Laurel Consuelo Broughton is the Creative Director of WELCOMEPROJECTS, a design practice that engages with everyday objects in a variety of scales and purpose. From architectural developments to couture accessories (created under WELCOMECOMPANIONS), she seeks out the underlying story that makes the ordinary come to life. She is also currently a lecturer at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture. Laurel’s curated project in zingmagazine issue 23, THE VILLAGE, demonstrates how she sees beyond the normal functions and size of items we use on a daily basis and gives them a new narrative for us to explore. Prior to her work in architecture and design, Laurel worked as managing editor of zingmagazine.
Interview by Hayley Richardson
In the WELCOMEPROJECTS statement for zingmagazine issue 23, THE VILLAGE is described as “the place all WELCOMECOMPANIONS call home.” This home comes to life in the Retrospective City, “where common objects have been transformed into functional building types as suggested by their forms.” This work, in both its 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional forms, possesses a Duchampian spirit, especially with the chessboard layout and lobster telephone. How and why did the surrealist lens become so important in you?
What’s interesting about Surrealism to me is that in a number of different media it sought to create a jolt or distance from familiar things so that we could see those same things in a new way. In my work I’m interested in the same end particularly through playing with the shapes of familiar objects but creating alternate functions for them. The shapes then reappear at different scales sometimes building-sized, sometimes object-sized, and sometimes somewhere in between.
The illustrations for THEVILLAGE are like architectural blueprints. Do you create these types of preliminary designs for all your WELCOMECOMPANIONS items or WELCOMEPROJECTS? What’s your creative process like?
In The Village I was interested in thinking about how the shapes of certain everyday objects could if enlarged be similar in proportion to building types we are very familiar with—such as the high-rise apartment building, the office complex or corporate headquarters etc. The cordless phone becomes the high-rise apartment building and the button becomes the office complex or corporate headquarters.
As far as my process goes, drawing definitely plays a role in all sorts of different ways. In The Village the project literally is the drawings. For WELCOMECOMPANIONS drawing might be used in the beginning to explore an idea and then to convey the designs to the manufacturer and then often we use drawings in our promotional materials.
Storytelling is another central element in your work. Are there any particular stories that made a significant impact in your life that may have laid the foundations for how you work and conceptualize now?
I was a voracious reader as a child and I think that definitely had an affect, particularly the magical realism that you find in children’s and young adult books—like The Borrowers or even Madeleine L’Engle or The Phantom Tollbooth. In a certain way it’s that same kind of wonder that I try to instill in my work but though objects and our interactions with them.
Speaking of stories, what is the story behind the name of your company?
The name WELCOME came about because I didn’t want to use my own name and I also didn’t want a studio with a faux research-y sounding name. I wanted something that seemed familiar. The studio is called WELCOMEPROJECTS and so WELCOMECOMPANIONS seemed like a natural offshoot for a line of accessories.
You recently collaborated with director, artist, and writer Miranda July on a collection called “Classics” for WELCOMECOMPANIONS, which “takes the phenomenon of a named bag to its most extreme.” The bag, The Miranda, is simple and unassuming from the outside, but inside there are specialized compartments for eccentric things like a single almond and a tissue-sized security blanket. Who else do you think would be an interesting person to collaborate with on a super-custom namesake bag?
It’s interesting you can learn so much about someone via what they carry around in their handbag. The Miranda really evolved in the design process from being just a namesake bag to being the limited edition art piece that it is now. I’d love to know what Joan Didion or Sophie Calle carry around in their handbags.
What would one find inside a Laurel bag?
I don’t know that there is anything particularly unexpected in my handbag . . . up until recently I carried around a two-dollar bill that I got 15 years ago on a visit to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia. The house is full of all these customizations specifically to Jefferson’s day-to-day life- such as his bed existing in a the wall between his study and his bedroom—so that on one side of the bed he got up in his study and the on the other side he got up in the bedroom—this was in case he wanted to get up and just start working immediately.
You have an educational and professional background in architecture and teach at USC’s school of architecture. What new ideas or projects are you and your students currently exploring?
With my students I’m most interested in providing ways of seeing and thinking that pertain to design. Most of my studios are about getting the students think outside of pre-conceived notions or conventions.
Los Angeles has served as your base of operations for many years. What is it about the city that keeps you inspired, or helps facilitate your means of production?
I constantly find Los Angeles inspiring from the oddities of the built environment to the culture of narrative and make believe that originates here. It’s also still a center of production which means you can find nearby almost any material you can think of. It’s hard to imagine trying to make things in a place where every material has to be ordered and shipped in.
What’s on the horizon for WELCOMECOMPANIONS/WELCOMEPROJECTS in 2015?
WELCOMECOMPANIONS has a new collection launching in February called Wrong Side of the Bed, which I’m pretty excited about!
Put a rare book in the hands of author Bradford Morrow and he will tell you about it like a sommelier discussing fine wine and handle it like a newborn kitten. Morrow has devoted his life to literature, working since his 20s in a variety of facets of the industry. After attending grad school at Yale, Morrow ran a rare bookshop in Santa Barbara, California, which he later sold in order to launch the innovative literary journal, Conjunctions.
Morrow’s seventh novel, The Forgers (Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic, November 2014) draws upon his area of expertise, telling the story of forgers in the rare book trade. Our narrator is Will, a semi-repentant and publicly shamed forger—erudite, perhaps a bit nerdy, and sly as an alley cat. His lover Meghan’s brother, a book collector named Adam Diehl, is discovered half-murdered and missing his hands. When Adam dies, his hands and killer are nowhere to be found. As Will tries to recover his reputation from his unsavory (if esoteric) past in order to build a stable home life with the grieving Meghan, he is stalked by another forger whose abilities rival his own.
Morrow is wily in his ability to tinker with genre. The reader who appreciates finer details is rewarded with a trail of narrative lacunae the size of a pinprick and an exquisite tone that is just barely, barely uneasy. Morrow knows how to lay canvas on a frame and stretch it just until the fabric is so thin, one cannot tell whether one is looking at reality or fabrication. The portrait of Will, as he tries to put his life back in order after being exposed as a highly skilled forger, is moving. Will is both an artist and an addict, and his disgrace saturates the page. The deeper thread that drives Will is the artistic urge to have a hand (ha) in beauty and history, and thus much of the novel can be read as a series of meditations on art itself.
I met with Morrow in his Greenwich Village apartment (stuffed floor to ceiling with books) to discuss The Forgers, the idiosyncratic book trade, and what a little imagination can do to alter history.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
How did you get involved in the world of rare books, which inspired The Forgers?
