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Peter Coffin: I should tell you steven, it’s important for me that you know that your work is really inspirational to me and interests me quite a bit.
Stephen Kaltenbach: Oh good
PC Your work and texts have just… after I moved to new york I ended up working for joseph [kosuth] for a while…
SK Oh you did?
PC …who likes your work, by the way. Joseph is a difficult person sometimes—that’s off the record—
SK ha!
PC I really, really appreciate what I’ve learned from him and working for him is a different story but I asked him about you just last year and on several occasions he’s said that he likes your work…
SK Really?
PC I think he was curious about you because you’re pretty religious and joseph’s usually known for offending people and saying the wrong thing so I was impressed with what he had to say.
SK Yeah… he’s had a lot of success with that kind of difficulty of personality… I mean, that has something to do with it. Bruce Nauman told me one time in the 90’s:—I saw him at his opening in new york—he knew I was interviewing with his gallery—“you have to be sweet...you have to be sweet” and then I went into the interview and I insulted something the guy holds dear. I knew I did it the minute I had said it…
PC Accidentally or…?
SK No! Accidentally! And I knew it and I knew I was not going to be with the gallery just like that.
PC That’s pretty funny.
SK It’s ridiculous but Bruce’s warning wasn’t enough for me or something… I think it’s a bad idea to say bad things about people… if I happened to know anything bad about kosuth I would never say it. And I don’t care to know… there’s so much… the art-gossip in new york is something that doesn’t interest me whatsoever. You also need to keep your mind free for more important things, higher things or whatever you want to call it… and I
think that that sort of… it’s not really a malevolence… it’s kind of a… I think it comes from insecurity… they see other people doing well and so they collect their own store of information—negative things about them—to kind of even the playing field and it’s totally unnecessary, you know?
PC One of the things that drew me most to your work and inspired me was also this challenge to ego and authorship which is a big deal and I’ve got some questions about that. This is so important… it feels like the final challenge in art—or one of the biggest challenges—it’s not difficult for artists in school to understand the importance of institutional critique or understand how to produce work independent of the market and that alone is a really great first lesson but the next level, I think, is a freedom of what you might expect from being an artist or a freedom from that ego attachment.
SK Although some work demands it so, see, there it is… you can either do it or not… I mean, if the work requires it… I mean, if you’re going to do anonymous things then you have to realize that it’s going to alter the way you get feedback because the ego is kind of a feedback thing, in a way… it can be financial or just people saying ‘that’s great’ or, conversely, ‘oh that’s a stinky piece’ or whatever… and so I thought that those issues were extremely interesting because everybody—all my piers in new york and here too—were only going at it in one way and I suddenly realized… I was thinking about opposites: how do you find originality? It seemed like origination was… when I was in school I came to realize that… it wasn’t stated but it was valued. It was highly valued. And the more I thought about I thought that could be a major goal in work… in fact there could be work that was about just that… what if the specifics of poetic composition became less important or submerged in this higher thing which was to direct a stream of art-making, somewhat, and I wasn’t bothered by things about how egotistical it would look and so-on… and yet, I thought, maybe some things just have to be done and you have to swallow the negative appearances of them… just all this thinking was so redundant in the sense that it would bend back on itself and suggest a new thing like… but along paths I was thinking, so I was thinking opposites… and all of my contemporaries… what were we there for? we were there to enhance our careers, to build a career, to build reputations, and become a… to gain a status where you could actually earn a little money with what you did and… it’s what they expect of you… but what about diminishing reputation? That is a possibility too… and what is wrong with that? Well, it has repercussions: if you’re willing to accept what comes then you can do anything, really. And then I thought well, what can’t you do? And then I think I wrote this to… there’s 2 different possibilities: this guy says, ‘bad art doesn’t kill people, cooks do’ and so I thought, if it’s in art and you really examine it for negative effects and for negative intent that could be anywhere from evil to just impolite and if it then satisfies your morality, then you could probably do almost anything and some things like the lying thing is a powerful principle. Now, I was a kid and I couldn’t really foresee the extent of how that would effect my life and it’s been terrible; that’s the most costly piece of art I’ve ever produced because the people who know about them don’t believe anything I say. My gallery guy in LA, david stone, he goes, ‘of course we don’t know whether or not you’re telling the truth or not’ and he just loves to dig me like that because he knows it bothers me PC interesting
SK yet, some of the things I was able to do with minimalism at that time really, I mean, maybe I could talk about that at some point… I don’t know if you want to get to your questions but, since I’m rolling on this, when I left davis I had a series of drawings of room constructions where I had taken geometric shapes and further simplified the viewing experience by incorporating them into the interior so that they were at one with the interior… they either completely filled the space like the cube in the room… left just enough room to get in and slide around the corner—that was what I showed at the whitney finally… that was what they wanted…
PC we’re made to look at a part of the room too
SK yes, their surfacing and so on… I felt like I had kind of reached an end point there although there’s no guarantee.. there’s always an artist out there with a better idea… so then I continued to look at other means of simplification and one of the means was reducing the actuality of the object
PC you mean, just to the idea?
