Causality

About

We are lucky to live in a time of expanding definitions in art. We celebrate the blending of genres and the mixing of mediums—painting as sculpture, sculpture as painting, sculpture as installation, ceramic as painting, painting and performance, and the vindication of weaving, carving, and craft—any means to visually express the stories of our time. 

When disparate elements are combined or random materials are stacked, when unlikely shapes are forged or incongruent designs are assembled, whether situationally mounted or unconventionally installed, this mishmashing incites a new visual equilibrium. Our world is made up of this dynamism—an unceasing revel of cause and effect.

Just 60 years ago, the art world was struggling to understand these new directions. Enforced was the undiluted version of tradition: painting was painting, and sculpture was sculpture. The distinction was so definitive that it elicited the infamous statement from Ad Reinhardt that sculpture was “something you bump into when you back up to look at painting.”

Although Europe had already embraced the art of the assemblage, it wasn’t widely understood here until MoMA mounted “The Art of Assemblage” in 1961. Soon the relationship between two- and the three-dimensional art changed radically. Formally and non-formally, sculpture in particular was “now exploring aesthetic areas either exhausted or rejected by painters,” observed Lucy R. Lippard in 1967. Looking to the West Coast, artists like Wallace Berman, Wally Hedrick, Jay Defeo, Viola Frey, Jess, and Bruce Conner, were free-wheeling in their use of materials, form, and color—embracing a multi-directional art making soon labeled Funk Art.

When the painter Elizabeth Murray arrived in the Bay area in 1961 from Chicago where she explored her own kind of Funk art during undergrad, the stage was set for the genesis of a maverick new rebranding of what painting could do. There in her High Street studio in San Francisco, Murray seized a Dadaistic attitude with vestiges of social protest and a predilection for art as action or event, as well as art as object. The effect was an all-out assault on traditional image making. New notions and possibilities opened up for Murray and after a trip to Pasadena to see the first museum survey of American Pop Art in 1962, she was “very impressed with the attitude, the license, that people like Warhol and Oldenberg took with objects.” Afterward, she began putting “other things” into her paintings.

By the late 1970’s she had all but abandoned the traditional rectangular canvas, opting for one that was eccentric and irregularly shaped. Twisting and skewing her paintings, she advanced painting three-dimensionally and in doing so held a mirror to our frenetic times.

Fast forward two decades and the painting by Elizabeth Murray titled “2. B!”, 1990, sets the defining theme for this show. Its unconventional stretchers, twist and thwack a Shakespearean play-on-words in marquee-size letters; its surface speckled with collaged matchsticks.

In her own distinctive turn, Judy Pfaff straight out of Al Held’s classroom at Yale, took a sculptural approach to painting. “I’m at war with conventions,” Pfaff told Irving Sandler in 1982. Strong color, bold three-dimensional accents, and a strong impulse towards architecture have been the currents driving her art. As I wrote in 2019, Pfaff’s work “conveys a risk-courting adventurousness that is all the more compelling because it edges toward the ephemeral, like performance and indeed life itself. This disposition cuts sharply against the objectness of painting.”

- Jason Andrew