The photograph on display pictures an unassuming object known to many as the “infamous” Slant Step. This unprepossessing object attained its significant history after having been rescued from a salvage shop in Mill Valley in 1965 by William T. Wiley and given to his graduate student Bruce Nauman, the most famous graduate of the UC Davis MFA program. A simple footstool utterly unsuited for its intended purpose because its dysfunctional slant made it impossible to find comfortable footing, the Slant Step became an inspiration for Wiley, Nauman and many others precisely because of its failure and ambiguity as an object. Nauman kept it in his studio for inspiration, making numerous drawings and his own even more awkward version of it. In the spring of 1966 he and William Allan made a film about constructing a new and improved Slant Step. This film was never finished and the footage is unfortunately missing. The films on display here—Abstracting the Shoe, Fishing for Asian Carp, Legal Size and Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube—are similar in structure and content.

As the quotation on the next wall indicates, the Slant Step’s appearance in Nauman’s life coincided with a breakthrough in his studio work while a student here at UC Davis. His work was transformed from its original concern with painterly figurative abstraction and later concern with minimalist sculpture into a conceptual practice that has since become the archetype for an entire era in art making. He was surrounded by brilliant faculty (Wiley and Robert Arneson in particular) that was steeped in the conventions of dada humor and cynicism about intellectual pretensions but also had their own forceful “Left Coast” ideas about what art could be. Nauman melded these various influences with a sophisticated and self-reflexive concern for art as a form of performance, based on the systematic philosophical exploration of thelanguage games of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nauman’s shift in emphasis has brought him vast international acclaim. The rather silly and useless object from a Marin County thrift store thus served as an historical turning point in the recent history of art.

The Slant Step subsequently carried on as a kind of art world celebrity object, inspiring “The Slant Step Show” at Berkeley Gallery in San Francisco in 1966 featuring William T. Wiley, Dorothy Wiley, Jeanette Wiley, William Allan, William Witherup, Jack Hudson, James Balyeat, Bob Anderson, Charles Wiley, Gary Groves, Jerry Ballaine, Bob Nelson, Jack Ogden, Jim Melchert, George Neubert, Dick Pervier, William Geis, Paul Heald, Jack Fulton, Dan Welch and Louise Pryor. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that there were “slant-steps made of bread, of colored plastic with electric lights inside, of wood and metal and silk and probably of chewing gum, too: it’s that kind of show.” Nearing the end of this exhibition Richard Serra stole the Slant Step from the exhibition, taking it across the country to show it to his friends in New York City. It was later returned, to be featured with Melchert’s Anti-Slant Step and Wiley’s Slant Step Becomes Rhino/Rhino Becomes Slant Step in the famous “Funk Art” exhibition curated by Peter Selz at the University Art Museum, Berkeley in 1967. Crossing the country again, Stephen Kaltenbach took the Slant Step back to New York to the School of Visual Arts in 1968 to show to his students and to make a series of industrially made copies that were intended to appeal to the consumer. The following year the Slant Step was back in California yet again to be exhibited in Sacramento in a gallery called Art Place and Phil Weidman’s Slant Step Book was published by Bill Dalton, The Art Co., Sacramento.

Such was the Slant Step’s infamy and its contribution to contemporary art!

- Anne Naldrett