New York Collects Buffalo State

Burchfield-Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave.

Through Oct. 3

Good premises don't always make good exhibitions.

Take "New York Collects Buffalo State." It attempts a grand and sweeping vision of the work of Buffalo State College alumni; it ends up badly over-reaching by including too many secondary works from secondary collections.

No problem with the premise. Diane Koeppel, Buffalo State assistant professor of art education, and Joan Vita Morotta were co-curators with the active help of 14 graduate students. Koeppel and Morotta reasoned that, over the years, Buffalo State grads have come to constitute an influential cadre of artists whose works have merited inclusion in collections throughout the state.

All truth here. Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo alone have cut a wide swath through contemporary art since they launched their careers in the mid-'70s from the old Westside ice house that would became Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. AP Gorny, Chuck Agro, Joseph Piccillo (here with a stable full of his leaping horses), Bill Stewart, Diane Bertolo and, from an earlier generation, Edwin Dickinson, have all made major contributions on the national level. Other artists - Bruce Adams, Richard Gubernick, Barbara Buckman, Alfonso Volo, Gail McCarthy and A.J. Fries among them - have forged regional reputations of considerable significance.

But the show is, I'm afraid, something of a muddle. As far as I can tell that sweeping vision might as well have been performed with a broom.

The show is an uneasy mix of very high quality work, a great middle of passable mediocrities and some pretty paltry stuff clinging to the edges. If Koeppel and Morotta had set some standards the show would have had fewer artists and fewer pieces. Adding to the problems are the "art ed" gimmicks. Something with the insipid title, "Inspiration Pod" - a collection of books and materials on the artists - and an ill-advised game of "Twister," in which visitors can gyrate before a mirror in happy imitation of Longo's drawings of suited men in whirligig poses, are enough to make one give up entirely on anything remotely interactive. Democracy may be at fault here. First, everyone involved refused to make the tough cuts lest some semi-worthy be left out. Second, the strong works are scattered, preventing them from gaining the concentrating force of the powerful group. Thus it is that poor old Edwin Dickinson is wholly without context. His sober self-portrait, two meditative landscapes and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's big "An Anniversary" (done way back in 1920-21) need a quiet space of their own. Instead, we find the masterful landscapes cast among works that are merely topographical Buffalo scenes or sentimental, over-detailed views of broken down farms or mistily romanticized ponds and fields. Encircled by disparate works, "An Anniversary" can hardly exert its special, odd mood and mystery.

I suppose that Sherman and Longo together were supposed to be the spine of the show. As it is, Sherman sounds such a harsh, near-hysterical tone with her mocking clowns that they blast away anything in their vicinity. This continuing descent by Sherman into morbidity laced with horror-movie threat has produced pieces that are over-produced, over-wrought and over-priced. To me, they look like works of an artist desperate to jolt the senses of we more mundane beings.

Chuck Agro's "Man and Moose Antlers and No Spare Change" will not be blasted. Odd to say, this and his other rendition of cartoon seediness exert an emotional control beyond Sherman's grasp. They are funky and rude but technically and conceptually sharp.

I never did understand why Longo's stiffly rendered gyrating men were so applauded in the '80s. Today, if you excuse the possum, playing dead is a useless ploy. Two giant pencil drawings - one a kind of mock-mystic bolt of lightning from the sky - carry on this lifeless illustrator style. The hyped-up scale only accentuates the thinness of the ideas behind them.

You can push your way through this crazy mix of crafts, furniture design, paintings and sculpture to such works as Vol's exquisite "Embryonic Angel with Minuscule Halo" and (to take a work that was done in the heyday of minimalism) Gubernick's abstraction that magisterially combines hard color with surreptitious illusion.

Harry Leigh's wall construction of bowed and layered wood is there to say something about plain-speaking abstract qualities so lacking in the various over-dressed craft objects and Henry Moore-ish remakes in alabaster. The earlier of Adams' two works tellingly injects modern art styles into cultural models, while the second slyly compares old master rendering of reality with photo-real depictions. Neither tries to force the irony down your throat.

McCarthy's "Lustered Vessel," in its delicacy and unhurried Arp-like undulation, quietly defies the plotted aggressions of a Longo or a Sherman and calmly cuts a little bit of space out for itself.

If only the show itself made a similar calm assertion, taking the world with some measured reflection instead of in big, chaotic bites.