Rutgers In New York 2003

In the early 1960's, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, had one of the most prestigious art departments in the country-a reputation that continues to this day. From the start, the program at Rutgers was dedicated to progressive avant-garde practices. Whereas other important schools during this period were heavily influenced by the formalist doctrines of Clement Greenberg, Rutgers' art pedagogy was formulated from Meyer Schapiro's Marxism (via Allan Kaprow), mixed with Eastern philosophies (via Black Mountain, John Cage, and D.T. Suzuki), Fluxus anticommercialism (via Robert Watts and Geoff Hendricks), and the gritty vernacular reality of central New Jersey (George Segal).

Artists at Rutgers were true innovators, scholars, and writers showing at the Rueben, Green, Hansa, Castelli, Martha Jackson, Bianchini and Ferus galleries - some of the most prominent American venues during this period. Allan Kaprow coined the word Happenings, and Lucas Samaras, Robert Whitman, Watts, and George Brecht (a friend of Watts and chemist from nearby Johnson and Johnson who made assemblages and events) were early performers and most important practitioners of this theatrical art. Because Roy Lichtenstein and Segal created their seminal works in New Brunswick during 1960-61, Rutgers has the only art department in America with legitimate claims to the creation of American Pop Art. Of the thirteen artists shown in Art 1963/The New Vocabulary, the first east coast Pop Art exhibit, five (George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and Robert Watts) were affiliated with Rutgers.1

In fact, the Rutgers group was not only one of the first to have direct involvement with Pop Art and Happenings, but also one of the first to be involved with Fluxus, kinetic sculpture, intermedia, performance, Minimalism, and Post-Minimalism. That early heritage has been written about extensively and is beyond the scope of this brochure.2

The Department of Visual Arts' established a reputation was as a breeding ground for innovative sculptors, conceptualists, and performance artists early on.3 Rather than making a specific genre of sculpture (such as the welded steel Smith-Caro tradition at Bennington College in the 1960s), Rutgers sculptors worked with new materials and figuration and created multimedia environments that incorporated real space, sound, and light. This was radically different from formalist sculpture with a defined style and praxis. Each Rutgers artist developed his or her own singular image from mass culture, vernacular information, and from within; creating personal methods of defining spatial and material essence, innovative ways of approaching events and redefining culture. Rutgers sculpture paralleled the real world. It was multivalent and theatrical, based on experience and art- less (at least initially.) Thus Watts' early kinetic and sound assemblages disclosed his engineering background, Segal's figures jut out from a plane like a Cubist collage in actual space, and Gary Kuehn's early work was workman-like and revealed memories of industrial accidents. Jackie Winsor cited her father's carpentry as a source for her early constructions with obsessive nailing. Artists at Rutgers used eccentric materials-who else other than Watts, Keith Sonnier and Joan Snyder used flocking to make high art? The Rutgers group always asked, "What is high art? How is the hegemony created?" Rutgers' strength was in grasping the esthetic core in the quotidian.

The formation of the Mason Gross School of the Arts in 1976 changed the intimate character of the school while increasing its professionalism, stressing greater diversity, emphasizing critical theory, offering state of the art facilities, and increasing studio spaces for students. Carolee Schneeman, the first woman hired in the art department, was followed by an impressive roster of female artists including Emma Amos, Judith Brodsky, Lauren Ewing, Ardele Lister, Diane Neumeier, Martha Rosler, and Joan Semmel. One of America's finest printmaking facilities, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, was developed by Brodsky. Photography, film, and graphic design were incorporated into the curriculum. The consolidation of Livingston College's Department of Visual Arts with Mason Gross brought the talents and activism of Leon Golub and Mel Edwards.

Recently surveying studios and slides of recent alumni, I noted a new emergence of painterly painting, both figurative and abstract, at Mason Gross (undoubtedly due to the influence of Joan Semmel, Hanneline Rogeberg, Tom Nozkowski, Suzanne Joelson, and Steve DiBennedeto) and the heavy influence of digital technology (in painting, photography, and video). These artists have a fluency with technology that matches the use of sketchbooks by earlier generations.

Looking closely at an alumni list I was also struck by the number of major curators and dealers with Rutgers affiliations. I don't think other accounts have noted this. For example, Robert Bianchi, Jack Flam, Stuart Horodner, Joseph Jacobs, Nina Jacobs, Robert Miller, Tom Moran, Ronald Onorato, Linda Weintraub, and James Yohe are all well-known museum professionals, art administrators, or dealers. The noted art historian Patricia Leighten revolutionized our understanding of Cubism; Leighten, the slide librarian at Douglass College when I was a graduate student, was always open to photographing another Becher or Nauman. Kathleen Ryan is the photo editor of The New York Times Magazine and Sherry Conkleton, a noted photo curator.

This winter, I visited every graduate and undergraduate studio at Mason Gross that invited me to look at work. The Visual Arts faculty suggested a pool of recent graduates from which I made additional selections. Given space and exhibition constraints, I could not easily incorporate large works or complex installations. I have included a few Rutgers artists of note (George Segal, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joan Snyder) not as tokens, but as a testament and standard to the quality that Rutgers generates. Since this is a group exhibition of available work, I selected for a viable show, something that coheres and works visually in the space. This is different than a retrospective or a thematic project. These factors defined curatorial selections. The choices were difficult, idiosyncratic, but honed by several decades of gallery work. Another curator would have undoubtedly made different selections.

