- It's my pleasure to welcome you
to the second Stephen Fleischman Lectureship
featuring the renowned artist, Deborah Butterfield.
The Lectureship honors the 25th Anniversary
of Stephen Fleischman's tenure as Museum Director.
Members of MMoCA's Board of Trustees who served
during that time funded an endowment
to provide for an annual lecture by individuals
who have made exceptional contributions to art and culture.
Talks organized for the Stephen Fleischman Lectureship
are held each year in April and have free admission
in recognition of the museum's dedication to providing
access to opportunities for learning and enrichment.
We're very fortunate to have
as our distinguished guest Deborah Butterfield.
Internationally respected as one of the most significant
American sculptors, Deborah Butterfield has created
a body of work of remarkable focus and lasting influence.
Through an inventive and masterful use
of a wide range of salvaged materials,
she creates sculptures that express an effecting
vulnerability and eloquently suggest equine power,
steadfastness, and grace.
She has explored this motif over the course of four decades,
creating a deeply moving series of variations
infused with metaphor and symbolism.
Deborah Butterfield's sculptures appear
in major public collections, including
the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York,
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond,
the Art Institute of Chicago,
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC,
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Deborah Butterfield also holds a special place
in MMoCA's institutional history.
The Madison Art Center, now MMoCA, organized her first
solo exhibition in 1976 at the museum's
Lincoln School building on Gorham Street,
as well as an exhibition in 1994
after the museum relocated to State Street.
MMoCA is please to count two of her sculptures,
Dapple Gray and Untitled, among the treasures
of its permanent collection.
Roberta Lieberman of Chicago's Zolla Lieberman Gallery
donated Untitled to the museum
for its collection, and we are honored
to have her son William here this evening.
So it is with great pleasure
that we welcome Deborah Butterfield back to MMoCA.
Please offer her a warm welcome.
[audience applauding]
- I was born in San Diego on the day
that Ponder won the Kentucky Derby.
And that is the reason for these hours of horses you're
going to be looking at.
[nervously laughing]
This shows me with one of my horses, Willie,
and it was in the days when we actually used film.
And we didn't know that he had done this until we brought it back.
[audience laughing]
He was really excited getting his picture taken.
[audience laughing]
I started out as a potter.
I went to UC San Diego in 1969,
and I took philosophy and chemistry and great things
with Angela Davis and [mumbling],
Linus Pauling and Jehanne Teilhet.
We did this show at the La Jolla Museum of Art
called Dimensions of Black, which showed African art,
how it impacted European art,
and then African-American art.
And I got to write the modern
to contemporary African-American art.
Anyway, we had this show and I got phoned down from Davis.
I transferred up to Davis to study ceramics
with Bob Arneson.
So I had this incredible time at UC San Diego,
but once I hit Davis, I knew I was in the right place.
And Bob Arneson taught ceramic sculpture,
and we weren't really allowed to make pottery in class.
And he said, you can make it on your own time,
but I won't critique it, it isn't for credit,
and then of course whenever I had a critique
all I had were these pots.
And Bob loved a good pot.
[audience laughing]
Then this was my last piece of undergraduate school,
and I actually applied to Davis and was lucky enough
to get in because it took me a while to figure out
how to make art, what I wanted to do.
These were life-sized ceramic saddles
which were technically kind of difficult.
I had to make a clay horse back and the clay
had fiberglass in it and, you know, make it
in three parts and put it back together.
But I was-- I wanted to be a Chinese potter,
you know, in the 11th century.
[audience laughing] But it, you know,
wasn't going to happen, and I just,
I was just so amazed carving into, making this saddle,
how much it reminded me the patterns were so Chinese
and how much it was like carving into leather.
At the time, I was really-- I'd always drawn horses,
I'd been teased for loving horses,
and I didn't have the courage to make horses.
So, for me, this saddle was like the negative space
between the horse and the rider.
So this showed a saddle and it leads up
to the reclining horses I did.
It's a saddle with a blanket over it.
So it's a utilitarian object not in use.
But it also, for me, referred to the idea
of drapery and classic sculpture.
And, also, everyone teased me for making these saddles
as being very sexual.
And so I had the saddle horn there being
quite phallic to please them.
[audience laughing]
And then this shows a vase from the Ming Dynasty
using a technique where you squirt the slip in a pattern
and then you puddle the glaze in there before you fire it.
And this is a saddle I made.
It was my Ming Dynasty saddle.
They didn't look like this, but it was, for me,
if I were a saddle in the Ming Dynasty,
this is what I would be.
And it raised the problem of having, how do you present it?
I couldn't just put it on a sawhorse,
so then I had, I committed myself to making this
carved wooden base after Ming architecture.
The table saws and I and materials like wood
with limitations are very, very hard for me.
So I worked my way out of these bases.
But this is at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art.
And this is a pot from the Song Dynasty,
11th to 12th century China, incised peony patterns.
So it was black slip over a white clay body,
and then the part that's white was incised away.
This is my Song Dynasty saddle.
And I about...
died.
It cracked when I fired it and I was devastated,
but I, you know, glued it back together
and then filled the crack with gold.
