Manhattan Midwinter: Through the Eddy

By A.T. Baker

There have been times in the history of art when progress stopped--a kind of eddy, a period of confusion. Today seems just such a time with the artist, like Matthew Arnold's traveler, "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born."

In Manhattan galleries at midwinter, the overall impression is of a series of dead ends being earnestly explored by many artists. They are producing hundreds of square yards of post-abstract expressionism, after Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell et al., and seeming acres of color field after Morris Louis and Jules Olitski. There are innumerable variations on hard-edged abstraction, after Stella, and scintillating but ultimately repetitious structures of glass, light and Lucite in the dimming name of op art.

As for the minimalists and the conceptualists, they seem equally moribund. Robert Irwin's recent show, in fact, might be taken as minimalism's last testament. When one entered the gallery, there was apparently nothing in sight. It turned out that the work of art was a stretch of gauze running the length of the exhibition room but set two feet out from the real wall. It was white, and looked like a wall. The best the conceptualists could do was a show by that professional enfant terrible, Les Levine, that featured drawings of five dozen or so Watergate characters, along with a voice on a loudspeaker intoning "June fifth, Sam Ervin, blue-gray suit, dark blue tie, pale blue shirt, gold watch."

In this bleak landscape, there are a few interesting outcroppings. One is a kind of surrealism that owes more to Hieronymus Bosch than to Salvador Dali. The best examples, currently at the Aberbach Gallery, are the works of Miodrag Djuric Dado, a Yugoslav painter who works in France. His L 'Hopital has a jolting impact: beyond the window is the peaceful French village where Dado now lives. Inside, a demon in the shape of an owl crouches by the central crucifix, near the dancing man and his maimed and malevolent companion. A rotund dwarf grins and looks away. What does it mean? Perhaps that these phantasms exist, within any hospital's clutching walls, even when life goes on routinely on the outside.

Stop! Enough! The other area of some promise is so-called photorealism. Robert Mann, a Californian whose paintings are on view at the Staempfli Gallery, has studied vintage photographs but does not refer to them when he paints. His aim is to recapture an era and a place: rural Ontario, where he grew up. The people are "a memory--they've floated back into this situation one more time." Their slightly stylized figures produce a kind of stage-front scrim against a photographic backdrop. The results have a peculiar authority, as hard to account for as it is easy to recognize.

Downtown, Soho's Meisel Gallery has mounted a show of 60 "New Realists." Robert Bechtle's parked car is as bright and as bleak as California sunshine, and Ralph Goings' mail truck as shiny and noncommittal as a new pair of shoes. Arne Besser's Betty is a fascinating exercise in the illusions that realism can contrive--the model airplane is in the window display behind her, while the buildings reflected in the window glass are across the street. Besser uses four or five photographs for each painting, taking what he wants from each. He explains: "Photorealism is a bridge between two art forms."

Photorealism scarcely has the amplitude to develop into a new and encompassing style. It is more of a reaction, a blast on an aesthetic whistle that signals: "Stop! Enough!" It can be taken as a sign, among others, that the long reign of abstractionism is over and that a new generation is looking for and exploring other modes.

qed A.T. Baker

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