Page 60 - Studio International - July August 1968

Right Wiley's objects, to me, are far less challenging.
Frank Roth They are obvious but not witty, homey but not
Study for waiting 1967 scathing. While he addresses his humour to the
acrylic on canvas spoofing of the middle classes by using trite images
52 x 46 in. they can readily identify, he does not, like Poe,
Martha Jackson Gallery, sharpen his tools with irony. In order for the live
New York potatoes supporting a wood construction to really
hit home, they would have to be a little more
Below
wormy. Wiley's victims get what they deserve
Fred Martin
perhaps, but does Wiley?
A portrait of the artist 1967
acrylic on canvas What makes the American funk artist durable is
66 x 91 in.
the degree to which he can con his viewer into
Royal Marks Gallery, New York
believing in his innocence. Where the question
lingers, art enters. An even more questionable
artist, in this sense, is Fred Martin whose show at
the ROYAL MARKS GALLERY could be read either
way. In general, Martin's imagery, which nearly
always refers to the countryside of his native
California, carries with it a kind of hayseed authen-
ticity. But in previous drawings—often accompanied
by legends—Martin showed his sophistication in
swift little feints that gave him away as a diddler.
Perhaps it was from Martin, who taught at the
California Art Institute when Wiley was a student
there, that Wiley caught the fever.
Martin used to write quaint little commentaries
such as 'mom was a poppy and pop was a sheaf of
golden wheat' under his drawings and you could
think what you liked, except that the drawing
always had a little twist in it somewhere telling of
the con man's conning. Now, Martin shows large
canvases, mostly without written commentary,
which seem rather straight and maybe even a little
sentimental. They are full of things fetched down
from the old attic, or stored away in the barn. They
smell of corn husks and folk. They might be the
work of the generation of 'Oklahoma' plain and
simple. Or they might be the work of Fred Martin,
father of one family of funk, so funky that he
comes out the other end.
There is even a suspicion of ambition that carries
him out of the funk class in the best painting in the
show. This is an almost classically constructed
composition in which every form sits in its desig-
nated place with a firmness that betrays straight
seriousness. The grin just isn't there, even though
there is a mysterious inset with a legend that reads
`Portrait of the Artist as a machine harvester'.
Here, Martin seems to have been absorbed by a
pictorial problem which he solves inch by inch
with real precision.
The work is painted in tones of gold, black and
brown and the drawing is stressed. Martin's linear
allusions to seventeenth-century modes (systems of
points and broken lines) lend the painting a kind
of sobriety. His spikey imagery is somewhat remi-
niscent of earlier Graham Sutherland although
his spaces are as wildly improbable here as in his
drawings. In fact, the spatial ambiguities induced
by the upright perspective of what may be a floor,
are the chief source of interest in the painting, and
Martin handles them very well.
Whether Martin is indeed putting us on when he
structions on view this time, it is the grinning did- For these recent watercolours, Wiley has cultiva- whisks out of his imagination's cornucopia the
dler who calls the tune. ted a style of even ink lines and appropriate keys, china, door handles, corn shucks and farm
`Any one who would stoop so low as to read this ...' systems of dots and commas, aping the flat state- machines that inhabit his paintings, remains open
he writes in the kid's notebook chained low to one ment of the Sears-Roebuck catalogue illustrator. to question. He may be a faltering diddler, but he
of the objects, and stands back grinning while one It is many times removed from the sophisticated is not a diddling falterer. He is surely one of the
after another the dupes come to be chastened. He imitations of Max Ernst—as far removed as Tonio most consistently interesting figures on the West
cons his viewers into reading the tedious recitals of Kreuger is from the American diddler or Confi- Coast.
homey affairs by using the visual image as a come- dence Man. Yet it is used to similar ends: to
on. Secreted in his poker-faced, tinted drawings underscore the conundrums the drawings symbo- When faced with the predominantly earnest decla-
with their long legends, are many of Wiley's stock lize, and, in the true spirit of Surrealism, to set the rations of the advocates of 'Destruction Art',
mysteries, such as the triangular motif, but they mind's eye adrift in a sea of seeming absurdities. gathered together in a motley exhibition at FINCH
are made to recede by the prominence of the writ- The pale, even washes tinting these drawings also COLLEGE MUSEUM, the arch little games of the
ten legends, not one of which illuminates any help to deliver the punchline image with deadpan diddlers are rather welcome. Finch College main-
mystery, and all of which are put-ons. intensity. tains a contemporary museum in the heart of the
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