JOHN ZEAMAN

Contemporary

Whitney Biennial 2000

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OK, let’s cut to the chase. “Sanitation.” Is it any good?

I mean, in the artistic sense.

It is, after all, supposed to be a work of art, not just a political volley in the culture wars.

You’re supposed to get in that darkened room with all those saluting plastic trash barrels and feel something.

You’re supposed to feel your freedom threatened. You’re supposed to feel that there are repressive forces goose-stepping in your direction. “First they came for the artists…”

Why else invoke the Nazis? All political art is propaganda. Whatever the cause, good or bad, it tries to sway your thinking by sneaking in the back door, by appealing to your emotions. If it’s powerful propaganda, you can feel the pull, even if it doesn’t take you in.

Hans Haacke’s “Sanitation,” part of the Whitney Biennial and the subject of numerous stories because of its attack on Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, is weak propaganda. It lacks the insidious cleverness of the strong stuff. Those plastic trash barrels, for one thing, do nothing for me. They’re all lined up, with their neat plastic liners, and their lids popped up. I know you’re supposed to think soldiers, uniforms, “Heil Hitler,” but I just can’t make the leap.

The marching doesn’t help, nor does the Fraktur script. It’s too overblown, too heavy-handed, too redolent of Sixties hyperbole.

Let’s face it. All politics aside, even on its own terms, it’s a mediocre work. It was designed for a single purpose, to provoke the mayor through the press, to goad him into charging at the museum with his horns down. People like that kind of thing. And it makes money for museums.

But it ain’t art.

The irony is that this will always be remembered as the Hans Haacke Biennial, even though the curators make a big point of saying that political art has run out of gas, that there’s been a “dulling of the sharper edges of social commentary,” to quote museum director Maxwell Anderson.

Haacke was the token political artist.

What the show is about, no one can quite say. In past years, the buzzwords have been “cutting edge,” or “subversive,” or “race-sex-gender.” One year it was “the return to painting.”

This year, no buzzword. There’s a little of this, a little of that. Perhaps that’s because this show has six curators from different corners of the country. You have to hand it to the Whitney. They’ve tried every kind of curatorial arrangement: inside curators, outside curators, single curators, teams of curators. Now geographically dispersed curators. Nothing seems to work, apparently, because they never repeat the same one.

A problem with many of the works in this show is that they seem only to exist for the purpose of the Whitney Biennial. You can’t imagine them having a life outside of this rarefied atmosphere.

This holds true for most of the installation art, which has become a big favorite at the Whitney, apparently because of the entertainment value.

This year, installation artist Tara Donovan covered an entire floor with thousands of very, very thin filaments of electrical wire. The hair-like pieces of wire have been very carefully placed, one next to another, so as to create a billowy landscape of concentric ripples. Much is made, in the wall text, of the time and obsessive effort it must have taken to shred all this electrical wire, and to carefully arrange it in this particular pattern. Nothing, however, is said about why.

In a lighter vein, Annette Lemieux creates a playground of sorts and populates it with truncated feet. The cast-wax feet teeter on a seesaw, kick a ball, walk on a rope. One poor pair stands in the corner, a dunce cap on its ankles.

Americans love cars, and American artists are no exception. One year the Whitney had a hearse that was covered – every square inch – with lube grease. This year there’s a cute MG Midget, which the artist, Kim Dingle, has dressed up like a doll, with a pink paint job and frilly lace hubcap covers. The artist calls it a “Priss Mobile” and “a big baby car on a big soft blanket.” And though it doesn’t say so, you can be sure that, in the popular parlance, it has something to do with “gender and identity.”

There’s nothing prissy about Chakaia Booker’s wall-sized assemblage of sliced and twisted rubber tires. It is actually one of the show’s most visually arresting pieces. The rubber has a life, and each individual piece wants to spring out of the knotted, compressed form that it’s somehow been jammed into, and get back to its original form. Hence, the whole has a kind of seething, writhing energy, like the suffering souls in Rodin’s “Gates of Hell.”

Also in the category of artists who do things with unusual materials is Vik Muniz, who used “Bosco syrup” to make an image of the 19th century masterpiece, “Raft of the Medusa,” by Theodore Gericault. His explanation for why he does this involves parallels between the collapsed forms of the dying people on the raft, and the tendency of the Bosco to run and drip during execution, and the urgency to photograph it before it dries.

