Crossing the Infinite: An Interview of Kate Mosher Hall

Kate Mosher Hall, Moon mesh, 2024 
Acrylic on canvas 
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm) 

interview by Kathleen MacKay

I recently visited Los Angeles born-and-raised painter Kate Mosher Hall at her light-filled studio in a bricky industrial area of Glendale. With the 5 freeway buzzing nearby, she walked me through her complex and unique process, which involves silkscreening light-sensitive emulsion over gessoed canvas using anywhere from eight to thirty screens depending on the particular painting, Photoshopping, layers of collage, and paint. It’s a “choose-your-own adventure” as she says, to get the desired effect. To help organize things, she’s created a lexicon: box paintings, hole or mesh paintings, recursion paintings. Some paintings incorporate elements of all styles. Hall, a punk drummer, worked in silkscreen studios for several years before she began UCLA’s Fine Art MFA program. We talked about Never Odd or Even, Hall’s second solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, which is currently on view in Los Angeles and the way that the work employs both good and bad math, challenges modes of looking, and the infinite repetition within binary relationships.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Let’s talk about paint. The works in Never Odd or Even often have a charcoal wash, right?  

KATE MOSHER HALL: I use charcoal but also flashe, which has that really dry matte look to it. It's really dense, really rich. It's important for me to have matte-ness in the blacks because I work with themes of obfuscation; things that you can't see versus things that you can see. Sometimes I like it when there's like a slip of: is it void or is it obstacle? Matte-ness gives in to that. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And you're talking about the "hole” paintings you make? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah. The "mesh” paintings. Sometimes I'll print paintings backward. I'll do a black background and then I'll print everything inverted with white or with a color. The "recursion” paintings are made reversed actually, so that black matte sets, because those are a two-point perspective receding into space. That matte-ness becomes really important.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: The "recursion paintings"—those are layers of silkscreen on top of each other, the same repeating image over and over until a center point?

KATE MOSHER HALL: It repeats, but it's also in succession of an image. So there's a bit of that repetition. Then, it evolves as it goes in. This idea is about quantity or quantifying an image. I'll take something and when it's spread out into space, it's like the way one experiences time, or something repeated into the abyss, again and again and again. It's a response to seeing images again and again and again. You know, like the deep-fried meme? Like the thing screengrabbed. I’m taking the thing that is already flattened out but expressing it as quantity. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: The idea of repetition/replication is so great with your work because it’s totally a different experience for me being in the room with those “recursion” paintings versus seeing reproductions of them. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: It's a huge part of it. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Especially my favorite 31,556,952 seconds. In person, there's this moiré thing going on that's really trippy and a little bit dizzying that's totally lost in any reproductions. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think a lot about the proximity to my work. How it looks up close and far away. Sometimes, when you're really far away, things will start appearing or walking in. And when you're close, they sort of fall apart. What the camera does is compress all of the resolution that I'm playing with in the paintings. So, if things have a smaller or higher resolution next to each other, the camera just makes it all the same resolution. The moiré pattern resists it. It's fun making work that refuses to be photographed—work that's about images and photographs. 

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Kate Mosher Hall, 31,556,952 seconds, 2024 
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm) 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: It's very rebellious in a way, like, yeah, you had to be there. It's kind of punk. And what you're saying about how the camera wants to put its arms around everything all at once—that's not really how the body experiences something, how the eye takes something in.

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah, I was thinking about these ways of seeing in multiplicity. I'll be experiencing a conversation with a friend and check my text messages at the same time, and we're also in the car and I see this billboard. All these rectangles presenting information within the world that I'm interacting with feels like these multiple horizons, which is a wild thing to actually navigate. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Layers of screens.

KATE MOSHER HALL: Or even just things out in the world. People. Something on a t-shirt, who knows? There are so many ways things are presented, contained in, shown. One thing I want to say about the title, the [Seconds] recursion painting: that's the number of seconds within a year. And the source image is a one-year-old's birthday cake. 

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Kate Mosher Hall, Pull up pull up, 2024 
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 
Diptych dimensions: 90 x 160 inches (228.6 x 406.4 cm) 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: It seems like you're doing a lot of math in your work. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I guess I'm interested in math. In the process for sure, when you're working with grids, and dot patterns, and ratios, and stuff like that. There's good math with the screening and then there's bad math, and I engage in both. 

