Strange art from out, a weblog by George Girton

Strange art . . . . . oct 6 2003 — o30.dat

Yesterday we went to the opening, at the UCLA Hammer Museum, of Lee Bontecou's retrospective. Lee, highly regarded in the NYC art scene of the 1950's (?) dropped out of sight for decades. People kept writing to her on her farm in rural Pennsylvania, but evidently she ignored all the letters. However, she continued to draw, paint, and create sculptures, intricate welded and tied shaped canvases and mobiles, unlike anything you have seen.

There are many intriguing aspects to her work, which it is not possible to see and appreciate in an hour or a day. Of course, this is the fundamental flaw of consumed, rather than participatory, art.

Still, there are a couple of things to mention. In the first series of art, from around 1960 to mid-sixties, Lee Bontecou created shaped canvases, canvas pieces tied together onto welded frames, each with one or more windows onto blackness. The window looked in onto a surface of black velvet or soot, a dark window of the most soothing black, yet also somewhat disturbing. What world was it in? A window to where? Only 2 or 3 of the working drawings for these pieces provided a clue: a planet or perhaps the orb of an eyeball looking back.

Twenty-five year later Lee Bontecou was drawing eyeballs, vast complex connected point of view diagrams conceived as exploded diagram connected sculptures. Some of them also had teeth in them, or sails to take them somewhere. Still wrapped together with copper wire, but as with the window series, if you stepped back far enough the small pieces of wire disappeared from the visual field. Was this the right way to view the art, or up close?

Probably both.

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