My name is Kim Connitte, I'm the curator here.
And it is my great, great pleasure to have you here for
this evening's conversation with the artist
Fred Eversley on the occasion of his exhibition.
Black, white, Gray, which we are
now essentially sitting in the middle of.
I should also note at the beginning that be very
aware that there are
sculptures that could tip off of their pedestals.
Should you back your seat up unexpectedly.
So just be aware before you move your body.
We've tried to position everything pretty safely,
but we just want to be extra safe.
This show, what was going to say?
This exhibition actually focuses on
one aspect of Fred's nearly five decade long career.
That is a very long time. I was realizing I was
thinking about it a little bit more than five.
Yeah, that's true, That's true.
We'll be thinking about the work that is here.
That is a body of work that he developed in the 1970s,
really looking at works in
the seemingly limited palette of black, white, and gray.
But I think as you see from looking at the works,
that it's actually endlessly fascinating palette.
Lucky for us, the Huntington,
which is a wonderful institution outside of Los Angeles,
will be organizing a larger survey
of Fred's work next spring.
We'll have the opportunity at that point
to really see the work from the beginning,
see all the bodies of work together.
It's an exciting moment for Fred
and we're thrilled to have the exhibition here.
This exhibition was first organized for art and practice,
which is in Los Angeles.
It's Mark Bradford space.
And Mark is an artist who I
think is familiar to many people
here in the audience and certainly
at Brandeis and at the Rose,
for having hosted an exhibition of his here in 2014.
And now commissioning his US.
Pavilion at the Venice Bian Ali.
In the next couple of weeks,
we're excited to kind of have brought the connection,
this exhibition from Los Angeles here.
And I think when you and I were first talking
about this exhibition and
thinking about the space in Los Angeles,
I just kept thinking about how beautiful and
perfect it would be in these skylit galleries here.
I think I speak for everyone here on
the staff in saying what a pleasure
it is to live with these works every
looks great, never better.
It's tough to actually install these works
poorly because there's such beautiful things.
Think about this five decade long career.
More than five decade long career.
I think one of the really fascinating points of entry
into Fred's work is thinking about his own beginnings.
And thinking about how someone,
a Brooklyn born Carnegie Institute
trained engineer who moves to
California to work in
acoustic test laboratories for Nasa.
Then within a very short period of
time decides to become a sculptor.
And this is in the '60s,
I should say only three years later,
after deciding to become an artist,
he has a solo exhibition at
the Whitney Museum to really seven years.
That's a really fascinating period of how all of that
developed so quickly and how
it also developed so seamlessly.
I would be interested to hear from you a little bit
about whether you felt,
whether growing up or in your time at Carnegie Institute,
now Carnegie Mellon, what was on your artistic radar?
Did you have colleagues who were also
working in the arts or
were there things you were looking at?
Because for an engineer,
obviously, it could be a different path.
That's a tough one. No, I really
didn't pay that much attention to the art world.
I mean, I grew up in New York,
We used to hang out as a teenager
in the various museums because it was free,
it was dry, it was warm,
and it was a good place to go,
especially on a rainy afternoon.
I went to Brooklyn Technical High School,
which in those days
was considered the best high school in the country.
But it required this long subway trip,
subway and bus trip get there.
And the train literally passed through
Manhattan from school to my parents house and back again.
I used to take the opportunity,
most afternoons, to get in,
as a student in New York,
you had a free subway pass so you can go anywhere.
And I took the opportunity
to stop in Manhattan to visit with friends,
to hang out in the village,
in various coffee houses and such.
It was the time, I mean,
Bill Cosby did his first performance.
I was there at age 16,
illegally there,
because I wasn't old enough to be in a club.
But I was there and people like
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez
and all these people who were passing through,
including a lot of the artists,
were hanging out in the village.
But again, I was a kid, my real exposure,
I didn't go to galleries,
but I did go to the Museum of Modern Art and
to the Met as a place to meet friends.
Each of them had a cafeteria of some sort.
You can sit there for free and talk and do
whatever you did in a comfortable environment.
And obviously wandered around and looked
at whatever was on the walls and the display cases.
I never thought about in those days, making art myself.
My grandfather was very much into photography,
really early photography,
glass plate photography in those days.
That was my really only exposure,
but he didn't do it so much as
an art form as opposed to a craft.
And he died when I was ten years old.
