Poetic Emptiness

A marble bust on a pedestal today is about as contemporary as an old-fashioned butter churn. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the 148 sculptures chosen for New York's Whitney Museum annual, which opened last week. One newspaper critic was driven to suggest that a young sculptor, viewing the exhibit, might want to cut his throat in despair. Actually, the pulse of contemporary sculpture, as recorded by the Whitney's new curators, may be measured to the point of monotony but it is strong and rhythmic.

Three-Ton Landscapes. There are few nudes to titillate the senses, and commonplace pop objects are generally absent. What has rushed in to fill the void is geometry, in so many varied forms that even Euclid would be puzzled. Sculpture, in this exhibition at least, has lost its Renaissance meaning and turned into ideological architecture. Big, bold, brightly colored shapes keep turning corners in the most subjectless, unliterary and unsensual art that the 20th century has up to the present produced.

Bronze, plaster and marble, when they turn up, seem quaintly Victorian amid the outcroppings of anodized aluminum, vinyl and Plexiglas. Sheet metal is everywhere; one piece, Ernest Trova's Large Landscape, weighs about three tons. Most of the newcomers (50 of the artists were making their debuts at the Whitney annual) are addicts of "minimal art," sculpture that is stripped to unemotive zigzags. Ronald Bladen, 48, contributes an empty 8-ft. by 8-ft. by 16-ft. white plywood box, tilted up from the floor. The box is empty and the work is untitled. Ellsworth Kelly, 43, otherwise a hard-edge painter of interest, displays an L-shaped item that dully fulfills its title, Blue White Angle. Paul Frazier, 44, represents himself with Space Manifold #5, an irregular cruciform abstraction that would kiss Rodin off as a sentimentalist.

"Nothingness Isn't Negative." Two artists who master the minimum: Tony Smith, 54, whose 11-ft.-high Amaryllis is a black steel construction that bends like the Japanese art of origami, or paper folding, and Robert Smithson, 28, whose Alogon, also of black steel, cantilevers from the wall like a sawtooth set of staggered boxes. Their works are as unsettling as a spastic octopus sculpted by Michelangelo might have been.

Modular, faintly suggestive of children's blocks, Smith's and Smithson's sculptures seem like statements in the vocabulary of boxy, urban housing. Yet in accentuating the negative, they make symbolism out of skeletal form. "Art needs more thought and less manual dexterity," says Smithson. "Nothingness isn't negative--the drive to reach the moon is a preoccupation with desolate nothingness. But it's involved with the idea of exploration." Their search is to find poetry in emptiness.

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