See-Throughs

Clarity and purity have been esthetic ideals since Plato first began formulating the concept of perfection, but only in the past 40 years have sculptors begun creating works that are literally as clear and pure as air or water. Only in the past five have they successfully built them. For although plastic and glass designs were put together by Constructivist Naum Gabo and the Bauhaus' Laszlo Moholy-Nagy back in the 1920s, their results amounted to little more than experiments, designed to illustrate the constructivist tenet that space plays as vital a role in sculpture as mass. It remained for a myriad of advanced synthetics and plastics to make see-through sculpture a burgeoning art form in the 1960s (see color opposite).

Still more important is the growing triumph of the minimal outlook. As artists are increasingly dedicated to the belief that "less is more," they are in stinctively drawn to those raw materials that least impede the eye. The clear sculpture that results is meant to afford the viewer a purely sensual delight in the infinite variety of light, its perpetual diffractions, spontaneous diffusions and prismatic permutations that can go on forever.

At least a dozen better-than-average sculptors are currently building next-to-invisible sculptures. Iowa's Hans Breder structures plastic and chrome-plated cubes into flashing games of chance. Minnesota's Robert Israel inflated interest at Manhattan's Whitney Museum with an immense sausage-shaped bubble of clear vinyl that wallowed about an entire, blue-spotlit room. Even Louise Nevelson, the Marianne Moore of modern American sculpture, has won new fans with a current exhibit consisting of the famed Nevelson wall constructions done no longer in wood but in clear Plexiglas.

Wind-Whipped Icicle. Among the recognized leaders is Los Angeles' Larry Bell, 28, who began evolving his coolly opalescent glass boxes five years ago after an early career in painting evoked "a gnawing frustration with two-dimensional form." To portray light and color in a Platonically pure and idealized fashion, he began painting glass cubes with abstract designs, found that the paler his colors became, the more easily spectators were able to ignore his boxes as objects, enjoy them instead for what they did to light. The technology behind Bell's boxes is highly sophisticated, but he dismisses it as "just so much voodoo." To him, a work of art acts best as a catalyst for its time when it strives to be timeless. Says he: "The idea is to make something devoid of any context."

Brooklyn-born David Weinrib, 43, is another artist who feels that technology is, at best, only the handmaiden to inspiration. "The ideas you have," he explains, "force you to try new materials, not the other way around." His Manhattan studio has been redone five times in ten years as he shifted from bronze to steel and plastic constructions and finally to polyester resin. One of his recent plastic pieces is Five Inverted Pyramids, a work that gleams with static tension; it confines the eye with its precise geometry, while at the same time allowing it to penetrate luxuriously into the center of the form.

Newest arrival on the clear plastic scene is San Francisco's Bruce Beasley, 28, whose opulent, crystalline Polomon flows sideways like a wind-whipped icicle. Beasley says he cast Polomon in Du Font's acrylic resin, Lucite, when chemical engineers said it couldn't be done--particularly not by an amateur working with two secondhand baking ovens in his Oakland backyard. So impressed was Du Pont by Polomon that it has agreed to provide Beasley with a partial supply of free Lucite. Like Bell, Beasley maintains that he shifted to translucent sculptures primarily because he wanted to use "light as an element. I can't escape my work being elegant." Unlike Bell, he concedes readily that his work "looks like today. It doesn't look like any other time in history."

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