Harry Anderson Audio Transcript Invisible City

Sid: So we’re at Harry Anderson's house on West Oak Lane on July 1...

Harry: …East Oak Lane.

S: We are doing an interview for the project Invisible City and the Vernacular Avant-Garde, funded by Pew Center for the Arts and Heritage. So I've known Harry for a long time, going back to 1970. Where were you born?

H: Highland Park, Illinois.

S: What your parents do?

H: My father was a painting contractor and my mother was a housewife.

S: Is Highland Park where the Frank Lloyd Wright's are?

H: There some there but that's Oak Park. There was, but I don’t want to get into that too much but there were a lot of people that did Frank Lloyd Wright type houses, his disciples. What was that called?

S: Prairie Schools.

H: So there were a lot of really nice houses in Highland Park that were from that era but I don't know if any were definitely Frank Lloyd Wright houses.

S: Did your home have any inkling of culture or art in it? H: No, no. My parents were both immigrants.

S: Oh where were they from?

H: My father was born in Sweden in 1900 and my mother was born in Oslo about five, six years later.

S: So what was your first art experience?

H: Oh boy, well I don't know if you want to get too personal. When I was in school like third, fourth grade I started doing these drawings of houses and buildings more mechanical stuff and the teachers just loved them. They would put them up in the hallway. I would do these science reports with these exaggerated letters stylized, all mechanical stuff. I kinda discovered perspective on my own in the fourth grade. I had a shop teacher, that was in the fourth grade, she showed us these isometric drawings of cube things, with things cut out in different sides you know different views of it and she said I know nobody can do this but can you draw the picture of that cube? So I just whipped it off. You know with perspective, this side looks like that, then I started showing the girl next to me how to do. Well look, if you look at that side that's over there if you put that over there and the teacher was so impressed she gave me this model ship she had made. She couldn't believe that I was able to do that. But I was always interested in, I don’t know if you can call that art, but you know it’s like architecture.

S: It’s spatial.

H: Right.

S: Intelligence.

H: Right. But for years after I left the teachers would put my drawings up in the hallway.

S: So did you take art classes in high school? H: Highland Park is very wealthy suburb of Chicago. One of the largest concentration of wealth in the United States in the northern suburbs. I had a teacher named, Ruth Estherman, she’s pretty well known, if you look her up. She was a good painter. She taught at the Art Institute as well. All my teachers were good, the only problem I had in art is that I was the only guy. I would be in a class with, you know, 25 women and me.

S: That doesn’t sounds so bad…

H: Yeah, well when you’re a young kid not interested in women necessarily. You know, all the guys would take shop...

S: Right…

H:…drawings, so I don’t take any shop drawings I know all at stuff. You know, just inherently, I know it. Take art and Estherman she showed the films of Picasso. No, not Picasso. You know, Pollack. Doing all this. And this was, you know, this was in the 60s, early 60s, late 50s. I don’t know where she got these films.

S: Is that town where the Bergman's lived?

H: Could be.

S: The big collectors of surrealist work?

H: Yeah I don't know. I didn't know anything about that. I left there long ago. It could be.

S: So you went to Penn State and...

H: I went to the University of Illinois first.

S: What did you study there? H: I started out in architectural engineering but it was just terrible. It wasn't anything inspirational about the type of program they had there so I switched into industrial design, this was good…

S:…and then transferred to Penn State in industrial design?

H: No, no. I graduated from the University of Illinois in industrial design. Then I went to graduate school in Penn State.

S: Okay okay so that's where you first came in contact with Italo?

H: I applied in the design department because that was my strength. I was very strong in graphic design and industrial design. They didn't have industrial at Penn State, so they had graphic design. So I applied for that and got accepted, but Penn State was so unstructured there they didn’t really care what you studied. Once I met Italo I just kinda made that my secondary thing. I did a lot of the graphics stuff all along. I should show you my thesis that I did. I printed it myself offset and I did all the graphics and stuff.

S: And that's why you did posters and books…

H: Yeah, I was always interested… I had a friend who ran the film society there. Showed all of these art films like Cocteau and all those European guys. Wild Strawberries. I would design these posters for him for his events. Penn State had this incredible film library and if you taught a class there, which I did cause I had an assistantship, you’d look through their archives of things. If you wanted a film I on time or an abstract thing on what time is they would show up in your class with a projectionist and the film, show it and then leave. I didn’t have to do anything except order it.

S: Wow.

H: My friend Juris Urbans was sort of in charge. He was very interested in film so he knew all the stuff to order for the film library there. So he had all this incredible stuff. S: Yet talk about Juris, because I asked Mary about him and she didn't remember him.

H: He was a painting major. They had really good painters in the painting department. He had studied film somewhere in California. He came to the graduate school at Penn State for painting. But he was always interested in film and his paintings were film-like, frames and stuff I can’t remember.

S: So what year are we talking at this point?

H: ’68. See I graduated from Penn State in ’69 I think. So ’67, ’68, something like that.

S: Was Richard Frankel there at that point?

