Artist and High Priest of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. Bob Brown expounds on Art, War, and Space. Brown passed away in 2009; see these tributes from the New York Times and Interview Magazine.
Image: RDB
You know, in 1960, if you’re over thirty years old, drop dead. The Sixties were ugly, the Fifties were uglier. HA HA HA.
It was called the ‘love decade.’ Bullshit. Everything went up in smoke, and this society’s solution was SWAT teams. We’re due for social changes. Homelessness is nonsense. There are a few thousand people who can’t cope, and our solution is to kick them in the balls. Voltaire said we’re living in the best possible world. If you knew the future, it would be too terrifying. As soon as I watch a movie and know the plotline, I lose interest. If life had a plotline, well, forget it.
Things were getting better, women took charge of their reproductive systems. We don’t know what human beings are yet. So much energy is expended on destruction. The U.S. spends $264 billion a year on war. Most countries hover around $50 billion. We’re preparing for the end of it. Where’s the enemy except for the American people?
I broke my hip six months ago. At 67, I’m glad to be functioning. I’m optimistic about 1998 because of space. In 1969, man walked on the moon. Those people [who were born then] now are in their thirties, and we can solve all our problems. We walked on the moon!
Right after WWII, America thought it had all the answers. In the Fifties, it discovered it didn’t have any. Men’s fashion was the ‘Little Boy Look.’ Men were realizing they didn’t have any answers, and the Baby Boomers saw that and rebelled. When the U.S. went into WWII, it was rural. We went in rural, came out urban. Parents can’t program their VCRs. If you want one programmed, get a ten year old.
It tool 30 years to get blacks to be called ‘African Americans.’ San Diego is one of the most comfortable, wealthiest communities in the world, but their economy depends on illegal Mexican immigrants. The whole thing’s obscene. People talk about secrecy, but they don’t talk about hypocrisy. Secrecy and hypocrisy go together. Competition is an outmoded, obsolete notion. If everyone were working together it’d be incredible. Everyone can do a couple hours of crappy work a day. Divide the unpleasant stuff that has to be done. The world just doesn’t have to be the way it is.
There were a lot of people who wanted to see a lot of bombs. We got really close to nuclear war. In Vietnam they wanted to. You’re not going to get two million young men out there and blow them apart. That was stopped in the seventies. Marshall McLuhan said that people back into the future. We walk backwards. But next year with the space station is really going to be big turnarounds. Now in Asia they’ve over-fished to the point where the only way they can catch fish is if they blow them out of the water with dynamite. We have to just eliminate thinking about waste. Nature doesn’t have any waste. Right now we’re using the kitchen for the bathroom, wondering why the food smells. It’s just stupid the way things are going now.
In 1968, I was in New York doing the Great Building Crackup. In the sixties, everything became art. We’re living in a dead world today. This is a dead world. We’re living in a dead, irrelevant world. It’s been this way for a generation now. We still act like it hasn’t happened. It’s like the emperor with no clothes. Everyone still says, ‘Oh, that emperor has such nice clothes!’ The emperor’s been naked for a generation! The thing is, everyone still has, as a role model, emperors. The emperors live over in River Oaks [a wealthy Houston neighborhood], and the serfs live over here. It’s just joking! In the sixties, everyone just said, ‘Let’s stop it,’ and the conservatives came over and said, ‘boom, let’s bring in the SWAT teams.’ McGovern said, ‘Let’s stop the Vietnam War,’ but the Americans said, ‘We don’t want to stop the Vietnam War.’ You know, when the French got their butts beaten there back in the whenever it was, I thought, well, the Americans aren’t going to do that. The Americans just walked right in, and I thought, who’s kidding? The whole thing was just insane. When I was eighteen, nineteen years old, I looked around and said, this world is just too dumb to be believed. Like in the fifties, the whole ‘get married live in the suburbs’ thing. The market economy today is just another version of Totalitarianism. I saw a thing on television that said, ‘We have to work harder for less money to maintain this marvelous economy.’ Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini were the same old crap. The focus has to be on people. This country has spent very little money on education. If things keep going the way they’re going it’s just a very grim future. They have to turn around. This thing is people are getting smarter. The Internet is out there. All the information is out there. We’re living in an open world. You can communicate with anybody. China is going to blow up. You just can’t have this kind of information out there and suppression. It just doesn’t work. And Singapore. All you have to do is sit on your butt today and be amazed. The shit’s gonna hit the fan there. All this advanced technology, but if you spit on the street there you get killed. This kind of dumb-dumb control is just ridiculous.
