Art: Gods, Chess and 28,000 Magazines

A run of first-rate sculpture shows has opened in the New York City area this spring. Such artists as Michael Heizer, Ursula von Rydingsvard and John Duff have mounted exhibitions demonstrating the range and vitality of contemporary sculpture. One of the most impressive of all opened last month at Storm King Art Center on the Hudson River in Mountainville, N.Y., 55 miles upstream from Manhattan. It is a concise survey of the past ten years of work — 17 sculptures, 19 powerful charcoal and oil-stick drawings — by the British-born sculptor William Tucker, 53, who has lived in the U.S. since 1978.

Those who have visited Storm King know it as a testing spot for large-scale sculpture. Anything displayed there must face not only the permanent collection of pieces by David Smith, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero and other virtuosos of bigness, but the setting itself: a mountain with sweeping green ledges and infolding valleys whose scale can reduce lesser work to mere bibelots. Tucker’s show, which runs through October, survives both comparisons.

Tucker was perhaps the most gifted of the English sculptors nurtured by % Anthony Caro’s teaching at St. Martin’s School in London 30 years ago. They were all struggling to get out from the monolithic influence of Henry Moore by constructing open sculpture from wood or steel, instead of carving or modeling. By the late ’70s Tucker was bringing an unusual intensity and even drama to his constructed work. He made pieces like the magisterial House of the Hanged Man, 1981, out of weathered, blackened balks of timber and bits of roof trusses and piers held together with massive, punctuating bolts.

These frame- and cagelike structures became more modeled and blunter in the early ’80s. All the same, one was not ready for the swing that appeared in Tucker’s work in 1984. He turned to bronze, to figures — everything his early sculptures had eschewed. This was as unexpected as the moment in 1970 when Philip Guston, known for 20 years as a painter of fugitive gray-rose webs, showed his first paintings of Ku Klux Klansmen and sent an avalanche of taste rolling toward “clumsy” figuration. What was the erstwhile constructor up to? This show tells.

Tucker’s new sculptures are named after Greek deities, the impersonal beings who presided over the creation of the world and its gods: the earth spirit Gaia, daughter of Chaos and mother of the Titans; Ouranos, god of the skies; their son Okeanos and his wife Tethys, parents of the sea and river gods. Unlike their Olympian descendants, these were too archaic to have acquired a fixed form in classical art. There was no thousand-year lineage of marble prototypes for their shape. They could be big and indistinct. And the conjunction of monumental size with muffled form entranced Tucker. The resulting pieces look ineloquent, truncated, more available — at first — to touch than to sight.

Works like Ouranos are infused with a sense of primal material under the stress of becoming, a mass raising itself up into consciousness even as gravity drags it down. You think of Genesis and the lump of clay just on the point of turning into Adam (the first sculpture of all). A little less thought, less work, and they would only be lumps. Tucker had taken a long look at Rodin, and it shows everywhere on his bronzes. The heavings and incrustations of their skins are, in fact, exquisitely organized to carry the eye around the form and leave no dead or slick patches on the surface. Groping, malleability, squeezing, thumbing bespeak a flat-out commitment to the tactile.

The biggest of the pieces, and Tucker’s masterpiece so far, is Okeanos, 1987-88. It packs three layers of imagery into its mass without the slightest strain or theatricality. At first it is a great bowed head and shoulders, rearing up from the earth and leaning forward. Its immense back carries memories of Matisse’s bronze backs, and its pose refers, distantly, to Brancusi’s Mlle. Pogany. Then, from the side, one notices how it resembles a big wave about to topple — the ocean over which the deity ruled. And finally, from the front, closer in, the deep pits and bosses in the surface suggest a rock carved at random by the swilling of that sea. It is a work of astonishing power and distinction.

Of the season’s shows in Manhattan, one that was unaccountably ignored by critics is Xavier Corbero’s at the BlumHelman Warehouse (through June 11). At 53, Corbero, a Catalan who lives in Barcelona, is one of the best though most idiosyncratic sculptors in Europe; his show, “The Catalan Opening,” contains work of such metaphorical richness, variety and wit that one would need to be an aesthetic pruneface not to enjoy it.

The Catalan opening is, of course, a chess gambit. Corbero’s exhibition is a set of 16 black chess pieces — king and queen, hulking monoliths more than 9 1/2 ft. high, and a whimsical army of knights, bishops, rooks and pawns, all carved and constructed from basalt. This brittle volcanic rock is too hard to chisel cleanly; it can only be sawed or broken like a flint. Corbero revels in the risks of breaking it. Each piece of basalt becomes a found object — altered, but bearing a memory of the raw look it had in the quarry.

The set is not just Catalan in name. It prolongs the spirit of older Barcelonan artists and architects, a sense of material fantasy that still saturates the place and gives Corbero’s work its sardonic, free-associating air and its obsessively fine craftsmanship. There are delicious Miroesque touches in this show, like the comb jauntily set on the queen’s head, grooved with the bars of the Catalan shield, or the wacky little pyramid that balances on the needle peak of a pawn called Miss Capicua, 1987-88. Other details resurrect the images of heraldic encounter, the dungeons and dragons that lie within the shapes of chessmen. Loving the double image, Corbero is part heir to Catalan surrealism. The son and grandson of metalsmiths, he sometimes gets a bit overrefined for American taste, but his delight in odd tropes — like making forms in basalt that conventionally would be done in metal — has its ! own authentic motives. He remains a very considerable sculptor.

Corbero’s work looks fairly orthodox, nevertheless, beside that of the young Scotsman David Mach, 32, showing at the Barbara Toll gallery (also through June 11). There is one object on view. It fills most of the gallery. It is called A Million Miles Away and is made from some 28,000 magazines — surplus copies of House Beautiful, Esquire, Town & Country and the like — spilling in a torrent from a fireplace, across the floor and through a wall and another fireplace. Embedded in them are a bathtub, a stuffed zebra and what must be the world’s largest outboard motor, a 300-h.p. Johnson V-8, which looks big enough to drive the Queen Mary. The work is not for sale, and will be dismantled at the end of the show; Mach likens such setups to performances, and this one was done before in England with different objects and a different title, Fuel for the Fire. The current enigmatic title comes from the absentminded state one gets into when stacking up tons of old magazines, one by one, a condition Mach compares to that of an assembly-line worker whose thoughts are “a million miles away” while his hands do their repetitive chores.

What is this weird object about? Plainly, a satire on commodity culture, the bulimic gorging of mass-produced imagery that is built so firmly into our social responses by now that we cannot, or will not, see its inherent strangeness. Mach is not just a fine-art version of the reclusive hobbyist who makes Eiffel Towers or Brooklyn Bridges from a million spent matches. He wants to turn surplus against itself — not in the friendly way of Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauschenberg but with real bloody-mindedness. A Million Miles Away posits a world in which things are carried along, bobbing like corks, on a gross, value-free cataract of media imagery. The waves of magazines undulate with a glutinous, twining rhythm, and their movement seems irresistible: they are going to take over the gallery first, and then the world. Only the zebra seems above it all; but then, it cannot read.