Mary Corse: A Survey of Light

Mary Corse

Kim Conaty is Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Mary Corse A Survey in Light Kim Conaty

One of the few women associated with the West Coast Light and Space movement, Mary Corse (b. 1945) shared with her contemporaries a deep fascination with perception and with the possibility that light itself could serve as both a subject and material of art. Yet while others largely migrated away from painting into sculptural and environmental projects, Corse approached the question of light through painting.

This catalogue is the first comprehensive examination of this singular artist’s work, and features new scholarship that underscores Corse’s groundbreaking approach to light, perception, and subjectivity. For more than five decades, Corse has maintained a commitment to abstraction and a belief in modernist painting even as she charted her own course through her studies in quantum physics and investigations into a range of unconventional materials, from Tesla coils and neon to glass microspheres and ceramic. Kim Conaty’s essay investigates how the artist’s early experiments with light—creating “paintings” made of fluorescent or argon light—made way for her subsequent explorations into how light might be integrated into the surface of her canvases through the interplay of reflection and refraction. Corse’s exquisite paintings activate the viewer in the creation of the perceptual experience: the kinetic effect of the work is contingent upon the movement of the body through space. As Corse has explained: “The art’s not really on the wall, it’s in your perception.”

Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London 115 color and 15 black-and-white illustrations Jacket illustrations: (front) side view of one of Corse’s 1968 light boxes. Argon light, plexiglass, and high-frequency generator, approx. 48 x 48 x 6 in. (121.9 x 121.9 x 15.2 cm); (back) Untitled (White Diamond, Negative Stripe) (1965; page 45)

Jacket design by Miko McGinty and Anjali Pala

ISBN 978-0-300-23497-8

9

780300 234978 Printed in Italy

A Survey in Light

Mary Corse

Mary Corse A Survey in Light

Kim Conaty with contributions from Robin Clark, Michael Govan, Alexis Lowry, and David Reed

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London

Contents

Foreword

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Light + Space + Time Kim Conaty

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Early Works

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Optical Baths of Radiance: The Light Boxes Robin Clark

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White Light, Black Light, and Black Earth Paintings

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Grounded Light: The Black Earth Series Alexis Lowry

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White Light Inner Band Paintings

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The Language of Not Knowing David Reed

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Corse Correction Michael Govan

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Timeline and Exhibition History Melinda Lang

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Selected Bibliography Checklist of the Exhibition Acknowledgments Lenders to the Exhibition Index

135 143 146 150 154

Light + Space + Time Kim Conaty

Driving down Topanga Canyon Boulevard recently, descending from the Santa Monica hills to the stretch of beach that lines the Pacific Coast Highway, Mary Corse noted aloud an obvious yet largely unremarked characteristic of the afternoon light: although we see the same sky every day, it never looks the same.

Atmospheric conditions are mercurial—changes in sunlight and cloud cover might produce a deep, saturated blue one day and a hazy, diffuse gradient of golds and oranges another. But, as importantly, perception is variable, based in physical and cognitive factors that affect how every individual sees the world. For Corse, the subjectivity of perception—the acknowledgment that everyone experiences visual phenomena differently—has been a consistent driving force in her artistic practice for more than fifty years. It keeps her looking at the sky every day anew.

Corse has explored this infinite uncertainty through painting, which in her hands becomes a site for material, compositional, and perceptual investigation. She makes paintings that shift in appearance from one viewing position to the next, one time of day to another. What on first glance may appear to be flat white monochromes transform into glowing surfaces as we walk alongside them. Ambient light serves, critically, as the catalyst for this phenomenon to take place. The effect can be gradual and disarmingly beautiful, like a shimmering wave of light that appears, builds in intensity, and then recedes, leaving an ethereal haze in our mind’s eye. It can also be more immediate, like a flash of light that illuminates the visual field before us. At just over human scale, typically standing roughly eight or nine feet tall, these paintings envelop us wholly and draw our awareness to the effects that our movements have on visual experience. An encounter with Corse’s work takes time and requires participation: the paintings’ coming alive is contingent on the observer’s shifting position. As Corse has proposed, “The art is not on the wall, it’s in the viewer’s perception.”1

The White Light paintings, the series I describe here, constitute the project that has compelled and consumed Corse for the majority of her career. They represent the bulk of her creative output and her greatest achievement. The series was initiated in 1968, when Corse first experimented with glass microspheres, also known as retroreflective beads, the industrial material employed as a safety feature in street signage and on highway lines to create surfaces that become illuminated when struck by car headlights at night. (“Retroflection” refers to the process by which rays of light enter a glass bead, bend, and are redirected back toward their source.)

