WILLARD
BOEPPLE IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID COHEN
Recorded
at the artist’s studio at Bennington, Vermont, August 2000
David Cohen: It has
been a revelation to see so much of your earlier work. It is good to be disavowed of the feeling
that the work you did before your recovery [from
a long, disabling illness after which the artist was no longer able to work in
metal] and your turn to wood, is somehow the work of
some other person. But I wonder how you
feel, now that you work in such a different way, pursuing your themes of
ladder, shelf, and room, when you look at your metal work. Do you find yourself surprised by some
commonality with what you are doing now?
Willard Boepple: Yes,
more often than not, I am surprised. I
began as a painter, and my sensibility in the earliest work came out of looking
at painting, Cubism in particular. I
called the first quite flat collage pieces “Fireplace Pieces”. I was interested in the look of the
fireplace, the domestic scale and feel of it.
At the time I didn’t quite articulate my interest in this way, though I
did call them “fireplace pieces”, but looking back now from the context of the
bookshelves and ladders – again, domestic objects – somehow they made more
sense than I realised. But as to the
issue of before and after the illness, I was working entirely in metal at the
time, bronze and steel, and I had done the first ladders in 1979, which I
showed at Acquavella’s, and it was that that I picked up after the illness, in
wood. When I am asked this question,
which I often am, Was there a big break?, the answer is that when I picked up
the activity of sculpture again, after that “interlude”, the ladders were where
I began. So at some level I would
almost viscerally answer, No! But of
course there were changes and differences not simply driven by the medium and
the way of working but in large part by those as well. As it happens, there is a logic to making
wooden ladders, yet I would not have done them in wood were it not for the
illness.
Your concern with the body,
your idea that functional things like ladders and shelves relate to what the
body does rather than what the body is, was in place before illness struck?
It was really what the
ladders were about. I was looking for a
way to get out of the Caro School of sculpture, that which I was most
interested in. I thought Caro was the
scuptor to contend with. Basically,
horizontality was his solution to staying abstract. I wanted to go vertical and find a way of standing up that was
not figurative. That’s where the step
ladder came from. The body part of it
was apart of the logic of it, the connection I responded to almost
emotionally. But, you know, if you take
a broom and stick it in the ground, you read it as a figure, as you do almost
anything vertical, a bottle, whereas a ladder, because of its structural logic,
plus its familiarity as something we know and use and feel, escapes that. The proportions and dynamic of the thing are
very felt visual knowledge which we are not very aware of, we only notice it
when it is wrong. Exploring this area
is what interests me. Maybe it is just
having three or four legs which makes them less figuratively read. If you schematize it, ladders probably
relate more to architecture than the body.
Ladders also marry the horizontal
and vertical, don’t they? You talk
about wanting to remain abstract, and yet by choosing a primary structure like
ladders it could be argued that you were close to representation, if not
appropriation. Did that bother you?
No, because wanting to
be abstract is something I mean in relation to figures, not abstract in the
absolute modernist sense.
But you did want to
deal with formal themes abstractly, say sensations of verticality, volume,
density etc., thinking of them in formal terms and not just deploying them in
the representation of things?
I am not sure what you
mean by formal.
I mean that you wanted
to explore them as phenomena in themselves abstracted from – at a remove from –
actual life. If you were concerned with
verticality, the ladder would be a structure in which to be vertical, rather
than a metaphor for verticality.
I guess the difficulty
is describing the content. The physical
sensations after which I strive are the driving force in making the
sculpture. The sensations of rightness
or stillness or airiness or stolidity, that are given us by objects or
architecture or other things in the visual world, are what I look for. This is the emotional terminology I use to
describe what it is that I am after.
When a sculpture takes on its own life, whatever the hell that means,
it’s the quality of that life that I try to figure out. What is the quality I like? It is a process of discovery.
I am interested that
you wanted to make art that didn’t represent the body but gave a sense of it in
things that are an extension of it. Did
you feel that that was a current issue or that you were branching off in some
way?
