photography – chickfactor zine

April 5, 2023April 5, 2023

The Decline of Mall Civilization, Second Edition

If you’re reading this, you probably already know who Michael Galinsky is. We interviewed him back in 2021 (and also in our paper zine) when he was putting together an art show, and he posts zillions of photos of all your favorite bands from the olden days in NYC and Hoboken on his socials. He makes films and TV shows and was in Sleepyhead. He was 20 years old when he drove across the U.S. making these images. He originally made a book called Malls Across America (Steidl, 2010), which is out of print. So he made his own new mall book, The Decline of Mall Civilization, in 2011. He is in the midst of crowdfunding the second edition of The Decline of Mall Civilization, so we wanted to share some of his 1989 photographs shot in malls across America, which have gone viral umpteen times. Interview by Gail / Photos by Michael Galinsky

Chickfactor: Let’s start with the basics about the book(s).
Michael Galinsky: I created this project when I took a color printing class in 1989. It was at NYU, but it was not in the art school. It was in the education school. I didn’t feel like I was an art student. I had this idea that I wasn’t that kind of creative person and the way that I took photos was more observational, which didn’t seem like art, but it also didn’t feel like journalism. I was going to a photo bookstore a few times a week, going through all these books and figuring out what I liked. What I found I liked was mostly stuff that was documentary in style but wasn’t really a documentary—so it was folks like Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander or Garry Winogrand. People who were observing the world, but from kind of a specific and interesting point of view that wasn’t so specific and interesting that it drew attention to their prowess as a technical shooter. I was really annoyed by technical stuff. It almost always ended up feeling like advertising copy or something, or drawing attention to this precision stuff that I wasn’t interested in. There was this connection between photography and music, and what I was mostly photographing at the time was shows. I was just trying to figure out what it was to be a photographer. a friend who was a photo student looked my photos, and he was like, “you should be trying to figure out what you’re shooting.” That was such great advice, to be thinking of the frame as a frame. My photo education was this bookstore where I looked at stuff, and then the first class I had was this color photography class and the teacher was awesome. Her first assignment was to watch River’s Edge and think about the color, the way it’s used and what it’s trying to say.
Keanu’s best work probably.
By far. It’s just a weird, crazy movie but it made me think, how are the images being used, and how is the camera being used? So even in photography, it started making me think about storytelling. I had to have a project. My girlfriend went to college on Long Island. I was visiting her, and we went to the mall, and I was like, “Oh my God, I have my project.” I shot like a roll that week. I went back the next week. My teacher was like, “this is great, you should continue this project.” So, I drove across the country, I took pictures all over the place. No idea what the fuck I was doing.

Which route did you take?
I went with my friend Sebastian; first we drove from Chapel Hill to Columbus, OH, because my aunt lived there. Then we went to Chicago, where we stayed with Gene Booth, and he took us to some malls and then we went to Detroit, where we met my friend Tom, and he took us to some malls. Then we just hightailed it across the country. I think we stopped in Wisconsin, but we didn’t find a mall. We just kind of stumbled upon places. We got to San Francisco after going up through Seattle and down and then our car got broken into; thankfully, we’d camped on the side of the road the night before and the car was a fucking mess. I had a bag with the film in it and the ones that were shot had not been separated from the unshot ones. That night I separated them out and I stuck that (shot) bag under the front seat. The other film got stolen. My friend was like, “I’m done.” It’s hard to travel, so we drove from San Francisco 40 hours straight to Saint Louis, shot a couple malls there. We did stop once near Denver, in a mall in Aurora, Colorado, but literally didn’t sleep. One of us slept, the other drove.
What kind of chemicals were in your body to be able to do that? Just caffeine?
A lot of coffee and cokes. When you got tired of driving, you just switch seats. If you can’t keep your eyes open, you can’t keep your eyes open.
Originally there was no interest in the project. I had no concept of how you do something with work when you have it. I went to one gallery where they literally laughed at me. They’re like, “these are pictures of people in malls. Yeah, it’s not really for us.” I just felt ashamed and weird, and I never did anything with them. I showed them once when we (Sleepyhead) played with Guided By Voices at Threadwaxing. I set up a projector and I projected them on the back wall. And then they went back into the box.

In 2010 I put them online and they went crazy. I found a box of the slides. I had two boxes, which I thought were the best ones. I started scanning those. Some of the other ones, all the rejects, are the best ones. They didn’t used to mean anything, but now they do. They’re the wide shots and stuff. I didn’t think those were important at the time. I brought them back to New York. I did a Kickstarter and that ended up being a book called Malls Across America, which went viral again when it came out and sold out. It’s hard to get now and what happened was because they didn’t reprint it.
When it was going viral, this designer came to me and said, “hey, I have this imprint on Steidl or Rizzoli, would you like to do one of those?” He wanted to look at the slides. He wasn’t even a guy who’s ever on the Internet, but so many people contacted him. He was like, “OK, let’s do a book.” We could do it on Rizzoli. It will be in the malls, or we could do it on Steidl and then you could make this amazing book. You probably won’t get paid, but it’ll be the most beautiful book ever. I knew who Steidl was because I’d filmed a conversation between him and Robert Frank at the New York Public Library. So I was like Rizzoli, it should be in the malls. He’s like, OK. The next day I was at Hot Docs film festival and this guy I was with says, “let’s go see this movie: How to Make a Book with Steidl.” I was like, “you’re kidding.” The first movie there was him making books with Robert Frank. I was like, “OK, let’s do it on Steidl,” which ended up being a nightmare. They took forever; they printed a beautiful book. They didn’t see me as the artist, they saw the designer, Peter Miles, as the artist. It was his project to them. So, they didn’t let me come to help make it. Then I had 300 books to send to backers, and they charged me like $25 a book. But at that point, Kickstarter, you didn’t add in shipping. So, I had to ship these books all over the world. It cost me more to do this than I raised for making the books. So, it was kind of a nightmare.

