ncluded in MOMA’s current ‘Contemporary Art from the Collection’ is Lawrence Weiner’s 1968 work ‘Gloss white lacquer, sprayed for 2 minutes at 40lb pressure directly on the floor’ which the museum purchased this year. Adhering to the artist’s terms for ownership and fabrication the museum produced a shiny and somewhat misty puddle of white paint on the dark cement floor. It allowed me to reflect upon several things, one being spray paint, and less expectedly, the year of 1968. I was 17 years old.
The aerosol can was perfected for a mass market in 1949 by the Precision Valve Corporation in the New York City borough of the Bronx, also Weiner’s home. Millions were quickly produced and sold. New inexpensive methods of paint application found artists willing to experiment in a period where that medium was being allowed to act on its own properties. I do not know the first artist to grip an aerosol can but Robert Rauschenberg may be considered a front runner in his early gritty monochromes and without question in the Cornell influenced ‘rose’ period of the mid-50’s. Their destructive potential upon the ozone layer unknown aerosol cans once held everything from paint, whipped cream, hair fixatives, deodorant, and cheese. Every garage or basement housed several cans within easy reach of the adventurous youngster. Holding of a match to a burst of hairspray would produce a flame thrower of impressive reach. Along with model makers and hobbyists, spray paint slowly became the medium of delinquents. Often used to ‘touch up’ a surface, spray cans sold at hardware, auto supply, art, and hobby stores. The can’s ‘big brother’ the spray-gun had long been in wide use both in industry and commercial art, requiring a compressor to disperse the paint through connection to a ‘gun’. Man Ray used a spray gun in his ‘Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself By Her Own Shadows’ painting of 1916. Jackson Pollock was said to have observed the random ‘accidents’ of paint application when decorating floats for communist demonstrations in the late ‘30’s. His later use of enamels was purely a financial decision, black, white, and silvers were available at any hardware store. Controlled dispersal was employed by the grand Yves Klein who used a spray gun loaded with IKB upon plant life and living female nudes to produce ghostly reliefs on canvas. Andy Warhol (who always yearned for a ‘painting machine’) spray painted Coke bottle’s silver in his early Pop years; Jim Dine and James Rosenquist also frequently reached for the can. The smoldering out of Abstract Expressionism allowed for spray gun’s finest hour as Color Field painter Jules Olitski sprayed out Greenbergian acres of instant pointillism. In the public realm Earl Scheib ran TV commercials for his “Twenty Nine Ninety Five!” ($29.95) paint job for any car- how many artists considered dropping off a shows worth of blank canvases to one of Earl’s many convenient locations? Custom car culture influenced the candy-colored transcendentalism of ‘finish-fetish’ LA art from the sixties. Closer to home Robert Smithson’s rapturous 1965 piece on Donald Judd’s ‘outsourcing’ of labor set the eventual stage for ‘post-studio’ artists who shifted the production of objects onto fabricators or teams of assistants responsible in executing sets of instructions (Sol Lewitt to Jeff Koons).Weiner’s art and other art categorized as ‘conceptual’ bears resemblance to both the fantasist instructional ‘pieces’ of Yoko Ono’s collected in ‘Grapefruit’ (1964) and in the directives around Allan Kaprow’s loosely structured ‘Happenings’. For me, today’s participatory art always feels like nostalgia for someone’s idea of the 60’s; while I am unsure as to who-was–where-when I suspect that Weiner and others remained aloof from the advant-garde hijinks of the Fluxus group and the chic Noveau Realiste events here and abroad. Weiner’s early paintings, (several rare examples included in his Whitney retro) illustrated the transference of ‘decision making’ (a phrase later bandied endlessly around in arts schools) to the owner of the finalized work in the form of a casual agreement. Concerned with pushing around materials (especially in the vicinity of liquids) Weiner’s militant ambivalence over the physical appearance of an artwork suggested Frank Stella’s ‘what you see is what you see’ attitude. Stella’s ‘black’ paintings ‘started and finished’ echoing no form other than the shape of canvas which could be notched along it edges, corners, or removed from its center. The ‘Action’ painter’s dilemma of when to quit a work of art had been resolved through Stella’s programmatic wall objects-art returned in service to an idea. The dry schematics for ‘A-B-C’, ‘Serial’, or Idea’ art production were abetted by the concise but ‘teflon’ language used by Jasper Johns, derived in part from his close relationship to John Cage’s adaptation of Zen Buddhist acceptance and his study of Wittgenstein in the early 60’s. Shifts in how artists talk about their art does not necessarily signal the new-but this time it did. Johns ‘Sketchbook Notes’, 1963-4 (“Take an object………”) were read by artists and poets and his phrase ‘discrete operations’ appealed to individuals working towards the obsolescence of the wall dependant art object. Demarcations of time played a major role in Cage’s ‘silent’ compositions and durations in ‘underground’ film and performance were stretched to sadistic lengths that were, as Warhol later remarked about his films, “better read about than seen”. In 1968, after an outdoor sculpture of his was accidentally demolished in a show at Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts (organized by Seth Siegelaub) the artist would dispense with any physical display unless the preference was exercised in agreement with his clauses of legal ownership-‘the piece may be fabricated, etc’.If 1967 was the ‘Summer of Love’ 1968 was a bummer. