Artist Deborah Kass joins to talk about her extraordinary career, examining the interactions of politics, pop culture, art history, and identity within a Pop art sensibility.
Artist Deborah Kass joins to talk about her extraordinary career, examining the interactions of politics, pop culture, art history, and identity within a Pop art sensibility.
Speaker 1:
Design Matters is on summer break and we’ll return with new interviews this fall. In the meantime, we are playing some archival episodes. This one with Deborah Kass is from November 2017. This is Design Matters with Debbie Millman from designobserver.com. For 13 years now, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative types about what they do, how they got to be who they are and what they’re thinking about. On this podcast, Debbie Millman woman talks with artist, Deborah Kass.
Deborah:
My whole middlebrow attachment to middle class entertainment, is to me one of the more radical things I do in art.
Speaker 1:
Here’s Debbie Millman.
Debbie:
Brooklyn recently got it’s YO back or is it, OY? I’m not sure. In any case, I’m talking about Deborah Kass’ sculpture of two giant yellow letters, Y&O. Depending on which direction you’re coming from or your mood, you can read it as YO, or you can read it as, OY. It was originally on displayed at Brooklyn Bridge Park and now it’s back in Brooklyn on the waterfront in Williamsburg.
Debbie:
Deborah Kass is a multimedia artist who combines a pop sensibility with politics, feminism and art history. Her work is fun, funny, eclectic and deep. She’s here today to talk about her long and extraordinary career. Deborah Kass, YO, or should I say, OY? Welcome to Design Matters.
Deborah:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Debbie:
Deb. I need to start by asking you a rather trivial, but potentially polarizing question. I understand you can’t live without Bounty paper towels.
Deborah:
That’s true. Where do you get your information?
Debbie:
I have my sources, and I don’t ever give them away.
Deborah:
That’s really funny.
Debbie:
But really Bounty? I like Viva much better.
Deborah:
Really? Bounties is quicker picker wrapper, I don’t know.
Debbie:
This is not a sponsored podcast.
Deborah:
No, it’s not.
Debbie:
Nobody has to worry about our being authentic.
Deborah:
No, it’s like … I don’t know. I inherited from my grandmother. She had really particular tastes in paper products.
Debbie:
Now do you keep a lot of paper products around?
Deborah:
Yes.
Debbie:
See, I’m a person that has a lot of paper products in storage. I just feel safer when I have a large quantity of paper products around me.
Deborah:
I completely concur because it ends up we have a lot in common, including a need for a big backup on the paper products. I’m never happy unless I see that really well stock shelf.
Debbie:
Yes, I hear you. You were born in San Antonio, Texas, but you grew up on Long island?
Deborah:
Yes.
Debbie:
What caused, what motivated that move to the east coast?
Deborah:
Well, my parents were from the Bronx and Queens. My grandparents were three out of four from Russia, well, the Ukraine, and Belarus and they were New York Jewish immigrants. My father just did two years in the air force in Lackland in San Antonio. They were just coming home.
Debbie:
Yes, you were coming–
Deborah:
Like that generation, the next move was into the suburbs.
Debbie:
Right. I was there as well. Your mother was a substitute teacher in the Rockville Center public schools, and your father was a dentist, but he was also a jazz aficionado and an amateur musician. I read that in your house, there was only one kind of great art, and it was jazz. You and your dad would listen to how Charlie Parker and Coltrane or Billie Holiday, could all perform the same tune but differently. This led you to thinking that interpretation was completely within the realm of a great artist. Do you think that this was only relegated to music? Or did you think it could apply to other art forms as well back then?
Deborah:
I only knew one kind of great art, and it was music, because my father said so. That’s what the literature of the house was, although my mother read a lot of literature aside from that. It was a very active passion for my father, and it was a very involving atmosphere. I didn’t really know that it applied to anything I did till about 1999, when I had a traveling show that originated at the Newcomb Museum there.
Deborah:
The Warhol project started in New Orleans, the show. It was because I had to give a talk to the trustees of the big opening, and I had to prepare some remarks. It never really occurred to me that I had in any way assimilated that point of view, except there I was in New Orleans, which in my family was like Mecca.
