Quirks, Clamors and Variety

By ROBERT HUGHES

Three surveys of the U.S. scene are vital full of hope

Every two years, the Whitney Biennial sails round and is promptly declared by its critics to be sinking. Look, the mast has gone! The hull has sprung, the captain is drunk, and the ship's macaw has taken over the chartroom! The pumps cannot keep up with the gurgling inflow of banality! Heavens, the parallels with Western civilization itself are too evident to resist! Not only are things not what they used to be, but it is so long since they were what they were that few can remember what they might have been. Indeed, one of the main uses of these big compendiums of current art is to enable the watchers on the prom ontory to vent such lamentations. In a world of instability and doubt, now that modernism is formally over but art keeps obdurately being made, one of the mottoes of the conservative critics is Ishmael's in Moby Dick: "The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth? --Because one did survive the wreck." At least things will be worse two years from now.

Or will they? The 1981 Whitney Biennial has now arrived, along with a whole season of roundups, "direction" shows and the like. East of the Appalachians, two other major ones are running: in New York, the Guggenheim's "19 Artists--Emergent Americans," and in Washington, the Hirshhorn Museum's "Directions 1981." Among them, these three sample the work of some 150 painters, sculptors, land artists, photographers, video and film makers. Some of the artists, like Richard Diebenkora, Harry Callahan or Ellsworth Kelly, are very well known and represented by first-class work. Others, like Willem de Kooning, are equally famous but showing weak things. Still others, such as the New York Artist Julian Schnabel (with his lumpen-expressionist jumbles of sticky paint and broken crockery), are immensely fashionable with collectors for reasons the work does not make clear. But nobody, not even the most dedicated footslogger on the SoHo treadmill, could have known everything in these three shows firsthand. Taken together, they make one realize yet again how indispensable the salon format is to a healthy art world. The curated survey, whose American prototype is the Whitney Biennial, always has patches of boredom and baldness, but it is still the nearest thing we have to the clamorous variety of the 19th century salon.

This year the results are often tonic, enjoyable and full of hope. Some shoots of real vitality have been emerging from the conceptual rubble of late modernism. Although there is nostalgia for the arid pieties of yesteryear--Peter Lodato's two blank 11-ft.-high rectangles at the Whitney, for instance--the general tone is unsystematic, quirkish and opposed to movements. So much so, indeed, that curatorial bias gets in the way. No one is likely to miss minimal art, but the total exclusion of color-field painting reflects as much bigotry as its absolute dominance did ten years ago.

But, granted that "movements" are more a dealer's spiel than a real feature of current art, there are still affinities among artists. What are the main ones here? To begin with, realist painting--but with a twist. The plain declarative style of tonal realism, whose American master is Philip Pearlstein, is hardly in evidence, although there are some exquisitely rendered pastel studies of gray, tumblng Midwestern skies by William Beckman at the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney has some beautifully observed images by William Bailey (still life) and Rackstraw Downes (panoramic landscape). The best figurative work at the Guggenheim is by the oldest of the "emergent" artists, the 63-year-old West Coast movie critic and former abstractionist Manny Farber. His still lifes of labels, dolls, mementos and children's toys, deceptively casual in arrangement and laid out with near architectural precision, despite their fatty paint, are like rebuses or allegories, swarming with references to movies and their auteurs. Peter Frank, the Guggenheim's guest curator, who has a marked taste for indirect and elliptical art, has also included an interesting painter from New Orleans, Jim Richard, 37. Richard's deadpan views of Southern suburbia do not justify Frank's claim that they possess "the most astoundingly lambent light this side of a Caspar David Friedrich sunset." That must be the most astoundingly nutty thing written by a talented critic about a talented artist so far this winter. But they do have a weird, banal intensity, especially in Viewing the Sculpture, 1980, where a number of chairs in a tract-home parlor survey a pressed-steel hardware-store Lazy Susan, landed in their midst like an alien life form.

The other primary vein of imagistic painting in these surveys (particularly the Whitney's) is a vague catch-all for anything reminiscent of punk or other nouveau-wavo aggressions. "Dumb art," it is conveniently called, and some of it is very dumb indeed--but not all. One notable exception is the work of a precocious 25-year-old named Jedd Garet, whose paintings seem to take their stylistic base from, of all things, late De Chirico-- not the pre-1918 master of tailor's dummies and spare, aching urban spaces, but the pompous neoclassicist of the '30s. Coarsely colored and drawn with a kind of savvy crudeness, Caret's Flaming Colossus, 1980, resembles nothing so much as a black squid with humanoid ambitions, silhouetted against a conventionally "apocalyptic" background of fire. Yet on this preposterous level, it does work as an image, generating enough energy to blow its neighbors off the wall.

