Sculpture by Order

"You specify it; we fabricate it," boasted the Industrial Welding Co. on a sign flanking Newark's Ferry Street. Industrial had in mind smokestacks, chemical tanks and it gave an idea to Sculptor Tony Smith, who passed the sign whenever he drove from his home in South Orange, N.J., to Manhattan. So, one day eight years ago, he picked up the phone and ordered a sculpture.

A sculpture? Well, nothing that Michelangelo would recognize as such. But Smith's sculptures lend themselves to both welding and telephoning. Smith's instructions were: "Build me a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel, with diagonal internal cross bracing." Industrial complied, and over the next years produced a dozen pieces for Smith, following his phone instructions or alternatively, blueprints or models.

Since neither the sculptor nor anyone else sees the whole work until Industrial fabricates it, the factory finds itself a kind of later-day artist's studio, where the artist treats a work's completion like an unveiling. Last week Tony Smith was busy chauffeuring selected friends across the Hudson and through the back streets of Newark to the cement-block building where his new creation had taken final form--a 16-ft., six-ton steel structure called The Snake Is Out.

Nicknamed "Snake," the sculpture looms massive and masculine, dwarfing everything in sight. Built in two pieces, it has a manhole on the top for workmen to descend inside for repairs and dismantling. Wandering around the piece, Tony recalled with paternal pride the day in 1962 when he completed the original 46-in. model. "As soon as I finished it, I realized the piece had a sense of movement, like a little dragon or a snake," he said. "Then I remembered John McNulty's short story Third Avenue Medicine, in which he describes how bartenders watch for a vein to protrude from a man's forehead. It's a warning. He's drunk too much, and the bartenders say 'The snake is out.' "

The plywood maquette sat on Smith's back porch for seven years until New York State commissioned the piece in steel for the new capital mall in Albany. The model went off to the fabricators, and not until one evening this summer did Smith see Snake again. On his way home for dinner, he peered in the factory's doorway and saw two huge pieces, one on the floor, the other hanging from a crane, hovering six inches over it. "They fitted together like a watch case," he remembers.

Snake's present incarnation is only temporary. Soon it will be dismantled and stored away for two years until the mall is ready. But if something should happen to the pieces, it would not be a total loss. Smith could just pick up the phone and order another "Snake." Industrial Welding could oblige.

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