Newsday, June 27, 1982

The Art of Life and Death

(excerpt)

In galleries throughout Manhattan, graphic works by disparate artists, sculptors, and cartoonists decry the atom bomb and its horrors.

“What do you do,” artist Larry Rivers recently asked sculptor William King, “for post-hopeless art?’

At the time, Rivers had saxophone in hand as part of his attempt to deter the nuclear holocaust he was talking about. For the benefit of Save Our World, an East End anti-nuclear group, he and his Thirteenth Street Band were exhausting their vast repertoire of jazz favorites at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton.

King’s protest against the bomb has taken a number of forms, most notably the 12-by-31 foot aluminum sculpture, on view at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza across from the United Nations through Aug. 31. It consists of a huge stop sign with a cartoony hand reaching out of it. The words on the palm of the hand announce the intent – and title – of the piece: “Stop World War III.”

If this is the pre-hopeless era in art as well as life, a great many artists are eager to keep it that way through anti-nuclear activism, by lending works to exhibits that will further the cause, or by painting their terrors on canvas.

The most ambitious of the “big bang” shows, “The Atomic Salon,” is at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 31 Mercer St., where under the co-sponsorship of The Village Voice, Carrie Rickey, who writes for the Voice, has gathered together works by 40 disparate artists who hate the bomb.

It’s a grab bag of a show, a conceptual work here, a sound piece there, a little design and decoration, a little realism, a little expressionism. There are pieces, like Tom Otterness’ “Lead Raincoat” on a hanger, which packs the wallop it was meant to. There are some chillingly evocative works like Larry Fuente’s “Pandora’s Box.” The sculpture consists of a coffin housing a bomb surrounded by mutants – an eagle with a death’s head and human feet, a goose with crab claws – all of them lit with ultraviolet and fluorescent light in weird colors. “Pandora’s Box” is a sequel to “Transmutation at Ground Zero,” Fuente’s first anti-nuclear installation at The Clocktower, a gallery near City Hall, which was a horrific walk-through jungle containing mutant animals with human parts shining with fluorescent lights in Day-Glo colors to suggest radioactivity.

But much of what’s on view has had the anti-nuclear message, attached as an afterthought – take Sandy Skoglund’s made-up photograph of iridescent green “Radioactive Cats” or, for that matter, the lead raincoat. Or Andy Warhol’s 1975 painting of nine differently tinted “Skulls.”

“Skulls” misses the point of the show. It’s merely Warhol being honest about the subject of all his portraits. His Jackie and Marilyn, his Mao and Jimmy Carter always were deaths-heads – public images frozen in time….

AMEI WALLACH