Growing up as I did in a household where there were very few books, I suppose I’ve spent the rest of my life overcompensating by surrounding myself with all kinds of books, from beat-up paperbacks to rare first editions. I’ve done almost everything with a book you can do, from writing them to binding, selling, editing, publishing, translating, collecting, and teaching them. All of these are facets of my lifelong love affair with books.
My first job in a used bookshop had more to do with handling reading copies of classics from every field than with rare books, although I was always intrigued by the volumes the owner kept in a glass-fronted cabinet. They possessed a kind of magic that to this day I can’t quite explain. When I went to graduate school on a fellowship to Yale, I somehow got it in my head that rather than spending my money on typical necessities like groceries, I would acquire first editions of some of the 18th century books I was reading for class. I persuaded myself that reading them in original editions might bring me closer to the text somehow. There was a very dangerous and wonderful bookstore near campus at the time called C. A. Stonehill, and so I bought a mixed edition of Tristram Shandy in the original nine volumes, three of which were signed by Sterne for copyright purposes, as well as a set of Fielding’s Tom Jones in contemporary speckled calf, six volumes. Believe it or not, these were relatively inexpensive at the time, although I did wind up moonlighting in a pretty sketchy Italian restaurant in order to pay off my book debts. After I moved on from Yale, I got a job at a rare bookshop out in California that specialized in modern first editions and that was when I really got interested in rare books. I left the shop after a while and started my own business with some borrowed money. Before I knew it I was in my mid-20s and running a pretty substantial rare book trade of modern first editions in Santa Barbara, California. After putting a lot of effort into that business for four or five years, I sold off most of my inventory and moved to New York so I could start the literary journal Conjunctions.
Have you known any forgers in your dealings?
I hope not!
There is an element of fetishism of rare books suggested in The Forgers. Is that what the rare books community is really like?
No, not always. Scholarship is one of the leading reasons people and certainly institutions collect. Still, every book collector has his or her own reason for participating in what Nicholas Basbanes calls “the gentle madness” of collecting. The collectors I find most intriguing and even endearing are those who accumulate books—books they’ve read and cherished—because it somehow completes an essential part of their life. I have a friend whose rationale for buying signed first editions of his favorite books is to be a little closer to the author—a book that the author actually laid her hand on makes the experience more tactile or vital to him. Those who collect rare books as an investment may be involved in folly because writers go in and out of favor. Back in the early part of the last century, writers like John Galsworthy, for instance, who we rarely talk about anymore, were highly collected. So collecting books is a really tricky investment. But finally, book collecting, like collecting anything, involves a lot of personal imperative, the first and foremost of which is a visceral as well as intellectual love for what is being collected.
Meghan—the narrator’s lover—is the owner of a bookshop. Were characters in The Forgers inspired by personas you know from the book trades?
This is the book I had to research the least because in a way I spent my whole adult life researching it without even knowing it. In retrospect, it seems strange that it never occurred to me before to write about this milieu. So no, none of the characters in the book are drawn from a single individual in the bookselling world, but there are definitely some composites. In Meghan, I wanted to recreate a little bit of my experience with a man I knew when I was going to college in Boulder, Colorado. Dick Schwartz, proprietor of Stage House II, was a real mentor to me. Back then I didn’t have much money, so I would just take books, carefully chosen, and pay him on time when I could. One day he said to me, “Hey Brad, do you know how much money you owe me?” And I said, “Yeah, I do.” He said, “How would you like to work some of it off? Here’s a broom, go upstairs, and do some sweeping and you’ll see there’s shelving and alphabetizing to do up there.” It was as if Dick read an invisible sign hung around my neck, Will Work for Books. I can’t tell you how happy I was to sweep and shelve and pack books for shipment. That said, I tend not to base many characters on specific people. I find it a confining rather than useful approach to character creation.
Landscape is important in your work, and many of your stories take place in bucolic settings, but much of The Forgers takes place in New York City, where you’ve lived for decades.
I’ve lived in downtown New York now since 1981, so I didn’t have to do any particular research on the East Village or Gramercy Park. Every year I attend the New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the Armory, so, again, walking around in my mind through that show with my narrator and a nemesis of his, I didn’t even have to close my eyes to imagine it. I know what it smells like. I know the lighting. I know the dealers there. I didn’t have to give it a lot of thought. It came very naturally.
Bucolic settings are more characteristic of your narratives, and some of how you handle landscape reminds me of Willa Cather’s writing. You’ve written a bit about her, and like Cather, you’re familiar with and affected by both the American Midwest and NYC.
Willa Cather and I share a love of landscape. Landscape to each of us is a kind of character. Nature is interactive and often willful in our books. To me, My Ántonia is as much about the Nebraska prairielands as the pioneers who populate it. My own novels such as The Diviner’s Tale, Ariel’s Crossing, and Trinity Fields are much more landscape-oriented than The Forgers, in part because much of the action occurs in natural environments. In The Forgers, the nature-based scenes in Ireland are invested with a quality of interactivity between people and the natural world. For instance, images of the night sky with its wheeling stars and constellations offer the narrator a kind of magisterial, eternal counterpoint to the transient, nasty machinations of those running around in the darkness terrifying him. Though some of the most violent acts in the novel occur in Ireland, there remains for me a kind of quasi-mythological aspect to the landscape there. Whereas New York scenes and those in Montauk are very tactile and “real” and have a dimensionality, scenes in Ireland verge on nightmare. Ironic, since Ireland is meant to be a safe haven where Meghan and Will are hoping to find peace.
Something that interested me about the parts of The Forgers that take place in New York is the foreboding sense of being watched or followed. I thought about how cameras are now all over lower Manhattan and how the city has been a Petri dish in a way for the privacy wars. Did this mindset impact your portrayal of the city?
I heard recently that you can walk from Battery Park to Harlem and be caught on surveillance video the entire time. It’s my understanding that more and more building owners are compelled to install cameras in foyers, elevators, and front doors for fear of lawsuits if the property isn’t outfitted with surveillance.
The Forgers begins with the line, “They never found his hands,” which is prelude, of course, to a murder. I was thinking, If you wanted to deprive a forger from pursuing his questionable art, what would hurt him the most? Taking away his pens, inks, papers? He could find more of those. No, the answer is his hands. Like a concert pianist, it requires years of practice and great skill to be a master forger. So when accounting for that murder (about which I wouldn’t want to go into details for obvious reasons) I had to think about those nosy cameras, too. There weren’t quite as many of them in New York around the time The Forgers is set as there are now, but the murderer still had to find a way to get around being seen. Comes with the territory, if you want to avoid capture.
The characters in the book who are forging are also sort of classic examples of New York paranoids. But we’re living in a world now in which everyone is paranoid.
