David Robbins: The book’s title, Accrochage, is a French term meaning a number of things: a violent clash, a car accident and, in the art world, it’s slang for a gallery exhibition made from inventory. In other words artworks that weren’t designed to go together are juxtaposed in exhibition, hence that clash. It’s old, at this point somewhat obscure art world slang. I never heard it or saw it used until I was living in Europe. The book was made by sandwiching three scripts together. Things that I’d been working on separately for some time, I instinctively put them together.
Kenny Schachter: I don’t want to get into too much detail about the story. It’s a great summer read. The books is three disparate stories. The first two went together in my mind but I had trouble understanding the meaning of the third one. The last part seems incongruous — abstract, disjointed — in relation to the other two parts.
DR: It’s called Accrochage for a reason! A clash between things that were not designed to go together.
It wasn’t until I put the three scripts together that I realized what I was really interested in, in all three of them. By putting them together they mean something else in sum than each does by itself. Which I quite like.
Sub-textually the book is a study of avant-gardism and what it’s for. In the first section, set in the art world as we know it, avant-gardism is presented against the background of the cosmopolitan art system. There the avant garde spirit is endlessly promoted but it’s also something performed for an audience. It’s entertainment for a niche audience, and arguably nothing more than that. The second section sets avant-gardism in the suburbs because that’s the landscape historically disparaged and dismissed by the avant garde. Using the suburb lets me remove all the professional supports from avant-gardism, and as a result it becomes something else — still something performed, perhaps, but also something more substantial than entertainment. The third section, set in the countryside far from the cosmopolitan center, removes the remaining, performative element of institutional avant-gardism — authorship. The object encountered by the protagonists is anonymous and authorless. You’re left to puzzle out your own reaction to what they encountered.
Avant-gardism has been around as a self-conscious spirit for, what?, 150 years? It may be about time to ask what it’s for! Is it only to entertain us? If we release it from its nature preserve — the art world — what is it then?
About the third section, you may be right. But maybe disjointed is appropriate: the couple in that section are on the road, out in the countryside — when you’re in nature, you’re farthest from the signal of logic. My main concern there was the object encountered by the leads — it was an idea long on the books, and an object I once intended to make — so their conversation could have been just about anything that made clear the rural, “out of touch” landscape they were in. When you can’t think of anything to add or any way to change it, that’s usually how you know you’re done, right? Of course it could also be you just ran out of ideas! But let’s let people decide for themselves. A writer friend in Paris who read the book liked that section. What can I tell you? We’ll fix it when the movie gets made!
KS: You talk about how the book is intended to bring to a general, mainstream audience the kind of insider art knowledge that you possess having been in the art world since the ‘80s.
DR: Yes.
KS: Why do you think that the mainstream audience would be interested in such concepts, or in the art world at all?
DR: Were we not once mainstream audience ourselves? I’d be inclined to give them more credit. You have to take into account that fifty years ago contemporary art was something done by small groups of people in a couple of cities to, now, something that is global and nearly as ubiquitous as pop music. You have the same artists showing up in all the fairs and biennials, and that sort of ubiquity is a pop idea. Why are we building all these museums all over the world if the audience for art isn’t growing? Also, just based on the evidence of the last two or three years: there have been three mainstream feature films about the art world — The Burnt Orange Heresy, The Velvet Buzzsaw, and The Square — and there was also a TV show called The Art of More set in the auction world… What we’ve been observing the last three decades, announced in ’86 by my piece Talent, really, is a gradual convergence of the art and entertainment context. Art becomes more like show business, and not only in its strategies of spectacularity and branding. As its claim to be revolutionary also weakens — there is only one economy now, worldwide, and we’ve given up on developing alternatives to it — art is also becoming entertainment. At the same time, entertainment becomes more conceptually sophisticated. This convergence can be approached from either side, and from either side the gap between the two appears smaller. The smaller it gets, the easier it is to leap over it. We can experiment with hybrids of art and entertainment more easily today than ever before, because of the digital revolution and the web, which get around the old production and distribution systems, of both contexts. So I think the fact that an artist could make an attempt to write a book, a dialogue-work like Accrochage that is meant for popular consumption, without sacrificing artfulness, is part of our time. I don’t think it could have happened thirty years ago, twenty years ago, even ten years ago. But it is part of our time that an artist would attempt to do that.
KS: There was the documentary The Price of Everything too. I agree in that I think there’s been more growth in the art world in the past 25 years than in the past 250 years. None of the films you mentioned succeeds in appealing to a mainstream audience, though.
DR: Right, they didn’t succeed in that. But the fact that there were these efforts to make these films with that idea in mind suggests that eventually one of them will succeed. Personally it’s not a big goal in my life that this should happen, I’ve got plenty of other projects, but seeing all of these attempts at picturing or portraying the art world by professional screenwriters who have no involvement with the art world, who have no idea what they’re talking about so that what we end up with is a cartoon of the art world with cartoon people. As Accrochage is sort of satirical, my people are cartoons too but they’re knowing cartoons, they’re informed by how the art world actually works, and by real art world attitudes and essences of how people behave there. What is it we tell ourselves and others about what we think we’re doing and why, you know? I’m not looking to change my life by selling a script to Hollywood but I think countering the sort of distortion produced by other attempts was a valuable thing for someone to do. It marks another moment in the history of the relationship between art and entertainment, right? For me that’s the beginning and the end of the achievement. Whether somebody makes it into a movie is ultimately none of my business.
KS: Do you think there’s an appetite for this kind of book? I’ve been doing this for thirty years myself, as a writer and as someone involved in every facet of the art world, I never thought there’d be anything remotely interesting to a mainstream audience that would ever appeal to these people. I understand that the art world has become a little bit sexy to people in the mainstream entertainment industry. But I guess until I had this situation with this art dealer Inigo Philbrick, who was a very young, attractive guy who stole an awful lot of money from a lot of powerful people — not until this happened in my life did I think that there could possibly be a story that had to do with all of these issues, some of which you talk about. You talk about the structure of the powerful rich galleries helping to infiltrate artists into museums, how money and art are so integrally tied together. You even have one of your characters make a comment about how people are turning into money! And these type of things are definitely of interest to more people. But I guess for me personally, not until there was a story involving the old fashion seven deadly sins — there was booze, addiction, hookers, drugs, private planes — did I imagine that it would appeal to a wider audience.
DR: There really is no predicting what people will go for. Just as we the makers evolve, the audience evolves too. The audience can be ready for certain things and not know it until that right thing is given to them. I worked for Diana Vreeland for a while, and she always said, “ Don’t give people what they want, give them what they don’t know they want.”