H: Yeah.

S: And he was running the gallery?

H: Uh, yeah. I guess so. The gallery was pretty unstructured.

S: Well I spoke to him and he said that Italo said, “You should show my friend, ”.

H: Yeah.

S: So. I looked up the catalogue and there's a work that says “Untitled Florescent Ultraviolet Environment (For my Friend Italo Scanga)."

H: Right. He did that in the student hall not in the gallery.

S: The next year there was a show with Flavin, Sol Lewitt, and Carl Andre. It was an amazing show. Donald Judd maybe? And I don’t know if Italo was involved with that or if it was Richard Frankel.

H: I think Richard Frankel was involved more in that. Italo and Frankel were real good friends. That’s why Italo got fired from RISD because he invited Flavin and Judd to come up and give lectures and the administration wanted nothing to do with it, because you know, they didn’t touch the art. They just do drawings and hand it to an engineer.

S: Oh okay, so that was anathema to a school that was involved with making.

H: Yeah, right. When Italo was at Penn State he was taking over for this guy named Cook, I can’t remember his first name.

S: Robert?

H: He just beat metal and made stuff, but all I knew was Italo. Italo was there for a year while he was on sabbatical, and then this guy Cook came back and I was doing all this minimal stuff, influenced by Italo. Cook wanted nothing to do with it. He wanted me to start doing work like his. Cook almost blackballed me out of the school. Failed me. The faculty in the other departments really liked my work. I did all this great printing and posters. My work was very strong. I took Eugenio Battisti Art History course on Early Renaissance on Cimabue, and the transition into the Renaissance, pre-pre-Renaissance. Battisti was an expert on Cimabue, for him I did this paper where I analyzed a painting with perspective lines to determine if the perspective was reversed as it is coming to the eye. Not going into the distance like a drawing. They had this idea that the vision comes to you through the eye so that things come out from that, and he was so impressed that he put my paper in his Art History journal that he contributed to. When I graduated after my thesis show he said he knew some people in northern Italy that had a gallery who he would introduce me to. I wasn’t ready for any of that. I should show you all the work I did in the graduate show.

S: So after you graduated you went to Chicago?

H: Well you see I had the degree in Industrial Design and a lot of my sculptural things were very toylike. Some of the projects I had done in undergraduate school were very successful. I had won a prize for one of the toys I designed. I went to a Playskool Toy Company there, they had their design headquarters, and I got a job as a staff designer. But Playskool really wasn’t interested in the things I was interested in. I like doing creative playthings. Playskool was much more commercial and more driven by marketing. So they wanted me to design like a vacuum cleaner or a lawnmower. Or something that mimicked an adult activity.

S: And you wanted something more interactive?

H: Yeah. I wanted something more intellectual and more abstract. They kinda left me on my own. One nice thing is that they had this great model shop. They came out with a product that was going to be introduced in a year at the toy show in the spring in New York and they would have to make prototypes as if it were manufactured. If something was to be injection molded it had to look like it was injection molded but you had to make it in the model shop. So they did a lot of vacuum forming where they would make things in halves and glue them together to look like it was injection moulded. So I worked in the shop along with the model makers on a lot of those projects and really learned a lot.

S: So you moved to Philadelphia in January 1970?

H: Yeah, I left on New Year's Day actually.

S: You were living in Elkins Park at that point?

H: I had met Don Gill. You know Don Gill, right?

S: I have to ask you about him...

H: Don Gill was teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago. I met Don Gill when I went out to visit Italo around Thanksgiving and that might have been before I was moving to Chicago or after I was living with my parents in Chicago.

S: Wait a minute, so you went and visited Italo? H: Here, in Philadelphia, where you were.

S: Oh Okay.

H: And I met Don Gill and he says, “I’ve got a storefront. You can move in and build yourself a loft in there.” It was a big open space with just a kitchen. So I did just that. I moved in with him and then when he decided to move to Philadelphia I decided to move with him. I actually moved his big St. Bernard, not a St. Bernard, what are those big lanky dogs? Great Dane. Gentle dog.

S: Where did you move to Philadelphia?

H: We found a place on the corner of Penrose and Cheltenham Ave. Ree Morton lived right behind us across the alley way just by coincidence. I met her.

S: And this is when she was in grad school?

H: No I don’t think she was. Where would she be at grad school?

S: At Tyler.

H: She was older. She had been a nurse.

S: She probably graduated 1970.

H: Yeah okay well she was either just finishing or just finished.

S: She was in the same year as Joan Watson.

H: Well Joan was there when I moved to Philly. But maybe she was in her second year or just finished. S: Oh okay. I think they overlap with Bill Beckley. ’68- ’70. And Joan might be ’69-’71. I’m not sure but they were all here at the same time.

H: I’m not sure Bill Beckley was in graduate school. I think he was in undergraduate.

S: He was in graduate school because he lived just across the hall from me.

H: I remember Bill building this big wooden thing.

S: You remember Bill building something? Like what?

