Sculpture: Floating Wit

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The yearly surveys of U.S. painting and sculpture staged by Manhattan's Whitney Museum have an enviable reputation for spotting new art trends. But the Whitney's singular problem is that it is committed to catholicity, determined to recognize the new and yet to support the established, blaze trails and still find room for tradition. The result is invariably a grab-bag display where the latest avant-garde creations nestle alongside traditional bronze nudes. For the 1968 annual, devoted to sculpture, the confusion has been compounded by a $155,000 Ford Foundation grant that enabled five Whitney staffers to visit 30 cities and recruit a dozen-odd artists never before shown in New York.

As finally assembled, this year's show is more a mixture than ever. The outlanders seem to be neither distinctively regional nor stylistically innovative. But for those visitors with the patience to sort out the radical from the merely novel, there are some discernible trends.

The mood is down-with-stolid-solidity. The most interesting sculptures seem to float and fly this year, more than ever before. They hang from the ceiling; they are transparent, pock-marked or filled with holes, marked by a lightness and informality of both profile and spirit. In the main gallery, the viewer's eye is carried roofward by a giant Alexander Calder mobile that sways like a living totem, then diverted by a gently teetering pair of silver spears by George Rickey. Against one wall, Eva Hesse has lined up a row of 30 glistening clear fiberglass half-box forms, whose intentionally sloppy casting endows them with a bubbly effervescence. Charles Ross's Plexiglas prisms are filled with mineral oil, so that museumgoers see other museumgoers distorted through them, edged in rainbow spectra. Even marble seems to soar, at least in Minoru Niizuma's vertical marble column entitled Windy Wind.

Geometry is all very well, but it works better if it is combined with wit: witness George Sugarman's whirling yellow-green Square Spiral, which sends the eye circling dizzily through the empty hole of its central vortex. John Anderson has built an immense symmetrical flower-like wood carrousel, calls it Baroque. Minimal forms still massively demand their unrewarding space, but they are countered by weirdly eccentric shapes that are frankly frivolous, at least unpredictable. California's William Geis, the gutsiest of the out-of-town recruits unearthed by the traveling scouts, displays Perusal's Oar, a leprously painted dream abstract crowned by a monster lobster claw. Another out-of-town eccentric, Walter McNamara from Reno, also displays an amusing work. His Soft Ware with Non-Tongue Plaster looks like nothing on earth except perhaps a telephone switchboard that some slap-happy electrician has partially torn apart.