That was just limited exposure to him.
I follow my normal secrets in going to university,
studying technology, studying engineering.
I chose the electrical engineering.
I went off to Carnegie Mellon
and Carnegie Tech in those days.
My exposure to in those days,
I had a couple of girlfriends who were art majors.
So I'd hang out a bit in
the art studios watching them paint.
Several of my fraternity brothers were art majors.
Only one of them went on to
become a professional artists.
And that was John, also showed
here in the collection and Brook in the collection.
But John is a young enemy.
We knew each other best,
that we were both on the paternity football team.
He played tight end,
he's a very good tight end and
I was a reasonable quarterback.
The students major,
my other fraternity brothers that were art majors,
actually not a single one of
them ever went on to become an artist.
One started a Blue Jean company and then I,
well, it's a long history,
but if we jumped to Venice to you arrive,
that was it when I arrived in Venice.
When I arrived in LA to start
my first engineering job front,
the company was on the beach.
And the only beach front community I
could move into as a black person, was Venice.
So I moved into Venice,
my roommate was one of my fraternity brothers
who was also an engineer for Hughes Aviation.
We were surrounded by Venice Beach in those days,
was the equivalent,
the LA equivalent to Greenwich Village, basically.
And that the remnants of the beach poets,
the ones that hadn't moved to
San Francisco were still there.
The young Lighten space artists are starting to move
to Venice because it was
very cheap studio space, I was surrounded.
And also some of the
Last two remaining musicians,
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, lived there.
They all moved out shortly after
I arrived and the artist moved in.
I was going out with the artist,
a sculptor, sculpture student at that time.
Her best girlfriend is Judy Chicago.
If you know who that is.
They were in the same class at UCLA in grad school,
Tony Bland, I don't know if you know who that is.
And going to art parties which were not all artists but
mostly artists becoming familiar with,
I was very useful in a way because I
could solve technical problems
that various artists like Judy Chicago,
like Larry Bell, had
trying to use technology to make their art.
I got into art. Basically, a friends level on
the consultant level was
offered an opportunity to
share a kinetic sculptors studio,
A man by the name of Charles Maddox
who made wonderful kinetic sculpture,
but it was famous for they broke
very good because he wasn't a good engineer.
I helped him engineer his sculptures so
that they didn't break as easy.
In return, I got
free studio space in use of all of his tools.
I started a little experiments in plastic.
They evolved into small pieces of sculpture,
multicolored multi layered pieces of
sculpture that luckily had a lot of popularity.
Collectors came by and for a couple,
$100 bought this little thing,
that little thing I was surrounded by.
Eric, or who died,
who was a good sculptor,
John Mccracken, who's now dead,
recently died who was a sculptor,
and John Alton,
who was a fantastic painter and we became good friends.
John and I just a quick interjection,
many of you may have seen the Alton retrospective
that was here two years ago,
three years ago anyway,
John was a person that was a brilliant painter,
but totally helpless about everything
else while his wife was away.
Any little problem that came up,
he come running next door for
my help to change a light bulb.
Literally, it sounds funny, but it's true.
And unfortunately,
he died at a very young age in 1969 in January.
And his wife, who at that time was the architect,
Frank Gary's Girl Friday,
as I said in those days, office manager,
for lack of a better word,
wanted to get the hell out of the studio.
Too many memories and to get out of LA,
she gave me the studio and traded
me a small piece of sculpture for the furniture,
bed in the couch and stove in the refrigerator.
It wasn't very much furniture,
I just started, I continued on
making these small experiments that
got more successful and larger and bigger.
I got into a group show at a gallery,
first small gallery, in LA,
and then was invited to be the youngest artist,
I believe in a very important show
called The Plastic Presence,
which was a show organized in
69 by the Milwaukee Art Museum.
That started at the Jewish Museum in New York
and went on to Milwaukee and then San Francisco.
Meantime, I was coming to New York and hanging out in
New York sleeping on people's couches. Literally.
Trying to find the gallery,
trying to do this, trying to do that.
I offered a show at the Whitney Museum.
They saw these little pieces I made.
I carried them in a sh,
I can get ten or 12 of them in a say,
said, do you have bigger pieces?
I said, yes, in California,
I had them one big piece that was at the Jewish Museum.
So, can you be ready for a show in June?
This was January.
And I said, oh, no problem.
