A Conversation with

Robert Barry*

Benjamin Buchloh: I would begin with a historical question, specifically the question
of your knowledge and awareness of the historical avant-gardes when you
began working in the early 1960s. And I would like to divide this question
into two complexes: first, your awareness and understanding of the legacy of
reductivist abstraction, in particular the legacy of Russian and Soviet work
from the 1915–1925 period, and second, your awareness and understanding
of the legacies of Marcel Duchamp in the early 1960s. I know that you began
working as a painter. Perhaps we can address what type of work you were
doing in the early phase of your development, before you did the better-
known monochrome work around 1965?
Robert Barry: As far as the Duchamp legacy or the Russian one, all I can say is that
outside of the general knowledge that any art student would have had at that
time, I really didn’t follow that work very closely. I had, of course, a sort of
general knowledge of Malevich and people like that. We did study it and it
was discussed, but it is not work that I looked at intensely. I was an under-
graduate student at Hunter College in New York in the mid- to late 1950s,
and at that time people like Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes were
teaching there. Then I went into the army for a few years, and when I got out
in 1960, I returned to Hunter for graduate school and it was a completely dif-
ferent crew of people. Eugene Goossen was then the chairman, and Tony
Smith was teaching there. In fact, I got to know Tony very well. He was one
of my teachers, and I guess he influenced the way my thinking went. I didn’t
even know at that time that Tony had designed Barnett Newman’s exhibition
at French and Company in 1959. I saw the show just before I went into the
army. And I had two years to think about it—because I couldn’t do any work
* The conversation took place on July 27, 1988. It might surprise some of our readers to find a
discussion with Robert Barry that had been conducted for research in 1988 to appear in the pages of
October now, in 2017. As a result, the interview’s author feels a need to explain the suggestion to have it
published at all. Perhaps the fact that one considers it necessary to apologize for daring to look back at
anything from 1968 (the central moment of Robert Barry’s work) might be enough of an explanation.
Another might be to recognize a complex radicality in Barry’s pursuits of the time that today seems
almost unfathomable. A third one might simply be that we wanted to send greetings and gratitude to a
great artist on the occasion of his eightieth year.

OCTOBER 159, Winter 2017, pp. 119–142. © 2017 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
120 OCTOBER

in the army, obviously. These paintings really stuck with me. They were a big
influence, but I didn’t know what to do about them, and then right after-
wards I was in the army.
Buchloh: Did Tony Smith talk about Constructivist work at all? Or Malevich and
Suprematism?
Barry: No, not at all.
Buchloh: Wasn’t Tony Smith as an artist a bit out of the mainstream at that time?
Barry: Yes, very much so. In fact, I remember that he was very anti-gallery, a lot of
his conversation had to do with the politics of the gallery world, the art
scene. If I asked, How do you get into a gallery?, How do you show your
work?, he became angry with me for even thinking like that. And then later,
once he became establishment . . . well, I didn’t like him so much anymore
because I thought he had sold out a little bit.
I used to love to hear Tony talk. He was great. He would come in and
talk about James Joyce. We didn’t always talk about art—we would talk about
architecture and modular construction, things like that. Town planning—
that was a big subject he used to like to talk about.
He was very particular, and I think there was a period when he wasn’t
really working. I saw very little of his paintings when I went to his house. He
ostensibly brought us to his house to show us his sculpture and his collection,
and he showed us his Jackson Pollock painting. He had a beautiful Pollock, it
was incredible, and Pollock had carved the frame for it. It was the only
Pollock I had ever seen framed. It was not a big painting—very dense, lacy. A
very good one. And he had an early Newman, which I was very interested in.
It was a small painting, maybe the second or one of the very first ones where
he had the single zip. I liked to listen to the way he described it, the thick,
almost rubbery texture of it, and so on and so on. It was through discussions
with him and some of the others that I began to get insight into this work
and reconcile some of my own thoughts about the way I related to it.
Buchloh: So your first encounters with abstraction, so-called geometric reductivist
work, would have been American-type or Abstract Expressionist painting?
Barry: Yes, although I would say my first encounter was before I joined the army.
There was a big show of Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art. And
William Rubin was teaching art history when I was an undergraduate at
Hunter in the ’50s. I remember taking some courses with him, and he
spoke about Malevich’s white-on-white paintings and things like that. That
was very interesting.
Buchloh: But you had none of the more specific information about the laboratory
period of Russian Constructivism, or Rodchenko’s monochrome paintings
from 1921, for example?
Barry: None of that. The only artist I became very interested in was Mondrian. And
Brancusi was another artist I liked very much. Motherwell taught a very inter-
esting course, and he was very fascinated with Mondrian, so he spent a lot of
time on that.
A Conversation with Robert Barry 121

Robert Barry. 9 Squares. 1963.

Buchloh: Did you know Ad Reinhardt?

Barry: Reinhardt was also teaching at Hunter when I got there, so I got to know
him a bit. He wasn’t teaching studio courses, but he was hired to teach a
course in Oriental art, and I sat in on a couple of them. I think he would
come in one or two evenings a week; he didn’t teach there full-time. His
course in the history of Eastern Art consisted of him simply showing slides
and saying: “Well, this is a good building.” Click. “This is a bad building.”
“This was built in the nineteenth century, but this is sixteenth century.”
There was very little explanation, and he just kind of ran through endless
slides. The slides were interesting because he had obviously traveled a great
deal and they were all his, he took the pictures.
Then I got to know him in 1967. I went to a place called Belmont,
which was something set up by the Whitney Museum to bring together
young, unknown artists and older, established figures. We went to an old
horse farm outside of Baltimore, maybe midway between Baltimore and
Washington, and we stayed there for the summer and they paid us a certain
amount of money and we made little studios in the barns.
122 OCTOBER