The forgers in the book, Henry Slader and Will, and perhaps Adam as well, have all earned their paranoia. They would be crazy not to be paranoid. What’s that line by Delmore Schwartz? “Even paranoiacs have real enemies”? Even though Will’s past has caught up with him, so to say, and he makes an effort to reform, he must look over his shoulder, as the past is a hard thing to shake. A phrase by another author, William Faulkner, comes to mind—“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In The Forgers, that concept is very much in play in a host of different ways. For one, the whole notion of forgery involves messing with the integrity of the past, changing the past by creating ideas and objects that are supposedly a part of the past but in fact didn’t exist before. And in a world where the reliability of the so-called objective past is put in question, paranoia about what’s real and what isn’t becomes central to how life and “reality” is viewed. So, yes. Paranoia and the terror of not being in control of one’s fate are very much a part of this narrative. There’s even a section that opens with the line “Dying is a dangerous business,” followed by a brief meditation on how, when you are dead, you lose control of how people perceive who you were and what you did. Death is open season on you, in other words. That’s classic paranoia at full throttle, I think.
You are sometimes labeled a mystery writer, but what especially delights me in the revelation of a mystery in your works is that you are a writer who will reward the detail-oriented reader. For example, you only name your narrator once.
I don’t really think of myself as a mystery writer, as such, and tend not to play by the traditional rules of mystery or crime fiction. I’ve always been considered a literary writer, whatever that means, but have in recent years gotten very interested in working with genre, which I consider a profoundly rich form of literature. Having said that, I do very much adore detail, and it’s just in my nature to bring my narratives to life with as much nuance and meaningful detail as I possibly can.
As for Will, he does not like his name. I was halfway through writing the book before realizing he hadn’t given his name. It didn’t take much deliberation to figure out why he didn’t, but I wanted him to offer it up, if grudgingly, just once. I thought Will was appropriate because he’s willful. Also, there’s a famous 19th-century forger named William Ireland—one of my all-time favorite forgers—who created Shakespeare (another Will) letters to give to his father. Ireland’s father was a Shakespeare scholar and collector, and since there are only a handful of bona fide Shakespeare signatures, young Will Ireland saw an opening to create some ersatz manuscripts to enhance his dad’s collection and thus please his father. He got away with it for quite a while. Some great forgers such as Ireland and Thomas Chatterton are actually collected in their own right.
Will, the narrator, is reliable, but as the novel progresses, the tension that develops is a did-he-or-didn’t-he-do-it thing. Of course, he’s also among other forgers who are just as suspect.
Well, the reliability or unreliability of the narrator is very similar to forging. It all has to do with imagination and making things up. If you’re good at it, you can get away with it. There’s a line in another of my books, “It takes a lot of truth to tell a lie.” If you stop and think about it, for a lie to work, it has to be mostly truth because if it’s just a pure fabrication, nobody’s going to believe that lie. But if you frame the lie in truth, people will be inclined to believe. So when people in this novel are forging, masters that they are, they know it’s imperative that their forgeries are grounded in truth. For example, to properly forge Conan Doyle papers, as we see in the novel, the forger would have to have done extensive biographical research and have an empathic knowledge of how the author’s mind worked. He would have to really know the period, work with materials that are as close as possible to the period. Nibs, ink mixtures, everything has to sing authenticity.
Forgery is also in a way an act of betrayal, and betrayal is also a theme of this book.
I think that when my characters, and especially in Will’s case, are making forgeries, they honestly believe they’re bettering the world. We on the outside may consider this a rather insane thought, but if you can forge an interesting document well enough, add something intriguing to the history of literature, for instance, can make something great out of the ether, then it’s not impossible to delude yourself into thinking this is a good thing. It is, I guess, an elaborate form of self-betrayal to think like that.
But betrayal has a role in almost all novels. Betrayal—in politics, in love, in business, you name it—is one of those things that humans unfortunately do. It’s an activity that sparks a crisis, which in turn can often be central to an interesting narrative. I think in The Forgers, Will in particular has the capacity to believe that he’s not doing it for the money and that he’s just doing it because he needs to. Much as I am fond of him, I’m fully aware he’s a deceiver. He’s also a writer who creates narratives that didn’t exist before. He loves going back in time and mucking with it. He adores laying claim to literary history, to biography, and bending it to his will. And if you can bend history perfectly enough, the original historical fact becomes wrinkled, complicated.
I’ve always been interested in memory and how memory is a function of an original perception that has been shaded by desire—the desire to reshape the moment that was just lived into something more palatable and fulfilling. I don’t want to play his analyst, but I do think a lot of the forgeries Will makes are, in a way, in (admittedly twisted) honor of his mother because she was a great calligrapher, his teacher and inspiration.
Will says at one point, “History is subjective. History is alterable. History is finally little more than modeling clay in a very warm room.” We know that Will’s character is morally shaky, but I found this train of thought about history insightful.
The Western world’s very first historian, Herodotus, is called The Father of Lies. Why? Because he was really a writer of historical fictions as much as anything. Where he couldn’t verify, or if he needed to fill in lacunae in an account of some war, say, in North Africa, he simply made things up and approximated. Objective, verifiable fact is, in the everyday world, as rare as hen’s teeth (maybe rarer, since there might be a genetically altered hen out there somewhere with incisors and molars, who knows?). Once people armed with imagination and predisposition witness anything, it morphs. I’m not saying we’re all delusional, by the way, but we are to some degree creatures of approximation, certainly when it comes to emotions. So yeah, to be sure, one of the themes of this book is to look at the idea of what is real and what is illusion, what is authentic and what is a fabrication meant to trick the eye into believing it is authentic.
Which implies something intrepid about art. The Forgers is asking, in a way, what is the role of imagination in the world?
Imagination is what we use to get through the day. It funds and nourishes us. Even when we’re asleep, imagination is firing up our dreams. Imagination is the prime mover of any individual’s life. You can imagine that there is a god you will worship that is your main reason for living and breathing. You can imagine that there is no god and you’re not going to have anything to do with such a crazy idea, and you’re going to imagine a way to be ethical without having to follow an ancient rulebook. And what I find fascinating is that you can imagine yourself as being very, very innocent and a very good person, and you’re not. There are a multitude of things that shape an individual life, but imagination has to be at that top of that chain.
Protagonists in your books tend to behave badly in order to protect something beautiful or special or good. Will, for example, rationalizes making forgeries in a variety of ways, one of which is convincing himself that he does it in order to create a good life with Meghan—and their life together is indeed kind of lovely. I thought in a weird way that might be what art does—keeps things that are beautiful and precious and strange, and protects them for us, but sometimes at a price.