I remembered a lot of the old Chinese and Korean pots
were repaired that way, and it was like an analogy
of when you get old you get wrinkles
and you become wiser and more valuable in a way.
And so when I did that, the piece really came to life.
And it ended up being collected
by someone who collected Chinese ceramics.
So it became or it ended up where it wanted to live.
And then--
[audience laughing]
I guess it's when I started really making art.
[audience laughing]
I had bought my first horse, an ex-racehorse mare,
and she tried to dump me in a cactus patch.
And so I made this racing saddle for her.
And it was Earthenware with glaze,
and then I put porcelain needles in it with silicone.
So when you touched them, they'd kind of wiggle,
but when they broke, I could replace them.
And, you know, anything that beautiful
and that brittle and angry is also rather delicate.
And when I taught here, I got Lucas Samaras
to come as a visiting artist.
And I showed him my slides sort of, you know,
just a little bit.
And I said, Lucas, I didn't know your work.
Bob Arneson said to me, "Wow, have you seen
"Lucas Samaras' work?"
And I said, "That's how I discovered you."
And he got all weird.
And if you know Lucas,
he's really an interesting guy anyway.
Very intimidating.
And he said, Well my name means saddle-maker in Greek.
So it was a perfect honor.
And then I got to go to Skowhegan School of Sculpture
in Maine in between graduate school years.
And I had really gotten sick of having to appease
the kiln gods and deal with waiting.
You know, when you do clay, you have so many steps,
and I just wanted to make something
and have it be what it was as I was making it.
So William Wiley was one of my teachers,
and when I moved up from San Diego, I loved puns.
And everybody down there hated it when I made puns.
So I end up in a drawing class with William Wiley,
and he would make a watercolor this big
and the title would be this big below it.
It was all puns and crazy things,
and I'm like, I just couldn't believe where I ended up.
But I didn't know how to, how do you make an image?
How do you begin to make art?
I couldn't figure out how that begins.
And he said, "Just think of a title and then illustrate it."
And so when I went there, I knew I didn't have any kilns,
and so I thought I'll make a bed of leaves.
And so this was my first attempt at regular sculpture,
and I learned how to lash sticks and whittle
and I made the quilt with roplex
and real weaves on the cheesecloth.
And I installed it in the woods.
And the sculpture teachers were so conservative
that they wouldn't critique it because it wasn't
made out of art supplies.
[audience laughing]
And this is '72.
So you know Jackie Winsor was using sticks and things.
And I felt like it was like a piece
that I wanted you to stumble across in the woods.
We all have these.
We're born in beds. We die in beds.
We make love in beds. We sleep in them.
We're sick in them. We jump on them.
We hide under them.
And so I think the ones who did talk to me about it
felt it was just not complete or specific enough.
But I felt then, and I guess I'm in a way that way
about my horses now, that I want to leave room.
They don't need to be pedantic and didactic.
I think sometimes that there needs to be an opening
for the viewer to crawl into, to inhabit art.
And so, you know, the meaning changes throughout time,
in different contexts and different cultures.
Historically things change
and become appropriated by younger people.
And so this was my next piece, which was welded steel
and chicken wire and plaster.
And I got a sculpture award.
It was very much art supplies.
[audience laughing]
Our studios were just little sheds right outside
in a meadow next to a bunch of dairy heifers.
And being a Taurus, I really was quite drawn to them.
And so I made this bed, and I was in love
with this man John Buck.
And, you know, he was married, it was horrible.
And I just thought I'm this heifer,
and I want to do art about myself, and how do I do that?
Manuel Neri was my teacher, and if you know
his figurative work, why bother making a naked woman?
I mean, he did it so perfectly, I had no need to do that.
So I wanted to do personal art,
but to have it be a little bit allegorical.
When Roy De Forest would give me advice,
he would never presume to say you should do this
or you should do that.
He would tell me a story in the fourth century BC Greece
there was, you know, an Airedale and a Great Dane.
You know, and he would--
You know, if the shoe fit, you could try it on.
Anyway, for me this was a self-portrait
on the rocky road of love and life and growing up.
And she's standing there trying to keep her balance
as if she were in the back of a pickup,
you know, going around a windy road.
And then I did go to John, to England with John.
He got a divorce and we went to England.
And I built this piece over there.
It was very rainy and very sexist.
I'd never really dealt with classism or sexism.
It was sort of shocking.
And so I was--
And I'd been an exchange student of Finland,
so I was very taken by the reindeer imagery.
So this was a terrible pun.
It's a reindeer.
[audience laughing]
There's a garden hose going up its left hind leg,
and it's a fountain.
[audience laughing]
I was inspired by Botticelli skies and Turner paintings.
And this big heavy plaster thing, I wanted
to make it look as if it really just,
and Magritte of course,
that it was just an idea that maybe you could
put your hand into it and it was just a thought.
Well, this is the sculpture that I had
been familiar with growing up of horses,
which were basically war machines.
Whoever had horses usually prevailed
in dominating other cultures.
And they were often stallions.
