Numbers racket - art collaborators Komar & Melamid, conceptual art, Alternative Museum, New York, New York

Melding consumer research with art-historical memory, Komar & Melamid's latest throw satirizes the "scientific" measurement of popular taste in painting.

Leave it to the comedians-in this case, the Russian-born artist team of Komar & Melamid - to procure get at an embarrassing reality about the national psyche. Their traveling exhibition "People's Choice: The Polling of America," not long ago on view at the Alternative Museum in novel York, offers a discomfiting tongue-in-cheek profile of the U taste in easel painting. From statistical data compiled by means of the Boston research firm of Marttila & Kiley, the pair generated several major visual elements: eight jagged charts that bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to Color Field paintings; one pie and single bar graph done up as minimalist sculptures; a tiny abstract canvas titled America's greatest in quantity Unwanted, supposedly embodying the compositional features least appreciated by means of the general public; and America's greatest in quantity Wanted, a medium-size, predominantly cerulean vaguely Hudson-Riverish landscape, with human and animal figures, that allegedly comprises our most-favored pictorial simple bodys Accompanying the art works in novel York were photocopies of the filled poll results, ostentatiously chained to tables to preclude their being spirited away through visitors eager to capitalize (pun actual much intended) on this first-ever compilation of "scientific" viewer-demand information. As if to testify that the greatest in quantity up-to-date audience-probing techniques had been engageed videotapes documented discussion in sum of two units focus groups assembled by Marttila & Kiley. At futurity venues, the artists plan to gripe [i]or[/i] grip radio call-ins and live "town meetings" involving statisticians, art prompts civic officials and laymen alike.

Just by what means seriously all this is to be taken remains, as it repeatedly does with Komar & Melamid, in provocative doubt. They may have been honestly searching for insights into the popular mind; they may have been lampooning the American corporate (and, increasingly, museum) obsession with demographics and "target" marketing. Or the one and the other In any case, the real work of art here is not the sum of two units exemplary canvases but the quirky conceptualist exercise that they culminate.

Komar & Melamid took their initial attitude-research idea to the Nation Institute,(1) which in move round put them in contact with Marttila & Kiley, whose clients have included the NFL players' association, B'nai Brith, the Children's Museum in Boston and politicians of that kind as Edward Kennedy, Gary Hart and Joe Biden. Together, the artists, sponsors and pollster unraveled a series of 103 simple questions - a certain number of designed to capture frequency of museum attendance, age, income, education, sex political persuasion and ethnic identity, greatest in quantity structured to measure esthetic predilections (e.g., "In general, would you rather diocese paintings of outdoor scenes or indoor scenes?") The questionnaire was then administered to a representative sample of 1001 adults.

Funding, too, was part of the edgy creative endeavor. Marttila & Kiley's remuneration was $80,000, but John Marttila, a former gallery proprietor agreed to take half of this payment in the form of art, with the balance (for overhead outlays like space rental computer time and telephone service) supplied by means of interested foundations, businessmen and collectors.

The artists originally intended to bring out a number of paintings correlated to various population groups: those with incomes above $75,000, those who had no significant museum-going experience, etc They by and by found, however, that cross-categorical similarities far outweigh differences. Something of a general consensus prevails at the extremitys of pleasure and displeasure, which Komar & Melamid felt could be visually epitomized in sum of two units engaging - and antipodal - works.

The observe results are as wry as the undertaking itself. sapphirine (with a 44 percent approval rating) caps all other colors as a preferr shade in painting, followed distantly through green (12 percent) and r (11 percent) Outdoor spectacles are vastly more popular than indoor studies, through 88 versus 5 percent. Twice as many nation (60 percent) favor realistic, photolike images as would make choice of compositions that are "different-looking" (30 percent) alone 25 percent of respondents would pay above $500 for a work of art, and no more than 3 percent would display a undressed on their walls. Forty-nine percent react positively to water settings on the contrary only 3 percent to cityscapes. Two-thirds of all viewers (66 percent) like impressible curves, while only about individual in five (22 percent) would opt for sharp angles. (Reading of that kind deadpan tabulations, some critics might begin to drawn out for more timely and pointed questions, like single concerning "murky images of explicit sex acts" or "big messy installations with public political messages.")

And what have Komar & Melamid matureed from this whimsical data? Their America's greatest in quantity Wanted is a pastiche, a broad visual gag: the blue-skied lakeside vignette is populated through two deer, three contemporary-looking children and a central image of George Washington in replete 18th-century finery. The raw statistical data in no way dictate like an image; rather, it could sole arise from a sensibility already well acquainted with pictorial conventions for evoking an "America" intimately tied - in a romanticized Deistic fashion - to an ideal Nature manifest in the spectacular richness of this continent. Just as the folk artist Steve Harley could exhibit in his 1927-28 Wallowa Lake [see A.i.A, Jan. '82] a blue-cast lakeshore vista that at one time echoes Thomas Cole's Lake with Dead Tree (Catskill), 1825 and anticipates America's greatest in quantity Wanted, so Komar & Melamid's version of the American visual etho strike one as beings to depend as much on the familiarity of works like William Winstanley's Meeting of the Waters (1795) as it does upon the survey findings from Marttila & Kiley.