That said, we’re still talking about two different economies. That’s proven to be a stubborn obstacle. In one, the goal is, say, to sell a single work for 100 million dollars. In the other, the goal is to sell 100 million dollars worth of tickets, or 100 million units of something — a record, a book, whatever. On top of that, there’s a huge stylistic question. The art world prizes the object, the gesture, and other non-narrative strategies, while the entertainment industry prizes narratives in its movies, TV shows, even in its pop songs, and really resists considering other approaches. How do you package the art economy for the entertainment economy without reducing the first to satire for the benefit of the second? That’s the challenge.
KS: Now that I’ve stuck my feet in the water with the story I wrote for New York magazine which I’m attempting to sell to a Hollywood agent, since this story broke I’m getting a lot of interest and the story is going to sell on the script and the non-scripted side, we’re fielding offers right now.
DR: That’s great!
KS: I mean I don’t really care, I’m just trying to recoup some of the money that was stolen. I’m not being presumptuous and thinking that I’m entering that business.
DR: No, that’s smart. I’ve been conned twice in my life and both times I turned it into material I could sell. I made more from it than the people conning me! Now that may not be the case with you in your situation because the numbers are bigger!
KS: What were those situations?
DR: The second one, which happened just this past year, is described in the book. The first con happened on the streets of Soho, maybe ’92? A drunken bum, young guy, came up to me and said he’d found an envelope with some antique coins in it, a name, Dr. Something-or-other, and a phone number. Could I call the number and tell Dr. Something-or-other, that the coins had been found? Being a nice guy and a soft touch I helped the guy out, dialing the number and talking to the doctor, who said there was a reward for the coins, which could be claimed by delivering the coins to him at his apartment on Park Avenue. I related this to the bum. “I can barely stand,” said the bum, “how’m I gonna get up to Park Avenue? Tell you what: Give me fifty bucks, you can have the coins and get the reward yourself.” Playing on the mark’s greed, right? The doctor on the phone had no objection to that arrangement, and gave me an address on Park. So the bum followed me to my bank, I gave him fifty bucks, he gave me the coins, and we parted company. I then ran into Janelle from Metro Pictures and told her about it. Janelle immediately said, “You’ve been conned.” I didn’t believe her. But when I got up to Park Avenue to deliver the coins there was no building number with the address given me by the doctor. Only then did I know I’d been taken. Thing is, they’d conned someone who could make use of the coins. During the next week I went to an antique coin shop and bought more antique coins. Then I published a limited edition artist’s book, designing the cover in such a way as to display the three coins in it. One of the books contained the “authentic” coins used in the con. None of the buyers of the limited edition book knew whether their book contained those coins or not. In effect I extended the con. Prose and Cons, the book was called. They’d conned the wrong person, in short.
KS: I think the con man would have made a good art dealer.
DR: I have affection for art dealers. Although a lot of them have dropped me over the years, I admire their risk-taking. Big personalities, often. In my experience they’re more extreme characters than artists. Considerably.
KS: I’ve grown to love art dealers myself. And I tend to only do business with them, whenever I get involved on the commercial side of art, I always say that I can’t sell crack to a crackhead. Inigo Philbrick sold one painting five times — I admired that since I couldn’t sell one once!
DR: In those other screenplays the art dealer is always the villain. But in my book the art dealer is not a villain. We should probably say that the story kicks off with a famous artist having vanished. It’s very “mystery genre,” with the detective essentially functioning as the audience and asking questions of people in the art world to try to determine what happened to the missing artist. Many art dealers figure in the story, so it’s impossible to pin the crime, if indeed there’s been one, on “the art dealer.”
The version of the art world you’re participating in is different that the one I was in, when active. The last quote unquote art exhibition that I did was ten years ago. And the last one I did was an exhibition which argued that somebody else was an artist. That’s how perverse I got about what I was doing, and how sophisticated the comedy grew to be.
KS: There was the Baskin-Robbins installation at Greene Naftali.
DR: Also ten years ago, and that was just a reprise of a non-gallery project, this time for gallery presentation. The Baskin-Robbins project went on for fifteen years, something like that. Actually I guess it’s still going on: the LA Philharmonic did one last summer.
KS: The book seems to espouse your long held beliefs about the art world, have they changed over time?
DR: Obviously. I loved the art world and was involved up to my eyeballs in it for years, but I chose to move away from that involvement and let my imagination pull me forward through life another way.
The views espoused in the book frequently are drawn from my experience — things people have actually said or done in my presence. Other than that I tried to write essences of attitudes. What reveals the essence of a role in this particular theater?
KS: You’ve written that people get sucked into the art world for the right reasons and then it turns into something else. Something more mechanistic, and less about creativity. More about rote ways of creating products for art fairs and all that kind of stuff.
DR: I doubt that I wrote “sucked into…”. But what you describe was certainly my experience. As you progress and you become more successful, you separate from your artistic peers or the group of artists you enjoyed so much in the early days, and you’re now dealing mostly with collectors and curators. Now, because of the reason you’re together — your success — it’s more uptight. It’s just less fun. So I wanted out of that. I really stopped making what I considered straight art exhibitions in 1989. I did a lot of solo shows after that, but I was no longer addressing art, I was doing something else. I was doing comedy.
KS: Vito Acconci, who is an artist I just admire and respect so much, he also quit out of the art world in around 1989, opening an architecture and design studio. For the same reasons, he was fed up with the art world.
DR: I didn’t leave the art world because I was sick of the art world. It was less a negative and more a positive: I headed in another direction with my thinking and my work, a move underwritten by the digital revolution and the web. Bit the fact that I’m talking to you means that I’m still attached to the art world. The art world has always been my sponsor, however remote I’ve chosen to make that relationship.
No, I withdrew from active participation principally because I was finding that the art system was formatting my imagination to produce for it. That’s fine for people who really have a commitment to art as a category — maybe a particular medium — painters, whatever — but I really came to understand that my deepest imprinting is entertainment imprinting. Entertainment culture. And art was a veneer on that imprinting. Art is very interesting, it’s good to know about, etc. etc., but it was inauthentic to the way my imagination actually works. Once I came to understand that — and I only came to understand it through immersion in the art world — for easily ten years, that’s all I did — a lot of exhibitions and was excited and it was thrilling and all that sort of stuff — I stopped performing David Robbins for the art system and I started being David Robbins. And being David Robbins is someone who acknowledges that his first imprinting is entertainment imprinting, which means television, pop music, movies, comic books, all that stuff. Which doesn’t mean that I want to do all of it, but I do want to do some of it! That everything should be made “art” was something I felt very uncomfortable with and constrained by. I’m fine with art generally speaking but I don’t want to spend my life producing it. I still like the idea of doing it once in a while if an idea is appropriate for art. But I want to do fake products, fake commercials for those fake products, TV promos for shows that don’t exist. I want to write books. Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy took ten years to write! You can’t do that if you’re on the professional contemporary artist circuit, with its demands for the constant production of art.
