The Avant-Garde: Subtle, Cerebral, Elusive

FOR the past nine years, Robert Ryman, 38, a shy, quiet, Tennessee-born part-time art teacher, has lived in Manhattan lofts and tenements and painted "naked" pictures. That is to say, he covers rectangles of metal, canvas or paper with white paint and then, instead of framing them or stretching them, he mounts them as close to the wall as he can get them, sometimes stapling them directly to the plaster. The effect is unnerving. The wall seems to have developed a gaping hole.

Ryman's pictures are so unsettling, in fact, that some who see them for the first time laugh outright. He finally made his first commercial sale a month ago. Moreover, Ryman is no longer alone. For the past year or so, a dozen-odd other, younger artists have been producing pictures or sculptures that share his work's maddeningly artless look.

Bill Bellinger, 29, makes dumb-looking sculptures that consist of a piece of rope slung from floor to ceiling. Keith Sonnier, 27, puddles flimsily sensuous Dacron on the floor. David Lee, 31, hangs clear sheets of plastic from the rafters. Richard Tuttle, 27, tacks up wrinkled octagons of canvas.

Pure Dirt. In enlightened 1968, even New York's moderately avant-garde critics are prepared to agree with Tuttle that yes, indeed all this may be art. But what kind of art? Some call it "antiform," for its outlines--or rather, its conspicuous efforts to avoid them. Others call it "process art," for it proudly shows off the marks of the process by which it was made. Another term is "conceptual art," for in every case, the concept behind the piece is infinitely more impressive than the workmanship. And "conceptual art," everybody agrees, is deliberately made hard to understand: subtle, cerebral, elusive, private, intense (see color pages).

Despite the lack of a label, a few adventurous dealers have been setting the new work out in galleries. The year has seen esthetic wonders running from algae to soft obelisks, and constructions incorporating words, photographs, chicken wire, sulphur and thin air. In September Manhattan was treated to the spectacle of James Lee Byars, 36, parading more than 300 votaries along East 66th Street in a communal robe. There were the "earthworks" artists at the Dwan Gallery, who had assembled works replete with peat and petroleum jelly. Meanwhile, their leader, Walter de Maria, 33, was filling three rooms of a Munich gallery with eight tons of "pure dirt, pure earth, pure land."

Negative Cube. The antic spirit that animates the earthworks movement has been cavorting in Manhattan for at least one year--ever since putty-nosed Claes Oldenburg, 39, dumfounded the city with his contribution to its outdoor sculpture festival. Oldenburg can always be counted on to do the unaccountable.

He was raised in Chicago, studied English at Yale, but switched to art at the Art Institute of Chicago and came to New York in 1956 to pioneer artistic happenings. He staked out new frontiers for pop art with his plaster foodstuffs, which he sold at his 1961 Lower East Side Store. (The businessman who bought his plaster pies for $900 then values them at $12,000 today.)

Oldenburg had gone on from plaster to vinyl and canvas. In 1962 he dreamed up monster hamburgers and bed-size pistachio ice-cream cones. Since then he has sketched a myriad of delightful "proposed colossal monuments" for Manhattan, including a giant Teddy bear for Central Park, and a mountainous baked potato for the front of the Plaza Hotel. Conceivably, Manhattan's festival organizers also expected him to whip up the baked potato. Instead, he had the city hire two gravediggers, who dug a 3-ft. by 6-ft. hole in Central Park, then carefully filled it in. He called it "an underground sculpture."

"It seemed perfectly valid to me," says Oldenburg today. "A kind of identification with earth, a recognition that earth is worth looking at, like sculpture. Taking the earth out of the ground, you are left with a cube, a nice geometric piece like Tony Smith's box, while the mound we excavated was a ground-up cube. We had a negative and positive cube--a conceptual thing." To most people, of course, a hole in the ground remains a hole in the ground. Who would ever think of it as a negative cube? Only a conceptual artist like Claes Oldenburg, who delights in the play of the mind above all, in the thousand fantasies that supplement his visual riddles.

To Oldenburg, his soft and cuddly toilet, with its water tank dipping to a U in the middle, suggests the Winged Victory. A magnified drainpipe incorporates the notion of a phallus and an elephant's trunk. Cigarettes on a tray look like cannons (he kicked the habit of three packs a day). Oldenburg's proposed colossal monuments were never meant to be built. Who wants a 650-ft. high Teddy bear in Central Park? But they are real nonetheless--they exist in the form of drawings, as "concepts" rather than sculpture.

Aggressive Medium. For nearly a decade, or since Robert Rauschenberg hung a tire on a stuffed goat and Andy Warhol began painting the soup can, artists have labored to create simple, obvious public art. They used colors that screamed; painting was likely to have hard-edged forms; sculpture was geometric, intended as focal points in plazas. Today the trend is in the opposite direction: artists are deliberately going underground. Even though they may use people as part of their sculptures--as does Byars--their purposes remain arcane and enigmatic.

"The pendulum swings," explains Richard Tuttle. "Pop was with the commercial image. It was a fight against the esoteric thing of abstract expressionism. Now this esoteric thing is coming back." Adds De Maria: "These works are secret--hard to get to. They put commitment back into art."

Minimal Sculptor Robert Morris, 37, argues that the new compulsion to record the process owes much to action painters like Jackson Pollock, whose huge drip canvases were a tapestry of color--and a record of the act. "Pollock had no heirs in the 1950s," says Morris. "But now people are involved with the physicality of art, in the all-overness, the aggressiveness of the medium, in, the material having its own properties."

