Richard Prince

Richard Prince is one of the most influential, important, and controversial fine artists on the planet. Renowned for pioneering appropriation art, his “Untitled (Cowboy)” series of rephotographed Marlboro ads includes a piece that sold for $3.7 million, ranking among the most expensive photographs ever auctioned. In 2021, his “Runaway Nurse” painting sold at auction for an astonishing $12.1 million. In 2007, the Guggenheim Museum hosted “Richard Prince: Spiritual America,” a comprehensive retrospective of his work. Richard’s methods challenge traditional notions of authorship and originality. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Vivo Barefoot http://Vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA25' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rick Rubin?

  Tetragrammaton.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I got to New York in seventy-four and in seventy-seven I kind of made a breakthrough. But for about ten years to eighty-seven, nothing... I mean, I had shows and I had artist friends.

• 0:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  And my audience were...

• 0:37Rick Rubin?

  What was the break... what was that first breakthrough?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  It was... now they call it refotography.

• 0:41Rick Rubin?

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  And it was just simply me...

• 0:44Rick Rubin?

  Did they call it refotography or you called it?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I did.

• 0:47Rick Rubin?

  Okay.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  It was a very awkward term at the time because I was trying to figure out what I was doing.

• 0:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  And basically, I picked up a camera and I tried to play it as if it was an instrument because I didn't know anything about it. I had no clue about how to work a camera. But I thought, "Well, all my friends are picking up guitars and they don't know how to play the guitar, but they're going to see the Jeeves."

• 1:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  And within a week, they got a gig. So maybe I could do the same thing with the camera. And I called it an electronic scissor, meaning if I looked at another image through the viewfinder... let's just say if I tore out an advertising image of a cowboy, like the Marlboro, and I pushpinned it to the wall and then stood, put my camera in front of it, and looked through the lens and kind of cropped. Two things would happen.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I could look through the viewfinder at ten in the morning and come back at four in the afternoon, and I would see basically the same thing. Nothing was changed. So the whole idea of the decisive moment...

• 2:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  ...completely eradicated.

• 2:13Rick Rubin?

  So then it's a new form of photography.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And the other thing was...

• 2:19Speaker 01

  The idea of the electronic scissor, instead of tearing the page out of the magazine and scotch taping, or cutting it and pasting it and collaging, I made a real photograph.

• 2:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  It wasn't a collage anymore.

• 2:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  There were no scenes.

• 2:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and it was a new piece that didn't exist before.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  And it was a real photograph.

• 2:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  So those two things happened, but it took a while. Because I didn't know what I was doing, so I started writing about it. But my audience at the time, there were just a few artists who kind of dug it and thought it was interesting.

• 3:04Rick Rubin?

  Tell me how you felt about it at the time. Did you think it was interesting?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  I thought it was, I thought it was new.

• 3:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I thought it was interesting because, well, the photography part of the art world completely rejected it. And I was also picking images that weren't necessarily aesthetically pleasing, you know, advertising images.

• 3:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Because I was working at Time Life Magazine. And they published seven magazines at the time. And when I would come in Mondays, there would always be a set of new magazines. So it's like, I would be excited then because I would go through the magazines and say, well, maybe there's a new cowboy, or maybe there's a new watch. Because my job was to tear up the magazines and give the editorial, which they call hard copies. And what, at the end of the day, all I was left with were these images of advertisements.

• 4:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  But nobody called for them.

• 4:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  And I kept looking at them, thinking, well, there's no real author. Who's the author behind? These are art-directed images. And they're very real. They have a virtuoso reality that's so real that it's unreal.

• 4:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  So it's something I didn't really need to think about, the meaning. They didn't really have. I just could organize them. Like, I think it was, what was it? William Gibson, some sort of pattern recognition. And, you know, I would, I would notice, like, there was a lot of watch ads, a lot of pens, perfume. And so... I would just start to refotograph what was plentiful, what was always there.

• 4:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  I wasn't on a treasure hunt. I was just whatever was presented to me that week.

• 5:01Rick Rubin?

  Did you call it refotography right away?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. But what's interesting too is that at first I was calling what I was doing pirating because I was very, I was very aware of what was going on with sampling.

• 5:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  And it just started, you know.

• 5:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  But I thought, I didn't really was comfortable with appropriation. That seemed a little academic. But I also ran into other artists who were also working with images. So that was important to me too. You know, to become friends with other people that had that kind of sensibility of growing up at a particular time.

• 5:46Rick Rubin?

  Do you think it's just the nature of the time and the place and the way information comes at you that other people see? They don't see what you see the way you see it, but they are looking at the same thing and then having their own interpretation of how to deal with this information?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think we were the first generation to grow up with television. And you know, there was always television, magazine, movies. At least if you ask the artists that I came up with, they would probably say have a very similar experience.

• 6:23Rick Rubin?

  And if you think before television and magazines, there wasn't really a place for advertising.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 6:32Rick Rubin?

  Advertising was a new thing.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and it certainly was, for me, it was a conceptual thing too. How do you frame this particular type of thing, this product? And I was always interested in the concept of, like for instance, the guy that presented The Cowboy to Marlboro was a guy named Leo Burnett. And in 1949, the year I was born,

• 7:10Speaker 01

  This guy LaComb, this photographer, did an essay on cowboys. And on the cover of Life, that, if you look at that cover, it looks like a Marlboro, kinda like a Marlboro guy. So, that was in forty-nine, and this guy Leo Burnett, I think pitched the idea to Marlboro in fifty-three. You know, he wanted a more masculine deal. So, all this was very conceptual. And I liked it, and I liked reading about the background of all this. It was kind of interesting to me, because I was living inside of a giant novel in Time Life.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  The building itself became the incubator. It had its own hospital, cafeteria, bookstore.

• 7:59Rick Rubin?

  Where was it?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  It was right across from Radio City Music Hall.

• 8:03Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And I would just, I basically haunted that place, went to the archives, I would go and do research. You know, but yeah, Time Life was my studio.

• 8:19Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I mean, because I didn't have a studio.

• 8:23Rick Rubin?

  No, but it's amazing, the resources and the information.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  And I actually looked forward. I had a stupid job, of course. It was just a bullshit job, tearing up the magazine. But I actually, and you know, I had to have something to pay the, you know, I had a crappy little apartment in the East Village.

• 8:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  But I had to have something to pay the rent. But I actually didn't really mind going there. Because it kind of like, that's where it happened, really, for me. For some reason, there was this kind of thing going on where artists were documenting what they did.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  In photographic and then narrative form. And they would like be pasting it up on these pieces of cardboard. And that's what they would show. And there was a gallery called John Gibson that was kind of dedicated to this way of working. And I really hung out at that gallery. Like I really was a pest, a kind of like a, you know, do you need coffee? I mean, I would do anything. And I became friends with the wife's owner. And she tolerated my presence on Saturdays. And, you know, but, you know, Vito Akonci would show there and Dennis Oppenheim.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  But then there were these other people, James Collins and Peter Hutchinson. And it was called, and they call it narrative art. But they used photography. They weren't photographers in that. So that was a kind of a stepping stone also. So I think the two, the combination of that gallery and then the time life experience. I remember there were four advertisements in the New York Times Magazine section that came out, I think of living rooms. You know, really dumb looking, generic.

• 10:27Rick Rubin?

  Like from a Sears catalog? What would look, you'd see in the Sears catalog? A model living room.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Like from a sitcom.

• 10:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, nothing that anyone would ever actually live in.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I, you know, but apparently that's what people did.

• 10:41Rick Rubin?

  Hard to know.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  You know? And it wasn't like they were, it wasn't like I looked at them as some sort of alien or sci fi or social science fiction. I just thought, this isn't something that I, that if I put this up at a gallery, I don't know if I'm going to get away with this. I don't know if people are going to like, because I don't know if I even liked it.

• 11:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  And I felt very uncomfortable. And it kind of visually, it wasn't very inviting. It wasn't very, it wasn't beautiful. I mean, but there was something that I needed to do. But what was my contribution? What was, how was I? You know, transformatively. And that's where the camera came in. That's where the camera really surrounded the living room. When I looked through the lens.

• 11:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  It was like absorbing.

• 11:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. I was gonna say the nature photography also adds, uh, you can call it a filter or a...

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Adds a truth.

• 11:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah. It's in music, sometimes if you have equipment with tubes, it's more pleasant to listen to the sound through the tubes. And you could say it's more truthful, but in a way, it's more colored. It's more beautiful than what the musician heard. The tube is doing its thing. And photography can do that. You know, in films, you know, you can see technicolor. And obviously, technicolor is not what the world looks like. It's beautiful.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's, and you know that these images are are highly art directed after the image is taken, too. On all the...

• 12:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  All the prep work that goes in before they're published. But the idea of presenting these living rooms as a standalone photograph, which then I presented

• 12:51Speaker 01

  as normally as possible.

• 12:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Just like other photographers. Like, I matted it.

• 12:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Framed it.

• 12:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, ordinary.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Very ordinary.

• 13:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It was the content that was radical.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And when you, and I remember when I first exhibited, people like would look at them and they weren't quite sure, is this... It wasn't even a question of, is this your photograph? Or who took, I mean, what?

• 13:23Rick Rubin?

  What is it?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  It's just like, what? And that's what I was kind of... That was the kind of reaction.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  That I received, that I got, but I knew that that was a reaction that no one else was getting from their work. And I felt that, yeah, maybe this is a little different.

• 13:47Rick Rubin?

  Did your opinion of it change after you showed it? Did you have a deeper understanding of it when you showed it?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  A little bit. I remember trying to, is there a way to make them more beautiful? I remember thinking about that. Because at first I was, not only, I mean, the living rooms, you know, there were always more than one. I mean, one, you might not believe, but you have to believe that if there's four of them.

• 14:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, four different living rooms, different furniture.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  You have to believe that this does, you know. I was always trying to take the speculation out of the work, the idea of the guessing, the umpiring, you know, the judgment. I was trying to take as much interpretation and put as much nonfiction into the work as I could. And the idea of making it into a real photograph, I believe, well, photographs, you tend to believe a photograph.

• 14:56Rick Rubin?

  Photograph is nonfiction. But interesting, what you're photographing is sort of fiction, sort of.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  It was until I re-photographed.

• 15:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but it was real, it was real furniture, but it was art-directed in a way where it was not someone's living room, likely. It was likely a set. But when you photographed it, then it became real.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Then it had this virtuoso reality to it. And I think at the time, what was in the air at the time, around 77, was this idea of like, what's real, what's not real? That was the big question. Who do I believe in? Or what do I believe?

• 15:41Rick Rubin?

  What else can you remember that was going on in seventy-seven?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there was the, I mean, I thought the punk thing was...

• 15:48Rick Rubin?

  Sex Pistols would have been seventy-seven.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I, and I thought seventy-seven was a year in which I thought a lot of things in the art world were beginning, you know, my generation was just starting with their, you know, getting their chops together and just starting to have the opportunity to maybe form collectives and show each other what they were up to and then maybe even showing publicly in alternative spaces.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  And I think the conceptual and the minimalists and the post-studio were kind of winding down. But I think back at any time during, at least in my experience, the art, there's always three or four, maybe even five things going on at the same time, different types of styles or different types of scenes. And, you know, I belonged, for lack of a term, you know, they, they called us the picture generation, you know, and I sort of was hanging around with that crowd.

• 17:09Rick Rubin?

  Who else was in that group?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Well, you know, people like Cindy Sherman, people like Troy Bronch, Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein was a very important, he was a little older than us, but he was, a guy named James Welling, Barbara Kruger was a really good friend of mine at the time. And...

