Interview of Oliver Andrews

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 4, 1976

GOODWIN

This tape will be devoted to a discussion of Oliver Andrews's early years, his childhood, his training, and some of his early work. We intend to lead up to the time when he began teaching at UCLA. First, Mr. Andrews, I'd like you to tell me about your family background.

ANDREWS

Okay. I was born in 1925 in Berkeley, California, where my parents were staying for a short time. Actually, we lived and my family lived in Southern California around Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, and Montecito. My family goes back for a long time in the United States and also in California.

GOODWIN

How far?

ANDREWS

My great-grandfather came to California in 1869 and started a ranch there which still exists.

GOODWIN

What was his name?

ANDREWS

His name was Joel Remington Fithian. Actually, a cousin of his was Frederick Remington, the famous western artist. That was my great-grandfather on my father's side. Before that the Andrewses had lived, oh, back into the beginning of the eighteenth century in the eastern United States. Also on my grandmother's side, my great-great- great-great-grandfather, Oliver Wolcott, after whom I'm named, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and he was the first governor of Connecticut. And so was his son and his grandson. They were all named Oliver Andrews. Then on the Tuckerman side, Joseph Tuckerman was the first Unitarian minister in Boston in 1720

GOODWIN

This is your maternal....

ANDREWS

That's my mother's side, yes. The Tuckermans and the Wolcotts were on my mother's side, and the Fithians and the Andrewses -- my father's mother, my paternal grandmother was a Fithian, and she married an Andrews. So all that goes way back in the history of this country. On my mother's side, my great-great-grandfather, my grandfather's grandfather, was one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. So all that goes very far back, and it also goes far back in the history of California. So I feel that I'm really a person with deep roots in California and Southern California.

GOODWIN

What kind of work did your father do?

ANDREWS

My father was a writer, mainly. He spent a lot of time in Polynesia -- in Tahiti, and in the Society Islands, and in the Cook Islands, Rarotonga and Aitutaki -- and wrote books about those islands and about his adventures there.

GOODWIN

Was he a novelist?

ANDREWS

Yes, he wrote semiautobiographical novels.

GOODWIN

Would I know some of his works?

ANDREWS

I don't think you would. He wasn't that well known. There was a book called The Horizon Chasers and another called Isles of Eden , which was actually about our family's visit to Tahiti. When I was six years old, my mother and my brother and my father, we went to Tahiti and stayed there for about a year. And that was one of my first introductions to a life in close proximity with the ocean. And, as you know, water has always been a fascination of mine and a part of my work. So we lived there, and I went out in outrigger canoes, and I could see the bottom of the ocean. That was part of my continuous fascination.

GOODWIN

You seem to have a vivid recollection.

ANDREWS

Yes, especially of that time in Tahiti, I have a very clear memory of what it was like living in Papeete and swimming and diving and so forth. And an incident happened when I was about four years old that I've always thought was very significant. I went out with my father in a canoe off Carpinteria, off a reef where I still dive. And there's a lot of kelp in that area. Kelp is a large plant that grows up from the bottom, grows sometimes seventy feet long and spreads its fronds out on the surface of the water. And it's a characteristic of the coastal waters out here. So anyway, we went out in this canoe. And a large wave came along and practically capsized the canoe, threw me out of the canoe. And I landed in a kelp bed. But for some reason -- I guess because I was a very small child -- when I landed in the kelp, I didn't sink. And I remember lying like a little sea otter, in this mattress of kelp, as it were, and looking up at my father, who was terrified. He was in the canoe, and he dove out of the canoe to save me. I remember feeling rather than what you would expect in being hurled out of this canoe by a wave, that I would be terrified -- but I remember feeling a great sense of peace and safety and that the water was really holding me up and that everything was all right. That incident, I think, has something to do with my feeling of confidence and at-homeness in the water, because as well as being interested in using water in my work, I do a lot of diving and I spend a lot of time under the water. And some of my sculptures have actually taken place in the ocean, under the ocean. But that's just one incident that I recall out of my very early childhood.

GOODWIN

Did you live on the beach in Carpinteria?

ANDREWS

Close to it -- not right on it, but close to it. The two families, my two different grandparents, lived fairly close to each other on ranches out there. You could walk from one place to the other. You could always see the ocean out there on a hillside; you could look out to sea. That experience has always affected me. The experience of living on a hillside looking out to sea is one of the cultural experiences that's common to certain peoples in different parts of the world. For instance, it's a Mediterranean kind of experience to live on these slopes with olive trees with rock outcroppings and so forth, with streams, and you're looking out across a landscape where there is water, and very often there are islands. And that's exactly what you see if you're in Greece or....

GOODWIN

It sounds so romantic.

ANDREWS

It is romantic, a part of the whole romantic experience. There's a lot of art that comes out of it and a lot of painting. A kind of architecture comes out of that, with tiles, roofs, and the use of water. That kind of experience exists other places in the world, too, like Japan. In Japan, you're very often on a hillside, and you're looking out across water to islands in the distance. It relates to a coastal kind of living and to living which has to do with travel by boat. And it also has to do with the kind of gardening and agriculture that takes place on a terraced slope. Where there are streams running down from the mountains to the ocean, you can do something with the streams. They can become part of the garden as they run through your garden. They can fill pools and so forth. That kind of use of water and use of landscape has always interested me. Countries like Italy, Greece, Spain, and Japan have found particularly beautiful ways to deal with that kind of situation. But the ways we're mostly used to in California, for instance, are borrowed ways where we have an Italian garden or a Japanese garden or a Spanish- Moorish garden, which suit our landscape very well and are really adapting something of our heritage from the past, but they're not really new solutions that we've worked out for our own presence here in California. That has something to do with the things that I've been trying to do in my work: to find a new way of relating to the landscape.

GOODWIN

Let's go back to your childhood. Did you attend local schools?

ANDREWS

Well, for a while I went to public schools in Santa Barbara, and then I went to a private school in Marin County, across the bay from San Francisco, that a relative of ours had started. And I went there through the years of high school.

GOODWIN

What was the name of the school?

ANDREWS

It was called the Marin School for Boys. It's no longer in existence. The school grounds -- before they were a school, they were a country club, so there were lots of trees and there was a big swimming pool. There were also very small classes, and scholastically I got along much better in those small classes than I had in big classes. In fact, all the time that I went to public school, I spent most of my time drawing pictures, not learning arithmetic or writing or much else. But there I took mathematics and Latin and French.

GOODWIN

It was a college preparatory school?

ANDREWS

Yeah. And from there I went to Stanford. I graduated from that school when I was only fifteen. And then I went for one summer to USC, and then I went to Stanford for a year, before I got into the army.

GOODWIN

Why did you select Stanford, or was it selected for you?

ANDREWS

No, I think I selected it because it seemed to have the kinds of programs and to be the kind of small school that interested me. I also liked where it was. I liked that situation geographically, on the peninsula there.

GOODWIN

Were you planning on studying something in particular at Stanford?

ANDREWS

When I first went there, I thought I would be an engineer. I thought I would design rocket ships and airplanes and wondrous things like that for the future. As I got into engineering a little bit, it turned out not to be as romantic as I first envisioned it. So I thought I would go to the more basic studies engineering was based on, and I would study physics. And so I did that. While I was studying I was also drawing. I had really been living a visual, artistic life all of my life up to then, but during that first part of my life I hadn't really awakened to the fact that I could be an artist. Everyone told me that being an artist was an impractical idea, and I shouldn't really take it seriously.

GOODWIN

Did your father ever say that?

ANDREWS

No, my father didn't say that so much because he was an impractical man himself.

GOODWIN

Because he was impractical?

ANDREWS

Right. Everybody said, "Look at your father. He just roams around and writes these books, and you should be more serious than that. Do something that has a future in it." So engineering and physics seemed fine. I always liked to make things a great deal. That relates to another thing that I did during that time. But all the time up to that I drew a great deal. I was always drawing; from the time I was six years old, I spent a great deal of time drawing.

GOODWIN

What did you draw?

ANDREWS

Oh, all kinds of fantasies. They often had to do with aircraft and rocket ships and space travel. So you can see where the connection came between the drawings and practical experience, which resulted in the idea of becoming a designer of aircraft or rocket ships. I made very detailed plans of incredible rockets. Of course, you must realize, this was in 1933 or '34, when there was no "star Trek." There was "Buck Rogers" and "Flash Gordon," and those things fascinated me. But I was completely self-taught in drawing. And, you know, I would draw in school until people would make me stop. But by the time I was twelve years old, I could draw perfectly well. I could draw anything. And I had a good knowledge of anatomy, and I could draw figures and horses.

GOODWIN

Caricatures?

ANDREWS

Well, I could draw caricatures of someone, but I really didn't draw in terms of caricaturing or cartooning. I would draw things as well as I possibly could, the way I thought they really looked. So I was really quite an accomplished draftsman by the time I was twelve years old. For instance, I was much better than most of the freshmen at UCLA. [laughter]

GOODWIN

Did you receive any encouragement?

ANDREWS

Well, not a lot. Nobody said, "Oh, God, that's wonderful. You're a genius. You must pursue this great gift." Everyone just thought I was remarkably gifted in drawing, but they thought that was just something nice, but not to be taken too seriously. I used to amuse the other kids by drawing for them as long as they would say draw this, draw that, as long as I could get anybody to watch me.

GOODWIN

Did you work on the yearbook or the newspaper?

ANDREWS

No, we didn't have any of those things in this private school. But every night after I finished studying, then I would draw. I filled literally hundreds and hundreds of notebooks with all kinds of drawings. Then just about that time when I began to go to the Marin School, when I was about twelve years old, I became interested in the Soap Box Derby, which was a race. You made these little racing cars with wheels that coast down hills. And there were rule books. In Los Angeles there was a race, and in San Francisco there was a race. So I entered these races in Los Angeles, and every year I would build one of these cars.

GOODWIN

Where was the race?

ANDREWS

Well, at first it was over on Slauson Avenue, and then it was on Stocker, where Stocker Street goes through the Baldwin Hills from La Cienega Boulevard. South La Cienega goes up a kind of a hill there, and then Stocker goes down to La Brea. The racers were really far from being soap boxes. They were really very, very sophisticated structures in which springing and streamlining and all kinds of very highly developed engineering considerations were actually incorporated into these little cars. And the kids talked about them all year. We compared notes. I also got my two brothers involved in this enterprise, and we would all build these cars. Then my stepfather would get a truck, and he would load our cars on it, and then we would come down and camp out. At that time you could camp out in the Baldwin Hills, but you can't anymore.

GOODWIN

You wouldn't want to.

ANDREWS

You wouldn't want to? And so for three days we would do this racing. And building these cars I learned or taught myself wood carving and sheet-metal work, and how to use a great number of different kinds of tools. The second year I raced, I won third place, and then I won second place, and then finally in the last year that I was in the race, I finally won the Los Angeles Soap Box Derby and I got to go to Akron, Ohio, and race in the international finals there -- which I didn't win, but I was very thrilled by the experience. It taught me something about making things for yourself. There were no textbooks; there was no organized body of material that taught you what the theories were behind how to make one of these little cars go faster than another. And so all that, I had to learn; and all of these kids who talked about these things built up a kind of mystique about them, very much like you would have in other backyard, craft-oriented things like building hot rods or motorcycles or any of those things today where there's a very small but very highly developed sense of craftsmanship among a small group of people. And I also realized that I could learn how to do wood carving and wood finishing and painting and all kinds of things like that as well as anyone could, by finding out what was necessary and learning how to do it. Helping people make art is very much the same kind of thing. It's showing them that they can master certain kinds of crafts and deal with certain kinds of necessities. That's in a way what working sculptors do. A lot of people who want to be artists want to make something, and they don't know how to do it. They know what they want, but they don't know just how to proceed. But an artist has to have the confidence that there's a way of finding out how to do it. Whatever it is, whether it's welding or working with lasers -- it doesn't matter what -- there is a way in which you can find out what you need to know. And there are ways in which you can find out for yourself a lot of things that you're told you have to leave to the experts. Often you're told that the thing you really want to do is something that you can't successfully tackle by yourself. Artists are always doing things like that: learning how to cast resins in ways that industry has said that you can't, or learning how to do bronze casting out of a garbage can in your backyard, or something like that. It's a common story of the ingenuity and inventiveness that artists learn to apply to their own work. So during those years I was doing a lot of drawing, and I was also building these racing cars. So there was a relationship to mechanics and engineering and structure and the craft of building things.

GOODWIN

Did you do anything in the way of organized activity, like the Boy Scouts or school groups?

ANDREWS

No, not very much. You see, even when I went to public school, we lived quite far away from the school, and I walked to school. When I went to this private school, there were no Boy Scouts there. Anyway, I always preferred doing things on my own. However, there was one organized family activity. My family was always building houses. My mother and father were divorced sometime after we came back from Tahiti, and then around 1934, '35, my mother and my stepfather were married, and we moved. From that time on, for the next twenty years, I was always involved in building houses of some kind or another on a very do-it-yourself kind of basis. The first place that we moved to, we made a house by digging a cave out of a cliff that was sort of a chalk cliff.

GOODWIN

Where was that?

ANDREWS

That was above Santa Barbara. We dug this very large room, carving niches in the walls for candles and shelves as we went along, and then we roofed it. It wasn't a cave that was dug like a hole into a mountain; it was roofed over with wood. It was just dug into the side of the hill and left open on the top, and then we roofed it over. We lived in that place for a while, while we built another house out of stone and wood. And then my two brothers, Gavin and Joel, and I -- each of us built a house of our own near that house. So we each had our own house from a very early age. Then during that time that we lived on Arbolado Road in Santa Barbara, my brothers and I got very interested in knighthood and chivalry and King Arthur and all that whole Arthurian legend. So we made a lot of our own armor out of tin cans and boards and anything we could get our hands on. And we painted this all with a very elaborate heraldry, and invented names for ourselves, and invented a whole....

GOODWIN

What was your name?

ANDREWS

I don't remember who I was at that time, but there were swords that were hidden in between rocks. Of course we read a lot of Arthurian legends. We read Malory's Morte D' Arthur. We read [Howard] Pyle's books. And of course our drawings were filled with this kind of activity. But that gave me an interest in heraldry and the romance of knighthood and armor and crests and those kinds of things , which I've had ever since. And it's given me a lot of interest in the way people combine armor and weapons into expressive heraldics.

GOODWIN

What was your stepfather's occupation?

ANDREWS

Well, he did a lot of different things, too. He was a writer, and he wrote some books. What he had that was unique: he had a kind of a genius for acquiring land without having money. And he would find ways of buying land with various kinds of payments that would be arranged in various ways -- I still can't understand -- that would allow him to get the land and at the same time rent it and develop it in such ways that the payments would automatically take care of themselves. But one way or another, he acquired various pieces of land which he proceeded to develop or turn into places to live. And one of these pieces of land, we eventually moved to. He bought some land further up than the place where we lived in the cave, on the last road that runs along the mountains in Santa Barbara, up in the hills along Mountain Drive. First we bought about 100 acres there, which we divided into twenty 1-acre plots, which we then proceeded to sell to friends of ours for fifty dollars down, fifty dollars a month. At that time the building codes were not very strict around there, so that everyone could build his or her own house. So we were sort of involved for, oh, twenty years or more in building this community there composed of friends of ours. If we liked them, we'd sell them a piece of land and help them get started on a house. Actually, probably twenty different households eventually got started and constructed. I built a house, and my two brothers each built houses, and of course we all together built a house for our parents. And pretty soon this community arose in which all the people were pretty independent. They all were the kind of people who would build their own houses and raise their own vegetables and make their own pottery and make their own wine and fix their own cars. That community actually is in its second generation now, and it's still going on.

GOODWIN

The same people? I mean the sons... ?

ANDREWS

Well, people and their children, a lot of the children of the same people are there. Of course, there's some turnover. My mother still lives there, and my brother lived there until fairly recently.

GOODWIN

It sounds like a colony.

ANDREWS

It is, sort of. It's not exactly a commune, but it is a group of people who live together pretty successfully and peaceably with quite a lot of freedom and quite a lot of ability to express themselves and their lifestyles as they wish.

GOODWIN

Getting back to Stanford....

ANDREWS

Yeah, so there I was...

GOODWIN

... studying in physics.

ANDREWS

Yeah. And then, of course, that was just about the time that the war started. First I thought that I would enlist in the ski troops because that seemed very romantic and marvelous -- to be skiing around in the Alps and so forth -- and I was actually accepted in the ski troops. I was doing quite a bit of skiing during the winters then. At that particular moment in the war, the ski troops suddenly had enough people, so I couldn't actually get to go, even though I had been accepted. Actually, it was probably a good thing because the ski troops really had some bad times in the Alps in Italy right after that. But anyway, then I had to be drafted because the time came, and I found myself in the coast artillery. I went to San Francisco for a while, and then we went to Hawaii. So I found myself again, after all these years, back in the Pacific. We stayed in Hawaii for a while, for about six months, and then we went to a very small island in the Western Carolines called Peleliu. It's in the Palau Islands, We stayed there for about a year, and during that time I worked mostly in the joint operations center, where at night I would take care of the wall map, which was the map of all of the islands on which all of the things that were happening within an area of hundreds of miles would be plotted, by radar, by plane observations, by rangefinder. I would take care of this whole map and keep track of where our airplanes were, where the Japanese were, where every- body was. And it was very fascinating, just sitting there and getting all this electronic information coming in. It kind of gave you a feeling like extended senses reaching out into the darkness over this whole network of islands. And of course it was a very familiar landscape to me, again, being water and islands and so forth. I spent quite a lot of time swimming there, and I had a pair of those primitive wooden goggles but no swim fins. I made a little surfboard, and I used to swim very far out in the ocean with it. I almost got swept away in the current a number of times; and if I had, nobody would have known the difference, of course, because I was the only one swimming around out there. It was very beautiful. The Palau Islands have some of the most beautiful waters in the world. They are now a very famous fishing, skin- diving place. And a lot of people go there on vacation. But I swam around there a lot. Then finally the war was over, and I went to Saipan for a while, and then I went to Hawaii for a while.

GOODWIN

Were you ever in any combat?

ANDREWS

Well, there were a few days. We spent a lot of time shooting our guns off at ships and at things that we couldn't see. Our island was invaded by the Japanese at one point, a sort of suicide raid, a couple of boatloads which came right into the camp where we were. So there was some small amount of combat going on. I was involved in that enough to know what it was like, but no one can know what combat is like for days and days on end without experiencing it, as some people in the war did. This event brought me close enough to the people that we were fighting to see them and see them dead, see Japanese soldiers dead in front of you. They were shooting at us, and we were shooting at them. But I don't think that anybody can really know what extended combat is like except people who have been involved in it themselves. But I did have another experience of contact with the people that we were fighting. When I was in Saipan, I was put in charge of a large officers' quarters, where I had to help me a crew of Japanese children whose parents had been on Saipan. I had twelve children that I worked with every day, and that was a very interesting experience, to work with those kids. They had, of course, a completely totally different psychological makeup than children that I was used to. And later when I went to Japan -- I'm very fond of Japan; I'm very fond of Japanese people, as a matter of fact -- it gave me kind of another channel of insight into what the experience of the war had been for these people, because I was there where they were.

GOODWIN

How did you communicate with the kids?

ANDREWS

They knew a few words of English, and I learned a few words in Japanese from them, but a lot of it was, you know, just sign language and things like that. They were very smart, those kids. So then I stayed there for a while, and then finally I got out of the army, and I immediately went back to Stanford, which started what I really think of as my college learning period because before I was not as involved as I was later. Is there anything that we should cover in that earlier part before I move on?

GOODWIN

I think we're doing it well. Was the military a bad experience for you? It sounds like in a way it was intriguing.

ANDREWS

It was in some ways. I didn't like the idea of war, and I got close enough to really see what it was like to see people blown to pieces in front of your eyes. But there were many things about it which were very fascinating: the islands that I saw and the things that I learned. I learned to be a radar operator and be a radio operator.

GOODWIN

You don't sound disgusted, like you had to give away years of your life for no reason.

ANDREWS

No, I don't think that I felt that. I felt that whatever happened to me in my life, I would try to make the most of it, make it as positive an experience as I could. Except for a short time there in Peleliu, I really never had to undergo any extreme hardships. That's the way in every war. There are only a few, a relatively small percentage of people who really are fighting the war and facing the horror of it -- I mean, in wars up to now. And then there are all these other people behind them doing all kinds of jobs, and some of them have a fascinating time and a very profitable time. Some of them are bored, totally. To other people, it's just time going by. And of course there are some people who never had it so good. But I must say I was really glad when the war was over, when I could resume my life, because when I went into the war, I really had very little expectation of surviving. I realized I was going to the Pacific, and the war was really bad there, and it was very likely that I would not survive -- I would get killed or maimed or something like that. And it made me realize a couple of very important things about my life: that I really should listen to myself and not do what everybody told me to do, and that if I wanted to be an artist, I should be an artist. If I was any good at it, I would have as much chance of making my way that way as any other way. And it was really ridiculous to try to find something to do in order to make time enough so that I could do my art, if I was really an artist. Looking back on my life and comparing it with that of other people who were interested in art, I realized that art wasn't just something that I thought it would be a nice thing to do or that it would be a good profession. I realized I really was an artist and that I had been an artist all my life. ever since I had been able to perceive anything. From the time I was at least six years old, I had perceived the world in an artistic way, and my way of dealing with it and transforming the world and making my own statement in it was one that had to do with drawing and with making things. I realized that therefore I should quit fooling around with other things, and I should be an artist. So when I went back to...

GOODWIN

... the "Farm."

ANDREWS

Yeah, back to the "Farm," back to Stanford, I immediately switched my major to art and started studying art. And at that moment a lot of things fell into place which had a lot to do with my future development as an artist. I met, for instance, a number of people right away who had an influence over me that has lasted all of my life.

GOODWIN

Who were those people?

ANDREWS

Well, one was an artist named Jean Varda, who at that time lived in Monterey. I met him through my uncle, my half-uncle, Chester Arthur, the son of my maternal grandmother. After my father, she married the son of President Chester Arthur, and they had a son, Chester Arthur III. So he was my half-uncle -- and a very interesting, fascinating character who was also a writer and also an astrologer. He had a house in the sand dunes near Oceano, near San Luis Obispo. I saw Chester again after the war, and he had a lot of fascinating, intellectual, and artist friends, and one of these men was Varda. Varda lived in Monterey, and Varda was a great friend of Henry Miller and also of a lot of other artists. So I used to see Varda all the time when I went to Stanford, first when he was in Monterey and later when he moved to San Francisco. Varda and I got along very well. He was about thirty years older than I was. We built a sailboat together, and we sailed it in San Francisco Bay. Eventually he got a ferryboat over in Sausalito, and I helped him fix that. So we became lifelong friends. At Varda 's house I met a lot of painters and sculptors and artists and all kinds of people who really opened up the world of art for me.

GOODWIN

What kind of artwork did Varda do?

ANDREWS

Well, he worked with materials, and he made paintings out of them; he made collages, layers of cloth and layers of paper; and he also did some things with mirrors and mosaics, imbedded in a kind of a matrix. They were figurative -- cities , buildings, animals, people, but mostly women in his paintings. Varda talked a lot about art. He was Greek, and he told a lot of stories. Varda had a kind of Greek clarity in his ideas about art which influenced me a lot and also confirmed my choice for myself to be an artist. Then one of my teachers at Stanford who is also still my very close friend was a man named Frederic Spiegelberg, who was a professor of comparative religion and particularly of Hinduism and Buddhism. At that time, in 1946 and '47, to study Hindu mysticism and Zen was not quite as popular a pursuit as it is today.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 4, 1976

GOODWIN

You were describing Professor Spiegelberg.

ANDREWS

Right. So there was Professor Spiegelberg, and he was a fascinating man. One of the best experiences that I had in college was meeting Professor Spiegelberg, and it sort of confirmed one of my feelings about school and education, that one of the most profitable things that come out of it is the people that you meet -- not so much the subjects and grades that you get, but the contact, if you're lucky enough to find a few or maybe even one real person that you really can admire and who fascinates you with the kind of knowledge that that person has. Spiegelberg was such a person for me. He knew a lot about art, and he knew a lot about the art of Asia, and he also had a great appreciation for contemporary art. So I studied everything that Spiegelberg had to teach, which included various aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism and Christian mysticism. Then, when I'd taken all of his courses, I studied with him independently and wrote papers and really became a very good friend of Frederic and his wife, Rosalie. During that time Spiegelberg wrote a book called The Religion of No-Religion, all about kinds of religious practices and beliefs that have to do with transcending and going beyond conventional, nameable, describable ideas of what spiritual experience is. And I illustrated that book for him. He also introduced me to students and people that he knew, and I introduced Fred to my uncle, Chester Arthur. We went down to the sand dunes of Oceano, and we all walked along the beach and discussed mysticism and philosophy.

GOODWIN

Were you a philosophy major at this time?

ANDREWS

No, I was an art major.

GOODWIN

There was an art major at that time?

ANDREWS

I switched to art after I got out of the war. I realized that I should do what I really wanted to do, so I switched to art at that time.

GOODWIN

What kind of art courses did you take?

ANDREWS

Oh, you know, what everybody takes. I took painting and drawing and art history of every kind. My studies with Frederic Spiegelberg and all my studies in comparative religion were sort of a minor, you might say -- you know, kind of on the side. I met one other man there who helped me to get started making sculpture. There was no sculpture at Stanford at that time. I studied drawing with Dan Mendelowitz, who created some really great theories.

GOODWIN

There's his book.

ANDREWS

There's his book, right up there. And painting with Victor Arnautoff and painting with Farmer and all the people who were there at that time. But there was one man who was just actually starting out a program in architecture, named Victor Thompson. At Stanford you had the possibility of independent study, and I took some of Victor Thompson's courses. So I asked him if he would let me do some independent study with him in making some sculpture. I proposed getting some logs and some wood- carving chisels and carving some things, and that I would just start doing this, and every once in a while we would talk about it, very much as the way we work in independent study here at UCLA. But there really wasn't any program at Stanford at that time, so we just sort of invented it and did it that way. And that was some of the first real sculptures that I made. I made a number of wood sculptures during that time.

GOODWIN

Figurative?

ANDREWS

They were sort of abstracted figures. Some were abstract and some were semifigurative -- that's the best I can describe it. And I liked them pretty much, and everybody that looked at them liked them, so I made as many of those as I could. And Victor encouraged me very much. And I guess it wasn't till just after I had -- it was later, when I was out of Stanford, that Spiegelberg introduced me to an old friend of his named Alan Watts. Alan Watts became a very close friend of mine, and I saw a lot of him over all the following years until he died a couple of years ago.

GOODWIN

He was living in San Francisco?

ANDREWS

He had just come out to San Francisco. I guess this was after Spiegelberg left Stanford, became the director of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco [University of the Pacific]. He did that only for a couple of years, and then he wanted to get out of that job, so he brought Alan, whom he had known at Columbia, out to take his place. Alan came to San Francisco and lived in San Francisco for a long time. Alan and I became very good friends. And I went to Japan with him, and eventually my brother married one of his daughters, so we really became very close. We spent a lot of time together talking and meditating and doing all kinds of things. The people who were influential in forming my ideas about life and about art all appeared about that time, in about 1946, '47. Alan Watts, Jean Varda, Frederic Spiegelberg, and all the people around them. So when I got back to Stanford I took a lot of units, and I studied very hard, and I managed to do three years of work in two years so that I got my BA in 1948.

GOODWIN

Where did you live while you were a student?

ANDREWS

Well, at first I lived in the dormitories, where you're supposed to live. I didn't really think that I wanted to join a fraternity. That didn't seem to be the kind of life that was for me. Then another painter who was at Stanford and who was a friend of mine was Brian Wilson, who now lives near San Francisco, and is a well-known painter, and paints birds. He shows at Gump's in San Francisco. And Brian and I were given the top floor of a large old building at Stanford which had been at one time the women's gym. It was an old, original wooden building from the 1890s when Stanford first started, and had been sort of abandoned; and woodpeckers lived there, so it was called Woodpecker Hall. We asked if we could have this building to paint in for our studio, and so we were told that we could have it. We decided that as long as we had the whole upstairs, we might as well live there, too -- which we weren't really supposed to do, of course. So we moved into Woodpecker Hall, and we lived there, and we painted. And the bottom floor of Woodpecker Hall was then taken over for opera rehearsal by the man who was running the Stanford opera workshop, who was Jan Popper, who eventually came to UCLA and for years and years ran the opera department here at UCLA. I used to meet Jan Popper after I became a professor and say, "Do you remember those old days at Stanford when you were rehearsing Peter Grimes and doing those [Gian Carlo] Menotti operas?" One time Jan Popper came upstairs, and he asked us to make some props for some of the things that he was doing, so we made some sculptural props that Popper used in his opera. So there we were in this romantic old Woodpecker Hall making art, and there was opera coming up through the floorboards; so that was a pretty interesting time.

GOODWIN

Did you ever go to the art museums in the city?

ANDREWS

Oh, yes, all the time. That was, of course, a great thing about being at Stanford. And also the people that I was meeting on the outside of Stanford were very much involved in the art scene in San Francisco, so I went there a lot. And I was very much involved in all the things that were going on. Some very interesting things were happening at that time at the California School of Fine Arts, which eventually became the San Francisco Art Institute. Some of the artists who were teaching there then eventually went to New York and became famous as early pioneer abstract expressionists. Clyfford Still was teaching there, and Mark Rothko was teaching then, and Douglas MacAgy was there, and another man named Clay Spohn, who isn't as well known but was very influential among artists then. And a number of other people. So it was a very interesting time in '48, '49, and '50 around the Bay Area. Richard Diebenkorn was beginning his figurative paintings there. And then there was another very interesting thing happening at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The San Francisco Museum of Art was very active.

GOODWIN

A very vital place.

ANDREWS

Grace McCann Morley was there, and there was an "Art in Cinema" series that started in 1948. About once every two weeks, everybody would go to the museum to go to this series, which was showing a lot of early movies that hadn't been seen anywhere else. A lot of European movies: Dali's Un Chien Andalou, Fernand Leger's Ballet Mecanique, the works of Oscar Fischinger. Some of the first works of John and James Whitney were shown there. John Whitney, who is now here today at UCLA on our design staff, was working with his brother James, doing some of the earliest work with optical printing in cinema. And then there were the Stauffacher brothers -- Jack Stauffacher, who is a printer, and his brother Frank, who was one of the organizers of the "Art in Cinema" series. And then there was James Broughton, who was a poet and who was doing cinema, and another film maker named Sidney Peterson. And all those people who were very influential in the development of avant-garde cinema were all there, and they were all talking and all doing work, so it was a fascinating and active group of people to be involved with. And so all during that time, I was really involved with those people as well as just going to school at Stanford. And then I used to, oh, I used to go down and see Varda, who was still in Monterey.

GOODWIN

You must have had a car to get around that much?

ANDREWS

I had a jeep. After I got out of the army, I got an army surplus jeep, and I painted it all sort of different colors and was driving all around in that little jeep. So finally I received my BA, and an uncle of mine said that he would give me some money to stay in school and get a higher degree. And I said that what I really wanted to do was to go to Europe, and would he give me the same amount of money to go to Europe? because I felt it was much more important for me to go to Paris and to meet artists than it was to study some more. And he said yes, he would do that. So I went to Europe for a year and lived in Paris, and went to London, and to Brittany and Ireland; and in the spring, I went to Italy.

