Originally appeared in issue seven of Megawords.
Interview by Anthony Smyrski / Photography by Elissa Bogos.

You probably don’t want to talk about the Philadelphia Independent.
The more time passes, the better I am at—I meet people and they’re like, “I can’t believe you’re the guy that wrote that! That’s so awesome!” I don’t know why that sucks. It shouldn’t. But it does.

How long has it been since [you left] the Independent?
A long time. Almost three years. The last issue came out the very beginning of 2005, February 2005.

Compare what you were doing for the Independent with your experiences working for larger, more established publications.
When I was doing the Independent, whenever I would get close to powerful people, or establishment people, or anybody with a lot of money, power or legitimacy … I would tighten up and move away. I think I was intimidated. I got this award from Philadelphia Magazine for being on their “People to Watch” list. This was a big deal at the time, like it could really help me materially. I went to the awards party, but I dressed really strangely, in ratty jeans and a military jacket from I. Goldberg. I tried to act like I didn’t care. I wanted everyone to look at me and know immediately that I was separate from this since I thought I was superior.

Do you think that was a mistake?
I don’t really know if it was a mistake. I was probably secretly worried that they would change me if I came close to them because I recognized that they were powerful. If you resist them, you wind up being defined by then, anyway.

Is it more effective to work from the inside, or to be an outsider?
Well, it depends. I’m confused as to what journalism can really accomplish. I used to say that if John Kerry won the election in 2004 instead of George Bush—and it was a very close election—I would probably still be doing the newspaper now. It would have given me a really big burst of energy. I read this book by Ken Kalfus called A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. It’s about a married couple in Manhattan who are in the process of getting a divorce, these really awful people who hate each other and have a child. Then 9/11 happens and, for various reasons, they both think that the other died in the attacks. And they’re both very happy about it. I think people in the United States treat each other worse than they did four years ago. I think the way the president has behaved has created new norms for what people are allowed to get away with.

The election had a direct effect on the paper?
That was a major consideration—do I really want to cover Bush and write these editorials for the next four years condemning this guy? But I have no power—

Do you think journalism can be effective at all? Can’t it be a catalyst?
Journalism that people get paid to do—nowadays, so far as I can tell—is about access and betrayal. You try to get access to people, institutions and situations that the public is interested in, that either have some celebrity value, or some intrigue value. You get really close to your subject, and you sell them out.

Was it different before?
I don’t know if it was different before. It’s a fundamental problem with writing. To go out and tell the truth about a person while they’re still around—that’s a tall order. You’re either not going to tell the whole truth or you’re going to burn them, or you’re going to have to change their name. Journalism is tough to do because there’s always a source—it can be someone who’s giving you the files, someone who’s giving you the interview, it could be the publicist—the source has the control. The story winds up always written from the source’s agenda, always compromised. Without the source there is no story. The supposedly macho, independent thing to do is gain a source’s confidence and then abuse it. You convince Dick Cheney that you’re his buddy, for example, so he lets you into his house, and then you write about his secret pot habit and his dirty underwear. But even in those cases, where you go out and trash the subject, there’s usually another source manipulating things from behind the scenes by feeding you negative information.

I used to have the notion that journalism was a big anti-power force. It was supposed to expose people who had gotten too high on their own prestige and were just greedy, who promote their cronies or engage in nepotism or abuse the public trust. I know for a fact that the people who own, run and operate at the highest levels of most major journalistic institutions—on the business side and the editorial side—have the same failings as the people they criticize. They are secretive and concerned primarily with hanging onto their own power. They like to make lots of money. They promote their cronies. This supposed set of norms that is the core of real, serious, public-interest journalism, the idea that you should be fair and transparent and open and public minded—I don’t think anyone who is close to power actually operates according to those norms. And journalists are very powerful. The people who own the media are even more so.

Do you think journalism can make a change?
I think journalism is this wonderful machine that lets people to talk to each other and also define a consensus. It helps a community take unheard minority views and weigh them against the current majority consensus and try to reach a balance point, an accommodation. In this way it is a positive, democratic institution.

And I may have been too harsh before … as far as my cynicism about the business and power sides go, in this respect journalism is really no better or worse than any other industry. The First Amendment is pretty amazing. The fact that journalists can pick up the phone and call government officials and corporate people, and there is a social assumption that people in power actually have to answer their questions or sit down with them for an interview—that’s amazing. I think that probably keeps a lot of people from doing a lot of terrible things.

Do you think that freedom is under threat right now?
I don’t think our legal freedoms are in much danger. I just think there’s so much chatter now that people can’t think straight. The real threat is that no one is using our freedoms in new or creative ways, and without these examples we might forget about them.

What about fiction? I know you’ve been working on some stories. Is that something you’re pursuing?
I wish I did it more. It’s pretty hard. I mean, I have a bunch of stories in my head that would work—things that have really happened—that would probably work better as fiction. Right now it’s just a bunch of files. I don’t really see fiction as being separate from journalistic writing. Non-fiction is just fiction that can pass fact checking, where all the names line up and there’s a phone number attached to quotes. Non-fiction is a little easier because there are more constraints. It’s a formula. It makes it easier to write.

Fiction, because you don’t have these constraints—do you think that expanse of freedom helps you get at the truth of things?
Oh, yeah, definitely. If you want to know what really goes on inside a marriage, if you want to know what really goes on in the CIA—fiction is the best way to answer both those questions. I don’t see that ever changing.

Do you want to talk about cars?
I’m fascinated by how they all look so mean, like they’re growling and snarling. Not just the Hummers, little Honda Accords have these slitted, beady, beast-like eyes. They’re ferocious looking. I feel like this is also true of the mascots of profession sports teams. I think this reflects something larger about historical changes in the spirit of North Americans, how our aggression is getting more open and pronounced.

I was just watching people on the subway the other day … whenever human beings are still and looking at something, something very important is happening. They’re praying or meditating. They might be looking at their book or a screen or an iPod. There’s some kind of transmission happening. If you really wanted to track media, that’s what you would want to focus on: What do people stop and point their attention at? In New York, I’m amazed by how much value advertisers get from the ads on the subway. There’s a lot of politics on the subway, and the only safe thing to look at is the ads. You’re not allowed to look at other people’s bodies. You’re not allowed to look at other people’s faces. Or, you can carry around something to look at during these dead periods. Like a book or an iPod. The iPod is this amazing tool for totally ignoring your environment, if that’s what you want to do. It turns your surroundings into this solipsistic music video where your errand is the only errand and everything else is just this marvelous montage of color and light passing you by.

What do you think is going to happen to newspapers? What do you think about newspapers like Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Le Monde?
It’s easy to get romantic about newspapers because by the middle of the 20th century, they had reached full institutional maturity, and they stayed at that point, in full creative flower, for at least twenty years. The design was perfect—the way the editors and reporters interacted and collected information—all of these things had been perfected. On the street, the newspaper had been naturalized into the human experience, built into the day like the sunrise and the mail. It was necessary. It was something that everyone wanted and liked. Most mediums tend to have this period where they’re super hot, where all the money is there and all the hot artists are doing it. You have new machines and new capabilities—like in the 1910s and ‘20s when you had these marvelous Sunday color inserts. Cities were growing at the same time so it was this terrific confluence of money, audience, technology, talent, and fresh material to cover. And then, from the ‘20s to the ‘60s or ‘70s, you have this gradual professionalization where newspapers come up with specific procedures and hierarchies. They institutionalize their role in society and their status increases.

Do you think the Internet is going to do that for our generation?
Right now the problem with the Internet is that only rich people in the first world have it. And all they do with it is use it to talk to each other. I don’t think you could ever have a magazine or a newspaper that defines a global consensus or a global community, but I do think you could have a website or message board where that could happen. That’s my favorite thing on the Internet—message boards. If you had people from all over the world debating the news on some message board, just going at it—that’s what I’m hoping for.