Yukinori Yanagi has an even stranger gimmick. He fills plastic plexiglass boxes with sand, packs it so hard that he can imprint an image on its surface – in this case, dollar bills – stands them on edge, and then – what else? – lets ants loose inside. Presto! An ant farm.

In contrast to Haacke’s artificial alarmism, there are some genuinely scary moments in this show, as in the film “Fervor,” by Iranian born artist Shirin Neshat. She provides a glimpse into the collective zeal and hypnotic power of Islamic fundamentalism. And Doug Aitken, who makes music videos, taps into urban paranoia with “Electric Earth,” a nighttime journey through deserted parking garages and empty streets, with eerie closeups of oddly animated things – a kicked bottle cap, a spinning shopping cart, and a dollar bill left on its own, jerking back and forth in a vending machine slot.

This biennial has its moments, as do most shows. Its biggest deficiency is the failure to produce any coherent whole, or even a big chunk of something. Occasionally, themes seem to coalesce – a couple of artists use grotesque distortions of the female form, for example – but it’s usually just a tease. It doesn’t go anywhere. There’s little sense of one thing connecting to another within a show, or any sense, for quite a while now, of one biennial connecting to another and adding up to anything like a style or movement.

Instead the artists scatter, as if on a children’s treasure hunt, and come back with random and whimsical things. Two years later they do it again with the same results. I suppose that’s what happens when all you worship is novelty.

Whitney Museum of American Art

2000

 

Duane Hanson

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One of the curious features of 20th century art is the importance placed on surprise. Art is expected to shock or jolt us. Duane Hanson always did a good job of that. Even if we know his work, we can’t help but be startled when we get off the elevator on the third floor of the Whitney Museum and see two people sitting at a table: the heavyset woman in the house dress eating a sundae and the earnest, casually dressed man who looks across at her.

They are statues, of course (the man is Hanson, himself), but rendered in a super-realistic mode and wearing actual clothes. Not only that, but they are sitting out on the gallery floor, with no barriers or lines to enforce the separation between art and spectator. The woman has a handbag next to her, with supermarket tabloids that you could pick up and read if the guards would let you.

The irresistible impulse when you see this kind of art is to go up for a close look. Are there veins? Downy hair on the arms? Little cracks in the lips? It’s almost disappointing when you find the inevitable signs of fakery: the hair that looks like a bad wig, the flesh that, despite all the careful painting, still betrays its fiberglass hardness.

There are about two dozen of these figures in this retrospective, the first since Hanson’s death three years ago. He emerged from the pop art movement of the Sixties and specialized in so-called ordinary people. “Ordinary” translates into lower-class or working-class types – waitresses, construction workers, house painters, bargain shoppers – who are unattractive, coarse, and look a little slow on the uptake.

Quite a few are overweight, and Hanson seems to have delighted in rendering their sagging guts, their flabby arms, gigantic rear ends, and grotesquely lumpy thighs. Their clothing is ill-fitting, loud, and mismatched. The archetypical Hanson creation is a tourist in a loud Hawaiian shirt, camera dangling around his neck, gawking at some sight with dimwitted awe. Or, a female shopper with bad hair, bad clothes, bad figure, carrying a bag with the slogan “Famous Designer Clothes/For the Woman Who Knows.”

Mocking the vulgarity and cheapness of American culture has always been a favorite occupation of pop artists, although Hanson did it in a rather obvious and heavy-handed way. He never had the cleverness or irony of other pop artists. He lived far from the New York scene, in South Florida, (which explains his keen familiarity with bermuda-clad tourists and trailer-park types) and so was that odd specimen, a provincial pop artist.

His earlier pieces in this genre, those from the Sixties, drew on another, minor chord of the pop art movement, America’s love affair with violence and sensationalism. His bloody motorcycle victim with its twisted arms and legs harks back to AndyWarhol’s silk screen images of car wrecks. Likewise, for his “Gangland Victim,” a mutilated, weighted-down body presumably dredged from the river, and “Abortion,” a sheet-covered body. They look a bit too earnest to be pop, but these were the pieces that first gained Hanson recognition, not surprisingly through that time-tested avant-garde seal of approval: censorship. A Miami gallery banned his “Motorcycle Accident,” as “too grisly.”

