On Art

...While the scale of the pieces might have related them to architecture, it was architecture with a difference, architecture without the usual functional norms...

...One might have guessed this from an artist who claims he would prefer to be completely invisible, "just an idea, rather than a physicality of any kind...

...sculpture for sculpture's sake of purest natural substance into simplest primary form...

...Levine's catalogue statement sums up, in a concise way, what his art is about: "I am trying to create an art that does not rely on contemplation—is not a contemplative device of any kind—but is one that involves the person in a kinetic experience...

...it can be accomplished by mere patient mechanism...

...By chance, I have come across an explanation of the reductive nature of the style in a very unlikely quarter—the Anchor book anthology of John Ruskin's art criticism?and I give the passage here in its entirety because it seems apt: "The exact science of sculpture is that of the relations between outline and the solid form it limits...

...it is the science always of the beauty of relation in three dimensions...

...It is also no secret that, like any forceful development, environmental art raises issues not easily clarified by criticism or commentary...

...but its relative mass, the ball, being gradated in three dimensions, is always delightful...

...There was, as well, little interest in embellishment, in that "pleasant bossiness" of form which Ruskin considered a traditional aim of sculpture...

...As one traveled through the piece, the curved surfaces of transparent plastic gave off sparks of reflected light...

...Varian noted in her catalogue introduction, "represents a different attitude to what one might begin to call the ecology of the art-artist intercurrent situation...

...The exceptions to this arrangement were Ursula Meyer's large, two-part wooden structure and Charles Ross's islands of plastic prisms, which shared one of the larger gallery spaces...

...Star Garden, an arrangement of his Acrylite pieces installed in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art...

...At issue here is a radical new order of art —democratic in its engagement of the audience, reductive in its means, and surprisingly broad in its individual possibilities...

...The environmentalist trend that has been so evident on the exhibition scene for the past year—although it encompasses work of the most pragmatic kind—has given rise to such definitions...

...the other, nearly invisible, hostile to associations of any kind...

...No one is happy with the term, for it covers over differences between artists that are as striking as the similarities...

...Yet, they share in sculpture's current urge to create settings which engage the viewer in a series of kinetic responses...

...Levine's ideal environments of the future (he claims that the means are available now and that only our sluggish human nature stands in the way) depend upon a complete technological package—controlled environments that will modify the climate and thus eliminate heating systems, pre-processed foods that will do away with kitchen stoves and plumbing...

...Within the past month he has had several of these environments exhibited: Slipcover, a series of rooms in New York's Architectural League that were completely upholstered in silvery Mylar (a metallized plastic) with inflating and deflating walls...

...Varian's try at it only further muddles the situation and calls into question what was, in most respects, a provocative exhibition...

...Varian's exhibition as a refinement upon the earlier Primary Structure show...

...and it does not matter whether that relation be indicated by drawing or carving, so long as the expression of solid form is the mental purpose...

...And setting aside the 19th century devotion to Beauty, Ruskin's attempt to establish the quiddity of sculpture freed from the claims of imitation on the one hand and architectural structure on the other, is still surprisingly applicable to a good deal of the sculpture now being produced...

...The feeling that one was situated in a kind of reconstituted Stonehenge?granted, an archaicizing, romantic notion—was definitely intended...

...A narrow corridor of space was formed by two long sheets of bil-lowed-out Acrylite mounted on metal stanchions...

...nonetheless, it continues in service...

...Each of the seven works by seven different artists, Mrs...

...The working title for the show was simply "Walk-In Sculpture," a comprehensible description, though it did not suit the final exhibition: Some of the works not only did not invite the viewer to "walk in" but positively discouraged it...

...Aside from Tony Smith, a veteran designer who has lately risen to prominence and whose large black structures recently graced the raw spring landscape of Bryant Park, and Brian O'Doherty, a former art critic for the New York Times, the artists involved in the exhibition were relatively young or relatively unknown to the broad public, although they have begun to make reputations for themselves in the narrower art world...

