Billie Lawless

Billie Lawless
Billie Lawless
Nationality	American
Education	[Rutgers College]], New Brunswick, New Jersey
Known for	sculpture
Notable work	Green Lightning,Didy Wah Didy,The Politician: A Toy

Billie Lawless (born July 16, 1950) is an American sculptor. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Buffalo, New York where he attended high school. Besides an avid interest in art that was fostered with the nearby presence of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and a close friend of his father's, sculptor Larry Griffis, Lawless was heavily involved in the sport of rowing. In 1967 he stroked the first Senior Heavy weight crew to win both the American and Canadian Schoolboy National Championships (Canadian Secondary School Rowing Association) in the same year. In his senior year of high school he represented the USA at the World Rowing Championships held in the Netherlands rowing in the straight four. Rowing would remain a constant in his life through college and afterwards when he coached for another ten years at the West Side Rowing Club.
He attended Rutgers College, New Brunswick, New Jersey from 1968 to 1970 and from 1972 to 1974 when he graduated with a BFA. At Rutgers College Lawless studied with Bob Cook, Livingston College and Mel Edwards at Rutgers.
Between the years of 1970 and 1972 Mr. Lawless actively fought against the war in Vietnam. He was involved in litigation with his local draft board when they arbitrarily removed his student status and made him available to the draft and he then claimed conscientious objector status. Mr. Lawless litigated and won a decision in New York State Supreme Court. By this time the war was winding down and his student deferment was reinstated. At the same time he enrolled at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana and studied with Kostantin Milonadis the then Distingusihed Professor and Artist-in-Residence at the Unviersity. It was at this time that Lawless committed himself to working with steel and the idea of combining it with as many different materials as possible (in particular at that time, stained glass).
From 1980 to 1982 Mr. Lawless atttended SUNY at Buffalo studying with Duayne Hatchett and George Smith. In June of 1982 he received his MFA from SUNYAB. Unrelated to the pursuit of his graduate degree Lawless built and installed Cock-a-doodle-doo at the State University College of Buffalo (Buffalo State College) directly across the street from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with a dedication in May, 1982.
In 1984 Mr. Lawless created the sculpture titled Green Lightning which was placed in the Midtown Corridor of Buffalo, New York. The installation immediately created a controversy vis-a-vis one part of the imagery that employed neon lighting and visible only after dark. Some city officials found the work to be offensive, and Mayor Jimmy Griffin (politician) ordered it removed on 20 November, 5 days later. Hiring a salvage company to cut it a part in the dead of night Supreme Court Justice Vincent Doyle immediately issued an injunction halting the demolition.
In 1994 Lawless married Svetlana Schreiber, an immigration attorney, in Cleveland, Ohio and originally of Sighetu Marmaţiei, Romania. He has two steps sons who both reside in New York, New York. Successfully de-orphaned! Wikiproject Orphanage: You can help!

Green Lightning

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Green Lightning

Green Lightning was originally conceived as a project at Artpark, Lewiston, New York for the 1983 season. It was subsequently erected in Buffalo, New York in 1984 and heavily damaged a week after its unveiling by the City of Buffalo and City of Buffalo Arts Commission (Director, David More.) Its total destruction was prevented when Lawless obtained a court order halting the destruction which was begun by the City under the cloak of darkness well after the Courts had closed. Lawless was one of eight artists accepted to exhibit at Sculpture Chicago '85 in the Spring of 1985. The jurors, Howard Fox of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mary Jane Jacobs of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL and John Chandler, Director of Supervision, Art Consultancy and Management, Boston, MA, selected Lawless' Green Lightning which was subsequently installed at Harrison and Wells Streets in the South Loop. It stood for five years with no controversy . In 1992 a jury in the New York State Supreme Court ruled that the Mayor of the City of Buffalo and the City of Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency had violated Mr. Lawless' civil rights with its unauthorized actions in 1984.In the Spring of 1993 Green Lightning was accepted into an exhibition to be held at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center in New York, New York. The exhibition was sponsored by the Association of Independent Artists and curated by John Rosis and Glenn Reed (See prospectus for this exhibiton).When the Director of the Center (Michael Ford) voiced his objections to the sculpture both curators (artists living in New York City) attempted to pressure Lawless into submitting another piece.Lawless refused and the American Civil Liberties Union initiated litigation. Justice Ira Gammerman of the New York State Supreme Court ruled that the Manhattan Psychiatric Center did have to exhibit the piece but that it was not required to give Lawless the site which he had requested. The Center offered a piece of land which was not large enough to hold the sculpture which effectively precluded Lawless from exhibiting the piece. No artists from the exhibition voiced any support for Lawless.

