Rad Summer is one of the most interesting shops in Portland, Oregon. If you happen to get by there we highly recommend it. We recently sat down with Honey Owens, epic musician and co-founder, to find out exactly what it’s all about.
INTERVIEW BY CLARK RAYBURN / PHOTOS BY SHAYLA HASON ANPQ: How did Rad Summer come about and when did you open? Honey Owens: Some friends of mine and I had been selling clothes around town and on ebay. We shopped at the same places but each had our own ebay stores that carried similar things. So we decided to pool our resources and open a shop. Rad Summer opened in October, 2007 with Charlotte Reich, Jacob Lavalley and myself. We found this cute dive-y space next to a psychedelic reptile shop in Southeast. The walls were early 1900’s crumbly and the floor had some shitty tile that was breaking apart. Every once in a while you would spot a lizard racing around or diving into vents that had escaped from next door into our space. Or better yet, a crazy, rare and poisonous spider! We pretty much slammed it open and threw our stuff in there. We spent a couple weeks trying to take apart a shrimp-growing tank and drag it out plus a day or two to spray paint the floor and walls . Our friend E Rock did this huge mural on our back wall of a smiley face and green slimers coming out of an Oregon Coast sunset with monolithic creatures. Pretty awesome!! By the time we had moved into the new space in November of 2008, Charlotte and Jacob broke up and kinda were ready to get on their own paths. As that started to flow into motion, our other two awesome friends Ruth Dunn and Valentine Falcon joined and it swirled into the three of us as the new Rad Summer diamond era holy trinity!! Charlotte stayed on for a while but left in March to start her own new awesome store, Zone. That will hopefully be on Belmont some time soon. It’ll probably be Rad Summer’s boyfriend basically. Also of note, even though these are my past partners and present partners, there is a larger community that is involved in the murals, record section, the jewelry, the blog, the vibe. I mean maybe sometimes more than others but they are there in a sorta Saturn ring way ya know? Many things come together and gas us up from our community of friends. One hand washes the other. It’s kinda Wu Tang… haha! ANPQ: Who does what for the store? HO: Well, we all take turns doing everything. Shopping, painting, making stuff, whatever. Our friend Zach does the records but likes to remain anonymous for some reason. It’s really similar to living with roommates, but it’s a business. We split the rent, the space, the responsibilities. When it comes to making decisions, there is no voting. We simply have a sit down and talk it out. We all agree or it doesn’t happen. Also of note, Valentine Falcon is an amazing front woman for the local band ‘The Get Hustle.’ They were really into playing a lot a year or so ago… house parties, underground clubs, etc. The whole band is like a band of shamans or something. Very awesome live! She’s a force to be reckoned with. We call Ruth Dunn ‘the preacher.’ At first glance, people might think she’s just some kind of reserved or shy, hot ’60s model but once you get to know her, she is another force to be reckoned with. Amazing inside and out, with a great sense for design and dance nights. She will lay down wizard
wisdom whether you know it now or not. It’s confusing but some of this is just for your information! I’m not trying to drop some weird ass shit for your ’zine. It’s hard to describe your BEST friends! Cuz like I am ready to marry them basically or like Rad Summer is our baby from our rad marriage. ANPQ: Why did you guys call the store Rad Summer? HO: I grew up in Los Gatos, California for a good part of my life. I lived down the street from a skateboard shop called Gremic. All my friends were basically older skater boys that lived in my neighborhood. I was always trying to be exactly like them which of course resulted in a couple broken bones and other awesome kid things. Santa Cruz was just over the mountain so it was a heavy ’80s Cali surf/ skate vibe. All the gear, Town and Country, Mr Zogs Sex Wax, Ocean Pacific, Vans had just come out. I sweated that vibe really hard. I wanted to have all that awesome gear, bleach my hair, try to get tan even though I’m a freckle face. That was what was majorly in style when you were ten or eleven years old in 1981!! Of course this was fading away as punk took over. Anyway, so later in life my friends and I would joke about this time period in my life. Cuz it was the time when I got my first yearbook in middle school and we would all sign each other’s yearbooks ‘stay cool and have a rad summer.’ We kind of ended up modeling our first store after an old kinda broken shack/head shop. We sold a couple skateboards and a tiny bit of vintage surf gear as well as the vintage clothes. The colors of the store ended up matching that time period so it flowed. ANPQ: When you’re hunting for stuff for the store is there a specific kind of thing you’re looking for? HO: Anything rad. It could have been made yesterday or 100 years ago, it just has to be haute on some level. Also, it has to be either wearable, readable, drinkable, smellable or listenable. We try to bring in things that support a posi-vibe. Now that we’ve moved into this sort of higher-profile shop, we’ve been thinking about elevating things a bit. We want to always have vintage or used/recycled things. But right now we’re gearing up to have local and independent designers represented. We’re all working on our own lines that will be available Spring 2010. Our fantasy is to someday have our store be like Biba meets Father Yod’s Source Cafe! There would be a vegan/raw cafe, a general store with delicious, hand made soaps and incense, bamboo towels, quinoa! Ha ha!! ANPQ: The store seems like it’s also kind of a hang out... was that part of the original concept? HO: Kind of, yeah. We had shows once or twice a month in our last location. We would roll out the racks to the side, throw down some pillows, get snacks, drinks whatever and chill out into the evening. Sometimes friends will drop by with lunch just to have a chill place to hang and eat like it’s a park or something! Pretty much every day people are dropping in just to hang though. It would really be awesome to have the cafe dream where we could have occasional events and art shows. ANPQ: What about Rad Summer sets it apart from other stores in Portland? HO: I don’t know really. I mean every store has their own vibe you know? All of them have something that somebody needs and so in a lot of ways we are all on the same page. We just want to rock it! Get some cool stuff in, make some stuff, share the love with our people, Portland. We really love being here and having a place where people can walk in and feel good. Today we had our crew out front painting, getting ready for winter. People were stopping by, commenting, honking. It was like we were farmers tending our crop and the neighbor farmers were coming over for some tea and a chit chat. Man, sometimes it’s like being on mushrooms down here, in a good way. Like, pinch me already!! But of course that could be the ten hours of paint fumes and paint thinner!! Rad Summer 2742 E. Burnside, Portland, Oregon 97214 radsummer.blogspot.com
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 4
Hardcore surf shop/hardcore coffee shop in Manhattan? Yes. Not Manhattan Beach, no, Manhattan. New York City. Really? Yes.
Surfing and coffee: two things that have been around for ages. But also two things that New Yorkers are becoming more and more taken by, right? Especially coffee, I would imagine. Coffee has become like the ultimate foodie commodity, right? Morgan Collett: New Yorkers are so specific in regards to what they consume. Just from being open for the last three months I can tell you that people here love surfing. They come in wide-eyed and eager to discuss the last time they went out, where they went, where to go, everything. Some are completely thrown back that you can actually surf in NYC. It's fun just talking about surfing and getting people stoked on the whole vibe. Coffee is such a foodie community right now. I never considered my self an intense coffee connoisseur. I enjoyed my cup of coffee in the mornings and was easily pleased with most people's coffees. When we [Morgan Collett, Josh Rosen and Colin Tunstall] opened the espresso bar, we realized how important it was to produce a great cup of coffee. If they disliked the tasted or were made a coffee that doesn't meet a particular standard two things would happen: they would tell you and you'd feel like an idiot and make them a new one, or they would never come back. Since the start we have used La Colombe, which is Rainforest Alliance certified. More than 25 million people in the tropics depend on coffee, a crop that is the economic backbone of many countries and the world's second most traded commodity, after oil. Rainforest Alliance standards are intended to protect the environment and the rights of workers. Amazingly, only 1.3 percent of the world's coffee is Rainforest Alliance Certified. It's topics like this that we pride our coffee in representing and New Yorkers definitely pay attention to this.
I have to ask: Was it a hard decision where you would order your beans from? It was a hard decision in the sense that we wanted to sell a great cup of coffee and there are so many fantastic coffee beans out there. Deciding to go with La Colombe was pretty easy. Being that they have some of the best tasting coffee in our trials and they are Rainforest Certified, we weren't too concerned when we made our decision. When did you open? The beginning of August [2009] is when we opened the doors to the cafe and the surf shop/back patio followed at the end of August. It was a fun process building everything out. We used all re-claimed lumber from up-state and worked like mad to get it all done in less than five weeks. So far, are you getting more coffee people or surfing people? How many crossovers? I guess a successful coffee place in New York City is going to service more people in a day, probably, than a successful surf shop in the city, right? For the first few months coffee was what was brining people in. Especially when the weather was nice, people were freaking out when they learned about the back patio. But I think the crossover is at least 70 percent. People aren't necessarily buying surfboards every time they come in, but more and more are realizing that we are a full-on surf shop. They get stoked to know that they have a spot to come screen films, talk about surfing, get their gear, and have a coffee. It all coexists so nicely. What's the surf industry's reaction been like? Amazing! New Yorkers have really been into it, which was our initial audience. What's been really great is that the surf industry is coming to New York more and more, and they have been pumped to collaborate with Saturdays. Its been nice bridging my life back home in Cali with our life in NYC. What were you thinking with the store? The space is subtle, wonderful. I think that's what we wanted to accomplish. We wanted something that would stay in NYC for a long time. A space that was super-inviting for New Yorkers and travelers. We worked with all re-claimed lumber and it gave the space a vibe we didn't really expect. Kinda feels like you're in California or something like that. A nice little escape for everyone in the concrete jungle. Saturdays NYC 31 Crosby St., New York City saturdaysnyc.com
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 5
THE KINGSBORO PRESS. INCREDIBLE. WONDERFUL AND SEMI-MYSTERIOUS. A MAGAZINE, A BOOK, VARIOUS EDITIONS. AN ARTIST BOOK/ARTIST MAGAZINE/ EDITION. EVERYTHING. INTERVIEW BY BRENDAN FOWLER / IMAGES COURTESY THE KINGSBORO PRESS The Kingsboro Press, the artist book imprint, has released objects in a variety of formats and Kingsboro Press, the “magazine,” has taken on several incarnations itself. Am I right to call it a “magazine?” What do you call it? Was your initial intention even to start a magazine? Jordan Awan: I think of it as a magazine simply because we issue it periodically. But I do think that we approach each issue and publication as if it’s an artist book or an art piece and not just a magazine; we try to give each issue something different and special to set it apart. Dan Wagner: I’m not sure what the original intention really was anymore, but it has progressed into becoming more of an artwork for all of us, I think.
And then you made that Amy Yao supplement that was pretty much the same size as the issue before it, right? Megan Plunkett: We invited Amy to curate a section of issue 5, but it ended up being so beautiful and so rad that in the end we decided to let it become its own thing. So we published it as a separate book, but issued it jointly with issue 5. Amy’s ’zine is technically part of issue 5, just printed differently on the same size paper and stock. Who started The Kingsboro Press? DW: Megan and I started it together in 2007 when we were in school together in Brooklyn. Jordan has always worked closely with us and officially joined when we started the fifth issue. You have a very limited Web presence but I know this is on the verge of expanding. MP: Yeah the Internet-ing is definitely mellow, but I’m in the process of doing a sort of experimental distro, kind of continuing the Kingsboro vibe and aesthetic but maybe making the circle bigger. But yes! Holiday. More soon…
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 6
Could you list all of the artists who have participated? Or most of them or a bunch, at least? MP: Basically everyone we work with is really a friend first—a lot of it just comes out of our solid circle of really trusted friends. It’s more and more rare that we would do anything with someone we don’t know directly, and I think we are all really proud of that in some way. It’s like a family. Some of the people (and places) who have done a lot of stuff with us and been really amazing and inspiring and helpful are Milano Chow, Alex Gartenfeld, Ooga Booga, Golden Age, Max Krivitzky, Aude Levere, Matt Vadman, Joshua Ray Stephens, Will Boone, Clare Wohlnick, Matt Keegan, Sean Keenan, Yan Yan, Donni Davy, Karma International, Erik Lindman, Dispatch. Also there were some really, really rad artists in Amy’s ‘zine like Becca Albee, Josh Kline, Jason Eberspeaker, Matthew Higgs, and a bunch, bunch more.
I often say that your output has remarkably high standards for both rigor and playfulness. Serious games? What do you think? JA: I think each of us tend to follow our intuition and not set any rules or guidelines that would carry over from one publication to the next, which would account for the playfulness; we allow ourselves a great deal of freedom with each individual project. We’re rigorous in that we approach each publication knowing that the content has to be first-rate and the presentation has to be high quality. DW: Each issue has always been a very experimental process. For us there isn’t really any room (or money) to make tons of proofs and prints to obsess over every single detail, so in the end it’s that initial creative burst that ends up coming through more than anything. MP: I agree with all of that, and also the estimation of Kingsboro as being both rigorous and super playful. I guess we keep saying it, but making things together is awesome. I love Dan and Jordan and I think we all really respect each other’s ideas and processes so we never set limits on ourselves for what we think we can or can’t do. I wouldn’t do something that I wasn’t totally excited about or didn’t feel was challenging us in some way.
Sometimes I feel like I got into fine art as a continuation/extention of my life in underground/ experimental/D.I.Y. scenes and for the expanded access to problems and problem-solving strategies and I’m kind of guessing the same would be true for you all? MP: I think that makes sense. For me, I think there is a lot to be said about all of those issues, for sure. I know we mentioned intuition but I guess that’s really the thing it boils down to. It’s just that feeling, you know? Something that is a little beyond words. It’s kind of the only way to explain my relationship to art and communities in a way that wouldn’t last too brutally long… JA: Actually, I’m probably the opposite. If I’ve ever become involved in any kind of scene, it’s as a result of personally being involved in art-making. Art is an expression of concentrated imagination, and it’s imperative to step outside that every so often to work with and talk to other people who are engaging in their own creative struggles. DW: I’ve always been interested in self-publishing and I guess it’s an extension of getting to spend time with my own work. It’s all been pretty unavoidable.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 7
Most exciting moments in The Kingsboro Press so far? MP: I don’t know about the most, but one super exciting thing is when some project we worked on is done, and then when I think back to how we imagined it in the beginning and it’s nothing at all like how we thought it was going to be. JA: I’m just happy to work with Dan and Megan on Kingsboro. DW: Yeah, I’m happy to be able to collaborate with two of my best friends. Or, going to LA for our 5th issue release at Ooga Booga was a lot of fun. We got to surf a lot again, which is the best.
Bill Owens’ seminal photo book Suburbia was published in 1972, the year I was born into the very suburbs he was documenting. Thumbing through the picture pages of his book I see my own early childhood—the fashion, styles and objects that sit permanently on my memory’s back shelf. The images trigger these foggy dead-end thought-trains of sparkly green Formica countertops, horn-rimmed glasses and itchy woven fabrics. They conjure up smells of dust mixed with sizzling Hamburger-Helper. Bill Owens catapulted into photography history when he confounded the viewers who picked up Suburbia thinking it would be a visual condemnation of the newly spreading plastic sprawl by instead offering a touching insider’s look at the people who made these new communities thrive. He also introduced giving the subjects their own voice by getting captions from the very people in his photographs—a novel approach that inspired future photographers. Bill Owens was also one of a few photographers who were assigned to document the infamous 1970 Altamont concert that was supposed to be a West Coast response to the much-heralded Woodstock. Dubiously, the security for the concert was provided by the Hell’s Angels, who bashed in people’s skulls and eventually beat and stabbed a person to death right in front of the Rolling Stones, who had hired them, as they were playing on stage. Aside from all of this, and a testament to his flexible and multi-faceted life, Bill Owens was an early pioneer of the Brewpub movement. In the early ‘80s California law prevented the joint operation of a brewery and pub. When the law changed in 1983, Owens quickly opened Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in Hayward, California—the second oldest in America by only a few weeks. He offered strong, flavorful beer as opposed to the mass-produced watery beer that was distributed by the mainstream brewers, paving the way for all the choices available to beer drinkers today. It was fascinating to talk with a man who can claim to be the creator of both the famous Pumpkin Ale and a string of historic photography books. Four to be exact—and he has authored several more books about brewing and making moonshine, as well as being the founder of American Brewer Magazine. Embracing new technologies at the wizened age of 71, Bill Owens is always busy, making short and funny movies using a handheld Flip camera, documenting the wide varieties of food that we humans eat in blistering, saturated color, as well as touring the US visiting breweries.
TEXT & INTERVIEW BY ED TEMPLETON / IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST Ed Templeton: I don’t know where to start. There’s so much— Bill Owens: —I’ve had a rich life, unlike a lot of people, who just kinda have a job. ET: Yeah, for sure. Where were you born? BO: San Jose, California, 1938. I’m old. Next week is my birthday. I’ll be 71. And when people bitch about their age, I tell them to shut the fuck up. ET: [Laughter] BO: Get out there and do something with your life. A lot of people want to retire. I say, “What the hell’s the matter with you? What are you gonna do, go play golf? Fight with the old lady? Get a life.” Do something, you know? Give back to the community. Be a volunteer at the local school, you know? People just take, take. They don’t give back to the community. I believe here in America, you should do two years for your country. I don’t care of it’s in the Army or the Job Corps or a volunteer at the local school district. Give back to people. ET: I can understand that. When I was researching for this interview, I learned that in 1956, Eisenhower authorized using the phrase, “Under God,” and added it to the Pledge of Allegiance, and I was wondering if, at 18, you were aware of that. BO: Nope. I wasn’t aware of anything. I was a total screw-up all my life. I flunked out of college. I was the bottom of the barrel in high school; they told me not to take college credit classes because I didn’t have the right stuff, and it was true. And I got into college as an agricultural student. There were 113 of us, then there were 13 of us, and then there were three of us. And they finally caught up with me and made me take English 1A, and of course, I flunked it. Then I hitchhiked around the world. I went to work construction. A friend of mine suggested going to Europe, and I said, “Great.” So I went to Paris to
study at the Alliance Francaise. And, of course, if you can’t write English or speak English, you’re not gonna learn French. I lasted three days there. So all the things I’ve set out to do in life mostly have failed. I did hitchhike around the world. I managed to not get myself killed, which is pretty easy to do today if you’re in the wrong country doing the wrong thing. ET: And what year was this? BO: 1960. I’m gonna go around the world again next year, the fiftieth anniversary. Maybe it’s ’62. I can’t remember. I think it’s my fiftieth anniversary of hitchhiking around the world—I loved Sudan. I hated India. ET: Really? BO: Oh, the poverty is beyond your wildest dreams. I mean, people who go to India, I say, “You didn’t walk two blocks from the hotel and look around?” Go to Mumbai, Bombay. Oh, my God. You just know Mother Nature has run amok. Too many burros, too many cows, too many people. People just begging for enough food for one day. It’s shocking. The second poorest place on earth is Cairo, Egypt, with ten million people living on the absolute edge of starvation. There’s six billion people on the earth, and three billion live on a dollar a day, eking out a living on a little bit of bread, a little bit of rice. ET: So you’re not a parasitic photographer who revels in such poverty for photographic purposes? BO: I don’t do that. When I do my lectures, I say, “Leave the damn Eskimos alone.” They’ve photographed them to death, you know. Come on, look right in your own backyard, there are photographs to be made. They’re at Costco. They’re at Home Depot. It’s right in front of your face, but people like to run off to other places to make what they think is exotic photographs. I think the nature of documentary photography is very sick. All the
awards go to violence and the downtrodden. The documentary photographers who I cut my teeth on, the FSA, 1930s, Walker Evans, and all those people who documented America, trying to show us as we really were during the Great Depression and a little bit afterwards, brought dignity to the human condition. Even though they were trying to show poverty, they didn’t exploit. Dorothea Lange’s picture of the woman in P-Town shows how desperate life was in those days. But I look around and say, “Man, there’s a lot of people with desperate situations now, but they live in a tract home, and they’ve only got one job for two people, and their mortgage payments are coming due.” And we have a bunch of right-wing nuts in this country. I’m really sick and tired of the talk shows—opinion shows that do no service for this country. They give their opinion. It’s not news. And they rail against the government. Again, where is these people’s volunteerism—did they ever go into the Peace Corps? Did they ever do anything besides make a whole pile of money, live in big fancy houses and have security guards? What kind of life is that? Come on. They just rail against the government. They have nothing to do but hate the government, and without trying to do something that’s positive. I stood in front of the post office last week and had people sign a petition to keep my little local post office open. Nobody called me a socialist. What’s the matter with people, calling somebody a socialist? Or to accuse Barack Obama of being a Nazi? These people are—what’s his name, Glenn Beck? Total fucking idiot. What he’s in for is for Glenn Beck and for his money that he makes. I’m sure it’s like $10 million a year. I’m sure his wife and kids will be fighting over his estate someday. I see him getting ratings on TV in order to sell products, Viagra and other stuff. I don’t know that it’s Viagra, but it’s just the commercial end of our society. I believe in
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 8
Surburbia: I enjoy cooking, dogs, cats, kids, soccer, and living here.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 9
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 10
socialized medicine totally. I believe in education. I help out a young girl with $200 a month. She’s a college student. This means everything to her. What’s $200 to me? That’s my bar tab. I drink that much at a local bar, you know? ET: I go to my local health food store, and out front was a guy with one of those Obama with a Hitler moustache photos trying to give out pamphlets, and it’s all I can do to stop myself from kicking his stupid little table over. I live in Orange County, which is kind of a last bastion of Republicanism down here. BO: That’s the old John Birch Society. Talk about intolerance. That’s the Glenn Beck style of intolerance. I think what made America great is the fact that—in my little town of Hayward here, we have a mosque right next door to a Buddhist temple—notice the symbolism? You could throw a rock from a Buddhist temple to a mosque. And up the street is the Catholic cemetery and the Catholic Church. Our society is built on tolerance. Look, if you wanna be a Buddhist, be a Buddhist. I don’t care. Just don’t try to force that stuff onto me. Hey Mormons—don’t force that stuff on me. I’m not really interested in your dogma of digging up some golden tablets in Iowa or wherever they found them and the extra commandments that only one person got. He got the money, man. He got the extra wives. That’s what it’s about, getting those extra women in there. ET: Were you shooting images for Suburbia during the same time you shot the Altamont concert? BO: No, I had not started on Suburbia yet. That was my first job, I came out of San Francisco State in ’68, and the first job I ever had in my whole life—I was 30 years old—was at a small newspaper called The Independent. And I knew people at the Associated Press because I was photographing the big marches and the anti-Vietnam stuff and draft card burning. Matter of fact, I have a show coming up in Paris where I’m exhibiting my riot stuff. And I tell people, “I’m not proud of making money on violence.” For instance, the fat guy being beat up by the Hell’s Angels, I won’t use my name for credit, because I figure the Hell’s Angels will come and murder me. They don’t care. They’re all crystal-meth heads. Now they’re fat and old! They’re all my age. They’re 70. Most of them are dead, on crystalmeth, or murdered each other. ET: At the Altamont concert I read that you were up on a scaffolding shooting pictures and a Hell’s Angel threatened you with a wrench? BO: Well, the guy came up with a pipe wrench and threatened my life, and I thought to myself, “This is not gonna be like in the movies where we have a fist fight, and I throw him off the tower. The reality is, he’ll hit me with the wrench, and I’ll fall off the tower, killed.” And I had a wife and a new baby, you know? I wanna go home. I wanna watch Walter Cronkite. I wanna live a regular life. I want my kids to go to college and be nice young men. Both my sons—neither one of them have tattoos, and they’re biochemists, and they’re citizens. And I’m in the distilling business, and when I describe certain people, I say, “That person is a good citizen. They participate in the industry. They’re not selfish.” I think this materialism thing has played itself way far out now that we sit in front of our plasma TVs with our iPods. How much more crap do you need to fill the emptiness in your life because you haven’t bothered to read a book in 20 years? All photos from Altamont, 1968
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 11
ET: I’m still trying to imagine that scene at Altamont—it seemed like you were even worried about getting your film out of there in one piece. BO: No. Just one guy threatened me. I climbed down off the scaffolding and went home. There was no problem. It’s just in that kind of situation, when you have 300,000 people and there’s no order, I mean, you’ve just have to push your way through the crowds. It probably took me an hour to walk out—I had a motorcycle in those days—and walked out and found my motorcycle and rode it back to the newspaper, and by 5 o’clock, I was home. You know, the murder didn’t happen until late that night, and I wasn’t present, thank God. I don’t wanna see anybody get murdered. I don’t wanna be there. It’s not pleasant to be around that kind of stuff. ET: What was the idea for Suburbia? It seems like it may have started organically. BO: I’m writing my memoirs now, and I found a term paper that I wrote in college for sociology class. I was raised on a farm, so we had a dirt road. I knew the houses and I knew the property lines, and in this paper I described the nine families that lived on this block. Kind of a rural area. I’ve always been interested in community. I was raised a Quaker and went to the Quaker church. We had a community center, and I don’t know who organized it, but on Saturday nights there were potluck dinners and my folks would take my brother and me to the potluck dinner. You meet the neighbors, and there was a sense of community. I believe in community. Then I went in the Peace Corps to work in community development, to be a teacher, and then at SF State, I had a class with John Collier, who was an FSA photographer, and I made a documentary of Brisbane, California. So by the time I got out to Livermore, I had already done—photographed or written about—numerous communities, so I began to write the mission statement. Here’s what I wanna do, and write a paragraph out, and then make a shooting script. People don’t realize that, I just don’t wander around with a camera, doing, “Oh, that’s cute.” I have a shooting script and I go out and I like to make overviews… ET: So you’re looking for specific things? BO: One overview says, “This is suburbia.” It’s a guy pushing a lawnmower, and there’s his little lawn and his house, and then the other houses and the trees, and you begin to put that together. But in those days, I did not call it “Suburbia,” because I thought the word was too negative. You know, I just was doing a documentary on Livermore and Pleasanton, and actually, only at the end did it become Suburbia, and only at the end did the editors say, “Are you gonna get release forms signed?” I said, “I don’t have to sign releases. I’m a journalist.” He said, “You went into people’s homes. We want you to do release forms.” Then they said, “Why don’t you do a caption?” And all of the sudden I’m showing up at people’s houses to ask them to sign the release form, and asking them for a caption for their photographs. I was the first photographer ever to do this. Like the photograph of the kids up in the tree, most photographers would caption that, “Two boys in a tree.” You know? But I go over and talk to the kids and they say, “Our dad has us climb the tree and pluck all the leaves off at one time. We think he’s crazy.” Suddenly, the photograph lets the people speak for themselves. And then a lot
Altamont, 1968
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 12
We’ve been married two months and everything we own is in this room.