• 17:37Speaker 01

  I'm not sure what happens now in the art world, but I don't know if people get together. But it's one of the things that I remember. I mean, luck has a lot to do with all of this. But I think I was very lucky because I only, when I came to New York in seventy-four, I came for like the idea of staying for three months. And it just turned into like forever. You know, I just kept staying.

• 18:04Rick Rubin?

  Did you come with the idea of becoming a fine artist?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Well, I was already, I was already making work, very traditional.

• 18:12Rick Rubin?

  Tell me before that, like, how did you come to the idea of this is what you want to do as a kid?

• 18:16Speaker 01

  I was always, I was always interested in making art, drawing as a child. You know, like when people say, you know, people can play the piano by ear, I think they call it. I was able to draw. I could sit down with a pencil and draw a portrait of my grandfather or my sister or whoever was around. And I could make it look like, without any...

• 18:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  I could do that when I was like nine. And it was just like something natural.

• 18:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  It was easy. I mean, I never really thought about it.

• 18:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  I never had to.

• 18:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Never even gave it a second thought. But I mostly, I got, you know, really sidetracked into wanting to become a musician. I mean, that was my first.

• 19:05Rick Rubin?

  What, do you play an instrument?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  I do. I, you know, I have over the years played in little, you know, bands. I mean, every artist. We were all in bands and everything like that.

• 19:19Rick Rubin?

  What instrument do you play?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  I play a little piano and a little guitar. It always seemed with the music then,

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I didn't like the idea of performing or being, you know, having to do it in public. The idea of collaboration wasn't a big thing with me. And...

• 19:41Speaker 01

  The idea of acting or, you know, having a that kind of shtick on stage has never, you know, appealed to me. And I'd always thought I'd hit a wall. I always hit a wall with the, with the, even, even the idea of playing the guitar. I could only go so far. With the art, there's never been a problem with that. There's never, there's never been a stop. Things just come out of that, you know, and they, and they still do.

• 20:14Rick Rubin?

  It's great.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  It's, it's very strange how. And I go back.

• 20:21Rick Rubin?

  So you might go back to re-photographing.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  I re-photograph, I still re-photograph, I still occasionally, I'm trying to make a new cowboy type of image.

• 20:33Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  I've never gave, given up on the jokes. The jokes are just endless.

• 20:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me the story of the jokes. How did it start?

• 20:40Speaker 01

  I wanted to draw again. This is like eighty-five. I moved into a house with musicians. They were friends of mine and they were, they were trying to make music.

• 20:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  But I wanted to draw again. Cause I had given up drawing, I'd given up anything with the, associated with the hand. I had read things that always not associated with anything with the hand anymore. And I kind of said, well, maybe I'll turn that around. So I, I decided I wanted to draw, but what do you draw? That's the thing. For me, subject matter is first, interpretation or how to do it is second. You know? So going through all these magazines, I, I always loved the cartoons. You know, whether it was in Playboy, New Yorker, Easy Rider had some really great cartoons. And I said, I'm going to draw something that's already been drawn again.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  I didn't want to make things up.

• 21:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  I had decided, I didn't want to.

• 21:42Rick Rubin?

  You're like documenting something that's already in the world.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I didn't want to like. I didn't want it to start with me.

• 21:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  I wanted to.

• 21:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you know what it is about? It's interesting.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Because I wanted to be, I wanted it to be believed. I wanna be, I wanna believe what I look at. And I wanted people to believe what they looked at when they were looking at what I did.

• 22:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  But if it came from me, like if I said, oh, I dreamt this, why? Why would anyone believe that?

• 22:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  You know, I was interested in the truth.

• 22:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  So, again, if I could just take as much interpretation out of it. And like, the idea of the critic or the judge or the umpire weighing in.

• 22:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  I didn't, I didn't need that, I didn't want that. Subjectivity was something I wasn't interested in. It had always been associated with art.

• 22:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I wanted to go beyond that. So the idea of drawing something that was already drawn, oh, cartoons are drawn. So I just redrew my favorite. This guy named Whitney Darrow was one of my favorite cartoonists. So I redrew it. But I, I knew what to do and how to do it. Because I, you know, craft, unfortunately, it makes it easier if you, if you know a little bit about the craft. And I knew, you know, you could spend years in an art supply store just picking up paper.

• 23:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  But I knew what paper to use.

• 23:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I knew what hot press stash was. I knew a number four B pencil.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  I knew exactly what to use right away and I could just do it that day.

• 23:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, so very little experimentation.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  So I just redrew the cartoon.

• 23:35Rick Rubin?

  You draw it scaled, same size?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Same, about, about this big.

• 23:40Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh, and the original was smaller?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Yes, a little bit. And it was a spot on reproduction, but it was hand drawn.

• 23:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Even the punchline.

• 23:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And I started calling, but the thing was, I called them jokes.

• 23:58Rick Rubin?

  But they were comics.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  They were cartoons, yeah. And I realized after a while, so I would send, and it was funny. I sent these cartoons to this guy in Chicago. And lo and behold, I would get a check in the mail for thirty-five hundred dollars. Astounding to me, I, cause I was, none of my art ever sold.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  These were the very first things.

• 24:25Rick Rubin?

  Is that true?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:26Rick Rubin?

  So up until this point, nothing sold?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  I mean, nothing, nothing. The cowboys, when they were first shown, nothing.

• 24:32Rick Rubin?

  Nothing.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Ever.

• 24:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  None of the photographs ever showed. So I sent them to this guy Hudson, who had a gallery in Chicago.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  And he didn't have a show, he just sold them. I said, this is, this is great, this is unbelievable.

• 24:48Rick Rubin?

  Were you operating under the assumption that nothing would ever sell at that point?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, yeah. I was trying to find jobs.

• 24:55Rick Rubin?

  How many years has it been?

• 24:55Speaker 01

  It had been, it had been like since seventy, nineteen seventy, seventy-one, I was making drawings and...

• 25:05Speaker 01

  But long story short, I was calling them jokes and I realized, it's not a joke.

• 25:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  If I wanted a joke.

• 25:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  And, and again, this, this is what happens.

• 25:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  I said to myself, I've got to drop the image and just concentrate on the punchline.

• 25:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, because you're calling them jokes.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:25Rick Rubin?

  You also could have gone the other way and decided to call them cartoons, but you didn't do that.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  I, and yeah, but, and then I had this...

• 25:33Rick Rubin?

  Did you feel like the fact that you were calling them jokes was like a clue?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  It was wrong.

• 25:38Rick Rubin?

  Nobody also was like, uh, an arrow.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  It was, and, and the arrow hit. So eighty-five turns into eighty-six, I was invited back to the ICP, International Center for Photography, to give a lecture on my work.

• 25:56Rick Rubin?

  Photography?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  You know, like...

• 25:57Rick Rubin?

  I thought they don't like you.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I get there.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  And there's a fucking line around the block. I'm thinking there's gonna be, what, five or six people?

• 26:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  And what I don't realize is that apparently, you know, of course, I'd had shows in New York, but there was a little bit of a underground audience for the work.

• 26:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  And so we're talking about maybe eight years into this practice that people wanted to find out more. And of course, I have a it was organized by a very good friend of mine, Marvin Heiferman, who was the first guy to show the photographs. And of course, I have a panic attack and I can hardly go in.

• 26:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I mean, I just flipped out.

• 26:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  And I had sublet in my apartment. I go back to my apartment. I get a call from this gallerist wanting to come over for a studio visit. And I said to the woman, I said, well, I don't have a studio, but I'd love to come to your gallery.

• 27:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And the next thing I know, I move in. I move into the gallery.

• 27:18Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  They have a back room.

• 27:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Which I took over.

• 27:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And I started looking, I started buying joke magazines. And I remember going to the Strand and I'd go to the humor section. I started checking out all these jokes.

• 27:38Rick Rubin?

  And it was important that you would never write a joke?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  No, not at that point.

• 27:43Rick Rubin?

  It had to be

• 27:45Speaker 01

  an existing

• 27:45Rick Rubin?

  found material.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:47Rick Rubin?

  And did you have to like the joke or was it something else?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I, the joke in the end had to be, it was a way of, for me, it was a way of surviving. It was serious. It was the way they were written too. The jokes are very strange sentences, the way they're, you know, like

• 28:08Rick Rubin?

  The structure of the sentence.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  The structure of the sentence is very different from other sentences.

• 28:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Like

• 28:16Speaker 01

  My father was always drinking. He saw a sign that says, "Drink Canada Dry." So he went up there. That's the joke.

• 28:24Rick Rubin?

  Well, Canada Dry.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And that's a very weird sentence.

• 28:27Rick Rubin?

  Awkward.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Awkward. And I was very much into comedians, too. I think they're really kind of important.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  There's no doubt in my mind, at least for me, they're important.

• 28:39Rick Rubin?

  Me, too.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  You know.

• 28:40Rick Rubin?

  Who were your favorites?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you know, Lenny Bruce, obviously, Richard Pryor. Dick Gregory was a big, you know, I just found that Bob Newhart 1959 album, The Button Down, which became a huge.

• 28:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, had a good time.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  But, you know, I loved all the comedians I used to watch as a kid on Ed Sullivan, you know, Jackie Carter, Jackie Vernon. I loved all the Borscht Belt. You know, Rodney Dangerfield is perhaps maybe the biggest comedian for me. I mean, George Cullen's a genius, you know, but.

• 29:22Rick Rubin?

  Rodney's special.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Rodney's very special. I managed, finally, after about 10 years negotiating with his wife, to buy his archive.

• 29:30Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  And it's, you know, I have, I've bought two. I bought Milton Berle at an estate sale, his archive. I managed to buy his, all his jokes were written on these card files. And they're organized by, by subject.

• 29:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, great.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  When you asked me about the straight arrow.

• 29:51Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Because to me, the joke was like the refotography for me. And I never thought to make another breakthrough.

• 30:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  But.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  You know, the cartoons were okay. You know, it was, you know, the idea of redrawing something that was already drawn. But when I got to New York and I went to, and I never went back to California. I just left all my stuff and I moved into this gallery. And she gave me this back room as a studio, because I didn't have a studio. I said, what, how do I deal with the jokes? And so I decided first to write them by hand, because again, I wasn't associated. I would write them in my own handwriting. And I would pick jokes that were fairly autobiographical. So it was sort of like self-torture. That's all. Very simple idea.

• 30:50Rick Rubin?

  Jokes that related to you or your life.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  It's like, I should have written that joke.

• 30:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  But it's okay.

• 30:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  I don't have to. It's already been written.

• 31:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  I'll write it again.

• 31:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  And I'll put it on an 11 by 14 coated stock. I went down to this warehouse on Broadway. Just spent days looking for the right piece of paper. Ended up with this 11 by 14 coated stock. And I wrote out, the first joke was, I went to a psychiatrist. He said, tell me everything I did. So he's doing my act.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  And I didn't get it. I just, but the, and like, where do I locate myself in that joke? Am I the psychiatrist? Am I the patient?

• 31:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And the idea of doing-

• 31:44Rick Rubin?

  And what's your act?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And doing my act.

• 31:46Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  And what is my act at this point?

• 31:48Rick Rubin?

  Exactly.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  And it was the perfect joke. What is my act?

• 31:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  And I realized, you know, I don't have an act. So what is this, so what is the psychiatrist even talking about doing my, you know, now he's doing my act?

• 32:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I have, oh, so I have an act?

• 32:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  So anyway, I write it out and I pinned it to the wall and I said to myself,

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Can I do this?

