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November 15, 2007
Alan Saret's Gang Drawings
Alan Saret, Violet-Fire Falls Ensoulment, 1968.Color pencils on paper.
The Gang's All Here
Alan Saret's gang-drawings (The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St., to Feb. 7, 2008) are each made with a fistful of colored pencils. He started making them in the late-'60s as preliminary sketches for his then well-known and quite positively received tangled-wire sculptures. Since then, the drawings have taken on a life of their own.
The delicate, faintly multicolored scribbles sometimes describe circular structures and other shapes, but they mostly look like tufts of hair. Two of Saret's sculptures hang in the show and indicate rather nicely where the gang-drawings spring from and, by the way, suggest that the sculptures themselves might easily fit in the genre of sculpture called "drawings in space." That genre includes some works of Picasso, Gonzales, and David Smith, as well as more recent manifestations, such as Patrick Dougherty's gigantic snagged sapling pieces that continue to proliferate all across the nation and even abroad.
Saret was a player in what was once called anti-form art, along with Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Lynda Benglis and a few others. Sculptors, riffing off the soft works of Claes Oldenburg, the felt and grease of Joseph Beuys, and other diverse influences, let it all hang out, as it were. Materials, some of them decidedly anartistic, were dropped, plopped, propped, strewn, flung and hung, randomly arrayed, all in the name of getting beyond both Cubism and composition. Why not let gravity and the nature of the materials do the work? Play it as it lays. Of course, anti-form lasted all of two weeks, but the glorious tidewrack remains, mostly as photos but with some prime pieces by Eva Hesse, felt-hangings by Morris, prop-pieces by Serra, and Saret's tangles.
Saret's last "museum" show was at P.S. 1 in 1990. The Drawing Center claims that its current 30-drawing survey is his first museum show in almost two decades. Apparently he "withdrew from the artworld in the mid-'80s to concentrate on site-specific and architectural projects." Or as we say in the art world (but not in Artopia), out of sight is out of mind. A cliché as telling as my other favorite: if you can't photograph it, it doesn't exist.
Saret's drawings, which I was not previously aware of, are like animal scratchings on the walls of a cave. They are thickets. They are grass. Like Saret's sculptures, they are almost not there. Their not-there-ness is why they have such presence.
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Posted by jperreault at November 15, 2007 9:49 AM
