Robert Cheatham
         

Select another interview to read

 

Interview June 2000 [atlanta georgia]

OP -- If you could start from the beginning, talk about your background as a person and as an artist…

RC -- I was born originally in Mississippi, then moved here very early. I spent a lot of time trying to live that down because of the divisive background and the stuff in the '60's when I was growing up in Mississippi...the Civil Rights stuff... and then as I got older, I came to see that actually there were a lot of Blues people who came from Mississippi; a lot of writers who came from Mississippi...so IÕve kinda come to terms with that and have tried to incorporate some regionalism into some of the writing and performance stuff that IÕve done. It has been good for me psychologically, actually, to come to terms with a lot of that. My training in the '60's & '70Õs -- going through the whole alternative community thing...and then I became ÔART DAMAGEDÕ at some point and started. drifting.

[plane overhead]

OP -- So you were talking about being 'art-damaged'...

RC -- Art seemed to be a way to combine intellectual labour and manual labour and a more balanced approach to things. So I sort of started drifting into sculpture. I did what I call FUNCTIONAL SCULPTURE for quite awhile - and thought that's kinda what I wanted to do, more manual kinds of things. Then I moved out of Georgia for awhile... lived in Indiana ... came back to Atlanta and did sculpture for awhile. And started playing music. I'd always sorta fiddled with the saxophone; I'd always loved jazz -- and wanted to be a saxophone player.

I did that kind of off and on for a while. I played in all the DESTROY ALL MUSIC festivals. I started a cassette label called Fort! da? and advertised at different places like OPTION music magazine...sold some cassettes. And then the music that I was doing at that point was getting so intense and heavy that I started having fantasies I was gonna die on stage, actually. So I said, this is probably not the best way to go about thinking of music.

At that time Public Domain was a loft group that was sponsoring the DESTROY ALL MUSIC festivals and other events. It was a loose group of people involved in some of the lofts in Atlanta...and I got involved with them. Glen Thrasher was one of the main people with -- with helping them become a 501(c)3. Uh, then a lot of bad drug things started happening with that whole scene. A lot of people started getting addicted to heroin, basically... That scene sorta fell apart; Public Domain kept going. We maintained a space in Little Five Points called KLANG, for awhile, which brought in a lot of people. A little black box studio in Little Five Points. When the music people started drifting away ... I started doing performance stuff then more seriously. And a member of Public Domain, Chea Prince, was able to get a server donated from an accounting firm in New York. We set that up and started offering free email accounts to artists and small art groups in Atlanta. Around that time I started PERFORATIONS as a hard copy -- a media kit -- or EXPERIMEDIA kit, as we called it. There'd be a music cassette; there would be a floppy, because at that time you didn't have CDs or a lot of other media; and one issue included a 90 minute videotape that was curated by Alan Sondheim in NYC. But I was having to do all of the PERFORATIONS myself for the most part. I'd done it on the side -- and on the sly. Because it was expensive to have it printed, I would have people do it after work wherever the printer would allow us in.

And then we said, The best thing to do would be to put PERFORATIONS online. At that time graphics were becoming available on web services - we're talking about '91...'92. So we started transferring PERFORATIONS onto online activities. First, the old PERFORATIONS -- the first 5 or 6 issues. And then around (issue) number 7, it started to be oriented completely towards web possibilities.

 

OP -- And when you talk about it being geared towards web possibilities, what changes occurred?

RC -- The possibilities that the web gave us was for one thing cost - 'cause all you needed was a computer to be able to process the material and get it online... we needed a server which we already had and were able to keep at Emory (University). Because we were not-for-profit, they let us their facilities, their phonebank program... so mainly it was the idea of costs and the number of people who could have access to… now we have probably 55,000 hits a month on the site. Most of the hits, I think, are for PERFORATIONS which, we never could have had that kind of distribution outside the web based possibilities. And also I try to encourage artists and writers, academics to explore the possibilities of hypertext, incorporating textual and graphic materials together in order to make the point they are making. Until fairly recently this has been fairly difficult to do, but there's been an explosion of interest in that sort of stuff in the past two years. Even more academics are doing that. Artists are doing it also. The problems with artists a lot of the time is that the content is a little thin 'cause they tend to be more technical people involved, at least until recently. Now you have artists who are involved in knowing some of the technology.

