The Super Micro-Macro World of Wanderama

Not too long ago, gallerygoing was a genteel affair. To and fro across carpeted floors swept the art lovers, sipping sherry. Safely up on the wall were the paintings, framed and titled, with prices on request. But no longer do the panes of varnish give onto idyllic visions of pinky Titian nudes, fluffy Millet sheep, plush Poussin valleys. Nowadays, avant-garde gallerygoing is more like the full 100 yards, with the visitors swivel-hipping through art works that threaten to tackle the visitor's body as well as his sensibilities (see color pages).

In the galleries sit hamburgers the size of Volkswagens. Here is a comfy zebra-striped chair draped with a leopard coat marked by the gallery PLEASE DON'T SIT. And right there behind the gallerygoer is a plaster facsimile of a real person looking like a petrified floorwalker. Coke bottles protrude from the canvas; TV sets roar from the painted surface; neon lights glow like theater marquees. A plethora of real objects has been swept into art, and art has walked right out of the frame into the living room.

Irreconcilable Appearances. "Painting relates to both art and life," says Artist Robert Rauschenberg enthusiastically. "Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two." His most spectacular feat of gapsmanship was his trend-setting Angora goat with rubber tire. It seems that Rauschenberg was struck by the incongruity of a stuffed goat in an office-furniture store window. He tried to paint the image. No good. But two years later, he laid a canvas on the floor, bought the goat, and set it on top of the canvas with a rubber tire around its middle. "I just wanted them to cope with the fact that it was there," Rauschenberg explains.

Cope the critics did, and Rauschenberg, in 1964, won the Venice Biennale Grand Prize.

Actually, Rauschenberg makes no claim to being the first to play the game. The cubists, he points out, long ago began incorporating materials from the real world (labels, newspaper clippings, playing cards) into their stuck-together collages. The surrealists later cottoned to the idea, as Max Ernst put it, of "coupling two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them." Dadaist Marcel Duchamp hung up mass-produced snow shovels and labeled them ready-made art.

Greasy Verisimilitude. But not even in their wildest dreams did the oldtimers go in for a production like Edward Kienholz's The Beanery (opposite), currently assembled at Manhattan's Dwan Gallery. A veritable apotheosis of the ordinary, it is West Coast Artist Kienholz's reconstruction of a favorite Los Angeles artists' greasy spoon, a kind of frozen happening quickened by sounds (random conversations, taped on the spot, and jukebox background music) and circulating odors (stale bacon grease) pushed around by a fan.

Kienholz, 38, has meticulously created the eatery on Santa Monica Boulevard. In his quest for verisimilitude, he even bought a new phone booth to replace the Beanery's so that he could have the real thing for his stage-set. The jukebox, too, is real, though the choice of records turns out to be art world in-puns: Up a Larry Rivers; It's Delightful, It's Delovely, It's de Kooning.

A taco on a plate is made of asphalt tile. Every object is rigidly held in place by epoxy, preserved in fiber glass, sometimes flocked to give it a mysterious felt texture. Point of it all? "People in any context are a reason for a tableau," says Kienholz, "this speaks volumes about our present society."

History as Machine Gun. Larry Rivers, 42, is the closest thing to an academic 19th century historical painter that the avant-garde can boast. Back in the heyday of abstract expressionism, he did a takeoff on Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, attempting, as he put it, "to paint its drama, pageantry, spectacle and absurdity without political bias."

His latest effort is by far his most ambitious--a 33-ft.-long History of the Russian Revolution (see overpage), The son of Russian immigrants (his father arrived in the U.S. in 1914, his mother in 1920), Rivers says that his work was actually spurred by reading Isaac Deutscher's trilogy on Trotsky and is "more a statement about art than about revolution." Explains Rivers: "Sure, I could have painted all the objects in, but I wanted to combine the sculptural qualities with the painting qualities."

The vast framework of the History, which will be put on exhibition next month at Manhattan's Jewish Museum, took nearly six months and $4,000 worth of materials to complete. To capture the spirit of the revolution, Rivers forced tangible and intangible images into juxtaposition. A real rifle, a sculpted wooden rifle, a painted rifle, silk-screened images of photographic rifles --all toy with vision. He inserted a real machine gun, glued real pencils to Gorky's desk, painted over still photographs of the revolution, added real plumbing ("It looks like a mysterious Rube Goldberg whisky still," he quips) to the section on Soviet industrialization. The final result: a collection of evocative images that collide like the fast-cutting montage of film.

Plaster Galore. George Segal, 41, makes ghosts in plaster with all the presence of living people. This is simply because he casts his figures directly from human models. Now at New York's Sidney Janis Gallery, his Costume Party differs from his previous work in its tinted surface. Two reclining silver figures masquerade as Antony (with Roman helmet and G.I. gunbelt) and Cleopatra (with painted Egyptian necklace). In aloof stances around them are a lumpy, black, helmeted "Pussy Galore-type," a red, catlike woman with a yellow-feathered mask, and a green-robed priest. They posture like demented inmates in a psychosexual drama, dancers in a group-therapy ballet.

"We can be just as interested in a flat painting," says Segal, "as in a dance concert." He wants to jump from medium to medium in an attempt to dissolve the boundaries between reality and dreams. "Have you ever been to a subway station?" he asks. "It is a totally man-made world of pure fantasy." For his Costume Party, the theme "left me free to range from contemporary experience to Greco-Roman metamorphosis of man to beast. It's illustrative of the many faces between man and woman in the nature of reality as I see it."

Nude Affirmations. The primary reality could once be fairly stated as what one sees in nature. But the retina of modern man is deluged with a thousand images that are themselves manmade, not the least of which flash from the television screen. To be true to reality means to include such images; so what is more logical than to tuck a TV screen into a painting. Or at least so thinks Tom Wesselmann, 34, who fiddles with the girl who doesn't exist, the supersex symbol, the Great American Nude, and sets her in homey seraglio scenes decorated with real radiators. Lift the Venetian blind, and there is a calendar painting of a Japanese harbor. Or, as in one recent Nude, the whole scene is stamped out of multicolored translucent plastic and glows from within by electric lights.

"I refuse to draw the line between flat painting and three-dimensional structures," says Wesselmann. "I'm aware of the differences between real and imi tation, but I don't attach much significance to the distinction. A painter from Belgium was up to my studio and thinks my works have to do with capitalism because I use real products. Not so; it's really an affirmation of the whole world."

Mattress-Sized Popsicles. In turning art into a supermarket display, artists are reacting violently against the grandiloquent gestures of yesterday's abstract expressionists, whose work often looked like a square inch of Constable blown up to jumbo size. As the life went out of such abstract handwriting on walls, artists fell back on the visible world. In their embrace of reality, they state that art is no longer that which only looks like art.

Believing, too, that art is no longer something better than life, these artists have made collage--by definition, a simple matter of gluing things on canvas--into a baroque explosion. Junk, advertising images, taxidermy, cups and saucers are now all straining beyond the frame, blurring the division between painting and sculpture, making art into a scavenger hunt for the perishable produce of the day.

The pursuit is undertaken with relish and good humor, much as a Claes Oldenburg delights in making a mattress-sized Popsicle on a limp stick. Beauty seems no longer at stake; the word itself is rarely used. But tough, satirical commentary abounds. "An artist should be an evangelist for looking," says Rauschenberg. Yet in creating a second, magical reality, the artist often ends up with whole stage-sets, creating a future problem: What's to keep the museums of the future from looking like a decayed Disneyland, or the whole back lot of MGM?

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