DAVID TOTAH in discussion with KATHLEEN STEWART HOWE

DT

Can you talk a little about Helen’s transition/decision to leave the academic arena in Boston and become an artist in California. What led her to take that path?

KSH

Helen graduated with a degree in art history and was enormously influenced by a professor at Pomona who went on to teach art history at Harvard, shortly before Helen graduated. This was the great Seymour Slive, the pre-eminent authority on the Dutch 17th century who later added the directorship of the Harvard Museums to his academic title. I think she felt a resonance whether conscious or not-- with the Dutch masters who were unparalleled handlers of light and who had been so beautifully evoked in the Pomona classroom by Professor Slive. So after studying at Columbia and Boston University, her move to study art history at Harvard seems  almost predestined. However, it was while in Boston as part of her course of study, which included working with children teaching art, that it became apparent that she was most interested in making art.

One can’t discount, that despite her connections to the East Coast and specifically New England, Helen is at heart and through and through, a California girl. To hear her talk about the quality of light in Southern California, whether she is evoking the luminous quality of early morning light over the ocean at Laguna or the razor sharp shadows seen against the San Gabriel foothills, is to understand how closely attuned she is to the light and space of California. And I use light and space here not to evoke the art movement that came to have that name, but her innate sensitivity to those qualities.

DT

What were the main sources of inspiration for the artists of the original Light and Space movement back in the 60s and how did Helen share those yet retain her idiosyncratic essence?

KSH

I think what interested me about the group of artists who became known as Light and Space artists is first how differently they each pursued their explorations of those seemingly boundless concepts. It’s also notable how loose their association was, and is. It wasn’t a tight-knit community, all living in the same urban neighborhood, meeting frequently at the same bars to argue approaches, and god knows there were no manifestos about what was and wasn’t Light and Space. (In fact, to this day, there are artists who are described in those terms who don’t like the term, which was initially dismissive.) They lived and had studios all over the LA Basin, their point of contact more often than not was Jack Brogan’s place in Venice Beach. Jack is an engineer and a wizard with the new materials that intrigued this group of LA artists. Almost every one of them went by Jack’s to discuss materials, technical problems, and in some cases Jack fabricated the work, or taught artists how to finish work, or imparted technical tweaks that might achieve their visions. Helen spent time there, polishing, picking up little tricks about casting or curing materials that she later would work out in her studio. She notes it wasn’t unusual to run into Larry Bell or Peter Alexander at Jack’s.

What were their inspirations—I think you would get a different answer from each of them. Over time I’ve heard quite a few potential references, frequently offered by critics trying to come to grips with this work. Most seem to address the formal qualities of the work: the quality of light here; the satiny deep luster of a custom car finish; the accidents of light in controlled settings, such as Turrell’s “Mendota Stoppages”; the way sun penetrates and reflects through the stream of windshields on the freeway. All of those have a formal logic. But this wasn’t a purely formalist movement. It was grounded in very basic questions of how humans perceive space and form and color. A key element, of course, was the seemingly endless parade of new materials from the aerospace industry and a willingness to explore those materials in pursuit of ideas and visions that, while referencing the spaces and light effects of Southern California, were actually questioning basic definitions of art. In many of these works, although 3-D and thus sculpture, the intent was to create forms or spaces that one could see into and through; to create forms in space (or light in space) that the experience of totally shifted with the viewer’s position or changes in ambient light.

LACMA under Maurice Tuchman initiated an Art and Technology program (1967-71), which paired artists with corporations in the fields of aerospace, scientific research, and entertainment. (It was definitely a boy’s club, neither Helen nor Mary Corse were included.) The partnerships were not always successful but it opened the possibilities of handling new materials and industrial technics in totally unexpected ways. At the same time (1968-1971) California Institute of Technology brought together artists and scientists "to see what would happen." The program included Helen Pashgian and Peter Alexander, and computer graphics pioneer John Whitney, Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, and Caltech trustee/industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. The emphasis was to investigate new technology to establish new visual vocabularies. Helen did her very earliest floating discs at Caltech.