I jumped on the plane and ran back
to California and worked my ass off,
and pulled together a show for the written museum.
And then that was followed by
a group show at Pace Gallery,
an important group show,
a one man show at Okay Harris,
and a one man show at Phyllis in
the opening show, Okay Harris Gallery,
and inaugural show of
the Phyllis Kine Gallery in Chicago,
that both went on to become
very important galleries in those days.
Shows sold fairly well.
One of the people that bought a piece was a guy from
Kansas City who had a factory that Jesus,
I'm just trying to remember what the factory was.
Come in a second. Anyway, he
sold his factory and moved to California.
Retired basically to California
and decided to open the gallery.
His name is Jack Glenn.
I was the inaugural show of that gallery.
Turned out to be it was
the first major gallery in Orange County.
I was off and running, and that's how it happened.
Just keep working on some lucky breaks and getting
some shows and getting good responses out of the shows.
One of the pieces that was in
the second show in New York at
Pace Gallery was bought by Barbara Jacobson,
who was on the board of the Museum of Modern Art.
She gave that piece in the collection of
Smith College. That's how I started.
I think some of these shows that
Fred was mentioning, the show at Pace,
which is called A Decade of Color,
that Early Phyllis Kind show.
A number of those exhibitions of
that plastic presence in particular were really critical,
I think for this period.
And a number of artists
who were experimenting with materials like
this because that history hadn't been written yet.
No one quite knew how to make sense of this work.
And there was a history that was
being written for minimalism in New York,
but then there was a very different version
of that happening on the west coast
that did involve technology in
totally new ways and that involved plastic.
And so just the very sense of saying that the plastic as
an artistic medium was
quite a groundbreaking concept at that time.
Absolutely for sure like
your inclusion in that and being part of
that initial mill and
with your own expertise in that material.
I mean, I think some
of some artists who were associated with
that group had a little bit of technical expertise,
but you are the one who's known
as like the most legitimate of
the one who was able to do that work without the studio,
without the technical expertise of someone
else who could have been executed, it wasn't.
So it moves from a model,
you think about conceptual artists who are designing
the concept for the work and then are
working with fabricators to make it happen.
Whereas one thing I think that was very
important you were doing was you were doing
the material experimentation you were actually
I was doing and fabricating.
And that wasn't totally typical at that time.
It still isn't tolerating.
It's definitely not typical anymore.
I'm still the only artist of
that whole gang that does all of
his own work for himself, any of that.
Actually, just continue. I don't want to interrupt you.
You've got to train. So hold my question.
I do all the work myself.
I build the machinery.
I do the experiments,
I cast the pieces,
I polish the I sell the pieces.
I do it all myself.
I wanted to ask you about the polishing.
So I think there's something
that is also really significant in a lot of
these and a lot of the kind of the
cast plastic works that
you may be used to seeing as we've just discussed,
Larry Bell, John Crack,
and artists you've mentioned.
There is something that feels very machined about a lot
of that work and certainly these as well.
But what I think is one of
the really fascinating sides of
this work and for me was really
revelatory being at your studio was seeing.
The initial casts of this material that the shine,
the amount of hand polishing,
if you could talk about that,
that would be really interesting.
95% of the work by
far is in the physical polishing of the pieces.
I started out using creating parabolic surfaces.
Parabeter being a very specific mathematical surface
that constantly changes shape as you go around it.
By definition, it's a shape that unfortunately,
can only be polished piece by piece by hand.
You can't put it on an automatic machine
of some sort, it doesn't work.
The parabola is the perfect mathematical shape
that is used very seldom in a manner that I
use it because it cannot be
machine generated, it becomes prohibitive.
Hats and bloc cameras that carried into space on
the early space flights had
parabolic lenses on them instead of the normal hotsmbol,
because a parabolic lens weighed only a couple of ounces.
Where has and B glass lens
weigh several pounds In the early days,
a space flight, every ounce costs
hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of launch.
The only shapes that you see out
there are handcrafted and
the most common ones are telescope mirrors.
All of those Paloma telescope mirror.
A telescope mirrors take 810 years of hand polishing and
costs millions of dollars
just because they have to make
them in the same way I make my sculpture.
And that is the hand grind them and polish them.
It's a great shape, the only shape
that focuses all known forms of energy.
Sound, heat, light to a single perfect focal point.
