Art: Endless Sculpture

No modern artist has stepped as far out into thin air as wan, visionary Frederick Kiesler, 67. More than steel, stone, bronze, wood or oil paints, his medium is space.

As a member of the idealistic de Stijl group (TIME, May 8) in the 1920s, he planned spiral buildings before Frank Lloyd Wright built the Guggenheim Museum, and proposed horizontal skyscrapers on cantilevers before Le Corbusier built them. Rarely has he realized what he has designed on paper; he has, for example, never built the “endless house,” a sculpture to live in, that made his fame.

“We know we belong to the stars,” explains Kiesler. “We are related to them in just a matter of intervals.” His objective is continuity in space, in which no art work would exist by itself, frozen away from man’s activity. In fact, his wife says that “whether eating an omelet or filling out his income tax, everything is space and continuity.” “Museums today look like laundromats,” he says of paintings unrelated on the walls, like separate peepholes into separate worlds. Says he: “Space is something that cannot be looked at through a keyhole.”

So when Kiesler made a show of “Environmental Sculpture” that opened last week in the Guggenheim Museum, he proposed to do over an entire gallery. “You can’t absorb the room in one glance,” explains Kiesler. “You must know what’s above, below—again the totality.” Part of the whole, called The Last Judgment, consists of a huge bonelike shaft of fire-gilt bronze that thrusts through a Plexiglas slab at counterimages of heaven and earth. It leaps up at an aluminum table whose bronze legs look like lightning bolts and jabs down at a white bronze floor plate. “Feel it,” urges Kiesler, “the metal is warm like a woman’s belly.”

Flanked by panels painted with false perspectives, other bits of bronze, chunks of pavement, ax-hewn and charred wood catch the eye. Some parts of the sculpture peep from behind doors; others curlicue underneath canopies. One piece, or “galaxy” as Kiesler calls them, is titled The Cup of Prometheus, and appropriately contains a burning smudge pot. To encourage people to contemplate the work, Kiesler cast two 85-lb. aluminum stools that are exactly placed in reference to larger parts. The problem is that Kiesler has had to borrow his most precious commodity—space—from a polygonal room in Wright’s animate museum. Nothing can dissolve the walls, and the sculptures seem strangers to them. Yet, even in failure, Kiesler makes more out of nothing than many do out of everything.