Deborah:
There I was having done all this Andy Warhol work, this work that looked just like Andy Warhol’s. I realized that I had been doing exactly what my father had been pointing out these great musicians had done, which was taking a pop standard and named Andy Warhol and making it mine, doing it my way. I never realized that I had made this connection between art and music or interpretive art versus creative art or … But to me it was all the same thing. I didn’t realize I had any connection to it till I had to give this talk and it was like the light bulb went off.
Debbie:
Was there ever a time in your life where you thought you might want to be a musician or a performer?
Deborah:
No, I did have a little acting flirtation in my teens, but–
Debbie:
Didn’t we all?
Deborah:
Yes, I guess we did, but I got the real bug because someone I knew from summer camp was in a Broadway Show when she was about 16 in the chorus of Henry Sweet Henry and Eileen Schatz was in the chorus, and it just blew my circuits. She ended up being a really famous soap opera actress, Eileen Kristen. But Eileen Schatz inspired me. I was very taken with this fact that someone I knew was doing something professional like that.
Deborah:
I started going to the theater a lot. What I would do is, I would take the long island railroad and on Saturday mornings and go to the art students league. I started at like 14 and draw from the model, and then in the afternoon I’d … This was all with babysitting money and none of this was supported.
Deborah:
My generation, our parents weren’t interested in creative children. They just said, “Turn off the light and go to sleep.” They didn’t care that I was interesting, which I was. But if I had me as a kid, I’d be fascinated. I would go to this theater thing in the afternoon on Broadway, but I quickly spread out to off Broadway because I was a little snotty, intellectual.
Deborah:
I actually went through my calendar from a few of those years. I’m still very close to my best friend from the time. At her surprise 60th birthday party, I gave a list of all the things we did, all the art we saw together and all the shows we saw them together.
Debbie:
Wow, that’s amazing.
Deborah:
It was fantastic. It was like a living theater, paradise lost, it was crazy, it was Nicol Williamson and Hamlet. It was like an unbelievably rich. I did have a little acting Jones for a while.
Debbie:
You knew that you wanted to be an artist or certainly had artistic talent, pretty early. From what I understand, fairly early in your life, you received a letter from Peanuts cartoonist’s, Charles Schultz, and he was actually a responding to a letter that you wrote to him. Before I share the contents of his letter to you with our listeners, what did you write him to motivate his response to you?
Deborah:
Well, I sent him drawings.
Debbie:
What did you draw?
Deborah:
I drew a comic strip, it’s so unusual for me based on his.
Debbie:
No, why I’m I not surprised?
Deborah:
I had my own comic strip with little kids called Apple Sauce based on Peanuts. I had found my first Peanuts book at A&S, Abraham & Straus Department Store in Hempstead. I remember there was like a pile of these books. I must have been eight years old, maybe nine. I don’t think I was nine, but then I started collecting the books. I was completely obsessed, and I copied them endlessly. I perfected Lucy and then I went on and did my own based on them.
Deborah:
I sent him a bunch of drawings and that’s all I know. I don’t know what I said, I don’t know what I wrote. I just know he responded, and it went back and forth a few times. I have quite a few.
Debbie:
So you have a whole correspondence?
Deborah:
Yes, I do. I have about six letters from him.
Debbie:
Well, and did you ever correspond with him when you were older and an adult?
Deborah:
No. One of the things I said, and I couldn’t find, “Go fly a kite, Charlie Brown.” When it came out, and I knew it came out somehow. I was very exteriorly motivated. I still I’m. Like the world was of enormous interest to me as a kid. I’m not like an internal artist who has like churning emotions that have to get out, I never was.
Deborah:
Even as a little kid, I was very interested in the world, and somehow I knew this book had come out, and it wasn’t at A&S yet. I’m sure I bothered my mother endlessly to take me there. I sent Charles Schultz a dollar for the book because that’s what they worth. He kept the dollar, and he sent me back the book, and he drew me a Snoopy.
Debbie:
Please tell me, you still have this.
