Introduction

To the People of New York City (1976), by the German artist Blinky Palermo, is a fifteen-part work comprising forty individual panels. Palermo completed it in late 1976, not long before his untimely death in February 1977. Although he had relocated to New York in the last few years of his life, he realized the work in his studio in Düsseldorf. The cycle was shown from May to June 1977 at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, New York, and again ten years later at Dia.

Belonging to a group of works called the Metallbilder (Metal Paintings), initiated in 1974, To the People of New York City may be seen as a coda to a career defined by several distinct aesthetic approaches. Works classified as Objects date from 1964 through 1974; the Stoffbilder (Fabric Paintings) first appear in the latter half of 1966; and Palermo began his Wall Drawings and Paintings at the end of 1968. He continued to create Stoffbilder until 1972 and Wall Drawings and Paintings until 1973. In 1976 he exhibited a work that was more installation than painting at the Venice Biennale. In each case Palermo variously redefined conventional ideas of painting as a planar rectangular surface conveying an image.

The thirty-nine single elements of To the People of New York City require a sizeable amount of wall. While the spaces between each of the fifteen sets of paintings are variable, the distances between the panels of each grouping must be equal to their respective width. All thirty-nine paintings are painted in cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and black. Notably, Palermo applied his acrylic paint to thin aluminum panels rather than to canvas, disqualifying reference to the weave of a fabric support without diminishing the effect of color-bearing paint. He applied the paint by hand but did so evenly, eliminating any sense of gestural activity and allowing the brush to leave only slight striations or irregularities subtly apparent.1 While thus refraining from signaling an authorial presence, he nonetheless retained the actual and notional quality of an artist's handling of paint.

Nine of the the work's fifteen separate parts comprise either three or four panels each. The size of the panels varies but remains consistent within each group. These small-scale panels display a horizontal format with, at top and bottom, narrow strips of color that band a central rectangle. The areas of red, yellow, and black in Part XV are not symmetrically proportioned, as they are in the other parts. Parts XI–XIV are larger, measuring 3¼ x 6½ feet, and have a horizontal format, while Part VI is uniquely sectioned into four disparately scaled rectangles—one red, one black, and two yellow.

Palermo's decision to use the same three hues throughout the work as a whole gave him the foundation for a set of combinations with which to set forth a controlled permutational color scheme. The scheme, however, evinces no regularized, inflexible system. Even while it takes full advantage of the visual power of repetition, it spares itself of an unyielding, mathematically determined seriality.

Free from representational obligation within a single rectangular unit, the colors of red, yellow, and black carry the eye from panel to panel and around the room without enforcing a sequence. Although Palermo refuses to impose a definite system of color arrangement, viewers may tend to want to look for one, a desire that encourages them not to dwell on any one panel. Instead they participate in the experience of observing unenclosed, resonating hues that—despite a deliberate allusion to the colors of the German flag—"float and breathe in the space of the gallery,"2 having escaped referential responsibility and subjugation to the strictures of formal delineation. The compositional relationships among the colors foster a sense of the color as disembodied from the unframed aluminum panels, which are almost imperceptible, projecting only minimally from the wall by hidden fasteners. These chromatic relationships are marked by their inherent potential for an open-ended interplay between individual panels and sets of panels.

The Metallbilder, concluding with To the People of New York City, were a new departure for Palermo toward the end of his short career. Like the Objects, the Stoffbilder, and the Wall Drawings and Paintings, they succeeded in broadening the parameters of painting, even while remaining unconditionally flat and rectangular. The Objects, on the other hand, had been conspicuous for their break from the customary planarity and rectilinearity of painting.

In the Objects, form is freed from dependence on a separately delimited background. Kissen mit Schwarzer Form (Cushion with Black Shape), 1967, for example, resembles an upright cushion, as its title suggests. Made of foam rubber covered with cloth and attached to the wall, it is painted a red-rust color on its rounded outer edges and bright orange on its rectangular face. A curvilinear black shape cuts eccentrically through the center. Stuffed like a pillow but richly imbued with brushwork, Kissen mit Schwarzer Form is a three-dimensional object whose presence is painterly and tactile. The emphatic black shape on its surface, moreover, assumes an autonomy that it would not possess on the surface of a flat picture plane. Thus superimposed on a protruding object, the shape's own flatness "stands out."

Palermo constructed his Objects so as to enhance the autonomy of painted shape. In the case of Schmetterling II (Butterfly II), 1969, a long, thin, irregular, vertical shape almost touches a decidedly irregular polygon placed high on the wall to its left. Tagtraum II (Daydream II), 1966, also a two-part work, is constructed out of a wood T shape and a nonspecific rounded shape covered with beige and purple silk, and thickly painted in uneven areas of white, violet, black, and orange. Instead of containing the form on a two-dimensional rectangular surface, Palermo outlined the entire painting-object so that it would function indiscriminately as both a form and a support.

While he was working on the Objects, Palermo embarked on the Stoffbilder, which he fabricated, literally, from bolts of colored cloth that he purchased from department stores. Unlike the Objects but like the Metallbilder, the Stoffbilder not only have pristine surfaces but are rectangular and two-dimensional rather than irregularly shaped. Tautly attached to a stretcher, the fabrics create smooth rectangular planes of color, one above the other. With the exception of early or experimental pieces in satin, silk, or white fabrics such as muslin or linen, the Stoffbilder are made of matte cotton yardage with surface textures and weaves that do not distract from the direct perception of the abutted areas of two or three separate areas of color, which are neatly, almost imperceptibly stitched together. The standard available width of fabric determined the maximum possible dimensions of the colored rectangles, which Palermo matched and scaled intuitively.

The broad bands of cotton in the Stoffbilder are perceived as unobstructed fields of solid color. Commercially available fabric stands in for oil or acrylic on canvas; expanses of dyed cotton substitute for a painted ground. Color and form, surface and support, fuse into a single, united presentation. Released from identification with any external referent, color is not subordinate to rectilinearity but instead announces its field as an independent reality unimpeded by any need to suggest illusionistic space.

Palermo's Wall Drawings and Paintings mark a radical yet logical extension of the ideas underlying the Objects and the Stoffbilder. Dispensing with the canvas, an intermediary support, they ally instead with a more all-embracing support, the architecture of the exhibition space. Between 1968 and 1973 Palermo realized more than twenty of these projects and recorded them in sketches and photographic documentation. (They themselves, however, having been affiliated with their place of installation, are no longer extant.) For a solo exhibition in 1971 at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich, for example, Palermo painted one of the gallery's four walls in ocher and one in white. Then he outlined these walls with a border a hand's width wide, encompassing the door frames. The wall painted ocher was outlined in white; the wall painted white was outlined in ocher. In precocious manner, Palermo extended painting to embrace its usually unattended architectural support—a support that here served also to determine the work's formal properties.

In To the People of New York City, form follows the dictates of rectilinearity rather than those of the surrounding architecture. Functioning through multiplicitous juxtapositions of red, yellow, and black rectangular areas, released from representational duties and from participation in hierarchies of composition, color receives a chromatic life of its own as the very subject and image of the work.



Notes

1. See Gary Garrels, "Technical Notes and Schematic Outline," in Blinky Palermo (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1987), for a close descriptive analysis of the work overall, including the nature of the paint handling, and for accompanying schematic diagrams pertaining to each panel's size and color scheme.

2. Richard Lorber, "Blinky Palermo, Heiner Friedrich Gallery," Artforum 16, no. 1 (September 1977), p. 77.

Anne Rorimer