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106 DJM

[[left margin]]VOICE SEPTEMBER 23-29, 1981[[/left margin]]

Ply Me with Judd

By Roberta Smith

Just when I thought it was safe to go back onto West Broadway, August is over, and I'm thinking this column should be renamed Space Run, or simply Art Frenzy. The art world seems to have cloned itself over the summer. There are new, renovated, and/or relocated galleries everywhere and more artists than ever turning out amazingly finished, professional products, ready for consumption. The Italians are here, the Germans are coming, and the French are rumored to be not far behind. Soho, shifting to an entirely new strata of beyond-art success, has finally overtaken both the Upper East Side (in chicness and rents) and the West Village (in gawking tourists) in a single rush. It's a very exciting, demanding time, but the excitement is undercut by a sickening feeling that things are accelerating out of control. The art world threatens to operate quite well without any real art at all, just something on the walls to provide ambience while people stand around and talk.

There's almost more talk about the outsize proportions and snazzy gray-and-black-on-white glamour of Mary Boone's new navelike gallery at 417 West Broadway than about her opening group show; everything in it, including an unusually ferocious painting by Julian Schnabel, looks slightly overwhelmed by such high-powered, high-style packaging. Barbara Toll has gone completely public with a beautiful little gallery on Greene Street and, uptown, Brooke Alexander has also moved to larger quarters, but little of the art on display seems up to the general sense of decor and design.

Perhaps one shouldn't set too much store in group shows-they all require highly selective viewing. I've mentioned the new Schnabel. Also look to the newly complicated, painterly canvas by Eric Fischl in Edward Thorpe's show. See Kathryn Markel's lighthearted, otherwise forgettable, "Starry Nights" for its John Torreano Comet and a relatively benign, nonviolent painting by Richard Bosman. Oscarsson Hood's skimpy but ponderously titled "The New Spiritualism: Transcendent Images in Painting and Sculpture" should embarrass everyone in it, but is graced by a small geometric Myron Stout drawing and a rather enticing painting by Joe Haske, also small. Probably the most solid group show is at Metro Pictures where Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons are all unveiling significant departures from previous work. Sherman in particular continues to develop in great leaps forward.

With the widespread manipulation of the photographic image in painting and drawing as well as photography, Andy Warhol's stock has risen once again; his current show should cause it to drop. Held in what must be the least known Soho gallery in the vast-size category, it makes the space look particularly large and empty.

I'm always interested in what Warhol does, but by now my interest is less in the visual, more in the conceptual shell game: where will he pop up next. "Myths," his latest series of prints bolstered by a few paintings is not too far afield-just far enough to contradict some of the characteristics that made him great in the first place. One characteristic was the instinct for turning live personalities-Marilyn, Jackie, Mao-into indelible icons slightly in advance of their deification in the general consciousness. In contrast, "Myths" represents long-established icons which were also usually never real people in the first place: Howdy Doody, Superman, Dracula, Santa Claus, Uncle Sam. Another characteristic was the talent for turning shows

SPACEWALK

into total experiences which overwhelmed the viewer and subordinated individual works of art, sometimes disguising their insufficiency. In contrast, this show has a disjunctive, haphazard look. At its best it offers a tepid summary of Warhol's several methods of presenting the image-in a overall grid, singly, in quadrants-and drawing styles; at its worst it looks like important moments from the history of popular illustration. The Superman prints and painting are so close to their source that the results suggest third-rate Pop Art circa 1965. The only motif which has anything like Warhol's old icon-uncovering instinct is Margaret Hamilton, Oz's wicked witch, in mid-screech. In a way that's touchingly modest, the weakest "Myth" is Warhol's flat, oversimplified image of himself. (Ronald Feldman Downtown, 31-33 Mercer, 966-3008, through October 10)

Gregory Amenoff's show exemplifies a kind of formularized professional art performance frequently encountered in today's successful art gallery. Amenoff's painting offers a synthesis of the organic abstraction of Hartley and Dove, wrought in large scale, with thick impasto and a darkly bright palette. It is eery to see the efforts of two artists whose appeal rests so much on a certain vulnerable lack of perfection being assimilated into work which 

