October 9, 1994

ART; An Artist Armed With One-Liners Goes After Pretentions

By VIVIEN RAYNOR

THE seeds for the current exhibition at Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven were sown earlier this year at the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. The event was called "Art Depot," this one is "Selected Work from Five Decades," and each stars Sam Wiener and his alter ego Evangeline Tabasco.

In a joint photograph, Mr. Wiener's half-face wears a mustache and eyeglasses, Ms. Tabasco's sports false eyelashes and has a flower across her upper lip. They should make it a cabaret act.

During his 40-year career Mr. Wiener has done his share of serious work -- sculpture, assemblage, tapestries together with stained-glass windows and other architectural ornament.

But since the early 1970's he has been really serious, dealing first with political and moral issues, then with contemporary art of the seriously difficult kind. It was halfway through this decade that Ms. Tabasco materialized with collages, assemblages and pseudo-archeological treasures, allegedly produced by the ancient Sohites, inhabitants of SoHo.

The trouble with satirical art is that its appreciation requires more knowledge than that for the straight goods. It is one thing to take in Barnett Newman's bronze obelisk but quite another to see it piercing the workshop's storefront like a misfired warhead. There it hangs, surrounded by simulated cracks in the glass and poised over the other works, which are Richard Serra look-alikes, hence the title "Barnett Crashes Richard's Party."

This is where the uncertainty begins: "Tilted Arc" (in a downtown Manhattan plaza) is famous or infamous depending on one's view, but does "Le Grand Fromage," a piece like a giant cheese with a cut slice leaning against it, have a basis in reality? Still, if not a Serra, the shape that, like the others, is made of a plastic foam-like material painted rusty black, is certainly a Serroid. Besides, this part of the show is titled "It Ain't Neceserrally So."

The artist's fascination with the sculptor knows no bounds. Indeed, Mr. Wiener may be speaking for himself in the title to the photograph of a Richard Serra plate in Yale University Art Gallery. The work is called "My Name Is Sam. I'm an Arcoholic." In an event, having been much exercised by the talk of moving "Tilted Arc" from its Wall Street setting,

Mr. Wiener went to the trouble of thinking up new locations from it, expressing them with small bits of metal added to color photographs of landscape. Accordingly, the work blocks a tree-lined road, bridges a gorge in the Rockies, stretches across a field of ripe corn and so forth. The possibilities are endless.

Someone saying he was off to buy a suit at the Metropolitan Museum -- a good joke in the 1970's -- would pass unnoticed now. Nevertheless, Mr. Wiener gets many miles out of museum gift shops with his, or rather Ms. Tabasco's, items drawn from the "Metropolitan Container of Art Gift Shop." These, a caption states, "are Sohite works of art created by the same artisans who fashioned the works in the museum."

Many of them are beer can tops and tabs, gilded and silvered, and most are posed like flatware in fitted cases.

Then there is "The Whitney Museum of American Supermarket Art," an open-fronted structure with four floors each containing miniature parodies of familiar works.

A mop head recalls early Robert Morris, while a rectangle filled to capacity by a photograph of a dog's head suggests Chuck Close, and a framed American flag Jasper Johns. There is even a George Segaloid.

Mr. Wiener is a comedian dealing only in one-liners and he doesn't miss a trick: Name a pretention and he nails it. I especially like the bronze of a bent knee titled "Small Monument to Kneeness."

Once on a roll, however, he seems unable to get off. That is the other trouble with satirical art; too much of it leaves the viewer numb.

Then again, too much of anything numbs, be it the documentation of starving children that seems to fill the nights on television and the talk shows the days.

Anti-art, however, digs its own grave differently. As Duchamp proved so eloquently, it simply becomes art.

Whether Mr. Wiener means them to or not, some works play it straight. They include "Those Who Fail to Remember the Past," a box lined with mirror that contains two rows of coffins covered with American flags and the sculptures made of laminated glass -- all done during the 1970's.

Sam Wiener with Evangeline Tabasco: "Selected Work From Five Decades" remains on view through Oct. 22 at the Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon Street, New Haven.