David Smith, Untitled (Zig III with Two Circle Sentinel, Two Box Structure, and March Sentinel, Bolton Landing), c. 1961
Oct 5, 2011
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David Smith, Untitled (Zig III with Two Circle Sentinel, Two Box Structure, and March Sentinel, Bolton Landing), c. 1961
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Sarah Hamill: This photograph is a photograph taken in Smith's fields, where he installed a lot of his sculptures in rows and grids outside of his sculpture studio and his house.
Narrator: Sarah Hamill.
Sarah Hamill: Zig III is framing Two Circle Sentinel, and then off to the right is Zig II. What we're looking at, then, is a comment on photography as a framing device. The photograph is framing the sculpture, and the sculpture is then framing another.
Narrator: The traditional function of a frame is to set an object off from the surrounding space—to clarify it and to make it stable. We’ve seen that Smith played with the stabilizing conventions of sculpture. Here he does the same thing with the picture frame. Zig III may frame the works behind it—but it also merges with them.
Sarah Hamill: In many of his photographs of his sculptures in groups, what he did was he created images of them joined together so that. . . the sculptural space and forms composed a cubic picture. And here what we see is Smith using photography as a way to think about pictorial space using his sculpture.
