From The Studio

ROSEC.S. SLIVKA

It's that time of year when the sheer quantity of East End culture is in heightened evidence, not only for the expanded summer population to look at but for its own self-approval. Spread out in every form, East End culture appears to be enjoying the sweet taste of itself, perhaps to the point of pig-out.

It is everywhere - on the street, at the beach, in the fields, in those genteel little shopping bags everyone seems to carry as they emerge from shops, cars, The Softball Game, real estate offices, restaurants, movies, and other variously multiplying Parthenons of pleasure endemic to the Hamptons, its culture legends, and celebrities.

In the gathering weight and complexity of the East End art world, we bring a random roundup of glimpses and insights, not including the wall-to-wall gallery scene and the museums such as Guild Hall and its Schnabelization.

Insatiable Appetite

We include places, spaces, and individuals whose taste and appetite for the practice of art is so omnivorous and insatiable, it is wanton, wondrous, and, sometimes, even wonderful.

Siv Cedering is an artist who is able to consume the entire culture and all its varying expressions into the creative amplitude of her own energies and imagination. She seems to treat each exercise of aesthetic discipline as if it were a new, never-before-savored feast all laid out for her to pick at, play with, and use as the spawning ground for her own creative act.

Widely and well regarded as a poet, she also paints, composes music, and writes children's books. Name it and Siv Cedering has done it or plans to do it.

Amusing And Unique

Now she has taken on sculpture, showing pieces in the garden of the Elaine Benson Gallery in conjunction with the annual "Creatures" exhibit. Arranging stone slabs and metal cubes in tilts and constellations, she carves, casts, and cuts out letters on the surface to form poems.

My favorite is the text "silence has so many voices," carved on three curved white marble shapes mounted on a black granite pillar. Another is a sheet of steel shaped as one-half of a heart enameled in red with the word "You" cut out.

It is intended as a sculpture for the edge of a pool, where a reflecting image completes the other half of the heart. Amusing and unique, it becomes still another of Siv Cedering's ceaseless flourishes.

She is surrounded by 17 other artists in the group annual, who devote themselves to the "Creatures" theme. Outstanding among the painters is Sheila Isham, who shows several of her new "cosmic earth, mythic play" animal spirit series, with complex coloration and supple brushwork.

The exhibit continues to Sept. 8.

Ross Bleckner Show

At Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, the curator Emily Goldstein has mounted a well-chosen Ross Bleckner show of small paintings and works on paper. The exhibit, intimate and intense, focuses on the artist's earlier studies of light and his recent series of works about structure as a molecular discovery, not unlike images of scientific evidence.

Most of the small oils, on view here for the first time, show a clustering of bean-like forms in concentric circles and cellular honeycomb patterns, cells clinging to each other in obedience to their kind and chemistry, generally orderly except for small hints of crowdings and disarray. Largely monochromatic in sepia and browns, they are air-brushed in thin layers, reminiscent of the domed paintings of 1992.

The watercolors, studies of light done from 1988 to 1993, are devoted to effects, as in "Fixture," the reflections of a chandelier.

Among the intriguing aspects of Mr. Bleckner's oeuvre is his concern with the inner life of things, beyond the surface. He appears at times to be flirting with abstraction, but he would want abstraction no more than the rest of his generation of artist buddies here on the East End - Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl - with whom he shares the success of the current art scene.

Art-Smart

It is a clan of superbly educated, degree-laden, university-trained professionals. They know all about paint, painting, art history, and the market, in contrast to the first-generation American successes of the '50s.

They further extend the art-smart uber alles traditions associated with Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, having to do more with effects, commentary, and appropriation than - as with the Abstract Expressionists, perhaps the last great spiritual movement in American art - the making of deeply personal, confusing, original art.

Certainly Mr. Bleckner's approach to art is closer to that of the intellectualized academician.

