(5 of 10)
Die by Telephone. Until two years ago, Tony Smith was self-confessedly an artistic wallflower. He was known, if at all, in Manhattan art circles as a minor architect and Sunday painter of geometric abstractions, a semiprofessional Irishman (his great-grandparents were from the land of Joyce) whose recitals of Finnegans Wake livened up artists' parties. Then, almost overnight, Smith blossomed.
His first sculpture was executed in 1962, when he was teaching basic design at Hunter College. It was a black box. As he recalls it, his students were constructing basic designs out of flip-top cigarette boxes. Tony had them enlarge their designs five times in cardboard to get the effect of added scale. Then one day his eye was caught by a black file box on a colleague's desk.
On his architect's drafting boards, he made a drawing of the box, enlarged the dimensions to 2 ft. by 3 ft. by 2 ft., took it into the Industrial Welding Co. in Newark, whose sign "You specify it; we fabricate it" he had seen while driving to and from his home in South Orange, N.J. "We were a little bit surprised at first," says William Schmidt, the welding company's president. "I wondered, is this guy a kook?"
Schmidt assigned two workmen to the job. First they cut the shapes out of sheet steel with mechanical shears, tack-welded it (a process similar to basting in sewing), then arc-welded it, checking and squaring the piece along the way for accuracy. Schmidt told his men that it was a work of art. "They didn't take it too serious," he says. But they did take special care to choose unscratched pieces of steel. In fact, they did such a good job that the next time Tony wanted a box, a six-foot cube that he named Die, "I just picked up the phone and ordered it."-
From Cool to Hottest. Slowly, Tony's yard in South Orange began to fill with huge, geometric shapes. Except for The Black Box, Die, and a third piece called Free Ride, all were plywood mockups, built with the help of friends and coated with auto-body underpaint. (Like Henry Ford, Tony believes in letting the customer have any color, so long as it's black.) "I never thought of them as sculpture," says Tony today. "I thought of them as basic design." But other sculptors in other studios were building basic boxes and calling it art. A trend was born.
In April 1966, Manhattan's Jewish
Museum staged its "Primary Structures" show, with Free Ride in its entry court. Minimal art was officially launched—and so was Tony Smith. As a movement, minimal art seemed out to prove to the hilt Architect Mies van der Rohe's dictum: less is more. Many of the objects were simply boxes, beams of steel or lines of bricks. Any figurative suggestions were banned. So was any sign of the craftsman's personal touch: whether large or small, the objects were commercially constructed, color was applied with a spray gun. The aim seemed to be to assault the viewer with the very "thingness" of the object. As shadows played across the empty surfaces, gallerygoers were invited to ponder the mysteries of life and the ultimate beauties of 3-D.