By spreading these same beads in a thin layer across canvases painted with white acrylic, Corse found a way to harness and refract light in her paintings. Through these works, Corse has sought to capture light within painting, turning an age-­old challenge taken up by painters from J. M. W. Turner to Paul Cézanne into a pursuit that relies not on paint but on the physics of light itself.

This essay focuses on the White Light paintings, grounding these breakthrough works in Corse’s formal and material experimentation in the 1960s and ’70s. These paintings, simultaneously minimal and maximal, material and immaterial, have proven themselves defiant to categorization. They are as much informed by the West Coast Light and Space ethos from which they emerged geographically as they are singular expressions of abstract painting in the wake of Minimalism (a kind of 1970s painting that one critic described as that which passed “through the eye of the Minimal-­Conceptual needle”2). At a time when many of her Southern California peers migrated away from the canvas to further their investigations into light and space, Corse reinscribed this inquiry firmly within the realm of painting.

Although she has employed the compositional structures of the square, the grid, and the monochrome throughout her work—the same modernist strategies reconsidered and reinvigorated at that time by painters such as Jo Baer and Robert Ryman, to name

Sketches on the wall of Corse’s studio in Topanga, California, 2018

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but two—Corse adopts these structures not as her subject but as a means of approaching what she calls the “abstract entity.”3 If Ryman’s white monochromes direct our attention to the materiality of their very existence on the wall—paint, brush marks, support, even hanging devices—Corse’s point us to something beyond the tangible, their effects seeming to hover apart from the surface itself and moving into the realm of the metaphysical.

The title of this essay sets forth the three principal subjects that Corse has investigated in her work since the 1960s: light, space, and time. Her chief concerns are the variablity of each

element and how one might relate to another. For Corse, these subjects represent the fundamental questions in painting, and she approaches them both methodically and intuitively, recognizing what can be measured and what cannot. Time is perhaps the most vexing element, the slipperiest, but its significance in Corse’s thinking, in her rejection of immediacy and embrace of the protracted viewing experience, is a distinguishing aspect of her practice.

The ephemeral quality of Corse’s paintings is critically important even as it poses challenges in the presentation of the

Figs. 1 and 2. Two views of Untitled (White Inner Band with White Sides, Beveled), 2011. Glass microspheres and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 108 in. (274.3 x 274.3 cm). Collection of Danielle and David Ganek

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works on the wall and, more significantly, in reproduction. The same work can appear dramatically different under varying light conditions and from alternate angles, a point that underscores Corse’s intention to create both an active and subjective viewing experience. When photographed, the shifting surfaces of the paintings resist the instantaneity of the camera, thwarting any attempt at a single, accurate record. Illustrating the paintings’ mutability, a pair of photographs of the same work represents two views within a range of perceptual experiences (figs. 1, 2).

In one, a white field appears evenly painted, while in the other,

­ hotographed under different lighting, a central band is visible, p owing to an optical effect achieved by Corse’s handling of the microspheres. These images serve as a useful point of departure, highlighting the transient, experiential nature of Corse’s work.

Beginnings When Corse arrived at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) in 1964, she was, as she likes to say, “already abstract.”4 Indeed, through an unusual and quite

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while at Chouinard, signaled an impressively mature formal sensibility and demonstrated her keen intuition with regard to light and scale. Although these works were never exhibited at the time they were made (in fact, they first appeared publicly three decades later),5 they set in motion much of what was to come in the subsequent years. In Untitled (Red/Blue) from 1964 (fig. 4), a solid blue triangle occupies the lower left corner of a rectangular red field, creating both balance and tension and elaborating an interpretation of Albers and color relationships. But Corse took something else very different from this painting, a work that art historian Suzanne Hudson recently described as “nothing less than the skeleton key for all that followed.”6 Where the two color fields converge, the artist perceived a flash of white light, a perceptual phenomenon that suggested a space beyond the surface and a luminosity that might be achieved through optical play. Seeking to attain this glow through other means, she began experimenting with adding reflective materials to her painted surfaces, sprinkling tiny metal flakes across the even surface of Untitled (Octagonal Blue) (1964; p. 41), a nearly eight-­foot-­tall shaped canvas with a defined white border. Only four years earlier, Frank Stella had begun using metallic paints in his Aluminum series, his initial interest in the medium tied to its complex viscosity and industrial, nonart status rather than its potential to create brilliant surfaces.7 While Stella continued to explore the Fig. 3. One of Corse’s early still life studies, late 1950s

extraordinary early education at a small private girls’ school in Berkeley, which she attended from seventh through tenth grade, Corse had studied Josef Albers’s theories of color and after-­ image and Cézanne’s radical reenvisioning of space through his still lifes (fig. 3). She’d also examined firsthand how brushwork could create depth and spatial fields within painting by tracing reproductions of Willem de Kooning’s canvases. Corse developed critical tools at this early moment—both conceptual and practical ones—under the tutelage of her school’s art teacher, Antoinette (Toni) Boyd Keffeler, a Chouinard graduate and exhibiting local painter who recognized her young student’s curiosity and ambition and made resources and hours of extra studio time available to her. To this day, Corse considers Keffeler her most significant mentor, and the reason she set off for art school in Los Angeles.

