Sculpture and Drawings

 

INTERVIEW

CVA

Lei's start at an obvious place of beginnings: were there things that you made as a child?

JW

I made a birdhouse I was very pleased with and hung it from a tree outside our kitchen window, lots of birds came, but none stayed. After a long time passed and there were still no residents, l took it down to see what was the matter. I peeked inside and discovered the house was full of nails. My interest in the outside of the house had rendered the Interior uninhabitable. The three inch second-hand nails I retrieved from old planks of wood pierced and filled the inside of the little house. My childhood projects seemed filled with enthusiasm and disappointing lessons.

Barry Ledoux (BL)

I remember building a tree house and hanging out there. I spent lots of time just daydreaming and not doing things.

CVA

Was there a moment in your early life when you real zed you wanted to make art?

BL

No, I was interested in cultural history as an early adolescent. Making art was something that dawned on me as a possibility only after I moved to New York when I was around 19.

JW

But you were exposed to art quite early on.

BL

That's true. I had a very good music teacher. He taught me about experience and how to use it. He introduced me to a broad range of things to look at; for instance, when I was interested in a certain kind of music, he would give me books that related ancient and modern art and cultural history to the music I liked.

CVA

He helped you find the correspondence of image to sound?

BL

Yes.

CVA

Did you or do you have an instrument, composer, or period of music that is special to you?

BL

Well, there is Dowland, an English Ren­aissance composer at the time of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I.

CVA

Why was music initially the compelling art form?

BL

Music was a way to get out it was something I could do.

CVA

Did you compose as well?

BL

No, I think that's why I never stayed with music. I really wasn't interested in the structure. I was interested in playing and listening to music rather than in composing it.

CVA

What instruments did you play?

BL

Piano first, then cello.

CVA

Jackie, when did you first meet Barry?

JW

I was in graduate school at Rutgers when I met Barry. He was 17 and visiting New York. While here, he saw a lot of art and met many artists. When I was 17 I was still in high school and my experience of the instructors was as teachers rather than as artists. Much later, when I went to Yale Summer School, Al Held visited. He was my first experience of an artist; he was an artist in a way I wanted to be one.

CVA

Can that be described a little more?

JW

At summer school, everyone was very busy discussing and arguing about art, as if that experience were a studious one. For me, art was experiential.

CVA

Did Held integrate his intellectual and emotional responses?

JW

He just seemed contained within himself, self-generating. He didn't seem scattered and that was what I liked.

CVA

So your development as an artist seemed a bit more direct than Barry's?

BL

Oh, I don't think one is more direct or indirect. Jackie went to art school; I didn't.

JW

In terms of age, he was exposed to art and artists long in advance of me. New York was his art school. Later, when he started making art around the age of 26, he knew what an artist's life was about, an experience which I found so hard to grasp.

CVA

Did the respective landscapes you grew up in (Canada, Louisiana) influence the work you made or make?

JW

I think it molds the personality.

BL

I think the first sculptures you showed at Paula's had more of a feeling of landscape in them than some of the later ones do.

CVA

What was It that you saw in Jackie's first show that seemed more Northern, more about where she came from?

BL

I didn't place It as being Northern be· cause I was new to the North and I had never seen Newfoundland where Jackie is from. What I liked about her sculpture was that it took lots of time to make; I never knew that was part of the process of making art I had lived in my head: read, listened to music. I never had to do things requiring a kind of moral commitment: a commitment to being present, making time to work, arranging for help when the weight was in excess of your ability to move it, being involved in all of the processes required to realize an idea. I liked the physical act, liked getting involved. You had a sense of Jackie's sculpture being both physical and, somehow, spiritual. I'm not certain spiritual is quite the right word.

CVA

Do you mean discipline?

BL

No. There's the act of making a piece and then there's the commitment to that act, to juggling the mundane circumstances needed to complete the Idea. For me what was Important was not only the circumstances, but also the physical act of working with those circumstances. Working with Jackie allowed me 10 participate in the experience of seeing an idea emerge. While working with her I did the things I always did, but all those quotidian acts of life are placed in a special context. The activity transcends the reality's a metaphor, a recombination of the real.