• 32:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  That's the question.

• 32:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  It's not getting away with it.

• 32:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Can I call, can I invite someone up and say, "This is my work."

• 32:28Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  This little, very modest.

• 32:32Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  $10.

• 32:34Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  That's the price that I put on the joke, the very first ones.

• 32:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Rick Rubin?

  So the jokes were the first thing that sold. You said the guy in Chicago sold.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Sold, yep. And then I started, I stayed in New York. At the time, I was looking for any job I could support myself with. And I knew I wasn't going to, you know, make it with the jokes, but I felt that I had to do this. It was funny. The feeling I had was if I had walked into a gallery and I had seen someone put handwritten jokes up on a wall and called them their art, I would have been jealous.

• 33:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  And when I have that feeling, I know that's where the arrow should be pointing.

• 33:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I said, "Well, wait a minute. I don't have to be jealous. I'm the one who's doing it."

• 33:34Rick Rubin?

  It actually happened.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  And it happened very organically. It didn't happen overnight, obviously. It happened because I was, you know, drawing and miscalling the cartoons' jokes. And so, and also, I had never seen this kind of subject matter, or even the radicality of the funneling of the information down to this little piece of paper.

• 33:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  But yet, the telling, "Tell me everything." That joke.

• 34:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I mean, "Yeah, I'm gonna tell you everything."

• 34:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And I just sort of started ripping with the idea of the joke. And it just became, "Okay, let's paint." And another artist, of course, would have maybe...

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Done something very crazy in terms of materials and how it was presented. My idea was that the subject matter was radical. I didn't need to radicalize how it was presented.

• 34:40Rick Rubin?

  You presented it in an ordinary way.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  So I decided, what's more ordinary than stretchers, canvas and paint? Completely every day. And that's what I, and then I decided to learn how to silk screen. Because silk screen at that point was a dead medium.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Warhol had exhausted it. I was a huge fan, of course, of Warhol, but he had exhausted it. There was only one silk screening company left in New York that was on Varick Street. And there were no more silk screen inks because they were outlawed because they were so toxic. So the only silk screening were hobby inks, which when you use them, they would fade away in three months. They would disappear.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And of course, that's what happened to some of my jokes. When you talk about collectors.

• 35:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  I had a collector call me up three months after he bought one of my jokes. He said, Richard, the joke has disappeared. And I said, well, I'll give you an option. And it's funny, this guy was Albert Brooks's brother. The comedian's brother. And actually, he was one of the funniest. And he ran an ad agency. And he was one of the funniest guys I'd ever.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  I'd never met Albert Brooks, but his brother was a big time Los Angeles collector. Calls me up. Joke's disappeared. It's a ghost. And I said, well, tell you what, I'll buy it back. But there are only four of those. And I said, you know, I used magic ink, disappearing ink.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I completely like bullshit. They were supposed to do this.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  But I said, don't worry, I mean, I'll buy it back, because there's only four.

• 36:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Of course, that's what collectors want to hear.

• 36:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  I suppose, I don't.

• 36:41Rick Rubin?

  No, it's like the stamp that's printed upside down, you know, it's.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  I was doing my act.

• 36:46Rick Rubin?

  It's more collectible.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I was doing my act.

• 36:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  On the phone.

• 36:52Rick Rubin?

  It's a question I had for you. If you had a choice of buying a Monet, signed by Monet, or a Monet signed by Picasso, which one do you want?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably the one by Picasso.

• 37:03Rick Rubin?

  Me too.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  I think, you know, you're getting, especially if it's an homage.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that it's an interesting question.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  But yeah, I agree, I'd go on by Picasso.

• 37:17Rick Rubin?

  It's interesting. And I was thinking about, I know you've published well-known books.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:23Rick Rubin?

  That you have authored.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Catcher in the Rye.

• 37:26Rick Rubin?

  Catcher in the Rye, written by Richard Prince.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, it's funny, that book, we took it to a number of printing presses.

• 37:35Rick Rubin?

  They wouldn't do it.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  I wouldn't touch, it was very, um, very.

• 37:39Rick Rubin?

  Litigious.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. So, I think it was published finally in China, I'm not sure. A really good friend of mine, John McQuinney, who has since passed away, he was a bookseller. He operated in what I call the gray area, meaning he sold first editions, and he sold art that had a little to do with book art, or he was trying to marry the two when he unfortunately passed away. But he was the guy who got that off the ground and saw that. And, and when we got the feel of that book, that when you pick it up, I mean, I'm a bibliophile,

• 38:23Speaker 01

  which I guess, you know, I like books more than people. I guess that's the definition.

• 38:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And when we got the book back from the, when it was first published, I could feel the weight, the paper, the dust jacket, everything was perfect. I'm trying to think what was different about. I think the only thing that was different was I doubled the price of what a normal Catcher in the Rye would sell for in a Barnes and Noble. That's what was different about the book. And other than that.

• 39:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  It's this acceptance as Richard Prince, you know.

• 39:05Rick Rubin?

  Is it only on the cover or inside too? Like on the page, the author's page?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  I think it's Richard, I think it's Richard Prince. I think we removed, we, on the back of the first edition of A Real Catcher in Rye is his, the image of Solon. He hated that image and had it removed. So we, we didn't publish it either. But it's funny.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Going back to Dangerfield, I sold that book outside of Dangerfield's on a blanket.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  I have pictures. And I think Chris Rock is in the window looking out.

• 39:49Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  His poster or something like that.

• 39:51Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  There was a park bench in Central Park where I, where I would go and sell these types of certain situations and it would get around town that, oh, he's there. And people would, I did that recently with Ted Kaczynski's book. I managed to buy the only copy of his biography that he wanted published, but his brother stopped it. So the manuscript became available to me. I don't know how, but I bought it called Truth Versus Lies or something. Anyway, we, and then we, we published it. I didn't ask permission or we just did it.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  And the same thing with, never got in trouble with Catcher. To this day, there's been no repercussions, no repercussions with the Kaczynski. Lots of trouble though subsequently with the problem with.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  This idea of taking things that are out in public first, where you see them out there. And I feel like they have a, the idea of something that's already been seen by other people, other than myself.

• 41:13Rick Rubin?

  It's already in the public.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  That, I need, for some reason, I need that. I don't know why, in terms of my subject matter. I like, because I feel like it can make a connection, you know?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  I think.

• 41:27Rick Rubin?

  Maybe it's some sort of deniability, because it's not, the content's not coming from you. You're the author of the work, but you can't take responsibility for the thing that's underneath. Do you know what I mean? It's like if you took a picture of a person, and that person goes out and kills somebody, that has nothing to do with you. You took the picture of it.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:46Rick Rubin?

  You were a step removed from it.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the idea of taking a picture of someone, I actually, in eighty, in the mid-eighties, I had an idea of how to take your portrait. And it was basically, you would give me five pictures of yourself that you liked.

• 42:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  And give them to me.

• 42:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I would look at them, and I would pick one. I would re-photograph it. And that would be your portrait.

• 42:12Rick Rubin?

  Done by you.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  By, by me. And I felt, no, two things happened there. Well, a couple of things.

• 42:19Rick Rubin?

  Everybody's happy with that arrangement. That's a great arrangement.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  You don't have to come and sit for me.

• 42:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  You're not going to be disappointed.

• 42:27Rick Rubin?

  No, you really like all five.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  You like all five.

• 42:30Rick Rubin?

  It's great.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  And there's a kind of a time warp. You could give me a picture when you were fourteen years old.

• 42:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's a great idea.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Avadon can't do that.

• 42:36Rick Rubin?

  It's a great idea.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  You know, now, I thought I actually, when I wasn't making any money, and this was eighty-four, this is actually how I was working with Errol. That's how I got to the archive of the, because then I started going through the archive of Warner Brothers. And I did Didi Ramone, I did the B-52s, I did Laurie Anderson, I did David Byrne, Brian Eno, whoever was on the label.

• 43:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  But I had permission, and they owned the co, and I wouldn't get in any trouble with that. But I actually thought.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  This could be a business, you know, but it still can. Yeah, I'm very bad at business, but it didn't work out, you know, and unfortunately. But it was a great, I thought it was an interesting way to take someone's portrait. There's a bunch of them that are out floating around in the ether out there from eighty-four. But the other weird thing in photography that I did, which no other photographer had done it, I made editions of two.

• 43:40Rick Rubin?

  Why two?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Because it was still a reproduction. Not much of a reproduction.

• 43:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  But because of the natural.

• 43:49Rick Rubin?

  Most photographers do two hundred and fifty.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Fifty. I mean, I remember Maple Thorpe. We had become friends before he passed away. He was always complaining to me about, you know. I said, well, Robert, I mean, you make, first of all, you make a lot of photographs, but you make big editions. He says, yeah, why do you only make two? And I said, well, you know, I started out with the Cowboys, even though it didn't sell. But I kind of knew the idea of two was a great, you know. It was also a kind of way of, not subverting, but kind of like dealing with the photography's naturalness.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  The camera has a lot of, you know, things that just go along, whether it's retouching.

• 44:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  I would always use a commercial lab. And they all had their own way of describing the process. And I would, I would use those terms sometimes to describe the work.

• 44:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Because it was real.

• 44:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it was technical.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I didn't want to make anything up.

• 44:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Or at least my way of making things up was different, that's all.

• 45:01Rick Rubin?

  The idea of two is really interesting. And it also elevates photography through scarcity. Do you know, like, when you can make as many as you want, it can't be worth as many as if there's only two.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I remember buying a George Tice photograph. And it was like two hundred and, the two hundred and fiftieth copy of this particular image. And I was kind of like, no. And most of, most of my, what I would call straight photographer friends, not that I had that many, but. They would have huge editions and I mean, I don't mind.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  You know, that's their business.

• 45:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, you're doing a different model.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it just had to be, I just thought that.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  I just thought it was kind of cool in nineteen eighty when I started the Cowboys. I had been doing editions of ten. But then I realized, well, none of them are selling. So what was the point? But so then I said, well, let's try two, maybe, maybe again, the scarcity would, would help.

• 46:18Rick Rubin?

  Back to the jokes. It started with you did it by hand and then it turned into silkscreen and then is that the end of it?

• 46:25Speaker 01

  No, then it became stencil and painting. And then I started reintroducing the cartoon on top.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Of the joke and I would put a joke that had nothing to do with the cartoon.

• 46:37Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  So the cartoon I would pick, there are certain situations that cartoonists use all the time. And one of them was a woman walking in on an infidelity. That's a standard. So what I would do is I would put that as the cartoon, but the joke underneath had nothing to do with the situation. So you would read the text and say, it didn't make any sense.

• 47:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  So I would do that.

• 47:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  That's how I reintroduced the cartoon.

• 47:08Rick Rubin?

  Really interesting.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  So.

• 47:09Rick Rubin?

  Really interesting.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  I did that for a while.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Then I did some abstract.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Paintings and. Put a panel, attached a panel under the abstraction and Hannah wrote a joke. Didn't silkscreen, I just wrote it out again, did that for a while. So eighty seven is when I, the galleries came knocking. Cause they realized, wow, this guy's got maybe like ten. I mean, I know what their motivation was. Backlog. And, you know, there was an article. And one of the art magazines published an article. So the phone started ringing because of this one article. I was completely like, gumfounded.

• 48:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  So people started visiting me in that little room.

• 48:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  And anyway, gallery came, made me an offer. I went with the gallery and it's funny. Our first show, I didn't. The woman, the gal, I didn't tell her anything about the joke paintings. She thought she was getting photography. And when I brought the work to the first show, she says, what are these? I said, well, this is my new work.

