Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha is an artist whose six-decade career spans painting, photography, printmaking, film, and book art. His first artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations—featuring 26 photographs taken along Route 66—marked the beginning of his ongoing exploration of the interplay between image and text, while later works such as Tulsa Slut and The End expanded this approach across different media. He draws inspiration from magazines, comics, and newspapers, experimenting with inventive materials like blackberry juice, chocolate, and gunpowder to explore the legibility and permanence of words. His work has been featured in major exhibitions including, most recently, ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN at MoMA in 2023 and LACMA in 2024, along with solo shows in Gagosian galleries worldwide. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Tetra Grahamington.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  I came here in 56. 56. Right after high school and I sort of identified with Grapes of Wrath a little bit because I came from Oklahoma. Yeah. You know, Bible Belt, Jim Crow laws and all that. But we had a little bit of a progressive introduction to the world of music through Clyde McFatter and, you know, Lieber Stoller and those kind of people that gonna need an ocean of Calamine lotion. Yeah. It's like prototype rock and roll, sort of. Yeah. What do they say? Rocket 88, you know, Jackie Brunson.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  They say Rocket 88 was the very first rock record. I don't know if it's true, but it's interesting. I don't either, but I just, I take it as what a lot of people think. But we listened to music like that and it was a little bit dark and, you know, parents didn't like us for that. Classic kind of parent-child growing up type thing. And then I wanted to leave and go to someplace where I could go to an art school and I thought about New York or Chicago, Kansas City maybe, or LA. And I picked this because I had visited here before and New York too cold. Yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Chicago too cold. Yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  I like the idea of palm trees and this life, you know.

• 2:02Rick Rubin?

  It was a bold choice because really, most artists at that time, or someone even with the dream of a career in art or work in art, would probably go to New York, don't you think?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then a lot of people had the idea that if you're going to be an artist, you can be, do something commercial so you can make a living at it. And then there's Hallmark Cards in Kansas City.

• 2:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  So Kansas City Art Institute welcomed a lot of people like that.

• 2:28Rick Rubin?

  Warhol started as a commercial artist.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was an accomplished commercial artist before he got into painting.

• 2:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  And he was an exceptional person for that. But New York was, you know, a lot was happening back there in the 50s with the abstract expressionists and de Kooning and Franz Kline and all these people, Adolf Galtlieb.

• 2:54Rick Rubin?

  At the time that you were moving out here, that was still happening in New York?

• 2:59Speaker 00

  It was still happening, yeah. And we got drifted that in our art school. I thought I wanted to be a sign painter. And so I went to enroll in Art Center School over on Third Street. And their quotas were all filled, so I took the second best. And I went to Cheneaud, which was better for me. And Art Center had a dress code. You couldn't wear any affectation of a beatnik. You know, you couldn't wear-

• 3:32Rick Rubin?

  Facial hair.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Facial hair of any kind, no good. You couldn't take a bongo drum to school.

• 3:38Rick Rubin?

  It's funny for an art school, right?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Well, it is, totally. I mean, it's much different today than it was back then. But they actually said, you can't wear sandals to school. And you can't wear a beret. And it was a commercial school. But then Cheneaud, on the other hand, was totally opposite that. You could dress and act like you wanted to and get away with everything.

• 4:01Rick Rubin?

  What was the experience of art school at that point in time?

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Well, I was in advertising design classes and general design classes and painting classes and drawing. And then they had another class called Visual World, studying the eye and everything that that means. And so I was lucky enough to be with a bunch of students who I jived with.

• 4:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  And we kind of inspired each other. Actually, it even got to the point of being competitive. And that was okay.

• 4:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  And we had good instructors too. We had Robert Irwin and Billy Albankston, John Altoon. Emerson Woolfer was a good teacher. And so these teachers just, you know, we got into this whole thing about abstract expressionism and painting on a canvas that's blank, you know, face the blank canvas with colors and brushes. And so we all sort of worked towards that. And then it went, I got out of feeling like I wanted to be in commercial art and I wanted to be in fine arts and painting and that sort of thing, you know. Just, I don't know, make crazy pictures that are preconceived.

• 5:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I'd had an idea in my head before I started it, rather than facing a blank canvas.

• 5:30Rick Rubin?

  And has it always been that way for you? That it's always preconceived and then you execute it?

• 5:34Speaker 00

  Pretty much, yeah, yeah. But other things will sneak in too. Whatever the circumstance of the moment is can influence me too.

• 5:45Rick Rubin?

  From your initial imagination to the finished piece, how different might it be?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Well, sometimes it's surprisingly different, but mostly it's, I follow a course. And sometimes that is just spontaneous and kind of look at the world and the contents of the world and everything that's happening in it and then just piddle with it.

• 6:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  You know, just mess with the stuff that they give us.

• 6:13Rick Rubin?

  Can you think of a specific example of working on something and it changing?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  I think early on, when I was in school, I kind of lived on SPAM for a while.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  And I loved the lettering on SPAM. So I had a personal connection to this. The can, the shape of the can, it had a weird little thing. You don't see too many products being sold in that rounded corner metal containers anymore. I don't think you see that much.

• 6:43Rick Rubin?

  I don't think so, yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  And so something told me, you've got to make a picture out of this. So I painted that real big, like six feet across.

• 6:54Rick Rubin?

  The logo.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, SPAM. So things like that, that I felt like were things that I, you know, experienced just in everyday life.

• 7:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  And that's my subject matter. And it's been kind of like that. I mean, off and on, zigzag, this way and that way, you know.

• 7:16Rick Rubin?

  You've come in contact with a lot of stuff over the course of your life. What makes the one, this is the thing that's going to be the painting? What's the spark that you recognize?

• 7:31Speaker 00

  You know, a lot of times it's just a notion that comes from the sky or from the ground or from somewhere. You wonder where it is. And then you, you just take it with blind faith and carry on through with it. And I've found that to be true with a lot of my work, is that I, I get a notion or something pulls at me and then I, I go at it that way. I mean, I don't have a game plan or a method particularly. And it's mysterious kind of phenomenon, this, you know, creating things.

• 8:11Rick Rubin?

  You have a notion that something's going to be interesting, then you decide to engage with it. How do you pick the materials to use, for example?

• 8:21Speaker 00

  A lot of it is a habit and the fact that paint seems to be okay as a as a source, as a material to use and print making okay, the same thing, a piece of charcoal, pencil, you know, these are kind of established things and I I got on to them real early and they don't seem to have changed that much, but I mean, there is a lot of things that are happening in in the art world now that, I mean, they're using computers and they're doing all kinds of insane things that I'm not ready to step up to.

• 8:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and if it's not broken, you don't need to fix it.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:02Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the Ferris Gallery. What was that like?

• 9:05Speaker 00

  It was really an astounding kind of group of artists that got together under the guise of one man named Walter Hops. We all called him Chico and he created this gallery and got a space over on Los Ingo.

• 9:23Rick Rubin?

  It was a storefront?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the place is still there, but not the gallery.

• 9:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  But it was, I think, back in the 50s or 60s, it was a you know, they had to come up with $50 a month rent, you know, so.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  But they had a complete lineup of really great artists and, well, they showed Andy Warhol's first exhibit of Campbell's Soup Cans, you know, those. And then they had Giorgio Morandi paintings there and they had Kurt Schwitters, a German dotist artist, and that made little collages from train receipts that he'd find on the floor, you know.