He settled into his niche, and exploited it for several decades, simply repeating the same thing over and over: molding his figures from live models, casting them in fiberglass, painting them, and dressing them up in the model’s own clothes. It was a tedious business, a single figure often taking as long as a year to complete.

We might be able to admire Hanson’s art purely for its trick-of-the-eye verisimilitude, except the illusion isn’t really all that amazing. A Hollywood special effects team could probably run circles around him, using all kinds of tricks, such as latex for flesh and little motors to blink the eyes. Hanson, who aimed his work at museums, limited himself to more traditional, permanent materials like fiberglass and bronze.

In any case, Hanson always maintained that he wasn’t interested in illusion for its own sake, that that wasn’t the point. “My art is not about fooling people,” he said. “It’s the attitudes I’m after – fatigue, a bit of frustration, rejection. To me there is a kind of beauty in all this.”

It’s odd that he doesn’t mention humor, which seems the primary impulse behind his work. But this insistence on an attitude of despair creates a weird contradiction and adds a layer of eeriness to a show that already has the ambience of a wax museum. No matter how ridiculous or buffoonish these people look, all wear morose, forlorn expressions. They stare blankly into space, or down at the floor.

At this point, you can’t help but be reminded of the sculptor George Segal, who, like Hanson, cast figures from life and aimed for a mood of alienation. The chief difference is that Segal eschewed realism and left his figures in a chalky, unpainted state.

What Segal understood and Hanson never did was that realism, especially ultra-realism, turned this mood into something embarrassingly maudlin. We accept the existential despair of Segal’s ghostlike people, sitting at diner counters or waiting in line, because their abstract, anonymous quality makes them stand for Everyman. But when that figure becomes such a real and specific person – a weightlifter pausing on his bench, a contemporary cowboy leaning against a wall, or an obese man riding a tractor lawnmower – their downcast eyes and forlorn expressions don’t make us feel their humanity more deeply. The mixed message confuses and irritates us.

We don’t want to see the man on the lawnmower looking so dejected. Everything else in this sculpture tells us that this is parody, caricature. If anything, we want to see this guy mowing his lawn with a little gusto, proud of his mechanical steed.

The most ridiculous example of this confused message is the sculpture of the house painter. The hapless fellow has just put a meandering swath of shocking pink paint to the wall, and, somehow, painted his own shirt front as well. He stands, staring out into space, looking as if his dog just died, and all we can think is, “Hey, pay attention to what you’re doing.”

The only sculpture endowed with any vitality or alertness is the one of Hanson himself. The trim, craggily handsome man sitting out by the elevator doesn’t look at all depressed. He gazes benignly, sympathetically at the stout lady in front of him. Is he demonstrating the correct attitude for viewing his art? Or, is he simply the creator admiring his creation?

No matter. It’s no fun being in a room full of dejected statues when we don’t have a clue as to their problems, unless it’s a poor wardrobe or a dissatisfaction with lawn mowing.

Perhaps, we think, they are like that disillusioned astronaut in the movie “Toy Story,” and they have just found out that they’re not real cowboys, or policemen, or waitresses at all – just statues. Or perhaps they’re unhappy because they sense that they’re not even real works of art. Only imitations of that, too. Just replicas of people, made for an assortment of wrong and conflicting reasons.

The Whitney Museum of American Art

1999

 

Chuck Close

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Repetition is the addictive obsession of the artists from the 60s and 70s, at least the ones who ushered in styles like pop, minimalism, conceptualism, photorealism, and post-minimalism.

“Big Self Portrait” by Chuck Close

The theories behind all of these isms (why, one wonders, was pop never popism?) were intricate and florid, whereas the art was simple, deadpan, and unbelievably repetitive. Warhol stamped out his soup cans and his multiples of Marilyn, minimalists like Richard Serra made us to stare at sheets of lead, Donald Judd gave us plywood boxes, and the photorealists gave us pictures that looked like they’d just floated up out of the developing fluid.

Among these artists is Chuck Close, who, like many of his generation, began as an abstract expressionist, then rebelled against it. His obsession was to make giant photorealist portraits of himself and his friends. The name has always seemed a put-on (though it isn’t), because these images do nothing so much as bring us up close to the subject, often closer than we really want to be.

Close’s career, the subject of a big retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is fascinating for its dogged persistence, demonstrating how an artist can lock himself into a rigid system, and then struggle – like a magician in a trunk – to set himself free.