I did a book called Belmont 67, and it was a turning point for me. One of
the artists who came to Belmont was Ad Reinhardt. We knew each other by
sight from hanging around at Hunter. And he was sort of surprised to see me,
but I was very happy to see him. He was there for about a week, and we got to
know each other personally; we drove around and visited various places, visited
the museum in Baltimore and things like that, stayed up late at night.
I once asked him: “Why don’t you use circles in your work? You only
use squares,” and he said, “Ah, the circle is . . . people . . . it is too much like
the Sun.” This was his answer to me. You know, he spoke in a sort of tough-
guy way. He would tell stories about when he was in the navy and stuff like
that. I always tried to keep on his good side because I really wanted to get to
know him. And we did sort of get along. . . . He laughed and shook hands
and gave me his address and told me to come visit him at his studio any-
time—and I really wanted to get to know him. Then, when I got back to New
York, unfortunately, he died that August. I think I took one of the last pic-
tures ever taken of him, hanging in the little office over here.
Buchloh: What about Barnett Newman?
Barry: Yes, I knew Newman. Tony Smith actually brought him to my studio to see
my work, and I sort of got to know him. He was friends with the people who
worked at Hunter. He was very close to Eugene Goossen, and he was very
close to Tony Smith. So Newman came, and I got to know him a little bit in
the way a young person gets to know an older guy, that sort of thing. I liked
him a lot, I liked to listen to him talk. And he was also influential.
Buchloh: One forgets nowadays that both Newman and Reinhardt were relatively
isolated at that time, in comparison with the overpowering image of Pollock
and de Kooning, for example. . . . Was it not really your generation, i.e., the
Minimalists, who finally discovered him?
Barry: Motherwell and even Rubin in his lectures spoke about the Abstract
Expressionists, but I can’t remember ever hearing about Barnett Newman. I
don’t think I ever heard his name once.
Buchloh: Was Clement Greenberg’s American-type formalism as a critical method
of thinking about painting important for you?
Barry: It is not something that I cared about or liked very much at all. And when I
did start reading it, I didn’t like it. It was the same with Michael Fried and
people like that. I didn’t think that it made sense to me in terms of how I
experienced this work.
Buchloh: So Newman, Reinhardt, and Tony Smith—that would be an important,
influential group for you? And the kind of reductivist abstraction that you
encountered in the 1960s would have been exclusively American? Was Frank
Stella an influence?
Barry: The early Frank Stella black paintings were very important. And Tony used
to talk about these.
Buchloh: I was thinking that since you emphasized physicality you might have had a
A Conversation with Robert Barry 123

different perspective on Abstract Expressionism early on, one not primarily

involved with its spiritual dimensions or its transcendental dimensions but
more with its emphasis on procedure or physicality?
Barry: It wasn’t about procedure at all. It was more of a spiritual and a physical
relationship.
Buchloh: Would that have changed gradually as you went along? You couldn’t have
had the same experience when you were looking at Stella’s work in 1958–59?
Barry: It was like staring at a stone wall or something. There was the same kind of
thing, but … you know how you can have the same reaction with something
that is completely opposite?
Buchloh: There is another issue that I find rather peculiar: the relative isolation of
Robert Ryman in the late 1950s and early ’60s in New York, given the extra-
ordinary work that he did. Obviously, Stella did extraordinary work in 1959,
too, but comparatively speaking, hardly anybody seems to have been aware of
Ryman in New York until the mid-’60s, right?
Barry: I met Bob Ryman when we were in the Systemic Painting show organized by
Lawrence Alloway [in 1966]. That was the first time I ever saw his work, and I
loved it immediately. I had no idea what he was doing before then.
Buchloh: Let me shift focus for a moment. If the trajectory of abstract painting
from Newman and Reinhardt to Stella was a relatively homogenous
approach, how did you handle Jasper Johns, which you must have seen at the
same time? Was that less interesting to you? How did you reconcile these
seemingly contradictory positions?
Barry: In the beginning, I had some problems with Johns, but eventually I liked the
targets and the flags and the number paintings. I didn’t like anything he did
after that. I don’t like those maps, or the things he does now. Johns is an
artist, like Stella, who started off very high and then lost his inspiration. His
best work was when he was in his twenties. I am not sure he knew exactly
what he was doing; he sort of came out and did something. Then he started
thinking about it, and it all sort of fell apart. I never had that much trouble
with the flags.
Buchloh: What about activities emerging from Rauschenberg and Johns, let us say
George Brecht and Fluxus artists in general? It is astonishing that whenever I
ask artists of your generation, most recently Dan Graham and Lawrence
Weiner, about their relationship to Fluxus, there is an almost violent reac-
tion: Either they say that they didn’t know anything about it at all or they
hated Fluxus.
Barry: I didn’t know much about it.
Buchloh: So when George Maciunas and La Monte Young published An Anthology
in 1963, you wouldn’t have encountered that?
Barry: I never even heard of it.
Buchloh: Was John Cage an important figure for you?
Barry: Not so much. You couldn’t just hear Cage, you had to go to him. I would say
124 OCTOBER

