Great God Pan

At a parking lot/test area somewhere in Greenpoint, Paré and Holman race back and forth across an expanse of asphalt near their workspace. It’s a spectacular and exhilarating display. Pentagons, a pair of hexagons, and something with eleven sides speed across the hard surface, blurring as they go.

“It’s not important how many sides the shape has,” Holman would later tell me, “It can be a hexagon or an octagon or whatever. It just has to be able to move.”

Not since Michelangelo Pistoletto rolled his giant ball through the streets of Turin has the art world been privy to such poetic extremes of motion and form. After a brief demonstration the artists regroup under a nearby tree to discuss their progress, DeWitt’s theories, and the current status of Minimalism.

Gaining steady notoriety over the years through the visionary and scientifically-informed automata of the Constructivists, Alexander Calder, and Jean Tinguely (especially his self-destructing “Homage To New York” and méta-maticdrawing machines), the “Movement Movement” can in reality be traced as far backs as the 18th Century when a giant mechanized duck designed by Jacques de Vaucanson revealed its ability to “chatter, eat, digest, and waddle, to the great astonishment of spectators who traveled to see it from all over Europe.” But it was not until the Minimalist object became accepted as a legitimate form (i.e. Brancusi’s “Bird In Space”) that a sculpture like a trans-a-gon could have been realized. And it was not until the unanimous recognition of such “weighty lumps” as an art form that a concept like trans-a—gon became, in DeWitt’s words, “necessary.”

 “Shape-art has been static since forever,” claimed Holman, who admitted that though he admires the reductive tradition and the oeuvre of its innovators, particularly Stella and Malevich, he often longs for “that feeling of the wind in my hair.”

“I think it was [Japanese fashion designer] Yohji Yamamoto who said that Minimalism was just another word for sloth,” he added.

Looking back over the parking lot, the trans-a-gon shapes, now resting motionless, have gone back to their static forms, looking more like pre-paint job Ron Davis maquettes than revolutionary “contour vehicles.”

So what exactly is trans-a-gon technology?

“The ‘gon’ part refers to the shape itself,” explained Paré. “In reality everything is a shape because everything has edges, except maybe a black hole. Trans-a-gons could be many-sided, even like a dodecahedron, which is very complex. Mostly we stick with an amount of sides that we can count on our hands or pieces of paper because our solar-powered calculator doesn’t really recharge inside our studio.” The ‘trans,’ he goes on to explain, stands for either ‘transport’ of ‘transformation.’ Both are applicable. “It’s hard to tell from his notes and Ferg can’t really remember.”

If DeWitt indeed embraced modes and/or methods of transformation in this work then it is likely he was aware of advancements being made in the late-1960s at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. Psychologist Dr. Bernard Gunther, in a series of workshops he conducted there, pursued different actions of what he called “Sensory Awakening” or “Sense Relaxation.” In one exercise—“Exploring”—participants were instructed to go under a sheet and interact with others in the room. Any form of contact/encounter was deemed acceptable, as long as one remained under the sheet. The action of entering the silhouette of the fabric, thus giving it a form or a shape—though not the ultimate goal of Gunther’s exercise—is a pretty good representation of the individuality plausibility of shape-art-creation, and its relation to movement, in this case, the exploration about the room. Like with the trans-a-gon actions, the simple formula—transformation through action—results in some level of inner conversion. “When it is over, experience how you feel,” Gunther would tell his pupils upon the completion of the exercise. “Come out from under your sheet.”

Another impetus towards DeWitt’s and the trans-a-gons’ development was the artist Robert Breer. Known primarily for his animated films that he began while studying painting in Paris in the late-‘50s, Breer played a rather large part in the motion-based three-dimensional form movement. In 1965 the University of California at Berkeley presented a show entitled “Directions in Kinetic Sculpture,” curated by the sculptor George Rickey. In the exhibition catalogue, Breer’s work is represented by a photograph of a dozen white geometric shapes. Entitled “Styrofoam Floats Moving Down Country Road,” this piece appeared just a few months before DeWitt began his work with trans-a-gons. And yet despite their similarity, distinctions must be made between the two mobile sculpture groupings. While DeWitt’s objects rely on speed as a characteristic (albeit through human and formal energy), Breer—who would interestingly enough go on to work as an animator for the children’s television show Electric Company—was content to allow, with the aid of small electric motor, simple movement, sans marked velocity or acceleration. While such distinctions may seem minor now, in 1966 Mankind was still three years away from a Moon landing and leaps in technology, not to mention these artists’ brand of “technical conceptualism,” occurred in great bounds rather than predictable progressions. Regardless, Breer was first, and differences of intention aside, there is no reason to believe that DeWitt was ignorant of his work. Both artists were based in the Hudson River Valley region and it is very likely that DeWitt spotted the Floats on one of his evening walks and had been inspired to take his geometric forms “on the road” so to speak.

In relation to these influences, it must be noted that DeWitt and his trans-a-gons favor not transformation over form, but transformation throughform. Instead of separating action from object, DeWitt hoped to create one from the other. For many years this seemed to be a forgotten goal, remembered only by DeWitt, lingering somewhere in the depth of his mind. Today his buried dream just may see sunlight after all. In fact, Paré is currently working on a film of large-scale experiments he plans to conduct on the trans-a-gons at a place called Niles Canyon near Hayward, California. Word has it that he has solved the plastics issue and that these new prototype sculptures will be “up to DeWitt standards.”

“The work is set to be exhibited this summer at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco,” Paré informed us. “With all the interest in Minimalism lately, like the MOMA show and that thing at the Hammer, I’m looking forward to showing people how quickly things can change, or at least how quickly they could have changed in the ‘60s if Ferg would’ve kept going with trans-a-gons.”

There is a rather well known account of Alberto Giacometti visiting an exhibition of kinetic machines designed by the Greek artist Takis in the early 1960s. It seems appropriate to mention it here. Dissatisfied with what he saw, the aging Swiss reportedly complained at the lack of humanness in Takis’s mechanistic pieces.

“Where is the man?” he asked, “I’m only interested in the man.” To which Takis replied, “But so am I . . . in the essence of man.” Not convinced, Giacometti probed further, “But you’re not working with material, you’re working with energy.” Again Takis countered, “The whole point is that we can transform material into energy—in fact, we don’t think of them as two different things.”