Power House: Becky Howland at MoMA PS1, Then and Now
An interview with artist Becky Howland
In the mid 1980s, New York–based artist Becky Howland began creating a series of sculptural portraits of transmission towers, latticed steel structures that suspend power lines. For Howland, who was born In Niagara Falls, New York, home of the first hydroelectric generating plant, these towers were fixtures of a childhood landscape. Describing them as “omnipresent symbols of energy production, power distribution, and authoritarian control,” Howland recorded their geometries in scaled-down drawings before translating them into sculptural replicas. Her resulting Transmission Tower series examines these ubiquitous features of rural infrastructure, forming a key part of her decades-long investigation into the power — and disaster — generated through the exploitation of natural resources.
Fascinated by similar towers (or “pylons,” as they are known in the UK) that dot the landscape outside his native Liverpool, Mark Leckey makes use of the form in his own work, as a symbol for contemporary interconnectivity. For his exhibition at MoMA PS1, Leckey extended his practice of bringing other artists’ work into dialogue with his own by inviting Howland to install her transmission tower alongside his. Both towers, one made in the US in the late-mid 1980s and the other more recently in the UK, underscore the networked states of being to which Leckey’s work often alludes, while also referring back to the underlying project of Dream English Kid: Leckey’s attempt to retrace his own autobiography through found artifacts and other people’s memories.
In a fortuitous act of resonance between past and present, all seven of Becky Howland’s Transmission Towers were first exhibited in this same gallery (then known as P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s “Auditorium”) in 1986, as part of the exhibition Transmission Towers, curated by Claudia Gould. To mark this resonance, we spoke with Howland about her work, and how it has evolved since it was first on view at MoMA PS1.
Jocelyn Miller: You grew up in Niagara Falls. What was that like? Was your family involved in any of the local industry? Or the arts?
Becky Howland: I was born in Niagara Falls. My parents moved there from Michigan. My father was an aeronautical engineer, as well as a musician, and he got a job working at Bell Aerosystems in Niagara Falls designing rocket fuel systems. We moved when I was an infant to the Kenmore-North Tonawanda section of Buffalo, and stayed there until I was 10 years old. The falls and water systems figured large, in family lore and my imagination. At the time, one of my dad’s hobbies was photography, and he often photographed the Falls. He also told us vivid stories of the “broken-down barge” in the middle of the river, and people who’d narrowly escaped being swept over the Falls. Our family eventually got a little boat and we swam in the Niagara River. We drove around Buffalo and Grand Island — I have many memories of lying down in the backseat of the car and just wondering “What is that?” There were oil refinery fires at night, grids of oil and gas storage tanks, and of course armies of transmission towers marching from the hydroelectric plant at the Falls, which produced a lot of energy for the state. It was called the “Power Authority.”
How did you first start making art? Were there particular artists or communities that served as touchstones for you?
My mother was a homemaker from the same small Michigan town as my dad. Her older sister had eloped and gone to art school at the Chicago Institute of Art and Cranbrook. My mom taught me how to sew and knit. When I was in fifth grade a teacher told them I was an artist, and should be encouraged. My mom drove me to art classes at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. I don’t remember much about them, but I remember the buildings, white marble buildings set on a lake, and a huge Soutine hanging beef carcass and then there was Marisol’s baby and Samaras’s mirrored room. That red Soutine — against the white of the building and all the snow — in memory it’s like a great beating heart.
I went to art school at Syracuse University and loved Noguchi and Smithson. I loved Noguchi for his scale jumps and Smithson for his public sculpture of rocks and mirrors. I was crazy about the pieces he did in Emmen, Holland: Broken Circle and Spiral Hill. And of course Georgia O’Keeffe and Joni Mitchell. I wanted to study everything! Urban design and Eastern philosophy…. The third year I went to Japan and stayed there for 11 months, studying the language, temple gardens, and ceramics. One professor at SU said look up a friend in Japan, so I did. His father had been a National Living Treasure in ceramics and I ended up working as an apprentice there, in Bizen, for eight months. I asked him, “Where do you get the clay?” And he said, “Once Japan was all underwater, covered in seaweed…and it took centuries to make this clay.” They didn’t just go to the store and buy it. It was 78 generations of potters. I think that’s older than our country! Also Noguchi had studied with his father, and I met him there in Japan.
My years in high school and college were marked by political assassinations — of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and the murdered students at Kent State, who were protesting the war in Vietnam. Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment. The first Earth Day started in 1970, which captured the spirit of environmental activism. There’s an idealism of my generation that I love.
How did you end up first coming to New York City?