KS: And who was the intended audience for that book?
DR: My mentor was a guy named George Trow, who wrote for The New Yorker. Wrote the great Within the Context of No Context. Things like this. This was in the Shawn era. What I learned from George Trow was “fancy thinking, plain language.” The language shouldn’t put anybody off. The language should be accessible and should be available to anyone who’s capable of reading, but the thinking should be fancy. Potential audience? Anybody who can read.
KS: My writing is simple because that’s my thinking as well!
[laughter]DR: Who did I write the Concrete Comedy book for? The future. I wrote it for people who are like me who one day discover that they are theater people first or comedians first but their comedy is playing out through objects — material culture. They are people of theater first, and artists second. I wrote the book to show that their instincts aren’t crazy, that there is a tradition to this comedic sensibility that has manifested in every creative discipline, initially in reaction to the first Industrial Revolution, beginning in the early twentieth century and eventually expanding into every area of culture.
KS: You say you believe in imagination but not art.
DR: Right. My allegiance is to my imagination, not to art. Anything — professional system, thought system, person — that threatens the health of my relationship to my imagination has to be identified and prevented from continuing to do so. I came to feel that the art world formatted my imagination to produce for it, so I withdrew from the art world in order to see what my imagination did on its own, without continuous prompting from any external system.
This refusal to privilege art has very much to do with the evolution of American culture. The “art above, entertainment below,’ vertical model is a European idea. An American can learn and adopt that hierarchical ordering but I’d argue it isn’t natural to an American imagination, to whom a horizontal model of culture will feel more authentic. Art is good, yes, but so is television. Classical music is good but so is rock and, for that matter, show tunes. These are all pleasure-delivery systems, delivering different kinds of pleasure. We want many kinds of pleasure. We want both art and entertainment. No one context, by itself, satisfies us. To dismiss or denigrate the pleasures of entertainment in the name of art will read as false and inauthentic to someone who was raised within a society that orders culture horizontally. I’ve argued this for forever!
Of course artists have for a very long time produced in a range of forms — paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture. But they’d assigned all those forms to the art context — until Warhol came along. Warhol produced for more than one context. He made paintings for galleries but he also made movies for uptown, buy-a-ticket movie theaters. He actively participated in two economies — elite and mass. Throughout his career he produced for multiple contexts. That’s part of why he is a revolutionary figure. He also represents the high water mark of that idea. After Warhol, artists, with few exceptions, went back to producing for only the art context. Even the big, globally successful artists of our time produce for the art context alone. A handful, big enough to win opportunities in other contexts, pursue those. Steve McQueen, with feature films. Murakami, collaborating with the big fashion houses. Sterling Ruby, with his own fashion line. Cattelan, the first art-based comedian to be recognized outside the art context — make that the second, if we’re counting Warhol. The list of names isn’t long.
I’m neither famous enough, within the art context or anywhere else, to be given their opportunities, nor egoistic enough to pursue them; I wearied of imposing my will upon the world. So what I do instead amounts to lab work. I do a form of gene splicing — applying art sophistication to entertainment formats to create hybrids. The production model I’m exploring is neither the one underwritten by industrialization — the first-wave pop moment, the Warhol moment — nor the Pictures artists’ second wave examination of mass media’s effects on identify construction but, instead, the third-wave pop moment underwritten by the digital revolution, which includes the web. Not in order to “explore the medium” of video or the web, as artists are expected to do, but to use these media to explore the opportunities of this historical moment, which opportunities the art context cannot contain.
KS: Somehow I think that your work fits into a rubric of conceptual art in some overarching form. Somehow it seems to relate to the continuum thread in the work you’ve been doing since the ‘80s.
DR: But just as much of it doesn’t. You can cherry pick from the last twenty years to make whatever case you want to make, but it is cherry picking. Show biz, comedy, theater, literature — I write books, and writing books throws a serious monkey wrench into the conventional model of the artist — all feed into and inform my choices. You’ve put your finger on exactly what I’m interested in attacking: the unified-field model of production, the Duchampian model. Where you work over your lifetime to create this legible still life of objects and gestures. Once that was revolutionary, today it’s academic. It’s what curators look for and what the market wants. It’s gotta go. Let’s make another model. Find out something else about who we are. I’m more like a one-man entertainment company. If I’m “an artist,” it’s because I have complete control over what I make, and what I make happens to be of a certain quality and a certain cultural ambitiousness.
It’s in fact a principle taken from art that led me out of and away from art. What principle? Form-discovery. Form-discovery is the idea that you discover the form as you go. It’s the core principle of modern and contemporary art. You discover the form of an artwork as you make it. What if, through applying form-discovery, you discovered a form that wasn’t art? I did, and more than once. And doesn’t form-discovery also apply to your life? It should and it does. I allowed form-discovery to shape my life. What I discovered, by applying form-discovery, was a model of invention and production other than the model of the artist that I’d inherited. Artists don’t just invent art, they can also invent the model of the artist. As I think I’ve demonstrated over the past twenty years or so, with concrete comedy and high entertainment, it is possible to produce things that are “art adjacent” but not art. I’ve made another model.
KS: What is your notion of the art/entertainment hybrid?
DR: There could be many. So far I’ve hit upon two.
The first is concrete comedy, a term of my invention. Karl Valentin invented it, I just named it and organized its history, which cuts across all disciplines. It’s non-fiction or anti-illusionist comedy — comedy for real, rather than done as a make-believe character in a make-believe story filmed by cameras or presented on stage. It’s comedy done by you, as yourself, in real space, using the materials of the world, including, at times, the world’s systems. An example would be a project I did a few years ago called Dough Play, where I raised money on Kickstarter for the stated purpose of buying play money. Another is REpotting, which I did at Green Gallery in Milwaukee. Every town has its cool gallery, and Green Gallery has been Milwaukee’s for the past decade. I went around to other, “noncool” galleries and borrowed generic artworks — paintings of flowers — and showed them at Green Gallery for one night. Were those paintings now cool because of where they were shown? Was Green Gallery now uncool for showing them? You get the point. See my book, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy, about this idea. It only took ten years to write!
