Energy as Delight

By ROBERT HUGHES

Without doubt, the show of Mark di Suvero's sculpture in (and out of) Manhattan's Whitney Museum is one of the biggest enterprises ever to involve a living artist. The works -65 in all, ranging from tabletops to steel monsters five stories high -are distributed in parks and public places all over New York City's five boroughs. For weeks, cranes were busy from Yankee Stadium to Central Park's Conservatory Garden, hoisting the ponderous components into place. The catalogue lists more than 90 administrators, engineers, city officials, industrialists and artists who pooled their services to create this major aesthetic event. Di Suvero, 43, has been a muffled presence in American sculpture for 10 years; with this exhibition, he emerges as an artist of exuberant vitality and un-blunted idealism.

Di Suvero came to New York from California in 1957 and settled in a rambling market building in Lower Manhattan. From its steep roof, a panoply of bridges, rigging and wharves unfolds. This is his sculptural landscape -as the marble quarries of Serravezza are Henry Moore's. The Manhattan docks have furnished both the material and the imagery for his work: the gray, salt-pickled balks of timber; their ponderous iron bolts, cleats and straps; the explicit logic of big practical structure. Pieces like Hankchampion (1960) are inseparable from that context. Its salvaged wooden beams, bolted together and strung with chain, are a homage to the plain speech of early industrial architecture. There is also a strong connection to abstract-expressionist painting. As James Monte points out in his catalogue essay, these weathered timbers were "a near-perfect analogue of the wide brush stroke in the painting of Kline and de Kooning."

Today Hankchampion looks less aggressive than it did 15 years ago. It still transmits an enormous sense of energy; what counts is the vigor of the form, the expansive thrust of its members driving into space. But this syntax of angles, which makes his best sculptures change so compellingly and unpredictably when one walks around them, had to wait. It would be five years before Di Suvero could work regularly on this scale again. In March 1960 he was nearly killed in an elevator accident. His back and left leg were broken, and the doctors said that he would never walk, let alone work, again. Di Suvero spent a year in a hospital, another in a wheelchair and three more on crutches; by an effort of will he recovered.

This long struggle meant he could make only small sculpture, which he did by welding steel plates on an asbestos apron spread on his lap. In 1963-64 he was able to continue a series of bronze hands begun in 1958 -fists, palms skewered by rods, fingers clamped to a balk of timber. These Rodin-like images of survival and defiance are full of expressionist anguish. As autobiography they are corny but moving. On the other hand, the earlier small steel pieces are generally disappointing. They seem clogged by graphic cliches and distended by a frustrated longing for bigness.

Rock and Grasp. It is hard to think of any other sculptor whose large and small works are so different in quality. Probably this is because Di Suvero's use of steel depends for its noble effect on its integrity as engineering and rigging. In the huge constructions now dotted from Flushing Meadow to the Battery and The Bronx, the fact of such a tonnage of steel thrust 40 ft. into the air in perfect equilibrium is impressive. No small sculpture could possibly move a viewer in the same way. Perhaps no monumental sculpture can be wholly spontaneous, but Di Suvero's comes closer to it than any other living artist's. It is not "pure" structure. The depth of a given I beam has an expressive meaning, a visual weight. The connections -the bolts, gussets and the like -have a symbolic as well as a practical side, for an imagery of grasping and holding together has been built into Di Suvero's work .

Size also gives clarity. In Ik Ook (I Too) (1972), made in Europe during Di Suvero's years of self-imposed exile in protest against the Viet Nam War, the girders float from their cradle of wire rope with the delicacy of drawn lines. Moreover, by designing some of the sculptures as two-part jobs -fixed bases carrying structures that seem equally massive but are free to rotate, rock or swing -Di Su vero avoids the oppressiveness of a monument. In all its spareness and rigor, a work like Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore) (1967) is sprightly too, with its big V of red girders dangling from the apex, turned by any wind. Mass is volatilized as energy.

There are plenty of 20th century sculptors whose big works move -Calder, for instance, or George Rickey. They too make public sculpture. But one senses, on touring this immense show, that Di Suvero is first and foremost a public artist, that his work is meant to get outside the Limits implied by museums. You can do anything with a Di Suvero, especially if you are a kid: ride it, climb it, gong it with a mallet provided by the artist, spray graffiti on it. "My only nightmare," Di Suvero confesses, "is that there'll be an accident. The steel won't fail, but kids can fall off it from 40 ft. up."

Di Suvero's immense ambition as an enhancer of life has prompted comparisons with Walt Whitman. They are jus tified. The sculptor seems set to carry off a feat unachieved by most of his peers: to produce high art which even so can be popular. One thing Di Suvero has al ready achieved. When William Blake wrote that "energy is eternal delight," he offered a credo that needs to be constantly reaffirmed, or proved, by art. Di Suvero is one of the sculptors who provides that affirmation.

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