Spectral Light, Anxious Dancers

By ROBERT HUGHES

There are a few living American artists whose latest show one would always feel eager to see. Susan Rothenberg is high on the list. At 42 she has survived the cultural gorge-and-puke of the early '80s, the manic starmaking and the pressure on immature talent -- all due, presumably, to wither in the hangover from the bull market. Rothenberg's anxious but unhurried cast of mind was somehow fortified in the pressure cooker. Her current show at New York City's Sperone Westwater gallery (through Nov. 14) is in some respects her best yet.

Rothenberg first appeared in the mid-'70s -- a time when figurative painting was still Out -- with, of all things, pictures of horses. These were more emblems than descriptions: bold, rather clunky equine silhouettes embedded in flat, abstract space, with the totemic air of cave paintings. Their primitive look was, in fact, quotation; it was clear from her knowing use of close-valued color and her pasty, elegantly manipulated pigment that she was already an artist of considerable sophistication. What was not clear was where she could take this quasi-heraldic imagery if she was going to hold on to her roots in pictorial minimalism. One soon found out. Rothenberg clung to the human figure, presenting it as a collection of parts, signs and & fragments: an open mouth, a lump of head, or a set of sequential images of a reaching arm that seemed to stutter across the canvas in a condition of terminal insecurity. The work looked muffled, ineloquent and infrangibly sincere. There was an intriguing contrast between the toughness of her pictorial means and the anxiety they suggested.

Since the early '80s, Rothenberg has been grappling with two problems: how to put her fragments together, and how to do it in terms of color. She has never been a "natural" colorist (black, white, duns and a range of silvery grays, punctuated with the occasional splotch of crimson or ultramarine blue, came easiest to this tonal painter), and quite often her efforts to introject color into her work looked like mere tints imposed on a monochrome structure.

From about 1980 onward Rothenberg took more to an open weaving with the brush, dabbing her pigment into a field of hatchings. There is so much overpainting and layering in her recent work that the paintings seem to have grown excruciatingly slowly. They carry a patina of doubt on every square inch of their surface. But they do breathe: light and air -- of a rather claustral kind, but atmosphere just the same -- bathe the bodies and unify them as objects in the world while threatening always to dissolve them as emblems of personality. The surfaces look as if they came via Philip Guston from Monet, picking up some of Giacomo Balla's futurist dissections of light particles along the way -- a sober flicker in which images flash and are gone like the sides of fish in dark, weedy water.

The subjects of this show are mostly dancers and jugglers, manipulators of the fleeting instant in whose work Rothenberg detects a familiar cultural pathos, distantly related to Picasso's circus folks but less sentimental. Most of them are in rapid movement, spinning, doing plies and tossing eggs, and this contrasts oddly with the way they are painted. True, Rothenberg always liked to play on contradictions between the quick, snapshot nature of her chosen image (a galloping horse, a teetering bicyclist, Mondrian solemnly turning like a mantis on the dance floor) and the nuanced and obviously slow way it was presented. But in these paintings this incongruity becomes extreme. None are done from life, and yet some figures have an undeniable veracity, the feeling of a life sketch that argues a lot of preliminary drawing; and an occasional awkwardness in the relation of figures within a painting suggests that she has been fitting together drawings done on the spot. Over this lies the integument of broken atmosphere, a congealed version of impressionist flicker.

At this point it is clear how much, subliminally or not, Giacometti has meant to Rothenberg. This probing for form through a web, a mist of approximate lines, so that the never-quite-final shape becomes a palimpsest of recorded attempts to fix it, echoes Giacometti's own anxiety before his subjects. How can the artist be sure, and make you sure, what is there? For Rothenberg the problem becomes worse, because she chooses subjects in movement, the opposite of Giacometti's hieratic stillness. It does not always come off, but when it does you are made sharply aware of the breadth of Rothenberg's pictorial ambitions.

Now and again she creates an image of such quiet weirdness that it really shocks you -- such as Half and Half, 1985-86, an interior with the top half of a body in the foreground, a head and shoulders staring mournfully out of the space like a resigned cousin of the figure in Munch's Scream; for no clear reason the lower half of the body is left standing up behind it, like a pair of empty waders, in the bland spectral light of what appears to be an indoor swimming pool. At such moments Rothenberg's imagery delivers the jolt and reach of feeling one associates with the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She is unquestionably one of the signal artists of our confused time.