ART

...The critical vocation could scarcely be expected to hold a man offered such a tempting dish of bureaucratic privilege...

...Which is to say that neither the author nor the participants know quite what it is all about...

...Prominent among its achievements—if that is the word —were the so-called "happenings," the acting out, in front of an invited audience, of a nonsensical, "improvised" scenario in which an assortment of materials of the kind long in use by painters, sculptors, and collagists (found objects, discarded junk, together with paint, paper, and other staples of an artist's studio) are animated in various ways by casts of non-actors (often the artists themselves) who are gotten up to look like figures in a bad painting...

...One had the impression that he was not entirely happy in a profession which, however much he might try to alter the fact, had traditionally been concerned with making intelligible discriminations among the plethora of artistic claims that constantly impinge on the public eye...

...There are a few items of real merit: the pastels of Lucas Samaras, which are very deft imitations of similar works executed by Emil Nolde about 30 years before Samaras was born, and an amusing three-dimensional cutout group portrait, called Maine Room, by Red Grooms...

...For the rest, there is only the usual hodge-podge of ill-carpentered construction, displaced commercial art, and egregiously incompetent painting that one now sees in the posh uptown galleries...

...In place of any such concern there was instead an implacable, and often unintentionally hilarious, disposition to transform—not in retrospect, but immediately upon contact—every esthetic encounter into a readily classifiable art-historical datum...

...For, as it turned out, this faculty for uniting the solemnities of historical certification with the copywriting proclivities of a very hip publicist was exactly suited to the taste of the '60s, with its voracious appetite for new sensations sanctified by portentous historical slogans...

...In those days, the only thing that seemed to excite him as much as a Jackson Pollock painting was a lousy Hollywood movie...

...With his customary mixture of pedantry and sloganeering, Alloway promptly set up as a spokesman of this latest wave of the present and has been tireless in expounding its alleged virtues...

...The two-year history of the Reuben Gallery offers no such obstacles...

...Experiments of a sort did make an appearance from time to time, but then, they were not exactly absent from the uptown scene either, for it was in the '50s that the "new" became the favored catchword of the official tastemakers...

...For decades serious artists had been making good use of found objects and various kinds of junk, imposing upon these materials, as they had traditionally done with paint, canvas, and clay, their own vision...

...This odious little style, born of an esthetic impotence that yearns nonetheless for all the prerogatives of creative fertility, made its appearance in London a bit earlier than in New York and was obviously just the thing for a sensibility nourished on the trashy movies of yesteryear...

...In his short Introduction to the catalogue of the Guggenheim show, Alloway refers to the work first shown in these downtown galleries as "new, experimental, or unfashionable," whereas in fact the fashions of the moment dominated exhibitions downtown quite as much as those on view in the more expensively appointed establishments uptown...

...Enamored as they are by every manifestation of lowbrow culture (comic books, advertising, window display, bad movies), they hesitate to impose on their favored samples of junk anything that suggests the processes of formal ratiocination, and so are reduced either to simulating the texture of the junkheap or to cheating just enough to brighten the debris with the look of some item of commercial manufacture...

...What distinguished the downtown galleries was not an esthetic but a sociological fact: They were the anteroom into which myriad unknown but ambitious artists awaited entry into uptown success...

...Yet this small survey affords a very clear glimpse into the mind of its organizer, and thus into the attitudes that now dominate the more aggressive branches of the museological establishment...

...ON ART Instant History By Hilton Kramer Among the museological luminaries who currently preside over our artistic affairs, none is a more curious phenomenon than Lawrence Alloway, the curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum...

...And as Alloway himself says in his Introduction: "Ideally, in a happening, the boundaries and the duration of acts and the area of the scene are problematic...

...But this will to historical order, which in Alloway's writing was carried through with the humorless dedication of a civil servant tabulating the incidence of cholera in a distant colony, represented only one side of his critical persona...

...What distinguishes the Reuben group is the expressive diffidence they apparently feel in the presence of these new materials...

