Please Don't Feed the Sculpture

Artists are always busy expanding the domain of art. After all, that gives them more room to play in. This past season, the frontiers, like those of Alice's Wonderland, grew bigger and madder until it seemed that art was that which looked least like art. Andy Warhol, in an effort to blow new life into pop, floated 25 silver pillows filled with helium in a gallery. Claes Oldenberg, whose realm is the bathroom, went limp, turned out washbasins and soft toilets made of stuffed vinyl.

The new pioneers were at it right up to the end. In Frankfurt, a frontiersman named Timm Ulrichs put himself on view in a glass box, along with his school diploma, vaccination certificate and other personal documents. Manhattan's Leo Castelli Gallery put on a one-man show titled "Store Fronts," which is all they were: a row of fullscale, blank and well-lighted store fronts made of metal with Plexiglas windows backed by brown wrapping paper. The artist is a 30-year-old Bulgarian escapee from Soviet Realism named Christo, who has lived in New York since 1964.

In an earlier gesture of verisimilitude, he once stacked 400 empty oil drums wall to wall and 13 feet high in a Left Bank street in Paris. He also likes to bundle up motorcycles, trees, other people's statues and live nudes in plastic wrapping, then tie them securely with rope. Their title: Packages.

Another realist of sorts also opened last week to grunts of approval in Rome's Gallerie La Salita. He is Richard Serra, 27, whose credentials include a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale and a Fulbright fellowship; he is currently deep in his zoo period. On exhibit were crude cages in which disport two turtles, two quail, a rabbit, a hen, two guinea pigs and a 97-lb. sow. The big pig oinks away as part of a work called Live Pig Cage I. "I'm not saying the pig is art or is not art," says the artist, "but she makes a form." Other goodies on view include a stuffed ocelot, a stuffed owl and a stuffed boar (Serra's wife is an amateur taxidermist), bidets crammed with conch shells, beaten-up boxing gloves, and broom bristles. Of his crass menagerie, Serra says: "People didn't know whether Robert Rauschenberg's goat with a tire around it was art. Now they know. If an artist goes on making goats, though, he's hung up." Serra tries to stay loose, and designs his works to last. Says he proudly, "I take great care to glue every feather down."

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