Deborah:
I have it framed. I pulled the page out, and it’s framed, and it’s like Brown now, and it says … I should know what it says. I look at it a lot like, “To Debby, best wishes.” With Snoopy, in a blue ballpoint pen. It’s so great. That’s amazing.
Debbie:
Well, his letter back to your first letter to him was, “Dear Debbie, thank you for your letter and cartoons. I enjoyed seeing your drawings, and I think you did very well with them. It is very nice of your teacher to display your drawings as she does. If you enjoy drawing cartoons, I would suggest that you keep at it. You can never tell what it may develop into. Kindest regards, Charles M. Schulz.”
Deborah:
I know so dear, and I did only write him one more time when he was dying. There was something about if you want to write your Charles Schultz, do it now. There was some way to email him regards and I quoted that to him and I said, “I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m an artist in New York and I’ve made my life this way. When I was a kid you wrote this incredibly encouraging thing and told me to keep at it–
Debbie:
“Keep at it because you never tell what it will develop into.”
Deborah:
-keep at it because you’ll never know what will happen.” I sat and I took your advice. “
Debbie:
Wonderful.
Deborah:
Yes.
Debbie:
In addition to sneaking out of your art students leagues classes to going to Broadway plays.
Deborah:
I was not sneaking out, they were done at 12:00 okay. I wouldn’t sneak out. I’d paid for them. I would want to be in them.
Debbie:
Well, you also would go to Moma.
Deborah:
Yes.
Debbie:
That is where, while still in high school, you first saw the work of Frank Stella, and I know that, that was a really profound experience for you. Can you talk a little bit about that first experience?
Deborah:
Yes. I haunted Moma to try to figure out what this was. This thing I wanted to do, even though I don’t know why I wanted to do it, I don’t know where I got the idea, and I certainly didn’t know anyone else who … These were doctors, lawyers and manufacturers. That’s what dads did, Mom’s taught. I don’t know where this came from. I was really on a search for a mission to find out what is this thing? What is art and what’s being an artist?
Deborah:
I would look at this work all around, and I didn’t really get a lot of it. I remember the first person I actually, I loved Ta Connie. I think most people end up painters probably fell in love with Ta Connie as a kid in some way.
Debbie:
Why do you think that is?
Deborah:
Gushy paint, just gushy paint. So beautifully fabulous gushy paint.
Debbie:
Now I read that, seeing Frank Stella’s work convinced you, you could be an artist, because you understood what he was doing.
Deborah:
Right. The thing that was so great about it was Stella’s first retrospective, I was 17, he was 44. It was whatever year that was 69, 70. It was the logic of Frank Stella that I understood. I understood how he got from that very first painting to the second painting, like what was going on in his head?
Debbie:
You just felt that way?
Deborah:
It’s clear in the work, it’s very logical. It’s logical work. How the jumps between the series, where what utterly fascinated me because they seemed completely logical, but they were obviously intensely, they’re creative jumps. They’re like not what you expect, but they make sense. It was being able to follow someone for 20 years of changes in their work and how they were changing. It was more in my head than it was emotional.
Debbie:
It sounds like figuring out a code.
Deborah:
Yes, like that. I understood his thinking and I understood the relationship of the form to the content, that the form was the content, that was a big deal.
Debbie:
Did it give you a sense that you could do this with your life as well?
Deborah:
Yes, I was already committed. I probably already gotten into Carnegie Mellon. No, I knew I was going to be an artist, but it was the first time I understood motivation within a body of work.
Debbie:
While you were at Carnegie, you also applied and were accepted to the Whitney Museum’s independent study program, which was only about four to five years old at the time. I actually applied and didn’t get in. What was it like going there?
Deborah:
My father had just died. I was in a completely altered state because it was unexpected. Amy is only 47, so it was a very weird time. I’m not sure I could describe much other than, I was kind of on another planet. I was living in the studio there I’d every now and then go home. It was a real shock when my father died. It was fun to be with really ambitious people my age.
Debbie:
It was at this time that you made one of your first paintings, would it be fair to call it appropriated paintings?