The second model is what I call “high entertainment.” Art is a specialized language, and that limits its audience, but it’s also got a strong experimental ethos to recommend it. Entertainment is accessible but, due to high production costs, is generally timid about experimentation. High entertainment combines the best of both contexts — art’s experimentalism and entertainment’s accessibility. Apply experimentation to pop formats. This is possible now, inexpensively and efficiently, because of the digital revolution. Once you’ve got the cameras and microphones, you can make a movie or TV show or pop song for a few bucks. Now, there can be such a thing as “personal television.” Anyone who’s interested can find examples on Vimeo. Anybody who’s interested can also check out the pop songs I made with two lovely groups of musicians. Talk about a good time! Theme Song For An Exhibition and The Mainstream, which was from the Ice Cream Social pilot. I had the George Martin role and wrote the lyrics for both.
In the lab, apart from amusing myself and directing my self-evolution I’m trying to work at the molecular level of the divide between art and entertainment. Do we even know what entertainment is, really? It seems to be some kind of vibration that passes between people. Anyway, such questions are interesting to me. What is entertainment? What is entertainment for?
KS: You do not believe in art objects.
DR: Belief is the core matter. Any kind of art object is powered by your belief in it. If you deny that object your belief then it’s just an arrangement of materials. So it’s basically faith-based. It’s your belief that there’s actually something happening there that makes something happen there! And what I found was that I was not a believer. Simple as that. I was not configured to believe. So I had to find other uses for my imagination. Other uses for my conceptual sophistication, my visual sophistication, all that stuff. I had to sort of carve out these other possibilities. Concrete comedy and high entertainment.
KS: Sure there’s a leap of faith when encountering some painted marks on stretched canvas. But there’s also a leap of faith in many other professions as well. The stock market runs to a great extent on psychology…
DR: The Constitution of the United States is nothing more than some ink on parchment unless you believe that there’s more to it than that! But the thing about art is that it requires belief in order for it to run. That’s the problem that I had with it: that it required my belief. Whereas something like entertainment meets you more than halfway. It isn’t that entertainment does without the use of a specialized language, it’s that the distribution systems of entertainment were so successful that we’re basically raised by the stuff. There’s no sense of learning the language, as there is with art. That’s the difference.
So I muck about in these questions. My artist friends — and most of my friends are artists — are very tolerant of my skepticism toward the whole practice. I think they understand there’s some validity to the questions that I’m posing, primarily about the grey area between art and entertainment.
KS: Do you have any commercially successful projects produced from within this grey zone you work from?
DR: You’re sort of framing my life with your own anxiety, aren’t you? I’ve never thought in those terms. Markets are another way of formatting the imagination. They’re just not a factor in what I decide to do. Never have been. I must mean what I’m saying. When was the last time I had need of the market machinery? Ten years ago, with the Concrete Comedy book. In between there’ve been tons of works. I’ve hardly been idle!
I’m a purist, an experimenter. A chemist with a lab. A mad scientist. I don’t have a style. I keep changing form, medium, context, whatever. I don’t have something that I want to do again in order to “succeed” at it. For me, searching is the destination. I’m just built that way. I’m not doing what I’m doing “in order to succeed at doing it,” I’m doing it because this is the way I want to spend my time. I think what I’m doing is necessary culture work. That’s the illusion I work from. Have I had a commercial success? Sure, of varying degrees. I did make a TV pilot for the Sundance Channel, that kind of thing. But I don’t really care enough about that idea of success to dedicate myself to its pursuit. I don’t need that kind of approbation. I can’t put any time into fame maintenance. I’m secure enough that I offer what I made and just go on to the next thing. I don’t do what I do for the approbation of an audience, I do what I do because that’s what a want my life to be. That’s the kind of experience I want to make, for myself first and for anyone else who finds their way to it.
KS: Not terribly well suited for the entertainment business, if you don’t care about an audience.
DR: I explored the audience thing sufficiently when I was an artist. “Audience” by itself can’t keep you interested in what you’re doing. In the end I’m a hardcore liberal arts guy, which means I believe I’m processing certain historical narratives through myself. That’s the job. An audience can find its way to the results of that effort. Nothing’s being hidden from them. If they find their way to something of mine, they’ll be entertained, and in a different way than other entertainment! But I’m not waiting around. I’ve got things to do.
You don’t have to go into the entertainment context to be an entertainer, you can use the web. I’m my own kind of entertainer.
I rather stumbled into the art world. I worked at the Factory and that’s how I got into the art world.
KS: When was that and what did you do there?
DR: Oh, that was end of ’79 to sometime in ’81. I worked at Interview but when you’re at the Factory you do all sorts of things, if you’re interested to. You could carve out a role there. They encouraged that. I came in quite frequently on Saturdays, when it was just Andy and Vincent [Fremont, who managed the Factory] and myself, at least for the first couple of hours, before Factory friends and associates started stopping in the late afternoon. It was fascinating. Two main takeaways from that experience. Working at the Factory confirmed my multi-disciplinary inclinations — art, books, movies, whatever. And I got to watch the king of the art world up close, so I didn’t have to try to replicate that in my own experience. Because I saw what it was like. I saw who comes to lunch, and what Andy has to do to keep being Andy, and all that sort of stuff. It was great to be liberated from that because I think a lot of artists are trying to replicate those conditions in their own success.
KS: You say the community of people you remain closest to are artists?
DR: Broadly speaking. Writers, filmmakers, artists, but everybody is aesthetic, yeah.
KS: Was humor always a part of your art?
DR: From the get go. The first exhibition, at Nature Morte, was The David Robbins Show . How serious could that be? In the early comedies — Talent, The Art Dealers’ Optical Tests, the DR Show — I operated instinctually. When in Germany in ‘88 Christian Nagel turned me on to the German comedian Karl Valentin, who’s really the inventor of the comic object — the object made with comic rather than aesthetic intent — and after that my comedy proceeded more self-consciously, because now I knew there was a tradition to my instincts. It took maybe five years to get a handle on thatl, artistically. By the time I did the first Ice Cream Social at a Baskin-Robbins in Manhattan, January ‘93, I had gained a satisfying degree of control over this new phase. In between I made some lousy art exhibitions. My worst one, far and away, was for Bucholz in Cologne. Daniel was very nice about it, as he is about most things.
KS: What other artists do you think use humor? Cattelan? Wurm?
