Interview

GO: Did it work?

JN: It kind of worked. But there were things about it that didn't work. And that's been the story ever since. I think 90 percent of the brushes I make don't do the thing that I hope they will do and get shelved. But then quite often I find a use for them later. I usually make a brush with a particular thing in mind.

GO: A lot of them look great. It's great just to see the variety and the crazy, almost Rube Goldberg-like inventive quality of the things that you've tried, like with feathers. . . .

JN: Anything from feathers to foam rubber.

GO: Is that always evolving, or have you sort of arrived at something that's working for the paintings you do now?

JN: I've arrived at something that works for now. I do have this sort of holy grail of the ideal filament and combination of different filaments at different lengths and strengths and with different degrees of snap and taper and everything. But I need to persuade the guys at DuPont to make it for me, and I haven't been able to yet. They've been very generous with me in giving me different things that I've asked for. But I haven't got them to reconfigure their machines yet to actually extract a bristle to my kind of ultimate design. I'm working on it. The ones I'm using now are synthetic, which is good for the animals. It's a DuPont filament-three different kinds of filament combined.

GO: And do they build them for you or do you make them?

JN: I make them. To make the ones I like most right now, I take household brushes and chop them up and glue them back together again and put my own handles on. And the brushes are like the characters in my drama or something. I bring them onto the stage, and I kind of know what they can do, and I turn them loose within the confines of the studio, like dancers.
GO: You bought the contents of a high-speed film laboratory from the University of Tennessee on eBay, right?

JN: It wasn't eBay. It was something called GovDeals.I bid $250 on a whim for the entire contents of the University of Tennessee high-speed movie lab, thinking that somebody would bid a little higher than that, and the closer it got to the end of the auction, the more I realized that there was a possibility I might actually win the thing-which I did. So I got the whole for 250 bucks, and I dispatched Tom Jarmusch down there to pick it up in a truck. It was quite amusing. When he got there, the guys in the warehouse kept saying, "Say thank you to your friend for relieving us of this burden." It kind of worked out good in the end, but I did get a lot of stuff that I just threw straight away. Tom came back with a truckload of wires and cameras and parts of cameras and lenses. . . . I got these amazing cameras that were encased in rubber-gun-sight cameras for filming the bullets coming out of the guns to calibrate them or something. They have these wonderful, big wide-angle lenses. I didn't even know they were cameras when I first looked at them. I thought it was some piece of machinery. I got a couple of those, and I got a couple of these enormous cast-iron cameras, which go at 10,000 frames a second with a rotating prism instead of a gate, so the film just runs through, vroom, like this. It doesn't go click-click-click-click-click. It just runs when the prism rotates. I've got many, many ideas for films from that.

GO: Are they shorts, or-

JN: Most of them are shorts, and a couple of them are longer ones. But they're mostly in the 8- to 10-minute range. There are a couple of half-hour ones. That's about as long as I can get without losing my attention. My attention abilities are curtailed somewhat. Whatever the hell I did with my life . . .

GO: There was a famous TV commercial where the model says, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." Do you find that maybe even now, in certain circles, it's taboo to make work that is beautiful?

JN: Yeah. I feel that, in a way, I'm trying to make something beautiful and failing. I find beauty really compelling-it makes me want to kind of puke in some ways. Well, I find the power of beauty very unsettling. And I think my paintings have that. In as much as they're beautiful, there's something unsettling about them. And maybe it's because I'm reaching for the kind of perfection of something . . . I'm reaching for the perfection of a movement or a moment . . . and that, you know, by its nature is reaching for beauty. But there's something about a moth to the flame about it for me. There's a kind of turbulence to the paintings, a kind of turbulent beauty.

GO: But I think what you're doing is tough because there is this kind of-

JN: Prejudice.

GO: Yes, because it used to be assumed that it was okay to make a beautiful painting.

JN: Yes.

GO: It was just part of the job, but it was part of the attack on painting, and on the idea of the decorative. I mean, I think that if you look at all the artists whose work you can say is clearly beautiful-it's not easy, it's harder.

JN: It's not easy to look at it?

GO: No, it's not easy for them to be accepted.

JN: I think there's some truth to that.

GO: I think that eventually it has to be accepted, but it's easy to dismiss some paintings that aim for beauty by saying, "Oh, that's decoration."

JN: I hope that my paintings are a bit more than that. Amy Taubin said something very nice in that piece that she wrote: that each of the paintings is a kind of search for a still place in the turbulence of one's life, and maybe there's a kind of beauty in stillness. I'd like to think that there's some sort of deeper beauty to the paintings than their lusciousness.

GO: Yeah, because your paintings are a lot about time-and about the beauty that's always escaping. Like in nature, the flower hits that moment where from now on, it's downhill all the way. So it's kind of capturing the evanescent quality of beauty, that it's just fleeting.

JN: Yes, that's very nice, Glenn.

GO: But there are a lot of really great artists who I think have this ironic obstacle of beauty.

JN: Well, I spent many years trying to make sort of ugly things-

GO: You failed miserably at making ugly things, James.

JN: [laughs] I tried to make ugly music and I guess I failed. Even that was beautiful, too. You know, you just do what you do, and . . . I do think that in some respects, the surface beauty of my paintings is a lure, to grab you into maybe looking and thinking a little further, but it's a sort of entrapment. I feel trapped by beauty, and maybe I try to use beauty as a trap in my own way. It's sort of irresistible, beauty.