Interview with Van Cook and Romberger by Glenn Wharton and Marvin Taylor on 5-11-2016

David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base

Interview with Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger

By Marvin Taylor and Glenn Wharton

May 11, 2016

 

GW: Today is May 11th, 2016. I’m Glenn Wharton, here with Marvin Taylor and Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger. We’re here to discuss their knowledge of David Wojnarowicz. Why don’t we get started by discussing your gallery, Ground Zero. Perhaps you could just tell us a little bit about the history of the gallery, and then how you worked with David at the gallery.

JR: When Marguerite had a rehearsal studio on Avenue A and 11th Street, right next to Anton Van Dalen’s studio, when I met Marguerite she had the space. And one of the early times just after I met Marguerite she said, “Oh, have a walk around the corner and go look at this little gallery and maybe show them your work,” because I had some small pastel drawings. So I walked around the corner with my roll of stuff, and there was Civilian Warfare,and it was very early on in their history and I – you had said, “Speak to Dean,” I think. But it was Greer Lankton’s show in there, which blew my mind. And there was a guy in there, and he’s like this tall, lanky guy. And I said, “Is Dean here?” And he goes, No, he’s not here.” And he was like hacking away at this sort of like totem pole thing. He had this real deep, grumbly voice, and he’s like, “Dean’s not here.” I said, “Well, I wanted to show him this work.” He goes, “Well I’ll look at it.” And so I rolled all of these things out, and he was, like, very positive. He was like, “Yeah, Dean should give you a show,” like right away. And I did actually go back when Dean was there, and he said, “Oh yeah, we’re going to give you a show,” but I actually never did it. It was, like, I could have shown at Civilian, but I just didn’t.

VC: That was David, just to add.

JR: But it was David, and that was my first introduction to him. However, I had actually seen his work earlier, when I went with a girlfriend I had before I even met Marguerite, went to the opening of the, it was like an opening and closing of the Pier. So I remember, it was like an event; everybody’s like, you know, champagne glasses and high heels in this rubble. And I remember David’s mural in there with the cow, and that comic strip that he did on there. It actually struck me, the power of that particular work, even as raw as it was. It was like obviously somebody that had a potent kind of voice already.

GW: Well, you know, maybe we should go back. Did you actually ever have a gallery before?

JR: No, that was our first gallery. What happened was, we did a show called The Acid Test at this little gallery. We started living together, and we

VC: We were doing curations,

JR: We did early shows at Danceteria.

VC: And we had decided to just call ourselves Ground Zero, and we had a comic book of the same name that we were working on, which we were placing in different magazines in different places. And Ground Zero seemed to be an appropriate name for the gallery, being as we felt that we were the epicenter of something that was both destructive and productive: New York.

JR: I mean, what happened was, we did that Acid show, and we did club shows, and then we did, we had this gossip columnist crashing with us for a little while, Tony Heiberg that wrote for the East Village Eye. And I had seen this little gallery, Sensory Evolution. I went, “Oh, what a cool name.” And I was talking to Marguerite while Tony was in earshot, and he said, “We should do and Acid show in Sensory Evolution.” Because it was, like, the right name. Well then Tony printed it in his gossip column that we were going to do a show. [laughter] And actually, the guy that ran it had already kind of blown me off. I tried to show him work and he didn’t care to even look at it. And I was kind of like, “Whatever.” But then, I ran into him on the street and he goes, “Oh, I saw the gossip column; you guys can do that for one night.” So we put the show up, and actually, we put Dean, Dean Savard actually was a painter himself, and we asked him for a piece for the show. And so when we had this fantastic opening – it kind of entered into legend because Martin Wong took too much acid at the show, and like, gave away his semaphore paintings. This is a well known story. Barry had to go buy them back from the junkies on Avenue B. But, after the show, Dean was so thrilled that we had put him in this show – and nobody else had ever asked him to be in a show, in all this time. And so he was thrilled to death to be in the show, and he said, “We’re moving Civilian Warfare to this new improved space.” And he knew that we were actually looking for a place to live. He goes, “You guys can have my old gallery.” So we actually moved into there with the intention of just living there.

VC: He gave us the keys at 3:00 in the morning. [laughter] __[4:50]

JR: And we were like living in the back. We kind of went, “You know what? Since we’re living here, we might as well just open the front for a gallery.” So we just opened it up, and I did a little show of my own stuff.

GW: Could you describe the space?

JR: A very tiny little

VC: It’s a long, narrow space, with a turquoise painted front, which, it had David’s banner up on the

JR: Oh, and it had his stencils on the window, of the burning house.

VC: And we liked the stencils, and so we added to them, which was, so, there was a sense of collaboration. And yeah, we put up a curtain at the back. And this long, narrow space, we just used for a gallery. And at some point, Dean had not paid the electric bill, and the people upstairs ran the line down for us.

JR: We had an extension cord running down from upstairs. [laughter]

VC: I think, you know, it’s sort of speaking to the zeitgeist of the galleries. Even though we did the show at Sensory Evolution, Stephen Styles didn’t want to look at James’s slides, and different to the situation at Civilian Warfare, whose name we also liked, that, one, David was sitting in the middle of a gallery show hacking away on a piece of wood. So there was nothing sacrosanct about the gallery environment. Two, when James walked in, they just happily unrolled the work on the floor. And three, that Dean was just so willing to give us the keys when he left. [laughter]

GW: It sounds like you’re not ordinary curators here, that you were working with artists in new ways or very different ways than the standard curator would.

VC: Yes, I think that’s fair to say.

JR: Well, when we were doing the Danceteria things, we’d have to do – one of the first shows we did was called The East Village Look Again. It was like another show they had done previously, the year before, I guess. But when we did it, we actually went around to every single – there was like a hundred galleries, so we went to each one and asked them for a piece to put in the show. And in this way we actually got to know almost everybody in the scene very, very quickly. And we had already lived in the neighborhood for a while, but we weren’t really involved in that scene. Marguerite was in rock and roll, and

VC: And when a few people wouldn’t let us have pieces, which again, sort of, you know, these are very long-term relationships that have stayed in place – you didn’t give us a piece for that show 30 years ago, you’re not allowed, not in the same zeitgeist, mindset, that we’re in. But, so, at that point, we invited some curators to also curate into this show, so it became the most – Carlo [McCormick] wrote about it -- overly democratic show in the world. [laughing]

JR: Robert Costa curated a show at our place, and he wrote a brilliant press release, which actually, when he sent it out, Grace Glueck from the Times got it and loved it, just the idea of it. She rode down on her bicycle and then wrote a review of our very first show in our gallery and put in on the front of the Sunday Arts and Leisure. Which was like __. [7:50] And our friend Calvin’s [Reid] piece from the show was the image on the front of the Sunday Times. It was like, What?! But also then I did a show of my own, and actually, David – I didn’t know David that well, but he came to my first show and brought Peter Hujar with him. And I was thrilled, because I had actually, before I even got to New York, I found that book of Peter’s, and I went, ‘This guy is, like, the greatest living photographer’ for the Portraits in Life and Death, my mind was blown. So when David brought him, I was like, ‘Oh my god, he brought Peter Hujar!’ I was just thrilled to death.

GW: So curators might come in and co-curate. Did artists also sort of curate? Did they work with other artists?

VC: No. A bit. We were very

JR: We let Peggy __ do one and Robert Costa do one.

VC: Oh, you’re right, we let Peggy Cyphers curate a show.

JR: That was about it for that.

