FLASH ART, Summer 1988, Magazine, P. 136, by KLAUS OTTMANN
EUROPEAN SCULPTURE MADE IN USA
JOHN GIBSON Gallery, New York
This exhibition of works by Armleder, Bijl, Bosslet, IFP, Lavier, Leccia, and Staehle at this gallery which has been an early and rigorous promoter of hyped-up curated group shows, appears to have been curated in-house though backed by a catalog essay by Dan Cameron. The subtitle Made in USA is irrelevant since the fact that the exhibited works were made in the United States does not add anything essentially new.
Most of the artists in the exhibition, especially Armleder and Leccia, content themselves with the mere grouping of objects without acknowledging the need for transformation – a task that has been recognized explicitly by Lydia Dona and Ashley Bickerton and which, in this show is achieved by only two artists, Eberhard Bosslet and Wolfgang Staehle.
In Bosslet's braced arrangements, the pressure applied to the objects transforms them into a state of hypermateriality. Staehle's video sculptures displaying endlessly repeated sequences of appropriated TV images seem to play out Valéry's fìnite world of the media in which cause and effect become interchangeable and the present permanent.
Klaus Ottmann
EUROPEAN SCULPTURE MADE IN USA
JOHN GIBSON Gallery, New York
This exhibition of works by Armleder, Bijl, Bosslet, IFP, Lavier, Leccia, and Staehle at this gallery which has been an early and rigorous promoter of hyped-up curated group shows, appears to have been curated in-house though backed by a catalog essay by Dan Cameron. The subtitle Made in USA is irrelevant since the fact that the exhibited works were made in the United States does not add anything essentially new.
Most of the artists in the exhibition, especially Armleder and Leccia, content themselves with the mere grouping of objects without acknowledging the need for transformation – a task that has been recognized explicitly by Lydia Dona and Ashley Bickerton and which, in this show is achieved by only two artists, Eberhard Bosslet and Wolfgang Staehle.
In Bosslet's braced arrangements, the pressure applied to the objects transforms them into a state of hypermateriality. Staehle's video sculptures displaying endlessly repeated sequences of appropriated TV images seem to play out Valéry's fìnite world of the media in which cause and effect become interchangeable and the present permanent.
Klaus Ottmann
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