LEAD: ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST beautiful exhibition spaces is the one that was confected not so long ago by the English architect Max Gordon for the Saatchi Collection here. It is a mysterious space, in which level is played against level and shape against shape. It is, in fact, something of a thinking man's maze.
ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST beautiful exhibition spaces is the one that was confected not so long ago by the English architect Max Gordon for the Saatchi Collection here. It is a mysterious space, in which level is played against level and shape against shape. It is, in fact, something of a thinking man's maze. It has a beginning and an end, but along the way between the two we never know quite where we are, and there may even be moments when we don't quite know who we are. In other words, Mr. Gordon takes away our everyday identity and leaves us wide open to new experience. The Saatchi Gallery fine-tunes the art, but it also fine-tunes the visitor.
It would be fair to say that until lately the Saatchis - the family is generally best known for its worldwide activity as the founders of a much-talked-of advertising conglomerate - had never taken a flyer on artists who were genuinely unrecognized. They got them quite early, and they got them in bulk, but they did not get them from the egg. Warhol was Warhol, Judd was Judd, Bartlett was Bartlett, Serra was Serra and Kiefer was Kiefer well before they entered the Saatchi Collection. The contribution of the Saatchis was to choose very well on a gigantic scale and to display those artists in a kind of magical decontamination chamber, where their work came to us purged of all outside associations - intact, complete and in sharp focus. The rooms in question quickly became famous for their generosity of spirit and their distinction of display.
The current show, ''NY Art Now,'' is of quite another kind. As the catalogue admits before we even get to the title page, ''most of the notable art currently made in N.Y. isn't to be found here.'' Never was a truer word spoken. What we can see at the Saatchi Collection, through mid-February, is the work of nine artists, most of whom have in common a university education, a high level of verbal facility and a gift for tunneling into the far reaches of a dead end.
Contrary to what is often said, the ''Neo-Geo'' group, to which most of these artists belong, has not as yet won for itself any kind of solid acceptance. It has been floated, in the way that stock offers are floated, in hopes that collectors will take up the option. Sometimes they have - witness the present exhibition - and sometimes they haven't. The artists themselves have talked up their work so well that we cannot but wonder what it is like. It is shown in ideal conditions at the Saatchi Collection, where we do not for a moment question the commitment. But how thin it is! And how diminished and demeaned are the echoes of earlier and better work that pervade so much of it!
The artists concerned are Ashley Bickerton, Ross Bleckner, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Haim Stainbach, Philip Taaffe, Meyer Vaisman and a group called ''Tim Rollins & K.O.S.'' Most of them share to one degree or another the wish to overthrow what is called ''the primacy of the unique object.'' Whereas artists traditionally aim to make something that is entirely their own and had not existed before, the new inclination is to downplay that ambition in favor of the annexation - or, as it is sometimes called, the appropriation - of existing idioms from the recent past.
This can be seen as a form of stylistic imperialism, in which modes of expression are taken over without reference to the feelings or motivations of those who first evolved them. Those who see the matter in this way are likely to regard much of the work in this show as a form of dimwitted and opportunistic raiding, to which the words ''plagiarism'' and ''theft'' can be applied. Needless to say, this is not the point of view of the artists concerned.
For instance, Mr. Taaffe has said that ''we are constantly losing and regaining our understanding'' of abstract art. What posed real problems of perception 50 years ago is now taken for granted as a form of expression that has won general acceptance. We look at it differently, therefore, and experience it in a different way, just as the act of flying the Atlantic is a different experience today from what it was for Charles Lindbergh in 1927. An art that was based upon ''losing and regaining'' - or even simply on probing and evaluating - our experience of the art of the immediate past could take many legitimate forms.
In the same way, what may seem to some visitors an up-front blankness and silliness here and there in the work may correspond to a perception of blankness and silliness in present-day American life. For instance, in the free-form symposium Dan Cameron has put together in the catalogue, Mr. Koons says, ''I think America has lost, for the individual, the nuances of life. We're in a position of impotence, and it has to do with taking a passive role in our involvement with life.'' A third element in the work is the notion that geometrical abstract painting can by now be taken as a point of departure, or a valid foundation, for many-leveled forms of expression. Mr. Halley, for one, takes established forms of geometrical abstraction and mixes them with references to circuitry and to prison cells in a way that might seem arbitrary or even perverse. But that is not how he sees it. He relates it to his first days in New York, when he noticed how in big office buildings ''the conduits, the supportive structure'' were hidden by marble or by wooden paneling. ''I thought to some extent this was characteristic of contemporary society or of capitalism in general. I aspired to actually ferret out and bring forward some of those structural conditions that existed behind the facades.''
It is also relevant that these are artists who have grown up in a ''give me!'' society, where people take it for granted that their every whim or wish can be fulfilled at a certain price. Whence the allusions in this show to objects of everyday gratification, from a porcelain model railroad train that was built to carry bourbon to the works in which consumer goods are racked up on shelves.
So, what we have in this show is a long series of individual ruminations, every one of which may be exploited to advantage in an art world that is ready to put up with almost anything in the name of novelty. It also facilitates the marketing of these objects that they have a high recognition factor. There is in most of them, that is to say, a recurrent element, whether of subject matter or of physical substance, that reassures the client.
I for one accept this exhibition as a expression of intelligent disarray before the problems of making art in the late 1980's. The first time round, there is enough to engage the curiosity of any fair-minded visitor. The second time round, this particular visitor began to see much of the work rather as a crafty imitation of art or a tenacious holding operation than as the real thing. The third time round, he stayed with one or two of the images - Mr. Gober's kitchen sink-turned-tombstone and half buried in long grass, for instance, and the elegant, plain geometrical statement (borrowed, but still cogent) of Mr. Halley's ''Before and After'' - but found that many another was fading fast.
The outsider in this particular pack of artists is Tim Rollins, who works on a collective basis with children from an unprivileged area in the Bronx. Something of their wild and spontaneous vitality permeates their work - notably in the ''Amerika'' series, which is painted with oil and china markers over pages from Franz Kafka's great study of an imaginary America. Something of Joan Miro dances along with these enterprises, and with it a direct access to an unconscious that as yet knows nothing of the market.
Time is not lost in this exhibition, which has drawn a large if sometimes hostile audience and will have a little niche of its own in the history of taste. (The present show is part I of a survey of New York art; Part II will follow later.) Where idioms are annexed, we are entitled to prefer their original form, just as we are entitled to prefer the Barnett Newman who wrote a foreword to Prince Peter Kropotkin's memoirs to the young people who fool around with it now that Newman is dead and gone.
Nor does the manipulation of motifs taken from Bridget Riley look very convincing in Miss Riley's own city. But these, too, are small echoes of a large history, and one that is not yet concluded.