From Syracuse we did some field trips. My roommate was from Manhasset and I stayed with her and her family there. We would of course run a little wild in New York. For example, to buy tools, our professor sent us to a hand-forged tool shop. It was probably around First Street and Avenue C. Of course the owner had one arm and had come here from Romania and we sat around drinking bourbon with him.
I remember a doll factory on Greene Street in Soho. It had a conveyor belt that opened onto the street. Or rather, a vertical device that rotated — like at a drycleaners — carrying limbs and doll parts that had been cast or dipped in latex, that dried while they moved. Arms and legs of pale pink rubber. Bizarre.
After graduation I went to a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Judith Rothschild had been a visiting artist at Syracuse, and she told me about it. When that ended, I moved to Bucks County, PA, where my then-boyfriend lived. He got me a job at the welding shop where he worked. That was fine for a while and then we both got fired for welding a spiral staircase that spiraled the wrong way…oops. Then what? I drove back to P-town to pick up things I’d left behind, and dropped in on Jack Tworkov. He had another visitor who made me a list of artists that he knew in New York who might need an assistant. I called them all. It was a pretty amazing list. Nancy Graves, Barbara Kruger, and Pat Steir, among others. Nancy was the only one who needed help right then. So I moved here with $500 from my parents and a part-time job.
How is your relationship with New York then and now similar or different?
New York is my home. But sometimes I like to get away. Recently I was reading Tom Finkelpearl’s essay in the catalogue from David Hammons’s show at PS1 (in 1991!). It’s called “On the Ideology of Dirt,” and it talks about how, as the South Street Seaport got cleaned up, the art world was also being sanitized. For me, that is a very good description. But the shift accelerated from 1991 to 2017. I mean, I’ve lived here since the ‘70s, and I miss the dirt and the wildness.
Right at the end of 1979, we — meaning a small group of downtown artists — did The Real Estate Show, that crazy thing. Hard to imagine that happening now, but who knows. The coincidence, that Joseph Beuys would be in town and come to our show, or that some of the Germans in our group would know him — that’s the start of how we created ABC No Rio. I’d love to see something like that happening again. The serendipity that led me to the artists of the group Collaborative Projects, Inc., aka Colab. That is a whole other story. First the Real Estate Show, and then the Times Square Show, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Is there a political or feminist stance to the medium and scale at which you work? I admire the boldness of your large-scale sculptures, and also the deadpan nature of your industrial portraits — features many might term “masculine” — yet of course your objects could also, in another light, be characterized as decorative due to the delicate precision involved in rendering all the careful geometries of your towers’ latticework. I’m curious if such characterizations or discourses are important for you, or interesting in your art making?
As far as my sculpture, how I think about them is: “Reality is not my strong suit.” So a lot of the sculptures I made were to try and understand what is going on around me. The Transmission Towers felt like actual embodiments of power. They were part of a larger body of work: Oil, Coal, and Electricity. The female role models determined to claim their autonomies were Georgia O’Keeffe and Joni Mitchell. That’s really pop culture. It was called “Women’s Liberation.” Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem are part of my early years…I mean, everyone was a feminist! It only made sense. It felt like a given.
Later I read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. And then later, New French Feminisms, an anthology edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle De Courtivron. The French writers seemed to have the most succinct and beautiful way to state feminist — or my — aspirations. I read about “La Jouissance” (which I later made a painting about) with their definition as “enjoyment of rights — sexual, political, and economic. Total access, total participation, total ecstasy” Yes!
Maybe the subject matter of the sculpture seems “masculine” when it’s about the world of power. Things that women are not supposed to question, or understand. When I was in undergraduate school, there was a foundry, but they wouldn’t let the women actually do the bronze pours. My roommate and I were the first ones. There were a lot of times that one had to push. Sculpture itself felt like a male domain. So it felt like a feminist stance to be a sculptor.
Sculpture was a bit like shop class that maybe boys took in high school. We learned to use power tools and “make stuff.” Metal was a strong component there. Cast bronze and welded steel, men and metal.
Predisposed to prove myself in a male domain, I wanted to make public sculpture and monuments, civic fountains. I went to Rome when I was 13 and loved it. All the fountains there are fed by gravity and aqueducts.
In New York, after I’d worked as an artist’s assistant, I got a job working for a plumber. I knew I wanted to work with metal and water, and it was very practical. The plumber I worked for also worked as a rigger for Mark Di Suvero. But that heroic scale, working with a team, didn’t seem real to me. One of my first public sculptures in New York was Portrait of a Gas Station, on a traffic island. 1977 and ’78. It was a guerrilla installation that I cast in place, and it stood about one foot tall. It stayed there for over 10 years.
Anyway, I’m very restless with materials. I pick what makes the most sense for what I want to do. Before I started oil painting, I had to work with egg tempera.
