4
TIM EBNER
Am I being OK with this? Am I getting kinda weird with this? Do I sound okay? I don't want to sound stupid.
M. No. It doesn't sound weird to me. It doesn't to me.
Yeah? Okay.
M. Let me put it this way, if you are ...
You'll shut that off ...
M. No, because I'm so stupid, I'm just as stupid ... (Both laugh)
Okay. All right. That's good. That's good.
M. I used to think that we were cocky when we were students.
I don't think we were. There were cocky students ...
M. There were people who were, but I think overall, compared to ...
We were naive. We had this, like, old kind of romantic notion all connected in with Ab Ex and stuff. We'll work till we're forty-five and then we'll get that one-person show or something. You know what I mean? Like, it's a long road ahead. I mean that's what mine was. That's what I needed. But I needed ... I wouldn't have been able to deal with it otherwise. That's how I had to see it. After five years, or something like that, then Kuhlenschmidt got interested. And then things started to happen. And I think I was sort of ready for it then. But, it's different now. People are going into it now, as students, as graduate students going into it now, they have a hell of a lot of savvy when it comes to ...
M. I'm not convinced of that.
... Oh they do, they totally do, they get on the covers of Artforum ...
M. That's not fucking savvy ...
... I don't mean it in a derogatory way. I'm just saying that they're not as naive as I was in terms of how it works, in relationship to your career. They go into it, they understand how to do these things, and they get those things done. And I think that earlier on, before the 80s, there wasn't ... you could be sort of naive about how things worked because there really wasn't that much going on. And the expectations about what to get weren't that high either.
M. You see, in retrospect, I don't think that's naive. Because in reality, there isn't that much to get.
Yeah. I understand your point. Yeah. Yeah. That's true, actually. You're quite right, and a lot of those things are sort of empty. God, it is different. It's very different. But I don't know whether I'm just nostalgic or what. It's just different now. They are so worried about how people are going to respond and not ... preoccupied enough with their own. I don't know whether the institution is responsible for that, or the people who come into it. It's a big complicated question.
I know there's one student up there that I really like, and he's so absurd. He's so out there. And when you want to talk about the work you just can't really come up with too much because it's not engaged with any of the issues that are spinning out there right now. His gear is out there spinning someplace and he can't lock up with it and make anything else move. Well, the guy's great, you know. But there's just one. Maybe a couple.
It's interesting to see so many people so worried about where their placement is in this mechanism that we're talking about. How they fit in. And how they can move along. I guess we kind of did it too, but the pressure on us was not as intense because we didn't have this ongoing anxiety about paying off these loans. I think it's a big, big issue. We took a lot more risks and didn't worry quite as much about success or failure, I think, just because we didn't deal with it like it was a career ... It was more like this passion that we had ...
M. Let's look at another painting.
You want to look at another painting? All right.