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Bathtubs, Boxes and Art

'Eight Artists' Exhibition is High Point of the Season

By GRIFFIN SMITH
Herald Art Editor

[[image- painting]]
'Studio Wall,' 1973 Oil and Magna Canvas by Lichtenstein
- Phillip Johnson Collection

Installing a bathtub is hard enough when you're coping with a bathroom. When the bathtub has to be included in an art exhibition, you'd better call an art expert or you'll be ridden out of town and it won't be by the plumbers union.

David Whitney, New York organizer of the "Eight Artists" exhibition at the Miami Art Center through May 5, filled the bill. The center imported him for a "three-day job" on the show that he originally had put together for the Corpus Christi Museum in Texas.

Whitney's problem was not limited to Robert Rauschenberg's "Sor Acqua" (the bathroom, complete with dirty water and floating demijohn "anchored" to what looks like the suspended remnants of a tin roof after a tornado).

There are three other Rauschenberg constructions, including one involving a pair of white enameled kitchen chairs supporting demijohns hidden in a "screen" of gauze netting ("Sant 'Agnese"), four huge, unpainted plywood veneer boxes by Don Judd and 27 paintings by six artists as diverse as Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Christensen, Neil Jenny, Gary Stephan, and Peter Young.

This type of show, through conceded the most significant to come to South Florida this year, could have been an instant fiasco. As Whitney put it, "Take four of the most important artists in the United States, put them in the same room and you have a four-way fight, with the public demanding Rauschenberg's blood.

"Add FOUR young artists of varying talent working in different styles to the package, and they get cannibalized. You must keep any of this from happening."

Whitney could not put up partitions - the usual procedure - to isolate individual work, because the sculpture needed every inch of breathing space. Instead it became necessary to install what amounts to eight one-man shows, strategically places so that no single work is killed or upstaged by another, regardless of viewing angle.