Didy Wah Didy

Didy Wah Didy

Didy Wah Didy is named for the last stop on a mythical railroad bound for hell (Black Southern American folklore.) With extremely simple imagery and few words the piece is a timed neon sequence that shows a mushroom cloud forming (animated) over a boys head. With the words "Atomic Playground Ahead" and "Kids Ride the Big One!" it is a piercing send-up of typical American road side attractions. In three of the four corners, constantly flashing are the words "chills," "spills," "thrills." When the "kid", who starts out smiling, then becomes alarmed, is finally "nuked," "death" with an alternating skull and cross bones flashes in the lower right hand corner. Each of the three flashing words are surrounded by the icons common in Lawless' work, lightning bolts, dollar signs and stars. In all it is a timed sequence of approximately sixty seconds.

The Politician A Toy

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The Politician A Toy

The Politician A Toy is a sculpture by artist Billie Lawless created under the fiscal umbrella of The Cleveland Public Theatre which is located at 6345 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio. The sculpture was made possible with the support of over a hundred and fifty corporations of both local and national origin. The sculpture is located close to downtown at the corner of Chester Avenue and E. 66th Street on a site provided by Roy Kuhn and the Kinco-Balin Corporation. The sculpture stands over forty feet tall and is enclosed with a wrought iron fence forty feet by fifty feet.The sculpture is composed of twenty tons of steel (plate, channels and I-beams), two tons of polypropylene rope (the tail), fiber glass (the bowties), a ton of cedar (the handle), assorted bearings (for the wheels and mouth mechanism,) television sets (the eyes,) industrial epoxy paints and the many and various electrical components required to power the piece. The sculpture is set on four concrete foundations and surrounded by a wrought iron fence five feet tall. The top of the fence is lined with double entrendre's of political cliches. It should be noted the the Mayor of Cleveland, Michael R. White, opposed the erection of the sculpture for purely aesthetic reasons ("I 've seen it and I don't like it...." The Plain Dealer, Feb. 19, 1994.) This opposition created difficulty in obtaining the required building permits from the City's Building Department. Ultimately the threat of a Federal lawsuit persuaded City officials to process Lawless' building permits. The sculpture stood on private land for the last thirteen years and was privately funded. Currently it is being moved to the Nance School of Business at Cleveland State University, 18th Street and Chester Avenue in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.

$...I Know It When I See It...$ (Uncensored Einstein to Uncensored Bork)

Armed with inspiration in the form of Walter Kendrick's, The Secret Museum and Walker Percy's The Message in the Bottle, books dealing with the history of pornography, its suppression, and the nature of language and man, Lawless created a complex, multimedia installation at SPACES (Cleveland, Ohio), a key work in the Uncensored exhibit in 1987. Although smaller than Green Lightning this work confronted many of the same issues, resurrected the offending "images" and incorporated video technology.
From the title down to the sources for the video clips, Lawless rips political statements out of their contexts and illuminates them with biting irony. Judge Potter Stewart's infamous inadequte definition of pornography forms the title. Passages from the Meese 1986 Commission on Pornography lifted verbatim from banned films and books were used--titillating material, considering it is a goverment document. A Mozart string quartet and quotes from Einstein and Susan Sontag were also included on scrolling text. Lawless juxtaposes the "safest, most conservative music--that of Mozart--with scenes from The Devil and Miss Jones, and comments on the frequent censorship in art as compared to music and science.
Framing the video monitors was a wall of manufactured political posters slaped up repetively with graffiti, and superimposed on what was a timed sequence of the same neon penis figure stepping up to a podium to direct the proceedings. Although much of the work is tongue-in-cheek, it addresses the issue of censorship, tries to define the weird line between pornography and art, and wrestles with the urge for communication under government suppression.

Amy Sparks, 1989

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External links

• Billie Lawless
• Artists Go to Court to Restore Sculpture in Buffalo
• Green Lightning Strikes Chicago as Unobjectionable
• The Politician: A Toy Interview on National Public Radio with Linda Werthmiller, August 31, 1995
• Public Sculpture signs off in Columbus ' Article by Amy Sparks, January, 1989
• Green Lightning
• Didy Wah Didy
• The Politician: A Toy Moves On to Cleveland State University