Jocko Weyland interview
Intro by: Ale Formenti
I consider myself lucky to know Jocko Weyland. Lucky because this big American guy is nice, he likes to chat. And he also likes to write. Have you read “The answer is never”? Or the reports from Shanghai published in Vice Magazine. Maybe you’ve read something he wrote in Apartamento Magazine, or you’ve held in your hand one of his innumerable publications (as they say today… “fanzines”). He had long hair once, and I remember seeing a picture of him (taken in 1984?) doing a backside boneless in a Colorado ditch. He has a tattoo, but it’s hidden. Don’t be mean, it’s nowhere what you’re thinking right now. It’s very difficult for me to talk about his work… because I’m a fan, I’d be too biased. But I must admit that one of his things that I like most is his pictorial production. Thanks to his photos taken in Shanghai I found inspiration for one of my works, but I’m not here to talk about my cabbage but his. In the garbage cans in front of the Elk gallery, which he founded and operated in the Soho area of Manhattan, one day someone found the body of a blonde woman brutally massacred. A few minutes after the discovery, a large group of policemen and journalists began to gather on those sidewalks because, after the news of the murder of a blonde had leaked, everyone believed it was Courtney Love, since she lived in the building opposite, but it wasn’t her, just a random woman killed by her fiancé who lived in the apartment above the gallery. Kobain’s widow was safe. I often talk with him and another of his qualities is that he (almost) always manages to live in different parts of the world. Whether it’s in the Chinese metropolis or in a small town on the Mexican coast… every time we talk he is in a different place from the previous one. I think this movement is a big inspiration for him. As I have already said, his artistic production is vast and ranges from ball-pen drawings to non-fiction literature. I don’t think he’s ever made videos, or at least… I’ve never seen any. The only thing we fully disagree on is the fact that he is not a fan of GG Allin, I am.
Interview by: Sergej Vutuc
You recently indicated the closure of Elk zine, which was self-published for 20 years. Is it possible to speak what was for you behind Elk zine — a mystical poetic story that sometimes could be also interpreted as a collage, cut up, archive, or just photocopy images. Also there is the thing that the last issue come out in a different format and published by two publishers — Nieves and innen.
Well actually, not to nitpick, but I indicated the closure of Elk in 2017, so a while ago now. I sent out an email that said, “The Mission is Terminated,” which is a Throbbing Gristle reference, and that was the end of Elk, the final one being issue #34. And again a bit persnickety but it was after 17 years, not 20. After that Elk the zine was no longer. Elk is dead, long live Elk, to quote Duncan Bock. There were many reasons to cease publication, but in simple terms I’d said what I had to say, and show, or more accurately, Elk had said what it had to say. Everything has an end, and in this case, it was time.
Your interpretation fits nicely. A mystical poetic story that could also be interpreted in a lot of other ways, collage, or a raiding of various archives and just whatever compelling scraps of paper or pictures that came into my orbit. An investigation and reshuffling from the infinity of images and texts floating around as part of the colossal amount of printed matter humans produce. Perhaps you could call each issue a “picture poem,” and also an autobiographical time marker, a reflection of longstanding interests and also ones that were current when each volume was conceived.
Basically there was no magazine that existed in 2003 that looked or felt the way I wanted to see a magazine, so I made my own, Elk, low-budget, low-fi, photocopied, and technically a “zine.” Reflective of what I was into and concerned with finding specific formal, intellectual, and cultural resonances between the images and texts, an idiosyncratic kind of rhyming of associations that could be literal or conversely very esoteric. That somehow, hopefully, got across a definite “feeling” and subtly prodded the viewer into thinking and experiencing one person’s viewpoint, passions, and memories seen through the pages of the zine.
I think trying to explicate any further would be counter intuitive. A big part of it was an air of mystery, begging a question of why anyone would make such a thing, or put these elements together, and what was the purpose anyway? An enigma, and explaining any further goes against the spirit of the endeavor.
