Truth Amid Steel Elephants

Nearly eleven years ago, a 27-year-old sculptor named Mark di Suvero had his first show in New York. His burly constructions of steel pipe, chains and massive timbers had an exhilarating effect on younger New York artists; hosannas rose from critics. "Here," exclaimed Sidney Geist in Arts magazine, "was a body of work so ambitious and intelligent, so raw and clean, so noble and accessible, that it must permanently alter our standards of artistic effort."

Hyperbole? Perhaps, but for some it did just that: Di Suvero became an inspirational figure to a circle of young artists who admired not only the vigor of his work, but also his tenacious will power. His background was both exotic and practical. Son of an Italian gunboat captain and steel salesman in China, he was born in Shanghai in 1933 and came to the U.S. when he was eight. Significantly for the sculpture he was later to make, he even worked as a boatbuilder on the West Coast. An elevator accident crushed his spine and nearly killed him in 1960, but though doctors insisted that he would be crippled for life, Di Suvero was back to rigging sculptures within a few years. Besides his will power, the young artists also admired his early, committed opposition to the Viet Nam War. Thus in 1966 he designed and helped construct the Artists' Tower of Protest in Los Angeles. Granted the quality of his work and the warmth of its first reception, one might have guessed that his career through the 1960s would become that of a cultural superstar.

It did not. Mark di Suvero is perhaps the least visible major talent in American sculpture: a tough, idealistic, exuberantly gifted man whose work may well contain more lessons about epic scale than any other living American's. But his achievement has until lately been strangely muffled. He has never written a public statement about art. His work is hard to find; museums until now have given it only the sketchiest support. Nowhere in New York can one find a large sculpture by Di Suvero on public view. But next spring, Holland's Stedelijk Museum and the Duisburg Museum in Germany will jointly sponsor a show of four or five of his enormous steel constructions. The Whitney Museum plans an overdue retrospective for the fall of 1972.

Herculean Appleseed. Any Di Suvero show is a nightmare of logistics, thanks to the size of his work. The I-beams of his 1967 construction now on loan to Minneapolis, Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore), have a spread of 50 ft. and a rise of 40 -- the height of a four-story building. When the Pasadena Museum temporarily allowed Di Suvero to rig a 35-ft. steel sculpture on its grounds, the only site it could spare was a corner of the parking lot; apparently the trustees feared it would chew up their lawns. The installation bills included a whopping $3,500 from the city engineer for checking the structural strength of cables and welds, in case the strung, teetering monster proved a menace to public safety. (It did not.)

Thus Di Suvero, struggling to produce sculptures that no museum or gallery can readily house, has become a kind of herculean Johnny Appleseed. scattering work wherever he can find space or means to put it: two, for instance, are now in a field outside Chicago. His sculpture presents a real cultural paradox: it is created from scrounged materials with little or no financial backing, and at the same time it is unsalably monumental.

It must be made where it will sit, the way a building is made. The idea of making blueprints and farming out the work to factories (adopted by some of Di Suvero's contemporaries, among them Donald Judd) would do violence to the spirit of his sculpture. Delegated work can be done with sculpture whose look can be predicted--symmetrical or elementary or inert forms. With Di Suvero, everything hinges on the fine intuitive balance and adjustment of the heavy girders, the turnbuckles and cables. His style is as intimate as watercolor, despite its scale. What counts is the tuning of parts. It is "relational" sculpture, and it pits itself against the tendency among American artists to do away with such European ideas as composition and balance. To watch the big V of red beams swinging on its cable from the apex of Are Years What? is to be reminded that truth lies in the nuance, even among elephants and whales. A geometrically balanced structure will come to, look utterly dull unless one is made to see that it is a special case, not normal--a bright moment snatched from a world of inarticulate things and relationships. To do that, an artist's order may well need to demonstrate chaos lurking in back.

Moral Edge. This is the special value of Di Suvero's work. It is also the justification for its immense scale. Steel is a tough substance and, below a certain range of size, a sculptor can make any configuration with it that he wants. The hard task for any constructor is to push the size of the sculpture to the point AP where engineering becomes an issue and the steel might fail--and then to find the one form that works both aesthetically and structurally. Di Suvero proceeds by trial and error, bracing and rigging the parts until they work. Few modern sculptors have submitted their creations to such rigorous tests of their reality. Either the 30-ft. braces stand up or they collapse. They inhabit a narrow and exhilarating area of risk and give the same pleasure that rises from a daring work of engineering. His devotion to "rightness" gives his work a curiously moral edge. It is existential sculpture, the way that Norman Mailer's best novels and reportage are existential writing: no fat, no decor.

Di Suvero once declared that his work must be able "to defend itself against an unarmed man." That is a peculiar-sounding remark, evoking an image of the sculpture as punching bag. But it is of a piece with the aims and the actual look of his constructions. They are to be swung on, climbed, played with. "Mark can set kids going the way nobody else I've heard of can," says his dealer, Richard Bellamy. "His loft is always full of them."

In a sense, Di Suvero's work is a testament to the often-quoted idea that play is the highest form of human activity: for players, especially kids, are no great respecters of form, and will quickly wreck anything weak or soft or redundant. The worst thing that could happen to Mark di Suvero's optimistic and rigorous sculpture might well be engulfment by museums. It is not meant to occupy a sacred exhibition space, fenced by a rail--real or psychic. It belongs in the parks and streets, in a world of wear and tear and, above all, use --the way a Mack truck belongs on the highway.

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