A few lines from John Ashbery’s elusive prose meditation “The New Spirit” (1972) came to me as I looked at Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s paintings, perhaps because Ashbery seems to move from the painter’s perspective to the viewer’s engagement with fine art:
The shape‐filled foreground: what distractions for the imagination, incitements to the copyist, yet nobody has the leisure to examine it closely. But the thinness behind, the vague air: this captivates every spectator. All eyes are riveted to its slowly unfolding expansiveness.
The hesitation mixed with decisiveness suffusing Ashbery’s prose correlated to both my imagination and my experience of the exhibition Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975–84 at Craig Starr Gallery. Beyond her evident love of paint, I believe Plimack Mangold recognized that painting had not reached a dead end, as many artists and critics believed. What Jackson Pollock accomplished in bringing forth the materiality of paint, or the idea that paint is paint, was just the beginning.
In my 2016 review of Plimack Mangold’s previous exhibition at the same gallery, I wrote:
If Minimalism was about getting down to irreducible essentials, the limit — Carl Andre placing bricks or sheets of lead on the floor of a pristine white cube — Plimack Mangold went one step further and got down to the floor itself. By doing so, and remaining true to the pattern of the floorboards, she incorporated aspects of Minimalism into her painting without succumbing to its flamboyant rhetoric about keeping the paint as good as it was in the can. Having attitude was of no interest to her.
Basing her work on direct observation, Plimack Mangold equates craft, seeing, and subject matter with unadorned necessity. Taken together, these two exhibitions track the expansiveness of her vision, as she moved from the floors of her city apartment to the trees outside her windows in rural New York, from sunlight on interior surfaces to what Ashbery called the “vague air” beyond the trees.
Each of the exhibition’s 10 works marks a step from a blank sheet of paper “taped” to a piece of plywood to a “taped” view of trees in Spring. Everything we see is made of paint, starting with the tan masking tape, which Plimack Mangold layers to replicate its real-life counterpart.
In “Untitled” (1975), the artist paints a sheet of white paper affixed to a plywood board, presumably a drawing table, with masking tape. Plimack Mangold puts a spin on the claim of some critics that art must be about art itself and not the artwork’s subject matter by transforming every inch of her subject into paint. The blank sheet of paper implies that we are always at the beginning, and while a number of art critics have associated this work with the white paintings of her friend Robert Ryman, I think what the two artists share is the pleasure of plain and direct making — or, as Ryman once said, “I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work.”
Plimack Mangold carries out this objective in “Paint the Tape, Paint the Paper, Paint the Tape” (March 1975). We see a sheet of lined white paper torn out from a spiral notebook, on which she has “written” the title as a list of goals in pencil, and signed and dated this painted page. She has memorialized the contract she made with herself, but does not make any claims about what this is achieving for art in general. The white paint with which the artist rendered the page spreads beyond its perimeter onto the painted tape. This is trompe l’oeil turned inside out: Plimack Mangold show us everything she has done. Rather than trying to fool us or showing off her virtuosity in the realm of resemblance, everything is on the surface. She has left the closed, controllable environs of traditional trompe l’oeil to look at the changing world.
In “Untitled” (May 1983) and “A September Passage” (1984), an evening sky filled with gray clouds and orange light spreads onto and over the tape used to demarcate it, separating the inside world of the painting from the outside world. We are, as Ashbery wrote of time, “riveted to its slowly unfolding expansiveness.” Just as paint is paint, Plimack Mangold understood that the world is what it is. Her paintings are not about arresting time, but rather recognizing that it moves ceaselessly, and all we can do is shape our passage through it. This is what I find so stirring about her art — everywhere she looks she sees intimations of mortality, including the sky and trees outside her window. Never once does she seek refuge or turn away.
Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Tapes, Fields, and Trees, 1975–84 continues at Craig Starr Gallery (5 East 73rd Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 25. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