Close’s bondage of choice is the grid, a graph-paper matrix upon which all his paintings are organized. In subject, he has shackled himself to the frontal portrait, and in style, to the kind of image rendered by the camera.

So what you see at the Chuck Close show is room after room of monumental heads, devoid of any of the emotion or expressiveness that one associates with portraits, and constructed, inch by inch, out of little squares. His sole maneuvering room is, as it would have to be, within the confines of the tiny squares. Where Close wiggles a little free is in the use of different media – acrylic, watercolor, oils, paper pulp – and in the kind of mark he puts within each box – impressionist color, pointillist dot, or decorative squiggles.

Like his contemporary the late Roy Lichtenstein, Close is overly fascinated with the Benday dot illusion. Blow up any magazine photograph big enough, and it turns into a meaningless pattern. Step far enough away from it, and the image pops back into its familiar form. This is a perceptual game, and not a new one. Impressionism relied on the same ability of the eye to resolve and organize disparate strokes of color into a unified image.

So, although it is amusing to see Close push the limits of the Benday dot by running wild within the little squares, it’s not enough to carry the show. No, Close’s career turns out to be one about process, about these very issues of freedom and limitations, of system vs. improvisation, of being maddingly repetitious – like minimalist music – and then injecting tiny variations.

Close’s most famous picture is still the first gridded portrait he made and the one we see at the outset of the show: “Big Self-Portrait” (1967-68).

It’s a funny picture, because of its obnoxious, in-your-face attitude. The artist, a long-haired, stubble-chinned counter-culture icon, thrusts his jaw out defiantly, a smoking cigarette between his lips. The photograph from which it was copied is also on display, with the superimposed grid that he used to transfer the image to the larger canvas.

In these early paintings, the grid is often buried beneath the paint strokes, but in subsequent works it emerges as an acknowledged device, a part of the composition. The subjects of the other paintings from this early, monochromatic mug-shot group are Close’s friends: the artists Richard Serra and Nancy Graves, the composer Philip Glass. (He has refused throughout his career to do commissioned portraits.)

As portraits, they are ugly and unflattering. Close delights in the discovery of imperfections through enlargement. We are confronted with the asymmetries of noses and nostrils, the cracks of the lips, the hairs that seem to sprout everywhere. These first pictures, too, slavishly imitate the camera, showing in sharp focus that which is near, and softening that which is at a distance.

 

He subsequently abandoned this grotesque detail,  lost what small interest he had in his subjects, and turned himself wholly over to system.

 

In one series, he begins with a small portrait of a man’s head and begins to blow it up, naming each picture for the greater number of squares in the grid from 154, to 616, to 2,464, and on up to the monumental one, with 104,072 squares.

Instead of a portrait, we are encouraged to think in terms of information bits. How many strokes, how many millions of modulations, go into each one? For, despite their mechanical appearance, they are painstakingly painted by hand. His method, in fact, is so time-consuming that the artist has made only about 70 paintings in his career.

From this point forward, the grid becomes an increasingly important image, while the methods used to patch together the images stretch across almost every painting medium, including a technique in which the paint is applied by fingertip. Some use a buildup of nested dots that remind us of Van Gogh or Seurat, others a tapestry-like weaving of gestural strokes. Some of the latest paintings have a kaleidoscopic, vibratory appearance. One, of the painter Lucas Samaras, an artist known for his mystical intensity, looks like a carnival spin-art painting, with the face seeming to radiate energy like a sun.

In 1988, Close became partially paralyzed as a result of a burst blood vessel in his spinal cord. His rehabilitation is something of a legend in the art world, and the artist, working from a wheelchair, was able to resume painting, using lifting equipment to raise and lower himself in front of his monumental-sized canvases.

In the pictures from the late Nineties, the image becomes increasingly abstract. The grid boxes are filled with tiny designs – blips, bull’s-eyes, squares within squares, and even figure-eight forms that spread across two boxes – each like a miniature abstract painting, as if the artist were recalling his early roots.

With these, the surface commands such interest that there’s less temptation for the viewer to step back for the big image.

Close’s career is a strange, obsessive journey, What you take from this show is a sense of art as process, not as a finished object. This is an idea with built-in limitations — somewhat like the novelist who constantly interrupts his story to remind you that he is writing a novel. We may gain some small philosophic insight into the nature of art and the creative process, but will almost certainly come away feeling deprived of something fundamental.

