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ROLL 3836 281-2 57th STREET REVIEW ---- New York City December 15, 1966 25 cent ---- Vol. 1 No. 2 EDITOR: Jock Truman REBEN NAKIAN Egan, 41 W, 57 St., thru December 30 The doors of the Egan gallery are open and the Nakian sculptures are there, back from The Museum of Modern Art; quietly, unpublicized, fortuitously, as powerful a show as there is in the city. "THe Birth of Venus," "The Goddess of the Goldern Thighs," "Hiroshima" and "Paris and Juno" from the "Judgement of Paris" series. All monumental bronzes are on exhibit as well as exquisite terra cotta plaques and figures, bronze plaques and figures and drawings. There is a different silence around the works than there was in the museum. -- Robert-Newman ROBERT SMITHSON Dwan, 29 W. 57 St., thru January 4 When a painter or sculptor is a good writer it is almost impossible to look at his work without reading his theories in it. The catalogue for this show Smithson has published several charts and a series of statements about his sculpture called "Plunge," a ten-unit piece made of black, intersecting cubes. It is an interesting series of gradations but none of the things Sminsonsays about it seems to have real bearing on its impact. "Doubles," a six-unit group of reddish brown shapes which projects improbably from the wall is a much more successful piece. Its title puts no extra weight on it. It is handsome, memorable and disturbing and successfully challenges one's sense of space-time. It is in pieces like "Alogon," "Ziggarat," and "Three Vortices" where Smithson seems to be illustrating theories rather than creating anything. The new pursuit of "new dimensions," "a new kind of sight" could not be more important and it would be a pity to slow it down with too much talk. Perhaps Eddington's remark says it best: "It would probably be wiser to nail up over the door of a new quantum theory a note 'Structural alterations in progress - No admittance except on business' and particularly to warn the doorkeeper to keep out prying philosophers." -- L. George ROBERT SMITHSONIAN Dwan, 29 W. 57 St., thru January 4 Revising the work of a sculptor like Smithsonian is difficult because of the impossibility of fixing upon a definite criterion for its evaluation. It could be said that the work is eminently successful because it fulfills the artist’s philosophical and theoretical formulations. If that kind of success is the sort to which great art strives then indeed Smithson should be content. The artist’s preoccupation with the instant manifests itself in sequential works of identical forms which increase slowly and regularly in size achieving an unambiguous breakdown and distraction of the flow of time. His statement about time is further expressed by the fact that these works can be read from smaller to larger or vice versa. Smithson uses the changing configuration of ostensibly simple forms (piles of cubes) to demonstrate the irrationality of the rational. He chooses a small non-human scale in order to objectify his art and thereby add to its non-rational and otherworldly quality. He paints a stainless steel structures in non-colors to render them even colder and more impersonal. The problem with his work, however, is that despite the fact that he has found his formula is diligently an executed the meticulously, to the end of concretising his thoughts, the metalic by-products of his philosophical
