The Paintings

"I am outside history. I wish I had some peanuts. It looks hungry there in its cage."
--Ishmael Reed

James Nares work is so strong and affecting that it would be possible and perhaps even appropriate to discuss it without reference to the current climate in the arts. Nares is a particularly independent artist, and his work has little relation to that of his contemporaries, and his milieu does not appear to be a source of inspiration, a stylistic influence or even a footnote to his work. I have always admired him for coming out of left field, being so ab ovo and apart, for making work that is totally independent of whatever movement critics are conjuring at the moment, whatever attitude is being championed. And yet not being the least bit alienated.

Nares is a painter. A rare thing, considered obsolete by some, retro by others. But Nares exists outside of the modernist "now" (and the post-modernist, and post-post modernist now,) outside and untouched by that theoretical moment that is by definition a progression from "then." His work stands beyond notions (or demons) of progress. He is independent of that system, untouched by fashion or notions of cultural evolution. The work is action, not reaction. He is free.

This was brought home to me not long ago when I walked through "The Armory Show" a large art fair located on the Hudson River Piers that serve the cruise ships and are often the scene of antique fairs and other gatherings of precious merchandise. Walking through the booths of galleries from around the world is one of the best ways to become instantly current with the direction of the art world. This big trade show is ironically named for the first International Exhibition of Modern Art, held in 1913 by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory ( Lexington Avenue and 25th Street.) The irony is no doubt lost on the organizers of the new armory, but is apparent to anyone armed with a knowledge of the original Armory Show where the public first encountered dada and cubism, where Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase provoked outrage that echoes today.

The poet Max Blagg and I wandered the aisles hoping outrage and epiphany. We found lots of irony instead. The art world is in a most ironical mood, it seems. We discovered little but gestural humor at high prices. Tongues were impacted in cheek. Starved for the shock of the new, we were offered instead the persistence of the same old same old. The principal trends I noticed were small bronze possibly feminist animals and the apotheosis of Andreas Gursky et. al. and the big, busy, mindblowing "Oh wow" photographs that transmute the utterly mundane into bigger than life vision. I realized, a bit glumly, that the world has utterly lost the importance of being earnest.

How does this all relate to Nares? Well as Blagg and I walked down the hall one of James Nares' brushstrokes spoke to us softly yet powerfully from quite a distance. We were drawn toward it and as we got closer it seemed to say, don't worry, art lives. Above all it was beautiful and we didn't have to say anything about it to make it so. The picture did all the talking.

Nares work is outside the mainstream, or would be if there were one. His work isn't funny or jokey or ironic. It is what it is: pure painting. It is painting as a means of expression and exploration. It is painting about feeling. It is feeling distilled.

Joan Mitchell said to John Ashberry: "There'll always be painters around. It'll take more than Pop or Op to discourage them-they've never been encouraged anyway. So we're back where we started from. There have always been very few people who really like painting-like poetry. I don't think you can stop visual painters and all the rest is an intellectual problem."

James Nares is a renaissance man in what Mallarme might have called "an age that has outlived beauty." Before that he was a renaissance punk. What I mean by that is that he was one of the central art practitioners of that giddy, reckless moment in that late seventies and early eighties when it seemed like something important was happening. There was an outbreak of energy and creativity that is still felt today, despite its marginalization by the marshaled forces of the market. Nares was a painter then, and his work today continues the early concerns and ground rules of that work. He was also a filmmaker and a musician. Today he is a secret guitarist, but music is still important to him. It fills his studio, and the way he paints is deeply related to the way a musician works.

For a musician beauty is an assumption. Even when dissonance is seemingly dominant, it is only to evoke beauty through contrast. In true music beauty is always the aim and the key. The work is the process of conjuring that state from within and manifesting it in the human realm. Music is the most abstract of the arts. It works, like God, in mysterious ways. Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk was once asked if that group's music was experimental and he replied: "All music is experimental." Of course some music is more experimental, or at least more consciously, bravely and skillfully experimental, and jazz of the twentieth century remains the high water mark of that noblest experiment.

The great pianist Bill Evans wrote in "Improvisation in Jazz" (which served as liner notes to Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue"): "There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.

"The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.

"This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician."

The art Nares practices is very much akin to the art of musical improvisation as described by master musician Evans. It is an art that is perfectly trained, disciplined and rigorous in its persistent improvisation. Nares's strokes are not the product of deliberation but of direct communication between the eye and hand through a mind that has prepared itself elaborately for direct action, for a kind of inspired, guided automatism.

The essentials of Nares work have remained the same, while over the years he has worked hard to perfect the means to facilitate the perfect stroke. I remember visiting his studio in a barn in a Bridgehampton cornfield more than ten years ago, witnessing his first attempts to suspend himself over the canvas in order to obtain the reach and movement he required. Today he has refined his apparatus, constructing a machine that allows him, with a stunt man's harness, to position himself optimally in relation to the canvas. Recent tinkering and tuning have added a rotary component that allows the sort of tight swirl he has sought for years. He has continually refined his brushes, making them himself and working (and sometimes pleading with) manufacturers to create the correct tools for that freedom of hand. And yet the act, the actual act, remains the same.

This spontaneous practice has predecessors in the painters known as abstract expressionists or what Harold Rosenburg called action painters: the most exemplary of them being Jackson Pollock. Pollock told Frank O'Hara: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of it's own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, and easy give and take, and the painting comes out well."

Being in the painting is the key, the way the musician is in the music. As popular music has become more and more a matter of rote and superficial fashion, recycled shards of melody salvaged from an era when music represented feeling, the deep, virtually extinct music of musicians like Bill Evans, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk seems even more precious and magical. And in painting and the visual arts a similar erosion of beauty and craft has occurred, and a market driven dismissal of tradition has resulted in a facile, fashion-driven practice of art, leaving the few practitioners of the difficult and the sublime marooned in spectacular exile and specious insularity.

The painter Brion Gysin said "And so the whole point of it... is the idea that you just put the material into a certain situation and give it a push, and then the thing makes itself."

The stroke has a life of its own. Nares says: "It's a fine balance between design and the thing making itself happen. The stroke has to have complete precision to work. Sometimes I lose it on the exit. You can't fudge it. It ruins the whole thing."

Each figure is almost always contained within the rectangle. "It's less of a window if I keep it within the confines of the canvas, but there's almost always a drip that's an umbilical cord."

Nares paints in time. He paints chorus after chorus of strokes and the squeegee removes the imperfect figures. It's not so much trial and error as trial and truth. His brushstrokes take but two to five seconds each, but they are repeated over hours and days. "Occasionally I get one on the first try," says Nares, but usually achieving the desired result takes considerable repetition. Producing a major work in a few seconds seems alien to our tradition, where masterpieces are supposed to be labored over, but this

"It's like car crash time," says Nares. "Time is slowed down during that movement. It's like music. You don't watch your fingers or you'll lose it. I have to detach and not direct it too much, but it happens fast enough that I can totally control it."

"Can you touch time," wrote Clark Coolidge in "Now It's Jazz." He wrote of: "Art seems to come best from getting oneself up into a state of great mental alertness compound of sheer high momentum (no thoughts of falling) and subconscious ability to keep an amazing number of elements suspended ready at the millisecond to be placed in time. Wow. Anyways, I believe in that great high sustain, pick-up on the fly, ability to shine and wing when in doubt, everything up for grabs, a half-conscious corner-pocket genius that can never be taught to anybody completely or explained even to oneself."

The work of James Nares has evolved in one continuous series of strokes for over twenty years. Nares remains outside of movements, or, perhaps he is a stranded survivor of an ancient movement, action painting, like that Japanese soldier hiding out on a Pacific atoll years after the war has ended, refusing surrender. Nares is his own movement, a mediator between the visible and the invisible. His mastery of rhythm, harmony and gesture speak directly to consciousness without the mediation of context.

The strokes are ideograms or hieroglyphs of a language in formation, an alphabet in progress, like making up Chinese as you go along, scat singing new hieroglyphics. Each line, moves in one direction, like time, across canvas space creating a character. The characters speak and we don't understand them yet but we stand by them waiting for a breakthrough.

In the beginning was the word, according to tradition. Burroughs suggests that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. "My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the thost, though this symbiotic relationship is now breaking down..."

In the face of the breakdown of all systems, new words are necessary. We don't have the tools. We must improvise. "Painting is a much more authentic reproduction of reality than a photo," says Nares. "A photograph has the illusion of being real. It's a potent deception. But with painting, it's like what Frank Stella said: 'what you see is what you see.'"

Today Pollock is seen is an end, and that is emphasized by the cult of his end-as if his free style could have only ended with his flying intoxicated through air toward a tree--but what if Pollock was a beginning? A difficult birth, but a birth. It is commonplace for the great initiators to be isolated in time before their contribution begins to flower.

Jon Hassell, a great musician and improviser, wrote: "We must make vivid again those fading regions of our being which lie 'beyond description.' Our rich, '4D' sense-surround is flattened into '2d' word descriptions, which then become the currency of reality transactions. Language colonizes our every moment with descriptions of feelings substituting for the feelings themselves. The tail (of abstraction) wags the dog (of sensation).

"Beyond description" says it all: beyond the writing, the words, the script."

"It depends on what the meaning of is is," said Bill Clinton, highlighting the tenuous nature of words in a democratic society, a place where the word means what the majority says it does. Obviously language needs reinvention. It needs to learn from the characters that compose it. As Ezra Pound pointed out the Chinese word for truth is an ideogram of a man standing by his word.

Nares' paintings take us beyond words, before words, to a place where the character emerges. The character is an abstraction, with the potential for recombinant growth. These mysterious expressions of a line recall the great graffiti theorist Ramelzee who wrote: "To my knowledge of the symbolic codes of the alphabets formation, it is very much incorrect."

In the late seventies Ramellzee, the brilliant madcap-scientist theorist of Wild Style graffiti and Iconic Panzerism, saw the formation of the character as a form of armament. He sought to disprove "the old mother's tale that words will or can never hurt you." Words are the ultimate weapons. They are used against us every day. Art is the only means by which they can be redefined or restored.

In these new paintings, with their brilliantly luminous, solarized forms, we see an energized encounter between biology and symbolism. We see the word beginning again, searching with tactile intuition for the forms with which it can express the state of the world.

Look. See.

The Photographs

Sort of like Edward Muybridge meets John Coplans I said. Actually more like Etienne Jules Marcy, said James. Marcy was a physiologist who was interested in studying the motion of humans and animals and who invented one of the first motion picture cameras in order to so. In 1882 he took the first motion pictures of a bird in flight, capturing twelve images in the course of one second.

And then, of course, there were Balla and the Italian Futurists, and heading back to the Armory Show, that nude descending the staircase.

While single mindedly determined in his painting practice, Nares has never shied away from experiment in photography and film. Not long ago he suffered an aneurysm. It actually occurred shortly after a near drowning experience in the Atlantic Ocean. This insult to his brain had debilitating consequences, robbing him of his ability to work for a considerable time, and almost robbing him of his life.

During his recovery, Nares' doctor advised him to stay at home for a while. Being unable to go to the studio, the artist was eager to find something he could do at home while recovering. I doubt that the doctor imagined that his patient would be testing his healing cranium with a powerful strobe light and physical movment, but that's exactly what he did. "I guess I was a bit mad at the time," he chuckles.

