Frank Stella at MIT - A Discussion of Recent Work and Installation of "Loohooloo" - 1995

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MITCHELL: Let me welcome you all here this evening. I'm Bill Mitchell. I'm Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. The occasion this evening that causes this talk to take place is the opening of a new space in the School of Architecture and Planning that includes a magnificent recent work by Frank Stella, the Loohooloo, made available to MIT very generously by Elliot Wolk.

We've worked over the weekend to get it all ready to open today. And sure enough, things got finished just in time, and the space duly did open. It's in Building 7. I had to check this just before I came up here to talk. It's room 7336. Am I correct on this?

Yes. I am correct. It's 7336. They haven't put the number on the door yet, so I have to be careful that I give you the right number on this.

It's not open this evening, but as of tomorrow, it will be open to the public. And I encourage everybody to come and take a look at this piece. It's a magnificent piece and a great room, and it will also bring you into the heart of the rebuild headquarters space for the Department of Architecture and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in the School of Architecture and Planning. And it also includes a really interesting, new exhibition space that we intend to make very active use of. So we welcome you all to that space, and we very much look forward to seeing you all there.

Let me make a very brief introduction to what we're going to do this evening. To anyone who's interested in painting, or in thinking about painting, or in the theorizing of painting, Frank Stella really, truly needs no introduction. So I am going to be brief.

Born in 1936, a Boston area native, educated at Phillips Andover and at Princeton. For four decades, he has been producing series after a series of astonishingly inventive and thought-provoking explorations of what non-figurative painting can be and can become. He's had all sorts of extraordinary twists and turns in the directions that he has taken, confounded and astonished the critics at times. That has been unfailingly thought provoking and really pushing the envelope, pushing the edges of what painting can be.

In the wake of the heyday of abstract expressionism in the '50s, he began to produce, as many of you know, his black paintings series. This was followed by the aluminum and copper paintings and the shaped canvases, breaking out of the rectangular plane. He moved into painted metal reliefs in the '70s. Later, huge three-dimensional pieces in the Moby Dick series and beyond. And explorations that's continued until now and has given us Loohooloo, the piece that we'll be able to see later on.

He's moved back and forth from rigorously precise execution to slightly playful improvisation, from straight lines and flat polygons to the curves with spatial readings of the exotic birds series. He's been an innovator in fabrication technique and in the means of making, of executing paintings, as you will see later on. In his Norton lectures at Harvard a decade ago, he produced a sustained theoretical exploration of the aims and means of painting that deserves reading and re-reading.

We're going to have a conversation about mostly recent work. We're going to sit over here on the stage and just talk about the slides as they come up. I have to tell you, it's completely unrehearsed and ad hoc. We just looked at the slides a few minutes ago. And we're going to do our best to make this interesting for you, but I think it will be.

Just before we start, what I'd like to do to give you an idea of what we've been going through in pulling this extraordinary piece of work into the MIT context-- we're going to show you a video of the work arriving at MIT and, in particular, some extraordinarily skillful crane operators maneuvering it in through the window of Building 9. I saw some of this happening. I haven't seen the video. So let's take a look and see what happened as this piece joined MIT.

[CRANE BEEPING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[APPLAUSE]

STELLA: Thanks. Is that on?

MITCHELL: Yeah. We're on.

STELLA: Okay. I can't resist a blackboard, so I'm going to draw-- I'm not going to draw, actually. I'm going to write a few words on the blackboard. And then we can start showing the slides and go on from there.

They are basically two questions that I get asked over, and over, and over again. One, why did you change, and two, what's going on today. Why I changed, I really don't have an answer to that except it's obvious. You keep going. But what's going on today, which is a way of talking about what we just saw in the video clip-- I'd just like to run by you as simply as I can the way I see what's happening, say, now.

I'm not going to define what the art of the '90s is, but it's interesting to see, or at least to talk about, what's happening and not just what I'm thinking about, but really what everybody else is thinking about. And it's pretty easy to explain it or to make a very simplified version of it. And so it really consists of two things.

And so what you have today is you have a painting. So if you have painting-- I know you all know that that's painting. But it doesn't have to be just painting. It's really art to today. So because you're making art, and most of it can be painted or it could be other things, it breaks down into two things, which is we have literalism-- it's a horrible word, but it's the best one-- and we have illusionism.

