Photo: Robert Barry

Art termed ‘conceptual’ had a strong presence in New York this wet spring. Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Braco Dimitrijevic, Sol Lewitt, and Alison Knowles occupied spaces both modest and extravagant. Robert Barry also participated in this ‘konzept’ surge simultaneously showing work at the towering new Sperone Westwater colossus on the Bowery ‘Gold Coast’, Yvon Lambert Gallery in Chelsea, and at ‘A Place To Which We Can Come’ at the Convent of St. Cecelia in Greenpoint Brooklyn. The last two of these exhibitions overlap in an intriguing manner and allow for a closer reading of Barry’s participation.The origins of abandoned urban space as an aesthetic site requires lengthier scholarship but the local development of downtown lofts for living/working and an awareness of Arte Povera’s unglamorous industrial contexts contributed toward the attraction of the ‘raw’ exhibition space. Post-minimal works like Richard Serra’s lead-throwing piece included in the important ‘9 at Leo Castelli’ at the Castelli warehouse (1968) were too physically demanding for the austere galleries on 57th St and the Upper East Side. This necessity for more durable surroundings also reflected an emerging romantic strain in the construction of the male artist persona as working dude, perhaps in guilty reaction to the chic Pop artists, or at least to Andy Warhol. Romantic connotations could be also found in the opening of an unused Queens elementary school PS 1 in 1975by Allana Heiss to host second wave post minimalism. This reanimation of ‘dead’ real estate placed the artist in the role of mediumistic empath or mystic archeologist, communing with the ‘space’ in an ‘excavation’ of history. The dominant metaphor of PS 1, of course, is that of the academy- offering the best ‘students’ shows and later in the 70’s residencies. Unlike sculptural interventions which led to the tepid category of ‘installation art’ discrete conceptual art either disappeared into the grime or relied on the photograph/document to mark its territory. Having originated on the blank white page the conceptual was dependant, despite the period optimism over new communication technologies, on the white wall or in a well produced and distributed publication.Serra Sabuncuoglu, a young Turkish-American curator was offered by a clergyman the convent at Saint Cecelia’s in its entirety to host an exhibition.

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