By Amy Sherlock
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Larry Bell, '2D-3D: Glass & Vapor', 2015, London. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube
Since the early 1960s, the American artist Larry Bell has produced a remarkably coherent body of work motivated by an ongoing interest in the interface of light and surface. Associated with the California ‘Light and Space’ movement of the 1960s and early ’70s, Bell lives and works between Los Angeles and Taos, New Mexico, where he moved in 1973. His early cubes, displayed on transparent pedestals at torso height – an homage, of sorts, to the right angle, which he calls ‘our environment’s most ubiquitous shape’ – were produced using the newly available technology of vacuum deposition, by which minutely thin films of metal are applied to glass surfaces. Their coatings turn the cubes into both windows and mirrors, giving an impression of depth and volume that alters in relation to the viewer’s position. ‘Charmed’ by the plating process, Bell bought his own equipment in 1969. His work since then has involved ongoing experimentation with the possibilities of the technique, resulting in series such as the ‘Vapour Drawings’ and ‘Mirage Works’ that he began making in 1978. Bell’s current exhibition at White Cube, London, includes a number of the ‘Light Knots’ that he has been making since 2013. Twists of vacuum-coated Mylar, these are presented suspended in transparent cubes mounted on white plinths: a return, of sorts, to the artist’s earliest efforts to render the immaterial (light, air) tactile and substantial, and a luminously beautiful demonstration of what he once called ‘the sensuality of vision’.
Amy Sherlock: You have been making art for over 40 years now and have been exploring a remarkably consistent set of themes – in relation to light, space and surface – through a very specific process – the vacuum coating of surfaces. The result is a body of work that’s both recognizable and diverse. How did that develop?
Larry Bell: I think the important thing is to keep the work as your teacher so that you’re always learning something it: follow the work and a whole other world will reveal itself. Over my career, I learned a whole bunch about the laws of physics. I was never particularly into science, but it turned out that one of the things that interested me was the strange kind of alchemy which comes with using industrial equipment for a very specific task. My work has taught me everything: all I know I learned in the studio. When I went to school I had a great teacher – several great teachers – but the main thing that they taught me was how to trust myself.
AS: You studied with Robert Irwin at Chouinard Art Institute (which became CalArts) in the late 1950s. What was that like?
LB: He was a fantastic guy. He was the most charismatic person I think I’ve ever met and he was very funny.
AS: Do you see any similarities between his work and your own?
LB: Not really. His is on a different wavelength. There’s a different pattern.
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Larry Bell, ’2D-3D: Glass & Vapor’, 2015, London. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube
AS: Tell me about the new work in your current show at White Cube – the ‘Light Knots’, which you have been making for the past few years. In the last show you had with the gallery, in the Bermondsey space in 2013, they were hanging freely. I’m interested in the fact that this time they’re in cubes.
LB: Well, they’re in cases that have a very specific architecture, which is compelling to the eye because it’s not quite square. They’re bigger at the top than they are at the bottom. It’s a subtle thing: it catches your eye though you don’t really see it, you’re not aware of it as an issue. I like playing with that. I also like the idea that the sculptures have been captured. To me, when the ‘Light Knots’ are in containers, they’re three-dimensional drawings rather than sculptures: simply by putting them in a case, their whole presence has changed. When I hang them from the ceiling, they turn very slowly with the air currents. Your eye is stationary, yet the space that you are standing in is reflected off the surface of the knots, so it’s as though you are seeing it from different perspectives. When you look at them in a box, they’re frozen and you turn. You have to walk around for the reflections to change.
AS: The cubes change the way you engage with them. When I saw the show in Bermondsey, I found the ‘Light Knots’ quite playful – they looked like mobiles. At Mason’s Yard, the presentation is much more formal. The clear boxes make it look like a museological display, as though the knots were trapped butterflies.
LB: Yes, exactly.
AS: What are they made of?
LB: Mylar, a kind of polyester film. It’s not expensive and you can get it anywhere. It’s easy to work with: I take a square of it and cut it very quickly with a knife. I’m actually making a drawing – in most cases, it’s very much like the outline of a torso. I follow the line that goes from the head to the neck and shoulder, and then a make couple of other incisions, which might suggest an arm. Then I take a corner of the Mylar sheet, twist it through a cut and let gravity pull the knot until it can’t move any further. That’s the form.