And I just--
It was '73 during the Vietnam War, and I decided--
Well, I tried going around-- I tried talking people.
I couldn't even talk my parents into the idea
that the war was a bad thing.
And I realized that I would never make it
as a politician and finally gave myself permission
to go in the studio, which was hard.
You know?
Your friends were being drafted, and it just,
I don't know, was a very weird time.
Anyway, we read the I Ching a lot with Wiley
and it kept telling me to be like the sun at midday,
which I thought meant shine.
The only way I have a hope of shining is by making art.
And so to hope to influence people somehow that way.
And then the Chinese horses were so much less about war,
and this one, I guess, about sport and pleasure.
And also they were meant as spiritual creatures
to take your soul from this world to the next.
And my work has often been very much about death,
Earth and, you know, the full catastrophe.
And so these pieces, when I discovered them really,
they just spoke to me so much.
These were my horses from my graduate show,
and then the one on the right, actually,
I made in '74 right after I graduated.
I got to have a show at the Berkeley Art Museum.
And Brenda Richardson was the director and said to me,
"How are these different than Nancy Grave's camels?"
And I went, you know I said,
"Wow, I've only seen them in a tiny picture,
"you know, in a magazine,"
but I would say that the difference is the point of view.
Nancy Graves is examining and studying these things,
and I am the horse.
So it's subjective and objective.
And she said, "Oh, I'm so relieved.
"You can have a show."
[audience laughing]
I painted them like Turner skies.
You know, they were 800 pounds,
and I wanted them to just kind of become atmospheric.
It was very stressful for the guards.
They changed them every four hours
because there was carpet there and the horses
were a little tippy and the schoolchildren,
all the girls would just run at them.
And the guards had to protect the kids.
And this is a show I made for the Madison Art Center.
I came here and I was having a hard time
with my work, trying to figure out what to do.
I had a lot of false starts.
And then John and I gave talks down in Louisville,
at the university there, or Lexington I guess it was,
and I got to go see Secretariat.
And he was the most valuable horse in the world.
I think he had just finished the triple crown
a year or two earlier.
And I get there and he's covered with mud.
And I was so disappointed.
But it was also so wonderful, you know,
that they let him just wallow in the mud every day.
And I remember the New Guinea Mud Men
studying South Pacific art and how wonderful
pots are before you fire them.
They have this wonderful quality,
especially when they're still wet that you somehow
never quite live up to once they're fired.
They shrink down a bit and you don't get
that beautiful, luscious feeling.
So I'd mixed everything I'd worked with.
I was still using the plaster and chicken wire armature.
I mean, I'm sorry, welded steel and chicken wire armature.
And instead of the plaster and gauze or burlap,
I used these paper strips from a taxidermy store
and this glue called Dextrin,
which is what's on the back of an envelope.
It's a sugar starch, so it's not poisonous.
And I just, I went out into the backyard
and dug up dirt full of pine needles and grass
and twigs and earthworms and rabbit [droppings],
and mixed it together with this Dextrin
and a little plaster and put it all over these horses.
And the gallery had been lit for a print show.
It was about 30 by 35 or so.
And I just left the lighting the way it was
so that the horses weren't lit as objects,
they were just more like they had wandered into this space.
And there were two doors.
And they didn't really have eyes or anything,
but you felt like you were walking in late to class.
You know, when you came in, their ears were at you.
And then many-- They were very close together so many people
wouldn't even go in the room.
You had to sidle between them.
And a lot of people were very intimidated.
It's really the best installation I've ever done.
[audience laughing]
You see?
You can feel the shame of being late, can't you?
[audience laughing]
There's a lot of blame there.
[cheerful laughing]
And then, well, I'd had a review on these last horses,
and they don't really have eyes.
I guess they kind of have nostrils.
They don't have feet really.
And I spent a lot of time with this woman from Art Forum.
And the first sentence of my review
was, "Deborah Butterfield's horses have no genitals."
[audience laughing]
Oh, my goodness.
I can't even show it to my parents, you know?
I finally get a review-- [audience laughing]
I don't know, I was disappointed on so many levels, you know?
I hadn't-- I don't know, I hadn't communicated
and I hadn't made it phallic enough, so I got busy.
[audience laughing]
Anyway, you know, they were very well received.
And I thought if they--
And so they went from, that show went from,
sorry Bill, went from the Madison Art Center.
The next year, Roberta Lieberman, she came into my studio
I think right as the show was up, and I'd been
showing my slides to students and she was looking
for artists so I showed her my slides over lunch.
And she gave me a show.
And we went home to celebrate,
and John, my husband, John Buck,
had just come home with a whole bag of wild morels.
And we picked asparagus in the garden and had it on toast.
That's my fondest memory of Madison.
[audience laughing] It was a lucky day
and about the same time of year, it was wonderful.
Anyway, I thought if these pieces were successful,
was it just because they were big?
I was worried that I was relying on scale.
And so I made this piece that was really little in Montana.
John had a job there, and I moved there with him.
And so we lived in a lodgepole forest.
And you could see, I don't know, I see like a horse.
You see silhouettes in the trees.
Like our Chow running through the woods.
