whitehot | November 2010, Max's Kansas City @ Loretta Howard Gallery & Steven Kasher Gallery@font-face {
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Artists at Max’s Kansas City, 1965-1974: Hetero-Holics and Some Women Too 525 W 26th Street Steven Kasher Gallery
This show opens with Dan Flavin’s White Around the Corner, (1965-67) a play on words that refers to a move away from the confines of the square canvas. Neil Williams’ colorful zig-zag painting titled, Pop, (1961) weaves gray, pink, green, blue and black paint across a cut canvas and clearly deconstructs the traditional idea of the painted surface. The cut canvas became an argument that was both for and against symmetry, as seen in Konskie IV, by Frank Stella and Untitled, (1965) by Larry Zox. By adjusting the shape of the surface, the art object sought a new dimension even though paintings of this style were limited from moving completely away from the wall. Lynda Benglis, however, disposed of the canvas entirely and threw paint on the studio floor in different layers. Her bronze-cast sculpture titled, Come, (1969-74) appears on the floor of the gallery’s first room and renders frozen drips of liquid that stack up. This piece serves as an emblem of the body politic that was brewing among both women and gay artists during the protests that swept the country during the 1960s.
Robert Rauschenberg’s Angostura (Carnal Clock), (1968) expounds further on the body as a site of physical desire. The title references angostura bitters tonic - a mixture of water, alcohol, and gentian root that is used as a cocktail flavoring – and ties it to the carnal object, evincing a clever but poetic use of language and innuendo. Through a combination of mirrored plexi-glass and silkscreen ink on plexi-glass in a metal frame, Rauschenberg passionately argues for the framed picture, the photograph. In this case, a light box depicts a collage of images portraying various male genitalia. Two small dots of light rotate slowly as time goes by. In stark contrast, both Black Triangle, (1966) by Ron Bladen and Green T, (1973) by Frosty Myers stand as two abstract structures that continue to break away at the foundation of the standard square form.
Additional drawings by Robert Smithson, William de Kooning, Donald Judd, Alice Aycock and Dorothea Rockburne appear on the gallery’s second floor. However, Brigid Berlin’s Polaroid portraits that appear between the first and second rooms anchor the various parts of this show together. As a fixture of Warhol’s Factory, Berlin used this moment as a chance to step outside of the spectacle that fomented in the backroom of Max’s Kansas City. Random and unassuming images, taken mostly outside of the bar’s context, depict those already mentioned as well as Vito Acconci, John Chamberlain, Larry Rivers, Larry Poons, Andy Warhol and Joseph Kosuth. These unstaged photographs capture the faces of those who were part of a common context, the early stages of art theory. Berlin’s documentation also reaches further into a series of audiotapes that contain the sounds and discussions once heard throughout the bar’s interior space, capturing the sound of art.
To wax romantic about this era would be a mistake. The military draft altered the population as soldiers were sent to Vietnam. The photographs on display at the Steven Kasher Gallery capture brief moments of hubris, far different from the uncertainties faced daily. The protests of Angry Arts Week during the winter of 1967 echoed the Dadaists of Switzerland who had performed their objections to World War I. But the American art market took a defensive line against these objections by turning individual artists, like Andy Warhol, into overnight superstars. Max’s Kansas City went one step further and made everyone a star, whether they were known or not.
"Black Triangle (Garden)," (1966), Ron Bladen, Painted aluminum, 37 1/3 x 40 x 52 inches, Edition 2 of 3 Courtesy, the artists and Loretta Howard Gallery
Courtesy, the artists and Loretta Howard Gallery
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