Can you tell me about your approach to art making in a political or social cultural context? I know many of your works are powerfully charged with statements about the world, capitalism, the many forms power can take, and also, of course, our environment.
I really do it for personal reasons, to understand things, or to get rid of a feeling. One of the first Superfund sites — a site of environmental disaster — was in Niagara Falls. A chemical dump in Love Canal. I made tiny artworks in response to that: Love Canal Potatoes. Sculpture, however, can be so unwieldy. It’s sort of horrifying to me that, 30 years later, most of the issues that my sculptures dealt with exist. Drawings are so much quicker and can deal with day-to-day things.
I have that progressive attitude that things should be fair. It’s a kind of innocence, I know. While I was thinking about the towers, I was reading about the Robber Barons. An era that, unfortunately, seems to have returned. Of course, I’m not advocating for a return to candlelight! It’s going to be very curious how this fragile and vulnerable electrical grid gets replaced. I saw this recently online: How NYC Gets Its Electricity. Love this!
Why did you start making the Towers? Can you tell us a little about the initial idea, the process, and then the fabrication of the objects themselves?
I’d been reading about the wars between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison over alternating current versus direct current. Alternating current is what’s used in the high-voltage wires carried by the transmission towers over long distances. There’s a sculpture of Tesla at Niagara Falls. I’d used images of them in drawings as early as 1979, and in my fountain Brainwash, which was in the courtyard of ABC No Rio. Also, I’d been reading about the health hazards of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) from the high-voltage lines that the towers carry. Christy Rupp suggested that I apply for a residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, which offers a great setup for welding. So I went. I took drawings with me, and expanded the drawing to a large scale. I mean, I made drawings on the table, and on the floors. Cut pieces and laid them together and welded them in place. Then, with the overhead hoists, stood them up and welded the front and back together.
I started with the smallest one, and worked my way up. I was supposed to stay for a month, but the next people for the residency kept cancelling or dying. So I stayed, and made the biggest ones. I think I stayed three months altogether. Maybe it was five months. There were a lot of metal scraps there, steel drums of strange shapes. That’s where some of the “insulators” on the towers are from. The straight pieces I bought at a nearby steel mill. It was fun to go shopping there. I bought a secondhand car, a gold Dodge Dart with a Slant 6 engine, and started driving around to sketch towers by the roadside. Then I would go back to the studio and build more towers. I fabricated the ceramic parts when I returned to New York, and welded them on afterwards.
What does the form of the electrical transmission tower most closely resemble to you in other forms or mediums?
Well, they are unbidden figures marching all over the landscape saying, “We are in charge.” Some of them look mean and intimidating, and some look friendly.
It’s curious for me to imagine being a male civil engineer, trying to design something to carry high-voltage wires. Maybe he was thinking of his mom. Big scary monster! Some of them look female, and some of them look male. Some look like Kachina dolls.
After I showed them at PS1, people would send me photos from all over. There are amazing ones in New Mexico. Everyone has feelings and stories about them. One person told me that when she was little she called them “Girls and Dogs.” Someone else calls them “Stalwart” — like, just doing my job, ma’am. Someone called them “Transformers” — like monsters that would come alive. For me, they are the most invisible public sculpture. They are looming everywhere! And no one really knows who designed them, approved of them, and what they do.
After the Women’s March this year, I thought, “Wow, that big one would look great with Pink Pussy Hat!” Like it decided to go on strike for green energy. Or it would be fun to retrofit one with photovoltaic cells, so it could be producing energy instead of just standing there.
The Towers have had a very full and interesting life traveling from one distinctive venue to another. Can you talk about your installation at [what was then] P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center?
The Towers were shown frequently from 1986 to 1994, first at PS1. Then some were shown in the East Village (at Piezo Electric Gallery and El Bohio/Charas), at Willoughby Sharp’s gallery, at Socrates Sculpture Park, and in a four person show at Holly Solomon Gallery. Also, in 2004, the largest ones were in Dan Cameron’s East Village Show at the New Museum. When I first brought the Towers to New York, let’s see…Tom Otterness had a huge studio in Brooklyn, and I think I took the big ones there. That must have been in the early fall (1985). Jane Dickson heard about them. She knew that Claudia Gould was curating the PS1 Auditorium, and suggested the towers to Claudia, who liked the idea, and we made a plan to show them a few months later, in early 1986. I did the finishing work on the big ones at Tom’s studio. It was very loud. They were glad when I was finished! It felt fantastic to see my towers stretched across the great sunlit expanse of the Auditorium. The opening at PS1 was in February, and it was very cold. I took it upon myself to set up a “Hot Sake” table with a hot plate in the Auditorium for the afternoon. It didn’t go over very well with the administrators. Ah, youth.