• 48:37Rick Rubin?

  This is the new work, yeah.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  She says, well, where are the photographs? I said, oh, I'm not doing photographs. So there was a bit of a.

• 48:46Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  There was a bit of a, um, an impasse there.

• 48:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Because, you know, we had settled on, in those days, what they called a stipend, which is, I don't know if they have those anymore. But you would get a certain amount of money every month. Supposedly against sales. Kind of like what they do with.

• 49:07Rick Rubin?

  Music business as well.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Music business. And so she was a little surprised. Here, I'm giving you this stipend. What am I supposed to do with these, by the way? I said, well, they're, they're jokes.

• 49:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  And I liked that idea that if anything else. I started doing an act. I said, you know, I would sell, people would say, you know, I like that joke. I like this work. I would, and I would kind of like say, well, what do you like? The painting or you like the joke? I would like start to kind of mess with people.

• 49:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  And like, really like, because the other thing that would happen is you'd walk into a guy and people would be laughing, which didn't really happen in.

• 49:54Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Most shows. So a lot of weird things happened because of the subject.

• 49:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  You know? And of course, then in Europe where if you couldn't.

• 50:04Rick Rubin?

  Language.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Speak. It would be the abstract. I would say, well, it's abstract. It's abstract art. It's perfect. You can just look at it. And, cause I would, I started to, when I started Silkscreen, I started to pick two strange colors. One background and then the joke would be silkscreen with a, with a very strange, and I, I felt that the color was the cartoon.

• 50:31Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Was a substitute for this, you know.

• 50:34Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  It was representational. So the colors became very important.

• 50:39Rick Rubin?

  Mm.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  And after a while,

• 50:42Speaker 01

  I did this thing where I would only work with like 18 jokes, like a routine.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I was really-

• 50:50Rick Rubin?

  That was your act.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  That was, I was really-

• 50:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Would you do multiple of the 18 or no? Only 18 and-

• 50:56Speaker 01

  I would do it, yeah, but different scale.

• 50:59Rick Rubin?

  Mm.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Sometimes it would be small, sometimes the same joke, like the psychiatrist joke was done very, a lot, over the years.

• 51:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  But in different ways and-

• 51:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Cause that's like one of your hit songs, that joke.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  That's like the, the hit song, exactly.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I wouldn't have a hit song until,

• 51:22Speaker 01

  to tell you the truth, I never, even though I, I was very lucky in the sense that, you know, it's not as if I haven't had museum shows and all that, which is, you know, it's okay. I mean, I'm not a big fan of being curated, but in talking about a hit show, I didn't have a hit show until I did, I don't know if you're familiar with the Instagram portraits.

• 51:53Rick Rubin?

  I am.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  That was the first show that was, I felt, broke out outside the art world.

• 52:05Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Where, and that was a new territory and new things to deal with, which I hadn't ever dealt with before. I'd always been inside world.

• 52:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  You know, just-

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Twenty-five people were my audience, I felt, you know. I was never expecting to make art that would be on the news. Like, that was preposterous. That's not something that I would want, or even, you know, it just never occurred to me, but...

• 52:40Rick Rubin?

  Well, it's not realistic.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  No, it's not, and you can't plan that, you can't. You know, you could try, I mean, a lot of artists probably try, but, you know. Anyway, that just happens, and I didn't even, at the time when I did the Instagram portraits, I was on Instagram for the first time.

• 53:00Rick Rubin?

  Instagram was probably pretty new, right?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  It was 2014, it had been along a little, a little while.

• 53:06Rick Rubin?

  Couple of years?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  But I was on my, yeah. I was on my daughter's, what they called Tumblr. I don't even know if that was, I wasn't really into the social thing. But I was specifically told by my kids, "Don't go on Instagram." And I didn't ask why, I just said, "Don't, it's not for you." So that's interesting, so I went on it.

• 53:31Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  And then...

• 53:33Rick Rubin?

  That was the only invitation you needed.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  It was like a brand-new giant magazine.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  I went down the rabbit hole, and they lost me for a summer. I see, I see why they told me not to go on. I became, I mean, it was like...

• 53:48Rick Rubin?

  Just too addictive?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  And so, it was like, again, having this thing in your room, too. I always liked the idea of, could I make art in my bedroom by myself?

• 54:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Right?

• 54:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  It's just so, something simple. But I was on the phone, one day, with this woman.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  And I was talking to her and I said, you know, she was a model, Jessica something. Anyway, I was going through her feed. And of course, everybody's posting lots of pictures of themselves. So I'm getting to look at not just five pictures that you like of yourself. Some of these people were posting like hundreds of pictures of themselves. So I was going through her feed and I said, Jessica, there's a, there's an image of you. You're, it looks like you're in somewhere in Switzerland. You're standing in front of a Brigitte Bardot in your Warhol portrait in your Skiat. And I said, it's fabulous.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  It's a, I don't know, I didn't care who took it.

• 54:58Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't pay any attention to who takes photographs.

• 55:01Rick Rubin?

  No, of course.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  I said, this is an amazing photograph. You should, you know, make a portrait of this. And she simply said, why don't you make a portrait? And then I clicked. Of course I should make a portrait of it. And that's how it started.

• 55:18Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like, again, one of those things.

• 55:22Rick Rubin?

  The universe.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  That just.

• 55:23Rick Rubin?

  Allowed it to happen.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  You know?

• 55:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  It just keeps, now, if I was a musician.

• 55:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  I would have still been back trying to figure out how to play F sharp on, on the guitar. Or, you know, there was never the arrow.

• 55:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  But with the art, these things just kept.

• 55:44Rick Rubin?

  They happen.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Happening. It doesn't happen very often, but when you, when it does happen and it just, it makes sense and it kind of checks all the.

• 55:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  The boxes and that, when she said that. And of course, my niece, I'm so lame sometimes, told me how to screen save. Back in those days. I'm like, screen save? What, what's this?

• 56:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Right? And then. The image would appear on your phone in a grid. And it was organized. I said, this is, this is, because I had stopped taking pictures because of this analog shit. They got rid of slides. I love, I only photographed with slides. Slide was my go to. Because it didn't take up any room. You didn't have to like, print a slide. You could, it was both a positive and a negative. It's very convenient. So, they, when they got rid of that, I just dropped, you know, I kind of like, I did the upstate thing, I took, you know, the digital, I couldn't move into the digital camera world.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  This was too weird for me. But when she showed me the screensaver, it just opened up a whole new, what I call post-place. Meaning, I can be anywhere and make art at any time, under any circumstances. And, I'm not on social media much anymore, but when I did her portrait, then it started, okay, what's my, what is my contribution in terms of like, and I realized, it was the comments underneath.

• 57:33Rick Rubin?

  So you would just write a comment?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  So I would, I, and I started, basically, not psychic jujitsu or kind of joy scene riffs, and, but I would, I would do this kind of like, what I call bird talk.

• 57:50Rick Rubin?

  What would be an example?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Just crazy sentences that I would make up, that made no sense. Most of the time, I would sit with the portrait, and I'd be watching TV, and I'd wait for the ads, and the ads would say something, and I'd write it down. Because it would make no sense at all.

• 58:08Rick Rubin?

  Unrelated.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Totally unrelated to the image. Most of them were, in the beginning, because the logarithm would change sometimes, and I would only, was allowed to like, maybe make.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  A sentence or really quick. It's almost kind of like a jazz.

• 58:27Rick Rubin?

  Would you make a sentence and then take a screenshot right away? Cause otherwise it would move down the feed, right?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I had, yeah, but I figured out how to get rid of. That was the other thing. I figured out how to get rid of all their comments. So mine would move up.

• 58:44Rick Rubin?

  How?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  I don't know how. I can't to this day, I don't know how.

• 58:47Rick Rubin?

  But you were, you knew how at that time.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  I figured it out. And I don't know if you can do that anymore. I'm not sure. What I was afraid of, which I didn't know at the time. Were they also losing it on their feed?

• 59:01Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  But they weren't. It was only on my feed.

• 59:03Rick Rubin?

  Oh, great.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  Then what I would do is I would look at their comments. And sometimes I would keep a really interesting comment.

• 59:12Rick Rubin?

  Along next to yours?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Along next to mine, but mine would always be the bottom one.

• 59:17Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  And mine would be the last sentence. And some of them, when I look back at them, I mean, for. I had to be convinced to show these images, you know?

• 59:29Rick Rubin?

  After the first one, did you think, okay, I'm off and running? I'm gonna do a bunch of them now?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  I was, I did a whole bunch.

• 59:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  And you know, again, I did my friends. I went on whoever had a feed.

• 59:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  I did my friends, I did people I didn't know. I did people that maybe I would wanna know. I did people that. It's hard to know, to explain why I would pick someone like the very first. How did the people show up in that very first show? Why, why those people?

• 59:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, some of them were my friends, some that I knew. But mostly it was about the way their portraits appeared. To me, they would only appear that way because they were on Instagram. So some reason, it was a very strange way they would show up. Sometimes with friends or whatever. And it was all about, maybe it was this distance thing.

• 1:00:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  It was a very different looking type of portrait, just to begin with.

• 1:00:31Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Regardless of what I did with it.

• 1:00:34Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  And my transfer was simply. You know, I had the option of making it into a photograph, but I decided on, it was a very new type of canvas that had just come out. Very white and very tightly wound. And when I saw that reproduced, and I saw how the ink fused with the canvas.

• 1:00:56Rick Rubin?

  Is it like a laser print?

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  No, it was just an inkjet.

• 1:01:00Rick Rubin?

  Inkjet?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, inkjet had started to become almost ubiquitous.

• 1:01:06Rick Rubin?

  How big were the images?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  The first size, I think, was like 48 wide and maybe 54 inches tall. And now, of course, I can make them tall.

• 1:01:20Rick Rubin?

  You still make them?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Not so much anymore, but I did a book recently called New Painting, where I took images of just people painting with their backs to their painting. A lot of women, some men, and just, you know, at some point, like five or six years ago, there were just so many people painting, it seemed to me. Like, I just needed to capture that, that idea. And everybody was painting the same painting, it seemed. So I started doing that. We published a book.

• 1:02:01Rick Rubin?

  Again, 300 copies?

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that.

• 1:02:03Rick Rubin?

  Are all the books like that?

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, sometimes there were a thousand, sometimes they never go into, I don't know, I don't think they've ever gone into a second printing. I've never done that. But no, they're very small addition. I like that.

• 1:02:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  But the, yeah, the Instagram portraits got, immediately, there was tension and there was crying by my kids. They got hammered at school. I mean, it came out. It became a thing. And I didn't quite understand it.

• 1:02:41Rick Rubin?

  Did people not like it?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Oh, the hate was unbelievable.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Oh my god, and then the money.

• 1:02:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  Right? Became a factor. And of course, then the people in the picture.

• 1:02:57Rick Rubin?

  The fact that you were selling them for a lot of money because they were desirable, collectible things.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  And the people in them.

• 1:03:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Who had no idea that they were in them.

• 1:03:06Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  And had heard about how much.

• 1:03:09Rick Rubin?

  They were selling for.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  I got that, it blew up into a shitstorm. It really became an issue. The way I describe my before and after is that before I owned, I owned half a stereo. No one would sue me. I could do anything the fuck I wanted. Nobody was looking.

• 1:03:28Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  In, in some ways, the before was great because

• 1:03:33Rick Rubin?

  You were anonymous.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  I was so used to, to just doing my thing.

• 1:03:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  And I didn't care.

