234 CALVIN TOMKINS began using in 1972 (an abstract pattern of parallel colored strokes that he had seen, for a second, painted on a car he passed on a Long Island hhighway) turned out to be the medium for a decade of further inves- tigation, Scent, Corpse and Mirror, The Dutch Wives, Usuyuki, and ‘other prints done in this style seem to shift and change as we look at them. The division of space into three equal pars (six parts in the larger prints) and the manifold variations in technique set up mirror reflections that keep the eye Rickering back and forth across the surface. Every inch of this surface is subtly articulated, and yet the movement is nowhere perceptible. Conversely, everything is still, and on the verge cof motion. A great many other aesthetic events are going on in these prints, needless to say, but none of them is conclusive, Atany moment, Johns’ art is becoming something other than what it is. (August 4, 1986) BETWEEN NEO- AND POST- “The new art package has arrived. It has set off a sort of feeding frenzy among the trendier dealers and collectors, some of whom had very little advance knowledge of the contents. Ifyou had been really attuned, of course, you would have known about a year and a half ago that some- thing was up—another swing of the pendulum, the emergence of a new sensibility, which looked with scorn upon Neo-Expressionism, graffiti, and other recent art packages, Now it’s here, turning up all over town, and if you want to get in on it you are probably too late ‘The question of what to call the new thing has not been settled. “Neo- ‘g¢0,” the catchiest title, may not stick, because it refers only to one ingredient of the package—the geometric abstract painting that mimics and comments on earlier geometric abstract painting. “Neo-concep- tualism,” “neo-minimalism,” and “neo-Pop” are broad enough to take in the assemblages and the manufactured commercial objects that some POST-TONEO- 235 of the other artists go in for, but as titles they lack pizzazz, (They also call attention to the fact that nothing here is new, only “neo.") Even without a suitable name, though, the stuf is getting major attention as it moves out of the East Village and into the international mainstream. ‘The big event of the downtown art season was the opening of a fout- artist show of the new work at the Sonnabend Gallery, in SoHo, The show sold out so quickly that Hleana Sonnabend’s only problem has been placating the collectors who were too slow in placing their orders ‘The four young artists—Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, and Meyer Vaisman—can write their own tickets in terms of futire gallery representation. Sonnabend will take on Koons and Bickerton, and she will share Vaisman with her colleague (and former husband) Leo Castelli, who, for his part, plans to show several other new artists in collaboration with Pat Heam, the current doyenne of East Village dealers. The situation at the moment is highly “fluid,” as Ileana Son- nabend puts it, and quite touchy. Sonnabend and Castelli do not wish to be seen as corporate raiders, capitalizing on the groundwork of small East Village galleries; they are willing, they say, to codperate with the artists’ original dealers on future exhibitions and on sales. But some of the artists, having scaled ambition's ladder, seem to feel that the East Village is now behind them. A numberof friendships have been strained as.a result Much of the talk about the new artists centers on their own aggressive selfmarketing. Meyer Vaisman, twenty-six, born in Venezuela and a fairly recent graduate of the Parsons School of Design, is a dealer as ‘well as an artist: he is a co-owner of International with Monument, the East Village gallery that shows Halley and Koons. Jeff Koons, who supported himself for five years as a highly successful commodities broker with Smith Bamey, Harris Upham & Co., Inc., is said to be as adept at promoting his art work as he was at selling cotton futures “These artists actually do the things I was accused of doing,” Mary Boone said to me the other day, in amusement. (The Mary Boone Gallery, in SoHo, launched Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and other stars of the Neo-Expressionist wave; she represented Koons briefly, but hh left her for another SoHo gallery, which he also left.) One especially effective ploy that has reportedly been used is to let on that Charles Saatchi has just bought your latest work, Saatchi, the British advertising and public-relations executive who is also the world’s most active buyerCALVIN TOMKINS. of contemporary art, began acquiring works by Koons, Halley, and others in the group about a year ago, and his purchases galvanized the ‘market for them. Another factor in their meteoric rise has been the rather strident enthusiasm of Estelle Schwartz, a private New York art adviser who exerts an uncanny influence over a small group of collec- tors. It was Estelle Schwartz who got lleana Sonnabend to look at the new work, ‘What with all the talk of escalating prices and rampant