Figures Cut Into The Air

The Ballet of Mathematical Elegance

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David Smith has been known, decreasingly over time and for reasons that probably made more sense at the time, as the one sculptor of the Abstract Expressionist movement. However, one can observe some sense to the attribution if one examines the roster of Abstract Expressionist painters for the two modes into which they divide—those who employ abstraction through the commission of spontaneous gestures to capture and evoke the emotional state of the artist at the extended moment of imaginative creation, who practiced what Harold Rosenberg titled “Action Painting,” among them, Pollock, Franz Kline, and, by his own admission, Robert Motherwell; and, on the other hand, those who employed more geometrically regular formalisms to convey something other than emotional response, by their own admission, something of the “sublime,” including Rothko and Barnett Newman. There are aspects of Smith’s work that suit both modalities and both ambitions, and the second is more revealing.

The centennial exhibition, which appeared at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, at the time of this writing, is appearing at the Centre Pompidou and is slated to travel to the Tate Modern later this year, is a lavishly supplied deposition that provides an ample opportunity to comprehend Smith’s mode and his accomplishment. Set chronologically, as it was arranged at the Guggenheim, the exhibition includes over 120 sculptures covering the entire range of the sculptor’s career, from 1932 to 1965, the year of Smith’s death. Smith was an artist who frequently worked in series, sequences of works grouped by title, often laboring on sculptures from more than one series at a time. Included here are numerous early works, a wide range of works from throughout his career that come of no series, and a substantial number of examples of every major series: Medals of Dishonor, the Landscape series, Agricola, Sentinels, Tanktotem, Forgings, Voltri, Voltri-Bolton, and the Cubis.

The principal impression of all this is of a titanic moral will, or an enormous proclivity, which may be much the same thing, for accomplishing work. Given that all of the works are metal sculpture, either welded or forged as their primary method of manufacture, the sheer physical willfulness, the capability for limpid though clearly laborious execution, is commanding. Smith just made sculpture, and one cannot imagine he could have devoted much time to making anything else of life’s business. As much as this exhibition is testimony of a body of work, it is as well documentary evidence of the nature of dedication, of the quality of having a purpose, of a devotion that manifests itself not merely in thought but in action, a living passion that compels a life as much and as naturally as breathing makes a life possible—this is what it looks like, after the fact, actually to do something.

Within a body of work this extensive, there is, of course, a wide range of styles and motifs—so much so in Smith’s instance that one is struck by the compelling breadth of aesthetic dreaming, by the seemingly unstoppable fulsomeness of imagination. As one wound one’s way up the spiraling ramp of the Guggenheim, and upwards in the time plan of Smith’s professional life, it felt as if there could be no end to the variety of visual instigation. Any roster of reports of transportive moments is necessarily incomplete. It barely delves past the surface, but it does prove a case by demonstration: that there is artistic life, the authentic aesthetic charge, to the engagement with any number of Smith’s works. A mere beginning: In The Letter, 1950, there is a visual loquacity of babbling chatter that stands itself before you like a schoolroom lesson on an unknowable inscription, strange characters written on an invisible board in the air, glowering down on you and waiting for you to throw off your dunce’s cap and admit finally that you do in fact understand what it is saying—that you did do your homework. In Australia, 1951, we are given a physical realization of arguably the core motif of Modernist Art—anti-gravitation. (It can readily be claimed that Modernism in the visual arts begins with Malevich and his elimination of gravity, of the down vector, which eradicated the horizon line, and with it the vanishing point at infinity, and fundamentally changed the idea of visual space. It should be noted that Malevich made clear he obtained the idea from seeing photographs of the earth taken from the then newly invented airplane—aerial photography created the Modernist visual expanse.) Here, Smith commits one of his most compelling moments of a repeating ambition: to raise the sculpture off not only the pedestal but the floor itself, to hover its broad body in the air by balancing it on what is functionally one leg that, although it must be centered on the ground, is positioned very far off-center on the sculpture and is unnoticeable at first—you don’t initially take in where the work extends down to the floor. And the sculpture then leaps through the air that supports it, like an aboriginal animal bolting abruptly out of the unknown forests of the artistic mind.