The flicker of a strobe can, of course, trigger seizures. Tony Conrad's 1966 thirty minute film "Flicker," consisted only of black and white frames and it caused some viewers to become ill. Nares' managed to survive his experiment on himself, and in fact seems pretty much back in form, but these extraordinary digital photos of the human body in motion under a strobe light are testimony to the almost desperate measures he took to challenge himself while confined. He took his digital Coolpix camera, set it on long exposure, and began moving through a strobe and noting the effects he could achieve through physical movement.

Semi-abstract, the resulting photographs are a dialogue between literal recognition of the body parts and the gestures, and a panoply of visual referents: the Alien, a Nautilus shell, skeletal remains of strange species, the Edgerton water drop explosion, the samurai warrior in bamboo armor, the multi-armed Shiva, destroyer of worlds. Of course they are all Nares, nude and in motion.

Although they are far, far different from the paintings, their field of study is related. They are time machine experiments in deducing the symbolic content of the human time signature and meditations on the symmetry of macrocosm and microcosm. And they are strange and beautiful. And they are evocative of our innate and ambivalent connections with the things we find strange, miraculous, horrifying and beautiful.

Conversation #1

Tom: Almost on a weekly basis I find myself quoting the line from "Honey, I Shrunk the Universe", the essay you wrote for Nutsy's, when I'm talking to about my work because one of the things that I find most gratifying about this conversation that we've been having over the years is that sometimes I don't know why I make things...

Glenn: Yeah

Tom: And you're a smart person who has similar interests to mine, maybe in a realm that's wider than mine, I think, or whatever...

Glenn: Longer.

Tom: But the thing I was trying to represent was about making a model of someone, and pushing pins in their body, building a model of their fort, then burning it down. This is called sympathetic magic.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: Essentially the thing that I intentionally do is build models. I think that's the one universal thing about what I've been doing since I was a child, it's been going on for that long. It's like a whole lifetime.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: You can't take that away from me, and the things that come along with it are really interesting, and I guess the part about fulfilling your own desires positively or negatively through what you make or what you build is like creating this self-fulfilling prophecy or, umm, voodoo. Whatever. It's very, very powerful, and when I read that I realized I had been doing that for a very long time without knowing it. I think there's a tremendous amount of untapped power there, so my sort of hidden agenda in this conversation is about learning to hone my voodoo skills. Maybe this isn't something that's appropriate for discussing in public, but I think it's interesting because it's not all about me. It's about everybody. We all have this, and you can see it more in something like these models.

Glenn: It's everywhere. And it's also in a lot of art. I mean in yours, it's kind of explicit. But it's in almost all art in a way. Because art is people creating their alternative universes. Sometimes it's eroticized, and sometimes like yours it's more about power, I think.

Tom: I've become very self-conscious about it. Because, you know, that whale I built...it first started out as one of the lost Russian subs filled with four nukes. I started building models of it, and I got really spooked because that's as likely a way as any that were all going to go in a big puff of smoke, and I don't know how many of those Akula class submarines are missing, but not everything is accounted for.

Glenn: Chris Burden probably still has all of his submarines.

Tom: I'm sure.

Glenn: Did you ever see that? He did a piece with every nuclear submarine in the history of the U.S. Fleet.

Tom: That work really says it all.

Glenn: I thought that work was genius. I've written a few times about how many nuclear warheads the United States has. Which is way more than it would take to wipe out the entire world. But if people see a number it means nothing to them. They just see digits, but if you actually see it represented, it's staggering.

Tom: I know, and then there was the piece next to it, the reason for the neutron bomb, you know that one? It was something; it was like, one hundred thousand nickels.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: With a match head. Representing each Soviet tank. Every single one, right?

Glenn: In my piece about the nuclear warheads I said, and if you look at every character- every single letter in this piece added up, that's how many nuclear warheads we have.

Tom: So just to bring it back, I had started making this attack submarine and then I realized nothing good was going to come of that except that it was this whole power trip, You know, I'm working very intensely trying to sort out some of things that didn't go so well in my childhood. All kinds of experiments and hard work, and I thought why not use the thing that I'm most skilled at, my work, to try to breathe some positivity into it. And course it's not as interesting to see a giant blue whale as it is to see a giant attack submarine. The details aren't as interesting, because I mean, nature's so hi-tech. There's no way you can even come close to it. I guess gore-tex. Or hollowfil or something. Silicon. But none of these things are as good as down feathers, or grease or oil.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: So anyway, so that's why I made the whale. Because I thought at least I could make some kind of gesture that was about love, without being too corny or personal.

Glenn: It's also really primal, you know, because the first artworks were probably models of animals, you know?

Tom: Yeah, inside those caves. I feel so removed from that. It's very difficult I think to access it quickly. That's what I aspure to in my practice. It's making things that connect me to my fears and desires in a meaningful and simple way.

Glenn: Yeah, connection with emotion and nature has become problematic. It's so mediated.

Tom: I mean I think that's why surfing is so popular. It's getting popular now because were at the end.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: And it's the quickest way into nature I mean once you're 30 ft into the water it's very rugged. Especially in a storm, and it's raining, and you really get the sense of the natural experience very, very quickly versus if you go camping. It's hard to get off trails. Or if you go skiing, which is a way a lot of people deal with nature. But that's super, umm, mediated through the lifts and the lodges. And the fashion.

Glenn: I think art and religion in the beginning were all about control and the first things they tried to control were nature, and elements of nature, the waves and the fish the game.

Tom: Yeah.

Glenn: But now we would like to control the nukes too. You know? I mean nature is more secondary, although now with global warming it's maybe making a comeback in terms of subject matter. But I think the nukes thing is, you know, it's important.

Tom: I think it feels like we forgot about it for a few minutes. Right now I feel like it's a little bit of a down topic, and I'm even a little superstitious about talking about it. It would be really narcissistic to think that our conversation could impact its presence. But I think typically that's what happens, we have conversations like this, and then something comes out later in the real world.

Glenn: When I was in college there was a nuclear hoax at my school. It was at a really intense moment in the Vietnam War, and these guys ran into my dorm with a big radio. And they said there was a red alert. Actually somebody in another building was broadcasting this supposed Civil Defense Network over this particular radio. And they said that President Johnson was flying out of country on Air Force One. And that Hanoi had been hit with a nuclear bomb and then Saigon. This was in Washington D.C. and all these guys in my dorm started crying and they went and got a priest who lived in the building. I went to Georgetown, so there was a priest living there, and he came out and was giving everybody absolution. It was a joke but it was really heavy; macho guys lost it and were crying.

Tom: Wonderful. How long did it last?

Glenn: It didn't last that long. I thought it was real, and I was just stunned. But everybody was freaking out. I wanted to get out of the dorm, I didn't want to die with all these screamers and so I went to go get the keys to my motorcycle in my room, and the radio was playing music.

Tom: Just like Dr. Strangelove...

Glenn: Something's wrong here. And I tried the other channels on the radio. And it was buinsess as usual, nothing going on. Then I came out and these guys were running away. People were chasing them and yelling. The punch line was that if you're in a brick building go to the basement, get in the corner closest to the epicenter, sit on the floor, put your head between your knees, and then kiss your ass good bye.

Tom: That's great, that's the best punch line.

Glenn: But that moment stuck with me. I remember when the World Trade Center went down I was saying to Gina, we've got to get out of here. I thought maybe it was possible that we were going to get nuked or something.

Tom: Right. That was just the first wave.

Glenn: Well yeah, I mean who knew? Because we were hearing heard about the Pentagon being attacked and all this shit. So it seemed like a really major thing.

Tom: It seems likely to happen, but then the other side of that is that if they nuke us then they're going to get really, really nuked. And we're so organized. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to do one. I feel like I could do it if I really put my mind to it especially if I had millions of dollars to buy the plutonium. I mean, like, the housing, the machine's pretty simple.

Glenn: But you know, we need to talk about it but in a very precise way. I don't think it's right, being afraid to mention it. I think what's important is how you represent it. I think sometimes movies are really kind of evil in how they represent terrorism or war or destruction. Like what was the one with Ben Affleck?

Tom: They blew up Baltimore?

Glenn: Yeah, to me that movie was so evil in a way. The Day After Tomorrow.

Tom: That was really intense.

Glenn: It was like kind of extinction pornography.

Tom: (Laughs) It did have a particularly pointless and bitter vibe to it. Maybe it's that Ben Affleck guy. He always seems associated with, umm, particularly, what's the opposite of uplifting?

Glenn: Downpressing, according to Peter Tosh.

Tom: Really un-uplifting and uninteresting. Even the film Daredevil. That really hurt me; that they ruined that because it's such a cool story. They could have done that so well.

Glenn: Ben Affleck is not heroic.

Tom: No, he's not, but they keep casting him as one. That's why it doesn't work.

Glenn: But his old partner can be. Matt Damon.

Tom: Yeah, why is he great? He always works. And, in a way they're kind of like interchangeable. At least in the way they're cast. Matt's more interesting. Somehow. Maybe he's less of a cyborg.

Glenn: I guess so. I think he has more depth. I mean he's played a lot of roles where I mean, he really has range. Whereas I can't think of Ben Affleck being in any movies where he was anything more than sort of Ben Affleck. So when you were a kid, were you into military models and stuff?

Tom: I was. I don't think that I was special. I had models of airplanes, and rockets, and guns, and toy guns, and it was kind of looked down upon by my family. So I had to sneak, I had the secret b.b. gun. And I had slingshots, and I got pretty good with the wrist rocket. And I remember I spent one whole Spring Break working, like driving myself crazy. I think that was the model for my obsessive behavior now. When everyone was on vacation somewhere I was in my room building this Japanese Zero. Because that was some cool plane that I had heard about. It was some super maneuverable thing. And it had some crazy advantage. And I remember I built one of those in balsa wood with tissue paper and everything, but like I wasn't part of a scene, and this is the reason why my skateboarding style and my model-making still are so like primitive compared to that of my peers.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: In both genres, I did all that stuff alone. I didn't like to skateboard with friends. Or I didn't build models in a club or anything so I think that kind of held me back from reaching a certain professional level in either of those things. But somehow it made me sufficiently crazy that I could go inwards. It got kind of, umm, tautological, in terms of the style. Like, repetitive. And with a high level of tedium. I think that tediousness is something that I still have at least in the model making. And that to me seems important because it reflects the reality of the grind, of the day to day existence that we all have. I mean I don't know. It's a little dark. But umm, I think it's there for all of us. Especially after a week like this week. I feel like it's the winter here because its so unbelievably hot. You can't just be outside for too long or else you'll get sick.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: So I just keep going from one air conditioning pod to another.

Glenn: It's weird just feeling the heat on your face.

Tom: And I'm also not shaving. The way I do when it's very cold in the winter.

Glenn: Yeah me too.

Tom: Because I need that extra layer of protection. It's like a radiator.

Glenn: I was like really involved in ship models a lot more than airplane models. Maybe because people in my family were in the Navy. But then I became like obsessed with it, and I used to do whatever I had to do to get copies of Jane's Fighting Ships, these professional books about the navy. I knew like everything about the Navies of the World when I was like 10-years-old. I still have a ton of them. As a child I became really involved in rethinking of World War II strategically.

Tom: You know, I just started watching A Bridge Too Far last night. Have you seen that one?

