MARJORIE WELISH
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slickness, a combination well known to admirers of camp, the
conscious cultivation of bad taste that pop art made possible, and
reinforced by new wave culture, as well as by their artworld coun–
terparts in psychosexual performance. Garet seeks a disturbing
purpose for his melodramatic decor and sometimes achieves pic–
tures that have internalized their decor, converting it to inner, psy–
chological space. The stylish languor exuded by Garet's recum–
bent figures is furthermore heavily indebted to romantic spleen.
Nineteenth-century critics commonly termed the character Sar–
danapalus "a fashionable," a dandy bored with the unbounded
luxury of his empire, and it is this sense of world weariness that
pervades Garet's stylishly lugubrious compositions and nourishes
their sensational impact.
Julian Schnabel's blue nude unsheathes his sword with the
self-aggrandizing importance of Hugo's hero Hernami, the stiff,
outstretched figure seemingly charged with a mandate to exist as
art and filled with that awe-inspiring responsibility. By forceful
style and material display, the canvases assume the rank of van–
guard and mainstream art object all at once. Paint slathered over
broken crockery or velvet, often in huge assemblage, initiates
Schnabel's eye-catching entry into the history of materiality. In
modern practice, forty years after bits of actual material were col–
laged into cubist art, Jackson Pollock stressed pigment's physic–
ality by using paint as an adhesive for sand, broken glass, string,
and other matter. Then Robert Rauschenberg stunned the art
world with assemblage that refused to reconcile nature
to
culture.
The 1970s brought the sensuous excesses of Frank Stella's kitschy,
flamboyant reliefs, a notable spin-off of which were Lucas Sam–
aras's flashy, sexy Crazy Quilts. Schnabel presents us with a typic–
ally American, conspicuous materialism that aspires to over–
whelm us with sensuous presence and the fact of its own contem–
poraneity.
The prevalence of today's sensationally tinged figure paint–
ing derives in part from the cumulative example of influential
artists who led the way. Guided by Warhol's increasingly more
stylish portraits of celebrities, but also won over by Stella's decor–
ative and campy betrayal of his own former geometry, young ar–
tists have disavowed the esthetics of economy for the esthetics of
excess and extravagance, creating art whose prodigal sensuous–
ness and violence act as preposterous but effective counter exam-
