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PICTURES IN
YOUR PAINTINGS!
Interview conducted w/ David X. Young
John Szpunar & Melanie Dante' for HeadPress UK
August, 2000 - March, 2001.
DXY passed away May,
2001.
For more
information on David X.
Young please contact his
daughter:
New York
City
Forty blocks down
town from the hub where the music and art business
sector stands, sits a building in the dynamic area
where Soho, Little Italy and Chinatown meet. It was
there, on 336 Canal Street, that David X. Young
defied the "Who's Who" of pop and fine art and
became a legend in his own right.
Born in 1930, Young came of
age with the abstract expressionists and allowed his own
work to revel in the joy of their spontaneity. But Young's
was always a tethered spontaneity. Pollack heaved his
brushes at the canvas to "free paint". David X. Young
always kept one eye fixed on reality. Critic Juan Osaka
McFelsnir noted of Young's work: "To refuse paint's
picture-making aspect would be to kill a major part of the
possibilities. And a major part of the fun."
The impact that the
underground jazz scene of the 1950s had on Young's work
cannot be ignored. The proprietor of the legendary Jazz
Loft in Manhattan's flower district, he opened his doors to
countless musicians and documented them in hundreds of
paintings and photographs. Young wanted his brushes to go
where the improvisation of jazz had gone. Night after
night, he took them there.
A multi faceted renaissance
man, Young threw fashion out the window with his short film
Klaximo (1963), a film so far ahead of its time that it is
just now gaining recognition. "I knew it would be shocking,
but I didn't think it would be the film that shocked the
avant garde!"
Undaunted by the direction
that the art world had taken in the '60s and by egotistical
jabs from the New York film underground, Young kept
working, producing a myriad of photographs and paintings
embracing life and love in Haiti. Toward the end of his
life, he completed work on his children's story
Cissimon.
Outspoken
until the end, David X. Young passed away on May 22, 2001.
Those lucky enough to have known him will never forget his
generosity, kindness, and passion. Those who didn't have
something to treasure as well. Pause for just a moment and look
at his work. The life is there, bursting forth from countless
canvases, photographs, and prints. David X. Young was once
criticized for having "pictures" in his paintings. They're
there all right, for the entire world to see. And with them is
something to treasure forever.
HEADPRESS: You were born
in New England in the '30s. Conservative times for an
artist.
DXY: Well,
yeah. I was born in 1930 and Roosevelt was elected in 1932.
My grandfather lost his fortune in the crash under Hoover.
But he hated Roosevelt. So every night, members of the
family would gather around the fireplace. I was a little
squirt. They hated Roosevelt. All I can remember is the
harshness. It was very conservative.
HEADPRESS:
I imagine that there wasn't much talk of Picasso around the
fireplace.
DXY: No,
there wasn't! (laughs)
HEADPRESS:
So what was your first introduction to painting?
DXY: About
the first thing I fell in love with was Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs. It was strictly Disney. But I'll tell you
exactly what I felt. I knew it was drawings. I knew it was
all a painting. But it was real. You believed in the
personalities of the dwarfs, you kind of accepted it-it was
real, but not real. It always fascinated me. Of course, we
weren't exposed much to art. There was no culture - it was
Time Magazine covers and Norman Rockwell
illustrations.
HEADPRESS:
I know you started to draw at an early age.
DXY: I
used to do drawings of Mickey Mouse, because I wanted to
get a job as an animator for Disney. When I was in junior
high school, I got sick of drawing a mouse with circles. So
I started using squares and rectangles. My teacher said,
"That looks like Cubism." So I took out a book and read
about Picasso and thought, "She's right!" And then I read
that Picasso had sold Girl Before a Mirror to the Museum of
Modern Art for $125,000. Well, so long Mickey Mouse! Things
just opened up.
HEADPRESS:
What were your influences as a teenager?
DXY: There
wasn't really much going on. I remember back in 1948,
everybody wanted to be the nice Norman Rockwell. I was
already fed up with him by the time I went to art school. I
had teachers who thought I needed glasses. But (laughs)...
