October 14, 2008 Transcript: Tom and Darren

Tom's cabin, interior. Night. Low light. Tom and Darren at the kitchen table.

[00:00:09.04] Tom: Get an artist's statement here. Well, it's already embedded in the work.
[00:00:10.17] Darren: I told Carma...Carma actually mentioned, there's so many people she sends your posts on to, that go to your blog, that were saying, "What has Tom been writing, we didn't get anything. Oh god, you know, and they were just like jonesing for the Tom posts.
[00:00:29.02] Tom: She sent me a little email today that said something about that. She said, can you write posthumously?
[00:00:33.21] Darren: Yeah, that's what she was saying.
[00:00:35.26] Tom: You know you're going to be offline, can you just go ahead a pre-write one.
[00:00:41.20] Darren: (Laughs)
[00:00:41.20] Tom: Well, not exactly.
[00:00:44.03] Darren: What I said, what we can do is, I can set up the software that we can pull certain segments of your writing and just over the course of the thing, just lines here and lines there...
[00:00:54.03] Tom: Oh random...
[00:00:56.07] Darren: And randomly generate a page
[00:00:59.10] Tom: Get people off my back...
[00:01:00.04] Darren: Keep this going forever, man. All you have to do is click, just hit a random one, I don't feel like writing...
[00:01:08.13] Tom: A random text generator.
[00:01:11.04] Darren: You've just be out-sourced to China.
[00:01:15.02] Tom: Actually, my new dream is to be translated into Chinese and then translated back into English. What do you think?
[00:01:24.12] Darren: Tim Schlish's wife...
[00:01:24.12] Tom: Oh yeah, right.
[00:01:29.08] Tom: It's so interesting in a way what she said, 'cause I do get that.
[00:01:33.15] Darren: Here comes the packet...He is rock. What a minute, I wrote like 4 pages.
[00:01:47.09] Tom: When I was in the Richards gallery with Glenn today, I was looking at the stuff, what we had discussed yesterday, a hell of an important conversation, because whoever came up with the idea, based on what Nick had said, the fact that we can suspend other things in those walls and that'll give the walls some substance.
[00:02:11.25] Tom: It won't be a problem with like seeing through them, but it'll give them a little more substance that what they have. That piece you found yesterday will be beautiful hanging in there.
[00:02:21.24] Darren: I like the idea. I mean, if we have a wall in the museum, we put something on it, that's what we do. So, that we're creating a new wall, it seems like a natural place to go.
[00:02:34.20] Tom: It does. It was not apparent to me before Nick first mentioned it and then you guys were talking about it yesterday. It was not apparent to me because I...my first conception of the walls was that they merely cleaved the space. Right, so they just established what the boundaries were or something like that.
[00:02:53.26] Tom: And now they're taking on more substance which I think is great.
[00:03:05.16] Tom: And they go with interesting...Hmmm, I wanted to mention this to you: if the main wall, which bisects the gallery, goes across at X angle, does the wall that forms the dividing line between the sleeping room and the sitting room go at 90 degrees to that wall?
[00:03:24.18] Darren: Ohhh, that's a good question, hadn't thought of that.
[00:03:28.28] Tom: See, I think it should, irregardless of the fact that it's not 90 degress to the gallery wall.
[00:03:34.28] Darren: It think it should too, especially since we're doing those angled houses, the opposite houses. I think it certainly should. That lends a total new dimension to the show, absolutely.
[00:03:44.28] Tom: Yeah, I think it does too. I was pleased I had the thought.
[00:03:52.01] Darren: I hadn't thought about that.
[00:03:56.06] Tom: Space. That's what we're doing, is defining space, within a given space.
[00:04:00.17] Darren: Sure.
[00:04:02.16] Tom: And the way in which we do that is by using those bisecting lines, right? The rails are lines. The only thing like this that I've ever been involved in before was the time that my former partner Ted Harper and I had ingested some powerful psychedelic and we were down in the print shop, which was down in the basement of his Mom's house, and they had a really beautiful backyard that looked out on...it was the Quivett marshes, which was all spartina grass, really beautiful, creek winding through it. And I was just spaced out, looking at the marsh and Ted disappeared for a few minutes and came back and he had this great big old ball of white twine.
