For the last post in my
Snakes in Art series, I’ll take a look at modern sculpture. This is a neutral
snake, neither sinister nor benign. Like a piece from 1961, Willy, Snake is Out references crawling natural
things in the form of steel tetrahedrons (four-sided form). I like to think of
it as an updated Mucalinda!
Smith turned from
architecture and architectonic paintings to sculpture in 1961. His earliest
monumental pieces, such as this one, explored shapes and geometric
relationships found in models of architecture he had never seen built. Despite
a title that relates it to a life form, Smith’s work is not pictorial or
anecdotal. In spirit, Snake is Out is related to his first monumental work Cigarette,
where the writhing, elongated form encourages the viewer to walk completely
around it to get a sense of the whole.
Despite the purity of form
and simplicity of Smith’s shapes, he resisted the stylistic term Minimalism. He
insisted that his work was always on the edge of dreams. However, he shared
modern artists’ enthusiasm for abstraction, partly because he conceived of his
works on such a large scale. His sculptures reflect in part his enthusiasm for
architecture.
Other posts in this series:
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