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>> Patrick Dougherty: Thank you all very much.
I'm going to make a few comments first about my work
and about how I got to becoming an artist
and then show you some images.
My son, Sam, he's just turned 17,
and when he was a little boy, he had a children's book
about three bears that encountered urban sprawl,
and these bears, they go up over a hill near their den one
morning, they look down,
and somebody's built a shopping center overnight.
Well, already people are hustling and bustling up
and down the sidewalk and they all look so satisfied.
Well, the little bears, they're not sure
if they're happy anymore,
and somewhere they find people clothes.
In the next sequence of pictures you see these little pint-sized
figures moving amongst the legs of all the other passersby
and the caption reads, "Well, now that they're
like everybody else, are they really happy?"
Well, no, not really because underneath their people clothes
still beat their furry little animal hearts.
Well, a big wind comes up and it blows and it blows.
It blows men's ties out, women's skirts up,
blows all the little bears' clothes off,
and they see each other for the first time and realize who
and what they really are.
Well, they go tearing back across the parking lot,
back to a place they could just be themselves.
And it wasn't so many years ago as the crow flies
that I was getting ready for work, I had a coat
and tie on and a briefcase.
I started down my walkway and a really big wind comes up
and it blows and it blows.
It blows my briefcase right down the street, blows off my coat
and tie, and the third gust blows everything else away.
And as I'm standing there completely amazed
at this unlikely turbulence in my life, the only thing
that I can feel under those people clothes is this thudding
of an animal heart, and I have all these flashbacks
of the times in my life when I imagined maybe giving
up my regular life, going off into the distance,
maybe into the wilderness, and building a small cabin
and living in a more essential way.
Well, you know, it was a time of change for me,
and so I found myself at the how to section of the library.
I see things like load-bearing, R-factor, coefficient.
I say, well, maybe building a house, even a small cabin,
is a whole lot harder than I thought.
But luckily for me as I start back across the library,
I happen to stumble on a stack of "National Geographics,"
and maybe the first one I picked up was about the barrios
in Rio de Janeiro in which a whole group of the population,
a portion of the population, the disenfranchise have to go
out into the city, pick up the dendrites,
[phonetic] the cast-off of urban life,
take that material somewhere and build them someplace to live.
And I said, I know I'm not supposed to like this
because these are really poor people and
yet they've done an amazing job with the materials
that they had at hand.
And in my mind it constituted a kind of raw esthetic.
Or maybe it was an article about a --
a tribe in the Amazon basin who had to go into the jungle
and forage whatever was there in order
to build the things that they needed.
I said, well, I know these --
these huts don't have any running water or electricity,
but they're beautiful and they fit so well back
into the environment from which the material was drawn.
Or maybe it was an article about the bird from Africa
that had done an amazing engineering feat.
Well, I said, I know these birds are not smart enough to do this,
but in human terms this would be considered
amazing craftsmanship.
It's then I realized that maybe I wasn't a normal builder.
Maybe I was more of a hunter and gatherer or some kind
of an inspiration builder.
And, you know, I did get started on that house,
and I learned some things while building it that really stood me
in good stead in my art life.
And maybe the first is the simplest; it's learning
to accept what you do, because if you don't know much
about building, you put a window in in the morning,
I can guarantee by the afternoon you think you've done
such a shoddy job,
you're jerking the thing right out again.
So to give it a good shot, what I decided,
even before I began the project, that I was going
to do the very best job I could do.
At the end of the day, I was going to accept my progress,
and the next day I would build on it.
The second thing is that if you use nonstandard materials
like so many sculptors do, you can't always go to Lowes
or Home Depot and buy the things you need.
And similarly, if you cut down a big tree and decide to use it
as the mainstay of your house, how do you know it would work
and who would you ask.
Well, I played a game with myself.
I called it "giving it my one best shot."
And I said, you know, if there's nobody left on earth
to ask, what do I think?
Do I think it's strong enough?
And somewhere along there I began accepting responsibility
for the kinds of things that I designed and made.
The third thing is that working day in and day
out in a very unselfconscious way, I began to see what I liked
and what I didn't like.
I saw how important personal preference is
in making those decision.
And over a period of time I began to develop my own certain
of personal aesthetic.
And, finally, I saw how important need is
in getting anything done.
I really needed this house, and so I was able
to coalesce my best energies
and direct my best problem-solving skills,
and sometimes when I have a friend who's not doing that well
with their work, I'll say,
"You have to figure out how to need it."
Well, I didn't know it was getting
out of hand but my neighbors did.
And they were always coming down to my house and kicking the dirt
and scratching their head.