 

X -- You mentioned in our previous meeting and also in your journals that you have the"Brechtian Effect"as an identity issue, could you talk about this?

RC -- One of the ideological issues of Public Domain was always an attempt to, what we call, DUST THE FRAME of issues of power so that individuals could be empowered to do their artwork, or just to stay active, basically. The other people in Public Domain were more involved in this issue early on. The attempt was always to reveal how society worked; how thinking about art worked; to reveal the fingerprints of the crime, so to speak.

 

OP -- Could you explain what DESTROY ALL MUSIC was about?

RC -- DESTROY ALL MUSIC was sort of a creation of Glen Thrasher who was really a linchpin in the Atlanta art scene and alternative music community. Glen had a 'zine, I guess you'd call it, called LOWLIFE. And he was very instrumental in having performances and arranging a lot of the DESTROY ALL MUSIC festival stuff. At the time, a lot of so-called NO WAVE experimental pop music was happening in New York and Atlanta at the same time ( Lydia Lunch, 8-inch Spine, Mars, DNA ). It was a sort of feedback effect. These were usually huge events that were held in different venues around. There'd be four to five hundred people that would be at these. Most of the acts were regional in the sense from the Southeast, but there would usually be a couple people from the outside Atlanta -- Davey Williams,La Donna Smith, Shakin' Ray Levis.

So there was a very vital scene there for awhile, and then it just sort of collapsed for a period of time. I think some of the energies involved with it may not have been that healthy judging by what happened with some of the people later on. And I think rather than just get back into the scene, a lot of them chose just to go with other things. And so now there's a whole new scene... a little bit healthier maybe. I just don't see quite as much of the pernicious drug use like heroin. So it was a very vital scene at that point, very intense, but it was also centering on what you might call ABJECT ART & PERFORMANCE. I don't think there's as much of that kind of performance material around generally now. Or if it is, it's more nuanced... it's kind of an intuitive, primal thing they're doing.

 

OP -- What do you feel, generally speaking, is the role and / or responsibility of an artist in our society, in our culture?

RC -- Boy, that's a hard one. Well, the role of an artist seems to be shifting somewhat. Originally in tribal societies, I guess you really didn't have artists. You had Shamans who functioned as artists. They were people who saw new possibilities, new venues for a movement of a tribe. And that sort of turned into the artistic creature.

Ezra Pound had the statement that the artist are antenna of a race; the poets, actually, were the antennae of a race, which I always really liked. I wanted to consider myself as an antenna -- that you saw future possibilities and things happening. And I think that's still the case but, uh, there are so many different kinds of art now and so many different kinds of artists. It's hard to make a general statement about an artist's role.

I'd like to say an artist points to new ways to live, new kinds of possibilities. I think that's generally true, but I don't know that it's possible anymore to have one kind of approach to anything. One thing that the Net is showing us is that we seem to be in a process of dramatic balkanization of everything: artistic enterprises, economic enterprises... I still like to operate sometimes under the optimistic delusion that an artist has something to give the rest of the culture.

You know I've been doing stuff in Atlanta for like fifteen years and... last night after I finished the performance (at Eyedrum) I was talking to a young woman downstairs in the performance venue. It's kind of disappointing to be doing stuff for fifteen years and to be no farther along than you were fifteen years ago in some respect. And we were talking about how the artist has to have his or her own response to the work they do -- you can't rely on the audience. And I think that's probably the case. So you do your own stuff, and whatever effects come from that, come from that. I can't really dictate to other people what they should do...you have to kind of do it and if there is something there other people will say so. If you have a problem with it, that is, if people don't respond to it, then you say Wow! Am I shit? you know, Should I continue on? So you have to find resources within yourself to be able to keep going regardless of what other people think about it. And that's kind of a problem sometimes.

OP -- regardless of whether you get press or anyone experiences your work . . .