SK So it was just the idea. And I did that in many ways but one of the ways I did it was to, in that social structure in new york, was, especially once street works became known by the museums and they would have—at one point there was this one show where everyvbody went out and did stuff.
PC The one the village voice covered?
SK Right.
PC ‘street workers?’
SK yeah. Then we had this party and writers talked to us at the party and it was very casual, but I was able to present them with actions that had never happened so, when it was printed, all that existed was a printed anecdote of the idea in the reader’s mind that it had happened to give it more actuality, to give it more substance and that really delighted me in terms of my minimalist crusades… I felt I was really playing with existence, in a way, and so, when I had that interview in artforum in novemeber, I was able to put some illustrated things in there that aren’t true that were really delightful to me… so they still exist. And it’s a piece but it’s completely, well, most art is fabricated…
PC do you mean the interview where you discussed the street works? Is that what you mean, or do you mean the advertisement…?
SK No. in the interview in artforum… yeah. There are pieces in there that aren’t
PC …or images of pieces in there
SK and I illustrated with images so there’s an image of this beautiful [pot that has an ash glazing??] but it’s not in the glaze.
PC Oh right. I just read about this again last night. I know what you’re talking about…Well I didn’t… I never thought of the lies as deceitful… I just sort of took it as a playful way of addressing something that’s sort of difficult to deal with anyway… especially I thought it was kind of a smart way of addressing how we take for granted what’s expected anyhow. With this piece, there was a question that the same woman who interviewed you in the artforum article, she followed up asking about the streetwork piece by asking about the freedback and she asked ‘was it was unfair for people on the street to have not experienced the piece and only for you to have told other people, other people, about it later and your answers were interesting because it wasn’t a concern… I understand now the concern that haunts you that you’ve done pieces a lot that you don’t know if people can believe you, but back then it was something that was just sort of a challenge to what other people were doing just for the sake of documenting it. They, perhaps, weren’t concerned about who would see it anyhow… they weren’t aware that perhaps the only audience who would carry this on or continue the discussion were the people at the party afterwards who would write about it and you weren’t taking that for granted.
SK No
PC It seemed like that was the new audience.
SK Right.
PC In all of your work you pinpoint the audience pretty well beforehand.
SK It did at one point occur to me that by focusing on a group I could do things that I couldn’t do otherwise and ads in artforum are all micromanagement
GAP IN TAPE--------------------
SK…not only did he make me stop playing, but he changed the game. But also in a spectacular way, so that the whole board was completely cleared of his pieces.
PC The one move, of the thing you would do, want you to do is win. That’s really nice.
SK Isn’t it?
PC So I wanted to tell you the ads were a big deal for me when I first found them but when I was studying here with _____ as my painting teacher and he… and I just at that time was becoming disinterested in painting… and he still supported me about this… and I… he cleared out his studio and gave me all of his artforum articles and I found these ads, still didn’t know they were yours, and I was especially excited about that fact… not til later til four or five years later...
SK 80s?
PC No this was later.. 91, 92? And that’s when I started college and I was really excited and I collected them all, searched through all of them to find which ones were… wrote them all down filled them all carefully, but then I came across the few that had no text and these were the ones that had me the most confused and the most engaged. I think you called them the ‘mini manifestos’… ‘micro manifestos’? as opposed to the others that were mini manifestos?
SK Well, Mini manifestos were my articles… that’s what I… I wrote an article that was published…
PC That was the mini manifestos, but these were the micro… now, were these all the text pieces also meant for emphasis? What makes, what qualifies or distinguishes these…?
