Corn-Pone Cubism, Red-Neck Deco

By ROBERT HUGHES

The dioramas, stick-outs and wraparound environments of Red Grooms have been jiggling and creaking their way to glory on the fourth floor of Manhattan's Whitney Museum through the summer, and there are still queues round the block. Few American artists are more genuinely popular than this 50-year-old from the suburbs of Nashville. Look at Rembrandt and Saskia in their parlor, life-size and shining with booze! Hop into a New York City subway car left over from the pre-graffiti '60s, full of drunks, hippies, nervous housewives and one ultra- Orthodox Jew, all looking like Cabbage Patch dolls that grew up and went to seed! Walk through the big arch into the City of Chicago! Go down Wall Street and ride the Staten Island Ferry, with its twin funnels emitting scarves of metal smoke! Visit the Texas rodeo, a whole roomful of giant Celotex steers, horses and cowboys, painted in colors that relentlessly approximate the noise of a barbaric yawp!

Each museum visitor gets an emergency pack of 20 exclamation points at the door, just to keep his or her spirits up. No wonder the place is as full as a dry-county barbecue on Saturday night. If you want to really pig out on cultural gorging and glut without risking any hangover of thought, then Red Grooms, good ole boy extraordinaire, will fix you up.

What do you do if you like this stuff less than most people? The usual view is that only an inhibited, snobbish sourpuss could fail to take delight in a Grooms show. And what, the Grooms fan will say, do you have against humor? The fan has a point, in a way, since Grooms' popularity comes at least in part from the truly awful seriousness of the high-culture industry, its inability to see how weird its own solipsism and sanctimony can look. The mock-religious cloud that formed around abstract expressionism when it was becoming America's first imperial style, coupled with the grip of the academies since, all but wrecked the middle ground between the sublime and the trivial. How many American artists, except for a few loners like Saul Steinberg and Ed Keinholz, are both really good and really, mordantly funny? By and large, America dislikes satire; it wants its humor cute and warm. Hence Grooms' success.

Judith E. Stein, curator of the Grooms show that started its national tour two years ago at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, sets him up as a real satirist. With a "keen political sense," she claims in her catalog introduction, "Grooms follows in the tradition of William Hogarth and Honore Daumier, who were canny commentators on the human condition." Alas, the history of American art criticism suggests that you need only sketch a bum to get popped into the pot with Daumier, or a street crowd to be compared with Hogarth. The truth in this case is the reverse: as a satirist, as distinct from a funnyman, Grooms hardly exists. His hearty sweetness drives out saeva indignatio.

As for his political bite, as recorded in a piece from the late '60s (Patriot's Parade, Lyndon Johnson with a skull inside his hat and a flower- bearing demonstrator under his enormous cowboy boot), it is cliche and does not rank with Robert Crumb or Ralph Steadman, let alone Daumier. Twenty years later, even these small fangs are gone. His work gums its subjects, rolls on its back and waggles its paws in its demotic eagerness to be liked. If this is the Whitney's notion of satire, no wonder it shelved its plans for a Keinholz installation last year.

Of Grooms' exuberance there is no doubt. Not for nothing does he favor the rowdy epithet ruckus in collectively naming his pieces: Ruckus Manhattan, Ruckus Rodeo. His tableaux fairly burst with riotous energy. In them, Jean Dubuffet's idea of making an art raw enough to stand up to the chaos of the street comes home to roost. Every Grooms surface pullulates with caricatural figures, each impacted with manic cartoony verve, rendered as layered plywood cutouts, as silhouettes, as stuffed dolls, as shadows. The detail is never hard to read, and one does not get lost in it, because Grooms sticks to the things everyone has heard of -- the cow that started the Chicago fire, Little Egypt gyrating, Cyrus McCormick looming dourly over his agricultural-machine factory, or (in a crypt below the graveyard of New York's Trinity Church) the skeletons of Alexander Hamilton in his wig and Robert Fulton with his steam engine. Ruckus America is all one big pop-up book, done in an impressively resourceful, oompahing parade of stylistic parodies: corn-pone cubism, red- neck deco. The way buildings splay and their ground cants toward the viewer comes straight out of German expressionist cinema.

Grooms is best when some menace is allowed to peep through the bonhomie, just as he is worst when he is most folksy. The Woolworth Building, leaning forward as though to resist some invisible gale, with old Frank Woolworth huddled like a crazed alchemist in its tower and a dragon made of dollar bills (the Spirit of Capitalism -- geddit?) waving its creaking neck from the roof, is quite a creation. But either way, one has the sense of an exaggerated rube's-eye view willfully prolonged. It reminds one that however "elitist" economy and wit may seem, vulgarity soon palls. Grooms' work is not folk sculpture -- it is too self-regarding for that -- but it enacts the illusion of folksiness. One suspects he might not know what to do if he stopped this beaming and lapel grabbing. "It's almost subversive," Grooms remarks in the catalog, "if I do something that isn't jokey." To him, perhaps.