Interview Text with Tommy Turner by Glenn Wharton and Marvin Taylor on 5-20-2016

David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base Interview Text with Tommy Turner by Glenn Wharton and Marvin Taylor on 5-20-2016

 

GW: Today is May 20th, 2016. I am Glenn Wharton here at the Fales Library at New York University, here with Marvin Taylor and Tommy Turner, and we’re here to discuss the life and work of David Wojnarowicz with Tommy Turner. So with that, Tommy, could you just tell us a little bit about your relationship with David Wojnarowicz, your working relationship, your experiences together, in whatever terms you want to discuss it.

TT: Well, we met working together in a club, the Peppermint Lounge. And we hung out a lot and got along and talked about our interests, movies, books that we liked. And we became friends. We’d go out after work and we started a – we were both interested in photography, so we’d go out after work, get something to eat, and you know, it’s like, dawn or pre-dawn, and take pictures, go to different -- go to the Lower East Side and go in abandoned buildings with like flashlights and candles and stuff and take photographs, go to the abandoned piers along the West Side. When David had a car we would go on -- he knew some locations in New Jersey that he was familiar with for a while, just kind of wasteland places that, any structure that was there was all graffitied up and overgrown. A bunch of them had railroad tracks and trestles running through, and we’d take pictures. We’d go to cemeteries, little old cemeteries, with flashlights, and do these like ghostly photographs, just turning it on or leaving the lens open. So we did a lot of that. And then he [pause -- sorry, we’ve got to close the door. Sure.] [3:30]

GW: And you traveled with him as well.

TT: Yeah.

GW: Where all did you go with him on road trips?

TT: We went on a few drive trips. One time he had been driving around the country in his old station wagon, and we met him; I think it was in Memphis. And me and my girlfriend at the time, Amy Turner, and I think Richard went on that one too, Richard Kern, then we just drove around looking at all mostly non-tourist spots, just any kind of oddities that we could find in different towns and cities. David had, his dashboard was filled with all of these knick-knacks that he picked up, like weird rubber and plastic creatures littered the whole dashboard, and pieces of road-kill that he would find, like snake heads. And he had a bunch of road-kill snakes. On top of the roof there was a rack to put luggage or whatever, and he had all these snakes tied to it so they would dry out so then he could put them on the dashboard when they were dry. And he had this frog that sat up there, it was this bloated rubber frog that was hollow with his arms up; it looked like he was kind of praying or asking for supplication. And David told me to look in it and I look in the frog and there’s all these, like, bugs. And he said that’s what kept the car going. It was like this really old clunker Chevy station wagon that should have been dead, like, years before, but he said all the bugs that would hit in the grille on the front of the car or the windshield, he would put in and feed this frog. And he said that’s what gave it life. [laughter]

GW: Did he think of this as artistic production or?

TT: [laughing] No, it’s just his life.

GW: It’s just life.

TT: Fun; yeah.

GW: Just a creative person.

TT: But I think deep down he believed it. [laughter]

MT: Well it’s interesting. Snakes and frogs play a big role in a lot of his photos and a lot of his work.

TT: Yeah.

GW: I guess that’s what made me think, where’s the line between life and art here; or is there one with him? What are your thoughts on that? [7:00]

TT: Um, well they’re really intertwined. I mean, just things like going to a diner or something like that, he would use in his writing, and just the ordinary people, like the waiters and busboys and stuff. I mean, like, one time he was in this place, it was a diner in the West Village, and they refused to serve this guy because he was like a homeless guy, but he had some change and he wanted a cup of coffee, and they were throwing him out. And David threw a fit and said, like, “I’m taking this coffee;” and paid for it, and bought the guy coffee and just like yelled at the waiters and whoever was trying to throw the guy out. So, things that he would see, like when we drove through Washington, D.C., we went to the Smithsonian and took a lot of pictures. And a lot of that got incorporated into work, like the one with the buffaloes going over the cliff. A lot of that stuff that he was seeing would get incorporated into his work.