• 1:03:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and if people didn't like it, it was okay.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. I mean, I was just gonna do it regardless because I, there was no.

• 1:03:46Rick Rubin?

  No repercussions.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Nothing. Even when I did my own crazy gallery with the Brooke Shields portrait, that was kind of cloak and dagger stuff that was kind of fun, Lower East Side. I called it even Lower Manhattan. It was really, Rivington back then was really bad neighborhood.

• 1:04:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  And to go to that gallery, which was sometimes open, sometimes not open. Who's behind this gallery? I had a beard. This woman.

• 1:04:15Rick Rubin?

  Ah.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  You know, supposedly running it.

• 1:04:18Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  But in those days, the idea of like being sued, it would never occur to me. I mean, who, who, I didn't know, I didn't have any.

• 1:04:31Rick Rubin?

  Why would anybody care?

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:04:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Right, but once, but then the money, the money thing, that's the only reason why there's litigation in the first place.

• 1:04:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, forgetting the litigation for a minute, you put up a show. Everybody's talking about it. People hate it. How are you feeling?

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  I got mad and really pissed off and went to the gallery.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  And three days before the show was supposed to come down, I, I took the show down myself because I was really pissed that they didn't say extended for next, for another two weeks.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  And I left the gallery.

• 1:05:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  I left.

• 1:05:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Gagosian, that day.

• 1:05:18Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  I was so pissed off.

• 1:05:20Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  That they didn't see.

• 1:05:23Rick Rubin?

  That something was happening.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  Something, let it happen.

• 1:05:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Let it, let it.

• 1:05:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Because, first of all, I didn't ask to show these. I never asked, they asked me.

• 1:05:33Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  I didn't ask you.

• 1:05:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  I never asked anything from a gallery.

• 1:05:38Rick Rubin?

  But if it's a hit.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  But I never had a hit.

• 1:05:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  I never had this much reaction.

• 1:05:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  And this much drama.

• 1:05:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  And, and the.

• 1:05:48Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think they wanted to take it down?

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  I don't think, it wasn't Larry, it was the people who worked under him. And I think, I don't want to even, I, I kind of know why, but I think there was some, you know, it wasn't about a scheduling thing, they could have extended it.

• 1:06:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  But when I heard that there was no, I walked in with a video and I had two assistants and we just.

• 1:06:18Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  And the gallery assistant came running down.

• 1:06:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  What are you doing, what's going on? And I wouldn't speak.

• 1:06:25Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  I just took them.

• 1:06:27Rick Rubin?

  What a great story. And you filmed it?

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  We filmed it.

• 1:06:30Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  And they had no idea what was going on.

• 1:06:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  And I just took them off the wall.

• 1:06:35Rick Rubin?

  And were they already sold?

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  They all sold.

• 1:06:37Rick Rubin?

  They all sold, but you took them back?

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  I don't know what we did.

• 1:06:41Rick Rubin?

  I'm sure eventually the people got them.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, people got them.

• 1:06:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  But I took them, I, I.

• 1:06:46Rick Rubin?

  But you didn't want them to show it anymore because they weren't being respectful of it?

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, well, I'm not even sure that they knew what was going on.

• 1:06:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  I knew, I, they knew what was going on.

• 1:06:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  I'm sure if I had talked to Larry, which I wasn't, I wasn't really in communication that much, but I didn't want to ask.

• 1:07:05Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Because I don't want to be beholden, I don't want to owe anybody.

• 1:07:08Rick Rubin?

  Of course.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Anything, at all, ever.

• 1:07:10Rick Rubin?

  I understand.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  So, I just thought, rather than wait for it to be over, I would, I want it to be over on my terms.

• 1:07:20Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  But what was so strange is that.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  We kind of made up and three months after that, they did, I think it was the Freeze Art Fair in New York. They did the whole booth. And that created an even bigger shitstorm because the price had tripled. And that's what caused-

• 1:07:43Rick Rubin?

  And it was Instagram again, backed by popular demand.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  And it really looked, actually, in an art fair setting. It looked good. They looked good on a wall for some reason. I didn't, I wasn't convinced. I had to be convinced to show them at all. But the minute we hung them in this particular gallery that was in the back of a bookstore on the ground floor of Madison Avenue. There was something about the reflection, the scale of, you had to walk through a bookstore. So you already were, there was already text and images. So it was a very seamless trip into the next room. And it made sense. And they kind of wallpapered the room.

• 1:08:30Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  And I do, you know, when you said collector, I do have one collector that I love and revere. Irving Blum. If you go to his apartment in Los Angeles, he has 20 of these things hanging in his house. He's like, he's, and for him, I've interviewed him, I've videotaped him. I've talked to him, been a friend of his for quite some time. And to me, he's, he's not just a collector. He's at a different level in terms of, you know, walking, it's a different curation. Yeah, he, he was the one,

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  he pissed a lot of the California artists off. But that soup can show-

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  He, you know, there's, it's almost like there's another side to that coin where if an artist does something, say, like, like, say, sixty-two, and you walk into an artist's, well, he didn't have a studio at a townhouse, and there, leaning against the wall, is a painting of a soup can in nineteen sixty-two or sixty-one, like, you know, this high, and there are several of them, they're all different flavors. You have to, like, what? You got me uptown, first of all, you...

• 1:10:05Rick Rubin?

  It's insulting.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  It's, it's almost like, what are you?

• 1:10:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Why are you wasting, is, is, so, the other side of that is someone's reception. It's not a compliment, it's almost like, it's, it's almost a way of completion.

• 1:10:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Because it wasn't, yeah, there's the soup cans, and they're leaning against the wall, but it wasn't completed until Irving came along and decided, I want to show these.

• 1:10:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  He had to have as big a perspective as, as Warhol had to, you know, because he brought them to California, not only did he show them, he showed them on a shelf.

• 1:10:47Rick Rubin?

  It's a great idea, I didn't know that.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he sold, the story that Irving tells is Dennis Hopper bought two. I thought he only bought one, but he, Irving said he bought two, and that was it. And Irving realized at the end of the show that they should all be together, he called up Dennis, who luckily I got to meet just before he passed away.

• 1:11:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Called him up, Dennis agreed, and then Irving called Andy up and said, I want to buy them all.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Would you take sixty dollars a month for the next couple of?

• 1:11:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  And Andy said, that was like, that kind of money, that kind of terms.

• 1:11:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Speaker 01

  And that, that started his relationship with Warhol. And then the next show he did out was The Silver Elvises.

• 1:11:53Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Which Warhol just sent out

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  on a huge roll. And Irving says, oh, Andy, what am I supposed to? He says, oh, just cut them up. That's why there's some, there's singles, some doubles and threes. Cause Irving cut them.

• 1:12:13Rick Rubin?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  I mean, stories like that.

• 1:12:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Make me feel so good about what I do and what I could possibly do.

• 1:12:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  And to get back to that Time Life Building.

• 1:12:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  What else I discovered long after I left was,

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  which is unbelievable, is that Warhol's Empire, the film, was shot from an office building in the Time Life Building.

• 1:12:45Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  And that was an overnight thing.

• 1:12:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Someone had to get, he had to have weird, some kind of weird permission.

• 1:12:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  To get into that building. I, I wish I had known that at the time. I would have loved to gone to that office building.

• 1:12:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  That office and look out. Like, where did they shoot that? Cause for me, I've always said I would not, I, I wanna make a movie. People say, why didn't you make? I said, well, you know, I'm not gonna make a movie until I can make something as interesting as Empire.

• 1:13:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  So, again, full circle now.

• 1:13:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  I have made a movie. It's six hours and forty seven minutes. It's called Deposition.

• 1:13:28Rick Rubin?

  What's it of?

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  It's my deposition. From my, uh...

• 1:13:33Rick Rubin?

  For the Instagram case?

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about... I don't know anything about the lawsuit.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so I got sued, but I knew...

• 1:13:41Rick Rubin?

  By one of the...

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Two.

• 1:13:43Rick Rubin?

  Two of the people in the...

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Two, two. And I had already been sued. I had taken some pictures of Rastafarians and made them into paintings years ago. Bought a book of Rastas in St. Bart and lived with the book for three or four years and drew in it and cut it up. Didn't pay any attention to the... I didn't know who the author was. I didn't... I just liked the images. But I... He sued me, which in hindsight, yeah, he should have. I mean, I should have asked. I could have easily avoided. But I didn't think that way. I didn't think about asking permission. I never have. I just... I didn't think that's part of making art.

• 1:14:22Rick Rubin?

  The problem with asking permission is they could say no, and then you don't get to make your art. And that's no fun.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  I guess so. I would have done that anyway, though, even if they said no.

• 1:14:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  It's like... It's like the building inspector.

• 1:14:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  You know? But anyway, knowing what I knew from the first lawsuit...

• 1:14:41Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  I knew from the second that when you give a deposition, you get videoed.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  And so I knew...

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  I'm not even sure if I can even... It's still cool to say stuff like this. I don't know. Because we settled, finally. I had had it this past... It had taken a toll on me. Eight years.

• 1:15:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Takes a toll.

• 1:15:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's no fun.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Just mentally, it's horrible. But on the back of my mind, I said, "I'm gonna have this video." Because when I went in, I knew I was gonna be videoed.

• 1:15:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  And I knew it was a bit of a performance.

• 1:15:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  I guess I can say that?

• 1:15:20Rick Rubin?

  I think you can.

• 1:15:21Speaker 01

  You're supposed to tell... You know, I was tell... I did tell the truth.

• 1:15:24Rick Rubin?

  Of course. And you could tell the truth and do a performance.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  That you're supposed to look straight at the videographer.

• 1:15:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  You're not supposed to look left or right. That's what the lawyers say. And when the lawyer asks you a question, you answer. But at times, I would answer their question and take up to 15 minutes. And there came a point in the deposition where the lawyer stood up, screamed, "Would you tell your client to stop this talking?" And then, of course, I shut down and just looked straight in my deposition. And you hear them arguing.

• 1:16:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  I like the idea you can walk in at any time if it's shown.

• 1:16:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  And it's just me talking about art.

• 1:16:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  That's it. And I think as a movie, we're planning on showing it soon in Rome of all places. In this little chapel.

• 1:16:28Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  That a friend of mine.

• 1:16:31Rick Rubin?

  Do you know when?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  I think Easter. We were gonna call it Deposition Row because there's a mention. They were trolling me before I did something about Dillinger.

• 1:16:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  And Desolation Row. And I said, "Deposition Row."

• 1:16:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  I said, "In a couple of days, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna be in Deposition Row." And they wanted to know what I meant by that. So I started, but I think it's cleaner just to call it Deposition.

• 1:17:04Rick Rubin?

  Both are good.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Rick Rubin?

  Both are good.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  We'll see. I don't know. There was, there was talk we were gonna screen it at the Metrograph about a year ago. I, I decided, mm, I don't know. I'd rather, I like the idea of doing it way, first.

• 1:17:19Rick Rubin?

  No, for sure.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Way away.

• 1:17:20Rick Rubin?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  You know, on a little box.

• 1:17:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, great.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  You know? I think we've cleared all the legal hurdles. Because depositions are public. My first step is, is people publish them, you know, so. But I never saw that coming.

• 1:17:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  That, that's the other thing about where does this go? And so, yeah, I, I get to have a movie.

• 1:17:50Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  You know, finally.

• 1:17:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  And people can stop asking me when I'm gonna make a movie. You know, because the idea of movie, making a movie to me is so collaborative. And I don't think I could do that. So.

• 1:18:05Rick Rubin?