H: Yeah, you could walk into it if you wanted to like a tunnel. Ask Larry Becker. Bill Beckley was living with Larry Becker right here on 68th and Broad or 69th and Broad. He was building that thing in his backyard there.

S: You had told me that Dan Graham did a study for the Pavilion with a mylar hut in your backyard in Elkins Park but it didn't work because it was mylar. Can you talk about that a little bit?

H: For all the shows they invited us to organize at Cheltenham Arts Center, mainly Italo, I would do all of the graphics and assist with everything I could. I met Dan Graham. He didn’t have much space in New York to do all that kind of stuff. So we did it in my backyard in Elkins Park.

S: And it didn’t work because it was mylar?

H: He wanted it to be like a perfect mirror.

S: So you said they did it again at The Flexible Flyer Building?

H: Tyler was renting space from this building halfway downtown on 5th street that use to be A Flexible Flyer, they made small moving mall earthmoving equipment. They were renting that for graduate students. They were in process of building the new facility at Tyler and it wasn’t done yet.

S: And that was 5th and Lehigh Ave?

H: No, above Lehigh. Greenwood? There’s a railroad overpass right there. It’s all board up now but there was a lot of space there so I helped build it there.

S: The grad students did work there and John Moore did urban paintings out there. No one had decent space. He went from doing still lives in his house in a rain coat to doing these urban landscapes. I remember going there once or twice.

H: Joan Watson went through all this stuff that they left behind like carts and industrial stuff. I got a lot of stuff, I got a set of print files around 20 drawers of oak for nothing. I got all original artwork from the art department there. Beautiful stuff. They also had bought this company called Splitkein Skis, a German company. So they had these posters and these casein painting that they had designed.

S: You used the line engravings for some of your catalogs. I know the Flexible Flyer or the Plows maybe?

H: They had the darkroom there and in the darkroom they were using 5 × 7 negatives. There were thousands of negatives. Some of them were real funky. “The Executives on a Sled” just posing to show off the equipment or people in the field, you know, posing with the plow. So I used a lot of those images. All found stuff.

S: So the Cheltenham art show that Italo did…

H: We did a lot of them…

S: There were at least two with mostly local people.

H: That was our first one. S: There was one with , Dan Graham, , and Willoughy Sharpe. Maybe .

H: I’m not sure, that’s why she is looking for these posters, they have all the names on it.

S: The people in Cheltenham didn’t know what was going on. It was just artists, I remember going to the opening when Roger Welch broke out of the cinder block and it fell right in front of me. I didn’t know what was going to happen either.

H: Meryl Spandorfer was very supportive. My first job was teaching kids summer school and then some adult stuff. I brought Italo to meet Meryl and they would do a show every year called, New Faces. The first one was the one we just talked about that I and Steigerwald were in with all the local people. Then we started bringing more people in from New York that Italo knew about like Gordon Matta.

S: Gordon Matta showed at Cheltenham?

H: I’m pretty sure either that Gordon or Ame came down to do lectures.

S: He was in a show that you were in called “Photographic Portraits” at Moore College of Art. In the Moore catalog there is a portrait of Winthrop and there is this baby on a blanket naked outside. I talked to his widow and asked who was Winthrop? It was Nancy Gooden’s son but Gordon also did this nude self-portrait with an erection. It was like a collage of several negatives that he laminated so it became big. It was several photographic prints and he put a box with a peep hole like Etant Donne. His godmother was Tini Duchamp. That was in 1970 and Etant Donne came here in 1969 so it was sort of a reference to that. You had a photograph in that show along with Jack Kruger.

H: That was up at Rhode Island School of Design. No University of Rhode Island.

S: But the photograph was shown at the “Photographic Portraits”. It was in that catalog.

H: Oh okay. S: So you are a nexus of all. You have been here since the 1970s and a lot of people have come through your house and you’ve interacted with them. So the 112 Greene St. show that you did and were in during June of ’71 was one of their first shows? Joan Watson and Richard Calabro were in it. There is a photograph of Teresa Winneke with John Benson and Dan Freeman playing an according on the Blocks.

H: Well Heidi and Larry were in it, they had a piece in it each.

S: And do you remember what their pieces were?

H: Larry had something out the back window because you could look out the window and see a wall. He put some kind of reproduction of a classic painting. Something you get a dollar store now that is a recognizable piece of art. He painted it white.

S: I know Joan had a teetering table on a board out the window.

H: Right, right. That was the other window.

S: I found pictures of it that I sent it to Joan. You had the rifles.

H: The guns and that piece of foam that I showed you.

S: That just came about because 112 Greene Street was kinda open.

H: I don’t know who was in charge of that but Italo sort of organized it.

S: Jeffrey Lew owned the building and he had an open door policy. It had to be more organized than that or it would have been chaos.

H: Well we got organized at a point were you know you’d say, “Italo you curate a show and I’ll give you the space.” I know Bill Beckley did something there once. S: Bill did things with the rooster on the shelf and sound pieces. You were the one nexus and it overlapped with Italo’s nexus and Italo would have these dinners over at his house in Glenside with , , and Sol Lewitt. Do you remember meeting Bruce Nauman there?

