BEVERLY PEPPER WORKS ON SCULPTURE FOR PALMA MUSEUM

PALMA is a city of surprises, go for a stroll, turn a corner ... and you'll find a sculpture that you hadn't noticed before.
Yesterday I had the opportunity of seeing a sculpture in the making as American artist Beverly Pepper was here to oversee work on her sculpture which will stand outside the city's latest museum, the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum Es Baluart, which is being built in the Baluart Sant Pere in the old city walls, overlooking the bay. Ms Pepper described it as an “extraordinary experience”. The sculpture, in slate, will be five metres high and 1.70 wide, and as she explained, “I hadn't seen the stone. I told them what I wanted and they sent me a photo to ok it.” However, the photo did not reveal all the details and so it was necessary “to reinvent the sculpture. I had come (to Palma) with a model and thought it would be a piece of cake, instead it turned out that we had to do a lot of things that were not intended.”
She is full of praise for Calizas Mallorca, who are cutting the slate. She says “they were very flexible and very good and they have a sensibility about art which I found very strange, it's not strange among the people who work with their hands but you have to have good luck to find directors who have that kind of sensibility. These people are really terrific and of course they speak Italian, (Ms Pepper and her husband live between Italy and New York).... it's just like being at home.” She explained that the sculpture is not finished yet, and she will have to work to “bring the stone into its own, as it's not what I thought, it's much more interesting than I thought, but it needs to be tamed, so the stone and I are in combat right now and when we cut the pieces the way I want them to be then I will need to come back to finish it, but already I think it looks quite beautiful and I think it's going to be lovely near the sea here.” She went on to explain that the slab of slate is like a kind of altar, “I didn't intend it to be like that, but now there is something about it, it has a pagan feeling but in the best sense of the word, very much like the Spaniards, it's untamed. I can't see a Spaniard ever being taught tricks they'd have to perform, they're so independent and this stone has that kind of independence. And I think it's wonderfully symbolic of this country.” Beverly Pepper is no stranger to Spain, having worked on the North Station Park in Barcelona, a city of which she has fond memories. That was a job that took longer than expected, from 1986 to 1992, in fact, when it opened in time for the Olympics. This meant a lot of travelling to and from but that has never been a problem for this artist, who has an energy which belies her years.
But to get back to the sculpture she is doing for Palma, she had never worked in slate before but wanted black stone. She says she doesn't know why she didn't say “granite,” “but I believe in the divine accident. I think that when you are given something unexpected you can go someplace else with it, so I think it's wonderful.” Before she came to Majorca, she took a slab of slate to see how she could defoliate it and worked very hard, but “when I got here it had already been done by nature”. And she laughs, adding “that was good because I understood what I was working with.” Like all artists, she is a keen observer. She likes the new museum, saying it is extremely beautiful and very original, but could be destroyed by parking - “a place must be found to put the cars,” a problem the city fathers have been struggling with for years. The Museum is quite amazing, she says, and would probably help tourism .... if it were properly advertised. She pointed to the Guggenheim Museum as an example. Art people, she said, will go to all kinds of places to see art or good museums. She finds Palma an interesting city and singled out art curator Maria Lluisa Borras for her work in bringing sculpture to the streets. “Her contribution on the level of art is quite extraordinary, and took a lion's courage, as Spain is a man's world.” She was curious about people's reactions to the various art work in the streets. “I do a lot of public sculptures and I've discovered no matter how much you think people have learned, if you give them something they've never seen before, they're hysterical, they hate it, they reject it but when they get comfortable with it it's theirs. Sculptures do make people nervous.” And here she tells an anecdote about the time she was preparing a show in San Francisco. She was lying on her back, bolting something when a hippie came by and asked “what ya doin' lady?” “Building a bridge,” came the reply. “Far out, great,” was the response.
But, says the artist, he would have been horrified if he had been told it was a sculpture, a bridge was a much better idea.
In addition to the piece she is preparing for the new Museum, the artist will also be having a show in Palma next year or the year after.
As her works are large, I comment that transport must be a problem.
With typical humour she replies, “It's like travelling, I make believe they're all like matchsticks, you can put them in your pocket and bring them...” Beverly Pepper started her career as a commercial art director, then as a painter, holding her first solo exhibition in Rome in the early 1950s, before moving to sculpture, and this is how it all came about: “We moved into a house on the outskirts of Rome today it's practically in the centre - and there were 39 odd trees that had been cut down and left behind and they sort of kept staring at me.” Then, on a trip around the world she went to Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. This was a time when there were very few visitors, “those who went, flew in in the morning and left in the afternoon, but I stayed.” She was deeply influenced by the Khmer statuary many storeys high, which had been abandoned for centuries, with banyan trees growing all over them. She found it quite extraordinary and says “I walked in a painter but I walked out a sculptor, and when I got back to Rome I picked up an axe and started work on the trees and never looked back.” All the time she had been painting, she had the habit of making small clay and wood sculptures, but did not consider this a hobby. Nor when she switched to sculpture did she consider painting a hobby, it was always her job, and she still paints. In art, as in so many other fields, women seem to have to work so much harder, and Ms Pepper has strong views on this. “When I started sculpting I never felt like a woman, later on I learned I was a woman. I have never felt like a woman artist.” She considers herself a strong supporter of feminism but doesn't see the word woman as an adjective to describe an artist. “However,” she relates, “I had funny things happen to me but never took it personally. I would be one of the few people in the Sixties working in a factory and it made the men very uncomfortable. I was a young woman, I was not in bad shape and I remember the first time I worked in a factory they put a screen around me because it was a distraction for anyone. But,” she adds, “even if it were a man they would have put a screen, it was distracting, and slowly the screen went back, back, back until I was in the middle of the factory.” Thanks to this experience, she learned about working with men: “If you know your metier they respect you, there may be jokes - which I would have had to take them to court today - but then I thought it was flattery (laughter). We had a great relationship.” On the downside, “Before I was an artist I worked in an advertising agency and there I found one day I got paid less than the men and today I imagine it's the same. Discrimination was economic and I think it still is, very serious.” And while she thinks that we have been so lucky to have had the feminist movement, she has never doubted women were superior. “Who,” she asks, tongue in cheek (or maybe not) “do you think invented fire and the wheel when men were out killing animals?” What does she want from a sculpture? “I want my stones to look as though I'd found them, as though they'd come from another civilisation... then I get angry when people think I found them that way,” she laughs. She likes her works to bridge time, not to be set in a period but to give the impression they could have been made at any time, 5'000 years ago or just two years ago. She has worked with various materials but when asked if she prefers stone over metal, her eyes sparkle and she quotes the words of an old song: “When I'm not near the man I love I love the man I'm near” amid laughter, adding, “now I'm in love with stone but when I go back I'll be doing a site sculpture, earth and stainless steel, so I guess I'll be in love with that. The medium is me, I have to rise to the occasion, do something I can live with. Whenever I finish a work I always think it could have been better, I always feel I've learned so much from it.” Knowing that moment when to stop? “You work until you don't have that gnawing inside. Paul Klee talks about sand and an oyster making the pearl, a creative artist, like the oyster with that irritation, hopes to make a pearl. I don't know what the oyster thinks.” Palma will be able to see one “pearl” when the museum opens later this year.