Cynthia Carlson

Audio Transcript Invisible City

Sid: Today is July 22, 2015 and we're conducting an interview in New York at Cynthia Carlson's loft for the project Invisible City: and the Vernacular Avant- Garde funded by PEW Charitable Trusts for Arts and Heritage. I am going to ask you a series of questions.

Cynthia: Okay.

S: You were born in ?

C: Right.

S: What did your parents do?

C: My father was a laborer. He came from Sweden and he did a number of things. He was a farmer and a laborer. He ended up working for Western Electric on the night shift making a particular screw for the telephone for 25 years. My mother was a housewife who occasionally cleaned our dentist's office until he committed suicide.

S: So did you have art in the house?

C: No.

S: What was your first art experience? C: There was a painting in our church which I thought was pretty amazing. It was Jesus walking on the water. It was a real painting and I have never seen a real painting before. I was pretty amazed by that. Outside of that I suppose it was comic books. But it wasn't until I was a little older that I started taking some classes at the Art Institute. They were like little scholarships for grade and high school kids.

S: You went to the ?

C: I went to school there.

S: You went there is the 1960s, what was it like then?

C: It was a very lively time because that was the time that the Hairy Who people, they weren't the Hairy Who then, but Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilson, although they were not in my immediate circle, I was very good friends with Art Green. We hung around together and so it seemed like a lively place. The major influence on that whole sort of aesthetic was Ray Yoshida. He was a funny teacher because he was very enigmatic. I don't remember anything he said I just remember lots of turgid looks. I should backtrack a little in terms of my parents because the truth is that I was also adopted. There was no art in the house I grew up in, subsequently a number of years ago I have found my mother, father, and my siblings. It turns out that my mother was a pretty decent amateur painter which surprised me.

S: Well it is bred in the bone.

C: Yeah.

S: Interesting. So when I was talking to John Ollman he said Yoshida would take people to the Field Museum? That was as important as the collection above in the Art Institute, above the school?

C: That is probably true. There was a great deal of interest not only in vernacular art vis- à-vis The Harry Who but also in just sort of natural history. I don't remember any of those trips I went on with him but I was certainly a regular visitor to the museum since I was a child. I mean I remember the dioramas with cavemen, they were so real and the mummies. The animal cages with the animals and painted backgrounds, it was very real.

S: Did you know Bill Schwedler back in Chicago?

C: Yeah. We were friends at the Art Institute. He is the one that brought me to New York when I came after undergraduate school. He, Art Green, I, and a number of others were good friends. Bill Schwedler, Art Green, and two other people were all roommates at this big storefront near us. They had wonderful parties.

S: In New York or Chicago?

C: Chicago.

S: So after the Art Institute of Chicago you went to Pratt?

C: Yeah I applied to New York to go to graduate school and Bill Schwedler was at Pratt. So I thought I should go there too. It wasn't that interesting of a school. I thought the graduate department was pretty uninteresting relative to what I had known in Chicago. But I didn't care. I was in New York and I was so excited about being there. The school could have been some tiny university with no art department and I wouldn't have cared.

S: Did you live in Brooklyn? C: Yes near the school.

S: What was Brooklyn like in 1967?

C: In that day Pratt was in a pretty decent neighborhood. It went really downhill a lot sometime after in the 90s when New York was really a dangerous place to live but an interesting place to live. The subway started to get all the graffiti, dark ominous graffiti. There was razor wire everywhere and the subway stations were only open certain hours. It was scary as hell to go there. I'm glad those weren't my years.

S: Bill Schwedler got a job at Tyler.

C: Yeah.

S: You got a job at PCA right out of graduate school?

C: Yeah.

S: Which is kind of amazing to me because by the time I went to undergraduate and grad school it seemed that all of the teaching jobs were sort of taken care of. You came to Philadelphia in 1967 but you commuted from New York?

C: Yeah, I never moved there. When I got the job in Philadelphia it wasn't because of Bill Schwedler. It was a different school and Bill Schwedler didn't have any clout at PCA. A teacher that I had in graduate school put in a word for me with one of the teachers in Philadelphia, Walter Erlebacher. I think he said a good word for me which he may have regretted because we clashed completely. He was a kind of artist that I really didn't have much interest or respect for. S: It's really interesting because I had always heard that Rafael Ferrer and Walter were at fisticuffs. When we were talking to Mark Campbell in one of the interviews he said that they got a long at first, which I was surprised. I can't even imagine two people diametrically and aesthetically different.

C: I can imagine that they would get along at first because they were both very powerful, passionate people. They were both pretty well-informed in their areas. I can imagine that falling apart pretty quickly because they were on opposite ends of the pole. Rafi went to great lengths to be very avant-garde and Walter, of course, was very much of the traditionalist. So they would've locked horns pretty quickly.

S: When you're hired at PCA in 1967 were you in the painting department or foundation department? What department did you work in?

C: I was in foundation and it was a part-time job for three or four years. It gradually became a full-time job. I was in painting too. I can't remember exactly what years or what but I was in painting.

S: Who were your colleagues?

C: Boris Putterman, David Kettner, Jerry Nichols, and Gerald Herdman. In the sculpture department, of course, Ree Morton and Rafi Ferrer. It was a small school and everyone knew everyone. That doesn't mean we were all friends and it didn't mean we weren't friends either. It just meant that you had a certain number of people that you sort of hung out with or had a good relationship with. Doris Staffel, I loved Doris. Harry Soviak, he was wonderful.

S: So Ree probably came in 1970 or 71? C: I was there in '67 and it must've been a few years later.

S: Because she was still in grad school.

C: She was. Bill Schwedler, if my memory serves, was the one that introduced us because I needed a place to stay over night. I was teaching a couple of days a week and the woman that I had been staying with didn't work out for some reason and I was looking for someone to stay with. Bill Schwedler said he would talk to Ree. She said sure. So I stayed with her...

S: in Elkins Park...

C: and she got a job at PCA too and we became friends almost immediately.

S: So you were in Elkins Park?

C: Yes, to sleep.

S: When did Barbara Zucker get to PCA?

C: Never.

S: Never?

C: No.

S: Wasn't she teaching there a little bit? C: She might have came as a visiting artist but she never taught there. She was from Philadelphia. She had a show not so many years ago in the gallery but she went to school in Michigan. She never taught in Philadelphia that I know. But she was a Philadelphia artist. Louise Fishman is a Philadelphia artist. Never had much to do with the city.

S: When you came to PCA in '67 was Dennis Adrian still teaching there?

C: No. Was he there?

S: Yeah. He was there before he went to Chicago.

C: Really? No kidding. He was in Chicago. You don't know when he came there? I don't either.

S: Yeah I don't have the exact dates.

C: That is so interesting.

S: Well there is this Chicago Philly connection with John Ollman and interest in outsiders.

C: I have to say that I take, at least from the time I was there, some credit for that because I introduced Joseph Yoakum and Marcy Hermansader to my students. I had collected his work and I knew him from Chicago.

S: You brought the drawings into class? C: I brought the drawings to class and I introduced a whole huge pile of students to Joseph Yoakum and primitive art because I had taken a number of trips around the country and visited environmental artists in their places. I did video interviews and took hundreds of slides of that work for a lecture which I had given all over the country. Philadelphia and New York but a lot of other places too. I can't remember anyone besides me in Philadelphia that was really into that but I may be wrong. Maybe there were others. I just don't remember.

S: Italo might have been a little bit.

C: Oh sure Italo would have been.

