Trends: Statements in Paint

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Clarke's most recent major work, a version of Frans Hals' group portrait of the officers and subalterns of the St. Adrian Militia Company, decorates a downtown Manhattan bar. It draws approving glances from young artists who drop in because, as Clarke explains, "we're all involved in process today, rather than track. By that I mean, if I were dropped on the moon tomorrow, I'd leave tracks wherever I walked—but I wouldn't be involved in them. Only the man who came after me would be. In the same way, painting today is a process of exploring. The real product isn't the painting any more. It's what the artist learns while he's making the picture."

The West Coast is an equally fertile breeding ground for art-oriented art. "All artists read magazines," notes Vancouver's Iain Baxter, 32. "TIME, Life, Look—any publication that tells them anything about art. However, some won't admit to copying even when everybody knows bloody well they do. I admit what I am doing and say directly this is an extension of so-and-so."

Baxter's waggish Extended Noland was based on a museum catalogue picture of a Noland painting, and was meant to twit the pretentious dissertation on Noland as much as it meant to parody the work itself. To Baxter, snobbishness and pretension often hinder the public from enjoying art, and he debunks both through his N.E. Thing Co., which produces buttons labeled "Artoficial" and passes them out to N.E. one who will wear them. The button presumably entitles the wearer to make official statements on art—though Baxter clearly regards this distinction as somewhat artificial. The company also issues certificates for ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Things) and ART (Aesthetically Rejected Things). The Great Wall of China rates an ACT seal of approval, while some of Picasso's paintings get the ART booby prize.

Tijuana Velvet. Farther south, San Francisco's William Wiley is, at 31, an elder statement-maker of the West Coast's cheerfully crude funk art movement. His exhibition in Manhattan last spring (TIME, May 31) contained many paintings and sculptures dealing with the frenetic activity of the New York gallery world about which the relaxed Californian has mixed feelings. Now returned to the relative peace of Marin County, Wiley points out that even works that nominally deal with art can also have wider implications. His subtle watercolor Sculptor's Holiday, for example, can be read as the interior of a studio, but its bizarre, stretched-out forms and lacerated strips of leather can also be taken as symbols for an uptight state of mind.