Deborah:
Yes, I guess after Apple Sauce, my appropriation of Charles Schultz, this would be my next major appropriation.
Debbie:
Ophelia’s Death after Delacour, can you describe it for our listeners?
Deborah:
Yes, it’s actually a very large rendition of a small oil sketch by Delacour called Ophelia’s Death. I think his was like, eight by 10 inches, a very small little thing. Mine was maybe five feet by seven.
Debbie:
Six by eight.
Deborah:
Six by eight, even bigger. It was redo of this painting, and I just repainted it.
Debbie:
Deb, you’ve written about how David Dao, the Chinese American artist and your teacher, saw the show of student work at the Whitney, and was so freaked out about your painting that he literally hit his head against the wall. Why was he so freaked out about your work?
Deborah:
I don’t know and I was really young, I was 20. I didn’t know what it meant. Listen, I still don’t know what it means when people react to my work, but I certainly didn’t understand what it meant then and I never asked him. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask him.
Debbie:
Your time at school was rather interesting, I guess is the word I could put it, and they found an interview wherein you describe your time there as total chaos and actually said this, this is a quote, “This is how crazy it was. Here’s an actual assignment. Our teacher got video cameras and said, “We’re going to hitchhike to Lexington.” One of our coolest teachers, the one who had studied with Kaprow was then in Lexington. We were stoned. We were tripping. We have video cameras. We went from Pittsburgh to Lexington with our thumbs out on the road. A lot of those students would transfer to Carl Arts. A few people went to Denmark to do primal therapy. This was undergraduate school. I did a ton of acid, smoked a lot of pot. I was such a bad girl and Oh, I had the best time.”
Deborah:
That is all true. It really was. I was out there and I had a ball.
Debbie:
It sounds like it was perfect.
Deborah:
I have to say, and I was madly in love. I was madly in love. I feel like I had the world’s best first love affair. The worlds maybe not best to art education, but for somebody dying to break out of Long Island and being a nice Jewish girl, I did it in spades. I had a ball and it was something else.
Debbie:
You started your art history paintings in 1989, and in this work you combined frames lifted from Disney cartoons with segments of paintings from Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock. It was here that you established appropriation as one of your primary techniques. What gave you the sense that this was something you wanted to pursue?
Deborah:
To answer that question, I should establish a little context, which was in the 70s, when I first came to New York, after the Whitney program. When I came to settle down, find my loft, start my life, become a famous waitress. In the mid 70s, what was happening in the art world was thrilling.
Deborah:
It was the height of second wave feminism. The art world was way smaller. The most interesting work, particularly painting, was being done by women. It was the intersection of New York school painting and feminism. The art that was being shown in Soho, which was a new thing, was Elizabeth Murray’s work, which was incredibly important to me, so was Pat Steer’s work, Mary Hileman’s work, Susan Rothenberg’s work.
Deborah:
All of these women, we’re really talking about abstraction and representation at the same time, but more what was interesting to me was how they were injecting their own personal point of view, or … I’m not saying this well, but after all those years at Moma, not understanding what any of it might have to do with me, basically.
Deborah:
I wasn’t necessarily the audience. I didn’t feel like the subject, these particular women’s work, paintings were the first time I felt like I was the intended audience of a piece of work. They were abstract paintings. I don’t know how that was communicated, but it was communicated extremely strongly to me who was already obsessed with Post-War painting, because of all of my time at Moma.
Deborah:
You can understand why, if I loved Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray would be a huge revelation. I said to Elizabeth once, I said, “You’ve ruined abstraction.” And she said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, before you, it was universal. Once it was you, it became specific.” That was a really big change.
Debbie:
I felt the same way when I looked at her first, the big giant canvases, a lot of portion and shape and it was incredible.
Deborah:
Yes, and Pat’s work, the fact that she broke picture making down into these parts. Now, Jasper Johns had done it, but it felt different. Just felt different. I don’t know. Something about seeing a little bird on a grid felt different. Mary Hileman’s relationship to the edge in those paintings and the casualness, only Mary would make a mark in that way, but it was still an abstract painting. Joan Snyder, I put into this category too, making operatic operas with that work.