I mostly listened to jazz and classical music. That’s really all there was.
Probably the artist that I listened to most was Miles Davis, he was somebody
who moved me very much. And I played a lot of Charlie Parker, although I
never saw him perform. I used to go to listen to a great deal to Ornette
Coleman and people like that. You could go and pay two dollars and listen to
these guys play all night. And I collected their records. I had a lot of jazz
records, and occasional classical music. I prefer solo piano music and cham-
ber music mostly.
Buchloh: Would you listen to twelve-tone or serial compositions of the twentieth
century, of the Second Viennese School, like Anton Webern and Arnold
Schoenberg?
Barry: I would say, at that time, no. I think it would have been very hard to. Since
then, of course, it has become much easier. Webern is one of my favorite
composers. Of course, you can hear all of his music in almost two hours.
Buchloh: What about Sol LeWitt? When did you first meet him?
Barry: I first saw his work at the John Daniels Gallery when he showed there [in
1965].
Buchloh: So that was also when you met Dan Graham for the first time?
Barry: It was the first time I met Dan, but I didn’t really know him. I just met him. I
went in there, and I thought about showing him my slides and stuff, but the
gallery didn’t last very long. By the time I got around to getting up enough
courage to show my work, it was closed.
I never really got to know Sol until we started hanging out together
with Seth Siegelaub. Then I got to know Sol very well.
Buchloh: Monochrome paintings were a major transition in your work, at least
for some period of time: How did you think about the category of the
monochrome? Did you conceive of it as coming out of Reinhardt and
Newman, or . . . ?
Barry: What painting are you talking about now?
Buchloh: Your small orange painting, or the small monochrome canvases
installed in the corners of a room, or the red square in the center of a wall.
How would you have seen your work in your relationship to that painterly
category, since obviously you could not have presumed that yours was the
first monochrome painting to be done? Did you consider it a historical cat-
egory that was available to you, even though it came from different con-
texts altogether?
Barry: It was a development. I mean, if you see the work that I did in 1960 or 1961,
I had sort of distilled things down.
Buchloh: Did you see Yves Klein’s work at Leo Castelli or at Virginia Dwan, for
example?
Barry: No, I didn’t know Klein’s work at all at that time. The only thing I knew
about Klein was some of the more sensational stuff, like the nudes and things
like that. But that was only at the back of my mind.
A Conversation with Robert Barry 125

Buchloh: What about Piero Manzoni?

Barry: No, absolutely not. Never heard of him. In my monochromes, I basically
used color as a kind of emphasis and I was using unsized canvas—not even
canvas, cotton duck.
Buchloh: The official historical reading would say that the generation of
Conceptual artists emerged in response to the Minimalists by extending—
and criticizing—their work. That is an assumption that is generally taken for
granted, even though it is superficial and perhaps partially wrong. Could we
say that your generation—meaning you, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth,
Dan Graham—responds in one way or another to Carl Andre, to Dan Flavin,
to Donald Judd, and to Sol LeWitt, by taking the terms that they had devel-
oped quite a bit further in a period of three years, from 1965 to 1968?
Barry: Yes, but I think of myself as a little bit older, and I didn’t see myself at that
time as working against Minimalism. I was in the exhibition curated by
Eugene Goossen called Eight Young Artists, which was actually referred to as
the first group show of Minimal art. By that time I thought of myself as an
established artist, and I was working in a sort of extreme Minimal way. But I
wanted to expand some of the ideas that the Minimalists came up with, going
beyond some of the things that they did very early on, not necessarily react-
ing against them, just kind of developing them. Your art just sort of develops
and you keep changing, and at some point somebody says, you are a
Conceptual artist. But it is not a term I ever used. I don’t care about it at all.
Buchloh: Problematic as it is as a term, it definitely demarcates a point of rupture or a
point of change that happens in your work, when certain parameters are aban-
doned, as it does in Lawrence Weiner’s work, who also started out as a painter.
Barry: You see, when I was in Belmont, I decided to stop painting. My paintings
had gotten to the point where they were these little squares, and I had gotten
into sculpture, which eventually developed into these wire pieces and things
like that. To me it wasn’t as much a rupture as a logical change. Or at least it
seems logical now. At the time, there was always a desire to move on instead
of stop and sit and continue making Robert Barry paintings. The desire was
to continue changing and seeing if you could do something different.
Buchloh: Were concepts such as the notion of disposability and site-specificity
important for you? The fact that you can install the work and it is site-specific
and then you dismantle it was very heavily emphasized at the beginning of
Minimalism.
Barry: Nothing new about that. I remember going to the Hansa Gallery in the old
days when it was located at Central Park in that wonderful old house. They
would put up shows that would be torn down the next day. That didn’t seem to
me to be a very interesting idea. Disposability was an old idea; there was nothing
new about that. And one of my favorite artists was Velázquez, and we know that
he spent a lot of time building these elaborate constructions for the king, which
are all gone, all disappeared. A lot of his time was spent doing that.
126 OCTOBER

Buchloh: So the gradual development into an approach that was, as it seems, criti-
cal of the object status of the work, as you just described it, came more or less
“naturally”? I mean, it wasn’t a programmatic effort on your side to criticize
sculpture as object? Because by that time Minimal sculpture had become
already very established, almost bulky, and even traditional in terms of its
constellation and materiality. I would imagine that the work that you did
would have been perceived by that generation already as some kind of a
threat, whether it was intended as such or not.
Barry: Yes, but critical is kind of a loaded term. What I was doing was, maybe, test-
ing the meaning of the word object, pushing it further. At the time the words
object and anti-object were in the air—it was something people were talking
about . . .
Buchloh: But not with a critical disposition towards the art object as a commodity,
for example?
Barry: I would say for a time there was. There was a period when I had nothing for
sale. I was making work but I wasn’t selling anything, deliberately. It lasted
for a short time. [Laughs.] I had a nice teaching job, I didn’t have to worry …
and also there was the problem of how to sell these things. This was some-
thing Seth Siegelaub eventually organized and had to work out.
Buchloh: When did you meet him?
Barry: I met him when I was showing in a gallery on 56th Street. And Seth had a
gallery on 56th Street, called Seth Siegelaub Contemporary Art, which he
had for about a year, a year and a half. He was showing painting, and the
only artist that he kept from that time was Larry Weiner, who at that time was
showing the Propeller paintings, or whatever you want to call them.
Seth had just opened the gallery, I saw Larry’s painting there, and I said
that I liked that. In fact, that was the only painting that I did like.

