Notes - The Harvard Advocate

We are sad to share the news of the passing of Charles Dessau Atkinson III '58, longtime trustee of The Harvard Advocate and a valued member of the Cambridge community.

The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing The Light in the Piazza at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.

One Man Advo Team Bests HPT in Softball

The outlook was decidedly not brilliant for the Harvard Advocate nine that day. Only three members of our organization had signed up to play in the annual softball game against the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

I-I-I-I

It is uncovered that, if performed correctly, certain songs of the South could even sever the jugular. (How’s that for soul?). While previously such power had been thought impossible, now– thanks to Ryan Coogler’s latest film Sinners– the blues are actually shown as the harmonica slide mojo bag eternally trailed by that bloodsucking stinger you had thought was mere legend. As if there weren’t enough things to worry about, Sinners coaxes from its cave the thing you’ve only heard whispers of, sensual and preying on a talented cast of proselytes, an otherworldly temptation. Of course, isn’t it always better to know the source of the things you’re hearing, licking their chops, humming in the forest, just a taste?

On January 23rd, Sofia attended the Drift’s launch party for its 14th issue at 123 Washington St. in Manhattan. She was left with some questions.

February 14, 2025

Caroline Harper New - “Notes on Devotion”

Full disclosure, I read this for the first time yesterday, but then I read it again and again. I’m a sucker for birds in a poem and I think they’re approached perfectly here—beautifully, carefully, not treading too heavily but aimed straight for the heart. —Leila Jackson

Rachel Cusk has written a novel which ends with the word ‘beginning.’ She has written a novel in which every major character goes by the same name. She has written a novel that sounds the same when describing sickness and health, in which the mourning of death is registered in the same tone as the celebration of life. She has written a novel in which artists make art of each other and then critique it; a novel of ideas in which ideas have no authority; a city novel in which the city is never named; a realist novel which enlists whole battalions against realism.

_{Photo by Aiyanna Ojukwu '26}

As we all know, the best part of Harvard is how we can skate by on a seemingly endless frozen Charles of prestige, luring important people into talking to us by tricking them into thinking we too are important. And this week, we got yet another celebrity to let us gawk at her: the WICKEDly talented Cynthia Erivo. Since The Advocate has its finger on the pulse, I, alongside our storied Notes editor, Aiyanna Ojukwu, made sure to attend both the parade and the roast to let you, the dozen or so readers of Notes from 21 South Street, feel like you were there too.

Let’s try again. She comes on a bike. She comes dressed in black, or—better—midnight blue. The bike is shiny, silver, scary. Not scary. A little scary, but you’d never admit it. She serves four. She serves eight. She serves as many as can fit around your dining room table. She built that table. Or so she says.

Asiyah is the oldest and largest center in NYC that accommodates the holistic needs of domestic violence victims who identify with the AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian) or BIPOC populations.

Mindplay is not really a play, so let’s get that straight from the beginning. There were many times as I was sitting in the sparsely populated Calderwood Pavilion theater when I thought, “I am not getting any insight from this, these are just magic tricks.” They were absolutely impressive magic tricks! But magic tricks nonetheless.

Booking a ticket to see Azealia Banks is an inherently stochastic process. In the days leading up to her Halloween show in New York City, I received the news that the opener, Cleotrapa, would no longer be performing, and her Los Angeles concert date, scheduled the week after this show, was indefinitely postponed. Nevertheless, my friends and I (a fallen angel, a nun, and Hannah Horvath, respectively) arrive at Terminal 5 in Hell's Kitchen endlessly optimistic. Unfortunately, nun gets his poppers confiscated at bag check.

Saturday afternoons are the worst at MoMA. Every resident and visitor in New York finds themselves at the museum, and you can’t see much art, rather a diverse sea of heads and a pretty decent shoe selection. But as I entered Monuments Of Solidarity on a Saturday afternoon – LaToya Ruby Frazier’s solo show running in the Summer of 2024 – the crowd dissolves, the air is fresher, and suddenly, it is quiet. I am in an alternate space.

I read Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America by Krista Burton (spoiler alert: there aren’t that many, and most are in the Midwest) before I reached the legal drinking age. So, I was very excited when the extremely long and nebulous creation of Dani’s Queer Bar in Back Bay first came across my Instagram targeted ads. This eagerly awaited new Boston establishment, funded in part by a grant from Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration, suddenly opened after many false starts earlier in September. After hearing cautionary tales about long lines and cliques, as well as celebrations of finally having a sapphic space in Boston, I decided to check it out.