And once my friend Brooks brought a relative
from another area of the country, and he said,
"I really like what you're doing here.
You're a real artist."
Well, maybe for all of you, that characterization would be great,
but it just scared me to death, and I felt like the edge
of the earth, and I wanted him to take it back.
And upon reflection, I realized
that as a child I thought being an artist was the best thing you
could possibly be.
The only trouble was, it seemed to come
with this tremendous sense of social responsibility.
You were supposed to do something great;
something that saved people; you know, something amazing.
And, you know, it came with that other word "talent."
Somehow you were supposed to be talented.
Well, I knew what the word "art" and, you know, and talent had
to do with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci,
I just couldn't figure out what it had to do with me
or anything I was doing at my house.
So one day as if by magic, I found myself enrolling
in the nearest art department, taking art history courses
and sculpture courses, and, you know, for me, that minute,
that day was the best day of my life
because I didn't know there was anybody else like me.
I didn't know there were lots of people
that liked handling materials,
that like seeing their ideas get worked out in three dimension.
The only trouble was I was kind of an art nerd and I'd walk
around at everybody and I'd say, is this art?
Is this art?
How come this person gets
to paint this board blue and call it art?
And I was just about to hold forth when one
of the major professors did me a favor.
He gets me by the throat, starts choking me to death,
and he says, "Who in the hell cares if it's art or not?
Why don't you just go in there a make whatever you make?
Who's going to know the difference in 20 years anyway?"
And
[ Laughter ]
-- and, you know, I needed that permission giving,
and I think I learned some things while I was in school
that helped towards my continuation as --
to becoming a working artist.
Maybe the first is the importance of a role model
because I didn't know if you had to have a psychiatrist standing
by when you made your first artwork, or whether you had
to have a family upheaval and get a divorce,
or whether you had to be, you know, go to a major city nearby
and work as -- as a waiter in order to qualify.
And it was wasn't until I saw these people
who loved making things, who were really intensely interested
in their work and seemed happy, that I realized there was going
to be some hope for me.
The second thing is that it's hard
to be a food faddist unless there are other people
around who eat beans rice, and similarly it's hard
to be a working artist unless there are other people
around who understand what you're going through.
For me I think my biggest job as a working artist is
to maintain a sense of personal equilibrium.
And this is particularly hard in our society
that gives high marks to culture but ignores individual makers.
And it's easy to have an identity crisis at any time
in your career in which you walk in your studio
and for one minute you don't realize who made the work.
And it's then you're glad
that you have a university art department around
or that you know somebody at a distant location, you call them
up and you say, "Are you still working," and they say, "Yeah,
I am," and somehow you're released and able
to go back and do your own work.
The third thing is that I began
to see there was a big difference between doers
and viewers, between people who make things and people
who look at them seriously.
To my mind, it was two different jobs.
Museum directors, curators, gallery owners, you know,
their job is to decide what object is more inherently
interesting than another or where something fits
in the lifeline of art.
Hey, that's not my job.
I have to be true to my ideas, true to my materials,
and sometimes, as in the case we're working here,
I didn't know what I was doing when I arrived.
So if I have to decide whether something's good or not
or whether it's art historically significant,
I would never get going.
And finally, I had to deal with that word "talent."
And I decided although talent wasn't irrelevant,
it just wasn't the issue.
I had the right to make what I wanted, when I wanted,
however much I wanted.
Basically I could do as much artwork as I could afford.
Well, at some shimmering moment I decided to quit school,
go home, build a studio, and get to work.
Well, you know, it's one thing to know that you have a right
to make something, and it's another thing
to know what you're going to make
and how you're going to make it.
And luckily for me, I went to a lecture at the university
by woman named Martie Zelt who had been a seamstress
in her life before sculpture and she brought Velcro fasteners
or zippers or cloth to her work, and I'm leaving that lecture,
and I'm saying, I wonder what I already know.
I wonder what simple technology, some simple method of joining
that I might already be familiar with.
And as I'm driving home along the roadways of North Carolina,
you know, maintenance crews are always cutting the sticks
down along the road and maintaining the brush,
and like Paul being struck off his horse on the way
to Damascus, I have an epiphysis.
I say, maybe I could use those.
Well, it wouldn't be so unusual that a woodsman
like myself would see the potential
of the saplings along his driveway
because they're plentiful, they're renewable,
it's just like having a giant warehouse always
at your fingertips.
And after working with this material for a while,
I realized that I had a deeper resonance with it
because I had grown up in the woodlands of North Carolina
and we have lots of underbrush, lots of intersecting lines.
And as some kids laid in fields and looked
at the architectural details of clouds, I found myself looking
at the drawing quality of the winter landscape,
all those hatch marks, all those natural lines.
