Image Culture
Conversation with William Jess Laird
June 4th, 2018, Episode 14, 44:31 mins.
June 4th, 2018, Episode 14, 44:31 mins.
IMAGE CULTURE
Conversation with William Jess Laird
June 4, 2018, Episode 14, 44:31 mins.
(Apple Podcast edited for publication)
William Jess Laird: I’m William Jess Laird. This is Image Culture.
In 2008 Robert Beck became Robert Buck. He did this in response to an idea that in a state of hypermodernity the status of the Name-of-the-Father had been fundamentally shaken. In its absence as a universal, he says, each of us must invent our own, be it knowingly, explicitly or intuitively. Robert changed his by the exchange of a single vowel. It was a work that marked a major turning point in his life and practice.
I met with Robert at his studio in New York on the occasion of his recent back to back solo shows at Ulterior Gallery. The first, Vestige, premieres a collection of staged Kodak Instant photographs made in the early 80’s during Robert’s first years in New York. The second show, entitled Second Hand, presents Buck’s ongoing series of amended thrift-store paintings, a body of work he began to coincide with the changing of his father’s name.
WJL: Here I am with Robert Buck. I thought maybe we'd start...I feel like every time I talk to you what we inevitably get to at some point is psychoanalysis, Lacanian philosophy. Where did your interest in that grow from?
RB: The first thing to say is Lacan is not philosophy.
WJL: Sorry, God, you're laying into me already.
RB: It’s important because part of my interest in psychoanalysis, as Lacan defined it, is that knowledge, the knowledge of psychoanalysis, comes from the subject lying on the couch. It's not epistemology. It's not philosophy. If anything it's ethics. Lacan followed the analysand, throughout his lifetime, in the Freudian field, which he reestablished and kept alive. Thus, it is relevant in civilization into the 21st century; to repeat myself, because of what was being said and heard in the clinic. My interest in Freud came in high school with The Interpretation Of Dreams. I was like, whoa, this is so cool, there's something else going on, which I have no control of, but has a quasi-science supporting it. So, I kept that interest up. I went through the Independent Study Program at the Whitney, where Mary Kelly as one of the instructors. Mary brought Lacan and contemporary psychoanalysis. She reanimated my interest, and I stayed with it. But not as –– and this is important to say –– not as any kind of inspiration for my art. I have enough going on. I don't need Lacan or Jacques-Alain Miller or any of the others [working in the Freudian Field]. It is a way to frame my art. I felt a greater affinity with the discourse of psychoanalysis than I did with, say, the discourse of the university. The paradox, of course, is that is how I learned of psychoanalysis, through the university discourse.
WJL: What do you mean at the Whitney ISP?
RB: Yes, at the Whitney ISP, but it was also coming through Mary, whose knowledge was coming through Film Studies and her university career in England. She brought that with her.
WJL: What was she like to work with?
RB: She was great!
WJL: What was the ISP program like at the time?
RB: It was a very volatile time politically, the first wave of the culture wars, and it was often very contentious.
WJL: Do you mean amongst your fellow students?
RB: Yes.
WJL: Or not students, I guess.
RB: Fellow cohorts, yes. To be clear, the Whitney has three aspects, curatorial, critical and studio. They have a bifurcated program, artists visit and theoreticians and critics also visit. Because it was 1993, we were, as I say, in the first wave of what we now live and breathe, the culture wars.
WJL: How do you define that?
RB: The weaponization of culture for political ends; a [wider] understanding of culture at work in late capitalism. How does culture work to spread globalization, benefit globalization? Maybe on the local level it would be called gentrification, but now it works via this much wider network of globalization. Around that same time there was the Whitney Biennial, which was a very politicized one.
WJL: And you said this was in 1993?
RB: Yes, 1993. There was a lot of push back against that Biennial for "politicizing art." But it's really the atmosphere we live in today, wherein art has been politicized in a way that is conscious of its use in late capitalism and put to use for those purposes.
WJL: What was the change? Because I guess you came to New York, what, ten years before you started at the Whitney ISP?
RB: About 12 years. Yes.
WJL: I guess we should jump back even further. What was it like when you first came to New York? What were those first years like?
RB: Amazing. Because–
WJL: Where were you coming from?
