print Summer 1983

Martin Silverman

However much Thek embraces clichés and funk, his shrug of a technique preserves the results from being “cute.” That epithet seems to be reserved for clichés and funk that are carefully, pains takingly rendered. Somehow the lavished attention is diagnosed as the symptom of an infatuation with the subject. I suspect that Martin Silverman is curious to see how far “cute” can be pushed—it may be the only taboo left to contemporary art.

In his preceding show the laborious, hokey figures were foiled by their own return-of-the-repressed sexuality. There was pathology in that homely ’30s stockiness.

print May 1983

Jannis Kounellis

What’s most elegant and, because a delayed perception, moving about this Jannis Kounellis installation is the evocation of the entrapped body, which is accomplished without recourse to any figural imagery. Presented on steel shelves, parts of peeling furniture (of tables, chairs, possibly a bed)—by definition congruent with the body, at its service—and of weatherbeaten doors, shutters, and locks compose an elegy of entombment. Hints of interment from Kounellis are not novel. And given his mystical interests (demonstrated by the diverse gas-fueled smoking purgatories, and the golden wall and

print May 1983

Mary Frank

Mary Frank’s bent is romantic, her sculptures a poeticized recapitulation of an Edenic period when man and woman enjoyed a unity with nature that amounted to a lack of individuation. Human arms are sometimes webbed, stopped in the middle of the evolutionary trajectory. Figures and flora are threads of a single fabric. Previously, when Frank laid her figures prone in a bed of sand, the mutuality with nature was presented as a closed-off option, fossilized, shedding the hushed glamour of any find seeming to be the repository of eons. Now it may be that this vision of mythic felicity is offered as

print May 1983

Richard Mock

Richard Mock revises Picasso’s experiments in surrealism from the ’30s and ’40s. It’s possible to see him as casting himself in the role of conciliator between Picasso’s outrageous aggression and Carl Jung’s outrageous suggestion that Picasso, on the evidence of the 1932 Zurich exhibition, was a schizophrenic; in other words, Mock tries to reconcile the world-disturbing, dangerously alienating sexual/creative drive of the artist with the continuance of the community/audience, needful of harmony and defensive of its own pathology.

The Demoiselles–like African masks of Mock’s heads may be his first

print April 1983

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg’s ruminations on East and West in these Japanese clayworks, Chinese paper works, and the “Kabal American Zephyr Series” turn on a series of elaborate puns that reduce both realms to the terms of fluid mechanics, the flow of liquids and gases. The Orient, in an essentially trite but complexly conveyed notion, is a weightless, watery domain traversed by corrupting currents from the West; America is both the west wind and its cessation, the crash to earth of the previously airborne but always gravity ridden.

Hydrants, fish, scenes reflected in pools or puddles, and one claywork

print March 1983

Gene Davis

Talking heads, even graphic ones, sometimes lose their cool; the number of screaming heads has proliferated lately. Not that they’re everywhere, but they are frequent enough to be a presence these days. Joan Snyder’s savagely drawn screamers and Italo Scanga’s “singers”/ witnesses answer Edvard Munch’s The Scream as it echoes down the years. Gene Davis’ open-mouthed self-portrait is of a different ilk, too pantomimic to be a portal for anguish or pained protest. A black silhouette of a profile, it’s repeated larger than life on 9 unprimed canvases and in miniature on 38 white rectangles. It’s

print March 1983

Ronnie Cutrone

Conflicts, cartoons, countries—Cutrone. Conflicts: overwhelmingly, there are pairs of opponents in Ronnie Cutrone’s Manichaean world view; faltering in the act of distinguishing light from dark, however, is likely. The separation is clear when an angelic Felix the Cat fights for a soul against a pitchfork-toting Woody Woodpecker (but isn’t it usually the cat who devours the bird?)—rarely otherwise. Elsewhere, coming across a panicked Yankee Woody chased by a Russian bear, this demonic taint prepares us for the Paranoia of the title. The bear is big, it is in angry pursuit; but even in his native,

print February 1983

Sylvia Plimack Mangold

Analyzing Van Gogh’s Crows over the Wheat Field, Meyer Schapiro describes the lines of perspective as “the paths of Van Gogh’s impetuous impulse toward the beloved object,” then goes on to note that in this painting as in most of the later work “this flight to a goal is rarely unobstructed or fulfilled.” In Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s canvases from the early ’70s a similar dialectic is at work: a pronounced convergence in the floorboards she typically rendered is frustrated by various painted-in devices—a mirror, rulers that “prove” space is not shrinking though it appears to be, etc. At the same

print February 1983

Frank Stella

The question has been “what will Stella do next” for so long that, lately, getting over disappointed expectations delays entertaining the possibility that Stella, at least, may have changed the question to “what has Stella done?”. If the flashy French-curve reliefs that so disturbed the peace in 1976 seemed, at the time anyway, to break with what came before, and were among the first Stella pieces to signify as individual entities independent of serial context, the newest work apparently aims to reinsert all the reliefs back into that series. The pieces are a coda, in a way, a formal autobiography.

print January 1983

Stephen Mueller

First scenario: Stephen Mueller’s paintings are a reactionary reprise of lyrical abstraction, beautiful but enervated; glamour under glass, they are sustained by an exhaustive battery of cosmetics and prostheses (stain, impasto, hachure, scumbling, scribble) detached from conceptual or emotional moorings to become free-floating, painterly items, an inventory of stock. A wan attempt to keep up with fashion (two suggestions of Jedd Garet-like figures) seems sadly foolish and ill advised.

Second scenario: Mueller’s paintings are an act of protective coloration in the service of extended life. Hidden

print January 1983

Steve Keister

From Georges de la Tour's incandescent figures to Dan Flavin's burlesques, artists have attended to the conundrum of emanating light. Steve Keister, too—witness the way he dims his installation space by blinkering the spots and training them exclusively on the painted interiors of his sculptures. The result is a seemingly sourceless beaming of light; the works appear to glow from within, but there is no trace of a controlling mechanism inside, Glamorama, for example, is a mannequin filled with light that enters through a hole in the top of the head which one has to stand on tiptoe to see.

print November 1982

John Chamberlain

“In what I do, constant hard work is not necessary; my drive is based on laziness. . . . I don’t mind admitting that I’m lazy because laziness is, for me, an attribute”: thus John Chamberlain on John Chamberlain, in a statement accompanying this show. It’s hard not to like a man with that kind of attitude—an attitude that allowed Chamberlain to do things that, in the ’60s and careful early ’70s, were verboten. It was a time when artists worried a lot. Certain things were not allowed—for example, paint on sculpture. Applied chroma was nothing, formalists opined, but a skin, and therefore it was

Jeanne Silverthorne