RC -- Right. Well, that's the good thing about electronic stuff now. Even though you may have small venues when you do things live, and this has always been the case of high art, the documentation of it is as important -- or even more important than the actual artwork itself because many more people are going to see the documentation, the representation of what you do than when it happens in real life. So if the thing had been recorded last night, I could put it on the web, make some MP3's of it and you know, in a couple of days a few thousand people would see it. But there's not the same feeling about connecting with people in that way. So there's a little bit of a disconnect with this electrical soup that we're in and you have to find ways of dealing with that. But I do like to think that artists still have some visions for how human life can be lived. It's just not as simple, for me anyway, as it was a few years ago. Ummm, and everything gets more difficult and less clear as you get older, I think.

OP -- It's that fearless young energy.

RC -- I think that's probably true. You begin to see all of the strings hanging out and that's actually, that's one of the bad things about getting older as an artist. You have to really combat that. You have to try to inculcate an innocence about what it is you do - 'cause it's easy to become cynical as you get older. There's a natural cynicism perhaps as you age and so you really have to deal with a certain freshness ... keeping fresh about things.

 

OP -- What changes have you seen in the Atlanta art scene in the past fifteen years?

RC -- Yeah, well part of the thing is that I'm fifteen years older than I was 15 years ago, so the people who would be my natural peer group -- artists, have sort of disappeared from the public arena as far as I can see. A lot of them, I think, have moved away; a lot of them have gone to New York, or they've become "successful" artists. And you enter into a new kind of relationship to your public, to your venues, when you move up to the level of museums doing officially sanctioned installations or things like that... you lose, to some degree, some of the community base that you started with, like small scruffy alternative galleries.

My feeling about the artists and venues in Atlanta is that it's invariably a very young audience now going to a lot of the alternative galleries of which there areat least 6 or 7 in town. The artists and the audiences, generally, are in their 20's. Now some people would say , That's not high quality Art, but I don't know... that's not really a germane issue because who makes these decisions about what's high quality art? Because if you do it long enough, a certain qualitative thing will happen to it -- if you support it long enough. There seems to be more of an audience now for art in Atlanta, but it seems to be severely age related. And there seems to be more venues cropping up all the time which I think is great. A few years ago you had some galleries, but you had two or three. You had Little Beirut; you had 800 East; you had Klang -- and that was basically it. And those were kind of like Eyedrum now, where they combine music, performance and visual arts. So I think it's better. I think maybe the economic climate now is such that people have more disposable income -- maybe more free time There's a more cosmopolitan audience coming into Atlanta now and some people associate it with the whole dotCom thing. More information people coming in ... so they want more kinds of amenities than the old-style Atlanta. I could be misleading myself about that, but it seems to be a better climate than it was a few years ago. But most people have to work at making it happen.

 

OP -- What are your thoughts on art in the 21st century?

RC -- Well, I don't think the so-called 'traditional' arts will disappear. I think they'll have a kind of renaissance. I was just reading something recently about painting having more viability now, in fact. So I don't know that the digital arts do away. I think they change the ratios of our perceptions about these former art forms. It changes and will change in ways we can't conceive. If you can have a software program and a hardware package that you can do cad-cam with sculpture, create sculpture just through software -- that's great ! but there will always be people who like the physical involvement because we have bodies. We still have bodies and hands -- and so there's a sort of visceral involvement with material that I think won't go away. It might go away sometime far in the future but I think more immediately we'll still have that. I think it's really difficult to say what the whole future of the electronic / net thing will be about. It's so revolutionary, literally, we have little idea about the possibilities of it because weekly, there are new developments in it and usually it takes our species a little while to process the economics of these things that are coming through. They're washing through faster than we can process them into our practices -- our daily practices.

I mean, look at the car. The car has been around for about 70 years and its only been within the past, I'd say, ten years that we're beginning to see some of the problems with the automobile: traffic; patterns of population movement and growth that it sets up. They're really rather pernicious. So the net will have similar kinds of very positive effects and it will also have very similar negative effects on life and art generally, I think. And there's no way to see fully what those effects are except to move into it and try to deal with it as we can. So I think we have big adventures in store for us with regards to all of this. Some people will prefer not to have anything to do with it after a while. I think we'll have media free communities at some point because people will be so saturated and overloaded.

Every individual now is becoming information node. And as the Net becomes more portable, you have more wireless devices that you can carry around with you . . . wearable computers. Every person will be a transmitting and receiving station. You'll be able to transmit live video from wherever you are. So if you're in the middle of China, if you're a transmitting station for video, what does that do to the relationship to the state? to the individual?