H: I remember Flavin he would come. I remember driving Flavin to the Flea Market. Richard Merkin would come a lot.

S: What would Flavin look for in a flea market?

H: Italo would go out to the farmers market to buy rabbits to cook.

S: Like at Zerns?

H: Yeah, Zerns.

S: Do you remember that Bruce Nauman piece in the tree, “A Rose Has No Teeth.”

H: I remember the piece. I don't remember the context.

S: There’s two pieces, a lead piece and a resin piece.

H: Oh right.

S: Bruce mailed it to him and there is a whole book on that one work. The book says that it was never nailed to a tree but Bill Beckley and Joan Watson saw it on the tree. That is one of the reasons I am doing this project, to correct the footnotes.

H: I don’t remember that.

S: Do you remember Marcia Tucker being there? H: Oh yeah.

S: So in ’72 you started showing in Henri Gallery and you showed there until Henri’s death in 1996. How did you meet Marcia?

H: Through Italo.

S: And how did Italo meet Marcia?

H: I think that Italo must have known people down there. That’s the color school people that he knew, he knew Gilliam.

S: Sam Gilliam.

H: I can’t think of this woman, Beverly something. And this other guy Don, who used to come up. There were people that showed with Henri and once Marcia met Italo she took a liking to him right away. Her slogan was come to my gallery it's not boring.

S: It wasn't boring. It was a tiny little house and it had early Italo pieces that had buttons. Tell me about John Benson? His photographs look pretty interesting. He was at Moore right?

H: See I got a job teaching at Moore just by happenstance. Some guy in the painting department didn't show up and he had built this vacuum form machine. So they were looking for someone who knew how to vacuum form. It was all the rage.

S: There was someone at Tyler doing vacuum things.

H: So I said I can vacuum form. I know what materials to get and how to do it. So they hired me. This was in the painting department and they had this course called Advanced Design in Working Materials. It should have been in sculpture. You know, all the politics. So I got hired by these creepy guys in the painting department to teach this course and that was when I met John Benson who was in the photography department. I asked John if I could teach photography. He asked me if I knew photography. I said no but how hard can it be? I certainly know how to work a camera. One of the projects we had in undergraduate school was to redesign a light meter so you had to know what a light meter did and how it transports to a camera. I already that end of it but I never developed film. So Laurie Seniuk taught me how to develop film. I started teaching Photo 1 because of John Benson. I started teaching this course that was required by the graphic design people about graphic arts kinds of applications of photography. Which should have been in printmaking but wasn’t. So that is how I got involved with photography.

S: I found out that Italo, when he first came to Tyler, Penny Bach was a printmaker who wanted to take photography. They didn't have a real photo teacher so Italo taught her photography.

H: Yeah well Italo...

S: Italo was a great photographer…

H: …He did a book on photography of his photographs.

S: It was commissioned by Look Magazine to photograph the town where his mother went. He did that in the ’50’s and the book didn’t come out until the ’70’s. It’s a great book.

H: Yeah well Laurie Seniuk helped him do some of the reprinting of it and put it all together. I’ve got some of the original prints that he did.

S: There must be 50 of them down in San Diego. They are really great pictures. So let’s talk about John Benson again. I remember his name and I know he was at 112 Greene Street.

H: He did some photographs of stuff. He had a polaroid, a big format polaroid.

S: Oh did he take the picture in 112 Greene? Cause there was a polaroid of everybody in a row.

H: Part of it got misaligned and part of it didn’t get developed.

S: That was another one. He was doing some really innovative things with photography.

H: Yeah I can't remember. I did a lot of shows with him.

S: He's deceased, right?

H: I don’t know.

S: Did he have a family?

H: He did. He had a son and a wife and they lived near the Art Museum area.

S: Are they still around?

H: He was a womanizer. He would flirt with all his students. His wife eventually gave up and couldn’t deal with him. All he did was chase women and he got divorced. I think he had come from RISD. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have survived at Moore. I wouldn’t have met Jerry Crimmins and Bill Walton. So I started teaching sculpture.

S: The Sculpture Department at Moore was kinda interesting because two of the sculptors, Bill Walton and Chuck Fahlen, had been printmakers.

H: They never taught sculpture.

S: They didn’t teach sculpture?

H: No. S: What did they teach?

H: Printmaking.

S: Jerry taught what?

H: Sculpture.

S: Jerry taught Sculpture. What about Bill Freeland? Was he sculpture later?

H: He didn’t teach sculpture. He was in the painting department. The only other person in the sculpture department at a point was Tom Chimes.

S: In sculpture?

H: Yeah.

S: When he was making the metal boxes?

H: Yeah, probably. That was when I met him.

S: You and Tom Chimes were both in a show at the Peale House. But it was your show and you shared it with Tom?