S: You were probably a head of the curve with Rafi being influenced by that work.

C: There were friendships there at that point and we were all sharing an interest in anything that wasn't New York art world. Not that I was adverse to New York art world as I wanted to be a part of it. But that interest came all the way from Chicago and stuck big time.

S: So when you're in Chicago what was you work like?

C: At first I was a very dutiful still-lives academician so to speak. Then I started trying to be influenced by that group which had more of an interest in vernacular things. So I started doing all these absurd charts. The art historian Whitney Halstead was extremely influential because he really taught beautiful courses on Dada and surrealism. He influenced a huge bunch of students for many years. I was one of them. He introduced me to Joseph Yoakum in fact. So I wanted to be a part of that but it wasn't very natural. I was doing all these absurd charts which I then took into graduate school. Now when I look back at them and the documentation they are not terribly interesting. I think I was a very slow learner and didn't really come into my own probably till about two or three or four years out of graduate school. S: There is an interesting painting that is reproduced in one of Lucy Lippard's books. I can tell it's your work.

C: I know it is me.

S: I can tell it is your work but it is an incredible feminist statement. It is sort of a landscape with repetitious forms.

C: Yes.

S: It is almost O'Keefe because it has flesh tones and there is a centralized vaginal image with a speculum that has forceps pulling apart the image. It is from 1970. So when did you get involved with feminists aesthetics.

C: I had no connection to feminist ideas at all at that time. It was really a blank slate. Those works evolved out of the charts which sort of went dry so I started picking up on all kinds of quilts and things that just had patterns in them. I swear that in all this hindsight when I look back at that work it is full of sexuality. It is full of feminism. I had no idea, none whatsoever. I was late coming to feminism in terms of New York. It was really students in Philadelphia that pushed me into it. The show that we did there that Ree Morton was in with her cake sale.

S: Have I sent you the letter that I have about that?

C: No.

S: Bill Scott was dealing with Edith Neff's estate and he came across a letter that he thought I would like because I did the Ree Morton show. It is a mimeograph and it's Edith Neff asking the women if they would take part in a women show at the school. In Ree's handwriting, it is a fountain pen, it says "yes I can contribute some drawings." But that is the cake sale with the beaux arts and the celastic.

C: That is what lead to all of the great work. That was the first piece.

S: So I have the letter of her agreeing to being in that show.

C: We had heated discussions about it. I refused to be in the show because I thought that by the time they were planning a show of female faculty it was a little to late, like locking the barn after the horse got out or something. Now I think that was silly of me but at the time I felt I'm not being in this it's too retro. Ree Morton said she was going to participate and she was going to do it with sticking it to them.

S: It might have been during the time of the Focus Show that was in all the venues in Philadelphia.

C: Yes it could have been.

S: That was a major show it might have been at the same time. I have to checked the chronology.

C: I forgot about that show.

S: It was big.

C: Yes it was.

S: It was in the Civic Center Museum, every gallery had women, every college gallery had women. So wasn't just PCA , it was the citywide. The only publicity was about Judith Bernstein screw drawing. But it might've been the same time.

C: It might have been. I would have to look back at my resume and I don't remember what year it was. Do you know?

S: It's about 1970.

C: Okay.

S: No it must have been later than that.

C: It must have been later because we just talked about that painting from 1970 and we were not talking about feminism.

S: It was probably 1973.

C: Yeah, that sounds much more like it.

S: You were coming down and teaching. How many days did you teach in Philadelphia?

C: Altogether I taught there for 20 years. When I went from part-time after a few years to full time it was three days a week but then as soon as I got a little bit of savings and selling my work under my belt I changed to two days a week. I went back to a reduced schedule. I was still considered full-time but it was a reduced schedule at a reduced salary. I was willing to do that because I didn't want to be there three days.

S: Even though you were living in New York I considered you a part of the Philadelphia school. C: I was. I had a lot of friends. I sold a lot of work through Marian Locks and I knew a whole circle of collectors that bought my work. I also considered myself very much a part of Philadelphia. I was on the Pennsylvania Academy committee that chose artists to have shows for a while.

S: At the Morris Gallery?

C: Yeah. I was very much involved with the community and what it was about.

S: And Ree Morton too. She went to graduate school at Tyler and then taught at PCA. She only had a seven-year career more or less.

C: Yes very narrow.

S: Until the very end, even though she was living in New York, she was coming down to Philadelphia. So I consider her a part of that.

C: Yeah absolutely. She was very grounded in Philadelphia.

S: I'm going to ask you some other questions about other people in Philadelphia and elsewhere and if you remember certain events during this time period.

C: Like a quiz?

S: Yeah, it is a quiz. When you came down would you go to the ICA at all?

C: Sure. We went to the galleries, the museum, the ICA, and the Barnes. S: I actually think that the Barnes and the Mercer Museum effected people in Philadelphia more than people realize.

C: I was going to mention the Mercer before when I was talking about medical diagrams. I loved that museum. I took my students there and they all went "ew what are we doing here."

S: Oh no, that is the...

C: Oh the Mercer, I am thinking of the Mutter Museum. The Mercer too.

S: The people at Tyler used to go to the Mercer because it was closer and they would use perspective because they have hanging wagons and things. They would do perspective drawings in there but there were also these weird artifacts, tools, and baskets hanging down. I really feel like maybe Italo...

C: He was one of those vernacular artists. Although unlike most of the others he was an educated man. He was trained as a lawyer.

S: He was trained as a lawyer and worked at the University Museum as a curator there.

C: So there was at a different sort of aesthetic to his whole work but then he made that whole building of hand cast blocks of cement. He was a vernacular artist.

S: Well the cast concrete building, he's one of first people to do it. William Price, who was a graduate of PCA or rather the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts, which became PCA, was the first graduate of that and Price also used to cast concrete for the Traymore Hotel. Jacob Reed Building, Rose Valley and Arden in Delaware. There was a mine in Pennsylvania and about 60% of the concrete in the came from this one area so I think that even using concrete is like an indigenous material and it was sort of more involved with the arts and crafts movement. It was prior to the international style with glass and I-beams and things like that. When you look at some of the buildings they have a different aesthetic but that is getting out of the realm. Do you remember William T Wiley show at the ICA?

C: I don't remember it but I knew him because he and Bill Schwedler and I had a three- person show at Alan Frumkin when I first came out of graduate school in New York and I met Wiley then. I knew him and I knew his work. I must have seen the show because I really liked him and I liked his work.

S: It was a show that came from Berkeley. It was called Wizdumb. It had this weird heavy manila folder with a spiral bound...and I know Ree, Italo and Rafi saw it. There is a picture of Rafi at the opening.

C: Then you can be sure that I saw it too.

S: There is actually a Ree Morton piece that she did a year out of grad school that's almost an appropriation of a William T Wiley. I wrote about it in the New Art Examiner. I'll send you a copy of it. Wiley had a canvas that was unstretched. There were lots of circles and two triangles drawn on it and there were pieces of wood coming out from the floor.

C: Oh wow. I know the piece that Ree Morton did.

S: She did paper with marks and two triangles. It is almost like one to one. And it is the year after wisdom at the ICA.

C: We probably talked about and I spaced the whole thing out. S: Philadelphia had one of the first Pop Art shows in the United States at the Y. It was before you got there. Billy Kluver did the second Pop Art show in the United States in ’62. Then Gene Swenson at the ICA did a show called The Other Tradition that merged pop and surrealism together instead of cubism and abstract expressionism being lineage. He shifted it over this way. They did the first Warhol retrospective. They did The Spirit of the Comics.