GW: And the club scene, the Peppermint Lounge, also; would you say there’s that same sort of fine line between life and art? Or was that just a job and he would go and – did any creative effort come out of that?

TT: He liked, they had some really interesting bands at that place, and he liked it. I mean, he was not like a club-goer, didn’t really care about that, but interesting people that would come in.

GW: He became a musician.

TT: Yeah; right. And, like, one time Johnny Rotten was in there and he stepped on this waitress’s foot. And she was going, like, “Get off of my foot!” and he wouldn’t. And David was walking by and had a glass of something in his hand, and just threw it in his face. [laughter] And, like, David towered over him, and he just jumped back. [laughter] But yeah, he, just in general, he absorbed all his, you know, having fun but everything was sort of a character study as well.

GW: And you actually worked with him. You did some things together, films. Could you talk about that?

TT: Yeah. We were talking about, I had been working on a magazine called Redrum. And David had done a – it was a small magazine that dealt with kind of like horror issues in general and like things happening in the world today, things I would find in the New York Post and whatever was in, like, the group mind of everybody at that time.

GW: Where Evil Dwells? Is that

TT: That relates to it because me and David had been reading that book, The Family, and David had done the Archie comics for a long time. He did it from when he was in school as a kid. He would make these like pornographic drawings, I mean cut-outs, collages, out of Archie magazines that he collected, and he would reassemble them in ways. So there was, in about 1984 or 1985, there were these kids that were in the news all the time. They always referred to them in the papers as “The Satan Teens”. And this one kid had killed a friend, and all of the kids in the town knew about it but didn’t say anything. And kids either liked the kid that did this, or didn’t, but he was like an outsider in high school. His father was the gym teacher and supposedly was a real tough guy and would beat him up and stuff. So he was rebelling against authoritative forms. I mean, it was kind of funny even though it was a murder, it was just these kids on the loose in Long Island in this really normal suburban town, and just everybody’s take on it.

GW: How was it that you actually worked together on Where Evil Dwells?

TT: Well, we got together and started talking – we talked about it a bunch. And David did, the Archie comic was related to the Manson thing, which related to this kid being an outsider with like Satan as like power trip kind of thing. And so we were talking about that, and we got together and said that we should work on a film together. So we at first just started talking about things that would be interesting to put into it. Like, we used the devil, because that empowered the kid, Ricky, because the other kids, like, you know, like, he spooked them out and they didn’t know what to take of him, so he got some power. But the devil symbolizes power. I mean, through history, religion, government, there are millions of people killed in the devil’s name; tortured. So we put on the devil, like, when this kid, he would take PCP a lot, and we had these hallucinations where these different power symbols, people like priests, a military general, a schoolteacher, he’s looking at the TV and he sees the devil appear. And he, as the military general, he hands him this flaming skull, and it’s like he’s getting a sacrament from the devil. And so he’s absorbing this, and he gets a diploma from the devil who is dressed up as, you know, [16:20]

GW: Where did the ideas come from? Did you sort of discuss them and they sort of came out of the discussion? What was his role? What was your role?

TT: Yeah. At first, there was just usually, like over breakfast or coffee or something, we would talk about it, and say, we’d come up with an idea about, like, say, that one. And then we would just both throw in ideas what we could do and what would be funny. Even though it’s a scary subject, humor was a big part of it. And then we got together, there was this other guy, Steve Brown, who was an old-time friend of David’s. We started writing like a treatment for the film Where Evil Dwells. And we did it like three consecutive nights, we just spent the whole evening writing. And after, I think, the second one, Steve got like [laughing] scared of it, and he said, “I don’t want to be involved in this. You guys are laughing about things you shouldn’t be laughing at.” [laughing] And so me and David finished it. And as it went along, we had a rough treatment. And we, as we were filming, it kept changing; we’d think of new things. And we did this hell scene and we put up all of these – we found this -- it was great; David found it. It was in Williamsburg, back when it was kind of desolate, and there was this abandoned factory along the water, and it tied in perfect with David’s imagery. It had a locomotive engine inside of it. So we had these guys from Survival Research build these bombs, like, we just made it really hellish. We tied people to the locomotive tracks and had this scary guy driving the locomotive. And we put up fliers around Thompkins Square Park; we made this big list like: Come be in Hell in our movie. We’ll provide shuttle buses. Come as a priest, an alien frog, a naked weightlifter, a clown. I mean, just all kinds of ridiculous stuff. And we made this big list, and like, we were cracking up just making the list. [laughter] And some of the best people were people that just showed up that knew nothing about the film, that just like were standing there.

