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Barbara Chase-Riboud's new sculptures, shown at the Parsons Gallery this month, attack such formal problems as the function of the base, and such poetic ones as the evocation of magic rituals in ancient African and Oriental cultures. 

She is black. She is beautiful. She is a woman. She is young. She is an American who has lived in Europe for 10 years. The danger is that all this becomes a double-edged weapon that deflects attention from her real concerns. Barbara Chase-Riboud is, above all, a sculptor, a draftsman and a jeweler. Her work certainly is related to her life: "Baggage tags I carry around," she says, but it is equally related to her sense of independence and poetic power. 
Her recent work leads both to Why Did We Leave Zanzibar (see colorplate) and to Bathers.
In Zanzibar, coils of blond silk, twisted, knitted, looped, braided, knotted, fall to the floor from a polished bronze high-relief. The sculpture is executed with great technical control both in the silk cording and in the use of the bronze. Each sculpture is unique, neither the cording nor the lost-wax process can be repeated. 
"I consider myself an artisan," she likes to say. One of her objectives is to unite an art which is considered noble to one which is considered craft—bronze casting, traditionally virile and male-oriented, with braiding reserved for women—as well as to reinterpret in a contemporary way the (magical) qualities of primitive art. 
What interests her consistently is the combination of opposites: Here, the burnished and the mat, the hard and the soft, the forceful and the tender, what resists and what submits. She plays not only on contrasts but also on the interaction between materials. For example, she wants to give the impression that the silk doesn't merely fall from the metal, but binds it to the floor, even supports it in a way; and the bronze, in which irregular elements are juxtaposed more or less vertically, suggests a fluid movement that can be read from top to bottom, like a waterfall.
The total effect is one of luxuriant nature, of water tossing up polished rocks. The silk cords, at the same time, suggest liana creepers that attack a building by insinuations, choking the foundations and splitting the polished mass into numerous fragments.
This sculpture, with its deliberately provocative title, develops the same formal problems stated in 1969-70 in her Malcolm X series; it is an effort to reinterpret with contemporary means an artistic form that can express something specifically black in all its potency. She clearly explained her motives:
"This piece has African connotations, especially if one considers how the African dancing mask (wood) is always combined with
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Author: Françoise Nora. Paris-based art historian who contributes frequently to these pages, has written books on Gauguin and Fénéon. 

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Bathers, 1972, aluminum, silk,
synthetic cords, 92 inches square.

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Untitled bronze sculpture with silk cord, 1972,
longest dimension (without cord) 31 inches.

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Charcoal drawing, 1971, 20 inches high.