JW

The experience you have in making a piece is part of the content of that piece. Barry is describing the emotional content of that experience, a level of feeling which goes into the work.

CVA

Jackie, do you have any thoughts on landscape and its influence on your childhood or Barry's?

JW

Because I left the place of my childhood at the brink of adolescence, I am left with yearnings for that landscape. I embrace those places. Barry, on the other hand, rebelled against his place of birth; he had lo push his childhood away because it was smothering. So we have two completely different ways of relating to our childhood and its landscape. A similarity, as I see it, Is In the way I stubbornly plugged away through February, March, and into April in order to persevere through winter. Barry's stubbornness was expressed through pushing away his environment year after year. In most cases, I don't manifest stubbornness, but I think it comes out in my work. I am stubborn underneath. Barry has the same trait and it is also in his work.

CVA

What are some of the experiences that feed your work? I know for Barry It is often music, poetry, or place.

JW

I feet Barry approaches life sort of back end to. I think that's very much in his work, a kind of angst, not Germanic in nature but, rather, an angst that comes from approaching life walking backwards. There's a tension. However, he has a desire to allow his tender side to surface or merge in the midst of that pervasive tension. His work has a psychic softness with tension surrounding it.

CVA

One could say that about your work as well.

JW

I do it on a larger and slower scale.

BL

You pace it out.

CVA

Time is an imperative in both of your works. At one point, Jackie, you mentioned fiddling around with a sixteenth of an inch adjustment, yet, at the same time, you're willing to allow fire to take its own course. Those are very different notions of time and control. Similarly, while the sculpture's image becomes recognizable almost immediately, one says, "That is a cube." the form ultimately is impenetrable, that suggests the slowness of knowing 1t. It's almost the opposite in Barry's work. Does this notion of time also inform the process? You said Barry works faster than you do.

JW

It's not necessarily working faster. It's also how you engage ideas. I can stick an idea out for two years and sustain it. Barry works an idea, finishes it, then works another idea, and finishes that. Only in the last year have such pieces as The Art of Singing become more complex and taken longer to make.

CVA

I think the longer you contemplate the two sets of work, the more sense your selection of Barry makes. But it is not obvious.

JW

It's not about visual equivalences. The choice relates to my sense of a shared source the seeds seem familiar to me, not the tree that bloomed. He comes out as a peach tree and I come out as a pear. My work is weighty, geometric, symmetrical, and, unlike Barry's, they are quiet and still. Barry has written words on the surface of its sculptures, and the words are bursts of energy. They are laden with content · "farewell, surrender, renounce." Also, the mounds of brilliantly colored, fluores­cent pigment are like radiation, emit­ting, reaching out towards you. The words and pigment are combined, superimposed on soft, lead men's suits and body parts. Quite different from mine. In my Exploded Piece, I built a form which is recognizable as a cube. It was a multi-layered interior of plaster, gold leaf, and fluorescent pigment contained in an outer layer of hand-buffed, black concrete reinforced with welded steel. It was as complete at that stage as earlier works of mine. Then I added another element, dynamite, and exploded the cube. Later the exploded elements were structurally reinforced and the outer layer reconstructed. The form passed through many stage, but the final presence is contained, quiet and still. In my pieces you recognize the object as cube and the event as burning or exploding, In Barry's you recognize suit, but you read a narrative.

CVA

The event are more physical?

JW

Yes. I used dynamite because it repre­sented the unknown, and I got what I asked for. The explosives blew the cube completely apart. l was trying to enmesh the idea and emotion of the unknown into concrete. I suppose one of the parallels between our pieces is how we work from a complete form - suit and cube - and overlay that form with another condition in order to alter the final form and experience. Barry doesn't do it in the same way I do, but his choice of materials such as lead are choices that are.

CVA

Not explosive, but insidious.

BL

They are. Jackie has a physical base in her works which supports a kind of psychic manifestation. I have a psychic state that somehow tries to find a physical base. I think the weights are the same, but the ratios are different.

