WITH STAN BRAKHAGE

Originally published in Philip Taaffe: Composite Nature, Peter Blum Edition, New York, 1998. The

discussions took place on September 6th and 7th, 1997, in Boulder, Colorado. The conversation

shifted location between several downtown bookstores and cafes, where Brakhage was always warm-

ly received by the locals as a familiar and slightly eccentric figure who often painted and etched his

films in the busy milieu of café-goers and passers-by.

PHILIP TAAFFE: I’m in the midst of a new adventure. I’m slowly building
a vocabulary of images related to natural history. Lately I’ve been delving
Stan Brakhage and Philip Taaffe,
Lalibela Studios, New York, 1997. into the sea world: researching imagery with the idea of eventually mak-
Photo by Peter Bellamy ing an epic underwater painting. This will involve very basic emblematic
creatures—deep sea fish, shells, crustaceans, sea weed, and coral forma-
tions. For the most part I’ve been reworking images taken from nineteenth
and twentieth century books on natural history. I’m always looking for
something so representative of its type that it almost becomes an abstract
element—a distillation or encapsulation of all its varieties. It is a character-
istic which does not exist in nature, but only through our observation of
nature—or more to the point, through my exposure to historical materials
concerning nature.

STAN BRAKHAGE: You’re going to recapitulate ontogenesis and work all

the way back?

PT: I’m recapitulating something…

SB: You could say you’re working forwards, from simpler creatures and
more symmetrical plants. And now with the sea forms and coral in some
sense you’re digging into earlier evolutionary designs. I don’t mean to lay
a solid equation on you—I know it goes back and forth and shifts around.
But is that a fair thing to say, generally?

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 PT: I think so, yes. For now, the project has to do with finding quintessen-
tial images of very unique groups of creatures. I’m trying very hard to un-
derstand how they operate, to animate them, to create gestural mutations
through my use of them on a silk screen. I usually work with many screens
at a time, juxtaposing images by pushing oil pigment through them onto
a surface. In a way, it’s quite a filmic process. There’s density, and there are
also weak traces of the image, which has to do with controlling the amount
of paint and how it’s put through the screen. Often I work with a brush
loaded with very thin paint and turpentine, dripping solvents through the
screen to make a watery impression. In this way I can lay down the bar-
est trace of an image. The fish look like ancient fossils, which is just what
I was hoping for. I’m trying to move beyond the typical graphic sense of
the silk screen medium, counter to the usual procedural ways of working.
I’m fighting the means of production itself, doing things that are outside
of what I understand has been done. It’s very different from how Warhol
would use the silk screen, for example. Andy used it to make the cheapest
graphic simulation of industrial packaging, or media production, within
the larger scheme of art. It was a reflection on how visual reality is present-
Metacrinus Angulatus with Smaller Sea
ed to us. I’m trying to turn it into something else.
Stars, (1997). Oil pigment on paper,
26 x 20 inches (66 x 51 cm)

SB: Maybe it’s presumptuous, but I don’t see any relation at all between
your work and Andy Warhol’s. At some point he may have inspired you…

PT: There really is no connection, you’re right. But when you start to use
silk screen directly in a painting you’ve got to think about Warhol, you’ve
got to take him into consideration. Perhaps that’s why I sought a very
different approach. What these are turning into is an accumulation of
gestures. The imagery is a pretext for a partial rendering, so they look like
broken or fossilized fish. They’re animated, yet they’ve turned to dust be-
fore my eyes. The forms are pre-drawn, they’re pre-existing images that are
being mutated, gesturally. I think that’s what’s happening now. I’m doing
these things to understand what they look like, first of all. Later I’ll be able
to use them in a more assimilated way, more of an epic idea, where they
will all come together in concert to operate within a larger field or format.
These are in an elemental stage of experiment right now, making me acute-
ly aware of further possibilities.

SB: Let me jump right in. Here’s one of the ways I feel deeply related to
you: the fact that one can point to certain things in your paintings and

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 say, That’s a snake, these are plants, these are leaves — the things you can
call them — is absolutely irrelevant. And that’s odd because mostly when
something can be named the name will dominate. And the mind will tend
to go for metaphor.

PT: I agree with you. The specificity of the image is a starting point, a
pretext. It’s a way of describing what’s there, the typological distinctions. I
mean, I care about these fish in terms of getting them right and having an
adequate variety of them. I don’t care about them until I’ve found a way of
doing something else with them. I only find them compelling once they’ve
been mutated, turned into something that’s unidentifiable. What do they
become? That’s what interests me. I’m less involved with them as scientific
specimen per se, or as wonderful old engravings that I have reworked. I’m
Sea Stars with Coral (Meanrinidae), I, really interested in where they take me, in their potential as a catalyst, in
(1997). Oil pigment on paper,
26 x 20 inches (66 x 51 cm) how they move towards a situation of plenitude, and beyond.

SB: Language is wonderful. I mean, I’m a frustrated poet myself. That’s

what I wanted to be since I was nine years old. But it became clear to me
that all envisionment that wasn’t illustrative was in some sense intrinsically
at war with language, because language is that which delimits vision. You
can drive up the road here about fifteen or twenty miles, and there’s a tree
with a sign on it that says “The Perfect Tree.” For some reason the Colorado
Forest Service has designated this as the perfect tree. They’ve given it some
thought, one can presume. It looks superficially perfect, but the minute
they put that plaque on it, it’s not the perfect tree. It almost ceases to be a
tree.

PT: In a way I’m doing the same thing as the Parks Department. It is a
peculiar idea, but maybe what we look for is the perfect imperfection, as a
better working model. There are various layers of editorial consciousness
that I bring to deciding which materials I will consider for this work. There
is the basic question: What do I really want to see? Which has less to do
with any idealization than with finding material I can actually work with.
For example, in considering our notion of what is a fish, or how to rep-
resent some quintessential differences of fish-ness, it’s important to have
a wide morphological range in terms of fin structure, body shapes, size,
depth of habitation, and so on.

SB: The main thing you do with them, which is very hard, is pry them

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 loose of their names altogether. Was that a conscious wish on your part?

PT: Well, I did that to the ferns, but I ended up using the names that natu-
ral science had applied to them, because they made such great titles.

SB: I share that fondness for titles, too. I think we both approach the matter
of titles in a similar way. They’re memorable, they ring with a kind of hon-
esty. They’re introductions to the vision, and in most cases they’re gentle.
You’re a little better at irony than I am. I think “Snake Eyes” is a nice ironic
statement. But didn’t we both last night acknowledge that they’re caprices
in relationship to the work? They don’t really have much to do with the
vision.

PT: It’s perfectly useful to have a title, even though it may have nothing
to do in the programmatic sense with the experience of the work. We’re
interested in something far more than what the title indicates. It’s merely
preparing us for the vision.

Sea Stars with Coral (Meanrinidae), III,

(1997). Oil pigment on paper, SB: Yes, so long as people can throw it away when it gets in their way. A
26 x 20 inches (66 x 51 cm) title doesn’t mean to represent the work, because words are one thing and
an image is another. Were it not called “La Mer,” I don’t think many people
would ever guess that Debussy’s great work was based on the ocean. In fact
to call it “La Mer” makes it subject to a kind of usage in the listening, and
elsewhere in the world, that limits it. It ties it to clichéd images of ocean,
and makes it harder to just listen to the music. But on the other hand, there
are a lot of people for whom that’s a great adventure, to listen and ride
through whatever imagery might be imposed by the connotations of that
title. You know as well as I do that if he called it “Place de la Concorde,”
and it were the same music, listeners would make associations with waves
of traffic and people moving about.

PT: So the honesty on the part of Debussy was to be true to his chosen
subject during the making of these compositions. To whatever extent he
succeeded or failed, the influence of the sea would remain the underlying
thematic concern. In this way, the music has a connection, emotionally, to
the process that engendered it.

SB: He shared with us his source. I’m always in favor of that as the direc-
tion to go in titling things anyway.

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 PT: It gives a little more to the audience, as opposed to numbering…

SB: Yes, you don’t entirely escape the problems of language with number-
ing, anyway: Number 13 of Jackson Pollock’s paintings from 1957. Well,
thirteen is a loaded number, see what I mean? There are problems with
numbers just as well…

PT: Do you have problems with certain numbers?

SB: A lot of problems, yeah. Of which I think the best meditation on that
subject is the book of Robert Creeley’s and Robert Indiana’s, Numbers.
But as a frustrated poet, titles are my one chance to use language a little bit.
I’m not going to let go of that. I know that in a deeper way it would prob-
ably be better if I employed numerals in Pollock’s fashion, but I can’t do it.
Painting with Diatoms (1997)
Mixed media on canvas. I’m going to insist on my frustrated poetics.
54 x 66 inches (137 x 167.5 cm)

PT: Yes, you must. Your titles are wonderfully evocative, you’re an extreme-
ly good writer.

SB: Thank you, but that’s still not a poet, right? In fact it’s almost the op-
posite. To be a good writer is to almost preclude being a poet. I love that
statement in Cocteau’s Orpheus, where he says, “What is a Poet?” And he
answers, “One who writes, but is not a writer.” I’m always struggling with
that. I don’t know whether I betrayed language or it betrayed me, let’s say it
was a mutual betrayal in my crucial late teens. But I’ve had the good luck to
be in the company of truly great poets all along the line, like Robert Dun-
can, Kenneth Rexroth, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson. And people of my
own age, Michael McClure, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn.

PT: You’ve dealt with animals in your work quite a lot.

SB: Oh yes. The one that springs to mind in relation to your present work is
The Domain of the Moment. The title is a phrase by William James, where
he is attempting to describe that moment when one suddenly feels at the
mercy of the universe, like a great emptiness. I won’t try to paraphrase Wil-
liam James, but it’s an incredible concept. As I read his statement about it,
that which he feared so much, I came to have this sense from the animals
around me that they lived in this condition most of the time. Only humans
struggle to be out of it. So I made four portraits: one is a little chicken. One

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 is of a guinea pig, one is a raccoon, who has a kind of interaction with a
dog, and then the final one is a snake, eating a mouse. These are multiple
superimposition works, very layered.

PT: We’re right on track here. When did you make that?

SB: Late ‘seventies, early ‘eighties. I also made a film called “Bird,” which
was inspired by a guy who taught here in Boulder, Robert Bakker, the man
most in charge of the idea of the hot blooded dinosaurs. A big bearded
guy with his bib overalls, out in the field most of the time, but he’d come
into town once in a while. This is dinosaur country. He wrote a book called
The Hot Blooded Dinosaur, which I highly recommend. It makes the case,
absolutely to my satisfaction, that there’s no reason to have two phylum for
Black Venus (1998–99) birds and dinosaurs—they should be one phylum. When we lived up in
Mixed media on canvas.
85 x 113 inches (216 x 287 cm) the mountains in Rollinsville I had a guinea fowl, and this was the smartest
creature in our barnyard, which had goats, chickens, cats, geese, and so on.
It was by far the smartest creature among them, and it couldn’t have had a
brain larger than a pea. I had a complete vision of it as dinosaur.

PT: I suppose the mind is always looking at related families of forms in

trying to put something in it’s proper place. There’s a continuous process
of classification going on all the time. We confirm our understanding of
something through a steady accretion of similarities, until we come across
a difference that makes it fall completely outside of our experience. I’ve no-
ticed that birds are very reptilian. Not only the talons, but the scaly feet are
extremely reptilian. I keep these Chinese roosters at the studio, and they
have hairs and feathers growing out of these lizard-like claws. They have a
distinctly reptilian feeling…

SB: You also have a painting with beetles. I see you’ve named them scarabs
rather than beetles…

PT: I called the painting Scarabesque—that was my impression of what

Thelonious Monk would have titled that painting. I’ve always admired
Monk’s playfulness with titles: Epistrophy, Misterioso, Brilliant Corners.
They seem to express the same oddness and angularity of his work.