But math does come in a lot in my work. My friend and artist Olivia Mole came to the show, and we were looking at the large diptych, Pull up pull up. It's the most abstract work I’ve ever made. I left it more open conceptually than I usually do. My big focus is modes of looking and the act of looking, how something’s presented, public or private viewing spaces. But with this work, I'm actually kind of letting it go. 

Olivia was like, “How do you feel about math?” She said hyperbole curves are these graphs that go positive/negative, so like 1x1=1, -1x-1=-1, and there's a mirrored curve that happens. Each axis is infinity; it goes on forever. At some point, somewhere in time they make contact. It's like imagining the painting going into the wall, going around into the building, and looping back around and coming through. And then I was like, “Olivia, this is crazy because the title of the show is a palindrome: Never Odd or Even is the same forward and backwards. So is Pull up pull up.” She basically mathematically figured out the thing I had a language relationship to. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: I was definitely thinking about the concept of the infinite looking at your work. It first came to me in the Seconds painting because there's all these layers going inward, inward, inward. And in the middle, there's a spiral or a Greek key that feels very much like it speaks to the idea of the infinite. Like how humans are obsessed with infinity because our existence is so finite. We know it's out there, we know it's all around us. But everything we have is so physical, so tangible, so finite. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I also think it's being in the threshold where we are with technology and our bodies navigating this changing landscape of how we access information, the quantity of information that we see. Like, we have to have a talk about Instagram because it's insane. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Especially if you're doing box paintings. It's just a million boxes. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: Boxes, yeah. But also like the juxtaposition of those boxes in the content. That scroll is really disorienting. It's confusing. It's also schizophrenic, like, oh, they’re selling me eye cream, and here’s my friend's birthday, an art show, and genocide. Seeing all these things stacked up, the timing of it, how do you respond to that sequence that quickly, and engage?

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And we're told that it's all real and it's all fake. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: And it is. 

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Images Courtesy of the artist and Hannah HoffmanGallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Paul Salveson.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And it's infinite, the scroll. That reminds me, I was thinking about your work and reading Emmanuel Levinas who was talking about humans reaching for infinity—the infinite in the finite—has to do with a desire that can never be satisfied. It's a desire that only arouses. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think that was built off of Lacan’s Peek-a-boo. I took this amazing class with Lesley Dick on the death drive. Peek-a-boo with the mother is sex and death. It becomes a part of the pleasure principle. She's covering up her eyes: Mother's gone, she's dead. Her return is a dopamine hit. It's pleasure but then it's related to that feeling of emptiness. And it's like Warhol's car crash paintings; the repeating image, the rubberneckers. Death is also related to the infinite. And then, the finite is related to pleasure. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Do you think pleasure is related to the infinite? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: That's the curious part. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And death is, of course, related to the finite because—kaput—it's your day. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think in any of these binary relationships, it always just goes into repetition, like their relationship with each other becomes infinite because it's inconclusive. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And that's lovely with your work, the binary that has to do with photo processing and light and dark, and inversions. I'm curious about the show at Hannah Hoffman, these big, dark paintings that are very affecting to be in a room with, they draw you in, the eye travels over them, one wants to spend a lot of time with them, and there's a kind of moodiness; a darkness and a somber feeling. But some of your earlier work is very playful and lighter. I'm thinking about that painting of the dog running on the beach with the mirror behind it, and the dog is in this really funny dog-shape.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I was feeling really conflicted making the show because I was feeling like, why the fuck am I even making art while genocide is happening? 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: This is happening around October 7th?

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah, I thought about canceling. I was feeling really conflicted and really questioning where my energy should go. A lot of artists shared the same sentiment. I think I was confronted by that feeling and being present for it. It’s also connected to the internet, right? Images, access to information. A lot of emotion, but we’re in this chaos market. In astrology, my Virgo sun is in the 12th house, which is the house of death and aliens and drugs. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And insanity, prisons, institutions… 

KATE MOSHER HALL: So fitting. Even sometimes if I'm having an analytical approach to making an image, I'll be like, this is how the thing is going to be made, this is how it's functioning. Sometimes it's really strange to me and surprises me with how the creepiness comes in. The moodiness, the darkness is such a shadow side of how I'm making things, sometimes I'm like, what's wrong with me?

