Rough Trade
Douglas-fir, steel
16’ x 16’ x 16’
1976
One evening at the James Bay Inn in Victoria, in early February of 1976, three people were drinking beer at the bar and talking about art – Jack Kidder, an artist; George Forbes, an English Professor; and Greg Snider, a sculptor. They were talking about the current retrospective of Marc di Suvero at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. di Suvero was an American sculptor Snider had met in Holland a few years earlier, who made colossal works out of reclaimed iron girders, beams and timbers, slung together with cables, chains, nuts, bolts, and welding. This aggressive industrial aesthetic reflected the building and manufacturing ethos of contemporary American industry at the time, as abstracted kinetic formalist modernist sculpture.
The exhibition sponsored by the Whitney brought together fourteen of these large-scale outdoor works, scattered throughout the five boroughs of New York. It was a rare opportunity to see a broad range of substantial work by this significant California sculptor, who had left America in protest during the Vietnam War and moved to Venice, Italy. His practice had long interested the three people sitting in the bar, and the exhibition was due to close in a few days. It was an opportunity about to be missed.
Then the two older men, Kidder and Forbes, offered an outlandish proposal: they would send their young companion to New York to see the show. Right now.
The next morning, hung over, he was flying to New York. As soon as he landed he headed out, and over the next three days made his way to every one of the works in the exhibition, from the Battery to the Bronx, from Brooklyn to Staten Island, from Manhattan to Queens. Not a trick was missed; it was nonstop. The stupendous scale of the works was a physical revelation. Their slow kinetics were a meditative surprise, and their brutal and crude assembly a keen pleasure to experience up close. When he had seen what he had come to see, he got on a plane and went back home.
How to repay this extreme act of generosity? A tribute sculpture was contrived in the spirit of di Suvero, made from four identical 8" x 8" x 16' timbers. Three were notched and fitted together to make an irregular tripod that could accommodate any sloping terrain. Slung from two chains, the forth beam could have its horizontal adjusted by the length of a third chain; this beam could always indicate a true horizon, whether visible or not. Fittingly, and amusingly, the work was named Rough Trade.
The piece was built, and set up in the front yard of the big Victorian house Jack and George owned on McGregor Ave. After being deemed an "attractive nuisance" by the municipality, which insisted on its removal, it was shifted to the back yard to offset public liability concerns.
After the sad passing of the two dear friends Jack and George, Rough Trade was acquired from their estate by Michael Williams, an avid art collector and owner of Swan's Pub in Victoria. He had the work installed close to "The Point," his art-filled waterfront home in Gordon Head. In 2000, Williams died suddenly during a flight to London; his property and art collection were bequeathed to the University of Victoria. Rough Trade's future looked unclear, until the artist – in discussion with Visual Art Faculty, the University Art Gallery Director, and Facilities Management – proposed an installation in front of the Visual arts Building, where the piece was installed in 2005.
Installed in front of the Visual Arts Building at the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC.