CVA

One of the most obvious connections is a notion of center. Is the work a shelter or a shell? What goes on in the center? Barry, you were talking about your show at the Clocktower as being about interiority in a way that you couldn't sustain emotionally.

BL

Yes, I think it was much more psychic· ally than physically difficult. I originally wanted to wear the "fuck you" suit, but I couldn't once I made it.

CVA

It became too precious?

 

BL

No, the way it was constructed made it Impossible to get into, but psychically I couldn't have done it either.

 

CVA

In other words, the emotion was exor­cized and you didn't want to apply that experience back to your skin.

 

BL

Yes, the suit as structure was a complete form, a complete idea. The language came from different emotional parts of myself: part plea, part sexual, part renouncement, part Invective. On a physical level, it was not possible to put the suits on. On a psychic level, It was possible, but not in combination with the narrative, the language.

JW

Art making is about taking parts and making wholes. To put the suit back on would return it to the realm of parts, back to its pre-art state. It would destroy the art experience.

BL

So the Impulse shifted from physically being in them to having the suits as a presence, talking about my absence. A form of absence in presence.

CVA

Very often in your pieces, Jackie, the center is empty / full. The interior is charged by the actual build-up of history in the surrounding walls, by burning, dynamiting, or layering. The same can be said about the suits; there's no body filling out that suit, but the absence of some musculature or skeleton is more powerful than any real rendering of the body could be. It seems both of you are doing the same thing, in radically different ways.

JW

The suits are empty and the space is for a body. l've often felt that my cubical pieces ARE the body and that the empty interior is for the mind or psyche.

BL

That's true; they have spiritual centers.

JW

I always felt that when you look in through the window to the center room you look in at your inner self, out of your physical eye and into the SELF.

CVA

The eye, the only part of the body that can penetrate the window space.is directly connected to memory, imagination, and spirit. Again this brings up the notion of shell and shelter.

JW

The cubes parallel and are metaphors for the body, you go up to the windowed cubes and touch them; you peek, you use your eyes, your nose. Your nose is right up against the window as is your mouth. The sculpture is touching your skin and it ls inviting in that way.

BL

When you first approach your pieces, Jackie, you notice how they are taking up space and asserting their own weight. The space they take up is greater than the area they actually occupy. They are very self-contained, up closer. the first thing you do is peer into them and, in that process, you end up making contact with them; in switching from eye to touch, you lose your sense of body as a separate entity. You become absorbed by the pieces and the surfaces invite you to stay.

JW

Barry's pieces are about the physical body; mine are more about what the body does: it touches, smells, and has memories. When you are close to Barry's, they restate the figurative. They are your height, and they are or contain actual castings of fragments of the body. When you view the interior of my windowed cubes, it is like closing your eyes and going within while the body is momentarily left to rest. The cube becomes the body and then ii excludes itself. It's like when you are exercising: you become aware of your body, but when you are engrossed in thinking or feeling, it disappears. In that way the interior of the cubes becomes empty space for the mind or psyche. They don't give out, they receive and reflect. When you go to Barry's pieces, you maintain the body because you recognize them as suits and relate them to your own body. Barry's pieces project out and pull you into a narrative. They are full/empty. Mine are more a place to allow memories. They are empty/full. In a way, Barry's pieces keep you at a distance; they keep you somewhat exterior about internal things and feelings. And the distance they demand maintains the body.

BL

Do you mean physical or psychological distance? 

JW

The pieces keep you at arms' reach, both physically and psychically. Actually, I think it is more accurate to say you go in and out of closeness. The circumstances that help to create that distance are language, pigment, lead, needles, spears and bugs-how you experience those objects.

BL

That's right. The closeness remains conditional. The bugs and needles keep you at a slight distance. The closeness in Jackie's work always remains uncon­ditional. It always is inviting.

