Sculpture: Era of the Object

Put a bronze man upon a bronze horse, and who salutes? Put a plaster Eisenhower in a real Jeep, and the art world cheers. For in today's sculpture, both traditional subject matter and traditional techniques have gone by the board. Where once marble and bronze held sway, sculpture is now made of plastics, automobile fenders, even fur, carpeting and burlap. In place of the commemorative bust, the symbolic nude or heroic grouping, there are now polyester broads, overstuffed light switches, 3-D inside-out doughnuts, stuffed-leather totems, and well-welded remnants of the new Iron Age. The definition of sculpture has broadened until it has become an Everyman art, and the results exist more as a fascinating collection of objects than ideal worlds of form.

Best show of the year to assemble the artifacts of the new sculpture revolution is Manhattan's Whitney Museum sculpture biennial, which opened this week with works by 123 sculptors, 50 of them newcomers. Variety is the show's sole common denominator, but the overall impression leaves one fact inescapably clear: the past decade has changed sculpture more than it changed in all the time between Michelangelo and Rodin. Sculpture is no longer a quintessence of form, something to be isolated, set apart and contemplated. Instead, sculpture may plug in and light up, move by machinery or breezes, invite the viewer to play with it. Says Whitney Associate Curator Edward Bryant: "Sculpture wants to come down off the pedestal and create its own environment."

Plastic Patina. Some contemporary sculpture now jostling for Liebensraum in the living room cries less for the patina of age than for the quick eye jab of bright plastic paint. The result is a spate of new polychromists (see opposite page). Among them:

> ROBERT HOWARD, 42, who has taught art at the University of North Carolina for the past 14 years. His abstract Landscape XVII is welded steel painted with two subtly clashing shades of red that seem to warp the solidity of the sculpture. "To do something like it in bronze would cost me $3,000," he says, "but I go out to the junkpile and pick up steel for 6¢ a pound."

> JEREMY ANDERSON, 43, is a San Francisco sculptor who prefers working in natural-finished wood. He painted the upper reaches of his attenuated Composite Mythology green to harmonize its grain. Hardly shocking when compared with Brancusi, the slender shape looks at once like ephemeral femurs knocking on a knee joint and a pinch-waisted dancer on toe point.

> H. (for HORACE) C. (for CLIFFORD) WESTERMANN, 42, is a Los Angeles-born rambler who usually turns out carpenter's daydreams consisting of mirrors and precision mitering. His work at the Whitney is a drum-shaped totem of wall-to-wall carpeting. Says he: "I don't know why I named it The Plush. If I liked analysis, I'd be a writer."

> ROBERT HUDSON, 26, working out of San Francisco, creates polychrome assemblages straight out of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. The iridescent blue hand was his starting point in Charm; he then kept adding things until, says he, "it has a whole world in it." Why paint it a profusion of colors? "I dig painting too," says Hudson. "What the sculpture can't say, the paint can."