At 50 yards I thought was a bear at 300 yards, you know?
And so I used this image with the horse of the many legs,
thinking of the nude descending the staircase
or the Magritte painting of the women
riding through the trees.
And when I used the same materials on the tiny horse,
all of a sudden they became really big.
So then I started using more sticks and poking them
through and trying to make it look like it was just
part of the landscape that we happened to come upon.
And then, so I made this first group of work
for Zolla Lieberman in '77.
A horse can sleep standing up, but when they
have a guardian figure with them
and they feel comfortable, they'll lie down.
But their bodies are made so they can lock their knees.
Since they're a prey animal, they can run and flee
at any moment, even, you know, wake up instantly.
And so since these were self-portraits, these were mares,
I thought of myself in the gallery as a reclining nude.
You know, the idea that I would have the courage to lay down
while these art critic predators skulked around...
[audience laughing]
...was, I thought, a sign of courage.
You know, like I'm strong and I will make myself vulnerable
to you because I am powerful.
And, also, it went back to life drawing lessons
with Wayne Thiebaud.
How he showed up in a blue suit and a pink carnation
at eight AM, and we all staggered in, you know?
And this was 1971 and everybody was hippies and, you know,
we worked hard but we weren't very organized.
And he informed us that class would begin at 8:05
or at 8:10 the door would be locked, and if you came late,
you could rejoin the class at 10:10.
[audience laughing]
And he had us draw a naked,
he had us draw the model
up in the right-hand corner of the paper.
And then he had us make a grid, and then we had to hold
our pencils up and make dots on it where we saw the figure.
And then, at the very end, he would let us connect the dots.
And what the nude ended up looking
more like a mountain range.
If you can see that one on the left, it was more like that.
You know, everything gets displaced and the foreshortening
and I didn't-- I got a B and I was glad of it, you know?
[audience laughing] I was grateful.
But I learned how to look.
I wasn't a great drawer,
but I did learn how to look at stuff.
And so the horses were made of the Earth.
The joke of the figure/ground relationship
and that horses, to me, they represent the Earth,
the Earth itself.
And then, in Montana, we had
the coldest winter we'd had in '78, and my father
had died that fall, in '77 actually,
and the Albright-Knox invited me to make a show there.
But they could either afford to bring me out
or the work, not both.
And we were all poorer then.
And so I made these pieces.
And it was so cold and I had to go to the--
We had four feet of snow, 30 below zero for three weeks.
And so I had to take my horse down.
I broke branches off the trees,
and he pulled them out to the road with a rope.
And then I had chains on the pickup,
loaded them up, went to a nursery
and used a pickax to get the frozen mud out.
And I was feeling kind of sorry for myself, you know,
that there was no art supply catalog for sticks and mud.
[audience laughing]
But then, you know, this was about my father.
And so I realized there was a point to all of this.
But so I couldn't be there to install them,
and it was so important that I sent them a compass and said,
Put their noses three feet apart.
And when I was here, I made, and I'm sorry
I didn't include the slide, I made a huge plaster Percheron
baggage horse for the Circus World Museum in Baraboo.
And I made this fiberglass harness, which about killed me,
which is why I went into the mud and paper and Dextrin
because I didn't want to use chemicals again.
But in my research, I went up and there was
a group of eight Percherons out in the pasture.
And I went out to meet and greet them.
And, you know, their heads are this big,
and they all came around me and I did that
encounter group thing where you can fall backwards
and people are supposed to catch you.
[cheerful laughing]
And they would just, they would catch me
with their foreheads and push me back up.
And I did it with the whole group.
And I thought, this is what I want to recreate.
I'd also seen a photograph of a girl in a Navajo
sand painting sitting in the midst of it being healed
by the four directions of the universe.
And so that was my idea, that you could go into the middle
of these horses and receive this positive healing energy.
And then this is a piece that evolved
from that small piece with all the legs.
And the pieces that were reclining
that were at Zolla Lieberman, Roberta Lieberman
went to OK Harris in New York and talked to Ivan Karp.
He was one of the only people who would look
at slides from the street.
And he said, "These are beautiful."
And she hadn't sold any of them.
She had sold some little ones.
So I was devastated, but there they were in storage.
And Ivan said, "We'd love to include a couple
"in a group show next fall."
And then I get a call in October.
"Young lady, would you like to have a show,
"a one-person show next month?"
[laughter]
And because I hadn't sold anything,
I had all that work available for a show in New York.
[audience laughing]
And he sold one to the Whitney Museum
and the museum in Virginia.
I mean, it was an amazing opportunity for me.
It really made my career.
This show was at Hansen-Fuller Gallery
in San Francisco on the sixth floor.
And we had to crane everything in.
And my gallery dealer was somewhat hysterical.
I wish I had a picture of the process
because the whole gallery was just trees.
You know?
I wanted to capture the feeling of what it was like
to be in the woods and to perceive
these entities in the negative space.
I also--
The sun had this way of making
these incredible sunset rays of light.
And I got quite martyred when I make these mud and stick
horses because they're on chicken wire with tie wire.
