Statements in Paint

The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once compared a work of art to a window through which life can be seen without the need to account for the structure, transparency and color of the windowpane. Nowadays, most artists would argue that quite the reverse is true. With cameras available to record the view behind the windowpane, the artist must concentrate on making his window preeminent. In fact, the 20th century has witnessed the development of a genre that consists of windows seen through other windows: in other words, works of art that deal with other works of art.

Back of the Easel. In recent years, particularly, a growing number of artists have chosen this device as a way of making outspoken comments about the nature of their calling. The majority of these works are little more than postgraduate examples of those art school exercises in which students are called upon to copy older paintings or even to try to improve on them. A minority illuminate their topic unforgettably. By penciling a Dali-like goatee and mustache onto a reproduction of the Mono Lisa, Marcel Duchamp made it difficult for anyone looking at the lady thereafter to overlook either the pompous reverence with which she is surrounded or Leonardo's decidedly ambivalent attitude toward women. More recently, Miro, Magritte, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Arman, Bruce Nauman and Walter de Maria have in various ways dealt memorably with the subject of art as art.

The newest crop of painters who prey upon their fellows promises to prove more unsettling than any of its predecessors. For one thing, the school is proliferating rapidly. One Manhattan showroom is currently showing Richard Pettibone's miniature copies of Andy Warhol's soup cans, while another opened last week with Howard Kanovitz's paintings of his easel, his art-world friends and the backs of his canvases. A third gallery is showing Malcolm Morley's version of Vermeer's Portrait of the Artist in His Studio--a much-admired painting that has also served as the model for a collage by Alfred Di Lauro and a painting by John Clem Clarke (see color).

Most Precise Words. John Clem Clarke, 31, manages to unnerve some viewers all by himself. He paints what, at first glance, looks perilously like clumsy reproductions of valuable old masters. On second glance, the suspicious would-be buyer sees that Clarke has deliberately differentiated his "reproduction" from the originals by using a stylized process that reduces their complex color schemes to a few relatively simple components. "I liken the process," he says, "to sending a telegram wherein you use the fewest, most precise words for the meaning of the message."

Clarke's most recent major work, a version of Frans Hals' group portrait of the officers and subalterns of the St. Adrian Militia Company, decorates a downtown Manhattan bar. It draws approving glances from young artists who drop in because, as Clarke explains, "we're all involved in process today, rather than track. By that I mean, if I were dropped on the moon tomorrow, I'd leave tracks wherever I walked--but I wouldn't be involved in them. Only the man who came after me would be. In the same way, painting today is a process of exploring. The real product isn't the painting any more. It's what the artist learns while he's making the picture."

The West Coast is an equally fertile breeding ground for art-oriented art. "All artists read magazines," notes Vancouver's Iain Baxter, 32. "TIME, Life, Look--any publication that tells them anything about art. However, some won't admit to copying even when everybody knows bloody well they do. I admit what I am doing and say directly this is an extension of so-and-so."

Baxter's waggish Extended Noland was based on a museum catalogue picture of a Noland painting, and was meant to twit the pretentious dissertation on Noland as much as it meant to parody the work itself. To Baxter, snobbishness and pretension often hinder the public from enjoying art, and he debunks both through his N.E. Thing Co., which produces buttons labeled "Artoficial" and passes them out to N.E. one who will wear them. The button presumably entitles the wearer to make official statements on art--though Baxter clearly regards this distinction as somewhat artificial. The company also issues certificates for ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Things) and ART (Aesthetically Rejected Things). The Great Wall of China rates an ACT seal of approval, while some of Picasso's paintings get the ART booby prize.

Tijuana Velvet. Farther south, San Francisco's William Wiley is, at 31, an elder statement-maker of the West Coast's cheerfully crude funk art movement. His exhibition in Manhattan last spring (TIME, May 31) contained many paintings and sculptures dealing with the frenetic activity of the New York gallery world about which the relaxed Californian has mixed feelings. Now returned to the relative peace of Marin County, Wiley points out that even works that nominally deal with art can also have wider implications. His subtle watercolor Sculptor's Holiday, for example, can be read as the interior of a studio, but its bizarre, stretched-out forms and lacerated strips of leather can also be taken as symbols for an uptight state of mind.

Los Angeles' husky William Tunberg, 32, may be the only artist who has ever elected to support himself as a donor to an artificial insemination clinic. (He was fired from his job as a life-class drawing teacher at Utah State for, among other reasons, producing drawings that the authorities considered too erotic.) Tunberg finds that when "people these days say 'Look at the old masters,' they are thinking of a cheap, Tijuana-velvety painting of a bullfighter or a landscape." Such folk may find pictures by even Caravaggio or Michelangelo "too crude and experimental." Tunberg's Neoclassical Drawing Trap was put together as a way of asking, "Do you really know what you are talking about when you praise old masters?" Says Tunberg, who is working on a construction showing a pair of hands making a pie: "Art is not just a scene or a picture any more. It is an object that exists for itself, but it also conveys something more than pure decoration--not exactly a message, but a hunch."

Aqe of Anxiety. Something very much like a hunch also drives Elaine Sturtevant, a fair, fey and fortyish Manhattan divorcee who went to Paris last year with her two small daughters and may not find it safe to come back. For she practices a kind of art that has made her one of the less popular artists in Manhattan. Sturtevant's thing is line-for-line copies of virtually every top pop painter and sculptor. She has "done" Segal, Wesselmann, Oldenburg, Stella, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Warhol with such loving cunning and accomplished accuracy that she makes them all look slightly ridiculous. If the ideal of pop is to reproduce banality literally, then Sturtevant has carried the ideal to its logical but infuriating conclusion--by reproducing the literal reproduction literally. "Oldenburg is ready to kill me," she admits. "It all makes him dive up a wall."

In the process of celebrating "process," Sturtevant has also rendered herself somewhat ridiculous (she once slathered herself with shaving foam to pose for her version of Man Ray's photograph of Marcel Duchamp). This disturbs her not one whit. "I have no place at all," she says, with a faraway look in her eye, "except in relation to the total structure. What interests me is not communicating but creating change. Some people feel that a great change in esthetics in general is happening, though few understand exactly why. Mainly, there is a great deal of anxiety."

Many of her guinea pigs might challenge Sturtevant's personal ability to create change, but few have failed to sense the anxiety of which she speaks. It is a fundamental unrest that arises because a basic artistic philosophy--originally formulated by the pop artists--now produces increasingly sterile new work. None of the mutants of the virile genus popus--such as op or earthworks or photographic realism--seem sufficiently robust to beget new species in their turn.

What will come after? Nobody knows. What the prevalence of "art for art's sake" creations mainly shows is that artists feel compelled to satirize the status quo. In this sense, the stage seems curiously akin to 1953. That was the year when Robert Rauschenberg set the stage for pop with his own contribution to the "art for art's sake" genre: erasing an Abstract Expressionist drawing by Willem de Kooning.

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