SB: That sort of titling serves to place the work at one remove from lan-
guage, in a way.

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 PT: There’s an interesting book by Lawrence Weschler about the concep-
tual artist Robert Irwin, which takes its title from an epigram by Wilhelm
Schelgel: “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” In other
words, to really see something, to observe it, is to forget what it’s called. To
have complete communication with the thing itself.

SB: Okay, but that’s ten times, maybe a thousand times harder to do in a
representation than it is in everyday life.

PT: Still, philosophically I think it applies. The idea of something arriving

at a point of descriptive accuracy that is nowhere near what you expected it
would be.

SB: Visually, what we share with language is iconography or hieroglyph. At

any moment, however big you make your beetles, they can become hiero-
glyphs for beetles.

PT: It would be good to get rid of the word and just deal with the image
itself, which was Burroughs’s idea.

SB: That’s what I was trying to get at in the beginning of Metaphors on

Vision : “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye
unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the
name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life
through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field
of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green?’ How many rainbows can
light create for the untutored eye?” It’s an attack on language, actually. The
real trick it seems to me is to have it namable but not have that at all inter-
fere with seeing it in the first place. I keep thinking of your snakes, where
the name almost accrues to these twirls of shapes so that I’m not distracted
from looking at them by the categorization that naming ordinarily insists
on. Have you ever considered the way your name is spelled—now first of
all can you tell me what is that name?

PT: It’s Irish.

SB: Taaffe. Double “A” and double “F”—that’s bound all the way through
your childhood to have had a strong and powerful influence on you.

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 PT: It’s been constantly misspelled.

SB: But look at it visually. Forget the literary connotations, like you’re
struggling to do with everything you make. Look at the relationship be-
tween your work and the most powerful thing you possess—your name.
Now Philip is spelled with only one “L.”

PT: I was grateful for that…

SB: Although you’ve got an “I” on either side of it, so that’s kind of odd too.
For your first name you’ve eschewed having what’s ordinarily the double L.
And in your surname you have double doubles, one right after the other. It
has to have had some bearing on your work. Who would give me that kind
of information is Gertrude Stein, who says your name is that which is most
personally received by you of every sound you’re ever going to hear. I’m
saying you’re predisposed for repetition, and as Gertrude Stein has proven
beautifully, over and over again, repetition does not exist. My favorite of
her lessons in this regard is, “Before the flower of friendship faded friend-
ship faded”—a second friendship faded is just as different from the first
Black Column (Asterias Murrayi), I, (1997), one as it could possibly be. So you know this lesson instinctively. Even
Oil pigment on paper, though you could excite a lot of people by increasing your symmetry you
22 x 15 inches (56 x 38 cm)
eschew that power, although you may play close to it.

PT: Perhaps this is where my penchant for superimposition and overlays

comes from. Or maybe it’s because I imagine somehow that I’m working
with color film stock. One reason I use these tissue-thin layers of superim-
position in a painting is because I feel I want to simulate the dye sandwich
of information on a frame of movie film. I often build an image by staining
the surface with consecutive veils of color. I’ve always enjoyed those paint-
ings by Morris Louis for this reason. A painting as a big piece of film.

SB: And it literally is film…

PT: It literally is film. I’m doing a sort of crystallized cinema. The animat-
ing part of superimposition has to do with identifying and completing the
character of a work. It often happens that after I’ve done an entire phase
of a painting, someone will come into the studio and see it as a finished
work when in fact it is not. The reason I like to attain such a high degree of
resolution before the next and maybe last phase of a work is because this

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 method forces a larger and more specifically realized conclusion.

SB: The best talismanic line I have for superimposition comes from Charles
Olson: “Two eyes in every head to be looked out of.” I get that because
my eyes go in different directions. In the morning I’m wall-eyed, there’s a
weakness in the left eye. Therefore I grew up having not just one vision, but
two, quite often. Every time I’d get excited, or tired, or drunk, right away
my eyes—particularly the left eye—just drifts. That then led me to perceive
in double. I’m also consciously involved with trying to perceive not only
what I’m remembering, but how I’m remembering it. It’s all drifting there,
like my grandmother drifting now somewhere between my two eyes and
their slightly different vision, and what’s coming up in memory is drifting
there too. There’s no way to represent that except for superimposition of A,
Pineshell Inner Mussel (Bi-section), (1997). B, C, three film rolls, and sometimes I’ve gone up to six rolls of film.
Oil pigment on paper,
20 x 27 inches (51 x 69 cm)
PT: I also get a better understanding of a painting’s structural requirements
by dwelling on it for sometimes long periods of time. In superimposing
further imagery, I may finish a work several times. In this manner there is
an accumulation of elements and meanings.

SB: For me that accumulation of meanings creates a certain irony which

I take it to be at the center of your making, of which one aspect is this in-
volvement with the decorative.

PT: I think it’s important that you mention irony in connection with the
decorative because this issue needs to be placed in a larger cultural con-
text. I do try to subvert the decorative in various ways, even though it is
not always easy to recognize how this has occurred in a given work. I don’t
have a uniform or consistent approach to these things. However, I believe
I’m much closer to a minimalist position in that I favor austerity. I gener-
ally use decorative motifs in a carefully restricted and iconic way. Also my
choices are very much about personal association and memory. I try to
invest the work with a psychic energy which makes me less immediately
concerned with loveliness of pictorial composition than with finding the
best means for holding the energy there.

SB: One way I held my sanity together across that fifteen-year period that
I commuted every other week to teach at the Chicago Art Institute, was by
visiting all of the Louis Sullivan buildings. That famous Sullivan quote is

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 wonderfully applicable to your work. What we mean by design: the pur-
pose of the flower for the plant, which he seems to be suggesting, is indeed
decorative or attractive or sexy—it is also a natural and necessary exfolia-
tion of the leaves and the stem and the whole root system. So what is the
present day argument? That the decorative has been used as a pejorative in
relation to painting?

PT: Yes, it certainly has, with the exception of Matisse, perhaps. Actual-
ly, the origins of these anti-decorative arguments are to be found for the
most part in modernist architectural theory. Mies van der Rohe’s reaction
to nineteenth century architecture was to strip things down to their bare
essentials, to a very focused structure. The use of proportion and planar
space was considered embellishment enough—anything more had to be
seen as antithetical to progress.

SB: Once stripped to “essentials” a new order of complexity just naturally

occurs—creates a new mystery. I know in the arts, the whole of it is for
me a mystery, and we’re all in a holy pursuit of the most ancient form of
being human. I invoke those caves. There’s nothing older, and they are very
mysterious, some of them as much as three miles underground and sealed
airtight shut, which is the only reason we have them today, sometimes
with only one set of fingerprints in the clay. Made on a subterranean cave
wall by tallow light with berry juice—what is that? We’re deep in a mystery
here—a holy ancient calling that’s the most intrinsically human thing you
could possibly think of.

PT: This is another side of the story that we haven’t discussed, an artist’s
motivation coming from a place that is completely private. The drawings
are meditations, but they’re also public. In the beginning it is always a
completely private vision, but the ambition or the motivation is to give
that to the world. I often find myself poised between two poles of thought.
The one, as Matisse said, is to make a painting as a luxuriant armchair.
And then on the other hand you have Georges Rouault saying, I don’t care
if anybody ever sees anything I do, I’m creating this purely as a form of
prayer, a private visionary meditation, and that is all.

SB: I’m somewhere between the two, also. I’m envious of Rouault’s being
able to say that, and I may someday be given that possibility, as I get older,
I can hope. But I’m somewhere in between, because I also feel the burden

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 of an evolution of human consciousness that is moving through the works
that I’ve cared most about, by my contemporaries and myself. I feel the
burden of this new possibility of exteriorizing moving visual thinking, as
it’s never existed before. I also feel a burden of Abstract Expressionism in
relation to this new possibility, which for me is the new great frontier of
human consciousness. So these are the two burdens that keep me social to
an extent. But when I’m working, forget it. I can’t allow any of that in, and I
will go to any lengths to exclude it.

PT: This brings up another question I wanted to ask, which has to do with
this issue of transcendence, and how our everyday circumstances need
to intersect with that point on a constant basis. We create because we feel
these ancient sources of motivation. I think we both feel that strongly.
We’re doing what we do because there’s something behind us that is propel-
ling us to act out a certain ritual. It’s a form of magical engagement, shap-
ing something that goes against a lot of what we experience. So much of
what we do stands in opposition to what we have to confront culturally.

SB: The arts will automatically undermine the given status quo. At the same
time, artists tend to be the most conservative people on earth, contrary to
the myths that are propagated about them. I’ve said again and again that
I’m not to be credited so much for the art which comes to me in a trance
state. I’m just running along panting after forces or persuasions or muse–
buzzings, or god or angels or whatever you want to call it, just trying not
to screw up, to get it somehow so that it has a life of its own. I’m being
midwife to this creation. I don’t understand it any better than anybody else.
What I’m to be credited for is having stayed alive to be able to do that in an
incredibly hostile time. When everything was out to destroy and defeat me,
I kept on reading, and opening myself up, so I had as wide a life experience
to pour through me, and as deep a comprehension of other artist’s lives and
makings coming through me, and I tried to be honest about what I was
doing. Honesty with no sense of hubris, as if I knew what was right and
what was not. I cannot praise something that I’m unable to see. I have to be
able to comprehend in order to make art. That’s got me in the worst trouble
imaginable.

PT: And that is why you are one of the great sole practitioners of the art of
cinema. Any adversity I have had to face in order to do what I do, I’m sure
pales by comparison to the obstacles you have been forced to contend with.

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 Nothing less than an act of sheer transformative will would have enabled
you to preside over those magnificent magic lantern poems of yours.

SB: Well thank you. It is the magic of art, its transformation possibilities,
which people most fear. Formal aesthetics contain magic powers, but most
people don’t know how to comprehend art aesthetically. Many artists also
eschew aesthetics for direct magic power in their works. All my life I’ve
witnessed the perils of the practice of magic by artists. Most people just
don’t have the wisdom and the strength to wield this power. Artists are all
the time in this category, right? There are great dangers in the arts. Abstrac-
tion is very dangerous—as you know very well.

PT: I’m glad you said that. As far as I’m concerned it’s got to be dangerous
Metacrinus Angulatus, (1997).
Mixed media on canvas, if it’s going to me any good.
27 x 36 inches (69 x 91 cm)

SB: Very dangerous. That’s why you’re being very careful. On the oth-
er hand to make a representation of something risks being either stupid
or facile or passé. And it is also dangerous. When you make a picture of
something, in a way that’s voodun, and it’s not been good for humanity.
White Magic is for me. My whole case against Black Magic is simple: you
have to move a mountain, so you apply your energy, the same as if you
were moving it a shovelful at a time, for however many generations it takes.
You pass that energy on in a useful form to others who also share in it,
until finally that energy has been accrued, and then if you have to you can
move the mountain because it’s already been paid for. Black Magic says
move it now, pay later. The temptation of Black Magic is that people always
have good reasons—beneficent, humane reasons for needing to do some
big thing. Like go all the way to the back brain and start forward. But it has
to be paid for a shovelful at a time. Or else, like the installment plan, you’re
in debt, with interest. If you’re borrowing against the future you have to pay
the interest, right? There’s great power involved, and what kind of a saint
can resist that kind of power—when you can put someone to death just by
incantation. How many are saintly enough to exercise that power benefi-
cently?