The counterculture we have now is very much defined by selling things. I wonder how much the Internet is going to push that on the rest of the world, and what kind of effect that’s going to have on developing countries.
They’re going to see all the images of ridiculous wealth and prosperity. The ghetto, hip-hop, Scarface mentality, that’s what will resonate. We’ve already primed the pump by feeding them all these images of stuff they can’t have. Hip-hop is the worst force in history. I feel like many of Marx’s predictions about capitalism succumbing to its inherent class contradictions might have come true if it weren’t for hip-hop. It blows my mind that the poorest people in America are the ones who most embody the predatory, capitalist, every-person-for-himself, cutthroat, gross celebration of material wealth. It’s like, “I live in a rubble house and have a plastic, fake, gold chain. And I have rims that look like chrome but they’re actually plastic.” Just that little bit of flash, that somehow became the essence of what’s “cool” or what posturing is. I think that’s part of what makes hip-hop so dangerous and interesting—it’s a celebration of these empty, selfish pretension. It creates a value system where you can satisfy potentially revolutionary urges by spending a month’s paycheck on a Gucci jacket.

The amazing thing about hip-hop is that it just solves so many problems for people in power. It has all this appeal. I think it happened organically. At the bottom of it, there’s a violent, frontiersman, gangster, cowboy, mentality, where “I’m going to shoot you, take what’s yours, get what’s mine.” I think long before it became a “black” thing, this was a classic, male, American trope. Henry Kissinger said this in an interview—at the bottom of the American psyche is a cowboy leading the wagon train. I think all the commercial aspects [of hip-hop] are built around that. The gangster is kind of the ultimate capitalist figure who doesn’t follow any rules and pushes all the other people around and takes as much as he can. He escapes punishment and deals with other people violently.

What is your outlook on the next couple of years professionally?
It’d be fun to start something again. It’d probably be fun to start a business. The Independent was like a business and it paid taxes and it didn’t break the law or anything, but it followed its own logic. It’d be fun to start another institution like that.

You talk about the bank a lot.
Starting a bank seems very hard. You need about $50 million to do it legitimately. But then again, starting a newspaper seemed really hard. If I had enough energy, got excited enough, and there were people around me excited about it—then I could see doing it. The reason I started the paper was… I was in college and reading alt-weeklies [and thought] “Whoa, I could do this better. This paper really fucking sucks. I hate it. I’m going to do my own.” That’s how I feel about banks now. They’re done badly, but they’re necessary. People don’t feel any kind of connection with their bank. So, that is a kind of opportunity.

I guess I’ve lost a lot of confidence in my own abilities. I’m not as excited as I used to be. After I stopped doing the paper, I was broke. I became very interested in saving up a lot of money. I did a lot of work that I didn’t like, to save up the money. I didn’t hate the work I did—it just didn’t do anything for me. But that’s all right. When I started the paper I worked in a restaurant. That was healthy because it created a lot of negative energy that I put in the paper. Lately I’ve been accumulating negative energy but I haven’t turned around and done anything with it. You have to use the urge or you lose it.

There is a certain level of satisfaction that you get just from reaching a certain degree of status in society. It’s mostly in your head. Say I moved to Philadelphia and I’m broke and I’m just getting started. I have no money so I need to do something crazy to get some recognition. But once I get the recognition—I’m making money, doing work and I can buy some nice things, I can order a fancy drink at a fancy restaurant. I can drop the names of a fancy client and go to fancy parties and obtain recognition as an equal or a superior. As soon as I have that, I’ve lost a lot of the impetus to do something interesting.

I’m a pretty lazy person. I need mediating motives or circumstances to break out. Also, I’m not good at working by myself. I like working with other people. I get worked up, then I get these big bursts of energy that I can transmit to people I’m working with. That’s why this bank idea might be good. You need an idea that’s going to work not just for you, but for the set of people around you.

Most people I know seem to be stagnating in a similar to the way I am—just interested in advancing professionally and accumulating money and accumulating credentials and having a better story to tell the guy at the party. Some of this is just getting older, but I think there are major generational and historical forces at play as well.

What do you think those forces are?
People want to get married and reproduce. They start to worry about security and the welfare of their offspring. They lose faith in their own ability to gain recognition for their own work and they seek out recognition that’s institutional. It’s a shortcut. You do something that’s already perceived to be worthwhile and legitimate, and then you don’t have to ask yourself the hard questions every day. I’ve definitely fallen into that trap.

Want to talk about gambling? I know you like gambling.
I think I’m potentially a compulsive gambler and I’ve known myself long enough to be moderate about it. I do it for kicks. It’s a very vivid experience. And, it’s also really competitive [and] interesting because in most games you’re actually performing experiments on live human subjects under stress who are all trying to perform experiments on you. And there’s money on the line and it’s pretty intense.

How did the gambling start?
I was getting into it with the newspaper, I wasn’t getting along very well with my girlfriend, I was fairly broke. Doing the paper, I’d been pushed around by all these guys with money—all these landlords and tough old men and bitter Philadelphia types who pushed me around like a piece of meat. At least that’s how I saw it. I wasn’t sure if I could hack it with real business-type guys. So, it was a way to deal with that. It solved a bunch of problems at once: get away from the girlfriend, figure out stuff about businessmen, masculine competition.

At the same time I was doing a lot of freelance work, where I was doing a lot of intense negotiations. Poker definitely helped with that, with seeing money not as something absolute but as a bargaining medium. There are a lot of good things, a lot of bad things about poker. I wasn’t very good at it for a while, but then I figured it out to some extent. But you never really figure it out.

Talk about how the game has helped you mature into an adult.
Making decisions under—

Stress.
Not stress, but uncertainty. Like, different ways that things could go: “Oh, that’s pretty good, I’ll just do that. That’s probably good enough. If it doesn’t work out, who cares, ‘cause it’s not always gonna work out.” It’s good practice for that. There’s also this concept of “game selection” that’s very important. Basically the question of who you decide to play with, when you start, and when you leave, are as important as any decision you might make inside the game.

A reflection of how reality works. It sounds like it’s just a distilled version of reality.
It’s a very zero sum type, cannibalistic, capitalist reality. It’s a pretty good model, but poker is a lot fairer than real life.

Why?
Because in poker, everyone’s playing by the same rules. You’ve got your money and you got your decisions. In real life, on Wall Street or in business, someone would have access to special sets of premium opportunities—to special sets of premium information. They’re given these tremendous advantages.

That doesn’t exist in poker.
No, assuming nobody’s cheating. It is just a game, though. Games are interesting. Any game, if you played enough, will start to—

Reflect life?
Yeah.

Mexico City, 2009.

All photos by Zoe Strauss

MEGAWORDS: One of the thing’s that always staggered me about your photography is the way the you’re able to establish an instant rapport—an instant connection—with people.  I feel sometimes you’ve just met them.
ZOE: Yeah. [A very loud motorcycle noise is heard outside the cafe.] Shut up, bastards! Could you have this in the interview?  Fuckin’ cocksuckers!

Of course it’s in the interview!
Fuckin’ assholes!

So, is that something that you are consciously thinking about?  What’s the process—you see someone and you’re interested?  Or is it random?
It’s totally random.

Always?
Always?  Well… yeah.  It is.  It’s totally random and it’s also completely unconscious. There’s no feeling of, ‘this person looks like this and I need to fit them into my work because thematically, or…’  It’s always this initial moment of meeting and then that’s the whole thing.

Does the initial contact happen with the camera or without the camera?
No, always with the camera.

Always with the camera?
It’s always when I’m working.  My meeting of someone is always, ‘Can I make your photo?’

Right.  So, it’s that direct.
Yeah.  That’s the introduction, always.

But the people are so comfortable.  It’s astounding.
I honestly have no idea.

How long does the relationship last?  Is it just, like, a minute?  Do you spend a day with them?
No.  The longest it generally ever is is if I invite myself into someone’s house, then it’s a little bit longer.  If it’s just meeting someone one the street, it’s a maximum ten minutes.

And that’s it?
That’s the whole thing.

Do you ever maintain the contact with the people?
For some of the people. There’s a couple people that I’ve gone back and photographed again.  And my initial meeting has gone the same as all the others— just meeting them as strangers.

Right—
And then I’ve got back and either photographed them again or just seen around the neighborhood or I know them again.  But for the most part that’s kind of an anomaly.

It’s always the initial meeting as a stranger but then sometimes I have contact with a couple different people.  Especially people where I’ve been in their home—that’s often the difference.

It’s a little more intimate.
Yeah.  It’s a little more intimate and I also want to make sure—I feel like that’s a very private, intimate thing that they’re allowing.  If it’s possible, it seems appropriate for me to kind of retain a little contact with someone if they want that—if they want that. But most people are, like, ‘Whatever.  The interaction’s done.’