My husband, Pat, has a theory about watering our newly seeded lawn. The water has to trinkle from heaven and fall like tender little rain drops...otherwise the lawn won’t grow properly.
This is our second annual Fourth of July block party. This year thirty-three families came for beer, barbequed chicken, corn on the cob, potato salad, green salad, macaroni salad, and watermelon. After eating and drinking we staged our parade and fireworks.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 13
of photographers copied this idea, but I was the first to really not do the stupid caption, “Pile of rocks,” you know? A lot of photographers still do that. They don’t have a brain in their head, so they just caption it. They make up some dumb word. They haven’t focused on anything. They just wander around, taking photographs, instead of having a real focus on culture. For instance, I’m a big foodie. I’ve been photographing food for the last three or four years. I have 14 DVDs full of food images. I can’t find a publisher, but I keep on photographing food, because it’s colorful and it’s who we are and it’s what we eat and how we eat, and it’s a great subject, from hamburgers to steaks—I don’t eat very much of that anymore. But I still like to photograph food. Grocery stores, piles of apples at a roadside market, all that. Colorful—we live in such a rich society, the richest society on the face of the earth for produce and food. Walk into a Safeway supermarket one time and look around. Oh, my God—or Costco. Go to Costco. It’s amazing. ET: That’s part of what I wanted to ask you about. It seems like you were coming from a place where, as you were looking at this Suburbia project, you were also in awe of people’s richness, of the whole idea of opening a drawer and shooting what was inside, or a person’s refrigerator, and marveling at how much food was brimming out of their refrigerators. Like you were marveling at this new phenomenon. BO: You don’t know how many fridges I looked into until finally I found the right one. Gotta have all the symbols there. It’s like that pantry for the New York Times Cook Book with the Crisco and the Jif peanut butter and all that stuff. I mean, you can go to 50 houses and look at the pantries, and none of them have the right stuff. But when I opened that door, I said, “Oh, my God, this is me. It’s the same stuff I have at my house.” You know, the New York Times Cook Book, The Joy of Cooking, Sunset magazine, Crisco, Jif peanut butter. You just kind of do your own—you have to see it. I meet young people that want to be a photographer, I say, “Drop out. Go to Europe. Go see the world. Go see something, do something besides walk around with a camera and call yourself a photographer. Go have a life experience. Go get a job somewhere, like working in a can factory, as I’ve done. Go do some stuff where you bring something to the photo.” A lot of people don’t bring anything to the photo. Remember, I also dismiss a whole bunch of photographers who are commercially successful. My attitude is, “Hey, they’re paying you the money. They own that. You’re for hire. Remember you’re for hire. You’re not doing this on your own.” I’m a photographer’s photographer. I do this on my own, with my own money. I am not beholden to anyone when I’m out doing photographs. When you start working for a client, you’ve gotta do what the art director says, or you’re dead. They won’t ever hire you back. I did a job for Woolworth Clothing out of Italy. I was in L.A. and Westwood and down in Santa Monica and all that stuff; they hired me because they wanted me to do my thing. They wanted my point of view into the photographs. They never asked me to do anything except photograph this kid in a coat or a shirt or a young lady wearing a scarf or something like that. I freaked them out, because I’d only take one or two photographs and say, “I’m done.” You got any argument? Let’s look—it’s a digital camera. You can see the image, right? It’s a great image. It’s got composition. It’s got color. And then at night, I just burn them to DVD and hand it to them. So at the end of the job, I was done. I didn’t have to go process film. I burnt all of the images onto DVDs and I could go home and just send them the invoice. But I don’t do much commercial work. I don’t pursue it. I have my letters being turned down by Jody Powell, who just died. The President of the United States wouldn’t let me come to the White House and photograph him. I’ve been turned down by a lot of people because I’m too cynical. I just say, “I’m realistic,” but they look at it as when they hire someone to do it, they’re going to do pretty pictures of them. ET: I read somewhere for your Working book, that you just looked people up in the Yellow Pages. How did that project come about? BO: Yep. Well, remember, I’m living in a small town where I know everybody, and there’s another small town nearby, Livermore and Pleasanton. So you open up the phone book and you look under “A” for accountant, well, I already have an accountant. I’ll go photograph my own accountant. “B” is for baker. Oh, there’s a bakery right around the corner. Walk in the bakery and say, “Can I take your photograph?” “C” is for car wash. Oh, my God, my town has a car wash. How do I make a good car wash picture? I’ve photographed things over and over again to get them right. I don’t walk in and make a photograph that has great composition and content on the first time. If I screw it up, I can go back. The car wash is always gonna be there, but how do you show that car coming through and the person’s rubbing it down with cloths afterwards or cleaning the hubcaps, where do I stand? Where’s the sun? Do I want high overcast? Do I do this summer or winter? I put time and energy into making that photograph so when I’m done—I just had a photograph on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Full-page photograph. The photograph was taken almost 40 years ago, and they paid me, uh, $600! Oh, my God. Because you have to remember, for a photographer coming through the system, there is no work. Why would you go to photography school? There’s not a job for you out there. The journalism business I’m in is totally dead. There are no young photographers getting internships at the L.A. Times. The L.A. Times is laying people off. My time was a special time where I could work one day a week for a year. I shot Suburbia in 52 days. ET: Oh, wow. BO: I took a year to plan it, a year to shoot it, and a year to get a publisher. Well, in our society, everybody wants a quick fix. They wanna shoot something and then they’re an instant celebrity on the cover of Rolling Stone with their wonderful images. Well, that happens to be a rock-and-roll band and you were paid to do that. Come on. Does that make you an artist? Yes, you’re an artist. Good for you. I don’t follow music. Those guys come and go. They abuse their wives. They take drugs. Screw them. I’m not interested in those guys who make millions and millions of dollars and have a drug habit. How awful. What kinda message is that to send to your children or your mother that you’re hooked on heroin? If that happened to me, I would be suicidal, if my children got hooked on heavy drugs like that. I mean, you want your children, and you want grandchildren, and you wanna have a rich life and have your children over on Thanksgiving Day, and your ex-wives, too. You wanna have a good life. I look at
Untitled, from Suburbia, 1972
a lot of that music and entertainment business, it’s so self-indulgent, that, “Man, I want that big house. I need that car,” you know. On and on and on. The Emmys are tonight. Those guys make millions, right? Millions! Doing what? Can they last 20 years doing it? Not very likely, because the burnout rate is huge in that industry. So I tell people, “Save your money. You’re gonna need it someday. Stay away from realtors. They’re all a bunch of crooks. Stay away from the stock market. They’re bigger crooks.” I think the people on Wall Street have run this country into the ground. They’re lying and cheating. I tell people, “I’m a sophisticated human being. You cannot, in one paragraph, explain to me what a hedge fund is.” You say, “Oh, they make a pile of money.” I say, “I’ve owned seven businesses.” I’ve earned up to a million a year, with 60 employees, and at the end of the day, I had no money for myself, so I got out of that business. I sold them off and moved on. I’ve met payroll, I’ve had employees. I’ve run small businesses. And it’s hard work. I never did anything wherein two or three years later, I was a multi-millionaire. I owned breweries. People love beer. Now I’m in the distilling business, and my phone’s ringing—I get emails from all over the world, people wanting to know how to make whiskey or how to make moonshine or whatever you want. ET: Is that why you quit photography? BO: I just quit photography because, you know—a divorce. Couldn’t pay my bills. Children need money—support your family, no matter what. And I needed a job, and so I talked to my CPA and I said, “How do you get money in our society?” And he said, “Well, here, do a limited partnership.” I said, “What’s that?” And he opened up the door and handed me the forms and said, “Just white-out the words ‘almond farm’ and write in the word ‘brewery.’” And I went around and sold stock for $3,000 a pop, raised $90,000, and opened a Buffalo Bill’s. And by then, no more photography for me. You can’t make a living in it. I’ve been laid off at the newspaper, and I’m not gonna starve to death. I’m not gonna pursue something—I mean, maybe I could be really famous had I had a stipend of some kind and could’ve worked continuously for 40 years in photography, but I promise you, I’ve got enough—I’ve got seven books out. If you Google “Bill Owens photographer,” there’s 1,500,000 pages! Holy cow, what’s that mean? Well, it means you’re famous! [Laughter] Big deal.
We feel most people have the wrong attitude towards sex, that it’s nasty and to be done only in the dark. With us sex takes care of itself.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 14
ET: What was your part in passing legislation for legalizing brewery/bars? BO: I did not do anything. I just heard about it. I just wanted to be the first guy to do it, and I had a lead time of four or five months to do it, so that was a big advantage. But I did visit the professor who was carrying the legislation. Actually, Alan Cranston did it on the federal level. Oh, pardon me that was for home brewing. I’d been a home brewer since my college days, and so when home brewing became legal, that’s when I did the first book on—what’s the title of my book? I put it up on my website—go to distilling.com. I put up one of my first books called Draft Beer in 10 Days. And so I did that one. And I published a magazine called American Brewer for 15 years, then Beer, the magazine. Then it went broke. Publishing a magazine—you know—when I go through magazines, I only count the number of paid ads. If you’re not running 50 percent paid ads, you’ve gotta be subsidizing this sucker. You know? It’s really hard to be in the magazine business, because you’re beholden to one person, the printer. If you don’t pay the printer, you don’t go! ET: Well, for ANP Quarterly so far, we’ve been relatively ad-free. But I feel like inevitably, we’re gonna come to that point where we have to sell ad space— BO: I mean, what would be wrong with trying an ad? Nothing. Skateboarding—look at how big that industry is. The clothing industry, shoes for kids, skateboards, surfing boards, all that stuff is part of the pop youth culture. I’d have no problem with that ad. I think it’s amazing there’s an outcry that San Francisco wants to tax Coca-Cola because of the sugar content because 30 percent of Americans are obese, right? Well, let’s put some tax on Coke and make a billion or $10 billion off of two more cents in tax, and if they all go ballistic—you know, “Oh, my God, the country’s turned to socialism because they wanna put a small tax on Coca-Cola.” It doesn’t matter what people pay. You have fat-assed people drinking a Coke. I think the average person in America drinks a Coke a day. You know, it’s like 16 teaspoons of sugar. No wonder we have health problems. Look at what we ingest. I don’t drink Coke ever. ET: Yeah, I never touch the stuff myself. BO: Matter of fact, for the first time in my life I bought a bottle of water. I mean, I don’t believe in bottled water. I’m a farm boy. We drank it out of a hose! I’m 71 and very healthy. I don’t eat very much meat now, but I do have gout, from the rich life of alcohol. Alcohol drinking will give you gout. And red meat and shellfish, so I stay away from those three things. And I go to bed at a decent hour. I’m up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning. I work every day. ET: Your book Leisure, that was much later, no? BO: Yeah, Leisure got put under. The three books, Suburbia, Working, and Our Kind of People, were done within about a five-year period, and then I lost my job at the newspaper. But the Leisure book had been photographed and put into a box under the bed for 20 years. I still think that leisure was a great theme to
work on. Actually, I wanted to do a big project on professional sports. I want to go photograph football, basketball, and hockey. You can name at least 40 professional sports. I’ve been out there to try to photograph—I think it’s in the Leisure book— bicyclists. Oh, my God, you stand there for 30 minutes for the bikers to come by and Whew! They’re gone. They’re moving at 30 miles an hour when they get to where you are. All that stuff, the color of the clothing, look at what the color of these suits and costumes! Or the different helmets and shoes. For a long time, I cut ads out of Esquire magazine and other youth magazines, I would just cut out leisure time activities, rock-climbing, backpacking, camping, automobile racing, which is still the largest—no, the largest spectator sport in America is college football, college football. [So I would like to] just set out with a huge shooting script and work for a couple years to photograph the leisure thing again. But now I’m more convinced I should’ve been a movie producer. I am a storyteller. I can stand up on stage, I can tell stories, and I understand shows. I can write. And had I been a movie director, I would’ve, I think, been a good director, because I can see—I’m a visual person, and I can see the story. Like last night, the new program Bored to Death was on. It was really great, for a TV sitcom. There’s some young people out there who have that magic with—if you look on my website at my films, I’m blessed, and I’m one of those rare people who have a sense of humor. My films, you laugh your ass off. So when my assistant comes over here—and I have a couple people who come assist me one day a week—will look at my films and say, “Why can’t we take this to the Apple people and have them put it on one of their phones? I mean, it’s ten seconds long, it’s funny, it’s perfect for an iPod or an iPhone.” But there’s no way to crack that one. It’s a full-time job to go do that. So I just put my stuff up on the website and give it away free and move on to the next project. My next project—you just saw it—was the Moonshine book. That one took me seven months to write. It will be up on Amazon.com by Friday. And then I have my Whiskey book, and I have my other projects I do that are much more interesting—let’s put it this way. I’d much rather go to a conference of distillers than a conference of photographers. ET: [Laughter] And the Moonshine book—is it a “how-to,” like how to build your own home brewing still or make moonshine? BO: Well, no, I don’t tell you how to build distillers. I say, “Just go buy one.” Also, I totally emphasize at the very beginning to obtain a DSP, distilling license. I give you all the websites. How do you get a license? How do you make this into a business where you can make money? When my phone rings and the guy says, “Yeah, I’m eight miles from Branson, Missouri and I wanna make moonshine,” I say, “Oh, my God. Brilliant marketing. You’ve got a built-in marketplace. Eight miles from your home—Branson, Missouri sees six million tourists a year. There’s gonna be 100,000 of them that want a bottle of moonshine to take home as a souvenir.” See? People gotta think the process out. Then I get a phone call from a guy in Georgia and he says, “Yeah, we got sugar cane right here. We’ll be harvesting in two months. We’ve got a still. We don’t know how to do this. Help us out.” Oh, my God, rum made from
There is nothing to do in Suburbia.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 15
fresh cane juice is called Cachaca, from Brazil. But nobody in America makes it. We make it from molasses. But to have some guy wanna make rum from cane juice in Georgia, yes! Come on down! You know? All this is much more interesting than running around the country, photographing the ghetto. ET: I liked how you mentioned that you see your little movies as little poems. BO: Oh, absolutely. ET: Because they’re not very long. BO: E.E. Cummings, that’s what it’s coming down to. Why is Twitter successful? So many characters, all in a nanosecond of information. But, I mean, to deliver it with a sense of humor, that’s what counts. It’s like the dog film. You watch the dog film? ET: Yeah, I saw that [on your website]. In a lot of ways, it’s an extension of Suburbia; it’s such a suburban activity to dress up your dog like that. BO: Yeah. I just bought a new flip camera, too. That’s totally the future. Eight hours on those little tiny cameras. HD. It’s amazing. You’ve gotta remember, I can’t do this by myself. Another photographer I employ, I have another assistant who helps me out, and I have part-time people who—I don’t wanna learn that technology. I don’t learn PhotoShop. I hire somebody to do PhotoShop. I wanna focus on how can I make enough money to pay people to help me?
ET: Have you moved into scripting your films? BO: No. I’m not that kind of—I’ve thought about that—because that’s real Hollywood, when you’ve done a script and have a real plan, that’s a skill—I know I could do it, but you have to have months to do it. Have you ever looked at a script? A script is like 10,000 words. It’s nothing. It’s all visual. So I don’t have the time, I’ve gotta be scrambling to make money all the time. I don’t have the time to—that’s what I keep telling people. To do any project, you’ve gotta be focused, and I’m not especially a good one on that to preach to other people. But to write a script and to shoot a movie, you’ve gotta be driven by some real demons. I mean, writing a novel—I’m writing my memoirs and a novel at the same time. I think I’m not successful in that area because my parents didn’t torture me. I think you’ve gotta be driven by certain demons that you can stand to work that hard. And in the movie industry, I’m sure those guys are driven by some kind of demons, to get sex from beautiful women—to live up to the expectations of their parents or their successful brother, so they go out and work hard to be a successful child also. ET: A novel, that’s a lot harder than a memoir, I imagine. BO: Yeah. Mine’s a good one because it’s funny. A science fiction one. I’m fifty thousand words into it, but I haven’t picked it up for two years. It’s too easy to procrastinate! So I’ve got other things to do, you know. I’m going on a threeweek road trip. I leave Saturday and I will go visit seven whiskey distilleries. Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
Untitled, from Leisure
Untitled, from Our kind of People
Untitled, from Working
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 16
ET: You’ll be shooting photographs along the way? BO: Of course. I go meet interesting people. Somebody who owns a brewery now has added a distillery to the brewery, hey, that’s my soul mate, you know? I know how to make beer. There’s a very, very big plus to knowing that. Like my wife’s grandkids, they say, “Oh, he should go to art school. He’s a great artist.” But I say, “I think you ought to send that kid to school to learn a trade, where he has a certificate at the end of going to school.” I have a teaching certificate. On my website, I offer you a certificate if you take an e-learning class in distilling. You’ve gotta be qualified to do something today. If you have a degree in art from a college, you’ll just simply starve to death. There are no jobs for artists. Sorry. Go on Craigslist, put in there: “I’m an artist. Give me a job.” See if anybody calls you. I don’t think anybody will call you to come make a drawing. For young people I think it’s quite difficult to look at society and think, “How am I gonna fit in? Where am I gonna get a job? How am I gonna pay my bills? I wanna do something with my life. How do I find that route?” And I maintain there’s a lot of luck involved in that too. Looking back, I’m one of the few people out of my high school or college that is successful. You would never have predicted it that way, a 25-year-old who was at the bottom of the class. They didn’t have those continuation schools, or they would’ve put me in that, because I just couldn’t do it, I was fidgety, couldn’t read and write. I say let these kids grow up. Let them go play. Let them go dream. When I was a kid, we would daydream. We would play.