JW

I think we are talking about the degrees of distance. In my pieces, I like no distance. For example, at this moment in time, you are here and l am next to you and we interact with each other as distinct people. We respect each other's separateness. But if we were together romantically, smooching with our eyes closed, we become internal and there is no distance. In Barry's work, you engage the pigment or flower, but pull away to read a word or recoil from a tarantula.

CVA

Your sculptures, Jackie, encourage touch. Barry's make you scared to touch, although the velvet quality of the pigmented surface is extremely tactile.

BL

I want that ambiguity, one of the reasons I continue using fluorescent pigment is because when people touch the work they are left with color on their hands. I want that peculiar interaction. You might find it scary or surprising when some of the pigment comes off on you; in a way, you become an extension of the piece, unexpectedly in­cluded in it. Getting pigment on your hands or discovering the bugs on the surface pulls you away from viewing the piece objectively and thrusts you into subjectively relating to it, to being an extension of it, being the flesh and blood presence, viewing the emptiness and absence in the suit, being caught between the illusion and reality.

JW

The suit sculptures reach out to bring you in at the same time they are pushing you away.

CVA

Is it flirtation?

BL

Yes.

CVA

And seduction is what the pieces are about, too. Perhaps if you only saw the fragmented shapes-the shards of body-you might think them analogous to rape, but the caring for the material and gentleness of how they are handled makes the sculpture seem so tender.

They may be dismembered or disjunctive parts of the body, but their disposition is touching and expectant rattier than cruel. Again, there's that thread of destruction and creation in both of your sculpture. What about their physical frailty and psychological vulnerability? The way that they're made seems suited to their content.

BL

I think it's really about not wanting to let go. 

CVA

As I sit here among all these body parts strewn around your studio, I can't help but think of a doctor's office. Do you get to be a doctor forever?

BL

Yes, but I don't know if I'll always like that When I install or repair a piece, it's not the same  thing as making it, but there is a memory of why I did It and, In some sense, I get 10 do it again.

JW

Actually. It's more like the composer­ musician replaying his score.

CVA

I think there is something revelatory about the materials an artist chooses to work with and the shift from one material to the next. How do you come to materials? Do you spend much time looking for them?

JW

The experience of discovering a material you feel connected to is not shopping. Shopping is when you've run out of nails. Just as friends are pulled to you by some magnetic energy that matches up with yours, so materials are drawn to you, All or a sudden you discover a material that has been around you for years. A material is p­articularly appropriate at a given time. By working with a material, you get to know it and it gets to know you; you are in partnership with each other, involved in a kind of dance in which no one is leading and no one is following.

BL

I agree. I came to use insects quite by accident. I was working in my studio, and a large dragonfly flew in and later died. The next day another one, exactly the same, flew in and also died. They were huge, about 5" long, and beautiful. Iridescent. I had never seen a dragonfly in New York, and the fact that they died in my house blew me away. I really liked them. I put them on one of the forms I was working on. It just made sense, it had no reason. How­ever, if you keep a material that inter­ests you around long enough, it acquires a reason.

CVA

Barry, did you know the danger of lead when you started to work with it?

BL

Yes. I knew it was bad for my liver.

JW

Barry has a conflicting relationship with his sculptures, of wanting to be near the suits and trying to keep away from the lead.

CVA

Why was lead so compelling?

BL

Because it has a beautiful surface and is malleable. And I like its relationship to copper.

JW

The word "lead" suggests leaden, heavy or ponderous feelings, and the words he has written on the sculpture are not light either: "Fuck You"-that's not light.

BL

In a funny way, I think I had language first, then the materials.

JW

It may have come first, but language is also a material. The choice of material initially may be intuitive but as you use it the reason you are using it becomes more conscious.

CVA

How you learn to work your material is not based necessarily on intuition; both of you have researched the possibilities and limitations of your materials.

JW

If s a dance of life; you move with it. It moves with you. If you are rigid, it won't work anymore. If it gets too rigid, it won't work with you anymore. It the movement stops, you move on to other materials.

CVA

But learning to impregnate concrete with pigment has been, if not a battle, at least a confrontation. It has required you to learn the molecular structure of your material.