self promotion, it isa surprise to find the new art so agreeable and (telatively) unas- suming. Halley paints multi-panel pictures in which a few simple shapes— squares or rectangles—occupy large areas of Day-Glo color. Vaisman ‘uses very large surfaces whose overall design patter is a photographic blowup of the weave of a piece of canvas. Bickerton makes eccentric wall constructions with eccentric images on them—the outline of a subway map, for example, or an array of gaudily painted simulated rocks. Koons buys kitschy objects from decorative-art outlets or souvenir Wholesalers and has them cast in stainless steel. At least, this is what they did for the Sonnabend show; with the exception of Halley, who hhas been painting in the same vein since 1983, the others have done very different work in the past, and they might easily do very different work in the future. (Koons told me he probably would not do anything ‘more in stainless steel.) What we have, then, is neither a movement nor a common style but a very loose group of artists ("barely even a group,” Sonnabend says) who share certain altitudes and influences. The primary influences appear to be Pop art, with its ironic use of ‘vulgar or commercial imagery, and Conceptual art, in which the physi- cal art object or image is simply a vehicle for the communication of aesthetic, philosophical, or social ideas. The new work is cool, une- motional, and frequently enigmatic—not the sort of thing to incite collectors to frenzy, you might think. On the other hand, it has afresh, cheerful look that comes as a relief feom the primal screaming of Neo- Expressionism, and it does seem to plug right into recent art history. ‘Ah, but wait. Art history these days is reckoned not in decades but in years or months. Although the primary influences may be Pop and Conceptual, the immediate antecedent of the new work is something called “appropriation,” which I had rather hoped I could ignore. Artists have always appropriated the work and the ideas of other atists, needless to say, in the sense of building on previous achievements, but the term entered art jargon and assumed a new dimension in the work of a POST-10 NEO- 237 number of recent American artists, the most widely exhibited of whom is Sherrie Levine. Levine made a name for herself in 1981 by regho- tographing some art-book reproductions of vintage photographs by Ed- ward Weston, having prints made from these negatives, and hanging them, unaltered except for the addition of her signature, in a show at Metro Pictures, She went on to make exact copies in watercolor of art= book reproductions of pictures by Egon Schiele, E] Lissitzky, Joan Mird, Piet Mondrian, and Kasimir Malevich, which she exhibited under her name with titles such as “After Joan Miré” and “After Piet Mondrian.” These “appropriations” were received with considerable awe, by certain critics, as Conceptual works that questioned and commented on the issue of originality in art. Having gained a measure of fame as an appropriationist, Levine has now decided that appropriation is no longer enough for her, according to a recent article in ARTnews, and she has gone on to paint geometric abstractions (stripes and checkerboard pat- terns) and to exhibit pieces of plywood untreated except for the knot- holes, which she has painted gold. These works, she has sai, “are about death in a way: the uneasy death of modernism.” Thirteen years ago, two people writing under the name Cheryl Ben= stein published an essay on a fictitious artist named Hank Herron, whose ‘work consisted of making exact copies of paintings by Frank Stella. The essay, which appeared in a widely distributed anthology called Idea Art (Dutton; 1973), argued that Herron’s copies introduced “a radically new and philosophical clement . .. that is precluded in the work of Mr, Stella, ie., the denial of originality.” This sy spoof went unrecognized as one at the time, and now, according to Thomas Crow, a critic who discusses it in the catalogue of a current group show of Halley, Koons, and others at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, it is being rediscovered and cited as prophetic. And so it is, to my chagrin, I had gone on naively assuming that appropriation itself was a more ot less amusing hoax, but no such luck—it turns out that Sherrie Levine's efforts (if not Hank Herron’s) are in deadly eamest, and, worse still, that they are tied up with French post-tructuralist philosophy, an ex- ceptionally glum line of thought which also informs some of the newest art. have no doubt that Charles Saatchi and his fellow-collectors are close students of post-structuralism, and are therefore in a better position than I am to understand the new work. They have surely mastered the notion of the simulacrum, for example. Jean Baudrillard, one of the top-drawer post-structuraliss, has advised us that we live in a world of238 CALVIN TOMKINS simulacra, by which he means, I think, 2 world of signs that have become detached from the real things they supposedly represent. As a result of the