An interview with John Waters by Tim Burrows, Issue 13.

 

On the evening after the most widespread day of the rioting and looting that swept London and other major UK cities in August, the director John Waters sounds thrilled to be connected – albeit only by telephone – to the place where it’s all kicking off. “When people ask me what my type is, I always say, ‘a yob’,” he explains, deliciously elongating the word.

Though talking from his home in San Francisco (where he spends his time when he is not staying in Baltimore, Provincetown, or New York), he has not been entirely immune from the effects of the damage that affected the UK’s urban pockets. Copies of his 1994 movie Serial Mom, starring Kathleen Turner, were destroyed in the blaze that raged in the Sony distribution warehouse in Enfield – “I didn’t love that,” he says. “But riots are criminals having fun because they’re pissed off. People do crimes because there is nothing else they can do.”

 

Waters has always found lawbreakers appealing. “Burglars, trespassers, criminals, always have a certain erotic cachet,” he said in the 2003 collaborative effort, Art – a Sex Book, which he co-edited with Bruce Hainley, essentially a collection of artworks that the pair found to display a certain sexiness, printed in tandem with a Q&A discussion about each work. Waters picked Overturned Furniture, a 1971 installation by German artist Reiner Ruthenbeck – a room full of pushed-over tables and chairs. “It’s what every teenager secretly wanted to do when the babysitter had friends over,” he explained: “trash the place.”

 

In part, Waters equates art with anarchy and lawlessness, and thus, he equates it with sexiness. In February 2010 at the ICA in Boston, Waters – who, at 65, remains an insatiably creative individual who can also call himself a writer, producer, artist, raconteur, stand up, and journalist with a straight (alright, a smirking) face – formed an unlikely pairing with Roni Horn, interviewing the artist ahead of her show, Roni Horn aka Roni Horn (“So, here we are, the odd couple,” Waters put it at the time). He asked Horn whether she thought her art represented either anarchy or safety – or both? “Safety has never been an element that I desired or strove for. Anarchy, maybe, or chaos,” she explained. “It’s less political situations, more natural conditions of not knowing, or strangeness.” But is her art sexy? “I think so,” says Waters today. “Roni’s work is handsome, as she is, and she uses it in her work to be seductive.  But there is nothing obscene there. It is fragile, like going into Tiffany’s with all the jewels out of the cases.”

 

The first Horn work that Waters remembers being drawn to was the 1994 piece, “Paired Gold Mats, For Ross and Felix”. A pair of crumpled, flat gold sheets that sparkle and glow in sunlight, the work was dedicated to Horn’s friends, the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who was dying of AIDS at the time the work was being made, and his partner Ross Laycock, who had passed away  in 1991. It is not difficult to imagine why Waters, a gay man deeply affected by an AIDS epidemic during which he lost several friends, was initially drawn to it.

 

He also owns a piece from Horn’s 2001 series, “Cabinet Of”: a spooky depiction of the changing face of a clown, it is perhaps the closest thing to “a Waters” that Horn has ever produced. “Clowns are scary – even as a child I hated them, and I don’t think this piece was made because Roni Horn was a warm and fuzzy child that bonded with a clown,” he says. “It looks like Roni probably thought the same way I did about them: ‘Get away from me!’ The one that I remember most is Clarabell on The Howdy Doody Show. If you watch him, he was almost psychotic.”

 

Yet on the face of it, the subtlety and flow of Horn’s oeuvre could not be more different to the hammy irony of Waters films. While it is initially difficult to reduce Horn’s style into soundbite-sized statements, aside from the hints such as “longevity” and “endurance” which she gave the audience at the ICA, Waters was famously ordained by William Burroughs as the “Pope of Trash”, a soundbite that prefixes most coverage of the director. As he puts it himself, “the reason why the art world is so great is you only have to appeal to one person in the whole world, whereas in the movie business you have to appeal to a million.”

 

The extreme imagery in his movies, such as Divine’s dog shit-eating scene in Pink Flamingos (1972), cemented Waters’ notoriety as a director, as much as his love of camp (though he loathes the term) pop ephemera. His Maybelline-enhanced pencil moustache, mirthful eyes, and desirous Baltimore drawl make up an image that has become shorthand for a stance that is peculiar to our times – his is a confidence that the life of a guiltless-yet-polite pan-cultural (and sexual) gourmandiser is ok, and screw the religious and political establishment if they think otherwise. It might be why he’s never been bigger. Last weekend, his 1988 film Hairspray played to 18,000 people at the Hollywood Bowl; it has become a modern musical phenomenon after it was remade in 2007 starring John Travolta in the Ricki Lake role, and is a stage staple in cities all around the world. Yet unlike many veteran heroes of transgression, he hasn’t gone completely straight – one of his biggest joys is still sniffing poppers on fairground rides.