• 10:04Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know they had Morandi. I thought of them more as American artists.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  They were. I mean, it was, and but they also had a appreciation for people like that and

• 10:16Rick Rubin?

  That's amazing.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Really pretty interesting lineup and a lot of contemporary artists at the time like Billy Albangston and John Altoon, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Craig Kaufman, Ken Price. And a lot of that sort of interwove with surfing and the beach lifestyle and most of these artists were living in Venice. Mm-hmm. I was mostly in Hollywood on Western Avenue about that time, but I lived in Echo Park and around there, so I never really got out to Venice until later on and I had a studio out there. But anyway, Ferris was, it was a hotspot.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Then Monday night was the openings. People would flock to Ferris. They have one every Monday? Yeah, every Monday night and you'd walk from gallery to gallery on La Cienega and then up the street and you'd go to Barney's Beanery. Oh, cool. So people would hang out there. Yeah. Ed Keenholz was another artist of the, he was one of the first artists that showed there and that actually created that gallery. So he was, he was one of the owners of the gallery. And Wally Berman. Yeah. Did you know him? Yeah, yeah. Oh, he was great. Good friend. I'm a fan. I just saw his son, Tosh, the other night and who was like that tall when I met Wally.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  But did you ever know him? No, no, no, I'm just a fan of the work. Yeah, yeah. And then there are a little bit of the cinema world got involved in it and Dennis Hopper was one of the first people to come around and actually buy works from the gallery. And he bought my first painting and. First painting you ever sold was to him? Yeah. Great. I mean, there's, there's quite a few people from the, from the movie business, but I, I was always surprised that there weren't more people in the movie business that were interested in art, you know? Vincent Price, he was an art collector. Yeah. And he had a real good taste and all that. So did Edward G. Robinson, people like that. But they didn't touch young artists. Mm-hmm.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  You know? Russ Tamblyn was another artist that I still see. I went to his 90th birthday party the other day. Amazing. Yeah. I reminded him that I watched him on a, it was Academy Award presentation or something and he was at one end of the stage and he did a cartwheel, cartwheel, cartwheel, cartwheel split like this. I just couldn't believe it and he must have been seventy years old when he did that.

• 13:02Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  To be able to do that, but he was a great dancer. Anyway, he was one of those people that was kind of under the sphere of Wally Berman. George Herms was another artist that was right there and he's still alive.

• 13:21Rick Rubin?

  On the Monday nights when you would go, would you say it was mostly artists?

• 13:27Speaker 00

  It was a lot of people interested in the scene and a lot of these people, they might end up buying art. I mean, if it was over fifty dollars, forget it. I mean, you couldn't. They were not interested in it. And there was another actor named Sterling Holloway.

• 13:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Who was, he was a supporter of the Ferris and he would buy things from there. And then there's Don Bacardi and Christopher Isherwood, the writer, and they would always come around.

• 14:00Rick Rubin?

  Cool.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  So they were part of the scene. And it was a lively bunch of people. They were all, they all had their individual voices. Each one of them had their own unique kind of thing. They were not, really, you couldn't say their work all looks alike, because it didn't.

• 14:18Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Each one was entirely different.

• 14:20Rick Rubin?

  Even when you describe them, it's interesting imagining them all hanging out together because I think of them in different ways.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:29Rick Rubin?

  Would you say in the whole scene, were there a few hundred people or a few thousand people? At that time.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  I would say a few hundred people.

• 14:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  To be safe.

• 14:40Rick Rubin?

  Small, local scene.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was. It was small, local, but people knew about it. And people from New York knew that whatever's happened in L.A., it's really gonna be maybe the fairest gallery.

• 14:53Rick Rubin?

  That's interesting. How do you think they knew?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  I guess, you know, it's the, our world is such a small entity that word just spread in little ways, but they, they knew what was happening. And then a man named Irving Blum, who's still alive, he was partnered with Walter Hops. And Irving took the gallery over eventually. And Walter went on to be the director of the Smithsonian and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.

• 15:23Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Anyway, and then the international scene sort of opened up when Marcel Duchamp had his first gallery show in his life. He was like 65 years old. And Walter Hops gave him this show at the Pasadena Art Museum. So that was a big, big thing. And all the artists went there and they, it was a, it was really a notable event in the art world.

• 15:50Rick Rubin?

  Do you think if Walter Hops didn't do that Duchamp show when Duchamp was 65, maybe our perception of Duchamp might have been different now?

• 16:02Speaker 00

  I think so. It was eventually going to happen no matter what. And so if Walter hadn't done it, I, I mean, someone else would have. A big museum, maybe like, I mean, a lot of his work is owned by the Philadelphia Museum. And, but he's, you know, highly respected and a real curious phenomenon to anybody who makes art, you know. A lot of people don't like him because he didn't paint pretty pictures, you know.

• 16:36Rick Rubin?

  Do you feel like the movement that you were part of was the movement after abstract expressionism?

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there were, you know, urgings and, you know, things brewing underneath the whole abstract expressionist. Boy, those guys were really painted beautiful pictures. And but there was almost like no room to move around them because you can, you know, that's all covered, all these things or these statements that they're making with paint and shapes and all this are kind of so well done by them. Why add to the whole thing?

• 17:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  You know, so it kind of went to the opposite side, which is, it kind of leaked into the world of popular culture.

• 17:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  And people were beginning to say, well, maybe the Coca-Cola bottle is not such a bad thing after all. It's a very known thing. And so let's make something of it. And Duchamp also said that, too. I mean, he was saying, look around. I mean, there's, there's a lot to see. You might be overlooking the valuable things.

• 17:45Rick Rubin?

  What do you think the first piece of art you've ever saw that could be considered pop art?

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Let me see. I'll show you. This is the first thing that got me. That's about the actual size of that work. It's a pen and ink drawing by an unknown artist named Johannes Bargeld, who was a German dotist, 1920. And that's called Beatles. And I saw that thing sort of almost like the size of a postage stamp in a book, you know, and I thought, wow, it just blew me away. And it was so curious. I mean, it looked like, what is that? Horse, is that a starting gate or what is it?

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Almost looked like a science experiment or, you know, not meant to be perceived as art. And that's what I liked about it.

• 18:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  So it had a real power to it.

• 18:47Rick Rubin?

  What year did you see this?

• 18:48Speaker 00

  I saw that about 1960.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  1960.

• 18:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, 1959, 1960. That was made in 1920. I wanted to see that thing in, in the raw, you know. So I went to the Museum of Modern Art on my first trip to New York. And I, I made a cold call to the Department of Drawings and, and just told them I wanted to see that. And they said, come on up. You know, they bring this work out, you know, and show it to me. And I felt like, this is like I've got an audience with the Pope.

• 19:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah, what else did you see on that trip?

