print October 1986

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid

The relation between conceptual art and painting remains an uncertain marriage. It was in defiance of their rigid separation by the cultural status quo that Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid first sullied their “pure” idea art with the sensual, and therefore more marketable, trappings of painting. It’s now been long enough since this collaborative duo returned to the academic style in which they were trained, a gesture at once sentimental and satiric, that the irony one expected to find in their most recent show stemmed in part from the eclipse of their conceptual status, the ease with which

print October 1986

David Ireland

Art, and culture as a whole, has long enjoyed an uncertain obsession with history. But history is something more than a body of facts or even the understanding that should accompany it. History is itself an enigma that is by nature a process, a mythology, an aura. For all the uses art may make of history, few if any employ its personal effects, rather than its information, in the way that David Ireland does.

Ireland is something of a pseudoarchaeologist and mythmaker of the historically insignificant. It is fitting, then, that the site of his installation The Cafeteria, 1986, at East Carolina

print September 1986

Alex Grey

Alex Grey’s paintings are an unusual amalgam of mystical obsession and scientific precision. His is an art of metaphysics, and no matter how far removed his concept of reality may be from the fringes of normal human experience, it is based on, and precisely rendered as, the results of an intensive personal investigation into the nature of man.

Visually, Grey’s quasi-textbook illustrations seem disturbingly inappropriate for anything that would be considered expressive or inspirational in painting. Despite the largely intuitive nature of his work, the nearly academic style of his presentation is

print Summer 1986

“Icarus: The Vision of Angels”

Man’s will to fly, to exceed the bonds of the earth, is a persistent dream. “Icarus: The Vision of Angels,” co-curated by France Morin and Ronald Feldman and mounted at their respective galleries, was an attempt to capture some of that fancy for flight held by artists and scientists. The curators’ task was perhaps as ambitious a project in its way as the many early aerodynamic efforts it documented. Their choices were excellent; however, when an exhibition’s topic is as broad as that of man in flight, one cannot help but twitch a bit in the curatorial back seat. In this spirit I must express

print May 1986

Arch Connelly

In these one-man shows, Arch Connelly placed his underground, nearly cultish work in the context and history of established galleries that have been receptive to art that has pioneered mannerisms of “bad taste.” Since his first shows, at Artists Space in 1980 and Fun Gallery in 1981, Connelly has been perceived as a particularly “out there” craftsman of New Wave glitz, as well as, perhaps, the heir apparent of a more entrenched high-camp style in American art. His relation to kitsch is rooted in an esthetic rebellion against the authoritarianism of “high art.” However, Connelly’s style of

print April 1986

WRESTLING THE IMAGE INTO SHAPE

REBECCA HOWLAND IS A graduate of a hard-to-define moment of energy that brought together an amorphous group of New York artists in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The results of that moment may be called Colab, short for Collaborative Projects, an artist-run agency begun in 1978 as a means of obtaining equipment and materials beyond the reach of the isolated individual, of using the power of numbers to maximize the funding of its 40-odd members (in so far as that funding came from grants), and also of taking the management of such grant support away from arts-organization bureaucrats and putting

print March 1986

Tom Fellner

Tom Fellner’s exhibition of paintings at White Columns was part of a continuing curatorial series of solo shows of relatively unknown artists that are held in the White Room, a modest-sized room off the central exhibition space. In the few years since its assumption of this role, the White Room has served as a suitably proportioned gallery to view an at once sizable but not overly ambitious quantity of work by an emerging artist. Fellner, an artist still in the academic throes of development, was carefully articulate in exhibiting only six paintings from a single series, not straying with a

print February 1986

Robin Winters

As certain artists expand upon an earlier body of work that is perhaps sloppy and confrontational, they mute its antiesthetic edge in favor of refinement. But for all the “improvement,” its previous coarseness and fixed inconsistency are often sadly missed. It is in such a way that Robin Winters’ new paintings, which are undoubtedly as masterful and as elegant as any he has produced to date, make one wish that all promising young artists would not mature into the middle-aged-ness of ”great" art. (The broad esthetic jump from old to new was pointed up by the inclusion of Metropolitan Acquaintances

print November 1985

pOPTOMETRY

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a state of mind galaxies away, the cosmic karma of a million Jesus-haired rebels sank into the fertile mud of Yasgur’s farm, and, fed by the proteins of a psychedelic sunshine, combusted in a spontaneous generation to grow the wild flowers of the Woodstock Nation. Today, the culture of that peculiar epoch is being entered in our history as "the ’60s’ It is the latest fetish object in our epic of national nostalgias. As the mass media begin to focus their attention on the craze for the decade’s sights, styles, and sounds, the hype industry is being calculatedly specific in

Carlo McCormick