Glenn: Yeah, that's a good one. It's one of the rare war movies that shows an Allied disaster.

Tom: Oh really? It's what goes wrong? Umm, I watched The Longest Day a couple of years ago, and I was really taken by that.

Glenn: I think there's something in boys that makes them want to control armies or navies. And you know, I man I was a self-educated strategist. I was like an auto-didact child admiral.

Tom: Do you think you could've handled it if you had been thrown into the position?

Glenn: Yeah, maybe. I could have been a 10-year-old admiral. You know?

Tom: Each one of these ships is millions and millions of dollars. Is there a cut off? Like if the ship is too small it doesn't get in this book. These are the big ships.

Glenn: There's some really crappy vessels in here. Every navy starts off with like the capital ships, if it has them. You know, the battle ships and the aircraft carriers. But then you get down to the submarine tenders, and the minesweepers. And the..

Tom: Maintenance ships.

Glenn: And the yachts.

Tom: See that's what I like are the little weird ones. Because those are the ones you can go and find and buy them and turn into your umm, into your yacht.

Glenn: Yeah, I think, I don't know if you can still find these things, but at some point-

Tom: These have all been scrapped.

Glenn: You can really find cheap former naval ships.

Tom: Here's the Haitian Navy. Haiti just has this got one ship.

Glenn: It's a boat, right? It's really not a ship.

Tom: Yeah, it's a 1937 Coast Guard Service boat. Particulars wanted. Just listed. It's got the flag.

Glenn: Iraq has a lighthouse tender.

Tom: Patrol vessel with some guns. It's got, uh, it's got 3.7-inch howitzer. It's got some M.G. 3 inch mortars. Got some bullet-proof plating.

Glenn: But then I was really interested in a certain period. Because it seemed to me, as a child, that nuclear bombs had destroyed the fun of war. Because it was just this kind of trump card that ended the ancient idea of battle...Submarines are really interesting. I was obsessed with submarines too. This is 1991-92.

Tom: Yeah, I had some of these books from when I was researching the aircraft carrier island. I got Jane's Radar Systems. I mean it was so specialized. I tried going up to their website. But it like was impenetrable, and I even tried to pay them. But it's very, very expensive. It was like hundreds and hundreds of dollars. It was Like $700. So I called first to tell them what I was looking for. They said that it wouldn't be worth it- they convinced me that it wouldn't be worth joining because I couldn't really access it, so I bought a couple of these books. And I went on eBay. I wanted to buy naval trade books, and in the end I just gave up. But what is interesting looking are these yearbooks. These cruise books. I think they're called cruise books, and they are produced to document every mission an aircraft carrier goes on. They go out these six-month missions. They produce a hardcover book with all these pictures. And these are the most sought after because they get into all these details that aren't on the official Navy publications, and they get into all the modifications and details. Pictures, parties, and things that the guys did on the ship each time. So you know for the Enterprise there are probably like twenty or thirty yearbooks available on that one ship, and there are dozens of ships.

Glenn: I wonder if that's an old- I wonder how long they've been doing that.

Tom: I don't know. They've definitely been doing it since the 60's. I mean if, they've probably been doing it for hundreds of years.

Glenn: You know, there's something about...

Tom: Controlling your destiny. Also I think life in a way is a battle. So many, many of our frustrations, and so much of our rage is sublimated into war. I mean it's like a direct connection.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: Fuck or fight. And all this stuff, especially for kids, and even for young soldiers until they're in combat, is all very, very creative. I mean you're building your body and your mind and strategy and engineering. And all that stuff. It's all extremely creative until the moment you use it, and then it's just all about destruction. I got just this really cool toy on eBay, something from my childhood. I rebought it. It's called Vertibird. I don't know if you're familiar with it.

Glenn: No.

Tom: It's a helicopter that's on a tether. And it goes around, and you can control the throttle and the pitch of the blades.

Glenn: Oh, I remember those.

Tom: And they're really vicious because the blade. If it's going full tilt and if you get your finger in it, I don't think it'll cut it off, but it'll definitely; it could break the skin.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: It's very, very sharp. It has to be. It has to cut the wind. And there's a hook and you can pick up a little car and astronaut and rescue it, and there's one version that comes with a ship. It's called Air and Sea Rescue. It's essentially this ship, and you've got the helicopter, and it lands and picks up the astronaut and brings it onto the ship. So umm, I just got another one. Next time you come over, I'll let you play it. It takes 4 D batteries,

Glenn: The Enterprise.... that's still in commission right?

Tom: Yeah, umm. I think it's in its last couple of years. They're going to decommission it replace it with the Bush. George. Not George W.

Glenn: George H.W.

Tom: The U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, and that's going be the last Nimitz-class ship, and then we don't know what's going to happen. They're either going to make a new version, or they're going to get rid of the aircraft carrier system. Eventually. I think the carrier system's great. I mean it's really expensive and obscene.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: I mean it's like a billion dollars a year per carrier or something. But it, you know, it represents so many of our problems and achievements. So I think it's a good symbol, and we haven't had too many. You know, we haven't lost any of them since World War II.

Glenn: Well, it's a good alternative to taking over a whole country so you can have a base there.

Tom: Yeah, I mean it's 6,000 people.

Glenn: Yeah, have you ever been on one?

Tom: I was just on the Intrepid a few weeks ago. I got talked into doing a little tour. I'm going to organize a tour: Behind the Scenes of the Intrepid, in September. You're, of course, invited.

Glenn: Oh, I'll be there.

Tom: I went with the chief curator. I went onto the flight deck. And underneath there's some great art graffiti'd on the walls from sailors. And I got to go into some of the areas that haven't been restored, that are really beat up. I spent a few trips on the Intrepid when I was researching. I think the best thing they have is their airplane collection. It's really terrific. I mean they've got the SR-71.

Glenn: Did you notice that they've turned all of the airplanes around?

Tom: Oh, away from Manhattan?

Glenn: They used to be facing Manhattan, and now they're facing New Jersey. And I was wondering if that was because that that's the prevailing wind direction. Suddenly they were all turned facing aft. It struck me as odd.

Tom: Maybe it was like a PR gesture, and they were thinking it was kind of aggressive having them aiming toward Manhattan. Like they're flying away to go attack Canada or whatever.

Glenn: I don't know. I mean the ship is facing Manhattan. So.

Tom: Yeah, but they always face in, don't they? When they come into port that's the way you always go.

Glenn: Yeah, yeah.

Tom: See that's convention, but I never thought about that. It's so crazy because you could never land an SR-71 on an aircraft carrier. They must have craned it on there somehow.

Glenn: Yeah, they were all craned on there.

Tom: Right, because they didn't have any of the arresting cables or anything.

Glenn: Also I don't know how any of those can still fly. Maybe the helicopters could. Some of them look kind of beat up

Tom: They're all completely trashed. There's nothing on there that would work.

Glenn: You know what amazed me, was how compact they are.

Tom: The carriers?

Glenn: No, the cockpits and the aircraft themselves. You see them in the sky, and they look kind of big. And you're right there, and you look in the cockpit and you think wow that's kind of a tight fit.

Tom: Yeah, I think that's one of the interesting things about weaponry or space travel is the human component. I mean, I think you have to engineer a minimum of civility to the action of combat. You want to engineer the minimum civility so as to maintain moral. I mean like on sailing hips spices were on the survival list.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: Because without spice, life's not worth living or something like that. Even the astronauts even had personal audiocassettes and things to play with. But that was also a little bit of a PR thing. You had to.

Glenn: Yeah, submarine duty, which as you know is the most claustrophobic and problematic duty in the Navy, the submarine service has always famous for their excellent food.

Tom: They had excellent food?

Glenn: That they had the best food in the navy, yeah.

Tom: As concession to the harshness?

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: Next to the Intrepid there is a great really freaky-cool submarine. I forgot the name of it.

Glenn: Oh yeah, I think it's the Growler.

Tom: Growler?

Glenn: It's an old missile submarine. Like an old cruise missile submarine

Tom: Exactly, yeah, and it had two hanger bays that could launch these cruise missiles.

Glenn: The Regulus.

Tom: Is that what they were called?

Glenn: Yeah, I know all this stuff.

Tom: So the Growler had an ice cream maker built in. And that's a pretty space-consuming object. But I think it's a way of maintaining civility. Have you read Tom Clancy?

Glenn: No. I've seen some of the movies.

Tom: In Carrier, which is a non-fiction piece about life on aircraft carriers, he talks a lot about the food and how the Navy's really interested in keeping it good.

Glenn: The Royal Navy always had grog from 1740 to 1970.

Tom: Drinks?

Glenn: Yeah, rum and water everyday.

Tom: Really? The American Navy is dry. You're not allowed to have booze. Although there are stories of the captain having a bottle of Single Malt Scotch.

Glenn: I saw a film on the Japanese super-battleship the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built. It was just unbelievably huge. At the end of World War II it went out on a kind of a suicide mission with 3,000 Japanese sailors and the night before the battle, they just pulled out all the sake, and they all got completely fucked up. Everybody was like staggering.

Tom: That seems so dumb, and then they all died. If they were all going to die anyway they figured. (Long pause)

Glenn: And they didn't have an ice cream machine. I loved submarines. I especially loved ships like the Growler, or prototypes of classes of ships that never made it. It's a direction that they could have gone in but didn't. It's like VTOL aircraft or "the flying wing." Weapons that never really made it.

Tom: These weird hybrids. Like the idea that it can fly and go underwater. Or it's a boat and a plane. Or a boat and a car. Or a boat and a car and a plane and a submarine. I was looking at this island upstate near Saratoga. It's priced at like a million dollars. And I was thinking about buying it, but Saratoga's a little far. But it's, it's a whole island in the middle of the Hudson, and it has its own 1500 ft landing strip.

Glenn: Really?

Tom: So I was thinking, that the whole thing about the country house in Manhattan is about beating the system. We're all thinking, like, how do you beat the system? Of course the helicopters, the big, the ultimate hack, that no one can figure out. Stephen Spielberg is always getting reprimanded by Amagansett for arriving in this helicopter. Whatever. I think that the car-plane or the ultralite is always really what I wanted to do. Launch off a building

Glenn: Matthew Barney has this kind of fantasy thing going. He has a speedboat, and he commutes from Nyack to Manhattan on it.

Tom: Does that work? Does the commute work?

Glenn: I think so. I used to think about doing that. Before we bought our house in Connecticut, we looked at some houses on the Hudson. I always thought about how long would it take to get there by boat.

Tom: That's in the Raymond Loewy book. He would always get speeding tickets on the Merritt Parkway. So he designed a special boat, and he would drink martinis on the way home from the office going like 40 knots on the Hudson.

Glenn: Yeah, it's a good survival strategy. When all the bridges are jammed with people trying to flee Manhattan, you hop on your boat or your helicopter, shake up the martinis and you're out.

Tom: That's smart.

Glenn: You could probably pick up some old Swift boat and rig it for luxury. I do worry about some of the navy technology though. Do you know about radar and cancer? Oh, here we go. A lot of Navy radar guys got cancer.

Tom: I looked into it a little bit because I was going to put a whole, umm, radar system on my island. I looked into the emissions, and it's definitely not safe. Especially with like a roof indoors, I should fax you this illustration I did on how radar hurts people.

