So many things dangle in these sculptures, lures for the touch needed to set the pieces in motion, that they leave an impression of baited hooks. Cum Glass, a magnifying glass suspended from a wire in an eye-shaped opening which ultimately fans into a fish tail, only confirms an iconography of enticement. As these elements suggest, what Mark di Suvero angles for, what he wants to hook, is our retina as well as our hand, thus lending a punning depth to his repeated use of hook-and-eye hardware. In the spinning pendulum of the glass is the mesmerist’s gluttony for viewers’ souls as well as for their Pavlovian obedience, the desire to have it all—doubting Thomas’ seeing-and-touching conversion experience, the micro/macro nesting of magnifying and fish-eye lenses, fragile metaphysics, and muscle-rippling bulk.
Di Suvero’s ambitions have been viewed critically as an egalitarian blurring of roles, allowing the audience the tactile, motivating power of the sculptor. It’s not just that we are seduced as the Indians were with glass and baubles—that has its funny side. It’s that although di Suvero’s works remain democratically dependent on the viewer, when they are as small as most of those here are they miss their own autonomy, must function as playthings despite their facade of self-determination. Anthony Caro once ventured that every sculptor dreams of defying gravity; there are only analogic residues of that fantasy in di Suvero’s top-heavy piles on narrow supports, inertia-defying folds, and forms mined out of their bases, immobile matter uprisen on its tail—a cobra charmed out of its coil. The work avoids the pridefulness of self-starting cybernetics and falls into the more genial of Edward Lucie-Smith’s categories of kinetic art, not “pseudoscientific research” but “showmanship”—still, however, passively absorbed entertainment. If di Suvero overcomes this relapse into the inert in the two monumental pieces, it’s because offsetting terms have been introduced into the spectacle. With To Intuit, it’s the steamshovel’s menace and a machinery of doggedness chiding its subject; with Zar, it’s a real rather than hoped-for melding of optics and physics. This is the only piece that pictorializes its capacity for movement (in an oversized spiral and bold diagonal blades). On a spring-based rockinghorse version of Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s The Horse, di Suvero rides the forward-thrusting Futurist curl, and his constructivist sympathies, onto clean turf.
—Jeanne Silverthorne