RB: The suburbs of Baltimore. New York was like this shining city on the hill, especially for a young man who wanted to get out from where he had been brought up for freedom and expression and all of those things that a city can offer. The city was not, of course, the city it is today. 9/11 was the fulcrum, the flexion point when the city became more monetized and capitalized. Back in the day, there was a certain freedom and a young person could eke out a living for nothing. I remember moving almost every two years because I could. It was like, oh, let's live in Jersey City or in Hoboken or the East Village, Chelsea, etc. There was a sense of freedom and that was culture-wide. It was before there was an awareness of the political impact culture could have. I was brought up in the shadow of the 60s...is that a blessing or a curse?
WJL: It’s interesting to think about these first years in New York for you. We should say that you have at Ulterior Gallery right now the second of two consecutive shows. The first was a collection of instant photographs, Polaroids that you made in the first couple of years you were in New York?
RB: Yes. They were Kodak [Instamatic Colorburst 250], not Polaroid. It's an easy mistake to make because the Kodak technology was on the market for only four years.
It was Kodak's version of Polaroid. Polaroid brought litigation and won.
WJL: It’s funny, it's one of those things that is kind of like Kleenex, right?
RB: Exactly. That's my example. Like Kleenex. The images I took were indeed during the very first years I was living in the city. The interesting thing is I hadn't yet made a distinction between artistic pursuit and life. I just was doing. I was this nascent artist. You can see in those photographs later themes. But although I did not make a distinction, I was still drawing on something I refer to as know-how. An artist has a certain intuition, whether you professionalize it or whether you don't. It's a way of dealing with life or experiences that otherwise could not be processed or sustained. As that goes nothing's really changed. I'm still doing the same thing, but there's a different way that I've positioned myself and my art in the world.
WJL: If you're coming to New York and you have this––you call it an intuition, right?
RB: Yes.
WJL: Was that there before? Was it there when you were living outside of Baltimore? What I mean to say is when did you know that you were–
RB: I knew I was an artist at a very young age.
WJL: How young?
RB: Five or six.
WJL: Wow, that's wild. Do you remember? Do you have a moment?
RB: I know that this is kind of artist bio sort of thing, but it was an activity I would do with my mother. When my mother was making art, things were calm at home. I was speaking to someone quite recently and realized that for my mother too art was a way to handle trauma, turmoil, the void, if I can put it like that. So I was getting two things, time with my mother, and a means, without language, about how to make sense of or handle life. You mentioned the first show at Ulterior or, excuse me, the two shows at Ulterior. The second one is titled Second Hand, in which I modify paintings that I find at thrift stores across the country, second hand stores. My mother was a Sunday painter. That is the link.
WJL: Making those sorts of paintings?
RB: Yes. Not formally trained, but the drive, the satisfaction, the enjoyment of making art, I would argue is the same.
WJL: So there's something familiar about picking up those paintings.
RB: Exactly.
WJL: Interesting.
RB: And then bringing them from one context or economy, which would be a thrift store, El Paso, into another. You've probably been to Savers in El Paso.
WJL:Yeah. We've talked about it. There's a very distinct [painting] genre of desert landscapes.
RB: Yes.
WJL: And they're completely on their own spectrum; like what's good, what's not good. They have their own logic to them. And some of them are amazing and actually super beautiful.
RB: That's my point, and my pleasure, to reclaim those paintings. And then bring that economy and that context into the context of a contemporary art gallery.
WJL: Right.
RB: In doing that, bring the signatures of contemporary art gallery goers, superimpose one on a painting using a grid –– which is how artists would transcribe from one source to another before the overhead projector –– and then put the paintings again into circulation. So it circulates from, say, from El Paso to New York and then into a collector's home wherever. That idea of recirculation has something to do with the body. My contention is that any work of art falls from the body of the artist, like a feather from a bird, and then it's recuperated by the museum, by the gallery, what have you. 1 I see this idea of the body both with the signature that's left behind [in a gallery guestbook] and with the painting that's left behind [in the thrift store].
WJL: What is the significance of the trellis that these paintings hang on?
RB: The immediate significance is that it has a relationship to the context of a second hand or thrift store. I think everyone can understand or apperceive that immediately; like, oh, I saw that at the Goodwill store. Of course, it also has a relationship to the street because first in SoHo, then in Chelsea, now in front of the Whitney, people often sell their wares. Sunday painters, not formally trained painters, on these trellises.
