For this blog post we were asked to question the reason of the placement of our sculpture. Why it was placed outside the confines of a museum or if it is a replication of other artwork like it. Quite a few of the sculptures placed outside the Sheldon Museum of Art have anthropomorphic qualities to them. However Tony Smith’s sculpture, “Willy”, is one of those that differentiate in the sense that it has no human qualities. It is more abstract and keeps the onlooker interested to find out what it resembles. Each way you look at “Willy” you are exposed to more types of geometric shapes.
The incorporation of “Willy”, a highly geometric shape, in the outdoors may signify mankind’s incorporation into nature. Humans are thought to dominate the nature around them, removing all traces of natural life in an area and settling down in that region. We make large, geometric objects, sharp, angular and symmetric objects. Nature, while not necessarily angular, also presents symmetry. Snowflakes, for example, have their own unique symmetry, even though each one is different from another, as humans are. The integration of a manmade, angular sculpture may represent man’s desire to place himself amongst nature, and “Willy” may be an attempt to signify the bridge human’s should make with nature. In other words, a sculpture placed outdoors may be an attempt of the artist to put man back outdoors, into nature, to see nature’s beauty as well as that of the sculpture and to be in nature, rather than cooped up in some stuffy building.
Tony Smith incorporated geometry into each of his sculptures. An onlooker is able to look at his art from different angles and break it down seeing simplistic shapes that we learned when we were small children. He had a background in architecture and incorporated his knowledge of structure and angles into these pieces. Although “Willy” was placed outdoors, it was put in an area that was less of the “traditional” form of nature. It was placed around buildings and in a more materialistic portion of the nature surrounding the Sheldon Museum of Art. This placement plays off of Tony Smith’s architecture background. “Willy”, like some of his other works, is a “larger than life” sort of artwork. As Tony Smith created more and more of his pieces, he made them larger and expanded out of museums and out of buildings to the outdoors where his art could expand and match the scale of America’s cities (Time Magazine). His pieces also challenged the art of his time. His work took sculptures of clay and turned them into metal. His art tended to resemble the geometric shapes and designs that architecture is based off of. The makeup of Tony Smith’s art pieces can argue the relationship between architecture and art. Tony Smith’s background in architecture highly influenced his work. “Willy” is placed amongst buildings, in other words architecture, this shows how his artwork can work with these buildings to enhance its features.
Works Cited:
(1967, October 13). Sculpture: master of the monumentalists. Time Magazine, Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837402-1,00.html
