As Professor Frank Owen closes out his final semester of teaching classes this week and will retire next spring, the Art Department will also bid farewell to an object Owen calls his “teaching pal,” an odd prop with a singular niche in American art history. As a guest looks it over in his Williams Hall office, Owen says, “It’s probably the shabbiest teaching tool at the University of Vermont, isn’t it?”

True enough, the Slant Step is an ungainly, impractical step stool, a homemade thing cobbled together from scrap wood and green linoleum in someone’s basement. And it likely would have remained just that if artists William Wylie and Bruce Nauman weren’t intrigued by the object they discovered in the Mount Carmel Salvage Shop in Mill Valley, California. Wylie bought it for fifty cents in 1965; soon after, the step took up residence in Nauman’s studio at UC-Davis, where the grad student who would develop into one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists mostly used it as a footrest.

The Slant Step’s coming out party, of sorts, occurred in February 1966 when, at Wylie’s suggestion, a group of Bay Area artists participated in a show for which they created works inspired by the homely object. A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer wrote: “There are 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.”

So began the Slant Step’s life as enigmatic muse—inspiring sculpture, works on paper, poetry, and one of Nauman’s first film efforts. The step itself would take on a sort of vagabond existence, changing hands between artists and friends, road-tripping across the country, narrowly avoiding being lost through the years. 

Life is safer for the Slant Step these days. Owen quips, “It’s retreated into academe.” When the step travels now, Owen packs it into a formidable wooden crate and ships it off to galleries and museums exhibiting retrospective shows on this time and place in American art.

On Wednesday, Dec. 8, Owen put the Slant Step on the model stand one last time for students in his Advanced Drawing Class. In true Owen style, a sense of fun and celebration was also part of the exercise as chocolate cake with green “linoleum-look” icing was served.

How did you come to be caretaker of the Slant Step?

Somebody has got to keep the damn thing so we—myself, Arthur Schade, and a couple of other buddies—kept it. And then we’ve loaned it out, are there when the shipping agents come to pick it up, and are there when they bring it back. Someday I suppose we’ll probably give it to some institution, probably back in the Bay Area.

Would you care to weigh in on the aesthetic meaning of the Slant Step?

We shouldn’t take it too seriously; it’s essentially a whimsical entity. It’s just some clunky, funny, funky object that nobody knows what it’s about. And it looks so humble. And it’s so characteristic about an attitude that Bay Area artists had—well, compared to New York—at the time. In New York, it was driven by ideologies and by theory and a handful of powerful critics—Clement Greenberg and some others. Out in the Bay Area, artists would just as soon go trout fishing or tune up their motorcycles or play baseball as make art. You couldn’t afford to be an ideologue. You had to have friends and they were going to do different work than you did.

So the Slant Step, I always have seen it as a San Francisco version of a Bronx cheer to all of the theoretical folk—raising the point that art is what artists make, not what theoreticians say you should make. If we want to make art about this stupid, humble little green linoleum object, why we we’ll do it.

How have you used the step as a teaching tool?

I walked into my first paid teaching job in 1967 in an advanced drawing class at California State University at Sacramento, and I brought the Slant Step. I plunked it on the model stand and I unrolled a scroll on which I’d written all of these different constructions using meanings of the word to draw—drawn close, drawn against, drawn through, drawn fine— and I told the students to make drawings based on this language of this object.

Maybe a third of the students in the class, being Californians of that era, knew what that object was. So the gasp that went up from those students was equivalent to when the model strips her robe off— Ha!—it had the same moment. ‘That’s the Slant Step.’

I’ve also used it as a subject through the years with my painting students.  So they’ll be painting, “A Woman Reading with Slant Step.” It will be like a companion animal in the foreground.

I read something that suggested the Slant Step marked a turning point in Bruce Nauman’s art. True?

That might be overstating. There was just a lot of laughing going on. How many people ever write about how much laughter was experienced at the moment? You very rarely read about that. (Owen speaks seriously, as if quoting an article.) “Some cheap whiskey was drunk and there was a lot of laughter.” We just had this idea, then we all went and did something about it. The great theoreticians or historians don’t ever chronicle those moments.

Are today’s students impressed by the Slant Step and its history?

I don’t think you should be impressed. You should look at it with kind of like an amused wonder, perhaps? At either my involvement with it, or why on earth would I even be concerned with it or should they be concerned with it. If they ask those kinds of questions, then it’s done its job. I can’t think of anything where I could introduce the cultural moment from the distant past that is condensed in that little sucker. There it is, the ferment of the San Franciso Bay area in the mid-sixties, a quite marvelous place at that time. This was all part of it.