Mark di Suvero's rugged steel sculptures combine formal refinement and industrial toughness in abstract compositions that are playful and serious, whimsical and vigorous. This mix of delicacy and bluntness forms the basis of much modern sculpture and has provided about 50 years' worth of sculptors with ample room to maneuver, each shifting the balance to suit his or her purpose.
But that leeway has never been enough for Di Suvero, whose seven new sculptures and 11 drawings at the L.A. Louver Gallery add such a strong dose of hands-on interactivity that their industrial-strength elegance is blown away by their unapologetic embrace of homegrown corniness.
At a time when corporate professionalism and digital slickness infect all aspects of culture, it's heartening to see Di Suvero's stubbornly wonderful sculptures, each of which finds heroic moments in the humble activities of tinkerers -- ordinary folk who cobble together scraps of this and that to enhance their surroundings and get a little bit extra out of life's ups and downs.
Di Suvero, born in 1933, wastes no time in linking his art to common things. In the main gallery, the first piece you see, "al di la," is an idiosyncratic, nearly 10-foot-tall gong that spins and tips as you strike it with a pair of rubber hammers, both of which slip into a stainless steel pipe when not in use.
The music you make by drumming on Di Suvero's symmetrical sculpture is cathartic -- and pretty good exercise if you keep it up long enough. More important, it makes you feel the cut, bent and welded steel in your body, its reverberations traveling through your hands, arms, shoulders and torso. When "al di la" comes to a rest, you know it differently than you did from a distance.
The second piece is "Luck's Prime," a hammock made of cantilevered I-beams, aluminum tubing, nylon rope, chunks of rough wood and a thick sheet of rubber. The nearly 14-foot-tall, 20-foot-long contraption screams overkill and goofiness.
To lie back and relax in it is to be pleasantly suspended. At the same time, the mammoth sculpture gives palpable form to the psychologically charged, often radically unbalanced relationship between labor and leisure that defines so much of American life, raising troubling questions about justice, equity and civilization.