overwhelming power of advertising, television, and the ‘media in general, we no longer inhabit a world of real things, according to Baudrillard; reality has been replaced by the signs and images that refer to it. And art—well, art has been replaced by its simulacrum, too. ‘The artist can no longer make art; he or she can only refer to it, and cone way of doing so is by appropriating or mimicking previous art. In the process, the artist Peter Halley has written, the elements of mod- ‘emism “are reduced to their pure formal state and are denuded of any last vestiges of life or meaning.” Halley, in his mid-thirties, has done a lot of thinking about these matters, and he has published a number of essays on the intellectual underpinnings ofthe new work. He comes from one of those New York families that take ideas seriously. His father, Rudolph Halley, served as chief counsel to the Kefauver committee that investigated organized ‘crime in the nineteen-fifties, and also served for two years as president ‘of the City Council. Peter went to Andover, a school whose highly professional art program helped him decide to become an artist. At ‘Andover, he learned about Minimal art, which was developing great strength in those years (the late nineteen-sixtes), and was firmly grounded in aesthetic theories. At Yale, where he went after Andover, the art program seemed to him much more conservative, with an emphasis on figurative painting which made him feel out of tune with the other students—so much so that he decided to do his graduate work at the University of New Orleans. The wave of figurative, expressionist paint- ing that swept over the art world in the early eighties seemed to Halley wholly irelevant, backward, and uninteresting. “I felt that Frank Stella \was right when he said thatsystems, repetitive shapes, and non-relational ‘work were what was interesting now,” Halley told me last month, “But suddenly all these artists seemed to have gone back to an interest in composition, which is related to an older, European state of mind.” By 1980, Halley was living in Manhattan again, He was painting Min- imalist abstractions, and he had started to meet some young artists who were using images from TV and other media in their work. Barbara Kruger, one of these artists, introduced him to the writings of Jean Baudrillard, whose ideas seemed to clarify his own. “My work had tended to vacillate between an interest in Pop Art and an interest in autists like Rothko and Newman, who dealt in existential or transcen- POST-TONEO- 239 dental themes,” Halley said. “But now my belief in transcendental themes broke down. 1 began to see that my work was no longer either abstract or minimal, it was about those things. The same kind of issue ‘was turning up in the work of media-oriented artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, and it was also turning up in music—David Byrne, for example, Byrne is a musical version of Pop and Minimalism com- bined.” Halley found himself painting geometric abstractions in which a few vertical lines within a square block of color suggested “cells”—he saw them both as images of confinement and as cellular units in the scientific sense. Often the cell blocks were connected to one another by heavy black lines, which he called “conduits,” signifying either spatial cor- ridors or electrical connections. ‘These images of confinement and in= tetconnection had social implications for Halley; they suggested the condition of the individual in a media-controlled, post-industrial world. ‘The highly reflective Day-Glo colors he was using were the “hyper- realized simulated equivalent” of color, he wrote. Halley is the house intellectual—few of the artists with whom he is associated are so steeped in post-structuralist theory. Jeff Koons told me that Halley says Koons’ work is very much in line with BaudFillard’s thinking; this is O.K. with Koons, who has not read any Baudrillard. Inhis own much-discussed 1985 show at International with Monument, Koons offered three separate but related classes of simulacra: large ad- vertising posters for Nike athletic shoes; bronze casts of aquatic equip- ment (Aqualung, snorkel, rowboat); and large aquariums containing regulation basketballs that had been filled with enough fluid (either water or mercury) so that they remained partly or completely submerged. He has also exhibited brand-new vacuum cleaners encased in Plexiglas, and, earlier this fall, at International with Monument, poster-size liquor ads (made from the commercial originals, with permission) and sta less-stel replicas of novelty liquor decanters and other aids to alcoholic ‘consumption. All this has something to do, I surmise, with ideas about our consumer culture and the desire for status. I must say, though, that the vacuum cleaners and the basketballs mysteriously hovering in tanks of water were indelible images—something I have not yet discovered in the work of Vaisman or Bickerton. ‘There are a number of new artists I haven't mentioned, Haim Steinbach does installations of commercially