Viewing page 12 of 12

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

ART/WORLD
[?] Subscription $20.00 per year $30.00 [?] JUNE 1986 [?]
May 20- June 20, 1988
[image]
JAMES ROSENQUIST, "Through the Eye of the Needle to the Anvil" 1988, oil on canvas, 17 x 46 feet, at Castelli, 420 W. Broadway.
Copyright 1988 Arts Review, Inc

SOHO EYE
by JOHN BLEE
DOROTHY DEHNER reigns over the Twining Gallery with an exhibition of recent sculpture and several series of drawings dating from the 40's. The Damnation series of 1945 has the incised futility of despair: ruined cities, skeletons, and the surviving insect. There is an interesting relation to the graphic work of David Smith of the same period; Dehner's works are less fetishistic and as a result are more explicit on the horror of war. The sculpture has a strong assertiveness as in "Sign Post" which is totemic and relates to African masks. "Encounter II" has a sense of the body akin to a dancer in a Martha Graham dance. (568 Broadway, through May 28).
At R.C. Erpf, DEWITT GODFREY holds forth with a series of large sculpture and drawings. The latter are reminiscent of Donald Sultans black lemons in their presence but have a nerve and articulateness quite lacking in Sultan. Godfrey's sculpture has an authority that is sustained. There is a feeling for material and a willingness to explore rather than exploit form. His work is not merely another generic manifestation of modern sculpture: it is decidedly unmannered. The sculpture has an approachable tactility too often lacking in much recent work. (568 Broadway, through May 28)
One of the last stands or perhaps the last stand of neo-automatism in painting is the show of JOANNA POSETTEDART at Scott Hanson. Here the breaks in the canvas provide as much drama as the drips, spatters, flung paint, etc. Color never goes awry, but never comes clear. With all the emphasis on properties of paint there is an inherent lack of sensuality and heat; sometimes there is merely fussiness. (415 West Broadway, through May 21)
It is rare than an exhibition makes you rethink a familiar presence; such is the show, MATTA, The Early Years, at Maxwell Davidson Gallery. Five drawings of 1938-41 shown together are startling, Matta manages to retain an experssive force within the surreal framework. The elegance has bite and fury. Here there is a journey worth taking with an artist who too often seems merely academic. One cannot question the integrity of vision. The drawings' hardhewn visionary quality is comparable to early Miro, though done with a very different sensibility. (415 West Broadway, through May 28)
Is glitz spiritual? The cakes of gold and silver in the work of CARL APFELSCHNITT tend to put one off any shamanistic reading. The incorporation of symbol - the mandala, the coiled snake and lunar orbs - come a little too easily. Instead of broken crockery we have imbeded quartz. (at Katzen-Brown, 475 Broome Street to June 11).
Clinging to the tail of surrealism, DAVID HARE manages to retain a whimsical sense of form. In "Arcadian Chariot," a recent work, there is a kind of purity that tends toward classicism. The congragulation cuteness. The deaf-eyed cuteness of his paintings is not endearing. (Gruenebaum Gallery, 415 West Broadway, through May 28).
At the Ingber Gallery SIMON GAON displays a turbulence and an almost heroic attempt to get as much paint on the canvas as is possible. "Beggar" is neoexpressionist, where the pleasure of the paint is at odds with the subject. In "Halloween On Christopher Street" Gaon squeezes paint from the tube and pulls wet paint through wet paint to achieve a richness more matched with the clownish denizens of this picture. Gaon's faces have a sameness of expression; he is more interested in the parade of the paint. (415 West Broadway, through May 28).
Bonnard's wife learned to draw from a teacher who started students off drawing sticks. JOEL FISHER at Diane Brown makes sculptures that look like sticks scrawled in space, yet at the same time are anthropomorphic. There is a laid back humor which is appealing. (560 Broadway, through April 26).
JO BABCOCK made his first pinhole camera out of a V.W. bus. He has since used Quaker Oats boxes, ration cans and paint cans (some fitted with lenses); and exhibited at, of course, Marcuse Pfeifer. Which is not to say that all these cameras (some never used as cameras) are not used to make perfectly serious photographs. Babcock's is an apocalyptic vision: in the moment of a nuclear flash. Sometimes there is a sensuous undulation, or vegetation seen in the ruins. His work is impressive in that the spontaneity of the making is as consistent as the vision that forms it. (568 Broadway, through May 19).
Creative Copies
[image]
REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN, "An English Woman," c. 1640, after Hans Holbein the Younger, pen & brown ink, 191 x 126 mm., in "Creative Copies, Interpretive Drawings from Michelangelo to Picasso" at The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, to July 23.
A. Jansons
By JONATHAN PHILLIPS
Since moving to 72 Greene Street, the M-13 Gallery has been consistently providing quality shows explorting different themes and sensibilities evolving from the impulse and legacy of post abstract expressionism. Andrew Jansons's exhibition of paintings (May 5-28) is no exception to this rue and assures us that M-13 is ending its spring schedule on a high note.
Janson uses acrylic, but partisans of lineseed oil will be fooled by his rich fluid handling of his medium. The serpentine, interlocking shapes which weave in and out of different hues and values as they mesh, provide dense, sensuous impacts. 
In "House of Exile" (1988), the compositional themes of Jansons' show is quite evident. Fires lurk in the eddies of his crosshatching, the cool logic of a painter trained as a physicist manages to emerge from the overall unity achieved by his design.