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Uh, I saw a lot of, I mean, that was my first trip to New York. So I'd never been there before. And then I went to Europe after that for about six months. And I saw mostly, I saw American art in, in Europe. And I didn't get too inspired by what European artists were doing, even contemporary artists. I didn't see too many that I, that I really liked. So work like this really had a, a powerful effect on me. And also Jasper John's work. Uh, he painted a Target. And then he had these ceramic faces called Target and Four Faces with these, you know,

• 20:10Speaker 00

  things like this with a little flap that comes down, like a little doorway that comes up. And you know, like, and I thought, wow, that's another, that's another one of these things. It is so puzzling. I won't even bother to figure that out.

• 20:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Why I like it, but I do.

• 20:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about that, about that feeling of mystery.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:31Rick Rubin?

  Is, is that what it's all about?

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Unexplained, I, I, yeah.

• 20:37Rick Rubin?

  What's the first time you saw any work with type in it?

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Maybe, you know, Picasso painted things like that and the French surrealists did. And also Jasper Johns painted that way too. So I got, I got pretty moved by, by that type of work. And I was also, I liked printing and setting type. I learned how to do that. I went, I worked for a printer and ran the presses. And so I learned how to set type and do that. And then that became aesthetic to me. You know, it began to really influence me. So I made some books from that. And then the idea of making a book into, I mean, why can't a book be considered an artwork?

• 21:27Rick Rubin?

  That was a new idea when you had it.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's just a, you know, piling on of all this stuff. You just give your soul to the school and to all your friends. And then, you know, every day that you get up and go to school, and every day that you make art, something new is coming into the scene. And you'd be keeping up with what's going on in the neighborhood, you know, Ferris Gallery and all the other galleries too. There were a lot of them. And then there were people who were kind of living out in the sticks, like Bruce Naumann was beginning to show his work there. And, and Joe Good was showing his work. And so it was like a vital, vital period.

• 22:16Rick Rubin?

  Do you think that feeling of community was necessary for you? If you would have come and there were no other artists and you were just by yourself, would it have happened? Or is it having a group of people, I want to say like-minded, you know, even with different ideas, but some thread of going out into the new world?

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. I can't imagine doing the thing by myself, but I, maybe I encountered something in your book that you also said, but in a different way, which is all art comes out of other art. And so, you know, originality is a vague term.

• 23:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Total originality. I mean, people come along and they're phenomenal, but they're not absolutely.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Immune to, you know, trying to understand the world or something.

• 23:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, and all of the information we have is stuff we've taken in over the course of our life. It's not, we don't come in filled with

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:25Rick Rubin?

  Ideas or pictures. We come in empty and then we go through life and see things and fill up this sort of storage.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I guess it's, you know, it's fortunate that we can have opinions about things because otherwise you wouldn't have things you don't like and you wouldn't. And so I would have things that I don't like and then, you know, I don't like that. And yet that would influence me too. And so it all comes together to make up who you are.

• 23:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  So I see a lot of people have funny feelings about the art world where it's, they think it's all conspiratorial or something that they're, you know, only the people who work hard at it or they don't even have to have that much talent to make a life out of it. But I see too much like young artists today or they're like kamikaze, you know, they're this crash and burn. They're making great works, but they're out there, you know? And there are younger people who are really, you know, pushing it forward. So it's good to see. Music, same way, huh?

• 24:38Rick Rubin?

  Yes, always changing, always moving. I can't say it's always better, but there are always new interesting things.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:46Rick Rubin?

  I think in the past, it was more curated because it was harder to put stuff out. So less stuff came out. Tom Petty would say in the 1960s, if you played on a record, you had to be good. You wouldn't get to play on a record if you weren't really good. Everybody was good.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:06Rick Rubin?

  And now the entry level is lower, so anyone can do it. But from that, really interesting things can happen.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 25:15Rick Rubin?

  I want to ask you about the picture without words that you have at the Getty.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:20Rick Rubin?

  Did you create that piece to live in that space?

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I took a

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Careful measurements, they gave me this commission to do that, saying, "There's a wall, do something to it." It's a big wall. Yeah, it's like thirty feet high, basically. Maybe forty, it's very tall. Yeah, and it's about fifteen, twenty feet wide or something, you know. So I conceived of this thing that I thought would be really good for an auditorium. You know, light streaming in from somewhere and smashing to the floor, making a mark on the floor. It was a big project, it was, you know, we put together these aluminum aircraft skins

• 26:12Speaker 00

  together to make up this thirty by fifteen foot surface to stretch canvas on. So it was very heavy, and I had to work on it in the studio I had in Venice. And I did a time study on it because light was coming in continuously throughout the day and it would blast on the wall and go down like this. And so we did a time study with natural sunlight. And it was, that was a technique that they had invented at the General Motors Company, I think. For what? To study automobile paints.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  And they have a way of doing a time study on something. And they can tell you how much damage or how much light is gonna happen over a hundred and fifty year time. Wow. And so they ran this over there and, I mean, it taught me a lot, I guess, but then I didn't want it to interfere with my idea. Yeah. And so, I don't know. I mean, that painting is about twenty-five years old now. Really? And I don't see anything.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Changed about it at all.

• 27:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, when you describe the picture without words, you talk about the light coming in and smashing the floor. When I see the image, I see the light. Like, to me, the feature of the painting is the light. Yes, there's an opening that it's coming in through at the top. Yes, there's a place it's landing on the bottom.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:50Rick Rubin?

  But the feature of it is the light. So it's interesting to hear you describe it as there's an opening and where it lands.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, and then a painting of that magnitude size was a little tricky, so I and I had a studio in Venice that had a thirty-foot ceiling. But this painting would not quite fit that. So I painted it on its side.

• 28:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  And I was always looking like this. I've got a picture of my son Eddie, and we're both looking at a painting like this.

• 28:26Rick Rubin?

  Was the first time you saw it upright in the museum?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:29Rick Rubin?

  Was there ever a consideration to paint it there? Or was that not possible?

• 28:33Speaker 00

  No, no, it wasn't possible. I mean, someone would have come out of the woodwork and done something, yes. They would have used that and painted on the wall. But I couldn't see doing it that way. I wanted a mobile something I could paint off-site and then install. It just made better sense.

• 28:54Rick Rubin?

  Did you ever consider painting it in a way that you could take it apart and put it together?

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Oh, you mean to make like multiple parts?

• 29:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, like if it was in four pieces that came together.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  You know, I thought about that, but I didn't like those joints.

• 29:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  It had to be in one piece, so that's the way it got to be. And so it was painted on its side, yeah. And I had a cot that I was always looking at it. So I'd just lay down on this cot.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  And then to install it was, I luckily had a fabricator, Ron McPherson, who really knew how to, he prepared the canvas for me and put it on this aircraft, aluminum aircraft skin with armature behind it and a, you know, a frame and everything. And then he, to move it, it took two forklift trucks to get it in place. And then somehow they had a complicated setup of bolts that held this thing in place. And, boy, you have to have some fabricator with ideas to know how to pull something like that off.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  That's why I always admire artists who make giant things in factories and, you know, with fabricators. Jeff Koons, a lot of people don't like his work, but if they looked at the fabrication of his work, it is top, top quality.

• 30:26Rick Rubin?

  The detail is unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Tell me how size of an image impacts it. What's the difference between the same image, big versus small?

