GLENN O’BRIEN: It’s funny, I didn’t know about you for a long time, but I knew your band, Destroy All Monsters. It was a mythic band. You got a tremendous amount of publicity for people who never actually put out an album.
GO: It almost seemed like a great publicity stunt because Destroy All Monsters was the kind of band that you would read about every month in Creem magazine, but then they never came to your town and there were no records.
GO: What was your intention when you got involved?
GO: Also how unsuccessful.
GO: But people today think that the Velvet Underground was really famous.
GO: Well, Iggy Pop did get famous. He used to get his picture in Rolling Stone because he was the first person to dive into the audience.
GO: That sort of relates to the “Kandors” exhibition you had at Jablonka Galerie in Berlin-I was so struck by those pieces. That was such an obscure pop-culture thing, but it really hit me. It didn’t have to be explained to me. I immediately knew that Kandor was the capital of Krypton, the planet that Superman comes from, and was shrunken in a bottle and kept in the Fortress of Solitude. What got you onto that subject?
GO: It’s kind of vague in my memory how the city of Kandor was shrunken and put in a bottle, but I guess it was Brainiac, the villain, who did it, right? So I don’t know if your role here is Brainiac the shrinker or Superman the savior.
GO: A lot of your work could be seen as creating these monsters that are on the border of being cute and yet monstrous at the same time. I mean, you were in a band called Destroy All Monsters. Was monstrosity always an interest of yours?
GO: I think there’s a monstrous element in your work that has to do more with benign monsters than malignant monsters. For example, the stuffed animals all put together are kind of a Happy Meal version of the two-headed baby that’s on the cover of the tabloid.
GO: See, I always saw those pieces as sort of about the breakdown of nature and the cracking of the genetic code and mutation.
GO: How did you get onto the subject of repressed memory syndrome?
GO: As the work progressed, did you remember more and more?
GO: I’ve remembered an event and thought I’d said something when actually it was somebody else who said it or vice versa. I think, especially in writing, so much of plagiarism is completely unconscious.
GO: One thing that the Internet seems to be doing is eroding the idea of copyright and originality. People are just taking bits of things and using them in a very free way.
GO: It’s given a lot of work to the lawyers.
GO: You put together a book of interviews a few years ago which I think has a lot of interesting things in it. There’s an interview with Kim Gordon [of Sonic Youth], and she says, essentially, “One can never have a crush on art.”
GO: But I have had somebody say to me within the last year that kids today don’t want to be rock stars anymore. They want to be artists.
GO: It wasn’t about money. It was about getting laid, I think.
GO: After Robert Rauschenberg died last May, we republished an interview that he did for us, and he was talking about a conversation he had with Brice Marden. Marden told Rauschenberg that his students had changed so much that when they’d come to class, the first thing they’d say is, “Tell me how to get a gallery.” Or, “Tell me how to get a loft.”
GO: What I didn’t like about the rock scene was what happened to punk: It became a cliché of itself, this glorification of immaturity, whereas, in the beginning you had James Chance being influenced by Ornette Coleman and James Brown simultaneously-a lot of really sophisticated stuff going on.
GO: Do you think this crazy art market boom that’s happening now is temporary?
GO: What leads me to think that it might continue is the fact that the art market is a sort of perfect market. It’s kind of impossible to regulate because it’s inscrutable. I mean, the government could never figure out how it works.
GO: But you can influence it if you’re smart enough. It’s sort of like magic.
GO: No, they don’t, so it becomes about buying and selling.
GO: Do you think that the boom has expanded the idea of art as something that requires explication?
GO: It used to be that rock stars had to be young and sexy, and artists could still be kind of old and overweight-and it was okay because they had achieved this mastery. But now that same kind of star system seems to be infiltrating art.
GO: There was a cover of New York magazine in 2007 with the headline: “Warhol’s Children.” It was all about that idea of artists as rock stars.
GO: But you have identified yourself as an avant-gardist.
GO: But is there still an avant-garde?
GO: Right, but the idea of the avant-garde is also related to the notion that there was progress in the arts.
GO: And that’s kind of fundamental.
GO: It’s funny that the art world is still considered to be leaning left when actually the Republican administration probably has had a lot to do with how the prices of art have risen to these incredible levels.
GO: No, but if you look at the Whitney Biennial or the opening show of the New Museum, at least it’s trying to look cheap.
GO: No. Once the traditional idea of beauty didn’t rule anymore then there wasn’t a problem, I guess.