Malls Across America was all double page spreads and it was meant to be lay flat, but they didn’t. The printing itself is unbelievable. You can’t believe that this is a printed book. I mean, it looks so beautiful. The paper is so thick. I was told it was going to lay flat. I wasn’t there and it didn’t happen. People still appreciate that book. It was like The Times top ten list and stuff like that. It’s out of print. And if they want to reprint it, I will let them. But they did also destroy a bunch of my slides because they wet plate scanned them, and I was like, it’s Steidl, I don’t need to check them. And then when I replied to rescan them for this book, I found some of them are all covered in mold. Steidl wouldn’t give me their scans until I explained that to them. They did it as a wet plate scan, meaning they got wet and then didn’t dry them properly so when they put them back in, they were moldy. I would have them do the book again if they wanted to because I’d like it to be out. I’d like them to do a second printing. But they didn’t and it’s fine. What I’m going to do next is make a book that combines the best of both books.

I didn’t feel like I had the agency to like kind of reprint the book that they designed. So I made an entirely new book with entirely new images, and that book was called The Decline of Mall Civilization, which, as anybody in your audience knows, is a reference to the Penelope Spheeris series. I was really into those movies. It made sense that I was documenting in the same way as maybe she did, in an observational way that wasn’t judgmental and was open to whatever it was, even if some of it seemed a little silly. And so I made that book, I did a Kickstarter and that sold out immediately. So that book now goes for $500 like the first one.
Then I met with a publicist in Brooklyn, and I was like, “listen, I’m going to make this go viral.” And she was like, “Yes, everybody believes that.” I’m like, no, no, really. I was like, please make sure they print enough. She was like, “OK.” The Kickstarter was 2011 and this was 2013, so I had a bunch of really angry backers, and I got them to all them. But here’s the thing: The book also, because it was priced pretty cheap, actually they priced it at like $36, even though they charged me $25. One article in Gizmodo had a like an Amazon clicker, it sold well over 600 copies. It also talked about The Americans; it sold 75 copies of that. It sold out so fast that it didn’t even go to stores. It never went to stores in the US, like no stores were able to get it. And then they said, “OK, yeah, yeah, we’ll reprint it but then they didn’t.” So that’s why it costs so much now (from $500 to $4000). A few years later, I made a new book, which is entirely my own. All new images, laid out differently, Tae (Won Yu) designed it.

Recently, this website called Chasing the 80s made a reel of the book, and it just went crazy. It got like 600,000 views. So, I was getting crushed with requests for The Decline, and I don’t have it. And the price was going up even more. I was like, OK, I already have the printer, I already have the drop shipper. I’m just going to do another Kickstarter because these people want it so badly and it doesn’t seem fair to kind of be like “you can’t have it.”
I spent a lot of time looking at older books of older photos that resonated with me, even though I hadn’t been in that time. I was really into music at the time and reading about old music. I was aware that if you’re looking at Television pictures, someone was there, and they were taking those pictures and nobody else was. I started to go to shows and take pictures of bands that I liked but I wouldn’t do it if anybody else was taking pictures because film was expensive and I was in my head, it was like, this is important, it needs to be documented. That’s how I felt about the malls. You never saw anybody in the mall with a camera and I knew they would go away, and I thought, this is going to be interesting in a while. Now, 30 years later, it has a much deeper resonance.

What was it about that original mall that made you think this was a good idea? Generally, people didn’t know you were photographing them.
Right. I was shooting from the hip, and I was doing it like as if I was … quite immediately it felt like this is what America is. I was thinking about Robert Frank’s The Americans and he shot so much in diners and honkytonks, like if he was going across America now he would be shooting in malls. But I also thought of William Eggleston, if he was doing it in malls, he would be doing it in color like William Eggleston because photography expands, and color had become possible and had become an art form. I was kind of combining those two elements in my head and I didn’t have a lot of great technical prowess, but I was also taking a lot of anthropology, religious studies classes, sociology. So, I was thinking like the way you want to do this is without judgment, even though was a judgmental punk rock motherfucker and I hated the mall, I was like, that’s not the way to make this work.

A lot of people in places with malls didn’t have other options. They don’t live near cafes or pubs. It’s where I worked as a teenager. Has anyone in the photos contacted you? Tell us a story about any of those people.
There’s a picture of two couples, like an old couple looking one way and a young couple looking another way on a bench. And it’s almost like kind of mirror images of these couples. And I was like, oh, that’s great. I was on my Facebook page for 10 years and just before the book came out, someone was like, “hey, that’s me.” She came to the opening and we started talking at a signing at Dashwood Books in New York. Mike McGonigal was there. Tae was there. My friend Jimmy was there. Suki was there. The woman I had photographed was like “Oh my God, like two years before that, I had a pink liberty Mohawk.” She said her favorite band was the Butthole Surfers, and half the people at the opening realized we had all been at the same Butthole Surfers show at the Ritz in 1987.

Once I studied all the Top 40s and Billboard 100s from every year of my lifetime and the late 80s had the worst popular music. What did these malls had in common, what was the vibe?
The malls all had a sense of placelessness. I took a couple pictures outside a mall, but they all look the same outside and they all look the same inside. When I got back, I tried to write down the names of all the malls. Like I could kind of tell from a set where it was. Sometimes I couldn’t even and so I’d write that. But then when I had to scan them, I had to take all the images out. So now I don’t know where they’re from, but I can usually tell by the floors is the most telling sign. Woodfield Mall had amazing architecture. Southdale Mall in Minneapolis was one of the very first malls. So that was kind of lucky. I stumbled upon that, and it was designed by Victor Gruen, who designed the first malls. But also, what was weird is there’s a mall in Vancouver, WA, looked just like one in Columbia, MO, it was literally the same with all the same places in the food court. It was such a weird, shocking thing.

