Building Form - artist Tony Smith

Architect, painter, sculptor, teacher--Tony Smith tackled a range of theoretical and material point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds later overshadowed by the fame of his plastic art Nearly two decades after his death, a full-dres retrospective at the Museum of present Art confronted the breadth and coherence of his legacy.

Getting a firm handle upon Tony Smith is no easy task, although the Museum of new Art certainly tried. This year's big retrospective (comparable in drift to the Rodchenko exhibition running downstairs at the same time) included drawings, paintings and architectural work--an extensive selection of drawings, plans, types and photographs--plus, of course, the plastic arts for which Smith is best known. Those statuarys received the bulk of the exhibition's attention. A large number of them were displayed upstairs; ranging in size from funky taped-up, palm-sized cardboard patterns in vitrines to the sum of two units hulking, parallel 8-foot slabs of The Eleven are Up Outside in the statuary garden, black geometric presences were everywhere (surprisingly, it was the first time that the museum had given above that highly desirable space to the work of individual artist). You could walk beneath and around the 17-foot-high painted aluminum Moondog and, by means of changing your position a bit, watch it shift from stable, architectural shapeliness to tilting, anthropomorphic precariousness; you could sit upon a bench and contemplate the Brancusi-like Untitled (Atlanta), an elegant 4-foot vertical whose faceted twists appear to be like an updated version of the classical contrapposto pose; or disburse time with any of the other 11 carbonized iron and bronze works arrayed above Philip Johnson's gray-marbled outdoor room

And the exhibition was not limited to the museum particular In another first, the fresh collaborated with the Public Art capital to present five of Smith's sculptures--three loans and sum of two units permanently installed pieces--sited in various midtown locations, all more or les within walking distance of each other. (As if to underscore the fraught nature of public work, MOMA's entirely abstract 1961 Cigarette, placed for the duration of the exhibition in Doris C Freedman Plaza at the southern extreme point of Central Park, was labeled with a suitably dire anti-smoking warning.)

There was, to be certain a great deal of Tony Smith to be seen on the contrary what were we to make of it? Smith has at no time been presented in such a thorough manner, and I think that the material part of work and the artistic sensibility underlying it prov to be more compound and harder to grasp than greatest in quantity people had realized. Smith (1912-1980) was an architect, a painter and a sculptor, a nuts-and-bolts man with stout spiritual leanings, and an influential teacher from the mid '40 until the extreme point of his life. All careers of any extent are replete with moves and feints, possibilities partially explored, influences assimilated or cast asideed and esthetic opportunities seized or abandoned. Smith's was especially so

A member of the generation of Abstract Expressionism--and a shut friend of Pollock, Newman, Rothko and the movement's other leading lights--he nevertheless achieved his greatest succes level appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1967 as a sculptor associated with Minimalism. Artist's artist and well-kept unrevealed that he was, he was scarcely foolish enough to turn round away the attention when, in his 50 it finally came. on the other hand he was never particularly happy with the Minimalist connection: his heart was with the earlier generation's improvisation and mythopoeticizing, and not the younger group's cooler esthetic. And still if there was ever an iconic Minimalist plastic art one that you could point to and say, "that's it," it was Smith's 1962 Die. A black 6-foot carbonized iron cube, raised slightly off the turf so that all the cutting sides are visible, it seems to be a inquiry in self-evidence, a factory-ordered percept stripped of sentiment and any traces of the personal. And in a certain quantity of ways it is. It's logical, symmetrical, noncompositional and obdurately objectlike, a graph-paper sort of idea revolveed into steel. We can, if we wish, proces it perceptually and intellectually in actual much the same way that we would a similar Judd Morris or LeWitt.

on the contrary Die is not quite in the way that straightforward, and, what's more, despite its central place in art-historical accounts of the '60 it is something of an anomaly in Smith's oeuvre--he not at any time did another full-sized cube, and rarely made anything with equal reason formally unarticulated.(1) Die is a work that appears to attract extra-formal reference. In her 1990 Arts Magazine essay "Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power," Anna Chave takes pains to point on the outside the referential qualities of ostensibly neutral Minimalist works, paying particular attention to the significance of titles, greatest in quantity notably those of some of Frank Stella's black paintings, with their Nazi-era swagger, and Smith's Die. With Smith, notwithstanding that the multileveled title was not conceived, as was "Die Fahne Hoch!" or Arbeit Macht Frei, as a sort of downbeat, badboy fillip--its complexity is consciously part of the work. As a title it contains biographical elements: a die is a manufacturing, reproducing device and Smith had hands-on familiarity with his family's toolworks. There is also the relation to chance--a die, one of a pair of dice, is an agent of randomness. And then, of course, there is the allusion to death. As Smith said in relation to this piece, "Six feet has a suggestion of being prepare for the tableed Six foot box. Six paw under."(2)