Tony Smith
Die, model 1962, fabricated 1968

Tony Smith's Die is a work that was conceived in the early sixties, and it's really a radical piece that had a profound influence on the following generations of artists. Usually a sculpture refers to something outside of itself–the human figure, or an artistic monument, or the act of making–but here with Die we have a simple six-foot steel cube that's slightly raised from its base, and that's it. Smith said that the fabrication was inspired by an ad he saw for the industrial welding company in Newark, New Jersey. Their logo was "You specify it, we fabricate it" and he specified a six-foot cube. So there's nothing here to suggest that Die is a piece about artistic genius or traditional notions of inspired making.

What Smith does with this piece is to bring the human body back into contemporary sculpture, but he does so in a new and unusual way. The six-foot cube has a reference to human scale, to Leonardo's famous drawing of The Vitruvian Man. If the sculpture were any bigger, it would be a monument, Smith said; any smaller, and it would be just an object.

At the same time that it refers to human size, however, it impedes the viewer's vision–you can't see around the work as you can with most traditional sculpture. And in this way Die insists on a direct confrontation with the viewer. Even the title seems to confront us head on, with its oversized if ambiguous references to mortality and chance. We can understand the title as a reference to industry, in the sense of die casting. Or we can understand it to refer to one die from a pair of dice. Or we can understand it to refer to death. Smith made this telling comment about the work: "six-foot box, six-foot under."