When we left off our conversation last time, you said it was important to
you to learn to live alone. How are you
managing?
I'm beginning to achieve that now for the first time. It is something
that afFects
my work, the quality of the work, all the aspects of creativity. I
realize that
living alone really means making your own decisions, about your work or
about your life or anything. Because once you let go, someone takes over
and you lose your own inner sources of creativity. And now I create
completely,
much more easily, like I used to many years ago. It's a matter of
preserving
your inner liberty, which is what - at least for me - keeps creativity
going.
Do you think that, generally speaking, an artist has to be alone or that
you
in particular have to be alone to point a specific vision of
things?
No, not in general, I think I am more alone than most artists, to paint
the
way I paint, to express things I want to get at without the influence of
comments by society. I would rather be in a crowd, observing what is going
on and making up my own mind, grasping at whatever fragments of truth I
can by using my intuition. I believe very strongly in intuition.
Intuition sharpens
through being alone; it can help you understand society as it is, without
your
having to become part of society. It makes you less conventional in your
outlook on society, for intuition requires no schooling. It could come to
you
in a cave, somewhere in the mountains. And that's the way I would like to
create ... by going back to a primitive - virgin - state. I mean in a
universal
sense, not in an individual or contemporary sense. So that for the type of
work I do, you have to be alone, to think alone, you have to just observe
and
try to capt that inner source ... which may be prehistoric, since certain
human
elements are part of us since the beginning of man. I want to go all the
way
back through the history of how people created and see if there's any
interrelationship between what I do and what the world has done and is
doing.
All these years I've really been trying to trace the roots we all have in
common;
to me that's the whole point of art. Like something I did recently - the
canvas
is almost Balinese, entirely through intuition; friends say it looks very
Indonesian.
Mightn't you have been influenced by Balinese works of art?
Absolutely
not.
Well, how would you explain it then?
I tend to cut myself off from group-thinking in society. In other words,
I don't
allow external commentary, literary or verbal, to influence my own
personal
values in any way. I'm not interested in society's fads or clichés; my
intuition
is all I need to - actually unconsciously - discover certain denominators
common to the collectivity, certain basic
values.
Do you really feel cut off from it all? You do write a great deal
yourself you
read and...
Oh, no, I never read anything.
Never?
Not at all. And I write purely from intuition, using my own grammar,
syntax,
word order ... I make up my own terms, phrases ... As a child of course
I learned to read and write, but I have a phobia against the written
word: I
have to learn everything through visual observation. I like to go to
conferences
to hear people talk. As far as my reading is concerned, my attention span
is
extremely short. I don't think I've read more than three or four books in
my whole
life.
And do you remember the titles of those books?
No, I can't even remember what they were; that's how unimportant reading
has
been.
How about newspapers?
I am very much against
newspapers.
So you don't read any of them?
No, because the information provided is channeled in such a very personal
way that it
really is no longer accurate. Reading the same article in three different
newspapers
you get totally different points of view, so what's the point of reading
them in the first
place? You can't get the correct story since the writer is bound to be
prejudiced in
some way; they all write for their own purpose ... there is no
objectivity. I don't like to
read about things that are going on. The older I get, the more
repetitious it all seems. I get this 'déjà vu'
feeling. Whatever happened yesterday. the day before yesterday, will
happen
again tomorrow; there's nothing new under the sun.
But how can you live without being interested in what's going on in the
world?
Well, I go to the cinema a lot.
But you don't care about what's going on now, all the big changes?
As I said, I just don't think that the human condition has changed that
much,
especially politically speaking. They repeat the same mistakes. People are
greedy and, in many instances nations become greedy - I mean the
individuals
who run those nations become greedy and they suck everyone in. And so
everyone has to suffer because a few politicians have decided. And this
has
been going on for years, just back and forth.
Is that the message behind your work, that humanity has made no progress
at
all?
Oh no. I try to avoid all that in my pictures. ... I like to imagine
...to make
up my own stories. I really don't care about facts, what the truth is.
You mean there's a
story behind every
painting?
Yes, something I just made up about something.
What do you really mean by a "story"?
Well, it would be my interpretation of some prior experience, something
that happened
in the past.
That happened to you?
Either to me or to someone else. Like I told you before, I tend to go back
into history. For instance, I like to use historical, monumental
sculpture. say
Roman or Egyptian, as a focus, and then I remake it over and over gain,
like
I did for Cleopatra. And I use a lot of photographs of earlier art, art
that
goes through generations, that depicts civilizations as they go by. And
then I sort of like to reinterpret them in present-day terms ... I can't tell
you exactly
what my work says because it's difficult for me to analyze what I do when
it's finished. I do know that whatever I used as a source has long
disappeared.
