Revelations of Summertime

By ROBERT HUGHES

Two exhibitions enliven a dwindling bill of fare

As the temperature soars, the New York City art world winds down. Early summer is the time for group shows, mixed hangings, tail ends of the year. Yet now and again, it contains some interesting items; even a few revelations. Two such shows, having nothing but dates in common, can be picked from Manhattan's dwindling bill of fare. One is a downtown exhibition of works on paper by the Kansas-born artist Alan Shields, 39; the other, at the Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street, is the promising second New York show of a painter from the Southwest, John Alexander.

Born in 1945, Alexander was raised in Texas swamp country--Beaumont, near the Louisiana border. One might not deduce that from his work but, with a little hindsight, the paintings suggest it. They have a marshy, embrangled look full of thickets of line and pools of darkness. Their peculiar sense of space (which looks incoherent in reproduction, but at full scale is not) is recognizable at once to anyone who has gone through swamp: no horizon to be seen, only a succession of angles that, when the eye pushes through them, disclose more tangles beyond. The light is murky. Such color as is there is local--a flurry of pink, a sudden network of vermilion slashes. Otherwise it is all bog color, glazed browns reflecting other browns, dank mossy greens, thick in tone.

This recipe could hardly be less like the ideal clarity and openness of traditional American abstract painting. It sounds like a terrible mess, but it does not cook out that way, for two reasons. The first is the strength of Alexander's imagery; the second, his formal control. Since most neoexpressionist painting is given to conventional signs for intensity but lacks formal rigor (a gut pile without shape), Alexander's work repays inspection.

It is weird, edgy stuff, raucous and paranoid by turns. On one side it descends from the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, whose images of cannibal nature--all claw, tooth and bone--were a significant, though now unfashionable, part of the impact surrealism made on New York in the 1940s. On the other it comes out of a native, down-home strand of buckeye humor, folk forms that verge unconsciously on surrealism: tall Texan stories and Bible Belt grotesqueries. A zoo of critters lurks in Alexander's paintings: snakes preying on rats, rats eyeing scrofulous cats, and so on up the food chain to leopards and a large stag, whose rack of antlers has a horrified, spiky erectness. We are shown a teeming, hostile world where everything studies the next species with blood or hunger in its eye; these acts of watching are traced out with lines, zapping like lasers--or the emblems of stigmatization in Sassetta's Saint

Francis--between eye and eye. Fish float in the sky, evoking the early Christian ichthys; a wretched tar baby hangs on a crucifix. It is a moralizing vision, as the grotesque ought to be: Alexander's art has always had a strong political and religious strain.

What interferes with the paintings is a tendency to caricature rather than draw every shape right through. There are too many bug eyes, cartoony ears and fragmentary evocations of Felix the Cat. But at the same time, Alexander's torrent of images corresponds to a real need, which, on the whole, his formal system can handle. But when his indignation is at full blast--as in The Art King, a mordant quotation from Bosch, showing a startled windbag of a culture hero being devoured, crown and all, by a leopard--he is plainly an original, though not necessarily a pleasant one.

At the Paula Cooper gallery in SoHo, Alan Shields' exhibition is at a far remove from this exhibit. It consists of works in, and on, handmade paper, done in his Shelter Island, N.Y., studio over the winter of 1982-83: a small affair, only seven pieces, but certainly the most delectable show to be seen in downtown Manhattan this summer. Shields has been showing on the international circuit for years, and his arrays of irregular patches and ribbons of stained canvas, sewn together with an offhand and improvisatory air, misled some critics into thinking of him as a kind of craftsy '60s bricoleur fiddling with mandalas by the seaside. (The sight of Shields, 6 ft. 4 in., with his shaven bronze dome of a head, nautical beard and Queequeg-like mien, daintily stitching in a studio littered with harpoons and coot decoys, is one of the more striking images of role reversal the art world affords.) In fact, his imagination goes far beyond that: it has a sparkling, lyric quality, which comes not so much from preordained imagery as from the way he handles his materials.

The subject matter of these paper works (some of which are conventionally framed like drawings, while others, double-sided, hang from the ceiling) begins with the paper itself, its density, translucency and fibrousness, the way it hardens into feathery blots or accidental-looking rags that preserve the liquid slurry as a shrunken form, like a dried leaf. Shields has a Japanese attitude toward paper: he likes it to speak for itself, and his approach is a matter of subtle interventions rather than brusque changes. The "drawing"--in fact stitching, run on the sewing machine in brisk swoops and zigzag flurries of contrasting thread--looks both improvised and exact, like a well-blown line in jazz. The paper shapes themselves start as regular forms: spoked wheels, geometric grids, or a sheet perforated with spaced holes. Most of them are spares, leftovers from earlier "multiple" projects. But because there is so much small-scale chance involved in the casting and drying, they come out lace-winged and irregular; and Shields compounds their variations, sometimes with breathtaking elegance.

Visher Now superimposes two of these stained, circular webs over a ground of broad bands, the colors ranging from malachite green to Naples yellow, but keyed to a dark, brownish plum in the background. It is the kind of "decorative" work that actually transcends the fixed qualities of decorative art by making one party to its visual mechanisms: the decisions about placement and tuning and chance and drawing that it incorporates. One sees a highly charged sensibility at work, not just a pat and pleasing configuration. Occasionally a metaphor of the larger world seeps in: Rose Cloud Crowd, with its floating spots of pink cumulus, is undeniably a seascape, and there is a piece with bitten fragments of paper riding on a gray field that looks like a nautical chart of islands and reminds one that Shields, when not in the studio, is a constant and obsessive angler--a name to frighten every weakfish in the Peconic Bays. But in general, it is process and material and color, rather than imagery, that generate the poem; and they are enough. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.