Solid Man

By * Robert Hughes

From the beginning of art history, the word sculpture has meant monoliths --continuous closed forms hewn from one block of marble or cast in one piece of bronze. Then the tin and cardboard constructions that Picasso made in 1912-14 provoked what has become a new orthodoxy: sculpture should be made of open and discontinuous forms, declaring themselves to be not one mass but a sum of parts.

The history of advanced sculpture, from Cubism to the welded-steel structures of David Smith and Anthony Caro, became, in effect, the history of construction. Of late, this has stiffened into dogma; almost any work can be made to seem regressive simply because it is a monolith (hence the decline of interest in Henry Moore). Still, the greatest single piece of recent American sculpture, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, is as monolithic as sculpture can get; and there are other signs of the rehabilitation of solid form. Among the most promising is the work of Clement Meadmore, most recently on view at Manhattan's Hutchinson Gallery.

Meadmore, 42, was born in Australia, but plagued by isolation, moved to New York in 1963. "You can't be a good Australian artist," he remarked. "That is like being a good one-legged runner. You can only judge what's best by the best in the world." The main characteristic of his work is an almost fanatical regard for the wholeness and self-definition of the basic form he uses. It is a closed tube, square in section and curving massively in space. It produces one continuous flow, a movement that starts and ends. It is not composed of parts; nothing interrupts it.

The texture is uniform, smooth matte black. Meadmore's sculptures do not respond to light, but absorb it with a dense matter-of-factness, declaring their absolute distance from the world of nature. Because Meadmore avoids focusing attention on the specific substance of his monoliths (the last question the viewer asks, upon looking at them, is what they are made of), he has managed to free them from the feeling that normally accompanies a sense of great mass --heaviness.

A work like Round and About is as close to being a purely optical phenomenon as monolithic sculpture could be expected to get. But its slow, massive ceilings and straightenings are a product of exactly that quality that constructed sculpture reacted against: a steady continuity of line, edge and surface. The eye travels along these convolutions as on a roller coaster, accepting the variations of pace, slow in the curves, fast on the straights.

Meadmore's work is supremely adapted to being walked around; in this sense it is intrinsically monumental. "I'm not interested." he says, "in metaphors of infinity or of anything else. I have to start with a real object, a thing--and then try to let it transcend its physicality. I've never been able to see why a spiritual statement should be fuzzy."

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