Connor's Floating Island (1985) is unique among her boat-like new pieces in hanging free in mid-air, like one of the churchly ship models. In making this piece the artist was conscious of the fact that the, to them, massive sailing ship of Captain Cook struck the natives of Hawaii (who knows how metaphorically) as a "floating island," which, as a present day consideration of a specific and historical early encounter with tribal culture necessarily entails a "primitivism" of a sophisticated order. One need not even notice Floating Island is modeled over one of those vacuum-formed, plastic topographical relief maps, to see as expressively considered the muddy, earthen brownness of its encaustically clotted, virtually barnacled, surfaces. As a matter of fact, thanks to the necessity of melting the wax, and to the pieces's free suspension in the air, all the earthly elements of nature must be implied.

That the much larger Lifeboat (1986), of an icy waxen whiteness, is too slim and lithe, like a canoe, simply to "represent" a lifeboat, at least one of familiar type, only heightens the purely sculptural aspect of a shape whose pointed "prow'· drags on the floor while her blunt "stern" hangs from a single cord from the wall. In overtone, this work is at once local-primitive, resembling as it does the "dugout" canoes of Indians native to New York; American-mythic, what with the classic "Whiteness of the Whale" of Melville's Moby Dick; and modern-universalizing, at least in line with all the U.F.O.'s, those ultimate vessels of wonder, commonly reported as "cigar-shaped." These are, of course, free associations; but Connor's work at large welcomes associations that concern not nature merely, but human consciousness rooted in nature.

With the floor-bound Swell (1986) Connor has directly determined as sculptural metaphor, in an aim, in her words, "to make a boat part of a wave." In doing so she has as much as realized in freestanding, if low-lying, sculpture a standard exemplar of metaphor itself often given in studio talk and art poetics: "The ship ploughs the sea." The curling gunwale of Swell is indeed in itself wavelike, while the whole seems not so much "taking on water," or swamped, as taking a wave, broadside. Everything about the piece, including its seemingly pliant bulges, corroborates a sense of flexing, unspeaking swell: putting it this way risks evoking a caricatural gush more appropriate, say, to heavy popular "art glass," with its gratuitous molten peaks and ripples; but then Swell (1986) could be said to show the unforced, ultimately Baroque conviction from which even such wares derive.

Two medium-sized pieces from 1986 present themselves as mythological in an orthodox classical sense as entitled Charon and Styx. Thoughts of mortality here take virtually erotic shape-as is often the case in the Metaphysical poetry ofJohn Donne and others in the Baroque era. These are in a sense empty, pod-like vessels, but affirmatively cavernous, with utterly labial rims; the cavities around which their edges curl are, as it were, phallic in negative (not unlike the status of the lump of dental cement into which Duchamp slipped the little bronze element of his Wedge of Chastity}. Inside, at the bottom, Charon is practically salaciously lined with black lace, while on the exterior ripples like elegant silken drapery folds resemble fine convolutions in marble works by Louise Bourgeois-but also Bernini. The inside of Styx has exposed silk, while outside a vivid aquamarine band girds the ''hull." In making Styx the artist recalled the experience of floating on a smooth pond with algae all around the edges, an interestingly circumscribed, reasonably person-sized experience of "oceanic.. peace. Floating and death (and art} were comprised in a broader meditation, "Metaphysical enough, on whatever might finally be remembered as continuing to exist after one is gone."

Fibrillation (1986), too, is a meditation on death, as well as a plastic pun on the heart as governing the system of blood "vessels" (Harvey's understanding of the circulation of the blood being one of the milestones of Baroque natural science). The title refers to ventricular fibrillation, an irregular, non-rhythmic pumping of the heart in coronary attacks, which interests Connor from reading in the scientific literature of chaos-especially on the breakdown of pattern or rhythm. It is at least not inappropriate that the cloth over which this piece is modeled and molded in wax and plaster is a crumpled woolen sweater, that is, a garment for covering the torso, which is to say, the chest and heart. Typologically, the piece might even relate to the sculptural urns for the hearts of French kings by artists of late mannerist times.

