Searching For Light And Color: An Interview With Tamuna Sirbiladze On The Event Of Her Untimely Passing

March 4, 2016

During my career interviewing and writing about artists, musicians, and designers, I have come to the understanding that creative people don't always have personalities that match their artistic outputs. Hermann Nitsch, in opposition to the violent imagery he depicts, is a quiet and cerebral old man in conversation. David Lynch infamously projects a mid-western "aw shucks" attitude that seems perfectly out of sync with the nightmarish dreamscapes that define his films. But last summer I ventured to Half Gallery to view the first U.S. solo show of Georgian painter Tamuna Sirbiladze. Unlike the previous examples, when I talked to Sirbiladze I met a woman who seemed exactly like the paintings that she so beautifully rendered: warm, embracing, and emanating a powerful and transfixing spirit.

I am utterly torn up to hear of Sirbiladze's passing today at the age of 45, due to Cancer-related complications. During the short conversation that I had with her, I already felt connected to her. She had a way of making you feel like you've always known her, and that more than anything, she wanted to be known. She wanted to know the world. She seemed full of curiosity and wonder. Of the many artists I've gotten to know, she was one of the few to drop me a line on Facebook or Instagram. It might sound vain to say, but I can't believe that I will no longer be seeing those notifications.

It seems criminal that Sirbiladze is no longer with us just at the moment that she was starting to gain recognition for her paintings. Her paintings, which veered between the abstract and the figurative, had remarkable beauty to them. They filled me with nostalgia: gazing into those vague figures highlighted by muted shades of bright colors always made me think of my childhood, spent by the beaches of Cape Cod or swimming in ponds buried deep in nature. Her paintings were full of love but never soft. There was pain in them, but also a sense of hope. She seemed to feel life very deeply, and her art will be lasting testament to that fact.

Adam Lehrer: Have you been to New York before?

Tamuna Sirbiladze: Many times, but this is the first time for my show.

Lehrer: How did you and Bill get together to put the show together?

Sirbiladze: It was when I was here last night. A friend of mine helped make the contact. Bill and I then exchanged emails. And then it just sort of came together.

Lehrer: Is there anything in particular that attracted you to Half Gallery?

Sirbiladze: I loved it because it’s such a domestic feeling place. It’s like home. And my works are so expressive and not at all domestic. It proved to be a nice contrast.

Lehrer: It seems like with a lot of art dealers, business is the bottom line. But with Bill, he’s a real art lover.

"...Searching for color and light is my main engagement."

Sirbiladze: Yes, he really loves art!

Lehrer: So how has putting together this show compared to others that you’ve been involved with?

Sirbiladze: Well, Bill really knew my work. For example there was this wool painting. Bill was kind of shocked at first, but then he loved. So, I see how he is very in tune with art. Not only with thinking and knowing, but also with intuition. He has strong visual knowledge.

Lehrer: Talking about the art itself, it’s different than much of the art I’ve seen recently. It’s a little abstract. How did you first get involved with art, and when did you start painting?

Sirbiladze: I was 13 when I started.

Lehrer: And you’re from Georgia?

Sirbiladze: Yes, and my father was a painter. And I knew at age 13 that I would be an artist. I started doing still lives. The first time I put a brush in my hand I knew that was what I’d do.

Lehrer: And you studied art in school?

Sirbiladze: Yes, I was fascinated by art. But I had to learn about it through books. In Georgia, there were no museums. But to see original art in books was my favorite thing.

Lehrer: Who were some of the painters that left an early impression on you?

Sirbiladze: I loved Rembrandt, Goya, and the impressionists.

Lehrer: Bill mentioned something to me about pomegranate, and that it’s a symbol used by a film director?

Sirbiladze: Yes, Sergei Parajanov. The pomegranate is a symbol of the country of Georgia, because there are some many pomegranate trees there. Many artists use it as a symbol. I had to sneak it in there.

Lehrer: So it’s like your homage to your country?

Sirbiladze: Yes, it’s like a subject itself. I didn’t want to make it as an art statement; I wanted it to exist as itself.

Lehrer: Does your home country filter much into your ideas?

Sirbiladze: You know, it works itself into the ideas.

Lehrer: Your color palette is quite beautiful, blues and red always on white background. Do you have a special relationship with color?

Sirbiladze: Yes, color is the reason that I started painting. Searching for color and light is my main engagement.

Tamuna Sirbiladze's work is currently involved in a group exhibition, entitled Imagine, at Brand New Gallery in Milan until April 2. You can also view our coverage of her debut solo show in the United States here. Text, interview and photographs by Adam Lehrer.

Get Your Strength Through Oi: An Interview With Punktrepreneur Toby Mott

March 4, 2016

text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Toby Mott owns one of the largest collections of skinhead and punk ephemera from the halcyon days of anarchy in the UK. A punk himself, Mott has turned his youth in revolt into an enterprise with the Mott Collection, which recently was released in the street edition of Skinhead: An Archive. Punk historian or punktrepreneur, Mott is intent of preserving the legacy of one of the most misunderstood subcultures. Skinheads, although some had nationalist or Nazi leanings, were not all rabid and racist xenophobes. Some, in fact, were gay. Some were Jewish. Some were jocks. Some were women. In fact, the skinheads were the working class alternative to a posh Swinging 60s London, with Cockney and Jamaican roots. Mott acquired much of his archive in real time, collecting posters, patches, posters, zines and more. In the 70s, he was the founder of the Anarchist Street Army, which tried to toss over the establishment in the Pimlico area of London. In he 80s, he lived in squat with the likes of boy George and made appearances in films by Derek Jarman, and was included in Gilbert and George's 'Existers' series. Mott was also the founder of Grey, an anarchist art collective that would vandalize areas of London, spraying grey paint on windows. His involvement in that group got him arrested and banned from the U.K. Today, Mott is more a gentleman than a punk, but a punk at heart. He has shed his leather for a clean, crisp dress shirt and a sharp blazer. We met up with Mott one sunny day by the beach during his recent trip to Lost Angeles to discuss skinheads, his collection and what it means to be punk in the digital age.

OLIVER KUPPER: Skinheads have this association to neo-Nazi culture. Putting out something related to skinheads, people might think that it’s related to Nazi culture. How do you clear up this confusion?

TOBY MOTT: People jump to the conclusion that I am, or I was, a skinhead. But this is a neutral overview of a culture. Most people more readily associate skinheads with fascist, neo-Nazi culture. But one of the reasons for doing the book is to show that it’s much more diverse. There are all different kinds of skinheads. In London, now, if you saw a skinhead, most people would assume that they’re gay. So you’ve gone from a threatening, aggressive, neo-fascist to gay culture. Apart from that, there’s the whole S.H.A.R.P. (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) thing, which came from America. It was pretty multi-ethnic in the UK, with The Specials and the whole 2-tone thing. I think it’s the same with most things. The most aggressive aspects get the most press, because they’re newsworthy. But it’s certainly not the dominant element of skinhead culture.

KUPPER: There are multiple subcultures within skinhead culture.

MOTT: Yeah. Within skinhead culture, you get into scooter skins, skinhead girls. When skinhead culture mutates and travels abroad, say, in Eastern Europe, it’s must more militaristic and nationalist. It’s kind of evolved from the original British skinhead. It’s become more uniform. In Russia, there’s a big skinhead culture, but it’s more nationalist.

KUPPER: Were you part of this culture?

MOTT: No. I was a punk. I was actually a victim of skinheads. Skinheads, initially, were born in the late 60s, early 70s. It turned into something called “suedeheads” and then “bootboys,” with the whole football violence, football hooligan thing. The fashion changed and evolved. They were into glam rock, and the reggae thing kind of brought it out. But then when punk came out - say, in ‘76, and the high point in ’77 – there were bands like Sham 69 who were called “street punk.” Somehow, that initiated a skinhead revival. As a sort of look, this was much more developed than the original skinheads. That’s where the uniform evolved and became fetishized – the Fred Perry, stuff like that. They would also attend the same kinds of gigs I was at. Often, at any random point, they would just attack you. That happened to me – which I write about in the book – at a Sham 69 gig. There was just a general level of intimidation between the punks and the skinheads. It wasn’t a happy unity, although we shared the same music. This was before the white power thing. Around ‘78/’79, Sham 69, Cock Sparrer, Cockney Rejects and other punk bands were adopted by skinheads. But punks would also be at the gig. There was an uneasy tension.

KUPPER: What do you think was in the atmosphere during that time that was creating these subcultures?

MOTT: At the time, there was a recession. It was pre-Thatcher; Thatcher was elected in ’79. There was the Cold War. The Labor Party was Left Wing. There was a kind of crisis, especially for young people. There wasn’t really an economic future. That has often fueled youth cultures in Britain, which are often political, not just fashion or music things. Everyone, pretty much, was a part of some kind of subculture. You had goths, punks, skinheads – the whole flamboyant, romantic thing. And then you had football hooligans. But there was never really a passive kid. You always had to be something or other.

KUPPER: Who were the football hooligans?

MOTT: They were the white working class. They got their thrills out of violence. They still exist. But that’s all across Europe. They fight each other. The police have really come down and sent people to prison, but it’s still big. It’s a subculture.

KUPPER: It seemed like punk had a soundtrack, with a lot of bands coming out. With the skinheads, it seems looser. It seems way more personal.

MOTT: Well, there are all different types of skinheads. The white nationalist skinheads would go for things like Screwdriver, No Remorse. There’s a whole culture with these bands – Rock-o-Rama Records. They have a record label, a whole culture, a whole identity. Putting that aside, we also had the whole 2-tone thing, with The Specials and Selector, which are multi-cultural, anti-racist. The look was less aggressive. Later on, in the 80s, you got bands like Bronski Beat, which appealed to the gay identity of skinheads. Then there was the street punk thing, which was referred to as “Oi!” So there’s no one musical influence. Whichever type of skinhead you were, you had your music. Then, you have a sentimental figure like Nicky Crane, who was on the cover of “Strength through Oi!” album. He was a prominent neo-Nazi, but he had a whole secret gay life. He was to die of AIDS later. In a way, he symbolizes the whole story, the whole contradiction within these cultures and identities.

KUPPER: Where does Bruce LaBruce tie in?

MOTT: Bruce LaBruce obviously fetishizes the whole skinhead thing. He’s from Canada. He’s interested because he sexualized it. In a way, if you look at those so-called neo-Nazi skinheads, it’s very homoerotic. The mosh pit thing…

KUPPER: Taking your shirt off, lots of fluids…

MOTT: Yeah. And then to find that some of the most celebrated heroes of that actually have this whole gay, secret life – it’s kind of obvious, right? At the time, though, it was big news. It was in the newspapers. But LaBruce adopted the skinhead look. I’m not quite sure how it’s viewed. Some of the original skinheads don’t appreciate this imagery, I’m sure. They write to me about my book, “How fucking dare you?” They don’t even want to acknowledge it.

KUPPER: When did you start collecting this material?

MOTT: I collected punk stuff as a punk. I was always fascinated by the skinhead element that was around me. I always collected the political pamphlets, from the both the Left and the Right, which were being circulated. The skinheads were the people circulating the extreme Right Wing stuff. It just added to my punk collection. Then later, in my discussion with the publisher, I stripped out the skinhead part of my punk collection, and it made the book.

KUPPER: Was there a Penthouse article that explores this material? What was that about?

MOTT: Weirdly enough, that features Nicky Crane. I think the media has always been fascinated with skinheads because they are violent. Although, as I’ve said, they weren’t all violent. The one the media concentrates on are the violent ones. American Penthouse did an article about British skinhead culture. But they don’t really have a say. In opposition, there are all these anti-fascist groups. But that story isn’t always as newsworthy.

KUPPER: You had a confrontation with skinheads at a venue. Were there any other terrifying moments in your experience?

MOTT: In my foreword to the book, I write about being surrounded by skinheads. There were some notable events. There was this thing called “Rock Against Racism” in 1978, to combat the rise of fascism. They very cleverly had bands like The Clash and Sham 69 to play these concerts. Everyone would go. On the way to one of these events, we were cornered on the top of a double decker bus. I was with my two sisters, who were punks. Because they fancied my sisters, the skinheads, we got by. It was another close shave. The interaction with the skinheads was aggressive. That was their mode of communication. Punks are much more articulate. Skinheads were never adopted by middle class kids like punk was. Punk was pretty much all-inclusive – race, class, whatever. The skinheads were always working-class. Not always white, but the majority were.

KUPPER: I don’t think a lot of people realize that punk was more temperate than skinhead.

MOTT: Skinhead was rigid. The uniform was rigid. Punk was inventive and creative.

KUPPER: Like hippies with mohawks.

MOTT: Skinhead was all-formulaic – these clothes, this haircut. It was militaristic, like a uniform.

KUPPER: That was all new at that point. Now, we have this completely different perspective of what punk is, just because it’s been commercialized and sexualized. Is it an attitude?

MOTT: Yeah, punk’s an attitude.

KUPPER: You don’t need to dress like that. You can be a punk in the way you look at work, at life.

MOTT: I think the book fair is punk, because it’s got that whole DIY thing. It’s not punk to look like a punk from the ‘70s or ‘80s. That’s not punk; that’s retro. I think the book encapsulates the whole ethos of do-it-yourself. The Internet is a gateway to that. But the Internet might be too easy. It depends on how you use it. What is punk today? Punk is an attitude. A creative attitude.

KUPPER: Going back a little bit, to the idea of skinheads shaving their head – what do you think the symbolism behind that was?

MOTT: I think the main thing about skinheads even from the late ‘60s was they would lose the identity of being working class. The manual labor was being lost with the rise of technology. By the late ‘80s when it was revived I think it was a safe place if you were lost, white, working class, and your whole future was being eroded. They fetishized the workman’s uniform. I think that’s what happened.

Also, some people like a code, like wearing black. That appealed to some people. Then they also had the camaraderie and the whole homoerotic thing.

KUPPER: I had always heard that the shaved head had to do with lice from working class individuals living and working where they were getting scabies and lice – that it was just an easy way to avoid that.

MOTT: A utilitarian thing. It also means you weren’t a hippie. The thing about the ‘60s skinheads is that their hair wasn’t as short as the later skinheads when what you wear became much more defined. There’s that book – The Skinhead Bible – which maps that out. But yeah it comes from working on a building site.

KUPPER: In terms of outsider culture going on today, do you notice any prominent subcultures that are making an impact?

MOTT: There’s always elements in hip hop culture. In the UK we have a thing called Grime, which is an underground thing. Then there’s the trans culture, sexual identity thing that is very outsider. It’s hard because now everything comes to the floor so quickly, nothing has time to become anything before it’s either exposed or picked up by a celebrity. I think for people who don’t find their place in the world how it is, they gravitate towards each other.

KUPPER: It’s interesting what’s going on in terms of the trans community and the gay community. Especially with fashion.

MOTT: I come from a world where gender is very clearly defined with expectations, but now it’s much more fluid.

KUPPER: Where did you grow up?

MOTT: I grew up in Central London.

KUPPER: What did your parents do?

MOTT: My father was a professor, my mother was a social worker. I was a middle-class punk. My parents met at art school so I came from a bohemian or what’s called the intelligentsia background. My emersion in punk was from making fan zines and that whole creative area, I went to art school.

What I find really fascinating about skinhead culture is that none of that culture was created by people I meet. A lot of what punk is supposed to be about is the kind of clothes, which came from these deprived backgrounds, whereas in fact it came from art schools. Skinhead culture is not from art schools. None of them went to art school, hardly any of them went to school. So it’s amazing there’s these artifacts. It’s less informed than punk. People who were involved in punk are informed about Dada and stuff like that; skinheads aren’t. It’s got a raw uniqueness to it. Some of this stuff comes from towns in Scotland and fucking nowhere. Deprived places.

KUPPER: Yeah, industrial towns.

MOTT: Yeah.

KUPPER: Where does Joy Division fit into all of that? It seems like they’re in this in-between place.

MOTT: Joy Division is from Manchester but they’re not related to skinhead culture. They’re too sensitive. They’re articulate and sensitive but they’re also from the same kind of background so they could have been skinheads. There were always kids who were more into music and girls than football and violence; they became punks like Joy Division. If those weren’t choices, then you became a skinhead.

KUPPER: So just fate?

MOTT: It was kind of predetermined. If your family members go to prison, you’re going to be a skinhead. If your family members go to art school, you’ll probably be a punk. I think in America it’s different so I can only talk about the British experience.

KUPPER: Americans seem very inspired, though, by the British.

MOTT: I get the idea that some of the people I’ve met here that were in skinhead gangs could possibly be from middle-class backgrounds. That really didn’t happen in the UK. There is a class structure there, and even in the subcultures it powers through. Apart from punk where everyone goes. But like I said, that was the more creative and rebellious kids.

KUPPER: I think that the white power thing in skinhead culture is a very American thing. It’s very difficult to find non-racist skinheads in the US.

MOTT: I think they just get more attention. And they’ve murdered a few more people. There’s always psychos right? But also they’re organized like the whole Tom Metzger thing and get more press. In Britain we have white power skinheads aligned fringe Neo-Nazi groups.

KUPPER: In terms of where the book is going – there’s a second edition that’s out now. Will there be a third edition?

MOTT: There probably will be a third. What’s interesting is that we always add something new. Who knows!

KUPPER: We live in such a digital age now, how do we collect this ephemera that’s alive today? What’s your advice?

MOTT: A lot of it is in the music world. I don’t know because I’m not sure how information circulates now. In my day you would be informed of a gig or an event on a piece of paper. Now it’d probably be on a PDF. Who wants to collect PDFs?

KUPPER: Who wants to print a PDF? (Laughs.)

MOTT: I don’t know, it’s just something else. Luckily for me most of my projects end with facture in ’90 or ’91. That’s the beginning of rave and the whole dance, hip-hop scene. Once it goes digital and online it’s different.

KUPPER: But now with the book fair it seems like zine culture is very much alive.

MOTT: Yeah there’s this whole analogue culture driven by the internet. It’s very exciting.

KUPPER: It is very exciting; we’re trying to explore that right now.

MOTT: I’m very pleased to be a part of that. I think it’s very important that things have an actuality rather than just an online presence. The book fair is amazing, it’s not even a retro thing. It’s real.

KUPPER: It is. I don’t think people are using it in a derivative way where they’re trying to recreate something from the past. It’s definitely very new, and I love what Printed Matter is doing.

MOTT: And it’s global. It’s all over Europe. These books are also beautiful objects, it’s not like buying a book on Amazon. It’s almost like some sort of art thing.

KUPPER: There’s a lot of freedom in DIY, you’re not really censored by anything specific.

MOTT: And it’s not economically driven. It’s not a money thing.

KUPPER: No one’s making money.

MOTT: No one’s making money, and everyone knows there’s no money to make so it’s kinda cool. (Laughs.) There’s a few people in it who want to make money, but that’s why I always say to them that there’s no money to make. So do something else. In a way it’s kind of pure; the fact that there’s no money other than being able to cover the cost of doing the project.

KUPPER: That’s why you have your day job. What do you think about magazines like Richardson magazine outside of the scope of everything else?

MOTT: Andrew [Richardson] is a good friend of mine. I don’t know if it’s a parody of a porn magazine or if it’s a way of being a porn magazine for a new audience.

KUPPER: Interesting. Because he doesn’t really say it’s porn, it’s a sex magazine. It’s not a porn magazine even though there’s only porn stars on the covers of every issue.

MOTT: I think to do that kind of thing it’s got to be away from the male gaze. I don’t know enough about porn, it’s a massive culture. It’s the biggest thing. He plays around with that but he’s really created a clothing brand.

KUPPER: That seems very punk in and of itself what he’s doing.

MOTT: Yeah I guess so. He’s taken something that most people find offensive and some people find acceptable, but not all people do. It’s a fine line.

You can follow Toby Mott on Instagram here. Purchase the "street edition" of Skinhead: An Archive on Ditto Press Text, interview and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Portrait of A Young Filmmaker: An Interview With CAMGIRL Director Dana Boulos

February 29, 2016

Dana Boulos is the talented director behind a new short film, entitled Cam Girl, that Autre has premiered exclusively online. Written by Jesy Odio, Cam Girl explores the vague border between our private lives and our proposed private lives. With the rise of adult webcam sites, where people can disrobe for a select viewing public in exchange for tips, Cam Girl is a prescient look at a humanity’s bifurcated persona; the erotic online persona and the persona of the girl who calls you up to tell you she just got her period, or the girl who calls you up to hang out. Cam Girl also reconnoiters our need to constantly communicate and digitally catalogue our lives. Autre caught up with Dana Boulos at home in Hollywood to ask a few questions about her inspirations, her love of film, her involvement in Petra Collins' all girl art collective Ardorous, and CAM GIRL, which can be viewed here.

Autre: Where did you grow up and did you always know that you wanted to enter the creative fields?

Dana Boulos: I grew up in Hampstead, London and moved to LA when I was 10 years old. As a child I wanted to be an artist. I knew I would fall into a creative field I just didn't know which one.

Autre: Who were some artists that first inspired you?

oulos: As a 5 year old I was obessed with Monet, I found his work so so soft and dreamy. I also look up to the works of Nadie Labaki, David Hamilton, Sarah Moon, Richard Avedon, and Larry Clark.

Autre: You have a big love of fashion - where did this love come from?

Boulos: It definitely came from my Family, especially my grandma. She was a model in Lebanon in the 60s'.

Autre: Can you talk a little bit about your production company?

oulos: I don't have a clothing label, but I do have a film production company called Cherry Runaway Films. My idea behind the Cherry Runaway Films is to also empower people into making films by discovering new up and coming directors, artists, and writers to produce their work.

Autre: You are a part of an all girl art collective called Ardorous - how did that come about and is it still active?

oulos: Yes Petra Collins and I became friends over the internet in 2009. She was forming all girl collective of artists from all around the world and I was one of the first to be asked me to be apart of it. We were all excited to be apart of an all girl collective that shared the same interests in art and understood each other. I had never met any girls in my city in LA that were into the type of art I was making at the time. I had become best friend with some of the girls I had met in IRL when they were visiting in LA. At the time we didn't realize how big it would get online and how many people clicked on the site. We all got amazing opportunities working with big publishing houses and having art shows around the world. The Ardorous was just the beginning and definitely inspired a lot of female artists out there on producing work. I feel really honored to have been apart of it.

Autre: Cam Girl is your first foray into film, where did the idea for this short film come from?

Boulos: I was at the right place at the right time. I had been hired by Oyster Magazine to photograph stills for a film they were doing a feature on and I had just met Jesy Odio who was working on set. She got my number called me the next day for a meeting she had just written her first short called CamGirl and wanted me to direct it. I read the script and instantly loved it.

Autre: What do you want young women to learn from watching cam girl - are there any defining messages?

Boulos: CAMGIRL, written by Jesy Odio explores what goes on in front of a computer screen and how it differs from what goes on in our bedroom IRL. The way we type with strangers online is not exactly the same way we talk with our friends when we got out. Although our main character is alone in her room she never takes a break from being in touch with others especially the constant digital cataloguing. I want to see more Women young or old in the film industry. Before meeting Jesy, I was studying cinematography and knew I wanted to pursue film making for 2015 and thats exactly what I did. I'm a strong believer in the laws of attraction. Anything you set your mind to you can accomplish.

Autre: What's next?

Boulos: I'm currently working on my next film 'CRIMSON ROSE', which I've been working on the script with Jesy since the summer of 2015. I'm looking forward to be working with some amazing people on this film, I cant talk about what its going to be about but definitely look out for a killer sound track to the film as well as mini book.

You can watch CAM GIRL here. Stay up to date with Dana Boulos by visiting her website or following her on Instagram. Photographs by Kevin Hayeland. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Through The Peep Hole: An Interview With Vanessa Prager

February 25, 2016

Vanessa Prager comes from a very talented and creative family. Most people know her sister, Alex Prager, and her larger than life cinematic portraits of people and crowds in surrealistic situations. However, the younger Prager is making a name for herself with her figurative oil paintings that verge on abstract sculptures. Faces, in a swirling, kinetic puzzle of colors and gashes of paint, seem less abstract as you pull away from the canvas. Prager’s work is currently on view as part of her first solo exhibition in New York – or outside of of Los Angeles – the Hole Gallery. The opening night of the exhibition was hosted by actor and comedian Fred Armisen, who counts himself as a fan of Prager’s work. The show, entitled "Voyeur," is interesting in that some of the works can only be viewed through a peep hole. The concept came from the artist’s thoughts about privacy, or lack thereof, in a hyper-digital world. Nonetheless, it is an interesting concept for showing figurative art in a century that has mostly abandoned the canvas as a relic of yesterday’s artists. Last Sunday, we got a chance to visit Prager’s studio in Downtown Los Angeles. As you walk through the door, the smell of oil paint is overwhelming and intoxicating. In the following conversation, we talk about her influences as an artist, her process and how Fred Armisen fits into the picture.

OLIVER KUPPER: How did you know you wanted to become an artist? Was it partly inspired by your sister’s pursuits?

VANESSA PRAGER: Well, it was weird. I went to boarding school when I was a teenager, for high school. When I was there, I started drawing. Those were the first signs of it. Weirdly, at the same time, she was down here starting to do photography. But you know, coming back to LA after I graduated, that was when I decided I wanted to do something in the arts. There were a few parts of that. One, I realized you had to get a job in LA and have a career, which wasn’t really something I thought about before then. Also, I had learned enough about myself that I was not really conducive to taking orders, doing nine to five. At the same time, my sister started having art shows. I think I went to her first one when I was seventeen. A bunch of our friends around that time were artists and photographers.

KUPPER: There was an energy going on.

PRAGER: Yeah. It was a really real thing. It wasn’t like we were all in Paris smoking and talking about art. I saw that there was this thing that you could do. It was a job for them. I don’t remember making a conscious decision after one specific thing. Around that time, after school, you wonder, what kind of job am I going to get?

KUPPER: So were your parents artists? Were they creative?

PRAGER: They were creative in their spirit. They’re not professional artists. My mom has been getting more into it. She's starting this vegan chocolate company. I consider a lot of things art. They definitely have the artistic mindset. That was definitely instilled into us. Art was a valuable thing for us growing up, more than objects. We didn’t have a lot of money, but ideas were important. That was one of the better things they could have given to us. It was always encouraged. When I started drawing, my mom was like, “Hey, you could sell these.”

KUPPER: So it seemed like a reality?

PRAGER: Yeah, it seemed like a reality. Alex is five years older than me, so she was already doing stuff when I was seventeen. I’m pretty active; when I get an idea I do something about it. But how you go about doing something like showing art – I know a lot of people wonder and never find out. To me, it was just looking at a lot of other people doing it.

KUPPER: Are there any other painters that you’re inspired by?

PRAGER: It’s hard, because I’m a painter, to view art without a critical eye. I definitely enjoy art, but ever since I was seventeen, I always look at art like – how did they do that? What’s going on there? You’re dissecting the thing. It’s hard for me to just purely enjoy things. Of course, I do. Whenever I see Lucian Freud for example, I’m in awe. I love somebody who can paint well. I love paintings. I’m just drawn into them.

KUPPER: Figurative art is relatively rare these days. It’s more conceptual. People aren’t sitting in front of a canvas as much anymore.

PRAGER: No. For a few years prior to doing this series, I was like, what am I doing? It really was a breakdown. I’m doing a really old-school thing in modern times, but I don’t feel old-school. I feel super modern in my being. I had to think about that. I think that’s how I came about this series. People would pose the question, “Why painting in 2016?” Why paint? Why paint with oil? There are so many things against the medium that don’t work in modern times. But then I realized my real love for it. I really took it apart. There’s something about it that I just love. That’s when I broke into this whole new thing. And I don’t paint in a classical way. I use the figure, which people do time and time again. But I do it in a way in which I feel I’m using it now.

KUPPER: Do you have any rituals before you start working?

PRAGER: I like to clean up and make the space my own. I really liked moving to this studio because it’s containable. I had a really big studio in Glendale that I shared before. It was always kind of hard to get each nook mine. Here, I like to water my plants. I get really bad when I’m in show. Things die. At the end of the month, I re-gather. I like throwing things away and cleaning out. I really like not having crap around. I’m a big fan of the trashcan.

"Life isn’t perfect. Things shouldn’t be perfect. I don’t like perfection. What is perfection anyway? History is a part of life, a part of now. The layering was a change for me to put everything together and have it all still be a part of the thing."

KUPPER: No clutter.

PRAGER: Yeah, no clutter. But there are little nooks. If I’m okay with them, then it’s okay. If I get into certain weird head space, I’ll do certain things. I’ll go walking or hiking. If I obsess over one stroke, and the rest of the painting isn’t working, I have to destroy what I’m attached to. Sometimes, it’ll pin me to a spot. Sometimes I end up making something that I love. But most of the time, I have to roll with it all and destroy it.

KUPPER: So you’ll start over completely if you feel something isn’t going in the direction you want it to go in?

PRAGER: For sure. Or I’ll just change it in a really dramatic way. If a face is going a certain direction and it’s just not working, oftentimes, I’ll turn the canvas over and do it on another thing. I always say that it’s telling me at the same time that I’m telling it what it’s going to be. I think that’s important for this kind of work. I never painted abstract before, but it totally borders on that. I can’t do it alone. It has to be an organic, flowy thing. There has to be something in the pure substances that tell me what needs to be there.

KUPPER: Your work started off much more realistic, and it became more abstract. Was that evolution natural?

PRAGER: Like I said, right before I started doing this series, I sat back and was like, why am I painting? What is that I like about it? How will it fulfill the thing that I want to get out into this world? This world, the one that we live in now, not the 1600s or the 1950s. Will it be able to interact with people? Essentially, that’s the purpose - for it to interact with people. In thinking about all that, it changed. It wasn’t quite there for it before. The style I was painting in before didn't make sense for all of those questions.

KUPPER: Your first solo shows have been happening recently. It looks like you’re just getting ready to explore that.

PRAGER: Totally. Had I gone to college, I probably wouldn’t have shown until last year. I started doing pop ups, little things here and there, in stores for one night only. While I was doing that, everyone got to see it. Good, bad, ugly, whatever - it just was. Had I been in school during that time, people wouldn’t have seen the work.

