Interview with Tom Lawson, Dean of CalArts School of Art
Because billboards aren’t distracting right?
TL: Exactly, [laughter] commercial billboards don’t even have to go through all this process [more laughter].
SMS:
That’s because it’s commercial.
TL:
Exactly. It was on a city building, a municipal building at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, so there was also this concern that motorists on the bridge would see it and veer into the river. [laughter] I thought that was pretty exciting, so I went out onto the bridge and sure enough, you could actually see it pretty well, which was great. Bu it was also pretty small and you know, it wasn’t distracting.
Anyway, it was during this time that I moved out here to take up the job at CalArts. I’d been a resident of New York and had an investment in its representation, and an older history stemming from Britain, and I was ok with that, because it made sense to me. But I couldn’t figure out a public space of Los Angeles that made sense to me. I just couldn’t get my mind around the problem in a way that satisfied me. So I stopped thinking about public art, and got more involved in the issues of educating young artists, and when you’re running a school it takes up a little bit of time.
SMS:
Just a little bit [laughter].
TL:
Yes, just a little bit. I began to pursue other things in the studio. I made paintings about fire, because one of the first things you notice when you move out here is the fire season, which is a shocker if you are not from these parts. Hillsides and buildings regularly burn down in October. So I did a whole bunch of paintings based on images of fire, and it turns out there was a particularly bad season of fire followed by a season of riot, and I just thought that that wasn’t the idea; that that wasn’t the right time to show them. I didn’t want to have them misunderstood as having anything to do with ‘the fire next time.’ That wasn’t what I had been thinking about.
SMS:
Now is that something you would have thought about in New York?
TL:
The fire?
SMS:
No, the politics.
TL:
Yeah, it was local weather conditions, local politics, local housing patterns; it was those kinds of thing I was thinking about. I was thinking about Goethe’s Faust. I wasn’t thinking about inner city politics.
Then, within the year there was a huge earthquake that rattled CalArts and we had to evacuate the building for six months for repair. My job went from being merely the dean to the entire project manager looking to find alternative locations, figuring out what we needed to continue, and how and where to provide that, and keep everyone’s spirits up. I really got into it because it returned me to the day to day excitements of doing public art. I was out on the road much of the time. I got a cell phone for the first time, a laptop with fax connector, so I could be in touch with Joann at the art office. She was in a trailer on the parking lot at CalArts, and I was driving everywhere in the Santa Clarita Valley creating the art school again and making sure that people were ok with it.
We found these amazing Lockheed buildings that had been test sites for stealth technologies — a huge hangar and wind tunnel, and all these experimental labs. They gave us the use of the main building and we cleared it all up, turned small offices into studios, and bigger offices into art galleries and classrooms. Some students left, but the ones who remained learned a lot about improvisation and experimentation, hands-on. There was a student there who had done some prior projects about public interactions and he made a bar that opened every afternoon at five [laughter]. It was an amazing six months.
In this period I got myself a new studio and began doing a new set of paintings that I still don’t know what to think about. They were diptych paintings with each panel about the size of a table-top (3’ x 5’). Up until this point I had kept a studio on campus, but after the earthquake I didn’t have access to that studio and couldn’t get my work out. So I got this idea about making art that would fit in the back of a station wagon. I needed to make something that I could pick up and get out.
Page 3 of 9 | Previous page | Next page