"...Unlike the intense amount of planning, modeling,
preparing that I go into to make some of the large scale
outdoor works, I wanted to bring to this piece more the
act of spontaneously making the work of art..."
"I think monuments, unlike artworks, are a blending
of art and architecture."
"I have two sides: creativity and the architecture.
[...] I don't want my architecture looking like my sculptures
and I don't want the sculptures being at all architectonic
in their form."
"What do you look like if you were a chair? [...] I
started researching the history of the chair, and what I
came up with is something."
"Groundswell" is a piece that
I made for the Wexner Center for the Arts. It would be their
first permanent installation,
and Sara Rogers, the curator at the Wexner Center at the time,
had contacted me as she was very aware of the smaller studio
sculptures. I had been concurrently building the "Civil Rights
Memorial," as I was making "Topo" and all these outdoor pieces.
I was working in my studio. Some of the works were being shown
with broken car glass, lead, beeswax. There were smaller,
personally scaled
works I could physically make myself. The rule was: I had
to be able to make it. And I think Sara and I discussed the
idea of bringing something of my studio works out of doors,
and I was completely interested in doing that. Knowing that
it was a museum, knowing that, unlike a lot of art in outdoor
places where you really have to almost gear yourself up for
maintenance-free works, a work here could be more delicate.
I took one look at the Wexner Center and I knew that. I had
been for years wanting to use the broken glass out of doors,
but inherently it's still glass and you just can't touch it.
You can't put it out there for just free for every day walkers-by.
So when I visited the Wexner Center and I realized that, when
Eisenmann designed the space, he had pretty much combined
two disparate grids, and spaces were occurring naturally.
They were what I would call his unplanned spaces, and they
were occurring in very, very visible locations. At the front
entrance, you looked out on this graveled rooftop. At the
cafe, you looked down on an eight-foot-deep, very odd sort
of pit, filling up with gum wrappers. And there was another
one on the upper level where the administration was - highly
visible but physically non-accessible, because each of these
areas was walled off. It was something that you could look
out on, both from inside and outside the building. And I knew
right away that I could use broken glass, but at the same
time what I was thinking of doing would require dump truck
loads of broken car glass, which basically I had not really
ever dealt with. I mean, I had taken something that was like
- these pieces I was making inside were no longer than the
size of a table. They were very, very small. But I knew that
I wanted to do this.
The other thing that was very important to me was that, unlike
the intense amount of planning, modeling, preparing that I
go into to make some of the large scale outdoor works, I wanted
to bring to this piece more the act of spontaneously making
the work of art, which meant all that I actually did as drawings
and planning was two or three very rough sketches on Xeroxes
of the photographs of the existing place. I deliberately wanted
to treat it the way I go into my studio, not knowing what
I'm going to do and make something. And inherently, the difference
when an artist literally has a blueprint for an idea and then
lets other people build it, or whether you can actually at
a larger, larger scale, physically go out and spontaneously
make something, is something I really wanted to explore in
this piece, so that on a given day, forty three tons of car
glass arrived. I had a crew of three people and we just made
this piece. I was terrified because I also realized "Well,
if it's an absolute disaster, I'm out there in full view."
A studio's a wonderful place, because if it doesn't work,
nobody can ever hear about it. Here I was, with school groups,
coming by watching this, and I'm out there not having a clue
as to what I might want to do. It took me three or four days,
and the way in which the glass was carried in - the architect
in me kicked in at some point earlier in the process, and
I realized - this is no different from getting roofing gravel
up to the top of a roof. So I called up a roofing contractor
and I said "Well, I've got these three rooftops that I need
re-graveled," and they were like, "No problem." Then I told
them it was broken glass, and they said, "Slightly no problem."
And the wonderful thing about it is to get all that gravel
up, you need a boom crane and a conical bucket, and we dropped
the glass by bucketload and bucketload and bucketload. And
I knew that the piece would be about that, because again,
these works are also about process. I think I'm absolutely
coming out a '70s attitude in art, where the process of the
making of the piece oftentimes can play into the piece. And
for this, it is about a meeting of East and West. It's a play
on the Japanese raked gardens of Kyoto, as well as the Indian
burial and effigy mounds of Athens, Ohio. So it's a real blend.
ART:21:
Could you talk a little more
about these references?
