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[[IMAGE]]
Dan Flavin, untitled, (to Ward Jackson), fluorescent light, 1971.

LOOKING AT THE GUGGENHEIM INTERNATIONAL

JAMES MONTE

What does this year's Guggenheim International do, aside from merely exhibiting works by twenty-one artists? If the intent of the exhibition can be reduced to a common demoninator, one can sum it up in the following manner: so-called "Minimalism" for want of a better word is surveyed by the inclusion of pieces by Andre, Flavin, Judd, LeWitt, Morris and de Maria. Pieces depending on one aspect of Minimalism, exact site location, and derived from Andre's piece entitled Lever, include works by Burgin, Dias, Dibbets, Long, Merz, Nauman, and Takamatsu. The sequential aspect of Minimalism, the aspect based on intervals, either visual or numerical, includes work by Darboven and Kawara. Minimalism's "conceptual" outgrowth is represented by the work of Darboven, Kosuth and Weiner.

The contributions of Michael Heizer, Robert Ryman and Richard Serra share one trait in common; each in his own way recalls the past quite frankly, and each looks toward future possibilities as well. Ryman's paintings, for example, are built around the notion that paint applied to a support by stroking must contain the feelings traditionally inherent in painting. Each mark bears an internal relationship to the others, much as elements in Serra's and Heizer's forms do the same. In other words, each of these artist's pieces deals with internal relationships quite aside from, or along with, other considerations, such as site, scale, or duration of the object in question.

The question of site or location is of real importance in this exhibition. Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum is an aggressive art work in itself, and most of the artists are more than casually interested in location as an issue inseparable from their individual efforts. Judd understood the problem and solved the usually negative interaction between Wright's architecture and modern sculpture by confronting the space in a head-on way. The walkway within the Museum, used to transport the viewers up or down, is a three-degree circular plane. Judd's piece is in the middle of the walkway. and is made of two concentric sets of joined sheet metal. The inner circle conforms to the slope of the ramp. The outer circle levels the slope. The piece brilliantly acknowledges the concentricity, slope, and spiral quality of the location, and plays the level base of the building off against the ascension of its forms. While accepting one part of the building's flatness, Judd was able to counterpose the circular plane, the incline plane, and the relative flatness, to form a tight equilibrium.

Merz's solution to the site problem within the Guggenheim Museum was one of numerical ordering, in neon, up the outer face of the parapet-like walls, which protect the visitors from falling into the flat lower gallery. Merz's numerical system is based on what he calls "...Fibonacci series in which numbers develop in progressive series towards infinity, starting from number one." The problem on the rising spiral walls is that they become visible as sign decoration, since they directly compete, to their disadvantage, with the architecture. Darboven's numerical orderings, on the other hand, are simply written in a series of one hundred books, laid flat in a continuous row conforming