Page 31 - Studio International - February 1968

A happening on the reception of Dr. Timothy's final message. Installed on What is paradoxical in these works is that their seeming
J. F. Kennedy ferry boat the stage, bathed in a flood of red and yellow lights, he coldness ill disguises their moral implications. Too big,
during the Avant Garde
eventually revealed to us the big news : Jesus Christ was too inert, too neutral, insistently passive, almost disturb-
Festival. The festival was
organized by C. Moorman in to be reincarnated; in fact he was already there among ing, they provoke in the spectator a discomfort which he
co-operation with the New us. If we looked carefully, we would be able to recognize soon senses as a kind of aggression against his living
York City Department of him. As he spoke, the light organ threw on to his face space, an excessive intrusion. 'If bigness seems a virtue to
Marine and Aviation. all the bearded Christs of history. us,' remarks Morris, 'it is because it is a good way of in-
Leaving aside this kind of mystic masquerade, it is hibiting all intimacy, all over-familiarity with the work.'
worth saying a few words on the trend currently domin- Cool sculptures are made to trouble; they are hard to
ating the New York art scene. What is a 'Cool' sculpture ? live with; they take up too much space; they are invasive.
It is above all a geometric form, simple, elementary, They are difficult to place in a home or even in a
massive, with no decorative effect, a large, inert, static museum. They are, of course, primarily the Cool artists'
mass which is there, a thing whose principal function is to reply to the overpowering architectural and industrial
occupy, to invade space and not, as previously, to present masses by which they are surrounded. But once these
balanced relations within itself. There is no longer any works have been completed, one notices that they
question of establishing plastic relations between the generate a climate of morbidity and sadness, of absurd
various facets of the work, between this or that shape, this and obscure anguish.
or that mass, but above all between the whole work and So apparently stable, neutral and so ill-adapted to any
the space around it. A Cool sculpture exists in the volume- psychological interpretations by the public, their very
relationship which it itself maintains with its spatial inertia transforms them into desolate and doleful records.
environment. For example: 'My works,' says Robert They evoke, Robert Smithson remarked, not the golden
Morris, 'do not fit into all apartments. The building age of technology but rather the Ice Ages. And this is
around them plays a decisive role in the breathing of Cool Art's main lesson : in a world increasingly dominated
the piece. I had recently to withdraw a sculpture from by science and technology, ever-changing and changing
the exhibition at the Jewish Museum as there was too more and more rapidly, this deliberate choice of monu-
much space above it. It no longer dominated. A sculpture mental immobility, this frank fascination with inertia, can
should be made to measure.' only represent fatigue, conscious despair, metaphysical
Cool artists must also take into account the size of the pessimism and a fear of and retreat from the jolting
spectators in relation to the work. 'I don't understand,' progress of contemporary life. It is rather as if the Cool
Stella has declared, 'why Europeans so often stick to artists were trying to still movement, and by erecting the
small-scale works, why they go in for so much detail. largest possible boundary stones, to hold back time—
We Americans see things big.' time which, as we know, destroys works of art.
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