Barry. Exhibition at
Westerly Gallery,
New York, 1964.
Installation view.
A Conversation with Robert Barry 127

Buchloh: Did you meet Larry around that time?

Barry: No, I didn’t meet Larry, I didn’t know him at all at that time. And then Seth
closed his gallery; he ran out of money. And he did a very interesting show, a
big group show with Reinhardt and Newman and people like that.
Buchloh: That is a very interesting detail that I never heard. He showed Reinhardt
and Newman in one of his last group shows?
Barry: Yes, in one of his last shows. He closed his gallery because he couldn’t sell
anything. And he decided to become a private dealer. I had a studio on
Grand Street at the time, and Seth came over and asked if he could repre-
sent me and I said nobody else is doing it, so. I got to know Seth very well.
And I met Larry. . . . Seth used to have these Sunday-afternoon soirées, and
he used to invite collectors or something—and he would hang work on the
wall. And that is where I met Larry for the first time. I liked Larry because he
seemed very exotic to me. And you never had to say anything with Larry. He
would always carry the conversation; he seemed to make endless small talk,
which was fun. I am sure he doesn’t remember any of this, but I remember it
perfectly well.
Buchloh: So one could say that two tendencies can be clearly distinguished in 1965
in your work: one is toward what Lucy Lippard called at the time dematerial-
ization . . .
Barry: Right, she hated Conceptual art.
Buchloh: And she didn’t even mention your work in the first version of the article,
interestingly enough.
Barry: No, she didn’t know my work. She didn’t know my work until she started liv-
ing with Seth. Then she saw a painting of mine. I think she flipped out when
she first saw it, she realized she . . .
Buchloh: Would that have been after 1967? Her article was published in 1967, the
first version of it in Art International. And there is a footnote in the subse-
quent publication where she says, In the meantime I have encountered a
number of other artists, and she mentions you.
Barry: Right. [Laughs.]
Buchloh: Dematerialization would have been one dimension, and then there would
be a gradual transition in 1965–66 toward an architectural dimension.
Barry: Yes, but I thought of it mainly like the idea of opening up the space, or
spaces, between things. These were things that I read into Newman’s work,
this and a lot of other influences, and the idea of open fields that you may
pick up from Rothko or someone like that.
Buchloh: If we talk about this phase, let’s go back to the monochrome phase briefly
and the architectural aspect that the work gains at that time by placement.
Your monochrome red square, for example, is to be hung in the exact center
of the wall. In another work from that time, four small canvases are supposed
to be placed exactly in the corners. Would you agree that this gradual process
toward dematerializing the art object and the opening up of the work toward
128 OCTOBER

Barry. 4 Orange Squares. 1967.

Installation view, Galerie Greta
Meert, Brussels, 2015.

architectural space necessarily evolved out of your work at that time?

Architectural space takes a rather prominent part in your work, and then very
quickly you abandon traditional support surfaces altogether and go to the
nylon-filament pieces.
Barry: I used string and colored plastic cord before I used the monofilament.
Buchloh: Had you seen pictures of Duchamp’s installation Sixteen Miles of String at
the Whitelaw Reid mansion in New York in 1942 for the First Papers of
Surrealism exhibition?
Barry: You mean with string? Yes, I was aware of that. But that had nothing to do
with it. I had also seen a show that Allan Kaprow did at the Hansa gallery
with transparent pieces of plastic that you ran into. But that had nothing to
do with it either. It was about thinking in what way you would see the work,
trying to deal with the piece defining the space and the area around it.
Buchloh: Were you thinking in terms of the spectator as well?
Barry: Yes, always.
Buchloh: But if one looks at the work from the outside, one has the feeling that the
structure, morphology, the material, and the display all address a certain
type of person—that is, a person that is not necessarily qualified or prepared
in art-historical terms but who is capable of a spontaneous experience or an
immediate experience. The work seems to critically dismantle certain tradi-
tions of art experience, of art-making, of art perception, by emphasizing an
immediacy of perceptual and conceptual experience. By implication, then,
there is also a certain radicality in terms of making the work available to a dif-
ferent type of personality than a specialized, privileged audience.
Barry: Yes, I knew that obviously it would be that way. That would be the starting
point. But I always thought about the myth of the artist who is misunder-
stood but ultimately becomes better understood, like dropping a rock in the
pool and then the waves spread out and then everybody will get it. Maybe
immediately there would be very few people, but . . .
A Conversation with Robert Barry 129

Buchloh: And in fact that was what happened. Sculpturally the work was not exactly in
the mainstream perception of sculpture. I don’t know what Judd would have
thought about the monofilament pieces. Or Carl Andre, for that matter.
Barry: Carl saw them. He liked them, I think. Seth organized an exhibition and I
had one of my pendulum pieces, which was a monofilament and at the bot-
tom was a little steel disk.
Buchloh: Carl’s problem with you—if we can address that for a moment—was that
he could not accept anybody’s work that was not sculptural in the traditional
sense?
Barry: It is not clear what Carl’s problem was—not to me, anyway. Seth used to say
that Carl to a certain extent was influenced by some of my early work, especially
the little square things that I was doing. But Carl would never acknowledge that.
When I first met him, the first pieces that he showed me were not the squares
on the floor or anything like that but his Lincoln Logs constructions. That was
the first thing that I saw. And the work that he showed me at that time, in ’63
and ’64, was more traditional and didn’t have so much to do with this idea of
laying the squares on the floor. It was less involved with the grid.
I remember when I did the wire piece, the cords connected to two buildings
at Wyndham College, when Carl did his haystacks and Larry did his strings in

