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Caro abandoned modeling and put together steel shapes—girders, plates, tubes—on the floor in a spirit of improvisation, pushing and tilting them around until they "locked" aesthetically. The result was a uniquely conversational and approachable kind of sculpture, quite free from the massy rhetoric of bulge and handmade texture that a younger generation of English artists found oppressive in Moore's work.
There were precedents for this, like Alberto Giacometti's floor sculpture of 1932, Woman with Her Throat Cut, which anticipates Caro so thoroughly that it is difficult to believe Curator Rubin's claim, in his long and other wise formidably reasoned catalogue essay, that it "had no direct influence" on him. But in the '60s Caro's horizontality was liberating. Floating, perky, mass denying, bland of surface, sprightly in color—how refreshing it all looked after the bronze rhetoric of what Herbert Read called "the geometry of fear."
Some vestigial habits remained. The dozens of bolts that held Caro's Midday (1960) together are, for the most part, ornamental: a kind of decorative texture, like studs on a jacket. But by 1962, when he made Early One Morning, Caro was in full control of his sculptural means. Its red paint is so intense as to produce a vibration, a smarting optical dazzle. This lightness and disembodiment is reinforced by the forms; they touch and spring away from one another with a delectably airy insouciance. Caro's sculpture from now on would be a matter of touch and gesture rather than accumulation and structure. Later works like Orangerie or even some of the unpainted, varnished steel pieces he made in 1974 at Veduggio, in Italy, conspire, in their deft placement and laconic sufficiency, toward an elegance unmatched in contemporary sculpture.
Sublime Essence. Well and good; but the effort to go further, to establish Caro as the one and only serious heavy weight, can lead Caro's exegetes into some astounding cadenzas of gibberish. Thus to Michael Fried a simple cantilever structure like Caro's Prairie (1967) becomes nothing less than a metaphor of sublime essence rising above the gross sublunary earth: "Prairie defines the ground, not as that which ultimately supports everything else, but as that which does not in itself require support. It makes this fact about the ground both phenomenologically surprising and sculpturally significant."
Of course, it would only do this to people who find the solidity of the earth (or the floor of MOMA) rather odd and need to be reminded of it by sculptures. The denial of the material in Caro's work, quite as much as its formal precision, appeals to the transcendentalist mind: to a criticism based on the flatness of painting and the open pictoriality of sculpture, on work that "overcomes" its own material essence.