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Journal Magazine
1.31.2001
Bob Irwin insists he's a "perceptual artist, not a conceptual artist," and still his ideas have influenced countless artists who have tuned in to the questions he puts out there. His work is often ephemeral or exists in plans, following his belief that "art is a thought form more than anything else." Since abandoning abstract painting in the late sixties, he has been committed to dissolving the frame of "art" in favor of facilitating broader inquiry and more expansive perceptual experience. “What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception,” he explains, "The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness."
I’m curious about the title of your exhibition here in New York, “Way Out West.” It got me thinking about the notion of the west and the idea it represents. Someone once told me, that dreams come from the west.
It may or may not be true.
I was wondering if the “way out west” is a source that you tap? Are titles like this one important to you?
I think that the earliest line paintings I made had titles, but I stopped titling work and haven’t used titles again until now. It really just has to do with the fact that we can’t keep track of all of the works. I realized that every time someone says, “Well, we’ve got something, called Untitled, 1967,” I’m like, I have no idea which Untitled that is.
“Way Out West” implies something far out, and expansive—
Actually, there are a couple of things. I come from way out west and there really is a lot there to tap into. It seems that this happens to be a particularly funny time for myself and also for my friends at Ferus Gallery, who have suddenly been discovered.
Right, people have just noticed Ferus and until now it seemed to them far away and insignificant. Now there’s new interest in something that’s been there for a good while.
We were the first generation to stay home. I went to New York thinking that I could have a dialogue, because I was an artist, cutting my teeth as an abstract expressionist at the time. I thought de Kooning was the greatest, you know? And I still do. But when I arrived, I didn’t get a dialogue, what I got was confrontation. I forget the name of the bar. There was a bar on Park Avenue, a famous bar that everybody went to, and everybody there had a real good rap on what they did, OK? And they just kicked my ass. I mean, I’m thinking I’m going to have a conversation of some kind, and they just fucking kicked my ass, you know? So I learned a couple of things. One was that I realized that there was something I was feeling that didn’t actually fit here. And I had this feeling that if I stayed I would get run over. I mean, if I had had a studio alongside de Kooning, I might have been! So that’s why I went back [to California]. Being alone and being in the West was crucial for me. To be left alone long enough to nurture whatever the fuck I was forming. I think the root is that there was and is a difference. Birds of a feather flock together. I mean if I was doing what de Kooning was doing, even though I was on the edge of it, I would have been in New York, that was the place to be. But I suddenly realized I’m not. So I went back and spent the time there to nurture what I was already doing. And the second thing was that I’m as L.A. as you can get, you know? They would say to me, “How can you live in L.A.? It’s the middle of fucking nowhere and there’s no culture, there’s no architecture, there’s no history,” all that sort of thing, you know, and I realized that’s exactly why—
That’s what makes it light enough to work in.
That’s exactly it. I’m footloose and fancy free, you know? In L.A. there was nothing to fight against. Well the other thing is that—this is stuff I’ve talked about a lot—but I had a happy childhood and New Yorkers can’t and that bothers the shit out of them.
What is it?
A lot of angst and the idea that something can come out of joy is just not there, you know? So—I mean, I had a happy childhood, I had a hell of a good time. In fact it might have cost me a few years as an artist because I was having so much fun. I didn’t get serious about it until—
It’s funny to me how—I don’t know that you’re a part of this or not but—how your career has been mythologized.
Mythologized!
People have written about your career as an artist and have romanticized it. Maybe its simply because for some, the experience of life and the journey you enjoy is something distant to them.
First of all, I have to say, I have absolutely no concept of having a career. I am not interested in it. Not interested in having a career, not interested in any of that. I like being an artist. I like the quality of questions, I like the whole pursuit. The idea that that in some way constitutes a career to me is sort of contradictory. Because decisions are made on the basis of what it is you think, what you’re interested in, believe in, and a career is—it’s like a life path of some kind or other.
People seem to have made a big deal out of your enjoyment of life, as if that is novel. The narrative is that Bob Irwin is the all-American who likes hot rods and fountain Coca Cola.
