Art for the Eighties

Art tor the Eighties proffers no specific program or theme. It groups together objects that do not go together In any obvious way. At the time the selection was made the only firm condition was that the artists be unaffiliated; since then, several of them have found galleries. The work Is varied and It Is new. Some of the artists know each other; some have met for the first time In the past few months. There Is figurative work and abstract work, painting and sculpture, and work that inhabits a space somewhere In between.

This exhibition does not concern Itself with the revival of painting or sculpture or any other presumably neglected art form. The work Included here does not seek to eliminate the object, nor does it concern itself with challenging or extending the notion of what may constitute a work of art either through manipulating context or isolating the viewer's relationship to the work. All the artists in this exhibition produce objects. Though some are not concerned exclusively with object making, the works produced are more or less autonomous. In Nancy Arlen's work, polyester serves as the medium for streaks of color suspended within translucent armature-like forms, reversing the relationship between structural support and applied color as It appears in painted sculpture. Donald Baechler's drawings reduce their found Images to the threshold of a kind of paint-by-numbers invisibility. Though it Is freestanding and multlfaclal, Tom Butter's stained fiberglas sculpture looks like crumpled painting, as If he decided to take them off the wall and stand them on end. Jean Feinberg makes paintings whose edges border a shallow recess seemingly deep enough to contain the array of cut-out wood or foamcore shapes that spill out over the edges anyway, sometimes changing color on the way. Cynthia Gallagher, another painter, makes irregularly shaped paintings on paper whose surfaces are hard enough to hold up ·10 all the touching they elicit (a recent painting was just turned Into a rug), combining shrill color with emblematic design to form an image where a centered shape disengages Itself from an overlay of conflicting patterns. With a fist of source material as diverse as Persian miniatures, Polaroid snapshots, Botticelli and Picasso, Joseph HIiton's small paintings combine a wily electlclsm In their Imagery with a seemingly naive figure style and ad hoc design, which together got him included In the now celebrated "BAD Painting" exhibition at the New Museum, N.Y. Jeff Koons, for whom "THE NEW" serves as a blanket term referring to all his recent work, constructs objects consisting of three elements: fluorescent tubes, variable plexlglass enclosures around them and a household appliance (or two), the brand newness of which It is the ostensible function of the first two elements to display. If Koons takes patently functional objects out of the sphere of everyday use, Jeffrey Plate's materials come straight from the trash heap or the steel mill, whence they are transformed Into objects whose formal elegance and aloof presence contradict the Constructivist Idiom they affect. Tom Rankin's sculpture Is generally long and low to the ground reflecting the industrial tubing, sliced through and incrusted with sections of colored plexlglass, which forms Its main structural element. Takao Salto's voluminous paintings are shaped not only in two dimensions but In three, raising questions concerning their optimum viewpoint that relate them to sculpture no matter how persistently they deny any feeling of weight. Closest of all, with Jeff Plate and Taro Suzuki, to the stylistic legacy of Constructivism and Futurism, F.L. Schroder's wall pieces made of cut, welded and painted aluminum channel are at the same time more or less gestural according to the texture of the painted surface and the three dimensional development of the channeling, while the use of spray-paint evokes assembly-line techniques.

1. Harvey Tulcensky
2. Takao Salto
3. Cynthia Gallagher
4. Tom Butter
5. Joseph Hilton
6. Tom Rankin
7. F.L. Schröder
8. Donald Baechler
9. Jean Feinberg
10. Jeffrey Plate
11. Robin Tewes
12. Nancy Arlen
13. Jeff Koons
14. Taro Suzuki

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Interview of Jeff Koons By Katy Siegel, Art Forum March 2003

KS: That 1980 exhibition was not just your first exposure in New York but your only show for a while. You went home to Sarasota in 1982. When you came back to New York did things get better?

JK: Before I left, there was really no one there for the work. I was supposed to have had that show with Mary Boone, and then I started to work with Annina Nosei a little bit, but that didn’t go anywhere either. That’s when I went home for a while. I saved up enough money to come back and have a small apartment downtown, and eventually I got a gallery. I had been in a group show in Venezuela earlier [“Art of the Eighties,” Galería Durban, Caracas, 1980], and a young artist there, Meyer Vaisman, saw the show. Meyer got a little older, moved to New York, and opened a gallery on the Lower East Side, International With Monument. And some people who were going to show with him, like Richard Prince, mentioned my work, and Meyer said, “You know Koons? I always liked his work. I saw it in Caracas. How can I see him?” Peter Halley was also at the gallery, so it could’ve been through Peter too—he had done the “Science Fiction” show [John Weber Gallery, New York, 1983]. I was in a lot of good group shows from 1982 to ’85.

https://www.artforum.com/columns/jeff-koons-165827/