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I always had, I mean, even working, because size like this, I would get into a habit for convenience. And just the physicality of it, I liked little works. And even I'd get works that were tiny like this. I like tiny things too. So every time I approach a work that I think I want to make, something pushes me in the direction of size. And I'll say, that'll work better if it's just like half size rather than six feet by eight feet, you know?

• 31:12Rick Rubin?

  And just the inner knowing?

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Or something says, how am I going to learn from this thing unless it overpowers me? I want a wall rocket. And then that makes it become itself.

• 31:28Rick Rubin?

  How is it different, making a piece like the example in the Getty, to live in a certain place versus a piece that's going to just be shown where it's going to be shown? Is that different?

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Well, I pretty much was guaranteed that that that there's, that's gonna stay there for a while.

• 31:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but I'm saying if you're asked to paint a picture that's gonna live in one place forever, it doesn't have to be that size.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:56Rick Rubin?

  If you know where it's gonna live, does that change it?

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Uh, not in the making of it, and there are not many works of art I make that I ever have any notion of where that thing's gonna end up.

• 32:08Rick Rubin?

  So usually, it's gonna go where it's gonna do.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. But I've worked on commissions too, where I, I did a library in Miami in 1985 that involved sixty paintings that were like six feet by twelve feet, and then a circular rotunda about six, let's see, "Words without thoughts never to heaven go," that's

• 32:37Rick Rubin?

  Seven.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Seven words from Hamlet. And so I painted one word on each, each one, and it was joined together. Each one was joined and sort of on, painted on aluminum with canvas mounted to aluminum, and then we would bend it into place in this circular opening, so sometimes the colors would jar with each other and they wouldn't continue on, you know, it wouldn't continuous. So, that's an example of some, where I knew this, where these things were gonna go.

• 33:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  And they're now in place.

• 33:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Now, that building was brand new, designed by Philip Johnson, and and now, they're thinking about, well, it's lived its life. Well, what's gonna happen with my artwork? And I go back and look at the contract and it doesn't really cover me on anything.

• 33:29Rick Rubin?

  It's not protected.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  I wonder, what's gonna happen to that? I mean, it'd be nice if they gave me those back.

• 33:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  I don't know what they're gonna do.

• 33:36Rick Rubin?

  Well, maybe a museum would buy it and build an installation. Something. I don't think it'll just go away.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. How important are the words you use? They've gotta have some kind of temperature to them, or anonymity to them, or I use a lot of two or three word combinations that they're not only just single words, but I started painting these single words like spam, you know, and I like that because it had an explosive sound to it. And they're like verbal utterings, you know, like smash. I always liked words like that. That had a noise quotient to them. Does how the letters look matter as well? Yeah, and then I was into

• 34:29Speaker 00

  typefaces and things like that, that I felt like that's gotta be part of the art. And then it moved on from there, but it was just like I like the way words go across a canvas and you know, your eyes are set like this and they read from left to right, that's right. And so it became a, almost like a landscape. So I was picturing landscape. I mean, even if I look out onto this lawn right here, I'm seeing a kind of a horizontal activity here that I'm picking up with my eyes and, and I like that. So landscapes, I like landscape painting. Things like that. And

• 35:12Speaker 00

  so maybe I could see these, this landscape horizontal where words would just be sitting on the landscape, so. And then they became the landscape. You have your Hollywood sign painting that's really wide. Yeah. That was a kind of an example. I lived over on Western Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard and I would check out that Hollywood sign every day and it was like a thermometer. You know, a weather vane or something. If I couldn't read that sign, I knew it was, I don't wanna stay outside, it's too smoggy. So if I can read it, then if it's very clear, then I know that it's, the air's okay to breathe.

• 35:59Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember the thought of painting it from behind?

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Maybe I got the idea by looking in the mirror or just accidentally seeing the painting in a mirror and the painting was behind me. So I then I thought, well, that's not an unlivable kind of image, is it?

• 36:19Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  It's uh, it's got some substance to it and painting it from the back, it's kind of like a ode to the rear view mirror or something like that.

• 36:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Also feels like it could be telling a story about Hollywood, like behind the scenes or something.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:39Rick Rubin?

  I don't know. It definitely creates a question mark when you look at it.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, just looking at it from afar was not enough for me. So I would go up there to the Hollywood sign. Back then you could just walk right up to it and climb around it and do uh, and they, it was really shoddy, made out of pieces of tin, I guess, on what looked like telephone poles. I think it's probably a lot of those poles are still holding the existing sign today. So I felt like, yeah, I see it from afar, but now I'm touching it.

• 37:20Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about perspective in general. So the choice of painting it from behind is changing the perspective we normally see. I remember paintings you've done where we're looking at something and we start moving to the side. And now we're seeing it from a side view and even further side view. And sometimes where you can barely make out what it is anymore because we're so close to, parallel to the image.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:47Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the idea of perspective in general.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  I guess I, I liked the concept of baseline perspective where, and I think it came from movies. And, and I would see movies as a kid and there would always be a, some scene with the characters in the movie. They're traveling somewhere and so they show you a little train. And the train always starts way off to the side and it's tiny down here.

• 38:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  And then pretty soon it goes, you know, so wow, that's panoramic, isn't it? And um, so I wanted to do some panoramic. Study and also I I would always see this 20th century Fox logo and wanted to go ahead and complete its diminishment, you know, and so it was like

• 38:40Rick Rubin?

  You've made it three dimensional essentially.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and it was almost like one of those freight trains or passenger trains that comes zooms in from the right hand corner and completely takes over the left hand corner. So it's like a megaphonic kind of experience.

• 39:00Rick Rubin?

  Did 20th century Fox ever use your version?

• 39:03Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:04Rick Rubin?

  Really? I'm surprised.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I and I've rarely got any pushback from anybody, even Standard Station. You know, I I had this idea about gas stations and I always liked gas stations and and the architecture of it and even for a while pictured myself, I could live in one of those gas stations, not bad at all. It's got the canopy was so great and park your car under the canopy, you know, and then there's little house. You could live in it. I I love that concept. So I was just, you know, that was an extension of somewhere I thought I might want to live.

• 39:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Tell me about the way California has changed over the course of your life.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  I do remember, I mean, there was a specific thing as I was reading the Look magazine and there was an article about Los Angeles and it said that there was a, this was like 1956 or 7, there was a net gain of 1,000 people a day. So, boy, if if 500 people in LA left, that would mean 1,500 people would have to come in and and that was just to me phenomenal then that, God, 1,000 people a day, net

• 40:28Speaker 00

  gain, that's astounding, you know, but I I'm not sure what it is today. It might be greater or might be less, I don't know, but. I like the old neighborhoods in downtown LA. You know, I lived over in Silver Lake and Echo Park, Hollywood. I see, now when I drive over there, I see entire blocks gone. They've been swept clean and you know what's coming. Aircraft carriers. God. And so I see great change in the city.

• 41:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  And a lot of the really pretty old buildings are gone. Or they're ready to be gone, you know?

• 41:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I'm surprised Musso Franks is still there.

• 41:16Rick Rubin?

  You did the photo book that opens up of Sunset Boulevard. The two sides of Sunset Boulevard. I remember I bought that right when I moved to California before I even knew your work. I bought that book and my plan was to have the two sides framed to put on either side of a hallway because I lived right on Sunset Boulevard. And I thought like this is the perfect.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:41Rick Rubin?

