Sculpture: Responding to the Moment

Rarely has the giant internal ramp of Manhattan’s circular Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, been put to better use. A visitor attending the Guggenheim’s fifth International Exhibition can proceed downward through its five spirals, passing 100 works by 80 sculptors from 20 countries arranged by generation—and thereby receive a gradual baptism into the myriad ways that sculpture has evolved in the past 20 years.

For the first time the Guggenheim International is devoted exclusively to sculpture, but that, says Associate Curator Edward Fry, 32, who spent two years and traveled to 30 countries in preparation for it, is only a sign of the times. Sculpture, he believes, is “involved with specific objects, with facts,” while painting “almost always maintains some quality of illusion, reference or metaphor.” Says Fry: “The facts of sculpture correspond to the post-meta physical moment we are in.”

In Revolt. On the top spiral at the Guggenheim are displayed the eminents who died in the 1960s but whose work still seems relevant to the post-meta physical moment: the dadaist abstractionist Arp Giacometti’s existential armature figures, the dynamic welded sculpture of David Smith, and the work of Burgoyne Diller, a precursor of minimalism. Next are the old masters whose common sensibility was formulated before World War II: Picasso, Nevelson, Lipchitz, Calder. Then come two generations of artists who, in Fry’s opinion, are at once trying to escape from Renaissance definitions of sculpture and “in revolt against the ways in which older artists have come to terms with their problems.”

Included in this group are the “fantastics,” born between 1910 and 1930, who explore odd materials and resort to private mythologies, whether through the twisted polyurethane of Chamberlain, the plaster casts of Segal, the junk sculpture of Stankiewicz, or the soft objects of Claes Oldenburg. On the bottom three tiers, and on the ground floor and bottom levels, in stage center, are the minimalists, including Tony Smith (TIME cover, Oct. 13). It is Fry’s opinion that the minimalists, who build industrially produced large-scale works, are trying to achieve a “tabula rasa, the clean slate upon which a totally new art may be invented.”

From Here to Infinity. To sculpture buffs, most of the U.S. and European artists’ names are familiar, but Curator Fry has made a determined effort to provide rarely seen examples of their work. Still more newsworthy is the display of the seven examples of Japanese sculpture, which show that Nippon’s advanced technology and freedom from European tradition have produced some sculptors with slates as clean as any in the U.S. The Port, an internally lit blue and transparent plastic piece by Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, and the giant slab of plastic Swiss cheese called Blue Dots by Noriyasu Fukushima have the same cleanness as Robert Morris’ silvery series of knife-edged I-beams and Donald Judd’s turquoise modular grids. All four works convey a feeling of openness and expansion, a common dedication to a spatial rhythm that can, in theory at least, be repeated to infinity.