DR: Who doesn’t, these days! I mean that only half facetiously. When I started using the exhibition format with express comic intent, in that first show in ‘86, I did it in large part because no one was doing it. It wasn’t being done — not by anyone in New York anyway, and that’s the world I knew. Michael Smith was doing comedic performances there, yes, but no one was hanging comedy on the wall or putting it on a plinth, claiming it as a proper exhibition. “I want to hang Noel Coward on the wall” — whatever that means, I said it more than once. I very much decided to pursue doing that because it was missing from the downtown scene. I’ve often worked that way: survey the landscape, see what isn’t there, and provide that thing. Some years later I learned about the work of Jeffrey Vallance, a contemporary doing wonderful comedies in exhibition form out in LA, but he was only a little less obscure than I was, at that juncture, so I didn’t know about him. And I don’t think Jeffrey told himself he was doing comedies; his thing was the pseudo-religious. Nowadays, by contrast, “comedy in art” shows up everywhere — which is part of the reason I could stop doing it. It didn’t look to be in danger of fading out. Just one more thing I was right about, ha!
You frame it the way the art world always does: as “artists who use humor.” My argument — and I wrote Concrete Comedy, a 400 page book, with this point of view — is that it’s instead comedy that uses material culture. It’s comedy first. I’m not addressing art history, I have no interest in art history. Instead I’m expanding our idea of comedy. That’s what I’ve been up to, if anybody should ask. It’s been a crucial part of my decision making.
I’m not really influenced by other visual artists, comedically. I am my own weirdo — ask anybody! Robert Benchley was somewhat of an influence — his short films of the 1930s more than his writings, although these remain a pleasure too. I collected all his books. Albert Brooks’ Real Life is some kind of cracked masterpiece. SCTV. Tati. Andy Kaufman was amazing, obviously. I’m not conscious of his influence but certain attitudes about positioning the audience, and about arriving at art through entertainment formats, probably come from his impact. All of this is as much an influence as visual art stuff. I’m a sort of mutated man of theater.
The biggest influence was Karl Valentin. Do you know who Karl Valentin was? He was a German comedian, active in the first half of the twentieth-century. Died in ’48. Very well known in the German speaking world. He’s the guy who invented the idea of the comic object — an object made with comic rather than aesthetic intent. Valentin is the guy who invented that proposition. It wasn’t that nobody had ever made a comic object before him, but he’s the guy who identifies it as a set of questions and pursues them consistently. Not only did he invent the comic object but he also understood that this category of object would not be well served by putting it into an art setting — gallery or museum — and as a result he invented his own context: the Karl Valentin museum, first housed in the basement of the Hotel Wagner in Munich.
KS: You don’t normally associate Germans with a sense of humor.
DR: I do! Kippenberger, George Herold…. Valentin was important to those guys. There are actually a lot of major wits at work in the German art world. They can be great.
I lived in Cologne for a year, and had contacts with those guys. They’re much bigger personalities than I am. They’re stronger people than I am. But I’m sure they influenced me, in terms of the sophistication of their own conceptual approach to comedy, I spent a lot of time in Europe, soaking up influences. From my time there, six or seven years all told, I became a hybrid American/European artist. There weren’t really any American artists who I identified as having anything to do with what I was interested in finding for myself.
But to answer your question: Manzoni, Oldenburg, for whom I worked briefly. Kippenberger, Herold, Bill Wegman, Res Ingold. Chris Burden’s early performances I regard as being in the slapstick tradition. Guys, mostly, because I’m trying to figure out what kind of man to be, right? Warhol took an essentially comedic position, of course. The Factory was a very sophisticated parody operation. Even the name of the place: the Factory — parody. More recently I consider Elmgreen and Dragset excellent comedians. They’re about the only ones active today who make me jealous. “Wish I’d done that!”
I predate Cattelan so he’s not an influence. A few years ago I had lunch in Milan with an Italian art dealer and an Italian art journalist. After lunch we walked to another cafe, passing a street where Cattelan then lived. Both the dealer and the journalist turned to me and said at the same time, “He stole your act.” Meaning, the idea of treating the art context as a platform for comedy. So there are people who know the real history of this sensibility, and who contributed what, and what I did, and when. It didn’t start with Maurizio. I’m already doing “art world comedy” in ’86. But he is fantastic at what he does. And I think we do want a globally recognized comedian who works in material culture rather than storytelling, don’t we?
KS: What painters?
DR: Painting is the pseudo-religious medium par excellence — all that precious “transcendence” — so the painting that is ever anything but art is quite rare. Joe Bradley sometimes pulls off comedic abstraction. There’s a baggy pants quality to Walter Swennen’s approach to painting. Scott Reeder’s “list” paintings. Kippenberger — although his are really just funny images made with paint, which are a dime a dozen, they are part of a grander comedic ambition. Padraig Timoney pursues a range of aims but among them, when he wants it, is erudite wit. I’ve had a comic painting or two made, myself. The paintings in the opening scene of Accrochage are paintings I’d had made in a smaller version. Long story short, there are “touches of humor” in lots of painter’s work but hardly any look to position the production of paintings as part of a larger comedic scheme.
But in painting’s defense, I will say that the freedom I claim for myself in my work overall is influenced by Picabia’s freedom and shape-shifting.
KS: Are you expected to be funny when people meet you?
DR: Art world people, you mean? I have no idea that anybody has any idea who I am or what I’ve done — and generally they don’t! Which is fine. I’m a pretty secure person. I got enough love as a child. I’m okay with being an obscure figure. Fame is like topiary. It’s decorative and demands a lot of maintenance.I try not to perform David Robbins, even for myself. There’s a period, at the beginning of a career, where the space of media attention is interesting to explore. Public life opens a new space in which you can inscribe yourself. Suddenly you have an audience’s attention and if you gesture this way the audience says “look! he gestured that way!’ and they think about it for a little while. As I say, in the early going public life is fascinating to discover. But I stopped finding it attractive after one particular lunch in the Austrian countryside. I forget the exact year. Early ‘90s. I was doing a show with a gallery that also showed Kippenberger, Herold, and some of the other artists associated with Galerie Nagel’s program at that time. Kippenberger et al were at the lunch, working their personas. A young woman approached me, pad in hand. I puffed up my little ego, preparing to give her an autograph. She was the waitress coming to ask for my order. I have been backing away from that moment ever since. Not the kind of person I want to be.
I do still go into performance mode if the conversation in a small group is awkward or stilted. Then I’ll sort of take over to get us all out of that particular hell. Robbins to the rescue!
KS: Do you think humor can be beautiful? There’s still this underlying notion that everyone seeks to attain, or if you ask the man in the street about their idea of art, frequently art is still — after all the conceptual art, the political, social, economic art — there’s still this kind of ideal of beauty that is sought after in art. Do you think there’s something similar in humor?