And we used to have problems like abstraction and representationalism, but that doesn't really matter. I mean, we have 100 years of that. And it's come now, in the '90s or at the end of the century, to this kind of way of seeing things. So they don't necessarily have to conflict, but they represent two different polls, or they represent, maybe, two different ideas. But they all revolve around the same thing, which is that in order to do anything, you have to deal with boundaries-- I don't know why I like spellings these. I just like writing with the chalk--

[LAUGHTER]

--to see if I can spell. You have boundaries and you have surface. And that's what you're going to see a lot of in the slides, and those are the kinds of things that I'm going to talk about a lot.

What you saw in the video, you can already see how much it's about surface and how much it's about boundaries. And you can see that if it were just what it is when you see the back side of the piece, that would be the literal part. I mean, that might be good enough. It might be a Henry Moore. It might be a minimalist structure. It could be in steel and be a Richard Serra and do quite well.

But it has something else, which is the painting, which is the surface that I worked on anyway. It's involved with illusion, or illusionism, and that's what brings it back towards painting. And the literalism doesn't exclude painting, but sometimes it's a conflict. And so we'll go, basically, from there, looking at the slides, see how I got to it, and what other things it leads to.

Basically, what the conclusion is going to be or what you might come to as a conclusion yourself when we get through looking at the slides is that art, in the end, will pass through all of these things-- through literalism, illusionism, boundaries, and surface basically. And it'll end up by defining art as something that you already knew it was there, which is it's going to be painting, sculpture, and architecture. So it won't be a surprise to you, but that's what the fine arts are.

And what happens is a lot of the divisions and different ways that we have of looking at things have to do with the kind of not necessarily confounding, but they have to do with people taking positions in relation to these things in which they want to have their own thing or find that the thing that they do best being the better thing. But we're not going to really worry about that. We're just going to see how they can come together.

And we don't know how they're going to-- I certainly don't know how it's going to happen, but you can see in the work that I'm doing that they do relate to each other, and they do become involved. I'm not saying that a synthesis is a great idea, but you can see at least-- or I can see-- that there are some possibilities for a kind of synthesis that would be interesting. And that's why I change.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

MITCHELL: Okay. Let's have some slides, and we can take down the lights.

STELLA: The piece on the left, I made at Andover in 1953 or '54, and it's the Brooklyn Bridge, believe it or not. And a lot of people think that I painted the Brooklyn Bridge, but that was Joseph Stella. We're not related. So actually, it's a kind of opportunity to sort of lay that one to rest.

When I first came to New York, a lot of people said that they were quite surprised to see what a young man I was.

[LAUGHTER]

I mean, I wasn't that surprised. I was younger then.

And the picture on the left is a painting which is very typical for the time. It's a kind of abstract expressionist painting. It seems to me-- actually, although it might predate Al Leslie, some of his paintings, a little bit that way-- but very much like Motherwell. Al Leslie, pretty much a kind of second or abstract expressionist painting. But the people that I was most influenced, probably, in this painting were Motherwell and Gottlieb.

And interestingly enough, it had a title, and the title came out of a New York Post headline. But anyway, that painting was called Requiem for Johnny Stompanato. And I'm sure that no one here really remembers who Johnny Stompanato was, but he was a hood who came to an unfortunate end with Lana Turner's adopted daughter when she stabbed him in the kitchen.

Okay. We can go on.

That was the last kind of painting on the left that I made before I made the black paintings. So you can see the transition from the Johnny Stompanato painting. And really, it's a landscape, and the real change is pretty straightforward and pretty simple.

It happened by painting out. You can see that there was a structure underneath and that there was a painting that was formed with bands and blocks. And you can see that somewhere a frustration occurred and things were-- and then it got painted out, but it got painted it out in such a way that it became a whole painting.

And that idea of painting it all yellow or painting over the other painting and making the bands carry the whole thing is what made the black paintings possible, because then they were all black. It seemed to be okay. It seemed to be a way for painting.

And again, I don't want to tie-in too much with-- but if you were to see the Mondrian show now, one of the things about the abstraction in that kind of painting is how landscape derived it is. And this is only a coincidence to me, but both of the paintings that you saw-- although the Brooklyn Bridge happens to be the bridge, it's a landscape kind of painting, and painting for a Johnny Stompanato is basically a landscape painting, and this is a landscape painting.

This is called Astoria. And it was about the sunrise in the morning as you travel on the subway to Astoria.