So when I turned to sculpture, it seemed easy
to coop the forces of nature and play all
that natural drawing style out into these surfaces
of these large kind of gestural forms.
You know, before I could get going, I had to figure
out what birds and beavers
and other natural shelter builders know about sticks.
And that is that they have an inherent method of joining.
If you drag a stick through the woods, you see what I mean.
You start out this way,
but before long it's got this infuriating tendency to tangle.
And every stick has a little bit of flexibility,
so if you flex it and, you know, you pull it through the matrix
and let it go, it kind of snaps back and holds itself in place.
That's the what, but -- I mean, that's the how but the what,
if you'd seen me at the time, you'd have taken pity on me.
I could spend about five minutes in an art museum before running
out with a headache and sweaty palms and go, you know,
they've used all the good ideas up.
[ Laughter ]
Or, you know, you could look at an art magazine
for a short period of time, and you'd say, you know,
they've exploited every material.
And then you hear that in the last census
in New York City alone, over a million people claim
to be visual artists; you say, whoa, there are too many of us.
But after wearing this for a while, I realized that I loved
to make things, I loved handling the material,
and I decided the art world was just going to have a lump it.
Before I show you a few images,
I'd like to say two other things, one about the art world
in general and the other about creativity.
You know, for me, the art world is not a wall.
What it is is a loosely knit group of jobs --
jobs filled with people, good people like you and I,
and those -- those people don't tell artists what they have
to do.
Artists have to decide what they want to do.
And artists, there's not one person
that hasn't imagined being taken a fiery chariot
into a major city where they
and their work get what they -- what they hope for.
The -- the truth is that we all want different things.
Some people want to live in a certain city,
they want to live -- drive a certain kind of car,
they want to have a certain number of children,
and this is these real world activities are --
help you set the priorities of what you allow your --
what opportunities you allow yourself to be available to.
The second thing is that, you know, I arrive someplace
with a pair clippers and three weeks later I have
to have a good piece.
And so I've had a few reflections on creativity.
And the first is that hysteria rides on the shoulder
of every creative person, and so if you want to figure out how
to move forward fast, you've got to figure out how
to channel your hysterical energy.
The second thing is that I have different states of being.
I have a state of being in which I do my laundry
and eat my dinner; another state of being in which --
is a door behind which all my problem solving skills lay,
and the question is how do you go over and own that door.
Well, if I'm happen to be home in North Carolina
and my friends come over and you can see the cares
of week shedding away and everybody gets incredibly funny
and creative, and you say, I wonder why we're not
on some kind of national talk show or something.
And I think that the best state for making is
when a person is unselfconscious but fully themselves.
And that's a state of making that I seek.
It's not about handwringing or a lot of anxiety,
it's really a feeling about being part of a community
and having dinner with your friends.
You know, I say about my work
that I do large scale temporary work which I build onsite
from material that I gather somewhere nearby,
and one of the unique qualities of the work is
that there's no studio doors to close and no place to hide.
The work is conducted in full public view,
and for some artists that might be consternating,
but I've found a way to think of it as a cultural exchange,
one of which the people and the energy of that place is --
is actually folded back into the sculpture itself.
And when I'm onsite, I like representing making
in a positive way, I like interceding for the arts,
I like demystifying the process, but mainly I
like reminding people that artists are just normal people
who are looking for their rightful place
in the world of work.
So I would like to show you a few slides providing I can --
let's see here.
I wanted to show you a few slides
of my house in North Carolina.
You know, it's an eco-house.
It's got this smallest footprint in the world.
All the materials are recycled, everything has been taken
from another building.
These stones I dug in the backyard.
And so I know that the bottom of this wall is not quite as good
as the top, [laughter] but I was just getting going.
And I always sequence the stones that I have just
like I sequence sticks, and -- and so all the good stones are
on the inside of the building
and all the bad stones are on the outside.
I -- throughout the whole house I've used cedar that I collected
in my woods and split it out kind of in a Southwestern style,
and this is a no-painting house.
This is my first stick woodshed, and when I was clearing my yard,
I cut all the sticks and made good use out of them,
and so it was kind of finding your sticks in place
that started in this shed and has been spread
out throughout the -- the United States as I go
to each ditch bank or around the belt line of cities
and find how urbanization is taken all the trees
and left only the small sticks that are about to be taken
for the new box store.
This is my first rock monument.
I knew that no one was going to build one to me,
so I just built one to myself.
[ Laughter ]
And it's a laid-up stone monument and it's --
it's got no mortar in it.
