White Wings in the Sunlight

Rarely has the Los Angeles County Museum been so thoroughly occupied as it was last week. Two floors of its Special Exhibitions Gallery, plus three outdoor plazas, were chock full of sculpture. In all, 166 pieces by 80 artists have been assembled by Modern Art Curator Maurice Tuchman for a mammoth exhibition: "American Sculpture of the Sixties." Whatever space was left over was taken up by Angelenos. On the first three days, more than 10,000 adults (not counting their children) milled up the steps from Wilshire Boulevard, past the bouncing Calder Hello Girls and the spikelike Rickey Two Red Lines, both set in the museum's pool, and on into the bright assemblage of glinting, sometimes kinetic and nearly always gigantic sculpture.

Much of the show's popularity was undoubtedly traceable to its carnival aspects. Children, especially, delighted in watching Len Lye's kinetic Flip and 2 Twisters, stood entranced as three giant loops of steel jumped and jiggled for 15 minutes at a time. Adults, too, joined in the good-humored spoofs of Claes Oldenburg's gigantic, canvas-covered Ice Cream Cone and Falling Shoestring Potatoes, and his plaster Pecan Pie. They poked their fingers into the spongelike walls of Harold Paris' Pantomina llluma, a "feelies" room containing $10,000 worth of molded, twisted and flat rubber and polyurethane, tensor lights and stainless steel. Grandmothers cheerfully took off their shoes to clamber around in Lucas Samaras' glittering, mirror-encrusted Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit warren, Corridor, 1967. Hippies gazed dreamily through the barred door of Edward Kienholz's The State Hospital into a Lysol-scented interior where lay the pathetic form of a lunatic old man.

Chunky Highlights. In all this Disneyland atmosphere, the handsomest work was undoubtedly the most stationary: the many varieties of outsized, technologically sophisticated minimal sculpture, much of it stationed outdoors (see color pages). David Von Schlegell's 42-ft.-long jet delta wings gleamed in the sunlight like anchors for interplanetary fleets. Robert Grosvenor's 24-ft.-long yellow Still No Title lanced downward from a portico of the museum building like a bolt of sunlight, ending a breath-taking eight inches from the pavement. John McCracken's brilliant blue column reflected shades upon shades of the California ethos; Lyman Kipp's Muscoot piled reds, greens, blues and yellows jauntily together like an enterprising architect's leftover bundle of construction beams.

Minimal sculpture, when seen indoors, commonly overwhelms the viewer. Outdoors, it takes on what Curator Tuchman, 30, calls "a heroic quality." Besides, it gets the benefits of the California sunshine, which Tuchman, who is a recent migrant from New York, describes rhapsodically as "more diffuse, more intense, with a pervasive glare, a kind of luminescence." Sol Lewitt's white jungle gym, for instance, gains a thousand chunky highlights from the sun. The California show also clearly demonstrates that the new cool geometry, which is often combined with bright color or gleaming industrial surfaces, is a truly nationwide movement. And the West Coast is at least as skillful as the East Coast. The razzmatazz Marriage of New York and Athens, created by Los Angeles Artist Tony Berlant, 26, outshines many competing works by New York sculptors in the principal downstairs gallery hall.

Built from Blueprints. Curator Tuchman, who took two years to assemble his show and visited 300 studios across the country, believes that the key trend emerging from the diversity of his exhibit is the artist's increasing rapport with and involvement in advanced technology. Larry Bell's clear, untitled glass boxes, for example, gleam like mother-of-pearl, thanks to optical coating methods developed by industry technicians. Many other works were assembled by technicians from artists' instructions or, like the Samaras Corridor, built by museum craftsmen working from the artists' blueprints.

To Tuchman, this does not invalidate the structures as works of art. Says he: "Every culture must make its art out of what it's really about, and ours is about advanced technology." All the same, he continues, the marriage between art and technology is by no means complete. Since artists are mostly self-taught technicians, Tuchman has been discussing with several North American groups and corporations the establishment of artistic-industrial workshops. In time, Tuchman believes, the work on display at Los Angeles will appear "crude, halting and incomplete," compared with tomorrow's wonders.

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