BLINKY PALERMO, BRUCE NAUMAN, AND RUDOLF SCHWARZKOGLER
Schwarzkogler is represented by seven highly enigmatic drawings, some of them apparently sketches of planned performances, and three groups of photographs documenting performances. He was one of the four main practitioners of Viennese Actionism, a late-60s movement whose “actions” included animal slaughter, defecation, and self-mutilation, much of it presumably in the 60s spirit of breaking rules and attacking bourgeois conventions.
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In any event, while one critic has identified Schwarzkogler’s quest as “the will to be free,” a phrase from his own writings, the dominant feeling of these six photographs is of constraint, entrapment. The artist/performer is denied the freedom of his body in a near-surreal world in which ordinary objects are stripped of their usual functions. It may be that in the actual performance, Schwarzkogler’s ritualistic actions gave them new meaning: it may be, as sometimes happens in art, that things became their opposites, that this apparently hellish prison suggested a kind of freedom. But these six photos alone suggest a total negation: actions’ and objects’ meanings are obscured, just as the artist’s body is covered over.
Nauman, an artist whose work in many media has taken diverse forms over the years, is still producing–he lives and works in New Mexico. While the drawings and sculptures included are interesting, a small exhibit cannot hope to give an adequate picture of his whole enterprise, something that also seems true of Schwarzkogler.
It helps to know, as can be inferred from the title’s translation (“Red line fabric picture”), that this is one of many pictures Palermo created not on a blank canvas but on fabric. The idea in part was to make pictures that would utilize materials such as preprinted fabric that are a part of daily life, thus putting the picture’s existence into the realm of daily living as well.
Novice visitors to art exhibits are often inclined to chuckle at things like paintings that are but a single solid color. Yet a comparison with the solid-color Ellsworth Kelly paintings in the Art Institute will reveal a world of difference. Kelly’s colors are the colors of the paint chart; strong, assertive, they suggest nothing so much as the idea of pure color. While Kelly takes things seen in daily life as his inspiration, he has refined and purified those forms to shapes so “essential” that they stand as “perfect” larger-than-life art objects, complete in themselves. The three pictures in Palermo’s Mappe are each somehow incomplete; each has an odd disparity, an imperfection, that makes it less a self-contained art object and more a part of the world to which it refers. Palermo’s combining of three images so utterly different from each other as these suggests his mind is able to see commonalities in images as diverse as speckles of white on black and solid red-brown.