C: That's right and that was Dianne Vanderlip wasn't it?

S: No.

C: She did a show in her gallery of that. I have that catalog somewhere.

S: Spirit of the Comics was Prokopoff at the ICA.

C: Gosh, I have forgotten his name.

S: It was Steve Prokopoff.

C: Holy cow, it is memory lane.

S: That had pop art but it had Arneson.

C: Was Bill Schwedler in that?

S: I think he was. C: I think he was.

S: But what Dianne had done from October 4- November 2 1968 was a show called Beyond Literalism.

C: Joseph Yoakum was in that or he was in a show that she did.

S: He was in another show but Bill Schwedler was in that show along with Chuck Fahlen and other people.

C: Oh Chuck I remember him. He was a good sculptor.

S: When did you meet Chuck?

C: I don't remember. It much later. I just really liked his work.

S: I liked his work and I liked him. The Spirit of the Comics was the Fall of ’69 at the ICA.

C: That was really early.

S: Do you remember Jim McWilliams?

C: No.

S: At PCA?

C: No who was he? S: Jim is the person who brought in , , , and Lamont Young. Jim is the one who had to deal with . That might have been before you got there.

C: It might have been. I don't remember any of that.

S: The Terry Riley concert was in November 1967. It was an all night concert.

C: Oh no. I wouldn't have been there because that's when I was in graduate school. I just got out of graduate school in ’67. So I just went and came back. I spent no time in Philadelphia.

S: That makes perfect sense but he was a graphic designer and he brought Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik. Then Jim got involved with Charlotte Moorman and after the first three avant-garde festivals he did all the posters from then on. What happened is there was a new regime in the graphic design. Jim worked with Gene Feldman. Do you remember Gene?

C: Not really.

S: Falcon Press? So Jim McWilliams worked with Gene Feldman and Gene first invited Dieter Roth but when Dieter Roth came they were expecting Dieter Roth to do diecut books. But Dieter Roth wanted to what he wanted to do. Gene couldn't deal with him and supposedly Dieter Roth was wandering around Philadelphia kind of drunk all of the time. And he stayed with Edna Andrade. If he was near the school he stayed at Edna's and if he was further west he would crash at Claire Van Vliet's. What happened is he made, with the students, he made 5,000 or 6,000 pages of a book. Gene said that he couldn't do that many pages. So he reneged on the whole idea but Jim really liked Dieter Roth and his freewheeling kind of way was like what Jim was doing. So he did . C: That was really before my consciousness of Philadelphia as a place that I spent some time. It might have been when I was there part-time. I just zipped in and out.

S: That might have been earlier.

C: Dianne Vanderlip and I put together a visiting artists program between Moore College of Art and PCA. Lectures took place in either or place.

S: Do you know who you brought?

C: We brought loads of people like John Cage, Terry Riley, and Jim Nutt. We brought lots of artists I can't remember. A lot of New York artists came.

S: Such as?

C: Ed Flood. I remember Ed Flood because he was the first one on the program and I had been berating all my colleagues because they didn't want to attend these things. So I made them feel as guilty as I could. They complained, who has time to sit around and just hear some click click click. I said, come on it's much more interesting than that. So a bunch of them did show up and sure enough Ed was one of the funniest and most intelligent people that I knew but he was so intimidated by giving his first lecture that he stood there like a zombie. And went click, I did that in 19... click...this is 17 × 18"...click. I remember that one very well.

S: When did you first meet Dianne Vanderlip?

C: We brought Alice Neel and Max Kozloff. I remember the incidences more than the names. Another amusing thing that happened was, pulled out at the last minute and I had a screaming fight with her. Those things I remember.

S: When did you first meet Dianne Vanderlip?

C: I think I met her through Bill Schwedler. It must've been very early because she had a gallery at that point.

S: She had a gallery until March 1968.

C: Well she put me in a show or two as well Yoakum and Bill.

S: I think I have to talk to Dianne. She may have had the commercial gallery and the one at Moore, they might have overlapped.

C: I don't remember that. She was very supportive.

S: She did amazing shows.

C: She did.

S: I think at first the Arts Council was doing really great shows than the ICA started and might have taken some of the energy away. Then Dianne started her gallery at Moore. There wasn't much going on as far as gallery shows at Tyler at that point. I don't know what was at PCA before Janet Kardon.

C: Yes, not much. S: Did you ever run into a person named Carl Fernbach Flarsheim?

C: If I did I don't remember.

S: He was doing concrete poetry shows and he brought John Cage down. He did a show with Tyler and a show at the Art Alliance which is really odd. He was friends with Ian Hamilton Finlay.

C: I remember one group that we brought down. Siah Armajani, Robert Irwin and Ed Levine. A sculptor and the last job he had was the head of the visual arts department at MIT. They all had this dialogue going. They lived in different parts of the country but they had a conversation which was freewheeling. It was about art, philosophy and aesthetics and so on. We brought them to Philadelphia College of Art and they just sat for three days and talked. It was like kabuki theater, students came and went. The students at the time they didn't really understand what was going on. But I've had people over the years come back to me and say, "you know we never realized how astonishing that was."

S: That was with Dianne and you?

C: No, by that time it was just at our school. Maybe Moore was invited too. I can't remember.

S: At one time, it was probably later, Tyler, Moore, and PCA would have a kind of round robin with speakers.

C: It must have been later. We didn't have much to do with Tyler although I knew Italo and some of the other faculty there too. S: Do you remember Nancy Arlen as a student?

C: No but that doesn't mean that I don't know her.

S: Well she went to PCA and then she was one of the people who came up to the Studio School when Mercedes Matter started that. Later on she was doing these cast resin pieces when there was Energism. Do you remember that movement that lasted about 30 seconds?

C: I don't remember it.

S: She was in a new wave punk band called Mars, she was the drummer, and then she passed away. She was a graduate of PCA. So tell me about Don Roger Gill?

C: Of all the people I don't remember him. Out of those that were of friends he's the one I remember least. I must've seen him less than any of the others. He remains somewhat quiet in my memory. So I can't tell you much about him.

S: I know that he did environments that involved dry ice, wood, and neon.

C: Yes, that is right, like Rafi. He electrocuted himself didn't he?

S: Yeah he did.

C: Everybody was working in construction then. It was like flying by the seat of their pants because they knew some things as they came out of sculpture but they didn't know a great deal about construction. They learned on the job and unfortunately he learned that was the end of him. He learned about electricity in the fadeaway. S: Well I think that would happen today because the drills now are plastic.

C: Yeah.

S: The drills then were metal and he hit a conduit and just electrocuted himself.

C: Yeah, it must have been awful.

S: Tell me about Jerry Nichols?

C: Jerry Nichols was there the whole time. I didn't really get to know him. He was in the painting department although I would think he could be equally in the sculpture department given the nature of his work. I got to know him more because at a certain point we became co-chairs together. That's when I really got to know him. He would be there some days of the week. I would be there other days during the week, but we overlapped on one day and of course we talked frequently. He was also involved with the theater group, Robert Younger and his first wife Daphne who I think was the starter of the theater group.

S: Bricolage.

