Presences in the Park

In the opinion of Samuel Adams Green, 26, director of Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, the trouble with most city park officials is that "they don't know a damn thing about contemporary art. They go around buying safe, conservative Moores, Baskins and Calders. They don't realize there are plenty of lively new people working in outdoor materials and outdoor scales." In the interest of public enlightenment, Green has now set up a month-long outdoor show of 15 gigantic sculptures by ten relative unknowns in Philadelphia's public parks and plazas. Four were done by Tony Smith, 54, a New Jersey design instructor and architect.

A similar thought struck New York's art-and fun-loving Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving, who takes up his new job as head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art next April.* Last week, at Hoving's request, the threadbare lawn of Manhattan's small Bryant Park behind the Public Library blossomed forth with a temporary display of eight large-scale (10 ft. to 16 ft. high) examples of Smith's stark black architectonic art. It is not the artist's first case of double exposure. Last December, he was given simultaneous one-man exhibitions--indoors by Philadelphia's I.C.A. and outdoors by Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum. Six months ago, only two of Smith's pieces had ever been shown publicly. Today he is billed as one of the most significant "new" sculptors, a vigorous exponent of cool geometry known variously as "primary structures" or "minimal art."

Abstract Rage. Smith is good-naturedly modest about his works, which look like nothing so much as giant piles of children's blocks jumbled together. With a Fenian twinkle in his eye, he says that he doesn't even think of his works as sculpture at all. They are merely exercises in basic design, similar to those that he requires from his students at Manhattan's Hunter College. He built each piece originally in tiny paper tetrahedrons, octahedrons or dodecahedrons. After that, friends constructed the full-scale mock-ups in plywood and painted them with automobile undercoating (only three have been cast in steel). The results, Smith feels, should be called simply "presences."

Massive and abstract, the looming presences are far from neutral. Smith says: "I think of my things as being stable, down-to-earth, ordinary in a sense. I don't want them to be 'An Experience.' " But he is willing to play the game of associating them with experiences. The 6-ft. steel cube known as Die, he explains, can refer to a matrix or mold, but it is also an imperative. In fact, he built it after having been injured in an auto accident, partly to express his rage with the world.

Gates of Marriage. Beauty has no important place in Tony Smith's hierarchy of esthetic values. Amaryllis was so named because the top-heavy form made by connecting octahedrons and tetrahedrons reminded him of the bulbous coarseness of what he considers an "almost obscene flower." Willie, a spiky, tilted, angular beast with three legs and no head, was meant to be "an ugly, hostile thing slithering around on the floor"; it was titled by a fellow sculptor in honor of the groveling husband in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days. Not all of Smith's imagery is negative. One of his works is a simple 10-ft.-high, well-proportioned arch that invites the viewer to pass through. "It is like a threshold," says Smith. "My friends say it looks sort of soft and tender, but, to me, at the same time it also looks the least bit rough and harsh." Aptly enough, it is titled Marriage.

* His successor, announced by Mayor John Lindsay last week, will be Manhattan's August Heckscher, 53, all-purpose esthete and intellectual, Special Consultant on the Arts to both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and currently the director of the Twentieth Century Fund.

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