On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE BY JAMES R. MELLOW It is like some vast visual echo chamber: The all-white, the all off-white, the all monochrome canvases (in shades from radiant pink to soft...
...But for all its fussiness, the result is nothing more than a hand-painted closeup lifted from the home-movie screen...
...It is also-like a hamster in a treadmill-being hurried along by the minute attention the mass media, art publications, critics and commentators are devoting to cultural topics...
...In the '30s, for instance, Raphael Soyer used to paint touching portraits of shopworn girls...
...In its curious way, however, the picture does make a point...
...Little wonder, then, that in the face of mass audiences, the growing numbers of artists, the perennial need for innovations (or, failing that, for super-refinements upon last year's innovations), the function of the avant-garde has become less and less viable...
...Judging from the Whitney annual, however, too many artists are now engaged in applying incredible means of torture to an old war horse that, inconveniently, will not die...
...Ranging alphabetically from Thomas Aka-wie to Kestutis Zapkus, 34 of the artists are appearing in the annual for the first time...
...All these examples-and a good many more-are part of the revolt against the traditional format of painting, one of the noticeable formal developments in the art of the '60s...
...Every recent New York trend-the shaped-canvas, Op, the soak and stain technique, minimalism-Is present not only in its current New York version but in each of its cross-country declensions from Bennington, Vermont to Waco, Texas...
...Chuck Close exhibits a mammoth nine-foot-tall black and white portrait of a friend, Richard, a head and shoulders view with every pore and every bit of stubble on the unshaven face depicted in painstaking detail...
...The lesson of the '60s would seem to be that the vanguard is now little different from other vestigial traditions, like the principle of royal succession (The avant-garde is dead...
...This suggests that there are hordes of new developments pressing against the city's gates, like the Visigoths before Rome, waiting to assert their claims upon America's art capital...
...There are, of course, some decent figurative paintings to be seen-as there are serious works by the new crop of abstract painters and the older generation, the New York School of the '40s and '50s-but the overall view is disheartening...
...Once it achieved status, however, it soon ran to seed and was buried under a succession of more rapidly paced movements, ranging from Pop Art to Earthworks...
...Mondrian's classic Broadway Boogie-Woogie, for example, is smartly updated in Mario Yrisarry's untitled canvas of jazzy, crisscrossing stripes of bright color...
...John Wilkis Tun, a three-dimensional wedge shape, seven feet tall and nearly 17 feet long, on which the canvas has been stretched and covered with broad, sagging bands of soaked-in color...
...Presumably, it represents all the muse that's fit to paint and its intention is to herald the return of figurative painting to the precincts of abstraction...
...It is social observation in the easiest and most comfortable vein...
...And more than half the invited participants are under the age of 35-admittedly, not quite below the age of suspicion...
...perpetuating itself through the dialectic of rival claims and positions of power, through minor palace revolutions...
...A few years ago, Robert Ryman (not represented in the annual) stapled sections of painted canvas directly to the wall, eliminating the wooden stretchers and thus asserting the purity of the canvas support itself...
...Meanwhile, a nude model (the Muse) is rising in a cloud of vapor above what appears to be a manhole cover, but may well be a mystic symbol being sketched on the pavement by a crouching artist...
...In the current annual, there are several variations upon this device, such as Manny Farber's large, rosy paper oval or Thomas Stieger-wald's pair of painted vinyl forms that, affixed to the wall, look rather like hot water bottles...
...Even Abstract Expressionism, beginning in the mid-'40s, had to face a decade of hardship, first overcoming the reluctant New York art establishment and then spreading its influence throughout the academic sanctuaries of university art departments...
...Georges is a serious and proficient artist in the realistic tradition, but his current work is painted in such a haphazard and unconvincing manner that one wonders if it is a put-on...
...The occasion for all this activity is the Whitney Museum's contemporary painting annual, a survey of nationwide trends, presenting 143 works by as many artists...
...John Clem Clarke shows an equally large, grainy, Kodachrome-like painting of an antique subject, The Judgment of Paris, with Playboy-type nudes strutting beneath a tree...