Museum of Modern Art

1998

Postmodernism

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Who knows anymore what postmodernism means? It’s not a movement, it’s not even a style. It’s a collection of attitudes, some of them quite contradictory. In architecture, it originally meant the end of the sterile glass box and the return to romance, decoration, and humanism. Then deconstructivism raised its irrational head and now all its bizarre manifestations are somehow thought to be postmodern, too.

In art, postmodernism spawned the notion that it was impossible to say anything new anymore, and that all artists could do was “appropriate” from the past. It also has come to mean, for some weird reason, the embrace of popular culture, strident anti-elitism, and the subversive idea that there is no such thing as historical truth.

If nothing else, postmodernism is a feeling of disorientation and uncertainty, a loss of modernism’s faith in the future, and worse, a sense of doubt about the past as well. Toss in some anxiety over the end of the industrial age and the approaching turn of the millennium, and you have the psychological cocktail.

Strangely enough, a good place to get a strong dose of this postmodern angst is in a little gallery in Edgewater. In fact, to visit the Polo Gallery is to immerse yourself in our current cultural predicament, not just because of the art inside, but because the whole River Road environment reinforces the sense of dislocation.

Outside the gallery’s windows, in the bright Hudson River light, is a bizarre landscape of glitzy condominium complexes and abandoned factory buildings, piles of rubble and arrangements of manicured shrubs, old waterfront taverns and fern bars. Land deals percolate, shopping centers sprout up, and the evil genie of toxic waste hovers. Looming in the distance is the mirage-like skyline of Manhattan’s western shore.

Polo has been open for 2 1/2 years. The current exhibit, “Urban Order,” deals loosely with the theme of cities. But, the show also has a lot in common with an earlier exhibit at Polo called “Post-Archaeology,” in which artists created pseudo-artifacts from imagined civilizations.

Many of the works in this show exhibit the same strange and uneasy relationship with the past. Most of it would look much more surreal if it didn’t so much resemble the environment outside.

Roselyn Rose’s collage-paintings combine fragments from the past – the entrance to an Egyptian tomb, Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel,” Assyrian archers – to create a sense of lost civilizations. It’s like flipping through a Rolodex of art history. Except we’re made to feel that the crush of historical stuff is oppressive, that the symbols of culture don’t add up to anything, that the past is a puzzle that can’t be solved.

Some of the sculptors in the show manipulate architectural forms from the past, and these too, present themselves as puzzles. Roy Steele’s red clay sculptures have been oxidized with salt to make them look like relics. A pair of ruined towers – intended as phallic symbols – suggest something from an ancient civilization. In contrast, Luis Castro’s architectural fantasies look fresh, like neat abstractions in limestone, combining such elements as flying buttresses, a medieval colonnade, and quatrefoils. But the parts don’t combine into a meaningful whole in the way that real architecture must. There are strange jumps in scale and odd juxtapositions.

Janice Mauro’s sculptures look like streamlined female fertility figures from primitive cultures, and there is an air of religious ritual about these works, but their solemnity is offset by contemporary kinkiness: The figures stand outside upright coffins decorated with sexual imagery.

Even the automobile becomes a relic in this show. Steve Mumford’s painting of cars stacked at the junkyard remind us that our own civilization is creating relics at an accelerated pace, so much so that we have to stack them on top of another.

Sharon Vatsky, deep into the archaeological-museum aesthetic, plays with the current preoccupation with angels. One of her fragment-like reliefs has a section of an angel’s wing on it. Another is a piece of a arch, with broken pieces of vine coiling around it. The funniest one – and humor is rare in this show – is on the theme of the fallen angel, and looks as if a heavenly being has fallen into wet cement.

No single artist stands out in this show, and yet the overall exhibit, and the gallery setting itself, makes a strong impression. Everything here feels post-something, whether it’s postmodern, or post-industrial or post-archaeological, or whatever. Of course, sooner or later somone will have to accept the consequences of this kind of thinking. It tends to beg the question. If we’re through with all these things, then what exactly has come to replace it?

Formaldehyde School

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Jesse Helms take note. Sex is no longer a preoccupation of the avant garde. Today’s fringe culture has graduated from images of sadomasochism and the like to … death. Death and decay. The pleasures of the flesh are out. The terrors of the flesh are in.

