Moving Metal

Janet Van Fleet

Interview by L. Valena
April 12, 2023

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was a piece of music. It's funny, when I first got the prompt, the album cover appeared to be a gong rack, and I have previously played in a gamelan! The music had lots of metallic sounds, like a gamelan, and then some sort of strings that might have been vibrating. It was all metal, striking sounds. There's a characteristic monotony, which I think was deliberate, and then in the middle of it was the sound of footsteps and maybe some vague spoken sounds. Very subtle.

What were your first thoughts and feelings?

It was the metal piece that really spoke to me. I like the sound of something striking metal, and the vibrations. I use metal a lot in my work too, so I thought we had a good match.

Where did you go from there?

Well, as you know, I had somehow missed the prompt at the appropriate time, and was in Boston. I had to wait until I got back to Vermont to get to my studio, so I had about two days to work. I had to hit the ground running. My first thought was that music, unlike most of the visual arts, is not stationary. It moves through time and space. So I felt that I wanted to make a piece that moved in some way, and also incorporated the striking metal suggestion.

I started by doing that very literally. I have a series of pieces that I did many years ago, called Rolling Boil, about being really angry about political stuff that was going on in the country. Everything was on wheels. I had a piece left over, a little cart, which I thought I would use. I often reuse pieces in my work. If you don't buy it or take it away, it's up for grabs. That's part of my process.

I first made a piece that I really hated. It was horrible! I knew it was dumb, and that it wasn't the way to go. The cart had a little round aperture in it, and I was able to insert the neck of an old clamp light in it. It sounded cool when it was struck, and I had things falling down and striking the metal rim. But it didn't sound right, it didn't look right. It was too literal. It needed to have the suggestion of music, rather than the execution.

In Boston I had found a piece of metal when I was out with my friend walking her dog. It was dirty, but I somehow was attracted and attached to it, so I had brought it back to Vermont with me. After the failure of the clamp light, I decided I would try to use that piece of metal I had picked up in Boston. I washed it, and it really fit nicely on the cart. I wanted to have these upright metal wires with the washers on them, so I needed something for them to be inserted into. That meant I needed a piece of wood. So I cut out a piece of wood that was the same size as the hunk of metal, and painted it black. That became the substrate into which I could insert the standing bits, and I added washers as a decorative element.

I was thinking today: why are they called washers? It kind of suggests water, which also moves. It's a moving, flowing thing, like music.

At that point, I thought I was done. I was moving onto another piece, which involved making some little figures. They were going to be suspended from some arms. I had thought about putting a figure lying down in between those two rows of uprights. But that wasn't right, so I just didn't move forward in that direction. But once I made those little pieces, I thought it would be really cool to put them into this piece. So I did.

So cool. What are they made of?

The heads of the figures are buttons, the bodies are wood, and the legs are wire. There are two male figures, with penises, and two female figures, with breasts. The breasts are made out of small tacks, and the penises are made of little bits of black wire.

I'm just amazed by how fast you turned this around. Is this your usual cadence?

Actually, yes. I think a lot of people who participate in Bait/Switch are finding out what their process is. I've been doing this for so long, that I know what my process is. I just have to do it.

How did you get started with this process?

I've been doing this professionally for 25 years. At the beginning, I was doing a lot of painting, because I thought that's what artists do. I like painting, but then I discovered three dimensional work and old stuff/found objects. I realized that was my medium. For the last many decades now I've been working primarily with found objects. Over time I kind of know what I'm looking for. I don't use color very much, I mostly have made things that are earth tones, natural metal and wood. This piece is unusual in the sense that I used those very shiny metal bits. Usually I use things that are kind of older and rusty. But for this one, it seemed like it wanted to have that brightness. So that was kind of surprising.

That's great. I find that people often make things that surprise them in some way when they're making work for Bait/Switch. I'm glad that, even though your process is so well-defined, something unexpected still happened.

Absolutely. I've participated in two Telephone projects that were run by Nathan Langston. In both of those cases, that happened as well.

If you could choose a superpower, what would it be?

I would like to be able to look inside my body, and other people's bodies. It's so amazing that we live inside these bodies, and we only see the outside of them. We really don't see what goes on inside the package. Last time I had a colonoscopy, the person showed me the inside of my large intestine on a video monitor, and that was very cool. Actually seeing this thing go up inside your body and looking at what it looks like on the inside. I would just love to see what it's like in there. Unfortunately, you really can't look inside of it without destroying it. I would like to see it in action.

Do you have any advice for someone else approaching this project for the first time?

I think people should just have fun and play. I assume that people who apply to do this are already prepared to do that, otherwise why would they ask to participate? So I think people probably come to the enterprise with that spirit. Don't stress. That's my advice. Have fun.

Call Number: Y100MU | Y105.vaMo

Janet Van Fleet is a visual artist who uses found and manipulated materials to create assemblages and constructions, with current work focused on large wall-hung figures. Van Fleet grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, then went on to earn a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Education. She is a founder of Studio Place Arts (SPA), a three-story community center for the visual arts in Barre, Vermont, where her studio is located.