I was a very hip young guy! Everyone in my family said,
"You don't know how to draw." It was, "You want to be an
artist. You just sit around and draw. You just want to
piddle with your paints." Which I guess means just pissing
on paper.
HEADPRESS:
How long was it before you were taken seriously?
DXY: Well,
I guess my talent was recognized quickly enough. I put on a
lot of school plays and things. It was a great way of
getting out of classes. One year, a guy came-this was 1947
or '48-he was a guy whose job was to help place students in
jobs. He saw what I did, and he said, "There's this new
thing starting in New York called television. I can
probably get you a seventy-five dollar a week job." My
mother wouldn't let me go. "I'd lose a son!" Those are the
breaks.
HEADPRESS:
Your mother was a writer...
DXY: She
wrote love stories. Very pulp, very sappy. She just wrote
raw emotion, she never bothered to figure out plots. Very
perfumed. When I was twelve, I used to make up plots for
her. I didn't know about sex or anything. A pair of
identical twins falls in love with another pair of
identical twins. One goes to the war and gets killed.
Stupid, silly plot ideas, but she wrote them up. She smoked
furiously and drank a lot of wine to get that emotion. It
sort of turned me off of being a writer.
HEADPRESS:
You attended the Massachusetts School of Art?
DXY: My
mother had this idea of keeping up with the Joneses. I went
there, put on a play (Tempers Fugit), and they tried to
throw me out of school. That was halfway through my
freshman year. Then they decided to give me a mature job at
the school supply store to teach me to be responsible. So I
took that job, and they were paying me seventy bucks a
week. So I stuck around and stole all the art
material.
HEADPRESS:
What was the response to your work in school?
DXY: I had
one teacher who was very hip. He took my work to a gallery
in New York. That was Larry Kupferman. He sent me a
telegram saying, "Congratulations. You're going to New
York." I was blown away. I'd never been to New York in my
life. I didn't know about art deals or percentages. Of
course my mother said, "Paint sailboats. People will buy
that." But, I did sell some paintings-in 1950, it was good
money. Finally, I couldn't stand Boston anymore. So I moved
to New York.
HEADPRESS:
Did you finish art school first?
DXY: Yeah.
I was making money. And I stayed for about a half a year in
Boston to find out what I was going to do. I realized that
I had to get out. I met a couple of people who showed me
how to get along; how to get an illegal loft-how to bribe
the building inspectors. How to live like an outlaw.
HEADPRESS:
You first hung around the jazz crowd while you were in
Boston, though...
DXY: Yeah.
I used to hang around the jazz joints. My school wasn't
that far away. The places where Bird played, rhythm and
blues bands... Woody Hermann. I was soaking up a lot of
jazz. But then, it was like a second nature to me.
HEADPRESS:
Your father was a jazz musician.
DXY:
Right. I was born with it. So, I got to know a lot of those
guys. They were transient. Most of them were based in New
York City, which was a pretty easy connection to
make.
HEADPRESS:
Can you compare the art scene in Boston to the scene in New
York?
DXY: Brown
was the color of Boston. A lot of brown suits, all the
buildings were very dirty. The painting was very drab. All
of the art school paintings in Boston were very religious.
A lot of crucifixions, painted over with yellow varnish.
Not one pretty girl!
HEADPRESS:
What was your first impression of the New York scene when
you got there?
DXY:
Well... I arrived with only a few hundred dollars. And I
think the first four or five days I gave away $100 to
drunks and junkies. I was very innocent. But Charlie Parker
used to wait for his connection on the corner of West 3rd
and 6th Avenue. I used to see Bird every morning.. It was
great. All the people I admired were there. I'd go across
Washington Square and see Kline and his gang. I thought
that was the way things would be forever.
HEADPRESS:
You did some cover art for Prestige Records.
DXY: They
were a cheap company and they were recording a lot of jazz
musicians that nobody else would hire. They put out
ten-inch records with no covers, just type-Mile Davis
Plays. So, Jimmy Raney and Stan Getz were going to record
for them. I wrote them a letter hoping to push the virtues
of graphic design and offered to do the first cover for
nothing. The second one was The Modern Jazz Quartet. I did
that for a while.