As regards to Art, it depends on what you consider Art to be, I guess. We could go into a really long conversation on what Art is -- what it is supposed to accomplish. Is it supposed to reveal deep structures inside the artist; deep structures inside society itself? It does all those things, and in that sense, the Net really acts as the fingerprint powder to reveal a lot of these unconscious invisible structures. It makes what was formerly invisible visible, just like the telescope and the microscope made the very small and the very large visible. Now the computer and the Net make things that are even more ephemeral than the telescope and microscope apparatuses (sic) brought us. The net, and the computer reveal the human brain; human thinking patterns -- and we don't really know how to deal with that yet. So Art in that sense still has a very vital funnction. And one great thing about Art is that it gives you a lot of down time to think about things. In a society of production you're supposed to always be producing. But my thinking about Art is that you have to have a large amount of time staring at the wall, so to speak, while you process. Doing things seemingly completely unrelated but in Art, there's nothing that's unrelated. So you have to have time to kind of integrate that together. And hopefully the Net won't suck all of our time away but will actually give us some time. Right now it's unclear as to how all that will work. So it's important that people take some control of these issues and be able to make some decisions -- however they think best -- without having it imposed by corporations.

 

OP -- Define yourself as an artist

RC -- Whoo ... define myself as an artist ... well for awhile I just wanted to ... do sculpture because it had a sensual aspect. Then, I wanted to play the saxophone. That was all I wanted to do. I just wanted to play the saxophone. Then, I wanted to do performance art and that's kinda mainly what I wanted to do. I started writing fairly recently, and you know, there are philosophers who say everything is writing, a form of writing in a way. An inscription on the surface of the world. Ideas and thoughts of images... even painting is a form of writing; music is a form of writing ... so for me writing has become a fundamental aspect of what it is I do. In fact, one of the reasons I've been so attracted to the web-based possibilities is that the web is basically still text-based and the computer is a writing instrument for the most part. There's a lot of image processing that goes on also and I suppose the challenge is to find some way to make the two work together in a whole that is greater than each individually.

What I've tried to do as an artist is to combine certain philosophical ideas with certain actions in the real world, and to try to realize certain unconscious ideas in unconscious actions in a way (laughs) that will have some communication to someone who sees it. Although the communication that they see may not be completely overt -- but that it speaks in an unconscious sort of way to the person, so that my unconscious speaks to the other person's unconscious. And I think you can do that with writing. Maybe writing is the preeminent way to do that. Not manual writing or newspaper writing, but a sort of poesis -- poetics. As I've gotten older, writing has become more important definitely, and I take a more conceptual approach to things. Things have become more elusive and luminous ... more ephemeral. So as regards to what kind of artist ... I think that every artist is a poet in a way.

 

OP -- What are your thoughts on and approach to space ?

RC -- Well, I was always interested in the notion that modern culture tries to exclude nature as much as possible - so it was an attempt to, just as earlier, to combine intellectual labour and manual labour; and an attempt to include the inside and outside together in some way. We live in, especially in the South now, we live in air-conditioning. We go from air-conditioned house to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned workplace. I can appreciate that. I like urban spaces but there's also something about being able to deal the forms of nature. And it's interesting now if you look at the highest form of computer architecture now, they're going back to organic forms which is very interesting. I think that industrial culture went to rectilinear forms, enclosures, because it was easier for a 19th century industrial machine shop to make that sort of thing. But now with the computer you enter into a more plastic universe, which tribal societies have lived in always, basically. In one respect the computer culture of McLuhan was there before any of us really. They were talking about uh, a new electronic universe bringing us into a tribal mindset and I think that we're seeing some of that. Both the bad aspects and the balkanization of brutalities' revival, identity politics. They're downsizing everything. But they're hopefully putting us back in touch with the fluidity of what nature is all about.

