Art: The Day of the Browser

Laundered by a benign autumnal sun, Manhattan last week seemed renewed, inviting, lithically radiant. Along the upper reaches of Madison Avenue, beyond adville, New Yorkers and out-of-towners ambled with art-gallery directories in their hands and expectancy in their eyes. Afternoons, from 5 to 7, the tinkling of ice in Scotch at show openings was audible out to the sidewalks. Inside the galleries, visitors doing New York on $5—or $500—a day pridefully signed the guest books, and sometimes added: “UGH!” or “Best show in the city.” It was all available for the price of shoe leather; in sum, the browser is again in flower.

The gallery season opens like the baseball season—with exhibition games. But after dealers have emptied their storerooms into group shows of “contemporary Americans,” they turn to catchier things. This week, a gallerygoer could see the British assemblagist John Latham’s skoobs (backwards for books), which make abstract use of old tomes. He could see—indeed, sit down on—Pop Artist George Brecht’s Blue Stool and White Glove. He could look at his own face in H. C. Westermann’s carpentered mirror boxes, each like a portable Marienbad, or ponder Jean Chabaud’s neatly perforated canvases, messages spelled out in the computer talk of punch-tape holes.

There was also, of course, some great old art: Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings at the IBM gallery, the masters at venerable Duveen, 60 years of American painting at the Whitney Museum. But browsers mostly like to discover. Some discoveries:

∙ ILYA BOBLTOWSKY, 56, now at the Borgenicht Gallery, is an old-line, Russian-born neo-plastic painter of the bars and striipes era whose new Columnsare a departure into scaless sculptor. They are carved from the invisible geometry of nature, suddenly visible when stained with the primary colors. In the conversion, the thin stripes of these new totems cause the eye to vibrate so violently between their colors that their sharpness blurs to become an optical enchantment.

∙ RUDOLPH SENO, 34, showing at Feingarten Galleries, clothes submarine creatures of the mind in thin bladders and sacs of sheet steel, brazing each thin gore of metal onto wire armatures. His sculptures prickle with spindly legs, tendrils and amputated arteries in a nightmarish yet elegant expression of the animal world.

∙ EDWARD GIOBBI, 36, at the Contemporaries, is given to literaryinspirations. Many of the 33 paintings on exhibit are circular canvases whose chromatic, half-defined figures from the works of Federico García Lorcaor Bertolt Brecht whirl like Roman-candle wheels. Or, exposing the germination of his ideas, he places the actual preliminary studies in the work, as if setting sketches of the backyard on the kitchen windowsill. In searching for an amalgam of abstract expressionism and classicism, Giobbi refreshingly describes anew the actual process of painting.