While Connor's sculptures are shaped and elaborated, their concentration on permanently fixing materials that are pliant and temporarily molten has connections, in the artist's generation, with certain Minimalist sculpture and the general tendency of "process art." Connor's sense of"process," however, embraces natural process as a matter of life. Even the povera quality of her work, naturalizing in means and effects, is part of an achieving or attending of an abstract "naturalism" by human agency.

By now everything merely natural has already been claimed, by industry or art, to a point where primitivism, in the sense of high-cultural retreat to some less alienated state of nature, is an impossible fantasy, more symptomatic than therapeutic. Connor calls attention to the 1965 prophecy, now expired but more than fulfilled, in which Claude Levi-Strauss, comparing the relation of industrially advanced culture to the rest of the world with a virus as only alive in relation to host organisms, predicted that by 1985 "the morbid hunger which drives us to gulp down all forms of past and present art in order to elaborate our own will experience a growing difficulty in satisfying itself."2 Significantly, when she incorporates actual microorganisms into works of sculpture, as with actual pond algae (reminiscent of her experience of peaceful suspension which inspired Styx) in the pulpy substance of a large boat-like piece still unfinished at this writing, Connor might almost be embedding microorganisms, at least temporarily, in a "culture" in the biologist's sense.

By the same token, any "Baroqueness" in Connor's work is freshly attained and not simply historicizing. Is it possible that a new artist's work might in some sense recapitulate not merely certain physiognomic traits but some sense of a like morphology as well-not just so many characteristic words, figures or even their syntax, but something of a historical "grammar" itself. Even such a seemingly anomalous feature of Connor's work as (otherwise feminist) concrete-abstract projects in ironing cloth into complex geometrical forms, a few years back, can be considered in relation to the conventionalizations of (originally) Baroque etiquette. At any rate, an essentially Mannerist sense of literal, yet exotic nature permeates works by Connor of the mid-198o's, of concrete over cloth, where what is basically a drapery study assumes a peculiarly vermiculated or pocked, coral-like surface (coral having its own "process" aspect, as interfacing peculiarly between zoological and geological structure). So, too, the visibly direct embedding of cabbage leaves in the concrete but in itself also leaflike shape of Cicada's Dream (1985) is Manneristic in the sense of Naturabguss, the direct casting and incorporation of natural plants and animal elements in Mannerist ornamental art. Likewise, the incorporation of wheat mold in Robe de Jardin, also of 1985 (and is the mold still growing, in which case the piece could be dated, for the time being, "1985-?"): here a twisted swag of drapery hangs, Manneristically enough, upside down from a wire, its original point of hanging now en pointe on the floor. Thus it is out of just such "Mannerism" that the "Baroqueness" of Connor's new vessel-like work, which is generally more voluptuously engaged in the interplay of human and natural vitality, has sprung.

All Connor's recent wax-and-concrete pieces, none of them huge, could easily have been made as wax ''for" bronze, and "scaled up" for monumental casting. Today, in the Reagan period, there is, if anything, a too easy and compromising desire to effect in inflationary, overscaled bronze sculpture an unearned, unachieved grandiloquence.3 Connor's pieces can only seem all the more true and just, in scale, material and workmanship, by comparison. How her new work concerns the humane grandiloquence of the Baroque is not a matter of grandeur of scale. It does concern nature in heartily active human possession in that great earlier age of science, and individual artistic integrity and aspiration in an age at least as notorious as ours for its open political strife and utterly planetary ambition.

Joseph Masheck

NOTES

1. Howard Hibbard and Irma Jaffe,"Bernini's Barcaccia,"The Burlington Magazine, CVI / 733 (April 1964), 159-70, here p. 168.

2. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Art in 1985" (1965), in his Structural Anthropology. vol. II, trans. Monique Layton {Chicago, 1976), 281-83, here p. 283.

3. The President himself is absurdly pompous when he means to be grandiose, but then how the grandiose is akin to the magnanimous would be difficult for such a Weberian Calvinist type to comprehend.