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy overshadowed the attempt on Andy Warhol’s life across Union Square Park from Max’s Kansas City-watering hole for Weiner and his social circle. Student protests shut down France and Chicago police ran riot at the Democratic National Convention; but to reintroduce the aerosol can here as the writing tool of the radical left would be incorrect- the poster, often silk screened within the very institution under ‘siege’, ruled across college campuses in the US and on the streets of Paris. Early 70’s New York would see the rise of the graffiti writer as urban hero, and while Robert Smithson (before his death in 1973) claimed indifference about the ‘bombing’ of subway cars he hated seeing ‘tags’ on geological formations in Central Park. 1968 was notable for music releases by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones-both LP’s would coincidentally feature ‘white’ covers matching in scale the proto-minimalist Robert Ryman’s paintings of the same period. ‘The Beatles’ package, meant to emulate crude ‘bootleg’ recordings, featured a poster by Richard Hamilton and the influence of Yoko Ono upon John Lennon could be heard in the sound collage ‘Revolution #9’. LA cult leader Charles Manson’s LSD addled interpretation of the double LP would be that of apocalyptic race war (the ‘white’ album) providing the twisted ideological basis for the Tate-LaBianca murders during the summer of 1969. The Stones ‘back to basics’ sound would be the last recordings that the Byronesque Brian Jones would fully contribute to before his death in 1969. ‘Beggars Banquet’s original cover photograph, that of a graffiti covered toilet stall, was deemed too ‘dirty’ for American youth and was quickly replaced by a shiny ‘clean’ blank; a debauched portrait of the band was to be found in the album’s gatefold. Dark things may come in bright packages, and the minimalists, post-minimal, and conceptual artists were, as artist Bill Beckley pointed out, puritanical in their art but totally romantic in their personal lives.The color white is as strongly associated with minimalism as Errol Flynn is to Robin Hood. Holding light longer, always available, bright and agreeable, it became the color of gallery walls both rich and poor from LA to Rome. How would Dan Flavin’s fluorescent structures been read in anywhere but the ‘white cube’? Wall’s got their post-minimal asses kicked but the floor was no stranger to paint and ‘Gloss White…’ may easily be mistaken for a short aerosol ‘test’ burst necessary to see if the can was dispensing correctly. Artist’s studios and workshops were speckled in such artless markings while the actual painting was done outdoors to lessen exposure to the noxious fumes. Newspaper was often put down to keep a work area tidy, and looking around at MOMA I found some nearby in Rauschenberg’s rarely polemic ‘CURRENTS’ print edition from the ‘party’s over’ year of 1970. What is missing in ‘Gloss White…’ between the can and floor is the vaguely militaristic stenciled lettering found at stationary stores used by Johns and many others-a Weiner scholar would best know the first moment a spray can was gently rattled and positioned over a cutout text-(they appear in Weiner’s 70’s films in the staircase landing of his Bleecker St. loft). Stenciling artists (Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, Glenn Ligon, and Ed Ruscha-a national treasure) are currently doing big business. It would be intriguing to view documentation of ‘Gloss White…’s installation, if any was allowed-perhaps the activity would be too ‘discrete’ to make much of an impression. Looking back I appreciate the underlying sense of mildly criminal mischief enacted in the artist’s removals of areas of carpet and wall, gunshots, and tossing of stones. ‘Gloss White…’ required no skill to construct and offered no drama in its installation-unlike the raising of an arc of corten steel would have provided in that very space several years ago. The radical 60’s cry of ‘tear down the walls’ (which I never heard anywhere except on a Jefferson Airplane album) extended to the gallery or studio floor which was locally excavated (Jean Dupuy) poured upon (Lynda Benglis and Richard Serra) and used as a teaching tool (Mel Bochner). Increasingly expensive Soho real estate, valued by a floor’s square footage would ironically host ‘earth’ artist’s deposits of soil, minerals, and other materials familiar to mining or manufacturing.
Lawrence Weiner’s ‘Gloss white lacquer, sprayed for 2 minutes at 40lb pressure directly at the floor’. marked his territory in a determined positioning within a long list of names for the exclusionary backward glance of art history. The camera pulls back from a single mark on a floor busy with drifting museum visitors, looking, listening to MoMA audio and holding up image grabbing devices between them and the art, or even the arts description. This shape may be a punctuation mark ending a sentence- a ‘period’ invisible unless you were told it was there.
Tim Maul
(thank you Krystallynne Gonzalez).