PT: We’re surrounded by these dangers. We live in a time in which the

whole possibility of human survival is really very much called into ques-
tion, and the dangers are increasing. They’re certainly not diminishing. It’s
curious you should mention incantation because it’s an activity that bears a

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 certain parallel to the art-making process. I made an experiment a couple
of years after I got out of art school. I was living in the General Theological
Seminary, an Episcopal seminary in Chelsea. One night I went to see An-
tonioni’s The Red Desert. When I came back to my room I started working.
I had a cheap little tape recorder on the drawing table, and I wanted to do
my version of The Red Desert. I wanted to get inside this haunted indus-
trial landscape, this weird sensuality, this sense of demise that I recognized
in the movie. I was drawing with oil sticks, and as I started making these
gestures I began speaking into the microphone…

SB: You were giving these lines characters…

PT: That was part of what I was trying to do. I suppose the experiment
was to see how long the vocal narrative and the linear or gestural narrative
could coexist, keep generating one another, before language fell away.

SB: And probably you talked less and less the more you got involved in
the work. You see how comparable that is to Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas and
Meditations: every word must be a character, as if in a novel, so that “a”
and “the” have lives as they move through the poem, until finally it’s a cast
of thousands that are murmuring their own stories. (I’m very dependent
upon the wisdom and friendship of Stein scholar Ulla E. Dydo for much of
my thought here.) The larger truth behind that is we are made up of parti-
cles that are absolutely unique, with no two alike. Certainly these cells have
likenesses unto all of the cells that make up our body, but let’s just stick
with the brain for the moment. The brain has all these cells inside, and each
of them is having its own individual life. They have parts you can name,
each has a nucleus, and a connective tissue that looks a certain way, but
no two are alike. They are then variously cooperating in whatever it is we
are, or imagine ourselves to be in some conglomerate sense. But there is no
actual or literal space in there. And unless your painting is in some sense
being true to what the individual lives of those cells are, you’re not evolving
in any way.

PT: One thing I want to reiterate about this process I was describing when
I was speaking into the microphone and making these marks and trying to
refer to my immediate memory of this film, is that it was some form of in-
cantation. And I believe there is a connection between this previous exer-
cise and my present incantatory use of silkscreen. The repetitive printing of

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 these animals and fish takes place in trance-like episodes, where the draw-
ing, or the shifting of the paper, is an exercise in getting someplace else, in
bringing them into a more elemental condition, perhaps. The best of them
seem like entrance ways to another reality. They suggest something which
is compelling beyond themselves.

SB: When we go through the womb we have fins at one point, we have
gills, we look very much like those curled rocks we find in fossils. We are
of earth in that sense. Although I firmly believe that it does not matter if
anybody else ever sees it, you cannot just think it, you have to put it into
material. Once you put it into material it’s in the world. We are here to
work with material, we are not walking on water. Just sitting and thinking
it is not enough. But if in the making you want to be true to the brain, if
Radiolaria, (1997).
Oil pigment on canvas, you want it fully in the painting as the mind, then all you can achieve is
22 x 30 inches (56 x 76 cm)
fish-ness: not fish, but fishness. I don’t know how else to put it. Because
otherwise you’re making a symbol that’s pointing to something outside.
Brains do not have fish stuck in them, they have fishnesses, they have an
energy in there, they have traces of something that can be invoked as fish.

PT: We’re getting into difficult semantic territory here, but I think you’re
loosely referring to the Platonic thought-form, the image we implicitly
know to exist, from which all particular examples are derived. the fish was
certainly a dominant Paleo-Christian symbol.

SB: But instead of having a symbol that gets more and more hardened,
like the valentine heart, you clash these things, or imprint them doubled.
They double over on each other, they start reverberating. You may have the
shadow of the same thing, or a near-symmetry, on opposite sides. I par-
ticularly think of your leaves in this respect. The snakes accomplish this in
a different way, because there are so many of them, all coiled in different
directions, it all might be one that your brain is juggling around in these
various ways, and being effected to a multiplicity of such.

PT: It’s just that I don’t want emptiness. I generally have a negative reaction
to empty abstract minimalist paintings, unless they are by really great prac-
titioners. I prefer to see something replete with feeling and imagery, not this
static inert artifact. I want a generosity of being, of spirit. I want people to see
and think about that. And even if the drawing is reduced and ends up only
having one thing in it, that is a result of my having wanted there to be more.

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 SB: Consonant with your working on the sea shells, you’re going into
chickens?

PT: Well I’m looking ahead. I’m not ready for the primates yet, but I’m
working in that direction. I want it all, you see. I want to interact with it all.

SB: I’ll drink to that! Here’s to having it all! Of course one of the heroes
of the Cantos of Ezra Pound is Linnaeus, for ordering the plant kingdom.
Another is Louis Agassiz, because he went always to the source, and wrote
a kind of spiritualized science. Do you know Agassiz’s work? There’s a mar-
velous little book of his writings, with an introduction by Guy Davenport,
from the Beacon Press. Agassiz was one of the great naturalists of the nine-
teenth century, from Harvard, who got his whole reputation destroyed be-
Radiolaria, Milleporidae, (1997).
Oil pigment on canvas, cause he opposed Darwin. So he got shot down by politics. In all the ways
22 x 30 inches (56 x 76 cm)
that he opposed Darwin he was absolutely right. It’s just that he overlooked
that Darwin was more right, in ways that were going to be more important.
But for Darwin, like any great man, like Freud, the work was 80% mistakes,
and Agassiz took a trip up the Amazon and pegged every one of them. He
made incredibly fine drawings. You would love Agassiz. Pound uses him
in the Cantos, where a graduate student is drawing a sunfish, and Agassiz
is having him keep at it, week after week, and the fish is rotting away, and
after three weeks Agassiz says, “Ah, we’re beginning to get somewhere…”
There was a deep and profound relationship between naturalism and draw-
ing in the nineteenth century. Not this snapping a picture, but feeling your
way along.

PT: Yes, linear investigation. I’m working a lot right now with nineteenth
century engravings and I love the personalities that emerge from such
intricately woven detail. Nature drawings are generally far more descriptive
and more tactile than most photographs. Although there are some great
nature photographers?the Czech V. J. Stanek is a personal favorite of mine.

SB: Photographs have the presumption that is the disaster of my whole field
of making, namely, that it presents a reality, a mirror held up to nature.
And it does not. My only hope is now that there’s digital technology and
people can cheat and recreate any “reality” they wish, that finally photogra-
phy will no longer have that burden—that it represents reality. Which was a
lie in the first place. Not represents, even, but that it is the literal imprima-
tur of reality.

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 PT: Although the early experiments in photography the cyanotyping, the
sun pictures—these were minor miracles in their own right.

SB: They had more claim to representing reality at that point, but they
didn’t make that claim because those were humble people. Do you know
what cinematographer means? “Writer of movement.” That’s what we do.

PT: That’s beautiful. The Pencil of Nature was Henry Fox Talbot’s title for
the first book of published photographs. Anna Atkins was certainly a pre-
cursor of this same aesthetic. She was the first woman photographer, really.
She made extraordinary cyanotypes in the eighteen forties and ‘fifties. She
came from a well-established English family who were Members of Parlia-
ment. Her father was very friendly with Fox Talbot. She had access to un-
limited possibilities in setting up an elaborate technical apparatus for doing
what she did. She was an important pioneer of the cyanotype.

SB: I don’t know her work at all. I know Julia Margaret Cameron, very
deeply. Always more to learn about…
Pyrula, (1997).
Oil pigment on paper,
26 x 20 inches (66 x 51 cm) PT: In Edinburgh last month I went to the library at the Royal Botanical
Gardens. They have an extraordinary collection of nature-printed books.
I examined a fascinating group from the seventeenth century which bore
Dutch and Sanskrit inscriptions. The Dutch were in Ceylon and India, and
there were numerous expeditions to collect plant specimens there. They
had a volume on edible Indian berries. The pages of the folios themselves
were quite large to accommodate a good portion of the actual specimen.
The Sanskrit names were handwritten by the Indian botanists working on
the project. Somehow they would take the flowering specimen, coat it with
colored ink, and put it directly through a printing press. The results were
unbelievable, beyond anything of this sort I’ve ever seen before.

SB: You’ve made me realize that I’m overlooking one of the most obvious
parallels to your present work—people’s pressing of flowers, in family
Bibles. As a child these never looked like flowers to me. They were always
more associated with the Bible, or whatever book they were in, than some-
thing that would grow out in the dirt.

PT: That’s right, they became attached to the book, they became a part of
the book…

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 SB: In fact, literally. Usually they left their little imprint on the pages of the
book…

PT: That’s a slow motion form of nature printing. There was another man,
an Englishman by the name of Henry Bradbury who produced four vol-
umes on English seaweed in the early eighteen sixties, using his own nature
printing method. I recently acquired a set of these. He invented a process
whereby he would place the seaweed on lead plates, and run the lead
through a printing press, and somehow turn that into a printing plate, an
electrolyte process or some such thing. Then he would apply this spray-font
kind of inking directly on the metal sheet, where the color would become
mixed in these marvelous striations. That also made a great impression on
me.
Pterocera, Voluta, Venus, (1997).
Oil pigment on paper,
22 x 30 inches (56 x 76 cm) SB: There was a man in Bennington, Vermont, who in the teens and
twenties of this century devoted himself completely to photographing the
snowflake.

PT: Ah yes, I know about him, W. A. Bentley was his name. Dover reprint-
ed the book of his work.

SB: God bless Dover Books. Without freezing to death, he devoted his life
to giving us these imprints, which do seem to suggest that it might actually
be the case that no two snowflakes even superficially look alike, despite
there being only about five or six forms available to the ice crystal.

PT: Then there’s Karl Blossfeldt, the botanical professor in Germany in

the nineteen twenties, who did those magnifications that have such an
eerie anthropomorphic architectural feeling about them. I’m sure you’ve
seen them. He brought out a book called Urformen Der Kunst. He was
a professor of botany, and he made this book for his students. They were
magnifications, usually on a gray background, of just a poppy seedling, for
example, or leaf forms or stems. They are lit such that the architecture of
the specimen becomes realized in a very particular way. No one else has
managed to take photographs quite like this. It’s completely memorable,
the way they are monumentalized. They’re very dry and formal looking,
but they have a powerful iconicity. What is it that these forms satisfy, which
in nature are so improbable and in many cases outrageous? I suppose it’s a
search for significant form wherever we can find it. But what is the trans-

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 formation that takes place, when these intuitive principles are applied to
film, or to painting?

SB: OK, I’m going to make a guess, Philip. What you’re doing is burrow-
ing into the back brain. The appeal of symmetry lights up the back brain,
which is our oldest brain. But at the same time that you do this burrowing,
the thing that has been important to me, which I said to you right away
when we first met, is that…

PT: Symmetry is death. Nature forbids symmetry.

SB: Yes, and you avoid it. I fear symmetry very much. I’ve used it in some
films, but always delicately off balance. It is to me, if not necessarily evil,
something tangent to that: dangerous.
Bal Astérie (1999)
Mixed media on line.
96 x 117-3/4 inches (243 x 299 cm)
PT: Do you think it’s the danger, or the appeal of danger, encoded within
symmetry, or does the use of it act as a kind of charm against something
more dangerous? A protective charm to deal with these dangerous issues in
order to stop something from unraveling that would be truly catastrophic?