...the landscape looks rather like the Berkshires and is perhaps too chilly a locale for Paris' apparent inde-cisiveness...
...Indeed, a young artist who devises a new formal discovery-no matter how minor-would be wise to maintain some kind of secrecy for a time...
...The most extraordinary of the large pictures, though, is Paul Georges' 20-foot-wide Return of the Muse...
...Whether or not it is also meant as a camp version of the huge 19th-century salon picture is difficult to tell...
...The Whitney annual has become the 20th-century replica of the 19th-century French salon-those official acres of bad, good, indifferent, eccentric, and stuffy works of art that brought the revolutionary avant-garde into being...
...It depicts a busy downtown street, crowded with gesticulating artists...
...But Return of the Muse does give one some uneasy feelings about the current state of representational painting-and especially about what the Whitney's view of figurative art will be in its major exhibition scheduled for February, "Realism Today...
...The degree of sheer cleverness and expertise displayed in the annual is somewhat dismaying...
...One suspects the avant-garde is now largely an editorial utility...
...In this respect, the art world is beginning to exhibit some of the symptoms of the marketplace...
...There are, as well, some out-sized heroics in the Whitney annual...
...On Art DEATH OF THE AVANT-GARDE BY JAMES R. MELLOW It is like some vast visual echo chamber: The all-white, the all off-white, the all monochrome canvases (in shades from radiant pink to soft tans, in solitary units or in clusters of twos and threes) go on repeating themselves at random intervals...
...And was the smallness of its operations, acting in opposition to the larger cultural establishment, basic to its success...
...Even a few old-fashioned modern masterpieces have been resurrected for the occasion...
...Long live the avant-garde...
...The Whitney's director, John I. H. Baur, has offered a cautious disclaimer in his Foreword to the catalogue...
...Did it, after all, for all its audacity and inventiveness, represent only the replacement, each time, of one small cultural elite by another...
...Maybe it is simply a passing case of the apocalyptic blues, but one can't dismiss the impression-especially after viewing the Whitney annual-that the role of the avant-garde as the most vital and self-renewing force in the history of modern art has become one of the casualties of the past decade...
...Otherwise, its formal possibilities will be reworked, recast, hybridized and exhausted even before he has had a chance to fully develop them himself...
...Sam Gilliam's Carousel Form IV comprises 75 feet of unstretched, paint-splattered canvas, draped and gathered and tied with string, suspended from the lobby ceiling-a painting strung up by its thumbs...
...And some artists have repeated themselves: For his contribution, Andy Warhol has run up another version of his earlier silk screen painting Electric Chair, this time dousing the photograph of the deathhouse throne in a bath of hot red...
...The reason for this is the vast expansion of our cultural resources: "The growing number of serious artists, the growing size of their works, and the growing tendency of both painting and sculpture to escape their traditionally self-contained limits and become events in the environment-all militate against the possibility of a 'fair' survey...
...Stylistically, his paintings are still much the same, but the girls have been traded in for lethargic hippie-types strumming guitars...
...Increasingly we have elected to concentrate (insofar as we are able) on presenting those new directions which seem to us to be generating the most creative excitement, as well as representing those established artists whose work has deepened, grown or changed in ways that contribute more than a repetition of past success to the development of our contemporary art...
...The speed with which these movements of the '60s were taken up, assimilated and refined makes it improbable that any newer development will go begging for very long...
...A more imposing departure from the shaped-canvas idea is Alan Shields' W.S.A...
...Lynda Benglis' Bullit, for instance, consists of nothing more than puddles of frothy pink and yellow polyure-thane lying on the polished slate floor...
...He suggests that it is no longer possible even to "approximate a cross section of the creative trends of the moment...
...One further, and related, point remains to be made about the Whitney annual, and that is the dispiriting account it gives of representational painting...
...Despite the radical differences in style, we seem to have now come full circle...
...The competition is becoming equally fierce, and for increasingly smaller advances...
...But if the evidence of the current annual is to be believed, what looms outside the walls is merely more of the same-only in more slick and vacuous guise...
Vol. 53 • January 1970 • No. 2
