Judy Pfaff in "Romance" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

(Sound of Welding)

JUDY PFAFF: I got my first welder in Maine,

and I made some structures 
and stuff and I thought oh,

I have to learn how to weld now.

I never wanted to be a sculptor.

My background is painting.

I was a painter.

All my friends are painters.

Elizabeth Murray, you know great, great painters.

And I always thought that welders 
were not only guys that drank beer,

and clanked around with rusty stuff,

I am now clanking around with 
rusty stuff, drinking beer.

But this first welder I got was actually for 
thin sheet metal and it was for auto body guys.

It was like a sweet welder, not 
stick welding, which is pretty rough.

This would be the equivalent 
of hot glue gun or sewing.

MAN: That’s Mel

PFAFF: I have to talk about Mel.

He moves earth around. I didn’t realize it.

I only deal with little things.

He deals with like big things, you know?

And he sees these roots, 
and he says you want roots?

I got roots.

PFAFF: So Mel and I go down 
to the river and we find,

I don’t know if you’ve looked at these things,

they’re the best roots I ever saw.

Can you see how rough these things were?

They’re like...these are huge.

Look at the size of that. Look.

These stumps were broken into four parts 
because we’ve got to get them into the gallery

and up elevators so we’re cutting them 
apart, putting them back together.

PFAFF: You ready?

PFAFF: You should-
MAN: But you can’t really do it when…

PFAFF: Right...we draw this pattern 
out and we’re going to take it apart...

PFAFF: I was born in London. That was 1946.

And came to America when I was 
(SIGH) about twelve and uh,

did not fit and was quite unruly.

I wasn’t raised by my mother.

I met her when I came to America.

I never have met my father.

I was a terrible student.

I don’t like to read.

I don’t like to do homework.

I could care less. I’m ornery.

I don’t like authority.

I mean there’s a lot of things that 
would...made me a lousy student.

The art part...and that was 
actually where Al came in.

Al Held was my teacher at Yale.

He thought I was visually 
intelligent, a disaster in other ways.

But he thought there was something in 
the way I sort of get it with materials

that would hook me into another kind of education.

Painters I think are made differently.

They can concentrate in different ways.

I found when I was a painter 
I couldn’t stop and until it

was finished another thought didn’t enter.

With the sculpture, they go on for months.

It tells different kinds of stories.

They’re sort of sequence of moments.

It worked better for the way I 
am put together and I love stuff

and as you know I love tools.

Last year, everyone I knew died.

My mother, Al, good friends, and uh,

and I just thought, this show 
I just want it to be emotional.

So I was basing this sort of on images of…

I don’t think hell, but darkness and kind of a…

a wilder characteristic than the other stuff.

The show is going to have a lot of light,

and there’s going to be one 
room all light, all white.

And another one all black.

Or I think, and these big 
roots are going to come in,

and so it’s going to be a stack of things that go 
from light to dark or heavy to light or however.

(TORCH FLARES)

I have uh, a way of never sort 
of touching things directly.

It’s sort of funny because I’m very 
hands-on but in a way that’s not…

not true.

There’s usually a tool.

And finding these burning kits was like…

this is for guys who make duck decoys,

so you get these blades for putting 
feathers on or doing details.

It’s all solid burning and 
dying and going through layers,

so it’s a nice physical way 
of getting into something.

I think I have so much control over things.

I get so involved that having an 
instrument between it blunts that a bit.

I think the show is going to look like these…

these drawings and it’s…

and you know and that’s sort 
of ends up actually to be true.

But I think if you see that and see the work 
you can see that there’s just a lot of uh,

imagery that sort of similar in a way.

There’s a lot of flaming going…

there’s a lot of like soot, fire, 
burning, and a lot of water too.

So the...I think it will be an 
interesting set of dynamics.

I think some of these drawings 
actually look quite nice.

Even tame.

Their way of being made is very rough.

What I don’t understand was all this roughness,

that it actually kind of ends up calming down.

We’ve been doing these forms for a while.

They’re based on what’s called a sweep mold.

Sweep...s-w-e-e-p mold.

And I saw a pattern for it on a WPA 
manual for people learning plaster work.

They use what’s called live plaster,

so the plaster is mixed with 
stuff and then you have a form

and at a certain moment you drag the 
form over and it takes that perfectly.

For big shapes, you have a circular 
track and you’re walking it,

so it’s just this gigantic sort 
of performance of walking this…

this plastic blade…

This will be filled with Styrofoam and 
then the last part of it is this plaster

that makes it like this 
most beautiful turned form.

So what this is going to look like, there are two.

There’s one that goes up this way,

and there’s another one that goes to the top,

so it’ll look like the 
negative space of two spheres.

And that’s where that kind 
of two worlds thing coming,

the white and the black, so...I think.

I don’t know.

I’m saying this thinking that 
that’s exactly what I’m going to do

but I always change my mind, so...

ELEVATOR: Second(?) Floor.

BOB: So if you want to be safe, 
you turn the lights off first.

ASSISTANT: (INAUD)

PFAFF: Is that going to work, Bob?

BOB: Yeah.

PFAFF: Do you know what 
happened? Was it the wiring or...

BOB: Oh this? I don’t know. I think, I suspect...

PFAFF: The ballast?
BOB: The faulty ballast, yeah.

PFAFF: That’s the...is that the brand new one?

BOB: No.

MAN: Look at that. That’s like 
a drain in my bathtub. Sweet.

MAN: More, more, more, more, more
(TALK)

ELEVATOR: Second Floor

PFAFF: You come off the elevators, and 
there’s a pretty big obstacle in front of you,

this kind of double cone.

I assumed one would go to the right.

There’s a kind of natural route.

I always thought that it would 
be walked counter-clockwise.

Just because the layout of the gallery.

I received two emails.

They’d just seen the show and both of 
them talked about sadness and loss.

And I thought wow, I’m glad 
that they saw that in that.

Because that’s what I thought,

that’s what drove it, that’s what I anticipated.

When we were finishing up the show,

once we stopped making a lot of mess

and there was a straight view past 
the drawing room into a far back room,

and I remembered that they 
had an Al Held painting,

a black and white, that if it was 
put up it would just fill that…

that slot through the gallery.

I think I’m very romantic.

That’s where these scrims and these structures,

why they’re around.

I think there are these levels,

like the thing that I was 
given was way too much romance,

way too much emotion,

and not enough of these other things 
which are hard for me to get to.

So the work is to get to the other levels.

To the silence, to the…

the breath, to a sweeter sense of things.