Information graphics designer, Edward Tufte, experiments with shape, scale and texture in his exploration of the three-dimensional world

left: Airspace, aluminum, 16′, 2008

From Skewed Machine  (cast iron, 2007, right), a tractor rearing vertically upward and tilted on its hind corner, Edward Tufte’s sculpture exhibition – at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum June 13, 2009 to January 17, 2010 – liberates us. Shouldn’t a tracto r be on the ground? It’s our assumptions that are upended. As the piece gently decomposes on the lawn, shedding flakes of rusted iron like so many previously conceived notions, Tufte offers us an alternative to “way finding” as he calls it. In order to “see deeper” he abandons procedural artwork that suggests a formulaic response to our world.

Moreover, the works serve as components of an investigation by the artist at his laboratory situated among 145 acres of fields in Cheshire and Woodbury, Connecticut www.tufte.com. It is in this relative isolation that the works succeed in their de-isolationist perspective, incorporating weather, animal and plant life, and light to project joy, delight and integrity. It looks like this, a stainless steel sculpture punctured with a dot sequence on one side, creased to a carved undulating flap on the other, declares that art need not refer to another thing to be understood.

Tufte makes explicit his formal ideas about shape, scale, and texture in a body of work that includes 50 large scale sculpture installations, 70 table pieces, steel engravings and digital prints. A selection is set comfortably here outdoors and in. They enrich the allusion to a s acred void, as depicted by Paradoxes 1-17 and Three Cylinder Buddha. While grey clouds gather outside over the harboring openness of Larkin’s Twig, 32 feet of triangulated rusting steel, one is reminded that sculpture becomes the space within itself.

Interaction with people and especially light, is part of the artist’s lexicon developed over four books  on analytic design and 32 years of Professorship at Princeton and Yale Universities. Tufte says, “Like dappled light, these anisotropic reflections appear everywhere once you know about them…they occur naturally in light from water waves, hair highlights, and metal surfaces – and artificially in computer simulations of real things.” Escaping Flatland embodies the thematic refusal to accept only computer screen and television generated knowledge. Watching a little girl push the rotating Millstone around its base, at 14,000 pounds of milled steel, is to vicariously experience a small but herculean triumph.

Conversations about fluidity from the known to the unknown object and from the intellectualized to the material run along endless lines of inquiry. Tong Bird of Paradise executed in steel, 20 feet high and in small scale, Tong Bird mobile, acts as a cipher from this world to the drifting imagination. Tufte cites Flaubert in his provocative catalogue essay, “I see … that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.” Nor in the exhibition Seeing Around, do they conform.

by Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

Read more about statistician/author/artist, Edward Tufte in: www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/tufte.html

View current and future events at the Aldrich Museum: www.aldrichart.org