a changing ratio | Rosemarie Castoro and Liz Deschenes

The central characteristics of Castoro’s and Deschenes’s oeuvres include formal and substantive examination of particular mediums, and a reliance on temporal processes, that participate in the tradition of Minimal art, but also illustrate a liberated view of materiality. The exhibition a changing ratio showcases how the practices of both artists, from their beginnings in the field of monochrome painting, opened up into experimental, cross-media, process-based approaches, then into space, and towards an intellectual reflection involving the body.

This Viewing Room is an extension of the exhibition into digital space and offers insight into the multi-layered oeuvre of Liz Deschenes and Rosemarie Castoro beyond the exhibited works.

The exhibition is a collaboration with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London • Paris • Salzburg and supported by Miguel Abreu Gallery New York.
 
 
Installation views | a changing ratio | Photo: Dirk Tacke

"Depending on the day, the weather, the architecture, and the presence or absence of others in the gallery, each encounter with Deschenes' work is a unique experience that speaks to our fundamental desire to be transformed by art."

– Eva Respini, chief curator, Institute of Contemporary Art ICA, Boston

Exhibition views "Liz Deschenes", Institute of Contemporary Art ICA, Boston (2016) | Photo: Charles Mayer

Prototype for Gallery 7 (3) is a large-format photogram mounted onto a free-standing frame on an aluminum plate, thus functioning simultaneously as a photographic and sculptural object. Liz Deschenes explores the material potential of photography using the elementary aspects of the medium: photographic paper, light and chemicals. Deschenes' time-intensive work process begins by exposing light sensitive paper to the ambient light of the night, then washing and fixing it with silver toner. The resulting photograms bear fine, abstract traces of their creation process and, through their reflective surface, involve both the viewer encountering them and the spatial context of their presentation. As the material tends to oxidize, the works slowly develop further over time. The exhibition space thus becomes a camera, which, depending on the incidence of light, determine the alteration of the surface. In this way, Prototype for Gallery 7 (3) absorbs light and makes the material development of photography perceptible, while at the same time the object – like Stereograph #35, FPF #1 and FPF #5 – reacts to its surroundings by reflecting movement in time and space.


Photo: Dirk Tacke

The title FPF #1 and FPF #5 (both 2018), of the two-part photograms from the series with the same name, refer to the abbreviation for "frame per foot" and thus to the process of creating the work. Each photogram of the series was exposed for as long as a human foot touched the ground for a single step, the duration varying according to the gait and speed of the walker. Deschenes refers to the measure for image rates "frames per second", which describes the number of individual images of a camera that are taken per time frame. The artist uses analog photographic techniques to examine and visualize time as a physical unit. FPF #1 and FPF #5 are records of the material conditions of their creation. The structure of the surface changes depending on the brightness during the exposure of the photosensitive paper and the intensity of the chemical development. The immediate reality of the photographic process takes the place of a mediating reality - in the form of a motif. The horizontally staggered works have a monochrome mirror-like effect, which, upon closer inspection, reveal a highly individual, sensitive surface: “It changes, it oxidizes, it catches handprints if handled. It is a sensitive, vulnerable material.” Photography is no longer just a momentary snapshot, it is constantly absorbing the influences of its surroundings. Similar to Stereograph #35, FPF #1 and FPF #5 should not be seen as classic pictures, but as experiences that are bound to space and time.


Photo: Dirk Tacke

In the series Concrete Poetries (1968-69), Rosemarie Castoro experiments with text, language, writing and the written image as well as with the temporal extension of actions and language by documenting her activities in the form of a diary and reciting these poems aloud and recording them.

These works are among the artist’s most conceptual works and show how the topic of time, as well as the reflection on time itself, occupy a major focus in her Oeuvre and how she succeeded in capturing these abstract elements in a pictorial way.

Comparable to the Inventory Drawings, created at the same time, Castoro developed a quasi-scientific system in the diary-like poems, with which she structures and records her daily activities in an almost exaggerated way.
Castoro shared the practice of Concrete Poetry with her former partner and sculptor Carl Andre, who typed stacked letters and words into his minimalist poems with a typewriter and arranged them within the space of a sheet of paper. Andre focuses on the formal image of language and the visual representation of its structure, whereas Castoro - who was also known to recited her works aloud - designed her acoustic poetry according to tonal and subjective rules.

Photo: Dirk Tacke

The abstract forms of the tall, expansive steel sculptures Black Flasher A and Black Flasher B (both 1979) derive from the modelling qualities of paper. According to a personal story, Castoro's mother had put a few $20 bills into a Coca-Cola bottle and sent it to her. Rosemarie Castoro then continuously crumpled the initially flat $20 notes and placed them upright on their narrow edges, playfully exploring the sculptural characteristics of the bills.

The two Black Flashers are made of thin steel and painted with matt black acrylic paint. With these works, Castoro draws a link to her choreographic and body-related works from the mid-1960s, confirming her ongoing interest in the physical exploration of space and the relationship between bodies and geometry. In a post-minimalist manner, the geometric form (here the basic rectangular shape of the steel leaves) is used as a starting point and expanded by a sensual component by squeezing the steel and painting its surface. At the same time, it is supplemented with the personal and autobiographical element of the narrative about the process of creation; further sexualized by the title Flasher. The title refers to this physical quality of the sculptures and implies an inconspicuous physical exposure. This is a known characteristic of Postminimal artists: investigating abstraction in the form as a further development of Minimal Art, also in regard to the subjective and eroticized body and the individual psyche.

The works were exhibited several times after 1979: in public spaces such as on sidewalks and squares in New York and Paris. The encounter with the viewer and the juxtaposition of physicality is an elementary part of the work. The works Black Flasher A and Black Flasher B were prominently featured in the two exhibitions at MACBA (2017) and MAMCO (2019).


Photo: Dirk Tacke

Rosemarie Castoro was a key figure in the New York art scene of the sixties and seventies. Her loft-studio in Soho, where she worked from 1963 until the end of her life, was a gathering point for the Art Workers' Coalition and the protagonists of the closely connected scene of that time, such as Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson.

Although Castoro was – wrongly - lacking scientific and institutional recognition prior to her two posthumous exhibitions at MACBA (2017) and MAMCO (2019), curators, such as Lucy Lippard and E.C. Goossen, as well as gallery owners such as Tibor de Nagy, Virginia Dwan, and Paula Cooper - paid great attention to her work and provided platforms to present her works. In 1966, for example, she took part in the exhibition "Distillation" curated by E.C. Goossen, which became groundbreaking for the subsequent definition of Minimal Art. Her works were also shown in several of Lucy Lippard's legendary Numbers Shows, such as "Number 7" at the Paula Cooper Gallery (1969), "555,087" at the Seattle Art Museum (1969), and "995,000" at the Vancouver Art Gallery (1970). Castoro was also one of three artists, along with Christine Kozlov and Adrian Piper, represented in Ursula Meyer's Anthology of Conceptual Art (1972) and was also included in Lippard's Anthology of Conceptual Art (1972).

→ to the artist page