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1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	Jill Giegerich	.

M. Yeah. Actually, to go back to that religious thing. It's about some kind of protection. It's like... No I wasn't aroused. Yeah, that's it. It's like I maintained artifice. I didn't go native.

And it's very fundamentalist too, if you are going to make an analogy to religion. Which is interesting because in a way the protection is from... it seems to me that fundamentalist religion is a protection from true spirituality. And in true spirituality, religion has absolutely no function. It has no power. I'm not sure about this, but maybe the attacks on the art world in the last few years have caused a kind of hysteria, a fear. Not only physical attacks like the incredible decimation that aids has brought into the art world, but also the NEA and the attack by the fundamentalist right, has pitted one against the other and then that kind of pitting always brings about this polarization. And as trite as it sounds, when you develop a really profound enemy it's a reflection of yourself. It's like fighting fire with fire. How do you fight fundamentalism? Well, you develop your own kind of fundamentalism. You trench. You dig in your feet. You take a position. And there you are.

M. When you used the phrase "dissolving the boundaries between life and art", it's so... that phrase kind of hits me. It's the reason to live... or maybe just to dissolve.

Well it's what we're going to do eventually... (laughs) so maybe we better train for it.

I don't know what about those water lilies. All I know is that I turned a corner and there was this magnificent spectacle in front of me that I had not prepared myself for in any way. And it seemed like something had been made more real than I had ever seen it been made before. And it just made me sit down and bask in that realness. It's again one of those great paradoxes. This entirely artificial construction... managed to take me totally unprepared into a new arena, like a mythic time, took me out of the time I was functioning in, into a mythic time. And that's my whole reason to be an artist. I want to exist in mythic time. (laughs) Without going insane.

Did you read Suzi Gablik's newest book, "Conversations Before the End of Time"? I could not put that book down. And I never read art theory that I can't put down. I don't even know if this book falls into the category of art theory. It's the opposite. Art theory is very hard for me to pick up. But I couldn't put this book down. And there are a lot of things that I disagree with, but I think that what she was talking about in this book presents one of the most serious affronts to the art making condition that I've read. It's a very serious assault on art as it exists today. My problem with her book is that a lot of the art that she posits as kind of transcending the dilemma of modernism is just not very interesting to me, or I feel falls into the same problems that she's critiquing. But she is really talking about an art and life dissolution in a very profound way, with no catch-22s, with no safety net. And these are conversations that she has with thinkers from all different disciplines. They're scientists, anthropologists, and therapists, and all different kinds of people. And its a conversation. It's like this conversation we're having. That's the nature of these conversations. And she, I think, is advocating a very radical position.

M. You mentioned that you thought her book wouldn't be well regarded by the theory mongers – which are who?

Oh you want me to name them? (laughs)

M. That's actually not what I meant, but that's okay. What's their stripe?

I think that they are probably the people that you were talking about earlier that deal in a certain kind of genuflecting to a certain kind of art rhetoric, a certain kind of discourse, and a certain upholding of logic and the scientific mind. And I think she's too romantic and too populist for people who are interested in that kind of talk.

M. Romantic. What do you mean by that?

You know that impulse that keeps rising up to dissolve the constraints of logic and science and return to a more innocent state. At least that's my take on the romantic impulse... I think I probably am one. I do have a very strong logical streak that runs through me, too. But I definitely have a strong impulse to dissolve that.

M. How does that very strong logical streak manifest itself?

Lately (laughs) not too strongly. Well I think it manifests itself in my work. Because at the same time that I have a desire to make something that dissolves boundaries, I am well aware that I have to do that by artificial means. And in order to effectively manipulate those artificial means I have to use a high level of manipulative seduction, which is logical. I have to use my logical mind. I have to make very logical decisions about what's working, what's not working, why is this doing this, why is this doing that. So it manifests at that moment in my work. But that comes in later. Actually first... My romantic impulses are the basis for making my work. They are the foundation. They are first. Before I can make those decisions, I have to have something to make them on. And the something that they are being made on is something that has come out of a totally romantic engagement with the world. I've made something out of a very anti-social play period that is not about logic, it's not about who's looking at what. It's a play with all the muck and chaos of all the things that I've been interested in and moved by. And I've sat down and I've just played through it. And I think that play is basically romantic. It's naive and it's outside of time.

You were asking me about where logic comes in, logic comes in after that. Logic comes in to manipulate, to achieve a certain end in the work.

M. Does it do that?

Hardly ever, but I try.

M. Do you see the place where it does?

In other people's work? Yeah. Sure. I mean at the same time that the water lilies made me sit down I was also very aware that this was a very masterful painting ... that this person had employed the mastery of form and technique and composition and positioning ...

M. Why is that logical?

Well I think that it seems that kind of information enters the mind through rational logical means. How do you (laughs) ...oh shit.

M. But aren't there historical precedents? that they are not logical? They're really kind of like phenomenological? And then they're recognized and employed.

Yeah, okay, but isn't the act of recognizing and employing a logic... well if you're going to go down this road, then you might as well say...

M. ...that logic is built on nothing?

Maybe logic is just another state of grace in the flood of intuition. I know that I've really felt in making art that I had to dance through different brain waves and for convenience called them these different things. But maybe they're not. Maybe a better way to say it is that I feel that, for me, art making has employed different states of consciousness. And that one of my tasks as an artist, one of the things for me to learn as an artist was how to enter into those different states willfully. And that's damn hard to figure out. And those are the tricks of the trade. Every artist has different ones. It's all about tricking yourself.

I mean how do you trick yourself into believing for an hour or so that you don't care about what anyone else thinks. How do you do that? It takes some very subtle game playing. And that's what's so interesting, so incredibly interesting about being an artist, the games that you play with your own mind. I mean it makes you very acutely aware of the games that other people are playing with their own minds and that gets to be an even more interesting game. And then you get to watch the games that your whole society is playing. And then you get to watch the world game. And it's completely fascinating. And that's why I could never think about anything else to do with my life. (Both laugh)

M. Okay, that's the end of the tape! That is brilliant and the absolute fucking truth. No matter how bad this gets, everything else is worse. Everything else would be a letdown.

Yeah, it's true. It's true. Everything else has a certain level of amnesia that you have to enter into.

M. And that's pretty hard.

Especially when you've been playing this game for forty years. What other game is there to play?

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