Written in honor of Juneteenth, 2024

405?

No: 405. It’s no question. I know you, 405, your trace, your teeth. You look like 404, but I feel you, quietly taking his place in my bones. So how’s about we start off with a toast, to you and me, then? You’re no secret, 405; you could be my greatest joy, how you warm and stretch me like new clay. It was 404 who faced me forward, and it’s you, now, who straightens my spine.

I have never written a book review before, let alone for an author that I have admired for a decade. This is the thought that ran through my head when reading And Then? And Then? What Else?, Daniel Handler’s latest book of essays. It feels wrong somehow, for me to be critiquing a book written by someone whose work I have leeched off of to fuel my own creative endeavors. (In fifth grade, I wrote a story that unfortunately parallels The Wide Window nearly beat-for-beat.)

Stephin Merritt is a singer-songwriter of the Magnetic Fields. Six months before the twenty-five year anniversary of their hit album, 69 Love Songs, Merritt joined The Harvard Advocate for an interview. He sat in his New York apartment, surrounded by books and paraphernalia. We spoke about Boston in the 70s, love in the 2020s, and what he’s been reading lately.

DOORS 7pm

Your correspondent arrived at the scene ten minutes past the slated start time for The Drift’s launch party for its latest issue. Well, the latest two issues, since, as the editors later explained, “we didn’t have a fall party.” The buzzy new magazine, founded in 2020 for “young writers who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse,” was healthily on Issue Twelve, and our venerable old magazine, for Harvard aesthetes and earnest ones, was finally comping half the cover for a blog dispatch.

We know Javi is up to something, since he employs defense as offense from the start. “I wasn’t trying to play victim,” he begins, “until the world taught me what a powerful grift it is.” Thus embarks our descent into Andrew Boryga’s debut novel Victim: the satirical story of Bronx native Javier “Javi" Perez, who learns to craft – and sell – narratives around his identity in pursuit of recognition as a writer.

Two tiny women stand on the edge of a cliff, almost hidden, looking out at the oceanic expanse on the cover of Alan Murrin’s debut novel, The Coast Road. The ocean is overwhelming. These diminutive figures are Izzy and Collette, two women living in Ardglas, a small seaside town in Northwest Ireland.

Awash in luminescent blue-green smoke, Lyn Lapid lit up Brighton Music Hall on the Boston stop of her “to love in the 21st century the epilogue” tour. Both onstage and offstage, she explored universal themes of modern love, inviting her audience to join her, reflecting a commitment to not just singing about, but truly embodying love– through trust, energy, and dedication.

My freshman year, a sophomore told me that I—along with one other girl—had the legendary status of being a ‘freshman of value.’ He said, “Of all the freshmen, I only care what you and Lassandra Springsteen think of me.” This brief interaction was one of our first, a preamble to our soon-to-blossom friendship. I was special; someone I didn’t know cared what I thought.

There are three things I will say to convince you that John Proctor is the Villain is worth seeing while it’s at the Huntington. One: everybody in the audience under 30 seemed to love it. Two: every guy in the audience whose wife clearly dragged him there (especially the old guys) seemed very grumpy as they were leaving. Three: it made me forget I had a headache.

I know it sounds silly but I’ve always considered Antarctica as the pinnacle of bravery – you have to commit to a week-long cruise, fight seasickness, endure the freezing temperatures, get along with old people… and for what? To say that you went?

Photo courtesy of Eric Rojas.

iLe, a Puerto Rican singer and composer, joined us by phone to discuss new ways of self-expression in the pandemic, the necessity of rage, and her upcoming tour through the Northeast. This interview has been lightly condensed.

On a tepid and earnest May afternoon, the Advocate boldly went where no Advocate member has gone before: the Harvard stadium. Equipped with one student-athlete, one former varsity baseball player, and many people kicked off of their youth little league team, we embarked on the ultimate battle (that no one asked for): to beat the Hasty Pudding in Softball. We were the best dressed, drunkest, and least appropriate team the stadium has ever seen.

At the beginning of All Fours, Miranda July describes two kinds of people.

“In life there are Parkers and there are Drivers,” July writes, “Drivers are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring…they get joy from petting a dog or hanging out with their kid and that’s enough… Parkers, on the other hand… need a discrete task that seems impossible, something that takes every bit of focus and for which they might receive applause.”