So my hands get really sliced up and then infected
because they're in the soup of making the mud.
So I was feeling a little Joan of Arc-y,
martyr-y here as well.
[audience laughing]
This is at the di Rosa.
This is the Magritte painting that you're thinking of.
This shows the installation.
Oh, one's at the Oakland Museum.
And that's at the San Francisco museum, the reclining one.
Hansen-Fuller did really good things.
And then this was my next show in '79 at OK Harris.
And I kind of thought I was the woman who made mud horses.
And we had just moved to our own farm
that had been derelict for years.
And I gathered, I had to clean the pastures.
There were like three old fences.
They never tore down a fence, they just built a new one.
So I gathered all this stuff and I was taking it
to the dump and then going to buy rebar
to make armatures, and I realized this is crazy,
you know, you should use this stuff.
So I started doing this, wanting to show
the inside of the horses because the old ones were hollow
inside to make them light and stable like a pot.
They were like a vessel.
I still think of them as vessels,
only it's more metaphorical what they contain now.
That reindeer was like a medieval watering pot
where they put holes in it like a colander
and fill it with water and then you water your seedlings.
So I still think of them as vessels.
But this one was really nice and everything,
but I realized it was like frosting on a perfectly
fabulous pound cake that didn't really need it.
And so I just started going bare.
This piece is one of my favorites in terms
of how I really think.
This was hog wire I was rolling up to make it safe
for my horses, and it tries to explode and cut you.
So I put sticks though it.
You know, you do that to keep it from unraveling.
So this whole horse is rolled up crammed hog wire,
and one day these sticks will all rot
and the pieces will explode.
[audience laughing]
And I think my friends were getting pregnant a lot,
and rather than my father's death, I was sort of thinking
about more positive ideas and opening up
to the light and looking at what was inside.
Like almost an emotional X-ray of a horse at a given time.
Okay, now I have to go faster because
we're going to run out of time, so hang on.
I was invited, in 1980, to build a show
at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
We stayed there for a month in the government guest house.
And I had an assistant.
We worked out in the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden.
And I got them to take me around.
We got these things from blown up buildings and,
you know, junk yards and it was
a really powerful experience.
But there were a lot of American tourists
who thought I was making dead moose and stuff.
That was annoying.
But this was really one of my favorite pieces.
This was made out of Arab ladders,
which were narrower at the top.
That one stayed. It was called Jacob.
Jacob's ladder. It stayed at the museum.
And this was me and Ovi welding.
You can--
Oh, there's another side maybe.
This was really, really fragile pieces of steel
that were almost gone.
Just like cloth.
And then this delicate woven mesh.
So I made a world feeling, and this was only 1980,
how fragile everything was.
We went to Israel for a month and ended up
knowing less about Israel than when we, you know,
when we left than when we got there.
Everything was so complicated, and this was my warhorse.
There were blown up troop carriers and tanks
along the road that were preserved as memorials.
And then this was '81.
I had a traveling show that went to different,
about 10 different museums,
and this was at the Walker Art Center,
and this stayed there.
It's called Rosary.
It's made from the crushed heating ducts
of Rosary Elementary School, Catholic school.
So it's very pierced and quite Catholic.
[audience laughing]
The pink brick dust is still on the silver metal.
And this, I got invited in '86 to go to Hawaii
by Thurston and Laila Twigg-Smith and build a show
for the contemporary museum there.
And it was my first opportunity
to use a lot of colored metal.
All the roofs are colored metal there.
And so, you know, they rust out really quickly
and there's hurricanes.
So I had a really good time over there
and built five pieces in three months.
And we got to live there and it was just an incredible time.
This was after my mare Ooha-oola-oola.
It means red thigh.
She had two foals with me and they were both born at 12:10.
And I would walk in a little late,
she's like looking at her watch, you know?
[audience laughing]
And then John had said to Twigg, Thurston Twigg-Smith,
"I'll give you my life's work for some land."
And Twigg said, "Well, I have to see if my daughter
"wants to buy this land, but I'll trade you art for it."
And Roy De Forest and the kids and wife were visiting,
and we drove down to the volcano
because it was supposed to be going off.
And Roy and I wandered out into the dark
under a full moon.
Can you see the volcano?
The lava was fountaining 1600 feet.
And there stood a white horse.
I'm like, this is my religious experience,
and I have it on film.
[cheerful laughing]
But we walked back and I said to John,
"We're going to get the land."
And sure enough, he called the next morning.
And then came home and built this show for Ed Thorp Gallery.
This was called Joseph after the coat
of many colors and Chief Joseph.
They're Appaloosa horses.
There's Pierce Tribe.
This is a studio shot.
Ferdinand and...
Riot in Baltimore museum.
And Palma, I managed to keep this one.
It's mouth which isn't seen here is like Guernica,
and I thought of Picasso but it was definitely a mare.
And my mother-in-law's name was Palma,
so it's like a contraction of Paloma.
And this is--
Oh, my gosh, my mind is going blank.
He's a samurai horse.
I found, I dug this up.
It's like 1930s automobiles.