DT

Would you agree that West Coast minimalism attempts to efface the components of its construction whereas East Coast minimalism is deeply conscious of its materiality? Hence the West Coast rhymes with levity/grace while East Coast with gravity. What, in your opinion, are some of the reasons for that?

KSH

I guess I’d refer to my answer above. In East Coast minimalism with its focus on materials tied to stuff of the urban environment—steel plates, stone pavers, pre-fab metal—there’s an insistence on ordinary and concrete materials, a sort of pragmatic reductionism to the most common materials. Kirk Varnedoe captured the difference best, and I’ll quote him because he said it so beautifully: “it (west coast aesthetic reduction) pushes toward dissolution and disembodiment…it’s not an optical style, it’s an actual optical experience….West Coast minimalism is all about ambiguity.”

DT

Do you know what was her peers' perception of her back then when she started, and what is it now? Was is it more difficult for a women to establish herself in a complex and sometimes dangerous (owing to the use of certain materials) craftsmanship dominated by men?

KSH

Helen has never—to me in private or in public fora when she’s been asked directly about gender discrimination—ever talked about the difficulties of being a woman in this group of male artists. If you ask her directly, she’ll wave it aside. It’s not an important question to her. What she will talk about is the way that LA artists were dismissed by the East Coast art establishment. In other words she identifies as one of the group of West Coast artists investigating light and color and space, not as gendered. However, in my conversations with James Turrell he stated unequivocally that she didn’t get the attention she deserved because she was a woman, and a beautiful woman at that, which somehow made her seem less serious. He followed that statement up with “Helen is a real artist.” Of course, women aren’t as represented in the galleries and museums as men are, and that disparity was even more marked then. Remember this is precisely when Judy Chicago started the first Feminist Art Program at Fresno State (1970) and the art project Womanhouse (1971).

Certainly Helen experienced the difficulties women had in gaining gallery representation or being seen as an equal partner to the male members of this loose group. But Helen’s response was to work—she maintained her studio practice over the years, working, experimenting, making art. Her peers respected her because she did the work, hard work. If you’ve visited Helen in her studio, you won’t find the elegant woman we meet socially, you’ll find the artist wearing a respirator and wielding a sander. She makes art because she is an artist; she does the hard work in pursuit of a singular vision. Period. Hence Turrell’s statement “Helen’s a real artist.”

DT

Several of her peers were able to form the experience of light and space by reducing materiality and often using mainly light itself. Helen, however, reached that result by maintaining a solid presence of the material, not subtracting it and yet the predominance of the object seems to vanish in favor of the experience. Would you say that this is the most significant factor differentiating her from her peers?

KSH

The loose group of artists we reference when we say Helen’s peers—James Turrell, DeWain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Mary Corse, Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, and to some extent Robert Irwin—all worked in distinctly different ways. Certainly Turrell and Wheeler are associated with light as the primary material. The others explored materials that complicated the experience of sculptural form as both transparent and solid—Larry Bell’s vapor-coated glass constructions, Valentine’s monoliths of smoky color, Alexander’s geometric forms of intense color. Helen’s work retains the solidity of sculptural form—the orb, the column, the square—but in her work, the solid forms seem to dissolve, colors shift, objects phase in and out of existence. Everything is contingent on the viewer and their movement. As Helen frequently reminds us, the viewer completes the work; the work of art belongs to the viewer.

The distinctiveness of Helen’s work lies in what happens within those solid geometric forms. They are vessels of light and color. But the very skin of the vessel seems permeable and interior forms appear and disappear as the viewer moves and the incident of light changes. Hard plastic surfaces become almost tactilely sensuous. And yes Varnedoe’s use of ambiguity to describe all of West Coast minimalism seems particularly apt when applied to Pashgian’s work. Its insistence that the viewer is participating in an experience that is wholly his or her own experience is distinctive.

