CL: Have you ever been involved with the production of the glass?

LB: On a trip to France, I got invited to a Saint-Gobain factory where glass was made, and it was fascinating. But I didn’t want to get into that—I was just fascinated by the vastness of what it takes to make glass and how ubiquitous it is in our society. It exists everywhere.

CL: Do you think glass is the mainstay of your practice? Or is it just one part of a whole?

LB: Well, paper was a good material for the vapor drawings. I had a fairly extensive library of engineering books on the technologies related to coating thin films, but none of the books talked about coating paper. So I was out there; I had this tool, and I found myself doing something that nobody had ever done before. It made me feel really good to play with it. I started working so fast, there was work just falling off my hands. There were a lot of rejects, but I had put a hell of a lot of work into those rejects. That’s when I decided to start tearing them up and combining things to get somewhere new and not waste the energy that had been put into the stuff.

I was so happy to have made that decision, because there was so much stuff left over from experiments that was good-looking but had a problem somewhere. I could easily tear that problem away and combine it with something else and make these little things that I’d never seen before— images that didn’t transmit light, but reflected and absorbed it as the glass did.

The light differentials across the surface of the paper really depended on what the surface quality of the paper was. If you look at it under a glass, you see that the paper is like a lawn; it’s got little hairs.

CL: Fibers.

LB: Right. And the way different papers are made determines how different that surface is, because they all have hair on them, and what that hair does when it faces the vapor stream is amazing.

CL: Again, it’s seemingly magical as it’s something you can’t really see. It’s microscopic.

LB: Yeah, you can’t see it if you get up close to it, but you step back from the work and all of a sudden it becomes a cohesive thing. That just added to the magic for me; I was totally infatuated with it. And I was doing things like weaving the light into the paper by creating gradients, where lines dissolved into each other. Every one was different, and every one was interesting. I couldn’t do anything that wasn’t interesting—at least to me.

Each thing I did took me to the next thing. There was no end: when I got bored, the imagery was gone and it was time to move on to another kind of imagery.

CL: What was the duration of the vapor drawing process? How long did you have to wait to see what you’d done?

LB: About an hour. It was really fast. Plus, the tank was huge; I could have a lot of stuff in there and experiment on different things at a time. One hour might give me fifteen different pieces of evidence of the activity in the tank. Every position in it collected the molecules in a different manner, so there was no end to the amount of diversity. That was just part of the wonder of the whole thing.

CL: Beyond glass, you have also made different kinds of work on paper—the collages and the Fractions.

LB: As far as I’m concerned, everything is an experiment. One thing leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another. Some of them are better than others, simply because they have a more finished feeling to them. And some of them don’t have that finished feeling, and they’re still better than others. So there is no loss in whatever I choose to work with.

CL: I want to come back to light. We’ve been talking about artificial light, and your outdoor projects also involve sunlight. How do you think of light as a source, as a medium?

LB: I think of light as a material I can get for free. I can use it as casually or as formally as I want, and there’s no end to the amount of it that I have access to.

If I’m doing something where there’s a physical object that wants to incorporate itself in some manner, engaging the ambient light—I look for those kinds of opportunities. Because that’s my game: I find the place that has the most interesting options and then go after milking it dry.

I forced myself to think of shows, or of gallery spaces, as extensions of the studio, because it was the only way I could fit into a commercial arena without hating myself. I didn’t want to be part of all that shit. I wanted success, I wanted money, I wanted everything everybody wants, but I didn’t want to fuck with the scene; I mistrusted it. The only people I trusted were my immediate friends, because most of them were my mentors and my peers and teachers. I was very lucky. They were just there, and would volunteer only honest opinions—wouldn’t give you an opinion unless you asked for it, then you’d get what they really felt.

CL: Moving then, from light to sound: You’ve loved guitars your whole life, and have a formidable collection. For you, how do the worlds of music and visual art overlap?

LB: Well, when I went off to art school I liked folk music, all acoustical sound—no electric stuff with regular amplification. I liked the simplicity of the idea of being a troubadour. Playing a twelve-string guitar resonates much more than a six-string and it plays louder, so with my hearing problem I could hear it. And that’s what meant a lot to me, because I liked the feeling of being in the rhythm that I created for myself.

They’re two different kinds of sensate experiences that have engaged me over the years. One is the physical act of making things, making an object. You might say, ‘Well, that makes you a sculptor.’ I’m not sure if I’m a sculptor. I’m not even sure if I’m an artist. I only know that if I keep my hands busy and keep doing stuff, I introduce myself to new things that I haven’t seen before. That’s the bottom line, to be able to constantly be engaged in something new for me.

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‘Larry Bell. Time Machines’ is on view from 1 November 2018 – 10 March 2019 at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami FL.

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