On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow Soft Goods and Hardware Some typical examples: a four-foot-high aluminum bin heaped with gray rock samples from Palisades Park, New Jersey (Robert Smithson's Nonsite:...
...Like Louise Nevel-son's construction in clear Plexiglas and Charles Ross' liquid-filled prisms, it sets a standard for crystalline elegance seldom matched by the other exhibits...
...With the current exhibition, offering 137 works, someone appears to have gone through the invitation list and ruthlessly eliminated those old founding friends of the Whitney whose marble nudes and sweet mothers-and-children had begun to seem inevitable fixtures of its annuals...
...The soft goods are another matter...
...Other examples include Valentine's large plastic slab, a smaller variation in the same material by Peter Alexander, and Anne Truitt's pillar of wood painted blue, entitled Whale's Eye...
...Walter de Maria's Garbo is a rectangular pillar of polished aluminum, its frontal plane engraved with the titles of Garbo's films in their order of appearance from Peter the Tramp to Two-Paced Woman...
...In gleaming metal, painted wood, and various kinds of plastic—rounded, squared, cast or welded, inscribed or unadorned—the stele rises ubiquitously from each one of the gallery floors...
...Clement Meadmore's 11-Turn of painted Cor-ten steel is really a twisted stele lying on its side...
...When placed in position, they are likely to fall limp and just he there...
...As much a painting on draped canvas (rather than in the conventional rectangular format) as a piece of sculpture, its seeming diffidence exemplifies that bent toward literal-mindedness—I almost said simple-mindedness?which both Pop Art and Minimal Art have introduced...
...ON ART By James R. Mellow Soft Goods and Hardware Some typical examples: a four-foot-high aluminum bin heaped with gray rock samples from Palisades Park, New Jersey (Robert Smithson's Nonsite: Palisades...
...In other words, they are all safe, accessible New York choices...
...Despite the fact, then, that the Whitney's curators were out beating the bushes for new talent, the big city vote and big city connections still carried the election...
...Many, if not all of these, are well-known figures with established reputations and connections in the New York art world...
...Scholl's foot plasters (Pop artist Tom Wes-selmann's Seascape Number 5...
...an eight-foot-high slab of translucent purple polyester that might be a giant pop-sicle (Dewain Valentine's Slab...
...Many of these have been around for some time, exhibiting regularly...
...in recent years, as the production of American art has grown beyond its physical capacities, it has divided them into alternating exhibitions of painting and sculpture...
...A few nearly traditional pieces of figurative sculpture are on display—witty productions by Roy Schnackenberg (Woman in Tub) and William King (The Interview), and Frank Gallo's Man with Necktie in sleazy epoxy—but only Leonard Baskin's bathetic Oedipus at Colonus reminds one of the old Whitney shows...
...and, from the Whitney Museum's fourth-floor gallery to its garden-level restaurant—stuck to the walls or in corners, lodged near the sculpture exhibits or placed in less frequented stairwells—a series of Brillo-like pads made of hair, paint and plastic (Richard Artschwager's 100 Locations...
...The other eight include one new sculptor each from Rhode Island, Connecticut, Illinois, Texas and Nevada, and two from Kentucky...
...Clearly the new trends, though pervasive and influential, do not account for all that is worthwhile in the exhibition...
...According to the museum, in preparing the present show the directors and curators traveled to 30 cities, viewing works by some 1,000 artists...
...what one might term soft goods and hardware?with the stele-form dominating the second category...
...Stanley Landsman's Flora is a pillar of glass housing a lighted globe that reflects itself into infinity...
...Oddly, the exhibition breaks down into two distinct categories...
...a large zippered plastic bag filled with peat moss and covered with a tangled growth of strips of braided yellow plastic (Frank Lincoln Viner's Peat Moss Plot...
...Eight come from California—a logical percentage in this quota of new talent considering the art activity on the West Coast...
...These are a few of the far-out creations in the Whitney's biennial report to the nation on the state of American sculpture...
...a five-foot-high replica of a standing brown paper bag (Alex Hay's paper and epoxy Paper Bag...
...They are made of odd and eccentric sculptural materials—cloth, dirt, pliable plastics, paper—that do not take easily to structuring...