DR: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely I do! Monty Python is more beautiful to me than Mark Rothko. What’s better than being transported by laughter? What feeling is better than that? You lose yourself like you do in sex, but without the mess.
I derailed my art career by —after ’89 I was trying to make the most beautiful comedy I could make, not the most beautiful art I could make. The comedy was the thing I was interested in pursuing, while the art had to be good enough to hold your gaze so that you would make contact with the comedic structure underneath. The stuff during those years behaved somewhat like art, but the organizing principle of the production of those objects was trying to make the most beautiful comedy I could.
KS: Are jokes/humor objectively funny like a great work of art?
DR: I definitely think it’s possible to pull that off, yes, and I think the exhibition format can be helpful in achieving that because it can deliver comedy in a non-narrative form. A bunch of objects in a room aren’t leading you linearly from A to Z, they’re instead framing a gesture approachable from many starting points. It’s not a “joke,” it’s something else, something concrete and itself object-like. I certainly tried for the “objectively funny” back when I was doing that kind of work. The German Re-unification Public Sculpture Competition that I made for Nagel in Cologne in early ‘91 — a fictional competition, for which I made all the entries — was objective comedy. By the end of my years of making exhibitions I’d gotten quite sophisticated about it. If, for example, I use the exhibition format to argue that someone else is an artist, as I did in my last actual “art exhibition” ten years ago, I’ve put in place something that stands on its own as so-phisticated comedy. You can savor it as an idea, and you’re meant to. I come out of conceptual art, and this kind of comedy shares certain qualities with conceptual art. But it puts comedy, not art, first.
KS: What were your hobbies/interests growing up?
DR: The usual post-war American boychild stuff. Television. When the new fall season of shows rolled around I’d study the schedule. Movies. Comic books. MAD magazine. Aurora monster models. Comedy albums — Allan Sherman in particular. Rock music. The Beach Boys’ Surfin USA is the first album I bought. It’s 1963, I’m six. Today I have it framed and hanging in the back hallway of my house. Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” was the first song to really blow my little mind. I was gone! Later the same year, ‘64, the Beatles appear on Ed Sullivan.
Nothing special, in short. But apparently my response to it was a little special. Early on I identified culture with experience. I seemed not to draw any distinction between synthetic experience, like TV, and real life, friends-and-family experience. I considered the Creature from the Black Lagoon a trusted friend.
KS: You grew up in Milwaukee, right?
DR: Yeah. I didn’t hate the suburbs. Green, quiet, clean, safe, a place that valued education — what’s so horrible? After twenty-five years away, living in the capitals of culture, I moved back to take care of my physically fragile parents. But I found there were really interesting people here. There are really interesting people everywhere! That’s the thing that’s changed. The web — the distribution of information — has changed the game. In 1979 I had to move to New York to get the New York information. A kid today doesn’t have to do that. I have 70% of the information that somebody in Manhattan has, and at the same moment they have it. The other 30% is “who’s at the dinner?” And who’s at the dinner matters a lot, because that’s where the deal was made or the networking went on. I understand that. But in terms of being up to speed with what’s happening in the world? I know just as well as anybody in the centers what’s happening.
KS: Do you go to galleries and museum where you are?
DR: I don’t go to museums but I have a loose association with Green Gallery here. But I don’t go to every show. They’ve got their own scene, they don’t need me. I’m really quite serious when I say I’ve moved outside of the context. It’s just not something I need much interface with. I have my own ideas, and my own things that I need to get done. I work all the time, to no apparent benefit to myself but it’s what I like to do. It’s a matter of directing one’s self-evolution. Art taught me how to do that.
KS: When did you leave New York City?
DR: ’87, but I continued to think of it as home. I was mostly in Europe during that period, but I’d come back and do a show in New York, for Colin or whomever. After ’93 New York stopped being the main reference point it once had been.
KS: Colin de Land.
DR: Colin and I were quite friendly from, oh, ’85 through ’89, and I showed work there during those years. I worked with a lot of different people at the same time. Colin, 303, Nature Morte, Jay Gorney, Feature. There was a lot of overlap in my “representation.” Everybody was friendly. In ’89 I did a show with Colin that he hated and he dropped me. It happens.
KS: Colin was the least commercial person. That doesn’t sound like him.
DR: That just tells you how much he hated it! Everything doesn’t come down to commerce, Kenny. We sold things but it didn’t make any difference.
KS: What was that show?
DR: An early attempt to make this hybrid of art and comedy, but I came at it from the wrong side — from art rather than from comedy. It was early in the transition away from art. I was figuring it out.
KS: Did you ever do stand-up comedy?
DR: No. I admire the form but I’m funny in conversation. And the lifestyle looks too awful!
KS: Were you funny in school?
DR: Always. When you’re funny, you’re funny. What can I tell you?
KS: You’re funny at dinner parties in Milwaukee?
DR: I was quite funny at dinner parties in Manhattan, I can assure you. Here, I don’t really participate in the social version of things. When I lived in New York I was extremely social, frequently hosting parties, one or two of them huge. But I’m an old guy, with a lot of work to do. I see people once or twice a week, that’s all.
I’m not comfortable around a high concentration of artists. Too much belief, there, probably. Too many assumptions about values. Back in the early days of Nature Morte, when I’d be hanging out talking to Steven Parrino and Joel Otterson and the gang, and we’d be having a conversation which I could understand intellectually but at the same time I was asking myself “do they actually believe this?” Of course they did, and quite intensely. So there was always a separation. The difference between myself and other artists — and I announced this, instinctively, with my first exhibition, The David Robbins Show — is that I was using the role of the artist as the material. I was interested in the mortar and not the brick.
KS: Before I entered the art world professionally I thought everyone in it was running around drinking absinthe and cutting organs off of their body and going nuts. I went to law school, and I was taken aback by the fact that the art world was more conservative than the legal world that I had briefly dallied in and worked in. The whole thing is a giant kind of paradox. I always consider myself, not for lack of trying, sort of stuck on the outside, even though I have a foot on the inside by nature of the platform I write for. Most of the mainstream art world looks askance at what I do. I’m certainly not embraced by collectors or museums.
DR: The inside/outside thing… I have the support of Obrist, people like Pierre Huyghe, other artists. I had a lot of support from young gallerists who are today among the big players — Hufkens, Bucholz, Nagle, Lisa Spellman, and so on. These were the people I started with. That was a long time ago! I haven’t seen any of them in decades.
