Three from the Image Machine

By ROBERT HUGHES

In SoHo, a trio of rising reputations but uneven talents

There were three one-man shows on the itinerary of most gallerygoers in New York City's SoHo area last month: Robert Longo, David Salle and Gerard Garouste. Taken together, they were fairly instructive. Here are three rising, though by no means certified, reputations; yet their success seems tinged with panic. They are all young (Longo is 30, Salle 31, and Garouste 37) and, of course, figurative -- the pendulum of taste having now swung so far that it is practically impossible to have a rising reputation if you are a new abstract painter. Each, in his way, is a perfect subject of the "postmodernist" image machine, that powerful contraption which, modeled on corporate p.r. lines, has transformed the very nature of reputation in the art world over the past five years. But how good are they?

Certainly Longo is the best of them. But his ambitious split show, which fills two galleries (Castelli and Metro Pictures), displays a worrisome unevenness: harshly accurate feeling one moment, bombast the next. Longo's subject is people under stress; in his paintings, the lid on the urban pressure cooker is always about to blow. He began to make a reputation two or three years ago with life-size figures of men and women apparently in their late 20s, starkly drawn in graphite on a blank ground, twisting and grimacing and staggering. They were, of course, done from photos (only the camera can cut movement into such inscrutable, violent morsels), and their power lay in their uncertainty: Were the people getting shot, having strokes or dancing at the MuddClub?

Longo is not without entrepreneurial desires. He staged performances, did sculpture and is producing a full-length film, Empire. His art got more ambitious, involving more people both in his pictures and as assistants in the studio. We see the results at Castelli and Metro. They include a large bas-relief in aluminum depicting a horde of struggling Wall Street types: a Roman battle sarcophagus with updated clothes, flanked by ominous, smooth, black effigies of skyscrapers in perspective that recall the architectural renderings of Hugh Ferriss in the '30s. The trouble is that the execution does not carry the theatrical idea. Longo is not much of a modeler; his striking talent for rendering does not extend into three dimensions, so that on closer inspection the faces and bodies in the sculpture are pedantically inert, like those "solid photography" busts cut with a laser device.

On a less operatic scale, however, he is convincing. Perhaps the best work in the show is Pressure, 1982-83: the white face of a worried, singlet-clad mime in the lower half and, above it, the cold, oppressive ziggurat of an art deco-style New York building. The film noir dramatics of Longo's work are tuned down, and a subtler pathos comes through, the surprise being that Longo was able to extract it from such obvious cliches as the Urban Clown and the Faceless Skyscraper.

On the face of it, Salle's combine paintings at the Mary Boone Gallery had things in common with Longo's. They often derive from photos, they use overscaled fragments, they shift style within the picture. But what differences! In contrast with the hyped-up aggressiveness of Longo's work, the strongest feeling Salle offers is a wistful unease in the face of image glut. Looking at his work is like watching a TV set in the rain with the sound off. Disconnected images, usually with a nude, a face or a word underneath, drift across one another. Salle scrambles together a variety of modes of drawing, from in Art to Soft Porn, but the line is always weak and wambly.

Salle's proponents, who are numerous enough to have made his work a fixture of the big European circus shows like "Dokumenta 7" and "Zeitgeist," seem to think his pictorial dithering is a critical act. It is said to be a meditation on the difficulty of finding any sort of authentic expression in a culture unhooked by the affectless glare of the Box. But this terrain was strip-mined by Warhol 20 years ago, and Salle is merely picking over it. His sources are too obvious. The overlay of drawings comes from late Francis Picabia; the tonally painted gray images from early James Rosenquist; the objects added to the canvas from Jasper Johns.

The work is all footnote, no text. Sometimes it is sly and learned, but in a sophomoric way. Why, in Black Bra, is there a bowl of apples "quoted" from Cezanne, a pair of eyes and a brassiere? Presumably because Salle has read Art Historian Meyer Schapiro's classic essay on Cezanne, which suggested that he associated the image of fruit with his mother's breast. Salle's wan canvases have their amusing moments, but they remain a kind of conceptual art, arid, mincing and overly concerned with their relationship to the art world as a system.

From this modest ledge there is a steep drop to the level of Garouste, a much touted French artist who got the two-gallery treatment from Castelli and Sperone Westwater Fischer. Garouste paints allegorical pictures, usually about Orion, a mythical giant and hunter from Boeotia, who bragged that he could clear the earth of wild beasts and so -- depending on which version of the myth you prefer -- was blinded by Dionysus, killed by Artemis or stung to death by a scorpion. What this legend means to Garouste is anyone's guess. All he has done with it is produce a set of murky canvases with loud patches of local color, full of posturing figures who flap and twist about in the pervasive dung-colored twilight like parodies of the 18th century Italian mannerist Alessandro Magnasco.

Garouste's style is the most affected thing since John Cleese's silly walks on Monty Python. What he offers as drawing is actually disconnected pseudobaroque squiggles. In a painting like The Red Room, 1982, with its woolly paint and Greek decor out of late De Chirico, there is neither an inch of coherent space nor a single shape that could be defended as form. Garouste is not a painter but a pretentious decorator. And yet he is treated as a classicist, as a man who understands the past; it is as though someone who remembered a couple of tags from Virgil were complimented on his scholarship. It seems that not only history but myth as well can repeat itself as farce, if dealers are pushing.

-- By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.