...Thus, if Alloway's methods left something to be desired as a mode of criticism, they were absolutely perfect for the new stratagems then becoming standard practice in our most "advanced" museums, and his services were duly enlisted by an institution whose directors had begun to feel a little lonely for the kind of crowd-pleasing fun and games already being enjoyed by official sponsors of the avant-garde elsewhere...

...For the most part these galleries showed young, or at least unknown, artists, and were often organized by the artists themselves as cooperatives...

...Among these galleries there was only one, as I remember, that sustained a high standard of artistic accomplishment: the old Tanager Gallery...

...There are also other bits of esoteric art-historical data from the long-lost '50s: How many among us could have known that the name of the Hansa Gallery, another downtown establishment that operated in that faraway decade, was actually "compounded from Hans Hofmann's Christian name and the Hanseatic League"—a fact upon which some aspiring museum bureaucrat, his hour come round at last, is no doubt at this very moment founding an exciting new theory...

...Their principal aim was to exhibit the work of artists who did not have ready access to galleries uptown, and in this respect they were a distinct success: Their shows were regularly, and often generously, reviewed in the Times and in the art press, and their artists frequently found their way into the uptown exhibition scene...

...Alloway's was indeed a very neat accomplishment, joining as it did the mentality of the square with the language of the hip, and it was not long before his unique gifts were recognized on this side of the Atlantic...

...Alloway qualified for his important museum post in another respect as well...

...Its sympathies were too diverse, its esthetic commitments too heterogeneous, its roster of artists too wide-ranging to be easily encapsulated in the jargon of a museological hipster...

...There was always something odd in Alloway's performance as a critic...

...His ubiquitous writings and broadcasts—he was at one time an art critic for the BBC—were filled with unedifying longueurs on the precise chronology and significance of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York along with a good many hair-splitting references to the kind of cinematic junk—long and deservedly forgotten—that used to run as second features in the double-bills of my childhood...

...As the latter is dated 1964, perhaps it should actually be considered post-Reuben...

...Head-splitting noise is the usual musical accompaniment...

...What the happenings at the Reuben Gallery brought to focus was not an art but a kind of taste...

...At the Guggenheim we are mercifully spared a performance of a happening, and are shown only a variety of more or less inanimate objects, some of which are actually paintings and sculptures, by the 11 artists of the group...

...The other was clearly in thrall to a hipster playing fast and loose with a jargon which, though devoid of esthetic reference, nonetheless gave one the impression that grave matters of immediate artistic import were being settled once and for all...

...Currently domiciled in New York where, in addition to organizing exhibitions at the place of his employment, he exists as a kind of gray eminence in the more salubrious purlieus of the avantgarde, he first rose to prominence in his native England during the '50s as an exponent of both American abstract painting and various species of popular culture...

...The Reuben Gallery (1959-61), which is being apotheosized on the present occasion, was one of the many small galleries that came into existence in downtown New York during the '50s...

...The real substance of the exhibition is not to be found in the galleries, however, but in Alloway's fascinating catalogue...

...Here for posterity are the names and dates of every happening perpetrated at the Reuben Gallery from October 4, 1959, to April 23, 1961, plus a chronology of exhibitions...

...The results of his proselytizing efforts on behalf of Pop and its kindred offspring have been many, and the exhibition called "Eleven from the Reuben Gallery," currently installed on the top ramp of the Guggenheim, cannot be considered among the most important...

...But the 10-year history of the Tanager would scarcely lend itself to the kind of historically pretentious exhibition now in vogue...

...Even before his move to New York, his deep personal aversion to esthetic quality— or indeed, to anything that smacked of high culture—had found its perfect objective correlative in the phenomenon of Pop Art...

...Alloway's own critical writing seemed remarkably unconcerned about the esthetic quality of the works he discussed...

...For if the art that Alloway has here treated to a grotesque exercise in interpretive flim-flam looks highly impermanent, and thus not to be much worried over except as a cultural symptom, his own intellectual style looks all too much like the model of the future...