GOODWIN

Did you go by yourself?

ANDREWS

Yeah. Some of my friends were already there, so I had some friends who had gone earlier from Stanford, but I went by myself, lived by myself when I was there. So I went to all major museums of Europe, just as everybody else does, and as young students do today. It was 1949, and Europe hadn't really completely recovered from the war by then, and so the cities were dark a lot of the time. Paris wasn't really lit up the way it was in subsequent years.

GOODWIN

It wasn't the City of Lights?

ANDREWS

It wasn't the City of Light at all. It was quite dark. In some places, some parks would be lit up; or for special events, you know, they would light up the Place de la Concorde, and that would be fantastic because you'd never seen it like that. And it was very cold -- it snowed -- and I didn't have much money there, so I lived a kind of minimal existence, but I really saw a lot of things. Varda had a friend in Paris, a painter named Jean Helion, who he told me to go and see. So I went to see Jean Helion. He welcomed me as a protege of his old friend. And Helion had "afternoons." He was one of those artists who set aside an afternoon, and people could come and see him. So Helion had Thursday afternoons. So by going to Jean Helion 's every Thursday afternoon, I'd meet all kinds of people. And so I could find out what was going on, and if I wanted to see someone, I could get an introduction from someone else to go and see whoever I might be interested in seeing. So it was a very good way -- although I was really isolated living by myself, it was a very good way for me to get in contact with people and with ideas.

GOODWIN

Where did you live in Paris?

ANDREWS

Well, I lived actually up near the Etoile on the Right Bank in a little hotel called the Hotel Belmont on the rue de Bassano. I didn't live on the Left Bank among artists, but it's easy to get down there. I also had an aunt and an uncle who lived there that I saw not very much at all, but it was kind of a contact, another avenue into Paris of the old days. As you remember, my parents and my grandparents were people who traveled a lot and came to America at a very early time and who at one time had been quite well-to-do and had sort of lived on a kind of international scale. And by this time my grandmother's sister was a marquise. She was married to the Marquis de Gabriak, so she was a very grand old lady -- not a very old lady, but very grand at that time. She wore jewels and furs, and, oh, once a month I'd have lunch with her or something. It was an interesting contrast between all my friends, who were kind of ragged, and this grand lady who represented the ancien regime and the ideas of the nobility and grandeur of Europe, which was something to, you know, appreciate. And her son, my uncle, was there, too, and he always carried a cane and wore suede spats.

GOODWIN

Who were some of the people you met?

ANDREWS

Well, I met Brancusi. I went to see Brancusi a couple of times, and he showed me through his studio. You see now photographs of that studio with his sculptures. They were all wrapped up in dustcloths under his skylight. Of that whole place, in that time, it is almost like a shrine of modern sculpture now, so special. Not very many people saw it then. It was a very awesome experience -- this old man all dressed in white, you know, with a big white beard, really looking like God, actually, and unveiling these incredibly beautiful polished sculptures one by one for you. It was a great, great privilege. And then I saw Giacometti quite a lot when I was there, went to see him in his studio a number of times, and used to see him out in restaurants and bars in the evening. I talked to him about his work, and he was fascinating. A couple of times I went to see Tristan Tzara, who was one of the early Dadaist artists. Then I went to England, and when I was in England I spent a day with Henry Moore in the country talking to him about his work. I also met Augustus John. In fact, I had a letter of introduction from an old friend of mine to Augustus John, and I met this sort of grand, wild-eyed old man in his favorite bar, Sloane's Bar, and went to dinner with him, and went riding around from one bar to another in London in a taxi, and listened to all of his stories. And he gave me an introduction to Henry Moore. So I went out to see Henry Moore in the country, had tea with him, spent a delightful day with that wonderful man telling me all about his work and showing it to me. But those were, of course, you know, visits. Fascinating as they were, those weren't people that I saw very much of. They weren't friends or anything like that, but it was a real privilege to know them even that small amount. I did a lot of drawings when I was in Paris. I didn't have a studio. I didn't actually make sculpture, but I made a lot of drawings for sculpture and developed a lot of ideas that I worked on after that. Before I went to Europe and just after leaving Stanford, I began to work with concrete. I did a lot of cast concrete and a lot of carved concrete pieces over steel armatures. I did a lot of those, and I made a lot of drawings for pieces like that while I was in Paris. Even at that time, I had this very strong feeling that there was a real sort of shift of emphasis, a real interest and focus of art beginning to develop on the West Coast in California. Of course, in that time, in 1950, that was really just the time when the school of New York or, as it was called later, abstract expressionism, was just beginning to develop in New York. You might say the fifties were a time when New York appeared as a major focus of art in the world. But I felt art was really also at the same time moving to California, and that California would eventually become a very important focus of art; and that actually happened. And I felt very much a part of it, just as I feel now that the focus of art in America is shifting a lot. I mean, it's now everywhere. It's now moving all over the United States. It's never again going to be in any one spot. It's going to be in Texas, and it's going to be in Ohio, and it's going to be in Kansas, and it's going to be lots of different places. At that time, I had this feeling that I had come from California to Europe, the center of the art that all our traditions here in the West are based on, but that really the energy was now shifting westward. So I stayed there about a year. And I went to Brittany, and I saw all the stone monuments there, the alignement , the circles at Carnac. I went out to an island off the coast of Brittany, Belle-ile, and I saw these things; the stone things impressed me very much. And I went to Stonehenge, and I saw that. And I went to Ireland, and there were more of those stone monuments. They seemed very mysterious and strange and prophetic somehow. Of course, today we know a lot more about them than we did in 1950, but still I felt a great affinity sculpturally, the way they were used in the landscape, for those stone monuments.

GOODWIN

Did you go to Italy?

ANDREWS

Yeah. I went to Italy in the spring, and I went to Florence and Rome, and then I moved to Venice. And Peggy Guggenheim was living in Venice, and I went to see her. Jean Helion gave me an introduction to Peggy Guggenheim. And at that time, she was living in her palace there, but she didn't have any of her art there, except she had all her Jackson Pollocks, which weren't held up by customs because the Italian government didn't think that they were really art that anyone should take very seriously. Obviously, twenty Jackson Pollocks couldn't be worth very much. So she had all of her Jackson Pollocks. And she was very gracious and very kind to me, and I went to see her a number of times. She took me on long walks through Venice, explaining to me why she loved Venice so much, and also told me a lot about her life in New York before she came here. I'd never seen a Jackson Pollock before, but she told me why she liked Jackson Pollock and why she thought he was a great painter and why she had the paintings. And she was really very kind to me and took the trouble to explain to me how she felt about all of these things. I'm very grateful to her for that. A number of other times when I was in Venice later, I went back to her palazzo, but I was never able to see her again, which I regret. And I went to....

GOODWIN

The Netherlands?

ANDREWS

No, I didn't go there, no. I went south in Italy, and we went to Paestum, and we went to that beautiful Greek Doric group of temples there. No, I didn't get to Germany; I didn't get to Scandinavia or the Netherlands.

GOODWIN

Were you writing letters to your uncle explaining how beneficial the trip was?

ANDREWS

I wrote him a few dutiful letters, yeah, explaining how much I was learning and how it was helping me to be an artist. And fortunately he accepted that without questioning me and sent me the amount of money that he said he would. And that allowed me to stay there just about a year. So I came back the following summer, 1950. While I was at Stanford, I had studied art, and I had made wood sculpture, but there weren't really facilities at that time in terms of shops, facilities, you know. There were just classrooms. So I went back to UCSB, University of California at Santa Barbara, which was then up on the hill. Now it's, of course, out at Goleta. It had come out of a sort of an industrial arts background and had a lot of shops there. They had a big ceramics studio, and they had welding studios and metalworking places and photography labs and all that. And so I went back there, took all of those kinds of practical courses to get the experience that I needed and to be able to use those facilities. I did a lot of ceramics and learned a lot that I've used ever since. I learned how to weld and some things about metal casting. During this time I met another person who was very influential in my life, and that was a woman in the theater named Iris Tree. Iris Tree came from a great theatrical family. Her father was Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, He directed and staged a lot of plays in England in the early part of the century. Iris was a fascinating lady. She was a poet, and she also wrote plays, I met her in Santa Barbara. She was forming a small theatrical group in Ojai, in the Ojai Valley. She had a ranch above Ojai in what's called the High Valley, and near there an old schoolhouse had been converted into a theater of about 125 seats. She had gathered a few people around her, and she wanted to do some plays. Iris asked me to do some of the sets for the plays. And so, while I was at UCSB, and then later when I was working around as a draftsman -- which was one of the first kinds of jobs I was able to get -- I was also working in the theater with Iris and going over to Ojai. We did a number of plays. One of the first ones we did was Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. It takes place in New England, and there's a fatal sled ride in the play, for which I sculptured a sled and built a hill on the stage. They actually got on the sled and went zooming down the stage. My brother Joel, who's a harpist, did the score and played his harp for this play, which we performed in Ojai; and we later did it in Santa Barbara. We also did Molnar's Liliom, which involved a merry-go-round and light projections I used scrims and all kinds of lighting effects on the stage. We did some Irish plays of [John M.] Synge.

GOODWIN

Did you ever perform?

ANDREWS

Oh, you know, I would walk on in a couple of plays, but I was really the stage designer, and often I would be running the lights during the production. I was building scenery and setting lights and running lights during production and so forth. In Santa Barbara we did a Christmas Miracle Play in which we used one of those sixteenth-century early English Miracle Plays, in which I did all the costumes. We had God, and we had, I think, about ten angels, and we had the Devil, and we had Greed and Lust and Envy and Pride and lots of costumes. I made wings for the angels and all kinds of special effects. One of the actresses in Iris's troop was an actress named Betty Harford, whom, a couple of years later, I married. We had a son named Christopher, who is now twenty-four years old. And so we worked in the theater for several years doing these plays, and then Iris finally moved from Ojai to Santa Barbara, and that sort of brought an end to that particular period. I knew Iris then for many years afterwards, until her death much later, but we didn't work anymore in the theater. But I did works for some other theater groups. I guess it was in 1962 John Houseman was here directing the Theatre Group, and I did the sets for his production of King Lear , which he did here at UCLA and also in the Pilgrimage Theatre. But since that time, I haven't done any stage sets, though I've still been very interested in scenery and that whole idea of make-believe, theatrical things. The theater experience has had a lot of influence on some of the events that I've done where I've used lights and Mylar and various kinds of effects, some of which probably had their inception as sets that incorporated light effects that I did for the theater. At that time while I was making sculpture, I had a series of jobs as a draftsman working for various firms. I learned drafting, and I must say that it always helped me a great deal as a sculptor to be able to make very precise and detailed drawings of my work. Later, when I began doing large commissions, I was able to draw the designs and write up the specifications in such a way that fabricators could construct what I wanted. I worked for an engineering company in San Francisco, and I worked for a county surveyor, and I worked for a geophysical company drawing contours of the earth. For a number of different companies, I worked doing drafting and drawings and basic engineering studies.

GOODWIN

Were those jobs simply a means to an end or did you enjoy them?

ANDREWS

Well, I enjoyed making the drawings. I enjoyed the craftsmanship of the beauty of the drawings I produced, but the jobs themselves were really pretty tedious. They were really a drag, and I really had those jobs because they were the only thing that I knew well enough to get a job doing.

GOODWIN

Why did you stick around Santa Barbara?

ANDREWS

Well, I had built a house there, during also this time when I was first married. Actually, I didn't entirely stick around. I went to San Francisco for a while. Shortly after I was married, we moved to Santa Monica, and we lived in Santa Monica for a year while my wife looked for jobs in her acting profession. But then we had this house in Santa Barbara, and it was in a much more beautiful place than anything I could possibly afford in Los Angeles. This was up in the Mountain Drive area that I have described, which is on a hillside overlooking the ocean. So the answer to "Why did I stay in Santa Barbara?" is that I didn't.

GOODWIN

You liked it.

ANDREWS

I liked it. But I realized that I didn't really want to go on being a draftsman for the rest of my life, and that once I had a little bit of success with my art, maybe I could get a teaching job somewhere. And so I didn't stay in Santa Barbara; I came to Los Angeles, and here I still am.

GOODWIN

But did you consider, say, going to New York?

ANDREWS

Yeah, I did. I decided that I didn't like working such long hours. The first drafting job I had was a fifty-hour-a-week job. I worked from seven in the morning until six at night, and that was really a drag. And then after that, when I would get home, I would be making sculpture for the rest of the night. I was working very hard, but if I didn't make the sculpture, I realized that I would just be stuck being a draftsman forever, and that art was really the only way out of that. There I was married, with a family to support, doing drafting all day long, but fortunately I had a lot of energy, and I still do But then I was in my twenties, so I had even more energy; so I worked all night on my sculpture and worked all day for the drafting company. Finally I was able to place some work with some dealers. At that time the Los Angeles County Museum had these "Annuals," which I guess started in about 1953. In 1950, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art gave me a show. It was the first show I ever had. They had a very farsighted director named Donald Bear there. His wife is still in Santa Barbara and up until last year had a gallery at her house, the Esther Bear Gallery, where I showed.

GOODWIN

And she represented you for a time? She was your dealer for a time?

ANDREWS

My Santa Barbara dealer, yes, she was. She sold some works of mine. Every year she would have a sculpture show, and I would have pieces in that. So that went on up until just last year. But Donald Bear died sometime in the fifties. But in 1950, he gave me a show of my concrete and wood and wire pieces. And I remember at that show, in October of 1950, June Wayne came to that show, sort of took me aside and talked to me about my work. I've known June Wayne since then. You're probably interviewing her, of course.

GOODWIN

She's been done.

ANDREWS

I think one of the interesting things about this is going to be the cross-reference between what people say about other people who are being interviewed. Well, anyway, this was the first show that I ever had. Then my first dealer that I ever had was our friend that we were just talking about, Paul Kantor. That was in -- let's see, that was about 1954.

GOODWIN

How did that arrangement come about?

ANDREWS

That came about because my friend Lee Mullican, who teaches here at UCLA, was with the Paul Kantor Gallery. And Ynez Johnston, Jules Engel, a number of other Los Angeles artists were in the gallery, which at that time was on Beverly Boulevard. And so Lee said, "Why don't you show at Paul Kantor 's gallery? I'm showing there." And so I showed some of my work to Paul, and Paul liked it. I showed there for several years, two or three years, until a New York dealer, Charles Alan, became interested in my work. And somehow Charles Alan and Paul Kantor just couldn't see how to divide me up between them, so I had to leave Paul, and I went to Frank Perls 's gallery. That's sort of getting ahead of everything.

GOODWIN

Right.

ANDREWS

I showed at Paul's in 1954. In 1953, I showed in the first Los Angeles County Museum Annual, and in '57, I won a prize in that annual. And in '57, I was picked out by Art in America magazine as one of their "New Talent" people. A lot of young artists have started out doing that.

GOODWIN

That's recognition. Your recognition was gaining.

ANDREWS

Yeah, very slowly, but those few things happened. I had built up a body of sculpture; I had a dealer; I had won a prize by 1957 in the Los Angeles County Museum. And so I thought that by that time I was really ready to look for a teaching job -- although, see, I only had a BA from Stanford. I didn't have an MA or an MFA, but at that time those degrees in looking for jobs were not as important as an exhibition record. Now the situation is much more competitive. I heard there was a job open at UCLA, and I sent my material here. I also applied for a job that I heard about at the State University of New York in New Paltz, which had just started a new art department, just outside of New York City. I thought New York was also a place I might go -- although I must say, all this time I really still had the feeling that I had gotten earlier in Paris that California was really a place that somehow I was intimately associated with, and that even if I went to New York, somehow I would still be a California artist and my ideas were still tied into the aura of California. So I applied for both of these jobs. As a matter of fact, I got $400 for winning the Los Angeles County Museum prize, and I used that $400 to go to New York to go to an interview at New Paltz.

GOODWIN

They wouldn't pay your way?

ANDREWS

No, they wouldn't. However, I did get the job. They phoned me and said, "Okay, you've got the job." And within a day or two, I also got a letter from UCLA saying that I had gotten this job, too. So I had two jobs, and I had to make a decision of which one to take and whether to go to New York or whether to stay in Los Angeles. Finally I decided to stay in Los Angeles, but it took a lot of thought because at that time there was a lot of allure to New York. Obviously that was a crucial decision in my life, and it had a lot of influence on what I did here, and also on this feeling of commitment to the West Coast as the place where I felt that I belonged.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 9, 1976

GOODWIN

Tonight we're going to discuss Oliver's work as a teacher and educator. You came to UCLA in 1957?

ANDREWS

That's right.

GOODWIN

So you've been here nearly twenty years.

ANDREWS

Yeah, this is my twentieth year. Since you get a sabbatical every seventh year -- I get a sabbatical next year -- that will be my twenty-first year at UCLA.

GOODWIN

What were your initial duties when you joined the faculty?

ANDREWS

When I first came here, we all taught more classes than we do now. We were then on a semester system, and the sculpture department had never been very large. For instance, painting at UCLA was always really quite extensively taught. There were always at least five or six teachers, and some of the teachers had already been here a long time when I came twenty years ago. I think Bernard Rosenthal taught for a short time, and then Bob Cremean taught sculpture a couple of years before, or I guess just the year before I came, '56. But he just came in for a year. And no one had really developed the sculpture department. It was a big room and a little room and hardly any equipment at all.

GOODWIN

Which building was this?

ANDREWS

That was in the building which is now the School of Architecture, directly across from the music building [Schoenberg Hall] , And it was a fairly good building for art. It was a low, rambling building. There were two floors and a basement, which in many ways made it a better place to teach art than this tower that we're in now. It's very difficult for the painters to go up and down in the elevators with their paintings. When we built this building, which we moved into in '64- '65, I had spent at least five years helping to design the building to be the way I wanted -- the sculpture part of it, anyway. I was able to at least convince the architects that sculpture should be on the ground floor. I said that everything sculptors made was heavy, and that we had to be on the ground floor. But in getting back to the old building, it was in the basement, and I was the only sculpture teacher. At first I taught beginning drawing and beginning sculpture, then two classes of advanced sculpture -- that's four classes. So I taught in that building for a couple of years, and then it was announced in about 1960 that we would begin working on a new art building. Everyone was very encouraged about that. We were all invited to submit our best ideas for the new art building. Everybody had wonderful ideas of the kinds of facilities they would like to have, mainly having to do with the relationship between various areas of the school -- that is to say, design and art history and print making and photography and painting, all spread out in one or two stories, and all having some kind of central area where people could meet and discuss the similarities and differences of all these disciplines. It was really sort of an idealistic interdisciplinary concept, with rooms designed with skylights and with overhead rails to move things around. The first blow to this idea came when we realized that there would only be a very small patch of land for the art department to be built upon; therefore, it had to go straight up in the air for eight stories plus a rooftop. But at least ceramics, design, and sculpture were on the ground floor. Having had some experience with designing facilities of various kinds, and of course having worked as a draftsman when I was younger, I was able to talk to the architects. There was a five-year fight then, in which I tried to get the kind of sculpture studio that I knew would work.

GOODWIN

What was their opposition?

ANDREWS

Well, one of the oppositions was that the architects wanted to do everything the easiest way. What they wanted to do was simply to build a building with a lot of rooms in it with no differentiation between the rooms, and put on a fancy-looking sun screen on the front of it so it would be architecturally interesting-looking from a distance. Very little attention was given to what actually took place in those rooms: the way traffic moved in the building, the way space was utilized. The painting department had white -- like in this office -- white asphalt tiles on the floor, which were ruined in no time at all. Asphalt tile melts when you spill turpentine on it, of course. Anyway, some of the ceilings were not very high to begin with, and then all of the fluorescent lights were hung three and four feet below the ceiling. So it was a very unsatisfactory building from everyone's point of view. Everyone was disgusted with it. Some modifications were made, but all this time I kept working to try to make the sculpture department into a workable space. I succeeded pretty well because I was the only person who was in charge of a whole area. I could be in continual contact with the architects, and I could read the plans and tell when what I had changed was changed back again into what somebody else wanted. Then I could change it back into what I wanted. I had to persuade people, for instance, as to why the sculpture work floor should be level. Any outdoor area, architects want to slope so that the water will run off. And I had to persuade them that, in fact, this was where you would be setting pieces of sculpture, and it was much more important to have it level and just maybe sweep the puddles out every once in a while. Well, I won't go into all the details of things that go wrong in building any large building, but by staying constantly with it, I was able to design a kind of space where the different functions that went on were related to each other, and where the disposition of the tools was in such a way that they actually could be used by people doing work with them, as well as just being bolted to the floor somewhere. There was a bridge crane that rolled in through a folding door, and there was a foundry where the furnace and the sandpit had to be sunk into the foundations of the building. So obviously all that is the kind of thing that you can only do when you get into the design stage of a building in the very beginning before anything is built. Then you start actually, in the case of the furnace pit, with the fact that a hole has to be dug in the ground and filled with concrete. And the right kinds of air supply and water supply and gas supply and different kinds of electricity have to run efficiently to the different pieces of equipment. All were taken out and put back in again several times. And I was able to get twelve-foot doors, and so forth and so on. One fortunate thing about designing the building and equipping it was that it was at a time when the University of California had the budget to purchase the equipment which was necessary to really establish the department on a solid basis. Today, ten years later, every day we still are profiting from the fact that we got the right equipment when we built the building and we put it in the right place.

GOODWIN

So you are pleased with the results?

ANDREWS

Yeah, yeah. It was fascinating to me to go through that whole process and to look forward to having a sculpture studio in which I could work that I had really designed myself. Not many art teachers have that opportunity to design from scratch the place where they're going to work and to work in it, to use it in that way.

GOODWIN

It sounds like the art department is fairly highly structured in that you're a part of the sculpture department and there are various other departments. Has that always been the case, where you had very specific responsibilities? For instance, would you ever teach a painting course even though you're a sculptor?

ANDREWS

Well, I could, I think, if I wanted to. As I say, I taught drawing when I first came here. We have a couple of courses that have a kind of ambiguous title to them. One is called "New Forms and Concepts."

GOODWIN

That's ambiguous.

ANDREWS

It can mean about anything that you want it to mean. And as a matter of fact, we have -- on the so-called painting faculty, we have two sculptors. One is a former student of mine, Barbara Hunger, and the other is Laddie Dill, who is an artist who works in -- oh, he had worked in neon; now he works in concrete. Both of those are pretty different from painting, but he teaches one course in drawing and one course in painting. He's a good teacher, and the staff liked his work, and there is some recognition there that an artist is an artist and doesn't have to be pigeonholed to teach only the kind of work that he does himself.

GOODWIN

When you came to UCLA, were you entrusted with the responsibility of building the sculpture department?

ANDREWS

Well, pretty much. It wasn't that I was entrusted; it was there was no one else to do it. But by that time I had been here for six, almost seven, years. I really was pretty committed to being the UCLA sculptor and to designing the studio. Actually, the problem was that the building was being designed for us. I was determined to try to shape the design as much as I could and not just let it happen to us -- as many of the other parts of the building just happened because the architect designed it that way, and nobody said otherwise, so that's the way it got built. It wasn't until people moved in that they found out that it was an awkward place to work.

GOODWIN

How do the courses you teach now compare to the ones you taught originally?

ANDREWS

Well, now I teach an upper-division advanced sculpture course two days a week. I also have six or seven graduate students that I work with on an independent basis. And then I have a lower-division course which is taught by one or two of my teaching assistants. Teaching assistants are graduate students who have demonstrated their competence and who are chosen to help out and to teach lower-division courses. Usually we have a couple who are more experienced, have been here a year, and a couple who are less experienced, who the following year will have more responsibility. Sometimes one teaches and one helps, and we've also done some things with team teaching. These teaching assistants are my own students, and I have usually worked with them for several years. Sometimes they come in from outside, but usually I've worked with them for a couple of years. I find they do a terrific job in that lower-division course because they really relate to the younger students, and it's great experience for them. I take a more or less active role depending on how they're doing and how much responsibility they can take.

GOODWIN

How would you describe the purposes of the art department in terms of its majors? What do you try to do for students?

ANDREWS

What do we try to do for these people? Well, in our undergraduate program, I think that we're trying to turn out educated people who have some kind of rudimentary knowledge of what art is all about and what's happening in the world of art today; and what the options for them as people are in either going further into art, becoming graduate students, or doing something else; but still having a pretty intelligent understanding of what the issues in art are. I think that as a university, we are committed to giving students a broad educational background. They should know to write and express themselves, know something about history.

GOODWIN

Is it possible to characterize who the typical undergraduate art major is?

ANDREWS

No, because they come from all different kinds of backgrounds. When they become graduates, I think you prepare them to be artists.

GOODWIN

What does that mean?

ANDREWS

Well, it means that you give them some practice in working independently and facing what it is to create a body of work, a body of original work, and know something about that work. And also to work under the kinds of criticism and kinds of stress that are somewhat analogous to what they would face if they were living as artists outside of the school. Now, some of them will undoubtedly become teachers, and of course teaching them to teach is part of the process of getting their degree. But the primary effort is simply in getting into their own work in the deepest, most committed way possible. But of course the number of students who become graduates is only a small proportion of the number of students who are in undergraduate study. In that way it's different from some other disciplines where you expect that many of the people who take the lower-division courses will go on to take the upper-division courses. Here, artists are the few out of the many.

GOODWIN

What do you look for in a potential graduate student?

ANDREWS

You look for people who are artists. You look for people who have a kind of intensity, a kind of commitment, and who are gifted, whose lives are based on a visual orientation to the world and who think creatively. Of course, some of them become painters or sculptors in a very traditional sense and others in a very untraditional kind of sense -- which is all right, too. But the better the students are, the easier it is to recognize them. I mean, you know who the good students are because they're just there and you recognize them. They're one of us, we artists think. It's a funny thing that students over the years in school do change quite a lot. People talk about what students are like in the seventies compared to what they were like in the sixties. In the seventies, supposedly, they're more security-oriented; they're less willing to go out on a limb; they're less politically oriented. In the sixties, there were a lot more protests, and in some ways I must say that I liked that. I found the students of 1968 really much more energetic and vital than I find the students now.

GOODWIN

What about the students of the fifties and early sixties?

ANDREWS

Well, there was a kind of an awakening then, too. Of course, they seemed a much more privileged group of people. They seemed very highly motivated. Also, the students of the late fifties and early sixties were much more concerned with each other's welfare. They were much more honest than the students now. Students now steal from each other right and left. They trample all over each other's work. They have very little regard for each other's welfare. They don't take care of each other; they don't have any respect for the needs of the people that they work with. As a gross generalization, which we're doing, they really seem much more selfish. And of course they're much worse educated. They're much less articulate than the earlier students. They have a very difficult time expressing themselves. And this must give rise also to a difficulty in communication. The students, say, in the early sixties were really extremely articulate, extremely education-oriented. In other words, they felt that knowledge was power, that enlightenment was freedom. They had these goals, and they were very dedicated to working hard to achieve these goals. They also had a kind of respect for one another, so there was very little theft and vandalism and destruction going on then compared to now. And all these are just generalizations of the way the mass of students sort of seem. The interesting thing that I was starting to say is that among this changing tide of students which flows in and out of the doors, there are the gifted ones that are the ones who will become artists, who seem always pretty much the same. They come from everywhere. I don't know why they keep coming, but they do. They're always those few students who are exceptions to the characterizations we were just making. And of course when you talk about the students going through UCLA as being a sort of a herd of students, that's really far from the truth because already they are a very select group of people. But anyway, those few exceptional students are a delight to work with. They're bright and intelligent and inventive and all those...

GOODWIN

All those good things.

ANDREWS

... good things. And they are, and they're all very different from each other, but they all seem to be able somehow to separate themselves from fanaticism and turmoil while the student body as a whole is being pushed around one way or another by tides of opinion and politics and mass feelings of all kinds. These students seem to have some kind of center in themselves which enables them to seek art as a way of self-expression. You don't really teach those students; you give them what they need to mature. You try to find out what they need. Some of them who have doubts about being artists, you can help them. And some, if they come from backgrounds where it is not acceptable or feasible to be an artist -- they think -- sometimes you can enlighten those students by saying, "Look, you've really got it. You can be an artist." They say, "Really?" And so that's, of course, a great responsibility, but it's a great delight to see a student wake up and realize what his or her real, true avocation in life is.

GOODWIN

Do you have to go to graduate school in this society to be an artist?

ANDREWS

No, you don't, but that's the route in the university here. Of course you don't have to go to graduate school. Lots of artists didn't go to graduate school. I don't have an MA or an MFA myself. I went to graduate school for a while, but I don't have a degree. But today, that's really pretty much the standard way to do it. There are very few art schools left compared to twenty years ago, so going to a university is the way that students go towards art. And it certainly is true that to be an artist it's no longer enough just to be skillful, to be able to do a lot of fancy brushwork and know how to run tools. Today you really have to know, you have to know what the hell is going on.

GOODWIN

But do today's artists even have the craftsmanlike skills? Is that a necessity?

ANDREWS

It depends entirely on what you want to do. Some artists revel in their own manual skill. They like to do the work themselves. Other artists find that they can get somebody else to do that work.

GOODWIN

But you don't have to pass a drawing test to be admitted to the graduate program here?

ANDREWS

No, but this particular department is very heavily drawing-oriented. All of our students, by the time they get out of here -- I mean, some of them resist it pretty successfully, but they all know something about how to draw.

GOODWIN

What do you have to do to graduate in a master's-level program?

ANDREWS

To achieve a degree?

GOODWIN

Right.

ANDREWS

Well, okay. First you have to get your BA, which is a matter of getting good enough grades in all the courses and taking all the courses you're supposed to take. Then to get into the UCLA graduate program, you have to show your work. You have to have a BA from somewhere with good enough grades, but the real criterion is showing your work. We have a review once a year in which, oh, 160, 170, 180 people apply, and sometimes those people are applying for a total of, say, ten or twelve positions. So this is a choice of one in ten, one in twelve, something like that. The best students are chosen, and then they come in and work here, usually about two years to get an MA and about three years to get an MFA. And again, there's a certain number of units that you have to take. But mainly it depends on the development of the work. And the student chooses three faculty committee members for the MA, four for the MFA, and perhaps a few other teachers to work with, so that the student, in the final phases of developing, isn't at the mercy of the whole staff. Because as the student becomes more individual, he or she shouldn't have to please everybody.

GOODWIN

It's hard enough just pleasing a few.

ANDREWS

That does happen, you know. Some of the staff don't approve of all the students that we have. I don't like the work of some of them that get degrees, and some of my colleagues don't see much merit in the students that I like. But I think that's quite as it should be. If we all loved all of our students, we'd be grinding out sausages. Ultimately, when the student's committee thinks that the work is ready, the student has a show, an exhibition. Then all the work is put up, and the committee gets together, and the student comes in, and we have sort of an informal oral. We ask the student a lot of questions -- make them very nervous.

GOODWIN

Is the exam more or less a formality?

