Nan Rosenthal, senior consultant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time of this recording, moderates a presentation and discussion with sculptor Claes Oldenburg. Rosenthal and Oldenburg go on to discuss his work including his manufacturing process, how he factors in the element of scale, and his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, with whom many of his works were developed in partnership. Recorded February 18, 1993, at The 92nd Street Y, New York.
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The preservation of and increased access to the 92nd Street y hum’s audio archives is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities thank you Bob known from the early 60s onward as one of the Prime inventors of the art movement called pop Claus oldenberg has since the 1970s
Amassed a really stunning ser series of awards for sculpture and for General art artistic Merit he’s a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and letters and he’s an officer of the French order of arts and letters not surprisingly for an artist so concerned with public works works outside of
Museums he has also been decorated by the American Institute of Architects oldenberg is the elder of two sons of a Swedish Diplomat his younger brother is director dor of the Museum of Modern Art klouse was born in Stockholm in 1929 and from age seven onward grew up in
Chicago from 1946 to 1950 he attended Yale where he majored in English and in art in the early 1950s he was back in Chicago studying some of the time at the art school of the Art Institute of Chicago and working also as an apprentice newspaper reporter covering
Police stories for kind of local uh AP he also traveled a great deal on the west coast and in 1953 became a naturalized American US citizen in 1956 oldenberg moved to New York here he settled at first on the Lower East Side and began to pursue his
Career as an artist who criticized the consumerist values of American society in the late 1950s Simon simultaneously his art acknowledged the attraction of popular objects an environment of 1960 called the street was populated by childlike ragged edged creatures chiefly figurative who reflected the colors and the poverty of New York
Slums the street marked one of the first appearances of oldenberg seral comic Alter Ego rayun an object with human attributes such as phallic potency the ray gun manufacturing company with Claus oldenberg as president began in 1961 to produce Commodities brightly painted plaster reliefs and three-dimensional objects chiefly representing fast foods and mass-produced
Clothing these objects were destined for oldenburg’s second important environment the store soon after the appearance of the store he showed his first giant soft sculptures of food such as a best bedsize hamburger a desk sized bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich and so on initiating a tremendously Rich play
With scale that continues in his work to this day he began soon to exhibit very widely and also to conduct performance Works happenings a draftsman of tremendous facility and wit in 1967 oldenberg had a show of drawings for colossal monuments I think my favorite of these is a New
York Monument a drawing of a concrete block stretching to the four corners of Canal Street and Broadway uh this was be I believe this was before the term gridlock came into wide usage the Colossal Monument show was followed two years later in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War by
Goldenberg’s first so-called feasible Monument the lipstick ascending on caterpillar tracks this t tank like sculpture with an inflatable red tube he installed on the Yale campus in a plaza facing an earlier neocolonial excuse me neoclassical war memorial there it mocked the virility of the US Military and severely questioned the
Presence of our material in Vietnam we’ll hear more about this political cosmetic uh quite soon except for a year and a half in the Netherlands in the late 1970s oldenberg has continued to be based in New York although he travels constantly not just for exhibitions of his indoor sculptures
Drawings multiples and Prints but also to explore create and install large-scale public projects an extraordinarily articulate man who writes and publishes his notebooks with regularity oldenberg remarkably enough has never before this evening lectured publicly in New York in 1977 seven oldenberg married kosha van buan a Dutch art historian
Whose doctorate is from the University of gingan Miss van buan was on the curatorial staff of the stlink museum in Amsterdam and taught at several institutions of Higher Learning in Holland she has written major monographs on oldenberg on Maria Van Elk on Bruce nowman on John baldasari as well as numerous articles
On Contemporary Art since 1977 or 78 she has collaborated with oldenberg on the conception and execution of large scale projects these projects public sculpture is the subject of the slide talk tonight which is titled the spirit of The Monuments I believe it will give us all a chance to see oldenberg public
Sculptures around the world which I think most of us haven’t seen except for perhaps a few this was to have been a two-person talk with Claus and kosha alternating uh and I think a chance for us to see their collaboration and action alas kosha has been failed by the very
Awful flu that is going around uh the Rin RAR in West Germany and has made its way here so Claus oldenberg will go It Alone following his talk I will ask a couple of questions and we will then focus on the written questions from the audience thanks good
Evening well it’s very sad that Koshi isn’t here um because we like to do this together it’s kind of fun to stand up here and and uh never know exactly what the other person is going to say and uh uh hold yourself back if uh the other person says the wrong
Thing and sometimes we kick each each other in the dark and so on so that’s a lot of fun and in in fact the lecture is titled the spirit of the monument and uh that’s kosh’s title and it uh used to begin when she was giving the lecture it
Begins with a a uh um a discussion of the function of of monuments but um you’ll just have to uh kind of guess at this function as you see what what uh goes by up here because uh she’s not here to deliver it so you might say that the of the monument is
Absent but we’re going to try to present uh present the lecture anyway so um it’s going to be done mostly in slides and uh I’m going to comment on the slides and then afterwards I’ll be here to answer any questions so we could dim the lights
This is going to go back quite far in time um we’re starting here in uh 1966 and this is a scene in London it’s a substitution of of uh a a gear stick for the U Nelson column in Trafalga square and this came about because um uh
When I was in London at that time I did a lot of driving and found myself very often stalled at this spot and using the gear stick it seemed just natural uh with the gear stick in hand and the eyes fixed on the monument to relate the two and so a
Kind of identification occurred which led to a arbitrary substitution which is very often the way these monuments arose uh a sudden inspiration and then uh an effort to rationalize it this Monument uh as a gear stick would of course move and it wouldn’t just be sticking there up in the sky like Nelson
You would be flipping from one gear to the other which would set the pigeons going this is a more realistic Monument it’s also in London about the same time and uh it’s a monument to an American politician who is largely forgotten now adle Stevenson he died in London and uh uh he
Was uh usually uh uh pictured wearing his uh bowler hat and uh in this case when he died the Hat fell off of course and uh the monument envisages placing the hat in a uh a flagstone of a London Street at the point where he died uh this the monument was actually
Uh I actually attempted to have this Monument put up but in London the rules for monuments are very strict and uh there was no succcess in doing it this is the monument that Nan mentioned which actually began uh by looking at u a baked potato with butter in
It and by this curious process I described it became the intersection of Canal Street and Broadway and and uh then someone said well it’s such an obstruction perhaps it should function as a anti-war memorial and so it developed into a anti-war memorial symbolizing the futility of War
It would have it would U cut off the traffic of course in up and down and across Manhattan and it turns out that it’s placed in a spot that was identified as the likely place to drop the bomb in those days you always talked about the bomb and where it would
Land another New York Monument is uh this proposal to humanize the PanAm building or what used to be the PanAm building it’s always seemed like such an obstruction like a dam in Park Avenue and U here it’s replaced with a Good Humor Bar and very often when um
When things are are represented uh they have a certain uh characteristic that’s repeated in the case of a Good Humor Bar whenever it’s shown it has a bite out of it to show you what you’re supposed to do with it and this bite is very functional in this case because it
Allows the traffic to pass uh London again in 1966 was a very dark win win and um I thought it would be great if there was some kind of a ball like a u like a sun or something to float in the temps and uh I remembered U uh looking
