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Transcript |
1 rectangle or 2 rectangles or 3 rectangles in some kind of combination. They do move me. The amount of brown on the wall and the grey, it would make a difference to us if these walls were entirely dark brown. We do respond to the thickness of these poles. Things that we call pure art or art for art's sake have an uncanny ability to move us and we don't know why. But then I discovered so do other things. The things that I was interested in, I encourage-ably sensual in the fact of all the [Inaudible 00:00:42] training. When you're supposed to be painting with 5 inch house painter's brushes on a 10 foot canvas and it's the sweep of your arm, what happened to Renoir's buttocks? They seem to be so much shut out of a list of arbitrary rules. Everybody was delivering lists and rules and boundaries and I think it was my anger and disgust that forced me to drop painting. I had painted for over 10 years before I went into sculpture. The move to 3 dimensions, again primarily one of disgust. The intellectual arguments about space on a modern painting, talk about implied space, keep the canvas flat, 3 dimensional thrust. Well nuts to you, the only space I really understood was the space in which I took a step. The reality of my own space did nothing to lessen the mystery of my physical existence. If I picked up a coffee cup and drank coffee, I couldn't understand what the cup was, people told me theories about electrons and all the spaces between them and everything was really light and weightless and fragmented and I was told about cubic collage and told to relate that to metaphysical medieval kind of thinking. All true, how do you go about trapping an invisible force in an art work? And this is one of the most staggering problems any artist has, how do you trap those physical forces, but what's my relationship to physical concreteness?
Alright, all these nagging unsolved problems drove me to a point where if I was going to be serious about what I was doing, required a revolutionary break with my own thinking and so I moved to 3 dimensions. I suppose, it still takes a certain amount of nerve to insist that you can make an art work that tries to trap invisible forces or project somehow what the quality of your experience is or what you're thinking about, that peculiar combination of what we're aware of outside of ourselves plus what's going on inside, if you stop to say it that simple and directly to yourself, there is no real way to do it. All the schooling in the world does not equip you with a language or a grammar so that mostly what I do, I was stumbling and trial and error. Maybe that's enough, let's look at pictures. I get bored hearing talk! Could we lower the lights please and put the first light on?
Alright woman in a restaurant booth, I don't know how old this is, '62 or something like that. The peculiar thing is I do come out of a thorough abstract expressionist training. My delight on art history was a private one, I simply liked looking at a lot of pictures and but I do like the atmosphere of being engaged and committed of ideas that are floating around today. It was one of my basic decisions that the only thing I could deal with was looking around immediately at what I saw. Alright, somebody you know very well, the first people trapped were close relatives, friends, you know people who are rather indulgent to nuttiness. The restaurant booth, I got out of a secondhand junk yard. The objects are much more than objects to me, they have a massiveness, a weight, a shape, a color, the person is in a stance in relation to them. The object and the figure carve the empty air around them. I left a space so you can sit down at the table next to her so you can walk into the sculpture. I wanted to really blur the boundary of the experience. The painting no longer exists on a wall but somehow I try to magnify the intensity of the experience. It's no longer a decorative object over the couch. It becomes a primary thing, very hard to ignore. Well, how many times have we sat drinking coffee and yet how do we look when we do it? We're totally unconscious of what effect we radiate at the time, so that the expressiveness within a figure can be matched by the expressiveness and the weight density of the objects that surround us. Which means intensely looking at where we are. Now I'm supposed to press a button I think
The dinner table, the fellow sitting on the chair with is back to the camera, who is pouring coffee for his friends is myself; self portrait. The woman in the background with her arms folded looking patiently and yet a little bit skeptically at the group is my group. Kako [00:07:06] with his leg crossed on the chair, his wife standing behind him. Opposite him is Joe Johnston, a dance art critic who was then having a fight with Ellen, big feud about interpretation and she refused to be sitting next to him in the sculpture and insisted on my averting her head.