DT

The unfathomable aspect of her work communicates a very palpable yet hardly describable feeling of comfort by converting into art what some of us experience yet are unable to express or share. I am referring to grace and those moments when we are able to connect with a higher place. Do you agree with that statement and what in your opinion are the ingredients that make Helen one of those artists who possess a gift for connecting us further into the depths of our souls?

KSH

You’ve expressed very well what is so difficult to put into words. And I’m glad that you use the word grace rather than using some of the tired clichés that reference the spiritual. Helen’s work is mutable and ambiguous, in the sense of blurring distinctions of exterior/interior, solid/permeable. Colors shift, meld, or suddenly burst into view only to disappear. It’s interesting to note that objects that are destabilizing usually induce anxiety or uneasiness. After all, if the definable boundaries and elements of the physical world can’t be relied on to remain constant, what can be? We may love the surprise of the unstable but that can pale after the first few minutes and then uneasiness may surface. With Helen’s work—such as the orbs and the small wall works you are showing—the initial mystery is there but what continues to engage us is an effable quality, as you say, grace, which is such a great word for it. Helen’s work centers our experience; we participate in the creation of her work by our exploration of each object. Our movements as we engage with her works reveal hidden depths, bursts of color, and the sudden emergence of forms. But those discoveries aren’t stable; they may disappear when we move even slightly. Move again, and we rediscover them but not precisely in the same way. In a real visceral sense, we’ve become the instruments that complete the work and each of us will have a different experience of any one work. You ask how that “grace” somehow connects us to deeper levels of self. Perhaps it’s a combination of wonder and agency. Helen’s work is at core rigorous in execution but remarkably generous in effect. It is all about making the viewer an active participant in its creation. I’ve watched people shift back and forth or circle around her work, stepping back, coming up close. At first I thought their bodily engagement was driven by the desire to “figure it out” technically. Now I think it’s really about the pleasure in participating in the creation of changing aesthetic experience. I think participation in creation connects us to, as you say, the depths of our souls.

DT

When art meets science - Can you describe some of the challenges she experienced with the different material she chose for the three bodies of work present in “Transient”, in order to achieve her objective of materializing the ungraspable? What do they have in common?

KSH

Seeing Helen in her studio, with her spiral-bound notebooks in which she has recorded complex calculations to yield the perfect curvature of a piece, or rather cryptic (at least to anyone other than Helen) notations on pigments and their behaviors in different materials or when added at different steps in the process, one immediately recognizes the lab journal of a scientist. I don’t think Helen sees a distinction between her role as an artist and the methods of a bench scientist that form the scaffolding for her work.

She is an experimentalist (most artists are) and a researcher (in the direct hands-on mode) and perhaps more importantly, she is never satisfied with rules decreeing what a material can and cannot do. She speaks of her time at Caltech as an artist-in-residence, working with the at-that-time new polymers, and the challenges she posed to engineers and chemists. She saw in these materials—conventionally considered the stuff of rigid, glossy containers—something with the potential to interact with light in sculptural form to become something entirely different, sensuous and mysterious. The rigid, reflective, glossy transformed into soft, mysterious, something that could exist on the edges of perception. Told, “that material can’t be used that way,” she worked experimentally with the material to bend it to her vision as an artist. That was the first of her discs: objects that hold light and color, but seem to dissolve and disappear.

She’ll be the first to admit that she has chosen to work in materials that are by their nature obdurate; there are failures and disappointments. It’s complicated by the changing availability of materials. The first materials she worked with are no longer available because they were so toxic. Each time there’s been a change in material technology, Helen has grappled with the new materials that require different procedures. Simply noting the change in materials she’s used over time—polyester resins, cast resins, resin on canvas, fiberglass, several generations of acrylics—gives you a sense of Helen as a rigorous experimentalist exploring each new material.

DT

Some of her contemporaries were exploring land art, and she too is inspired by nature. How does she perceive a direct response or creative act in situ such as those of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer?

KSH

Interesting question. I’d have to ask her about Smithson and Heizer. I‘ve visited Turrell’s Roden Crater project with her and she was a huge help in Pomona’s commission for Turrell Skyspace. My sense is that she responds to Turrell’s work in the landscape because he molds light in spatial envelopes that become another form of landscape. His work prompts a heightened perception of light at a site, something that she is very much in tune with. My guess is that the hulking land forms of Heizer might not elicit the same response.

