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continued from page nine
the patterning, movements, shifts, and overall distribution of colors.
For the sake of color relationships, garments and persons were occasionally
switched, even sometimes the placement of a given figure's feet, the attitude
of a hand, the pattern of a garment, down to such details as a cigarette,
handbag, or cocktail glass. The finished collage was photographed, then
projected by means of a slide projector onto tracing paper. It was copied
in outline only in those portions that would later actually appear in
the painting. All this was done piecemeal -fragments of garments, garment
patterns, hands, heads, poses, all of which could be readily combined
to the best advantage. These Kanovitz transferred by means of carbon paper
to the canvas by tracing the drawing over the carbon paper. At the same
time, the individual fragment was drawn in its abstract color relationships.
Color areas were delimited either by solid lines or by dotted lines or
strokes signifying various tonal values. This represented a renewed process
of abstraction and analysis not limiting itself to materials but touching
upon faces as well as garments, alienating and transforming them into
chunks of subject matter to be reassembled solely by color. Color fields
were still painted by brushwork; a face, for example, was constructed
like a mosaic. Between roughly adjacent color fields, the canvas was treated
with a transparent glaze.
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| The Opening
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Finally, the
finished figures were covered with precisely matching stencils. The blue
background was then applied with a spray gun, which distributed the color
evenly and texturelessly over the surface. This created a luminous (one
might almost say "optimistic") blue background, while at the same time suggesting
a vast abyss intensified by that expressive power inherent in every blue.
For art world insiders, the painting is full of information; yet amid the
celebrities are also anonymities -just as for the great majority of viewers,
every one of the
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persons represented is an unknown quantity. Once again, the particular
spills over into the general, just as it did in "New Yorkers." It seems
as though it hardly mattered to Kanovitz why the people in his painting
came together. If it does really represent an art opening, the art doesn't
seem to matter (there is none represented in the painting) but communication
does. The arrangement of the figures draws the viewer in, precisely because
(thanks to the creation of an anonymous space in which the "realistic"
figures are enclosed) the scene is being played nowhere and everywhere
at one and the same time. The silhouette-like figures anticipate yet another
formal de- velopment in Kanovitz's work, that of his free-standing cutouts.
The wealth of photographic material that had been assembled in the preparatory
stages of "The Opening" had brought Kanovitz in the course of his collage
studies to the idea of isolated figure groups. "The People" (plates, pp.
31, 82) emerged a year later, in 1968, and in the artist's conception
formed, together with "The Opening," a single work extending into three-dimensional
space.
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| The People
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In "The
People," the content-related process of anonymization is developed
on the formal level. We are shown only rear views of people who appear
to be intently gazing at something. In their arrangement vis-a-vis "The
Opening," these cut-outs are attention-grabbers. We, the real viewers,
are compelled to strike poses exactly like the ones they represent. Like
them, we enter into communication with "The Opening"
as a painted picture hung in an exhibition. But "The People" also belongs
to the depicted opening and is plugged into that painting's theme. In
any case, the reason for the gathering of all these people would vanish
and there would be no more opening if there were no art to look at. The
void would be back with a vengeance, as Hunter called it, "the ubiquitous
American exper- ience of urban loneliness. .." For us as viewers, this
void is physically
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