Museum openings, for some reason, whether it is the fur and the clatter, or the Crest toothpaste smiles of everyone including the works of art, always put me to thinking of the end of Western civilization. They are the art world’s affirmation of old Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, decked up with a whorishness impossible to resist. That of the Whitney Museum’s 1968 Sculpture Annual was no exception. Hundreds of people coquettishly trying to look younger than they are, younger than the young, dabbed their ashes and spilled their drinks on the floor while successfully, and in most cases justifiably, ignoring the art.
Before running through the various species of sculptural undertaking which the Museum doggedly charts, I’d like to salute the three or four out of the 137 artists whose work, lost as it is in the sparklingly mediocre assemblage, is worth taking seriously. Dewain Valentine gives us a polyester slab in translucent mauve that seems to emulsify a Jules Olitski painting, or make of it a precious window. Roy Lichtenstein’s Modern Sculpture with Velvet Rope is as suavely parodistic as his earlier forays in Art Deco. Peter Sandback’s Trapezoid electrically marks off some wall frontage with an orange elastic cord. Pieces by Oldenburg, Westermann, and Saret maintain their expected excellence.
For the rest, the Whitney provides us, not with an indication of where sculpture is (the staff there would be the last to know,) but a compendium of effort by people who may like to think that they are advancing the sculptural frontier, but who are moseying around, pointlessly, garishly, in three dimensions. They represent the enormous backlog and overflow of a momentum that may, for all we know, prove necessary in order to crystallize some inevitable and historically conscious sculpture. Less positively, they may be looked at as revealing a tally of accepted styles and going clichés that cast light on sculpture as a market, or as a means of employment and advancement for college professors.
The following is a list of popular idioms with brief descriptions and enumeration of their best known or most typical practitioners.
1. Carved or laminated wood, tree form, totemic, and sculpture from out of doors in general: Lekakis, Mallary, Anderson, Kohn.
2. Visceral-biomorphic, late San Francisco Abstract Expressionist, old-guard New York sculpture from the forties: Lipton, Ferber, Howard, Geis, Liberman, Rosati, Roszak, Bigger, Agostini, Hunt, Bourgeois, de Rivera.
3. Pop, fetishistic, assemblage, Surreal, and Funk: Berlant, Bauermeister, Price, Samaras, Melchert, Hay, Segal, Graham, Seley, Artschwager, Wesselmann, Boghosian, Ossorio, Bontecou, Laing.
4. Light sculpture: Antonakos, Chryssa, Landsman, Levi, Benton.
5. Plastics, polyester, fiberglass, very acrylic, glossy, reflective: Ross, Paris, Huntington, Kauffman, Lye, Levine, Weinrib, Stone.
6. Modified twisting or neo-David Smith geometric: Sugarman, Rosenthal, Doyle, Sellers, Todd, Hall, Hatchett, Gussow, Meadmore, von Schlegell.
7. Primary structures, Park Place, and Minimal: Grosvenor, Bladen, Morris, Judd, Murray, Truitt, Tobias, McCracken, Kipp.
8. Earthworks: Smithson, Oppenheim.
9. Figurative: Rivers, Baskin, Schnackenberg, Grossman.
Naturally, the talent here varies widely, and I have not meant to denigrate artists by pigeonholing them rather severely. They have found themselves in undignified, chaotic, clashing surroundings, and I have taken the liberty of arranging them in a blunt but clearer order. From the evidence of the show, many can be seen to wander from one style to another. Some of the sculptors are caught in low moments of their inspiration, others in peak form.
—Max Kozloff