HEADPRESS:
The Cedar Bar was a popular place for New York artists at
the time.
DXY: Well,
the Cedar Bar was three times the size of this loft. It was
down on University Place and 8th. Most of the painters, the
abstract expressionists, were guys who had government
support until the end of the war. And they were a pretty
serious gang. They used to hang out after work at The
Waldorf on 8th Street. They'd get together, drink a cup of
coffee, talk about each other's art. Well, they tore that
down. So, the nearest place to go and hang out was the
Cedar Bar- it was a half a block away. The glass of beer
was the same price as a cup of coffee. So they all started
drinking. They all became a bunch a drunks! Today they say,
"To be an abstract expressionist you have to be an
alcoholic." It just sort of happened. It was a great place.
I got to know Kline very well. I'd met Pollack before and
he was very gentle and sweet. But at the Cedar, he wa s...
he got very violent. He'd walk in the door and the place
would be absolute chaos.
HEADPRESS:
You were showing with DeKooning and Pollack when you -- and
your -- work came to be considered
controversial..
DXY: Yea
(shakes head) The shit hit the fan about my work after some
success in Chicago-selling to Hugh Hefner in the company of
Pollack, Kline and DeKooning-all good friends. The only
controversy was that I was intruding on the turf of the
Poppers. They moved into the money of the art market with
their trash neo-dadaism called Pop. I was about the age of
most of those Poppers and thought the whole thing was just
silly and stupid. When the tide turned against real
painting, Jackson, Bill, and Franz had big enough names to
survive on their own, but me, the beginner did not. I stuck
to my guns henceforth... I think that made Geldzahler and
company regard me as some kind of a threat. That was the
only controversy involved. Of course, the kind of painting
I did was generally known as controversial at the time. But
that wasn't just me.
HEADPRESS:
What advice do you have for people who have creative
aspirations of their own?
DXY: Go to
law school or turn to crime! By all means stay out of the
gossip of the art world. It will only contaminate the
brain. A quote: "Love work, hate mastery, and do not let
the government know of thy presence." 16th century rabbi.
Cultivate that little world of pure pleasure that making
art gives you, and forget about being important. If you
actually are important, in time, people will find you
out.
HEADPRESS:
In 1954, you got your loft in the Flower District.
DXY: Well,
I couldn't find a decent place. Every place in the Village
was so dark. It just so happened that there were three
empty floors on 6th Avenue. They were $120 bucks. So I
rented them, rented out two of the rooms. My grandfather
was a plumber, so he helped me out. I got some non-union
guys to help with electricity. I even had a chimney sweep
work on one of the chimneys, so I had a fireplace. I heated
the studio with a kerosene space heater and the back with a
gas heater. I broke up orange crates and junk from the
streets to heat the place. I came all the way from Cape Cod
to New York to learn how to live like a bum.
HEADPRESS:
You eventually brought in a piano.
DXY: Yeah.
I was dead broke. I couldn't afford to go anyplace to see
jazz. But I had this loft and I had all these friends who
were musicians. And they couldn't afford the studios to
jam. So, I opened up my doors and got all the jazz for
free. I got that piano-a very good used upright- and
brought it up by block and tackle! After that, I kept an
open door. Anyone who wanted to play could come on up.
Thelonious Monk would rehearse with Hall Overton right
below my bed. I'd go to sleep at night being serenaded by
those guys. This was after going out downtown and hanging
out at the Cedar.
HEADPRESS:
The door was open for musicians... What about people who
just wanted to hear the music?
DXY: Well,
there weren't that many people who were interested.
Eventually, people came to realize that it was a scene.
They didn't know why it was a scene, but they knew there
was action there. I mean, we all smoked pot. There were
only a couple of cases of heroin. So a lot of these squares
would come in with a cheap attitude-just to get high. But
we had jam sessions-Zoot Sims was playing upstairs, Monk
was playing downstairs. That was the real shit.
HEADPRESS:
One of your tenants was LIFE photographer W. Eugene
Smith.