Debbie:
How did that influence the kind of work you were doing at that time?
Deborah:
I’m not sure it influenced me specifically in terms … I never made a Frank’s Stella painting except when I use Frank Stella, but it was never to me about, “Well then I’ll make a piece of work like that.” It’s more what it meant philosophically or what it could mean–
Debbie:
What it opened up in you.
Deborah:
What it opens up, period and where you can go with that information. Then I go back to the early, late 70s or early 80s when Neo-expressionism happened, which also happened along with Ronald Reagan, but in that particular group of artists, you had to be a white man. There were simply no women my age, who got any traction for being painters. Women my generation got traction by being on the outskirts of the then very new and exciting market, following closely to Ronald Reagan’s reign, and the people who were doing critical work in relationship to the culture and representation, us painters called them ‘The photo girls’.
Deborah:
It was Laurie Simmons, Sarah Charlesworth, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine. What I’m getting at here is it was the content of that work, that weirdly in my head connected to what these women had done. Painting in the 70s, breaking open a system like abstraction and figuring out new ways in and new subjectivities, somehow getting them in there. Here were all these women doing critiques of photography and media and inserting their subjectivity and seeing what it looked like from their point of view. That was incredibly interesting and radical.
Deborah:
The art history paintings, came from a combination of those 70s women and what they’d done with the history of abstraction in Post-War painting, and what Barbara, Cindy and Sherry as I love to say, we’re doing in terms of sort of cultural critique and media critique, and putting them together into the art history paintings, which was me looking at the history of painting in a certain way or there’s certainly the one I loved and knew starting with Saves Son. It’s like the stuff I just loved.
Deborah:
Through Post-War painting, through Andy Warhol, and putting that kind of critique that the photo girls were putting towards the culture, towards the history of painting.
Debbie:
Your fascination with Andy Warhol began when you were about 13, and you saw a reproduction of his 1961 painting titled Before and After. Can you describe the painting for our listeners?
Deborah:
He reproduced and paint a widely distributed advertisement for a nose job. It was a little drawing, not his. From the advertisement of the profile of a woman with a nose, a big Schnoz.
Debbie:
Are you drawing it?
Deborah:
Here I am drawing it. Then the after the nose job …
Debbie:
I read that you took subversive joy in that image.
Deborah:
I did because nose jobs were really important and on Long island.
Debbie:
Especially in the 70s and 80s.
Deborah:
This was the 60s.
Debbie:
Yes, I guess that’s why, right?
Deborah:
Yes.
Debbie:
You said that your decade of Andy Warhol started in 1992 and ended in 2000, and then you began a new body of work in 2002. Let’s talk about your decade of Andy Warhol. It began when you borrowed the format of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy silk screens, and used an image of Barbara Streisand. You titled it Jewish Jackie. Why? Why did you make this painting?
Deborah:
Well, in the art history paintings, I got up to Warhol and I used Andy a bunch of times, including before and happily ever after, making men, puff painting to name a few. There I was with Andy. Those paintings particularly, we’re really about my absence in art history. That’s what they were about. It’s like, here’s our history, here’s how it’s written, here’s what’s valuable, here’s what’s not. I’m really missing in here, in this whole equation.
Deborah:
I was having a conversation with a friend. It was about the sexism in the art world, which was my common theme. It’s my theme. I was screaming like, “Jerry, you’re interested in every single thing that’s in the inside of adolescent boy’s head. You think it’s valuable? Anything a guy does, even if it’s like from when they’re 13 years old.” And he said, “Well, I’d love to know what 13 year old girls think about.” I was fascinated. This is why you talked to your friends. It really got me thinking.
Deborah:
Also at that time, it was another contextual thing about that particular moment, late 80s. This was really the beginning of women’s studies in academia and black studies and critical race theory and queer theory. This was all the beginning of what became academic 20 years later.