GW: And then who would do the shooting and the editing and the audio track, and the?

TT: We usually had about – because some of those things, because we broke into the warehouse, and like we heard the next day that Port Authority police were there. And the survival Research guys went there to do some promo stills for their own group, and there were these cops going, “Do you know what went on here yesterday?” And they were like, “No, I don’t know.” [laughter]

GW: So was it like an 8 mm film?

TT: Super 8. So a lot of the shoots could only happen one time. Luckily Super 8 was cheap, or cheap-er. Now it’s not cheap at all. But we would usually have, like, a bunch of our friends had cameras, so we would usually have about five or six cameras shooting from different angles. So me and David would, you know, like, in a big scene, I would shoot this, and then we’d kind of wander through and shoot. The audio, we had a deck to do sync sound for the film, and so during dialogue scenes, we recorded the sound which was supposed to be in there, but I had a fire which destroyed a lot of that sound. So me and David just went and got a 4-track tape recorder and watched the film. We edited it. We stayed up -- for the Where Evil Dwells trailer, Tessa Freeland was putting on her film festival, the New York Film Festival Downtown, and she wanted us to premiere it there. And, so, it was by no means done; we still had a lot of scenes to shoot. But me and David stayed up for, like, a week just editing stuff. My house just had these strings with film all over it. We would take things and we were just messing around with it, like scratching the film and putting pieces in upside down.

GW: Did you work with storyboards, or was there any kind of planning it out, or was it more organic?

TT: There were no storyboards. We planned out scenes. We’d go to a location and we would plan out, we’d get the actors that we needed and the location, and rough out what we were going to do, but there was a lot of room for improv, which, a lot of the best stuff was improv. So, what else? [23:53]

GW: Did you work on other films? Did you work on Fire in My Belly at all, or any of that?

TT: No. We had traveled to Mexico together at that time, and he used the stuff that he shot by himself.

GW: So he did a lot of shooting for Fire in My Belly in Mexico, obviously, on those trips.

TT: Yeah. I think he did, like, all of it. I guess there’s some found pieces, but most of it was just stuff that he shot while walking around.

GW: What was that like, walking around with him while he was shooting?

TT: Oh, it was funny. Like, one day, we were like, “What are we going to do today?” And he said, “I want to see a bear riding a tricycle.” [laughter] So we were like, “All right. Where do we start?” So we started looking up little circuses and stuff, trying to find – it was before the Internet. [laughing] So we were just asking people, and, like, he didn’t speak any Spanish. Mine was really __[25:11] But [laughing] trying to visually mime doing a bear riding a tricycle. [laughter] And we ended up finding some little circuses, and David used a lot of that for Fire in My Belly.

MT: What was it about Mexico? What drew him back there?

TT: I think it was, when we went there, it was right after they had had a monstrous earthquake and Mexico City was in a shambles at that time. So it had a lot of urban decay, and it was an extreme, like people with no legs breathing fire going up to cars. I mean, you see, panhandlers like the homeless guy who’s washing your windshields in New York, but in Mexico it is way more extreme from the desperation. And he liked the landscapes. When we went to the pyramids, he was more interested in the land around the pyramids than the pyramids themselves, like, all the stuff that he shot with the ants on various objects. So everybody was, like, walking up, sweating, going up the pyramid, and [laughing] David’s sitting with fire ants, putting clocks and Jesuses on the ant holes.

GW: Did he say anything about why he was doing that?

TT: No, I mean, I knew. I mean, the people there were like, “Crazy gringo.” [laughing] But I knew a lot of his symbolism and liked it, so I knew he’d make something cool out of it.