Glenn: I think it's the Navy version of Agent Orange. I think it's something that's not acknowledged.

Tom: You know, I had about an hour conversation with a salesperson and an engineer from West Marine, which is this terrible, but sort of the most accessible Marine supply place. And I told them what I was trying to do. I was trying to do a radar system indoors, in a big indoor space. And he said he couldn't, with conscience, sell it to me. If that's what I was telling him. But he couldn't stop me from doing it with a different salesperson, or eBay or whatever. You know, Raytheon makes the same systems for the Navy as they make for us. They're just bigger and more powerful. It's the same stuff. It's intense FM waves. The same stuff that they use to cook plywood. The important thing is where you stand. If you want to be safe, you have to stand right in the middle underneath it so it goes around you like an umbrella. But if you're in the path of it, in the bow of the boat, you can get nailed. That's why it's put up really high. But really you have to sort of trust what they tell you. The radar salesman said that in port they're supposed to turn them off. But they obviously don't, because you see them turning.

Glenn: What about these radar gun cops?

Tom: They get testicular cancer because they keep their radar gun in their lap.

Glenn: Well, what about major league pitchers? They always have that radar gun aimed at them. I wonder if at 90 feet away it's harmful.

Tom: Yeah, I have one of those things. I kind of turn it off when I'm not using it, that is how I deal with it.

Glenn: What do you use them for?

Tom: In Nutsy's World, we had them for timing the slot cars. And we made a really fun little movie about the radar gun.

Glenn: Can they pick up something that small?

Tom: Yeah, 13 mph is our top speed.

Glenn: Really? Jesus, they seem so much faster.

Tom: I know, well, to scale it was like 280 miles an hour when you multiply it by 24. Yeah, between 8 and 13 miles per hour were kind of high speeds. And by the end, we we found that we could hop them up to like 18 or 20 miles per hour. But then you had to do all this other stuff to the suspension to keep them from going out of control. Radar guns are not meant for slower speeds or scaled speeds. But, I have this radar gun, man, and it really, really works. Sometimes when they have these great things like toll plazas; they have the radar guns set up to tell you how fast you're going.

Glenn: Yeah, yeah.

Tom: It's a kind of speed deterrent. Which I remember they have one of those in Connecticut, where I grew up, so we used to kind of do our own little time trial because it wasn't manned. So we'd start at one point and see how fast we could get going. That stuff always just drums up my adolescent urges, like I dare you to thing. Do you know what I mean?

Glenn: Yeah, yeah. We drove to Pennsylvania to pick up Oscar a few weeks ago and they had them on the Interstate at the beginning of construction zones. They always made me speed up to see how fast I could hit it. Oscar O'Brien, age 6, enters. Oscar: I have to tell you something.

Glenn: What?

Tom: Hi Oscar.

Glenn: Remember Tom? Tom's the one that built that aircraft carrier you were looking at and really liked. Oscar: What aircraft carrier?

Glenn: Remember you said what's that? And I said that's the ceiling. And you said how could an aircraft carrier be inside. Remember on the book. Oscar: Yeah.

Glenn: He built that, and it's inside. So what'd you want to ask me? Oscar: I wanted to ask you something. Can I watch Pirates of the Caribbean?

Glenn: Yeah. Oscar exits.

Tom: Cute. He was wearing a good badge. That looked really real.

Glenn: Yeah, he likes badges and stuff. He likes your work. He's getting to the point where he really likes Lego, and I have to build all his Lego stuff for him, which is really kind of complicated. I mean it's probably nothing for you.

Tom: Well, I don't like Lego because I don't like following directions.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: And I also, well, I've got a little bit of a grudge against Lego because as a kid I couldn't afford it in the quantities that my imagination required.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: And now I guess I can afford it in pretty much unlimited quantities, but it's a whole other eBay project. And also, you know, it's a grid. So I kind of have resistance to it. Like you can't- you know, any curves you have to build up.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: But also now, it's so specialized that the things you're building, you have instructions probably, and you have to more or less assemble it according to the plan or otherwise it just doesn't work.

Glenn: Yeah, but then I'll think, well, you don't really need this or this could be better. I mean I definitely sometimes think that we should customize something. But I just decided that from now on I'm going to glue them together.

Tom: That's a really good idea.

Glenn: Because I built this tank, this missile-launching tank. And Oscar's cousins were at the house and I had spent hours on this and suddenly it was in a million pieces.

Tom: Oh no, Well, if you get into the glue. I recommend you use, umm, cyanoacrylate. Essentially crazy glue. But they have professional that have it in dispensers that don't glue your fingers together.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: And there's this other thing. It's essentially an accelerator. So in case crazy glue isn't fast enough, in case five seconds isn't fast enough, you can just zap it with this, and it's instant. It's permanent and strong. So if you want, I can hook you up with all that stuff.

Glenn: Do they still make the glue-sniffing glue?

Tom: I think so. I'm not sure which. I was never a big huffer. But I mean.

Glenn: I wasn't either. But I think that subliminally those fumes were a part of the transcendence of the model experience. As a kid I made so many plastic models. The fumes were there. I think we weren't getting it high levels. But it must have been a high in some way.

Tom: Well, you know, I have to admit that welding fumes always have this kind of, umm, welding fumes that always have this kind of, umm, kind of calming affect on me. I think it's not unlike some of that stuff.

Glenn: Calming? Really?

Tom: Calming. Yeah, it's vaporizing metal. I'm sure it's really toxic. And sometimes you've got to burn through paint, weld through paint. That's really toxic. One day I was doing some welding on a Saturday, and that night I had a date with this really hot writer from the New Yorker. She was really beautiful, and she was really, really smart. She wrote about politics. And we went on this date, and I met her in Brooklyn. And I felt like, I failed the date because I was too dumb.

Glenn: Yeah?

Tom: I was like a little just like slow from my welding things. But I'd never had that experience before- failing a date because I was too dumb. I think it might have been the welding fumes, but maybe I'm just too dumb in general.

Glenn: I remember guys who were working with plastic resin. Artists, who seemed a little brain- damaged from it. They seemed especially attached to this medium. (Names deleted.)

Tom: Oh I think I met him.

Glenn: I guess it's hard to pinpoint what causes behavior.

Tom: I think people who like that stuff like other stuff.

Glenn: You observe all the safety measures right?

Tom: Now I do. I don't think on that particular Saturday I had been. ow, I've got this great system that I just hooked up. I've got an air compressor that's out on the street in a metal cage with a hose going through to this hood. I've got two hoods. One is just like a hood, and one that's like a welding hood. It's called a positive airflow compressor. It just creates higher pressure inside. It's not an airtight seal. Just higher pressure inside than outside. And all the tubing is like biologically rated. And the compressor's biologically rated. So I can be welding in extremely toxic conditions, and then it's kind of nice. I mean that was very expensive to install. And I never use it, but it's better late than never. But I think the real issue is that this stuff has a cumulative effect. You don't want to do it everyday. You do it every once in awhile.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: I think we have a lot of toxins living here. You see it on a day when you're in Midtown walking around. You take a shower at night, and your boogers are black. That's your primary filter, your mucus membrane.

Glenn: Yeah, I worked at Republic Steel and I would come home and blow my nose for 15 minutes and all this black stuff would come out. It was horrible.

Tom: Do the ablutions. See I think that's why Malcolm X got into Islam was because he worked as a welder too, at one point. Or as a metal worker. But he would do the ablutions morning and night. And that helped. But what did you do there? What was your job?

Glenn: I worked in the blast furnace division temporarily replacing guys who had been injured or killed on the job. I needed the money for college, so I pretended that I was not going to college. That I wanted a real job. So they put me in the blast furnace. The blast furnace is a process that hasn't changed since World War I. We would wear these asbestos suites when we'd tap the furnace and it was really gnarly. (Laughs) You'd be wearing this asbestos suit, and you'd have this like 12 ft pike, and you'd have to tap the furnace, and this molten iron would shoot out and go down these trenches and into these railroad cars. And they would take the molten steel to another part of the plant where it would get rolled out and stuff. People got killed or badly hurt fairly frequently.

Tom: That summer did anyone get killed?

Glenn: Yeah, there were three. It was so weird. The mill where I worked still had segregated locker rooms. My best friend at work was a black guy, and we liked to eat lunch together but we couldn't eat in either locker room, so we would go sit somewhere else and smoke and drink Pepsi. We were the new guys, and our job was replacing people. One night there was a gas leak by the furnace face and it went into the adjoining locker room, one of the black locker rooms, and two guys got asphyxiated sitting on the toilet. We replaced them.

Tom: Ugh, that's the worst.

Glenn: I can't believe I did this shit. I mean it was really toxic.

Tom: You can't kill bad grass, see, even you.

Glenn: After the furnace would run, there would be like all the trenches where the molten iron would run. It would be filled with slag, and we'd have to break it up with picks. This would get picked up by a crane, you'd have to walk out on an I-beam with a hook and grab the crane and open it manually. If you slipped, you'd fall like 20 or 30 feet.

Tom: Was it hot like this all the time?

Glenn: It was really hot. We used to have to take salt pills. Yeah, it would get up to 130 degrees in there.

Tom: Would they give you water too?

Glenn: Yeah, water. And we drank a lot of Pepsi and smoked a lot of Kools.

Tom: I can't imagine smoking in that. But I guess if it says 'cool' on the package, it'll make you cooler. Right?

Glenn: Yeah, I was always into the subliminals. I think it makes my voodoo stronger.

Tom: I'm always trying to realize greater power in being mediumistic or making my voodoo stronger. That may not be the appropriate place for an interview, but I do feel like I want to ask you about that because I feel like I've accessed just a fraction of my potential. Let's just say my potential is like from here to here I feel like I've done about that much.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: And when I look at the my life, I know that possibly there isn't all that much left. I mean, I just heard yesterday that an artist that I knew from L.A. Jason Rhodes, overdosed and died yesterday. I always thought he as a really good artist. Difficult personality.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: Even his objects weren't great, but the way he thought about them and his idea was really far out. But the point is I realize that there's limited time and the depth is kind of unlimited. There's unlimited potential. How much you realize of it? So I'm working real hard to try and push that, but I don't know if it's something that can be pushed. Or do you just have to keep working.

Glenn: I think it's just choosing the right thing, each time, choosing the right project I mean. I think you've been really successful at picking subject matter that appeals to people for reasons they might not be entirely sure of. That's why I started talking about the aircraft carrier and the military stuff and the submarines because I think it is about asserting power over things that are beyond the range of our grasp in daily life. You know, that's why kids Oscar's age are all obsessed with super heroes and Star Wars. It's the same with us. They hear about these horrible things in the news every day. Play is a way of training for this. You fantasize about being able to solve these monumental problems, or you fantasize about getting control of unstoppable forces. I think that's where the important decisions come in. Like talking about that movie like, Day After Tomorrow. I mean because that was just a completely negative viewpoint. You know? The magic comes in when you stop the bomb from going off. When you take on something really scary, like a monster or an evil army, and you slay it or converting it into something positive or benign. With your aircraft carrier you humanize it inside. Outside it's the same. It looks like the regular attack aircraft carrier. Inside it's kind of like the party pad. That philosophically transformative customization is something I see in a lot of what you do.