Deborah:
I was reading a lot, a lot, a lot about subjectivity and objectivity and specificity and fluidity of gender and Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick and before then Goober and Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic, Elaine Showalter, The Pembroke Aeries, the Columbia University press, Gender and Culture series, Nancy Kei Miller edited with Carolyn Heilbrunn. There was enormous, enormous amounts of intellectual activity around identity. But this was the stuff that was working in Barbara, Cindy and Sherri’s work. This is what their work was really engaged with and engaging.
Deborah:
Women’s studies came out of a lot of really smart women. Most of them Jewish, a lot of them Jewish. Let’s just say, a lot of them are Jewish, who were really good girls older than me. Who were brilliant children, who became brilliant women, who did nice girl things like major and get their PhDs in French literature and English literature and something cracked in the 70s.
Deborah:
Then in the 80s, began to re-examine their own history of their own topics and subjects, French literature, English literature, American literature through the lens of feminism. That is what I was doing with the art history paintings. I was re-examining my beloved history of art Post-War painting through a lens of feminism, because I was reading these women. It looked like no one had done this in painting and I really wanted to do it. They were just starting to do it in English literature.
Deborah:
Then it became critical race theory and black scholars looking at the law through the lens of race. When I have that conversation with my friend and he said, “I would love to know what 13 year old girls think about.” I was thinking about my work as I always do, and I realized that that work had really been about my absence, that the art history paintings had been about my absence. What would my presence look like? What would my presence look like? Then he said that thing about being 13 and those two things just exploded in my brain. What I was thinking about a 13 looked a lot like Barbara Streisand.
Debbie:
Yes, I actually read that. You talked about how Barbara Streisand changed your life as a Jewish girl growing up in suburban New York and stated that her sense of herself, her ethnicity, glamour, and her difference affirmed your own ambitions and identity. She did the same exact thing for me, exact thing for me.
Deborah:
That is the power of being Barbara.
Debbie:
Absolutely.
Deborah:
I was really obsessed with my parents nostalgia. My father had the music thing, which was major and my mother was a great reader and a great movie person, like those girls were, they loved the movies, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s.
Debbie:
Are you kidding? My mother told me that she and my father were getting a divorce, she took us to see Hello, Dolly, starring Barbara Streisand. Seriously, now you understand my fascination with Barbara, but in any case you were saying …
Deborah:
That’s like Rosie O’Donnell story. When her mother died, her father threw out everything her mother owned. She hid Funny Girl, the album, and that’s what Barbara means to her.
Debbie:
Yes, of course.
Deborah:
That was her last piece of her mother. Well, so having been obsessed with my parent’s nostalgia and movies and I knew everything about Hollywood in the 30s and 40s. My mother would talk endlessly, Leslie Howard was Jewish and Ashley Wilks and Rita Hayworth’s electrolysis on her hairline. I mean she knew it all. She knew it and she was great. I had a whole theory when I was probably 14 about 1939 being the best year of movies ever.
Debbie:
Of course, and it still is, to this day. [crosstalk 00:33:30] The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, I mean please.
Deborah:
Goodbye Mr Chips and Wuthering heights. It was an amazing, yes.
Debbie:
Never to be repeated.
Deborah:
But for a 13 or 14-year old to know this was like, “I mean really, I was a gay boy.”
Debbie:
That’s so funny that you should say that. I often say that about myself.
Deborah:
Yes, I was a 100%.
Debbie:
I’d be a much better gay man.
Deborah:
I am, I have to. That’s a part of my work and this has been under theorized. Anyway, so Barbara was so obviously different than any other of these movie stars. I was completely in love with Marilyn Monroe, I just adored her. I adored Jane Russell. I adored Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was like my favorite.
Debbie:
You knew that by heart?
Deborah:
By heart. It was very clear when Barbara showed up, that she was different than any woman who’d ever been a movie star. She looked like people I knew. She looked like a New Yorker. She looked like the Jewish girl.
Debbie:
Is it true that Barbara Streisand declined an offer from Warhol to sit for a painting?
Deborah:
That’s the story. I know the same story, so that is my understanding.
Debbie:
But we don’t know for sure?
Deborah:
But Barbara wouldn’t, because Barbara controlled her own image.