... It's other people who tell me what my work evokes, like that
Indonesian series.
Do you consider your work figurative rather than abstract?
I have this obsession with the human figure. I think because I want to
make
up my own interpretation of what people are all about so it becomes
abstract
in that sense. Who's to say what is real?
It's true, the human figure has been present in your work from the
start.
Yes. always present. And in recent times it's become a
stream-of-consciousness
type of drawing: the inner self is allowed to take over ... there is no
external
control ... the figure is entirely internalized. So things are allowed to
happen:
three legs, for instance. instead of two. Why? I don't have the slightest
idea;
the form seems to develop on as own. I find my work is very difficult to
interpret; other people try to interpret my work ... it's been diagnosed
as
surrealist as expressionist - especially strongly German, as fantastic
art as
new invention in art brut. They're all just labels. I don't like labels.
I realize
that the promotion of art requires labels, otherwise works cannot be sold.
Art critics and curators, the people who are in charge of assigning
creativity
to the walls of museums and galleries simply cannot understand work that
is
not labelled.
Once you showed me some black-and-white photographs of yourself in front
of a fun-house mirror. It was a ... contorted autoportrait. Distorted
figures
are a constant in your work. aren't they?
It's more of an elongation of their limbs than
distortion.
I mean, your major theme is
humanity...
Yes. of
course.
--- and maybe the distortion is meant to convey some truth about
contemporary
society or society in general through the
ages?
There was a time when I made comments, many years ago. I was looking for
a new human form of the future.
Oh, really?
One keeps going back to one's childhood, because its childhood that
formulates
your outlook on humanity.
You think
so?
Things that were distorted in your childhood remain in your brain
forever. I
like to bring out these distortions: it seems to me it should be
everybody's
goal to accept their own, personal distortions in life.
You mean that distortion represents a certain basic truth?
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Towards oneself. Everyone has their own
distortions to deal with but they don't face up to the truth. But anyway,
distortion is always more fascinating than the way things are normally.
You
just have to be honest about it. In art it's better to face up to the
truth or
else it turns into pure aesthetics or simply whets your
appetite
Or would you say the elongation of bodies in your work underscores the
particular kind of space you create as background to your paintings, and
even
to your drawings?
The latest wave of cinerna refers to the kind of space that gives rise to
creatures
from outer space; they deal with what such creatures look like and their
reactions to our world.
You mean science-fiction
rnovies?
It is science-fiction but you see more and more of it because of all the
new
techniques in
cinema.
So the people in your work, the distortions, could be said to come from
the
outer space so frequently portrayed in contemporary films?
They do float in space and ... that is something I must contend with. Now I
have been told that a psychological explanation exists for that: you
know, if
your feet are never on the ground, if your figures are always floating
around
in space ... Then there's this whole thing of "religion"- Could they be
floating
into hell? Many of the early Masters were constantly obsessed with
religion
... the whole bit ... guilt, hell and paradise. Those are weighty
considerations:
perhaps the fact that the bodies are floating around is a formal way of
avoiding
all kinds of spiritual traps.
Many of your pictures also, bring to mind the Medieval "Dance of
Deaths"...
Yes, that fascinates me. Recently, in some large works on paper, I have
the
feeling it is sort of dancing in a limbo. It's when you use contrasting
colors,
with an aura of light that is shining through, maybe at the top. And then
you're surrounded by dark areas around the figure and you have the
illusion
that the figure is trapped in this limbo, but it's always the light of
the other
galaxy, of the heavens which you can see at the top, where the person has
come through ... this hole in the dimmer area.
Another characteristic feature of your work is the way it shimmers ... the
beauty of the colors, the special effects - the translucence, the marble
stratifications, the dapples, the dribbles, - I mean it's very
preciosity, in the
noble sense of the word.
I'm glad this exists in my work, because I don't like blackness, darkness,
to permeate my compositioris, space.
So light reigns in all your work?
Even in the most tragic ones, there's this luminescence ... like jewels
pierced with light
... There is also another aspect of my work ... the stick figure, which
is a Neolithic stick
figure. I would like to transport myself all the way back to prehistoric
man, and to
transpose the Paleolithic and Neolithic stone carvings and paintings to my
compositions.
A while back you talked to me about figures with three legs cropping up
in your work. Well,
if you look at art from the Sahara region or even from Pueblo (Arizona)
or New Mexico ...
you often come across human or animal figures with two heads or three
arms or legs,
etc. That didn't seem to bother prehistoric man very much ... in fact,
quite to the contrary
..