[00:04:50.29] Tom: And he started, he tied a piece of it off to the corner of the print shop, and he walked over to a tree and he wrapped it around the tree and he looked around. And he walked over to the edge of the house next door and he like thumb-tacked it in there. Looked around and he...and when he finished he had divided the yard into all of these fairly small quadrants, just with one piece of string.
[00:05:21.24] Tom: It was amazing. Well, maybe it was the drugs.
[00:05:31.17] Darren: (Laughter)
[00:05:34.06] Darren: I know whenever I was laying out the purlins on my shop, I had the chalk line out....

....Offstage, camera operator is trying to turn off the overhead fan, which is making too much hum. Tom and Darren kibbitz.

[00:07:15.14] Tom: You're good at a lot of things but singing isn't one of them.
[00:07:18.00] Darren: I'm telling ya, you should invest in stocks now.
[00:07:25.12] Tom: And I love the fact that you can't remember the lyrics of an entire song.
[00:07:29.03] Darren: Yes, I can. I tend to skew the lyrics occasionally. "I am the eggplant..." It works much better. What was John Lennon thinking? I am the eggplant much better that I am the eggman.
[00:07:52.07] Tom: I heard the revamp of a Beatles song on the way to work. It was about the credit crisis. It was hysterical.

..........

[00:08:30.12] Tom: So how is this guy Mike Reeves or whatever his name is going to be at the opening?
[00:08:33.16] Darren: I don't know. This is Lily's big idea.
[00:08:35.11] Tom: Okay.
[00:08:35.11] Darren: He's supposed to be...You know, he did some of the auctioning a few years ago at the Bizarre Bazaar. Really, he ran the prices up a lot, a lot better that what John Rayhall was, sort of this droning guy you just didn't want to listen to. And Mike raises a lot more, he is inherently entertaining.
[00:08:59.27] Tom: Sure, sure. More personable.
[00:09:02.16] Darren: But, his band's going to be there and I guess he's going to play for...just sort of doodling with a few other musicians. And after a set period of time, then he and his band are going to play. So I don't if that's going to be background music or what the deal is. I don't know what kind of music...
[00:09:23.14] Tom: Back to cleaving space....
[00:09:25.06] Darren: Back to cleaving space...
[00:09:36.05] Interviewer: You know what I'm getting? Crickets.
[00:09:36.05] Tom: We can't turn them off.
[00:09:38.22] Darren: Got a shotgun? You go outside and shoot a shotgun, you'll have a good 10 seconds of...
[00:09:41.07] Tom: Yeah.
[00:09:42.23] Darren: Or 15 seconds
[00:09:49.00] Tom: That's the classic whippoorwill story around here.
[00:09:53.23] Darren: Maddenly 2:30 in the morning go out and fire a 12 gauge.
[00:09:59.06] Tom: Which only completely wakes you up. But it doesn't work.
[00:10:04.01] Darren: It works for about 10 seconds.
[00:10:05.06] Tom: Marilyn stark naked...yeah, just lost it in Mississippi, she just completely lost it. And just went outside and like fired both barrels, man.
[00:10:15.20] Darren: Oh man, I've done that several times.
[00:10:17.07] Tom: She was so cute, right. And when she came back inside and the whippoorwills hadn't shut up, you know, and she was stark naked with a 12 gauge shotgun in her hands, I thought, yeah, that's why I married that woman.

[00:10:49.12] Interviewer: The other thing that to me is of interest is just talking about the show in terms of what you expect people off the street to think of it, if anything.
[00:11:00.00] Tom: We've thought about that, we haven't talked about it all that much because there's a certain level at which, as an artist if we can call me that as part of this, I don't really give a shit what they think about it. I mean, but of course there are levels on which I do really care. And I don't know what the answer to that is, after seeing Darren's show come into the museum in the last couple of days and then having 3 separate people come up and say about the color-field painting, "Is that the packing?"
[00:11:40.02] Darren: (Laughter)
[00:11:45.07] Tom: What do you think? How are people going to respond? Considering the level of interest in the show which is amazing for anything I've ever been associated with, with this museum, that we can be below the floodwall and some old lady walking a dog says, "You guys building a house at the museum?"
[00:12:05.08] Darren: Yeah, I think we will get a lot of people who are just curious, just curious about this.
[00:12:12.19] Tom: And have never been to the museum before, which is fantastic.
[00:12:16.23] Darren: I think so too, I absolutely agree. So we're going to have a lot of that sort of train-wreck type looking.