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Kate Mosher Hall, Squeeze wax, 2024 
Acrylic, flashe, charcoal, and color pencil on canvas 
92 x 84 inches (233.7 x 213.4 cm) 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Your process seems so physical. Is that part of it? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I guess so. I've been doing this for so long that I don’t think a lot about all the labor. When I'm not actually making the painting but making the parts that are going into the painting, it’s a nice moment for reflection. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: You’re a drummer too—also physical. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I'm actually not really good at drumming, to be honest.  

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Do you have natural rhythm, though? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I have theories about this. I think I was actually born left-handed because when I snowboard or skateboard or anything like that, I ride goofy. When I first started drumming, I was playing backwards a bit. I really like doing dance beats and the separation between my legs and my arms was really hard to break. Because I think that I'm strangely left. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: That's nice with your paintings to think about inversions. You were a punk drummer in the DIY scene, and now you're in the art world. What are the similarities between those, or the differences?

KATE MOSHER HALL: Well, they're really different, but there's also similarities. The art world also has so many genres. There are different modes of making in different communities, and different intentions and goals that come out of art making. When I'm in the art world, I'm rubbing up against worlds I never imagined I'd be close to, like working with multiple commercial galleries. When I went to grad school, it was cool, I can teach now because silkscreen and printmaking is kind of a dying art. There's ironically a lot of interest in it as it's disappearing from campuses, this idea of translating digital image into material. I love the collaborative aspect of printmaking. It really keeps me in the community too, in a way. I'm always like, open door, come print something.  Because of that, I feel the art world has opened. And it feels like more of a community. I got here through the support of friends, community, artists, these galleries. So, I try to support others as much as I can. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: What’s next on this front?

KATE MOSHER HALL: I’m actually really interested right now in taking a break from making paintings and I'm thinking about writing a play. I've been thinking about performance quite a bit and looking to use my studio as sort of a showing space—performance space, video, plays, poetry, literature, whatever. There's this new urgency and thirst in LA for collective engagement and feeling the sense of the present moment being performed and witnessed all together.

Never Odd or Even is on view through March 23 @ Hannah Hoffman 2504 W 7th St, Suite C, Los Angeles

Images Courtesy of the artist and Hannah HoffmanGallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Paul Salveson.

Collector Jim Hedges Is A Gatekeeper To A Secret Trove Of Andy Warhol Photographs

interview by Oliver Kupper
portrait by Summer Bowie

Jim Hedges is a debonnaire Southern gentleman with a Yankee sophistication who just so happens to have the largest private collection of Andy Warhol photographs. Many the world has never been seen before. A seasoned art collector, Hedges has become a historian, a scholar, and a gatekeeper to the bromide crystal cave of Warhol’s photographic imagination—as a body of thousands of images, the oeuvre is an x-ray of 20th century contemporary popular art. Behind the high-priced auction block megaworks that include the bright iconographic visages of Elvis and Marilyn, Warhol’s photographs exist just beneath the surface like an iceberg—polaroids, 35-millimeter, and photobooth strips are honest, true, hypervivid, erotic, pornographic and awash with the deep microscopic ribonucleic acid of Warhol the artist and documentarian of a louche, and sexually liberated, pharmaceutical zeitgeist.  On view at Hotel Bel Air, Hedges will be showing a selection of Warhol photographs in dialogue with the work of Maripol, whose polaroid documentation of the late-disco and New Wave-era offered a complimentary, but equally electric, gaze to the Downtown New York glam-era. We caught up with Jim Hedges to discuss his collection. 

OLIVER KUPPER You grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee and discovered Andy Warhol's work through Interview Magazine—how did Interview enter your life?

JIM HEDGES Back in those days you could go into a magazine store and spend an entire afternoon looking at things. I found a magazine store that had Interview and I got a subscription when I was 12-years-old. It was my gateway drug. It was my entry point to things, not in Warhol's world, but the cult of celebrity and what was happening in Downtown New York, which in the late seventies, early eighties, was a spectacular and exciting time. And then as I got older and started collecting art, I decided that Warhol's work was something that I was super interested in. After years and years of collecting and getting educated about the landscape, I started to buy photos by Warhol. But I had also been in the investment business for 18 years. As I started to transition out of that, I realized that art collecting was sort of like a misunderstood asset. 15 years later, it's my full time job. 

