Page 67 - Studio International - November 1966

sense of form, colour tact—Stella is a master among the are suggestive, sensuous and disturbing, and have, as
many youthful exponents in the exhibition. Miss Lippard acknowledges, affinities with surrealist ob-
Museums vie with galleries and galleries vie with mu- jects. Certainly Louise Bourgeois' uncomfortably textured
seums in the packaging of up-to-the-minute develop- latex moulds—among the most convincing works in the
ments. At the new quarters of the FISCHBACH GALLERY, show—are truly in the line of surrealist objects. Other
another critic, Lucy Lippard, presents her own package, works are perhaps less aggressively 'sensuous' and sugges-
Eccentric Abstraction. She starts off merrily begging the tive, but nearly all of them are out to assault in the good
question by defining her artists as eccentric 'because they old nihilist tradition. Does this warrant still another
refuse to forego imagination and the expansion of sensu- label ? And more important, does the continuing existence
ous experience while they also refuse to sacrifice the solid of the perpetual Dada challenge among one group of
formal basis demanded of the best in current non-objec- artists really justify Miss Lippard's speculation that 'the
tive art'. This, needless to say, lets a lot of air into the future of sculpture may well lie in such non-sculptural
package. Miss Lippard has plenty of 'buts' in her intro- styles' ? The future of which sculpture ?
duction. For instance: 'But where formalist art tends to In both of these exhibitions— qua critical assertions—the
focus on specific formal problems, eccentric abstraction is polemics outstrip the occasion for the polemics, which
more allied to the non-formal tradition of opening up new again is typical of the cultural apparatus undermined
areas in materials, forms, colour, and sensuous experience.' by the merchandising mentality. I want to make it clear
Miss Lippard tells us, also, that 'eccentric abstraction that I believe the artists exhibited in both shows should
thrives on contrast, but contrast handled uniquely, so be granted exhibition possibilities, but they should also be
that opposites become complementary instead of con- granted time and breathing space before they are thrust
tradictory'. into the airless bags of the critics.
Coming nearer to a point which is at least comprehen- Much more modest in intention was the JEWISH MU-
sible, she tells us that these artists refuse to take a single SEUM'S exhibition titled The Lower East Side : Portal to
point of view. Her explanations become curiouser and American Life (1870-1924). This was a documentary
curiouser, as for instance this discussion: exhibition making proper use of various media—photo-
`Frank Lincoln Viner's expandable wall piece combines graphs from the period, documents, recorded street
garish pattern and disciplined form, tautness and limp- sounds, a film showing the arrival of immigrants at the
ness in a way that transcends ugliness by destroying the turn of the century, and a stirring film strip of Zero
concept of ugly versus beautiful in favour of an a-logical Mostel reading letters from imploring immigrants written
visual compound, or sight. In spite of its urban ambience, to the editor of the leading Jewish daily. There was also a
there is an aspect of visceral identification that is hard to fine arts section including paintings and drawings of the
escape, an identification that psychologists have called period. As a moving document of a vital and often tragic
"body ego".' period in American life, and as a well-co-ordinated use of
Two photographs by It happens that most of the objects in this selection are various media to convey a fully-rounded image, the ex-
Lewis Hine, 1910, in the
Jewish Museum exhibition, compounds of various unorthodox materials—plastic, hibition was exemplary. It was accompanied by a lively
The Lower East Side leather, oil-cloth, wire—and that many of the objects catalogue edited by Alan Schoener, director. r