AS: Have you ever worked with figurative elements before?
LB: No; not until I started playing with this stuff. After I’ve twisted the Mylar into shape, I place it in a machine that deposits metal or quartz films onto it. These coatings are exquisitely thin; they interfere with the light that strikes the surface but don’t change the form. I like to experiment with these things and I can do it fast. Right now in my life I am happy working with a flow that lets me get a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time. The faster I work, the less I think about it and the more intuition takes over. In my experience, improvisation, spontaneity and intuition are the most powerful tools that you can possibly work with.
AS: Are there new technological processes that you are interested in experimenting with?
LB: No. I’ve been working with the same techniques since the late 1960s and they’re no longer new. I’m a dinosaur in tech terms. When I first started working with vacuum film, it was all new – both the process itself and new to me. I purchased the thermal evaporator, which is the piece of equipment you need to for vacuum coating, because it was too expensive to send everything to someone else to fabricate. I could never get enough done: I couldn’t afford it. I managed to get enough money together to buy a used evaporator and learned the process. Eventually, I commissioned somebody to make me a big one. I ordered it in 1968, got it in 1969, and have been using it ever since.
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‘Venice in Venice’, 2011, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube
AS: The finish it produces still looks incredibly fresh. I remember seeing your work in a show called ‘Venice in Venice’, which ran alongside the 2011 biennale. It was installed in a palazzo on the Dorsoduro and it looked radically contemporary in contrast to the crumbling, baroque surroundings.
LB: I actually wanted to destroy the piece in Venice. I didn’t like the way it looked.
AS: In that context?
LB: No: at all. I thought the patina it had acquired wasn’t right, somehow. I tried to have the piece destroyed but couldn’t because it wasn’t mine to destroy – somebody else owned it.
AS: Does that mean your work always has to look squeaky-clean-new?
LB: It doesn’t. What I learned from that experience is that everything on this earth has a right to a patina and to try to keep things squeaky-clean is impossible. Deep down, I already knew that to be true, but at the time of that Venice show, I didn’t see it.
AS: Something that has always struck me about your work is the way each piece looks perfect, flawless.
LB: Well, they seem that way, but each one is a lesson. I see the work not as art but as evidence of an activity, and that makes it a lot easier for me to function. There’s no good or bad: it’s just what you did. And it’s a continually evolving process.
AS: I wanted to ask about your work The Iceberg and its Shadow (1977), which I was reminded of by one of the panel pieces included in the show at White Cube – 6 × 8: An Improvisation (1994). The Iceberg… was perhaps your most ambitious piece in terms of scale – 56 sections of glass, which could be configured in an almost infinite number of ways. The title is one of my favourite ever for a work of art. Where is The Iceberg… now?
LB: It doesn’t exist. It was destroyed. It was bought by a collector in Connecticut and given to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where it was installed for a period of three years in different areas of the campus. And then it was put into boxes in storage and lost for 30 years. They found it when a new director came in, saw it listed on the inventory and realized that it hadn’t been on show for decades. But they couldn’t find it, because it wasn’t in the place where they store art. When they eventually tracked it down in some warehouse, it was all smashed up.
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Larry Bell, ‘The Iceberg and Its Shadow’, 1974. Courtesy: the artist and White Cube
AS: The iceberg had melted.
LB: You know why I called it the iceberg? Because there were 56 parts to the piece and they all fit together in any configuration. The iceberg was 28 panels of clear glass and the shadow was exactly the same configuration but of grey glass. The number of possible combinations of the iceberg was the factor of 56, meaning that in any given show of the piece you were only seeing the very tip of it.
AS: Helen Pashgian, another great California light and space artist, has talked about her work as addressing ‘the space where air meets the water’. It’s a beautiful image, like the horizon: a meeting point between two expanses that you perceive but can never quite reach, or get a hold on. The idea of an iceberg and its shadow reminds me of that: something vast and substantial, but disappearing all the time. A kind of fickle solidity.
LB: Well, thank you. But it was actually not so mysterious – it was very specific, in the way that I just said. Though I always thought it was a good title, too.
Larry Bell lives and works between Taos and Los Angeles, USA. His work has been widely exhibited internationally. His solo exhibition, ‘2D–3D: Glass & Vapor’ runs at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, UK until 26 September.
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