Into my water closet and seeing a brass ball riding up and down on the on the water and uh there was Association in my mind between the tide in the temps and the water going out of the water closet and so I made the connection in
This form which is U uh attached as you see to a bridge near the center of power in London and this would uh being a a very shiny Brass Ball it would be something like an oldtime gallion or something like a Turner maybe sitting in
The in the temps and and going up and down slowly uh the monument was uh was misunderstood because people thought I was saying that the temps was uh polluted but but that wasn’t true at all because of course the water is clean where where this Brass Ball rides nevertheless
Um uh you can’t uh reject any interpretations when you’re yourself your mind is as Loose as as as to produce this sort of thing you can’t exactly set rules for how it should be interpreted and uh the uh Fountain of Aeros was being repaired at the time in Picadilly
Circus and so this is a substitution of a more contemporary subject which would also be keyed into the tide so that it would rise and fall like a maybe a pumping organ or something well all those had been uh in the late 60s and uh around 67 or 68 uh
People kept asking why don’t you uh do something for real why do you just live in your imagination and produce these things and uh so I felt the same way but the opportunity didn’t arise until some graduate students at Yale University graduate students of architecture uh had been interviewing uh
Herbert marus who was a socialist philosopher at the time and they had asked they had showed marus some of these uh colossal monuments as they were called these fantasies of mine and asked him what would happen to society if they were ever constructed and maruzi said and these
Are his words if you could really invisage a situation where at the end of Park Avenue there would be a huge Good Humor ice cream bar and in the middle of Time Square a huge banana I would say and I think safely say that Society has has come to an
End because then people cannot take anything seriously neither they president nor the cabinet nor the corporation Executives there is a way in which this kind of satire of humor can indeed kill now that was very inspiring to the students so they um they commissioned me
To make a uh such a monument for Yale uh Yale at that time was um and still is and always will be I suppose a very conservative institution uh but at that time the students were uh uh were difficult to deal with they were demonstrating and they were wanting to change things and
Uh at Yale um it was not only the Vietnam War which was a problem but it was uh uh other smaller items like that the Yale didn’t allow any sculpture to be placed on the campus and uh um there were many things that they wanted to protest against they wanted something
Which would would bring the protest together and they wanted to place it in a very hot spot so uh the group uh was led by steuart uh R Who Um was then a student a graduate student he’s now at the Museum Modern Art and uh I brought
This in as the uh proposal it’s a lipstick that uh is based on caterpillar Treads and the idea is the lipstick comes in on its own it’s a traveling monument and uh I visualized that it would be remote controlled it would find its spot and then it would sit there and
Uh the lipstick which would be a soft lipstick would rise and fall as it had in the Picadilly one now as it turned out the we didn’t have a great deal of money and they had hoped to raise a lot of money from students but they didn’t uh get very
Much and uh they approached a few donors and finally uh Philip Johnson I think was the major donor and the sculpture was realized with the caterpillar Treads compromised into wood which didn’t move and the soft lipstick was only installed for the inauguration and after that a
Hard one was uh uh uh uh replaced it but the site the site was a very powerful one which is in the center of the university in the war memorial and it was also right next to the president’s house at this could never have happened except that people were so the
Administration was so scared of students in those days they thought that let them do this and that may they may not do anything worse and in fact some people who worked on the sculpture felt that they were uh compromising the revolution because they were uh diverting it into Aesthetics so
There was a lot of uh uh U interest about it Vincent Scully who was a a good friend of the president was a secret backer of the project and I think that’s one of the reasons that it it was allowed to happen the architectural historian and nowadays it’s no longer a
Controversial piece the uh lipstick it’s still at Yale but it’s been moved to one of the residential colleges Morse College where you see it here uh I think artworks um have an age like everybody and they go through periods and there’s a youth when the the
Sculpture is not so much art as a uh uh as a rallying point uh uh uh it’s it’s alive and then it it goes into a kind of middle-age and it’s retired and this one is retired and people don’t climb it anymore to make speeches the way they
Used to do they climb it to Sun themselves and uh people like to brag about making love inside of it and so but anyway it’s nice to have it in a university because the um the generations come and go and um it it’s rediscovered and reinterpreted and um uh it’s it’s the
Oldest living feasible monument at this point that was 1969 and um the uh series of large Civic works that followed didn’t really begin until uh about 5 years later with the cloth pin in Philadelphia uh which was followed by this piece is the bat column which is 100 feet high located in
Chicago this was a commission for the GSA and you see it here when it was put up in 77 the landscape around it has changed quite a bit since this time and uh it’s a sort of lesson in in site specificness uh in in plac ing a
Sculpture in a city you can’t really insist on that because uh in 10 years usually the uh situation is totally different at least in America in growing cities like Chicago and New York the bat column was inspired by uh The Columns that were at the Northwestern station not far from the
Site uh the Northwestern station has now been torn down another building has been put up but the idea of a column in Chicago is um is very Central to the to the history of the place Chicago is a is a town of architecture and there was a
Very critical moment in the history of Chicago when uh it could have gone into native architecture but instead it went into neoclassical architecture and neoclassicism took over and so the bat column is U both a comment on that an attempt to uh also to pull the column
Back into to a native tradition by making it into a baseball bat the uh uh bat column was awarded the Golden Fleece award which at that time was an award given by Senator proxmire otherwise a liberal Senator but uh he gave this award every year for the most conspicuous waste of government
Money but those were different days that was the Carter Administration and um the sort of thing that happened to Richard Sarah sculpture which was also a GSA piece didn’t happen to the bat column it was it was unpopular but the government defended it and uh uh so it’s still
There whereas the Tilted Arc is unfortunately been taken away the government was more daring about art in those days there you see a view down and this was in those days it was a kind of what they called skid Ro in Chicago which was a very poor section and when we put the
Bat column up the uh uh skidrow residents in those hotels across the street were throwing bottles at us but we had Mrs Mondale to give the address and uh it was a very festive occasion and Ernie Banks uh a local baseball player was there and a lot of
Balloons were raised and as I say the government was much more positive about art in those days maybe that’ll come back here you see what’s happened to it this is a a contemporary photograph of the same sculpture the Northwestern station has been replaced by a large Skyscraper by helmet
Ywn and highrises have come up all over skidrow is long gone and this shows you what this sculpture is really about it’s um it’s uh an attempt to to identify with the structural aspect of Chicago Chicago is full of uh metal structure and um it’s full of elevated trains and uh fire
Escapes and water tanks and buildings that uh are very structural and the site is not particularly good site in front of this GSA building Social Security building but we wanted to identify with the structural tradition of Chicago and uh more and more the bat column has
Has come to do that as the city rises around it Michigan Avenue in Chicago has grown a lot since those days too and this is an early proposal for a skyscraper uh just south of the Hancock Building Chicago is interesting because of the different scales that the architecture has
Different periods have produce different scales so you can see the history of the city in terms of the scale uh the Hancock is one scale the Palm Olive uh Playboy building behind it is another scale and the first scale was the water tower which is down to the lower left
Chicago is also a very ferial City and it’s a it’s a city that sometimes reminds you of a cemetery uh because it rises out of a flat plane and it’s so vertical and so this statue would seem to be a very good subject for a a skyscraper there since it’s a Loredo
