INTERVIEW: Joshua Saunders with Josh T. Franco

Pocket Gucci

Joshua Saunders is an Austin-based artist who works largely with the paper detritus of everyday life from today and recent decades. He also creates poignant assemblage sculptures from everyday ephemera. Josh T Franco splits his time between New York and Texas. He is a Chican@ artist and Art History PhD student currently working on a collaborative project with Saunders and artist Alison Kuo scheduled to show at Co-Lab in Austin Fall 2011. This interview follows the opening of Saunders’ solo show, Wizard Sleeve, at BiRDHOUSE in Austin.

Interview with Joshua Saunders, by Josh T Franco, 7/27/10, remote by Skype

Josh T. Franco: Where did the title of the show, Wizard Sleeve, come from?

Joshua Saunders: “Wizard sleeve” is like a slang term for a vagina that’s aged. It kind of becomes baggy. One of my friends when I was younger, this older guy named Steve, would always say it. You know like a joking thing, he would always call people “wizard sleeves” or whatever, and I never really knew what it was, then he told me and I thought it was really funny. I knew not a lot of people would know what it was, so it would be a funny title, and what with the Gucci thing as the title piece…

F: Yeah, totally…but it’s the “cliché” piece too. I watched so many people at the show respond—like one guy thought it was gold paint. He was like “It’s really beautiful. It’s gold paint.” He thought it was ironic and cool enough being gold paint. I said “No, that’s his semen” and he got really disgusted.

S: [Laughs] I know, one guy was like “Man that ‘cliché’ piece just makes me mad.”

F: [Laughs] Did he know it was semen when he said that?

S: Yeah, he said “I’m mad about it…I’m just mad.” So I said, “That’s awesome!”

F: [Laughs] That IS awesome! Really funny.

That whole front room. I’ve thought about it, and it was the craziest set up - with the cliché piece and the pocket Gucci - because you walk in and you see pocket Gucci, and it seems to be the wildest thing in the room. Then you look at the cliché, you realize what the material is, and all of a sudden the pocket Gucci becomes pretty tame because it’s just plastic. Then you’re like ‘Oh fuck, this thing’s crazy’. Did you put thought into the placement?

S: Definitely. I wanted the pocket Gucci to be right in the front because it was on the poster, and it’s been one of the strongest digital images I’ve had all year. So it’s circulated a lot more than the other stuff…

F: …and it’s on eBay, so....

S: And what?

F: It’s on eBay, so more people have probably seen it than you know of…

S: I tried to sell it on eBay. I tried to get Soulja Boy to buy it. So, I’ve been using it quite a bit. Not literally, but…

I liked backing that with the cliché piece, because I figured most people wouldn’t get the cliché piece right away, but I think it’s like you were saying: it’s even more aggressive, whatever that really means. But it would take the prize for probably being the most shocking thing in there. Even though the context in which I made the piece is not necessarily to be shocking, but kind of to be a conversation about ‘shocking work’ in a way, and it being a cliché or not.

F: We all think we’re kind of “over” the idea of ‘representation-and-not-representation’, that distinction, but obviously we’re not. Because when you realized that that’s not representing semen, it is semen, obviously everyone has a reaction. So there’s definitely a lot more there to talk about.

S: [Laughs] I judged it for a really long time, and that’s why I made that piece. I made a different one called “Ode to Joy,” which we talked about last time you were around. I don’t know, those are just reactions to me thinking that people using semen was easy, and didn’t really warrant the reaction in a way. There really isn’t much to it obviously. It’s like all people can produce semen and put it on any type of substrate. It was the easiest piece to make in the whole show. But I knew it would probably garner the biggest reaction. I made it because I’m having a conversation with myself in a way about what I think is okay to do and not do, and what is a cliché, and what using clichés means in your work.

F: Yeah, do you remember the piece a few years ago that caused all the controversy; it’s a Virgin Mary image and then he slung shit all over the piece? It was on exhibit, I think it traveled quite a bit too.

S: I know that piece, but I don’t know the artist’s name.

F: Me either, but you think after that, using semen would be cliché. But in your show, already on its own it’s not cliché, and then pairing it with pocket Gucci--I think that’s the brilliance of your stuff. Now we can talk about pornography. If I were sitting with anyone else about to have a conversation about pornography, I’d be rolling my eyes…

S: [Laughs] Definitely.