Recent graduates include Diane Bonder, Heather Freeman, Jackson Lenochan, Elizabeth Line, Clifford Owens, Aaron Williams, and the collaboration of Ellen Lesperance and Jeanine Oleson. Bonder is a consummate personal filmmaker whose Closer to Heaven is an elegy to her father. Line makes installations of small collages on house paint chips, like a marriage of Richard Tuttle and Ellsworth Kelly. Freeman and Lenochan recycle signs in ironic and political ways. Owens's videos are arch, aggressive, (gross) and funny cultural in-jokes. William's paintings counter an organic illusionistic space with "modernist" flatness to disconcerting effect.

A parallel ritualistic universe of performed activities, at once contemporary and timeless, is documented in large scale photographs by Lesperance and Oleson.

Current graduate works in this exhibition include Wendy White's sculpture, which resembles a combination Franz West/Jessica Stockholder/Bambara fetish. Brian Benfer made a linear gesture in hydrocal and asphaltum that harkens back to process art like Sonnier. Zachariah Rockhill's self-effacing self-portrait video with running paint covering his head mocks a Colorfield painting as it references and updates performances such as Jim Dine's The Smiling Workman. A sense of post-punk absurdity is reflected in the performance videos and constructions of Lucas Kelly. Mara Faye Lethem's impassioned photograph Pain Survey, with the euphonious phrase scratched right into the negative, speaks strongly of personal angst. William Ortega's large black and white self-portrait with Barbie doll body acknowledges the Metro Pictures group as it deconstructs Hispanic machismo. Ligia Bouton makes cojoined vestments that are awkwardly worn and performed in by two persons. Yet I selected photos from her Recreation of a Deer Day series that are equally real and surreal, like dioramas or Duchamp's Etant Donnes.

Justin Adian, Coleen Fox, Wes Sherman, and Erin Thurlow all contribute abstract paintings that hold their own with any currently shown in New York. Adian's paintings for example, mix an Arte Povera sensibility with the subtle warped geometries of New Yorkers such as Robert Mangold. Fox makes sensitive, almost palpable fields. Sherman's paintings usually deal with complex color and figure ground relationships-I selected an atypical overall yellow field. Thurlow's Nite of the Hunter references the classic Agee film as well as his process of night walking with a digital camera in the course of hunting imagery. The linear vertical pattern derives from a curtain. A gestural, gutsy geometry built up with punchy color typifies the paintings of Jasmine Justice. I have selected Melissa Bebee's intimate, almost Vuillard-like, interior knowing full-well her repertoire includes large exotic installations.

Katrina Bello's sensitive biomorphic drawings and paintings and Geoffrey Trapp's self-portrait, a homage to John Travolta film characters, are among the standout works by talented undergraduates. Marisa Tsikitas' paintings are colorful, exuberant, expressionist, and mildly kitsch. Eve Schneider's anti-monumental mini-monuments (remember

Giacometti's year-long production in a matchbox?) and medicinal color charts, and Syd Olshfski's abstractions show promise. Many of these artists already have strong signature styles and they hold their own with the graduates.

Mason Gross School of the Arts will continue to influence the art world because of these talents and because of the recognition of the achievements in the past. It's a continuum, and a proud heritage. Off the top, these student works may include the future masters of the Rutgers Tradition. Take a close look and enjoy!

---- Sid Sachs, April 2003

Notes

1. The date in the title of this show is a misnomer; the exhibition took place at the Gershman YHMA in Philadelphia in October 1962, six weeks before Sidney Janis' New Realism exhibition, which historically is credited. There would have been more Rutgers connections - Letty Eisenhauer was suggested by curator Billy Kluver but nixed by a local committee. Eisenhauer, an integral performer in early Happenings by Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Ben Patterson etc. showed at the Y several seasons later. See Sid Sachs "Destination: Broad and Pine" and other essays by Constance W. Glenn and Cheryl Harper in Harper, A Happening Place (Philadelphia: The Galleries at the Gershman Y, 2003).

2. For examples, see Joan Marter, Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963 (Newark: The Newark Museum 1999), 15 Degrees from Rutgers; Charting New Directions in Contemporary Art (New Brunswick: Mason Gross School of Art, 1996), Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Judith F. Rodenbeck, Experiments in the Everyday; Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, Events, Objects, Documents (New York: Columbia University, 1999 and Geoffrey Hendricks, Critical Mass (Amherst: Mead Art Museum 2003).

3. For example Alice Aycock, Chaikia Booker, Cheryl Dunye, Mel Edwards, Lauren Ewing, John Goodyear, Geoffrey Hendricks, Gary Kuehn, Larry Miller, Robert Morris, Rita Myers, Linda Nishio, Charles Ray, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Charles Simonds, Mimi Smith, Keith Sonnier, Patrick Strzelec, Ted Victoria, Robert Watts, Robert Whitman, Jacqueline Winsor, etc.