KUPPER: Or only students would have seen it.

PRAGER: Yeah, and they would have tore it to shreds, and I would have cried. [Laughs.] I equate it to that because that’s what makes sense to me. This is the work that I’m really proud of. There is a difference to me. I was still learning then. It’s a matter of figuring out how to release your feeling. Until you do that, you’re always reaching for that. I think I’ll always be exploring new ways to do stuff. That’s the job of an artist.

KUPPER: Part of that process seems like a layering. That seems to be a distinct style of yours. Is that accidental or is that part of it?

PRAGER: It’s part of it. It’s a big part of it. Life isn’t perfect. Things shouldn’t be perfect. I don’t like perfection. What is perfection anyway? History is a part of life, a part of now. The layering was a chance for me to put everything together and have it all still be a part of the thing. That’s how I see layering. I don’t use it in the classical oil-painting, glazing sense, which I’m sure some painters think is really annoying. I use it more in a sculptural sense. Topography and maps, even looking at mountains and rocks and stuff, is really inspiring to me. I use that a lot in the layering process. I enjoy painting with the skylight because it has those shadows. You see it in different lights, and everything changes.

KUPPER: Do you see yourself getting into sculpture?

PRAGER: I may. I really like sculpture. It’s just a matter of how. It’s learning another medium or hiring out. The way I envision it is kind of big. I think this is a good way of getting into that. I do like sculpture. I like the idea of it coming into three dimensions.

KUPPER: I want to talk about fans of your work. Fred Armisen is a big fan of your work.

PRAGER: He’s a pal. He’s a big fan of painting and art in general. He’s super cool and supportive. When we met, we just hit it off and chatted about art. He came over to my studio. Now, he’s hosting my show. It’s great because I think he’s so cool, and I love crossing over to new areas of art. I’m from LA, so the way that I envision having an art show isn’t necessarily classic. We have the movie industry here. Of course, I think it should be integrated. The art world shouldn’t be a separate, special area. I love anything that crosses over and opens it up to other groups of people.

KUPPER: The Hole is a great place for that. They’re really experimental in how they show their shows. And Kathy [Grayson] is a great curator.

PRAGER: She’s amazing. It was a really good fit. I’ve known her for years. She loves painting - she is a painter - but she tends to show the super conceptual work. She shows the picture of a painting, work that’s based on the pure idea. She shows less of the classic oil paintings. It was going to be interesting to see how that crossed over. But she loves oil painting. I thought it was a really good match, in the end. She brought a lot of conceptual stuff to it. The idea for “Voyeur” - we totally vibed on that.

KUPPER: Talk about that. That’s a really interesting way to present the work. A lot of the work, you can only view through a peep hole, right?

PRAGER: One of them you literally cannot get to. It’s an eight-foot painting behind a wall. You can only see it through the peep hole. Some of them you look through peep holes. Walls are set up. It’s in a maze-like fashion. In the end, you get to a painting. It has a definite flow. The idea of “Voyeur” was seeing things that you shouldn’t see. It’s messing with the fact that we have so much information these days. People can find out everything about other people before they even meet them.

KUPPER: What’s next after this series?

PRAGER: I don’t know. The show is still up. I always take a moment to relax and regroup after an opening. That was my first time showing in New York, so I had no idea what was going to happen. I just put everything into it for months. I’m going to have an empty studio. It will be a good place to start. I’ll just start making stuff. I’ll see where the next vibe takes me.

Vanessa Prager's exhibition Voyeur is on view until February 28, 2016 at The Hole NYC, 312 Bowery, New York. Text and photographs by Oliver Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Agency, Anal and Attitude: An Interview with Aiden Starr

February 23, 2016

Aiden Starr has the most magnificent rack I’ve ever come in contact with. Aside from her undeniably pronounced assets, Aiden is articulate and knowledgeable about what she does and has nothing to hide because of it. She is one of the most accomplished women in porn, exposed and giving no apologies. Straight forward and cutting; she tells it like it is and that is what I cherish about her as a friend and a colleague. She calls bullshit, she celebrates the good, she treats sex work with care and consideration. For her, porn is a humanist pursuit as she acts as a matchmaker between client and provider on all levels of the industry. I caught up with the 4’11” blonde bombshell and her sweet porn chum, Daisy Ducati, at the Beverly Center in mid-January after an Evil Angel shoot. I hung around while they shopped for their dresses for the 2016 AVNs and XBIZ awards while asking questions about her career and the porn industry at large, and learned more about her impressive roster of porn films, both as a performer and a director, past and upcoming and other untouchable arenas: agency, anal, and attitude. Some men seemed to recognize both of the girls as we walked through the mall, but I remained the invisible pervert.

Audra Wist: My interest in you has always been about you being super professional and somebody who has successfully crossed over hardcore porn and femdom and also somebody is who both a performer and a director. I am not so involved in the porn industry to know how common that is, but it doesn’t seem—

Aiden Starr: It’s not. Male performers and directors are way more common than female performer/directors.

Wist: So, was that a part of your trajectory when you started out… like you said, okay, I’m going to perform and I definitely want to get to directing eventually, this is something I’m interested in technically... or was it more or less I’m going to get into this and see how I do and play it by ear?

Starr: My first sex worker job was a phone girl in a dungeon. What a phone girl means is the girl who picks up the phone, who books the sessions for the other girls and who preps the equipment in the room and who keeps the time. And working on the magazine that the dungeon put out at the time cause this was the 90s.

Wist: And this was in New York?

Starr: Yeah, New York. And also working on the website, updating. But most of what I did and what I was really good at was managing the clients. I really liked submissive girls - that’s why I started working there. My buddy was a bottom and we played together and she started working there and she asked me to work there with her because she wanted me to work on her shifts, be the phone girl, and book all of her sessions. Get her guys that she liked and make good matches for her. So, my initial interest in the adult industry was making good matches between clients and providers to make the job enjoyable - to make the experience enjoyable for not only the clients, but also for the providers. Not only was a monetary exchange, but an exchange of a good time and a good energy.

Wist: Right, that’s what it’s about.

Starr: I didn’t start working in that kind of adult film until I was working in the dungeon for a couple of years and then I only did it with women who were my lovers in real life. Before I graduated high school, I thought about applying to Tisch [School of the Arts, at NYU] and had prepared an application, so I was familiar with video medium and had directed stuff before. In fact, the very first thing I directed, I was a twelve-year old and I directed a mockumentary on date rape.

Wist: Really? That’s great! Wait, so did you-

Starr: It was a dramatization. It was a girl and a guy going back and forth, talking about their experiences, like a he said/she said reenactment of it with a party scene: people drinking too much and the concept of date rape. She didn’t know why they were going into the bedroom because she’s young and didn’t have the experience... and he didn’t understand that she didn’t know why they were going into the bedroom because why would she go into the bedroom if she didn’t want to be there? That kind of scene. I wrote these scripts out for my friends, who were twelve, and I made them do it.

Wist: [laughs] Oh, you “made” them do it - that is your career in a nutshell.

Starr: And it was also kind of a porn, a soft-core porn. Now, my version of this was them getting under the covers and moving under the sheets because when you’re twelve you think that’s what sex is. You just pull the sheets over your head and move around.

Wist: That is so funny.

Starr: But that, theoretically, is a soft core porn. So, I guess if you look back early enough, I was always going to end up where I ended up but that’s not what initially sparked my wanting to be a sex worker. It’s like a spa, going to see a provider. It’s beautiful and it’s fantasy and it’s like watching one of those movies from the 80s like Legend or Labyrinth where everybody is amazing and is in a castle and there’s a princess. And to me, it was helping people with their castle fantasy.

Wist: You see a smattering of people in the adult industry, or maybe this is any industry, but you have people who are the real deal and people who are eh, what are you doing here.

Starr: Tourists.

Wist: Right, tourists. And I feel so much of what’s going on, all this shit about sex positivity and feminism, it’s all just internet chatter and no real showing up. Show up and do something. For you, it’s like here I am: a director for a huge porn company. Here I am: performing in porn. Here I am: a mainstay in porn and have been for a long time. What do you think about all the stuff that’s being thrown around on the internet online… I’m trying to think of an example…

Starr: Oh, you can think of an example. Just try real hard.

Wist: What are you thinking of?

Starr: The James Deen thing.

Wist: Oh, yes! Of course. I honestly did not even think of that when I was thinking of these questions but that is perfect. We should talk about that.

Starr: That’s a great example of sex workers espousing feminism in social media. The fact that, to these women, you always take the side of a woman whenever she claims to have been raped, that is part of their perceived definition of feminism. Which is interesting, because for me rape is not a gender-based issue. I know just as many men, or trans, or otherwise gendered people, who are sexually assaulted as I do women. So, I don’t see rape culture as a feminist issue. I see it as a humanist issue. And it’s interesting because it’s being ascribed to a feminist issue. People claiming “women get raped, women get raped, women get raped.” People get raped. Human beings get raped. And I think that’s kind of getting lost while people are espousing the idea of rape culture and the knowledge that this does exist. A man was trying to convince me the other day that rape culture doesn’t exist and I said “God bless you that you don’t know that that exists.”

Wist: Damn.

Starr: Seriously, bless your existence and that you don’t act that way towards people. Bless your parents for not fucking you up the way that a lot of other people are fucked up. It’s a thing, it’s a real thing. But I don’t think that it has to be under the feminist banner and I think that it is being ascribed to the feminist banner by sex workers or sex positive people in social media. It’s interesting to see the dynamic of where feminism was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and today. Today it’s all about preventing victimization and I feel like many many years ago it was about empowerment and equality. I’m not sure how that happened.

Wist: Preventing of victimization. So, do you think that there’s an alternative to that view? Not that this is a say-all-end-all my-little-constitution of feminism or whatever, but is there anything we can do? Or is it just being somebody who is doing the work and not being “I’m gonna go on the internet and say what I think about this thing that I have no first-hand knowledge of whatsoever!”

Starr: I think for me feminism, at it’s core, is about equality. It’s about people being equal to people. You obviously could go into the history of it and it’s present-day application and the issue, be they American, Central American, South American, African, European, Australian, Asian, whatever pocket of the world, and how feminism plays out in certain area, but for me, it’s about everybody being equal to each other.

Wist: Straight forward, straight up.

Starr: That’s kind of how I’ve always seen it. Everybody deserves common human rights.

Wist: Yeah, there was a gal [Laurie Penny] who wrote a piece for TIME and it was this call to arms, like we have to do something about this, isn’t this horrible and I thought yes, of course rape is horrible—

Starr: Yes! No one is arguing that! No one has ever been like this is totally fucking fine. Only the idiots are saying “she asked for it” and no one listens to them. They’re idiots and we all know they are idiots. Feminism has definitely become more anti-male. Feminism looks closer to female supremacy than it does feminism.

Wist: Right, it does! I wrote down one time “I am a female supremacist but I don’t devalue men,” and I could not for the life of me figure out what that meant. But now, hearing you say that, maybe I was trying to ascribe to a particular brand of contemporary feminism while wanting to break away or find some alternative that felt right. I looked at that sentence a lot. Do you think that that’s why there’s been a rise in femdom porn? I don’t know the numbers, but do you think there’s been a significant spike?

Starr: Why there’s been a rise in femdom porn is such an interesting fucking question. It’s one of my favorite subjects to talk about. When I talk to clients about porn and why they watch it, I always pick their brains and it’s so interesting to see that side where subs have no control and they like having no control. Whereas, if you play with a girl and it’s a girl/girl situation, the girls like “you can do this to me, you can do that to me, but I don’t like that and I don’t like this, period.” Whereas, guys just want to be this rock bottom. It’s so different between the two genders and their perception of being submissive. It’s fascinating! I have no fucking idea why except that money is so important in today’s society that I’m sure it has something to do with the burden that men are supposed to be the primary breadwinners.

Wist: Yes, I was thinking the same thing. It has something to do with money as it’s so closely related to power.

Starr: Yeah, findom [financial domination] is huge.

Wist: I think it’s also that because of money, people acquiring large sums of it, people are too comfortable and they really seriously do not know what to do with all of it. And then it gets mixed in with desire or their dick or—

Starr: It’s burning a hole in their pocket.

Wist: Right.

Starr: I think men also feel like the pressure is on them in social situations to engage women and do they like the sexually aggressive archetype because it takes the pressure off of them. So, why I think that any kind of porn rises, any kind of art rises, any kind of entertainment rises, at all in any medium, is culture. The pervasive language of the culture directly affects femdom. What that language is is debatable but definitely male responsibility and that they feel burdened by society in some way, shape, or form to still be the sexual aggressor or monetary provider affects femdom. And going back to feminism, maybe that’s why all these girls are angry on the internet because their realities are not pleasing to them.

"IT'S LIKE A SPA, GOING TO SEE A PROVIDER. IT'S BEAUTIFUL AND IT'S FANTASY AND IT'S LIKE WATCHING ONE OF THOSE MOVIES FROM THE 80s, LIKE LEGEND OR LABYRINTH, WHERE EVERYBODY IS AMAZING AND IS IN A CASTLE AND THERE'S A PRINCESS. AND TO ME, IT WAS HELPING PEOPLE WITH THEIR CASTLE FANTASY."

Wist: Yeah, this is the whole put a ribbon on your car situation, right? Support our troops? Did that. I bought my ribbon and put it on my car. Done. It’s a whitewashing culture. Maybe something that folds into that too… I was really into your Marshmallow Girls series for Evil Angel. I remember thinking damn, this is in the fucking mainstream! This is so crazy and why not? And to put it out there under those circumstances and to really capitalize on a previously thought of as “niche” market is bold! With that and femdom porn too, I think we really have to acknowledge and reckon with the fact that people want different things and have different needs. And look - you put it out there and people buy it. That’s the best part.

Starr: They buy it! People buy the shit out of my porn. I make money and I can pay you. Yeah, people buy the shit out of my weird crap.

Wist: I’m wondering about the back end of that, too. Does porn still dictate what’s on the cusp of happening in technology? Is the porn industry experiencing the same thing that magazines and the print media are right now then?

Starr: Yeah, obsolescence. Our medium is experiencing a trend towards obsolescence because of the drop in capital because of all of the free porn on the internet. It’s fucking us super badly.

Wist: What do you do to counteract that?

Starr: What you have to do is make something that they would pay for even if they could get it for free. You have to make the air smell so good that people will come over to your post to sniff the air even though there’s air everywhere for free. It’s really fucking hard. Selling something for free is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It is possible, but you just have to think about it. When I make movies, all of my cast is hand-picked. The movie we just shot Lesbian Anal Sex Slaves Volume 2—

Wist: Repeat the name for me?

Starr: Lesbian Anal Sex Slaves Volume 2. Daisy [Ducati] and I were doing a shot together, fleshing out ideas of how we were already interacting and then figured out as other characters, figuring out our dynamics, props. It’s a more complicated process now. You can’t just put anal porn on the internet now and expect to make money.

Wist: Do you guys storyboard?

Starr: I don’t storyboard… we were talking about it during sex. We were inspired by each other. I talked to her, proposed an idea afterward. She’s in a lot of my stuff anyway and I like picking performers who like to be involved in the creative process or are blank canvases. Typically, I like to pair those types together in a scene. Daisy has been in a lot of my stuff and she is a part of the creative process and then I pick a blank canvas, or two, and give them to her and it goes from there. Does that make sense? I just compared it to painting.

Wist: Makes sense to me.

Starr: I have active participants in a scene and passive participants. And I participate only if the passive participants are unable to complete the tasks at hands. So, today for example, the girl was having trouble with anal. I saw her having trouble with anal so I told her to get on her back and have the other gal lick her butthole. I had to change the situation because she was not comfortable. Otherwise, I would’ve just let them do what they were going to do. I only interject if I feel like I need to as a director.

Wist: Does that happen that often that people [directors] step in and say okay, you are clearly having trouble with your butthole today—

Starr: You just do something else. It’s okay! For me, it’s about the happiness and safety of all the performers. No one has to die. I don’t make snuff movies.

Wist: What’s that like for you to work with fresh eighteen year-olds in the industry? Do you feel like you’re mama bear?

Starr: I don’t usually hire young girls.

Wist: You don’t?

Starr: I don’t. I’m 36 and I’m not really attracted to people half my age. It’s just not a thing for me. This girl was special. She has a special energy and I wanted her to have good experiences with us doing rough stuff. She had fun today. And because of it, she’s going to be a more comfortable sex worker because of it.

Wist: Right, she didn’t feel bad about it and that’s so important! So many people have bad one-off experiences.

Starr: You can really give yourself serious psychological damage with bad experiences.

Wist: Yeah, I think about this with clients. They have these bad first experiences with dommes, and these are grown men, and they are traumatized. And I feel bad. That fucking blows. They paid to have a traumatic experience.

Starr: It’s intense. A lot of pro dommes are really bad. Really bad where I’m like what the fuck am I looking at right now?

Wist: Well, I have my own are-you-for-real bullshit detector thing that I do or observe, but do you have that too?

Starr: Yes, absolutely. If you are a pro domme and I see you do a scene with no aftercare, you suck. Period. If you are too fucking cool to get them a glass of water… if you are too fucking good to realize that you’re playing with a human being, I don’t like you. We’re not cut from the same fabric.

Wist: Yep. And it’s all too common.

Starr: And you know what it is? It stems from insecurity because cruelty stems from insecurity and that’s what that is. That’s not BDSM, that’s cruelty. It’s true, man. And girls think it makes them look like a badass.

Wist: It’s a bummer. So, you guys are preparing for the awards show this week?

Starr: Yeah, I’ve been working my balls off. XBIZ awards are this week and then the AVNs are the following week.

Wist : Did you ever read David Foster Wallace’s essay on his experience at the AVNs?

Starr: No.

Wist: He opens it up with this horrendous story about men jerking off so much, so furiously, that they just can’t handle it anymore and they chop that shit right off.

Starr: Sweet, wow. Wait a minute… first of all, the AVNs are not that much fun. Okay, if Satan were involved, I would be much more excited about not being able to work the entire time while being there. I would be much more excited if anybody even just masturbated until their dick fell off much less cut off! If there was any masturbation at all, that would be amazing. There’s really nothing. We get dressed up, sign shit, talk to people, they stare at us, we do radio shows—

Wist: What’s that like, getting the mesmerizing stare? What are their faces like?

Starr: Here’s the weirdest shit the world: everybody knows your name and you don’t know any of their names. And you don’t know who they are… or if you do. I just try to be nice to everybody. That’s my plan for AVNs.

Wist: Do they say weird shit to you during a meet and greet?

Starr: Sometimes. Like, “Every time I masturbate, I cry,” and shit like that. I love that though. I want people to scare the other girls standing around — that’s how weird I want it to be. If it’s not weird, it’s just like, “Hi, nice to meet you, goodbye.” I like weird shit. One dude during an independent signing at a store, he came in and said, “You have really big breasts.” and I’m like, “yeeeeep!” and he goes, “I bet your mother had really big breasts, too.” and I said, “She does.” and then he comes back with, “I bet your grandmother has big breasts.” and I’m like, “As a matter of fact, she does.” And he was older; he started asking what my grandmother looked like...

Wist: Oh, god.

Starr: And at the end of the conversation he asked me if I would tell my grandmother that he said hello and I was like, “Sure will, buddy.”

Wist: Shit. [laughs] By the way, I do have to say, your tits are amazing. That was one of the things I had wrote down to say. It’s not a question, but I needed to say it.

Starr: Then you’re going to love the dress I’m wearing to AVN. It’s red latex over the boobies, over the cleavage and it’s really not my size, total smashville.

Wist: Another question I had for you because I still haven’t figured this out for myself, was about negotiating yourself into your work. I struggle with this. So, you have your government self and then you have this performer you’ve created, another part of you, which is still very much you and not something false. I was also thinking about David Bowie since he passed the other day, and I thought wow, porn is like David Bowie. Is there a relationship there?

Starr: Porn is like David Bowie but porn is more like football.

Wist: Porn is like football? Explain.

Starr: So, you’re a football player, right? You eat well, you’re in shape, you work out and train, you look good, you’re a football player. But then, when you put on your uniform, you tackle people. You wouldn’t tackle people in real life, but you do when you’re in uniform because it’s your job and it’s okay. So, porn is like football.

Wist: Ohhhh, I see. So, porn is like football and not like David Bowie?

Starr: Porn is like David Bowie because David Bowie was majestic and sexual and fantastic. And tight shiny clothing and shoes you can’t really walk in. David Bowie is like porn because of the sexuality that is so raw and potent that it makes people nervous. The most popular comment on all of the stories on my Facebook feed about David Bowie on Facebook were “speechless.” He renders people speechless. Porn renders people speechless. When guys come up to us at AVN, they often cannot articulate themselves. You’re activating the part of your brain that does not recognize language as a form of communication, the animal or primal part of your brain that is activated by symbolism, colors, tarot cards, crosses, shit like that. That is how porn is like David Bowie.

Wist: You knocked it out of the park.

You can follow Aiden Starr on Twitter here. Text and interview by Audra Wist. Photographs by . Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Nine Morbid Songs About Dying: An Interview With New Zealand Soul Singer Marlon Williams

February 19, 2016

Marlon Williams, the New Zealand born soul crooner whose self-titled breakout album drops today, isn’t just a throw back. Sure, his slicked back hair, tight fitting Brando style tees and general ruggedness may suggest a yearning for 1950s Americana, but this vocal prodigy from the Southern Hemisphere is merely singing from the heart, which can transcend time and space and musical genres. In his voice and vocal style, there are also strains of religious spirituals that can be tied to his family’s Maori upbringing (his father was a Maori punk singer) and singing in church choirs. Already selling out concerts and becoming a household name in his native New Zealand, Marlon Williams’ self-titled album will surely see the young musical artist gain international recognition, especially in the United States with multiple tour dates sets, including a spot at SXSW with his backing band The Yarra Benders, in March. We got a chance to speak with Williams about his Maori roots, soul music and his new album.

Autre: Can you talk a little bit about your upbringing in New Zealand...I read somewhere that your roots go far back to a native Maori tribe, is that right?

Marlon Williams: That's right. My dad's half Maori, my mum's quarter so I'm some ratio too. I was brought up in a port town outside of Christchurch in the South Island. It was a classic small town upbringing, a lot of freedom to kick around the streets as a kid

Autre: And your dad was a Maori punk singer...that is very different than the music you make - do you have memories of seeing him play - what was the name of his band?

Williams: He kinda stopped playing by the time I was around but he played in a band called the Boneshakers. New wave punk from the rural North Island.

Autre: What was your earliest exposure to music - how did you gain access to music that influenced and inspired you?

Williams: My dad always introduced me to new stuff, pretty steadily throughout my childhood and into my teenage years. It started off with Elvis and the Beatles and eventually lead into The Band and Gram Parsons.

Autre: Who are some of your folk and blues heroes?

Williams: Dave Van Ronk, Peggy Seeger, Vashti Bunyan, Robbie Basho, Blind Willie McTell, Lightnin Hopkins, Bob Carpenter. This list won't ever end.

Autre: Does New Zealand have a strong folk scene?

Williams: It really does. A lot of really great underground stuff and some more well known. Aldous Harding, Delaney Davidson, Nadia Reid, Eb and Sparrow. All good friends, all great musicians.

Autre: You have accomplished a lot in a short amount of time, and you've won a lot of awards, were you surprised at your success as a musician or is this something you've always wanted?

Williams: It's all I've ever really known so it's hard considering alternative paths, but it's certainly a nice feeling to be appreciated. As long as I can do it how I want I'm happy.

Autre: You are being hailed as "the new Elvis" is this something you balk at or embrace?

Williams: Neither. It'd be a dick move to react too strongly to that one either way

Autre: What is your ideally suited environment to write music...do you have a ritual or does it come to you at all times?

Williams: I have no ritual. It just happens when it does. It's a very frustrating way to write music, especially when it doesn't hit you for a while. I need to get disciplined

Autre: Your music video for the track Hello Miss Lonesome is very intense – where did the idea for the music video come about?

Williams: That came from the director, Damien Shatford, who's a good old pal of mine. He's made a couple of videos for me and they both feature me getting smashed up. You'd have to ask him why. Maybe I did something to him I don't know about

Autre: Your new album is self-titled and it almost seems like a “break out” album – whatever that means – do you feel like you want to reach a much wider, global audience with the record?

Williams: Who doesn't? The more people I can get to hear my music the better. It means the Kiwis and Australians get a break from me for a while

Autre: You are planning to tour in some major cities in the US – is this your first time touring in states and do you have any apprehensions?

Williams: This is my first headline tour in the states, yeah. Not particularly. I only ever worry about survival and love

Autre: What can people expect from the new album?

Williams: 9 morbid songs about dying

Autre: What do your parents think of your success as a musician...have they supported you all along?

Williams: My mothers a painter and dad the singer so they'd be hypocritical to condemn me. They've always been behind me 100%.

Autre: Where do you want to go with your music after this album…any grand, surprising plans?

Williams: I'm not completely sure yet but it'll be really, really good

Marlon Williams' self-titled album on Dead Oceans records is available here. Watch the music video for highlight single Strange Things below. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photograph by Justyn Strother. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Mad About The Boy: An Interview With SHOWStudio Editor Lou Stoppard

February 18, 2016

With the massive outpour of round the clock fashion coverage and inundation, SHOWStudio editor’s Lou Stoppard still firmly stands out. As a writer, broadcaster, and curator, Stoppard offers both a conceptual understanding of fashion as well as an open-mindedness to the changes in the industry that allows her work a warm resonance that rings true throughout the media. As SHOWstudio editor, Stoppard has picked the brains of designers ranging from Nasir Mazhar, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Public School, Cottweiler, and many more. Perhaps most infamously, Stoppard was granted a two-hour interview with Kanye West following his Yeezy Season 2 presentation. In all her interviews, Stoppard manages to ask thoughtful and conceptual questions while still putting her subjects emotionally at ease. As a result, her video interviews offer true portals into the inner-workings of designers’ brains.

Lou Stoppard’s exhibition Mad About the Boy will be showing at Fashion Space Gallery London until April 2. Stoppard curated the exhibition as an exploration of the concept of youth in the fashion industry, specifically how the idea of the teenage boy is constructed through fashion collections and images. The exhibition combines the contributions of designers such as Raf Simons, Hedi Slimane, Gosha, Jun Takahashi, JW Anderson and others with those of artists and image makers like Larry Clark, Nick Knight, Judy Blame, Mark Leckey and others to construct and break down the fantasy of the teenage boy.

Stoppard took the time to answer some questions we had about the exhibition.

Adam Lehrer: Do you think that the ideas presented by designers such as Raf have been positive in shifting ideals of masculinity at large?

Stoppard: I think it’s definitely becoming easier for men to say they are interested in “fashion.” Alex Bilmes, editor of Esquire, talked about this when I interviewed him for SHOWstudio’s In Fashion series. He mentioned that for a long time men felt comfortable saying they were interested in “style” but not “fashion.” [The idea of fashion] felt fey or niche. I think that has changed. Partly this is due to the spotlight on menswear and with the way that designers are speaking to men. Designers like Raf often draw on obsessions or ideas that tap into a collective consciousness: certain musical genres, films, and books (you saw that particularly with the David Lynch tribute at his [Fall-Winter 2016 show). I think menswear designers of late often explore rites of passage and themes of growing up that tap into men’s sense of their own masculinity. There’s also a wide range of different views of ‘manhood’ presented in menswear- much wider than the vision of femininity presented by womenswear.

"I do think that part of the thing people are obsessed with to do with youth is this idea of freedom: freedom to create, freedom to reinvent, freedom of indemnity. And part of that is the notion of experimentation that people tie to youth."

Lehrer: Do you find that there is ever disconnect between how male teenagers are presented in fashion and how actual teenagers in real life dress and what they are interested in?

Stoppard: Of course. Though I think certain rites of passage or events and ideas all people connected with as a youth – sex, space, social groups etc – crop up again and again in fashion’s depiction of the boy.

Lehrer: What is it about youth that you think so fascinates fashion?

Stoppard: That’s sort of what I’m trying to explore with the exhibition. I think to some extent it’s aesthetic: fashion loves a slim and lithe body. On the other hand it’s more abstract: youth is fleeting which appeals to an industry that is all about change.

Lehrer: You've said there is an element of nostalgia in the ideas of youth in fashion, can that ever be stunting to a creative process?

Stoppard: I think nostalgia is, to a degree, inevitable. Designers tirelessly reference their obsessions, which do tend to be formed during formative, youthful years. They often reference the things that first got them interested in fashion and style; bands, icons, clubs and so on. To a degree it’s about looking back but it’s also about reinventing. They make things the way they wanted them to be, or create characters they wished they could have been. You see that a lot in the work of people like Jun Takahashi and Hedi Slimane.

Lehrer: I know you quite like wearing certain menswear brands, do you think the explorations of youth in menswear has led to this gender fluidity in the products sold by high fashion brands?

Stoppard: I do think that part of the thing people are obsessed with to do with youth is this idea of freedom: freedom to create, freedom to reinvent, freedom of indemnity. And part of that is the notion of experimentation that people tie to youth. There is a whole section of the exhibition about gender fluidity. When you look at the way someone like Alessandro Michele at Gucci looks at gender it is very much tied to the freedom of the kid.

Lehrer: Was there anything particular about the work of Tony Hornecker that you thought he could add to the overall feel of the exhibition?

Stoppard: Well Tony did the set for all those original Meadham Kirchhoff presentations and shows, and I knew that I wanted to restage a bit of their SS 13 menswear presentation, which is one of the most beautiful and intelligent fashion displays I’ve ever seen, so working with Tony just felt so apt. Ben Kirchhoff also suggested Tony as being perfect to handle the restaging, so obviously it felt respectful.

Lehrer: I know the exhibition explores different ways that the male youth has been portrayed in fashion, but is there any singular idea throughout the various images that you feel could sum up the entire idea of the exhibition?

Stoppard: It’s about cycles and tropes, in a way, I suppose.