Taft’s sculpture of death which is strangely enough labeled the Monument of the first settler it’s in Graceland Cemetery this is intended to be upside down and shows you again that the bat column is related to the structures provided you uh do like throw and uh put
Your head between your legs and look at them this way this uh was a picture of uh Central Park with a proposal uh from the 60s for some U colossal uh pool balls the identification of course is of the park with a uh with a pool
Table and the balls were envisaged as uh Office Buildings that would Move I think that was suggested by the those huge structures down in Cape Canaveral at the time which used to crawl around very slowly and launch rockets but if you lived along the park then every morning you’d have a different configuration and if you went to the
Office in these buildings you’d have to find your office the uh proposal uh for Minster Germany which came in 1977 just after the bat column was based on the on the pool balls in Central Park but here there uh it was only possible to build three balls for a Municipal Park in
Minster the balls were uh intended of course to be on a on an uninhabited field but it turned out that this field was very popular with students and the the balls uh soon became places for the students to write out uh poems and and slogans and uh uh
To sit on and so they became more like Billboards after a while that is to say after the students had attempted to roll them into the local Lake but we had put a very deep foundation on them so they had to live with them and now they’re they’re quite
Popular our hope is uh I say Kosh and I always hope that uh the sculptures that we develop for places uh will become uh emblems or or something associated with these places so that they will serve a function uh and and people will will uh think of them as being their their own
And this has happened with the balls here in Minster which are very popular even if they’re not used as art they’re used more as Billboards in 1978 uh well Kosh and I as they were married in 1977 in 1978 uh uh we moved from Holland back to New York
And um we uh both felt that art was too confined by the gallery system that showing a work in a gallery and having it get lost um for good in in a a warehouse or in someone’s home was not the way that we wanted to have art go out so we
Decided Ed to step out of the gallery system and devote ourselves entirely to commissions Public Works uh it was a time when this was possible for one thing there was a factory up in Connecticut lip and card Incorporated which specialized and only did Art Works usually of welded steel
And also the government was beginning to sponsor art and there were numerous regulations in cities which uh uh set aside a certain amount of money for Public Works so it was really a um a very good time uh to make this decision also Public Works were fresh and people
Hadn’t yet gotten together all the defenses that they eventually would to combat them and you could sneak into town and put up a public work before people realized what had happened nowadays you have to take a vote and everybody has to be in on it but in those days it was more autocratic
And in a way that’s better for art so one of our first commissions was in De Mo Iowa and this is the site which is in the middle of De Mo and it’s uh we visited there on a very hot day and standing on this large expanse of
Concrete we felt as if we were on a beach one of the heroes that our heroes is Robinson cruso I think because um uh well I’ve always liked Robinson cruso because he uh had to invent everything out of what he found around him and that’s sort of
An attitude that I take in the studio I like to put things together out of whatever turns up and um when we stood on the beach there we talked about um Robinson cruso finding himself on the beach and we thought well wouldn’t it be original if we somehow
Transplanted an ocean Vision into the middle of of America because De Moine is almost the Center of America and so they developed a sculpture called the cruso umbrella the umbrella is the object that cruso first made because he had to keep the sun off his head and it’s uh of
Course cruso is a fictional character uh he made this umbrella out of straw and it was the thing he was most fond of when he when he left the island he took the umbrella with him in De Mo you have a lot of deforms probably because the city has starts
With a d and because it’s a capital and they have domes on the capital and then there’s a an insurance company there that has umbrellas all over the place uh travelers insurance and so umbrellas kind of pushed their way into our our imagination and so we
Um we we uh put this all together and came up with a model this actually is a cruso approach uh you you use the Christmas tree and then after the Christmas you clean off the needles and and you make something out of it and this is the
First attempt to make the cruso umbrella out of the Christmas tree with a little piece of rope at the end and this is what it led to a very large sculpture made out of steel which combined a lot of forms not only the umbrella but uh the forms of farm machinery and plants
And there it is when it’s finally placed in De Mo the color uh was originally a u a color derived from uh the John Deere company uh farm machinery but uh it wasn’t it wasn’t the right green it was too uh too light and so instead we took
The Green from the typical New York dumpster which is that nice dark green let fit the umbrella and there you see the uh umbrella in front of its uh in front of the concert hall an auditorium and the City Hall in back or the rather the uh the capital in
Back and our feeling is that the umbrella functions a little bit like that road in relation to the Dome of the capital it kind of repeats that long that long run and then the do end to it but also you can see how insignificant public art is in this picture we would
Always do a sculpture and then fly away and then we would look down and we couldn’t even find it on the ground that’s how art is I mean you have to look at it close and that’s uh the other thing about scale in in U in cities is that it’s very
Important to have the right scale that we’re we’re not engaged in just making something large the reason it’s large it is because it has to compete with buildings and and cars and uh all the things that happen in the city but it has to be just the right
Size and this umbrella is the right size when you’re down next to it and that’s the important thing uh this is a sculpture which followed in Las Vegas at the University and it’s between an auditorium and a concert hall and the sculpture is a flashlight which is facing downward the university wanted uh
Something to call attention to the to the events in the auditorium and the concert hall and so the first proposal had been a tower which would throw light up into the sky however that seemed to be somewhat of a cliche in Las Vegas where most of
The most of the time is spent doing that uh on the strip and so we started to think about something that was a bit anti-as Vegas which uh would reflect the other part of Las Vegas now Las Vegas is a very big city and many people there live a family
Life and have a an intimate time not everybody goes down to the strip one of the models for the scale of the flashlight is the uh lighthouse out on Roosevelt Island another one was the torch from the Statue of Liberty that’s definitely facing upward but this is the sort of thing that we wanted to uh to counteract and we combined our thinking with the cactuses that we’re standing around and the result was this form which is um a cylinder
With profiles of a flashlight set around it and it’s facing down and the light is very very minimal coming up from the bottom the uh structure of these of these fins of these profiles creates a very very dark uh blackness in the daytime because it’s it’s composed of
Shadow and it’s a very strange thing to see in Las Vegas we wanted to do something that that was like a hole in in the in the day which was like a piece of night left over uh in the day which is the way sometimes it’s feels in Las
Vegas and so nothing in Las Vegas is black because it’s a it’s a desert uh country and to to make something black means to invite the heat in so everything is trying to push the heat away but this flashlight pulls the heat in and is like a as I say like a hole
And then at night the uh the flashlight disappears and all you you have is the illumination down at the bottom a very quiet sort of gentle illumination coming from the bottom botom this is one of the U projects that kosher influenced very strongly uh she’s uh has a lot of
Important influences on the sculptures in the beginning the bat column for example the color gray which is so appropriate to the bat column she chose because she felt that it harmonized with the city of Chicago and in this case it was largely due to her insistence that
The flashlight was turned on upside down and became the antithesis of uh of the strip because she wanted to emphasize the other part of Las Vegas another University sculpture is at the University of Pennsylvania it’s called the split button it originally was visualized as a button having fallen off the statue by
Calder’s grandfather which stands on top of the the city hall and it had the four holes which were reminiscent of Penn’s plan for Philadelphia which was four parks around which the city would grow and it was to be a button to sit on in this very landscaped center of the
