In the late 1960s, Stephen Kaltenbach was among a group of New York-based artists who founded the movement eventually called conceptualism. It became widely influential, in part because its parameters were so liquid: in its antimuseum, anticommodity stance, conceptualism privileged ideas over objects, words over images, communal sharing over individual ownership. It was a perfect fit for the era’s burgeoning counterculture.
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The new exhibit at Bert Green Fine Art surveys Kaltenbach’s work since 1965. The artist’s roots in minimalism are evident; everything is pared down to essentials, offering little to distract the viewer from grappling with the ideas that the work presents. The effect is at once austere and playful.
Most intriguing are the expressions of the artist’s spiritual leanings, which combine self-referential elements and allusions to mortality and transcendence. The bronze plaque Art Works (1968), were it set in pavement like the New York sidewalk plaques that inspired it, would be obscured over time, its maker forgotten with its message. And mystery and the finite are central to Kaltenbach’s time capsules, such as Humilis (1970), a burnished steel cylinder whose contents are unknown, and whose inscription teasingly reads, “Please open this capsule before deaccessing it.” Following those instructions, of course, would make resale impossible.
Work by Stephen Kaltenbach Through 10/26 Bert Green Fine Art 8 S. Michigan, ste. 1220bgfa.us Free