But of course, the trellis is an echo of the trellis or the lattice on the painting by which I transcribed the signatures. It's an echo and I think of them as skins. But going back to psychoanalysis, there is a way in which that screen, lattice, lace, or embroidery of some kind, functions as a screen over the void.
I know it's a bit heavy, but that is what art does. Art essentially is a way, as I've been saying, to handle the real. And in the 21st century we're living closer to the real.
WJL: The Lacanian real?
RB: Yes, originally defined by Lacan as [one of] the three consistencies, imaginary, real, and symbolic.
WJL: I guess you started collecting these paintings at the same time you're doing the photographs, correct?
RB: No. I only started collecting the paintings maybe ten years ago to coincide with having changed my father's name by a single vowel. The Second Hand paintings are a way to illuminate or explicate what that change is about. The name, we're going a little bit further, so bear with me, the name is also second hand.
WJL: Right. Or it's inherited?
RB: For me it's the same thing. You inherit it, but you had no choice in making it. You can make a name for yourself but the one you're given is the one, unless you do something else with it, that you carry through life.
It's there before you begin and after you leave. What I've done by just the exchange of two vowels is to question that, the status of the Name Of The Father in the 21st century. Where it differs from artists who have done this in the past, I did not do it in the imaginary. In other words, it's not Rrose Sélavy of Duchamp nor is it Ziggy Stardust of Bowie.
Neither is it in the symbolic, Philip Goldstein to Philip Guston, Andy Warhol to Andy Warhol. What I did was in the real. So how is that apprehended? How the name is put back into circulation is a question, and it's an open-ended question.
In a way, I want it to remain an open-ended question because it rattles you, it causes perplexity, which we are confronted to increasingly in the 21st Century, in hypermodernity. Let's talk about perplexity for a moment, and the real. How can Columbine happen? And then Sandy Hook? And then Parkland? And now Santa Fe, Texas?
These are random acts. They have no sense. They have no...there's nothing in common to them.
That is something we must all manage. What is this senselessness? And there's a kind of move now that differs from what was happening in the 20th Century, which is a kind of sliding or scanning or slipping.
This is not just because of technology. Perhaps it was brought on, or precipitated, or accelerated by technology, but it's in life. It's in the everyday that we deal with it, this going from one news item to another, to another, to another, to another. It's kind of like an event horizon.
The more that we do it –– you can feel it with Instagram –– the more we're compelled to do it. Donald Trump is a kind of an engine for this.
He's the father of this kind of perverse enjoyment, I would call it.
WJL: A perverse enjoyment of tragedy, of national tragedy, things like that?
RB: Yes, a dark enjoyment. Because we have to ask ourselves, if we wanted these things to stop, they would have stopped. Right?
The show that I did in 2004––
WJL: They’re tolerated, in a sense.
RB: Yes, they're tolerated. I would even say they're enjoyed. The touchstone text for this is Civilization and Its Discontents.
WJL: Yes, Freud's text.
RB: Exactly. Why do these acts continue to manifest themselves at an increasing rate? Again, bear with me, the pillar of the Name Of The Father was the screen against the real.We didn't have to question the real, but we do now, because the Name Of The Father has fallen. The status has changed. So we are confronted to this real. And about this idea of sliding or metonymy, we could say that the Father was metaphor. When the symbolic was in place, we worked with metaphor. Now the paradigm is metonymy, and metonymy is why we could say the future is feminine. Not female, because female is of the same binary as male, female. Feminine is...I could identify as feminine, you could identify as feminine. The idea of identification is left open with the feminine.
WJL: What’s the nature of the shift from the symbolic to the real? What is it like to live in a world where we deal mostly with the symbolic?
RB: That’s your father's world, or your father's father's world. In other words, war, there were world wars. They were localized. They had a reason, they had sense, they had meaning. Wars today, terrorism, do not have meaning. We are always talking about the senselessness of something.
This idea that we are living without sense is what I mean when I say there has been an unprecedented shift in civilization. We could say it began with May of '68, Stonewall, Selma, let's go back further.
WJL: Sure.
