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As an artist, Terry Fox has always seemed to be a European who happened to be born American (in Seattle, to be precise, in 1943). His work addresses matters of great philosophical complexity, which are most often suggested by objects and drawings of spartan simplicity. A spiritual dimension is at his art's core, but in a manner that chafes against material limitations without getting unctuous or affected.
Fox, whose touring 20-year survey of Conceptual art is currently at the Otis Art Gallery, has in fact spent a good deal of time in Europe. He went to Rome shortly after high school to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He was in Paris in 1968, where his participation in the dramatic student uprisings had a profound effect on his artistic direction. His first European gallery shows were in 1972, and he's had more one-person exhibitions in galleries and museums in Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland than in the United States. In 1980, he became a full-fledged expatriate-moving from San Francisco and New York first to Berlin, then to Naples, on to Florence and, since 1988, to Liege, Belgium, where he currently resides.
The survey exhibition's useful catalogue, written by art dealer and former curator Constance Lewallen, pointedly notes that Fox chose to leave the United States for good "just after President Reagan had taken office." It's easy to see why: A spartan aesthetic concerned with issues of spiritual and philosophical moment is hardly compatible with a period whose profile is most vividly marked by consuming greed and debilitating political duplicity.
Tellingly, the Otis show was organized by Elsa Longhauser at the Moore College of Art andDesign in Philadelphia and will travel next to the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. American art schools and universities, unlike most American museums, have always been more open to exhibiting artists whose concerns are not manifest in the fabrication of traditional objects. At Otis, Fox's spare materials include some piano wire, a couple of ordinary drinking glasses, four beer bottles, a button suspended from a pencil by a piece of string, a few ladders, long strips of paper marked with ink and pencil, a pair of battered stools-the stuff of everyday usefulness.
Neither is there much...