F: …but you’ve given us this new way to look at porn, which…who knew that existed?

S: I like to approach pornography in a “fun” way I suppose? My acculturation process has made me feel like I shouldn’t deal with pornography, and I shouldn’t watch pornography, and all that. So, it’s like, I don’t know, part of my growth into adulthood. But I’ve realized that it’s totally fine to make things out of it, or to make jokes about it, or whatever. I like it; I think pornography’s such a strong material because it’s so basic. But people get so riled up about it. To me, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, because it’s the most fundamental part of being a human, and it’s such a funny-looking exploitive medium anyways. There’s so much to take from it! My favorite thing is to use it in different ways; to take things out of it.

F: I’m actually at my parent’s kitchen table right now, so talking about porn is really awesome to do right here! You said that “Hand Censored Swank Extreme” you decided kind of last minute to put that in?

S: Yeah.

F: I was looking at it with the glove—I kept my glove as a keepsake—and I realized it’s got all those fun aspects, and it’s really cool with the show. But then I realized you also accidentally created some, like, ultra porn! I was flipping the page, and I flipped over the page, and there’s this woman with her ass in the air, and something you had cut out on the other side had made like a space in a large chunk of her ass, but it had left the outline of it intact so you see her ass in the air, her whole midsection, then there’s the hole. And on the other side behind it shows a hand in a grabbing position so it looks like it’s grabbing her vulva or something! Like her internal sex organs! It’s like “holy shit,” you know.

S: [Laughing] That’s why I like that so much! That’s why that project happened. It’s because I was using that to build other things. I wasn’t trying to empty it out at first. I was just cutting pieces out of that to make other things out of, you know what I mean? Taking and then using. But then once I had done it enough it started to make weird things like that happen. And that’s when I was like “Wow, I’m so excited about just the emptying now.” And then it became the focus of the piece, not the taking away.

F: It was brilliant. You know I loved the idea when I heard it. I didn’t realize what kind of shit would really happen when I actually looked through it.

S: Honestly, that piece was finished like a day before the exhibition opened, because I still had to work on that a lot right before. But that’s one of my favorite things for sure. I’m probably going to scan every one of those pages and create a book out of that just to reproduce it in entirety, and not to change anything, not add pages or anything, but just scan the whole thing and make an editioned book out of it. I think that would be really cool.

F: Yeah, that’s really smart. I want to go back to pocket Gucci.

S: Okay.

F: I think we’ve skirted around this conversation before, but we’ve never been in a “serious” venue, such as this interview [BOTH LAUGH] to talk. So pocket Gucci; I work with a philosopher, Maria Lugones, who’s responsible for this idea of the ‘coloniality of gender’ and so I saw pocket Gucci, and immediately the collusion of historically constructed race and global market capitalism all at once get sort of swatted at, like backslapped, and that’s really interesting. All the sort of sources where I think about that, and the people I think about that with, and the legacy I know of that through, are all women of color thinkers, or queer folk, so we have to talk about identity. How did you end up doing this?

S: I just felt like every single element of it was loaded from the exact moment that I realized that I could make it. You know what I mean?

From the color indicated on the box, I mean, it’s obviously totally charged. The fact that I realized, ‘Man, maybe I could put a sex toy in there and it would fit properly’, and then I went and got it and realized it fit so perfectly and then the actual one I found…just as I created it, it was like every moment got better. It has commentary on the biggest issues, period. I mean race, gender, sexuality, marketing…things that kind of control the world in a way and in the form of this funny anti-product.

I have an idea and then I wonder if it’ll work. And when it started to work, it’s just like my pleasure levels went through the roof. It started to like work like that. Then I realized, wow, this thing is super charged.

F: I’ve been familiar with it for a few months, and I’ve shown it to people I work with. It’s sparked some really good conversations. I don’t think people are done talking about it. I’m not done writing about it.

S: It’s kind of been funny since I made it too, because its been a source of really interesting family dynamic stuff. Recently I got some pages in Cantanker magazine in Austin, and one of them is pocket Gucci. My family thinks that I’m doing whatever and no one’s like “You’re really an artist, and we’re happy about that.” They’re more like “If you would get busy doing something pretty soon that’s going to get you a career and be more on a path to normality, we’d be really happy”, but now I’m starting to get a little bit going in terms of people seeing my work. So I told them “Hey I got all these pages in this magazine” and they were so excited, but my mom asked me, first question, ‘Well, what images are in the magazine?’ and I had to say, because she’s seen it, “Pocket Gucci, and some of the other stuff”. My grandfather’s older and really conservative, and he really wanted a copy. My mom asked me to take razor blades and remove my own work from the magazine before sending it, and I just think that’s so funny.