But people were innocent in the Sixties. But they tried to market art. The art market is collapsed. I think this is the first time in history when people know the future is invisible. There’s no art world. This new generation is called ‘Generation Why’. All the social problems could be solved in a year if the world could live without fear. And this is the first time in history where it really is possible to live without fear. It’s all attitude. Does anyone really need $30 million a year income? It’s just nonsense. When people say, ‘We don’t have enough money,’ what that’s saying is ‘We aren’t interested.’ Money’s just, you know, get some little mint and print. What is this horseshit? The people who play the money game, there’s always enough money for them. The people who don’t know that there’s a money game are starving to death. The people who like to play games should find another kind of game. And the first thing a ‘privileged’ mother does when she has a baby is discard of it. She sends it to the nursemaid. And I don’t think any baby is very thrilled with being thrown away. All these privileged people out there filled with unconscious rage because they were discarded as children. If you’re really doing everything the society says is right, it’s not working. Four automobiles, four houses, I mean, that shit doesn’t do it. Happiness is inside. And when you’re living in fear and in business, you know, terminology is warlike. If you’re fighting all day, and fighting to cut their throats, you don’t turn that off. You’re either friendly or not. All these lawyers making $250 an hour, I mean they can’t be warm, loving people.
We’re mutating. A generation ago, the life span was 45 years old. I’m 67 years old and I have trifocal lenses. Plastic trifocal lenses. This is incredible! Even with this broken hip, I’m walking. I’m not walking like a gazelle, but I’m walking. The thing is, I’m functioning. And all these people out there with heart transplants. Incredible. One of the dumbest ideas that’s going to go is this idea of retirement homes. The world is taking like 85 percent of the world’s population and throwing it on the junk pile. But this is the first time in human experience when eight and nine-year-old kids, sitting in front of the computer, have power. When they’re putting stuff into the computer, nobody knows they’re eight years old, and children have this infinite enthusiasm. When you finally get a couple of degrees, you’ve been steamrollered, and you’ve been beaten to shit by the time you’re twenty-one! There’s this vast army of people out there committed to maintaining the status quo. They don’t really like the way things are, but they’re just afraid to rock the boat.
Kids are free agents, and they’re a threat to the status quo because they just haven’t bought into that system. I blundered into this chat room, and this high school sophomore was telling me how he we was an expert hacker. I mean, he’s teaching little kids how to break into the Pentagon, how to break into AT&T. These are crazy little kids that’ve never had an outlet before, and this is going to be exciting to see what happens. There’s never going to be another major war because how are you going to get the two or three million seventeen year olds? There was a ‘History of Guns’ on Channel 8 [PBS], but what about going to all these mental institutions and seeing what happens to all of the people who’ve been blown apart by guns? The world I was born into sixty-seven years ago is obsolete. When I was a young man, war was still seen as a way to exercise manly virtues. Of course you can always find somebody who’s dumb enough to believe this shit, but if you went to a college and talked about how bravery and courage is getting your head blown off, they just wouldn’t take it. The United States lost the Korean War, they lost the Vietnam War, that Gulf War was just a joke. And they’re still picking on Iraq. And get off Cuba! This country’s really a threat to the world. This exclusive policy is stupid. But the whole world is participating in space. That’s going to be the future.
It was called the ‘love decade.’ Bullshit. Everything went up in smoke, and this society’s solution was SWAT teams. We’re due for social changes. Homelessness is nonsense. There are a few thousand people who can’t cope, and our solution is to kick them in the balls. Voltaire said we’re living in the best possible world. If you knew the future, it would be too terrifying. As soon as I watch a movie and know the plotline, I lose interest. If life had a plotline, well, forget it.
Things were getting better, women took charge of their reproductive systems. We don’t know what human beings are yet. So much energy is expended on destruction. The U.S. spends $264 billion a year on war. Most countries hover around $50 billion. We’re preparing for the end of it. Where’s the enemy except for the American people?
