Excerpts from his catalog essay from his exhibition
The Art of Real
Galerie Pierre Huber
1987
The Renaissance artist
labored over perspective in order to create an illusion of space within which
he could make believable the religious and philosophical ideals of his time; the contemporary
artist labors to make art itself believable. Consequently the very means of art
have been isolated and exposed, forcing the spectator to perceive himself in the process of his perception. The
spectator is not given symbols, but facts, to make of them what he can. Thus,
what was once concealed within art - the technical devices employed by the
artist - is now overtly revealed; and
what was once outside - the meaning of its forms - has been turned inside.
-E. C. Goossen
Excerpts from the original
The Art of the Real catalog essay
(1968)
…An old, oft –repeated joke about sculpture describes it as
something you back up into when looking at a painting. With the recent
ascendancy of what can be termed object-type painting, that joke can now be
inverted, as we now bump into paintings at every turn. Object-type paintings
are meant to invade the viewers “space”.
The artists in this exhibition present objects which are neither painting nor sculpture, but hover between the two
categories. Peter Hopkins is one of these artists, none of the works he refers
to as “paintings” are, in fact, made with paint. He fabricates objects that
look like paintings and provoke the normal interpretive discourse of painting.
The intention is to frustrate the basis of a particular interpretive theory of
art which rests on referential theory of meaning. Peter Hopkins’s “floating
structures”, which support flattened optical fields, arose because of the artist’s
frustration with specific categories of art production and the interpretive
power encompassed by these same categories: the effect is a new type of
painting that is categorically
incoherent.
Hopkins concentrates on the surface of his objects in order to create a “site” qua Smithson for which the writer E.C. Goossen might have claimed in his groundbreaking 1968 essay for The Art of the Real exhibition: “ instead of perceptual experience being accepted as the means to an end, it has become the end in itself…The spectator is not given symbols but facts, to make of them what he can….{that} lead him to the point where he must evaluate his own peculiar responses”…