John Waters: Unwatchable

“The art world needs satirists like John Waters.”

By David D’Arcy, GREEN CINE 

Given the prices that art brings these days, and the reverence paid to art (sometimes exceeded by the reverence paid to the pursuit and purchase of art), the art world needs satirists like John Waters. “Unwatchable” runs through Sunday at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea (535 West 22nd Street). Waters uses the contemporary art vocabularies of photo-collage and found objects to do what Waters has done for decades – to mock propriety, pop culture and snob culture in the name of fun and in the name of freedom.

Once again, Waters is targeting consumer culture, and reminding us that it has become a structure of consciousness. (Being reminded by him brings some spark to the obvious point.) At first glance, it looks as if his framed images are another version of the ready-made – idiotic mass-produced slogans and images from tabloids that, by their very silliness, become observations on themselves when put in a frame.

9/11 images of a burning World Trade Center are placed next to stills from a 1960s science fiction film that shows a flying saucer crashing into the Washington Monument. The film was one of Waters’s favorites, he says. The fantasy film of the youth that Waters can never regain becomes the nightmare come true. And we thought those movies were nothing but escapism.

Most of the show is entertaining rather than sinister, but no less political. Waters takes John Walker Lindh, the convert to Islam whose conviction was meant to be a victory in the “war on terror,” and eroticizes him in a piece called Dream Lover. Michael Jackson and Charles Manson are reduced to two rubber children on the floor competing for attention. You don’t know whether to pick them up or kick them. But it’s art, so you don’t touch.

Censorship, in case you haven’t guessed, is a favorite Waters theme. Why not? He’s seen enough of it firsthand; we know there’s more than a joke in his film stills from which cigarettes have been slashed out of the pictures. What will the censors think of next? A lot of this kind of satire can seem sophomoric, but Waters brings a wry depth of experience to the world of censorship and pomposity that he’s trashing. He’s been there.

I spoke to John Waters last month on the eve of the enfant terrible’s 60th birthday. He wouldn’t discuss the new film that he’s writing, but he was eager to talk about his art. Each work in the show is in five editions. Unwatchable also has a published catalog, available soon from D.A.P.

DAVID D’ARCY What’s the unifying concept behind the show?

JOHN WATERS It’s called “Unwatchable”, which is the meanest thing you can say in the movie business. But images that you can’t watch in a movie theater – in an art gallery, you don’t watch them, you see them. So I think the show is the difference between the two worlds I’m in, watching and seeing, which you do in both worlds, and separately, and it’s also – hopefully – insider humor about the art business and the movie business put together. Like the one over here [pointing to a set of questionnaires in which artists are subjected to viewer’s questions to be filled out after preview screenings] – you have a market test. This is based on a real sheet that they pass out when you go to a movie. They pick ten people who then have to fill out this questionnaire: What did you think of the movie? What part didn”t you like? How would you change it? And then they expect you [the director] to change it. Imagine if in the art world they did that. So I tried to think of the stupidest thing collectors could say. On Richard Serra [known for his enormous sculptures in steel]: “There’s only two – not much to pick from.” Imagine what would happen in the art world if they had to test everything.

D’ARCY What about [Andreas] Gursky [the photographer who takes images and expands them vertically and horizontally]? Someone wrote here, “I don’t live in a museum.”

WATERS “It’s too big. It doesn’t fit over my sofa.” These are the things that every artist would dread hearing a person say. In the movie business, we have to address these kinds of comments. In the art world, mercifully, so far, you don’t have to, but you never know.

D’ARCY I saw This Film Is Not Yet Rated [the new documentary by Kirby Dick about the MPAA rating system, in which Waters, along with other film directors, describes going before the ratings board, and being informed which sexual references accounted for the panel”s decision to assign a restrictive rating].

WATERS The movie got an NC-17 rating, even though it’s called This Film Is Not Yet Rated. I’ll probably regret being in the movie the next time I have to go in front of them, but hopefully I won’t.

D’ARCY This is a great duo here [pointing to two baby-sized rubber figures facing each other on the floor, one of Michael Jackson with his armoutstretched, the other of Charles Manson.] Doesn’t Marianne Boesky represent Yoshitomo Nara, the Japanese artist who makes little figures that look like lawn gnomes?

WATERS This didn’t come so much from that. This came from: I have a fake son named Bill, which is basically this reborn baby that women make. And you can order one of these babies, and it’s very realistic. For mine, I ordered an angry baby with bad hair. He kind of got famous. It was my Christmas card last year, and I started to talk about it on the radio. I started getting fan letters to him. And it led to this.

I was in the last Chucky movie, and Chucky kills me. The person who made the Chucky movie made these. Certainly, now, it’s a battle about who would get a better table at a restaurant. Manson would. Michael Jackson has peaked and the restaurant would probably not even take his reservation, even though he’s more famous all over the world. But Manson, if he were to get out, would probably be welcomed at any party, which is a scary thing about what fame is in America. And if they had met when they were kids, what would have happened? You never know… if you had a play date, if history could have been changed. These are two of the most notorious people, all over the world.