The one on the left, believe it or not, although it looks like an abstract painting, is actually a portrait. It's a portrait of Carl Andre.

[LAUGHTER]

MITCHELL: How so?

STELLA: These were all-- I did a series of paintings which were polygons with the centers dropped out. And that could be a frame, and the portrait, obviously, could go in the middle. But I knew what Carl looked like, so I left it out.

[LAUGHTER]

And I did a series of other people. I did Leo Castelli and Ileana, his wife, and all my friends. It was a group of portraits.

But actually, it was an interesting thing, because I did an octagon. Right after that, the graphics started to form images which had spaces in the middle. And the one I can think of is a Chase Manhattan Bank logo which appeared about six weeks after my show at Leo's announcement.

And then that was a painting done later on, which is-- again, and you can see boundaries. It's become an issue here in surface. That's practically the only issue, but it's an interesting way to see it. And this, in a way, relates something, finding a way to deal with the things that come up later are a way of looking to make a space.

Okay. We can go on. Sorry.

Well, this gets into another idea, which is a way of dealing with the boundaries and the surfaces. But this time, the thing that's going to be painted, or the painting, instead of being kind of self-defining, becomes something that's built. And then the painting takes place on what's built. So it's a way of thinking about the painting as not so much marks on a surface, but as a structure and sort of building what it is that you want and then painting it.

But in order for it to work-- the problem with this kind of way of working and thinking about things is that it's not so easy to make the painting seem that it really-- it has to do something more than appear to be on the surface. It's just difficult, that's all. But it's a problem. It also has it's kind of rewards, because it's a way to be, at least pictorially and graphically, dramatic in a relatively easy way.

MITCHELL: And these are fabricated in metal?

STELLA: Yeah. That's fabricated in aluminum, and the other has fiberglass. And that's honeycomb aluminum. And the other thing here is treating the surface. It doesn't show up much there, because it was very shallow, but the aluminum was etched first and then the painting and then inc and some things were scrubbed on the surface to give it a kind of movement.

MITCHELL: Did you ever get them fabricated in a shop and then bring them there?

STELLA: Yeah. This was the beginning of the surfboard technology, actually, which ends with [INAUDIBLE]. This was fabricated in California.

And this is taking what we've just seen before one step further, but there are new elements. And there's an attempt here to make the surfaces move, so they're not just planar surfaces in relation to each other tipped or tilted. It's an introduction of another degree and level of complexity.

Now, I didn't do these.

[LAUGHTER]

But this interests me a lot, and the reasons are down there-- literalism, illusionism, boundaries, and surface, and even painting and art. The surface here is given. On the other hand, it's used. And it's a very complicated, very irregular surface. And on the face of it, we would assume that they didn't really care that much about the surface. But let's have the next slide.

It's pretty obvious on the one on the right when they go to the trouble of incising and cutting the line, and it is a tremendous feel for the surface and the given things. There's making and controlling your own surface by indenting and making the relief, and then there is the use of the relief and protrusions that are given by nature and the surface.

So it only goes to show that, from the very beginning, people who know what they're doing or care about what they're doing have a sensitivity to the whole scene and the whole situation. And you have to bring your own touch to the surface, but you need a surface to react to in a way too. It always helps. I think there's been a big-- it's not a big problem, but you can see that the assumption of being given a neutral or flat surface to work on is not such a great gift, as you can see from these paintings.

Now, this is something that we don't have anymore, and we don't have these kind of complicated architectural surfaces to work on. Again, this is a given surface, but it's made much like the surface in the caves in Lascaux and Altamira. And again, it's the question, or the issue, or the interest in surfaces and things that you can do when you're given an opportunity. Things happen when there are opportunities, when there are challenges, and the Roman and the German are good examples. And they also serve as pretty good reminders that the degree of complexity can be quite great, and problems in dealing with them are great too.

By and large, in this case, most of the solutions are what we would call scenographic, and we would tend to say, well, it's decorative. And those things are all true, but when there are also other examples where these things are taken to heights in expressive and heights that are truly great, and they couldn't be done any other way.

MITCHELL: Here the surface dissolves too. If you're down on the floor, we have a true [INAUDIBLE].

STELLA: Yeah. But I mean, it's hard to find a place to look at things. It's hard to know where you are. I mean, it's also hard to know who you are.