Do people understand what you’re sort of doing with the photos?  Does that make sense?
I think yes.

Personally, that’s something that I often struggle—not struggle with—but question. Because it is this relationship you have with somebody and you take it from the world that they sort of exist in.  Then you put it into the world that we exist in. They’re not always parallel.  Often they are complete opposites, you know?
Yeah.  Totally.  I think about it all the time.  In terms of portraits, it’s an image of a real person.  It’s not abstract.  It’s not, ‘This is representing blah blah blah.’  It’s a real person that I’ve had a real interaction with.  And almost always it’s someone I had a strong affection for that happened in that moment.  I think a lot of what it means when these images go out into the world and how they get shown—what it then means is—how people are reading this image—

So, when I’m talking to people and I’m making the photo, I always say—you know, it’s changed over the years.  I used to always just say, ‘I do this show under I-95.’ And that required a lot more explanation of, ‘I show this once a year outside.’  And now it’s kind of changed to, ‘I might show this in a gallery or it might be in a book.  And I do this outside installation, too.’  So, like, those things are things that people know immediately and they can understand. They’re aware that these things are going to be seen by a larger audience.

I always say I’m not sure where it’s gonna go but it could go out into the world and be seen by a lot of people or it might just stay in my house. I have no idea. There’s sometimes when I feel like people are not really cognizant of it.  I don’t really show that.  I feel like that kind of—that kind of uncertainty and that kind of hesitation that shows in the photos.

They don’t understand, maybe?
Yeah, it’s either they don’t… Yeah, I feel like that’s true.  In that moment it needs to be a full and reciprocal moment that the photo might go out and into the world.  But I am just judging that myself.

It’s a judgement call.
I could be making that up in my head and I could be totally wrong.

Is everything you are shooting near your home in South Philly?
No.

Do you go to other places with the view in mind to take photographs?
Yeah.  Mainly, it’s South Philly, right—near my house.  But it’s also in other neighborhoods that I’ve either lived or known pretty intimately.

Would you come to my neighborhood and walk around?
Yeah—

Is that how you do it?
I would totally just walk around.  Or drive around!

Right, right—and just see how it turns out.
Yeah—

It’s really organic.
It’s always just, ‘I’ll see what’s going on here.’

I guess that’s like the photo of Christmas decorations in Kensington.
Actually, no– someone emailed me.  They said you need to get to Trenton and then Somerset right away.  But I knew it from a couple years ago when Giant Santa was up. And I had forgotten.  I always want to go back to the Christmas house, so I was happy to get a reminder and then I went there.

Some people e-mail me, like, ‘Oh!  Here’s a funny sign blah blah blah.’  And I’m, like, ‘Welllll, I’m not driving to Pottsvile or whatever.’   But since I knew the house and I was, like, ‘I know Giant Santa’s up—‘

That’s one of my other questions.  It seems to be mostly—it’s like you’re documenting sort of human interaction.  And then it seems like you also will go to specific events—
Right—

And the signs—
Right—

So where do the signs fit in?   And the buildings that don’t have people in it, necessarily. But it seems to be mostly—at least from my perspective—if it’s not people, then it’s some sort of focus on the sign or a particular object—not so much as a skyline or whatever.
Yeah, it’s not—

How does that fit in?  How is it related?  Is it related?
Oh, yeah.  I feel like all three are connected and they all need each other to have resonance.  They need to kind of bounce off of each other to really have the kind of epic scope that I’m looking for—or hope to achieve.  They all allow—they all mean—they all add meaning to each other. And they kind of just allow you to move between photos and make your own meaning to it.  So, they matter a lot and you’re right.  The landscapes are generally architectural and, for the most part, they’re very flat.  Like, I have my—

Yeah, they’re very graphic.
Yeah, there’s a couple reasons for that but generally it’s just that’s the aesthetic that I like.  That’s what I like to look at and that’s what I like to make.  And that also fits into the idea of the connection and a kind of gridding and attachment of imagery.

I know this is a huge question to ask.  But what’s the mission?  What’s the epic plan?
[laughs]  That’s a good question! I have noooooooooo fucking idea!  I thought it was a good idea to just chart this out.  Woo!  Now, what was I thinking.  Crazy… talking crazy.  Umm…

Or, at least, where does it stand right now?
It stands—

I feel like it’s something that changes.
Yeah, yeah—but I feel like the plan has pretty much remained the same from the start. Which is—it’ll be the end of of ’95, which is in the 2010. That’ll be when I kind of cull everything and that will be when this project is complete.

When did  the  I-95 start?
2000.

Also you just had a show in Seattle?
Yeah—it was in Bellevue, which is right outside of Seattle.

What was it like?
The place—it is a crazy place.  And it’s kind of a complex thing.  It’s a residency where you can go and live for three months and produce work and produce the show.  And then put it up.

Was that what you did?
I produced most of the work off-site.  I was the second person to do it and so it was a real short timeline and a real rush to get it done.  So, it was literally like this show was produced in three days.  Both the work was manufactured and produced and printed at Fast Signs Bellevue—which I loved, by the way.

So, it was kind of—it was interesting.  It was just one of the works-in-progress, kind of thinking about different ways of installing stuff and different ordering of photos.  And it was in the lobby of an apartment building.  It’s a really odd place and a really odd set-up but a great residency program—a great chance to go to the Northwest. And I love the exhibition director Abigail Guay-it was a residency and a great space to work in. I was really fortunate to be able to do it and I think its going to grow into an important residency.

What are your thoughts on the way you would present your work under I-95 and the Bellevue and the ICA?
I will go with this.  Well, I feel like everything comes back to I-95.  That’s a central project, always.  The other shows are all kind of just thinking about different ways of presenting the material that goes into the I-95 project—into the actual presentation. So, the one in Bellevue was a combination of larger format prints on vinyl that I’d been thinking about for a little bit.

Stuff that you couldn’t always do with 95.
Yeah, stuff that really doesn’t make sense in terms of that installation—but things that allow me to kind of help think about the ordering of photos more and, really, as times goes on to really tighten up the edit of 95 to the strongest it can possibly be.
So, in a way they’re really all… Not that the shows aren’t—not that the shows aren’t complete.  But they’re almost all exercises in a way to figure out the best configuration for 95 that can happen.

How about levels of freedom?
It’s awesome.

Even at the ICA?
Um, it was a little, well—I’ve wanted to—yeah, actually, at the ICA it was okay.  It was actually pretty great.  They were very supportive of the work and I put up a photo that could have caused a lot of problems that faced the street.  And they were very supportive of it.

Which is awesome.
It was tremendous how supportive they were of the work and how they understood why I chose this image and went through a whole process of kind of making sure that this was—it wasn’t just being contentious– it was genuinely something I thought was beneficial to this work and to the show.

When you did the show at the Bellevue you were sort of able to do whatever you wanted to, pretty much—
Yeah, it was pretty much what I wanted to do.  The show in Bellevue was less, uh, less complete than the ICA.  The ICA was really kind of complete with a lot of theoretical stuff going into it.  And the Bellevue show was more kind of thinking about the order of the photographs.

Have you ever felt you’ve been in a dangerous situation or felt in danger when you’re shooting with someone?
No.

Never?  Really?
There’s been once or twice when I’ve been in someone’s house and I felt a not-great vibe and I just leave.

Right—but it’s never gone further—
No.  There’s never been a time when I felt like I have to get out.  There’s never been anything more than just a feeling of discomfort.

It’s never escalated.
No.  And it’s almost always just on the street, so, it’s not, you know—there are times when I go into someone’s house.  There are ridiculous things where I go into someone’s house and be like, ‘Helloooooo.’  Which is kind of nuts, but, in the moment it always—it’s just relying on intuition which isn’t necessarily the greatest idea in the world.  [laughs]

It makes things interesting, for sure.  [laughs]
It’s really something else.

What’s next after 2010?
Jesus Christ, if I had any fucking idea. I need to get started on figuring out my next long term plan and I’m just… I mean, there’s a couple things that I’ve been thinking about but there’s nothing that seems like it’s gonna be a decade-long body of work like this. And I don’t know if I need to have that.

Did you plan the ten years from the outset?
Yeah.  I felt like it had to be ten years.  I’m mentally ill. Why, fool?  Who am I fooling?

www.zoestrauss.com
www.zoestrauss.blogspot.com

Interview by Dan Murphy. Photos courtesy of ADAMS.

