Photo: Ealan Wingate.
Dorothea Rockburne installing "Intersection" at the Spoleto Festival in 1972.
Roberta hits the nail on its head:
NYTimes: Art Review | 'High Times, Hard Times'
Painting in the Heady Days, After It Was Proclaimed Dead
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: February 16, 2007 {excerpt}[...] Burdened by a big title that broadcasts a level of ambition and comprehensiveness it does not fulfill, this show arbitrarily skips across the surface of an immense subject while suffering from too much agenda, too little research and inappropriate architecture. The scale and physical eccentricity of the work do not take well to wainscoting and other unavoidable facts of the academy’s busy Beaux-Arts interior. Several paintings are forced onto curved walls.
The show passes over the artists who dominated painting during this period, like Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Brice Marden, Robert Mangold and Robert Ryman. Young Turks of that moment, like David Diao and Peter Young, are here, but the whole project feels a bit hollow at the center, like a time capsule from a time that didn’t quite exist.
Still, with 42 works by 37 artists, "High Times, Hard Times" is a start and should inspire further attempts. It was proposed by the painter David Reed and assembled by the art historian and critic Katy Siegel in consultation with Mr. Reed. Sketchy as the final outcome often is, they and Independent Curators International are to be commended for tackling a job that a flush New York museum should have taken on about 10 years ago. Whatever its problems, this exhibition demonstrates a central truth: far from being dead during the period in question, painting was in an uproar. [...]
...this exhibition, pulled off by a small nonprofit art organization with no gallery space of its own, has taken the plunge, and it suggests all kinds of possible exhibitions: surveys of Ralph Humphrey's or Ms. Fishman's career, for example, or of New York painting in the late 1970s and even the '80s. Perhaps it will remind New York’s big museums to think outside the box of the blue-chip retrospective or the sampling of current gallery trends and examine painting’s neglected recent past in ways that might benefit its present and future.