The hard-­edged color-­field paintings and shaped monochromes that Corse began producing between 1964 and 1965,

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rich, shimmering effects of metallic paints in monumental shaped canvases like Empress of India (1965; fig. 5), Corse abandoned metals after this brief flirtation. For her, the relative failure of these materials to create the inner glow she was seeking led her in another direction, one that saw her opt out of color and shift her focus to simple white acrylic paint, a medium that offered a different path toward the elusive white light she was after.

Corse’s turn to monochromes and shaped canvases in the mid-­1960s linked her work to contemporaneous developments by artists including Larry Bell, Robert Mangold, and Stella, but her intersection with these aesthetic conversations was limited and her path divergent.8 She shared with many of these artists a preoccupation with defining the relationship between a painting’s internal structure and its bounding shape, but her white monochromes resist becoming autonomous near-­objects on the wall. Instead, they are first and foremost ruminations on color and light, their scale and symmetry suggesting a direct connection with the embodied viewer before them. Corse’s definition of white is both expansive and inclusive, drawing on a scientific understanding of white light as the presence of all color. Her guide was Albers’s pedagogical sourcebook, Interaction of Color

Fig. 4. Untitled (Red/Blue), 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 78 x 52 in. (198.1 x 132.1 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York; and Lisson Gallery, London

(1963): “The color spectrum of the rainbow is a dispersion of the white sunlight”; thus “the sum of all colors in light is white.”9 The shapes that Corse explored in her white canvases challenge the traditional square or rectangular format of painting. More significantly, they signal her interest in making paintings that suggest capacious and unrestricted fields of white light.

In 1965, Corse began to minimize the sides of her shaped paintings—moving from octagons to hexagons to diamonds—as she shifted attention from the periphery to the center. For each of these works, including Untitled (Hexagonal White) (p. 43) and

Untitled (White Diamond, Negative Stripe) (p. 45), Corse articulated the compositional space with a subtle vertical line made by overpainting white on white or leaving bare the division between two painted fields. These bands bisect her paintings and serve, as an early critic described in Artforum in 1968, to “control the spreading span of the neutral field.”10 Just as important, these linear bands seem to offer a way into the internal space of the painting and approach a new dimensionality.

Corse would literalize this in-­between space in three dimensions in her brief, contemporaneous foray into sculpture with

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Fig. 5. Frank Stella (b. 1936), Empress of India, 1965. Metallic powder in polymer emulsion paint on canvas, 77 x 224 in.

(195.6 x 569 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of S. I. Newhouse, Jr.

Untitled (Two Triangular Columns) (1965; pp. 46–49 and fig. 6).

This work (and a related variation of the same title) consists of a pair of identical, white, roughly eight-­foot-­tall columns, each in the shape of an extruded isosceles right triangle and set in relation to the other, their hypotenuse sides parallel but not touching, leaving a gap of a few inches for light to pass through. Corse painted the surfaces of these wood-­and-­joint-­compound constructions as smoothly as possible, then sanded them extensively to diminish signs of her brushwork. By doing so, she adopted a formal posture common among many painters and sculptors at the time for whom the subjective mark was still tied up with the dated heroics of Abstract Expressionism. She wanted to focus attention on the forms and their physical relationships rather than reveal them as handmade constructions.

Corse’s sculptures were an intellectual extension of her shaped paintings, three-­dimensional formations based in the same simple geometries. The pairs of triangular columns are directly tied to the diamond-­shaped canvases with bisecting interior bands; each is grounded in the spatial dynamics between two triangles. Rather than standing as imposing white monoliths, the sculptures invite viewers to see through them, the space between the columns serving as a visual passageway resonant with the bands in the paintings. They even “hover,” propped on interior triangular bases made of hand-­cut slabs of clear plexiglass, which brings them ever so slightly out of an earthbound existence. Although these works now have fixed installation instructions, Corse played with various iterations at the time, manipulating the placement to articulate different

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geometric relationships. She even tried grouping all four columns together in a single formation.11 Made in the same year that Donald Judd coined the term specific objects, these columns are anything but. As Judd extolled the wholeness of sculpture and how it might counteract the limits of painting and “the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors,”12 Corse’s sculpture suggested painting’s limitlessness.

