The problem in group shows in general, and in the group show at 112 Greene Street, is that work is exhibited one per artist leaving the focus of the artists’ intentions to guesswork. Such shows are often lively, as indeed this one is, but they just about exclude the possibility of serious criticism. But exhibitions are not mounted, one hopes, to provide subjects for criticism. With the possibility of serious criticism excluded, perhaps it is safe to try. Rosemarie Castro’s Tored, graphite and gesso on masonite, looks like a giant brushstroke mounted on the wall recalling Lichtenstein and therefore

Duane Michals’ photographs demythologize on a double front. First, with their ghostly presences, they undercut the medium’s claim to an objective recording of an external appearance. Next, by making the technical origin of those presences so clear (double exposure, camera motion, superimposition of negatives) they call into question the traditional notions of appearance in the spirit world: surely, he implies, if ghosts are just blurry humans then ghosts as we conceive of them can finally be said not to exist. His conclusions in both cases may not be final, but they do leave his images suspended

Keith Hollingworth has chosen to make private meanings the obvious content of his work. This connects him with Surrealism, but only fleetingly. His art is not intended to educate the viewer in preparation for a future which will reveal deep meaning, as with the traditional Surrealist program. On the contrary, his work is designed to subsist undeciphered in a world that denies change and, by implication, the work itself. Thus one sees echoes of Cornell’s hermeticism, Magritte’s codes, and Duchamp’s “machinery” in Hollingworth, but these echoes have no explanatory value. By employing feathers,

Floyd Johnson is showing in New York for the first time since his exhibits of 1950–52 at the Downtown Gallery. His large, unstretched, bannerlike canvases are stained in luscious, high-keyed purples, reds, and earth colors. Swirling, organic spills of paint surround and overlap geometric patternings—discs arranged in large circles or in the manner of shingles or scales. The geometry points more to Tantric art than to Constructivism, and indeed Johnson has claimed for his works the function of meditational objects. This claim has been accepted uncritically in the comments that his show has so

Amsterdam-Paris-Dusseldorf at the Guggenheim Museum is not one exhibit but three, selected independently by Fritz Keers of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Blaise Gautier, director of the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Paris, and Jürgen Harten, director of the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. Subsequent to its choice of the three cities, the Guggenheim functioned with almost complete neutrality. The imposition of American tastes and presuppositions has been avoided which is admirable even when it results in the presentation of esthetic and cultural enigmas outside the contexts that

Ann Healy’s pieces at A.I.R. include an outdoor sail sculpture similar to the ones she has made over the past five years, and two indoor pieces which indicate a new direction in her work. The outdoor pieces are usually designed and rigged for particular sites, for the intention is to transform the specific environment—to make one aware of the effects of natural phenomena such as wind currents and the reflectivity of light. The piece at A.I.R., designed fora narrow dark street, was originally displayed at the Performing Garage. It was hung parallel to the street so that people could actually walk

The work of Betty Parsons at Sachs shows the virtuosity of an experienced painter as well as the awkwardness of someone attempting to sidestep existing conventions for the discovery of basic forms. The paintings often refer indirectly to landscape or figure. The Queen of Crete, for example, is vertical and suggestive of the human body, somewhat similar to the forms of Pollock in his early painting. One of the most successful paintings in the show is To the Glory of Africa in which loosely executed red lines against a field of light blue and tan are set into motion by a counterpoint of small blue

Pat Steir’s work at Paley and Lowe makes use of both explicit and suggestive metaphor. The paintings, on canvas lined like graph paper, contain pictures of birds, flowers, landscapes, charts, and notations of ideas and feelings. The images suggest that the paintings may be interpreted as metaphors both for states of consciousness and states within nature. While Steir’s work demonstrates a lyrical sensibility, some of her images tend toward the illustrative and artsy. The execution of the paintings seems a little awkward for the lines cease to differentiate between descriptive functions. The

Ira Joel Haber’s small, self-contained constructions create a strange and private world. The major part of the show consists of boxes at eye level containing buildings made of miniature clay bricks. These structures are behind glass and in front of pictures of landscape or sky which present a mood in keeping with the character of each building. Other boxes are more complex, with plastic houses and full landscape vistas including both real and pictured rocks and grass. Another series in the show is a group of floor pieces, unboxed landscape constructions with charred factory buildings and a few

Eccentric art has generally existed outside of the mainstream of art. It has not often dealt with abstract formal issues, has been too involuted to inspire direct genealogies, and lacks a kind of cultural universality. It is difficult however to draw a sharp boundary between art that is extremely subjective and the recognizable qualities in the work of artists using more accessible forms. The term “eccentric” may be used in reference to the obsessive treatment of peculiar shapes, signs, and images.The strength of some eccentric art seems to come from its ability to make its obsessions compelling

The James Yu Gallery is new, large, handsome, and spotless, and it opened with an exhibition of paintings by Suzanne Szlemko, which outside of New York would be categorized as “semi-abstract.” The paintings are compositions with brightly colored organic geological forms like a close-up of a cross section of the earth. One can decide whether or not the paintings are attractive but that’s about all there is to think about, and I’m not sure whether such decisions constitute thinking at all. Szlemko’s paintings might have been interesting in 1914, but they were done in 1971 and 1972, and from this

There seem to be two kinds of paintings in Harriet Korman’s show at LoGiudice. One kind is composed of a single specific shape, red or black in color, on a ground of raw canvas. The other kind contains black painted lines parallel at regular intervals on a white painted ground forming a shape or shapes on the ground of raw canvas. In one untitled painting, for example, the painted area of black and white stripes forms a rectangular “U” shape in which the base is much thicker than the vertical legs, and the parallel lines run horizontally. There seems to be a suggestion in this painting, and in

