Next, the Sun

Into the blue afternoon sky above Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle, a thin red line grew from the roof of One Oliver Plaza, a 37-floor office building. Twisting and looping in the stiff wind, the thing looked like a string of huge frankfurters seized with the ambitions of a condor. In fact, it was a 1,500-ft. red polyethylene tube, filled with 4,500 cu. ft. of helium. The line rose over the skyline and began to dance, guided by twelve men straining on guy ropes on the roof far below. One link tore off as the wind lashed it against the nearby Gulf Building and floated away above the Allegheny River. Confesses the man who devised the spectacle, German Kinetic Artist Otto Piene: "I haven't heard where it came down, but apparently it didn't do any harm." The event was "a sky ballet" entitled Red Helium Sky Line--and he thought it went off very well. "You make a huge line and let the wind draw with it on infinite space."

Piene, 42, who was a founder member of kinetic art's Group Zero and now works with M.I.T.'s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, had been asked to put on an outdoor sculptural event by Citything, Pittsburgh's public arts program. The resulting balloon show lasted three days, cost contributors around $5,000 in cash and another $4,000 in materials and services.

Linked with it was a participation program for Pittsburgh's schools, whose students made hundreds of what Piene calls "wind things"--inflatables, banners, kites. Then they were all flown over the East Liberty Mall. "It was so joyous," said Piene happily.

Big Tools. Piene's own inflatables are an effort to get art out of the cult of the unique, ownable object, and away from an art market whose dealings he sees as mere fetish mongering. He wants to change art into a system of total environments, which can be enjoyed but never possessed--as a sunset is unpossessed. "I want to make art as monumental as nature," he says. His sculptures are meant to exist on equal terms with Pittsburgh's buildings, bridges and night sky.

Otto Piene rejects the "microscopic" tools of the traditionalist--paint, brush, stone. His media are electricity, wind, gas, fire, smoke and movement. "There is one essential difference between Gothic cathedrals and rockets: a cathedral seems to soar, expressing the yearning of its builders to ascend to heaven; a rocket does soar. The same technical difference exists between traditional sculpture and my objects. Mine don't merely express something. They are something."

Arched Petals. Piene's Manned Helium sculpture, staged in Point State Park, was indeed something. The materials were ten 250-ft. lengths of clear polyethylene tube, 40 helium tanks, three searchlights, eight floodlights, dozens of helpers, and a 17-year-old student from the Carnegie-Mellon University, Susan Peters. The tubes were guyed to earth at each end and inflated; they rose in arches. The intrepid Miss Peters ("She doesn't weigh much--say 92 pounds") put on a parachute harness, and Piene hooked her to the center ends of his plastic chrysanthemum, and let go the ropes. Up she floated, 60 ft., bobbing in the wind; then the peripheral ends of the tubes were released from the ground. Slowly the huge fronds swung vertically, shining in the klieg lights, and the whole sculpture rose to 150 ft. Says Piene: "We pulled her down after ten minutes up there. Sue's a brave girl but there had to be safety ropes. Otherwise I suppose she'd be in the stratosphere by now."

Piene's art hooks into a worldwide concern for ecology, for redesigning man's physical consciousness. But he considers his show in Pittsburgh the merest sketch for future projects. These include a mile-long arch of hydrogen-filled balloon flown over the sea, to be exploded at dusk by an electric spark; vast towers of flame; and a scheme to incorporate the sun into art by turning it black, red or blue with optical "veils" hung between it and the earth. What will the ecologists make of that?

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