ETHEREAL GRAVITY

an interview with the scuptor Joel Perlman by Peter Barton

The New York sculptor Joel Perlman, like his sculpture, is quick to express an unabashed fascination with heavy metal. Welded steel is his medium of choice, but bronze, aluminum, or iron also play a part when the situation calls for a variation on the theme. Perlman works in his TriBeCa studio, an industrial loft space well equipped for metalworking, but larger pieces and a move over to cast bronze often brings him to the Talix Sculpture Foundry in Beacon, NY. I caught up with him there and we discussed, among other topics, the emotional energy, which is a standpoint in this physically taxing and psychologically arresting art form.

Peter Barton: You were 18 or 19 when you first picked up a welding torch and you're still at it more than 30 years later. Can you recall the exact moment when you realized that fire and metal were it for you?

Joel Perlman: I remember it quite clearly: it was at Cornell. I said to my teacher, Jack Squire, that I wanted to do welding. He looked at me as if I were from Mars and said, 'Well, Sonny Boy, if you want to be a welder go downtown to Ames Welding, they have night classes. This is a university.' So that's what I did, and I learned to weld right along with truck drivers and bikers and farmers. It had just been some inkling, an intuition, but once into it I was immediately, totally transfixed by the whole process. The raw power at your disposal, that you could take two pieces of metal, there would be a flash and buzz, and suddenly they're one single piece - just seemed like such magic to me. I felt I'd found a work process that could keep up with my thought process. I think very quickly and expressively. I'm impatient to get it done, to see what it looks like. This was the perfect way.

 Joel Perlman in his studio.

PB: So the immediacy came because you were able to think images up and translate them quickly, expressively?

JP: Not at all. I don't ever have set images in mind. I don't think through or draw things out first. I'm not at all intellectual as many people think my work is. If anything, it's the opposite. I don't know what I'm doing until I'm doing it. It's essentially process and intuition. The welding, the grinding, the cutting is what aims the piece and also determines what it ends up becoming. I maybe start with a shape. I add to it. I break it up. I do it again moving forward then back, constructing then deconstructing, by trial and error. The great thing about welding is that you can tack shapes together, bang things into place with a hammer, break it apart, all of which is good for somebody who likes to change his mind a lot like I do. If I knew what was going to happen when I started, then I probably wouldn't even do it. It just wouldn't be any fun without discovery.

PB: You went to England and worked with steel sculptor Brian Wall. Was this a sense common to his work as well?

JP: I learned a lot from him, about life, about what it takes and what it means to be a sculptor more than about actually making sculpture. His approach is different, more formal I'd say. I looked to him as a role model at the time. I was hungry for a role model. My father had died when I was very young, and I met this tough little guy who seemed to literally breath sculpture, and raise hell and live wild. It was clear sculpture was the most important thing in his life and no matter how edgy things got for him he always managed to put the work out. He was relentless. He was the most important influence for me, not the only one, but very important. I saw that art and the artist have to be the same thing. I wouldn't be doing sculpture today if it weren't for guys like Brian showing me the way. It's tough, it really is and you can't find it otherwise.

PB: I know that friendship among steelheads is important. Do you still depend on this dialogue when you're looking for inspiration? I mean, do you begin talking about shapes with a fellow welder, or what?

JP: I work a lot with Richard Heinrich, an old friend from Cornell and a steel sculptor as well. We go to steel yards together. We wander around, and pick out off-cuts and scrap cuts and drops and plate and we have it all banded up and delivered to our studios, his is upstairs above mine. Then from this raw material what I'll do is spend a couple of days cutting things up and cutting shapes out. I quickly sketch shapes on the steel, then using the torch I cut a big pile of shapes, circles are what I use a lot now. From this pile I work - well, it's in a way like poetry, you need a lot of words, vocabulary, than you put them together with the sense of an interaction, an impact. Shapes dramatically define each other, excite each other, become sensational the same way words can do. So yes, I suppose it begins with dialogue, but not always about shapes, sometimes about life, a new welding torch or piece of equipment and goes on from there.

PB: Your shapes often surround an open area, create a shaped space or volume which is as interesting as the solid areas themselves. Is this premeditated?

JP: In Ithaca we had a drawing teacher whose name was Allan Atwell. He had a way with Asian concepts, a guru-like figure. I could not draw at all and I struggled with it. One of the things he told me that stuck was that I shouldn't worry about drawing the figure, draw the spaces between the arm and the torso, between the legs, respond to the negative spaces because that's what gives shape to the figure. I saw this at Stonehenge, how the spaces in between the stones had an equal presence, carried their own weight. So you're exactly right, shaping space is important to me or at least to the way these sculptures find themselves and I have him to thank for that insight.

PB: The space in and around the metal also plays off of the surfaces - rust, patina, burnt oil. How does surface figure in the equation? Are you guiding surface toward an esthetic conclusion?