Tom: Well, I think when going back to my childhood and being interested in military stuff and guns and superheroes. I was also really into the concept of revolution. Like it was Women's Lib time. And I made this drawing. It was like Kid's Lib. Because I felt like kids were these oppressed by adults- we had to go to bed, we couldn't watch TV.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: I was kind of identified with that, and I think so much of the violent iconography and the superhero stuff was about resisting this overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. I was under the oppression and tyranny of my parents and all the Oedipal stuff that goes along with that. You know, this feeling of powerlessness and being in love with my mother and not being able to do anything about it because there was this guy in the way, my dad.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: And I don't know how specific or universal those themes are but I think we all have them...

Glenn: Yeah, yeah. It worked for Jim Morrison.

Tom: In some ways and this struggle informs our whole lives. Some of us get farther away from it and get into complex issues and some of us are still stuck with those things.

Glenn: Or other people might still be stuck on it and not realize it and be acting it out in other arenas, which is probably the most common thing.

Tom: Ok, so that makes me feel like I'm one step ahead, but.

Glenn: Well, who was it who said the artist is the exemplary sufferer. Maybe it was Kierkegaard. And I think that's true, you know. I mean I find it true that people who are good artists are usually people who have survived their sensitivity without losing it. I value being "too sensitive." Everybody says "you're too sensitive." Well yeah, I am, but so what? I mean, but I didn't choose that. And isn't it good that I am.

Tom: Right, well I think the ones that are the really good artists are that, yes, the ones that are too sensitive. The lucky artists have this ability to bring their story- their very personal story to the universal... like Ingmar Bergman or Woody Allen.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: They have this talent for making the way that they have suffered legible to an audience. (Phone rings.)

Glenn: Yeah. Well that's what you're doing in your way.

Tom: Saved by the bell. (Pause.) When I built that aircraft carrier piece, it kind of I felt a little bit like I was doing a PR effort. I was thinking "Oh this is kind of good PR for the Navy. It makes it seem fun." And then when I watch movies about how the government blew up the World Trade Center, so that we will support a war in Iraw that makes me angry. The whole military romance kind of comes down to Pat Tillman. He's a great professional football star and then after 9-11 he leaves his million dollar contract to join the Special Forces, he gets sent to Afghanistan and then, of course, he immediately gets killed.

Glenn: And then it turns out it's friendly fire

Tom: Exactly. I think that's a really important story. Cause that's the way it is. It's like everything goes wrong. I mean that guy gave up a million dollar contract. He was a great player. Apparently he was a loved player too. He had integrity.

Glenn: He was the all American hero

Tom: And then he goes and gets his stupid ass wasted. Some friendly fire. What an idiot! But that's the way it goes. I don't know, there's something like deeply gratifying about the tragedy of that. I mean it's tragic, but it's appropriate. It reminds people about the reality of war. He's not going to go and be Rambo. He's going to get shot by friendly fire. Like you or I probably would. Because it's just another body. And bullets rip through everyone's flesh regardless of how tough you are.

Glenn: Yeah.

Glenn: But I think most art artists generally have small ambitions, which is, I think, what's important about what you do. You don't have small ambitions. I mean your work might look cute in a way or user friendly, but it's talking about what is important. What is crucial. I like that. I think it gets down to the facts, to the important matters, in a smart way the same way that the work of David Hammonds does, or the work of Chris Burden.

Tom: Well, Chris Burden is definitely a model in a lot of ways for me. I mean I think I always am frustrated with his status, and that he didn't make the cut yet. They haven't decided that he's the art Messiah. I don't get why, I mean I'm a huge Bruce Nauman fan, but why does Bruce Nauman get that level of recognition and Burden doesn't?

Glenn: I think it's just marketing principles. Chris Burden doesn't make a lot of stuff that can be speculated on.

Tom: Right, it's all big stuff.

Glenn: And there's not a lot of it. It's deliberate and measured. It's limited and specific to what he's interested in. He might make one thing in a year. But it's an important thing. I think if he had more product he would be exponentially more famous, but he chooses not to do that.

Tom: That interesting. You do need a certain quantity of products to support a market so there's commerce going on. That's a really good point.

Glenn: I mean if he did, if he produced like Damien Hirst produced, who knows?

Tom: But then he wouldn't have the sensitivity. If you compare those two artists, Damien Hirst's focus and his impact is largely commercial. It's more commercial than conceptual. If you look at his impact on our community and the audience, it's more about that. And it's very successful about that.

Glenn: Yeah, but in a way it seems cynical.

Tom: But I think that's very overt, that's been there from the beginning and continuously. His theme is cynicism. Mother and child, bisecdted animals...He wanted to cast his grandmother in resin, in formaldehyde. And you know, the pills, all those drugs. The whole concept of promoting drug use is a very cynical, destructive thing. I mean we use drugs, but anyone who uses them or doesn't use them knows that life's better without them and there's a cynicism inherent in using them. I think that strangely there's something very uncynical about what's going on with Chris Burden. Even though he deals with the most destructive, violent forces. You know, he's got this house in Topanga Canyon, and he's had it for thirty years or whatever, and it's in the middle of the wilderness there. And over the last thirty years all these houses, and all these lights have been built up there. When he first moved there it was dark, and now he sees lights all around. So what he's done, and I don't think this is cynical at all. I just think it's downright aggressive in a very proactive way, is that he's collected all these street lamps from all over. L.A. County. He has different antique ones and he's sandblasted and refinished them, and like, antiques and perfectly recast the glass. And he's created this giant chandelier in the middle of his compound with fifty of these street lamps, and he just turns it on at night. To fight back. And he's made his existence a very direct reflection that combats what his neighbors have done to him. I don't think there's anything cynical about that. It's not passive aggressive. It's just downright aggressive. It's very direct. Something I'm learning recently is about the value of looking someone in the eye and telling them something you know they don't want to hear. Rather than being nice and not telling them so you don't hurt their feelings. But then there's a dishonesty to that. Yeah, you might, for a while, keep the friendship going. But it's going to be based on a lie. Whereas if you tell them upfront, you have a chance of overcoming things.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: I know that sounds really basic. But it took forty years to come to terms with that and like act on it.

Glenn: Well we're trained not to do that as part of the socializing process. To learn to shut up and tell lies. And don't rock the boat.

Tom: For me even in a conversation like this there are all kinds of not-niceties. I mean we like each other. We're friends. So it's not an issue, but I think and also it's not like there's any agenda specifically or any issue. But I think so much of building big projects or writing things that are critical involve other people and the impact on them. For example in your novel, what is it called now?

Glenn: Shallow.

Tom: Shallow. You change all this shit because you didn't want to get in the lawsuits or deal with the politics of that. At least ten percent of how genius it is or how condemning it is or harsh or critical or just downright funny is that there are true stories about these fashion models and other fashion people...

Glenn: Well to me the reason you write fiction now, isn't to tell a story, but so you can tell the truth which is against the law.

Tom: Right. Because of libel?

Glenn: Yeah, slander, libel. Whatever.

Tom: Is it against the law if you tell the truth?

Glenn: Yeah, yeah.

Tom: It is because it's defaming.

Glenn: Yes.

Tom: That doesn't seem right

Glenn: No, it doesn't seem right. It's an interesting word, defaming. It's gets to the heart of our culture, how it works. To defame is a crime. As if you are stealing someone's fame. I think that after a certain point that is what fiction became. We had the new journalism, which used novelistic techniques to deal with non-fiction things. So, what's left? What's left is the private sphere. The private sphere is where humanity actually lives, so how do you write about personality and things like that without stepping across the legal boundaries. I think that's entirely what appealed to me about writing something fictional. I think it's interesting and important to show the other side, the side that is edited out, that's unprintable. Today a lot of journalism is just public relations. The agents and publicists are so powerful that they'll get approval over the photos, approval over the text, you know. The whole thing is just a deluxe press kit.

Tom: In Vanity Fair they'll get approval?

Glenn: I think it's implicit, at least. I mean Vanity Fair was kind of hard hitting in the beginning and then they kind of backed off, because, I think, the agencies got together and said well no, you can't talk to this person. We'll give it to somebody else who'll guarantee a cover and photo approval and a positive spin and they won't ask these questions and they'll throw in the Armani suit. And there are all these media outlets that will do anything. Sure, it'll be a really positive story.

Tom: But Vanity Fair shows a balance. It's not just fluff. I've been fluffed. I just met this journalist who was assigned to write about me and he said he didn't want to write a fluff piece. Okay, here are all the other things that are written about me, will you just take a quick look at them before you interview me please? And he's like yeah, yeah, yeah, I will. And then in the end it was just a fucking fluff piece. I wasted three days with this guys. It was supposed to be a major profile, but in the end it was just a rehash of everything he read.

Glenn: It's not necessarily all the writer's fault. The editors' training is to do things in a specific formula. These are Tom Sach's credentials, and this is why he's interesting.

Tom: So journalists have to write that all out at the time.

Glenn: Yeah, I mean that's how they pitch the story, and that's what the editors want to get back.

Tom: But that takes up two thirds of the article at least, if not three quarters.

Glenn: That's why I like interviews. Because at least it's in your own voice. And you can say " that's a stupid question." Of course that will probably get cut.

Tom: Have you read Werner Herzog's Minnesota Declaration?

Glenn: No.

Tom: That's just his little manifesto. It's worth reading, but in the beginning of the book it said rather than agreeing to do this project and have it be a culmination of lies from past interviews. I decided on a much worse option: to collaborate, so it's like an all-new 100 page interview. I don't know why I'm bringing it up. Other than just he's someone who's, everything you read about him, the first seven eighths of the piece is basically the back-story every time. I know the story about him not using a phone until he was 17, or walking for days and days and days, getting arrested, passports, and no one really dying on the set of Fitzcarraldo. I don't need to read that every time.

Glenn: That's kind of inevitable, I mean unless you go into a smaller circulation publications, or YouTube or something like, where you can avoid the accommodation of the lowest common denominator. I mean it's great if you can get away from all the preconceived notions of how something is communicated, but it almost takes a fine artist to get away with it.

Tom: Do you have a MySpace site up yet?

Glenn: No, no.

Tom: I was thinking of putting one up. Not for me, but for my studio.

Glenn: I was thinking of doing it because I think that's a good way to get people to look at things you're doing.

Tom: By the way, you know the book is coming out in October and there's a special edition, a collaboration I'm doing with Muccia Pradia. The a cover is a Prada-sewn thing that I'm going to fuck up and set fire to or something. I'm not sure exactly how it's going to work. That's off the record.

Glenn: Your secret is safe with me.

Conversation #2

Glenn: I think we need a plain language art magazine. Don't you think that's a good idea? It could be done by artists with tape recorders. It would help get rid of the art world. Because the art world is not artists. Artists are not a part of the art world.

Tom: No, that's why I don't go to those art fairs. Like Miami or Art Basel or whatever.

Glenn: What's great about art fairs, is that more than showing the art they really show the machinery. You know? I mean more than anything, the Armory Show or Art Basel really show you how it all works. And there are no artist there. They would be intruders.

