1997 Interview by Joan Simon

Lines of Inquiry 

For nearly thirty years sculptor Fred Sandback has evoked room-filling volumetric forms using the most minimal of materials—ordinary colored yarn. Below, he discusses the origins, means and purposes of his deceptively simple practice.

This interview was conducted September 1, 1996, by telephone from Westport in upstate New York to New Hampshire’s Rindge, where Fred Sandback had just returned after completing the installation for his Manhattan exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts [September 12, 1996–June 29, 1997] and preparing a survey of nearly thirty years of drawing at Lawrence Markey Gallery, New York. He was getting ready to fly to Cologne via Boston and Frankfurt if Hurricane Edouard didn’t intervene (it did not). In Cologne, Sandback opened a show of his work at Galerie Rolf Ricke; he went on to Zurich for his exhibition at Annemarie Verna Galerie. Follow-up conversations took place in November 1996.

In this interview, Sandback discusses an almost thirty-year career that he characterizes as “a nomadicized existence.” His is a sculpture practice that puts him on the road often to construct works at different sites, and he will sometimes rebuild the same piece in different places over the years. Sandback travels with a duffel in which he carries his materials: skeins of ordinary acrylic yarn. His signature medium is a single strand of yarn which he stretches point-to-point within a room to create geometric figures that simultaneously define pictorial planes and architectural volumes. A floor-to-ceiling line may be repeated four times, creating an open screen or wall-like stand within a room. Similarly, a pair of room-high rectangles, set at an angle to each other, each constructed of a baseline flush with the floor and two verticals, function as independent frames or portals. Though fixed in space, they seem to shift dynamically as our sight lines change when we walk around them or pass through them. Made of air and edges, Sandback’s sculptures are minimalist in concept and in image; they are also quite literally minimal in weight, mass and materiality. Thus Sandback’s works offer the Platonic form of the minimalist primary object. They precisely define real volumetric forms in real space, but forgo the mass of a tangible object.

Sandback’s palette of yarns (he has also used string, wire, and elastic cord) has varied over the years to include intense yellows, reds, oranges, pinks, purples, blues, and greens, as well as more muted tans, browns, grays, and light blues. He has experimented with fluorescent hues, and for a time in the 1980s used multicolor yarns made up of painted banded increments, each several inches long. He also often uses black or white. His colors are selected, in part, to assure visibility, to allow a line to be clearly evident but not obtrusive in situations as different as a Neo-Classical marble staircase, a room whose modernist glass curtain wall reveals a garden beyond, or the “white plasterboard cube,” as Sandback calls it, which is his typical framework and often a deliberate choice. The point is for the edge to be evident wherever it is located, but never so visible as to call undue attention to itself.

Slightly rough-textured, Sandback’s material absorbs light as it intensifies and strengthens our perception of his supple, thin line. The line also has a certain glow, an aura of sorts; the fuzzy, hairy surround of the yarn’s constituent fibers functions almost the way bits of charcoal or pastel dust do to amplify the density of a linear trail.

Sandback’s constructions echo the dawn-to-earth yet utopian Russian constructivist precedents of Malevich and Tatlin. This is especially true of his corner installations, where triangles are played off two walls and the floor, dynamically charging the rectilinear architectural supports. One thinks also of a more immediate lineage of American geometric abstractionists, especially given Sandback’s Yale training. The edge that defines and floats Sandback’s planes is not unlike the edge determining perceptual shifts between color fields in Josef Albers’s paintings. (Though Albers’s color course was still taught at Yale when Sandback was an undergraduate, Albers himself was no longer teaching.)

Sandback was born in 1943 in Bronxville, N.Y. He attended Yale as an undergraduate, studying philosophy and sculpture (BA, 1966), and as a graduate student in art (MFA, 1969). He began to exhibit publicly while still at Yale. His first solo gallery shows were in Germany in 1968, at Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, and Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich. His first New York gallery show was at Dwan in 1969. His first solo museum exhibitions took place in Europe at Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, in 1969, and at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1973. His first large-scale solo show in the U.S. was at New York’s P.S. 1 in 1978 (and the very first non-gallery show at the Clocktower in 1974). He has continued to show frequently at museums and galleries in Europe and the U.S. His more recent peripatetic practice has included exhibitions at the Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim (1986); the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover (1987; the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (1987); and shows at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1989) and Magasin 3, Stockholm (1991).

