a different kind of light
by Douglas Messerli
Ed Moses Ed
Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and 70s, curated by Leslie Jones / The Los
Angeles County Museum of Art / I attended this exhibition with Pablo on
May 18, 2015
As Prints and Drawings curator Leslie Jones makes clear in her
introduction to the catalogue of the new show at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s
and 70s, the art of Ed Moses seems almost to be a contradiction of what we
might imagine for one so closely associated with the famed Ferus gallery
artists. The four major artists gathered together by Ed Kienholz and Walter
Hopps in 1957, were characterized by the purposefully provacative title of the gallery’s
1964 exhibition, The Studs. Moses was
shown along with Robert Irwin, Ken Price, and Billy Al Bengston in a grouping
that seemed to point up that the new Los Angeles art—the “L. A. Look” as it
came to be called—derived from the light and space of the landscape, from the
Angeleno culture of the car, surf, and aerospace industry, featuring art that
was, as Jones writes “technologically sophisticated, flawlessly executed, and
clean (as well as transparent).” The work was nearly entirely about lustrous
and light emanating through the gleam of machine-like products. The drawings of
Ed Moses during the same period clearly represented a different kind of “light.”
Moses work was more often
described as “modest” and “delicate,” consisting of what even he described as “goddamned
valentines,” graphite drawings and rubbings with colored pencil that referred
to the abstractions of painters before him such as Arshile Gorky and Philip
Guston, even Mondrian.
Moses’ work of this early
period, moreover, instead of boldly declaring the contours of his images,
primarily erased them, defining his subject matter by the absence of line
rather than its assertion, such as in works as One Potato Three Potato (of 1961-63) and Mask (1962), which references Thomas Eakins’ Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing a Mask.
Many of
Moses works were indeed like valentines, featuring roses chrysanthemums and lilies, often set against a
background in cut-out abstractions like the “pop up” Swedish greeting cards he
had come upon during this period.
Even more in
opposition to the artworks of the others of the so-called “Studs,” which in
their glistening surfaces seemed to have been untouched by human hands, Moses’
works drew attention to his intense use of the graphite pencil and scissors, as
in his Kaw works, organic, somewhat
birdlike forms that hover and float over his surfaces, evidence of an almost
maddening attention to detail and pattern in a way that might even remind one somewhat
of Martin Ramirez, except that rather than presenting his patterns with
ribbon-like visual clarity, Moses seems as much interested in what isn’t there,
in what he has left out.
Conversely, in works related to the Navajo blankets introduced to the
artist in the early 1960s by artist-friend Tony Berlant, Moses in fascinated
with leaving things in the work, such as the so-called “lazy lines”—diagonal
lines or interruptions in the weave of a blanket as it is pieced together over
time. Later he extended the idea of the rugs’ horizontal lines and the vertical
“lazy lines,” by taping the parts together and leaving the tape upon the canvas
to suggest the process itself. In short, Moses seemed to be working in a
direction throughout this period that pushed away from and even against his
fellow Ferus gallery friends.
In the
context of contemporary post-modern art, however, it is Moses’ “valentines” and
rug-influenced drawings that now seem more radical than the machine-like
constructions of his peers. His emphasis on pattern and detail demonstrate the
hand of the artist at work and remind us his obvious passion in his creations.
As White puts it, in hindsight, we can now see his later gridded paintings as “pictures
of drawing ideas,” and we perceive the true importance of these drawings from
early in his career.
Los Angeles, June 2, 2015
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