Barry. Diagram for installation between two buildings

at Windham College, Putney, Vermont. 1968.
130 OCTOBER

Barry. Inert Gas Series: Helium. Sometime during

the morning of March 5, 1969, 2 cubic feet of
Helium will be released into the atmosphere. 1969.

a grid on a ground. I remember going with Seth Siegelaub to see John

Weber when he was running Dwan Gallery, and Seth came in with the pho-
tos. John was enthusiastic about Carl’s piece, and then when he saw mine, he
just went, “Pfft.” And I thought, what a shithead. Look at them at least, then
you know why you are so against even looking at them. I have lots of anec-
dotes about people looking at my work and not even seeing it. Not long after
that, I went with Seth to John Weber’s office at Dwan, and in the corner he
had a piece by that guy who does these sort of string cubes … Fred
Sandback. I think Fred Sandback was a student of Judd and he had sort of
pushed him. This was a few months after we had shown Weber this stuff and
he had stuck his nose up at it and didn’t want to comment on it, didn’t want
to deal with it—and here he was showing this Sandback piece. Seth and I just
walked out; we couldn’t figure out what was going on in this guy’s head.
Buchloh: The question I am leading up to concerns how your work with language
evolved. I mean, we are still talking about the monofilament pieces and the
pieces in the first show at Seth Siegelaub’s. But how do you get from the dema-
terialized objects, from the monofilament pieces and the wire pieces, say, to the
inert-gas series and the radio pieces? There is a shift—at that time, there is still
an emphasis on physicality, even though it is dematerialized physicality.
A Conversation with Robert Barry 131

Barry: I was always involved with using words and language and things like that.
The question was, How do you get people to know it? In Seth Siegelaub’s
January Show, I showed wall labels with the titles of the pieces on the stickers
on the wall. There were a couple of radio-wave pieces in the show, too. [88mc
Carrier Wave (FM) and 1600kc Carrier Wave (AM) (1968) consisted of radio
waves generated by a transmitter hidden in the gallery and audible only
when amplified through a transistor radio tuned to its specific frequency.]
There was the radiation piece in Central Park [0.5 Microcurie Radiation
Installation (1969)]. In other words, I was showing all those invisible works or
works made with non-perceivable materials.
Buchloh: That is a crucial phase, obviously, in terms of its ramifications for the defi-
nitions of visuality of aesthetic experience. Again I have to say that from the
outside the work looks incredibly critical because it seems to dismantle an
entire legacy of perceiving art as a perceptual construct.
Barry: I think there were several layers. I have to be honest and say the initial moti-
vation grew out of my previous work. It had to do with the work itself. It did-
n’t have any kind of critical relationship to anything that was going on in the
art world at the time.
Buchloh: But it redefines the parameters of aesthetic experience.
Barry: Well, hopefully, but it was something that was not on my mind when I did it.
Maybe after it is done you can see it in those terms. Because as an artist you
just make the work.
Buchloh: The work seems to say, “Seeing is not the primary mode of experiencing a
work of art.”
Barry: Right. But this had come out of other ideas. Like the four little squares, or
the single square. And I had already by this point said many times that the
empty space between them is as important as everything else, so that these
works could be moved from one space to another, and so forth and so on. I
also said that location, when and where something is shown, is as important
as the thing itself.
Buchloh: So there is an increasing emphasis on site-specificity as it emerges in your
work without that term necessarily being mentioned. There is also an
increasing emphasis on ephemerality in the sense that the work is no longer
solid, massive, once and for all defined and determined; instead, the work
shifts, is contextualized, becomes contiguous and contingent on the location
and the site and the place within which it is installed and perceived—not
necessarily produced.
Barry: That was true also with the radio waves. We had an AM wave and an FM
wave and the idea was that one zoomed off into outer space and wasn’t
stopped by the atmosphere, whereas the FM was very limited and it bounced
off the atmosphere and would come back. One was more confined and one
was more expansive.
Buchloh: With the gas pieces, for example, there was one rather poetical title that I
vaguely recall: From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion…
132 OCTOBER

Barry: Yes, that was the definition of inert gas.

Buchloh: There is a certain scientism in that work, which then disappears completely
when you shift into the registers of language.
Barry: Well, not originally. We had to use language; we became very involved with
language.
Buchloh: Did language allow you to distance yourself from that kind of techno-
scientism? The last thing you would have wanted was to be perceived in the
context of the Art and Technology discussions of the time, at least I would
imagine.
Barry: Oh, I didn’t want to have anything to do with that!
Buchloh: But at the same time, the pieces with the radio waves and the gases come
very close, they could easily have been misperceived as a celebration of tech-
no-scientific thought.
Barry: Yes, but the Art and Technology people were making these little wonky
machines, and my work had nothing to do with that at all. But I liked certain
things like zero time. Once you started looking into these things, you started
finding all sorts of wonderful features.
Buchloh: Why would you have argued that that type of physical or chemical infor-
mation would be purer, less conditioned, less determined than traditional
artistic materials? Why would you have argued at the time that this type of
information and this type of material would be more productive for an artist
working in the present?
Barry: It dealt with space. I was interested in filling up space.
Buchloh: Did it emerge from a scientific interest?
Barry: No, I don’t think it was any more scientific than mixing paint.
Buchloh: It crossed my mind that when you said you went out to buy neon or
xenon, that this might have been partially motivated by responding to Dan
Flavin’s use of fluorescent lights or Bruce Nauman’s use of neon. As if you
asked yourself, Why shouldn’t I use the actual chemical and physical ele-
ments and gases, rather than transform them into visual objects again?
Would that have entered your mind at all?
Barry: Not really. I didn’t think in those terms at all.
Buchloh: But it does tend toward an increasingly self-critical reflection of proce-
dure, as well as toward a revelation of the physical operation of materials typ-
ical of post-Minimalist thinking. The emphasis on the physical properties of
matter was very much an issue that other sculptors at the time were dealing
with: In Richard Serra’s Splash Piece, for example, the lead as a material was
foregrounded first of all in terms of its chemical and physical properties. So
one would think that because you dealt with inert gas you might have had a
similar approach. [
Barry: Well, I was aware of properties. Very much so. And I gave it the definition that
went from measured volume to indefinite expansion, to a kind of infinity. I
liked the idea of infinity—remember, I also did the book of a billion dots.
A Conversation with Robert Barry 133

Buchloh: Wasn’t that later?