As far as the book, it’s not the last issue. It’s something else. Though I can see how that’s a bit confusing, especially since the name is the same. But it’s different than the zine, a much broader and intensive chronological stew, a beast of a different feather. The zine was something you could fold and put in your pocket, fleeting, and also towards the end it seemed I could barely give it away. So with the book I wanted to do something different with a “bigger” physical presence, something that is hard to just throw in the trash. And very explicitly not a compilation of old Elks. Not a historicization of the zine that existed between 2003 – 17 but all new material, which of course is not exactly true because it’s all “old” from many different origins. Basically I had a box full of stuff I’d never used in the zine, and it nagged at me, and I couldn’t bring myself to let it all go to waste. So five years after the closing of Elk the zine I decided whether the world needed it or not, to make one last, ultimate, culminating Elk in a different format and with a lot more pages in the shape of a book. The swan song, an encore, the ultimate Elk. As far as innen and Nieves, Aaron Fabian and Benjamin Sommerhalder are old friends who were always supportive of Elk, and I knew they had the production and distribution capabilities I didn’t have, and that they were into it. So I made and they published Elk the book.
When you talked about Elk, you referred to the band Throbbing Gristle, and we could see how important music is through the Elk zine, your exhibitions, and collaborations with musicians. What is it that you find in that raw sound of the 80s, their lyrics and their visual expression?
First an aside about the Throbbing Gristle citation. I always liked their “The Mission is Terminated” postcard that announced the end of their activities in 1981. But lo and behold they broke their promise and reunited years later. And then what do you know, I also reneged, and followed in their footsteps by getting the band back together, so to speak, and putting out the Elk book five years after Elk the zine ended.
Without going into a 10,000-word exegesis, yes, music has been important from the very beginning. Briefly, the popular musical climate that I grew up with in the late 1970s was abominable. AOR rock and all that. Frankly, it sucked. So pompous and excruciatingly bad. As was the culture at large. At least the mainstream aspects of it, which is all I was exposed to in smalltown Colorado. And then, thank God, punk came along. Through skateboarding and secret signals that managed to get through the morass, some of them conveyed to me by my older sister Michèle, who is ten years older and was very tuned in and sophisticated. She helped start me down the path with David Bowie and Brian Eno and Tom Waits and Siouxsie and other precursors. Soon after there were the further glimmerings with Devo and the Sex Pistols and the Dead Kennedys, and from there it was one short step away to hardcore and all the usual suspects along with much more recondite effusions, from The Neos to Portion Control to The Birthday Party, and all of that led to non-musical but equally as important influences like No Mag, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Nick Blinko, and Survival Research Laboratories. “Punk” in the broadest audio, artistic, and literary sense blew apart the prevailing miasma of the time and as cliché as it sounds, changed my life, with repercussions and lessons learned that are still relevant to this day. Raw, yes, and in opposition, and also graphically jolting. As you say, in their “visual expression,” revelatory and galvanizing. The primitive fuck-the-rules sometimes juvenile but also often truly avant-garde aspects of the two-dimensional artistic outpourings of that time. A huge blast of fresh air, with an impact that later was felt in Elk the zine, and also very much so in my book The Answer is Never, because punk and skating went together like bread and butter. You couldn’t have one without the other, and punk was not only an aesthetical movement but also provided an ethical and moral counterpoint to all it stood against. Surely the situation has a changed almost to the point of being unrecognizable since then, but that original impulse – that initial shock of the new and radical – is reflected in many of my pursuits in the ensuing years.
You had an exhibit with Thurston Moore called “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” at KS Art in New York in 2005. Can you say something about that?
