Mirko at the VAC: A Magical Mystery Tour

MIRKO IS NOT a public person, Harvard's sculptor-in-residence keeps his Carpenter Center studio curtained off and locked, so that few people ever got to see his sculptures.

When confronted by the locked door of his fifth floor studio I originally felt that somehow Harvard's sculptor ought to belong to me; I ought to be able to watch as well as learn from him. But after tripping over and disarranging at least five of his works in process, and after being disturbed at the interview with Mirko by a stray artsy busybody, it's easy to see why Mirko doesn't hold open house. His jungle of massive wood beams from razed houses (works-to-be), metal shears, styrofoam, paints, glues, saws and over 100 sculptures and sculptures-to-be is neither suitable nor navigable for masses of visitors.

Mirko Basaldella (he prefers to use only the first name) wants to "give students the grammar to express themselves." The design programs he directs at the Carpenter Center differ radically from traditional figure study and painting practice.

Indeed, he and other teachers at the VAC shy so strongly from academism that they won't even exhibit their own works in the building, because that might encourage imitation instead of learning.

Mirko is a most wordlessly cloquent grammar teacher. He visits all the classes in the VAC occasionally. When he dropped in on one VES 20 section he moved a one inch black square into a big white area on a figure-ground exercise. Instantly the design improved 100 per cent -- you knew what "activating space" meant and what a square could do, although it would take ten pages to explain it in writing.

Mirko came to America in 1957 to organize the University's design courses, although he was already an established sculptor and had designed the famous bronze gates for the Ardeatine Caves in Rome. He teaches because he's interested in students and wants to give them "something different [in training] than what I had." Mirko studied traditional art school methods in Italy.

Sometimes the teachers at the Carpenter Center can drive students to incessant nail-biting and general anger. In all the design workshop, including Mirko's own, people gripe, "He's absolutely incomprehensible and he just wants us to do everything his way."

One student said, "The secret to success in Mirko's course is to get the project done while he's not looking. Otherwise he poses too many questions that you can't resolve." And Mirko supposedly teaches by the Socratic method--he asks questions until you come to his conclusions.

But once you decide that the Mirko (or Alcalay, or Reimann, or Neuman, etc.) language is the one you want to learn, the "grammar" seems correct. Teachers' corrections are improvements-- your eyes tell you that even while your ego rebels.

MIRKO stands closer to an interviewer than Americans do, and he speaks softly, never making press-release-type pronouncements of his beliefs and theories on Art. His works are what is public. When they are complete Mirko "shoos them off like grown children." And he does not cherish favorites because "to love your own work very much is like to love yourself--it is sick, morbid."

He protested to the secretary who arranged my interview, "But I am not a star."

Like most arists today Mirko rejects attempts, similar to those of Coney Island portraitists, at a frozen duplication of reality. The reality, he feels, is better than a copy because in the duplication you lose "the warmth of a cheek, or the movement of a tree." For art to equal nature it must "create its own magic reality."

Words tend toward a Coney Island Mirko. They can say that Mirko looks intently at you while he speaks, and that he smiles at just the right moment to put you at ease, and that he really has fun when he shows you how his mobile sculpture moves and makes sounds when he pushes it.

But even his own words, and still less those of his cataloguers who speak of "interplay of space and void" are inadequate when they come to his work. They cannot delineate a method of work, or describe the shape of a from.

Mirko's sculpture, from beginning to viewing, is simply nonverbal.

EVEN Mirko's telling of how he makes a sculpture could fit any of at least 1000 great and minor artisst today. There is material--styrofoam, bronze, wood, automobile parts, plexiglass, wood. Material tells you what is permissible--bronze cannot be translucent, while plexiglass makes Mirko play with its strange transparency. Uncolored plexiglass does not exist visually, until you cut it. So it is the elimination of material that makes the form, while the bulk makes a void.

Then there is nature, from which most of his coherent forms come. Bird wings, insect claws around flowers, snakes--anthropomorphic forms are a major source for Mirko.

