On Art

...ON ART By James R. Mellow The Modern's Acquired Tastes Happenings, Pop Art, record attendance figures m the museums, a too-responsive press, the waning influence of Abstract Expressionism—the early years of the '60s presented us with most of the cultural phenomena we are still struggling to sort out A new generation of artists, reacting to the dominant Abstract Expressionist school then in its second generation, occupied the galleries and in short order new styles began to proliferate Hard-Edge, Op Art, color-field painting, culminating in the present modes ot Primary Structuralism and Systemic painting Some signs of the times were sociological, others were esthetic The Venice Biennale prizes, for instance, began to assume the importance of the Holy Grail, artists' scuffles, dealers' ploys, strenuous politicking became part of the biennial event, which was expected to confer upon one country or another hegemony over the mternational art scene The New York gallery district, more or less huddled around the Museum of Modern Art and the old Whitney, broke out of its 57th Street precincts and began to move upward along Madison Avenue Tenth Street, an area of cooperative galleries and fervent van-guardism, came to an unseemly end, with the emphasis on new talents and new gimmicks, any artist with something on the ball seemed able to make the great leap uptown to more reputable or more profitable gallery quarters Thus the start of the '60s saw the art scene, until then self-protectively single-minded, begin to open up in an entirely unpredictable way At the same time, there developed a trend toward the re-evaluation of individual artists and styles of art long suppressed or languishing American sculpture came in for le-newed consideration and veteran sculptors like Louise Nevelson and the late David Smith were given serious critical appraisals In 1960, for example, well before Smith became internationally famous, an entire issue of Arts magazine was devoted to his work by the then editor, Hilton Kramer Equally serious treatment had already been given to Nevelson's work Both of their reputations were boosted by such attention A major exhibition of geometric and constructivist art, installed not in a museum but at the Galene Chalette m 1960, reawakened interest in structural modes that just five years earlier were considered passe The Museum of Modern Art's important Monet exhibition in 1960 not only restored a neglected master in the light of modernist practices, but introduced the idea of "series" paintings—that is, several works devoted to a given problem—which has been carried over into current Systemic ait No less significant was the Modem's extensive Art Nouveau exhibition that same year While it may have captured and codified a trend in interior decor, the real importance of the exhibition was not that it revived a taste for florid, nearly psychedelic extravagance in decorative accessories, but that it prefigured the current interest m the environmental For Art Nouveau was first and foremost a design style with environmentalist ambitions, tackling everything from furniture and vases to the entrance structures of the Pans Metro The troublesome '60s themselves are now the subject of a reappraisal The laige exhibition of 127 works in painting, sculpture and mixed media that has opened at the Museum of Modern Art (and will continue there all summer) is devoted to the acquired tastes of the present decade One uses the term in the double sense, for the exhibition includes examples of each of those new modes—from the shaped canvas to the electrically operated assemblage—that has required a certain getting used to, and because the show is drawn from the Museum's collections, consisting entirely of lecent acquisitions, gifts and promised gifts As a report on the '60s, I think it suffers from two problems the general untidiness of the period under consideration, and the mstitutional natme of the exhibition No doubt the exhibition was meant to provide a repiesentative survey, but it also seems intent upon establishing the validity of the Museum's position as custodian of contemporary developments It is no secret that the Museum's pre-eminence in the field has been threatened somewhat by other New York institutions, notably the Guggenheim, the Jewish Museum and the new Whitney, or that the Museum's policies, in an awkward administrative hour, have come under some haish attacks Critics, no less than curators, are having difficulty making sense of the '60s, and on that subject especially one hesitates to pitch stones at the Modern's trim plate-glass facade If the exhibition had to be done, the Modern was the logical place to do it Yet, it might have been a better exhibition if it had been presented as an exposition of the period, borrowing the works where necessary rather than under the cover of a standard "recent acquisitions" show One notes, for instance the omission of any work by Kenneth Noland—certainly an important reputation m the years under consideration—and concludes that the Museum has neithei acquired a Noland painting nor been given one by a collector The exhibition fares best when it is dealing with clear-cut categories like Op Art (stunning examples of Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Gene Davis) or kinetic art (Tinguely, Bonani, Ronald Mallory, et at ) In the latter category, the exhibition provided one of those incidents which could hardly have been better scripted by a professional Edward Kienholz is represented by an electronic oracle...

...The Fnendlv Giav Computet, mounted on a silvered rocking chair It gives Yes and No answers in blinking lights to questions that are first written on yellow cards and then addressed to the computer through a telephone I happened to come up to it after someone had phrased his question improperly, asking "Who'll last longer, the Museum of Modern Art or John Canaday1" The machine, obviously bohxed, had ceased locking altogether and was blinking out a signal which, tor all I know, was an SOS It is the sculpture section installed in the garden, including large works by Smith, Nevelson, Tony Smith, Calder, and Ronald Bladen, which carries the main force of the exhibition Inside, a small space is crowded with Chiyssa's neon variations on the ampersand, Trova's chrome-plated man, and Donald Judd's red wall sculpture in the Primary mode, among others Disparate talents are so jumbled together they seem like problems swept into a corner A similar confusion occurs m the salon devoted to Pop and figurative art of various persuasions Pop is covered from early (and not very interesting) examples of Oldenburg and Lichtenstein through Indiana's The American Dream I and some recent, highly-colored Campbell's soup cans by Andy Warhol Neither Richard Diebenkorn nor any of the Bay Area painters are represented, in fact, the trend toward straightforward figurative painting is not covered at all Instead, one gets a blow-up of green pears by Peter Dechar and a thoroughly undistinguished early work by Sidney Goodman, whose recent figurative paintings are much more interesting In the midst of all this, like a man caught in a traffic muddle, George Segal's plaster Bus Duvet seems headed on a collision course for Frank Gallo's sweet plastic nude, engagingly settled back in a sling chair All in all, the show is a curious melange Registering the Museum's international and Latin American commitments are several not very notable Italian, Japanese and Argentine works, while the British contribution to Pop Art is represented only by R S Kitaj, an American painter living in London Of recent British sculpture there are no examples other than Paolozzi and Latham It is easy, of course, to fault an exhibition of this kind, it attempts too much with too little Any of the trends it documents might have done for one of those carefully selected exhibitions the Museum usually mounts As a show, it is more a record of the guesses and compromises involved in acquiring a representative collection of current work in a steadily rising market —of buying early or accepting what is available One might praise the museum for airing its transactions so forthnghtly, but I think its position would have been better served by a retrospective of the '60s that was not limited to its own holdings A salient fact about the art of the '60s is that it developed out of far different sociological conditions than obtained with earlier modern movements Such movements, whatever their difficulties, were sustained by their position as outsiders and served by a limited and proselytizing elite until they became popular Since the early '60s, however, art and artists have had to deal with all of the recognizable pressures of broad success, including the necessary machinery of publicity and the demand for innovation The demise of Abstract Expressionism represents a casualty of that transition as much as a failure of style This is not to say that all current art is pandering to a taste for the new The environmentalist trend, the urge for monumental sculpture, the audience participation aspects of Op and kinetic art are, I think, attempts to come to terms with the broad public, to take art out of the museums, so to speak, and into public places The problems of the Modem's exhibition, then, issue from its past success Having zealously promoted the audience for vanguard art, it has now fallen heir to the pressures it helped to create...