Page 51 - Studio International - June 1970

Having known of Kadishman's work only by
reputation and by the few pieces I had seen
in the United States and Europe, I was
thoroughly unprepared for the sculptures that
he made last autumn in Uruguay. During the
period that we were both there for Angel
Kalenberg's first Symposium of Sculpture of
Montevideo, Kadishman made two important
works, both destined for permanent installa-
tion in a beautiful grove of eucalyptus trees
within a park on the outskirts of Montevideo.
The first of these two was a series of three
identical steel cylinders, each with its ends
open and more than six feet in diameter. A
steel slat, spanning the interior of each
cylinder and with its broad side vertical,
completed the work. Painted yellow except
for the contrasting blue of the interior slats,
the cylinders sat side by side with their outer
diameters touching each other; the final
effect was that of seeing a playfully poly-
chromed trio of locomotive wheels or giant
gears. It is a work which may be easily
situated historically and stylistically within
the context of young English sculptors associ-
ated with St Martin's—Annesley and Tucker
have both made pieces to which these cylinders
may be compared.
Kadishman, however, began his career as a
sculptor with works in stone, chiselled or piled
in cairns in the manner of Shemi Haber; his
recent work has been closer in spirit to this
tradition than to the St Martin's group,
despite his frequent use of steel, plastic, wood,
and plate-glass as materials. One of Kadish- It is interesting to compare Kadishman's idea picture plane.
man's favourite devices during the late 1960s with a similar project of Jan Dibbets that was The perceptual tensions between shallow and
was in fact to incorporate sheets of glass or executed in 1969 and illustrated in the cata- deep space, as well as the overall lateral
plastic into his sculpture. To these sheets he logue of his recent exhibition at Krefeld. extent of the perceptual field—both of which
attached volumes of wood or other solid Although in both instances trees within a the artist established intuitively and empiri-
materials, usually by a notched fitting, in forest were singled out by coloured markings, cally—are indications that this work derives
such a way that these solid volumes seemed to Dibbets chose a grove in which all the trees from a traditional source of modernist art,
be suspended in air. had been planted at fairly even intervals in namely the cubist sensibility. This cubist
The preoccupation with air spacing and straight parallel rows; and he then isolated orientation emerges with greater clarity in
levitational effects achieves its greatest success a single row of trees with paint applied to each Kadishman's documentary graphics based on
thus far in Kadishman's second Montevideo tree trunk for the first 4 or 5 feet above the the Montevideo 'forest'.
project, The Forest. The artist nailed a large ground.
quantity of rectangular metal sheets to the The differences between this project and [On the occasion of his one-man exhibition
trunks of trees scattered through the forest Kadishman's forest are mutually illuminating. now at the Jewish Museum, New York, until
within an area of two or three acres. The Although both cases show an interest in June 21, Menashe Kadishman has executed a
rectangles were attached vertically at a more isolating a part of nature from its context new version of The Forest in Manhattan's
or less uniform height, oriented so that their through visual means, Dibbets's concern here Central Park.]
surfaces would all be visible from a vantage would seem to have been more conceptual
point at the edge of the forest, and painted and a priori in character, as is apparent from
bright yellow. The effect, as Kadishman his choice of a straight line of trees rather than
described it, was that of a 'forest within a the more random, less geometrical configura-
forest' : the empirically placed yellow panels, tion which Kadishman adopted. It is the
separated from each other in real space, difference between Versailles and an English
created a visual configuration within the garden, or between the Cartesian and empiri-
forest that rivalled nature and was in contrast cist traditions. It is also the difference between
and counterpoint to nature. Saturated yellow conceptual and perceptual art; and Kadish-
is a colour that occurs rarely in nature in any man's art, here as well as in other examples,
concentration, and even more rarely in a falls clearly into the second category. For
forest. It is a man-made thing, like the straight Kadishman, in marking his trees and creating
geometrical edges of Kadishman's panels. a 'forest within a forest', has established a
Within the natural forest this man-made perceptual and even pictorial situation, in
forest brought to mind the blazes used to which his rectangular yellow planes act as
mark a trail, or targets on a practice range. disjunctive segments of an implicit, single