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continued from page eleven
voked by the photographically deceptive object painted onto a surface,
could not fail to be heightened by the identity between image and external
shape. And it was even more pro-voking to discover that -besides the correspondence
between the painted image and the subject itself, between the shape of
the painting and the shape of the subject -the size of both subject and
painted image now corresponded! The line of experimentation embodied in
"The People" is further developed in "Mazola and
Ronzoni" (plate, p. 95), "Mr. B.J."
(plate, p. 103), and "9th Street Junk"
(plate, p. 100).
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| Ninth Street Junk
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Like his
contemporaries in Pop Art, Kanovitz was becoming in- creasingly preoccupied
with objects seen in everyday life rather than with figurative social
themes, because in the every day objects the tensio!l between art/reality
and the illusory image was readily generated. Was it not inevitable that
this complex, polyvalent mediation between contradictory elements would
be readily and aggressively available in objects that were at the furthest
possible remove from the dignity of being considered worthy of depiction
in a work of art? The cut-out figures now stood in empty space not only
in the formal sense but in physical reality. But in still another way,
what was originally an artistic concept -figures placed in front of a
blank background -was now transposed into reality. The background, now
cut away, was replaced by the "real" wall in the gallery, in front of
which the picture was hung. The reality of the exhibition situation was
introduced in contradiction to the reality of "realism." The two realities
contradicted each other, pressing their separate claims to reality. In
the long series of window paintings, from 1968 to 1970 (plates, pp. 87,
92, 93, 98, 105), Kanovitz heightens this contradiction. A trompe-l-'oeil
painting of a window placed in front of a wall claims to be a window in
that wall. The illusionistic representationalism of
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the painting, which is a reality as such, puts reality itself on the spot.
At the same time, the window painting makes no claim about itself beyond
the fact that it is a picture. It further emphasizes this claim by thematically
restating the question: Isn't the thing framed by the window a picture?
Isn't it the picture? This question lends itself to being refined, folded
and unfolded at successive levels of complexity, all of which leads inevitably
to further paintings. What is the painting? A shaped canvas representing
a window with a frame? Or is it what the window frame surrounds like a
picture? Or is it what we see behind the windowpane? Or is it the other
half of the picture? Is the Soho skyline (plate, p. 93) with its complex
outline of rooftops and watertanks, which are completely darkened, hence
sharply silhouetted against the bright sky background, only an example
of how very real reality can appear, regardless of whether it is presented
flat or in three dimensions? Or is it an ironical picture element which
only happens to resemble a skyline? Is it actually just an abstract configuration
of shapes, which for compositional reasons has a place in this painting
-because its angularity constitutes an abstract quality to set off the
lush and subtly nuanced handling of other portions of the painting? If
Kanovitz paints trompe-l' oeil, it is not merely to demonstrate a technical
perfection reflecting an art-for-art's-sake esthetic stance; it is instead
always a way of asking questions about our reality and our relationship
to reality. The provocation inherent in Kanovitz's work doesn't come from
the perfection of his technique, but rather from his juxtaposition of
technique and content, together with the fragmenta- tion of content. The
abstraction process which we have traced step by step from the outset
of Howard Kanovitz's career as a painter was zealously linked by him with
internal
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| Mr. B.J.
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