JW

One of the first materials I pushed to its structural limit was concrete in the Burnt Piece. Concrete weakens and can be destroyed with intense heal. Heat expands the air pockets in the material which can cause fragments of concrete to explode off the main body. It even can explode or collapse the whole form. I burned the piece about five hours until the form began to expand and round slightly .As it cooled later. It contracted and the cube became slightly concave. During the firing, fragments of concrete popped off the main body to a distance of 20 feet. I had researched the materials' proper ties because I wanted to push to its structural limit, to where the concrete was actively, dangerously, responding to the heat but was not overwhelmed or destroyed by the fire. That is what physically happened to the form and material. That is its history. Part of the process of investigation becomes the content, as does discovery, I chose materials inappropriate to the physical task, but appropriate to the overall con· tent. The content includes going be­yond physical limitations.

CVA

Barry, earlier you expressed an interest in the composer John Dowland. What drew you lo him?

BL

Well, I was interested in a series of four song books, written over a period of fifteen years, in which he combined four voices and accompanying stringed and strummed instruments, such as violins and lutes. The songs I liked were based on word meter. There's a beautiful blending not only of what the words say and mean. But of the natural rhythm of the words and how they relate to each other-a perfect mesh. The textural use of sound added another dimension to the natural rhythm and meaning of the words.

JW

I'm sure that's how language evolved: a sound and an object or activity came together. And Barry is restating that fundamental of language, of sound and object together. 

CVA

Barry, some of the words you use to describe your work suggest the extension of music into movement.

BL

When the pieces are broken up, they have to do with gesture which implies a kind of dance or movement. But I think of them much more as singing. It is about language, about the way you utter a word and the placement of the letters of a word on the suit forms; it is both drawing and singing. It is about using the body as an instrument of expression and then breaking it into parts which is where the abstract or art making element enters.

JW

In Barry's sculpture, the narrative thrust of, to instance, "farewell," is readable. You know what it means and it's meant to be read. It's language; it's a sign. The suit or form comes next and is even more identifiable. It is not a sign, but more of a symbol. Then you move further into the abstraction of the feelings, to the materials and 'how they are handled, to where the texture of feelings is paralleled in the materials. Part of the content comes from moving in and out of these levels.

CVA

It is like tracing the way you move from the specific detail (such as Barry's purple freesia or Jackie's hand-buffed layer) to the more developed form (the torso or cube) to the larger concern. The armature which supports all the parts and represents the body or the event of burning. You both weave pictorial and sculptural space; in some ways, the work is as much about painting and drawing as it is about sculpture. That seems to be another area of overlap between the two of you. Surface definition is a primary concern for the two of you: it isn't for most sculptors.

BL

In Jackie's work there is a real consideration for the hand. What it does and what It can do.

JW

Well, I think that consideration is about a desire for intimacy in the work. Scale seems determined by the relationship between the largest and smallest most recognizable element. The refinement of touch is the smallest element in the cubic pieces and it is intimate. Tile juxtaposition of that intimacy to the largest element which is your experience of their physical weight, (in some cases. nearly 2,000 pounds) determines the scale. Regardless of how large the sculptures are or how large the scale is, which the surface helps determine, the concern for surface primarily is a desire to pull intimacy into the work.

CVA

You both are intimately involved with the fabrication of a work; it almost seems a ritualistic process. There is this connection to what in the past has been called primitive art. Is the artist a shaman or healer? Is the process of making art about expurgation, about bringing the fear into focus so that the fear is dissipated?

JW

For me making art ls about bringing oneself into focus in the second in time that one is in. In that second, one brings forward all of one's history, even if some of it may be partially deleted and/or more richly underlined. You are a channel, you become an open vehicle. If you are very restrained, what comes through is restricted. If you are more open, more empty, you create opportunity. Perhaps that opportunity will present a view of one's greater self that may not be about one's own personal story. What art is, it seems, is the commitment to look at that.

CVA

To permit it?

JW

Yes. It's a commitment to a kind of self-reflection or recognition through the work. I think that process is the same for Barry and all other artists.

