John McCracken
In the late 50s, Tony Smith and Barnett Newman helped to remodel Betty Parsons' 57th Street gallery. They created an almost cube-shaped main space - the walls pure as a page, with subtly curved corners and a concrete floor - whose proportions fitted their ordered works. These two artists were the linchpins of Minimalism, influencing such artists as Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Richard Nonas and Sol Lewitt, all of whom were interested in human artefacts and in alternative descriptions of art. Andre called his works 'arrangements'. Rooms were called 'spaces'. Curators called the new art - which more than ever before drew attention to the 'space' - 'primary structures' (Kynaston McShine), 'literalist' (Michael Fried), 'systemic' (Lawrence Alloway), and 'Minimal' (Richard Wollheim).
Experiencing New York art through magazines, in 1963, Californian John McCracken cut a notch in his sign-oriented abstract paintings on Masonite and began to inch his way from Newman toward Smith. He began to paint on blocks of wood, and in 1966 made his first lacquer-covered 'plank', an eight-feet tall blue and red board that linked the wall to the floor and seemed to wed West Coast colour with the severe, literal and systematic East Coast Minimal works he had read about.
Since then, McCracken has incrementally extended blocks, slabs and planks into a variety of wedges and polyhedral solids that recall the reductivism of New York Minimalism, Bay Area Zen, as well as the iconic, almost religious 'presence' (a McCracken word) of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is something solid yet evanescent about his sculptures, such that a room of them, now in varied chromatic hues, bears the stamp not only of something 'higher' but also of something man-made; something that looks at earth and sky and then beyond into primary forms, colour and light. They emanate both simplicity and complexity, and are imbued with the physical qualities of revelation and concealment - all requirements of religious mystery. Of course, there is no moral, no directive and no dicta guiding them - nothing to tinge them with moral imperatives, and no programmatic explanatory principle. And, they make you feel good.
That's a vapid thing to say, but to experience their 'objecthood' is more than just to experience their 'theatricality', their surface, style and 'presence', for even the word 'beauty' seems insufficient. In the Smith-Newman-styled 'cube' rooms in which they reside so well, McCracken sets up an experience that takes you beyond Euclidean shapes toward a form of geometric representation that might be described as organic, and which evokes inner, meditative and 'feel good' experiences.
For each work, McCracken constructs a rectangle in wood and covers it with canvas. He then saturates it with coloured resin which he sands and buffs to perfection. In this show were eight works of varying colours and shapes: Stone and Sky (both 1996), each about the size of the box your VCR came in, cherry red and sky blue respectively, which sat vertically on pedestals; Zuni (1996), an elongated red wedge; Red-Black Beam (1987), a wine-dark beam of night; Spirit (1996) and Space (1995), wall pieces each about three inches thick and the size of a square boogie board, in white and red respectively; Thor (1996), a coffin-sized, Darth Vadar-like, looming, black monolith; and Guardian (1995), an azure rectangle that comes to the waist of a tall person like McCracken. Thor and Stone had their corners trimmed like crystals, but every surface was deep and impenetrable, soft and hard.
California has always been 'different' from New York. Words like 'groovy', 'organic' and 'sunshine' come to mind. In the early 60s, surfing and hot rods were ubiquitous. Hot rods were exotic, colourful and not prone to rust - rust being something Eastern, Appalachian, industrial... old. (A Los Angeleno friend once left his Chevy Malibu convertible's top down for two years - it rained twice.) McCracken opted for the light and colour found in car bonnets in a time before metal flake. He didn't look at shapes and forms so much as inside them, bearing the Pacific rim's Eastern orientation and sensibility in mind. This 'out west' newness and a Buddha-like serenity imbue McCracken's work - it always looks fresh and yet manages to appear as time-daunted as the hills. This is not an easy quality to manufacture. And as hokey-seeming as titles like Sky and Guardian are, they fit.
In the gallery, there were also subtle plays of light and shadow - a plum colour on the azure surface of Guardian which reflected the fire-engine red of Space - trapezoid shadows on walls and floors were like visual subtexts. The vertical-standing Thor had a monkish quality and suggested the permanence and deep time 'presence' of a J.G. Ballard novel. But McCracken's brand of Minimalism always seems to look to the future, and in that regard the works always appear contemporary.