Visually, it has a very unique look
that non parabolic work cannot look like.
I postulated and still
postulate that if indeed there
are metaphysical energies of some sort,
it's only reasonable to
assume that they follow the same laws of
physics and laws of concentration
of energy that known forms of energy,
light, heat, radio waves and such do.
And it's still just a postulation.
But the feedback I've gotten over all of
these years from all kinds of
folks is that they feel
that concentration of metaphysical energies,
to use a better word, your psychiatrist friend,
My psychiatrist friend who put
a piece that I thought he was going to put in his house.
He put it at the end of. This is
the most famous psychiatrist in LA.
It's at the end of his couch where all of Hollywood
stares at a Thee transitional object.
I've gotten enough feedback over
the years that I'm starting to finally believe it.
I still like it. I don't like the work.
The work is hard work,
You know, if I knew how to do it easier, I would.
I haven't devised in all of
these years an easier way of doing
it than I had in 1970 when I started doing the parabolic.
As you get older, you make much less pieces per
year than you did when you were a kid and could
work 14 hour days of hard work.
But I'm still making it.
Can we talk a little bit about
thinking about the materials that you're using?
And think about the lenses, for example.
Because we're looking at one
specific body of work here that's
really looking at the monochrome single color work.
And also many opaque works,
if you could talk a little about also,
you play with transparency in some of the early words,
thinking about perception of your, well,
yeah, the transparent pieces,
which there are none here.
Unfortunately act as basically fish eye lens.
That's, that's one of the properties of a Coabola.
Most of my work is transparent.
This is just a small segment of work in where I
used opaque pigment in
the plastic as opposed to a transparent de,
these pieces at more as mirrors than they do as lenses.
Where the transparent pieces at more
as lens than they do mirrors.
So it's the mirror, the opposite.
Essentially, what I attempted
to do on some of the pieces is to make them thin enough,
which is very tricky.
Paper thin, you have
some transparency in
an opic object, which you definitely feel.
I think certainly in the white lens behind you,
you can see that central spot
that is quite transparent and it is paper thin.
I've actually had a number of classes come in and ask me,
is it actually open or is it a solid there?
I think, yeah, that's
a nice way then
also in thinking about this body of work color,
because again, we're looking at black, white, and gray.
But that was not the palette that you were using?
No, before then, I was using
transparent multiple layers of multiple colors.
The work that followed,
this was again transparent, monochrome.
This is a body of work
that is an interruption between the multiple layer,
multiple color and the single color transparent work
as a result of this show.
In some ways I'm thinking about,
but only thinking about because there's
so much fucking work about trying to combine the two.
It's a great idea,
but it's a lot of work.
Maybe it'll happen and maybe it won't.
With the color that you were using,
you were often using a magenta and an amber, and a blue.
I'm curious also to hear about
your choices I know a little bit,
but how you came upon those colors and then
how you also made
the transition into doing like the first black lens.
How I came upon those colors,
they happened to be the three colors
that was in Charlie Maddox closet.
I was doing these little experiments
and I never went to the store and bought it.
I tried a different color. I did eventually.
But I mean, those three colors
were the three colors that happened to
be by random in the closet in Charlie Maddox.
And yet it's also the perfect three colors.
I mean, it has this primary, but not primary.
And the way that they can create the three color ones,
how they create this amazing halo,
those colors, black, white,
and gray pieces started out with black.
And it was because my next door neighbor,
the scop to John Mccracken,
decided he was very famous for making black planks.
I'm sure a lot of you have seen
he decided he had been making enough black pieces,
he was going to try some different color pieces.
And he gave me his can of black,
and I made a piece.
I didn't do anything with it right away.
I cast a piece because it was so unlike me.
It looked fairly ugly when it came out
of the mode, this black blob.
And then I finally polished the black blob,
and it came out pretty spectacular,
but very different than what I had ever done before.
It took me a while to warm up to it,
and I made a couple other black pieces.
And my secretary at the time,
Margaret Us, she had been
the registrar at the Guggenheim Museum.
A very smart woman
and new the art world backward or forward,
15 years older than me. She said, fed.
Whether you utilize it or not,
it's the most important thing you've ever done.
I just respected her opinion.
I made a couple more black pieces.
One day she walked in and she said,
I love him, I love him.
And she put her hands on her hip.
And said, why don't you make a white piece for
us white people? All right?