And Ekazuki was a samurai horse whose mother died
and he grew up next to a pond and he would look at himself
in the water to keep himself company.
And, of course, in the great battle all the horses
were afraid to ford the river, but Ekazuki wasn't afraid
of the water and he led them to a great victory.
But welding this metal was just like cutting butter.
You know, it was just virgin American steel, really thick,
and it made me feel like I actually knew
what I was doing again.
It was wonderful.
And then, in '88, this is my first bronze sculpture
for the Walker Art Center.
Martin Friedman had asked me to build an outdoor piece,
and I didn't know how to do that.
And I met Jim Dine at a dinner with Martin,
and he said, "I've been casting with this young man
"in Walla Walla, and you must get a hold of him."
I just had my first baby, Wilder, in '84,
and Mark flew out to Bozeman and I showed him my slides.
He said, "Just drive a truckload of sticks out here
"in the spring, and we'll cast him in bronze,
"and then we'll weld a horse."
And that was the most fun I have ever had in my life.
And this shows me working in Hawaii.
We would send bronze sticks over there,
and Mark would come over and we'd weld armatures.
And here I'm tying passion fruit vines onto them,
and then we had to put them in container
and ship them back to The Foundry.
And this went to the Kansas City Zoo.
This is Lucky.
These are at the Denver Art Museum.
They have three horses and they wanted one
that the children could climb on.
The patron of Ed Kienholz in Hope, Idaho, Klaus Groenke,
bought three horses of mine, and I'm a dressage rider
and one of my wonderful horses died and his daughter
gave me her St. George Young Rider horse.
I had to go to Germany and try him out.
And he taught me so much and I loved him.
He just died at 30 last year.
But when I would go to a show or even at home,
he loved to curl up and have you cuddle with him.
And there was payment at the show.
I had to give him about a dozen carrots,
and then he would do really well.
But I often caught the cat sleeping under his chest.
He was really a dear horse.
And this is Second Daughter, also at the Denver Art Museum,
after my mare PJ, whom I bred, and birch wood.
I'm sorry, this is Second Daughter, and this is Argus,
after the myth of the cow herd with all the eyes.
And this is PJ.
This was Walla Walla.
It was a vine, an ivy vine going up the tree
in Walla Walla that I liked.
The Wicked Witch and the gingerbread house had been pinching
and wanting to kill for years, and Mark
finally gave me permission to do it.
And Bob Arneson, the right hind leg
is a bougainvillea vine from his porch
that I had also wished bad things upon.
[audience laughing]
And it finally died and Sandy brought it up
to The Foundry for me.
So I always thought it was a wonderful piece
using him as one of my foundation legs.
And this is a piece I got to make
out of Manzanita from California.
This shows my palette. [audience laughing]
This is in Bozeman.
This is my steel studio.
This wonderful man in Rockford, Illinois,
owns the scrapyard, and he has traded me art
for probably 100 tons of scrap metal.
I get to go there and choose it, and they ship it to me.
And I got these pieces of concrete with rebar in it.
This is a piece I made on 9/11 called,
9/12 actually.
I didn't know what to do with myself.
And so this piece is called A Thousand Cranes.
And this is after Mondrian called Boogie-Woogie.
This is turning its head.
And this is my own piece, Hawaii,
the Big Island, that I own.
I sent this wood, in 2002, from the Big Island.
I sent a container of it and built the piece in Walla Walla.
And, again, it's that idea of, is it a figure?
Is it a reclining nude?
Is it a land mass, is it a continent?
I love the-- Or is it just a pile of stuff?
When I drove the reclining mud and stick pieces
to Zolla Lieberman in '77, I had an open trailer
and they were wrapped in plastic.
And the gas station guy asked me if I was going to the dump.
[audience laughing]
And this is Monekana, which is at the Smithsonian,
the American Art Museum.
Monekana is the Hawaiian word for Montana.
And these are my models.
They're long gone.
Dear Isabelle just died at 30, on the right, and Vicki.
They were both Grand Prix mares that I rode in dressage
from Germany and Denmark.
The sweetest, most wonderful, talented horses
I've ever known.
This is Isabelle, whom I kept.
And this was one of my first horses, Hoover.
He was an Appaloosa Percheron
and quite a good dressage horse.
And this is Hoover in the collection,
the Margulies collection.
This was Rex who was a noble horse.
He's quite old here.
The dressage horse is Saddlebred and won the Northwest
Therapeutic Riding Horse of the Year Award.
We used to have the riding program at my barn.
And this is Rex using coral gable.
This was Ismoni, my best horse who died of colic.
And anyway, I made a white horse that lived in Madison
for quite a long time called Ismoni.
This was at the [mumbling].
And this was Willie.
The horses just die, is what they do.
So much--
It's such a daring thing to love somebody, isn't it?
And that's him.
This is Captain, our old-- He's like 27 now,
but he's a cow horse, a thoroughbred quarter horse
from the Winecup Ranch in Nevada.
I always have one cow horse around, and this is him.
And didn't know it, I was making it,
and I said to Walt, my assistant, "My god, who is this?
"This at this nose."
We're like, "It's Captain."