VC: But mainly, we worked with artists to the extent that – so, going to the idea of the gallery, that we were very keen to have a space that would allow for installation work, because there wasn’t anywhere to do it. There were the clubs, but to have it in a gallery situation, and also just, I wanted to offer people the opportunity to really push the work to the most farther limit that they had thought possible, And a lot of times our artists would be concerned that we were going to say no. And of course, [laughing] we always said, “No, no, no; you’re not going far enough. Please go a little farther.” So, one of our early shows at the Civilian Warfare space was this guy Robert Parker, who put a ladder, who actually put a campfire in the middle of the gallery. We seem to have had a lot of fire in the gallery, now that I think about it. And so this big wooden structure, and he was into metalwork and forges, but he was also a conceptualist. And he put coal around the whole edges of the gallery.

JR: Right; he forged those huge railroad spikes and hammered them in the wall with like red paint coming out, looking like they were bleeding into like a stigmata on the wall.

VC: Yes. So it was a very – I don’t know what , you know – so it was very interesting because

JR: I think it was your bent more. Marguerite is much more versed in conceptual art than I am. I mean, I may be more pragmatic in terms of materials, like, I want people to draw or whatever, but we totally wanted to push people in terms of content matter and the idea of Ground Zero, like, this is the place where people should do the most intense work. But then Marguerite also would very much push them to transform the space to be a site-specific thing reflecting the most pure statement they could make and not necessarily to sell. We did a lot of kind of unsaleable installations.

VC: And it was an interesting thing that some people, some artists, responded well to that. And others found it very difficult to move from a piece of wall art. And there was a – we had a – the idea -- James always gets upset about his own work going into galleries and being on the wall for a limited audience, but then going to somebody’s home even before anybody’s even seen it. So we wanted to move away somewhat also from that sort of idea of the prestige of the wall piece, but I also wanted it very much to be, to reexamine actually what that means, to create a piece of work. So, we had become quite close to David at a certain point, and he was obviously the ideal character to do that. And he was feeling constrained. He had been showing I think with Gracie [Mansion] at that point.

JR: They were very much trying to make him do -- his dealers wanted him to do saleable wall pieces. And that’s their focus because that’s what they’re in business for, and they’re spending a lot of money. At that time, there was like people spending a lot of money for full-page ads in ArtForum or whatever, and it’s a substantial. The rent started going up, especially with the advent of these kind of neo-geo guys. The gentrification of the East Village had gotten to the point where the storefronts were really getting much more expensive. The galleries were expanding, getting bigger, like Dean moving to a bigger Civilian Warfare. All of a sudden, now he’s got this overhead, and the advertising, and all this stuff going on. It wasn’t really Dean trying to make him more commercial. I think they actually were gone by that time. I think it was when he was starting to do a deal with Gracie a little bit.

VC: Yeah.

GW: And so maybe you could tell us s little more about your early relationship with David and how you discussed and negotiated works that you would install in the gallery.

JR: What happened is, he came in when Marguerite was pregnant and he’d heard that we were broke in the back with no electricity, and he gave Marguerite a check for like, a substantial chunk of money. He said, “Oh, I just did an auction for Life Café.

VC: Well, it was substantial to us.

JR: And then goes, “They gave me half the money.” He says, “I’m giving money to a café.” He goes, “I heard you guys __.” [13:10] He just gave us the half of the money. And I was like, oh my god. I gave him painting for that.

VC: This is also based on, well one, I was pregnant, and two, we were doing this completely – this gallery could not possibly make any money. [laughing] So he was there to support that, as well. But we had moved around the corner. Unfortunately Dean’s relationship with the landlord had completely disintegrated and we couldn’t actually continue to pay the rent.

JR: It was through his lease.

VC: Yeah, we couldn’t. So that sort of fell apart. So we moved around the corner into a much nicer space on Thompkins Square Park and Tenth Street.

JR: But that wasn’t – he gave us the money when we were still in the Civilian __

VC: Yes, that was early, early on.

JR: It’s strange because I gave him a painting, I felt so intense, like, he gave us this money. So I gave him a painting I did of __[13:57] and I think it must be somewhere here in the collection, although I’m not seeing it listed.

GW: Well what were his thoughts about exhibiting his works? Did you work to sort of push him a little bit further as well?

JR: The first piece he gave us was actually for the Acid show, and that was a collaboration with Marion.

VC: Right. With Kikki Smith?

JR: That thing with the upside-down photo.

VC: That was the three of them.

JR: Well, it was Marions’ photo of Kikki Smith with a skeleton overlaid on the face, and that was under a little doorway with a fence on it. But then there was another thing that was like a hand cutting meat with a map. So that was the first piece we showed.

MT: We have a slide of that.

VC: And our first curations very often were, we covered the walls underneath. So they were already hanging on work. So there was already this energy happening.

JR: It was your installation really that we hung the work on top of, for that show.

VC: But people did pieces.

JR: But then when we did move around the corner to Tenth Street and we were like: Okay, now we’re going to do a formal year, and we had a backer that was helping us pay the rent. And then David said, “I would love to do a show with you guys.” So at that point, that’s when he started adjusting the whole thing with Richard Kern to do that. [15:20] And you pushed him to do an installation.

VC: Yeah. I used to go to breakfast with him a lot. So, disclosure, I was in this all-girl rock band, well, one guy in the band. And we had toured with The Clash. So this was obviously, at that moment, something that this is of interest, and I can still play in the band,

JR: And David Loved The Clash. He’s got that, the cover of one Clash album is in that big train painting, so we know that he loved Give ‘Em Enough Rope. He loved that.

VC: So the band was also political, punk; it’s already another energy. So we used to go and talk a lot. And ironically, I’m just finishing my French PhD, but at that time I was talking about Roland Barthes and a lot of that, the idea of mythologies, his book Mythologies, and coming off the wall and breaking the concept of what art was. And I was sort of disturbed by conceptual art that had just become so sterile. Because I guess it’s sort of like the old, you know, the old quarrel, it’s like reason against passion, and how do you get the two together was sort of, can we get the two together? Can we do this? Can we recreate narrative as opposed to break it apart?

GW: And so David was right in there with you as you were discussing these ideas.

VC: Yes; yes.

JR: He had done a couple installations. He did one at 51X.

VC: Yes.

JR: That was an underground space, and I remember it had some of those babies crawling around with the maps on them. Then he also did something at the Anchorage that had some of his skeletons in a tableau. But what he was going to do for us was a much more kind of coherently orchestrated.

GW: Could you describe that first exhibit?

VC: Yeah, um.

GW: Do you remember it well enough?

JR: Which?

GW: The one you said you did the first exhibit with David, or that he – maybe I misunderstood you.

VC: You Killed Me First.

JR: The one that we did, well that was the Acid show.

VC: No, no, no; the first gallery show with David.

JR: The first installation show that he had, we didn’t do that show. That was 51X.

VC: No, no, no; at our gallery, they’re asking about.

GW: The first show that you did with David at your gallery.

JR: The first show we did there, You Killed Me First. Okay; we’re just getting to that.

VC: Get to it; get to it now.

JR: Yeah, yeah; okay. Well, he basically worked with Richard Kern to make a film about this young punk girl that gets a lot of flak from her family and kills them all at Thanksgiving dinner. So, she, the girl was played by this young Lung Leg, she called herself.

MT: We actually have a manuscript of her; she was trying to put together a book of her poetry.

JR: Oh, yeah, yeah; I remember she showed us her poetry. Karen Finley played the mother, David played the father. And then David kind of co-wrote the script to the point that he definitely based the father on his own father, who had like pulled a gun on his mother at dinner once. He was kind of a sailor, kind of an alcoholic sailor guy. Anyway, he was, according to David, a very abusive character. So David focused a lot of his performance on recreating this guy. Anyway, David plays the father, he like chops the girl’s rabbit, I mean, just a whole succession of events happens in this film that drives this girl to the point of killing her family. Well; what he did then, they had the film made, and they came in, and what we had, the gallery on Tenth Street was another long kind of railroad space, deep and narrow. And there was a back room clearly demarked, like with a wall. So the gallery itself is quite deep. It had been the Limbo Lounge before. It had like this stone floor. And in the middle of the space they built a cement-block wall with just one window in it with like broken glass. And in the front, David painted “24 hours No Parking” and some fake graffiti on it. They strewed garbage and like brought all kinds of

VC: Which they got a lot of from, they went across the road to the park and collected dead leaves.