So some of the stuff I do is an attempt to deal with genius-loci of a place. This particular place (the Dancing Hut ) was covered in vines, so in sitting down here meditating, I didn't say I need to cut down all these vines; it just kinda grew as an organic sort of structure because the place called for it. If I was living (somewhere else) I would probably do something entirely different, more appropriate to the space. The problem with society now, the idea of appropriateness of a space or a location doesn't seem to be too germane to how the architecture of a lifestyle fits in anymore. We live in sort of a global culture, a global air-conditioned disassociated sort of culture. Artists examine that but we also sort of buy into it because its a more comfortable place to live. We don't have to sweat as much, physical labour is a problem sometimes. But if you come to it yourself, doing the physical labour and sweat yourself, I think that's a different sort of thing than having to work in a factory for 12 hours a day. So we're coming back to the body in a different kind of way. Rather than having an institution tell us we have to do "this kind" of labour now can choose to do it if we so wish and can choose to fit into the environment in a certain kind of more vital, more connected sort of way -- theoretically. There's a gap between theory and practice however. But that's one of the things I think artists should examine -- those gaps, those cracks in the world -- fissures. To be able to pry them open to see whatever the culture tries to cover over for whatever reason. Sometimes it wants to cover over things for good reasons. Othertimes they're not so good. So an artist -- at least I try to think about that stuff . . .

[plane overhead]

 

OP -- Talk about your recent installation, DROMOS, that was part of the < connect > show (atlanta february 2000)

RC -- The < connect > show was a really great event -- I was talking with Maurice Clifford one day and he mentioned the show. I started sort of conceiving of something. My father was still alive at the time. I was living in the basement of their house. I think an artist needs to be aware of seepage in his or her work -- in some fashion. You don't have to be overtly aware of it but you can be unconsciously aware of it which I think I was. So the piece I did for the <connect ? show -- DROMOS -- appeared to be about death although -- people who have seen it recently have told me they thought it was about some form of transcendence, which I thought was, whatever kind of theoretical problems one has for some of those concepts, there is a positive aspect to that which I like. I'm trying to be more positive and optimistic about some of my approaches to things. It's easy, it's very easy to be negative as an artist in the culture we live in... and I think sometimes we don't know what it is as an artist we think until we actually do a project. And then we see.

So, it was about death and the unconscious and the dream state that technology throws us into. When I'm putting these things together a lot of times I work with bits and pieces of things that float by. Sort of stick them together. And I'm surprised a lot of times myself by the results. Even in doing more programmatic sculpture. It's very difficult for me to make a sketch of something and then go through the factory process of realizing it. If I can't get something out of the actual processing of the materials, the event, and the responses of people to the event, in talking to people, then it hasn't been a very valuable experience to me. So in that respect, the DROMOS thing was the best piece I've ever done, 'cause it involved all of these things. It involved my unconscious; it involved the unconscious of people who came through the show and got something out of it; and then it sort of led to thinking about other projects I can manifest in the future. So it was a very valuable experience.

 

OP -- In the digital age everything in essence is in the public domain which brings up an issue of appropriation. How does appropriation fit with you as an artist? Whether in fact you appropriate things from your own work into others or others appropriate work of yours ... how do you feel about that?

RC -- It's a very difficult tricky issue on the web. Once you make something digital to put on the web, basically, it's gone as a form of property. Uh, it's kind of problematic as an artist because you want to be able to stay alive. You want to accrue some results from the work that you do ... both some acclaim -- that is, you want to be loved by people, and the more people who see it, the more people who can possibly love you; that's a basic for artists -- but you also want to be able to make some money off your work, and if uh, the whole NAPSTER thing with Metallica is an example of some of those problems and issues involved -- I don't think we've yet resolved how that will work for artists. I myself don't worry when I put a piece of writing or something on the web as to whether someone is going to steal it and sell it. It hasn't happened, if it were to happen I might have more concern about it. But, uh, if they were to somehow appropriate my ability to create new work I would be more concerned about that. I write like other people, so if someone reads my stuff and they start writing like me, how can I -- what can you do about that? Or if they hear your music as a form of appreciation of what it is you do.

I think the problem with internet property rights and appropriation is actually having to do with economics. We don't know how to properly appreciate artists economically. We know how to appreciate the big stars -- the media network has always created big stars. It's the problem at the bottom of the food chain; the artists who have problems making a living. My hope is that the Net will actually help those people ... myself, to survive at some point. I don't think we know how to make that work yet, so it's a very tricky issue. I guess there'll be a lot more lawsuits. Corporations obviously want to be able to control money flow -- to be the gate, the valve through which money flows. To control artists in some respects. When you control money that people have, you can control what people think and what they do. So there needs to be some way, artists need to be more involved in trying to find ways to make it work down at the bottom levels. The problem is that artists don't have the power, the technical means a lot of times to make that happen. That's why I'm always involved in small art groups -- to try and foster the ability to get some economic recruitment, I guess you could say.