  How is it different when there's someone there? What do you think?

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's a lot. When someone is with me. The last time I had real assistance, I had a studio in Harlem. Had it for about seven years, just before COVID hit. And the great thing about having. It depends, obviously, what you're making.

• 1:18:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  But I was making paintings.

• 1:18:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  And the great thing is you can make a mess and you don't have to clean it up. That's the advantage. And it sounds stupid, but it's really like you don't have to like clean your own brushes and you don't have to. It's all prep work.

• 1:18:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  You know, but and my idea about making art has always been it's I never wanted it to be a job. Once it becomes labor.

• 1:19:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  I get so detached and bored and I want to move on to the next body of work or another process because I have no desire to work for a living, basically. I never have.

• 1:19:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. You think you can get to the point where just having the ideas enough and you don't even have to make it?

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  That too. You can, you know, file it away in your head.

• 1:19:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  And live with it in your head.

• 1:19:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  And that's an interesting point, especially with our experiences and our lifetimes. I think because of the histories of what we've done, I think we can actually sort of do that now because.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  I know that I've, I've become more patient. I don't have to rush. I don't have to like make a painting. And you're right, sometimes.

• 1:20:16Rick Rubin?

  I'm just wondering where the line is, you know, where.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Why do you have to necessarily?

• 1:20:21Rick Rubin?

  Actually, why bring it into the world? It's still.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  It's still here.

• 1:20:24Rick Rubin?

  It's still there, yeah. Interesting.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Rick Rubin?

  I guess the benefit of bringing it into the world is that then you can share it with someone else. And I don't think there's any way to do it otherwise.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, or you can just share it with your one friend or, or even share it with yourself. Just to, you know, I mean, I make a lot of things that I need to make just to see what they look like. And then, most of the time, for a long time now, I'm at least able to make things and put them away. For years. Like the work that I'm showing in Martha.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it's been in the racks for maybe almost 15 years. And I, and I said, let's bring, you know, I have a, I have a winter, I call my winter studio upstate. I very rarely go up there anymore.

• 1:21:23Rick Rubin?

  You used to live there pretty full time, no?

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  I lived there full time. I left New York for a little while.

• 1:21:29Rick Rubin?

  How many years?

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  I left, 95. And I met, I met my wife up there and we had kids and, and I, and I, I found it exotic. I found it strange. I'd never been out of the city.

• 1:21:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  I found it bizarre.

• 1:21:46Rick Rubin?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  Well, I grew up outside of Boston in a suburb. I mean, and I came, it was funny too because Panama is now in the, in the news and I was, that's where I was born. I was born in the Canals.

• 1:21:59Rick Rubin?

  How did it come up for you to be born in Panama?

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Oh, my father worked for the government, so did my mother.

• 1:22:05Rick Rubin?

  What did they do? Do you know what they did?

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  To tell you the truth, I knew what my mother did. She worked for the OSS, which was pre-CIA.

• 1:22:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  That she told me. But my father, I was never very close to them, but I was never very close to him. But he was a nice guy, but he was just, I never really knew what he did.

• 1:22:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  But that's how I came to be. He was stationed there. So we moved around a lot.

• 1:22:38Rick Rubin?

  You have brothers and sisters?

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  I have a sister and...

• 1:22:40Rick Rubin?

  Older or younger?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  A little older, couple of years.

• 1:22:43Rick Rubin?

  How's your relationship with her?

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  I haven't talked to her in a long, long time, but she's very important to me because she introduced me to cultural things at the time. She was a couple of years older than me and would introduce me to things that, you know, like say I was in the eighth grade, she was a sophomore in high school or something and all of a sudden I get turned on to. But anyway, the upstate thing, I think it was for about, on and off for about seven years and then we moved back.

• 1:23:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  I have a body shop where we make, when I wanted to paint, I wanted to paint something that was already painted. I wanted to move on from the refotograph. And I always liked the way, certain way that cars were painted by teenagers, where they would metal flake, stripe, put a flame, mostly Bondo. They would put nine coats of, but they would leave the hood like completely boned. And I would see that on the street and I said, Dan, that looks great.

• 1:23:54Rick Rubin?

  Why is Bondo so good looking? What is it?

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  It's just great.

• 1:23:57Rick Rubin?

  Why?

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:23:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it is. And everyone knows it. It's like, why aren't all cars Bondo?

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Well, I set up a shop. After I moved on from Time Life, I moved to California for a little while and I discovered Lifestyle magazine.

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  And, you know.

• 1:24:16Rick Rubin?

  Like Sunset Magazine?

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  Well, like, you know, Surf, Bike, Heavy Metal, even. It seems like in these giant magazine stands. I was just mad for magazines after time life. I loved.

• 1:24:29Rick Rubin?

  I loved magazines too.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  But I noticed in the car magazines in the back, there were advertisements for car parts where you could send away for a particular part. And I was very interested in. The biggest part was the hood at the time. There was this company in California and, you know, for, for not so much money and the idea that you could send away for it and it would arrive in the mail. It's like saving up your box tops.

• 1:24:57Rick Rubin?

  It's so funny.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  You could order a specific one.

• 1:25:01Rick Rubin?

  Well, of course, because everyone else was buying it to fit the car they had.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  But I was buying it because it had a certain kind of like subtext.

• 1:25:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  Like the Dodge, a 1968 Dodge Challenger was in Bullitt. That's what the bad guys drove. Or a 1970 Dodge Challenger was in Vanishing Point. That's what Barry Newman drove. So even if nobody got the painting, the people who picked up the work, those shippers were, they would go crazy. They didn't know anything about art, but they knew about what a Challenger was. And I just loved that.

• 1:25:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  I just loved the connection I made with that side of the art. Had nothing to do with painting at that point. It just had to do with, yeah, they knew.

• 1:25:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. The thing you chose to paint, it was almost like a secret language going on beneath the surface.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  The Mason's Handshake.

• 1:25:58Rick Rubin?

  Insiders.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Inside World.

• 1:26:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Which, which is a, a publication I.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  Published once.

• 1:26:07Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  This is called Inside. It's just, it's just basically, yeah. It's a way of, you know.

• 1:26:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Talking culturally about what you share and what you know and.

• 1:26:18Rick Rubin?

  And you might not even know necessarily why something is cool, but you know it's cool and you know the other people who know it's cool know it's cool.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  And then they add on even something you didn't even know about.

• 1:26:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 1:26:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  And so it's.

• 1:26:31Rick Rubin?

  It's a whole additional conversation going on.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it was two years ago, we had a show of the hoods. They never went over very well. People still didn't quite get them.

• 1:26:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  But I started, you know, painting them at first with very specific car colors that came out of the factories. Again, just more nonfiction to them as much as I could. And then I, then when I moved upstate, I built a proper body shop, hired some real motorheads.

• 1:27:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  And we went to town. So I'm just saying, this idea of luck or juxtaposition or when you walk into the studio and something happens, like, we basically had a junkyard at some point, you know? Hundreds of cars. And one day I walked in and there were like, there were these four doors that were leaning up against the wall. And I looked at them. I said, oh, that's the doors. I said, don't throw those away. Let's weld them together in a row. And the Chevy Impala is gonna be Jim, that's Jim Morrison. The other, the other three, I'm not sure what car they came out of.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  But that day.

• 1:27:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Walking in the studio.

• 1:27:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  That kind of experience for me is what it's all about. Okay, I got it that day.

• 1:28:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  Right. And it was so like-

• 1:28:04Rick Rubin?

  But it's happening every day. It's always happening.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  It's so dumb. It's so, it was so kind of like, not moronic, but for, for a couple of years I've been walking around this stuff and then I never made the connection.

• 1:28:21Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  When do you make the connection?

• 1:28:23Rick Rubin?

  When did you make the Jim Morrison connection? I don't understand that one myself.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Well, I just, you know, it was just a four, you know, I looked at them, there were the four doors.

• 1:28:33Rick Rubin?

  Oh, the four doors.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  And I called them the doors. And I said, that's the piece.

• 1:28:38Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  And-

• 1:28:39Rick Rubin?

  It's the doors.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  I, we welded them together. We did one going right and we did one going left. And I started to become, then I got obsessed with doors. But anyway, those are the kinds of things that wouldn't happen with me with the guitar.

• 1:28:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  That obviously it happens with people who play the guitar.

• 1:29:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah, a discovery happens.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  And but-

• 1:29:08Rick Rubin?

  A realization.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I know that I played in a band, the Glenn Bronka Band. Everybody played with Glenn Bronka. Every artist I know. He would come over to your apartment and say, this is what you hit one note, as long as you can do this.

• 1:29:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  He had like seven guitarists on, on the stage. And I remember one night, we opened Irving Plaza.

• 1:29:32Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  Laurie Anderson was on the bill. This is about maybe the fourth or fifth time I played in public with Glenn. Glenn was, you know, very serious. He really was, took his, you know, it was his way of the highway, you know? And I had brought along a friend who was a real rock and roller to fill out the guitar, you know? And that evening-

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Something happened on stage where I looked at my rock and roller friend and he looked at me and something was happening with the sound. And we both recognized we'd came off stage. So should we tell Glenn what we just thought we heard? And I said, he doesn't want to hear that. He wants to be Philip Glass. He wants to be, you know, he wants to be taken seriously. He doesn't want any kind of like references to rock and roll or anything like that. But what was interesting, I just heard a new kind of rock and roll. I thought, I thought.

• 1:30:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  But I didn't want to say anything to him.

• 1:30:35Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember the name of the piece? Because I want to see if we can find it.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  I don't remember the name. All I remember is that I quit that night because I couldn't talk to the guy.

• 1:30:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Because the next day, who joins the band? Is Thurston Moore and Leonardo. And I've asked Lee, hey, I know they probably didn't stay for so long, but they probably, they did hear something. And then, of course, they turned it into Sonic Youth.

• 1:31:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  I think that's what happened.

• 1:31:08Rick Rubin?

  So Sonic Youth was an outgrowth of Glenn Bronco's band?

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  I think that's probably my, you know, because I was hanging around with Kim.

• 1:31:15Rick Rubin?

  Take a look, see if any of these songs look like the song. Just because I'd love to listen to a...

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  I haven't listened to Glenn in...

• 1:31:25Rick Rubin?

  His records were put out by 99 Records. That was the way that I learned about...

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  The Ascension.

• 1:31:30Rick Rubin?

  What's with it?

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  I think what, I think Lee and Thurston kinda came along. I feel, it just.

• 1:33:30Rick Rubin?

  Grew out of that.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  You know, is there a way of Richard Prince loud song?

• 1:33:37Rick Rubin?

  Let's see.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  It's the only song I've put out in my life.

• 1:33:41Rick Rubin?

  Let's see.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  This is the only song that I've ever found that I like.

• 1:38:23Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the story of that. How did that could not exist?

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  I had a very strange interlude where I was... Do you know that guy named Jeff Aroff?

• 1:38:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:38:34Rick Rubin?

  I know him well.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  Kidding?

• 1:38:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  He's a really good friend of mine.

• 1:38:37Rick Rubin?

  He's great.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  I love Jeff. He gave me access to Warner Brothers publicity pictures. When he knew I loved publicity pictures, I could just go through them and take what I wanted. But he also knew that I was kind of a wannabe songwriter. And my goal was to try to write a hit song. That was stupid. And so he brought me out to California and he put me together with some of the session guys from the Beach Boys. It was a complete nutty thing to do. You know, sometimes I would hear these melodies in my head, but I could just, again, I'd hit a wall.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  But anyway, I would go back to my bedroom. What I wanted to do was just record my own stuff in my bedroom, on my own. So I set up, I had two cassettes. So, and I had a keyboard. And I would just play the keyboard and record it on one cassette. And then I would play what I had recorded on the cassette and play more keyboard, but recorded on the second cassette.

