WFMU Interview with DJ Trouble

WMFU INTERVIEW WITH DJ TROUBLE
June 22nd 2000

Trouble: What influenced you to want to go into making art?

Rupert: Well the reason I think I made art was that leaving high school my only possibility to being accepted into further education (and thereby get a grant) was to go to art school. Then, when I was there, somewhere along the way I figured there was more money in art than music. There was more potential to have a longer career. I don’t think it was a very conscious decision. Music was really interesting to me and I was also interested in Pop Art and art and pop. I loved that apocryphal story about Andy Warhol making these paintings in the 60s and he’d have the radio on. He was directly in touch with what then was called "low culture". But now we seem to be able to mention Dr. Dre in the same way that you say a contemporary painter. You could say talk about a painter Inka Essenhigh. in the same way you could the London band Suede. We’re talking about the same thing. Contemporary music’s no longer regarded a lower canon than painting.

Trouble: Or maybe it’s the other way around. Painting, or what our interest in art-making right now, is no longer the higher cannon. We’ve met in the middle.

Rupert: Yes. Although economically it’s a different thing. That’s another reason, to come back to your original question "Why art not music?" For me it seemed like to be an artist you can actually do it alot quicker and get the money quicker by selling a painting rather than forming a band, trying to get an album out, then you’re trying to market it and deal with the record industry. If you look at why in the later ’70s people formed bands, that was the place where they could put information out. They could play at CBGB’s or they could play in London at the Marquee club or wherever people played. Whereas in the "80s people started to return to making art because the record industry had closed off in a certain way. There was a gap of opportunity and if you look at London, you look at the exhibition "Sensation" that seemed a place where new people could actually come through.

Trouble: But simultaneously there was a huge music thing going on too.

Rupert: Right, but phenomena like Brit Pop or Grunge in the Nineties seemed alot more mediated. And to me the music thing was never going to be that lucrative. For most of my friends it was was easier and less complicated to sell a painting. You could do the business yourself, if you’re talking about the punk DIY thing. Growing up in London I remember buying the first Scritti Politti single. I don’t know if people know that record, "Skank Bloc Bologna". It was released in 1978 and distributed through Rough Trade. One great thing about it was that on the cover the band wrote how much it cost to make the record, where you could make it, the printing costs, the production costs. Where and when and the exact prices. Everything was there. That was very illuminating. It demystified the means of production. So twenty-five years later, looking at the artworld I think alot of artists are interested in staying in complete control of the product. Not in a "control queen" way but that that’s part of the process and protects their long-term careers. We’ve reached an era in contemporary art where cultural middle-management, a new breed of "power curators", define most of what gets shown at the institutional level. That really limits alot of artistic autonomy. In order to be included in a prestigious big group show your work gets subjugated to what ties it in with their umbrella "vision": that you represent "contemporary gay political agenda’ or some currently-prevalent aesthetic tendency. Your work becomes one aspect of the curator’s auteur-like "grand vision". If this is your first big public viewing, that can lead to a very limited reading of what your work is actually about. You start to become a token, an Uncle Tom. Because some of my work in the late 1980s concerned gender and identity after my first shows I was pigeonholed by certain curators and critics as a "gay" artist doing "performance". We all know what that means..! No one discusses Bruce Nauman’s work in relation to his sexual orientation. My sexual orientation doesn’t define my work. It’s also kind of redundant considering I’ve also had relationships with women... So I was frustrated by the way my work was "framed’. I decided to open an artist-run gallery to get more autonomy. I wanted to show the work of particular artists and within that situation then show my work on its own terms, to build my own context rather than be defined by curators or commercial galleries. I saw friends get "prestigious’ big gallery representation and although I was ready to join them should the opportunity arise, I had so much ambivalence about it and its viability in the long-term. I naively felt a career spent starving with integrity was as good as getting a brief compromised fifteen minutes in the sun and repeating one "proven-successful’ signature work for four seasons. Put succinctly, once you move into Mary Boone Gallery you’re then typecast within the framework of that canon.

Trouble: Yeah, but even that framework is still so much looser than walking into a giant record company.

Rupert: Right. Or a stadium.

Trouble: That’s true.

Rupert: What’s expected in a stadium is much clearer. You’ve got to start with a good song, do some other ones, maybe do a couple of bad stuff in the middle, but you’ve really got to be good at the end. Whereas with a painting show, you could do anything and they’ll either come or they’ll go. Either they’ll buy it or they won’t. You’re not expected to produce this baroque, traditional entertainment piece.

Trouble: Where you’ve got a million people gaping, waiting..

