The Slant Step

I was talking with David Elliott from Studio Art today and when I asked him "what is a cuff?," he told me about the Slant Step. A sculptural cuff!



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From https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/slant-step-comes-home-good/

The Slant Step’s history as an “objet d’art” began in 1965 when Professor William T. Wiley and graduate student Bruce Nauman came across the seemingly useless object in a Marin County shop. Wiley paid the 50 cents and Nauman kept the step in his studio for inspiration (and footrest!).

Owen studied art at UC Davis around the same time (bachelor’s degree in 1966 and master’s in 1968) and would become the Slant Step’s caretaker for 45 years. “Somebody has got to keep the damn thing, so we — myself, Arthur Schade and a couple of other buddies — kept it,” Owen said in a 2010 interview with the Vermont Quarterly, out of the University of Vermont, a few months before his retirement from the art faculty.

All through his academic career, Owen used the step as his “teaching pal” — in Sacramento, San Francisco, New York, Virginia, North Carolina and, finally, Vermont, asking his students to ponder its meaning (and their own).

Still, in his interview with the Vermont Quarterly, he cautioned: “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.”

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There's even a book! http://www.specificobject.com/objects/info.cfm?inventory_id=18072#.V_B7gDIZNmA