I don’t feel that Richie playing with guns will have a negative effect on his personality. (He already wants to be a policeman). His childhood gun-playing won’t make him into a cop-shooter. By playing with guns he learns to socialize with other children. I found the nighbors who are offended by Richie’s gun, either the father hunts or the kids are the first to take Richie’s gun and go off and play with it.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 17
Back in 2006 I was living in LA, working as the director of a contemporary art gallery. Most of my spare time was spent visiting galleries, museums and artists’ studios, trying to get a handle on the local scene. Going to shows and seeing bands was another constant, and I was always on the lookout for places and projects where these two worlds collided. A lot of the visual artists I was meeting played music, like the painter Luke Whitlatch with his band Bipolar Bear, and there were a bunch of art school bands around, like the Mae Shi and LA Riots, who had come out of CalArts. I started to hear about artist-led projects like My Barbarian and Los Super Elegantes, who were pushing the boundaries of the “band” concept, performing their music in gallery spaces and bringing installation-based performances into traditional music venues. The whole scene seemed ripe for the fruition of art/music collaborations coming from all directions. I was excited by the possibilities. It was around this time that I met Eamon Ore-Giron during an open studio event for the UCLA visual arts grad school. His studio was one of the most exciting places I’d been in a long time, filled with stacks of small, delicately rendered gouache drawings of skulls, crosses and anthropomorphic totems, spray painted planks leaning at odd angles, cut-up record cover collages and vividly colored canvasses marrying the weirdo Pop style of John Wesley to imagery of Latin American public murals. His work answered to something I had been seeking for a very long time, a co-mingling of the West Coast skateboard culture I grew up in and the high art references of the world I now found myself engaged with. As we talked, Eamon was working on a home-made contact mic he was building to capture sound from a bunch of random objects he’d attached to a decrepit turntable to create a kind of rudimentary looping device. There was a definite mad scientist vibe about him that I liked immediately. Later Eamon introduced me to his friends Joshua Aster and Justin Cole, two other visual artists at UCLA who were beginning to experiment with sound as a further element in their artistic practices. As I later learned, Eamon, Josh and Justin had already begun collaborating on musical experiments, forming the band OJO as an outlet for their more acoustical tendencies. The fact that they called the group OJO, Spanish for “eye,” and one of the few words that reads as a palindrome in both languages, was a clue that this was a band that was already thinking both musically and visually. What started off as freeform, open ended, everybody-make-some-noise jam sessions, quickly formed into a solid core group of dedicated collaborators pushing the boundaries of music and performance in exciting and unexpected directions. After they were joined by Brenna Youngblood, another visual artist from UCLA, as well as the musician Chris Avitabile (Collapsible Mammals) and cultural historian Moises Medina, OJO began to expand the boundaries of the project, producing elaborately choreographed performance compositions that included visual elements like light projections, sculpture and installation environments. From the outset, OJO was interested in breaking down the barrier between performer and audience, bringing their audiences into the fold as both collaborators and sound makers/instruments. A typical OJO performance will often include directives to the audience, asking them to clap, snap, stomp, howl, chant or scream while moving in circles through the performance space. More than any other point of reference, OJO’s most recent performances evoke the Happenings of the 1960s, and the Cunningham-Cage-Rauschenberg legacy of multi-media performance collaborations, updated to reflect the political and musical climate of now. Their shared interest in creating an egalitarian, all-inclusive performance experience has led them to perform in galleries, museums and artist-run spaces including ESL Projects, Queens Nails Annex, the Hammer Museum and LAX Art. Most recently, OJO completed a three-part performance series at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, part of the museum’s Engagement Party residency program aimed at supporting non-object-based collectives whose practices have historically been overlooked and underfunded by art institutions. The concept of the “art band” can be defined any number of ways, but for OJO I think it’s less about the fact that several members of the group are practicing artists, and more about turning the basic idea of a “band” into its own art project. Recently in LA I met with the members of OJO at Eamon’s house in Angelino Heights, to talk about the genesis of the group and what they’ve been up to lately.
TEXT BY BEN PROVO / IMAGES COURTESY OJO UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
OJO Interactive Lecture Series, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009, image courtesy of MOCA Los Angeles/Patrick Miller (opposite) OJO Interactive Lecture Series, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009; OJO Color Chorus, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009, image courtesy of OJO/Christine Kesler
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 18
Ben Provo: I’d like to say first that I hope I’ll be able to identify each of you by voice when I listen to the interview tape back home, but there’s seven people in the room so forgive me if I accidentally attribute any of your own words to one of your colleagues. Eamon Ore-Giron: Just don’t confuse our words with Moi’s. [all laugh] His tend to be… more explicit. BP: I’d like to start in the beginning with how this all began. Eamon, Josh, Justin and Brenna, you guys were all in grad school together at UCLA, doing your MFAs in visual art, but prior to forming OJO, were you already playing music individually, making music on the side? EO: That’s partly brought us together, recognizing that we were not just visual artists, but being like “Hey, let’s start experimenting with sound.” And that’s when Justin, Josh and I got together. Joshua Aster: It started as a pretty acoustic motivation, to see where we could take the acoustic guitar, as the basis of our sound—we knew we all had that. BP: I remember Justin told me there was a big John Fahey influence early on. Justin Cole: Yeah, John Fahey, Sandy Bull, kind of sprawling improvisational guitar pieces where the three of us would just wig out for hours. We were all in the grad studio together, so when one of us would get burned out, suddenly they would appear at the other one’s studio door holding their guitar and just making that smiley face, like, “Wanna play now?” And normally it was always good timing. Brenna Youngblood: The real beginning of OJO was probably in the class of ’05/’06. We were always in the Clam, with the guitars and the drum sets. JC: We called the practice space the Clam. EO: What was cool was knowing that the sculptor Evan Holloway, who had been at UCLA before us, had put sound proofing up in the room, which was just milk crate foam. But it was cool to know that we were reviving some kind of musical tradition there. Something had been going on before us, and that room had mojo. In the beginning there were actually a lot more people we would bring into it, like Mateo Tennant, Jeffrey Wells, and Joe Duetch. Before we knew it everyone wanted to be in this little tiny room, just freaking out. BP: I’ve noticed just from spending a lot of time in artists’ studios that there’s a lot of down time, like waiting for the paint to dry or whatever, and playing music fits right into that. It seems like a lot of the artists I know play music as well in some form, maybe just as a way of entertaining themselves and their friends, as a way of hanging out. But not necessarily in a “Hey let’s go start a band” kind of way. EO: Yeah, it was definitely really organic that way for us. One of our first formal exercises was doing a lot of experimental work with records. BP: Like manipulating vinyl albums? EO: One of the things I was doing at the time was cutting them with two lines, like an X/Y line across the record, then putting the needle in the groove. That would make the record have quarter notes. It was like a metronome. And within those spaces I could place other little “hits” to make it into a total other rhythm. And then playing them sort of as a DJ would, they would become like a super rudimentary, super minimalist drum machine. Then we built contact mics for the acoustic guitars to give them pickups. JA: We didn’t have pickups… EO: So we just built contact mics with duct tape. And that became some of our earliest recordings, running the acoustic guitars and the manipulated records through effects and playing them all live. BP: This is how you made the first OJO record? JC: The first recordings we made are what Eamon’s describing, the manipulated vinyl records with beats on them and Josh and I both playing guitar over that. And we decided “Oh this sounds good let’s put a CD out.” That was just fun, just to give it out to lots of people. And it was fun when it got played on WFMU in New York.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 19
BP: That’s cool. EO: It went well with the super late night stuff they play. JA: The 3 to 6 a.m. slot. BP: I know you guys performed a few times on KXLU here in LA. Is that how the people at WFMU found your music? EO: No, I just sent it to them. Just cold turkey sending people the record, like, “Hey, check this out.” We were still doing these experiments with the cut up records at that point. Then I found an 808 drum machine at St. Vincent de Paul’s, a second hand store in downtown LA, for like $50… which is like the King of the drum machines. So I brought it back and we started playing with it and that’s right about the time Hugo Hopping asked us to do something at ESL. JC: So the next record was a burned CD we recorded here at Eamon’s house, just editing down little tracks we had arranged for our first proper show, at ESL Projects in March of ’06. BP: The idea of audience participation seems really important to you guys. Was that idea always there from the beginning? JC: Part of the whole idea of ESL Projects, when it existed, was they wanted all the work to be community outreach. In some way, the work had to reach out to the direct community that the space was in. So coming up with this audience participatory music thing was kind of our way of meeting that prompt. But also, I think we realized this was a really fertile avenue to continue to explore. BP: So in part the element of audience participation in your
performances was first kind of thrust upon you by the parameters of ESL Projects. EO: I don’t remember being as aware of that. We were already wanting to work in that direction anyway. So it was in perfect sync with our ideas. It came at a good time for what we wanted to do. We were really thinking about it and we didn’t want it to be just us playing music. We were never inspired by the idea of being a “band” proper, so we came up with the idea of creating a composition that included the audience. BP: Most of your performances have taken place in art spaces, rather than, more traditional music venues. Was that idea of performing only in galleries, museums, and artist-run spaces an explicitly stated premise of this project, or did it kind of just happen that way? JA: We’ve all been to plenty of rock and roll shows, and we love that aspect of music, but we felt like there were limitations, or other ideas that could not be explored within a space that’s already pre-set. There seem to be more open opportunities in other kinds of spaces. There were possibilities to play and perform in a way that was outside of the pre-set realms of, “Okay we’re the band on stage, and then there’s the audience.” That separation was something that wasn’t really interesting. I was more excited by where those things interweave, where the band becomes displaced and the theatre of the performance is actually happening in the room, all around. BP: Performing in the round. JA: Performing in the round, and moving in the round, too. One of the setups we have is that the tower of amplifiers is a central part of the performance space, and everybody, the crowd and us are included in the performance.
(clockwise from top left) OJO Interactive Lecture Series; OJO Flesh Car Crash; OJO Color Chorus, all Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009, images courtesy of MOCA Los Angeles/Patrick Miller (opposite, from top) OJO Interactive Lecture Series, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2009; Album cover for OJO OJO 2005, design by OJO/Eamon Ore-Giron; OJO preparing for Passin’ Thru the New Amazing at LAX><ART, 2007; OJO performance installation for Passin’ Thru the New Amazing at LAX><ART, 2007; Crowd scene, Good Times Forever at Queen Ann’s Nails, San Francisco, 2006.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 20
BP: I’ve noticed this prominent theme of circular movement in the OJO performances I’ve seen. It kind of brings to mind the Sufi dances of Universal Peace and the Whirling Dervishes – this idea of a meditative reaching toward group ecstasy through simple circular movements and simple poetic chanting. EO: I think the idea of the Whirling Dervishes and the Sufi dances have equal footing in the hierarchy of ideas of where that can come from. JC: It’s all about the sound being made more permeable and more open to everyone. BP: So it’s less omni-directional. JC: Yeah, so it’s not just us playing music for these people, but where that wall gets removed and the audience realizes, I kind of came here to see myself do this, or to hear myself with these other people doing this. BP: And in order to achieve that, you have to literally move the audience out of the traditional space in which they’re used to receiving music. Probably if you tried to achieve that in a traditional music venue, the audience wouldn’t feel welcomed into the experience. They might not know how to respond. JC: There’s a lot of unspoken rules about how you’re supposed to behave in a concert hall. BP: I go to a lot of shows, and I almost never see people react to music in a room the way that they react to what you guys are doing. It’s just doesn’t happen very often, outside of dance clubs and mosh pits, maybe. JA: One of the things that we use within each performance is a script or a menu that we give to the audience. We call it a score. The audience is active within the performance in that they are either singing, or shouting or clapping or snapping fingers, moving around.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 21
There are activities for them to do. It’s best when these things kind of fold into the music so people are learning as they go along. Moises Medina: People are learning as we’re creating. There’s a sublimation. There’s no in-between, because we’re creating this shit as we go along, too, as far as improvising and reacting to what the audience is doing. So as they’re learning we’re also adapting. It’s like we’re all learning a new operating system, so let’s exploit that.
those spaces where unexpected things can happen. Or at the end of shows, once people have really digested what they’ve gotten themselves into… sometimes at the end, the audience just doesn’t want to stop. And the piece continues and that’s really great. Chris Avitabile: That’s when we feel successful, when the audience throws us a loop. So we know, yeah, they really felt that, maybe more so than another element of the score, so the piece moves in that direction.
JA: In the score, when we come up with certain pre-programmed things, like clapping or whatnot, those elements are executed in repetition or patterns, so as one thing fades out the next thing will come in. The way the music is written, transitions are really important… how we’re going to get to the next part, and yet how we’re going to let this part live and see what happens. One good example was in the Interactive Lectures at MoCA. For one part we gave bubble wrap to the audience to pop and we thought it was going to last for maybe two minutes and it ended up lasting for ten. Meanwhile, the next stage of the performance was already taking place, but there was this wonderful residue of what the audience was doing. Those are the things we recognize as we’re going along, or when we hear the recordings later. There’s lots of surprises for us and that’s really important for the group. For the audience to push back, and to push the piece along in different ways than were originally suggested.
JA: The discomfort of all the things that can happen within one of our shows falls away when you realize that the sound is coming from you, from your neighbor next to you, and it’s less threatening. It feels inclusive. That’s what we want. And also for people to feel like, “You want to be a wall flower, that’s cool, too. Walls are good, there’s walls all around you.”
EO: We have to work within the learning curve of the piece. Some of it we overestimate and some of it we underestimate. There are moments where we’re like, “They did that for way longer than we thought they would.”
BP: I brought my daughter to that show and she was freaking out. I had her up on my shoulders, dancing around. She loved it. EO: Queens Nails was pretty insane, too. That was very intimate. That was in a room just a little bit bigger than this room but with a hundred people.
MM: Which makes it cool. JC: We try to leave things open, but having a score helps. It’s like having a map, so the audience knows where they’re going. But it’s about the journey. It’s not about just getting there, it’s about going. It’s fun to have
BP: Have you guys ever repeated a specific piece or score to see how it changes in different venues or on different days? EO: We did the first piece from ESL Projects at Queens Nails Annex in San Francisco, then at LAX Art in Los Angeles as well. CA: Then again, they were varied. I was an audience participant at ESL, but then I was a performer at the other two performances. And LAX was just chaotic. That vibe was just way more punk rock than at ESL!
MM: It was like Bikram Yoga music therapy. CA: But kind of dark – it had a very dark energy to it.
(clockwise) Poster for OJO performance Passin’ Thru the New Amazing at LAX><ART, 2007, design by OJO/Eamon Ore-Giron Poster for OJO Engagement Party performance series at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2009, design by OJO/Eamon Ore-Giron Score for OJO performance Passin’ Thru the New Amazing at LAX><ART, 2007 Album Cover for OJO Passin’ Thru the New Amazing (Live at LAX><ART) 2007, design by OJO/Eamon Ore-Giron
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 22
OJO, 2009, Top row: Joshua Aster, Chris Avitabile, Justin Cole Bottom: Moises Medina, Eamon Ore-Giron, Brenna Youngblood
BP: Chris, you mentioned the punk rock vibe of the performance at LAX. I wonder how you all relate to punk as an influence on your work. When I see footage or photos of early punk shows, it always feels like the energy in the room was coming from everywhere at once. And whoever was there was expected to participate. Even though the music you guys play is totally different, I think there’s a correlation in the way you’re democratizing performance space and breaking the boundary between performer and audience. EO: It’s about conjuring that moment where the energy is coming from all points, and you don’t necessarily know where it’s going to come from next… trying to conjure up that moment within a group of people you don’t know. Punk was definitely of its time, but we all have certain inspirations within that. But it’s just one part of a show.
But especially in the last performances at MoCA we managed to marry all the elements of all of our experience. And at the same time put much more of our stamp on it as individual artists, and musicians. BP: I know you all used to have a big loft space in downtown LA where you had your individual art studios. I was curious about collaborations in visual art between the members of OJO, either within the context of the band or outside of it. EO: We had a show together, Justin, Josh and I, at the Bank Gallery in LA, where we exhibited together. But we didn’t actually physically work on the pieces together. It’s been tougher since we don’t all share a studio space together anymore. CA: It’s kind of awesome how everybody’s own work is their own work, as well.
CA: I think people surprise themselves with their level of participation in what we do. Wall flowers can turn into dervishes. I always come back to my favorite moment out of any OJO performance, when some older dude came up to me after Queens Nails and said, “I didn’t know I needed to scream, but I needed to SCREAM!” [all laugh] Just, like, dripping in sweat…
JA: The visual things that take place in the performances are all collaborative. At least in a decision-making process. JC: The real answer to your question is what the albums end up looking like. BP: Totally. JA: And our posters, and even the cards.
MM: We were all sweating. CA: … and I thought like, “Wow, that was very therapeutic for that guy.” That was big, that hit me hard. BP: One of the things I love about OJO is it seems like everything you do comes from a place of generosity, of openness. At the MoCA show I was reminded of this experience I had back in college at this open mic night kind of thing. People were reading poems, singing songs, embarrassing interpretive dance weirdness, whatever. Then this kid came up and lead the audience through a participatory performance recreating the sound of a rain storm with just rubbing of hands, finger snapping, clapping, stomping. It was really moving how this kid brought the audience together. Any sense of cynicism, judgment, standoffishness kind of evaporated for a few minutes and there was no audience and no performer. On the surface it was totally silly, but there was a greater meaning there. It was uplifting. JA: That cynicism around performance art that can kind of make people roll their eyes… we’re pretty conscious of that. EO: And we also participate in the eye rolling, sometimes. Because I think we take it on as a challenge. If we don’t like something we’ll engage in it to make something good, so we’re not as equally jaded. We’re not ashamed of it being looked at as art and equally as a band. It’s weird describing OJO to people who ask me what it is. I don’t really know what to say. You just have to go there. Because I could tell you one thing, and either you’d think I was telling you about being in a band, or I’m telling you about being in a performance art group.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 23
EO: Our performances are the total result of our visual language, the aesthetic choices that we make with everything.