Rupert: Right. Or if you look at Conceptualism, or Brecht it’s different. If you look at narrative theater, that still continues in rock’n’roll. The audience really wants the build-up and the climax. I think in art you don’t necessarily always have to continually "do a build up." In art you can do something that’s quite quiet, or quite odd and offbeat."

Trouble: Do you think alot of artists right now want to be pop stars?

Rupert: Sure. Well, not pop stars, but they really love pop in a huge way. I don’t think they want to be "pop stars" because I think the reality of being a pop star is quite different to what we all imagine it to be. About a year ago we had a show in the gallery which was all work about David Bowie by artists. And it really came about because we were sitting around and we’d been to various group shows but that was a theme that really united us. The sense that we were more interested in particular albums by David Bowie. In the sense that you could put out a product and it could look a certain way, have a certain feel, and then you could do something completely different. So I think we were interested in pop, but particular kinds of people that managed to succeed in pop. People who made their own position. Also I think pop is the canon that people will look back at for this era. In the same way they looked at Picasso, they’ll look at David Bowie. They’ll look at the Beatles in the same way they look at Cezanne.

Trouble: So I’m wondering how the art world, and to some extent the music world is going to fit into this new phenomena we were talking about earlier.

Rupert: What phenomena?

Trouble: That there is no alternative. That everything is now mainstream.

Rupert: Coming back to Bowie again, I found it was interesting because in the 70s he managed to find and promote alot of very new ideas before everyone else did. And there’s alot of validity to that position. Alot of artists do that. You do something before everyone else goes there. And you move on from that. We’re seeing that in the Internet world. You see stuff that comes up, somebody manages to take it to a certain level. I guess we all saw the movie "Velvet Goldmine". It suggests that Bowie managed to take existing ideas and then use them very early. Bands like Kraftwerk existed, but Bowie being there at the right time could bring that kind of music to another market. I think marketing is the great art and finding this way to market it early is the thing. So that really perhaps is the position if there’s no alternative, then it’s about speed. That Virilio thing about the speed of information.

Trouble: But then everything becomes incredibly accelerated. it’s like you’re dancing on the head of a pin. You’re doing something for five minutes, five minutes, five minutes. You’re purely chasing thing for the sake of chasing.

Rupert: Well I don’t know about that, but you can certainly get yourself into a position... I mean, the reason that I decided to do a gallery as an artist was that it put me in a position where I could get lots of information, that I’m somehow a transformer. Somebody brings me something, I figure it out and figure out where to take it.

Trouble: I love that concept. I like looking at it like that.

Rupert: I think that’s one way of looking at it, that artists are often looking at stuff that’s coming round or we’re re-cycling stuff in a different way. That’s a pre-millennial thing. We’re in this millennial moment. If you look at the end of the nineteenth century, every craze that had been in came back at once. The hula hoop and all that stuff. We’re in this moment where we’ve re-configured that 50s Modernist furniture for the year 2000. Everything’s ergonomic. Everything’s made to coordinate together. We’re also in this era where you can really put yourself in a position, which alot of artists are doing, of being transformers, changing things over. It’s maybe not even about having a show in a gallery. Having a show in a gallery is great. But if you’re paying off school fees of $50,000 or $100,000 in debt, you’re probably not concerned with the prestige of the gallery show. You’re probably figuring out how to make money on the Internet, or you deal art or you do something else.

Trouble: So, to go back to more of a DIY aesthetic.

Rupert: DIY, but I think people are looking at the mainstream in a particular way, thinking about how to enter it without having to be sucked up by it. The more you're sucked into the mainstream, the more you're unable to see what's going on outside of it. Although you have to have ‘one eye in both camps’. (Laughing). I think the future is marketing.

Trouble: The future is public art.

Rupert: I'm curious what the future of music is. It seems we're in a weird gap right now. The idea of someone getting up on stage with a guitar seems sort of ridiculous.

Trouble: Right, but at the same time standing in a room watching somebody push buttons on a sequencer seems equally ridiculous. The Internet seems to have made us more privately public. We sit at home alone with more access to information. We access more alone. People in this culture only make music now to get a contract or a girl or whatever. Or to get across a political agenda. Or to get something across that needs to be done.

Rupert: I keep thinking the political will return because it's been so out. You've got all these whispers in the wind about various things but I think there's this weird little political wave that will come up.

Trouble: Right. It seems like even to present something that's unknown seems a political act.

Rupert: Yes. Or that just to be honest is hugely political at this point. I think it always was. To be quite brutally honest, or not even that brutally. To say what you think is a very radical thing. We're in this position of always mediating stuff, always thinking: what will the other person want to hear.

-Broadcast on WFMU on DJ Trouble’s show on June 22nd 2000.

http://www.wfmu.org/Playlists/Trouble/trouble.20000622.html