Have you ever had a problem with somebody you photographed asking you to remove it?
Once or twice, someone didn’t like the way they looked. Most people are happy to have it documented. I haven’t had any issues with this project, but I’ve had it with other things. It’s confusing because one of the important aspects of a free culture is that we should be free to make images in a public space. I mean, that’s the law. No one has the right to say “you can’t take my picture” if you’re out in public. You can’t then turn around and like use it to sell something, but you can make art out of it. And that’s important. But it’s also important to be respectful of what other people desire but trying to balance that out with public needs. there are people who do it problematically. At the same time, if you look at what’s so important to our culture, if we didn’t have Vivian Maier and Robert Frank, these things are important for understanding our culture in the future.

Things are so much more politicized now.
People have often said to me, “hey, don’t take my picture” and I’ll try to honor that. But when it’s violent and they grab your camera, they get in the way of you photographing or talking to someone else, and they’ll disrupt it, they also don’t want to be seen. It’s complicated and important for the free flow of information that we allow these things to happen. We are in such a weirdly politicized moment that I’m less interested in doing anything political anymore, and it’s hard to find the value in a lot of this stuff.

Do you have any tips for photographers who want to make their own book or crowdfund?
Number one, be patient. Shoot a lot. Be Organized. Double back everything up and take the time to put them in a folder with a date and some keywords so that you can find stuff later, which I didn’t do. I did kind of organize my negatives back in the day, but not that well. The main power of photography is it captures something that will be gone. It captures a moment that will not be repeated.
Don’t launch until you’ve already created a lot of connectivity, so people who will share it, websites that will share it because without networks, without people sharing the work, it’s difficult. There was so much demand for this that I set up a sign up for an e-mail. So, the first day of this campaign we already made 50% of the money. So, it relies on having people willing to share and want to back what you’re doing. Someone will share it; I’ll see it get shared and then there’s two sales. So, it really does impact it. So, make sure that the people you have as allies are going to step up and be an ally.

You collector geeks need this book: order here.

November 26, 2021November 26, 2021

Shooting Blanks: The Art of Half-Cocked

*Half-Cocked* photo by Michael Galinsky over Steve Keene art

1994 was a pivotal year: The art and music community on the East Coast was rocking and filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley made a film called Half-Cocked, which featured many band people including Rodan, Slint, Freakwater and the Grifters. Now they have curated, along with Tony Kapel, a new art show called Shooting Blanks: The Art of Half-Cocked, opening Nov. 29 the Seven Seas Motel during Art Basel Miami that pulls together art, photography and ephemera related to the film and the broader community. Some call it nostalgia; others call it historic documentation. We spoke to Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley about their work and the exhibition. Photographs by Michael Galinsky

Chickfactor: How did the art show “Shooting Blanks: The Art of Half-Cocked” come about?
Michael Galinsky: About this time last year Tony asked me to be on his radio show that airs in Miami and online. He wanted to discuss Half-Cocked and my mall photos. We had a great conversation, and he also had several other people involved in the film on the show in the following weeks. Part of our discussion had to do with his surprise that the film wasn’t more widely known, so it was his idea to build an event around it during Art Basel. He suggested showing my photos and the film. Since Half-Cocked was such a collaborative project, and everyone involved with the making of the film is an artist we decided to make it more of a celebration of the kind of creativity that the film was meant to document. We also wanted to loop in others who documented that world, and people like Theresa Kereakes who helped inspire that kind of documentation.

Letha Rodman Melchior by Michael Galinsky

CF: Who is Tony Kapel and how is he involved?
Suki Hawley: Tony is a musician/artist who does curation and puts out records and cassettes. This made it a very easy collaborative effort. The other day he mentioned that he started telling everyone about this event right after we decided to do it, but that no one really believed we’d pull it off. I laughed when he said this because this was part of the secret of getting Half-Cocked made. I kind of knew that if you told people you were doing something you kind of had to do it. At the very least it puts a fire under your ass.

CF: Please describe Half-Cocked the film.
MG: Suki was in graduate film school and was frustrated and annoyed because it wasn’t nearly as useful as her undergraduate program had been. I was a photographer who wanted to make films. We met at her roommate Cynthia’s birthday party, and shortly after, she started to book a tour for Cynthia’s band Ruby Falls, and she used all of the contacts I’d developed in booking Sleepyhead’s first tours. So that summer, she went on the same route that we often took and met many of the people we knew. That summer she also shot listed the film Party Girl because she was the director’s assistant and the director came from theater. So, she realized she kind of knew enough to make a film. We understood that it’s best to write what you know, and since we knew all of these amazing musicians in the South, we wrote about that. We did a lot of brainstorming with our roommates Cynthia Nelson and Steve Thornton respectively and then Suki and I would write for days at a time. We got a rough script together in a month. I sent it to my dad, who panned it. “Where the fuck’s the conflict?” he scrawled on the title page. We made another pass and sent it to everyone we hoped to have in it. Jon Cook had ideas for a crazy subplot that involved murdering a pizza delivery guy. It kind of exploded what was there. I mentioned this to Sean Meadows the other day, who was also in the movie, saying there wasn’t a way to incorporate it. He asked why not? I guess he was right, we could have done that. However, we really wanted to make something that could get seen. Even in my band we weren’t exploding the boundaries of expectation, just gently pushing them a bit. I loved work that exploded them, but it wasn’t my impulse to do so.
SH: Half-Cocked is about a bunch of kids who steal a van full of gear and pretend to be a band in order to stay out on the road. The stakes are not as high as Some Like it Hot, but it does borrow some of that kind of slapstick at times. The other inspiration was teen riot films like Over the Edge and Suburbia. There were a lot of other more serious film influences as well; The Last Picture Show and Stranger than Paradise come to mind. The idea was to write a skeleton script and have everyone fill in their roles. We wanted to document the world we were a part of without making a “documentary.”

