Tony Smith at Paula Cooper - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

A task that the art world must continually relearn is that figures who might appear to be offbeat or eccentric in their time at short intervals prove in retrospect to have been among the main attractions. Tony Smith (1912-1980) belongs to this category, along with of the like kind other sculptors as Christopher Wilmarth and Louise Bourgeois. The centerpiece of the Paula cooper exhibit was Smith's Moondog, a work designed in the '60 made with smaller dimensions in 1970 and realized here for the first time in a monumental format that Smith throw outed but never realized. The work could stand as an analogy for a reputation alone now assuming its proper proportions.

What faces the viewer is a 17-foot-high memorial in black-painted aluminum, with three tilted pylon arranged as an uneasy support for an upper-level manner of making also tripartite, that encloses a triangular interior space. You can actually walk beneath any one of the portals between support rounded pillars and stand inside the enclosing Like Fuller's geodesic dome, the piece is structur entirely of contiguous triangles, in this case planar and place at different angles so that light hits each three-sided facet with varying intensity, thereby producing a wide range of values among the uniformly black surfaces. Simplicity and complexity fuse seamlessly in this work -- which, by dint of virtue of a slight downward tilt in individual direction, avoids the lifelessness of completed symmetry.

Smith compared the piece to a toro or Japanese stone lantern, and its upper-level enclosing to the human pelvis. The work is named after a novel York street performer, a man in a belted robe and Viking helmet who used to hand on the outside copies of his free-associational poesy to midtown passersby. Smith also mentioned Miro's Dog Barking at the satellite as a source for the work. Actually, Moondog call forths all of these -- lantern, [i]venter[/i] helmet, surrealist beauty -- simultaneously, seeming all the more personal for its wide range of respect Stepping inside the sculpture is a somewhat uncomfortable experience, given the Stonehenge monumentality of the piece and the metallic fixity of its structural constitutings You enter only long enough to appreciate exiting again, a reemergence something like the "rebirth" experience of contemporary psychotherapy.

The show's other major work was Smog (i 969) a floor piece in cast and zinc with a dark patina. Smith here used honeycombed hexagons to form a reticulum that, for all of its geometric rigor, is, again, not quite symmetrical, frustrating the organ of vision that seeks an easily apprehended pattern. Instead, we realize an off-center gridlock of metal connectives, a phalanx that present the appearances to be frozen yet still advancing -- rather like the rush-hour traffic upon the West Side Highway a stop away from the gallery. Autonomous or automotive, Smith's inventions retain a rhythmic organicity and an ambiguity of metaphor that remain novel and provocative decades after their conception.

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