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Winston Smith | |||||||
Instead of sticking a pair of scissors into a co-worker's neck or dragging the uncrossed blades from pelvis to collarbone as a piece of performance art, he works with a steady hand, liberating images from old magazines and sticking, for instance, a housewife who looked like she just huffed oven cleaner right into The Apocalypse, or riding a dinosaur, or reviling from a steam shovel, or becoming the queen of Egypt -- in effect, pulling up the blinds of traditional consumer context, deflating the tires on the shiny rims of the American Dream, and stripping back a couple layers of skin from political beasts; he quietly lacerates and, in the process, gets to a new, darker heart. At first look, nothing's wrong -- with the capture and re-arrangement of images from their intended picture language, cropped so close you can't see the line, his art looks like a photo. For instance, an idyllic, innocuous scene with a '50s Betty Crocker replicant whipping a meal into place. Look closer. Maybe a dog's peering forlorn from a window in the oven. Or the baby's bottle is a nuclear warhead. Or Reagan's not mowing a lawn or a carpet, but a tall shag of people. Men fish for money. It's not to say that Winston's heavy handed or has a ham for a brain. Far from it. With no shortage of humor or lightness in a fundamentally grim situation, much of his work simultaneously operates on an extremely polite, soft talking, artistic level. And this is how I found Winston, the person: cutting into loaded topics with dexterity, wit, and a firm grip on the lamp that shines across the face of America's popular culture. On a final note, since the advertising budgets of mega corporations have come to far exceed most countries' gross national products, civilization, for the first time in history, has taken on a commercial assault akin to the 24-hour B-52 carpet bombing of North Vietnam: non-stop hot turbulences, disorienting buzzbomb noise, supra-fast flashes, creating many vacuous craters in not only the landscape but in the public's mind. Think of Winston as a bomb shelter against the assault, or better yet, the media who picks select pieces off the pocked battle field and glues them together how he thinks they should have been in the first place... So, what do you do? As little as possible. I try to synthesize everything that i see in contemporary culture into its real meaning and in order to do that I have to condense many images because our culture is so image based. I condense what are, to me, the high points into compositions that betray their true meaning. Portray or betray? Betray, because the true meaning of some of these things is really hidden in contemporary culture and I think to show what it is really saying is a betrayal from what the origins are. They want you to think that this wonderful food or soap is terrific, and if you don't buy their food or soap, you're not going to get laid or have a nice car or have a wonderful life or have 3.2 children, whereas my thing is that their soap is really just poison. It poisons the environment and it poisons you and you wind up enriching them because of giving them your money for blah, blah, blah. So, by taking things out of context, you actually can create a truer meaning for something than it had in the beginning because of advertising... All of these things are coming from old advertisements and illustrations sometimes, but mainly old advertisements from the '40s, '50s, and '60s. Their original intention was to lie to you. That's what propaganda is all about. Not that all propaganda lies, but to propagate anything just means to tell your version of it. But commercial versions of telling you anything is generally done to enrich them monetarily at your expense. I don't know why I have such an axe to grind over that, because I'm a happy participant in enriching them myself. If I had more money, I'd spend it on more crap. More plastic shit. I'm not really much of a saint when it comes to those things. How old are you? Do I really have to tell? Anyone who knows their arithmetic will know how old I am if I say that I was born in 1952. Right at the end of the Korean War. Why should punk rockers who have had a hard time getting over their bad selves be familiar with your work? Why would somebody who's a hardcore punk rocker... How would they know Winston Smith? People know my work mainly from Dead Kennedy records and from some things in Maximum Rock 'N' Roll or just other underground punk scenes during the period of the late '70s throughout the mid and late '80s. I guess even into the 1990s because there was a resurgence of the punk trip. I think when the Gulf War came along, I think that actually added... I don't know if one thing had to do with the other, but there was a protest movement that built up. Instead of the frumped-out hippies who, after the Vietnam War, had turned to television and cocaine and money making, these frumped-out punks -- I don't know what they turned to, but -- just becoming slackers, but I think when the Gulf War came along in 1991, that a lot of people woke back up again and figured that, well, this is something that a lot of half-old farts like us had better stop, and enough of them are old enough now where they are half-old -- they were teenagers in the late '70s and now they're in their early 30s or older and now they're mature adults in a certain sense and they actually have the wherewithal to do something about society although we're all contributors and we're all steeped in what our society does, both good and bad. And who knows, maybe it's been around long enough that there's been a marketing aspect. I never though punk rock could ever be co-opted by the mainstream; it's so ugly and so tawdry and off- putting and so repellent that I was always thinking, "Great, this is something that won't be that flower-power, hippie-dippy, love bead shit and no headbands and