SK Well, anything that I can tell in a sentence, micro, like ‘you or me’… it’s not a sentence but still I include that because it’s only three words. Just I decided, actually… the lie pieces came from my struggling with what I wanted to say with the language and I realized that I was unable to say exactly what I wanted to say. And so one of the ways that I tried to make myself perfectly clear was to keep reducing what the words were until maybe the result, it seemed like there was only one possible interpretation… then I realized that there were actually still ways… so then, I thought, even with the greatest intention, I can’t tell the truth, yet I’m surrounded by people who are using falsehood to raise their.. I mean, I saw it being used creatively to selfish benefits and in a lot of different categories, you know, social relations, career stuff, business…
PC But you were trying to use it independent of morality.
SK Actually it was, I helped created this, I was wondering if there was any… I had no idea that lying was evil and I thought that basically the reason was wrong in a very deep sense… that it was always used for… to gain advantage, for selfish reasons. Then shortly after that I realized that falsehood was used out of kindness sometimes too and it became the thing and I thought maybe in art, because it’s kind of in a way separated even if you make it take away the barriers as much as possible, it’s still separated from life… that maybe it could be transviewed to do something good, so each one of those things I thought, first of all, I had the ideas that I wanted to do, is there any thing that it could hurt anyone and, once I satisfied that I thought ok, is there anyway this will give me an unfair advantage over someone else and once I was satisfied I thought if I kept it in art, it would be actually, it could be a moral act… the thing I didn’t think about was the fact that, at that point, I didn’t a lot of, actually I thought truth was pretty situational, so I thought it didn’t matter if people believed me or not. And that’s really changed for me and that’s not something I saw coming or was seeking but… when I was painting the portrait of my dad I had a religious experience that ended up making me a Christian and since then I have, because I have a—this is why some people refer to me as being crazy… I have so much religious experience that it’s hard to accept that it’s real for some people and a lot of people don’t. but one of the things is that… it’s… there’s a great deal of value in me being religious like, the awkwardness of being spiritual… being in true contact with god and… I was a zen buddhist at the time and came out a Christian and I really didn’t want to do that but it happened to me… and I am actually delighted with that aspect of my life now and I see people who benefit from it and yet, to me, when I tell that story, it’s one of the most unbelievable stories, I mean, I could accept Christianity as history when I was a kid, I did, but as a… it’s almost like, alien or something… I mean, I’m talking about as real contact with real non-human or super-human beings that really want to help me and that just doesn’t seem believable and so to be an avowed liar who has an unbelievable story, that’s a very uncomfortable position for me to be in.
PC There’s something, though—we came to this because of the lie piece—but in the exercise of telling a lie, it’s almost as though art is allowed to help to see the truth, that’s the famous quote.
SK That’s true.
PC And It’s not so much unlike when we arrive at a place where we open ourselves to something that’s powerful inside, it’s because we’ve passed through, perhaps, the lie that we’ve already taken for granted, and that’s why this exercise of offering and allowing in a generous way, almost giving you permission, not to hide from it but to step to the other side of it.
SK It did seem like it, the ultra-honest thing to do to me, but I was, one of the other things I was doing was taking lsd as a means toward originality and it really did change my perception of who I am and my thinking.
PC And people who have done lsd will also talk about the experience of stepping outside of themselves to look back at what they are and then having realizations and it’s not any different from what you’ve experienced, I mean it’s certainly different from what any of us have experienced…
SK I think it’s an exceedingly unwise thing to do and I think I may be suffering a little bit from my involvement at the time but I will say that it did make my ability to see myself and also to work with my own mind because I was doing some of these things, easier to first recognize and then easier to do because…
PC You’re already with your work challenging the perspective of things that limit you or limit your…
SK My motives weren’t, my, that’s not the word I’m looking for, my drive for success wasn’t as important, as interesting a pure idea…as central in my work. I was at the same opening I was at where bruce was telling me to be sweet to people… there was a woman there, I never did ever get her name, but she was talking and she said ‘oh, you were a new york artist’ and I said yeah I was here until 1970 and she said ‘well, we have a show for you’ and I said… I had a certain amount of success and I think maybe she had questioned me enough to know that I’d had a number of museum shows and she said, well, ‘why did you leave?’ and I said, ‘I decided to destroy my reputation’ and she just broke out laughing and she didn’t believe me. It’s like, oh, you’re pulling my leg and she never said that, but I could see it and I thought to myself that an act that is completely unacceptable on the face of it that is far enough away from normalcy to at least… the articles were trying to open new doors.