Debbie:
Right.
Deborah:
I have to tell you, when I was painting my celebrity portraits, and I would ask Barbara Kruger my heroes, I asked some of my heroes.
Debbie:
She did Elizabeth Moran, Pat Steer?
Deborah:
Yes, but they said “Yes.” And Barbara Kruger said, “No.” Because Barbara Kruger controls her own image. It sounds crucial to Barbara Kruger as it is to Barbara Streisand, but Barbara Streisand, did a damn good job of controlling that.
Debbie:
Yes, absolutely.
Deborah:
My guess is she didn’t want someone else painting her, when she’s too busy creating herself.
Debbie:
You also painted portraits of yourself impersonating both Warhol and Elizabeth Taylor in a series you called The Debs. Don’t think I don’t want one of those. What was it like inhabiting somebody else’s spirit in that way?
Deborah:
It was great. It was like the best marriage. I always feel really grateful that I got to partner with Andy for as long as I did. I learned so much stuff about making things and ideas and making ideas multiply, literally and figuratively. It was just the best partnership.
Debbie:
We touched a little bit on women’s roles, or a woman’s role in the art world. Do you think that women can or ever will be able to be equal in the art world? Do you think that they’ll have to be granted art world equality by men? Or do you think that this is an uphill battle that will not be won in our generation?
Deborah:
The only way that, that will be resolved as when women make the same amount of money as men.
Debbie:
Does that what gender equality in the art world looks like to you?
Deborah:
I mean in the big world, because it’s the big world that pays for the art world. Women need to make as much as men.
Debbie:
In the world?
Deborah:
In the world for enough generations that art is something they feel like investing in, and till women make a dollar to a dollar, women in the art world don’t have a chance, I don’t see it, I don’t see how till there’s financial equality, anything is going to be equal.
Debbie:
After the Warhol project, your plan was to take some time off. I think you took about a year off. When you take time off between periods of work, do you ever worry about ideas and having something new to say?
Deborah:
Yes, always.
Debbie:
Is there any way that you manage that fear or that stress?
Deborah:
Every break is for a different reason in a way, but it does tend to come at the end of a series. After Warhol, which I always knew it would come to an end at some point, I don’t remember exactly what happened anymore, but if you’re telling me I took a break, I believe you. But I do know when I got back to work, there were a couple of things I just had been thinking about a lot, and I didn’t know what it would look like or what it would mean or anything. It was really still wanting to say what I say in a different way.
Debbie:
Your next body of work Feel Good Paintings for Feel Bad Times, consisted of paintings of phrases from musicals and movies is a reaction then to the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq. Those were indeed feel bad times, but it’s hard for me to imagine how the world now is affecting the work that you want to be making.
Deborah:
That’s a really good question that I am in no way prepared to answer.
Debbie:
What was the intention of using the phrases from the musicals and the movies? Was it this sense of joy that you experienced in observing those or participating in those types of art forms and wanting to bring that into the work to cheer people up, to distract them, to create a sense of a dichotomy between realities?
Deborah:
Well, the whole thing was very tongue in cheek in every single phrase was double edge.
Debbie:
Right. I think everything in your work is double edged.
Deborah:
I guess it is. It must be astrological.
Debbie:
[inaudible 00:39:37]
Deborah:
It’s my sun-moon opposition. I was turning 50, and I really wanted them to be about turning 50. It was also that idea about identifying that I was playing with and nostalgia and weaponizing nostalgia and …
Debbie:
They were biting, the phrases were biting.
Deborah:
Yes, but nostalgic. But nostalgic only if you’re a person like me. But again, that’s where the specificity comes in. I love musicals. I love the old musicals. I don’t love the new musicals. I loved Hamilton, but my whole middlebrow attachment to middle class entertainment is to me one of the more radical things I do in art, because art’s supposed to be this other thing.
Deborah:
Yet the middle class, is the thing that has, it made the greatest art, it made the greatest movies. We made the greatest, a lot of great stuff. Let’s face it, working class, middle class, it’s where the action is. But that great middle class made us. That great middle class was the thing that was being attacked so directly by Republicans and by Bush in particular.
