BOOKS - _ So Chic, So Glossy Art history on the run know I've succeeded when my work is talked about as though it were a movie that had just been seen," says the artist Eric Fischl. His strange, voyeuristic paint- ings of suburban family life provoke a lot of conversation-as do surprising works by several other celebrated contemporary art- ists. But how can you keep up with what's hot and what's not now that art talk is as fashionable as cinematic chatter? One de- terminedly trendy guide is the Vintage Contemporary Artists series, which offers a little bit of art in a glossy package. Designer Elizabeth Avedon dreamed up the series and chose hip subjects for the first four books: Fischl, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Robert Rauschen- berg. She got her father-in-law, Richard Avedon, to shoot the artists for the covers. And she decided to keep things brief. Un- like hefty art tomes that can break your budget (or your foot, if you drop them), these slender paperbacks are economical- $9.95 each-if skimpy on pictures, with only eight pages of black-and-white illus- trations and four pages of color apiece. The texts, each a long interview with the artist conducted by a critic, can get pretty windy. Elder statesman Rauschen- berg, at 60, is the most fun to read. From the deck of his weatherbeaten cottage on Captiva Island, Fla., he recalls New York of the 1950s, when few artists were either rich or famous. Rauschenberg remembers when he and avant-garde composer John Cage sold some books one day to buy lunch-a shared kosher pickle and beers. He painted his famous "Bed" (1955) on a quilt because he'd run out of other things to paint on. But his interlocutor, critic Barbara Rose, is too friendly. Rauschen- berg barely mentions Jasper Johns, a close friend in the early days, and she never asks about their falling out. Of the young bucks, Fischl, 39, is the most forthright, chatty and occasionally humorous. He describes how his paintings are made ("my backgrounds come from magazine photos") and delves into the Freudian aspects of his primal scenes. "I wanted to shock the audience," he admits. Salle, 35, the brooding intellectual, is far more obtuse, though sometimes inadvert- ently revealing. He somehow doesn't un- Forthright, chatty and downright humorous: Front and back jacket for Clemente book derstand why his paintings-often shad- owy images of half-dressed, contorted women-offend feminists. Inevitably, there's a lot of art babble on these pages. Clemente, 35, who divides his time between New York, his native Italy and India, gets caught between his too-me- ticulous English and Eastern mysticism. He can be as lyrically baffling as his beauti- ful art work or he can sound just plain buggy. But at least he's earnest: "If people could think of works of art and atomic bombs and social structures as having the same degree of reality in them, we would make atremendous step forward in terms of living." That's a nice thought, but like most of the words in these books, it just reminds you of what a single picture is worth. CATHLEEN MCGUIGAN An Exceptional Trip The sojourn began on little more than a whim: after two years as a graduate student in economics at China's Nan- jing University, Vikram Seth decided to save money and hitchhike home to New Delhi via Tibet. True, it would be a grueling and perilous two-month trip of about 1,200 miles, but Seth was banking on the rewards of taking the road less traveled. His gamble paid off. Starting from Heaven Lake, nes- tled in the desert of the northwestern prov- ince of Xinjiang, he wound across the snow- capped Himalayas, then trekked by foot through mossy bamboo forests near Ne- pal-and managed to glimpse a remote cor- ner of China that few foreigners have seen. Seth's keen perceptions and graceful prose make From Heaven Lake (192 pages. Vin- tage. $5.95) an exceptional travelogue. He deftly evokes China's maddening bureau- cracy and the tensions. between the Chi- nese and ethnic minorities. In the few cities he passes through, Seth notes the socialist drabness of "standard shop cuboids," and describes poor cobblers and tailors sitting on the streets, "looking desultorily at the dust whirling about in a sudden wind." Most importantly, he etches poignant portraits of the people he encounters-Chi- nese, Muslims and Tibetans alike. There's the soldier who graciously gives him a lift on his bicycle; comradely Sui, a chain- smoking truckdriver with an obsession for fishing; and Norbu, a young Tibetan in Lhasa who tells how his family was perse- cuted during the Cultural Revolution. Time and again, Seth is struck by their kindness-all the more remarkable, he notes, "from a people into whom a suspi- cion of foreigners has long been instilled." For all the kindnesses, Seth's journey is filled with hard beds, bumpy roads and spartan meals of bean curd and rice. By the time he finally arrives in bustling Katman- du, the mundane pleasures of "civiliza- tion"-Coca-Cola, Tobler marzipan and Reader's Digest-have taken on a wonder- ful new meaning. But Seth also has the less tangible joys that are the ultimate reward of the adventurous traveler: a trove of warm memories and the feeling, he says, of being "more at home in the world." PAULA CHIN NOVEMBER 1987 NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 45