And I ran to the store and bought some white pigment.
And again, the first one, I didn't
know what I was doing, you put it in.
But then I learned how to play with the white.
I made some white pieces and then I decided
to take half white
and half black and make integrated pieces.
And that's the gray pieces.
That's the story of how that happened.
That's great, and as I mentioned the beginning,
but thinking about experimentation
with these colors that we think of as,
I mean, they're often considered
a chromatic colors, black, white, and gray.
But that the dimension in those colors,
those two white lenses are quite different.
I mean, I think you even described the, well,
it's the rosy white lens or the yellowish white lens.
There's nothing actually that's
that objective about those colors which is,
I think, quite fascinating. Let's see.
I would love to open up for questions.
I have one more point that I wanted talk to you about,
which is these wall arcs and the pyramid that, okay,
back here in this area, just as
another part of your experimentation and
thinking about experimentation with
materials in relation to what you have around you.
So I did not mention in the introduction,
but one other fascinating accolade of Fred's was that he
was the first Smithsonian artist in residence
in 1977-1988 where he was living in
DC fully as an artist
in residence there with
the National Air and Space Museum.
Part of you want to be able to work there as
an artist, how did that go for you?
How it went was they built
a custom studio to
my specifications in the parking garage,
basement of the parking garage of the museum.
And everything was perfect
except the day I arrived back to start work,
I discovered that they
had connected the ventilating system
for my studio to
the central ventilating system for the entire museum.
Any fumes I made would fumigate 10,000 visitors a day.
Casting polyester resins and
casting polyesters you want to have flying around.
So we had a crisis moment.
The director of the National Air Space Museum,
Michael Collins, the astronaut,
the one that went around the moon but never landed.
He said to me, Fred,
can't you use pre cast plastic And I said,
Michael, that's not what I do.
I mean, you can do anything but that's not what I do.
I've never done anything in precast plastic.
We went back and forth, and back and forth.
And I said he offered to buy
a lot of precast plastic for me to experiment.
I started cutting and polishing
the edges of the acrylic
and putting them into various shapes.
The earliest one in this show is
the wedge over there, the triangular wedge.
Eventually it transformed into these pieces.
And unfortunately, what's not here are
the hanging spiral pieces for essentially five years.
That's pretty much what I did
was the precast plastic pieces.
And when I pushed that to the limit,
I went back to this list of things
I was going to do eight years before,
polyester pieces that I was going to
do in 77, Now this is 85.
And went back to my old list.
And went through the list and
started doing things I had planned to do
eight years before life goes on.
The one piece here that is
not plastic is the double metal black piece.
That is actually a metal model
that won me the competition to make
the largest piece of sculpture in America south of DC,
the 40 foot sculpture in front of the Miami Airport.
That was essentially the second model.
Made for presenting to
the committee to get that commission.
Number one is my first outdoor piece,
it's my first metal piece.
There's still a lot of people around that are very upset
that I got that commission and
someone else much more famous than it.
But that was the motto
presented to the review committee in Miami in 1977.
Correct me if I'm wrong,
but I'll just start describing this,
the parabolic curve shape.
It feels like slice cylinders,
but that curve is also one that would ideally capture,
it captures what it is.
It's my artistic adaptation of
a finish invention from the turn of the last century,
early 1900s, 1800s scored scovemius rotor windmill.
And it was invented by
Finnish scientist and was
used as a windmill design for many years,
up even to 45, sometimes on ships.
Because what happens is that
the concave surface captures the wind.
The convex surface creates
a partial vacuum in back of it, and it turns.
Unfortunately, the Miami piece does not ultimately turn.
Unfortunately, because of the city
of Miami got into a battle with the county of Miami.
The airport is county property,
but it sits in city limits.
The city was concerned
about children rotting it
like America line and set
and getting hurt and getting sued.
They got into a jurisdictional battle and I said,
hell with it, because of stub.
That model turns fine.
But the actual piece never turned.
Sit there bolted to the ground potential Energy.
Potential energy. I would
love to open it up to questions from any of
you for Fred,
put me up to that.
He did it for the opening in Los Angeles too.
But you didn't wear brace nnapers this time?
No. I was just
wondering when you were making these pieces,
like how they come out sort of contradict, like surprise.
Surprise. Surprise. In other words,
you take everything you've ever
done and you think about it,
and you figure out that if I do this,
it'll look like that.