 

Some might regard the confrontational pop perversions of the man who has unleashed a shit-storm of grotesque pop imagery against conservative America to be at odds with Horn’s more hushed explorations of self through her documentary of Icelandic wanderings and playful sculpture – and Waters does not view that as a problem. “For me, to appreciate her work doesn’t mean it has to be like mine,” he explains. “In the same way I am never attracted to people in real life who are like me; I’m not looking for a double. I love to hear from those outside of my experience, and find out what they think is beautiful or what they think is art. I know what I think and I don’t need somebody else to tell me I’m right – I want somebody to tell me I’m wrong!”

 

As with JG Ballard, those that have stepped into Waters’ home have reported back their surprise at the ordinariness of his domestic life, and of his fixed routine (which goes something like: up at 6, read papers till 8, work till lunchtime – repeat x 5 and on Friday, martinis). He is the product of a middle-class Catholic upbringing in Baltimore, which might explain where he ended up. At first, he repressed his desires as a gay adolescent in the 1950s and 60s, bottling them up until he got angry, and used this rage at the world as fuel for his filmmaking. Waters’ dad had his own fire extinguisher business in Baltimore – one of his fondest memories, he once told a journalist, was watching the house of a neighbour burn to the ground with his father – while Horn’s father, of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, had a pawnbroker shop in Harlem (where she first encountered gold, a key element in her art). Both were post-war East Coast suburban kids, looking for an exit.

 

To Waters, Horn makes art that is “joyously pathological. Good work can also come from un-joyous pathology, of course, but either way, the older you get, the more you have to work out your pathology. I guess that is what a lot of artists do; they have an outlet for every dark thought. It is when people have dark thoughts but no outlet to use them creatively that they go crazy.” It is as Norman Mailer put it in The White Negro, his 1957 essay on the sudden rise of the jazz-loving existentialist – the hipster – in the midst of the “totalitarian” America of the 1950s: “whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath within oneself, to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention”.  One reading of “the artist” might be explained as somebody who has escaped the daily grind and encouraged their inner-psychopath, but has refused to go back like everybody else, and so has found a new daily grind; an endless search for one’s own ideal form of expression.

 

In Anne Carson’s poem Wildly Constant, which she wrote during her time as writer in residence at Horn’s Library of Water in Stykkishólmur, north of Reykjavik in Iceland, she muses on her own encounters with Horn:

Roni Horn once told me

 that one of the Atlantic explorers said

  To be having an adventure

is a sign of incompetence.

Instead of adventure, what Carson stumbles upon as a defining impulse of her (and perhaps Horn’s and Waters’) creativity is to find oneself in “another world”; the world of art-making:

 

Not the past not the future.
Not paradise not reality not

a dream.
An other competence,
Wild and constant.

 

Carson collaborated with Horn on her 2004 book project, Wonderwater, along with Louise Bourgeois, Helene Cixous, and John Waters. Each produced a volume of responses to the titles and phrases that have cropped up in Roni’s work, which Waters turned into mock TV and film pitches.“Being Purple” became a “sad musical about the decline and paranoia of rock star Prince” while “Water, Still” was imagined as “John Water’s third autobiography from beyond the grave.”

 

“Roni is hardly known for being a laugh riot, but she does have a really good sense of humour,” says Waters. That piece with her niece [This Is Me, This Is You] has a lot of humour in it – a lot of wit.” He sees the intricacies, the flaws and perversions in Horn’s work as subversive fluctuations, often imbued with her own subtle humour. “Something like Pink Tons almost mocks the heaviness the sculpture of Richard Serra by doing one which is more perfect yet damaged looking,” he says. “And it is pink, which is so unlike Roni – I don’t think she owns a pink piece of clothing. People ask whether is it feminine or masculine; to me, it’s a comment on elegant weakness, which is something I think is difficult to show but she pulls it off in an incredible way.”

 

Horn is a film buff, and the pair have bonded over a love of “extreme art movies” – although they don’t influence each other’s work directly, Waters does believe that they care what the other one thinks about what they produce. As he has put it before: “All control freaks are looking for the person they can’t control.”