Born in the Fifties
(Union Square Gallery, November 3–24, 1984)
This group show brings together seven artists working in different mediums and, though aesthetically diverse, a high degree of quality and fun is present here. The show restores the sophistication other members of this baby boom generation have declined. In a range of ways, the work assimilates and develops traditional ideals of form, balance and beauty so absent from current popular painting obsessed with post-W.W.II malaise and expressions of despair and the grotesque. The show is a welcome relief from the amateurish stylings of the younger artists who've been receiving so much press lately. What unites the show, what the works have in common, is an affirmative celebration of life or, at least, a colorful sense of humor in poking fun at its irritations.
Chris Bobin's marvelously detailed quilt, The Jilted Blond (She had her problems), is a flag for an America caught up in its emblems, fetishes and symptoms. Sewn in colorful fabrics is a central image of a tough blonde woman with a cigarette in bright red lips. A super cheeseburger, spilt martini, dangling phone, a hand full of scallions, receding legs in high heels, and the titled spelt out are the attendant images the artist craftsperson has sewn onto a patterned field. A few syringes, capsules, fake knives and onions, sleazy boxes of prophylactics ("gathered in gas station men's rooms all over the south") are decoratively attached onto the surface. The breezy "pop"-like rendering of the images and the large scale clash hilariously with their sobering commentary. Ms. Bobin has taken the folk art of quilting into modern times. One can't help admire the skill that went into creating this reeling, hungover, Hanna-Barbara-like tapestry.
Lisa Egan's set of twenty paintings collectively titled Entropy, are hung salon-like and fit together to meld an environment of bright images that are primitive and child-like in their rendering. You'd love to see her figures in some hip cartoon on Saturday morning. They ignite your imagination into envisioning their continuation. Each is its own little story or fable. Though not nearly as powerful as a series of huge canvases she displayed a few years ago, these little works with their shocking colors, fantasy people and objects, are a lot of fun and charge your sense of outrageousness.
Todd Weinstein's color photographs, both titled Europa 1983, are haunting in the pocket of stillness they capture in varying environments. In one, a gentle looking young boy, in a candid gesture of reverie, hands pensively on face, moves wistfully past a large painting of Christ being lowered from the cross. The remarkable catch of this youth's fragile, impassioned moment is emphasized by the surrounding comfy age-old decor of the museum (Ruben's house in Antwerp). The boy's long, fleshy arms belong to the manner of the painting.
His other photo has a child safely asleep in the rear of a car, totally protected in this shell from the frenzy of activity going on around him—the car being parked at a bustling street corner in Pigalle. Colored neon lights brightly light up the background of stores and shoppers while a street light illuminates the subject like a spotlight.
Weinstein lets his subject dictate the overall form of the shot. This instinctual impulse, zen-like in its spontaneous grab at order, proceeds from the "content is form" tenet. However, strictly bounded by the 16x20" print size format, the chanciness and play are contained and new criteria for our need for form and balance are established. He supplants the geometric perfection of Renaissance perspective with jazzier arrangements—context is more fluid and angles and dimensions are captured in liberated firm-glance transience.
Where a lesser artist would settle for an off-balance composition, Weinstein's clean, heightened taste can edit the image in the camera to achieve a marvelous "new" blend of subject and context not restrained by the traditional obligations for order and prettiness, everything just so.
Louise Hamlin takes these exact same daring risks in the composition of her paintings. Her views of the city are candid and pedestrian. We feel the artist at the curbside along with us, her subjects, and not sequestered in the ivory tower. In Christmas at Twin Donuts, a painting of the interior of a crowded donut shop, the perspective moves across the rows of counters and people seated at them back to a line of people waiting to pay their tabs at the front register and then through the front windows to the bright sunlit outdoors. This painting is major in its attention to the everyday details, like an arrangement of ketchup, sugar and napkin dispensers, and its fascinating overall composition of the busy yet ordered shop interior. The painting celebrates the daily and common. The central figure (the painter's husband, poet and critic Gary Lenhart) is so absorbed in a letter he's reading that his eggs and toast are getting cold. A little girl seated next to him at the counter, unserved, notices.
Three other paintings are outside night views of the sidewalks and streets. Walk, Don't Walk is a view as if waiting for a traffic light to change. It's a small but beautifully measured arrangement painted in the dark tones of night—browns and dark green of trees with some colors illumined by street and shop lights—all in breathy brush strokes that define and show movement without needing to be precise.
Taxi on Broadway is similar in the way she defines her images. A restful upper Broadway with lush trees is painted in broad strokes that merge the colors with shadow yet retain clarity.
Her snapshot compositions, despite the quick urban paces they depict and glorify, are solid and pleasing in the risky, slice-of-life way they make a moment permanent.
Looking at Barry Kornbluh's two black and white photographs in this show, the poet Michael Scholnick said, "He's not afraid to be serious. Or solemn." In one we look down, past a vase of tulips in full bloom, through a winter-frosted window to a snow covered graveyard. This is an eerie and chilling image yet the simplicity and joy of the flowers and commonness of the window frame prevent the melodrama of the stark tombstones shrouded in cold snow from taking over.
His other shot is a breathless, soft-focus portrait of a woman caught in a dreamy pause, one hand with cigarette raised to lips, the other blankly holding the end of her long hair held out. An angel haze puff of smoke rises and delineates her head against faded patterned wallpaper; behind that is a comfortable cushion for the homey intimacy of the subject's mood.
Both of these images are special in their timeless quietude and remain in mind. His honesty is piercing. He faces feelings that are painful—loneliness, stillness—and strips emotions down, brave enough to go after and reach the nucleus of a vulnerable psychological state.
Wendy Miller's abstractions in pastel colors are explorations of innermost consciousness. In three untitled works, paint is thickly applied and the surface is scratched to a rough texture yet the working of the surface is careful and deliberate and a central orb-like image, like a seed at the core, is revealed.
Where the three paintings wish to obscure the techniques that went into making them so that one's attention is attuned to the complete, mystical-seeming picture, three untitled smaller works, drawings with colored pencil and crayon, do call attention to their process. Central images also emerge here but they're more complicated and provocative. The working of the surfaces is finer and more precise. The central image seems to be coming into focus, arising through the network of scratched lines.
The subject of these works is the delicacy one would need in say, acute gauging for engineering, that is, a useful fine tuning out of rawness. They express calm at the same time as they stand as the crafted evidence of an intuitive process.
Peggy Katz's distinctive and charming painting metal sculptures complete the show. The sculptor takes flat rectangular pieces of metal stood upright on bases and welds images on each side. She then paints them in bright colors. Her images range from views of Mt. Fuji at different times, to cows at pasture in sun or snow viewed through a window, to saints and bare essentials representations of "boiler makers" and "old hat." Also, a lovely, Matisse-like still-life of a table arrangement—fruit and small resting cows on the table.
She applies shimmering colors—bright reds, oranges, blues—or, in one Fuji, dark, storm cloud blues and purple and, for one of the saints, garish, cheap, tourista colors—pink and gold. She also leaves certain surfaces untreated that have rusted for an even rougher finish.
What is delightful about these works is the way they merge the formalism and piety of medieval icons and the stark and joyous, brilliant contrasts of "floating world" Japanese woodblock prints. The resulting images are tremendously amusing in this disparity but at the same time this cave-drawing rawness and stripped-down stateliness is powerful and affecting and remains.
(unpublished)