Sculpture: White Wings in the Sunlight

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Minimal sculpture, when seen indoors, commonly overwhelms the viewer. Outdoors, it takes on what Curator Tuchman, 30, calls "a heroic quality." Besides, it gets the benefits of the California sunshine, which Tuchman, who is a recent migrant from New York, describes rhapsodically as "more diffuse, more intense, with a pervasive glare, a kind of luminescence." Sol Lewitt's white jungle gym, for instance, gains a thousand chunky highlights from the sun. The California show also clearly demonstrates that the new cool geometry, which is often combined with bright color or gleaming industrial surfaces, is a truly nationwide movement. And the West Coast is at least as skillful as the East Coast. The razzmatazz Marriage of New York and Athens, created by Los Angeles Artist Tony Berlant, 26, outshines many competing works by New York sculptors in the principal downstairs gallery hall.

Built from Blueprints. Curator Tuchman, who took two years to assemble his show and visited 300 studios across the country, believes that the key trend emerging from the diversity of his exhibit is the artist's increasing rapport with and involvement in advanced technology. Larry Bell's clear, untitled glass boxes, for example, gleam like mother-of-pearl, thanks to optical coating methods developed by industry technicians. Many other works were assembled by technicians from artists' instructions or, like the Samaras Corridor, built by museum craftsmen working from the artists' blueprints.

To Tuchman, this does not invalidate the structures as works of art. Says he: "Every culture must make its art out of what it's really about, and ours is about advanced technology." All the same, he continues, the marriage between art and technology is by no means complete. Since artists are mostly self-taught technicians, Tuchman has been discussing with several North American groups and corporations the establishment of artistic-industrial workshops. In time, Tuchman believes, the work on display at Los Angeles will appear "crude, halting and incomplete," compared with tomorrow's wonders.