The everday of yesterday: a New York gallery recently exhibited a long-unseen body of work from the Pop era—Alex Hay's oversized versions of ordinary objects. Viewed now, these trompe l'oeil paintings and sculptures take on new associations - painting at Peter Freeman, New York

The spirit of Pop art is generally associated with the antic side of the bipolar '60s. The very name suggests a certain explosiveness, and its legacy is traced, as a rule, through the noisier artists of succeeding decades, from Jeff Koons to Paul McCarthy. Alex Hay's work of the early to mid 1960s was Pop to its core, but, looked at 40 years later, it suggests another disposition altogether and a very different line of descent.

The 10 early works shown in Hay's first solo exhibition since 1971, at Peter Freeman in New York, are quiet, distilled and preternaturally simple. The show included both paintings and sculptures, all much enlarged trompe l'oeil renditions of ordinary things. Some, inevitably, have the antiquarian appeal of Duchamp's bottle rack or Larry Rivers's painting of an old Cedar Bar menu: the 80-inch-high painting Cash Register Slip (1966) reproduces a receipt from a hardware store founded in 1886; the sale, for four items, came to a grand total of $5.05. Egg on Plate with Knife, Fork, and Spoon (1964), in which the 7-foot-high flatware is painted on three separate narrow canvases and the massive, cream-colored plate is a shaped fiberglass relief, is as redolent of the once ubiquitous greasy spoon as Edward Hopper's Nighthawks; with knife, fork and spoon stiffly standing guard around a single, righteous sunny-side-up egg, this composition is also almost comically reminiscent of Grant Wood's American Gothic. But other works are of everyday objects that have changed little in the intervening years. A sheet of lined yellow legal paper, the seal of a Cuban cigar, a stretch of chicken-wire fencing are rendered with calm exactitude, every detail precisely observed, measured and enlarged. Thus the perforated edge at the top of the sheet of legal paper is depicted with perfect fidelity, while the differently shaped, minutely tufted perforations of a length of toilet paper, with its softer, more fibrous surface, are executed with no less gravity. Equally meticulous sculptures of a brown paper bag and a paper airplane, made from paper stiffened with fiberglass, lacquer and epoxy, have the same quiet self-possession.

For a while in the '60s, Hay was in the thick of things. He had four solo shows between 1967 and 1971 and, after assisting Robert Rauschenberg as set designer for Merce Cunningham's 1964 world tour (Hay's wife, the dancer Deborah Hay, performed at the time with Cunningham), participated in 1966 in 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, organized by Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver. Hay performed alongside Rauschenberg in Pelican (1963), Map Room II (1965) and other events of that decade, including several of his own. But by 1969, Hay had left New York, and for many years has lived in Bisbee, Arizona, where he still makes objects, though not art, and not for profit: a pair of shoes, for instance, occupied him for a couple of years. Such disciplined application to craft--such trance-like patience--suggests a spiritual, perhaps Eastern inclination, and indeed Hay has pursued Buddhist teaching.

But then, so did John Cage, who was also on the 1964 Cunningham tour. And it is the Cage connection that is most illuminating for Hay's work. Labor in excess of necessity, Hay's working premise in the 1960s and, it seems, now as well, suggests how Zen precepts and their emphasis on process link Hay's kind of Pop to post-Minimalism, and points beyond. This tradition can be traced to the many current artists whose spectacularly painstaking work, mostly in sculpture, demonstrates the same kind of serene infatuation with surface: Robert Gober, Roxy Paine, Jennifer Pastor, Ron Mueck, Keith Edmier, Jonathan Seliger.

A retrospective look at Hay's early work also helps connect the dots between Pop and the fully abstract Minimalism of its time. Thus the individually painted lines of the legal paper evoke Agnes Martin, while the blank surface of the red-bordered mailing label summons up Anne Truitt and Jo Baer. It is notable in this respect that early mentions of Hay's work appear in both Lucy Lippard's Pop Art (1966) and Gregory Battcock's Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. In his introduction to that landmark book, Battcock traces a surprising genealogy. "Pollock's ... challenges to the art process and method have been accepted by numerous Minimal artists and others," Battcock wrote, "among them Malcolm Morley, Dan Flavin, Alex Hay, Richard Artschwager, Roy Lichtenstein, and Aaron Kuriloff." Battcock further links this oddly assorted group of artists to Duchamp, and continues, "They take care to provide just the right surface--a surface without craft (indeed, without art); in this way rejecting those impulses that claim glory in manual work and nobility in craftsmanship." (1)

Whatever the durability of the judgment, these remarks are obliquely illuminating. The same is true of Lawrence Campbell's review of the four-person 1964 exhibition at Castelli in which Hay's work was first publicly shown; the other artists were Artschwager, Christo and Robert Watts. "The frame of reference was Surrealist," Campbell wrote. "A few years ago ideas like these would have been found in illusionistic painting." (2) But these vagrant, disillusioned ideas had no sooner appeared than they were pronounced familiar. Donald Judd reviewed the same show and said of Hay's contributions (which included Egg on Plate), "these are well done but aren't unusual." (3)