From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Through March 11

Perhaps no artist better embodies the nearly forgotten world of West Coast minimalism than De Wain Valentine, said Randy Kennedy in The New York Times. In the 1960s and ’70s, when making art from plastics was still verboten to many tastemakers, the Los Angeles–based sculptor saw industrial synthetics as a means by which he could, as he explained then, “cut out large chunks of ocean or sky, and say: Here it is.” Until last month, his most ambitious work from the period had never been publicly shown. Gray Column—which is being exhibited at the Getty as part of a multi-museum effort this fall to showcase the birth of the L.A. art scene—had only been displayed “ignobly” on its side in a corporate headquarters lobby. An 8-by-12-foot, 3,500-pound monolith, it finally stands upright, “its deep gray gradually dissolving into a ghostly, colloidal translucence as it tapers toward the top.”

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The work is “as much an act of technical bravura” as one of imagination, said Peter Aspden in the Financial Times. Valentine all but invented the process that allowed such a large object to be created from a single pour of polyester resin, and he sanded and polished it to a sheen that surfers and boat-makers might envy. A derisive term—“finish fetish”—became attached to the aesthetic, but you can see what Valentine and similar artists were after. Gray Column has “a hypnotic visual effect.” Look closely, though, and you might discern that polyester resin is an unstable substance: Despite efforts to restore its original gloss, the column’s surface is ever so slightly rippled—even cracked. We can still admire Valentine for aspiring to perfection. His column, at 35, is telling us something else: that “the yearning for flawlessness will always be compromised.”