[LAUGHTER]

But now, having shown the things that we saw running through the paintings and some of the ideas just tipping over the top, what happens is-- again, we talk about change, which is that, at some point, you take things from the outside, and you deal with them in a kind of ordered way, or you make a mark or a drawing. You try to order things. You try to organize them.

And then at some point, it's hard not to be interested in the things that happen that are beyond your control and beyond your, actually, imaginative ability, or just any ability. I mean, for me, this is beyond my ability to comprehend it.

But anyway, these were actually done relatively recently, about four or five years ago, but I started on it when I was working on-- actually, when I was in Eliot House at Harvard. And I was blowing smoke rings, and Harriet had gone back to the city, and I was there alone. And they heated up the room, as they do in all universities, and then they think that's warm enough. They turn off the heat.

[LAUGHTER]

And this was a happy moment. When the heat was off, and the air was very still, and it was still warm enough blowing the smoke rings, they started to do a lot of things. And they filled up, and I really could see the smoke just because I was alone in the room with just one light where I was reading. And blowing the smoke out, the way they hovered, and they held, and then they did what they did here, which they dropped, and they sort of bifurcate. They make other smoke rings.

And as you can see, these are photographs. Actually, the fellow that you saw in there, Andrew Dunn, who kept saying shit all the time, and he was putting things-- was the one who photographed these too. But this was almost as unpleasant as putting the piece in the room, because the black box was pretty hard to handle.

But anyway, we photographed these from six sides in a black box. And then with the photograph from each side, we had a cube. And then with that, we could trace them, and then feed it into the computer, and get-- go on. I think we'll see some. You'll get a version.

Oh. There's another. Now, this is a continuation. There's someone else blowing a smoke ring.

[LAUGHTER]

But actually, it wasn't smoking.

And we're making a piece of sculpture there. And I only throw that in to show you that it's the interest in things outside that you really can't control. Molten metal is pretty-- that's molten stainless steel. And you can use it, but you can't really control it. Or at least, we haven't found a way to control it.

And again, the smoke is the same thing. It sort of dissipates itself, so it's pretty hard to get it to do exactly what you want. And so I guess that the interest of the change has been in things that have their own way of doing things that you can be involved with, you can participate, you can look at it, and you can see them. You can try to work with them. You can try to shape with them. But it's to see if some of those things won't give you a way to sort of spring out, to get beyond where you were.

MITCHELL: What kind of smoke is [INAUDIBLE]?

STELLA: Well, my smoke is cigar smoke. That's not smoke.

[LAUGHS]

MITCHELL: [INAUDIBLE] smoke rings anyway.

STELLA: Yeah.

MITCHELL: [INAUDIBLE] cigar smoking?

STELLA: No, that's the porpoise making them. That's a beluga whale. But the whale, he--

MITCHELL: [INAUDIBLE]

STELLA: Yeah. No, the ones before were smoke. And also it was his form that led to the shapes in the paintings before, which is the beluga moving.

Okay. I guess we can go on.

Okay. That's the computer's version of what we saw in the smoke. It's not exactly those rings, but that's one way we could get it.

And then you all know this. I mean, I'm sure you're very familiar. That's just on the computer. But that's an open net, and the other is a solid version of it, what it would be like if it were a perfume bottle.

[LAUGHTER]

And that's a painting on the right, quite similar, that has the forms. And there are two basic forms in here. There's the smoke ring. Most of those drawings are versions of the computer drawings of the smoke rings, and there are basically two kinds.

There is a net. And then there are some two-dimensional outlines, just drawings. And then there is some of the three-dimensional, complicated ones with all the numbers, which you all know are sliced versions of a solid. And then you tip them, so they make kind of dramatic drawings.

The other thing are the dots. So it was a combination of the smoke drawing and dot the colored images in the background. And those are enlargements of four-color printing dots, actually.

And on the left, there's some very unsuccessful, but sort of what I'm looking for or one of the things we were looking at. I don't know how far we'll get. It was a question of making the dots three-dimensional and, of course, making the smoke rings three-dimensional.

And those dots are three-dimensional dots, but they're derived from lumps of clay, and they're scanned, and then put in the computer. It's kind of complicated and expensive, but it was the only way we could get chunks that were what we wanted. So that's how the chunks or how the dots, if they became three-dimensional would relate to the smoke rings when they became three-dimensional.