C: Yes. Bricolage, they did very interesting things. They did very avant-garde and interesting things there. They were funny. Jerry was part of that and actually I think he had a big impact on me. He had such an interesting way of thinking about things. I don't see him anymore. We've emailed a bit but I really respected and admired him a lot and still do. We worked very well together because I was always very neat and the minute I came in I would just take everything on my desk and throw it in the garbage. The secretary would retrieve important documents and his desk place was a complete and utter wreck. But if somebody needed something I had no idea where it was but he could put his finger on it instantly. He is an ironic guy. He has a kind of sardonic edge to him that you have to get used to. It could be a little insulting sometimes but I think he's a wonderful person.

S: I think he's really great and he is under recognized.

C: Very much so.

S: In the 1970s you're doing these flat paintings. When did you start doing thick paintings and relief?

C: That came about because I was doing a crit with a student and I was very interested and excited about her work and I realized that I was more excited about her work than my own work which was really depressing. So I came home and I slashed a bunch of paintings and destroyed a bunch paintings. Then I started weaving them, wove them together with strips. Simultaneously I had taken a trip out to Colorado and I never been out west before so the whole sense of having been in a vertical orientation my whole life to the horizon was really amazing to me. I was starting to do landscapes but they were not naturalistic. They were repeated and then I wove some canvas into it. After I came back from one trip I was very impatient with the slow rendering so I started working very quickly. As I worked quickly the paint got thicker. Pretty soon that's what I was doing and I was using the paint out of the cake froster and then shaping the edges. One thing led to another and next thing I was off the canvas entirely and onto the wall with squiggles of paint.

S: What year are those woven canvas pieces?

C: 1975, 1976, 1977.

S: Was Louise Fishman doing the woven things at that point? C: I didn't know her work then. I only knew abstract painting and expressionist painting.

S: What about Allen Loving, he had strips of canves. They weren't exactly woven.

C: I wasn't really aware of him. I knew his wife because she was in a women's group that I knew.

S: There was somebody at AIR who made sculptural reliefs with black paint and a cake.

C: Oh yes, that was Pat Lasch.

S: Oh yes.

C: When she saw or heard about my paintings with the cake froster she called me up and introduced herself. When we looked at each others work we became good friends. Her father was a pastry chef and she did it with incredible refinement. I own a piece of hers that I recently bought.

S: I think that she is great.

C: She is a great artist and not represented by anyone. We became very good friends and we see each other when we can.

S: When AIR was in SOHO I use to go there all the time. SOHO was not like what it is today. There were less galleries and I didn't need a gallery guide.

C: You just knew where to go. Harmony Hammond was doing those rug pieces. S: And also the ones on hangers.

C: I think there were some other people with grids that were woven too. Some of Ree Morton’s early work had that element.

S: So when you were starting to do these shaped things that went onto the wall and Ree Morton was doing things with celastic were you talking back and forth?

C: Always.

S: Who arrived at it first? Or was it in the air? Or do you not know?

C: I don't think we thought that way. Ree Morton was a huge influence on me. When I look back and think about it I think that I was extremely rigid although I thought I wasn't. She really opened my mind to lots of different kinds of ideas that I have simply dismissed but not in a way of my locking horns over ideas the way Rafi and Walter might have. Just in friendly conversations about things. She had an amazing sensibility to just embrace different things and people. All in a friendly way.

S: Everybody says such amazing things about her. I didn't know her that well at Tyler and I was friends with Joan. Tyler was only maybe 300 people and probably 100 were in Rome. It was a very small school back then. I remember seeing Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando on TV on Laurie Simmons bed. I don't know why I was there because I wasn't really friends with her. There were three of us on her bed. She might of had a big TV. I remember Steve Keister's work, what he was doing before he was doing the hanging pieces. I talked to him about it and he asked me how I remember that. I remember being in his studio. Bill Beckley lived across the hall from me. Dennis Adams was a TA and my teacher, but he's only about three months older than I am so he got to school early and I transferred so I lost a year so when I was a senior he was a grad student already. C: This ought to be a very interesting show that brings together a lot of things that are not ordinarily connected.

S: That is why it's called Invisible City because every other city for instance, Detroit had Kick Out the Jams, there is all these shows in Chicago, the Getty did all these shows in California, New York is always doing New York but I think that there were a lot of interplay's between New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and Philadelphia that needs to be explored. Let's talk about Rafi, which is a tough one. Rafi was doing these process pieces. He had a show at the ICA that was one of the best shows I ever saw. Then he started doing these neoprimitive pieces. First he is doing tarps with leaves and neon. Then he starts staining the tarps and drawing into them and on maps. But this is after Alan Shields being shown by Dianne Vanderlip...

C: and Paula Cooper...

S: and Paula Cooper. I always feel like Alan Shields should come into the picture because he was doing these things with beads and sewing. They were sort of pseudo- primitive.

C: Everybody was influenced by anthropology.

S: Claude Lévi-Strauss...

C:... yes we were all reading and talking about anthropology. Richard Nonas had been an anthropologist and he was a friend of Ree Morton. All of that was in the air in New York, Chicago and in Philadelphia. Kind of primitive roots like Picasso going to African art.

S: I think even reusing Raymond Roussel Impressions of Africa, the only person that would use Raymond Roussel is somebody that knew Duchamp or a french literature student. The sources of things are related to Philadelphia and I don't think people outside of Philadelphia get that. Philadelphia has 90% of the Duchamps but they are objects and not ideas. Those objects are pretty funky if you look at them. They are made out toothpaste, they're broken, they have little waterwheels with a little light pole. The cast is weird because it's Maria Marten’s and Teeny Duchamp's hands. It is not one figure being cast like George Segal. It is two figures combined like a hybrid. It's an odd selection of objects and Philadelphia artists go and look at the museum and the Duchamps all the time. Where as everyone else has to make a pilgrimage. I have Europeans come and they haven't seen Etant Donne. Everybody in Philadelphia has seen that. I think that Duchamp, Barnes, Mercer, The Philadelphia Museum, ICA, and the Arts Council, and I think that the galleries weren't necessarily that strong because there weren't any good critics so that I think that the art schools were the place were ideas merged.

C: Marian Locks was really trying to push ahead. I don't remember when she opened her gallery.

S: She open the gallery probably around '68 or '69. First in the back of a furniture store on Chestnut Street and then she moved down to 15th and Walnut. She did try but she had a lot of artists, some were great like Ree Morton and some were nuts over it. You showed there several times. Let's talk about Marian and also galleries. We already talked about Dianne Vanderlip, that didn't last that long as a commercial gallery. Do you remember the Makler Gallery?

C: I do. Dolores showed there. Did Larry Day show there? He was another influence on me, not aesthetically, but I cherished his friendship greatly because we had wonderful discussions together and we locked horns on everything but they were always polite conversations and interesting intellectually and if there was a disagreement he always won because he was so much smarter. These are some of my cherished memories of intellectual feedback in Philadelphia.

S: His crits were notorious or famous for being really cogent. C: Yes he was. Occasionally he fell sleep.

S: They were at Gross McCleaf, this was at Makler near Curtis. It started out with some Philadelphia artists but not very many. They had Saveui who was at Penn, David Pease showed there a little bit, and they did Rafi's neon multiple with the pipe. But for the most part they did blue chip stuff from New York. So what is your take on Marian's gallery? I think it was the Philadelphia gallery?

