Sea with Monuments

By ROBERT HUGHES

For the past decade, a good deal of American sculpture has been playing an asif game: how to escape the museum while staying locked into the museum's certification. The strategy has been to make things larger and larger, to the point where the great outdoors must itself become a museum. This has created a stock of homeless public sculpture--"monumental" but commemorating nothing except itself, kept in the warehouse by a scarcity of sites and the forbidding cost of transport and installation. What park could be given to these orphans? How could their possible relationship to landscape be tested? And what would be seen to happen?

One answer opened last week in the conservative and flintily traditional community of Newport, R.I. It is an exhibition named "Monumenta," organized by Art Historian Sam Hunter and a staff of his graduate students from Princeton and backed by an enthusiastic Newport resident named William Crimmins. Fifty-four large works by 40 artists have been installed on the island's shores, in its shopping center and around the gardens of its mansions: an encyclopedia of large-scale sculpture from the U.S. and Europe. "Monumenta" runs through Oct. 13, providing an unexpected cultural foil to the America's Cup races.

Gnomes in the Garden. The experiment works, but not always as it was meant to. "The picturesque charms of Newport," writes Princeton's Hunter, "with its inexhaustible variety of visual backgrounds, should help mitigate the brute power of contemporary sculpture colossi." Mitigate is scarcely the word. The landscape sometimes annihilates the sculpture. That vast, wrinkled plane of sea fringed by blue pudding-stone bluffs is so much stronger than some of the works perched above it that objects like George Sugarman's 18-ft. Kite Castle, 1974, Alexander Calder's stabile or Robert Murray's pleated steel Windhover, 1969, become mere origami. They are gallery art, or at most museum-plaza art, scaled up and deprived of context.

This is actually a good lesson. It makes one remember how completely the city and the museum (closed, protective spaces, controlled environment) have permeated formal American sculpture and directed its "look." The art demands an artificial space, cold or meditative, in which nothing competes with the object. An extreme example is the work of Barnett Newman, the late dean of minimal art. Several of his austere steel pillars are dotted on the rolling, shaven greensward of one of Newport's more lavish mansions, The Elms. Isolated in their white museum cubicle and garnished with the rhetoric of sublimity, all Newman's sculptures look imposing. Here they might as well be garden gnomes. Not so with the work of David Smith, represented by ten sculptures across the lawn. But then Smith's work was always conceived in terms of landscape or, more exactly, the heroic domination of landscape by icon; it is essentially outdoor and declamatory sculpture. Thus the silver tracery left by Smith's disc grinder on the stainless steel only comes alive in sunlight; spotlights kill it. Smith's constructions of forged and welded iron, like Wagon II, 1964, also force themselves on the out-of-doors by their density as metaphor.

That density is the oxygen of outdoor sculpture. It is why Claes Oldenburg's 18-ft.-high red steel Geometric Mouse, Scale X looks convincing on its beach, and why Alexander Liberman's Argo is the most successful combination of work and site in the entire show. The white sails, cylinders and arcs simultaneously evoke an archaic temple precinct and a ship, while running a counterpoint to the real spinnakers billowing on the sea below; they turn a flat site, for a moment, into a reminiscence of the Aegean. It becomes increasingly clear that Liberman, along with Mark di Suvero and Clement Meadmore, is one of the three U.S. sculptors best fitted to handle large outdoor projects.

Maze of Grass. Apart, that is, from earthwork artists. Unfortunately, the Newport show is short on earthworks --simply because land there costs too much. There is one piece by Richard Fleischner, in the grounds of Chateau-sur-Mer, that shows exactly the kind of unpretentious but intelligent relation that an earthwork can have to its environment: an undulating meander maze, a barely noticeable ripple on the lawn, covered with sod grass. It is low-key and perfectly appropriate in its site, harking back to a time when stately homes had garden labyrinths as a matter of course. In sum, the "Monumenta" project discloses a great deal about the survival of public sculpture in the 1970s in something other than its usual urban form--a grandiose ashtray plunked down to decorate a skyscraper's barren forecourt. The Newport exhibition is worth the trip, even though few things in it are quite as aesthetically stirring as a glimpse of Intrepid beating to windward.

Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.