Interview with James Surls, conducted by Sarah C. Reynolds

I think any great concept starts with, in a sense, capturing the moment; it’s like riding the prevailing wind. You happen to be wanting to go someplace, and that’s the way the prevailing wind will take you. You get to do two things at once. Lawndale [Art Center]1 came about because the [University of Houston] art building burned. The painting building burned. The print building burned and ceramics, sculpture—they shared an old building with architecture. Architecture had one end; art had the other end.

This was in maybe ’78, ’79, ’80. The school, the power structure of the school, came and said, “Oh, my goodness, Mr. Surls. We are so sorry. The building burned. We just don’t know what we’re going to do. We’re going to have to continue classes and put you somewhere, so we’re going to put you in this old warehouse over a couple of miles off campus.” Which it turns out was Lawndale; Lawndale was the name of the street. They put us over in that building, apologized and left, and I was the happiest man on the planet! The idea of the warehouse, the big, raw, space—I mean, that’s a paradise for artists. It’s a paradise particularly for sculptors who—keep in mind now—are noise makers, dust producers, junk collectors.

So Lawndale in a sense came about just because God struck the building with lightning and set it on fire. And I happened to be the recipient of the good fortune [and] so did some other people. They also moved graduate painting over to that building. Graduate painting had the upstairs: huge studios, great studios, good studios, high energy. It was almost like playing in the freeway, in a sense. Like putting yourself in traffic. Lawndale was able to be the doorway of an enormous amount of traffic. We just happened to be the right people, in the right place at the right time to take care of a situation.

Lawndale was like being handed a race car, and someone says, “Hey, here’s the keys to the car. You can go as fast as you want to go.” Whoa! What an invitation! I mean, a race car, not just an old jalopy. They thought, “Poor people, having to work in that hot, old building.” I looked at it like a Ferrari, and I assumed the keys. To tell you the truth, I just assumed directorship. No one gave me that. As this “imaginary” director, I didn’t have an imaginary staff. I had probably 30, 40, 50 or 60 eager students available. They weren’t all my students—some were other people’s students, like the graduate painting people. But I became pretty authoritarian in my willingness to say, “Hey, I need ten guys to come down here and move a stage.” Now, they could say, “Kiss my ass—I’m not going to do it.” But they were incredibly willing to participate. They would move a stage. Paint a wall. Get ready for something. And those guys got to come to the performance. That was their reward. They got to be there when the reality of the action took place.

We got to expand our audience out of the University because we did things that involved people from outside the University. 

Creative Risk

Consider the Museum of Fine Arts. The public really [doesn’t] want them to goof. They cost too much. They’re too big. They spend too much money for failure. It’s like having NASA fail: You don’t want failures of that magnitude. They don’t want to do a show and have the public say it’s a dog. They want to do shows the public [says] are great! Well, can you imagine where Dow Chemical would be without their laboratory? I mean—think about it—they have to have that lab. Lawndale was a lab. That’s basically what it was. There were some things being tested over there. There was also a very significant failure rate. You know, regardless of how much I appreciated something or liked doing everything we did over there, they didn’t all work. Some were bombs. I think you have to be able to do that. You have to have a place where you can take chances and run risks and if the test tube blows up, you simply say, “Shit. We learned.”

You can live as far out on the edge as you want to go, but it’s not really necessarily fair to take your family out on the edge with you. You can’t take your kids out there and turn them loose because now all of a sudden two worlds have to survive side-by-side, simultaneously. They have to coexist. I spent a lot of money [at Lawndale]. I didn’t go around telling people that, or complaining. I did it because I wanted to do it. I liked doing it. I thought it was important…to me and to the community. I think one of the things that made [Lawndale] successful back then was the fact that artists took responsibility for their own actions. They were willing to do things. They were willing to take responsibility for their own actions, and suffer the consequences. That’s what responsibility means.

As best I can tell, [today] there may be a bit more “laying in wait.” Kind of saying, “I can’t do this because…” or “I can’t do that because….” There are too many reasons why they can’t do something—and mostly they’re self-imposed. You’re not really supposed to consider what’s out there in terms of what you can and cannot do. You just do it and let the chips fall. If they do, you may get hurt. There’s a possibility you might get wounded—that’s what entrepreneurialism is, to tell you the truth. And guys who can—I mean, Texas, for goodness sake! Is this the wildcat state or what? Are we risk takers, or what? Are we willing to go out on a limb? There have been more rises and falls and busts in this state than probably anywhere in the world, and some guys do it and come back and do it two, or three or four more times. That’s not happening [in the visual arts] now—but it did.