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There is the half-arrogant, half-embarrassed, self-bemused demeanor of Wagon II, 1964, which stares at you in perplexity as it waits for you to figure out its predicament (some number of Smith’s sculptures seem placidly to be waiting for you to figure them out): with one of its four wheels noticeably larger than the others, all it could do if ambient is run in circles. There is the haughty dignity and self-enclosing confident verticality of the works of the series begun in 1955, titled the Forgings—distinctive in Smith’s oeuvre for being the only sculptures he did not assemble out of disparate metal pieces but fashioned with a forging hammer. There is the fusion of the two stances in many of the works of the Sentinel and Tanktotem series, which appear mildly uneasy and exposed in their somewhat loopy oddness of inappropriately arranged elements—like someone caught off-guard when you unwittingly open an occupied dressing room and locate a customer half into his proud new pair of pants—even as they seem serene and insouciant in the perfect completion of the ingenious principles of composition that ideally arrange their elements. There is the sly, surreptitious intelligence of Home of the Welder, 1945—a personal documentation of artistic confession in which tools and materials of the metal sculptor’s occupation are welded into a diorama that might have been a three-dimensional mental snapshot of a corner of his studio. It appears deadpan, but things are not as simple as they seem at first, and a sense of deeper intelligence rises up from below like a pentimento seeping through to the surface, or blood spreading across a bandage—the intelligence of what lies beneath. The tools and materials entered into the work are real. Yet here, they are no longer that which made the work, they could not have been the actual tools employed to make this work—they are components of the work. Not only should they be what precedes and makes possible the work—they are, in literal fact, instances of the pre-conditions for the work, separate from it for their status as causes of it. But they are, in literal fact, the work—the result of what they should be doing, should be in a position to do. They are what they are, in fact, and, in fact, what they are not. In their paradoxical posture, they stand at both ends of the microscope: as what must come before and makes possible what they fashion, and what has been fashioned—in two places at once, each box inside the other. As a logical conundrum, Home of the Welder precedes substantially, as well as outdoes, the benchmark work of such apparent impossibility—Jasper Johns’ Painted Bronze Beer Cans, 1960, in which the two cans have been cast and painted with such palpable accuracy, they appear as good as the real thing. They appear to be the real thing, turning to chaos the very idea of simulation, of representation, with the thing the image of itself as mere image—until you go to drink the beer. Then, there is a truth.

For all the vastness of variety of effect, tone, and composition in Smith’s work, there is also a distinctive degree of similarity, perhaps beyond the degree inevitable in a strong imagination, an imagination that is incapable ever of looking like something other than itself, an imagination that submits spontaneously to the first requirement of excellence in any of the arts: that one should not need to look at the signature to recognize whose work one is contemplating. The consistency of manner certainly goes beyond that which is imposed by the method of manufacture, by the working in metal that is not cast but is fashioned directly as metal, using the tools of the industrial metal-worker. In this, Smith denotes his first mark of presence in art history: he is the inheritor and first major sculptor to take advantage of the incursions into new manner and style by Picasso and Gonzalez.

But beyond the Cubist formulations that derive from the initiators of welded metal sculpture—pick-ups of the new stylistic conventions one finds in such early pieces as Agricola Head, 1933, and Sawhead, 1933—there is a visual language of David Smith, or not entirely of Smith but marking his touch to the material. When aspects of that language arise as motifs or standard practices—when they demonstrate themselves as aspects of evident “content”—they are easily recognized and have become part of the arsenal of references for Smith: they show up regularly in the popular criticism. Primary among them is Smith’s practice of “drawing in space.” Another Cubist-obtained technique, derived specifically from Picasso and transmitted to sculpture by Smith, it is his manner of welding sheets and rods together in an open netting of abstract forms that invariably indicates the presence of an immaterial plane—a “surface” upon which he is sketching. Used frequently, one may take as an example Hudson River Landscape, 1951, and observe the implication: the sculpture lacks, for the first time in the art form to our knowledge, a central mass. The work becomes a skeletal disposition of tracked forces, actions in the void that trace their vapors like a time lapse, like a retention of vision of something never seen, too fast to be noticed, and sculpture—the visual art of felt mass, the physically material rendering of imagined images—becomes something conceptually immaterial, literally a figure cut in the air.

This is the aspect of Smith’s work that relates to Action Painting, to the form of abstraction that records the momentary emotional state of the artist, and although we know that nothing so densely and strenuously rendered as welded sculpture could be as spontaneous and immediate in its impulse as a painting, it does not matter. The effect is convincing—it does seem as if Smith dashed off the sketch in the air before his conscious mind, his self-aware and deliberate thought, could interfere with the sincerity of confession—and the fact of the matter is that we never have known that Pollock or Kline was truly confessing his state of mind, and that too does not matter. It is never the artist who is the issue in the art. When there is art, the artist is nothing. And when there is not, there is nothing whatever.

