On Art

...It took them three hours in all to set Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's invisible underground sculpture...

...In the Seagram Building plaza, between the pair of gushing fountains, a huge broken obelisk poised upon a massive pyramid has been installed...

...Hey, lousy Fascist pinks...

...For a modest $16,000 (privately funded), 31 pieces of sculpture were placed throughout the streets, parks and plazas of Manhattan in locations ranging from Battery Park to the Lennox Terrace Apartments uptown...

...Stephen Antonakos' fountain of orange neon light, for example, searched around town until it finally found a home in the lobby of New York University's Loeb Student Center...

...There were snags, of course: Some dealers and collectors were reluctant to loan works when funds for insurance proved inadequate and where the safety of the works could not be guaranteed...

...What the present exhibition makes clear??and perhaps it would have been clear before now, had there been any consistent patronage of monumental sculpture— is that there is no environment for such works, there are only environments...

...A middle-aged man with a Western twang was particularly incensed...

...Albert List and Mrs...

...The only comment overhead was from ayoung executive type who, glancing at the rust-orange patina of the metal, said to his friend: "If he had put on a finishing coat, it wouldn't have happened...

...Considering the write-ins that already mar the Bar-nett Newman and Bernard Rosenthal sculptures, their reluctance is understandable...

...Called Sculpture in Environment, it will continue to be on view through the month of October, and may possibly be extended to six weeks...

...George Rickey's six-unit Peristyle, an arithmetical progression of gleaming needle forms that sway in the wind, nearly escapes notice, being mounted on the balustrades of the 42nd Street Public Library in front of a tall privet hedge...

...It has since been retired to the shelter of the Vivian Beaumont lobby...

...He seemed unable to leave, returning again and again to strike up conversations with the spectators...

...It has created a stir one might expect over a machine from Mars: At most times of the day, a crowd can be seen circling warily around it...

...Burton Tre-maine...

...To give credit where credit is due: A large measure of thanks should go to the responsive dealers and artists —16 artists created works expressly for the event??as well as to the enterprising Office of Cultural Affairs...

...Stationed across from the stately Plaza Hotel, it stirred only mild interest among the sunworshippers sitting around on the park benches and casually watching as two workmen applied a coat of black Rustoleum...

...Small groups of viewers clustered around Newman's Broken Obelisk, discussing the work quietly among themselves...

...A ready-made sculpture thrust into a space like Lincoln Center will more than likely fail...

...The activity, however, attracted the notice of one of those ambulant madmen who wander about the city giving passersby a blunt piece of their minds...

...To the inevitable question, a Rockefeller Center guard stationed at the sculpture patiently answers: "As it was explained to me, this is your living room, and that is the television screen, and there you see the stars of 1967??the people walking through...

...What is it...

...Smith chose the site himself, judging that the scale of the Lincoln Center Plaza would be death to any piece of sculpture not designed expressly for it...

...A nine-foot sculpture on wheels by the late David Smith, Zig IV, was tried in front of the theater but lost out to the span of the building...

...Tony Smith's Snake is certain to be missed by a good many people, unless they go skulking around behind the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center where its huge black mass sits, poised like a cobra, overlooking the Pioneer Market and Century Pizza Parlor on Amsterdam Avenue...

...The rust-orange surfaces of the metal contrast sharply with the sleek bronze and glass facade of the building...

...It's not finished, whatever it is," said one bemused, elderly woman, "but I wonder what it'll be when it is...

...It includes monumental examples by Calder, Tony Smith, Marisol, Lyman Kipp, David von Schlegell??in fact, large works by nearly every important sculptor with environmental ambition...

...Other sculptures were welcomed with open arms and given preferential treatment...

...The sculpture actually did house a star of some magnitude for a brief moment when Frank Fontaine, of the Jackie Gleason Show, looking seriously overweight and wearing a tent-size, bright red sweater, hurried through the acrylic environment unnoticed by the crowd...

...When the Dadaists caused riots in the earlier part of the century, they were expressly trying to insult official art and discredit the dead culture of the museums...

...In some instances, the sites have proved less than ideal...