PC Absolutely. And people will still come to the work you did… a few others artists, not very many who try to challenge themselves this much… it’s the only way we can go now. If we take this drive for granted we won’t realize all the other potentials that are still out there that are not unsuccessful, that are not detrimental… I even think that you have a pretty harsh view of your own trajectory… but it sparked some people powerfully.
SK Not all for the best.
PC Well there are a few artists who… I was going to ask you about your experience with lee lazano because people are now, you’ve noticed that there has been a resurgence in… people are really interested in her work and it’s a great thing. I’m really glad that she’s come back to life through this.
SK But also I’m sorry that she was so bitter about her lack of success because she had a very joyful personality and her mind was so supple and she was a genius. She enjoyed thinking... enjoyed communication on that level. We really had a very good time together. She and john tauriano were my 2 closest friends, the most fun to visit with. I don’t know if you’ve ever met john but you should.
PC He’s in new york still?
SK Yeah. He’s a hilarious, delightful human being. He teaches in a college there… he’s a painter, he lives in tribeca.
PC I’ll try.
SK Very, very original work.
PC Lee Lozano mentioned your work… did you collaborate on pieces or mostly just dialogue? Do you influence each other or are you on the same plane?
SK I would definitely say so and I think that there are going to be questions about who influenced what and I know some things but I decided that’s absolutely… I’m not going to say anything because, well, for one thing, she can’t protect herself, you know? And, for another thing, it’s so much more interesting to have people try to figure it out. And I’m satisfied with what they’ve come up with. I want the best for lee. I have some of her work… I, when ever I have a one-person show, I show one of her pieces in my show… if it’s one specific kind of work, maybe I wouldn’t unless it matched, but if it’s a little retrospective I could just have this… because I like the fact that people can come up to it and accept it as mine and look at it from another standing and there’s a piece by lee Lozano and there’s absolutely no explanation for how it got in the show or something. I have 10 of her pieces… she did a lot of private stuff that never got shown, just to get an idea… come to her studio and see her all enthused about something…
PC Her notes are amazing to read. That’s actually my favorite work of hers.
SK She did something that—I didn’t know what she was doing and she never told me—but… my brother was doing it years later: once she filled a notebook—she filled the complete notebook and didn’t leave any spaces… and that’s an inventor’s thing because then they have dated work and there’s no place to modify things and so it actually acts as evidence for previous… rivals, conflict… inventors are just like artists! Anyway, that was one of the things she did. She was most interesting because of her attitude and because… she had a very surprising attitude… some things, socially, especially… really amazing to me. But then when she began to become more and more unhappy… her work… this was work, but it was also very close to her life and it wasn’t happy. She cut herself with a blade. And even when she… she had 2 million dollars worth of ephemera… beautiful posters from the Newton gallery… early shows… all the shows. She used to keep them in a pile on the floor—but they weren’t jumbled or anything… they were fine—and then she threw them out her window and she was on the 6th floor on grand street and they all just fluttered down. They were destroyed.
PC Joseph told me he found a Robert ryman cut up in her garbage… took it home and restored. But yeah, she I think she probably opened herself up so much that, the way people do, that they make themselves feel vulnerable. Perhaps you’re in a similar position… you open yourself up so much.
SK It really amazes me that it happened but it did happen and I think part of it was chemical and it… can make life difficult and… in her case it did and she did it more. She did these pieces where she smoked grass every day for 30 days. You’ve heard about that. Have you heard about any other drug pieces?
PC I think she mentioned lsd… a few of those… they were showing them at ps1.
SK She took lsd every day for 30 days and she never admitted that as far as I know… and that really changed her. She was very unhappy at the time and I was so… I mean… I never said anything… we gave each other the freedom to do whatever we thought was appropriate. But boy I really didn’t think that was a good idea. I’m amazed at that. That’s when things started to get bad. It happened right away. I think that she actually dealt with things somewhat well considering… she never really recovered. …
PC The great thing, I think, is that the energy of her work still comes out. You can see it in her work and that’s a great thing. …You not only have redefined such artistic notions as information but also the spirit of the enhanced contract of trust between artist and audience that allowed someone like Robert barry to create invisible works using radio waves on black and white steel in which the emitting apparatus was concealed from view leading viewers to take it on its face but the art work had in fact been meticulously realized…did the question of artist matter to you at the time? I know it did, but who do you feel you were making your works for? I guess it depends on which case…
SK It did, but I’ve always been interested especially in making people suspicious, and yet I realized that for some people that would certainly be the effect that the work had but I was more interested in the necessity of needing to know.
PC Curiosity.