This is pretty funny to me, because until just almost the last year or so, nobody talked to me at all about anything, you know? Suddenly this idea that there’s a mythology—I mean, wow! Well, actually, I had talent, you know, like the magic wrist. I could draw and do perspective and all that kind of shit, I just did it. So I got away with that for a period of time, and then one day I realized, it felt like I was standing in the parking lot. I wasn’t even in the game. I mean, here’s the game and I’m out in the parking lot. And I was going to dig in or get out. So the next ten years were not a graceful ten years because I just burrowed into the studio, I stayed there every day. Basically, the rest of my life fell apart. My first wife... I would come out at midnight and generally meet Kenny or Moses [Ken Price and Ed Moses] for a beer. Other than that, all I did, every day, was work. I mean, I was undisciplined. I hadn’t really asked myself serious questions, I was a long ways from—I had to go to work and I had a lot of catching up to do.
I’m thinking about what you said that you encountered here in New York—confrontation and the expectation that your ideas be well-packaged.
Their positions were well thought out and really well articulated, you know? I realized all these arguments for me, in the beginning, were just swimming around with seemingly no clear way to separate, distinguish or critique them, and my thing was simple. I said, “OK, if you boil it all down, it comes down to a few arguments that are crucial and basically they’re the arguments that philosophy’s been wrestling with for eons,” so I thought, “I’m going to have to teach myself philosophy,” which was also not very graceful.
In one of your texts from the “Hidden Structures of Art,” I think its “A Radical History of Art”, you emphasize the importance of asking, “what is this, what does it mean?” Stepping back to look at what it is we’re doing—a self-reflexivity. What’s your opinion of art today and whether its asking itself these questions?
Well, there’s art, and then there’s art. What’s going on in the art market or art world is kind of a comic opera right now. But I do think with regards to the history of modern art, this really is a good moment. This is a testing moment.
What is it that you think makes it a particularly good moment now?
Well, the quality of the questions is so good.
You mean, that this moment is right for it and that there’s room for the questions now?
There is for me. One of the questions I’ve attacked, which in a way I also find really hilarious, is that we don’t have a practical reason—I mean, why art? In the overall scheme of things, what is it that art does that justifies its high standing?
What is this special thing that we trust and invest so much faith in?
Yeah, exactly. You know, if it’s politics you’re interested in, you can run for office, you can argue on a corner, you can debate with people, you can vote, you can roll a bomb down the aisle, you know, of a theater. But, what does art do?
Here’s this thing we can’t qualify but are certain is a meaningful pursuit—.
Well, we do have to qualify it. What is it that art does? I mean here it is, we’ve set high standards we’re building cathedrals for it and if it doesn’t contribute something absolutely special and unique, then it’s overrated.
Its the trust that while artistic pursuits aren’t meant to be rationalized they have value and contribute to significance. That may be the most important thing about it.
What I hit on a long time ago was that perception is something that is unknown. It’s an infinite set of possibilities. If its perception you’re interested in you could revisit how and what is it we decide to act on, recognize, acknowledge, what have you, and how we organize that for ourselves. If you think of it, it’s broad enough that you could take it back to when art was captured by the church, when in their way artists contributed a different way of looking at things. Once you put aside the meaning, which of course, people are still doing in politics or whatever, once you get rid of it, then you have to ask, what does it do? I decided it had to do with perception, that the world is, what we make and remake it to be at every instant.
Right.
So that’s it. Physics considers the whole of nature, the universe of matter and what all. They’re really looking at it, you know? I think that’s the role that artists have always played, only now, that we’ve taken the other roles away it can be our focus. The simple explanation for me is that, as a painter, I allowed myself to make the edges of the paintings disappear. I looked around one day and made this simple observation: the world doesn’t present itself to me in frames.
Yeah.
Framing is a learned art—brilliant! And it will continue on because it is one of the ways we think and organize, OK?
Right.
But it’s not self-taught. That’s not how we see the world. Smell, touch, you know, all that. It presents itself as a complete envelope for us to look at.
With an interest in knowing how. It might be like the Heisenberg principle— stepping back to consider how we’re perceiving, and how we’re looking at art.
Maybe I was a little more naïve in the beginning, but for me that was a good question.
Yeah.
It’s a big, beautiful question. But when you proceed and try to make some sense out of that, you don’t know where you’re going to go and I spent a lot of time not knowing where I was going to go. But every now and then, if you really feel unsure, you can check the question. It’s still a good question. You’re committed and now you have to pursue it. The scale of that question for me, of course, is greater and way more complex than having a career.
So when you abandoned the frames of painting for what you felt would allow broader questions, the floodgates kind of opened and you saw that there was imminent potential.
