Caro: Heavy Metal

By ROBERT HUGHES

Now and again New York's Museum of Modern Art gathers itself for a major act of certification. It launches some heavy metal. The show of 35 sculptures by the English artist Anthony Caro that opens this week is just such an event. The ponderous slipway has been checked and greased. Brochures prepare us for a new Cunarder, the latest in a steelworking tradition that goes back to such august four-funnelers as the M.V. Picasso. The chairman, Curator William Rubin, picks up the champagne bottle and takes aim. The grizzled chief engineer, Critic Clement Greenberg, puts down the disc grinder with which he had been stripping an American dreadnought, the U.S.S. David Smith; he wipes away one gruff tear of pride on an oily rag, then jerks the levers.

Down she slides: not a Blue Ribander, evidently; smaller than we were led to expect, and lighter; but so buoyant, so fresh and trim in line, that we only realize later and with the mildest disappointment that this Pride of the Clyde is in fact a yacht.

Out of the Monolith. Success sits easily on Caro. Few living sculptors have achieved more of it. At 51, a twinkling, compact man with a boxer's fleshy nose and a pepper-and-salt beard, he is by general consent the best sculptor to have emerged from England since Henry Moore. One powerful wing of American Establishment taste--the Greenberg circle, which includes such critics as Michael Fried and curators like Boston's Kenworth Moffett and MOMA'S Rubin--is disposed to think of him as the most important sculptor alive: the sole inheritor to David Smith. This has been announced so often in the past ten years that it has become a pedagogical dogma.

Like most such dogmas, it revolves around an idea of historical fulfillment: "modernism" transcending its "superfluities." We are by now so used to sculpture that lies on the ground, crawls up the wall or dangles from the ceiling that the convention of figure-on-base seems almost an archaeological memory. Yet it was Caro, 15 years ago, who came out with a real alternative to that convention. In the '50s, as a pupil at the stuffy Royal Academy School in London and later as a studio assistant to Henry Moore, Caro had been trained in a monolithic approach to sculpture. His work reflected it: scarred, blimpish nudes writhing lumpily on their pedestals. Then, in 1959, Caro made his first trip to America. He met Kenneth Noland, talked to Greenberg and saw Smith's welded-steel sculptures. He was 35 and, as he recalls, "waiting to be blown over."

The result was a conversion whose rapidity made St. Paul's fall from horseback on the road to Damascus look positively sluggish. Suddenly the issue was how to make sculpture that carried no association whatever with the human figure (which even David Smith's erect steel totems habitually do): "I wanted to make sculpture that was real, not metaphoric. I didn't want to make models of people." The pedestal, Caro argued to himself, puts a frame round the meaning of any sculpture. "A base says, 'This is the limit of the sculpture's world'; everything in that world is different from your reality." From a base, sculpture orates; from the floor, it talks.

Caro abandoned modeling and put together steel shapes--girders, plates, tubes--on the floor in a spirit of improvisation, pushing and tilting them around until they "locked" aesthetically. The result was a uniquely conversational and approachable kind of sculpture, quite free from the massy rhetoric of bulge and handmade texture that a younger generation of English artists found oppressive in Moore's work.

There were precedents for this, like Alberto Giacometti's floor sculpture of 1932, Woman with Her Throat Cut, which anticipates Caro so thoroughly that it is difficult to believe Curator Rubin's claim, in his long and other wise formidably reasoned catalogue essay, that it "had no direct influence" on him. But in the '60s Caro's horizontality was liberating. Floating, perky, mass denying, bland of surface, sprightly in color--how refreshing it all looked after the bronze rhetoric of what Herbert Read called "the geometry of fear."

Some vestigial habits remained. The dozens of bolts that held Caro's Midday (1960) together are, for the most part, ornamental: a kind of decorative texture, like studs on a jacket. But by 1962, when he made Early One Morning, Caro was in full control of his sculptural means. Its red paint is so intense as to produce a vibration, a smarting optical dazzle. This lightness and disembodiment is reinforced by the forms; they touch and spring away from one another with a delectably airy insouciance. Caro's sculpture from now on would be a matter of touch and gesture rather than accumulation and structure. Later works like Orangerie or even some of the unpainted, varnished steel pieces he made in 1974 at Veduggio, in Italy, conspire, in their deft placement and laconic sufficiency, toward an elegance unmatched in contemporary sculpture.

Sublime Essence. Well and good; but the effort to go further, to establish Caro as the one and only serious heavy weight, can lead Caro's exegetes into some astounding cadenzas of gibberish. Thus to Michael Fried a simple cantilever structure like Caro's Prairie (1967) becomes nothing less than a metaphor of sublime essence rising above the gross sublunary earth: "Prairie defines the ground, not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not in itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant."

Of course, it would only do this to people who find the solidity of the earth (or the floor of MOMA) rather odd and need to be reminded of it by sculptures. The denial of the material in Caro's work, quite as much as its formal precision, appeals to the transcendentalist mind: to a criticism based on the flatness of painting and the open pictoriality of sculpture, on work that "overcomes" its own material essence.

"It only takes one great artist to keep a tradition alive." So runs the first sentence of William Rubin's monograph, and one is left in no doubt which prince is coming. But now that the English dauphin has been so well anointed with the oil of consecration, one may step back and reflect that after all, his work does not have the immense flawed vitality of David Smith's; that it is an intelligent, distinguished but sometimes only dec orative addition to the short history of constructed sculpture.

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