No, all mine, brand new
idea of course! [laughs] What do we ask of art, what is the
experience? If I am determined that I
don’t want to make figurative sculpture as such, but I am looking for abstract
sculptural objects that have life, then where should I look? To me so much of our experience has to do
with living in our bodies and the sensations that we know, to do with bodily
sensations, weariness, stolidity, these kinds of terms, which are about
physical sensations. To invest, to
create a sculpture that is as vivid as these kinds of physical sensation... is
this new? Caro used to talk about
building sculptures that are as vivid as a person. So it is hardly a new idea.
It is curious that you
come out of painting to be a sculptor and yet you have this definite sense of
sculpture’s proper place of interest being the body. So, to make abstract sculpture is to make things as vital as
the body. There is an implicit
recognition that sculpture and representation of the body naturally go
together.
As vivid as the sensations
felt by the body. As to calling myself
a painter, well, the first day I worked for a sculptor I knew it was for
me. It was the very physicality, the
material, spatial facts of gravity, thickness, it was a bolt from above.
Who did you work for?
Isaac Witkin. It was 1968, I was up here at Bennington for
a visit, I was packing my bags to go to New York and find a loft, and Isaac
said, Oh no, work for me for the summer.
Due to personal history
and circumstance more than anything else you are very much in the family of
Witkin, Olitski (who you also worked for), Caro, Bennington, Greenberg.
I came from it, like it
or not. It has all got such a bad name
in the last twenty years, but what an education, what a group. What a vital, live time it was for art.
Do you feel that the
work you have made since then has been more of a working within that tradition
or a struggle to break away?
Very good
question. I want my art to be mine, to
come out of something that I am about.
Discovering what that is, it seems to me, I bring as many tools to the
job as I can. I don’t think very often
in terms of escaping a tradition or look. From a career standpoint it would
have been a much cleverer thing to have done.
The wish to make the most vivid, live sculpture I can is what drives the
enterprise. I look to where I can to
find help. Within, without a tradition? Working through Caro and David Smith and, as
Hans Hofmann put it, “sweating out cubism”, is really what I think about. Cubism especially for me. The language of Caro, though, is not
mine. His is a very exquisite and
specific juxtaposition. It is a touch,
not a whole object, way of seeing sculpture, and I don’t think that is mine.
This is one of the
crucial questions in your work. Are we
dealing with a whole object, or an environment, or set up, where different
things are happening. Take this shelf
piece. It is a thing three-quarters the
way to being an object in the round, we can take it in as a totality, but it is
also a thing with things in it, things doing things, flapping up and down,
arrested in that action. This raises
all sorts of things about the status of the piece. Is it a sculptural object or a sculptural event?
Given the choice, gun
to my head, I would say object. I think
they are more out of the world of objects than, say, environments.
But do we see the flaps
– the boards are like hands, the brackets like arms. Do we see it as a figure with arms, like an Indian sculpture with
lots of them, or do we see it as an environment- the shelf – with something
going on in it, the flaps and brackets?
Maybe you have to tell
me. I guess I see them as whole objects
that come out of the world of mechanical objects, sewing machines, stamping
machines, paddles on a steamer, some kind of casternet, who the hell
knows? I see them in that sense more than
as the environment of the shelf, which has certain proscenium implications.
Being rectangular, a
receptical. The shelf is at once a
pedestal and integral to the whole.
There is some sort of duality.
The first of these
things started with letter boxes, “in-out” boxes that you have on a desk or
shelf, very hand scaled, that you reach into and put things in. It crosses into the environment/stage sense
as much as the ulititarian sense. Much
like the step ladder, it relates to the body with a visual logic that helps
build the sculpture. It seems to me
that the environment/stage is a pictorial way of looking at these objects, and
I don’t think they are pictorial.
You wouldn’t be happy
with that half-way house, the relief.