Among Sandback’s museum shows must be counted those at the Fred Sandback Museum in Winchendon, Massachusetts. Under the patronage of the Dia Art Foundation, the small museum opened at 74 Front Street in 1981 and closed this past summer. Sandback’s relationship to Dia is long-standing. Heiner Friedrich, who showed Sandback in his Munich gallery, later established the Lone Star Foundation; it subsequently became part of the Dia Art Foundation, which was founded by Friedrich, Philippa de Menil (now Fariha Friedrich) and Helen Winkler. Sandback’s current exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, contains eight string installations and three small wood bas-reliefs, a new development in his work. The wood pieces are being shown for the first time in New York. 

Drawings in Space 

Joan Simon
You once referred to your use of thread or yarn as being akin to using a pencil. 

Fred Sandback
It’s a very basic way of expressing yourself, which is not too encumbering. I’m lucky to have a medium that allows me to stay light on my feet. It really is like drawing. 

Simon
Is it true that what prompted you to begin to use that line, that piece of string, was an off-hand remark? I believe it was George Sugarman who made the comment— 

Sandback
Yes, it was George Sugarman. He was a visiting artist at Yale, and there was a “crit” of some kind. It was 1967. I rapped painting, groused about narrative, pictorial content, material content, signifying content. George sort of snapped, “Stretch a piece of string between two points and leave it be.” Perhaps he prompted me to do exactly that. 

Simon
When you did take that piece of string, you stretched it not just between two points but stretched it so that it described a volume.

Sandback
The string suggested the outline of a piece of lumber, a two-by-four, lying on the floor. 

Simon
In some ways it sounds like a lot of things Bruce Nauman was doing around that time. You were surrounding, making the edge of the invisible visible. He was doing the opposite. He was casting the space between plywood boxes, or the space underneath a chair—making solids from the negative, empty spaces within the surrounding edges. 

Sandback
I thought those pieces were great. I knew them through documentation. I don’t think I had ever seen them at that time. 

Simon
From this low thing, the size of a piece of wood, what happened? How did you continue? 

Sandback
When I started, I had no idea it would be an ongoing thing for thirty years. The string provided a medium and a basic modus operandi; I felt entirely at ease in a nonobjective framework. Pretty soon I wanted to find a way to define volume to get away from sculpture’s pictorial qualities. 

Simon
Why did you want to get away from pictorial space? You’ve mentioned it a number of times—in relation to Naum Gabo, and in your complaints about sculpture to Sugarman. 

Sandback
Well, Gabo, along with Albers, was one of the two greats of the contemporary academy of art. You could feel his presence all over the place. And while his work has certain things I wanted or could imagine I wanted in sculpture, it also struck me as wrong. It seemed to be, well, to be telling stories about abstraction, making up old stories. It wasn’t itself abstract. 

Simon
What were the early metal rod pieces you made? And why did you stop making them in the late sixties? 

Sandback
I welded the metal pieces to partially define the boundaries of imagined solid volumes, but soon began to want to diminish that reference to a closed volume. 

Simon
When and why did you start using color in the string pieces? 

Sandback
Well, they have to be some color or other. I use color in simple constructive ways—to make a piece more recessive or aggressive, louder or softer, warmer or more brittle—and to balance the relationships that various pieces have as they coexist with each other, and with a particular environment. Color did service from the beginning. The first pieces were high-key colors. I thought the string had to be more visible, which wasn’t so. 

Nuts and Bolts 

Simon
Would you talk a bit about the craft of what you do? How you select the yarn, work with it, where you buy it? 

Sandback
I buy my yarn at Wal-Mart, and I use the acrylic kind, not because it’s cheap but because woolen fibers are too short for a line to remain taut under tension. This limits my palette, and I am on the lookout to broaden it. 

Simon
What is the relationship of your sculptures to your work on paper—the drawings, the prints? 

