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Judy Pfaff
 

 

 

ARTS MAGAZINE.

November, 1980.

Judy Pfaff challenges visual convention in her formalization of perceived experience. Her apparently chaotic installation, "Deep Water," is a case in point. In it the artist draws upon a tangible, real-life experience to provide a rich, unruly, and untested formal vocabulary with which to explore and express the deep water of her mind's inquiry into the roots of the creative process.

Since about 1975 Pfaff has tended to pursue an inspirationally directed creative mode free from conceptually or visually preconceived logic. Her desire is to promote a "biological flow" of unprocessed visualization that forms in the interstices between intuition and cognition. This presents problems. A sophisticated and knowing formalist, Pfaff, maker and teacher, has become well versed in the formal problems of art; experience places at her command a copious and nuanced visual vocabulary. The very practiced richness of this vocabulary raises an interesting question: How in the search for unstructured experience can an experientially informed artist overthrow knowledge and visual logic made intuitive by repeated procedure?

That she knows all the moves is evident by the range of subtlety of independent passages in this riotous experience The play of two and three dimensions at the wall, ceiling, and floor's edge expressed through mirrors and illusory painting; the arpeggios of delicate decorative instance; the interspatial relationships of collected sculptural composites; the counterpoint that cohesive passages of similar internal elements make as they pass through these groups; the natural symmetry of elements placed in relation to the diagonal-all attest to an eye that in its practiced perception perceives both the work and the problem it poses.

The solution is brilliant. Eschewing the too familiar forms and conventions of abstraction, she gains a brief unstructured moment by referring to the scintillating color, formal variety, and unique spatial deployment of weightless forms drifting in the disembodied aquatic world of the neutrally buoyant skin diver. This realistic reference to the tropical waters of the coast of Yucatan, combined with the formal problems of two- and three-dimensional cohesion, relativistic viewpoint, full color range, light, space, and viewer interaction, accumulates into an informational overload that temporarily eradicates preconception.

Preparations are time-consuming. The concept necessitates the elaborate fabrication and accumulation of a profuse, diverse array of forms and materials. These include full ranges of day-glo and acrylic color, variously cut or carved glass, plastic, reflective mylar and diffractive contact paper, spiraling cane, painted tree branches, flexible sticks, balsa wood, wire mesh, and personal memorabilia. Then, with all the elements at hand, she dives in over her head through the reflective plane of self-consciousness to deal simultaneously with the psychological and the formal. It is more than can be managed and requires a theatricality of gesture of which she is full conscious. Admitting to the creation of forms "at the edge of the grotesque," procedurally and experientially she attempts to develop an additive process into an organic flow that combines the formal, psychological, and procedural in relational interaction.

At the conclusion of a 7-day "natural time slot" of complete immersion, she stops. In this manner the apparent irresolution of the work at once gives evidence of the procedural process and indicates the location of the art in the structures of relational interaction. The paradox is that the apparent naiveté of the enterprise is dependent upon the formal sophistication it attempts to subvert as logic pulls her beyond the fringe of known experience.

A consequence, perhaps limitation, of this heroic flash is that it is a hard act to follow unless seen as a forerunner to a new conceptual or procedural sequence. Necessarily combining both intuition and logic, such a sequence may begin in intuition and work through the experiences of inductive reasoning (in Pfaff's case, inventing, accumulating, and deploying the elements of her environments) to become a refinement of visual deduction that may either close the episode or, more fruitfully, allow it to become a sub-unit in some new intuitive formulation.

It is tempting but facile to relate Pfaff's work too closely to the forms and concerns of Abstract Expressionism. Rather, her art is closely and clearly located in the present. Her accumulated visual sophistication is engendered by the academically translated formalism of the '60s, her lived experience of both conceptual analysis and that moment of partial negation when Post-Minimalism extended logical structure into the realm of personal formulation. And, most recently, her sympathy for the position of full negation of perceived logic that fuels a prevailing art interest in the sources of the pre-logical. Moreover, this visual and conceptual competence is coeval with a societal interest in the structures of the mind, which is academically and scientifically marked by a proliferation of research and a re-arrangement of the studies of the mind into the newly defined area of Cognitive Science. It is artistically and expressively explored by visual artists as diverse as Elizabeth Murray, Louisa Chase, William Ramage, Robert Irwin, Robert Morris and Mel Bochner. Seen in relation to both art and the larger world context,"Deep Water" is product and process of the '80s.

(Holly Soloman, September 12 -October 4)

Betty Collings.

 

 

 

Home Writings Judy Pfaff