This was Danuta.
And this is Danuta.
She's in Louisville.
And this is Spotty, who just won the intermediary
championship in the northwest in dressage,
and he is an Appaloosa Warmblood.
And I'm still riding and showing him, and my young trainer
is showing him, and he is the best horse.
Oh, my gosh.
And this is Spotty.
These are galls on cottonwood, which represent the spots.
This is Dancia, my newest horse.
This is Dancia.
This was indelible, right? At Zolla Lieberman.
And that's my son, Hunter.
I decided to make this gigantic piece.
And the columns in the old Zolla Lieberman Gallery,
I had fought with them for 20-some years.
And this piece, you see?
They're saplings. They are mere nothings.
They used to seem like they were five feet across.
Anyway, that piece was almost double size and twice--
It was 4,000 pounds.
And it was the only thing in the gallery.
It was so wonderful to have it there.
And this is my greenhouse in Walla Walla.
They built a studio, which I lease, and it's annexed
to this repurposed greenhouse from the '60s.
So my wood is out of weather.
And they don't have to spray poison on it
to keep the weeds from coming up.
So I can work all year-round, which had been a real problem.
And this shows me.
I have a fabulous studio but I love
just being out with the sticks.
And sometimes I leave the doors open and I go out there.
There's like deer in there, hiding out from the hunters.
[audience laughing]
This shows the process where they invested
in the ceramic shell.
So they invest these, burn them out, burn,
clean the ash out, and then core it with wax.
I mean swish wax in it, core it,
and then put it in a plaster waste mold.
And then burn it out.
So it's like a twice-baked potato.
First it's lost stick and then it's lost wax.
Or, if it's small enough, under an inch, it's just solid.
So they just immediately cast it.
But they get the beautiful surface with the ceramic shell
but the reliability with the traditional plaster mold.
So the ceramic shell is inside the plaster mold.
So they found that it costs more to do it
in the beginning of the process, but then
in the metal shop they don't have to do very much tooling,
and it leaves a fresher, just amazing surface.
This is Mark Anderson talking about
his new electric furnace.
Induction furnace.
This shows the guy, a little blurry, pouring the metal.
It's 2300 degrees.
And this is a load of bronze sticks.
And this is what it looks like when I weld the armature.
Or what it looks like before they
weld the horse back together.
So here it shows us doing some brain surgery.
I didn't like the way the neck and the head were,
and so we cut the head off.
And it weighs about 100 to 200 pounds, I don't know.
So I have a hoist.
And that's John, my assistant, there welding.
But this is the studio in Walla Walla.
Can you see that?
We're repositioning the head.
There it goes.
And this is in bronze.
And I've got it already patinaed.
And since they're one of a kind,
I can change them when I'm like,
I just can't live with it, we have to do something.
So we often do major corrections at the very end.
This shows how I patina it.
I use a weed burner and a couple kinds of acid and paint,
white paint and black paint.
I lay down the white paint to give an opaque,
light undercoat, and then ferric nitrate goes on top of it
with heat, developing lighter tans to deeper reds.
That's not an earthquake is it?
Okay, and here they were.
This is my first show at Danese Gallery in New York.
[audience laughing]
It's like the Ascension.
[audience laughing]
And look at that guy.
These guys rig Richard Serra, but he's comforting the horse.
[audience laughing] Just intuitively.
I mean, I don't think he's thinking about it.
But you can see the scale.
And these aren't the big ones.
There's the Ascension, actually.
[audience chuckling]
Then I kind of went back to my roots,
and I think the horses are getting so big
because I'm getting more blind.
And so I have to be able to see them.
And so the legs are really long, and I just felt
like the space underneath them was not adequately defined.
And I started-- And you can see my studio, the whole floor
was covered with stuff.
So when we clean up my studio to photograph them,
they kind of, some of them look naked.
This one was really one of my favorite pieces.
I just started leaning stuff on it
and leaving stuff on the ground.
This was from a forest fire, the first piece I did
from this fire behind our house.
We had to evacuate all our art.
We have a Bob Arneson head that weighs about 300 pounds,
and the problem with it is that you have to stick
your fingers in his nose and his ears to move him.
And it's very difficult.
And we gave up on the lawn and thought if the fire came,
we'd just roll it into the pond.
And he's still there, he looks great.
[audience laughing] But, anyway, the fire--
I guess I haven't even talked about materials.
I feel like I'm talking too long.
But the wood that I use, because it's translated
into bronze, I can use wood that is almost not there.
Wood that is strong enough for me to put together
as a piece made of wood is so fragile.
It's got bugs, it's got dry rot, it's very,
very old, and this way I only need to keep it
in one piece long enough for them to put it in,
you know, in the ceramic shell.
And, again, that idea of age, of a story,
of a narrative, of a history is more interesting
than something that's just utilitarian.
And the wood that I use, the metal that I use,
I think of it as an analogy to different
types of horses or different ways of thinking.
I am in love with materials and metal
There's a-- I love The Periodic Table, a book by Primo Levi.
Copper is so cooperative, but it isn't.
It quickly becomes brittle and breaks.