Barry: No. It was before. That was in 1967. The twenty volumes were done some
years later, eventually published by Gian Enzo Sperone, but it was originally
dreamed up in 1967. I found ideas like infinity and the idea of going from
zero to infinity and certain properties of radioactivity like the half-life, in
which the radioactivity would endlessly halve but never end up at zero, fasci-
nating. Like the paintings, there were infinite arrangements if you incorpo-
rate the space and the situation around them. It was a very busy time in terms
of ideas, but it had more to do with ideas of time and infinity and change
and trying to incorporate these ideas.
Buchloh: There is one rather different work that instantly comes up with the inert-
gas series and the radio-wave pieces: the telepathy piece. What I was trying to
clarify before was whether the scientism of those works is really not a primary
concern, since telepathy is, in a way, the opposite of the scientific. Suddenly
there is this implication of a mystical or an irrational dimension.
Barry: That piece, by the way, only exists in the form of a catalogue page, although
I did it a couple of times.
Buchloh: Do you believe in telepathy? Did you then or do you now?
Barry: If it existed, then it existed. I don’t know if I believe or don’t believe. I really
don’t know.
Buchloh: Did you practice it?
Barry: When I made the piece? Yes, of course. But whether anybody picked it up or
not I don’t know. But I certainly tried to do it.
Buchloh: So it is not an ironic piece?
Barry: There is a dimension of irony about it, of course. And it was kind of a
humorous thing, but people claimed that they were getting ideas. But then I
did this piece with the group at Nova Scotia College of Art with David
Askevold, using ideas or incorporating ideas and people’s thinking . . . incor-
porating other people. The artist’s relationship to others became an impor-
tant aspect.
Buchloh: That is exactly what I was trying to get to, because a remarkable change in
your work happened at that time—from what one could easily misunder-
stand as a devotion to rationalist scientific materials to shifting to a probably
not so sudden reconsideration of the social dimension of the work of art.
This signaled a way of thinking that previously seemed to have been relatively
absent from your work, the dimension one could call the critical attitude
toward the institutions framing artistic experience, in work such as the piece
from October 1969 when you proposed in Amsterdam that the gallery
should be closed for the duration of your exhibition.
Barry: I did that in several galleries.
Buchloh: I know. And that strategy suddenly opens up a completely different range
of issues in the discussion of your work and of Conceptual art practices in
general: Suddenly the gallery is reflected upon as a social institution, and the
134 OCTOBER

scopic desire to discover and see works of art in the gallery comes under
unexpected scrutiny.
Barry: Yes, but that dimension was already present in the January Show I did with
Seth. That work was also about you being there in the gallery. When you
walked into that gallery, all you saw was a sticker saying that this gallery is
filled with radioactive material or something like that, or radio waves or
something.
Buchloh: But the presence of these materials was still defined within or against the
conventions of art-making, whereas in the gallery-closure piece the quest for
visuality itself is defined as a complex social and psychological phenomenon
that is institutionally mediated and controlled.
Barry: But I didn’t think of it in this way. Also, this wasn’t the first time a gallery
had been closed. I had heard that Daniel Buren had done it before. But it
didn’t matter. Actually, somebody had told me that Yves Klein had done it as
well. I did it with Sperone, I did it with Art & Project . . .
Buchloh: Did they actually close the gallery?
Barry: Well, of course. It had to be done that way. I did it with several of them.
Buchloh: And there is a subsequent piece, which in my mind is a very important
piece, when you use the quote by Herbert Marcuse.
Barry: The Marcuse? The idea was to turn the gallery into a space where we can
come and think for a while about what to do.
Buchloh: In that work, the gallery suddenly is a place where we can come and think,
and in that sense it is almost an inversion of the closure piece.
Barry: True, but then I did the invitation piece. Where the show keeps moving
from space to space but there really isn’t a show. I don’t know if you know
that work. What would happen was that over one season, the gallery would
send out an announcement saying, “Leo Castelli in New York invites you to
an exhibition by Robert Barry at Art & Project in October of 1969,” or what-
ever the hell it was. And then in October 1969, Art & Project in Amsterdam
would send out an invitation saying, “Art & Project invites you to an exhibi-
tion by Robert Barry at Paul Maenz’s Gallery in Cologne.”
Buchloh: Like a chain letter?
Barry: Exactly, like a chain letter. It started at Leo Castelli and then it moved geo-
graphically across the ocean and finally it wound up back at Castelli’s at the
end of the season, and people would have been getting these announce-
ments for over a year. And of course there would be no show. The show
would just be the mailer that would be stuck up someplace, on the wall or
something like that.
Buchloh: And, again, you would say there was no critical impulse behind these
works—even though they clearly read as such with hindsight?
Barry: It was simply bringing attention to the role of the gallery, what the gallery
could be used for. I thought of the gallery itself as a medium to be used.
Buchloh: Not as something that was obsolete?
Daniel Buren and Guido Le Noci outside the Galleria
Apollinaire in Milan, 1968.
Barry. Marcuse Piece. 1970.
A Conversation with Robert Barry 137