F: [Laughing] I agree. You know, its so funny that you say that because I’ve had similar experiences with papers that I’ve really been proud of or had published…I’ve shown my mom first, and then she told me that if I wanted to show my dad I had to edit out “some things”.

It’s just like I hear this shit, and I live in New York now. We definitely have a different vibe growing up in Texas. This just totally points to that. I wanted to ask you about being an artist in Texas, and the shows at BiRDHOUSE. It’s all changed – Texas is crazy now.

S: Well, Austin, I mean, I don’t think I could live anywhere but Austin, really.

F: I know. I’ve been in West Texas for three months and I’m going insane.

S: I haven’t traveled all over Texas too hard, but I do get the feeling from the people I hang out with, which, randomly, is a lot of people from West Texas, that it just doesn’t seem to have the level of acceptance.

F: But I love that you’re here, I come back a ridiculous amount and all my research and work is here…I like that we’re staying. I think that’s what’s different about our generation. We’re staying in Texas, as ridiculous as it is sometimes.

S: There’s something like really amazing Texas too. You know I moved here, and I had never even been here. There’s some kind of like push-pull feeling about this place. Like it’s too hot, it’s trying to kill you at all times in the summer. It is weirdly conservative, yet there are these pockets of really driven amazing art folks and musicians and other stuff happening. I think it is an interesting diverse group and that’s really attractive. Colorado is similar but everybody’s really outdoorsy, and fitness oriented, and they seem more liberal and whatnot. And that’s kind of boring in a way.

F: That’s what I’ve found around New York, like in Vermont and New Hampshire; it’s there, but there’s not an edge to it.

S: It seems like people are slightly less distorted, but they’re like slightly less exciting in a way. I kind of like the false cowboy in Texas that drives a giant truck and then actually doesn’t do manual labor, but has major pride in being a Texan good boy, you know? I like the juxtaposition between real and unreal here. The psychology of pride in the past. I guess I have a hard time finding words, but there is something crazy and kind of magical about Texas and its whole quagmire.

F: The project we’re about to do with Alison has to do with all of this, at least a large part of it.

S: That’s a great example. Just that town, is like exactly like that. Marfa. High art meets middle-of-nowhere Texas.

F: But there are other things in Wizard Sleeve. We’ve talked about dots before, and I’m still thinking. I use a lot of dots in my drawings; I spend hours just going like this [DOT-MAKING GESTURE] with a pen, so they always stick when I notice them. A lot of people were looking at “East of Eden” and the flowers really stuck out. Some people thought they were lollipops. Then I was looking at your past stuff—in “Girl on Paintchip Mountain,” the whole skyscape is dots, “Hand Ladder” has dots in the hand. “Hand Ladder” is interesting; in “East of Eden” the dots are flowers, it’s pretty clear, and in “Girl,” they’re stars; there’s definite representation going on. But in “Hand Ladder” the dots are really ambiguous. Did you have something in mind when you did that?

S: They’re just like some type of energy or something leaving that hand. I just thought that they looked beautiful; like it was releasing little dots of color. They’re so useful because they’re so ambiguous, but they’re so beautiful, especially when you cluster them.

F: Like in “Girl,” the way they get more dense around the bottom.

S: It’s really fun to use dots too. Because you don’t have to think as you draw and do dots endlessly.

And that’s part of why I like making things that have a lot of small particles to them that take forever to do. That’s when I really get to stop thinking and spend hours doing monotonous tasks, which I actually find really relieving about art. Or about my art making process.

There are no gestural brush strokes, or things that can change the whole trajectory of the piece. I’ll leave stuff like that sometimes until I need two days of just dotting things in a row, or something. So, I have this large number of hours. It’s great.

F: I know there are sections in my drawings where there are going to be dots, and sometimes I come to them, then save them. And if I know I have something coming the next day that’s going to stress me out, I’ll think ‘I’ll do these after that’ because it’ll feel really great.