I broke my hip six months ago. At 67, I’m glad to be functioning. I’m optimistic about 1998 because of space. In 1969, man walked on the moon. Those people [who were born then] now are in their thirties, and we can solve all our problems. We walked on the moon!
Right after WWII, America thought it had all the answers. In the Fifties, it discovered it didn’t have any. Men’s fashion was the ‘Little Boy Look.’ Men were realizing they didn’t have any answers, and the Baby Boomers saw that and rebelled. When the U.S. went into WWII, it was rural. We went in rural, came out urban. Parents can’t program their VCRs. If you want one programmed, get a ten year old.
It tool 30 years to get blacks to be called ‘African Americans.’ San Diego is one of the most comfortable, wealthiest communities in the world, but their economy depends on illegal Mexican immigrants. The whole thing’s obscene. People talk about secrecy, but they don’t talk about hypocrisy. Secrecy and hypocrisy go together. Competition is an outmoded, obsolete notion. If everyone were working together it’d be incredible. Everyone can do a couple hours of crappy work a day. Divide the unpleasant stuff that has to be done. The world just doesn’t have to be the way it is.
There were a lot of people who wanted to see a lot of bombs. We got really close to nuclear war. In Vietnam they wanted to. You’re not going to get two million young men out there and blow them apart. That was stopped in the seventies. Marshall McLuhan said that people back into the future. We walk backwards. But next year with the space station is really going to be big turnarounds. Now in Asia they’ve over-fished to the point where the only way they can catch fish is if they blow them out of the water with dynamite. We have to just eliminate thinking about waste. Nature doesn’t have any waste. Right now we’re using the kitchen for the bathroom, wondering why the food smells. It’s just stupid the way things are going now.
In 1968, I was in New York doing the Great Building Crackup. In the sixties, everything became art. We’re living in a dead world today. This is a dead world. We’re living in a dead, irrelevant world. It’s been this way for a generation now. We still act like it hasn’t happened. It’s like the emperor with no clothes. Everyone still says, ‘Oh, that emperor has such nice clothes!’ The emperor’s been naked for a generation! The thing is, everyone still has, as a role model, emperors. The emperors live over in River Oaks [a wealthy Houston neighborhood], and the serfs live over here. It’s just joking! In the sixties, everyone just said, ‘Let’s stop it,’ and the conservatives came over and said, ‘boom, let’s bring in the SWAT teams.’ McGovern said, ‘Let’s stop the Vietnam War,’ but the Americans said, ‘We don’t want to stop the Vietnam War.’ You know, when the French got their butts beaten there back in the whenever it was, I thought, well, the Americans aren’t going to do that. The Americans just walked right in, and I thought, who’s kidding? The whole thing was just insane. When I was eighteen, nineteen years old, I looked around and said, this world is just too dumb to be believed. Like in the fifties, the whole ‘get married live in the suburbs’ thing. The market economy today is just another version of Totalitarianism. I saw a thing on television that said, ‘We have to work harder for less money to maintain this marvelous economy.’ Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini were the same old crap. The focus has to be on people. This country has spent very little money on education. If things keep going the way they’re going it’s just a very grim future. They have to turn around. This thing is people are getting smarter. The Internet is out there. All the information is out there. We’re living in an open world. You can communicate with anybody. China is going to blow up. You just can’t have this kind of information out there and suppression. It just doesn’t work. And Singapore. All you have to do is sit on your butt today and be amazed. The shit’s gonna hit the fan there. All this advanced technology, but if you spit on the street there you get killed. This kind of dumb-dumb control is just ridiculous.
But people were innocent in the Sixties. But they tried to market art. The art market is collapsed. I think this is the first time in history when people know the future is invisible. There’s no art world. This new generation is called ‘Generation Why’. All the social problems could be solved in a year if the world could live without fear. And this is the first time in history where it really is possible to live without fear. It’s all attitude. Does anyone really need $30 million a year income? It’s just nonsense. When people say, ‘We don’t have enough money,’ what that’s saying is ‘We aren’t interested.’ Money’s just, you know, get some little mint and print. What is this horseshit? The people who play the money game, there’s always enough money for them. The people who don’t know that there’s a money game are starving to death. The people who like to play games should find another kind of game. And the first thing a ‘privileged’ mother does when she has a baby is discard of it. She sends it to the nursemaid. And I don’t think any baby is very thrilled with being thrown away. All these privileged people out there filled with unconscious rage because they were discarded as children. If you’re really doing everything the society says is right, it’s not working. Four automobiles, four houses, I mean, that shit doesn’t do it. Happiness is inside. And when you’re living in fear and in business, you know, terminology is warlike. If you’re fighting all day, and fighting to cut their throats, you don’t turn that off. You’re either friendly or not. All these lawyers making $250 an hour, I mean they can’t be warm, loving people.
