Imaginary transports: using architectural elements that seem to refer to history, Ned Smyth's public sculpture evokes a golden age that never was - On Site

Art in America, April, 2002 by Tom Mcdonough

For a relatively brief time in the late 1980s, an hour-long stroll through lower Manhattan could have provided you with a rather complete survey of the range of public sculpture at that time. Beginning on Broadway just above Wall Street, you could visit Isamu Noguchi's Cube (1973), a large cadmium-red steel block with a great cylindrical hole punched out of it, pre-cariously balanced on one corner. Positioned on the elegant travertine plaza fronting the tailored Marine Midland Bank Building, the work possessed a purist geometry and an almost narcissistic self-containment that represented the last gasps of a postwar modernist esthetic nearly as well as the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill skyscraper behind it.

That esthetic and the "plunk-down" sculptures it had produced throughout the 1970s were the targets of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981, destroyed 1989), the next stop on our tour. Located at the foot of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on Foley Square, a short walk north from Cube, Tilted Arc was a 120-foot-long inclining plate of curved steel, conceived specifically, as Serra described it, to "alter and dislocate the decorative effect of the plaza." (1) Rejecting the model of self-absorbed monoliths so often found on corporate esplanades, rejecting the notion that merely transplanting sculpture to the outdoors was sufficient to render it "public," Serra, along with many of his contemporaries, called for a sited approach to public sculpture, one in which the work would be understood as an intervention in its particular setting and as a refusal to be the mere decorative adjunct to surrounding architecture.

From Foley Square you could walk west and south, ultimately reaching Battery Park City, that postmodern development built out into the Hudson River on landfill. At the foot of Albany Street, amid apartment towers harking back to classic designs of the 1930s, you would find the last stop on this tour, Ned Smyth's Upper Room (1986). As the title suggests, it was an almost architectural form, a sort of ruin composed of exotic, vaguely Egyptian-looking columns surrounding a bluestone-paved court. In the center stood a gazebo to shelter visitors from the sun and a low stone table with inlaid chessboards. This, too, was sited sculpture, but absent the antagonism or critical attitude towards its setting. While declining modernist egocentricity, Smyth coupled the new conception of public sculpture with a desire for utilitarian, welcoming spaces. Upper Room was neither the first nor the last of such spaces; sculptors Mary Miss, Alice Aycock and Jackie Ferrara were among the pioneers in this genre, while Smyth himself, over the past 20-odd years, has gone on to produce a large body of comparable public works, which range from pseudo-classical ornament to tile and mosaic and architectural decor. His more conservative strain of sited sculpture, with its affinity for conventionally inviting places and for whimsy and illusion, has received relatively little attention in recent years, but a spate of new pieces in several cities provides us with an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with this original public artist.

Smyth's public sculpture can only be understood when seen in the context of his early career, that is, in relation to the work he exhibited in the late 1970s at Holly Solomon Gallery, home to several of the leading figures of the Pattern and Decoration movement, then at its height. In his debut there in 1976, he already had revealed the essential components of his esthetic: his cast-concrete Roman Gothic Arcade consisted of a row of freestanding columns whose flattened Egyptian papyrus-motif capitals joined together to form a unified range of pointed arches, while behind this arcade was a raised basin, reminiscent of a font, backed by a flat fortress wall. These sculptural elements transformed the gallery space, evoking a Western architectural heritage that spanned over a thousand years of history. Eschewing the rigors of much contemporary post-Minimalist sculpture, with its self-referential focus on process, Smyth openly declared his interest in archetypal meanings, symbolism and the decorative. It was an historicist postmodernism avant la lettre.

These interests have continued to preoccupy Smyth right up to the present. One of his most recent public commissions, Foot Hold (1999), designed for the campus of Montclair State University in the upscale suburb of Montclair, N.J., clearly recapitulates such early concerns. Confined to a narrow courtyard between two undistinguished classroom buildings, Foot Hold transforms its mundane site into a marvelous rock garden, with carefully placed boulders and low columns covered in glass mosaic set amid a gravel landscape. (This outdoor work is complemented by a massive mosaic mural, It All Evolves Up the Rungs of DNA, located inside an adjacent science building.) Those columns have long been in Smyth's sculptural repertoire, first appearing in his 1977 exhibition at Holly Solomon, where he had collaborated with painter Brad Davis on an environment titled The Garden. (2) There he had first devised their distinctive form, loosely based on Egyptian and Islamic precedents, with their extravagant floral capitals, often at least half as high as the shafts on which they rested. The Garden, like Roman Gothic Arcade, was an attempt to assemble historical forms in a decorative whole to create a fantasy space, to turn the mundane gallery into an evocation of a grander, even wondrous elsewhere; Foot Hold attempts to do the same for the equally mundane college campus.