The backstory there is that from 1982 to 1984, first in Colorado and then Hawaii, I made a skate and music zine called Revenge Against Boredom. In Honolulu when I was 16 I got a letter from Thurston that said something like “Hey send a copy of R.A.B., I heard it’s cool.” I guess he’d gotten the address from Flipside or Maximum Rocknroll, since it was listed in their zine contacts pages. I had just heard Sonic Youth’s first album “Confusion is Sex” a month or so before and liked it a lot so it was a cool convergence. I sent Thurston some R.A.B.s and he sent back a copy of his zine Killer, the one with Madonna on the cover. That was that. But eighteen years later, tagging along with my great friend Ton van Gool, who had been the visionary booker at the Effenaar club in Eindhoven, and at the time was the inspired and prescient curator at the MU Foundation there, we went to Sonic Youth’s Murray Street studios. They were busy, so I didn’t say much, but as we were about to leave I asked Thurston, “Do you remember Revenge Against Boredom?” First there was a flicker of uncertainty but upon reflection he answered enthusiastically in the affirmative. A few months later he approached me at the Jupiter Poetry Festival at Amherst in Northampton, Massachusetts, and showed me some of his collages. He’d seen some of my closeup photos fetishizing details of hardcore album covers, and suggested we try and do an exhibit together. After some missteps we approached Kerry Schuss and he agreed to do it at his gallery in Tribeca, pairing my photos and Thurston’s “Street Mouth” collages influenced by Charles Henri Ford’s “poem-posters” that utilize photographs by Leee Black Childers, Mick Rock, Bob Gruen etc. cut out from Rock Scene, Creem and Circus magazines dating to his teenage years. Creating, as he put it, “An ongoing open-heart bio-historagophy.” By the way as far as I know not one of our pieces sold, but the opening was really crowded and a lot of fun and was also the beginning of my long running and continuing association with Kerry’s gallery.
I would go back to the story of how you met some zine makers from the Yugoslavian zine and worldwide scene of the 80s, and the connection to your first zine Revenge Against Boredom. Back than zines used to have a section, where they introduced other zines and created incredible worldwide connections and mail art packaging surprises. Maybe everything that nowadays, when you want to start a zine, it’s hard to imagine that you can create something so “massive.”
Yes, the mail was incredibly important, and led to a worldwide correspondences with zine makers and oddballs and loveable nutjobs from England to Germany to Canada and then later even further afield, like Yugoslavia. You’d see an address listed in one zine and think, sure, Smashed Hits from Ohio, that sounds interesting, and send off a letter with a self-addressed stamped envelope, and get back this amazing gem full of band news, photos, anarchist screeds, and comics. An underground lifeline to what was going on out there, and it not to state the obvious, it was all new. Never been done before. A complete and vivifying break with the past. That was so important, the novelty of it all.
Especially where I grew up in Colorado, it was quite remote and there was no such thing as a punk “scene” there. Just me, growing up in a house at 9,000 feet in the mountains on 300 acres a mile from a paved road, painting “Flipper” on my dad’s old work shirts, and skating on the neighbor’s cobblestone patio. And Hawaii was also isolated, really peripheral. The mail was crucial for any information from the outside world, and making connections and sometimes friendships that have lasted to this day. “Mail art packaging surprises” is an apt way of putting it, because it wasn’t just the zines themselves, but the letters, flyers, stickers, and other ephemera that came too. A critical introduction to all kinds of artwork and ideas that were truly oppositional and revolutionary and in fact existed at that time almost wholly outside of the hegemonic “mainstream.” And not to be gloomy, but yes, I agree, it’s inconceivable that in this non-corporal world of screens and the complete annihilation of attention spans and contemplation that something so “massive” or meaningful could happen, a network of such profound relationships. But hopefully I’m wrong about that. It’s a bit sad, the loss of that tangible, you-can-hold-it-in-your hands physicality, and the depth of meaning that entails. So many “things” have been lost, and so it goes, and though many see it as progress from another angle it’s the disappearance of chances for significant connections of a type that no longer exist.
Elk wasn’t just a zine, it was much more to me, the soul of a self-created world that is also a stage for other people, whether it was an exhibition space — Elk Gallery or Elk Books — which published works by Mark Hubbard, Gloria Toyun Park, Mark Gonzales, Rick Charnoski, John F. Weyland, and Thomas Hauser to name a few. I could see that all these parts could lead you one day becoming a curator at a museum, and that is what happened when you were at Moca Tucson from 2013 – 2017. But also there’s the complexity of being part of an institution.