...It was an invisible underground sculpture meant to deposit everything— in Oldenburg's words: "baseball games, lovers, squirrels, worms, a helicopter passing overhead"??in one coffin-size hole...

...The advisory committee for the exhibition consisted of museum directors and curators (Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney, Kynaston Mc-Shine of the Jewish Museum, Ruth Gurin of New York University's Art Collection), architect Paul Rudolph, and two prominent collectors??mrs...

...But it sure attracts a lot of attention," replied a stout, gray-haired man...

...asked a pert young secretary...

...In a sense, contemporary sculptors have forced the issue...

...The important thing is not that a Dada event of this kind took place, but that it took place with the cooperation of the cultural establishment...

...The returns from this exhibition??good or bad??should be registered in the work of the sculptors involved for years to come...

...As he strolled off, he treated the midday loungers to a matter-of-fact and unprintable account of the sexual proclivities of anyone who might be involved with such a thing...

...They have been working increasingly on a scale that precludes regular showings, in the ordinary gallery or usual museum space...

...Sponsored by the Lindsay Administration and its cultural affairs director, August Heckscher, this up-to-the-minute civic display of vanguard sculpture was a part of the city's two-week Culture Showcase, marking, appropriately enough, the start of the new art and theater season...

...They were in the presence of art with a capital A, and seemed a little intimidated...

...From my own tour of the Sculpture in Environment exhibition, I can only report that the attitude of the public is generally mild-mannered and ambivalent...

...One suspects, too, that it might have looked uncomfortably like a squared-off version of the large Henry Moore piece already there, stranded in the dry pool...

...Marisol's mammoth variation on the post-and-lintel structure with painted facets of black, yellow and blue occasioned the worst diatribe...

...Told it was a piece of modern sculpture, she turned to her girlfriend: "Would you believe??a piece of sculpture...

...The main issue of the Sculpture in Environment exhibition, then, is not that the broad public has been confronted with modern art, that we now know what Linda and Charlie, among others, think of it...

...The object has already received the stamp of public attention in the form of a Hippie love-in symbol scrawled on one of its flanks, and a small pencilled heart inscribed, "Linda and Charlie...

...Well, at least it's not a copying machine...

...It looks like a helluva lot of money to put into something that isn't anything," he commented...

...These works of visible and invisible sculpture, together with 28 others, constitute one of the most important cultural exercises ever undertaken by an American city...

...Nor is it that a city administration has, for once, accepted the challenge of the art of its day...

...he kept shouting at the uncomfortable workmen...

...The real issue is that modern sculptors, who have for years aspired to the streets, are now being tested...

...Up at the Seagram plaza??on more sophisticated ground??there was little confraternity among strangers...

...The interment was held without advance notice on a Sunday morning, attended only by an immediate family consisting of the sculptor, dealer Carol Janis, Doris Freedman of the Office of Cultural Affairs, and the two grave-diggers...

...The event in Central Park, of course, having been performed with all the secrecy of a grave-robbery, did not have a large audience...

...Viewers of Chryssa's neon extravaganza, The Gates to Times Square, which has been deposited crosstown at Grand Central Station, seemed the most avidly curious and communicative...

...The size of the work had already served notice that sculpture intended to break out of the mu-seum-with-walls, that it wanted to address itself to a broader audience, to install its private thoughts in public places...

...The hazards of public sculpture...

...Les Levine's All Star Cast 1967, a walk-through set of intersecting corridors made of transparent Acrylite, has been doing a thriving business in front of the Time & Life Building, in spite of competition from Radio City Music Hall Rockettes picketing across the street...

...After a lunch break, they dutifully refilled the hole with the loose dirt they had excavated...

...In the cavernous waiting room at Grand Central Station, a mammoth construction of aluminum, stainless steel, Plexiglas and pale blue, blinking neon lights has been set in place between a newsstand and a candy vending machine...

...After a half-century of vanguardism, the cultural establishment has obviously learned??if you can't lick them, you had better join them...

...Then, too, the committee was expected to select and arrange for the sites, but at the last minute some dealers and artists had to fend for themselves...

...The success of the public mode of sculpture will therefore depend upon specific commissions...