S: It’s almost like a mental massage for me. I mean, I have a lot of anxiety and I feel like I spin a lot in my own thought process. And that can become really overwhelming. And just doing dots is great. It’s not using drugs or anything else to turn that off. It’s just using a meditative monotonous task. Those trees too, in “East of Eden”—you know, first, creating all the triangles and the tree parts, and then having to deal with them all and arrange them in size and put them all in. Same kind of thing. It’s just stupid amounts of time.

F: The biggest surprise to me in the show was the roach traps. I had no idea you were doing those. I actually didn’t know what they were at first. I saw the roaches—it’s that thing again, about the difference between representation and not. Like with the semen. I saw the roaches, and I saw what you were doing, juxtaposing them with the images. But I didn’t realize they were actual roach traps until my friend pointed it out. And it changed everything, again.

S: In a way it’s self-revealing. I’ve lived in some really shitty situations in the last couple of years that have had some pretty serious roach infestations. We lived at this place a little bit down the road from here last year, and we just had this really bad roach problem. It was there when we got there, and it got worse. I tried to combat it quite a bit. Having a roach infestation is not like the raddest thing to have to deal with. I feel like people slightly want to judge you too, like ‘Oh my god, you live in filth. Look at this problem you have.’ Which in some ways is probably half true. I definitely know with myself I could probably tighten up around the edges a little bit, but at the same time, it’s also part of Texas in a way. I had a lot of those traps. I was always amazed at the mother being caught and birthing like thirty or fifty babies only to die immediately. It’s got that mother-cradling-child-in-the-ash-of-Vesuvius kind of feel to it. Like a haunting entire-dead-family image. I had these things, and I thought, ‘Well what am I going to do?’. I didn’t just want to throw them away, which would obviously be the logical thing to do, to remove them from the house. Put babies in there, and it would create a really interesting aesthetic.

F: It definitely did. There are so many layers to that story you just told. It’s the same sort of juxtapositions we’ll deal with when we do the Marfa project. This high art in weird places—you’re on the East Side of Austin, which has experienced this crazy development. Roaches are “part of” low-income housing, or “trashiness.” But then you put it in BiRDHOUSE—and I don’t know if you remember, but you made this anxious comment that night at the show about these people in “fancy clothing” [Both laugh]…and all those layers are there. Like the roach traps. You made them art, which is fantastic.

S: I think making art is sometimes just like showing internal parts of your life, that you’re not really supposed to. You know you’re going to be judged by it and have a certain comfort about it, like ‘Hey, that’s fine.’ I’ve really worked hard this year—well, ‘worked’ is probably the wrong way to describe it—but I’ve allowed myself to stop filtering some of the things I want to make as much. Like not telling myself ‘No, don’t do that’.

If I have the idea to put babies in despicable looking roach traps, I’ll just allow myself to do that. Whatever it says about me, I’m not as concerned with. I just don’t want to stop my process. I want to use whatever materials I fee like. I want to go out on a limb and make clichés, even if they’re bad or if people aren’t accepting of them, or don’t like them, or I don’t like them once they’re done. I like to allow myself to do whatever I want now because I think that will help me to grow. Also, I like self-revealing stuff, probably from spending so much time in that psychological high school for behavioral problem children. I mean I learned a lot about the more you reveal giving you a lot of strength in a weird way, to have a lot of your dysfunctional parts on the outside of you. The roaches are just an obvious aesthetic representation of some of the dysfunction that is in my own life. And that’s strong, that’s strong in art. That’s what I look for. When I go and look at people’s work and stuff I like to see a kind of window into people, and the more willing they are to open that window, often times the more the art will do it for me.

F: It’s like the men’s nipples exhibit that lives in theory in our heads. It’s about asking people to put out their anxieties about race and their bodies, and living in male bodies.

So this shift that you just described, this not filtering yourself; does this have anything to do with your new opinion of Dash Snow’s work? Because the first time we met, we talked about Ryan Trecartin, and we also talked about Dash Snow. We were on opposite sides of the fence about the polaroids. The collages we agreed on, but the polaroids you were not a fan of, and I was. Earlier this summer, you said you had changed your opinion about that, and I don’t remember if we talked about “Nest”.

