Out of the Junkyard

By ROBERT HUGHES

In general, U.S. museums do not just reflect art history. They program and write it through their selections, their "theme shows" and their imprimatur. But Manhattan's Whitney Museum, with dedication if not full impartiality, has clung to the principle of a survey--not declaring where it thinks artists are supposed to go but where they are actually going. In the present show, devoted this year to sculpture, there are 99 artists showing one work apiece, and it is simply intended to provide a survey of American sculpture as it now stands.

The result is a show with no theme except diversity; the pieces, crammed onto three floors of the museum, add up to a kind of instant junkyard of the future. They range from the tense brutality of Barry Le Va's Cleaved Wall (24 meat cleavers, slashed into a 30-ft. expanse of board) to a lamentable anthology of sculptural cliches that looks as if Gucci had been playing with oak beams and steel joists, but is in fact the work of the respected painter Kenneth Noland.

Magic and Line. The most mysterious and commanding work in the show is by a young New York sculptor. Nancy Graves. 30. Her Shaman is a group of ten objects made of latex, muslin and wire, hanging from the ceiling. They derive (she says) from the ceremonial costumes worn by priests of the Kwakiutl Indian tribe in North America, and they have an eerie "presence," as if the magicians, like shadows, had vacated the elaborate cloaks and headdresses, which were also their skins of power, and left the shucked-off relics behind them, battered but still imbued with magical force.

Artist Graves' sculpture works on a startling range of levels: as a poignant memorial to dying primitive cultures, as a combination of place and object (the hanging skins can also be read as a sacred grove), and even as a statement about the museum culture through which most whites experience tribal art. "One of the things that was also in my head," Nancy Graves says, "was how things are related in anthropological collections--the object to the glass case it's shown in. the case to another case, the whole display to the room." But her main preoccupation was with costume, its way of reflecting and modifying the body that wears it so that it helps determine the body's own awareness of its roles. On her own chosen ground, a field where the man of magic confronts the linear thinking of anthropologists, her contribution is dazzling.

Out of Despair. Equally dazzling, considered as illustration, is Duane Hanson's tour de force of social realism. "The content of my sculpture," he recently declared, "is derived from my feeling of despair. Realism is best suited to convey the frightening idiosyncrasies of our time." So his work makes up a chamber of all-American horrors: lifesize, startlingly real figures cast in Fiberglas and polyester resin. A group of Bowery winos sprawl filthily on a littered sidewalk; a dead motorcyclist, hideously mangled, lies pinned under his wrecked machine. In Tourists, Hanson extends his distaste to Mr. and Mrs. Middle America on vacation somewhere in the sun: he with his Hawaiian shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts and festooned camera equipment, she with her blue sunglasses, red slacks and gold sandals, both staring with puzzled receptiveness at--what? A palm tree? A Morris Lapidus facade? Hanson has pinned down the fragile particularity of pure banality. There may seem to be something too easy, almost flip, about this kind of social anatomization.

Wood as Grass. Certain younger sculptors at the Whitney eschew the high finish such works imply: their materials are plain, crudely put together and ostentatiously frugal. John Duff's Tie Piece, with its floppy swag of old neckties sewn together and swaying on a curved wooden slat, is a very promising exploration of the possibilities that lie dormant in ignored objects. It is rare to see such a fastidious imagination expressing itself through such deliberately mingy means.

The works of Ed Shostak, 29, have a similar roughness--but by default, since, "I couldn't afford to make them in metal." A struggling young artist if there ever was one, he is still at the stage where his bed is a mattress on the floor, and he works, often two shifts a day, as a waiter. Influenced at first by minimal art ("I am extremely derivative. I worshiped Robert Morris, but I got over that") Shostak has gravitated toward a kind of abstracted nature-imagery. Minimal art he now finds understated and unimportant. "I think of my work as more flamboyant, which you're not supposed to use in minimal work. Instead of being unimportant, my work is very outrageous." His large floor piece, Bloomin', is an artificial wooden garden: panels of coarsely cut building board lie flat as grass or fold into flowerlike cones; sprouts of timber push upward. "I want the color to look like growth, living and flowers. Brown is the earth, green for growth, bright colors for mature flowers." Spring unfolds in the unheard creakings of Shostak's rough carpentry. qedRobert Hughes

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