CF: Who are the artists involved with the show? Tell us about a few pieces in it.
MG: We tried to be as inclusive as possible, both directly inviting people and making it known that we wanted people to contribute. We focused on the creative community in Louisville and Chattanooga, where Rodan and Boondoggle were from; bands we met on our first tours. However, we also pulled in people like Ron Liberti, from bands like Pipe, Small 23, and Clok Lock—as well as a brilliant poster artist. We have videos from [the late] Letha Rodman (from Ruby Falls), her sitcom Apartment 6, as well as a few of her collages, and a short film we made about her work. She was a huge supporter of all of our efforts. We will also be showing a film made by Ian Svenonius and Alexandra Cabral, The Lost Record. Ian brought a great deal of wit and panache to Half-Cocked as the owner of the van that gets stolen. We have photos from Pat Graham, Theresa Kereakes, Allison Wolfe and others. We have just a growing body of art and documentation and hope to take the show on the road to other locations, and maybe make some kind of book.

CF: We’ve talked a lot about community and documentation. Are those central themes here? What else were you hoping to achieve by wrangling these artists together?
MG: The most exciting thing to come from this effort is a short film that Suki cut from Andrew Bordwin’s video footage of the Ruby Falls tour. I’d never seen this stuff and it’s really funny because there’s one section where Ruby Falls has their show in Chattanooga canceled and they find out in John Moses’ record shop. Almost the same scene takes place in the film and I had no idea that it had happened on their tour. So, in the short we cut in several scenes from the film that mirror what’s going in their footage. It adds so much to the idea of documentation. There’s a performative aspect to Half-Cocked that’s different in the color video footage. Together, the short video and the film capture something so much deeper than the individual pieces do.
SH: There’s not much wrangling going on. Everything has fallen together pretty organically. Not everyone could get their shit together to send stuff, and a lot of people don’t have much of their older stuff. However, everyone is still involved in making art in some way. I think it’s all very inspiring to look at and sit with. It’s like mini museum show and hopefully the beginning of a much larger project.

CF: Michael, when did you start taking photographs?
MG: I started making pictures in high school in a photo class. I took to it like a duck to developer bath. Really, I was the only one in the class who was obsessed right off the bat. I spent many a lunch hour in the darkroom discovering the magic of images forming in the developer tray.

CF: What was your first camera?
MG: My first, and really my only 35 mm SLR camera was a Nikon FG 20 with a shit sigma 3.5 lens. I ran that thing into the ground. The lens was kind of soft, but that gave the work something of a distinctive slightly out-of-focus look, LOL.

CF: Tell us about some of the books you’ve published.
MG: My first book was Scraps, and it was put out by David Simkins on his Sugar Free Records label. He was a music fan I met in Chicago I think and when he moved to NY he offered to put out a book. I had another book that is still not published, of my early music and tour photos. Scraps is a reference to what was left after I made that book, but it’s also about the scrappiness of the underground DIY world. After that I made a couple of books of my mall work. All the books are out-of-print, but I want to make some new ones. I want to make a book that combines Scraps with the unpublished one Lost. I want to make another one largely based on what I have pulled together for this show. I also want to get to work on the color stuff I shot after 1995 when I got a point-and-shoot camera.

CF: How many films have you made together?
SH: Michael and I have made nine feature films and countless shorts (many of which will be playing in the gallery). We have three or four long-term doc projects in various states of disrepair.
CF: What are some of the biggest challenges facing creative artists these days?
MG: There is just a veritable flood of content of all types. I can see how overwhelming it is for my daughter. Everyone is competing for our eyes and ears and so much of that work is overly slick and produced, even the stuff that’s meant to be messy and fucked up. No one wants to pay for creativity or “content.” It’s a shit show.

CF: How would you describe the Half-Cocked era compared with 2021?
MG: What we wanted to document in Half-Cocked was a world that was unconcerned with the expectations of the larger world. It wanted to be separate and disconnected. Now that’s happening in a million different ways in small groups—but also wildly connected through social media, and with so much intention. I’m glad we got to do what we did then.
CF: Half-Cocked came out around the time the internet truly took over our lives. What was better before personal technology changed everything?
Everything. And nothing.

CF: Explain what the Soundwave Art app is and how it will be used in the show.
SH: Soundwave basically turns each image into a QR code. So when you point your phone it can bring up whatever reference we want. It makes the show so much more interactive. Michael has a lot of spoken word and music that goes with his photos. It just makes the whole thing much more interactive. We can link to videos by band, or sound pieces etc. It adds a great deal.
CF: What are your future plans?
MG: I really want to tour with the film again so that we can see the world but also celebrate the art that went into it. So many of the acts are still making work, and hopefully this will help them get more attention
SH: me too!

Watch the trailer or rent the movie here.

Shooting Blanks : The Art of Half-Cocked will feature work by the filmmakers Suki Hawley & Michael Galinsky (RUMUR), as well as past and current work from the cast, crew and artists connected to the scene documented in the film:

Akeo Ihara / Allison Wolfe / Amy Davis / Andrew Bordwin / Barbara Johnson / Brian Lynch / Bob Fay / Cynthia Nelson / Catherine Irwin / David Pajo / Erin Smith / Gail O’Hara / Greg King / Ian Svenonius /Janet Beveridge Bean / Jason Noble / Jon Brumit / Jon Moritsugu / Jon Moses / Kevin Corrigan / Leslie Gomez-Gonzalez / Letha Rodman Melchior / Luis Collazos / Jeff Mueller / Jennifer Rogers-Anderson / Maitejosune Urrechaga / Michael Galinsky / Ron Liberti / Pat Graham / Sean Meadows / Suki Hawley /Tara Jane O’Neil / Tara Key / Theresa Kereakes / Tim Furnish / Tim Foljahn / Thom Snively

Half-Cocked is a 1995 film that documented the DIY underground music scene in and around Louisville, Kentucky, in the early ’90s. It was a vibrant, creative community that had a powerful impact on musicians around the world. This show will celebrate the art and the artists associated with that scene, then and now.

