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Art

The New Art:
Big Ideas for Sale
By Rosalind Constable

[IMAGE] 
Christo's "Cubic Package,"
280-feet-tall, helium filled,
yours for $187,000.

An art gallery with no visible art for sale would seem like a contradiction in terms-like a flower shop with no flowers in the window. But John Gibson runs just such a gallery. He calls it "Projects for Commissions", and he is in the business of selling ideas." I'm interested in selling people the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower," says Gibson. "That's the scale on which I want collectors to start thinking."
  Artists, of course, have been thinking, and working, on that scale for some while now, if not quite at the height of the Eiffel Tower (984 feet), at least that of the Pan Am Building. For example, Gibson has for sale (from photographs) a 280-feet-high helium-filled Cubic Package by Christo, the Bulgarian-born artist famed for packaging anything that takes his fancy, from motor cycles to museums. Shown at last year's Documenta in Kassel Cubic Package is going for $187,000 delivered deflated to some lucky collector with unlimited ceiling.
  John Gibson is a burly (35) man with a neat beard and a ready laugh. In the early '60s he ran an art gallery in Chicago, from where he hoped to sell avant garde art from the East and West coasts. But even though he drove a taxi at night to help meet expenses he could not make a go of it. Gibson came to New York, and very quickly became aware that the work of the new young sculptors was getting too large for average uptown gallery.  In 1965 he became director of Park Place, a cooperative that leased huge space on offbeat West Broadway for the express purpose of showing the monumental sculpture (and painting) of members of the group: Park Place had plenty of space for Robert Grosvenor's 21-feet long cantilevered structures, and Edwin Ruda's 20-feet long shaped canvases.  But as he watched sculpture growing ever larger Gibson realized that the time was approaching when no gallery would be large enough. He then went into business for himself, renting a pocket sized gallery at 27 East 67th Street, from where he sells ideas for monumental-sized sculpture to people bold enough to commission it, and with space enough to contain it.
  "Mainly what I'm about," says Gibson, "is art projects for public and corporate places." He is seeking patrons in the "new skyscraper cities," now chiefly located in America's Southwest, but hopefully later to be found in the emerging African countries. "I think Atlanta is a new kind of skyscraper city," says Gibson "I find there an openness of mind you'd never find in Chicago. New York is different. New York is always new."
  The openmindedness of Atlanta centers around the Great Southwest Atlanta Corporation, which owns a amusement center called Six Flags Over Georgia, and recently bought 3000 adjacent acres for an Industrial Park GSAC has already spent $350,000 on extremely up-to-date sculpture for its Industrial Park, and plans to acquire 1000 pieces over the next ten years. (Douglas Mac-Agy heads the sculpture committee, and Josef Albers is in charge of coordinating the colors of the industrial buildings. Gibson has so far sold them eighteen pieces of sculpture (eight of them commissions) by such well-known Primary Structuralists as Will Insley, Don Judd, Les Levine, Gerald Laing and Sol Lewitt.
  Somewhat Facetiously, Gibson has said he is in the business of selling "mail order monuments." But he really means it: he is convinced that only sculpture on a monumental scale fits in with today's skyscraper world. "My true love," he admits, "is visionary sculpture." By this he means, for example, a skyscraper the height of the Empire State Building, packaged by Christo, and standing in lonely grandeur in the middle of the Phoenix Valley.
  Another visionary project Gibson would like to see constructed is Will Insley's Isometric Channel Space Concentric Reverse. On paper this is simply a small geometric drawing. (See cut) Constructed, it would consist of a steel grille 480 feet square (larger than a New York City block) over a gravel fill of 12-feet-deep reversed pyramids. Says Insley: "I think a person identifies very well with 12 feet, twice the height of a man." He waould like his piece built in flat, treeless country, but Insley, who comes from Indianapolis, adds: "I often tend to think of things in Indiana-in the middle of a cornfield,

46 NEW YORK