Neck & Neck

Though they lacked the precision of computerized analysis, the surveys of painting and sculpture staged by the Whitney Museum of American Art have long been considered the U.S. art world's Gallup poll. They attracted the whole spectrum of artistic talent, accurately forecast which schools and techniques were gaining popularity. But because the Whitney is a Manhattan museum with limited funds to comb the nation for prospects, critics have charged that the Annuals reflected the fast-changing Manhattan gallery scene but not the nation at large.

With this year's painting exhibit, no such complaint is heard. Helped by a $155,000, five-year Ford Foundation grant, the Whitney for the first time dispatched five directors and curators to 30 cities to look at work produced from Sarasota to Seattle. The result is a record number of exhibitors: 165 artists, 64 of whom are from outside the New York area, including 27 who have never shown at the Whitney.

Finish Fetish. The very diversity indicates a vigorous painting scene across the U.S. And the multiple styles should decisively demolish the notion that trend setting stops or starts at the Hudson. For better or for worse, New York and the provinces are neck and neck when it comes to whipping up frothy op and pop confections. And as for styles so new that no handy handle has as yet been hung on them, they are almost as likely to be committed to canvas in Chicago as in New York.

Abstraction is the dominant mode in the U.S. right now and accounts for approximately 50% of the paintings at the Whitney. How varied nonobjectiveness can be is illustrated by the op grids of Cleveland's Julian Stanczak as well as by the empty canvas of Manhattan Minimalist Robert Mangold, and the sheet of lacquered aluminum from Los Angeles' Billy Al Bengston (representative of what one Whitney curator dubbed California's "finish fetish"). But abstraction as an end in itself is on the wane. Artists everywhere are tending to combine it with figurative elements, or give their abstractions the illusion of three-dimensional space. One shaped canvas by Washington's Thomas Downing is painted to produce the optical illusion of five shelves piled on top of each other, while a seemingly abstract composition by Manhattan's Peter Dechar, 25, portrays, in fact, a pair of pears (see color opposite).

Comics & Bubble Gum. The Whitney's curators found few artists portraying local flavor in the tradition of Grant Wood. What they discovered instead was regional groups with a common outlook, like the West Coast's "funk artists," whose gamy, gutsy assemblages have been shown in many national exhibits. Equally vigorous are half a dozen youthful Chicagoans who call themselves "the Hairy Who." As can be seen from Karl Wirsum's The Odd Awning Awed, the style of the Who is based on garish colors and art-nouveau line, draws its imagery from comic strips, bubble-gum wrappers and ath-lete's-foot advertisements. The movement's weakness is an adolescent desire to shock; its strength lies in its verve and technical proficiency--qualities that mark the Whitney Annual throughout and that are in themselves the best news in the show.

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