Lehrer: Do you believe youth in fashion will always be a concept heavily explored, or will we move on at some point?

Stoppard: Almost every designer draws on their own life and formative influences, so I think youth will always be there in fashion, even if it’s only due to creatives reflecting.

Mad About The Boy, curated by Lou Stoppard, will be on view until April 2 at Fashion Space Gallery at the London College of Fashion, 20 John Princes Street. Text and interview by Adam Lehrer. Photograph by Flo Kohl. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

The Naked Word: A Conversation Between Lydia Lunch and Thurston Moore at the The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

February 16, 2016

A condensed version of this conversation between Lydia Lunch and Thurston Moore, held at the Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics on July 15th, 2015 in Boulder, Colorado, can be found in Autre's current LOVE Issue. Recording by Max Davies and Ambrose Bye. Moderation by Bil Brown.

LYDIA LUNCH: I did my first spoken word show with Thurston Moore. Do you remember?

THURSTON MOORE: I remember, yes. It was in New York City. You decided you would do something without the necessitation of these annoying guitars, amps, and drums. Let’s just get rid of that craphole, huh? You had some ideas of this dialogue you had written. And you roped me into it.

LUNCH: I remember inviting Thurston to take a walk with me. We didn’t know each other, but we lived a block away from each other. We would spot each other on the subway. This was the early 80s?

MOORE: I saw you in the late 70s. I lived on 13th Street.

LUNCH: I was on 12th.

MOORE: I would see you on the corner of 12th and A.

LUNCH: Cowboy boots, spiked skirts.

MOORE: Ring in nose. I would see you sometimes in the subway, on the L train.

LUNCH: I remember thinking, “Who is this tall boy? Why is he so shy?”

MOORE: I knew who you were because you had a reputation. You were in a band called Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was something kind of crazy.

LUNCH: But we didn’t meet each other. We would just spot each other.

MOORE: You knew all these people. I was a loner.

LUNCH: But then I left, and I came back to New York. That’s when we met. I don’t know what came first, the spoken word or “In Limbo.” By the way, somebody is asking me to answer questions about that period, and I don’t have any fucking answers. I don’t remember. But, I came back to do spoken word. I don’t remember how we met, or how we got introduced, but I invited Thurston to go on a walk with me. I started telling him this terrible story – it wasn’t a true story, most of my stories are true – and his reaction was so, “Oh my God. You’re kidding me. I can’t believe it. Really?” I was kinda like, “Yeah.” I don’t know if this involves the “urinating in the doorway” story or not. Was that the same incident?

MOORE: That was the same time period, yes.

LUNCH: So I said, “We’re doing this tomorrow night. We’re doing this performance. You’re just going to be the straight man.” I don’t even think we used mics. I think we did like a Chinese whisper circle. We were just walking around talking, and people could only hear snatches. That was my first spoken word show. And that was my first show with him. My second one was called “Daddy Dearest.” Actually, some people from my class saw us do “North Six.” Years later, well, Thurston, we did the first spoken word show together. Get on the bill! He was like, “Can I have a collaborator?” I’m like, “No. You, your guitar, and your poetry.” We did a few shows. Those were great.

MOORE: I don’t think even at that time the word “spoken word” was being used.

LUNCH: No.

MOORE: It was whatever was being used. Some kind of performance. I recall that. We were introduced through Richard Edson, one of the earliest drummers of Sonic Youth.

LUNCH: He lived across the street from me. He lived one block away from you.

MOORE: Yeah. And when you came back into New York after spending time in London, or wherever you were…

LUNCH: I went to LA for two years, and then I went to London for two years to work with The Birthday Party. I moved back to New York to around ’84 with Thirlwell.

MOORE: I met you through Richard Edson because he was involved with doing the soundtrack music to a film that Seth B and Beth B were doing. It was called “Vortex.” It was their first major film. It was a bigger film, and Lydia was the lead.

LUNCH: Angel Palmers, a detective.

MOORE: Yeah, you played Angel Palmers, detective.

LUNCH: Who takes a bubble bath.

MOORE: There was a very interesting bubble bath scene. Anyway, Richard Edson said to me, “Hey, I’m doing music for this film. I want you to play bass. Lydia Lunch is in it. We’re going to get together and circulate some ideas.” I was very intrigued. He took me over to where Lydia was staying, on Rivington Street at John Duffy’s apartment.

LUNCH: Thirlwell wasn’t there then.

MOORE: Thirlwell hadn’t come into the scene.

LUNCH: I came back to New York, I don’t know how. I was staying at somebody’s apartment.

MOORE: You were staying at this apartment, and that’s how we met. We were sort of hanging out. That’s about it. One thing lead to the other…

LUNCH: [Laughs.] Remind me, how did I approach the “In Limbo” session? That’s what the guy who is writing the book about you wants to know, and I can’t remember.

MOORE: We had done this music for Vortex. It never really came to anything. The soundtrack for “Vortex” – I’m not even on that. It sort of happened very quickly. Richard did what he did. You and I remained in touch. You reached out to me to see if I would be interested in playing for some songs that you were working on. I said sure.

LUNCH: I think I wanted to make the slowest record ever made. Really depressing.

MOORE: It was the slowest record in the world. And this was at the time when I was really engaged in listening to the fastest music being made.

LUNCH: [Laughs.] As contrarian.

MOORE: I’m listening to Minor Threat and Black Flag.

LUNCH: And I wanted to do sludge rock. I want to do the most tortuously, painfully slow. I was very depressed. Part of me was very depressed. I just wanted to write a record that was morose. Actually, we do “Still Burning” from that live still.

MOORE: They were great songs.

LUNCH: They were very poetic.

MOORE: I felt like they were really musical.

LUNCH: You played bass. Jim Sclavunos played sax.

MOORE: We would meet at Bradley Field’s basement studio.

LUNCH: He was the drummer of Teenage Jesus.

MOORE: He had this basement rehearsal space on Grand Street. He let us use this space. Sonic Youth was rehearsing there. I think Lydia was kicking upstairs.

LUNCH: Yeah, that was my loft.

MOORE: It was literally two blocks from where I was living on Eldridge Street. I would go there, and Lydia would hone to me what she wanted. I would play on the bass. Richard Edson was going to play.

LUNCH: You told me something about a slow dance. I’m not sure.

MOORE: The first rehearsal was pretty much, you know…

LUNCH: A seduction.

MOORE: Yeah. Lydia said, “Can we dance?” I said, “I don’t dance. I don’t even know you.”

LUNCH: [Laughs.] “Shall we dance?” I didn’t mean disco or go go. Well, I thought we had to get to know each other. I had to see if you could dance slow enough. It was a slow dance.

MOORE: She was trying to slow me down.

LUNCH: That was true. Did I?

MOORE: I knew she was just trying to slow me down, but it’s just like…

LUNCH: A volcano was trying to slow a tornado down.

MOORE: It just made my heart beat faster, honestly. Anyway, we started doing these songs. Edson was playing drums. You called in Sclavunos to play the saxophone. And Pat Place played the guitar. Then, we started rehearsing at Michael Gira’s place on Sixth Street.

LUNCH: I have no recollection of that.

MOORE: The real rehearsals started happening because there wasn’t enough room at Bradley’s.

LUNCH: Then, we recorded at Donny Christenson’s. Did we?

MOORE: We might have.

LUNCH: Where else would we have done it?

MOORE: We did. I think I remember going to Donny Christenson’s.

LUNCH: We did record. The record exists. It’s called “In Limbo.”

MOORE: That was the first time I remember meeting Donny Christenson.

LUNCH: Who was in the Contortions and the Raybeats.

MOORE: For me, it was great. Donny, Pat, Jim, and Lydia were playing in bands that I would go see and I was really intrigued by. They were very informative for Sonic Youth. My scene, at that time, was my band and then Mike Gira’s band Swans. There were a couple of other outlining bands. A lot of that, the bands that existed a couple years before us – such as Contortions – they had all broken up. Everybody was going to different places. Lydia left, and then she was back.

LUNCH: To start doing spoken word. To start collaborating with other people.

MOORE: She started employing me into what she was doing. Subsequently, these other musicians from that time period came in. I got to meet Sclavunos, who started playing drums for Sonic Youth. He played on the “Confusion is Sex” album.

LUNCH: And he played in Teenage Jesus, 8 Eyed Spy, Shotgun Wedding Live. Then, he went on with Sonic Youth. Then he went on with Nick Cave.

MOORE: It was super exciting. Jim O’Rourke came over. Nick Cave came over. The birthday parties for shows in New York – we were all there hanging out and having dinner at Susan Martin’s house. There was this whole crew of new music that was happening. This was ’81, ’82. We all connected. Lydia was sort of the one who threw everybody together. When I think about it, that’s kind of how it happened.

LUNCH: I think the instinctual genius – I don’t know how I even conceived of it at that point – was that I took Teenage Jesus to the UK in 1978. I was one of the first people to decide, with no money at all, that this had to go to Europe. To play there, and to find other people there. A lot of bands didn’t get to Europe at that point. I just jumped myself there and jumped myself to Berlin. I moved to London, and then the collection of people came together naturally that way, through this connective tissue of this corralling thing that I naturally do. I was always more mobile than everybody because that’s my addiction. My addiction is moving. I don’t collect people, but I kind of cattle prod people into coming together.

MOORE: To your credit, the people who resonated with you were these people who were doing interesting things.

LUNCH: I would have a lot of dinner parties at my house. I would cook for everybody.

MOORE: There’s a little bit of the dinner party thing that really brought everything into place. I don’t know if that happens anymore.

LUNCH: It happens in Spain, but they’re a food culture. I would always throw Sunday parties. Who else was throwing dinner parties? I had the space. That was an important thing. We were all poor. We needed to eat. We would just do that. And just to have a place where you can hang out that’s comfortable… Often, it was on Sundays. It was the Sunday brunch get-together, when everybody needed reparation.

MOORE: Lydia found this great place in this really wild area of Brooklyn.

LUNCH: I was living up in Spanish Harlem. By the way, on the bus one day, when Thurston was going up to visit me (not many people liked to visit me in Spanish Harlem, which was why I liked it), that’s where we wrote “Death Valley 69.” On a bus on the way up to Spanish Harlem. But then a very rainy day, a torrential because I needed more space, I saw this ad in the Village Voice for a loft. I ran down there and convinced the landlord to give it to me. It was a 2,000 square foot loft in Dumbo. Nobody lived there then. Hence, Thirlwell is still there.

MOORE: It was incredible. It was a huge space.

LUNCH: Instinctually, I just had to go for that ad. I just had to go and convince them that I was the one who should have it. I already convinced somebody in Tribeca to give me a building that was abandoned for six months when I was eighteen. That was next to Donny and Jodie’s, where we recorded. I’m very good with landlords that way, until I go on a rent strike. They love me.

BILL BROWN: It’s an interesting thing. Up until the last three years, downtown LA was completely a fucking wasteland. There were a lot of artists who went into the warehouse district on the other side of the river. They would get these huge warehouse spaces. They all shared the rent. They become these creative epicenters. Talking about “Death Valley 69,” didn’t Richard Kern do that video?

MOORE: It was.

LUNCH: Which I’m not even really in.

BROWN: It’s amazing, the artistic community that was surrounding you guys at the time. Who exactly coined the phrase, “spoken word?”

LUNCH: It’s what I’ve always called it. I always called it “spoken word” because I was not a performance artist. I was not doing poetry. I don’t know who invented it. I like it because it’s unglamorized. I don’t know if anybody invented spoken word. That’s what I always called it when I was curating.

BROWN: There was something interesting that you [Moore] said, “We’re not punk. We’re not hippies.” That specific thing hit me. An old friend of mine that was around your community at the time had always said, “We were the generation that screamed the loudest because we were the most ignored.” He said, “We weren’t punks. We weren’t hippies. We were in-between. We weren’t Gen X or millennials.”

LUNCH: I screamed the loudest because I was the most fucking hateful. That’s the bottom line. I wanted to be ignored. It was not a rallying call for attention. The less the better. “Less Is More” was one of my first songs. “Popularity Is Boring” is another one. Those are the first lyrics I came up with.

MOORE: Everybody likes to be in bands because they like to be in gangs. There’s a certain aesthetic of the gang – there’s a pleasure in that. It’s you and us against the world. It’s nice to have a sobriquet that you appreciate – no-wave, new-wave, punk, hippie. At the same time, you don’t want to be strapped into something, so you liberate yourself from everything. You’re free to be who you are.

LUNCH: I was saying to my class the other day, I’m a conceptualist. First, I have the concept of music. I never think about who I’d like to work with. That’s not how I work. The concept of the music comes first, and whomever suits the concept comes next. I’ve never sat down and said, “I want to work with that person.” If you asked me, I would say, “I want to work with nobody or everybody.” It’s who suits the musical concepts. For me, when I collaborate – and I think this is why I’m so successful, and I continue to work with so many different kinds of people – it’s the sacred zone. All bullshit is left out of there. Maybe I’ve just been lucky with the people I’ve chosen. Except for maybe one or two people, in the history of everyone I’ve ever worked with, it’s been a totally blissful experience. The only reason it might not have been, in the end of two of those instances, is that they’re both completely insecure men who have macho problems. Anybody who isn’t macho, which is most of the people I work with (Thurston, Thirlwell), they never have problems with me. The two macho assholes were the only ones who ever had problems with me. When I go into a collaborative relationship, this is the sacred ground. I want everyone to feel as good as possible. I’m there because I fucking adore what you do. I think you’re a genius. I’m not calling you into the circle unless you’re the perfect person for this sacred marriage, to take it somewhere else. I really am the cattle prodder and the cheerleader. My job is to make people feel as good as they can doing what they do. That’s what I do. I don’t need feedback. I don’t need the reciprocation. That’s why I love spoken word. I’m not waiting for the applause. I can’t stand when people applaud after a fucking song.

BROWN: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was founded on poetics. As the general public that knows who you are, they won’t think of you as literally. Thurston is doing literary press. Lydia was writing poetry in the 90s and publishing as well. Lydia has spoken word. The word “poet” was completely removed from that for a long time.

LUNCH: It’s the first thing that brought us together, the spoken word. Which is interesting.

MOORE: To me, I felt like I had more direct engagement with writing. Early on, I was enamored with forms of poetry. I was enamored with studying poetry for my own studies. I would read and read. When I went to New York, I was aware that there was a poetry scene, but I didn’t think I was going to get involved with it. I didn’t think of myself as a poet. I thought I was going to be a writer. Playing music, I felt like I didn’t have any established skills as a musician. I knew how to do some stuff. I still don’t know how to play real guitar. In a way, it didn’t really matter. The music I liked allowed me to be free with the guitar. I knew I was into composition the same way that I’m into the composition of like minds on the page. That’s how I looked at music – as a composition. Same thing with being free, writing free verse. It’s the same thing as playing free improvisation. I equated them. They were just different variables of discipline. One was words on paper, and one was playing an instrument and making sound. It was composing sound the way you would compose language.

LUNCH: I never thought of myself as a musician. I always thought of myself as a journalist, as a historian. I went to New York to write. The music was merely the machine to back up the words, even when half the music was instrumental. Even when all the music was instrumental, the titles were what were most important. To me, it’s just a vehicle. The music exists to offset the words. I do all kinds of music. I still consider myself a writer, a journalist, a historian. That’s what I do. The naked word is the most important to me. I love doing music, but that wasn’t the priority. I was what allowed me to facilitate getting the word out. The format for it didn’t really exist at that point.

BROWN: Thomas Sayers Ellis was talking about Go-Go today. Why was he talking about Go-Go in the context of a poetics panel? There were only a few words spoken in one of those pieces he played at the panel, but it seemed like the music was the word.

LUNCH: Exactly. That’s what divided it from hip hop, which was manufactured nana, studio nonsense. So here we are.

MOORE: Coming to Jack Kerouac’s School of Disembodied Poetics, to me, the challenge was to come here and teach poetry, as opposed to coming here as a rock and roll musician. I don’t want students to think I’m going to bring out my guitar and write songs. That’s the last thing I want to do. I have no interest in doing that. It’s a very personal thing for me, to write music. I feel like I can share it. I do teach, sometimes, in different music schools. I talk about the experience of playing music and what I do personally. We can work together from that. I’m more interested in writing where I can talk about what that is as an art form. I want to talk about the history of poetry, especially post-World War contemporary poetry, which is where my focus is. I’m not going to go in there and talk about Victorian English poetry. I’m not that learned in it. I’m not going to do Lionel Trilling at Columbia University or something like that. I have an awareness of how poetry exists as a community – that lineage of writing, people sharing ideas about how words appear on a page. There’s the visual, the idea of the confessional, the idea of the experimental. Those things work together, and they also work apart. They can keep their own ground. They can play with each other and inform each other. That was really interesting to me. I was really interested in Acconci, who really agonized over how to take these words off the page and put them in these other spheres. He becomes a visual, conceptual artist, but he’s a poet doing it. Someone like Ted Berrigan, coming out of Frank O’Hara, writing this conversational poem, but keeping a certain economy to it, and still having it be an expression of his mind in the moment. Or you look at language poetry, where it’s all about this data that’s on a page and what that means, the idea of stripping emotion from the work. How far can you take that? Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci were really into that. They were doing 0 to 9 in the magazines in the 60s. They wanted to strip all the drama, confession, and emotion from the poem. They go towards this crystallized heart to see what is there – just putting a number on a page. Aram Saroyan puts one letter on the page. What is that? Is that bullshit? He was given a grant to make poetry, and he put one word on a page. He wrote, “Lighght.” When you look at it, it’s surrealist. It’s loaded. There are all kinds of movement in that. There are all kinds of ideas. It’s playful. It’s wonderful. It’s a great poem. And it was completely contentious. It polarized the entire poetry community, that this is what he delivered.

BROWN: Both of you mentioned Dada today.

MOORE: Lady Dada? [Laughs.]

BROWN: Lydia did too. I have a weird theory that there is a particular strain that has continued all the way through the 20th and into the 21st century. We’re carrying that along. We’re saying that if we don’t keep this going, as it ebbs and flows…

LUNCH: It’s the Pranksterism that keeps us alive. From Dada, and forward from that. Going into the Merry Pranksters. We need rebellion with pleasure, because otherwise, we’re sunk. There is a sense of Pranksterism in a lot of who we are naturally attracted to.

BROWN: He’s more attracted to concrete and experimental poetry…

MOORE: To me, it’s sort of a pantheon of this lineage of writing that goes on in the culture. I’m curious about it. I’m interested in it. It excites me. It’s very artful. You can come from any angle to it. To me, Dada is important because it’s a reclamation of being an artist. Everything has to be honored by the academy and the system in society. In a way, that’s okay. That creates a place of learning. That history is great, but anybody who can suss that, who can glean that information and reclaim it, incinerate it, reform it – those are the people who are doing the work that breaks into the new ground. That was interesting to me. I read about the advent of people coming out of William Carlos Williams. These 20 year olds out of Columbia University, particularly Allen Ginsberg, that passion and desire.

BROWN: That time was searching out the Bob Dylan, searching out the rock stars of the time.

MOORE: But his glory was in poverty. He made a lot of money, and he decided not to keep that money. He knew that if he kept that money, money would be taxed, and that money would go to a military complex. He decided to create a foundation called Committee of Poetry where all the money would go through, nonprofit. In the 60s, he was so primary in founding all the underground press that was existent.

BROWN: He would have people coming to him, and he would write them a check.

MOORE: Small presses, starving poets and artists. He was just like, take it. All I need is milk and my shitty little refrigerator.

LUNCH: I say give me a car ad. I have people I’d like to pay all the time. I’m not against it. I want the enemy’s money. I want the fucking enemy’s money. The only people who ever give me money are usually my friends. I give my friends money. That’s why they’re in my fucking bands. However, that is the recycling of the family funds. I want the fucking enemy’s money. My biggest regret in life is that I didn’t invest in fucking Wackenhut when I was talking about prisons under Bill Clinton for two years. I could have retired and had my own poetic institute, instead of them supporting me. My biggest disappointment. I didn’t invest in the military industrial complex. There’s still time, motherfucker. Give me the money, and I will. I want the money. They ain’t going to shut me up. Do I look like I’ve been droned? Well I have, but that’s how I usually look. That’s enough for me, now. Choke it off like a chicken.

Listen to the full audio of the conversation between Thurston Moore and Lydia Lunch below. You can click here to purchase Autre's LOVE issue, which is available through select Ace Hotels. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Art From The Dark Heart of Europe: An Interview With Harlan Levey

February 10, 2016

I had the great fortune of meeting Brussels-based curator, Harlan Levey, while he was in Burlington, Vermont last October as part of Burlington City Arts' visiting critic program. The curator of that institution, DJ Hellerman, facilitated a meeting that quickly evolved into a lively discussion, not necessarily about local art, but about contemporary art in general, the nature of the art market, and the rewarding challenges that come with conceptually rigorous exhibitions. I was struck by Levey's genuine passion for the artists who comprise his program at Harlan Levey Projects and the integrity with which he works. And just like that, he was back on a plane to Brussels, having reinvigorated Burlington's quiet contemporary art scene.

Harlan Levey Projects Gallery is located in Brussels at the heart of the European capital's gallery district, representing a small, distinctive roster of international artists including TR Ericsson, Jeroen Jongeleen, Abner Preis, Zoe Strauss, Marcin Dudek, and more. We caught up with Levey last week to discuss the storied path that lead him to found Harlan Levey Projects, one that includes professional soccer and literary studies at the European Graduate School, as well as what guides him as curator and informs both the artists he works with and the exhibitions he organizes.

Abbey Meaker: You’re an expat from Cleveland living in Brussels and you’ve been there for how long?

Harlan Levey: I’ve been in Brussels since the turn of the century. 15 years longer than I ever imagined.

Meaker: I read that it was soccer that prompted the move?

Levey: Soccer was so important to me growing up. It introduced me to people with all different backgrounds and offered me the opportunity to travel from a young age. I love the game and everything it brought me off the field. After college, I harbored dreams of earning a living playing in the Netherlands, but this didn’t work out at all.

Meaker: How did you go from sports and literary studies to a career in the arts?

If I go back to the late 90s, I was over here in the Benelux, not getting paid to play and in need of a job. I found one at the Center for European Studies (CES) at the University of Maastricht teaching a comparative literature course to study abroad students. It was a right place, right time situation, which was great, but not so straightforward, because I had no working papers and the semester was starting. CES found a solution by offering to enroll me in an MA program, pay my housing, expenses and a modest living stipend. I was registered as a student, and as an American was thrilled about the opportunity to study anything and get paid for it. The MA wasn’t in literature. It was in a program called ESST, which stands for European Science, Society and Technology studies. If we skip all that, writing, all kinds of writing, framing and illustrating are things a literature study prepares you for. To return to your question, sports and literature were part of a life journey. My subsequent studies, jobs, and experiences all had a role in leading me towards working in the arts.

Meaker: Does literature inform your curatorial practice?

Levey: Yes. Absolutely. Literature has always informed my life. I am more of a narrator than a curator and am excited by the potential of curating as a form of expanded literary practice. The gallery’s program has been dominated with narrative driven exhibitions until now.

When I was writing, I never thought about the audience. With the gallery, building audiences and educating clients is a core task. You need to develop audiences for artists, ideas, and the gallery itself. In considering who this audience is, I find myself nodding along with how Fitzgerald told it when he said: “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.” Via the work of the gallery, I try to ‘write’ with this same approach. Literature definitely has its role.

Meaker: Did you work for other galleries before starting one?

Levey: No. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I knew little about running a gallery when I started one. I had very limited knowledge of the actual business and nearly no capital. I was a total outsider with a history of working with outsider art, and the learning curve has been huge. I had no idea what I was up against. What I did have was a lot of experience working with artists and communicating their ideas. I’d spent 5 years as the Editor in Chief of Modart magazine and director of a non-profit I co-founded with Ruggero Lala called the No New Enemies network, which assisted artists working in public space.

Meaker: Does No New Enemies still exist?

Levey: Yes. NNE just won an open call from the city and region of Brussels to develop six installations in the tunnels near the local skatepark over the next four years.

Meaker: Do you recall a particular artist or artwork that inspired you to become a gallerist?

Levey: I opened the gallery when Modart magazine went to ground. Of the artists we were featuring there some clear patterns of professional success. For one, there always seemed to be somebody who innovated, who made rather brave work and was followed by somebody this work had inspired who knew how to cash in. The second artist, the one most people have actually heard of, considered commercial translation from the start. This commercial translation often contradicted the essence of what made a work interesting to begin with. I have a great deal of empathy and interest in artists I thought were doing ground-breaking relevant work and were not able (or not interested) to think about commercial strategies. This included artists like Hans Reuschl, Jeroen Jongeleen and Abner Preis. I come from Cleveland. I’ve always been attracted to hard working underdogs.

Meaker: What is the mission of Harlan Levey Projects?

Levey: David Foster Wallace once said something about his belief that good fiction should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Our mission is to make money for our artists and business by doing exactly that.

Meaker: What has been the most challenging exhibition and why?

Levey: “Saved by an Unseen Crack,” a solo exhibition by Marcin Dudek. It was the first exhibition in our new space and came with unprecedented investment, challenges, and risk. The opportunity to move into a larger venue was unexpected. Everything happened very quickly. We had about two months to plan and build the interior of the new space. At the same time, we were preparing for two art fairs in April. Marcin’s opening was scheduled right between them. Marcin was involved in both of those events and was also preparing for a solo exhibition in London with our partner Edel Assanti Gallery shortly thereafter. We were all overwhelmed with a lot on the line. Everything needed to go perfectly. It was a very tense moment.

Meaker: But it all worked out. You had great success in Dallas.

Levey: Yes. In Dallas we were very fortunate to place all of the works that we brought in excellent collections and develop several new relationships. Then came the opening of Marcin’s show, which was also met with a tremendous response.

"He said that if you want to be an artist or a writer, accept suicide as the only viable pension plan."

Meaker: What did you show in Dallas?

Levey: The unspoken booth concept was the ‘greatest country song never written,’ and it featured works from TR Ericsson and Marcin Dudek. This year, we’ll present new works in a similar format.

Meaker: How did you start working with these guys? In general, how do you find new artists?

Levey: This really varies. For example, I met Abner Preis through mutual friends at a punk concert and exhibition I organized in 2006. Haseeb Ahmed and I were both invited by the European Commission to work on a common project. A high school friend introduced me to a dealer in Cleveland who drove me out to meet Tom. I met Jeroen through Abner though I was already a big fan of his work for several years at that point. Marcin and Amelie got in touch with me when they moved to Brussels after reading an article in the free local culture mag. We had dinner together 5 or 6 times before I ever looked at their work. Emmanuel and I met when I was invited to give a lecture and do studio visits at a post-graduate residency program. That all said, I visit studios on a regular basis, have worked on several selection committees, and continue to write for art oriented publications occasionally. I also get introduced to artists through relationships with other galleries and presence at fairs and other events.

Meaker: I am a big fan of gallery artist TR Ericsson. Can you talk about the exhibition All My Love, Always No Matter What, shown in September and October of last year?

Levey: With pleasure! I’m also a big fan of TR Ericsson. His work stops the music of the market. It flattens the hype. Live. Dream. Die. Loop. That’s how it goes, reinterpreting intimate histories with skillful and considered conceptual, contextual and material interventions. The subject matter isn’t easy, and even when there’s direct aesthetic appeal in the images he makes, there’s usually some troubling element embedded within them. Tom’s the real deal and currently one of the most underrated artists of my generation. He came over with his wife Rose, daughter Susie, brother Mikey and two assistants, Matthew Rowe and Connor Elder. It was a special moment. At the end of the vernissage, we held the European premiere of his film “Crackle & Drag.” About a quarter of the room was in tears by the time it was over. We followed that up with a performance from Joy Wellboy who had been given texts and images from Tom’s archives and wrote several songs with this material. By the time they were done, more than a quarter of the Ericsson entourage was wet eyed too. I’ve never seen so many people crying in the gallery. At the same time, the whole event was incredibly joyful.

Meaker: Did this important exhibition influence the direction of HLP thereafter?

Levey: All of our core artists influence our direction. In many ways, they are our direction. We’re maturing our practices together. Tom has become a big part of this. He didn’t change the programming or attitudes of the gallery, but he fit right in with our team and I’ve learned so much from working with him. I’d say the same for everybody else. Our artists reach out to each other with encouragement, criticism and questions. Everybody who feasibly can, shows up at every opening, and while sometimes there’s a bit of ego jousting and skepticism towards new artists in the program, eventually there’s a great respect and admiration from and for everybody. At HLP we’ve cultivated a great team spirit.

Meaker: What can we expect from you—shows, events, fairs, etc.?

Levey: Up next outside of the gallery are fairs in Rotterdam, Dallas and then Brussels. In the gallery we have upcoming group and solo shows. The first is titled “Do You Speak Synergy” and features two artists we represent, Haseeb Ahmed and Emmanuel Van der Auwera, as well as Ella Littwitz and Benjamin Verhoeven who I met along with Emmanuel when working as a guest lecturer at the HISK in Ghent. This is the first show I’ve worked closely on with our new associate curator Denis Maksimov. Denis is a brilliant and passionate guy. He’s made a very welcome addition to the team and we expect great things from him in the future.

The following show in the gallery is “Eat, Shit, Smile” by Abner Preis. Our last show with Abner was an incredible success on many levels, and for better or worse, there won’t be another show like it during the madness of Art Brussels week. I can’t wait.

Meaker: Is there anywhere outside of Brussels to see the work you’re facilitating?

Levey: Right now there’s Instagram, the Art Fairs I mentioned and all of our artists present work internationally. On our website you can sign up for our newsletter to keep posted on events outside of Brussels.

Meaker: Do you ever partner with other institutions?

Levey: Absolutely. In soccer you’d say, “Let the ball work for you.” We play a passing game. Our attitude is that when you’re growing a small business, all forms of partnership are important. We can always do more with others than trying to make a one in a million run on our own. Knowledge, resource and competency exchanges have been a big part of how we’ve managed to grow the business.

Meaker: What about Brussels? Recently the NY Times called it the “New Berlin.” Do you think this is accurate?

