Audrey Chan.

Lloyd Hamrol and his sculpture Woven Cone (1973) at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California on May 22, 2007. Photo credit: Audrey Chan. (Click image to read interview.)

Last May, Tom Lawson invited me to interview artist and former School of Art faculty Member, Lloyd Hamrol, whose collaborative rope sculpture Woven Cone (1973) was an iconic fixture on the CalArts campus. During my two years at CalArts, I would pass it everyday as I walked to my studio. The sculpture had taken on a fairly legendary status - if decrepit in aspect - as a rumored site of marriage proposal and a totem to animistic pseudo-spiritual rituals. Regardless, it was one of the few pieces of public art on campus and its hippie aesthetic and modest presence hearkened back to the early days of the institution as much as Frank Gehry’s post-cataclysmic concrete fortress architecture.

Following the discovery of a termite infestation and a collapsing backside due to 30+ years of SoCal sun exposure, the new Director of Operations determined that Woven Cone was to be demolished. Tom thought a ritual bonfire at graduation would make for a proper farewell. Unfortunately, the rope was made out of polypropylene and wildfire season was coming. Still, timing was an issue. Would students and faculty, upon learning that “the teepee” was to be no more, cling to it with nostalgia or perhaps develop a sudden attachment to it? The administration decided it was safer to wait until after graduation.

The unceremonious removal of Woven Cone was postponed until after Lloyd and I met on campus to talk about the sculpture’s origins (as a class project) and his thoughts about teaching at CalArts. You can read the interview here. My favorite moment of the interview was Lloyd describing how he climbed into the sculpture to exploit the “inner sanctum”’s qualities of “voyeurist fantasy.”

Also, his anecdotes seemed to fill out a missing piece of the early history of CalArts’ art program. His workshop-based teaching practice was based in collaboration and play. He said that he felt like an outsider to both the dominant pedagogy (led by personalities made famous in the book Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia) and also the new gender-based paradigm of the Feminist Art Program, co-founded by his wife at the time, Judy Chicago.

Importantly, this was a moment when art school tuitions were rising, forcing the now ever-present question of young artists: career or play?