And I wanted to show you this because my --
my neighbors have been an endless source of inspiration,
and they're always telling me when their children go
to college, you know, they're going
to do something really good finally, and so I've got a lot
of neighbors and I put them out there.
[ Laughter ]
It's called "Waiting it out in maple."
I wanted to show you some material shots,
and this is a maple that sits outside --
was sitting outside my studio, and it takes
about a tractor trailer load to make a --
a fairly credible piece.
A lot of times in the pictures I'm going to show you,
it's going to seem like we've got these supper long sticks,
but actually most of the sticks are in the six-foot variety
and your eye is actually making the jump.
My friend, Scott, we're bringing these sticks into a gallery,
it's always an addition-subtraction problem.
And this was at the Herron School of Art
over in Indianapolis, and the city was clearing a new golf
course, and so we were able to capitalize on the --
the place just before the bulldozers arrived
with a big pile of sticks to work with.
I wanted to show you a piece from start to finish.
This is a willow grove in -- on a willow farm in Ireland,
and actually before the Lowes and Home Depot, you know,
people grew willows for various uses
around the house including wrapping tops of radishes
and putting walls together and all kinds
of fencing and so forth.
So this is a remnant of that time when --
when we grew willow, and if you cut the stool, you get twice
as many sticks, so rather than being degrading the environment,
the willow is a really great thing to reproduce itself.
And here we have the same problem here at Purdue;
we had to go get our material and bring it over to our site.
You can see those really long sticks that guy's holding
up there, and those are our basic structural pieces.
And this at Tallaght Community Arts Centre.
You know, Ireland has more than leprechauns,
it has some amount of crime.
They were afraid that if I worked out on the street, then,
in fact, somebody would tear the piece down.
I was afraid that no one would see it, so I decided
that I would make my own version of this vernacular architecture
and the Irish Round Tower that is in and around Dublin.
These monks in the eighth
to the ninth century built these enigmatic towers,
and so this was my version of it.
It's about 42 feet tall and there's a tree on the interior
of it, and that tree is what supports it,
and the living limbs of the tree are actually on the outside.
And this was two years later just before the piece came down,
so you can see it has its original limbs.
The tree was not in good shape to begin with but -- I --
this is a -- I'd like to show you start to finish a piece
at Cornell University, and here I'm gathering sticks
in a maple grove that we have the hauling
of getting those things over to school.
I wanted to build a companion piece for each one
of the these locust trees, there are seven trees,
I thought I'll build something that interacts
with each of the trunks.
I always make a thumbnail sketch,
I did the same thing here.
It's something that I read into, so if there's a coffee stain
on that paper, it might get translated
into some kind of stick thing.
[ Laughter ]
There are -- I mark out the piece on the ground,
and we did the same thing
over on the piece here for Sidewinder.
We got a good footprint, we used hoses and electrical cords
to figure out how the piece should look.
In this case, they're allowing me to drill into their concrete
because they were going to replace this area a little bit.
So you can see my basic structural uprights go
into these holes.
Once -- once we get our uprights in, we take
and set a scaffolding around the whole thing
and then we pull the shape we want, tie that shape back
to the scaffolding, and as we work on it structurally,
then we can cut the piece loose and it holds itself in place.
This is a little more elaborate scaffolding that we used.
Here these are around the 24-foot high variety of towers,
and this is the day of our opening.
I wanted to show you how I work.
This is a piece at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
This was a building that was given to the college.
It's -- was the old county jail and led me to think
about making a lot of escape hatches or a flying carpet
or something, and they'd taken the roof off
and so you could look through the windows
and see the sky into the interior.
The piece is about 32 feet tall.
It's called "Cell Division."
And the way I really work is I start working structurally
first, and so in this case I've woven lots of sticks
into the jail bars and I start making the scrim
that will hold the piece together.
In other words, I'm going to make a canvas
and then I'm going to draw on it.
This is I'm starting these circularities now
that I've got the piece laid out and it's strong enough to take,
now it's kind of applique.
I'll put sticks on where I think they really look good in kind
of an aesthetic phase or a layer.
And finally there's a cosmetics, and that's what we've been doing
on the Sidewinder over here yesterday.
We were going around and doing fix-up, and basically
that means erasing, and what we do is take tiny little sticks
that don't even count for anything
and hide things we don't like.
And so in this case you can see we don't have any cut ends
or anything that would keep your eye from --
would interrupt your eye from moving around the piece.
I wanted to talk about my work in terms of temporary
because I don't do any permanent work.
This was a pink and white dogwood.
I bent the limbs down a little bit at a time and wove over it.
You can drive down the street and see the construction of it
and wonder what the hell we were doing.