 

OP -- What is your experience as an artist with arts funding?

RC -- Artists and official funding. I am so burnt out about official funding. I mean, we apply for grants, and ... there aren't any. Effectively, there aren't any more fundings for artists. But when Public Domain and PERFORATIONS was attempting to apply for funding, you would apply, you would have to jump through hoops; you would have to do demographic studies, all kinds of things you would have to consider. Then of course, they either wouldn't give you the money, or they would give you a drastically scaled back amount of money. So I try not to even think in terms of funding. Public Domain just applied for a large grant from the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities). First one we've ever done -- or applied for anyway. I don't think those work really . . . I mean the money is just not, there's plenty of money . . there's more money apparently in the United States than ever. The economy is going on eight cylinders . . . and yet, we still can't figure out ways to get money to certain kinds of enterprises.

I think the MacArthur grants are a good thing. You know they find people . . . I don't even think you apply for those, they just kind of find you. And if there were like a thousand of these kinds of things around the country - finding people, it doesn't have to be great high art necessarily 'cause you never know when a person is starting on a career -- or a creative career -- exactly what's going to happen with that person. But they have to have some encouragement at some point. And grants, a lot of times want finished projects. Like museums, they like finished product. They like for you to already be there. There needs to be some ways to help people to get there and not have too much concern about what the final product is; about what the demographics of it are; whether this group and that group are going to have equal access to it 'cause an artist can't control those things a lot of times.

Artists have to find ways to fend for themselves, I think now on a certain level, 'cause the state and the city ... the federal government apparently, uh, don't care . . . and view artists with some suspicion. They view happy artists okay I guess, but not all artists are very happy. In fact some of the most vital art comes from artists who aren't very happy. And in fact, it enables you to see aspects about the society and the culture that people who are just going mindlessly through the culture don't necessarily always see. But you're not gonna get any money just to be able to make a sharp stick to poke that culture and society in the eye with as a lot of artists in the past have done. But they should be able to have those visions somehow. I just don't know how -- again that's one of the hopes that I have. The whole Net economy, information economy thing that somehow it reorganizes those ratios more towards the creative end of the endeavor. It's not happening yet but it might.

 

OP -- What is your response to the belief that an artist successful in today's world is primarily a business man and secondly a craftsman ?

RC -- Craftsman, yeah. Well, in high art you have the example of Jeff Koontz who was basically a Wall Street guy for awhile and became a very successful artist. It's very difficult to do high level art uh, without being involved in business in some respects. Christo is another example of that. Lots of money going through to do these projects. And in some respects, the projects were the outlines of the money that he got. Wrapping the REICHSTAG for example - you gotta get the material etc. So I think it is very important for an artist to be a business person it's a very different thing for an artist to come to terms with. One of the small galleries I'm involved with now is going through a lot of these inter-scene struggles having to do with business 'cause there's some sense if an artist is involved in business in any way, and this is still a very big attitude, somehow there is a sellout there. I think because the corporations and businesses themselves have had such a bad track record in the United States in support for the Arts, and that they've had such an onerous attitude towards art in general. That's not been the case I understand in other countries in the world. But in the US we've still a very middle class approach by corporations towards the artist and Art itself. Um, I think if you find very successful artists that they are successful business people at the same time. The old paradigm was that if you were an artist who did your work, you were taken care of by a patron. Maybe still there is a lot of that than happens. I guess the patrons now are corporations though. I myself have problems struggling with that. I don't know how to quite deal with that myself and in that sense I've been an abject failure from the point of view of making myself deal with monetary issues. As I get older it's something I realize I should have been taking care of a long time ago. And I'm struggling with it still at the moment. Uh, with the whole idea of money in the first place which seems to be an anathema to the artist. We'd like to live on white bread and cigarettes and red wine (laughs) like in a garret in Paris in 1850 or something. But that's just not possible anymore. We've got to have cars. We gotta be able to move around. If you're doing certain kinds of art, you need computers. You need high-tech materials, and in order to do that you gotta have money coming in. You gotta be able to deal with money flow and circulation. It's difficult.