We’re mutating. A generation ago, the life span was 45 years old. I’m 67 years old and I have trifocal lenses. Plastic trifocal lenses. This is incredible! Even with this broken hip, I’m walking. I’m not walking like a gazelle, but I’m walking. The thing is, I’m functioning. And all these people out there with heart transplants. Incredible. One of the dumbest ideas that’s going to go is this idea of retirement homes. The world is taking like 85 percent of the world’s population and throwing it on the junk pile. But this is the first time in human experience when eight and nine-year-old kids, sitting in front of the computer, have power. When they’re putting stuff into the computer, nobody knows they’re eight years old, and children have this infinite enthusiasm. When you finally get a couple of degrees, you’ve been steamrollered, and you’ve been beaten to shit by the time you’re twenty-one! There’s this vast army of people out there committed to maintaining the status quo. They don’t really like the way things are, but they’re just afraid to rock the boat.
Kids are free agents, and they’re a threat to the status quo because they just haven’t bought into that system. I blundered into this chat room, and this high school sophomore was telling me how he we was an expert hacker. I mean, he’s teaching little kids how to break into the Pentagon, how to break into AT&T. These are crazy little kids that’ve never had an outlet before, and this is going to be exciting to see what happens. There’s never going to be another major war because how are you going to get the two or three million seventeen year olds? There was a ‘History of Guns’ on Channel 8 [PBS], but what about going to all these mental institutions and seeing what happens to all of the people who’ve been blown apart by guns? The world I was born into sixty-seven years ago is obsolete. When I was a young man, war was still seen as a way to exercise manly virtues. Of course you can always find somebody who’s dumb enough to believe this shit, but if you went to a college and talked about how bravery and courage is getting your head blown off, they just wouldn’t take it. The United States lost the Korean War, they lost the Vietnam War, that Gulf War was just a joke. And they’re still picking on Iraq. And get off Cuba! This country’s really a threat to the world. This exclusive policy is stupid. But the whole world is participating in space. That’s going to be the future.
Photo: Kate Lord
We were all going crazy in the Sixties; things were happening fast. The Great Building Crackup was just another attempt at doing something. When it’s time for something to happen, it happens, and it has nothing to do with being original. The stuff is out there; if it hadn’t been Einstein, it would've been Schmageggy. It was out there to be picked up. There could be a million versions of history. All of these books have to be rewritten because of the simple fact that there’s no such thing as a great man. There are visionary mothers, great mothers, and great men are just eager little suck-ups trying to please Mom. It’s not going to be Mrs. Einstein, Mrs. Picasso, here’s little Pablo! It’s the mother who creates the vision, and then the eager little goody-two-shoes, the little sissy boy, wants to please Mom! The Great Building Crackup was just my attempt to get ahead, and you know, the whole avant-garde thing just happened so fast. My great thing is formulating the theory of Pharblongence, total confusion, I mean, nobody knows what the hell is going on! And nobody has ever known what the hell is going on; we’re just kind of bumbling around in the dark. I did the Meat Show, and I couldn’t believe the response, and I just went into a panic. I didn’t know what to do, so I did these tinted photographs, and nobody knew what to do. They were these weird pornographic things I got out of some German encyclopedia, and no one responded. But then everyone started doing tinted photographs.