As far as the Transmission Towers’ re-emergence, it’s a series of “J’s”—including you, Jocelyn! It started with James Fuentes (who did the Real Estate Show at his gallery in 2014), James Michael Shaeffer, and Joshua Abelow, who led me to the artists at Know More Games — Brian Faucette, Miles Huston, and Jacques Louis Vidal. Know More Games showed my Strip Mining for Coal sculptures from 1983 for the first time ever. Through them, I met Jesse Greenberg and MacGregor Harp, of 247365 Gallery. Miles was the first one to see my towers in a long time — he kind of flipped out when he saw them. He curated a show in Red Hook, which led to my solo show at 247365 in 2016. Which I think is how Mark learned about my work.
Looking at this list of relatively young men who’ve supported my work — I guess this is what feminism looks like. One aspect anyways.
How did you come to know of Mark Leckey’s work? Had you been aware of it before the show proposal came your way?
There was a time that I mainly went to the Met to see art. My dad got very sick in 2008, and died in 2011. I was very involved in his caregiving. Also I was getting training, and then worked as a freelance bookkeeper. So there was a lot I didn’t see.
When Gavin Brown’s Zach Bruder first contacted me about participating in Mark’s show, I googled him and realized, oh, that’s the person Miles and Zach Susskind talked about before the show in Red Hook. That was a nice surprise. I was sorry to have missed Mark’s show in New York in 2014. Seeing it in photos is so much different than experiencing it in person. The towers are just one aspect of the work.
What do you make of the almost curatorial aspect of Mark’s art practice, expressed through his weaving other artist’s works into his own shows?
It seems like it’s actual curatorial, not almost curatorial. It’s a pretty nice way to meet someone: “Hey, I love your work, wanna be in a show with me?” Or rather, “Would you like to have a piece in my show?” I think it’s a very generous and innovative way to do a survey show. I’d like to try it sometime.
My work and that of a few other people were in the show “as themselves.” I mean, as part of Mark’s work he makes composites of other people’s work and I don’t know how I’d feel about that. Probably I would hate it, to have my work combined with someone else’s, by someone else. But it certainly is fun to look at them. There’s been a lot to think about, being in this show!
My work was there because we both make towers, unbeknownst to each other. He calls them pylons. I did notice one of his small pylons on the second floor is now called Pylon, Transmission Tower, and wondered if he’d morphed the title after meeting me and my tower. I like the practicality of his pylons. They fold up flat, which makes them super portable. I learned a lot more about Mark’s work from being in the show. I was also astonished to see some of the show unfold as it was being installed. I’ve never seen so many people working together to install.
I’ve really enjoyed getting to know the videos. Being part of the show has been a good excuse to look very carefully. He had me at the tiny rotating Felix in the Long Tail! I love the text in GreenScreenRefrigerator. And parts of Mark’s work are very funny. The photo collage of him as a drummer surrounded by adoring female fans cracks me up thinking about it.
Artists can be so competitive and it’s good to break that down a bit. Also, historically speaking, there have been a lot more white-male solo shows than solo shows for women. So I think it’s to his credit to invite me to share the room with him.
What are you making now, besides some of New York’s best (and most biting) protest posters?
Thanks for the poster shoutout! I never imagined that, in 2017, we — I mean a large part of the country — would be working to defend basic civil rights and the foundations of democracy. So yes, I’ve been taking part in a lot of direct actions on the street, with varying degrees of discomfort, anger, and exhilaration. I’m making a lot of drawings right now, some of which get translated into posters. And hunkering down, like many people, for extended activism.
What’s your relationship to the Internet? Does the digital play a role in your approach to object- or image making?
This is the first year I’ve felt screen addicted. Like, before it was something I’d heard about, that happened to other people. Post-election I can’t watch the news on TV. I can’t stand the sound of the president’s voice. The opportunities for research online are endless. And I love research! So sometimes it’s hard to stop. And make the art.
Right after 9/11, I took two classes in Maya, the animation software. But it felt so strange — the more animated the objects, the less animated the artist. Just sitting there in a dark room, click click click.
However, as Billy Kluver used to say, “People are Analog.” Right now, I live in a body. The digital seems to bore into my brain in a way that is worrisome. Maybe the number one Syrian terrorist is Steve Jobs. The activities that mean the most to me are the direct physical actions — pencil on paper, drawing charcoal and ink on paper, or the touch of clay. That’s when I really get in a trance.
Beforehand, I don’t really know what I’m doing or feeling. It’s like horses running in all directions. Afterwards things make more sense.
You can see Becky Howland’s work in the exhibition Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers, on view at MoMA PS1 through March 5, 2017.
