L.L.: The lateral extension of Smog, as opposed to the verticality of Smoke and most of the early work, say before 1968, reminds me of the Chicago piece, Lunar Ammo Dump. What happened to that project?
T.S.: Well, it was postponed for three years, partly in protest against Daley and all that, then they never brought it up again. I don’t know if it’ll ever be revived. I’m kind of sad there is no good record of it, because there was a certain grandeur about it. It was 132 feet long, with two walls on either side of this amphitheater, so that its width was much greater than its length; it was spread out at a point where the pavement of the mall broke in two because of the theater; it was made up of two rows of six boxes on each side, 24 in all, each 12 square, 12 feet apart in each direction, and 8 feet high. This proportion would have sat in there very easily; it wouldn’t have had a lot of muscle, but it would have made nice places for people to wander. The pavement is black granite so there wouldn’t have been any kind of strident contrast to the general yellowish red of the campus designed by Walter Netsch who, by the way, was perfectly content with the piece.
L.L.: What’s its relationship to Maze?
T.S.: Just that it is a very simple thing, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. You know, I don’t think of Maze as being in an open space. I think of it in a closed space as it was at Finch College [in 1967], with the space around it being just as much a part of it as the space through it. Someone once thought of it as a free-standing monument. Well, to me that would be very much like a war memorial [or like smith’s own Roosevelt Memorial proposal] and I didn’t think of it in that way. As a matter of fact, a while before I did any of these pieces I did a lot of projects that were somewhat like Maze in that they were, let’s say, excavations, where the excavation would reach a certain depth, but then all the earth that was taken from the excavation would form an embankment on the sides, something like Haole Crater. Sometimes I would have some kind of organization of rectangular prisms or something in the plot so you would be able to see it from the raised part of the mound. I had been interested in things of this sort for a very long time. As a matter of fact, I often thought of making sunken gardens. I remember a specific place where a house had burned so only the excavation was left, so I put the house to one side and the excavation became a sunken garden. Quite a few of my houses have been partially below the surface, that is the earth comes up to the sill line on the outside and then the floor is below. At Fritz Bultman’s studio in Provincetown, one side of the building is about 4 feet below the surface. And then my scheme for Betty Parsons’ house—the floor dropped 2 1/2 feet below the ground level. I have always been particularly interested in excavating and then piling the dirt up; a lot of it has to do with cutting into the side of a hill and then using excavated earth beyond that as fill.
L.L.: Your idea of voids and solids being equally important reminds me of Carl Andre’s idea of sculpture as “cuts into space,” solid as a hole and hole as solid. And what about your mountain piece?
T.S.: I haven’t seen his work. Of course the mountain piece is related. Right now it’s just waiting until they find a place in the vicinity to use the fill for building a road or something; the property is so big they can’t dump the fill at random. I’ve always been much interested in projects that deal with the land in a large way but I don’t know exactly how to approach anything of that sort. Except in a few cases, like the church I have been wanting to do for a long time, and a couple of other things of that sort, I never did very much in the way of projects. For instance, when people asked me about houses, I would always say, well, you get the land and I’ll talk to you about the house. I feel that way about earth projects. Generally, I wouldn’t know how to go about one, because I’d be faced with an infinite number of possibilities. I think much better when I have something specific to work on. In just the same way these pieces happen in the models themselves. I never think of them on paper.
L.L.: What happened to Water Garden?
T.S.: I never worked on that again. I’d like to, because I’m very fond of the idea of making the paths a maze, so people wouldn’t always be able to get out. At certain points they would have to retrace their steps and see the moving water in a different mood. If you walk along where it is flowing one way, you get a different feeling than when you are walking in the opposite direction. There again, you see, it’s halfway between the Osaka Cave and the flat pieces like Hubris.
L.L.: In what sense?
T.S.: In the sense that it can’t be characterized. There are so many units and it is not moving toward any final stability. Instead, it is still a very organic thing.
L.L.: Are you still painting?