MT: It’s been one of my thoughts, and I don’t know if it’s true or not, that he abandoned that film at some point, And then he gave a bunch of footage to Rosa von Praunheim that ended up in Silence=Death. Do you know anything about that?

TT: No, not really.

MT: It’s sort of a mystery to all of us what happened there. We’ve got a cutting script for it that includes sections that were removed and then given to Rosa. And so we have all of these different versions of it. I think it’s probably lost in time. We’ll never be able to quite know what happened, and it’s fascinating. Because it’s a great film, just to think about what he was doing, and then the interesting history of how we ended up with three or four different versions of it.

TT: Right, and three or four different sound tracks.

GW: So you never talked to him about any of that, or you don’t have any memories.

TT: I just remember him telling me that he got a lot of good footage that he wanted to do something with and was putting it together, which became that.

GW: And how did he show his films?

TT: Well, we showed at underground festivals. And the one that he did with Richard Kern.

GW: Which one was that? Do you remember the name?

TT: You Killed Me First. And that one was, I think that was mostly David’s idea, but it was shown in this gallery that James and Marguerite had, Ground Zero. David set up this whole dinner table which was a recreation of what was happening when the girl kills her family. It’s the dinner table aftermath, with them sitting there, and he had these skeletons dressed up as the people in the film. And there was a big turkey that he let just rot, that was in there. And the film showed on a little screen behind the table, and it was in the back of the gallery. They built this wall; it looked like a wall to one of the tenements, with, like, a broken window. And you had to peep through the window to watch the film over the scene that was recreated from the film. But to get there, it was really dark. There was probably like one red light bulb in the front. And he threw in all this garbage, like, he had this whole crew of people driving around; I mean, I helped grab stuff. We would just drive around to these lots and just grab hubcaps and whatever stuff we found.

GW: And you said he showed at film festivals. Were there also performances where film was shown?

TT: Mmmm; no.

GW: So they were always shown in formal or semi-formal festivals?

TT: I’m trying to remember. Me and David did this one; I’m trying to remember if we showed a film. I kind of think we did. David was just standing there. I was dressed up like a little kid in pyjamas playing with this bear that David loaded with all of these guts from animals. And he’s reading these headlines from, like, the New York Post. And he just collected news bits from here and there. So I’m, like, just being playful, playing with the bear. I can’t remember; it wasn’t Where Evil Dwells that we showed but I think there was something; I don’t remember what. And then as he’s reading his monologue, I’m getting more and more wanting to get at the bear, and I start tearing it and pulling guts. And there were bags of blood inside of it, so I was just, like, covered in blood in pyjamas at the end. But, you know. Yeah, the __[33:31] really, we showed it at a couple of underground festivals and we didn’t do any performances at those.

TT: Do you have any thoughts that -- people are starting to show his work now more and more, and it’s being shown at the Smithsonian, and MoMA and the Whitney. And I guess I’m a little bit concerned that it shifts the meaning of the piece when it’s shown in a museum with white walls as opposed to within warehouses or the kind of places that it might be shown downtown.

TT: Yeah, it kind of, yeah, it definitely does. It looks odd. [laughter] To say the least.

GW: What are your thoughts about that?

TT: I don’t know how he would have felt about that.

GW: He did want to succeed in the art world.

TT: He wanted to succeed, but he had, like, a love-hate relationship. Like, when I first met him, also, like, I would go out and watch for cops for him while he would do these stencils, and he hit all the big galleries. This is before anybody knew who he was or anything. Like, all the big galleries in Soho, he’d spray-paint right underneath the name, like, he did this burning house with a jet crashing into it image. And he hit all of them. And then, like, one night after we did this, he was really depressed. He was going, “Oh, now I’m never going to get a show. [groaning] Oh.” [laughter] And I was like, “Well what the fuck do you do that for?” [laughter]

GW: __[35:47][laughter]

TT: But I mean, he hit all the big galleries. He didn’t like the mass-produced showing of, like, the art in, I don’t know, like.

