Interview

GO: Did you visit him?

JN: Yeah, I loved his studio on Greenwich Street. He'd just started making those oil-stick, oil-rubbing paintings, and everything was black. The telephone, I remember, was oil-sticked black.
Everything was black. It was beautiful.

GO: Were you making work then?

JN: Yeah. The only thing that really survives from that period is my pendulum movies. I hung this enormous pendulum from the bridge on the street where I lived and made a movie just watching the pendulum swing. I also had cast these concrete balls and just left them in vacant lots or in the middle of the street. They looked beautiful. It seems like a long time ago. It also seems like a kind of golden age, those years. Because there was no money . . .

GO: You didn't need money. People would go to Max's Kansas City at cocktail hour and maybe order one drink and eat all this free food. Half the art world was surviving on it.

JN: Openings provided a lot of meals, too. There was a kind of liberation in that. Nothing to lose.

GO: Who did you meet early on?

JN: Lindzee Smith, Julia Heyward, Paula Longendyke-a funny, mixed crew. Boris Policeband, whom I loved, lived with us for a while and ate spaghetti every night and ate only at night. He was the first guy who watched more than one television at a time. He had about 10 TVs, which seemed really radical. There were no remotes. He ran around changing channels while he talked to you.

GO: Around '74, there wasn't a lot going on. I remember Patti Smith was doing stuff.

JN: Yeah, Patti Smith, Television, then Talking Heads.

GO: The first time I saw Talking Heads was at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, on Chambers Street. They were a trio.

JN: I saw them there, too. Was Lisa Stroud a great friend of David Byrne's?

GO: She was his girlfriend.

JN: She dragged us all down there to see him. Diego Cortez was a great influence in my life and other people's lives at that time. He was the first one to tie into the things that were happening in the larger world, and he introduced us to more of the music that was coming out of England and that whole attitude toward making art and making music, which we picked up on and applied to our films. I kind of took a left turn out of the art that I'd been making at that time, and went into this other thing. Picked up a guitar. James Chance said he was forming a band.

GO: Did you meet him through Diego?

JN: Possibly. We had this little garage on Jay Street, in the same building where we lived. Our landlords parked their big Cadillacs in the garage during the day, and after they left at night, we ran in and put up a movie screen and showed movies and did performances. I met James when he was playing there with a trio. It seems like a different city altogether. It was a ghost town-the whole of lower Manhattan, from 14th Street down, was just wreckage. Beautiful wreckage.

GO: Did you have any kind of gainful employment?

JN: I did odd jobs with a couple of friends. We had a construction outfit called the Three Aces. We pretended that we knew how to do things, and then figured out how to do them. Somehow we managed to work it out on the fly. We put up a few things-I doubt whether they are still standing. I had a friend who was a plumber. He dragged me off in the middle of the night to fix someone's toilet in a little apartment, and the owner was a guy called Philip Glass, a musician. I fixed his toilet.