And enlivens them, because most artists I know, not just writers, work in order to share with others, the ultimate purpose being to offer a gift to someone else, probably someone you won’t ever meet, so they can share in your experience, dreams, ideas, vision, life. I’m not the kind of writer who is particularly interested in drawing the reader into embracing any philosophy or worldview but I do like the simple idea of building something as best I can, and sharing it with those who might want to commune.
If you’re a fiction writer, you’re making things up, but it’s also important to be absolutely truthful, as honest as you can be, sentence by sentence, and every word has to be the truthful word. You have to create a mathematics of truth that constitutes a book and it has to answer to itself or else it’s not going to add up. I don’t like fiction that smells like fiction. There’s a certain stench. I love fiction that makes me feel I’m truly experiencing a fact. Obviously, I’m not wedded to only realist fiction or historical fiction. I love Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, but that book is just golden in terms of the truth page by page.
Does this relate to your more recent tendency to write in the mystery genre?
When you think about it, everything is steeped in mystery. Many novels are crime novels in the sense that they explore the human capacity for subversive behavior, harmful behavior that goes full-bore against the grain of societal mores. A lot of fiction investigates subtle criminalities that occur in everyday life. Not necessarily robbing a bank or shooting a bodega clerk, but the moral equivalent of such rotten, even evil behavior, is often at play in the narrative arc of much fiction. Nursery rhymes, fables, and fairy tales often portray some of the most diabolical, violent, and deplorable acts humanity is capable of. London Bridge is forever falling down and don’t try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, for he’s a lost cause!
As for your own process, it sounds as if you tend to write quickly?
Sometimes I write very slowly. But The Forgers was white heat fast, written in a matter of months. Otto Penzler, my editor, runs Mysterious Press, and he has a wonderful series called Bibliomysteries, for which he asked me to write a short story. That’s when I got that opening line about the hands, and I asked Otto if I could write about forgers. He said, “Absolutely, just so long as there are books and there’s a murder.” Those two elements are the premise. I started with a short story last year in the spring, some pages and notes. It shot way past the 50 pages. When I finally gave it to him, I gave him 86 pages, but I had already moved on past 120 pages. I said, “This isn’t all,” and I showed him the rest, and he asked me if I could get all of it to him by the end of the year. Every day I got up and couldn’t wait to get back into the forger world, so it was done ahead of schedule. When I handed in the novel, I turned around the next day and wrote another bibliomystery called The Nature of My Inheritance, as a way of fulfilling my original promise to Otto. That one came out this past summer.
What are you working on now?
I’ve been working on a book for many years now that I am finally finishing. It’s called The Prague Sonata, and is a novel in which the holograph manuscript of the second movement of an unattributed, magnificent piano sonata from the late eighteenth century surfaces in New York. Its owner, Irena, is a Czech immigrant dying of cancer who passes it into the care of a young musicologist, Meta Taverner, after telling the hair-raising story of how it came to be in her hands. In 1939, when the Nazis came to Prague to establish “the protectorate,” this manuscript, which had been inherited by a woman named Otylie after World War I, was deliberately broken up in three parts to save it from Reich confiscation. Oytlie gave one movement to her husband, who perished into the underground, another to her best friend Irena, and she kept one part for herself. In short, Meta’s quest to locate the missing movements of the sonata takes her to Prague, London, and elsewhere. It’s a novel that has involved doing research in places as far apart geographically and culturally as the Czech Republic and the hinterlands of Nebraska, not to mention endless reading and consultation with experts about Beethoven and other composers from Mozart and Haydn forward. I hope to have it completed by year’s end.
Cover art by Gary Taxali; Blab World #2
Monte Beauchamp is the award-winning, Chicago-based founder, editor, art director, and designer of BLAB! magazine, a comics anthology first published in 1986 as a self-published fanzine, with book projects including The Life & Times of R. Crumb (St Martin’s Press), Striking Images: Vintage Matchbook Cover Art (Chronicle Books), The Devil in Design (Fantagraphics), among others. BLAB!, in its current form of Blab World, is now a highly-regarded venue for contemporary artists working in sequential and comic art, graphic design, illustration, painting, and printmaking—a love song to these underground worlds often placed on the periphery of the visual arts. Monte teamed up with photographer Paul Elledge to produce BLAB! magazine: Inside Out, a project in zingmagazine #21 in which the artwork within BLAB! finds its way out into the cold, cruel streets of Chicago. I met Monte for the first time in 2010 at the opening of the outstanding BLAB! exhibition he organized at the prestigious Society of Illustrators in New York. I’m now fortunate to once again get to opportunity to speak to Monte about BLAB!, his project in zingmagazine, the world of print, and his newest book, Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World, published by Simon & Schuster, which features top illustrators telling the stories of sixteen monumental figures in the world of comic art and pop culture, including Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, The creators of Superman, R. Crumb, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Herge, Osamu Tezuka, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Hirschfeld, Edward Gorey, Chas Addams, Rodolphe Topffer, Lynd Ward, and Hugh Hefner.
Interview by Brandon Johnson
What did you set out to achieve in founding BLAB! magazine?
There were no grand plans whatsoever. How BLAB! came about was a total fluke. One evening after work back in the mid-’80s, I began bellyaching about shenanigans taking place at work where I was employed as an art director. To help take my mind off it, my wife at the time suggested I draw a comic book, which I didn’t have the desire to do, but several days later the idea of creating a fanzine about comics flashed in my head.
I had always felt that if it weren’t for MAD magazine, the sixties counterculture may never have happened. MAD ingrained in its readers the ruse of advertising and the distrust of corporate authority. MAD‘s publisher, William M. Gaines, also issued a very fascinating line of comic books known as E.C.’s, featuring incredible page-turners such as Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, and Two-Fisted Tales, which were discontinued during the great comic book witch hunt of the mid-1950s.
So I decided to contact the counterculture cartoonists themselves to see if they’d write essays about what influence, if any, MAD and the rest of the EC line had on their work. And much to my surprise nearly all of them gave the project a thumbs up; they agreed to blab about it—which in turn gave way to the title BLAB!
So I self-published a one-shot limited edition of 1500 hand-numbered copies which I schlepped around to independent record, book, and comic book stores and placed on consignment. I also placed a few ads in several comic book publications.
Not long after, I went to the post office box on a Saturday morning and it was jam packed with orders; it was like this for a good solid month and then came a lull in orders—and then four to six weeks later, the post office box again became jam packed with letters, this time with letters from fans raving about BLAB! and inquiring when the next issue would be out, which in turn inspired me to attempt a second issue.