ANDREWS

Well, by that time, yes. Well, it's a formality in the sense that the committee wouldn't let the student mount the exhibition unless the committee was pretty sure that the degree was going to be granted. But it's also a way of saying, "All right, here we are at last, and here is all this work, and here are you about to get out of here and go into the world, and so what do we all think about all this? What do you think about your work? How did it get to look this way?" and "What artist do you like?" and "What do you read?" and "What do you see?" and "Where does it go from here?" Questions like that.

GOODWIN

Well, why is UCLA producing artists? What are they supposed to go out and do?

ANDREWS

They're supposed to go out and do art. Of course, a lot of them want to support themselves by having teaching jobs. When I got out of college, I had to work as a draftsman for several years until I finally got the job at UCLA. But when I got a job twenty years ago, it was a lot easier than it is for the students getting out of UCLA now. So some students have to work at other jobs. It used to be that if you had an MFA from UCLA, that was a pretty good degree. Degrees vary in their worth depending on their institutions. By "worth," in this context, I mean simply how effective they are in getting you the job you want.

GOODWIN

There's a hierarchy of prestige?

ANDREWS

Yeah. If you have an MFA from UCLA, that's pretty effective as a job-searching tool. But of course now there aren't enough jobs to go around, especially in California, so students have a hard time finding jobs, and they have to do all kinds of things to make some money, until they reach another stage of the career of the developing artist, and that is after that student has had a certain number of exhibitions. Some students start showing even while they are in UCLA, you know. They sometimes say, "What? You say I'm not ready for my degree yet, and here I've just had a show in New York and another in Los Angeles, and everybody buys my work, and it's still not good enough for you?" and so forth and so on. But anyway, there is this next stage where students, by this time young artists, become well enough known so that they have some exhibitions to their credit, and then they're in a slightly more advantageous position than those people who are just coming out of school.

GOODWIN

You mean in order to qualify for a teaching job?

ANDREWS

To qualify for a teaching job. Of course, some of our graduates aren't interested in teaching at all. They have independent means, or they are able to find some other kinds of jobs, so they aren't faced with that problem.

GOODWIN

What percentage of the graduates do you think remain artists?

ANDREWS

[pauses] That's hard to say. I haven't counted them all up. I would just guess around 40 percent, something like that, of all of the graduates that come out of here. Of my graduates, the people on whose MA or MFA committees I have been, about 60 percent have become artists. About 60 percent of all my graduate students from the last twenty years are artists today. They show, and they make work of greater and lesser significance. But it's very interesting to me now in that I have been teaching long enough so that I have quite a number of students who are teachers.

GOODWIN

We're going to talk about those graduates individually in a moment, but there's still a point I don't quite understand.

ANDREWS

I just want to say, though, that some of those graduates are now teachers, so that I'm sort of a...

GOODWIN

Grandfather?

ANDREWS

... grandfather to them.

GOODWIN

Right. Aside from the enjoyment or challenge that an artist brings to his own work, what are all these artists to do? What does society expect of them, if anything? We don't have churches or palaces to decorate, and we don't have wars to glorify, and we may not even have very many homes to beautify. What are all these people going to do?

ANDREWS

Well, they all do different things, you see. That's what artists used to do: they used to make things to put in palaces and for homes and so forth. Now there's an incredible range of different kinds of things that artists can do. Although we don't have palaces, we have banks, and we have corporate headquarters, and all of those places gobble up a lot of art, and they're still being built. And we have highways and parks that still provide places for art. Of course, there still is a market in art that sells to collectors. There are all those galleries on La Cienega Boulevard and in New York, and they sell to collectors. But artists do other kinds of things, too. Some artists are engaged in activities that relate to ecology in one way or another, that relate to the landscape, that relate to getting people together to perform certain kinds of actions which have something to do with art. So there are a lot of things to do, and artists are constantly thinking up new ways of practicing their art. Not all the ways that artists make art are remunerative, in the sense of providing a living for the artist; but there are things to do that satisfy certain human needs, or that redefine priorities, redefine what art is, or even occasionally outrage people, although that's kind of hard to do these days.

GOODWIN

Well, it seems that a strong case could be made for the idea that this society doesn't want artists, that artists are threatening.

ANDREWS

They're not threatening enough. Society does want artists. Society is always building art centers, and we have a National Endowment for the Arts and all kinds of grants and fellowships for the artists. We want culture.

GOODWIN

Right. But isn't that the frosting on the cake? I mean, what does the average workingman want with art?

ANDREWS

The average workingman doesn't really come in contact with art very much, so he doesn't really want the individual one-to-one experience with art. But he wants to be cultured, so he wants to have art around, and he wants to have art on buildings and sort of have the general comfortable feeling of being a cultured person in a cultured society. But the actual, raw contact with art of persons who love art is not very much a mass phenomenon at all.

GOODWIN

It's really elite -- not necessarily qualitatively, but involving a very, very small number of people.

ANDREWS

But there are a lot of things like that that are valuable to society. In one way, that's what a university is about, as opposed to a trade school or a business school. A university is a place which pursues knowledge for its own sake and is full of people studying all kinds of weird and strange things about the ancient past or hidden in the interstices of nature. One of the problems that the university has in surviving is to explain to the people who support the university what good this all is. If you really take the trouble to look at it very deeply and to explain it all, then you see that in effect the knowledge that filters out of all that kind of intense search is what really allows civilization to make its progress. And that exploration in space and in medicine and all kinds of fields depends on what develops out of pure research. But if you ask some scholar who's digging into a Talmudic manuscript, or somebody who's translating an ancient language or looking through a microscope, what good it is that they're doing at that moment, it's hard to define the goals in a short-term way.

GOODWIN

Right. I really can't think of a more difficult profession than being an artist in today's society.

ANDREWS

Well, I suppose it is.

GOODWIN

I mean, what's going to be tougher?

ANDREWS

But many people pursue what they do in an artistic way. One of the valuable things that art is doing is that it's showing that art -- more than a bunch of products, say, a bunch of paintings hanging somewhere, or a bunch of sculptures that you can set on a pedestal -- art is a kind of attitude which can be applied to many kinds of endeavors. This point of view is that you do what you do because the thing that you're doing has ultimate worth, so you do it as intensely as you possibly can. So you're not doing it because you're making a certain wage or a certain salary or because somebody can use it to make a better cosmetic out of or for any utilitarian purpose, but you're doing it purely because it's fascinating.

GOODWIN

It's satisfying.

ANDREWS

Yes, and all kinds of things can be done that way. When they're done that way, they have what we call "style." So there are many scientists whose approach to their work, as you know, has the kind of creative, intuitive element that we associate with art. But you can do business that way, too, or anything that way. By opening up the boundaries of art, it's helping a lot of people to realize that there's value in doing things with style. And if we lose that value, everything our civilization is based on is going to be in bad trouble.

GOODWIN

I agree. If you try and evaluate the UCLA program according to the very high ideals which you mentioned, as far as artists having some impact on society, don't you use very difficult criteria? I mean, in order for UCLA to produce one artist who will be a brilliant artist, doesn't it also have to produce several others who will not attain such an achievement?

ANDREWS

Yes. But that doesn't mean that you wasted your time on the people that didn't become brilliant artists, because that education, that contact with art, has value for them, too. So you can't measure it only by how many great artists you turn out, just as the science department can't measure its ultimate worth by how many Nobel prizes their graduates win.

GOODWIN

But isn't there a big difference between the successful scientist and the successful artist, in the sense that the successful scientist always has a kind of utilitarian function to serve, whereas for the artist the standard of excellence is so much higher?

ANDREWS

Higher than what?

GOODWIN

Than performing adequately or satisfactorily.

ANDREWS

That's the same thing as in science. For all the great nuclear physicists, there are a lot of other people doing research here and there.

GOODWIN

Right.

ANDREWS

But ultimate science is really a philosophical matter, anyway. The whole idea of nuclear physics and the ultimate question of what energy really is, is a metaphysical one. So ultimately people who are working on the forefront of science are working with many of the same concepts that artists are.

GOODWIN

Are your students competing with the great artists of the past? Are they trying to make some new contribution or display a greater technical ability?

ANDREWS

Not a greater technical ability. I mean, who would try to outdo Michelangelo in marble carving? Actually, technical ability and manual dexterity and all those things are things that we don't revel in anymore, really. They are more things of the past, although there are very good, competent draftsmen and artists who do extremely elegant, competent work. But the ideas and the concepts, what things mean, as I said before, is really more of a question in art today. But of course we're conscious of the past. I think the more you know about the past, the more it frees you to go into the future. But I don't think that's where the competition is. That competition has already faded into the past. If you can at least get a sense of comradeship with, really feeling an identification with, some of the figures of the past, then it helps to assuage the loneliness that a lot of artists feel. Because artists live in maybe a further-out sense of awareness than most other people. It's a lonely place to be. Sometimes your greatest feeling of kinship and comradeship comes when you recognize something in an artist of the past that really strikes a spark in your own feelings, and you say, "Oh, yes, now I understand what Monet was feeling when he tried to paint those water lilies." There are those sparks that go back across the centuries to past artists, even to artists of the immediate past. So I think that's all positive. Of course, artists who are trying to make a living by showing their art are all in competition with each other in the sense that there are only so many galleries and so many good galleries and so many collectors, and it's more "in" to be in one gallery than another and so forth.

GOODWIN

Right.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 9, 1976

GOODWIN

Do you think this is a healthy time for the visual arts?

ANDREWS

Well, in some ways it is, and in some ways it isn't. There are advantages in that there's a very widespread recognition of visual artists by all elements of the community. As I said, we now have the National Endowment for the Arts, which gives money to artists and gives money to performers and helps finance public sculptures, combining grants with communities so that they can purchase sculptures. Communities themselves all seem very interested in having some art around. There are plans to make a certain proportion of the expenses of buildings allocatable to art. So there's a lot of sponsorship for art. There are a lot of people taking art courses, and you have adult art courses in University Extension, and many people buying art books. The more successful artists are heroes in a way and set intriguing lifestyles which everybody watches with great interest and often envy. And so we have superstar artists, you know. And certainly the prices of art -- although what society is willing to pay for art may not be the indication of its real value, prices of art are way up. And there have been a number of lawsuits lately which have helped to establish the value of works of art as some of the kinds of objects in our society which have the most permanent and enduring monetary value. So from all those points of view, you know, art is just doing fine and dandy.

GOODWIN

What's the other side of the coin? [laughter]

ANDREWS

Well, as far as what kind of a place it is for artists to work in, and whether artists are really doing significant artwork, this is much more difficult to assess. It's very difficult to assess the art of your own time. But right now, in this period of the seventies, art seems to be somewhat in the doldrums. In the last seventy years we have had great, exciting movements. After abstract expressionism, we've had recently a series of smaller- scale art movements: op art and pop art and minimal art and conceptual art. Now art seems to be fragmenting, which in a way is good because it means that no one has to be any one kind of artist. All kinds of art are appreciated: figurative art and nonfigurative art. There's almost unlimited opportunity in the different ways that an artist can channel his endeavors. But that's also confusing. And I think that people who are studying in the field, my students now who are studying art here at school, for instance, have a difficult time ahead of them just deciding where they fit into this whole unprecedented scene. And you see things happening all around you, and artists being successful, and artists doing all kinds of things, all kinds of activities, but for a person doing art, what is the meaningful way for them to make a commitment in which they can really feel fulfilled? That's very difficult. And it's also hard to say what kinds of criteria, what means of evaluation there are for telling what art is good or isn't good. And also there is no great mission in our time. In a lot of periods of the recent past -- in the time of the impressionists, who wanted to paint out-of-doors and to use natural light and so on, or in the period of the cubists -- there have been great missions. There has been an avant-garde; there's been something to get behind that would really, if successful, change people's eyes, turn their eyes around, turn their heads around, wake them up. There doesn't seem to be that necessity or possibility right now.

GOODWIN

Do you feel that there's no longer a language in which artists can adequately express themselves?

ANDREWS

There are many languages.

GOODWIN

What are they?

ANDREWS

There are lots of languages. That's one of the problems. Yes, there are languages artists can speak and that artists can use as ways of communicating.

GOODWIN

Do they speak to people other than artists?

ANDREWS

Well, some of them do, and some of them don't. There are some very esoteric languages and some metalanguages that artists use where they can communicate with their colleagues or with their clients or with what you call "the Art World" -- whatever that is -- that sort of international coterie of critics and museum directors and dealers and so forth who buzz around the world deciding what's hot stuff. There are those. There are many, many artists who are not a part of that group at all who are also doing very interesting art all over the world, and who are doing art which has meaning for them, and maybe for the people of their community. But maybe that community may not be a geographical community; that community may be a community which keeps in touch by the mail or by some other means. I suppose that will even spread out. You may have artists' networks who all communicate by CB radio, for all I know, which is not far from being possible. There are a lot of art worlds that are not the same world as the art world of art magazines. And so all those worlds interpenetrate.

GOODWIN

Does an artist in today's society, in order to achieve recognition and success -- however that's defined -- have to say something original?

ANDREWS

You mean make an original statement? Well, there has to be some freshness and creativity, if you want to call that originality. Yes, in a way that's what art is about.

GOODWIN

Does he have to be an innovator?

ANDREWS

Yes, I think so. Look at the artists who are successful. They are innovators in some way. Often that innovation is based on the past, but if you just go on doing the same things that have been done up to now, that's not very interesting.

GOODWIN

So aren't we faced with the problem that there's no role left for the artist who isn't a philosopher, who's just a good craftsman? There's nothing left for him?

ANDREWS

Oh, there's plenty of roles for good craftsmen, you know. They can do good crafts.

GOODWIN

Like what?

ANDREWS

Well....

GOODWIN

I mean painters, sculptors, printmakers.

ANDREWS

They can paint nice pictures that aren't very meaningful or very original.

GOODWIN

Right. Nobody admires them.

ANDREWS

Well, then that becomes a hobby or a kind of therapy. Thousands and thousands of people dabble around in art, and that's all right. They feel good. And there are other people who do all kinds of things that sort of relate to art but maybe aren't what you call "high art." I mean there are all kinds of people, all kinds of putterers and craftspeople. There are a lot of craftsmen who don't do the traditional kinds of crafts. What we call crafts is what we, you know, teach here at UCLA: pottery and weaving and all of those things. And of course those materials are art materials in themselves, and there are those craftsmen who transcend the boundaries of their craft. While they may be making ceramics, they may be making pottery, they can excel to such an extent that those pots become expressive vehicles of art as in painting. There are people who are doing weaving who are much more artists than people who happen to be painting pictures. But there are also all kinds of things, just comfortable nice things, that people can do that at least are handmade. And then there are people who are doing things other than that, that are also art. I mean, there are people painting cars that are producing an art form in itself. And there are people just making all kinds of things that you never see in galleries, but they have an element of handmade excellence to them.

GOODWIN

I'm thinking, though, that we don't have any kind of middle ground. We have the great innovator on one end of the spectrum; and on the other, just the hobbyist, the craftsman, who's simply spending his leisure time.

ANDREWS

Well, there's a tremendous amount of mediocre artists who sell a certain amount of work. That's the middle ground.

GOODWIN

Right, but we don't....

ANDREWS

It's always been there. That has nothing to do with our time being different from some other time. That middle ground has always been there.

GOODWIN

Well, I'm not referring really to the quality of the art that's being made, but simply to the way the art is being made. I mean, we don't have any cathedrals to build.

ANDREWS

Well, we have churches. We have religious structures being built all the time. Some of them are lousy, and some of them are good. Some are beautiful. Philip Johnson is designing a new church over in San Gabriel [actually Garden Grove].

GOODWIN

Right.

ANDREWS

But don't get me wrong. I don't mean by innovation that you have to work with laser beams or something like that. There are painters who are painting today who are painting on square canvases with stretcher bars on them, and they are painting figures of people, just as artists have been painting since the Renaissance. But the way those figures are painted is creative; it's original; it's a new vision of the human figure. And there's no reason why that kind of painting can't be a viable means of painting for a long time to come. Whereas that may have been the main line of art at one time, now it's one of many lines.

GOODWIN

So you're not worried that art is dead or dying?

ANDREWS

No, I'm worried that it's boring, but I don't think it's dying. I think it goes through phases. Anytime that you're looking, you're always looking at a lot of junk on the surface anyway. But just at that moment there's always something going on somewhere where most people are not noticing that's fascinating. Nearby somewhere are the seeds of what art is going to be like twenty years from now. But that kind of art, the kind of art that's truly innovative, you're absolutely right -- it's not for everybody. You have to look directly at it and struggle to understand it, and that takes an effort. You have to be willing to have your values changed. That's part of the thrill of it. But most people don't want their values changed; they want everything to stay just the way it is. They're trying desperately to hold everything together because everything seems to be flying apart. So art is not for them.

GOODWIN

Well, we're not going to solve the world's art problems.

ANDREWS

No, we're not going to.

GOODWIN

Let's talk about some of your former students and where they've gone.

ANDREWS

Okay. Well, two of my first students, the first two people that I gave MA degrees to, have been very successful artists. They were artists from before they left UCLA and they still are. And now they happen to be married to one another. I'm talking about Lloyd Hamrol and Judy Chicago. Judy Chicago, when she was at UCLA, was Judy Gerowitz. Lloyd got his degree, and then Judy got her degree.

GOODWIN

Was he Lloyd Hamrol?

ANDREWS

He was Lloyd Hamrol the whole time, yes. Some years after they left UCLA, they were married. Lloyd has been doing for the last few years a kind of environmental art which is based on creating some kind of hollow or depression, or building up out of the ground or hollowing out the ground, or in some way creating a kind of space where people can feel comfortable and protected. They remind you of Indian kivas, and some are like igloos. They use natural materials: logs, timber, stones, sandbags, things like that. Lloyd has built these things in lots of different places all over the United States.

GOODWIN

What did he do while he was at UCLA?

ANDREWS

He did some plaster and some welding, and then he finally began making laminated wood sculptures and some drawings that went with them that were very clean, pristine, beautifully crafted. Judy was painting. In order to learn the techniques of automobile spray painting, she took a course in automobile body work. She did some paintings on car hoods and fenders. Then she went through a very austere, minimal period, where her forms were very simple. Then she did some paintings. Since then the works have become, again, more colorful and lush and curvilinear. And Judy, of course, is one of the prime movers in the women's art movement.

GOODWIN

Did she learn that at UCLA?

ANDREWS

Did she learn that at UCLA? [laughter]

GOODWIN

Did that come out of her experience here?

ANDREWS

No, I think that just came out of the depths of her being. Judy's involvement in the women's movement started at Cal State Fresno [California State University, Fresno]. I went up to Fresno in July of 1969. There was a sculpture show up there in which one of my water sculptures was exhibited, and I was asked to come up and give a lecture. At that time I was flying a kind of flying sculpture that I'll get to later, which was made of Mylar and balloons. I said, "Well, I'd like to fly one of my sky fountains instead of talking." So I went up there, and some of my students went with me. We had a great time in Fresno, and we came back. Shortly after that the people in Fresno asked if I had any students that would be good teachers. I suggested Susan Titelman and Judy Chicago. They both went up there and worked. The next year, two more of my students from down here went up there. For several years there was a kind of exchange between Fresno and UCLA. It was at Fresno that Judy developed many of the ideas that became important in her work later. She started a women's class up there and started formulating concepts that became important for the formation of a body of ideas about women's involvement in art. Then Judy and Susan came back down here to Los Angeles, and Judy brought a lot of her friends with her. In downtown Los Angeles they took over an old house, which they called Womanhouse. They made a lot of art in that house, and a lot of associations between women took place at that time. Judy met Sheila de Bretteville and Arlene Raven and Ruth Iskin and some of the other women who have been instrumental in carrying the movement on and in founding the later gallery space, which was called Womanspace, and now has moved to a number of different places. Now it's the Woman's Building. It's downtown and has an active women's art program. Judy spent a lot of time and energy in doing that. Do you know what she is doing now? Making this enormous table. She's making a huge triangular-shaped table that I think has ninety places, thirty on each side of an equilateral triangle. Each place is for a great woman of history, either real or mythological. It starts out with the Venus of Willendorf [Museum of Natural History, Vienna] and goes through Nefretete and Florence Nightingale and up to important women of today. Each woman has her place setting. When Judy was at UCLA, we did quite a lot of ceramics together. since that time, Judy went into -- oh, she did plaster and concrete and plastics and wood and Fiberglas and all kinds of things. Then she got back into ceramics through finding that one of women's traditional crafts is china painting. In the past, women had had a kind of cottage industry of painting little paintings on plates and pottery, and Judy decided to revive this activity and explore its potentials as a creative art medium. So Judy studied china painting, learned how to do it, and made quite a number of works based on that. Now this is all coming together in this huge project of making all the plates and knives and forks and candlesticks and linen for this huge table, which will have its debut next year at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Now Judy is in the stage where there are a lot of different kinds of projects to be done that all combine to form this table setting, and so she has a lot of women helping her. They're working very actively together.

GOODWIN

Do you think feminism is an important issue in art today? [laughter]

ANDREWS

What kind of a question is that? Shall I say, "No, it doesn't mean anything"? Well, of course it's a very important influence because it's happening. Through the movement a lot of women have become more seriously involved in art than they would have been otherwise. There have always been some women involved in art. There have been some very great artists who have been women. Of course, in a school, the women's movement is a very crucial factor because every art school has a predominance of women. There 're always more women than there are men in most art schools and art classes.

GOODWIN

Students?

ANDREWS

In art schools, yes. How those women are treated and what they feel about their ability to do art is very important in how they develop. So, yes, I think it's been tremendously important. The thing that's happening now, of course, is that the militant aspect of it has kind of died down. Those classes where you used to have women, all making art out of petticoats and stockings and feminist materials and so forth, I think that that kind of narrow interpretation of feminism in art is now a little bit passe.

GOODWIN

A little boring?

ANDREWS

Yes. It's getting boring. But the movement has become transformed in many constructive ways.

GOODWIN

Well, what is the issue of feminism in art other than equal pay for equal work?

ANDREWS

Well, it's a number of related issues. One of the issues is the amount of attention paid to women artists. A lot of women artists feel that art galleries and museums and dealers don't pay women artists the amount of attention that is due them and their work. And really, if you look at the kinds of shows that have been put on in the country over the last fifteen years, you see that probably to a certain extent that's true. But in any case, women feel that way, that they're not getting the attention, much less the equal pay. Equal pay, you know, applies to many areas other than art. And women have a feeling that their ideas, their concepts, haven't been really taken seriously.

GOODWIN

But what are their concepts in terms of their artwork?

ANDREWS

They are about how women feel about art. A lot of them are similar to concepts that men have, but some are not. But there's another issue here, too, and one which Judy has explored a lot, and that is that there's women's art, which has a slightly different emotional motivation than men's art. It's just different. Somehow it comes from whatever the source of femininity in women is, just as male art comes from whatever the source of masculinity in men is. Now, of course you can make too much of a division this way, but a lot of women have been encouraged to make their own kind of art and to go into the sources of their own lives and feelings for their art rather than trying to make art like the male models that have been held up to them as the right kind of art to do. So I think that rather than making art look particularly different, beyond the use of typically feminine subject matter, it's really helped women to have the confidence to find sources in their own experience for their art.

GOODWIN

Do you think group shows by women artists make sense?

ANDREWS

Yes, they make as much sense as group shows by men artists or group shows by college professors or group shows by students or group shows by horse fanciers or miniaturists.

GOODWIN

Right, except traditionally sex isn't a criterion for organizing exhibitions.

ANDREWS

Well, it's no more ridiculous than all the other criteria for organizing exhibitions, like, you know, all figurative or all landscapes. Exhibitions have to have themes now, you know. Instead of gathering together a lot of really good work because it's good, exhibitions not only seem to have to have themes, but exhibitions have to prove something. Most of the exhibitions that you see these days have an issue that's supposed to be proven. After the exhibition is over, nobody could care less. For instance, there's an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art which combines abstract expressionists with early American landscape painters. So they have Inness and Homer and then those panoramic landscape painters like Frederick Church, and then they have a lot of abstract expressionists. This is supposed to prove that abstract expressionism is really in the romantic line of great American landscape painting. It's just nonsense. So why shouldn't there be exhibitions of women painters so you can see what women are doing? I must say that that makes more sense than a lot of things, because if there is a kind of feeling that we haven't been conscious of in women's painting, a good way to look at it would be to get some of the very best painting by women, the best art by women that you could get, and have a look at it. Anyway, we got on the subject just by way of saying that Judy has been not only very active as an artist but very influential in other ways.

GOODWIN

Right. Let's talk about some other graduates.

ANDREWS

Well, let's see. Tony Berlant was one of my early students. Besides becoming an artist, Tony also became one of the most knowledgeable authorities on Navajo Indian art, particularly blankets, which he started collecting. He very soon collected a lot of blankets, and actually he made such a success with his blanket trading that he turned his whole business over to his father, and now he's back doing art. Tony organized a number of exhibitions which turned a great many people on to the beauty of American Indian art.

GOODWIN

How did he get into Navajo blankets?

ANDREWS

He just saw some and loved them and started learning more about them. A lot of people said, "Oh, you know, that's so esoteric. There are those wily old traders. Watch out." But Tony turned out to be much smarter than any old Indian trader that ever swindled a family out of the blankets in their attic. Tony actually was instrumental in saving a whole body of Indian work in the Mimbres Valley, a body of work that was unappreciated. Tony found more Mimbres pottery than anyone ever had before. He also started a foundation in order to help collect their work and keep it intact. One thing that Tony did was also to help bring a consciousness of Indian art to the art community. He traded blankets with artists whom he admired. So he would trade a blanket for a Don Judd, for instance, or to some other artist that he liked. During the time Tony was working, the appreciation of Navajo and Southwest Indian arts skyrocketed, and so did the prices. So anyway, there's Tony. Another student of mine is Richard Matthews, who went to the Kansas City Art Institute. He was there for six or seven years and was very influential in developing their program. Maria Nordman is an interesting artist who worked with me. She makes environments that have to do with the effect of light. She uses natural light from the sun and channels it through slots or over corners and makes it as though you were inside a dark room and light were shining through the slot in the door. That's an oversimplified way of describing what Maria does, but that does not really describe the quality of her work.

GOODWIN

What did she do at UCLA?

ANDREWS

Well, she made some sculpture. She made films which she projected onto objects. She also did some photo- montage, where she made large photographs on linen and on emulsion. With these materials she could produce a photo- graphic surface on the surface of her sculpture.

GOODWIN

Do you ever turn down a student's ideas, discourage him from pursuing an idea that seems too far out?

ANDREWS

Too far out? No, never for being too far out. [laughter]

GOODWIN

For being too traditional?

ANDREWS

No, we really don't do that. By the time a student gets to be a graduate anyway, that student usually pretty well knows what he wants to do to an extent that you're trying to encourage him, not discourage him. But of course you enter into a critical discussion with students. You point out to them potential problems in what they want to do. But I don't think that you every work so didactically with a student that you tell her what she is doing is wrong. Because you never know until you try it, in other words. No, I don't think that we work that didactically. Some other students that I had are George Rodart, who is a painter, and Kelly Haimes. Loren Madsen is a very interesting student who worked with me. Speaking of technically dexterous people, he's a fantastic craftsman. During his final year here, he was so good that he had difficulty because he could do everything well -- great difficulty finding what would really allow him to express this craftsmanship without being too refined, and still satisfy his own needs. But he finally found a way of working and put on a sensational show for his MA thesis exhibition. He balanced bricks; he made a pathway of bricks in the air. Each brick was balanced on a three-foot piece of 1/8-inch welding rod. Then, after that sort of brilliant debut, he decided to stop and think about everything for a year, so he went up in the mountains and then came back deciding that he would be an artist. Then he had a number of shows, and now he's been doing a lot of work. He had a show at Riko Mizuno a couple of years ago. He had a show in New York. He had a show at the Walker Art Center recently. He has been showing a lot. He's found a way of working that uses balance. The works are very, very delicately constructed and of consummate craftsmanship. But he's used the craftsmanship to obtain this balance of the pieces, which gives them a kind of a trembling apprehensiveness that's really very fascinating. Loren is a very unique kind of artist, and I think that the work that he will do will even become more interesting in the future. Then this last year we had two students. Bob Goulart and Nancy Youdelman, who both worked with the figure in quite different ways. Loren Madsen is very abstract and constructional, you might say. In contrast, both Nancy and Bob work with the figure, and they even work with body casts. They take molds off of people's faces. In fact. Bob does entire figures, even groups of figures, all made from body casts of people that he knows. Both Bob and Nancy show a great deal. Bob's pieces are mostly nudes. Nancy's are mostly very fancifully clothed. She's very interested in clothing and costume.

GOODWIN

Are you surprised by the great variety of interests and styles?

ANDREWS

No, I'm not surprised by it. I think it's great. I think it's simply an indication of all of the different kinds of possibilities there are in making art. And of course here in Los Angeles is where a lot of things, ideas, products that filter out to the rest of the world are created. In a way, all the rest of the world gradually becomes to look more and more like Los Angeles, for better or for worse. And so there's an incredible diversity of cultures, of materials, of places -- tremendous opportunities for fabricating things in Los Angeles. Almost anything that you want to do or get made, you can find someplace that makes it in L.A. I think the diversity among the artists that have worked with me is simply a reflection of this place. And it's also a reflection somewhat of the way that I teach in that I try to really bring out the potential of each of my students, to allow them the oppor- tunity to find themselves. I think that the fact that they do have such diversity shows that it's worked pretty well.

GOODWIN

Do you know if by and large your graduate students are already living in Los Angeles or they come here to go to school?

ANDREWS

Oh, the graduate students? There's a great variety. Of course we encourage people to come from out of state because of the experiences that they bring, but it costs a lot more for an out-of-state student to come here, so that's a deterrent. But at present among our graduate students we have a person from Japan, and we have a person from England, and we have a number of people from other states. But most of the students, because it's a state university, come from somewhere in California.

GOODWIN

Do you often take graduates who are undergraduates here on this campus?

ANDREWS

Yes, sure. Quite often.

GOODWIN

Do you feel there's a danger in that they may not have broad enough exposure, that it might be good to go somewhere else for a while and see how other people work?

ANDREWS

Well, I think that usually that's not so much of a danger. It doesn't hurt them. Actually, the experience of being an undergraduate here and then going into graduate school has a kind of continuity to it, which I think is good. After they get out of here, they're going to have plenty of diverse experiences. I think it would be very dangerous and sort of inbred if too large a proportion of our students all came from our own undergraduate body. But there do seem to be enough people from outside. There's a good mixture.

GOODWIN

I'm sure students will go almost anywhere if they have a good job offer, but do you find that students like to stay in Los Angeles?

ANDREWS

A lot of them do. Well, Los Angeles is one of the world art centers, after all. But they don't all stay here. A lot of them write to me, and they're all over the world.

GOODWIN

Do you like to stay in touch with the graduates?

ANDREWS

Sure. But California is a place where artists like to come from other places.

GOODWIN

Why do you think Los Angeles is a great art center?

ANDREWS

Because there are a lot of artists here and a lot of galleries here. A lot of art is happening here -- that's why it's a center. As I said, a lot of other things are happening. It's a cultural center of the world. The ideas, the products, the ways of living that are invented in Los Angeles influence how people think in the rest of the world.