OLIVER KUPPER So, at 12-years-old you wanted to move to New York? 

JIM HEDGES My mom is actually a Yankee. And my dad is from Tennessee. So, I had cousins in New York. 

OLIVER KUPPER And your father collected outsider art? 

JIM HEDGES As a teenager, my dad started doing wood carving. Over the course of time, he started doing more and more large-scale, ambitious projects. And then he started meeting other Appalachian wood carvers. He was diving into the folk, outsider art landscape. Then he fell in love with self-taught African American artists. And he became a big supporter of theirs. He had a collection of over 2,400 works of art when he died. He was definitely a collector, but he would never define himself as a collector. But he was an incredible advocate in terms of placing the work with museums and getting big curators from New York and elsewhere to meet the artists. It's a totally different channel than what I've done, but it's definitely in the blood. 

OLIVER KUPPER What did your father do, and what did your mother do?  

JIM HEDGES My dad actually ran our family's charitable foundation and was an artist. My mom was an interior designer. And you know, my great-grandmother started the museum in our hometown. My grandmother was a docent. Everybody was around art. 

OLIVER KUPPER With Warhol, did you start collecting his photographs first, or was it his primary works? 

JIM HEDGES It was primary works first. I bought some Warhol paintings. I bought some Warhol works on paper—all sort of without strategy. I would purchase things I was very attracted to. And then I got more familiar with the breadth of the Polaroid body of work. And I understood that they were used to make the silkscreens. It became much more deep as a pursuit. But you know, he had a dark room in his parents' basement when he was nine years old. He grew up as a photographer. And he photographed virtually every day of his adult life. But what’s interesting is that all the iconic paintings, like Marilyn Monroe, were from film stills or newspaper articles. And to avoid getting sued, he started using his own source material, his own photographs.

OLIVER KUPPER Warhol existed in this very strange world between pop art and fine art photography, and it is something people appreciate more now as opposed to back then. 

JIM HEDGES There are very specific reasons why it hasn't been elevated until recently. The last exhibit of Warhol’s life was a photography exhibit. If you rewind to the eighties, artists like Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman were thinking about photography in different ways, but photography never had the sanctity that painting has. But photography was going to be Warhol’s next big push. Six weeks after the show, he was dead. And when he died, there were tens of thousands of photographs in his estate. And his estate became the Warhol Foundation. The Warhol Foundation is in business to give away money to contemporary artists—it’s the largest donor to contemporary artists in the world. So, are you going to sell one of 56,000 photographs or are you gonna sell an Elvis painting that will bring in millions? The values were low with photography and it was never a priority. Then the foundation gave half of all the photographs away to collecting museums, because they wanted people to be able to study the photos. Which was genius because it solidified the curatorial study, but it also hatched the market. But then, they are left with 20,000 photographs. That’s when I started collecting them. 

OLIVER KUPPER: So how many pieces are currently in your collection? 

JIM HEDGES: Thousands. 

OLIVER KUPPER: And those include Polaroids, 35-millimeter, the stitched photographs…

JIM HEDGES Warhol used six photographic mediums. He made 16-millimeter films. I have the only eight that are in private hands. And he also made photobooth portraits in Times Square. Those are interesting because of the serial repetition of the image. Then in 1977, Thomas Ammannn, who was a big Zurich art dealer, gave Andy a 35-millimeter Minox camera. In ‘77  Warhol stopped carrying a Polaroid. He only used the Polaroid BigShot in the Factory, in the studio, to do formal portrait settings. Then he was carrying the 35-millimeter around. So the final decade of his life was all 35-millimeter photos, unique silver gelatin prints. Then in 1979, he started sewing them together. Warhol would take a black and white 35-millimeter picture, he would print the contact sheets, and circle the images that he liked. And then he would print those 8 by 10. But if he really loved the image, then he would then blow it up to 11 by 14 inches and do grids. Again, going back to the photo booth. Those were the contents of the last show that he did at Robert Miller Gallery. Those were the most rare of everything because he only made 500 of them. And of the 500 that he made, about 300 are in institutions. I've got about 60 of them. At the end of the day, the stitched photos with the sewing machine, the serial repetition, harkens back to the 16-millimeter filmmaking in 1963. 