C: She was pretty game, this was the history of galleries in New York and Philadelphia probably too, wealthy women with a lot of different career profiles. It gave something to be a part of the community and Betty Parsons did lot of New York galleries and she was part of that kind of woman. Except she was game for all kinds of stuff. She was a very dignified, reserved woman, very attractive, well spoken and well behaved. She was the opposite of Phyllis Kind as a personality. She always treated me with respect. I sold some work for her and she let me do what I wanted. I had an installation there which I painted the walls with outrageous colors and stuck all kinds of clay things on it. The whole place had to be redone after I left. She was open to it so that's mainly my memory of her. I think I only had two or three shows with her and then I saw that I was coming to kind of aesthetic crisis and I acted very foolishly and unilaterally pulled out from every gallery I had because I didn't want any pressure from anybody. I wanted to evolve on my own. Which turned out to be an enormous mistake because in the art world you can't hop off the train and then hop back on. Because the train leaves and you are left behind. So I had pulled out of the gallery which was stupid.

S: You did show at 100 Acres with Barbara Toll and Pam Adler.

C: Yes.

S: I think that is were Steve Keister showed.

C: At Pam Adler's? I don't remember. S: I think one thing that's interesting about Philadelphia on top of the Focus shows where everybody was involved. Philadelphia actually had a matriarchy as far as the arts institutions. Ann D’Harnoncourt as curator and then later on director. Jean Boggs being the director. T Grace Atkinson being the ICA director and Suzanne Delehanty. Kippy Stroud starting the Fabric Workshop. All of the galleries were run by women from Dianne Vanderlip, Estelle Gross, Marian Locks, Hope Makler, Helen Drutt. All of the major galleries run by women. Curators at PAFA being women. Even more so then I think. Later Ann Tempkin who was a curator at Philadelphia Museum is now the major curator at the . I think it is like a training ground and also it had a big influence on what was being shown. For example Agnes Martin had her retrospective...

C: She came to Philadelphia College of Art.

S: We actually have a transcript of that lecture because she would talk so slowly that there was the architect who transcribed it so we know exactly what she said. I think she memorized those lectures. She didn't have notes. The first time I heard her at the retrospective I thought it was miraculous. I thought it was like an oracle. The next day when I was working at Makler's Milt Brutton came in. Hope and Milt Brutton thought it was awful. Milt Brutton said she was just manic depressive. Warren Rohrer came in and we just thought it was the best thing we've ever heard. It was so weird. It was like the art people and the collectors.

C: Warren was an ex-mennonite, his whole sensibility was one of a very great reserve and contemplation. He was more like [Agnes]. Milton was. I stayed with them for many years after Ree was gone. I traded them art and I had my own room and bathroom in their house. They collected my work.

S: At Warren's house?

C: No at Helen and Milton until he died. S: It was a funny collection. It was floor-to-ceiling work.

C: He was an obsessive collector. He is the only collector I've ever met I told to stop collecting. There were small pathways between places of purpose. You had to get from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen and out the door. Everything else was filled with stuff. Most of it was art and there was no place to hang it or look at it.

S: I did a show of Herbert Hempills’s collection for the Noyse Museum. I went to his house 10 times...

C:... on the east side

S:...I don't know where it was. I went there and he would take my coat and put it on a hanger but he didn't have a closet because his closet was filled with artworks. You could hardly walk down his place. People by this point were sending him polaroids and he would buy things from polaroids. He showed me something and a couple weeks later there it was. He had a two-story apartment and it went from the basement to the other apartment and on the railing there were things bubblewrap coming out like maybe 4 feet. He had things screwed into the tiles of his bathtub and onto the tile wall.

C: That is just like [Milton].

S: Helen Drutt is almost like that too.

C: That is what is creepy about collecting.

S: She's got two back-to-back homes and it is scary walking through her house. When you had your show a Hundred Acres was Barbara Toll working there? C: Yes she was. I had stopped Ivan Karp on the street and on an impulse I was riding my bicycle and asked if he would come to my studio and he said yes. He immediately signed me onto a show at Hundred Acres. That was his gallery too but it was directed by Barbara. That was my first show in New York outside at Artist Space and a three-person show was at AIR. I would have to look at my own resume to know exactly what was first. But the Hundred Acres was my first show in New York of my own work in a gallery.

S: Later you did have a one person show at Barbara's. At her own gallery after she left Hundred Acres.

C: That's right, yeah.

S: I loved that gallery. I thought it was fantastic.

C: She had a good eye.

S: She was showing Leonardo Drew, Ellen Phalen, and you.

C: She had interesting artists.

S: It was a good place. In 1980 you had a one person show at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin.

C: Exactly.

S: It is also a place that has a major piece of Ree's. C: Yes.

S: With the twigs leaning against the wall and a paper piece in the middle. I don't know which came first the chicken or the egg but was Ellen Johnson really enthusiastic about both of your works?

C: Yes. She was there. It was a great gift to meet her. She was an extraordinary human being. She was the person who tipped the bucket for me because I heard subsequently afterwards that in these meetings they would have to decide what new artist they would give a show to. When my work came up the interest was mixed and she said, well if you give it to her it is not going to look like anybody else. So I got shown. She was lovely and I saw her after that. When she would come to New York she would look me up. We would get together and go to galleries.

S: It's a great little museum.

C: It is a wonderful museum.

S: That whole town is so weird. It is like a twilight zone story where they took this little town and plunked it in a cornfield.

C: Ohio is unusual for all of its universities and art activities. That is where William Olander came from and he ended up at the as the curator.

S: At Oberlin?

C: When I was there he was the curator. He's the one who walked me through my show. He was lovely and as nice as he could be. That is when I moved entirely into installation and was not doing any objects at that point. I was just going from place to place with installations all over the country. That went on for a number of years.

S: Let's go back to Bill Schwedler just briefly. I'm a real fan of his work, especially his earlier work. Italo had a few of his paintings.

C: They were good friends.

S: When we interviewed Mary, Italo's first wife, she just said that he was so great and was just raving about him.

C: [Bill] was the godfather to one of their kids. I don't remember which one.

S: Harry Anderson has a painting. Eileen Rosenan has a painting which is odd. He was in those editions that Bill Copley did, the SMS editions. These little tiny editions. He is almost like a comet because he died so young.

C: Yes that was just awful because he was one of the first people ever to get aids. They didn't even know what it was when he got it. They operated on his brain. He was a complete guinea pig.

S: I remember when AIDS started I was reading in the Village Voice or the New York Times that people were getting amoebas in the brain. They didn't know why that was happening.

C: Yeah it was really an awful demise. He was remarkably handsome. He looked like the Marlboro man. He had a beautiful square jaw. He was just so handsome it was eye stopping. As he deteriorated he didn't want people to visit him necessarily because he hated the fact that he was sort of falling apart physically. It was very painful. S: Let's talk about the work. The early work had these organic shapes draped over like poles and architectural space that look like they are charcoal and sprayed. There is colored field landscape things in the background but weird combination of surrealism of some kind with biomorphic shapes and a landscaping thing that is drawn. Weird juxtapositions.

C: If I go back to my early work it was totally influenced by him. Too closely influenced by him and he knew it but he was polite about it. I loved his work.

S: There is an intermediary period where there are these kind of brownish fields that look like cracks or landscapes from above not directly landscapes but lots of charcoal lines with these weird little almost like fingerprint shapes floating.

C: I think you must be talking about the Roseville. I have a film that you would probably be interested in. A friend of mine, when I was in graduate school, came out to be with his friend and he was a little lost about what to do. So he went to graduate school at NYU Film School and his thesis was a film about me called Cynthia Ceremony and it was about marrying a tree. He interviewed all my friends about my marriage and he interviewed Bill Schwedler and some other people from Chicago and New York. It is an interesting film.

S: I would love it. So you married a tree?

