N. So you want to up the ante and bring more of this idealism to your work. You want to be more more passionate?
Yeah. We're still playing poker. We're still out there. After all these years, we're still playing poker and so it's like it's getting a little dull, let's up the ante. Recently, they asked me to do some pieces in the bar. And I said yes. And people thought well what did you do? Leave Ace? No, I just did a favor for a friend of mine and put some pieces in the bar. And I like the fact that it was wrongheaded in a sense. It's that kind of ... is it midlife crisis? Is that what it's called?
The kids and I get along really well. I went back to the school. I started teaching again. And it was cool and I was getting along with the kids great, even better than before. And I was instigating some changes and they made the changes and we've been extremely successful in the last three years. And they are "Why don't you come up here? You'll meet somebody" (laughs) And what did I do? I went and got the biggest studio I could find. (laughs) And this is what I'm doing in regard to my art right now, I went and got the biggest studio that I could. I'm talking about hitting a threshold and wanting to do something.
N. It would make you feel existential despair. You wouldn't be happy.
If I just had to rely on being a teacher or be called a teacher ... I can't do it. I tell the kids "I'm not a teacher. I'm an artist who happens to be here, causing you grief." (laughs) You're going to run into teachers after me. But I'm just here to give you grief. And they respond tremendously. And I respond tremendously to them. They've made me feel positive about our future. If this is what we're producing, and the young minds that are coming up despite everything that you hear ... I can't tell you how much I love these kids. You say something nice to them and you can see them tear up. They're real.
N. They don't have so many defenses.
These are real people with real feelings. Young, uninhibited, not cynical.
N. So do you see yourself stopping teaching for awhile and devoting yourself fulltime to your studio?
I've thought about it but I don't know if I have enough discipline yet. I still think I need to ... I'm going to do it both ways until ...
N. And so there will be a power play and you'll be out. And then you'll have to deal with your art and you'll be ready to.
There will be some power play. They will figure out something, with artists they always do.
N. Well, that's an interesting point you made, "with artists they always do". Does that mean that artists really are outside the society?
They have to be. They're not and they are. They don't call the roll in everyday. They don't discipline the kids enough. It will probably be along those lines that I get challenged. But I've just been lucky, extremely lucky.
M. That's what everybody who survives says. (laughs)
All right. Well, you look around. We mentioned a couple people, but there are so many others that I see that you guys don't really know about. But again it really goes back to the work in the end. I was always trying to challenge myself to do this kind of work that was bigger than big. You have to be a little bit stupid I think to try to do that. Because it doesn't make sense and it's not profitable and it certainly takes a lot of risks. And I didn't even know if I was capable of doing it, to be honest with you. You're going to make that sacrifice or you're not.
M. What about the anti-authoritarian urge?
That's a problem that you work out. I think I've worked it out.
M. Give me a clue, quick. (laughs)
You learn. I mean I've learned to keep my mouth shut now. You know what it was? I finally realized that there are other people that are really smart. And I'm not going to always understand why they make decisions. But I'm going to accept them. The problem with me before was that I was trying to look at it from the standpoint of, they either have to be one hundred percent smart,or I have to agree with them one hundred percent. And I wasn't seeing myself. They don't have to be one hundred percent, they just need to be sixty-forty, or seventy-thirty, or eighty-twenty, or whatever it is. Just like I'm not one hundred percent. I want people to be open minded enough to accept my sixty-forty or forty-sixty depending on where I'm at on what issue. And so it's just a question of respecting that aspect of it.
N. What you said about roles when you were talking about professionalism, a lot of that is assuming a role, being a team player, with enough confidence in the other people in the team even if you don't agree with them all the time, that you're willing to play with them. And that's hard to learn... The way you play politics is definitely you quietly amass people that have a similar point of view as you do. That's how you get power. Quietly
What if you're not in a position to... I have no power ...
M. What if it's just a constitutional inability to ...
N. I know, because you are the most rebellious person I ever met, Mitchell.
Are you really? You don't come off that way.
M. I don't feel that way.
N. You're totally rebellious. Are you kidding?
M. Now you're going to make me disagree with you.
N. Well are you or aren't you?
M. I'm more conscious of it now. I'm not really happy about it. I've paid for it.
We all have. But David is okay. David made it through all this shit. David has been out there for twenty years, believe it or not.
N. You were going through some pretty major shit when I first met you. You were going through a big crisis then, weren't you?