GOODWIN

But isn't it also a big void?

ANDREWS

It is. It's a totally different kind of space. There's no perspective in Los Angeles at all. All the lines are absolutely parallel. And that's exactly the kind of space which the whole world is beginning to participate in, a rather simultaneous space.

GOODWIN

Well, we're talking now of a geographical space, but I'm also thinking of a chronological space. It's really a traditionless or tradition-free environment, with no past.

ANDREWS

That's right.

GOODWIN

Isn't that scary?

ANDREWS

Yes, the new is always scary.

GOODWIN

But there aren't any good things to rely on, either. You can't point to the wisdom of experience. There aren't great, inspiring things that are manmade in the environment.

ANDREWS

No, I think there are. Well, they're not the kinds of things that you're used to looking at. But if fly over Los Angeles at night and just look at it with the lights on, that's a great, magnificent thing that man has made.

GOODWIN

What about the presence of great art of the past? Isn't that something that's missing here?

ANDREWS

Oh, I don't think so. There's as much of it here as there is anywhere in the United States, except maybe New York City. Where else in this country is there more great art of the past?

GOODWIN

Well, I can think of a lot of places that would be more interesting for me.

ANDREWS

I mean in terms of great art.

GOODWIN

Well, is Los Angeles any better in this instance than San Francisco?

ANDREWS

Well, they're both, you know, pretty close to each other.

GOODWIN

Yeah, right.

ANDREWS

No, it isn't any better in that sense, but Los Angeles is much more a city of the future than San Francisco is in the terms of its spatial layout. San Francisco is much more like a European city. It has a center and a real downtown, and it has a kind of ambience to it, which is why a lot of people like San Francisco -- because of its old-time flavor. That's just what's interesting about Los Angeles: it's not like any other place in the world.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 11, 1976

GOODWIN

Before we continue discussing Oliver's work as a teacher, I'd like to interject a comment. I noticed today that Alexander Calder died in New York.

ANDREWS

Did he really? Oh, my goodness.

GOODWIN

I wondered if he had any personal impact on you as a student or as a young artist -- whether you had any particular interest in his work.

ANDREWS

Well, yes, I'm interested in his work, and he is one of the small number of important artists who was active during the time I was growing up and learning about art. I always admired his work very much. I wouldn't say that he was one of the key figures in my development or one of the artists that I felt a particular affinity for in my own direction in art, but I admire his work very much,

GOODWIN

Do you remember when you first saw a large portion of it?

ANDREWS

The first Calder I ever saw was in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1939. Of course, if you're interested in art, wherever you go you see some Calders. Calder is a very visible artist. His work is published a great deal; you can't look at art magazines without seeing something about Calder. I have gone to New York many times during the period that my art has been developing, ever since I was in college, and there you see Calders around. I think that to me one of the most interesting aspects of Calder's work was his method of working. If you've ever seen a photograph of his studio, you know it's a very large studio with wires and tools and all kinds of materials hung all over the place. He worked in a very non-highly technological way -- not that he didn't use advanced methods of fabrication in his work, but he preferred to put the things together by the kinds of methods that, say, a farmer could do out in back or in the barn. To put two pieces of metal together, he preferred to rivet them rather than weld them together. Even when he began to get very large commissions and he began to have a lot of his work executed by metal fabricators, he would specify that the pieces were to be put together by hammering and forging and riveting. Of course, some of the really large pieces had to use a lot of welding for strength. But that handmade look was always a part of Calder's work. You always felt somebody doing it with their hands. Even that circus that he made in Paris in the twenties is something that you could make with a pair of pliers and a pair of tin snips and a soldering iron. A lot of his work has that handmade look, which I like.

GOODWIN

Do you remember when his mobiles were originally installed at the County Museum in 1965? They were in the reflecting ponds, and they were hit by jets of water.

ANDREWS

Right, I know. I got very close to them because soon after they were installed, the stainless steel bases began rusting around the welds, as stainless steel often does when it comes in contact with water. I worked on them. I cleaned them up for the County Museum when they were in the pool. So I was polishing them and dealing with them and actually handling those pieces, so I got very close to them. They're on the lawn now, and unfortunately they don't work with water anymore. Too much trouble.

GOODWIN

I'm not sure they work at all now, because they're obstructed by the trees.

ANDREWS

Right.

GOODWIN

Did you have any personal contact with Calder at the time?

ANDREWS

No, I met him a few times, but I didn't know Calder personally.

GOODWIN

I was really sad to hear that he had died, because he had been one of my heroes.

ANDREWS

Yes, but after all, he was quite an old man. He really died in the height of fame and activity: doing things all over the world, painting airplanes, having a huge show on at the Whitney right at this moment. Yes, it is sad that Calder is gone, but he really couldn't have died at a more glorious time in his career. He was a master of lifemanship as of art.

GOODWIN

There wasn't much left for him to do.

ANDREWS

Well, there was plenty left for him to do. He could have gone on making those sculptures for a long time, but he did die at a very high moment at the end of a long and very richly fulfilling life.

GOODWIN

Well, let's talk about UCLA a while longer, there were a few more students of yours whom we need to mention, Peter Alexander and Michael Todd.

ANDREWS

Yes, well, both of them were students of mine, and they both live here in Los Angeles now. Peter Alexander has been doing a number of drawings of sunsets lately, but he has made a lot of sculpture, particularly some very elegant, very beautiful sculpture in cast resin. Michael Todd began to become interested in sculpture just towards the end of his time at UCLA. He had been working mostly as a printmaker there, but I worked with him during his last year. Then he went to the East Coast. He taught for a while at Bennington, in Vermont, and gradually evolved a form of sculpture that suited him. During the late sixties he worked in Fiberglassed plywood, creating very simple forms. Now he has been working for the last few years at the University of California, San Diego, working in metal, making large welded sculptures. He had a show last year at Nicholas Wilder. Like myself in one way, Mike is interested in making large-scale, outdoor sculpture that can relate to public spaces.

GOODWIN

I think the only example of that kind of work of his that I've seen is a sculpture in the front yard of the La Jolla Museum. There's a big, circular-type sculpture.

ANDREWS

Right. A very interesting show that he had was at the Salk Institute down there. The institute was designed by Louis Kahn. It's a very bare, stark kind of building with a courtyard running down the center between the blocks of buildings. Mike's sculptures were displayed in the courtyard.

GOODWIN

That sounds like a good idea. Do you know who was responsible for that?

ANDREWS

No, I don't.

GOODWIN

What kind of relationship do you tend to have with other artists on the UCLA faculty?

ANDREWS

Oh, it's a professional relationship of mutual respect. Artists on the UCLA faculty are quite different from each other. I didn't know any of them before I went to UCLA except Bill Brice, who was a friend of mine already, Bill was in the Charles Alan Gallery at the time that I was. Charles Alan and Bill were old friends. So I got to know Bill that way. I have had several friendships with artists who visited UCLA from elsewhere. For one summer, David Hockney taught at UCLA. David Hockney was also with the Alan Gallery. When David first came, his first trip to the United States, Charles called me from New York and asked me to meet David at the plane and to help him because he didn't know Los Angeles and he didn't know how to drive. So I picked up David. He loved California and the palm trees and the swimming pools, which began to appear in his painting. David immediately sent a telegram back to Charles Alan, telling that he had safely arrived, and said, "Venice California more beautiful than Venice Italy." I thought that what David needed most was to learn how to drive, so I taught David to drive in just a very few days. Then we went out and bought him a car. He immediately got on the freeway and drove all the way to Las Vegas before he figured out how to turn around. So he spent a couple of days in Las Vegas until he had gambled away all his money, and then he got in his car and drove back to Los Angeles. Of course, David's paintings and prints and drawings of Los Angeles are now known all over the world, and David loves Los Angeles just as much and probably in a different way than I do.

GOODWIN

Where did he live while he was here?

ANDREWS

Oh, every time David came, he lived in a different place. He lived for a while here in Santa Monica in a wonderful old apartment house that looks like the superstructure of a 1930s ocean liner. Sometimes he stayed at Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.

GOODWIN

Let's talk about him a bit longer. Who was instrumental in bringing him to UCLA? Do you know how he wound up there?

ANDREWS

Well, he had come to California a number of times before that. Actually, I thought David was such an interesting person and such a brilliant artist that it would be great if we could have him at UCLA for a while, so I asked him if he would be interested in teaching at UCLA, and he allowed that he would. So I presented the idea to the rest of the faculty, and we decided to hire him.

GOODWIN

What did he teach?

ANDREWS

Painting.

GOODWIN

How did he get along with the students?

ANDREWS

Oh, great, they loved him. They thought he was marvelous.

GOODWIN

What does he do when he comes back to Los Angeles?

ANDREWS

He works. Everywhere that David is, he works very hard. He appears to take life very easily and to lead a very full social life, but actually David works very hard at his art. He paints every day. He's a brilliant artist.

GOODWIN

How do his views of L.A. differ from yours?

ANDREWS

Oh, that's too complicated a question.

GOODWIN

Well, I know you like Los Angeles.

ANDREWS

So does he.

GOODWIN

So does he, right.

ANDREWS

Well, David comes from England, and that's a whole different perspective.

GOODWIN

Who were some of the other visitors?

ANDREWS

Well, a visitor that I got along with very well was Arman, who is an artist who does collections of objects. Arman uses a lot of found objects in his art, and accumulations of many objects of the same kind, many musical instruments. He did a piece with 150 clarinets. He also likes guitars, which he sometimes saws into strips and sometimes smashes to smithereens. Then he imbeds objects in plastic and also some things in concrete. When he was here, he was working with paint tubes, using dozens, even hundreds, of paint tubes with the paint running out of them or being squeezed out of them, and then the paint tubes and their paint are laminated between two layers of clear Plexiglas. But Arman, for instance, is also a skin diver, so we went diving a few times. Arman was here for about a year -- I think it was about '68-69. Whenever I go to New York, if Arman is in New York -- he lives part of the time in France, and part of the time in New York -- if Arman is there, I usually go to see him.

GOODWIN

What do you call Arman? "Arman"?

ANDREWS

What do you call him?

GOODWIN

Yeah, does he have a first name?

ANDREWS

Well, Arman is really his first name. His whole name is Arman Fernandez, but he uses only one of his names, like some other artists, such as Marisol or Kosso.

GOODWIN

Did he see the Watts Towers, as far as you know?

ANDREWS

Oh, yes, he's seen everything.

GOODWIN

He must have enjoyed them, judging from his work. Were there any other notable visitors to the UCLA faculty?

ANDREWS

Those are the two that I was closest to and that stand out in my mind as the most interesting people for me that we've had so far at UCLA.

GOODWIN

Their careers have been given even more recognition, I suppose, since they've been here.

ANDREWS

Yes, that's true.

GOODWIN

I guess Arman especially. I know he had a big show in La Jolla.

ANDREWS

That's right, yes, he did. Well, David Hockney has been internationally known since those times, those days.

GOODWIN

Who are your friends on the regular UCLA faculty, people that you like most?

ANDREWS

Well, I don't think you can talk about it in terms of liking people on the faculty more than other people.

GOODWIN

Whose work do you find most interesting?

ANDREWS

Well, one person (actually I should have mentioned him before) who's on the UCLA faculty who I've known for a long time is Lee Mullican. He is also part of this series. Actually, I knew Lee before either of us came to UCLA.

GOODWIN

How did you know him?

ANDREWS

Well, because he lived in San Francisco, and he was a part of that group of people in San Francisco in the late forties that I described earlier. So I knew him at that time, and I also admired his painting. I suggested to my colleagues that he would be an interesting person to have on our faculty. His work is quite different from that of most of the other members of the painting faculty, whose work is more or less figurative in nature. Lee is pretty much an abstract painter depicting a kind of interior landscape of consciousness. So it makes a very good balance to have someone like Lee on the regular staff whose temperament and whose artistic vision are rather different from some of the other people. But I admire Lee's work very much.

GOODWIN

Do you ever look at the members of the faculty in terms of generational differences?

ANDREWS

No, I think that's irrelevant.

GOODWIN

Who are some of the old-timers who are no longer at UCLA who stand out in your mind as being kind of colorful characters, people who had an impact on the art department at one time or another?

ANDREWS

Oh, I don't know who had an impact on the art department. How would I know if I wasn't there? Probably the most interesting figure who used to be at UCLA is the painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright. Was he interviewed as part of this program?

GOODWIN

He had agreed to be interviewed, and he died before the interviews began.

ANDREWS

I think some interviews were made of him, though, a number of them. I know Jan Stussy, who was a friend of his, interviewed him, and I'm sure material must be available somewhere. MacDonald-Wright was a very active early abstractionist, way back at the beginning of the century, with his movement called synchromism. Although his fame to the broader art world is based on those early works, he continued to be an active painter for all his life. He lived a very long life. I guess he must have been close to ninety when he finally died. His work continued to be extremely interesting. I met him a few times. When I was in Japan in 1963, Stanton MacDonald happened to be there, and I went to see him, had tea with him where he lived in the abbot's quarters of Kininji monastery. So it was quite arresting to see him in a whole different milieu. As you know, Stanton MacDonald-Wright had a great affection for Japan. He'd been going there since the twenties, and there was quite a bit of Japanese influence on his work, particularly some of the prints that he did. He told me that he had lived in Japan in a former reincarnation, and that he often recognized places that he had been in that former life.

GOODWIN

Is it surprising that an artist who is so far in the forefront of his time was teaching at UCLA in those early years? I mean, was that an odd combination?

ANDREWS

Oh, why should it be?

GOODWIN

I don't know. It seems like he might have had a lonely time, not having too much comradeship with other avant-garde artists in Los Angeles.

ANDREWS

Well, by the time Stanton MacDonald-Wright came to UCLA, he really wasn't an avant-garde artist anymore.

GOODWIN

Everyone caught up with him.

ANDREWS

Sure.

GOODWIN

I looked at the catalog of an exhibition called "Artists of the University of California, 1963-64," and you're one of eleven representing UCLA. I wonder if you could just say a few words about some of the other artists, just to kind of characterize them. Some of them obviously are still teaching.

ANDREWS

Yes, quite a number of those artists are still on the faculty at UCLA.

GOODWIN

Let me pick a few who either aren't teaching anymore or who would be much older. Remember a woman named Dorothy Brown?

ANDREWS

Yes, certainly. She was there when I was there.

GOODWIN

What was her field?

ANDREWS

She was in painting. I really think that this is a waste of time. We can spend our time much better than just reminiscing about all the old artists who used to be at UCLA.

GOODWIN

Okay, but I just want to explain why I was doing it: because you would have the vantage point that someone outside UCLA wouldn't have. Since we're not studying many of these artists, we're using you to tell us about them. But we can move on to other things.

ANDREWS

Well, I think there would be other people who would be much more interested in talking about that than me.

GOODWIN

Okay, before we leave UCLA, do you have any personal contact with any of the art historians?

ANDREWS

By the way, when I said that I didn't mean that I wish to turn off just because we were talking about Dorothy Brown. I think her work is very interesting. I just meant that I don't feel that this is the place to go into an analysis of my colleagues' work. Yes, I've known quite a number of the art historians who were at UCLA.

GOODWIN

At some of the universities where I've studied, either the art historians are separate in their own department, or they don't get along very well with the artists, or vice versa. I think that's probably fairly common.

ANDREWS

Yes, I think that happens in all universities.

GOODWIN

Why?

ANDREWS

Oh, everybody has their own little piece of ground to defend. Some art historians are interested in artists, and some artists are interested in talking to some art historians. It depends a lot on what those people's fields are. It depends on how an artist thinks and works, whether the artist is really interested in the history of art or whether he's interested in a particular aspect of art history that people in his place represent. You might have a fascinating Egyptologist, you might have a fascinating person in some area of medieval art, but that doesn't necessarily mean that painters would be interested or have much in common with those people, but they might. I'm quite interested in Oriental art, in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art, and we had at one time a very interesting man, who since went to Harvard, named John Rosenfield. John and I hit it off very well, and we used to talk a lot about art. It turned out also that I kept going to temples in Japan and seeing John's name written on the roster of who'd been there, and I finally caught up with him in Kyoto. There have been other art historians of interest who have been at UCLA.

GOODWIN

Have you ever had any desire to teach some art history?

ANDREWS

Well, of course, I do teach art history in a sense, in that I do more with my students than just show them how to weld and hammer nails and mix plaster. If you're going to teach anybody what art is about, then you can't help talking about art history. I show a lot of slides in my class, and there are a lot of pictures. If I take my students, as we were discussing earlier, to the museum, we're talking about art of the past, so I'm teaching art history. My course isn't called "How to Make Sculpture and Learn about Art History," but inevitably we're talking about art, so there's some art history.

GOODWIN

What are some of the points you like to bring out or some of the artists whose work you like to show to your sculpture students?

ANDREWS

Well, I show my students an enormous variety of different kinds of work, both of the past and of the present, and both in the main line of Western history of art as it evolved from classical times through medieval times and the Renaissance, and we also study a lot the art of other peoples. I think it's a misnomer to call Africans or Indians primitive people. Our museum, which has some of the greatest collections of African and Oceanic and pre-Columbian art in the world, is now called the ethnic galleries or something like that [Museum of Cultural History] . But anyway, we look at a lot of pre-Columbian sculpture, a lot of African sculpture, a lot of Eskimo work, a lot of Indian work. I try to give a very broad based idea of how art comes into being and how it answers the needs of different kinds of people. Then of course we do show a lot of contemporary sculpture, and I also photograph works of contemporary art to show my students. I can't cover everything that happens, obviously, but especially in the Los Angeles area, I try to keep in touch with the most interesting shows that are happening and make slides of them. Whenever I go to some other city and whenever I go to New York, which I do a couple of times a year usually, I do a lot of photographing. No slide library can possibly keep up with the pace of what's happening in the world. Our slide library is always at least a few years, probably more, behind. So I photograph, myself. I have quite an extensive slide collection, because now I've been doing that for twenty years. I have sometimes the only slides -- they probably aren't the only slides that exist in Los Angeles -- but they are the only slides that I know about or that most people know about that cover certain shows that happened during the past twenty years. We also read things that artists write. At this particular moment of time, artists are writing an awful lot. I don't know what that means in terms of where art is at and why visual artists are spending so much time writing, but they are. There are all kinds of magazines out now, and artists are publishing books, and they're talking and writing a lot. So we pay attention to that. We also use cinema. A few years ago I began to realize that a lot of the work that artists do and a lot of work we do in our classes are things that have action, that move, that change, that also are temporary. We set things up and then we act with them for a while and then they disappear. Also, what we do often takes place in a space that is not contained within the frame of a camera, of a still camera. So film, moving film, cinema, seemed to me to be the appropriate way to capture what was going on. I started taking movies myself, and three years ago I applied for and received an innovative-teaching grant at UCLA, which was to combine cinema with sculpture. I was able to buy some equipment, and now a lot of my students are making films. Some of the films are purely documentary in nature -- in other words, just to record something that happened. But other films are intended to be works of art in themselves. Just as you can make a drawing of a sculpture that describes the sculpture, you can also make a drawing of a sculpture in which the drawing itself is a self-contained work of art. We have the same attitude towards film. So you see, as well as the sculpture course being art history, it's also cinema.

GOODWIN

Do you use the Murphy Sculpture Garden frequently as a teaching tool?

ANDREWS

Yes. We always take our students around the garden and give them a tour and tell them what's going on and how the sculptures were made, how they were acquired, give them that information. Most of the students have an amiable attitude towards the sculptures and accept them as part of their environment, but often until their attention is focused on some of the special qualities of the sculpture, they're not very aware of them as anything more than just other things, like trees and lampposts, that are in their environment.

GOODWIN

I know what you mean. I had an experience once where I was sitting in the garden, and I just was chatting with a student. We were discussing the sculpture garden, and it gradually emerged that she thought the sculptures were by students. She liked the sculpture, but she didn't have any idea that they were by so-called "famous" artists, [laughter]

ANDREWS

Right. But it is one of the very few places in the world where you can be teaching a sculpture course, and you can simply walk out of your studio and point to many of the great masters of twentieth-century sculpture.

GOODWIN

What are some of the pieces that you enjoy particularly, if any?

ANDREWS

Oh, I like many of them; there are a lot of marvelous sculptures there. There are a lot of kind of bronze "people" in the sculpture court. Much of the work is figurative. The concentration of the sculpture is pretty much in the early part of the twentieth century, going from people like Rodin and Maillol through some early pioneers, like Jacques Lipchitz and other European artists. There are a few examples of relatively modern work, like the marvelous David Smith that we have, the Cubi. There are not very many of the Cubi s around in collections and very few in California. There are hardly any Noguchis in California, although Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1905. Then we have a piece by Anthony Caro, which is over in front of the theater arts building. Some of the interesting things about the sculpture when you begin to learn who they are by and what's going on is that you often see works by people who relate to each other. For instance, a younger man and an older man who may have both influenced each other: that is the case with Tony Caro and David Smith. Or you can take Lipchitz and Etrog. Etrog worked for a while with Lipchitz. As a matter of fact, there's a very interesting triangle there near the theater arts building because you have Henry Moore in front of the theater arts building and then the Caro and the David Smith. Caro worked as an apprentice for Henry Moore. His sculpture doesn't look anything like Henry Moore's, but he worked for quite a few years with Henry Moore. Then he didn't branch out on his own until he left England and came to America and started working at Bennington. During that time he met David Smith. They both influenced each other quite a lot, and Caro had quite an influence on David Smith in the last ten years of David Smith's life in changing the look of his sculpture, which had been very much, oh, pedestal-oriented, and very vertical and sort of stacked. Smith's sculpture then began moving much more openly over the ground. The whole way the sculpture stood up was changed in a direction that obviously had been influenced by the association between Caro and David Smith. So we could go on -- we don't want to do a whole tour of the sculpture garden right now, but we could go on talking about the interrelationships between some of the people who are shown there.

GOODWIN

How does the garden appeal to you as an organized space?

ANDREWS

It's very good. It was laid out in its main layout by Jere Hazlett, who was then on the staff of the university and who later became one of the partners in Cornell, Bridgers, Troller & Hazlett, the landscape firm that designed that complex there. The north court is a very beautifully designed space. I think it works very well. It's a good place to show sculptures, and it's intelligently planted. It's matured as the plants have grown over the last dozen years or so, since it came into being.

GOODWIN

From my own point of view, I think it's a real privilege to have that kind of resource. Actually, reviewing the contents of the garden reminds me that wasn't George Rickey a visitor at UCLA at one time or am I mistaken?

ANDREWS

No. We had a big Rickey show in the gallery, a very large extensive retrospective. Then we purchased a piece out of that exhibition that is now in the garden. Rickey has come to Los Angeles many times in his career, and he was also a friend of Frederick Wight, who founded the gallery, of course. There's been a long-standing association between Rickey and UCLA. Although we discussed it a few times, he never held an actual visiting position. He held a position at UC Santa Barbara for a while, a summer. One interesting aspect to that involves one of my students, Richard Matthews, who I mentioned earlier, who was at the Kansas City Art Institute. There are quite a lot of Rickeys in Los Angeles belonging to various collectors. Due to their delicate nature, they get out of whack quite frequently. The smaller ones get bumped into at parties by people and fall over on the floor, and the larger ones get thrashed around by Santa Ana winds, so they frequently need fixing. I imagine that it's a terrible problem for Rickey: the more famous he gets and the more his sculptures are spread all over the world, the more people are calling him and telling him that their Rickey doesn't work anymore. So George asked me if I didn't have a student who was very adept at welding and balancing and who had the kind of nature which could deal with the precise adjustments required by these works of his. The minute I thought about it, I realized that Dick Matthews was just the man that Rickey was looking for. That indeed proved to be the case, and for quite a few years, as long as Richard was here, he was the town "Rickey-fixer." In fact, after he went to Kansas, he went back at George's invitation and spent a whole summer working with George at his studio in East Chatham, New York, and participated in making Rickey sculptures. Dick was a film maker, and he made a film on Rickey making his sculpture.

GOODWIN

Have you been particularly interested in Rickey in terms of motion or the elements?

ANDREWS

He's a very interesting artist. His progress from the complex kind of jiggly things with a lot of little motions in them that he did earlier, to the very broad, simple kinds of motions that his pieces have now, is a consistent progression. Rickey was a late-arriving artist. He taught for years and years at Tulane in New Orleans and really didn't get time to pursue his work until he was just about to leave there. Rickey had thought a great deal about art during all this time, so his development really was quite consistent once he got started. Although his works are mechanical -- in other words, they're put together with hinges and swivels and so forth -- the mechanism is complex enough so that the pieces usually have a kind of delicacy and balance and lightness of movement which is very much like the way things move in nature. I mean, they move often more like grass and more like trees than they do like swings and merry-go-rounds, although they do have some of that nature. Rickey is also a very clear thinker and writer about art. His book on constructivism, which includes a lot in his particular specialty, kinetic art, is one of the best books in the field.

GOODWIN

What do you think of a label an artist like Rickey has to carry, "kinetic artist." It's easy to identify him that way, but do you think that's important?

ANDREWS

All art in the last few years seems to have a lot to do with labels. This is largely an art historian/museum curator-produced kind of thing to keep the business of art criticism going. Movements have to be invented, and labels have to be applied. If you're an art historian or if you're a museum director and you invent a label which sticks, then you get a lot of points for that in the art world. If you invent "abstract expressionism" and that's what it turns out to be, then that really gives you a lot of cachet in the art world. So everybody's trying to do the exhibition which establishes the trend. Of course, the problem is the whole thing gets ahead of itself, with the result that the best way to kill off an art movement is by doing a definitive exhibition on it. I think one of the most interesting exhibitions in that sense -- almost an artistic production in itself -- was the optical art show that the Museum of Modern Art had, which literally created a movement ["The Responsive Eye," 1965]. There was no op art until the Museum of Modern Art created it. For years there had been artists painting bright hard-edge paintings. So, for a couple of years before the show was scheduled, people (we won't say who) from the museum went around and said, "Well, we're just looking around, and are there any op artists around here?" And everybody said, "Op artists? What are those?" "Well, you know, their paintings are like this and like that, and they're very hard-edged and glow between the colors and so forth and so on." And everybody said, "Oh." And they said, "Well, it's a big movement, you know, we're going to have a show, so we'll come back later." So amazingly enough, op art began to appear everywhere. More and more op artists had to be included. So there was this enormous show, titled "The Responsive Eye," and everyone realized that op art had arrived. Suddenly most of those artists disappeared, and the ones who had been painting that way all along, like Vasarely and Anuszkiewicz, continued to paint their paintings.

GOODWIN

Let's talk about another phase of your work as an educator. I'm referring to the exhibition you organized at UCLA.

ANDREWS

The "Electric Art" exhibition.

GOODWIN

Right. That was in 1969. How did that come about?

ANDREWS

Well, Fred Wight had the idea that it would be good if some of the staff of UCLA would organize some exhibitions of particular interest both to UCLA itself and to the surrounding community. He asked me to be one of those people. LeRoy Davidson had done an Oriental art show using local collections. Anyway, Fred asked me if I would like to do a show, and I said, "Yes, I would really like to do a show, if I can do what I want." He said, "Well, what do you want?" I said, "Well, I would like to do an electric art show, called 'Electric Art. ' There's a lot of electric art going on." I had to then immediately invent a term myself, but it seemed to me that there were lots of different kinds of electric things going on. Some of them had to do with light; some of them had to do with laser beams; some of them had to do with sound; some of them had to do with electromagnetism. But all these works shared the use of electricity in one way or another.

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 11, 1976

GOODWIN

We're continuing discussing the "Electric Art" show.

ANDREWS

So I asked if I could do an electric art show, because I felt that there were a lot of interesting artists doing work that had some relationship to electricity, And of course, the essence of my work is not merely a display of electricity, but I do use small electric pumps to pump the water that I use in my water sculptures. Anyway, Fred Wight, the director of the UCLA gallery, agreed to have an electric art show. I had also specified that I would have to travel around the United States and Canada to find the electric artists. I couldn't do the show sitting home writing letters. So we agreed to have this show and to double the length of time that was usually allotted to a single show, because it would be an extremely difficult show to set up because of all the mechanical problems. The [UCLA] Art Council funded it, and so off I went. I went to Chicago and to Toronto and Montreal and to New York. I assembled a group of artists' works, we made arrangements for shipping them, and gradually they arrived back at UCLA. Then we did a catalog which had illustrations of the artists, statements by them. For the introduction to the catalog, I asked two people to write about electric art. One was my friend Alan Watts because I felt that he had a way of integrating ideas of consciousness with ideas of modern science.

GOODWIN

No pun intended? Alan Watts, electric art?

ANDREWS

Yes, that worked quite well. I also went to Washington to see an exhibition of one of the great pioneers of electric art, Thomas Wilfred, who created a number of types of light displays. One, that could be played with a keyboard, almost like a piano, was called a Clavilux. A friend of mine at the Museum of Modern Art, Don Stein, organized this exhibition in Washington, D.C. When I checked into my hotel, I walked upstairs and went to my room, and on the door of my room there was a little bronze plaque that said, "In this room stayed Thomas Alva Edison while he was in Washington." So, anyway, I traveled around and got all these pieces, and I really learned firsthand what it takes to put together an entire exhibition. While I was working on the show, I read a book by a young art critic. Jack Burnham, called Beyond Modern Sculpture, which had quite a number of the artists that I was using. Also, Jack Burnham himself made a very interesting kind of electric art, an example of which I had in my show, which was sort of a luminescent tape. Jack Burnham has since become quite well known as an art critic, but I don't know if he still makes art or not. Anyway, Jack Burnham did the other essay in the catalog of the "Electric Art" exhibition.

GOODWIN

Are there any artists whom you approached who didn't want to cooperate?

ANDREWS

Not really. There were some artists who didn't have work ready, like Jim Turrell. It wasn't that they didn't want to cooperate, they just weren't prepared at the time. I think almost every artist that I asked to submit a piece did so -- 90 percent of the artists, anyway.

GOODWIN

Which were some of the more memorable pieces, in your mind?

ANDREWS

Oh, we had a marvelous Chryssa neon piece. We had a Thomas Wilfred. It was very difficult to get it. It belonged to a radio astronomer named Eugene Epstein here in Los Angeles, and Wilfreds are very, very delicate and very, very valuable. To get the piece, I had to go over and pick it up by hand, and put it in my car, and drive it over to the exhibition. Then we had a disciple of Wilfred's, Earl Reiback, and many well-known artists, like Takis. We had a Takis electromagnetic piece. We had a Jean Tinguely, two radio pieces by him. We had two pieces by Dan Flavin. We had a Les Levine. We had an Antonakos neon piece.

GOODWIN

It was a large show. There were about forty artists.

ANDREWS

Yes, it was a very big show. It filled up the whole downstairs, and [it was] an incredible thing to install because every piece had to work and had to be placed in the right kind of ambience where it could be seen. Jack Carter did a terrific job of installing it. Opening night finally came around, and we had arranged to get four searchlights, pink searchlights, to play on the front of the gallery for the opening. And opening night it rained. [laughter]

GOODWIN

Like tonight.