• 1:39:54Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  And then I would just go back and forth.

• 1:39:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  And I just, I came up with this thing and when I heard it, I just said, you know, that's, you know, that's it. This was 1985. I'm not gonna do anything more.

• 1:40:09Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  I don't wanna do anything more in music and I told Jeff that. I'm not gonna, this stuff, that's gonna ever happen. But I kept that. I always thought, I just thought it was loud.

• 1:40:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It also sounds spiritual. It sounds like maybe church music.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  It just happened.

• 1:40:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Were you playing it loud in the room when you were playing it?

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Not really.

• 1:40:33Rick Rubin?

  Cause it sounds loud.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  It sounds loud, yeah. It does sound loud.

• 1:40:37Rick Rubin?

  Maybe it has to do with the cassette recorder's compression or something that makes it sound loud.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  I have no idea, but it was, it had always existed on a cassette. And, you know, and over the years, of course, I've met, you know, thousands of music, really well-known musicians. I love speaking, you know, to musicians and, you know, I've had, you know, the opportunity to actually sit down and they wanna talk about art.

• 1:41:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  You know, they don't wanna talk about music.

• 1:41:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  And... Everybody's an artist. But I, you know, it's fine. I'll look at, you know, whether it's Ronnie Wood or Johnny Depp or, you know, Paul McCartney, you know, or, you know, Dylan. I think Dylan, to me, is the more accomplished artist, I think. I got a call one day from his manager. It's years ago. Would you want to meet? Bob wants to meet you. I said, what are you, what are you, nuts? Is this some sort of lunch show?

• 1:41:47Rick Rubin?

  Frank?

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Says, yeah, he's not, he wants to meet you. I said, God, yeah, fine. So this short story was that he was playing at the Beacon and as he does usually in New York. He says, he's out in New Jersey. Go to this, stay at this motel out in Jersey. I said, all right, that's where I go. Says, yeah, that's where you go. And so I go out there and I pull into this like ratty old motel and I go into the lobby and is that one of his handlers there? And I figured I'm going to go up to him rumors. Says, no, no, he's out in the parking lot. I said, oh, all right. We walk up in the parking lot and he's in an RV.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  That's where he's staying. And it's kind of like, not very nice looking. You know, it's just a regular beaten up, which he drives. He loves to drive.

• 1:42:44Rick Rubin?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  So, I mean, that in itself

• 1:42:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  was knocked me for a loop. Of course, I'm nervous as hell.

• 1:42:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:42:53Rick Rubin?

  Bob Dylan.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  You know, Bob Dylan.

• 1:42:55Rick Rubin?

  Scary, of course.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Scary.

• 1:42:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  He wants to talk about these publicity pictures of all the work. I guess he had seen me. I had started working with publicity pictures in the mid 80s, but then really got into them in the late 90s and started collecting more and just organizing like memorabilia. I love the way I would go into a memorabilia store and something would be elaborately framed. And there would be a signature. And I just love the formalism of the presentation. You know, you would get this photograph. That they would like mat, double mat, but then they would like, they were selling the autograph.

• 1:43:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Speaker 01

  And so I kind of wanted to mimic that. And I just had a, you know, it was just, again, another journey, another body of work. I don't know where it would lead. I don't know.

• 1:43:53Rick Rubin?

  I eat a Bob Dylan.

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  But it got me a call from Dylan. And of course, we sat there for like hours.

• 1:44:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  And he was sort of like scoping out the idea of like what, he did want to talk about the art world and how does it operate? I mean, he had shows of his paintings and I wasn't aware of his paintings at the time, but I soon, then I visited him again in California. What I was very impressed was the gates that he makes, these phenomenal. I just think the subject for Dylan, the idea, and he brought me to this, I think it was in Santa Monica, his studio. And all this iron work that he collects and he welds and he makes these gates. And I just thought, first of all,

• 1:44:47Speaker 01

  I looked at it and I said, that is great folk art. I really, and I just, it just, the marriage that he made with the subject. The paintings, okay. I wrote about the paintings. I wrote about the fact that it almost seemed like his studio, he was, the term I came up with, witness protection. It had that vibe, like he could just,

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  if he needed to escape out the back door, five seconds flat, he could. It wasn't an artist's studio. It was a strange looking studio. But the gate was really phenomenal. Then he did have a couple of shows, he had a couple of shows with Gregozian, and I helped out. I kind of helped. I didn't really help, but I became friends with his manager, who I used to visit his offices and talk to him about the memorabilia that he was organizing, you know. And the painting, I just was knocked out that, you know, the original painting from, music from Big Pink and self portrait painting was there.

• 1:46:00Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:46:02Rick Rubin?

  You could photograph those.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  I have done many.

• 1:46:06Rick Rubin?

  You could re-photograph those.

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  Variations of those two paintings. But I think, yeah, that's probably the idea of becoming friends, or at least not friends, but acquaintances, with, you know, a musician like that. You know, like, I know that I've seen your thing with Paul McCartney. And, you know, Paul and I get together like, we get together at least once a year for the last, I don't know, year or whatever. And it gets easier. You know, I get very nervous. Like, you know, he's a, you know,

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  it's like I have this thing where it's like, but this past August, because he likes to come to the studio. He likes to see what's going on.

• 1:46:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  Because he likes to paint. He was very good friends with DeCuny, who was one of my favorite artists. And we could really communicate on that level, just visually. And, you know, I know that he just had his photographs shown that he took in 64. He showed them at Brooklyn. But this past visit was really interesting because he played me some of his new music that he was just rolling around with. And then, of course, then he split and went on this big tour. And I guess it's over now. But to have conversations with,

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  I think with artists who have, you know, their feet in maybe a couple of different worlds in the arts, you know, whether it's, you know, maybe they're making movies, but they're playing music too, whether they're painting, and you know, I kind of like that.

• 1:47:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Because one is usually experimental. For the most part, one is really solid, is what they do for a living. But it's nice to share the studio experience with a musician.

• 1:48:13Rick Rubin?

  Different than sharing it with an artist?

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah, yeah. They're looking at it in ways in which another artist, you know, when I get together with someone like Christopher or something, like I, I just went to his, um, he had a show downtown on Wall Street recently, took over a floor, an abandoned office floor and put his work up. And it was really successful. You know, whether it was the windows looking out, the textures, the, the leftover, the wires hanging from the ceiling, and it all figured into the work. It was, you know, he created an environment,

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  or he took over an existing environment. And I've done this before, and he's known about that.

• 1:49:06Rick Rubin?

  There was the first house.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  The first house I did out in L.A. was a teardown. We were able to lease it for three months. That was an incredibly fun, and I met a lot of artists who, uh, cause I stayed for three months in, in L.A. to do the project, and it wasn't in a gallery. You know, I treated the house like a domestic environment.

• 1:49:32Rick Rubin?

  How did you get the idea to do that?

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  I just liked the, the idea of, of showing work in a domestic with furniture, with the idea of showing, you know, hanging a work in a kid's bedroom.

• 1:49:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  The idea of having outdoor space, like a garage or a driveway, or park a car.

• 1:49:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:54Speaker 01

  And then tearing the house apart. And then sheet rock. I loved sheet rock like, like Bondo.

• 1:50:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  You know, for some reason, when, I love the idea of sheet rocking, taping, but don't paint it. Leave the tape.

• 1:50:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:10Speaker 01

  I've done three houses. So I did second house, which was up near my property, but that was actually bought by the Guggenheim, the whole place.

• 1:50:21Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  All the hood, there were all hoods in that house. And then it got hit by lightning and burned down.

• 1:50:29Rick Rubin?

  What are the odds?

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  What are the odds? But it was like a gift.

• 1:50:34Rick Rubin?

  But the house was existing.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  House was existing in a field of grass. It was abandoned and I'd been driving by it for years. It was just a simple ranch house, but it was floated in a sea of grass. And I said, I'd love to do something with that house one day. And one day I saw it was for sale.

• 1:50:53Rick Rubin?

  Perfect.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  The son, I guess the dad had passed away, bought the house and I just started doing my thing.

• 1:51:03Rick Rubin?

  Did you put any works in it or you worked with what was there?

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  I worked with the rooms. And I worked what was going on the outside. I didn't really change the shape. I didn't change the way you got up to the house, the driveway. I didn't mow the lawn. I parked a car and put it on cinder blocks because everybody has gold cars in there. I basically did what I was introduced to when I went first went upstate. Because when I went upstate, as I said, I didn't really know what it was like to live in the country. But I soon realized, you know, there's a basketball hoop in almost everybody's yard. There are these tire planters and I mean, there was all these kinds of things that

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  I just started treating people's yards as a page in a magazine. I started photographing people's yards and what was in the yards. And then I got my own yard, that house. And I treated the house as an upstate. And I decided, I put a lot of different things in before I decided, let's just do hoods. And then, I don't know what happened. I'm not sure why it was sold to the Guggenheim. I'm not sure why they bought it, but they did. I think they were trying to go through all the legal things to get it access.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  So they had to, you know, they had to deal with parking handicap. Well, they never got to that stage because they removed all the hoods except one, which was mine. And then my painting, which I did not sell them as part of that. It was what I call my Sid Vicious painting, which was this thing I had bought at. A sex pistol, almost kind of like a shawl. Some cheap fabric that I bought at a flea market. And I stretched it and I painted everybody out except Sid. I just thought, you know, I liked Sid, I don't know. I loved his version of my way. I mean, that to me was just phenomenal.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  And I finally, and I did eventually meet like McLaren, who was a real character. But that burned. When the light, I got a call. House, yeah. I mean, what? But luckily, the only thing in that was the Sid and my hood, which was no big deal because I could just repair it. And then I left it there. And I think we renegotiated where I bought the house back from the, in some weird deal for like a dollar or something. And it's the house and it's now, well, there's very little there. The car is still there.

• 1:53:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  The 78, a beautiful view. I'm not sure what to do with the property.

• 1:54:03Rick Rubin?

  Maybe the ruin is the most interesting thing it could be. It's like going to Rome.

• 1:54:07Speaker 01

  It might be. And it's all been, you know, fairly documented.

• 1:54:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:12Speaker 01

  It's been, I published a book called Second House. And that's the thing about books is they have a way of hanging around. Published 300 copies. I mean, I have my own publishing company. And we published, you know, 300 copies and we give them away. You know, we're just giving a couple of book, you know, really interesting bookstores who like the books.

• 1:54:34Rick Rubin?

  When did you start doing that, the publishing?

• 1:54:37Speaker 01

  A while ago. It's this company called Fulton Rider. And I just decided, I've never been interested in this idea of the, the catalog resony kind of, I just don't see how that's going to be possible with me. I know people have tried it and people are trying to do it right now.

• 1:54:58Rick Rubin?

  You used to make too much stuff?

• 1:54:59Speaker 01

  Well, I just don't see how you're going to organize it, yeah. I mean, you know, unless you want like 25 vault. I mean, I make bodies of work and I always have.

• 1:55:13Rick Rubin?

  Do you think of yourself as a curator?

