This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Contemporary art/southeast. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1977-1980 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 1980)
by Mary Michels This year’s Arts Festival of Atlanta featured a six- week exhibition of large, metal, outdoor sculptures by Construct, a Chicago-based gallery and agency consisting of eight nationally and internationally known sculptors. The exhibit, sponsored by Gilman Paper Company for an S18.000 installation fee, has been lauded as an important effort to bring serious art to an Atlanta audience. As Clark Poling, associate professor of art history at Emory, noted, the show was a valuable opportunity for many Atlantans to experience first-hand a kind of sculpture they would otherwise have had a chance to see only in the pages of art magazines. Why was the Construct exhibit chosen for the festival? An influencing factor was convenience, according to Genevieve Arnold, one of the Arts Festival organizers. For a flat fee, the Con struct group handles transport, installation, and removal of its sculptures, she explained. The show was not an unqualified critical success, but it did work as an educational ploy to bring people closer to art. Set among the trees alongside the lake in Piedmont Park, the sculpture’s bright colors and fan tastic metal shapes excited the curious interest of picnickers, sunbathers, ball-players, and roller- skaters for weeks before and after the eight-day art festival in May. Children scrambled up it; adults walked cautiously around it But no one passed by without looking at it. Youthful visitors, accustomed to the park’s Noguchi-designed playground equipment, were- understandably confused about the precise nature of the seductive but dangerous-looking new structures. Glimpsing them through the trees, one small roller skating person screeched to a halt in the road border ing the installation area. “What is it?” she demanded with the directness.of youth. “Sculpture!” replied her more precocious companion. It was an amazing insight for a I2-year-old to have, especially since there were two little boys playing on Mark di Suvero’s bright orange “Eagle Wheel” at the time. This work exerted a particularly powerful attraction on child ren, who responded enthusiastically to the playful invitation to scale its rakishly-angled beams and swing from its dangling wheel. Local sculptors and academicians questioned about the Construct works found them considerably less exciting than the kids did. Alan Sandman, a member of Thirteen Minus One, an Atlanta sculp tors’ group, described the exhibit as “tired," although six of the eight pieces were brand new. The experts’ disinterest is partly attributable to familiarity with the kind of welded metal construction that most of the Construct sculptors have been working with for the last fifteen years. Because the process itself has become standard, predictable, and unremarkable, it can no longer carry the weight of innovation and inspiration alone, noted Larry Millard, a sculptor- professor at the University of Georgia. Both Millard and Poling voiced the opinion that the most exciting work in the park was not in the Construct show at all, but a few hundred yards beyond in a small, shady grove. There Richard Nonas arranged a group of huge, weather-worn, rectangular beams, punctuated by vertical ones, leading into the grove at various angles. “The mammoth beams direct your attention through the trees, through patterns of light and shadow. They reveal the site as a marvelous kind of little-sacred grove,” said Poling. What appealed so strongly to both these critics was the collaboration between the site and structure, that traditional notion of a monument’s meaningful rela tionship to its surroundings, that modem, abstract sculptures such as the Construct works lack. Ironi cally, according to the definition of sculpture deve loped by art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss in her festival-sponsored lecture on “The Logic of Con temporary Sculpture,” the Nonas work is not pure scuIptur£,J>ut a related form, a “marked site.” Krauss CoHtends that with the advent of self-contained, non- contextural, abstract art, a new definition of sculp ture is required as “that which is not-landscape and not-architecture.” Her concern in doing so is to deny the value of pluralism as a catch-all attempt to encompass the diverse directions in sculpture-related art today. Traditionally, Krauss noted, sculpture has been about marking a place. For the four ccnturies'preced- mg this one, Western sculpture was of a monumental nature, deriving meaning from, and adding meaning to its location. This is no longer necessarily true. Abstract sculpture, unlike its predecessors, is a sell- contained world with an internalized logic, and a pedestal incorporated into the work ’ K °^ C governing what is sculpture today could be summed up as “have pedestal, will travel,” quipped Krauss. .2 'Forth Bridge," by Charles Ginnever. Photo by Mary Joe Pieper.