C: No I didn't. It was Marcy Hermansader, who was one of my students. It was her idea and I said what a good idea I am going to marry a tree too.

S: That is another thing, I mean Philadelphia had earthworks and environments. In New York and the people out west when they did earthworks at earthmoving equipment but Italo would make little plaster blocks and put it in a dead tree in Rhode Island and Ree would wrap something like... C: ...yes her early work.

S: It was trees and and even Joan probably had things and Rafi with the leaves.

C: Yeah you're making all these connections that I never would've thought. But they weren't necessarily connected but when something is in the wind it gets filtered through each individual's sensibility and gets spit out. It looks different but you're very sharp to find all of these connections.

S: I think that in New York the people in lofts in SoHo would go to Canal Street to get latex and resin.

C: Oh yeah, in SoHo there were all the fabric arts. Everyone was doing schmatta art.

S: In Philly you have Fairmount Park, the largest park within the city limits. You have suburban areas, Rafi was living in Mt. Airy. There are trees everywhere and logs being cut down. Those were things that Rafi used in installations at Castelli's. Ree used in her installations. Italo used in his installations. It was this shared thing. Even somebody who is using fiberglass like Chuck, he had things that you could get in a hardware store very easily. Very vernacular things or the every day. I am looking over there and there is the westermann wastebasket and dustpan. He made everything by hand with galvanized metal and wood. It is hand stamped. Even that is an aesthetic that is crafted in a certain way. It isn't industrial like minimalist, I think Philadelphia was post-minimalist. It was going beyond that and even when they did a minimalist show at the ICA it was called A Romantic . When they did a minimalist show with Agnes Martin it's totally different than a Judd or a Flavin. It is a different aesthetic. It is almost like Sienna and Florence. That's really a stretch but it's a different sensibility that I think is shared by some of the people. You were really good friends with Ree and this might be painful so you don't have to answered it. You became one of the executors...

C:..yeah well I wasn't an executor. Her children are the executors but there was a committee of people who could guide the executors into art world decisions because the kids didn't know anything about art so technically it wasn't an executor it was an adviser.

S: Who were the advisers?

C: , Donald Droll, , and me. Many of them died so I was left and Allan Schwartzman. He became not an executor but the other advisor because he had by that time curated the show and knew probably more about her work than any of us did. And that remains the case because he has a good memory. He has accompanied the work to various places for installation.

S: He has an incredible memory. C: He is still amazing

S: When I was still doing work I called up when the New Museum started I called up to make an appointment to see if he would look at stuff. I had been in one little show. He knew who I was. He knew what the work was like. I don't think I ever met him in person.

C: Oh he is great. I really like him. I don't see much of him. He is extremely successful in business and is busy with his enterprise. He forms collections for collectors in different parts of the world. He and I were the last two who were advisers to the estate. I sort of dropped out. Now that the work is with Alexander and Bonin I don't think there is any need or issue to follow it around in a kind of check on things way that we used to because those dealers are wonderful. Ted Bone...

S:..is amazing

C: He is an amazing human being and ethical. Before that the gallery the work had been in a number of different galleries with let's say just less-than-perfect relationships to honesty.

S: Well now there's been two major exhibits in Europe if not more and in fact a lot of the work is unfortunately in Europe. C: Yes. They been very successful at placing things in museums there more so than here although earlier on when she died a lot of things went to good museums. There is still a fair amount of work mostly drawings given the fact that she worked in such a short period of work.

S: I actually talked to Dike Blair about the car accident. So I know exactly what happened and I said he didn't have to tell me. I was just curious and I wasn't sure if I would use this ever. One of my conversations with Rafi, Rafi was in Chicago.

C: I know.

S: He said he went to the hospital. Did you go to the Chicago also?

C: I did.

S: I don't know what he meant by that.

C: I don't know. If he says he went to the hospital okay but I don't think he did. Anyway she was in a coma and I have no qualms saying this in any kind publicly way. Rafi has this habit of being good friends with somebody and then turning on a them and starting to dump on them. He's done that with any number of people that were once very close to him and myself or Ree. Ree was honestly a stomping ground and at that point he was going around the country on all these lecture circuits and he was dumping on the people making jokes. He is very witty and smart. So he was in Chicago and so was Ree. Ree was planning to go to his lecture and sit in the front row to make him uncomfortable. I don’t think that ever happened because I think the accident happened before that. That was what severed Rafi and my relationship because after she died he came to me in Philadelphia when I was teaching, doing a crit and said he needed to talk to me and I burst into tears. He said he wanted to talk about it and I said it's too late. We proceeded to have a conversation and I was really hard on him. He said to me, "you have no sympathy." I just smiled and I said "that's the thing you've always put people down for is being sympathetic instead of hard-nosed." That was the end of our friendship. I've run into him once or twice after and we sort of smile and make nice but that was the end.

S: He is very hot and cold with me. I don't think he will participate with this project. He's got to be part of the project because...

C:..he was very influential. He has never changed. He is a little crazy, infantile and a good artist.

S: I was talking to Frank Bramlett who's also a good artist. Frank came to Tyler in the early '70s and he became friends with Rafi and he said around 1974 Rafi and Italo had a falling out. They were really good friends too and I said is it because they were competitive? He said, "no but Rafi told Italo that he had to change his behavior." So I asked Mary about that but she didn't know what that meant. Obviously I can't ask Italo and I doubt that Rafi would answer me. Actually Frank didn't know what he meant. C: Rafi probably, you know the way all of us do, wire up our universe the way we want to see ourselves. He probably would not remember or have a different remembrance of it which ameliorated any kind of criticism.

S: I have a question about Rafi and Italo. You may not feel that you have an answer but I just want to get your take on it. I studied with Italo. Even though I was a painting major I was taking Italo to critique my paintings. But they were shaped so I thought he was better to ask then David Pease. Italo, when you look at his books, he talks about Busoni and Arnold Schoenberg. He had all these students that became well-known there's a little blip when he was at Tyler. All the students became well-known. It might have been just a fluke and not Italo. He was very intelligent but he just played up I'm just an Italian.

C: Yeah he played up being this southern Italian peasant.

S: I think that was an invention. The same thing with Rafi. His father was a lawyer. His stepbrother or half-brother was an academy award-winning actor. I don't think he had a privileged growing up. His mother had some issues that he had to go to a military school.

C: His half-brother was Jose Ferrer.

S: I found that José in high school went to La Salle College as a prep school just for a little bit before he went to Princeton. So he was already coming to Philly, I don't know if Rafi was, but his brother was in Philadelphia. Rafi came to Philly because he had a friend who was working in Louis Kahn's office. Within a year of him moving to Philly he's showing at Makler Gallery. He's the showing at the ICA. Italo gets him the connection to teach at PCA somehow.

C: He was a mover and a shaker. You have to admire his nonstopable--you couldn't say no to him.

S: Rafi goes, "I'm just a drummer. I know about improvisation." But then Phil Simkin did a show called Letters which was the second earthwork show in the United States at Long Beach Island and the catalog is literally a cardboard box and there are copies of letters from Sol Lewitt, Bob Morris, Richard Serra and Rafi. Rafi's is 3 pages long in French, English and Spanish with puns and all sorts of statements. But Rafi comes off as I just made these things and I improvised. He plays up his...

C: Spanish roots.

S: This is before postmodernist things with ethnicity. So what I want to know is do you think that they exaggerated and played down their intelligence to kind of get a niche in Philadelphia? Cause it would separate them and they would be different than other artists?