manufactured items in strange com-240 CALVIN TOMKINS binations—for example, a portable radio-tape player on a shelf: pair of latex “Yoda” masks. Peter Schuyéf, Ti Shan Hsu, and Mary Heilmann paint geometric abstractions, Ross Bleckner, an artist who has been showing since 1979 at the Mary Boone Gallery, began in 1981 to show stripe paintings that referred directly to the Op-art move- ‘ment of the nineteen-sixties and reéstablished Bleckner as an important influence on the current scene. The Europeans Helmut Federle, John M. Armleder, and Gerwald Rockenschaub have turned up in group shows of the new abstraction here, and most of the Americans are now starting to show in Europe. ‘The most curious case, however, and, in my view, the most inter~ ‘esting artist of this new generation, is Philip Taaffe. Although ‘Taaffe's paintings are nearly all “appropriations” of the work of certain twentieth- century artists Barnett Newman and Bridget Riley are his current ‘models—he does not seem to attach any poststructuralist significance to this fact. And, indeed, the superficial resemblance is deceiving, for ‘Taalfe’s paintings differ in many ways from the “originals.” For one thing, virtually all of them are collages. When Taaffe makes an Op- art painting with an undulating stripe pattern which mimics the work of the British artist Bridget Riley, for example, he uses an obsessively complex technical process that is entirely his own. First, he hand-prints the wavy stripes from linoleum blocks, euts them out, and glues them to the canvas; next, he paints over the entire surface; he then scrapes the paint down to retrieve the outlines of the stripes. There are many more steps in the process, and they give the finished picture a dense, handmade look that is the antithesis of Riley's smooth, impersonal surface. (Reproductions of Taaffe’s work do not show this aspect at all.) When Riley was in town for the opening of her first New York show in several years, at the Jeffrey Hoffeld Gallery, on Madison Avenue, Taaffe went to the opening, introduced himself, and invited her to his studio. She accepted the invitation, and, according to Taaffe, her re- action to his reworked Rileys was by no means unfavorable. “You mean she took it as a compliment rather than a ripoff?” I asked him. He nodded, but a moment later he said that, to be honest, what he was doing was not simply a compliment to an artist he admired. “I do admire her work a lot, but unfortunately there's always some violence involved in taking another artist’s work and making it your own,” he said. “What | think I'm doing is romanticizing the space of Op at POST-TONEO- 241 ‘There isn’t much room for the imagination to move around in Op, but in my paintings, I think, there is.” ‘Taaffe, who is in his early thittes, has kept somewhat aloof from the East Village artists. He did not participate in group discussions that Halley and others used to have fairly regularly in the apartment of Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, two young eritics who have written about the new work and organized a number of group exhibitions of it. He does not even live downtown; his present studio and living quarters are in a midtown commercial building on Broadway. Nor does Taaffe share the pessimism of post-structuralist thought. He decided to be a painter when he was a young child growing up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and his emotional and intellectual commitment to painting is untouched by philosophical doubts. He feels that painting can still have a powerful «effect on society, in the sense that the sort of concentration and integrity that it requites can be a-model for how one leads one's life. And his ‘use of other artists’ work as the basis for his own does not strike him as being any different from, say, Manet’s use of Giorgione in Le Déjeuner sur PHerbe, of Picasso's use of Delacroix and other Old Masters ‘Taaffe is intensely bothered, moreover, by the accusations of com- mercialism, cynicism, and hype which have been levelled against th new abstract art. “That kind of talk makes me furious,” he told m ‘makes me want to say, ‘Just wait until I do the paintings I have in my head.’ " He shows with Pat Hearn, and he is not in negotiation with Sonnabend, Castelli, or any other gallery. The furor that now exists about his work and the work of Halley, Koons, and one or two others is just so much noise in the background, he says, sthich he tries to ignore as best he can “Ifonly art could accomplish the magic act of its own disappearance! But it continues to make believe it is disappearing when it is already gone.” That's Jean Baudrillard, quoted in Flash Art, a magazine that keeps in close touch with the latest trends. Taaffe isn’t buying this lin. In a panel discussion at the Pat Hear Gallery (he is not totaly aloof), he said with the invigorating arrogance of the young, “I think we've gotten to the point now where it’s been proven that painting cannot be Killed... . It won’t die, and we have to accept that fact.” (November 24, 1986)