"The important thing was the space the marks suggested. It was the space within a space. The painting was physical, but it also had a pictorial dimension.
Materiality and gesture make space." –Frank Stella, from the catalog
Went to see the current retrospective at the de Young Museum for Frank Stella. The first few galleries provided excellent examples of the kind of geometric, colored canvases you might expect from Stella: striped patterns of energy presented with experimental and industrial paints (with copper, aluminum, and florescent alkyds). But the last few rooms were really unexpected, at least to me: sculptures that represented Stella's idea of dimensional drawings executed with some amazing engineering (including 3D printing and other rapid prototyping tools).
I recall seeing earlier forms of these works at a show at the Addison Gallery in Andover, MA in the late 1990's, showing his work with Tyler Graphics. He was also working on some kind of art car with the students there at Phillips Academy - imagine being a high school art student, and your teacher is Frank Stella. Clearly things had moved from flat shapes, to swoopy collages of low-relief "objects-drawings". Then like his use of copper and aluminum paints, the shapes began to take on a materiality of their own; not just parts pulled or pushed from a surface, but collected in space.
But there was a point in the show where he answered whether his pieces were paintings or sculptures, and he famously, and for a long time, resisted calling his art sculpture. He responded that he thought of his process as drawing – drawing in space. While the nature and quality of the objects was, clearly, of great importance to him, the act of making was primary.
It struck me that this transition was so much like the transition from something like analytical cubism to synthetic: a profound qualitative and dimensional shift that allowed the object making to include new technologies and processes, like printmaking or 3D printing. I thought about how I had framed Stella’s work from the things I learned in art history class (the Black Paintings, the shaped canvases) and what I had seen at the Addison show (large flowing, brightly-colored, printed shapes). So the surprise for me was the continuing evolution of the work into new spatial and perceptual realms, and the on-going experimentation with new digital tools at the forward edge of making.
When I read wall labels at an art show, I am primarily looking for dates, which give me some idea of the direction and the progression of the works. But in the case of this retrospective, the things that caught my attention were the materials. The copper and industrial paints gave way to aluminum and fiber-glass, and then to TUSK Solid Grey 3000 and Protogen RPT (both liquid photopolymer resins used in stereolithographic printing). In many art shows, the type of paint or materials hardly changes at all – obviously not the case here.
Finally, in the lobby as a tremendously fun and engaging activity put on by the Museum staff; they replaced the mono-chrome gridded image that usually hangs on this extra-large wall with an enormous Stella piece from 1999 (which would have been right after the Addison show I mentioned earlier) called Das Erdbeben in Chili. In front of this was a set of tables laid out with scissors, colored pencils, glue sticks, and a large supply of brightly colored papers. Young children and their families were seated there, cutting shapes and collaging the parts. It was gratifying to see the energy and the imagination of Stella's work transfer directly to those young artists.
