Routinely slandered as the airhead middle child between the radical 1960s and the greedy 1980s, the 1970s were a lot more than just a smiley face. In Summer Nocturne: Works on Paper from the 1970s, a group exhibit on view now through September 23 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), the ’70s show up in all their complex glory, combining celebration with criticism and offering a lot to consider for the present moment. Fittingly for a time that mostly went its own way, curator Julie Joyce has imposed few rules. The 10 artists represented — Robert Beauchamp, Huguette Caland, Richard Dunlap, Dane Goodman, Luchita Hurtado, Tom Marioni, Marie Schoeff, Michelle Stuart, Joan Tanner, and John M. White — were all born outside of California, yet all spent at least some time living here. Several have settled permanently on the Central Coast, and some have been shown before at the museum, while others are making their SBMA debut.
The title for the show is taken from Dunlap’s 1977 construction “Summer Nocturne,” a giant black sun mandala, eight feet in diameter, that was created with tarpaper on the floor of the artist’s studio in Santa Barbara approximately 40 years ago. It’s an intensely evocative work that harnesses the macho energy of UCSB alum Richard Serra’s grease crayon “process” drawings to an image that’s emblematic of sunny Santa Barbara by negation. Nearby, negative space reappears in striking fashion through a large drawing on yellow paper that Marioni produced in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art as part of a live performance in 1979.
For “The Results of a Theatrical Action to Define Non-theatrical Principles,” the artist sat on a chair in bright light and used vigorous, rhythmic arm gestures to shade the area outside of his shadow with a large pencil. What’s left is a large rectangle of yellow paper hanging loose to the floor within which the figure of a seated man appears, his shape defined by the collection of strokes that surround the space his shadow once occupied. For Marioni, the founder of San Francisco’s Museum of Conceptual Art, these ’70s performances manifested the collective sense of Pacific Rim Zen that he felt bound the artists and poets of the Bay Area together. The show’s physical organization puts Marioni’s work in dialogue with Dunlap’s in a great conversation about the West Coast, art history, Northern and Southern California, and the influence of East Asia.