Lead is so luxurious and buttery,
but it has no structural strength.
Steel is just, it's so fabulous
and probably the best to work with of all.
It's the most resilient
And bronze, in casting, is really great.
It's so much lighter than steel and easier to bend.
But then, at a certain point, just before
you're where you want, it breaks because
it gets crystallized from being cast.
And so I try to find--
All of this is incorporated.
When I start working, I am just-- This is so high.
But it's just that body shape.
And I weld it on the floor or I make it
out of sticks and we tie it together.
And then I hang it up.
And then do the two cross pieces for the chest and the hips.
And then we weld the legs down.
I'm using sticks that have already been cast in bronze.
And they stay there forever.
And that way you don't get the cutting
the table legs off effect.
But so when I'm working, I don't have
the neck or head or the tail on it.
It's basically an abstract painting that's a long rectangle.
And I wrestle with that for a while
until I'm informed of who the horse is.
And then I add the neck and the head and personify it.
This was at LA Louver and Paule Anglim.
Storm Castle.
This piece was Kamehameha.
This was from the north shore of Hawaii,
the Big Island, where Kamehameha was born.
And Twigg gave me this old rotten Hawaiian
canoe hole that was so filled with termites.
And there's some whale bone in it
and just amazing things that we gathered.
And this shows the volcano where we live in Hawaii.
We're at 3400 feet.
And there's lots of dead trees.
[audience laughing]
It's fabulous.
And these are these wild horses and donkeys
that we found on our land.
We bought 100 acres, and they had been fenced out
and the man who owned them was dead.
And the donkeys had been rounded up
from the golf courses and brought up the mountain.
But this is what inspires me in Hawaii.
These are koa trees.
These are giant hapu'u ferns, like The Land Before Time.
They walk around.
And this is my studio in Hawaii.
I have an assistant.
This is John helping me get wood.
And these are pieces made from ohia, and I'm starting
to use leaves and seed pods from the trees.
I've become kind of a tree worshiper.
Ohia is the native tree.
It's the state tree, actually.
And we live in a forest of them.
And they have these beautiful yellow and red flowers.
It's just the craziest tree you've ever seen.
That's sunset there.
And then we were invited to Iceland.
We've gone for two years, several years ago
and the year before, and spent a month there making art
and staying on a horse farm with a woman
who is a famous sculptor there.
And she let us stay in this guesthouse and use her studio.
And my son and his girlfriend and John and I
all made work there.
This is me on one of these horses I always made fun of.
[audience laughing]
They're tiny and they look like My Little Pony.
[audience laughing]
But they are so courageous and fearless.
There's no predators there so they're not afraid of nature.
They're just so unbelievable.
This is an eider duck
out on a peninsula
where I gathered all of this driftwood and debris.
And behind this Icelandic sheepdog is old eider duck
nesting boxes, which I made into this horse.
This was at Anglim Gilbert last winter.
And this is Amonis, my studio assistant in Iceland.
This was my suitcase.
[audience laughing]
And this is another piece from what I brought home,
the material that I just kept like this.
I didn't get it cast.
I just love it.
Speaking to the marine debris, you know,
these currents of plastic, oh my god, it's a nightmare.
Another one from Iceland.
And then this is in Wyoming, in Cody, where I gather wood.
This is where I almost had a heart attack
seeing all this wood.
[audience laughing]
This is a piece in my New York show.
Pine forest.
And this is a piece from the Cody, Wyoming, wood.
And this is a piece from Hawaii.
And then I was allowed to get some debris
from the tsunami that washed up in the shore of Alaska.
The Gulf of Alaska keepers gathered all this debris
and brought it down to recycle in Seattle.
Somehow the permits weren't right,
and King County made them put it all in the dump.
And it was a tragedy.
And Waste Management was nice enough to--
I mean, they risked getting a huge fine, but they snuck me in,
and I filled two U-Hauls with this debris.
And look at this little fir tree growing out of this buoy.
There's hope.
And this is the piece I made. This is the armature.
That's the only part of it that's bronze.
So it's welded bronze and painted bronze.
And then I made this piece.
It was at Greg Kucera last fall,
called Three Sorrows, Earthquake, Tsunami, Meltdown.
And this stuff, I tried to use more abstracted stuff but,
I mean, I have in my studio baby shoes and toothbrushes
and crushed helmets and, you know,
everything is written in Japanese.
It's so poignant, and it looked like it
just washed into the gallery.
These are small pieces from that same.
And then this is a scene of the forest fire
where I've gathered some of this burnt wood
a few miles from our house.
But the baby trees are coming back.
This shows me building this piece.
And there it is, this is also in my New York show.
And this is Brianne.
This is how we figure out who the horse is.
We try to figure out the neck and the gesture.
That's me with one of the big ones.
This shows them welding this piece.
This is what it looks like before I get it back.
They weld it all together and tool it,
and then they sandblast it.
And there's Danuta.
All right, I think that's it.
Uh-oh.
[audience laughing]
I showed this in Smithsonian before the election.
[audience laughing] It's a tragic story.
[audience laughing] [audience applauding]