...They all, more or less, work within the realm of primary structuralism—that is, the new mode of large, impersonal constructions generally fabricated of newer materials not previously associated with sculpture, such as plastics, plywood and aluminum...

...These elements, nearly seven feet tall, were arranged with very precise spatial relationships obtaining between the units and the surrounding walls...

...Here is at once the simplest, and, in mere patient mechanism, the most skilful, piece of sculpture I can possibly show you—a piece of the purest rock-crystal, chiselled (I believe, by mere toil of hand) into a perfect sphere...

...Imitating nothing, constructing nothing...

...This aspect of the work confirms the Tightness of Mrs...

...It is a vision of tomorrow's completely mobile society...

...Even Brian O'Doherty's metal-edged dolmens and Will Insley's ominous black plywood ramps took a negative stance, staving off, by their self-possession, the participation the other projects invited...

...One was given, therefore, an opportunity to see works meant to establish their own territories—to hold on to their own turf, so to speak—isolated in private rooms and not, as in the usual gallery group exhibition, thrown into the confusion of the common ward...

...To take the simplest possible line of continuous limit?the circle: the flat disc enclosed by it may indeed be made an element of decoration, though a very meager one...

...and White Foam—A Disposable Place, sl foamed-in-place urethane environment created specially for a recent exhibition at the ymha Gallery in Philadelphia...

...The primary structure label was devised last year for the influential exhibition by that name shown at the Jewish Museum, and it denotes a style that has continued to dominate both the exhibition scene and art criticism ever since...

...Levine is a young Canadian (originally Irish) artist and designer, something of an enfant terrible in the field of environments, about which he has very definite and aggressive ideas...

...One walked around them as in a maze bathed in subdued light...

...By kinetic I mean a relationship of movement to his own body, not kinetic in the fact of art that moves...

...The only necessary item of equipment in this brave new world, apparently, will be a trusty Dispose-All that will grind up one's plastic home of the moment and destroy the packaging for ersatz—but highly nutritional—meals...

...Smith's reference to Stonehenge in his catalogue interview was particularly telling, for his was a primitive, man-made environment whose function was not altogether clear...

...Les Levine's Star Machine provided an environment of a very different, more futuristic order...

...Tony Smith's construction, for example, was an environment created from four very large, unadorned wooden boxes painted black and installed in a dimly-lighted room...

...One could dismiss these events as mere faddishness, but they are solid demonstrations for a future world in which furniture and our sedentary habits will be rendered obsolete...

...In contrast to Smith's romantic setting, Levine's environment opted for immateriality—a transparent no-environment...

...Between Smith's and Levine's projects there obviously lies a world of interesting differences: the one, hankering after archaic situations...

...The perfection of art, under this dispensation, is no longer a matter of the artist's direct handling of the material...

...The artists in the Finch College exhibition dealt in the most basic planar or solid forms—variations upon the square, the triangle, the cube...

...The seven sculptors and/or designers represented were provided with individual rooms in which to install a sculpture or construction of environmental proportions...

...It is no coincidence that Charles Ross—whose rows of sparkling, liquid-filled prisms were so arranged that they shunted the viewer around them?or Michael Kirby—whose metal constructions, like bewildering mirrors, framed photographic segments of the bare room in which they were installed or duplicated the view from its window—should be active in performances of dance and drama...

...Ruskin's acknowledgment that perfect sculpture might issue from "mere patient mechanism" or from "mere toil of hand" is not far removed, in principle, from the attitude of those primary structuralists who prefer to have their works factory-made to their specifications...

...ON ART By James R. Mellow Architecture with a Difference Iam not sure what Elayne Varian, organizer of the recent Schemata 7 exhibition in the Contemporary Study Wing of the Finch College Museum of Art, intended by her definition of the exhibit's theme, but it indicates the scientism that seems to be attaching itself to certain forms of contemporary art ¦—most noticeably to recent sculpture...