In some ways you're right.
But there's always an element of surprise.
There's always an element of surprise.
The trouble is with this medium and the way I work it,
you don't know until
the last 15 minutes after working a month.
Because until you put
the final polish on the final surface,
you can't see it while you're working on it,
no matter what color of the piece.
It's just a white mat surface while you're working.
The whole time you're working on it,
no matter what the color of
the piece or if it's transparent or not.
It's just a white no see through surface.
Until you do the very last polish
gunk off and stand it up,
can you see what you've done?
It's a weird process.
It's totally different than
any other process I can imagine.
Well, photography can be that.
Photography. You can mouse
around and do this and do that.
But I'm talking about old fashioned photography,
not digital photography where you see the changes.
But you can spend
hours and hours and hours in the dark room
until you actually get
a print and bring
it out of the dark room and look at it in sunlight.
Can you really see how good a photograph it is or not?
I can't think of anything else painting in
such every painter I know.
Stand back and change.
You stand back and look.
The additive process, additive mental process,
unfortunately you make a guess,
a cast, Then you work a crazy number of
hours before you know
if you have a successful piece or not,
you don't have a clue really how the whole thing works.
And there are surprises,
hopefully, good surprises, sometimes they're not good.
Yep. I have questions about your polishing process. Yes.
What you use, how you
start grits, use polishing compounds.
I start almost always
with the roughest sand paper you could buy.
24 grid, 36 grit.
You work with water? Just dry? No, no, no.
That's dry and I stay
dry up until we changed over the years.
But it stays dry up until 400 grid, 320, maybe.
Then you got in the old days when I made these pieces,
the finest you could buy was 600.
I would go to 600 grid.
Then you do something called old 600.
You take a 600 that before old 600.
Then I would go through in those days,
five different levels of polishing compound.
Each one successive you can go to
12,000 You only have to use three polishing compounds,
sometimes only two if you're lucky.
In some ways it's a little bit more efficient.
But the worst part about it is
the rough grits because what happens is polyester,
when it comes out of the mold is tacky.
And you have to get beyond the tack,
literally 40 or 50,
24 grid or 36 grid just to
burn off the tackiness
to get to the good plastic underneath.
Because in 2 seconds sand paper loads, you throw it away.
Two more seconds of loads you throw it away.
And it's always more than one day.
Just doing that can
be three days just doing that when you're doing that.
And as you probably know, you have nothing.
I mean, it's this matt surface.
Even when working at 12,000 it's still a matt surface.
It's a very fine matt surface,
but it's a matt surface.
It doesn't have any brilliance,
it doesn't have any true transparency,
has translucency but not transparency.
To get the transparency,
you still have to go through the polishing compounds.
You go through the compounds and then you find out
some deep scratches and you go back and red.
This also brings up really interesting questions
now for conservators within
institutions that hold works of Fred's and
other works by artists
from this period experimented with materials.
If work is scratched or damaged in the institution,
there's a real hesitancy to determine
how to actually do you polish out the scratch.
But conservators talk about
the fact that in order for them to do that,
they want to make sure they have
the right grit sandpaper from that time.
And some of that is actually very,
very hard to access.
Now it sounds like these little details,
but it's actually like a real conversation
within museums about these works.
And there's a couple of conservatives that work is.
The guy at the National Museum of American
Art on a black piece of
the black piece at home and
got it perfect. I mean, it's beautiful.
It's better than I ever was.
But he worked for
a couple of years on the piece, all right?
I mean, called me up and ask advice and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If I was in DC, I stop by and see how good he was doing.
I mean, he really taught himself
the whole skill that is necessary.
I mean, in some ways it's insane work.
The only thing good about it is
that it's so insane
that I don't have anyone really competing with me.
And that's true.
It's too much work to do.
The materials changed, the plastic has changed,
the colors have changed.
The company may be old stuff,
a long out of business,
you think you're doing something,
but now you're using new materials,
resin, new colors, everything.
It's starting from scratch again,
you know, and it is what it is.
Yeah.
I guess kind of us about faith.
But do you think
like I just think it's so interesting that you
were saying one thing and it just
went in a totally different direction of the
related do you think
like in your experience like sculpting,
like what was missing?
Or do you think you would like if
your friend had directed you in
music studio like your life would have
got that? I have no idea.
I have no idea.