JR: At the time the park was really a garbage dump.

VC: And it was real garbage.

JR: And dog shit and everything; I mean, it really was a mess.

VC: [laughing] A special moment for us.

JR: Inside the room, there was just enough room – it was like a small room at the end. When you looked in through the broken window what you saw was a kitchen table,

VC: Dining table.

JR: With like a Thanksgiving feast, which over the months rotted progressively. And they seated three skeletons around the table. And they were David’s things with kind of flesh, you know, like the Walking Dead, the way they have the Walking Dead skeletons now. But at the time, it was like, you’d see a little bit of David’s kind of maps that were glued onto the skeletons, creeping up, but mostly rotted, bloody flesh and clothing. And like, you know, the one figure was like the sister and then the mother, and then on the right side was the father, with his head – which was David. So he’s actually making his own rotted body there. And the blood splattered all over the walls, which was actually real pig’s blood. So boy, I’ll tell you, by the end of the month, this was a very ripe, frickin’ smell on this thing. And in the corner of the room was a little TV monitor which played the film on a loop. So believe me, over the months, we memorized that thing; you know?

VC: “Why don’t you rip it up and write ‘Motherfucker’ on it?” That was just going, with Karen Finley’s voice, very strident.

JR: I mean, it’s a very potent thing. As you came in, it was quite dark, so people were intimidated coming into this room. And then you’d have to intentionally navigate quite a ways down to see the broken window, and then you’d see this horrific scene.

GW: Did he have anything to say about the lighting? Did he want it to be dark?

JR: Oh yeah, it was all the way he wanted it.

VC: Oh yes; totally.

JR: There was actually a little tape recorder in the corner with a foghorn noise. It was definitely intimidating __[21:25]

VC: The lighting, there was a blue light on the No Parking. And it wasn’t lit, so essentially it was a dark room with a blue light coming across onto the No Parking.

JR: If you were opening the door, coming in from the light, it was like: Shit, this looks like a really frickin’ alley.

VC: It was really very dark and it looked like an alley. And a lot of people didn’t get any further than just coming into the front.

JR: Yeah.

GW: So he really could control every aspect of the installation, right? It was all his idea.

VC: Oh yes.

JR: Absolutely.

VC: Yes; absolutely.

GW: Did you have any signage or announcing the __?

JR: Well, in the front it says “Ground Zero” on the window. I mean it’s clearly and we’d have the door propped open.

GW: Any explanation of the work on the wall?

JR: No.

VC: No.

GW: Would he have wanted something like that?

JR: No.

VC: No.

GW: No.

JR: No idiot-proofing __. [22:10 laughing] If you have the courage to go in there and look at this thing, that’s it.

VC: Yes.

JR: And I think we did do an ad in the East Village Eye for it.

VC: And did you know, I mean, what was so interesting about this was, and I guess this is why we got on so well, we actually enjoyed the fact that people came in and were terrified. Now this is really about taking it to the next level of like, what does it mean to have a gallery, and what does it mean to be an art viewer, and what does it mean to participate in the experience of a piece of art? So here you are and you come in and, as we said, people didn’t even get in the door; they’d just open the door and freak out.

JR: It really is a crime scene.

VC: And leave. Yes, it was very bloody.

JR: And people were not so inured to the idea of like the kind of Walking Dead thing like they are now. That was really like, Oh my god! And it smelled. And it was like: This shit looks real.

VC: And when you got down to the end of the room, which was quite a long way down,

JR: Yeah; it was a long ways down.

VC: And you had picked your way through this garbage, and all of this, this is a small window. So it’s what, about 24 by 24?

JR: So only like two or three people could see it at once.

VC: People had to crowd in to be able to see it. So there was even a confrontational moment as you tried to see through this window. And also people weren’t sure that they were supposed to be looking through this window. So this idea of privacy and the public sphere is also addressed there. And personal space in a darkened, scary environment, so there’s some jostling to try and see it, and then try and navigate whether you should be looking around. And then this noise going, and then, all of a sudden, here’s the foghorns going. And it’s very overwhelming. And then, the film itself is quite aggressive, and David humping Karen Finley like and her screaming at the top of her lungs.

JR: It’s just awful.

VC: Really, oh my god, you know.

GW: This is extreme.

VC: It was very extreme.

GW: So how would you sort of characterize his thoughts, if you can remember, or if you know, about, I mean the difference between say exhibiting in the Pier, exhibiting or doing street art, exhibiting in your gallery, and maybe exhibiting in a more white-cube space?

JR: Well we definitely, it was making, I mean, you know, other people were trying to get him to do more of painting paintings. He did give us a piece for the back room which is one of his posters from Buenos Aires, so we had a piece to sell, and we did sell it to Corrado Levi. So that was, it kind of offset at least some of our expenditure for that month. But he also did mention that he was somewhat slightly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s last piece that’s in Philadelphia there, where it’s like the peep show through the window. So there was a certain aspect of that, the voyeurism. And there’s even a sequence of voyeurism in our book, the Seven Miles a Second, in the first section where David’s peeping through the hole of the door. So this is a recurring motif in the work.

VC: I had actually spoken to David a little bit about – and I’ve spoken about this before, but it just occurred to me, A rebours, you know, the Huysmans book, and just the idea of having, creating fake environments and voyeurism and that whole thing. And there was another book by Henri Barbusse called l’Enfer, that we spoke about, which it happens, I think he wrote it in Algeria, but there’s a man who is watching everything through a wardrobe as everything unfolds in the next room. So, you know, these are definitely

JR: Isn’t there also a sequence in the Proust.

VC: Yes, there’s a sequence in the Proust. I didn’t mention the Proust at that time because I hadn’t read the whole Proust at that time; thank you very much.

JR: It’s there in all the greats. [laughter]

MT: I’ve always wondered, and I’ve never known this, just how much theory and how much literature did David read? Because his work seems so inflected by critical theory.

JR: He was quite widely read. I mean, there was a lot of stuff kicking around his apartment.

VC: Later on, of course, he was reading Foucault.

MT: Oh, okay. Well that certainly makes sense.

VC: That makes, you know – but that wasn’t until quite a lot of people who suddenly came to Foucault at that moment.

MT: Yes.

VC: But we certainly spoke about Roland Barthes, who had been very key.

JR: The more he wrote the more he read, I think. He was becoming very well read.

VC: And I know that he loved Against Nature, I mean, loved it, of course, of course.

MT: That makes perfect sense, too.

VC: Yes, and he had been reading

JR: Well, Marguerite definitely aimed him at that.

VC: So he had been reading around that sort of outsider topics and I think probably Camus __[26:35]

JR: Well that whole show that he did at the end of the flowers was definitely influenced by the A rebours conversations that he had with Marguerite.

VC: Yeah, I think.

JR: The flowers as a very fertile image of decay and all the stuff going on __.

VC: Decaying __ity, you know, all of that stuff. And you know, I mean, who doesn’t love that book? The __ book? It’s the best.

MT: Yes; exactly.

VC: And we totally enjoyed the whole conversations around that, and what that means. So I think he was theoretical. I think he was starting to read theory. I know he loved literature and was a good reader, was a strong reader.