SK Well, in a way, it gave them an extra thing to think about. Robert Barry is showing invisible radiation or not or he’s just showing us the idea of invisible radiation or he’s showing us natural, I mean, my secret piece at paula cooper’s was really an exciting time for me because at that point I was thinking about the possibilities of not making work and still being an artist, so just thinking about things, so I went into the gallery and I didn’t forsee this moment then but so I saw the secretary was wearing a pink blouse and the next time I go in she’s wearing a white sweater and there’s different paper on her desk and the magazines are a little different, so there’s all this peripheral visual information and so I decided that I could choose whatever I wanted to do as other people were doing in the show, choosing, either carrying stuff in or whatever they were doing, I could choose stuff and it was also up to me whether to do anything with it manually or verbally or in anyway, if I was going to be free to do anything moral, then I could do anything moral and there’s nothing moral about telling people what I’m doing and actually be doing it but still there and what I liked about the piece—in a way it was one of the most interesting pieces, I thought, in the show—and no-one was looking and the people who were looking at it were doing other things and didn’t recognize it as they would have had they looked at it with pure vision…
PC it was on the periphery where we’re yet told it was being framed as art work… just on the outside or on the edge
SK and I would have had the choice and I did also take the choice of framing it when I spoke about pieces in magazines, but I decided this didn’t need an artist to talk about it and yet, now, because it’s, the idea really is that same situation I thought the piece itself had a lot of nice poetic integrity… and I’m talking about what you could see… mine was the biggest piece of the show. Mine was all over the place. Sort of blanketed everyone else’s work, gave me this power… it was also ok with everyone… it went with the piece. The piece was that I was doing it and had considered it, so it was a concept. I was doing conceptual art. And at the time I didn’t consider the fact that there would be a day when I could talk about it without destroying it and, pria sent, she was telling me that she couldn’t find any information about the piece and so there’s nothing to destroy, it’s gone, so I can do whatever I want with it if you see what I mean.
PC Have people asked you about it in the past?
SK Not yet. Not till now! I’m also interested, I did also mention this to pria, about my documentation, a lot of it has been hooked to time in a really tight way. For instance, my museum intrusions were done with my classes. People have asked about reproductions and if reproductions are available and asked me where they are… I don’t know… why don’t you know… because I didn’t do any documentation of them at the time because my students also had cameras and they took pictures of this stuff and I didn’t talk to them about them and I didn’t tell them that they were important to save or anything but some of them did save them and they’re in shoeboxes some place and now they’re 70… but not, the age difference was very slight… I would say they were, I was 27 and they were 20, 19, so they’re whatever they are, 58… well, time to clean out the closet! And they’d throw that stuff away! Or anybody who wanted to in the visual arts could look up the class roster, look up these people and get the documentation.
PC Is this a hint?
SK No! it’s not! It’s just a fact. Or not.
PC But this is part of the piece. I like that. It’s a living thing still.
SK I just find it interesting, one of the things I was really impressed with was when art history started to investigate futurist performance and the artists were all dead a lot of their widows were still alive, and there’s almost no documentation and no first had account of it, it’s all second hand stuff… a lot of it from elderly women who didn’t like what their husbands were doing! I mean, there’s certainly a lot of… because they made a lot of press… there’s a lot of information out there but I was interested in the fact that it took a lot of, it was almost to the point where they were in history and they had to put the pieces together… so they’re in this kind of status where a faded photograph…
PC Well that brings me to the last question I wanted to ask you about the bank vault piece.
SK It was called the art of money and the way you can find the most about it is life magazine in the month after the show. It had a picture of abe… can’t remember his last name. he did a masterpiece. Much better than mine. He showed a million dollars in one dollar bills in a big pile on the floor of the bank… of the vault and these two guards maybe one or two guards guarded it… so there it was: it was a big pile so these guys were standing there… you know ‘don’t touch this money’… and people were going in and out looking at it and its on the cover of life magazine and there’s probably some article about it if you wanted to pin down when it was or where it was, at least you could find that life magazine.
PC It’s been very good of you to answer some of these questions. Thanks very much.
SK Oh it’s my pleasure.
PC Pria’s finishing up her text. She’s told me it’s very good… I haven’t read it yet… what we’ll do is take down this interview and you can play with it, move things around, add things if you like and we would like to have it accompany her text.. it’s only for her graduate course in Columbia and maybe if there’s a chance we could publish it. but thanks very much.
