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ART FORUM - DEC. 1975 - Phil Patton            ROSENQUIST

leads the way single-file along a mountain path; the land falls away beyond them and their silhouettes on the narrow high shelf of foreground have the strange staginess of a George Stubbs painting.

These two pictures, by contrast, point up what is so potent about Sander's photography and also so depressing. With rare exceptions, Sander's people are not caught at any particular point in time——they seem frozen for eternity. It is difficult to imagine them going through life expressing anything but what we see on their faces. The handymen and Sander's family are more obviously in the process of experiencing their lives, of knowing who they are. The rest combine to form a collective portrait of the German people: it is possible to sense the nation's past and (God knows) its future in these portraits. But few of these people admit the possibility of a personal history, or of an individual consciousness of that past and future. History is temporal; they did not participate, it occurred elsewhere.

Nancy Rosen and Edward Fry have organized "Projects in Nature..." which is "...Eleven Environmental Works Executed at Merriewold West." Merriewold West is the Far Hills, New Jersey, farm and weekend retreat of Mary Lea and Victor D'Arc, who also financed this undertaking. Rosen and Fry considered the work of artists they knew and of artists who responded to ads placed in art magazines last winter. They finally invited six artists from New York City and five from elsewhere to participate. This exhibition was planned as an alternative to the usual "playground" effect of large objects scattered about fields, although the D'Arcs have quite a few of those too. Making art count against or in the environment is no easy task, but it is simplified by the fact that artists can now consider a piece of the environment as they used to consider a blank canvas, that is, with a certain number of known possibilities and conventions available to them. Some conventions are a little too available, and the results here vary tremendously in intention and success.

The real meat of the exhibition was the work by ALICE AYCOCK and GEORGE TRAKAS (possibly the best I've seen by either artist) and the less successful, but interesting projects of ROELOF LOUW and ALAN SONDHEIM. These four went beyond merely presenting or altering aspects of the environment——they pulled the viewer into their work and into a more internalized perception of nature. Aycock and Trakas did it bluntly, forcing the viewer into precarious, uncomfortable conditions to graso their work completely. "Seeing" Aycock's Project for a Simple Network for Underground Wells and Tunnels meant descending a ladder into a seven-foot well and crawling through 25-inch high tunnels. As usual, Aycock's structure is obsessively sound, so clearly sturdy that you know whatever is going on in your head results from your own personal phobias (or ideas of comfort, for those who find such damp isolation cozy). Aycock's materials and building methods are cooly contemporary, but her actual forms are layered with ominous historical precedents: caves, catacombs, dungeons, beehive tombs.

In Union Station, Trakas contrasted materials and building methods in two bridges which extended out from an elevated road into a marshy forest. The bridges, one of steel and one of wood slats (looking like a small railroad) would have intersected about 100 feet out, except Trakas dynamited the meeting point, splintering the end of the wood bridge, twisting the steel bridge back onto itself, and creating a large pit filled with water. Walking out on either bridge was like approaching the scene of some violent accident, a collision, perhaps, between the industrial and the natural. Ironically, however, the slatted wood bridge mechanized you, riveting your eyes downward in the effort to stay upright. The steel bridge was continuous, easy, liberating your vision, removing the fear of falling. In different ways, Aycock and  Trakas managed to divert the romantic power of nature into their pieces. Aycock excluded it and created her own mysterious, totally consuming situation; Trakas inserted into the environment delicate man-made structures which focus that entire wooded area on a dramatic narrative and a single climatic event.

Louw's piece, although less controlling, also involves movement and shifts in perception, this time between three large steel plates (c. 7' X 9') dispersed up a large, sloping field. Louw's work is the most abstract, the least romantic, and there's a lot going on in it experientially (not the least of which are interesting shifts in spatial and pictorial perceptions). But for all its supposed rigor, the placement of the plates is mysteriously arbitrary and the piece, which leans too much on Serra, seems muffled and obscure in intent and effect.