No because I don’t
think they are. I don’t consider the
word “relief” an insult, but as you said earlier, you can see it almost in the
round, even though it is on the wall.
Many of them, I find, work just as well off the wall - on the floor, for
instance.
Another theatrical
implication of this piece, “The Woman who Blamed Life on a Spaniard”, as if the
name were not theatrical enough, is the definite sense of a frozen moment in
time. Some sculptures imply narrative,
others an out-of-time ethereal otherness (compare Michelangelo’s David as the
first, the Venus de Milo as the second).
Your shelves with the flapping things in them are like frozen moments in
time.
The examples that you
use all rely on narrative. The only
extent to which this piece of mine has narrative is the sense of time, that it
could keep going. The sense of motion
is something I am very interested in, but if this is too literal in this case,
this is a failing.
The curious thing about
this one is that it looks like it is in motion, but I can’t imagine how it could
actually rest, there is no natural place for the parts to reside.
I see it in terms of
compression and expansion. Other kinds
of motions, my wave-like pieces, maybe operate more in terms of space than time
or narrative. I am often asked, Why
don’t you make kinetic sculpture? I’m
not interested. I want it to be the way
it is when it is seen. I don’t want it
changing, controlled by the wind or the viewer. I want the viewer’s participation in it to be driven by the
object as it is, not by its variety.
Do you think kinetic
art is a gimmick?
That’s a bit harsh, but
there is an element of curiosity, there is something not meant. I want to say, Show me what you mean, damn
it! There is something of the same
problem I have working with gorgeous pieces of wood – red cedar, mahogony –
people see the material and say, What gorgeous wood, I love wood. And oh! It’s a sculpture. It should be the other way around. The same kind of thing can happen with
motion and light. I want the experience
to come from the thing that I made- it can be humorous, dour, dark, light, on
its own terms.
In some of your works,
the element of metaphor is very striking, like your firebox pieces. Color – red oxide and graphite – almost
pushes it into a different conceptual territory. “The Woman Who Blamed...” might bring to mind certain kinds of
mechanism, but is not a representation of it; shelves and ladders are such
basic structures that one can have the sensation without being caught up in any
particularity, but in this piece, they are so much logs-in-boxes that it forces
a reading. Is that something you wanted
or feared?
No, I
wanted that surrealist edge, that sense of “what is it?” Abstract sculpture has the wonderful
potential of catching people coming around a corner and making them say, “what
the hell is that?” Then, what has to
happen, this thing, this object, this collection of wood or steel, has to
justify its existence. It is not framed,
hanging on a wall, it is not framed or hanging on a wall; we are not prepare
for it as we are when we sit in an auditorium to hear chamber music. All the expectations, opening a book, the
curtain rising on a stage, are not there.
This thing- does it make toast, does it hold open the door. I love that engagement. What a test, to justify itself.
Tell me about your
attitude towards color? You feel the
visceral pleasure people take from wood distracts from sculptural
experience. Do you use color do
overcome that?
Color,
in the first place, always comes after.
The sculpture gets built and then the color comes to help, or to
finish. The color decision might be,
Leave it alone. There are many
different reasons to use it, but often with the wood it is to let the grain lay
back, push the woodiness of the wood into the distance so that you are aware of
the form first and the wood second. I
tend to use humble, cheap woods – pines, cedars, not intrinsically
beautiful. Once the neutrality of the
wood is established, the color experience is totally emotional. I can never make sense of it. It is always a terrifying moment for me-
“You are going to ruin it!” It often
takes much back and forth. I find I
tend towards the earth colors, they somehow have a rightness, a factual feel
that makes sense of the material. Maybe
that is just an after the fact explanation.
But the laying back of the wood is the first duty.
By the time you moved
onto a new project, the shelves could build up to enormous density and be
filled with incident, whereas the new subject, the house structures you call “rooms”,
have started very simple. You are now
onto your third major project. Have you
found, in your experience of the ladders, shelves and rooms, that you need to
start simple and then build up to density.