Levey: Berlin has had the reputation of a creative hotbed and Brussels is happy to rightly be described the same way, but Brussels isn’t the new anything. Brussels is beautiful, dysfunctional and surrealistic Brussels. Not so long ago, Berlin represented cheap studio space and living costs along with a vibrant creative community and arts sector. Brussels has the same offer.

Brussels also has per-capita diversity comparable to New York City, and a history of outstanding artistic production from the Flemish Primitives through Marcel Broodthaers to Michael Borremans, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Walter Van Beirendonck, Stromae or Wim Delvoye. If we talk about fashion, dance, film, music, architecture, comics, painting, contemporary art, whatever, there has always been high quality here. There’s also a strong appetite for it. Then there’s private and public sector support of it. The city’s location is another perk. 3 hours to Amsterdam. 2.2 to London or Cologne. 1.2 to Paris. Brussels has been a crossroads for centuries.

The reason for the sudden interest in Brussels has to do with other things as well. For example, Belgium has the EU’s highest taxes on income and labor, but inherited wealth isn’t taxed at all. When Francois Hollande became President of France in 2012, something like 30,000 Parisians bought property in Brussels. This led to an influx of Parisian galleries that have added to an already exciting local scene.

Meaker: Are you looking forward to Art Brussels?

Levey: Always. It’s an outstanding fair. Katrina Gregos has done a wonderful job developing it over the last few years and I’m proud to be one of two galleries (together with Super Dakota) from Belgium that’s been selected for the Discovery section this year. The fair’s outstanding reputation has been cemented by a flux of new satellite fairs including Independent, Y.I.A., Unpainted and Poppositions. Brussels can’t handle the dozens of satellite fairs that Miami does, but the emergence of all these new events testifies to the strength of the landscape here. If I wasn’t jamming in my Art Brussels booth, I’d visit every one of them.

Meaker: What advice might you give young artists?

Levey: I wouldn’t, but I do appreciate a piece of advice philosopher Wolfgang Schirmacher once gave me. He said that if you want to be an artist or a writer, accept suicide as the only viable pension plan. You have to be ready to tighten your belt, committed to staying sharp and true to things you might have forgotten.

Meaker: Young curators?

Levey: Find topics that you are passionate about and go deep instead of broad. Ask yourself what help a curator can provide in every project and whom this service benefits. Art can be useless. A curator has to prove that it isn't.

You can visit Harlan Levey Projects' booth at Art Rotterdam 2016, which features artist Emmanuel Van der Auwera's Video Sculpture series. The VIP opening is tonight and the fair opens to the public on February 11 and runs until February 14. Interview and text by Abbey Meaker, co-director of Overnight Projects in Vermont. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

V Presents: Graham Fink

February 8, 2016

V presents...An Interview with Ad Agency Creative Director and Multi-media Artist Graham Fink

I first met Graham Fink in London in 2006. At the time, I was looking for a new job and my recruitment agency wouldn't send me on this interview: assistant to the Creative Director at M&C Saatchi. It sounded exciting, so since the agency was being so unhelpful, I set out to directly contact said creative director myself. Easy task. I made sure to point out in my email that the recruitment agency didn't want to send me to see him. Within 30 minutes, we had set up a meeting for the very next day, late afternoon. I met Graham at his offices on Golden Square... I had no idea what to expect, and he was everything I shouldn't have expected. I remember being pretty gauche in my interview and dropped the word 'creative' way too many times for the 'admin position'. I didn't get the job, but I kept in touch with Graham over the years. He has never stopped being a great source of inspiration for me. He currently holds the position of Chief Creative Director of Ogilvy in Shanghai.

It has been so exciting to see him make the natural but sometimes difficult transition: from "Ad' agency Creative Director" to "Multimedia Artist". Really it is all the same, only the title changes. Graham's new solo photographic show entitled "Ballads of Shanghai" opened at Riflemaker in Soho, in London on February 1st. I took this opportunity to interview him for Autre Magazine.

VIRGINIE PICOT: You have been based in Shanghai for 5 years. What impact has your move to Shanghai had on your work?

GRAHAM FINK: Moving to China had a huge impact on me from day one. The sheer scale of the country and the different way the Chinese look at things. Both visually and philosophically. It also taught me that everything I knew, was of no use to me whatsoever.

PICOT: China has gone through and is still going through a big transformation culturally, economically and socially. Your show is about the rapidly changing landscape of Urban China. How has this transformation affected you as an artist during those 5 years?

FINK: China changes herself faster than David Bowie’s characters. But like Bowie, the country is on a voyage of self-discovery. After the Cultural Revolution, China was so far behind the West that it had to catch up fast. And I think that’s why there is so much copying going on here, because that’s the fastest way to catch up. But now, many creative people in China - artists especially - are going back to their deep roots. Finding the latent creativity in their DNA. Their true voice. What they really stand for. For me, as an artist from overseas, I am working with the unfamiliar. I like to get out of my comfort zone and see new things around me that I don’t understand. Yet. But I am also confident in my own DNA and instinctively trust it in my work to mash East and West cultures together.

PICOT: Can you tell us more about this show? Talk us through the original idea through to the process and execution.

FINK: Well, as a kid, I’ve always been fascinated by derelict buildings, empty shells, rubbish dumps and so on. My parents lived on a farm with thousands of acres all around us and everyday I went exploring. I came across all sorts of ‘secret places’ and found things that I'd never seen before. So I’m probably at my happiest when scrambling around similar places today. And now I have a camera, it allows me to capture the things I see. It’s a bit like discovering treasure. As with the ‘faces’ I have taken thousands of images. But it’s when they are seen together that powerful stories emerge. For this exhibition I have used recycled wood to make the frames. So even that has a different past. I wanted a kind of new and old feeling to the prints. So after much experimenting, I printed them onto a beautiful matte art paper and then painted certain areas of the photographs in a high gloss varnish. So as you walk past them, they catch the light and they change.

PICOT: Faces are a common denominator in your work. In your print on marbles "Nomads" series as well as your "Drawing with my Eyes" series, what is behind this fascination, or perhaps obsession with faces, and how do they fit in this show?

FINK: I’m a Pareidoliaist. I see faces in everything. Cracks in walls, mud splattered cars, flaking paint on doorways. These apparitions continue to grow and the spirits seem to follow me everywhere. In this show the faces take a back seat, but they are still there if you look for them. It has become an obsession and over the years I’ve taken thousands of these "ghosts." Paul Verlaine said best: “L’image poétique devrait être plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air.”

PICOT: You have worked across various media, won countless awards... How do you keep your ideas fresh and how do you keep inspired?

FINK: For me, it's important to stay fresh by experiencing new things, going to new places. Some people want to be cool, well, I think that being ‘cool’ stops you from finding new things. If you’re ‘cool’, you may not listen to a particular type of music, or you wouldn’t be seen dead in certain places. That’s when you get stale. When I came to China, most of my friends thought I was mad. And it certainly was a massive culture shock. But it’s amazing how fast your brain normalizes everything. Luckily, China is a big place with many subcultures. I see things everyday that leave indelible markings on my mind.

PICOT: Who has the biggest influence on you as an artist?

FINK: That’s impossible to answer as there are so many, I mentioned one earlier, and now that I’m in China, I discover many new ones that I’ve never heard of before. But every time I see Frank Auerbach’s work, I get excited. And of course no one could be more obsessive than him.

PICOT: How is your work as Chief Creative Director for Ogilvy China feeding into your work as an artist, and vice versa?

FINK: It’s funny, but I often get asked that question. As I see it, both Art and Advertising require acts of creativity. I never say, well today I am doing advertising so I’ll put my advertising head on, or the next day, now where did I leave my artist head. I think it’s more about you as a human being. How you approach something. The art I do is very conceptual, and so is working on an ad campaign. It always starts with an idea.

PICOT: What art do you most identify with and why?

FINK: I love art that looks free. Where you're not aware of the hand of the artist. In China there are 5 main styles of calligraphy, but my favourite is the cursive style. Often the brush never leaves the paper, and so the characters merge into one another. It’s not particularly legible to the average person, but you can feel it more than you need to read it.

PICOT: Art on social media vs. social media art... Are social media platforms the best modern advertising space for art or does the art get diluted in that space? Do you have a social media strategy?

FINK: The best social media art isn’t necessarily made for social media. I was intrigued by Richard Prince's exhibition of Instagram images complete with Likes. They were hanging in a gallery, but were also going crazy on social media. This gave it a kind of double meaning, which of course I’m sure he intended. The most interesting art has always been talked about and shared, either by a tweet or word of mouth. And word of mouth has always been the best advertising. As for my own social media strategy, I think it’s important to embrace what is out there and experiment. This interview has been another experiment.

Ballads of Shanghai runs until February 14, 2016 at Riflemaker, 79 Beak St, London W1F 9SU. See more of Graham Fink's work here, and follow his Instagram to keep up with the experiment. Text and interview by Virginie Picot. This is the first in a series of interviews V will conduct with individuals in the creative fields. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

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Transcending the Blues: An Interview With Legendary Record Producer Daniel Lanois

January 28, 2016

Daniel Lanois lives and breathes music in a very literal sense. As a true audiophile, he seems to be marinating in centuries of sound waves, honing in on some of history’s most visceral musical compositions. It’s as though he pulls rhythms directly from the ground and resonant frequencies from the stratosphere. This description may seem over the top, and while it comes from a place of genuine reverence, I can say that over the 3 hours that we spent together, I witnessed this phenomenon with my very own eyes and ears. When he tells a story, it doesn’t suffice to tell it in words. His life story wouldn’t make sense unless he sang it to you, played it for you, and punctuated it with his signature, “yea, man.” Which is why I had to compile all of these bits in an audio file to give you a real feel for who he is and how he communicates. It’s really quite elevating.

Growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, the steel capital of Canada, he was raised in a community that was directed by the shifting of the harsh seasons. A community that gathered to play traditional French Canadian folk music; the true salt of the Earth. The melodies he heard as a child stuck with him and he felt that he needed to capture them, so he made himself a recording studio in the basement. Pretty soon he was recording music with the likes of Rick James and was determined to find the roots of the American soul. He gravitated south to the Mississippi delta where he found the guttural rhythms that live in your hips and the pain and the suffering that gave birth to the blues. But when the Mississippi River spills into the Gulf of Mexico most people stay put, singing their woeful stories of yore. Nevertheless, Lanois took those symphonic lessons and synthesized them with his Northern roots to produce music with some of the 20th century’s most groundbreaking artists: Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Willie Nelson, Peter Gabriel, U2, Brian Eno, Sinead O’Connor, and the list goes on. He’s been nominated for 7 Grammys, 4 of which he was awarded, and yet, his humble beginnings are invariably evident in his unpresuming temperament.

These days, he’s making music with the free wheeling musical outlaw, Rocco Deluca. They have a friendship that is bonded by their two major loves, music and motorcycles. Together they create a sound that is at once arresting in a way that makes one feel buoyant and unencumbered. When you spend time with the two of them, you get a sense that their lives are filled with nothing but positive, creative vibes, and it seems impossible to abate the longing to just tag along and pretend this is a normal day for you too. We met them at a café, followed them back home, and continued the night with several friends who tagged along and indulged in the privilege of a private listening party. Here’s what we took away.

AUTRE: You were just singing a gospel song, and I’m not familiar with it specifically, but it seems like it comes straight from the slave trade.

LANOIS: Yeah, “Once I’m taken away, I will not fold” is the message.

AUTRE: I think that is the roots of this country. Everything that this country has been built off of has been the elbow grease, the blood, sweat and tears of the black community. So for that to be the source of our strength is no surprise.

LANOIS: For that church music to reach the top of the charts in the early ‘60s. Sam Cooke was not a pop singer, Sam Cooke came from the soulsters and from church. It was that beautiful church harmony that made its way into popular music. We were just talking about James Cleveland who is from the LA area, he’s not from Chicago.

AUTRE: And Bo Diddley, I mean he invented rock & roll. And Big Mama Thornton.

LANOIS: All that. Well, the Bo Diddley beat is an old African beat. But I’m Canadian. So for a Canadian kid to come south of the border—I went to New Orleans and made a great record with the Neville Brothers—for me to actually work with the Neville Brothers? As a white French-Canadian kid? That was the cherry on the cake of my PhD.

(laughs)

AUTRE: It seems like you’ve had an autodidactic approach to music. Or have you?

LANOIS: Without any doubt, every day I learn something new. And I hope it keeps coming my way. I never went to school for any of it, I’m self taught. But when I was a kid I got to work with Rick James in my mom’s basement. I didn’t have to come up with any tuition money. For Rick, he came in by himself, and in 20 minutes there was a fully flourishing piece of music coming out of the speakers, and I was practically in tears. Oh my goodness, I could not believe this was happening. I was in the presence of a Beethoven.

I was talented, I knew what I was doing, but I had never before been exposed to anyone like Rick. He came in, and I recorded him some demos—mindblowing. I realized that I needed to go somewhere where the bass was good, so I went to New Orleans. I got to work with the Neville Brothers and George Porter from the Meters. Leo Nocentelli, perhaps the funkiest guitar player out of America. To be in that place, to hear the parade bands, where so much music had come from, that was amazing. The music of the North was so stiff. The music of the South had funk.

AUTRE: Going back to the beginning, what was your initial experience with making music?

LANOIS: As a kid I played slide guitar and I played woodwinds as well. I started a little recording studio at home, so that was the basis of the whole thing. I was in and out of bands up in Canada. I got to be a good player as a teenager. But I always had my recording studio and that was the mecca, the crossroads for so much. I was connected with a gospel music association in Canada, and they brought acapella groups in from across the world to tour Canada. One of the touring stops was my studio. So I made acapella quartet records - dozens of them.

AUTRE: Oh, that’s amazing.

LANOIS: They had great singers too. So imagine this white French-Canadian kid sitting there and hearing the four-part harmony. Tell me that’s not an education to hear all that, and then that related to all other four parts of any other genre. Funk music has four parts, you know. The intertwining of these four parts provided me with a really great understanding of how music communicates. How significant the harmonic interplay is. That was kind of it. Plus on top of that, the Pop music on the radio was the best stuff.

AUTRE: Back then, yeah.

LANOIS: You heard Sam Cooke on the radio, you heard James Cotton, The Jackson’s. Psychedelic stuff. It was kind of amazing. We didn’t hear any fluff, you know we had to listen to some of that British music, but I didn’t mind that. (laughs)

AUTRE: Yeah, that was before they had found the algorithm for selling commercial products with pop music.

LANOIS: The force was certainly different, it just belonged to that time. It was a cultural revolution on the rise. The Poet’s Society, rebellious rock & roll, psychedelic. It all came to a head. How special is that? Plus, also the front end of a medium, not everybody had a camera so if you shot pictures it meant that you were involved with something special. You know, you look at photographs from the late ‘50s and ‘60s, and they all look significant, because people were discovering something. Not to criticize modern times or anything but there are so many pictures now. Now we’re not at the front end of the medium—but when you are at the front end of a medium, things are more special.

AUTRE: I think that’s a good point you make though about the fact that we didn’t have an image associated with the music. There wasn’t a music video for every track. So when you listened to an album, you had a listening experience; just listening. Now musicians have to sell themselves as more than just a sound. They’re a sound and an image. Plus, their social lives are on blast through their social media. So, you have their personalities to judge as well. There is so much less focus on creating amazing music and leaving it at that.

LANOIS: The other concern is including merch. You know, “how’s your merch going?” Merch?!

AUTRE: Exactly. You have to boost your T-shirt game.

(laughs)

AUTRE: You’ve worked on some incredible records. And it seems like you’ve always been innovating your sound. This music you make with Rocco—you sit there and if feels like you’re floating in sound.

LANOIS: We try and break new ground on every project. I didn’t come up through a referential time, so coming up as a kid everything was new. We didn’t think, Geez, let’s try to make it sound like a 1948 tune, that would be a cool sound. No, everything was new. So, I’ve never bought into the referential aspect of music making. Even in these modern times where it’s easy to say, the grunge and the punk thing in the ‘90s, that was cool, let’s adapt that look and that sound. Well no, I’m not interested. I’m glad that it happened and I respect that it did, but in regards to anything we’re going to do from here on I want it to be original.

AUTRE: Who are some of your rock & roll heroes?

LANOIS: I’ll always appreciate pure forms, sometimes I go to the Thirsty Crow on a Monday night and there’s a guy there who plays a lot of old records. We always appreciate hearing Electric Mud from Muddy Waters. They play a lot of 70s R&B on that night, a lot of stuff from San Francisco. That era of the ‘70s where things were getting funky but experimental.

And you know we have modern day heroes as well. I listen to some of the hip hop out of the Long Beach area. And the D’Angelo record that came out a couple years ago, I enjoyed that a lot. Any pure form. Anything strong that qualifies as soul music ultimately. And we’re not talking a genre of R&B particularly, but something that seems to exist for the right reasons.

AUTRE: There seems to be this reemergence of soul music, of traditional ‘60s soul music coming in through a lot of newer pop music these days. It’s being revisited, which is really interesting. I talked to a young woman who I really respect and she said “you know, in some ways I feel like maybe hip hop is coming to a close.”

LANOIS: Maybe a certain aspect of it.

AUTRE: A certain aspect of it, yeah. But in the same way that soul music had its own era through the late ‘50s, the ‘60s, and a little bit into the ‘70s, but then it kind of veered into Funk. Which, then veered into hip hop. I feel like it is kind of coming back, and there’s this veritable urge to find its roots; to get back a little bit of that heart that was really pulsing through it originally.

"Miley Cyrus naked with her bare cunt on a cannonball – is that all you got, baby? You know go up the flagpole and back down, bare cunt. I’ll throw some confetti. So, I kinda like that whole thing that’s happening in America right now where the girls are just in charge of fucking pop. I say, take more clothes off, have more hits, own the fucking country, get to the top of the charts and I’ll be eating popcorn."

LANOIS: You hear it a little bit with Alabama Shakes, their recent record is pretty adventurous. I hear some shades of ‘70s experimental soul, but I wouldn’t offer a lot to support the theory. But I’m ready to be educated.

AUTRE: Where did your love of motorcycles come from?

LANOIS: Since I was a kid I just loved everything that went with it—freedom, and to feel that wind on your face. When I was a kid I got my first Harley and me and my brother rode from Canada all the way down to Florida.

AUTRE: That’s a long trip! How long did it take you guys?

LANOIS: Oh, it took a long time. We could only ride so long because it was freezing, but by the time we got to Kentucky and Tennessee it started getting warm. I love wintertime riding.

AUTRE: You grew up in Ontario right?

LANOIS: I’m French-Canadian but I came up as a teenager in a place called Hamilton about an hour from Buffalo on the Canadian side. It was a steel town and a real working place.

AUTRE: Do you go back much?

LANOIS: Yeah! I still keep a place there; my mom is there still. I have a soft spot for what I call the Great Lakes of Culture.

That part of the world is very harsh in the winter. The harvest comes in and the root vegetables will keep all winter. And I love that—you wouldn’t dilly dally through the fall. You cut your wood in the summer, make sure you can and jar in the fall. That way you can have some fruits through the winter. That’s sort of long gone now because of the coming of Whole Foods. You can get a tangerine in Toronto in the winter, that wasn’t the case at one time.

AUTRE: So, how long have you been living in this house?

LANOIS: Fourteen years. Nobody wanted this place fourteen years ago. At the time, I was working with Melanie Ciccone, Madonna’s sister. Madonna looked at this place, and Melanie knew about it and she said “well my sister doesn’t want it, but you should get it,” and I came here on a rainy day and I loved it.

AUTRE: It’s beautiful.

LANOIS: I came up with a mix today I’m very excited about. The performances for this record were all done here, and I took them back to Toronto and I manipulated them and added some new ways of looking at the works. Some of it is very pure form hand played, and some things are more built. It’s not a point of bragging but I’m a sonic specialist so I get in there and I build things. One of the things you’re going to hear that was built is one called “Low Sudden” and it’s more of a trance. It visits some of what I was doing in the early ‘80s and touches on some of those sounds you’ll hear in a minute.

AUTRE: We’re excited to hear it.

LANOIS: Some elements are a little crazier and symphonically driven —I’ve gone into harmonic places that I’ve never known before. Now this is significant because you might think “well we’ve done it all, and same old chords” but there are a few turning points in this music that provided me with a glimpse into the future.

AUTRE: So where do you think that inspiration came from?

LANOIS: Perhaps, I might have gotten disillusioned with the usual chords. It’s not a rhythmic record; you’ll hear the strangeness of the chords and the textures. It will conjure up feelings you’ve never had before. One has a very Italian melody—things that I would never come up with, because I see myself as a rocker. To bump into this whole way of looking at harmonics has really opened up a new side of my imagination. Crazy ass shit.

AUTRE: The devotion you have to music is astounding. Your collection here is amazing.

LANOIS: I have a couple of comic friends. Jim Carrey is one of them. He is so smart; he could do a routine at the drop of a hat. He walks in here and says, “This is how to live! Close to your passion! What are you passionate about? You can’t take that to the grave! You could take this to the grave!” He gave a whole sermon to justify the mess I made in the front room.

AUTRE: Well, it seems this is your living room, and this is how you want to live.

LANOIS: It’s better than buying yachts and going to St. Barth’s.

AUTRE: How did you get a hold of this piano?

LANOIS: If you’re lucky enough to have an acoustic instrument that sounds beautiful, you can always restore it back to its former glory. Even if it gets funky or messed up, you can always return it to the sound. It will maintain the sound. When we found this barrelhouse of a piano, it needed refurbishing, but we could tell it had heart. We resurrected it.

AUTRE: There’s kind of a similarity to motorcycles in that.

LANOIS: Yeah, a little bit. It’s nice to respect a tool, to imagine what it was like in 1915.

AUTRE: Going back again to your beginnings, how did you get into music?

LANOIS: In the beginning, my father and my grandfather were violin players. They played some of the traditional music of their French Canadian culture. There were no nightclubs back then, so people would gather around their houses. They would whip out their violins. There were piano players. All my uncles sang. I was exposed to that as a kid. The melodies really got in my brain. There was nothing popular about them; they were just old songs.

AUTRE: What was your first introduction to rock & roll music?

LANOIS: [Sings.] “You’re so young, and I’m so old. This, my darling, I’ve been told. You and I will be as free as the birds up in the trees. Please, please stay and be mine, Diana.” That’s the guy who wrote the theme song for the Tonight Show. A guy named Paul Anka.

Where we lived was between Detroit and Buffalo. We got great broadcasts out of those cities. I got to hear all the great Motown stuff on the radio. We had some cool DJs in Toronto. They were stoned out of their brains. This was a time when they let disc jockeys do whatever they wanted, late nights especially. And they were beat poets, spinning some yarn, playing an entire side of an album. Back in the day, there were no pictures of anything. I would sit in my mother’s basement, listening to the crazy music on the radio, imagining what it would be like out in the world.

AUTRE: Was there anyone in particular who really influenced you?

LANOIS: Rick James.

AUTRE: Were you invited down to New Orleans, or did you go there to seek out music?

LANOIS: I saw a piece in Life about the architectural significance of New Orleans. So I thought, I think I’m going to go down there to finish my record. I took a train from New York down, going through all the backwaters of the cities. I got to see industry in America. I got to see its decay, the decline of manufacturing and the steel industry. I was practically in tears—there is so much poverty. We grew up in North America thinking everything is great, but I saw the opposite when I went down there. It was a real eye-opener for me. It was a musical journey to go down there, but I was just as interested in everything else that was happening culturally.

AUTRE: What was it like being a Canadian kid down South?

LANOIS: Amazing. You would hear stories about this crazy river, the bloodline of creativity. It’s called the delta, where different influences come in from different parts—blues, bluegrass, Texas swing. All these different forces. What did it add up to? Rock & roll. I got to work with the greats. I got Rockin’ Dopsie to play on a Bob Dylan record. Are you kidding me? I’m a dumb French Canadian.

AUTRE: How do you feel about music now?

LANOIS: It’s fine. You’ve got Maroon 5, force-fed rock. I kinda like the thing that’s happening in America where girls are just fucking in charge of pop music. So, Miley Cyrus naked with her bare cunt on a cannon ball – is that all you got, baby? You know go up the flagpole and back down, bare cunt. I’ll throw some confetti. So, I kinda like that whole thing that’s happening in America right now where the girls are just in charge of fucking pop. I say, take more clothes off, have more hits, own the fucking country, get to the top of the charts and I’ll be eating popcorn. I won’t make records like that, but I’m kinda glad somebody else is.

AUTRE: You keep coming back to real, pure form, for the experience of music rather than whatever movement you might be a part of.

LANOIS: We have a responsibility in these referential times. It’s easy to be spot-on with style. I don’t want to make a referential record. There’s nothing stopping me from sampling a song, but will that fill us? I don’t think so. I don’t want to do referential. I don’t care if I’m penniless. I want to do new things. I want to see the future of music. I may not get there, but I’m going to damn well try.

Autre will be releasing Daniel Lanois and Rocco DeLuca's track The Resonant Frequency of Love with an accompanying short film on Valentines Day, 2016. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper and Summer Bowie. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Touch The Leather: An Interview With Fat White Family Lead Singer Lias Saoudi

January 22, 2016

text by ADAM LEHRER

Full disclosure: there is nothing objective about this article. I love Fat White Family. The band, to me, represents everything I’ve ever held dear about rock n’ roll: chaos, rebellion, sleaze, art, drugs, poetry, and politics. The first time I saw the band play live, about a year and a half ago, I was more excited than that time I saw Martin Scorsese walking down the Bowery (re: very excited). After housing beers and watching various members of the band run around the venue with their most famous fan and cheerleader, Sean Lennon, I elbowed my way to the front of the hall and got ready to let loose. 15 minutes went by when the band’s six members, gangly, unkempt, and skinny, took to the stage, launching into a particularly cacophonic rendition of the opening chords of the band’s lead single off debut album Champagne Holocaust, Auto Neutron. Lead singer Lias Saoudi, already half naked and sweating like Usain Bolt at the finish line, jittered to the front of the stage like a character in a Chris Cunningham music video and the band belted in unison, “AH AH AHHHH AHHH AHHHHHHH!” Instantly, bodies began colliding in joyous punishment. In various levels of intoxication, the crowd bowed to the revolution of the Fat White Family. It hurt so good. By the end of the song, Lias had his cock out. The scene erupted like a Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition come to life.

The band; Lias, as well as Saul Adamczewski (guitar), Adam J. Harmer (guitar), Joseph Pancucci, (brother of Lias) Nathan Saoudi (keyboard), Severin Black (drums), and Taishi Nagasaka (bass); formed in 2011 while they were squatting and enduring various levels of impoverished horror in Peckham, forming an alliance and an agenda in the process. From the time that the band released their electrifying debut record, opinions of them were divisive but absolute. Hero worship and skepticism were thrown around equally, but nigh any journalist could argue against the fact that this band was relevant to our sick, scared, and poor era. Noisey called the band, “A reminder that rock n’ roll can mean something.” The Quietus called Champagne Holocaust one of the best records of 2014. Pitchfork, in a more lukewarm review, nevertheless described the debut record as the “shambolic beginnings of something.” Case in point, Fat White Family wants rock music to have substance again. Charged up by leftist politics and rally cries against the agonies of capitalism, Fat White Family is both aware of the culture while totally antithetical to the culture. The music, while certainly energizing, has its touchstones: the anarcho punk ethos of Crass, the shambolic poetry of Mark E. Smith and The Fall (they even released a single called I Am Mark E. Smith), the nihilist poetry of Country Teasers, and the early garage psych of The 13th Floor Elevators. But the music is only half the story with the band. I often say that the most effective (and my favorite) politicians (Obama, Churchill, etc..) do what they must to achieve power, and once the power is achieved use it to shake the culture and make change. It seems every article out there in one way or another finds different adjectives to describe the pestilence and grit and grime that define the entity that is Fat White Family. Though those descriptions aren’t false, they fail to mention the intelligence behind the art. Fat White Family is intimately aware of the power of performance and media. With a militaristic look, an aura of degenerate mystery, and ratchet stage antics full of blood and nudity, the band commands attention. Now that the attention has been achieved, the band can have their ideas known and their message spread.

Fat White Family’s new album, Songs for Our Mothers, is out today on Fat Possum. It continues the band’s political nihilism while incorporating a more subdued if not at all toned down sound. The melodies are more pronounced, and the incorporation of synths and horns brings to mind the more ambitious records of British pop music history. From opening track The Whitest Boy On the Beach, there is something off-kilter and more thought-provoking than the band’s earlier onslaughts, bringing to mind bands like Devo. It seems the album’s central conceit is an exploration of the volatile conditions that often create the best art, as the band has cited the work of Ike and Tina turner as a central influence on the band.

In anticipation of Songs for Our Mothers, I spoke to Lias on a Viber call. He is nothing like his stage persona. Expecting a bamboozled alkie, I found myself speaking to a fiercely intelligent young guy deeply worried about the state of the economy, highly aware of contemporary art, and fiercely committed to original art. Topics that came up were housing, the band’s unhealthy obsession with Irish actor Sam Neill, the divide between human being and performer, and of course lots about the new record. I also snuck in a question about Lias and Fat White brother in arms (as well as brother from same mother) Nathan’s collaborative band with electronic act Electronic Research Council and Sean Lennon, The Moonlandingz, whose record Expanded is out now.

Autre: Perhaps I’m off base here, but from the moment I first got into the band I detected at least an awareness of a performance art aesthetic, is that at all accurate?

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah definitely. I went to college for four years, at Slade School of Art in North London, so it’s something I’ve been a part of for a while.

AUTRE: What about politically? Did you develop your own sort of ethos on your own? Or did you pick up certain ideas from family members or friends growing up?

LIAS SAOUDI: Well my mum is sort of like a Yorkshire coal miner who was there during the strikes. My dad’s an Algerian immigrant. It’s not like I grew up on an estate, but I wouldn’t jump to say that I was, myself, working class. I was afforded opportunities both my parents never had, because they worked really hard. But both of them, yeah completely. But myself I guess I would say I was more lower-middle class. We would go on a holiday abroad every now and then. . I think it was the kind of environment, which set me up to take it where I am now. It was probably always going to turn out this way.