BL

It's not the soul just looking in at itself; it also is the soul in relation to something in the world. There is a telling statement in News of the Universe, Robert Bly's book, about this. The soul, he says, is where the inner and the outer world meet and it is in every point of the overlap.

JW

Meditation is the space where the inner and outer worlds meet. It also is the world of the shaman. There's a description of the shaman in Joan Halifax's Shamanic Voices I would like to read: "The shaman, a mystical, priestly, and political figure emerging during the Upper Paleolithic period and perhaps going back to Neanderthal times, can be described not only as a specialist in the human soul but also as a generalist whose sacred and social functions can cover an extraordinarily wide range of activities. Shamans are healers, seers, and Visionaries who have mastered death. They are in communication with the world of gods and spirits. Their bodies can be left behind while they fly to unearthly realms. They are poets and singers. They dance and create works of art. They are not only spiritual leaders but also judges and politicians, the repositories of the knowledge of the culture's history, both sacred and secular. They are familiar with cosmic as well as physical geography, the ways of plants, animals, and the elements are known to them. They are psychologists, entertainers, and food finders. Above all, however, shamans are technicians of the sacred and masters of ecstasy.• '

BL

The shaman's world includes the overlap, and art comes from that overlap.

CVA

II making art is about self-realization or reflection, how does It differ from psychoanalysis?

JW

Soul or a large view is the difference. Where all parts are viewed in one context. The question. I guess, is not only how big can I be and how small am I, but also how willing am  I to  embrace  It all. With analysis you approach your life from the point of view of things being stuck: life has problems, things are blocked.  It doesn't come from the context of perfection where events can be lessons. It can be insightful, it can be parallel, it can seem similar, and you may delve into the same materials, but in art the materials are transformed to a greater purpose or goal. To have your life work well is not the goal, but the means to a greater end.

CVA

But the greatest need is to create something.

JW

That's embracing your life. You embrace what over on the couch may seem negative. One such experience was dynamiting the Exploded Piece. I can't tell you how catastrophic it was for me to witness the sculpture blow to pieces. I felt I had lost my whole persona, my protection.

CVA

Did I have to do with the loss of your own power?

JW

The fact or the sculpture's destruction was catastrophic. So was the metaphor. My art reflects my life, and my life reflects my art. I wanted to put the unknown into the known, to make a marriage or union. I got what I asked for, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.

CVA

It was more unknown than known?

JW

Those two things-concrete and dynamite-don't go together. After the explosion. I tried to find the similarity between my life and that act. l was like living my life out there-as an abstraction-and then coming back and living with emotion and content In my body where it was murkier. I looked over at the abstraction and It was clear; then, I looked back to see where the abstrac­tion matched my life. I felt like some part of me died during the explosion. I felt the loss literally for weeks. I felt naked, like I had lost all my clothes and I was the only one who had lost them. Shortly thereafter I went to a dinner party and I couldn't stay; I couldn't deal with people. I became nothing but Intimacy; I had no protection. Everything seemed significant, profound, and incredibly intimate. I kept asking myself why. Three weeks tater my dad died: his heart exploded. I felt I had gone through the experience myself. Life presents itself, you deal with it, and you make abstractions.

BL

Or you don't deal with it.

JW

You make abstractions, and abstractions are common to people: only the stories are different.

CVA

One or the possible stories or metaphors in both your work is a sexual one.

JW

I think energy expresses itself sexually, but it also expresses itself spiritually. In Eastern disciplines these energies together are called Kundalinl or Kl. It is life-force energy. The first or most basic energy center or chakra resides in the genitals. That same energy nurtures the whole body. Yogis do practices to bring that energy up from the lower chakras to the spiritual centers located in the head. In a nonspecific way, I feel my pieces are full of that energy. The energy is strong, but subtle.

CVA

What about ritual?

JW

I don't like the word because in current use it can suggest mindless, heartless activities.

CVA

My sense or ritual includes the spiritual. Wasn't the unbraiding of rope for your early pieces an obsessive task?

