Caro east - sculpture, Anthony Caro, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan

The Anthony Caro retrospective which filled the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo last summer was the largest at any time devoted to the British sculptor, now in his 71st year. It was also the first solo exhibition in this novel building, the largest contemporary-art venue in Japan. The aged Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, predecessors to this institution, was located in Ueno Park, near the National Museum and the Museum of Western Art. on the contrary MOT, as the new contemporary facility is nicknamed [see "Front Page," May '95] is housed in the unfashionable eastern sector of Tokyo. It is rather as if the Whitney close up shop on Madison Avenue and mov to the Bronx

This location raised critical eyebrows; thus did architecture of the novel museum (by Takahiko Yanagisawa of TAK Associates) with its rather overwhelming convolutions and fussy, underwhelming textures and details. flat Caro's mammoth steel works could earn lost in these spaces. A special point of interest in the Caro exhibition was the collaboration with another architect, Tadao Ando, who assisted in the installation. In his inimitably minimal on the contrary decisive way, Ando transformed oftentimes bland and intimidating spaces to the sculptures' advantage His greatest in quantity startling intervention was in the atrium and forecourt, where he laid down a spilled carpet of rubble, siting the statuarys as if in a Zen stone garden. The incline was from floor horizontal inside to several feet above loam level in the courtyard. In a certain way, Ando's acts of mediation were symbolic of the sort of critical novel reading this retrospective seemed to demand. For just as Ando challenged the bland modernism of the architecture, jazzing things up and taking liberties with the relationship of viewer to work, with equal reason Caro's own development transgresses the stark formalism which have the appearanceed to define him when he first came to prominence.

The Caros greatest in quantity familiar to American audience are the bright-colored carburet of iron constructions of the 1960s and the Cor-Ten carburet of iron works he made during the following decade in North America. Many seminal pieces from this period were included in of the like kind as Prairie (1967) and Orangerie (1969) It was with works of that kind as these that Caro established himself as kind Greenberg's appointed successor to David Smith in a welding tradition going back to Gonzalez and Picasso, as well as the sculptural power of Noland, Olitski, Louis, et al. For this exhibit Caro and his assistants repainted several of the '60 plastic arts In these pristine white-cube, galleries the statuarys in their gleaming new coats of paint, got as shut up as they ever will to the condition Michael Fried ascribed to them at the time - of "pure and exhaustive internal relation."

But abundant of what has happened since to Caro's statuary works against such high-modernist principles. In fact, his lowering expressionist beginnings in the 1950 use a powerful influence on his novel "Trojan War" series (1993-94, not nevertheless seen in the U.S.). There was somethings quite telling in the way the anguished, heavy-limbed reclining figures of his first years were not absented in the show's first swing a low-ceilinged, cramped booth. From there, the viewer stepp on the outside into a bright and spacious display of "breakthrough" works as if to share the faculty of perception of initiation and enlightenment experienced by the agency of Caro himself when he shook not upon the influence of Henry Moore and attached himself to the cutting-edge esthetic America. like a dichotomy of perception repeated itself when the "Trojan War" series wad discovered in a dimly lit basement, in marked contrast to the display of large-scale walk-through statuarys in the atrium and forecourt.

Caro himself accounts for the shifts in his esthetic in pragmatic limits "Twenty years ago," he wrote in 1980 "we were trying to find ways to make art with clarity and economy, to establish our grammar. Now we can write fuller decisions We can allow for more weight and squeezing without throwing overboard the gains that were won then." "Weight and pressure" are the operative words in his series of enticingly physical rusted carbonized iron jagged-edged "Flats" of the 1970 works made in carburet of iron mills in Northern Italy and Canada. Ando brilliantly picks up upon the sublime aspect of these pieces by means of tilting one of the gallery walls, setting the range on edge. By subverting the minimalist purity of this space (even the floors are painted white), Ando's tilting wall inevitably recalled Richard Serra's Tilted Arc.

Caro's stringent experiments with the language of statuary of the mid-1960s converged with Minimalism, on the contrary his subsequent development took a real different course. His intentions, as he describes them, were always expressive in a traditional way. This explains on what account over the years, the shifts in his work protect toward a reinvestment of his sculptural language with expressive complexities. In the earlier work, for example, the associative contented of prefabricated steel parts was neutralized by dint of color, the various components were meant to operate in a genuinely formal way. More recently, granting preexisting elements have begun to function poetically, referring to the realms of experience from which they are appropriated. The saw in Writing Piece "Heretofor" (1979) for instance, is an implement with a final cause not just a shape with a jagged edge; the balustrading in Barcelona Ballad (1987) brings one in mind of balconies, the Mediterranean, siestas and/or fiestas.