♪ [Music playing] ♪
I first started video at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and I immediately had a visceral reaction.
It was almost like the first time I remember trying on a suit, when I was twelve years old,
in a three-way mirror, seeing the side of my face
and my profile, and it was sort of distancing and sort of oddly magnetic.
And then when I moved to LA in 1970,
I started doing the reels, where I worked for a whole year every day,
but at the end of the year I would go through and weed out
and I'd come out with, like, a twenty-minute selection.
I never really looked through the camera.
I arranged the monitor, the camera, and myself in this sort of triangle
that made it more of a performance for myself.
I could see what I was doing and modify it from there.
"No, way off, your rhyth—your whole timing is off. You didn't hit yourself in the right place. . . ."
Usually the second take was the one that was the good one because the first one
I was thinking about what to do,
the second one I'd thought of what to do, the third one was overdone.
I don't think that other artists that used video at that time were so interested in the audience.
They tended to be just using the whole reel,
like thirty minutes of jumping up and down or whatever.
And that was really different from television, which had thirty-second ads.
They had a way in and a way out, and so my work was sort of more like that, I suppose.
"Now we have another boot that we hope will catch on.
It's a white boot with a steel reinforcing in the sole for added life."
I never made scripts; I always just sat down and started to babble on.
One of the ways that I edited,
I would test it out on friends or technicians, which I found to be really a great audience because
if they stopped looking at their wavelengths then I knew that it was communicating.
Laughter was one response where you know that they got it.
"Mom!
I think Randy's going to be sick!"
Crooked Finger, Crooked Stick is my favorite one of all time without a dog.
"Wow! Neat Finger! Boy, is that crooked!"
"Oh, that's nothing, you oughta see my stick."
"Wow! Is that neat!"
I don't know how I thought of that.
I think it's really about showing off— like one-upmanship—
and with the stupidest things possible, like the finger and the stick.
I came into the art world at the time when,
especially with video, people were making statements.
I've never been one to comment so I just wanted to be flat.
That, I thought, was really significant and important.
My heroes at the time were Bob and Ray, the comedians,
who I just adored,
and the writer Borges with his use of circular time.
Those things appealed to me.
And also, I should mention Glenn Gould, whose idea about
recording—rather than performing to a public—was really interesting to me.
When I was performing, I never could have anyone in the room at all,
and that's why my dog worked out so well—because
he wasn't too concerned about me sounding stupid.
When I got Man Ray, I had no intention of using him.
He was six weeks old when I got him.
I brought him into my studio when I was just starting to do the video in LA,
and he was always really interested when I was trying to figure out
how to hook the stuff up.
He seemed to get this really weird attachment to the microphone.
It's almost like a bone
so in one video I threw it to him and he retrieved it, and it made this horrendous sound.
[Distorted recording from microphone]
So he was always helping me think of stuff to do
and he was really my art partner.
There's something really scary about sitting in a room
with a video camera staring at you, with a monitor,
and you can't think of anything.
My best video, I remember,
Spelling Lesson, happened after feeling that way for about two hours.
And then I just sat down next to Man Ray and
this thing came out.
"You spelled O-U-T right,
but when it came to 'beach,'
you spelt it B-E-E-C-H,
which is like the, uh,
well there's a gum called 'beech nut gum.'"
So if I had given up, that wouldn't have existed,
and I was really kind of grateful that I had the stamina
to stay with it.
The funniest one was Man Ray with the alarm clock, where
he's in bed like a human sleeping,
and the alarm clock's ticking away violently on top of him.
And when the alarm goes off,
he blasts out of bed.
And I did that years later,
and the alarm goes off and he looks at it and goes back to sleep.
I think that was the funniest two-part piece that I made.
I think the longest one was that milk-treat bottle one,
where Man Ray is trying to get a Milk-Bone out of a glass bottle
and he bangs it around all over the place.
And the glass bottle breaks
and there's this Milk-Bone inside of this broken glass,
and you see the camera go up for a second,
when I thought, "Ah, I gotta stop this." But then I felt,
"No, he deserves it."
And he gets the bone out
and chews it right next to the microphone
and the broken glass.
It's really upsetting
but it's also triumphant in a way.
Every year, something kind of changed,
where I would upgrade the equipment.
By reel two and three, I got a better microphone so I'm talking more.
"Please excuse my shaky handwriting. . . ."
And then, by reel eight, I switched to color and there were people in it.
But I think the first ones were just as strong, if not stronger,
so I learned to really distrust technological advancements.
The first wave of these reels ended in '77,
and then more than twenty years later,
I don't know, I started to make reel eight,
and after reel nine I thought,
"Well, here comes reel ten, eleven, and twelve,"
but no! Nothing.
So I gotta wait another twenty years to start those.
"Hoo hoo hmm hoo hoo hmm hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hmmm
hoo hoo hmm hoo hoo hmmm
hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hmmmmm"