For more information on OJO, please visit: www.myspace.com/ojobandojo www.justincolestudio.com/Ojo.html www.moca.org/party/ojo/ www.youtube.com/user/MOCAlosangeles Special thanks to Yong Ha Jeong.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 24
Regular readers of this magazine may have noticed that we rarely cover fashion. In fact, when we started, we had a pretty serious anti-fashion policy. This is not because we are opposed to fashion (we are sponsored by a clothing company, after all!), we just thought that the topic was so extensively covered in other publications that we should focus on other things. We’re happy to announce that we are breaking that rule. Don’t worry… we are not suddenly becoming a fashion magazine… it’s just that every once in a while something comes along that kind of pushes it to the next level. This is one of those cases. The rule-breakers in question are Kate and Laura Mulleavy, two sisters from Pasadena, California, who create under the label Rodarte (their mother’s maiden name). With no formal training in design, Kate and Laura approach clothing with organic intuition. They founded Rodarte in 2004 and over the last few years, in their own unique and idiosyncratic way, they have literally taken the fashion world by storm. Ever since their first collection, which was presented to stores and press in the form of a series of handmade paper dolls, Rodarte have done things their own way. West Coast natives, spending their childhoods in a small town in Northern California as the children of educated yet slightly hippie parents, Kate and Laura have strong countercultural roots. It’s in their blood, and perhaps it’s just that attitude that makes what they are doing so totally fresh in a fashion environment that has (at least in this writer’s opinion), in recent years, become increasingly banal. Plus, as the images included in this article attest, the way they approach the act of creating clothing bears more resemblance to the practice of visual artists than to any typical fashion protocol. Inspirations for their collections range from the work of conceptual artists like Gordon Matta Clark to Star Wars and Frankenstein to random pieces of garbage they see lying on the freeway. Being that we are all Californians, we thought it would be a cool idea to meet up with Kate and Laura in Paris, where they were presenting their Spring 2010 collection at the ultra-cool department store Colette. Their installation, which was basically a full shop take-over, was quite a happening. Rather than simply presenting their clothing in a prescribed style, in true family style, Rodarte instead asked a diverse group of friends, creators and collaborators to make things especially for the shop. The end result was a Rodarte store within a store, which featured art installations, books, bags, records, pillow cases, posters and much, much more. This interview took place a few days after their opening, in the lobby of a small hotel, where, after too much coffee, and even though we had only just met, we all kind of talked over one another like old friends. INTERVIEW BY AARON ROSE / PORTRAIT BY AUTUMN DE WILDE / IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTISTS Aaron Rose: The things you make, at least for me, kind of exist in this middle realm. Even though you’re definitely working within a fashion vernacular, what’s really going on in your work can be talked about in a lot of different ways… Kate Mulleavy: Sure. Sometimes we meet people and they say to us, “When you’re talking about your work it almost doesn’t even sound like you’re fashion designers!” But the thing is that we are fashion designers, and that’s what I think we’re doing. But at the same time, it conceptually exists outside of that. Yet I don’t think we sit around thinking, “Oh we’re fashion designers, we design clothes for people to wear.” The thought process behind doing a collection isn’t like that for us. AR: Let’s talk about geography. In particular, California… here we are, three Californians sitting in Paris. KM: We never thought we’d be sitting here really, I guess… AR: That’s what’s so interesting! It’s kind of rare, I think, for people in your business, and especially making the kinds of clothing that you create, to be living in Los Angeles. Laura Mulleavy: I have to be honest and say that I don’t think New York would feel like a home to me. I love New York and I actually love being there and all of the people that we know, and I’m not sure if it’s about how we grew up or where, but for me there is a disconnect. I hate not being able to see trees in my backyard. I find that very weird and I think about it when I’m there and I start panicking about it. The fact that you have to go to a park to see grass? It’s really strange. KM: I think there’s multiple layers to that. LM: Me too. KM: The first thing is that we grew up in Northern California, in a small town, right next to Santa Cruz. It’s pretty much beaches and forests there… you know, redwood forests. The landscape is, well, basically you’re in Steinbeck country. It’s just that simple; and on top of that our father was a botanist. Our father is actually a fungi expert. So he studied mushrooms and everyone we knew growing up had their own greenhouses. Our experience of the world in childhood was seen through a natural landscape. I think, because of that, we had this connection to the idea of land in terms of human and natural expression. There’s always been this fascination in my mind with the notion of an uncontrolled landscape. You know, one of the reasons I really respond to a city like New Orleans, for example, is that there, the environment overtakes the human imprint. I was realizing it when we were there. I had a penny and I was like, “God, my penny is turning green. It doesn’t just stay a copper penny!” It didn’t just tarnish, it turned green!! AR: Nature is definitely winning in New Orleans… KM: Right? And in some ways I think there’s some connection with us to California on an emotional level, but also I think it’s just the interaction we have with the idea of land. Not only the idea of land, but also just of the specifics
of time and place. For example, Laura and I have always been obsessed with the Gold Rush. The whole frenzy of it and just the idea of the unknown frontier. There is a larger historical connection and personal memories… we have so many personal memories and I think part of that had to do with the people we knew growing up… AR: What were the people in your life at that time like? KM: Well, my mom is an artist and my father being a botanist… I mean, my father studied the world on microscopic levels! He was studying slime molds and those sorts of things that you can’t necessarily see with the human eye. So we had a family that was sort of obsessed with detail. But I guess for me it’s just the idea of the imagination. Our imagination was free in a sense. It wasn’t defined by anyone saying, “This is what’s cool or interesting or whatever.” Now, we can just go on the internet and everyone has the same great taste in music but back then you really had to figure out what you liked… AR: You had to really hunt. LM: Yeah, you really had to hunt. KM: Where we lived it wasn’t just given to you. Like we didn’t really understand fashion at that time… LM: I don’t think you just had to hunt, you also had to choose. You had to choose to be a fan of something. For me, I liked the idea that there were fans and I feel that maybe that’s what’s missing now. I don’t care that everyone likes the same music, that doesn’t matter to me. I just hope that there are still people who are real fans of things. It’s like you wore a badge saying, “I’m a fan of this.” AR: Your music was more of a lifestyle choice. It defined your personality… LM: Yeah, like, “This is me!” So the idea of fan-dom is really interesting to me. KM: We were just saying the other day that, in a strange way, growing up constantly seeing tons of Hare Krishnas had a huge impact on us. You know the idea of dressing to separate yourself from others and at the same time to signify something about yourself to those people? As well as becoming a part of something that seems larger than the individual. The identity politics involved in it, but also the madness, is what attracted us to them. Because there is a madness! Hare Krishnas have a madness to their aesthetic and I think seeing things like that as kids is what led Laura and I, in a strange way, into being obsessed with fashion. AR: So you guys weren’t the girls who clipped out pages from fashion magazines and hung them all over your walls? LM: We did later… when we were teenagers. AR: Like in your high school days? LM: I think actually that was more like in junior high. Yeah, it was junior high. Instead of having pictures of boys on our walls we had the fashion clippings. So we did experience that. KM: Yeah, so we did have that obsession, but I didn’t really have any real knowledge of what designers did until much later than that. I would gravitate towards pictures and we
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 25
Photos of the Mulleavy family and their community in Northern, California, circa 1970s (opposite) Portrait of Kate & Laura Mulleavy by Autumn De Wilde (seen lower left painting on photo)
Kate and Laura’s parents, Northern, California, circa 1970s (opposite) Images from studio fittings, Fall, 2008 Collection Photographs by Nobuyushi Araki, used as inspiration for Fall, 2008 Collection
were obsessed with watching films and I knew that these were ways of exploring life outside of where we lived, outside of ourselves. Or realizing that you learn about what you’re interested in from certain things that you seek out. AR: Why didn’t you guys go right into fashion? You both studied other things in college, right? LM: Yeah, we were going to college, but for me, I would have never even considered studying fashion. KM: Laura almost became a doctor. AR: Really? Were you actually pre-med? LM: Yeah, my first year in college I was. But after that, I was not into it. Really, what it was… math killed me. I changed my major because I couldn’t really even get into an interesting biology class. I didn’t go the usual path. I just chose integrated biology. You know, there’s another way that you can do it for pre-med, but I wanted to just study plants and animals. But by the time I got through all the requirements for it, I thought, “This isn’t right.” Sometimes you just know it. It’s not a big deal. And Kate said, “You’re changing your major.” So we went to an Elliot Smith show and I said, “OK.” AR: You decided at an Elliot Smith show? KM: Yeah, I said, “Laura, I’m taking you out tonight and you’re changing your major.” LM: Yeah and I was like, “OK!” The show was at the Fillmore, which is kind of funny, and I decided to switch to English. It was interesting. I realized what it was though… college for me wasn’t a way of choosing a career. I think a lot of people approach college like that, but I think it’s really important to have the freedom to go to school and just learn. I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things that we do now without having the ways of speaking about aesthetics that I learned there. You know, I don’t think you can really be an English major, for example, if you don’t take history classes. It just doesn’t really make sense. Even though you should separate a story from its historical context, it’s better to understand what was going on in a certain time because the world that an author is creating makes much more sense. KM: Well yeah! LM: You can pick up on more because you’re building a dialogue that you’ll need later. I think an isolated education on one topic would have been really detrimental to me. I mean, you have so many interests… how do you really choose? I ended up taking a million art history classes and they totally affected the way I would write for my English classes. So I don’t know. KM: Well, I didn’t really think about it so much because I actually said in high school that I wanted to go to fashion school. LM: But you actually went for creative writing… KM: Yeah, but I knew I wanted to go to fashion school too. But I also knew that I wanted to write. I mean, I applied to literally four schools. I would get good grades in an English class or something like creative writing, but I hated science and math. So instead of taking the classes that you have to take because you know they’re going to get you into college, I just stopped at entry level classes that kids basically took before dropping out of high school. So I guess I knew that the weird combination of classes I was taking wasn’t exactly what would get me into every school that might be good. That being said, I applied to Berkeley on a fluke, because I didn’t think I would get in there. I was actually told by a teacher of mine to not even bother applying. AR: Why? Just because your grades weren’t good enough? KM: Yeah, my grades weren’t good enough and my SATs were really bad. But I thought, “I’m just going to apply there!” because with the UC (University of California) system, you know, you just apply to all of them right?! I actually ended up getting into Berkeley. But of course, as is
typical, rather than being excited I was like, “Well, I don’t understand why UCLA didn’t let me in?” LM: Haha! That’s always the big drama. I remember people having that discussion of who got into UCLA and who didn’t. KM: I remember my parents took us to an orientation at Berkeley and that’s when I decided. I think it was inevitable. I feel like everything in our lives has happened in this weird way. I mean, I was born in Oakland, my father was finishing his doctorate at the time that I was a small kid. My earliest memories are of living in that area. My parents had a little apartment on Telegraph that, weirdly enough, later in college, I went into this apartment for a party and I had this weird reaction. I called my mom and I said, “Where did you live? Was your guys apartment in such and such…?” and it was! The party was actually in the apartment that they were living in when I was a baby!! A similar thing had happened to me once in Oakland. I was driving around one day and I stopped at this Catholic church and I went in and thought, “This is weird. How can I know this place?” and it turned out that it was the church that I was baptized in. So I feel in some strange way that it was inevitable that I would have ended up back there. Especially for my dad—he wanted us to go there. But my parents didn’t really pressure us to get a certain job. The fact of the matter is, we got out of college and came home and literally watched horror movies for a year. We didn’t work, we didn’t interact with our friends… AR: You watched horror movies for a reason or just because you were trying escape life? LM: Well we did kind of want to start a company at that point… KM: We wanted to be fashion designers at that point, but, yeah, we didn’t know what we were doing really. LM: We literally made friends with the kids at the local Blockbuster. KM: Yeah, we didn’t even go to the cool video store. We went to Blockbuster!! LM: There were these four guys there. There was this one guy Hugo, and his fantasy was to own every Criterion Collection film… so when he could get one it was this big deal. The other kid was really into Sci-Fi, so we would have these discussions about Alien and Star Wars. There was this other guy Clarence who was older, so he was like the father of the group, and I don’t know what kinds of movies he liked actually… KM: No, Clarence never commented… unless it was on the new movies that came out. AR: He was the new release guy… KM: Yeah, he was the new release advocate. But seriously that’s all we did! We have the kind of parents who never said anything to us. My parents never said, “It’s time for you to go out and live for real.” So it makes sense that we never thought, “Oh I have to go to fashion school to do what I want.” In fact, my grandfather came to the United States from Mexico and didn’t speak any English and ended up being an engineer working at Caltech. He never had a formal education… LM: He taught himself aeronautical engineering. He learned English at PCC [Pasadena Community College]. This is actually really cool. He didn’t speak English; they moved to Pasadena when it was still just only Colorado Blvd., and they lived above a brothel I think. This was in the 1930s. The reason why his family left Mexico was because of the revolution and his father was a musician. He was a conductor and he could play any instrument. He was amazing! AR: This is your great grandfather you’re talking about… LM: Yeah, my great grandfather. My grandfather’s father. So they moved the family to America because in Mexico
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 26
they shut down the churches, so he couldn’t get work—because in Mexico that’s how musicians made money. So his family came over on a stagecoach; they came through New Mexico. They stayed on Native American reservations. My grandfather to this day tells us that he invented the frozen banana because they used to eat food out of trash cans in the freezing cold weather. KM: Yeah, but he also thought he invented everything! He actually went to a convention in Washington DC for his inventions that we still don’t understand!! LM: So the whole family came to Pasadena, and he studied at PCC, and we actually have some of his essays. They are really amazing. He would write narratives about where he was from. We have the same things from our grandmother. So he studied English and then taught himself aeronautical engineering. I mean, how do you even do that? AR: Such a cool story… LM: My grandfather passed away about fifteen years ago, and my grandmother about two years ago, and when she died they told us to go to their house and choose stuff because they were going to start dividing up the estate. I would go to this little bookshelf and they had all these little books of fables, and then all of his science books from the 1940s and I just thought, “We have to get those! They are so cool!!” But, you know, later on, he actually worked on the Manhattan Project, and that was a really strange thing because nobody in our family knows about it… because he never talked about it. I think he was ashamed. He was really interesting… AR: There’s an interesting family correlation going on actually. I mean, who teaches themselves aeronautical engineering? LM: Yeah, but I always thought, “Oh that’s just the California way.” You know you just make it up. AR: Which in kind of a weird way is what you guys have done. I see a direct correlation there between what your grandfather did and what you guys do… LM: I do too. That’s the one thing I really like about California. There’s that thing where people come to LA to become something. You go there to do something that people will tell you that you can’t do. I do like that spirit and I like the feeling that even in the United States there is that belief that you can do something new. Sometimes the rest of the world thinks that Americans are ignorant, but I don’t really think that’s it. It’s the belief that you can do something better… and that’s how a culture grows and expands. If you have that limitation when you say, “Oh, everything great has already been done,” then you’ll never get anywhere. I do like that open feeling… AR: The West Coast doesn’t have all the baggage that places like Europe, or even New York, has when it comes to history. You know, that heavy 20th Century burden…
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 27
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 28
Image from backstage presentation, Spring, 2009 Collection Various visual inspiration sources for Spring, 2009 Collection (opposite) Images from backstage presentation and studio fittings, Spring, 2009 Collection
KM: No, it doesn’t. LM: We have the Gold Rush. That’s our beginning. But we do have some other weird baggage… AR: The Hippies? KM: Haha. Yeah, we do have that. LM: No, I was thinking about the California Missions. Did you have to make a Mission in school when you were young? Out of sugar cubes? AR: I’m sure I did. I was in public school in LA, so probably… LM: I’m sure you did it. So yeah, we do have our Mission baggage. And the Mexican American war… Alcatraz… But that’s about it. KM: So yeah, you know when we first started making clothes we actually really didn’t know what we were doing and the funny thing is that… AR: Wait, was there a distinct moment when you were watching all those movies that you remember when you guys were like, “Lets do a fashion line!”? KM: There kind of was a moment where we did kind of decide to start it… LM: Yeah, I was starting to get a little depressed. It’s weird not having that routine on some level. Because I have that, kind of like, I have to be busy. I’m kind of hyper I think. So I started thinking, “What are we doing?” Because we didn’t know. I had no plan. I didn’t know how to have a fashion company. We didn’t know anything about the industry. We didn’t know how to make any of it work. So it seemed scary. I think from that time when you’re 15 to when you’re 24 is when
you feel a real fear about what you’re going to be doing with your life. Because you’re young and you have no experience and everything seems so unknown. Over time you start knowing that situations can seem scary, but you can get through them, but in that moment I remember being really frightened. It seemed like the end of the world. KM: I mean, really, what happened to us is strange. We did a collection where we made ten pieces. And you know, if I was going to be really honest, I did know that when we did that, we were supposed to be doing it. I had this feeling. It wasn’t where we are now. Now I feel like I’m understanding our vision more. Every season, I feel like we push ourselves, but in the beginning those were the first things we had ever done. I had drawn my whole life and I knew that it must be an innate thing because I could just draw. I drew fashion. I could have gone into illustrating if that was still a thing to do. In terms of the fashion world, it’s not the job I would want now, because there aren’t really illustrators now like there used to be—it’s not the same. But I knew I could draw. I didn’t know some of the other things, but that was what was interesting. AR: So you have always been an artist in some capacity? KM: Well, really what happened for us is that we did that first collection and within two weeks of finishing it we went to New York. That whole trip was just because we decided to go. We had never been there before. This is a crazy story, there was a blizzard when we went and we flew into Boston, and then we had to take a train to New York and we had this giant box, this huge box… LM: When they flew us into Boston, they flew us because there was this snowstorm in New York, so they redirected our flight and we were snowed in in Boston. Everything was shut down, and they put everyone from the plane up in a hotel. In the morning we were told, “You’re going to have to take a train into New York,” but in order to get to the train station, I mean the snow was waist-high, they had this setup, and it was so annoying, a cab could only take someone every hour. So we got grouped in with these people, but they couldn’t get us to the train station! So we had to walk this box through the snow! I mean I wasn’t prepared; I didn’t have any snow gear. So we were all wet, and then we had to sit in the train station for ten years. But then the train ride was all frozen ponds and ducks and it was so beautiful! KM: When we got to New York we stayed at our friend’s apartment in the East Village who we went to school with… LM: She was in school for art conservation. I felt like she had 20 cats and was recreating some Byzantine scene… KM: Yeah, we were all in this really small room and we didn’t know what we were doing. I thought we had made a huge mistake. In that moment we felt as if we should never have come there. We didn’t understand New York on any level.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 29
AR: What was that first collection like? KM: Our first collection was inspired by the environment that we grew up in. We were literally making dresses to look like the trees we saw as children. AR: Did you guys set up appointments? Were there people you were supposed to meet with? KM: We tried, but it was hard. LM: It was at that point where you had to call people 20 times. I was panicking. I remember sitting on our friend’s bed and being like, “Oh my god!” But I kept calling and I called stores and they still wouldn’t see us. You know we couldn’t get through and it was just so complicated! But we just kept calling. Actually, now that I remember, we had four appointments. Two of them were with magazines, one was with Women’s Wear Daily and after that one meeting they put us on the cover. Which is like the weirdest thing in the world!! AR: You had no idea that was coming, right? KM: No, they didn’t tell us. LM: They didn’t know they were going to do it either! We met with the editor in chief. KM: Well they called us in, but it was the day before fashion week and we were meeting with Bridget Foley, the editor, so I knew something was going on. So they had us take a picture, and you know, we had never been interviewed before, so we really didn’t know what was happening. Then the next day, our clothes were on the cover. Our friend was like, “You know, you don’t just go into Women’s Wear Daily and get a cover!” AR: And you guys can honestly tell me that you had no idea that this was going to happen? KM: No! They had never seen our stuff. Weirdly enough they just pulled us in a room… LM: They didn’t even plan on doing it. People were just walking around the office and they would grab people in to look at our clothes. It was very spontaneous. I remember we asked them later why they had us come in, and they said, “We never let people come in the day before fashion week starts!” It’s a really busy time. It was just a fluke. But because of that we sold the line to four stores while we were there. KM: We didn’t know how to do sales either. We had to make everything up. We were having our friends price our clothes. Our friends would come over and say, “Why don’t you just charge $30,000 for that!” Of course, we didn’t charge that… but we honestly, and we did this up until a few seasons ago, we would call our friends and be like, “Can you come over and help us price this collection? Because we don’t know how to do it” They would come over and just look at the pieces and make up prices. This is the level to which we had not figured this out… LM: My favorite thing was when we got back to LA, there was this phone call that Anna Wintour (the editor of Vogue) wanted to have a meeting with us. It all happened really fast. It was a month and a half after we had first gone to NY. KM: Which is really crazy.
