On Art

...But once inside, especially in the darkened rooms, their responses are loud and clear...

...Directly across from Bell's room is a little quiet-corner, produced by Franz Erhard Walther, a German artist now living in New York...

...But all I could hear while inching along were whispering, giggling couples and a disembodied voice resonantly explaining the purpose of this black hole (of Oh...

...The final exhibit has been produced by Pulsa, a group of young artists sponsored by Yale's Department of Art and Architecture and the Graham Foundation...

...At various periods in the history of art, in response to different pressures, the limits have been expanded or contracted, or disguised to give an impression of boundlessness...

...to his equally disembodied partner...

...This is intended to be a sort of visual-deprivation chamber: One sees only the vague blue haze carried over from the bright lights of Flavin's room...

...The colors he manages to create this way are quite beautiful, and the finished products are six-sided, immaterial paintings, like caged volumes of cloudy and iridescent air...

...For without museum exhibitions and gallery showings, without the art coverage provided by dailies and monthlies, without the financial backing of dealers and collectors for the digging of earth-trenches, much of the work would pass unrecognized as art...

...here are several reasons why the Modern should have put on the "Spaces" exhibition...

...For his "Spaces" contribution, he has fashioned a totally dark environment, lining its walls with vacuum-coated glass...

...The floor has been covered with white cloth and there are bolts and bags of material stacked along the large plate glass windows that look directly out on 54th Street...

...Perhaps this will have some salutary effect...

...On Art TRAVELING THROUGH 'SPACES' BY JAMES R. MELLOW jl^f art exhibitions were rated like Broadway entertainments, one would have to count the current "Spaces" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a public success and a critical failure...

...But the limits are there, and they are as important as the ambitions contained within them...

...Presumably, the experience is meant to approximate traveling through the interior of one of his boxes...

...It is, in the end, the art establishment that maintains the status of the earth-trench as a bona fide work of art, and not just another hole in the ground...

...Judging from the steady stream of visitors-mostly young people and groups of school children being led through the audio-visual rites by their teachers-the exhibition is a resounding hit...

...For the truth of the matter is that everywhere man goes, he creates an environment, and there is a certain amount of conscious or unconscious art involved...

...For his "Spaces" environment Robert Morris, the former minimalist sculptor, has brought the landscape itself into the museum...

...Art, after all, is a limiting affair...

...Supposedly, programmed noises were to be pumped into this perfect and inky silence...

...Ironically, although much of this work-environmental and otherwise-Is supposed to be in revolt against the art establishment, it has become exceptionally dependent upon the permissive standards the establishment maintains...

...Forms that are low in art-content?as environmental art and some other contemporary forms tend to be?come off badly...

...The third room, designed by California artist Larry Bell, is functionally the least successful...

...In the past, artists went out into the country to paint a landscape...

...The room has been provided with "grow" lights and refrigerated air to maintain the proper climatic conditions and heighten the effect...

...Correspondingly, though, there are several reasons why the Modern's show is damaging to the art in question...

...With the aid of several business corporations, ranging from General Electric to klh Research and Development, the artists are providing a barrage of visual, auditory and tactile sensations not ordinarily associated with more sedate forms of art like painting and sculpture...

...Spaces" is a gesture in that direction...

...But the moon has not become a piece of art as a consequence...

...But it is difficult to see how Dennis Op-penheim's recent gesture of having a Dutch farmer cut a huge "X" in the middle of his wheatfield, or Christo's wrapping a mile of Australian coastline in plastic, is going to enlarge our esthetic possibilities...

...To begin with, it has been subject to pressure lately for not being responsive enough to current developments in the art world...

...For all the expense involved and despite the momentary diversion of the fun-and-games aspect of the show, one leaves "Spaces" feeling-So what...

...Participants-In a kind of Zen experience of space-are invited to sit on the floor and roll out bolts of cloth, interspersing their activities with moments of contemplation, and thus giving themselves a kinaesthetic experience of the spatial distances in the room...

...They have taken over the museum's sculpture garden, setting up clusters of heating units, sound boxes and flashing strobe lights...

...Or, if they feel so inclined, they can wrap themselves up in sacks and, kindergarten-like, indulge in nap time...

...But the little fir trees are becoming crisp and brown at the edges-which seems to prove that you can make art out of the country but you can't make the country into art...

...Walther's room is a "space-awareness" kit...

...A kind of romantic assault upon convention is in progress, an attempt to make art out of everything-the noises in the street, the wide-open spaces, the technology of the modern age...

...Electronic listening devices have also been placed throughout the garden to pick up sounds and relay them through a computerized control booth, in this manner producing responses in the garden equipment...

...He changes the character of a wilderness by erecting a house, or the nature of a vacant field by building a stone wall...

...The effect of all this, however, is so sprawling and diffuse, so minimal in interest, that the experiment really adds nothing to the pleasant sense of architectural space the garden, with its Calder mobiles and Matisse sculptures, already offers...

...He has constructed neck-high, steel-faced bins mounded with dirt and cleverly planted little fir trees to establish illusory distances...

...Conditioned by the usual museum prohibition never to touch anything, much less walk around in it, young people at first tend to hang back at the entrances...

...The show, comprised of five rooms and an electronic garden, has been designed by five artists and a cooperative group, Pulsa, to demonstrate the current state of one of the more ambitious contemporary developments, environmental art...

...Next comes a plunge into the total darkness of Michael Asher's room, where one is obliged to remove one's shoes and gingerly tread the spongy flooring...

...At the moment, there seems to be some need to rebel against the limits...

...The first of the rooms, designed by light artist Dan Flavin, is a bath of yellow and green fluorescent light, nothing more...

...But, technologically, the vacuum-coated glass was a wasted effort, adding nothing that could not have been achieved simply by painting the walls of the room black...

...The control booth, located in the cafeteria lobby, with its electronic equipment, heaps of spare parts, paper Iunoh bags, longhaired engineers and their visiting girl friends, is, in fact, visually more interesting than what it is producing in the garden...

...All sounds as well-noises from the corridor, every possible subcity rumble that might be transmitted through the Modern's construction elements-have been carefully screened out or muffled by the acoustical materials used in the construction of the room...

...In his earlier works, Bell had developed a unique and interesting form of art, producing very simple and elegant cubiform boxes of vacuum-coated glass framed in metal...

...At worst, they become unredeemably precious, rather like Marie Antoinette gotten up in a milkmaid's costume with a milking stool, playing at the simple life amid courtly surroundings...

...The technological litter now deposited on the moon has created another man-invaded landscape...

...Calcutta...

...For all I knew, it might have been Virgil pointing out to Dante the special features of one of the lower circles in the inferno...

...In addition, the show gives the museum an opportunity to demonstrate that with the proper financial assistance, it can accomodate some of the more expansive forms of art now being created-created by artists, moreover, who are reportedly hostile to the conventional art establishment and its institutions...

...Barriers of squared-off lighting units flank both sides of the entrance, flooding the otherwise empty enclosure with an intense but pleasant subaqueous light...

...It puts a frame around experience, just as architecture puts a frame around sets of spatial experiences and conditions...

...It is rather similar to a room in a funhouse without the unpleasant surprises...

...My own feeling is that only works of art of some richness and complexity -like the paintings on the Modern's walls and the sculptures in its gardens?can withstand the rigors of prolonged museum presentation...

...In pitch blackness, one gropes along the outside wall, moving from corner to corner, following the screams and guffaws of other, similarly blinded persons ahead...