...I assume it is an anti-Establishment gesture meant to remind the Whitney of the old Biblical injunction, "Dust thou art...
...In some instances, the sequence of the names in the alphabetical listing of the catalogue—say from Lyman Kipp to Leroy Lamis, a collection of seven sculptors—has not changed...
...That sounds impressive until one checks the current selection against the last Whitney sculpture annual...
...All of the latest trends in mixed-media, environmental structures, Minimal boxes, and Op and Pop Art are thoroughly represented, from Ronald Bladen's mammoth black wall of painted lumber to Stephen Antonakos' sculpture in fluttering red and pink neon light...
...Next to it, on the floor, is a pillow of white canvas with the label "cap" scrawled across it in pencil...
...Of the 137 artists represented in this exhibition, 85 are repeats from 1966...
...The new piece, untitled, is made of a translucent acetate that creates complex volumes and intricate linear outlines—a dazzling display of line and mass with delicate figurative associations...
...The classic example of soft goods in the present show is Claes Oldenburg's Giant Soft Ketchup Bottle, a loose and baggy form hanging from the ceiling like a deflated balloon, spilling out a puddle of red canvas...
...One of the charges that both artists and critics frequently level against the Whitney annuals is that they have been dominated by New York artists and dealers, by the tastes that prevail here...
...To overcome this problem, the Whitney was awarded a Ford Foundation grant so that its curatorial staff could travel throughout the country and make selections on a more representative basis...
...Not all the sculpture in the show, of course, falls so readily into these categories...
...Actually, Oldenburg's sculpture is among the more interesting objects on view...
...Anne Truitt, from Washington, D.C., is making her first appearance in a Whitney annual but can hardly be considered a discovery...
...It looks like a piece of sculpture whose third dimension is suffering a slow leak...
...James Rosati's work, though it seems to have been recently influenced by Minimalism, maintains a variety of forms in complex relationships, something not always considered in Minimal Art...
...Minoru Niizuma's Windy Wind is a conventionally carved abstract monolith of beautiful marble...
...Of the remaining 36 listed as appearing in any annual for the first time, 20 are from New York...
...Within the context of the exhibition, there is a certain shock value in coming upon a carefully plotted heap of industrial rubble...
...others are younger artists who have achieved some critical recognition in the New York galleries during the past two years...
...The museum has been conducting such surveys annually since 1932...
...Where the hardware might be said to relate to the blunt and implacable forms of current Minimalist art, the soft goods sculptures derive from Pop Art and more recent anti-formalist styles...
...Intentionally gauche and nonformal, its handsome tomato-red color is one of the most attractive things about it...
...Bar-nett Newman's Here 111 is a simple slender pillar, 10 feet high, made of stainless and Cor-ten steel...
...Bennett Bean's Untitled is a stele-within-a-stele of smoky Plexiglas...
...This leaves only 16 sculptors from outside the New York area who are appearing in a Whitney annual for the first time...
...The pickings in the outlying districts, to judge from the results of the search, must be very thin...
...Thus Dennis Oppenheim's Decomposition—Whitney Museum is, quite simply, a pile of the materials that went into building the museum —gravel, cement, wood shavings, slate chips, metal filings—arranged in concentric rings on the gallery floor...
...she has been shown regularly in New York exhibitions for several years...
...The prevalence of the form would be worth noting simply as a curiosity, but it seems to indicate something more: Among a considerable number of sculptors, working in different styles and with a variety of materials, there appears to be a nearly obsessive concern with unitary forms...
...a Plexiglas bas-relief of a woman's pedicured foot thrust up against a painted blue sky that could be a drugstore display for Dr...
...Of the 52 artists added to the present exhibition, 16 have appeared in other Whitney annuals and cannot be classed as new...
...The obdurate literalism of such work, seen against the ambitious rhetoric of earlier styles, successfuDy manages to distinguish it from the sculpture of the past...
...Indeed, this annual is nothing if not up-to-date...
...Lee Bontecou is another hard-to-place artist, and her new sculpture?two tall somewhat Surreal flowers cohabiting, blossom to blossom, atop slender transparent stems—represents a very radical and decisive change from her former wall constructions of metal and canvas...
Vol. 52 • February 1969 • No. 2