He Got His Wish

In a talk at Guild Hall a couple of years ago, Mr. Bleckner said that once he decided to be an artist, the only way for him was to become an "important artist," whatever that may mean. Judging from the way it all worked out, he got his wish, certainly in terms of fame and wealth, but at the same time, as the current show indicates, with enough authenticity to be able now to risk old-fashioned, noble failure.

It is this seesawing between failure and success in American art today that makes art-watching so intriguing.

But don't let success fool you, as these artists certainly know. Crass success takes just as much work as noble failure. Mr. Bleckner's strategy - to make objects of art about something that can be clearly identified, while at the same time leaving that little margin of mystery that defines it, paradoxically, as Art - pays off.

The Artist Pays The Price

As Mr. Lichtenstein so clearly pointed out, post-'60s art observes itself with greater facility than ever before, beginning a new fashion of Post-Art art and Smart-Art artists.

It is certainly well known by the Smart-Art artists that real artists are dumb, and that their ultimate destiny is to be romantic victims, a scenario Mr. Bleckner's friend Julian Schnabel pursues in his fine film on the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, recently shown at Guild Hall.

The film makes the point pointedly: Its hero is really the filmmaker. The poor, dumb Basquiat, who remains an artist and pays the price, is the victim, unlike Mr. Schnabel, who lives in Montauk on the former Andy Warhol estate, and Mr. Bleckner, who bought Truman Capote's estate. Both men, by the way, are still under 50.

The Bleckner show continues to Sept. 13.

At The Nabi

The pre-Smart Art artists Howard Kanovitz and Athos Zacharias are in a show together at the Nabi Gallery in Sag Harbor, their work in total contrast but both with contagious energy and the excitement of the genuinely new.

The two painters, friends from student days at the Rhode Island School of Design as well as former musicians in the same band, are now both East End-New York artists, but that's where the similarity ends, as dramatically seen in the Nabi's 90-foot-long space, where they hang on facing walls.

While both came out of the confusions of the Abstract Expressionist '50s, they took opposite though related aesthetic paths. Certainly they show us that art is not made by movements, but by one person at a time doing his own individual thing.

Howard Kanovitz

Mr. Kanovitz's paintings pursue a dream-haunted hyperrealism. Using all the tools of photographic projection for precision of detail and ultimate pictoriality, he arrives at an image that approximates the picture-making memory.

Like fragments of a dream, heavy with hints and puns and sudden revelations, the vision is unforgettable, as in the 1998 "Nearby Pharos," three figures on the beach with an ideal horizon of sky and the remains of washed-out pier columns in the distance.

"Dog at Sea" depicts a dog on the beach with a rainbow in the background, all in the photorealistic mystery that is this artist's signature.

Athos Zacharias

While Mr. Kanovitz takes off from figuration and reality to arrive at the dream, Mr. Zacharias starts with figuration and arrives at abstraction.

In the "Epaulette" series, the painter uses a pair of blue jeans draped on a surface to seem like epaulettes, the fragment of the object suggesting meanings both visible and invisible in an environment of abstraction.

Mr. Zacharias's love for layering and vivid pigment, as well as his mixture of hard and soft edges, geometry, and gyration, is clearly seen in the floral-inspired "Geisha," 1998.

The Nabi show will run through Monday.

Tattooing

Perhaps the most fun on the current gallery scene is at the Morgan Rank Gallery - not "good" art, but the outrageous imagery of the tattoo parlor, an authentic and well-researched survey of some 100 years of American skin decoration.

Tattooing, once the sign of working-class fantasy and identity - particularly for men in jobs such as construction or the Navy that require high risk and mobility - has become somewhat of a fad among today's youth, with many of the old themes still in use - roses, spiders, hearts.

The contemporary East End primitivists Charles Waller and Scott McIntire, both of whom show regularly at Morgan Rank, have created designs especially for this show. Particularly engaging is Mr. Waller's multicolored "Mermaid Mother and Child."

Unpretentious and refreshing, the exhibit concludes Sept. 14.