So I’m in Jamaica right now. And it’s Christmas Eve. I’m here with my mom and brother and sister. We just got dinner. Christmas Eve dinner. They serve the food at the Riu Hotel buffet-style which means waiting in line, so I was kind of annoyed with all of the 20 inch buss down wigs getting stuck in my salad and the over-enthusiastic pardon me’s from overcompensating white dads, still standing in my way. Everyone was dressed in their best red carpet looks. Red Walmart polos and green FashionNova ball gowns galore. Decent food though.

To Whom It May Concern:

Hi, I really want to just rest this summer, because I know for sure that this spring semester is gonna leave me with half of the desire to move and think that I currently have, but I have been highly peer-pressured into working. And no one in their early twenties can resist peer pressure – I am applying to this internship just like I might jump off the bridge if my friends do, Mom.

Ben Fry is a designer from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the founder of Fathom Information Design, a Boston-based design firm. Fry completed his doctoral degree at the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, his postdoctoral fellowship with Eric S. Lander at the Broad Institute, and was the Nierenberg Chair of Design at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. He has authored Visualizing Data, and co-authored with Casey Reas Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists and Getting Started with Processing. His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Museum of Modern Art, Nature, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Minority Report, and The Hulk. In recognition of his achievements, Fry was honored with the National Design Award for Interaction Design in 2011.

It’s winter break. Our treasured time for rotting, reunion, and fervor. And, more importantly, hedonistic consumption. These are the books essays films albums and snacks that filled The Advocate with flames in 2023. May they warm us well into the new year.

“Sweet reader, I cannot sleep –

Chappell Roan has overcome me

with reverence for her lyricism.

Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. Yoon is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Harvard University.

Note: All events described in this manifesto are either very true or very made-up. There are two doors and two brothers. Also two butterflies and a golden key. Choose wisely.

The Wife of Willesden, the new play written by Zadie Smith and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, hit the A.R.T. this past February. It’s an adaptation of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” (and prologue) from The Canterbury Tales, which you may remember as the most lewd thing you were allowed to read in high school. Being a typical Patroness of the Arts (and Zadie Smith follower), I snagged myself a rush ticket to the performance on Friday, March 3rd.

“When I think about people, I think about space, how much space a person takes up and how much use that person provides,” begins Joan is Okay by Weike Wang. Our narrator is Joan, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese-American whose life happily revolves around the New York City hospital ICU, where she works as a physician. But when her father dies unexpectedly from a stroke, and her mother returns to America from China to “become friends” with her children, and her brother and sister-in-law mount pressure on her to settle down in the suburbs and start a family, and the coronavirus pandemic shuts all life down, Joan is forced to question her workaholism and define her own cultural beliefs.

George Saunders is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize; Congratulations, by the way; Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award; The Braindead Megaphone; and the critically acclaimed short story collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, and In Persuasion Nation. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

On a summertime Tuesday night, the Brooklyn queer bar 3 Dollar Bill readied itself to host an unlikely trinity. I wandered in among the ticketholders who were congregating, apparently undaunted by the impending weekday morning, for a performance of Oscar at the Crown. The website announcing this “immersive nightclub phenomenon” promised a show that would situate in one dystopian future the three pillars of society: sequins, Oscar Wilde, and the housewives of Orange County.

American Queen Elsa might sing, “The snow glows white on the mountain tonight, not a footprint to be seen,” but on the other side of the Atlantic, her French counterpart prefers a less literal image of the scenery. “L’hiver s’installe doucement dans la nuit, la neige est reine à son tour,” she sings, cleverly evoking the larger themes of winter and sovereignty in Frozen. Farther south on the same continent, Elsa continues to make it snow, but her voice is now that of the Spanish singer Gisela, who proclaims either “suéltalo!” (literally “let it go” in Spanish) or, in the Catalan version that Gisela also sings, “vol volar” (a slightly riskier translation meaning “it wants to fly”).

The November 1951 issue of The Harvard Advocate addressed a single theme: William Faulkner. Reviews, essays, and excerpts from dissertations crowded the now-yellowed pages of the magazine, tackling everything from the author’s novels to his childhood. Two names in particular jump out from the list of contributors: Albert Camus and Thomas Mann. The Advocate editors were eager to milk this literary windfall, placing their names in bold print on the cover of the issue, and noting their “gracious acknowledgment” to contributors including Camus and Mann “for making this issue possible.” In the Contributors’ Notes, the two are described as follows:

The Gulf Stream, Winslow Homer, 1899. Image courtesy of metmuseum.org

Hesiod’s Theogony starts off by telling where the story itself comes from: the muses teach Hesiod a song while he shepherds his lambs. His poems are created by the divine. They’re passed on by the voice of a goddess as it takes over his lungs.

“Reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand,” said Marianne Moore about her friend and contemporary near the end of Barnes’s career. “The Perfect Murder,” printed by The Harvard Advocate in its 1942 75th Anniversary Issue, exemplifies the curious linguistic prowess that Moore praises. In fact, the study of “foreign [languages], which you understand” is the very occupation of Barnes’s protagonist, Professor Anatol Profax, a dialectologist (specialist of tongues). A crossbreed between Middlemarch’s intellectually stubborn Casaubon and Baudelaire’s voyeuristic flaneurs, Profax harbors his cherished work in the crook of his elbow as he haunts the streets with a removed aspect and attentive ears. He records the “figures of speech and preferred exclamations in all walks of life” in order to classify species of speakers. He bunch-indexes (Barnes’s term) the inarticulate of England, France, and America as “The Inveterates” and devises other groupings—among them “Excitable Spinsters” and “The Impulsive”—along lines of fanaticism, eloquence, and verbosity. Profax’s scrupulous science literalizes what Moore recognized as Barnes’s genius: she paid close attention to the subtleties of expression, and did not underestimate the potential of a single language to spawn multitudinous variations.

That was a winter of fire alarms. Smoke set off the blare one afternoon in mid-February, shrieks bouncing through the halls of my small-town high school as we exited, half-costumed, onto the frozen grass. Our science-teacher-cum-set-designer had decided that burning bamboo poles for our South Pacific set was a good idea. The strobes flashing from the walls when the warning system smelled smoke told him otherwise.

Published in a “Special Poetry Supplement” to The Harvard Advocate, Vol. CIV, No. 3-4 (Fall 1971).

Mark Bradford, Black Venus, 2005. Berezdivin Collection, Photo: Bruce M. White. Courtesy of www.themarkbradfordproject.org.

Published in The Harvard Advocate, Vol. XCV, March 21, 1913

The later poetry of Edward Estlin Cummings is instinctively recognizable to any lover of poetry. His page is a visual canvas, upon which words are not simply sounds that peal back to produce meaning, but aesthetic objects laid out upon the page.

Artists have always had assistants—Greek sculpture was carved in workshops, and Rembrandt painted with aides whose anonymity continues to cause curatorial headaches. But the figure of the “fabricator” is a relative newcomer in the history of art production. The fabricator was born only a half a century ago, when a push toward the use of modern materials and bigger, more complex projects meant that the art waiting to be created was unrealizable without a trained hand.



Fabricators cut, solder and engineer ideas into formation; they build and construct technologically complex visions on behalf of their author. Fabricators are not just helpers. While they follow orders, fabricators know something that their bosses don’t: how to make the art work.



Beginning in the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg synthesized found object and painting, technology and sculpture to generate art that whose form no longer offered easy understanding. Donald Judd stripped his creations to their most substantive essence so that his compositions equaled their content. In doing so, each obscured the lines between art and material, object and creation. Artistic innovation required a technical equivalent. For Lawrence Voytek[1](#_ftn1) and Peter Ballantine[2](#_ftn2), fabricators for Rauschenberg and Judd respectively, each day meant finding practical and mechanical solutions to ideas in gestation.



Voytek mastered material so that Rauschenberg didn’t have to. Welding, bending or just experimenting with anything industrial—from aluminum (he used over two tons in his 27 years working for Rauschenberg) to Renobond, 3 mm thick skin coating for skyscrapers—Voytek shaped the substance of Rauschenberg’s hybrid inventions. Ballantine, a carpenter, cut and glued Judd’s freestanding, discrete, plywood structures into their Minimalist simplicity. Unsupervised in his workshop, he built Judd objects as he might have built a table, so that the art would echo the kind of well-made appropriateness suitable to a finished product. He estimates that in his shop, entirely set up for Judd fabrication, he constructed 250 plywood cubes over the course of his career. In conversations with both their fabricators, one can hear the excitement of building art “like it had never been done before” resound twenty years later.



 Fabrication meant different things to Rauschenberg and Judd. For one, it was a means for increased experimentation, for the other, a way of distancing the artist’s hand from his creation. Rauschenberg’s delegation was practical—he simply could not produce the work himself—whereas for Judd, the delegating a task meant transferring control. As a result, the two artists developed distinct relationships with their colleagues. Rauschenberg kept his fabricators close by. Judd had no contact besides the initial object order and its final pick-up. But today, both Ballantine and Voytek retain a fierce trust in the artists they worked for. It is always “my artist” and always “the work.” 