I don’t think I can improve on your description, “the soul of a self-created world that is also a stage for other people.” Elk started as a zine, a curatorial project on paper, if you will, and that was done by one person, me, alone. But that can get lonely, and fortuitously after a couple of years thanks to Jim Walrod’s suggestion I met David Selig and Tom Sachs. David had empty storefront full of pretty Blood surfboards next to his bar Ñ on Crosby Street in Soho, where he and Tom had planned to open a surf and wax shop. That fell through and now they wanted to “do something.” What exactly was a mystery, but they’d seen Elk, and thought that was a good start. That’s where the first Elk Gallery shows happened, starting with the surfing meets California “Finish Fetish “artwork colliding with hot rod custom car culture exhibit “Now I Hate Summer” that opened in December 2006. The irascible and infinitely hip Jim Walrod, may his memory be a blessing, is very much to blame for what happened. It was through his insistent intercession that Elk went from the two-dimensional to three dimensional manifestations in the real world. And I’m eternally grateful to David for his unstinting support and keenness to do unusual things outside the white cube and its accoutrements, not to mention his inventive ideas as far as venues were concerned. Two examples are the former pet supply store on W. Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles that housed the Elk Gallery for Gloria Park’s wig sculpture, drawing, and video show “La Perruquiere” in 2007, and the lifeguard storage basement in Rockaway where you and Leon Zuodar’s “Sergej Vutuc and LELE Live from USA” came into being in 2011.
If Elk was fueled by anything, it was a curiosity and an omnivorous and eclectic impulse. With the gallery, which put on 16 exhibits in different locations in New York, Los Angeles, and Beijing between 2006 and 2011, that turned into a stage for showing the actual work of people I admired. Trying to bring it to a broader audience in a different context, and that the viewership was often sparse wasn’t really an issue. The fact that “it,” the work, got to be seen in space, intermingled in intriguing ways, is what was important to me. Like the zine, it was born out of not finding what I wanted to see out there, especially in the confines of the “art world,” whatever that means. So I did it myself, out of necessity and a genuine urge to “promote” and honor these often overlooked or unrecognized artists and writers.
As far as the deceptively named Elk Books division, since they weren’t really “books” because they were also photocopied zine-style publications, they were painters, photographers, and poets I wanted to showcase to a fuller degree. Either old friends or sometimes new ones, and I edited and printed these “books,” to fulfill a deeper exploration of their work and ideas, to celebrate what they do and share it with other people.
And yes, in twisty, unexpected, and it must be said, unintended ways, because I definitely wasn’t on a track to become a curator as the profession is commonly defined, Elk and its outgrowths, my own work, and some other projects I was involved in, like the Macro Sea dumpster pools at Danny’s Lot in Brooklyn, is what brought me to the attention of Anne-Marie Russell, the then-director and chief curator of Moca Tucson. I’m grateful, everlastingly, to her for seeing and appreciating the connections between all those disparate activities and bringing me on as the curator at Moca Tucson in 2013, where I had free rein to indulge my curatorial predilections during my time there, through 2017. Which was a wonderful opportunity and a blast. But it wasn’t just a one-man operation anymore so there had to be an adjustment to all kinds of new challenges and complexities and occasional pitfalls that are endemic to an institutional non-profit setting.
You were born in Helsinki, Finland and have lived in many places around the world following your father’s professions, which forms a strong basis for your poetic story about skateboarding and leading up to and after writing your history and memoir The Answer is Never. From the side I can see this continuity of spirit of discovering unknown parts of the world.
My father was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, so my early years were spent in Moscow, Caracas, and Albany, New York. Then when he retired at age 49 when I was eight we moved to Estes Park, Colorado, because he’d really gotten into skiing and wanted to concentrate on his own writing. From there it was to Hawaii, because of surfing, and then San Diego, where my choice of college was entirely determined by the University of California, San Diego’s proximity to the Del Mar Skate Ranch. Those teenage years of skating and moving around informed everything. Traveling in Europe in 1986 and Russia in 1993 and even Cameroon in 1996, skating was always part of those expeditions and became a motif in The Answer if Never. And by extension, life in general. Exploring and discovering and meeting interesting people, often within the sphere of skating, in many different locales.
Here I would like to talk about your journey from New York to Beijing in 2007 – 2008, which later left various traces in your work. Perhaps the most interesting part for me is where you start to leave one medium and start engaging in others.
