print May 1978

Paul Waldman

The limbless, headless, naked bodies in Paul Waldman’s new paintings a restuffed into tight corners, as if into plastic bags. The paintings are sectional, repeating long, narrow shapes that, when read together, remind one of progressively longer spikes or knife blades. Each panel is dominated by extended expanses of pink, baby blue or pearly gray, and the bodies complement this fruity arrangement by appearing more apricot than flesh-toned, in order to make them more “luscious.”

The spiked-shaped panels are right-angled on the left, and severely diagonal on the right; one painting may consist of

print April 1978

John Walker

John Walker’s paintings are Studio School, Tenth Street, ’50s. The scale is heroic. The geometric rectangles must be read as antigeometric. The color is predominantly earthy, muddy, primal. For the added touch of personal synthesis there are the pieces of canvas collage out of Cubism, the tentative black lines from Matisse. Slapdash and thrown together with machismo, these paintings rage tough. The philosophical discourse that envelops them must be dragged out of the existential closet. The references, the ambitions, the influences are all ripe for devastating parody. It’s as if the artist has

print April 1978

Harvey Quaytman

Harvey Quaytman’s paintings are very curious. He showed a whole suite of them, every one of which seemed to me exactly the same in shape and structure. Normally this would not be unusual, except that the shape and structure repeated was so unusual. The paintings were a conglomeration of small, irregular shapes near the floor with one very long and narrow section which jutted upward almost out of view. Of the smaller shapes, only one had a generally nameable look: it was placed on the far right of the long narrow member, and had an arched upper right-hand side. The question one asks about this

print April 1978

Larry Bell and Eric Orr

If you can’t get your wild, visionary project financed, you can always make smaller, attractive art objects in its place. We get used to grandiose monuments which never get past the planning stage, and we take pleasure in seeing the scraps that went into their planning (generally this is not thought to be a perverse pleasure). The unfulfilled projects are usually sincere enough, no matter how unnecessary; we believe the person who envisions the prospect of a gargantuan hole in the desert. Sincerity takes the form of fast, hard, sloppy drawings and scribblings over geographic charts. There is a

print April 1978

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison

On the other hand, there are Helen and Newton Harrison. Their show attempted to fuse what may be considered as art with what is not art. And without a tinge of irony or humor. As it turns out, the art part is absolutely dispensable, while the rest is of considerable interest. The Harrisons “work” with earth, performing reclamations of wastes, for instance, moving compost materials into barren areas of upper New York State. (The fact that the land is in Artpark is irrelevant.) These areas will be seeded to become “variable meadows” of trees, berry patches and orchard. (One wonders who, if anyone,

print April 1978

The Battle of Chile

Although I think that The Battle of Chile is a stunningly conceived and brilliantly executed work of art, I know I am doing it an injustice by reviewing it under the condition of art, in this magazine. Its proper place is probably not here. I feel that I can “use” it because I can consider it both as high art and historical document. But what its true use might be in a Third World nation, as a meaning in a Third World culture, I am unable to judge. It is a film which can exist solely on the periphery in our culture, simply because it is Marxist, pro-working class, anti-imperialist and clearly

print March 1978

Peter Plagens

For the sake of argument, let’s say that the major dynamic contributing to the incomplete discussion of United States art is the consistent machine-gunning of California art, usually by those who are not even native New Yorkers. These fake New Yorkers’ xenophobia produces unilateral condescension toward the human aberrations from the West—branding them as simple, stupid, lazy, mush-headed idiots—finding California’s weather simply too good for the production of suitable art or proper intellectual activity. Everything and every thought is assumed to originate in New York City, although New Haven

print March 1978

Jasper Johns

It might seem that there could be little more to be said about Jasper Johns, that we know perhaps a little more than we want to, with the Whitney retrospective and the concomitant exegesis. But not quite everything has been covered, especially a consideration of the general reaction to this inundation of Johns. There were at least two shows devoted entirely to the range of his graphic work, and a show at the downtown Whitney, which covered all the various editions which evolved from the painting Untitled from 1972: the hatchings, the flagstones, and the body parts. This last show was interesting

print March 1978

Frances Barth

The confusions of the art world right now stem from its recent history, a history which valued the stripped-bare solution, the risk of repetition, the integrity of the void. This state of affairs could be seen as the logical, even natural, outgrowth of a series of moves culminating in Minimalism and Conceptualism. The problem today is to proceed out from that position into something more pictorially complex without becoming reactionary. The appeal of realism and photography is the appeal of conservatism, of reaction. (The repetition of the solutions of Minimalism and Conceptualism are likewise

print March 1978

Sam Gilliam

The taste for thickly painted paintings is epidemic; I just wish I could discover the responsive audience’s reaction to it. Only other artists seem to catch it, and even among those you might think are immune, their surfaces are becoming clotted with malignant growths of paint. Some are more advanced, more extreme than others: Humphrey, Torreano, Gorchov and Sam Gilliam paint works which appear thicker, uglier, and more degenerative than Olitski’s or Bannard’s. But this “radicalness” just makes it less possible for us to get excited by another painting “move.” Painting “moves” are fabricated

print March 1978

Les Levine

I can’t imagine what it is like to be a second-generation lyrical abstractionist field painter just beginning to explore surface texture, but I bet it’s less depressing than being yet another artist engaged in another resurrection of some lame Duchampian gesture, and always for the purpose of explaining it away as just art. I look forward to the next Les Levine mock-art situation with even less hope than I do the next batch of thick paintings. I expect the same product from both: not art, really, but some kind of unconsidered, nebulous “activity”—small deviations from over-processed “ideas”

print February 1978

Kenneth Noland

It was impossible for me to imagine Kenneth Noland’s paintings getting any prettier than they already were, but they have. With the new ones, as always, success weighs heavily on some unique experience of color. But as his retrospective last year proved conclusively, Noland de-sensitizes our response to color by removing it from any reference, leveling difference between individual colors, making them function in any possible combination, in any arbitrary relationship. Only the plaid paintings surprised, with their multiple stain surfaces and dark, moody blues. But they still seemed to lack any

Jeff Perrone