The same week that BLAB! #2 was printed happened to coincide with Chicago’s big summer comic book convention, so I brought a handful of copies to show around hoping to drum up sales. Kitchen Sink Press—which published the work of several of my heroes: R. Crumb of Zap Comix fame; Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of MAD; and Will Eisner, considered by many to be the father of the graphic novel—was exhibiting there so I gave a complimentary copy to its founder Denis Kitchen, who flips through it, and immediately offered me a publishing deal—which blew my mind. Right then and there we sealed the deal with a handshake.
Denis tripled BLAB!‘s press run, expanded its page count, and we also reformatted it as a square-bound, digest-sized paperback. I began adding more comic book stories by the incredible Joe Coleman, Zap artist Spain Rodriguez, and a talented newcomer—Richard Sala. I also assembled a compendium on the influence R. Crumb had on popular culture (which 10 years later was expanded into a trade paperback published by St. Martin’s Press—The Life and Times of R. Crumb). That same issue also sported a magnificent cover by RAW magazine artist—Charles Burns. Partnering with Kitchen Sink Press put BLAB! on the map; from the incredibly brisk sales, I knew we were on to something. Four years later, issue #7 of BLAB! won a Harvey Award (the comics industry’s equivalent of a Grammy) for Best New Anthology of the year.
So that’s how BLAB! got rolling; it was never something I set out to do—it was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I had no inkling whatsoever that BLAB! would take on a life of its own and evolve into the full-color, hardback compendium of comics, illustration, found graphics, and articles that it is today.
The Rapture, Ryan Heska; Blab World #1
How does a typical issue of BLAB! come together? Do you always have specific artists in mind for each issue?
Nowadays the process is very nonlinear, intuitive, one that starts with a single inspirational idea and builds from there. For example, I was walking around downtown Chicago one afternoon when a humongous storm hit. Massive gusts of wind were whipping all sorts of objects about and as I ducked for cover, off in the distance I saw a funnel of garbage swirling about in the air being sucked skyward. It was an eerie yet awe-inspiring sight, which set me thinking about The Rapture—and then a scene of people rising skyward interpreted by BLAB! artist Ryan Heshka flashed in my head. So I ran the concept by Ryan who dug the idea, and created a masterpiece. Ryan’s painting was so inspiring I began asking other artists to create “end-of-the world” scenarios that I compiled in a feature titled “Artpocalypse” for the first issue of BLAB!‘s sister publication BLAB WORLD, which in turn set the tone for the comic strips and feature that appeared in that of volume.
You curated a project in zingmagazine #21 called “BLAB! magazine: Inside Out” which features various works that appeared in issues of BLAB! in different formats and mediums and photographed these in outdoor environs around Chicago. It’s sort of a magazine within a magazine—a peek into the world of BLAB! What inspired you to present BLAB! in this way?
Actually zingmagazine did. One aspect of zingmagazine that I always admired was it’s offbeat curatorial nature, which inspired photographer Paul Elledge and myself to present BLAB! in a similar fashion. Rather than shoot the artwork in a hoity-toity setting—such as a gallery—we took a less precious approach and photographed the artwork itself sticking out of garbage dumpsters, in alleys, and on the streets of Chicago.
Adolf’s Aberration; four-page story by Nora Krug; Blab World #2
Your new book Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World is a collection of biographies of 16 legendary cartoonists presented through an equally graphic medium as created by other illustrators. There’s a double curation here—first the subjects, and then their corresponding artists. How did you conceive of this idea, and how did you select each group?
In late 2007, I was fishing around for an idea for a graphic novel to produce and the media blitz surrounding the release of the final Harry Potter novel earlier that year set me thinking about the far-reaching effects fictional characters can have on the world. I began thinking of popular literature equivalents from generations before. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came to mind as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, followed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan—whose successful spin-off as a newspaper comic strip set me thinking about cartoon characters of equal iconic stature. Disney’s Mickey Mouse flashed in my head, followed by Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, followed by Siegel and Shuster’s Superman—the archetype for all superheroes. And then it dawned on me—had it not been for iconic comic characters such as these, the entire cartoon industry as we know it today wouldn’t exist. So I pitched my New York City agent on a collection of short-story biographies told in the very medium the industry itself had spawned—the comic strip—about the monumental creators who pioneered the entire cartoon medium—from syndicated newspaper comic strips to comic books, manga, graphic novels, caricatures, gag cartoons, children’s books, and animation. She loved the idea and that’s how Masterful Marks: Cartoonists Who Changed the World came about.
Any particularly difficult editorial decisions in this process?
Such a grandiose undertaking is an obstacle course, there are always editorial hurdles to get over, roadblocks to maneuver around. Fortunately my agent sealed a deal with a wonderful, seasoned editor at Simon & Schuster—Anjali Singh. Anjali, what can I say except that she is an incredibly insightful, intuitive, and brilliant senior editor who has a knack for signing fresh and original projects. For example, she brought the graphic novel Persepolis to America, which became a hit and was turned into a feature length film. Anjali turned out to be a dream editor to partner with; we really worked well together and she backed me 100% on the team of illustrators and cartoonists I assembled—fabulous seasoned talents by the likes of Drew Friedman, Peter Kuper, Sergio Ruzzier, Nora Krug, Arnold Roth, Greg Clarke, Nicolas Debon, and so forth. As Masterful Marks was nearing completion disaster struck—Anjali, along with several dozen other Simon & Schuster employees, were laid off. When the news arrived that we wouldn’t be ushering Masterful Marks into the world together, I was devastated. Completely. The very person championing my book was gone and all sorts of turmoil can happen when a book is orphaned. Fortunately, the project landed in the lap of a junior editor who got the project back on track. And then as we were completing the book, what happens? He takes a position with another publisher, and Masterful Marks landed in the lap of yet another junior editor, Brit Hvide, who did an admirable job ushering the book into print. After seven years, Masterful Marks was released this past September and received incredible accolades and reviews from the press. For example, it was included in Entertainment Weekly’s “The Must List,” plugged in USA Today, The Huffington Post, and Library Journal. A most wonderful and totally unexpected perk was receiving a letter from Hugh Hefner (also featured in the book) stating that Masterful Marks was “… a grand compilation.”
Dispatches From Oblivion; four-page story by Greg Clarke; Blab World #2
Why do you continue to make print books in this dematerializing world of media?
Well, there’s a caveat to all of this. As long as I’m allowed to edit, design, and package visually content-driven books that I have an intense passion for, that I believe in one-thousand percent, I will continue to create books. It was a long, arduous road to get here. Looking back on the unexpected twists and turns my professional career has taken, I sometimes ponder that had I remained in advertising, I’d have a house all paid off, a hefty savings account, and my dream car—a light green ’56 Chevy with a 3 speed column shift to tool around in. Yet, on the other hand, a rewarding career isn’t always about money, it’s about the love of the game.