 

OP -- Because of the advent of digital technology and the internet and the way in which people perceive events, it's my (PJ) thought that people no longer need to leave their homes and attend events, art installations and stuff ... and as an artist we have to find ways to bring them back into the physical realm of the work. What are your thoughts -- ?

RC -- Well, I think an artist has to give added value to his or her artwork. You have to ask 'Well what is it that an artist has over and above - or under - the artwork?' -- And one thing is an approach to life ... and a certain kind of community aspect that an artist has to bring. If an artist just has the work itself, that's just rather thin gruel really from the real world point of view and the digital medium, as you were talking about, because everything can be reproduced. Everything can be simulated. So what is it that the artist as a person brings to the mix? Is it a certain idiosyncratic approach to things? Is it an approach to time as we were talking about earlier? Either a stretched form of time or a very compressed form of time?

A lot of artists try to bring the public into their work environment. That's the good thing about Railroad Earth for example. It is a mix of real life and the artistic life. The problem is that it gets a little confusing both for the public and the artist sometimes. But I think that's one thing that the artist has to bring to the digital thing - is him or herself. So it puts more of a burden actually on the artist to be a more interesting person; to be a fuller person. To have things to say and to be able to say; and to be able to talk about whatever it is they do. To be able to be verbal and articulate about it; to be able to SEE other people in regard to their work - not just to do the work. There are other people out there ... the work only finds its completion when there are other people to complete the circuit. And again, just a fully digital completion of that circuit is pretty thin gruel, really. Artists a lot of times tend to be really isolated sorts of people. Writers are especially of that sort. Melancholic sorts of creatures . . . depressed a lot of times. I think the digital medium actually brings artists more into contact with other people. Um, so I don't know that that is a ready answer to the question, you know, but I think that artists have to bring theirselves (sic) and their community to it -- and new ways of creative thinking about how people are with each other.

 

OP -- I find that the music is my thing, its my personal experience. Yet, I spend more time listening to other people's music, researching . . whereas there are people like Brian Eno. He went through this huge phase where he just refused to listen to anybody else's music except his own because he felt that he could really get in touch with what he was doing. How do you see your own patterns of influence?

RC -- I read a lot, I go through actually a lot of art magazines. I thumb through, something catches my eye. A lot of times I don't even know names. I look at phrases while going through a magazine, or a paragraph, an image that will strike me. And not just art magazines. I go through a lot of of very strange material both on the web and newsstand so to speak. I always really like Rebecca Horn's stuff as an artist. I mean, I guess there's a lot of people. I've been more influenced probably by musicians and by writers than I have by visual artists per say.

I interviewed Jacques Derrida one time and so DECONSTRUCTION has been a very important aspect of the way that I've seen things in the past. Jacques Francois Leotard and the so-called 'Post Structuralists'; there are lots of people I still read in that area. And of course, Heidegger, Martin Heidegger was influential in that whole area ... and Maurice Blanchot. It's difficult to translate some of that stuff into artistic creative enterprise, and so I read it and it soaks in. -- Walter Benjamin is another one, probably my favorite theorist. You have to let it soak into you -- to use a metaphor that Walter Benjamin used, kinda like ink into a blotting pad, and then whatever comes of it ...

As regards to musical stuff, I was always very influenced by jazz -- the whole free jazz movement in the '60's & '70's. Coltrane, Arnett Coleman, Cecil Taylor. I had a collection of over 2000 records. I basically sold all of them. I was performing a lot and I found I wasn't really listening to them. I didn't listen to my own stuff -- I was just ... I found it difficult to ... listen to 2000 albums. But I had a collector's mania about it. I don't really collect, in that sense ... for one thing 'cause there's so much stuff being produced now it's hard to keep up with any particular person's oeuvre. So I go through like a pack rat and pick up bits and pieces of things as I float through the culture. A word or a phrase. I jot down ideas in the car; I keep a camera around and I'll take pictures of things. Just trying to pick up stuff sort of unconsciously as I go through. So I . . . I'm not particularly obsessed with my own stuff - going back over my stuff -- I'm just trying to keep my gates open for whatever's around me and not any particular one artist or one person.