AR: Yeah! Some designers work their entire lives for those kinds of situations. So you guys didn’t have any representation, no PR, nothing? LM: No, we didn’t have any kind of representation until after our third collection. KM: You know, I was talking to Nan Goldin, who Laura and I really love, and she said, “Always keep your friends around you.” I think one of the things that Laura and I have done since the first collection is that every person that has worked on our shows, since the very first one, are our friends. Now we have new people who have become our friends. People who do production on the show and so there’s that element as well, but basically every single person that’s in our world is our friend. LM: Like our friends Shirley and Autumn… I mean our friends came to Colette to help us install this show. I was shocked! I literally had this moment… we were sitting there, after we were done and it was 4 a.m. and we had to get up super early and we were sitting in our hotel and I remember thinking, “God, our friends came to Paris, and actually stayed in that store with us all night to install everything!” Five people that we know did that for us!! Now that’s cool! AR: That’s really the best advice in the world! Your friends know you; they’re never going to bullshit you… KM: That’s true. LM: Yeah, they know you and it also makes the experience of doing all the things that are so high stress a lot more easy. KM: It also makes perfect sense for us, because I think that we never thought about it in a typical way. We didn’t go to school and have it laid out for us like, “Here’s how you become a fashion designer, and here’s how to follow all these rules.” And within the United States there are rules! We are very different than other people. I mean we didn’t even realize how different until we were nominated for a young designers CFDA award. LM: Yeah, I thought, “Why does everybody act like what we do is weird?” I didn’t get it. At that time we had done this collection with these giant shapes and these big squares and I thought, “It’s not that weird!” AR: Was it because you guys weren’t looking at anything else that was going on? LM: No. It just didn’t seem weird to me. I just thought, “What’s the difference?” It’s just clothing. We got
nominated three times before we actually won, so this was the first time we were nominated. It was for the young designer category and at the awards they played this video, actually that Ryan McGinley shot of all these naked girls in Woodstock. So they played the video of people running around in the woods and then every once in a while you’d see an outfit. So there were the other designers with these lovely dresses and then ours came on the screen all of a sudden and it was this big shape and I was just thinking, “Oh! I get it.” KM: No, Laura looked at me after the video and said in slow motion, “We’re not winning this award.” And we realized at that point that we were really different. LM: But this year we actually did win the designer category, and that was a weird moment too! That didn’t seem like it was going to happen either. But I don’t know where this story was all going, though… KM: I think we were just talking about how sometimes you have to negotiate new rules. I mean I love Paris, but one of the things that’s frustrating for me personally is, well, even in this hotel, I’m like, “Can I eat a breakfast after the breakfast room is closed?” and I’ll ask and someone they will say, “No. It’s closed. You can’t do that.” With everything we’ve ever done, there has been someone at some point who said, “You can’t do that!” A friend of mine said something to me the other day, “I remember calling you once because someone had said to me, ‘Tell them not to do that, it’s not a good idea.’” And she said, “I told you that, and you didn’t listen.” She reminded me that I said, “Thanks for telling me that, but I’m doing it anyway.” LM: That’s my instinct about everything. Make it work you know? KM: Right. I mean we didn’t take the path of going to school. We didn’t take the path of, you know, working for someone first then starting a line. We didn’t know what we were doing. But part of that is also saying, “Do I really want to know what I’m doing? Do I go into every collection knowing what I’m doing?” Not really. Part of it is that you have to take a creative leap and say, “Well, OK, if you’re so afraid of what everyone thinks about you, you’re never going to do anything interesting!” You know we’ve had collections that people have loved and some that people have not liked, but the fact of the matter is that just doing something that’s middle of the road just isn’t good enough. AR: Do you guys feel like you improv a lot? KM: Some of it is.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 30
LM: Oh yeah. I think our way of working is very improvisational. It actually really frustrates people. We don’t schedule anything the way we’re supposed to. When you design something, the way you’re supposed to do it, you normally use a tech sheet to explain everything that goes into making the garment and indicate how to make it. You do a flat sketch and you indicate things like where you put a zipper, and this is the zipper you’re going to use and we’re always saying, “ But we don’t have the zipper!” Then it holds everything up. We’re always backwards… it’s a mess. This season it happened where we changed everything and then our zipper color was wrong. So we go through this long process of everything being last minute. But in our creative process, you have to see the piece to complete it! We can’t do it the other way. AR: You’re working more like visual artists… LM: Yeah, there’s a process of doing it and then you interact with it and then you understand it more. I think that is a very chaotic experience for a lot of people. KM: At the same time, one thing I think is the opposite spectrum from that, is that when we do a collection, we spend probably two months between the two of us, just talking about the ideas behind it. Which we really talk out. AR: You mean before you even make a sketch? KM: Oh my god, yeah! Then when we sketch everything out, it is meticulous in a sense. For example we did these leather cage pieces and Laura basically woke up one morning and said, “I had a dream about this, this is what we’re doing.” So we sketched it out and then we literally translated it from the sketch. A lot of times the dresses we do, it’s about draping, because things do change when you’re draping, you develop a hand for that… LM: I just mean where fabrics go… KM: Right, but part of it is that Laura and I never sketch in color. It’s pre-visualization for us because a lot of the things we do we actually dye ourselves, so we create the colors ourselves. AR: I was going to ask you about that. How you get those colors and textures? KM: It’s a lot like painting for us. In all honesty. AR: What, like you guys are in buckets? LM: No, no! We work with a professional dyer. KM: We do work with a dyer, so we don’t have to do that. LM: It’s funny because some people say, “Oh, I dye” and I always think, “No, you don’t dye.” Dyeing to get what you want… to make it beautiful, is not easy. The person that we
Images from studio fittings, Fall 2009 Collection Various inspiration sources for Fall, 2009 Collection
work with is a trained fine artist that has worked with color theory for years. For example, if you try to make that exact color tan that you want to make, trust me, it would take you three weeks. KM: Well if you’re like us. For instance, we did a collection and we wanted blood splatter dresses and that took two months. AR: Why, because you couldn’t get the right red? LM: It was not even about just getting the right red. There were two things about it. One was that, we were very specific on how the blood should look. Also, before we had done that collection I had hated the color red. Well I hated the way I had seen it in clothing, you know? KM: Well who wants to make a little red dress? The idea is disgusting. LM: Doesn’t an all red outfit seem really garish? It just seems so formal. AR: Yeah, it’s kind of a funny concept, unless it’s a joke. KM: It’s just also seems old. LM: Yeah, it seems very old. KM: But we both like blood… LM: So I remember seeing this thing, this passage in a Sylvia Plath novel where she talks about blood and water mixing and being like poppies. I liked the way that sounded, the idea of blood floating or even color floating. So then I thought, how do you translate that? At the same time I kept looking at these images of blood splattering in horror films. So I said, “Kate we’re doing blood splatter girls. That’s what we’re doing this collection.” Immediately, we thought “How do we get good red colors? What’s a red that we’re going to respond to?” So we made three reds… one we called a Rodarte red… KM: Because it was actually our own shade. AR: So how do you do that? You call the dye person and say we need a certain red? KM: Yeah, we had meetings about it. We were there every day. LM: It’s a dialogue because you have to be able to say, “Oh, this is too heavy or this is going the wrong way…” You have to talk about colors like they’re happy or sad. You have to be able to communicate about color that way to get the shade you want, so when we were developing the red, that took a long time. Then we worked with silk tulle on these dresses, which if you get wet, turns into a little noodle or sponge. So we thought, “How do we take the most greedy color, which red is, and keep it concentrated?” Putting blood splattering on something is not like you’re doing a print, because it doesn’t stay. So how do you keep the white perfectly bright white and not let the red dye bleed into pink? We kept saying, “We don’t want pink anywhere on this garment!” KM: Yeah, we had a lot of pink in the tests… LM: We had so much tulle with pink in it! So the technique to figure that out took two months and that’s shocking to me! But in the end, all that hard work, that’s what made the dresses so beautiful! I’m still so proud of them. AR: How did you mimic the splattering? Even that part seems totally nuts! LM: Because it wasn’t splatter. It’s just the way it was done. There are different techniques. One was taken off this image from one of Nobuyoshi Araki’s photographs of a flower. There were different things that we used as a guideline. You wanted the idea of the dripping and you wanted the idea of it soaking, like it was coming internally… more the idea of something being stained on the top. There were just a lot of different looks that we put together to get it. KM: I think looking back, that’s why when we sketch, for us personally, the color ends up being so important. I mean, when we do color in a show it’s so magical. Something interesting about how we work is that we really understand how color moves through a
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 31
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 32
Various Inspiration images for Fall, 2009 collection, Yellowstone National Park photos by Todd Cole. (opposite) Images from studio fittings, Fall, 2009 Collection
show. All that is mapped out in our heads. So we say, “OK, this is what we’re doing in this, and these are the colors, and this is why it’s going to change here, and so on…” We don’t have swatches that are telling us this. We make it up. Then we just think about it, think about it, think about it and then do it. AR: You totally pre-visualize? LM: Yeah, but then it drives us crazy. Because we have thirty-five sketches and there’s no visual markings of what colors are where. So you have to imagine them. KM: Yeah, but our shows are mapped out from the very beginning to the end and the order very rarely changes. LM: You know what’s funny. Someone was telling me after our last show that they could not tell the difference between the pieces from the runway show. They were like, “Oh, I didn’t realize all these pieces were so different!” It was kind of annoying to me actually. You know, what’s true though is you really can’t see it all in that context. A runway show is only ten minutes. You don’t see the subtleties and that’s the hard thing about doing things that are more couture for a readyto-wear runway show. There is that translation that does get lost, because people can’t stare at something long enough… KM: Well also people need categories… AR: It goes back to the argument about rules. KM: It does go back to rules! AR: I was wondering about that actually. As
I was looking through your collections I was viewing the pieces the same way that I would assess works of art. They weren’t just garments. There is so much subtlety. In the shows I feel a disconnect from that. It feels to me that the best way to look at what you do is to be able to spend 15 minutes really going in… there are subtexts going on there… LM: There are. But you know, the reason why I like doing a runway show in the end is because, personally, I have that one moment. I don’t know what it’s like in the audience, but for me, backstage, everyone’s in their outfit at one time. Everyone has the full look and you can finally realize and say, “That’s what we did!” That’s when I can understand our work the most because it’s all finalized. Then you have that moment when you can talk about it to someone else. Before that I knew where Kate and I were going with it in the four months leading up, and it makes sense in some way, but I wouldn’t know how to verbalize it. You know even last season we did our collection based on… KM: Frankenstein? LM: Yeah, but where did it start? KM: Gordon Matta Clark. LM: Yeah. So we had wanted to do a collection based on Gordon Matta Clark’s work about houses and all the things that went into them, but it just twisted into a story about Frankenstein. You know this reconstructed
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 33
person. In the end, the only thing I wanted to talk about was Frankenstein. KM: But the reason it all makes sense is because we had the idea while we were driving from Pasadena to Downtown LA and along the freeway there’s a patch of old Victorian houses. One day we were driving by and I saw this huge sheet of insulation and I thought, “OK wait a minute…” LM: This is in the middle of the freeway! There’s always a piece flying around there… KM: The insulation made me think about this idea. LM: The idea of what goes into a house. KM: Then I thought of this idea of Frankenstein, which in our minds was a parallel because I thought, “Deconstructing an object or constructing the human body are similar.” So we made this parallel in our minds and an interesting link was this idea of Frankenstein. What’s also interesting is that a lot of people who saw the show thought that we had done the collection about futurism. Interestingly enough, it kind of was. One of the biggest things that Laura and I question season after season, which is an anomaly in the fashion world, is how the future will look in terms humanity, instead of just how the future will look in terms of technology. Our idea of the future is really linked to this notion of the human imprint. We don’t make these collections about the idea of the future being so removed. In our minds it’s always linked to some kind of history or past.
Rodarte at Colette, Paris, 2009, Installation Views (right and opposite) Images from studio fittings, Fall, 2010 collection Backstage in New York at the presentation for Fall, 2010 collection
LM: But I think you do have two camps. There are people who are more minimalist in what they think the future would be like and then there are people who think it’s just this huge, chaotic world. I tend to be in the more chaotic world side because I think it’s more interesting. Maybe because I like tactile things. I don’t respond to sterile environments. AR: It’s funny because it seems like we’re moving towards a more sleek and clean exterior, while the interior seems to be becoming more and more chaotic. Like if we just make everything look like it’s in control, people will believe it… KM: Well that’s why we like Star Wars! I like the storm troopers when they’re not pure white. George Lucas actually physically made that decision. We asked him this question. LM: Yeah, we got to have lunch with him! KM: Yeah, we’re huge fans. We actually took Monsters Magazine with us to get signed! LM: OK, this was embarrassing. We were at the airport recently arguing about Star Wars for an hour. This was on the way to Paris. We happened to have a layover in New York and someone was sitting in the area, and overheard our conversation. Then they told someone that we know, because, you know, everyone waiting for that plane was coming to Paris for fashion week. So this person knew us but couldn’t see us, and deduced who we were based on the subject matter alone. They told our friend, “I was sitting in an airport and had to listen to two people arguing about Star Wars for an hour!” KM: But George Lucas actually did think about that. Maybe now it doesn’t seem like something that you would notice, but he always felt that even though it’s science fiction, you have to connect to the world still. So how he did that is that there’s a physicality in his films. When you watch Star Wars you physically relate to the space. You don’t feel like it’s something that your body wouldn’t exist in. That’s why he made the decision that when storm troopers are out in the desert, they get dirty. It seems like that should be obvious, but for many people it wasn’t obvious. Why do teenagers see that film and relate to it so much? Because there is some sort of emotion or connection to this idea of space. I think tapping into that is really fascinating. AR: Oh totally! I can completely see how that relates to your work. KM: That’s also one of the reasons that we do what we do. For this collection, we physically aged everything, which is something that you might not notice from a distance, but you know, we sandpapered the fabric, we burned stuff, everything was stained to look like old wallpaper in some sort of burned up landscape and I think part of that was—and I don’t know if Laura feels this way—but I just don’t like something that’s clean and untouched. I like the idea of ruin. AR: I think everything you do has that feeling. It’s definitely a common thread through your work. Like it’s falling apart… KM: Well, we realized that that is what we do. AR: Are your clothes autobiographical at all? LM: No. I think what I respond to is something that’s more
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 34
chaotic. Visually speaking. I’m immediately drawn to anything that looks chaotic. I love anything that’s texturized. So the combination of both seems more interesting to me. But the more I think about it there is something that is autobiographical about it. I mean, we grew up in the Redwoods. Everything you see there is tree bark or covered in shadow. Our house was surrounded by a mustard field, an apple orchard and a redwood forest. There was also a eucalyptus forest, and little rocky beach. Then you’d have tide pools. That’s all we saw! It wasn’t a modern city. I mean, for our first collection we tried to recreate the idea of tree bark. That’s a simple way of talking about it, but I think that’s what we were trying to do. KM: But I also think that what moved and propelled it forward was two things. I think in terms of the mathematics of things. Like when you think about a spider web and how it exists. With a spider web, when the wind changes or you walk through it, it completely disintegrates. LM: And spiders spend a whole day building those webs! KM: Also, what I love about spiders is kind of the same reason that I’m a horror fan. It’s kind of an outsider creature. But spider webs, when you think about it, are really incredible. If you think about the logic behind them. There is a certain amount of perfection in them. But to me, what’s interesting is that duality. The fact that it’s almost a tightrope act. How long does this exist for? How do you make something that’s perfect and at the same time could totally disintegrate. AR: Has that happened? Have you guys run into that yet? Where your clothes disintegrate? LM: Haha. Yeah, they fall apart. KM: But that’s what they’re supposed to do! LM: That’s the cool part about them. KM: But they can be repaired. LM: Our friend told us she was wearing something of ours recently and she snagged it on something and half her dress fell off… and I was like, “Cool!” KM: I also think it’s important to challenge concepts. OK, so people want to spend a lot of money on clothes, it’s our job as designers to challenge those ideas. LM: Yeah, you know some designers are really interested in having the newest tech fabric. They are interested in looking for something that hasn’t been used, what can they do that’s different with some crazy new textile and that’s really cool. And when you have a lot of money and you can get to that point that’s interesting. But for us it’s more like, how much can we manipulate something that seems like a traditional textile? For this collection we aged every textile! Everything was either burned or shredded or sandpapered and stained! They needed to
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 35
look like they were buried for 20 years and we found them. As if someone pulled a piece of old wallpaper off the wall and used it for their outfit. So when we got the fabric for this collection, Kate and I were like, “Oh my god! This fabric is so ugly!” AR: Why, because it was too new? LM: Yeah! We started panicking! We knew that we were going to have to work with an ager because everything seemed so ugly. This sea foam green fabric that we were so obsessed with suddenly seemed so new and so perfect it was shocking! I looked at Kate and she was like, “We picked the ugliest fabric.” I said, “No we didn’t, it’s just not there yet.” But it was scary because it just looked so new and we knew that if we didn’t ruin it, we couldn’t use it. So that was the system for this last season. AR: That’s so crazy. I mean, the act of creation and destruction are not really that separated you know? Would you say that this approach ties into an overall Rodarte philosophy or are your choices based mostly on aesthetics? KM: In many ways, the notion or ruin or decay is a central theme in our approach to design. I can remember a huge earthquake happening one summer… I was standing in our kitchen and within a few seconds every porcelain plate, bowl, and glass cup had literally flown off the shelves and shattered on the floor around me. I remember being mesmerized by the shards. A broken plate will always be more interesting to Laura and I than a perfect, untouched object. The value is in the stain, the shadow… smudge, tear. We are attracted to imperfection and to the beauty of chaos.
I have not met Nicolas Pol. I have never spoken with him over the phone, or even emailed with him directly. Instead, the following interview was conducted between our respective homes (Los Angeles and Paris), through a translator/handler of sorts—something that I have never done before. I mention this not because of my initial confusion at such a dialogue but rather because somehow I find it fitting, when all is said and done, to have interviewed Nicolas Pol and still feel like I don't really know him any better for his words than I do for his art. And it's not even that I find his work so clear, because it's not. But it is incredibly direct. His paintings hover like a perfect, imperceptibly stylized version of that person who might be about to have a nervous breakdown on the street. That idyllically destroyed person whom you really should leave be, but from whom you can't avert your gaze. “What is he thinking? What's going on in there? How did his clothes get so perfectly fucked?” As well, Nicolas Pol makes sculptures like The Keep Britain Tidy Letter (2005), an oversized professionally-designed and industrially-printed box for “Swisson Sticks,” a product that looked like ski poles but would somehow help people in the event of a geotechnic North/South Pole reversal. No where is it explained what they are for, but their importance is at once conveyed: odious but crucial. Our correspondence took place during the final days in his Paris studio working on his debut American exhibition, The Martus Maw, for a massive pop-up gallery in Manhattan (www.feedbackltd.net). The photographer Billy Nava travelled to his studio to shoot the work and some portraits and sent them back to us mid-interview. Had ours in fact been more of a conversation I would have asked him about sports iconography, Basquiat, industrial design, graffiti, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen's concept of “Bad Painting,” Brad Kahlhamer's diaristic paintings of the American West, and other things. But after two rounds of inquiry through two languages and a mediator I realized that specifics were not at all the point. I had prepared two sets of questions, neither of which was taken on literally, but I think the results tell you what they need to. In fact, I think Pol's responses, the first half of which were handwritten, actually get much closer to the heart of his wonderful, raw, impulsive, direct and genuine practice, anyways. TEXT AND INTERVIEW BY BRENDAN FOWLER / PHOTOGRAPHY BY BILLY NAVA
Nicolas Pol and untitled work in his studio, Paris, October, 2009
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 37
Studies For A Pink Martus, 2009, mixed media on canvas, 80.7x 118.5” (previous) Puaka Crusade, 2007, mixed media on canvas, 51.2x118.1”
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 40
Hi Nicolas, how’s it going? I was wondering, first, what were you into as a kid and how did you come to art? At this stage, it would be fair to call your practice interdisciplinary, right? Did you arrive at sculpture through painting, or painting through sculpture? Or printmaking? What did you study first? Darkness. The press release accompanying your first show, Life Goes On If You’re Lucky (2005), talks a great deal about darkness. Where does this darkness exist? I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about some of the narrative within that show. For example, what was the story with the “Swisson Sticks” box in The Keep Britain Tidy Letter (2005)? In works following that first show, it seems like the “grappling with human darkness” turned into more of a “wrestling with possibility,” am I right? It seems like you found a more playful approach to rough painting. Optimism in the aggression? Would you agree?
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 41
I’m sorry I couldn’t answer to each question in particular but I realized quite late that printed as Vlad gave them to me some of the questions’ words were missing so I had to guess the blanks and decided to explain work in a quite general way. Hope you can read my writing and forgive my limited English. Many Thanks, Nicolas Pol Hi Brendan, I’m absolutely fine, thanks for asking and I hope you’re well... OK, so... Sure, my practice is interdisciplinary. As an artist I lust for different things: lines, words, melting colors or sounds, space slumbering. Still it’s all about one thing. Clearly, painting is a way to achieve poetry. So sometimes it goes into explicit construction of a painting as a mode d’emploi for a nonsense tool or a weapon just to write nonsense stuff that excites me, to draw and paint on it in aim to reach idiotic emotions of confusion. Like a disguised handicap, maybe as a frustrated writer, but in joy of using oil matter as shit or bodily fluids, to invade an object with rotten soul. Any means is cool to invite or provoke a further analysis from the viewer, sensing that something is wrong with that image or box or wooden thing. So it’s not a problem if it doesn’t look quite right as long as a form of necessity operates as a big weird lie. Using a code like with hidden signs and figurative language, I tend to have a taste for classical formats (cauvre or rectangular tableau). Because painting is so conceptual to me, volume pieces (box or sculpture or installation) are as much paintings as regular format cameras, but nothing is more mysterious or new than a tableau all the time. About painting, all I can say is that I’ve felt copper with black varnish for acid etching was a very sensual imitation for my hand and mind to draw. It still is close to writing; it’s small-scale and goes with a spike or a needle and feels like surgery. Also, it’s ancient and it makes me feel like a psycho from the Dark Ages. But this creation of multiples also leads to other uses of printing techniques, from like xerox on paper or canvases or silkscreen on different surfaces (canvas, metal, wood, trash bags...). This attitude corresponds with the allusion in early paintings to a firm like Pfizer. That family name is related to a background secret motivation to make fiction... fiction fantasies interfere with my painting. There’s sort of a painter family tree and curse like in an old conte. It’s just part of a desire to deal with mythos or to melt mythologies, just as an invisible skeleton without feeling and then painting is just like meat on it. Like creating a new holy trinity for a new religion, but I’m only writing in the Old Testament fashion (more anger, disasters, blood and fun). Then what was just a personal reference to a movie dream got more explicit, leading to other sections of brands... At this stage paintings are a bit like movie music that would exist without the scenario, dialogues or images. They are allusions to a missing film. All of it, just an occasion to comment in an abstract way because sometimes it’s like I have a friendly link to these metaphorical corporations and other times it looks a bit more scary: food or sex, control, defense, holidays, policies, flesh. For instance, the “Swisson Sticks” box was a way to create a sculpture without touching matter, being a fake ready-made like monolith with shiny plasticated surface and a scientific crook with heavy texts to reach humor. I had seen that reportage on T.V. about Earth’s magnetic field balance with the North and South position and discovered the fact that it’s a space shield to the Earth and regulates everything to winds, oceans, movements. As a fatality it’ll inverse soon (every 65,000 years) and will devastate humanity. So I thought it was a cool opportunity to write a tale of power, The Keep Britain Tidy Letter, tale of vanity. So here’s an empty box with weird sticks on it, like ski sticks, that are in fact weapons of survival in threat-full times, that can save your ass by generating counterfields and have different applications. Aesthetics of a toy box for modern barbarian tools that you can only use to protect yourself and your family. Texts on the box give you information in an absurdist and arbitrary style. I like it when something is different things at the same time: a letter to the British Empire, an empty box, printed tools, false science informations, shapes and colors of ski sticks that are weapons of ordinary fascism, a mountain landscape and snowy weather time, a total crook, and the whole project finally is a a reverse painting, unique and willing to fascinate with with tasks for individual printed products. Probably that sculpture was also more a device meant to make more explicit details in paintings. Then, as far as darkness leaps into my things, it’s probably because – to quote David Lynch – I tend to be stuck into “darkness and obscurity,” or at least my imagination is. And I watch the news. Also, Dante said that when he created [The] Divine Comedy he had a much harder time writing about Heaven than Hell. Evil simply carries a long chorus of images. Okay, the whole process of explaining turns it into what it is, a schizophrenic joke. I’m following a crooked path of whatever goes through the mind, flipping from the meaningless to layers of simulation of heavy meaning and reference. Hoping someone will have the opportunity and desire to sort of tidy my room someday with more distance. As I’m trying to do now, major themes stand in the work and for today they seem to be: Death Sucks (most of the time) Pleasure and sins are cool but Loss of freedoms always suck Power is savior or punisher Life is laughing at us and sex Looking at painting gets you from you. Know yourself, you are yourself. That’s the message of.