The exhibition will include screenings of Half-Cocked, other Rumur films, and a slideshow + Q&A on Galinsky’s photo book Decline of Mall Civilization. In 1995, the Half-Cocked soundtrack was released on Matador Records. The cast included members of the bands Rodan, The Sonora Pine, June of 44, Ruby Falls, LungFish, Slint, Nation of Ulysses, Shipping News, Boondoggle, The Grifters, Sleepyhead, Freakwater and Crain.

PUBLIC HOURS
Tuesday, November 30 – Saturday, Dec 4 / 11 am — 6 pm
Sunday, Dec 5 / 11 am — 5 pm

IN THE COMMON SPACE
SATURDAY Dec. 4, 2021

4pm
The Decline of Mall Civilization
Book slide show and Q&A
with Michael Galinsky

6:30 pm
Half-Cocked
Film Screening and Q&A
with Suki Hawley & Michael Galinsky

8PM Live Music
Gown
BORRI
Rat Bastard
Nightly Closures
Pocket of Lollipops
KC Jankem

Photo by Theresa Kereakes for the Shooting Blanks show

May 25, 2015February 8, 2016

an interview with tae won yu

it’s an honor to present an interview with insanely talented artist-designer–photographer-renaissance man tae won yu, who used to play in kicking giant. gail and peter momtchiloff interviewed tae in lois’ living room on a moonlit september eve… (this originally appeared in our paper issue chickfactor 17, out in late 2012)

photo of tae won yu by gail o’hara; other artwork and photos by tae won yu

chickfactor: do you come from a creative or musical family?
tae won yu: no, I’m the only one. I don’t know anyone in my family who does art. my father played the clarinet. he had somewhat of an artistic soul but he was really a journalist. both my parents saw me as  a little bit of an anomaly. they often commented on where I got my predilection for drawing…

peter: which predilection emerged first?
tae: visual art definitely. when I was in kindergarten, constructing elaborate cardboard costumes and sculptures and cray-pas drawings. when I was in elementary school in america, I was obsessively drawing the new york yankees. I remember getting  a nice autograph from reggie jackson and a bunch  of players. I would draw portraits of them in marker. for awhile it was quite embarrassing, the living  room was filled with my portraits. then there was a melding around junior high when I became obsessed with music and I would draw and paint album covers perfectly. I was informed by a style and aesthetic I don’t see anymore, which was—in queens, where  I grew up, there were a lot of rockers and heshers who had jean jackets with iron maiden art beautifully airbrushed or oil painted on the back panel, the coolest ones.

cf: we saw a leather biker jacket with talulah gosh on it in portland. what were you like as a teenager?
tae: mostly a music phase. very intense, very angry. I was obsessed with the clash and english music. the first record I got—was it called venus records? on 8th?—I asked them what was good and they asked me what I liked. I said I like punk rock, and I don’t like horns. they gave me buzzcocks singles going steady and wire’s pink flag and basically that’s all I listened to.

cf: what about when you started playing music?
tae: that was ’89 I think. I had just started college. the music that influenced me back then was yo la tengo’s first album and seeing sonic youth live for the first time. the first time I heard yo la tengo’s first album it was playing at café orlin. I was into r.e.m. too. there was a good balance to that music. definitely seeing sonic youth, there was something visceral about how they riffed and played music, making noise, attacking the instrument. it gave me ideas and a sense of freedom about how to make music that wasn’t based on playing well. I bought a four-track from a heavy metal guy in the chelsea projects. from there on  it was very similar…if I want to see something, I’ll draw it. if I want to have something, I’ll make it. in the same way, it’s basically playing pretend.

cf: how did you end up in olympia?
tae: right after graduating cooper union and the summer before that, meeting lois and calvin. people were telling me about olympia bands like the go-team when I was in new york but I didn’t really know about it and never listened to that music.

peter: did you play in any bands in  new york?
tae: I made a cassette album and passed it around and made it my own obsessive hobby  to create covers and editions and pass it to people and people liked it. the formative experience was definitely seeing a show at a yoga studio, I remember many things about it, it was downstairs, celebrities were there (jon spencer). it was mecca normal, some velvet sidewalk, go-team, galaxie 500 played, all these things were just swirling. it was an amazing show. I immediately connected with what galaxie 500 were doing and I really got go-team. I gave him my so-called album and he wrote me back and through him and sassy magazine I connected to allison wolfe and molly and bratmobile. it was a whirlwind of activity. no one I knew was aware of these things except for the rock nerds, but I didn’t really learn it from them. that show and myself just writing got me really connected, and somewhere in the next year I was playing with rachel, we had this early version of kicking giant, and olympia seemed to be the promised land. the ipu thing was happening, calvin invited us.

peter: how did you hook up with rachel?
tae: she wore an einstürzende neubauten shirt to our class, just through that, through the t-shirt connection we started talking and became inseparable best friends. every single night we would hang out and talk. we were really close. the experience of going to olympia—the enthusiasm and the freedom—we were there a couple weeks before ipu just dancing. coming from new york, where people are just standing around, and there seemed to be no purpose to play music except to say that you just did. I don’t know exactly why we did it, there were no rewards other than the company. but the eye-opening experience of playing in olympia was that it was kids and they really loved it. it was a lot of love being shown for music. a lot of sincerity and enthusiasm. it was very seductive, so that’s why. after returning to new york, I needed to make a decision. I had nothing going on in new york.

