Westermann's Witty Sculptures

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the Whitney, a craftsman in the American grain

If artists were comic-strip heroes, Horace Clifford Westermann would be Popeye. The gimlet stare, the laconic speech, the cigar stub jutting like a bowsprit from the face, the seafaring background and fo'c'sle oaths, the muscular arm--all are there. He signs his work with an anchor; and Westermann's age, 55, is about right too. What the comparison lacks, of course, is the talent. Westermann's retrospective of 59 sculptures and 24 drawings, which runs until mid-July at the Whitney Museum in New York and then goes on a tour of museums in New Orleans, Des Moines, Seattle and San Francisco through the spring of 1979, attests to that. For a small but steadfast audience, Westermann's imagination has for years been one of the most original and disturbing in American art. During the '60s, he was widely condescended to as a minor figure, a Yankee post-surrealist constructing his dark whimsies--the haunted houses and shark-besieged boats in glass cases --at a distance from the "mainstream." But now that irony, memory, autobiography, humor and outright obsession have asserted their claims in art once more, Westermann's importance cannot be shrugged off.

His work is partly made of old-style popular allusions to folk and fairground art. Its imagery is redolent of the fun house, the ghost train, the penny arcade --these small environments of illusion whose hold on the imagination, over the past 25 years, has been so drastically loosened by the encompassing phantoms of TV and movies. Westermann can imbue a model of a building, a little ship's hull or a box with extreme suspense: one peers through the glass at a scene that resembles the inverted world of the fun fair, but concentrated (and made epigrammatic) by its littleness. The box serves him as it served Joseph Cornell: as a diminutive theater in which anything can happen, whose proscenium marks its contents off from the real world. But Westermann's imagination is quite unlike Cornell's nostalgic, refined mode of dreaming. It is colloquial, even brash, charged with sexual tension and loaded with implications of frustration and death.

Many of these implications rise from his service with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II and later in Korea: in particular, the series of Death Ships, schematic models of the floating charnel houses that vessels (including his own) were reduced to by kamikaze attacks. Likewise, the oddly titled Hutch--One Armed "Astroturf" Man with a Defense, 1976, is a grotesque and sardonic parody of the violent hero, a maimed golem with a boxing glove for a head. If much of Westermann's work is a continuous effort to exorcise the horrors of war, the materialistic defeats of peace get their share of attention too.

The basis of Westermann's art, which provides both the curt humor and the haunted pessimism with a formal matrix, is craftsmanship. After quitting the Marines in 1952, Westermann eked out his G.I. Bill income by working as a handyman and carpenter--precariously, since his standards of joinery and finish soon became too high for him to be employable in the quick-profit building trade. His sculptures have always been exquisitely made, the rare-wood inlays done with a skill almost vanished from modern American joinery, every miter and dovetail fitted to perfect tolerances. This pitch of care gives the work an indelible presence. It is quality as metaphor, proclaiming that art, before it says anything else, is a statement of the need to make something really well.

It also gives Westermann's pieces a typically hermetic and defensive look: protected by their glass enclosures and crates, armed with hooks, hasps, locks and hinges, they take their stand as small fortresses of care and responsibility against an inimical world of non-art--ratty execution, sloppy thought. This point is neatly made by A Close Call, 1965. Inside the box, a wooden doll with an ermine's head reels backward to avoid a dagger that has penetrated the glass ceiling.

The outside world is breaking in. It is a very funny and slightly poisonous image of paranoia. But it also has a lot to say about how frail privacy is (can the creature be, in fact, an artist: Westermann himself?) and how vulnerable are the fictions that art erects.

The value of this retrospective is that it lets us see how the desire for an unimperiled wholeness in the face of a world perceived as menacing can supply an artist of Westermann's gifts with an apparently endless range of subjects and motifs. Inventiveness, we are reminded, is one of the strategies of survival itself.

Robert Hughes

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