ANDREWS

Yes, so I didn't think anybody would come, and Fred Wight thought that it would be pretty dismal, so he'd better come down to keep me company because there would just be a few people there. We thought that people might begin to come after word of the show got around; it would probably take a week or so for that to happen. The show was supposed to open at eight o'clock. We got down there in the rain at seven-thirty, and there were 2,000 people in the rain waiting to get into the show. Of course, the searchlights looked fabulous in the rain. They lit up everything. The gallery was just jammed with people. You couldn't even move; the whole gallery was filled -- an enormous opening. While that show was at the gallery, over 40,000 people came to see it, which is the largest attendance that they had had except for the great Matisse show which opened the gallery. Another marvelous thing is that people went to that show that had been at UCLA for twenty years and had never been to an art exhibition at the gallery before, People came from all over the campus. They came from science; they came from everywhere to see the exhibition and to see the new work that was being done.

GOODWIN

Did it make the statement you intended to make?

ANDREWS

Well, I didn't intend it to make any one particular kind of statement or prove a point, but it was a very good survey of many different but related things. All the pieces were fascinating and interesting. We made one sort of long-distance television piece for which Nam June Paik gave us the instructions. We rebuilt a television set so that it turned into a work of art. We followed the instructions, and it worked. The thing that I said in the introduction to the show was that today there is no one art movement. There are many, many different kinds of art movements that are all viable. The "Electric Art" exhibition gave the viewer a perspective on things that were happening in art all over the world at that time under the heading of "art and technology." As you know, the Bell Telephone lab and Robert Rauschenberg had worked together just before this and presented six "Evenings of Art and Technology." A lot of people were interested in working with scientists -- artists and scientists working together, exchanging ideas. The E.A.T. group did a large hemispherical Mylar dome in Osaka [Japan], and the Los Angeles County art museum put on a show of pieces, which also opened at Osaka and then came to L.A., called "Art and Technology." Of course, the great vision of the future, that there was going to be an incredible marriage between art and technology which would produce marvelous technological art forever, didn't exactly dawn on the scene, because art is too various to just be that. But still there are possibilities. Whenever there's an art movement, there are a lot of people doing one kind of art; there are a lot of other people who want to do immediately some other kind of art. They want to junk all the laser beams and optics and kind of burrow down into the ground. A lot of people went out and began digging trenches in the desert and that sort of thing, which just shows the incredible diversity and vitality of art. But I was very pleased with the "Electric Art" show in the sense that it demonstrated that our age can be described as an electrical age, as Marshall McLuhan described it, as well as by any other description. This kind of art really is not the art particularly of the sixties, although it sort of blossomed at that time -- one of its many blossomings was in the sixties -- but you can see that Thomas Wilfred had been doing electric art since 1924, and so had other artists. There are still artists in the seventies who are doing fascinating things with light and electricity.

GOODWIN

Neon?

ANDREWS

With neon. People like Rockne Krebs working with lasers and so on.

GOODWIN

Have you done any exhibitions since then?

ANDREWS

Well, I organized one exhibition for the Woman's Building of my grandmother's paintings. My grandmother is an artist. You see some of her works in my house. She was a California artist. Ruth Iskin, who is very active in the women's movement -- I mentioned earlier that she was a friend of Judy Chicago's and helped in the organization of the first Woman's Building -- Ruth and I were talking one day and she said that one of her favorite artists, one whom she had studied extensively, was Mary Cassatt. I said, "Oh, yes, Mary Cassatt was also a great favorite of my grandmother." So it ended up that Ruth came to my house, where I have quite a lot of my grandmother's paintings, and we decided to do a show.

GOODWIN

What's your grandmother's name?

ANDREWS

Her name is Lilia Tuckerman. So we did the show: "Lilia Tuckerman: California Landscape Paintings of the Twenties and Thirties." I guess you couldn't find an exhibition that was more different from "Electric Art" than "Landscape Paintings of the Twenties and Thirties," but it was a beautiful show. There were paintings of eucalyptus trees and purple mountains and light in the ocean and other things like night scenes of cars driving with their headlights down winding roads. The paintings showed in a specific way the kind of life that went on in California in those days. An interesting thing to the women at the Woman's Building was that my grandmother raised a large family -- she had five daughters, thirteen grandchildren, and twenty-three great grandchildren by the time she passed away, so she led a very active family life, a very active social life -- and at the same time she was able to pursue her art with a great deal of integrity. From the show, it was evident that she was really an artist -- she was really a painter, someone whose art is to be taken seriously, not just as a pastime or a hobby.

GOODWIN

Was she a large factor in your own art education? I don't remember discussing her.

ANDREWS

No, we didn't discuss her. Well, she was not the deciding factor in my becoming an artist, but I was always conscious of my grandmother's paintings. At a very early age, I used to go out painting with my grandmother. She was one of those open-air painters. She used to take her easel and climb over fences and go in the fields to get a place to paint from, and I used to go with her. What was valuable to me was the idea that art was something that not everybody did but that some people could do and take seriously, even if it wasn't for everyone. So my grandmother was one person around me that I could see who was being an artist.

GOODWIN

Where did she study art?

ANDREWS

Oh, she studied in New England with -- I can't remember the teachers she studied with, but they were quite well known landscape painters of their day. Of course, when she was studying, it was about the turn of the century, and so the latest thing at that time that she knew about was postimpressionism. She painted a lot with a palette knife, for instance, a direct application of color on the canvas, which was considered incredibly daring at that time.

GOODWIN

Let's talk for a while about Cal State Northridge and your work there.

ANDREWS

Well, I only taught there for one year, you know.

GOODWIN

Oh, I thought it was longer.

ANDREWS

No, I taught there for a year. I just thought it was an interesting way to get out of the rut of teaching always at UCLA, so I did that simultaneously. I taught a morning class a couple of days a week. Cal State Northridge developed very quickly, in a few years, from a few Quonset huts in an orange grove into a growing, full-blown university. They asked me while they were building it some questions about how to build a sculpture department. So I helped them, and I established a good relationship with them, and I went over there and taught for that year. But it wasn't that different from what I was doing here at UCLA.

GOODWIN

Is there much competition among the campuses of the University of California?

ANDREWS

Competition for what?

GOODWIN

Glory, money, students?

ANDREWS

Well, of course. I think that there's more competition between the University of California as a whole with other universities, but there's also a lot of cooperation between them.

GOODWIN

What kind?

ANDREWS

Oh, in the sense of exchanging ideas, exchanging students, and working on similar problems.

GOODWIN

I remember about the time I was applying to college that UCLA was being built as a center for the arts. Of course, the Dickson building was going up, but the whole curriculum seemed to be expanded both in terms of studio and art history. It seemed that both Berkeley and Los Angeles were going to be the centers for art activity for the system.

ANDREWS

Oh, well, I don't know what people thought they were doing then. I don't think that really happened. There's a very active art department at Santa Barbara. There's a very active art department at UC Davis. Davis was supposed to be a farming college, but of course it obviously isn't, and what was once a sort of agricultural college has now become a very highly sophisticated university exploring all aspects of growth and ecology.

GOODWIN

Right. I was going to make that point, that it seems that almost all the campuses have active art programs now.

ANDREWS

Sure. San Diego has a terrific art department, and they all do.

GOODWIN

Do you think that each campus represents a different style, movement, or emphasis?

ANDREWS

Well, I don't think that any one campus is even consistent enough within itself to say that it has its own emphasis. Whatever emphasis, whatever direction a campus art department has, is a result of people who are teaching there. When those people are there, the people with the most powerful ideas give shape to their ideas, and students are interested in those ideas. So obviously, while you have somebody at Davis like Wayne Thiebaud, you have an interest in certain kinds of painting. Or if you have Bob Arenson doing ceramics, obviously that place is going to become a center of funky ceramics because Arenson is there. But what Arenson does is different from what Thiebaud does, is different from what other people on that faculty do. Or you may have people at Santa Barbara like Howard Warshaw, who's interested in classical drawing -- drawing the figure and drawing the body -- so that's an interest; but then there are other people there who are different.

GOODWIN

Irvine certainly developed fast as an art center.

ANDREWS

Yes, it really did. Irvine has a lot of good artists on its faculty -- Tony Delap and Ashiro Tegawa. They have John Mason there in ceramics, of course. They don't have a very good art facility, but they do a lot of interesting work there. They have a small but good gallery, and they've had a number of very good gallery directors. For the last couple of years, they had Hal Glicksman, who has put on a series of fascinating, active shows. Now Hal has gone to the Otis Art Institute, and now Melinda Wortz is the director of that gallery, so I think we can expect to see more fascinating things happening there. One very interesting thing that happened there while Hal was there and is being carried on by Melinda is the use of the outdoor space. Behind the gallery there is a lot, a dirt lot, about sixty feet long and twenty feet wide, that sort of somehow got left out. It didn't get covered with asphalt or made into a bicycle rack or anything else. In order to sort of keep it within his purview, Hal decided that it was just what some artists would like nothing better than to have, a dirt lot that you could do anything you wanted in.

GOODWIN

A sandbox?

ANDREWS

A sandbox, right. So he asked a number of artists to do things there, some of which were quite fascinating. Gary Lloyd, who works with me now at UCLA, made a piece there. He dug down into the ground and buried ropes and made little pyramids and mudholes and so forth. Then I executed a piece there last year, which went from the summer solstice to the winter solstice. It went from June 21 to December 21. My installation consisted of two slabs of marble, some eucalyptus poles, and a pool of water. It had a lot to do with reflections of light, with the shadows of the eucalyptus trees on the marble and the image of the sun in the water. For the opening of the piece, I performed a tea ceremony on a slab of aluminum which was part of the piece. Later on in the same gallery, Shiro Ikegowa did a tea ceremony as a piece. He caught the fish and built a sushi bar inside the gallery. No, he didn't do a tea ceremony, excuse me; he did a sushi feast at which he served tea. He built the whole sushi bar, caught the fish, and prepared and served it himself. Then Lloyd Hamrol, one of my first students, worked in that space, shortly after I did. Then the next person was also one of my students, Victoria Franklin, who works in planted works of art. She did a vegetable mandala there. She made mounds of earth and then planted carrots, radishes, lettuce, all kinds of vegetables in patterns; and then finally, for the opening, she had a harvesting. So that plot of ground is still in possession of the gallery, and I think it's a marvelous idea for a gallery to own a field as well as a building.

GOODWIN

What do you think historians of the future are going to say about the University of California's patronage of the arts? Are they going to be grateful for the large number of artists who've been professors? Do you think that they're going to see that, to some extent, this was a form of public subsidy without which artists couldn't devote their full time to art? I mean, are people aware of the great potential?

ANDREWS

I think that more important, more visible, will be the students, will be the people who have become artists after having passed through the University of California. No one will ever know whether it's just because the University of California was there, and many brilliant people happened to be in Los Angeles because it was a large city, and the place to go to was UCLA; so they went there and somehow struggled through the program and eventually turned into artists. But I think that if that keeps happening, that a large nimber of really interesting and important young artists come through UCLA, it must be that somehow the university is helping those artists find themselves and helping them in their development. I think that result will probably be more significant than the fact that the university sheltered a few artists by giving them teaching jobs.

GOODWIN

Well, I was thinking of the statewide impact of the University of California, thinking of the art faculties at Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, Santa Barbara, Irvine. I think it must be fairly remarkable that this has happened.

ANDREWS

Well, it's not just the University of California. It's universities all over the United States. What's happening in universities has to do with artists thinking that it's okay to teach. That has to do with the thing I mentioned in the very beginning of all of this: that today artists begin to feel that they have to know, they have to have a consciousness of what they're doing and what it means, and not just be practitioners of putting paint down or practitioners of the bronze-casting craft. It is that awareness of knowledge, that intellectual content in art today, that makes it somehow all right to teach. I remember when I first started teaching twenty years ago, teaching was just a little bit suspect.

GOODWIN

Why?

ANDREWS

Well, because there was this kind of idea that you ought to just do it, you know, that artists should just create, and when people asked what they were doing, or asked artists to explain, the artists should just sort of grumble or say something poetic and enigmatic and let it go at that. Somehow the idea was that if you talked about art too much, somehow the divine inspiration would become diluted and you would become confused. So there was almost a fear of too much explanation. But I think that attitude has changed in the last twenty years, and that makes it now not only okay but even valuable. Now the idea of having a position in the university and having brilliant and eager students to inseminate with your ideas becomes a very attractive proposition for artists.

GOODWIN

I think it was last session we were talking about, among many things, patronage for the arts, church and state and so on. It seems to some extent the university is a great patron of the arts, even though it doesn't necessarily collect the art that its artists make. It sponsors the art.

ANDREWS

Yes, it does.

GOODWIN

Do you think teaching is an art?

ANDREWS

Is teaching an art? Oh, well, of course. You know it's an art.

GOODWIN

What's artful about it?

ANDREWS

Well, teaching is communication, isn't it? Getting across ideas, communicating ideas, communicating enthusiasm. You're communicating interest in various areas, just as art is. Not all artists are good teachers, but surprisingly enough, a lot of them are, even though not all artists are very articulate. But in a substantial proportion of the cases, a person who is a good artist, who has a feeling for materials, a feeling for communication, a feeling for style, also has a feeling for how to get those ideas across to the people.

GOODWIN

Let's reverse that thought. Do you have to be a good artist to be a good teacher?

ANDREWS

Not necessarily.

GOODWIN

Are there some people who belong on a faculty who are just good teachers?

ANDREWS

Of course. The university has long recognized that. We have positions weighted in various ways towards research and teaching. The university has a lot of people who are terrific in running certain kinds of classes, in doing teaching. Their main emphasis and their work is in teaching, and maybe they don't do so much research or write so many books or discover so many things or do so much art, but they are somewhat recognized for their teaching. In the university there are different kinds of positions. Some people are invited in to talk; some of them are lecturers rather than professors; there are also others on the faculty who are brilliant researchers but who don't get along very well with younger students, who are impatient with basic matters. If they're valuable enough, ways are found for those people to do a lot of research and have contact with graduate students, do their stuff that way. Of course, there are many, many other people who are not only brilliant researchers or artists but who really enjoy communicating with students and would just as soon be teaching an undergraduate course as a graduate course.

GOODWIN

Are there a few things that you could point to, ideas about teaching that you've experienced over the years, things you've learned as a teacher about working with students?

ANDREWS

I think anything I can say about that -- about how to be a good teacher, or what I discovered after twenty years of teaching -- would really be the sort of thing that you shouldn't do as a teacher. I think it always comes out sounding...

GOODWIN

... corny?

ANDREWS

... pedantic, corny, trite, pompous, and just exactly what we mean by "academic." Teaching is a kind of a feel. It's a kind of an active relationship, which comes out in teaching. I think it's better to leave it at that.

GOODWIN

Do you learn a lot from your students?

ANDREWS

Well, sure, of course.

GOODWIN

You've done a lot of lecturing outside the university, several times a year in various places to various groups. How come?

ANDREWS

Because they ask me to.

GOODWIN

Do you feel it's an obligation you have?

ANDREWS

No, it's not an obligation.

GOODWIN

Do you enjoy academic encounters?

ANDREWS

Well, that's not an academic encounter.

GOODWIN

I don't mean "academic" in a negative sense. I mean it in a positive sense. I mean you like learning situations.

ANDREWS

It's interesting to talk to people about art, and some of the lectures are lectures about myself, my own art, what I think about it, what kind of works I try to do, and what effect those works have on people and on society. That's interesting to me; to tell people about that helps to clarify my own ideas. And often, just as with learning from your students, you learn from people that you lecture to. People respond in various, interesting ways. But an equal number of my lectures are not about myself but about some aspect of art in general that I'm interested in -- maybe on water or water sculpture or many, many other aspects of art. Most of the lectures that I do are combined with either slides or movies or both, all of which I've taken myself, so that I'm really not just lecturing but talking about these pictures and responding to the way people react to the visual material I'm projecting.

GOODWIN

Before we finish off this aspect of your work -- teaching, education -- I'm going to talk a little about art schools as opposed to university art departments. What are the basic differences today between art schools and university art departments?

ANDREWS

Well, the main difference is that the art school teaches art and art courses and doesn't teach all of the background subjects that a university teaches, like languages, history, anthropology, all of those other courses that tend to make up what we like to call "liberal education." Also, a less obvious point is that in a university, there are other disciplines which may not particularly have to do with a liberal or an arts education but which may be very useful to artists. There may be an engineering department which has things that would be of interest to artists, or all kinds of other aspects of knowledge which simply aren't available in an art school. Of course, that doesn't mean that a student who's really interested in expanding his or her knowledge can't go and find that knowledge somewhere. Just because you go to an art school doesn't mean that you're invading the university if you go over there and try to get some knowledge out of it. You find that the most interesting, dedicated students are doing just exactly that kind of thing. They are going to where the knowledge is, and this is how they develop an ability to do art. They develop a kind of investigative ability. They know where to find out what they want to know, whether it's how to deal with the material or whether it's a philosophical concept that they want to track down. But on the other hand, average students, or all the students other than those few that we've been talking about, are not very interested in seeking out anything that's not right under their nose or is not part of an assignment where they have to write an essay or bring something back. So that an art school can be a narrower kind of an education, although there are some people who go to art schools after they take their undergraduate training at a university.

GOODWIN

Does an art school education offer a more intense art experience?

ANDREWS

Well, usually it does in the undergraduate stages because there's simply more time to do art in an art school where you're not also studying other subjects. It is true, though, in a university, students don't get to do as much artwork as they would like to if they really are interested in art. Not all art students are that interested in art. They would like art simply to be part of their general education. So that's fine for them.

GOODWIN

Why are art schools dying out?

ANDREWS

Well, the reasons are complex. One is simply economic. Large institutions take so much money to run that art schools usually have to be subsidized by large amounts of extra funds, and there is a lot of competition for funds. It's hard for art schools to justify themselves. A few old art schools in the country are doing pretty well, though, like RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design; Cranbrook Academy in Michigan; Kansas City Art Institute. Cal Arts in Valencia seems to be pretty stable. The San Francisco Art Institute seems to still be pretty viable and is doing a pretty good job. So art schools are not dying out.

GOODWIN

Do you think in a way the university has usurped the function of the art school?

ANDREWS

Well, yes, to a certain extent it has, you know, because it's attractive to an artist today to go to a university, where there are all the advantages a university has to offer. All these people are involved in all kinds of different subjects, and in the kind of life that goes on around the campus, the cultural advantages -- concerts, music, plays, dramas, all that sort of thing, computer terminals, engineering departments, anechoic chambers, all kinds of glass-blowing labs, all kinds of things like that that universities have. On the other hand, at an art school, particularly one which is broad enough to include a large number of arts -- where you may have music, painting, dance, theater, all those things together in one complex -- there' s a real advantage to that, too, in the sense that there's a real interpenetration, interdisciplinary kind of excitement that takes place. That's great to be part of. Since the school is smaller, there's a lot more personal interaction between people. Students and faculty all get to know each other better. So there can be an advantage. There can be a kind of intensity generated in an art school when everything's going right.

GOODWIN

What about at the graduate level? Are programs basically the same, comparing the art school and the university? We've already mentioned resources that the university has that the art school doesn't have, but the form of instruction is essentially the same?

ANDREWS

Well, it's the same in the sense that the most advanced students aren't taking directed courses anymore but are working in a more informal way on longer projects, projects of their own invention. So it tends to be a matter of discussion, individual criticism. It tends to be much more informal. Of course, in the university maybe there's a little bit more pressure on the professors. although it really depends on who the teachers are, how relaxed the atmosphere is, and how much competition there is to get whatever degrees may be available.

GOODWIN

Do you know if the same students apply to UCLA as apply to Otis or Cal Arts?

ANDREWS

Well, some of them do. Some people apply at a lot of places, all at once. Most students make a rather intelligent survey of the different kinds of institutions that offer the kinds of programs that they want and then apply only to those that they would like to go to. Different students want different things out of their graduate education.

GOODWIN

Los Angeles must be a rather unusual place to have so many university art programs and also at least three large art schools: Otis, Cal Arts, and Art Center.

ANDREWS

Yes, Los Angeles is a rather unusual place.

GOODWIN

This is the wish category, crystal-ball gazing: if you were reliving your life and planning the ideal art education, what would you plan?

ANDREWS

You mean for myself or if I were planning an institution?

GOODWIN

No.

ANDREWS

Where would I go?

GOODWIN

Where would you go and what would you do? Today.

ANDREWS

Well, today is rather different from 1945, '46.

GOODWIN

I'm not saying you have to choose something other than what you did, but what appeals to you now that didn't exist then?

ANDREWS

Well, I think I'd probably still go to a university because my intellectual interests are really quite broad. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of things. I'm interested in science; I'm interested in religion; I'm interested in plants and growth; I'm interested in animals and in animal communication; I'm interested in communication between dolphins and whales. Many intellectual needs that I have I think would be better satisfied at a university than anywhere else. I think if I were starting over again, one thing that I would like to do, as well as studying art, as well as more zoology and more biology, in the beginning of my studies I would like to study more botany and study more geology. I'd like to maybe combine all of the interests that I have in architecture and art under landscape architecture.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 7, 19 76

GOODWIN

I'm just going to mention some of the topics we've discussed previously because we haven't been together for about three weeks. We began with a discussion of Oliver's childhood and education, his travels and training. We then continued with a discussion of his work at UCLA, including some of his more prominent graduate students, and also some of his colleagues on the faculty, including visitors. We also discussed some of the characteristics of Los Angeles as an art center, and we concluded last time with a discussion of some of the advantages and disadvantages of training artists at universities as opposed to art schools. With this session, we're going to talk about Oliver's work as an artist, about his sculpture in various media and forms. Let's go back to the time when you were still a student and your work in sculpture was just beginning.

ANDREWS

Yes, that's when I first began to make sculpture per se. As we've discussed earlier, I was always drawing, ever since I was five or six years old. I'd always been making things also: making armor, making weapons, making boats, making model airplanes, and even making soapbox racing cars, as we talked about earlier, so that making things and carving wood and working with metal were always pursuits that I was interested in following. However, I had never quite made the connection, pulled those things together into something that you could call sculpture. I knew that I was interested in art, and I knew ever since I got out of the army that art was something that I was going to spend the rest of my life doing, but it never really focused in my attention that I would be a sculptor. I was interested in painting, and I was interested in drawing, and I was interested in all the forms of art. During my last year at Stanford, when it became possible to pursue studies a little bit more independently and there was someone sympathetic to my work -- Victor Thompson -- I began to make some sculpture. Actually, at that time at Stanford there were no sculpture courses given. There was painting and drawing, but no sculpture. So I decided to make sculpture anyway. The first real sculpture that I began to make was a wood sculpture. I found some oak logs and I bought, I think, two chisels (a flat chisel and a curved chisel) and an army surplus hammer (which I still have), and I began to carve these blocks of wood. I found two pieces of apricot wood and a couple of oak logs that were lying around the campus, that were to be used for firewood. So I carved several sculptures and was really thrilled by the results. I was very pleased to see what I could do with just pure carving. whereas before, my efforts in carving had been directed towards making something more or less utilitarian. But I had had some experience in wood carving. I had made bows, for instance, carved bows of yew and osage orange wood. Then, after I graduated from Stanford, back on Mountain Drive in Santa Barbara, I began to make work in concrete. This was also carving. That summer, I made a number of very large -- compared to before -- wood carvings. We got some blocks of wood that had been used to shore up ships in a shipyard. These were about six feet long and three feet wide and two feet high, something like that. I carved a number of large wood sculptures that summer and made some big concrete sculptures and also some concrete furniture. All that work was done just before I went to Europe. In Europe I did mostly drawings, several hundred drawings, during those nine months in Europe. All the drawings were very sculpturally oriented. They were all of sculptures or proposals for sculptures and had something to do with sculptural ideas. I continued to use those drawings as working sources after I came back from Europe. This was in about 1950, I guess. I continued to work in sculpture, and I also began to make some ceramic sculpture at that time. It was shortly after that that Donald Bear, who was then the director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and whom I had known for a long time, saw my work. I had my first one-man exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1950. That included concrete sculpture, wood sculpture, ceramic sculpture, and some wire sculpture -- twisted wire sculpture, woven-wire sculpture -- I had just begun to make.

GOODWIN

These were mostly abstract forms. Is that true?

ANDREWS

Well, no. Well, they were actually all based on the figure, most of them. They were simplified and abstracted, you might say, but the source of them all was figurative. It was during that time that I met Iris Tree in Santa Barbara and began working in the theater doing stage sets for Iris. Then I moved to San Francisco for a year, where I worked as a draftsman for an engineering company. In San Francisco I didn't have the space and facilities for wood carving and concrete that I had had on Mountain Drive in Santa Barbara. So living in that little apartment, working every day, I went ahead with the wire sculpture, something that was light and portable. I could carry it around with me and work on it, even take it on the streetcar with me. You could sort of roll it up and stuff it in a bag and take it somewhere and unroll it. The portability of that sculpture really interested me a lot, I thought it was a very good kind of sculpture for a mobile society, for people who are always moving around, in the sense that they could roll the sculpture up. Quite a large sculpture could be rolled up and stuffed in the trunk of a car and carried somewhere and unrolled, and then beaten and twisted back into shape a little bit. Then you could hang it on the wall or hang it from the ceiling. During that year I made quite a lot of wire sculpture, and then I returned to Santa Barbara. During that time in San Francisco, I bought my first welding torch. I had learned to weld earlier in school. I got my first welding torch shortly before I left San Francisco, and began to make some welded sculpture, which was my principal way of making sculpture for many, many years. And of course, I still do a lot of welding.

GOODWIN

Were you making sculpture to sell or basically to express yourself in spite of any sales?

ANDREWS

I didn't think about it that way. I was making sculpture to express myself, and at the same time I was quite aware that I intended sculpture to be my profession. I was interested in selling it, but it didn't seem to me an either/or kind of proposition. Then I returned to Santa Barbara and did some more work with Iris Tree in her theater, then got married and started building a house. I built a house on Mountain Drive, sort of improvising as I went along. I improvised the house, building it entirely from the ground up, starting with courses of stone, with stone walls. The house was constructed of redwood from there up, using mostly scrap lumber. I never made plans for the house. I'd just go to work every day and cut and nail and hammer and chisel, and gradually the house took shape. I found some houses that were being demolished and salvaged some windows and doors out of them. Eventually I built the whole house and did all the plumbing. This was in the days before the Uniform Building Code extended into the further reaches of Santa Barbara County, so one could still do that kind of thing oneself. All the people who lived in the Mountain Drive community needed plans for their houses; so I was doing quite a lot of architectural drawing for other people, but it seemed to me more fun to build a house without any plans at all -- build it out of your head, as it were. I learned a lot about building techniques at that time, and of course many of these techniques also applied to the making of sculpture. Then we moved down to Santa Monica for a year, and I worked in my garage and continued to make welded sculpture. Just before that, I had joined the Paul Kantor Gallery. It was about this time that Charles Alan started his gallery in New York. During the time that I was living in Santa Monica, I had my first show in New York with Charles Alan. That started a rather intensive relationship with Charles as a dealer, and I had several shows with him, and he sold some of my work. Shortly after that, we went back to Santa Barbara and lived there for two more years until I got the job teaching at UCLA, at which time we moved again to Santa Monica.

GOODWIN

Have you been living here [408 Sycamore Road] all that time?

ANDREWS

First we lived two blocks over the river there on Hillside Lane. About fifteen years ago, I bought this house and moved into it. During that time the work was rather medium in scale, and it was welded out of bronze and steel.

GOODWIN

Where do you get those materials?

ANDREWS

Well, some of the materials you buy.

GOODWIN

Where?

ANDREWS

At metal supply houses. Some of those works also combined some found parts that I just sort of collected here and there and all over.

GOODWIN

Like what?

ANDREWS

Well, all kinds of parts of objects and machines and appliances and various things like that. The idea of using found objects was never a really large part of my work, as it is with some people who were making junk sculpture at the time or, say, sculptors like David Smith and Richard Stankiewicz, who were really using quite a lot of found objects in their work. The piece called The Reaper, which Los Angeles County Museum owns, probably contains more junk -- I should say more found objects, manufactured parts, and industrial debris -- than any of my other work. Most of the parts in my other sculptures were fabricated, were cut out of pieces of metal or formed in some way to the shape that they were, rather than found. An artist whom I admired very much who was working in Charles Alan's gallery was Richard Hunt, who is still doing welded sculpture and lives in Chicago. My sculpture of that period had very poetic titles to it, with mythological, lyrical, poetic overtones of meaning and symbolism.

GOODWIN

What are some more examples?

ANDREWS

Examples of what?

GOODWIN

Of poetic titles. Is that what you mean -- titles?

ANDREWS

The titles were poetic because the sculptures were still slightly referential, slightly figurative, and contained all kinds of literary allusions in their symbolism. If you care to read them, you would see references to figures, to animals, to boats, to astronomical devices, to traps and lures.

GOODWIN

Would you decide on a title after you made a sculpture, or was it something you planned?

ANDREWS

Usually afterwards, but the influences, the allusions, the kind of symbolic content of the sculpture would grow while the sculpture was being made. Then, finally, the content would be summed up in a title. Sometimes the title would be apparent; sometimes it would take a while after finishing the work before the title revealed itself to me. But the title is an important part of that kind of sculpture.

GOODWIN

What would be your working methods as far as the production of a sculpture? Would you work on one piece at a time and then move on to another or work on many simultaneously? Would you do preliminary drawings?

ANDREWS

Yes, I make quite a lot of preliminary drawings. I was drawing all the time. Out of all of the preliminary drawings available to me to start a new sculpture, I would pick the one drawing that seemed to interest me the most. I would assemble the materials that I didn't have and begin the sculpture, begin to cut the pieces and weld the sculpture together. Sometimes I would start more than one sculpture -- sometimes there would be two or maybe three -- but usually I'd work on pretty much one at a time. As the sculpture would grow and evolve, it would almost always depart somewhat from the drawing that had instigated it. The sculpture would be continually improvised along the general plans of the drawing until it was finished. The sculptures seemed to be generated in families, in works which had similar stylistic looks to them. The first pieces were quite linear. They were mostly made of rods and bars and thin sheets of metal. Gradually, as that welded sculpture proceeded, it became a little bit more solid and more volumetric and made of more enclosed, boxed-in forms. They also began to include a few other materials, mainly wood in the beginning and later stone. So those two tendencies continued as I was working at UCLA and as I continued to do welding. The tendency of the sculpture to grow more volumetric increased. Like many other sculptors at that time, and particularly welders, I was influenced by the work of David Smith and also by Anthony Caro. I began to look for other ways for the sculpture to move over the ground plane, other than standing on a plinth or on a solid base. My earlier sculptures had very complicated ways of standing, had multiple legs, and sometimes there were different tiers of the sculpture as it moved up from stage to stage. The sculptures would seem to have a first story and a second story. Then gradually the main elements of the sculpture came in contact with the ground plane or with the floor and related to it in a much more direct way. As this happened and as the sculpture became more solid, I began to use a more varied combination of materials. In 1960, I built a small foundry in the studio of some ceramics students of mine in Los Angeles. Later they moved down to Costa Mesa, and I built another foundry down there. Through doing that, I learned how to design foundries. So I designed one when the new sculpture studio was built at UCLA. It contained a complete foundry that I designed. After the new foundry was in operation about 1964, I moved out of the foundry that I had in Costa Mesa. That is how I got into the process of casting. And some of the parts of the sculptures that I have made since 1960 have cast bronze parts. Then I used carved wood sections in them and timbers in the larger pieces. Some of them used blocks of stone, and some used bare metal or polished metal in combination with painted metal. So there was the development there of a single sculpture that combined and harmonized, or contrasted perhaps, a number of different materials. During all this time I was continuing to go diving, skin diving and scuba diving. Living by the ocean was very much a part of my life, but during that time it did not occur to me at first to use water as part of my sculpture. Water, I had always thought of pretty much in terms of fountains, in the traditional way of using fountains, until my perspective was broadened by the traveling I did in '63 and '64, during my sabbatical. I began to think of ways of working with water that weren't like traditional European fountains. Insights came to me from seeing water used in the Middle East and water used in Japan. I began to develop ideas for using water that I thought would work with California light and space and work with contemporary architecture in ways that I didn't think the older ways of using water could do.

