Word: whitney
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Every two years, the Whitney Biennial sails round and is promptly declared by its critics to be sinking. Look, the mast has gone! The hull has sprung, the captain is drunk, and the ship's macaw has taken over the chartroom! The pumps cannot keep up with the gurgling inflow of banality! Heavens, the parallels with Western civilization itself are too evident to resist! Not only are things not what they used to be, but it is so long since they were what they were that few can remember what they might have been. Indeed, one of the main...
...will they? The 1981 Whitney Biennial has now arrived, along with a whole season of roundups, "direction" shows and the like. East of the Appalachians, two other major ones are running: in New York, the Guggenheim's "19 Artists-Emergent Americans," and in Washington, the Hirshhorn Museum's "Directions 1981." Among them, these three sample the work of some 150 painters, sculptors, land artists, photographers, video and film makers. Some of the artists, like Richard Diebenkora, Harry Callahan or Ellsworth Kelly, are very well known and represented by first-class work. Others, like Willem de Kooning, are equally...
This year the results are often tonic, enjoyable and full of hope. Some shoots of real vitality have been emerging from the conceptual rubble of late modernism. Although there is nostalgia for the arid pieties of yesteryear-Peter Lodato's two blank 11-ft.-high rectangles at the Whitney, for instance-the general tone is unsystematic, quirkish and opposed to movements. So much so, indeed, that curatorial bias gets in the way. No one is likely to miss minimal art, but the total exclusion of color-field painting reflects as much bigotry as its absolute dominance did ten years...
...constructions and collages at Wildenstein last spring, and throughout the summer a selection of her major "environmental" sculptures from the '50s and '60s-arrays and assemblies of separate pieces, meant to confront the viewer with whole surrounding families of shape and texture-went on view at the Whitney Museum in New York. This year, according to her dealer, Nevelson is "resting." Rest, in terms of a career like hers, is an extremely relative term...
...over form, shadow vanishing into deeper shadow, leading the eye inward to a profusion of veiled detail that demanded the most strenuous attention. In an environment she showed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, Dawn's Wedding Feast (reassembled in her 1980 show at the Whitney), Nevelson turned this effect inside out by painting the whole array white, not black. The chalky surface now produced an effect of mummification, not atmospheric distance; the calcined forms, visually explicit, retreated from the eye in a startling way. She also made a number of gold-painted sculptures that were...