Caro

It was big, but I am not sure it was monumental. There was nothing really intestesting to look at, except maybe the very visible seams, rising from the surface of the work, the patination of the bronze was too even to be noteworthy, but not even in a way t hat was slick or profound.

It hasn’t stayed with me, as a piece that breaks open modernist sculpture—though I found it interesting that I can never tell Caro apart from Hyde…I think the core though, was that in a room with an Olitski, and a Poons, I could see the narrative, but I have no idea how to talk about them.

I do not know how to read painting whose central goal is texture as opposed to colour or line. I am not even sure that I want to. (It was a really nice Poons though, this dappled grit of black over a lavender/grayish field, lunar but not isolate.) But I could find my way around, and after a few days of looking at those fellows, I think that I could note where a good building up of material and a bad building up of material, begin, intersect, work in concordance or oppositon, and finally end. My love of slickness, of lack of texture, of smoothed of machined surfaces, would give me an entry point, as would my appreciation of the formal building up in proto or early pop works, work that is essentially about formalist surface tension.

I have no idea how to look at sculpture. I do not know what a good sculpture or a bad sculpture is. I know how to look at 3d art that is not sculptural, I can place what I like formally about Judd, Andre, Flavin, Hesse, or Nevelson, to name 6. But I cannot use that formal knowledge to sit back and look at this Caro, and say this is why this piece is interesting. (and there was one in the basement, that was a table top version, that made it even more difficult)

I kept trying, but the thots came out in half sentences, cheap and easy. I like the transparency of medium. I am not sure why this is still a muddy brown instead of shiny or green. Sometimes it made me feel like a philistine, I literally did not have the vocab to talk about the pieces themselves. The table piece was grey, but it wasn’t steel. It featured a circular hole fastened to a base. Coming out from the hole were 5 or 6 large shards, in a similar material. The shards were wide at the base, and long at the ends. The larger pieces, was about as tall as I was, and featured 4 segments. They were constructed in such a way that they looked like a screen. Some of the pieces were oblong, and some were rectanglur.

See, that paragraph was awkard, that the piece was shoved into a window and could not be walked around in, was part of the problem. But I have walked around major Caro’s before. I do not know how to read not only his work, but large abstract sculpture. I think that I have mentioned this, in previous essays, on the fellow, but it would be interesting to know, from the modernist guys. When I am standing in front of a large Caro or Smith (I saw several David Smiths in SF and had the exact same problem. or Hyde work, how do I look at it?