Totally. When I hit the questions of that scale what answer did I have? I thought, Where do I begin? I didn’t know so I did the simplest thing of all, I got rid of the studio and didn’t have the slightest fucking idea what I was going to do or where I was going to go, you know? But that’s the best I had in terms of a response to a question, to stop doing what I’m doing, which is not an answer, but it’s a place to begin. So for a long while, I didn’t do anything much, I did things out in the desert, which nobody has seen or will see. That was at least a way to sort of keep my hand in it, but then I’d look at what I did and I thought, well, I can’t take photographs of these things, I’m not going to bring a bus tour out here to look at them, there’s no way to cart them back to New York or to L.A. or that sort of thing, so I just abandoned them, but they were a good exercise.
So, it was a conscious decision—you realized you weren’t yet sure which direction you were going—
Well, the idea that there are no frames, is monumental. You might be able to intellectualize it in some way, but you can’t actually convert that to how one would live and function in the world. You also just have to accept the idea that there are good questions, that nobody else is necessarily interested in. And so you’re also not necessarily going to get any immediate feedback either.
There’s inquiry for inquiry’s sake. You can allow a work to behave like a question, or prompt that does’nt require an answer but invites an engagement with the person experiencing the work. And you can propose something in a way that will allow the question to have a life of its own.
That’s a luxury I’ve never experienced.
Are you sure? Maybe you have and don’t know it.
A lot of people think that what I do is has a conceptual component to it, but it’s not like that. I’m a perceptual artist, not a conceptual artist. I think about things, I have a mind and I ask questions. Everything I do—decision making, how I move or whatever, it’s all right here. You know, I put my hands over the thing and it just starts to—I’m not a mystic either—but whenever it starts to feel right, I think I’m on to something, you know? No argument against conceptualizing, it’s another facet. We have a brain and we can think, we can in a sense work, and complete, and develop, and exercise these problems as such as philosophers do.
So the questions you like to ask yourself are extended in the work—as part of your practice? The questions, what is this? What is art to begin with?
Well, the work, to some degree, is an exercise in trying to make some sense out of that.
For yourself and for the viewer?
For myself. I have no ambitions for the viewer at all.
None?
Nope.
You hope that they might like to engage in the same kind of—
That would be real nice, but that’s not a motivator.
You don’t hope for that?
The thing is, when I give a talk, at one time or another a student will have the audacity to say to me, “Well, how do you make a living?” So one of the ways I examine it is, well, “making a living,” that’s not a big question, not a very interesting question—instead let’s talk about the economics of identity. That’s much more complex. The idea of actually being loved, that’s a nice motive, the idea of having a rapport or communicating, all of that. If these become at any time the rhyme and reason, then they start becoming part of the definition. You have to understand that the economics of identity are potentially much more corrosive than wanting to make a living and if you adopt that it may begin making decisions for you. Nothing wrong with wanting to be loved or respected, but if you let those things affect you you’re not in control of what you’re doing. There’s something more crucial there—its that there’s the moment of discovery, OK? And that’s a solo journey, except for the fact that the world’s not out of bounds. If I can think something at this moment in time, given all the information, all the history that is at my fingertips, then somebody else can be thinking it and everyone else that is thinking this is, in a way, on their solo trip. So there is this group of colleagues who, without necessarily knowing each other, are starting to have some kind of abstract communication. The key to that is that we’re willing to suspend judgment. That’s the real crucial thing. We’re not making judgments, we’re playing with an idea, you know, that is really interesting, really powerful, really beautiful, and we’re all excited about it. And when that gets more developed, it becomes an exchange. The next step is a different one. At a certain point, we make a commitment. I do a thing we’ll call art and somebody else writes a paper on the nature of atoms, or whatever. Up to that point, I’m not publishing and I’m not making, because I don’t know how to publish and I don’t know how to make yet. I’m still—
Thinking about it in process.
I’m still thinking about it. I’m still playing with this idea. And, so, on the best level, when I have an exhibition, anybody else who’s an artist, who’s really interested in these things is going to come look at my best shot and say, “Well, that’s a pretty good shot, I would have done it this way,” etc. I mean, forgetting about the public now, we’re talking about artists looking at other artists’ work. We’re actually starting to have a different kind of dialogue, it’s about shaping this thing and how it moves into the world, we’re polishing off the edges and what have you. Now we’re at a point, we’re involved with something totally different from the process of discovery.
Do you have a preference? Which activity do your commit yourself to more?
I like the quality of the question. I’m convinced that with all the great discoveries that have been made, someone posited the question that revealed that possibility. That’s the really exciting moment for me and that’s where the challenge is.