C: Yeah I think that's probably true. It's carried both of them quite a distance and it's very popular. I would call both of them extremely charismatic and charisma as a character trait I think often tops intelligence or anything else. Because it's louder and out there and you see it, feel it, and are influenced by it. In fact it is very scary in the wrong hands and can be used very badly by despots. I think both of them were very charismatic characters and they were also both very smart. They both had this role which was ethnic. I think you are quite spot on about that.

S: Even when Rafi is talking about shows like the process show at the Whitney where he put hay and grease on the wall, in many of his lectures he goes, well they didn't get the greaser attacks.

C: I still didn't get that. But you know the other thing is is that they both have a great need to be the outsider. They need to be a fighter, they need to be against something more than they have to be for something. They both needed to be against something whether it was the art world or culture or the gallery world or the other artists or other friends. Against was a louder voice which I think was unfortunate on behalf of both of them to an extent. I knew Rafi more than Italo but both of them were friends.

S: Well I interviewed Richard Frankel. Did you have your show at Rhode Island from Richard?

C: I believe I did but I didn't go down.

S: Richard was at Penn State before he went to Rhode Island and Italo was at Penn State before he went to Tyler. They were just starting this gallery so Italo said, "you should show my friend ." I thought I've never heard this story. I heard that Marcia Tucker went to the house. went to the house in Glenside. Sol Lewitt. I think Judd may have been there but I never heard of Flavin. So I looked up the catalog resume and there is a show Untitled Fluorescent Environment (for my friend Italo Scanga). So these people were networking. They weren't in New York but they were going up to New York and showing.

C: Rafi was friends with Bob Morris until they had a falling out too.

S: They had a falling out too?

C: Yes. He was dumping on Bob Morris.

S: Oh well supposedly Bob Morris said don't go ethnic and Lucas Samaras said go that direction. I don't know if that's part of it. I also found out that Bob Morris was in a show at the ICA called The Atmosphere of '64 and he had all these kind of neo-dada gray boxes with little Duchampian puns. He did Site, the dance that he did with Carolee Schneemann in New York. In philadelphia '64 Carolee Schneemann did not come down to Philadelphia it was Olga Kluver. Billy Kluver's wife. I would love to see if there is a picture of that. That was one of the reasons I wanted to interview Bob Morris. Both about that and about the Long Beach Island show that Phil did. So tell me about Phil Simkins.

C: Well his wife was at PCA and I knew him because we were both finalists and were given commissions for the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia which was an ongoing project for a number of years because the first building was jumped and then all the artists were jumped. There was a second building which was more modest and then some of the same artists Phil and I were invited to resubmit work for this new building. I really got to know how smart, funny and completely... he was one of those people who were nonstop. He just went story after story. His exhibitions were wonderful. I mean he did that piece in California about the cable knit news and he had people in knitting machines knitting the news as the news was coming off and they were getting these dresses that people would wear. He did that whole piece about the real estate mogel in Philadelphia. He had a space and he drove up in a white cadillac and it was all a real estate office, the art opening, and it was to get people who had property and artist together to make pieces on the property. He was unstoppable and I really liked him. To go back to Rafi again Phil was in a positive direction. Everything about him was about affirmation not negativity. Therefore I thought he was a much greater person. He also was teaching in New York so he was reverse commuting at York College. I had done a number of these evaluations of schools where they teamed people up to evaluate to art department. He invited me to York where he was chair. I thought York didn't really have an art center there but he was doing a splendid job. He put all his energy into that he was just as funny with the students as he was with his own work. I think humor is an art not so much now but it has a history of humor as disregarded as second-rate. As it is in the movies you never see a comedy getting an academy award. It has to be drama to be taken seriously. The same thing is true in art although there are all these artists like Peter Saul endless Westermann and endless numbers of artists if you start to think about it for which humor is an important ingredient.

S: I went to school with Stefi at Tyler, Phil Simkin's sister. Phil and I didn't team teach but he was my mentor when I taught one year at Moore. When he passed away I went to the funeral and John Formicola came and gave a little talk. When Marian started the gallery they wanted to do a print show to kind of put themselves on the map. It was going to be a Picasso print show. He made a machine that made some drawings and it went on a conveyor belt and if it got to the end and you didn't buy it fast enough it would go into this vat of water and dissolve. So you had to buy things right away or it was too late. When I was at Tyler he was coming to Tyler and was doing inflatables and performances. That is the other thing that I found in this research, on top of Bricolage there were other performance groups like Willie Heeks did performances in Philadelphia. There were a lot of things going on that people don't either remember or know about. So who did the film again?

C: A dear friend of mine Bard Martin who is a photographer. He is retired. He ended up in commercial photography doing quite well. That was the only film he ever made.

S: Was he connected to Philadelphia at all?

C: Not at all. He had come from California.

S: So Marcy got involved because you were her teacher?

C: It was Marcy’s idea. I just glommed on. We were just joking around then. We were young. Was it a performance I don't know. He decided it would be an interesting idea for a film and it was. It was shown at the Museum of Modern Art young filmmakers when he first finished making it.

S: The Y Arts Council that became part of the people that were involved with the ICA. There was this one woman that we interviewed name Audrey Sabol and her husband and her son started NFL films. She was collecting art. She did a commission of Wayne Thiebaud to do a portrait of her daughter. They had Lichtenstein billboards and things like that. But because her husband was involved with film she was having filmmakers do portraits of her. Through that she met Jonas Mekas. Through Jonas Mekas, at the Y Arts Council, Jonas Mekas wanted to show two films but also have a disco. The disco consisted of The Velvet Underground. They thought that was outrageous. But one of the films that they showed was by this guy Nelson from California, who was friends William T Wiley, called Oh Dem Watermelons. It has a film score by so from those connections when they did the Museum of Merchandise at the Y they had a soundtrack in the background that Steve Reich did. There is also misconceptions for example, when I asked you about Ree Morton and Frank Stella Mark Campbell, our dean, said [Frank] was stretching canvas in the hallway in a complex shape and Ree came by and said she could do that because she worked with Frank Stella. But she was kidding. Mark took her completely serious. I was excited that there was a Frank Stella connection. But then that got corrected. I asked everybody these things as summaries and you can go on as long as you want. So we're working primarily in the ‘60s and ‘70s for this project in Philadelphia. What do you think during that time period were the five most important events or exhibits?

C: I can talk probably about the exhibits I thought were important but I'm not sure they fit the timeframe exactly. I think when Rafi, in the context of that time, when he did that piece that was an homage to Duchamp with everybody riding to the museum on motorcycles or something and he deflected the fountain. It was a performance but it was in good spirits and it was an event. I remember very much the piece, it was a public art piece. I can't remember where it was, somewhere in center city, that Siah Armajani did an homage to Louis Kahn.

S: It is a reading room at Fleisher. C: Those were things that were influential to me. I think it kind of disappeared in the city.

S: It's one of my favorite pieces of public sculpture and Fleisher often at times has a coat rack or a mop in there and I've told Penny Balh and they have supposedly corrected it. I think it's so quiet and so beautiful. And Armajani is such a great artist. I find that sacrilegious.

C: It is. I don't know if it's one exhibition over the other but I think Janet Kardon did a splendid job at the gallery. She brought all kinds of people that would have never been there.

S: Are you talking about PCA? Or the ICA?

C: The PCA and then the ICA.

S: She did a great job at PCA.

C: She did. I remember the Points show and the Sketchbook show. But she did so many others. S: She did Point, Line, Time.

C: The ICA had so many good shows. They did an art as furniture show.