cf: how did it change you to live in olympia?
tae: I learned so many things about self-sufficiency. it gave you freedom and part of it was an exercise in delusion about ignoring certain things you might have to invest your time in doing but I learned about how you make things, and you make things for yourself and each other in the community, I learned to make a pie, I learned to cook. you experience the inspirational energy of riot grrrl and communities that were self-empowered and self-directed toward a greater good, very idealistic. everything had a dark side. there’s a pathology to every good intention but I definitely experienced many things.

peter: what pathologies are you thinking of?
tae: one thing is: not everybody should be making music. some music is really terrible and simplistic. just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. you can try, but… once there was enthusiasm for inclusiveness, everybody, but it turned into this riffing on anger and cutting people down who didn’t adhere to its very simplistic ideals. on the whole the lifestyle in olympia after a while was—I always described it as a marshmallow ceiling—you could do as much as you can and you’ll still be applauded for it and you won’t really be challenged so you have to constantly challenge yourself. but you don’t really get the experience of actually failing in the context of the greater view. it’s very supportive and wonderful in many ways, but if you know there’s more that you can or should do, you do have to venture out I guess. for me.

peter: that’s probably true of many scenes.  at some stages, that’s really helpful. at some stages, it’s not helpful at all.
tae: I like to be criticized. I prefer to be criticized, I don’t really like people who say how great it is. I have an idea of what’s good, but I always want the art to be better. I don’t care about my satisfaction of my self-perception. for the art to improve it really needs to be critiqued by informed and sensitive people that I respect.

peter: do people pay attention to critique? I mean, you may. most artists—my impression is that if someone tells them they don’t like something about their work, they’re not going to take that well.
tae: most people cry.

cf: it depends how you put it. if they actually do sit down and think about it…
peter: to aim higher is a good thing to be told. perhaps that’s what people need to be told in a supportive environment.
tae: if you’re serious about it, you appreciate the criticism.

cf: what about that art studio you used to work out of in olympia? how many people were  in that?
tae: I didn’t work in the studio. that was nikki and stella’s place. I mostly worked at home. I would go in and out.

cf: I remember talking to you once about art school, and you said: don’t go to art school. do you have any regrets?
tae: [laughs] no, you can’t really regret these things. cooper union is a very good, intense school. the best thing that came out of it was meeting rachel and forming the band and surviving the first few years, which were really difficult. I wish that I was more disciplined and focused about it but it made me feel like, the things I learned and the attitudes about art were something I couldn’t identify with, it was during a period of heavy theory and marxism, things of that sort I couldn’t really understand. I was more of a craftsman and a traditionalist. I don’t mind things that look like recognizable things. I like skill. I appreciate venerable aesthetics and things that come out of  long training. it’s not all intellectual for me. allowing things to be and creating a space where sensitivity can be aroused, that seems to be the kind of art that I appreciate. not so much about a storehouse of critical theory. that was the reigning aesthetic at the time I went to school. I didn’t really fit in but I did get a lot of ideas about conceptualization. you need some sort of background/foundation about how to proceed and what sort of direction to go to. it’s just another tool in the tool kit.

cf: what album cover are you most proud of?
tae: hmm, I guess the recent one I did for sour patch I’m very proud of which is all paper construction. the album is called stagger and fade. it’s very similar to the style and aesthetic that I do for the chickfactor posters, paper constructions of a scene. for them I constructed little cassettes, trees, drum kits, instruments and melded it with photo collage. it’s a small band and tiny release, but I was happy to put my all into it. it really reflected their sensibility. it was also for myself very satisfying because I discovered a new style.

peter: it was a big change of style of your work and it seemed to emerge fully formed. was  it just by chance that you developed a new thing—this 3D paper cutout? and was it an illusion that it emerged fully formed?
tae: the style is very much an extension of other illustration styles I’ve been doing with colors. I mean, I always loved danish childhood design, furniture, books, toys, very simple design, back to basics. I  love the idea of remaking reality through your hands. especially for the sensibility of a child because that  is the way that children attempt to control their environment. when faced with the unknown, when you’re powerless, the thing that you can do is draw and fold and glue. make a gnome out of felt or make a rocket ship out of paper-towel roll. that sensibility and attraction is very powerful and if you’re able to do it to a sophisticated level that I was able to, it made perfect sense to do it but the actual arrival of coming to that style is directly from my day job as a designer of children’s books. I was working on a project where I was designing robots for a book and that was a lot of paper folding and things like that. it was wonderful, two or three months constructing robots out of recycled materials, I just brought that home, that type of folding, gluing. it’s almost like discovering and remembering that, if you fold cardboard and you have backing tape or glue, what is stopping you from making something you want to make rather than something for a book? if you’re making something that already exists in reality, it doesn’t take that much.

peter: did you feel that you needed a change of style?
tae: I’m pretty restless, I always want to try something new. that’s been my method and my downfall in a way. not very marketable.

cf: does the sound of an album have much to do with the cover design?
tae: yeah.

cf: have you ever had to say no to an album based on the music?
tae: I don’t recall. I can’t remember.

cf: when is your coffee-table book coming out? can we set up a kickstarter tonight?
tae: my weakest point is my sense of organization. knowing what I’m doing. I need a curator, I need somebody who understands me.