Campus but uh it the more we thought about it the more we we that we felt that that was a rather dull way to treat the a button so uh we broke it kosher said um that uh we’ve got to somehow cut across the the uh uh the Perfection the
Symmetry of the of the circle so it became a split button which um is also what we imagine as the most useless object possible that is to say a student gets a shirt back from the laundry and the button falls off and what can you do
With that so the split Button had its origin is that it’s located in front of the library and uh from the very beginning it became a place where people would climb and sit and stick their head out of course and sometimes the whole band got on and sometimes the uh the football
Team got on and jumped on it and tried to make it come down uh eventually we had to put a stem under it to hold it up but it’s function over the years uh right in front of the library and U there was a lot of opposition in the
Beginning to it some people felt that it was too assertive for a sculpture that sculptures should be polite and have their place and and lie on the ground and not stand up like this and they C certainly shouldn’t be bright white like this but we insisted and the sculpture
Is still there and it’s it’s used for many things this is a happy moment and uh it’s also used uh to make a statement like this which was done uh for uh students and uh relatives who had died of AIDS this was a a week it was wrapped up like
This in Castle Germany in the documenta exhibition of uh 1980 documenta 7 we were invited to make a sculpture a large sculpture and visited castle and looking around for a subject found this very uh typical uh what’s called a spitz haaka or just an ordinary pick which you find in any City
Uh it’s especially U uh found or people remember it very much in Germany because uh after the second world war there was a lot of work always with pxs and so are in the city so it’s a kind of U uh slightly magical object that you see it
Everywhere and of course in Castle is a famous statue of Hercules on top of a folly that was built in the 18th century a wonderful statue he stands there with his Club looking out over the city and he looks straight down a line which runs into a street the Williams ho
Al which runs right down to the river so what we imagined was that instead of a club Hercules might have a pickaxe in his hand and he might throw the pickaxe and the pickaxe would go in a straight line right down to the river and it would land at the river like
This this part hasn’t changed very much uh for many centuries and the only thing there now is a pick but you can find a uh watercolors by the brothers Grim of this spot and it it really looks very much like this except for the pick I did a a print for documenta
Taking the Grim watercolor and putting the pick in it another uh sculpture for Germany in fryborg in brow it’s near a vocational school at the edge of town and it’s called The Garden schlock or garden hose it’s it’s kind of a fountain but it’s an enormous structure which produces very little
Water like when you’ve just turned the Fountain off you know and there’s just water coming out a little bit at the end which forms in a pool down there this area had been um an area of uh allotment Gardens like this you know those Sunday
Gardens that you have and each one has a little hose and you go out and water your plants on Sundays and when the city expanded uh these were taken away and a big Park was provided for people and in the park there had to be a sculpture and
The scul sculpture became the garden Schock because we wanted to memorialize these small gardens secretly I think we felt that people would have been a lot happier if they had had those Gardens rather than this big Park which is rather empty this sculpture was made in a very
Difficult process uh at Manis man company because when you bend steel this is a 50 cm uh diameter when you bend steel it it tends to turn into an oval or flatten and we didn’t want that we wanted it to be a perfect circle all the way around so
They had to invent a special machine which heated the steel and passed it through so that you would have this perfect curve people like to try to climb up to the top of it but it’s very frightening and nobody ever makes it over the top and down the other
Side and as I say a little bit of water runs out of it and forms uh this pool we skipped one there what we skipped is the uh is the preparation of course all these things do start as very small models the first uh attempt to realize it is probably a
Drawing uh to realize the idea and that passes very quickly into a study of some kind uh quickly made what I like to do is to present uh our proposals in a very primitive form because uh we want to uh establish a confidential relationship with the people commissioning it and we want them
To trust us so when we come to them we want it to be as close to the idea as possible and uh this is a good example of that when you present something like this people have to have a great deal of confidence to know what’s going to happen to it
Fortunately in this case they did and this is the finished sculpture which is called The Balancing tools and it’s in front of a factory that makes chairs in in uh in viam rine which is near Basel the factory is where you are looking from and uh it’s right out in
The countryside so that this functions is a kind of a gate between the countryside and the factory and the tools are used because um uh obviously to relate to the factory but we also wanted to emphasize U something of the history of the factory which makes chairs and uh
Particularly Mass produces em chairs and um uh IM was very involved with tools and we wanted to uh uh memorialize that aspect of it it was uh um when it was put up it was all alone in the garden but soon other things were put up and U among
Them this chair museum which is designed by Frank Gary that you see in the background this Museum that uh is entirely devoted to to chairs through history this makes it very difficult to have a lot of shows but uh it’s it’s an extremely extremely interesting building
That you you may have seen pictures of from other sources and the uh balancing tools functions as a kind of a Counterpoint to it at this time this is at the lipen cot Factory and uh the uh a large sculpture has just been delivered from a uh um a place that
Makes Yachts up in Rhode Island it’s uh called The Spoon bridge and Cherry and it was commissioned uh by the uh Walker Art Center for its Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis it’s also a fountain and again it’s a very modest Fountain the water runs out of the top of the cherry
And around it coating it completely and then sort of dribbles down at the bottom into the uh spoon and then runs out at the bottom of the spoon at the same time there’s a spray of water coming out of the stem which uh on certain conditions creates a kind of rainbow
Haze what was needed here was a uh a focus of the sculpture garden which was designed by Ed Barnes leading from the museum where you’re looking from uh which would which would carry the eye down this path at the same time we did didn’t want to dominate this sculpture
Garden so we didn’t want something that stuck up too high and I had been playing around a lot with a spoon for many years and uh had not been able to work it into any kind of a sculpture I had had it standing up and lying down but nothing
Had really worked until kosher came along and said the problem is you don’t have anything in the spoon and she put that cherry in the spoon and when that happened the sculpture came to life and it’s almost a symbol of of our col collaboration we feel but that’s what
Brought the sculpture finally uh to life it uh has something of a ship quality there was a long long ago there was a story I remember about uh Minnesota some people had claimed to found a Viking ship up in Minnesota uh and that uh turned out to
Be an artificial ship that somebody had planted but the memory of that is contained in here and also perhaps canoes that are pulled up on shore Minnesota is so much about lakes and the spoon itself is a kind of a symbol for a lake Minnesota gets very cold and of
Course if you have a fountain you have to um uh worry about that and uh the sculpture that is a fountain uh should look good in winter as well as in uh in summer we had hoped that they would leave the water in and people could go skating because there’s something about
Skates that would fit in very well with the spoon however they they drain it and nevertheless it it has a uh a certain winter aspect it looks like a cherry sunde or something in the winter and does seem to survive the season I put this in because I uh wish
That kosher was here to uh uh to add what she um adds so well to the lecture but this is this is uh uh the model you see and uh when we presented it which was in ‘ 89 we had a commission in Miami the following year and uh the uh project was
Again a fountain and we were asked to do a rather elaborate Fountain uh near the U uh government center and the first thought of course we had since we like to have very obvious thoughts and see what we can do with them was oranges and that led to
The thought of um an orange squeezer uh my favorite happens to be one called syx juicit which is kind of out of date but it has a Monumental quality and I once realized a soft sculpture made out of ayx juicd so the starting point was this uh silx juic version of The