Barry: No, not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact. The very first time Leo asked me
to do a show at his gallery was in 1970, when his gallery was still uptown,
before he moved to 420 West Broadway in Soho. My first proposal was to
turn the gallery into a child-care center for a month. And we thought about
it, and there were some objections. There were legal problems, first of all.
And insurance issues and things like that. If anything happened we would all
have been in trouble. So he couldn’t do it. But that was my first proposal to
Leo: to turn the gallery into a child-care center.
Buchloh: From the outside, when one hears that now, it seems incredibly critical of
the institution of the gallery.
Barry: Yes. But it is not. I’m not against galleries, I’m just calling into question the
role of the gallery. It is not critical. It is expanding the role … using the
space around the canvas, the space in front of it.
I also did other things. I presented the work of Lucy Lippard. It was like a reversal
of roles. And it was announced as “Robert Barry presents the work of Lucy
Lippard.” It was always the other way around: Lucy was organizing exhibi-
tions. Here an artist was organizing an exhibition of a critic. Which I
thought was sort of an amus-
ing thing to do. I did a lot of
things like that.
Buchloh: Let’s go back to the phase
when scientism turned into lan-
guage. When would you say this
happened? After the inert-gas
pieces or the radio-wave pieces
around 1968, when you pro-
duce your first series of slide
projections, entitled It . . . ?
Barry: The use of language really
starts in the January Show,
when I put the stickers up just
announcing the pieces. And
then the poster that I did for
the inert gas, I very carefully
composed that. The page was
blank except for one line at
the bottom. How we were
going to word that and how
that was going to be phrased
was important because that was
the only way that people would
know about it, really. There

Barry. All the things I know but of

which I am not at the moment think-
ing—1:36; June 15, 1969. 1969.
138 OCTOBER

was even a big debate whether we should use photographs or whether that
would be misleading.
Buchloh: Was there any deliberate reflection on language being the most social
medium of all? That it was more accessible than visual constructs?
Barry: We decided to leave it to language and keep the pictures out. With the inert
gas, we photographed and documented everything, but in the poster we
decided not to use any images, so what you have is a big sheet of white paper
and on the bottom a single line of text.
Buchloh: But the language that you use in those ’68 pieces—like in Something which
is . . . —is no longer a scientific or scientistic language. And that is a very
interesting shift, because then the language once again becomes very . . .
well, let’s say ambiguous, in the same way that Lawrence’s language can be mis-
read, in the sense that it can be very poetical and at the same time very specific.
Barry: It was a big thing, I remember, that Joseph Kosuth was included in a concrete-
poetry show, and there was a discussion about if that was a legitimate thing for
him to do and whether the work could be misconstrued as a kind of poetry.
Buchloh: Because you didn’t want your work to be perceived as poetry?
Barry: No, I didn’t at all. I didn’t know anything about poetry. I didn’t want to be
in the domain of the poetic. I thought that would just create a lot of prob-
lems. I mean, it is like hitting on pans and saying, “I am creating Minimal
music.” I didn’t want to desecrate something that was really worthwhile by
saying, I can write poetry too, or I can make music too. I had too much
respect for that. That was neither my tradition nor my intention.
I would even say I worked with words more than language. I think of
language as the whole thing, whereas I sort of settled on words and phrases.
In the beginning I used text, but it was spaced out. The first real so-called
language pieces were essentially sentences, attempts to describe something
that was not really describable. And the question was: If I put together a
string of adjectives, as in the It . . . series, if I put together a string of these
adjectives, would that amount to something in someone’s mind, or not?
Buchloh: I always thought one way to approach these definition pieces was to say
that the “It” they try to define is the work of art, as though you were giving a
definition of the different qualities and possibilities of a work of art.
Barry: That’s the way some people read them. They could be read in those terms.
Buchloh: That doesn’t mean it is the only way, but it would not be objectionable?
Even if the definition of the work of art is not the primary or even the exclu-
sive referent?
Barry: No, not at all, it is not the only way.
Buchloh: But when you started using language, you entered the territory of poetry,
from which you had to distinguish yourself.
Barry: Or prose.
Buchloh: And prose. At the same time, you did use the distribution form of the book.
So there is a kind of threshold of various language functions between prose
 Barry. Untitled (Artwork
with 20 qualities…). 1970.
140 OCTOBER

and poetry, between the descriptive and the performative, that both you and
Lawrence reached without entering either one. And the distribution form of
the book did imply that the work of art now was more accessible, more easily
distributed, and as such it had an additional political dimension to it.
Barry: And I did the typewriter pieces also. And I typed things up on cards. In
Castelli’s show, for example—although the works were in notebooks—the
individual pieces would be on typed cards or something like that. Some were
even handwritten, such as the first ones I did before I learned how to type. I
actually hand-lettered on pieces of paper. And it took many forms—some
were works that were sent out in letter form and things like that over a peri-
od of time, and some of the phrases would be changed and so forth. The
thing about books was that Seth was very interested in books.
Buchloh: But it seems again and again that Seth was a very politically minded per-
son, whereas the artists apparently were not so political.
Barry: I never knew Seth being especially political. He became very political, but he
was not yet at that time. I think Seth became political a little bit later, when
he became more involved with Lucy.
Buchloh: When I talked to Seth, he emphasized, very much to my surprise, that his
work was as an impresario and was directed against the notion that the work of
art would serve as an object with which you can financially speculate, that the
work of art has a potential to produce surplus value in which you can invest.
Barry: Yes, those were ideas that were certainly discussed, and I was caught up in
that way of thinking.
Buchloh: You were? That is what I was trying to get to, but it sounds like you weren’t
particularly willing to talk about it.
Barry: Yes, but then I rejected it. I have to admit that there was a time when I said I
am not selling anything. And that was that.
Buchloh: So the reference to Marcuse was not just an occasional quote?
Barry: I had read a lot of Marcuse at that time. But also Merleau-Ponty and
Heidegger. These were my main readings, but there were others too. And it
was that writing that I had come across.
Buchloh: Did you read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception? It was translated
in 1962.
Barry: Of course, but not that early—I would say I read it in 1965–66, probably. But
I had read his essay on Cézanne.
Buchloh: So the shift toward language, or toward words, as you put it, did have some
political implications in terms of radically redefining aesthetic experience . . .
Barry: Yes. But I would say that my initial inspiration wasn’t probably that. In my
conversations with Seth and Larry, I got caught up in that, as a way of
explaining what we were doing, justifying it. . . . When you got caught up in
the art world, in the art scene as it was constituted at the time, which is much
smaller than it is now, it was much more intense. And we were on the out-
side, we were kind of rebels. Not accepted by galleries; no one was looking at
A Conversation with Robert Barry 141

