William Leavitt: Theater Objects Published in 2011 by The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Pg. 129-133 Interview with William Leavitt By Erik Bluhm December 19, 2009 Erik Bluhm: Theres a progression of involvement in your work, beginning with the random-grouping black-and-white photographs and onto California Patio [1972, p.76] and the curtain installations [Gothic Curtain, 1970; and Red Velvet Flame, 1974, p. 102]. Then at some point you jumped from static arrangements to real-life people acting out your direction in plays. William Leavitt: Im not sure they can be truly called playsmore a kind of stages setting with characters and speech. Someone commented after seeing The Silk [1975] that it was like a series of slides, which I think was apt. Plays were sculptural for me, a kind of moving, talking 3-D. Plays also gave me an excuse to create illustrations for them. EB: What led you from exhibiting photography, to settling up installations, to putting on plays, and then eventually to performing music? WL: Well, the sequence was more like from sculpture, to process sculpture, to environment with sound, to installation with narrative text, to a play; with that came the photo representations of the performance, the texts for the plays, and the drawings as illustrations of possible sets. The music came later, though Id used sound in the environments. EB: Did the performances feel like a stretch at the time? WL: Yeah, sure. But they didnt happen in a vacuum, and since we were coming from a time in the 60s of street action, civil rights protest, communes, the womens movement, do-it-yourself Whole Earth Catalogers, psychedelic music, and the end of the Vietnam War, this activity of purpose was carried over into the art and music of the 70s. For instance, there was Allen Ruppersbergs Als Caf [1969] and Als Grand Hotel [1971], which were certainly theatrical. [William] Wegman was in his studio on Main Street [in Los Angeles] making theatrical sight-gag videos. Bas Jan Alder was doing his Chaplinesque falls. There was Ed Ruschas movie Crackers [1971]. Ed Kienholz has done Barneys Beanery [1965]. Gilbert and George painted themselves gold and stood in the gallery as living sculptures. I knew I wasnt a performer myself, but I was interested in social situations and the literature of theater. Also, Id done sculptural actions, videos, and with California Patio I had a stage setting with a description of character and actions.

EB: So you werent a performer and you dont necessarily consider yourself a playwright, as I recall. So why that direction? Why not film? Or writing? WL: I think a dramatist would want to engage the audience through emotion and metaphor. My interest was first in a presentation of a generic middle-class social situation. I was looking for images and social codes that could be reduced to some kind of icon. The temporal form and progression was abstract, which I think closed off emotional involvement on the part of the audience. Our audiences at the time didnt have the traditional expectations for theater. Pretty much anything was allowed as long you were going through some search of possibilities outside of traditional forms. Later, I may have written a script that was closer to being a work of theater, but in the earlier pieces I was willing to experiment with something that would have very little dramatic payoff. EB: Were there presences in the theater arts that influenced you? WL: In the early 70s, I was teaching at Immaculate Heart College where Bill Shepard was also teaching theater. Bill had spent a year in Poland studying the techniques of Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski, and he brought them to Immaculate Heart. I participated in some of the theater workshops and classes, so there was the influence that theater could be done in ways that I hadnt considered before. His play productions were adventuresome, and he brought to the school groups such as the Bread and Puppet Theater, which was a kind of agitprop theater company of the time. EB: Why did you choose sound as an element in the installations? Why not moving parts or images? Why sound as the sense? WL: Id had some experiences with audio technologymy dad was an electrical engineer and tinkerer who had electrical stuff around in the garage, plus tape recorders and amplifiersso although I wanted to introduce the possibility of mood and atmosphere to the installation through the sound, I wanted to show the electrical devices themselves for the sculptural aspect of their cables, boxes, speakers, mikes, etc. Also how these real functioning things contrasted with the illusion partthe fake plants and trees. EB: Its a big jump from sound as an ingredient to sound as the focus. WL: At some point in the 80s, I started building electronic music circuits as a hobby and ended up a few years later with an analog synthesizer, which Joseph Hammer and Rick Potts invited me to bring to their music studio in