Tom: But it's so far from art. Like I think of, you know, I mean I never met Jean-Michel Basquiat but more than any other artist, he's one that I have some sort of real affinity with. Probably because his life was so short that he lives forever this ideal.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: You know? He's like perfect, and also, of course, what he did. Like the style of it and the quality of it as you know there are all of these connections. But when I think about what I'm doing in the studio, it feels a million miles away. And then when people talk to me or suck up to me and ask me about being in the art world, and I just feel like they so don't get it, and I'm always a little weirdly offended because it seems so detached. I mean, yeah ok, I get my money from the art world. But, I get my power from Con Edison. I engage the grid to get what I need so that I can run my air conditioning and my drills. But to think that something like Art Basel or the Armory has anything to do with my production. But you know, strangely, a lot of artists do. There's a huge trend towards this self-consciousness in contemporary art. I mean, you know I think, maybe that's for one of those artists who did that piece the "All Fun and No Work Makes Jack a Dull Boy" piece.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: It's very conceptual and heady. Maybe that's not a good example because that's actually a great object. I know there was a show last year somewhere in Germany, of Kubrick's archive. And my fantasy is that it was filled up with objects on pedestals, like you know, the stack of paper from The Shining, or the bone that was thrown in the air from 2001. Or the dueling set from Barry Lyndon or scripts of Dr. Strangelove and the Alex de Large's codpiece. Whatever. I think that's kind of a good collection of stuff.

Glenn: Artists are kind of typically and sometimes passively victimized by the mechanisms that are supposed to support them and honor them. Their venues. Or art writing. Look at the art magazines. They're not good.

Tom: Well, what about that plain text art magazine that you're going to write-- produce?

Glenn: Well, that's an idea. Let's raise the money...

Tom: What about a plain text magazine? Like fuck. If it's about art. That's fine. But how about a plain text magazine. I mean one that's not as idiotic as Newsweek or Times, because those are the only ones that I'm smart enough to read. I've got a college diploma. I've done a little postgraduate work. Like, I'm a highly educated person. And I'm not smart enough to read any of those things. So why would anyone else be? And I'm actually invested in it. Like it's my job. My business. And I'm a serious businessman. And I read my trade journals, but I can't get through them. That's the only business that's like that. If you read like, Plastics Monthly, and you're in the industry, you're going to understand it. Or, you know, The Male Clinic Report. You're going to understand every word in there. But you can't read an art magazine.

Glenn: Yeah, because the Male Clinic Report or whatever is written by doctors, but art magazines are not written by artists. They're written by specialists and experts. But what makes these people experts and specialists?

Tom: I'll tell you exactly what makes them specialists and experts. They are all unqualified. The dealers do have certain qualifications. They know how the market works. And sometimes it's not pretty. A certain well known artist was at my house right before the auctions, and he said, "I hope I tank." And, you know, because when you're the flavor of the month, you know...

Tom: Right.

Glenn: It's not only that all the people who would never pay any attention to you all of the suddenly want something from you. You're also in a kind of precarious position because you're the one that everybody wants to knock off. I think.

Tom: Knock off, like make copies, or kill? Or both?

Glenn: Some people want to destroy you. Some people want to replace you. The star system is not good for art. You know, we live in the superstar culture, and it's kind of better to be a bit elusive. I don't know if it's good to be at the top.

Tom: When I start thinking along those lines, and I'm embarrassed to have given it this much conversation. I'm not embarrassed in the context of our conversation, but if it's in print I'm going to feel really corny. That we spent our time dignifying this bullshit with our thoughts, but I think it's worth talking about for us at least. When I start thinking about that stuff, I get very overwhelmed, and it's very, very scary. I'm thinking about artists like Mister Y and these things are a million dollars. I know that I'm a good artist. That I'm the best at what I do. And I operate at an extremely high level. And I have no competition in what I'm doing. And I'm doing really, really well. But my prices aren't nearly close to that, and my finances aren't that solid. And I've got to get my shit together, and I got all these expenses. And like here's this guy, a million dollars a painting, and I can't help but think of myself in competition with that. I try and not to think about that because that's where my brain goes. I think it's very destructive. It's very, very far away from the things that make me a superhero. And that's just working in my studio and turning good shit out and thinking and making good decisions like you said.

Glenn: Yeah, but I think the difference between you and Mister Y is that you, your work...

Tom: I don't want to go there... You cant even...

Glenn: The difference between you and Artist Y is that your work is aimed at the intelligent general public. It's not aimed at this class of occult speculators.

Tom: I'm not concerned with the market...

Glenn: Bravo. Because it's a clique or cabal... You're the so of Pop. Your work is there for "The People." It's there for smart people to go on to your website and see what your doing, what you're thinking, what you're listening to and what's you're interested in. You know, I think that's how really good artists operate. They are in a dialogue with the world, not the anointed experts. I think that where art goes wrong is when the artist doesn't have the fans and it's all kind of about the value of the work. It has to be explained to the public.

Tom: And that's the case with, umm, Artist X.

Glenn: Yeah, I mean if it needs to be explained then there's something wrong with it, I think. I mean that's what was great about Pop Art was that it didn't need to be explained.

Tom: That's a great title for a book: This Object Needs No Explanation.

Glenn: Yeah, well, I mean, you can talk about it, of course, but it doesn't require that for completion. I think that's the important thing is that...

Tom: But I had, I made this duct tape painting, it was like a color field.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: It was just duct tape. And my uncle who's like, Marty, a used car salesman from Queens, he went to one of my openings. And he went up to my dad. And he said... I heard the story later. "Can I ask you a personal question?" My dad was like sure, yeah. He was like I don't really get it. What's this supposed to mean, and you know, I think my dad was little dumbfounded. Because he found himself trying to, he had to explain modern art. You know, I did a presentation once at a nursing home, and I showed them my duct tape Mondrians. And you know, some of the guys there said "Oh, it looks like some ceiling tiles." So I found myself instantly in this place describing De Stijl. Giving like, an impromptu 15-second history on the De Stijl movement, and Modernism and stuff. So even that stuff is too elite and esoteric because it requires a sense history to get it.

Glenn: Yeah, but I think the difference between you and Mister Y is that you, your work...

Tom: I don't want to go there... You cant even...

Glenn: The difference between you and Artist Y is that your work is aimed at the intelligent general public. It's not aimed at this class of occult speculators.

Tom: I'm not concerned with the market...

Glenn: Bravo. Because it's a clique or cabal... You're the so of Pop. Your work is there for "The People." It's there for smart people to go on to your website and see what your doing, what you're thinking, what you're listening to and what's you're interested in. You know, I think that's how really good artists operate. They are in a dialogue with the world, not the anointed experts. I think that where art goes wrong is when the artist doesn't have the fans and it's all kind of about the value of the work. It has to be explained to the public.

Tom: And that's the case with, umm, Artist X.

Glenn: Yeah, I mean if it needs to be explained then there's something wrong with it, I think. I mean that's what was great about Pop Art was that it didn't need to be explained.

Tom: That's a great title for a book: This Object Needs No Explanation.

Glenn: Yeah, well, I mean, you can talk about it, of course, but it doesn't require that for completion. I think that's the important thing is that...

Tom: But I had, I made this duct tape painting, it was like a color field.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: It was just duct tape. And my uncle who's like, Marty, a used car salesman from Queens, he went to one of my openings. And he went up to my dad. And he said... I heard the story later. "Can I ask you a personal question?" My dad was like sure, yeah. He was like I don't really get it. What's this supposed to mean, and you know, I think my dad was little dumbfounded. Because he found himself trying to, he had to explain modern art. You know, I did a presentation once at a nursing home, and I showed them my duct tape Mondrians. And you know, some of the guys there said "Oh, it looks like some ceiling tiles." So I found myself instantly in this place describing De Stijl. Giving like, an impromptu 15-second history on the De Stijl movement, and Modernism and stuff. So even that stuff is too elite and esoteric because it requires a sense history to get it.

Glenn: Well, but it still works if it makes people think. If they have to try and solve this problem, if they feel that need, then it's working. Pollock didn't need an explanation. Okay, maybe it's simpler than that. Art needs to be able to stand alone. You know, if it needs a set of instructions then there's something wrong with it.

Tom: Yeah, I think you're right, and that's why I'm putting wood burning instructions in my next piece. (Laughs) No, I completely agree. I'm just being a wise ass, but I am actually putting instructions in my next piece because of how badly maintained things get. When I see them in other places, so I at least can point to the sign. You know, they have those signs up in bars like "No Credit." Just so that they can point to them.

Conversation #3

Glenn: So, how's Middle East Crisis going?

Tom: So there was yet another article in the Sunday Times Magazine about the Avant-garde being assimilated by the mainstream. This time it was as told through these kids who do street fashion....

Glenn: Oh, Aron and Supreme all that. Yeah, I saw that.

Tom: You saw that article?

Glenn: Yeah, I read it.

Tom: Ok, ok, you saw that article. But then, in the Outlook Section, they talked about Hezbollah's combat tactics about how they're so nimble, but they're hi-tech, and they've got lots of money and it's hard to attack them because they're invisible, and the U.S. military or even Israel is this large organization that functions by committee and centralized commands. So these guys, very much like the terrorists everywhere- can operate independently and strike. So it struck me that the solution is get those kids who do those t-shirts, like Aron, to have their own little boutique armies.

Glenn: Yeah.

Tom: And do independent actions. Now you could say at first it's a cynical thought. Like we need another Vietnam to thin out those ranks because those kids are such dilettantes. But I think in reality, the idea of having some independent contractors that can go in work with more freedom and independence is interesting. Of course, there are risks involved, but you can really get results like that especially if they are well funded.

Glenn: Yeah, I think this idea dates back to the sixties when Sonny Barger and the Hells Angels wanted to go as a unit to Vietnam. I think it all depends on what the motivation is. I mean Iraq is full of people like that, in a way, because these armed security companies there are filled with 40 and 50 year-old ex-Special Forces and Navy Seals. I mean that's a pretty new concept for the United States, these private armies. Their jobs are to guard embassies and Halliburton offices and oil trucks or whatever. But I guess the difference is that they're not offensive minded. They're more defense.

Tom: Yeah. I'm talking about using the creativity of the American spirit again. Because I think what's happening is that these guys, these Hezbollahs are much more like the independent-minded rebel Americans than we think we are, but we're really stuck with this big, messy system. And these guys are smart and nimble. And they're going to kick our ass. We'll never win. It's just going to be a big disaster. But if we go in there a get aggressive and fight like the punks that we are, then we can win. And we could get rid of all that dumb fashion in the meantime too.

Glenn: Yeah, but we also need to kind of have a better design for the future world. Do you know Peter Fend? Peter Fend is a conceptual artist who got in trouble because he was leasing satellite time and beating all the intelligence agencies to things, like Chernobyl. Peter has a great theory about how to reorganize the world's political units according to water. He's a geopolitical thinker, and I think that would be a good thing for artists to put their attention to. Let's come up with an intelligent redesign for the Middle East. How do you make Israel workable and acceptable? How do you replace that wall? I love that Albert Brooks movie where he's a comedian who gets hired to find out what Muslims think is funny. That seems to be the approach we're lacking.

Tom: What movie is that?

Glenn: I forget the name of it. It's his last movie. It's really, really great. It's like...

Tom: Oh, that sounds great. I think the way we solved the whole slavery issue in America was only by love, by making love. And getting everyone to fuck each other. We're getting there. It is getting better you can't say the revolution was televised. I think we will win eventually. By winning them over with shopping. And it's going to take time. And I think it's a question of accelerating that. And you know I think we can get rid of some of the baddies. Seduce them into our evil system of consumerism.