S: I don’t know what happened. I think I just spent more time looking at the work. In some ways, to be completely honest, I think that maybe I was slightly…I almost want to say jealous, of some of that work, because it was pretty aggressive and good. Some of those situations just seemed pretty intense. I don’t know what my issue was originally, but I spent a lot more time looking especially at the Dash Snow work, and I think it’s really strong. I was always interested in the collage stuff. I looked at the collage stuff more and more and I think the collage stuff is really the strongest. But the more I really loved the collage stuff, the more I realized that I loved the other parts of the work too. In a way, I guess the same reason I made the cliché piece, I felt like some of it was all a huge cliché. You know, you’re young and beautiful, and you’re from New York, and you’re a social prince of a major art scene in a capital of fine art in the world and obviously you take polaroids of people taking cocaine off other peoples’ dicks. I guess I didn’t want to react to it in the way I ended up reacting to it. At first, I wanted to be like ‘No, that doesn’t work on me’ because it’s so obvious. But in a way, I think I’ve realized it’s not obvious. It’s like, that was what that dude chose to do, and the images are really strong, and you can’t take that away from them. I had to become acquainted with my own reaction. Obviously, I overreact pretty hard. I’ll have an opinion way before I’ve allowed myself to process things. Which is my own problem or whatever. You ever get a first impression and run your mouth right away and then think about it, and think ‘oh god.’? That’s why I’m saying now. I like the work because I don’t have to pretend like my first opinion is where I stand. I was wrong at first. I actually do like the work, and I think it’s really strong. And the Ryan Trecartin stuff; it’s been the same reaction from beginning to now. I just think that stuff’s like a tornado of different elements that just rocked my world.

F: I found out that Ryan Trecartin was born in Texas, also. I don’t know how long he lived here, but yeah, Webster, TX, I think. It’s fun to look at an artist, and after a show, see what other artists come to mind when you sit and think about it. I was sitting and thinking about “Wizard Sleeve,” and Dash Snow and Ryan Trecartin came to mind because we had talked about them, but also there’s a lot of it in the materials; this sexy, kind of hip stuff. Then I was thinking about Kara Walker. Do you know who she is?

S: No.

F: She came to mind because she did these large, life sized silhouette narratives, sort of in the round…

S: Oh, I think I’ve seen them.

F: You’ve probably seen them. Everybody else I thought of first was part of that New York, downtown scene. I thought ‘Why does Kara Walker keep coming to mind?’ I watched her Art:21 episode, and this goes back to what we were talking about with pocket Gucci. First of all, there are all these dismembered body parts. Trecartin does the same thing with distorting body parts. Matthew Ronay, I also looked at. He did really funny things with penises and bleeding anuses and plastic sculptures, a few years ago. So, Walker does dismembered body parts too, but she does them in silhouette on the wall. They have to do with these historical fiction-y sort of slave narratives. She said this: ‘What does Black stand for in White America, and what does White stand for in Black America?” That adds this whole other layer to bodies. Bodies are a part of your work obviously. Part of Matthew Ronay’s, part of Trecartin’s, part of Snow’s, in a big way, and she adds this other layer to it. We all share not a common experience, but this inhabitation of the body. I always find things coming back to it, you know, pornography…and this is a really bad way to ask a question. I don’t know what the question is right now, but, bodies, it was nice to get out of one circle of artists and think of another dealing with them, dismembering them, and reformulating them, sort of connecting artists across different realms.

S: It feels like there have been different moments within art that are happening simultaneously now, and earlier, in different phases. Some people approach the body in kind of a celebratory way where they want to show it for its ‘raw beauty’ and whatnot. And really, there’s so much form drawing and so many representations of the body as a kind of beautiful vessel on earth, but then there is obviously a whole flipside where people like to distort it. It is really a fundamental thing; you have to deal with your own body and your interpretation of everyone’s bodies around you. So, it’s loaded.

I just happen to not be on the beautifying the body side of things. That doesn’t mean I can’t see beauty or whatever, but it’s not really what my work’s about. I like making freaky things look beautiful.

F: It took me a while to think about this, but I was looking at pocket Gucci yesterday and only just thought of Judy Chicago, and cunt art in general. Maybe it was because that’s just too obvious, but it also might have been my own shit, because you’re a man, not a woman.