A Rope Is an Idea. One change has been the new emphasis on soft, amorphous Oldenburgian constructions, works that fold and change from day to day. They share sloppiness and seeming crudity. Museumgoers in Chicago and Milwaukee this year found themselves climbing inside semitransparent, womblike constructions by Frank Lincoln Viner and Jean Lindner. Unlike Oldenburg's work, these works depict no recognizable object, but like it, they change with the touch of a human hand.

"Things are still well made," insists Keith Sonnier, "but the artists are sneakier about it." Sometimes indeed they are so sneaky that their craftsmanship eludes the viewer altogether. Bruce Nauman, 26, at Manhattan's Leo Castelli Gallery last February, showed off crude fiber glass forms, limp latex-and-cloth sculptures, and a stuttering neon sign that proclaimed "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." Minimalist Morris blossomed forth at a Castelli spring show with billowing grey strips of industrial felt.

The Bykert Gallery last week was showing the work of Alan Saret, 23--oversized tumbleweeds of chicken wire.

Saret once dumped 200 Ibs. of sulphur on the gallery floor. Was it meant to be salable? Perhaps not, for a surprisingly large number of the process artists feel that the business of buying and selling art has been overemphasized. "My art has nothing to do with servicing collectors," snorts David Lee. "It's art for living, for turning on with." Rather than produce art that would sell, he supports himself by carpentry and writing. "I feel ridiculous, selling my work at a gallery," says Bellinger, who would prefer to make his work in quantity and sell it cheaply at a department store. "To me, a rope is a simple, physical expression of an idea, a way of conveying information. What gives a man power today is not what he has, but what he knows. The gallery system is out of tune with the times."

Pushing the Limits. This does not mean that far-out art lacks for collectors.

Manhattan Publisher Eugene Schwartz, for one, is fascinated. "Painting has been getting complicated again, brushwork and expressionism are coming back," he says, citing the expressively sprayed canvases of Jules Olitski and the newly fluid pictures of Larry Poons. "New art is disturbing to everybody," warns a big pop collector, Robert Scull, who is also a major patron of the newer art. "It takes a realignment of your computer to like it." Says Jan Van der Marck, director of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art: "They are doing just what the pop artists did; they are pushing the limits of the acceptable."

What draws Van der Marck especially to the conceptualists is their fascination with the mutable. They build works out of air, fire, water, ice, and whatever else changes with the passage of time. Indeed, the most exasperating aspect of conceptual art is how it sometimes almost fades away altogether, forcing the viewer to visualize something he cannot see--to respond to some "invisible" feature that exists outside and beyond the picture. Walter de Maria painted two parallel lines on the Mojave Desert, photographed them coming together mystically in the distance, and exhibited the picture. Since the lines have long since blown away, does the "art object" actually exist? De Maria says yes--in the minds of those who have seen the photograph, and experienced from it a shadow of the uncanny sensation he felt walking between the lines and feeling them pressing in.

The same argument holds true for the projects evolved by Manhattan-based Christo, 33, for wrapping trees, nudes, museums. The concept is as old as Dada: Man Ray once packaged a sewing machine. But Christo's projects are more grandiose--so vast that most exist only as models and photomontages. Finally, this summer for Kassel's Documenta show, he constructed a 29-story-high package of pure air with the aid of five cranes, half a dozen engineers, the British Rhine army and materials contributed by a German chemical firm. It was valued at $60,000. Which is more real, the models or the construction? Christo answers the eerie reality of the package itself, his sardonic comment on Western man's obsession with packaging everything from peanuts to private lives.

Caesarean Zipper. The fascination with soft, cerebral art has sprung up abroad as well as in the U.S. It is to be seen in the work of Dusseldorf's Joseph Beuys, 47, whose chilly, grey environment aims to summon up the ghost of concentration camps past, as well as in Vienna's Walter Pichler, 32, whose electronic helmet turns the wearer's voice to peeps. At the Venice Biennale, there were the five claustrophobic pouches designed by Brazil's Lygia Clark and titled The House Is a Body; visitors were invited to scramble through to experience all the pleasures and traumas of intrauterine life, from penetration to expulsion. Some participants find it so terrifying that Sculptress Clark rigged up a "caesarean zipper" to extract fainters and weepers.

"I don't care about my objects," announces Pichler. "Most of them are worn out after two exhibitions anyway. What matters is the way I got to those objects, the idea behind them." Lygia Clark some time ago came to the personal conviction that "the object as art no longer existed. What remained of importance was only the act."

And just because such artists are no longer concerned with permanence, they are free to use perishable materials without qualms. As a result, Claes Oldenburg may well be the first artist in history to develop a body of work that is soft and changeable, coolly intellectual and at the same time warmly droll. "I am for an art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze like your sweetie's arm, or kiss like a pet dog," he once noted. And his work is all of that.

Nominally, it depicts car parts and household appliances, but at the same time it suggests human softness, human vulnerability. "I never make people," he points out. "I make representations of things that relate to bodies, so that the body sensation is passed on."

It is this indefinable "body sensation" that haunts all of the new art, in one way or another, and brings the best of it stingingly alive. Even David Lee's clear sheets require a body moving between them to make the composition complete. "What I am doing," reflects Lygia Clark, "could almost be called art for the blind, but for the rest of us it is important too. We do everything so automatically that we have forgotten the poignancy of smell, of physical anguish, of tactile sensations of all kinds."

Thus, whether the art is abstract, playful or simply aimed to astound the senses or stagger the imagination, each work retains a sense that an individual conceived it and executed it by hand. Moreover, he did it for a purpose--to make the viewer look, and feel, and think. The artist may speak from underground, but he retains, in an elliptical way, his traditional role. It is to make his fellowman more aware, not only of his anxiety but also of the beauty that lurks at his fingertips, in the materials of everyday existence.

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