Glenn: Instead of dropping leaflets, they should be dropping iPods.

Tom: Yeah, totally. I mean that's the best thing. Definitely iPods. And they should be cheap enough by now that we can afford to do that. iPods with like, James Brown on them.

Glenn: The young guys in the Middle East need rehabilitation in terms of learning to have fun and look good and meet girls and have ambitions and express themselves as individuals. That's what we need to work on I think. Not just killing them all.

Tom: I think we can kill some of the really bad ones.

Glenn: I think we need to kill the ones that are past rehabilitation.

Tom: Well, we kill their heads and then feed their bodies with our sugar. I mean I think the problem is like in Brave New World he says, Huxley says, " You must choose between high art and world peace." And that's why Shakespeare was banned. Because it makes you think. And I think the problem with the African Diaspora, and what's going on in the Middle East, is that although we have peace in America, we have a loss of, or a diluted generalized experience of culture. We don't have these, like, intense pockets of culture. We've got Eminem. So that's something. But we've got a long way to go.

Apocalypse and Wallpaper

All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art

Glenn O'Brien: Was Pollock the end or was he just getting warmed up?

Christopher Wool: He'd barely started. His late black paintings are actually my favorites....completely underappreciated. It's idiotic that they are seen as "figurative" thus retrograde. Critics....who needs them but you can't kill them...

From a conversation published in Purple, vol. 3, number 6

Charlie Parker recorded "Now's the Time" in 1949 and it's still now. New is what works now. We may question modernism, but we still can't help looking for that thing that snaps us out of autopilot and makes us look up on the chance we might see something in the present, right in front of us. Epiphanies happen. Oh snap!

Christopher Wool's paintings do that kind of job now-conjuring new visions, flipping out fresh takes, constructing unheard of pictures that shock and thrill the curious and the jaded the way New York abstractionists did back in the boho fifties. But this is no rehash. It's not Abstract Expressionism for Dummies. Wool has absorbed the whole esthetic enchilada of the 20th Century and he refries it afresh each time. He beautifully circumvents the big bad art-historical rules the way the Pop Art rebels did in the sixties. It's a brand new bag (synthesis)-a big, hungry eye with a great rhythmic ear. For me it's a visual analog to that jazz that's stuck in

my head, something that moves me like Epistrophy or On the Corner. A door to the gray area where the future comes from.

Christopher Wool is not an art movement. But his art is always moving, transitively and to the extent that it seems to change from viewing to viewing. Wool isn't a movement guy nor is he a clubman or a joiner, but he has his fellow travelers, collaborators, aficionados and co-conspirators. If there is a movement related to him it will come from the youngsters, improving new chops from his central, influential grooves. And those with a good eye will see here a mode of departure that is strong and true. As Lord Buckley once said: "Yeah, there's the hard lick that makes this endless drag flip city."

From now on when I say Pop Art, I mean what people think about Pop Art today and when I say Abstract Expressionism, I mean what people think about Abstract Expressionism today. As Dick Higgins wrote in 1967 "Whatever the debt that others who are generally considered Pop Artists owe to Oldenburg...in my opinion Oldenburg belongs more properly to whatever movement Goya was a member of." We're in this for the long haul.

You can't look at the work of Christopher Wool, or you can't begin to look at it, without thinking of Jackson Pollock. Wool began his career with drip paintings, and he has progressed into ever more complex strategies of abstraction and the articulation of ephemeral concepts. And he's done all this after the nominal end of abstract expressionism, the perceived end of abstract art and the declared end of painting. Quite a coup and he's getting away with it.

Pollock and Wool are very different creatures. Pollock is dead, for example. He was loud, unsubtle, drunk and by all accounts obnoxious. Wool is alive. Also cool, dry, subtle and quite pleasant. But it's about the work. There's something important

and umbilical there, and the more one looks at Wool's masterful accomplishment the more one realizes that we are beholding an extraordinary and important achievement. We're at ground zero.

So, what has Pollock, the anointed and martyred artist of introspection and high seriousness, to do with Wool, the quietly controversial, unobtrusively cool artist whose abstractions are made with the tools of a graffiti artist and whose titles come from James Brown and Funkadelic?

Frank O'Hara wrote that Pollock's work was a quest for spiritual clarity. "The effort to achieve such a state is monumental and agonizing, and once achieved it is a harrowing state to maintain. In this state all becomes clear, and Pollock declared the meanings he had found with astonishing fluency, generosity and expansiveness."

When Pollock's Caddy went airborne it seemed to put the exclamation point on the sentence of Abstract Expressionism. It was an act that couldn't be followed. Andy Warhol used to say: "He was too introspective. He thought too much. That's why he killed himself." So even though non-objective painting continued after Pollock, even though the best of them got better, art history moved on. It took Pop to bring back shock and the new. But the monumental clarity has come only in dribs and drabs.

But then slowly and surely Christopher Wool has reinvented abstraction and created a radical new way of working that partakes of that clarity and that heroism, but in a way that is shockingly novel and perhaps heretically casual. The work achieves spiritual clarity, but in a way that might horrify the hipster of a past generation, he makes it look easy. This is the cool clarity of a later time.

Wool has made these free wheeling pictures with a full understanding and appreciation of abstraction and of Pop too. So then what is his relation to the half-century old practice of the transcendental Jack the Dripper aside from their mutual thoroughgoing abstraction and a groundbreaking invisibility to the philistines of their time?

One could superficially interpret Wool's paintings as parodies of Pollock's seriousness, as a cynical re-enactment of action painting utilizing an impoverished bag of tricks hijacked from vandalism. But then one would be missing the point. (If anything Pollock parody describes Mike Bidlo, but even Bidlo does it with love.) No, Wool embraces and engages action painting as his primary source material and he then manipulates it, with the cool reflection of a pop artist or dada collagist, creating art that is both intense and reflective, physical and mechanical, unconscious and considered, refined in technique and redolent of street vernacular, both high and low. But despite the many apparent contradictions the work is singular, strong, organic and as deep as it might appear shallow.

One of the subtitles in Harold Rosenberg's essay "The American Action Painters" (1959) is "Apocalypse and Wallpaper." That makes a nice tag for what Wool is up to. There is a painting titled Apocalypse -SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS-and a series of paintings made with the rubber rollers used to mimic wallpaper. In a way that title sums up the ways in which Wool is a perfect bridge between the action painters championed by Rosenberg and the generation that followed and, in a way, opposed them. He is the Pop/Action painter, an action/reaction painter.

Harold Rosenberg created the term Action Painting, in doing so promulgating an idea that changed the course of art. He wrote: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a

space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or "express" an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."

Suddenly the artist was not the great craftsman as much as the great actor or athlete, working in the moment. It was the inspired act, in the moment-not the grand plan, executed over time. Wool works the way the action painters work, but that is only the first step in a process that involves considerable calculated manipulation, calculated action in reaction to the original strokes. Here the tools of the pop artist, like silkscreen, and the graphic designer, Photoshop, meet the neo-primitive tools of the action painter.

William Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility." So maybe Wool's is a poetic approach to action painting where the action becomes the subject of contemplation and then further acts, less actiony acts. It's almost a true fusion of Abstract Expressionism and Pop-a noble bastard if ever there was one.

Warhol mocked abstract expressionism, admiring their achievements but smarting from their macho attitudes. Yet he himself only eliminated the token action drips on his first pop paintings when Emile de Antonio told him they were "shit." According to Dave Hickey the Warhol soup can was the artists way of putting Abstract Expressionism (i.e. "soup") back into the can.

Wool makes the soup too, (lots of noodles,) yest, he makes gestural paintings in a more or less traditionalist manner, then makes the can, manipulating the gestures later with reproductive and collage techniques from the primitive-- cutting and pasting by hand--to the state-of-the-art using computers and graphic design programs. But the same sort of instinct and transcendent judgment that created the

initial impulsive marks is also expressed in the deliberate use of the higher tech tools. And, in the process, and it's all about the process, he manages to redeem painting from academic argument and décor, bringing it back to life by inventing a sort of action/reaction painting that resolves more contradictions than you can shake a brush at.

Wool uses clip art and decorative rollers in the same way he uses verbal clichés. He recycles base materials, signs of commercial kitsch and decorative banality and the husks of devalued emotional triggers, transforming them through a sort of alchemical overkill into strangely beautiful compositions. He's mining the same ores at Koons, but the results are radically different, from the precisely absurd to the funkily sublime. Wool's abstractions employing flower clips are not about kitsch. As Rosenberg noted: In America kitsch is nature." Wool's compositions spring from the spirit of the urban landscape. With Christopher Wool as with Richard Prince or Paul McCarthy, Playboy is mother nature.

Wool's work is funky. It is high funk. It is consciously funky, from its appropriation of graffiti tactics to it's urban povera aesthetic to its references to funk music. "Why must I chase the cat..." "I can't stand myself when you touch me..."

Christopher Wool takes it to the bridge, spanning abstract expressionism and pop, drama and comedy, funk and the sublime. The emblem of his advanced funkiness is his spray squiggle-with all the innocence of an amateur doodle, yet all the stealth of a master brush stroke. That funk is the P-Funk. Fifty years on Pollock's paint splash looks very artistic, whereas in its day it was a shocker. But no naked emperor connotations survive. The equivalent shocker today is Wool's joyous squiggle, a gesture usually associated with impromptu juvenile defacement, obliteration, error. It has a motor-bootiness to it that is guaranteed

to produce discomfort in the academically squeamish. That's street knowledge.

A few years ago a patronizing adult looked at a colorful abstract drawing my five year old son was working on and said, "Oh, that's really good! Is it a house." My son looked the questioner over skeptically and said, "It's a scribble!"

But look at how free it is, a scribble. Look at how that sprayed line seems to have a mind of its own, or is it a mindlessness of its own? It's the arm aspiring to freedom in randomness, dowsing a psychic magnetic field, making tracks to a secret place where the artist is as natural as a preying mantis or a local god.

Okay, lets have a show of hands.

Graffiti is the human signature of the city. Tags are the only non-corporate individual markings in the city landscape. The spray can and marker make the only show of hands. If it were art, graffiti would be revolutionary art.

Graffiti is never abstract, but sometimes the lettering is very abstracted, pushing legibility to the limit. At the height of New York's "wild style" movement, with its heavily decorated letters (or armed letters, as Rammellzee would put it) readability was trumped by graphic spectacle. But I recall taking an Amtrak train to Philadephia where the tracks into the city, particularly near the North Philadelphia station passed through desolate post-industrial slum with weird fields of graffiti that seemed almost like an alien alphabet. It was genuinely ill. It looked like Chinese on crack and angel dust. I don't know what physical cues Wool provides himself when composing a sprayed line, but the results can be as strange and unsettling as those Philly tags. Sometimes his line is easy and loopy and partakes of the innocence of childlike doodling, but other times it is uneasy, tense and ill.

The word paintings are hard edge on the edge. It's not reductio ad absurdum or a send up. It's painting with attitude. It's not exactly Robert Ryman with found lyrics, or Ad Reinhardt meets concrete poetry but it's up that alley. It is minimal in its self-defined context, painted words stripped down to the bondo. It is abstraction of language itself, but it's also about the tension running along the thin line between mass production and the personal hand. It's about the aura of the stencil, about energy radiating and splashing from the confines of the character. It's sign-painting with feedback.

