DI SUVERO--WHAT’S RIGHT AT WRONG SITE

This is another review from Wilson’s recent tour of East Coast exhibitions.

Mark di Suvero, by any measure, counts among the tiny elite of America’s leading contemporary sculptors. His most characteristic works are enormous structures fashioned of industrial steel I-beams not uncommonly as tall as two- or three-story buildings. Some 20 of these behemoths (along with as many smaller works) are on view through Oct. 31 in a 25-year retrospective at Storm King Art Center in the country near Newburgh, N.Y. They provide the best opportunity to date to ponder why his highly valued work seems bolted in balance by the tensions of paradox.

Di Suvero’s materials evoke a kind of hard-hat aesthetic that popularly sits atop a red-neck mentality that ought to evoke Archie Bunker macho , National Rifle Assn. authoritarianism and Strom Thurmond Americanism.

Instead, Di Suvero’s work stands as the ‘60s ideal of high art aligned to counterculture liberalism. In 1966, he designed and helped build a big “Peace Tower” in Los Angeles on Sunset Boulevard protesting the Vietnam War. In 1971, he went into self-imposed exile in Europe over our continuing involvement in that obscene conflict. Given all that, you would expect work bristling with slogans, symbols and aggressive hostility. Instead, these great structures are purely abstract and more inclined to evoke ceremonial gates for Shinto shrines, jazz rhythms and lyrical fun than strident social consciousness.

Another curious aspect of Di Suvero’s career is the way he has virtually escaped easy categorization. He has, for example, never been seriously lodged in our awareness as a “California artist” despite the fact that he grew up in San Francisco (he was born in Shanghai in 1933) graduated from UC Berkeley and maintains a studio in Petaluma. Heaven knows, that is sufficient justification for California art boosters to add him to their roster. (We are very clever about maintaining the names of artists who haven’t lived here for years: Ed Keinholz, Larry Bell, Kenneth Price. On and on.)

The Aesthetic Chamber of Commerce aspect of Di Suvero’s California Connection is less important finally than the fact that--when you come to think of it--there is quite a big dose of Bay Area sensibility in the guy’s art, especially the Existential romanticism of the Beat Generation with its attraction to assemblage, love of scruffy heroic individuality and all kinds of wandering. Car trips. Head trips. Keep on truckin’ trips.

Di Suvero doesn’t let the Beats down on any count. In the early ‘60s, he had an accident that broke his back and smashed a leg. Doctors said he’d never walk again, much less make art that has to be put together with cranes and welding torches. After two years of heroic effort, Di Suvero was doing it all.

The artist also travels a good bit but less in body than in mind. He’s given his art a distinctive look, but it’s really romantic-eclectic. Some early drawings are strikingly like the paintings of Franz Kline, and later sculpture looks like a physical translation of Kline’s dynamic angles. There are also a few disturbingly flaky works like “Hand Pierced” of ’59. These are so truly violent and distraught that one doesn’t even have time to dwell on how wimpy current Neo-Expressionism appears by comparison. You are just glad Di Suvero got it under control.

Fervid emotion continues to animate his work even when it moves into the familiar form that causes it to be seen as a classical artistic culmination between the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism and the antiseptic rigors of Minimalism.

Given all that, about the only thing left to complain of is that in all these years we’ve never seen enough of Di Suvero’s work together at once to formulate a general impression of what appears piecemeal to be some of the best, most vigorous sculpture of our time.

Well, the Storm King survey should certainly fix that. The place is legendary. Some 65 miles from Manhattan, it is known among the cognoscenti as the place where sculpture is shown in the ideal setting, namely out of doors. There is no question the place is pastoral. A stone manor house atop a hill serves as a regular museum and gives the place the aura of a gracious baronial estate. Around it undulates acres of carefully landscaped green pasture ending at the edges of domesticated forest. Carefully placed round and about are monumental modern sculpture by everybody from David Smith to Alexander Lieberman. There is an Alexander Calder in the meadow and a Barbara Hepworth on the greensward. As one looks out over the serene green land dotted with Di Suvero’s great works, only one thought comes to mind:

Who the hell ever decided that outdoors was the best place for sculpture? I think it was Henry Moore. Well, his stuff looks swell next to a hedgerow because that’s the way it was designed, but what a bucolic setting does to a Di Suvero should not happen to my best friend Gorbachev.

Wait. We’ve seen Di Suveros in all kinds of landscape and they look fine. They look good in Oakland. They look good in the Wells Fargo Plaza. They even look good in Paris’ Tuileries garden. It must be this particular real estate.

Storm King is idyllic with a landscape providing no hint of the city. Maybe that’s why the Di Suveros suddenly evoke the worst possible kinds of sophomoric cliches about the brutalities of urban life imposed upon the magisterial calm of Nature. The sculpture’s great rusting hulks lumber on the scene like Godzilla Meets the Picturesque. It’s a Lake Poets surreal nightmare of virginal land about to raped by the bulldozer Minotaur. The effect is particularly marked in a piece like “Sunflowers for Vincent,” an eccentric yellow monster sporting a huge ship’s screw that seems to lumber down a dirt path like a Rube Goldberg contraption gone berserk. Then you notice that it and the immense, blasted black boiler of “Lady Day” are the only works in sight that don’t look more-or-less alike.

Piece after piece stands in the landscape resembling a small herd of gracefully awkward, grazing brontosauruses. You begin to develop a queasy suspicion that the great artist has been doing a fan dance all this while and that he has great power but little range. Geez, Mark, say it ain’t so.

Well, it ain’t so. It ain’t necessarily so. What confronts us at Storm King is a coincidental variant on a practice that crops up with increasing frequency in the Post-Modern era, namely art presented in surroundings that tend to alter its character. Usually we encounter the phenomenon in museum presentations of so-called “treasures” exhibitions where skillful designers create ambient installations intended to “dramatize” their contents. This is art as a form of popular theater.

Storm King was not, of course, designed specifically for the Di Suvero survey, but it is carefully landscaped and maintained to a fare-thee-well. (The only thing liable to disturb one’s ruminations other than clouds of gnats are gardeners buzzing by on motorized mowers.) In short, Storm King has its own sensibility. It derives from the historical tradition of English landscaping where everything was cunningly planned to appear natural, including brand-new ancient ruins to aid in sublime meditation.

Nothing wrong with that if you like gentrified country estates, but the chemistry between it and Di Suvero’s Stakhanovite sculpture makes each into a caricature of itself.

One of the most endearing things about Di Suvero’s work is the way he likes to include moving parts suspended on big chains. Kids love to play on them. At Storm King, a couple of attractive young lovers were seen using the huge “Gate” as a swing. Suddenly Di Suvero was Fragonard and his pile-driver sculpture was part of an erotic rococo fete galante .

Well, anybody can make a mistake, and certainly the mismatching of Di Suvero and Storm King was unpredictable and nobody’s fault. All the same, one can wish it had not been a mistake that made one of our best artists appear as a confectioner of trivial design solutions wrapped in a mantle of overblown macho .

The superstitious part of the mind is very leery of accidents that read like oracles. This one says, “The yuppification of art is proceeding on schedule. We have just made one of its most serious heroes appear effete and outdated.”