H: Well when you walk into the Peale House it has a gallery to the right and a gallery to the left. Two separate galleries. They offered me a show there for the whole space. I didn't need the whole space because each room was pretty big. So I asked Tom Chimes if he could do a two person show. He also did all the posters for Moore's faculty shows.

S: So... H: I didn’t do this but this was a good show a Moore. I had it printed.

S: Wow.

H: I tried to keep the original drawing. Dianne Vanderlip wouldn’t have anything to do with it. “I want that drawing back.”

S: What’s that?

H: Steigerwald doing his painting.

S: I remember that. At Moore your colleagues were Bill Walton, Tom Chimes, Jerry Crimmins, and Chuck Fahlen.

H: Oh this was a thing I did with John Dawson at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

S: What year was that?

H: Should have been in the ‘70s. We just went up there to give a lecture or a talk. We decided to do a spontaneous show. They had all these images of samples on how to teach students how to work presses.

S: So it’s like a stock photo?

H: Like a stock photo. We just took a bunch of those and printed information over them for the event we were doing.

S: A lot of people think of Philadelphia as The Academy but the period we are talking about the action was at Tyler, at Moore and maybe PCA. I think those were more active schools.

H: Oh yeah. S: So what about Bill Walton. Now that he is dead he is getting recognition. Why did it take a long time for his reputation to get out of Philadelphia?

H: He’s lucky he got as far as he did. Very few artists get that far. Bill Walton was always consistent. He was always trying to go to New York. Trying to get involved in some gallery. I was friends with him right away because he was interested in cars and motorcycles. I had all these cars that I use to keep at his place, you know, out in North Wales.

S: So tell me about Dianne Vanderlip and her influence maybe through her gallery and also the gallery at Moore.

H: When you’re on faculty you are supposed to be on some committee. Being involved with Dianne Vanderlip you could do something real and work on the shows coming up. I did a lot of design work like the western show. I took it to the printer and had it printed. I became very good friends with her. So we use to go to New York in a U-Haul truck and go to…

S: Frumkin?

H: Frumkin? It was downtown, SoHo. We would go to the and get stuff. We would put it in the truck and drive back to Philly and set up the western show. We had a million dollars worth of western stuff in the U-Haul. We were driving back to New York right after the show and the truck breaks down in the middle of New Jersey. So we call U-Haul, they come and tow the truck to the U-Haul place. The gave us another truck. So in the middle of New Jersey, in the middle of nowhere, we are transferring a million dollars worth of western art into another truck and driving back to the gallery in New York. No insurance, just me and Bill Walton.

S: No insurance?

H: No insurance on the art.

S: The school didn't insure the work? H: Well if they did it would be a hell of a hard time to get anything out of it.

S: Wow.

H: I’m sure they did. Or said they did but boy… I mean who is going to steal western art? If anything they are going to steal the truck.

S: Let’s talk about Bill Schwedler , William Schwedler. When was the first time you met him?

H: Italo had met Schwedler at RISD. RISD would hire individuals to come up and teach one class from New York. I think Schwedler, I’m really not sure. You would have to look up Schwedler’s history.

S: He was at Tyler but he left?

H: Well he didn’t get along with the dean. The dean was a tyrant, what was his name, Charles LeClair?

S: He didn’t get along with Charles LeClair?

H: If LeClair didn’t like you then you were out of there. That’s what happened to Italo, too. Fortunately Italo got a job in California so Italo was out of there. But LeClair didn’t like Schwedler.

S: You would think he would like Schwedler.

H: Well I think that LeClair was gay. Schwedler certainly was.

S: That’s what I mean. H: Yeah well maybe Schwedler didn’t like the advances of LeClair.

S: You didn’t know Schwedler when he was teaching at Tyler, you met him through New York, through Italo?

H: I briefly met him at Tyler but he wasn’t there for very long after I moved too..

S: Cause I got here in ’68. And he wasn’t there in ’68.

H: Well I got here in ’70 and maybe he was there and just leaving.

S: I think he was there before I got there. He may have been hanging out here still.

H: When did Italo start teaching at Tyler?

S: He started teaching in ’67.

H: Oh okay so maybe Italo and I would go visit Schwedler in New York.

S: Schwedler was from Chicago?

H: Right.

S: The work you have, the earlier work is more imagist. It’s on the endue of like almost Harry Who but not really. It is more idiosyncratic if that makes any sense. A lot of hanging and organic things. Later he starts making more abstracted landscapes that are crenelated like glaze of Roseville pottery. And the Schwedler catalog from Alessandro’s said Italo introduced him to Roseville but Mary Ashley said no. It didn't seem like Italo would like Roseville but you like Roseville. So I am assuming it came from you. H: Well it's hard to say Italo had a piece of Roseville. I mean Italo liked pottery and Roseville made some very nice elegant simple stuff that wasn't the flowery more well- known stuff. He liked the minimal Roseville. I wish I had saved some of that stuff I bought for Schwedler. It would be worth a fortune now. You know, some of the Futura stuff. Some of it wasn't marked.

S: Cause you recognized it.

