Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere

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“Do you see what I see?” I thought people did, but I was wrong. Most people have no idea what they’re looking at. Art is interpreted, judged, criticized, umpired to death—subject to the I-know-what-I-like point of view. Everyone has an opinion. Well that’s nonsense. My freak flag says not in my backyard.

Freak flag: maybe one of the illustrations for this interview can be Jimi Hendrix. Do you or did you ever read philosophy or critical theory? I know you’ve kept a distance from it, but I was just wondering what things were like in the late ’70s and ’80s when theory first caught on. Would artists refer to Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin all the time the way that some today refer to, oh, Žižek or Rancière or Alain Badiou or anti-globalization stuff?

I read some Roland Barthes. I thought he was good because he wrote kind of like a novelist. About the only other guy I read was Christian Metz. He wrote a lot about the movies. Like when you were sitting in a movie theater, he said your body was experiencing “a general lowering of wakefulness.” Later I said watching a movie was moving by wading more than swimming. I kind of stole that from him.

I guess what I’m asking for is a sketch of the times. I know you’ve said you felt separate from the Pictures group and the theories surrounding it.

From 1977 to 1981 there was a whole lot of theory going on around “the Pictures group.” But I think it was mostly leftover thinking from conceptual practices of the early ’70s. It wasn’t like there were a lot of “lifestyle” articles like they did with the “neo-expressionists.”

I remember the writing of the time being pretty uptight and hard to understand. I was guilty of writing the same way. I wrote a piece for Real Life magazine called “Primary Transfers” [1980]. When I read it today, I can barely keep my eyes open. It sounds like I had a secret and didn’t want to tell anybody about it.

What do you think of photographs of artists in magazines? Honestly I’ve never liked them that much.

I don’t mind portraits, as long as you use a fair amount of Photoshop and airbrush.

But maybe that’s because you’re very interested in the role of the artist—“role” in the sense of performance, I mean.

There is this idea of looking the part. When I see someone like Iggy Pop, I say to myself, “Yeah, that’s rock ’n’ roll.” But what should an artist look like? Picasso? Pollock? Did Warhol look like an artist? Does James M. Cain look like a writer of hard-boiled fiction? How great does Samuel Beckett look? Or James Joyce with that eye patch? The three greatest artists of the 20th century were bald. (OK, Warhol wore a wig.) You’ve got to remember that Groucho Marx’s mustache was greasepaint.

Is being an artist a good job? Selling paintings composed of your canceled checks seems like a pretty sweet gig.

If you don’t like leaving home, then being an artist is a great job. And sometimes, yeah, I treat it like it’s a job. Like I have to finish a painting that week even though there’s no deadline. I like to work quickly and I like to work on five or six things at the same time.

Do you have a good work ethic, or are you just kind of manic? I think those are the only two ways people get things done.

It’s not obsession and it’s not manic but I’m in my studio as much as I can be. I’m not laying about smoking a blunt and grooving on the pitter-patter outside the window. I don’t have artist’s block, or writer’s block. I’m more the Joyce Carol Oates of the artworld. There’s no mystery, no voodoo, no religion, no otherworld to what I do.

Oates. I would never have thought to compare you two, but it makes sense. You’re both prolific and fascinated by American pulp. Have you ever felt that, in the artworld, there was kind of a bias against you for being an Americanist? Or a reverse bias. Sometimes I feel like Europeans still think of American artists as unaware, unconscious, “savage.”