Invented Images - August 30th, 2024

“Invented Images” was a group exhibition at the University of California Santa Barbara Art Museum from February 20 through March 23, 1980. The exhibition then traveled to the Portland Museum of Art (April 8 - May 18 1980) and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery at the University of California, Santa Cruz (May 28 - June 21 1980). 

In all three venues, the exhibition presented work done since the late ’60s that used “props and artificial set-ups as subject matter.” 

Featuring artists Jared Bark, Michael Bishop, Steven Cortright, Robert Cumming, John Divola, Bernard Faucon, Robdrt Fichter, Phillip Galgiani, David Haxton, Graham Howe, Bill Jones, Kenneth Josephson, Michael Levine, Mark McFadden, Marcia Resnick, Lucas Samaras, Laurie Simmons, Sylvia Salazar Simpson, Boyd Webb, and William Wegman. 

76 pages
Softcover, perfect bound
22 x 22 cm

Published by UC Santa Barbara Art Museum with an essay by Phyllis Plous and commentary by Steven Cortright. 

Robert Cumming, “Apples Plus Two Apples Equals Four Apples” (1974)
Laurie Simmons, “Brothers/Hay” (1979)
William Wegman, “How They Are Toward Newspaper” w/ his dog, Man Ray (1974)

Critic and curator Richard Armstrong wrote a grumpy review of “Invented Images” for Artforum in May 1980 (Vol. 18, No. 9) in which he addresses the catalog: 

“A note about the catalogue: besides its sporty cover (again toy figurines, this time on a striped field arranged to spell “Invented Images”), it is a distorted, perhaps ironically so, souvenir of the show. Color photographs are reproduced in black and white, worse (or more intellectually fecund, depending on one’s point of view), photographs are not reproduced to scale. Hence, a three- by three-inch color Samaras ‘Photo-Transformation’ is further transformed into a seven- by seven-inch black-and-white illustration. Invented images indeed!”