Caged Action

Patients who go to Dr. Herbert Ferber Silvers, D.D.S., graduate of Columbia University's School of Dental and Oral Surgery, are usually unaware that he is also a noted sculptor; and those who follow the work of Sculptor Herbert Ferber, 56, have probably never heard of Dr. Silvers. Yet this double career has been going on for more than 30 years, ever since an ambitious young man took up dentistry at Columbia and at the same time began studying at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design at night.

Last week, after a year-long tour about the country, a retrospective of his work landed in Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art, while at the same time a smaller exhibition opened at the Andre Emmerich Gallery. Ferber's iron sculptures are not always comfortable to look at: they often bare aggressive fangs, as if defying the viewer to come close, let alone to touch them. At times, their restlessness seems rather fretful; but at their best, they are full of hurtling vigor.

Bony Wrestlers. Ferber started out as a carver, and the earliest work in the show is a conventional female torso from 1932 --a small but ballooning mass that simply stood in space without having any particular relationship to it. In 1934. Ferber began a series of wrestlers into which space entered quite naturally between the parts of the two struggling bodies. Gradually space became more and more important in his work; he whittled down his figures until flesh became bone and bone in time became purely abstract forms. The wrestling went on, but the combatants were no longer human.

Unlike many of his colleagues. Ferber does not worry about being "true to the material." His only goal is to reproduce the forms whirling in his head, and when stone and wood were no longer flexible enough, he switched to welded metal. Though his sculpture often seems to have an organic life of its own, it is not inspired by nature, and he believes that no association should interfere with the tense interplay between mass and void. "In open sculpture," says Ferber. "the space and the forms are equally important. The eye travels around and inside them. There is no business of front or back because the eye goes right through."

Absent Platform. Ferber's earlier work retained one convention: each piece, imprisoned by gravity, had to rest on an obvious base. In his Spheroid II, Ferber tried to eliminate the platform. The sculpture has the suggestion of an outer surface; but inside, everything is movement, with each form challenging every other. Taken literally, the sculpture does have a top and bottom, but esthetically it does not. Since it is in constant motion, its base is gone.

In his various Calligraphs, Ferber carried the experiment further. In one the action may take place in a kind of cage; in another, the forms bounce back and forth against a wall and a roof and seem never to come to rest. These sculptures do not rise up from the ground; the forms, though loosely defined by a framework, are made to twist and pierce, coil and writhe in almost complete freedom. Ferber has even done a sculpture in which the framework is a whole room--an "environmental work" that envelops the viewer. It is a daring proposal of marriage between sculpture and architecture, though there are probably not many people who would want to be enveloped so vigorously. In almost all his work. Ferber's early wrestling matches go on in the form of a ceaseless battle against constraint. When a work succeeds it becomes not metal, but a magnificent release of energy.

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