  I never went through with putting it together, but I loved that feeling of... It was a place that I romanticized about because it was the 60s in California. Sunset Strip. For people who like music, it was a very important time.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Pandora's Box.

• 42:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it was great.

• 42:05Rick Rubin?

  How did the idea come to do it in that fashion?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  You know, maybe it's some romantic connections to words again, like sunset. I didn't realize that there was going to be, I was going to come to LA and find that there was an actual Sunset Boulevard.

• 42:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  You know, so, and then wow, they also give you a sunset. And then that became a, kind of a target for this activity I had going in my mind to photograph buildings. And just for posterity's sake, or just as a, you're acting like a reporter, you know, and you're capturing what's out there and bringing it back, printing it on paper.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  So I've been doing that for years and they've got a website at the Getty called 12 Sunsets. And if you get on that, it'll show you, they've taken my photography over the past 50 years. You can look at what it looked like, what a building looked like in 1966 and 186, 96. And if you want to know how many synagogues there are on Sunset Boulevard, bang, bang, bang. If you want to know how many dry cleaners, bang, bang, bang. And I thought that's a piece of information that is beyond imagination.

• 43:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  You know, that they're able to do something like that. But there was a team of people that got all that the pictures together, the photography, and then studied it in like an archaeological study.

• 43:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  In a way.

• 43:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you did your first one, did you have any thoughts about the future or no? You felt like this is just documenting the moment?

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Well, no, I, I, I had notions about what it would be like and of course I didn't know.

• 44:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, can't know.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  So, but the possibility was always out there and I liked the absurdity of it.

• 44:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What can you and can't you learn in art school?

• 44:19Speaker 00

  I, yeah, I, I think, well, that you, you can learn is that there shouldn't really be any rules.

• 44:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  And all possibilities are out there. That, that kind of disturbs some people because they like to have their thinking grounded in reason instead of absurdity or possible, you know, things out there in space and so that's something I learned there. And luckily, I was around a lot of students that also were in kind of a competitive sense, inspiring each other. And we didn't get everything we learned from the instructors. We did learn a lot from them, but we got to learn a lot by just being around each other.

• 45:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Competing and, you know, making pictures and crazy art.

• 45:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  So it was good for all that.

• 45:22Rick Rubin?

  At some point, over the course of your life, from where you started till now,

• 45:29Rick Rubin?

  and I'm not talking about your art, I'm talking about the fine art world. The fine art world became mainstream. It was not when you were starting. When you started going into art, no one went into art thinking it's a serious career. It might be something to do.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:50Rick Rubin?

  But it wasn't like, I'm gonna be successful doing this thing.

• 45:54Speaker 00

  No, no. It didn't promise you a successful career like they do today. I mean, you go to art school today and there's all kinds of commercial possibilities to spin off into that you can make a living from. But we just wanted to make art, you know, till we spit blood.

• 46:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it was almost deciding not to pursue anything that could be successful.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:20Rick Rubin?

  Does that sound right?

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, or that would be, you know, condescending or where you'd be edging into the world of commercial art or something like that. You know, that was frowned on, I guess. Yeah, I mean, but, you know, then a lot of people would, we all made a living from it and I make a living from it, so.

• 46:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  But I'm still kind of in a state of wonderment. Trying to figure the whole thing out.

• 46:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. I read that one of your paintings, eight or 10 years ago now, sold at auction for fifty something million dollars. And do you know which painting I'm talking about?

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:01Rick Rubin?

  Okay. Tell me, from its inception, when you made it, what was the reaction to it? When it originally sold, what it sold for, if you remember?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:12Rick Rubin?

  And then, the life story of this painting?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Uh, it was painted about 1965, I guess. Uh, it was a painting called "Radio." I painted the word "radio," and then I somehow wanted to take some seat clamps, you know, carpenter's seat clamps, and pinch these letters, you know, pinch them. And for, just to aggravate the theme.

• 47:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  And I believe I had the, yeah, I showed these things at the Ferris Gallery. And I, I didn't sell them. I didn't sell anything for quite a while. But then, eventually, I think maybe 10 years later or something, I sold it for probably $500, and out of that, I got $250, which I had to pay taxes on.

• 48:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, do you know what happened to it after that?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was, it was bought by, um, Jack Quinn, who was an attorney, he helped a lot of artists out, and he bought the painting and they had it in their home for years and years. And then, then it was sold after he died. And, uh, he was a proponent for 10% resale royalty for artists, you know, for unique works of art, which never really became law. They tried to invent this thing that every time a work was sold, artist gets 10% of it. But it took hold for a little bit here in the state of California, and then they voted it out. So, so, of course, I, when that sold and I heard about that, I wanted to say, "Where's my cut?"

• 48:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  But there wasn't any, so.

• 48:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  That's the folly of it all.

• 48:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the good news is, is that if someone would pay that for that work, maybe your other works might be worth something.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  I guess so. It's supposed to work that way, not always, but.

• 49:12Rick Rubin?

  So I asked you about the mainstreaming of art. When do you think it got more like taken seriously in the public? What made that happen?

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Well, a change in attitude, I guess, that goes from generation to generation. You had the abstract expressionist before that. You had, well, you might say, Ashken School or New York School of Painting. And that lasted into 30s and 40s. And you had French surrealism come in there. And then Picasso was always working at that time. And so it was always evolving into newer and different things. And it's like the music world, I guess. You know, you've got rockabilly coming out of race music.

• 50:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  And rock and roll coming out of that. Then jazz has always been around. So it's the same kind of framework. I think the art world and the music world is a lot alike. And you might say literature too, I guess. Yeah, there's just these waves of people coming and going and, you know, creating new things. And it's, it's pretty active. It's pretty active in the audience out there and the people who are producing it. The artists, there, there's no shortage of them.

• 50:42Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about the difference between seeing a reproduction of an image in a book versus seeing the real thing in a museum or a close.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  I got inspired by reproductions.

• 50:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  And sometimes the postie stamp picture. Like this thing right here, I saw as a little illustration in a book on the subject of Dada, the Dada movement in Germany. And.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  That was all I needed for that. And I wanted to push it another step forward. When I called the Museum of Modern Art and wanted to see it in person, you know, and they showed me. But I saw little reproductions hit me just as hard as a real work.

• 51:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  I didn't see a lot of real works until later on.

• 51:32Rick Rubin?

  When you saw the real version of the Dada piece, was there any revelation that was different than seeing the postage stamp or no?

• 51:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's some color in here. There's a little red ink that I didn't really know. And it didn't seem to matter. My love for this little thing here was enough that it didn't matter if there were colors in here.

• 51:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  But seeing the colors was like a bonus.

• 52:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Yeah. What do you think makes an American artist, besides coming from here, in terms of the work?

• 52:09Speaker 00

  You know, it's more international than ever. And so influences are across the pond and everywhere. So I think it's so universal now that it's... But it used to be closeted off in little pockets. You know, what's happening in France and what's happening in England is another thing. Like David Hockney and his friends, they all sort of... You could look at their work and say, yeah, that's... They're all connected somehow. You know, they had a solid kind of look that was generally similar. And as time goes by, you know, you can get fatigued by looking at their work.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  And you can, you know, then somebody else comes along. So it's unpredictable.