AUTRE: I find it interesting how some adults think that people our age, millennials or whatever, are apolitical or don’t care. But I just don’t find that to be true these days, certainly with bands like yours, and with what’s going on in the States right now with everything rallying around Bernie Sanders and things like that. Do you feel generally hopeful that at least people seem to be more aware than they were in the last few years?

LIAS SAOUDI: I think a certain amount of apathy has lifted, but I fail to see any real, genuine hope in the situation being altered. I think there is something to rally around and I think that’s really positive. I think it’s the lowest kind of cynicism to just not even bother. My issue with bands and music and the people here in London while I was kind of squatting around and studying is that people were just concerned with climbing up a ladder socially. There’s no way you’re getting anywhere.

AUTRE: Yeah, absolutely.

LIAS SAOUDI: I mean I’ve been in London for 12 years and we worked pretty hard at this project. From an outsider’s perspective it must seem like we’ve had some success. But my living standards have never increased, if anything they’ve diminished. And London, the city that I’ve kind of grown to love and consider home, is kind of out of my reach. That brings anger.

AUTRE: Yeah it’s the same situation over here in New York. What’s insane to me is that one of the main reasons people want to move to cities like New York or London is because they want to eat at great restaurants with really talented chefs, or see great bands or artists. But if they don’t start regulating the rent, these people aren’t going to exist and these cities are going to suck.

LIAS SAOUDI: It’s just become a little bit like Paris. The restaurants will remain, but all the other good stuff will fuck off. It’s prohibitively expensive to live here while you’re trying to do something creative. It’s always been tough, you know you have to work a shitty job while you’re doing your painting or your band. The city is for tourists and millionaires and for people to invest in property while you’re pushed further and further out of the housing market and the red market. It’s boring. There’s nobody standing up for you, there’s no rules, there’s no law anymore.

AUTRE: It’s pretty insane. Living in New York, I’ve been here almost four yeas years but I’ve already had to bounce around from three neighborhoods. It happens too fast. Blame it on hipsters moving to your hood all you want, but people are going to live where they can afford. No one is at fault other than greedy landowners and a government that doesn’t protect its citizens from encroaching poverty.

LIAS SAOUDI: It’s alarming that the government, our government, doesn’t want regulation when it comes to things like the housing market. But they are perfectly comfortable with regulating the Middle East. It’s like you won’t put a fucking cap on the rent in South London but you’ll happily bomb Libya. I’m confused now by what they mean by regulation. It’s just such fucking dog shit. Bands don’t traditionally come from London- they come to London to make their way. And I think we’ll see an end to that.

AUTRE: So I wanted to ask you some stuff about the new record, which I’ve listened to and I love. The first thing I noticed is that right from the first record, right from Auto Neutron, it kind of had this groovy but nevertheless full on oral onslaught. The new one seems a little bit more textured, maybe are there some synths in there?

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah there was a little bit of a disco element. Everybody was kinda getting into Donna Summer at that point.

AUTRE: Yeah, that’s interesting. I thought of the first Devo record honestly when I heard that second track.

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah it is that kind of vibe. I think it was just a lot more thought going into it. Not that we didn’t take it seriously the first time. It takes a long time to make a record. That’s always the case, it’s a refection of what everybody’s been into. It’s is a little less schlocky, a little bit I dare say understated. I’ll be held to that no doubt, but it’s about drawing a juxtaposition between that understatement and what actually goes on in the songs, the events and fleshing them out. If there’s a shock value that’s where it is.

AUTRE: I’ve always thought you guys even at your most cacophonic had some serious grooves going on. I feel like it comes in even stronger when you’re quieting down a little.

LIAS SAOUDI: It’s kind of like dance music I suppose essentially.

AUTRE: Yeah you can dance to it for sure. I know Joe Strummer had a quote that was like “the best rock and roll music just makes you want to stop thinking and dance and not give a fuck what anyone thinks.”

LIAS SAOUDI: I think so, and I think if you can do both at the same time that’s kind of the goal. If you can have both angles, and you can realize what you’re dancing to. The story behind it, the narrative.

AUTRE: Substance.

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah you’ve got two layers going on there. There’s an ever so slight intellectual side to it.

AUTRE: I caught some psychedelic vibes too, are you guys into Psychedelia at all?

LIAS SAOUDI: Yea of course I mean we’re steeped in that. I think especially on the first record. There was kind of all that dodgy psych that was all pouring out during the last five years. A lot of it was just an interesting sound, but it didn’t seem to have any essential purpose. It was kind of like vintage shop psych for metropolitan dudes to pose around to and get laid. There was no essential struggle or crisis. Which given the times we’re living in, like we were talking about earlier, I find a little apathetic and irresponsible to an extent.

AUTRE: Definitely. I thought it was interesting, when I saw you guys at the Bowery Ballroom last year I saw you running around with Sean Lennon. He actually co-produced this new record, and you guys are doing a side project with him? The Moonlandingz?

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah the Moonlandingz man!

AUTRE: I love that video.

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah it’s good, it’s fun. Kind of tongue in cheek, the whole thing. It’s all really well written stuff. We were playing this fictional band within a concept record, we just decided to take it to the next level. And then Sean got involved. I got something from Sean the other day actually, Yoko Ono is on one of the tracks now.

AUTRE: Oh sweet!

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah, we’re having a scream off on one of them I think. It’s nice, we’re in a position now where you can kind of cross-pollinate with other artists much more easily. Maybe the financial rewards are not as great these days for musicians, but if you get a little bit of a break you can start working with all kinds of people. It’s kind of exiting.

AUTRE: Definitely, and I feel like Sean is almost a perfect mentor for you guys because he for one thing is massively famous just because of who he is, but he also has an ear to the underground always.

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah and he’s a really great musician man. It’s great to have him in the studio. He’s just always been really lovely with us and always supported us since the first day we met him. He’s been a great ally to have, whenever we’re stateside we always hit him up.

AUTRE: Most people associate you guys with influences like The Fall and the Birthday party ad Crass, all that stuff, but I hear soul on your records, I hear funk. And he’s a good producer for that because he knows a little bit about everything.

LIAS SAOUDI: He’s kind more into the sensual side of it all than the harsh, politically charged kind of punk side of it. And that works well for us.

AUTRE: I feel like Fat White Family has a lot of hero worship attached to it. Rock n’ Roll lovers have a lot of faith in you guys. I mean Noisey described you as “the band making Rock n’ Roll mean something again.” Do you welcome this? Or are there times when you want to just play rock music without people attaching so much to it?

LIAS SAOUDI: I try and remain as ignorant as possible. I kind of gravitate towards things that I don’t really understand. I don’t really think about it that much, I just try and get on with my job. I find it extremely difficult to write and I’m quite precious about it, so I’m just getting on with it and I hope it works out. It’s not the most stable profession, all those people saying that is great, you know, wonderful, but it’s kind of just a lucky byproduct of what we’re doing.

AUTRE: You do get a lot of positive reception in blogs, but I can’t imagine it actually compares to the reactions you guys get at your shows when kids go fucking nuts.

LIAS SAOUDI: That’s great, that’s my favorite part of it. I was doing a little bit of performance art at the end of college, and I was kind of at a loose end- didn’t really know where to place myself. I’ve really become quite jaded and disdainful with the whole contemporary art scene. But being in a band you could kind of just do that at your own street level instead of having to curtail to some type of elite the whole time. So that was important to me, and the performance thing remains priority #1 for me.

AUTRE: That is the benefit of Rock n’ Roll over art, because art is still contingent on you being able to sell your stuff to some rich guy, where as Rock n’ Roll is just contingent upon kids losing it over your music.

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah. You know when you’re shit because people just don’t stick around. It’s a lot more difficult to lie to yourself.

AUTRE: When I saw you at the Bowery Ballroom you had your cock out within the first three minutes of the show.

LIAS SAOUDI: (laughs) I don’t know where that comes from really. As a person I’m usually quite reserved, quite shy, quite insecure essentially, so it’s like an outlet I suppose. It’s not really like a pre-meditated thing. It just feels nice. Theoretically, again if you’re doing that in contemporary art it raises all sorts of questions. Difficult questions. But I think if you’re doing that in Rock n’ Roll it’s just a bit of spice.

AUTRE: Yeah! So you once wrote “Hell hath no fury like a failed artist” in Is It Raining in Your Mouth. The band has if not become overwhelmingly financially successful has gained a certain level of notoriety. Is it as easy for you to write those same sort of vibes with the success that you have now?

LIAS SAOUDI: Well a lot of the time when I’m writing there will be some sort of historical context, some sort of totem culturally that other people can gather around and hang their hat on essentially. When I wrote that I was actually talking about Adolf Hitler.

AUTRE: Oh shit that makes sense!

LIAS SAOUDI: (Laughs) Yeah! But it worked for me as well so I just put that in there. So that’s usually the angle I come in at when I’m writing sometime. So it’s kind of personal but it’s also got a different context usually.

AUTRE: Do you consider the rock star version of you to be you and a part of you? Or like a character that you have to get into to become what you are on stage?

LIAS SAOUDI: When I go on stage it’s a peculiar experience, I don’t feel like that person at all really. That’s just the way it happens when I perform. It’s strange when you get up on a stage in front of a big crowd of people, there’s all kinds of things that happen in your brain. Some of them healthy, some of them not so healthy, I think naturally I must be a real attention seeker. Because I do love it. It’s a weird one.

AUTRE: I was looking at the press release for the new record and at the end there it says something about this record being about love, death, sex, the actor Sam Neill. What’s with the obsession with Sam Neill?

LIAS SAOUDI: I don’t know where that comes from exactly. It’s a real thing in the group.

AUTRE: He’s good man.

LIAS SAOUDI: (Laughs) I think maybe it’s the film Event Horizon, which is arguably one of the shittiest films ever made.

AUTRE: He was in Possession, have you ever seen that movie? Sam plays a spy that comes home to his wife who acts increasingly unstable wife who ass him for a divorce, that description doesn’t at all sum up the head fuckery that follows.

LIAS SAOUDI: I’ll have to check that out man.

AUTRE: That’s a good horror movie.

LIAS SAOUDI: He’s in one of the songs. In Satisfied, there’s a lyric in there about Sam Neill working outside or something. It’s fun when you bring things back down to the juvenile level sometimes.

AUTRE: Do you find it difficult to stay out of the bullshit side of the music business?

LIAS SAOUDI: It is weird and it’s slightly disturbing when what you do as a bunch of friends; living together in a shitty house; suddenly becomes your bread and butter. It’s something you just kind of have to get a grip on so you don’t have to go back to making pizzas or whatever. There’s an element of anxiety there. You’ve been struggling and then you get a little bit of a break, and then you have to grapple with how making art is an economic act whether you like it or not. You have to accept that.

I try to get at a part of that on the record, by talking about the relationship between Ike and Tina Turner. Just how in a way everybody kind of endorsed the violence that took part as a fan and a listener of the music. It’s in there.

AUTRE: It is interesting with Ike and Tina though because those songs are so beautiful but you can hear the tension between them. Or you go listen to old Phil Spector productions or something and they sound so perfect and pretty but then you realize that the guy who’s making them is quite psychotic really. It gives everything an interesting spin.

LIAS SAOUDI: It’s a brutal dichotomy and it’s something which you kind of find yourself in all of a sudden. As far as it being a business, and you have all these people around you, and you have to decide which you trust and which you don’t. There’s things that go wrong and it’s difficult but that’s the reality of the situation.

AUTRE: It must be even more frightening because Fat White Family does have potential to become quite a big rock band.

LIAS SAOUDI: I mean maybe, I don’t know. I’ll take what I can get. The more people that listen to it the better

AUTRE: Are there any other bands these days that you find to be adequate if not pretty great?

LIAS SAOUDI: There’s a couple of really great bands kicking around. There’s a band called Meat Raffle who are a new band just putting out their first release, but they’re worth checking out. I’m a fan of the Sleaford Mods I think they’re really good.

AUTRE: Oh yeah I like their new record a lot.

LIAS SAOUDI: It’s funny and it’s brutal and it’s full of the right kind of spite. It revels in its own authentic misery, and I think that puts the fear into all the right people. That’s the ultimate kind of process. You can just kind of dance to the pain, and that’s what it sounds like to me.

AUTRE: So are you guys going to be touring the states on this new record?

LIAS SAOUDI: Yeah we’ll be over there. Our management is based in LA now so they’ll be really key in getting us over there. I imagine quite a bit in the next year. I think March, and then maybe later on in the year. I like to spend time over there, although touring is a bit tough. It’s a lot of fucking driving and a lot of shitty food. It’s that whole middle bit, which is quite a big bit, it’s pretty tough to get in the van and drive around and do shows. But once you get to the big cities its always fantastic you know?

AUTRE: Yeah. Alright man, I can’t wait to see you guys next time you come to New York, it was a pleasure speaking with you. Good luck and congratulations!

LIAS SAOUDI: Cheers man!

Fat White Family's new album 'Songs For Our Mothers' is out today via Without Consent/Fat Possum Records, purchase here. Watch the music video for Whitest Boy On The Beach here. Text and interview by Adam Lehrer. Photographs by Flo Kohl, shot on location in London. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Dreams In Blue: An Interview With Artist and Painter Phillip Mueller

January 17, 2016

text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Viennese artist Phillip Mueller’s art is mythical, fantastical and deranged. It exists on a plane somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch splashed with modern pop references, Thomas Kinkade on acid and a print out from your brain of a recurring nightmare. However, there is also something so sweet, alluring and romantic about his work. Mueller, whose solo show opens tonight at Carbon 12 Gallery in Dubai, is a genuine painter and he is studious about his work. In a world devoid of figurative meaning in painting, Mueller uses his paint and brushes almost like a protest, and the depth of his work is a war against contemporary’s artist stodginess. His current exhibition in Dubai, entitled “Dreams In Blue. The Year Phillip Mueller Didn’t Wake Up,” is described as a “dream-inspired road-movie.” One of my favorite pieces by Mueller is a portrait of Byron holding a pack of cigarettes, wearing camouflage and a pope hat – it is painted on a surfboard, which is a regular platform the artist works on. In fact, the surfboard isn’t just a medium, it is yet another piece of the puzzle and symbolism for the artist’s seemingly voracious desire for freedom and rich excess. Rich, not in the sense of monetary wealth, but rich in the sense of life. There is a distinct vitality in Mueller’s work that spills over the canvas edge like an orgy. We got a chance to speak with Mueller shortly before Christmas, when he was still working on his current exhibiton at Carbon 12 Gallery, to discuss his practice, mythology and his desire to get back in the studio and back to work.

Oliver Kupper: When did you know you first wanted to become an artist?

Philip Mueller: I never wanted to do anything else. I was painting my whole life. When I was 8-12 years old, all of the other boys went to play soccer, and I had painting lessons at the studio. I had lessons from a Croatian painter. I was always painting.

OK: Did your parents support you as an artist?

PM: Mostly my father did. My mother didn’t want to see me as an artist.

OK: Why’s that?

PM: She was scared I would always be broke, you know? I wouldn’t be able to feed my child.

OK: Your work deals with a lot of allegory and mythology. Where did your interest in mythology originate? Why does it play so heavily in your work?

PM: It was always interesting for me. It’s an imminent level. There are so many strong stories and strong figures. You can tell these stories for the next ten thousand years, and it won’t get boring. You can see all these stories in our contemporary life too.

OK: You can turn to them to find answers, or to figure stuff out.

PM: They exist because of explaining life and humanity.

OK: I want to talk about some of the mediums you use. You use surfboards, which is really interesting. When did you first start exploring the surfboard as a canvas? Have you ever gone surfing? Vienna is kind of far away from surf culture.

PM: Actually, near Vienna there is a lake that is quite big. It’s a well-known place for windsurfing. About 4 to 5 years ago, I bought a windsurf board and started to paint on that. Since the late 50s and early 60s, the surfboard has stood for absolute freedom. It’s also a myth for freedom. It fits on this narrative level.

OK: Freedom seems to be a major theme in your work. Would you say that freedom is one specific theme that you’re chasing? Is there any specific theme that you’re chasing in your work?

PM: Not only in my work, in my whole life. I’m looking for freedom in everything.

OK: When you conceptualize a work of art, what is that process like? Do you have visions that come to you? It seems like there’s a lot that goes on in your mind before you put paint to canvas.

PM: There are these stories, and I can talk about them. Then, there is a sketch. The canvas is like a playground. It’s like playing. It has to be playing from the start, in the end. Otherwise, it would get boring. It’s very important to have storytelling, but it doesn’t completely inform what I’m painting. Colors, structures, figures—they all come together during the painting. The longer it takes to finish a painting, the more complex and interesting it gets, for myself. When I think it’s finished, I sit in front of it. That’s the part when the painting tells me what I have just done. The work reflects when it’s done. It’s a very exciting moment.

"There’s a lot of stuff that has to be done. I get really depressed if I haven’t painted for more than three days. Last week was tough because I barely had time to paint. Christmas is coming and I hate it."

OK: You apprenticed with Hermann Nitsch. We did an interview with him, actually. He’s amazing.

PM: He’s fit at the moment. He’s strong again.

OK: Yeah, he seems like it. I still owe him some California wine. What was it like working with him? What kind of impact did that have on your work?

PM: I was working with him at the Castle in Vienna where he lives and works. Normally, his assistants are working for him for 5 to 8 years. I quit after 1 ½ years because there was no time for my own work. Still, I think that time with him was very important for me. He’s one of the most intentioned and sophisticated artists I know. It was also quite heavy. It was good to see this industrial, factory kind of working. I learned things that I would have never learned at university. Creating exhibitions, dealing with art dealer and collectors. It’s quite romantic. There are lots of animals there. In winter, it’s like a Nazi movie.

OK: It’s like a fairytale.

PM: Yeah. Actually, I met him five days ago. He looks good. I didn’t see him for a while.

OK: He seems reinvigorated by something. Maybe more people are appreciating his work.

PM: Yeah. There was a time when the state of Austria was fucking with him.

OK: A lot of countries were.

PM: Yeah, but especially Austria. Now, they want everything from him.

OK: Exactly. Now he’s a national treasure. As soon as American audiences (or another big audience) appreciate his work, the country where he’s from ignores the past completely. Now, you’re a national treasure, no matter how controversial. You could be in jail for twenty years.

PM: [Laughs.] Once the American market embraces an artist, you’re perfectly right. Everything changes suddenly.

OK: Speaking of reception to your work, has there been a certain perception to your work in Dubai? Is there a controversy? What has the response been to your work in Dubai or the Middle East?

PM: Dubai is so international. People from all over the world come to those exhibitions. They are really happy to have my work there. There was this performance I did at my first solo show, “Eat when you can, sleep when you can.” You can watch it on YouTube. It was quite disturbing for most of the audience, I guess. I’m sure they went home and thought, “Wow, what the fuck, but good to have such things here.”

OK: Is there going to be a performance aspect to this new show?

PM: No. I don’t want to do performances at the moment. For the past two years, I haven’t been doing performances. I really want to be a painter.

OK: Do you think people are coming back to figurative work? It seems figurative painting is coming back as a more appreciated art form.

PM: It will come back. On the other side, I don’t care because it’s the only thing I want to do. I will do it anyways. Maybe it will come back because of me. [Laughs.]

OK: You asked people to watch Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky (another person we interviewed) before seeing your show. Why Holy Mountain?

PM: It’s one of his strongest and most complex works. I’m impressed by the project itself, the grand scale of it. Every thirty seconds, you have an idea that is so unique and great. It leads to the next idea. Jodorowsky is interesting because he’s a logistical genius.

OK: And it’s full of symbolism.

PM: Yeah, of course. That leads to my work. He uses symbols that are already socially visible. Skulls, crosses, all of this occult stuff. he brings his own ideas onto those symbols. When you do that, you can create something really big based on those symbols that are already in our heads.

OK: What’s next? Is there a new body of work? You said you would focus on painting.

PM: Yeah, I will focus on painting. I’m so happy with the new works I will exhibit in Dubai. I already started a new series that is based on the works I did for Dubai. There’s a lot of stuff that has to be done. I get really depressed if I haven’t painted for more than three days. Last week was tough because I barely had time to paint. Christmas is coming and I hate it.

OK: You just want to be in the studio.

PM: Yeah, and there’s so much to be done.

Phillip Mueller “Dreams In Blue. The Year Phillip Mueller Didn’t Wake Up" opens tonight in Dubai and runs until March 6th, 2016 at Carbon 12 Gallery. Unit 37, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1 - Dubai. Photographs courtesy Carbon 12 Gallery. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

For the Love of Gore: A Conversation With Teenage Filmmaker Kansas Bowling

January 8, 2016

We met up with Kansas Bowling, the young, bright-eyed filmmaker who is about to release her first film – a “prehistoric slasher film” called B.C. Butcher – at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles. It was the perfect setting for a late night nosh and chat about filmmaking; a not so unusual conversation among the famed booths of the Jewish deli where Bowling’s boyfriend, the iconic DJ and “Mayor of the Sunset Strip” Rodney Bingenheimer, has his own table. And it was at that table where we talked with Kansas about her upbringing in Los Angeles, her early fascination with low-grade horror films and B.C. Butcher, her first feature, which stars the likes of Kato Kaelin and Bingenheimer himself. The film is Bowling’s debut as a filmmaker and is being released today on the famed production and distribution company Troma’s digital streaming service. Troma is known for cult fare such as Toxic Avengers and Return to Nuke 'Em High. At seventeen, Bowling is in for a strange and wild ride with her cinematic pursuits, and being with Troma means that she is already in the right company. What you will learn in the following interview is that Bowling used a combination of production sources to fund B.C. Butcher, which include crowdfunding and a settlement from a car accident. Fate, it seems, stepped in at the right time. While other kids are gearing up for prom or college campus tours, Bowling is getting ready to “spend more money than she has ever spent in her entire life” to create a print of the film to project in movie theaters. In the following interview, you’ll understand that Kansas Bowling is surely a talent to watch.

Oliver Kupper: I want to talk about your upbringing. Did you grow up in Los Angeles?

Kansas Bowling: Yes. I was born in Beverly Hills. I lived in Hollywood, and then I moved to Topanga Canyon. I moved to Koreatown, then Mid-City, and then back to Hollywood. [Laughs.]

OK: Were your parents a part of the industry.

KB: No, not really. They did extra work, but all the kids do that. But not really. My mom works at Bloomingdale’s, and my dad works for the L.A. River.

OK: So there wasn’t really a film background. You jumped into it on your own?

KB: Yeah.

OK: You have a really interesting name. Were your parents artists or hippies?

KB: My dad’s a bit of a stoner. [Laughs.] They were in a popular grunge band in the 90s, when I was born. It was called Bottom 12. My mom was a backup singer, and my dad was a bass player. He used to get naked on stage.

OK: Was it based here?

KB: Yeah, it was based here. They didn’t have an album come out though. My dad has this big story about, “Oh, we could have made it!”

OK: Growing up, did you know you wanted to become a filmmaker?

KB: Pretty much always. Ever since I knew what a filmmaker was. Before that, I wanted to be a firefighter, but that didn’t happen. [Laughs.]

OK: And then film came along?

KB: Yeah. I was a really big fan of Quentin Tarantino, since I was 7 years old. My sister and I would play Kill Bill. We had fake samurai swords. I would always be Lucy Liu, and my sister would be Uma Thurman. We would film it and stuff.

OK: How did you get access to those movies? Not a lot of kids are able to see Tarantino movies when they’re that age.

KB: My parents didn’t really care what we watched. Sometimes, they would introduce movies to us. But a lot of the time, we would just find movies on our own. They didn’t really care. Especially when I was older, like a teenager, my parents had never heard of the movies I was watching. Therefore, they didn’t care what I was watching. I watched I Spit on your Grave when I was 13. They had no idea what that was. It has the most horrific rape scene of all time.

OK: Specifically, the horror film genre—gore, exploitation films—is that what you got interested in?

KB: I don’t necessarily just love exploitation films, but I love lower-budget films. I feel like they have the most heart. Not just horror films, but also American-International Beach Party movies, Annette Funicello. I don’t know, just weird sixties and seventies sex comedies. Doris Wishman, Diary of a Nudist. Stuff like that.

OK: Can you remember the first film you ever saw? Or the first film that made an impact on you?

KB: Probably Kill Bill. And then when Death Proof came out, I liked that even more. I saw it when it came out, and that’s when I found out about those kinds of movies. I started watching Troma movies shortly after that, when I was about 12.

OK: And you started making films after that.

KB: I used to shoot little short films with my friends. It was fun. They were really silly. We’d have mini-premieres with all our parents. There were little red carpets we would set up, and we would take paparazzi photos. [Laughs.]

OK: And your parents were supportive of what you were doing?

KB: Of course. They were always really supportive.

OK: A lot of kids have no idea what they want to do. Or, their parents try to steer their kids into a different direction.

KB: They knew what I wanted to do, and they saw this passion and ambition that I had. They didn’t want to get in the way of anything.

OK: When you started making your first films, you started working with Super 8?

KB: I got a Super 8 camera when I was 13, for Christmas.

OK: Did you immediately know how to use it? Do you have any mentors that you started working with?

KB: It was pretty simple. My sister and I didn’t know about lighting at first. We shot a lot of things indoors at night that never turned out. [Laughs.] But we figured it out eventually.

OK: Let’s jump into the movie, “B.C. Butcher.” Where did that idea come from? That’s your first feature film, right?

KB: Yeah. Me and my friend, Kenzie Givens, wrote it when we were in high school, just because we were bored. I met her in high school because she opened up her locker, and she had a picture of Jack Nance from Eraserhead. I walked up behind her and said, “Oh my god, I love Jack Nance!” She screamed and fell over. [Laughs.] We became really good friends. The next day, we went to Cinefamily and saw the movie Possession together. She’s really in love with John Waters. I’m really in love with Roger Corman. So we decided to make a movie together. I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we made something so cheap? All we would have to do is run around in a state park or something, with loin cloths. We could make a caveman movie.” And then she said, “Yeah, or a slasher movie.” Then we were both like, “Oh my god, a caveman slasher movie!” And then we just started writing it together. I was fifteen when we started writing it, and she was sixteen or seventeen.

OK: Did you make it during the summer or the school year?

KB: We graduated at the same time. I graduated my junior year, and she graduated her senior year. She went off to college, so she didn’t get to help me make it. But we said we were going to make it. I didn’t want her leaving to stop me, so I went ahead and made it.

OK: Where did you get the funding for the film? Did you crowdsource it or find producers?

KB: I shot one scene to use on Indiegogo. I got the money for that one scene from insurance money from a car accident. It was such a minor car accident, so it was no big deal.

OK: So it was fate?

KB: Yeah, it was definitely fate. I did one scene and put it online for a crowdfunding thing. I didn’t really get my goal, because I was pretty naïve. I thought, “Oh, I’ll put it up, and people will give me ten grand.” But I got $1500. A lot of it was because people started writing articles about it. I went to Monsterpalooza, this horror movie convention, and I passed out flyers to everybody. I passed some out to the right people, and they wrote about it. Fangoria wrote an article about it. This website called Birth.Movies.Death did a big thing that brought a lot of money. It didn’t get me all the money that I needed, but it did get me a lot of exposure.

OK: It’s hard to get a movie made, even a low-budget film. Especially when you’re younger and people don’t know what’s going to come out of it.

KB: Yeah. After that, I still wanted to get the money from my original goal. It took me about eight more months to raise that money, getting jobs and stuff. But I love it.

OK: Your cast is really interesting, specifically Kato Kaelin. How did that come about?

KB: Rodney [Bingenheimer] introduced me to him. They go to IHOP together all the time.

OK: Were you aware of who he was in the nineties?

KB: Yeah, he’s Kato Kaelin. Rodney said one day, “You know who you should have in your movie? Kato Kaelin. Here’s his phone number.” I called and said, “Hey, Kato, this is Kansas. Will you be in my movie?” Kato is so funny and so nice. He’s a really, really good person. He was so professional and cool. He added to a lot of his lines, and they’re the best lines in the movie.

OK: Was it mainly ad lib?

KB: Kato was the only one to ad lib. Kato was only supposed to be in one scene, but we expanded the role to give him more screen time. I told him, “Say whatever you want.” And it worked.

OK: When is the release of the film?

KB: It’s going to be on Troma’s new streaming service, called TromaNow on Friday. That’s available to TromaNow subscribers. The official release date is in March. The DVD is going to come out. We’ll have a theatrical release too. Video on demand, of course. Amazon.

OK: Do you have plans to go to film school, or will you just keep making more movies?

KB: Film school is such a waste of money. My sister is an actress. The other day, she had to go to an audition at a film school. I came with her, and I was waiting outside the room, poking my head into all these classrooms. There was a classroom where the teacher was showing a class YouTube clips of Eddie Murphy stand-up comedy. These kids are paying $100,000 a year to watch Eddie Murphy clips on YouTube. [Laughs.] I’m not going to film school.

OK: You could use $100,000 to make another movie.

KB: Exactly. I could make 10 movies.

OK: Do you want to go in the direction of this type of movie?

KB: Definitely. I don’t like serious movies. I like fun movies.

OK: That’s how some movies should be. There are a lot of serious movies, but people should be able to have fun at the movies too. Do you have any ideas for another film?

KB: I have a bunch of ideas lined up. It was hard to pick, but I did pick. But it’s a surprise. I keep giving hints. It’s going to be a pseudo-documentary.

OK: Is it going to be like Cannibal Holocaust?

KB: Sort of, but not quite on that level. Have you seen Faces of Death?

OK: I’ve heard of it.

KB: It’s going to be sort of like that, with the narrator standing there. It’s going to be like an education film, but totally fake.

OK: You mentioned Roger Corman as one of your heroes. Have you met him? Do you have plans to reach out to any of your heroes and see if they want to work with you?