sandals can be sold to promote K-Mart. Because you could go to some dime stores and see all this flowery crap with all this hopeful hand-woven stuff to the hippies being re-marketed from the late '60s and early '70s to the mainstream and it would just join and suddenly every product in the world was being marketed in that direction. And I didn't think punk rock would ever do that, although unfortunately, it actually has. The mainstream has actually embraced it, which shows how far the mainstream has sunk. When did you first think of, "Hey, I wanna cut out some scraps of paper, glue them together, and make something"? Did you have other artistic avenues before that or was the progression to collage? The first time that occurred to me to cut out pictures and glue them together was sometime in late 1958 and I was probably about 6 years old then. I recall being shrieked at by my mom because I cut up one of her art books. It had Michelangelo and Leonardo and I cut out pictures of the Mona Lisa and put Mickey Mouse's eyes on her. I thought it was really clever. I think I got my behind paddled severely, so I had to cut up things that weren't her property. Years later, when I was in high school in the late '60s, there were no Xerox machines at the time. You couldn't go down to the Kinko's and push a button, so I would draw pictures out of old magazines. The fear of being punished was so strong -- even when I was a teenager, I refused to cup up anyone else's magazines. I'd draw the pictures and then cut out the drawings and then collage those together. And that had a certain effect -- being able to draw helped because I was able to reproduce, at least to my satisfaction, what I was drawing. Although, unfortunately, it all had the same tone. It was all black and white drawings, it wasn't color. Also at that time, the pictures that I'm using now didn't have, for me, any nostalgia factor because they were too recent. Going back to the first time you cut out scraps of paper and started gluing them together. Have you ever huffed the glue just for fun? Yea, it's great. It's my favorite high. [laughter] Next to angel dust, it's my favorite drug. Actually, the glue I use is Uhu glue, and it's a German glue and you can get it at the dime store. Unfortunately, there's no odor. No aroma. There was no high. Any high I get is... Purely artistic. [laughter] What's the newest technology that you're really excited about? There's a new technology for reproducing pictures of limited edition prints onto fine art or archival paper. The new technology's called Iris Prints and it's a form of reproduction that involves the artwork being scanned by computer and then computer outputted onto canvas or archival paper. It's very high quality ink and very high resolution so it's actually the closest I've ever come to using a computer in my work. People ask all of the time what computer I use to do this. I don't do this on computer. The only digital action is my digits. Razor blades and glue. Sometimes I wish I had a computer just because it might make life easier, only I simply don't have the patience to deal with computers. I think I'm too old-world for that or I'm just too old for that. You can't teach old dogs new tricks. Maybe someday -- I even said that in my book -- I will get hip to using computers about the time that implanted mind control computers are the standard. I will still be using some archaic Mac. In fact, the one I got -- I actually own a computer that I bought about three years ago that I've turned on about five times. I don't know how to turn it on or off without help. I must say it was temporary insanity. I don't know why I bought it. It was cheap. It was a couple hundred bucks and it was a garage sale computer. My friend said, "Oh, if you'd had that computer on your desk 10 years ago, it would have been the fastest computer on the planet and now it's landfill. You were over-charged." And people ask what I have on my computer and I tell them that on my computer are a pair of tennis shoes, a hat, and a can of cat food. Have you ever attracted a fan that you wish you never had? Has there been anything non-productive? For the most part, people who write or email me now (my girlfriend knows how to run the computer) usually have said pretty positive stuff. People have been, over the years, very supportive about my work, they also tell me how my work may have opened their eyes about something or inspired them or given them encouragement, which I think is what we're all here for. This may sound really corny, but I think we're all here to encourage one another because life is so hard that it's pretty bleak for most people in the world. We're kind of lucky where we are, but for the most part, encouraging others is really where it's at. So it's nice to know that people are encouraged by it, although I have gotten a couple of things from people over the years that are pretty zippy. Years ago I would get these giant containers from a lady named Julia in England and Biafra would get them too. They were sometimes long, rambling letters like someone was reading someone's diary. "OK, good," I'd think. "Now what does this have to do with anything?" And there would be long diatribes and there would be these boxes that were obviously pretty expensive to send from England filled with newspapers -- The Daily Press. I kept looking through them trying to find... Something against you or appropriate... Is there something like a message? It was just your standard newspapers and tabloids and sometimes I'd go through them and would see a little circle that would say, "Winston and Biafra" and there'd be a little arrow pointing to a house or there'd be some cryptic thing. The woman may have unfortunately have had some certain psychological problems. Biafra actually figured out that she'd been in a home some place and had managed to get to the post office and was, from time to time, able to send us stuff. So that was a little disturbing