Sandback
The prints and drawings have always shared speculative and documentary relationships to my three-dimensional pieces in varying ways. The cut drawings I showed at Nolan/Eckman gallery two years ago and the new bas-reliefs are the first things I’ve made which don’t do this. 

Simon
What are the cut drawings? 

Sandback
Those were made with a mat knife on mat board. The line I generated was sort of nowhere. It wasn’t negative in the sense of a cut making a removal—just a slight pushing aside. 

Simon
How is your work sold? Is it sold by diagram, with instructions? Do you provide a formal certificate? And when it is sold, are you supposed to reinstall it, and to supervise any later reinstallations? 

Sandback
A limp piece of string needs at least diagram, instructions, and a certificate and, in the case of most pieces that refer beyond their own boundaries, my help as reinterpreter; but, to the extent that a practical canon of interpretation starts to emerge, this job becomes more assignable, as ultimately, of course, it has to be. From repeated reconstructions there emerges a general sense of what these things ought to look like. 

Simon
Something that distinguishes your work from much Minimal work, and related Conceptual work, is that you have rarely been involved with mathematical systems, or even measurements. You said not long ago that you stopped measuring, and began to work more intuitively, even with pieces you had built and previously measured before. How and why? 

Sandback
To the extent that a piece addresses its particular environment in a way that I arrive at intuitively, a set of previous measurements can only be a hindrance. 

Simon
Your work depends on the room as its support. From early on there have been some frequent motifs, positions, operations: lines stretched floor-to-ceiling; diagonals bisecting a room; a right-angled U-shaped form that functions as an apparently freestanding element within a room. And your work has always had a very important relationship to the floor. Someone recently commented at the Dia space that there was a kind of rubbing visible in the floor—as though the line had been stretched and had abraded the floor. I wondered what you thought of these ghost effects? 

Sandback
The ghost on the floor is the ghost of a clean gallery. Everything else shows wear and tear except the areas right next to the lines where people decline to walk. I don’t especially like that, but I’ve decided to live with it. Some of these things are rather like drips on a painting—as I get used to them in my proceedings they may move from being leftovers to being constituents. 

Simon
You once said that the relationship of a room to your work was that of a dance floor to a dancer. 

Sandback
It’s like canvas to the painter or stage to the dancer; it’s what I have to build off of. 

More lines: the Bas Reliefs 

Simon
You said the other day that some big transitions had recently occurred in your work. Presumably you were referring to the new, small wood-panel pieces? 

Sandback
Well, I don’t know if it’s been a big transition. It’s been a sort of through-the-looking-glass thing. Of getting away from the limitations of that framework of interior space. The wooden things have bold lines cut into flat, irregularly shaped panels. The line functions visually from all the way across the room. So when you look at one of these works, it’s not in a drawing space, it’s in a sculpture space. The works are fragments—or they appear to be fragments—of possible sculptures. It’s been a year since I began to have the idea to show a drawinglike thing. I tried to saw into the panels or cut them with an ax. 

Simon
You are referring to the multiple criss-crossing grooves cut into the shallow wood panels? These have complicated intersections of lines; the effect is almost puzzlelike, especially compared to the simplicity of structure of the yarn works. 

Sandback
Yes—they forgo the clearer structure of the yarn sculptures—it’s not at all clear where the lines start and where they stop. It’s ironic that the low reliefs are wood panels on the wall. Though they provide a partial exit from the residual pictorial quality of the yarn pieces, the fact that they ended up on the wall has its own pictorial aspect. They’re in some more known sort of space, the space of bas-relief. 

Simon
Can you talk about why you made these works so small? 

Sandback
Well, they seem like they have to be small. As the size increases, the lines become more trapped by the panel—at least that’s how it seems to me right now. 

Simon
What about their color? 

Sandback
They are painted with acrylic house paint. The red ones are the same paint I used for my house and the panels are for the most part number two pine—often scraps from the kindling pile. 

Simon
You make these wood pieces in the studio and take them to another place for exhibition. You are not building in the space, as you have been with the yarn pieces for the past thirty years. 