RB: We have these diverse groups, who from the margins, become the center. This begins to erode the Name Of The Father because that one name, so to speak, that universal symbolic excludes people. It doesn't work for minorities, ethnicities, etc. It's not like I could say it happened at one particular time. They are flashpoints. It happened gradually. Technology is the elephant in the room because technology creates another dimension, and this is fascinating. Is it Duchamp's fourth dimension? Maybe. It's certainly an infra-thin because you can't really put your finger on it. But it creates something that we all have to manage. It accelerates the news and this strange appetite we seem to have as human beings, speaking beings.
WJL: I want to talk about this in the context of your life and your work because when you talk about the experience of changing your name from Robert Beck to…
RB: My father's name.
WJL: Excuse me. Yes.
RB: That’s the distinction.
WJL: When you talk about changing your father's name from Robert Beck to Robert Buck it obviously has everything to do with what you've just been describing. But it also seems like there must be a point where you say, this is something I'm going to do. Looking at the world, you can understand it in these terms, but what was it for you?
RB: Okay. The first thing to say, again, is that whatever I have to say about my work, in relationship to, whether it's the university discourse or the analyst discourse, comes after the fact. As we were saying earlier before we set up the mics, the artist works in the blind spot. If you're not working in the blind spot, why do it?
WJL: What are you doing?
RB: Exactly. I felt at a certain point that my work had created a vocabulary or a lexicon for experiences that I otherwise couldn't contend with. But I knew there was a beyond of that.
I knew there were another set of circumstances or experiences that had to be unpacked, as scary as that was. So that's partly what precipitated the name change. And I wanted the work to be commensurate with the work I had grown up with, work that shook or rattled or perplexed me. Like Jackson Pollock [or others], when artists would create new knowledge. That seemed to me in the early aughts to be changing. Art became more transactional. It became more monetized. That's the first era in which hedge fund guys got involved.
WJL: Right!
RB: Art was seen as investment rather than a discourse. It was a way to respond to. And it did a lot at once. It responded to the personal aspect, which I'll talk about in a moment, the cultural aspect and then the work itself. Whatever artist you might name, I would contend is devising a vocabulary for experiences that would otherwise go unspoken, in quotes. I felt I had done that. I had come up with this glossary and now it was a dead end.
WJL: Right.
RB: The word buck, I felt like I got four things at once that were very much specific to the work. The first, money, art market.
WJL: Big bucks.
RB: Sure! The son in Native cultures, American Native cultures. The stag, which is littered in my work as Robert Beck, on the cover of an artist book, in fact. I thought it was like some kind of spirit animal. I was making a transition. But the beautiful one is to dislodge, to throw something off one's back. And it was also a way to prod or to push or to move me forward.
WJL: To buck you forward.
RB: Exactly! It did that, and in ways I couldn't begin to imagine when I thought I would do this. Speaking of Utah, as we just were, I was in Utah, it was August 2007, and I knew I wanted to do this. I didn't know how. I was looking for anagrams of my name. I think the best one I came up with was Trek Cobber, which just didn't work. And I wanted something that was in the real, let's say. The word or signifier is in the symbolic. The letter is in the real. And it came to me like a thunderclap; almost as if I had been called to do this. We can call it a work of art, but I think it's more appropriate to call it an act of art, or a maneuver, because that way it keeps circulating and is unknowable.
WJL: What was the first work you made after the change?
RB: These works that are hanging behind me. The Cell (Winter Mimicry 1.0)works.
WJL: Really?
RB: Yeah.
WJL: That’s serendipitous.
RB: Yes, it is. We can refer to the photograph for that. 2 There were [one among] a series of works I did that in some way, and I can see this retrospectively, had to do with metonymy.
The cell pieces were created using a process called hydro-graphics. A small object is pulled up through a bath. On the surface of the bath is a film with a print. When the object [is pulled up] through the film it retains the print and then it is laminated. The inlay of automobiles like wood is done hydrographically. The cells can be installed on the floor, in corners, on the ceiling. They're meant to evoke the idea of things morphing or splicing, dividing, multiplying. That, for me, was this kind of creeping sensation that we were moving to a horizontal plane from a vertical one, speaking topographically.
