So, when we shipped it to France to be shown at the Consortium in Dijon, we cut all these elements apart. I ended up building a whole fresh new sculpture using those first couple gestures. Certain long wings needed to go through the holes in a certain way, so I could cantilever off that, but then after that it was free-floating, making a new work, and it was really fun. Every time we reinstalled it, it took on a new shape. However, I was always highly conscious that the table was a marvelous stand-in for a piece of graph paper or a building.
Rail: In another piece I read, you refer to how every time you see one of your works it looks different to you.
Rubins: That’s true.
Rail: The work itself, certainly the ones that are large-scale, but also the drawings—I feel like they actually want to be different.
Rubins: Again, if the work is doing its job, then when you go to look at it, it does something in your mind. I mean, it has room for you to place your mind into it, as your mind is at that moment—do you know what I mean?
Rail: It’s situational?
Rubins: Right. I believe that if a work of art is going to last through time, it has to be a fresh experience each time you look at it. That’s what I yearn to have in my work.
Rail: A yearning—that’s a very eloquent way of putting it. So to retrace one’s steps, another impression I get from talking to you is that you’re highly disciplined. Do you think that’s accurate?
Rubins: I think that’s funny. “Discipline.” I mean, as a child, I was always in trouble. I can still hear adults saying, “She does not listen; she cannot pay attention.” [Laughter]
Rail: Oh, artistic trouble.
Rubins: I was a hyper kid—always being told “Sit still! Sit still!”
Rail: How old are we talking? Six? Seven?
Rubins: I didn’t learn to read until I was in high school.
Rail: Okay.
Rubins: Disciplined isn’t the word. I can be highly focused in odd ways. Even now I’m a painfully slow reader. I like audiobooks. But I’m extraordinarily determined.
Rail: Yes, determined.
Rubins: I think that’s what makes me disciplined, because I want to get this stuff done. My dad was an engineer, and he often repeated the Thomas Edison phrase, that invention is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Anybody can have lovely ideas and a big imagination. I always had a big imagination and a little too much energy, but I was able to focus that and find a way to bring those ideas into reality, and that has been my discipline.
Rail: You’re talking about a high level of motivation to execute something.
Rubins: So I can see it. And then if I’m happy with it, that’s the most satisfying way. But I need to see it.
Rail: Do you think that your yearning to see is intensifying as you go along?
Rubins: That’s always been there. I just get better at it, I think. As I get older, I’m able to hone things down. I’ve always built things, and I really needed to build things at a certain scale, but I had no means of storing those things. What do you do when you build something so big? I used to call my early works my “Christmas floats,” because it was like you put all this energy into making a Christmas float, and then Christmas is over, and the float disappears. I was making these huge pieces, like Worlds Apart (1982) or a 45-foot concrete appliance wall, and they were there for a period of time, and then we brought in the sledgehammers and put on dust masks and got the work out of there.
Rail: I want to shift topics and talk about your drawings. When I first saw the drawings, it was in a catalogue. My first question was, “Why is she calling it a drawing?” I hope that’s not too reductive.
Rubins: Let me tell you a story. I grew up on the East Coast, and I got into graduate school at UC Davis, which was a very competitive school at that time. I really wanted to go there because it seemed like my art school education was grooming me to go to New York. I was artistically mature, but as a human, I was immature. I was an immature person, and I really was not ready to take on New York. I really wanted to go far, far away and kind of evolve.
Rail: You were so self-aware. How old were you?
Rubins: I was probably twenty or twenty-one. Graduate school was a lovely umbrella. To be able to experiment and do stuff and not have to take on that responsibility—it’s a kind of gift for an artist.
Rail: That’s true, very true.
Rubins: It was perfect that way for me. My sister and her husband lived in the area of San Luis Obispo, California, and they had a house in a town called Los Osos. They went to Europe for the summer, and I was taking care of their house and their dog. I had a waitress job at this community called Morro Bay. It was a beach community, and my waitress job was boring. But out there in the water was a leftover volcano forming a lump in the water—but it was a leftover volcano. It was a volcanic thing that had eroded away, and I was enamored with it.
I thought, it’s just a soft hill, but it’s a volcanic thing with all this history. I would just stare at that thing for hours. It was enigmatically mesmerizing for me, and I thought, “When I get to graduate school, I’m going to make this into sculpture. I had a sketchbook and I made tiny drawings about these enigmatic lumps that I was going to build when I got to graduate school.”
Rail: You knew they were for the future.
Rubins: Yeah.
Rail: Consciously?