DXY: I was
on the top floor. Hall Overton was below me. And he rented
out half of his floor to Smith. Smith had just lost his job
at Life and was down and out. Very depressed, very drunk,
and very crazy. And very impressed with himself. I sort of
avoided him for a long time, but I knew he liked jazz. So I
invited him up one night and we started talking. We became
very good friends.
HEADPRESS:
How was your artwork progressing at this time?
DXY: I had
a few shows. I was developing. I wasn't trying to take over
the world yet. Smith was around. I sort of absorbed
photography through him. I got interested in film.
HEADPRESS:
You made a few trips to Haiti during that time.
DXY: Well,
Charlie Parker was around. I knew him quite well. Mingus
was coming to my place a lot. Mingus and Bird were very
close. We were all hoping that he'd show up one day. He
died on March 12, 1955 and Mingus got very upset. I can't
explain it, but I felt that I had to try to get to the
heart of black culture. To do that, you would normally go
to Africa. But Haiti was just down the street. It was
French as well, and if you wanted to do anything with art,
you'd go to France. That's originally why I went.
HEADPRESS:
With paints and a camera. Were you consciously moving into
a new field?
DXY: I've
always been interested in images on a flat plane within the
confines of a rectangle. Never the third dimension.
Sculpture always bored me. Sculpture is phallic, it sticks
out at you. Painting is vaginal, it sucks you in. So
photography fit that interest quite easily. After I got to
know Gene Smith's level of print quality, I could see how
you could do really fine work as a photographer. But for
me, it was always an adjunct-- like spare visual parts.
Movies were another dimension to photography, and I liked
the storytelling climaxes and rhythms. Like music.
HEADPRESS:
A lot of what you shot in Haiti has a documentary
feel.
DXY: I was
never interested in reportage. I just kept a camera with me
and when I saw something to shoot, I shot it. When I was in
Haiti, I acquired a Bolex movie camera and 600 feet of
color film. It turned up in a film I did on Haiti called
Seven Haitian Moods. Now I look back at the photos I took
in Haiti and realize there is an instinctive documentary
there. There's a certain hunk of lost Haitian history. But
I was there before it left and recorded some of those
things. And now-gee-whiz, look what I got!
HEADPRESS:
In the mean time, the loft scene was dying?
DXY: Well, let's say this.
In 1963 or 1964, Pop-Art started to come in. That killed
abstract expressionism where I was coming from. Then the
Beatles came over here and there was no room for jazz. There
was no work for musicians. The spirit was gone. They were
raising the rent. It was time to do something different. I went
back to the Cape and made Klaximo.
HEADPRESS:
Let's hear a little about that film.
DXY: I did
that film in 1963. It was way ahead of its time; I still
can't get it shown.
HEADPRESS:
Do you see Klaximo as industrial eroticism?
DXY: For
one thing, I hate the term industrial eroticism. It's an
oxymoron. I made Klaximo as protest against that very
notion. The idea that machines or computers could better
the idiosyncrasies of the human psyche. The big problem was
to convey the illusion convincingly, which of course meant
erotically. And it was largely a mise en scene editing and
rhythm problem. It was a challenge just like painting a
leafy tree in certain lights is a challenge. No other
difference. I don't see anything avant garde about it. I
think it is too clear for that category.
HEADPRESS:
What were you getting at?
DXY: I
thought I'd do something different. I didn't want to do
anything unless I could carry it all the way through. I
suddenly had enough film that I could actually do
something. Those were the days when the computer was
beginning to be talked about; if you keep a computer
writing long enough it would write all of Hamlet. You could
play chess with a computer. There was a guy I met who was
around twenty-eight years old. He was legally blind-he had
these big thick glasses and was bald. He was devising a
computer that could make the trumpet sound of A flat the
way Dizzy Gelespie could do it and then the sound of A flat
the way Louis Armstrong could do it. This was really very
different. He was going to invent a computer that could
play jazz in any style, and therefore eliminate the need
for jazz musicians all together. That's what mediocrity's
always trying to do, to get rid of the artist by some
mechanical means. I was completely horrified by the whole
thing. And I started to think, "How the hell can I express
this horrible idea?" It just so happens that I was living
with a beautiful blond girl at the time. I got this idea
that the most horrible thing a human could do with a
machine would be to fuck it. So, I decided to make a film
about a girl fucking a robot. All of my friends said, "You
can't do that! How the hell can you do that?" It was a
challenge, so I worked on it and worked on it. The movie
was very convincing; it scared a lot of the guys. The women
loved it, though.