The chosen words and phrases are All-American mantras, knucklehead koans, idiot ideograms. They are about conventional wisdom, common knowledge and default settings. They are compressed and concentrated like Alka Seltzer or Pez. They are bricks. Clunky, dangerous, mass-produced, but no two exactly alike and their composition on the canvas or page or slab puts them under a philological, microscope..

Sometimes, if you look at a word long enough, it's stops making sense. And then you can start over again with it. We deconstruct the word and the letter and the phrase by contemplating it in skewed order, instinctively going for acrostic . Wool deconstructs words and decontextualizes phrases by stacking letters at faux random. The process generates calligraphic effects, acrostic reverb and a kind of Rubik's cubism of meaning.

For the great impenetrable fakakta theorist of graffiti Ramellzee, graffiti was a scientific restoration of the alphabet's power, with limitless metaphysical connotations, from the Van Allen belt to blood types. Undoubtedly the graffiti writers remanipulation of the letter had a deep iconography. Even graffiti has its cabalists. But this work is more casual. It's about the meeting point between the machine and hand work, between formula and expression There

are no answers here, only good questions about how characters and words work. Or not.

Unlike the swaggering abstractionists of the fifties, the purist painters, Wool doesn't disassociate his paintings from at least a metaphoric relationship to the world. There's a street-smart quality to his esthetic. He's a connoisseur of chaos and a cartographer of disorder. His photographs, as in his book East Broadway Breakdown (2002) lays out a vision of apocalyptic entropy: graffiti on graffiti, vagrant dogs, wrecked chassis, scary spills and the abstract expressionism of blood, urine and motor oil, the gleam of pvc bagged trash, toxic stains, and demented detritus. Here's the flotsam of Office Depot farce and the jetsam of the studio apartment tragedy, a world of dreams put out on the curb and waiting to be hauled off and given a decent or at least ecologically correct burial. But even absent of image there's true grit in the sub-stratum, in the sub-iconography of the work.

Jean-Michel Basquiat loved the do-it-yourself bilingual bricolage aesthetic of Alphabet City, the of bootstrap enterprise. Wool, another far Eastsider, has a similar romance with fringe New York, the no man's land, the interzone, the DMZ and the ruins of concrete jungle. Where Basquiat gleaned pop cues from that world Wool finds an alphabet of symbolic abstractions. Here is the action painting of the unconscious-accidental splashes and streaks that mark fields of blighted architecture. The over-painting of his large canvases resembles nothing more than the amateur abstract paintings that are the whitewashed windows of empty storefronts.

Wool's swirling squiggles ride the canvas with fraught exhilaration. Sometimes Wool's knotted lines seem loopy and comic other times they are furious or tense. When they accrete they look like cross outs, negations, but what they are crossing out is often blankness itself. They are crossing out nothing. Usually

they avoid the edge, marking territory with animal energy, like a dog on a pissing marathon, extending proprietary redolence over the full scope of available space. I fuck this space up therefore I own it.

Compare Wool's line to Brice Marden's. Marden's line swings as it inscribes the plane. It has rhythm and elegance. It's almost pastoral; the kind of line one might find on a topographic map or as an element in some Islamic décor. It is almost calligraphic measure. Wool's line is drastic, edgy and anarchic. Sometimes it has a sort of nuclear center, orbiting a ground zero in mid-canvas while other times it's like tracks of weird subatomic particles skidding through a cloud chamber. Sometimes the lines ignores the confines of the canvas which becomes a sort of arbitrary grid or section, superimposed over the real ground of action. Then there is more to the painting than meets the eye and that part is real gone. Then it begins with the line, never a straight line, or the shortest distance between two points, but a careening, tortuous, insane line, a unmeasured distance between here and whatever.

Sometimes Wool's line, doubling back on and crossing itself creates islands of bio-morphic shape reminiscent of Baziotes or Miro, particularly when the tonality is manipulated to give the delineated space clarity. (Untitle 2006 silkscreen ink on paper 72 x 55 1/4) Sometimes Wool's line, like Basquiat's line, achieves a frenetic graphic equivalent of syncopation by setting up a rhythm and then playing with the stresses, riffing against our expectations.

Wool begins with action painting, then he edits it. He doesn't just overpaint the plane, he rearranges it. He creates a sort of Photoshop cubism in which the plane is both real and illusionary, whole and composite.

Wool creates an archeological dig on canvas. Under-painting is often an important part of abstract painting, but here it is a matter

of interactive layering. We are so used to the simple plane of the canvas that Wool's assemblages of the plane, often only slightly off or out of register and his sometimes hard to see or invisible cuts and edits make the pictorial arena a mystery.

Every painting is a history and Wool's over-painting, his blotting and scumbling is a multi-purpose strategy that gives the work areas of discourse, areas of revelation, areas of concealment or metaphorical occultism. Over-painting can reflect a change of course or it can be a strategy from the get go. Every painting has a time signature, and sometimes Wool plays with this. What came first here? What was added? What's the frequency, Kenneth? (Noland?)

Sometimes the bottom leaps to top, as if reclaiming turf from the neurotic scribble that cuts across the surface, undecided between randomness and skewed logic. (Untitled 2002 104 x 78) Sometimes broad over-strokes partially conceal an armature of line. (Untitled 2006 96 x 72) Sometimes the over-painting leaves traces of the line's path, or the thick-brushed gray covering mimics or reacts to the thin black spray line beneath. But however he layers a composition there's always the ironic dichotomy: depth in 2D. Wool creates depth where there is none, showing that depth is an illusion as much as anything.

The stencil and the roller are primitive forms of mass production, the bridge between hand and technology. But all tools are equal here-spray paint, roller, stencil or a terabyte of memory.

The perfect splash of Wool's "Minor Mishap" resembles completely a successful abstract expressionist gesture, maybe a Clyfford Still painting. But is also a sort of acheiropoieta-an icon not made by hand. If you can see Mother Theresa's face in a raisin bun then you could see an agonized Christ in this blood red drip of silkscreen ink. You could see a lot of things. It is certainly

an evocative abstraction and this sort of accidental abstract reminds us of the spectral image evoking power of abstract art at its best. The acheiropoieta of the 9th century, miraculously produced images, were seen as proof that iconoclasm was against the will of God. Undoubtedly the capacity for the miraculous is indelibly ingrained in humanity, and the best random productions of Wool's process have that kind of evocative power. The drip of Minor Mishap is, in fact, re-used again and again as a silk screen component in other works, an icon of accident. And by repeating these painting moments via silkscreen Wool creates a sort of emotional hieroglyphs or ideograms that stand, like musical tones, for inscrutable yet real states.

This is a large part of Wool's modus operandi-capturing the action and re-using it. It was also a part of the Warhol repertoire, and he developed it to the threshold of where Wool now operates with the "Shadows" series, where abstraction met pop mass production. Wool takes that combination of abstract action and mechanized manipulation much further. Maybe his work has more in common with some Warhol fakes.

There is a peculiar beauty to some Warhol fakes because, as Rene Ricard pointed out to me, the lazy forgers, using Warhol's original screens, neglected to clean them and so the images became more abstract the more paintings they made. When Wool overpaints with silkscreens he deliberately allows them to accumulate ink and dirt with the effect of creating distortion. Think fuzztone on a guitar line.

Warhol found magic in the imperfections of the printing process, in the colorful auras created by out of register silk-screens, the accidents of overlap. Wool is also interested in the copy of the copy of the copy, but he takes it farther. Like Roy Lichtenstein he loves the dot array of printing, but in his hands the image is gone. The process is all that's left. This is the devil in the details-think

Lichtenstein on angel dust. We usually consider the consequences of the chain of transmission in the negative, as "transmission loss." But for Wool the process is not about loss but gain, about the inverse accrual of distortion gain. As the copy is copied it becomes more original. The process itself enters the picture, presenting a portrait of the void in the machine.

Wool runs the human soul as expressed through pure, almost animal expression through the reproductive technology, copying it until something else emerges, the soul of the machine. Warhol declared he wanted to be a machine. But Wool figured out how to make the machine human.

Mass production was an inspiration of the Pop Art sensibility. Democratically Pop perceived value in whatever was popular. A purchase equals a vote. And so Pop Art was a dehumanized art, using commercial art for its own sake, reveling in the romance of the impersonal and the corporate. But it's not as as corrupt as it sounds. Pop, said Warhol, was about liking things. So it was more about like the soup label or the Supremes than about dissing seriousness.

Wool's more recognizable pop sources are played the way a musician would play them. Maybe not a pop musician but a jazz musician. The word paintings are like standards beloved by the beboppers-they take power from playing against the familiar and finding inversions and secondary meanings and ironies in the context of the expected and the banal. Wherever there are snatches of cartoon and kitsch clip art there is also pure bebop. Like the boppers he transforms kitsch into something powerful and primal. The cartoon flowers have a sort of skull and bones mojo to them, projecting the doom of happiness, the sinister bend of the cute. They are late breaking flowers of evil.

In the pattern paintings, made with wallpaper rollers and lacy grids, he take prettiness and jacks it up until Marshall amp level distortion sets in. This amp goes to eleven. You're in Sonic Youth territory where the composition seems to swarm, gathered within the borders of the canvas as if by magnetic force or biological imperative. He achieves a kind of graphic atonality, hitting those sour keys like Thelonious Monk or laying down swirling tonal clouds of like late Coltrane. To quote a Monk title, it's "Ugly Beauty." It's reinventing beauty for an age that has outlived it.

Apocalypse? Now? What happens when the world ends? Bangs? Whimpers? Whoop-de-doos? Life goes on, I suppose. Apocalypse is a moving target. The end is always at hand for somebody. It has to be, to fill the seats of the churches, and maybe the gallery openings too.

Something is always ending and something is always beginning. At the beginning of abstraction, it was seen as the end of the picture and the end of humanistic art. The public was alienated and scandalized by the antics of what they perceived as extremist artists, from Picasso to Pollack, while astute commentators from Ortega y Gasset to Wyndham Lewis to Malraux saw abstraction as a new sort of extremism. There were now two art audiences, the traditional public and the initiated public. The artist was seen as turning his back on the mass audience, creating a clandestine sect dedicated to illuminating private worlds closed to the public. Ortega called it "artistic art." Lewis called it "extremist art," and defined it as art alienated from the craft of the medium and dependent on theoreticians. Ortega saw the new art as young and an inevitable consequence of democracy and mass-communcation. But Lewis saw the new artist, the abstract artist, as serving the

program of the pundit-prophet (think Clement Greenberg), an "agent of the Zeitgeist," and therefore fashion.

But maybe we've underestimated the public. Maybe this is where it all comes together. A pop apocalypse. Apocalypse means "lifting of the veil," and it refers to the disclosure of mysteries hidden from the many. Maybe there is a new young public, tuned in not to the networks, but the networks of networks, to a quantum field of signs and data, a public to whom abstraction is just another avenue of perception. Not that they made an effort. They just couldn't help it. They get it. Abstraction is nature now. Ultimately that's what Christopher Wool's work is about-about the abstraction of consciousness, perception and expression, about second nature becoming nature, about the wallpaper starting to swing hard.

Like they say on Avenue D: "It is what it is."