Roundup at the Whitney Corral

By ROBERT HUGHES

A sprawling show of American painting and sculpture

A few years ago, the word salon was scorned in the art world. It suggested a chaotic visual mob scene with thousands of mediocre paintings and sculptures stacked from floor to ceiling of an exhibition hall, accepted or rejected at the whim of reactionary committees. Good art, it was felt, did not disclose itself in crowd scenes. It was found in small concentrations in private galleries, or in tightly curated theme shows in museums, or in artists' retrospectives. Lately, however, some virtues of the 19th century salon system -for until the rise of the private dealer in contemporary art after 1900, the salon was the main meeting point between new art and a wide public in Europe -have become apparent. In particular, the salon was relatively democratic. Any artist could send to it and stand a chance of acceptance. It suited a culture with a vast pool of unemployed, or insecurely employed, talent. There were more painters than buyers in the Paris of the 1850s, just as there are far more artists being produced by the art-education system in the U.S. today than there are galleries interested in their work. The salon was an indispensable testing ground, and may become so again for us today.

The Whitney Museum's Biennial, which opened last week, is not a real salon. It is too closely preselected for that; entrance is by invitation only. Nonetheless, since 1932 it has been the closest thing to a salon that New York City has had. At least some of the names in the 1979 exhibition -which includes 110 objects by 56 painters and sculptors, along with programs of film and video work by 32 other artists -are not likely to be known to most museum visitors. What the five curators who chose the show have given us is a pan around a diverse, though often bland horizon, rather than a squared-up essay in the dominance of some historical direction. And rightly so: one lesson of the past ten years in American art has been that movements have vanished with the death of the avantgarde. The very idea of collaborative groupings, once an essential part of modernist practice, seems to have lost its strength -at least for the moment. In fact, it takes some effort to remember the days in the '60s when the air was thick with talk about which movement (Op, Pop, post-painterly abstraction, arte povera, conceptualism, photorealism) was the latest incarnation of history. In an eerie way, the future seems to have joined the past (as far as painting and sculpture are concerned) in a common elephants' graveyard. So one is left with the individual talent, the single work. Diversity is all; and if this cooling-off has deprived the art world of its former urgency, at least it has the merit of reality. The only people who still feel nostalgic for the days of movements are dealers; the historical handle made paintings easier to shift.

The only "big" movement of the 1960s with an aesthetic that continues to be felt in the 1979 Whitney Biennial is, oddly enough, minimalism -a style made up of simple, primary, uninflected forms, usually garnished with tangled masses of oversubtilized criticism. Less, these days, does not seem to be more, especially when the work in question is yet another empty grid by Sol LeWitt, or something like Richard Serra's Toll, 1978-79 -three walls of a gallery enclosure painted dead, oily black. In the past, some of Serra's sculptures have been memorable, their slabs and rolls of lead or iron imbued with a harshly macho directness. Compared with them, Toll is merely a shrug of indifference. What is such work about? Nothing, except the conventional performance of an artist basking in the routine approval of a museum.

Some of the minimal work in the Biennial, like Brice Marden's wax-encaustic panels, is beautifully made, but the craftsmanship is placed at the service of no discernible idea; it is art's answer to the well-made play, a kind of systematic decor--though (mercifully perhaps) with out the metaphysical pretensions of its ancestor, Barnett Newman's work. More likable are the folded tracing-paper drawings by Dorothea Rockburne, with their spare geometry of arc and line appearing through superimposed translucencies of paper -the product, if not of passionate invention, at least of rigorously organized taste. The problem with work of this kind is not that it is in some way provocative or unfamiliar, but the reverse: its very reticence, its excessive care about its own limits, unintentionally becomes a form of surrender. There is very little here that was not done better, and under the stress of a more vivid necessity, in Europe and in Russia 50 years ago. It is all footnote and no text.

But to see what an abstract artist at the height of his powers can do, one should go to the two large relief paintings by Frank Stella, with their flapping, exuberant forms slathered in paint, crayon and glitter: a splendid yawp of vitality. Beside such work, nearly all the abstract painting being done by artists of Stella's generation in the U.S. today looks ei ther timid or bored. Among younger artists, the abstract impulse tends to be more plainly decorative, less ambitious: witness the elaborately imbricated patterns of Joyce Kozloff s Mad Russian Blanket, or the high-keyed color swatches, like details from Matisse's wallpaper back grounds, of Kim MacConnel's Baton Rouge, 1978. There is also a liking for emblems, sometimes of a puzzling sort -as in the paintings of Lois Lane (not a pseudonym), which sport in profile a curious little animal vaguely resembling a horse, silhouetted on a column against a dark background or dangling from what appears to be a parachute. Here, quirkiness is pushed almost to the the point of risk.

Of more orthodox figurative art, there is no lack. Philip Pearlstein, that master of the art school nude -the flesh always rendered cold, the formality of the body emphasized by photographic-style cropping -has produced one of the best paintings of his career in Female Model on Platform Rocker, 1977 -78, with its uneasily tilting floor line and stutter of shadows cast by the slats of the chair across the pale wall. California's Robert Graham is represented by a group of his small, fragmentary bronze torsos, minutely finished, imbued with something of the erotic dandyism of the Belle Epoque. But the prize for obsessiveness, were it to be given, surely belongs to Gregory Gillespie, 44, whose Self-Portrait in Studio, 1976-77, is rendered with maniacal detail -everything in place, every pore on the knobby hands and taut face a deliberate homage to the Flemish quattrocento, and the palette with its squidgy mounds of pigment (paint depicting paint as well as painter) turned into one of the most ar resting displays of realist bravura in recent American art.

The Biennial's sculpture tends toward a kind of monotonous and outsize wackiness. A lot of it has more in common with precincts or buildings than with the usual conventions of sculpture: surrealism, mixed with primitivist nostalgia, is its presiding spirit. Donna Dennis' large-scale model of a frame house -swollen doll's quarters, too small to function as a building -is one example of the syndrome, and another is Alice Aycock's 24-ft.-long construction of arches, ladders and drumlike wooden wheels, whose title (The Happy Birthday Day Coronation Piece) sounds as portentous as the piece looks. This kind of lumberyard Piranesi is simply too big for its boots.

There is the expected quota of mock anthropology and imaginary biology; the most eccentric and striking example of that genre being a pair of crude effigies of horses, made from sticks, chicken wire and mud by the California artist Deborah Butterfield. There is also a hilarious piece of funkiness by a Texas sculptor, James Surls, representing a tornado chewing through the roof of a church; Surls' debt to that master of buckeye surrealism, H.C. Westermann, is ob vious enough, but the image has a wobbly comic-strip blatancy about it that carries conviction.

The best large sculpture in the show is a delicate construction of wooden slats, curled and woven through one another and supported on pebbles, by Michael Singer. Its ancestor is Giacometti's famous surrealist construction of the 1930s, The Palace at 4 a.m. -there is a similar feeling of spindliness, fragility and, isolated in its museum cell, of mystery. Though it suggests other cultures (bamboo lattices, fish traps, grave-marker posts), it does not do so in a sloppy, metaphorical way. At 33, Singer is clearly an artist worth watching.

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