S: Improbable Furniture.

C: Yeah. Claes Oldenburg, Scott Burton and tons of other people that were somehow involved with furniture in their art making.

S: Do you remember when Janet did Time that Scott Burton was doing performances? Did you see those?

C: I did see some of them. Yes. I had a hard time with the kind of duration.

S: They were like tableau.

C: They were. He is an interesting artist too. I have to say that Ree's piece when she got a Cap's Grant,it was $3000 or something like that, but they saved $500 of it that you had to do some community service and what most artists did was that they gave a lecture somewhere. But Ree did her flag piece on the Howard B Getty and I thought that was a wonderful piece. It was friendship something in the wind. That to me was one of the great pieces. There was another film on that piece that someone took Super 8 and I'm in it. I'm going around talking about young people, young women wearing these high heels and short shorts.

S: Does Ted have that film?

C: He does, yes.

S: She's on film at Art Park along with Chuck Fahlen. In my school I can stream it.

C: Jim Roche was another artist that came and he was a good friend of Ree's too. He is from Florida.

S: He married Alexa Kleinbard.

C: She was a student of mine, she's really wonderful. S: Let's go back to the deflected fountain that Rafi did. That was during the Peace Show at the museum. There were four students from PCA who got students from Tyler and Moore involved and they went to the board at the Art Museum which would never happen now. And they asked to do a Peace Show. They selected these works, they had everything from Rothko to Bill Daley. I remember seeing the show and Christo wrapped the staircase and Rafi didn't want to be in the museum. He wanted to be against the museum. But I didn't know there were cars involved.

C: Oh no, don't quote me on that. I just remember somehow that there was a gang of us that got from one place to another, whether we were walking or riding or going on motorcycles I don't remember and then he deflected the fountain.

S: He was in the fountain with Daniel Schneps who was a student from PCA.

C: Lucio Pozzi was another artist.

S: It's like Dennis Adams I gave him a show and he was saying don't you remember when Franz Erhard Walther came to Tyler and I didn't remember that. I tracked it down and he had been in a show at the Museum of Modern Art and one of the students in my sophomore year was at the Museum of Modern Art and participated in the performance. Italo said why don't you invite him to Tyler he liked you. So she invited him and he crashed at her place for three days and did performances with students at Tyler. I don't know how I missed that because Tyler was so small but if it wasn't for a chance conversation with Dennis I wouldn't know that story. That's why I'm doing this project because there were avant-garde activities going on and it is not what you think of as Philadelphia. Philadelphia is thought of as figurative and conservative. I don't think that's necessarily true.

C: Well at Philadelphia School there were all those painters like Larry Day and Sidney Goodman. They were all painting these tableaux of people standing around in bermuda shorts representing important ideas from the 17th century. But that is the Philadelphia School.

S: That's what people think but I think that there is an alternative to that.

C: It is wonderful that you are doing the show.

S: In your mind at this moment who do you think were the five most important artists practicing during that time period?

C: You mean influential?

S: However you define important? C: Italo at Tyler. Rafi and Ree at Philadelphia College of Art. At Moore, I wasn't so aware of who taught there that was influential.

S: Chuck was there but I don't know if he was influential.

C: He had a kind of lower profile. He was very laid-back like Jerry Nichols.

S: I think his work was very reserved.

C: Yes, very quiet. I can't think of other artists. Edna Andrade was a solid rock as an aesthetic presence in Philadelphia. I am thinking in terms of faculty and their influence more than artists and their influence. I think Larry Day influenced a lot of people.

S: Out of those people how do you get people like Robert Younger? Where do they come out of?

C: Beats me. There was Jerry and Robert and they were there too. I don't know if they were influential. Terry Gross many years ago before she was as syndicated as she was, she did a really snappy thing on the radio. She commissioned three visual artists to do pieces for the radio. Robert Younger, me and I forgot who the other artist was. Maybe it was Phil Simkin. I have that tape somewhere. I've never played it.

S: What year?

C: Well it was in that timeframe.

S: Because when she started she was on all afternoon. It wasn't like one hour. It was three hours every day. It was wonderful but crazy. Then it shrunk to an hour but it was still amazing.

C: She interviewed me and other artists. She was really great because who interviews artists on the radio? Nobody. It is one thing to interview famous writers or famous musicians or composers but artists very rarely reach that profile.

S: You think you have that tape or a copy?

C: I might. If I do I will send it to you. But it only plays on a tape recorder and I have no tape recorder anymore. It was a little cassette. S: Robert Younger use to send these diptych postcards in envelopes of two photographs taped together. They were excellent and so enigmatic. He did fiberglass installation with fluorescent lights. Then he moved to New York.

C: I guess Walter Erlebacher was influential too. He was so passionate, so vocal, and strong. Dare you cross him in your classroom but again I'm going to faculty not the importance of the artists.

S: Well since we have time we haven't really talked about Duchamp. What you think Duchamp's importance was in the world but also in Philadelphia proper?

C: Here is what I think and it goes back to the whole process of education. I think that there are two main positions, either you can be a dutiful student that works their way through art history with enormous respect or you can be somebody that votes against it and does anything they think they can to be against whatever they think is academic. I think that's the part that Duchamp contributed to 20th century art for better or for worse. I think that now that I am older I have a lot more interest and respect at looking at traditions that I scoffed at because there are many fine lines. I was a great admirer of his all through school and after that because it gave me permission to do anything I wanted somehow. I'd like a little of that permission back frankly but I think it has a bad side too which is just a lot of blather.

S: Well Willem de Kooning said he was a one-man art. C: He was. He was a great intellect.

S: But he also wasn't someone who just knocked out works for the marketplace. He lived on $2000 a year teaching french.

C: He had an enormous respect. He really carried that across. I would say people like Picasso and Matisse in terms of 20th-century art even Bonnard are way more important. Not in terms of their effect but just the quality of the art itself.

S: Robert Morris did a late essay where he said the three most important artist of American art in the 20th century were Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, and Edward Hopper.

C: That's interesting I wonder why he would think that. I thought the Hopper show of his drawings at the Whitney sometime ago showed that he was a remarkable draftsman. Very pragmatic. Very American. No-nonsense but really good and simple. His paintings, I don't think he is very good painting. I think he is a painter who painted gripping scenes that it stayed in our conscience and he became an iconic painter but when you look at the painting's themselves they look labored. They are not so interesting as paintings as painters who look at paintings. The drawings are much more rigorous and marvelous.

S: I think they are images. I studied with Matthew Baigell who is an American art historian and he said one thing which really stuck with me about Hopper is that Hopper was a very introverted person and he was alienated from almost everyone including his wife. If you look at Hopper’s paintings there oftentimes is a visual barrier to connect to the people or a lot of distance to the people. So you think of like The Nighthawks, there's one person with his back to you, there's another person that is looking at their sandwich, and one guy is washing dishes and another guy is sort of talking to him. Everybody is skewed and outside of the restaurant there's all these windows with the shades up and no lights on. So you are outside looking in like a voyuer. There is no one in the apartments and it is 1942, so those people are 4F. They are not soldiers they’re like losers and they are eating at night. They are people who couldn't go to the military.

C: I never thought of it like that. I don't know Bob Morris but I would just really enjoy a conversation about why he picked those three.

S: He was doing some Edward Hopper appropriations recently.

C: I haven't follow his work for years. He just got dropped off the map for me as someone that I would seek out.

S: He has sort of shifted. This has been really great. You had a lot of information that I will have to look up.