Fountain and it carried out the ordinary uh uh requirements of a fountain M which is a kind of a bowl and a in a symmetrical Central uh situation but this was only the starting point and what we did was to break the bowl and we loaded the bowl with Peels
And orange slices and this shows a moment before the sculpture has actually taken place it shows the sculpture falling and breaking and this shows the end result that’s the courthouse behind it and on the right there’s a library by Philip Johnson it’s a kind of a courtyard made
Of uh concrete and this thing is in the middle of it and the breaking quality that the uh Bowl has uh seems to open up the architecture around it it’s a sculpture that has no Center and uh many many different ways to look at it it it’s uh it’s sculpture that inspires you
To walk around it all the time and the fountain are programmed in a very erratic way so that you never know when they’re going to come on and go off the uh there are a number of holes around the uh the plaza now unfortunately the holes are filled because people kept falling into
Them which was fine with us but the city was worried about lawsuits but otherwise this this sculpture is is is not at all compromised it’s a very difficult sculpture uh there was another problem because nowadays well this is recent uh you have to design sculptures that
Cannot be uh run into by people who are blind or it’s called sightless now uh and after we had built the sculpture they passed the law stating that all sculptures had to have uh railings around them to keep people from running into them and this was because the
Sightless people had to have the same possibility of access to the sculpture as people who had site and we argued about this a great deal and finally we put some markers which uh warn people um when they’re coming close to the sculpture because it’s it’s really a rather rather
Dangerous sculpture even if you have can see where you’re going uh as I say people fall into it or they hit their head while they’re looking at something else because it’s a very distracting sculpture it’s uh it it uh of course it had a lot of political meaning too in in
Miami because it turned out we didn’t know this but there’s a large U um arena there called the Orange Bowl and uh well that’s a coincidence but but it’s it’s more it’s more than that because the because the the hierarchy the the uh the sort of uh uh
Hierarchy of Miami is known as the Orange Bowl and if you if you threaten to break the Orange Bowl it means that you uh opposing the hierarchy and so we felt that Miami had reached a state where everything was breaking anyway and the city was flying apart in all
Directions and uh we explained this to the newspapers that that this sculpture was uh was about Miami today and not about Miami yesterday we try to um to make some sort of a comment about uh the cities that we find ourselves in but we don’t want to
Make it too obvious we want really the comments to be implicit and to eventually come from the people who live in the city so it’s a very delicate problem to not to impose ideas on on a sculpture that’s placed in the city or on the people of that City and to let
Them discover the things to put so much into the sculpture that it can be can ideas can be discovered and that the sculpture can can come to life that way uh growing in a city and uh first time you see it you see one thing and the
Second time more and that way it stays alive it’s also a sculpture that has a lot of different materials the early sculptures were all made of welded steel but uh we pushed more and more for a variety of materials and uh this is steel the peels are steel but
The uh bowl is concrete and then the slices are cast resin then there’s water and stainless steel aluminum as many things as we could get into it a rather more um carefully made model of a sculpture that was uh commissioned by Barcelona Barcelona had a public arts program uh
To place uh uh sculptures in small Parks all over the city which has been going on for a number of years uh a very good program we were invited to do that but we uh uh hesitated so much and argued about the contract and so after a while
We found ourselves in the Olympic budget which was a good thing because we got more money uh and so this sculpture actually was made for the Olympics and was inaugurated last year just before the Olympics it’s not in the center of Barcelona it’s in the uh edge of the
City in an area that’s being developed as a new residential area and a park it’s called the Val de Hebron it was also an Olympic uh site for archery and soccer it’s called the match cover in in Catalan it’s mistos and um we think it’s a Spanish
Subject we think the subject of fire is Spanish and we think there’s something uh of a windmill about it which reminds us of Don kote and the colors are the Catan colors but really I think it originated because um I had been um I had grown up
In Chicago and I had seen the Chicago Picasso so often that I was sitting and bending a match cover one day and I realized that if you bent a match cover a certain way it looked like the Chicago Picasso I think you’re all familiar with that
Sculpture and so this is an attempt to uh to suggest uh that sculpture or to establish a bond between Chicago and and Barcelona which again is not necessary but it’s inside the sculpture you could also say that the sculpture uh has something Marshal about it uh we thought uh the match the
Matches were a little bit like um perhaps well even today the Spanish Civil War is on people’s minds and we we thought about that and uh then when it became the the Olympics we thought about competitors of course some people who are full of energy running some people
Who are burned out some people who are uh burning because the sculpture is not just this central portion it has a lot of bches strewn around the intersection and just beyond this is a a reconstruction of the Spanish Republican Pavilion of 1937 by uh Jose Ser where the guica was first shown and
Uh it’s a very historic building that has been reconstructed and will serve as a museum so this little center of the park will have that museum plus this sculpture it’s high on a hill and you’re looking down towards the Mediterranean and there you see some of the uh spent
Match or that’s actually an unburned but there some of them are burned and it gets very Mediterranean when you get up on the thing there and lie under those things in the background you see the hill with the amusement park up on top TBO these individual matches are like sculptures in
Themselves that’s the Mediterranean Beyond it also I think has a little input from the gudi Cathedral this is another climate this is Paris and this is Park lavet which is a uh a strange um Park that lies in the northeast corner of Paris used to be the slaughter
Houses of Paris they were taken away and U there was made this park with a science museum the original plan had been to put a lot of sculptures there there are also Pavilion uh by Bernard schumi uh you can see one of them red red one there it’s a
Kind of a a futuristic landscape and uh we were one of the few survivors of the sculpture program Daniel ban put up a piece but many other sculptors who were supposed to put something up uh they didn’t have the money for what we have here and and uh managed
To put up is a a buried bicycle the concept the concept is that you take a 50 m long bicycle and you bury it in the ground and only a few things stick up but the things that stick up not only not only are individual sculptures but they have a certain logical relationship
To each other which you can figure out after you look at it for a while it’s sort of like those um uh well you’ve seen pictures of of uh the archaeologist digging up a portion of the Sphinx or something and then imagining this very large thing that’s
Underground or in the Planet of the Apes when they dig up a section of the Statue of Liberty and of course there isn’t really a bicycle down under there but perhaps at some stage in your life you would believe that there is it’s very popular with uh with
Families who come out on their bicycles and like to climb on it this is one of the problems of course that we have with public sculptur is that well we belong to the generation that thinks that you’re supposed to stand back and look at the work of art I mean not
Really but we would prefer that actually because uh the sculpture does get uh very badly damaged when when people climb on it but this particular sculpture has climbed on a great deal and uh I was I would go out there and sit in one of those chairs and watch and the uh family
Would come out say four four persons and first the the mother would help the kids up on top and they would slide down the bicycle seat and then finally she would get up and slide down and then the father would get up and slide down and all the time they were taking pictures
Of each other so I guess you know we have to console ourselves that we appear in all these photo magazine photo albums the this thing swivels around too see one of shumi’s uh structures in the back the building that lies behind there is a is called a Zenit which is a rock
And roll Auditorium the what used to be the Seagrams building on Park Avenue has a program as you know of putting up sculptures from from time to time and this sculpture was put up two years ago it’s a horseshoe as you see and uh it has an inscription on it Animo at F