to know that she had my address, but it was really nice that she was over in England and not here. I have a few people come up to me at shows or my expositions or at book signings who want to kind of challenge me over the artwork. "You must be some kind of commie." And I say, "The work just speaks for itself" and it turns out they were Reagan supporter types and had been listening to Rush Limbaugh and so they saw me as a convenient target who represented the other side, the anti-Christ or whatever. I would say that for the most part, people... If they like it, they really like it; if they don't like it, they don't mention it. I'm a non-entity to them, which is fine for me. What's the largest cache of images that you've gotten? Have you ever scored a mother load? Years ago I used to buy old magazines for 5 or 6 for a quarter. I would get old war-time Life magazines from the '40s for 50 cents apiece and then the last couples of years because of the vintage craze... Everybody's into vintage now. Everything that's 10 years old is called "vintage" now. So people would say, "Oh, that's vintage so therefore this magazine that was formerly 50 cents or a dollar and a half is now 5 dollars." $2.50, $3.50, $4.50, $5, $10, $20, $1000. I even had somebody who wanted to sell me some of their old magazines and then they said, "You need to take care of these" and I said, "I'm not going to take care of these. I'm going to cut them up." And then he wouldn't sell them to me. I should have said, "Yeah, I'm going to give them to my grandmother. I'm going to put them in lucite. I'm going to put 'em in a time capsule." No, sometimes I feel bad when I cut them up because I feel like, "Oh, these are things that should be preserved, but the fuckin' library of Congress has them. I don't have to preserve everything. I'm not an archive." You're not a historian? I really do enjoy the history factor of it a lot, but someone did point it out to me once. They said, "Well, actually you are preserving them in your own way. You're taking images that would have otherwise never seen the light of day any other way. They were cast-off, commercial images from before the war or the '50s, stuff that people had forgotten about. That generation that's past now and those products no longer exist and the whole rationale for selling them no longer exists. And so you're actually resurrecting this as a cultural icon." So that made me feel better. I bought it. [laughter] "OK, I agree with you." According to the artist Crumb -- the piece of art that he did that people almost immediately identify with him was "Keep on Trucking"... Oh, was it The Mr. Natural Guy? Right. But it's also the bane of his existence. Is there any piece that you've done that would fit that bill? Is there anything that you're glad you did, certainly, but people identify you way too immediately with it? I would say what people identify me with mostly is work done in concert with the Dead Kennedys. Biafra referred to me a few times in articles as the artistic conscience of the Dead Kennedys. The bad conscience. I think that, perhaps, the cross of dollars, the cross of money, is the one thing that people identify with. They identify it with, perhaps, not me, but they identify it with the band. The DK logo is also something that people make cheap t-shirts of. The cross was something I made quite some time before I knew Biafra and I made it specifically because of people making money off of religion.
A couple of questions about the piece "Idol." Why did that take 3 years to do? Because the first date is the date of creation. The second date is the date of publication because I had to alter it. The Secret Service came by and they said, "You really can't print it the way you're doing this." The Secret Service? Really? Yeah. Well, we were warned, actually. They said that this could constitute legal problems and it was their first record and Biafra figured, "Ah, let's not fuck with this, we'll fuck with it later." I noticed that there's double eyes on the pyramid. Yeah, you noticed that. Good. Actually, I was kind of happy that that happened. At first we were kind of bummed that we had to change it, but it gave us a chance to change it in a much more sinister way than it would have ever been if they hadn't ever intruded. Forked tongue out of Washington. Snakes over the crucified hands. See this part right here? That's on the dollar and to me it looked like a rattlesnake tail, so I made this as the back of a rattlesnake. I think it was a little while later that on my ranch I had to dispatch a rattlesnake that was going to kill my cat. It was about as long as my baseball bat and just about as thick, and I didn't have a gun at the time -- they were locked up some place -- but I had a sword. It was a renaissance faire sword that I'd carry around when I worked at the faire -- a costume sword -- and I stabbed the snake. I made stationary with it. I sued the snake skin and the rattle and, in fact, on the day I was photocopying it, I had to go answer the phone and the shop lady went to put something in the photocopy machine and opened it up and went, "Yeahhooww" because she saw the snake and there is a visceral thing to seeing a snake (especially when it's unexpected). So she shrieked. I sent some letters to Biafra on that stuff and unbeknownst to me, he cut them all out and put them all over his next record, "Let Them Eat Jelly Beans." That snake became more famous in death than he ever was in life. My cat, 101 (its name)... I had it hanging on the wall for a long time, and I'd wake up in the middle of the night hearing this "prrr-prrr," thinking that I was hearing a rattler in the room and in the morning the rattle part was all gone. He had gnawed it all off. Good 'ol 101. So, yeah, I was able to change a lot of things on that cross. Like the atom bomb at the top that made the UPC... With the 666 ...Behind the INRI thing
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