Sandback
It’s a big burst of fresh air for me to work with my whole concentration in the studio. One of my frustrations is that I got myself into always using the dynamics of the buildings I worked in, and so became bound temporally to the specific site. The new pieces extricate me from that segmentation of experience. Maybe it’s just a circular little sideroad, but it’s very gratifying. 

Simon
And how did you install them at Dia? 

Sandback
They claim an equal amount of space and the same sort of space as the generously proportioned string sculptures. There’s 7,000 square feet of space at Dia, with eleven sculptures in it; three of the eleven are these shallow relief things. Each pretty much occupies a wall. 

Simon
Could you talk about the difference for you between size and scale? The yarn works are almost immaterial, the edge a very fine line, defining usually a very large volume of space. There’s a diagonal line in the Dia show that bisects a thirty-by-thirty-foot room. Nearby is one of the new wood pieces, a diptych actually, barely a foot square. 

Sandback
These pieces seem to have somewhat similar scales in their relationship to their surroundings, but need different aspects of size to accomplish this. 

Simon
Why are dimensions not listed on the checklist for the Dia show, but the color of yarn for each untitled work is? 

Sandback
The checklist is just a guide for the visitor—color and placement are indicators enough of which piece is which; beyond that, I didn’t want to communicate an interest in numerical measurements, which I don’t have. 

Simon
Could you also talk about what you perceive to be the differences between working in tandem with a site, site-specific works, and environments? 

Sandback
Inasmuch as a line that I draw inevitably makes reference to where it is drawn, it needs to in some way work in tandem with its place and so is specific to it. “Environment” suggests to me a work that eclipses the given environment for the sake of a new one. 

Looking at History 

Simon
Critical writings about your work usually invoke the Russian Constructivists, and then usually go right to David Smith and Mark di Suvero. What art-historical names do you see in your lineage? Would you choose the same ones that others bring up when they discuss your work, such as Tatlin, Gabo, Giacometti, David Smith . . .? 

Sandback
Do I have anything to say about it? Giacometti was a major love affair. Recently I picked up David Sylvester’s book on Giacometti—found it still very relevant to me personally, now. The Russian Constructivists weren’t particularly important to me. “Real sculptors” who were up there with Michelangelo—that was my first major love affair. I spent the summer in Paris when I was still an undergraduate and had no glimmer of what art was. The stuff I saw there—sculptures of Michelangelo, Maillol, Rodin, Brancusi—that was the big package of inspiration for me. 

Simon
Lisa Liebmann, in a catalogue essay written in 1984 about your work, “The Cabin at 8 a.m.,” noted, “Threadlike lines and variations on cat’s cradle were something of a surrealist fetish during the thirties, and in New York during and after the war.” She cited works by Matta and Ernst, and the first major exhibition by the expatriates, “First Papers of Surrealism,” assembled by André Breton and strung together by Marcel Duchamp in ’42 in that huge, room-sized web of string. She talked of Giacometti in relation to your work and also likened your materials, the string, pens, and pencils, to the tools of automatism. 

Sandback
What a marvelous image that Duchamp set was. But did that inform my thinking? No, not at any conscious level. It surely comes into focus now—it’s a wonderful thing to think about and to play off of. I don’t think it was then. 

Simon
What about Pollock? 

Sandback
The idea of “overall” painting was much more stimulating to me at the time than were the particular paintings. 

Dia, Then and Now 

Simon
I was thinking about your closing the museum of your work that Dia sponsored for almost fifteen years, and about your preparations for a show of your work at Dia in New York. What kind of exhibition do you conceive this show to be? 

Sandback
It’s not a retrospective. It’s what I wanted to do at a given moment. But it’s got some retrospective aspects to it. There are two big sculptures from a series that Dia owns. One was built in 1978 in a big exhibition at P.S. 1; the other was built in 1976 for an exhibition where the New York Earth Room is now, organized by Judd to benefit the War Resisters League. Aside from those pieces, everything is contemporary or else contemporary-dated and ongoing. 

Simon
Can you explain a bit what you mean by contemporary, as opposed to contemporary-dated and ongoing? 