DT

My first reaction when I saw Helen’s work in images made me want to meet her and see the work in person. Through but beyond an aesthetic affinity, I felt the purity in how she translated her inspirations into a very complex craftsmanship. Meeting her and the experience of my first studio visit confirmed that feeling. Can you describe what initially triggered your interest in Helen's art and impelled you to explore it as far as you have?

KSH

I met Helen in a different way, through her service on the boards of educational and arts institutions. Those meetings confirmed that she was someone who had a deep commitment to the arts as a necessary, integral part of whatever it is that makes us human. I had to nag her a bit to get an invitation to her studio. (I had seen a few of her epoxy resin on canvas paintings from the 80s but I wasn’t familiar with the range of her work, nor did I understand that the epoxy paintings were just one chapter in a lifelong exploration of sculptural form, surface, light, color, and that they represented the smallest fraction of her engagement with materials that we don’t commonly think of as art materials.) My visits to her studio were a gradual introduction to that amazing range.

It took awhile before she showed me her earlier work—the magical orbs—because she was focused on what she was working on at the moment. So my experience was a gradual unwrapping, a slow reveal, of what she had done, what she was doing at the moment, and then, and only after a while, what she was working towards. I had the privilege of showing her first large columns at the Pomona College Museum of Art where I paired them with much earlier work. I saw those objects—her columns of 2010 and the orbs from the early 70s —as a continuum, evidence of unwavering commitment to a vision, totally independent of what you refer to as noise and external pressure. I admire her work and find it deeply satisfying. I also find her continual quest to translate her vision into different objects with different materials and in different forms exhilarating.

DT

I sense that the art world is slowly on its way to searching for an alternative to the past two decades’ excesses where art production blurs lines with art creation. Do you agree that Helen is an artist who still creates from impulses of authentic inspiration and preserves a consistency for tuning into her own frequency and rhythm in spite of the noise and external pressures?

KSH

One need only look at Helen’s career to see the depth of her continuous engagement. She’s remained focused on her vision, sometimes working for years on a tricky problem or exploring where her ideas will lead. I think there are times when she’s spent years working through different formulations of her core concepts only to put that production aside because it didn’t satisfy her. I think I go back to James Turrell’s statement “Helen is a real artist.” A real artist in her unwavering commitment to her vision without needing the constant validation of a market or critics. Working at something until she was ready to bring it into the world.

DT

For an artist of her generation and her caliber, Helen seems to retain an extremely young spirit with an incredible energy and enthusiasm; it's as if she is just beginning to explore through materials, yet she has over 50 years of experience. What is, in your opinion, Helen’s bridge and legacy to a new generation of artists exploring minimalism and light and space?

KSH

Let’s start with the proviso that Helen is remarkable. Whether it’s her energy, enthusiasm, or her boundless commitment to and optimism about her work. On a mechanical or technical level, it’s important to remember that Helen started with very new materials back in the 60s, working with resin polymers. Over the course of her career materials were pulled off the market—usually because they were toxic—but also because they were replaced in the manufacturing chain by some new material that seemed to be better or cheaper. That constant churn of available materials, and the constant challenge to an artist who uses those materials, requires a willingness to learn, which really means experiment, with a changing palette of the materials one uses to create art. Just think about it. Imagine a painter being told that tempera is no longer available, here use these oil pigments, and then oils aren’t available, try these acrylics—each switch requires rethinking how to use the material in service to your vision. Then think of having to make those changes every 3- 5 years, not over decades or generations. It’s difficult to tell which is causal—is Helen an amazingly youthful spirit (which I guess I’m defining in part as an openness and engagement with the world around her) because her practice requires flexibility and makes constant demands on learning and mastering new materials? Or did Helen’s natural bent to be open and engaged and unafraid of the new make it possible for her to have a remarkably lengthy career?