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is so disturbingly effort-free. There is nothing and everything wrong with these paintings: they are replete, resolved, skillful, even satisfying to look at and yet they cancel themselves out. Their absolute consistency of tone-chromatic, emotional, and physical-both across each surface and from painting to painting makes the work ultimately very anonymous, mechanical, soulless. Amenoff doesn't allow himself any mistakes, nor does he take on much beyond the highly developed level of his meticulous craftsmanship. His work is permeated with an air of impersonal competence and, despite its brooding coloration, a cheerful invulnerability. (Robert Miller, 724 Fifth Avenue, 246-1625, through October 3)

The year of the Germans, which is upon us, is not getting off to a good start. Bernd Zimmer's paintings of large, colorful mountains, waterfalls, and the heads of cattle (also mountainous), are for the most part painted in the nonchalant, gestural style which locates itself somewhere between German Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and 1950s Bay Area figurative expressionism (remember David Park and Elmer Bischoff?) with great swishes of bright, thinly stained paint. The impact of the work stems mostly from its large scale and saturated color. The images seem deliberately banal, almost incidental-the main thing being the gestures, but then these don't seem to mean much either. By far the best painting in the show is the deep blue, starlit image of bathers. Painted in noticeably less grandiose and more felt brushwork, it is also extremely in debt to K. H. Hodicke, the German painter Zimmer studied with. By the time you read this, Hodicke's work will be on view at Annina Nosei's gallery and perhaps someone will be thinking of doing a David Park show. (Barbara Gladstone, 41 West 57th Street, 758-6765, through October 10)

I've always liked Ron Nagle's ceramic objects, and his current ones, delicate fusions of painting and sculpture, of Art Deco stylishness and Surrealist suggestiveness in glazed porcelain, are no exception. These upright cylinders and squares, all eight inches or less in height, are short on size but long on presence. Animated by a rightward lean, as if they're in a slight hurry, they present front panels of contrasting, spattered colors which are often cut into on the right side, a device which adds a jutting profile reminiscent of a facial expression in some cases and of a modified bathroom fixture in others. Nagle's orchestration of each object's textures, tints, spatters, and blobby drips always seems slightly miraculous to me, like some exquisite orchid, and yet he continually shows how craft can be taken to perfection, then for granted, and so on into the expression of a full-scale ambition. 92 [[?]] Cowles, 420 West Broadway, through October 3)

[[?]] figural madness

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which currently grips the New York scene, Donald Judd's great wall-a mammoth plywood honeycomb of stacked and truncated rectangular volumes-is a sobering, exhilarating reminder that the so-called Minimalist aesthetic is neither played out nor particularly minimal. The centerpiece of Judd's first show in two and a half years, this work jams together the structural shifts laid out one by one in the divided plywood floor and wall-box series which made up his 1977 and 1978 New York exhibitions at Heiner Friedrich. More than that, it touches on virtually every structural idea that Judd has ever used: the vertical wall stack, the horizontal row of boxes, the diagonal plane, the flat-footed but unobtrusive use of systems (although the system involved here remains totally mysterious with one viewing). It also brings Judd's characteristic emphasis on the edges and thickness of materials, which the striated one-inch thick plywood makes remarkably specific, into more dramatic play then ever before. Masterpiece is a pompous word, but it applies here, for this work represents a tremendous shift in Judd's career, one which seems comparable to Stella's shift to painted metal relief six years ago, but only time will tell.

Standing 12 feet high and running 80 feet along the wall, the work looks at first like the biggest speaker system in the world. It is neither sculpture nor architecture nor environment: it has an immense but not inhuman scale; it can't be seen all at once, which is at odds with Judd's usual simplicity, and yet it is unified. The structure's continuous row of 10 triple-tiered boxes yields 30 volumes eight by four by four feet, each cut by a diagonal plane, or two or three of them, slanting from the upper front edge to the back or bottom of each box. It joins Judd's customary static form with a new sensation of speed and movement; its many facets and angles, its spaces and volumetric illusions click by when you walk past it or move your eyes along it. The result is a series of 3-D volumes which are often quite difficult to read (sometimes the work seems like a giant exercise in depth perception)combined with a front surface which is broken regularly and irregularly by horizontal bands of varying widths.(This is where the genius of plywood comes in, but it's impossible to describe in this space.) This combination of sensations strains the eye-to-brain connection but doesn't short-circuit it; the way this work presents, disguises, and eats up space all at once-and does something similar with issues of size and scale-will sustain a lot of looking and thinking.(Leo Castelli, 142 Greene Street, 431-6279, through October 17)