Page 29 - Studio International - January 1968

Ibram Lassaw and Herbert Ferber. aristocratic society and not a democratic one, that to
Given this 'beginning', it has taken some twenty years produce rarities is to offend.
for American sculpture to come of age. In the meantime, But one needn't go quite this far to see a revolution in
contemporary American painting of several varieties has the making. Technology as it is being explored by
come to prominence internationally and has held the American sculptors makes possible an environmental
stage. The country itself has become incredibly art con- sculpture, a truly public art, appropriate in scale to the
scious, and great wealth, both public and private, has energy, ideals, and physical realities of the nation. Part
gone to the support of the visual arts. But the decisive of the difficulty that American artists have had with the
stimulus has been the perception that modern industrial European tradition—especially with its English mani-
technology can assist the artist to satisfy the demand for festation which is closest to America culturally and
art of the growing mass market and of the increasingly spiritually—is its relative intimacy of scale. The vast
interested public sector. Technology is casting the artist, United States needs monuments more suitable to its
particularly the sculptor, in the role of conceptualizer. vistas and distances and to the architecture of its cities.
Works that might have taken years of a sculptor's life- In America, size feels right.
time, had he laboured alone in traditional materials, are No doubt this is a complicated problem. I do not have
now capable of machine-assisted realization in new in mind the grandeur for which Paris is so justly famous—
materials with relative ease. It is now possible to think of a sense of scale in public buildings that seems to dispense
multiples or sizeable editions of major works. Instant with the necessity of having people to inhabit or use them.
Michelangelo? It can be argued—it will be argued—that Rather, I should like to think of the environment as a
the art work as a unique object belongs to an outmoded whole, with a scale of artistic expression appropriate to