An MCA retrospective of a career spanning one-half a century is the occasion for a conversation with the artist and her curator, Elizabeth Smith.

Lee Bontecou seems surprisingly dainty standing by her great abstract sculptures in the main-floor galleries of the Museum of Gimmicky Art. But she spent years crawling around the dark, forbidding planes and curves of these pieces, commencement welding together their light metal skeletons and then stretching canvas across them. Painted in nighttime, ominous earth tones, they seem to pop off the white museum walls. The largest, nearly 7 past ten feet, is part of the MCA'southward permanent collection.

This pioneering work put Bontecou on the fine art charts in the 1960s. But much of it has been in hiding for some 30 years, since she fled New York City. She taught art at Brooklyn Higher for 15 years, but since the early 1970s she's made art in a barn in rural Pennsylvania. Little of that has e'er been shown.

One contempo afternoon the creative person sat for an interview in the MCA cafe. Joining her was Elizabeth A.T. Smith, the MCA's chief curator.

A short walk away, some 70 sculptures and fourscore drawings from private and public collections, equally well as the artist's own holdings were being assembled in the museum'due south galleries for the show that opened hither February 14, the most comprehensive exhibition of Bontecou's work to date. (It was at UCLA'due south Hammer Museum from last Oct into January.) Many of the works had never been seen publicly. Across the hall from Bontecou'southward hulking sculpture, fragile transparent plastic flowers–some two feet tall–were being arranged on tables, and plastic fish, the work that occupied Bontecou in the 1970s, hung from the ceilings. Then there was her well-nigh recent work–animalistic assemblages of porcelain, steel, cloth, and wire that made me think of Georgia O'Keeffe coming together Salvador Dali.

Built-in in 1931, Bontecou had her start solo exhibition at New York's prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, becoming the only female artist in a stable that included Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, and Jasper Johns. In 1972 she had a midcareer retrospective at the MCA. By then she was withdrawing from New York, along with her artist husband, William Giles, and their daughter, Valerie. A 1993 exhibition of her sculpture and drawings at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, too curated past Smith, brought the two women together and renewed interest nationally in Bontecou's piece of work.

Mara Tapp: What's the first piece of Lee Bontecou's art that you remember seeing?

Elizabeth Smith: I was traveling around the country a great deal in the early 90s. I would get to the museums in every city I went to and I would come across Lee'due south work in practically every drove–the Walker [Minneapolis], the Fine art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum, MoMA, of course, and the Whitney. I began thinking nearly the work and feeling very interested in it and wanting to know more well-nigh it.

MT: The work that you saw was the big constructions washed in the 60s?

Es: Right. I found them very compelling. They're incredible objects. I had studied Lee in school, of grade, as a student, and I knew of her and knew of her work, simply I hadn't really seen much of it. So that was what sort of got me started on wanting to know more than. I thought I could exercise an interesting small show of piece of work from the 1960s because I could borrow it mostly from public collections.

MT: Since the work was nowadays just Ms. Bontecou was not, that creates an interesting problem for a curator, doesn't information technology?

ES: Sure. Most of the time you work closely with a living artist if yous're going to do a prove of their work, only Lee was difficult to observe and I did try–

Lee Bontecou: I didn't respond 'cause I even so didn't want to talk well-nigh those works.

MT: Why?

LB: I wanted to experiment and I wanted

the liberty. It wasn't annihilation to do with Elizabeth.

MT: She was just one other person sending you notes and leaving messages for you?

LB: Nosotros just talked on the phone one twenty-four hours and she said, "Well I'm gonna do a show," and I said, "OK, but I just don't feel similar being involved."

MT: What year was this?

ES: The show took place in '93.

MT: Then y'all talked to her and what made you change your heed?

LB: Well, bleaaahhh.

ES: That's a long story.

LB: I had this work, the new piece of work, and those pieces were mainly finished. I'd worked on all of them at in one case practically, except for the piffling ones, simply so I got really sick. I hateful actually ill to the point of "Well, maybe I'll make it or perchance I won't," and then I realized I can't leave this stuff for Vallie and my married man to bargain with if I take to go out of here. So it but happened.

I think you lot [turning to Smith] just wrote a letter of the alphabet. Information technology came and said you'd like to run across the new work, and I just said, "Well this may be the time."

