Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
It’s a picture of my apartment after 9/11
I lived right across the street from the South Tower for 24 years
so it was very traumatic
So after that it’s like, “*** it, I’m coming here”
Philip Glass was the impetus for me going to New York, thinking I had a job
Unfortunately Philip had only one concert that year
So he said, “Well do you need work?”
I said, “I can plumb”
So that’s how we became plumbers
One of the first concerts with the Philip Glass Ensemble
We did a six-hour concert
That’s how long the music was
Joan Jonas invited me to her first performance
so I just borrowed my friend’s camera
So the next morning Joan Jonas called and said
“Do you want to sell some of your photographs?”
I’m thinking to myself “Plumbing, photography?”
So that’s when I began shooting film
I started working with Keith Sonnier
who was at the Leo Castelli Gallery
You couldn’t get any higher in the contemporary art world
He had Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, etc., etc.
So my first concert in New York
was in 1972 at the Castelli Gallery
Richard Serra I met through Phillip Glass
In Leo’s warehouse right in front of us there were racks of paintings:
Frank Stella, Jasper Johns…
So we go out and haul these paintings up and criticize them
Besides, we had just finished melting lead
and throwing it against the walls and peeling it off
I’ve got some ashes, Rauschenberg ashes
somewhere in here
This is Rauschenberg and I going to Havana Cuba in 1988
He came up with the idea to show American art to the world
I would go and play my saxophone at the openings:
First we went to Mexico City, then Santiago, Chile
then Tibet, Japan, Russia, Cuba
He freed my mind
I was free to do anything I wanted to do
So when I painted my first painting, It was like “Oh my god!”
I mean it was serious. This was serious ***
Many of the artists were furious at me
about doing too many things, that I should only pick one thing
Well I said “I get bored really easily.”
Most interviews go, “Oh you had a great career”
and I’m like, “Dude, I’m still trying to figure out who I want to be
and what I want to do, believe it or not”