JR: I mean that’s actually, I think some of the influence he had from his mother, even though he kind of, he portrayed himself as quite the waif. But there was a place where, and you can see, because I remember looking at the show that you had here at the library, where he’s talking back and forth to his mother, and they were close, to a point. And she was having him read certain types of things. She was an intelligent and read woman. So, I mean, there was more connection there than sometimes he showed later on.

MT: Because we have his library, but I was never sure what was his and what was Peter’s, in the library, because they both came from the loft. And so that’s – but this is really helpful in understanding.

JR: Well Peter certainly would have shown him things and said, read; look at this; look at this. And that’s what that was; that’s something that different people have told me, that the relationship was, Peter was not really a romance so much as it was very much like a mentor and the young follower. Like, Peter taught David. And he stopped, David was never a junkie. Peter disapproved so strongly when David dabbled with any kind of drugs; David stopped; that was it. And he listened to Peter. So that was, that’s a key relationship but it’s not really a romantic relationship.

MT: Tom has said that, that in the beginning, they may have tricked a bit, but it became something very different.

JR: Yeah.

VC: Yes. I mean, so, you know, I’m talking about, with this installation, I mean, we had talked about all of those ideas. So they were on the table. It wasn’t as if a completely naïve, I mean, I think that goes back to the idea of what, the sort of rational, cold-bloodedness of the conceptual world as opposed to this incredible exuberant expressionistic punk thing. But this is informed, so that was the conversation, how do you inform that type of consciousness with the production of art, with objects, with an environment? And how do we, you know, and then of course we’re completely revolutionary in our take. And how do we now disrupt the art world? How do we disrupt and fracture this set of structured imperialism? [laughing]

MT: Mm-hm, mm-hm.

GW: You had talked to him about these questions?

VC: Oh yeah. I mean, and who could ever forget the dumping of the meat over at?

JR: Or the cockabunnies? The things that he would do.

GW: Well, maybe you could describe some of the other installations that he did, or some of the art projects.

JR: Well, he did the one where he dumped the cow bones in Leo Castelli’s – it was like bloody cow bones in Leo Castelli’s staircase.

VC: Which he did with Julie Hair; the two of them did that.

JR: Then he did the cockabunnies. He glued little bunny ears on cockroaches and set them loose in the gallery; I don’t remember where that was, but he did things like that.

GW: Were there other major exhibits at your gallery?

JR: The other installations I saw that he did was one in the 51X that I mentioned. I don’t know if there are pictures. I haven’t seen any pictures of that.

MT: Yeah, I didn’t know anything about that.

JR: Usually they were like a painting on the wall with odd objects. And David was very much – he collected crap. And I always remember, I actually added, when I did the second edition of Seven Miles a Second, we added a spread of him driving his car, where it shows that front dashboard. He had all of this crap on the dashboard.

VC: Objets. [laughing]

JR: Little toys and all of this stuff, and I said, “David, if you ever get in a car accident, that stuff’s all going to end up embedded in your forehead.” [laughing] But it was all kinds of stuff. And road kill. He’d find something on the road and he’d put it up there. This is like some grisly stuff. And Popeye and the Flintstones.

VC: But even if he just did a small piece, for example, the crawling babies, you know, and he had done the map babies. And they were chained to the gallery wall on a little platform. So, you know, the baby is trying to leave and it keeps, it’s pulled back with a string.

JR: She had made a, these huge, she got these huge photo murals of the forest or something, and then she painted falling radioactive babies falling through it. And so we put that on the wall, and then David built a little shelf onto that. And he’d buy these little crawling babies down on Orchard Street, they’d have these little crawling babies. And so he’d take those and glue maps to them, and then tether them with a little string around their neck to the thing, so they’re just like crawling on the shelf.

VC: Yes, they were so funny.

JR: Then he had those I remember also in 51X, he was using those at that time, as well.

VC: Yes, I loved the crawling babies.

JR: But he would collect this kind of stuff, you know, and little dried up dead animals, and he just had tons of stuff. Or like he’d go out and buy skeletons. So I was amazed when I saw that recent picture, the installation with the tree. He had a tree in this installation that was the private people’s thing. It was a tree, but he had hanging like fruit, were like five different huge animal skulls, all covered with maps and painted slightly with kind of tribal motifs on them. And so he – I don’t know. It’s quite expensive to go buy these these kind of bone. And I think it’s actually illegal at this point to even get these kind of things. So, I don’t know, but I think for years he was collecting skeletons. He’d go out to the desert and he’d fill up the back of the station wagon with all kinds of smelly old stuff; you know. [laughing]

VC: And I mean, you know, in the first show I saw of his at Civilian, he had one of the globes hanging out from the wall. And there’s a lot of people there, and it’s in motion. And I do think that the kinetic aspect was always attractive to David, that he liked things to move. And he did the installation when they recreated an installation at, um, the New Museum, when it was on Broadway.

JR: Right.

VC: And he had, they had a film going there, with Howdy Doody in it, and actually, Crosby, my son, is one of the babies in that.

JR: Howdy Doody with Koch’s voice going, “How am I doin’? How am I doin’?” You know, like that. [laughing]

VC: And it had Crosby as the baby in some of that stuff, he __[33:32] baby.

GW: What do you think about these reinstallations and reimagining, if it’s a better word?

JR: Well, they’d better do it right if they’re gonna do it, that’s the point.

GW: And how does one do it right?

JR: Well you have to figure out, either find somebody that saw it the way it was, or, you know, I mean, I can remember__[33:47]

VC: But I think as well that the idea -- so, here’s where it gets complicated. The second show he did with us was wall paintings. We could say that, and then he had a piece that had explosives on it, you know, all of these firecrackers. And Joe Coleman standing in front of that with a cigar the entire opening and threatening to blow it up. [laughter] And David did in fact blow it up.

JR: He blew it up in the film, Fire in My Belly. So that’s the piece you see exploding. The portrait of Bishop Landa, and who was the guy who destroyed the Mayan Codexes. So there was a deliberate comment that he made in this thing. But he also had another painting in that show which was the portrait of Tommy Turner.

VC: Oh yes.

JR: But when we showed it, it was this white painting of Tommy with like Frankenstein; Tommy’s Dream, it’s called. So it was like all these monsters surrounding Tommy, who was going into withdrawal. He was trying to dry out while he was traveling in Mexico with David. Anyway, when we showed it, it had a stick coming out of the top of the painting; hanging from that was this horrible little Mexican puppet. Well, we still have the Mexican puppet. Nobody ever asked us for it and so now they keep showing this painting without the stick and the Mexican puppet, which was part of the piece. I don’t know who it belongs to, but in the New Museum they never showed it the way it was supposed to be shown.

VC: I think anybody that has to recreate David’s work needs to resist the impulse to make it in good taste.

GW: That’s a good guiding principle.

MT: Mm-hm; mm-hm.

VC: He was so not about good – not making it comfortable; it didn’t need to be this pleasant experience. I mean, this thing was, the puppet’s awful, you know. It’s one of those really awful puppets. [laughing] And I can imagine it would have deterred quite a few people from wanting to own this thing as an object. So,

JR: Well, that’s true. You read my piece about the Smithsonian thing, right? I mean, my differentiation with that, in terms of what was eventually shown in the restored version wasn’t anything like the original. And then people were saying, “Oh no, David wasn’t attacking the Catholic church.” It’s like, bullshit; he was totally attacking the Catholic Church. He saw that as what was actually hurting the Mexican people. And he’s traveling in Mexico, and they’re all like just completely repressed by this engine of the Catholic Church. So yeah, he was definitely attacking it. And so, to say no he wasn’t, to have some kind of like idea like, oh no, we wouldn’t want to attack religion.