MT: I'm wondering as well if there wasn't something about her that convinced yous that your work would be safe in her easily.

LB: That wasn't a problem in my head.

ES: I felt lucky to receive an invitation from Lee to go and see what she had been working on 'cause, of course, I was quite fascinated–

MT: I'g pressing you on this non to be rude, but information technology just seems that, every bit wonderful equally Elizabeth Smith is, she came to you representing this earth that you'd backed away from–

LB: I didn't.

MT: If that's the wrong word, correct me please.

LB: I but went because I wanted to piece of work, and likewise I was having a child and all kinds of things. My begetter was living with u.s.a. at ane indicate. A lot of things modify in your life. And then I was education. I hadn't backed away. You can't be more involved in the arts than educational activity. You're working with other brains, you know. I was correct smack in Brooklyn. People say, "Y'all dodged the art world." Well, heck, they were the art world. I was the art world. I didn't contrivance it.

MT: I'm wondering if part of the reason that y'all took another avenue is the thought that you needed to sort of free yourself from this–

LB: Oh! Oh! Oh! Yeah. I wanted to experiment, and you can't if you get–I guess I had–some notoriety. And the whole New York scene changed as well. The loft I was in, the factory sold out. Another one came in–24 hours a day. Blast boxes. And then the galleries came down there then the boutiques came downward in that location and you can't afford [to live in SoHo] and then we simply decided it'southward time. We wanted Vallie to maybe not be in the city. Oh, she went to schoolhouse there for a little while, and then that nice school crumbled so. [She laughs.]

MT: There'south the ugly press of gentrification, although we didn't call it that in those days. Only permit me try this theory out on both of you lot. It seems to me that there was perhaps a certain irritation at beingness bandage in one fashion or some other–

LB: Oh yeah. Oh yeah–

MT: And that going abroad allowed you to call information technology on your own terms.

LB: I didn't retrieve that at all. I wanted to work, and I didn't think all of those things out. You think of that maybe now. There wasn't an it. I wasn't that smart. I was too young, yous know.

MT: I wonder if it'south smart or if it's just that sometimes the world of journalism and criticism and maybe even art history imposes things on artists–

LB: Certain information technology does!

MT: In that location's content and there'due south politics, of course, but the primary drive is to get it done, whatever that takes.

ES: I remember in that location's as well an enormous pressure that many artists experience when they have to produce work for a gallery show, a museum testify. It's like you're expected to accept a new torso of piece of work every year or two years. I know that you worked on some of your pieces over many years without that fourth dimension pressure.

LB: And they wouldn't have been as good if I'd just pushed 'em out. They wouldn't take been finished.

MT: I see three really distinct phases–

LB: There may be three phases and many more than only with the new piece of work I've done I've delved back into the erstwhile work. And so you lot push it further.

MT: Does the newer stuff have the strongest elements of the two previous phases and put them together?

ES: You might say that.

LB: I don't desire people to [tell me], "Go and exercise some more of the aforementioned stuff 'cause we're selling this stuff well." And that'due south happened. I've watched a lot of young artists, when I was young and they were young, and some of them came in with far more of a statement, and they wanted that over and over [hits table] and over until they just left. They had to. And I think they had a heck of a fourth dimension getting out of that.

ES: A lot of people fall into that trap.

LB: Because they made such success out of it.

MT: I look at the early work, with its strong, welded, machinelike quality, and and then I look at the fishes and the flowers, which accept a dissimilar quality, though some of the techniques are shared. Then I look at the newer stuff. I can see elements of both. It makes logical sense to me, in terms of technique, just mayhap that's simply a function of getting older and working with the materials over a period of years.

LB: Yes, that'due south correct, and the plastic things–information technology was merely actually great fun, after doing all that other work, to do former-fashioned carving and then put it into a strange little motorcar that, in ten minutes, yous've got the pieces. Then, of class, you put them together simply, human being, for a sculptor that was really catharsis. Drawing tin do it but this is even more than because it was sculpture. It was holy smoke, yous know. [She laughs.]

ES: That must have been fun.

LB: Well, pulling that hot stuff down over that and and so sucking it out from underneath, and then when information technology cooled you just popped that Styrofoam out of there. [She laughs.]

MT: You loved the process of all of this.

ES: You tin see it in the piece of work.

MT: When you lot're working on your fine art, do you merely get totally immersed?

LB: Sure.

