Word: whitney
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...ones here? To begin with, realist painting-but with a twist. The plain declarative style of tonal realism, whose American master is Philip Pearlstein, is hardly in evidence, although there are some exquisitely rendered pastel studies of gray, tumblng Midwestern skies by William Beckman at the Hirshhorn, and the Whitney has some beautifully observed images by William Bailey (still life) and Rackstraw Downes (panoramic landscape). The best figurative work at the Guggenheim is by the oldest of the "emergent" artists, the 63-year-old West Coast movie critic and former abstractionist Manny Farber. His still lifes of labels, dolls, mementos...
...other primary vein of imagistic painting in these surveys (particularly the Whitney's) is a vague catch-all for anything reminiscent of punk or other nouveau-wavo aggressions. "Dumb art," it is conveniently called, and some of it is very dumb indeed-but not all. One notable exception is the work of a precocious 25-year-old named Jedd Garet, whose paintings seem to take their stylistic base from, of all things, late De Chirico- not the pre-1918 master of tailor's dummies and spare, aching urban spaces, but the pompous neoclassicist of the '30s. Coarsely...
...several years now, Borofsky, 38, has been filling galleries with his stoned pictorial ramblings, large-scale doodles interspersed with logorrheic messages in script. What they may mean (assuming that these spurts of buckeye American surrealism are meant to have any narrative meaning) is utterly opaque, but in the Whitney he is at it again, in his klutzy, feckless way, in a room dominated by scrawled names and a huge black cutout of a man who repeatedly swings a hammer. Whatever its meaning, this piece is visually more interesting than the "environment" that greets one on the fourth floor...
Recent decorative tendencies in American art are sampled at the Whitney but ignored in both the Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn. The idea of an art, abstract or figurative, that is entirely hedonistic, anxiety-free and without social resonance is not, of course, new in America. That was what most abstract painting in the '60s was about, although the fact was concealed as embarrassing. Now the impulse is out of the closet, which is a relief-although it seems not to have produced any genuinely major painting. The best of the peintre-décorateurs, and the longest...
Earthworks and land art are notoriously difficult to get into a museum -in fact part of their aim was to escape its confines-and at the Whitney they are present, in a ghostly way, through slide projection. But there is one unusually gifted land artist at the Hirshhorn, Lita Albuquerque. By dusting isolated stones or strewing sharp, evanescent blotches of pigment in desert places (the color is then blown away by the wind), Albuquerque produces an exquisitely fugitive interference with the landscape, like a fleeting pictograph, an acceleration of cultural time in the great stasis of nature. Her single rock...