I’ve always dealt in that. The “Filthiest People Alive” always interested me. That’s where it came from, and I wanted the idea of children, which everyone seems to want now – I always joke that gay people have more children than Catholics these days – so these are extended family of mine. But what’s so bizarre to me is that they’re the actual real size of a baby. The heads are the size of a child’s head, only with a man’s face. [Looking at the Michael Jackson figure] You can see that Michael Jackson does need guidance. He’s reaching out. Imagine if Michael Jackson had joined the Manson family.

D’ARCY Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys spent a lot of time with the Manson family, who used to drive his Rolls Royce to Safeway where they would rummage for food in the dumpster in the back. The Beach Boys even recorded one of his songs. but Manson himself was small.

WATERS He’s very short; he’s about that tall [pointing to the Manson baby figure on the floor]. I don’t think I’m glorifying him. In a way, I’m making fun of both of them, and their celebrity. What were they like as kids? Could anything have changed? They say it all happens before you’re three years old. Who knows? These are frightening in the way that, if you went into your house and turned on the lights, and looked at them, I think they would be frightening. My fake child Bill frightens me ever time I turn on the lights in my house in Baltimore. So he is what led to this.

D’ARCY Why did you name the fake child Bill?

WATERS Because I had an old Christmas ball from a thrift shop in my Christmas decorations for ten years. I never knew where it came from, and it said “Bill” on it.

D’ARCY There’s a rubber snake on the floor.

WATERS I loved joke shops as a kid. It’s called Slimy the Snake. I used to have a little rubber snake that I put around and scared people. Only I put my monogram on it. That’s the same monogram that was in my last show, Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot. It’s a recurring monogram that I use.

D’ARCY So it’s the same monogram that’s on the slippers [in another photograph of Waters.]

WATERS No, Divine gave me those slippers twenty years ago for Christmas one year.

D’ARCY Are they suede or velvet?

WATERS They’re velvet.

[We move to another wall, where magazines are framed and mounted with the addresses of famous people as their subscribers.] D’ARCY Can you be prosecuted for this?

WATERS All the addresses are fake. No, they’re aren’t really stolen from these real people’s houses. Edward Albee does not get Reader’s Digest. Rei Kawakubo, the Comme des Garcons designer, does not get InStyle. This is a satire on what would happen if people went through celebrities’ trash cans. These would be secret subscribers to all these magazines. I was just trying to imagine celebrity ephemera that would never be. But I doubt that Anna Wintour gets Budget Living.

D’ARCY Do you yourself read all these magazines?

WATERS I read all of them but Reader’s Digest and National Review.

D’ARCY Has National Review reviewed any of your films?

WATERS Well, John Simon used to be the movie reviewer, so I hope not.

[We walk over to a framed blow-up of a newspaper headline from a tabloid.] “Ed Sullivan Raped Me” [referring to the host of the long-running Sunday night variety on CBS who was thought to be the paragon of family entertainment].

WATERS That was a real headline. It was a tiny headline in a tabloid this year. That’s just a blow-up of it. And you have to think, that was a slow news day if they had to think up that one in 2005.

D’ARCY I would imagine that most of their readers don’t know who Ed Sullivan is, or was.

WATERS Sure they do. Most tabloid readers are old. They are not young people.

[A large Rottweiler on a leash in the gallery barks loudly.] D’ARCY I thought the dog was barking at us, but he’s barking at the figures of Michael Jackson and Charles Manson on the floor. [We walk over to another framed work on the wall, which lists comments that dealers might make to clients.]

WATERS This is obviously what everybody in the art world would say off the record. It’s called Artistically Incorrect. I think it addresses everything in the art world – “Thanks for not buying anything.” “No discounts, please.” “We don’t loan.” “We wouldn’t sell to you if you were the last collector in New York City.” “All photographs fade.” “If you sell this at auction we’ll have you killed.” Or “Your child probably could do this.”

[We move to a framed ensemble of photographs of movie stars praying, with the slogan “Praying Is Begging” daubed over them in red paint that looks like blood.] D’ARCY Where does that slogan come from?

WATERS “Praying Is Begging” comes from an atheist bumper sticker put out by Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s organization.

D’ARCY Is she still alive?

WATERS No, she was murdered by a man named Waters, and I’ve been obsessed with her because she was from Baltimore. This is movie stars praying as if it were defaced by a radical atheist. “Praying is Begging” always made me laugh when I saw that bumper stick.

D’ARCY Now this woman [in a framed photograph] I didn’t recognize.

WATERS It”s Bill Clinton”s mother. She looks like a character in my movies.

D’ARCY Virginia Kelley. She outlived four husbands.

WATERS This was an accident. I was working on something else. Half of them are accidents, and this is a perfect example. I love Clinton, I’m a big supporter of Clinton, but still, it does explain a little bit about his life. People have forgotten about his mother, and I wanted to remind them because I always liked her.