VC: I have to say, I actually made stickers after his death. There was, what’s the, Bendel’s – what’s the big department store across from St. Patrick’s? They had window installations of David’s there. And I thought to myself, he would have had a shitfit, excuse my French. But he would not have enjoyed this. This would not have been something

JR: Maybe he would have wanted it there, but he would have wanted something aggressive.

VC: But whatever they did, he would not have enjoyed.

GW: Well, what is it that he wouldn’t have liked about it?

VC: The location? [laughing]

JR: Well, the location would be good if it was saying what he wanted it to say.

VC: It was sort of cute, the way it was handled and it was like.

JR: Was that done after his death?

VC: Yes, it was well after his death. I made stickers of him smashing St. Pat’s, sort of comic, and I went and put a few on the window just to make the point. [laughing]

JR: If that was him, he would have definitely taken that opportunity to make an installation about the Catholic Church, because it’s right there; you know what I mean? That’s where you would do it; you know?

VC: So I mean, that probably, you know, yes, the good taste issue, right there.

JR: And then the place probably would have gone: No, you can’t do that. And it would have lasted for about two days and it would have been canceled. David wasn’t afraid to

VC: And David would have protested his own show. [laughter]

GW: One of the things that I’m worried about and I know Marvin is as well, is that as time goes on, we start to historicize David Wojnarowicz and other artists of the era, and they start to enter museum collections which are white cubes, and so they enter into sort of museum thinking about how do we portray the past. And so there is this desire to recreate the spirit, the environment, but it’s very difficult in a white cube and very difficult, and I think we’re concerned that something about the ethos of the era will be lost.

VC: I think it’s very important to remember that he had a sense of humor. And I think that gets lost so much in the interpretation of his work when it’s recreated. Anecdotally, the show that they had at the New Museum, I happened to run into Kikki Smith. The two of us were standing in front of this thing, and it’s going, “How am I doin’? How am I doin’?” And it was so goofy.

JR: A big, paper maché head, and it was goofy. We went, ‘Boy, that looks like typically half-ass kind of slapped together thing.’

VC: He didn’t always take himself so seriously.

JR: It wasn’t perfect, I mean, for Christ’s sake.

VC: Perfection was not necessary.

JR: We were laughing, we were laughing our asses off.

VC: So I’m laughing and Kikki’s laughing, and this woman came over and told us off. “How dare you!”

JR: How dare you laugh at the Saint David Wojnarowicz. [laughter] I was like, you know, we knew David and __[39:00]

VC: We didn’t say anything, We just looked __ so sorry.

JR: Fricking paper maché is ridiculous. Come on. It looks like he slapped it together with Elmer’s Glue, you know? And there is something when you look at some of those paintings, and as a conservator, right? You’re going to look at, like, we borrowed. Remember when we did the Mumia [?] 911 show and we borrowed a painting of David’s from PPOW, and we were carrying it, and was like, the lathing, he had gotten this cheap-shit lathing that he had framed the thing with, and as I’m picking the thing up, the thing came off in my hand, and it was like: Oh my god, he put like two nails in the side of this goddamn thing. It’s not really secured properly. It’s like, god, he just did it in a hurry and he put it together and he took it to the gallery and that was it. And it wasn’t like __maybe put together the most solid was for the ages; you know?

VC: There were moments when you, for example, the later work is a lot more prepared for conservation, if you like. He, that’s legacy, you know, the big four paintings; that’s legacy work. Those are designed to be, you know, put me in a museum, I need to be kept.

JR: But he was doing that himself. He didn’t have an assistant, I don’t believe.

VC: No, no, no; he never had any kind of assistants.

JR: Physically I don’t know how he did some of that stuff towards the end when he was weakening.

GW: That’s very interesting that you say that. He was at that point thinking of his legacy. And you know, conservators have a lot of tension with this type of art that is meant to be sort of falling apart, meant to stink, meant to be haphazard. And yet, certainly in the museum context, we’re worried about public safety; we’re worried about people knocking things over. We’re worried about, should we clean it; how far should we clean it? Should we somehow stabilize or make it more structurally strong so it actually can survive into the future?

JR: Have you had any problems with like the spray paint starting to crack off, or?

GW: Oh yes.

JR: The maps, how well did he glue those down? And earlier on maybe

GW: These are the kind of questions. Do we allow it to deteriorate and allow present generations to experience it, or do we inject adhesives and do repairs so that it can last into the future?

JR: I think he’d want it to last.

VC: I think he’d want it to last. [laughing] I don’t think there’s an absence of ego in this case.

JR: We have a piece in our storage of this snake that had been in the, it had been the,

VC: Yes, but that, he lavished a lot of care on the painting of that because

JR: Yeah, it needs some restoration.

VC: So there were moments that you know, he is very invested in the painting and you can really see that, and he spends a huge amount of time. Because, you know, frankly, he learned to paint as he went along. In the beginning, he didn’t know as much about painting as he came to learn at the end. And

JR: It’s a shame really, when he just really had started to get it, then.

VC: He had just hit his stride. I mean, he had an innate, he had everything there in place in the mind, the hand, the body, and the sensibility. He was an apprentice to himself, if you will. By the end, he had learned to paint,

JR: You know that last piece he did, the really big elaborate thing? It was in my piece, I link to it. Very elaborate piece with – it was one of his last paintings. This huge thing. I can’t think of the name of it. I could show it to you on line. But it’s accomplished. And it’s just, he really had just gotten it and put all his things together, the montage, the photography, and how to assemble all these things into these beautifully orchestrated things.

VC: I think that sometimes when he worked with the grey and white, he was using photographs and a little bit frightened of using more color in any kind of representational way. So he has a painting __[43:05] because I can’t paint; I don’t know how to paint. So the grey at times has to do with both looking at black-and-white photographs and being a little anxious and wanting to demonstrate that he can draw. So there’s that anxiety that he had of, you know -- I think that a lot of people had it, but -- will I be taken seriously if my craftsmanship is not up to a certain level, and you know, having that push-back because some of the early work was very thrown on. But he was working in this figurative __. Again goes to that same anxiety, same conversation, how does one bridge that gap between the conceptual and what’s the parameters of things being representational and not representational.

GW: So someone who is interpreting this work or curating or conserving his work in the future might also be advised to think about what point in his career he created it. Because you’re describing a certain evolution.

VC: Yes, and anxiety. So, I mean, the anxiety is a really good word to use when you’re thinking about David’s work, in terms of both his own production of anxiety for the viewer, but also his own anxiety during the production of the work and how that informs what he’s doing with that work. So, I mean, we all love the posters from the supermarkets. But that’s a sort of ready-made that covers you. So it picks up some of your anxiety because it’s giving you this background to work on, you know, and they’re among the very young artists at this point. It’s like a massive, you know, self-education process going on.

JR: Well it is a big growth spurt and it’s quite a compressed period of time. So you’re looking at just like a point from like maybe ’77 or something to very early ‘90s, and it all happens in there, so you have like early work and middle period and then later

GW: In a decade. __[45:09]

JR: In a decade, literally. So, yeah, big difference.

VC: Also, we were all doing – there were so many group shows we were producing, what? Literally on a daily, two daily, weekly, to meet these goals.

JR: Yeah. Somebody wants something for a show, so you do it overnight and then it’s there the next day.

VC: And then, you know, the bane of my life, the theme show. [laughing] Which is, there was always a theme in the East Village. So then you would have to step outside of anything you had been thinking about and all of a sudden you’re creating something for the theme show. So that’s sort of another thing that you might think about, that there are these works that seem to be out of place, but that’s because they were part of this conversation that was happening. So there’s a huge amount of conversation and response and back and forth between everybody.