And it must have been a rather mysterious object on Park Avenue for the few months that it was up and that’s because it wasn’t really meant for Park Avenue it was meant for the highlands of Texas and this is where it was eventually placed you may know that
Donald Jud the sculptor has a um uh some large grounds out in Marfa Texas where he shows his large outdoor works and also uh has changing exhibitions of artists that he likes and uh we know Don very well and we were out there a few years ago and
Looking at the sites it used to be a Cavalry Fort and at one point uh when the Cavalry uh retreated they um shot the horses or took them with them and uh they had a favorite horse called Louie Louie was very old and uh so Louie died and they decided that they would
Memorialize Louie and they built this uh rather strange geometrical form uh which just stood at this spot and Don told us the story and we thought the monument was so sad and pathetic that uh it deserved a little more and a few years later we came back
With this horseshoe which is made of aluminum and resin and it um it’s given Louie A A fitting Memorial Animo FID is the u means uh uh spirited and faithful and it’s the motto of the of the Cavalry it’s especially nice to stand there in the morning because the sun
Comes up over those Hills way back there and comes right into the into the horeshoe of course it’s a rather unrealistic horseshoe and it’s got a big nail through it and uh there’s a slight u a slight reference to a postcard I had uh by melee which had a hammer and
Sickle on it and uh so it’s not really a horseshoe one of the longest projects that we worked on these things all take many years by the way from the uh commission through the contract through the fabrication and sometimes through the political process which can be very
Involved as in this case this is in Cleveland and the sculpture Here is known as the free stamp Standard Oil company had built a new building Standard Oil of Ohio which you see on the left in the center of Cleveland and they had commissioned a sculpture in front of
It uh right across the street is a famous existing sculpture a civil war memorial which you see on the right there um and we usually don’t work for corporations but in this case the the sculpture was so Central to the city of Cleveland that we thought we would take
A chance the trouble with corporations is that you never know who you’re dealing with and one day your best friend disappears and is never seen again the Scot the uh The Architects uh obada and cabam had provided this pad in front of the building uh which you can
See there at under the stamp and that was a pad where a sculpture was supposed to sit we have a lot of uh uh strange relationship with with Architects and and uh they always are trying to tell you exactly where you’re going to put the thing the exception to that of
Course is Frank Gary and some other Architects but a more conventional architect will designate where the sculpture is going to go in this case it was so it was so blatant the sculpture had to go right on that pad that our first response was to put a rubber stamp on
It now that’s that’s a very factious response but but it turned out to be not only that but a very good solution because the the building has something of the character of a stamp and so does that sculpture across the street and so we developed the
Sculpture uh in uh you know to a point where it it really uh began to work uh the original idea was to have it as a kind of a house uh you could enter it and then you could look up inside but that proved to be impractical so it was just placed down
Like this on a on a pad and the the letters free which Koshi said should go on the stamp uh as a paradoxical uh statement it being crushed down she said the only thing you could put there is free which will uh negate that
Uh you can read or you can figure out I mean you don’t always no one tells you that but you can figure that out by walking around what the letters are and this was accepted by Standard Oil and we were um about to build it when Standard
Oil disappeared it was taken over by a British Petroleum and they changed all the signs and U they changed all the staff and they said we certainly don’t want a rubber stamp outside our building because that might say that we are a rubber stamp of Standard Oil it was a very strange
Coincidence and the contract was broken and um it looked as if the uh rubber stamp was finished and uh British Petroleum actually said that they would they would uh build the stamp in Cleveland somewhere but not in front of their building but we insisted that it was
Made for the building and in this case we were very very uh firm about being sight specific so there was an impass and there were demonstrations and uh a number of people uh wrote their support of the sculpture but nothing really happened until uh well there were a lot of
Pressure was a lot of pressure put on the politicians because the U City of Cleveland was very favorable uh to the sculpture had had uh uh it had gone before the the uh planning Council and so on had been approved so um it was a matter of waiting for the political
Situation to become favorable and that took a number of years but finally it did and uh we were asked to come out to Cleveland and consider an alternate site if we could given our um feelings about site specificity so we said okay we’ll do it
Because uh we’d like to do it for the city of Cleveland since that was the way we started the project so we went out and we found a spot next to the City Hall uh in a park called Willard Park and um the way rationalized it Koshi imagined that the stamp had been
Picked up from the original site and thrown five blocks through the air and landed on its side next to City Hall this was very good because this site was a horizontal site the other one was a vertical site and the object was suitable to a horizontal presentation if
You did this to it also you could look from this site and see the original site and since that pad was still at the original site you had a kind of narrative sculpture so uh with a story attached that people could tell and and this um this
Sculpture was actually put up and the mood changed completely to a um very uh positive thing the uh the mayor was for it and the city council president was for it and the chairman of British petrolum came and he was for it and Evan Turner the head of the museum was for it
And we had an absolutely unbelievable uh uh inauguration which was like a love feast and with a band and uh we couldn’t believe it because it had started out so badly so this um was a case where a public sculpture went through a lot of Trials and changes and and it had a
Happy ending if you go to Cleveland now you’ll see the sculpture it’s also uh there’s also a lot of controversy about the color of the sculpture but it’s very logical that it should should be pink because that’s what a stamp is and it’s it has a a very interesting
Effect on the buildings around it which are all of course very straight and this being a kind of piece of architecture it it has a tendency to to distort the buildings and twist them and it it really does very nice things to its surroundings it’s an illusion of course
Again it’s like the buried bicycle because we didn’t actually bury the stamp we we trimmed it off there’s a little room in there that’s a lot of fun to go into when you’re inside it’s like a fun house the walls are not straight and you lose your uh sense of
Uh of the Horizon and like being in a spaceship or something to go a little bit off course uh and back in time a bit to 85 one of the critical events in this period of the 80s for us was a u a performance that took place in Venice in
Italy was called the Coro Del cello and um it came about because the architect Frank G and kosha and I were invited uh by germano Chan to do a seminar in Milano with architectural students and the seminar was divided in two parts one developed a project for Venice
Architectural project for Venice and the other part developed a performance for Venice and the only thing which actually got done was the performance so that all of these architecture students found themselves dressed up in strange clothes and moving curious objects in a kind of um uh well in a performance that sort of
Bridged the Comedia delar two happenings and was a very free and open kind of thing as far as Aesthetics was concerned it was done in the city of Venice near the arsala you can see here um a scene during the performance uh if you go downtown to the uh Guggenheim in SoHo
You’ll see uh some of the props from the performance which are on display Now by coincidence this house ball for example which was a major part of the performance that rolling over the ancient bridge that uh you enter into the aralo it was uh in a way a kind of um uh
Representation of how we go about um uh taking the measure of a place of a city and condensing it into a uh into a monument and um uh it it was like a a municipal report on Venice and it had it functioned on a comparison between the
Present and the past so that all the characters in the performance had a dual identity uh one was a a present identity which was banal in my case I was a Sunday painter and a seller of cheap souvenirs in the past I had been Marco
Polo and U kosher was in the present uh a travel agent in the past she was George sand or her present name was Georgia sandbag uh Frank Gary was in the present of Barber but um he had been a uh he had been paladio germano taant was a pool room
