Robert Motherwell, the great Abstract
Expressionist painter, once said that an artist is a person who is hypersensitive to
materials. But Donald Lipski, my sculpture teacher and thesis show co-chairman
at The University of Oklahoma in the mid-seventies (whom I liked and trusted as
a person much more than Robert Motherwell about statements of this kind and who
is himself in the big time national and international art scene now making
public sculptures) sat in my apartment on the floor back then, picking away at
my carpet, telling me—taking Motherwell's statement a step further—"An
artist is somebody who is obsessive about things."
He meant the word literally, that is, things as objects— hard, concrete,
tangible phenomenon. Don's pastime was to gather—he claimed without conscious
intent or at least much thought—bits and pieces of string, slivers of wood,
small grass roots and carpet threads
and the like, and twist these in his fingers while he talked with friends,
watched TV or argued with his colleagues (though Don was a charmer and never
argued very much) and when that activity or event he was engaged in was over,
he would throw the piece of string or root he had played with, ultimately into
a cigar box and go to the next thing in his life, often where he would sit or
stand and talk while he played with another string or sliver of wood which would
end up in the same box. He had been doing this for years and years when I met
him, he said, and had thousands of these objects in boxes he kept stashed away.
Sometimes I would stand with him while he chewed on a toothpick, knowing I was
watching great art in the making.
I got pretty much into that process
of his because at some level when he met me, I was doing some of the same
procedures he was, only a little differently, and we had this real liking for
each other, at least I took it that we did. I put up an installation of
one-time carbon strips I collected from Bell Telephone Company, those flimsy
carbon inserts on the print-outs of telephone bills of customers all over
Oklahoma City and its environs, in what was known then as the Lightwell at the
art school, Fred Jones Hall, that spanned a space about fifty by seventy feet,
and he put up an installation of plastic strips similar to those used to
partition off a worker or a crime scene, except his strips were clear with just
a hint of color. He did this just off the I-35 Oklahoma City bypass, spanning
an even greater space than mine, over a huge gully so that we all could walk
under it, not unlike walking into the inside of an enormous guitar or dulcimer.
It brought people off the road for miles to see it, listen to it from
underneath, including the police whom he charmed into talking about it with him
and not the flow of traffic he was disrupting.
He and I did these pieces simultaneously,
truly simultaneously, and he deferred to me on that day as he always did on
every other occasion I ever had with him in which a mention of our art was
brought up together. When I complimented him on his work, walking under the tremendous sound the
vibrating plastic generated, coming out the other end and looking into his
sparkling eyes, he said very gently, "Oh yours is the greatest." My
piece was still hanging in the Lightwell, with the magnanimous title of
"The Great Southwestern Carbon Systems," but everybody looking at art
was out there off I-35 looking at his. I swelled anyway.
Later I got downright territorial
and paranoid about what I was doing which was drawing and blowing graphite onto
the wall at an eye level line making these tiny obsessive scribbles about four
by six inches apart like a mental path one would be following with one’s eyes.
Although they were 2-d, drawn on a wall, they weren’t too terrible different in
nature from the 3-d hand-twisted sculptures Don was making and throwing in his
cigar box. I tried to hang sheets across the front of my space at the North
Campus studio as though by doing this nobody could see what I was playing
around with. I finally took the sheets down because nobody cared, and they were
getting in my way.
Don would come out to my space and look
at these little drawings of mine with a grin, chew on his toothpick, and walk
over to a chair across the great expanse of space in those old Navy barracks on
North Campus turned into graduate art studios, and sit down. He wouldn't move
the chair. He'd just sit down half a room away and wait for me to begin work
again, leaning his chair against the wall, head tilted to the side and stare as
I worked. He eventually claimed that wall upon which his chair was leaning and
began aligning his pieces that he brought in his cigar boxes, his chewed and
twisted pieces, putting them up one following the other, along an invisible
eye-level line on the wall. I'd seen him do this before, on the floor, while
talking to people, pulling one piece out of a box at a time and spacing them
evenly apart, staring at them as though he was having some great insight.