Actually I first went there in 2005 to write a story about Danny Way’s jump over the Great Wall of China, and stay with my old friend Johnee Kop from Honolulu, who had relocated there. The piece never got published, but I spent three weeks there and fell under the spell of China’s chaotic gritty charm, and two years later moved there and stayed for 1 ½ years. I put on Artus de Lavilléon’s Elk Gallery show, wrote a column called “Raw China” for Vice, tutored English, got paid to be a pretend architect at real estate developer meetings, took the photos that a few years later became my book Geomancy, skated a lot of brand new marble banks, wandered around, and generally soaked up the madness. It was by turns infuriating, exasperating, thrilling, and incredibly stimulating.
To your point, despite the photos that turned into that book, by then I was a lot less interested in photography with a capital “P”. To take a good, really good, or maybe even “great” photo began to seem too easy and not much of an accomplishment. Maybe also the field is just too crowded and it started being not so vital or imperative and though I still took pictures and “liked” them the law of diminishing returns set in. With photography becoming so ubiquitous and everyone with a phone being a photographer, photography as a so-called “fine art” consequently became more precious and a bit of a joke in its attempts to portray itself as more important or better than what everyone in the world was doing with their handheld devices. It happened gradually, my turn away from photography as the “one” thing, “my art,” and as my passion for it declined writing and then drawing and painting became more how I wanted to spend my time.
Coincidentally after a few months in Beijing Rich Jacobs asked for a ballpoint pen drawing for a show he was organizing in Brooklyn, so I got a pad of this school paper that says, “My math homework” in Chinese characters across the top, and the cheapest pens I could find, and started picking up cigarette packs, business cards, candy and noodle wrappers, all this throwaway consumer packaging that made up a grand exposition of discarded detritus littering the streets of the Northern Capital. Started drawing those, and it was really liberating, freeing, and meditative, copying them from “life.” The concentration it took makes it a much more direct pursuit, your brain to your arm to your fingers holding the pen and scratching on the paper, primal, raw, or elemental. Amusing that I started at age 40. A late bloomer. Some of those drawings will be shown in Pula, and they constitute the beginnings of a turn toward focusing on drawing and painting during the last 15 years.
Your first occupation, photography, became more and more secondary, and with the time you lived in Mexico, you turned strongly to drawing and painting and also moving parts of you short story collection Eating Glass into drawings.
Photography segued into being occasional fun thing to do, with the side benefit of providing images to use as source material for paintings. Photos I took of lone women on the sidewalks of Beijing being stalked by the oppressive architecture were the inspiration for my “Beijing Walkers” paintings I did in Tucson, and later photos of desolate backwaters of America, from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn to Detroit to American Flats in Nevada, were used as the basis for gouache landscape paintings of empty pools, oil refineries, and decaying buildings. Liminal spaces, as they are known, where I often find myself lurking. Those two series won’t be displayed in Pula, and either will the drawings that are related to the Eating Glass stories, that I’ve been doing since my time living in Punta Mita from 2018 – 20. Got over 300 of those now, getting to phone book proportions. What will be shown are “word” drawings that are transcriptions of signs and other public announcements from China, well-meaning and inadvertent misrepresentations of the English language that summon up the Babel-like linguistic environment there, the first paintings I did back in 2010 of these really touching and beautiful brightly painted clay folk art figurines my mother bought in Moscow in the 1960s, depictions of objects and natural items on the ground, baseball plates, hoses, plants, and grass, from the time I spent working for the Parks and Recreation Department in Incline Village, and “redacted” and overpainted foldout ski area trail maps. Bookending all that will be a selection of the record cover photos from the early 2000s, and recent skiing self-portraits. So even if photography is not the emphasis it will start and end, appropriately, with that medium. Kind of closing the circle. And by the way, the title, “The World Isn’t Finished Yet, Is It?” is from a letter Charles Bukowski wrote to a friend in 1992. Even though it’s thirty years later that sentiment seems even more applicable now, emblematic of the zeitgeist, you might say, and relevant.
Skateboarding is an integral part of your work. I imagine you struggled with wooden toys, but in one way or another traces of the culture like self-built ramps, parks, and other signs of the scene have always found inspiration in your work.
Lots of struggling with the wooden toy, and I still do occasionally. Never a master of it, but that’s ok and possibly why I keep at it. An ongoing experiment, Sisyphean, and still enjoyable. Though sometimes it’s latent, or abstracted, or not formally evident, yes, those shapes, forms, and scenarios that come with skating, many times they have provided a backdrop, or have been a foundation or jumping off point into or onto the work. There are many reasons skating has affected all these endeavors, sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly, in an offhand, allusive fashion.
