Essay

The Year That Was:
Marching Toward the Millennium

by Therese Schwartz
[Part Two of Four]

Twenty-five years ago I wrote a series of articles for Art in America titled "The Politicization of the Avant Garde" which recorded the art and the activities of artists in the 1960's and early 70's. Although I am a working artist, not a critic or historian, I have an obsessive interest in what motivates us and what kind of art is produced in a particular time and place. I decided to take one year in these last 1990's and make a record of what I saw. I chose the season ending June 1998. I know that the present is not a time of "break-throughs," and that each of the last years of this century is very much like the one before it and the one following. Therefore, my record of any one of these last three years would be a reliable picture of the current art world.

Part One of this article, in the Newsletter of 6 July 1999, described generally the motives and production of artists working in all media today. Specifically, it discussed the luxuriously enhanced trend in Installation Art and its probable source in the booming stock market. Part Two follows here, detailing the overwhelming number of exhibiting painters and the extraordinary diversity of style.

Painters, Painters, Painters

Because of their numbers, I have classified the painters by sound. They range from those whose work is loud with color, design, and size, to the painters who work in a softer voice. In the center range would be artists who fall anywhere in between, and also those whose style has not changed much over time.

Loud and Clear:

Terry Winters (Matthew Marks) invoked industrial-derived grids. Abstract images were used in deep complicated structures. Color was subsidiary to strength of design. Beatriz Milhazes (Edward Thorpe), a South American, composed her brilliantly colored intricate work using real images mixed with abstract symbols. John Currin (Andrea Rosen) showed large realist paintings greatly occupied with balloon- breasted women. They were rough and tough, and while some might have called this work candid, others would have labeled it differently. Phil Bower (Spencer Brownstone) attacked geometry by defacing, piercing, and mutilating the surface, and it seemed a protest against the usual limits of formal style.

Ellen Gallagher (Gagosian) painted large, deceptively simple mono-colored pieces, in which human cartooned faces were barely visible. The washed-out color did not diminish the deconstructive humor.

In contrast, John Walker's (Knoedler & Co.) heroic narratives of bloody war were based on what he knew of his father's experiences. This mural size work was passionate and openly Expressionist.

Carlos Capelan (Monique Knowlton) simulated prehistoric cave painting. An attempt to go in the footsteps of Ice Age artists is almost impossible to bring off, except perhaps as archeological illustration. Matthew Antezzo (Basilico Fine Arts): described as "appropriation art," this show needed the viewer's active participation in order to understand the contents, which included ceramic squares and oil-painted linen. There were allusions to Robert Ryman, Sherrie Levine and others.

Ken Grimes (Ricco Maresca) was concerned with UFO appearances and his work was sourced in science fiction and motivated by the belief that there is intervention among us. The viewer was informed that Grimes was born the day of the first moon landing.

An overwhelming display of drawings by Robert Longo (Metro Pictures) is listed here because the show was so insistent. Hundreds were hung from the ceiling to eye-level and their subject was "things that influence his personal environment." Never mind that it was impossible to see most of it, the effect was total.

Lisa Corinne Davis's (June Kelly) patterned paintings in deep earth colors, although abstract, carried a sense of tragedy. A variety of material was used to achieve an unrefined surface, which further suggested expressive intent without stereotypes. An exhibit titled "Painting by Numbers" by Candice Breitz (Silverstein) was all on the surface. She took advertising and used it straight up - not satirically, not humorously. Logos of big names, Nike,Hilfiger, jumped out of the paintings, and it was a good example of how some separations grow dimmer.

Marilee Stiles Stern (Phyllis Kind), formerly a dancer, made a compelling picture of the harsh demands she has experienced; the paintings were stiff and labored, with dancing black figures against ominous deep red spaces. Pop Art was brought up to date by John Wesley (Jessica Fredericks) in bright, relaxed, and funny paintings. Even when the humor was pointed it bore no malice. Early examples in this genre carried social comment, but this work seemed part of the scene, not above or outside. Betty Goodwin's retrospective (Jack Shainman) carried echoes of Conceptual Abstraction dating back to the 70's. Words were vital to identify and explain the objects, and the presentation, an interesting piece of history, had little relevance to the present.

In A Lower Key:

The following shows were quieter, but I don' t mean that they lacked strength or direction; remember the proverbial power of a soft voice.

Martin Mull (David Beitzel): these were loosely painted, vague, and relaxed. Pale figures appeared in pastel backgrounds. They seemed half real, half myth, somewhat like personages remembered in a dream. Carl Fudge (Ronald Feldman), although dense and mysterious, was not vague. His all-over patterned canvases were designed to withhold their contents, which he said "constitute a refusal of narrative...and an acceptance of grief."

Aris Koutroulis (O K Harris), an artist of the 70's, worked finely lined surfaces, on which occasional areas of paint outlined human figures. In a dark room periodically lighted they alternately glowed and then went back into darkness. Juan Genoves (Marlborough) also seen here since the 70's, showed pale gray canvases, on which small blurred figures ran and walked in various urban directions. They seemed lost and confused and begged for our pity.