I
don’t think of it in those terms.
Looking back as you are making me do, the three groups that you
describe, including the ladders, began simply, spare, skeletally. Who knows if this is a pattern? There is a room where I have played already
with the positive and the negative (making two versions) which leap frogs the
issue so to speak. There was no
deliberate move, with the shelves and ladders, to say, okay now it is time to
solidify, to fill them. That just
evolved, an organic process.
Perhaps the difference
between density and simplicity, to pursue a musical analogy, is more like
scherzo and adagio, one allows the eye to flitter fast, the other forces a
slowing down. What determines whether
you are going to make a piece fast or slow?
Very
often, and this is to over-simplify, but very often in the making of my
sculpture, the discoveries come from desperation, not knowing where to turn or
what to do.
Do you wake up in the
morning with a sculptural idea?
Often
a sensation, yes. Let’s do this with
it.
With “it”, you say, but
do you wake up with the sensation, let’s do a sculpture that is this?
Maybe,
but I say “with it” because sculpture almost always come out of the one before,
reaction, variation. I know the analogy is over used, but music has a direct
abstract link to emotion which is shared with the best abstract art. With the stepladders, there was a period of
much simpler ones, that led to densely packed baroque ones, but then “The Weir”
[a more minimal, sliced ladder-piece] came after that.
Do you have any prior
sense of whether a given piece is going to be crowded or quiet? Isn’t this as important to the mood of the
piece as, in music, whether something is in a major or minor key?
More
often than not, on this level, if the idea is not directly related to the last
one then it is the sensation of getting physical – “get boisterous, come on,
these are too placid”. It’s
reacting. You see only the warts and
the defects, and you want to remedy them in the next, calling for radical
methods. Attentuate, pound and pack, or
Lift open, slam shut, jam.
This back and forth
within a motif, from empty to crowded to emptied again, it occurs to me, also
reflects in the pattern of the projects themselves. The new series, the rooms, with their scaffold quality, look back
to the skeletal quality of the ladders, the two contrasting with the encased
quality of the shelves, which, so to speak, they sandwich. Were you conscious of that?
I had
no idea that I made so much sense! The
rooms came out of a dumb idea. Thinking
of the bookshelves as very much of domestic scale, a word I keep using, I
wanted to build the structure in which these objects could reside, but the
structure itself stopped me and took over.
It said, Wait a sec. This is
it. I did put one shelf in an early one
but it looked liked an airconditioner.
Within the Modern
Movemement there is a tradition of the sculptor, or artist, creating a room
which is entirely sculptural in itself.
Schwitters with his merzbau, Dubuffet with his walk-through
environments, Caro with his sculptitecture.
This was always moving in the direction of environments, away from
objects. How do you feel about your
rooms in this respect?
They
are still objects. I want to see into
them, for the eye to be able to swim around within this volume. That is one of the sensations I am
after. Is that a hybrid? I think it is more of an object.
The shelves tease the
eye, drawing them into a place where there is no room for them. The rooms, so far, are the opposite: there
is nothing to bounce against. You force
the experience from the inserted shelves.
It is hard, in their current, skeletal phase, not to see them like
Picasso’s Diagrams (lines in space). Is
the scaffold the form, or will they get denser, and fill in?
I
don’t know yet. I’ll keep you posted-
or they will. I am dealing with this
volume, and there are lots of places to go with it. I’m sure that will include packing, or even slicing up space into
finer bits, compression, who knows?
It seems across your
career that you are consistently more preoccupied by volume than density; even
in the room which you can actually sit it, you are more interested in the
optical (looking out) than the tactile (walking through). That is unusual for modern sculpture, one of
the hallmarks of which is the priviliging of the haptic over the optic.
I
probably agree. Some of my works invite
touch, but it is not something I much want or intend. I want a visual experience: “What is that?” This is not to say that it is a pictorial
seeing: it is sculptural.