Deborah:
The dismantling of the middle class is one of the most tragic things that’s happened in my lifetime. To embrace this middle class stuff like musicals, it seemed really like a good idea.
Debbie:
Let’s talk about OY/YO, because it has so much embedded in. I mentioned what it looks like a little bit in my intro, so very large, big yellow letters, OY, YO, you can look at it from two different directions. You first developed the idea, I believe, through paintings and smaller scale pieces that were inspired by Picasso’s, Yo Picasso and Edward Roche A’s, Oof. How did they sort of infiltrate into your psyche?
Deborah:
Well, I was walking around Moma, as I do still, not as often as I did when I was a kid though. There was Ed Roche A’s Oof, and I just saw OY, so I made the painting the exact same size, same color. It was up at the gallery, and a friend saw the reflection and said, “It says YO in the reflection.” This is like an Andy moment where I went, “Should I paint it?” Which is exactly what Andy would have said. She said, “Yeah.” So I made the YO, so I painted the YO.
Deborah:
Then, it takes a village story. My print publisher Robert Lococo, Lococo Fine Arts who I adore, said “What if we made a little sculpture out of it? That way you could see it at the same time.” We did. Then this opportunity came up to do that, a large scale sculpture and it was completely [inaudible 00:43:04]. Who wouldn’t want to see that eight foot tall?
Debbie:
Especially in New York City.
Deborah:
Yes. That’s how it happened. There was a lot of people with a lot of good ideas and a great opportunity.
Debbie:
It’s a modern day version of the ‘I heart New York’ logo.
Deborah:
That and love.
Debbie:
Yes, Robert Indiana, absolutely.
Deborah:
It is totally those two things combined with Tony Smith.
Debbie:
Yes, absolutely.
Deborah:
When it went up, when it was installed, I knew it.
Debbie:
Is it going to become a permanent part of the New York City landscape?
Deborah:
Well, one can hope. There’s a lot of conversations going on. Hopefully, there will eventually be a great New York City spot for it to stay permanently.
Debbie:
It has to.
Deborah:
It really was a remarkable experience.
Debbie:
It’s such a Mashup of the culture of this city, this wonderful melting pot that still does exist and should be expressed in this way.
Deborah:
I’m still shocked, but t’s not like I planned for it to be an instant icon.
Debbie:
Yes, sure.
Deborah:
But even I knew it was the minute it was installed. It was just so obvious. That’s what happens when you have opportunity, which is the thing that is lacking to specific groups of people that, this is an example of [inaudible 00:44:37]. There’s not a lot of public art by women, and there’s virtually no permanent public art by women.
Debbie:
Well, hopefully this is going to change and help move that.
Deborah:
Thank you. I hope so, but given that opportunity, it just worked out really well and it was so much more than I ever thought about.
Debbie:
Charles Schultz would be proud.
Deborah:
He would be proud, yes.
Debbie:
I have a final question for you. You’ve had a remarkable career. You’ve had extraordinary longevity. There are a number of artists today, but not many that you can look at the trajectory of their work, and feel like they haven’t even peaked yet. They’re doing the best work of their career. I think that you’re an artist in that category that’s just continually doing things that are really important and making a really important contribution in statement.
Debbie:
In a recent interview you were asked if you had any advice for young artists today and your response was classic Deborah Kass, you said, “Don’t be an asshole.” Why that advice? Aside from the obvious why that specific advice?
Deborah:
I guess because at this point in my life, I know more about human nature and I know that people don’t forgive and they don’t forget, and that’s why you should mind your P’s and Q’s.
Debbie:
Deborah Kass, thank you for making our world and our city, a more painterly and provocative. You can see some of Deborah Kass’ work on deborahKass.com. This is the 12th year I’ve been doing Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. Remember we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward talking to you again soon.
Speaker 1:
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Debbie:
Okay. She’s here to talk about her long and extraordinary career. Deborah Kass, welcome to Design Matters.
Deborah:
Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Debbie:
You should see you.
Deborah:
You should put that in. This should be it.