An Unlikely Muse

This website was created as a repository and resource for everything slant step. As such, it exists as something between a historical archive and a scrapbook. Even as I type this in December of 2010, there is very little information to be found on the web about it. If you happened to be one of the artists caught up in the slant step phenomenon, you know its history, or if you came across the story by chance, as I did, you might have learned about it long after its (first) heyday.

The short version of the story goes something like this: In 1965 a couple of artists became curious about an unusual object, clearly hand-built for some intended purpose (though hardly aesthetic), discovered residing in a salvage shop in Mill Valley, California. After repeat visits, one of the artists, William T. Wiley, purchased the green linoleum covered, wooden, chair-like item at the request of the other artist. Impractical for sitting, or standing, due to its sloping surface, that other artist, Bruce Nauman, used it as a foot-rest in his studio. In fact, no one that came into contact with the slant step could agree on its intended use. The nail-filled slanted step became an unlikely muse inspiring poets and artists alike to create work.

The first exhibition of work was shown in the Berkeley Gallery in San Francisco in 1966. In 1970 a second exhibition, the Slant Step Show, took place at the Art Company in Sacramento run by Bill Dalton. The History tab will take you to a digitally photographed version of that original catalogue published by Phil Weidman, who has kindly provided permission to scan it, where you can read the text and see the images for yourself.

In 1983 the Richard L. Nelson Gallery (today known as The Nelson), located on the University of California, Davis campus, mounted the Slant Step Revisited exhibition which included the original slant step, and works by numerous respected artists and poets, including William Allen, Robert Arneson, Jack Fulton, Ray Johnson, Stephen Kaltenbach, James Melchert, Jack Ogden, Ron Peetz, Michael Stevens, Phil Weidman, William Yates, William T. Wiley, and William Witherup, just to name some of the participants.

To this day the intended use of the slant step has not been agreed upon. Ask anyone who knows about the thing and they will tell you in their expert opinion, unequivocally, what the object was built for. Problem is, no one agrees, and the form, as such, remains as mysterious and unknowable as ever, which, perhaps, explains why some forty-five years after its discovery work is still being created in its image.