Page 41 - Studio International - September 1969

Soto's The Soto retrospective exhibition reached

Paris this summer by way of Berne, Hanover,
Penetrables stage it had been extended and related to its
Düsseldorf, Amsterdam and Brussels. At each
new setting. In Amsterdam, where it was
Jean Clay allocated eight large rooms at the Stedelijk
Museum, the exhibition was designed in a
few hours and erected in a week by a team of
forty working night and day. It will remain
as an extraordinary example of speedy work-
manship where, in the final analysis, every
detail contributed to as perfect a mastery of
space as if the artist had devoted months of
labour to it.
The dominant feature of the Paris exhibition
(which was held in June) was a giant Penetrable
measuring some 500 square yards set up on
the large paved space between the right wing
of the Musée National d'Art Moderne and the
left wing of the Musée de la Ville de Paris.
This is the largest Penetrable ever made,
requiring about 60 miles of tubing. It is also
the first time that Paris has seen a major
scheme of contemporary art carried out on the
scale and in the way desired by the artist. Its
enormous size—and this is the scale upon
which many contemporary artists would like
to work—should dispense a salutary shock to
the art establishment and especially to gallery
managements with their addiction to sizes
favoured by such artists as Chardin or Corot.
In the following remarks I have attempted to
expound some of Soto's recent ideas and to
compare them with those of the Futurists.
Cubists were preoccupied with a matter of
much concern to contemporary artists—the
fusion of objects with their environment. From
the beginning of the analytical phase in 1909,
the object was not merely outlined but liter-
ally exploded in the space around it. Form
was pulverized and reconstituted in patch-
work fashion. Parts were superimposed and
juxtaposed while all possible views of the
object, of the surrounding room and even of
the space around the room, were presented in
a new two-dimensional design conceived by
the artist. But the fusion of space and object
was still transcribed onto canvas within the
reassuring bounds of the picture and not
directly experienced by the spectator in real life.
The same problem confronted the Futurists.
`Our bodies penetrate the couches upon
which we sit and the couches penetrate us.
The bus bursts into the houses it passes while
they in turn hurl themselves at the bus and
merge with it.' (Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Painters, April 11, 1910.) In 1912, Boccioni
completed his Abstraction of a convex and concave
head in which the hollow space stretches in a
line across the compact mass of plaster and
acquires a positive plastic value which con-
trasts with the solid elements of the composi-
tion. In that same year, Boccioni attempted a
savage synthesis of subject and environment
in his Fusion of a head and window in which he
planted the lower part of a window, complete
with frame and glass, on top of a head and