Morris was the first essayist to precisely describe the relation between sculpture style and the progressively more sophisticated use of industry by artists. He has lately focused upon material-forming techniques and the arrangement of these results that they no longer form specific objects but remain uncomposed. In such handling of materials the idea of process takes precedence over end results: “Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders of things is a positive assertion.” Such loose assemblies of materials encompass concerns that resembles the cycles of industrial processing. Here the traditional priority of end results over technique breaks down; in a systems context both may share equal importance, remaining essential parts of the esthetic.

Already Morris has proposed systems which move beyond the confines of the minimal object. One work proposed to the City of New York last fall was later included in Willoughby Sharp’s “Air Art” show in a Y.M.H.A. gallery in Philadelphia. In its first state Morris’s piece involved capturing steam from the pipes in the city streets, projecting from nozzles on a platform. In Philadelphia such a system took its energy from the steam bath room. Since 1966 Morris’s interests have included designs for low relief earth sculptures consisting of abutments, hedges, and sodded mounds, visible from the air and not unlike Indian burial mounds. “Transporting” one of these would be a matter of cutting and filling earth and resodding. Morris is presently at work on one such project and unlike past sculptural concerns, it involves precise information from surveyors, landscape gardeners, civil engineering contractors, and geologists. In the older context, such as Isamu Noguchi’s sunken garden at Yale University’s Rare Book Library, sculpture defined the environment, with Morris’s approach the environment defines what is sculptural.

More radical for the gallery are the constructions of Carl Andre. His assemblies of modular, unattached forms stand out from the works of artists who have comprised unit assembly with the totality of fixed objects. The mundane origins of Andre’s units are not “hidden” within the art work as in the technique of collage. Andre’s floor reliefs are architectural modifications –– though they are not subliminal since they visually disengage from their surroundings. One of Andre’s subtler shows took place in New York last year. The viewer was encouraged to walk stocking-footed across three areas, each 12 by 12 feet and composed of 144 one-foot-square metal plates. One was not only invited to see each of these “rugs” as a grid arrangement in various metals, but each metal grid’s thermal conductivity was registered through the soles of the feet. Sight analysis diminishes in importance for some of the best new work; the other senses and especially kinesthesis makes “viewing” a more integrated experience.

The scope of a systems esthetic presumes that problems cannot be solved by a single technical solution, but must be attacked on a multileveled, interdisciplinary basis. Consequently some of the more aware sculptors no longer think like sculptors, but they assume a span of problems more natural to architects, urban planners, civil engineers, electronic technicians, and cultural anthropologists. This is not as pretentious as some critics have insisted. It is a legitimate extension of McLuhan’s remark about Pop art when he said that it was an announcement that the entire environment was ready to become a work of art.

As a direct descendant of the “found object,” Robert Smithson’s identifying mammoth engineering projects as works of art (“Site-Selections”) makes eminent sense. Refocusing the esthetic away from the preciousness of the work of art is in the present age no less than a survival mechanism. It Smithson’s “Site-Selections” are didactic exercises, they show a desperate need for environmental sensibility on a larger than room scale. Sigfried Giedion pointed to specific engineering feats as objets d’art thirty years ago. Smithson has transcended this by putting engineering works into their natural settings and treating the whole as a time-bound web of man-nature interactions.

Methodologically Les Levine is possibly the most consistent exponent of a systems esthetic. His environments of vacuum-formed, modular plastic units are never static; by means of an experience’s ambulation through them, they consistently alter their own degree of space-surface penetrability. Levine’s Clean Machine has no ideal vantage points, no “pieces” to recognize, as are implicit in formalist art. One is processed as in driving through the Holland Tunnel. Certainly this echoes Michael Fried’s reference to Tony Smith’s nighttime drive along the uncompleted New Jersey Turnpike. Yet if this is theater, as Fried insists, it is not the stage concerned with focused-upon events. That has more to do with the boundary definitions which have traditionally circumscribed classical and post-classical art. In a recent environment by Levine rows of live electric wires emitted small shocks to passersby. Here behavior is controlled in an esthetic situation with no primary reference to visual circumstances. As Levine insists, “What I am after here is physical reaction, not visual concern.”