Hustler but but he had been jordano Bruno and there was this interpenetration which is so common in Venice of of the banality of the present and and the great history and it culminated in a u in a form which was called the uh the cotell ship the knife
Booat it was a um a Swiss army knife uh which had somehow merged with the bin Toro which is the the um uh the state ship of Venice in the old days which was rode by many Galley slaves and was a very ceremonious thing and
Uh here you see this is uh the Sunday painter at work uh in his costume Dr cello that was my name uh had two assistants that Frank G’s sons who were known as knife dogs and we were all dressed as knives there there’s Georgia sandbag with her house ball she had come over
The Alps and uh this ball would roll around the performance and interrupt all kinds of of things and this is Frank this is after he lost his mustache in the early part of the performance he had a mustache but it was shaved off and he’s wearing a an architectural
Costume made of uh columns and a pediments and we’re going to switch to the other the cortell was a um was here’s the knife ship the cortell ship came in at a climactic moment in the Performance Sailing uh under the bridge from the arsala which is the Old Navy yard of of
Venice a very secret and and strange place and there you see the ores the ores were were uh uh moving at least on one side and then the thing would dock on the other side the boat is um uh was then later transported to America and became a sculpture in its
Own right and was placed inside the gohai museum as you may remember where the spiral functioned very well in the uh Center and it even made it out to the West Coast a it was installed at the mocha we uh continued to work with Frank
And this has been one of the uh uh developments of our collaboration kous in mind has developed as we became more and more involved with architecture we also became more involved with Frank and he’s a particularly receptive architect to uh art and to artists he always has been
And it’s a very rare thing he’s not envious of artists and we went to um uh to the California Venice where he had his studio and we watched him work and uh studied his uh procedures and and talked about all the projects that we would do together one of the
Projects that we worked on was this camp for children with cancer in the Santa Monica Mountains uh above Malibu this is a a very rough model of it but we imagined there a uh a wave having come up on shore and brought with it a lot of buildings which was
Scattered around Frank believed uh and kosha and Frank believed very much in a concept of what they call disor organized order in which um uh you would construct a village in a very uh random sort of way and the the uh the wave uh would throw up this flum and Jetsam
Which would then be developed into the buildings the dining hall of the camp was a symbolic wave looking at it from from behind and on the other side there was a large uh the kitchen was in the form of large milk can the feeling we had we may we may
Have been wrong because it’s very difficult to to to uh put yourself in the place of of these kids that we were we were very moved by watching them uh we wanted to uh do as much as possible to make the buildings as interesting as possible um for them and uh the camp
Never never took place because the funding was withdrawn and uh partly the uh the the people who were putting up the money objected to the imaginativeness of the buildings and and they they thought that something like log cabins would have been better we we of course thought that the
More the Wilder it was the more fun it would be this is the infirmary by the way which is located at the center of the camp in the course of developing our project for Venice we had thought of a binoculars building uh first it had stood in the
Water of the canal as you see in this drawing and then it had come on land and become developed into a theater library but that part of the project was never realized and so after Venice uh the models were sent back to Venice California and the model of the
Binocular stood on Frank’s desk for a long time now Frank was developing a building for um chot advertising and he had developed the left side and the right side but he felt that something was needed in the center and this binocular model had happened to be standing there and Frank
Took it and he put it in the center and everybody said my God that’s just what it needed at least this is the story I’ve heard we weren’t there but um it’s a nice story and I I think it probably did happen something like that because in Frank’s office very
Often that’s how things happen and uh he called us and said do you mind if I put the binoculars in the middle of my building and we said of course not but we did go out to look at it and uh it’s a very unusual thing actually What’s Happening Here is that
Frank is is is making uh uh our sculpture part of his building so that uh it’s not in front of the building it’s it’s integral to the building Incorporated in the building which is a very rare thing for an architect to do especially since it’s such a central
Point it’s uh it’s the center around which the building revolves so we were very excited by this of course in California there is a tradition of object architecture as we all know there are donuts and puppy dogs and all kinds of things in the shape of buildings or
Buildings in the shape of of things and uh it’s a tradition that I kind of admire but they’re always built so badly and uh they’re made of Stucco and uh they’re just not seriously uh intended so we wanted to make a uh building in that tradition which was very carefully
Made and had very precise lines and so we insisted on this and the construction of this was very complicated it took a long time to get just the right uh Framing and then to lay the plaster on perfectly it’s the entrance to the building and also the entrance to the
Garage you drive in between the legs of the binoculars and behind it is a uh a conference room and in the conference room there are two doors one to either binoculars and uh one of the problems we had of course and we’ve always had in relating architecture and sculpture is uh the
Interior because normally there’s nothing inside a Henry Moore for example but inside this sculpture there had to be something and what we had was a room but we didn’t quite know what to do with the room so we thought perhaps there could be a room for contemplation the two doors lead off the
Conference room if nobody if everybody is sitting around and and nobody has a good idea uh they say well you better go into the binoculars and think about it so inside the binoculars we don’t have any furniture we have a u light coming in
From the top of course but we also put a uh a large light bulb this is the uh conference room and you could see the door to the binoculars on the left and also the window through which you can see the binoculars and then the landscape outside up at the top
Is a snake made of wood by Frank and here’s the inside of the binoculars with the light bulb looking up it’s a very large light bulb and it has a window or two because Frank told us that all buildings have Windows and if you don’t have a window it’s not a
Building it’s strange space in there it uh because it’s so sensuous it it really doesn’t need any furniture and that’s that’s more or less the way it is you walk in there and you stand and you look up at this light bulb this is the last slide and it um it’s a
Drawing uh from 19 89 having to do with architecture some years ago in the 70s um a collector in England Lord Peter Palumbo who also collects buildings wanted to create a um uh an Immaculate perfect Mis vandero building in the city of London City area of London he owned some property there
And he wanted to clear it and and and build this beautiful Brown building and uh I was involved because he wanted to uh commission me to do a sculpture in front of it but it didn’t happen and one of the main reasons it didn’t happen was that uh Prince
Charles called the M vandero project a glass stump which was such an ugly thing to say that it you know it kind of ruined the project uh so years later The Independent Newspaper in London was starting a new section on Art and they asked uh us to make a uh
Project for for London and so I remember this incident and also the site which is one poultry Street and Peter Palumbo had now uh succeeded in in commissioning the late James Sterling to build a building on this site and it was uh um going to happen and so we put all these things
Together and we asked the Independent to send us any relevant material and we would see what we could come up with for that particular site so we looked through the papers and that they had sent us and kosher found a most wonderful quote by Prince Charles he said it’s after all he’s
Speaking at an anward at a at a banquet he said it’s after all one of my rare opportunities to stir things up to throw a proverbial Royal brick through the inviting plate glass of pompus Professional Pride and to jump feet first into the kind of spaghetti bologi
Of red tape which clogs this country from one end to the other so koshes said that’s the subject for our building so this is known as the prince’s foot and it has Windows and it has columns even if they’re soft columns and it looks a little bit like the James Sterling
