The regional history of American modernism – late as well as early – has yet to be written. In particular, the connections, parallels, and uncanny resonances between innovative activity in disparate quarters can and should be mapped; the dot-connecting would reveal sometimes astonishing vectors. The ties established in the late ‘60s between artists from Chicago’s Hairy Who and their northern California Funk counterparts, for instance, or the devolution of cubism between the wars in such far-flung places as Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Taos would dramatically fill out American art history. In particular, chroniclers should look at the artwork produced in various art departments and schools – i.e., in “university towns” – in the wake of the GI Bill between the 1950s and the 1970s. (Indeed, one of the principal crucibles of Pop Art, a decidedly mainstream triumph, was Rutgers University in the middle of New Jersey.)
The little city of Boulder, just north of Denver, was one such university town. Home of the University of Colorado’s main campus, Boulder became a laid-back melting pot for many of the more eccentric ideas in an eccentric era. A crossroads for traditional Western American culture and progressive, even experimental social trends, the town prided itself (as it still does) on a kind of collective rugged individualism – an anomalous condition that at once describes the original Beatnik impulse and the incongruous success of the American way of life itself. As such, Boulder has long been a great place not just to make art, but to experiment with it; people there either leave you alone or cheer you on, and the school itself pats you on the head and gives you tenure, or at least a decent budget and studio space.
It’s in this context that Roland Reiss, hired more or less straight out of graduate school in the mid-1950s, developed a radical body of work, painting-sculpture hybrids the likes of which had not been seen before. The plastic-based materials Reiss employed, Plexiglas, polymers, polyurethane, and the like, were attracting attention among his peers in Colorado and also in southern California, where he was born and educated. Reiss left Los Angeles before this interest in new substances arose there, and in Boulder he was aware only of those few of his local colleagues who shared his interest – each of whom worked with different combinations and formations. Former student DeWain Valentine, for instance, worked with fiberglass after graduating and before moving himself to L.A. The objects Reiss began creating in the late 1950s, and perfected in the 1960s, looked like nothing else around him.
To our eyes, they do suggest the similarly voluminous “bubbles” of the late Craig Kauffman, Reiss’ exact contemporary (and later friend). But for the most part they do, if anything, exactly the opposite of what Kauffman’s vacuum formed Plexiglas pieces do. While Kauffman “went minimal,” investigating the qualities of surface and light, Reiss, if anything, went baroque, accentuating the eccentric contours and topographies of his molded forms by embedding in them, or even painting them with, bright colors and provocative shapes, some seemingly organic, others as graphically bold as corporate logos. In this, Reiss not only happened to distance himself from the light-and-space aesthetic of the “boys of Venice,” but also from the equally austere structures of artists in New York such as Sven Lukin and Charles Hinman. These painters shaped their canvases into elaborate, but still planar (and clearly “hard-edge”) constructions; all formal elaboration was built, not rendered, in contradistinction to Reiss’s shapes painted on (or into) shapes.
Hinman, Lukin, et. al., enjoyed a moment of fame in the mid-60s – all too fleeting, given their artistic achievement, but that they got any recognition at all can be explained by their New York context. Similarly, Kauffman and his fellow southern Californians (Valentine not least) were able to capitalize on a burgeoning southern California art scene that was making New York sit up and take notice. Reiss’s equally startling and inventive works of the same period never got the props they merited, hidden in the hills as they were. In his 1997 Archives of American Art oral-history interview, Reiss recalled that, sometime in the early-mid 60s, “Time magazine came out to write an article about us, about artists working in plastic in the Denver area, but they did not publish the article. About four or five years later we saw an article in Time magazine about the plastic movement in Southern California.” Reiss and his Rocky Mountain cohort had proven either too exotic for the New York media, or not exotic enough.
There isn’t room here to discuss Reiss’ intricate working methods; certain of them, at least, are apparent to the naked eye – it is clear, for instance, that he cast several works from the same mold, coloring and detailing each in vastly different fashion, or even embedding extraneous materials (neon in at least one case) that provide further formal and perceptual contrast. Reiss discusses his modus operandi at some length in his Archives interview http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/reiss97.htm.
Besides, this essay is not only about Roland Reiss’ “early work;” as the two beginning paragraphs should make clear, it is as much about unpacking the great complexity of America’s postwar artistic heritage, in all its confounding contradictions and unanticipated tergiversations. Reiss, broadly recognized as one of southern California’s key living artists – thanks as much to his achievements in academe as to those in the studio – actually began doing something significantly different in a different time in a different place. In this light we need to expand our estimation of Reiss – just as we need to expand our estimation of art in America in general.
Peter Frank
Los Angeles-New York
August 2010