Adams: We built a house in Finland in the summer of 2002, and we created a taste for doing more alternative places—We built this house, and when we came back [to Denmark] we did this huge poster for the bus shelters saying that you could come and “live for for free as it should be”—we did a map [that showed] how to find [the house]. We went back there in December, just to check if it was still there. We figured it would be gone. We arrived early in the morning and we saw the house, and we saw smoke coming out of the chimney—a chimney that we didn’t put there. And we came closer and realized that somebody was living in there. It was rebuilt in certain ways. We just stood there looking, and a neighbor passed by and just started talking to us in Finnish. We understood that she was talking to us about the house and she managed to explain it in Swedish.

The thing is, when we built it, the neighbors were really complaining. We thought we were super secret and just built it next to the train tracks with bushes all around it. But [the neighbors] started showing up more and more and wanted us to leave. We were sort of noisy, hammering nails and stuff. But this lady told us a story about these two good boys, one from Denmark—apparently someone understood where we were from—and one from Sweden, who had built this house. “Two good boys,” she said. And, that they stayed there for two weeks, then some days after, these “two bad Finnish boys” came around and vandalized the house. Then this guy living there, with two friends, reconstructed it and he moved in and had been living there ever since. He had installed a heater and mattresses to keep the chill out—because it was like 15 below Celsius. Super cold. And lots of snow. It was extremely inspiring to see that you could contribute and make this practical graffiti thing—so we just wanted to continue doing it.
Did you talk to the guy living there?
He only spoke Finnish, so we wrote him a letter with some questions. But he only answered with one word. He was an old man in his 50s or 60s with a big beard.

Where was he living before?
“Elsewhere,” he said. Anyway, we have been doing this sort of stuff ever since. Building small asylums. This [pulls out a photograph] is beneath the Copenhagen central station. We did this in March 2003.

Why the Central Station?
There is a nice buzz around central stations in general. Then again, poor people and the alternative cultures are forced into the periphery of the cities, so we just wanted to some how reclaim the center of the city. Probably the main reason is [that] so much [is] happening, especially in the center station. You can sit there for hours and just look at people—people traveling, people hanging out and people begging. It’s just an inspiring environment.

Also, we both have a history of doing graffiti, so the train tracks are already close to us, so to speak. We started running around on the tracks, looking for holes and forgotten rooms. Eventually we found this room beneath the Central Station, just next to track number 12. We had the train running on the other side of the wall there. The ceiling was super high, probably around eight meters high. We figured it could be nice to make a hidden room inside the room, like a clandestine loft—so we started looking for material. We didn’t want to pay for anything. We didn’t pay for anything [for the house] in Finland, either. I think we paid for nails then we either found everything or shoplifted it. So, we found everything we needed around the Central Station and on the tracks.

Do you have power in there?
Yes. We found a plug at the station and we [used] a long extension cord, so we had power. We wore this DSB (Danish Train Company) worker wear, so nobody worried or reacted to us walking on the tracks carrying arms full of wood.

Where did you get the DSB outfit?
Just looking around in the yards. Itso has a good memory, and had been looking for that stuff for years.

When the house [was] done, you entered from beneath, we constructed this sort of ladder on the wall with bolts. We found these old mailbags inside the room. We made hammocks out of them, so we had two beds in one part of the room. We had a kitchen in the other part of the room. We had a microwave and we had a stove, a fridge, a table. And we made these chairs out of scrap wood, from a sign for the train going between Stockholm and Copenhagen. We also had a radio.

Was it important to use these recognizable things from around the station?
Yes. We didn’t want to pay for anything, and its nice to say that it’s from the Central Station as well. For example, the table [was] a time schedule for the trains. We had all these pictures on the wall ‘cause we were taking portraits of people passing by and people that were hanging out—junkies shooting up, people looking for recyclables, the hot dog vendor, travelers and homeless people. Like the “penguin.” He was sitting behind this vending machine every night, really well dressed, just having his nose sticking out of the jacket. On the weekends, people just fall asleep there after they have been out in the city partying.

During the period when we were working on the house, we heard noises from the streets. [There was a] metal plate on one of the walls and we figured it would be some sort of ventilation shaft that we could perhaps crawl through to get a glimpse of the sun. But when we removed it, we had this grated window out to the street. So we were just sitting there for hours and hours just watching people passing by.

However, it was torn down some months ago. It was there for four years. We were going there on and off. Itso referred to it as a sailor’s home. And that’s what it was. It was really cold in the winter, but nice in the summer time. They had been reconstructing the Central Station, and they found it. Now it’s just a construction site.

“Graffiti writers are such fundamentalists with tons of Do’s and Don’t's…I don’t hang out too much with graffiti writers.”

How accessible was the house?
We had two different entrances. One was just crossing the tracks, another way was, we found this old door in the street about 20 meters away from the house, and we managed to drill the lock and get it open. We could go in and out from that door, which was convenient, because we didn’t have those DSB vests all the time. If the train drivers see you running on the track they will call the cops and the cops have their station just 30 seconds away. One time I was spotted running on the tracks, and Itso was coming two minutes behind me. He saw that the cops were on the tracks looking, but they still couldn’t find the house.

After this project, I was really into doing hidden stuff in cities. To get the full picture you have to know that Stockholm, where I’m from and where I do some of my work, is having this idea of becoming the cleanest city in the world. Like the new Singapore or something. There is an instant graffiti removal program and a zero tolerance towards “uglifying” in general. It is quite scary. How ever, surpressed cultures often seem to find clandestine stategies on how to survive. This is where I work from. More and more is getting removed, and you get so claustrophobic in the city, like all the good stuff is disappearing. But if you do stuff that is hidden, then you create some sort of curiosity of the concealed. I think that the mental space is getting bigger and bigger. People’s fantasies are so powerful.

Is it important that what you are doing falls under the title of “graffiti?”
My identity is coming from the graffiti movement. It’s basically the same—working outside, doing stuff illegally in the streets that is communicating. It’s not following the grid. It is creating alternatives for people. I think it’s funny that graffiti is considered to be destructive. When graffiti reached Sweden, people didn’t consider it to be destructive at all. People were really positive about it. But then the media created this idea that it’s bad. And that spray paint is really bed. Even putting up posters is ok, because people don’t really consider it to be that destructive.

I think it’s easier to reach people by using alternative strategies. I still love doing tags, but it’s nice to widen it a little bit.

Have you received negative criticism from the graffiti world about not using traditional methods?
Graffiti writers are such fundamentalists with tons of Do’s and Don’t's… I don’t hang out too much with graffiti writers.

What other projects have you worked on?
I can show you this house from Berlin. This is Berlin Ostbahnhof, one of the biggest train stations. This is in the eastern part of the city. Next to the train station is the river Spree that runs through the city. If you’ve been to Berlin, you’ve seen that there are construction sites all over the city. So it was pretty obvious to us that we could use this material, because it’s all around, and it’s made for building stuff. We are both bike lovers, so we were scavenging and looking for stuff in bike stores, and getting stuff for free. We [found] like hundreds and hundreds of bike tubes that were put in the trash.

Me and Bajki, who I did this with, chose this place because it was a no man’s land until ’89 when the Berlin wall was torn down. The wall was just running next to this place. Actually, there is a piece of the wall still standing in this neighborhood.

We had to build in the nighttime, and this was January, so it was really cold. Every day, we were standing there waiting for the workers to go away from work. When they were gone, we could go in there and work. It was the same idea with this house that it would cost nothing. For example, we made beds out of inner tubes. We built it to blend in with the surroundings, on the edge of the river. People didn’t realize that they were walking out on top of a house. There was a hatch in the ceiling, you entered by climbing down.

What about the boat?
So, here are some photos of a boat I did. I really wanted to build a collapsible boat. I was looking at photos of boats that are collapsible, that were built lately—and they were really slick and built from expensive material. I wanted to use basic material, like wood and metal. I found this really fine looking boat in and old photo dated 1875, and I more or less just copied it with the material I had. I made this collapsible skeleton. I wanted to make it collapsible because I wanted to go down the manholes in the streets in Stockholm and paddle those paths. There are so many different channels in Stockholm. There is sewage, which is really bad to go in, but there are also these channels for rainwater [that] just stretches below for miles and miles.

