Art: Three from the Image Machine

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In SoHo, a trio of rising reputations but uneven talents

There were three one-man shows on the itinerary of most gallerygoers in New York City's SoHo area last month: Robert Longo, David Salle and Gérard Garouste. Taken together, they were fairly instructive. Here are three rising, though by no means certified, reputations; yet their success seems tinged with panic. They are all young (Longo is 30, Salle 31, and Garouste 37) and, of course, figurative — the pendulum of taste having now swung so far that it is practically impossible to have a rising reputation if you are a new abstract painter. Each, in his way, is a perfect subject of the "postmodernist" image machine, that powerful contraption which, modeled on corporate p.r. lines, has transformed the very nature of reputation in the art world over the past five years. But how good are they?

Certainly Longo is the best of them. But his ambitious split show, which fills two galleries (Castelli and Metro Pictures), displays a worrisome unevenness: harshly accurate feeling one moment, bombast the next. Longo's subject is people under stress; in his paintings, the lid on the urban pressure cooker is always about to blow. He began to make a reputation two or three years ago with life-size figures of men and women apparently in their late 20s, starkly drawn in graphite on a blank ground, twisting and grimacing and staggering. They were, of course, done from photos (only the camera can cut movement into such inscrutable, violent morsels), and their power lay in their uncertainty: Were the people getting shot, having strokes or dancing at the MuddClub?

Longo is not without entrepreneurial desires. He staged performances, did sculpture and is producing a full-length film, Empire. His art got more ambitious, involving more people both in his pictures and as assistants in the studio. We see the results at Castelli and Metro. They include a large bas-relief in aluminum depicting a horde of struggling Wall Street types: a Roman battle sarcophagus with updated clothes, flanked by ominous, smooth, black effigies of skyscrapers in perspective that recall the architectural renderings of Hugh Ferriss in the '30s. The trouble is that the execution does not carry the theatrical idea. Longo is not much of a modeler; his striking talent for rendering does not extend into three dimensions, so that on closer inspection the faces and bodies in the sculpture are pedantically inert, like those "solid photography" busts cut with a laser device.

On a less operatic scale, however, he is convincing. Perhaps the best work in the show is Pressure, 1982-83: the white face of a worried, singlet-clad mime in the lower half and, above it, the cold, oppressive ziggurat of an art deco-style New York building. The film noir dramatics of Longo's work are tuned down, and a subtler pathos comes through, the surprise being that Longo was able to extract it from such obvious cliches as the Urban Clown and the Faceless Skyscraper.