Shaping has been the central issue of Jack Youngerman’s painting for most of his career. But it is only in this year’s Pace Gallery exhibition that he has made this concern manifest in a literal way. The works look like giant cutouts shaped by monstrous scissors. Of the eight large, highly-stylized shaped canvases comprising the show, three are bipartite and only one is symmetrical. The shapes are, as always, organic in nature—abstractions on a theme of flowers or leaves. Half of the works are hot—sunshine with lemon yellow or two close-hued golden oranges—while the other half use contrasts of

An adequate description (dodging questions of determining adequacy) of Richard Calabro’s work at Hutchinson is not impossible but necessarily of enormous length and probably not useful. The exhibition is essentially in two parts: what is in the front room of the gallery and what is in the back room. The work in each room could be described as an aggregation of lesser aggregates, with sticks, glass, neon light, rope, wire, tungsten light, cloth, video, and furniture parts being the basic constituents of the lesser aggregates. The discrete aggregates in the front room seem as constituents of a

The Castelli Furniture show could be thought of as something Dr. Szeemann might have squeezed into Documenta 5 or as an exhibition exhibition (as in exhibition baseball game, i.e., one that doesn’t count, which altogether seems an odd notion). However, while the disjunction offers two possibilities, the possibilities are not necessarily so restricted. Generally the “Furniture” show doesn’t look much different from other group shows except that we are told the work on exhibit is furniture. In several cases, it is necessary to inquire what kind of furniture is intended. Di Suvero’s twisted metal

Tal Streeter, like Kenneth Snelson, is a recent convert to the gentle tensility and grace of bamboo for his sculptural material, and to the refinement of Japanese construction techniques. But unlike Snelson who explores the complex dynamics of tension and compression in deceptively simple bamboo sculptures, Streeter’s kites are frankly nonassertive. They are only secondarily involved with formal considerations.

The art of kite-making traditionally receives great respect in the Orient, but has only recently begun to be appreciated in the West. Streeter’s kites are made of barely opaque rice paper

The signs of struggle so conspicuously absent in Wilke’s relaxed work are discernible in the tougher polyethylene sculptures of Jean Linder. In spite of the unfortunate plastics industry odor which permeated her Mercer Street exhibition space, in spite of too much plastic sculpture in the ’60s, and the whole industrial SoHo ambiance in which her work is situated, she managed to state her sculptural ideas with force and clarity. No innovator, but a solid former (vacuum-former) of materials she turns transparent vinyl into soft and fairly firm configurations of varying density, texture, and

Hannah Wilke is clearly involved with the sensualist approach to sculpture. In her first one-woman exhibition after years of crafts-world obscurity as a ceramist, she shows remarkable assurance and facility. Her sensibility and her material seem to have fused perfectly and immediately into one strongly expressive whole. Wall sculptures of fleshy pink latex sheets hang on pushpins, bunched in groups of overlapping, snap-fastened flaps. They are so lusciously tactile that it is all but impossible to resist the urge to run their soft, spongy petals through your fingers. The five works range in

Caspar Henselmann is attempting the “superman” approach. In an effort to free himself from the stifling treadmill he was on of producing kinetic sculptures to decorate lobbies out of glass, steel, oil, and air pressure bubbles, he has spent the past few years exploring a variety of new sculptural modes. The results, a very great many (too many) of them at least, were brought together for his Mercer Street Coop exhibition. Through the jungle of confusing styles he presented, a certain and interesting sensibility was discernible. He has a bent toward the flowing, the naturally inundated, the

Edward Clark is concerned with surface to about the same extent that Youngerman is not. In his most recent work the surfaces are thickly encrusted, asserting the physicality of their medium with obdurate aggressiveness yet emitting light and seeming to contain atmosphere. The three constants in Clark’s painting are horizontal striping, an active surface, and an obsession with the ellipse as his personal hieratic image.

Clark’s exhibition covered three years and as many distinct solutions to his basic problem of maintaining a valid relationship between the ellipse and the canvas edge. His earliest,

Willem De Kooning’s paintings of 1970–72 on view at the Sidney Janis Gallery continue the series of figures in landscapes that he initiated in 1963 when he moved from Manhattan to The Springs on Long Island. The particular importance of this exhibition is the debut of de Kooning as a sculptor. It is in the light of this new development that we must reevaluate his recent paintings. The American master at merging figure and background into holistic unities has suddenly, at the age of 68, presented his familiar figures to us as solid, clearly-defined entities. The ambiance or setting so vital to

Carl Holty, born in 1900, has seen a lot of art come and go. A German-American who grew up in Wisconsin, learned academic painting in the Middle West, studied under Hans Hofmann at Munich in 1926, joined Abstraction-Création in 1932, and became the second chairman of the American Abstract Artists, Holty is in himself a formidable phenomenon. Forty-one of his works, from 1925 to 1971, were on view at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York through most of October.

The case for Holty is in a way the opposite of that for Arthur B. Davies. Holty is not overwhelming in his art, but

A large number of graphics by Arthur B. Davies appeared at the Hirschl and Adler Galleries during late September and early October, together with a few of his paintings and miniature bronze sculptures. Davies is familiar as a painter and, for having been a chief organizer of the Armory Show, as a hero of the modern movement in America. When we are perfectly honest about Davies I think we would agree that his painting was uneven, and that to some extent our advocacy of it is a dialectical compensation for European ignorance of the native American modernist tradition. But ever since I first came