I like hearing you explain the potential of a good question. It reminds me of the difference in sensibilities of the West Coast and East Coast—I don’t mean to harp on this too much—but it seems to me there was a time while you were asking important questions, when many people may not have been listening, while others were racing to define their style, stake a claim with some answer or say, “I did it first,” you know what I mean?
Did it first. There’s a motherfucker.
It misses the point.
It misses the point, definitely.
I like that in the past you’ve talked about ideas as being something that you tap into that is part of an extended practice.
Well actually, I am having a complicated moment in my life, because until now, I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing and have been left alone. And suddenly Ferus is discovered, all of those friends of mine who lived kind of in the quiet out there for a long time—
It’s as if New York discovered it this week.
Yeah, it’s only 50 years ago now man! It’s funny. It’s kind of nice in a way because I see these guys having a moment and I’m happy for them. The point is how do we survive out there staying out of it and not getting all that attention. We survive for one reason: because whether we were dumb or not, we thought we were doing something.
Well, like you said, it’s not one art world.
Well, there’s this one; it’s big and it’s powerful, and it’s rolling along.
This one that writes its own history? This one that—
Oh yeah. Of course it comes out, a lot of people say, “Well, you know, there really isn’t an avant-garde anymore.” Bullshit. You just haven’t looked hard enough. There’s an avant-garde out there. There’s always been an avant-garde and there always will be an avant-garde because we haven’t answered the questions yet. There’s somebody out there wrestling with those questions and that’s your avant-garde. But you’re not going to know about it because right now they’re below the radar. These people that say there’s no avant-garde, really they’re not sifting their sand very fine.
That’s right. Well, I think there are a lot of artists under the radar who have enjoyed the same questions that you’ve been asking—
I’m assuming there are, I’ve always assumed that. There have to be. It’s the nature of the beast, that somebody is asking new questions, coming up with interesting speculations and then acting upon them. But the market is not set up for that.
I was hoping you’d talk about this a little bit.
The thing is, I don’t talk about much because I live in a glass house, so I can’t go around throwing stones. If I can’t very carefully touch on the subject about why something is interesting or not interesting, then it becomes a critique, and I am not in the critique business. There’s not much to be gained by it.
Well, like the effect the market may have, do you have opinions on what kinds of things might not be healthy for the way we think about art? Maybe that’s a poor way to put it, but things that might be a hindrance to the questions that we agree are important to art—
Again, the economics of identity. Who doesn’t want to be loved? Let’s say I’m doing something and I know if I just do it a certain way then you might like me or love me, especially if you’re a beautiful chick, OK, and I’d like to get next to you. So, uh, you like red, so I put a little red in my painting for you. You know, there’s nothing wrong, but it certainly changes the—
I think chicks like purple.
They do?
Yeah.
Oh my god, funny to find that out this late in the game. Day late and a dollar short, boy! Well, they also like you to have a full head of hair, you know. They used to in my day, I mean it’s not such a big deal anymore.
And now people are noticing your writing…
It is a funny moment. Several people have brought it up in the last few days. I have been doing that writing forever and I swear, no one has said a word about it. Last night, a couple of people came up to me with Weschler’s book, [Robert Irwin biography] and it’s all dog-eared, and they say, “I want you to know, you’ve changed my life.” I’m like, woah! I keep telling this story that I taught a beginners watercolor class at Chouinards, this was the first thing right after I got out of school, you know? So I’m all gung ho and I had a real potpourri of different kinds of people there and there were five ladies who were about 50 years old, and they kind of stood off to the side, you know, so I asked them one day, “What’s happening? Why are you here?” And they all explained to me that their children had moved away, their husbands were completely busy, and they were having to reinvent their lives because their lives at one point had a particular kind of rhyme and reason to it and now it had none. And you realize, to do it at our age, or doing what we do, how complicated it is, you can imagine that they’re unprepared for it, so that —it was over my head, it was way too complex for me, for a 23-year-old you know? So five years later, I walk into this bar and I’m having a beer and a voice in the back says, “Mr. Irwin! Mr. Irwin!” And I look over and it’s one of those ladies! And she calls me over, I go back to her table, and there she is with five Hell’s Angels. And she says, “I want you to know, Mr. Irwin, everything I am today,” she’s slurring a little bit, “is because of you.”
Ha.