Sandback
Images that occurred here for the first time are contemporary; new conceptions of an earlier image might be dated 1968/1996. 

Simon
Your relationship with Dia goes back a long time. Could you fill in some of the background of how the Dia artists—Dan Flavin, Bob Whitman, La Monte Young, John Chamberlain, Walter De Maria, Donald Judd—came together? Did all of you know each other? 

Sandback
Pretty much, although I didn’t have particularly close bonds with many of them. 

Simon
You were one of the artists who developed your own museum under Dia’s patronage. Were you all aware that these different museum spaces devoted to different artists were being made? 

Sandback
Was there any kind of group consciousness there? No, it seemed to be rather the opposite—there was something of an isolating aspect. You could concentrate on your own work in your own environment. It tended to keep people home on the farm. 

Simon
How did the invitation to work on your own museum come about? 

Sandback
It was casual. I presented the notion. There was a small building in Winchendon—a former bank—that was very cheap and derelict. And I needed a place to work. Very rapidly, spontaneously, the idea grew. Work started on the building in ’79, and it opened to the public in ’81. 

Simon
How would you describe the difference between how you worked before you had the place and after? 

Sandback
It was a little hard at age thirty-seven to start to have a place that was in some sense permanent. Not hard, but a little peculiar, or at least premature, to start tending your own legacy. 

Simon
What did you show there? 

Sandback
A series of installations that were commissioned by Dia, and some that developed spontaneously. 

Simon
Which, for example, were commissioned? And are any of these in the Dia exhibition? 

Sandback
There was a mix, which I had the freedom to determine—pieces number five and number ten in the current Dia exhibition are part of a series of “Ten Vertical Constructions,” two others of which I built in Winchendon. The mix of things I showed there was probably about fifty-fifty. 

Simon
The commissioned pieces are still owned by Dia? 

Sandback
Yes. 

Simon
When the museum was open to the public, how did you administer it? 

Sandback
We kept regular gallery hours, we did advertising, and we arranged the local education program. 

Simon
Who is “we”? 

Sandback
I and my curator/director Jean Fincke. 

Simon
How did the decision come about to close the museum? 

Sandback
I initiated the decision and my colleagues at Dia concurred. I felt that the relocation to the new building Dia is planning for its permanent collection will serve these functions better. 

Simon
Was 74 Front Street sold? 

Sandback
Yes. 

Early Days 

Simon
Where were you born? 

Sandback
I was born in Bronxville, N.Y. My father was a commercial artist. We were a pretty unstable family. Moved around a lot. To a certain extent you went where the work was. Commercial illustrators never spent a long time in one place. For a while we were in Hartford. Then he was in Florida, where Dad really wanted to be. He was not that good at staying a long time in places, and he was not around that much in my life. 

Simon
Were you one of those kids who had a talent for drawing, or cartooning in your notebooks, and the like? 

Sandback
Yes, I always made art. Like our son Peter, now a sculptor and professional woodworker, I seemed always to have to be pushing something around. 

Simon
What sent you off to Yale, and did you have any idea that you would study art? 

Sandback
No. Because my father was cast somewhat as the black sheep—as that which you did not want Fred to become. I was supposed to not be an artist. I think I went to Yale because it was expected by my family—continue the family tradition—and to a certain extent I found my way to the art department out of contrariness. 

Simon
Was it unusual for a graduate student to be exhibiting in commercial galleries, as you did? 

Sandback
Yes, my first exhibitions in Europe and at the Dwan Gallery in New York predate my graduation. Though it was what many of us thought was supposed to happen next, it was regarded with a certain amount of skepticism as well, both by myself and my contemporaries. 

Simon
The way you work, the craft, the materiality of the line and the immateriality of the structure, reminds me of something you said about a year ago, that you made stringed instruments and long bows. 

Sandback
They were not amused at the Yale art school when, applying for admission, I told them that I had done such things. That did not fit into their agenda. My relationship to such things is persistent, and I’m sure it’s quite connected to the sculpture that I make, though it’s hard for me to define that relationship. 