So that's a whole other problem that's either ahead of us or, maybe, become forgotten. I don't know. But that's another possibility compared to the way we're doing it, which is in a relatively conventional and flat way.

Basically, the painting represents the drawings printed on paper and cut out. These paintings, including the one that's upstairs, are basically paintings that have some illusion in them, but it's the illusion of a collage of cut pieces of paper that are then enlarged.

So that's the piece that's upstairs when it was in the [INAUDIBLE] Gallery on the right. And then these are flat pieces. This is in the Kawamura Museum in Japan, and that's when we were conceiving of the pieces as kind of installed murals to relate to the actual space that was there.

And this is what it, as they say, turns out to be. On the one hand is a painting by a graffiti artist, and the other hand is a painting of mine. In the end, they're not that different, but it's a way of making the thing sort of move. The issue here, for me anyway-- I'm not sure what the issue was for him-- but it was to make it move out.

And one of the problems with the graffiti-- not that I think that that's either a good or a bad painting. I don't think it's either one, but it can be very good. But one of the problems with it is that-- and it's the same thing that happens with me-- which is that you're forced to make it on a canvas, so it has a boundary, and it's a convention. So it's forced to become a painting.

The painting on the graffiti was put in a gallery, and this kid who's perfectly capable of handling a spray can with a lot of effect-- it would be better on metal or on the side of a moving subway car than it is on canvas when it stops moving, when it's static. And there's the same problem I have, because it's just on a canvas.

I make it move as much as I can. I do all kinds of things. But in a way, I'm not that satisfied with it. Although I like it optically-- I mean, I like it as illusion. But again, I'm still torn. I'd like it to be literal too.

And this was the beginning of the idea on a public scale. This is just painting outside on the back of a theater in Toronto, the Princess of Wales Theatre. And then we'll see the inside now.

This was the start for one reason or another, and it's the painting on the-- that's, I think, a quarter [INAUDIBLE]. I'm pretty sure that's what it is, anyway. But the thing about it is that it works.

When we looked at the paintings before the graffiti painting and my painting, they had the conventional boundaries. There's something about the imagery, the smoke rings-- I mean, I guess it's a little bit obvious. But anyway, the fact that the circular shape and the moving around does the boundaries, which are the top and the bottom of that, don't seem to press themselves on you in the way that they normally would. The fact that there are no side edges, that the imagery keeps moving and keeps circulating, I think, is a tremendous plus.

That's some detail.

And then these are the balcony fronts. And what's interesting about those, I think, in some ways, is that they're totally abstract. There's some of the computer imagery. There's some of the forms that, actually, you'll see later in some of the other things. We used everything that we used, and we just made it in relief, and then cast it. And the result was it looked very ordinary, actually. Very un-abstract and very much like a floral decorative design, maybe, from the 18th century. But the big plus was it was acoustically very successful.

MITCHELL: Where is this?

STELLA: It's in Toronto in a theater called the Princess of Wales Theatre, which was a new theater built, actually, for Miss Saigon. And now, Beauty and the Beast is there.

[LAUGHTER]

MITCHELL: This is cast aluminum?

STELLA: Yeah. This is cast aluminum. The same idea. Like, the other things were cast plaster. And then this is part of the theater downstairs in a-- I don't know. Not a restaurant, but I don't know if it's a bar.

You can see that the architecture is not exactly flattering, but you can still carry it. And one of the advantages of this kind of imagery and this way of dealing with things is you can sort of fight your way through almost anything.

These are big murals in the lobby, and they look nice in the photographs, actually, in the slides. They're not so red hot when you see them.

[LAUGHTER]

They're painted with the most modern billboard technology available. There's a transparency that's read and then scanned, and then it's sprayed with four-colored dots on plastic. But it's super durable, and the machine can paint that mural in about, I don't know, 80 or 90 hours. It goes night and day, and then it's done in a couple of days.

Well, for those of you who are architects, I'm sure you'll love these.

[LAUGHS]

These are the drawings that we made after we built the piece that's upstairs. And we made these drawings for a gallery exhibition, which actually is going to open next week in New York. And the reason that we did it is that we wanted to try out the idea, and we wanted to do what we couldn't do upstairs, which is to paint on both sides of the surface. So these a freestanding sort of murals, and they will be painted on both sides.