I was going through crisis after crisis. It was always ... The folly of a young man. Do I want to go back to those times? No way. (laughs) I like getting older. It's fine. What's wrong with it? You probably do more now. You work five days a week. I bet twenty bucks right here right now that you could never have done that twenty years ago. I'll bet you do more now than you did twenty years ago. I know I do.
N. Well, that's probably true. Well, you reach a certain age where you realize that you do have to make choices. As much as I resisted making choices, you do have to prioritize your time. I have a problem with focus right now and it has a lot to do with not having enough time. As an artist, I've always been very focused. One of my strengths has been that I have focus. I definitely have more confidence [now]. I can go to someone and say "Look, this is what it is" and if they don't like it, that's fine. I really don't want people to baby me. I think that's a big difference. I don't know if I want to be babied, but I used to be a lot more sensitive. Now I'm not very sensitive at all.
Do you remember you twenty years ago? Do you remember Nancy twenty years ago? She was always thinking about a piece.
M. She still is.
But before it was more obvious. You were ...
N. More daydreamy, or something?
Yeah. (laughs) You definitely were living part of your fantasy, part of your piece. We never quite knew if you were on stage or not. You were a little trippy.
N. Oh, really?
These have been weird times. Expectations have been high. Delivery has been slow. We've used all the one liners from the past thirty years to come up with a very divisive society. We started out very idealistic and we've turned it around it and wormed it into some really wonderful things but we've also wormed out some really crazy kinds of ... I think we have to pull some order out of this chaos. That's what I see. I see myself and the people I respect who are still involved in doing things with quality and integrity. Whether we were able to get involved with stuff where things worked out, it doesn't matter. But if we've still got a mind and we still have some sense left in us, we can still pull some quality out of this, make some sense of this chaos for the people behind us. I feel that ... there was a reason....The stuff that's really going to help still hasn't been heard yet. And the reason I say that is because most of the people that are involved in the business don't even want to know what's going on. They've turned it into a kind of personalized, rhetorical thing with no philosophical roots, no attitudes, nothing about pain, no survival. It's just fun little games. Baldessari's comments (Los Angeles Times, Calendar Section, Dec. 30, 1996) I thought, were right on.
N. That was good because he's in a position where people will really listen to him.
And they probably won't listen to him either.
N. It also takes someone on the inside being willing to look around in depth. I feel that's one thing that I've been frustrated with a bit, curators that I feel don't show any depth of knowledge. Some of them go out and look at a lot of stuff. If you go out and look at a lot of stuff, and then you decide on these people, I don't have a problem with that. But if you don't go out and look at a lot of stuff and you end up with the same five people – what are you comparing it to?
No one from MOCA has been by my studio ever since I've been with Doug Christmas. This is my frustration. Not having a family. Not doing things. Never being in a position to do it. Always being a teenager. All this kind of stuff. If I had the children, I'd probably be having the same problems or related ones. We've cleaned up our acts, most of us. The ones that have are still trying to do something. I still think something will come out of this. And I do believe that it takes that. It has to have that kind of frustration
When we were younger, we were pissed off. Now it takes us longer to focus because the messages we're looking for have to be air tight and they have to be meaningful. We're still looking and we're going to find those answers. And we're going to find that meaningful work.
I do see some problems coming. But not the kinds of problems that people are focusing on. We went through that generation of being clogged up in a system that didn't have provisions for it. And we've got a whole other generation that's coming up behind us that's going to be even more clogged and have even more restrictions. If we're having trouble getting things together, and our lives were fairly black and white, easy to get by – look at these kids that are coming out of college at 22, 23 years old, $80,000 debt loads ...
N. That's ridiculous.
They're going to be getting married. They're going to be flipping out, they're going to be raising children. They're going to be going through ... I can talk about what poverty and psychological stress and all that that has done in my life...I think we're going to be needed to help sort this out. If you've gotten through that twenty years and you're in your forties now and you haven't punched yourself out, I think you're in a good position.
N. You've got to figure out what you can give and how much. That's a hard thing, to figure out – what is the limit to what I can give, what's the scope of it.