The Sixties were a stampede. In ’59, word got out that Mark Rothko made $9,000 in one year. In the Sixties, all these young men who would’ve gone into business or medicine or something went into art. And in the late Sixties when women’s liberation was going on, women went into art, and today everyone is an artist! If you have six billion artists, and everyone is selling a painting, it’s just absurd! If everyone’s an artist, then who’s going to buy all the art that these ‘artists’ are creating? We have to have rituals where things are made by people and then they burn them up. We can’t keep saving every dead leaf and every broken brick. Years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they had a room as big as a football field with Egyptian caskets. Hilarious! They’ve got so much Egyptian shit. I mean, can you imagine a thousand years from now them having a room full of nothing but broken bottle caps? Broken plastic cones! Turn that shit into park benches! You go to the Louvre and see all these mindless little humans huddled around the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa just looks like one more god damned… you know! The Last Supper looks like an adobe wall, they’ve pissed with it so much. These restorers, I mean every once in a while they just repaint a painting. There was a Poussette-Dart at the Museum of Modern Art, pencil on canvas, and he punched a hole in the canvas. It sat like that for years and one day it [the hole] was gone. Human beings are just absurd. I think if you understand that humans are insane animals, no problem. Sure, we’re always breaking and fixing things, but to think agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago and here we are in space. We’re running this fantastic experiment. Could be we will destroy ourselves. The nuclear thing is still out there, cuckoos are still out there. What’s going to happen? We don’t know. But we have to save the planet; we have to save our little home. None of this ‘I’m going to be okay, to hell with you.’ The next ten years are really going to be exciting. When people feel like doing something, they can do it instantaneously. This war on drugs is just absurd, and kids in jail for selling a little bit of marijuana. The country’s solution to dealing with all these young men with too much testosterone was to send them next door to rape and plunder. ‘Go destroy our enemies.’ Now they can’t get away with that. There’s just a vast amount of intelligence out there that’s not being utilized. It just doesn’t have to be that way.
I was an angry young man, and I wanted to kill. When I was eighteen years old, I was arrested and charged with rape, so that disqualified me from fighting for my country. HA! When I became an artist in ’48, ’49, to be an artist meant being in a group of dedicated people, mostly men, and it was like being a monk. You dedicated your life to art, and your audience was other artists. Art was a sacred pursuit. You can’t commodify art like you can commodify automobiles. I moved to New York in ’59 and everyone was talking about how Abstract Expressionism was over with. Everyone was talking about comic strips. It was in the air. Warhol was a tremendously successful commercial artist, which was not talked about, but then he just decided to go into art and was just right on top of it. And Lichtenstein had his first exhibition in ’51 or something like that, and it was like comic strips to Picasso. And then there was this sort of Happening thing going on. There was this messy Pop Art kind of thing, but by 1962 or 1963 it all got very neat and commodified and commercialized. Things happen fast. No one could imagine going faster than 100 mph forty years ago. Let’s just outlaw wheels!
Everyone is an artist. The idea that I’m an artist and you’ve not is just absurd. The idea that I have some sort of special thing, the whole exclusive thing is just insane. Everyone has to participate. We’re all savages in a new civilization. War is just ugly, crazy, insane shit. It’s children having their legs blown off with land mines, young men being driven completely insane. War is obsolete now, but there’re still thirty or forty civil wars going on now. But it’s over with. We’re just savages putting together this global civilization. That is just exciting! It’s exciting to see the trial and error and the screwing around, it’s exciting to see the changes. But this idea of taking all these little scraps and cataloging then and insuring them and putting them in vaults is just dumb. Take them out and burn them up.
The first Happening I ever saw was Allan Kaprow’s ‘Bon Marché’. The tension was just exciting. People have just reached a level of saturation. People might just have another war to be entertained! People are so flipped out that they’d do the Third World War just to be entertained. You never know.
I encountered everybody. The world in the Fifties was just tiny. If you wanted to see everybody in the art world, on Tuesday you went uptown to the openings, and on Friday you went downtown to the openings. And after the openings on Tuesday and Friday, usually there was a loft party somewhere, and you could see everybody from Richard Huelsenbeck, he was one of the founders of Dada back in 1914 or 1915, to art students. The entire art world consisted of maybe 1,000 people. You could see Huelsenbeck, you could see Isadora Duncan. Marcel Duchamp was still alive. He had a retrospective in 1965 at the Pasadena Art Museum. Why didn’t he have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art or something?