Grace Jones and Andre Leon Talley at Studio 54, ca. 1980. by Andy Warhol

OLIVER KUPPER I didn't realize that he had a dark room as a nine year old. I know the Warhola family was religious and they would go to church, and the iconography of the saints in the stained glass really translated into his pop iconography—celebrities as saints. But I didn’t realize how deep the photographic process was to him. 

JIM HEDGES You know, it's funny, at the end of the day, his photographs didn't really have an advocate before I came along. Which is not to say that lots of people didn't do things to elevate his work. But in terms of consistently positioning, educating people, getting the photos seen, doing the press, I'm the only person who has done that in the past 15 years. It's been great because what has grown out of it is my own education. I've had incredible amounts of fun with the subjects. I have met scores of the subjects—whether it's Calvin Klein, Bianca Jagger, Barbara Allen, or Debbie, Harry, the list goes on. In addition, for the people that collect Warhol's work, the photographs are fairly inexpensive—most things are between $18,000 to $48,000. On the far outside is like $150,000. I have one client who bought Tom Ford’s 96-inch purple Warhol fright wig self-portrait, which is like 8 feet by 8 feet. It sold for 60 million to my client and they have it in their dining room. At the exact opposite end of the dining room is the actual Polaroid that was used as the source image. 

OLIVER KUPPER So it completes the story of the primary work. 

JIM HEDGES I would even go so far as to say the Polaroid and the painting are equal. 

OLIVER KUPPER It’s interesting, the evolution of how the photographs started off as artifacts of process in a sense to being elevated to a fine art status in of themselves. 

JIM HEDGES Well, I've never liked the idea of the photographs as process material. They were made in the process, or in the service of making art, but they have always been part of the artwork.

OLIVER KUPPER I think what I mean is—in the realm of paintings—the photographs become artifacts. 

JIM HEDGES It’s funny because to take it one step further, I have a collection of acetates. The material used to make the silkscreens. They're very powerful images. They're ghostly. Because it's either a negative or positive. I believe that people will view them as art because again sure, even though it's a process project, the artist touched it. 

OLIVER KUPPER Maybe we can talk about your current show at Bel Air Hotel and how Maripol fits into the curation? 

JIM HEDGES I met Maripol thanks to you, quite literally, and I was enchanted by her. She's smart as a whip. She's a genius. She’s a hustler. She's just all sorts of things that I find really appealing. So when I met her, it was an instant connection. And I’ve spent hours looking at material with her and not just photographs, but also jewelry and various designs and sketches. She has a very important story to tell. There aren’t a lot of women from those days here to tell the story. Going through the Polaroids, the degree of overlap is extraordinary—there are so many people she photographed that Andy photographed. There are just some blockbuster images. I want to elevate the work, juxtapose it with Warhol within the same era. So. I selected seven images and printed them very large in an edition of three. They are going to be crowd pleasers. 

OLIVER KUPPER Maripol seems like a missing link when it comes to the documentation of the early 1980s club and nightlife cultures. 

JIM HEDGES Well, what I like about her is that she's a truth teller. She doesn’t embellish. There's a whole host of people who basically have their own stories that they dine out on, or get paid five grand to talk about at a conference, but the stories are all myths. Maripol, she's the source. 

OLIVER KUPPER She is the master of calling bullshit. She'll tell you if someone was lying or if a story is apocryphal. It’s amazing to debunk these things because that era was so full of myth. 

JIM HEDGES I'm also impressed by how modest she is. She is super respectful. 

OLIVER KUPPER My last question is about the Sex Parts and Torso series. How, how did you discover that work? 

JIM HEDGES I almost have to talk about it concurrently with the Ladies And Gentlemen series, which are the drag queens. Andy enlisted Victor Hugo, set dresser and Halston’s boyfriend, to go out to the sex clubs in the Meat Packing district and recruit boys to come back to the Factory to take pictures of them having sex. And to give them bottles of beer so that they could make piss paintings. The Ladies And Gentlemen, that was Bob Colacello. He recruited those people from a bar in Times Square. But these two complimentary bodies of work are so endlessly fascinating. With Ladies And Gentleman, most of them were successful performers, like Marsha P. Johnson, who was credited with throwing the first brick through the window at Stonewall. Whereas the Sex Parts And Torsos people are anonymous, and unfortunately probably dead from AIDS. 