our work. I would say for a while that I was caught up in it, but it wasn’t my
initial motivation, it wasn’t what I was thinking about, really, as I was making
the work. I think it was mainly through my association with Seth and Larry—
and with Lucy. It was a very political time, during the Vietnam War, and
there was the Art Workers’ Coalition.
Buchloh: So the radical implication of turning the work of art into a linguistic defi-
nition, or into a textual operation in terms of its implied politics, or into a
definition of the work’s status in terms of its economics, all of those implica-
tions would have been important?
Barry: They were important. And they were something that I thought about. For a
while, like I said, I wasn’t selling anything, and I examined that point very
quickly—it didn’t last very long. I was bought. But even before that, there was
a lot of opportunity to sell. But . . . you get to a point where it seems like a
very naive attitude to have. I remember Lucy was a little bit pissed at us, she
was disappointed that this kind of purity was lost. Maybe Seth had become
disillusioned, too, because he was very interested in publishing a newspaper.
This was before he moved to Paris. He did a lot of research on it and spoke
to a lot of people, trying to get money. He was trying to do a newspaper simi-
lar to those they put up on the walls in China, so that he could post it around
on the billboards and walls in Soho, wherever he was going to put it, I have
no idea. But it would start that way—people would read it and it would
become like a radical newspaper. We were caught up in it, but that was kind
of a secondary thing. I didn’t think that the political aspect of it was strong
enough to keep the work going. It wasn’t enough to keep changing, keep
growing the work. In other words, the primary motivation was my thoughts
about expanding the notion of what art was. There was obviously a political
association with that, no doubt about it, but it wasn’t a primary thing.
Buchloh: What did you do instead of the child-care center as a proposal?
Barry: It simply became a show of recent work, the conceptual stuff. It was a pretty
radical show for that time. Typed text was all it was. You sat down and you
read. And that was it. There was nothing on the walls. There was a table with
notebooks and stuff and various kinds of typed things. Some in book form,
some typed on index cards, some typed on eight-by-ten sheets of notebook
paper. Some pieces existed only in catalogue pages, and a letter would be
sent with the information.
But there were a lot of pieces that used language. If I was invited to do
an exhibition, my piece would be to show the work of such-and-such an
artist. And that statement would appear, so I would be using language to
describe another type of situation . . . to say that the gallery is empty or that I
am showing Lucy Lippard or that I wanted to show the work of Ian Wilson.
Which I did. I presented the work of Ian Wilson in a show. My piece was for
Ian Wilson to be invited to be in this show because he had been excluded,
and I don’t think he should have been.
142 OCTOBER

Buchloh: But that is a political act.

Barry: And I said what I was thinking about, or everything that was in my mind, and
then I listed the time and date. I used language to get these ideas across, think-
ing about how to phrase these things as economically and clearly as possible.
Buchloh: One last question that I would like to ask: Do you perceive the backlash of
a certain type of figurative representation as it emerged in the 1970s as in
any way connected to the backlash against the repression of visuality that
Conceptual art had brought about? And do you see that as a critical histori-
cal reversal of the positions that you had developed in the late 1960s?
Barry: Probably it is, but it is not something that I am aware of. I rejected virtually
all of it. I never understood it, never could relate to it.
Buchloh: So you wouldn’t say that there was a sense in the work of Conceptual
artists of having gone too far in the elimination of all visual elements, and
that gradually visuality would have to be reconfigured or readmitted?
Barry: Well, these things are not engraved in stone. It is not a religion or a doc-
trine. You do what you have to do to get your ideas across.
I think artists have been flirting with going back to painting for a long
time. That doesn’t bother me at all. I deal with the history of art—one of my
favorite composers, Bach, was thought of as an old-fashioned composer at
the time since he wasn’t using all the latest melodies from Italy. I rather like
this idea of using paint, which is an awfully handy medium. I thought so
when I made paintings, which I have been going back to for a really long
time, drawing on walls and paintings on paper. And I have always made draw-
ings. For many years I supported myself through the sale of drawings, and
then I started making drawings on found colored paper. And in the draw-
ings, by the way, the color is found. We would go to the local paint shop and
find that red. In Rome, we went to all of the paint shops, and the same thing
in Nice. We used the color right out of the cans, so to speak. So the color is
found and chosen in much the same way that the words are found and cho-
sen.
Buchloh: Found according to what criteria?
Barry: You look at it and you just decide, nothing specific.
Buchloh: What do you mean by a found word?
Barry: Oh, when you’re reading and something pops up and you say, “I can use
that.” Something stands out and announces itself, or you hear something on
the radio. I write it on my list and maybe I can use it later, maybe not.
Buchloh: So you actually make word collections?
Barry: Yes. Lists of words.