So while I got all involved in the joyful construction of limbs, a forest of legs, table legs, chair legs, human legs, adjusting spaces, all of the play of somebody who likes art for art's sake. I couldn't avoid the psychology or that literary subject matter of what was true about the relationship of all these people to one another. Not only that were they thick, were they thin, fat, skinny, hostile, opening, welcoming? And all that somehow had to be meshed into one thing. I suppose that's what I meant by a unified field theory idea where somewhere there must be, I think, I can't be very sure about this, a connection between all these waves of impulses that we have
Alright the bus driver. Well I knew I wanted to do this piece, I live an hour outside of New York and I'm forever going into New York City, I love the place. Can't stand the franticness after a while and escape usually to my calm, country farm and I usually find myself at 2 o'clock in the morning more than a little drunk catching the last bus and at the port authority, that massive terminal, I looked up at the bus driver, I must have been in a terribly paranoid state that night and I said my god are you going to take me home?
So once the impulse is there, I found a scrap yard in Newark that specialized in scrapping only buses, they scrapped them 5 high and for 20 bucks I could have bought a whole bus. That really jogged me back on my heels, I said what am I going to do, get the motor fixed, put on the wheels, am I going to drive the bus to 57th street and park it outside the gallery if I want to have a show? How much did I need? Here I'm dealing with real places and what's the limit, what's my boundary and very hard to know. So these problems get solved in very concrete fashions. The only bus I found where the stuff was new enough for me to use was a quarter of a mile from the yards welding torch and I didn't have one and I had a sledgehammer and a coal chisel, so I decided to hack out only those parts that I absolutely needed. Labor saving maybe but I was forced to just chop out a few pieces and compose them rigorously. I put the thing on a platform, my anti platform, but I made a step that you can get up on the platform and put your money in the coin box but then the museum of modern art ripped it off and won't let anybody up on the platform
Fringe benefit of that same trip to the junk yard, I found 2 bus seats, maybe because I do so much driving and traveling it's a part of our experience that we neglect, we try to blank out our minds, read a paper or think about girls, anything! And we don't pay attention to the experience. I have the seats, the empty seats sitting in my studio where I work when I was working on the bus driver and I simply happened to think, what would happen if I sat people in those seats, exactly the way you're sitting in these endless rows of identical seats, if you steal a glance at the person sitting next to you and notice the subtly of their gesture, no 2 people are sitting exactly in the same way and if you know the person well enough, you know that gesture is characteristic somehow of them of the way they hold themselves all the time. Alright, so I took 4 people I knew, started by putting them, I said well sit down in the bus seat, each one came out different and it's an excuse for a peeping tom or voyeurism on the Marcel Proust level. You can wander around and examine ever finicky detail about these people when in real life we're just permitted these secret little glances
This piece is called the artist's studio. I suppose I was mocking myself and years of frustration. I have to apologize for a quality in the slides. The slides are 3 dimensional, the slides don't give you the entire sense of the experience. It's a real chimney, those chimney blocks are piled up. On the other side of the chimney where you can't see it in the photograph is an ordinary kitchen chair, old beat up chair, the artist viewing chair. On the metal table next to him are the attributes of a saint, his palette of brushes and he sits in his chair warming his back against the insufficient chimney, gazing at his canvas which is about 9 feet away against the wall, he canvas is 8 feet high, 6 feet wide and it's a painting of a wall with a window on it, you know the wall of my studio. And there is his canvas and the sculpture is the model, standing in the classic contrapposto thrust opposition pose that goes all the way back to ancient Greece, through the Renaissance, through [Inaudible 00:13:42] Matisse up to the modern day, radiating homosexuality and the idiot artist sits in his chair looking at his painting of a bare wall
