SEPTEMBER 17, 1993

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

ENTERTAINMENT

Art and curatorship at its best

25 Years: A Retrospective Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art

by Barry Daniels

25 Years: A Retrospective is a celebration of the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art's twenty-five years of bringing the best of contemporary art to Cleveland. It is an astonishing public record of the importance of the Center's activities in our community as well as a reflection of the spirit and taste of the Center's co-founder and retiring director, Marjorie Talalay.

Talalay, who curated the show, has included 98 of the 1,200 artists whose work has been exhibited at the Center, trying as much as possible to include those pieces that had been originally shown at the Center. It is both a good survey of the complex period from 1968 to 1993, and a very personal summing up of Talalay's remarkable leadership.

life coincides with the 25 years under review, it provokes reflection and reminiscence. To the extent that good art is a mirror of our world, I found myself wandering through my own past.

After looking at the intellectually stimulating, but often willfully ugly conceptualist work, I looked wistfully back at a ravishing Helen Frankenthaler woodblock print, Essence Mulberry, with its skinlike paper caressed by the washes of vibrant color. How could we give up this pure sensual pleasure for the heady theoretical debates of minimalism and conceptualism? I move forward and am delighted to find the response in the sensuality of the neo-Expressionists, especially a superb small monotype by Erich Fischl and a color woodcut by Francesco Clemente.

I was thrilled by the strong political statements in the more recent late post-modernist work that has opened up to multiculturalism. Adrian Piper's work

Chronologically, the exhibition begins makes us question the racism in our govern-

Persimmon, 1964 Robert Rauschenberg

with some fine examples of late Modernist abstraction by Elsworth Kelly, Frank Stella and Helen Frankenthaler, but the period really begins with the Pop artists-Warhol, Lichenstein, Johns, Oldenburg, and Rauschenberg-whose work, in retrospect looks like the first gesture of post-Modernism with its taste for "assemblage, allegory, citation and appropriation.”

We pass on to the violently anti-art aesthetic of Conceptualism (Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth), Process Art (Sam Gilliam, Robert Morris), and Earth Art (Robert Smithson, Christo). In this work we can see the almost perverse attempt to foreground theory and radically alter our definition of art and the art object. The Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s are represented in works by Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, Alex Katz, Georg Baselitz and Erich Fischl. There is notable New Image work by Chuck Close and Nicholas Africano. Finally there is a varied selection of recent work that represents the multiculturalist phase of late postModernism which adds a political slant to the playfulness of early post-Modernism.

The special pleasures of this exhibition are the startling contrasts and juxtapositions it makes through its process of condensation. For the viewer, like me, whose adult

ment's foreign policy through a witty comment on the white man's fear of the black man's penis (Vanilla Nightmares #20). Luis Cruz Azaceta uses a neo-primitive style to comment on fascist regimes in Latin America (El

Dictador).

Clegg and Guttmann's large color Cibachrome, Corporate Music, is a funny take on the forced marriage between the corporate world and the world of art. Andres Serrano's Heaven and Earth, Cibachrome photograph of a cardinal turning away from the bound and bloody nude torso of a woman, is a provocative comment on the relation between the Catholic Church and issues of women's rights. And what a surprise to see this work near such equally bold political statements from the 1960s as Faith Ringgold's Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger and Robert Rauschenberg's Signs, dated 1970, which forcefully brought back my own memories of the 1960s: it is an assured and true summary of that very difficult decade.

Somehow, the exhibition managed to lead me to a cluster of works by Pop artists last, taking me full circle and reaffirming the striking vitality of the work of these now, almost classic artists. These are great works, and Andy Warhol comes off looking like the Picasso of our times. His small early self-portrait is a masterpiece. The artist's brazen and vacant expression is a key to his entire body of work. His portrait of New York Gallery director Leo Castelli is so masterfully painted in thick layers of acrylic over the silkscreen photograph that it is a whole post-modernist essay on the disjunction between subject and surface.

From Warhol through Mapplethorpe, the work of gay artists is a vital presence in this exhibition, although it is often more representative of a gay sensibility than a presentation of gay subject matter. There are a few, notable exceptions. It is hard not to like Gilbert and George's Hill, for its exuberant

and unabashed pedophilia, and its fruity lushness. And I was particularly engaged by the two photographs that conclude the photographic selection along the corridor that leads to the first painting gallery. Robert Mapplethorpe's Christ, a small black and white photograph of a crucifix figure nailed to a wall of jet black stones, evokes a complex set of responses. The pale, emaciated, tortured body turns this crucifixion into a metaphor for AIDS, and also makes us think of Mapplethorpe's

Portrait of Leo Castelli, 1975 Andy Warhol

own crucifixion in the hands of right-wing censors. The image is shot through with traces of Mapplethorpe's own personal Calvary and his brave sexual honesty.

Next to the tormented Mapplethorpe image is large color Cibachrome print, Ken and Bruce, by Tina Barney. It is a baroque fantasy of bare-chested manhood as well as a celebration of the tenderness and love in the embrace of the two men at the center of the image. In a profound way the curator's decision to place these two photographs side by side encapsulates our own gay history in this period. This is art and curatorship at its best. Surely it is time for

the Center to consider an exhibition devoted to gay and lesbian art.

25 Years: A Retrospective continues through November 7 at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 8501 Carnegie Ave. There is an excellent catalogue, whose illustrations and chronological list of exhibitions and events at the Center from 1968 to 1993 is testimony to the contribution it has made to our community. (Skip the essay by art historian Ellen G. Landau. It is written in an unreadable jargon of the kind the latest issue of Artforum condemns as being both "elitist and obscurantist.") For inforabout exhibition and related events, telephone 421-8671. ♡ AVAILABLE NOW! SPECTACULAR DISCOUNTS!

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