As the New York art world enters its second straight season without even the pretense of a dominant new art movement, the closest thing to a "trend" in sight may be less esthetic than social and economic-involving, among other things, the return to respectability of the co‐op gallery. The co‐op, in which members share expenses and duties, flourished briefly in the semi‐underground 10th Street scene of the 1950's, then lost out to the new big time entrepreneurial galleries of the sixties with their well groomed stables of art stars. A sixties artist who had to pay for his own show was judged an embarrassment to his family and friends.
This is changing. Since the parade of new art began careening off in every conceivable direction at once, the entrepreneurial gallery has lost its status as van guard bandwagon. More and more, such galleries either have become the refuge of one or another languishing faction or have started hedging their bets; either way, their cachet has diminished. A natural beneficiary of this leveling process is the co‐op. As the rationale of movement and gallery politics is weakened by events, the alternative, for young artists, of a friendly SoHo setting where their work can appear in company of their own choosing and be judged on its own merits becomes increasingly attractive-worth, perhaps, a few hundred bucks. As for the art audience, what can it do but follow where the artists lead?
Granted, this thesis may be premature. The art‐world prejudice against co‐ops as havens for losers is deeply engrained, and even with a quantum leap in their number this fall-including an all‐women showplace, on Wooster Street, and a rather glossy operation called West Broadway-they are still few and unproven. But their underlying logic, in the present confused situation, seems quite irresistible on the face of it. The currently atomized state oftaste will be worked out, slowly, in artists' studios, and nothing is closer to the studio than the co‐op gallery.
55 Mercer is both the address and the name of what, pending a look at the new entrants, is the very model of a working, up‐to‐date co‐op. A three‐year‐old, commodious, comfortably shabby loft in SoHo, 55 Mercer is catholic, serious and rife with good vibrations. I am unfamiliar with the work of most of its many members, but its two season‐opening shows bode well. Simultaneous debuts by two young artists- sculptor Rosemary Wright and painter Janet Alling-these shows are auspicious at once in themselves and as signs of the kind of in‐process energy that gives the co‐op its art istic reason for being. Unfortunately both shows are set to close later this week...
What is surprising about Janet Alling's beautiful oil paintings of plants is not their possession of the personal and the poetic-one might expect as much-but their power. Working some what within the photograph like conventions of much new realist art, but with a painterly freedom counter to those conventions, Ailing renders her lush coleuses, gloxinias and jade plants super‐close up, in outsized scale, with a wonderful intensity both of attention to visual fact and involvement in the act of painting. That intensity results in an art which, though obviously open to many influences, is utterly free of clichés. And, as I said, it is beautiful.
A lot of recent representional art has been corny or insipid, but a number of artists, among whom I would now include Ailing, really do appear to be advancing realist painting in an important way. Almost brutal in its scale manipulations and Its assertions of detail, but full of acridity and sweetness of personality, work like Alling's reintroduces us to the visible world with a bang. Such work, its newness substantive rather than merely technical, is of exactly the kind least likely to find a place in the now‐enervated "vanguard" galleries; it's too strong for them. And until a new revolution in taste arrives to focus the situation, onemight well expect that permissive laboratories of style like the downtown coops will be where it-what ever "it" proves to be-is at.