T.S.: I haven’t had a chance to paint lately but I have started to do a lot of drawing.
L.L.: It’s struck me that your paintings have been mainly concerned with curved shapes and the sculpture with angular ones.
T.S.: I think my interest in painting remains that of dealing with the interchange of figure and ground. I don’t think of certain shapes. I am mainly involved with trying to make an equilibrium over the surface based on fairly close values. The reason I tend to use those convex shapes is that I feel an area of color has its own center, and I resist shapes that radiate or suggest style and structure. I think that goes partly with my dislike of fragmentation, of busyness and disturbing overlays of speed and noise. To relate that to sculpture, the same thing happens in three dimensions that happens in two. Forms tend to have their own masses, their own centers of gravity, but it seems (and this is a hangover from architecture) that I think of walls, which enclose space and also define the exterior space.
From an urban point of view the activity is just as important as enclosed space. We find round plans among nomadic peoples because the public state is at the center of the group; the nomadic hut is a very organically defined area, not defined in any formal sense. It’s only when people begin to live in towns that the need for plane walls becomes necessary because, for one thing, buildings being right next to each other so as not to waste space, it is simpler to use plane walls and and also courtyards, streets, squares. While nomadic people have round plans, in urban communities, domes and such features are raised above street level. They don’t ordinarily rise from the ground which indicates people want to look at centrality somewhere, like in the sacred nature of the dome. But at the same time they don’t have to live in a world of concave/convex surfaces pushing in on the space; the public space is free of forms. I think my own work has architectural vestiges in that sense and that may also be one reason why I like things placed so the spaces between and around forms have a certain clarity. If I should do curvilinear sculptures, I would try to give them a kind of shape again, so there would be a balance, as there is in the paintings, between inside and outside.
L.L.: So the inflated sculptures you’ve been planning for so long and can’t find the means to execute would merge your painting and sculpture ideas?
T.S.: Yes, if I could do it. But there again I think of the pneumatic sculptures as being naturally suited to color. It would be difficult to make inflated pillows that would be purely prismatic; the sense of internal pressure tends to produce forms. That may be true of making gas tanks with metal because all the pressure is on one side, but if you’re making masonry walls, unless it is for residences or something like that, there isn’t any differentiation in pressure, and therefore there’s no real necessity to make them curved.
L.L.: Do you have some idea of a logic in the relationship between color and structure in sculpture?
T.S.: I feel that there should be a logic to it.
L.L: Can you think of any current work that has it?
T.S.: No. Or perhaps Kelly. But most colored sculpture is in classical architecture and sculpture, and the essential premise is primitive, giving clarity to certain kinds of form, but very often using colors symbolically, and also without any of the comprehension of colors that we have today. If you think of sculpture as fundamentally primitive, really primitive, you see that colors are used very much in terms of contrasts in light and shade, and even though they may have used reds or browns or some other colors, it isn’t color in the modern sense. It is very pleasing, but it is pleasing in a…
L.L.: In a cosmetic sense?
T.S.: No, I wouldn’t say that. I think it is simply a sense of form that relates more to pattern or ornament, without thinking of ornament as something bad in itself. I’m not using the term pejoratively, but I am simply saying that if you make an entire wall or floor out of red and black tiles, it is not exactly color in the modern sense. It is based rather on the availability of pigment and clay and all that. You certainly don’t get any spatial sense of color in anything of that sort. A lot of high sculpture from some other periods has to do with the fact that it ages very beautifully. Contemporary technology gives the possibility of new color relationships.
The only colored piece I ever did was intended for a southern city and I thought in strong sunlight the use of colors in the classical sense would be logical, and compatible with the piece. It was going to be on a piazza with more or less monumental buildings, fountains and trees; I felt that since the buildings were whitish concrete, the associations of my work with blackness might just not be the same in this part of the country. I had the feeling that there it might just look dirty…
Color is a three-dimensional phenomenon, but it doesn’t have what I’d think of as sculptural quality.