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 42
You studied for a while under Jean Michel-Alberola, and he introduced you to the idea of the “painting parasite.” Could you speak a little about this? In the new paintings you will frequently paint out the undercolor of a logo or image, but omit the outline, or the “actual image.” I have actually been employing what I think is a similar strategy in my work, too, lately. For me it is about negation, or a means to remove or cancel power from an image while still retaining both some of the formal qualities of the image and the initial intended mention. A defeated trophy. Is this the case for you, as well? Where did you come up with this strategy? In one of the shots of you in your studio you are standing over a painting with a loaded brush in one hand and what would appear a sketch in the other—is it? How far do you compose your paintings before you begin? At first I was surprised, but then I thought it made sense that these paintings would begin with somewhat of a “map.” How detailed or specific are the maps you create in advance? From looking you can tell that you throw yourself into the work entirely. I wonder, do prefer the act of working on a piece or the feeling of seeing it completed on display?
Nicolas Pol in his studio, Paris, October, 2009 (opposite) Puaka Almond, 2009, mixed media and silkscreen on canvas 53.9x85.4” Untitled (Crying), 2008, oil and glycerol on canvas 72.8 x46.9”
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 43
Hi Brendan, hope you’re well... I’ve never known exactly what was that “parasite” idea of Jean Michel Alberola. Let’s say that I didn’t properly go through art teaching of any kind... In years I barely spoke ten minutes with this artist, he would let you totally on your own to discover things yourself and that was good. But what I can try to explain now about parasiting will answer partially to your second question. I think the whole thing is about assuming that a painting deals with its own subject and problematics but that it’s not enough. It needs to be parasited by something else out of its environment to get into an unexpected dialogue and enhance its interaction with everything. I never tried to force myself to achieve this when working, to me it all seems quite boring, like a rule or a recipe to make conventional stuff intellectual looking. I tend to hope that a painting process leads to go beyond intentions to a zone where losing control makes it a living object. The complexity of it doesn’t seem to be programmable with a single parasiting ingredient. Any work of art exists more like a solar system of parasites. That’s probably how one can explain layering or partially burying words, images or trademarks. It’s another way to be true to your secret intentions. Like you said in the negation of a sign, it tells that the artist is both here and there, into ambiguity and contradiction. Clearly this can be described as a projection of desires. In the Gilles Deleuze sense of an agencement, the association of elements constituing the object of desire. I like your idea of a sketch being like a map. Something really small navigates to the large. In the end, even using a map gets me lost. I mean that if I try to find my way into a painting it will resist and in the end I will have to throw away my studies or plans. Generally I’m going through a medium doing whatever happens but on some rare occasions I really hope a certain drawing can just do it, but the more I tend to be simple the more complicated it can get. Then it’s funny ’cause you can’t cheat and have to dig into the swamp. And that’s exactly what I prefer, sensing that strange forces that you know very few of are at work, and you are no guide even to yourself. I like to display things and show, but the fascination is in waiting for something to come up from colors, or drawings.
For the last 50 years, this former YMCA building located in downtown Manhattan has provided work and living space for countless artists and writers, a list that includes Mark Rothko, Fernand Léger, Wynn Chamberlain, Michael Goldberg, and William Burroughs. Today, the building houses Buddhist meditation, and three artists keep permanent residences and continue to work at 222 Bowery: Lynda Benglis, John Giorno, and Lynn Umlauf. Declared a landmark in 1998, the building is safe from the recent rebuilding and development on the Lower East Side, and as the city twists and changes around it, we take a look back at the surprising history of the building. TEXT BY ETHAN SWAN / PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEORG GATSAS In 1963 the painter Wynn Chamberlain threw a party for John Giorno, who had just reached his 27th birthday. Drawn from a loose community of young artists, most of whom lived nearby, eighty guests climbed six flights of stairs to reach Chamberlain’s loft, a wide open salon that held his studio, his bed, his kitchen and his parlor. It was the top floor of a former YMCA building at 222 Bowery, one of several artists’ studios in the building. In the three years since Chamberlain’s arrival, the room had hosted countless dinner parties, but nothing quite at this scale. Billed as a “Pop birthday party for a young poet,” the gathering marked one of the most incredible concentrations of American geniuses during the 20th century. There were painters, sculptors, poets and dancers—Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank O’Hara and Jonas Mekas among them. Jasper Johns came early and left before the arrival of his estranged lover Robert Rauschenberg. Merce Cunningham and John Cage were perhaps the oldest guests, Frank Stella perhaps the youngest. Every one of them was connected to the next through a web of collaboration, inspiration, employment, and romance. Nearly all of them were under the age of 40—a generation of artists only just beginning to experience recognition. In 1963, they were all at the cusp of unveiling their voices: Warhol had shown his first soup cans just 17 months previous; Lichtenstein had only been appropriating comic strip art in his paintings for two years. Frank O’Hara had yet to publish Lunch Poems. Wynn Chamberlain’s major series of nude portraits, which included more than a few of the party’s attendees, was still two years away. Johns was a few months from opening his retrospective exhibit at the Jewish Museum, and Rauschenberg was about to become the first American to win the Venice Biennale’s International Grand Prize for Painting. In a few short years, nearly everyone at the party would have attained some amount of fame, but in 1963, none of them were yet household names.
Giorno, who had just given up his job as a stockbroker to concentrate on his poetry, remembers the party less as a celebration of his birth and more as an opportunity for these creative energies to converge. “They didn’t come to be with me, they couldn’t care less about me; they came to be together.” Such occurrences of artistic concentration are not uncommon in avant-garde histories; echoes stretch back to the cafés of 1920s Paris and reach ahead into the artist squats of Mexico City today. But six stories below, at street level, this creative communion would be hard to envision. As partygoers left Wynn Chamberlain’s building, they emerged onto the Bowery, a 15block avenue in downtown Manhattan that housed the single greatest concentration of homeless men in New York City. Opposite the building, The Bowery Mission, a Christian relief foundation established in 1879, provided hot food, clean beds, and prayer for men in need. To the right, The Prince Hotel offered 195 prison-sized cubicles for $2 a night. Across the street was another flophouse, the Sunshine Hotel, one of dozens of Bowery hotels that offered cubicles in the 1960s. “Maybe it’s a little hard to imagine for those of you living in more affluent circumstances,” explained Nathan Smith, manager of the Sunshine Hotel, in a 1998 interview. “Picture a long hallway, with a series of doors on either side. These are the cubicles. Four by six, no windows. The cubicle walls are only seven feet high, so there’s chicken wire along the top to keep guys from climbing over into the next room. It’s like living in a bird cage.” While several thousand men slept each night in flophouses, another 8,000 slept on the Bowery itself each night. Homelessness was not a new epidemic for the neighborhood, having peaked in 1900 when an estimated 25,000 men slept along the 15 blocks of the Bowery. Throughout the 20th century, a steady influx of out-of-work veterans and alcoholics stigmatized the neighborhood, chasing away businesses and
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 44
Entrance to the the Bunker building
families, leaving only pawnshops and bars. In the years following World War Two, half of the saloons below 14th Street were located on the Bowery. Harold Mazer, owner of Mazer Kitchen Equipment at 207 Bowery, recalled this uniformity along the street: “When I came down here [in 1946], it was bar, flophouse, bar, flophouse, bar, barber school—they used to use the unfortunates for training.” Mazer was one of several entrepreneurs who began trading in restaurant equipment along the Bowery in the 1940s, attracted to the cheap rent and convenient location. Reaching out to the Manhattan Bridge at Canal Street and a short distance from the Williamsburg Bridge at Delancey, for most New Yorkers, the Bowery was only good for one thing—getting out of the city. Delivery trucks rumbled up and down the street, moving cushioned chairs to restaurants uptown, and steel range tops to diners in New Jersey. The restaurant supply shops filled in the empty storefronts between the taverns, taking advantage of long-unwanted retail space. The sidewalks were dark and perpetually dirty, ever since the Third Avenue Subway Line was established in 1878, an elevated train that ran along the Bowery. While the train platform created a welcome shelter for the neighborhood’s drifters, it drove businesses to nearby avenues like Lafayette and Broadway, ending the Bowery’s draw for pedestrians. In 1955 however, the Bowery’s sidewalks saw daylight for the first time in the that century, when the Third Avenue El was dismantled and the elevated track pulled down. Windows boarded against the gaze of subway passengers were suddenly exposed to the sky, revealing a surprising number of vacant lofts. As much of the restaurant equipment was too heavy to carry up stairs, many of the upper stories on the Bowery were left vacant. Observing this emptiness on a walk through the neighborhood, the painter John Opper changed the history of 222 Bowery in 1957.
Opper, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists and one of the earliest abstract painters in the country, returned to New York in 1957 after five years of teaching at the University of North Carolina. Settling with his family in what would eventually become SoHo, Opper was happy to return to the city. In a 1968 interview with the art historian Irving Sandler, Opper recalled what drew him back to New York: “I missed the companionship of the artists; I missed the discussions… And my work wouldn’t be shown. And I would get careless with it. I just stuck it away.” After reconnecting with his community of artists, Opper began his search for a studio. His daughter, Jane Opper, recalled his method: “We lived at 32 King Street, and he walked over towards the Bowery, just started walking along with his head up, looking at various spaces. He had come across Prince Street, and he saw these magnificent windows above a store called Tip Top Chairs… He stopped and asked for the manager, and they started talking and he asked if anyone was using the space upstairs. ‘Would you like to make some money in rent for that space? I’m an artist and I know a lot of other artists who would like to use that space.’” Opper took the third floor as his studio, an open loft, raw and spacious. His friends James Brooks and Mark Rothko follow the next year, the latter taking over the basketball court as his studio. Rothko had just taken a commission to create murals for the dining room of the Four Seasons restaurant, designed by Philip Johnson to be New York’s most exclusive and expensive restaurant. Up until this commission, Rothko had always described his work as “painting in a scale of normal living”: the canvases low to the ground, crowded together tightly, making the gallery into an intimate space. At the Four Seasons, the paintings would hang high on the wall, above seated diners at an unfamiliar distance. This geometry required a different scale,
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 45
John Giorno’s entrance
Bunker hallway
John Giorno’s restroom
View from Lynn Umlauf’s studio window
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 46
Mark Rothko’s paint splatter on Michael Goldberg’s studio floor as did Rothko’s intentions: “I accepted this assignment as a challenge, with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to… make viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.” Settling himself against the broad mortared walls of his basketball court, Rothko submerged into a room where all the doors and windows were bricked up in order to create a body of work that would feel the same. That would reach his aspirations to “paint something that will ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.” Jane Opper acknowledged the effect of the building’s open spaces on her father’s painting as well. “Working in the big space on the Bowery,” she explained, “it gave him the ability to stretch out the canvases and really be able to explore what he wanted to do, which was work with color.” While the studios uptown were subdivided as rents increased, the lofts downtown stretched out for 2,000 to 4,000 square feet, making larger works possible. By 1958, Alfred Leslie, Tom Wesselmann, and Tom Doyle had all established studios in the neighborhood, realizing large-scale pieces in the vastness of their lofts. Wynn Chamberlain became the next artist to move into 222 Bowery, in 1960. Unlike Opper, Brooks, and Rothko, Chamberlain chose to live in the building as well, establishing a kitchen and bathroom on his floor, while the rest of the residents shared a toilet on the landing. Although the loft was a haven, his wife Sally Chamberlain is quick to remember the discomfort lurking just outside the door. “An air of menace hung over the run down buildings and dismal streets strewn with garbage and broken glass,” she recalls. The closest grocery stores were in Little Italy or the West Village, and the only restaurants were Moishe’s Delicatessen on Grand, or Fenelli’s, “a seedy bar surrounded by other seedy buildings on grimy Prince Street.”
Although the Bowery wasn’t exactly unsafe, walking the street was difficult. “Coming back at night,” Sally Chamberlain remembers, “Wynn and I would have to push our way through a gauntlet of drunks or step over winos passed out in front of 222’s tall iron gates.” The Bowery Bums, as they came to be known, were rarely threatening, but their steady presence and unimaginable numbers defined the neighborhood. In addition, their relative helplessness and regular, if meager, pensions made them a target for robbery. The sculptor Tom Doyle described this threat: “The only time when you could have trouble would be around the first of the month, what’s called ‘Mother’s Day,’ when the guys got paid, they got their checks. And then hawks would come in, and rob them if they were drunk on the streets. They were called hawks, you know, gangsters.” But this had little affect on the growing number of artists, who saw only the cheap rents and high ceilings. As word spread about the spaciousness of the Bowery lofts, artists continued to migrate from uptown. Sol LeWitt, who’d been living at Bowery and Hester street since the mid-1950s, took a job at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, where he worked alongside artists Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold, both of whom moved to the Bowery in the beginning of the 1960s. It was during this time that Ryman’s wife Lucy Lippard began referring to the community of artists in the neighborhood as the “Bowery Boys,” including Ryman, Mangold, Mel Bochner, Donald Judd, and Eva Hesse. Asked to define the term in a 2001 interview, Robert Mangold said simply, “there was this group of artists who visited each others’ studio, knew each others’ work, and maybe there were some shared attitudes but it was more a community group. There were not many places to go, no bars or hangouts that I recall outside of Moishe’s.” Although there was a suggestion of “shared attitudes,” the defining feature of the “Bowery Boys” seemed to be location, a camaraderie that took the place of a public space.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 47
Michael Goldberg’s studio Ironically, it was the absence of this sort of creative community that drew Mark Rothko to the Bowery in the first place. A biographer maintained that “Rothko did not like to work in neighborhoods where there were many other painters,” and so in 1962 he left the Bowery to the influx of artists. Michael Goldberg, a young abstract painter, took over the gymnasium, his work electrified by the space. Goldberg was a spry, active painter, foremost an abstractionist, but with a boldness that conveyed immense freedom in his work. In 1951, at 26, he participated in the historic, groundbreaking show The Ninth Street Art Exhibition. The defining exhibition of the New York School, The Ninth Street Show was organized and executed by artists, and included many of the era’s most revered painters, including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman. Although he was close with many of the other artists in the show, The Ninth Street Show was the artist’s first public exhibition. Goldberg’s gestural, abstract canvases referenced the improvisational spirit of jazz, and helped define the energy of post-World War Two New York. Beyond his remarkable talent, Mike Goldberg was a tremendously loving and well-loved man. Upon his death in December of 2007, his friend and neighbor Max Gimblett described Goldberg as “the mayor amongst us artists here in this neighborhood.” Born and raised in New York, Goldberg attended painting classes at the Art Students League of New York from his 14th year. By the time he was in his twenties, Goldberg was a member of the Eighth Street Club and a frequent visitor to the Cedar Bar. He thrived on the same community energy that called John Opper back to New York, and his presence on the Bowery inspired exchange and discussion between artists—artists who arrived in ever-greater numbers by the year. In the very beginning of 1965, a The New York Times article appeared, titled “The
Bowery Blossoms With Artists’ Studios.” Contrasting the horrors of the Bowery with the excitement of its new residents, the article declared, “more than a hundred young artists are quietly moving in and converting decayed lofts into studios and living quarters.” Citing the natural light, the large spaces, the permissiveness, and above all, the low rents, a handful of artists offered testimonials to the Bowery’s positive qualities. Most were unable to shut out the neighborhood’s darker side, however; the sculptor Irwin Fleminger summed it up best: “Artists are supposed to be sensitive, yet you have to be more than tough to get through this. Most people just couldn’t take this.” Although it was the first time the Times acknowledged the growing community of artists on the Bowery, the article did recognize a trend in the arrivals to the neighborhood: “Plagued by high rents and small apartments elsewhere, the artists moved onto the Bowery in three separate waves: first, along the northern edges near Cooper Union, second, around Broome and Grand Streets, and most recently in the central—and grimmest—portion of the Bowery, near East Houston Street.” Dead center in this “grimmest” portion stood 222 Bowery. The article spurred a series of letters and rebuttals, from neighborhood artists who resented the attention and others who denied any romanticism on the Bowery. Camille Norman, who had just moved out of her Bowery studio, described it in a letter to the editor dated January 12, 1965, as “an involuntary artists’ ghetto community.” In her conclusion, Norman asked a question that remained unresolved through the flurry of responses, a question that still remains relevant: “Whose responsibility will it be if ultimately there is no low-priced housing adequate to the visual artist’s special needs? What then will happen to this nation’s art?”
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 48
Michael Goldberg’s studio
Michael Goldberg’s work in his studio
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 49
John Giorno’s work
W
hether or not they considered it an involuntary ghetto, artists continued to flock to the neighborhood. At the beginning of 1965, the number of artists who had studios on the Bowery was well over 100, and the number of famous artists who worked on the Bowery guaranteed that a spotlight remained on the neighborhood. Roy Lichtenstein separated from his wife in 1965 and took a studio at 190 Bowery, strengthening the neighborhood’s ties to pop art. Vito Acconci and Amiri Baraka both lived on the Bowery in 1965, representing two edges of the mid-60s literary avantgarde. Alongside Bernadette Mayer, Acconci created the mimeographed, underground magazine 0 to 9 in his loft at 217 Bowery, while Amiri Baraka and his wife Hettie Jones produced the poetry journal Yugen from their loft at 27 Cooper Square. Eva Hesse, recently separated from her husband Tom Doyle, quietly and industriously pioneered Postminimalism in her studio at 134 Bowery. As the New York art world grew and branched out, the Bowery was flexible enough to grow with it, offering space to every discipline, every credo. This growth necessarily led to fragmentation, and this success fostered changes in the landscape. While recalling his 1963 birthday party at 222 Bowery, John Giorno acknowledged these changes: “[In 1963] the art world was small enough that artists went to other parties. By 1965, nobody would go to a party like that for an unknown person.” If in 1963, the birthday party of an unknown person was enough to draw the most creative and talented artists in the city to the Bowery, in 1965 a performance by an infamous writer would create an entirely different spectacle. An item in the Saturday The New York Times titled “The Bowery: Arty and Avant-Garde” reported on a reading given by William Burroughs and Mack Thomas at 222 Bowery. Again the night was hosted by Wynn Chamberlain, with many of the same attendees, but the atmosphere was entirely different. While previous reports regarding artists on the Bowery focused on the extreme disparity between the homelessness outside and the creative capital within the studios, “Arty and Avant-Garde” invokes the contrast almost whimsically, remarking that a couple of derelicts babbled on the doorstep at 222, presumably juxtaposing their voices with that of Burroughs and Thomas. Gone is the spirit of Bowery artists as trailblazers and homesteaders—the attendees were dressed well and in furs, their fashion marking contemporary trends: “Beards are out, long hair is in.” Even the fact that the event warranted an article was new; in her memoirs, Sally Chamberlain recalls that they hadn’t invited the press, “but somehow Harry Gilroy from The New York Times got in and reported who was there.” This list of attendees was remarkable, and illustrated the wide swath of artists who frequented the Bowery: poets Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Diane di Prima; artists Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman, and Larry Rivers; photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon; the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen; and the writer/artist Brion Gysin. Less than a year and a half had passed since Giorno’s birthday party, an event attended by many of the same people. In this short window of time, many of these artists made their names; perhaps more importantly, in the same short span, the Bowery was given a new identity as a home for artists.