H: Yeah if you knew what was or it had been marked with a sticker and the sticker had vanished, gotten washed off or something but if you knew what it was it didn’t matter.

S: So you went to a lot of flea markets and you still go to a lot of flea markets.

H: Right.

S: Italo went to a lot of flea markets. He brought people like John Moore who you wouldn't think would go to flea markets. Although he had some early glasses in his still lives. Tell me about the aesthetic of flea marketing and dumpster diving and how it effects your own work and how it effects the work in Philadelphia from that time period?

H: Italo went to the flea market and he would buy old tools, farm implements, bear traps, and different things at Perkiomenville. You would just buy stuff and he had a good eye. He would see a Tiffany that was cheap in the ‘70s and buy it. I couldn't afford it, all I could afford was like boxes of fiesta wear for a couple dollars. I couldn't afford to spend $10 or $20 on a Tiffany. But Italo would take all this stuff, load a truck up, and arrange it in the gallery like an installation, almost spontaneously. Reacting to the height of the building, the space or certain piece of architecture, putting things in in a certain space where it was very unique. It was the things I was interested in doing myself like installations. We did a show, I wish I could show you images, at Virginia Commonwealth University where we shared a gallery. Italo didn’t teach, you either just became his friend or did things together. I basically worked for Italo when I was in graduate school. He wasn't like a professor who is suppose to every once in a while come to the artist and say well how is this working out or give a critique of the work. He never did that. When I was in graduate school there was nothing to teach. If he liked you, you were his friend and if you didn't like you he just ignored you. So some students were very turned off by him because he didn’t like him. S: So here we are in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is where we have the biggest collection of Duchamps in the world. Duchamp came up with the idea of a ready-made.

H: Right.

S: But the way that people use Duchamp in Philadelphia is different than in other places. In other places its the ideas but I have this theory that in Philadelphia the artists look at the objects that Duchamp made out of toothpaste or broken glass or dental plastic and see how funky they are. They are nothing like the little waterwheel in the Etant Donne. Duchamp obviously had a big influence on the 20th century but I feel he had a bigger influence here and I was wondering what you think about Duchamp in Philadelphia art?

H: Yeah well I didn't really study contemporary art history very much in school. I kinda took Duchamp for granted. Yeah I am Duchampian. That is what I am if you want to label me.

S: Rafi deflected the fountain and dedicated it to Duchamp.

H: Well it’s more of like…

S: His tents are like enclosed spaces like Etant Donnes.

H: It’s more like piss on Duchamp.

S: But it's also a model to work against or to react to. Other places don't have that. When I went to school here they didn’t have very much contemporary art so the Arensberg and the Gallatin Collection was the new stuff and then they got the Woodward Foundation but for the most part we didn't have anything and it wasn’t in the galleries here so I have this theory that the art that came out of Philadelphia came out of the schools because it wasn’t in museums and it wasn’t in the galleries. It was the art schools and the galleries in the art schools. In the ICA more than the other institution. I know the Art Institution of Chicago they would go over to the Field Museum and look at those artifacts. I was talking Stephanie Smedley and I was thinking about the when Italo would do an installation how I still installed shows in the gallery from something Italo taught me. He said you put the the biggest thing in the middle of the wall or over on the left-hand side cause you read from left to right so it hangs symmetrically but you can’t have the largest piece on the right-hand side cause your eye will go there and it won’t go back to the rest of the wall. It’s kinda like illuminated manuscript the first letter is in the front.

H: Yeah, I don’t remember him saying that.

S: Well I just remembered that. It makes sense, the walls look better that way. He would install drawings low on the wall and then have those glass bowls with spices you had to bend down to. He generated a body response to look at the things down to the floor like almost like genuflecting.

H: His imagery were events from when he was a kid in his hometown. There was a lot of religious ritual stuff. I went to his hometown in Calabria and the whole town looked like an Italo Scanga installation. The cemetery and the spices hanging, he’s just reflecting what he grew up with. He would study the saints and how corrupt they were or what their intricacies were. He would discover a little thing about a saint and do a drawing or a piece based on that. There was a lot of the depth behind with what the imagery was.

S: Joan Watson was on that trip and she was saying the cemeteries had tombstones with the tools of the tradesmen. So if you were a carpenter there were tools of a carpenter on the tombstone. I think that's really important but the other thing I have is Italo playing off his past history. At that point there's post-minimalism or Arte Povera happening in the world. I really feel like when he was here before he went out the California he was actually doing Arte Povera and I don’t think anybody got that. I don’t think anybody even wrote about that or it didn't dawn on them.

H: Yeah, they couldn't transcend the religious symbology.

S: When Italo had that show at the Whitney with the hanging baskets, Ree Morton had hanging lights with rawhide. There's a formal language that gets replicated by students the way things hang or lean or prop like propping is what Richard Serra was doing and he's very much in tune with what's going on in sculpture at that time period. Because they were not in New York they made forays into New York.

H: Italo was never in the Whitney annual, was he? S: He was in the Whitney and he had a one person show at the Whitney.