JR: Well also there was a point where, like, I noticed like when we did the second show of David’s, the Mexican Diaries which I only just managed to recently finally get back onto his resume because it had been left off, those were just paintings but, for instance, one of the best ones was this painting called Street Kid of a bandaged hand with coins on it and other stuff in the background, these Mexican Wanted posters. It was a painting but we didn’t sell it and the next time I saw it, it was in the back of Gracie Mansion’s like maybe three or four years later, and he had completely transformed it and painted all of these vines going across it and obscuring some of the original stuff. So he had gotten it back and he got, I’m going to keep going with this. So we have slides of it in its earlier state. And then it exists in this so you might go, “Oh, here’s this painting,” and you go, “Oh shit, there must be another one.” No, it’s not another one; it’s the same painting in two different states.

GW: That’s very interesting.

VC: I mean, I think that goes partly to the question you were asking about conservation, if he would want his work conserved, no question.

JR: Yeah. You don’t want it to fall apart.

VC: However, he was not that precious himself, so he would get it. So just, again, the word “anxiety” you have anxiety about preserving David’s work. [laughing] I would not have that anxiety.

JR: I think he’s important for various reasons. I mean, I don’t know; technically I could compare him to somebody like Art Spiegelman who doesn’t really draw but it’s the structure that’s more important, it’s how they’re putting it together, it’s the ideas that the thing has as a whole. It’s not like, oh, it’s freakin’ Rembrandt. It’s not. It’s like this is a visceral statement and he’s putting it all together and expressing it the way he can. It’s not about being a virtuoso draftsman or something like that.

VC: We were just talking about this the other day, going and buying the blue paint from --Utrecht blue. That was so prevalent in David’s work. It’s a very unique color.

JR: If you want to restore his work, you’d have to use the Utrecht paint. You better go buy Utrecht paint before they go out of business or something, because that’s what he used.

VC: He used to buy the big jars.

JR: That blue, it’s actually called Utrecht Blue. If you don’t get Utrecht blue you can’t restore the freakin’ thing.

VC: I tried to match it when we were in Europe and I couldn’t find it. I had to make it. I had to go and buy some, you know.

JR: Because as I said, we have a piece that needs restoration and we’d have to make sure that we get the right paint.

GW: Are there other materials that he used that you can recall?

VC: Some of the turquoises are just house paint. It was the same paint that was on the front of Civilian Warfare. Right. That was a bought off the shelf.

JR: House paint, the bane of the restoration, of the conservators.

GW: Yes.

VC: Yes.

MT: He used it a lot. We have a lot of it.

VC: But mainly Utrecht, a lot of Utrecht paints.

JR: If it was ever rolled up, when you pull it back out it’s like ___

VC: That Utrecht blue, that’s the blue.

MT: Is that the blue he painted the little monkey skeleton? Do you know the monkey’s head?

VC: Yes.

MT: So that’s it. Because it’s in the Magic Box, and it’s that blue.

VC: Yes, that’s the blue.

JR: It’s the Utrecht blue.

MT: That’s fascinating.

JR: And maybe towards the other end of his career he might have started to use a little better supplies. I don’t know though. David was like an economical guy. Some of the places where we really first bonded with him maybe more was when we did the collaborations when we drove with him to Virginia. And it was like a whole group of us and we were all painting together in a room, and so then we all kind of mixed art supplies. So we had to use some of his paint because we didn’t have any paint, you know, and we were like making a slop over there in the corner.

GW: Could you talk a little bit more about the collaborations? Because I think, you know, since we’re having this conversation for researchers in the future, they inevitably have questions of authorship and questions of how it actually worked between David and other artists. How did it work? Did he often take the lead? Or did other people have an idea and he would jump in?

JR: I don’t think it was really a matter of anybody taking the lead.

VC: I mean, when we did the Virginia trip, which was Marilyn Minter and Christof Kohlhofer were on that.

JR: David West.

VC: David West. Tessa and Carlo were there.

JR: Luis Frangella.

VC: Luis Frangella. Who else?

JR: Now he did works with Luis Frangella where they collaborated quite smoothly on some of those Buenos Aires posters, as a matter of fact. And they’re beautiful, and you couldn’t – I would say it’s almost impossible to say who did what. I saw one of a shanty town. I love it. It’s beautiful. But I can’t actually tell who did what on that. And I watched them working together and they had almost, like, either David was really watching Luis and seeing how his – because Luis had such a beautiful brush line. David’s brush line got better from watching Luis paint.

VC: And Luis you see use a very long brush. I mean, it was so elegant to watch him. So this was just like a pure pleasure to watch this guy paint.

MT: He did those massive things at the piers, as well.

VC: Yes.

JR: Right, he did that big genie on the side of the ABC of the big skull, you know, muscle face thing.

VC: I mean, if you could sort of speak to the actual act of making the art, you know, Luis, to watch him actually make the art was as much of the process as the final piece. It was absolutely stunning, it was beautiful, and it was something to see.

JR: And he had the beautiful hand. So then David would go, oh here’s the, like maybe push towards a more push on the subject matter but then absorb technical information from who’s around him. I know he talked to you about photography. He did a whole show with Marion that was these assemblage pieces, mixed photography and painting. At Tim Greathouse they did a collaborative show together, so that was a whole show of collaborations. With us he did, well, we did these several messes like the painting mess in Virginia. We did one at our gallery.

VC: [laughing] The painting mess.

JR: We did one at our gallery of The Nuclear Family. It’s the same title we just used for that show with Crosby __[52:08]

VC: Everybody sort of grabbed a space, to start off with, because this was a huge gallery. So we all grabbed a space and people started to work in their own spaces.

JR: They were all mixing together.

VC: __[52:20]

JR: But we stayed in the same space.

VC: You know, it starts with David West who we love and is just genius, starts writing “do-da, dada, you killed me mama goo” and then David’s like, and then they do these needlenoses, right? Those little flying things with the pointy noses; dweezles. And then they just start appearing everywhere. The issue is, which we learned, at this point, you have to really trust the people that you’re working with. So, to the extent that they’re going to look at it, and you know, you can’t have anxiety if somebody paints over your work. But you have to hope that they’re not going to paint over your work because you have this sort of: Oh, that’s a great piece. Mmmm, not so much. Okay. Everybody would just look at each other; yeah, go for it. __

JR: Well, they did the same type of thing at the Ground Zero one. And that was a hideous ugly mess. But, David did take a specific wall and he painted a big squawky head, like he does with the dots in the eyes, but he made it a killer cop who had like skulls spilling out of his mouth. So it was like a very focused political statement in this one little place that David made, and the rest of it just unbelievable slop.

VC: Everybody just goes kind of nuts in there. I don’t know; it’s some good pieces. I resent that.

JR: Occasionally bits and pieces. You did a pretty piece over here. I mean, you know, there’s different things going on, or Keiko Bonk did a nice little motorcycle with a whatever the hell it was, a mouse riding a motorcycle or something. What the hell was that?

VC: I mean, there was __[53:45] collaboration. It’s not that you want to be exclusive because you don’t like people, but you have to kind of be really careful. It’s like dropping acid with a certain group of people. You don’t want to drop acid with the wrong people. So you know, this is kind of, yeah, it’s very close to that experience where, you know, the music’s going. If you don’t like that music, it’s just like, “I can’t work in this.” So, you know, there’s a sort of relaxed-ness that comes.

JR: I mean, there’s a point where the East Village started, there was like, I kind of came in late, but I was working with World War III magazine which is more like comics. Marguerite was in bands. But as it came to, really, what was interesting about the East Village and going to someplace like Danceteria, there really wasn’t a demarcation between visual artists and performance artists and musicians. Like, we all were hanging together. And like, the musician would say, “Can you come and do” something. We would work together in that way. And then sometimes I’d be in a band or somebody, one of the musicians would come and do a painting whether they could even paint or not. Or I’d be playing because even if I couldn’t play, it didn’t – it wasn’t so segmented as it is now, I think, in some ways.