A big part of your work is documenting what you do and publishing it.
That comes from the graffiti background, documenting your stuff because you know it’s going to disappear. If you do stuff outside, it could disappear in an hour.

I’m just into communication. But I don’t want to tell the whole story. I want the city to be bigger, and unpredictable, as in mental space. What I like least about art is that it’s so fancy and so expensive. I want to tell people about stuff, but I don’t want to do so by selling expensive photos or paintings. So, I do these books instead. I just think it’s nice to spend time doing your stuff. And I have lots of time.

Do you have a job?
From time to time I do stuff to get money. But I haven’t been working for a year and a half now.

Let’s talk about books and zines.
Zines fall into two categories, you have your punk rock theme, your train hopping zine or travel zine … it kind of looks pretty shitty, sometimes they’re incredibly interesting and incredibly content heavy. And then you have your more abstract collections of artists images.  I think Barry Mcgee is a prime example of this, amazing product, but they’re very much conceptual art pieces. Thats not to discount it at all.

A zine can be more about a means of distribution and different formats and less rules, while a bound book has a form that is so intrinsic that you know go through it beginning to end. It has this progression that’s inherent in the form: it has a beginning a middle and an end. And everybody knows how to go through a book. You can either capitalize on that or start to depart from that. Those are the things I would eventually like to try, to experiment with the form.
To change the way people interact with the form, and to elevate the status of the zine and brign it more to the level or prestige in a way and intimacy that is normally associated with a book.
Both the status and the fact that you can curl up in bed and read it. Its more intimate.

I think some zines may feel so throwaway, the average person may not grant them the same level of respect as a book.
It’s a pain in the ass to read a typewritten page that has been Xeroxed for 12 generations. But on the flip side the thing that’s really nice about those is that it can be handed around a multiple amount of times and it is a very effective way of communicating.

Whats the last project you worked on? Was is the Space 1026 10 Year Anniversary zine?
I’m really bad at finishing things. That was kind of for me an exercise in taking somebody else’s content and getting it out super quick. It started out as a project that I thought I was gonna get all the photos in a day, Xerox them that night, and making the zines in the morning. But it took me like 2 weeks, which is still an incredibly fast turnaround for me. Right now I’m doing the proofreading and finishing the layout on the next Melee, and I realized one of the interviews I did is already over a year old. Melee is an incredibly big challenge because I’m by myself narrating all the content, doing all the design, and then all the production. Out top of putting it together, I gotta figure out how to pay for it. I gotta save up the money to get the covers done, I gotta fold them, I gotta cut them. And then you have the distribution which is the most frustrating thing.

Its a nightmare.
In theory, if the magazine made money it’d be easier.

But you have to do all the work on your own at this point, when you are dealing with small numbers like this.
I have huge problems going into stores and handing out my stuff. That’s the social anxiety part number 1. And then a couple weeks later, looking around the store, you find it behind something and then you go and put them in front of the rest.  I was in a store the other day, and it still had some stuff of mine from like 2 1/2 years ago. You can’t go to the register and be like “uh, you know that 12 dollars you owe me?” They say, “Wait till it gets to 15 and then we’ll settle up.” Just that act of going into places is incredibly hard for me.

That’s why I’d kind of love to just start giving these things away. It almost makes more sense. I’m kind of torn right now because I did the Spothunters book and had that offset printed and professionally done and so I have 2000 of them. Its easier to give away. So when you have only a 100…that you make you feel a little more pressure.  Especially since you save 10 for yourself to put aside and you give away 20, which leaves you with 70. It’s hard, you know. I don’t want it to sound like I’m whining about it, but it’s certainly an uphill battle.

So what are you publishing plans for the future? I’m always interested to see people that are smaller scale doing their thing and what their ethics are.
What I would like to do is really just push the content. One of my goals initially, when starting to make the zine, just making mini comics, graffiti books, and for lack of a better term, street art documents, I really enjoy the idea of cross-polinating, where it isn’t as simple as I publish comics or I publish artists zines, you know what I mean. They’re all stuff that I’m interested in, and to be able to share that with people and just to be able to say hey, if you enjoy this, then maybe you’ll also get into this. So I kind of hope to continue to push that. I have a project that I’ve been working on probably the past 2 1/2 – 3 years.  It’s about the history of the railroad tunnel in Providence.  When it gets done it’s going to be a really ambitious project. What I’m trying to do is talk to some rail fans, talk to graffiti writers, some rich kids who had a party down there. So there are basically all these different people who have interacted with this space for the past 100 years, and to bring all of that together and show how it all co-existed, and how different people are interested in this place, hopefully that will be interesting.

Other than that, I have the 2nd issue of the Melee coming out pretty soon, hopefully.  The 3rd issue I think I’m going to devote to New Jersey.

Who’s in the 2nd issue?
The 2nd issue is an interview with Will Buzzell about… it’s about his gambling problem.  So we went to this place called Lincoln Park, it’s a casino in Rhode Island, and just talked to Will a little bit about gambling, before, after and during. And then we visited him later, once he quit, to kind of see how that was going. There’s an interview with my buddy Jimmy, who followed Phish around while they’re on tour for a couple of years. Kind of my idea is I want to interview people about things that aren’t their main focus.

Thats an interesting perspective.You can get  a whole new idea of a person when you start to bring other parts of their lifestyle into play, when you are talking more about then what this person is popular for.
And that’s what I’ve been talking to Greg LaMarche about. The subway tunnels. He’s always known as the artist but he has has this separate, well not separate, more parallel, separate field of knowledge. My friend Margo who I interviewed for Melee, she doesn’t spend very much time thinking about the neighborhood, but she was in the neighborhood as it became gentrified and that’s something that hasnt been talked about in New York, how it’s kind of happening all the time. It’s one of those things that people talk about casually, but hasn’t been a main focus. I hope other people find it interesting.

What are you doing on the more traditional art side of things? Is there any connection between your painting and illustration and your publishing work?
They kind of are, but not totally. To kind of bring everything together…bringing the illustrations, and for lack of a better word, fine art, together, especially when I was doing things outdoors…a part of me thinks I’m really shooting myself in the foot by compartmentalizing what I think so much, but they all meet their specific purposes and they fulfill separate needs that I have.

Sometimes its nice to have a hobby, a pure hobby. Something that can satisfy you purely aesthetically. Like my photography I don’t plan on making money off of it and I don’t have to make any excuses for it.
And that’s to me what Cantab kind of is. I don’t want to worry about going to stores, I just want to be able to do it. And in that way it allowed me to express ideas and concepts that I’m not interested in pouring in all my time, I can just get them out…it’s a whole different ball game. And you know they all come from the same mind and I guess all of my…are about some ambiguous disaster…

Tell me more about the prevalent disaster theme.
In the next issue of Melee there’s two photo essays and I guess that’s the closest thing to having an introduction and everything and one of them is about St. Louis and how dilapidated half the town is. Since 1950, St. Louis has experienced a population boom of a half a million people. Its a real interesting phenomenon that is going on there right now that people are moving into these downtown loft buildings, these downtown condos that are converted from former industry, so you still have a huge amount of houses in pre-existing neighborhoods. But nobody wants to live there. While I don’t literally want to do a series of paintings about St. Louis, the ideas are kind of parallel, and they cross pollinate. And then the other photo essay is about the Denver International Airport that is supposedly going to be one of the detention centers for the New World Order. When then start bussing all Americans citizens into these concentration camps, one of which is supposedly under the Denver International Airport.

Who’s theory is this?
It started with this; I was going to Denver, and about a week before I left, I was at a party and this cute girl mentioned that Denver International Airport, that there are a bunch of conspiracy theories about it on Youtube. And I was kind of really interested cause she was really cute. So I went home and looked it up, and low and behold there were a bunch of guys on Youtube yelling about it, a whole Wikipedia thing on it, apparently there’s an episode of Coast to Coast A.M. that talks all about it, you know, aliens and all..

Did you go there?
Yeah, I had to go anyhow. I spent an extra two hours walking around to explore.  It became interesting apart from this whole experience because when you go to a place and it’s complety innocent, and even if you’ve taken all this conspiracy information with a grain of salt, I still got freaked out. You had to go in this underground subway, which is essentially taking you from terminal A to B but in the videos they were talking about how one of those people moving things was going to drop you off in some underground hold. One of the things the guy kept talking about is that once you go underground at the Denver International Airport, you’ll never see the light of day again. So of course I’m on the subway, and I was like this is the end. That kind of experience is something I think other people might find interesting.

