The Brooklyn Rail

In 1966 I lived in Lower Manhattan on Duane Street near the corner of Greenwich. Richard lived around that corner. I don’t remember the exact details but we met on the street, started talking and pretty soon he was coming over to hear my recently completed tape piece Come Out. His reaction was enthusiastic and perceptive. He got both the formal structure and its role as part of the Civil Rights movement right away.

I soon visited his studio and saw eleven groups of industrial rubber belts hanging from eleven nails on the wall. On one hand their irregular shape suggested Pollock but being in a series of eleven hangings made the whole piece something new. Where was this going?

A little later I visited his studio and all the rubber was still there, but there was a new piece: To Lift. A sheet of that heavy black rubber on the floor but lifted up in the middle so that it stayed in place as an arc. It stayed in place because the material, the rubber didn’t slip and collapse on the floor.

Months later Richard called me on the phone. It went something like this:

“Two sheets of lead. Roll one up into a pole. Then prop up the other sheet using the pole. You got it? What do you think?”

I responded something like, “I have to come over and see it first.”

And there it was, just as described. A big, obviously heavy sheet of lead held to the wall about 4 or 5 feet above the floor by the other lead sheet rolled into a pole. A lot of tension there. A lot of potentially dangerous falling weight. You could feel it. Years later he said about the prop pieces, “We would set them in place and then hold our breath.”

Richard was using heavy lead, too heavy for him to move around by himself. It slowly evolved that friends helped him to move it; Philip Glass, Chuck Close and others as well as myself. Friendships grew out of this and one of the first results was the Anti-Illusion show at the Whitney Museum in 1969.

It was in that show that my Pendulum Music was performed by Serra, Bruce Nauman, Michael Snow, James Tenney and myself. Four loudspeakers were placed on the floor, facing up, each with a microphone on a cable hanging down directly above them. Serra, Nauman, Snow and Tenney each pulled back one of the microphones, I turned up the amplifiers, gave them a cue and all four released their mics. As the mic pendulums swung over their loudspeakers a pulse of feedback was heard. The pendulums and their feedback pulses drifted out of phase creating slowly changing melodic patterns, and then gradually slowed further down to a standstill, droning continuous feedback. I pulled the plug and it ended. I have always thought of that piece as audible sculpture, clearly influenced by Serra.

Richard himself said the following about Pendulum Music: “It caused a certain kind of dislocation of our sensibility, not in terms of space, but in terms of sound. I thought it really slipped right into the middle of that whole process movement and brought it together—and it was so simple, too.”

Years passed and we stayed in touch. Sometime around 2019 I was asked to come to MoMA, take a close look at Richard’s newly installed Equal sculpture and give my reactions.

I did and I saw eight forged steel blocks stacked in pairs. Each block was 5 feet by 5 and a half by 6 and weighed 40 tons. Each stack was 11 feet high. The upper block always overhung or underhung the lower. It was all highly thought out and complex, but at the same time immediately obvious. As I walked around the stacked blocks I noticed my eye level was exactly where one block ended and the upper one began. When I got up close to see that, I could sense the immensity of the block above me. When I walked further away, there was a sense of calm and contemplation.

Now, as I write this on my computer I’m looking at the piece on a screen. Totally different experience. There’s a video of Richard addressing precisely that. He says: “The virtual denies tactility. Walking, looking, experiencing, and touching—that’s kind of been lost. That’s not to say it’s not gonna come back.”

Richard is no longer with us and our whole generation is slowly leaving. We’re leaving behind a large body of art and music which we hope you will continue to look at, listen to, and think about.