Rubins: Yeah. I didn’t know how I was going to make these sculptures, but I was going to make sculptures. So I was in California, and I saw adobe for the first time. Now, I had come out of a ceramics education. My sculptures were clay things that I didn’t fire—I just made them. So I made these concrete and mud and straw mounds, and they were just terrible. They were not interesting. They didn’t have that enigmatic energy, but the drawing still worked for me that way. I thought maybe I should go back to those drawings, and so I started making the drawings again. I realized, “Wow, this is just a lousy piece of paper and some pencil.” And I figured out if I drew on the floor, I could put all my weight on the pencil.
Rail: I see. That’s important.
Rubins: And I could develop this weird deep space. It wasn’t a line. I began questioning what a drawing is. “Is it a puddle? Is it deep space? Is it a picture of something?” And so I was making these paper pieces that I was really excited by, but I didn’t know what to do with them. “What am I going to do with it now? Is it something? Is it a flat thing?” So I started to build sawhorses, oversized sawhorses, and flop them over that.
I didn’t know what to do with them. It was like a material I was inventing, making this weird deep space, but I didn’t know what to do with it. So I think that is the beginning. That is the origin of the evolution of the drawings.
Rail: The way you’re talking about it, it becomes organic. It has its own autonomy. Could you talk about how these particular works—which are graphite on torn paper—are installed? How is it done?
Rubins: Initially I make the drawings, and it takes a fair amount of time. And then it takes just a few minutes to figure out the form somewhat and get it on the wall. I do it very, very fast. I do it so fast that I don’t want to catch myself. Do you know what I mean?
Rail: That’s part of the process.
Rubins: I do it so fast. I think that is just my own kind of energy, you know? I have a lot of energy, and there’s some anxiety there, and I just want to get it done. I don’t even stop and look. I just put it up, and then take a minute to breathe, maybe adjust a little thing here or there, but not too much.
Rail: Is that why pushpins are used?
Rubins: Yes, the pushpins are perfect that way.
Rail: Because you can—
Rubins: I can just tack them up fast. I get nice long pushpins—like, half-inch long pushpins. I get these things, it’s just a common pushpin, and then I can install them very quickly and sit back and take it in. It’s not a super controlled thing. It’s something that kind of happens. I’m not saying, “Okay, this needs to be a little bit higher,” you know?
Rail: So you spend a laborious, painstaking time—
Rubins: It’s not painstaking. It’s just long. I’m not a meditator. I swim, that’s as close as I’m going to get to that kind of thing. But perhaps this is close to it too, because I’m just watching those layers of stuff go down and watching that deep space evolve.
Rail: Okay, but then you throw it up;, you pin it up there. Do you ever step back and correct?
Rubins: Like I said, I might adjust a little something here or there, but not too much.
Rail: No radical corrections.
Rubins: Very rarely.
Rail: And it stays that way. So then how is it replicated?
Rubins: We make photographs, and a map. The map shows you where it goes on the wall. We trace it on a piece of plastic, and then you know where the folds are. But does it adhere to that one-hundred percent? No. It comes close enough, and then I can kind of bring it into a satisfactory form.
Rail: Is it very high quality?
Rubins: It’s Arches paper.
Rail: I see. And you are using regular pencils?
Rubins: They’re called General’s Sketching Pencils. It’s a rectangular pencil. I made friends with people at the factory. They would sell me cosmetic defects, and I would buy them in bulk. So instead of paying ninety-five cents a pencil, I could pay ten cents a pencil. The lady who used to sell them would call me and say, “We have a batch of ten thousand,” and I’d write her a check. So I have enough pencils for the rest of my life, basically. [Laughter]
Rail: So we have the fabrication methodology, and we have—for lack of a better phrase—the display methodology. Do these works preclude interpretation? I mean, do they not require interpretation? When I was saying, “Oh, that looks like this, and that looks like that,” you replied, “That’s very amusing, that’s very nice—”
Rubins: It depends upon the viewer. The viewer is going to bring whatever they want to the experience. I can’t dictate to the viewer what to think, what to bring to their experience. I wouldn’t ever want to, either.
Rail: Do you think that your monumental works and your drawings exist on two poles of an arc? Is there any way in which they contradict or complement each other? Or do you think of them as just two types of expression that you use to make your work?
Rubins: I don’t know. I don’t even try to think about that. I know that I do them both, and they both give me a lot of satisfaction in their own ways. I don’t really know how they relate to each other. And I don’t want to try to explain it either. I just accept it, to tell you the truth.