Viewing page 35 of 38

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Village Voice 1/11/68 

Art 

The New-Old Look 

By John Perreault

Richard Artschwager's "sculpture" now at the Castelli Gallery is disconcerting for several reasons. It is vulgar, eccentric, coldly nostalgic, and embodies the current post-Camp; post-Pop sensibility that is straightforward in its backward look at outmoded popular and historical styles.

At one point in his career, Artschwager supported himself by making furniture and he is best known for his Pop-Minimal works that parody furniture. In his current show shadowy references to counters, end tables, double luncheonette seats, screens, and the like are all executed- with the exception of one blue piece- in unpleasantly marbleized brown Formica, resembling the smokey swirls used on the insides of turn-of-the century book bindings. The pieces are all "hand-made" out of this diseased-looking, overtly-nostalgic Formica which, since the structures themselves are clean-cut and rather Minimal, produces a peculiar union of contradictions. The most successful pieces are the hinged panels and the wall works that hang somewhere between painting and sculpture and seem to mimic overblown Victorian picture frames, except that the frames themselves are, so to speak, the pictures. 
At the moment, in clothing, in popular music, and in decor, we seem to be looking back to other historical periods which, given our insane world of napalm, corruption, and American Imperial decay, don't seem as distasteful as they probably were. Or perhaps it is merely that we are insatiable in our need for new stimuli that we have embarked once again on a romantic voyage of historical plunder. 
Just as this new look at the past is happening in life, it seems also to happening in. Along new Trans-Lux Victorianism, other recent examples are Roy Lichtenstein's "modern paintings" that mimic the popular Cubism of the '20s and '30s, and many of the Serial works of Robert Smithson which, along with his recent writing's. ("Ultra Modern" in Arts and "The Monuments of Passaic") express this new romanticism, not without some ambiguity. Also, more than one person has pointed out that Frank Stella's new paintings, as impressive as they are, have a certain '30s resonance to them. Those wide curves of color are not entirely unrelated of Radio City bannisters and to Radio City itself. Recently I even found myself admiring an old radio in the window of a Third Avenue pawnshop and thinking how its lumpy 1930 streamlining would look in a living room full of Stella's paintings and Lichtenstein's Brass Rail sculpture. 

Artschwager's new works have this new-old look also. It's all very neo-romantic and I don't find it altogether pleasant. But, of course, art does not necessarily have to be pleasant. This new romanticism in art throws me off balance. Therefore, I suspect that it must be valid. This is not superficial as it sounds. My favorite view of art, pieced together from many sources and perhaps most fully articulated by Morse Peckham in his "Man's Rage for Chaos," is that art proceeds by discontinuities and that each art work is in itself a surprise and a discontinuity that destorys preconceptions and shocks and wakes up the senses. Just as we get used to Minimal-Primary Structure, in other words, along comes something unexpected to upset all the theories and all the self-satisfied comfort, that took so long to attain. 
This new style that I am trying to identify, perhaps prematurely, is, unlike Camp or Pop, not in the least sarcastic. It seems quite innocent, perhaps too innocent. Statement and sentiment are in harmony. The heaviness of the forms is related to the "bad" art of the '20s end '30s, but although also related to Claes Oldenburg's famous Cedar Rapids bedroom set, it is not really satiric or condescending, but deadpan, sensuous, and terribly nostalgic.
From last year's "Winchesters Cathedral" right down to the latest Beatles album, popular music is certainly riddled with the nostalgic as is the current fad for military and band uniforms and grandma evening gowns. There is no reason to have assumed that art could have remained forever immune to this new romanticism. What is particularly disturbing at the moment, in Artschwager's TransLux Victorianism in particular, is that we are not yet accustomed to the kinds of emotions that this new sensibility allows and even insists upon.