MT: You said some pieces you come up dorsum to, that some pieces accept a long time. So the immersion comes and goes?

LB: Oh sure. Come up in and work, get into it, and then perhaps y'all demand a residual. Y'all go back to it again.

MT: I'm wondering nigh the role of your husband, and if the fact that he's likewise an artist had an upshot on your fine art.

LB: No.

MT: Do you talk about your work?

LB: No. No. No nosotros don't. Both of u.s. are but not the kind to talk. We go our split ways in that sense. I don't even think, with my friends, we talk e'er nigh the intellectual office of it. I retrieve I did maybe when nosotros were in art school.

MT: Could you lot talk a little fleck about your family–your father'south piece of work and your mother's work during World War II and about going out and looking up at the northern lights with your mother and brother? Can yous tell that wonderful story and talk a little bit about how all this comes into your art?

LB: I don't know if information technology does, but anything yous call back affects yous. It was in Westchester–like in the centre of the night. She did it a couple of times at nighttime. We but went out to the athletics field, laid upward, and it was amazing. Information technology went from one hemisphere to another, like a kaleidoscope, and it went on and on so it turned to color and it whipped and you could smell information technology. The ozone you could odour.

MT: Yous could smell it?

LB: It had a existent smell.

MT: Was it your popular and your uncle that invented the kickoff aluminum canoe?

LB: I told that to the New Yorker and they have to cheque everything. [It didn't check out.] My uncle was an engineer and my dad–they were fishermen. That'due south all. They wanted a canoe. They'd go down rapids

and they'd rack 'em up and they couldn't patch 'em on the spot so they decided, "Hey, let's get an aluminum canoe. Information technology'd be lighter." So they went upwards to the aluminum visitor in Canada. They stretched the stuff out and put the bulkheads in either end–I think it was similar a xiii-footer–and they went around in that, full of dents and stuff. Didn't matter.

MT: What interests me is y'all're exposed to this notion of engineering, of putting things together.

LB: Well, yeah. It's in my mom. She worked on transformers and stuff similar that. And so she and her friend, a woman, they would accept theirs work and the others didn't. Then the union [came in] and my begetter said, "Margaret, yous cannot buck the wedlock. You know, you practise not practise that. You're gonna exist injure." So she stopped.

MT: A lot of people didn't grow up that way. They didn't have mothers who worked or who pushed them or who would have never thought of proverb, "You're a girl. Don't do that."

LB: Right.

MT: It sounds to me like you were reared a feminist. I wonder if that comes through in the work at all, or is it just a characterization that you didn't even think about?

LB: I don't even like it.

MT: Why?

LB: Because art is art and information technology doesn't mean whether information technology's woman or man. It doesn't matter. And it'south simply, like, another affair to have to fight.

MT: Isn't that a supremely feminist argument, though? Art is art. Period. It shouldn't be woman art, man art. Information technology'southward art.

LB: Right. OK. All right. When I started, they wanted my things [to be] completely wimp feminine, and the gallery wanted to push button that and I just wanted to throw up.

MT: Now plug your ears because I accept to ask Elizabeth Smith the curator question. All these things nosotros've been talking virtually–the family influences, the crafting–exercise they prove upwards in her art from a curatorial betoken of view?

ES: I remember, equally Lee said, everything that happens to you in your life comes out in some way in your piece of work, especially if you work in the kind of way that Lee does, which is very much from her interior and from her imagination, a kind of intuitive fashion of expressing yourself about things. And then, yes, I see it in the piece of work. I call back it permeates the whole work in means that aren't necessarily actually specific.

MT: I understand her not wanting to be labeled and I love the idea that art is art. At the aforementioned time, if I had stepped off of Mars and I asked, "Who is this woman?" what would you tell me?

ES: The longer I know the piece of work and the more breadth I see in it, the harder it is to categorize it. What'southward and then interesting is you tin can look at this l-year span and yous can meet how many movements Lee's work has been tied to over the years.

MT: Give me a partial list.

ES: Well, for example, Donald Judd, one of the foremost artists associated with the minimalist movement–also a critic–wrote about her early 60s work. He was linking it to what would be the groundwork for minimalism. And then her work has been sort of linked to the emergence of that motility. Even earlier her work was linked with the assemblage tradition and the so-called neo-Dada movement. Her work was and so later co-opted by the feminists during the genesis of the feminist art motion. They saw Lee'southward work as heroic. They really looked at a lot of the imagery that she used–it was circular, deep crevices–and saw that as a celebration of vaginal imagery in a mode that they themselves were thinking nigh art making. Only the work doesn't really have to do with that either.