Reminds me of a scene from Children of Men.
And that’s the thing, the post apocalyptic imagery, I hate that term, but that imagery within our culture from everything, from Children of Men to Mad Max. There’s a Billy Joel song called Miami 27, that’s just about the destruction of New York City, and then beyond that September 11th happened, and it was so close to a movie, it’s really hard to distinguish that this is really happening. Those are ideas that kind of inform my paintings. And my publshing too.

Its increasingly difficult to distinguish between the fictional aspects of things and reality. You really realize the power of images and media. But you also can see how little of a stronghold the images actually have on their power.
I was in Italy after September 11, it must have been November. It was right about when American troops were first sent to Afghanistan. And there were posters all around for an anti-terrorism rally in Rome and I thought it was an interesting phrasing, not pro-peace, not solidarity with America, which is what a lot of the posters you saw said.  Me and some other friends  walk up to check out what’s going on.  And we get into the Piazza del Povolo and there is a million people and then you see these jumbotron tv’s. When we get there, everyone is raising American flags and Italian flags, and we’re the only Americans. This John Williams cinematic music comes over the loud speakers and we turn around an on the jumbotron are shots of the planes hitting the towers, just getting everybody riled up, hands up in the air, and it turns out it was the day Italy was sending troops to Afghanistan and basically this was getting people to rally behind the war. Strangely somehow I felt like what the hell are you guys doing, this is my country. You guys are using our imagery to propagate this war.  And even now I think it’s very interesting that so many images of NY, even with what Guiliani is doing in the presidential campaign, so much of  September 11 propaganda and kind of this image of NY as the symbol of America, that we need to defend, so it’ll never happen again. It’s being pitched to the rest of the country when everybody in NY is a democrat and thinks that the patriot act is awful and so in that sense I don’t know how you take ownership of that event. But once it starts to be something that people claim ownership of it or manipulate it, it really raises a lot of issues of where your from and legitimately being in a place.

Being in the business we are in, as image makers, it raises a lot of issues for us, morally and ethically. It becomes hard to come to terms with being responsible. And with the internet, the stakes are higher and things are moving much faster. G-mail and google also have this indexing capability which is scary.
When I was trying to figure out where I was going to live in Philly, I was sending out a bunch of emails and all of a sudden, the ad that comes up on my g-mail is for the Ikea in Philly. The computer knew what I was looking at. and that’s why print media is great.

Its a consumer society.
We’re at a point where we are in a country with so much consumerism … iPhones and iPods,etc. I find it fun to ride the subway in NY and try to calculate how many thousands dollars of electronics are in the car with people, by the time people have their dvd players, GPS,  iPods, radio, cell phones, cameras. But we’re at war, and there seems to be no sacrifice.

No Victory Gardens or war bonds.
But we can hang up yellow ribbons and keep living life as usual. Commerce seems to take over. Caleb and I get into the argument a lot about the Os Gemeos book, which is an amazing book that they could give away for free. But Nike paid for it. And you’re almost like this is an art that’s made, in a sense, off the back of poverty because they paint in impoverished places.  I think this is something we need to start questioning in young communities, how much corporate money we want to be taking and how much it’s worth it.

www.cantabpublishing.com

ON THE STREETS
My district is about 2 miles by 3 miles, its one of the highest crime districts in the city. It’s bad. People are getting killed left and right, because no one cares and no one helps.

Drug dealing is so bad, and gone on for so long, that you can contain it, but you can’t stop it. When operation Safe Streets started there were tons of cops walking foot beats. A cop is standing on the corner that the drugs were sold on, so course it looks a lot safer; but all you’re really doing is moving it. That’s why Camden jumped off, because they just moved the operation. You’ll never stop it, and you just have to hope to god that someone who isn’t a piece of shit doesn’t get killed. Drugboy killing drugboy – I couldn’t care less. Airbrush a t-shirt and I’ll send a teddy bear. But when it’s the little kid who’s playing basketball at the Rec Center and someone ends up killing him, that’s the sad part.

We do a lot of roll-ups. Where we’ll just roll up on a corner and jump out. That’s where people are at their most vulnerable, but it’s also the most dangerous for us. And when we do it in plainclothes its even worse, because they think they are getting robbed, and they are a lot quicker to pull a gun out. You’ve gotta’ watch their hands. The only thing that can hurt you on a person is their hands; if you can see them you’re fine. Then you get the asshole that won’t show them, so you’ve got to get physical on people. Even a gun in the face doesn’t matter, because they know you won’t shoot them. You have to get in their mindset. They think they are in a rap video or movie – that’s really the mindset. For a bundle of drugs sold, they get paid $20; and some corners will go through 500 bundles in an afternoon. So they are making money. And it’s the young kids that sell it on the corners; they are the ones that want to fight. They are trying to make a name.

It so crazy how drug corners work. It’s so organized. People think they are just some stupid ghetto thugs. But they have ranks and shifts. Each corner has what’s called a caseworker, a manager basically, he makes sure the stashes are up and each dealer is where he’s supposed to be, he’s making sure the lookouts are where they are supposed to be.  There’s corners in this city that have motion detectors on the roofs of the buildings, because cops would climb up to the roof and watch from there, and see dealers and buyers. It’s insane. The shit you see in the movies is nothing close to what really happens.

“The shit you see in the movies is nothing close to what really happens.”

ON STOP SNITCHIN’
I’ve seen nasty motherfuckers out here. I’ve seen guys with machine guns shoot up a street just to shoot up a street. I’ve seen them blow up cars and light houses on fire. That’s the mindset. They’ll burn a house down and kill an entire family because they thought they were going to snitch.

That’s the worst part about the job, especially where I work, is that the people hate us. A little girl was killed in shooting recently. We pull up to the scene and there’s a little girl lying there half-alive. We immediately have to attend to her, and when we ask the 30 people standing there watching, all you get is “Fuck you officer, I didn’t see shit.” There’s no cooperation at all. People are terrified to say anything. Every once in a while there’s an old person that will say something. But the whole stop snitchin’ thing is real. I’ve done drug corners where we’ll roll up and we can’t find anything, I know it’s somewhere, but we can’t find it. Sometimes an older guy will be out front sweeping, and he’ll whisper to us “Officer look up the block a little bit more.” But he’s not getting involved any further. We had a homicide investigation where we were knocking on doors, asking questions, and doors were getting slammed in our face. One little old lady was hanging out her window and said, “I’d check the third house in on the right.” And she closed her window and went back inside. We hit the house and picked up a few guns. Now, I’m not sure if it tied into the homicide, but it shows there are some people who will help.

ON THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM
The problem with the city isn’t the Police Department. And it’s not the higher ups in the department. I feel like I’m well trained, well supplied, well paid. There is an abundance of overtime. It’s the judges. They just let people out. People know that if they get caught in Philadelphia, they are going to get off. There are two defense lawyers in the city that are bar-none the best at what they do. They are going to burn in hell, but they are good fuckin’ lawyers. For the right price, you can get off on any job.

I got kicked in the face, I was involved in a fight outside of a bar, and a girl booted me right in the face and split it open. In court the judge asks me if I’ll accept an apology from the defendant. I said, “In lieu of what?” Judge says, “She has a drug addiction and has three kids at home.” I said, “Your honor, number one – I will not accept an apology; and number two – you already made up your mind.” He said, “That’s right, I did.” And she got off. And that’s why people act the way they do. They see their friends get off for shooting 4 people, so why the fuck not? They think, “Dude looks at me wrong I’m going to put one in his face.”

ON THE JOB
They say our job is 98% boredom, and 2% sheer terror. It’s like being in a war where I work.

I don’t care if I get shot and killed on the job. I’ve accepted it. I’m not afraid of it. The worst thing that could happen in my opinion is me fucking up, and getting another cop killed. I have a partner, and we’re so in tune with each other. Just the way he’ll speed up the street or turn a corner, I’ll know something’s up. They call it the police sixth sense. This is my second partner now; my first one was five years. You get in tune with your partner, and that’s what makes it good.

I couldn’t tell you how many fish fries and soul food barbeques I’ve been to. For me growing up, I was mostly around white people, and it’s a neat aspect of the job to be exposed to, and be able to get in with, people from different backgrounds and cultures, and different neighborhoods. The friends I’ve made on this job I’ll have for life.