The Danish artist on the “puzzle” of art and what (good) art does—and doesn’t—do for the world
What good does art do the world anyway? If you wanna save humanity, join Doctors Without Borders, is the advice of trending Danish artist Thomas Øvlisen. But if you wanna be an artist, make good art that facilitates contemplation, work hard, and don’t try to be like Axl Rose. Øvlisen’s work is a playful, sophisticated peculiarity in a market bloated with hack abstraction like so many cronuts in the gut of a gluten-free health-foodie fallen off the wagon. Øvlisen’s development of a visual puzzle is based on the raw material of childhood memories and he thus explores memory as its own experience. Moreover, Øvlisen embeds cultural criticism in his work—slyly recognizing “the square as a symbol of western culture,” for example.
With a show on the horizon at Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery in September, Øvlisen and I had a conversation via Skype about the state of abstract art and the state of humanity.
Interview by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
You’re recognized as an abstract artist whose sensibilities are unusual to the history of abstract art.
Well. I never considered myself an abstract painter. For my degree project at RISD, I expressed abstraction as a symbol of our culture, rather than a self-referencing painting technique. You find abstract art everywhere, even on coffee mugs. So you can use abstraction as a symbol of our culture. It’s a glorified aesthetic. Since the beginning I was interested in breaking down the genres in art or ignoring them at the least, so I paid equal attention to all 5 visible sides of my paintings.
These ideas gave me an excuse for making abstract paintings. I quickly learned that I also liked making beautiful paintings or good abstract paintings, and I developed the ”satisfy my childhood memory” technique. I have always believed in good art.
For your project in the last issue of zing, you asked ten artists to contribute a drawing from memory of a childhood object. What is your “satisfy a childhood memory” technique?
When I started making abstract paintings, I thought about trying to satisfy, for example, a childhood memory of growing up on a lake and being in the lake and looking at the trees in the background. So I started doing these abstract landscapes that only I could identify. But when I could identify that aura and space, then I called the painting “done.” My aim was to get that feeling and that specific landscape recollected.
The people who contributed to the project in zing are artists of all genres who have influenced me and made me who I am today. I thought it was quite amazing that, Margrethe Sørensen, a woman in her seventies made a drawing on a project her father had done was she was a child. Dike Blair did an actual story on how scared he was in his first childhood memory. It’s always interesting to define drawing and obviously these artists did everything but draw. The fun thing is that the director from Los Angeles, Brian Lee Hughes who works with film, was the only one who actually did a line drawing from memory, which is what I expected to receive from everyone, and he did a great drawing too.
To return to another statement you just made, can you explain more about what you mean by “abstraction as a symbol of our culture”?
I think that at any given point, art is used to critique our culture, whether it’s the artist or the culture looking back in history. For example, if we want to understand what people were doing and thinking during the Renaissance, we look at the art they were making.
To me the square is very symbolic of western culture. It doesn’t exist in nature. The prime monument of what we do is put a painting over a couch in the suburbs, solidifying one’s achievement of being the happiest family on earth. It is the perfect symbol (monument) of a retarded culture (system) on autopilot. And abstraction, maybe through Cold War propaganda, has become the symbol of our freedom (coercion of others) and way of living.
What was the process for making your earliest works?
How I started making abstract paintings more or less happened by chance. While I was a student at RISD, I spilled black enamel paint and instead of wiping it up, I painted everything in my studio the same color. Then everything I was working on became abstract. In my degree project, the paintings were all abstract, sanded to the point of almost no paint on the canvas. The idea was a simulation of nature. The effect of the elements raging on our cultural golden calf. The paint I had spilled was enamel and I my sanding was that of the auto body shop. Working with cars or mopeds is another childhood thing.
So when I ventured into image making in my first show, I exhibited the silhouette of Monument Valley with five graphically receding stars above them ingrained in the paint layering. I quickly realized that this use of imagery on my shaped and five-sided wall works rendered them canvas-like. They were just bearers of visual identifiable imagery. The sculptural part disappeared.
Art making in school is like putting together a puzzle. So, for the Monument Valley exhibit, I had appropriated the process of an auto body shop and I had simulated the weather and the elements. I used Monument Valley as the perfect image because it is a natural landscape named “Monument” and it’s the perfect example of what is wrong with our cultural belief in dominance over nature. It’s like when we cut a big hole in the biggest sequoia and then are like, “Look! We can drive through it! But oops, it died. Hey, let’s do it to another one!”
Basically now I’m doing what I like.
I always did what I liked. I always felt it was the only thing to do as an artist. To honestly pour myself into my work. It used to be my childhood, but now I have kids and a great family and I pull from the many joys and strains in my everyday life. The process and materials are transparent. You get what you see and feel, and my works are not trying to be something else. They are not trying to create an illusion. Now I don’t really care about explaining it. I don’t see my work as something to get. I want people to experience it and like their own experience.
Do you think with the rise of Internet and the tech boom that progress/devolution in culture is speeding up? How does cultural speed relate to the kind of art that is produced?
For me, I’ve always focused on making really slow art. It takes a lot of time for me to make work, and it takes a lot of time for the viewer to experience it. There are so many layers of the work and the materials change with the lighting. Art can do that—give you a break. Art can do a lot more than that too. But it is a place for contemplation. I think artists are the last idealists. I guess there’s something kind of naïve about being idealist these days because it’s tough times for humanity.
On your blog, you do espouse opinions that imply you really do believe in the efficacy of art and its place in the world.
I really do, but I don’t try to explain that. Some artworks can just hit you with awe, but I just want to enjoy it.
How does art confront the terrible things that happen in the world?
It can, but I think it’s very difficult to make art that doesn’t border on propaganda. If you make work on such a big topic, it’s easy to ridicule both the art and the topic.
I sometimes wonder if I should just join Doctors Without Borders. I don’t think I could save the world through my art.
I don’t know if it’s escapism, but entertainment isn’t bad in tough times. Even if it’s just room for contemplation, and a place to free your mind from other terrible stuff.
Of course art is central to humanity. It’s cross-cultural and is a unique habit of our species.
It’s like smoking. There’s no tribe that doesn’t smoke. Art and smoking.
But I agree. I don’t think art in any direct way saves the world.
A great song can keep spirits high. Sometimes it’s just the simple things.
If I can make work in terms of the aura of the work, if I can fill my work with love and happiness, it will communicate love and happiness the other way around. There’s no way to prove that, but this is the pure essence of art for me.
That’s kind of an old idea of what art is—an object imbued with some sort of magic.