And because we designed it right into the computer, we're able to have it carved directly. So the technology, the fittings, and everything, it's much smoother and much nicer than the piece that's upstairs, although I'm not trying to denigrate that in any way. But we've made a technological advance since that piece was done.

MITCHELL: What's the material for this?

STELLA: It's fiberglass. It's really a big surfboard. I mean, it's the wave and the surfboard. I guess it's the whole thing. But it's just really literally a big surfboard, and it's cut into sections, and they fit, and it's pretty smooth. There are a couple of pictures of it later on.

MITCHELL: What kind of building machine-- a three-axis, a nine-axis?

STELLA: I don't know. It just works. I'll check. It's pretty sophisticated. I don't know if it has that. We can go through these. I mean, maybe some people like these. Anyway, that's what we do. Okay. Next.

But again, they stand up. So it's pretty simple. It's a rectangle on the bottom and a wavy line drawn on the top, and then you connect the surfaces like a minimal surface.

And that's what it looks like when it's being done. That's the studio, and that's those things. And you can see that it looks like a surfboard there in the corner, and it's pretty good. It's pretty smooth, and it's easy to work on.

Okay. There are a few more shots.

It's mostly masking tape. And you can see how to paint while you're talking on the telephone.

[LAUGHTER]

You learn a lot from looking at these.

And this is the last idea. This is when you take an idea, and you give it to an engineer. The idea is pretty simple. It was a beach hat that my kids got for me in Rio. And it's a piece of foam, and there are spirals cut out of the center. They're just cut. So it's really cuts in a two-dimensional plane, but it's a beautiful form for twisting once you cut it. Almost anything you do with it looks great, so let's see what we do with it.

That's the same form. And this is being built now in Antibes. We tried to build it in America, but it was too expensive, and they didn't want to do it. Well, we found some boat builders in Antibes, we found a naval architect to help us with it.

And what's interesting about it is that it's exactly the same from a technical point of view. It's exactly the same as the model. The model is a small piece of plastic [INAUDIBLE]. It's cut out, and that's bent and twisted.

And so we convinced these guys to just work for us for a few months. And they laid out fiberglass on the floor, and they made the sheet. So the sheet was made with a diameter of about 24 feet. And then the cuts were made, and then they bent that, and then they laminated balsa wood to that, and then laminated the other surface, and then took the cut. So they literally made it the hard way, but it's actually the only way that you can get the forms-- that I know of any way-- that are this complicated and within some kind of reasonable kind of expense.

The reason we had to go to this trouble was that it has to be suspended. And it's in a place that's aluminum and glass and can't take much of a load, so we had to be under 6,000 pounds. It's roughly a 20, 24 foot diameter.

And this is the same form seen in two different computer renditions of the same idea used to make a building rather than just a sculpture.

And I think that might be it. I don't know if there's any more slides.

MITCHELL: Nothing's on the slider. Maybe we can put the lights on, and I suspect that various people may have questions they'd like to raise.

STELLA: Okay.

AUDIENCE: When you say move [INAUDIBLE] the mural. You were talking about trying to get it to move. I was wondering if you can explain, maybe, what you mean. Move in what way? I wasn't sure, because a subway car moves in a certain kind of way, but I'm not sure that's what you meant.

STELLA: Well, the subway car is pretty straightforward. It just moves by you and depending on the speed. But it's not so important what actually the movement is. It could move sideways, it could go this way, up and down, and back and forth. But it's the sense of movement.

I mean, most paintings that are successful or most paintings that you care about have a sense of movement. By definition, painting has a serious-- and it's one of the things that comes up nowadays with literalism-- is painting is static. It doesn't move. And almost anybody can make a painting that moves or make an object that moves.

And one of the reasons why film is so popular, it can make a claim to being more advanced or better than painting, because it moves, it flickers, and it's better at depicting movement. These things are all relative, but they're important.

And I think that the success of painting in the past, which is why bring up the notion or the problem of illusionism, has been a success at being a static art that implies movement in a convincing way. I don't want to play with words, but the literal movement within the picture, the action, whatever is depicted that takes place and the emotional substance of it, you are moved in a way too. But I think that they have to come together.

When we say a painting is great, that's really what we're talking about. It seems vital to us, and there's a kind of movement in an unreal situation. After all, it's static. And at the same time, we are moved. The interior, our interior, our consciousness, our feelings, and everything are moved.

