Tony Smith, Die

0:00:05.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art looking at a sculpture from 1962 by Tony Smith called Die.

0:00:11.8 Dr. Beth Harris: As in dice that you throw in a game, ’cause this is a cube.

0:00:17.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, it could be one of a pair of dice, or it could be a reference to the idea of death, or it could be a reference to the idea of die casting of the machinery of metal production. This is cor-ten steel, but it’s lifted ever so slightly on a little plinth that’s kicked in so you can’t see it, but it creates a shadow line so that the object actually floats ever so slightly.

0:00:39.5 Dr. Beth Harris: From here, I can’t see that it’s actually got four sides. It almost looks as though it could just be two sided.

0:00:46.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, because it’s six feet, unless you happen to be quite tall, you really don’t see over it, and so it does fill your view. And what’s interesting is that when you walk directly up to it, it completely obscures your view and is about as tall as the average person and about as wide as their arms if they’re extended. And in fact, Tony Smith, the artist, was originally an architect, and he had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright and used the six-foot measure as a basic measure for the inhabitants of the structures that he built.

0:01:16.5 Dr. Beth Harris: Well, and the way you just described it is enclosing a human body within a geometric shape, the shape of a square. It reminded me of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvius Man.

0:01:25.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: I think very consciously Tony Smith is thinking about that. The artist was really erudite. He could read ancient Greek and Latin. He was in love with mythology. He was a deep humanist, and Leonardo’s ideas are very present, I think, in a work like this.

0:01:39.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And yet it also reminds me of sculptures by Richard Serra.

0:01:43.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, Serra actually speaks to the impact that Smith had on him. Smith is of a generation of the abstract expressionists, although he’s often incorrectly lumped in with the minimalists of the mid-1960s. But he painted and was close friends with Jackson Pollock, for example. And even though this sculpture is manufactured, it’s something that was planned, he was always interested in the idea of spontaneity, even in three-dimensional works of art.

0:02:09.6 Dr. Beth Harris: So he’s often lumped in then with artists like Donald Judd, for example. I’m reminded of his wooden cubes, for example.

0:02:18.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: That’s right, but those are cerebral in a different way. In works of art by people like Donald Judd, there’s an attempt to create an object in the world that had no parallel, that had no reference outside itself. Whereas with Tony Smith, in a sense, the opposite is happening. This is loaded with references. It is a pure geometric form, and in that way, it’s referencing the Platonic ideas of the ancient world.

0:02:39.9 Dr. Beth Harris: That’s true, ideas about ideal forms that might remind us of the divine or the mathematical harmonies of the universe.

0:02:47.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: But this is made out of this brutish cor-ten steel that has been roughly welded together, and so it is still a product of the industrial world. And it’s almost as if Tony Smith is asking, can humanism, can the ideas of the ancients, can the ideas of the Renaissance continue to exist in an industrial culture that is so brutish, where the natural materials are not marble, but are steel?

0:03:10.7 Dr. Beth Harris: In marble, this becomes something else entirely. Then those ideas about Platonic forms, ideal forms, pure geometry become much more closely associated with ancient Greek philosophy. But in these modern materials, it’s very hard for us to make that leap.

0:03:26.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: And it would be inauthentic for this artist to use marble. Marble is not the material that we use now. This is an industrial culture. In a sense, there’s a kind of bravery, a kind of honesty by saying, can I put these two kinds of things together? And he goes further in that direction because he didn’t actually even make this. You know, we live in a world of factory production. And so what he did is he called up his foundry, Lippincott, and he put this order in. And they delivered it to his house, which was then in South Orange, New Jersey.

0:03:53.2 Dr. Beth Harris: Here in the sculpture garden at MoMA, surrounded by the flowers of spring, this pure geometric form really stands out. So maybe the cube is making me look again at the contrast between those two different kinds of forms.

0:04:07.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: And to think about whether or not it’s possible to create beauty out of industrial culture that we generally look at as ugly.

0:04:14.4 Dr. Beth Harris: So why raise it up slightly off the ground?

0:04:17.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, look what happens. All of a sudden, because it’s not on the ground, it does float up. It feels lighter. We actually have a sense that it’s hollow. If it was on the ground, we might actually mistake it as a solid. And I think that Smith wants us to understand how this was made, even though we can’t penetrate it visually, to have a sense of what its constructive technique is. And in fact, the welding on the edges is quite visible. There’s been no attempt to hide that at all.

0:04:40.4 Dr. Beth Harris: Well, and I think also by having it float slightly off the ground, we recognize it more as a cube. We see its edges more.

0:04:48.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: It is, in a sense, more perfect. It’s not bound to the earth. It takes on that Platonic ideal as a perfect form.

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