H: Did he? In that little gallery downstairs.

S: I think he was in the Whitney Annual.

H: Yeah I don’t remember him being…

S: I know Ree Morton, Raffi, Tom Chimes, and Chuck Fahlen were in one. Raffi had a one person show too. Right after Tom Armstrong became the director. So he probably knew their work before he went to the Whitney and Marcia Tucker knew them.

H: Right.

S: Can you talk about Raffi and Italo’s friendship? And then there animosity?

H: Well I don’t know about their animosity. They use to love to argue about art. I was pretty naïve and not very talkative so I would just be hanging and Raffi would say, “If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen”.

S: Well what kinds of arguments were they having?

H: I can't remember but you know they would just go on and on forever.

S: And this was in Glenside or?

H: No, oh yeah Glenside…

S: Or downtown were Raffi lived? H: No, no in Italo’s house. We would go to Raffi’s house he lived over in Mount Airy, or somewhere.

S: Gorgeous Lane?

H: Yeah something like that.

S: So you took photographs?

H: Only of Italo’s work but also Italo’s work that was in Rhode Island that was in Avalanche Magazine,

S: You photographed Dan Graham’s work in Documenta in the early 1970s.

H: Yeah that was in the Meer House.

S: Do you still have the negatives for those?

H: I probably gave them to Dan Graham.

S: Do you have the negatives for the Avalanche shoot?

H: I’ve got so much stuff it’s really impossible.

S: During the time period of ’56 to ’76 what were the five most important events or exhibits? Who do you think the five most important artists were working in Philadelphia during that time period?

H: Well like you said before, all these incredible shows we did at the Cheltenham Art Center in an obscure place in the middle of nowhere with these incredible people that came down from New York to participate. I don't know what kind of draw we had in terms of people that came but they knew something was going on especially as it built up so that was significant.

S: Yeah well I remember the one that that Roger Welch and Dan Graham were in.

H: There was a guy from Canada. And the Open Friday thing.

S: Those are later though aren’t they? Late ‘70s? Early ‘80s?

H: I’m not sure.

S: Why did that come about? Because Dianne had left?

H: Dianne left and they were trying to save money. They wanted to keep the gallery in- house. So me and Frieda started running the gallery. At Rhode Island School of Design they have the Woods-Gerry Gallery and every Friday night they would have an opening in the three gallery spaces. So they came back to Philadelphia and wanted to replicate what was going on at the Woods-Gerry Gallery. We had to figure out how we were going to choose the people. We didn't want to reject too much stuff. I don’t know if you knew Robert Campbell who was crazy. I got to show you one of his paintings.

S: No.

H: He was at Tyler and he was crazy.

S: What year?

H: In the ‘70s. He would do the craziest stuff. People could get hurt. He never graduated. He ended up killing himself, killing himself in front of a train. But I really was a supporter of his and helped him print little book and make some other stuff try to get him involved with being in shows. His girlfriend kept trying to keep track of him, they lived up in Jenkintown in this little place above a store. He was incredible.

S: Not exactly crazy, but what about Chuck Connelly or Fred Scaboda? H: Well Chuck was sane, very sane. He wanted to be like Robert Campbell, he wanted to be crazy. It's called the Burning Viaducts. Everything he did was incredible. It was about this girlfriend he was breaking up with. Opens Friday turned out to be an incredible event and it was impossible to maintain the energy every week.

S: How many were there? I was in one of them.

H: There were many. Helen Drutt came along and took over the gallery. She kinda took credit for Opens Friday. They wrote her up in the Inquirer, Opens Friday, another feather in her hat, but I didn’t care. She just continued what we were doing. That put more on the map for quite awhile.

S: I think Diane did some amazing shows.

H: Oh yeah she did. The gallery space and the location are really good. In terms of all the stuff that's around there the Institute and History Museum.

S: I mean she did like the first artist book show or one of the first ones.

H: I designed the catalogue for that.

S: Oh I remember that picture, where do I remember seeing that? Maybe just here.

H: Probably in the show.

S: She also did a piece with Germano Celant about artist records. The first with sound pieces.

H: I don't remember.

S: She did a show called East-West, North-South which was drawings by Jasper Johns. She had H.C. Westermann, Oyvind Fahlstrom, and Claes Oldenburg in a show when the museum closed for air-conditioning in ’75. She did a show called, PMA at MCA Philadelphia’s museum's collection of Philadelphia’s artists at Moore College of Art. There wasn’t that many outreach things yet.

H: Well she was real good friends with Chuck Fahlen. Chuck Fahlen really helped influence what they did.

S: So he was on the committee too?

H: He wasn't directly involved in the committee but he was very much a friend with Dianne.

S: Baldo Diodato?

H: He introduced himself to Italo.

S: He was a consulate in Trenton?

H: Yeah he was a vice-consulate in Trenton for Italy.

S: But he did rubbings over at Cheltenham? And in front of City Hall or behind City Hall?

H: Yeah he did a lot of funky stuff I helped him do some prints and stuff.