Alright, if I was going to look immediately around me and make all these breaks, it requires, obviously you're going to look at the things that move you most and the bedroom, the bathroom, the interior of the house is just as much part of an experience as is a street right outside of our house or where we go. It's a real bathtub by the way. I bought the plumbing fixtures, built the wall, amazonite, imitation ceramic tile. The plumbing fixtures are put in precisely as a plumber would do them. All I have to do is with hot and cold water and that whole thing would work and it was important for me that I do exactly that. If I'm dealing with the expressiveness of materials, the porcelain whiteness of the tub, the antiseptic yellow shine of the tile, the glittery chrome of the fixtures are placed absolutely according to 20th century values. You stand in the tub and the shower head had to be there so you can wash yourself, the handles have to be where they are so you can turn the faucets and the divisions are precisely 4 inches by 4 inches because we manufacture everything by modular mass production and we have our 20th century values of cleanliness antiseptic modern efficiency where that girl stands in the tub completely oblivious as A symmetric as an ancient Greek sculpture in a gesture of caressing herself, shaving the hair of her legs, couldn't care less about the hard repellent antiseptic quality of the place around her and I didn't think more about that I was just struck, maybe it was ironic memory of the luscious of Bonnard's bathrooms
The gas station, I really got a hard time when I showed this in New York, when was that? 63 I think, something like that. You've probably seen these ads in the art magazines for a correspondence art school, do you make these mistakes in composition? And they show you these pictures with crude mistakes in them and I'm always delighted with those pictures. So here I had 2 evenly balanced, the sculpture is 25 feet long, very extravagant size for then, not anymore today. 15 feet of black emptiness in the middle and who the devil ever heard of putting 50 feet of empty air into a sculpture and really I got a rough going over, they couldn't recognize that as any kind of composition and what I was really after is it's a long corridor and if I started at one end and started walking, just the experience of walking along that thing was how these gas stations felt to me. I looked at dozen of gas stations and all I remember is driving these endless black distances. So the 15 feet of emptiness nothing seemed somehow crucial to what was going on in gas stations
Alright another, justification, if you give yourself permission, there's a funny thing, who's around to give you permission to do anything? Really who is an authority? Somewhere along the line you make an arbitrary decision to break some rules. Ok so you follow your logic. If it's ok to use any real material in the world and incorporate it into your private fantasy then what's wrong with pure light? I found myself always fussing with the lights on my pieces or admiring how they looked on the changing light of day, really liking that and it made a difference. In my chicken coop I have a naked light bulb and I bring a piece into the gallery and I have to do a completely artificial set of lighting. And the pieces changed incredibly with a change of light. So why not use light itself as an expressive tool. I was using wood, chrome, leather, plastic, rubber, everything and looking at the age or the shiny newness, I was regarding all those qualities in real things as expressive elements. Alright, light, a kind of movie sign that you see on a highway not in a city theater. Suburban movie theater at night. I literally passed this, in New Jersey. 2 o'clock in the morning, I don't know why it's always 2 o'clock in the morning when I'm getting back from New York. The guy changing letters on the sign and I caught a fleeting glimpse of him for an instance. He had one letter left and he was just reaching to take the last letter off and I, it really jogged and stayed in my head, the box of light is literally that, fluorescent light tubes behind this milky white plastic, you know 3 dimensional sign that says cinema and when you put the plaster figure in front of the light, the fluorescent light is so cold and menacing, it seems to chew away the edges of the figure
The dry cleaning store, again the same thing. I did the dry cleaning store straight after the cinema. I suppose, well probably it's something like a feminine version of the cinema, which I don't know, masculine, feminine, it's very strange. The pieces lit by the red neon, the red neon bounces of the silver, the blue metallic foil, the wedding dress and there's a lot of very odd pink and green, purple and enormous multiplication simply by illuminating the piece with the red neon light. The common subject I suppose is the excuse to take off into very private areas of feeling
Couple on a bed, well alright it does take that same kind of nerve I think to face bedroom relationships, very intimate relationships. The sculpturing of forms is one thing, a certain kind of play. The subtlety and sensitivity of the way a woman holds herself in relationship to a man in a particular moment or the attitude of a man just sitting on the edge of a bed or the light coming in through the window, these are things to be seen, much more difficult to track in a concrete visual way, you're talking, it's almost like trespassing into things that should remain quite private. I don't have any justification for whom I trespass but I think it has to be done with subtlety
