Spatiodynamisme

A new tower, 160 feet high, loomed last week above the trees of Paris' Park St. Cloud, looking like a giant Tinkertoy sparkling in the sun. The tower is made of steel tubes, supporting scattered metal plaques colored red, blue, yellow, orange, brown and silver. Part of an international building show, it is meant to dramatize the possibility of a new kind of monumental sculpture.

Such lofty, light and airy abstractions, the tower's inventor believes, would be a great and welcome change from the traditional bronze men on horseback, men in capes, and men thinking, chin in hand. But Sculptor Nicolas Schoffer, 43, does not stop at purely visual effects. He got a composer friend to extract a musical tone from each plaque on his tower (by banging or rubbing each one separately) and record the sounds together on tape. Then he persuaded an engineer to build an electronic "brain" for the tower which "plays" the tones according to the effects of light, heat, humidity and surrounding noises. The result sounds rather like a Balinese gamelan: a succession of groans, bongings, sighs and muted tinkles. "This piece of sculpture," says Schoffer, "aside from its purely visual role, becomes the source of an emission of sonorous background directed towards the city."

Hungarian-born Schoffer painted dolls in a Paris factory before World War II, fought with a Maquis hill band during the German occupation. "Under the shock of war," he says, "I evolved into a different sort of person. I began meeting intellectuals; I began sculpting new ideas; I began to hold conferences."

The theme of Schoffer's "conferences" he calls spatiodynamisme. Sculpture, he thinks, should reach up and out to dominate space, rather than simply filling a certain portion of it. Modern materials such as tempered steel make such "dynamic" sculptures possible on a grand scale, and the addition of so-called music by electronic means would make them pretty hard to ignore. But Schoffer's success in getting his tower sculpture constructed is only the beginning. "My goal," he says solemnly, "is a city built up around this tower and, so to speak, taking its essence from the sculpture."

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