The World Fusion of Howard Ben Tre

The current main exhibition at the Palm Springs Desert Museum, “Howard Ben Tre: Interior/Exterior,” introduces the West Coast museum audience to a rising 50-year-old New York glass and metal sculptor of expansive ambition.

Ben Tre’s mostly monumental oeuvre sprouted from a socially conscious working-class Jewish background that eventually led from youthful anti-Vietnam War, pro-Castro activism to an art infused with questions about everything from traditional design to ancient history, ethnic identity and the larger cultural role of contemporary art. That puts Ben Tre in the mold of Isamu Noguchi or Robert Irwin--hands-on artists who evolved into late-blooming entrepreneurs combining aspects of designer, urban planner and architect.

Ben Tre’s ensemble includes 30 large objects, 11 drawings and documentation of four public art projects. The latter emphasize Boston’s Post Office Square and Providence, R.I.’s, Bank Boston Plaza, both realized by the artist in partnership with his wife, Gay.

Ben Tre’s art has certain binding characteristics. His trademark cast glass concentrates and broadcasts a greenish, translucent light. A tendency toward abstract symmetry lends pieces a sense of decorative polish. Pieces betray an urge toward the modest scale of a pedestal or bench. At the same time a lapidary polish imparts a sense of muffled opulence. Origins in ancient cultures waft spiced odors of exoticism.

In other ways, the work is all over the map. A single one of Ben Tre’s 8-foot-tall, slender, cast-glass uprights triggers associations that put it through sci-fi particle-beam transformations from Mesopotamian temple column to Japanese ritual lingam, from an Art Deco movie palace motif to an object of contemplation.

That particularly curvy vase probably had a past life as an erotic Indian temple maiden before she was abstracted into an earth mother by Henry Moore, set into an aura-frame by a Neo-Expressionist, then transformed into an oversize designer-label perfume flask.

Curiously, for all the information provided by the examples on view and catalog reproductions, this work defies aesthetic Gestalt. Each piece wants to be either a jewel that derives meaning from appropriate isolation or--through multiplication and integration--to fuse with some as-yet-unassembled whole. The work doesn’t seem intrinsically meaningless, but it does take a posture of modernist ambiguity.

Could that, in itself be significant? Given the present context, maybe. After all, we’ve recently been through an epochal symbolic moment when 20th century modernism took a millennial rollover into the status of past history. If we read Ben Tre’s show as his version of how that history panned out, certain possibilities are suggested. The artist reminds us that the avant-garde’s early struggles to achieve an art of pure expressive personal originality were inspired largely by the ancient non-Western art that serves as his leitmotif. He seems to have homogenized historical motifs into interchangeable modules that express themselves more in social than personal terms. In short, Ben Tre seems to say that at the dawn of the 21st century, culture is about simultaneous existence of all history.

The traveling exhibition was organized for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art by its curator Debra L. Hopkins. Catalog essays were contributed by independent curator Mary Jane Jacob, the Museum of Modern Art’s Patterson Sims and art critic Arthur C. Danto.

* “Howard Ben Tre: Interior/Exterior,” Palm Springs Desert Museum, 101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs; through March 11, (760) 325-0189.

FO(3 Photos) Howard Ben Tre’s “Bearing Figure With Alabastron,” left, “Column 36” and “Wrapped Form.”