You know, life in many ways can be a big series of
accidents that add up fortuitously or not fortuitously.
For me it added up fortuitously.
But again, this type of work,
you have to expect a lot of failures.
You wasted not only money but a lot of time.
You can either take that and walk away,
or you can just keep going.
Luckily, I had enough success
technically and career wise,
and things that I have just kept going.
When I look back on my whole life,
the last 50 years,
I'm happy I made the decisions I made,
but it wasn't always obvious as you're doing it.
I mean, I'm still polishing Classic.
At age almost 76,
most people are sitting in Miami on
a beach chair having a Roman Coke, Right.
And you say, what the fuck am I doing?
But that's what I, you know,
I made those decisions and I'm still living with
them all these years later, him.
Thank you, Mr. You received a personal thanks for
a letter of gratitude for having
inspired James and his work.
Thank you so much. It seems
like your work is so much about mine.
No, I've never received a letter from Jim.
Jim Tyrell was my
three doors away neighbor when I was an engineer.
So I knew Jim before he ever did a piece.
And I mean, it's hard to envision,
it's hard to describe the situation.
It was a store front,
is now a Starbucks,
but it was a storefront about a 1,800 square foot
storefront on the corner in Santa Monica, California.
And he had the windows
painted frosted over like I have in my studio.
And you walked inside and it was a totally white space,
and in the middle was a very large,
very magnificent Navajo rug.
And that was the only thing in the room.
And in the corner of the only,
except for one thing in the corner of
the room was a very gorgeous,
I'm sure, very expensive harp, you know, a harp.
And James would be sitting cross legged,
and then on the rug,
and anyone who came in set cross legged with him,
his wife was the harpist
and she had long hair down to almost the floor.
And she sat there and played the harp.
And, you know, you have a glass of wine,
smoke a joint, whatever the hell.
And James would talk about ideas.
He didn't describe anything like the sky room,
I mean, the sky ceilings,
particularly in those days.
But he talked about ideas about light and
space and vision and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
My then girlfriend, who was
a painter while I was an engineer,
had a studio right across the street.
And she was there and Debencorn is right next door.
Debencorn's painting away and my girlfriend's painting,
Everyone's doing that stuff.
James just sat there in
this all white environment on this rug talking ideas.
One day and he was taking flight lessons.
You, his wife obviously had a lot of money.
One day he bought a DC three.
They moved the harp onto the airplane.
I never saw I never I never visited the airplane.
It was a Santa Monica airport,
but I never saw it.
And they got rid of the studio and they flew off.
And I didn't see Jim for years. All right.
And then they got divorced at
some point before I went to
Washington in the mid '70s, I don't remember.
And he started going out with Julie God,
Julie Brown, who was
at the National Endowment for the Arts.
She was a program officer
at the National Endowment for the Arts.
And a very nice woman.
A very nice woman.
And they were together for a while.
I saw Julie once in a while,
but I ran it to gym very seldom.
And then he started described
when that started appearing.
Right. I honestly,
God have never done the research exactly,
but I never thought about him lipping me off.
It never crossed my mind.
Was he influenced by my work?
Maybe. I mean, it was out it was out there.
He might have been influenced by my work, maybe not.
I honestly I don't know the answer.
You know, I honestly, I do not know.
Do you have any other questions?
We Hold on 1 second.
You've had your hand up for a long time.
So I'm just curious preface
with like the rise of manufacturing processes.
We talked about changes in
materials and things like that.
Just the current prevalence of,
I guess the idea that really minimal,
really clean, smooth, slick,
lots of cast plastic.
Do you feel that the context within
which people do your work has changed,
especially if they come to your work without
the knowledge of all of the
hand work that goes into them?
I have no idea. I could care.
Question. But I I honestly, God don't know.
I personally paid very little attention to any of that.
I'm still living with the same furniture
I had for 50 years ago.
Right. And the only thing I have some glasses,
I think, and some herring.
Good herring. I mean, honestly,
God, what does the newer generations
who grew up different over the years?
No, I think about my work,
I never thought about it,
never spent 1 second thinking about it.
I mean, it's interesting thinking though
about how reception for work changes.
How at one moment in
one place in time it means something and it
signals it can constantly change.
It can mean something now
and it can mean something different in
the future in a way that we won't
even be able to predict. Now.
Yeah. Is a lot younger than me, obviously.