The challenge is to keep identifying ideas that you want to do. One thing that art students are not told is how long they’re going to have to be artists. It just goes on and on and on. Fortunately, I am personally weird. I have a bottomless well of weirdness that keeps coughing up ideas that I want to do. So I don’t need external prompting, from the art world or art history or anyplace else.
KS: I still think there’s room in the art world for your mindset. It just seems very similar to how I feel about and think about the art world. I think comedy is the language… — like I make these videos and two-dimensional works that are always imbued or at least I try to imbue them with some level of comedy.
DR: They’re on the web. You can’t discount that. The web is a neutral ground. That was a really important thing, that the web came along and solved some of these problems I’d had with the art world for a long time. Now I had a place to put all these other, “art adjacent” experiments. It didn’t have to go by curators. It didn’t have to behave like art! You mustn’t undervalue the fact that you’re putting your videos on the web.
KS: So how come you haven’t taken more advantage of these technological changes of the last ten years?
DR: I’ve got 65 videos on Vimeo! I have taken advantage of it. I really dedicated myself to producing for that neutral ground, because it didn’t have to be art. That was extremely attractive to me.
KS: You need an audience.
DR: Not something I have anxiety about. I have an audience. What I don’t have, anymore, is a sense of the audience. I’ve no idea who is watching or why. Early on in your career, when you first gain a public life, you have a sense of your audience. You can move your hand this way or that way, and the audience says “Look! He moved his hand that way!” But I eventually evolved out of that kind of mythmaking. As a result, today I don’t have a sense of audience. I haven’t lost any sleep over it.
KS: Did you ever have a show on TV?
DR: Two friends and I had a TV show called Something Theater for a while in Milwaukee. One of the advantages of living in small market places is that they can be more open to experiment. We approached a couple of TV stations in Milwaukee with the idea of just buying TV time in the way that infomercials do, and airing shows of our invention. They were completely open to it. You could do anything you wanted so long as you respected FCC rules about language or sex. You can show colors for a half-hour if you want to. $150 bucks for a late night show on the weekends. We bought TV time, late at night, and delivered a digital file of the show to the TV station.
I also shot a TV pilot of the Ice Cream Social for the Sundance Channel. They had an open competition, something called TV Lab. Some friends brought it to my attention at a dinner and at that dinner I said, “I’m going to win.” And I did. Out of four thousand submissions, they chose four, and mine was among them. The four never aired; turned out TV Lab was itself a pilot, and it didn’t get picked up. But I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of my short pilot even so. And what a blast it was to make it! If you ever get a chance to direct, do it. It’s basically just leadership. Everyone else knows only a part of it. You’re the only one who knows the whole, and it’s up to you to lead. So you do.
KS: What is your most commercially successful project?
DR: I never sold any art work for more than $10,000, and even that figure I considered high. I did sell a lot of art under that amount, though, and invested the money. That’s why I was able to have the independence of mind that I’ve eventually pursued. Highly recommended approach, you kids out there!
KS: Do you miss being more integrated into the art world?
DR: Ah, the jilted lover’s question. The art world can never quite believe anyone might move beyond it, as though in no doubt it’s the best of all possible worlds. But all systems are narcissistic, aren’t they?
I’d have to say no, I don’t miss being integrated into the art world. I enjoyed the art world enormously, until I stopped enjoying it. It’s too narrow. Eventually I came to regard art as a false freedom. As an artist you can do whatever you want, yes — so long as you agree to have what you’re doing categorized and subjected to interpretation as art. That’s not real imaginative freedom, sorry gang. Because, especially in an imagination with deep entertainment imprinting, such as mine, all sorts of other categories of imaginative work will surface and ask to be made. If I have an idea for a twenty-second promo for Quelque Shores, a “resort soap opera” that doesn’t actually exist, or a promo for my fake band The Roomtones, neither of which address what art is or might be, this isn’t material appropriate for the art world. If I want to make commercials for “Backpacks for Inner Journeys,” or “Windmills of Your Mind” cannabis-leaf spinning lawn decorations, both of them products that don’t exist, those efforts will suffer by being subjected to the interpretations of the art system. From long experience I know what the art world does and doesn’t do well. I’ve made my tests, and I accept what that context is good for and what it isn’t. It’s simply not the right context for every idea you’ll have. And I refuse to cut myself off from other kinds of ideas. My imprinting demands that I respect entertainment ideas.
Art results from the artist addressing what art is or might be. What I came to understand, eventually, is that you can take the conceptual and visual sophistication which you were using to address art, and separate it from art, to instead address some other cultural form — TV, advertising, fashion, whatever. Art was the training ground but you don’t have to spend your life there. I have real imaginative freedom, now, Sometimes art results, sometimes comedy, sometimes something terribly slight, sometimes something uncategorizable. Sometimes I need to write books, and books take a lot of concentration and time. I’m more like a one-man entertainment production company, now. I’m completely self-indulgent. As much bad work has come about through rigor as through self-indulgence. Rigor in art is an academic argument. It’s an academician’s idea of a good time, or a curator’s. It ain’t mine. I’ve earned freedom of movement for myself by hard work and careful distinction-making and experimentation, and I’m not trading in that freedom just to do an art exhibition. Which is not to say that it’s impossible to also make an art exhibition as part of that freedom. You certainly can do that. The problem is a practical one: to do that you need to engage the professional apparatus, and I can’t guarantee any gallerist that I’ll ever think that way again. That’s not fair to them. They have expensive businesses to run. If I had an idea that cried out to be done as an exhibition, I could approach certain friendly galleries. But as yet I haven’t needed to. I’ve evolved away from thinking in the exhibition format mode. I dearly loved making exhibitions, once upon a time, but I’m no longer willing to have my imagination formatted by them.
Your question frames my evolution as a rejection of art, and it was that in part, but it could just as well be framed as a positive embrace of new developments. My position is viable because technological developments have made it so. The digital revolution has enabled a personal approach to mass media formats, and the web has given us a means of distributing the results. My entertainment imprinting showed up from the first show, The David Robbins Show , so the instinct was already present in my work but it played out in objects instead. Now I can use the grammars of pop culture directly, in a personal way. That’s exciting!. And the web offers a neutral ground, without curators or a pre-determined interpretive system. Had the web existed from the start of my career it’s conceivable that I never would have entered the art world, which I sort of stumbled into through the Factory door. I really had no plans for my life, other than to try to proceed in a multi-disciplinary way. I didn’t go to art school but to a liberal arts university. I was trained to be a generalist rather than someone specializing in any particular form or medium. It’s a very different sort of education, and eventually it took charge. Other than that, I had no plans. At this point I have accepted that there is no professional context for what my imagination does naturally, and I’m fine with that. Not my problem, in a way.