I'm interested in the history of the evolution of animal and man, all the
transitions they
went through on the way to today. I keep going back into the area of
their early
development.
Do you feel more linked to the post than to the future?
An artist needs the past to go on to the future. The older I get ... I
don't know ... the more
I am fascinated really with the past ... and the less intelligible it
seems, the harder it gets
to grasp.
But why is the past so important?
Because the past gives you the answer to the interrelationship of the
entire human
species, our interlocked past. It gives us access to whatever is left of
the unknown
primitive societies of the world, which no longer exist. It means we can
tap the same
sources ... Now, I can paint something that looks like it has been done
in Bali without
being Balinese but someone in Bali could not paint like, let's say ...
Roy Lichtenstein or
Warhol. It's never happened, because of lack of technology I suppose.
Contemporary art
is technologically-onented.
Is it important to you to live in New York?
Only because I find I can do the very sort of mundane things I like. I
have very few
interests other than drawing - basically, expressing myself. I don't ...
read, take drives
into the country, play sports. My only interests are on the creative
level, and New York
offers a vast panorama of international film festivals that give me
inspiration. There's the
Argentinian Film Festival - you get to know so much about their culture
because of their
way of expressing themselves - and the Pasolini Film Festival this month
... I find them
very relaxing as well. And sometimes I use the material of a film; maybe
it comes out
later in a drawing. New York is a city that lets you live out your
obsession, whatever it is.
I couldn't survive anywhere else. Once I step out of the "work" area into
the street I have
to have some place to go and I can't figure any other place but New York.
You see, New
York is full of a lot of basically very creative people. And it's a city
where you can do so
many things on your own, you don't have to be dependent. You can wander
around any
time of the day or night - all kinds of places stay open; you're never at
a loss for
something to do or visit. It's a total sort of experience.
You mean if you lived somewhere else your paintings would be
different?
Oh. yes!
Sort of an outward underlying frenzy or pulsation ...
That's it. It keeps you on the move ... provides the dynamic tension for
you to rernain
creative.
Have you made any discoveries to your personal advantage in all these
years of painting
and drawing?
I found that I can do a variety of things ... that I really do like to
draw everything. A long
time ago I felt my range was very limited. But, like yesterday I got
ahold of the Geneva
museum1 catalogue of Roman helmets - full face helmets - and
was able
to incorporate them right away into my work. In fact, I created a whole
new series of
faces.
Could we delve into this question a bit more deeply ... have you unearthed
any universal truths through your
work?
Yes, well I feel life is very, very rewarding in one sense: I have come
to realize
that we are not going to be here forever and I find that quite nice in a
way
... because I feel I won't have to suffer that much, you know, forever -
like
I did when I was young. Now each day is nice, you take advantage of each
day. My expectations for artistic success are limited to ... having
enough money
to continue my life until I die. Having committed myself to this
particular
experience in life, I am not equipped at my age to do anything else in
exchange
for financial benefits. There's nothing else I know how to do.
Any
regrets?
I don't regret it, no. And I don't really worry about ending up in a
poorhouse
anymore. Either you are totally creative - not fitted to play the game -
or
you play the game by creating a 'genre' recognized in dollars and cents.
But
if you really worried about the future, you simply wouldn't paint.
Does doing portraits bring in any
money?
Not really. It's just people I know, being nice to me. I do a lot from
photographs as well. When people come in, I put them down into a chair
and they read the newpaper. I do four or five drawings ... that come out
as
caricatural, satirical portraiture. It wouldn't be real portraiture, but
you would
have this resemblance with the person, and certainly you could get to know
who I was doing. Then I revert to the stick figure. I like doing it all,
it keeps
the turntable going around and around. Over the years I have acquired the
flexibility and experience to keep jumping from one thing to another.
Why?
To avoid routine ... or being repetitious...
But your early works already encompass your more recent ones. A work by
Lassiter is always
recognizable.
Is that
so?
Well, that is definitely my opinion.You fall into a category of your
own...
But I did make some voluntary changes in my painting and drawing and many
New York museums were turned off by those changes. And sorne of the
changes are just for the sake of being different. Other times I am trying
to
discover something new, to change my concept of a figure - the face, the
outline - so I have it go in many diverse directions, with some abrupt
changes,
to get away from any standard version ... from the routine vision of
things
that bears down on us ... and does us in.
The main thing is what you believe in
yourself.
I don't believe in anything. It's all I can do to keep drawing and
painting ...
and I just keep on looking forward to doing that till the day I die.
Shedding a long look back into the past as
well.
The future is nothing but a replay of the past.
