The Girder Look

A major preoccupation of modern sculptors has been, in effect, beating Rodin shapeless. The nude ballooned and blimped at the hands of Gaston Lachaise; man shrank under the chisel of Giacometti as if roasted overnight; Henry Moore punched holes through their stomachs. The products were monumental, surrealistic, but withal still related to the human figure. Somebody was bound to get tired of doing it.

Such a fellow is Britain's Anthony Caro, 42, whose works suggest an explosion in a boiler factory. His Month of May, a star attraction at London's current sculpture triennial in Battersea Park, is a magenta, orange and green collection of huge aluminum jackstraws seemingly flung into the air over two chunks of I beam. There is no pedestal, no impressive volume filled with bronze--and no relation to human scale. "I wanted to make sculpture that is as meaningful in a room as a person," says Caro. So he shunned anatomically suggestive totems as "people substitutes" and made sculpture that substitutes things for people.

This Inhuman Clay. Caro is amply qualified to pioneer the engineer's esthetic in art. Son of a stockbroker, he took an engineering degree at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1944, then studied art for six years, mostly at the Royal Academy Schools, before serving a two-year apprenticeship under Henry Moore. Not until 1957 did he have a one-man show in London of savage figurative bronzes, which drove a critic to gasp, "One almost wishes them back into clay." Caro gave up modeling in clay as "lifeless." A trip to the U.S. opened his eyebeams to the possibilities of metal assemblage. "There's a fine art quality about European art even when it's made from junk," he says. "America made me see that there are no barriers and no regulations."

Back in England, he taught himself how to weld. His first abstract steel sculpture in 1960 took three months to make. It is a brown-painted disk, triangle and rectangle called 24 Hours. That left him nowhere to go but up. His works became increasingly asymmetrical, forcing viewers to move around them and look through their tilting tangles of plates and pipes.

That Tinker's Toy. Caro creates by adding pieces to a growing work. He may start by suspending a steel circle from the roof, or by resting a bar against a packing crate. Then, prowling through the work, he alters the angles like a tinker with a giant toy. He likes to work in a confined space to prevent stepping back, taking an overall look and possibly making cliche changes for symmetry's sake. Once the girders are joined together, Caro slaps on flat, emphatic coats of bright -- paint whose loud colors are supposed to have a kind of subliminal impact, says he, "like a title." The results are scaleless, impersonal presences engineered to relate to nothing but sculpture. "I saw that you didn't need to make a sculpture of somebody crying," says Caro, "in order to make a sculpture cry."

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