By 1966, Corse’s downtown Los Angeles studio must have felt like a laboratory (fig. 7). In little more than a year since moving into a large, industrial live/work space at Beverly Boulevard and Hoover Street, Corse had proceeded through multiple permutations of the white monochrome and begun to experiment with new materials and processes that were readily available in her urban milieu. Her engagement with these materials was direct: she cut her own plexiglass and plywood, made screenprints on her studio floor, and, at this time, began working with electric light, handling the construction, complex circuitry, and wiring involved. She lived near school but spent most of her time away from it.

Chouinard during the mid-­1960s was a hotbed of experimental activity, providing an extraordinary backdrop for Corse’s formal and material explorations. Founded in 1921 as a program geared toward preparing artists for commercial careers, Chouinard became associated in the 1960s with teachers and students such as Robert Irwin, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ed Ruscha, whose cutting-­edge, conceptually oriented work brought the tools of advertising, design, and production into a fine-­art context. As

Fig. 6. Corse’s two sculptures titled Untitled (Two Triangular Columns), both 1965, in her downtown Los Angeles studio, c. 1967

Fig. 7. Generators and other materials used in light box fabrication in Corse’s downtown Los Angeles studio, with screenprints on the wall at right, 1970

tempting as it is to place Corse more tightly within the context of the so-­called Light and Space artists who passed through the school in the 1960s—Bell, Irwin, and Doug Wheeler, to name a few—she had little to no relationship with them. Instead, while many artists, including a number of Corse’s fellow students, were thinking about painting’s “successors”—sculpture, performance, film, environments—Corse continued to investigate the medium’s vitality.

At Chouinard Corse chose to work with Emerson Woelffer, an Abstract Expressionist painter who had taught briefly at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a school known for its experimental approach to arts education. While there, Woelffer had crossed paths with Albers, one of the school’s founding professors, whose pedagogy (grounded in the elemental and interdisciplinary methodologies of the Bauhaus) remained central to the curriculum. As a teacher, Woelffer was known for his hands-­ off approach, and for allowing an impressive range of students— who included Ruscha, Joe Goode, Llyn Foulkes, and Barbara T. Smith—to explore their ideas freely while emphasizing the

importance of hard work. Woelffer described his approach thus: “Here’s L.A., let them express themselves. It was not teaching them. I let ’em go their own ways.”13 Corse recalls this quality as the most important for her, as he gave her great independence to work away from the classroom and in her studio for weeks, even months, at a time. Whether she understood it then or not, Corse’s decision to work with Woelffer, someone sensitive to the critical issues in painting and receptive to formal experimentation, connected her to a kindred spirit. When asked about Woelffer’s role in her education, Corse, remarkably, characterized his way of being in a manner that related to her own work: “It seemed as though bright light came right through his eyes from inside.”14

Painting without Paint “I always thought that the essence of painting,” Corse recently reflected, “is not about the paint. I was more interested in the flatness, the light, and the space.”15 Between 1966 and 1968, Corse employed plexiglass, space, and electric light to make

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Early Works

Untitled (Octagonal Blue), 1964. Metal flakes and acrylic on canvas, 93 x 671â „2 in. (236.2 x 171.5 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York; and Lisson Gallery, London

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Three views of Untitled (Two Triangular Columns), 1965. Acrylic on wood and plexiglass, two parts: 92 x 181⁄8 x 181⁄8 in.

(233.7 x 46 x 46 cm) and 92 x 181⁄16 x 18 in. (233.7 x 45.9 x 45.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Michael Straus in loving memory of Howard and Helaine Straus 2016.6a–b

46

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Untitled (Electric Light), 1968/2017. Argon light, plexiglass, and high-­ frequency generator, 101⁄2 x 101⁄2 x 25⁄8 in. (26.7 x 26.7 x 6.7 cm).

Collection of the artist; courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York; and Lisson Gallery, London

Untitled (Space + Electric Light), 1968. Argon light, plexiglass, and high-­frequency generator, 451⁄4 x 451⁄4 x 43⁄4 in. (114.9 x 114.9 x 12.1 cm).

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; museum purchase with funds from the Annenberg Foundation

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White Light, Black Light, and Black Earth Paintings

Untitled (First White Light Series), 1968. Glass microspheres and acrylic on canvas, 78 x 78 in. (198.1 x 198.1 cm). Collection of Michael Straus

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Untitled (Black Earth Series), 1978. Ceramic, sixteen tiles, 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8 cm) overall.

Dia Art Foundation

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White Light Inner Band Paintings

Untitled (White Light Band Series), 1991. Glass microspheres and acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8 cm).

Collection of Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

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Untitled (White Multiple Inner Band), 2003. Glass microspheres and acrylic on canvas, 96 x 240 in. (243.8 x 609.6 cm).

Collection of the artist; courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York; and Lisson Gallery, London