GOODWIN

How do you feel about your work in terms of consistency? Are you pleased with most of the objects or do you find that once in a great while you do something that thrills you and makes the others look less interesting? Do you work at a generally high level of achievement in terms of your own expectations?

ANDREWS

Well, of course I feel that some works are more successful than others. Sure, sometimes there are problems that need to be resolved. The sculpture just won't work out, and you keep working on it and working on it and changing it. Sometimes some drastic step is necessary to really change the direction of the whole piece if it isn't developing right. Or sometimes you have to abandon something- you just have to junk it and start over again. It just becomes apparent it's not going to work out in the terms that you're interested in. I've been through quite a number of distinctly different styles of sculpture, and I've used a lot of different materials. At one time, about 1961, there was a phase of ceramic sculpture which was much more gestural and loose and open than the more rigid metal sculpture was. The first shows that I had contained a number of different kinds of sculpture. I'm not saying that bothered me much at the time. I also felt that I would like the work to look more consistent, but at the same time I had so many interests going, so many different kinds of things that I wanted to explore, that I didn't want to get stuck in any one particular stylistic avenue just for the sake of having a consistent-looking show, and just for the sake of making sculpture which had a kind of identifiable trademark or style. So the work tended to be rather diverse for quite a while. Later, the combination pieces began to have a consistency of style, and the sculpture really began to look like one body of work when I got into the water sculptures. I also tended to return and rethink certain kinds of sculptures, so that in retrospect you could easily go back to the whole body of work and pick out pieces that could be grouped together in families, but they might be separated in the working process by other pieces that were quite different. Probably I won't have to worry about that very much until someday when someone does a retrospective exhibition.

GOODWIN

Do you like to be working constantly or do you like to work at intervals, take rests between big pieces? Do you always want to be active?

ANDREWS

I don't know. I never thought about it in those terms of whether I work the way I like to work. You know, "Well, let's see, I'd like to work this month and take next month off."

GOODWIN

Say, do you work every weekend?

ANDREWS

I'm always working, George. I'm always working. There are usually about ten different things under way at the same time. Some artists who teach, for instance, teach with a very concentrated effort, and then they work in the vacations or something like that. But I always have some work going, and then in the vacations I work even more. But I always have some work at hand, and I work every day.

GOODWIN

Where do you do your sculpture?

ANDREWS

Well, it all depends.

GOODWIN

On the sculpture, on the individual pieces.

ANDREWS

Well, when I'm doing a large commission -- and sometimes I'm working on one, sometimes I'm not working on any for a while, but most of the time I have at least one, sometimes even two or three commissions going -- some of the work on those pieces is fabricated by fabricators. I have one man that I've worked with for about fifteen years who has a sheet-metal shop, and he does my work just because he's a master craftsman and he gets bored turning out all the standard stainless-steel tanks for rockets or whatever kind of expert metal fabrication he has to do by the hundreds. He just likes to work on my things because they're interesting. He understands what I want, and he's able to do it very beautifully. One aspect of working is making drawings -- I mean, not artistic drawings but working drawings. First I make drawings for myself, and then I make drawings for fabricators that turn into blueprints. Those blueprints can be understood by metal fabricators, and I take those blueprints around and get bids on them and discuss the details, and then a sculpture begins in some factory or metal-fabricating shop. Making sculpture under those conditions means going to that shop, sometimes every day, sometimes several times a week, talking about the piece, how it's coming.

GOODWIN

Why do you use fabricators?

ANDREWS

What?

GOODWIN

Why does an artist use fabricators? What is their role?

ANDREWS

To make the sculptures, so that you can extend what you're able to do. No artist who does large work could do all the work himself or herself -- there's just too much of it to do. Once you know how to weld, once you know how to grind, know how to sand, there's no point in spending your energy doing that drudgery day in and day out when you could be designing and conceiving new sculptures.

GOODWIN

So it's time-consuming and it's boring?

ANDREWS

What you have to do is find a fabricator who can do the work the way you want it. The artistic criterion of excellence and execution is simply your approval and acceptance of that work. In fact, the man that does welding for me is a much better welder than I am, probably is a much better welder than any artist could possibly be, because he's been doing welding four or five or six or ten or twelve hours a day, five, six or seven days a week, for the last thirty years. He's a master. There are many other people who are fabricators like that. For instance, there are now fabrication places that are specifically set up to make sculpture for sculptors. There's Milgo; there's Lippincott in New York; several of them in different parts of the country. That's what they do: they make welded sculpture for sculptors. So part of the operation is overseeing that work. Some of the larger pieces, I wouldn't have the tools. I wouldn't have the size of machinery of press brakes necessary to make a twenty-four-foot-high stainless-steel sculpture or to bend a sheet of metal twenty feet long. I don't have that equipment. But I can design it, and it can be made exactly the way I want it to be made. Then some of the other work, some of the smaller pieces, are made at the studio at UCLA, where my students help me with the work. In that way the students are paid -- it's a good way for them to make money and at the same time an excellent way for them to learn. They can learn a lot of things by being paid to do a job that would be much more difficult to try to teach them. It's a very simple and direct way of learning. Many of my students who have become artists themselves have been apprentices and worked for me at some time or another during our association. Then I have a studio out in the back of my house, and I work out there also. Particularly when I'm exploring something that is new or difficult or that I really don't quite know how to tell anybody how to do it, I work on it myself for a while. I work out the technical procedures. For instance, when I first began dealing with titanium, I didn't quite know how to bend titanium or how to weld titanium or how to polish titanium or how to cut titanium. So I worked on it myself for a while until I learned how to do those things, and then I could show other people how to do them.

GOODWIN

You sound like a metal freak. [laughter]

ANDREWS

Well, I am. I do a lot of work in metal.

GOODWIN

What do you like about metal? As opposed to wood?

ANDREWS

I like wood, too. I was going to say I do a lot of the wood carving myself. It's interesting, these two media that I work with, fire and water. Fire is necessary for welding; it's necessary for ceramics. When you do welding, you dress for it. Instead of wearing a face mask and aqualung so you can navigate in the water, you wear a pair of goggles and gloves and you wear a respirator over your nose. But you see, in welding you're working with fluid metal, and the behavior of metal when it's fluid is fascinating. Each metal has its own characteristic. Silver is very, very fluid, very, very elusive. On the other hand, it clings to everything. Other metals are hard and obdurate. Other metals are slow and gooey and sticky. In welding you experience metals by knowing them in their fluid states.

GOODWIN

So you're as interested in the process of making a sculpture as the final product?

ANDREWS

I'm interested in the process as part of the final product. It's all part of one thing. The process of working I like very much, and if I don't work enough I begin to miss it. A lot of the making of sculpture, especially in commissions where you're dealing with architects and buildings -- a lot of the process in making commissioned sculpture is done on the typewriter, where you're typing letters to people. For me, for my temperament, that has to be balanced by working. I like to get my hands on the materials, I like to weld and polish and carve and cut and all that. I am glad that I have people to help me. I wouldn't want to spend all of my time grinding and polishing, but a certain amount, particularly where that physical activity is in the creation of a new form, I find really exciting. I think it's necessary for me to keep my hands on the material somewhat in order to keep in touch with what I 'm doing.

GOODWIN

Are you aware, too, of the sounds of making sculpture?

ANDREWS

Well, sure, it makes a lot of noise.

GOODWIN

I mean, as long as we're scrutinizing the process....

ANDREWS

It makes a lot of noise, particularly metal working. Carving makes some nice sounds. The thump of a mallet against wood or the clang of an iron hammer on a stone chisel.

GOODWIN

Is making sculpture essentially a form of play?

ANDREWS

It depends on what you think play is. Is work play or is work work?

GOODWIN

It depends on what you're doing.

ANDREWS

Can work be play?

GOODWIN

Sure.

ANDREWS

Making sculpture, sometimes it's work, sometimes it's hard work, sometimes it's play, sometimes it's pure drudgery.

GOODWIN

Is it hard work in the weight of the materials?

ANDREWS

Sometimes the materials are very heavy, you know. You have to push them around, get them from one place to another. But sometimes making sculpture is driving around town in the smog, buying things from stores. It's all kinds of activity that all kinds of people do. Of course, the work that artists do actually comprises many different kinds of activities, not just brushing paint on the canvas or welding or whatever. It has to do with all those things -- speaking, talking, writing letters, teaching, driving your car around, dealing with people. All that's part of making the work.

GOODWIN

Do you work at night?

ANDREWS

Yes, I work a lot at night. I like to work at night because the day is mostly a time when people want my time. I'm teaching or talking to people or people are visiting me or people are calling me up on the telephone. At night, all that quiets down, and it's possible for me to have time to myself. I think that's very important for any sustained kind of work, that you can have enough time so that you can pursue and develop ideas without being distracted. I like that aspect of the night. Also, temperamentally, I find the night the time that I like to work in.

GOODWIN

You're a night person?

ANDREWS

Yes. Often I work all night long.

GOODWIN

I haven't seen your studio, but do you tend to have your own work displayed there, things that you've completed previously?

ANDREWS

No, usually not. Usually I keep things stored away. I don't like to look at them all the time. I like to get them out and look at them critically and then put them away again. Of course, the water sculptures really aren't in existence unless they're full of water, the pump is turned on, and they're working.

GOODWIN

What about other artists' work? Would that be a distraction?

ANDREWS

Well, you see a lot of artists' work around here, There's a painting by Varda there, and there's a raven mask that [Kwakiutl] Chief Tla-Kwa-Gyula (James Earl King) made us. Yes, I like to be surrounded by other artists' work -- at home, that is, or in other places. The studio is a place where the decks should be cleared for action.

GOODWIN

What do you do with your old drawings?

ANDREWS

Oh, I keep them, and then I look at them every once in a while, throw some of them away. I have a whole trunkful of them over there in the corner.

GOODWIN

Do you ever sell them, too?

ANDREWS

Sometimes I do. Sometimes I give them away or I give them to causes, but they've been exhibited in various places.

GOODWIN

How about your favorite sculptures that aren't commissioned? Do you keep them for yourself?

ANDREWS

Which ones?

GOODWIN

The ones you enjoy the most.

ANDREWS

I enjoy the most?

GOODWIN

Or would you like to sell them?

ANDREWS

Oh, I have some of them. Most of them are sold. Some of my earlier work I still have. I like to look at that every once in a while. Some of it I see in other people's homes. There is an earlier piece in [my wife] Jill's office there that you can see from here. That's a piece that, say, we would have around, and I would look at it for a while, and then I'd put it away and put something else up.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 7, 1976

GOODWIN

We're continuing our discussion of Oliver's sculpture. We're going to focus on his commissions. What were some of your earliest commissions?

ANDREWS

Well, the commissions came out of water sculpture, mostly. However, the first commission that I ever had was a commission for a light sculpture from the architect Eero Saarinen, who was a friend of my dealer, Charles Alan. Eero was married to Charles Alan's sister. Aline. Eero was commissioned to build a hockey rink for Yale University, and this is a very unusual building with a hyperbolic paraboloid roof that was built on suspension cables. The nearest thing I can say that it looked like was a large, overturned ship. On the front of it he wanted a lighting fixture. It had been first suggested that he should have someone with a great New England tradition behind him, a New England blacksmith or somebody like that. But he saw my work, and he said, "Well, we should really just get as far away from New England as we possibly can. We'll commission this Oliver Andrews from California to make a lighting fixture for the building." But the irony of it was, of course, that my great-great-great-grandfather, Oliver Wolcott, was the first governor of Connecticut, where Yale is. In fact, he and his son and his grandson all went to Yale, so my background couldn't have been more traditional than that.

GOODWIN

Had you built or designed a lighting fixture before?

ANDREWS

I never designed a lighting fixture in my life before, but the idea really intrigued me. Eero came out here and talked to me about it, and it was wonderful discussing it with him because he really understood what he was doing and was very open-minded about my ideas. In fact, he finally accepted an idea of mine which was really quite different from what he originally had in mind. So I made this lighting fixture, a sculpture actually, and it was installed on the building, and it's still there. On the strength of that, Eero commissioned me to make all the lighting fixtures for the two colleges that he built a few years later at Yale, Stiles and Morse colleges, which were built of stone and were sort of medieval-looking structures. I made twenty-six bronze lighting fixtures that went over the doors of these buildings. There were two colleges back to back, joined where their dining rooms were. In each of the dining rooms there were five big hanging lanterns. Some of them were three feet, some of them were five feet in diameter. Then there were also sixty-four little lights that went in hallways and passages, the sort of thing that you would come across in an ancient castle, where you would have a torch stuck in the wall with a sort of iron grill around it. I made what I felt were contemporary versions of those kinds of things. This is an example obviously of where an artist must farm out the work to fabricators. Nobody could make, in a year, which was the fabrication time, that many structures by himself. I liked the idea of working with light. The form of the lighting fixtures themselves was important, but also the pattern of light, what the shape of the light was as it came out of the fixtures, and the kinds of shadow-forms the light cast on the wall. So I enjoyed that, and everybody liked those lighting fixtures. Every once in a while I go back to Yale and see how they're doing. They really work very well. They're both practical and fit in with the architecture. I thought at the time that doing this very large commission for an architect as famous as Eero would result in my getting to design a lot of lighting fixtures, but in fact that never happened, and I never designed any more. I was not again commissioned to design lighting fixtures until just a couple of years ago when I did a large commission at El Paseo de Saratoga. I designed the lighting fixtures there as well as seven water sculptures. So I had that experience with Eero, but I didn't really get into doing commissions in a steady way until I began to do water sculpture. About 1965, just about ten years ago. I developed a way of using water that flowed in a smooth, rippling sheet over the forms of the sculpture. The sculptures that I made were very simple, slablike shapes made of marble or ceramic or bronze. The water didn't shoot up out of them -- it just welled up. It was pumped up the inside and flowed down over those forms. I liked that very much. There was a quiet, contemplative quality. The first piece that I made, when I first got it working in a little tank, I immediately had the feeling that I had discovered a way of using water that was really going to be significant to me and that I was going to be able to do something with for quite a while. So I made a number of versions of those pieces. In fact, the first piece that I made like that I showed in an exhibition at the David Stuart Gallery along with some of the earlier work. A small commission for a Neutra house in Los Angeles came out of that. Then I showed a slightly larger version. Those were two slabs facing each other, one of bronze and one of marble, and I showed that at the Esther Bear Gallery in Santa Barbara. Out of that arrived another commission for Mr. and Mrs. Warren Tremaine for another Neutra house. I don't know why the first two commissions I got were both for Neutra houses, but they were. The Neutra house in Santa Barbara [1636 Moore Road] is a superb example of Neutra's architecture. It's a magnificent house with a pool connected to it, and the sculpture was installed in the pool.

GOODWIN

What was the device or the technology that you invented for moving the water? How did you achieve the effect you did?

ANDREWS

Well, there's no particular technology involved. I use little recirculating pumps. They're called that because they are submerged in water, and if you connect them onto a pipe, they piamp water out of the pipe. If the water falls back into the pool, it's continuously recirculated, The first pieces were simply level on top, and they filled up with water until the water flowed over the top of them. One of the good things technically about that kind of water sculpture was that they were so simple, that there wasn't a whole lot of complex internal pipes and jets and things like that which always seem to get clogged up and need constant adjustment. On my sculptures you can adjust the volume of the water flow so that it is very quiet, just barely rippling, which would be appropriate, say, for indoors, where the sound of the water is very amplified by being indoors. Where you're close to the piece, you don't want the sculpture to be too loud and splashing. On the other hand, out of doors -- in a public square, for instance -- you really need a lot more water action. The sculpture can be much more active and stimulating. So this gave the possibility for great range of expression, from the most quiet little ripple or trickle to an active gushing, splashing kind of action. So the basic pattern allowed a versatile handling of the water forms. Later I invented ways of curving the top of the sculpture so that instead of flowing over a straight, horizontal lip, the water actually flowed over a curve. That took a little bit more internal plumbing work to get the water to do that because, as every fool knows, water is level and doesn't flow over a curve. But I found ways of making it do that. So although there's a lot of piping going on in there to make a curved lip of water, where some parts are higher than other parts, still mechanically it's very simple, and the pipes are all open. There are still no jets, so that once the work is constructed, it works very efficiently. I explore different kinds of materials: Monel, stainless steel, bronze, titanium, a very high chrome stainless called Incanel, which is a bright, silvery color. All of these metals have different properties and do different things with water. Also my experience with light began to come into the play, because the way the water interacts with light is very important. So that many of the sculptures have light built into them or light in the pools in which they are, or light is in the base; and in some of the neon sculptures, the light source is inside the water. There are neon tubes in the center of the sculpture, and the water runs over the neon, which shimmers through it. I never really liked the idea of having light bulbs somehow contained inside the water shining out or shining up in your eyes, but I wanted a way to integrate the light more with the water. One day I was standing outside a motel in the rain -- it was one of those good old motels where all the roofs and windows are outlined with neon tiibes -- and I saw that the neon tubes were exposed to the rain with the water dripping on them. I thought, "Wow, that's great. The neon can be underwater. It's just a question of insulating the terminals, and you can put the neon tube in the water." I made a series of acrylic plastic, clear acrylic sculptures that have neon tubes inside of them. But most of the sculptures of that period were wandlike, or bladelike, of polished metal. They're called "Water Wands" or "Water Blades." By this time, I was no longer showing with Charles Alan because he had sold his gallery to Felix Landau; I was at this time showing with David Stuart here in Los Angeles. When I put on the "Electric Art" show at UCLA in 1969, I had one of my pieces in it. It had an electric pump, and electric lights, so my work can be said to be electric art. A New York dealer, Lee Nordness, saw my piece in that show and liked it very much. I showed a couple of pieces at his gallery, and then later I had an exhibition in New York at the Nordness Gallery. The commissions always seemed to have mostly resulted from people seeing the smaller works in exhibitions and then imagining or discussing in what way those small works could be adapted to larger applications. Lee Nordness had made a collection of art for the Johnson Wax Company, which is housed in that magnificent Frank Lloyd Wright building in Racine, Wisconsin. It's one of the most wonderful buildings in America, I think. Lee got me a commission to do a piece for the center of the town of Racine as a memorial for Mrs. Irene Johnson. There are three generations in the Johnson family -- the founder and his son and his grandson -- and this was the middle generation. Anyway, it was Irene Johnson's idea in the beginning, and then she died during the negotiations and the fountain became a memorial to her. But it was the first time I had done anything that had that much public prominence, where it really was the centerpiece of the entire town. It was right in the main square. Also, there's a lot of traffic around the square and a lot of activity at night. Fortunately, I had very good cooperation from the city of Racine, who were the eventual owners of the sculpture, so they illuminated the sculpture very well. It's sometimes hard to achieve all the things around the sculpture that are necessary for it to really work in the most effective way.

GOODWIN

What was the nature of the commission? What did they ask you to do?

ANDREWS

There were already two pools in this square in the center of town. One of the pools was a lily pond. It had been a lily pond for a long time. Then there was a tall Civil War monument with a soldier on top of it. One pool had been dry for a long time -- there was nothing in it -- so they wanted me to make a sculpture that would go in that pool. I went there and looked at the pool, and we filled it up with water. Then all the businesses on each side of the street began noticing that water was pouring into their basements, so we realized that we had to reline the pool. That was done by the city. Then I explained to them that to really be effective, they not only have to have lights in the pool, but they should mount lighting fixtures on top of the streetlight poles on each side of the street which would shine down at the sculpture so it would be illuminated on the top. Since the sculpture is twelve feet high, the lights in the water made a lot of nice light around the base, but the top of it was still dark. So the city did that, to their great credit. As I was saying, even after you get a commission to do a sculpture, it is difficult to get all the surrounding things done right, which is why, if possible, I try to get control of as much that's going on around the sculpture as I can -- the design of the pool if possible, the lighting if possible, the planting if possible, and so forth. Anyway, they did a good job on that, and the sculpture really is quite successful there. It's an example of a very active sculpture. Since it's in a city square, surrounded by a lot of noise and racket and activity, it has to be quite active. It has a sort of spiral ramp on it that the water pours off of and splashes down into the pool. A lot of water comes out of it and makes a lot of splashing, which is great in that particular place. The lights light up all this splashing, so there is a feeling of excitement and activity. It's intended as a gesture towards the renewal of the center part of that city. Like many cities everywhere, and most typically cities in the middle part of the country, Racine has been depleted because shopping centers and housing have been built on the periphery of the city and people moved out towards the edges of town. The center of the city in such cases tends to become more or less abandoned and depleted and run-down. Very similar things happen in a lot of other cities, even large cities. In Cincinnati, for instance, I did a sculpture there which was part of a similar but much larger scale development of the center of Cincinnati. While I was having my show at Lee Nordness Gallery, a dealer in Cincinnati, Burton Closson, became interested in my work. In fact, we sent a sculpture to the Taft Museum in Cincinnati for a water show. The people in Cincinnati really liked that sculpture. They just loved it. On the strength of that, B. Closson invited me to have a show at his gallery. Out of that show developed a commission for a bank, right in the very center of Cincinnati. Cincinnati also had a large monument dating from the nineteenth century -- a fountain, in fact, in the middle of the city, which hadn't run for years and years and years. They were just in the process of refurbishing that fountain and beginning to have activities in a large square around the fountain and beginning to develop their waterfront. A large number of these projects were developed by a man named Pope Coleman, who is president of the Cincinnati Institute, which is an institute which studies Cincinnati and what its civic needs really are. The institute coordinates all kinds of different agencies and ideas into methods which work and which are a practical, efficient way for using money that's either donated or raised to enhance living qualities of the city. So this sculpture also became part of that program, and I must say the whole concept worked very well. Part of the revitalizing of downtown Cincinnati was involved with the development of a contemporary art center right in the center of the downtown area. Although Cincinnati has a fine art museum, the museum had not concerned itself with current problems. A contemporary art center really was necessary in a city where so many people are interested in contemporary art.

GOODWIN

What kind of financial restrictions would you have specified? Would it be previously agreed how much was going to be spent?

ANDREWS

Well, of course. You have to make a realistic budget and agree on costs of the sculpture, and then you have to fulfill the obligations of the contract. You have to make the sculpture that you agreed to make and deliver it on time.

GOODWIN

Did you present, say, a model?

ANDREWS

Yeah, in this case I did. In this case I made a small model, and I photographed it. There are a lot of different ways of presenting proposals for commissions, and they have quite a lot to do with the stage in which you enter into the negotiations -- in other words, whether the building is built, whether it's half built, whether it's just a drawing. If the building is built, for instance, I find that a photomontage is a very effective way of presenting an idea. In other words, you photograph the building and then you photograph a model and put that in front of the building, or you construct an image of the sculpture from photographic paper. With this method the person who is looking at the photograph gets a pretty good picture of what the sculpture is going to look like sitting there, and of course that's what people want to know when they're considering the piece. Or you can make scale models, which I also have done: sometimes just the form of the sculpture; sometimes they're actually little working models -- say, an inch to the foot made of the same material. The water actually flows out of them and shows you how it will work. In the case of the Cincinnati bank, the pool was already built. The bank originally decided to put some standard water jets in it, but we persuaded them that they could do something much more imaginative.

GOODWIN

What about the expressive content of the sculpture? Has that ever been a problem, where you wanted to have more freedom but were restricted?

ANDREWS

No. That's never a problem, really, as long as the general idea is accepted. Usually one has pretty much freedom. Often in making a proposal, or afterwards, people want to know what the sculpture means, what it symbolizes.

GOODWIN

What do you tell them?

ANDREWS

Well, I tell them what the sculpture means in my terms. I write it out and type it up and send it to them. And they say, "Oh, that's fine, okay." And they're satisfied.

GOODWIN

But your sculptures don't have messages.

ANDREWS

They don't?

GOODWIN

I mean in a verbal sort of way, do they?

ANDREWS

Of course they do. You've never seen any of them.

GOODWIN

Well, just slides, but not in any literal sort of way or literary sort of way. They're about themselves.

ANDREWS

Well, yes, they are, but that doesn't mean that they can't have certain associations which may have something to do with the place that they're in and what they're doing there.

GOODWIN

Well, could you describe in more detail what kind of effect you wanted to produce in Cincinnati?

ANDREWS

Well, for instance, the largest commission I've done in California is the commission for the [Los Angeles] Times newspaper factory in Costa Mesa. This was a case in which there was a competition for this particular work. The building was in two parts. One block of the building was the factory, where the actual production of the newspaper took place, with the presses and type and all that. The other part was for all the people who composed the newspaper, the editors and so on. The two halves are connected by a roof with a hole in the top of it, so there's a sort of atrium. My idea was to make a sculpture in a pool which would go up through that opening. Now, originally they had wanted to get an old printing press and just set it there. Then they got the idea that they would have a contest for somebody to put a sculpture there. Mine was the only water sculpture, so as well as purchasing the sculpture, they would have to build a pool. I didn't really expect to win. But anyway, it did win. As part of the presentation, I told them what the sculpture was about. It's a column of stainless steel, twenty-four feet high and six feet wide. The front side of it is polished stainless steel, and the back side is a mat-black stainless. It's oriented east and west, so that the sun rises more or less over it. On summer solstice, June 21, the sun will go right over the top of it. Depending on whether it is more in the spring or more in the fall, the sun will be to one side or the other. But anyway, the sculpture reflects the color of the sun, the color of the day. The sculpture symbolizes the activity of a newspaper. The dark side of the sculpture symbolizes night, obviously, and the bright side of the sculpture symbolizes day. The water flowing over it symbolizes activity, action. As the water flows over and contains the whole column, it symbolizes the continuing activity of a newspaper, which goes on actively night and day. As the sun illuminates the different sides of the sculpture, it can remind people, if they are prepared to think in those terms, of the way the cycle of human events is constantly changing, its mutable color and tonality, over the twenty-four hours of the day. In fact, a newspaper is an organ which is constantly in touch with the changing aspect of human events. Does that make sense to you?

GOODWIN

Yeah. Would I perceive that if I were a conscientious viewer?

ANDREWS

I don't know if you would or not. I don't think that you need to know that to appreciate the sculpture. There's a lot of sculpture that we admire where we don't really know the creator's complete intent. How can we ever know what a pyramid is really about? But that doesn't mean that we aren't impressed with it or that it doesn't have meaning for us today. So anyway, the same with my sculptures, whether they're in front of a bank or wherever. But what I'm saying is, if there are people who really want to know what the meaning is and are disturbed by not knowing the meaning, it's amazing how satisfied they are when you tell them what it means. They say, "Oh, that's what? Oh, all right. Okay." Then they feel free to make whatever interpretation about the sculpture they want.

GOODWIN

They feel free to disregard your specific interpretation.

ANDREWS

Oh, sure. Another sculpture that was really full of a lot of "meaning," if you want to call it that, is a sculpture that I made for a cemetery in Cincinnati. It was in the crypt of this cemetery, down in the vault where those people who wished to be interred in that way are interred. Their ashes are put in a bronze vessel or box and sealed into a wall in the crypt. Dealing with this situation seemed to me a fascinating challenge, because funerary art in our own time has become pretty degraded. I can't think of many modern contemporary works of art associated with death that have much dignity or power or beauty. Most funerary art is pretty dreadful, whereas the art of the past connected with death and interment and beliefs in an afterlife represents some of the most moving and profound art that exists from the past -- getting back to the pyramids again, or thinking of the Renaissance and the sculpture that Michelangelo did in the Medici tombs, for instance. So that seemed to me a very interesting thing to try to deal with, particularly a marvelous place to use water in the way that I use it, because you could get across the idea of quiet and repose, and at the same time the use of water as symbolizing eternal life. The pieces I made were of bronze, and they were dark and quiet without being really somber or lugubrious. They had a sense of peace and repose about them. At the same time, they had, in contrast to that, a sense of the play of light and a refreshing play of water over the forms which seemed to me a very appropriate thing in the context of a place where people go to remember people that they loved who are dead. This would be a way to say that the spirit of the people who died continues through the attention of the people that are left to remember them.

GOODWIN

What kind of commission do you look forward to undertaking?

ANDREWS

Oh, I look forward to commissions where I can do more different kinds of things in the sense of making a total space with water involved in it. One of the things that I did in Cincinnati was to make an entire garden which was a shrine for Saint Francis. The Warrington family had long wanted something like that in the small maple grove near their house, but they hadn't decided just how they wanted to do it. Finally we talked about it, and we decided to go ahead with the idea. Their own ideas were very good. John Warrington is the president of the Cincinnati Art Museum. They went at it with the idea of the relationship of Saint Francis to nature in being one of the earliest people to have an idea of a communication with nature on a kind of an equal basis, really one of the first people to talk about ecology. So in this garden, you enter between two panels of flowing water, two 4X8 bronze panels over a small bridge, which comes as a kind of a ritual purification before entering the space. Then we got a lot of rocks from the mountains nearby, and I composed the rocks and built walks. I built a whole lighting system for the garden in which the lights are contained inside and under rocks, so that you don't see the lights at all in the daytime, but at night you see just enough light so that you can go from one light to the next without seeing all the lights, just enough of them so you can go through the garden and find your way from one place to the next. I did a lot of planting there and built in a watering system. I enjoyed doing that very much, since I could create a real ambience there and create a living thing. As we plant and trim and watch the plants grow, we are caring for a living organism, that garden. The garden also gave me some experience in handling all those diverse elements so that I could at least show that I had done some landscaping. Asking to do things like that, asking to take the responsibility for the lighting or deal with the landscape, you think that nobody will let you do it unless you've done it already. It's hard to get started in those areas, so it was very helpful that the Warringtons were willing to allow me to take on the whole design and gain that experience. So, as I say, I would like to have as much control over all those elements as possible, so that I can create a space as well as just putting a sculpture somewhere. A sculptor whom I admire greatly, Isamu Noguchi , is probably the sculptor who does that the most. He has designed many gardens and courtyards and playgrounds, and has handled all of those elements in the spaces that he designs. He is probably the premiere master of that kind of work in the world today.

GOODWIN

Do you enjoy working with patrons, people who commission sculptures and landscapes?