• 53:01Rick Rubin?

  I read that you were included in the first ever pop art exhibition in Pasadena in 1962. What do you remember about that time?

• 53:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, that was an exhibit put together by Walter Ops. And he was, at that time, the director of the Pasadena Art Museum. It's a really kind of eclectic, out of the way museum to have. And he was, I mean, you'd be around him for five minutes and you'd realize that this guy's for real. And he had something to say.

• 53:35Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  It was like a, a real experience to be around this guy. And he had a, a way of, first of all, he would bum a cigarette from you, you know? He'd walk back and forth puffing this cigarette. And then he'd be walking back and forth, speaking and saying great things as he's walking back and forth. And when he leaves the room, he realized, you've learned something.

• 54:04Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  You know?

• 54:05Rick Rubin?

  That's great.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  And so he put all this together, he put that show together. And I felt honored to be in it. It was good. And I felt like a lot of these other artists that were in that show are, they shared some common sympathies. You know, an openness to the world of commerce, you know, the world, the pop culture and what's happening in the world today. And choosing subjects that are figurative instead of abstract like they were for years. Which was great art, too. You know, the abstract expressionists and all those people, abstract painting.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  And there's still abstract painters today that are pretty good.

• 54:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah. Who else was in that show in 62, do you remember?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Joe Good was in there, I grew up with him. He was a, an altar boy in my church. He was sort of like the altar boy with the black eye, like he'd see in Norman Rockwell paintings. And Andy Warhol. And... Roy Lichtenstein.

• 55:20Rick Rubin?

  Had you seen Roy's work before that exhibit?

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, Roy Lichtenstein, yeah, yeah.

• 55:25Rick Rubin?

  Where would you have seen it?

• 55:26Speaker 00

  I saw that in 1961 at the Leo Castelli Gallery. And I was in Europe and painted a bunch of little pictures about that size and wanted to show them to Leo Castelli. And I respected him. He had a real good gallery. And he said, "Let me show you in the back room. Go back there." And there was a painting there of somebody named Roy Lichtenstein. I never heard of him. I got to know him. He was a good friend.

• 55:58Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Finally. But it was a picture of tennis shoes. And I just felt like, "Oh, God, that's hard to look at." That hurts, you know? It's aggravating and it's so terrible and then it's got some possibility to it. And then, damn, that thing might be profound.

• 56:18Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's amazing. It smokes up on you.

• 56:21Speaker 00

  The tennis shoes, you know, that he would... And he did... All of his art was made that way, you know? He had a way of seeing the world through kind of comic book eyes.

• 56:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  And he took that and ran with it and had a very good, besides, career of it. I mean, he created some really great works.

• 56:41Rick Rubin?

  You talked about your trip to Europe and not really feeling the European art as much as the American art. Was there anything about the place that you remember about Europe that spoke to you? Just the location, the buildings, the experience?

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I went all over. I went through Spain and I just, you know, I love this west. San Sebastian, Spain, and went to Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon. And all around Europe. I didn't get as far as Eastern Europe. I went through the Greek Isles and I bought a Duxeo. You know, those cars?

• 57:25Rick Rubin?

  I think so. It's a little teeny car.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Looks like a throwaway vehicle.

• 57:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  A real teeny, and it got like 60 miles to a gallon of gas. And I drove all over Europe and the British Isles, too.

• 57:40Rick Rubin?

  Wow. And it looks kinda like a Volkswagen Bug, but smaller and like a toy version of a Volkswagen Bug.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and it was very flimsy. I mean, it was like paper thin.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  I mean, I haven't seen one in L.A. for a long time.

• 57:57Rick Rubin?

  No, not in a long time.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:59Rick Rubin?

  I see them sometimes in other places in the world.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. But Europe was, you know, I I went to the museums over there and I learned quite a bit by seeing the museums. I didn't get so much influence from all these historical artists. Didn't get so much from that, but I mean, I was more into what was happening in America.

• 58:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  But hell, I mean, Europe is the beginning of it.

• 58:28Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it had moved at the time that you were.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:32Rick Rubin?

  Like it does. It always moves around, you know?

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:36Rick Rubin?

  Have you used any unusual materials over the years?

• 58:39Speaker 00

  I was using oil paint for a long time and then I I felt like I was putting a skin on a surface, you know, and that I I wanted to do something else, like stain the surface in some way or other. And so I started using gunpowder, which is charcoal and sulfur and and instead of using graphite, gunpowder was I was able to make an image with it and correct it if I made a mistake, easy to correct. Not so much with graphite, but then I I started using staining things with grass cut from the, you know, and rubbing the grass in and

• 59:24Speaker 00

  that sort of thing and axle grease and caviar and things like that that that made images. And but I I didn't know about the last ability of them or anything like that.

• 59:38Rick Rubin?

  Do you know if they survived?

• 59:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, they mostly had. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And but I I made a Hollywood image out of Pepto Bismol. And if you leave that out in the open, eventually, I mean, that's it's.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Almost fifty years old and the image is still there, but it's faded a little bit. You know, so no customer guarantee.

• 1:00:05Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Rick Rubin?

  Are there any themes that you've returned to over the years?

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  Well, I haven't, I haven't gone back to gas stations. I mean, I guess the main theme is words, I guess, that persist right up to today. I'm looking at it a little like it's, well, could I call it poetry? That's, is that too ambitious to call it poetry or what? But I find myself making these little word things and they mean something to me, but I don't think too much about it.

• 1:00:44Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, there was a period where you were using words, but they weren't complete words. There were parts of words or letters were left out.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  I did a few things like that, but then they, then that began to, it made me question what I'm doing, you know? And are you deliberately leaving these letters out or chopping?

• 1:01:04Rick Rubin?

  Too much of a choice.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Rick Rubin?

  How's your relationship to making art changed over the course of your life?

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Well, I'm surprised that I'm still at it and, and physically I can handle it and I still have the same motivation and belief in it. I'm not distracted from, from the many things that are out there. I see that, you know, the world's full of cacophony, noise and, you know, visual and otherwise. And so I, I maintain my love of doing it. So stop the presses.

• 1:01:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, what's the, what's the feeling you get when you finish a piece?

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Usually I know when I'm finished. Sometimes I'll stop a little early and then say, don't go any further. And it just has to kind of round itself out. Every so often I'll start something and then I've got to tear it up.

• 1:02:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Start over again.