HEADPRESS:
Why did you decide to make a film in the first
place?
DXY: Film
was my first love. Somehow down the line, I got 4,000 feet
of black and white Tri-Ex reversal film. I had just gone
through the whole scene with the art world-Pop-Art coming
in-and I realized that I didn't want anything to do with
the art world until Pop-Art blew over. Little did I know it
would last so long. I just decided to shoot movies instead.
I figured with 4,000 feet of film I could really do
something. I could afford to make mistakes and all
that.
HEADPRESS:
So you jumped into it without any real training?
DXY: I'm a
completely self-taught person. And everything in that film
is something that I just made up.
HEADPRESS:
Who influenced you?
DXY: My
two heroes are Orson Welles and Louis Bunuel. I always
loved Bunuel's sardonic streak and Welles' visual sense. I
tried to utilize both influences.
HEADPRESS:
A lot of painters have turned to film at some point.
DXY: Film
is a different way of approaching an audience. You had the
audience's complete attention for a half an hour, an hour,
or whatever. You were commanding their total thing. A
painting is something that's on the wall. You're drawn to
it or not drawn to it. With film, it's a chance to be boss
for a while. Welles describes it very well: "A ribbon of
dream." Something that can trigger the imagination. And I
always loved things that could trigger the
imagination.
HEADPRESS:
You tried to apply the free form of jazz to painting. Was
this easier with film?
DXY: I
think that jazz works in certain cases in films. Of course,
the joy of jazz is some guy taking a solo and going off on
it. If that's too dominant, it can take away from the drama
of a film.
HEADPRESS:
Film is pretty calculated.
DXY: There's a little
dance thing that I did that is definitely cut to the beat. A
visual jazz thing using the music as the source, instead of
trying to fit the music to the story.
HEADPRESS: Klaximo was
shot at your family's cabin?
DXY: At
Eastham, Cape Cod. We shot at my cabin. It doesn't even
exist any more.
HEADPRESS:
Did you do any story boards?
DXY: I
story boarded it after a while. I had to keep track of what
I was doing. I shot 4,000 feet and the film was 1,000 feet
so we shot four-to-one. That's a pretty good ratio. Then it
got to the point where it was hard to keep track-a cogwheel
cutting to a hip. It was very difficult. I had to story
board before I could edit. I did it in three tempos; slow,
medium, and fast. The most difficult sequence was the bar
scene. The hardest one to edit. I really didn't know what I
was doing. I was at the bar and just shot the kind of mood
I wanted. This guy takes a drink, this guy looks over
here-none of it led to anything. The first edit was
dreadful. When I did the final cut, it was really hard to
make it build. The rest was far out, but it was regular
filmmaking.
HEADPRESS:
Where did you find your actors?
DXY: They
were a bunch of guys who were party buddies of mine. They
were just hanging around. It was the end of the summer and
we didn't have anything to do. The clubs were closed and
all that. So it was a hobby or something.
HEADPRESS:
Was it difficult to direct them?
DXY:
Visually, I got them to do exactly what I wanted. And once
the camera was on, they were very serious. But they
regarded it as a party. And I don't think any of them
thought I was serious. Probably the most interesting one
was the old guy, who literally was a dirty old man. He
loved to rent his place out to young college girls in the
summer. He said to me, "Imagine you asking me to play a
dirty old man in a movie!" And he did it like a
trooper!
HEADPRESS:
Did you process the film along the way?
DXY:
Whenever I had the money. Literally cashed in beer bottles
and waitress tips. I'd sell a drawing for $25 and I'd
process more film. I had a hard time getting the nudity out
of the lab. This was 1963, before X rated films. They
thought I was a college kid making a porno. I had to
convince them that I wasn't.