You know we had that unique experience. We weren't supposed to be artists – the generation before us and it looks like the generations after us – we came through that thing of you could be what you wanted to be. It was an idealism that came off a generation of freedom in the best sense of the word. It takes a long time to implement change. Whether they like what we've contributed or not, doesn't matter. If they don't want to hear it from me...If I have to get out of the way... I think we have every reason to hold our heads up high. I had no business doing this, but I was privileged to be a part of it. I lasted five minutes, or whatever, and I haven't given up yet. I still want to do it. I know it will only be done in the future by people who have access of money, or whatever. But you know something? There was a point when it wasn't that way and it was done on sheer guts, and somebody's going to pay attention to that.
I remember talking to Harold Rosenberg in New York in the mid seventies before he died. And he told me about putting out this little critical essay magazine with some friends because it made sense. It was the thing to do. It was about a certain thing that they believed in and that's all they were going on. I think that's what good things are about. Good things are about not really having the right reasons to do them necessarily. I don't think that the kids that are coming after us are going to be unaware of those kinds of motivations as they get older.
N. They're going to look for alternatives and things that make sense to them.
These are psychological battles. We're talking about quality versus non-quality experiences. Art opens the door on quality experiences and you can't shut it. You can close it down and it looks like only a trickle is coming through, but you're not going to shut it. And I do believe in that. I really do believe that the power of education is in that, and I'm not a painter's painter that believes that painting is going to do it all by itself.
It's that issue of quality. It goes back to the work and it goes back to how the work is influencing people. I don't think that we're being overrun by the rest of the popular interests out there at all. I think that it's up to us to keep that flame alive. When I listened to Harold and Rose (Slivka) and Susan talk, and John, Ray, and Robert, they were talking about keeping this voice alive. After all, they were, most of them, surviving in environments that weren't supportive. In New York, all of those artists had to withstand the post World War II conservative attitudes that were coming out of a generation that wasn't all that open to a man putting a stripe on a canvas, let alone "something that a child or a monkey could do". Our reality is probably not as difficult. At least we can say we're artists, and people don't care.
It goes back to that question. Who are these people? What are they doing? I don't care what they do. I don't care if they're in for five minutes or fifteen years, if they need a cape or they don't need a cape. Everybody's contributing to this, pushing this forward. And the recipients sometimes aren't the leaders. But the business is such that that's the way it goes. It doesn't have to be that way.
M. What you're talking about is a profound faith in the activity itself.
There it is. They were doing it because they believed in it. Nobody was supporting what they were doing. They were all being laughed at, these abstract painters in the 50s, in New York, at the time. There was no support. We think there was tremendous support. There was very little support. They believed in what they were doing. They lived a way of life and that was it. It hasn't been alternatived to death. It wasn't self-conscious. It was real.
Other artists I've met... I have a friend, Tom Fresh, who is a painter, transitioned from painting into high tech stuff, making clouds in rooms and stuff. There are a lot of people that were out there doing stuff that didn't end up on the pedastals, if you will. It's those people who have influenced so many people, that have kept alive those ways of thinking, the logic of pursuing that kind of poetic stream of thought, idealism, that pure vein of quality. And how many people do they influence?
Okay, things didn't work out. I paid my dues. This didn't work out. That didn't work out. It's no fun being alone. Screw it. I'm not going to sit around and listen to myself. I've got kids to go up to and tease and goof around with.
N. In your case do you care that people know your name, your personality? Or do you just want to be part of this stream of thought?
I'm happy to be a part of it. I'm really happy to be a part of it. I'm not sure about the other stuff. I'm not sure because I haven't experienced it so I can't say one way or the other. If it means what we were talking about earlier, going back to the 80's. No, I don't want to be a part of it. If it means something else, where you could get more done or better things, or quality situations, or have some kind of impact, sure. I do know that I've learned from a lot of different people over the years. Not all of them were well known, recognized people. But they did believe in this fine art, contemporary, original, progressive thinking kind of thing. And style comes in and out of that picture. But the message is still pretty clear. It's lasted through all that stuff. I don't get cynical because I don't believe that quality goes away. It think quality stays. Quality doesn't disappear. People hold on to quality. It may not be a popular issue, but it's still held on to.
It's a part of the progressive voice, progressive in the sense of open minded, open society, tolerant, respect, quality issues. That's why we suffer through our mediocrity. It's not just the view, it's the fact that the view is in this social situation, I like the fact that if people want to see my work, they have to come here. They have to go around the block.
N. And see what the environment is, see what other people are experiencing.
Maybe I can't go downstairs and hand out ten dollar bills, but I am letting people know that their plight is seen by not running away from them, and by staying here.
END