So there's these two kinds of movement, neither of which are quantifiable in any way. I mean, you can't really very well describe or it doesn't mean much to say, I feel this, or I feel that, because how do you know what the other person knows? He doesn't really know very much about what you feel or what it means to feel. You can say, I feel sad, but these are not very exacting. And it's the same way about the sense of how successful the movement is within a picture.

But these things still, nonetheless, as difficult as they are to deal with it, it seems, to me anyway, pretty clear that they are what painting both is and is about. Well, that was a short answer. Sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Could you tell us a little bit more of the title Loohooloo? And also I know there is a new biography coming out on you by Guberman, and how--

STELLA: Well, you all know the answer. I can tell you that.

[LAUGHTER]

I can guarantee that. However, there's a person sitting four rows back here who's are expert on Melville, but the title comes from a Melville novel which I haven't read.

[LAUGHTER]

And I make no apologies. In fact, when we went to a Melville symposium-- we all live in our own little worlds, as they say. But a woman came up to me and was so happy that I had done-- she expected me to do for Melville, for Marty, for what I'd done for Moby Dick. I mean, I just spent five years working on Moby Dick, and she wanted me to spend another five or six years working on Marty to see if I could resurrect it, because she felt it was a very under-appreciated effort. But that wasn't my goal, and it's not going to be my goal.

AUDIENCE: Do you ever seen an error of cooperation between artists and architects similar to [INAUDIBLE]?

STELLA: Well, I don't think so.

[LAUGHS]

My experience with architects has been pretty grim.

[LAUGHTER]

But I think yes. I think it's possible. Basically, you get the job after the architect has done what he's done. And so if I want to work with an architect, I'll hire him, but I can make the billing. You could cooperate.

But the problems are nothing is very conducive to it. The whole scheme for building is so obvious and so complicated at the same time that there really-- the main problem is not just for the architects and the artists working together. It's really a problem for the architects too.

Few, if any, architects that I know of in recent time-- and Frank Gehry tries it once in a while-- are able to change anything. In other words, you're committed to a building scheme after the plan's in. That's it. It's over. You can see what mistakes you made, but you can't do anything about it, and nothing changes.

Gaudi is the last one I can think of. Nervi was pretty good at it. But Gaudi, Nervi, those people could make things happen and make things change. Corbusier did it in some of the houses I think too. Architects are no different from anybody else. They don't get it all right the first time, as we well know.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. There seems to be more interest amongst artists dealing with murals or site-specific works than the other way-- architecture [INAUDIBLE].

STELLA: I don't know. It probably is. It's probably true that way. But it's a small world, and there's a lot of building, and there are a few architects who have a sense of themselves, and what they can do, and what art's about that maybe only a few architects can really afford to bring people in to do the jobs. There isn't much left in the budget.

Most of the work that gets done, as we all know, is from the few jobs that are mandated. The budget mandates some decoration or art. And I've yet to meet an architect who didn't complain about that too.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Can I ask you to explore that a bit more? Also the issues of scale-- the beach towel that looks good at the scale of a couple of feet, and then becomes a sculpted form in tens of feet. And then it becomes a building, and it's 200 feet scale. Going from that painting to a sculpted form to architecture. It seems to me that sometimes a form becomes pretty intimidating when it becomes a building or it becomes architecture.

STELLA: I made a building for the project-- I didn't have it here for Dresden-- and Phillip Johnson built it in his gatehouse in New Canaan. And it was a monstrous masterpiece, but it was only the shell of what we did. We never worked on a fenestration or the roof, or anything like that. But the form, he was able to build it and blow it up. It seemed to work okay.

AUDIENCE: I'd just like to ask a question about [INAUDIBLE], because I recall, for example, in the question in the panorama, where they would rotate the stage [INAUDIBLE] developed to the various forms of the panorama.

STELLA: In Mississippi and Missouri. Well the painting-- Yeah. The painting didn't move-- I mean, the painting moved as you rolled up one end and unrolled the other, and you moved it across.

AUDIENCE: What type-- the audience rotated in the sense of-- of course, if you go into a gallery, you're moving so the painting [INAUDIBLE]. You're getting movement, so [INAUDIBLE].

STELLA: Okay. But it's still-- I don't know. There are a lot of ways of looking at it. But the basic thing is you make a mark. You act, and you make a mark. And that's it. It stays there. It doesn't move after you-- you can't keep the paint moving after it dries. That's it. I mean, you could. You could make it slippery there. There are a lot of things you could do, but it's not-- it would be both complicated and difficult. Although you see a lot of that in installations and stuff.