The other influence on Smith contributing to the uniqueness of his manner—and the uniqueness of the individual thought is always founded in the adoption of anterior thoughts, or styles of thought; no mind creates itself, no mind fails to have a mind behind it—is that of Surrealism: another article of identity Smith shares with the Abstract Expressionists. The impression it left can be seen clearly in his use of glyphs: the wormy marks that seem to function as obscure and inscrutable inscriptions in some alien tongue. They arise and prance about in a great number of his works: The Letter; Wagon II; Voltri VII, 1962; and many more. They are more basically adoptions of the biomorphic—abstract forms of what is reputed to be vaguely organic rather than geometric configurations but that ultimately are nothing more than geometric forms employing curved rather than straight lines, no more organic or less geometric than a square. The abstracting is in the smoothing out, or regularizing, of the curve—moving the form away from life experience in that there is little in physical reality that is geometrically simple—and it puts Smith not only in the debt of Arp and Miro but settles him squarely in the single sculptural tradition of the twentieth century, and the last authentic sculptural tradition we have had, by aligning him with Brancusi.

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These practices and motifs—the curvilinear sketching literally in the open air, the curving glyphic forms, the anomalous aggregates of discovered elements welded into strangely lyrical unities—are what Smith is now known for. They regularly appear in the reviews of the popular press. This is the profile of his reputation. However, these attributes do not tell us why Smith should be known at all. To a great extent, what they testify to is technical innovation—Smith greatly expanded, virtually created, the vocabulary of welded sculpture, he made possible the achievements of all future sculptors in the mode. In essence, he laid the groundwork. But to have established new forms of expression, to have formulated a new artistic language, is not in itself to have said anything. There is no testimony in this to a meaning in his work. Even Clement Greenberg, who championed Smith as the greatest sculptor of his generation and one of the great American sculptors of any period, admitted as much: “But the means in art never guarantee the ends, and it is for the individual and un-derived qualities of Smith’s art that we praise it, not for its technical innovations.”

What Greenberg celebrated instead were Smith’s formal innovations, the sculptor’s original compositional strategies, which Greenberg saw as new tactics for accomplishing an aesthetic effect while continuing to meet traditional standards of judgment and expectation for artistic relish—the works avoided bad taste; they never fell to the status of “gaucherie,” never descended to the level of “garden statuary, oversized objets d’art, and monstrous costume jewelry.” What appealed to Greenberg was Smith’s “formal energy.” He admired the artist’s “unity of style,” the “rugged felicity” of the manner in which a “ ‘classical’ spareness and speed” achieved a “streamlining without emasculating [Smith’s] invention . . . [Smith’s] sculpture for all its energy presents an elegance like that of Picasso’s and Braque’s high cubism.” But this is the language of pure sensation, of “style” in the most demoted sense, in the sense exclusively of manner of conception and execution without a concern for further import, for the implications of the manner. This is the language of decoration, of the interest in avoiding gaucherie, merely of the look of the thing. As a concern with problem solving—and that is what discussion of integrating intricacies of surface with velocity of effect amounts to—this is a matter of “shop talk,” a concern with how to get things done rather than with what is worth doing. As such, it is simply a variation of the issue of technical innovation—just another means that does not guarantee the end. What is still not addressed is whether there is a meaning in Smith’s work, whether Smith has anything to say, and whether we can tell ourselves what it is, rather than do as Greenberg did: restrict ourselves to the suburbs of the real issue, working constantly around what ultimately matters, working there strenuously to say something that sounds right—as Greenberg often seemed to do, with “rugged felicity”—and always talking around the point.

There is a natural impulse to believe that this all is about something, that Smith does have something on his mind, and it is quite evidently something enormously elusive. In fact, Smith appears to be an ideal model for the kind of intellectual obscurity that is the subject of this meditation. For all the ruggedness of his work, there is a delicacy about Smith’s achievements, there is something behind them that is fleeting, that is immediately before one’s eyes and yet is impossibly inscrutable—something that withers at a breath. At the root, at the gut level, Smith’s sculpture wants to be taken as abstract not primarily for technical or stylistic reasons but because he seems so palpably to be speaking in some strange foreign language—because he seems to be speaking.

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