To get us thinking.(Art)

"IN THE LATE 1960s," I read, "European and American artists began to question the very basis of art making." Did they, one might wonder, escape the dilemma by finding employment as, say, carpenters or motor mechanics? Of course not. They persisted. And I am looking at some of their handiwork, shown under the generic title "International Art: Process, Matter, Form", at the Australian National Gallery--of which, I hasten to mention, I am a Friend.

I avoid the confrontation between a lead pole and a lead plate. I forgo interaction with eight biscuit tins surmounted by illuminated photographs. I concentrate instead on an exhibit by Mario Merz, called Fibonacci Numbers. I know a thing or two about these numbers. They form a series in which each number is the sum of its two predecessors. It has intriguing connections with an array of natural phenomena. It relates to the disposition of leaves on a stem and seeds in a flower head. And the ratio of sufficiently large successive numbers in the series defines the felicitous shape known as the "golden rectangle". Possibly, the series also represents the financial progress of a successful questioning artist, each new work fetching as much as the previous two.

Merz, it need hardly be said, is big-time in international art. He has been a leading member of the Arte Povera movement, initiated by an exhibition in Genoa in 1967 and so-named by art critic and curator Germano Celant. His work has appeared in major galleries in Europe and the United States, including, famously, a retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1989. It is characterised by the recurrence of leitmotifs. The first was the "igloo": in the words of Celant, "a metal skeleton covered with fragments of clay, wax, mud, glass, burlap, bundles of branches, and political or literary phrases in neon tubing". (There is a rather more up-market version of this structure made of porphyry in the gigantic fountain provided by Merz for the city of Turin, in which he resides.) Later:

 
   Merz began to utilise the Fibonacci formula of 
   mathematical progression within his works, 
   transmitting the concept visually through the use of 
   the numerals and the figure of a spiral. By the time 
   of his first solo museum exhibition in the United 
   States, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 
   1972, he had also added stacked newspapers, 
   archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his 
   iconography, to be joined later by the table, 
   symbolic as a locus of the human need for 
   fulfillment and interaction. 

Back to the construction in front of me. The materials are redolent of impoverishment. No porphyry, no Harley-Davidson, here. The background of synthetic polymer paint and metallic paint on a loose canvas vaguely depicts five pine-like trees. For the benefit of those having better eyesight than arithmetic, the Fibonacci series, running from one to 233, can be made out on each think. In front of the canvas there stand two wire-bound bundles of twigs, then an array of branches supporting part of a broken pane of glass. Neon tubular lights in the shapes of numerical digits are suspended from its upper edge. Their sequence ...