[ Laughter ]
I knew from an arborist that we had to have this thing off
in three months, so this is its leafy phase.
And then finally we're just
about to pull it behind a car to the city dump.
That picture I don't have.
But --
[ Laughter ]
This was at Swarthmore College, still talking about,
you know, doing temporary work.
This tree was slated to come down two years hence,
and so we -- I was allowed to use it.
The great thing is that it had no limbs on one side
and all the limbs on the other, so that allowed me
to have this stacking thing so that you had this strong --
a dramatic vertical and then you had this kind
of stacked form beside it.
And this is its winter configuration.
And then finally some very dramatic takedown pieces --
pictures, and this is two years later, so you see it did survive
and did survive the Philadelphia winter.
This is a piece in Denmark in Krakamarken
which is a nature park, and you're supposed to use materials
from the park in order to build your sculpture.
When I saw all the other artists at this conference kind
of cogitating about what they were going to make,
I realized that when man thinks of nature,
he seeks his own reflection.
And so this is -- the sculpture is seeking his own reflection
in this little lake.
You could crawl up in his insides and look
out the window, look out his face.
But -- and then it had a great possibility in the winter,
this whole area flooded, leaving kind of this big mythic figure.
The thing is about 30 -- 33 feet long and about 16 feet tall.
And then this is the hero fallen two years later.
Probably the best of the sculpture
that is -- that -- this imprint.
This, you know, all of the --
all of North Carolina potters make face jugs,
the Romans made face jugs.
This was my attempt at making face jugs
at the Fredric Meijer Gardens,
but unfortunately even though we did a good setback
from the roof, four years later, the snow came tearing
down the roof and left these poor things screaming.
[ Laughter ]
This is a particular effort.
We -- this was at the Clemson Botanic Gardens,
it was after Bramante's Tempietto,
and we actually planted living bare-rooted maples
into this piece when we plant -- when we worked on it.
And so this was five years later with its --
and then a seven years later, so that you can see
that there was a little remembrance of --
for talisman for what had actually existed prior to.
I wanted to talk about my work in terms of drawing.
And this is in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, at the Kohler,
and this is a, you know, I just --
I like this piece about as good as any
because it's a red maple -- I mean, a red dogwood and --
and maple -- excuse me, and willow,
and these pieces are woven into the track or the beams
above the light tracks, and you can just touch them
and they barely move but I -- I love the drawing quality.
And everything that you do with a pencil,
you do that very same thing with sticks.
In other words, all the drawing conventions of hatch marks
and diagonalling and using really small sticks to kind
of blend in with the universe out there,
you have to do the same thing with sticks.
And sticks are tapered so when you strike a piece of paper
with your pencil, you tend hit it with one weight
and finish off with another; in other words,
lots of drawing is tapered lines, and it just so happens
that stick fits the bill.
And so the reason the surfaces seem to move is
because you're having a whole series of these tapered lines
that you can employee to your best advantage.
This was a kind of skywriting.
This is in -- Ireland -- I mean in Denmark along the North Sea.
I just gathered on one side of the road, brought it over,
and set some scaffolding and worked into the trees there.
This was some big city calligraphy.
This was at the World Trade Center.
You know, if you've ever dealt with the Port Authority,
they said, you know, "You can use sticks in this building
as long as they don't touch the walls, the floor, ceiling."
[ Laughter ]
So I saw the electricians were using wooden ladders,
and so I went to Putnam ladder Company, borrowed some ladders
and was able to build a work there and fill the bill.
One of the things is working on site allows you
to adjust the scale, which is a really critical part of -- of --
and one of the great advantages of working stick by stick
and line by line because in this case I just went
and got more ladders.
It's a 10,000-square-foot lobby, you know, two or three sticks
in there was not going to it.
So, you know, adjusting to scale is a big plus.
This was at the Phillips Collection, it's three floors
of sticks, that's about 16 feet wide that little stick thing.
I used a platform lift to build it.
I'm outside the building looking down through the oculus above
and kind of -- this kind of blending of these kind
of smaller drawn lines with kind
of an architectural line of the building.
And, you know, I'm used to working even in tight situations
where I would have to work with the ongoing activity
of the space; in other words, people continued
to use the stairway and we could hear their confessions
on the way up and down.
[ Laughter ]
"What is this thing?"
This was at the American Craft Museum before it --
their new building, and there, again,
you can see how it played off of the drawn line
and the architecture itself.
You know, I did mention that, in fact, there are no doors
to close and no place to hide,
and this is normal day at the office.
This was on the campus of University
of Michigan on the diag.