By 1967, the neighborhood had taken notice. Lyons Houses, who owned a dozen Bowery flophouses, began to strip their hotels of cubicles, replacing them with open lofts. The Alabama Hotel, across the street from 222 Bowery, ousted the 300 men a night who slept in these cubicles to create eight 4000 square foot lofts, rented for $175 a month. A 1967 Time Magazine article noted that the project was so successful, Lyons Houses had already begun renovations on a second hotel, The Boston, at 103 Bowery. Things were changing at 222 Bowery as well. In 1966, John Giorno returned to New York from Morocco, and Wynn Chamberlain cleared out the third-story loft that held his paintings so that Giorno had a place to sleep while searching for a new apartment. “I moved here after I got back from Tangiers, thinking I would be here for a month,” he recalled in a 2008 interview. “Little did I know I would spend the rest of my life here.” Giorno occupied a unique space in the Bowery community; he identified as a poet, yet he took his primary inspiration from the neighborhood’s community of visual artists. “The energy of the scene around the painters, sculptors, and musicians and how they all related to each other was extraordinary,” he recalled in a 2002 interview. Building upon this notion of relations and network, Giorno established Giorno Poetry Systems in 1965. Giorno Poetry Systems is an artist collective, record label, and non-profit organization whose primary goal is to expand poetry beyond its limited audience through the use of new technology, and tactics. Similar to Warhol’s utilization of commercial silkscreen techniques to engage painting, Giorno issued recordings of poetry, utilizing the most purely pop format of the era—LP records. Over the next twenty years, Giorno Poetry Systems issued over 20 LPs and compilations. In 1968, from his third floor loft at 222 Bowery, John Giorno offered his most broadly populist and accessible project yet: Dial-a-Poem. Using simple, readily available technology—telephones and answering machines—Giorno was able to transmit his poetry throughout the city. Listeners simply called the listed number and the answering machine would play them a tape over the phone. “When it started The New York Times did a quarter page feature story with the phone number,” Giorno recalled, “and instantly there were hundreds of thousands of calls. It was free.” Sharing his poetry, and that of his peers—William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Jim Carroll, Vito Acconci—Giorno was able to spread wildly transgressive and otherwise silenced viewpoints. “Dial-a-Poem in 1968 was very sexual,” he explained. “Poems with sexual images, straight, or preferably gay, as I’m a gay man; and as political activism.” As the project grew, this activism grew as well, and by 1970, Dial-a-Poem included “antiVietnam War material, civil rights, and radical politics. I had tapes from [radical anti-war group] The Weather Underground and Bernadette Dohrn, [Black Panthers] Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. Diane Di Prima wrote a series of poems called ‘Revolutionary Letters,’ one was ‘How to Make a Molotov Cocktail.’” The New York art world was undergoing a similar radicalizing transformation, and new voices began to slip through the cracks between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. One such voice was that of Lynda Benglis, a sculptor who moved into
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 50
Burroughs’ typewriter in John Giorno’s place
John Giorno’s living space
Michael Goldberg’s unfinished piece in his studio
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 51
Lynn Umlauf’s studio
Lynn Umlauf’s & Michael Goldberg’s bed
222 Bowery in 1972. Her agile sculpture is unmistakably corporeal, recalling the weight and form of the body, yet resisting recognition as any specific or known part of the body. Setting her work in opposition to the overtly masculine discipline of Minimalism with her process-oriented, tactile work, Benglis was able to disrupt its cool reductive air. While critics suggested that her poured-latex sculptures recalled Jackson Pollock’s drip technique, Benglis created a far more critical, and personal, gesture in her work. Another recent arrival at 222 Bowery was the sculptor Lynn Umlauf. She and Mike Goldberg met and fell in love in 1969, eventually marrying 10 years later. Born into a family of sculptors, poets, and artists, Umlauf quickly became a vital member in the Bowery community. As an artist, Umlauf works with a diverse palette of material, including Plexiglas, wire, mesh, rubber and fabric. Her sculpture evokes drawing in three dimensions, reaching out from the ceilings, walls, and floors of their sites, in both color and form. As a chef, Umlauf was a part of Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden’s restaurant Food, managed and staffed entirely by artists. Situated in a SoHo storefront, Food acted as a community space as much as a restaurant, where visitors could stop by the kitchen during the day to discuss the evening menu and groups like the Philip Glass Ensemble met regularly. In 1974, 222 Bowery welcomed an old friend back to the building. William Burroughs, newly arrived in the city from London, returned to the site of his 1965 reading and the home of his friend John Giorno. Giorno had alerted him to an empty loft in the building, and on the day of Burroughs’ appointment to view the room, waited patiently to meet with him and the landlord. As the time passed, Giorno worried that Burroughs had missed the appointment. “All of a sudden he knocked,” Giorno recalled, “this little knock on my door. I said, ‘William, where have you been?’ and he replied, ‘I found my place!’”The landlord had shown him a storage area, and Burroughs decided it was an ideal space. “It was dark, and cool, and quiet, and he said, ‘John, I’ve found my bunker!’” “The Bunker” became Burroughs’ affectionate nickname for the building, and from 1974 until his death in 1997, Burroughs would return to 222 Bowery every year to retreat and write from its safety. When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, another influx of veterans made their way to the Bowery for cheap lodgings and distraction. For this generation, heroin replaced alcohol, and the neighborhood became a much more troubled place. Suddenly the lax policing that enabled thousands of men to sleep on the street and hundreds of artists to live in illegal lofts spiraled into complete lawlessness. Drug sales were so prevalent and uninterrupted that addicts would form lines on the sidewalk, shamelessly waiting for their turn to score. The desperation of heroin addicts outstripped the tragedy of alcoholism, and muggings, break-ins, and prostitution became commonplace. Lynn Umlauf explained the effect: “Drug addicts have to have more money than alcoholics, and that’s when it got dangerous.” In 1977, The New York Times returned to the Bowery. In the 12 years that had passed
since “Arty and Avant-Garde,” the neighborhood failed to transform into an artists’ haven like nearby SoHo and the official report ran under the headline “The Bowery Would Be Chic, They Said—Ha!” Gone was the breathless gawking of 1965, the sense of excitement. What replaced it was a brutal observation: “The view from a Bowery loft is, after all, the Bowery—silhouettes of bodies curled around empty broken bottles. A walk home from the grocery store can mean repeated requests for change or finding that once you have made it home, the front door has temporarily become someone else’s pillow.” At 222 Bowery, however, things continued to develop, and new relationships continued to be built. In 1976, at the invitation of John Giorno, the Tibetan Lama Dudjom Rinpoche arrived with his monks and family in order to establish a New York center for Tibetan Buddhism. Occupying Burroughs’ space while he resided in Kansas, Dudjom offered teaching and meditation in the Bunker. At Dudjom’s death in 1987, two of his monks, Palden Sherab and Tsewang Dongyal, picked up his practice, and continue to hold teaching and meditation sessions at 222 Bowery. Again the artistic climate was changing on the Bowery. The neighborhood grew rougher, graffiti began to appear, and a new generation of aggressive artists began to haunt the streets. Just north of Houston, on the opposite side of the Bowery, CBGB provided a venue for punk and new wave to thrive in New York. The nearby streets began to host young musicians and artists, among them Debbie Harry, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lenny Kaye, and Amos Poe. Although separated by generation, John Giorno recorded “Who You Staring At?” with guitarist and composer Glenn Branca, who lived around the corner at Spring Street. y 1980, drug addiction had become an epidemic. Almost half of the individuals arrested for drugs between Houston and 14th Street gave the Third Street Shelter (at Bowery) as their address. Many artists left the neighborhood, many left New York all together. The generation coming of age in the 1980s was falling prey to AIDS and overdose, and many of the brightest young downtown artists died in their 30s, including David Wojnarowicz, Keith Haring, and Félix González-Torres. In 1998, The Landmarks Preservation Society designated 222 Bowery as a Landmark, requiring that the Landmarks Preservation Commission approve any alteration, reconstruction, demolition, or new construction in advance. Citing the historical significance of the building and reputation of the architect, The Landmarks Preservation Society issued a lengthy statement documenting the relevant points. Among the evidence listed for this decision in their report is the item “since the YMCA left the building in 1932… the building has been converted to residential/studio space for worldrenowned artists and a meditation and teaching center for Tibetan Buddhists.” Built in 1884, 222 Bowery was the first of the modern-day YMCAs. Before 1884, there were several YMCAs on the Bowery, but they were simply soup kitchens and shelters. 222 Bowery was distinct because of its specific aim: “To promote the physical,
B
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 52
Michael Goldberg’s paint splatter on his studio floor
intellectual, and spiritual health of young working men in the densely crowded Bowery.” Instead of reaching “fallen and destitute men,” the YMCA at 222 Bowery was intended to “reach the larger class of hard-working independent young men.” To this end, the YMCA offered a gymnasium with calisthenics classes, weekly cultural events such as lectures, concerts and debates, a circulating library with 1,000 volumes, and six educational classes. At the beginning of the 20th century, they began offering “English for Italians,” reaching out to the immigrant population of the Lower East Side, and membership reached a high of 663 men. Membership slowly decreased over the next 30 years, until the YMCA’s Board of Directors closed the building in 1932. Looking back on the YMCA’s aspirations for 222 Bowery, it’s entirely possible that the Board of Directors would recognize the building today as a success. Standing at the heart of an ever-growing expanse of luxury lofts and nightclubs, The Bunker maintains itself as a site of calm, of friendship, and of creativity. Established by artists who yearned for a creative community, 222 Bowery outpaced any of John Opper’s hopes for a vibrant scene. Continually occupied by artists for five decades, the Bunker has hosted a remarkably diverse set of individuals, working in a variety of media and movements. Throughout the building’s history, the basic ideals of the YMCA have always remained intact—modesty, self-improvement, and hard work. Simplicity reigns at 222 Bowery: “I did a lot of work here,” remembered Lynda Benglis, “I did a lot of gold leafing here, and I was sleeping with all this plaster, sleeping with all this gold leaf, in this same bed. This same pull-out bed I’ve had since I got here. Nothing’s changed. I’ve just gathered more furniture.” Dedication is well-loved at 222 Bowery; for all of Mike Goldberg’s humor and charm, what truly drew people to him was his love of painting, and his commitment to his
craft. In a 2001 interview, he described abstract painting as “still the primary visual challenge of our time. It might get harder and harder to make an abstract images that’s believable, but I think that just makes the challenge greater.” Goldberg dedicated his life to meeting this challenge, a task remembered by his friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in a memorial tribute. “The studio was Mike’s life in my opinion. Everything else was everything else. I think he really lived to work as much as any other artist I know or have known… I think he was very bound up in the idea that an artist is, more or less only, his or her work.” Transience is a quality often associated with the Bowery. The lure of the flophouse is bound up with the opportunity to pay one night at a time, to cut loose whenever you want. Burroughs kept his bunker for nearly 15 years after leaving New York, returning as rarely as once a year, but content to hold onto the possibility of returning. In 1966, months shy of his 30th birthday, John Giorno set up a temporary room in Wynn Chamberlain’s storage space, expecting to stay a month before heading off somewhere else. It would be impossible to pinpoint when the change occurred for Giorno, from short stay to lifelong home, but four decades later, he’s still in the same room, and certain that’s where he belongs. Acknowledgement: This article would have been impossible without the research of The New Museum’s Bowery Artist Tribute. The Bowery Artist Tribute, an initiative of the Education and Public Programs staff of the New Museum, preserves and records the history of the Bowery, chronicling the artists who have lived and worked on or near the Bowery over the past 50 years. For more information, please visit the Bowery Artist Tribute website at: www.boweryartisttribute.org
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 53
TEXT & INTERVIEW BY AARON ROSE / PORTRAIT BY TERRY RICHARDSON / IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST SPECIAL THANKS TO BENN NORTHOVER
“Artists shouldn’t waste a single drop of their lives fighting the old: we should continue and concentrate on the creation of the new, because the old will die by itself.” – Jonas Mekas (Diaries, 1972)
It is only very infrequently in life that a person has the opportunity to sit down with an icon. I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened for me. For years and years, while I was living in New York, I would go see films at Anthology Film Archives. For those who have never heard of it, Anthology is a small theatre on the corner of Second Ave and Second Street in the East Village. However, during the time that I was frequenting the theatre I didn’t really realize its history—it was just one of those places I went because the movies were cool. Later on however, through a conversation with filmmaker Harmony Korine, I got more of the back story on the place and the man who founded it, Jonas Mekas. If this is your first introduction to Mekas, you’re in for a real treat. Not only has he been involved in the underground film community for over 50 years, he has continued, even today, to place himself at the forefront of cinema culture. With someone like Jonas Mekas, it’s almost impossible to know where to start. He is now 87 years old, which means that before I was even an embryo, he had already changed the cultural landscape of our times. That said, it is impossible to list all of Mekas’ accomplisments in one magazine article, so here is a brief history… In 1944, Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, were taken by the Nazis and imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Nazi Germany for eight months. After the War, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from 1946-48 and at the end of 1949, he emigrated with his brother to the U.S., settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two weeks after his arrival, Mekas borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16-mm camera and began to record moments of his life. Around the same time he discovered avantgarde film at venues such as Amos Vogel’s pioneering Cinema 16, and in 1953 began organizing his own screenings of films by underground filmmakers. He has since become one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the “New American Cinema,” as he dubbed it in the late 1950s. In 1954, he became editor in chief of Film Culture magazine, a self-published film journal that he started with his brother. In 1958 he began writing his now infamous “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice. At the beginning of the 1960s, the New York film underground was coming into full flower and in 1962 he co-founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which organized many legendary screenings of the time. In 1964, Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for screening Jack Smith’s controversial film, Flaming Creatures. He launched a campaign against the censorship board, which convinced him of the importance of an outlet for independent film more responsive to the filmmakers themselves. To serve this need, he opened the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives. Anthology is now one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. As a filmmaker, his own output ranges from narrative films like Guns of the Trees (1961) to experimental essays (The Brig, 1963) to “diaries” such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost (1975); Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania (1972); Zefiro Torna (1992); and As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001). His films have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world. In 2007, Mekas was honored at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s award ceremony for his significant contribution to American film culture. That same year, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center was established in Vilnius, Lithuania. Exhibitions there focus on art and film collections by Mekas and
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 54
his friend and artistic collaborator George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus art movement. The Center houses an extensive avant-garde film archive and library, and has plans to build a Fluxus Research Institute. Most recently, his work was featured at the 51st Venice Biennial and was the focus of a major retrospective PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center in New York. An exhibition of his work will open at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2010. … and that’s just part of the story. Through his various creative ventures throughout the years Jonas Mekas has been intimately involved with the careers of filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Frank and Andy Warhol. He hosted some of the first New York performances by the Velvet Underground and has been personal friends with cultural icons such as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, Jackie Onassis and many, many more. Unfortunately, to go into any more depth here would be almost impossible. There is, however, a book about his life, To Free The Cinema (Princeton University Press), that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to look deeper. Hopefully now you understand why it was so exciting (an such an honor!) for me to sit down with him. The following interview was conducted over lunch at a small French bistro, just around the corner from Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. Over a bottle of red wine and much laughter, Mekas reflected on his life, his art, the future of film and his motivations for spearheading so many incredible creative ventures. To bring it all fullcircle, the preceding evening we had both attended the New York premiere of Harmony Korine’s new film Trash Humpers, perhaps one of the most amazing experimental features to be released in years. The future of film looked very bright to us that day. Portrait of Jonas, 1963
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 55
Aaron Rose: Your biography states that you moved to New York in 1949. Jonas Mekas: Not exactly moved. I was moved!! I came as a displaced person after almost five years of living in displaced persons’ camps in postwar Europe. I was brought here as part of the United Nations Refugee Organization on an army ship together with 3,000 others. This was after the second World War. When they brought the refugees to America they had places for living prepared for us, and jobs. I was actually supposed to go to Chicago… not to New York actually. My original destination was Chicago. AR: So you arrived in New York, but then you went to Chicago? JM: I arrived in New York with my brother. We stepped out of the ship and we looked at New York and we said to each other, “We are in New York! It would be stupid to go to Chicago!” So we never went to Chicago. We stayed here. AR: Was that illegal? JM: No! No! If you could survive you could stay. There in Chicago, they had arranged a job for us in a bakery, you know, guaranteed. But here we had nothing. We had to find a job. But we took that chance and we fell in love with New York. I consider that New York saved my sanity. AR: Can you describe your feelings about the city when you arrived here? JM: We stepped out that evening into Times Square. We looked around and we did not know what was real and what was unreal. We thought we saw the moon, but we were not sure if it was the real moon. It was like a huge opera set. It was incredible! It was incredible. AR: Where exactly did you arrive from when you came to New York? JM: From Germany… it was postwar Germany. AR: Oh so it was a totally different experience!! JM: You could not even compare it! It was like a fairy tale. After a whole decade of war and then postwar misery…
AR: Were you and your brother already making films at the time? JM: No. We were interested. I was interested, but you know I could only write, make notes, read about it. There was no money in the displaced persons’ camps. We were fed by refugee organizations. AR: What inspired you to pick up a camera? JM: Seeing films!! It was contagious. The same as writing poetry or music… it’s always the music that inspires you to be a musician. The same goes here seeing films. Most of the time, the films we were seeing in postwar Europe were bad. They were brought over to entertain the army. What we discovered here in New York at the Museum of Modern Art… like the classics of the cinema from the twenties, thirties and the avant garde. You could not see any of that there! I mean, the closest to something that one could say was interesting was John Huston’s Treasure of Sierra Madre. That was the first time I remember thinking, “Hey! Look! Maybe something can be done in cinema.” AR: Just out of curiousity. How did two brothers—two displaced refugees from Europe—find the Museum of Modern Art? JM: The New York Times! AR: Really?!! JM: Yes. We bought the newspaper and we discovered that they were screening the next evening at a place called The New York Film Society, which was run by a man named Rudolf Arnheim, who was a very well known art historian, and also by the great film buff Herman Weinberg. The program for that evening was a double bill. It was Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher, one of the great avant garde classics, and also playing was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They used to screen films, I think it was on 18th Street between 6th and 7th avenues. So that was what we saw! Then, after that, for the next three years or so, we did not miss a single film screening at MoMA, we did not miss a single theatre opening, any film opening, ballet, music…
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 56
Jonas’ mother, from Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania, 1971-2, color film stills; To New York With Love, 2001, Color Film Stills (opposite) Walden, 1969, black and white film stills
AR: It’s almost as if you guys were addicted… JM: No! We were dry sponges! We were dry sponges because there was nothing in postwar Europe. There was nothing under the Soviet occupation and the German occupation where we grew up. There was nothing! It was forbidden, even. It was forbidden to read the French literature… it was forbidden! So we came here like dry sponges and we sucked everything into ourselves. That would be the closest comparison to ourselves. We were sponges. Indiscriminately almost. You know, you don’t know. You take everything in… garbage and everything. AR: Yeah, like you just had to see it! See it! See It! JM: Yes. AR: What were you doing for work at that time? JM: We were not choosy. We took whatever job there was. Jobs were available very easily. My first job was at the Castro bed factory in Queens making beds. We had no real specialty… no special talents. AR: When did you first pick up a camera? JM: About two weeks later. We borrowed some money from a family that lived in the same displaced persons’ camp as us in Kassel, Germany. We were very friendly. They had come before us and they already had jobs and had made some money. So we borrowed some money and we put a deposit on our forst Bolex camera. This was about two weeks after we came to New York. That was the beginning of my diary. AR: Were you actually trying to make “movies” at that time or was this more about just taking snapshots of your new life? JM: No! No! We had already written several scripts. We were practicing with our Bolex, just trying to master it. We had scripts for narrative films, and for documentaries. The first film that we wanted to do was a poetic documentary about what it feels like to be a displaced person. Later, some of that footage was used in my film, Lost, Lost, Lost. AR: Wow! So you held on to all that footage? JM: I still have it. Though I’ve now used up four Bolexes. Actualy, really, five of them. One Bolex lasts seven years or something. AR: Did you process your own film? JM: No! We could not process our film. We had no money
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 57
to build a lab. We were just walking around with our army jackets! We did not even have money to buy new clothes. AR: … and this was the 1950s? JM: Yes. We arrived in New York on October 30, 1949. In three weeks from now we will be celebrating our 60th year in New York. AR: What kinds of films were you watching in the 1950s? Who were your favorite filmmakers/films? JM: We went to all of them! Whatever was shown. AR: You didn’t have favorites? JM: No. How could we have favorites if we weren’t familiar with what there was? We had read the names like Orson Welles or Cocteau, but we had seen nothing! Two or three years later it was a different story, though, because we began publishing Film Culture magazine. AR: What inspired you to start a magazine? You didn’t have magazine experience… JM: I did have experience. When I was 12 years old and in primary school I was already mimeographing a little fourpage newspaper for the school. I was also editing it. Then, when I was 18, I became the technical editor of the local weekly newspaper. Then in the displaced persons’ camps I was the editor of the daily bulletin for the people in the camp. I was also publishing and editing a literary magazine. My life from childhood is in publishing and writing. AR: I had no idea! That makes perfect sense. JM: But that was not the reason why myself and my brother decided to publish Film Culture. The reason was that we had made friends already. Many friends that were running around with cameras that we were meeting at the screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and at Cinema 16. There were several places where young, film-interested people usually met. You would see them. I was not a student of The New School or NYU, but I used to sneak into the film classes where I met people who became some of the best known avant garde filmmakers. People like Gregory Markopoulos, Curtis Harrington, etc. In England there was a magazine, Sight and Sound, already. In France there was Cahiers du Cinema just beginning and there was another magazine called Cinema, and there was actually another one in England called Sequence. But here in New York there was
nothing. We wanted to exchange. We wanted to discuss. We needed a platform so that we could begin to present and to discuss our ideas and exchange our ideas. There was nothing here. There was this miserable little publication called Films in Review, a very conservative monthly, and there was the Hollywood Film Quarterly that used to come out like once a year, but for us there was nothing. So it was emptiness and it was because of that emptiness that we decided that if nobody was doing it we had to. So we started to publish Film Culture. AR: Did you consider the European magazines to be part of the same family as you? JM: Not exactly. They were mostly devoted to the commercial cinema. Our friends were not in commercial cinema. We needed a magazine that would be open for both the commercial cinema and the new, independent filmmakers, the avant garde filmmakers… because we ended up in the avant garde film and literary community. The Beat Generation was coming in. There was excitement. Very soon after there were the happenings theatre, the action painting, Abstract Expressionism… everything was coming in! Coming in! There was like an electricity in the air! There was intensity and that was not in Sight and Sound. Not in Cahiers du Cinema. It was something else. So we felt that we needed a film magazine that was a little bit younger and in a different spirit. That’s how Film Culture came to exist.
