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DM David Mirvish Gallery 596 Markham St. Toronto 174, Ont. (416) 534-7593-4 avery bannard bush caro davis frankenthaler hofmann louis motherwell murray noland olitski poons steiner stella of these jaunty little personal appearances, Hanson comes to seem, despite the apparent evidence of his work, a kind of comic mannerist of the "low" art of trompe-l'oeil painting, a tribal magician who has put his decidely black magic means to basically white ends. While the works produced in this spirit of arcane joking are, quite necessarily, extra-artistic, the concerns behind them prove to be anything but: Hanson's generla and critical audience is at a loss only if it wants to be. For it is not in the grotesque figures around him, but in the even more evident act of an artist's having removed himself in order to be better seen, that a viewer might, at this perhaps prematurely late date, very possibly see himself. From Another Country continued from page 29 other materials: raffia, hemp, leather, feathers, cord, metal chain or bells. Each element has an esthetic as well as a symbolic and spiritual function. My idea is to reinterpret the esthetic function in contemporary terms, using modern materials (bronze and silk, bronze and wool, steel and synthetics, aluminum and synthetics)." In a N.Y. Times review of her exhibition in 1970, "Four Monuments to Malcolm X," the critic was astonished that she would employ such refined techniques and produce works he chose to describe as elegant and "Parisian" to make social comments or express revolutionary ideas. This is an odd accusation. Barbara Chase-Riboud doesn't make protest art, She pays tribute with a beautiful object to the aspirations and visions of race, Her monuments are meant as elegies, not clenched fists. Violence is not for her, and her originality-which might be interpreted as an anachronism today-is to believe in the value and effectiveness of a certain beauty. "This makes for a very dense object rather than a learn one," she says. "Let's call it Maximal art. I think civilization is minimal enough without underlining it. Sculpture as a created object in space should enrich, not reflect. And should be beautiful." "If beauty can be called 'black',: she says, " then Zanzibar can be described as such. There is a mysterious and even threatening aspect to it which has the emotional impact of certain African sculptures-and for the same reasons. Displaced in time and space, taken out of their 'real' enviornment, they assume a basic impenetrability that can repel or attract." Her concept of beauty goes against the usual grain of contemporary American art, which results in a certain isolation of her work, not only from New York but also from Paris. Pop art not only was the product of American industry and the media-which it both worshipped and derided, Pop was White with a folklore of the present and recent past. For this young Afro-American, the "remembrance of things past" is stronger than any ties to American society, even those of protest, be it the America of the '60s or the '30s. It is obvious, however, that what is happening in art today cannot help but affect the artist. Experiments with contrasting materials removed from their everyday function have already been done, for example by Robert Morris in Untitled, 1963, a sculpture where cords attached to a piece of wood fall and intercoil: or by Oldenburg. But the concept has never been developed and analyzed as systematically and with such a deliberate bypassing of modern technology in favor of primitive esthetic as it has by Chase-Riboud. It is striking to find in the work of two other young women, Polish-born Magdalena Abakowiez, and Jagoda Buic, a Yugoslavian, a form of expression derived from weaving that is akin to the work of Barbara Chase-Riboud. These are forms in volume, hung on the wall, out of which burst undulating cords, bare or wrapped in wool, that intertwine on the floor. In the United States, Nancy Graves with Shaman, 1970, developed similar structures, but as a total enviornment. All of them give an impression of violence, subtlety and of primitiveness that evoke prehistoric civilzations. Thomas SILLS Recent Paintings Feb.29 - Mar.11 Barbara LONDIN Quiet Confrontations Mar.14-25 A.L. WILSON Sculpture Mar.14-25 and Tables and Chairs Otello GUARDUCCI Sculpture Mar.28-Apr.8 BODLEY GALLERY 787 MADISON AVE. La Galerie de la Chouette GALERIE D'ART Paintings Sculpture Precious objects Gems lithographs 1 rue de l'Abbaye-PARIS VI-325 32 92 HENRY KOEHLER To March 18 BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD March 21 - April 8 BETTY PARSONS GALLERY • 24 W.57. N.Y. 62
