Overdressing for the Occasion

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Bicentennial may or may not be recalled as a year of great achievement for U.S. museums, but it has certainly nurtured some of their endemic ills. One of these is a manic itch to overdress exhibitions. It is highly contagious, and now sweeps through the Whitney Museum, whose big Bicentennial show, "200 Years of American Sculpture," opened this month. This is a historically complex and potentially important survey, involving seven curators, 345 works of art and a catalogue as thick as a phone book. But in order to secure impact, the Philadelphia pop architects Venturi & Rauch were engaged to package it, while all seven curators--who chose the show's contents--were locked out of the galleries during installation.

As a result, the presentation is ignorant, cluttered and coarse, and it trashes the sculpture. Works that need to be walked around and experienced in three dimensions are stranded on ledges and behind glass, so that they can only be seen frontally. When this is inflicted on pieces like the exquisite (and much underrated) cubist sculptures of John Storrs, an artist who should have been rehabilitated by the show, it borders on vandalism. Harsh blasts of light transmute rows of neoclassical and Victorian marbles into white soap. A group of David Smiths is gussied up with a 50-ft. photomural of what purports to be, but is not, the landscape around his studio at Bolton Landing. Such arbitrary window dressing annuls the difference between museums and show biz.

Does it matter? Very much, because the enterprise is serious and several of the curators have done an exemplary job. Nobody attentive to American culture can leave the Whitney without having his or her ideas about sculpture in this country--its history, quality and social role--changed and stimulated. The first thing that strikes one is the prompt, and precipitous, decline of American sculpture after the arrival of the white man: until the late 19th century, the white tribes of America could produce nothing that came close to Indian art in vitality, beauty or density of meaning. The point is made very succinctly by a room of Indian carvings assembled by Anthropologist Norman Feder.

Thrones and Colossi. To move from the grand volumes and rhythmical, steely incision of these Tlingit house posts and Eskimo masks into the world of American neoclassical sculpture is to shift to provincialism. It is also to descend from necessity into sentiment, and, in a sense, from confidence into anxiety. Compared with the pressure of ritual meaning in the best Indian art, the search for a language of classical form and Roman gravitas conducted by the professionals who rose to commemorate the American ideal after the Revolution--Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford--looks curiously wistful. Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave was the first internationally famous work of art produced by an American; when it toured the U.S. in 1847 it created a sensation and people queued to see it. Yet today, as one gazes on this chaste pastiche of the Medici Venus, it seems more an anthropological document and less a work of art than most Alaskan carvings. The problem, of course, is not that neoclassicism is remote from us but that the American version of it was unimpressive.

Today's taste tends toward 19th century folk art represented by some delectable objects in the Whitney. The most splendid "unofficial" sculpture is a veritable New Jerusalem of junk and old furniture sheathed in gold and silver foil, the Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly, begun in 1950 in a Washington garage by a black janitor named James Hampton, and left unfinished on his death in 1964. It was meant for Christ at his Second Coming and may well be the finest work of visionary religious art produced by an American.

But the main direction of U.S. sculpture, throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, was official and public. In a catalogue section titled Statues to Sculpture: 1890-1930, Art Historian Daniel Robbins gives a fascinating account of the plaster colossi produced by the cohabitation of raw new capital, laissez-faire idealism and academic talent. He also shows how the desire for emblematic icons of American history-- realized by such grand-scale performers of the period as Augustus Saint-Gaudens--eventually made an accommodation with modern style through art deco. In the studios of beaux-arts figures like Saint-Gaudens and Karl Bitter, as well as those of decorators like Paul Manship and protomodernists like Gaston Lachaise, John Storrs and Elie Nadelman, sculpture made its last pub lic stand before the museum became its sole arena.

The growth of a museum network coincided with the emergence of two art ists, David Smith and Alexander Calder, who became the first American sculptors to achieve international renown: their work influenced Europeans as no previous New World artists' had, and with it American sculpture was seen to have transcended its provincialism at last. The task of describing the crucial period 1930-50, which saw the emergence of a dazzling array of technical options--movement in sculpture, open-welded construction, the use of found objects--and the rise not only of Smith and Calder but also of Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Joseph Cornell and Barnett Newman, has been elegantly done by Rosalind Krauss.

High School Semiotics. The last part of the show, dealing with the past 25 years, provokes real unease. Here a mixture of uncertain taste and polemical narrowness has given a shaky and partisan reading to history. One curator in particular, Marcia Tucker, seems flatly prejudiced against the very idea of sculpture as a solid, weighty or highly modulated object. Her selections seem meant to prove that in the past decade sculpture has advanced historically by denying its own material essence. Moreover, "with a few exceptions," she declares, "present-day sculpture has generally rejected anthropomorphic, transcendental, nostalgic and metaphysical content." If sculptors do not conform to these norms of up-to-dateness, they do not get through the Whitney door.

Consequently Bruce Nauman, a feeble parodist of Marcel Duchamp, has five works in the show, and a large corner is occupied by a fatuous scatter piece by Barry Le Va, consisting of three black rags and three ball bearings glued to the carpet. Meanwhile, several artists who do have a claim to be in the show, like Carl Andre, Dan Flavin or Lucas Samaras, are represented by quite mediocre pieces, apparently chosen to make their work seem less "material" than it is. Worst of all are the exclusions: nothing by Charles Ginnever, Richard Stankiewicz, James Rosati, Forrest Myers, Clement Meadmore or, indeed, any of a dozen other living sculptors whose work will probably be remembered as a necessary part of American sculpture long after the mishmash of high school semiotics now in curatorial vogue at the Whitney has been forgotten.

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