JOSHUA NEUSTEIN follows close on the heels of "Drawing Now," the
Tel Aviv museum's comprehensive exhibit of international contemporary art).
In many ways he echoes much of its content and enlarges upon its visual hypotheses.
Neustein belongs to the growing circle of artists who explore rather than conclude;
and who experiment instead of making definitive statements. Their end products
are often created as transient pieces that provide us with more information
about the process of art and the use of materials than they do about the pleasures
of an aesthetic experience.
For many years, as an adjunct to his conceptual exercises, Neustein has been
having a running romance with paper of all weights and stocks, investigating
its physical properties for the purpose of formulating intellectual concepts
and shrouding them in artistic terminology.
This current mammoth show is an excellent interim report reviewing his familiar
patterns of the past eight years. Given the opportunity to enlarge works beyond
the scale of human proportions and to present them in spacious surroundings,
Neustein has been able to burst out of previous restrictions to present some
of his best work to date.
TRADITIONALLY, the support for picture making
was paper, canvas, plaster or plank, a flat surface that carried descriptive,
markings in pencil, charcoal, paint, etc. Within the modernist idiom, paper
has become for Neustein the art object in itself, with no separation between
image and surface. His penetrating search has led to a point where, paper is
now the objective summary of his art, while the act of changing its character
is the subject.
Yet Neustein's art for many reasons, is an enigmatic
one. It seems to fall between the norms of what the forms of art are all about:
To consider his work inconsistent with painting or sculpture and totally in
the realm of drawing, would negate his proven sensibility towards deep, amorphous
space, colorist values of gray tonal gradations, and the occasional fixed composition.
Essentially, he has been creating installations, units of art in which a variety
of substances, usually paper, have been sprayed, cut, torn, folded, framed,
bunched and shredded; then hung on walls, stacked on pedestals or strewn on
the floor.
In most instances these installations are re-creations of previous attempts;
here their placement, scope, proportions and tonal ranges have been altered
to fit the spacious new site.
A limited number of assembled Compositions are organized around a tree trunk
whose "profile" has been traced in pencil in varying positions as-
an attempt to codify a linear view that in reality doesn't exist. This symbolic
gesture clarifies Neustein's point that art and nature are symbiotic and that
both live and develop independently of each other or as illusionist partners.
NEUSTEIN'S work is far too personal to be considered
Minimal. It lacks the surface polish and occasional dehumanization that characterize
some minimalist art. There is an abundance of spectacle without sensationalism
in the plan, proportion and tactility of Neustein's art. The way in which he
uses linear thrusts and gestures, or graceful folds and rolls, quite negates
the obsession of fixed emotions and static neutrality of minimalist art.
His stippled surfaces are full of energy, particles that expand and contract.
And I would even be bold enough to suggest that they venture into the area of
romance and naturalism, as in "Red Eagle Run," where long torn, stretches
of paper suspiciously inherit the moonlit seas of an Albert Ryder.
Or in the tall vertical piece, "One sheet in six
strips stacked." Although there is a basic mathematical concept in this
work, which is amplified into art by a quivering contrast between ragged and
razor-sharp edges, it possesses a totemic quality, as if it were a low-relief
obelisk of an anthropological statement.
Within this context, one could postulate that
Neustein belongs to a lineage of abstract expressionists who also divested their
paintings of literal messages, forging images that became objects in their own
right, yet carrying within them the spiritual plight of the artist. Barnett
Newman is one, especially his series, "The Stations of the Cross";
and another is Ad Reinhardt, whose brooding black canvases are elegant examples
of a timeless expression.
Despite their scale, barrenness and visual simplicity, most of Neustein's installations
are non-aggressive, open and easily responded to -provided the spectator is
willing to accept art at its most difficult level.
A SPECIAL feature of this exhibit, and I think
a first for the Tel Aviv Museum, was the workshop atmosphere in which it was
created. The public, invited to visit and browse during the week prior to the
opening, witnessed the procedures and questioned the artist about his aims and
objectives. This public atmosphere, to a great extent an educational process,
further crystallizes Neustein's conceptual thinking and emphasizes his resistance
to formalized artistic expression in which images are pre-packaged within. fixed
frames. (Tel Aviv Museum, King Saul Blvd.)