SB: Yes, truly catastrophic would be to lose the back brain. Or to pretend
that there weren’t things that seem to be happening again and again, or to
pretend there weren’t things seeming to be symmetrical. So the trick is very
delicate. Things can seem symmetrical, like a snake, but it’s quite clear right
off the bat they are not. Language either becomes at one with the shape or
it ceases to exist and then it’s irrelevant. To try to pretend that we haven’t
named things, to try and pretend that we can go back and be primitive is
to me the horrible danger. That’s what so many people try to do as they go
through their teens over and over again, try to pretend they’re primitive.
All of Germany decided it wanted to be primitive again and shuttled eight
million people into the furnaces. You avoid the name dominating, and you
avoid symmetry dominating. And those in a dry way are two of the most
interesting things about your work. In the wet way, you’re burrowing into
the back brain, from which ground you now say to me you want to evolve
the human form.

PT: Well, I want to be able to move in that direction. I’ve never really ad-
dressed the figure…

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 SB: Because you feel constricted by an abstract language?

PT: No. This abstract language you refer to applies to much of twentieth
century painting. Is Francis Bacon an abstract painter or a figurative one?
Although he addresses the human figure in a considerable way, he uses an
abstract vocabulary. In his work these distinctions are a mirage.

SB: Yes, but the name is still in there. I think you probably want to do it in a
way that the name is irrelevant, like toe or arm or elbow…

PT: I haven’t yet found a way to introduce the human face in my painting.

SB: No one’s ever tried to do it so that it didn’t dominate as representation.

The Blue Crabs (2002)
Oil pigment on canvas.
26-1/2 x 35 inches (67 x 89 cm) PT: I have to wait for the right combination of factors.

SB: You’re trying to avoid representation?

PT: I’m trying to empower myself to be able to come to terms with it,
because as an artist I feel a certain responsibility to do so. I want to find my
own way of approaching it, in gradual steps, starting from the diatoms, the
ancient ferns, the deep sea creatures, and these other ancient beings that
are obliging me to touch upon them. Also I’m afraid of them disappear-
ing. My obsession with all of this is an attempt to catch up with the natural
world, in a sense.

SB: There you’re an American artist in the same position as the Hudson
River School: what’s tragic about their paintings is as we look at them now,
we realize everything they painted is essentially gone.

PT: Now there are nuclear reactors on the Hudson River…

SB: Or consider Albert Bierstadt, who came out here to the West. In gen-
eral he’s one of the most popular painters of the Hudson River School, and
for that reason he’s not gotten the breaks critically that I think he deserves.
He came out here and painted these Rocky Mountains, and now they’re
mostly gone, or about to be.

PT: What do you mean, through erosion?

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 SB: No, through people throwing tin cans around, and building nuclear
reactors! They’ve hollowed out one entire mountain in Colorado Springs
that’s called Little Washington, it’s the Strategic Air Command. It’s sup-
posed to be America’s last ditch defense. They’re the ones who will launch
the final Armageddon, it’s an entire mountain that’s been completely hol-
lowed out…

PT: Well there’s a dilemma here, in that I don’t want to be nostalgic at all.
We can’t be nostalgic, we have to face reality. But how does one face this sit-
uation, especially given the debased level of abstraction throughout culture
and society?

SB: You said you want to have it all, which I thought was very funny, and
Crabs (Cancer Ruricola), IV, (1997). now we’ve added the weight to that. Nothing less than all of it will do.
Oil pigment on paper,
20 x 26 inches (51 x 66 cm) The problem is, there’s only part of it that you’re in charge of. We have to
take our instructions. We don’t know from who or what, but we must not
deviate too far to the right or left of those instructions because if we do
we’re worse than wasting time, we’re committing blasphemy, then we’re on
dangerous grounds.

PT: What is this fear of fern forests, Stan, can we get to the bottom of this?

SB: [Laughs] They’re too much the same on one side as the other, though
they’re not identical. But they give the impression that this might be so,
and this makes me very nervous.

PT: They’re also self-generating, self pollinating, I believe. What about the
pleasure principle as an impetus for making something? I will honestly tell
you that my most fundamental decisions as to what gets incorporated into
the work and how I go about doing things, are closely determined by what
I anticipate the pleasure yield to be. Not to say that those decisions won’t
also be agonizing as they are played out.

SB: Yes, of course, and you need to have your own bag of tricks to stay
alive. But let’s face it, the other thing you’re doing when you’re making
marks, and talking into the tape recorder, as you have done, anthropomor-
phizing those marks, and creating a story—you’re trying to give yourself
something to hang on to, something as solid as a detective story.

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 PT: Clues…

SB: Yes, while in fact you are drifting off into this terrifying realm. Because
those marks end up essentially…

PT: Haunting you…

SB: Because they are essentially unnamable. So you’re protecting yourself,

you’re holding on to something. I also invent little stories, or I whistle col-
ors, I sing: red red red green, blue blue blue purple. Or else I talk to myself,
hang onto little stories, little scenarios. But finally that isn’t going to have
much to do, if anything, with what eventually the work is when finished.
I’ve just used these little tricks to survive the making. And then when the
Fistularia with Lobsters, (1997). work is done, it has its own life, and it doesn’t care what I did to get it there.
Oil pigment on paper,
28 x 35 inches (71 x 89 cm)
PT: It’s true, at a certain point there is another phenomenon that takes
over. At the start of the working process you input all of this information,
throw all these clues out there, and the work starts to take shape. Then at
a certain point what you’re doing is just rounding out the identity of this
thing. Allowing this set of characters, this theater you’ve concocted, to have
the most complete identity possible: seeing that identity in its totality and
just letting it speak. At a certain stage I recognize the character of a given
work, and I’m attempting mediumistically to let that character come out
in whichever ways it needs to resolve itself. After a certain point you’re just
following the clues. So these formations, these drawings I’m doing now,
are putting the clues out there. In seeing them around the studio, they’re
going to take me in a direction I want to go in. Those are the steps, and we
have to put one foot in front of the other, and build up the clues, and then
follow the story to its ultimate conclusion. It’s like judging a more or less
correct path, hacking one’s way through a jungle and then finding your way
back. Reaching a destination, and then being able to retrace your steps and
knowing the journey that you’ve been on.

SB: When you make those marks, you’re leaving little bread crumbs so you
can find your way back through the forest—and you’re hoping some little
bird doesn’t come along and eat them up. Humanly, the individual maker,
he or she, has grounds that are essentially neurotic. Usually these are the
cross-wires of being a teenager, and are essentially sexual, there’s no way
around that. The kinky bather paintings of Cézanne are absolutely essential

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 in order for him to get to Mont Saint Victoire, or at least to the apples, let’s
go that far. At some point he had to go back to that again, those really em-
barrassing slimy sexual distresses of Cézanne. Of peasant Cézanne, getting
his rocks off…

PT: Or getting rocks thrown at him, probably.

SB: Yes, but at any rate he has to go back to the Bathers and try to make
a resolve between the apples and the human body. I know they’re great,
I have great respect for them, but I have never cared for his bathers. For
that matter I prefer his earlier, more honest teenage “sex” paintings to the
bathers, but I know he had to go back and touch those roots again, in order
to do Mont Saint Victoire. That’s a fulcrum. You cannot deny the neurot-
Passage III (Rainbow Fish), 1997–98
Mixed media on canvas.
ic roots of the making—and the more embarrassing the better. So in that
26 1/2 x 36 1/2 inches (67 x 93 cm) regard my best advice to students is, don’t come out and photograph the
Flatiron Mountains yet again, or make an imitation Hollywood movie.
Show us something that’s so embarrassing you can hardly bear to bring it
to class. Now for me the social corollary for that is the avant-garde. You’ve
got to have your avant-garde: it’s embarrassing, it’s stupid even, it’s ama-
teurish in the worst sense of the word, as well as the best, and etymologi-
cally speaking the best sense means “lover”—amateur. But also in the worst
sense, the puffed-up self-important drunk at the end of the bar, telling you
his uninteresting story. Uninteresting because there’s no solution for it. You
can’t solve his problem by giving him ten bucks, or a blow job, or anything.
It’s useless. It’s uninteresting. So that’s the avant-garde. And the arts need
it to bust open into new areas, just like people need the embarrassment of
their teenage years.

PT: I once read an interview with the poet John Wieners. When asked if he
had a theory of poetry he said, “I try to write the most embarrassing thing
I can think of.”

SB: Wonderful. There’s a great story that Charles Olson told me about John
Wieners. When John had his crack-up, and Olson and Robert Duncan
went to visit John in the asylum, he didn’t know anyone, couldn’t recognize
anyone. They were giving him shock treatment, followed by hot and cold
water baths. Olson and Duncan kept going to visit him, many times. And
the doctor said, “I can’t give him too many more shock treatments. If he
doesn’t come out of it, he’s going to end up in the burnt-out ward.”

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 PT: The shock corridor…

SB: Yes. He had no memory left at all, then he began to come out of it. And
he wrote a poem. He didn’t know who he was, couldn’t remember his past,
didn’t recognize anybody, but he wrote a poem in the style of John Wie-
ners. And this was the origin of Olson’s statement that Style is Soul. It is the
visible manifestation of soul, irreducible. And his proof was John Wieners,
at this point. Speaking of poets, it interests me that you chose to put that
Novalis poem in your catalogue.

PT: Yes, Hymn to the Night.

SB: Was that your first catalogue?

PT: In fact I think it was. It was published in Hamburg

SB: Have you seen my Last Hymn to the Night: Novalis?

PT: No, I haven’t.

SB: That’s a short film, maybe four and a half minutes, where I scratched
sections of that poem onto the film, so the words appear as electrical fires
interwoven with paint. The other version I made this past year, pulling
out from under all this awful cancer treatment I’ve been through. I tried
to imagine what Novalis’ last Hymn to the Night might have been, when
he’d be beyond language. It’s a twenty-five minute film, the most elaborate
hand-painted film I’ve made. Why was Novalis important to you, so early
on?

PT: I just felt very strongly about that poem. I was reading it over and over
again, in a book Dick Higgins translated. We reprinted part of the poem
and may have neglected to attribute the English translation to him.

SB: He’s a good man. Published Gertrude Stein’s complete Making of the
Americans. People keep waiting for the Great American Novel without
realizing it’s already been written. So you felt an affinity with Novalis. Did it
have to do with his life, his loss of his loved one?

PT: I guess at the time I was feeling like a stray soul. These words touched

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 me very deeply, and I was hoping that what I was feeling was in the work.

SB: It was a beautiful gesture, because the poem and the paintings are not
at all illustrative, they’re just concomitant.

PT: The text was a way of assuring myself of the path that I was taking at
that time. I can’t remember very well my exact motivation, but I think I
wanted to echo the Romantic obsession with irretrievability. It’s hard to
talk about these things now.

SB: I think it’s important to do so. If you can, then it’s your duty. If it’s not
interfering with your real work.

PT: Usually I just try to learn from a situation. You’re a professor, I’ve al-
Painting with Radiolaria and Milliporidae
ways admired professors, although I don’t think I could ever be one.
(1997–98) Mixed media on canvas.
33 x 39 inches (84 x 99 cm)

SB: Look, a large piece of that is a joke. Because really what I’m asked to
profess, for the most part, is Hollywood movies, because that’s all anybody
knows or cares about, particularly in a place like this. And I never saw a
Hollywood movie in my whole life that deserved more chit chat than what
we might do right now after dinner. But that’s what’s been given to me. So I
try to combine some short poetic films with every feature, so they get some
sense of a real art of the cinema…

PT: What are some of the movies you’re showing in this “Sex, Death and
Cinema” course? Maybe I should come to Boulder more often.