Joan Nelson (Robert Miller) works in a miniature size; these were landscapes in the style of early American artists. Expertly done, they could be read as mildly satirical or obviously chic. More small paintings, by Arpita Singh (Bose Pacia) in East Indian style: they were exquisitely detailed, involving native myths, and were a little beyond the comprehension of those outside the culture.

Sean Scully (Galerie Lelong) exhibited paintings and photographs of old walls; they were sad, personal and almost sentimental. The photos were the most affecting, while the painted works that repeated the scenes were a little like echoes. Mood was also in the dark small "Nocturnes" of Daniel Lang (Bridgewater Lustig). They were mysterious, done in deep shades of blackish blue, and could be described as romantic. More mystery in the white paintings of Juliao Sarmento (Sean Kelly). Thickly impastoed, they bore titles such as "Suffering, Despair and Ascent" and carried the almost indiscernible face of a woman placed in an undefined and lonely country.

Native American artifacts such as bowls, stones, patterns of woodcarvings, and blocky totems were the subjects of smallpieces by William Willis (M-13).

Helen Marden (Thomas Healy) went back to harmonious abstractions, pale, tasteful and unchallenging. LeighBehnke (Fischbach) created her own quiet disorder by using pieces of painted photographic images arranged illogically. What emerged was unreality although made of real things. And Sara Sosnowy's (John Weber) show was a scholarly replay of geometric abstraction, again reflecting other less distracting times.

With Apologies to None - Unclassified, Unlabelled

These will be painters I could not place in any easy category. My point about the artist as a mirror of the times seems undeniable as I write in these crazy days of December 1998. Very few of us who had been in political causes in the past would follow any today. Similarly, there are few followers of anyone in the exhibiting scene. The time when you could see a dozen de Kooning knock-offs in one afternoon is long past.

Return Engagements:

I start with those who have appeared regularly over the years and whose shows of this past year followed a style and philosophy uniquely their own.

Janet Fish (D.C. Moore) is an artist who has exhibited regularly over the last 20 years. This show again demonstrates her expert technique in still lifes of glass objects, shadows, and her unchanging preoccupation with form and color. A constant interest in unreal landscape was again demonstrated in Wolfe Kahn's last appearance (Beadleston). His work, a personal reflection of nature, is somewhat idealized and even romantic. John Baldessari (Sonnabend) is definitely not a romantic, and this was not a variation of previous shows. Here was his brand of Minimalism - almost all blank canvases, each showing just one object such as a pencil. Mary Heilman (Pat Hearn) first appeared in the 70's, and her elegant versions of geometry have not taken many changes since. They are full of lovely color, relaxed but vigorous, and a pleasure to see again. Stephen Pace (Katharina Rich Perlow) who first exhibited in the 50's, brought back his earliest work in a retrospective. Some of the best impulses of early Abstract Expressionism were there, and their vulnerable innocence was both strange and touching.

Agnes Martin (Pace Wildenstein), probably the best example of a Minimalist painter, presented her latest work, which varied from her style only with its less defined lines and paler color. Seeing these paintings, I was more than ever impressed with their cool independence and absolute conviction.

Altoon Sultan (Marlborough): A departure from his well-known paintings of simple objects, this show was a piece of Americana. It was about agriculture, and it showed fields of soybeans, fertilizer tanks, irrigation equipment, grain bins and cows. A sort of celebration of virtue and a return to basics?

A 60's painter who fled to the safety of Vermont, Marjorie Kramer made a return to Soho (55 Mercer) with a show of homely local scenes - backyards, clotheslines, old automobiles. It all seemed sad, but perhaps only to a committed urban dweller.

Machines, Process, Formula:

How else to group artists who use recognizable process, or simulate machines or convert previous style and still can't be described as "in the style of"?

Melissa Meyer (Devon Golden Fine Art): A show about a process used in the Garner Tullis Project, which involved encaustic done on specially produced paper. What actually appeared in these small pieces were swirled free-hand abstractions in rather murky colors. There is some therapeutic element suggested, but not easy to discern. In Ingo Meller's show (Cheim & Reid) there was also a simulation of machinery. Broad strokes of paint roughly applied were the same for each canvas, so that the look was both spontaneous and factory-made. Takeshi Kawashima (Walter Wickiser) presented work based on commercial logos minus printed words, which were precise, harmonious, and absolutely correct. Dan Walsh (Paula Cooper) did not derive from machines, but from process. Abstract, and based on the grid and geometry, it still appeared conventionally decorative, suitable for corporate spaces, pleasant and unchallenging.

Marjorie Welish (E.M. Donahue): based on geometry, the work turned in different directions, and its theme, explained in words, soared above that which was visible. Helmut Federle (Peter Blum) also presented geometrically designed large canvases, to which were attached many kinds of metaphysical meanings. These were described in a long scholarly article to be read with the show; now obviously, geometry for itself is not considered enough by some practitioners.

And showing an attachment to commercial surface was Eric Wolfe (Jessica Frederick), whose large black and white scenes were impeccably rendered. They suggested abstraction but also represented real locations.

[The Year That Was: Marching Toward the Millennium will continue in Issues #3 and #4, discussing Sculpture, Video, Photography and Performance.]

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