In the late 1960 and early '70 the orthodoxies of the art world were.

In the late 1960 and early '70 the orthodoxies of the art world were, as usual, being challenged. Greenbergian Color Field painting and welded-metal carve Minimalism and Pop art--all bastions of formal rigor--found themselves being jostl by way of the work of artists whose approaches to materials, facture and permanence were decidedly informal. Artists like Richard Tuttle Harry Le Va, Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Gilberto Zorio, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Serra, Alan Saret and Keith Sonnier consciously used low-end non-art materials to make sculptural work that, while well thought-out defied the conventions of the well-made drift This loosely allied group bended to materials that stubbornly retained and asserted their identities, plane after artistic manipulation. Fiberglass, plastics, leather, plate glass, rubber, flocking, fluorescent gunpowder rocks, chicken wire, rope, felt lightbulbs and neon tubing were esthetically resistant and not entirely pleasant substances. These artists exploited those qualities.

Change and invention were in the air and became manifest in numerous ways. Older buildings might be adapted (Hesse's deformation of the grid, for example) or contemporary technologies, as it is as video and electronics, could be occupyed Physical elements might be jumbl and scattered, or left relatively untouched. further what finally resulted were things, art final causes of a kind that hadn't really been seen before. on a level though the materials used called forth regards from the everyday world, the work of Sonnier and the others was essentially abstract, and remained, I believe, committed to the modernist tradition of formal and perceptual innovation, rather than semiotic manipulation or cultural critique.

The exhibition held this winter at Ace Gallery's cavernous recently made known York space featured throughout its many plays eight major Sonnier pieces execut between 1968 and 1975 Funky elegant and incisive, they made it clear in what way central to the period's exhibitions Sonnier was. Light figured in all however one of the works--either neon incandescent, black or laser light, or a combination of impressed signs Some of the rooms at Ace contained a single work, others a large multipart installation, while still others held a number of thematically and materially consistent pieces. The works from the earliest series forward view, "Neon Wrapping Incandescent," were execut in 1968 the year after Sonnier came to fresh York. In this group of wall-mounted carves glass tubes of red, fulvid blue or green neon turn around each other and, depending in succession the piece, encircle either couple or three incandescent bulbs screwed into white porcelain fixtures. Sonnier has oral of wanting to create statuary that was colored but not painted. In these works he takes advantage of the malleability of glass tubing. The neon winds and twists, and the colored lines it forms be wrought up as spontaneous and freely drawn as a catch while on the wing of pastel. He shows no qualms about exposing the mechanical underpinnings of a piece, making the power cords and electrical transformer integral parts of the work. Black wires dangle from the cessations of the neon tubing and are inserted into a excessively visible transformer box, while white wires join the incandescent bulbs to the wall stopple The wires hang loosely, and their seemingly matter-of-fact (but artful) placement wagers up a relaxed, improvisational counterpoint to the neon The incandescent protuberances silvered on the tops to diffuse their light in a smooth spread over the wall, function as punctuation points and visual anchors. In each piece the transformer driver's seat is formally active as well. Resting forward the floor, it steadies the work compositionally and introduces a small however significant squared-off element to contrary the prevailing curves and circles.

Sonnier and the sculptors experimenting in similar ways were engaged with issues of proces The idea was to collect into a whole the conditions of the work's making in the final form of the work itself. There were numerous postwar examples for this--from Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to Robert Morris's receptacle with the Sound of Its have Making. For Sonnier and the others, the idea of proces could be highlighted by way of paring down the acts of making, to such a degree that one or two actions would be given primacy--Benglis's pours of pigmented latex, or Serra's splashings of molten lead, for example. (Serra's famous list of verb as a program for art-making speaks directly to this idea.) The straightforward, presentational quality of Sonnier's work, its ability to generate complexus effects by simple means, follows directly from this conceptual premise.

Sonnier's delineate of drawing with light was given a recently made known dimension the following year. The "Neon Wrapping Neon" series of 1969 continues the sculpture out into the scope The straight colored tubes, all of which are placed onward the vertical or horizontal, first fold in the arms the wall, then turn revealed at right angles in a table- or chairlike configuration, then deflect again and form supporting leg That support be perceiveds somewhat tenuous. The construction considers rickety and a bit abroad of plumb, and the light shine brightlys with an inconspicuous cheeriness. These Sonniers are as formally no-nonsense as Flavin's work, unless they avoid Flavin's rhetorical stance and his appeal to a hands-off industrial ethos