KS: Are you bitter about any part of the art world?
DR: I’ve developed the alternative that I sought, along with the arguments for it, so I’ve no reason to be bitter.
I will say that I find it amusing that the oh so radical artists of a certain European group I was briefly part of, the members of which were pretty nasty to me and more or less drove me out of that gallery for not being their sort of radical, now present awards to each other in institutional settings. How very radical they are! La comedie humaine, right?
But the art world gave me far too much for me to feel bitter about my involvement in it. From the art world I learned how to self-direct. I learned how to identify an interesting subject and, then, how to invent a methodology for digging in to that subject. Lots of people go through life never learning how to do any of that, and I learned it all from my immersion in the art world. “Education” is too stingy a word for what my involvement in art gave me.
I was given more opportunities than most, and by serious people. Nobody asked me to take the creative path I ended up taking. I derailed my art career once I put comedy — theater — ahead of visual art and started using visual art as only the means of packaging the theater. Even though I was good at it, that was my choice. You have to accept the consequences of your decisions.
That said, I do think the art world changed in a direction I wasn’t nuts about. The year of that change was 1987. You could actually feel the change. In that year, downtown went from feeling like a society of ideas and shared values to, instead, a place where it mattered whether you were invited to the lunch. Not a version of life that holds appeal for me, putting it mildly. I date the current, “assetized” version of the art world from that year.
KS: When was the last time you were in NY? Do you miss it?
DR: I was there a few years ago. I wanted to see the then new Wooster Group production, The Room. Wooster Group productions are my favorite cultural thing from my years in New York. I saw everything they did from ‘79 to ‘87. Always left the shows with a feeling of having undergone bloodless brain surgery. They’re the best.
I always have the same reaction to being in New York. For the first ten minutes, it’s “I’m home!” After that it’s, “can I leave now?”
KS: Do you still look at art?
DR: Sure. I check out the main art websites on a regular basis. And I read you! I enjoy seeing what’s going on. Just because I evolved out of that way of thinking doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate that way of thinking in others. I don’t need them to also “not believe”! But I don’t ache to participate. Best to leave the field to people who really mean it.
I don’t feel that my sensibility would work well at all, these days. It’s just as well that other arguments “retired” me from that context.
KS: I don’t necessarily agree that your sensibility wouldn’t work.
DR: Well, it’s a pretty ferocious time, one with very real and valid concerns. I tend to approach just about everything as theater and material, not to make fun of but to make fun from. I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that in this climate. I need the relative quiet of peacetime for the subtleties I’m interested in to make apparent.
KS: You wouldn’t be comfortable in the fine art context or what’s happening in the world today?
DR: Can they be separated, really, at the present time?
But it’s a bigger issue than topicality. I don’t care to engage the interpretive system of art, the meaning system of art. It’s genuinely not interesting to me. I passed through it and arrived elsewhere — an imaginative location I like better. I worked very hard to liberate myself from art’s arguments. I wanted full access to my own imagination. That was the principle, and also the goal. For me the art system was preventing full access to my own imagination. So it had to go.
KS: What do you think of the art market?
DR: If I sold a painting for $250,000, I would be embarrassed. I’m not constructed in such a way as to think that’s a desirable thing in life. I really have no interest in spending my life making things for rich people to buy. Which is one of the reasons I got out of the game and sought other applications of imagination. I didn’t really understand that aspect of the profession when I went into art. I don’t know how I thought a painting came to appear in a book I was reading, but it only got there because somebody bought that artwork. That’s usually how things enter art history: artist’s studio to gallery to collector to museum. But what young person knows how the world works?
KS: Did you ever follow your resale market?
DR: Do I have one?
KS: What defines art for you today?
DR: I consider any invented behavior that plays out in communication forms to be art. Art is in a lot of people but in some it comes out in a way that will not necessarily announce itself as such. Sometimes it takes an artist to know an artist! I briefly had a personal trainer after injuring my arm, and that personal trainer treated training as his medium. A bit of genius, that.
KS: What defines success for you today?
DR: I do only the work I want to do in the way I want to do it, for my own reasons, every day, and I work at my own pace. That’s success in my book.
Success has never been a big part of my portfolio. I never thought that was why I was doing what I was doing. I thought that I was processing through myself certain historical narratives — about irony, say, or re-thinking the dynamic between art and entertainment and in that way advancing the Americanness of American culture — that I felt someone ought to be processing. Very liberal arts noble, maybe, but I find that tradition beautiful. That’s the education I got. I mean, do you think someone like J. D. Salinger or Joan Didion is kidding?
KS: In 5 years, in the best of all possible worlds what would you be doing?
DR: I would have completed these three books I’m working on currently. That would bring the total to ten books, I believe, and that’s enough to feel like I’d honored my parents’ efforts to give me an education. And I’d like to think I’d have moved back to Europe. Life is just gentler there — when there’s no state-sponsored genocide being committed, I mean.
KS: What do you want to do that you haven’t yet?
I’m really not looking to change my life. I’ve arranged things pretty much the way I want them. I better have, I’m 63! I work in a wide variety of forms, I only work on things that interest me, I work at a pace of my choosing, and everything I care to release makes it into the world. How many people can say that? How much better do I need it to get than that? Do I also have to be celebrated for it? Why? I’m not doing it to be paid attention to for doing it, I’m doing it because this is how I want to spend my time. It’s what I want my life to consist of. I’ve already won, according to my terms. I don’t need to win twice over. That’s just piggish.
There was a period of, oh, maybe ten years — my LA cycle — when I ached to do a project in the mainstream. But I wasn’t willing to do what’s necessary to drive to the goal line — get an agent and all that. I don’t like having to convince anyone to do anything! In the end I’m really just a kind of scientist, mixing art and entertainment in the lab to see what results, and in that way processing history through myself and advancing the culture. Like every other artist.
I confess that I would like to publish my memoir with Farrar Straus. They seem to be publishing memoirs by artists these days, and mine is more substantial than the ones I’ve read. I developed my writing alongside my art from day one, and as I was George Plimpton’s assistant for three years and managed the Paris Review office during that time, I’ve had some involvement with the literary world. My memoir starts with my time at the Factory and proceeds from there. Treats only professional life and the life of ideas, nothing about my private life because, really, who cares? I’d also like to win a Tony award for Best Play, for the play I’m working on now. Is that asking too much?
Also, when I eventually pass, someone please arrange to have my obit read “He died from complications.”