JW

I don't think repetitive activities neces­sarily are spiritual or that obsessive tasks are rituals. The unraveling was never a task; the act was an extension of the vision, an element of the complete idea. An idea is only as grand as your willingness to attend to details which are the vehicle through which the preciseness of ideas is realized-where revelation becomes clearly revealed.

BL

If you have a good idea and never do anything about it, it dissipates. If you pursue the idea, you get to see your feelings manifested in the world.

JW

You are grounding spirit in matter.

CVA

What about the literal grounding of your sculptures? What compels you towards the wall or to make something that is free-standing?

JW

I think the word ''free-standing '' covers it for me. Things that are dependent upon other things have a vulnerable quality about them, unlike a tree which is free-standing and grounded by its own roots. By hanging on the wall, Open Cube Is dependent upon it and that aspect of the sculptural is vulnerable. When I first conceived the piece, I wanted It to be about "opening up.'' both physically and metaphorically. I wanted the inner to become outer. The concealed to become revealed; I wanted it to be inclusive. There is strength hidden in the willingness to be vulnerable, and I wanted that lo be in the piece as well. Once the cubical structure was broken open, a new support system took its place.

CVA

The surface and edge of the sculpture are particularly exposed, and the sculpture's enormous weight makes it vul­nerable. The overt figurative reference seems absolutely appropriate; I was reminded of the cross not as sign, but as person or skeletal structure. There's an element of black comedy in that figurative reference.

JW

When you first see it, you read it as sign. You have to be with the piece a few moments before it loses its initial reading as cross and becomes Open Cube, the abstraction.

CVA

There's a wrestling match going on In Barry's newer works between the thing itself and the sign. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the armature: it's not as much a part of his internal system or vocabulary. Is it a geometric spine?

JW

In The Art of Singing the armature takes on the configuration of a. cross from a particular view. I'm sure Barry just propped those lead 4 x 4's up against the studio wall, and the cross emerged unconsciously as an abstracted structure in a way, it's another abstraction of the coat.

BL

It also is a hollow form like the coat.

JW

The 4 x 4 lead form is visually more abstract than the coat; if you make the connection to cross, the configuration has a long history. The image goes back and forth between abstraction and sign. The other pieces, using the same forms in a slightly different composition, retain their abstraction. They actually look more like broken tree limbs.

CVA

The soft metal coats have an obvious reference to knights. I'm not certain these are knights or that the armor is shining, but there is some sense of heroism. The metal suits have been punctured, and are not quite as invincible as those of their medieval relatives.

JW

Those knights in shining armor were fighting against the evil outside of themselves. Barry's deal with the feelings within. The battle is on a different field: it's right there where the coat is.

CVA

Did the original concept of the suits include the punctures?

BL

No, not the puncture by itself, but the puncture in combination with the flower -the violent and the fragile together. I pierced them to change or destroy something. Destruction is still transformation, and that's what the puncture is about. Making something and changing it. The puncturing took me a long time to do. A real flower softened the metaphor of the first puncture, making it more complex. The reality and metaphor were simultaneous.

JW

I used fire in the same way in Burnt Piece.

BL

I helped Jackie when she burned that piece.

JW

In Burnt Piece, besides wanting fire to transform the state of the cube. I wanted to unite form to force. The fire initiated the interaction while the cube had to withstand the force. The marks of the fire are all over the cube. It drew what you see.

CVA

But you spent much time thinking about how it might be, what could happen.

JW

Oh yes, no doubt about It. I was kept very busy figuring out the structural engineering problems, the five layers of mesh, the pre-fired clay, the 1400 pounds of concrete. It was constructed to withstand fire. I made a context in which the game of life was played; fire interacted with wooden structure, form united with force. I worked very hard to make it an even match.

CVA

This act of joining-of connecting figures, materials, signs and symbols of chemical reactions- pervades both of your works. Connections also suggest oppositions, Language and form work in opposition, then unison. So does regularity and irregularity, inside and out· side, surface and structure. Are there other oppositions?

