Word: trova
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Faceless, armless, toeless, sexless and potbellied, the figures could be store dummies, moon men, dolls, Oscars, or medical textbook diagrams. Ever since their creator, Sculptor Ernest Trova, 39, presented them as "falling men" on rotating wheels and bolted six together into a giant humanoid child's jack for a Famous-Barr department-store exhibition in St. Louis in 1964, the debate has raged over what the little men mean...
...London, when Trova showed them, they were called by one critic "the cumulative image of Man as victim, stereotype, faceless statistic." In Minneapolis, they typified, according to Curator Jan van der Marck, "the modern enigma." Trova himself has said, "The falling man is a personal hypothetical theory on the nature of man. I believe that man is, first of all, an imperfect creature...
Lost in a Maze. Now that his gleaming, chrome-plated figures stand on their own two feet in the U.S.'s top contemporary museums and private collections (the Museum of Modern Art put kaleidoscopes of Trova's falling men on sale for $3.95 each, sold 8,000 in the past year), Trova is less concerned with the figures than with the sculptural environments in which he places them (see color). "You might say I am a student of Aristotle," explained the mustachioed Missourian in his suburban St. Louis studio last week. "Man has to deal with things around...
...Maze, Trova says he meant the boxlike environment to be a "complicated" one. One figure is enclosed in a Plexiglas chamber, another figure is trying to get into one, while the third and fourth are lost among the partitions...
Bronze, plaster and marble, when they turn up, seem quaintly Victorian amid the outcroppings of anodized aluminum, vinyl and Plexiglas. Sheet metal is everywhere; one piece, Ernest Trova's Large Landscape, weighs about three tons. Most of the newcomers (50 of the artists were making their debuts at the Whitney annual) are addicts of "minimal art," sculpture that is stripped to unemotive zigzags. Ronald Bladen, 48, contributes an empty 8-ft. by 8-ft. by 16-ft. white plywood box, tilted up from the floor. The box is empty and the work is untitled. Ellsworth Kelly, 43, otherwise...