Word: 80s
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...between tragedy and farce. Ostensibly it is a sardonic burlesque of the United Nations (here thinly disguised as the World Body) and its present-day cast of characters, but underneath runs a current of sadness that the ideals of the 1940s have been overrun by the travesties of the '80s. One veteran envoy, producing an old Esperanto primer, even remembers when "one universal language would make war obsolete...
...best new painting being done by American artists whose careers have come into full focus in the '80s puts itself at a remove from such matters. To start, there are Neil Jenney, 39, and Brice Marden, 46. Jenney's career is long for his age -- he started exhibiting sculpture in the mid-1960s before turning to painting -- and his work is dense with critical thought. The look of his current paintings, when first experienced, is puzzling: impacted "views" of nature that are not really views at all, but icons concentrated by cropping and framing...
Marden's work reminds one how silly was the death-of-abstract-art talk heard so much at the start of the '80s, as foolish as the death-of-painting cant in the '70s. Much of the work of younger American artists remains abstract, whether "decorative" (Alan Shields, Valerie Jaudon or the exuberant Judy Pfaff, whose manic, space-consuming constructions are hybrids of painting and sculpture) or more ostensibly rigorous in its aims, like that of Gary Stephan, 42. His paintings are like massive and vivid reflections on late cubism, especially the utopian "cubifying" abstraction of the 1920s, as practiced...
...fact, despite the abysmal state of fashion and ephemera, some depictive art of the '80s in America is in fine shape. Those who doubt this might consult the current retrospective of the fluent, tantalizingly mysterious work of Jennifer Bartlett, 44, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. One might also adduce the small, concentrated paintings of Mark Innerst, 28, which inject photo-derived images of Great Tourist Views (colossi of Memnon in Egypt, the Hudson River landscape of the 19th century) with a remarkable feel for the subtleties of atmosphere...
...which arrives in the U.S. trailing clouds of praise from England, Germany, Canada and Australia, may do just as well. True, the sex this time around is considerably muted. But moods have changed over the past 20 years, and Vizinczey has cannily kept pace. The prime aphrodisiacs of the ^ '80s seem to be money and greed, and An Innocent Millionaire offers a spellbinding combination of both...