LIN:
The Wexner Center is in Columbus,
Ohio. It's forty minutes away from Mound City, which is the
largest grouping of these mounds, so it's a melding of a conscious
idea on my part to sort of blend East/West culture,
but it's also about bringing a studio artwork mentality out
of doors. And also it's about process. And I think [Robert]
Smithson had done a piece for Kent State, called "Asphalt
Pour" in the '70s. He took a dumptruck full of asphalt and
just dumped it on the side of a hill. And I think he buried
a shed with it, or was that (another artist)? It was just
about bringing in, tying in, a spontaneous process into the
piece. But for me, it was my first artwork that I made that
I was having a problem, because I knew when I had done the
monuments
that I was still searching for something. I really do feel
the memorials are a separate, stand-apart. I think monuments,
unlike artworks, are a blending of art and architecture.
They have a function, but their function is for the most part
purely symbolic, so they're in between. They're sort of the
true hybrid between art and architecture.
I knew, for me, that I was struggling in the studio works,
and in an earlier piece called "Topo," to get back to the
land in a much more fluid yet intuitive way. And I think when
I had made "Ground Swell," I realized that, for me, it was
my first artwork and I knew that I was very interested in
where it was going to go. And where it went was to "Wave Field,"
which again led me to the whole topology show. So I think
for me, my sculptures deal with naturally occurring phenomena,
and they're embedded and very closely aligned with geology
and landscape and natural earth formations. I think that someone's
work - like Alice Aycock or Scott Burton's work - their artwork
dealt with a language that tied it back into architecture.
ART:21:
Why is there such a distinction
in your thinking between art and architecture?
LIN:
I actually I keep them separate;
that's just a choice I made. I don't know why I did it. I
felt compelled to do it basically. I have two sides: creativity
and the architecture. It's got ideas about framing the landscape,
being ecologically and environmentally sensitive, not that
a lot of the artworks aren't using recycled materials and
about nature in another way. But formally,
I liked that they're different, that I don't want my architecture
looking like my sculptures and I don't want the sculptures
being at all architectonic in their form. And that's just
a choice I made or a choice that was made. I don't think I
ever really thought about it. I don't think I woke up one
day and said, "I'm going to be an artist on some days and..."
It was more that I couldn't choose between the two, nor did
I choose to blend them. I think it's taken me a body of work
to see how I am developing.
ART:21:
Can you talk some more about
this?
LIN:
Okay. I think there's a very
easy segue into it, which I think is very, very interesting.
I have one huge concern because I sort of split my time between
the artworks and the architecture that, in a way, the processes
of making them are very, very different. And I've always been
afraid that there'd be a real split, or a schizophrenia that
would begin to occur between my life and my creative process
as an architect and my life in art. Concurrent to the "Topology"
show, I had been asked by Knoll, a furniture company, to design
their 60th anniversary collection. And from a designer's point
of view, from the design/architectural world, the chair is,
in a way, the closest to a self-portrait. What do you look
like if you were a chair? And that was a very tough struggle
for me, because I just was searching for something and searching
for something, and I started researching the history of the
chair, and what I came up with is something. I ended up titling
"stones," and they are as much about sculpture as they are
about design and architecture. And the form is... you can't
quite tell. It's a very simple elliptical stool that you sit
on, ever so slightly concave in the center. They're lightweight
concrete, and they are about that merger, or that dialogue,
I have between art and design. And they're a hybrid, and the
whole series is called "The Earth Is (Not Flat)." They deal
with the curvature of the Earth. There's a chaise lounge called
"Longitude," which literally is the same inspiration I had
to make "Wave Field." It's a slight undulation in the ground
plan. But it also is playing off of design, taking Mies van
der Rohe's classic psychiatrist flat day-bed and literally
throwing a curve onto that, from a design point of view.
I think, for me, the stones are my favorite, if you can have
favorites. It's always terrible to say your favorite, but
because in their simplicity, they both talk to the sculptural
world and the architectural world, and they are in that sense
they really talk about who I am and where I'm coming from.
And so they're very important to me. So, that simultaneously
I could be doing an art show called "Topology," and a commercial
line of furniture entitled "The Earth Is (Not Flat)" and yet
they're the same voice. For the first time, and that was a
couple of years ago, I was sort of made to feel whole. But
I think it is hard to separate yourself into two worlds, so
it's very nice when you know that the worlds, though separate,
are in absolute close dialogue, and that they're in step with
one another. And that's been very, very important for me in
my aesthetic,
artistic development.
