(An Appropriate Distance)

 

FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

Apr 15, 2015 7:35 PM EDT

Thanks for the very nice review, Piri. I could never get into that generation sequence business. It always seemed to me that the “first” was very clear and the “second” was painters like Resnick and Goldberg (and anyone else that painted like De Kooning) and by the time there could be any “third” so much else was going on that the category was diluted beyond usefulness. By “presentation” I meant contriving paintings to be apprehended for the character of their elements rather than their arrangement, pictorial content or external reference. A “presentational“ work would presumably be simple and “one shot”, coming right at you, ”in your face”. It was an attitude and a feeling more than a defined theory, and getting into definitive fine points would just be headache-making. By far the most gratifying consequence of this exhibit and the reaction to it is that art-savvy people seem to be reacting to the paintings the way I did when I was making them 50 years ago. Back then about all I got was “Bauhaus”, “warmed over Malevich”, “decorator colors” and a general feeling of bewildered distaste. Now I hear things like your phrase “good enough to eat”, a heartening response of simple sensual pleasure.

- Darby Bannard

Apr 17, 2015 1:18 AM EDT

Yes, I know "second-generation" is also used as you say, Darby. But I was following the usage of Kenworth Moffett. It's confusing, I know, but it seems to me that the truest heirs of first generation ab-ex are the color-field painters of whose group you are such an integral part. To say you are third-generation is to suggest that you took your cues from Goldberg etc. which is certainly not the case.

- Piri Halasz

Jul 18, 2015 8:17 AM EDT

Piri,

You said one of the best things that has ever been said about Darby Bannard's early work when you said "Bannard’s minimalism wasn’t hostile to modernism, like the minimalism of Morris, Judd, Carl Andre & Robert Smithson." Understanding the observation you present is a key to getting why his early paintings are so good.

It is commonly held that Bannard left his earlier minimalistic work behind as he developed. He certainly left the NYC spotlight after he responded to Olitski's reintroduction of painterliness in the 70s. But when he lost all his painting supplies in transit to an Emma lake Workshop in the 80s, he was forced to paint with limited means, which were reminiscent of the minimal means he used the 60s, and which inspired a rebirth of that method within his production.

But he no longer employed Euclidean geometry for developing containers for his color. Instead, miminmalistic "geometry" was revealed as "directness" in the scallop like shapes that arose from the painterly but focused paint handling that came from the Emma Lake Workshop series. These and the scallop pictures that followed show, as I said elsewhere, "that Minimalism, at its root, was about reduction to the clear statement, not geometry and not theoretical 'content' ... his surface went from "dry" to "wet", all without giving up any of the simple clarity that he had taken from Minimalism."

It is his insistence on clarity as a visual value that prevented his version of Minimalism from being antagonistic to Modernism. While other Minimalists were focused on what they wanted to deny, his instincts led him to affirm something, something that happened to be one of the core values of Modernism, something that his later work was to show did not contradict what most Minimalists said they were contradicting.

You summarized all this very nicely.

- John Link