“I couldn’t tell you how many fish fries and soul food barbeques I’ve been to. For me growing up, I was mostly around white people, and it’s a neat aspect of the job to be exposed to, and be able to get in with, people from different backgrounds and cultures, and different neighborhoods. The friends I’ve made on this job I’ll have for life.”

ON DEATH
I’ve seen people shot over a dice game, card games – people don’t care. I saw a lady who just had her head tied to the train tracks and run over by a train, I’ve seen a lady who was as close as I am to you right now, slit her throat with a razor blade; she bled out and died like a bad horror movie. I’ve had more than enough people die in my arms. There are only two that really get me.  One time a girl was hit by a car, she’s really hurt. I’m giving her CPR; I’m covered in blood. She’s dying. I’m used to seeing drug dealers die, but when’s it’s a respectable person … she had crystal green eyes, I watched them roll into the back of her head.

I had a baby die on me once; there was nothing I could do.

ON PRISON
Prison is crazy. Every once in a while you’ll lock up a dude and they are cool; they know it’s the game and it’s how it works. They know they have to deal with the cops; it’s a business hazard to them. They have the same friends on the street as they do in prison. Prison is hard for the random guy with a DUI, who doesn’t know anyone; they aren’t in tune to all the craziness.

You can be rival drug dealers in the neighborhood, but you’ll band together in prison because you are from the same neighborhood.  I’ve been in every prison in the area. I’d kill myself before I went to prison. A couple guys I work with are prison guards, they tell me it’s more outrageous then you could ever imagine. My buddy got knocked out and thrown down a flight of steps at work at the prison. He said as a guard you have to establish a rep, just like these animals on the street. The next day he took a tougher and more “physical” stance with the inmates. He never got fucked with again and everyone listens to him now.

Like any other job, there are a lot of crooked prison guards too. Every inmate has a cell phone; they have all sorts of contraband. The guards are the ones bringing it in. Its one guard to 150 prisoners, someone gets hurt everyday.

ON PUBLIC OPINION
People think all cops are assholes, and they are bums and they eat donuts. And there are cops like that, but it’s in any line of work. Cops are good people; it’s the minority of us that create the bad image. People don’t understand that, it’s just like any other job.  But I go out and I work hard. In my squad it’s an unofficial competition. If someone gets 50 bags of rock, my partner and me try to go out and get 60. You’ll hear another team get an arrest, and we’ll try and top what they caught. If there’s 9 shootings in 3 blocks, we know its 3 drug corners, and that they are shooting each other. We’ll go saturate the area and try and pull up some guns and make a few arrests. We’re really out there trying to make it happen, to have some effect.

The number one thing is the media is fucked. They’d kill 30 cops just to get a story. You don’t hear about the 750 good jobs that cops did in the course of 24 hours; that averted a shooting, or locked up a guy wanted for murder. All you hear about is the one kid that had handcuffs on him and got socked in the mouth by a cop because the kid spit on him. But also you don’t hear about the homicide detectives when they do solve a case. You don’t hear about the detective who spent 3 months working over time, really applying himself putting a case together. And there’s a racial thing, a white kid gets shot on Cottman Avenue outside of a bar, it’s all over the news. I’d say once a day there’s a shooting in North Philly, maybe it gets a blip of news.

What we do is shootings, stabbings, homicides; we take down doors for drugs, stolen cars, and surveillance, lots of plainclothes work. Imagine if one part of the district is getting killed with burglaries: over the last 30 days, say there’s 28 burglaries. We’ll go out in plainclothes, and cars, and walk around and have a presence. That’s how it works. We had a guy robbing a lot stores, must of robbed the same ones with a gun I’d say 15 times. Eventually we got him.

And don’t get me wrong, there are Joe Pro cops, he’s got his badge, and his gun, and was picked on in high school – and he ruins it for all of the cops. I’ve been able to keep myself away from idiots like that.

“People hold us to a higher standard, which is good. But when cops fuck up, it’s all over the news. And people can only see us as corrupt donut eaters, they can only see black and white. People gotta’ realize we’re people too. All they see is a gun and a badge.”

Don’t think just because a cop is a cop he’s a dick. There are people that come down to rallies against police, but they only know what they see on TV. People from outside the city they think they know how it is. They think they are fighting for a cause, but they don’t know how the real world works. Not all cops are bad, and you’ve gotta’ remember cops are people. You might catch a cop on a bad day, he’s got problems at home, and here you are being a knucklehead a little bit, and you’re not listening to him. You might get gripped up, or you might get smacked in the mouth. But when you deal with someone who is being a bitch at the DMV, that doesn’t make the news.

People hold us to a higher standard, which is good. But when cops fuck up, it’s all over the news. And people can only see us as corrupt donut eaters, they can only see black and white. People gotta’ realize we’re people too. All they see is a gun and a badge. Unless you do something wrong. Then they see everything.  The first thing people look at on a cop is the gun, no matter what situation. Little kids, old people, everybody. And some cops abuse that power.

There’s an old saying at the police department that goes, “I’d rather be tried by 12 than carried by 6.” If someone tries to hurt or kill a cop they deserve what they get. A cop has a family and wife or husband, and kids they want to go home to. You can fire me; I’ll get another job. But you’re not going to hurt me. I’m going to defend myself. People gotta’ realize it’s just a job.

How did you end up where you are now, what was the trajectory?
Will: A month before I finished college—2006—I had a show at Harvard University. When I was doing my thesis show for painting, I had a gallery show in New York at Rivington Arms. I thought I was going to be in New York or Boston. I thought I had a handle on it. I thought I was going to find a way to live and work and party and stay fabulous. I went home after I graduated, came back and went to see my friends in Philly for one last time. At the pub we got so drunk, I just got done watching England in the World Cup with my best friend… I fell asleep on the couch with my neck over the edge. I woke up, and that drunk sweat just poured out of the back of my neck and soaked this couch. I watched Wild At Heart, the David Lynch film, I passed out in the middle of the afternoon, soaked this horrible, filthy couch—and I decided then, that it wasn’t going to work out for me in New York because I was obviously too much of a disaster. I clearly saw from that day, I didn’t have what it took to hack it on the Lower East Side and to make ends meet and make work and be seen five, six, seven days a week, and to keep up with the society pages—which was what I thought being “successful” was.

I thought it was the easiest thing in the world: Know people. Know people with influence. Know people with money. Know people who want to see you—I mean, it’s visibility and fabulousness, the society pages of W magazine and Vice magazine or Harper’s Bazaar. I was fascinated with the fact that I could look good, fresh gear, throw money around. But none of that stuff I have the ability to sustain.

Was art doing anything for you?
Will: I was only just getting started. I saw the potential of what it could be—it could be easy. I thought: me. I’m foreign. Which, I’m not even legitimately foreign. I’m half-American.

Right.
Will: So, I came to Philadelphia and gave up all that.

Is it something you still want?
Will: Being an artist, painting, sitting with your passport when you’re at customs and you write where your profession is: “artist.” That’s definitely a liberating feeling.

Dan: I’ve put “artist” at different times, depending on my mental state on the airplane.

Will: I’m jealous of people who have never even thought of putting anything else.

What defines being an artist for you?
Will: Someone who doesn’t feel themselves in any way accountable for their actions, because what they do is in some sort of parallel state. You’re involved in the world of art, which is totally unpractical, or you’re involved in the world of the world, which is a very practical place. If you write down “artist” on the customs form that means you don’t have to deal with the reality of the world around you, ‘cause you’ve got a higher cause. My position now as a dealer, which is bizarre, is to encourage [artists] and to enable them to live in this parallel universe.

Because it’s conducive to their creative process?
Will: Yeah, they’ll make better work.

Dan: What about these people who are very competent and well spoken about their work, and are integrated and are very successful. They’re not even really good artists, but they sustain themselves on looking good and being seen, doing everything right—writing grants well. They’re fully sustainable.

They’re working the system.
Will: It’s a job.

I think you have a perspective on a certain kind of art that I don’t have the same knowledge of. I think we’re at this weird spot right now where that kind of art doesn’t know where it belongs, culturally.

Dan: You’re saying that since art doesn’t function in the real world, since everything that’s happening now is so immediate, with the Internet and the media in general—I feel that a lot of art reflects that.