Isn’t that terrifying? I mean that’s terrifying! And you think about teaching and it makes you think “Whoa, shit. This is really serious business. I have twelve minds here that are somewhat—I mean they’re all filled with piss and vinegar and bullshit, but they’re open!” You know, they may strut and what have you, but basically they’re vessels waiting to be fed. You gotta really tread carefully. The idea that you would teach them how to be an artist is absurd.
One of my favorite teachers was Wayne Thiebaud –a guy who’s work I liked but was mildly interested in. At the time I was becoming disenchanted with painting and I approached him about my dilema after hearing him lecture about things that painters didn’t seem to talk about that got my attention He said he would accept me in his class to keep the discussion going and that he had no intention of persuading me either way. I think he was interested that I was asking questions and struggling instead of just auditing the class of a famous painter.
I haven’t seen him in 40 years. He is a nice guy.
He is great. He encouraged me to enjoy art more broadly. He got me interested in “the death of painting” and he handed me some of your texts like the Hidden Structures of Art , He told me “this is important stuff”. It allowed me to become interested in art in a different way. At the time I didn’t know much about Thiebaud’s work. I was catching up to the present in art history and still interested in asking the questions I had been asking myself but hadn’t addressed until Wayne Thiebaud encouraged it. He got it right away and introduced me to work by Bruce Nauman and Steve Kaltenbach whose studios on campus I had been working in to experiment with art ideas. So asking questions and experimenting for me remain. But there’s still a separation that I’d like to do away with. When someone asks what you do and you answer “I’m an artist” they usually say “Oh, you’re a painter?”. The converation doesn’t go far beyond the expectations people have of art and what it can do.
That’s a fatal thing to tell them. You never tell anybody you’re an artist, because the conversation that ends up, no matter what they say, is “I’ve got a cousin who really can, you should see, he really can draw!” you know? And then you have to deal with it, you have to say, “Oh, yeah?” Like, “Come over to the house, I’ll show you.” Then you think, “Oh fuck. I’m in big trouble. Now what do I say to this person?” What do you mean draw? He can’t draw his ass.
Well even art professors have their minds set. Its like you said, teaching someone how be an artist is absurd.. You know, William T. Wiley and Bob Arneson fought to allow Bruce Nauman to graduate. Bruce Nauman didn’t care to explain what he was doing in the context of most everything else that was happening then, and still those two were the only ones to defend him because they figured, “It’s OK that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Maybe it’s a different kind of knowing that we just don’t get— anyway, he’s more committed than most and he’s serious.” Trust.
Are you kidding? They weren’t going to graduate Chris Burden, he was, you bad, bad, bad PR, fuckers. He fucked ‘em up pretty good. The other side of it, it was very funny, he’d do these things that would absolutely send everybody over the edge. They’d all be pissed off, and he’d come to me and say, “They’re all mad at me!” And I’d say, “Of course they’re mad at you. It’s like, you fucked with their heads, and now you’re coming to me to bail you out. You need to learn how to bail yourself out if that’s the way you’re gonna live man!” And then in the end, of course, they were not going to graduate him.
Maybe that’s a quality of artists worth paying attention to—
I mean, it’s definitely one of the possibilities. Because that’s the other thing, when you go to all these universities, one of the things that has happened numerous times, is that a group will come, or a couple of guys, or one guy would come and say, “I’m in the graduate program here, and they’re restricting me,” and I say, “Listen. Anytime you want to go for the big badge, that’s where everybody’s going to get shit up their neck, so there’s only one solution.” And he says, “What is that?” And I say, “Get the fuck out of here, because this is not an educational situation for you.”
Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education, right? . . . I wanted to ask you if there are any artists whose work you like or identify with now?
No.
No… you sure?
Positive.
You haven’t seen anything for a while.
I, come on! I live in a glass house. I don’t like anybody. No, I, it’s hard for me to talk about—
Because it would sound like an endorsement or a commitment?
No, it’s not that. My head’s buried in the sand. I’m so fucking far up my own ass that sometimes, I—we were talking about a guy today who really loved being a painter. And I understand that. Once in a while in the middle of the night, I’m painting again. I’ll come back an abstract expressionist, because it was—being an abstract expressionist was a genuine kick in the ass, it was really fun. Boom! Ba ba ba bam, pow! You know? It was, you know, but, god! Are there any artists I really like? I mean, there are things I see that I really like.
Well Bob, thanks for the inspiration.