KB: I have met Roger Corman once. I just ran up to him and hugged him. I was 14 probably. He thought I was so weird. I was wearing this big, black fur cape and black leather pants and white go-go boots. I saw him at LACMA and hugged him so tight. I was like, “I love you!!!” And he was like, “Thank you.” I think I did the same thing to Jack Hill, who directed Spider Baby. When I was fourteen, I asked Quentin Tarantino to marry me.

OK: What was his response?

KB: He said, “When you’re eighteen, we’ll see.”

OK: Are you a film purist? Do you want to make things on film exclusively?

KB: Definitely. 100%.

OK: What is your advice to other young people that want to make a movie?

KB: Don’t sit around thinking about it. Just do it, because it’ll be worth it.

You can watch B.C. Butcher, written and directed by Kansas Bowling, on Troma's digital streaming service here. Follow Kansas on Instagram here to stay in loop with her cinematic pursuits. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Rotten Sun: An Interview With Belgian Musician and Artist Joris Van de Moortel

December 28, 2015

Joris Van de Moortel, 31, has intrusive bluish-gray eyes. They are unsettling; despite the subdued kindness that surrounds them. Looking in to them one realizes Moortel doesn’t see the same boundaries most of us do, the boundaries that most of us construct our lives around.

Moortel smashes, sometimes literally, the line between art and music. He is both musician and artist and the two feed off one another. Moortel makes mixed media pieces that often incorporate elements of his musical performances; a guitar he smashed on stage the night before, panels from a stage he played on. Sometimes the work comes after a performance; sometimes it’s made during.

The Belgian artist wriggled his way in to art school at 12 years old when he started following a friend’s father to night classes. Moortel graduated from the Higher Institute of Fine Art in Ghent Belgium in 2009. In his early 20’s Moortel sold his first piece through a gallery in Belgium. From that point on he devoted himself entirely to his work. Most everything in Moortel’s world is about simultaneity. At the same time that he was a child drawing nudes he taught himself to play the harmonica, guitar, bass and keys. At the same time that he began selling artwork he was performing in solo shows and with a variety of bands throughout Europe. At the same time that he became an artist he became a rocker.

Moortel stole the spotlight of the European art scene in 2012 when he had his first solo show at the Le Transpalette art center in Bourges, France. In 2014 he performed in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris titled “Don’t Know You’re Gonna Mess Up the Carpet,’ in which he stood atop a tube with a drummer inside and conducted a mind-bending rock performance involving video screens and neon lights. Moortel had his ‘coming out’ in the American art world this December at Art Basel Miami where he had his first solo exhibition in the US through the Denis Gardarin Gallery. Days before he had an exhibition open at the Contemporary Art Center of Wargem in Belgium. Next he is off to Madrid for a solo show at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia. In May he’ll come to New York for Frieze art fair. In between he sneaks back to Antwerp to spend time with his young children and maybe get around to cleaning his studio.

SCOUTMACEACHRON: Tell me about your Art Basel exhibition?

JORIS VAN DE MOORTEL: During the making of this exhibition I was also working on a big museum solo show in Belgium which opened the day before I left for Miami. There’s a lot of overlap between those two exhibitions. Like the installation here [gestures to house-like structure]; the one in Belgium is the size of this area [gestures to entire exhibition space]. It’s huge. The drawings in this exhibition are related to the one in Belgium; one is related to a CD recording I did and the other is related to a solo vinyl I did.

MACEACHRON: When you say related to, what do you mean by that?

MOORTEL: This part of the work is part of the exhibition in Belgium but it’s much bigger with real actual speakers that work. These [Gestures to artwork] are casted speakers in resin. All the works here are muted. Nothing makes any sound anymore. These pieces, the back of this piece [Gestures to artwork] also contains speakers but it’s muted. Most of my pieces come from performances. Like this one is part of a stage from a performance I did in Belgium, Singapore and Paris. It is just one part of twelve panels that made up the whole stage. I sprayed it white with an air press gun. And the last one I did was a collaboration with the designers A.F. Vandevorst for a fashion show in Paris. This piece contains elements of the performance; part of the coat I was wearing, speakers, the effects I’m using, neon which is running through the piece.

MACEACHRON: When and why did you start incorporating these objects that are a part of your life, a part of your performances, in to your work?

MOORTEL: I don’t think about it in that kind of sense. I mean it’s all part of the studio. My studio is on the one hand a music studio but sometimes it’s more. At times I’m busy with music and then it shifts. All my wood, all my materials are there; the welding machines, the steel, the aluminum, the cast materials. It’s all in one studio. The performances play a part also, it really depends. Sometimes [the performances] come first and the sculptures come after. Sometimes it’s a part of it from the beginning. Sometimes the work is made during the performance.

MACEACHRON: Tell me about your musical background?

MOORTEL: It goes from age ten or twelve. That was the first time I really hit music, not only listening to it but that was the moment it really becomes important. Then of course I immediately wanted to play it myself but I never wanted to or didn’t take the time or wasn’t patient enough to take classes. Friends of mine did. I started out with the mouth harp and guitar, bass guitar.

MACEACHRON : Did you teach yourself?

MOORTEL: Yeah and friends taught me things. It took quite a few years. Now I play in quite a few bands. For me it’s hard to say something like or hear, “oh you’re a good guitar player, you’re a good bass player.” I would never consider myself like that because I’m not an academic, I didn’t study it. I collaborate with a lot of other musicians. Now I play guitar, sometimes the keys and sometimes also bass guitar in one specific band.

MACEACHRON: Do you remember what music you listened to when you were ten or twelve years old?

MOORTEL: The Doors.

MACEACHRON: Any particular album?

MOORTEL: All of them on vinyl, all of them on CD. I had t-shirts. I had a vest with Jim Morrison on the back. Had I been allowed to get a tattoo at age of fourteen in Belgium I would have had Jim Morrison on my back. I was completely, completely in to that. Also a lot of sixties and seventies music from San Francisco and LA. Then Velvet Underground, the New York scene. Patti Smith, Ramones. All very sixties and seventies.

MACEACHRON: Wow, advanced for a ten-year-old.

MOORTEL: [Laughs] Yeah, I know.

MACEACHRON: Did you go to art school?

MOORTEL: Yeah, when I think about it that’s why I didn’t want to study music. I started when I was twelve. A friend of mine, her father was going to an art school during the evenings and weekends. He was studying sculpture and had a sculpture studio. I asked, “please, could I join you, could you teach me?” It wasn’t really allowed until you’re eighteen but I said, “I really want to.” So I started drawing nude models for years. It was a lot of clay and plaster. I started welding at that age. I kept doing that until I was fifteen and then I went to an art school. I kept going to the other school as well. So that was my only occupation, drawing a lot of nude models, clay studies and painting.

MACEACHRON: So you weren’t studying normal school subjects at all?

MOORTEL: In Belgium you can go to an art school from when you’re fourteen. You get regular classes like math and language and everything but reduced in a way. Your focus is on art. Then I kept on going to art school for high school. When I went to University it was also art school.

MACEACHRON: The type of work you make now, how did that evolve from drawing nudes?

MOORTEL: Well you have all those study years. The way of working is only a growing thing. When you grow up as a human being it’s the same kind of thing I think. A major shift was around twenty, twenty-two when I started building installations. The first exhibitions were mainly installations, not really focused on sculptures or wall pieces or paintings. And then this took over again, by making sculptures again in to what I’m doing now. But it depends on museum shows and institutions. It’s all part of the same thing but you show a different chapter of something.

MACEACHRON: What’s your process like when you’re creating? What’s your studio like?

MOORTEL: Messy.

MACEACHRON: [Laughs] Do you sit around and think about things or do they just come to you? [Joris walks away and returns with glasses of water for us both.] Do you know something is going to be in your work when you see it?

MOORTEL: Like certain elements or parts?

MACEACHRON : Yeah, how do you get from nothing to that [point to one of his artworks]?

MOORTEL: Most of the, for example the basis of this kind of piece they come from really big installations. So the frame is already there some how. Like this frame was apart of the stage. So the frame is there. And it wasn’t the intent, I mean those frames I didn’t use them for two years after the performance. Also with these [gestures to artwork] they traveled from my show in the Netherlands in a museum then to Berlin then to Paris and then back to studio. I almost wanted to throw them away but I kept them for some reason and then they were the first pieces for a gallery show I was working on at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Brussels. They got really well received. From one thing comes another. A lot of pieces travel from show to show and don’t get sold and then eventually they end up in another piece. Mostly the moment it gets sold that’s where it leaves me so I can’t redo it or whatever. When pieces come back to the studio they don’t leave out the same way.

MACEACHRON: So everything is constantly evolving, including yourself, I suppose that’s the nature of art. Did you go through a starving artist phase or were you successful from a young age?

MOORTEL: I always had jobs and worked. I was self-employed quite often.

MACEACHRON: What kinds of jobs?

MOORTEL: Record stores, bars. That was only when I was in art school because I didn’t finish it. I did two residencies but I didn’t finish with any degree. At twenty or twenty-four I started working with my first gallery in Belgium. It worked out from the first moment. I did one really huge piece for the gallery show and it was sold. I could make a living off that for almost two years. So then I became self-employed.

MACEACHRON: It sounds like most of your work is much larger than what’s here at Basel.

MOORTEL: Yeah, there’s always a balance with these kinds of things. But this presentation is what the gallery shows look like.

MACEACHRON: Speaking of galleries, how did you connect with the Denis Gardarin gallery?

MOORTEL: It is the first time we’ve worked together but it’s been going very well. They’re really working hard. We’re almost sold out so it’s moving. Also in terms of audience they’re all American collectors. They didn’t know me before so they’re responsive and very… I’m really surprised in a way. I came here thinking, “oh this will go fine.” I wasn’t worried but I also didn’t expect anything. But American collectors are like, ‘oh this is great, I’ll get it.’ That doesn’t happen in Europe. People come back. Even collectors who have five pieces say ‘oh let me think about it, can you put it on hold for a week?’ This doesn’t happen in Europe.

MACEACHRON: Americans just go for it. So you’ve sold some pieces so far, everything?

MOORTEL: Basically everything yeah. I mean there are a few left but most have sold.

MACEACHRON: This is your first solo show in the US right?

MOORTEL: Yeah, I was in the Armory show before but that was five years ago so the work was kinda different. Something like this it’s the first time.

MACEACHRON: This is an incredibly vague question so answer however you like. What differences do you see in the art world in Belgium/Europe and the states?

MOORTEL: I think with all these fairs… it’s the same as shopping for clothes for instance. Ten years ago you didn’t have the shops in Belgium that you had in New York. But now you have H&M, whatever, Zara, that took away the exotic kind of thing. The art fairs took away some of the exotic things. You don’t have to discover in Europe European artists. You’ll have to go to Brussels, Antwerp to discover… well we’re talking about me, to discover me because I’m in a European art fair or gallery. So in a way that generalized and made it easier to go around, which in a way is a good thing because there’s so much going on. You need those art fairs to actually see something because you can’t go all over the world all of the time. A lot of things have changed through the years. The world population has multiplied by three or four. So also the art world is growing. In the sixties and seventies it was way different, there were less artists because there were less people on the planet.

MACEACHRON: This is another vague question but what inspires you? Other artists? A feeling?

MOORTEL: It depends. It’s come from so many different angles. It’s music, the work itself—looking back at pieces you did years ago or even last year—things you read. I’m always reading multiple things at the same time. I’ve been absorbed by Albert Camus again, his essays on Kafka. George Bataille, his essay “Rotten Sun” is the title of the exhibition. It comes from many different angles. I don’t have a specific sort of… there’s a certain pattern or a wave of making things and then there are times that I go to the studio but don’t do much. I read, I play some music. And then there are times when you don’t have time to because you’re really making work. It’s always in that kind of wave. In times, for me it works to go to the same places over and over. Like next week I will hang out in one coffee bar where I get in to that rhythm of reading, writing, reading, writing, reading, writing. I don’t have time for that when I’m working in the studio. Then the next project is in Madrid so I have to work on that again. It will go in a wave of thinking about what I have to do then doing it.

MACEACHRON: What’s your process like in a physical sense? Are you regimented, do you get up very early, do you stay up all night, do you drink bourbon?

MOORTEL: I have two kids. I’m not really a… I used to drink a lot but I don’t like alcohol anymore.

MACEACHRON: Do you think it changed you at all as an artist?

MOORTEL: Um, you’re dealing differently with time. The concept of time is completely vague when you don’t have kids, when you don’t have a job because as an artist you don’t have a real job. You don’t have limits on time; you don’t have to wake up, you don’t have to go to sleep, you don’t have to do anything you just have to… you have you’re deadlines but it’s really vague. Of course you work a lot but it’s not, you don’t need an alarm clock or anything. With kids you also don’t need an alarm clock because they wake you. It makes you go to bed earlier, it makes you drink a lot more coffee, it makes you drink less alcohol, it makes you go out less—so all the good stuff.

MACEACHRON: What do your children think of their dad being an artist? I know they’re young.

MOORTEL: When I Skype with them they’re more interested in the food I’m getting here than what I’m actually doing out here. But no they really enjoy it when they come in the studio, it’s opposite the house. The six year-old likes to draw, she likes guitar and noisy stuff. Last time she was in the studio she said, “Daddy, there’s so much stuff out here I really need to help you to get some order in here. I really should help you make your stuff.”

MACEACHRON ; My goodness that’s pretty cute.

MOORTEL: Yeah it was really sweet. It was really honest. Like, “there’s so much stuff out here.”

MACEACHRON: That is sweet. Are there any installations or pieces that mean more to you than others, perhaps a defining moment in the process?

MOORTEL: In a way a piece like this comes from a specific installation, which really means a lot to me. The piece is like a proper extraction from that so it’s a direct storyline for a piece like this. There are many more angles and stories for a piece like this. When you start talking about it it’s like “this comes from there and this comes form there.” But I always work within the concept of an exhibition, like a solo show, even if it’s only a fair booth. They’re all connected somehow to each other. Ideally, when you talk in terms of collection they should get this and install it like this but I’m not thinking like that because it should be how it was conceived and how it’s made in a way.

MACEACHRON: You mean all the works here should be displayed together?

MOORTEL: Yeah, but it’s also a nice idea that everything goes. They come from a different angle, different sources, they come together at one point and then they leave each other. That’s also beautiful.

MACEACHRON: Where are you going next?

MOORTEL: Hoboken, it’s a part of Antwerp. Next up is Madrid. Then New York in May for Frieze. Then Paris, Vienna, Belgium.

MACEACHRON : How long do you get to be home and see your family?

MOORTEL: Oh as much as I can.

You can catch Joris Van de Moortel's solo exhibition "Ça vous intéresse l'architecture? Botanics of sound in which wires get crossed and play with the rythmic structure" on view now until January 31, 2016 at BE-PART in Waregem, Belgium. text, interview and photographs by Scout MacEachron. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Leading The Hip-Hop Renaissance: A Conversation With Viper Magazine Publisher Lily Mercer On The New Golden Age of Hip-Hop

December 21, 2015

I’m one of those weirdoes who actually gets excited for the weeks when new magazines drop. I get my art fix with Juxtapoz and ArtForum. Politics get imbibed with the New Yorker and the Atlantic. The need for weed is expressed through Heads. Fashion frenzies with Purple and Arena Homme+. Rock n’ rolling with Mojo. Freaking out in experimental music with the Wire. But it wasn’t until this past summer when I discovered a thick UK-based magazine called Viper that I’d get to read about hip-hop in an intelligent and creative manner (the Source isn’t really doing the trick anymore).

That issue, the Spring/Summer 2015, immediately spoke to me. A fantastic block letter logo emblazoned upon a cover depicting two of the best MCs on the planet, Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples. On the inside, I found a magazine that was creatively akin to much missed culture and fashion magazines like Index and the Face. It isn’t just about the music; it examines hip-hop as a culture and a lifestyle. There was an ode to the late A$AP Yams. There was an examination of the cultural and fashion impact of FILA. A photo series documented the migrant crisis of Greece. Not to mention, articles on some of hip-hop’s most under-praised and creatively fertile artists: Milkaveli, Earth Gang, and the aforementioned Earl and Vince. Here was a magazine that gave life to the love that hip-hop inspires. This magazine, revolutionary in its impact to the culture it targets, is the brainchild of the young North London-hailing music journalist Lily Mercer.

Mercer was studying fashion journalism before growing disenchanted with the industry, generating a knack for interviewing rappers. Quickly she found herself generating bylines with respected music rags like Noisey and Clash. Noted for her taste making talents, she was given her own radio show through Rinse FM, The Lily Mercer Show, that airs Monday morning from 1 to 3 am where she breaks grime artists and Chicago MCs on a regular basis. Viper Mag was unleashed upon the world as a 50-page zine in 2013. It was born out of frustration. Mercer wanted to read the magazine that the hip-hop community deserved. So, in a naively punk manner, she did it her fucking self. “I was trying to find a magazine that I enjoyed reading, and there were none,” says Mercer. “So, I made my own. And we are all the luckier for it.”

The magazine is now 150 pages deep and holds an accompanying website that is updated daily. Mercer also keeps a personal blog where she espouses on all manner of her ideas and beliefs. It is no small feat becoming a personal brand in the world of journalism (I should fucking know, believe me), so it’s all the more impressive that Mercer has become something of a celebrity in her own right. She has done so through buckets of knowledge, insane enthusiasm, and an unbridled work ethic that flips millennial stereotypes on their heads.

Holding my Earl/Staples issue of Viper, I gave Mercer a ring on Skype. We had a wonderful conversation spanning her career in hip-hop, fashion and hip-hop, hip-hop culture, hip-hop politics, and lots of other things hip-hop. Enjoy.

Adam Lehrer: We always talk about Golden Ages of hip-hop—, late ‘80s, mid-90s. But people never seem to realize that they’re living in a Golden Age. Do you think we’re living in a Golden Age of hip-hop right now?

Lily Mercer: I do. For me, it started in 2010. Now, I look at the artists I listen to. The only thing I would wonder about is the longevity. I don’t know if they are lyrically better artists, but for me, there are way more interesting artists now.

AL: There are your Kendricks and your Earls, but hip-hop has gotten more adventurous sonically. I like shit from the bottom up—from Dr. Yen Lo on the underground, to the stuff that Future put out this year in the mainstream. The pop artists and the underground artists are all good.

LM: I agree. When an artist like Kendrick gets to the level where he is now, that’s when you realize how many new artists are out there.

AL: Do you remember the moment you fell in love with hip-hop?

LM: Yeah. There were two songs. One was “Wishing on a Star” by Jay-Z. Weirdly, that’s the Jay-Z [track] that no one thinks of. My mum had grown up playing Motown, so there was a soul connection. It was hearing a song that was accessible but also quite deep. To me, those songs were quite profound at eight years old. After, when [rap] became an obsession, was when Eminem came out. That was a gateway drug. He’s a white rapper with middle class parents. I was a middle class kid, so it was the kind of hip-hop that was acceptable.

AL: There was an interview the other day with Vince Staples and Mac Miller, talking about the difference between white rappers and white guys who rap. White rappers come with all the stereotypes. White guys who rap are the guys who do it and respect the culture and the history.

LM: I’ve always said I’m quite racist because I never liked white rappers much. I didn’t actually listen to Mac Miller until recently. I do like his music now. I don’t know why I don’t listen to white rappers as much. This might sound weird, but white people in the industry don’t like other white people in the industry. There’s only one person around in this clique. You sit outside; I’m in this crew. They get cold towards you. I never understood that, but maybe that’s why.

AL: How did you realize you wanted to be on the editorial side of the industry, as opposed to making music or working in publicity?

LM: I’m musically disabled. I can’t read music. I can’t count beats. You would be surprised how little I know about the technical side of music. The business side can be shady, so I didn’t want to get into the business side of the industry.

As a five-year-old child, I was collecting magazines. Then, I ended up at fashion school doing fashion journalism. As soon as I finished, I thought about how much you could spend on a handbag, and I fell out of love with fashion. I graduated, then, literally a month later, I started interviewing rappers. I could create the images and the writing with authority.

AL: That’s interesting that you fell out of love with fashion. What was your relationship to fashion before?

LM: I always loved fashion. At age 5, I was dressing myself. My mum taught me how to sew. I always wanted to be a fashion designer. I met Alexander McQueen when I was about 14. I was out drinking one night (the drinking is 18, but we used to get away with it much younger). I just went over to him and said, “You’re my favorite. I love you.” It sounds weird, but if I had become a fashion designer, I would want to be better than Alexander McQueen. And that’s impossible. There was nothing I had to offer the fashion world.

AL: Fashion is weird for me. I come at it from more of a music angle. I didn’t know about it brand-wise until Kanye West lyrics, to be honest.

LM: It’s funny, I used to dress like A$AP Rocky before A$AP Rocky. I thought, “These rappers are getting into fashion.” I think it’s a good thing for the fashion industry. The fashion industry benefits more than the music industry does.

AL: It’s crazy. You see men wearing Rick Owens’ dresses because A$AP Rocky said they look cool in a song.

LM: Especially with the whole skinny jeans thing. it was so skinny, then it went to baggy, then it was back to skinny. More than fashion, I’m really into street fashion and street culture. In London, we have a very large Caribbean community. Growing up in East London, the best-dressed men were Jamaican. If you asked me my fashion icon when I was growing up, it would have been Ghostface, with the gold, the Wonder Woman bracelet.

AL: Ghostface is my favorite MC of all time.

LM: Me too. He might as well be number one, because he’s all around—lyrics, interests. His imagination is cool. The way he speaks to people is amazing.

AL: It’s interesting, he’s hyper-literate with his lyrics, but in interviews, I can’t always understand him.

LM: One of my worst/best interviews was with him. It was in a caravan before he went on stage. He basically said I had two minutes. And I thought, “What am I going to do in two minutes?” He looks at me and says, “Are you going to start?” As soon as he said that, I snapped at him and said, “No, you’ve given me two minutes, what the fuck am I supposed to do?” He started smiling, and went from being in a really bad mood to being happy. Two days later, my friend saw him in the airport, and he said, “Oh, your friend was that cool blonde girl.” I can die happy now.

AL: You clearly are internet-savvy. How did you start to learn the power of the Internet? When did you realize how powerful it could be?

LM: It was all in building my own website. I’m not totally [internet] literate, I’m still figuring things out. It took me years to figure out how to use the Twitter handle properly. I’ve never tried to get followers out of anything. I’ve always been quite natural about it. Being a broke journalist, the Internet has made my career in London. If I were into rappers ten years ago, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go. The blog and Twitter have given me a bit of a following.

AL: How did the Lily Mercer Show, your radio show, come into fruition?

LM: It’s funny, I never thought I would do radio. But I was living in Queens. I got a DM on Twitter from this girl asking, “Did you ever think about having your own radio show?” She really knew about the artists I was playing, when no one else knew about them. These weren’t big people yet; they were really just my friends. She thought that would translate well into a radio show. I thought about staying in New York, because that’s where a lot of new things were happening. But when I got back to the UK and started working with Rinse, they asked me to do the show by myself. That was the summer of 2012. The show has been weekly since February 2013, which is crazy.

Nobody knows how big Rinse is in the UK: dubstep, grime, jungle, garage—all these really significant movements that were happening in the UK were broadcasted by Rinse when it was illegal. It was an illegal pirate radio station. They were literally climbing up random rooftops to get it broadcasted. That’s the most rebellious thing in the world. I love being on a stage with that history.

AL: Do you find that it was just really good timing, and that the show came into being just as Skepta and Novelist and all these guys were taking off?

LM: It was. You could hear people like Wiley and Skepta all over when it was still illegal. A lot of [grime artists] are managed by the station, actually. I was playing people Chance the Rapper and Tinashe two or three years ago. I started playing Kali Uchis on Rinse in the beginning of 2014, and she was on the Viper cover. Now, she’s got an album deal.

AL: I am a huge fan of Viper Magazine. What were the magazine’s origins?

LM: Basically, the first issue of Viper was a 50-page zine. That was our way of showing the world what we were going to do. Then, the next issue came about six months later. It was a full print magazine with 150 pages. It took me about nine months to plan it all out. I spent a lot of time figuring out 1. how to market it, 2. who I would want to put in the magazine, and 3. the actual logistics of it. It was ridiculous. When I did it, I was quite naïve. I didn’t realize how much work it is.

AL: You kind of have to be, right?

LM: Oh, yeah. I never would have done it otherwise. I made the magazine out of frustration.

AL: It reminds me of what The Face was for the fashion world, but for hip-hop. It’s writing about something that people might not take seriously, but in the culture that it exists in, it’s taken very seriously. But it’s still fun and enjoyable to read.

LM: The dream was to have it like that. I was buying Face in the last few years of it. That magazine killed itself well; it ended as one of those legendary magazines. Unfortunately, we’ve fallen into a bad state of journalism. Viper is as much about lifestyle as it is about music.

I remember reading about the crack epidemic and homelessness in hip-hop magazines. For the very first issue of Viper, the zine, I wrote a piece called “The Sound of Chiraq.” This was the end of 2013. It was basically asking, “Why are we so focused on the violence and not the incredible music that’s coming out of that city?” There were really poor documentaries that came out about Chiraq after that. Yesterday, I interview Saba, who is from Chicago. He was saying, “I don’t know why people don’t pay more attention to the music.” It’s still such a relevant topic now.

AL: Vince Staples was asked if people take hip-hop too seriously. He was like, “are you kidding me? Hip-hop isn’t taken seriously enough.” He said it’s the most important popular art form in the world right now. I totally agree. It reaches the most people and still says the most things.

LM: I agree. Vince is one of the best. He does something that’s really difficult—managing really difficult things in between things that are quite funny. You might not understand what he’s saying, but you’re aware of it. Earl does it really well. In “Hive,” he says something like, “It’s lead in that baby food,” and I thought, he’s talking about that thing in India. I recently watched a documentary on Tupac, and he says some things that are so explosive. He’s the last revolutionary musician we’ve had. He’s the last Bob Marley. He was the last guy to say something against the government. Kanye tried to do it. Somebody is going to stand up. Maybe it’s Vince, someone with the balls to say the things he does.

AL: It seems like the better fashion, art, and music journalism is coming out of London. There’s Viper for hip-hop. You have i-D and Dazed. In the US, everything is just a print version of Buzzfeed. Why do you think you guys are still able to maintain business models while writing about things that are interesting?

LM: I will say one thing: Rupert Murdoch bought Vice, and then he bought i-D. It’s genius. He can control the next generation. Young people go to Vice to feel intelligent, but they have no idea it’s owned by Murdoch. That’s not to say it’s going to become totally right wing. Besides that, London doesn’t have conglomerates. It’s easier to be independent.

On the other side, the English mentality has always been quite revolutionary and anarchist. I feel we have so much revolutionary history in our country. And a huge part of that is immigration. That’s what made the country. London is one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world. I’ve spent time in New York and LA, and they are still quite segregated cities. London is not like that.

The music scene is really exciting in England. Marvin Gaye, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix—they all lived in London for certain parts of their life.

AL: Hendrix became Hendrix in England.

LM: There’s something about this tiny island that’s in the middle of everything, but at the same time, is entirely its own. As close as we are to European cities, we don’t have the same lifestyle. I do feel that growing up in London, we have a real chip on our shoulder. You get these people who are really tough and moody, but who also have a sense of humor. There’s something about British culture that’s quite rebellious.

AL: Is there a single article you’re most proud of at this point?

LM: Oh, that’s hard, because I also wrote a really great article on the sexualization of men. It wasn’t a huge feminist statement, but I just wanted to write a piece that balances out the double standard. It started when a friend of mine didn’t believe that women watched porn. Like, women can be really sexual people, but at the same time it’s like, “You can’t touch me. You can’t say sexual things to me.” My friends and I will be like, “Oh, look at that guy,” but if a guy did that to us, we’d be offended.

But the Mick Jenkins article, I asked him, “What’s the biggest conflict in your life?” He said, “White people saying the N word at my shows.” Immediately, that opened the floodgates. We talked about really crazy things. He actually went in on Vice, about the Chiraq thing, and the way the mainstream media focusing on the (Chicago] violence. I don’t know why it’s my favorite. He made me feel like I could contribute a lot of my personal opinion on things.

Outside of that, I think probably my Nas cover interview for Clash. One, it was my first ever cover story. Two, there was so much room for me to say what I wanted to. I told his entire backstory.

AL: Rappers can be rather prickly. Do you have any interviewing tricks that you use to disarm a subject?

LM: Method Man and Ghostface were probably the hardest. I interviewed Method Man and Masta Killa at the same time, and then U-God and GZA that same day. I previously interviewed Rae and RZA, so I had done almost the whole Clan. That was sick. The first was Method Man. The people who had come in before me had given him books, so the entire time he was reading through a book. It was the worst thing in the world. I found him to be really defensive. I said something about the origins of the gangs in Staten Island, and he was saying, “We weren’t a gang.” Finally, at the end, we talked about his film How High and how everyone thought they were high and not actually acting. Finally, he looks me in the eye and says, “Yeah.” That was it—I got on his side.

I also think eye contact is the most important thing in the world. If I can’t make eye contact with someone, I’m not engaging.

I also find that a good question to ask anyone is, “What’s your favorite animal?” I never open with it. But when you ask disarming questions that aren’t about music, people open up a little bit. They become more human.

AL: Top 5 rappers?

LM: I would say in terms of legend figures, Ghostface is number one. Nas has to be in there, because he’s Nas. I really like Sticky Fingaz, which is a rare one. MF Doom. I’m not even going to say B.I.G. and Tupac, because that’s a given. The fifth one is really fucking hard. I might say Big L. He was so slick.