• 1:02:09Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about life in the desert.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  I started going out there, I, in the late 40s, I had this friend named Harry Cone. His father was a, had a movie studio called Columbia Pictures. And somehow, he was given this property inside of Joshua Tree National Park. And somebody took me out there. I knew this young Harry Cone, who died a few years ago. But he lived back in this, in these enormous boulders with a house built in the 1930s. Wow. And it still exists. Sounds great. Yeah, yeah, it's down a little dirt road inside the park.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  There's a few privately owned parcels inside the park. And I just said, oh, ma, this is just great. I mean, the Joshua trees and all this, so. And I found a, a property that I got up near Pioneer Town, if you know where that is. I don't know where that is. What else is near there? Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree, basically. It's high desert, so it's like 5,000 feet. And then, so I got this place in 75. And started building a house out there. And finally, it took about four or five years to build this house. And I go out there all the time, so I'll go out for like a week or 10 days.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  And then, I don't usually make much art out there. Cause I, I go out there and I read or I, you know, take care of little repairs, things like that. Events of plain living.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  When you're out there, do you see many people or is it more? No, you don't see anybody around. I mean, I've got a neighbor, maybe that's a mile away. Yeah. That I never see. So it's remote and, and. Sounds great. For all that, it's great to have it be remote like that. And there's no progress around it or anything. But every so often, a fire will get near there. But it's a little bit on the other side of Big Bear Lake. So it's the desert side of Big Bear Lake. And I just, it's a habit of, sort of a living habit that I don't go out there and look at the landscape and wanna take impressions from it and make art from it.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  So, I don't really do that, but it's just a, it's a living thing that, habitual kind of routine that I find myself in, that I, that I love doing.

• 1:04:54Rick Rubin?

  You think it's what you see, or the silence?

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  Silence has a lot to do with it.

• 1:05:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, there's a military base out there, Marine, Twenty-Nine Palms Marine Base, and you hear helicopters go over every so often, but it's, it's very remote and, and good for that reason.

• 1:05:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, sounds great.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Rick Rubin?

  Tell me the timeline from an idea for a work until you have a finished work typically, or is there no typical?

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  I don't often have a notion to do something where I, I'm forced to put it off for a while and still keep on to the idea. So, I usually get on to things soon, but then sometimes I'll work on a painting for, I don't know, three or four years. I, I did one of the Los Angeles County Museum on fire and I just, I would paint on that thing for a couple of months and then I'd put it away for six months and paint on it for a while and then put it away for another period of time. And so, it's not like something that has, has a, a deadline to it.

• 1:06:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. So, would you say there were always works in progress around?

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Right now, I have about four or five things that I, I mean, I kind of put aside, but it's there to look at.

• 1:06:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  But I'm, I know I've got progress to make on it, but I'll, I'll do it when I get to it.

• 1:06:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Understand?

• 1:06:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are there any that start and finish and they just happen?

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I'll do that with things that are simple or involve one or two colors or things like that, that I feel like are right. But generally, I, I start working on something and I stick with it until it's done.

• 1:06:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. To remember the, um...

• 1:06:58Rick Rubin?

  Initial thought behind the museum on fire painting?

• 1:07:02Speaker 00

  That came out of, I mean, the angle of the of the museum, the way it was in the picture, is really doing the same thing as that 20th century fox.

• 1:07:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  Or the standards.

• 1:07:16Rick Rubin?

  Perspective, the feeling of perspective.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  It goes from lower right hand corner to upper left hand corner and the slope of the building and everything. And then you get up here and you've got a fire happening. And then over here, you've got this green placid lawn or whatever it is. And so you've got the hotspot over here and you almost could fall asleep over here.

• 1:07:38Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. But the thought of deciding, I'm going to paint the museum on fire as opposed to just painting the museum. Do you remember the instinct of it's going to be on fire?

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I'd use the idea of fire in certain things. And I made a book called Various Small Fires. And I've got no unreasonable attachment to fires. But I felt like they were like additional things in a picture. So and they were very colorful, you know? So you'd have this blast of light happening over here.

• 1:08:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  And but the whole thing with the museum started with a helicopter ride that I took over LA. And we somehow fell into a, somebody said, you want to take a, yeah, sure. And I'll take my Polaroid camera with me. And we went all over LA in a period of like 45 minutes. You can see the entire city. You see thousands and thousands of swimming pools.

• 1:08:45Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  And then we somehow came around over by the LA County Museum and I took some pictures of it. And I always felt like it was a

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Authority figure, you know, in some ways.

• 1:09:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  Maybe this is my statement against this authority figure.

• 1:09:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  You know, let it burn.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  So, you know, it became that and a combination of just wanting to paint a picture. You know, just the idea of keeping my hands busy.

• 1:09:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Has that painting ever shown at that museum?

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was. About three months ago, it was in my exhibit there at the county museum.

• 1:09:26Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic. Would you say you're always working?

• 1:09:31Speaker 00

  Pretty much, yeah. I mean, I don't take vacation breaks so much. I'm not really into that. Oh, I don't want to work. I mean, I do like my studio and I find a kind of security in just being around my, the way I work and there always seems to be something urgently needs to be worked on and thought about.

• 1:10:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Is there a typical time of day you like to paint?

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Usually during the day, sometimes at night and phone doesn't ring, things like that. And that can be uplifting.

• 1:10:17Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about Mason Williams.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  So Mason, he was a friend of mine in third grade in Oklahoma City. He and I were good friends and he and I came to California together and lived in a boarding house downtown. And Mason, he went off and he was in the Navy for a couple of years and I just stayed in art school. And then he came back and I talk to him all the time and he lives in Oregon now. And he and I have made projects together and I've done artworks for him and he's a really interesting character and talented, great musician and.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  You know, feel lucky to have him as a friend.

• 1:11:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. I mean, great musician, and he also was involved in comedy. I think he discovered Steve Martin.

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, he and Steve were, played banjo together and they, and he wrote, he actually hired Steve to write the Smothers Brothers.

• 1:11:24Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, amazing.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Rick Rubin?

  When you have a work that's a series of images, let's say the gas station book. Tell me about what goes into a sequence.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  It's a evolving kind of thing that sometimes is just, you make these decisions and if I have 26 photographs in front of me, how do I know how, where they're gonna go and how they fit together and there, there's no common

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  game plan, anything like that.

• 1:11:55Rick Rubin?

  Can you move them around and see what happens?

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a matter of moving around. It's almost like making a collage, in a way. And then there's a kind of a a routine that I don't want to be too sensible or too aggressive or too ununderstandable.

• 1:12:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Do you ever put limitations on your work?

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  I think I do and probably usually when I do, I don't know it. What I'm doing.

• 1:12:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, do you ever say, I'm only gonna work in black and white, for example, or I'm only gonna make it, it can't be bigger than this size?

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, when I was in school, I admired Franz Kline.

• 1:12:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  Because he chose to do work only in black and white, mostly. And I thought, God, what a, what a commitment to that. And I like the commitment as well as I did the work of art. And I also, everybody had respect for Marcel Duchamp when he said, hey, I'm not gonna paint anymore.

• 1:12:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  And that was like 1925.

• 1:12:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  He said, I'm making no more art. I mean, he did, he broke his rule there. He was making little things all along, but the idea of saying,

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  you know, standing up to the world, saying, I'm not gonna make any more art. I mean, it's somehow it, it taught us something, I don't know what.

• 1:13:18Rick Rubin?

  I've heard you say, I'll paraphrase incorrectly, but something about certain works are touched by angels.

• 1:13:29Rick Rubin?

  You've had that experience? Tell me what you meant by it and tell me what you think was touched by angels.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  I might think of, well, the book I did called Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, I thought was

• 1:13:46Speaker 00

  off by itself and it didn't nod to the world of painting or bookmaking or anything in any respect. And so I thought it was off by itself. So that's, I guess, where the angels live. Maybe, maybe that was touched by angels. I don't know. I, probably what I was thinking of.