ANDREWS

Yes, sure. I find it interesting to create spaces for people that meet people's needs and that affect people in a way which goes beyond just simple -- if you could call it simple -- aesthetic appreciation. Being surrounded by work which is consciously created can have a profound effect on people's moods and how they feel, and on their psychic and spiritual condition. Also, this type of work creates all kinds of ongoing situations. For instance, when I did that sculpture in front of the bank, it was originally surrounded by a very strong fence, and nobody could go in there. You could sort of stick your face in the bars and look through, but no one could really appreciate the sculpture and the garden around it because the bank managers were afraid that people might walk in the pool or they might mess the place up. But gradually, with public concern, a lot of people asked why the bank didn't let people in there, and there were articles in the newspaper that mobilized public opinion, with the result that finally the garden of the bank was opened to the public on weekdays during certain hours, from nine to four, something like that. People loved that garden and went in there and treated it with great respect. Then the Contemporary Art Center next door asked the bank if they could use that space to display some more outdoor sculpture, and they said yes; so now a whole community situation has grown out of what started with putting my sculpture in the pool. In doing commissions, you're not always dealing with the same kinds of people. In a private commission, you're dealing with a client, with a person who is purchasing the sculpture for themselves or for their house or their garden. In some other instances, you're dealing mostly with an architect, who engages you to do the sculpture for his client. Or sometimes you're dealing with a client who comes in after the building is built and wants you to do a sculpture there. Also, of course, you're dealing with a contractor or a construction crew. I think that anyone who wants to do commissions has to enjoy and be able to deal with those kinds of people and talk their language and make ideas clear in terms that they can understand.

GOODWIN

Does your work fall within a certain spectrum of emotion? A kind of a certain range of feelings, a certain key? Of course, I haven't seen it in person, but the things you've described seem to have many things in common as far as being quiet, or relatively quiet, subdued....

ANDREWS

Well, not all subdued. The piece in Racine is very active, and some of the pieces in El Paseo are very active, but some of them are very subdued.

GOODWIN

Simplified?

ANDREWS

Yes, they're very simplified.

GOODWIN

With complexity....

ANDREWS

They're simple and direct. The experience is more complex than simple emotion, I think it has to do more with a state of consciousness, with a state of both excitement and repose, a kind of intensifying of awareness which brings a sense of peacefulness and at-oneness with your surroundings, and at the same time a sense of awakened attention and also a sense of being drawn out of yourself, of expanding your attention into areas that are wider than yourself, and therefore on a higher level, freeing you from all kinds of petty and mundane preoccupations. In the presence of the work, you can transcend for an amount of time, and that always brings a sense of release and calm and of extended horizons.

GOODWIN

Calm would be an adjective that pervades many of the pieces.

ANDREWS

Calm, yes, calm, but in the sense of an expectant or a very aware state of calm.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE
DECEMBER 14, 1976

GOODWIN

Last session we discussed Oliver's sculpture, and toward the end we focused on his various commissions around the country. Today we're going to begin with another aspect of his sculpture, that aspect called "events." How did that concept evolve in your work?

ANDREWS

A lot of people had been doing works of art that were called "events" and "performances" and "environments" before I started doing that kind of work. Sometime in the middle sixties, artists began to become more interested in getting outside of the gallery and doing art in a space other than gallery space and museum space.

GOODWIN

Does it have an element of protest in it?

ANDREWS

My work didn't, but the work of some other artists was made from a position of protest. There's a kind of irony in that, though, in that artists went out of the galleries and into the streets or went off into the hills to do their art. Of course, a lot of them had fun doing that, and there were very interesting things done, but the only artists who got seen very much were those same artists who had the backing of museums and galleries, which arranged that people would hear about these events and go out and see them. The irony of it is that the way the general public got to know about any of these arts was purely through art magazines.

GOODWIN

Traditional channels.

ANDREWS

The art magazines reproduced photographs of environmental art. Many artists were trying to get out of that so-called art-magazine-dominated, gallery-dominated kind of weight that they felt on their backs. But the effect was to make artists even more dependent on the system than they were before. There were a lot of people who were honestly interested in other alternatives. Of course, some people wanted to get onto the bandwagon and do the latest things -- get out there and dig ditches in the desert, and roll boulders around in the mountains, and get noticed because it was the latest thing to do. Those people found themselves, as they always will, at the mercy of advertisement and promotion. But other artists were honestly and personally...

GOODWIN

... searching?

ANDREWS

Yes, searching and interested in doing other kinds of things and interested in really working with the earth. All this has a lot to do with a heightened degree of interest in the earth itself, in ecology and getting closer to the land and living in simpler ways and finding alternatives to technological ways of doing things. [There was] that show that Pontus Hulten did at the Museum of Modern Art called "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age," where there were all kinds of machines. As you remember, that was the time of Experiments in Art and Technology, and it was the time of Bob Rauschenberg's "Seven Evenings" that he did in collaboration with Billy Kluver from the Bell Telephone Labs. E.A.T. represented a kind of a heightening of yearning back to an almost thirties- like confidence in technology, you know: "Better Living through Chemistry." [laughter] It turned out that technology -- that laser beams and electronics and optics weren't the great answer. After a while, people realized that all future art wasn't going to be futuristic. So eventually there was a turning towards simpler ways of doing things, doing things out of doors. In my own case, I had always been interested in doing that. Since my work dealt with water, I was interested in getting closer to the water, and I also wanted to have some kind of art that would relate to the landscape. I had been trying for some time to have more control over the environment, the ambience of the places where my works were placed, to have some hand in the lighting, some hand in the landscaping, but I wanted an art form where I could do something without having to get a commission and working for two years with earth and plants to see how the work would look in a landscape. This demanded something that would be a large scale, that would be transportable, that could be handled by a couple of people, that you could just go and do and look at, and then that you could remove. If the work would leave a lasting mark in the landscape, or deface it, or be impossible to collect afterwards, it would limit you in the places that you could select to do the work. So putting all these requirements for a large, landscape-related work together, I came up with the idea of doing a work of art that I called The Sky Fountain because it's like a large one of my "Water Blades," but in the sky. The rippling of the Mylar, aluminized Mylar, performed in a way in which the work could react with the atmosphere, like a flying waterfall. I'd done a couple of preliminary works. In January of 1968, Judy Chicago and I made a twenty-foot-diameter inflated sphere of vinyl, which we rolled down the street in Century City. We finally rolled it up onto one of the roofs there, and then we had it illuminated. It was right after Christmas, in January. We had it illuminated on the plaza there. A number of artists were interested in doing similar work. There were several festivals and events in which local artists participated. That was the time when Sam Francis and Jim Turrell were doing their aerial diagrams in the sky with airplanes that left lines of smoke behind them and were directed from the ground by radio. Judy Chicago was doing her smoke pieces, which she called "Atmospheres," which were made of canisters of different colored smoke. She did those at different sites, just as I did with the Sky Fountains. She did one of hers out in the desert and one at the beach and so forth. When the Sky Fountains reached their final form, I did them in a number of different places. I did the first one at the beach in Santa Monica, and then I did one out in the desert, and then I did one up in British Columbia, on Cortes Island.

GOODWIN

Are spectators important, or even necessary?

ANDREWS

Well, they're not necessary. Just a couple of people could put up the Sky Fountains.

GOODWIN

Is the idea to communicate with the public as well as between the artist and his work?

ANDREWS

Oh, sure, and most of them -- except a couple of the preliminary ones, which you might say were trials -- were all done with a lot of people around. It's very exciting for people to see this because you see the whole thing evolve from a couple of suitcases. Out of these suitcases come the balloons, which blow up to five feet, and then this hundred-foot-long roll of Mylar unfurls like a scroll into the sky. So it all seems that a huge thing appears out of very little. It could all be carried on an airplane, except for the helium tanks. The packaged Sky Fountain can be carried anywhere, so that you can go and do it anywhere.

GOODWIN

But it all takes planning?

ANDREWS

It takes planning, yes.

GOODWIN

You know precisely what you want to do before you do it.

ANDREWS

Usually. Sometimes at the last minute, particularly some of the indoor ones, the final form had to be improvised. I did one in a building in Kansas. The building was 12 feet high inside. I set up a piece there called Diamond Sky Fountain, which is a diamond shape rather than a column. Then the one I did in Grand Central Station, I had the materials, three Mylar strips 100 feet long, and there were certain options open as to how they might be deployed. Actually, it was not until I was in that big room -- that grand concourse at Grand Central Station is 200 feet long and 100 feet high -- that I decided to make a bridge spanning the entire area. So the final form of that piece was improvised, but pretty much you know what you're going to do. Spectators also can participate because they can help blowing up the balloons and unfurling the materials and that sort of thing, so everybody can have a sense of participating. When we did the five Sky Fountains in Cincinnati in August of 1973, there were five 100-foot-high columns, and hundreds of people were there. So we had people holding all of them. It's very exciting to hold onto one because it's rippling and you feel this tremor of the wind blowing on it. It's like holding onto the line of a sailboat. You can really feel tension of the air, Or holding the string of a big kite -- you know how exciting that is, to feel that vibration, to feel the wind in your fingertips? You have a real sense of physical, tactile communication with the atmosphere.

GOODWIN

Who pays for these various events?

ANDREWS

Well....

GOODWIN

The artist's burden?

ANDREWS

The first ones, of course, I paid for, but then a number of them were paid for because they were part of some kind of celebratory event. They work wonderfully for that kind of thing because they're spectacular looking, they shine, and are visible for miles away. The one in Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center paid for. The one in San Diego, the San Diego museum of art [Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego] paid for. So a number of museums and individuals and galleries have paid for them. Not that I ever made much of a profit out of doing them, but I was paid transportation and materials and so forth. That's a fairly common thing for museums to do today: to pay artists for performances of various kinds

GOODWIN

Do you document your own events?

ANDREWS

Oh, yes. And of course that is an important aspect of those events because even though there may be a big crowd there, it still is a limited audience because the event takes place usually over one day. So I have documented them extensively and made slides, and all of them were filmed cinematically , because the motion of the Sky Fountains is an important part of their essence. Then when we went to doing the Sky Fountains underwater, having to go underwater further limited the audience participation.

GOODWIN

Why did you decide to go underwater?

ANDREWS

Well, because that's part of what I do. From the very beginning I was interested in making a work of art which could actually take place in the ocean, because I love skin diving, and under the water is an entire unexplored environment where art can take place. When I had evolved the Sky Fountain to the point where it would fly, I realized that it probably would work underwater. I saw the possibility of realizing my megalomaniac dream of uniting the sea and the sky. So first we tried the underwater version. We simply took the Mylar material and tacked one end of it to a float and let it unfurl under the water, which it did beautifully. It unrolled all the way to the bottom. Under the water, it sort of undulates. It's a much slower, more gentle movement than the airborne Sky Fountain. Then the final thing was to fly about a hundred feet of the Sky Fountain with balloons into the air, and then unfurl the bottom part from the surface of the ocean down to the bottom, about fifty, sixty feet down. The Sky Fountain goes all the way from the bottom of the ocean up to the surface and then on up into the air.

GOODWIN

It's suspended by itself in the air?

ANDREWS

Yeah, the balloons hold it up in the air.

GOODWIN

Could it blow away?

ANDREWS

No, it really couldn't blow away because it's going down into the water. That holds it in place, because there's a weight on the end of it at the bottom of the ocean. But the wind could blow really quite hard and it would still be safe because down in the ocean you don't have the hazard of it flying into trees and buildings and telephone poles. Actually, when it was unfurled under the ocean, I would be on the bottom of the ocean when my helpers would release it on the surface, and I would film it with an underwater movie camera as it rolled down through the water. I eventually made a film which had a number of Sky Fountains, showed the evolution of the Sky Fountains from the land-based versions, and then finally documented a number of underwater ones. The film also shows seals and eagle rays and quite a lot of underwater life playing around the Sky Fountains.

GOODWIN

Are you very deliberate about where you place, say, an underwater fountain?

ANDREWS

Oh, yes, that's very important. The whole landscape is important.

GOODWIN

The movement of the tide and the vegetation under the sea -- all those are factors? [tape recorder turned off]

ANDREWS

Yes, the place where the Sky Fountain takes place is very important. All kinds of factors are taken into consideration: what kind of a reef it is, and whether the water is clear, and whether it's protected enough so there won't be too much wind. But, as well as the practical aspects, the aesthetic aspects of the place are important, because the place, the landscape, is part of the work. The ones that were done in the ocean were all done close to islands, Santa Barbara Island or the back side of Catalina, So that you actually see the Sky Fountain, the part that's in the air, you see it against or with an island somewhere in the background. In fact, on Catalina, the back side is very rocky, and the rocks have a sort of gold sheen to them. So instead of silver Mylar, we used gold Mylar, because it looked very good with those rocks.

GOODWIN

What exactly is Mylar?

ANDREWS

Mylar is a polyester film. Polyester is one of the many polymer plastics. In liquid form, it's combined with glass cloth to make Fiberglas, and as a thread woven into cloth it's called Dacron. The film has a trade name, Mylar. It's a transparent film. It's very tough, and the kind that I use is very thin. It's either a quarter-mil or a half-mil. A half a mil means that it is one-half of one-thousandth of an inch thick. When it gets thicker, like two mils and five mils, it gets fairly stiff. It can be aluminized. A vapor deposition of aluminum, a very thin metallic coating on it, makes it reflective like a mirror.

GOODWIN

Where do you buy Mylar?

ANDREWS

You buy it from the Mylar store.

GOODWIN

Mylar man? [laughter]

ANDREWS

From a place like a plastics company or a place like Transparent Products that sells all kinds of plastic products.

GOODWIN

What quantities does it come in?

ANDREWS

It comes in rolls, which are about, oh, three, four, or five, six feet wide, and usually in hundred feet, two hundred feet, hundred yards, thousand yards.

GOODWIN

Can you recycle it? What do you do when you're finished?

ANDREWS

Well, you can use it over again. I use the thin stuff because it's so light that the helium balloons can pick it up, and it's very strong. It gets kind of crinkled after a while, but some of them I have used several times. We did an underwater event in a swimming pool two summers ago at the [UCLA] Recreation Center, where we used the Mylar in the swimming pool. Swimmers unrolled it underwater. We used lights, and we used underwater magnesium flares and musicians and highway flares. We had a lot of light and a lot of sound. We did a whole water performance called "Water Magic." We rolled and unrolled the Mylar several times. We did several performances and a number of rehearsals.

GOODWIN

You've done over twenty-five Sky Fountains and water fountains and related "events." Do you feel that the fountains are as important to you as your stationary sculpture?

ANDREWS

Oh, yes, I think they're as important to me. They're an important aspect of my work, and I think they form a complementary aspect of it. The ability to do one of these things, to celebrate a particular event, to do it at a particular time and place, makes a nice way of making art. It's a complement to the long-range pieces that might take as much as a year to make. In a way, you know, an artist's vacation is work, and an artist's recreation is more art. So they're really fun to do and interesting and exciting and involve a lot of physical effort in swimming or activity of some kind. They really are recreational in the sense that they utilize your activity in nature. There are some people who would like to fly kites -- I fly Sky Fountains. But just because they're recreational doesn't mean that they're not serious. I just think of them as another aspect of the same impulse that produces the metal fountains. I feel that this particular kind of event, with the Mylar and the balloons and so forth, which I named "Sky Fountains, " has by now pretty well expressed most of its inherent possibilities. I've done them inside; I've done them outside; I've done them in the air, in the water and so forth. If an opportunity came to do another variation that I would find really novel and challenging, I would probably do something with Mylar again, but I'm looking now at other kinds of things to do. I feel that the cycle of the Sky Fountains is pretty nearly complete. I'd like to do some things in the ocean with pure light, with light beams underwater at night. That's one of the kinds of things I'm looking into at the moment.

GOODWIN

What are some other possibilities you might explore?

ANDREWS

Well, we're planning an event this spring for the Avant-Garde Festival in New York. A number of these pieces, some of the biggest Mylar ones -- the one in Grand Central and the one in Shea Stadium, which was 1,750 feet long -- were done for Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's Avant-Garde Festival, which is an annual event in New York City. Each year Charlotte, by some miraculous feat of persuasion, manages to get ever-larger, more spectacular places to hold these events. Now she has the...

GOODWIN

... the World Trade Center?

ANDREWS

That's right.

GOODWIN

Really? [laughter]

ANDREWS

You guessed it.

GOODWIN

I was just thinking of King Kong.

ANDREWS

The biggest thing, the biggest man-made structure on Manhattan Island. Anyway, we do have the World Trade Center, and I was just there last month looking at the view off the World Trade Center and thinking about what I can do from there. I think we're going to get some special searchlights called "Mini-Nova hand-held searchlights." They're little searchlights just about the size of a battery-held flashlight that put out two million candlepower each. So we're going to get six of those on top of the World Trade Center, and we're going to do some things with them. I'm going to do this piece in collaboration with Gary Lloyd, who's teaching sculpture at UCLA.

GOODWIN

Who are some of the other artists who've participated in the festivals?

ANDREWS

Oh, my goodness, there are so many: Nam June Paik himself, who's a video artist; John Cage has been in almost every one; Otto Piene has participated; and Ay-0 -- dozens of artists, mostly from New York, but some from all over the United States.

GOODWIN

Are there some that seem so eccentric that they're just silly?

ANDREWS

What, artists who participate in the Avant-Garde Festival? Yes, there are some silly artists in the Avant- Garde Festival because there are so many artists participating. But one of the beautiful things about the festival is that there's a great range of quality of art from not very high to very high to fascinating. That's pretty much the nature of the free-for-all art-fair kind of a thing that these Avant-Garde Festivals are. They're all somehow held together by Charlotte's charismatic presence, which pervades the whole atmosphere of the event. The reason why the artists come back and participate year after year is really based on the magnetic strength and attraction that Charlotte has, the great emanation of love that she has, which is absolutely irresistible and persuades mayors and police chiefs and firemen to allow her to do these festivals every year. But as well as the pieces that are just okay or mildly interesting or even silly, they're also some of the pieces which are really marvelous and which make the whole thing worthwhile year after year.

GOODWIN

Is the event essentially for artists?

ANDREWS

Yes, it really is for artists, but of course the public is there, too. There are always a lot of non-art people participating.

GOODWIN

Does a person have to be an artist in order to design an "event" which he forms or assembles?

ANDREWS

A person doesn't have to be an artist to produce an event, but a person has to be an artist to produce art. If the event is art, the person who created it is an event artist.

GOODWIN

When is an event not art?

ANDREWS

Well, all kinds of things happen every day that are not art. It all depends on what you think art is. But some artists make events which they announce and say, "This is going to be a work of art," or they might even say, "This is going to be a work of nonart."

GOODWIN

What's that?

ANDREWS

Well, nonart can either be nonart or it might be antiart. It might be intentionally directed towards being something else than what an artist thinks people think art is.

GOODWIN

Just to further complicate this issue, is there a difference between bad art and nonart?

ANDREWS

Of course, because there can be bad nonart and good nonart.

GOODWIN

You lost me. [laughter] Would you encourage people who have no background or record of achievement in more traditional arts to go out and...

ANDREWS

Do events?

GOODWIN

... do events? Right.

ANDREWS

Well, I wouldn't necessarily encourage people to do events any more than I encourage people to make art. As a teacher I help people who have decided for one reason or another that they want to make some kind of art, and so I help them. Sometimes they make good art, and sometimes they make bad art. But whether a person is going to do an event or not depends on whether they think that's important for them, whether they think it's a way they wish to interact with the world. Of course, more and more kinds of activities can be and are done as art. That's one of the things that events show us: that the lists of acceptable art activities, like painting with paint on canvas or sculpting a stone with chisels, is expanding tremendously. There are all kinds of ways of dealing with material or dealing with the events of the world that can be dealt with in an artistic way, that is to say, in a way in which as intense a concentration can be brought to bear upon an activity as is possible for a human being.

GOODWIN

Is Marcel Duchamp the grandfather of this form of expression?

ANDREWS

Well, yes, I think he's one of the grandfathers of this form of expression. The further back you go, the more grandfathers you have, you know. Certainly he's the grandfather of this form of expression just as he's the grandfather of a lot of concepts and ideas that we are dealing with in contemporary art.

GOODWIN

Before we turned....

ANDREWS

Going back to grandfathers, I think one of the fathers, you might say, of environmental art and happening and events is Allan Kaprow, who wrote that one big book in the sixties, Assemblage , Environments and Happenings. He defined some of the parameters and initiated several of the typical kinds of art events that people have done since. But then there are other people who have done events and performances which stem from very different concerns than the ones that Allan Kaprow was involved in. But he certainly is one of the important figures in the history of that type of art.

GOODWIN

Before we turned on the machine, we were discussing Christo's Running Fence. That would be an event, wouldn't it?

ANDREWS

In a way it was. There you have a work of art which involves an artifact, a thing. They made something. But to understand the whole context of what Christo did there, you really have to go back about three years ago and look at and include all of his efforts to get the fence up as really being part of that work of art: all of the drawings, the funding of it, the raising of the money by selling drawings, the persuasion of all of the people who owned the land over which the fence was to go; the legal problems with the legislature, with the State Coastal Commission, with all of the permits that had to be gained to get that thing going, with negotiations to get the material, to get the 300 students that would be ready to put it up and who were waiting for a year for the word to begin. The whole logistics of the campaign to get that fence into being is certainly a good example of action as a work of art or done as part of a work of art. So the Fence is a standing result of the action. Now the Fence itself has disappeared and no longer exists. It was taken down in about two weeks. But yes, that's a good example.

GOODWIN

Is the aspect of organizing the Running Fence as important as the Fence's actual appearance? Because it seems to me that having seen the Fence, its formal appearance was successful in itself.

ANDREWS

Yes, it was beautiful.

GOODWIN

Right. I think that was a surprise, at least for me -- that in spite of all the words that preceded the construction of the Fence, the Fence had so many formal qualities of its own.

ANDREWS

Yes, it did. In the case of the Fence, you can say that it's a very complete work of art because of all that went before it and all the repercussions, the waves that it left, the changes in people's minds. It did change a lot of people's minds about what art was, about what they liked, about what was valuable to do in terms of making a work of art. It really had a profound effect on many, many people. So all of that aura, all the actions around the Fence , all the actions of putting up the Fence and taking down the Fence , all are a part of the whole concept which makes a work of art. In the case of this Fence , because it involved so many people and so many considerations for such a length of time, and because it justified these considerations by its presence, that in my mind makes it a very complete work of art. Ultimately all of the pieces fit together into something which is truly expressive.

GOODWIN

I'm trying to decide what single factor seems most responsible for its success. I don't know if it's possible to determine that.

ANDREWS

Don't you think that it's Christo's conception of the Fence , that the single guiding factor all through the whole thing is that this man, this artist, had an idea that was really a worthwhile idea, and he had the insight and the persistence to carry it off and make it work?

GOODWIN

I suppose if I knew through firsthand experience that it really was Christo's undertaking from beginning to end. I'm wondering if it would be a more successful work of art or a better work of art if he had done it all himself and had spent twenty years to do it. Would that change what he has accomplished?

ANDREWS

You mean if he was the lawyer, and if he talked to everybody himself, and if he drove every one of those fenceposts? I think that's irrelevant.

GOODWIN

Would that be crazy?

ANDREWS

It would just be irrelevant and absurd. Christo is using the means at his disposal, just as every artist does. I mean, you wouldn't say that an oil painting painted in the traditional way would have been better if the artist had first gone out and shot a badger and pulled the hairs out of its tail to make his brush out of, would you?

GOODWIN

No.

ANDREWS

So an artist goes and buys a brush in a paint store or buys pigments that are packaged in tubes; it's all part of making the work of art. But oftentimes we don't see it as that because we accept certain conventions in the making of a work of art. Artists have to use possibilities at their command, and the more that an artist can marshal his resources and use the technology and the spirit and the skills of other people, the more that that artist is able to mobilize his or her own concepts and ideas. If an artist spends twenty years doing some kind of manual drudgery just to get a work of art into existence, then the work of art becomes very dissipated by the time it finally achieves its appearance on the face of the world.

GOODWIN

Yeah. Except the Running Fence in a sense shows no personal side of Christo's involvement.

ANDREWS

It doesn't? Oh, come on.

GOODWIN

There's no mark that says "Christo."

ANDREWS

Well, what did you want him to do, paint his signature on it or something?

GOODWIN

I don't know, but...

ANDREWS

The whole Fence , the whole look of it, is Christo's work: the way it catches the light, the way it reflects the sunlight, the way it billows in the wind. That's what Christo decided that he was going to do. The Fence says that. The proportions of the Fence -- who said it should be eighteen feet high and sixty-two feet long in each panel?

GOODWIN

He did.

ANDREWS

He did. So that's what he's doing. Just because he didn't weave the nylon on his own little loom doesn't mean that he's not responsible for how it looks when the light hits it. Part of the miraculous quality of the Fence is the fact that it actually did take place within a few days. One day there was nothing, rolling hills, and three days later there was this incredible apparition coming out of the sea and running over the hills.

GOODWIN

I think the characteristic that most astonishes me about the Fence is its scale, the fact that it's twenty-odd miles long. I can't get over that.

ANDREWS

Somehow the scale, you know, doesn't seem merely huge and gigantic. It doesn't really seem overwhelming. You have to have that scale in order to have it go over different kinds of terrain and go up one hill and down the other and through a town and so forth. Also, it has to be able to be seen from a couple of miles away. In order for it to be effective, you have to see it from wherever you are on the road to wherever the crest of the hill is. The scale seems just about right to do that, and you really can see it quite well. Although it's really huge when you get up close to it, when you see it in the distance, it seems to fit into the landscape quite well.

GOODWIN

I wonder what's left for him to do, but I'm sure he'll take care of himself.

ANDREWS

Oh, I think he'll think of something. I don't think we have to worry about that.

GOODWIN

Right. It would be nice to collaborate with him.

ANDREWS

Oh, it'd be wonderful, of course.

GOODWIN

He hasn't participated in any of the New York festivals?

ANDREWS

I think he has. He's a good friend of Charlotte Moorman. [laughter] One time Charlotte Moorman and Otto Piene and Christo were having lunch out of doors on a terrace with Howard Wise, and it started to rain. So Otto Piene and Christo very rapidly began to improvise a tent. Charlotte was running around getting the pieces of rope and said to Christo, "Do you know how to tie a knot?" [laughter] Anyway, that's a delightful idea, thinking of those two geniuses of environmental art whipping up a tent in the face of an impending rainstorm.

GOODWIN

I thought you were going to say that somehow they were going to figure out how to stop the rain, plant the clouds or something.

ANDREWS

Well, that would be a good one.

GOODWIN

Right. [laughter]

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO
DECEMBER 14, 1976

GOODWIN

Oliver, what do you expect from a dealer?

ANDREWS

Well, I used to expect a lot more than I do now. You expect that the dealer is going to do all those aspects of selling art for you that will free you to spend your creative time making your work. Now, different artists have different things that they need from dealers, and therefore some dealers are good for some artists and not for others. So one of the problems that every artist has is to find the right dealer, or the right combination of dealers, who can do what the artist wants them to do. Some artists are very good businessmen and handle a lot of the details of selling their work and enjoy that aspect of it, enjoy making deals and representing their work. Some artists don't. Some artists don't like to deal with people about business. They'd really rather just have somebody else take care of all of that business, just send them a check and take care of the details. So what dealers do is somewhat variable. One of the primary considerations is that a dealer has to have some kind of understanding of his artist's work, appreciate the artist's work and understand it well enough to present it with a certain amount of enthusiasm and conviction to clients. Otherwise, the dealer doesn't really understand where the artist is at and is unable to keep pace with the artist's growth. The dealer may like some work that the artist is doing because it sells well and then become very disappointed when the artist changes and does something quite different, which the artist may have to do for that artist's own creative integrity and growth.

GOODWIN

Why do you expect less from dealers now than in the past?

ANDREWS

Oh, well, when I first began to sell art, I had a very good dealer, Charles Alan. I expected that all dealers would be good businessmen. In my naivete, one of the things that I thought I should do was that when I began having more than one dealer in different parts of the country, I imagined that I should let the dealers work out their arrangements with each other by themselves, and as sensible businessmen they would work out [laughter] sensible agreements. But that isn't always such a good idea, and often it's better to deal with each dealer and to assist somewhat in making those arrangements exist on a harmonious plane between one dealer and another.

GOODWIN

Are you saying you can't trust dealers?

ANDREWS

No, I didn't say you can't trust them. I said that sometimes they don't always get along with each other as well as you would like them to. Often there's a conflict of interest between dealers or a conflict of pride between them, and sometimes it's better for the artist to work out those arrangements or at least to assist in them somewhat. The artist has to take some kind of initiative in making his or her business arrangements in such a way that they work to everyone's advantage.

GOODWIN

Why do art dealers seem to have a bad name?

ANDREWS

Oh, I'm not going to go into that, George, and talk about who the bad art dealers are.

GOODWIN

Who are the good ones?

ANDREWS

Well, the dealers that I have had, I have always gotten along very well with. I got along very well with Charles Alan when I was dealing with him. I got along very well with Lee Nordness. My dealer in Cincinnati, Burton Closson, is a good friend of mine. I get along very well with David Stuart, who's been my dealer here in Los Angeles for many, many years. I had a show last summer with a new dealer in the [San Fernando] Valley, Carl Schlosberg, who did a garden exhibition. I was interested in showing with Carl because it was a different kind of gallery situation, in the sense that the works were all shown out of doors. With all of those dealers, I had a very good relationship.

GOODWIN

Do dealers have different styles?

ANDREWS

Well, of course. Dealers have different styles, and some dealers have more affinity to some kinds of works of art than others. Yes, of course, just like any other businessperson.

GOODWIN

Could you point out how one of your dealers might operate differently than another? Present your work in a different way?

ANDREWS

Well, for instance, Lee Nordness worked very much representing artists to corporations and companies. Lee did many collections. For instance, he did a collection for Metromedia, both for their offices here in Los Angeles and their offices in New York City. He also was a friend and advisor to the Johnson family, the Johnson Wax family in Racine, Wisconsin, and helped them a great deal. So that was Lee's way of working with corporate clients, selling out of his gallery. Some dealers work more privately; that is to say, they work more out of their homes, and more in terms of finding things for a small, select number of clients, rather than having a gallery which sells to a much wider range of people who buy what they see in the gallery. Many dealers sell to people who buy what they know they want. When a dealer starts out, usually but not always, the dealer gains experience by having a gallery, which is a space with the dealer sitting there with some works and having exhibitions and so forth. Sometimes, after gaining a clientele and gaining a certain expertise with a certain facet of the art market, whether it's in sculpture or whether it's in painting or whether it's in works of a certain period of time, then sometimes that dealer becomes less active in having a different show every month and deals a little bit more privately. Then there are dealers, like Esther Bear, for instance, in Santa Barbara, where I've participated in many shows, who deals out of her house, The house has one small gallerylike room in it, but she really is showing works of art in all the rooms of the place where she lives. There are many dealers like that who show works at home, where you get a much better idea of how a work of art might look on a wall or in a garden than you do in a gallery. Another person who deals that way in Los Angeles is Mitzi Landau, who shows in her own house, and she is active right now. So there are many styles of dealing.