SB: You’re certainly welcome. I’d like to convince you to come and live here,
or at least try it. Well, let’s see, Doctor Strangelove, that’s Sex and Death…

PT: Yes, I love that.

SB: A lot of movies qualify for this category if you stop to think about it.
It’s a major theme in the West. The Puritans have left us this burden, that
if people have sex, death has to threaten them. Or else they have to be
dead first, and then they can have sex. I show as many great films as I can
get away with, but for the most part you can’t overdo that or the students
wouldn’t come away with anything, you know? A lot has to be directed
right there where their culture is, what they grew up crawling around on

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 the rug looking at on TV. Then I show one or two short independent films,
and if I don’t overdo that, they’ll accept it. Who did you study film with
when you were at school?

PT: Robert Breer I remember quite vividly: you must know him.

SB: Oh, what a lovely spirit—I would not have sensed that he would have
had much at all to do with what you are doing.

PT: Well, he was very sympathetic and watched me closely—I think I made
some interesting work in his classes…

SB: Was filmmaking part of your focus?

PT: In fact that was an important focus for me when I was in art school. It
was a very critical moment for painting. One had to really justify the idea
of presenting a painted object. I made paintings and drawings in art school,
but mostly I was doing photography, animation, and conceptually oriented
installation.

SB: Did you go to Anthology Film Archives?

PT: I practically lived at Anthology Film Archives when it was on Wooster

Street. I went there constantly and saw many of your films.

SB: You’re so lucky to have had Bob Breer—I’d loved to have been in a class
with him. There are people who tell jokes that are funny and that’s great,
but with him it’s just pure wit.

PT: A very smart guy and a wonderful filmmaker.

SB: The air’s titillated all the time around him—you know—so humble and
beautiful and sweet. He’s one of my favorite people. A lot of people ask me,
why don’t I teach filmmaking, which I do not, and never have, and have al-
ways adamantly refused to do so. No one understands the creative process
well enough, certainly not in these institutes in which I make my living, to
give me the grounds on which I could do such a thing. Firstly, I would have
to be chosen, and then in turn choose those who’d chosen me to be my
students. It would probably never be more than one or two at a time. There

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 would have to be some disclaimer, because the path they’d be taking would
be more dangerous than football, or chemistry class, and that would have
to be understood up front by them and by me.

PT: I’m sure these institutions could invent a new form of casualty insur-
ance for you.

SB: The first thing I would teach them is how to get out of a trance, be-
cause many are lost to insanity every year along these paths. People can’t
get out, or they get stuck in certain habits that destroy them, across several
years. One saw tremendous destruction in the 1960s. So I would have to
have ways to treat them for this eventuality. Also we would have to be able
to meet anytime we wanted to, day or night. Not only would there be no
grades, but there would be no system other than that that would evolve as
part of a personal relationship, because I would have to get to know them
very well before I could begin teaching them things. Otherwise I would
start interfering with their creative making, because finally the only thing
they have to give is that which has never been given, that which is absolute-
ly unique. And how do I know for sure there are generalities that you can
Long-Tobacco Pip-Fish (Fistularia), (1997).
tell people, protective measures to take? You go too far, and you’ve sudden-
Oil pigment on paper,
27 x 36 inches (69 x 91 cm) ly precluded what was the only reason for them to be a maker. That’s the
danger…

PT: It’s virtually impossible to teach painting, although many try. I never
learned anything in art school about how to make a painting. For that mat-
ter I’ve never taken a printmaking class in my life.

SB: That’s what I was going to ask you, and I suspected that was so. But you
did have people that kind of helped you to protect yourself, were kind to
you and buffered you…

PT: …And who taught me to think critically, not to accept received ideas
or opinions so easily. My best teachers put great demands upon me, forced
me to demonstrate my intentions, to do things that would stretch my own
boundaries. They would guide things along in a kind but firm way, without
any bullshit. Saying, you might do better if you try this, then leaving the
rest up to me. I had to make use of my own resources, to think these things
through.

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 SB: Robert Duncan and Jess Collins saved me. I arrived in San Francis-
co having a nervous breakdown, with this whole world seeming not for
me, and they and others, like Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth and Miriam
Patchen, gave me the sense that there were people like me in the world who
were doing great things. That you could be strange and unusual and that it
was possible to survive.

PT: That was the importance of William Burroughs for me. At sixteen or
seventeen years old, when I was reading those books for the first time, he
instantly broke down all these barriers for me, shattered this sense of what
was possible, and really made me believe in myself and my own sensibility
and who I was. He gave me a sense that there was something to explore
within myself, and I should be proud of this, that there was a lot to look
forward to and experiment with. That’s what Burroughs gave me.

SB: He had to have been good at that because he did it for Allen Ginsberg
and Jack Kerouac and so many others. So really what he was was a great
teacher. I rely very much on the wisdom of my many mentors, mostly po-
Multile Smaller Fish, Vertical Drawing, ets, to guide me.
(1997). Oil pigment on paper,
26 x 20 inches (66 x 51 cm)
PT: There is something that occurred to me that I want to ask you about:
Let’s say you meet an average citizen in a hardware store, someone who
doesn’t know anything about your work. You get to talking, they ask you
what you do, and you say, “I’m a filmmaker.” And they reply, “Oh really,
what kind of films do you make?” I would imagine you probably have a
great way of responding. But if you were to say, “My films are abstract,”
suddenly this is something that this person, this everyman, would have a
difficult time hitching in his or her own mind. When I meet someone like
that, a lay person if you will, and they ask, “What kind of paintings do you
make?”—the last thing I want to say is, “I make abstract paintings.” Be-
cause I am afraid of the vacuous associations that this person might make
about the nature of what I do. The vast majority of abstract painting is
completely banal…

SB: It’s dangerous enough in America to admit you’re an artist at all. That
alone can get you killed, particularly here in the West. Up in Rollinsville,
in the bar there, or Wyoming for sure. If you go north of here they’ll shoot
you at first provocation for being an artist.

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 PT: Yet I’m concerned with identifying my cultural role and explaining that
to people who need an explanation. I try to provide as much satisfactory
information as I can to satisfy their interest. I may talk about historical
referencing, types of architecture and symbolism, and so forth. But to say
you make abstract films is a wonderful thing, because in a sense people’s
imagination will flower out in all kinds of directions. For me to say that I
make abstract paintings is a terrible handicap.

SB: You could tell them you’re a geologist. And then if you get to know
them rather well, after the third drink, you could tell them you’re a geolo-
gist of the imagination. Or geographist. As you move into shells and so on,
you also move into geography. Of course that’s the name of Guy Daven-
port’s great book, The Geography of the Imagination, which I recommend
very highly. I define abstract vision as moving visual thinking, but normal-
ly I’d still be regarded as an abstract artist. I just tell them I’m making visual
music. Music for the eyes, like we have music for the ears. They don’t quite
know what it is, but they do seem to accept that. I think it was Walter Pater
who said “All the arts aspire to music.” It’s a great truth.

PT: And it happens to be the most abstract art!

Long, Deep-Sea Toothy Fish (Chauliodus SB: That’s it. But on the other hand, when you work with film, as I’m also
Sloanii), II, (1997).Oil pigment on paper,
38 x 24 inches (97 x 61 cm) photographing again and not just handpainting, you do get images of
things that are namable. Now here’s my sense of what a picture is: a pic-
ture is a collection of namable things, framed. And I do mean the pun in
“framed”—i.e. that the collection is biased. Now when you think about it,
that definition is at least 50% literary. That’s OK: the arts veer toward each
other. Painting veers toward music. Films veer toward literature. They all
jostle each other in some way. But at the same time, when the chips are
down, you’ve got to go for ground. Of all the things you’ve said, in various
interviews that I’ve read, you know full well that we have to go to ground
now or there’s no evolution, and we do just become footnotes to what else
was done. Because the highfalutin’ stuff has been done and tried in all vari-
ous different ways…

PT: What do you mean when you say go to ground?

SB: In your case I would say it means go to the back brain and build up
from there. That’s the quickest way you’ll get to the human. Oddly by going

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 to the extreme before human.

PT: That’s my instinct. I feel it’s an inadequate situation that we’ve inher-
ited, through modernism in the twentieth century until. now. We’ve been
consumed with all of this rupture, fracturing, splintering, the obliteration
of precedence.

SB: All of this disposable hanky-panky…

PT: It has been the nature of the avant-garde that it always answers its own
questions. It always goes its own way and finds its own level. But where do
we imagine we’re taking things? I see myself as engaged in a type of re-
search that is intended to bring us forward, to provide some new options. It
is an autonomous quest, but it should result in alternatives, in wider cir-
cumstances for the production of visual culture. It’s supposed to set up that
possibility, not close it down. That’s the nature of the activity.

SB: In other words you want to make sure you don’t get painted into a cor-
ner, that you don’t paint yourself into a corner…
Calligraphic Tail Fish
(Porogadus Miles), III, (1997).
Oil pigment on paper, PT: Certainly one must try to avoid that. I must say, I think I’ve managed
26 x 20 inches (66 x 51 cm)
relatively well thus far.

SB: I’ll give you that right off the top, but still you’re going to worry about
that, at times, aren’t you, in the dark night? Plenty have. You see people
being bumped off to the right and left, all around.

PT: At the same time I don’t think artists are really that much different
from anyone else, except that we are called upon to do exactly what pleases
us, and what we feel will interface with our given cultural reality in a signif-
icant way.

SB: Happily you do many different kinds of paintings, you don’t allow
yourself to get stuck. Yet they’re always your style, one senses it’s you, it’s
one spirit. Curiously I feel you more in relation to Mark Rothko than to
Barnett Newman, who would seem to be a more obvious choice by your
earlier paintings. I don’t know quite why that is. Every now and again
there’s a painting that’s made up of this kind of variable field, with shapes in
it, which makes me think of the early Surrealist works of Rothko.

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 PT: Yes, those pictures are quite important to me. They were the product
of the kind of cataclysmic breakdown of civilization that mars or scars the
brain, and scars our souls in some deep way, so that we have to start again
somehow. Abstract Expressionism was a moment that had everything to
do with the devastation of the Second World War, and the very real, tragic,
historical factors that the entire world had to confront.

SB: I feel as strongly as you, speaking for Abstract Expressionism. It’s not
just “America’s greatest contribution to art,” which I think it also is, but
a supremely decisive moment in human history. You seem to me to be
involved very directly with a present-day evolution from Abstract Expres-
sionism. I don’t mean to put that on you as any kind of a burden, and it
may not be how you see yourself at all, but it has to do with lineage. Art
grows through history like a tree; it has a natural evolution. Some branches
go off into nowhere and the fruit dies on the vine, so to speak. Although to
be part of a tradition doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to produce
the next branches.