It had too much content for minimalism. It was besides rich and elusive. Information technology wasn't nigh feminist problems or almost a woman'due south body. When I did the testify in the early 90s it was quite fascinating, because that was a time when a lot of artists were working with the body as a site for political and cultural contention, and Lee's use of canvas and textile and her bodily references seemed to really strike a chord with that thinking. And [at present] I'm hearing a lot of discussion about neosurrealism. People are seeing Lee as a latter-day surrealist. OK, you tin can run across strains of that in the work also. The beauty of it or the richness of it is that it can exist linked to so many dissimilar things without being tied direct to any of them.

MT: And she's besides a very generous artist. She says, "Think any yous want nearly my piece."

ES: She doesn't desire to impose. She'due south probably most closely allied to the abstract expressionists because she acknowledges when she was a young artist [during] the heyday of the abstract expressionists, she admired not only their work only the thought of freedom and experimentation that their work embodied and the way they lived their lives. They weren't theorists. They didn't talk about their work. It was intuitive. She even so doesn't want to really talk about her work. She doesn't want to ready meaning. She wants to keep it open up for people.

MT: Do people ever ask you, "What does this mean?" What exercise you lot say?

LB: I don't answer at all. It'due south what you see in it. What I see in it is something else. I don't get defenseless up in that.

MT: When did you realize you were an artist? Do you think?

LB: It wasn't "Ding! I'm an artist." In fact, fifty-fifty when I was doing well, I would but say, "I'chiliad a sculptor." I couldn't say, "I'm an artist."

MT: A sculptor isn't an creative person?

LB: Yes it is, just you tin be a sculptor and not practice fine art. Your sculpture might be yuck, yous know? Information technology just might be mud pie. But you lot can still say, "I do sculpture." But when I say "artist" I think of Vincent and the Renaissance and cave painting and I feel very apprehensive when I await at that lineage. Look at Michelangelo. I mean, who can practise that?

MT: But you don't take to say, "I'1000 Michelangelo."

LB: No, I know I don't. [All laugh.] I know I don't.

MT: You've been quoted talking about how politics influenced your work.

LB: If you say there's ii sides of man nature–I don't know if I'thou going to come out with a sentence [here]–but if you say at that place'south a dark side of us, the underbelly, and then the inspirational things that are in united states of america, I put those 2 things in. The jets and the planes, which are cute, they're also killers. And so it's political only not that kind of political. We have wars that human being tin't seem to stop, and he makes these cute things. At that place was a show at the Met ages ago with some crazy collector. It was a huge show and information technology was gewgaws and jewelry and it was astonishing, but the beautiful things were the daggers with the etchings and the armor, and the balance was–well, it was tasteless. Information technology was awful! [She bursts out laughing.] And when I got out, I just happened to hit a head of an Egyptian bust. It was just, "Ahhh. Thank goodness. I'chiliad out of there."

MT: Practice you come across all this in her work?

ES: Yes, I do.

MT: What do you desire people to take abroad from this show?

ES: First of all, I call back that they tin can't assist only take away the incredible range that Lee's created over virtually a fifty-year period. Whereas people have tended to recall of Lee as an artist then closely associated with the 60s, I call back now people are starting to recollect near her very differently. I specially hear this from so many younger artists who find the work incredibly fresh and compelling, and they marvel at how Lee has fabricated the works, the fact that she'southward made everything herself throughout the whole fourth dimension. There's a sensibility to the work that excites people, artists besides as the general public, so I promise that'south what people volition have away.

LB: Hear, hear.

MT: What do yous want them to take away?

LB: Their own thoughts, I guess, and their ain feelings about information technology. Out in LA they were seeing something in themselves and they thanked me for maybe helping them to see something. It was the best. Not "How did you do this?" or "How did you practice that?" just just something they had gleaned from themselves. Everybody has a different take on everything. I've had people come up and say, "I didn't run into that as foreboding. I saw it as something really funny." That was their view. Something inside their life–I don't know what it was, but it was good.

The Bontecou show runs through May 30.

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Kathy Richland.