Last year's award winner, Jeff Koons, fully lived up to the Puvis honor by decisively losing a court case for plagiarism, and getting labeled "egregious" and a "pirate" to boot. But rising above such common cavil, Mr. Koons' continues his career unabated, as one would expect of a Puvis champion.
This year's honorees will again be judged on the customary artistic criteria: hype, gigantism, egomania, blatant overpricing, outrage, etc. We briefly considered the recently O.D.'d wild man, Jean-michel Basquiat -- a kind of Schnabel on speed, who combined incoherent hieroglyphics and higher prices. All we can say is requiescat Basquiat And Marc Quinn, the batty Brit who this year sculpted a bust of himself using his own frozen blood, attaching it permanently to a refrigeration unit. It left Mr. Adrian cold.
There has to be more, and this year an additional factor appears in the entrails -- namely, deliberate triviality. Well-marketed, seriously presented, utter, gormless triviality.
5th RUNNER UP
Antoni Tàpies, widely considered Catalonia's greatest living artist, for having the sheer cajones to design as the central hall of a new National Museum of Catalan Art -- a 60-foot-high gym sock! This proposed structure, according to Señor Tàpies, "involves a reflection on the objects of daily life to which we give no importance. I wanted to demonstrate that you can achieve transcendence through a simple object." He put a hole in the sock to "make us think of those with holes in their socks"; and less transcendentally, to function as an entrance to the museum.
So far this meisterstück exists only as a 6-inch model, looking suspiciously like an actual old sock. Perfect. But Sr. Tàpies will have to wait for the coveted Puvis until he can successfully spend millions on construction and ram this chatchke down Barcelona's throat for all time.
J. Seward Johnson, who has a process for casting people in bronze, capturing the most quotidian details with almost frightening fidelity. Fuelled by his Johnson & Johnson money, he has turned out copies of various lackluster citizens on park benches so realistic they can give one quite a turn to suddenly realize they are not real. (Vide the alloy avatars, for instance, up an alley adjacent to 75 Howard Street, San Francisco.)
The ultimate not-real pieces --at a second remove from reality one might say -- are Mr. Johnson's cast yuppies. As if there weren't too many yuppies to begin with, his copies in bronze have for some years been strewn about our downtown American cityscapes. Why? Well, why not, as toy soldiers for corporate warriors? They can look out the windows of their offices in Darth Vader-like buildings, see these metallic mirror-images of themselves deployed below, and experience the cozy Stevensonian satisfaction of watching their toy soldiers in "the pleasant land of counterpane".
In the real land of Puvis, unhappily, the sculptor does not win top honor. For however trivial Mr. Johnson's ideas, his execution is far too careful and meticulous to pass muster on cynicism.
Robert Motherwell, for producing more than 150 versions of one painting, each consisting of nothing more than a black blob on a pumpkin-colored background. Or actually, to be kind, like a fragment of Chinese calligraphy, writ large, as it were. To the untrained eye, these pictures all look alike. And indeed, they even look alike to the trained eye.
Now, this is why we reach beyond the grave to place Mr. Motherwell in contention: the artist maintained that he himself did not know which of the lot was the echt one! In other words, one infers, the subject (an elegy, hence the black) was so elusive, so complex, that the artist couldn't gauge the success of his own labors. That elegaic feeling apparently was too vast the be expressed through linear claptrap like gaining mastery or reaching a goal; but only through hopeful, sensitive, probing, aleatory stabs in the dark. And maybe not even then.
Wow. Sounds terrific, until you see the actual work. Blobs. Mr. Adrian has extracted more meaning from Rorschach tests. Our elegaic query to Mr. Motherwell: echt or ecch ?!
Ellsworth Kelly, for honing his recherche and difficult skills since the 1940's. Frankenstein (the critic, not the monster) once declared that Kelly "defines the present decade in American art with the same greatness of stature with which Jackson Pollock defined the decade that ended with his death." Kelly himself says, "It's very hard to do these paintings really. A lot of paintings today dominate you in a kind of ruthless way. I don't think my paintings are like that. They're quiet and reveal themselves slowly."
Since you must be all agog to see some of this subtle and significant stuff, we present without further ado the alembication of over forty years of artistic progress: "Yellow Relief with White," 1990, and "Orange Relief with Green," 1991.
A veritable tsar of trivia. A contender. We rest our case.
Wayne Thiebaud, who has put his vibrant line and juicy paint in the service of some truly goofy nonsense. First runner up standing is amply justified, in our opinion, in view of a recent experience at the De Young Museum. There we were, transfixed in front of David's "Death of Patroclus", which depicts Achilles mourning the death of his best friend, killed by a Trojan. This, the reader will recall from the Iliad, is the pivotal moment impelling Achilles toward his prophesied doom in Troy. Great drama is woven into the rather small painting, with the rythmic massing of the crowds, the path of light cresting at the funeral bier, the vital Achilles, the dead Patroclus, the loosely painted, evocative warships in the background against a brooding mauve sky glowing with the promise of war. A virtuoso work as well from a purely mahlerisch standpoint.
Well, the next painting that met our eyes, not 10 yards away, was by Thiebaud -- a tray of candy, for crying out loud! Definite Puvis possibilities here. Especially considering that some twit at the San Francisco Chronicle thought it swell that the candy could be mistaken for lipstick tubes, or bullets.
What firmly clinched Mr. T's candidacy was his vertical cityscapes in imitation of Diebenkorn -- an urbanization of Ocean Park, as it were. If Mr. Adrian may be permitted the occasional acerbic observation, the selling of Diebenkorn has got to be a tour de force on a par with marketing pet rocks. Imitation of Diebenkorn is truly the sincerest form of trivia. Yet Mr. T is outdone by .....
Kenneth Noland, the reigning titan of trivia, who proves that less is more. Less paint, more gelt, that is.
Typical Noland minimalism is shown in the minimally titled painting "No.1".
Kenneth Noland's "No.1" (1958)
The effect is like a Frankenthaler chasing its tail, featuring those (ha, ha) oh-so-exuberant stripes that make her best work resemble awning material. Awnings must be the bottom of the heap in textile design, and Mr. Noland is too top-drawer to join Ms. Frankenthaler and her more anonymous confreres in awning design.
Mr. Noland's minimalism extends to his persona as well. We once took a painting course from him at UC Berkeley, and while we had no idea who he was or what he painted, we were impressed by his spare, laconic style. While other professors would gabble on interminably, Mr. Noland didn't lecture. He didn't comment on student work, except for the occasional "hmmm." One time, he stopped in front of a painting in progress, being vigorously flogged by none other than Mr. Adrian, framed a small portion with his hands, and said, in his whispery way, "Hmmm. That's got ... some stuff." Mr. Adrian never forgot it. We never understood it. But we never forgot it.
Perhaps his paintings do the same thing. He draws a line. We never understand it. (What's to understand?) But we never forget it.
Or maybe it is just another black-magic market phenomenon. It doesn't matter what is on the canvas. For instance, a Noland print was offered locally several years back at a knock-down price of $7,000. One lady took one look; sniffed, "That print for seven thousand dollars?"; and went home to Orinda. A week later, when Architectural Digest featured the Noland studio, and she realized that Noland paintings could sell for a hundred times the price of the print, she couldn't snap it up fast enough.
As Francis Bacon put it: "Who ever bought one of my paintings because they liked it?"
Now let the qualification process will begin anew for the third Puvis Award. We are confident that the Art World won't let us down, but will boil over with a riotous supply of even more outrageous anecdotal material, artworks, and candidates.