540
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
cuteness), rather than making them serve as definers of place. At least, that
seems to be her starting point. You can never be sure, in MacPhee's
work, just how much is observed and how much is invented, filtered
through time, memory, and the history of art.
Space tips and slides, disorienting the viewer and making him con–
centrate on the artifice of painting, not the reality of New Jersey dock–
lands. MacPhee's paint handling has been getting looser and lusher in the
last few years, and the struggle between the delicate, relaxed touches of
her brush and her brutal subject matter is an important part of what her
new work is about. Her tender color, with its abrasive, ac idic top notes,
adds to the tension. The result is not a predi ctable commentary on the
unexpected beauty or sensuality of the mechani cal, but rather a complex
meditation on what it means to aspire to a great tradition of painterly
painting from the perspective of a late twentieth- century urbanite.
MacPhee is a newcomer to watch with interest.
Among old friends , shows by Helen Frankenthaler and Willard
Boepple, both at Andre Emmerich Gallery in April, raised expectations
that were richly met. Frankenthaler was in fine form, flirting with land–
scape allusions and pulling back at the last minute to a world of floating
blocks and streaks of paint and floods of color. Nature informs these
paintings, but it is nature translated into purely painterly terms , or per–
haps it would be more accurate to say distilled into essences of startling
color and seductive surfaces.
Boepple continues to explore his ladder-like image , but saying that
tells you little about the inventiveness of his sculpture. The newest works
are of pale, sometimes stained wood. The "ladders" are sliced, chopped,
and reassembled to make structures that are at once abstract, anthropo–
morphic, and architectural. They wave and balance, press their limbs
closely together and then, when you least expect it, announce themselves
as solemn, deadpan enclosures. The largest piece in the show, however,
did none of these things, being a giant cascade of chunks and planes that
seemed at the same time an homage to Cubism and a genial nose–
thumbing at the awe with which Cubism is regarded these days. It's as if
Boepple had recaptured, at large scale and in his own vocabulary, the
irreverent spirit that turned a scrap of sheet metal into a still life, or some
sheets of cardboard and a couple of pieces of string into a guitar. Boep–
ple's seemingly casual spill of blocks and scraps was also authoritative and
serious, for all its playfulness.
A final thought. None of these artists were represented in this year's
Whitney Biennial. Given the general awfulness of the show - admittedly
awfulness of a different kind than any of the previous versions - I
would
take that omission as a kind of endorsement.
