Three years after Real Time was published, Jennifer Bartlett first showed her mammoth painting Rhapsody at Soho’s Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976. In the essay that opens the book designed by Harry N. Abrams Design Director Sam Antupit nearly a decade later, critic Roberta Smith writes, “Rhapsody is Bartlett’s great and imperfect epic, a visual event that unfolds in real time, real space, and above all, real thought, without ever leaving the wall.” Indeed, for some viewers the work might’ve amounted to sensory overload. Painted on steel plates primed with white enamel and grey silkscreened grids, Rhapsody uses materials derived for subway signage and assumes a similar amount of running space as a typical station: 153 feet of wall for its 987 12x12 inch plates.
When it first appeared, it took the art world by storm. A short article in Art in America notes, “The piece traveled triumphantly for two years, with stops including Documenta 6 and the Whitney’s landmark ‘New Image Painting’ show. A second museum tour followed in 1985–86,” for which this book was made, and then “like Rosenquist’s F-111, Chicago’s The Dinner Party or Serra’s Tilted Arc, Rhapsody became an art-book legend, an oversized milestone, inconvenient and unseen.” In 2006 MoMA installed Rhapsody in its atrium and produced this short video interview with Bartlett (scroll down) talking more about the piece.
But Rhapsody’s ideal vessel, in my humble opinion, is the catalog that documents it. Smith’s essay, written specifically for the book, hints that she might agree:
Rhapsody’s disjointed narrative adapts extremely well to book form. Its reconstitution here makes Rhapsody more continuously available than it has ever been—providing the chance to pore over it ad infinitum, aided by Bartlett’s own text listing the conceptual impetus behind each plate. And, actually, a handheld Rhapsody is not at all farfetched. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Bartlett works large in order to be intimate. The plates are page-size to begin with, and painted mostly one at a time. And this book’s contrasts of installation views with big reproductions of single plates underscores the way Rhapsody continually pushes viewers back for the long shot, then pulls them close for an inch-by-inch examination. This contrast should also reveal that what looks dense and rich from afar is, up close, often startingly thin, forcing the viewer to balance an overall meditative resonance with a dashed-off nonchalance, which, in keeping with Rhapsody’s mass-produced surface, makes no concession to “beauty” or “touch.”
Set in square justified blocks of Richard Isbell’s expansive Americana, Antupit’s font choice may seem a bit quirky at first, but the reader quickly adapts. It is expansively horizontal, a vista, produced in anticipation of America’s bicentennial—an occasion that calls to mind all the breath, history, and amibitions of Bartlett’s painting.