JW

The fundamental opposition or separation is body and spirit.

CVA

Jackie, you were telling me about a dream you had about things joining to become one.

JW

Oh yes. In the dream, I was standing on a mountainside with a man who was my teacher, only his face was so marred I couldn't identify him. That I couldn't identify him was important to me in the dream. He came over to me, put his mouth on my ear, and spoke into it. He continued talking until I lost a sense of this being there, and the words going into my ear became like my own mind thinking. Then the teacher came around lo the front of me and put his mouth on my mouth. He was so close that I again could not identify who he was. As my breath came and went, he spoke into my mouth; as he talked l couldn't tell if he were talking in or I was talking out. Later in the dream I spoke and, as I spoke, the teacher said ''What she is saying is what I think. She is speaking and we will be saying the same thing. We are the same voice." I want to instill one thing with another, like fire into concrete, in the same way my teacher's voice became my own in the dream.

CVA

Seamlessly?

BL

Yes, without any connections, perfectly bound, perfectly joined, together:

CVA

Nature sneaks into your pieces, Barry, as a kind of ravishing beauty, somewhat in contradiction to the man-made. Why did you begin to incorporate the flowers?

BL

The flower is both about beauty which is fleeting and the symbol which is ever lasting. It's about the real which dies or which is manifest temporally and the abstraction that exists always. It's the same for the insects: the locust is both real and not real. It is dead, but it appears as it did when alive. I choose the bug because it is a carapace, an exoskeleton, like the suits. The bugs, the flower, and the bells all have two functions: they're both passive and active.

CVA

You almost can hear the bells simply by seeing them.

BL

It's very important that they are played. There is a point of choice, of whether or not to be involved in playing them.

CVA

Or how familiar you might become with tile piece?

BL

Yes. I did not want them to have just the function of possibility, but also of being.

CVA

Do the bells also carry memories?

BL

Yes, from my childhood. In my home town there was a group of Dominican sisters who taught the Montessori Method. These are Montessori bells which I remember being absolutely drawn to as a kid.

CVA

The bells, then, become a symbol for childhood or of beginnings. Given that the sculpture also speaks of dying, of ending, the bells complete the narrative cycle.

BL

Yes. I think so. There is another refer­ence to beginnings in Doll, a suit that I scaled down,

CVA

The piece Is not quite doll-like, but it does make you look differently at the life-size suits. The smaller ones almost point out the artificiality of both.

BL

It was really important for me to create the artificiality. The suits are autobiographical and I had to shift the size to make them more object-like, less me, with more distance. They are narrative, figurative and autobiographical. Jackie's pieces are similar, but in a more abstract way. The geometry creates a built-in distance.

CVA

Yes, but if you listed the activities Involved in making Jackie's pieces, they seem less abstract. Does the wrapping, binding, containing, holding in, restraining, controlling, manipulating, have an innuendo of bondage?

JW

They do share a common vocabulary but not a common end. The early pieces combined materials distinct in form and nature through the use of wrapping, which was a way of including me in the pieces physically by a recording of real linear time. And that lengthy wrapping time imbued the sculpture with stillness and united the forms as one.

BL

The wrapping in some pieces seems more about a compressed experience of coiled potential energy.

JW

Bondage on the other hand seems about limitations. The body and its ex­tensions -time, tools, and materials -are limitations, but they are the nature of physical reality. The nature of spirit is that it wants to communicate, to express itself. It wants to be recognized and realized, it wants its potential and limitlessness tapped and used.

BL

Through the body the potential of the spirit is realized. Bondage is about separations: art is about bringing things together.

JW

Bondage seems a stale of mind, its essence being non-agreement, and what is not agreed upon is the union of body and spirit. That state of mind dis­solves by embracing the circumstances of your life to the point of ownership. Bondage of spirit is when the body/ spirit union becomes separate or un­even, and the body is held experientially, by concert, as object. Art is a mirror of life both specific and grand. It manifests as object or matter as does your body, but it is not about the object per se, it is a vehicle through which you get to express and experience the elusive physically.