IMAGES WITHOUT IMAGINATION
MULLER, MARION
On Art IMAGES WITHOUT IMAGINATION BY MARION MULLER The exhibition of New Image Painting that is just ending its stay at the Whitney leaves several things to be desired-namely: depth, maturity...
...Thus he applies his color crudely in a technique resembling finger painting...
...Besides the economic implications of the situation, one cannot help wondering about the quality of the training of the next generation of artists now in our schools and universities...
...One Moscowitz painting I did enjoy, however, was The Swimmer, where only the head and stroking arm of a lone swimmer emerge from a deep blue sea...
...Fortunately, while the horse is of secondary importance to Rothenbcrg, it is of primary importance to us...
...The titles tell it all: Cruel Discussion, An A rguinent...
...It is an important achievement in a professional career, opening doors to valued teaching jobs that are painfully scarce these days...
...Michael Hurson's efforts likewise display a cartoon mentality...
...I am not, of course, deploring the search for originality, for distinct modes of expression...
...In another series, entitled Palm Springs, he demonstrates the passage of time with a sequence of frames where only a float in a swimming pool changes position...
...This is terse, economical and needs no verbal assistance to communicate...
...he wants us to know his paint is simply paint-not grass or lumber or flesh...
...Yet this is precisely what the museums and the powerful dealers have been doing-to the detriment of everyone...
...Becoming a "has-been" at 35 is as devastating as being neglected in one's prime...
...In one series he animates eyeglasses, making them dance, cavort and posture in human attitudes...
...On Art IMAGES WITHOUT IMAGINATION BY MARION MULLER The exhibition of New Image Painting that is just ending its stay at the Whitney leaves several things to be desired-namely: depth, maturity and, sometimes, quality...
...The cane and the hat are objects he will use in his old age...
...As she herself tells us in the catalogue, her chief concern is with certain geometries: By using horizontals, verticals and crossed diagonals, she divides her canvas into sections and then adjusts the anatomy of the horse to these divisions to produce interesting shapes...
...In these works, figures and objects are presented nonrealistically, or removed from their usual environment, or radically manipulated in scale, or crossfertilized with recent styles-like Pop, Color Field, Hard Edge, Geometric Abstraction, Minimal Art, and Materials Manipulation...
...Fat Stomach...
...In Girl and Vase we see a broken vase and a child crying...
...It hardly matters that these are not terribly beguiling shapes, for the artist does not want us to become involved with these images, nor to presume that she is involved with them...
...One is not surprised when this fever overtakes the influential merchants and king-makers...
...Among the images so created are a pair of Lovebirds, Merlyn's Lab (a fantasy of the alchemist's laboratory) and an ambitious five-panel painting entitled Amphora, with a semblance of a Greek vase in each panel...
...The work consists of 987 12" x 12" squares-white enameled plates that have a superimposed silkscreen grid, making them look like sheets of graph paper...
...Susan Rothenberg's image is the horse...
...Throughout, certain themes are repeated and overlaid with variations...
...The animal's color, its stance (always in profile), the way its contours are drawn or scratched out of the background, bring to mind primitive Indian and Etruscan wall paintings...
...Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody occupies an entire room-and a large one at that-in the museum...
...But the scale is about the only surprise, for Africano's subjects are situations and characters that could have come straight out of cartoon land...
...His molded wax figures, affixed to the canvas, are minute compared to the background...
...Yet despite occasional flashes of charm, this physically immense work seems rather long on ego and short on profundity...
...Still, just as we would not sing the praises of unresolved scientific experiments, neither should we applaud every artistic sneeze as apocalyptic...
...at their worst, a cheap rag rug...
...the background stands for the sunset, a symbol of his waning years...
...Well, I suppose the answer lies in the word "new...
...The strongest egos cave in under the pressure: Shall they continue and enlarge their scope through their own sensibilities, or must they fall in line with some new fashion to get attention...
...They were, I thought, the best things in the show...
...What a naive cliche...
...That is a constant and weighty challenge and, like a scientist, an artist must explore honestly every meaningful path, no matter where it may lead...
...Finally, this undue attention to the new has consequences that wreak special havoc...
...In Saw and Sawed he paints a log, a saw and some scraps of lumber...
...Is he alluding to such passive Orientals as Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek and Teng Hsiao-ping...
...The ideas are obvious, and the key words are lettered onto the frames of the pictures...
...A painting of a field of grass with a white fence cutting across it is labeled Here and There...
...Only in Paying Off Old Debts, where a black laborer is shown carting a bale of cotton, does the linty texture and tattle-tale gray color make a clever interplay of medium and message...
...Robert Moskowitz paints symbols...
...Zucker suggests that his technique is a metaphor for his subject matter, but it is difficult to see how this nostrum of modernism applies...
...The constant clamor for and celebration of new trends creates an atmosphere of turmoil, insecurity and dissension that brings out the worst in our artists...
...But the Whitney and other prestigious institutions ought to be above making fashion news...
...Their perceptions are more incisive and their draftsmanship is far more distinguished than what we see here...
...Nevertheless, it quickly becomes apparent that the artist's interest in her subject is merely peripheral...
...For example: - Joseph Zucker's paintings are contrived of small cotton balls that have been impregnated with color and adhesive and arranged in a mosaic fashion...
...The art world has become obsessed with newness to the exclusion of almost everything else we value in the arts...
...At their best, these pieces resemble a gaudy float in the Tournament of Roses Parade...
...The avowed purpose of the show is to make us aware that after a long absence in the '50s and '60s, images have returned to the art scene...
...Nicholas Africano also surprises us with the scale of his painting...
...A brown cane and a yellow hat on an orange ground is called Retirement Painting...
...But, we are advised, the imagery is of an altogether new variety...
...How did these works-and a good many others that are equally undistinguished-get to hang in the Whitney...
...But it seems to me that if the Whitney felt compelled to exhibit cartoons, some better choices might have been Jules Feiffer or Ed Sorel or Bob Blechman, to name just a few established practitioners of the genre...
...A museum show or acquisition has tremendous clout...
...It is a question they are forced to ask themselves, since many of our finest artists have not received their due recognition, while the first scratches of fledgling painters are making the big-time art scene...
...Denise Green plays with the shapes of urns, pots, fans, and rabbits...
...So she scratches a border around one painting, imposes a grid on another, rules some vertical lines on a third-to demonstrate that what she cares about is the intellectual and structural aspects of art...
...The tail end of the Cadillac symbolizes active power, the chopsticks passive power...
...His entire oeuvre has the ring of a child's primer...
...And increasingly those positions are being awarded, not on the basis of professional expertise or philosophic depth, but on the degree of furor the artist has recently created in important circles...
...What it all adds up to is a rambling, free-association attempt to portray the history of modern art...
...Rothenberg's images are indeed powerful-monuments, in a sense, to man's experience with the horse as a beast of burden and as a symbol of the free spirit...
...Another work, called Cadillac Chopsticks, is his statement about power...
...it is their business to create fashions and move merchandise...
...Neil Jenney juxtaposes ideas and images...
...Onto these Bartlett has painted a variety of marks and images: dots of color that add up to a symbol of a house, simplistic tree forms, geometric figures such as arcs, circles, squares, triangles and squiggles, a few hastily rendered realist-type landscapes...
...It is because their purpose is belied by the viewing experience that these paintings succeed as well as they do...
...And this sort of attention is no less damaging to the young than to the old...
...Jenney, I would guess, is fighting illusion...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 3