PT: This again connects us to the idea of maintaining some tribal direction,
Tetra (Hyphessobrycon pulchripinnis), and encourages me to believe that the essential responsibility of the artist at
(1997). Oil pigment on paper,
22-1/4 x 30 inches (56 x 76 cm) this stage in the twentieth century is to heal: to tell stories, to bring things
together, to unite the elements of our artistic heritage. The task is to start
making connections between things, rather than throwing them away in an
act of dismissal or rabid consumption. There’s no question that a process of
rupture and refocusing is necessary for the development of new art. What I
am calling for is a more inclusive situation, a more broadly assimilated art.
Because I believe that ultimately the most significant work is that which
takes more into consideration, rather than less. We are at a completely
fractured, splintered point in our cultural history. Yet I think it’s necessary
and possible as it’s never been before to undergo this process of healing and
re-connection. We need to look at the whole picture, try to create complex
harmonies and disjunctions, and to examine the links between them.

SB: I’m intrigued as to how you arrived at where you are today, from those
early works that involved re-enactments of other paintings?

PT: I see that as prefatory to what followed. Those works were a means
whereby I could practice a certain aesthetic, to reach another end. I was
concerned with Abstract Expressionism’s obsession with the sublime, and

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 the premise that a painting could demonstrate a transcendent reality of its
own. I have this practical side to my nature, which told me I should take
a gradualist approach in coming to an understanding of these ideas. The
work of Barnett Newman is certainly exemplary in this respect, so I de-
cided that I would re-enact certain of his paintings. Not as parody, but as
a tribal ceremonial act. The irony of the gesture did not escape me, but I
thought of it rather in terms of liturgical reenactment, a sacred dramatur-
gy. What, as an artist, was I supposed to do with Newman’sVir Heroicus
Sublimis ? I responded to it by making it again. I should say, however, that
in reconstructing such a work, some interesting transformations occurred.

SB: Correct me if I’m wrong, but in your writings, and in the interviews
that I’ve read, maybe reject is too strong, but there seems something in you
that isn’t primarily interested in the attitude that artists must contend with
other artists in order to grow. I find that interesting as I mused on it last
night, because you had just told me that as a youth you wanted to be a box-
er. And I thought, yes, of course, you would want to work through certain
things very physically as a child, and naturally you would come to a stra-
tegic understanding of artist’s attitudes when it comes to contending with
one another. To begin with, they fight amongst themselves and weaken
each other, and then they get bumped off by the rest of society that doesn’t
give a damn for them in the first place. But worse than that, they tend to
remake negatives and positives of each other’s work, which gets you into a
historical time warp.

PT: That’s the pernicious aspect to alot of twentieth century artistic think-
ing—the defensive, propriety attitude, the territoriality. Of course, it’s easier
to be critical of some of these positions from our vantage point, after the
battles have already been fought. But I suppose part of the reason I’ve done
some of the work I’ve described, the re-enactments, is to call into question
this sense of territory, and turn it into something that can be explicitly built
upon, rather than it being untouchable artistic property.

SB: In contention one says, “I’m going to do the opposite.” But the opposite
is always dependent on what you’re doing the opposite of. Suddenly you’re
in a trap. The quickest way to get into an historical trap is to be contentious
with other artists. Yet how can one help it—if you don’t make an expression
of your annoyance, you run the risk of not defending that which has been
given to you to do. But you’re not in a war with other artists, you’re only

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 reacting against them. You’re being honest, saying you don’t care for it,
making your statement.

PT: I think there is a physical as well as a psychological dimension to one’s

decision to do certain things. For example, my decision to make paintings
that are related to Ellsworth Kelly’s work came out of the self-knowledge
that I was in fact a very similar kind of painter, in terms of my ability, in
terms of the physical act of wanting to make those curved lines, wanting to
paint them in a certain way, wanting to subdivide canvases or use color in
a certain way. Not only was I deeply interested in the nature and texture of
his paintings, I was interested in being that painter. I felt my abilities cor-
responded very closely to what he had done. After having realized this, the
next question is, how, conceptually, to make a connection with it? If one
deliberately chooses to do a type of work that numerous other artists are
doing—in this case Ellsworth Kelly being one the best and most prominent
artists working in a geometricized, hard-edged way—how does one pro-
Aviary (1999) ceed? Rather than making a painting slightly different from his, I decided
Mixed media on linen.
114 x 102 inches (289.5 x 259 cm)
to try to get as close as possible to his works, to get right inside them if I
could. I then took that result and constructed a dialectic within it. I played
with the space, changing it by suggesting the illusion of having a rope, or a
section of wrought iron pass through it.

SB: Oh yes, the rope, what’s that one called? South Ferry?

PT: South Ferry, yes. It’s modeled after an actual marine rope. The title
of his work was South Ferry. I felt a romantic connection to that title, it
evoked life on Coenties Slip after the war, the New York waterfront, period
film noir — all of this before my time. I wanted somehow to participate in
that spirit by reliving this work. So I made the painting and extrapolated
from that. But there’s more to the story. I took a day trip to Bayonne, New
Jersey, one afternoon when I lived in Jersey City in the mid ‘eighties. As I
was cycling around the dock areas, I came to a little place under a bridge
where there were these kids swinging from a giant rope, a marine rope. It
was wonderful, it must have been a hundred feet long. They were swinging
from one area to the next, and I was in the middle of this situation, observ-
ing. I was working on this painting at that time, and it occurred to me that
this rope should be in it. It had to do with desire and memory, it alluded to
a highly charged erotic experience, certainly. All the works from this peri-
od seem to be generated in this or a similar kind of way.

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 SB: We did touch on the necessity to go back to the grounds of one’s own
most sexual privacies, as a springboard into wherever you’re going, artisti-
cally. Basically your work is meat, meat patterns, and here you are trying to
be Ellsworth Kelly. You’ve gone to an opposite extreme, and you have that
rope in there, which has its erotic connotations for you, at source. But des-
perately you are trying to work through ritualistically all of the geometric,
which essentially is not going to be a part of your making. It isn’t, is it?

PT: Well, it was a way of getting things going, of constructing a foundation.

In order to arrive somewhere else, it is necessary to pass through another
domain; a new phase of possibility is entered through an existing place.

SB: It’s also a way of getting to the front brain, because that’s where those
geometries come from. They don’t exist in nature, either in your meat phys-
iology or anywhere on earth, except for chance. There are no straight lines,
there are no real triangles. There are shards of crystals that look like they’re
geometric, until you go at them with the microscope and then they all have
wobbly surfaces. The geometric is a late human idea, and it exists more as
an idea. I’m not speaking against it, you understand: it’s an effluvia…

PT: I see it this way: take this lemon peel here on this table, and the shadow
it makes on the tablecloth. Focus in on this shape, distill the line, take this
part of nature and accept it as a building block, something you can utilize
to go somewhere else. One then takes that “abstraction” and puts it on a
surface, and that provokes a certain set of associations. One examines what
those associations are. On the basis of those associations you construct
other material that you want to incorporate into this original idea. Now
you have this new set of material, of which some can be applied and some
cannot. There’s a radical empiricism at work there somehow. It’s also about
an abstract idea that becomes a story emerging out of nothing—out of pure
observation. Just a perception of a very limited part of physical space that
can be examined. This is a microcosmic scale. I’ve always been interested
in the molecular separation between an object and the space behind it. I’m
very interested in how we perceive that physical reality. I’d like to be able to
apply those observations to a very different kind of pictorial situation than
what we’ve known before.

SB: But the more geometrically you represent this experience, the more you
have to limit seeing in the first place. One always has to limit seeing: one

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 can’t have everything all at once. I’m with you in that in the long run I want
everything, but we can’t have everything all at once. The more the geome-
tries interfere, they become like language. They limit the possibility to see
that lemon peel to an extraordinary extent in the first place, however you’re
going to represent it. There’s the dilemma. To me it’s as simple as this: we
were all taught in school that we could do this and achieve depth:

However, the grounds on which we receive and perceive this kind of phe-
nomenon are more like this:

It’s meaty. And that does not make any easy representation of depth. Thus
the intrinsic lie of Renaissance perspective, that we’ve all delighted in for so
Large Triangular Fish, Double
(Dicromita Agassizii), II, (1997). many centuries, evades us when we put it into loose cellular mucous jellied
Oil pigment on paper, lines. This second diagram has a little depth, but it’s wonky. The first draw-
26 x 33 inches (66 x 84 cm)
ing is nice and neat, but it’s a dream, a human dream. We insist on it, and
force it onto things in nature, but it does not exist in nature. What other
of the geometers, or straight-line dreamers, have been significant to you?
Would Mondrian have meant a lot to you at some point?

PT: I’ve always loved the edges of Mondrian’s paintings, where the paint-
ed line stops before the edges, a little bit in from the line of the stretcher
bar. Speaking of straight-line dreamers, here was a man who could design
cities beautifully, down to the square inch, if he had to. The right balance
for anything we may ever have to organize in our lives, is there in his work.
The choreography of space in those paintings feels so wise, so humane. I
find the work very humanitarian, actually, ready to be of assistance at any
given moment.

SB: What about Albers?

PT: To some degree. Vasarely’s son, Jean Pierre Yvaral, did some very inter-
esting work in Paris in the nineteen fifties. I’ve had a close relationship with
the work of Bridget Riley, a while back.

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 SB: I know Bridget Riley mostly from the op art days; I haven’t seen any-
thing recently.

PT: I made surgical reconstructions of some of her paintings, but on a

much larger scale. I have one from 1984 at the studio,Undercurrent, you
may have seen it. It incorporates lino-printing and collage: paper on paper.
It has this very topological, strangely distended surface.

SB: The Great Western Sky has some of that feeling…

PT: That’s a later manifestation of some of those same linear ideas. But it’s
important to point out that these groupings of lines have been around for a
long time. When you see these wavy optical patterns on the robes of figures
in Assyrian bas-relief sculpture from 2300 B.C., you realize that vibrating,
repetitive lines didn’t fall from heaven into the studio of Bridget Riley in
1961. The idea was to focus on that phenomenon and turn it into a senso-
rium—to locate the whole sensory apparatus of the body within the gray
matter of the brain.

Calligraphic Tail Fish (Porogadus Miles), I,

(1997). Oil pigment on paper, SB: Fly over any country and you know when you’re flying over human
26 x 20 inches (66 x 51 cm)
habitation or not, because it’s all checkered and circled and triangled. The
landscape is geometricized. What’s lacking is to bring in the back brain.
And in order to do that, you’ve got to have symmetry without having it.
You’ve got to show that it doesn’t really exist, even though it looks like it
does. You now seem to be expressing the same need along the lines of the
animal kingdom, and some of your animals tend to the asymmetrically
symmetrical…

PT: For a long time in my work I’d been using various acculturated sym-
bols or marks. Crystalline references to art history and architecture—the
humanly constructed—that is what I’ve concerned myself with, by in large.
In this newer work, the nature composites, I’m using depictions in place of
acculturated symbols. The context of my work is still very much rooted in
the language of abstraction, but this new vocabulary changes my approach
somewhat. I experience this nature imagery as opening up the work, letting
other information in. I’m interested to see how it might fit into a cultural
geology, how it tests the abstract tradition. Let’s remember that abstract
merely means “drawn from.” It also applies to something that is taken from
somewhere else.