This one is called woman listening to music. Pretty lyric, a girl lies on the floor on a mattress, she's white the mattress is white, it's a reconstruction of the corner of my attic, the primary structure above her, that triangle is literally the sloping dormer. The one board houses a real hi fi set, it plays an auditoria by Vivaldi which is a chorus of women's voices singing something that almost sounds something like a Gregorian chant and I get the image of whitewashed monk cells and the entire sculpture is white but the women sound incredibly sensual and that jarring shock of those two things together knocked me out on the music and I've never been able to look at the sculpture without remembering the music, somehow they've become connected for me
If you're going to deal with sex, what else is there to deal with. This is my wife's mother, she was 80 when we did it. I never worked so fast in my life, I was scared stiff but she sat like a trooper she didn't complain once. The only thing that happened was after I finished making the sculpture I invited her to look at it and she absolutely refused to look at it and she hasn't seen it yet
Another view of it. she sits in front of a window, a very long narrow window. A chunk of wood cut out and she just sits there in front of it
You're right it is a kosher butcher shop, again very, how to talk about certain pieces, my father used to be a kosher butcher. When I was a kid every Friday afternoon I used to have to squeeze myself in a space between the glass and the hooks and have to wipe the blood off the hooks and I remember those hooks vividly. And I found, I don't know, years ago, when I was working on the piece, I went to the old neighborhood where the store still exists and I found a secondhand equipment shop and I found the identical hooks in a basement. But reconstructing the store, I didn't reconstruct the whole store. It's only a store front, it's something like a facade. Behind the woman holding the chopping block is a rectangle of black plastic which means the images are reflected three times into it somehow, each time dimmer. The spacing it extremely austere. The movement frozen as the air, some kind of ritual and the thing is sort of packed with things hanging right over my head that I can't even explain
Alright we can relax a little bit, it's a man getting off a bus. Friend of mine posed for this and he was quite proud that he looked as noble as Caligula or a Roman empire. And we had some words to say and we have some words to say about how we're affected by the objects around us, those entries are very narrow
Here's my ode to the lyric beauty of port authority architecture. Blue and orange for my walls and the heating depth right above her. She's just sitting on an old suitcase waiting for her bus
Terrible slide but of a work that really excites me or has me interested because I'm still not through with the momentum of it. Literally it's the cab of a truck, a half ton panel truck. Driver sits behind the wheel and he looks straight ahead. You stand behind him, the whole thing is done in a black box in a black tunnel, you stand behind him as if you're in the truck with him and on the windshield of the truck is projected a movie I took of driving down the highway at night at 50 miles an hour. I'm real hung up with on the road I guess but it's a perfectly still 3 dimensional experience and the film is endless and hypnotic, you actually, I get a sense of vertigo because you're standing perfectly still, you feel like you're hurtling through space, you see a black field in front of you and all the lights keep moving out at you. This whole business of combining film with 3 dimensional reality is something I'm very baby primitive at. That's in the air, al the permissions for multi media, mixed media, total environment etc. Something maybe we can talk about later in questions or, the possibilities I feel are enormous, ok so I'm involved in the piece somehow
Another stab, out in another direction. Well I don't know if it's restlessness or what. Again I'm victim of my own logic. If I suspect something like this unified field theory and I can use all the materials of the world including the intangible invisible photons of light. What about my memory of history and stories? How can I incorporate into my work, things that I know about that happened before? It's very odd how much awareness we carry around, we can't walk out the door here, we automatically instantly accept the leaves turning brown because we have a sense of the seasons for instance. We walk out armed with mental attitudes, alright history, this is old testament story, legend of Lott. Old dirty erotic story and I showed the piece to my regret in a show called erotic art. And I'm really sorry that it had that context. The figure on the right, Lott's wife turning into a pillar of salt after looking at the destruction of the wicked cities against orders. The later part of the story has to do with incest and the 2 daughters who get him drunk and become pregnant and bare his children. A lot of very baffling mysterious things about this story that is told on one column on one page in the old testament.