J. Garvey
By ROBERT HARDING
James Garvey has already received some attention because he is one of the few working blacksmiths and metalwork forge masters here in the metropolitan area. His renown began shortly after his work at the Statue of Liberty ended two years ago.
This show marks the opening of a space fo public display in the storefront of Garvey's shop at 153 Franklin Street. The work achieves a seldom accomplished marriage between the demands of working metal as craft and the demands of satisfying the instinct for meaning in the medium of metal. Garvey, a master of metal work, handmolds redhot steel into gleaming metaphors whose reference is transcendental value and psychic truth. His start shapes and his gleaming twists embody the energies that flow from the center of each person's reality. Thus, metal becomes alive and yet retains the force of its physical presence. 

Jan Staller
By PATRICIA WARNER
There is an arresting exhibition of Ektacolor and dye transfer prints by American photographer Jan STaller at the Lieberman & Saul Gallery (155 Spring Street), whose main subject is the forlorn edges of New Jersey plant and factory sites: those famously blemished areas of grime and detrius that lap the busy highways from New York City. Staller has built a solid reputation upon his lyrical documentation of urban and industrial landscapes. IN the new work, again, he hones his camera on storage tanks, pipelines, rusted girders and sagging wire fences. In Staller's lens and with his surreal use of color, these objects become mystical and engrossing.
The artist prefers to shoot at dawn or dusk on long exposures, when natural and artificial light together render moments of eerie beauty in settings dramatized by the absence of human beings. 

A Painter's Thoughts About His Work
by JOHN HULTBERG
[image]JOHN HULTBERG, "Charred Edge," 1968, oil on canvas, 39x200 inches at Anita Shapolsky, 99 Spring to June 11.
I thought around 1950 that I would et some of these feverish abstract expressionistic slabs of pain we were turning out in San Francisco down on their backs and peer at them from the floor's edge, like Kafka's bug, to see if perspective could lend them a magic they needed for completeness.

Like Van Gogh, I want to lay everything I Have on the table and hope that I'll be called compassionate instead of mad. What a risk to take!
I said twenty years ago I wanted to be George deal Tour to Matta's Caravaggio. Why do I forgive my melodramatic excesses so easily? To shock the avant garde snobs, I say I want to be a populist artist like Verdi and Dickens, Hugo or Rodin. Wasn't this Beethoven's aim? The idea was to confound somehow the "you and I know what these forms mean, but the rabble don't" school of abstraction in painting, where elisions and abbreviations soon become a secret code for the initiated. Following Godel's law that said an overcomplete system risked a sentimentality of smug allusions to a code nobody knew in the first place. 
From a safe distance in a dangerous half-light, I paint crucifixtions miles away from me on faraway hills in an enchanted haze. Any one of these steep long corridors of foreshortened lights may be an exit out of this industrial swamp, this clogged rhetoric of abandoned junk.

When I doubt myself I embellish my paintings with a stale vocabulary.

My happy memories have to do with conquering fear and weakness. Isn't that what a painting might inspire in others who have doubted themselves as I have?
I have to give up certain obsolete PLatonic archetypes that activate the clouds in my paintings. The possessed bickering of Wagner's characters give my painting a hope. I want some human meat in my landscapes' vegetable stews, but not too much!

The best painters are not too articulate; I am ashamed of this loquaciousness in myself. If an artist has the guts to give himself over completely to the spell of strong emotion isn't that enough? This rocking threnody that usually calms me down from world-fear, how can I cleanse my inauthentic wordiness with it to something resembling the sort of grace that will be accepted by the unsophisticated?

Why is it that my thinking of agonized artists always solaces me a little?

The intention of the pioneering zealots of Modern Art was nothing less than the total destruction of all our institutions and the laws of the past. But the only thing that survived this urge were new monuments of the art movement, quickly elevated to holiness and enshrined in academic glory by the heirs of these zealots; new institutions we dare not overturn, explosives turned into bricks for edifices that never should have been built. Soulsearch is alien to the spirit of modern art; let's abandon this obsolete superstition!

The naked female animal curves of Antoni Gaudi frightened the German architects into a brutal rectangularity that was meant to awe and not seduce us, the fortresses of the powerful. Now we have the plastic materials to continue where the art nouveau poets left off, yet we go on with these sterile boxes. Why was this tyranny of the rectangle in painting as well as building? Because windows and doors needed right angle corners for reasons deeper than structural strength? Yet if we allowed the curves of the earth and the celestial ellipses in our dwellings would we not feel an anguish stronger than that given by these perverse cruel boxings, which after all coffin us safe fro an affront, a proud defiance to that whore Mother Nature, whose education imply something far crueller than man can devise.

Jotting down the pretty colored lights of doomsday, yet I cannot make my painting as unabashedly beautiful as those of artists I enfy for their ability to shut off the pain that cripples me. I must inadequately decorate and over-dramatize the torment that fuels me, to make my peculiar dark nights of the soul convincing at least to the part of me that tires to commune with the normal ones. If I could only get to the unquestioning loveliness of music that floats above all human strife to a contentment!

Art to me is that comfort that holds me tight as I die daily.