The Harvard Advocate: How did you get started as a fabricator?



Lawrence Voytek: In college at RISD, I worked a lot in the industrial design department. When I graduated, my wife-to-be and I moved to Florida, where I took classes at Edison Community College. [Robert Rauschenberg’s] fabricator before me had recently left, so I sent my portfolio to him [Rauschenberg]. Bob had me come out to interview. It was pretty intense. Bob was always a hero of mine. I had seen a lot of films on him. When I was going to school, some were into Jasper [Johns], some into Roy [Lichtenstein], but I was always into Bob.



I went and I knocked. He said, “I’m Bob Rauschenberg.” I said, “I’m Lawrence Voytek.” That day, [other assistants] showed me where the welder work and they asked me if I could weld an aluminum frame. No one ever told me that I had the job but they told to come back tomorrow cause they had more frames for me to work on. 



Peter Ballantine: I came to New York in 1968 to be in the Whitney Independent Studies Program, which was just starting. Judd was one of the teachers there. I ran out of the money I brought with me and in those days, the fashion was for artists who needed to make money was to be a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician.



I started working for Judd on his building on Spring Street as a carpenter. I learned carpentry on the job—out of books. I always said yes whenever he asked me to do something. In 1971, he brought me a paper with a sketch and asked me if I could make it.



HA: Can you describe the studio? What kind of work did you do?



PB: There was no typical day at the studio—there was no one studio. There was Judd’s building over at Spring Street. That was a studio and the idea-making happened there. But that studio was not a place where art got made; the Judd studio was not where things got cut and glued. The art was made in shops. There was my shop, one in Switzerland, one in Long Island City and others. The shops were small, with only 1 or 2 people. Or in case of Bernstein Brothers—an industrial metal shop in Queens where fabrication started, there were 5,6,7,8 people working but only one guy doing the Judd.



My shop was in my house. There was a lot of work to do. Judd was prolific and sometimes before a show there would be a big rush of things to finish. It was basically a small factory. When you are an artist fabricator, you sometimes end up pulling a lot of all-nighters. It’s not a 9-to-5 job. If you had a shop in your house, you could glue up at 10 and do another one at midnight. Weekdays, weekends, evenings and all that stuff—I didn’t make distinctions among those.



Sweating about the materials was a big part of the job. It’s a special problem in Judd’s case because you’ve got angles that have to come together with other angles. If you introduce curves into that, you’re in trouble. I was always looking for really good material. 



LV: Captiva [an island off the coast of Florida where Rauschenberg held his studio] was very magical back in the early 80s. Bob’s studio was a simple piling building that faced the Gulf of Mexico. You could probably throw a stone from the studio it into the water. Bob would be working upstairs, in a 35x45 ft studio with glass doors that facing the Gulf. It was painted white and he worked on a large table in the center of the room. The welder worked below the studio and there were a lot of mosquitoes and it was hot and balmy. The bugs and the wildlife—it was like being in a tropical jungle.



Bob was a collaborative artist and there were always a group of people working with him. I did all the welding and putting the pieces and the parts together. In the early years, we lived a very gregarious sort of party lifestyle, but it always focused around what Bob was doing. We would get everything ready for him during the day. He would wake up and go to the beach and hang out. Since he was part Cherokee, he would get a dark tan. Then he would have a nice lunch. We would get to the studio before the sun went down and everything would be prepared and then he would work.



My working hours were really crazy. Sometimes we would work through the night. At one point I worked 73 days in a row without taking a day off, just because we had so much to do. 



HA: How would you start working on a piece?



PB: Sometimes I got a phone call. Sometimes it would just be a discussion in person with me taking notes. Sometimes he gave me a drawing. But those were not engineering drawings. In fact, you would be surprised how un-drawing-like they were.  They were sometimes just ideograms—tools to get the work made. But I didn’t always need drawings because I knew his work pretty well.



Judd never stopped by. It wasn’t because the shop wasn’t close. My shop was a block and a half away from his studio. It was so close that you could walk over and discuss the new pieces that you were thinking about in the rain without an umbrella. But you weren’t running to ask, “Should I use a darker grain of plywood?” That kind of stuff—the type of plywood, where to cut the sheet, to a large extent the details of the joints—those were fabricator decisions. They were not Judd decisions. You just had to make those decisions. There’s a lot of amount of unspoken trust in fabrication.