Alhambra [a suburb of Los Angeles], where we recorded sounds, and later, when Steve Thomsen joined us, we played a few live shows. Joseph, Rick, and Steve had been doing this kind of music for fifteen years of so before asking me to join them. Rick and Joseph did the sound for my play Random Trees at the Santa Monica Museum [of Art] in 1990, but they were more interested in performing as a band, and I went in the direction of creating sound for me theater pieces. It wasnt really until 2002, with The Radio at LACE [Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions] that I put this interest to use on my own. EB: Did you have aspirations in this field before seeing that it could be done, as LAFMS [Los Angeles Free Music Society] were doing at the time? WL: Even though in time I met the individuals of LAFMSJoe Potts, Tom Recchion, Fredrick Nilsen, and RickI didnt really know them when they were doing their first performances in the 70s. However I was in Boulder, Colorado, in1967, teaching summer school, during which time the university was presenting a festival of avant-garde music. In a very small hall, I saw John Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma perform a work for prepared pianos and

what looked like homebuilt electrical devices, which they had arrayed on folding tables. This obviously had some effect on me, though evidence of such was not direct unless you count the sound installations I did in 1970. EB: Its interesting that you bring up John Cage. When we spoke a couple years ago about your publication Landslide that you did with Bas Jan Ader, the impetus for that magazine was a sort of reaction to the hierarchy of taste in the art world. You were attempting to bypass that rigor through pseudo-invention and basically coloring outside the lines. It could be said that someone like Cage operated similarly within both the composer and art worlds while settling in, or at least kowtowing completely to, neither. WL: I didnt think of Cage as an outsider, though his work was sometimes modest and unprepossessing. It seemed part of a network that was furthered by cheap printing and record production. EB: But that network was not necessarily the network of what you could call the tastemakers. It existed in spite of them. I see in some way a correlation between your installations and explorationsand Ruppersbergs and Wegmansand self-released, self-invented, and self-promoted entities like John Fahey and his Takoma releases, and I think Cage served as a model for people like that. You seemed to identify with those working on that wavelength more so than with the flash of artists like [Robert] Smithson or [Robert] Morris and what was being celebrated by Artforum and that world. WL: Morriss Box with the Sound of Its Own Making [1961] must have been influential for me. The geometric forms show at Dwan Gallery was terrificbig and blank and a real statement, but it was also the permission thing, If he can do this, then I might be able to do that. Landslide was more of a gagsure we took this contrary stance, but Id assimilated Morriss work and obviously felt something for it. We seem here to be dwelling in the early 70s and causes of the work produced, which considering the distance is daunting and maybe a little distorted, so I want to ask you how you see the tenor of the 70s from your historical interest in the art and music of the time. EB: Well, in California I see the tenor of the 70s as moving in two distinct directions. What had begun as revolutionary in the 60s was just marketable by the 70s. In music, its the trajectories of your Jackson Brownes and Eagles mixing with stars, while in the shadows there were people like John Fahey, or LAFMS, or even YaHoWha 13, who were not necessarily against such pursuits but were not really too interested in changing or watering down their exploration and/or messages. Of course, there was crossover between the two: Wallace Bermans group included Neil Young and Dean Stockwell, who were both off-and-on members of what could be called the Establishmentand thats when people paid attention. In the art world, why did Morris or Smithson garner that kind of attention? Because of the way they looked? What they made? Who they knew? In time, well dig out all the other people who were making important work concurrently but didnt get the recognition. Every new issue of an art magazine contains such a discovery. WL: Perhaps were forgetting the global aspect of the art world then? In Europe, the Arte Povera and Fluxus people were dealing with smaller-scale works, materials as signs, temporality. The Gutai group in Japan were known players, and I think they balanced the forces from New York, if one was interested. Airline tickets were moderately cheap, so it was possible to sample other points of view. And, in Los Angeles, there was an active local community trying to find its own voice-there were venues and print forums which sustained us. Maybe because there wasnt r