An Insanely Great Sculpture
"SOAP" by Alan Rice and Richard Katz.
This sculpture is made of mild steel and it's about 28 feet long and about 15 feet across. It stands maybe 12 feet high. Definitely monumental abstract minimalist art.
Want to see a bigger picture with a road in front of it so you get some scale to it? Take a look at An Insanely Great Sculpture by Rice and Katz Big Picture by the Side of the Road with Mount Tam.
Want to see the sculpture from the other side?
Want to see the sculpture as it was proposed for the parking lot at the new Marriott in Emeryville?
Want to see a video of the sculpture? If you have a good fast connection to the net, AND you have Quicktime 3 or better, go to SoapMovie ; or email Richard Katz put Sculpture Video in the Subject field and type something in the message about how you want to see the video of the sculpture. Or just telephone FrogOJT.
About this Work of Art -- an essay by Richard Katz
Most of the audience doesn't know enough about producing soap to recognize these forms as tanks or tank bottoms from a soap factory. That doesn't matter. These are objects that have been through the mill of reality. The audience senses that they are not just arbitrary hunks of nonfunctional crap, not just "Art" for art's sake. These are pieces of heavy-duty iron, that have survived in good condition, and earned respect.
• The M&M piece has an essay on chaos growing out of it. The artist explores the edges of the metal ad infinitem (and beyond).
•The big-curve -with-rectangles-cut-out has two chaotic pieces of steel attached, one in a U-shape and one a long straight piece of very thick flat plate. These pieces of steel are painstakingly cut with the torch to be as complex as anything else on earth.
• The cone-shaped tank bottom has gigantic zig-zags attached to it, with hooks at the ends.
Real life doesn't have any non-sequiturs. If something really ever happened, you accept that it could happen. If an element of art looks contrived and phony and arbritary, like it never could have been a real part of anything, the sculptor has a problem. He's got an oversized trinket. God doesn't just walk up and stick perfect triangles on things and walk away. The fanciful zig-zags and chaotic edged objects here maintain their mapping to the soap-factory reality from whence they came. The artist transports the original steel elements of soap factory reality, over time and over space, into our present and into the future.
About the origins of this Work of Art -- a short history by Richard Katz
Al and I started the sculpture project in '78 or '79. Some developer in San Francisco called up my trucking company, and asked if I could "haul away some tanks". I went to look at the job, and the "tanks" were gigantic vats that were embedded in the four floors of the Pioneer Soap Company. We took the job. We hired up a crew, and extricated all the pipes, vats, pumps, etc from the building; the building ended up being the hq of Macweek, I believe. Aside from getting paid for the work, and a share of the scrap sales, we made a deal with the developer that we'd make him a sculpture out of the steel, and a maquette of the sculpture out of the brass and bronze from the valves. So the developer changed his mind later, and put a railroad car where the sculpture was supposed to go. We were done with our part of the rehab, so we hauled away all the steel that had been earmarked for the sculpture; most of it had been cut out of the building artfully by Al, to preserve whatever shapes it had that he had as building blocks in his head. Dings and dents were a problem. The elements were big and dangerous.
He and I spent the next several years, off and on, sculpting the three elements of the piece. When he died, the three big elements had been completed, as I recall. (I don't know if the big bolts that hold the zigzag piece together were supposed to be exposed if you look at it from underneath, or not; I decided that they were, that they were meant to be discovered, as opposed to being concealed.)
The three elements were finally juxtaposed a couple years ago at the corner of the new playing field where Fifth Street in Berkeley meets Codornices Creek. That was through the goodwill of Mr Douglas Fielding. I paid for all the crane time. Shortly thereafter, the management of the field was handed over to the Berkeley/Albany Soccer Club, who freaked out about liability, and ordered the sculpture to be gone. Mr Fielding built a fence around it. It is the only major sculpture I've ever seen with a fence around it. I compromised with the soccer club --- the sculpture isn't really there permanently, it's For Sale. I even put a For Sale tag on it. A brass For Sale tag, with a phone number. They park their PortaPotty next to it..
If I had a spare fifty grand, I'd get it all sandblasted and primed and painted up, and get'er out there where maybe somebody'd pony up the righteous amount of cash to lay claim to it. I've put a lot of thought and effort into the project, taken out a few ads, made a video even. Now I read that Marriott is gonna build a new place, in Emeryville, and maybe Marriott'd pick up the tab to pay me and Al for our work and finish the project in a righteous fashion. That'd be cool. I'm aware that nobody is gonna spend over a quarter million bucks for public art unless the city holds a gun to their head; but since you gotta do it anyway, this is a hell of a better way to do it than to do one on commission. 'Cause it's already there; it's Three-D.
The sculpture has three elements that are worth about $120K apiece. They belong together. It would cost the buyer about $50K to get the sculpture sandblasted, primer-painted, and then painted with a coat of, say, white Imron. Then the new owner is free to execute any paint scheme he thinks is cool, because the sculptor (Mr Rice) was real clear that he didn't care about paint. When somebody asked him if zebra stripes would be okay, he said "Yeah, sure, zebra stripes." I never asked him if he were serious about that. I never questioned him about anything that had to do with the art we were engaged in, come to think of it. I'd probably let the whole thing go, as is where is, for $210k.