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AF 6/68

trasts of light and shadow.  The relation of part to part is often unexpected and adds an excited rhythm to the work. 

The four dark "open form" bronze and wood construction-sculptures of 1961-64 document the complexity of steps and missteps involved in Voulkos' shift from the clotted compression of his work in fired clay to the demands of a new medium. These are built by welding or fastening together pre-cast bronze in various shaped slabs (some ragged, some bent) and metal sheets folded, curled into tubes, or otherwise eccentrically twisted.  As constructions they are technically impressive, if too easily derivative in statement from the Abstract Expressionist esthetic and the objets trouvésbent fender-junkyard school.  More important, matter and manner are never quite co-ordinated; "Vargas II," for example, in spite of its brave linear attempt to wing out into space (and one can appreciate here the extent of Voulkos' reaction to the restrictions of clay) has a gravity-bound heaviness to its individual slabs and an awkwardly incoherent contour.  "Big Remington III" is the strongest of the four, compensating by the boldness of its large, distraught sheets of steel at one end for the less convincing clutter of bronze detritus at the other.  Perhaps most provocative in these intermediary works is Voulkos' use of a heavy table or platform-like base for his scattering fragments.  Whether, as in "Honk," a hospital bed for modern mutilations or, in "Bad Day at Shattuck III," an icy last resting place for a mangled mystery, they add an oddly calculated stark, and weighty note to otherwise diffuse conceptions. 

This notion of a platform setting has recently been clarified and dramatized.  Voulkos now uses it for the on-stage geometry of his latest works, "Hiro" and "Big A" (both 1964-65); huge, spotless, shiny aluminum post and lintel arrangements, they support with symmetric balance the bright yellow glitter of polished bronze Brancusi-like forms which rest above and dangle below.  These forms, once more monoliths, play different variations on angular ways to slice a sphere.(Does Voulkos refute Clement Greenberg's statement:"To all intents and purposes, the Renaissance and monolithic tradition of sculpture was given its quietus by Brancusi"?)  Not at all related to the art of subtle mathematical adjustments, the two new works deal brilliantly with high drama; their tensions have to do with weight, clean shadows, and brightness falling from the air.

The changes in style recorded in this exhibit are so extreme that one feels an exasperated necessity to search out unifying links, such as the rude and perhaps fractious strength throughout-an assertive power achieved partially through aggressive handling of materials and partially through grandiose scale (one sees it in the bunched masses of clay, in the think slabs of torn, bent bronze, and, equally, in the heavy Leger columns of the recent work). Another constant is Voulkos' rough, consonantal rhythm - a pervasive irregularity in the juxtaposition of forms.  What seems surprising in the context of such ambitious strength is an apparently passive weathercock sensitivity to the winds of artistic fashion.  And what is most painfully absent is the electric and unifying pressure of a personal vision, which perhaps explains the curious lack of cumulative force in an exhibit that, after all, contains a fair number of strong individual pieces.  The show is accompanied by a catalog admirably long on photographs, but, for a museum publication, disappointingly short on words.  N.M.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Dwan Gallery: 
One large combine-painting and a group of frottage-drawings constitute this show of quietly attractive post-Biennale, post brouhaha work.  The painting, "New York Bird Call for Oyvind Fahlstrom," is a pastel-toned collage equipped with a lagniappe of several moveable parts, primarily three tiny, neatly plastic-covered canvases attached to the mother canvas by a long key-chain or hooks.  The composition of the main canvas is based on more or less rectangular cut papers, each a separate image and each tidily stapled so as to cover the entire surface.  The upper portion, a bird-scape, is plastered together in controlled tachistic disarray; the lower images - silk screened city scenes (some familiar from earlier work, some repeated in drawings in this show) and cloud formations - cut broader sections of the canvas and work against each other with irregular balance.  One should note that this new work again contains objects, but of a tame, assimilable, and flat enough character to take them out of the "gap" and put them into a Cubistic order: a tube-ended hockey stick makes a useful diagonal across some birds; an attached trash can cover (folded and beaten flat) adds a double curve and texture, as well as one of several possible allusions to city sounds; isolated metal letters and numbers are absorbed into the collage surface with no trouble.  The tiny sibling canvases have the effect of frisky decoration, rather than (as they might have, say, in Johns) the weight of philosophic statements about, for example, "the nature of a picture plane" or "the ambiguous relation of object to image."  The reference in the title is apparently to Fahlstrom's phonetic bird calls in a work called "Sunrise" and the moveable parts presumably relate to the chance-oriented and Cage-influenced programming of that artist's work.  But since Rauschenberg's basic format is fixed, he is only toying here with the idea of chance, rather than actually presenting thirteen ways of looking at a bird call - i.e., "the beauty of innuendoes" is chosen in preference to "the beauty of inflections."

