reviews project for a revolution
Project for
You might read some irony in the title of the show that Mitchell Algus
– superman science teacher and gallerist – has curated for Matthew Marks.
a revolution
That’s not to say it’s inappropriate: it is borrowed from the title of a novel by
Alain Robbe-Grillet, and one of the show’s interests is in exploring how the
in new York
ideas of the novelist and filmmaker were shared by a group of Europeans
during the 1960s and 1970s. The irony lies in the fact that Algus’s show reveals
M atthew M arks, new York just the kind of canon we might be living with had New York not – in Serge
9 julY – 17 auGust Guilbaut’s phrase – stolen the idea of modern art in the late 1940s and laid the
ground for the later dominance of Pop, Minimalism and conceptualism.
Algus’s show is really just a survey of neglected Europeans, yet it
reads like a brilliant counterfactual history. Imagine: instead of our gods
being Pollock, Warhol and the Duchamp of the readymade, they are Léger,
André Breton and Duchamp the futuro-cubist painter. The importance of
Duchamp’s early style is glaring in Konrad Klapheck’s Die Mätresse (The
Mistress), from 1964: the lady is a bathtub faucet with a shower extension; so too in the unsubtle sadomasochism of Peter
Klasen’s Femme Bandée, 2 Interrupteurs, Robinet (Bandaged Woman, 2 Switches, Faucet) (1968). And Léger’s softly massy
shapes are a recurrent presence: Lambert Maria Wintersberger’s Sprengung 20 (Explosion 20) (1970) depicts an eerie grey
building-cum-fingernail that is entirely of a part with the Frenchman’s scenes of a modernising world.
The tone of this work might be familiar from Richard Hamilton’s painting – there are certainly echoes in Paul
Wunderlich’s nauseous green spray-gunned scene Liegende Frau mit Lowen (Lying Woman with Lion) (1969). But Algus’s
interest is in Continental European art, which was much less susceptible to Americana than British Pop, and much more
interested in extending what was to them the still-viable tradition of Surrealism. Hence the glassy atmosphere of sex and
violence throughout: this is the context of Jacques Monory’s five-canvas tableau, Adriana No. 3 (1970), consisting of the
portrait head of a woman surrounded by four (more) lions; also of Walter Redinger’s Untitled No. 11 (1969), a delicious expanse
of creamy fibreglass from which a sinewy knot obtrudes at the bottom, as if some struggle was taking place just the other
side of the wall; and surely also of the tiny Carlo Mollino photos of nudes dotted throughout the show like peepholes to that
violent other side.
It is true that some of these artists might look weak in other circumstances – and they have Algus to thank for being
provided such a flattering platform – yet this doesn’t justify their critical neglect. What Algus has proved here is that they
deserve to be judged on their own, postwar European terms, and not with the standards set by the steamrolling force of the
American canon. Great museums wish their shows could make points as powerful as this; few regularly do. Morgan Falconer
jacques Monory, Adriana No. 3, 1970, oil on canvas, 202 x 410 cm.
© the artist. courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, new York
157 artreview
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