When we had discussions, they were practical, not aesthetic. I knew what he wanted and he knew that I knew what he wanted. He didn’t have to over-explain it. Though in pure theoretical fabrication, we wouldn’t be discussing that at all. 



LV: Bob always had a lot of vivid dreams. I would come to work and he would tell me what he had dreamt. He would dream of a glass car tire and he wanted to make a glass car tire. That started a long journey of getting in touch with glass blowers and mold maker and finding the perfect tire that he wanted to mold.



I was also in charge of development and research, so I would read samples of what industry was playing around. Bob would see something and would say, “I want to play with this” and we would order it and he would start playing with it.



Bob was a real hand-on person. He was also like a little child—he wanted to see everything. He would come up with ideas and he wanted to see different materials and different ways he could do them. So I would make samples. He would say, “I want this” and I would show him this, this, this and this and he would say, “I like this one the best.” It was like getting a show-and-tell together. It was pretty wild—like bringing a child a new toy to play with. And we would buy these expensive exotic materials and he would just play with them.



PB: Judd made a point of not playing around in his studio.



The studios were removed from him and he from them. That was essential to do what he was trying to do. Judd was looking to work within other traditions and he was looking for well-made pieces. He got control in his work by ceding control and putting the work into these old traditions of good workmanship, like carpentry and sheet-metal work. This was fabrication in a straight, classic factory kind of way, like the Ford plant in Michigan, in which you don’t know who is fabricating and there’s no fabricator’s hand. This way of working that Judd did, the idea of fabrication is now pretty well accepted. You could name 100 people who do it today, but in 1964, it was pretty unusual. 



The other day I was watching a Sol Lewitt wall drawing project going on nearby. Lewitt is famous for delegating the work to others. But while everyone was working, there were instructions taped on the wall. Those guys were working on a real set of instructions! And in “The Factory,” Andy Warhol might not be there for three weeks but then he was there. If you are going to delegate and supervise at the same time, that’s not delegation. With Judd, it was real delegation.  



HA: What do you feel when you see something you built in a museum? Would the work look different if it had been made by a different fabricator?



PB: I have a shop where I am the only person, alone with these pieces for their whole gestation and birth, so I have quite an intense relationship with them. Once they are gone, they were never my pieces, but when I am constructing, they are my something, “pieces” is not right word. I come back into a relationship like that when there’s damage and I have to restore the piece.  I can almost always tell my own work. Even though I strived to do top quality anonymous work, I can tell the way I did glue blocks.



I have a feeling toward the pieces I made that I would see in a show in Zurich almost equivalent to driving by an apartment in Chelsea that I used to live in when I first came to New York. It’s not, “That’s my piece.” I don’t have a proprietary interest and even, when I am looking at a show, I don’t go rushing across the room to tell someone not to touch a piece. They become as if I hadn’t made them.



LV: When I look through the Bob’s work, I can tell you this is an Eric Holt, this is a Brice Marden. When I started working for Bob, I changed the shop and I brought in everything. Anybody else would have done something different. Even [art historian] Calvin Tomkins said in a review that he preferred Bob’s work before that high-tech fabricator, me.



But if you look through Bob’s work, I hope you feel it’s all Bob and not the apprentice helping. In some ways having the non-ego when you fabricate for somebody else and trying to make what somebody else wants while your attitude was invisible—that was always important in working with Bob. Sometimes people want their mark to be known. But I think that the vision of the artist should be valued. And that’s a strange thing. You don’t want to say “Look at me” you want to say, “Look at him.”



 



*This interview was conducted in three parts—one-on-one phone calls with Mr. Voytek and Mr. Ballantine respectively, as well as a phone conversation with both at once. The text was then condensed and edited.*





[1](#_ftnref1) Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lawrence Voytek realized that he wanted to be an artist from an early age. He graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 1982 with a degree in sculpture and started working for Rauschenberg that same year. Since Rauschenberg’s death in 2008, Voytek has been completing approved works, including some for the Obama sculpture garden. When he is done, he plans on returning to his own art, both painting and sculpture.



[2](#_ftnref2) Peter Ballantine grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He went to college in Colorado, where he was an art major. He fabricated for Judd from 1971 to February 1994, Judd’s death. He then spent ten years as an art supervisor for the Judd Foundation. Since 2004, he has worked as a freelance restorer and curator. Ballantine is currently organizing a symposium on Judd and fabrication to occur this April.