Fishlike fish "Sublime Geometries: CMCA in Portland" at June Fitzpatrick BY CHRIS THOMPSON

The critic Hilton Kramer deserves his reputation as the art world’s wittiest curmudgeon for his fine summation of minimalism: "The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation."

The received way to interpret this is also the most simplistic, namely as a dig against minimalism, where minimalism is so lifeless and impenetrable that the only way to get it is to have an expert explain it to you at length. Since it laughs not, we ought to, at its expense. But the more accurate take on Kramer’s quip is that it is not really talking about minimalism, at least not primarily, but rather about a shift in the relationship between artistic practice and art criticism.

The critic Michael Fried insisted that minimalism was an ideological art, which for him meant that it sought to situate itself in discourse, to take a position relative to other positions, rather than imagine that art could somehow capture the entirety of its past within its own pure presence. This would also take shape in the critic Hal Foster’s writings, which conceived of minimalism as a political art in the sense that for it, "historical specificity, cultural positioning is all."

As a number of contemporary artists and critics have pointed out, these are academic arguments in the sense that they nourish and are nourished by the academy. Curator and critic Rob Storr has noted recently how curious it is that several generations of artists and critics have dedicated themselves to "institutional critique" without grappling with the institution of the academy; in his words, we "seem to think everything is fair game except the academy. It is a dubious exemption."

Storr’s point suggests that there is room for a critical practice that is at once aware of contemporary criticism’s academic legacies and interested in producing a conversation that is not tied to the varieties of discourse produced by the academy and the museum. For him the critic Dave Hickey, a favorite of art students everywhere, exemplifies this kind of conversation, one that, Storr says, aims to return to those who look at and read about art "a certain power that he feels was appropriated by the academy and the museum."

Along these lines, it is interesting to return to Kramer’s point above and read it not as a joke about minimalism’s difficulty — or even an homage to the need for critics like himself to explain, or explain away, the new — but as an invitation to think of one’s own perceptual practice and aesthetic judgment as the only real prerequisites of critical engagement. Read in this way, Kramer’s quote could be made to mean that the more that a particular work has to do with an exploration of the phenomenon of perception, the greater the role one’s own individual explanation of this experience plays.

"Sublime Geometries," a collaborative exhibition between the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the June Fitzpatrick Gallery at the Maine College of Art, brings together 13 artists (Eric Brown, Ben Butler, Daphne Cummings, Kendra Ferguson, Martha Groome, Jeff Kellar, Frederick Lynch, Duane Paluska, Greg Parker, Scott Peterman, Noriko Sakanishi, Don Voisine, and Mark Wethli) whose work stages precisely this kind of experimental engagement with the processes of perception.

Scott Peterman’s photograph "Naples" shows a black ice-fishing shack at the center of a frozen lake. The settling fog hasn’t thickened enough to cloud the foreground, but has all but dissolved the rest of the space, with the result that the black polygon becomes dense and saturated, a pure void in the middle of the frame. What is astounding about this work is that all of the details of the photographer’s personal experience — we imagine him standing there, on that lake, on a day unlike any other, in the fog, waiting for the right moment — are at once irrelevant to his aesthetic inquiry but absolutely necessary as part of his artistic method. When we look at this image we see an ice-fishing shack on a frozen Maine lake, but this is only something we arrive at fairly late in the cognitive process. What we see firstly, and throughout our encounter with the image, albeit implicitly, is rich black form balanced dead center in a field of shimmering gray and silver.

The skill in staging the shot and processing the image creates a set of visual relationships that conjure up a sense of atmosphere and mood that we imagine are integral to the place itself, and are utterly convincing because of their formal rigor.

Peterman’s piece, like all of the work in the show, works beautifully because it so nearly did not; these works court risk and succeed in constructing a territory that holds itself together and is for this reason able to welcome our engagement with it.

A similar logic is at play in Ben Butler’s work, meticulous topographical drawings that track the ways that forms change and forces mesh in their encounter with each other.

He notes the way that forms morph in response to changes in their surrounding conditions, as for instance when the basic box used as the model for dwelling "becomes a transportation vessel, and encounters water, it is stretched and molded and smoothed into a beautiful gliding pod. It resembles a fish, and is beautiful, but not because it mimics the fish by design. Instead it becomes like the fish in the same way that the fish becomes like the fish, because it has to."

Chris Thompson teaches at the Maine College of Art. He can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"Sublime Geometries: CMCA in Portland" is at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery at the Maine College of Art, in Portland, through February 26. Call (207) 879-5742 x283.