The Silent interviewee : Glenn O’Brien answering his own questions in a room that also contains Mike Kelley
GO: It almost seemed like a great publicity stunt because Destroy All Monsters was the kind of band that you would read about every month in Creem magazine, but then they never came to your town and there were no records.
GO: What was your intention when you got involved?
GO: Also how unsuccessful.
GO: But people today think that the Velvet Underground was really famous.
GO: Well, Iggy Pop did get famous. He used to get his picture in Rolling Stone because he was the first person to dive into the audience.
GO: That sort of relates to the “Kandors” exhibition you had at Jablonka Galerie in Berlin-I was so struck by those pieces. That was such an obscure pop-culture thing, but it really hit me. It didn’t have to be explained to me. I immediately knew that Kandor was the capital of Krypton, the planet that Superman comes from, and was shrunken in a bottle and kept in the Fortress of Solitude. What got you onto that subject?
GO: It’s kind of vague in my memory how the city of Kandor was shrunken and put in a bottle, but I guess it was Brainiac, the villain, who did it, right? So I don’t know if your role here is Brainiac the shrinker or Superman the savior.
GO: A lot of your work could be seen as creating these monsters that are on the border of being cute and yet monstrous at the same time. I mean, you were in a band called Destroy All Monsters. Was monstrosity always an interest of yours?
GO: I think there’s a monstrous element in your work that has to do more with benign monsters than malignant monsters. For example, the stuffed animals all put together are kind of a Happy Meal version of the two-headed baby that’s on the cover of the tabloid.
GO: See, I always saw those pieces as sort of about the breakdown of nature and the cracking of the genetic code and mutation.
GO: How did you get onto the subject of repressed memory syndrome?
GO: As the work progressed, did you remember more and more?
GO: I’ve remembered an event and thought I’d said something when actually it was somebody else who said it or vice versa. I think, especially in writing, so much of plagiarism is completely unconscious.
GO: One thing that the Internet seems to be doing is eroding the idea of copyright and originality. People are just taking bits of things and using them in a very free way.
GO: It’s given a lot of work to the lawyers.
GO: You put together a book of interviews a few years ago which I think has a lot of interesting things in it. There’s an interview with Kim Gordon [of Sonic Youth], and she says, essentially, “One can never have a crush on art.”
GO: But I have had somebody say to me within the last year that kids today don’t want to be rock stars anymore. They want to be artists.
GO: It wasn’t about money. It was about getting laid, I think.
GO: After Robert Rauschenberg died last May, we republished an interview that he did for us, and he was talking about a conversation he had with Brice Marden. Marden told Rauschenberg that his students had changed so much that when they’d come to class, the first thing they’d say is, “Tell me how to get a gallery.” Or, “Tell me how to get a loft.”
GO: What I didn’t like about the rock scene was what happened to punk: It became a cliché of itself, this glorification of immaturity, whereas, in the beginning you had James Chance being influenced by Ornette Coleman and James Brown simultaneously-a lot of really sophisticated stuff going on.
GO: Do you think this crazy art market boom that’s happening now is temporary?
GO: What leads me to think that it might continue is the fact that the art market is a sort of perfect market. It’s kind of impossible to regulate because it’s inscrutable. I mean, the government could never figure out how it works.
GO: But you can influence it if you’re smart enough. It’s sort of like magic.
GO: No, they don’t, so it becomes about buying and selling.
GO: Do you think that the boom has expanded the idea of art as something that requires explication?
GO: It used to be that rock stars had to be young and sexy, and artists could still be kind of old and overweight-and it was okay because they had achieved this mastery. But now that same kind of star system seems to be infiltrating art.
GO: There was a cover of New York magazine in 2007 with the headline: “Warhol’s Children.” It was all about that idea of artists as rock stars.
GO: But you have identified yourself as an avant-gardist.
GO: But is there still an avant-garde?
GO: Right, but the idea of the avant-garde is also related to the notion that there was progress in the arts.
GO: And that’s kind of fundamental.
GO: It’s funny that the art world is still considered to be leaning left when actually the Republican administration probably has had a lot to do with how the prices of art have risen to these incredible levels.
GO: No, but if you look at the Whitney Biennial or the opening show of the New Museum, at least it’s trying to look cheap.
GO: No. Once the traditional idea of beauty didn’t rule anymore then there wasn’t a problem, I guess.
from here