I’m sixty-seven, I’ve been beaten to shit, the world has knocked the stuffing out of me, this is the way it is, you just learn to accept. Nothing is more pathetic than being an old, angry person. This is the way it is. If I were as angry today as I was when I was twenty, that would just look silly. It was crazy then, but now it’s just silly. But I’m really excited about this space thing. And John Glenn going out into space! We have all this energy, and everyone’s bitching about energy. Get with it! All the problems today just don’t have to exist. And Kissinger gets the Nobel Peace Prize! The while thing is just like shooting crack. The art world works the same way. You know, the group of buttholes I associated with, well, we just thought people like Frank Stella were buttholes! The idea was to get out there in the frontier, in the woods! We were all scrambling to get out there. This is what makes life interesting. All these dumb shits that climb mountains! But that’s what human beings do. I’ve been around the block a few times, I know what’s out there. But you just run out of steam! Nobody in the world can stand to be thirty years old for five years running, you just blow your gaskets! The reason I look the way I do today is because being young knocked the shit out of me! If I’d been born old, I’d look better. But that’s what it’s all about. The problem with me is that I’ve had to forget forty years of horseshit that I’ve accumulated. Irrelevant! It’s just dumb-dumb cluttery-dumb! There’s just so much archaic horseshit that’s going on today. And the idea of stuff. I mean, I’m wearing today exactly what I was wearing when I was sixteen years old. I’d like to see big festivals where people make things and then burn them up. It’s the making of art that’s important. In the Sixties, all of this dress code thing stopped. I'd go into these restaurants with my wife, and they’d insist I wear a busboy’s jacket and bowtie. HA! To take someone in a t-shirt and put an ill-fitting busboy’s jacket and bowtie on them, it made me look like a joke. It’s just dumb, but that’s over with.
I did “Fried Blood” because we have to cut the horseshit and realize that we’re savages discovering a new world. We have to get back to the very beginning. We’re all naked, we’re all ignorant, and we have to help one another because it’s just overwhelming. It’s out there, and it’s going to be incredible. Cats and dogs make their mark, human beings make their mark. Instead of peeing on the wall, we scratch our name on the wall. Everybody has a story, and everybody has a voice. Well, I never knew that the Grateful Dead had a teddy bear for an icon. Live and learn!
The Sixties were a stampede. In ’59, word got out that Mark Rothko made $9,000 in one year. In the Sixties, all these young men who would’ve gone into business or medicine or something went into art. And in the late Sixties when women’s liberation was going on, women went into art, and today everyone is an artist! If you have six billion artists, and everyone is selling a painting, it’s just absurd! If everyone’s an artist, then who’s going to buy all the art that these ‘artists’ are creating? We have to have rituals where things are made by people and then they burn them up. We can’t keep saving every dead leaf and every broken brick. Years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they had a room as big as a football field with Egyptian caskets. Hilarious! They’ve got so much Egyptian shit. I mean, can you imagine a thousand years from now them having a room full of nothing but broken bottle caps? Broken plastic cones! Turn that shit into park benches! You go to the Louvre and see all these mindless little humans huddled around the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa just looks like one more god damned… you know! The Last Supper looks like an adobe wall, they’ve pissed with it so much. These restorers, I mean every once in a while they just repaint a painting. There was a Poussette-Dart at the Museum of Modern Art, pencil on canvas, and he punched a hole in the canvas. It sat like that for years and one day it [the hole] was gone. Human beings are just absurd. I think if you understand that humans are insane animals, no problem. Sure, we’re always breaking and fixing things, but to think agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago and here we are in space. We’re running this fantastic experiment. Could be we will destroy ourselves. The nuclear thing is still out there, cuckoos are still out there. What’s going to happen? We don’t know. But we have to save the planet; we have to save our little home. None of this ‘I’m going to be okay, to hell with you.’ The next ten years are really going to be exciting. When people feel like doing something, they can do it instantaneously. This war on drugs is just absurd, and kids in jail for selling a little bit of marijuana. The country’s solution to dealing with all these young men with too much testosterone was to send them next door to rape and plunder. ‘Go destroy our enemies.’ Now they can’t get away with that. There’s just a vast amount of intelligence out there that’s not being utilized. It just doesn’t have to be that way.
