Niele Toroni. Andata E Ritorno (Orange), 1991; installation of four canvases, easels, imprints of No. 50 brush repeated at regular distances; 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 x 1 1/8 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, London. Photo: Thierry Bal.

In Michael Newman’s poetic text accompanying the exhibition The Supreme Rifts… A Measured Propinquity at London’s Marian Goodman Gallery, he attempts to justify the grouping of five (exclusively male) artists that, to this author, initially seemed based purely on art-world pragmatism and economic interest: Sol LeWitt, Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter, Ettore Spalletti, and Niele Toroni. Might this layering of grids, cubes, and chromatic forms—displayed (for the umpteenth time) with plenty of prime white-cube space left for phenomenological shuffling—be supreme, an adjective that Newman borrows from a poem to describe the “rifts,” or spaces of discourse opened between the different works? Can it still be so, especially when so many of the works were produced last year?[1] Newman’s stream-of-consciousness explanation of the exhibition’s title does little to dissuade.

Newman’s quasi-exegetic exploration of the arrangement of LeWitt’s “rules,” Orozco’s “combination of the machinic and the handmade,” Richter’s color strips, Spalletti’s chromatic “depth,” and Toroni’s signature brush imprints leads him to consult Stéphan Mallarmé. Just as Marcel Broodthaers had declared Mallarmé to be the source of all contemporary art, Newman remarks that Mallarmé is the “key to almost everything that has happened in art since he wrote.”[2] Mallarmé’s seminal poem “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard” famously utilized white space, making a “spatialized poem.” With this, Broodthaers claimed, Mallarmé invented modern space. Newman instead invokes Mallarme’s “Mystery in Literature,” and from there culls the phrase “the supreme rifts,” in his view describing the physical and immaterial spaces of argumentation between the arranged works. What about a measured propinquity, implying a more-than-coincidental proximity? Newman claims that there exists an essential reason why these works should be shown in this way.

Such a quest for a justified propinquity ultimately belies a potentially more convincing result of the works’ positioning: an evocation of the tension between physical materiality and process-based strategies, two different poles of production that many of the works navigate between. For example, Toroni’s characteristic brush imprints—shown with the group BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Paramentier and Toroni) in 1967-68—have clearly lost their political verve.[3] However, the contemporary reactivation of this cool Conceptual gesture makes underlying pencil-drawn X’s, marking the points where brush had touched canvas resolutely visible: an evocation of their material construction. So too with LeWitt’s “sloppy” cube paintings: The presence of the artist’s “hand” is not lost. After passing paintings by the older postwar titans, Orozco’s Blackboard Drawing works (1998) show that the traditions of “first generation” conceptual artists, themselves informed by Minimalist aesthetics, have not been forgotten. Such drawings—in sharp contrast to Orozco’s earlier poetic work—retain clean geometry and a precise process. Perhaps this arrangement can, in fact, be supreme—or affectively contentious—if we follow the pertinent discourses between different generations.

The Supreme Rifts… A Measured Propinquity will be on view through April 8, 2017.

Andreas Petrossiants is completing his MA in art history at Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He is currently writing on the work of “second generation” institutional critique artists, and their inscription of labor within research-based practices.

[1] The short answer is no.
[2] Marian Goodman Gallery, The Supreme Rifts…A Measured Propinquity, Gallery Press Release, London, 2017, http://mariangoodman.com/exhibition/4279/press-release.
[3] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Group That Was (Not) One: Daniel Buren and BMPT,” Artforum (May 2008).

Berndnaut Smilde. Nimbus D’Aspremont, 2012; digital C-type print mounted on diabond; 75 x 110 cm.
Courtesy the Artist and Ronchini Gallery, London.

Part of the Art+Climate=Change festival, the exhibition is intended to stimulate discussion about global warming and its devastating impact. Truthfully, I expected it to be worthy and sincere but deadly boring. Instead, I was moved and, in front of some works, enchanted. Bosse proposes a reinvestigation of the sublime—but not in its Romantic, 19th-century guise, which placed humankind at the thrilling center of things. Here, humans are rather on the periphery, facing the unintended consequences of what we have wrought, filled with regret. Delafield Cook’s Sperm Whale is cleverly juxtaposed with photographs of the American wilderness by Ansel Adams—a passionate environmentalist when it was distinctly unfashionable to be one. This is art for the Anthropocene, the epoch in which we confront humankind’s impact on the planet: mass extinctions, the pollution of the oceans, and the alteration of the atmosphere.

Jonathan Delafield Cook. Sperm Whale (Physeter Macrocephalus) (detail), 2013; graphite on canvas,
six panels; 245 x 1200 cm. overall. Courtesy of the Artist and Olsen/Irwin Gallery, Sydney.

Other works in the exhibition are equally compelling. Jamie North’s Slag Bowls are formed from concrete and steel slag, inhabited by moss collected from post-industrial sites. In 2014, North traveled to Pittsburgh to undertake a residency exploring new materials and technologies. Working with the Calgon Carbon Company and Pittsburgh Botanic Gardens, he wanted to investigate American “human-impacted landscapes” through sculpture and photography. Other works by the Australian artist stand like prehistoric stones in the darkened space of the gallery; fissured, weathered concrete columns appear to have formed naturally. Growing within their pitted gashes and broken surfaces are tiny ecosystems.

Jamie North. Slag Bowl I & II, 2013; concrete, coal ash, steel slag, Australian native plants and moss;
15 x 37 x 37 cm. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

Gabriel Orozco’s video of hands relentlessly turning a smooth river stone in a compulsive fashion suggests the relentless weathering actions of wind and water. David Haines’s mesmerizing two-screen video projection, Day and Night (2005), juxtaposes a rocky cliff and waves dashing against rocks. Slowly you realize there is a tiny, formally suited figure, almost invisible against the enormity of the landscape, clinging to the cliff face and shifting from foot to foot. Like Magritte’s Castle of the Pyrenees, it is an image of the impossible, and in its enormity it echoes Delafield Cook’s leviathan in the next room. The wall text suggests it is about climate change—something of a forced “fit” that left me a little skeptical. It seemed a larger metaphor for our puny ambitions and relentless ego in the face of forces beyond our control.

Ansel Adams. Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, 1935; gelatin silver photograph; 56 x 71 cm. framed.

Issues of control—and lack of control—are paramount. Nature is the protagonist here, but the notable absence in these works is the controlling hand of humanity. Berndnaut Smilde creates clouds in his Nimbus series, like a magician conjuring up elemental forces. They are beautiful, mysterious images, but they cannot compete with Ansel Adams’ photographs of cloudy skies over Yosemite. The exhibition compels us to face the tragic consequences of the way we have interpreted Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Nature/Revelation is on view at the Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne through July 5, 2015.