GW: Is there anything you would want to tell a future curator or someone that wanted to exhibit his work, that you just feel that they ought to know, someone in 20 years, maybe, that’s thinking: I want to do an exhibition of David Wojnarowicz?

TT: Well he did a show at Gracie Mansion, and he was getting so fed up with her. He did the show, but he had this little guy. He didn’t do it all the way. I think it just became this spider that he painted. But he wanted to have this spider, which was Gracie Mansion, with this like bulb in the ball of the skeleton, in the abdomen, like have like a little fan with all of these dollar bills circling around [laughter __ 37:10] over this little man __. He wanted to have it in the window and have her not know that it was her. [laughter] __ So, I mean, like, [laughter]

GW: He was always playing with – he had a complicated relationship with the art world.

TT: [laughing] Yeah; definitely.

MT: You know, something nobody talks about is the humor, really, like this, I mean, there’s a lot of humor.

TT: Yeah, no, but even that, like, he was really mad but he made it into something funny.

MT: Right, yeah. Yeah. That dark sense of humor.

TT: Yeah. I mean the humor was a big, I mean, I guess a lot of people -- like you were saying, it being shown in a big white room, it’ll just look so stark in that room. If it’s in a dingy wall where it’s dark, I think that the humor would come out more from the environment.

GW: That’s a really good point. So if humor is part of the work, and that sort of environment or context is part of the work, to try to recreate that in a white cube space means you’re missing some of what the work is; right?

TT: Yeah, because to look at it, the white wall, the screen of , like, you know, if you’re just looking at it, it looks really harsh, and if you’re not paying attention, the humor could go over your head, because all the scariest stuff, a lot of it’s jokes. [laughter]

GW: It sends the wrong message, in a way.

TT: Mm-hm; mm-hm. Yeah.

GW: Is there anything else you can think of, remembering him and how he wanted his work to be portrayed or experienced or shown?

TT: [pause] Not really, I mean, he was kind of particular about it. This was some gallery that – I guess that was Gracie Mansion, too. He said he would get calls, and he would throw out his -- like one time, I went with him. He had to confirm that it was his work, because when he started getting known, people would go through his garbage. And it was like doodling for him, but he would do it, like, on a big log and make a snake out of it or something. But he threw it in the garbage. He didn’t want it to be representative of his work. So he threw it out, and then he’d get called in, “Is this yours?” I knew right away it was his. And he’s like, “No, I never saw that.” So what was shown – he wanted something to be presented in a particular way.

GW: Could you describe that a little bit? Or, wat do you mean by that?

TT: Well, I think that the environment was – the Ground Zero show, I think that that – like, the same reasons that he went to Mexico to be, like, all enmeshed in the lifestyle. I think that his work should, he wanted to come out of that, like an organic form coming out of where it originated. Like, he did an installation in some people’s house; that’s another one where he got garbage and stuff and brought it in to some art collector that wanted David to do – do you know that piece?

MT: I don’t think so.

TT: Because I think that they want -- like, I don’t see how anybody could recreate it. If you took it down – like, he built it into this room in their house. It was like this big mountain with these caves, and there was all this stuff in there. And they had Christmas-tree lights so you could look all around it. But it was all garbage from, like, all over the place. And he built it in there. And, like, he got a kick out of, like, bringing all of this garbage into this nice townhouse, like, on the Upper East Side or something like that. [laughter] And have all his friends unload his station wagon, walking in all dirty into this house, carrying garbage. [laughter]

GW: Somebody should have videoed that.

TT: I know. [laughter]

GW: Well, okay. If you can think of anything else that we should know,

TT: Yeah, if I think of something I’ll

GW: Do you have any final questions for Tom?

MT: No, this has been great. Thank you.

TT: Good.

MT: It’s really helpful.

GW: Well, thank you very much for your time.

TT: I’ll e-mail you if I think of something that pertains to what we were speaking of.

GW: That would be great. Thank you.

TT: Sure.

MT: Super. It’s good to see you.

TT: You too.

MT: This is a great project.

TT: Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing how it comes out.

End Tommy Turner 052016 at 43:50