Word: suvero
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...Mark di Suvero is perhaps the least visible major talent in American sculpture: a tough, idealistic, exuberantly gifted man whose work may well contain more lessons about epic scale than any other living American's. But his achievement has until lately been strangely muffled. He has never written a public statement about art. His work is hard to find; museums until now have given it only the sketchiest support. Nowhere in New York can one find a large sculpture by Di Suvero on public view. But next spring, Holland's Stedelijk Museum and the Duisburg Museum in Germany...
Herculean Appleseed. Any Di Suvero show is a nightmare of logistics, thanks to the size of his work. The I-beams of his 1967 construction now on loan to Minneapolis, Are Years What? (For Marianne Moore), have a spread of 50 ft. and a rise of 40 - the height of a four-story building. When the Pasadena Museum temporarily allowed Di Suvero to rig a 35-ft. steel sculpture on its grounds, the only site it could spare was a corner of the parking lot; apparently the trustees feared it would chew up their lawns. The installation bills included...
...Thus Di Suvero, struggling to produce sculptures that no museum or gallery can readily house, has become a kind of herculean Johnny Appleseed. scattering work wherever he can find space or means to put it: two, for instance, are now in a field outside Chicago. His sculpture presents a real cultural paradox: it is created from scrounged materials with little or no financial backing, and at the same time it is unsalably monumental...
...must be made where it will sit, the way a building is made. The idea of making blueprints and farming out the work to factories (adopted by some of Di Suvero's contemporaries, among them Donald Judd) would do violence to the spirit of his sculpture. Delegated work can be done with sculpture whose look can be predicted-symmetrical or elementary or inert forms. With Di Suvero, everything hinges on the fine intuitive balance and adjustment of the heavy girders, the turnbuckles and cables. His style is as intimate as watercolor, despite its scale. What counts is the tuning...
Moral Edge. This is the special value of Di Suvero's work. It is also the justification for its immense scale. Steel is a tough substance and, below a certain range of size, a sculptor can make any configuration with it that he wants. The hard task for any constructor is to push the size of the sculpture to the point AP where engineering becomes an issue and the steel might fail-and then to find the one form that works both aesthetically and structurally. Di Suvero proceeds by trial and error, bracing and rigging the parts until they...