You know, the interesting thing is that there's three weeks
of drama; in other words, it looks like hell,
the first day you're throwing the sticks out,
and the same people that are calling the police
that day are inviting you to dinner the last day.
[ Laughter ]
That -- I'd say the more interesting thing is
that people start living vicariously through you
and the people that are working with you, and so sometimes
as you ease up to the very end,
they're afraid you're going to ruin it.
They didn't like it, they really start liking it,
and they like it a lot, they come up and say,
"Don't you think we've done enough?"
[ Laughter ]
And so, you know, the --
the, you know, part of being public --
this was an impromptu opening over at --
in New Harmony, when we took the scaffold back people just came
out of the woodwork, they dropped the --
the barber's towel from around them, and just came
out to see what we were doing.
And here, again, people --
some kids in Ireland came to visit this big piece
that I was making, and, you know,
the public informs you about your work.
And you think you know about it and they tell you more.
I mean, here we are back in childhood
where kids know everything about sticks --
they're a tool, a weapon, a piece of a wall, a magic wand,
drumsticks -- and people remember those child --
childhood days and, in fact, I believe that we are kind
of playing out a shadow life of our --
of our hunting and gathering selves in our childhood moments.
So everybody had that feeling about playing with sticks,
and so one of the big feelings that people bring
to a sculpture -- to these kinds of sculptures is reminiscence
about their own childhood play
or about a bird nest they've seen or a bird about some kind
of indigenous tribe that they visited or they've read about,
or sometimes it's just a feeling
that for a minute you could step back into the Garden of Eden,
step through the threshold across the curtain
without being encumbered while -- with your worldly possession
and you could just be an animal for the day.
I wanted to talk a little bit about using volunteers.
If I've done one good thing, it was my willingness and ability
to partner with organizations and use the --
their leverage and the good will that they have
to help organize the various things
that are necessary to pull this off.
And one of that thing -- one of those things is labor.
At a certain point people said, "We want to help you."
"Could we help you?"
"How about if our volunteers helped you."
And this is a piece in France and it, you know,
I'd had too many glasses of Bordeaux, and so I thought,
well, I will build some Bordeaux bottles.
And it turns out that there is a kind of saying in France called
"Sortie de Cava" and that means "free at last."
When the bottles themselves have been in the cellar so long
and you let them out, then the bottles themselves are free
to drink, and that's why you see them dumped
onto the street outside.
And -- but what I really wanted to show you is that, you know,
I have a lot of help, and here we had a, I don't know,
maybe 40 students in our class and then some other people
from outside and professors and so forth came to help.
In this case, you know, we --
this group of people was from a farm cooperative.
They decided to come over and help us as well,
pick the leaves off, you know, there's an electrician here,
a retired engineer from Africa, you know,
a plumber from down the street, several students.
So we just really have gotten a lot of help over the years,
I have, and -- and it's really fun.
This was the final minutes of this piece.
And I just had a couple more pictures.
This was at -- at Middlebury College
where the students were helping me take the leaves off;
and this was our starting point for getting ready with this --
this was the final work, people out enjoying it.
This thing is still up and it's been there
for about four years even though the snow is quite deep.
We developed a form that could really handle that snow.
And these were the people that helped me build it.
So we just -- I've just had lots of good help.
I wanted to talk about my work
in three different ways very briefly.
The first thing that I've done is to work with architecture,
one kind of piece that I've made, and this was
at the deCordova in Lincoln, Mass.,
a way of suggesting a reciprocity
between sculpture and architecture.
And so they wouldn't let me get up on that roof that easily
because they were afraid I'd dislodge the tiles.
I built a mockup on the ground, picked the thing
up with a crane, and put it up on the building.
The only trouble was, the drawing quality of it was not
that good, and so I decided I'd have to go up
and reinvest the surface up there, and so I got
in the bucket truck and they moved me around --
the piece is about 70 feet tall
so it's what you'll do for sculpture.
And, you know, often when you're in a bucket truck,
you're really frustrated, finally you just say,
"Would you mind holding my belt?"
[ Laughter ]
And you just can't help it, you just climb right
out over the rail and start working.
And so you can see that I did, in fact,
put some heavier lines in there.
This is, you know, the Floridian home being attacked by insects.
[ Laughter ]
And it's at Hollywood Cultural Arts Center, and, you know,
just an attempt to make different kinds of things
that interface with architecture.
This is in Manchester, England, and --
to try to put a kind of more rollicking garden gate feeling
on the front of this -- of the art museum.
And this was at Max -- in LA on Melrose Avenue.
Max Azria asked me to -- would I do something
with the front of their store.