cf: chickfactor 17 is our 20^th-anniversary issue. how have things changed in the past 20 years?
peter: what were you doing in 1992?
tae: geez, 44 to 24. I was in olympia. oh my god. are you kidding me? I was sleeping with a 17-year-old, downhill from there, geez. my god. in my 20s, I had the privilege of doing exactly what I wanted to do and inventing myself through music. that was something that I don’t regret and was important in my life. being able to play music and almost that spiritual release, inventing music and collaborating with someone. for a short amount of time, it was so ideal. I wasn’t mentally ready to handle it. as with a lot of things, as soon as it got difficult, I felt like I wasn’t being treated fairly so I quit. I started designing record covers and I was able to pursue art. throughout my 20s it was difficult, I didn’t know how to live. I had a sense of purpose doing art and music, but me personally I had no, I was really depressed and addicted to marijuana. I didn’t know how to live. I was terrible. in my 30s I pursued a course of action trying to fix myself. sort of worked. I’m still growing, I still feel like I have a long way to go. but in those 20 years, looking back, I’ve come some way. I’d like to apologize to everybody I’ve ever met in those 20 years.

peter: you said you felt you were unfairly treated?
tae: specifically I felt I was—I should talk to rachel about this, I don’t think I understood it until now—I was booking all the shows, felt like I was doing all the work. she was indispensable, I could never have made music without her.

peter: it’s so common in bands that one person does all the work. I feel like it’s almost universal. I’ve done it once or twice. in most bands I’ve been a kind of passenger. the most important practical thing in a band is having someone willing to do…
cf: a claudia.
peter: something that anyone could do, but someone has to do it. it’s interesting that you put it in terms of unfairness because I think it is unfair.
tae: equally unfair is my ignorance or unwillingness to talk about it. it could improve if I’d put it out there but I didn’t do that. I had a childish resentment and it grew to a level, out of almost revenge I wanted to quit it.

cf: has anyone caught you drawing them on the subway?
tae: yes.

cf: what happened?
tae: depends on the person. some people are really pissed off. I don’t know.

cf: do you feel threatened?
tae: no, they don’t even talk to me directly. they talk  to somebody else, like “this fool’s drawing me.” whatever. it’s like, hey man. I got eyes, I can do what  I want. no one likes to be stared at or monitored or so closely observed. it’s natural. I’m just recording reality.

cf: remember in the ’80s when punks used to charge a dollar if you wanted to take  their photo?
tae: that might make things easier, if I gave them a dollar to model. it’s an odd thing. I’ve had jobs where I do sketching at live events, I’m being paid to do it. sometimes I sit with them and they actually pose for me. those drawings aren’t as strong. their perception of the event changes, they’re concentrating on me  or rather on themselves. the ideal situation is for  me to catch people and have some space and be hidden, and that’s when I really capture not only who they are and their physical gestures and messages that they’re unconsciously expressing, but also the environment around them. they become part of the entire thing and the distance that you have from  this person, this ego, you’re able to report a much more accurate picture of what’s happening. that  gives me much more pleasure and freedom about it. when a person realizes that they’re being objectified and reported on, they filter out certain things and they’re not themselves anymore. I really love ugly photographs of myself. I like to be taken any way that I am. there are certain photos that make me cringe but I accept that because that’s what I see in other people. what I consider beautiful are all accidental, it’s all just a moment that is not intended to be captured and you’re lucky to capture it. it’s the work of the artist to capture it. that’s not something you make an appointment for. that’s something that a person has to really go out and steal. there is that tension there. my art really comes from that type of reportage,  that’s a part of it anyway, at least in the drawings and photographs that I make. less so in my illustrations.

peter: I know this photographer steve pyke and I like his stuff, but here’s what a lot of people say about it: the pictures aren’t very like the people. what he does is he takes pictures, he uses various lighting effects and what he ends up with is an interesting image of a human  face but often it’s an unusual take on a person. people often say it doesn’t look like that person, and that clearly isn’t what he’s trying to do. in a way it’s a depersonalizing thing. it’s not really a portrait in a sense…
tae: well, on the other hand, the person that is being depersonalized can also be recognized as a brand that people are attached to, so what they’re saying when they say it doesn’t look like the person is “I don’t recognize this brand.” you’re selling me coke but this is not coke. one can say that an interesting picture of a face, that’s all it is, that’s all celebrities are.

peter: there’s a tradition that when you’re doing a portrait, you’re trying to “capture” something about the person and I think that is sometimes what people set out to do and that is sometimes what makes a portrait good.
tae: I don’t know, it goes different ways. there’s a wide spectrum of treatment of how to take portraits and report reality but for my own experience/aesthetic, for me what works is not to intentionally create an image that I have in my mind. which is similar to not to interview someone with an expectation of what kind of answers I want from them. it’s like, let it happen, try to let as much accident and chance into it because the subject doesn’t know themselves, and I don’t know it. if we’re really truthful, we don’t really know who we are and we don’t know who anybody else is. so there’s a chance, given the right circumstances, that you might run into a beautiful accident. you hit on something and that’s a risk that’s kind of worth taking.

cf: have you done a new yorker cover?
tae: [laughs] I have not!

cf: what is wrong with those people? adrian tomine, jorge colombo, chris ware, all these people have done them. why are you not on the cover?
tae: I don’t know why.

peter: do you have an agent?
tae: I don’t have anything.

peter: maybe that’s what you need.
tae: I also need ambition.

cf: do you think artists have a responsibility to influence politics?
tae: no! what? how do you influence politics? you mean have an opinion and spread it?

cf: I just meant with art. like pussy riot or whatever.
tae: I don’t know. I’m not very political. I have opinions about issues but for me the artist, my responsibility  is to hopefully be an example of doing something of noble intent with honesty and thought and purity of intent. and work hard basically. it takes a lifetime to understand what you’re doing. if part of it includes expressing it through political art, definitely so.  I just see it as a bigger picture kind of thing: it’s  your behavior, it’s how you do things, to do it right, something that lasts, something that connects with people, to be constantly evolving/changing. it’s more about a practice of how to live and proceed—a method of living—than the actual object itself.