Learn more about Lily Mercer at www.lilymercer.co.uk and read Viper at www.vipermag.com. Text and interview by Adam Lehrer. Photographs by Flo Kohl. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Stoned Immaculate: An Interview With Azalea Lee, A Minimalist Crystal Healer Who Makes Metaphysical Fine Jewelry

December 18, 2015

Speaking to Azalea Lee is like talking to that wise aunt who has all those otherworldly insights that she wraps in easily accessible metaphors so that you don’t have to work too hard to arrive at the answers. Whether you actually have that aunt, or you always wished you had that aunt, when you walk into her crystal shop, you immediately feel that sense of comfort and familiarity. Her space is in an old building in the fashion district of Downtown Los Angeles. There’s a weird old elevator that you take to the 9th floor, walk down a short dark hallway, ring the bell and the door opens to a bright, white room with a sweeping landscape of the city and a friendly woman who asks you to take off your shoes. Entering Place 8 Healing is like walking through the pearly gates in a dream where you know you’re not dead, and this isn’t eternity, but somehow you feel lighter and more at ease. There’s a cubby station next to the door with a cushion that you can sit on where we eventually held the interview. She explains that we spend so much time wearing shoes and clothes that we lose our grounding; that removing that barrier between our feet and the ground is an essential part of rooting ourselves with the Earth.

We start with a crystal consultation. Azalea asks us to walk around the space and take a look at all the stones, making note of one or two that we find pleasing and one or two that we find displeasing. However, she urges us not to read any of the descriptions – to just go by our gut reactions. Azalea’s practice is all about intuition, and it’s how she leads her life. There are about 4 large, glass cases with crystals arranged on shelves according to their respective gemological families. We slowly walk around each case in perfect silence until we both spot a small, oblong pink crystal that is vibrating on the top shelf. We decide that it must be calling us. Once we’ve each selected a few crystals that we do and don’t like she explains how they may apply to our lives in very specific and astute terms. We tell her about the pink stone that was vibrating and she giggles, “Oh yeah, the mangano calcite, that one’s not in a very stable position so it tends to shake a lot.” She has a great sense of humor.

There’s a shelf of stones carved into the shapes of penises in one case. When we inquired she said that she doesn’t use them in her healing sessions at all, she just saw them at a gem show one time and started to collect them because they make her laugh. Thus is her affinity for crystals. If she feels any kind of reaction to them, she sees them as useful. She says that the crystals you find pleasing are important, but the crystals you find displeasing are even more important. They carry the lessons you need the most; the ones you avoid like the plague because they’re the hardest to face. In the case of Oliver and me, she was pretty dead on. In the following interview, we talk to Azalea about how she discovered her vocation for crystal healing, some of the more extreme reactions her clients experience, spirit animals, past lives and what she says to skeptics.

Summer Bowie: When did you first experience a calling toward crystal healing?

Azalea Lee: So it’s a kind of circuitous story. When I was born I had always known that I had a purpose in my life, but I had no idea what it was. So as the years went on I kept asking myself, "'What’s my purpose?' I met the love of my life. Great! That’s nice. What am I supposed to be doing with my life? Got a house. Great! What am I supposed to be doing with my life?” I had always been interested in spirituality. I had always been a seeker and studied metaphysics. And so the years went on and then when I was about 37, I started looking into making metaphysical fine jewelry, but I couldn’t really find anything that was of quality, and that was my aesthetic. In general, the most common metaphysical aesthetic is much more bohemian, and as you can see from the space, that just is not my aesthetic at all. I’m just much more minimalist.

So I just wasn’t finding metaphysical jewelry that appealed to me. But in the meantime, my husband and I started rockhounding. We went to this mine in central California, which has benitoite, and it’s actually the only place in the world where gem quality benitoite is found. It’s the California state gem. So we found a crystal that was big enough to cut, but I needed a gemstone cutter and I didn’t know any at all. And then my friend said, “Oh I know a gemstone cutter.” And she showed me a gem of his that was like a sculpture – I had just never seen anything like it. So I said whoever this person is, he’s going to be huge and I want to meet him as soon as possible. So I met him, his name is Jean-Noel Soni, and we became fast friends. Soon after I started making metaphysical fine jewelry for myself and then at some point I asked him if he would like to collaborate on something, and he said, “Yeah!” So I decided to take this crystal healing course because I don’t want to read from some book that this crystal means this or that; I just don’t know how they got that information. It’s very “for the Bible told me so” which doesn’t work for me.

SB: Can you describe your first crystal healing experience?

AL: So in that first course I had to do a crystal healing on my instructor’s friend with my instructor watching just in case I got stuck anywhere along the way. And at the end of that she said to her friend, “Can you believe this is her first time?” And I just felt like, “wow I totally get it!” I mean I just totally understood what we’re supposed to be doing. It was like somebody handed me a guitar and I could just riff. So I sort of walked out of that space in a daze and it was like “this is the thing that I’m supposed to be doing” and it just completely landed and I just ran with it.

SB: You were a costume designer and wardrobe stylist in the past. Can you talk about your transition into crystal healing?

AL: Well when I got into costume design and wardrobe styling, I had always known that that wasn’t what I was going to be doing, but it was something I was good at. When you’re working with commercials you just take the idea of what the advertising agent wants, and what the director wants, then look at the actor and find that middle ground. You sort of intuit from the face of the actor what kind of clothes that person would wear. So it was a job that was very easy for me and I was doing a lot of different jobs, although the jobs weren’t always coming together. And in very weird ways a lot of these jobs would fall apart. So I said the universe is telling me this is not the direction I’m supposed to be going. It kept on leading me away and I was getting intuitions to try other things and go a different way. It was as if I was hearing:

-Keep going that way!

And I kept on going that way.

-Keep going!

-Really? I’m getting really close to this edge!

-Keep going!

-Really?!

And then one day when the crystals came it was like the football landed in my arms and I was like, “Oh I better start running!” So that’s how it really felt. It was as if the universe asked me to go to the end of the world, and even though it was scary, I listened. Then all of a sudden out of nowhere this thing landed, and I had the ball, and I just had to run with it, and I did.

"I’ve had sessions that felt like Merry Melody cartoons, sessions where people are in outer space, and ones that are more abstract where people are just seeing shapes and colors. It’s like going to the movies and seeing people’s personal stories."

SB: Wow, that’s a serious calling!

AL: Yeah, if you really listen, it will take you farther than you think you can go. Because it’s really terrifying, but if you are trying to forge a new path, you have to go where no one’s been before.

SB: So you did a crystal consultation with Oliver and me just now, but in a healing session, how do you choose the particular stones that you employ?

AL: Well in the same respect that you were gravitating toward certain crystals, certain crystals are resonating for me to be placed on you. So in a crystal healing session there could be hundreds of crystals placed on and around you. And they’re not static, it changes throughout the duration of the session; what crystals are being placed on you. A lot of it is intuitive, for instance during a session, the only way I can describe it is, you know in cartoons how you see exclamation points coming out of somebody’s head? That’s what the crystals do to me. They demonstrate this: me! me! me! And I go okay, you’re supposed to be the next one, and sometimes I don’t even know what that crystal is about and then I learn about it in this reverse engineering kind of way; seeing how the person reacts to it. Then I see over time with several people what this crystal does for them. So that’s one way the crystals speak to me, and then on the other hand there’s this very left-brained side where I will choose a crystal because I see what the person needs and I know exactly what it does. And so it’s a combination of the two approaches.

SB: What’s the most significant change you’ve felt in yourself since you developed this practice?

AL: There’s definitely a parallel between the themes that resonate with my clients and the themes that resonate in myself. The inside joke among healers is that we’re really just trying to heal ourselves, but we’re doing it in tandem. Each one of us on the planet shares the same stories and we’re all working to heal those same stories. That means that when somebody has a healing in my space, and there’s something that is close to me in that, I also get healed too. It’s such a great situation to be in; it’s really just such a joy to do the work that I do. It’s like when you watch a movie and you really resonate with a character, then when the character gets what they want, you feel really great too.

SB: Yeah, it’s amazing how much we get out of that. So, which stones are resonating with you most right now, and how often does that change?

AL: Well people tend to have theme stones that they resonate with, and I resonate with phenacite. It’s the stone I’m wearing around my neck right now. Phenacite is a very high vibration stone, and it’s about channeling a lot of the spiritual consciousness into the world. It’s a little off-putting if you’re not grounded enough or if you haven’t done the work that I’ve done. It’s like a high wattage stone that I really gravitate towards. I also gravitate towards black tourmaline, which is one of the top three stones that I really recommend for everyone. Tourmalines, if you squeeze them, will develop positive and negative poles with an electrical charge.

SB: That’s right, they have pyroelectricity, and I think they have applications as pressure gauges in electrical devices.

AL: Yeah, if you heat it up it will develop a polarity. But from the metaphysical corollary, black tourmalines have a lot to do with the root chakra. And so what it does with a lot of the negative energy that’s coming toward you is that it can turn it into something that’s neutral or something that’s positive. So it’s basically like, you’re driving down the street and somebody got upset at you because they thought you did something and it helps you to recycle that energy for yourself. It’s like taking the poop and composting it to grow something wonderful.

Oliver Kupper: Can you describe some of the extreme reactions people have had in a session?

AL: Oh yeah, I’ve had some people ask me if they were screaming in the middle of a session. And I say, “Oh yes! You were screaming.” I mean I never know what’s going to happen in a healing session. I always say that I’m not actually doing the healing. You’re doing the healing yourself and the quality of the healing is always dependent upon how willing you are to engage with whatever needs be engaged. That’s the biggest factor. So if people are ready and prepared to go all in, we will go all in. And even people who are kind of like, “I don’t know, I’m just going to try this out and see what it is.” They have some really surprising and intense responses.

Most people describe it like lucid dreaming. They’re fully somewhere else, but they’re able to communicate to me what they’re experiencing, and I’m able to ask questions to help them journey wherever they need to go. And the crystals are like resonances – it’s like being at a soundboard, and I’m adjusting the frequencies as you’re going along. If you need more heart support, I bring the crystals that are more geared toward heart support. I’m constantly adjusting as we go along to see what you need and eventually it all settles. There are a lot of people who resolve a lot of grief, a lot of people will cry, and in my sessions there’s often a lot of humor. I’ve had sessions that felt like Merry Melody cartoons, sessions where people are in outer space, and ones that are more abstract where people are just seeing shapes and colors. It’s like going to the movies and seeing people’s personal stories.

People often meet their spirit animals, which they love, and people often experience past lives. I often ask people if they believe in past lives, and it doesn’t matter to me at all, but it’s just more helpful for the client. For example, I had one person who didn’t believe in past lives, and they ended up in a castle, and they just couldn’t stop saying, “I’ve been here before. I’ve been here before!” So I asked if they’d traveled there before, and they said, “No, but I’ve been here before” and they couldn’t get over it for about 15 minutes. It was really bothering them. But what people often say is that they get clarity. So when you come out of the crystal healing session you feel like, “now I know what I need to implement in the next 6-12 months.” So most people come back after about a year, because that’s about the time when they need another check-in. And the sessions are just far too intense to do more than once in 6 months.

I had one artist who came in and she said, “I wanna know what my next show is going to be about.” So I said, “Okay,” and she had this vision and saw exactly what her jumping off point was for her next show. Which was like, “Ha! Rad, glad to be a part.” So, it’s really fun and always surprising.

OK: What do you say to skeptics?

AL: Honestly, if you can walk out of my session and you have some insight in your life that makes you happier or fulfilled, I don’t care if you feel like it was a placebo. Did it make you happier? Good! That’s really the most important thing to me. Whether or not this is something valid to you, whatever you decide is a measure of truth to you, that’s your own personal decision. I’m not here to persuade anybody.

SB: I’ve read on your site that you’ve been a crystal healer in many past lives. Can you describe one of your past lives? And how do you know it’s a past life?

AL: Sometimes what happens is you travel to a place and it feels so familiar to you and you don’t know why, and it’s because you’ve lived there before. Or you have some karma that you’re working out of that particular place. It’s like you have to come back to the scene of the crime and work out what you didn’t work out back then. For me, one of my favorite ones was when I went to the Sacred Valley in Peru, and I realized I had one of my happiest lives when I was a poor sheepherder. And I experienced me just being on the hill and I had this sense that I had this happy little family. I just had what I needed and my life was just simple and happy. Whenever it was, there wasn't any political drama, so I could just focus on the simple things. And sometimes for people who have had a very traumatic life, what happens is that in another life you’ll have a break life where things are a little easier. Just to give you a moment before you go back deep again. And that was the case in this life. There wasn’t anything really significant in that life. I just remember feeling the sunshine, my sheep, my family, and just all the things that were important to me.

A lot of people have memories of being royalty and skeptics say, “everybody thinks they were kings and queens, but how many could there be?” But when you think about it, there’s been a lot of royalty over the years, and it’s not just kings and queens. It’s dukes, marquis’, lords, etc. And of all the lives to lead, it’s not the most fun. There’s always a lot of political intrigue where everyone’s watching their backs and there’s endless responsibility. There’s so much drama in those lives – I haven’t experienced that those were people’s best lives – those are always the more complicated lives for people to have, which is why those lives come back up and are in need of the most resolution.

But yeah, crystal healing…It’s like trying to describe what it’s like to be stoned to someone who’s never been stoned. I’ve just never heard anyone who could articulate that very clearly.

You can visit Place 8 Healing for a crystal healing session or a crystal consultation at 120 E. 8th Street, Suite 902 Los Angeles, CA 90014. You can also learn all about the various properties of a wide host of crystals and buy crystals from Azalea online at www.place8healing.com. Text and interview by Summer Bowie. Photos by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Place 8 Healing on Instagram @PLACE8HEALING. Follow Azalea's jewelry line @ASABOVESOBELOW. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

A Bromance In Vinyl: An Interview With Elijah Wood and Zach Cowie of The DJ Duo Wooden Wisdom

December 15, 2015

text and interview by Scout MacEachron

At first nobody noticed when Elijah Wood and Zach Cowie began playing music. In those moments the duo had everything they wanted; anonymity, influence and unmediated feeling. Wooden Wisdom, the Wood Cowie DJ duo, was playing the Art Basel party Illuminate the Night at the unfinished Brickell City Center in Miami.

Then people did notice; women in ball gowns, 20-somethings in dresses a mother wouldn’t approve of, Miami types, men in whatever men wear to these things. The DJ booth was surrounded. The crowd gathered it does on a major subway line during rush hour: relentlessly, unpleasantly and pathetically.

It didn’t seem to matter that they were interrupted every minute so some partygoer could take a picture with Elijah Wood. It didn’t matter that the police put up a metal barricade half way through the set because people wouldn’t stop taking goddam selfies with Elijah Wood. It didn’t matter that most weren’t there to listen to music. What mattered to the two men was what they were playing music. And they were good, artfully leaping between disco, rock, house, jazz, funk and more. Wooden Wisdom’s style isn’t assault (like the DJs at MDMA fueled festivals) so much as warm suggestion. Wood and Cowie play what they want to play and it’s up to the listener to take it from there.

The duo met at a party in 2011. Wood spontaneously joined Cowie for a set and they’ve been spinning side by side almost ever since. Their first official tour was in January of 2015. Wood began mixing during long stretches on set in New Zealand; he was bored and had a lot of CDs. Cowie has been in the music business since anyone can remember, first as a record label guy then as a DJ. They share an obsession with the hunt for new music, old music, really any music they haven’t heard and Vinyl. They get each other and when on stage communicate without saying anything (a gift only the strongest artistic partnerships possess). They know that they get attention because of Wood’s fame but they don’t really think about that. For them it’s about the flow and selection that is DJ’ing, not image. Their passion is intrinsic. So much so that in a room of 400 flash-hungry Basel attendees if you listened closely, really closely, all you could hear is the music. In the following interview, Autre chats with the duo about their musical obsessions.

AUTRE: We’ll start with a boring question. How did you guys end up here, at Basel?

ELIJAH WOOD: We played a gig almost a year ago here at Bardot and I believe it was through that promoter. He kind of put us up for this. Is that right?

ZACH COWIE: I think that’s right.

AUTRE: So music and DJ’ing are clearly both art forms. For you two, as a team, what do you see as the specific artistry in DJ’ing? In mixing songs, in being up there, in selecting songs, in interacting with the crowd…

WOOD: It’s selection I think and mixing. But really it’s selection. I think that’s what sets any DJ apart from anyone else at its core.

AUTRE: The songs that you select?

WOOD & COWIE simultaneously: Yep, yeah.

AUTRE: So how do you two select?

WOOD: Prior to any gig, or if we’re going on the road for a small portion of time we’ll often just have a conversation about what we want to put in our bag. What we’re kind of feeling and that will sort of set the tone. Then we’ll pull based on those ideas. Then we’ve got kind of a basic very broad statement that we can kind of work within.

COWIE: Read the crowd, work around with it.

AUTRE: So do you plan out what you’re going to play?

COWIE: Nooo.

WOOD: No. We bring enough records that we don’t have to. We can kind of play it very organically.

COWIE: Yeah, and I think the beginning of the record pull is just the stuff we really want to hear today. Personally that’s how I pull all my bags and records. I start with the empty bag and I put in like 3 things that I really want to hear right now and I try and compliment those things with other stuff in our collection. And our tastes are so similar that they usually come pretty close. In fact we generally will be bringing a lot of the same records accidentally. [Both laugh]

AUTRE: When you say bag, do you mean an actual bag?

WOOD: Yep.

COWIE: Yeah, yeah we just play records so we don’t use the…

AUTRE: Right you guys just play records?

WOOD: Yeah, yeah. So they’re just like these travel bags…

COWIE: Flight cases.

AUTRE: So I know you’ve been asked this before but why just vinyl?

WOOD: [Zach] started with vinyl. I didn’t actually. I started with CDs and then ultimately iPod for a long time. So for me the difference is it’s active. It’s tactile, it’s physical.

COWIE: And a lot can go wrong.

WOOD: Yeah. And there are so many variables that can get fucked up over the course of an evening playing with records that it causes, it causes you to be fully active at all times and that’s something… you’re engaged, you’re constantly engaged. It’s a far more enjoyable experience from a technical standpoint. And it also sounds really good. It’s real, it’s physical.

AUTRE: So how do you deal with those mess-ups or accidents or whatever goes wrong?

WOOD: Pull another record.

COWIE: Pull another record. It’s stuff like that that makes everybody know they’re alive which, I think that’s… that’s where it’s at for me.

WOOD: The imperfections.

COWIE: The imperfections are the important part. If you’re listening to somebody on CDJs or something it’s like somebody is just tapping you on the shoulder at a steady beat for an entire night.

WOOD: And I also think that for me coming from having played with CDJs for a long time just for fun…. My problem with digital and the reason I moved away from it is that there are too many choices. I like having a finite amount of choices. When we pull records for a gig or for a two-week thing we’re pulling a finite amount of music that’s really specific. It’s broad but it’s specific.

"At a certain point when there’s a sweet spot. I feel like I’m in the music. I’m not really in the crowd I’m in the music. When it’s going really well that’s the universe I’m in and that is a really incredible feeling."

AUTRE: Finite in sense of the time?

WOOD: No, finite in terms of the physical space of the bag. So with a laptop or USB stick you have an infinite amount of choice and I think that that’s not necessarily a good thing. I love having parameters and working within those parameters. See what I mean?

AUTRE: Absolutely.

COWIE: There’s a DJ that I, that we both, love named Theo Parrish. I watched a documentary where he said that he’s never been comfortable trading artistry for convenience. That’s my favorite quote about that. We love records. That’s why we do all of this is to go out and find records, play records. It’s like, if it’s not in my hands I don’t feel like it’s a real thing.

AUTRE: Do you spend a lot of time… do you go to record shops and dig?

COWIE: All the time. All day, every day.

WOOD: Between record shops and Discogs and…

COWIE: I was buying stuff online on the ride over here. [Both laugh]

AUTRE: How do you feel physically and emotionally when you’re on stage and holding a crowd in your hands?

WOOD: Some of the greatest moments…

COWIE: It’s super fun but I also don’t really think about it.

AUTRE: Really? You just get in to it and don’t…

WOOD: Yeah, I think when you’re actually in the zone you’re not thinking about the audience. You’re kind of thinking about… for us, I don’t know maybe I’m speaking for myself. At a certain point when there’s a sweet spot. I feel like I’m in the music. I’m not really in the crowd I’m in the music. When it’s going really well that’s the universe I’m in and that is a really incredible feeling.

AUTRE: Kind of like Malcom Gladwell’s concept of flow.

COWIE: It is a flow state. It’s 100% flow. I know the day that I hit 10,000, it’s weird. It’s a real thing.

AUTRE: You just had a sense or you actually counted?

COWIE: No I just… there was a day when I stopped having to think about all the technicalities and only think about music. Like a guitar player doesn’t have to look at the neck of his guitar anymore. It was a cool moment. [Laughs]

AUTRE: How does feeling out the crowd and feeling their mood change what you play? Do you just feel it? Is there a zone?

WOOD: Yeah.

COWIE: Yeah. You can tell when something’s bombing. There’s just a vibe. And on the other hand you can tell when something’s really working. We try and act fast to compliment the stuff that’s working.

AUTRE: How do you guys work together or communicate when you’re on stage?

COWIE: Well we’re standing right next to each other so…

AUTRE: But I mean do you both control what’s playing? Do you look at each other before switching songs?

WOOD: No, there’s not a lot of conversation.

COWIE: We’ll we can’t hear each other because it’s so loud.

AUTRE: Do you wear headphones?

WOOD: We do wear headphones, yeah.

COWIE: We’ll just be like holding stuff up at each other and being like…

WOOD: Well if he’s got a good idea yeah he’ll throw something out and be like, “Do you wanna do this next.” But oftentimes we’re not even sharing what we’re going to do next except for the occasional glance over. It’s happening as it’s happening and there’s not a whole lot of conversation except for ‘that was awesome.’ [Both laugh]

COWIE: [Laughing] ‘That one’s really good, where did you buy that?’

WOOD: Or ‘can I take a photo of your record.’

COWIE: [Laughing] Exactly.

AUTRE: Last question. What do you want people to feel or experience while listening to you DJ and watching you on stage?

COWIE: I just want everybody to love music and to be inspired to go out and find records that they love. That’s all you know? It’s all music. I don’t want them to pay attention to us.

WOOD: Not at all.

COWIE: I just want them to love the music.

WOOD: I think we’d be really happy if we were in a box.

COWIE: Behind a brick wall.

WOOD: Honestly we don’t really like… sometimes we get put on stage and there’s lights focused on us and we don’t really love that because it becomes about something else. We’d be way happier tucked away and if it’s just about the notion of people focusing on the music. But I mean for people the takeaway… if people hear something that we’ve played and it inspires them to seek it out and they’ve heard something they’ve never heard before, that’s a really wonderful thing to try and impart on people.

You can follow Elijah Wood on Facebook and Zach Cowie on Twitter. Text and interview by Scout MacEachron. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Uprooting Sculpture As We Know It: An Interview With Artist James Capper

December 11, 2015

text and interview by Scout MacEachron

James Capper looks a bit like a mad scientist. He is standing in the middle of a park holding a comically large box with buttons and joysticks on it. It’s raining and everything, including Capper, appears to be sinking in to the grass. His hair and clothing are soaked; his expression part exasperation, part intense focus. The box is attached to a Mini-Cooper-sized, spider-like machine that Capper is controlling. The machine raises and lowers it’s legs, taking chunks of grass with it. A small crowd gathers to watch. “I didn’t expect all the rain,” Capper says to no one in particular.

Capper is a 28 year-old British artist redefining what we think of as sculpture (i.e. a chiseled Greek naked person made of marble). Capper’s sculptures move. The one he’s currently controlling is a walking machine or earth marker. It looks something like a moon walker meets spider meets robot. The idea was born from a show at the Paul Kasmin gallery in New York in February called “MOUNTAINEER TEETH.” Capper’s goal with the Mountaineer design is to create a sculpture he can sit inside of and climb up a mountain. The exhibition was his first solo show in the US and included various sculptures and drawings. The gallery represents Capper. They are the ones that arranged for him to participate in this year’s Art Basel Miami where he showed one of his sculptures in the afore mentioned Collins Public Sculpture Park.

Capper is shockingly young for an artist of his prowess. He graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and Design with a B.A. and immediately began working. His work has been shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Moving Museum in Dubai among others. Capper began drawing at an early age but it wasn’t until he learned how to weld that he turned his attention to sculpture. His interest in machinery, engineering and the industrial quickly led him towards the moving sculpture.

I met Capper at Collins Park to observe his moving sculpture. At over 6 ft tall he held an umbrella over my and his publicist’s heads as we ran to the nearby W hotel. Tucked on stools at the hotel café we chatted over hot coffee. I sat on his right side, Capper can’t hear out of his left ear.

In reality Capper is far from a mad scientist type in appearance and personality. He is thoughtful, genuine and soft spoken in the way that someone whose ego has yet to be inflated by greatness is. Capper is handsome, in a British way. As he talks it becomes clear that he is deeply passionate about his work. He has a vision and that vision is and will revolutionize the medium of sculpture. Expect great things from Capper in the years to come. And if one day you see a spider-like machine walking up a mountain with a man inside it is most likely him.

AUTRE: How did you end up at Basel this year?

JAMES CAPPER: Paul Kasmin started representing me in March of this year. I had a show at his gallery in New York called “Mountaineer.” It was a survey show of drawings and sculptures. There were eight sculptures that sat around the walls, which were the component parts of a much larger concept. They were called “Mountaineer Teeth.” And then there were something like 25 drawings. Initially, that’s where my work begins from, where ideas manifest.

AUTRE: Drawing?

CAPPER: Yes, drawing.

AUTRE: Tell me about your beginning as an artist. Were you the kid who grew up knowing what he wanted to do? You have a pretty interesting niche.

CAPPER: I’ve always drawn. I’ve always felt a lot more comfortable drawing than actually writing. In some ways, the best way I can translate ideas is through drawing. That’s where I started. I always had pencils and pens. Now, that’s still a fundamental part of my mannerisms as an artist. That is the one key element that drove me to art school. I knew that there was one thing I could always fall back on—that I could draw. My interest in sculpture really opened up in art school. I went to the Chelsea College of Art in London, and then I went to the Royal College of Art in London.

AUTRE: Do you remember what you drew as a kid? Was it abstract or normal kid stuff? Maybe some of both?

CAPPER: I would say it was just the normal stuff that kids my age would draw, but it really came out on my foundation. The drawing teacher told me, “You have a really straight line. It’s not like these scribbly, scattered lines.” That really opened up, for me, the possibility of making the drawings I make today. I’ve always enjoyed it. I’ve always had my quiet moment where I sit down and make drawings. When I make drawings today, I have to have some sort of solidarity or quietness to be able to convey ideas. I can’t do it when I’m under stress or pressure from the studio. That, fundamentally, is where the ideas come from. I draw from an open mind. They are a way of articulating thoughts.

AUTRE: Tell me a bit more about when you were in school. How did your interest in sculpture develop?

CAPPER: Before getting into Chelsea, I didn’t know if I would ever get into art school. I enrolled in a job where I ended up helping out some fabricators. They were doing heavy fabrication—welding stilts together. I understood, having drawn from a young age, that it’s not that far between a pen and a welding torch. You have to have a fairly steady hand, an idea, and a certain confidence in what you’re doing. The transition between being able to draw and being able to weld was like the transition between a saxophonist and a trombonist. It’s a very smooth transition. What I found before getting into Chelsea was that my fabricating skill in metals was getting quite good. I wanted to open that up in these workshops I took in art school, particularly in woodworking. I ended up doing a lot of abstract sculptures. I was very inspired by David Smith and Tony Caro. That’s what helped me get through my first year of art school. Then, I realized that I was really interested in making what I had made while welding—these big, still, moving structures. So, I started investigating that. Those are the primal beginnings of this language, this DNA of what I do now. It all came from fusing all these different things—primary drawing, a little bit of knowledge in fabrication, and art school.

AUTRE: Give me a brief sketch of your path from art school to now.

CAPPER: In my second year at Chelsea, I met this amazing young woman called Hannah Barry. She ended up inviting me to exhibit my work in a group show—what we called a “squat scene.” You guys probably have the same thing in the States—artists have exhibitions derelict buildings. That’s what started this relationship with Hannah and the other artists involved in this squat. A year later, pre-graduation, she opened a gallery in the Southeast part of London called Peckham. I had my first show there, which was a drawing show. From there on, this relationship unfolded. I’ve been working with her for eight years now, and she’s done her utmost best to help me produce ideas. For instance, this year, we produced “Atlas,” which was an idea for a work that I had in 2007. For both of us, we know how much of an achievement that is. It was an idea from, essentially, the beginning. We were commissioned by Henry Moore Foundation a couple of months back, and the show is still running in London.

AUTRE: From the drawing, when did you start building the type of work I saw outside?

CAPPER: There were a number of drawings that I made in 2009, when I was at the Royal College of Art, the sculpture school based in South London. I sat down one morning, having just enrolled in the place, seeing this phenomenal facility. But I didn’t have a penny to my name. So I thought, I can always fall back on my drawing. I put together a whole bunch of drawings on this translucent paper of my dream ideas. These ideas, predominantly, started the foundations of what I now call “Earth Marking.” They were a whole bunch of mobile sculptures. Hannah and I try not to use the word “kinetic,” because it gets confusing. We’re talking about heavy engineering, rather than something more whimsical. And we’re talking about innovation as well, which is something I don’t believe we see a huge amount of in the latter. Predominantly, I put down these ideas thinking, “If I had all the time and money and everything in the world, this is what I would do.” I just went out into the abyss. That was the first time I found this error in my thinking. It’s like a reconnaissance area, where I can go completely off the track of art, engineering, technology, etc., and come back with ideas and predictions. Things I wanted to aim my target to. These were the first target drawings, one of them being “Mountaineer.”

AUTRE: Tell me more about Mountaineer.

CAPPER: Mountaineer was a mobile sculpture that I would be able to sit inside—like an operating crane—and climb up a mountain. It has these four telescopic legs. It’s very much like a crane or an excavator, but very influenced by insects, on a large scale. It was making those drawings, and seeing films like Fitzcarraldo, where he pulls the ship over the mountain, that influenced me in this radical way. That was the beginning of this investigation, what I do and who I am today.

AUTRE: Have you ever had an interest in engineering? Did you teach yourself?