I remember Bob Rauschenberg did a piece for art and technology which was a big, steel box with mud and hot water in it and the bubbling mud.

[LAUGHTER]

It wasn't bad.

[LAUGHTER]

And it was certainly good. As an idea, it sounds better than it looked. I mean, you get tired of the bubbling.

[LAUGHTER]

But you know that you can say that paintings get tiring, but it just raises the issue. I mean, it's a good way of seeing it. The point about painting is painting also has a past and has a history. I don't know if it's the convention that we accept and that we like, or they really did it right. Sometimes it happens in the right way, and it's convincing, and it's okay. And then when you bring up the issue like having the boiling mud, it's sort of interesting to bring up the issue, and it gets your attention. But does it carry, and does it hold as much as the non-bubbling works like that?

AUDIENCE: I noticed in working space. You're very interested in Caravaggio. And now we see these frescoes in palaces, and churches, and things like this, in the theater in Toronto, where you enter, the building decoration. Do you find that you end up wishing that things looked more like they did in the 1600s, say, instead of the clean, modernist look from, say, 10-250?

[LAUGHTER]

STELLA: What's 10-250.

MITCHELL: This room.

STELLA: Oh, this room?

MITCHELL: Yeah.

STELLA: Oh. I'm not sure. What was the point, though? What does Caravaggio have to do with it?

AUDIENCE: Go back to that period a lot and refer to it as sort of [INAUDIBLE].

STELLA: Yeah. The reasons for Caravaggio are different from the general reason, which is the Baroque. The reason I was drawn to it or interested in it was a matter of change in my working life, as it were, for 10 to 15 years. Making things, quote "literal, direct, and simple" seemed to have a tremendous virtue. And I didn't find it convincing, and it's nice to look to some. It wasn't just what everybody said. It wasn't all that great.

And it wasn't, but I don't think that's as important as it wasn't going anywhere. And I'm not saying that this way of working or anything is necessarily going anywhere. It is different, and to me anyway, the painting in itself and the way it relates to both the architecture and the sculpture seems to me, anyway, a pretty fruitful way of working. And if I look at what I've done and what I'm doing, I have to say, well, it may not be that great, but it's not boring me to death.

MITCHELL: [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: I have two questions. One has to do with transformation from the gray values to the color? Because [INAUDIBLE] gray value [INAUDIBLE] to color, and I was wondering how you did that. And two, I was wondering how the smoke was-- actually, it moved vertically. And at least the piece that we had here had two [INAUDIBLE], and it's actually [INAUDIBLE]. It moves in and out but not up and down. I was curious about that-- those two things.

STELLA: I'm not sure exactly what you're saying, but one of the things is true. One of the senses that there's no way of getting, which is really beautiful about the smoke, is that, first of all, it goes in the direction that you send it. But then when it hovers, when it stops, it then creates its own sense of dropping out. And as it drops, it forms, again, depending on all kinds of things like the temperature, and currents, and air currents. And that has its own kind of really compelling dynamism, which I like.

I'm not going to get that in the painting. I'm not worried about. But the idea is that maybe, in some way, which is not that clear, one way or the other, I get something like that. That's what I'm going to settle for, and I'll be quite happy if I get a little closer.

AUDIENCE: Can you describe your methods of working with assistants? What do they do, what did they do, and how do you feel about it?

STELLA: Well, I can tell you what they feel. They feel they do everything.

[LAUGHTER]

And I--

MITCHELL: They keep working on the photo.

STELLA: Right, right, right. And I make a mess of all their really good ideas, but you have to learn to live with it.

[LAUGHTER]

They all are tremendously talented, they do a really good job, and they do things I can't do. And they have a lot of good ideas, but I like some of my ideas too. You just work it out. You just keep banging away.

The biggest thing-- the only reason that they stay is because of the opportunities. Because we do work on new ideas, there are things to do, and they can get to run off by themselves and do what they want to do that they couldn't do otherwise. But if it weren't for that, they would be long gone. I guarantee you.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: I'm curious about these sculptural forms that you're working with now, from the last few slides that you showed. And they seem very compelling forms, but in the slides, they weren't yet painted. One of them was turned into architecture. [INAUDIBLE]