I also think that the whole lifespan of the object acquires aura. I don’t think that the process stops with the artist. The work takes on its own life.
The Romans and the Greeks had the idea of the muse—that genius came from the outside. The artist was considered great and honored, but it wasn’t doubted that his genius came from the outside, which I think takes a lot of pressure off the artist.
I think culture in general is still very modernist in its way of thinking. So obviously what’s more important to culture is the artist, the individual who is the genius. That’s not the way I see it and that’s one of the reasons I like abstract art. When you see my work, your experience of it is just as important as my making it. Your accumulated memory becomes a part of experiencing my sculpture. There are shapes and forms in the work that aren’t quite recognizable but that are evocative so maybe you think, “Have I seen this before?” and then perhaps you start to play with your mind trying to figure out what’s going on.
Furthermore, art is an old idea! I am not so sure art changes that much. Content and context are relative terms to experience and production.
On your blog, you wrote about the “idealized image of the artist in western culture.”
Mary Bergstein was my degree professor at RISD and I wrote a thesis paper about the role of the artist based on modernist writing by Emile Zola. I was engaging with the idea that the artist is supposed to suffer, which has become a financial issue. The artist is supposed to give up his entire life in order to make a masterpiece and in reality most modernist artists came from pretty middle class, upper class families. They were able to make as much as doctors.
It’s maybe easier to talk about rock stars. Nobody has to act like Axl Rose, but half of Brooklyn does. In reality, rock stars turn 25 and start doing yoga. Then by 30 they have kids. Then they go on stage and look and act like they’re 15.
It is never sexy to be an addict.
What is your advice for emerging artists?
Don’t do drugs. And in the end, persistence is key. If you really, really want it, just keep on keeping on. The great thing about New York is that there are many pinnacles in the art world. Gagosian is one of them, and that’s about a lot of money and hype. If you don’t care about that, then there’s luckily a lot of people who support other kinds of art.
You have a show upcoming at Klaus von Nichtssagend in September. What’s that about?
It’s a series of new sculptures. Simple, slanted cubes that happened really randomly and just started growing on me. They’re light and playful, and at the same time they’re heavy looking cubes. Then I have these flying buttress things that I lean up against the wall. And a few of my boards (DIY surfboards are another childhood thing). I think it’s a more calm and mature exhibition of my work. A little bit less experimental (this isn’t true, I have been told—it just feels that way to me). I’m really excited about it.
During the late 70s, artist Kitty Brophy struggled in a male-dominated art world while falling in love with one of the rising stars of the downtown scene
EDITORIAL NOTE: Lessons of New York is an oral narrative series told in parts and based primarily on interviews with artists who were involved in the Lower East Side scene during the 70s and 80s.
Recorded and edited by Rachel Cole Dalamangas
NEW YORK, 1978
KENNY SCHARF: My first girlfriend in New York was Kitty Brophy. She went to high school with Larry Ashton, my roommate in Santa Barbara at University of California. She had just moved to New York to go to school at Parsons. Larry came to visit, and this Arizona girl, I met her and she immediately moved in with me at my apartment on 55th Street. That night we met, we went to of all places—we were pretending we were sophisticated—to The Plaza for drinks. She grabbed me under the table and she was like a crazy, fun girl. She’s a great artist.
KITTY BROPHY: I had a lot of premonitions and psychic moments when I was young. I always knew I was going to live in New York City. I knew I was going to be an artist. I knew I was going to be a model. I just knew it would all happen.
After I was accepted to all these art schools, I narrowed the decision down between Parsons and RISD. I knew RISD would be a much better school, but I wanted that glamorous New York City life. In a way, I knew I was making the wrong decision about art school, but was making the right decision about where to live and I did have an amazing life in the city.
My mom put me on a plane in Phoenix, Arizona. I was 18 years old. My aunt Mickey lived in Princeton, and her husband was a famous writer, and they picked me up at the airport and took me to my dorm and dropped me off. Mickey was an actress and had lived in New York when she was young. She saw the adventure that I was about to have and was excited for me.
Kenny Scharf was the first person I met in New York. He was this darling California guy who looked like Shaun Cassidy. We met through Larry Ashton who was a really close friend of mine in Phoenix growing up. He’s a few years older than I am. He introduced me to Kenny and it was love at first sight for me. Kenny had a blond shag and he was tan and he was so cute and he had the greatest butt.
Basically, I was living with Kenny right away. I had been living in a dorm. Have you ever seen that movie Pitch Perfect? Remember when Anna Kendrick’s character walks into her room and the Korean girl is sitting there and won’t talk to her? That was my experience. I had a Korean roommate and a Greek roommate, and they wouldn’t acknowledge me or say hello. It was just like that. It was so funny because here we were living in New York, the greatest city in the world, and these girls would just go to school and then go back to the dorm. And I was the sort of person who wanted to learn everything, see everything, do everything.
So, I started crashing at Kenny’s apartment on 55th Street. It was bizarre . . . that part of the city had nothing to do with our life, which started to be more and more downtown. He had a job nearby at a salad bar. I can’t believe the amount of food we stole from that place . . . I was an accomplice. I would come in and sit down with this huge purse and we’d just fill it up. I also had bags and we’d fill them up with food, yogurt, cases of Perrier or whatever. Once, Kenny stole a plant.
One Sunday, I went to Penn Station to take the train to visit my grandfather on Long Island. He was in town from L.A. and staying at his sister’s house. I put on a corduroy skirt and a nice coat. I had been in a real serious depression. The night before I had stood on the edge of my 13 story dorm building and contemplated jumping off of it, but something just told me not to. I had a chemical imbalance that started when I was 14. It was a horrible way to live. I’d experience intense mania followed by serious suicidal depressions that would last for weeks, then maybe one week of normalcy before the cycle started over again. It was different back then because people didn’t really talk about these issues. It was very taboo still. Now, of course, it’s different. But, the next morning, I still had to get up and go meet my grandfather for lunch in Long Island and pretend like everything was normal because he was funding my schooling.
I was sitting in Penn Station waiting for my train and it was very crowded. This huge guy who was out of his mind, I think he was probably on heroin and PCP, he had on a big overcoat and he was just gross. He walked over to me and just started molesting me and I was floored and didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t even scream. I was thinking, “This guy is going to fucking kill me. He’s going to rape me and kill me in the middle of Penn Station.” And all these other people were just watching. Nobody did anything and I was gasping and couldn’t breathe. Finally, I turned to a young guy sitting next to me and said, “Can you get the police?” The young guy ran and came back with a police officer. But by then the guy who attacked me had moved on. What really got me was how when the police showed up, all these people rushed forward to tell the police their version of the story. I asked the young guy, “Why didn’t you help me?” And he was like, “Oh, I thought you knew that guy.” Like some huge, dirty, derelict guy in an overcoat is my friend? They did capture him and they told me he had been going around all morning doing that and pulling knives on people too. He even broke through the handcuffs when they arrested him. I missed my train and had to use a payphone to call my grandfather and make up a story about why I was late. I went home to Kenny’s on 55th Street that night and told him all this and he looked at me like, this is just too much.
