White Wings in the Sunlight

Rarely has the Los Angeles County Museum been so thoroughly occupied as it was last week. Two floors of its Special Exhibitions Gallery, plus three outdoor plazas, were chock full of sculpture. In all, 166 pieces by 80 artists have been assembled by Modern Art Curator Maurice Tuchman for a mammoth exhibition: "American Sculpture of the Sixties." Whatever space was left over was taken up by Angelenos. On the first three days, more than 10,000 adults (not counting their children) milled up the steps from Wilshire Boulevard, past the bouncing Calder Hello Girls and the spikelike Rickey Two Red Lines, both set in the museum's pool, and on into the bright assemblage of glinting, sometimes kinetic and nearly always gigantic sculpture.

Much of the show's popularity was undoubtedly traceable to its carnival aspects. Children, especially, delighted in watching Len Lye's kinetic Flip and 2 Twisters, stood entranced as three giant loops of steel jumped and jiggled for 15 minutes at a time. Adults, too, joined in the good-humored spoofs of Claes Oldenburg's gigantic, canvas-covered Ice Cream Cone and Falling Shoestring Potatoes, and his plaster Pecan Pie. They poked their fingers into the spongelike walls of Harold Paris' Pantomina llluma, a "feelies" room containing $10,000 worth of molded, twisted and flat rubber and polyurethane, tensor lights and stainless steel. Grandmothers cheerfully took off their shoes to clamber around in Lucas Samaras' glittering, mirror-encrusted Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit warren, Corridor, 1967. Hippies gazed dreamily through the barred door of Edward Kienholz's The State Hospital into a Lysol-scented interior where lay the pathetic form of a lunatic old man.

Chunky Highlights. In all this Disneyland atmosphere, the handsomest work was undoubtedly the most stationary: the many varieties of outsized, technologically sophisticated minimal sculpture, much of it stationed outdoors (see color pages). David Von Schlegell's 42-ft.-long jet delta wings gleamed in the sunlight like anchors for interplanetary fleets. Robert Grosvenor's 24-ft.-long yellow Still No Title lanced downward from a portico of the museum building like a bolt of sunlight, ending a breath-taking eight inches from the pavement. John McCracken's brilliant blue column reflected shades upon shades of the California ethos; Lyman Kipp's Muscoot piled reds, greens, blues and yellows jauntily together like an enterprising architect's leftover bundle of construction beams.