AR: Did you consider yourself an artist at this point? JM: No and I don’t consider myself an artist at this point now. AR: Really? I was wondering that because sometimes it is difficult to be both an artist and a critic. JM: No. I was still working in factories at that point and in 1953 I began to work in a photo studio. That’s how I managed to pay for Film Culture. AR: So even though you were making films you didn’t consider yourself a filmmaker? JM: No. I was just filming. I’m doing the same thing now. Now I’m just taping. I’ve always done many things simultaneously. I worked whatever job I could get for money, I was organizing screenings. Already in ’53 I was curating screenings at Gallery East, which was right here around the corner from where we are sitting now, on Avenue A and 1st Street. AR: So you were curating underground screenings in the East Village in 1953? JM: Yes. Avant garde screenings. AR: You didn’t waste any time!! JM: No. The difference when I say that I’m just filming… that I’m not a filmmaker is this: You see, to make a film, those who make films—filmmakers—they have scripts and then they illustrate those scripts with actors, etc. and it’s all controlled. You know what you are going after, the scene is described there. Even if it’s a documentary in a cinéma vérité style, or
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 58
like Michael Moore is doing now… he knows what he is going after. He has an idea of what he’s searching for and he finds it or he invents or whatever. I never know. I film real life. I have no script. I don’t know what will come in the next moment. I don’t know if I will film anything today or not. I always have my camera… it is always with me and then suddenly I feel, “This is it… I have to film!” I want to tape this. I want to have a record of this. I need it. It’s some kind of an obsession. I never know what I’m filming. It’s unpredictable and I guess what I film is motivated by some memories. I don’t know. I never know the reasons why I want to film this or that scene. AR: So it’s just something you feel inside? There’s never any thought about what you would like to make of the footage at all? JM: It’s unpredictable. I mean, so much of what we do is determined by the first ten years of our life that you never know. Maybe in front of me at this moment there is maybe something, some detail that provokes some memory. Maybe some color or some movement that connects to somewhere with some movement or color or some detail that happened when I was maybe three years old? I feel it and I have to film. Something is touched by what’s happening that has touched, jumped, connected with that moment or memory somewhere in the past and it makes me want to film. I don’t resist those moments. I just follow it. AR: Did that take a long time to cultivate? JM: When I look back at my footage it’s almost the same from the very beginning. Only at the beginning I was caught in a net of professional filmmaking. Rules like, “Don’t move your camera, stay there, stay there…” or like with light, “You need lighting… you should light it up” or things like close-ups and long shots… the whole vocabulary of the conventional cinema. The same thing happens with musicians. Like with jazz musicians, when one first learns to play, one has certain teachers one admires and it takes time to escape them and to find what’s real for you. What you yourself are all about. You eventually free yourself from all the teachers, all the musicians or poets that you admire and you permit yourself to come out with that which is really unique and your
Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and Michel Auder, mid-1960s; Scenes from the life of Andy Warhol, 1965-1982/1991, color film stills; Andy Warhol at Invisible Cinema screening. (opposite) Allen Ginsberg, from Walden, 1969, color film stills; Jackie Onasis, from This Side of Paradise, 1999, color film stills; Jonas Mekas & Salvador Dali, from Walden, 1969, color film stills
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 59
own. It took me, I would say, to master my Bolex and to escape at least maybe ten years. AR: Going back to your early work as a critic. Did you have a particular approach to criticism? Did you have any role models? JM: No. Again, I had to invent myself. I can’t remember who said it, but someone said, “Oh Jonas is not really a film critic, he is a diarist.” And that is right! Because I was not criticizing films. I was writing about only those films, reviewing only those films, in my columns which I liked. There were maybe only two or three times that I wrote about films that I did not like and I regret that I did that. I wrote only about the films that I liked. It was the same with Film Culture magazine—we only wrote about those filmmakers that we admired and liked. AR: So it was possibly just another extension of your diaries? JM: Yes. Also, I was dealing with an area of journalism in motion pictures that was not touched by anybody else. They all wrote about public cinema or commercial cinema. With the exception of a few occasional articles, no one was writing about the avant garde or the experimental film, as it was called then. So there was nobody for me to follow. AR: In your opinion, what elements need to be included in a film for it to be considered avant garde? JM: There is no formula. No real description. One only has to go to the dictionary and look it up. The avant garde is always the front line in any field. In science, in music, where somebody just comes in, moving ahead into some totally unknown area, the future… and doing something not so much that people aren’t used to, but going maybe to different content, using different techniques, different technology. That’s the avant garde area to me. That’s where usually it’s all very fragile, and on the front line is where usually most of the bullets hit you. Most of the attacks are directed against the front line. Against the avant garde. It’s that area that I felt needed somebody who would defend it from all
those critics and all those attacks. So that was my function, to try to help those very fragile new developments. AR: What were the attacks? Was it being discounted as garbage? JM: Every commercial writer or reviewer dismissed us as amateurs! They said we did not know what we were doing, that we were just babbling. They said our cameras were shaking, our images were shaking, there is no story or who cares about it… this is amateur’s work. That is continuing even today! AR: I know you were involved in early screenings of films like John Cassavetes’ Shadows and Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy. These films were released at the apex of the Beat Generation and were big media events at the time. Was this the first time that you saw what was considered “underground” filmmaking finally becoming mainstream? JM: Not mainstream… but it became more visible. Mainstream maybe in certain New York or San Francisco circles, but on a very limited level. They did not play in 100 theatres or anything. Not even in ten theatres! It opened in New York and San Francisco, but usually those films were screened in film societies, university screenings, etc. I wouldn’t call it mainstream. But still those films were easier to accept than say Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man. AR: Do you think that was simply because the format of those particular films was more narrative-driven? JM: Yes. Both films were narratives. Semi-abstract narratives, but still narratives. There are protagonists, there was a loose kind of story line in both Shadows and Pull My Daisy. The people involved in them were also known… Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, etc. They were not celebrities then, maybe now they are, but in 1958 they were not celebrities. Jack Kerouac had to die to become a celebrity and Allen Ginsberg managed to live long enough to eventually become a celebrity. They were respected though. Pull My Daisy was covered in
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 60
Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono & John Lennon at Invisible Cinema screening; John &Yoko, from Happy Birthday to John, 1995, color film stills
Esquire magazine, a very positive review and that was mainly because of Jack Kerouac’s narration. That write-up took it into a different category. It took it out of the avant garde. Also, Pauline Kael from the New York Times liked Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising very much—that was another film that had made public inroads already. That was because there was something there thematically and also a loose narrative in that film. But that was about it until Andy Warhol came into the picture. AR: Many times when something belongs to a small core group of people and then becomes accepted, there is division within the ranks. Were there critics of this attention amongst the core filmmakers of the avant garde? JM: I think everybody… painters, musicians, poets, filmmakers—there was a community between 1955 and 1965 where everyone was helping each other. You could see everyone in the same places from downtown to midtown. The splits and fights came a little bit later. Some filmmakers clashed and some of them did not talk to each other for years, but those clashes came later. They came once some recognition came. It was not about money. Some filmmakers attacked Andy Warhol because his films were being discussed more than theirs. Even though most of the discussions of Andy’s films were about how the writers did not like them. They would say, “What is this? Is this a joke? This is not cinema!” But nobody was writing about little avant garde films which were perfect and beautiful, because they were not controversial. There was a controversy in Andy’s work, so he got a lot of press. AR: Warhol came into the underground film scene a bit late in the game, right? JM: The first films of avant garde persuasion that he saw, he saw at my screenings at 414 Park Avenue South between 28th and 29th streets. In January of 1962 it became the Filmmakers Cooperative headquarters. That’s when the co-op was created and that’s where I lived. As soon as the Filmmakers Co-Op was created, filmmakers used to come almost every evening and screen their films to each other. That’s where Andy used to come and sit on the floor—there were no chairs. That’s where he met Jack Smith, and Taylor Meade, and a lot of other filmmakers, and saw their work. After that he decided to make his own films. AR: Were you involved with the Factory scene? Did you go there? JM: Occasionally yes. But I was too busy. I brought the Factory people into the Cinemateque because all of the early Warhol films were premiered at the Filmmakers Cinematheque that I was running. So they were always there. Sometimes, though, the first screening of one of Andy’s films, after it was just made, would be at the Factory, so I would go there. AR: Many of your own films from the 1960s period include luminaries like Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg and basically a who’s who of the art-intellectual scene in New York at the time. However, they are shot almost like home movies. As you were filming these people, was there a point when you said to yourself, “I’m a diarist. I’m making diaries!!” or were you sometimes thinking in terms of constructed narratives? JM: No. I never knew what I would do with that material. For example, for my film, Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol, I had the footage but I did not do anything with it until Andy was already dead. The Centre Pompidou in Paris were preparing his first retrospecive. They contacted me and asked if I had some footage of Andy that they could show at the same time. I said, “Sure I have it!” So that occasion gave me reason to collect some of the footage and that is how it was finished. Most of my films were finished that way. My last film, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, was made for a festival in Avignon, France. The theme of that festival was beauty, so they asked if I could make something for them. It was the same with Walden. That film originated in 1968 when the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo decided to have an arts festival representing music, theatre, poetry, and somebody suggested film. Somebody decided that the film component should be me. So they called me and asked if I could make something special for the occasion. I said, “Of course!” So that’s how Walden originated. AR: How did Anthology Film Archives begin? What is its purpose? JM: The same like everything else! I’ve never done anything unless there was a need for it. By 1968, there was already a large body of work… what are now known as the American Avant Garde classics. A body of classics was by then already there. It was established! But, filmmakers very often are very careless about their materials. Some they keep the originals at home, or some they placed them with labs, which later, as in the case of Jack Smith, he took the original negative of Flaming Creatures to a lab and then forgot which lab! It was discovered much later. So there was a need to not only, okay, this is even more complicated. The body of work was there, but in 1960 maybe there were 15 universities that had film departments. Maya Deren was traveling around the country showing her films, but there were only like a dozen of these universities that she could go to. Around 1967, when the American Film Institute issued their first list of universities and colleges and high schools that had film departments the number had grown to like 1,200!! That’s a huge jump in one decade. Almost all of these courses dealt with commercial film and the established history of cinema and classics. But, because there was also so much discussion of avant garde film in these courses, they also wanted to show some examples. They had seen nothing. So where did they go? “Oh… there is Jonas in New York! He runs the Cinemateque.” So I used to get all those calls and I could not deal with them anymore. So I prepared a list that I would send to one, recommending this or that film, maybe some Brakhage… but then I would say to myself, “Which Brakhage? There are over 100 films of Brakhage… maybe this one would be good?” I did not want to be responsible for this all by myself. So the idea came about to create a little committee of filmmakers and film historians—curators from the East Coast, West Coast, and Europe—to make a film selection committee. We spent four years selecting. Looking and looking and arguing and discussing and we selected the beginning collection which contained 300 titles. That became the basis of Anthology Film Archives. We said, why don’t we screen these? If anyone in any university wants to show something they can take any film from this list. AR: How did you work it out with the filmmakers? Was there a rental agreement in place? How did you finance all of this? JM: Yes… actually we had an incredible sponsor. Jerome Hill was his name. He was a musician, a painter and a filmmaker. He won the academy award for a documentary he made about Albert Schweitzer. A beautiful little film. He was also a neighbor of Scott
(opposite) Filmmakers’ Cooperative Union Poster, Mid-1960s; Poster for The Brig, 1964; Jonas Mekas with Yoko Ono and John Lennon, June 9, 1971
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 61
Fitzgerald. So he sponsored Anthology Film Archives to build a special theatre in the Public Shakespeare Theatre on Lafayette Street. It was a special theatre that was designed by [avant garde filmmaker] Peter Kubelka that was known as the Invisible Cinema, where if you are sitting in the seat in the theatre, you could only see the screen. You could not see your neighbor, you could not see the person in front of you or to the back. You were isolated completely with the film. Jerome Hill also sponsored the acquisition of the prints that we now have at Anthology. But, as we began, we wanted to find the best prints and with this we discovered that the originals of many of these films were fading, crumbling, collapsed. The filmmakers were not taking good care of them! Some did not even know where the originals were! So on one occasion, we tried to find the originals of a film by Adam Flaherty called The Man of Aran, and we chased it all over the world! His family did not know where it was. Then we discovered it was right here in New York on 57th Street. So we had to go immediately into film preservation. Now, our film preservation program has preserved hundreds and hundreds of films. The American Film Preservation Society, run by Martin Scorsese, is very helpful also. AR: Do people propose films to you and then you decide what to preserve? JM: We have to decide and it is difficult. Because now, at Anthology, we have maybe about 60,000 titles. Most of our titles fall into the category of the independents, the avant gardes. When film labs began closing, switching to video, they abandoned film. We saved them, by dragging materials from film labs, sometimes from the dumpsters in the street. The money initially was totally unavailable for film preservation. As time went on, now more and more people are understanding that film is fragile and that film has to be protected and safe. So now more money is available, but still it is very limited. So let’s say we have $10,000, that means we can preserve only maybe two or three little films with this. So we have to look at what are the priorities. What is really important to preserve? What is really crumbling and needs to be immediately protected?
AR: It’s almost like a celluloid emergency room… JM: Yes. So decisions are made based on what is an emergency and what is important and what is less important at the time. We know we cannot preserve them all right now. AR: You would need a factory to do that. JM: Not necessarily a factory, but money. AR: Let’s talk a bit more about your work… JM: Well now I am working in video and installations and I’m completely somewhere else. Not what we’ve been discussing. That’s my past. AR: How do you see the future of film? JM: Well I wouldn’t call it the future of film. I would say the future of the motion picture because now it’s not film. Also, now we have computers and other technologies. The future? Well, it will just continue! It’s very, very active. It will continue into the future as everything else will continue. I mean technology is changing. You can make a movie now with your telephone. But we are still dealing with motion pictures. With the art and with the medium of motion pictures. No matter what they call it. Of couse technology determines the look or the visual texture. Like we say in painting… the texture of watercolor is different from the texture of oils. So a different medium or a different technology produces a different kind of image. One kind of image is produced from 8mm film, a different kind of image by 16mm, one from 35mm and 70mm, etc., etc. What you can do with 8mm, you cannot do with 16mm. What you can do with 16mm, you cannot do with 70mm. And… what you can do with your telephone, you cannot do with any of these! That also determines and influences the subject matter. The technology very much determines the subject matter and the style of what is produced. New technology allows us to go into completely different areas of daily life. We can go into any place. It’s like the dream of Salvador Dali that eventually the camera will be in your head. AR: You are indeed the quintessential iconoclast. You have always championed the underdog. In all of your experience in all these years what have been the pros and cons of living life this way?
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 62
John &Yoko Bed-In, from Happy Birthday to John, 1995, color film stills; Summer Manifesto, 2008, color film stills (opposite) To New York With Love, 2001, Color Film Stills; Oona, from As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, 2000, color film stills; Jonas Mekas on 1st Avenue, photo by Benn Northover
JM: I suppose indirectly what I do could fall into that category, but I’m not a rebel by nature. I consider myself a farmer. Actually, once, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, “Oh Jonas does everything with a farmer’s shrewdness.” So I’m actually practical, down to earth. If something is not done and needs to be done, then I feel I should help it to happen. If the filmmakers are making films and they want people to see them… or if the distributors refuse to take them because they think these are just some amateur works, then a distribution center is needed to be created. That’s why Filmmakers Cooperative was created. It was from this necessity. Film Culture magazine was created from the same necessity. There was no other place to write or exchange ideas, so we needed a magazine. Then for screenings, that’s why I started Filmmakers Cinemateque. There was no place for us to screen our films in New York. It’s the same with Anthology! Nobody was preserving the films. We have to preserve them. Necessity! Necessity! Why do anything if there is no necessity? Or sometimes an inner necessity. You write or you compose or play or you sing because you must sing, you must play, you must write poetry, you must make films! There is an inner necessity. AR: So you were never trying to fight anything. You were just filling needs where you saw them? JM: No, never fighting. I just do what has to be done. I cannot see the work of my friends that I admire disappear. Or, if I see something that I like I want others to see it. I have to exchange! I cannot even look at the sunset by myself! I need friends! I do everything for friends… for friendship.
IMAGES FROM HOME SERIES COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MARC SELWYN FINE ART Untitled (hallway), 2008, c-print on aluminum, 48x35” Untitled (bar), 2008, c-print on aluminum, 35x48” Untitled (home), 2008, c-print on aluminum, 35x48” Untitled (doorway), 2008, c-print on aluminum, 48x35” Untitled (home), 2008, c-print on aluminum, 48x35”
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 64
TEXT BY JUNE SUTTON / PHOTOGRAPH BY TODD COLE The LA Ladies Choir is a loosely-organized group of Los Angeles artists, musicians, singers, poets and performance artists who come together to create beautiful music. The project came to be when two musicians, Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond and Aska Matsumiya of the Moonrats and The Sads had a shared vision for a local women’s choir. Then, in early 2009, through a series of strange and serendipitous events surrounding Aska’s daughter and a fortune telling booth, their dream finally became a reality. The first Ladies Choir shows were loosely organized, playing mostly art exhibitions and small gatherings, but the idea quickly manifested into a collective that is now many voices deep.
Members include Diva Dompe of the band Pocahaunted, musicians Ariana Delawari and Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, performance artist Anna Oxygen, fashion model Frankie Rayder, costume designer Miss KK and many, many more. The choir exists as an ad-hoc, punk rock collective where pretty much any lady who wants to throw on a vintage dress and “sing joyfully!” is invited to show up to their Sunday practices and to perform. The end result is a group of singers who are at times a little ramshackle, however, there is something about that disorganization that is actually the power of this group. The Ladies Choir is not about showing off. In fact it’s the opposite. Even as an audience member
RVCA /A NP QUA RT E RLY | 72
you feel included in the performance. Your eyes and ears are welcomed into the experience in a natural way that makes you feel like saying, “Hey, why don’t I sing in a choir?!” That said, there is most definitely a method to their madness, and they do take their singing very seriously. To quote their mission statement, “We are dedicated to creating healing experiences for ourselves and for others, our other selves we haven’t met. We recognize that music is a resource for strength and we have the ability to magnify our strengths by coming together and sharing our joy!” The LA Ladies Choir’s first record, “Sing Joyfully” will be out in December on Teenage Teardrops.
The LA Ladies Choir (L-R): Aska Matsumiya, Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, Raquel Jordan, Frankie Rayder, Michele Miskovich, Paige Stark, Tracy Hood & Phoebe Hood, Keiko Ichinose, Mora Elian, Jenny O, Alexandra Spunt, Diva Dompe, Simone Leblanc, Kitty Jensen, Jenny Park, Cynthia Merino, Anna Oxygen, Talulah Brown, Becky Stark, Miss KK, Nicole Disson, Rachel Kolar, Astara Calas, Ariana Delawari.
RVCA A NP Q.COM | 73
Hello and welcome to what would most certainly seem like a themed issue of ANPQuarterly. Anyone who has been following ANPQ for the last four years may point out that this would be our first themed issue, and that person would be correct. Well, sort of, because we’ve never declared an issue “themed” before. Or maybe we have but just can’t quite remember now. So what is the theme this time around? There is no theme. But it does feel like there is sort of a theme, right? Would it be “historical”? It’s not enough to say that the theme is “historical,” though, because just the act of making a magazine is by its very nature both documenting and creating history. So then, where are we? Looking at the final layout and reading through it does feel like kind of an extra rich, staggering list of people, places, things and works this time around. To list the whole thing, well, that’s what the magazine itself is for, but what if we did list everyone mentioned within like it was a Kool Keith rap? Picture this excerpt, “...Rodarte/Matt Keegan/Bill Owens/coffee/ surfing/clothing/Brina/Thurston/Jonas Mekas/Mark Rothko/Ojo/Matt Lipps/John Opper/John Giorno/Lynda Benglis...” and then end the rap with “fifth color: red.” How about that, ANPQ Vol.2/#4 Fifth Color: Red? ANPQuarterly Volume 2/Number 4
Contributing Photographers Terry Richardson, Autumn de Wilde, Georg Gatsas, Billy Nava, Benn Northover, Shayla Hason and Todd Cole
Publisher PM Tenore
Special thank you to: Meghan Casey
Editors Aaron Rose Edward Templeton Brendan Fowler
ANPQuarterly is published four times a year by RVCA Corp © 2009 RVCA (All rights reserved). Printed November, 2009 on Crumple Street in Gardena, California. Reproduction in whole or in part is strictly prohibited by law. Opinions expressed in articles are those of the authors. All rights reserved on entire contents unless otherwise noted. Artists, photographers and writers retain copyright to their work. Every effort has been made to reach copyright holders or their representatives. We will be pleased to correct any mistakes or omissions in our next issue.
Layout/Design Casey Holland
ANPQuarterly™ is a Registered Trademark
Contributing Writers Ethan Swan Ben Provo June Sutton Clark Rayburn
(opposite) Jonas Mekas poster for Diaries, Notes and Sketches, mid-60s (front cover) Jonas Mekas, NYC, October, 2009 Photograph by Terry Richardson (inside front cover) Bill Owens, Untitled, 1968 Altamont (back cover) Matt Lipps, Untitled (garage floor), 2008 c-print on aluminum 48x35”
960 W. 16th Street Costa Mesa, CA 92627 PH: (949)548-6223 info@rvcaanpq.com