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Oldenburg, it was feared, might impair the playland's image as "a family-oriented operation." Fortunately, the Gemini company (TIME, Jan. 18) stepped in to sponsor the icebag. Puffing and rearing to its full 18-ft. height like some cross between Mount Fuji, a tomato and a dinosaur, it has turned out to be one of the key works in Oldenburg's brilliant career.
Etching on the Eyeball. Those projects that do triumph come out of a real interaction with, not mere use of, industrial facilities. Boyd Mefferd's room (made with the help of Universal Television) is a stunning perceptual experience: a pitch-black chamber lined with strobe lights. When they flash, the effect is engulfing and somewhat unnerving: silhouettes etch themselves on the retina as on film, and afterimage sheets of brilliant color drift and flower across the entire field of vision. Mefferd's piece is unique in that it is wholly objectless art —everything happens on and to the retina without mediation.
Equally remarkable light-pieces were developed by Newton Harrison (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Rockne Krebs (Hewlett-Packard Co.). Harrison's room is dark, and in it stand five tall plastic cylinders. They are filled with helium, argon and other gases. When an electric current passes through the cylinders, the ionized gas lights up—rose-white, orange, deep blues, greens and purples. By controlling the gas flow, Harrison produces extraordinary changes of form in the light—bubbles, disks, even artificial lightning. The effect is solemn and exquisitely meditative; it is also wholly pictorial, without a hint of gimmickry. The room is Harrison's private homage to Mark Rothko: "I made a very specific reference to him," he says. "This was my way of acknowledging a man who I thought was involved in a kind of magnificent and very lonely vision."
Rockne Krebs' laser room is a sharper affair: intense beams of red, green and blue light slice through the darkness, rebounding from concealed mirrors to form an intricate lattice that almost abolishes any sense of bodily space. Indeed, one of the general effects of the "A. and T." show is to shift the focus from art as object to art as environmental sensation. The visitor is always being encompassed —by gas lighting or lasers or, in the case of Tony Smith's piece, by several thousand cardboard tetrahedrons and octahedrons supplied by the Container Corp. of America. Taped together, they form an immense, gloomy brown cave pierced by Wagnerian shafts of dim yellow light. With its emphasis on internal space and disregard of volume, it is his best sculpture in recent years.