They didn't know exactly what I was going to do,
and I'm hoping they were not sorry but I decided
to can cover it with paisley cloth and so produced this work.
The second thing I've done is to work with trees, and using trees
as a matrix on which to work.
This was -- a tree, an oak tree in Japan.
It was planted 400 years ago
when this little Shinto shrine was built
where I was allowed to stay.
This is made of reeds and so forth,
and so in Japan sometimes a sacred tree
at a temple has a rice rope around it to sanctify it
and so this was called "Holy Rope" -- [Cough] excuse me --
and these kids came to visit me.
So you can see I've used the [inaudible]
and used all the bamboo and so forth to help roll the piece up.
And this was in England in a Leylandii hedge,
and even though it looks like a solid bank of trees,
what it is is if you stick your head in there,
there's these huge cathedral-like spaces
in the trees themselves, so this is hallway that goes in,
and then I developed these big kind of chambers in there
and skylights for them.
So it was a bit like a warren, you could walk in there.
It was about 125 feet long of sticks.
And this was a piece in at Birmingham Museum of Art,
and you read up the piece.
The piece is about 50 feet tall.
I considered a roller coaster for squirrels and --
[ Laughter ]
had taken the limbs from two different trees, brought them
to together, and wove over them.
So it was really an interesting piece and went
through several serious hurricanes.
The other thing I've done is borrowed the overtones
of trees and to set a mood.
And this was back down in Savannah,
it's "Be It Ever So Humble."
It was set in underneath this live oak tree, and you can see
that you can see these big source limbs above it
and then it dropped all this moss and stuff
down on the top of the piece.
This was a piece in Hawaii, and it played off
of this monkey pod tree and the trunk system
that the monkey pod tree had,
and you can see how the thing kind of rolls
up into the lower limbs of this big tree.
And the piece at New Harmony, which was one
of the my favorite, where I was able to capitalize
on a hornbeam hedge that had nothing underneath it
and this big head of hair above it to build a kind
of cliff dwelling feeling.
And then this was its winter configuration
which was equally nice with all this huge verticality above it.
And a piece in North Carolina called "Trail Heads"
where each one of these heads is --
basically takes over the crown of a tree and is interwoven
with just one single tree.
And so that was -- that was a really nice piece,
and when I took it down, the mothers that had the kids
that were in the neighborhoods around there came over
and accosted me, and they said, "We're going to tell the artist
that you're tearing this down."
[ Laughter ]
And I said, "They're making me do it."
So we had it for about two years and then it had to come down.
The third thing I've done is I've had
to make independent pieces because there's no trees
to work in, there's no architecture to blend on to,
and this was in England, and in an area where there was a lot
of standing stones and Neolithic graves,
and so this was in that manner.
This was a new piece down in Rock Hill, South Carolina,
in front of the Performing Arts Center called
"Ain't Misbehaving."
It's -- it's got five big heads that look different directions,
you can only see four at a time.
This piece was at the Morris Arboretum, just came down.
You know, it started out as a snail shell from my garden,
it went to layer cake, and then it became a fourteenth-century
Japanese hairstyle, and then,
[ Laughter ]
Finally, it was the summer palace of Dr. Zhivago.
[ Laughter ]
This was at Bowden College, and it's called "Simple Pleasures,"
and learning to take a group of objects and hook them together
for the combined strength in order to hold up against snow,
climbing, and other eventualities.
Sometimes I have to build work inside that stands on its own
and this was based on kind of stick tripod kind of deal.
It's called "Sleepwalking," and it's
about 27 feet high, it's in Brussels.
And a piece in -- up in Tacoma, Washington, at the new Museum
of Glass for their opening show and using the reflective power
of this pool to extend the image and fill
that kind of huge space.
This was a new work that I have in North Carolina for --
as a private commission.
And one thing I like about it is this --
you know, I just remind you, there are no strings
in this thing, there are no wires,
this thing holds itself together through just sheer entanglement.
But I really wanted to show you, the last two,
three slides is how many people will come
to see a sculpture burn.
[ Laughter ]
And the -- and the -- and -- and the Scots, you know, they --
they -- they're druidic,
and so they decided a year before this sculpture was built
that they were going to burn it down at the end,
and so the whole town, in fact, the entire county came
to see it just set on fire.
This was the sculpture itself built
after a Callanish standing stones, and then a scale picture
to show you about the size of these things, and then,
of course, the ultimate moment
in which the fiery dancers were out there.
But to add insult to injury, the dancers cooked their breakfast
on my sculpture the next morning.
[ Laughter ]
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
If we have time for questions -- do we --
we going to do some questions?
We don't have to.
[ Laughter ]
They had a microphone -- is this one that's going to --
[ Pause ]
You can always ask the people that help me.