• 1:14:07Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. I like it. I like, I like thinking about it.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then every so often I think about nonverbal communication, you know, how you can, that always reminded me of when they were gonna interview Thelonious Monk for a music magazine and I think he said, "Okay, I'll do it if I can bring a friend along with me." And they said, "Okay, sure." Yeah. And so the interviewer is saying, "Mr. Monk, what do you think about country and western music?" He doesn't say anything. Long period of time in the interview, you know, it was, "Mr. Monk, what do you think

• 1:14:53Speaker 00

  about cowboy music? You know, country and western music?" Still no answer. And then Monk turns to his friend and says, "You think that guy's hard of hearing?"

• 1:15:06Rick Rubin?

  Incredible. That's amazing. Amazing. What would you say the most beautiful place on earth you've ever been?

• 1:15:16Speaker 00

  San Francisco. And I can point to

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Why I'm saying this, because I visited there as a kid back in the late 1940s with my folks and we drove through there and we hit some relatives there and so San Francisco and every time I go there, I say, "This is the most beautiful city in the world."

• 1:15:38Rick Rubin?

  Do you think the hills have something to do with it?

• 1:15:40Speaker 00

  Uh, the, the, the kind of mystery of it, the Chinatown, the bridges, the...

• 1:15:48Rick Rubin?

  Victorian houses.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, the houses and everything about it, it's just got this kind of romantic, Dashiell Hammett kind of flavor to it that I, I, I just, I really feel like it is the most beautiful, beautiful city in the world.

• 1:16:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 00

  But then, you know, nature, of course, I mean, places that you go where there's like silence, like the desert, well, that's, that's, yes, that's beautiful too.

• 1:16:14Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. You never had the calling to move to San Francisco?

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:16:18Rick Rubin?

  Why do you think?

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  I don't know. It's, it's better to visit there.

• 1:16:22Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  Like, I, I love New York, but I go there on my own terms and I like, I see my friends and then I get out of town.

• 1:16:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 00

  But if I had to live there, I think it would be, it would be a different set of circumstances for an artist to live there and then have to bring materials to your studio and get a two by four across town without, you know, and boy, what a issue that is. And I didn't like that. I liked the idea of Southern California.

• 1:16:53Rick Rubin?

  Curators, collectors, and artists. Tell me about the mindset of those three different categories of people.

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  Curators, collectors, and artists. And collectors are curious kind. They have, you know, their minds are off in different directions. The artist is thinking only of himself, you know, not so much where he fits into this thing, but curators have a particular knowledge of, I was lucky enough to work with the, the man that is now the director of Museum of Modern Art in New York, Christophe Chéri. And he curated a, a exhibit in mine that was up about a year and a half ago there that went to the County Museum. And he, he wanted to see every work that I, that I did and he only would

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  put it in the exhibit if he could see it in person.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  He had to see that thing in person.

• 1:17:52Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  Says, "So if I can't go to that collector's house and see it on a wall, well, I'm not interested in borrowing it. I've got to see that thing in person." And so the personal contact with a curator is essential.

• 1:18:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  And he's that way. He's one of those kind of people.

• 1:18:10Rick Rubin?

  Are most curators open to collaboration with the artist?

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  Well, this man certainly was. And he, he wouldn't put something in the show that I didn't approve of. Or, you know, why should I care what he puts in his exhibit? But I, I did kind of like have a few choices along the way. And he was worse with me on that.

• 1:18:36Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  So he was, I was lucky to have him.

• 1:18:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Are you ever surprised seeing your art up next to other artists? Do you ever get a, any kind of a, either a good or bad feeling about it?

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I've seen my work in exhibits alongside other, other people. But, and I might get a tug from it, a laugh out of it.

• 1:18:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  You know, just the curiosity of these two supposedly thoughtful artists.

• 1:19:11Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. It sounds like you have fun doing what you're doing.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I would if I, if I didn't have fun with it. No, I, I do that. So every so often, something will come up, come up that requires a lot of labor and concentration. So that might make me think and make me want to say, "Oh, God, I've got to do that now." But I, generally I get with it and I like it.

• 1:19:42Rick Rubin?

  Would you say that once you have the idea, do you feel in service to the idea?

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  Yes. I've got a notion of what I think the, the idea is going to be.

• 1:19:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 00

  You know? And then the execution of it will be something else. Sometimes I don't know which way it's going to go.

• 1:20:08Rick Rubin?

  Do you do sketches?

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do a lot of little writings and sometimes sketches. And they're, they can be misleading. They can be, uh... They can distort your thinking. But I like, I like to do that, you know, when I'm at a restaurant or something, you know.

• 1:20:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. What might be something you would write?

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  It might be a, well lately I've just done, I'll think of doorways, you know, a drawing of a doorway and at an angle and what that might be. Or imagining that as being a bigger work, like a bigger painting.

• 1:20:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  As a first step towards a painting.

• 1:20:51Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Would you say it always starts with something you actually see in the world?

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  Sometimes I'll get an inspiration from other artists' work. Like I started, there's a Danish artist that, named Hammershoi, William Hammershoi. He painted these kind of sad-looking interior paintings in 1900 or something, you know. And I, but somehow I saw these, this wainscoting inside of a, a room and the, and the kind of architecture around the doorway and all that and I, and I say, I don't know, maybe I'll visit that and see if I can push that along.

• 1:21:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  And yet, it's gonna look nothing like his work. You know, but it'll be a trigger.

• 1:21:39Rick Rubin?

  It's an interesting thing, when you see work that an artist does, it opens possibilities of what can happen.

• 1:21:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Rick Rubin?

  Like, he made a left turn, what happens if we go right? You know? What happens if we go up?

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, instead of down, yeah.

• 1:21:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  Maybe down is the way to go.

• 1:21:58Rick Rubin?

  Maybe.

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  Well, you, you can crash going down, can't you?

• 1:22:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, but maybe that's good. Maybe we wanna crash.

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Rick Rubin?

  You never know. How often do you start something and then decide this is not gonna work?

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  Usually it's in the early stage.

• 1:22:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Speaker 00

  So I don't set aside a canvas and then start on it and then, it's always a little different, but I, I can usually stop something early if I don't have some kind of hope for it.

• 1:22:30Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. Most things, if you get off to a poor start, do you find that it corrects and turns into something that you like?

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, with, sometimes it's an accident that, you know, almost like falls on your foot and you don't realize what's happened. And then this accident is, damn, it's good, you know? I mean, you put the wrong color on there, but wow, something is different and something happened that

• 1:22:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Speaker 00

  you either learn from or you hit upon or, and you didn't start out that way. You didn't, you didn't really want that to happen. But it's an accident, so accidents are great. People don't realize that accidents are vital part of things.

• 1:23:15Rick Rubin?

  How much of the whole enterprise would you say is intellectual?

• 1:23:24Speaker 00

  What, what did Yogi Berra say? Baseball is 99% intellectual and the other half is physical.

• 1:23:40Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  Counterculture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry? Tetragrammatin. The avant-garde? Tetragrammatin. Generative art? Tetragrammatin. The tarot? Tetragrammatin. Out-of-print music? Tetragrammatin. Biodynamics? 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.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

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