A friend of mine went to Israel and I asked about the destruction. Evidentially it was some earthquake that threw up salt deposits and 3000 years later not even a snake, insect, lizard exist there. How long does it take to walk through that territory? I was told you ride 2 weeks on camel north to south. The bomb in Hiroshima was one square mile which you can walk in about 20 minutes and 20 years later that city was rebuilt. An uncle of mine, years ago, I painted a whole, year on this theme. This uncle, a very gentle guy, retired street cleaner, who was a scholar, mildly said to me why are you being so hard on those girls for, they were doing the only thing they knew to continue life. And asking people alive now to pose for me in this situation which is an extraordinary one, which has something to do with I think how people are feeling now, how would you behave in a totally extraordinary situation that threatened extinction? What would happen and it was quite amazing the variety of response I got and how much didn't work. How people really reacted quite differently, posing for me can sometimes be a difficult job
Alright the movie house. The box office, the front of the movie house but you can open the door when you stand at the box office there's a blazing ceiling of very warm light, it's intensely light. 8 feet by 12 feet of solid light immediately over your head, you can open the door and walk into a very narrow black corridor. Totally restricted, the mirror reverse in space of the in and out front facade of the box office. I won't go into any fancy
This is called the execution, it's a relatively, well this is a new work I did, first time I broke my own rule, again a restless stab, mostly involved in my studio with internal response, I had turned down 4 requests from angry arts to protest government policy in Vietnam. I didn't want to do that, I didn't want to use my work as a propaganda poster and I didn't like the cliche of charring a baby doll and nailing it onto a board and splashing the board with red paint which is about, what I thought, the prophetic and effectual limit of artist protest. I did make a piece called the [Inaudible 00:33:54] piece. A man was putting on a show he said he was putting on a show called war and peace, would you want to do something for it and I said yes and I worked a long time on it. I borrowed a gun, I shot the bullet holes in the wall. I really felt exhilarated and unashamedly enjoyed the power but then when I threw the gun down and stood next to the wall my own hackles began to rise. It was a piece in which I could be both the victim and the executioner. So I guess, I made it essentially as another private piece and the problem I have is having the work wrenched out of its intended context. Alright I think that's the last slide, why don't we stop, put on the lights and if you have any questions I'll do my best to answer them
[Informal Conversation]
Speaker : Does somebody have a question?
Audience: I would like to ask, the pieces that we've seen here, do you feel that the environmental detail such as the real detail and the real phonograph add to the mystery you were talking about when you first contacted the excitement of art or do they occasionally have a tendency to explain?
Speaker: I think the mystery deepens. If I choose any real objects to use, I pay a terrific amount of attention to its size, its weight, its texture, it has to operate in my piece as another element in my composition. I'm going to respond to the height, the skinniness, the fatness, all these things. Its reality is you raise a very peculiar point and I think an extremely valid one. The objects I use I either build myself or have them built by other men. Generally, I may break my own rules next week but that's beside the point and they have an expressiveness. If we look at an antique chair in a museum here, that's put here for you to prize the elegance, the poise, the craftsmanship, a list of qualities that separate this chair from 50 thousand other chairs done 175 years ago so that we admit hat objects can radiate some kind of expressiveness. Alright, if you pick up a kitchen chair that's 40 years old with cracked and peeling paint that has simplicity, austerity and a history of association of use together with a shape, it's also talking. Absolutely talking to you. It used to be popular a few years ago to put down interior decoration, you walk into somebody's house, the way they arrange their furniture, the kind of furniture and the space they create for themselves to move through is as revealing as the person, himself or herself I think. Where do you go to look for clues? Where do you find those answers that you're looking for? I can't find answers, I only find hints and just how you arrange the books around yourself has something to do with radiating outside of yourself, some of your qualities and it works on all levels, how cities sprawl, I drove in a cab to Baltimore and the first thing that struck me about Baltimore is that it was an old city and it's massive and heavyweight and it's nothing frivolous and then I see a Florentine bell tower that has a clock that says [Inaudible 00:38:31] so alright there is some kind of nuttiness poking itself up of this staid massive, impressive old city. You know things like that, so what you call a real object, how real is it, what the devil do you know about it and it's got an immense amount of information, expressive information locked into it. Are you still bothered?