[00:12:25.14] Tom: You know what I was thinking, I have thought about this a little bit, I think one of the things that we'll hear...Trish will come into the installation--mark my words--Trish will come into to the installation and say "well, I could have done this..." Any my response is, You couldn't have the idea.
[00:12:44.24] Darren: That'll be sort of the main response from the work in the abstract show. You know, that'll be the main response: I could have done that.
[00:12:55.20] Tom: Already has been, both Ruth and Bev said this morning, "I got to get my brushes back out."
[00:13:03.17] Darren: That's cool, you know. I mean, if you want to go ahead and give it a shot, that's great, I think. But I'm not sure you can do that.
[00:13:13.25] Tom: There's a real difference in having an idea to do something that's interesting, and there is saying, as so many people do if you're a writer, say "I've always wanted to write." Well, all you have to do is, like, practice for 3 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, for you know depending on what you bring to the table, between 2 and 10 years and you'll probably be able to write something.
[00:13:46.18] Darren: That's the way I feel about the furniture that I make. You know I been building furniture seriously for 7, 8 years now. I just now feel like I can build a decent piece of furniture. I mean, I think I can...I have 4 or 5 pieces that I know I can build pretty well. And it's still not on par with Thomas Moser or George Nakashima but I feel that I'm a little more competent now that what I was 10 years ago.
[00:14:15.24] Tom: You're still a young guy. I'm always amazed the really young artists that come into something, say like David Foster Wallace, that at a very young age is writing...and Pynchon, I guess...writing whole new things, big psychologically complex things when they're still remarkably young. I'm not sure I even woke up until I was 30.
[00:14:46.19] Darren: You saying I'm going to be the next Pynchon? Is that what you're saying?
[00:14:50.01] Tom: Your writing career is very much like your singing career.
[00:14:59.09] Darren: I'll take that as a compliment, a budding star.
[00:15:07.09] Tom: That's why I like working with you. So full of shit.
[00:15:11.16] Darren: No, but it is, with the abstract show, one of the things that is most overlooked with abstract work is that tendency to say "well, I could do that." The fact is, some of those paintings of Nick's are very sophisticated. They're very sophisticated. When I was curating that show I looked at 200, 300 artists all around Ohio, I really wanted to stay in Ohio, but there are a lot of people doing abstract work. It's really interesting, amazing because most people consider representational work as a higher medium.
[00:15:56.04] Tom: And it's much more difficult to do figurative art, you have to be able to draw.
[00:16:01.25] Darren: But, I think in a lot of cases, you have to know what the rules are and be able to obey by the rules before you can break 'em. I think you can see that very clearly in Nick's work and also in Mark Roth's work. I think it's very deliberate what they're doing.
[00:16:29.17] Tom: Back to the wrack show. I like the way the lines, none of which are perpendicular to any of the walls of the room re-define the space. I mean, they completely re-define the space where if, when you guys were talking yesterday about hanging other stuff on the walls that we installed, I was suddenly thinking, although I don't want to do this, I was suddenly thinking, it would be really cool to just completely ignore the walls of the gallery, so they would be as invisible as possible.
[00:17:06.09] Darren: In a way, if we do that, that wall being on the angle with the 90 degree directly off it, that does ignore all the planes in the gallery, it's as if they don't exist.
[00:17:21.22] Tom: As do the other two walls.
[00:17:21.22] Darren: So it may make sense to ignore those. What if I built just half a bed and it came out of the wall.
[00:17:29.12] Tom: That would have been just fine.
[00:17:29.12] Darren: You know.
[00:17:32.26] Tom: That would reinforce that idea that the walls of the gallery are invisible.
[00:17:37.12] Darren: They just don't exist.
[00:17:42.08] Tom: But no, I think we need to pay a little attention to 'em.
[00:17:45.14] Darren: They're there. That's a big part of what the exhibit is, you know it's there. Why did we do it?
[00:17:52.10] Tom: But what will people think?
[00:17:58.10] Darren: It's a difficult question.
[00:17:58.10] Tom: Say fairly sophisticated people like, let's say when Jim from the pub comes over.
[00:18:02.22] Darren: You think Jim's sophisticated? Sorry, trick question.
[00:18:11.04] Tom: I was thinking about it. I'm a little slow, but I was thinking what a really good response was. Something terribly politically incorrect, like yeah, you're right, he married a girl from Kentucky.