S: So the top five.. the top five things again. Opens Fridays.

H: The Cheltenham things.

S: That’s two.

H: Well I guess places like Nexus and stuff the early Nexus. S: It’s your five, not my five.

H: Well Nexus was important to me. In the early days they would invite me to shows. I was never a member in Nexus.

S: What about Don Dedic Gallery?

H: I didn't know too much about him but I was involved in a couple things over there, that evolved into Nexus.

S: Well actually it didn’t. The people in Nexus don’t know anything about it. It was on Walnut Street and if you went out the back door of Don Dedic Gallery it connected to Chancellor Street were Nexus became.

H: Oh okay. Well thats the connection then.

S: The building was connected but Nexus start on its own. And Dedic was Dennis Adams’ roommate for a little bit. You, Larry, John Michael Willse, maybe Joan Watson, and Teresa Wieneke.

H: They moved to 3rd St.

S: They did?

H: Yeah. Nexus was on Third Street…

S: Not Nexus, I mean Dedic.

H: Oh I don’t know about Dedic’s history.

S: Yeah I was talking about Dedic. H: But I did a lot with Nexus. They would invite me to curate shows. So I was really good friends with the administration who was running it.

S: It was just artists.

H: Yeah.

S: It was a co-op.

H: They had one person who helped direct and organized stuff.

S: Actually Willy Heeks did a performance in the basement.

H: Willy Heeks did a couple of performances.

S: So I was interviewing Mark Campbell earlier today and he was part a part of Bricolage and there was a lot of performances there. Willy Heeks did a performance on top of doing a painting. Do you remember performances being done in Philly?

H: Yeah well Willy did some things at the Cheltenham Art Center.

S: What did he do there?

H: He had this white robe thing on and he had cotton in his ears, it was very surreal image wise. I don’t know if he said anything you have to ask him.

S: I have to find his phone number or email.

H: Neke Carson did something at the Cheltenham Art Center. S: Neke did something at the Cheltenham Art Center?

H: Yeah. If I can get that poster that I am looking for with the list of names. I don’t know if it was Dan Graham who had a projector with a loop. It was just a loop of film going through the projector over and over.

S: Roger Brown had a film of a mouse being projected on the side of the cinderblock before he broke out of it.

H: That could have been it.

S: Alright, so that.

H: I can’t come up with five but that is three or four.

S: Okay, what about the best artists?

H: The best artists…what in Philadelphia?

S: Yeah. During this time period or the ones you respected.

H: Well Italo of course but they were just my friends. Rafael Ferrer, was never a Philadelphia artist.

S: I don’t think he thinks so either.

H: He tried to get me and Don Roger Gill to go to New York and steal a projector out of the place uptown, where they had alternative shows…

S: Finch College? H: It was run by Castelli, Castelli had an uptown place.

S: Yeah they had a warehouse.

H: Yeah a warehouse.

S: He wanted you to steal a projector for what?

H: I think Keith Sonnier was doing…

S: A video projector?

H: an installation with a slide projector. He wanted us to go up there and steal a projector out of the show and we almost did it. We were saying what are we doing here being criminals for Rafael who we don’t like very much.

S: He wanted to use the projector or just the act?

H: Just the act. Him and Keith Sonnier had a dispute going on all the time.

S: After Rafi dumped the leaves at Castelli Gallery. Castelli asked him to do a show. He schedules the show and then Keith was getting a stipend from Castelli and he was ready to have a show. Castelli asked Rafi if he would delay his show and Rafi had it in his mind that he was promised a certain time to have his show. So he had a show that was only several days short. Then Sonnier came in. So Rafi had one show at Castelli but it was really short and Sonnier came in right afterwards and if Rafi had just waited and he might have been in the gallery.

H: Rafael was a very impetuous, nervous kind of guy. He use to teach sculpture at Cheltenham Art Center.

S: What did he teach? H: Just welding, nothing conceptual. He didn’t like teaching it so half the time he would call me upset and ask me to take over the class. Then I started teaching the sculpture class because he didn’t want to keep doing it.

S: When he deflected the fountain you said he was trying to get other people to take on the days to help?

H: He wanted me to do for only four weeks every tuesday. He only did the first week to get the notoriety with the press. He wanted me to do the other three weeks. I did one and then I show up to do the third and nobody is there. Nobody knows why I am going to go into this fountain. I said forget this I’m not doing this anymore.

S: It's quite funny actually.

H: He didn't care that I didn’t do it.

S: It's funny because I can't figure out the dynamics of Rafi and Italo but I know he thinks that Italo had a following or a posse and that he was alone. He had students help him with the leaves at Castelli’s and he had one of the students from PCA in the fountain with him the first time so he had sort of the same thing going on.

H: Well Italo had more of a camaraderie going on with people. He was good friends with Larry, Beckley, and Joan. He didn’t teach here he just became your friend.

S: Well that is about it.

H: Well I am going to find some other poster stuff.

S: That's great I think that's a wrap.