Living Outside His Own Shell

Jonathan Borofsky is responsible for some of the finer moments in Los Angeles public sculpture. Downtown, his figures of flying men hang from the ceiling of the Civic Center Metro Station, his “Molecule Man” sculpture, composed of four, 32-foot-tall perforated aluminum figures stands before the U.S. Federal Building, and his giant black “Hammering Man,” with a mechanized arm moving up and down, is in the courtyard of the California Mart. In Venice, his ballerina crossed with a clown adorning a restaurant facade has become a tourist mecca. Now, crowds are gathering outside the Remba Gallery in West Hollywood to watch his “Turtle Clock.”

Seventy-two cast-copper turtles are arranged in a 40-by-15-foot rectangle on the front of the Robertson Boulevard gallery. Every hour, on the hour, the turtles’ heads move in and out of their shells in different configurations. Naturally, since these are turtles, the movements are slow and methodical. Most of the action takes place at noon and midnight.

Borofsky, an L.A. resident from 1977 to 1992, now lives in Ogunquit, Maine; his large-scale public art projects have been installed around the world.

“In most of my public sculpture,” he says by phone, “I try to deal with archetypal symbols that can be read by most people on the street. Not too abstract or difficult but symbols that resonate, like the flying men [“I Dreamed I Could Fly”], because most people have had dreams about flying. I like to connect to people’s interior self. I like to come up with images that ring true.”

Borofsky, 56, began his association with Remba in 1993 when he did an edition of cast-copper sculptures of limes in a bowl for its Mixografia workshop. But for his next project, says gallery owner Luis Remba, Borofsky wanted to return to his usual grand scale: “We wanted something really ambitious, and he came up with this idea of turtles. He always takes risks with us. He likes to be experimental.”

The clock took shape in turtle time--that is, slowly, over the course of five years. Borofsky says the reptiles are a bit of a departure from his usual work. “Instead of using everyday silhouettes of human beings, I reached back into the past. The idea is to connect these ancient living forms together so they appear to be one.”

In fact, there is an addendum to “Turtle Clock,” a small-scale accompanying exhibition, inside the gallery, called “All Is One,” a phrase Borofsky has incorporated in his work in various ways since the mid-’70s. It consists of smaller cast-copper turtles connected by their feet in various configurations.

His interest in turtles, he says, began in 1975. “I did a wall painting of a turtle for my show at Paula Cooper [Gallery in New York]. I see them as [a] life symbol and representing the transition between living in water and coming to live on earth. Plus, it’s surprisingly like a human being with two arms, two legs, a neck and an oval head.

“Also, what always fascinated me was the shell that covers the back and allows the more vulnerable parts to pull in and hide,” he adds. “There was something metaphoric about that for me. Human beings create their own psychological shells to protect themselves.”

And why the clock? “It refers to the idea of the animals being ancient that still exist today, underscoring the continuity of passing time.”

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In the 1970s and ‘80s, Borofsky seemed to be a ubiquitous presence on the gallery and museum circuit. His 1985 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s downtown warehouse, the Temporary Contemporary (now the Geffen Contemporary), was a typical demonstration of his irreverence and high spirits. “Basically, whatever was inside my head came out in those installations,” he recalls.

One part of the show included the statue of “Hammering Man,” chaotic drawings on the wall, bits of doodles and numbers scattered on the floor, as well as a basketball court where visitors were encouraged to shoot some hoops. “It created an energy, a sense of relaxation,” Borofsky explains. “I’ve often tried to take away the pomposity and stuffiness of the museum atmosphere.”

Beginning in 1969, every day for several years Borofsky spent hours simply counting to quiet his mind. From the mid-’70s, he began assigning the numbers counted during the day to specific works of art. In this way, he felt that all his diverse work was connected, underscoring the fundamentally spiritual message that “all is one,” a phrase he displays in each of his installations.

“I wanted to make the point that despite the different styles I used-- abstract, realist or conceptual--the idea was to help people feel and see the interconnectedness of everything.”

Although a decade has passed since his retrospective, “Turtle Clock,” with its interconnected elements, manifests the same message. “If you really have that spiritual idea, that we are all one, then you see and treat people differently. But it sounds preachy, so I usually don’t talk about it.”

His work is considered an influential bridge between late ‘60s Conceptual art, with its emphasis on systems and pure information, and the embrace of personal experience in the expressionistic art of the ‘80s. Lynn Zelevansky, now curator at the L.A. County Museum of Art, wrote in ArtNews in 1984, “Borofsky is attempting nothing less than to integrate the personal with the political and the material with the spiritual, mirroring in an art context the complex totality in which we live.”

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Borofsky never embraced his status as an art star, whether in SoHo in the ‘70s or L.A. in the ‘80s. “I don’t like talking about art. I have no social desires. I seem to like to be alone a lot.”

Around 1987, he got a request to re-create his figure of “Man With Briefcase” in steel as an outdoor sculpture for General Mills in Minneapolis. “Before you knew it, I was taking pieces that had been grouped together in the installations and presenting them as individual pieces in outdoor locations,” he says.

For the last decade, he has concentrated on monumental public sculpture, completing more than 20 projects in the U.S., Europe and the Far East. A few weeks ago, three of his “Molecule Man” sculptures, standing 100 feet tall, were set directly into the Spree River in Berlin as a commission for the world headquarters of German insurance company Allianz.

In Tokyo, he recently mounted an 80-foot-tall silhouette of a man in flashing red lights on the side of a building titled “Heartlightman.” An audio component offers the relentless thumping of Borofsky’s own recorded heartbeat.

Of the transition from galleries to public art, he says, “It’s almost like going from graduate school into the real world. In the one, you are relegated to a given white box. I used to make those spaces as organically interesting as possible, a walk-in, three-dimensional space of the mind,” he says. “Now, one piece of mine can be in a location where thousands of people can interact with it. My 70-foot ‘Hammering Man’ in Frankfurt has 20,000 cars drive by it every day. That has an interesting feel to it. I feel good about the idea that it is something positive or helpful for human beings, as opposed to the 5,000 people who see your museum show, and then it’s over.”

He finds the fit to be more in tune with his essentially egalitarian view of the world. “I never felt comfortable selling my art for money, period. It feels awkward to me to get paid $15,000 for some squiggles on paper. I get large sums for big outdoor sculpture but it feels less awkward because I know how much effort it takes and how many people have to get paid and what the materials cost. The aluminum alone for the ‘Molecule Man’ in Berlin cost $600,000. If I’m going to communicate with the art world as it exists, I have to sell my work, but at least I ended up doing it my way.”

A native of Boston, Borofsky has fine-art degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He lived in Manhattan until a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts brought him to L.A. in 1977. He sees his move to Maine as a return to his East Coast roots. Enthusiastically, he extols the virtues of the tiny town of Ogunquit: the changing seasons, the absence of traffic, and, as he is an only child, the proximity of his parents. His mother, an architect and artist, and his father, a musician, have lived in the town, off and on, for 25 years.

When he is not traveling on the business of installing sculpture in far-flung municipalities, he goes sailing, has dinner with his folks and comes home to his five cats. “In my garage, I still make little paintings as I began [doing] when I was 8 years old,” he adds.

“I loved L.A. With the palm trees and the weather, it was very exotic for me,” he says. “But it was time for a change. It was like the gypsy in me needed to move on.”

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Jonathan Borofsky’s “Turtle Clock” and “All Is One” at Remba Gallery, 462 Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood. (310) 657-1101. Through Jan. 8.