Perspectives Review :

“Art in the Abstract”
by Elisabeth Kirsch
The Kansas City Star
7/9/98

Installation art may be popular, but magazine editor says painting will always be around.
Raphael Rubenstein, a senior editor at Art in America in New York and a native of Lawrence, is the guest curator of the biennial “Perspective” show of Kansas City artists, opening Sunday at the Gallery of Art, Johnson County Community College.
A master list of 76 artists was compiled with the help of Bruce Hartman, director of that gallery; Deborah Edmont Scott, chief curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; and Sean Kelley, co-director of Grand Arts. From that list, 62 responded to Hartman’s request for slides.
Rubenstein selected 20 artists for studio visits and then chose 10 to be in the show: Kathryn Arnold, Shauna Alterio, James Brinsfield, Kyoung Ae Cho, David Ford, Nate Fors, Peregrine Honig, Christopher Leitch, D.F. Miller and James Woodfill. He also decided on the specific pieces he wanted in the exhibit.
In conjunction with Sunday’s opening, Rubenstein will give a lecture on contemporary abstraction, a subject that he has been exploring in a series of articles in Art in America.
The free talk begins at 3:30 p.m. in Room 211 of the college’s Cultural Education Center, upstairs from the gallery.
Rubenstein recently answered 3 Questions about the exhibit and art in general.
Q. Share some of your impressions of Kansas City art, good and bad.
A. One thing that really struck me about the Kansas City art scene was the West Bottoms neighborhood, which felt a lot like SoHo must have felt in the 1960s.
It’s an old industrial neighborhood with a lot of really striking architecture, removed form the city but not too far away. I saw a lot of adventurous artists with studios there looking not just for space, but for a community. Of the 20 studios I visited, half were in the West Bottoms.
There’s also a good mix of museums and adventurous nonprofit spaces in Kansas City, particularly Grand Arts and Johnson County Community College Gallery of Art. Their programs would be impressive anywhere, in Los Angeles or New York.
I think the commercial gallery scene has room to develop more, and I felt the need for some kind of publication about the arts apart from the Kansas City Star coverage.
Q. Talk about the criteria you employed in selecting works for the show.
A. I really didn’t expect to do a thematic show. I thought I would just find 10 artists whose work I liked and cross my fingers that it would look good and make sense visually.
The theme and the criteria that I eventually arrived at appeared almost automatically as I was reviewing the artists’ work on the plane back to New York. The work that started this idea was the film by James Woodfill, which uses rhythmic sound and image. From this work, I traced a path to all the other artists’ work.
In the most general way, it’s about repetition and difference. By that, I mean it’s about artists who establish a basic formal or thematic unit and then explore the possibilities of continuity and variation offered by that unit.
Q. There was much hostility in the art world to contemporary abstraction in the 1980s, and even up to the present. Is that changing now?
A. There has been a predominance of installation and video in the last few years. Installation art has become a period style, just the way gestural abstraction was circa 1958.
The first things students out of art school turn to is installation art. To devote yourself to abstract painting is not the automatic choice; it requires a serious commitment form the artist.
Abstraction seemed artistically exhausted a while back, but that is not true now. Abstraction is now reacting to and incorporating a lot of aspects of society and of other art forms. There are now abstract artists whose work incorporates video, sculpture and installation.
Painting has not gone away since the caves of Lascaux until today because we seem to have some genetic need to be in rooms with colored, painted walls.