I worked with curators
who were 30 years
older than me or 40 years older than me.
I worked with curators my age,
and I worked with curators much younger than me.
I don't the ones I respect,
you only respect certain curators.
I think they look at the work very similarly.
I mean, the oldest one I can think of right now
are still alive is Josie Sorrows.
And she is she used to
run the Municipal Gallery in Los Angeles.
Show some Jose whatever now,
90 maybe the answer is I don't know.
I mean, I never thought about it.
I've never thought about it, No.
You think about some things
and some things you don't think about.
And when I make my work,
I don't think about how
other people might be self centered,
but I think about
how other people are going to receive it.
I mean, you try to get a commission, you make something.
But again, I made that a totally different than anything
else that was proposed for that commission.
Right. I mean, totally different,
which is why so many of the people in
the art were upset when I won the competition,
because I was up against
Louise Nevelson and Don Judd and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Who made more who made much more classical sculptures
than those are and had done successfully outdoor pieces?
I never did anything other than the plastic.
It was a shock for me that I won.
And then once you win, then how do I make it?
Because I know plastic,
how to invent, how to make that thing.
I'll withstand hurricanes, earthquakes.
And you just keep going.
You just keep going.
I made piece outdoor pieces with steel and
acrylic that came out of this kind a thing.
But Sequchal, I was having a show in Miami.
They had a large outdoor plaza.
I adopted this kind of a concept to make
a series of pieces that we sit outdoors on that plaza.
Let's have one final question, Sam,
if you want to thank you so much for sharing all with.
I guess the question I want to ask is,
I think of the moment that these first came out of that,
as in Southern California,
this moment where artists form
really historically
unique relationship with corporations,
specifically plastic
and lighting corporations that really
influenced that worked a lot of your I don't know if you,
we never, never. Okay.
I mean, I've been always all by
myself in the same 3,000 square feet.
John Autun, 3,000 square feet.
Never have I done anything.
I mean, there was one that came out of corporation.
I mean, like coming out of while
coming out of like yeah, a laboratory.
There was not there,
there's one exception I just remembered there was
a very important show
called Art and Technology
at the LA County Museum in 1971.
Enrich the game was to put artists together with
corporations to come up
with things that artists couldn't have
done very easily themselves realized.
I was the youngest person in the show that I'm aware of.
I mean, it was Rauschenberg and Deepen Corner.
I mean, a people, some of the projects materialized.
Mine was one that never materialized.
Not because the idea was
bad and not because the corporation was bad.
I was working with a company called Ampex Corporation,
which is the biggest manufacturers of tape recorders.
They were great partners,
but the concept I had was just too far
out in those days with that technology,
I was working with liquid crystals in
the very early days of liquid crystals,
and no one even knew about them.
I knew about them from engineering,
but no one in the world had ever seen liquid crystals.
Liquid crystals in those days
were not electrically actuated
the way they are in the cell phone.
They're actuated by heat.
They change color with heat.
I was trying to light images on a surface
of liquid crystals using a laser.
The heat, It was 20 foot diameter,
circular theater that was going to be
covered with liquid crystals on the inside wall.
And there was a very high speed high powered laser
rotating from the ceiling,
writing these images onto the wall.
It was a brilliant concept.
Still a brilliant concept,
but in those days when
you finally get it all figured out,
not only me but a engineers,
a whole team at Apex working with me,
I can commute to
San Francisco to meet with these engineers.
You start to figure out how powerful the laser has to be,
how fast it has to rotate,
you break it down to how
much is it going to cost to make the sky,
damn thing, I can't remember.
It's extraordinary.
More expensive than the whole entire show. Just my piece.
That piece could be done
nowadays using current technology,
without the laser, without anything,
just bunches of little wires, right?
For 1000th of the cost.
What would it cost then?
My piece was one of
several projects that ended up being described in
the catalog and everything but never
actuated because it was just too damn expensive.
Thank you all so much for coming.
Thank you, Fred, for being here.
You're welcome to thank you this whole thing.
Thank you. Thank you for being the show.
All the shows turned out very.
And I hadn't been in Smith College for many,
many years. I mean, Brandeis.
Yeah. And got me back to Brandeis.
You know, I haven't been
here at least 50 years before this.
That was other question I was going to ask you.
What's that about your first time
when you were first here? We'll see.
Oh, I had friends who went here than.