• 1:55:16Speaker 01

  Upstate, I've curated a bunch of buildings. I've built buildings over the past 30 years. It's almost like a little village now. It's almost a mini Marfa.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  What I'm planning to do is... I want to do a show called "Collection", where I've taken other artists' work and I've paid homage to them.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  So in that sense, there's a bit of curating going on. I don't have a space for that show yet, and I don't know when I want to do that show. And what I've done with the homages is, like for the Warhol,

• 1:56:08Speaker 01

  it was, to me, it was an interesting Warhol because it belonged to Alice Cooper. It was one of the electric chairs, which of course is interesting because...

• 1:56:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  And we did a trade. And so all I did was I did a zine on the whole thing. Him owning it, Shep is in there, his manager. And then every electric chair that's supposedly out there. Because there was some kind of question about this one, but I don't care. It's Alice Cooper. And I believe he got it from Warhol.

• 1:56:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  So that is part of the curating, if you were going to say yes. Because that's my idea of paying homage. And then I have a pollock where

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  it's a photograph of him by...

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Very well-known photographer. But I bought a cancelled cheque from Pollock made out to the IRS. But it has his signature. So that's Pollock. Then de Kooning, I bought, one day, I was talking to this... Do you know the Minutian Gallery?

• 1:57:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  He's a strange guy. Anyway, he kind of was courting me for a while. But I love his space on the Upper East Side. I live like four doors down from his gallery. It's a beautiful space. Does fantastic shows. Very focused on what I like to focus on, the type of art. So I was up there and he was talking. He wanted to do a show with me, but I just wasn't sure I could do something, work with him. But I'm sitting in his office and he has one of the ugliest de Kooning drawings I've ever seen in my life. Great body, but the face looked like someone drew it,

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  you know, like after. And I said, what's... And it's tall, it's big. What's the story with this drawing? He goes, "Well, I don't know." I said, "How much?" I knew exactly. I wanted to buy it and then I wanted to do... I wanted to reproduce the paper, the image, and then I wanted to put my own face in like 15 of them and line them up. So that's the de Kooning. But, so when you buy these...

• 1:58:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, you could do whatever you want.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  You buy the real one.

• 1:58:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  And mine. You buy the Warhol. You have the Warhol and my zine.

• 1:58:58Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  And then I got a Picasso from 1948. And I riffed on that. And you buy the all 10. But you also get... At least you get the Picasso.

• 1:59:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It's great.

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  So the idea is like, I'm gonna curate... I would say I'm more of a collector.

• 1:59:22Rick Rubin?

  Tell me everything you collect.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  I collect books. I started, you know, collecting paperbacks in the East Village.

• 1:59:31Rick Rubin?

  Based on the covers or?

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Mostly the beats. I started with, you know, Carowack and that kind of stuff. And I just learned more. I became friends with people who sold first editions. And, you know, I just haunted and hung out. And then I met other book collectors and I learned. And I went to the antiquarian book fairs and, you know, years and years of just studying and knowing what was going on. And because I didn't start to read until very late. I was very dyslexic. I didn't read until I was like 22. But when I started, it flipped. I just started being able to read.

• 2:00:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  And I just started reading like everything. But art, sometimes I go through periods where I go kind of crazy and I buy a lot of art. You know, the problem now is we're trying to set up a foundation. In terms of collecting my own, my friends, I'll, now I'll call them up. I say, hey, where would you like your art to go? Let's say it's the Institute of Chicago or Mocha. It's not as easy as you think. You just can't donate.

• 2:00:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  You know, it's a whole process. And it's a bit of a, it's a little defeating. You know, you call them up and you say, hey, I've got, you know.

• 2:01:00Rick Rubin?

  It's also not what you want to spend your time doing.

• 2:01:02Speaker 01

  No, not at all. But it's, I think it's, it's better than, you know, certainly better than selling. But it wasn't making art that really turned me on the most. When I was like 19 or something, I'd just come back from this European humanities thing, which I never attended. It was just part of this thing that I went around to all the museums and I would draw.

• 2:01:30Rick Rubin?

  How did you get to go on that?

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  I was at some stupid school that I was avoiding the draft. It was like an alternative hippie school up in Maine. Doesn't even exist. It was like, and every loser in person couldn't take an SAT got, you know, sent there and, but they had a humanities course, which was, they would, you would go to France. And I, sure I'll go, but I never went to class. I just hung out and, you know, I would just get on a train. I went to museums all by myself and, you know. But I came back from that trip, you know, and there was a little carriage house with a little art department at that school. And there was this guy there.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  He was my only art teacher and, but what really turned me on was going to his house when I was nineteen. He had real art on the wall. And that, I think, that experience actually was incredibly profound for me because I had never been to a house that had real, you know, he had etchings, he had acquitants, he had dry point, he had painting, had drawings, you know, anywhere like a dry point Matisse to a Mary Cassatt acquitant to a, this guy named William Bailey, who was a fantastic draftsman and painter from, taught for years at Yale.

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  This guy Walt Kuhn, who is well-known for painting circus. Yeah, he also put together the Armory. He was one of the three curators that put together the Armory Show and where Duchamp and, and he was the guy who always told me, no, don't settle on any one thing right now. Yeah. Don't try to create a style. Like all the artists that are around our neighborhood in Maine, who are trying to get shows and sell their work. Because in those days, it was you're in Wyeth country. I mean, I'm a huge Wyeth, I love Andrew Wyeth, huge fan. But, you know, there's a lot of other things out there.

• 2:03:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, wasn't your path.

• 2:03:43Speaker 01

  You know, so, and then go to New York, you know. At least check it out.

• 2:03:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  You know.

• 2:03:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  And find out what's.

• 2:03:52Rick Rubin?

  Good advice.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Going on, and that was difficult.

• 2:03:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  I didn't want to, again, I didn't want to leave that bubble. And I was having a great time up in Maine.

• 2:04:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  Hanging out with older, you know, working artists.

• 2:04:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Going to figure drawing class. I love that.

• 2:04:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  But the start's really not that different from a lot of other, you know. I think it was getting to New York that. The idea of walking down the street in the middle of the afternoon on West Broadway back then in seventy-four, and being able to pop in to a gallery, you know. One, it's free, you know, they've got us anything. Not having to make an appointment, not having to make a plan. Maybe you just went to the bodega to get a sandwich. Oh, I'll just walk in and I see this Art Povera show

• 2:04:52Speaker 01

  that I don't really know much about. Or I see a Vito Aconci, who I later become very good friends with. Like, I can't believe I'm friends with this guy years later. But, you know, in nineteen seventy-four, to see, go to Sonnibed or Castelli or, you know. It's just not making art. It's, it's, it's the whole.

• 2:05:13Rick Rubin?

  It's like a community or a.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  And then bumping in to another artist and saying.

• 2:05:22Speaker 01

  Let's grab a coffee and just talk. I think that's, for me, I know it's not for a lot of artists, but for me, that's part of the work.

• 2:05:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  You know, I loved coming out to LA and I used to have shows right away in LA. Little, you know, in hotels and crazy weird places in LA. But the problem with LA is that you just couldn't walk, there's no walking down the street and bumping.

• 2:05:49Rick Rubin?

  You don't run into anyone?

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:05:51Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  You want to go see John Baldassarre, you're gonna go all the way to Venice and make an appointment.

• 2:05:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  Talk to the guy or whatever.

• 2:05:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  There was no spontaneity that way. And I'm not sure what artists, if that's part of their routine these days.

• 2:06:05Rick Rubin?

  I know a lot of musicians like that. That's sort of the camaraderie of fellow travelers.

• 2:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Rick Rubin?

  Because if you don't do it, it's a different conversation.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:19Rick Rubin?

  You know, unless you're doing it, it's like speaking another language.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  I think you also break through.

• 2:06:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  To places where you wouldn't ordinarily.

• 2:06:28Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  Maybe you'd get there much later.

• 2:06:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I was in Laurel Canyon in 1967. I missed it, though.

• 2:06:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  I was there.

• 2:06:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  And I didn't have the wherewithal to stay.

• 2:06:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  I don't know what would have happened. I was there outside the whiskey when the Doors were playing.

• 2:06:50Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  I was, I had just gotten out of high school. I was visiting my sister. But that community of musicians up in the hills and them, I mean, I mean, I love those docks.

• 2:07:05Rick Rubin?

  It's a great time in music.

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  And then them talking about hanging out.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  I mean, the stories. That kind of time must have been a little bit what I think that I experienced in the early days of Soho.

• 2:07:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  I got there just in time. I mean, it was almost over as soon as I got there, the real estate thing. I mean, it just went.

• 2:07:31Rick Rubin?

  But that's also the luck. You happened to go. You had a guy who told you to go. You listened, you went, you thought you'd go for three months. And you found it.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:42Rick Rubin?

  And you persisted through years of rejection.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  Well, I thought.

• 2:07:48Rick Rubin?

  Years and years.

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  Yes, but I learned to, I really thought after a while, if the work wasn't rejected, then I'm, I mean, I don't know. It's not like I wanted to be rejected.

• 2:07:59Rick Rubin?

  No. But being hated is better than nobody caring.

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  Well.

• 2:08:04Rick Rubin?

  There's an emotion.

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  There's, when you get, yeah, it's better to have that extreme, either extreme love or, you know, this guy is just wrong.

• 2:08:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  I don't know. I still have a very narrow definition or idea of what an artist is.

• 2:08:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:24Speaker 01

  Especially these days.

• 2:08:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  And it's probably not the correct one, but I still think an artist is essentially an antisocial creature who basically just is in a room doing something by themselves. And their audience doesn't really have one at the moment of the making or probably won't for a while.

• 2:08:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It's not about them.

• 2:08:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:08:55Rick Rubin?

  I read a review of one of your shows. The reviewer finished looking at the show and said, "I wish I was dead."

• 2:09:10Speaker 01

  You know what? I love, I actually, sometimes I used to collect those things, you know? And, uh...

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  I'm not sure if I've heard that one.

• 2:09:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, I wish I was dead.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Please kill me.

• 2:09:29Rick Rubin?

  It's unbelievable.

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, well...

• 2:09:35Speaker 01

  I don't know what's next, but it's, um...

• 2:09:39Rick Rubin?

  Are you just excited about making art now as you've ever been?

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's all I do.

• 2:09:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  It's all I think about. I don't really do anything else, and I never have. I mean, like, for instance, this is the first time I've actually sat and talked to anybody about what we're talking about in a long, long time. I mean, I, you know, I gave up giving interviews and talking to the press and whatever for a while ago, you know? I don't know. I just felt, this time I felt comf... I mean, I thought I'd feel comfortable. Because you're an artist, you know? And I think I feel more comfortable about, around people who are creative.

• 2:10:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  Because they get it.

• 2:10:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, even if explaining stuff, I mean, you get it, you know what it's like, you know, you have to make these decisions, and you know, some of the decisions are made not by you, but for you. They're just, they're made kind of automatically, and it's like, it's not like magic. I don't know what the word is.

• 2:10:49Rick Rubin?

  Would you say it's like it's revealed to you?

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  Revealed? Yeah, something, something is definitely, but I think it's recognition. You're able to receive it. Whereas, most of the population, all that got taken away from them by probably around age six.

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  Somehow the artist, something didn't get removed somehow. Yeah. You know, something happened very young.

• 2:12:05Speaker 02

  What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammatin? Counter-culture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamic? Tetragrammatin. Graphic design? Tetragrammatin. Mythology and magic? Tetragrammatin. Obscure film? Tetragrammatin. Beach culture? Tetragrammatin. Esoteric lectures? Tetragrammatin. Off-the-grid living? Tetragrammatin. Alt spirituality? Tetragrammatin. The canon of fine objects? Tetragrammatin. Muscle cars? Tetragrammatin. Ancient wisdom for a new age.

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.