SK Sure, sure. I’m of course interested… if anyone is interested! I notice that I do get some interest from other people, mostly students, a friend, an LA artist has been using my art and his work in funny ways… doing new Yorker type cartoons with… he does really off-center stuff.
PC Who’s the artist?
SK Rodriguez… he’s a very nice young guy… I think some of his work… like, one of his pieces was to build a curriculum for grammar school children about conceptual art… because he thought they had no understanding of it. and he felt that, as an art piece, to create their understanding of it, so that they would be going into high school and going into college, you know? It would really change the whole art scene. The idea had such a big scale.
PC That’s really great.
SK Doing it in some kind of really strange way… I mean, I called a friend of mine who is a gallerist who understands contemporary art a lot and that person did not get it …really I often think that there are 2 possibilities… there are people, we don’t get things right, and one of the reasons is that it’s too good. You don’t have a language yet.
PC Yeah that’s right.
SK And so, that’s possible. He is a good guy.
PC and you keep in touch with a lot of people who you’re friends with here in davis?
SK Right. Yeah. I mean, There are a few people… I stay pretty busy and I’m looking for…
PC Peter vetenberg?
SK Yes, we see eachother once in a while while working. He’s been my buddy since the mid 60s. he’s a realy interesting guy because he’s a Christian and he likes me a lot. A lot of those people just dumped me.
PC The same thing happened with Adrian piper too when she got into her.. with her I think it was Hinduism or tantric meditation, and some people were concerned that it became too specific, that it framed her work.
SK This is just a religion prejudice. So Robert campus, he never abandoned me, he tells me sometimes, you know, ‘you guys are crazy’ and so on but he loves me, you know? And I respect him so much for being able to get beyond his own prejudice… that he still hasn’t gotten rid of, that he doesn’t allow it to effect the way that he is.
PC He’s even interested in his own prejudice. He knows that there’s something…
SK Yeah, I wonder how conscious he is of it. the fact that, even though he doesn’t like it, what I’m into, he’s been able to contextualize, to realize that he really still likes me and that didn’t happen in many cases… people were just, like, ‘who could be friends with kaltenbach’ and really I am free to express my experience but I don’t expect anybody to listen, I would if I thought it would work… because they think it’s like, in that context, ‘you get hit by the magic meatball’ or something it’s just like ‘oh! This is not possible it’s just so good’ but you can’t. it works the opposite. Anyway. I do stay in touch, in terms of that, and, barry, bruce, for 10 years, at a show at the Brooklyn museum when I saw them and they said, you know, you’re home, but I had to change it. had to change it. I don’t know. If you have an experience so powerful that you have to move in to the center of nowhere… you have to do what you have to do. …he’s become a very good friend of mine. I didn’t understand a lot of the stuff of his thinking at first, but somehow, within a couple months or something, that art became really accessible to me. I still felt that it was odd, but it was exotic, not sophomoric.
PC And not so self-devolved. There was something prettier about it. I knew, well, I hardly knew bob armiston, for a brief period when I got here… he talked about how, I think he talked about you and bruce… he mentioned that bruce almost didn’t pass, almost didn’t graduate.
SK What it was was he didn’t know what he was doing. Actually, for a while bob supported him and a dozen really good artists… actually, it may have been a good defense by bob that… if that happened, you have to at least give the art some chance of having something I mean, somebody who pays 5,000 a month on rent has decided to risk their space for a month or two on this, let’s go back and look at this for a minute. Bruce’s first piece was a kind of a fence post, maybe a little bigger, this high, 2 sides, it was electrical, on one side kind of curved like that and on the other it was kind of curved like that so it had a kind of lean to it, and he made it in clay, kind of rough, made a mold, plaster mold, and made it fiberglass and used fiberglass resin caught dyes in the mold… carmel.
PC You were also involved.
SK Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t. I can’t remember. I certainly would have avoided anything that looked like barbs… we had terms for it. I was working on a piece, I wasn’t into fiberglass, I was into bondo, polyester
PC Pretty bad stuff
SK Yeah, so I was using that and he was using that and we built these pieces and, one of the things we did to carry a show was, you know the walnut creek biennial, and we sent our stuff down there and bruce’s piece was rejected and mine was the third prize… and I think that’s so funny because now I go to a museum and see Bruce’s and mine is in a crate somewhere in walnut creek. It’s funny. Some pieces are stronger than others and the idea was stronger than electric power. You said you had images?
PC You’ve given me plenty of information, give me a second, I think I’m going still---
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