Plus, the the signifier cell became important because I felt the very beginning of an atomization in culture, where each one was moving into some kind of autistic or cellular life. The cell phone was new then. The idea is that each of us are now in our own kind of pod, or singular life, a kind of one-by-one approach.This is important to say too because the universal of the Father no longer holds. Thank goodness! We can't say that the experience that my good friend Lyle Ashton-Harris has, who I was on the Whitney program with, is the same experience that I have. Let me put it this way, the singularity, in a way, has already happened. I don't mean the singularity of artificial intelligence. I mean the singularity of each person, one-by-one, wanting a part of the larger culture. The only universal is singularity. That is the paradox that we're living.
WJL: To go along with that, I guess we're the most individualist we've ever been, right?
RB: Yes. The tricky part is how is a collective then formed politically? That becomes the tricky part. We can see this in what's happened around school shootings, using the name that comes to mind, Emma Gonzalez, and that movement, that youth movement. There is this moment in which young people put singularities or distinctions aside for a common cause.
WJL: When did you first make work about school shootings?
RB: In 2000.
WJL: In the wake of?
RB: In the wake of Kipland Kinkel, who shot his parents in 1997 in Oregon. That was the [first] shooting that caught my attention. Then it was, yes, that's Kipland there, with bullets taped to his chest. 3
He was suicidal after shooting students, I forget how many now, maybe nine, and then his mother and father. 4 This was followed by Columbine. 5 In 2001 I was invited by the Queen's Museum to participate in an exhibition titled Crossing the Line. The artists were asked to create a new work based on works that had been exhibited at the Queen's Museum. For me the one that really crossed the line was The Thirteen Most Wanted Men by Andy Warhol, because he famously, the work was famously, censored. Rather than remove the work he painted over the, I forget how many canvases, thirteen, with a silver paint. 6 It was kind of like an erasure. You could still see a ghost of what had been there. For that context, I produced a portfolio of prints called Thirteen Shooters, thirteen boys at the time who had carried out school mass shootings.
WJL: There is something interesting in that work, the way it's titled. Correct me if I'm wrong, but each work, each print, is not titled with the name of the boy, but rather the name of the news outlet in which they appear.
RB: Yes. Thank you for your eye to that detail because it's important to make that distinction. I did the work in 2000, before there was a move culturally to omit the name of the shooter. That's not why I did it. [The omission] predates that injunction by culture by about fifteen years. My idea, speaking of intuition, I "knew" that this was the way to do it. It's easy to say that by using the media source I'm indicting the media. Sure, that's partly there. But what I was really doing, blindly, was putting a name of the father, or rather putting the true name of the father to these boys. Kipland Kinkel was one of the thirteen. But Kipland, something of that name failed, or [perhaps] otherwise he wouldn't have done this. There was something in the symbolic that didn't hold for him. What his true name is...was that fame, that elevation.
WJL: "NBC News shooter" [for instance].
RB: Yes, exactly.
WJL: Because that's what he is now.
RB: Exactly. Yes. So that was my very early play with the Name Of The Father. That name was missing [or deficient] for the shooters. The name that held them, that holds them now, exactly as you say, is [for example] "NBC News" or [any of] a thousand other news sources.
WJL: It's interesting because that move to omit someone's name is so strange now because it's [also] a practical concern, because you can find these people [shooters] easily.
RB: That’s true. That's an example of where technology kind of accelerates or fuels or facilitates this idea of identity, subjectivity, availability, transparency, etc.
WJL: It’s much like a photograph too. A lot of this reminds me of those early criminalistic photographs, Bertillon, trying to understand what a criminal looks like and the crazy theory that you can predict who's a criminal and who isn't by what they look like, by what their photograph, by what their measurements are. 7 So, it's almost like this strange version of that with profiles online, where, after the fact, you feel as though you can look at someone's profile and can kind of understand that something was wrong the whole time.
RB: Or not.
WJL: Well, I don't think you can. That's what I'm saying, it's an illusion. But I think people project onto these things.
RB: Exactly. They basically...there's a rupture. There's a rent in reality. A confrontation to the void or to the real. Then we, civilization, circulate around that hole. Like, let's watch the towers come down seven, eight, nine [times] repeatedly. How many times? We go to Facebook again and again trying to find a reason, and there is no reason. For me, the shooting that kind of is an emblem for this is Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas last October. 8 He did not fit the profile of any of these young men. So, what? He had money. He did it, we have to conclude, it's chilling, because he could. And here's another chilling thing. This is an answer for some people to contend with these unprecedented changes. There was a show I did in 2014, which the poet and writer Kenneth Goldsmith, called my "Death and Disaster" series. These were paintings that contended with recent acts of American violence or malfeasance. I call it "My American Carnage Show." [At the time], I would talk about the idea that it's not the changes in civilization that are most concerning, but the effects they have on subjects who cannot handle them, mostly young men. Because of the lack of any laws against the NRA and [mental] healthcare issues in this country, we could say the NRA facilitates these acts of violence.
