ART REVIEW : MOCA’s ‘New Sculpture’ a Fine Match of Work, Space

“The New Sculpture, 1965-1975: Between Geometry and Gesture” is the exhibition the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Little Tokyo warehouse space was born to house.

The show beautifully chronicles a crucial development in recent art; but, thanks to its setting in a rehabilitated warehouse, it also reveals a decisive aspect of the complex situation within which that new art was first made and exhibited. The result is a smashing display in which the sculptures and the gallery spaces eloquently converse with one another.

That conversation almost didn’t happen. “The New Sculpture, 1965-1975” was organized last spring for New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art by curators Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall. It evolved from an exhibition they had assembled for a museum in Madrid, and the Whitney was to be its only American venue.

As the show (and its indispensable catalogue) turned out to be among the most admired of the 1990 season, MOCA curators Paul Schimmel and Elizabeth Smith began the daunting task of reassembling most of it for Los Angeles. We can be grateful they did. For at the Temporary Contemporary, this exemplary presentation may tell us something that the show at the Whitney could not.

I didn’t see “The New Sculpture, 1965-1975” in New York, but the consensus is that something not-quite-right could be detected in the pristine, white-walled galleries of the modernist Whitney. More than one reviewer noted that such sculptures as Alan Saret’s manufactured tumbleweeds of wire mesh, Richard Tuttle’s nearly invisible wall-drawings in wire and pencil, Keith Sonnier’s glass-and-neon ensembles, Barry Le Va’s scattered felt and broken glass and Lynda Benglis’ poured latex appeared vaguely uncomfortable, almost out of place.

Many of these sculptures had of course been included in a landmark exhibition (“Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials”) at the Whitney in 1969. But an of-the-moment reckoning is different from a retrospective view.

This sculpture’s form could be described as the residue of an intuitive, loosely orchestrated dance between a predetermined artistic activity and the vagaries of random chance. In 1969, this emphasis on artistic process was fresh and buoyantly self-evident. Twenty years later, it’s as conventional as one-point perspective during the High Renaissance. At the Whitney last spring, this kind of sculpture seemed an historical husk--the “tailings” left behind by a decade of volatile cultural shift, now awkwardly sanctified inside the august walls of the museum.

Take Richard Serra’s marvelous “Splash Piece: Casting,” which causes the spectator to recreate in the mind’s eye the artist’s lively process of splashing molten lead into the juncture between wall and floor, which becomes the mold for the finished piece. MOCA’s rehabilitated industrial building manages to restore to prominence a hidden, if crucial, context: This is sculpture that is very much of, and about, the predicament of experience at the end of the industrial era. Between 1965 and 1975, raw, obsolete industrial space was where a lot of this sculpture was being made--and where many of the artists lived.

The “New Sculpture” circa 1965-1975 was named many things at the beginning (including Anti-Formalist and Process art), but Postminimalism is the term that took.

It invokes both a connection to, and an elaboration of, the profound implications of Minimalist sculpture, which were as decisive for art at the end of the century as Cubism’s had been at the beginning.

One reason is that industrial fabrication became a standard Minimalist method. The mark of the artist’s hand was devalued. Art as the autographic utterance of the individual artist gave way to art as a locus around which artist, environment and spectator converged in social intercourse. Privileged monologue, you could say, began to yield to social dialogue. During a fateful period of upheaval in American life, art gained a democratically political dimension.

Also notable is Minimalism’s formal revolution. Like the skin that is a membrane between a person and the environment, sculpture heretofore could have been described as the precise articulation between the expressive exterior of a form and its invisible interior. Suddenly, Minimalism erased the boundary. In Donald Judd’s repetition of identical, open boxes or Carl Andre’s floor-bound stacks of ordinary bricks, the sculpture’s inside and its outside were continuous and indistinguishable. Sculpture was no longer “skin,” but Mobius strip.

Postminimal sculpture pushed this formal erasure into the realm of social and psychological content, embedding it within the materiality of three-dimensional art. Hair’s-breadth fragility coexists with brute power in Serra’s 1969 “One Ton Prop (House of Cards)”: four massive plates of lead stand erect solely through a careful, if disaster-laden, balancing act that also harrowingly decribes modern existence. When Bruce Nauman made “Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists” (1966), he ambiguously wedded a sincere reverence for artistic import to a mocking disregard for cultural genuflection: Esteemed, pointedly anonymous artists were brought to their knees. The late Eva Hesse (1936-1970) transformed the Utopian perfection of Minimalism’s industrial regularity into dystopian decay, with “identical” fiberglass tubes that drooped and sagged in response to the pull of gravity, and whose translucent material has the look of ancient flesh.

Hesse, Nauman and Serra emerge from this show as its crucial artists. Tuttle and Le Va are enormously gifted eccentrics, and the late Robert Smithson (1938-1973) is Postminimalism’s most brilliantly cogent theorist. Finally, the tiny clay, wood, iron and bronze forms of Joel Shapiro brilliantly announce a transition in which the prerogatives of abstraction begin to adhere to figurative sculpture.

While its psycho-physical dialogues can certainly be forceful, Postminimalism is far more cognizant of the messy vitality and contradictions of ordinary life than is Minimalist art, which tends to retain an edge of idealist absolutism. Age might explain why.

In 1965, the average age of these 10 artists was about 26. A general youthful willingness to break rules is evident. Yet, the generational aspect is significant in more specific ways. With the decline of hard industry in the United States and the concomitant rise of high technology, industrially resonant materials were destined to join the repertoire of available materials for the “useless” pursuits of art. To employ, as these artists did, lead, concrete, plastic tubing, ball bearings, fiberglass, resin, latex, neon, felt, vinyl-coated wire, radios, rock salt and auto-body filler as appropriate for sculpture must have seemed a natural.

So, in fact, must the very practice of making art have seemed a natural. It’s easy to forget that, in this country, artists born about 1940 make up the very first generation for whom being an artist did not seem a wild (or merely futile) aberration. The distinct marginality of modern American art had been a condition that preceded their birth. By the time of their adolescence, the battle for its serious acknowledgment, at home and abroad, had been won. In a very real sense, these were artists in the right place at the right time. It’s no slight to say the best of them took advantage of their unprecedented situation, and seized the moment. “The New Sculpture, 1965--1975” is magnificent testament.

* MOCA at the Temporary Contemporary: 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 621-2766, to July 7. Closed Mondays.