Andres Serrano, once notorious for submerging a crucifix in urine, has moved on to lavish photographs of murder victims on morgue slabs. Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin creates morbid tableaux populated by the grotesque and the diseased. Others specialize in bottled specimens – fetuses, animal parts – in a genre that’s become so popular it’s known as formaldehyde photography.

Perhaps it has something to do with the AIDS epidemic. Or, the aging of the baby boomers. Or the approaching end of the millennium. Or contemporary art’s need for something new that shocks.

The latest manifestation of this trend is a Soho exhibit titled “Beyond Ars Medica.” The objects in it are not the work of any contemporary artist, but are samples from Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum, a 19th century collection of anatomical anomalies, diseased organs, medical instruments, skeletons, and the like. Although intended by its major benefactor, surgeon Thomas Mutter, as a teaching collection (it is still operated by the American College of Physicians, based in Philadelphia), it has always attracted curiosity-seekers. And, so many contemporary photographers have found its collection so matched to their new taste for the bizarre that their works have been put into a calendar, now in its third year of publication.

It is an exhibit that would warm the heart of P.T. Barnum. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen and see the amazing horned woman. Yes. This 19th century French citizen, nicknamed Widow Sunday, sprouted a 10-inch protuberance from her forehead. A model of her face, showing the drooping horn, can be seen in a photograph at the Soho gallery.

Or how about the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng? Members of the college had performed the autopsy on the pair, and the museum was allowed to retain their connected livers along with a plaster cast of their torsos, also shown here in a photograph.

With the exception of a petrified ovarian cyst the size of a beach ball, and which weighed 70 pounds when removed, most of the borrowed specimens on view in Manhattan are wax models. Some show faces ravaged by disease, such as the man whose lips and cheeks were destroyed by gangrene, other faces are deformed by pustules or tumors, or flayed to show the insides for the purpose of medical education.

Every once in a while, something has that startling presence of art, like the photograph of a cross-section of a human head, cut into a thin profile slice, which allows you to see the shapes and positions of everything inside, the brain like a halved cauliflower, the lumpish masses of the tongue and eyes, the spaces of the sinus cavities, the densely packed arteries, veins, muscles, and nerves. Other works trigger a more emotional response, horror at nature’s random cruelties, the incredible burdens that some people must carry, and, of course, the inevitability of suffering and death.

Included in the displays of medical equipment, is a Victorian tonsil “guillotine,” the medical kit of a physician who accompanied an arctic exploration team and was frequently called upon to amputate frostbitten, gangrenous feet and toes. Also displayed is a collection of objects removed from children’s food and breathing passages: jacks, tiny metal animals, and toy ships.

Some of the Mutter’s most famous holdings can only be glimpsed in photographs. Like the conjoined skeletons of twins whose two skulls melded into one, giving the appearance of a human with four legs and four arms. Or the photograph of a group of fetal skeletons, all mounted in an upright position so that the group looks like an X-ray photograph of children clustered in a playground.

Those photographs of the Mutter Museum’s interior show a Victorian setting of glass-fronted oak cabinets, green-shaded lamps, and spotlighted specimens, reminiscent of a setting in a Jules Verne story. And there’s something comforting about that antiquated atmosphere, because it puts a distance between us and the victims of all these diseases and mishaps, and allows us to gawk without feeling guilty.

Here and there, throughout the show, however, the mood shifts from Jules Verne to P.T. Barnum, from the gentleman’s curio case to the old circus freak show. Perhaps it’s the photographs of the shrunken heads created by the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador, or the cast of a foot of a 14-year-old Chinese girl deformed by foot-binding that is displayed in a satin-lined case. Or the photograph of the man with the Brooklyn Bridge tattooed across his back.

One of the hypocrisies of our time is that we gawk just as much as the Romans or the Victorians – they had nothing to match our daytime talk shows – but we don’t admit what we’re doing. We have to dress it up with psychobabble, or the pretense of “giving the news,” or, as in this case, the facade of art.

National Academy of Design Annual 1992

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America’s longest-running yearly art show, The National Academy of Design’s Annual Exhibition, is on view once again. This is the 167th such show staged by the venerable academy, and, as always, it’s a meditation on the meaning of tradition in the present-day art world.

There is no such thing as art without a tradition, but just what is ours? Judging by what is seen at the Whitney Biennial, many believe that art began with Andy Warhol, or maybe Marcel Duchamp.