[00:18:23.13] Darren: She has her green card.
[00:18:27.25] Tom: That was so funny. We couldn't get married until she had her green card.
[00:18:34.16] Darren: We're avoiding the question very presidential-like.
[00:18:39.18] Tom: I think the response is going to be all over the board. I think there are going to be a lot of people as you were correlating with the response to the abstract show, there are going to be a lot of people that either say, my 7 year old kid builds things like that in the back yard...to people who I think will go "cool." And maybe some people even beyond that go "this is a really interesting conception and it's really well realized." Because it will be.
[00:19:18.07] Darren: How do we play in with that message, I mean really, whenever we're saying, how will people react, we’re sort of stating that there's a message or a way that we would react to this. What is our reaction to this? I mean, how do we consider this? How do you consider the show?
[00:19:40.03] Tom: I like it a lot. Not on paper. Because I don't do paper. I don't draw. I've liked the concept from the very beginning when we built the pergola at James and John's place and we used that stick, the other part of which has got to be in the show...in some capacity.
[00:20:06.23] Darren: I love the idea of being able to peel that, if that was possible.
[00:20:10.05] Tom: No, no. It's not possible.
[00:20:14.04] Darren: But it would be really cool.
[00:20:16.06] Tom: It would make a great ped[astal] for something.
[00:20:18.23] Darren: Sure. Well, ultimately what I wanted to do with it was make a trestle table. I mean, that's what I wanted to do.
[00:20:23.13] Tom: But I mean for our use now we could use it as a ped and not cut it, not do anything with it.
[00:20:29.00] Interviewer: What's a pergola?
[00:20:30.11] Tom: A pergola is...what is a pergola? A pergola is an outdoor arbor, specifically not connected to the house.
[00:20:42.05] Darren: A free-standing arbor.
[00:20:44.04] Tom: A free-standing arbor. That's a pretty good definition. And they can be any configuration or elaboration from gazebo to something that's minimal. Ours is going to be quite minimal. They're probably more traditional in a square shape with the rafter ends being cut decoratively, a la southwestern architecture. For our purposes, of course, they're going to be irregular sticks. They're usually, as I said, square. We have come on the V-shape which we like quite a bit, because it allows....
[00:21:29.06] Darren: It's a vanishing focal point.
[00:21:31.01] Tom: A single point perspective but it has a flair to it that a square doesn't have. That's because it's a triangle.
[00:21:40.22] Darren: Flair, and bling and all of those...is that what you're....
[00:21:44.16] Tom: I am not ostentatious. I am not ostentatious in the purchase of useless jewelry that dangles. They're a lot of things I am...
[00:21:56.25] Darren: That definition so came out of the dictionary.
[00:22:02.03] Tom: Actually, it was sent to me by Neil Baldwin. The email is posted on the wall behind Glenn. I had no idea what bling was. I heard the governor of Kentucky's wife use the word bling in a commercial for the lottery, when these like women workers in Kentucky, like 8 of them or something had all pooled 5 bucks a piece and bought 40 lottery tickets and one of them hit. And they won like 163 million dollars divided 8 ways, 20 million a piece. And the governor's wife was saying, being cute and funny and everything, what do you intend to do with this, and some of them gave some serious answers, and then she kind of winked and nodded and said there'll probably be some bling involved. And I didn't have a clue. The closest I could come to bling, I did a reading about 8 or 10 years ago, I was reading at the University of Pennsylvania Behrend, and they paid me handsomely to read, and then they were going to take be out to dinner afterwards. And they had actually, they got this Spanish tapa bar to stay open late and we were going to be the only customers, we had it all to ourselves. So of course, the entire English faculty goes, right, and the administrative people and myself and my daughter. And there's an MLA convention that's going to be like the next week, and all they can talk about is who is going to be boinging who. So I had boinging in the back of my head, meaning fucking. And then she says there's going to be some bling involved, and I'm thinking the word has morphed, and they going to have these guys who dress up with ties and strip
[00:24:26.09] Darren: Didn't you do that in the 60s?
[00:24:26.09] Tom: Only a couple times. Just the once, and it got hung up in the bull vine. Who are those guys though, the Edwardians, the Templetons...
[00:24:48.08] Darren: The Chippendales. You always do this, you sort of meander around.
