by Robert Morris, which is a midden of bones, limbs, faces, bamboo and assorted rubble but revives memories of the early Peter Agostini, and possibly the show's piece de resistance, Robert Rauschenberg's 
Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba, I." Almost nine feet tall, this is a translation - into beautifully colored ceramic tiles, yet - of David's "Napoleon at St. Bernard," bordered by the usual Rauschenbergian photograpic images, including one of a wrecked automobile. It's good to find the mind still capable of boggling. (Through July 27.)

New York Times
Friday, July 13, 1984
By Vivien Raynor