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Artschwager

continued from page 30

if you make a tabletop with solid wood rather than with sheet veneer and laminating presses, etc., it looks different and feels different. On the other hand, it doesn't make it better or more functional to do things the hard way than to do them the easy way.
So I started thinking about doing production-and at that time the idea appealed to me and still does. I was serious about what I was doing. This business of the presence meant nothing. I worked out a production routine for making chests, drawers-things like that which wouldn't take much in the way of tools and could go quickly but still be well made-and I managed to make this idea work in a limited way, which is all I wanted. Now my workshop is a factory. The work we do is not antiseptic, however. The wood gets looked at before it gets put together, and we try to get nice graining, and so on.
QUESTION: Well, having got the workshop organized to your satisfaction, what happened then? 
ARTSCHWAGER: Well, I was doing ordinary pictures before I was doing ordinary objects, or surrogates or effigies or whatever you want to call them. Drawing mostly. I had practiced art off and on during this time because I had decided to go into it many years ago. I had actually studied for a year here in New York. But nothing really good came out until 1960 or 1961, and those were drawings-ordinary things, purposefully ordinary. It was formica which touched it off. Formica, the great ugly material, the horror of the age, which I came to like suddenly because I was sick of looking at all this beautiful wood. We have marvelous materials in our shop-gorgeous woods, absolutely the best that money can buy. But you look at acres of this stuff, and you don't react to it any more. It's like stock quotations unless you are interested in stocks. So I got hold of a scrap of formica-something called bleached walnut. It worked differently because it looked as if wood had passed through it, as if the thing only half existed. It was all in black and white. There was no color at all, and it was very hard and shiny, so that it was a picture piece of wood. If you take that and make something out of it, then you have an object. But it's a picture of something at the same time, it's an object. So I made a little object-a little box. I had real walnut on the outside and walnut memory or walnut picture (formica) on the inside. And then I made a wood and formica altar piece. It was a very good object—the first really good one. It was a celebration of the material which you lean your elbows on in twenty per cent of the luncheonettes in New York. When you separate it from that, it's pretty marvelous.
To go back to what I said before, furniture to the person who uses it celebrates those things it is. Sometimes they are people surrogates. That sounds a little weird, but when you go on making furniture for years, you are either going to stop reacting to it, or you are going to get some, I suppose, exotic reactions, and by now my reactions are no doubt pretty exotic. I guess this shows up in the very recent things. Right away I try to get rid of the "good" and "bad" epithet and look for something else. But this is not so unusual. This is the way people are thinking these days. This is related to existentialism among other things.
QUESTION: You worked at one time as a carpenter for Claes Oldenburg...
ARTSCHWAGER: I made a number of things for his show in 1962. They were armatures. I said to him—did you ever consider making upholstered furniture—not painted stuff but real furniture? He said, why don't we both make sketches? Among my sketches were three or four chests of drawers. His reaction was, but this is just a chest of drawers. But that reaction did not last very long. He is the major influence on me. What he did is the starting point. But one could say that Oldenburg owes something to Jasper Johns— remember his beer cans cast in bronze? I work with industrial materials and manufacture. For instance, when I make a table object, I work in the factory and with its tools. I make the art completely outside of the art environment. I don't make it in the studio. The look is a very different one. And the method is different too.
QUESTION: When you look at the "Table with Tablecloth," do you think of it as a sculpture?
ARTSCHWAGER: It's not sculptural. It's more like a painting pushed into three dimensions. It's a picture of wood. The tablecloth is a picture of a tablecloth. It's a multi-picture. There is something special about furniture. Pieces of furniture are close to the human scale. This gives furniture a human quality. It relates more intimately to the body in so many ways. You have to think about it—the shapes, the meaning.

54 CRAFT HORIZONS September/October 1965