Man stands out in nature and in Mirko's sculpture. Noses, arms and faces turn up frequently. Many of his objects are totem-pole-like--the piece by the Holyoke Center express elevator is one example, although this work is less interesting and more rigidly rectilinear than most in his studio.

Mirko believes in the vertical and the horizontal because "the vertical is from nature; it is man, tree. It is the active and the horizontal is the passive, like death."

Individual memory and memory of mankind figure in the images. Mirko's titles are mythical, Biblical, and concerned with ritual. He looks for "another dimension," a way to evoke a total, rather than merely an intellectual response in the viewer." Abstract form is the common denominator," Mirko said.

And ultimately in the Mirko sculptures there is the creator. Every man has his own set of permanent beliefs or temporary feelings which go into the associations and expressions in his art.

But Mirko does not preconceive an object. "I try to be free and to catch what is the essence." From the nucleus of an idea he enters into a dialogue-- a dialogue of eyes and hands and shape and what might be called soul. "I first try to understand, then to make contact [with the work], like you first meet and later make contact with a person."

Confronting a Mirko work is as aliterate a process as building once. "There is enough complex to life," he says. Therefore he tries to "come directly to emotion" with his combinations of forms.

IN HIS PAINTING of a crucifixion Mirko uses a frigid yellow -- a moon yellow. With many black, downward curves to suggest mourners, and sharp linear arrows for Roman spears, pain and sickness hit a viewer immediately. Only then does he read the cross, the helmets or the realistic skull which Mirko makes the clue, the "bridge to reality." (Although sculpture is his main passion, Mirko does paint, draw and work in monotypes because each media has its own expressive quality. To investigate the "contemporary fourth dimension," like Picasso, Braque, and others before him, he painted musical instruments from many sides at one time).

There's a visually witty wood snake in one piece. Mirko made it because "sometimes you play." After a while one might analyze the wit of the snake's proportions, but at first the whimsy is simply experienced.

Mirko s right when he denies stardom. To play Helen Hayes in the mid-twentieth century are scene which revolves around the blatantly rich New York market one must dream up a revolutionary original concept of art. There's Jackson Pollock, of course, who gave the physical making process so much more prominence than Mirko ever does. And there's Morris Louis, whose name and stripes of color are better known at Harvard than is Mirko. The action painter, the flat painter, the minimalist, the happening-creator, the sculptor of simple geometric forms at superhuman scale (Tony Smith, for one)--these are the fantastically novel stars.

Most of Mirko's works could fit into a Radcliffe cubicle, and his thoughts and interests and forms by now seem traditional. The uniqueness of his sculpture is one of expressed personality and artistic choices, not fundamental conception of art.

But within tradition Mirko is very alive and open to new ways and ideas. When he came here from Italy he discovered styrofoam. He sketches in it--styrofoam is well-suited to sketching because it is easy to cut, join, and texture with just a fingernail or scrap of wood. And he modified the lost-wax casting technique to cast directly from styrofoam, and even egg cartons, to bronze. (In lost-wax casting, one puts a refracting material like plaster around a wax shape one wants to reproduce, melts out the wax once the plaster hardens and then pours in molten metal.)

One advantage of the styrofoam-bronze technique is that it is very easy to texture the surface of the model and transfer this to the bronze.

And relevant surface patterning is a Mirko specialty. Sometimes the pattern relates to the material, but it is most interesting when it connects with the subject. In one soldier-type piece, Mirko gives the surface a reptilian pattern which suggests armor without duplicating it. Signs also appear on his surfaces--"from the blood, from ancestral things."

Critics have said that some patterns show Pre-Columbian influence, but Mirko denies this. And Mirko's patterns are less mazy and diffuse than those of often hallucination-inspired Pre-Columbian art.

Mirko's emphasis on direct emotion seems special in the context of the VAC's neo-Bauhaus superrationality. The way he develops his forms from his feelings is encouraging and refreshing for those tired of ubiquitous Form From Function