Irene Tsatsos

It was sometime around 1970 and I was on one of my regular visits to the Art Institute of Chicago with my mother.  We walked past a line of Frank Stella chevron paintings, turned a corner, and propped against a wall directly in front of me was an enigmatic object, terribly simple and inexplicably, overwhelmingly compelling. I didn’t know it at the time, but this nuanced sculpture was the work of John McCracken, the pioneering Minimalist associated with southern California’s Light and Space group.  McCracken’s shiny red rectangle sat directly on the floor, leaning against the wall, angled away from me, yet drawing me to it as if it were a giant magnet.  My intrigue and enthusiasm were displayed decorously, of course, in a manner befitting the hushed seriousness of the museum; but on the inside I was jumping around like the apes in front of the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – another cultural artifact of the same era.  Approximately eight feet high by nearly two feet wide, the dimensions of the piece were about twice the size of my body.  The simplicity of this was riveting, and that such a straightforward object had this kind of power was perplexing.  In retrospect I am grateful to her for hiding her complete bafflement of this and indeed all of contemporary art by answering my questions in open-ended ways (“Well, dear, what do you think?”), allowing me to retain my awe. That said, I somehow knew that, while well-intentioned, she was way off-base when she happily suggested I could simply “make one myself.”  I was already developing some intuition for art criticism, and the rigors of studio practice; after all, the tools available to me – crayons, poster board, tempera paint, clay, decoupage – were incapable of allowing me to re-create this shiny hi-tech object.  More importantly, in some inarticulate but deep way I understood that simply being around this was enough.