Yeah definitely, if you ever see Wayne Thiebaud, say hello, and tell him I appreciate his story. All those guys. And, you know, I still love all my friends’ work. I mean, I really think Kenny Price is a great sculptor.
Yeah.
And I really like Ed Moses, I mean I haven’t seen his paintings in a while, but the process sounds absolutely hilarious. I’m almost afraid to see it.
Any students you work with?
Well, I’ve had some amazing students, which I obviously didn’t teach because they don’t do things the way I do. Like I would have never thought to bolt myself to the back of a Volkswagen, you know? That’s not a thought that would ever pass through my mind. Or to do a drawing just of the ocean, like Vija Celmins.
She was a student of yours?
Yeah, over the years I had Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, I had Joe Goode. Chris Burden—I had to visit him in his studio because he wouldn’t even come out of his house. Doug Wheeler, Maria Nordman, Alexis Smith.
That’s great.
And I only taught for five years.
Is that right?
I first taught at Chouinard Art Institute for two years. That’s where Larry Bell, Doug Wheeler and Ed Ruscha went, and then they fired me, so I got a job at UCLA. And then I went to Irvine and I set up the graduate department there.
Yeah.
Well, I got fired at UCLA and then, when I started the graduate program at Irvine, it was a brand new school so there was almost no structure at all. These students just came, and I think, you know, given their names—we were really having a very good time. You know, it was hot. But the issue of getting tenure came up, and then all my friends, my Ferus friends in many cases, Craig [Kaufman], and Ed Moses, who actually was sort of a revolutionary, and all of a sudden, oh! They all wanted tenure. So, in the end I retired, because I couldn’t get involved. And then, a funny thing happened. Because I didn’t have a studio anymore, I didn’t have to be in one place and at one point I sort of made it known as much as I could that I would go anywhere at anytime for anybody for anything.
Oh yeah? I like that.
Well it was fun. It was really interesting. In the beginning I got these invitations for places like a little junior college, you know, somewhere in Arizona, and in Long Beach, and things like that. At one point I got enough of them that I could string ‘em together, and that’s when I got my first old Cadillac, you know from an old lady from Pasadena.
Right.
And I’d get in that Cadillac and I’d drive to a town and I would give myself a question and I would wrestle with it, and sometimes not succeed.
Sure.
You know, it was “start a lecture and end up fucked,” in front of 60 people, or in front of 30, or even in some cases, in front of three people. So, I’d get back in the car and I’d think, “Phew, boy, did I blow that!” And I’d think about what I did, and I’d set the question up again, and then in the next town, I’d ask the question differently, OK? And then I’d wrestle—so it was a really great period. I mean just, getting in a car, a couple of days, and then into a town, and just driving along the country, you know, rolling around.
Nice process.
Well, the thing is, it finally turned into this amazing Odyssey, during which I’ve now been in 48 of the 50 states and in an institution or a university in every one of these places, which must be 150, or whatever, a couple hundred. That was really a great experience. And being a big football fan, I would always try and go to Nebraska in the fall. Oklahoma would come to play Nebraska and—all of the people that knock it don’t realize it—it is the one great reason why everybody in that state congregates.
Yeah. From here we forget about events like the. Indianapolis 500 or college games out there that bring people together.
All these people coming together, it’s great! I remember we’d go to LSU, the game was at 7 o’clock at night. I would have to scalp a ticket from somewhere. So I’d arrive early in the day and there were like 20 ladies in their 40s or 50s, overweight, with pom poms on the side of the road, you know, going for it at 10 o’clock in the morning! You’d have lunch on the campus, spend time there, and then watch all of it come together.
Maybe that’s the other art world.
It’s a lot richer than people give credit to, you know?
Yeah.
So I’ve seen ‘em all. I’ve been to Notre Dame, Michigan, Army, Navy, Yale, Harvard, Oklahoma, Texas etc. That’s a whole other thing that I’ve always really enjoyed. I can’t quite do it like I did, you know, I don’t have the energy, because it’s hard work.
Yeah. Well I think your example inspires people to think about what we mean when we talk about the art world. You’re speaking on behalf of everything else outside of what people tend to think the art world is, because there’s a lot out there.
Well, the thing is, some say, “These people aren’t going to understand what you’re saying.”
It doesn’t matter.
There may be 90 percent of them that don’t, but there are going to be ten people out there who say, “Hey, that was kind of interesting.” You never talk down. You make the thing as complex or interesting or demanding as you feel like it is.
Right.
And that’s the best you can do.