VC: Yeah.

JR: People were open to collaboration and I think it’s a healthy thing to collaborate because you’re getting – I think David learned from us just as we learned from him. So really, I don’t think there was a hierarchical thing of like, oh, so-and-so is in charge. I think David would very much have resented somebody saying, like, oh, he was in charge of the collaboration with Kern. He made sure that he did the film with Richard and he also Richard did the installation with him. So you can’t really say that one did the other. With the collaborations with Marion, they both worked on it. It wasn’t like, oh, so-and-so was in charge. And like in the comic, is the same thing, even though

GW: Can you tell us a little bit about that. Seven Miles a Second is it?

JR: Right. I started that with David in maybe ’86. And I guess at some point I would have assumed that I was going to color it. But by the time it ended up getting colored, it was logical that Marguerite would do it, because she knew David’s palette. And she had a different kind of take on it. And if I did it, I would have used these other references. So, in essence, she became the third collaborator and the third co-author of the book.

VC: And just to say to that, I made some unusual choices. But I knew what David liked in my work because he told me. I knew where he liked the color and where he didn’t like the color. I knew his paints. I’d use his paints. So all of that was present. And then later on I as here in Fales, and I was looking in one of the boxes, and there was a note about one of the scenes from the comic. And I had, intuitively I gave it this bright pink, dark pink sky with the yellow. And there was a note: Magenta sky.

JR: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

VC: And I was so vindicated; I felt so relieved. Anxiety; there’s that word again.

JR: I mean, when I started it with him, he said, you know, like, okay, I want this three-part structure: me as a child, me as a teenager, and me as an adult. And he kind of gave me just this stack of typewritten stuff. So I kind of edited bits out of it. He said, “Well I kind of like this.” He had a kind of a rough structure that he wanted to adhere to. And then I found pieces in the writing that he gave me that would correspond to or that we could put together so we’d have like, there’s one monologue over here and another monologue over here, and I put it together so the two people were talking on top of each other. But that’s kind of how it happens in life; you know? And he liked that kind of thing. It’s like an Antonioni or something; you have people talking on top of each other. Like this and that. So he’s aware of all of these things. And we’re talking about it. And so I put, you know, I roughly edited together what he had asked for out of what it was. It’s still my edit, so to speak, but I tried to keep the words that worked the best as words, and then you’re drawing – you see, you don’t want redundancy between the visual and the text, but you also want to keep the best language intact.

GW: So would he then comment on your drafts?

JR: Yeah, he loved, he liked, he saw the first two parts. It’s a three part structure; he saw the first two parts finished, up to a point. Not with color, but he approved the edits.

VC: James has long scrolls. [laughing]

JR: I’d take these things and I’d cut it together and tape it together. It’s like a scroll.

VC: Because we forget William Burroughs is, of course, you know, always present. [laughing]

JR: I have a picture of it on line. I can send you the link to the place where I have a picture of the scrolls on line. And then you can see he scribbled in little bits and he added, like, he’d see how I structured the page, and he’d go, “Okay, well,” and he’d add a word balloon coming out of somebody’s mouth, or whatever, like that. So we got all the way through but then he died before we did the last piece. We had had some discussions about how the last part would play out, but I mean, there was one thing that he wanted me to do which was, like, end the thing with this like happy sunny day where he’s just happy to be alive. But there is like literally nothing in his writing that corresponded with that so I couldn’t do that. You know? I mean, really, it’s like a book where the actual author dies, writes his own death, so to speak.

GW: And so you, after his death, you completed it.

JR: I had to complete the final part. Tom Rauffenbart gave me access to his final journal. And hopefully, some of that still hasn’t reached print, because some of it I don’t think really was intended to be published. Because there was some pretty personal,

MT: It hasn’t been published, not everything.

JR: Rough comments about some people that I know he loved them, but David, he never really held back what he had to say. [laughing] So it’s a little intense. But I know some of that stuff came out and I just didn’t even want to look at it, because I didn’t want to know what came out. But I read all of it. It was pretty harrowing. __[59:43]

VC: It was hard on you, as well, because, you know, we’re working on our dead friend’s __.

JR: Well, I feel bad because he did say, “Oh, I just want to see the thing done.” And then I didn’t get it done. I was too slow. __

: But you did get it done in the end.

JR: I did get it done in the end.

VC: Yes, and it’s been redone and we’re happy about that.

JR: The one that’s out I think is the closest to what it was supposed to be.

VC: Yes. David definitely was, I mean, that’s another aspect of David hoping that things would be accessible, and wanting actually young people to see this work, and which was why the comic was a good medium. And, you know, wanting to reach a broader audience.

JR: We mainframed that thing.

VC: He wasn’t somebody reclusive. I think it’s very, very key that he wanted to be seen and he wanted his work to go to a broader audience.

JR: Even the first edition, you can’t get much more mainstream than Time Warner DC Comics, you know what I mean? Then he did like 25,000 copies but they wouldn’t keep it in print now. It’s at an alternative publisher. But they did it perfect. And it also went to France, right now, there’s an edition out there.

VC: But I do think, and I said it once before, but I’ll just repeat this, I do think it’s important to remember that David had a sense of humor. We had a song when we were in Belgium, we had made a recording, and it’s a very sort of cute, pop-y song. If I could sing a song as beautiful as you, the birds would stop their singing just to listen to my song.

JR: I think we’ve probably got that tape.

VC: It’s on his answering machine. And it was what you, when you called David, all through the wild mélange, through all of it, that’s what you got. [laughing]

JR: Marvin’s got everything here. [laughing]

VC: (Singing) It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, I’m in love with you. Oh my god. [laughter] That’s a sweet song. But I mean, that’s David. He was like, you know, people would imagine they were going to get some really, (in a deep voice) “Hello, this is the Wojnarowicz residence; enter at your peril.”

JR: To me, one of the best installations he ever did, he didn’t even claim credit for. It was anonymous. There was a thing at PPOW called The Lazaretto. And a lot of that was David. When you walked in there was a room with a skeleton on a bed, with like one of David’s texts on the wall, and all of the AIDS drugs on the bedside table, and it was a rotting person just sitting. And I actually drew, one of my drawings in Seven Miles a Second is based on that rotting corpse on the bed. And then when you went around the corner, there was this giant boat or something. I can’t really remember it clearly, but you followed the path through and a lot of the pieces were done by different people. But it was not a credited thing, I don’t know if you remember seeing that?

MT: Did they reinstall it?

JR: They might have.

MT: PPOW, when they did a show of several years ago, because I remember

JR: The original.

MT: Yeah, I remember it.

JR: Yeah, it was very memorable. Then at the end, you’d get to this thing and it was the Howdy Doody puppet

MT: Right; yes.

JR: Using Ed Koch’s voice going, “How am I doin’?” And Ed Koch, all of these people died under Ed Koch’s watch, you know.

MT: Yeah; I’ve seen that. It’s in my memory.

JR: But to me, that was one of David’s most powerful things, even though his name wasn’t on it.

MT: Yeah.

VC: But I think the other thing was that we all had repertoires of pieces. So Keith Haring, of course, made it his business to trademark his babies and what have you. But we all had them from necessity, because we did these collaborations always sort of like a public performance, although it wasn’t quite public, but it would be. So you’re doing something immediate, and it’s like what can I go to? Oh yeah, I’m going to go to the needle-nosed dweezles, or the googly-eyed head, or the, you know. So we had these little pieces that, you know, I’d do flying babies, David and I did babies, I suppose. __

JR: David has his lexicon

VC: He had his lexicon of

JR: Of imagery that, and you can see the evolution of that when you look at the earlier pieces, there, and he kept those, and he kept expanding that language that he had, a reservoir of imagery that he’d recombine and put in different organizations. And I know in the film storyboard that Marion has, it was almost one of the most full manifestations of that where it was like a piece with insets that’s everything moving and everything shifting and evolving. So I really would love to see that come to fruition.