GOODWIN

What kind of agreement do you have with your dealers in terms of promoting your work? Do you agree to be with a gallery for a certain length of time and to produce a certain amount of work? Or is it a much more flexible situation?

ANDREWS

My relationships with dealers have always been more flexible than that. The only time I ever had a contract with a dealer was for a while with Charles. I had an agreement where Charles guaranteed to buy a certain number of works every year. But otherwise, the dealer represents my works and tries in whatever way to sell them. Whenever I'm ready to have a show, then I have a show. Some dealers are more active in seeking out commissions. I myself do both gallery work and commissions for public buildings. Some dealers are more interested in one aspect than the other. Of course, there is a whole class of art dealers who deal exclusively in architectural commissions. There are a number of those people in Los Angeles, such as Tamara Thomas, for instance, who doesn't have a gallery or hold exhibitions but who understands the needs of architects and who knows the artists who are able to work with architects and clients. There are many architectural dealers in Los Angeles and other parts of the country. On the other hand, there are artists who begin to work more and more architecturally who find that maybe the dealer that they were with in the early part of their career when they were showing work in galleries isn't the kind of dealer that they need after they begin to get more commissions Some artists find that by that time, since they have to deal personally with architects so much anyway, they might as well be their own dealers and not pay someone else to do what they can do better themselves.

GOODWIN

How does pricing work? Who sets prices?

ANDREWS

In my experience, that's a matter that's agreed upon between the artist and the artist's dealer. The price structure is arrived at as a kind of averaging out of a lot of different considerations. There's the work itself. There's how expensive it is to make the work. Are the materials expensive? Making water sculptures, for instance, I have to use stainless steel and bronze, which are relatively expensive materials. I mean, they're more expensive than if you worked in plaster.

GOODWIN

Wood?

ANDREWS

Well, some wood is expensive. But anyway, my materials are relatively expensive. How hard it is to make the work has something to do with it.

GOODWIN

Is time another factor?

ANDREWS

Yes, the time and technical requirements. Then, of course, the other aspect of the work is what work that's similar to that work seems to command as a price on the market. Then finally the thing which is perhaps most difficult to assess, but which really has more bearing on how much the work costs, is the reputation of the artist. Of course, that factor in determining the price of the work becomes more and more important as the artist becomes better and better known, because ultimately price is based on the reputation of the artist and the value of his or her work on the market, to the exclusion of any merely material concept, like how many hours the artist might have spent or whether the sculpture is made of a more or less expensive material. Those become irrelevant in time. What you can charge ultimately depends on that elusive thing, your reputation. It has to do with how many shows you've had; how prestigious your gallery is; whether the people who bought your work belong to the top rank of collectors, [laughter] or maybe they're only second-rate collectors or third-rate collectors; and how many museums have bought your work, and whether it was bought by the Museum of Modern Art or whether it was bought by a small provincial museum; and whether you've ever shown in Europe; and how many reviews have been written about your work and by what critics; and all that whole business. Finally this all boils down to how much you actually can sell the work for, what the traffic will bear.

GOODWIN

Do you think you get a good price for what you put into a sculpture? Are you rewarded fairly?

ANDREWS

Oh, I'm always delighted if anybody buys my work. My work, I think, is still pretty moderately priced in terms of the current art market. Now, so far we've been talking about what happens when you bring a piece into the gallery and you say to the dealer, "What kind of a price tag are we going to put on this work of art, and can we sell it for that much?" When you do commissions, pricing really is based much more on practical kinds of considerations. When you do a large work of art, you have a lot of things to think about that are going to affect the cost of the piece. You must use people and fabricators and services which you have to pay for and which you have very little control over. So it's very important, when you make out a budget for a price for the work of art, that you charge the right amount and that you finally come out after months of work not in debt. That happens to many artists. Many artists figure out their budget and come up with a price and run into unforeseen difficulties and end up in dire financial straits. So it is important to have some experience figuring budgets, especially if you're getting into large amounts of money.

GOODWIN

Are commissions generally more profitable than gallery sales?

ANDREWS

No, I wouldn't say so, necessarily. It just depends on how you do them, and what kind of work you're doing, and how you run your business. There are some artists who do commissions, architectural commissions, who really are not at all well known for their work through galleries and don't sell that way. So for them, architectural commissions would be more profitable, but for other artists they might not be. Also, one of the most important factors and one of the places where artists get into trouble in doing commissions is not so much estimating what everything will cost, but making very, very clear specifications of what the artist is actually going to do and not do -- exactly where the limitations of the artist's responsibilities are. For instance, if an artist calculates what a work is going to cost, and then finally gets it to the site and realizes that he is going to have to install it at union wages when he didn't expect to, that often can be a very considerable factor in what the cost of the work is going to be to the artist.

GOODWIN

Can you give me some idea of what it costs in materials to build some of your commissions?

ANDREWS

In materials? Well, stainless steel costs about $1.25 a pound. So if you make, let's say, a sculpture that is twenty feet high and four feet wide and three feet thick and made of twelve gauge stainless steel, it's going to weigh about 4,000 pounds, about two tons. And therefore there will be about $5,000 worth of stainless steel in the sculpture.

GOODWIN

What about the expense of a fabricator?

ANDREWS

That's certainly a factor, too. Again, some artists design the sculpture and have some of the work done by a sheet metal factory, or by some kind of metal workers, or perhaps by some kind of shop which customarily does another kind of manufacturing. Then, some artists actually go to one of the sculpture fabricators that do exist now, places like Lippincott and Milgo, who are in business to make works of art. Usually those companies are prepared to take a rudimentary drawing or the simplest maquette and turn it into design drawings which then can be fabricated so they can take over the whole job. Of course, that makes it easy for the artist to estimate the cost, because he just figures out what it's going to cost for Lippincott to make the sculpture and adds his commission onto the top of that, plus transportation.

GOODWIN

So it's several more thousand dollars to the fabricator, in this hypothetical sculpture?

ANDREWS

Well, in a kind of very, very general way, if you're talking about making a metal sculpture, and you're talking about standard shop practices of welding and bending and so on, then you can figure that very roughly the fabrication will cost about the same amount as the materials. But of course that depends on how tricky the job is, how much finishing the fabricator is going to do. That's just a kind of rough rule of thumb.

GOODWIN

So the costs really begin to climb. [laughter]

ANDREWS

They sure do. And of course costs of all of those kinds of things are going up and very rapidly. Skilled labor, steel and bronze materials -- those are the prime things that are going up in cost in our society.

GOODWIN

And the dealer's commission is usually about 50 percent?

ANDREWS

But in the case of a commission, an architectural commission, usually the commission is on the profits. On a really large piece of sculpture, so much of that work is in outside costs, in material and fabrication, and if the dealer took 50 percent, the artist would get next to nothing. So you figure it according to a different system.

GOODWIN

So in a large sense your productivity is definitely limited by your market? You can't produce in anticipation of sales.

ANDREWS

Right. I don't make a twenty-foot sculpture and just sort of sit it in my sculpture yard and hope someone will come along and buy it, although I have done that. If you want to work large, unless you are very famous, you pretty much have to have commissions.

GOODWIN

Do you have to be concerned with limiting the number or even the quality of pieces produced? Or are all those limitations natural and built into the system? Do you have to control the supply?

ANDREWS

Be careful not to make too much art, you mean?

GOODWIN

Yeah. Keep it precious.

ANDREWS

No, George. In the case of the kind of work that I do, I try to be as productive as I possibly can, and I try to make as many sculptures as I can because that's the way of expressing what I have to say, of fabricating my ideas and bringing them into being. Each sculpture is slightly different from the others, so I just don't have enough time or enough help to make all the sculptures that I would like to see. That's one way that helpers can be of great assistance, in that you can get your ideas into reality while they still have some freshness to them. You can progress from one idea to the next. You can see what something looks like, and you can make some progress in your development, instead of spending all of your time welding and fabricating metal.

GOODWIN

So there's no danger in being overexposed?

ANDREWS

Swamping the market or something like that?

GOODWIN

No. Say, having a one-man show every year in a few cities: Los Angeles, the Midwest, New York.

ANDREWS

There's no danger of that in my case, in the case of artists who work like I do. You know, if you're a painter who paints a painting every day, then maybe you might worry about producing a bit too much. Maybe you ought to slow down and think about it a little bit. But in the case of my work and artists who work in ways similar to me, the problem is getting the works made and not in what you're talking about.

GOODWIN

Which dealers do you think have been most sensitive to your work?

ANDREWS

To my work? Well, the dealers that I've worked with,

GOODWIN

Yeah, who represented you?

ANDREWS

The ones that I've just mentioned. There are, of course, other dealers in the world who are sympathetic to sculpture and who show more sculpture than painting, or who seem to be particularly effective in presenting sculpture. For instance. Pace Gallery is a very good sculpture gallery.

GOODWIN

I mean, was Charles Alan more perceptive, let's say, than another dealer?

ANDREWS

Well, yes, towards my work he had a lot of sympathy and understanding.

GOODWIN

Do you think there are enough good dealers in the art market? Are they a limited commodity like everything else? Is it a real art to be a dealer who's successful in many ways: who sells art, who pleases his artists?

ANDREWS

Well, yes, of course. It takes a special kind of person, a special kind of businessman or businesswoman. Of course, it's not easy. It takes a special kind of flair. But I think there are enough of them. I don't think there's a shortage of art dealers.

GOODWIN

It seems that dealing is one area where women have made, if not a greater contribution, a more visible contribution than some other areas. Maybe there are fewer obstacles to becoming a dealer than, say, a museum director.

ANDREWS

Oh, there are a lot of women in museum work now: Barbara Haskell and Marcia Tucker [both Whitney Museum, New York].

GOODWIN

Are artists always shopping for new dealers? Are they continually trying to upgrade their representation?

ANDREWS

Some artists are, and some artists aren't. Artists come to crossroads with dealers at certain times in their career. Just as in all other kinds of human relationships and partnerships and representations, both of the parties grow in different ways, and sometimes the kind of arrangement that was appropriate at a certain stage of the relationship is no longer appropriate. So the dealer and the artist go separate ways.

GOODWIN

Can a Los Angeles artist become successful by only showing in Los Angeles?

ANDREWS

What are your terms for "successful"?

GOODWIN

Vague.

ANDREWS

You mean world famous? Or do you mean satisfying the artists' own need to show their work or what?

GOODWIN

Establishing a national reputation.

ANDREWS

A national reputation? Well, as a matter of fact, there are artists with international reputations who have hardly ever shown in New York. Peter Voulkos hardly ever had a show of his sculpture in New York that I know of. For years and years, Ed Kienholz showed only in Los Angeles and was internationally known as an artist. But there are all different kinds of artists, and artists in the first place are exceptions to all kinds of standard rules. Every artist is an individual case. Obviously, if an artist wants to make an international reputation, one of the things that artist would do is probably to try to have shows in different parts of the world. But I think it's been proven that that's not so necessary. It depends on what the artist wants to do. Some artists feel that people in Los Angeles have a particular receptivity to their work that they might not find in New York, so maybe they don't feel like showing in New York.

GOODWIN

Don't most artists want to be well paid and highly regarded, like any other people?

ANDREWS

Well, yes, they do, but artists have certain ideas about what they're willing to do to get well paid and highly regarded by other people. A lot of times artists may have things that they would rather do and ways they would rather live than the things that they have to do to achieve eminence and profitability in the shortest possible time.

GOODWIN

In other words, they don't have to compromise with what dealers or other so-called "experts" tell them?

ANDREWS

I don't quite know what you mean by that.

GOODWIN

There must be some dealers who advise their artists as to style.

ANDREWS

Tell them how to work?

GOODWIN

Yeah. And maybe the most famous artists are occasionally guided in that direction. I have no way of knowing.

ANDREWS

I don't either. [laughter]

GOODWIN

Okay, we're stuck.

ANDREWS

Do you think Leo Castelli tells Roy Lichtenstein what his next show ought to be like?

GOODWIN

I think it's a possibility. I'm not worried about it, but it's an aspect of the business that intrigues me. It seems that although an artist can establish a national reputation by showing in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles artist can similarly show only in New York.

ANDREWS

That's right. He won't have to show in Los Angeles at all. Or even a New York artist can show only in Hong Kong.

GOODWIN

Except it doesn't seem that a New York artist can "make it," according to conventional standards, by showing in Los Angeles.

ANDREWS

Well, it would be interesting to try.

GOODWIN

Right. Definitely.

ANDREWS

Or some Los Angeles artists show in London or somewhere. Of course, there's a whole connection between London and Los Angeles. David Hockney, for instance.

GOODWIN

The Hockney connection.

ANDREWS

Yes, there's the Hockney connection.

GOODWIN

Why do galleries fail so often?

ANDREWS

Well, it's a difficult business, a very difficult business. It takes a lot of investment in the first place; it takes some staying power. Of course, just because galleries go out of business doesn't mean necessarily that they're not successful. Not all galleries started in the first place with the idea of staying in business forever. There are some people who would like to run a gallery for five years and then do something else. Or who run a gallery for a while and succeed in escalating its status. For instance, Virginia Kondratieff started the Dwan Gallery and took over a place that was a clothing store in Westwood and ran it there for a couple of years. Then it moved over next to Flax on Lindbrook Avenue, and then John Weber came in and took that over. From a modest beginning in a little clothing store in Westwood, it became one of the most powerful New York galleries. Then Virginia stepped out and John Weber took it over, and now it's the John Weber Gallery, You know, there 're the old standbys that have been in New York for the last forty years. Then there are other galleries that exist very successfully and with great integrity for a certain period of time, and then whoever's running the gallery may feel that the time for that gallery's pertinence in the scene is over. Take a dealer like Howard Wise, who was very perceptive and a very good dealer and very appreciative of his artists. [His] became the gallery for electric art, for light art, and magnetic art. He was the dealer for Takis, and Otto Piene and many of the most interesting artists at that period of the late sixties when a lot of that kind of art was being made. Then Howard Wise finally realized that, although it's still around, the great time for that art had passed and the most interesting artists were doing other things. So it was really time for him to step out of the gallery business. So his gallery and his style of dealing was over. But it wasn't that it had failed; it was that he just felt that the time to do it that way had passed.

GOODWIN

It's an interesting point. How do you feel about the new legislation favoring artists in terms of royalties? Are there two valid points of view on that issue?

ANDREWS

I think it's good. You're talking about the California law that was just passed by Jerry Brown, that artists get a certain percentage of the increase in the amount that the art is sold for each succeeding time. Well, practically, that is going to apply to a very, very small fraction of artists who are working. The amount of money that artists are going to get beyond a certain few artists is not very much. What it is significant for is the fact that government is recognizing artists' needs and taking some account of them. Of course, the federal laws are still absurd and self-defeating in the fact that an artist cannot donate his own work to a museum and deduct anything more than the mere cost of the materials, which is very unfair to artists. It also means that the nation's museums, and other places to which art can be donated, are being deprived of a great number of works of art that would otherwise be given to them. The whole tax structure of the valuation of art is in terrible need of an overhaul, I think.

GOODWIN

Let's talk about critics for a moment. How do they affect you as an artist, if at all?

ANDREWS

You mean how do they affect my work?

GOODWIN

Yeah.

ANDREWS

Well, I don't think that they affect what I do. I don't think I read an art criticism and say, "Oh, oh, gosh, I shouldn't have done that after all," or something dumb like that. I don't think that artists pay much attention to critics in terms of criticism and evaluation of their own direction in art, but critics are very valuable just because they write about art and because it's some- thing for people to read and learn what's going on. We have, for instance, a magazine like Art Week. There are some good articles in Art Week, reviews of exhibitions, but just because so much art has to be covered, not all the articles can be of the most inspiring quality. You have a lot of people writing reviews who really don't know very much about art or have much experience with it. But in a way that's very helpful because it gives those people a chance to write about art, and it gives people something to read about art. These reviews are valuable not because they're terribly perceptive, but just because they are about art. People hear about what's going on, and perhaps their interest is aroused in some way, so more people see more art. It's just a matter of dissemination of information. A lot of what's written about art is of that nature. Some of it has style, some of it doesn't, some of it's dumb, some of it's perceptive -- it ' s just chatter about art really. A very small amount of what's written about art is of any critical importance in evaluating what's going on.

GOODWIN

I've noticed you receive several art periodicals. Do you enjoy reading criticism, aside from art news?

ANDREWS

I don't read very much of it. I look at the pictures mostly. All those art magazines that I get are ways of keeping in touch with what's happening. I only read articles about something that I'm intensely interested in. For instance, I read all the articles about Christo's fence. I read the New York Times, and I read all of the newspapers from Sebastopol to Petaluma to San Jose, because I really was interested to see what effect that crucial work of art had on all these people writing from different points of view. So if there's an artist that I'm interested in, that I know, then I read the reviews about that artist. Or if there's an article which seems to me particularly pertinent to my interests, then I read it, but I don't read everything.

GOODWIN

Is there a writer or a critic whose work you admire particularly?

ANDREWS

Well....

GOODWIN

If you don't have one, that's okay, because I have one other question I want to get to.

ANDREWS

Okay, let's get to it.

GOODWIN

Right. Is there an art community in Los Angeles?

ANDREWS

Yes, I think that there more or less is, a sort of vaguely outlined art community.

GOODWIN

What is it?

ANDREWS

Who belongs to it, you mean?

GOODWIN

Or what is it?

ANDREWS

Yeah. Well....

GOODWIN

Is it more than a random assortment of people interested in and doing art?

ANDREWS

Well, it's involved with some collectors and some critics and some artists who share common interests. But 237 if you go to all of the openings in galleries in Los Angeles for a year, then you'll know that there is a certain group of people that you keep seeing over and over again and that are concerned enough with art to go and see a lot of it. And so you see them where art is.

GOODWIN

Well, other than the "crowd" or the "group," is there a feeling of community, of togetherness and mutual responsibility?

ANDREWS

In a nebulous Los Angelenian sort of a way, I think there is a feeling of community of ideas and concerns and interests. People are talking about similar subjects.

GOODWIN

But not all artists are necessarily in it?

ANDREWS

Not all artists, no, not all artists. Some artists are in it some of the time and not all the time. Some artists are in it a little bit, and some artists are in it a lot.

GOODWIN

It's take it or leave it?

ANDREWS

Well, I think that artists and collectors and people who are interested in art like to talk to each other and share their ideas and bounce them off each other and find out what's going on. But it's not like the art world in New York, and it's not like the art world in San Francisco. The art community we're talking about has a particular sort of nebulous, fluid, casual quality, just like life in Los Angeles.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI [video session]
MARCH 29, 1977

[NOTE: What follows is the text of a video tape produced by Mr. Andrews himself in conjunction with his oral history. The conversations occur against the backdrop of the water sculptures at the El Paseo de Saratoga shopping center in San Jose. The video tape includes extended interludes of images and music without conversation.]

ANDREWS

My name is Oliver Andrews. I'm an artist, a sculptor, and I work mostly with water, water flowing over smooth, simple forms of steel and bronze. This film is about a group of seven sculptures I made for the El Paseo de Saratoga shopping center in San Jose, California. In creating the sculptures, I spent many days with the builder of the shopping center, talking over the design of the sculptures and the water courses which contained them. Chan[ning] Christman built El Paseo de Saratoga, where these water sculptures are. Chan, we started making water sculp- tures together quite some time ago, wasn't it?

CHRISTMAN

Yeah, across the street at the West Valley Professional Center in 1963. Wasn't that your first fountain?

ANDREWS

That was my very first fountain. I made a small model, and Chan and I looked at it. We turned it on in his front lawn. It looked good, so we made one about eight feet high, and I put it in over there. That was our first experience of working together. Chan, when you started the idea of El Paseo de Saratoga, what was your idea of how water sculpture would be used here?

CHRISTMAN

I wanted folks to be met by flowing water whenever they came in any one of the half-dozen entrances to the shopping center, the water to originate in a sculptured water source and then flow to the central plaza where we have a reflecting pool and a gathering place, each entry being different, each sculptured water source being different, and all leading them into the center of the shopping center, so that the sculpture became involved with the flow of the water and with the experience of the people visiting the center. Kind of a total environmental sculpture springing from yours.

ANDREWS

Chan, what would you say is the reaction of people? Now that El Paseo's been here for about two years, how do people react to the sculptures here?

CHRISTMAN

It brings a lot of life and vitality and sparkle, both the sound and also the dancing reflections of the sunlight on the concrete columns of the building. It adds a great deal of vitality to the central part of the shopping center.

ANDREWS

During the years that the sculpture has been running -- although some of them went in before other ones -- they've matured. The surface has slightly changed (it's become more green), some of them have slight tinges of other colors, and each one has acquired a real patina and general surface look that is particular to it. Having a water system like this with planting and flowing water is like a garden. The whole place is a water garden as well as an earth garden, and it takes maintenance. Water has to be kept clear; the pools have to be cleaned out. In the beginning, there were quite a few problems with algae and keeping the water flowing and clean. The place looks beautiful today: the water is clear and sparkling and splashing. Chan, what were some of the problems in maintaining the water and keeping it clear?

CHRISTMAN

An interesting study, working with the different ways of treating it. We've used six or eight different systems of chemical treatment, which unlike the swimming pool chemicals, will permit fish and plant life. But most of them sooner or later end up with a man on a broom scrubbing hard, because that algae is a basic living substance, and it's hard to handle. I'm very hopeful that the ozone equipment which is coming will enable us to work with fish and will be beneficial to the growth of the plants.

ANDREWS

Now, I'd like to move from the central area to some of the other pools and some of the other sculptures and try to show how the different areas are related to each other, [music -- vistas]

ANDREWS

This is my wife, Jill Fairchild, who has witnessed the evolution of these sculptures. Jill and I are going to discuss the use of water with public sculpture and how it seems to affect people.

FAIRCHILD

Oliver, why did you begin working with water in your sculpture?

ANDREWS

Well, you know I've always been fascinated with water. I've been diving in the water since I was a child, and I always wanted to use water somehow in my water sculpture. But I could never figure out exactly how to do it. I could never figure out just the way that would really be compatible with the way we live in California and the kind of feeling that we have about water here, the way the light is here. I finally got an inkling of how to do it when I went to Europe and went to Japan and saw ways that people were using water there, the way it's used in the Mediterranean. There are lots of parts of the Mediterranean -- and parts of Japan, too -- that are very like California in the way you have hillsides sloping down to the sea, you have islands offshore. And I finally worked out a way that I could use water in a quieter, calmer way than the way that you ordinarily see it in baroque gardens or in Japan.

FAIRCHILD

I've noticed that some of your sculptures bubble and bounce and the water spills over very freely, and in others it flows very slowly and very caressingly. Why do you change each mood of each sculpture?

ANDREWS

Well, as you can see, this sculpture here is in front of the theater, which is a place that's used a lot at night. It's illuminated, a lot of people gather around here, and light shines down on the sculpture. So we needed something which was much more active, much more bubbly and sparkling, than the smoother sculptures like the ones that are further down the mall there, where the water runs in a quieter, smoother kind of way.

FAIRCHILD

Some of your surfaces are textured, and some of them are very smooth. Do you feel that that definitely has an effect on the flow of the water?

ANDREWS

Oh, sure it does. When the water is very smoothly flowing over a smooth surface, it's quiet and slick. And when the surface is rougher, more agitated, you get a much more coruscating, rumbling, bumbling kind of a movement of the water, which gives a whole different kind of feeling. The one is very contemplative, very quiet; the other is gayer, more active, more playful -- it just has a different mood. It allows them to both go deeply into themselves; and since there is a sort of action of water, a kind of sound that the water makes, it tends to make a place where water is a special kind of a place. It tends to make it a place where you're not so distracted by traffic or by things that are going on around you. For some reason, in cities people seem very attracted to water. One reason why that could be is that, scientifically speaking, water produces negative ionization. Dry rubbing -- like the scrubbing of dry tires on asphalt, or the pounding of feet on pavement -- produces positive ionization, which seems to make people anxious, nervous and irritable; whereas negative ionization seems to make people feel benevolent, calm, and peaceful. So that's the kind of feeling that I would like people to get from being close to the water, a kind of feeling of quiet and calm awareness, a feeling of paying an effortless attention to themselves and what is around them without being distracted by outside considerations.

FAIRCHILD

Your sculptures have a very natural feeling to them. They have a very natural movement of water, as opposed to jutting, or giant spouts, or fountains that use a lot of water in spray. Do you feel that it tends to bring nature into a shopping center, or nature into a developed area, by having the water move in a more natural way?

ANDREWS

Well, all ways that water moves are natural because water is a natural element. So a waterfall or a charging cataract is as natural as a trickle or smoothly flowing water. But the tradition of spouting and gushing water began in Europe, in Italy and France, during the late Renaissance, when people began thinking of their ability to move water around as a matter of civic pride. You'd bring a river into town, and you'd do as much as you could with it before you'd let the river out of town on the other side, [music vistas]

FAIRCHILD

Oliver, we were talking about the use of water in the Mediterranean in gushing, bubbling fountains of water, in Europe and the Mediterranean. I'm wondering how that relates to your water sculptures at El Paseo.

ANDREWS

Well, that tradition comes out of a desire to use the water very actively, to use its hydraulic power, to use its pressure and to throw it up to the air in a kind of exuberant way. And that relates to the kind of society in which there's surplus energy and in which the whole idea of using it displays that. Also, it has to do with having plenty of water, with a gushing river that has a lot of hydraulic power behind it. The tradition that I'm more interested in -- becuase it relates more to California -- is the tradition where there is much less water, where instead of water being thrown up in the air, it lies quietly in pools. And those kinds of traditions which come out of a society where water is extremely precious, where it's a matter of life or death, have to do with using the water in a smooth, contemplative way. This pool that we're sitting next to, with its blue tiles, the kind of blue tile that in Spain and Portugal are called azuelos, reminds me of the way water is used in the south of Spain and in North Africa, where the great buildings like the Alhambra in Granada use the water in the way I've been describing. And here we see this water sculpture which is behind me, where the water runs down in a quiet sheet: this way of using water is actually very practical in the sense that there's not as much evaporation when it runs down smoothly like that.

FAIRCHILD

Do you feel that now with the water crisis, and certainly with the energy crisis, that there's going to be more of a demand for the water sculptures; or on the other turn, that there won't be?

ANDREWS

I think it will make people question their use of water more carefully. Of course some people may make a superficial judgment that the use of any water is not to be condoned. But I think the precious and creative use of water is really something that calls our attention to it even more. When you realize that the water in this pool, for instance, is subject to the same kind of conditions as water in a reservoir, that the water is not really being wasted, it's being recirculated -- then it really isn't a wasting of water. The smaller sculptures that I make, which aren't in pools but have self-contained tanks of their own as part of the sculpture, have to be watered, have to be added to only very seldom. Probably once a week they take the same amount of water that it would take to flush a toilet once. So that's really not an awful lot of water to use for what I think is a very important purpose.

FAIRCHILD

You've been using water in your art for a long time, and you've used water as an art form with other sorts of experiments. Can you talk to us about the use of light as art in water, and maybe some of your Sky Fountains, water-ocean fountains.

ANDREWS

The Sky Fountains are a kind of sculpture that I do in the water. A Sky Fountain is made of a strip of Mylar one hundred feet long and five feet wide which goes down to the bottom of the ocean, is attached there, and then flies up into the sky, attached to helium baloons. So in a way it achieves a marvelous uniting of the sea and the sky. It ripples with the wind and moves with the ocean currents, attracts fish -- divers can play with it. We've recorded some of these on film, with underwater film, and that's another way of using water in my art. It's sort of like flying a kite except that you do it underwater. And at the end of the day you roll up the Sky Fountain, take it home, and you don't leave anything behind to contaminate the ocean. But I've done a lot of those and experimented with them pretty extensively. What I would like to do now is to do some work in the ocean at night, where the work would be completely immaterial: you would just use very powerful lights under the ocean; you would make grids and patterns. And of course, then when you switched off the light, the work of art would disappear.

FAIRCHILD

You film your underwater art pieces, don't you?

ANDREWS

Oh, yes. Naturally the audience at an underwater art event is not quite as extensive as the audience that we have everyday here at El Paseo de Saratoga. For those people participating it's very exciting. But in order to allow people to appreciate that on a wider scale, I always film those pieces. And I think of the films as being not only documentary but as being works of art in themselves.

FAIRCHILD

You use Mylar a lot, and the surface of Mylar is very similar in look and texture to the stainless steel or some of the metal with water flowing over it. It sort of turns the Mylar into a sky water-fountain almost in appearance, right?

ANDREWS

Yes, it does. It's shiny and bright and reflective, and it ripples, so that you can make something very large but which is very light. It's very transportable. These pieces, too: we can pack them in a suitcase and get on a plane or drive somewhere and unpack the sculpture, and out of one small suitcase comes a sculpture which may be 200 feet long.

FAIRCHILD

What are some of the art pieces you've done with the Mylar before? Haven't you done an avant-garde art festival in New York, at Shea Stadium?

ANDREWS

Yes, we did a piece in Shea Stadium which was a sundial made of gold Mylar around the inside of one of the tiers of Shea Stadium, at an art festival which I shared with Nam June Paik, another artist. It was 1,725 feet in diameter. We also did a piece of Mylar in the grand concourse of Grand Central Station which was a bridge 300 feet long, that bridged that whole....

FAIRCHILD

An important part of your work nowadays is trying to do environmental work or water sculpture that is a part of landscape sculpture, garden sculpture. I wonder if you have any plans or ideas that might be coming up in doing an entire environmnet, an area. Maybe you'd like to talk about the Cincinnati environment that you created a piece for, the Saint Francis piece [Garden of Shrine to Saint Francis, commissioned by John and Suzanne Warrington].

ANDREWS

Yes, that was a garden. That was a shrine to Saint Francis; and Saint Francis, being a nature person who was one of the original ecologists, you might say -- he had a close communion with nature -- this garden was a place in which one could go and walk between two faces of flowing water, across a bridge between them, so that the transit from the outside world into the garden was a sort of purification as you passed between these walls of water. And then in the garden, gradually, as you went deeper in, it became more and more difficult to tell which parts of the garden were just growing and which parts were actually designed by an artist. And gradually, deeper in the garden you became lost in the sense that you didn't quite know where you were, but you knew your way out -- a kind of nice way of being lost. A kind of analogy of the human condition.

FAIRCHILD

It's windy today, but it's amazing to see how the water sticks to the surface of your sculptures and does not spray off. I'm wondering how you achieved that texture, that tensile strength.

ANDREWS

Well, part of it is the surface of the sculpture which is not absolutely slick-shiny. It reflects light, but it has a certain amount of surface tension with the water on it. It also has to do with the way the water flows over the lip of the sculpture so that it does not -- it's slightly rounded, just the opposite from the lip of a tea- pot, where you want the water to go from the teapot into the cup. In this kind of a fountain, you turn the water slowly over the lip so that it gradually doesn't leave where it can be blown off. It sticks onto the sculpture and comes down in a smooth -- see, even when there is quite a bit of wind blowing, when the wind does blow it off, it returns back to the sculpture. No matter how much you know about working with water, it always remains something of a mystery. Even when you make models and conduct experiments, you never know exactly how the water is going to behave until you install the sculpture and turn it on.