HEADPRESS:
There really isn't a lot of nudity in the film.
DXY: There
was only 100 feet of nudity, and it was basically bare
buttocks. But, yeah, I tried to get things done as best as
I could. I guess what I'm trying to say is that nothing was
regular. I had to look at what I shot as it came.
HEADPRESS:
Where did you end up cutting the film?
DXY: I cut it on the Cape.
That was the initial cut. The last cut was right here, in this
loft. I finally got a hold of a four-plate editor and I matched
it, synced it.
HEADPRESS:
And let's talk about the score.
DXY: The main jazz theme
was done by Zoot Sims. Zoot was at my place one day and I asked
him to do something. He said, "Oh, I can't do any thing..."
Five minutes later, he came up with that. He'd done a
jazz-blues thing that we recorded at my jam sessions. He
changed the emphasis on it-it's the same notes, different
stress. The other music was from-I got this guy who knew about
computers. I felt a synthesizer score would be appropriate. He
did all the incidental music, and I thought it worked very
well.
HEADPRESS:
You composed the title track?
DXY: The
title track, yes. I did the music and lyrics, though
Carsten Bohn did the arrangement and my daughter sang it in
multiple overdub. It's actually kind of a bebop riff tune.
But the rain theme Dark Cloud at the end is pure Zoot Sims,
bless him, and the incidental music is Bohn.
HEADPRESS:
So what did the cast think of the finished film?
DXY: They
loved it. They loved seeing themselves. The old man,
especially.
HEADPRESS:
Do you consider Klaximo a feminist film?
DXY: I
suppose you could say that now, but there wasn't any kind
of feminist movement then. That came later on in the '60s.
But I was just trying to express my horror of the machine
taking over humanity. And I wanted it to be erotic, but not
pornographic.
HEADPRESS:
The film is beautifully lit.
DXY:
That's one of the reasons that the Warhol crowd hated it, I
think. (sadly shakes his head) Because it looked so
professional.
HEADPRESS:
If the men had built a robot for themselves-
DXY: If I would have done
it that way, they might have liked it. Maybe the fact that the
film conveyed a reasonable approximation of intercourse with a
woman made it hard for them to take!
HEADPRESS:
What kind of lighting set up did you have?
DXY: A lot
of the film was done with two lights. Some of it with one.
I was a still photographer-I didn't know that I couldn't do
it. It was innocent bravado, I guess.
HEADPRESS:
What do you remember about the New York underground film
movement at the time?
DXY: Well,
the underground film movement was very small. There was
Norman McLaren, Douglas Crockwell out in upstate New York;
people like Kenneth Anger. It was very small. And most of
the films weren't very good. They had things like The
Geography of the Body, and it's a camera panning around the
body of a nude guy lying on a table. About as uninteresting
as you can get, unless you're gay. But I knew that that was
the market to show these things. I got the idea for Klaximo
almost simultaneously with all of that. The Warhol people
were following the influence of Anger and all those people.
They were all set to move in on the scene. Warhol was a
very clever guy. He knew that world and he knew that there
was a lot of energy that wanted to get attention. So he was
like a general managing the troops. Jack Smith was doing
things like Flaming Creatures and all that stuff.
HEADPRESS:
When did you first become aware of that movement?
DXY: After
I made Klaximo. I brought the film to New York and was
screening it here, trying to get some attention. Shortly
after that, they became in; everyone wanted to make movies.
We got some pretty wretched films out of that, didn't
we?
HEADPRESS:
You showed the film around New York when it was
finished?
DXY: I
showed it to the Museum of Modern Art. They rejected it.
Willard Van Dyke was the guy who was running it at the
time. I took it to Janus Films, or something like that, a
company that released a lot of the early underground films.
They rejected it. Nobody had done anything that outrageous
at the time. It was a real first. I thought a friend of
mine at the New York Theater would do something, but he
wouldn't show it. Then I took it to the Cinemateque and had
a disaster with Mekas who came here several times when I
was working on the film. He would never write about
it.
HEADPRESS:
When did you first meet him?
