Interview

GO: Was your first band the Contortions?

JN: The first band was the Contortions. James Chance said he was forming a band, and would
I play guitar? I said yes. I was always one of those people who wanted to do everything, and it was just too good of an opportunity. Everyone has a small percentage in them, at some point, where they want to be a rock 'n' roll player of some sort. Some do it and stick with it, and others just take
a dip. I took a dip with the Contortions.

GO: Well, that was a pretty good dip.

JN: It was a good dip, yeah. It was a great band.

GO: So it was James and you and Pat Place?

JN: Even before that, it was James, myself, and Anne Deon, who was Alan Vega's girlfriend, and the same drummer James had for a while. Then the drummer quit, and Anne Deon stepped in . . . We loved her, but she had difficulty keeping time. One day she was no longer there. Then Chiko Hige and Reck came in, the Japanese bass-and-drums combo-they were fantastic. Then Pat came in, and then Adele [Bertei]. I remember we were rehearsing in this old movie theater on Delancey Street where Lydia Lunch was living upstairs. I think Mars and those guys were all living in that rehearsal space. We were rehearsing there and Adele walked in, and James just took one look at her, and she looked so good that he said he wanted her in the band. That was an addition based on something very superficial that turned out to have depth. She was great. She sang one song with us, "Chain of Fools," and she did it as good as Aretha Franklin. Adele is tiny, but she had the biggest voice. We played all the going clubs-Max's, CBGB. I quit just before Brian Eno did No New York [1978]. It was funny, I had just quit the band and went to London, and then he came over to New York and made that record.

GO: You were also making movies.

JN: I'd always made these short Super-8 movies, and a couple of longer ones. But then Eric Mitchell was a great inspiration to me. Eric Mitchell and the whole attitude of learning your instrument by playing it that was around then. We applied that to filmmaking. We would act in one another's films. I'd be doing sound on someone's film one day, and camera on somebody else's, and acting in another the next day. We exchanged roles with a great deal of freedom from one day to the next. We made films as quickly and cheaply as we could, and we made them about our own lives-or thinly disguised versions of our lives-and we showed them in our own cinema on St. Marks Place, the New Cinema. We showed our films on a video screen. We couldn't afford to have prints made, so we had video dubs made from the original Super-8. It was maybe the first video movie theater. It was a terrible picture. Amy Taubin [the longtime film critic for The Village Voice] described it as "bent pink soup," which it was. That was a great moment.

GO: There was so much talent in those films. It's funny, because you overlooked the flaws-or they even enhanced it. It was interesting to see your film Rome '78 [1978] again. I remember thinking that it was an epic when I first saw it. Thirty years later, the thing I noticed about Rome '78 was Eric seemingly watching himself in the monitor, admiring himself.

JN: [laughs] There wasn't a monitor. He's looking off camera, reading the script. Or maybe admiring himself in somebody else's eyes. That's kind of what one did. It was a funny time. It was very dark, and I loved flirting with danger . . . but it was also about having fun, which seemed radical-the idea of having fun. I said to Frank Stella the other day, at the gallery . . . I was admiring some new works of his, and I said, "God, this looks great! It looks like you really had fun making it." And he just turned around and walked off, and I realized that's a sort of generational distinction. To have fun making art was something that the generation before mine was not supposed to do. That the joy of making it should be apparent, I find it quite a redeeming quality.

GO: When did you get serious about painting?

JN: I had been a painter before I came to New York. But when I came to New York, I wasn't interested in painting at all. Then around '82, I guess, I realized that I couldn't do everything. I wanted to make movies, I wanted to make music, I wanted to make art. I figured that I couldn't be good at all of them and make a living at the same time and that I should probably focus on what
I knew best. So in 1982, when painting was enjoying a kind of new life, I caught the bug.

GO: You're like the last of the Action Painters.

JN: Well, I wanted to find something in painting that I could identify as my own. And I kind of stripped it down for myself to the things that seemed most important. A lot of it had to do with reinventing the brush, the surface, and the paint. It's those three things that I kind of came up with my own versions of, or my own mixtures of. They're pretty simple, the ingredients to my paintings. I like to think of it as like making bread or something. A little change in the recipe and you get something completely different.

GO: You make your own brushes and you have invented a series of devices to make paintings with. Talk about how that evolved.

JN: Well, my devices were all born of necessity, because I've always had the problem-which a lot of painters have-of making a large version of something that works well small. Once I'd reduced the paintings and stripped away everything and was left with the brushstroke, I thought that to increase the size of the brushstroke would be a sort of simple mathematical enlargement thing. If you make it bigger, you simply make a bigger brushstroke. But when the size changes, the physics of the thing changes.