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 SB: You’re right to remind me, I shouldn’t just say geometric, one gets into
habits. D’Arcy W. Thompson’s Growth and Form was a book that was very
important to the Abstract Expressionists, and a guiding light for so many
artists I’ve known. And it’s been a major book for me, one I’ve read over
and over again, a work that demonstrates geometric physiology, or the
mathematics of growth. Still, the difference is not dissimilar to the dream
of the cube, or any other perfected straight-line painting. Something like
it exists, but that’s not it. It’s not unlike saying, “It seems to us that people
repeat in their language, but no one should write as if that were true.” In
that case, you’re deflecting the whole evolution of human thought if you
make it seem that it’s true. Almost all of Gertrude Stein’s imitators, includ-
ing Robert Duncan, who consciously imitated her, almost all of them tend
to make it up as if it’s repeated, and it isn’t. But if you make the reader think
so, you’re involved in a lie in the first place. Lies can go on forever, but the
Strata Colensoi (1997–98) truth is very finite.
Oil pigment on canvas.
55 x 63-1/4 inches (140 x 160.5 cm)
PT: What about the discussion of Abstract Expressionism as being just
another form of American cultural imperialism? That these big abstract
paintings were a way of asserting American cultural predominance, of
gaining some ground during the cold war.

SB: Blind nuts…

PT: I never thought that argument had much merit myself.

SB: For certain kinds of Abstract Expressionist paintings it needed to be

that wide to permit the viewer to encounter it with his or her peripheral
vision. That’s all, as far as I’m concerned: peripheral vision.

PT: To enter into it.

SB: Well, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say “enter,” because I always feel there’s
a barrier there. Most of them signed their paintings on the front, which is
a number one barrier that says, “Keep Out.” Artists have all these various
ways of saying, “This is a picture, it’s not a window.” Very often if there’s a
path, Cézanne will put a tree fallen down across it, things like that. Where-
as for instance Andrew Wyeth, in Christina’s World, the signature is paint-
ed on the back. Not always, but it’s a real distinction in most cases.

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 PT: I haven’t signed my paintings on the front in a long time. I sign them
on the back.

SB: You do? Why?

PT: I sign it because it’s finished, it’s a kind of declaration of the work hav-
ing been completed, before leaving the studio. I sign it just to indicate that
I’m the author of this work.

SB: Same here, but it’s peculiar for me to do so—I who was so clear about
trying to escape my name, or any name for that matter. The only reason for
having that name there is to say ‘by way of me,’ or ‘here’s what this creature
did.’ I’m simply trying to keep that integrity clear, so it is known what I’m
responsible for. And that I should protect, as long as I’m alive, what it was
that I did and where I ended—not thinking that’s the best, but that’s just
what I did.

PT: I don’t sign my paintings on the front because I think it somehow

interferes with the viewer’s experience of the picture. I want people to sense
that I’m there with them, but that authorship is somehow not the most
important thing. I always like to stand outside of my work somehow.

SB: Well it perhaps doesn’t matter in your case anyway, in that you’re not
painting anything that one might feel they ought to walk into. I mean, no
one’s going to walk into your snake pit, you know, your paintings are so
flat, so true to the sense of the flat surface, the Abstract Expressionists also
had this aesthetic. There’s no invitation to enter into a painting of yours, so
it doesn’t have the same problem that a landscape would…

PT: I don’t know about that. The illusion of depth is just a nice conse-
quence of the way certain things fall into place within the painting. It’s not
a deliberate effort to construct any semblance of perspectival space. There
are other things that are more primary to me than the deliberate setting
up of illusionist space. The space within a painting has to function in an
activated way, and there may be some intimation of depth, but it’s coinci-
dental. I think this goes back to what you were saying earlier about creating
a fictive place, an imaginary space that viewers may consciously inhabit.
Which is why it frightens me when you say people don’t want to enter my
work, because I do think of my paintings as places.

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 SB: Don’t you mean something like “be haunted by” rather than that you
would want one to have the sense that they would walk into it?

PT: I would say that to look at a painting means that one is taken up with
another reality, a pictorial fictive reality, and as such that picture represents
an imaginary location. So that if one is fed up with the mundane and pe-
destrian experiences of life, and instead stands in front of a painting, that is
a place, an imaginary construction to inhabit with one’s sensory being. To
be lost inside of a painting is the crucial experience here, as an alternative
to other places in the world.

SB: How I interpret that is that you just want to give me an aesthetic ex-
perience—I should be so engrossed with your painting that I would walk
away from it, as Clive Bell once put it, and not be able to tell people what it
was I was looking at. They would say, “Was it was it flowers, was it a snake
painting, was it landscape?” And I would say, “I don’t know.” I’d be so fully
imbued with it that the brain wouldn’t actually be capable of or interested
in subject matter.
Claw Column, (1997).
Oil pigment on paper,
22 x 15 inches (56 x 38 cm)
PT: I want the viewer to come away with a very detailed memory of having
been there, having seen this thing, having experienced what I experienced,
in the making of it. With all of that archaic material inside there too.

SB: For me your work has a quality of place, and the brain tries to penetrate
that, and do something further with it. It seems to me your work is always
creating a place in the mind.

PT: It’s important to me that a painting possess a strong iconic quality, a

frontal gestalt. This makes the character of the work immediately present,
enterable in a metaphysical sense. It is this very direct presentation of a
theme, through the flatness of the drawing, which seems to heighten the
metaphysical dimension of an icon painting. But the best religious icons
are also the sexiest. It has to do with the piecing together of the composi-
tion, the merging of figures, the strange proximity of elements. So it’s this
combination of the metaphysical and the erotic that constitutes my experi-
ence of an icon.

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 SB: I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but maybe at this point in your evo-
lution you’re painting the space as thought would have it, rather than space
in the exterior world. How one might think a region, rather than a reflec-
tion upon an exterior one.

PT: That’s a very good point. Painted space is mental space

SB: And that again puts you in alignment with what I think is the import-
ant and necessary continuum of the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic: they
were the first to paint closed eye vision. They painted it without knowing
it, without being conscious of it. I don’t have a single word from any of
that whole history that they even consciously knew they were involved in
Falcon Claws, (1997).
hypnogogic vision, but they so obviously were. You can find traces of it ear-
Oil pigment on paper, lier, even, in Kandinsky, Klee—even back to Gustave Moreau. Of course in
26-1/4 x 35-3/4 inches (67 x 91 cm)
Turner you can find the “Ur” of this whole sense of vision, the paideuma,
the gristly roots (as poet Ezra Pound put it) of this need that flowers into
the picturing of the unnamable.

PT: Can you define what an image is?

SB: Image is difficult. Picture I’ve defined. An image, I don’t know, I’ve nev-
er tried to push that distinction.

PT: An image is more transient.

SB: It doesn’t seem to me the naming would have to be that crucial.

PT: It’s ineffable, what constitutes the experience. Does mirage better define
this notion?
Pteris Viscosa (1996)
Oil pigment on canvas.
66-1/4 x 55-1/2 inches (168 x 141 cm) SB: It could be a part of a picture that is unnamable. I hear “mage” rever-
berating in it.

PT: Magician, magus.

SB: Yes. When you say image I then more want to talk about Impression-
ism, rather than hard-edged depiction. I like the word visual, because it
escapes all these things. Moving visual thinking, then, is the center of my
concerns.

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 PT: You also use the word envisionment.

SB: I suppose that means after the continuities of time, and out of all of that
vision, what reverberates as meaning—the composition of the whole of it,
what’s meant . Again, it’s tough because language doesn’t quite describe it,
otherwise I’d probably be a poet and not a filmmaker.

PT: For me, the deepest part of the process of making a painting is when I
get into an almost incantatory state. When I’m working in this way, I can
sometimes recognize a previous archaic existence that I seem to have been
a part of. I’m revisiting an archaic moment. Now I know this sounds com-
pletely outlandish and presumptuous…

SB: No, not to me, not to anyone who studies DNA…

PT: I tell you, sometimes when I’m working on a painting, I’ll put an
Seaweed Painting No. 1, (2000). element into place, and I’ll see that in relation to something else; and I
Mixed media on canvas,
64-1/4 x 57-1/4 inches (163 x 145.5 cm) will have an experience of passing through the familiar terrain of a forest
encampment, or sitting by a fire, part of some remote tribal archaic life that
I have been a part of, I feel that very strongly. It’s a recognition of an earlier
existence, in the act of having experienced just a particle of that existence
in a work. That’s what really exhilarates me.

SB: You can have that as reincarnation, as some people do, or you can have
that as DNA encoding. I can tell you just one story that’s put me at peace a
lot in this matter. They had little cut-out silhouettes of hawks and sparrows,
and then they had little chicks who never did see their mothers and never
were trained, and these chicks with no training were wandering around,
and they pass the shadow of the hawk over them, and they all go crazy and
start running in all directions. Then they pass the shadow of the sparrow
over them, and they go about whatever they were doing, pecking and
scratching without worry. And they didn’t get this info from mommy, they
got it genetically. That’s enough proof for me, and there are a lot of other
examples. Charles Olson spent the last years of his life trying to understand
the outside limits of being human. What we’re really sharing at the out-
side of being human, in the womb as well as now, is a kind of a grid, if you
could call it that, and here’s where language gets awkward. There is a kind
of grid which is lit up, even in the womb. We know fetuses dream. What
do they dream of? Something’s lit up in there, this dreaming grid which is

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 being shaped, upon which all the imprimatur of their later life will rest—
all the ways in which they can imagine or be. And I think that has to be
informed by genetics, by DNA. That has to be where we are the most alike.
It’s unimaginable that it could be anything else. I think that’s what I in my
way, and you in yours, are trying to reach, and give representation to.

PT: Perhaps that’s why I need to go back to Ireland and investigate my Celt-
ic roots. I think I have some shamanistic past, but I’m not sure I’m ready to
brag about it.

SB: There’s a playful side to all of whatever the making is, but basically, it’s
dangerous, it’s not socially acceptable, and there’s no choice. It’s impris-
onment. There is this real fear and sometimes hatred of the artist and of
visionary experience.

PT: It’s clear to me that the art we appreciate, the art that we find most
Seaweed Painting No. 2, (2000). overwhelming and compelling, that we pay attention to, is the most dan-
Mixed media on canvas,
64-3/4 x 56-1/2 inches (164.5 x 143.5 cm) gerous stuff, in terms of the risks it takes. It’s a raw challenge to how things
have been done previously, and this puts us in a state of temporary dis-
equilibrium. We know that this information must be dealt with, which is
exactly what we demand, it’s what we expect.

SB: The darkest continent of the world is the human mind. For me none
of this is a question of decoration. It is seriously a question of art. That’s a
discipline you share with people that goes all the way back to the ancient
caves. It’s the earliest record of being human, and that gives you a stable
grounding in some sense: to be an artist even though everyone uses the
term for everything other than what it should be used for. And it’s such
an annoying shit factor in your social life—one is so often embarrassed to
open one’s mouth to say it. But the truth is, if you hold to that you have a
touch with all humanity, and this is some protection against these dangers.
It makes you very small in relationship to the whole endeavor, because it
also includes those known and unknown artists who tried and failed—
those who never made anything of any significance—by the millions.

PT: Or some of those great manuscript painters of the Middle Ages—we’ll

never know who they are, those contented or malcontented monastics.

SB: Or all those people who did beautiful, great things, that were just lost

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 or thrown out with the trash. It puts one in this great arena which I liter-
ally need when I’m uncovering these layers of the mind. I need it going on
all around me and that’s why I work at Potter’s café in downtown Boulder,
in this atmosphere of businessmen talking, of fans watching the football
game, of tourists.

PT: Why do you do this, instead of working at home?

SB: To keep from going crazy. I do not paint or etch on film in a solitary
room, at home or in my office. I can edit there but I can’t dig out the ma-
terial. I need to be sunk in with my fellow human beings, so I’m not alone
with it.

PT: Do you think artistic statement excludes equivocation and speculation,

Adiantum Asplenium (1997)
Oil pigment on canvas. and a negative way of describing things? Describing something by naming
55 x 66 inches (140 x 167.5 cm) all the things that it is not. Do you think that’s a valid approach?