S: Yeah, even talking about it is kind of weird. One thing I like about making work is that I don’t even have to really be a part of it. I mean, I am a major part of it, but I don’t have to represent it. Obviously I’m at my own opening, trying not to drink too much, but other than that I don’t really have to participate in the work. The work can leave me, and people can draw their reactions, but they don’t have to know I’m a straight white 29-year-old dude. I don’t even have to participate in that; a lot of people can have different ideas about who the person who made this was and what their opinions on this or that are. I feel like I really don’t have to do that in a way. I make stuff like jokes. I like joking. My father is very humor-oriented and I’ve taken a lot of humor-based social abuse in my upbringing. So, I feel like I’m really, really comfortable with a lot of parts of myself: what I am, what type of sex I’m into, what color I am, how rich or poor I am…I’m really comfortable with all that, so I really like to make commentary on it, and not have to do it in a circle at a party where people visually and audibly react to me. I like to make physical representations of the jokes that I think are interesting. And maybe it’s not totally a joke. It doesn’t have a punch-line; it’s more like a gate to a conversation that a person can have with themselves or others. So it isn’t a joke.

F: All those anxieties. Like the guy who thought it was gold paint and loved it, then found out it was semen and almost retched. Your comfort level in artmaking brings out this conversation with himself; like what kind of sex he’s into, what he can tolerate seeing outside of his body. You know, this is a guy that has probably never touched his own semen or something…goes right in the toilet and never talks about it.

S: [Laughing] Yeah, it goes into Kleenexes and that’s it.

Which is fine, that’s great. In fact, that type of reaction is what I’m kind of wanting, in a way. If a person’s more comfortable about it, I think in a lot of ways, it doesn’t carry much power with them, because they’re probably like ‘Oh, well that’s clever.’ But a person that’s kind of got issues, as I would call them—I’m sure they would say that I have issues, you know? But that reaction, that’s exciting. Like the guy who’s like ‘That just makes me mad.’ I showed that “Ode to Joy” piece at this show called Texas Crude at Co-Lab, and this other guy was like ‘That is just so, so wrong.’

The cliché piece is different—when I made “Ode to Joy”, I just came onto a panel, a watercolor panel, once. It was almost like I was playing a game with myself: “This is something you kind of judge, why don’t you just do it.” Then I did it, and thought, “This is funny, I’m going to do this for a while.” So then I kept doing it, and it was lying around in my house and some people saw it and I would either claim what it was to people or not, depending on who they were and what my mood was. But that was really different than the cliché piece. The cliché piece is stenciled, and so I painted that with semen, rather than came onto something. So, there was some planning involved with that. I used Helvetica because I think Helvetica is the most traditional. I was really worried when I made it because it started to bleed. You can see that little cloud under, where it did seep at the beginning. But then the actual film held, and made the letters pronounced, which I was so happy about. I liked the people’s reactions. I liked the approach - I’m really anal about my artwork anyway, so the same way I approached cutting out trees endlessly, is the same way I made that stencil piece. I tried to be as on point about it as I could. I thought about it a lot; “How am I going to create a Helvetica version of cliché and literally have it be close to as perfect as I can make it with semen?” you know what I mean? So the first piece is kind of like daring myself to come on stuff and see how I feel about it, and the second piece is, “Well, you’ve done that, and what other more advanced ways can you use your own semen?”

F: First of all, I love that you said “playing a game with yourself” with a straight face.

S: [Laughing] It is a game.

F: I guess I knew it was Helvetica, but didn’t think about it. Then I read the title on the sheet, and ‘Helvetica’ is part of the title, so it finally got me to watch that Helvetica documentary that came out a couple of years ago.

S: Oh, I haven’t seen that.

F: It’s been in my Netflix queue, and I had tickets to the opening in Austin, but in my head I was just thinking “I don’t want to go watch a documentary about a font.” So, I didn’t go to the showing, and I didn’t watch it for the last few months. But this morning I thought, “Well now I have an interesting thing to think about when I watch this.”

S: Actually, there’s this one other funny thing, on the topic of the semen pieces. This one guy at that show, he asked me “Well, do you, uh, did you masturbate every time that you came onto the panel?” And I was like, “What do you think that I did!? Like I brought this 9x12 board into my sex life?” Man, that would be fifteen times, or a million times crazier to me…bringing my work into my actual sexual life? I mean, I suppose masturbating kind of is my sexual life, but it’s not like I brought this thing in with other people at all times for a year! And have to explain it to a lover?: “Oh yeah, I’m working really hard on this piece…” I guess with the dude, masturbation was still kind of taboo to him or something.

F: You’d probably have to give your partners a commission too, or something.

S: [Laughs] Yeah. This is funny. I loved that question. That was one of my favorite questions. “Did you masturbate on this?” Yeah. Yes I did.

zingmagazine

August 2010