Obviously the snow and skiing are one of your other passions that also inspire you in your artistic work. You made the book The Powder with images from ski magazines of the late 70s and created poetic narratives and other views on the sport. But lately your life path has taken you back to Lake Tahoe, to your parents, a place of seclusion that has also led you to turn the camera on yourself and create a new set of performative works by becoming a ski model, filmmaker, and editor on your own.
Skiing came before skating. I was incredibly lucky to be introduced to it by my father right after we moved to Colorado, at a young age, when you don’t know you’re mortal, and can pick things ups intuitively, like kids do with languages. Such a gift. Skiing defined our time in Colorado, and added greatly to the joy of life growing up there, and also became a lifelong fixation. Much more than a “sport,” it can be wild, free, and expansive mystical-ethical pursuit that also at one time had an original and eye-popping aesthetic. By reproducing photos from 1972 – 1984 Powder magazines, The Powder celebrates that era in all its glory, with photographs mixing physicality and nature taken during an invigorating, constantly changing phase of rapid development and innovation. Almost forty years later, after many breaks, when I would just ski a couple of weeks a year while visiting Incline Village, for diverse reasons I have become a permanent resident there the last three years. Helping out my parents and retreating from the hubbub a bit. Secluded, that’s true, in many ways cut off from the rest of the world, but also a time for personal and familial growth, of giving back to the ones that brought me here, and specifically to my father, who had been the one to get me hooked on skiing in the first place, and until he had to stop at 89 years old, was my favorite person to ride the chairlift with and to slide down the slopes alongside.
Because of this relocation somewhat unexpectedly skiing has come to the fore again, doing it much more frequently than I had in a long time, and also surprisingly and at times a bit shockingly, that has led to what you describe as these “performative” works. From the beginning I had to acknowledge the irony and hypocrisy of someone, meaning me, who rails against “selfie culture” and the glut of self-congratulatory self-representation plaguing our species. Guilty as charged, even ashamed, but fuck it, and I couldn’t restrain myself from embarking on these narcissistic ski self-portraits. The solitude up in the mountains, and having the means, that is, a camera phone, got me thinking about trying to recreate and recapture the spirit and look of those old pictures from Powder magazine, using myself as model. The whole process is borderline comical, and I always do it in private, either in the backcountry or up at Diamond Peak when I hide out at the end of the day, skulking behind trees as the ski patrol does their end-of-day sweep, emerging on the now empty mountain to set up my “photo studio.” I’ll find a trunk, a rock, or cornice to jump off, then use a branch or rock as a “tripod” to set up the phone, get the video rolling, and hike up to the takeoff zone. That can take at least five minutes and can be strenuous, especially if there’s deep snow, and depends on the steepness and the conditions, as well as the weather. After that I get my skis back on, count to 20 and catch my breath, and descend to go sailing off the feature or obstacle, flying past the recording device before skidding to a stop. Then I climb back up to retrieve the phone, hit “stop,” and brush the snow off the screen before putting it back in my pocket. Sometimes it’s on sunny days, but just as frequently it’s blizzarding, ‑10 Celsius, the wind howling, and my fingers are freezing off. There’s something so absurd about how much energy and exertion is put into it, using the most primitive (though paradoxically “advanced”) means to maybe get one decent picture. And there are all the times the twig tripod falls over, or it’s snowing too hard to even see an image, or the phone runs out of battery power, or after the fact I realize I positioned the lens wrong so I’m not even in the frame. And that’s just the beginning, since after I chop down the video to two or three second clips, and spend a lot of time enlarging and “capturing” a still. It’s quite a production but every once in a while one of them turns out just the way I want, and is evidence of something ineffable, that moment escaping the laws of gravity, in the air, with the trees and con trails and clouds in the background. And even if it’s a bit silly, there’s something about those photos that is the stuff of my life right now, where I’m at, both literally and figuratively, and it seems applicable and fitting to include them in closing out “The World Isn’t Finished Yet, Is It?” Bringing things up to the present, and a summation of sorts.