Sondheim's project is something of a glorious failure. Sondheim had a grandiose scheme to contrast the microcosmic with the macrocosmic, explained at length and mostly unintelligibly in his portion of the catalogue, but his involvement with Merriewold yielded a strange 60-minute video tape which seems to sum up the wonders and the uncontrollability of nature. Most of the tape is devoted to looking at various drops of Merriewold water which reveal deep transparent spaces, a variety of forms and textures in constant, violent motion, all swarming through the environment, all invisible to normal sight. Sondheim complements this visual deluge with two narrations, one spoken, one typed onto the tape. The sounds are of city traffic, radios (macrocosmic). But mostly Sondheim talks and writes about the project, himself, his loneliness and sense of failure. Periodically he identifies specimens. In the end Sondheim's personality and confessions become part of the general uncontrollable data. He is intelligent, humorous, melodramatic, self-indulgent, part scientist, part artist, part adolescent, constantly moving and changing.
——ROBERTA SMITH

JAMES ROSENQUIST, Leo Castelli Gallery uptown; "A Survey of Polaroid Color Photography," International Center of Photography; ROSAMOND WOLFF PURCELL, Neikrug Gallery:

Ten years ago Lucy Lippard commented that JAMES ROSENQUIST seemed to stand on the verge of the nonobjective. His latest set of drawings shows him even closer to the nonobjective, and further away from the huge juxtaposition of Pop images which make up paintings like the F-111.

Rosenquist has always claimed to be concerned with avoiding collage; this movement away from the figurative in his work also may be part of the movement away from mere juxtaposition. Certainly the new sketches were unified more schematically than Rosenquist's previous work. It was a unity more self-consciously painterly than in his earlier work, although the imagery is drawn largely from the Rosenquist of the past.

There is still the same aggressiveness and even violence which has always seemed a feature of Rosenquist's work, the flashing of images in huge scale, the rubbing of the viewer's nose in cliché details from the world of advertising. Wind and Lightning, however, refers to much more abstract and almost expressionistic shapes in the drawings. This can go alongside such advertising icons——now rendered less literally——as the tangled orbs of an atom symbol or the little close-up cluster of color dots taken from color TV ads.

Rosenquist's interest here seemed to be chiefly in marks on the paper as traces of real objects now departed, as clues left from some encounter between three-dimensional objects and the flat paper. Spray stenciling or spray tracing and cutouts pasted on are key techniques. No longer do we see the rosy-cheeked girl from the billboard; now we see a large rouge pad bursting through the paper, larger than life. We don't see tailfins of big cars, but tire tracks, as if the vehicle had been in the studio and just driven away.

In a sense Rosenquist seems to be going backward toward painters like Johns and Rauschenberg when he embeds a flag behind flaps of paper or has a reduced-size ladder flopping half cut out of the paper, half part of it. Rosenquist treats groups of nails in a variant of Dine's method of tracing tools onto canvas or paper. Nails have been a key element in the imagery of Rosenquist's work for the last few years and have a long history as literary symbol in modern painting. The trompe l'oeil nail in the Cubist painting asserts a plane behind that of the canvas. Dine's or Rauschenberg's physical nails hold things on the flat canvas, or suspend them out from it. But Rosenquist's nails are here shown sideways, in spray-painted silhouette, larger than life size. They hang there in the space of the paper, leaving their trace rather than asserting their presence in three dimensions.

Other self-conscious references are more overt: Rosenquist pencils labels beside elements in the picture. One element which asserts the paper's flatness against the recession of some shapes sketched on it is labeled "aperture anchor." In place of the sound it would have made, a dinner triangle is stenciled on the paper, accompanied by its handwritten name.

These sketches seem to mark Rosenquist's shift to another mode of work, and while some of what they attempt is played out, they may also represent an artist in search of an alternative that may surprise us.

To stay healthy, any art needs a continuous replenishment of it sense of magic, of energy, of lightness and play. At its best, Polaroid photography seems to provide this kind of nourishment to photography today. It is a technical innovation which also restores a vigorous crudeness and naïvete to the medium. It reduces the number of procedural