Soaring Sail Mountain

In New York in the late 1960s, Saret became associated with an emerging generation of process or postminimal artists, who were linked by their experimentation with new media, techniques, and procedures, prioritizing elasticity, fluidity, and non-compositional techniques. His breakthrough arrived around the same time, when he began to use industrial chicken wire, among other flexible industrial materials, to create art, generating mass without weight and dematerializing sculpture in the process. After a three-year sojourn in India between 1971 and 1974, Saret began to focus on building sculptural mass through line, using twisted and looped strands of steel and copper wire, as in Soaring Sail Mountain.

As is common in his practice, this work derives its effects and its principles from the artist’s chosen materials, with media (and process) begetting form. Soaring Sail Mountain unites geometry and organicism, structure and flexibility, order and disorder, inside and outside, buoyancy and solidity. The work seems to be animated by the potential for change, growth, and transformation. Appropriately, it evokes natural phenomena, from fires and bushes to the mountain referenced in the title, a characteristic that sets Saret apart from other postminimalist artists, who generally eschewed the very illusions and associations, both natural and spiritual, that he sought to cultivate. Saret is equally important to the history of sculpture for having re-introduced color into a medium that had, since minimalism at least, generally avoided it; Soaring Sail Mountain evidences this shift as well, possessed as it is by a distinctive polychromatism, thanks to its use of both slate gray steel wire and bright orange copper wire.