JP: David Smith talked about this – 'truth to materials'. Metal should look and act like metal as far as I am concerned. I myself have not painted a sculpture in years because of this idea that a piece of my work shouldn't be wearing an overcoat of red or blue or whatever. You wouldn't think it, but steel is very soft, very vulnerable and once outside it oxidizes and corrodes and finds its own way in the elements. Steel as a material is innately beautiful and I love the way it looks on a crane or a bridge or any piece of industrial machinery and that's mostly what I'm interested in. I use it as a raw material, for its own qualities. It's not so much an esthetic consideration or response as it is an inspiration. I love going to Chicago because there are so many mechanical bridges crossing the river there. I find myself wondering if I could ever make a piece of sculpture that looks so good, shapes and spaces and materials together in that way are so satisfying. I don't usually see art I like in that way, so it's not really esthetic.

PB: There has been this minimalist idea that welding metal is an antique mode. Richard Serra, for example, whose work is about not-welding. Where does that sit with you?

JP: I understand what Serra is talking about, his hit is the immediate one shot blow and there's no room for craftsmanship, the hand of the artist. I see my work as being involved with process and leaving the evidence of process, the result of activity. It's a stream of imagination unfolding as I move along, a string of visual experiences rather than one jolt or impression. Why it isn't an issue in my work, is that without welding these pieces can't exist, that's the way it has to be. That being the case, I think the welds and rougher aspects of the working process are best left alone, to look like what they are. I don't understand grinding down welds to make them invisible or denying the surface of the metal its chance to be part of the impression.

PB: So the subject of your work is actually this stream of energy that is captured in a series of increments, captured in metal fragments. There must be a beginning and an end to each artistic episode. The muse shows up, thrashes you around for a week or so, then departs leaving you exhausted with a giant spatial and temporal anomaly in the center of your studio – something like that?

JP: That's pretty much the way it is though that's a romantic simplification. One thing we're talking about is site specific opportunities and I'm always more interested in this sort of inspiration, especially large scale installations in nature or in built environments. In this instance you have an idea of where you're headed, a framework that's not pure urges. But commission work isn't all that regular, and sometimes all you can hope for is the chance to at least have a say as to which pieces go where. And sculpture changes dramatically when it's bigger than you are. In cases like that you have to move more deliberately, plan more and limit the enormous danger that goes with metal and scale. Hopefully the viewer has the feeling of a free-fall experience, but all in all there's a lot to getting the whole thing right. Studio process is controlled work. I did a large piece, twenty-one feet high for Common Grounds a park in New Jersey. It's up on a little hill surrounded by sky and open space and that's a dramatic way of looking at sculpture because your move around it, step back and get this feeling of immersion and awe. Sometimes you're dancing with the muse but other times its like three rounds with Iron Mike Tyson.

PB: But you're always in the heat of the creative moment, sculpture is never a design opportunity?

JP: You know me so well by this time, after all these years in art together, so you know that I'm a little bit ill at ease until it's done. I always get very excited when the piece is in process and no matter what plans are made I am swept away in the action. I only relax when it's done. What I usually try to do is take a piece from beginning to end non-stop, coast to coast. But I know myself too, I have to get away from it for awhile, get away for a couple of days, then come back and look at it again with fresh eyes and see things which I didn't see when I was close in on it. Yes, I do make changes, but also I like to set a pace and move with the momentum. My energy means nothing to a stone sculptor, so it's the energy I'm really going for. If I'm on, in the end it's art.

PB: The work going on exhibit at Chesterwood.– did you create that for the space?

JP: Not at all. It's a ten and a half foot piece and it's always been indoors, it was in the Kouros Gallery exhibit I had this Spring in Manhattan. So I'm really anxious to see it outdoors. The Sculptor's Guild, a group I've been with for many years but haven't exhibited with in a decade asked me to put a piece in this show at William Chester French's studio and estate – you will recall that he sculpted the Lincoln Memorial in Washington as well as other monumental commissions. The grounds are exceptionally beautiful. At first I turned down the show, but then the idea of this piece going up there to the Berkshires intrigued me then really got hold of me altogether. At the last minute I called and they let me in after the deadline. I don't know why I risked losing the opportunity.

PB: You've always had periods of working large scale, but you seem to be getting to big with more regularity. Impulse or opportunity?

JP: I won first prize in a sculpture exhibit in Japan, the piece is in the permanent collection at Utskushi-Ga-Hara Open Air Museum. A big risk, then a big surprise. Because of that I began to feel anything was possible. The thing is it keeps getting more exciting so I keep moving toward the feelings. When I do that it seems to turn out okay. If I think too much or try to figure it out, nothing much happens. Intuition and process. I know whatever urges I get, metal will be there to back it up.

Joel Perlman exhibits in Manhattan at the Kouros Gallery. The artist has sculpture in private collections in both the Hudson Valley and Berkshire Region and on permanent view at Storm King Sculpture Park. His work at Chesterwood will be on exhibit through November 2000.

Peter Barton is an artist and art writer whose work regularly appears on Univesal Quest. His artwork can be seen at: http://www.pardolattuadagallery.com/

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