Building and it’s at one poultry Street and uh it reminds us that uh that what we’re doing is is still fantasy and despite all of the political processes and difficulties that we we go through um the ideas are still uh start this way uh I don’t know if this will ever be
Built but uh I mean at that point we weren’t feeling sorry for Prince Charles but now it’s different anyway that’s the end of the presentation and I know it would have been uh philosophically more edifying if Kosh had been here because what we do is that I tell the anecdotes and uh kosher
Uh interprets them and uh gets to the bottom of what we’re really doing but perhaps that could be another time and um uh I thank [Applause] you CLA I found that fascinating and I have lots of questions but so does the audience which we’ll get to very
Soon I wonder if you talk a little bit about why it’s so difficult to get such monuments accomplished in New York well uh I don’t know there’s there’s um it just has never happened for us in New York I I like to think that the Fantastic monuments the early monuments are are
Very close to the the spirit of New York I think because when I was a child I always thought of New York as a fantastic place as a unbelievable place where Anything Could Happen a uh zeppin could come in and anchor itself to the Empire State Building and things like
That but but the opportunity hasn’t Arisen I think what you have to do here is work for it you know you have to uh go out and put up your Monument I think the city actually will give you spaces uh for example there’s a couple of islands in the river that they’ll let
You put things up on but you have to pay for it and maintain it does the scale of the city work against I think the scale is is uh yeah I think uh well I mean there’s nothing wrong with putting a sculpture up in Brooklyn or Queens you know it’s all
Part of the city uh but I think uh if Kosh and I would would put something up I think we’d look for a um something in the middle of the East River or something like which have a little bit of uh uh distance from those big things those
Skyscrapers you mean like on Rosevelt island or well Rosevelt island is getting rather crowded too yeah I think of that little island just south of Roosevelt Island but that’s already beginning to fill up anyway we welcome suggestions and contributions would you talk a little bit more about uh how the works are
Fabricated do you continue to go to lipen cot in Connecticut or well lipin cot is still functioning and uh it’s the basic Factory for us we do build things overseas whenever possible the Barcelona piece was built uh entirely in in Barcelona in that case the models are
Made here and sent uh to the factories over there but it’s good to have a a factory that one can uh one knows one’s way around in and the lip and cot Factory has always gone beyond fabrication to arranging transportation and all sorts of things that are complicated insurance and so
On what is the surface of most of the pieces you show this well it’s um automobile it’s mostly Oh you mean what’s painted there it’s painted with an outdoor urethane which is very strong thank you do you think writing plays a big part in your work and how how does that
Function writing you’re writing or you’re in kosher’s writing well of course kosha is really uh professionally you would say she is a writer uh and she spends a lot of her time writing and a lot of her um input is uh is content you know his interpretation uh is U uh political is
Philosophical and mine I I I do have I put content in too but that’s uh largely her area in the large scale projects we also use writing uh as a as a u as form I didn’t show we have one sculpture in England which is very much concerned
With writing which is called the bottle of notes which is a bottle made out of writing so I think U I think writing does does play A Part both as a as invisible and visible part and you go on keeping notebooks yes I mean there’s more of a text to the
Large scale projects than there is to to uh um the smaller works and uh before I started the large scale project with kosa I was uh more open in my uh approach to content I I was more formal formally involved than than content involved but it seems that the large
Scale projects demand a text uh being uh uh Civic uh being involved with people they’d like to they like to put things into it they like content and it’s it’s uh it’s something that uh that seems to come naturally when you’re making something for a for a
City how well this is an audience question how well do you feel you need to get to know a city before you make a piece for it well it’s not necessary to know the city very well we are working here with u with First Impressions and
Uh we’re working in a poetic kind of way we’re trying to merge our poetry with the the uh the things that we find in the city so it’s not necessary to make a municipal report it’s it’s often uh the things we pick up are either stereotypical or they’re uh
They’re far out or I mean there’s no rule for it and it’s it’s not an attempt to uh to make a municipal report uh we never quite know what’s going to function it’s it’s a very intuitive process but the important thing is that that that we mix our own feelings with
It so that it it becomes an artwork and uh not an illustration of the Mind of a community got a couple of very easy ones this one says I’m going to La soon where exactly is the binocular I’d like to located on Main Street uh in Santa Monica it’s uh difficult to miss
[Laughter] it here’s another easy one in which New York art gallery are you represented so that we may see your work well as I said if you go down to the U um downtown Guggenheim you’ll see uh some of the pieces from the the cortell but
Otherwise you’d have to wait until I had a show which probably won’t happen for a couple of years and that will be at most likely be at the pace gallery What distinguishes Frank Gary from other Architects and why do you feel so comfortable working with him well he’s a wonderful man and um he is a as I said very generous uh to Art and and and uh makes art very much a part of his work um and
He’s always been very friendly to artists to flip that over what makes so many Architects so difficult to work with uh this is something that rich question yeah compl commented on about a month ago here yeah that’s uh um well I don’t know what it feels like
To be an architect but it must feel very different than being an artist uh for one thing you have a program which tells you what you have to do and then you have to compromise that program or your own your own program constantly you have to make changes and
Then you have to worry about so many so many details um and you don’t really have the freedom that an artist does so you’re probably much more circumspect and it probably tends to attract uh a different kind of person uh when I was a child my
Parents said I hope you grow up to be an architect and it didn’t say I hope you grow up to be an artist you know it’s a more responsible position because after all these these have to stand up you know so I think that they have to be
More careful uh Frank’s buildings look like they’re going to fall down but they don’t of course I mean that’s the art you know that chair museum is an extraordinary yeah the chair museum and also the new concert hall for Los Angeles I mean there there’s something else maybe we can conclude with two
Related questions the first one is how do you decide how big to make your monuments well as I said that that’s a very important thing that it is not just a matter of of enlarging something but enlarging it in the proper scale because it’s really about scale and uh of course
Scale is an extremely U uh changeable relative thing um I don’t know at what point you would say you’re looking at the proper scale because as I say when you’re flying over a sculpture it’s it’s hardly visible when you’re standing next to it it’s so big you don’t even know what it
Is um but there must be a middle ground uh in relation to the um to the background for example the rubber stamp the free stamp has a definite scale in relation to the building and the uh Civil War Monument which is established in that drawing we showed even though
It’ll change as you get closer and further away but that’s something that we pay a lot of attention to the exact scale this one’s fairly long question it says to me your sculptures seem to have been placed on Earth by a very large giant don’t you think this giant would
Grace other planets with his Creations before I die I’d love more than anything to see what he’d put on the moon do you think that’s possible what would you do well as a matter of fact there is a sculpture on the moon uh you know uh
This is true the um a few years ago when when we were last on the moon the the only time and ever uh the uh there was a project I think it was Frosty Meers the sculptor who originated the project he went around to several artists and got some very small chips
Plastic chips and they were mounted inside the module that was left on the moon and he got I think he got a renberg and a Chamberlain and uh he got one of my uh mice geometric mice oh my so there’s a little geometric Mouse in the in the
Thing there up on the moon so it’s already been colonized okay I think that’s a good note to end on thank you very much CL okay thanks for listening for more information on the 92nd Street y New York and all of our programs please visit us at 92.org