DXY: I met
him through Dan Talbot in 1959 or 1960. They wanted to do a
film on Howl, Ginsberg's thing. It ended up being
Halleluiah the Hills. He came up with a script and I was
looking at it with Dan Talbot. I thought it was hopeless.
He then became a power, writing for The Village Voice. His
brother Adolfas liked the film. I ran into Jonas Mekas
twenty-five years later and he refused to shake my hand.
So, obviously, the film made some kind of serious dent on
him. Dan Talbot would only say, "I'm not ready to show it
now." He wouldn't say that it was a bad movie. But I really
don't know why no one would do anything with it.
HEADPRESS:
Do you find it ironic that now, thirty years later, you are
becoming a "Pop Popular"?
DXY: I
guess it is a good feeling, but it hasn't bought me that
house in the South of France yet. And I don't think I
shocked the Poppers of the '60s as much as I intruded on
their turf-claim as the next underground avant garde. Which
was really just a polymorphous perverse group indulgence
coming out in the open to claim some market action. They
resented Klaximo as if it were an intentional power trip,
which surprised me at the time. I thought they'd like
it-after all, in its own way it is quite perverse. As for
now, it is just that the times are finally catching up with
me.
HEADPRESS:
Has the film been screened publicly since then?
DXY: I
showed it at The Knitting Factory in 1997. And I had great
reactions. I'd do it again, except I'm not a promoter so
much. I'm interested in doing other things. More
painting.
HEADPRESS:
Do you feel that cinema and photography made you a better
painter?
DXY: Not
at all. It's still the same eye. I liked [with SLR cameras]
how you could vary depth of field and mix soft and hard
focus in the same picture. Very painterly effects of a
sort. Movies add rhythm, like music. And you have all those
theatrical things to play with. I'm afraid today with
digital-and all these film cutters on cocaine-that the
dream is becoming too reflexively nightmarish.
HEADPRESS:
What are you working with now?
DXY: I
used to like oil painting best, until turpentine shot up
from a dollar a gallon to fifteen bucks a gallon-that
killed all the splashy fun! I couldn't stand acrylic until
I realized that the painters who used it were such bad
painters to begin with. I devised my own formula for
acrylic and use it quite a bit now. But the odor! I used to
love the smell of turpentine, but acrylic smells like a
stale brontosaurus fart. But the demands and quixotic
nature of watercolor-I'm growing to like that best. It's
also portable, vivid and quick, great fun once you really
get into its rhythm. Full of surprise! I love painting the
female figure and country-seaside landscapes. Sometimes
just form/shape speculations just to see what comes up. No
real preference-just what is in front of me that might give
a tingle. I hate the city and city shapes-it's all just
boxes and dirt and rectangles. But really I never know what
I am going to do.
HEADPRESS:
You've just recently begun showing again, after about
twenty-five years. Are there any contemporaries that you
feel connected to?
DXY: There
are no real painters left that I have found; not that I've
looked very hard. Certainly no adventure and excitement
since DeKooning and Kline. It's all in the past I'm afraid.
There are a lot of illustrators of course-but most of that
now is just Photo Shop, which I consider cheating when
taken solo. Illustration kills adventure-just something
that "looks like art." I hate "style"; it's a very
self-conscious thing. Things just come out, good or bad. I
could show you things I did that recall DeKooning done long
before I even knew of him.
HEADPRESS:
You once said that you came to New York to be a part of an
atmosphere that was nowhere else to be found.
DXY: I
think all the freedom's gone now. There wouldn't be fifty
thousand kids trying to be artists if there wasn't some
kind of taste of money. When we started out as artists, we
didn't have any taste of money at all. We did it out of
love. It was the only way we could live. That's a
fundamental difference. The kids today want to be loved.
They don't have the pure instinct. Big egos. They graduate
from art school with all kinds of degrees, and think they
have all the answers. A friend of mine was at the Cape. He
said, "There's an underground movement going on right now
to bring the painting back. I don't know. Maybe it's just a
question of time. But the freedom, the joy, and the love
for creation in this city.. It's not there now. And I think
it will be a long time coming..."
finis.
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