Yea. It is created from what’s happening right now. So, where are these artists drawing their inspiration from? A lot of what we do, comes from our environment, our observations of daily experience. That’s because we function in the real world. Then there’s the sort of people who push themselves farther and farther away from reality and accountability. Is their artwork relevant to anyone but themselves?
Will: Well, they’re putting themselves in a dangerous position. It’s a position that was created by the birth of the commercial art scene. They can commit to being looked after by somebody in the art world. This management is protecting artists from the real world.

The actual system of managing artists—it’s protecting them from the real world? It’s not just your method?
Will: No. I don’t even do that good a job of it. If I did a better job of protecting my artists from the real world, I would be a lot richer. My artists would be a lot richer.

Dan: Aren’t the most dark, most reclusive people making a lot of the most pop shit right now? It seems like the most pop, candy, crisp music and art is coming out of the people that are less integrated. They’re integrated in this new way, in this MySpace kind of way.

Will: Think about Daniel Johnston. His tapes went around to whichever stores he would go to. But today, if he had access to MySpace, sure—

So, does access to MySpace make art less genuine?
Will: There’s a rift. There are two different worlds: the world of complete, immediate availability to everyone, mostly 100 percent free. Then, there’s the gallery scene, [which is] clinging to this mold from the ‘60s. You can’t keep art from the world, and the world from art and artists.

How did you hook up with Fleischer Ollman after you decided to stay in Philly?
Will: I worked at Utrecht at Broad and Spruce, next to Philadelphia International Records.

This was after New York?
Will: Yes. I didn’t do anything for a couple of months. And then I was flat broke and working at Utrecht and still pretty destitute. I started hating it so much that I didn’t look after myself and I didn’t wash my Utrecht T-shirt. The manager was constantly hitting on me and I told him that I wanted a two-week vacation to London. And he would say stuff to me like, “Oh, I was thinking about going to London. We could go clubbing. You could show me around.” I said, “Listen, I want to go home and see my family and friends. I’m not sure I can show you around.” And, he goes, “Maybe you should take a bath.” And I turned around and said, “What the fuck did you say?” And he’s like, “Nothing.” So I went into the back room, took my shirt off, and I walked out of the store.

I did nothing for three months after that. Then I got a job painting the walls that summer at Fleisher Ollman. And the next day, he’s like, “Do you want to come in a couple days a week?” The next day I came in, and I didn’t take a day off after that. I started answering the phones, packing things. And when that final person left, the boss and I had lunch. We had turkey burgers. He says, “Do you want to be the director?”

How long had you been there?
Will: Two years. Parallel to this, is me, desperate to have a good girl and stability and stardom. I’ve been desperate since I was 20-years-old to have that.

How long have you been the director?
Will: One year. This show that’s coming up is a sort of testimonial show of everything that I’ve wanted to say in the past year.

When you say “director,” I’m curious as to what that means. You’re the curator as well?
Will: Yes. I decide month to month what every show is going to be and the cost. The program is a story. There’s a narrative. The story is closing the gap between art and life and normal peoples’ lives. Like what we were talking about. There’s a massive rift. Contemporary art is at a high level. It only serves itself and anyone who’s involved in that work. There’s that guy Martin Kippenberger. He said the act of living was his art, and a lot of people accused him of being a fake and charlatan. He just wanted to live. He didn’t want his art to take him away from his life.

I find that there are two extremes. There is either high-end conceptual art that’s dense and hard to understand from the outsider’s perspective. If you don’t know the codes to decipher it, then it’s inaccessible. Then, there’s the opposite extreme, which is, since it is accessible it has to be ugly and quick and doesn’t mean anything. Do you know what I mean?
Will: Absolutely. The fact that the terms used and the kind of arguments made to make it accessible—it’s no different from someone talking about a hip-hop producer. It’s gobbledygook to someone who hasn’t had the training in what is being talked about.

That training costs money.
Will: No. It doesn’t cost money. All training—all it costs is conversation.

I don’t know if that’s true because there’s a social realm that conversation exists in.
Will: My gallery is paying for me to go to Basel, Switzerland, which is just a horrendously dull place. It costs money and it costs fucking time. Then, I get the education that I need in order to keep up.

I don’t identify with it. There’s a part of me that is sick of the skateboard graffiti bullshit, because it’s not even the graffiti skateboarding that I knew, ever. I don’t see myself ever identifying with that higher art world, either.
Will: I’m trying to make a middle ground and Philadelphia is the right place to do it, because it’s not New York, where everyone needs to know which social game they’re playing at any given time.

Dan: The middle ground is interesting, though. Like what you said about Barry McGee. People in that scene think that they are at the top. People in that scene, it’s like, well Barry is the most famous student, Jeffrey Deitch is the biggest art dealer in our scene. But then you realize that’s not really what’s going on. This is also going on elsewhere—times millions of dollars.

Will: I’m trying to find out how to be comfortable with the idea of having that title, “producer,” and what it means.

It’s a strange title. You have to have a different perspective on things than the individuals you use to make the larger project.
Will: People are willing to collaborate with you much more quickly than if you were just two fellow artists. It feels like there’s less competition and less ego involved. Unfortunately, for me sometimes I feel like it’s been reduced so far that I have no identity in this producer role. No one ever asks me how I’m doing. It’s just kind of a given. As part of my 24 hour job description, that I’m always solid.

That’s your doing.
Will: Certainly. When you look good all the time, no one ever tells you that you look good. And that’s not fair.

That’s one thing you miss from when you were an individual artist?
Will: I do lament the idea that I am in any way different than the artists I’ve worked with. Temperamentally, I started off exactly the same as them. I slowly adopted a kind of persona or a mode of working day to day. I enjoy looking at the shows, but my name doesn’t get mentioned. I don’t want to be this kind of Guru, or super producer. I don’t want to be Timbaland. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and realize that it would be a good idea to have an ego as a producer.

Okay, here’s a question. Is knowing art an art in itself?
Will: It’s considered a different discipline because it’s considered threatening to the artist.

What is threatening?
Will: It’s ancient. [Artists] have some sort of mystic connection with, well, God. Now, they have a profound, tuned in connection with extremely wealthy people. There’s not really religious art any more.

Artists of a certain level are producing work strictly with these patrons in mind. Consciously or not, when they’re making artwork—the thing is marketability? Doesn’t that violate the pureness of the artistic act?
Will: Yea. The artistic act is thoroughly compromised at this point. And, yes, it’s pretty necessary to cling on to the sacredness of the artistic act. What we’ve got to do is let go of what we have here.

And then what? Get out of the gallery?
Will: I think that would be ok.

So where does the artwork get shown?
Will: Now we’re getting somewhere interesting. Music, something which was previously only able to be enjoyed live and in person, can now be beamed through the ether. A lot of art will be able to be reproduced from the pages of a magazine or a disc. There are no churches to put artwork in.

And museums are strange places, too.
Will: Any institution that’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable places for viewing art. I mean MOMA is loaded with compromise. It’s just the experience of museum going—it’s not the experience of art. You can’t see the work. It’s noisy and there’s never a chance to be there when it’s quiet.

So what’s your ideal?
Will: The reason I was interested in art as a kid, was simply because I loved the experience of being in museums and having this kind of communication with works of art. And, for various reasons, [these days], people don’t have time or space in their brain to commune. Everything is efficiency, expertise, specialization. The economy thrives on the fact that we’re constantly renewing—

Consuming.
Will: They’re speaking consumption. Just, pure consumption. Like a waste producing machine. I mean, art’s gotta stick? That’s my ultimate thesis as a dealer. Art’s got to be disposable. Made out of paper—or, it’s got to have the ability to last centuries. It’s one or the other.

Indulgences. The practices of indulgences. Like, buying a new car—it’s not an emotional or spiritual indulgence that’s being encouraged. I would encourage spiritual indulgence, ‘cause I would like to indulge in it myself. And I would like my surroundings to—

Cultivate it.
Will: Yea. That’s when I actually can think. In my house—it’s a world away from other environments.

That’s something that becomes more and more obvious to me as I get older—how much your mental environment is intruded upon by outside forces that you have no control over. Do you see art having some function in being counter to this?
Will: Art is an expression that will resonate in generations to come. Art is something that can educate and illuminate somebody who comes from completely different circumstances than you—someone whom you never met, and you never will meet.

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