SB: That’s certainly an exhaustive way to go about it. I don’t know. It’s valid
if the heart of the person doing it is good, is dedicated to goodness. It’s
intriguing. Rilke at some point wanted to get rid of things in the world
altogether, and the way to do it was to name them—that was an actual pos-
itive ideal. Then you would be left with the truth. The truth is always what
you fully believe down to the bone at the given moment, and it can’t ever
be anything else than that. When you deal with fact, you’re into the sliding
world of science, which changes its facts faster than people change their
laundry. Nowadays scientists have far more presumption. Now they think
they know. That means they know less than when they didn’t think they
knew. As a child, do you remember having hypnogogic visual experiences?

PT: Yes, I really loved the optic feedback, when I rubbed my eyes. Looking
at the sun and seeing the veins in your eyelids. Looking at colors with your
eyes closed. This inner kaleidoscope.
Vipera Leberis, I (1997).
Oil pigment on canvas,
27 x 18-1/4 inches (69 x 46 cm) SB: We very much share that. In periods when I’m mad enough to push
toward myself as a realist filmmaker, I’m trying to paint as near an equiv-
alence of hypnogogic vision as I possibly can. I fail miserably, but usually
turn out something else that’s so wonderful to me that I can fortunately
just go on and evolve various ways of creating a visual musical equivalence.
There too I feel particularly related to you, because I feel in the length or

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 varieties on a theme in your work, you’re really extending over time. You
could almost be a filmmaker like Viking Eggling or Hans Richter, both of
whom started out making scrolls. They finally stumbled into film because
they couldn’t accommodate the scroll medium to the length that their work
was demanding. Your painting from the Vienna Secession catalogue was
like that.

PT: You mean Megapolis. That was about thirty-five feet long by twelve feet
tall. I like working on a large scale. I can fit so much more inside.

SB: There is a sense in much of your work of real color and real form sim-
ilar to what I’ve invested in making some of my works, like Mothlight, or
Garden of Earthly Delights, using a real, collaged, flattened object. Only
you do it with paint.

PT: I like how you described Mothlight as having to do with the attractive-
ness of death: the fact that the moths were attracted to this warmth and
light, and that killed them. It’s a way of showing that feeling or reality on
film in a very palpable way.
King Snake, Ringed Phase;
Double Impression (1997).
Oil pigment on canvas, SB: That was certainly the personal reason for making it. I felt I was being
29-1/4 x 21-1/4 inches (74 x 54 cm) killed by the process of creating by being drawn to the light. And the moths
certainly were, right before my eyes. Then there was this question of what
to do with their bodies, which started all that off. It was very important to
me that I didn’t kill any of them in the making of that film. There’s a later
work that’s more related to painting, actually, pressing Alpine mountain
flowers between thirty-five millimeter film, so you have the images in
much larger scale:The Garden of Earthly Delights.

PT: I notice you use a phrase which I use quite frequently, which is aesthet-
ic ecology, to describe a state of equilibrium in a work, where all the parts
are functioning within the general system. Nothing wasted.

SB: Aesthetic ecology, yes. To me it means more than balance: it means

nothing should just have dropped into the work from heaven. You could
have something dropped in from heaven, but that would be an anomaly,
and you should, then, have prepared for that anomaly. You can’t slide on
too much of that — that suddenly things will just occur. A place has to
be made, things have to be generated. I’m talking about a continuity art,

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 across time, the way it comes into existence, how it interacts with every-
thing else. And my great teacher in this respect, is Gertrude Stein. Her
ultimate poem is Stanzas and Meditations, because there every word has
a life of its own, as if it were a character in a Tolstoy novel. Whatever they
tangential describe or obliquely indicate, all these words also have a life of
their own, in between the lines, which you might call their soul.

PT: I think the phrase “aesthetic ecology” can also apply to the fact that,
in the awareness of making something, you have to energize every frame.
Every cell has to have a life energy. There’s a cumulative effect as a result of
all of these energy sparks. It’s a funny psychological problem, how to treat
one’s chosen material. I love calligraphic gesture and will very often scrape
litho ink over glass deliberately to make an impression on paper from
that. But there’s a fine line between appreciating a certain gesture or mark,
giving it its due weight, and not feeling too precious about it. And I think
the material has to be treated in a very ecological way, so that one makes
good use of these resources, accepting them for their potential and for
their capacity to be integrated within a larger scheme of things. They have
a practical use value — as well as having a particular beauty. There is the
more inclusive, loving part of the story, and then there must be a ruthless-
ness, which has to do with knowing what belongs where.

SB: For me the really arduous and disturbing chore of furthering what’s
known as Abstract Expressionism, in contemporary terms, in terms of
the human mind, lies in uncovering that whole streaming of moving
visual thinking that is and always has been free of language. Because of
the Abstract Expressionist painters we have all these different areas of the
unnamable—areas of now-shared, human non-verbal thinking that we can
inhabit, travel to…

Brakhage, Mothlight, (1963).

PT: To inhabit the pictorial — that’s a very important idea. You have some-
Filmstrip
how managed to calm the better part of my anguish about not knowing
what something is called, while I’m working on it. The pull of language
is so great at times, that I might find myself conforming to the imaginary
demands of a discourse which says that the identification of something
has absolute primacy. Often in art those premature qualifications can be
misleading and counter-productive. So from our conversation I feel more
relaxed about that idea.

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 SB: Painting is where this new visual consciousness rose, and I think prob-
ably every evolution of it will occur in painting first. And I’ll tell you why:
people can only deal with so much. It is to me in one sense the same as the
Impressionists, who went out into the landscape and in the rain and wind,
and they sat there and painted from nature, and it made an enormous
difference in human vision, right? Similarly, Jackson Pollock goes into his
head, and finds some area that’s never been expressed, and at great agony
gets it out of himself. Many went nuts under this, literally went crazy and
came to bad ends, not just the alcoholism and suicides, but literal insanity,
trying to get this vision out of their heads. The beautiful, shamanistic clar-
ities of these drunks, which is really mostly what they were: utterly sincere,
desperate, crazy American drunks. What a thing for this to come out of.
And then there are certain people who manage to go on being creative and
achieve a certain kind of happiness, and it absolutely puzzles the hell out of
Cobra Nocturne (1997)
Mixed media on canvas. 55 x 66 inches me how they do that.
(140 x 167.5 cm)

PT: I know what you mean. Most people are condemned to a life of at least
partial torment. Perhaps the point is to bear it with dignity.

SB: And I yearn for it, of course, I want to be, well, happy is too superficial
a word. But you know what I mean. I want to be joyful and present a splen-
dor, a happy splendor to people, and to myself. One thing that you and I
share that makes us forever not happy—you wanted to be a filmmaker and
I wanted to be a poet, so we are in the first place failed—although we’ve
had the sense to accept what was given to us to do.

PT: Well, that’s not entirely true, perhaps. I might call myself a would-be
filmmaker. But the point is I really enjoy making paintings. And some art-
ists have made astonishing films. Richard Serra, for example. I don’t know,
I still have it in my mind that I might be able to make films. But I do very
Lizard Page II, (1997). much like to make paintings.
Oil pigment on paper,
29-1/4 x 21 inches (74 x 53 cm)
SB: I’m envious of these people who can go out and be a Sunday painter.
I’m also frustrated in that sense. I would like to go up in the mountains
here. Then again, I don’t care too much for the mountains. But I would
love to sit in a garden somewhere and paint. To make a painting of the
garden, and not have all this crisis of human evolution on me. I come to
town now and have my Irish coffee five times a week, something like that.
I don’t really drink otherwise. It’s a nice balance between the coffee and the

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 liquor. That’s about my only vice. Every now and again I go crazy and say
some wild things that startle the natives. But I try not to do that too often.
Usually it’s on a humanistic level. I usually don’t get all that upset about
art anymore. Curiously, only to the extent that I speak positively seems to
me to be useful anymore. Because there I’m operating from what’s in my
bones, what are my grounds. I’ve always known I’m more nuts than people
who had reputations as such, like Harry Smith.

PT: It’s funny you should say that, I’ve had similar feelings myself. I’ve
always found that I could be just as crazy as the really crazy ones if it was a
question of detente.

Claw Column, (1997) SB: Harry’s trick to stay out of the asylum was to dance it openly and
Oil pigment on paper,
30 x 44 inches (76 x 112 cm) be funny. I couldn’t do that. If I once slipped into that mode that was so
common to Harry, or on other occasions to Kenneth Anger, I would go
over the edge and right into the loony bin. I couldn’t handle it in that way.
Therefore I know I’m more crazy. I can’t afford to fool around with it and
be funny about it. So I’m known as one of those bores that’s known as very
serious. Very serious professor. It’s such a gas that I can call myself a doctor.
[chuckles].

PT: In thinking about the future of this endeavor, this ultimately plea-
surable, ultimately painful process of making art, I think what you said is
quite right, that the government and the people who want to control things
in this country seem intent on taking ground away from artists who are
trying to open up worlds and free people’s minds, to give them something
to think about, to provoke them, to make them more human. In New York
City they’re not teaching art in the schools anymore. Children are not
going to visit museums, they’re not going to know how to look at art any-
more. There’s a deliberate intention to make the society into a more com-
puter-oriented, technocracized population. I think it’s terrible that children
are learning to use computers at too early an age, I think this is very perni-
cious…

SB: Yes, I’m very nervous about it because my son Anton is up against it
right now. Fortunately it’s rather limited, but I don’t even like for him to
learn it at all, yet. Maybe ever. I don’t have much belief in computers, which
can either be regarded as my being an old fogey, or that I know something

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 most other people don’t right now know or care to know.

PT: It keeps people more separate, and reduces human contact.

SB: Yes, and it is a lie in the sense that it is a net: the internet floats itself on
bringing people together, when in fact it’s effect is in many ways quite the
opposite. But all of these things again are not something I feel I can have
too much effect on, or whatever I say means much of anything. It’s all just
blowing in the wind. It doesn’t even constitute an event for me. Finally you
can say, what’s the difference. People have to pay for their discoveries, we’re
not here on earth to have these visions grow on trees. They must be earned.
The gesture of goodwill is that we need each other, and as best we can, we
pass on to each other what we’ve earned, and that’s part of the generosity
of the work. You’re absolutely unique and individual, but you’re working
within a sacred calling that goes back to the dawn of time, so who can stake
a claim and say “this is mine?”

END

Bee Sheet, (1997).

Oil pigment on paper,
29 x 21 inches (74 x 53 cm)

STAN BRAKHAGE was born in Winfield, Kansas in 1933. He attended Dartmouth College for

one semester before abandoning formal studies to pursue his education amongst poet-teachers

Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, and Charles Olson. Throughout the 1950s, in New York and San

Francisco, Brakhage was among several filmmakers who sought to create a personal cinema based

on poetry, myth, and the visionary experience. Anticipation of Night (1957) was a turning point for

both Brakhage and independent film, positing vision itself as the central subject of his work. The
four-and-a-half hour The Art of Vision (1961-65) was described by its maker as a “visual symphony,”

and involved shifting focus, multiple superimposition, and scratching and hand painting directly

onto film. His filmography consists of hundreds of films, and his many books include Metaphors on

Vision (1963), Cine-dance (1967), The Brakhage Lectures (1972 ), The Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected

Writings 1964-80 (1982), I….Sleeping (1988), and Film at Wit’s End (1991). He served as Distin-

guished Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder until his death in 2003.

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