The illustration program at Parsons just killed me creatively. The teachers basically just wanted us to do what they wanted us to do. And they wanted us to paint like them but not as good as them because they were afraid that we would get good and take their jobs someday. That was during the time of super-realism and photo-realism. My work is the exact opposite. The teachers were biased toward the male artists and there weren’t many girls in art school. Most of the girls who were there were in fashion or in graphic design.
I had been celebrated in the large public high school I went to in Arizona. I’d been in the gifted program where we got to do whatever we wanted. My high school teachers had been all like, “Your work is great, this is wonderful.” I just flourished. I was awarded artist of the year. I was already drawing S&M art in high school, drawings in which the women were empowered and the guys were tied up.
So I went from encouraged and creatively free-flowing to Parsons where everything I did, the teachers were like, “This is shit. You can’t do this.” There was one teacher at Parsons in particular who called my work “fake naïve,” and I was like, “What does that mean?” And he said, “Why don’t you study Grandma Moses and learn how to do real naïve?” He wasn’t referring to my pen and ink stuff, because my pen and ink stuff was my personal outlet. Those drawings were very indicative of my mental state during that time. I never showed them to anybody except a few other people.
It was so bizarre for me to go to New York City where it was so much about pushing the men and encouraging the guys and there was really no support for women. I mean think of how few women succeeded in the art world back then. You can count them. And here I was doing these delicate little ink drawings, things from my heart and my damaged brain, and no one knew what to do with them. Kenny liked them. Keith Haring liked them a lot and he was very encouraging. But art at that time was getting to be bigger bolder faster funner.
Not all women have that story. There are women who say, “Oh no, it was a great time to be a woman artist.”
I mean, Kenny had it tough too at art school. But he was strong enough. He had the confidence and the strength to deal with that criticism. One of his teachers was the wonderful illustrator, Sue Coe. He was also very smart because he learned technique. That was something I didn’t learn in part because the teachers I had didn’t teach that at Parsons—maybe I just took the wrong classes. Kenny learned as much as he could about how to paint. He was doing video and silk-screening and photorealism and oil in school.
Kenny was perfect for me, and we were eager to go out and experience everything. We’d go to Xenon and get all dressed up in spandex. This was back in the era of Rocky Horror Picture Show and David Bowie. People were flirting with gender identity. I never labeled myself as gay or straight or anything. I’d put makeup on Kenny and we’d put our spandex on and go out. We went to Studio 54, but it was so over our heads. Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Halston, these people were there but they were older and much more sophisticated. I remember going there and feeling so young and so wowed. This was before our whole scene started downtown at the end of 1978. We loved disco, but as soon as clubs opened downtown, we never really cared that much about going uptown anymore. We were just new to New York and the nightlife was in transition.
I was one of the few non-punk or retro-dressed girls in the East Village scene. I had been a debutante in Phoenix. I was the girl who would wear the hot pants and mini-skirts and high heels and makeup. Like, I wouldn’t let anyone kiss me when I was out at night because I didn’t want my lipstick to get messed up. I never drank in public, mostly because I didn’t want to spend the money, and later I was put on Lithium for my manic depression so I couldn’t drink at all, and quaaludes were all over and cheap so that was pretty much my thing until I got into coke in the ’80s.
John Sex and Wendy Wild, and Kenny and me, we used to double date. It’s so funny to call it “double dating.” We didn’t “date” in our group, but we did hang out all the time. John wasn’t John “Sex” yet and Wendy wasn’t Wendy “Wild.” That was later. John was this guy from Long Island with blond hair. The nicest guy. He would wear like these little tiny cut-offs. He was so creative and made these amazing silk-screens. Wendy was just this girl from Long Island with long, dirty blond hair and she was cute and fun. Nobody in our group was stuck up. We were always doing something. Like, “Let’s party!” “Let’s make a video!” “Let’s put on a show!”
Then all of a sudden John and Kenny were fooling around, and Wendy and I were like, “What just happened here?” The story I heard later was that Kenny hooked up with John at GG Barnum’s, which was this amazing transsexual nightclub with trapezes. The drag queens were incredible. I loved them. We’d be in the ladies’ room and they’d be in there, and we’d be putting on our make-up together. I was in awe of them. They were like super women.
Back then nobody was monogamous. Kenny wasn’t. I hadn’t ever been either. I wasn’t the kind of girl in high school who had a steady boyfriend for years. That kind of thing to me was uninteresting. And at the time, Kenny was blossoming and I encouraged him. I was in love with him and he was in love with me, so I just said, “You need to be who you are.” Wendy was pretty open too. But we were also hurt. Kenny and John were these young guys and suddenly the whole world opened up to them. I didn’t expect monogamy with Kenny, but I did want to be the main girl. Kenny would tell me, “Kitty, I just want you to know I love you. I really, really love you.” And that was my tip off he was going to go get with someone else. It was very funny.
I had terrible social anxiety so it was very hard for me to ever get up on stage. I did Acts of Live Art and a few other things on stage. Kenny didn’t have that problem. He’s the biggest show-off and that was part of my attraction to him. He was the most engaging person. He would just walk up to anyone he thought was interesting and say, “Hi, who are you?” And that’s how we met Klaus Nomi. Klaus was a lovely, lovely person. He was actually a baker at the time. He was a bit older than us.
But then later it became an issue for me. It was very, very hard to live in Kenny’s shadow because I had been a promising artist in high school and then suddenly I was just Kenny’s girlfriend. Our relationship happened even before Kenny was famous. I mean, Kenny was famous before Kenny was famous. And I was like, “I’ve never just been somebody’s girlfriend.” You know? Even after we broke up later, for the longest time, people kept referring to me as “Kenny’s girlfriend.” On the one hand, I could stay in obscurity and do whatever I wanted artistically. I had incredible freedom. I was never stuck or pigeonholed or dictated to. On the other hand, no one knew anything about me or my art. People weren’t mean to me, but that was how it was especially when Kenny started making it.
I never felt bitter or angry about it. I just felt sad about it because that was the era of women’s lib. I grew up in the ’70s and I was that first generation where women could do everything, or at least we thought that way. In hindsight, the reality was very different.