Dead Cat Bounce
Tony Zaza
Alfred Leslie, BETTY MOORE, Oil on Canvas 7 feet X 5 feet ? Alfred Leslie. Courtesy of The Boil and Squeal Gallery, New York.
One can only marvel at the voracity with which the demons of the New York gallery/museum scene have scrupulously resurrected some of the lost souls of the 1960s after paying no attention to them for 45 years and allowing them to grow old and gray while children were given license to spread their excrement on numerous overwhelming numbers of gallery walls.
Ripped from the shadows and thrust back into the lime light are Alfred Leslie, Raphael Soyer, both Stellas, Ruscha, Christo, Youngerman, Mimmo Rotella, Diane Arbus, Romare Beardon, Lucien Clergue, Anthony Caro, hearty painters, sculptors, and photographers, who were barely allowed to breath in the contemporary gallery arena, are now released, born-again, Christ-like martyrs of the post-war era where downtown artists could be numbered on two hands and galleries could be numbered on one.
Like bottles of fine wine allowed to age now uncorked for populist consumption they are a rare vintage, their creative juices squeezed from anonymity and exile in an era when to be an artist was a moral curse.
Christo has managed to conceive and execute a final intrusion upon the natural order of things. It is a virtue that his "gating" of Central Park, a final self-indulgent calling card, lasted only two weeks; insufficient time for the budding and blooming trees of spring to reclaim the environment. From above, the gating seems more chaotic than one would expect; simulating a path to an Olympic event, or perhaps, a used-car lot.
Leslie’s rejuvenation reminds us of a time when enamel paint was easier to buy and use than oil. House-painterly, his work, large compositions/constructions with their heavy fields of dense prime color offset by vacant colorless space are moody cityscapes that prefigure the bright west coastal "Ocean Park" series of Diebenkorn. The monumental full-figure studies seem more emotionless now than in the 1960s, like huge funereal portraits. The small painterly collages are still marvels of invention.
The forgotten painterly peelings and scrapings of Rotella, stark in the 1960s, are now a curious archeology of Pop hinting of all the graphic distractions of the psychedelic era that emerged after his earliest New York debut. Like Beardon whose work was mostly a best kept secret, Rotella vanished before the tsunami of downtown abstract expressionism. Beardon somehow survived isolated in the provinces after overworking as much as possible the jazzy streetscapes of the downtrodden.
Arbus and Clergue owe much of their notoriety to their unimaginative exploitation of the ready-made genre subjects which impact the unprotected viewer like the manipulative commercials of the 1960’s and 70’s for CARE package donations. In their hands, nature and nurturing are fair game claiming that which is the provenance of the public to be their own creation.
Soyer, Caro and the Stellas fit into the corporate mold of 2005 as if they were truly born-again, decorative and vacant, landmark makers of those same 1960s hang nicely in the cold marbled headquarters lobby of multinational conglomerates (and Emerates).
Seeing Jack Youngerman’s Rorschach-patterned graphics from the 1960s brings back echoes of Maremeko and Sister Carita — these designs were bold fields of color against primary colored backgrounds. The drab interiors of the 1950s were transformed by this simple use of pure color. Derived mostly from Matisse’s use of the boldly colored cut-out, Youngerman’s field painting is no less inventive in post-modern terms since it equates the minimalism of the current scene with it’s equally austere lack of meaning.
It is important to note that all these granddads of the pop alternative, like aging rock stars, cannot be adequately read today because they are so removed from the cultural context from which they sprang. What is more, this cultural gap is far more extreme than, for instance, that between the Renaissance and the Baroque.
