Page 36 - Studio International - May 1972

germ of this idea arose from speculating about (5) Hommage a Frucht pieces. These structures can structure by threading plastic tubes of equal length
`alien' art i.e. 'art' done by peoples from in a way be taken as not so much in opposition to as and bore such that the resulting structure is
`out there' —if they exist. complementary to previous work (such as the reliefs, essentially stable but allows for movement by having
including those reproduced). what amounts to articulated 'joints'. By making the
The theme—the formal arrangements of the elements- 18 tubes of equal length the fact that the polyhedron
Amongst observations concerning the value and -is a physical representation of an important is intrinsically convex is disguised and by giving the
/ or function of art today I would propose the extreme situation, the smallest asymmetric polyhedron tubes a i : 6 ratio the overall character is no longer
all of whose faces are triangular. The structure is the one of a linear network type.
following : art is self-expression in the sense that `dual' of one all of whose nodes are trivalent, The most obvious differences by comparison
people express themselves through their known in Graph Theory as one of the two Frucht with any of the reliefs I have made are, for me, (i)
appreciation of what artists make. What art Graphs, so the triangular-faced polyhedron can be the overridingly deterministic quality of the theme,
called a Frucht Dual. It is also a structure and (2) the absence of any specific spatial context.
offers its audience is something to love and/ or composed of five tetrahedra, the smallest number The works which immediately preceded the
to hate ... amongst other activities ...further- required to produce an asymmetric three-dimensional `tube' structures were on the one hand the double-
more it is abundantly clear that people have a generalization of a tetrominoe (as Golomb calls sided free-standing relief screens —dating from 1965 —
them), it can be constructed by joining the seven and on the other, a series of two-dimensional works,
deep need to express themselves this way, they nodes of an asymmetric triominoe (having five Parity Studies, the first of which, dating from 1968,
love to love and to hate and this outlet is good faces or cells) to a new node. was an engraved plastic laminate sheet, all concerned
and quite harmless. q In this context a 'dual' structure is one arrived with a similar theme and one closely related to
at by exchanging nodes for faces. By asymmetric we that of the 'tube' structures. 1971.
mean that the automorphism group of the graph Photo: Roland Scherman
1Routledge & Kegan Paul 1971. is restricted to that of the identity group; what that
Wiz. 'A Structuralist Art ?' 20th Century Studies May says amounts to the following: considered as
1970. an abstract set of elements and relationships, none of
'Notes in catalogue/ broadsheet of the travelling the respective elements (nodes, connectives and
exhibition 'Matrix' (Arnolfini Gallery), 1971. `faces') can be permuted and as a result we have the
4 George Braziller, N.Y. 1971. complete absence of redundancy. By contrast the
5'The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems' in The smallest totally symmetric structure of this kind
Future of Art Viking Press, N.Y. 1970. (i.e. the edge graph of a simply connected polyhedron
6 The last and longest was 'The climate of Charles —or three-polytope) is the tetrahedron; here all
Biederman' Studio International, Sep. 1969. the respective elements can be permuted.
7 Studio International, 'Two cultures', Dec. 1970. Physical/perceptual aspect: in this, the simplest
8 Studio Vista 1968. The book is dedicated to version of the series, the secondary theme is
Naum Gabo. omitted, and 'graph' is realized as a physical

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