[00:24:54.09] Tom: It's my fondness for lists. See, that way we get more than one option.
[00:25:05.04] Darren: Chippendale, for which Chippendale, the actual furniture maker, would be appalled, that his name turned into that.
[00:25:09.15] Tom: I'm surprised they could do that.
[00:25:13.02] Darren: I'm surprised too because the Chippendale factory is still open.
[00:25:21.02] Tom: I don't know, but I think people are going to see...I think people of...boy, talk about politically incorrect, I was going to do it again, but I'm not going to do it on camera. I was going to say something about I.Q. but I'm not going to now. People with synergistic, vertically integrated mentality.
[00:25:43.23] Darren: What a minute. Say that again.
[00:25:52.11] Tom: Oh come on, I was clear as a bell. You don't follow that? This is almost completely theatrical, what I learned in theater because in theater as a general education, and I think theater is one of the great general educations you can have, because you end up having to do a little bit of everything, so it's vertically integrated in ways that a lot of professions are not. And synergistic because you have to bring in ideas from everyplace to make it happen. So I'm almost embarrassed that the two of you laughed so hard at that. Was it just that I knew those words? Or that I could string the together so comfortably. But you know what I mean.
[00:26:54.21] Darren: ...your explanation of bling.
[00:26:58.18] Tom: And then there was that side-line into I.Q. So what I think actually, is that people that are capable of creative thinking are going to look at the show and just go "wow, this is really cool," that they had the idea to do this, that they took the time to collect the obviously, a lot of collecting of stuff to make it happen. We have at least 8 truck-loads of stuff involved in this. And I think it's going to be hard to deny that, when it's all put up. I think there'll be a fair number of people that go "I wonder if I should like this?" or "should I like this?" Is it a tangible big enough that I have to acknowledge that it's there? And then it does have the fact that it is tangible, all the parts, unlike your abstract show, which demands that people construct a framework that allows them to understand, to try to understand what abstract art is, why did that guy just, why is this just like a huge red canvas, with just a couple of subtle variations? Does it mean something? Is it emotional? Does it tap into your emotions?
[00:28:26.11] Darren: You have to build an inner framework whenever you're discussing abstract, there has to be an inner framework, I mean inside you, inside the viewer to come to these pieces to any sort of idea of what's going on. I mean, you have to be able to acknowledge within yourself that, at least for me, that yes this means that for me I'm upset here, or this just makes me happy, I don't know why it makes me happy but I have that inside of me, I understand that this, whatever it is, makes me feel happy. Or any sorts of that. And with the wrack show, I think all of that will be very apparent, it will be right up in your face, all that structure is right there.
[00:29:11.27] Tom: That's a good phrase, because it will be right in your face. And that's what I mean by the fact that its tangible quality, that you can't deny that it's there because it going to be like seriously right there in front of your face.
[00:29:29.23] Darren: It will be. And I think that...
[00:29:32.07] Tom: Will they get the sex toys?
[00:29:34.25] Darren: I'm not sure I get the sex toys.
[00:29:37.29] Tom: If the piece of Brian's, we saw again today....exactly, you wouldn't know about Praxiteles or whoever it was statue of, who the fuck was he saying it was like...and then he does this funny dance...Iris. He always duplicates this dance step with it. But we're only looking at this part of Iris, right. But I think it would be wonderful for him to talk at the museum and just have to reproduce that little dance step. And talk about Iris, seriously. Talk about Iris. And what we're actually looking at is a crotch. Not to put to fine a point on it, that's what we're looking at. And I think when you combine that with, there's another piece that's a candidate, that kind of looks to me like a lady bending over, and if you put the two of those things in a place, in a space, and then you put that douche-bag thing on the wall behind it, and then you put that...
[00:31:00.00] Darren: Which I found out what it is, actually. It is an air bladder out of a well tank, is actually what that is.
[00:31:09.11] Tom: Damn, I was so sure it was an enema bag for a truck.
[00:31:16.26] Darren: I'm sorry to shatter you views. I found out what that was.
[00:31:21.25] Tom: You shatter my illusions. Whatever is actually is, the fact that it could be mounted on the wall behind these sculptures and then next to it would be this white boat bumper. The boat bumper starts confusing you. You're pretty sure it's a sex toy. But you don't know how to use it. So, I like that. I like that, the mystery.