'Anne Truitt' at the Hirshhorn: Slow art

In yesterday's examination of the Hirshhorn's Anne Truitt retrospective I discussed how Truitt didn't fit neatly into the categories that critics and scholars have built up around post-war art. Sure, Truitt's a minimalist, but only kind of. Sure, Truitt made sculptures, but she didn't do much sculpting. And so on.

As such, the Hirshhorn's Truitt show provides an opportunity for a re-consideration of how we think about post-abstract-expressionist art. Typically we talk about the post-abex generation as being pop artists or minimalists or whatever. Sure, Truitt is some of those things. But mostly she makes work that is slow, that is slow to look at, that she made slowly and that draws the viewer into a slow visual absorption of the work. (Truitt painted and sanded and re-painted her surfaces dozens of times before they had the depth of color she wanted.)

Perhaps the right way to consider Truitt is as part of an unaffiliated group of artists who slowed art from the frenetic pace of the expressionists, both figurative-exers such as David Park and Willem de Kooning, and ab-exers such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

From the first gallery of the Truitt show forward I was conscious of the way in which individual sculptures trapped my eyes and slowed my looking. Truitt's Watauga (1962) is a low-slung sculpture, longer than it is tall, a big rectangle sitting on a smaller rectangle. The smaller rectangle thrusts forward, toward the viewer. The left side of the sculpture is painted near-black, the right side is a ruddy brown. (All of Truitt's colors seem to require two-word descriptions.) Just like a good Barnett Newman grabs the viewer's eye and moves it around the canvas, Watauga held my eye, which involuntarily bounced between the big rectangle and the smaller, thrust-forward 'base.' I'd look away, return to Watauga, and would find myself trapped again.

Over and over, too. Insurrection (1962) held my eye between its two reds. Valley Forge (1963) bounced me between its red rectangles, turning my gaze into a participant in art Pong. A Wall for Apricots (1968, above) shuttled my eye up and down, from a pale blue to a pine-tree green to a dead yellow, and back up again. Landfall (1970) features a faded-denim blue with some small, overlapping blocks of darker blues at its base. My eye would wander up the plinth, and then would be snapped back down to the darker blues at the base, only to be drawn upward again by the expanse of light blue. And repeat. Truitts are easy to get lost in, to spend time on. If you walk by them you miss them. If you linger you are rewarded.

Truitt was hardly the only artist looking for ways to reclaim surface, technique, color, light, process and pretty much everything else form the abex-ers. Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell all reduced art down to light and each found ways to gave it enough physical space so that we could lose ourselves in it. As with Truitts, if you look at an Irwin or a Turrell quickly, you may not see anything. It takes time.

And more: Robert Smithson made art that emphasized the long, slow passage of time. Ed Ruscha made paintings that only fully revealed themselves once you solved his word or picture games. Richard Long took walks, long walks. Ultimately, maybe we should think less about our beloved -isms and more about pacing.

Related: Anne Truitt and what I learned about her work by visiting Maryland's Eastern Shore. Greg Allen flirted with some similar ideas.