They know everything.
[ Inaudible ]
>> I just wanted to ask, how do you feel when you have
to burn down your work?
Like it's -- I know you take a lot of effort in it and it takes
like a week or I don't know how many hours, but I seen you guys
out there and it took you guys a long time.
So how do you feel, like, your time and effort [Feedback]
in this piece is just getting burnt down?
I don't know like --
>> Patrick Dougherty: Well, you know, as a context,
we all do temporary work.
I mean, doctors see patients, it's a one-time deal.
You know, we're all doing temporary work and so, you know,
I always think that art history ought to take care of itself
and artists ought to do what they want to do,
and if you get lots of opportunities to work,
as I have, in kind of lot of nontraditional art spaces,
the only way I'm able to work there is you got
to give the space back.
And so it's been a worthy tradeoff.
You know, I'm very interested in process, I'm very interested
in the community building aspect of --
of getting up with a group of people and --
and just working and using the sculpture as an excuse
in some ways to have a really good time
and to build something that's interesting to everyone.
>> Is it on?
All right.
Two questions for you: One, how long have you been doing this?
And two, have you worked in economically depressed areas
and has the artwork had an effect on the residents
to perceive what they can do
about their situation differently?
>> Well, I started in --
I started in the early '80s so that's my --
the lengths of my career.
You know, I don't know.
I don't really know how
to answer whether one particular artwork can have an effect.
I do know that -- that what I try for is to reach everybody,
whether it's the person who's painting pictures in the house
or whether it's the painter that's working on the outside
of the house or, you know,
I feel like these works are available
and they're just different starting points
in the work for different people.
You see different things, you have different associations,
sometimes it reaches the level of thinking, oh,
this is about drawing and form and so forth, but,
you know, I don't know.
I just -- I think my obligation is not to save people
to make things that are incredibly exciting
that make people want to run over there and take a look,
and to the degree that that provides uplift,
I'm really glad.
>> Hi, okay.
I'm wondering how many projects do you take on a year
and how much do you make annually as an artist?
[ Laughter ]
>> Patrick Dougherty: Well --
>> I'm just curious.
>> Patrick Dougherty: Well, I do about ten projects a year.
I work somewhere every month.
And, you know, in a way in terms
of just plain getting the work done,
you know how lazy you can be if you have plenty of time,
well this is kind of a forced feed.
You have to produce.
And so in a way that's meant
that I've produced an enormous amount of work.
In terms of charging, I charge everybody the same amount.
Currently I'm charging $15,000 plus my expenses,
and so that sets the market in a place where lots
of people can afford me and I can come, you know.
Temporary work is -- is the problem.
If you were doing permanent work and it lasted,
you might make $100,000 dollars, but, you know,
I feel like I want to be every man.
I don't necessarily want to [Feedback] necessarily appeal
to one particular segment of collectors.
I really think art belongs to everybody
and that the real purpose of art is to excite the imagination,
so I'm really happy with what I do and the way that I proceed.
>> Hi. I was just wondering, it seems like each
of these projects have so much entailed in them from concept
to design to construction and collaboration
with community groups.
So how long is one of these projects from start to finish,
from just the beginning of an idea to the completion.
>> Patrick Dougherty: Well,
generally what happens is people contact me more
and more just strictly on the Web, and they'll e-mail me
and they'll say, "Could you send us some information?"
A lot of that, maybe we get 100 --
I don't know, not 100 a month,
maybe we get 30 people ask us a month;
maybe ten of those might be possible prospects;
maybe one of those really pans
out that they can get the funding and they really want
to do it and we have time to do it.
So then I'll make a site visit,
and on the site visit I look around.
I've kind of got a method to my madness.
In a site visit, I try to make word associations with my site,
I try to remember how I feel when I look at a site,
I make thumbnail sketches, I listen to the people
that are the principals, you know, that have a lot
of vested interest in the site, and then generally we try
to work out all the logistics of how we'll gather,
where we'll gather, where the piece will be,
and then when I come back, then I actually decide what to do.
When we see who's really going to help me
and where the material's really going to come from,
then I make my final decision.
I feel like I'm carrying a little bit of a reservoir
of ideas around, and like a novelist might have conventions,
like I like to have doors and windows on some things, but,
you know, I try to be really fluid,
and a lot of the actual work is very reactive, so it's --
it's ad-libbing most of the time, and that seems
to work out really well.
[ Pause ]
Oh, it takes three weeks to build something.
We're on site for three weeks.
So -
[ Pause ]
Well, I really appreciate it.
[ Applause ]
All right.
[ Applause ]