Anthony Santuoso’s “A Creation Story: Resolution.”

See this, then, as the antidote to the Whitney.  The artists of the National Academy are not afraid to draw from art history. They are open to new syntheses —incorporating lessons from modern masters as well as artists from the Renaissance or the 19th century.

Of course, it’s doubtful that academy founder Samuel F. B. Morse (the inventor of the telegraph and also a painter), would understand what academic standards are being maintained by today’s academy. But he would be even more confused by today’s topsy-turvy culture, in which what was once the avant-garde — pop, minimalism, conceptualism, neo-geo and whatever —is now the establishment, and artists who aspire to the otherworldliness of the Renaissance or the passionate expressiveness of Van Gogh, are the rebellious outsiders.

The problem faced by the artists in this show, then, is what to draw from the grand tradition and how to bring something new to it.  Most of the artists here resist the contemporary draw of superficial novelty and shock value. However, too many have erred on the other side, never evolving past role models like Bonnard or Monet. They fail to put their own stamp on it.

Rosemarie Beck is one who has successfully bridged past and present. Her Cezannesque patchwork compositions of figures and landscapes can, like the best abstract paintings, persuade you that that the beauty of paint hue and texture can carry the day.

Most of the artists here are image makers.  They are not necessarily realists, but they are committed to making pictures.

Some do this while leaning toward near abstraction, like Judy Cutler. In her New York cityscapes, blocks of color slip, slide, and clink against one another like musical notes.

Others have little stories to tell, like Patti McManus in “Mugging.” Painted in drab browns and steely grays, the picture of a subway purse-snatching has a matter-of-factness about it, as if to reflect contemporary society’s habituation to lawlessness.

Myron Heise works in the tradition of the early 20th century Ashcan School. His raucous treatment of the San Genarro festival captures the fleshy, tawdry side of Little Italy’s annual street fair and, ironically, given its church sponsorship, turns it into something out of the biblical city of Gomorrah.

What to say about super-realists like Paul Fortunato or Daniel J. O’Neil? Their self-portraits revel in every vein, pore, follicle, and nostril hair. In late 19th century France, when painters felt challenged to do photography one better, such obsessive verisimilitude might have made sense. Today, not so much.

This is a big show, with 300 paintings arrayed across the Academy’s three-floor warren of galleries. With no unifying theme, the vast display of stylistic possibilities can wear you down. Who can make himself heard in this crowd? At times, the paintings themselves exude weariness as with Joe Greenberg’s “Figures in an Interior,” in which an old man stares off into space with the resignation of Arthur Miller’s tragic salesman, Willy Loman.

Every great work must look as if it could have come from no other time than its own.

Lots here have a “now” feeling about them. There’s the funky cartoonishness of Carmen Cicero’s “Death Hails a Cab.” It’s bold and amusing, but never rises above the low art of comic strips.

At the other extreme is Steve Brown’s “Study for Eight Cows,” which almost seems a kind of dare, as if an artist had set out to prove that a pedestrian 17th-century subject painted in a 19th-century style could be valid in a late 20th-century exhibit. One searches in vain for the ace-in-the-hole that will back up the claim.

There are any number of beautiful small paintings in this show. Somewhere, on any given day, an artist in some studio gets lucky and produces a flawless gem, like the lyrical, near-abstract still life by Stanley Lewis.

There are even a few medium-sized paintings with considerable charm, like Larry Mizrahi’s quirky black still life. This is a sly and playful painting. Up close, one sees that the objects on the table are just daubed on against the black background, and yet everything in the painting clicks: the cat’s face, the candle in the dish, the art book, the four yellow table legs.

Rarer still are those ambitious paintings in which the artist is trying to go beyond charm or a successful composition, and into the realm of ideas.

Anthony Santuoso’s “A Creation Story—Resolution” is a picture that harks back to the Adam and Eve story. The image of the Garden of Eden appears within a kind of magic circle, outside of which are two contemporary figures. One is nude and asleep, one clothed and awake, both with artist’s tools in their hands. There’s a hint of New Age mysticism in this work, but it’s a painting that deals with myth, symbolism, and states of consciousness, just as the religious works of the past once did. It’s a picture that rewards sustained contemplation, never yielding all its secrets.

 National Academy of Design

1992