Page 41 - Studio International - November 1971

Gibson's in May 1970.
ws : What was your next important piece ?
DO: Probably Preliminary Test for 65 ft Vertical
Penetration. Again the project deals with the
correlation of bodily activity, output, tolerance,
with a particular place and land dimension. In
this case the tolerance factor was sixty-five feet,
the height of Lucky Peak dam.
ws: Was it a natural land mass ?
DO: No, man-made. I was interested in
conditioning the body to withstand this fall, the
eventual dive, treating the body as material that
could be extended to its limits. Instead of
manipulating exterior form, I was developing
interior form to this end.
ws : But this was in relation to a land mass and
that was a bridge from your earlier concerns.
Do : Well, again it was an attempt to do without
objectification—instead to focus on the spirit of
the body traversing space, bisecting matter like
a tool, transferring from a high point to a low
point.
ws : Do you tend to work in series, to develop
ideas in three or four different ways ?
Do: Probably. I see things in groups. The dive
piece is particularly interesting in terms of
economy. It's almost literally about immersion,
invasion, entrance.
ws : What if someone asked you how that
differed from just jumping into the water ?
DO: I would say that there is always an inalien-
able infrastructure that is independent of the art
substances of the piece.
ws : Does it make any difference if the viewer is
aware of the other concerns, or is he expected to
appreciate the piece or the photograph with the
information that is supplied ?
Do : The photograph of my body travelling
through space and entering the water holds a
great deal of latent and manifest information.
I don't think much else has to be added. I make
no attempt to deny its overt manifestations.
ws : How does this relate to your Push Up piece
on the earth ?
Do : That piece was actually called Ground Level.
The project itself consisted of isolating fragments
of a process and examining them as ends in
themselves. I was expending energy for its own
sake. No objective result could be discerned
through this procedure. The sum total of
pounds per square inch exerted on the ground
could have resulted in the construction of a
substantial object, but I chose to exhaust myself
instead, simply to allow energy to flow through
to the ground. Later I projected slides of this 12
activity back onto exactly the same area, on
snow, and thus literally re-entered the space by
means of my image. The photographic residue of
that process was driven back to the site, to the
area where the original pressure had been
released. I worked on the snow-covered ground
with these photographic images for nearly an
hour, measuring them, opposing them, fading
into the figures. It was finding form in output
alone. Expenditure became content.
ws: What about Deformity and the nail
sharpening ?

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