Con(jug)ate 3. 1977. Clear vinyl. 12 units each app. 2'x3'x2'. Provenance

An exhibition itself is a form and in the act of selection a theme emerged. It is not something that I imposed on the artists though it certainly reflects my taste. In the dialogue between national and local, or between international and regional art, the ten artists here are not local or regional in their stylistic character. A juror of the May show in 1970 had no doubt about this issue: "Too many people looking over their shoulder (sic) at what is happening in New York and not enough at what Ohio has to offer them as inspiration". Regional art is not only a matter of geography as it shows in the work of art. It is also a sociological fact which affects the lives of artists but may not be evident in the work they do. The artists in this exhibition are of the second type.

A great deal of the information about art is not bound to one place. It is an error of regionalists to make art dependent on topographical location. It is as legitimate to think about Han Hofmann as John Steuart Curry when you are in the Mid-west, Carl Andre no less than Thomas Hart Benton. Information in the form of travelling exhibitions (and travelling artists) and publications is available for artists trained to receive it, as almost everybody is in the 20th century. One of the training grounds of course is the American university system and this a strong factor among the artists here. Black, Camp, and Collings teach at Ohio State University and Kalb at Ohio Wesleyan; McPherson and Ringler were students at Ohio State and Dewald has done graduate work there. Thus it would be unreasonable to expect that the work of these artists be restricted to the iconography of Ohio. It would place a restriction on art which does not apply to other fields of knowledge. Lewis A. Coser has pointed out that "Few knowledgeable men today are likely to view the history of modern science as that of a series of geniuses making discoveries in isolation. It is by now generally recognized that the scientific enterprise developed within a scientific community and within an institutionalized setting" (1.) The situation is similar in art: here the network acts as a community or institution, providing a high level of information about the work of similar others.

The fact of a fundamentally even communication system in the U.S. does not, of course, wipe out regional characteristics, but it means that art in New York is continuous with the work of artists in other parts of the country. For example Camp's tall, thin paintings pick up the format of one of a group of six paintings done by Barnett Newman in 1950 which Camp saw last year in "Aspects of Post-War Painting in America" at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts. …

Another statistic concerning the exhibition is this: of the ten artists, seven are women. When I made my initial choice from the 72 I had no idea of the sex of the artists, as the slides were identified by surnames only. In the process of selecting I became familiar with the artists of course and collected auxiliary information, about their academic background, about their gender. This was the point at which the theme of the exhibition emerged, based on the ntoion that 20th century communications have, for those who want to use it, dissolved the center-periphery relationship of capital city and provincial cities. The talk about Rome, Paris and New York as centers fails to take into account the fact of modern common culture, a matrix of shared esthetics that spans the U.S. To identify this kind of art, historically self-aware and formally sophisticated, solely with New York is to accept old-fashioned stereotypes about the nature of urban life. New York is potent as a place with the greatest concentration of artists and the most extensive support system (galleries, museums, magazines), but its styles and interests are not obscure; they are available to anybody who wants to use them. The consultability of New York art is well understood by the artists in this show, not in the sense that they have turned to outside models, but in the sense that the themes of their work include the knowledge of work done in New York.

The feminist movement in art has been to some extent associated with New York but it is hardly a one-city phenomenon. Women preponderate in art schools and university art departments but this numerical factor is not sustained. An inversion takes place and men preponderate in the art galleries and museums of modern art. This exhibition is a witness to the increased visibility of women's art, a new factor in American art that has emerged, precisely, with the 70s. The question will certainly be asked, given the transitional state of the relation of the sexes at the moment, am I following a trend rather than responding to esthetic excellence with the ratio of three women to one man in the exhibition. The answer is no. There is a reason for the present vigour of women's art. As a recently formed group, women can draw on the energy that comes with the pleasure of self-discovery. It can be said, in fact, that social change and esthetic vitality are linked. Male artists on the other hand lack a comparable socio-esthetic cause on which to draw. …

By "occupancy of the world" I refer to the move of sculpture away from pedestals and into the partition of pre-existing sites. In such work formal intricacy, as a measure designed do concentrate attention on the work of art, is replaced by other forms of organization, for instance, Dewald's serial arrangement. Collings' Con(jug)ate 3 - Complementary combines the functions of environmental occupancy and internal connectedness. The taut inflated forms are, to quote the artist "twelve stops on a continuum of possibility in the rotation and connexion of two similar symmetrical surfaces". Thus there is a precise interplay of the root forms behind the antic variety of the different units. A ring is a logical expository order for such a piece but there are various options in the diameter of the circle and obviously changes in the setting would alter the charcter of a sculpture of transparent forms. The material and its ordering therefore have the property of environmental interaction. … [emphasis added]

Collings in her statement is sceptical about artists' writings, wondering if it does not have the same status as art itself and thus "is only valid when seen as further evidence for interpretation". However her doubt leaves out of account the fact that though the source of both art and words is the same the medium is not. McPherson's schematic imagery of ordering and grouping processes are, in a sense, linguistic but they are discursive: she does not present an argument but an emblem. Verbal communication as it deals with causal and projected relationships is descriptive and analytical in a way that visual art is not. Thus artists' statements are priviledged: they come from the same source as the work of art, but are necessarily explanatory in nature. There is another reservation about first-person testimony by artists which Camp states succinctly; "I take myself too seriously. I lose all sense of humor and attempt an approach that borders on legend…." Here he draws attention to a risk not a necessary consequence of artists' writings. Grandiose over-estimation of the centrality of one's profession is not restricted to artists: actors, doctors, soldiers, and stamp collectors do it too. In fact the artists' statements published here should be taken neither as mysteries nor as myths. They are informed bulletins that an art critic, or anyone else interested in art, neglects out of vanity (he knows better), timidity (inability to cope with the ideas), or formalism (an attachment to the visual properties of art at the expense of contextual information). …

I suggested earlier that distinctions between urban and regional art or between metropolitan sophistication and provincial expression had been subsumed by the comparatively equal distribution of art and its institutions. The present exhibition is a case in point: although there may be specifically Columbian characteristics, they are based on the actual grouping of artists (influenced by the university system) more than by a sentiment for local, vernacular subjects. This is not to deny the legitimacy of such imagery, but it is my impression that the information network tends to produce more interesting art than the genius loci. This exhibition shows that participation in national trends and tendencies does not lead to any lessening of personal individuality. Annual local shows, though a good gauge of the diversity and inventiveness of a community's art, are not suitable forms in which to scrutinize in more depth selected themes. The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts by making its galleries available to an exhibition of this sort has made it possible to view the artists both in terms of their personal identity and of their artistic continuities with the rest of the country.

(i) Lewis A. Coser. Men of Ideas. New York 1970. p.27. Co

Lawrence Alloway, Professor Art History, SUNY Stonybrook, N.Y. Contemporary Art Critic.