70 THE ART WORLD Stella in Relief RANK STELLA'S painted reliefs at the Museum of Modern Art are fancy art—the fanciest art that MOMA has ever shown with so much institutional confidence. The material- ism—the joyful shingness—of Stella's reliefs is more insistent than that of almost any other modern painting. ‘Though many of the best reliefs have been named after exotic, refined, Matissean birds (‘Steller’s Albatross,” “Dove of Tanna”), they look more like the nests of very large city pigeons with very loud taste—birds who have been terrorizing Canal Street, filching Lucite curves and shop-front grilles, cannibalizing discarded Christmas tees for their glitter and tinsel, and ‘weaving all this stuff together with the tubes from old jukeboxes. The museums exhibition is curated by William Rubin, MOMA’s director of painting and sculpture, who put to- gether a retrospective of Stella’s early, minimalist. paintings in 1970. The new show includes examples of eleven of the twelve series of reliefs Stella has made since: the geometric and rela~ tively conservative “Polish Village” and “Diderot” series, the more freely painted “Brazilians,” the flamboyant and playful “Exotic Birds” and “In- dian Birds”—still in many ways the ‘most sensual and appealing of all the reliefs—and the “Circuits,” “Shards,” “Maltas,” “South African Mines,” “Cones ‘and Pillars,” and “Waves” series. (The “Waves” series is only a few months older than the show it- jense energy of these reliefs is impressive. It’s a material energy that we like to think of as American, but it’s the energy of kitsch detritus rather than the (by now) more accept- able energy of skyscrapers or bill- boards. (In some ways, the previous ‘American art that Stella's most resem- bles is the pressed-car reliefs of John Chamberlain.) But Stella’s art remains exhilarating in a way that mere assem- blages of kitsch (whether they're straightforward, like Chamberlain’s, or arty, like Julian Schnabel’s) can’t, because of an underlying counterpoint. People who like Stella’s work are al- ways demonstrating how, despite its congested surfaces, it is in fact rule- bound and methodical. Any art can be rule-bound and methodical, though, including most bad art. What makes Stella’s method so remarkable is that the difference between the pictures? structure and their surfaces is 0 ex treme. In the “Exotic Birds” and the “In- dian Birds,” for instance, w! ‘main the most direct expression of Stella’s ambitions, the architecture of the reliefs has been borrowed—“ap- propriated,” to use the current term— from the world of engineering and rational function. The reliefs are ma- chine-age. Stella begins by arrang- ing and then tracing “irregular ccurves””—the scroll-like templates that “We laugh at the same things.” JANUARY 4, 1988. ‘engineers use to draw boats that float and airplanes that fly. He makes a ma- quette of the resulting design, and sends it out to be fabricated at about four times the original scale in hon- eycombed aluminum. (This takes a Tong time and a lot of money.) The larger “Exotic Birds” end up about ten feet by twelve feet. The reliefs are therefore rooted—like “found” sculp- ture or Duchampian readymades—not in the invention of ne i discovery of the possi 1a form that already exists outside the artist’s studio. After the forms have been mechanically enlarged to human scale, we begin to respond to the six- foot-tall irregular curves in the way that we respond to those irregular curves we know best: they become fig- tures—the abstract equivalents of nudes. ‘They suggest the human form reduced to a shorthand of preening arabesques, as though the artist were working as Rubens” stenographer. It’s Stella’s ur- gent desire to make bodies, rather than solve any pseudo-formal “problem” of mediating between sculpture and paint- ing, that's at the heart of his love of relief. And it’s our desire to look at bodies—to possess them—that’s at the heart of our response to the reliefs: a response that is at once heightened, erotic, and unfocussed on any par ticular figure. The reliefs invent a new emotion: nonobjective lust. The ideal of abstract fguration—of creating things that have the emo- tional power, in art, of the human body without simply imitating it—is cone of the basic dreams of modern art, and is the Holy Grail of modern sculp- ture. It’s the emotional core of David Smith’s achievement (and certain un- painted Stella reliefs do in fact strongly recall Smith’s “Cubis”). But Stella’s “nudes,” unlike Smith's, are idealized, 2s much as any in Ingres or Rubens. Their perfect curves and ro- bust flourishes recall those of the my- thologized nudes of the grand manner (whose forms, too, were based on a mathematical dream of perfect propor- tion as well as on observation). But if the architecture of Stella’s reliefs is borrowed from a world of high rationality and composed with an academic confidence, their painted sur- faces are spontaneous: free and instinc~ tive, even primitive. After the pieces have been fabricated, the artist and his assistants, in alittle Squall of painting, decorate each piece separately, usually rubbing in ground glass, so that the surfaces will shimmer. Stella said once that he didn’t know what he was do-