I was an angry young man, and I wanted to kill. When I was eighteen years old, I was arrested and charged with rape, so that disqualified me from fighting for my country. HA! When I became an artist in ’48, ’49, to be an artist meant being in a group of dedicated people, mostly men, and it was like being a monk. You dedicated your life to art, and your audience was other artists. Art was a sacred pursuit. You can’t commodify art like you can commodify automobiles. I moved to New York in ’59 and everyone was talking about how Abstract Expressionism was over with. Everyone was talking about comic strips. It was in the air. Warhol was a tremendously successful commercial artist, which was not talked about, but then he just decided to go into art and was just right on top of it. And Lichtenstein had his first exhibition in ’51 or something like that, and it was like comic strips to Picasso. And then there was this sort of Happening thing going on. There was this messy Pop Art kind of thing, but by 1962 or 1963 it all got very neat and commodified and commercialized. Things happen fast. No one could imagine going faster than 100 mph forty years ago. Let’s just outlaw wheels!
Everyone is an artist. The idea that I’m an artist and you’ve not is just absurd. The idea that I have some sort of special thing, the whole exclusive thing is just insane. Everyone has to participate. We’re all savages in a new civilization. War is just ugly, crazy, insane shit. It’s children having their legs blown off with land mines, young men being driven completely insane. War is obsolete now, but there’re still thirty or forty civil wars going on now. But it’s over with. We’re just savages putting together this global civilization. That is just exciting! It’s exciting to see the trial and error and the screwing around, it’s exciting to see the changes. But this idea of taking all these little scraps and cataloging then and insuring them and putting them in vaults is just dumb. Take them out and burn them up.
The first Happening I ever saw was Allan Kaprow’s ‘Bon Marché’. The tension was just exciting. People have just reached a level of saturation. People might just have another war to be entertained! People are so flipped out that they’d do the Third World War just to be entertained. You never know.
I encountered everybody. The world in the Fifties was just tiny. If you wanted to see everybody in the art world, on Tuesday you went uptown to the openings, and on Friday you went downtown to the openings. And after the openings on Tuesday and Friday, usually there was a loft party somewhere, and you could see everybody from Richard Huelsenbeck, he was one of the founders of Dada back in 1914 or 1915, to art students. The entire art world consisted of maybe 1,000 people. You could see Huelsenbeck, you could see Isadora Duncan. Marcel Duchamp was still alive. He had a retrospective in 1965 at the Pasadena Art Museum. Why didn’t he have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art or something?
I’m sixty-seven, I’ve been beaten to shit, the world has knocked the stuffing out of me, this is the way it is, you just learn to accept. Nothing is more pathetic than being an old, angry person. This is the way it is. If I were as angry today as I was when I was twenty, that would just look silly. It was crazy then, but now it’s just silly. But I’m really excited about this space thing. And John Glenn going out into space! We have all this energy, and everyone’s bitching about energy. Get with it! All the problems today just don’t have to exist. And Kissinger gets the Nobel Peace Prize! The while thing is just like shooting crack. The art world works the same way. You know, the group of buttholes I associated with, well, we just thought people like Frank Stella were buttholes! The idea was to get out there in the frontier, in the woods! We were all scrambling to get out there. This is what makes life interesting. All these dumb shits that climb mountains! But that’s what human beings do. I’ve been around the block a few times, I know what’s out there. But you just run out of steam! Nobody in the world can stand to be thirty years old for five years running, you just blow your gaskets! The reason I look the way I do today is because being young knocked the shit out of me! If I’d been born old, I’d look better. But that’s what it’s all about. The problem with me is that I’ve had to forget forty years of horseshit that I’ve accumulated. Irrelevant! It’s just dumb-dumb cluttery-dumb! There’s just so much archaic horseshit that’s going on today. And the idea of stuff. I mean, I’m wearing today exactly what I was wearing when I was sixteen years old. I’d like to see big festivals where people make things and then burn them up. It’s the making of art that’s important. In the Sixties, all of this dress code thing stopped. I'd go into these restaurants with my wife, and they’d insist I wear a busboy’s jacket and bowtie. HA! To take someone in a t-shirt and put an ill-fitting busboy’s jacket and bowtie on them, it made me look like a joke. It’s just dumb, but that’s over with.
I did “Fried Blood” because we have to cut the horseshit and realize that we’re savages discovering a new world. We have to get back to the very beginning. We’re all naked, we’re all ignorant, and we have to help one another because it’s just overwhelming. It’s out there, and it’s going to be incredible. Cats and dogs make their mark, human beings make their mark. Instead of peeing on the wall, we scratch our name on the wall. Everybody has a story, and everybody has a voice. Well, I never knew that the Grateful Dead had a teddy bear for an icon. Live and learn!
