30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes

This book contains excerpts of interviews I have conducted with artists over the past thirty or so years. These interviews began when I was a graduate art history student and would-be curator in southern California. I didn't have an original idea about art. Doing interviews with artists seemed like a good way to find one. Not that much has changed. The most recent interview was conducted this year.

I'm not sure how to describe this book. It's about art, but it's about a lot of other things, too. These dialogues run a gamut from political argument to naive questions with patient answers to interview as performance piece. In some cases, these are outtakes of interviews originally conducted in preparation for an exhibition and its accompanying catalogue/book. What is presented here are the parts of the interview that were thrown out because they didn't seem "quotable" in the context of what I wanted to say at that time. I know a little more now and am a bit more attuned to the oblique nature of content. Sometimes art is best approached from the side.

This book would not be possible without the encouragement and support of the following: Emerick Yoshimoto; the Oral History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles; Marla Price, Susan Colegrove, and Pam Hatley at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; my former colleagues at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; and Anthony d'Offay, who suggested early on that these interviews be published. A very special thanks goes to Peter Willberg for donating his time and skills to this project, and for his friendship.

From Los Angeles to Berkeley to Sarasota to Buffalo to Fort Worth, I have spent a lot of time in artists' studios, and have always felt very lucky to be invited. Many of these artists were and are friends and mentors. If one believes that art is, and has always been, a significant and vital part of the formation of an individual and society, then there is no greater privilege than to be able to speak with the artists of our time. It is to them that I am most grateful.

Tadao Ando THE BOXER May 13, 1998 Fort Worth, Texas Michael Auping: Were you interested in buildings when you were young?

Tadao Ando: As a child, I used to go looking at the construction sites near my home in Osaka. I always thought the carpenters were important people. They looked so great for me, a young boy with so much interest toward making things by my own hands. They would put the frames up before the siding was put on, and they were so confident and proud that the house they were building would stand for one hundred years. I was very impressed by that as a child. They would tell me that a building must be built with confidence and pride- materials alone do not make a building great or strong. Becoming an architect, or any profession, is usually gradual. You don't know exactly when you become that person who is an architect, but I think that maybe it was that moment for me that I could imagine myself as a builder. The combined effect of beginning to understand a carpenter's confidence, and the pride of a craftsman, made me think that this could be a way for me to contribute to society in some way.

MA: What type of a house did you grow up in?

TA: We all have had certain experiences in our childhood that have stayed with us for our entire lives. The house that I grew up in was very important for me. It is an old Japanese small wooden house partitioned into several units- a Nagaya row house. It is very long, and when you come in from the street you walk through a corridor and then into a small courtyard and then another long space that takes you deeper into the house. The courtyard is very important because the house is very long and the amount of light is very limited. Light is very precious. When you live in a space like that you realize how important light is to interior space. Living in a space like that, where light and darkness are constantly interacting, was a critical experience for me.

MA: You can see that in your buildings, in the sense that you pass through various intensities of light that create different moods in each space. You also create long walls that catch light, natural light, and that change throughout the day. Do you think these characteristics refer back to that house?

TA: Yes, but it's unconscious and very natural for me. The memory of that house has always stayed with me, the ways the rooms seemed to be painted in shadow and light. That is how I experience space. When I was fifteen years old I took part in renovating that house. I knew the house so well, and the workers and craftsmen let me join them. It was a very important learning experience. I was very proud that I could contribute because I knew the house very well. By working with them side by side, I developed an intimacy with that project that was very important for me.

MA: Was it a well-built house?

TA: It was a very common, typical house that was built about ten to fifteen years before the second World War. The house was sixty-five to seventy years old at the time when we renovated it. There are many houses like it in Japan. So in that sense there wouldn't appear to be anything special about the house. It was in a working-class neighborhood. Across the street was a craftsman's small factory that did a lot of wood works and next door was a shop that did a lot of small stone works, especially used for the Japanese chess games.