"Fidgeting," he called his
twisting and chewing. So seeing these fidgeted sculptures go up on the wall, mounted with little
straight pins, like intimate aesthetic specimens, seemed like a natural progression
of ideas. It wasn't one-upmanship with Don, ever. He didn't have to do that. He
was the greatest. I knew this and turned my attention to making black on black
paintings instead, larger objects with white marks on them, not too far removed
from those Agnes Martin made on her canvases that she entitled after the birds,
the trees and the sky. Those little obsessive sculptures of Don’s, though,
eventually went all over the world. They reached their height when they were
shown, I think, at Marborough in London, after he left The University of
Oklahoma and went back, I heard, to Chicago and then New York, finally to
Philadelphia. I know they were at O.K. Harris in New York City because I saw
them there.
Once when Lipski was in my
apartment, he took his hand and scooped it down into a large wooden bowl I had
filled with thousands of pennies. He loved that. All those pennies in that
bowl. This was over a decade before Ann Hamilton’s now famous privation and excesses installation in
1989 of 750,000 pennies drowning in honey at the Capp Street Project in San
Francisco. My fascination with my pennies was with the series and systems of
objects in frameworks devised to contain or sequester them, in my case by
random—simply because I, as artist, stated so (as Marcel Duchamp had done with
his urinal and such). Don’s fascination was with the idea that these little
copper things of monetary value had been brought from the world where they were
scattered out doing something totally different than art and were placed by
human attention in such a way to force an intrusion on those out-there
boundaries, so that these round money-meaning things became something else,
which wasn’t too far from Hamilton’s notion sometime later. (These notions are
always in the air until they wear themselves out or are transformed into
something else. The current parlance is to call these in the air notions,
“memes.”)
Anyway, on this day, the day of my
critique with Don in my apartment, he reached down before he left and put a
whole handful of my pennies in his pocket. I got the message and thought it was
cool. He was going to spend them (or randomly drop them on the street) and get
them back out there again. Open and Closed Systems, I called this idea and did
several shows with photographs (including my Senior Thesis show) based on it. I
didn't realize until I saw the front cover of Art in America some years later and opened it to the article inside
how prophetic this little gesture of his was way back then. Not only had he
expanded his plastic strip series, he was binding string and twine and sisal
around ordinary objects like pitchforks and scissors turning them into
something else while never losing their sense of ordinariness. And with such
notions, he was on his way to several renowned museums.
When I first met Don, I brought him my
portfolio of slides from my work on Long Island. These were found objects I integrated
into various backgrounds of linen, stained paper or Turkish towels. These
sculptures all had binding in them and looked like non-functional musical
instruments, I thought. Others of these looked like small pieces of furniture
stripped of purpose. "Beautiful stuff," he said thoughtfully, his
head bobbing around the screen, in the art history room where I projected them.
Don loved lots of stuff, especially everyday stuff made into conglomerates tied
together literally or figuratively through proximity that entered The Temple of
Art as ordinary objects to be contemplated upon. "But I'm having a hard
time getting past the materials you are finding and using. They are entities,
things-in-themselves, you know. I'm not sure anything needs to be done with
them. What can you do with objects that already have a life such that nothing
you do to them can change that? Picasso's bicycle seat changed into a bull is
still a bicycle seat and that's the charm, but do you want to make charming
art?" I stared down at a vintage hub cap I was going to smash into an
element in a painting, like Rauschenberg.
I guess Don changed his mind. His art
certainly has charm, and his bound- by-twine pitchfork is still definitely a pitchfork. Of
course he posed this question to me, not himself, really. But that's the other
thing about artists, they usually talk a lot and while they do, they're looking
to steal each other's things. "Steal" is definitely too strong a
word. There isn't a deliberate con game going on, anyway not with us at the
university back then, not like the one at the cash register where you get the
checker talking and then with sleight of hand, lift something from the drawer.
Though, I must tell you, that I practiced that, turning it into an art with my
brothers and cousins with the offering plate that passed at church. I know
loads about how to do it. Heavy borrowing is part of the taking-in process for
object worshippers. I know I took that chair Don sat on across from me in the
North Campus studio when I graduated and left for my next thing in life,
although I haven't decided as of yet to twist string around it and turn it into
art. But keep your eyes open and keep a look out on the art magazine racks. You
never know.
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