Audience: [Inaudible 00:39:00] but what kind of critical flag do you like to fly and I wonder isn't it a relationship to mystery. You pointed out that the story in the [Inaudible 00:39:14] for the mystery to be explored
Speaker: Right
Audience: So in relationship to your pieces, if I'm sitting here seeing them again, I wonder whether it isn't possible to suggest, to think about it, critical question raised about the mystery of the object has to be not by a question of whether they are real or whether they point towards the mystery
Speaker: What, you see the only way I can really, I can't give you an answer to the question all I can tell you is as I live with my own pieces, I understand reality less. I can only report from my own experience, what seems to be very really and convincing when I deal with the most utterly realistic detail, that's why the slides are misleading because they're abstractions. You know your consciousness of leaning forward and touching that chair in front of you and your awareness of the space immediately in front of you is something that you can't explain. Ultimately, we'd, I don't think there's a human being alive or has ever been alive that can explain the mystery out of consciousness so that -well ok ultimately we're faced with a mystery, philosophically- ok we just have to go from there. Anything else, any other questions?
Audience: How did you happen to decide to use people, how did that come about rather than a model [Inaudible 00:41:23]
Speaker: Oh, I started out making life size figures that I constructed and I used a regulation method where you slap together a few 2 by 4's, you make your strong internal armature, bend some chicken wire around it and drape the [Inaudible 00:41:53] dipped in plaster. You can build up, tear down, model and everything else. And at the time the figures looked like my paintings, they were interested in pure gesture with no realistic details or no anatomy. Somebody gave me a box of J and J bandages, so I just put them on myself and I was delighted at the realistic detail. Now I either would have carved or modeled realistic detail into the figure or cast, somebody gives you J and J bandages, you break your foot, you put them right on your skin, that's how you use them and I put on one layer instead of the 10 that a doctor puts on and I was amazed at the revelation of bones in anatomy, so the 2 things that really intrigued me; the power of a gesture which is something internal, which says something about spirit, says something about something invisible together with concrete reality. In my own thinking I was in a point where I could not divorce one from the other and that's the peculiar tightrope I was hunting for. And then I discovered casting people, the process was so wet and uncomfortable, tedious, that they couldn't posture and pose, like you hold still for a photograph, it takes a 30th of a second or a 60th and you put your best foot forward for that instance, you can't, it's very difficult to do that with plaster and I liked what happened. Anything else?
Audience: [Inaudible 00:43:40]
Speaker: I didn't say that
Audience: [Inaudible 00:43:48]
Speaker: Well, I hope not. If you look closely at the faces, you'll discover that they're mostly deadpan and that's willful on my part. It's a suspicion I have that whether we're conscious of it or not, we get a phenomenal amount of true information about, from the way someone else holds their body. There's a whole body thing. You have energy, spirit, a stance, we are so trained to eyelashes, eyebrows, eyes, Maybelline and expressive quirks on the side of the mouth. Most of us look at disembodied heads floating around and we forget that these heads are all connected to extraordinarily sensitive instruments called bodies. The buildings that we're in, you walk down the street and you respond to the character of the street without knowing it, the sky, when the sky turns black, when the sky is blue and sunny, quality of action, the difference between a 12 year old Ford rattling down with a busted tailpipe and a sleek sports car with a loud muffler rolling down the road. The quality and sound of action, movement and also that happens in your body, there's such a fantastic amount locked up in the body, attitudes, ways of looking at the world that I would rather, with the greatest of ease I could paint these things flesh, put eyelashes, eyebrows, realistic skin coloring and I would hate my own work, I just won't do that. It's, it has something to do with dancing, I don't know, you really pressed me in a corner well that's enough about that, anything else?
Speaker 2: There will be sherry served outside of the auditorium and on behalf of Mr. Parkers who is not here today and the women's committee, I want to thank Mr. Segal for a very fine talk and he'll be outside if you have any more questions
[End of Audio 00:47.15]
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Audiovisual Collection
