From Sticks to Cenotaphs

By ROBERT HUGHES

At New York's Guggenheim Museum, a view of new British art

For the past two decades, Americans have known less about contemporary English art than vice versa, and there is no mystery why. The English, by and large, have not been aggressive in sending the work of their living artists abroad, while American museums, foundations and dealers have flooded Europe with every kind of U.S. "product" from abstract expressionism to photorealism. No market, no museum shows: few American museums in recent years have given any hint that England has sculptors younger than Anthony Caro, or painters less celebrated than David Hockney. Thus the Guggenheim Museum's current show, "British Art Now," is doubly interesting. Chosen by the museum's curator of exhibitions, Diane Waldman, it consists of work by eight artists, a sample with no pretensions to being a definitive list but the first good one to be seen in the U.S. in a long time. Parts of it are just as civil, neat and unoxygenated as anything that young American abstractionists have to offer. But much of the work is not, demonstrating a vitality, an instructed breadth of feeling that rarely shows its head in SoHo these days.

One case in point is Sculptor David Nash, whose work belongs in the general category of land art but is infused by a wit and sweetness usually absent from that genre. Nash lives in what must be the most sodden provincial seclusion the British Isles can offer--the Welsh village of Blaenau Ffestiniog, near which, 40 years ago, the National Gallery secreted its paintings to save them from the blitz. Nash assembles his sculptures from rough tree branches, trunks and slate. His projects include a sculpture of growing trees, topiarized into the form of a dome, a sylvan abstraction that will take 30 years to reach its intended dimensions. What seems so fetching in his work is not just its titles, which are antic (who could not be charmed by a pair of boughs, their twiggish arms laid over each other, called Cuddling Branches?), but its unpretentious dialogue with natural shape, which Nash treats not as raw material but as an equal partner in conspiracy. Chorus Line (Three Dandy Scuttlers), 1976, strikes a fine balance between whimsy--the flurried vaudevillian movement of the wooden legs--and presence, for there is something edgy and insect-like about these funny apparitions: they are cousins to the bugs and beasties that swarm in Miro's paintings of the '20s.

Another convincing oddity is the work of Simon Read, whose bizarre photographs--the face distorted and stretched, like a rubber mask--are done with elaborate bellows-and-pinhole cameras that he makes himself. Taken as serials of the same motif, in accordance with the rotation and expansion of the camera, the photographs assume a shifty, hallucinated look.

In its machined exactness, Keith Milow's sculpture is a far cry from Nash's split logs. Milow takes "monumental" forms--crosses or cenotaphs, those blockish memorials to the war dead that one sees in every English town--and removes religious or commemorative use, leaving an abstract residue. The crosses are worked up with cuts, angles and elegant inflections of thickness. The cenotaphs stick out horizontally from the wall, very much like the "architectons," the suprematist sculptural fantasies designed by the Russian Kasimir Malevich 60 years ago. Indeed, the spirit of Russian constructivism--spare, idealizing, but wedded to primary forms and to the nature of industrial material--presides over Milow's work, lending it a subtle dignity. Tim Head's photo projections are studies in uncertainty. Images of ordinary things--a ladder, a bucket, a brick wall --are projected over arrangements of real objects, and the result is a brilliant melee of impressions, in which image and reality can hardly be told apart.

Perhaps the most gifted of the eight artists is the painter Hugh O'Donnell. His large, crammed canvases owe something to Frank Stella in their controlled decorative fullness. They also allude to Japanese Momoyama screens, and that is no accident since O'Donnell studied them while on a fellowship to Kyoto in the mid-'70s. The desire to activate every part of the surface with emphatic silhouetted forms, stopping just short of congestion, is the animating principle of O'Donnell's work: he is a trader in visual surprises who can set his big, fractured geometrical forms, the loops and slices and incomplete circles of color, moving with splendid elan. A work like Palaestra, 1979, shows his peculiar talent for keeping up a lively debate between edge and surface in the reactions between the rhythmical curves of the design and the slices made into the canvas by its wooden framing battens. Squiggling, spinning, breaking off into ribbons and trellis-like crisscrossing, O'Donnell's shapes are never inert and only rarely predictable: any artist who can perform with such assurance at the age of 30 will deserve watching over the next few years. -- Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.