cf: what are your favorite tools?
tae: soft graphite pencils and eraser. x-acto knife.  pva glue. cardboard. construction paper. graph paper. computer. photoshop. ipad. brushes app. fuji x-100 digital camera. contacts g1. polaroid land cameras.

cf: if the tate called you and said “do whatever you want in the turbine hall,” what would you make?
tae: [laughs] I would like to make a…that’s a big space, right? the challenge of working on such a  big space is about how much human energy can  you bring together for one project. so it would be wonderful if it’s something that…in 3D space I  do love the experience of seeing everyday objects recontextualized. that’s a spiritual experience that I want to have in an architectural space, to enter into an empty room that is huge and endless, it’s like something from a dream. suddenly the space is what your mind can feel if you have no language. you’re not naming it cause there’s nothing there. maybe making a city out of one-color cardboard, something of that sort where there’s a repetition and consistency of form repeated over and over and over until things that you recognize suddenly change into its own body and its own shape and its own entity and its own spirit. when you have a huge space like that and all you can see is one thing, I can see the collected efforts of so many people and materials coming together. those are things I would think about. that’s a good question.

cf: what about if you could make products or projects and money was no object?
tae: if money was no object, the thing I would really like to do is explore construction and printing. I love making paintings and prints and photographs but I do love using, again recontextualizing familiar things like greeting cards, books, fanzines—these are all things that we take for granted because we are used to perceiving them as manufactured articles. we don’t have a relationship with them. every single one of them is a legitimate medium in which to express craftsmanship and perception of reality and skill  and focus. even a cardboard box—you could make  a cardboard box if you wanted to. in the same way that you don’t have to buy a chair, you could design and make a chair. I do love picking these elements of industry and reconfiguring and seeing what happens if you make it. if you see it through your eyes. the best of performance art always has one foot in recognizable theater or language or some component and another foot in the true avant-garde. if you could have one foot landing on solid ground, it gives you security to reach out further and I guess that’s what  I imagine. an opportunity to make something—you pay respect to things that exist in traditional form and you take it and kind of run with it and rather than remaking something that existed, you allow it to be what it is and allow the form to stand its ground. all these things are venerable mediums but rather than making yet another card or illustration, you can push it and see what happens. if money was no object, the thing is I don’t think I would actually spend it on any materials. I would spend it on time and allow myself to actually make things. I would make the paper. I would make the woodcut. I would draw.

cf: so if money was no object, you’d still work.
tae: exactly. that’s exactly what I want. if money was no object, I would use it to do nothing but research and work.

cf: how has technology changed your process? do you use any apps?
tae: oh yeah, I rely on the computer for many things. they’re all very useful but the more that you use it, the more you realize that we need tangible objects. we need paper, we need ink. we need…

cf: time away from the screen.
tae: we need time away from the screen. but most importantly, we need something to hand to somebody else. something as a direct expression of a connection between a person. let me send you this link, MP3. that doesn’t, that has no… it means so much more to present somebody with this thing that you made, that’s not analogous to an attachment. it exists and visually you receive it but there’s no heart in it. I’m not against technology certainly, I love technology and finding the right way to use it but I always return to the idea that we need to make objects to exchange between human beings. it’s proven.

cf: what did you take away from working in the magazine industry?
tae: [laughs] geez. you learn about workflow, discipline, time management, how difficult it is to me to exist…I worked for home magazine and ellegirl. one experience that really stands out for me…I never took the job seriously. I thought that everybody there had other things going on in their lives and this was just a job. you just do the work. especially a teen girl magazine—how much could you really stand behind it? I remember going out for drinks and socializing— they were all great people, I enjoyed hanging out with them—I suddenly realized by the look in their eyes that they took it completely seriously. I guess that’s what you have to do. this is your real job, if you’re going to advance, you better take it seriously. I really learned, and I’m still learning, I’m at a publishing house. every day I’m there, I always feel like I should be at home writing songs and drawing.

peter: if you could press a button or a magic wand and have four extra hours a day, would you like that?
tae: yes, would I love it? yes.

peter: what if you could wave a magic wand and never have to sleep again?
tae: I love sleeping.
peter: so do I.

cf: what’s in your fridge?
tae: it’s kind of empty these days but usually just basil, heirloom tomato, homemade pasta.

peter: you keep tomatoes in the fridge?
cf: you kind of have to when it’s this hot in  the summer. in this heat beautiful heirloom tomatoes turn to mush in a second. do you  have any good stories about calvin, lois, nikki mcclure, jeff cashvan?
tae: [laughs. tells jeff cashvan story deemed inappropriate for print by cf editor] I always feel like calvin will always have a better story about you than you’ll have about him. he still remains so guarded, he reveals  so little of himself. the story with lois is what a true friend she is, she is truly an example of how to live  a noble life. the only story I could tell is her being an upstanding person, so reliable, if I have a moment of doubt, I always think, what would lois or eric do in this situation? and use that as my moral compass.

peter: what happened to that rickenbacker you played in kicking giant?
tae: oh, I had to sell it. in one of my buddhist-inspired moments of letting things go, I sold it back to richard [baluyut] for the price I paid for it.

cf: did you have a top moment from the chickfactor brooklyn shows?
tae: seeing versus, though I’ve seen them so often. it was a really stellar set from specifically those years, fantastic, all my favorite songs. and small factory as well. my high point was just this feeling at the end of the last show, staying till three or four in the morning and not being able to say goodbye, reveling in the company of these familiar faces. especially the joy  of people who traveled far. to hang out with pete and you and lois. the human connection, the sharing, the joy of long-term friendship and appreciation for  each other.