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named, or designated, in terms of something human. This is something I guess that people just have to do because it allows some kind of compatibility with these external forces, these external places, and animals. Q: Where are you going to do next? RS: I'm just going to Venice for three weeks to study the lagoons in Venice. I did a piece, actually, down in Florida. I made two islands, apropos of your discussion of islands here. One was made out of something called oolite; it's a coraline material. It was made in a shallow lagoon on Summerland Key near Key West, and then there was another one called Sunken Island. Sunken Island was made up of some slime-encrusted rocks with sponges called dead-man's fingers. There again you have that [humanizing] projection onto something. They look like black fingers coming up out of the lagoon. And I also planted a ring of mangrove trees, a hundred-foot circle of mangrove trees. Mangrove trees are island-building trees. You can take a seedling, and if they find enough sediment, they put their roots down almost instantaneously. They're very hardy. Then they spread out with those tentacle-like roots, and they catch the sediments. Throughout the Keys you'll see all these little islands built up out of mangrove trees. They grow very rapidly. They're very hardy. I don't know whether mine will grow because there wasn't that much sediment at the bottom of this lagoon. There was mainly a rocky floor under about two to three feet of water. Q: Are you independently wealthy? RS: No! [Laughter] Q: I supposed I wondered because you're taking off to Venice next week... RS: Well, now, see they're flying me over there. It's like a program; it's like a seminar. They pay my ticket over there, and then I get a fee for that seminar, like a visiting teacher or something. That's all that is. I'm going because I need the money, actually. Q: How about in Florida? How did you [afford] that? RS: That wasn't hard at all. That didn't cost anything. That was manually built. I did that with a rubber raft and my own hands. Those were more intimate pieces. The Spiral Jetty was just a big massive work that necessitated machines, laborsaving devices. But you can build these things manually. [Inaudible question from audience, and then a major skip in the tape] RS: ...income. That made it very easy for poor people to buy his work. [Laughs.] And then the rich, of course, couldn't buy it. But there he was taking a kind of creative approach to economics. That's one way of doing it. I think you can dismantle a lot of those structures. That's really what the whole world conflict is about. As soon as Marx exposed exactly what capital was, then it created a worldwide revolution. But artists tend 10
