Word: schoffer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Such lofty, light and airy abstractions, the tower's inventor believes, would be a great and welcome change from the traditional bronze men on horseback, men in capes, and men thinking, chin in hand. But Sculptor Nicolas Schoffer, 43, does not stop at purely visual effects. He got a composer friend to extract a musical tone from each plaque on his tower (by banging or rubbing each one separately) and record the sounds together on tape. Then he persuaded an engineer to build an electronic "brain" for the tower which "plays" the tones according to the effects of light...
Hungarian-born Schoffer painted dolls in a Paris factory before World War II, fought with a Maquis hill band during the German occupation. "Under the shock of war," he says, "I evolved into a different sort of person. I began meeting intellectuals; I began sculpting new ideas; I began to hold conferences...
...theme of Schoffer's "conferences" he calls spatiodynamisme. Sculpture, he thinks, should reach up and out to dominate space, rather than simply filling a certain portion of it. Modern materials such as tempered steel make such "dynamic" sculptures possible on a grand scale, and the addition of so-called music by electronic means would make them pretty hard to ignore. But Schoffer's success in getting his tower sculpture constructed is only the beginning. "My goal," he says solemnly, "is a city built up around this tower and, so to speak, taking its essence from the sculpture...