If the surface of the painting-combine is thick with the clustering of image and the physical density of collage, the drawings are, conversely poetic in the tenuities.  The combined effects of frottage, silk-screen, and occasional pale color make even the most crowded agglomerations of scientists, invoices, crowds, beer bottles, fruit, keys, Campbell soup ads, comic strips, juice cans, presidents, credit cards, faces in the crowd, government buildings, watches and urban-in-need-of-renewal landscapes seem subtle, bodiless, and elegant.  Silent interspaces muffle and grisaille effects dominate.  These drawings have not much to do with either sensuous apprehensions of modern reality or social comment.  If Rauschenberg does not believe that one should "mettre le coeur a nu," neither does he eschew personality; these bodiless, flickering images have the Daguerre scent (not unpleasant) of nostalgia, and a way of rushing the documented present into the past.         N.M.

GASTON LACHAISE, Felix Landau Gallery:
This exhibition consists of some fifty works covering a twenty-five year span from 1910 to 1935.  Included are a group of bronzes, many of which are quite familiar, and a series of drawings that have never before been exhibited.  The bronzes are mostly female and male nudes and Expressionistic, distorted studies of potions of the female anatomy.  These distorted pieces, made during the latter part of Lachaise's career, combine a personal, poetic commentary on the human form with a kind of precise pulling asunder of one portion of the body, doing battle with it, training it, making it swell or jump through hoops and finally creating a kind of contextual gap where each portion achieves its own life and tells its own story without regard for the rest of its companion members.

The drawings do much the same thing, but here the whole person is used.  Anatomy, as we know it, is made to do marvelous things and develop grotesqueries which bear no literal resemblance to life, but seem all the more real for their simplicity, directness and semblance of a non-rational truth.  It is this that gives Lachaise his power - his ability to present the most outrageous distortions with a simplicity and wit that somehow rings true.  His was a highly personal art given formal precedent by a previous generation of European Expressionism.  Thus, the allure of these pieces is based almost entirely upon a kind of empathy with his vision.         D.F.

TOM HOLLAND, Wilder Gallery:  Bulging canvases by the San Francisco artist taste powerfully of "Dr. Strangelove." Holland has learned to love the bomb, airplanes and automobiles - mechanical symbols of destruction and virility - all of which contrive to become candidly phallic.  The earth, bombarded, supporting the speeding car, place of rest for the plane, is the feminine principle.  He colors solemnly, using dark, frosting-think impasto laid on in patterns of plowed fields so that even his technique becomes a metaphor for fecundity.  Certain canvases are built out dimensionally; the hood of a convertible juts forth, pulpy palm leaves shade an erotic landscape, while other canvases are blasted victims of an explosion or ejaculation.  The pictures are technically remarkable for their formal integration of relief elements and for the consistently fine control of impasto. Holland has had the sense to scale his statements monumentally so that the finest line is rendered as if with a blunt, lethal instrument.
Probably his imagery comments at two levels; first as a simple celebration of potent virility - a circumstance altogether refreshing amid the confused attenuation of most current interpretation- and secondly as epic Rabelaisian satire of the spiritual impotence that prompts misuse of power.          W.W.

CHARLES GARABEDIAN, Ceeje Galleries:
The painter shows 20 canvases, mostly small and meticulous, dating from 1963 to the present.  The surface look of a primitive, or even an amateur, while very apparent, begins to dissolve upon even a little reflection.  The picture-making devices are too complex, and innocence never triumphs in these works.  Rather, a whole set of art historical origins emerge, most of which are pre-Cubist.  There is a spreading of interest that can include the early Northern and Southern European Renaissance as in "Saint Francis at Lake Arrowhead" and "Christ Under the Off-Ramp," as well as 1930s public mural style as in "Dana Goldman."  The welder figure in this latter work so heroically fills the bursting

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