MT: I think it’s really important to remember how kinetic the works are.

VC: Yeah.

MT: Because that could be easily lost. But in the film you see it again and again. He’s fascinated with things that turn.

VC: Yes. Absolutely.

MT: And the piece I wrote for the Whitney catalogue is all about that. It’s about the motion in the works he was trying to do about Peter’s death. Because there’s all of this circular motion.

JR: So you’ve written something for this. Has this show been postponed?

MT: It has. It’s going to be winter of 2018.

JR: I was talking to the guy that was, one of the Davids __.

MT: “The Davids.” That’s what I refer to them as, the Davids.

JR: I was pleased to see that they liked my essay and that they’re thinking about that, because we were like: Wow, when am I going to hear from these guys? Well then Cindy put them onto us.

MT: That’s great.

GW: Can you think of anything else? We’ve covered a lot of territory here.

VC: Yes, we have.

GW: But is there anything that we’ve missed?

JR: I think when you look at if they were going to reconstruct an installation, for instance, you just have to look at the photographs of what it is. But I think you would need to speak to people that maybe saw it in situ.

VC: I guess that’s what we do.

JR: How the hell do you?

GW: That’s what we’re doing. [laughter]

VC: What we’re doing; yeah, yeah.

JR: I mean, I don’t know if you could recreate what we had, that thing. I mean, you could, but where are all of the skeletons?

GW: Would it have to be perfect to convey what it was?

VC: No, and I think you could go outside and bring in modern rubbish.

JR: It was weird because one of the skeletons ended up, one of the skeletons from our show, Tommy took it home, Tommy Turner. And then he divorced his wife, and she was in the apartment, and she took the skeleton and she put it out on the fire escape and left it there. And Tommy was calling up and going, he goes, “I’m going to call the cops and say she killed my friend and left him out on the thing to rot.” You know? Because, can you imagine, the cops go, “Oh my god, there’s like a rotting skeleton on the frickin’ fire escape.” [laughing] __. The ongoing crime scene.

VC: I guess the other thing, just to say, was that, you know, to do with the __[1:06:15], the whole stencil thing, which was also very important to us all, the idea of things being outside of the gallery as well. Because we had Wigstock, we had the Thompkins Square Park. There were always events in Thompkins Square Park, and taking the art outside, doing your performance outside. So, you know, and with the maps, that whole idea of boundaries is there as well, you know, let’s get rid of these boundaries. That’s like such a David conversation.

MT: Yes, absolutely. __

VC: And that was so from the gallery to what goes in the gallery to the park to the neighborhood and to having these discussions to what are the parameters of your friendship. Let’s take it to this, let’s make art. It was always, let’s make art. So I think he’d welcome you if you were trying to recreate his work, he would definitely be pleased. [laughter]

JR: Do you have a specific example of something that you were having trouble figuring out how to reconstruct it or whatever?

GW: No, I don’t. I mean, I’m not a curator, but we’re trying to create this information resource for curators, researchers in the future that are trying to understand his work, how to interpret it. And we don’t know what questions they’re going to have, and I have a feeling they’re going to say, “Why didn’t they say this? This is the question I have.” So we may be feeding them information, and they may be trying to read between the lines.

VC: I think __ circus, I was having a little difficulty [laughing] being overly ethical. We had one of David’s things, and it was just like, bits of paper all glued together, and it was falling apart. And I said, “How do you sell this to somebody? It’s going to fall apart. I’m going to ask them for all this money.” And he said to me, “Oh, they don’t care.”

JR: Yeah.

VC: [laughing] And I thought that was so genius. It’s like, oh, okay, well if the artist says so, fine; I’ll just sell these things. But I think, yeah, he wouldn’t have minded the preservation. But I mean, we understand that it’s flimsy. We understand that it was meant to, you know. And also like just to maybe the other comment is with the punk ethic that it was not meant to be made precious, it was not meant to be made collectible to a certain extent, it was not meant to be owned and contained and made palatable in any way. And even not meant to be remembered.

JR: Well, that’s not __.

VC: Which is a very strange thing to say but at the same time it was, I just remembered all three of the punk things, because we did pose in the end, but there was a lot of times when we were saying: no; we’re not.

JR: Well, some things were meant to be ephemeral, of the moment. But then if you do have something, you don’t want it to further deteriorate. Then there’s also an aspect of like saying: Okay, Utrecht paint; you better buy a bunch now so you have a stock of it. Or like, the way you can tell a real or a fake Basquiat of a certain period is to go like, oh, the Xeroxes that he glued down at the time, Xerox had this sort of raised ink; you could feel the ink because it was actually plastic glued down to the paper, heated and glued into the paper. If it doesn’t have that kind of ink, it ain’t the real thing. __

VC: Yeah, a lot of the time David would have been using clear varnish, you know, the clear paint medium, again.

JR: Roplex or something?

VC: No, no, no. He was still using just the glaze, the painting glaze, the plastic glazes, right? Matte Utrecht, that would have been the glue, not – you know, for the decoupage.

JR: Utrecht was the closest store to him because he was up there at Peter’s thing, so it was like literally right around the corner __.

GW: Yeah, that’s helpful.

VC: Just to add to that, you know, my memory of the things that were being used.

MT: Mm-hm.

GW: Can you think of anyone else we should talk to? Who else is around that might have memories of working __[1:10:17]

JR: The other person that actually, somebody else that collaborated with him was Steve Downton, and he’s on my Facebook. He did some work with David __.

VC: Yes, Steve would be a good one.

JR: I don’t know, where’s Rich Colicchio? He would know about that 51X thing. I don’t have any pictures of that.

VC: You know, and I would say, you know who would know a lot about it? David West, actually.

JR: David West __

VC: David West collaborated with him and his

JR: Christof Kohlhofer went to the same things that we did with David.

VC: Yes, but David West painted with him a lot.

JR: David painted with him.

VC: David and, the two Davids again, more Davids,

JR: Keiko, as well.

VC: Were both showing with Gracie Mansion at a certain point. Um, and __

JR: Keiko, Christof, David, you know, that was our crew of people that, we all painted with David. Luis is long dead.

VC: Luis came and did, well, he wasn’t long dead. Luis came and did the installation at the back of the third Ground Zero on Ninth Street.

JR: I think Bronson Eden. I mean, the people from.

VC: Just to say, we had moved to Ninth Street between Second Avenue and Third Avenue. And we just had a downstairs gallery with a back yard, and we went out the back and painted the back yard. But David did a show there, but I don’t think he did so much in the back yard. But Luis did rats, we did like a thousand rats.

JR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. David wouldn’t participate in that particular one. __

VC: __ rats. Lovely.

MT: I love rats.

VC: I do, too. I have to send you a picture of __

JR: Keiko Bonk is now in Hawaii; David West is in France. Marilyn [Minter?] is huge now.

VC: Yes, of course. Well she was sort of the least interactive of that crowd.

JR: Well, because she had her own thing and she had – well that was really a drag because she had to use the projector, so she turned off all the lights. I’m like: Damn, we’ve gotta sit in the dark while she does this thing.

VC: And she smoked like – I mean, everybody was smoking, but she really smoked. She really, really smoked. Well thank you for allowing us to save this information.

GW: Yes, thank you so much. This is really, really helpful.

VC: Thank you for allowing us to save this information.

JR: I don’t know if that makes sense at all what I said about the comics, but if you have any other questions, you can ask, because he did it. Because I scrambled that like eggs.

End transcription at 1:12:31; audio continues to 1:17:24