Page 43 - Studio International - September 1969

folded ( Lygia Clark), and so on. relation to the object contemplated. He also realized that the cube of space in which we operate
Spectator participation, which is of growing noted that perception is influenced by the is also a form and that it too should be subjected to
importance to young painters today (Visual degree to which movement is voluntary or thorough dematerialization.
Arts Research Group, etc), must be seen as involuntary (as being pushed in a wheel- In the course of time, Soto has perfected his
already a particular method of physically pene- chair, for example). Vision involves the motor invasion of space, either with his multi-
trating a work, and a preliminary phase of a concept nerves of the central nervous system. The retina storied plexiglass constructions, or through
current at the end of the 1950s; the environment. does not respond in isolation. Vision varies the illusionary depth produced by contrasting
The work is touched, entered, penetrated : it with movement and activity. The Penetrable colours (particularly in his compositions based
is the same development towards fusion and cannot be viewed like a picture. on squares) ; through bringing together a
the same rejection of any hiatus between work 2) THE ENVIRONMENT, in SOW'S case, 1S plain non-vibrating surface with an optically
of art and spectator. radical. His first aim is to bring down the active surface, or—later on—by slowly en-
This division was necessary to the under- walls around us, to pulverize them optically. circling the vision of the spectator first with
standing of the principles behind Soto's Pene- A room occupied by a Penetrable no longer has cylindrical pictures and then with circular
trables. Their simplicity is misleading; this is fixed proportions. Its volume is elastic and walls going round a whole room. He has, at
always the case when an artist works seriously fluid. The eye may, at one moment, wander last, invaded the whole available space; his integral
in an infinite forest only to register a vibration Penetrables allow no disengagement, provide
within an inch of the retina the next. The no external viewpoint, but plunge the visitor
whole stability of our vision—and even our right into the heart of the aesthetic process,
mental processes—is lost in this universe of just as Boccioni dreamed. For a Penetrable is
perpetual change in which are captured all limitless by definition. Soto recently suggested
possible modes of perspective. We no longer filling a whole station with his tubes so that
know where to look in order to re-establish the both trains and people might pass among
familiar spatial dimensions of our environment. them. We are confronted with one of those
Our contacts with pieces endlessly and untir- global conceptions which are limited only by
ingly knotting and unknotting, making and un- the paucity of our imagination. 'In the past',
making, take place in a world without propor- Soto has said, 'the spectator sat like an un-
tions whose centre is everywhere and whose involved witness of reality. Today we know
perimeter is nowhere, where 'plastic relation- that man is not on one side and the world on
ships' have disappeared, where the estab- the other. We are not observers, but consti-
lished rules of artistic appreciation (the play tuent parts of a reality which we know to be
of colours and balanced masses) are crumbling swarming with forces, many of which are
under the effect of an all-embracing and total invisible. We are in the world in the same way
concept which is a universe in itself but which that fish are in the water. We are in it and not
refers to certain basic laws governing matter. looking at it. There are no more spectators,
This invasion of the spatial cube is, in Soto's only participants...'.
to attain the maximum of meaning with the case, the outcome of ideas dating back fifteen For Soto, 'environment' does not mean the
minimum of effects and materials. He is years to his first transparent work, Two same as 'surroundings' : 'The fact that one
frequently misunderstood. The superficial ob- squares in space (1953). This consists of a paints a picture going all round the room in
server will see no more than a series of visual piece of rhodoid placed in front of a slightly the manner of the fifteenth-century fresco
tricks and optical gadgets and never suspect diagonal plane. From this period, and parti- painters does not mean that one has created
the concepts therein embodied. To Soto, cularly from his strip plexiglass works of an environment. Even at the centre of a
vibrations are no more than a method of 1955-7, he succeeds in isolating an 'ambiva- circular display—whether kinetic or static—we
emphasis, a spatializing of a complex notion lent space' of both two and three dimensions. are still looking at the work. We remain
within the realities of our physical environ- These works are still of very modest propor- observers.'
ment. Merely to appreciate the 'elegance' of tions. And yet the result is utterly dizzying. It Thus three instructive principles emerge rela-
his tubes is rather like congratulating Mon- is as if the artist has, in our very surroundings, tive to the development of contemporary art:
drian exclusively upon his manual dexterity created out of the wall a small sector of space 1) The ending of form within an environment
in drawing nice straight lines. which is subject to physical laws other than in that the Penetrable adjusts to the room or the
Soto's Penetrables, which look like a solidified those dominating the rest of the scene and space in which it is placed just as water takes
rain of vertical tubes amidst which the spec- which has its own specific gravity, its own on successively the form of the different
tator wanders, are among the most fertile peculiar density, an area of weightlessness vessels into which it is put.
productions of contemporary art. in a universe subject to gravity. 2) The visual presentation of the milieu which
1) THE PARTICIPATION OF THE SPECTATOR 1S Astonishing effects are created by the play of embraces us: the function of the Penetrable is
constantly solicited—above all because it is strips at various angles as if each piece corre- to represent the extremely dense matter,
his movement within the work which causes sponded to the atmosphere of a different corpuscular and fluid, which envelops us.
the visual dematerialization of volume; and planet, and as if each series of strips reacted 3) The impossibility of disengagement in the
secondarily because the mere fact of entering variously to the universal laws of attraction, presence of the work—just as there is no dis-
the work provokes an entirely different per- and individually to the pull of gravity. A engagement from the physical universe. Thus
ception of it from both the tactile and the step to one side and a whole series of diverse finally, via the Penetrable, we come to question
psychological points of view. We are captured movements are provoked, creating the worry- any work based on plastic relations between
by the experience of a work which enfolds us ing sensation that contradictory physical laws one shape and another or one colour and
like an immaterial garment; which both apply simultaneously in the microspace that another. The single fact that these relationships
probes and troubles our means of perceiving Soto has entrapped with his transparent are external to us, means that they are false from the
the physical world. In La structure dans les arts sheets of superposed plexiglass. Little by little, outset and represent no more than an aesthetic-
et dans les sciences, Richard Held recently he enlarged this 'ambivalent space' until it ism. Art must supersede all aestheticism in
observed that perceptive intensity varies with occupied the whole wall. It is rather as if, order to achieve its purpose in deciphering
the movement or stillness of the spectator in having optically pulverized form in his pictures, he reality. q