pete mcgovern

190cm x 190cm

It was too cold to go and watch the cricket this Sunday so I've been doing the little undone things about the house, diverting myself from approaching the precipice of actually properly starting one of the big things I've been planning to do, which will take several months.  Fortunately crisis averted upon picking up Thames & Hudson's ' First Works by 362 artists '.  The dipping in led to something Richard Serra wrote that is relateable about his early work with four large lead plates (480 lbs each); What was satisfying about the piece was that the aesthetic came from the solution of the problem and nothing extraneous was necessary. The piece satisfied all the problems of what an aesthetic solution could be without having to go outside the limitations and counter-limitations that it set up for itself. For me, having resumed image making after a few months out, this helps confirm the thinking I've found myself doing over the last few days. The sensibility to ...

Lewis Baltz at Castelli, 1981. Of all his books, Park City is the big one and coming across this poster for the original exhibition of the photographs at Castelli Gallery is a treat on a Saturday morning nearly 45 years later. Leo Castelli was one of the leading gallerists for contemporary painting at the time having given Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella, among others, their first one-man shows. But it was actually his wife, Antoinette, who brought Baltz to his attention.  Photography as a medium had little to no credibility in the mainstream art world and while things were slowly starting to change it was Baltz's educated thinking that made him a more easy fit into the discourse at the high end. I got to hear him present this work a year later in England in a sparsely attended seminar room at Trent Polytechnic. No-one liked it. It took a week or two before I realised he had changed my life.

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