Word: whitneys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...