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PARTISAN REVIEW
and disappearing during some arcane ritual. Jacobs's paintings are
mysterious and gritty. They give the lie to one of her countrymen's
assertion that Canadians prefer "reason over passion."
Across the street from the Jacobs exhibition, Ross Bleckner
showed recent work at the Mary Boone Gallery during October and
November. Bleckner's work is further evidence of the pervasiveness
of the articulated surface and, alas, of the pervasiveness of what I
can call only cynicism in current painting. The deep, uniform tones
of his vertical canvases were interrupted by jewel-like spots of color
that ranged from transparent wiped patches to thick clumps of pig–
ment, with sleek, shiny passages in between. Almost hidden among
these incidents, you discovered a tiny hand, like the hand of God in
Northern Renaissance paintings, or a
fleur
de
lis,
or ghostly birds.
(Some said they were angels).
I kept having testy conversations with young artists who found
the Bleckners exciting and new. They claimed that the tiny images,
which I found silly, were the
point,
signifying, I was told, Bleckner's
ironic detachment, his downright subversion of the kind of abstrac–
tion that his paintings superficially resemble . What then was I to
make of the large gray picture, all blobs and knobs arranged in con–
centric rings, mercifully free of angels or hummingbirds, that man–
aged to be the best picture in the show? Bleckner fans told me, too,
that they admired his surfaces . I'll grant that he can put paint
through its paces, but there is something flashy and a little tawdry
about Bleckner's star-spangled canvases; rather than connoting opu–
lence, they seem merely slick. (The gray picture suffered less from
this, its paint more legible as paint than as glitz). The problem with
Bleckner's virtuoso paint handling, curiously, is his evident disdain
for his medium. His imagery provides the clue, and finally, it is his
imagery that troubles me most. Bleckner doesn't trust the ability of
his medium to be expressive nor does he trust the ability of his
viewers to read his pictures. He insists on spelling out a single mean–
ing for his audience, leaving nothing to chance or to ambiguity. I
was reminded of a dance performance I had seen last season, a piece
that seemed directly motivated by the choreographer's choice of
music and open to a wide range of interpretations. The dancer's
movements were apparently spontaneous (although obviously set),
suggestive, ambiguous-until the last moment, when he resolved a
series of feints from one side of the stage to the other as a shrug.
What had seemed provocative, seconds before, became a literal–
minded pantomime of indecision . The mood of the dance changed