One would also like to like the work of Jonathan Borofsky, but he makes it difficult. For several years now, Borofsky, 38, has been filling galleries with his stoned pictorial ramblings, large-scale doodles interspersed with logorrheic messages in script. What they may mean (assuming that these spurts of buckeye American surrealism are meant to have any narrative meaning) is utterly opaque, but in the Whitney he is at it again, in his klutzy, feckless way, in a room dominated by scrawled names and a huge black cutout of a man who repeatedly swings a hammer. Whatever its meaning, this piece is visually more interesting than the "environment" that greets one on the fourth floor of the Whitney, Robert Wilson's chic '20s-style set for his short piece of dramatic gibberish from 1977, / Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I Was Hallucinating. With Borofsky, at least, you do think you are hallucinating. But then, why should a stage set not be "sculpture"? In the Whitney, pretty well anything that isn't flat or a photograph can be classified as sculpture, like Scott Burton's table made of sheet onyx lit from inside, or his chairs--two hunks of rough gray gneiss, cut in a way that makes only minimal concessions to human buttocks, impartially devoid of life as sculpture and comfort as furniture.

Recent decorative tendencies in American art are sampled at the Whitney but ignored in both the Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn. The idea of an art, abstract or figurative, that is entirely hedonistic, anxiety-free and without social resonance is not, of course, new in America. That was what most abstract painting in the '60s was about, although the fact was concealed as embarrassing. Now the impulse is out of the closet, which is a relief--although it seems not to have produced any genuinely major painting. The best of the peintre-decorateurs, and the longest at it, is Robert Zakanitch, 45 represented at the Whitney with a lavish and seductive canvas of two swans, heraldically conjoined at the heads, floating on a gray-green field of water and creamy lilies. But younger painters tend to settle for something lighter, stylish in a glitzy way and openly bird-brained. Beside Robert Kushner's Same Outfit, 1979, Dufy might look like Poussin.

There is quite a lot of "narrative" art, disconnected accumulations of words and images that owe something to Jasper Johns, something to James Rosenquist. The most conspicuous new practitioner is a Texan named Vernon Fisher, 37, the only artist represented in all three shows. But political content hardly appears at all. The sole artist concerned with it is an Englishman, Conrad Atkinson (Hirsh-horn), who makes ferocious indictments-by-assemblage over such issues as Northern Ireland and asbestos poisoning of workers. His accumulations of data--letters, text panels, photos of graffiti and so on--undergo very little aesthetic transformation, but they have an undeniable forensic power.

Earthworks and land art are notoriously difficult to get into a museum --in fact part of their aim was to escape its confines--and at the Whitney they are present, in a ghostly way, through slide projection. But there is one unusually gifted land artist at the Hirshhorn, Lita Albuquerque. By dusting isolated stones or strewing sharp, evanescent blotches of pigment in desert places (the color is then blown away by the wind), Albuquerque produces an exquisitely fugitive interference with the landscape, like a fleeting pictograph, an acceleration of cultural time in the great stasis of nature. Her single rock in a glass case at the Hirshhorn, unnaturally glowing under its pall of red dust, is as startling as an asteroid.

Yet some of the best things on display ti these shows do not fall into any of the usual categories of the '70s. In particular, and perhaps best of all, there are the two rooms by Judy Pfaffat the Hirshhorn and the Whitney. If there is any central metaphor to Pfaffs maniacally strident and wonderfully energetic work, it is immersion. Colonies of shapes--spiky, blobby, twisting, knotted, tangled--sprout upward from the floor or hang in clusters from the ceiling. They proliferate like brain coral, elkhorn, lacy underwater fans; the wall beyond them dissolves into patches and drifts of submarine color. It is the octopus' garden, and walking through it one seems to float. Such an image could become excruciatingly kitschy (one cutout angelfish would do it), but what preserves the balance and tightness of Pfaff's work is her daring, uninhibited sense of abstract form. Those squiggles and meshes, bits of screening, Mylar and Day-Glo plastic work together beautifully as aerial handwriting. In her work there is not a trace of the hesitation and nostalgia, the feeling of being becalmed, that gave the '70s their grayish tone. A few more artists like her, and the '80s might be an interesting decade.

--By Robert Hughes

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