The New New Criticism

More than one newcomer to Manhattan's giddy gallery-go-round finds himself both bedazzled and befoozled. Should he wander into Manhattan's Frumkin Gallery this week, he will find a partner in bemusement. Hung by two wires from the ceiling is a large plywood artist's palette, smeared with paint and with a paintbrush affixed to it. On the palette, in black plastic letters, is the question: "What's It All Mean?"

The wry questioner is William Thomas Wiley, 30, a graduate of San Francisco's cheerfully ticky-tacky school of funk art. For the past eight months, Wiley has been surveying the cool, hip New York City art scene, and the show at the Frumkin Gallery reflects his conclusions. Wiley finds himself impressed with "how important art is here, how it fits into New York culture." At the same time, he is irked by its high seriousness and the pretentious critical debates that rage about each new fad. "I'm both for and against the New York art scene," says Wiley. "The thing is to deal with the purities and the impurities as you find them."

More often than not, his works joke about the gallery scene. On the floor repose a dozen constructions made of impure but somehow weirdly poetic materials: rope, rocks, logs, old felt and even a few potatoes. They are put together with the purest of professional skill, and spoof everything from minimal art to maximum drip. On the walls hang dreamlike, deft pen-and-watercolor landscapes, depicting logs, brooms, brushes and other oddments, poking fun at the high turnover in art vogues, or the foibles of collectors. Modern Sculpture With Weakness combines a log nearly chopped through, a plastic wheel with a slice removed and aluminum tubing tied with string. The whole kids Roy Lichtenstein's slick abstract "Modern Sculptures" and a high-flown review that attacked their "weakness."

Not all of Wiley's visual puns are lampoons or deal with art alone. A square of latticed Masonite strips frames a ball wrapped in black electrician's tape from which dangles a tangled skein of white string. It bears a tag saying, "This piece was begun on April 4, 8 a.m. and completed April 4, 7 p.m.," because Wiley was making it on the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Recalls the artist: "I didn't think of the black and white as racial, but when I heard about King being shot, it suddenly seemed relevant--the rickety structure, the black friction tape, the white mess." Through his almost accidental and homely memorial, Wiley sardonically reminds his viewers that chance and blind illogic play roles in art as well as in life.

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