CAPPER: The biggest thing I had to teach myself in the latter years to make these dream drawings come true was building the relationships I have with my industrial supply chain. I needed to be able to delegate as well as manufacture things that are true to the drawings and the ideas. Being a good drawer and being a good welder means that the principles and the skeleton of the sculpture are together. Then, moving from the studio to the power coaters allows it to be painted very well. Their work is fantastic. Being able to work with the hydraulic engineers who make the hoses is also fantastic.

AUTRE: What is your London studio like?

CAPPER: They say this area of Southeast London—Kent Road—is quite a rough area. In the British Monopoly, it’s one of the cheapest ones on the board. But it’s getting good. Peckham—where we originally had the squat—has turned into a huge art district in Southeast London. It’s maybe partly to do with the amount of artists who have moved into the area. My area, when I moved into it, was predominantly industry. I moved into it to move next to the powder coating place so that I could paint. Now, there are warehouses full of artists.

AUTRE: It’s kind of like Brooklyn.

CAPPER: They are inspiring places to be. When the artists come in, they’re even more interesting. This area being full of warehouses—whether it could gentrify, I don’t really know. Unless they start knocking the warehouses down. That’s happened in London. It’s a good piece of London for artists, and it could be like that for another ten years, I imagine.

AUTRE: What’s your process like when you’re in the studio? What sparks your creativity?

CAPPER: It’s really quite mundane. It’s like a normal day. I start around 8, I stop for lunch around 1, and I finish at 6. It’s probably a bit of a longer day for most of the industry guys who start at half-8 and clock off at half-4. If you were to walk into the studio, you would think it was a manufacturing shop. I occasionally people dropping in and saying, “Hey, do you reckon you could weld this up for me, mate?” I have to try to explain to them. Sometimes we give in.

AUTRE: Tell me more about this piece specifically. How did it come about?

CAPPER: It’s been about two years work. I made drawings of a family of prototypes, Mountaineer being one of them as well. The drawing started off as this program where I wanted to investigate radical engineering to make things walk. I wanted some kind of propulsion that could transverse across many different kinds of terrain. It’s kind of like one of those things which already proves itself. A while back, I made this piece called “Midi Marker.” It moves like a caterpillar—expanding and contracting. It’s super simple. That went on to influence Greenhorn, which is a much larger work. I ended up making these four articulating arms—I call them flippers. It can steer around the forest. It’s amphibious.

AUTRE: When I think of a traditional sculpture, I think of something that does not move. What does it mean to have your sculptures move? You could have just created your drawings in an immobile way. Why did you add the movement element?

CAPPER: I saw this one work in Chelsea, in a very rare catalogue. It was Michael Heizer’s “Dragged Mass.” I loved it so much I photocopied it and made my own. The work was commissioned to be outside the newly built Detroit School of Art. He delivered something like a 60-ton piece of sandstone, and he had two bulldozers drag the stone until the machine stopped. What it did was it left this huge mark behind it. It sunk into the ground. He got into a lot of trouble, because it didn’t look like a sculpture. But that opened my eyes to what sculpture could be. That lead me on to an investigation in Land Art. Heizer was swapping his canvas and paintbrush for sticks of dynamite and a bulldozer. It reminded me of the relationship between drawing and welding. I was wanting to make something really pioneering. I didn’t want to be a copycat.

AUTRE: It sounds like a lot of your pieces interact with land in some way. There’s a contrast between the electrical, the mechanical, and the earth. Is that intentional?

CAPPER: I say with “Earth Marking” that it’s not so much that I’ve made a glorified pencil making the ground. The mark making they make is a forensic analysis. It informs how I can make the work better. I want to make this highly methodical walking machine, which is radical engineering. The only way you can really investigate and move forward in it is to take into account all the marks left to perfect these things. For instance, I see a number of engineers copying animals when there are similar ways to get these movements. There are simpler methods, and more graceful movements. It makes the marks and the machine pieces of work in their own right. For instance, “Atlas” and some other works all sit on these concrete blocks that they made. They stand on the work that they made.

AUTRE: Collins Park, were they worried about the sculpture messing up their grass?

CAPPER: They were super amazing about it. In order to initially install these works, we were going to lay down all these sod to get the forklifts and the equipment in. And they were like, “It’s fine, just drive on the grass.” It’s the land of understanding.

AUTRE: On a day-to-day basis when you’re home, how would you describe yourself? You seem pretty put together and responsible—not like a crazy artist. What do you like to do when you’re not making art?

CAPPER: It’s difficult. Being a young sculptor—or any young artist—there’s a challenge of finding the initial production costs and budgets for these works. I’m pretty much working every day of the week. It’s totally a life thing. It’s part of my lifestyle now. If I’m not working, I’m thinking about it. If I’m not thinking about it, I’m working on something. This year, I made 45 drawings and 21 sculptures. I’m used to making about 4 sculptures a year. This year has been a really crazy year for me. Aside from that, I like to take trips out of London into the outside countryside, into Kent. I enjoy time out on the local scene in Peckham with my friends—the Peckham Badboy Club. I find time outside of what I do, but I’m mostly working. It’s what I love. I haven’t found anything so far to put me off of it.

AUTRE: Do you feel like, in the past year, you’re at that point in your career where everything is exciting? Or has it been steady?

CAPPER: I’ve been taking a lot more risks. I’m trying to get these dream works made. I’m sending them out of the studio with no compromises. That’s one of my biggest ethoses. It makes me less of a commercial entity. The main priority of this year—having the representation—is still making sure the work has the maximum output and impact. It’s not like resting back and watching things take over. It’s been a really challenging year, and I hope there are many more to come.

AUTRE: What’s your dream at the moment? The Mountaineer climbing?

CAPPER: Yeah. You have to always have a 25-year dream. Otherwise, you don’t know what you’re aiming for. For an artist, you’re limitless. So yeah, there are ideas for Mountaineer. The machine comes in three sizes: a four ton machine, an eight ton, and then a thirty ton. That’s what I call the “Mountaineer Super Climb.” There are drawings for these. There’s a work that I call the “Walking Ship.” If you looked at it, it would look like a fishing boat of some sort. But I would modify it, I would put legs on it, so I could walk out into the sea. I would turn the cargo part into a studio. Ideally, I’d love to take it to Venice Biennale and have parties on it. Before Venice sinks!

AUTRE: What’s next for you?

CAPPER: Next year, I’ve been invited by the Sol LeWitt Foundation to participate in a residency, in Spoleto, outside of Rome. I also just found out that they’re interested in commissioning Number 10 in the long list. To get all of these ideas made may still take a few years, but that will be a great body of work. We’ll be testing those works in the mountains in Spoleto this summer. I’m really looking forward to that. It’s an expedition.

You can visit James Capper's website here. Text and photographs by Scout MacEachron. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

All Or Nothing: A Conversation With The Legendary Artist, Writer And Cultural Survivalist Jack Walls

December 3, 2015

text and interview by Adam Lehrer

Getting to talk to your heroes is a double-edged sword. On one hand, there is a massive sense of glee and feeling of, “Damn I’m doing it” that arises in anticipation of the conversation. On the other hand, the recourse of the hero in question becoming an actual flawed human being stripped of the mystical powers that you have built up around them in your mind is a serious concern. That made it all the more gratifying to me that after talking to artist and writer Jack Walls, the man became both more human AND more mythic to me throughout the conversation.

Walls is known throughout the art world as many things. A poet. A creator of images. A romantic. The long-term boyfriend of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. A perennial outsider artist rebel. An icon.

He dreamed of being a writer and an artist since he was a South Chicago gang-affiliated youth in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, surely being one of the few men to look tough with an Oscar Wilde book in his hand. With a penchant for adventure, he joined the Navy in the ‘70s, settling in New York City after.

Walls became a slightly enigmatic downtown NYC staple as Mapplethorpe’s boyfriend in the ‘80s, often appearing in Mapplethorpe’s images clad in tight jeans and a tank top. After Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989, Walls embarked on a film career, studying at Chicago Filmmakers. He tried to get a Mapplethorpe biopic off the ground for years before being frustrated into stagnation in the ‘90s.

When Ryan McGinley, Dash Snow, and Dan Colen formulated a new downtown NYC rebel art scene in the late ‘90s, they all uniformly cited one artist as a massive influence: Jack Walls. The trio was hell bent on having Walls become a mentor of sorts to them, perhaps even a father figure, and eventually Walls relented. Through the process, an entirely new generation of art weirdoes found themselves interested in the work of Jack Walls. He was the subject of a solo exhibit at RARE this past summer, while another exhibition Paintings, Et Cetera opened up at Basilica in Hudson. Though Walls claims to have no interest in the “antiquated system” that is the art world, the art world is surely interested in him.

His writing is also getting more attention than ever. His poem The Ebony Prick of the White Rose’s Thorn, an epic rumination on love, grief, and life after love, garnered near unanimous praise. Indeed, it’s a devastating read.

Few artists have been able to shift between visual art and the written word as seamlessly as Walls. When photographing him for this article in Gramercy Park, it’s clear as to why: the man oozes soul and poetry. Just sitting still, he gives off the presence of a man deep in profound contemplation. Walls and I were able to speak at length on, well, everything: his early impressions of literature, Mapplethorpe, Dash and crew, the art world, and the strength that can only be achieved through tremendous grief.

Now based in Hudson Valley, Walls is as active as ever.

ADAM LEHRER: When you went to the Navy, you took three books with you: the dictionary, the Bible, and Babel by Patti Smith. The dictionary and the Bible are, of course, important works for any aspiring writer, but what was it about Patti Smith’s book that made it the third essential book? How did it affect you as a writer?

JACK WALLS: I discovered Babel before I knew anything about Patti as a singer. I was listening to soul music. The punk thing was new. I was aware of Patti’s image, but I never listened to her. I saw that she had a book out, and I picked it up. Every time I would look back at a passage, it did something else. Right away, I knew that this was not something you read in one reading. It’s something that evolves. I thought it was interesting how she flipped language back on itself. I knew it was special. It was something that you can pick up and read starting anywhere—just like the Bible and the dictionary.

LEHRER: So you love words?

WALLS: Mm-hmm.

LEHRER: I think all artistically inclined people have one thing they’re sensitive to. Maybe a painter is sensitive to visuals. A musician is sensitive to sounds. Are you more sensitive to words than you are to visuals?

WALLS: No. I look at words as paintings. Any good writing is visual. Any good sentence paints a picture. Having said that, I spend a lot of time with photographers. [A lot of them] don’t read. Beyond that, they’re terrible spellers. Their whole thing is visual. I don’t know if that’s true of all photographers; no one’s today. But from my own personal experience, I can tell you. One of them was Robert. There are others that I’d rather not mention.

LEHRER: When you started reading heavily in Chicago—James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde—did literature fill a void that you were, up to that point, filling with gangs and that sort of lifestyle?

WALLS: I always knew how to draw and paint. They say God gives everyone a gift, and I took it for granted. The challenge for me was wanting to be a writer. When I was in seventh grade, I read Manchild in the Promised Land. I was obsessed with that book. Where I grew up, on the South Side of Chicago, wasn’t [that different] from Harlem, though Harlem was much more gritty. Even though it was tough, it was still sugarcoated in the way Claude Brown wrote Manchild in the Promised Land. It made me want to go to New York. It made me want to be a writer. It made me want to try heroin. I thought that I would have a better chance at success as a writer than as a painter. The tools were minimal—a pencil and a piece of paper. If you were big time, you would have a typewriter. To be a painter and an artist, you would need a whole arsenal of utilities. It’s a lot to carry around. Having said that, even as I was trying to make myself into a writer, I had sketchbooks. I was always doodling. I always had the reputation of being a good drawer. When I was in the military and in gangs, people would always say, “You draw so good.”

LEHRER: You describe yourself as a romantic, or being invested in romanticism. Especially from a certain time period, there’s a romantic vision of a writer. I always think of William S. Burroughs with a hashpipe sitting in a nice bed somewhere. Did you have a romantic vision of being a writer?

WALLS: Oh, yeah. I didn’t join the Navy because I was patriotic. I joined the Navy because I wanted to see the world. By that time, I had stumbled across Genet. Before I joined the Navy, I was going to the gay bars on the North Side. There were always these soldiers coming from Great Lakes, which was the naval base outside of Chicago. That sparked my imagination.

LEHRER: So, you were thirsting for experience more than anything, and hoping to filter that into your writing?

WALLS: I knew that in order for me to write, I had to go out and have adventures. I was joining the navy to write about it later. At that point, before the Navy, what was my experience? West Side Story? That was done already. Especially by the time I joined the Navy in the late ‘70s, the narrative of growing up in the inner city and being a gangbanger—that was uninteresting.

LEHRER: I read your interview with Ryan McGinley in Vice some years back. You said that gang life had a romanticism to it. Do you still feel that way? Maybe it was romantic when you were involved with it, but now hearing about what’s happening on the South Side of Chicago, there doesn’t seem to be anything romantic about it.

WALLS: Back then, we were still basically living in the 1930s. We were fashioning ourselves off Bonnie and Clyde. We were mimicking Humphrey Bogart, John Dillinger, James Cagney. We even dressed like that. I look back at it now as play-acting. These kids today are play-acting, but they’re play-acting Scarface. These guys go to Iraq, and they come back to gangbang. They learn how to gangbang in that war with real weapons. So it’s a real difference. People are not so naïve. It’s hard to romanticize people flying planes into the World Trade Center. There’s nothing romantic about that at all.

LEHRER: When you got out of the Navy, were you already making art and/or writing, or did you kind of start when you met Robert?

WALLS: I was always doing it. But I was doing it because it was what I did. I didn’t go to art school. Some people move to Manhattan specifically to start hanging out in galleries. I wasn’t overtly thinking like that. I got real jobs. I worked as an usher in a movie theatre. I tried to be a waiter. Then, I ended up as an office clerk for a car company. That’s what I was doing when I met Robert.

LEHRER: When you met him, did you know he was a famous photographer, or were you just attracted to him?

WALLS: It comes back to Babel. In Babel, one of the first pictures is of this guy holding up what I thought was a string. It was a self-portrait of Robert pushing the plunger to take the picture. I didn’t realize that was him when I met him. I was living with Robert for several months [when I realized it was him]. I went to St. Mark’s Bookstore, and they had reissued Babel. I picked it up, and when I opened the book, the picture of the guy with the string was Robert. This book… This guy—I carried it around with me for my entire military career. I didn’t put two and two together until we had known each other for about a year. And I was like, “Babe, that’s you.”

"Grief and romanticism is the same thing. If you can romanticize grief, I don’t want to say you hit the jackpot, but you really have something. What are you going to do, wallow in it?"

LEHRER: That’s amazing.

WALLS: I think experiences happen to you for a reason. And then there’s the simple fact that I’m here. Why am I here? Robert died of AIDS; most of the people I know died of AIDS. Here I am at 58-years old, healthy as a horse for the most part. Is there some sort of plan? I didn’t have my first one-man show until I was 50. I was minding my own business when I met Ryan McGinley, Dan Colen, and Dash Snow. This was the late ‘90s. In the late ‘90s, the art world had shifted, especially the young art world. It was more independent films and Sundance. Sam Rockwell. Jeffrey Wright. The list goes on and on. The art world was wide open for Ryan and Dash.

LEHRER: Those guys turned out to be incredibly successful and influential. What did you find so exciting about them when you first met them?

WALLS: Nothing.

LEHRER: Haha, nothing?

WALLS: Dash was 17-years old. He was doing this graffiti thing. I thought he was going to get in trouble. He was always running from cops. That’s also when the point and shoot came out. Photography was getting easier. Everybody became a photographer, as evidenced by Instagram. Dan Colen had just got off at RISD. He was the only one that seemed to have a plan. The first painting he ever did, which we showed to me, said “JACK.” Just my name, and he had fake diamonds and all this stuff in it. His plan was to only make two paintings a year, but they were going to cost $20,000. He thought he could make $40,000 a year, and that would be it. I didn’t know it was going to take off the way it did. I remember when Ryan told me that he was going to have a show at the Whitney. I thought it was never going to happen.

LEHRER: Were they nuisances? Were they destined to have you as their mentor?

WALLS: I don’t know. I used to party with them. We would be hanging out in Cherry Tavern. It didn’t occur to me that I would be a mentor. It was more organic, I guess. Their pictures were so good; VICE became interested in them. Ryan became their photo editor. Dash was taking pictures and that’s when he was doing these photo-realism things.

LEHRER: I feel like people are so interested in Dash because of this lifestyle or this myth that he created around himself. People forget that there was a lot of emotion and a lot of politics in his work.

WALLS: Oh yeah. He used to drive me crazy. Everything was an inside joke. Dash got locked up in LA, so he had to do some time out there. Once you get locked up, the white people hang out with the white people, the black people hang out with the black people. Dash’s natural instinct is to hang out with black kids. He goes over to them, and they say, “Uh, you can’t do that.” He was a natural rebel. And that was a part of his charm. The kid didn’t give a fuck either, which is really important. I don’t give a fuck either.

LEHRER: It was almost like a rejection of the art world, but then it became almost the status quo in the art world.

WALLS: It was not aimed at trying to impress people in the art world. That’s what it has to be. It has to be like: “Fuck you.” When I was with Robert, I saw how the art world worked. He wanted to be this “artist person.” But I actually saw the politics and mechanizations of the art world. And then Jean-Michel—poor thing. His approach to the art world was all attitude and spirit, and the art world fell at his feet.

LEHRER: You’re one of the few guys who was a part of the 1980s art world—Basquiat, Keith Harring, Robert—and the next big wave—with Dash, Dan, and those guys. Do you worry that that epic downtown scene is becoming impossible in the city now?

WALLS: Oh, it’s terrible now. We were living in the center of the universe. Now, the center of the universe is the Internet. That’s what it all boils down to. I think it’s a good tool to use to get a point across and show art. But some people want to take pictures of food all day long, or take pictures of cats.

LEHRER: I wanted to talk to you about the screenplay you wrote—Somebody’s Sins—about Robert’s early years. I know it got scrapped, but given the enduring influence he’s had, do you think you would revisit it?

WALLS: It’s being revisited right now.

LEHRER: No shit? That’s fantastic.

WALLS: I wrote that in the ‘90s. I was trying to get it picked up by Hollywood. When I first met Ryan, it was lying around, and he read it in one sitting. So that’s what I was doing in the ‘90s, writing about Robert’s early years before he became famous. But it didn’t happen. And 9/11 happened, which kickstarted me into doing paintings and making things to show.

LEHRER: After the movie didn’t come through, and you were in that period of stagnation, were you disappointed about the project, or was it deeper than that?

WALLS: What I learned from that was that any contract can be broken. In Hollywood and in New York, everybody signed on the dotted line, and it just didn’t happen. It was written about in the press and everything. I have a scrapbook of this shit. They tried to resuscitate that thing a bunch of times. About three years ago, I rewrote it. In this version, Robert is dead by page 30. When he dies, we’re already a half hour into the movie. Then, it covers Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow—they come into it. And I stopped at 64 pages. I left it open-ended. I wouldn’t call it a documentary. It’s a piece of art.

LEHRER: You have always been pretty interested in cinema, even before you went to the Chicago Filmmakers to study?

WALLS: How could you not? I grew up watching the Golden Age of film—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford. Those people know how to act. There was none of this Keanu Reeves bullshit. That’s not acting. These are personalities saying words. They lead these scandalous lives, they drink blood or whatever, and then they go make movies.

LEHRER: There are some great actors out there—Tom Hardy, Michael Fassbender. And Sean Baker just made Tangerine. He wanted to make that movie so badly that he filmed it all on his iPhone. I feel like now is an excellent time for your movie ideas to come to life because there are so many people getting them made.

WALLS: Absolutely. Hollywood is like the art world. It’s an antiquated system. I have friends around my age that are trying to make films. They’re always going around looking for money. They look ridiculous. On top of that, you don’t really need money. All you need is energy and half a brain. You can figure it out. If you have a computer, you can do just about anything. If people stop spending so much time watching porn on their computers, maybe they could get something done.

LEHRER: Did you ever have trouble identifying as an “artist?”

WALLS: Don’t get me wrong; I worked real jobs. The artist thing came later. I didn’t even start considering myself an artist until those kids—Dash, Ryan, and Dan—started getting all this press and talking about me like, “Artist/writer Jack Walls was a really big influence on them.” To this very day, whenever someone introduces me as an artist, the stress kicks in. When someone comes up to me and asks, “What do you do?” I say, “My name is Jack Walls. Google it.” They’re asking to be entertained. Are you kidding me? Then, there’s the other side. There are people who want to always talk about what they’re doing. “Oh, I work in small construction pieces, and then there’s this collage.” Fucking shut up. I’d rather hang out with musicians. You just hand them a guitar. They actually do something.

LEHRER: Patti Smith came out with Just Kids. I’m assuming you read it.

WALLS: Oh, of course. I had my “Ebony Prick of the White Rose’s Thorn” show, and she came. She gave me the first signed copy hot off the press.

LEHRER: What was it like to read about Robert from the perspective of a woman who loved him before Robert really knew who he was?

WALLS: She is a really good writer, but I’ve heard those stories. I heard them from her; I heard them from him. It was nice to open her book.

LEHRER: I read an interview of you in Hillbilly Magazine, and you said there was a part of you that hated the art world. Do you still hate the art world?

WALLS: It is what it is. The whole thing is really smoke and mirrors. It’s maybe the same twenty people that are trying to control things from the top. Then there’s everybody else. I am what I am, but I’m still not a mainstream artist. I’m still on the outside, basically. I was never really accepted by the art world. I wanted to be left alone for the most part. Some people in the art world are really good people. But here’s the thing: Ryan and Dan became everything in the art world that I was trying to avoid.

LEHRER: You mean an art star, basically?

WALLS: Yeah.

LEHRER: You have such a loyal support base. There are artists out there who love your work so much. So you were able to infiltrate that world.

WALLS: It wasn’t intentional.

LEHRER: Are you content these days with where your career and your life have taken you?

WALLS: I’m open to having shows. I want to show. I want people to like my art and buy my art. I really do enjoy the art world in that I’m happy for the young people that are coming up now. They’re trying to change the game. The kids now in their mid-20s, they have so many inspirations around them—whether it’s me, Ryan, Dash, Warhol. You could even go back and study Renoir or Van Gogh. It’s all laid out. It’s there for the taking.

LEHRER: I want to talk to you about “The Ebony Prick of the White Rose’s Thorn.” I love the line in there, “I dream so much of you that I might never reawaken, et cetera.” You have suffered tremendous loss throughout your life. Is it easier for you to work through grief, or does grief just floor you?

WALLS: Grief and romanticism is the same thing. If you can romanticize grief, I don’t want to say you hit the jackpot, but you really have something. What are you going to do, wallow in it? Just accept it. Actually, like it. It’s emotional to grieve. You don’t get to experience it all the time. I took a friend with me to the [Dash Snow show at the] Brandt Foundation, a new friend that I’ve only been seeing for a couple of months. We go for a drink afterwards, and we’re in this bar. All of a sudden, he bursts out crying. I’m like, “What’s the matter with you?” He says, “Jack, I was so moved today.” The whole theme was a lot about grief. Grief is when it gets you. I try to be a badass sometimes. I try to say I’m not even thinking about that shit. It’s when it gets you. My father died in May of 2001. I didn’t grieve that until about ten years later. It’s going to get you at some point.

LEHRER: Was it about unresolved issues, or just because that’s how it happened?

WALLS: I couldn’t go there. I didn’t even go to the funeral. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go home. This might just be me, but you can’t be a normal person and expect to be an artist at the same time. For me, it’s all or nothing.

Jack Walls' The Ebony Prick of The White Rose's Thorn can be purchased here. Follow Jack Walls on Instagram (@hifibangalore). Text and interview by Adam Lehrer. Photographs by Scout MacEachron. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

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We Buy Souls, a diary from Miami #miamibeach #artweek

Your sad little lit scene with its sad little parties is full of clout chasers and sycophantic social climbing gatekeepers in Tea Hačić-Vlahović‘s electrifying new novel 𝗚𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗠𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿. Read an interview with the author by @summer.bowie on autre.love now #teahacic #novel #writing #author #quotes

Family band 🌴 Thanks Miami 📸 @stosdada

“If my artist friends can make art out of anything, and architecture is art, I can make architecture out of anything.” Frank Gehry (1929–2025) Quote from our interview of Frank Gehry - SS23 “Utopia.” Photographs by @magnusunnar #frankgehry #architecture

Last night in Miami, during Art Week, Autre Magazine x @dartcarproject hosted an intimate dinner celebrating women in art and motorsports. Honoring racecar driver Zoe Barry (FW25 “Work In Progress” cover), the night brought together cultural icons—including Kid Cudi, George Clinton, Crystal Waters, Olivier Picasso, Jeffrey Deitch, Tony Shafrazi, and Spring McManus—for a family-style dinner under the stars at The Miami Beach EDITION. A celebration of creativity, speed, and women leading the way. Special thanks to @caddis_life for making things come to life . And thank you to the entire @miamibeachedition team and @purplepr #ArtWeekMiami #AutreMagazine #DrivenArtistsRacing #WomenInMotorsports #ZoeBarry #MiamiNights #ArtMeetsMotorsports #CulturalIcons #FamilyStyleDinner #MiamiBeachEdition #Innovation #Creativity #WomenLeading #MiamiEvents

In Art/Life — One Year Performance, Tehching Hsieh tied himself by rope to fellow artist Linda Montano for an entire spin around the sun. They had not met prior. They remained celibate, slept in separate beds, and made photographs of each other every day. On autre.love read a review of Hsieh’s retrospective exhibition on view at @diaartfoundation beacon Text by Hank Manning #performanceart #tehchinghsieh #art #diabeacon

WORK IN PROGRESS 🏎️ The logistical ballet of getting a McLaren Artura GT4 race car custom-wrapped by @mickalenethomas for @dartcarproject delivered to the @fontainebleaumiamibeach where it will be on view in the hotel’s Departures Drive during @artbasel week (presented by Autre Magazine). In Autre’s FW25 WIP issue , racecar driver @zoebarryracing takes the McLaren around the track in West Virginia (photographed by @amandademme with support from @caddis_life ) and speaks to veteran driver Lyn St James about the trials and tribulations of working in a field dominated by the preconceived notions of how much women can achieve behind the wheel. The McLaren, the helmets, and race suit have all been customized and designed by contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas See the car at Departures Drive at the @fontainebleaumiamibeach from December 1st to December 7th #mclaren #racecar #artbasel #miamibasel

BERLIN BASEMENT FIND. 16 copies of the ultra rare @nadialeecohen and @peeweeherman recently found in a basement in Berlin. This is the opposite of a Black Friday sale - originally $20 now $50 due to rarity. Link in bio. #peeweeherman #nadialeecohen #paulreubens

New York, New York 🗽What a dream to present @performanyc biennial’s grand finale with @motherdaughterholyspirit.nyc and close everything out with a legendary performance by the one and only @crystalwaters A very special thanks to @staud.clothing for the support #performabiennial #crystalwaters #party

Legendary actor Udo Kier has passed away at the age of 81. Born in the ruins of World War II, he escaped a world of violence to become a muse to Warhol and countless artists and directors. With his thick German accent, he had a chameleonic presence on the silver screen that was magnetic and transfixing. We were lucky to spend an afternoon with Kier for Autre’s second issue at his home and pool in Palm Springs on a 115 degree day. In a conversation with Charlotte Taschen (@germaninla) he talked about always playing the German villain: “I like what I do, and it’s always interesting and always a bit nasty.” Udo Kier (1944–2025) Photographs by Julian Feeld #udokier

AUTRE Magazine presents the Performa 2025 Biennial Grand Finale with generous support from @staud.clothing , cohosted by @motherdaughterholyspirit.nyc Join us on November 23, 8:00–11:00 PM at 424 Broadway for an unforgettable night of music with Crystal Waters, and complimentary drinks and copies of Waters’ FW25 Autre cover tix - click link in bio #performabiennial #crystalwaters #nyc #workinprogress

“There is a pivotal point in the life of a work when I’ve done all I can, and then I’m obsolete; I totally vanish.” @anne_imhof AUTRE “Citizen” FW24 🏴‍☠️ WYWG out Dec 5 on @pan__hq WYWG is a deeply personal survey presenting several new bodies of work that reflect on and further develop a number of core elements that have constituted Imhof’s repertoire from the outset. Throughout the exhibition, Imhof explores notions of finitude, reality and artifice, chance and fate, absence and presence, set against a backdrop of postapocalyptic isolation. #anneimhof #contemporaryart #artistspotlight

Autre’s FW25 “work in progress” issue is officially out now. In the pages of this issue, we took an experimental, provocative, deconstructed approach. We stripped our logo from the cover. We stripped the ads from the inside pages. We zoomed into the contemporary nature of work AND process in the 21st century—a gig economy of burnout and radical inequality. From prehistoric biology to PR to movie making and race car driving. How do we survive, creatively, in a time of extreme existential crisis? The issue is also, loosely, an exploration of magazine making and the role of cultural synthesizers in a time when print media is more exciting and more read than ever, but is virtually unsupported and challenged by algorithmic, attention driven social media and AI. In our cover story with Betsy Johnson, she curates five years of artifacts—notes, relics and trash—from her creative process to reveal a psychological portrait of an artist of our time. Purchase the issue now - 🔗 in bio #wip

Midnight, the stars, and you ✨ Last night, at the expansive new @laeyeworks campus in Los Angeles, Autre Magazine invited guests on a journey through space and time to celebrate its FW25 “Work in Progress” issue. The evening opened with a captivating panel featuring @caltechedu astrophysicists Katherine de Kleer, Cameron Hummels, and Mike Brown, moderated by Autre’s managing editor @summer.bowie , who guided a conversation spanning black holes, dark matter, and the possibility of life beyond Earth. The discussion gave way to an intimate cocktail soirée, where guests mingled under the stars with drinks courtesy of @madremezcal . photographs by Oliver Kupper #autremagazine #event #nightlife #workinprogress #laeyeworks

“We wanted to destroy art—museums, galleries, everything.” Marta Minujín In conversation with @hansulrichobrist for AUTRE WIP (🔗 in bio) Marta Minujín with her first mattresses in her studio on rue Delambre, París, 1963 #martaminujín #hansulrichobrist