OLIVER KUPPER Is the Warhol Foundation nervous about these works being presented? 

JIM HEDGES No, I think they were just really happy to find somebody that wanted to buy hundreds of them. It's homoerotic work, but you'd be so surprised if who buys the work. It is not always wealthy, middle aged, gay men 

OLIVER KUPPER So is there anything that people haven't seen yet? 

JIM HEDGES Honestly, there's lots of stuff people haven't seen. For example, in May 1969 Warhol was hired by Esquire magazine to document the Downtown New York performance arts scene. So he went out with this Polaroid camera and he took pictures of some of the most outrageous performance art happenings. I've got 27 Polaroids that he made of a particular performance, which was this performance from a German artist where he is naked and covered in blood. I can’t really show that Hotel Bel Air. And I have some sexually explicit stitch photos, and nobody's ever seen those. I have a lot of stuff under the mattress, and when the time is right, I’ll show them.

Hotel Bel-Air welcomes a selection from the Jim Hedges Collection of Andy Warhol Photographs in its lobby from 14 February - 14 April 2022.

Maripol, Vincent Gallo, "In the Loft" - NYC, 1983

Public Access: An Interview with Glenn O'Brien

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photograph by Margret Links

Before he became the Dapper Dan with lily-white hair and a suit as crisp as the white tablecloths at Mr. Chow’s, Glenn O’Brien was a chronicler of the Golden Age of the New York avant-garde and the subculture underground of the 1960s and 70s. He was the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine. He was also, briefly, the editor-at-large of High Times magazine. But what he is best known for is TV Party – a public access cable show that featured some of the first appearances of artists like Jean Michel Basquiat, Klaus Nomi and Blondie. After 30 years, O’Brien has released three brand new episodes of TV Party on YouTube. Shot at locations such as MoMA Ps1, Le Baron New York, and Lafayette House, the new TV Party – a “television show that's a cocktail party, but which is also a political party” – features a number of luminaries and a smorgasbord of who's whos. In the following brief interview, Glen O’Brien offers a bit of fashion advice and talks TV Party and why it is always important to look ahead. 

AUTRE: You were a part of a fascinating era in New York – with Andy Warhol’s Factory, Basquiat, the birth emerging music scenes like hip hop and punk, a pre-gentrified New York – do you miss those days?   

GLENN O'BRIEN: Well, it was exciting and maybe a more interesting and inspiring community, and I prefer the spirit and tone of the art world then as opposed to now, but if you start to think that way you’re kind of doomed.  I have to deal with the moment like everybody else and keep evolution going, so I don’t think too much about the past.  

AUTRE: Can you remember when the idea for TV Party first came to you?

O'BRIEN: I always wanted to do a TV show.  I have probably mentioned too much that I loved Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark, Hugh Hefner’s 2 shows, because they were in a party format that seemed a lot more cool than the typical talk show.  The direct inspiration was going on a public access show, Coca Crystal’s If I Can’t Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution, and discovering that people had actually seen it.  I was immediately motivated to create a public access show. 

AUTRE: What can we expect from the newest episodes of TV Party – there are only a few online right now, are we going to see more in the future? 

O'BRIEN: We want to move the party from city to city, place to place and have guests that aren’t the usual showbiz fare. We’ll see how much stamina we have. 

AUTRE: Many people don’t know that you worked for High Times magazine – can you talk a little bit about that?

O'BRIEN: When I went to High Times it had a bigger circulation than Rolling Stone and seemed more interesting culturally—drugs aside. I was working at Playboy in Chicago and was desperate to move back to NY.  They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Aside from some things dealing with Rasta, I didn’t have much connection to the pharmaceutical aspect of the magazine.  I was kind of the culture czar.  

AUTRE: You are known as a 'style guru' – what is one piece of fashion or style advice you can offer?  

O'BRIEN: I guess my basic advice is don’t follow fashion; express yourself. 

AUTRE: What’s next? 

O'BRIEN: Writing a couple of books.  Working on some films and TV Party.  The usual.

Text and interview by Oliver Kupper for Autre. You can visit Glenn O'Brien's website to read poems and other writings. You can also view all three episodes of TV Party here.