Interview

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James Nares did not immediately rocket to the top of the New York painting scene. The Englishman turned New Yorker had to go through many phases to get there. He practically had to shoot himself in the foot. (Literally and metaphorically-you know the English and their hunting.) He was a No Wave musician, a filmmaker and performer, and a leading member of the living-dangerously clique of the '70s and '80s. But no matter what he was going through, he always worked at his art with elegance and grace, and he was always greatly admired (and collected) by fellow artists, many of them more successful than himself. Finally, over the last decade, the handsome, towering, snooker-playing, self-effacing painter has finally begun to achieve the recognition he deserves. His paintings can be found in many great collections and at the Paul Kasmin Gallery. And a retrospective of 30 years of filmmaking was held recently at the Anthology Film Archives in New York. I interviewed my old friend at his apartment in Chelsea, where he was picking away on an oud, and at my house in the country, where Nares is here and there on the walls.

GLENN O'BRIEN: What brought you to New York?

JAMES NARES: My friend Seth Tillett. I'd been at school with him, and he lived in New York. I ran into him on the street in London. All I did was read American art magazines. I felt like a real loner in London, being interested in all these artists that nobody else seemed to have heard of.

GO: Who were you interested in?

JN: I was interested in the Avalanche magazine people.

GO: Like Vito Acconci?

JN: I loved Vito. And really the whole spectrum of what was happening, from Gordon Matta-Clark on down. Seth told a story about going to the Broome Street Bar and turning around, and the guy next to him was Robert Rauschenberg, and they got into a big talk. That sealed the deal for me. The idea of being able to walk into a local bar and sit next to Rauschenberg was too much to resist.

GO: Had you been making art in London?

JN: Yeah. Ever since I was tiny. It was the thing I could do. They weren't quite sure what to do with me. But I seemed to be well occupied and out of trouble when I was making art, so they encouraged that.

GO: What kind of work did you make as a youth?

JN: I painted the neighbors' rhododendrons bright red with enamel. That was beautiful. I remember my mother came and said, "What are you doing, children?" "Painting." "Oh, how wonderful." That red-and-green thing has stuck with me ever since. I made a fountain out of my step-dad's tuba. He never played the tuba. I don't know why he had one, but I mounted it on a chimney stack and connected the garden hose and made this beautiful musical fountain. They were very long-suffering, my parents. I took old 16mm home movies, which I really regret now, and melted them onto a board with a blowtorch and made a kind of [Jackson] Pollock-spaghetti-melted film painting. It was quite beautiful. But it ruined those memories forever. They were like, "Well, that's very nice, James. That's beautiful."

GO: What's your oldest extant work?

JN: My mother has a horrible little woolen doll character. God, it's ugly. It looks like a voodoo doll. I don't know how I made it or why. I also have a great autobiography that I wrote when I was 5. It has a self-portrait on the cover, with little pictures inside. It starts off matter-of-fact and then it ends abruptly with a passage about my father dying. It suddenly becomes very tragic. "Then the fangs of death had crept into our household, and it was never quite the same." That was the end of my autobiography at age 5.

GO: So what did you do after arriving in New York?

JN: I hooked up with Seth, and we moved in to this big loft on Jay Street in Tribeca, when it was a total ghost town. September of 1974. The first people whose door I went knocking on were Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear, because I loved their magazine, Avalanche. Willoughby was very warm. He opened the house to me. I had seen him do a sort of performance lecture at the Royal College of Art, in London. He had come in and mussed around on the stage, pulling wires and setting things up, and that went on for an hour or so before anything happened. There was a bar attached to the lecture hall, and everyone kept getting more and more drunk. After a while, Willoughby turned on a slide projector and flashed through a whole carousel of slides very quickly. This critic I was sitting with and my self were the only ones who knew the artists, so with each artist that came up, we yelled out the name. It was almost like Name That Tune. Then Willoughby asked if there were any questions. It was over in about 60 seconds. The audience was appropriately appalled, and I loved it. So when I came here, I said to Willoughby, "I loved the thing you did there. I heard that you were on acid." Willoughby said, "Well, of course I was on acid!" That was my first visitation. The neighborhood there was cool, and 1974 through '76 were very definitive years for me. Richard Serra was very present in the neighborhood and in my mind. I think my early artwork and movies show that.