ART FOR ART'S SAKE

The members of most professions--be they baseball players, politicians or journalists--treat their calling with gravity and decorum, at least in public. Privately, they may kid their colleagues mercilessly. Artists, on the other hand, like actors, regard their fellows as prime targets for public parody. Lately, works of art poking gentle, and occasionally savage fun at other works of art seem to be multiplying like guppies. Though these works sometimes look like literal copies, they are usually sly, even malicious comments about the nature of art and its relation to reality. John Clem Clarke's stylized version of Frans Hals' "St. Adrian Militia Company," which hangs in a downtown Manhattan bar (above, with artist seated second from the left), is surrounded by a white line so that the staid, 17th century Dutchmen appear to be figures on a television screen. Clarke thus suggests that TV's ubiquitous eye has changed everybody's way of seeing reality. Vancouver's Iain Baxter burlesques famous artists by carrying their pictorial trademarks to logical extremes. By adding ribbons to his copy of Kenneth Noland's "And Again," he has created an authentic Baxter (shown with the artist, at right). In visual language, the work snorts that if stripes alone make a painting, then why don't longer stripes make a better one?

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