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)
an abstract-expressionist point of view of bravado in the work. The found objects—the wheel and the semi-spherical bases with their nautical references— are delightful,” Poling added. Although the style of di Suvero’s work is radically different from that of Kenneth Snelson’s “North- wood III,” Poling found the two of them to be “clearly the best works in the Construct show.” The works reflect two extremes of abstract-expressionist temperament, the romantic and the classical. Di Suvero’s work is exuberantly emotional, whereas Snelson’s is clean, clear and controlled. The ten-year- old work of Snelson’s, chosen for the convenience of its relatively small size, is a system of aluminum tubes of different diameters, delicately suspended in space by the tensions of steel cables. Snelson’s work is concerned with the organization of force in space, and with the tensions and counter-tensions that hold structures together. At first glance, “Northwood III” has a deceptive look of mathematical simplicity. On closer inspection, one marvels that the long, solid looking, metal tubes don’t come tumbling down in the slightest breeze. John Henry’s “Rocher du Diamant” occupies some middle ground between Snelson’s and di Suve ro’s works. The yellow, rectangular, upward- thrusting beams are, at the same time, cleanly simply and exuberantly playful, affecting one’s experience of the space they occupy. Lyman Kipp’s “Red Flag" elicits a similar response to its two intersecting planes of red-painted steel elements, two of which lie in a vertical plane, crossed by a slanting beam with a flat, shovel-like attachment at its base. The work that Millard and Sandman found the most exciting was Charles Ginnever’s “Forth Bridge.” This geometric structure of four parallelograms defined by ribbons of rusted steel joined at the corners, plays tricks with perception. Montague des cribed it as “drawing in the air.” The box-like ele ments, although not coplanar, appear to “flatten out as you get closer,” says Sandman, who found the illusion captivating. The work bridges some shad owy, half-world between two- and three-dimension ality, that gives it a quality of “transcending its physi cal presence,” according to Millard. “Ginnever, of the whole group, did something potentially exciting,” he added. Linda Howard’s “Kegon II” looks a bit like a conventional garden trellis gone awry. Thin, rectan gular aluminum strips of uniform width but varying height, are spaced evenly apart along two semicircu lar base lines, forming two curving sides that are connected along a diagonal axis by a “wall of stacked, horizontal stnps. This connecting wall beg ins to curve in on itself near the top as the heights of the two sides vary in opposite directions. “I enjoy the way the work twitches in on itself," says Montague, who chose this as her favorite among the Construct group’s sculptures because of Howard’s work with “illusion and energy to make negative space become positive space.” Howard’s work is characterized by classically controlled and understated variations on the arrangement of like units that result in surprising shapes and patterns. The eight Construct works cover a broad range of tendencies in abstract metal sculpture, from the min imalist geometricity of Kipp’s and Ginnever’s works, to the exuberant excess of di Suvero’s and Peart’s . All of the artists have taken the hard, unlovely, mechanical materials of our industrialized, deper sonalized, 20th century environment, and restruc tured them into non-threatening forms that celebrate, on the one hand, man’s participation in some natural, rational order and, on the other hand, his triumph over the irrational element of chance. None of these ideas is new, but they are still relevant. Each work is typical of the artists’ previous works. Is this just tired redundancy, or evidence of a consistent statement of their concerns? Clark Poling notes that “there has been an expectation since World War II that there will be rapid, radical stylistic changes in art." But, he adds, “1 don’t think that’s necessarily healthy.” Caroline Montague sees the consistency as an ongoing effort of the artists to “continue defining their own particular reality.” Have these artists broken new ground in the exploration of their metaphysical territories, or are they wandering in aimless circles over the same old ground? Mon tague’s personal feeling is that it is difficult for herself and for other artists to work on something that does not interest them. Still, some art is more compelling than others, if only because some artists’ “particular realities" are more interesting than others.’ The Construct show may have been boringly “safe” to those who were overly familiar with the processes and ideas involved. But for its less expe rienced audience, if it opened a door to greater appre ciation of more challenging artistic territory, it served the highest function of art. SmXnSS