Simon
And I think you also talked about caning, someone close to you made caned furniture. 

Sandback
Oh yes. Uncle Fred, the antique dealer, the restorer of furniture. That was a very nice early image. Uncle Fred would cane chairs, and I would watch. Uncle Fred sort of defined my masculine role model—he and his partner Dominic Marcarelli, who utterly amazed me when I was five or so by transforming a log into a naked female figure. 

Simon
Did you actually work with him? 

Sandback
No, I never did. I always liked it, though. When I was old enough to go to the Peabody Museum by myself one of my favorite exhibits was a demonstration of how to make snowshoes. 

Simon
I know you are an expert archer, and have built long bows. Didn’t you tell me that you also built kayaks? 

Sandback
This was my job for any number of summers, to teach young fellows how to make cloth-covered boats. Very economical use of materials. Very light and airy. 

Simon
You’re a trekker, climber, kayaker. In addition to traveling to make your work, you are in a very real sense an explorer, a world traveler—I think you’re the only person I know who’s gone to the North Pole. There are obviously lots of levels to your use of the word “nomadicized.” 

Sandback
I think that’s funny. I’m very much a stick in the mud. But by a strange confluence of things I have become this traveling guy. 

Simon
You said Yale was really an arena for painters when you were there. These were the post-Albers years, when Jack Tworkov was the director. Thinking about Tworkov just made me connect your new wood intersecting incisions to his linear motifs. 

Sandback
A nice connection. He was kind, generous with his attention, though we didn’t have an ongoing exchange. 

Simon
How often did visiting artists come? 

Sandback
There were many of them. Very illuminating. Samaras came, Morris, Judd. 

Simon
Which were the most interesting to you? 

Sandback
Judd was one; Morris another. I think those two guys were the main two that appeared on my horizon. 

Simon
Both of them were writers and artists. I’m trying to imagine what each was like in the studio as a critic. 

Sandback
Morris was a guy who needed a lot of stimulation. Liked to see things happen, was full of suggestions and parrying back and forth. Don would watch. He was a good watcher. Morris was more concerned with modus operandi, with how one did things, with schemes for making things. And I don’t think that was what Judd wanted. I think he was watching for—no surprise—specific qualities in people’s work. 

Simon
You also studied with George Kubler while you were at Yale? 

Sandback
Yeah, a friend and I didn’t want to take our history of art course. We were very cheeky and said maybe we’ll have lunch with the master every week. And the wonderful thing about a place like Yale is that you could do things like that. Kubler had no use for contemporary art—it was not where his mind was. I think he regarded it as pretty peculiar, retrograde. But he was very kind, and he kept inviting us to talk about it. It wasn’t a class. He and two guys, two students, had lunch together. 

Points of Viewing 

Simon
Your work allows for a kind of shyness on the part of your audience; a viewer can keep a good distance from a work and take it all in. But also the works allow for a very intimate address; you are invited to walk up to them, and through them. Viewers want to get up close to the yarn and touch it, and while the works are ephemeral, they are not really as delicate as they appear. The new, small wood panel works also have that double approach. You can’t stand still and hold a “one-point” perspective for long. You have to keep walking. In this regard, I’m fascinated by your use of the term “pedestrian space,” a characterization that you and a friend— 

Sandback
Dan Edge— 

Simon
—first used in 1968. What did you mean? 

Sandback
It was related to the idea of wanting to get off the pedestal, get off the canvas. And I think it was coined with an awe of other cultures where art seemed to fit in the middle of things rather than on the periphery. That seemed to be a good description in general. I wanted to be in the middle of it, whatever “it” was. Whether it was culture, or life—whatever. I didn’t want to be over on the side looking at it. I wanted to be in the middle of it. Pedestrian space had a different intonation but it certainly was related to the literal space that Don Judd wanted to occupy. 

Simon
The words “pedestrian space” also seem to capture the performing aspects of the work. 

Sandback
It’s got the foot. The foot in them. 

This interview was conducted by telephone on September 1, 1996; further conversations took place in November 1996. It was first published with an introductory text in Art in America 85, no. 5 (May 1997), pp. 86–93, 143.

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