WJL: You have this relationship with your mother, painting with her growing up. You come to New York and you're doing this work. A pivotal point for you, it seems, is in 2008, shedding that name. So, what about your father?
RB: Theoretically, the father always fails. The father cannot live up to the status of the symbolic father. So there's always a faltering. My father was in the work consistently that I did as Robert Beck. But I felt as if that wasn't enough. The earlier phase of the work is so much about rituals of masculinity, rites of masculine passage. I can say that my father functioned for me for a while artistically. He was there just enough. I'm not [a full-blown] psychotic. There is some hold I have on reality. But he could not handle and was absent from the chaos that was created otherwise at home, which is to say, the maternal enjoyment. I always use enjoyment in quotes. The French term jouissance is what I mean. [The term] is now coming into American [English] vocabulary. Jouissance is a kind of exquisite enjoyment, a dark voluptuous enjoyment. One enjoys too much. There's a surplus.
WJL: The one that we were talking about earlier.
RB: Say more.
WJL: The kind of enjoyment that the American public has over [repeatedly] watching something terrible unfold. A fascination.
RB: Yes.
WJL: Jouissance.
RB: Exactly. That jouissance was something I had to handle then for myself, which is what the new work as Robert Buck does. Whether that jouissance is in civilization or whether it has to do with my mother specifically...it's both at the same time. This is also why the future is feminine, because of this jouissance. On the feminine side, for women, that sliding, that movement, that Not All is prevalent; as opposed to the All, the all of the phallus, [by which] everything could be handled by the universal. There is no longer a universal. So we're on the side of the not all. It's uncharted territory. On the personal side, the canvas that we see here, the mink stole used to belong to my mother. That is one way of handling the material, you could call it, that I was really aiming to contend with as an artist. All artists, you know this, have to challenge themselves, no, don't even have to, we have no choice.
WJL: When did you start going to Terlingua?
RB: I went to Terlingua ––
WJL: We couldn’t get through this without talking about the shack.
RB: No, it's good, I love it. They're related in some way. I went to The Big Bend for the first time in 2007. And I just knew –– something went off inside –– I wanted to be a part of that landscape.
WJL: Do you think there's something about being raised on the East Coast that primes people for that?
RB: Yes.
WJL: Yeah, I think so too.
RB: Or not. When I first went through [far] West Texas, it was in 1997. I was with someone who could care less. He kept saying, there's nothing here.
WJL: But there's so much here!
RB: Are you kidding? Everything is here! When I bought the cabin in 2008, February 2008, people were like, what have you done? You're just going to be looking at the same mountain range every day. And I'm like, it's not the same mountain range every day. It changes by the hour! The cabin became my extimate studio, more of a studio than my [NYC] studio that we're sitting in. The [cabin-studio] is where I get inspiration. Ideas come to me there that are not premeditated.
WJL: Right. We talked once about the relationship you have [with the place] and said that you conceive of what you should do in Terlingua, and then execute here [in NYC].
RB: Yes.
WJL: Is that fair?
RB: Yeah. Maybe not should do, but a desire to do. To be clear, my place is not in Terlingua. It's an hour's drive off-road outside of Terlingua. 9
WJL: If you could manage to make it even more remote. [Laughter]
RB: [Laughter] Yeah! There's something about that isolation that allows for quiet. No demand coming from the phone. No demand coming from email. No injunction. That time is so precious to me. One really has to fight for it. We were talking about this when you were setting up. You can have that in Marfa as well.
WJL: Yes.
RB: Where you are there just with the sky and the field and the mountains in the distance.
WJL: When did you move into this studio that we're in?
RB: 2003.
WJL: It’s interesting. I ask this, for people who have been in New York a while, do you still like being in New York?
RB: Yes.
WJL: What is it about the city?
RB: Diversity. The speed of life. The demands. There's a kind of push in New York that once you get used to, that tempo, it's hard to let go of it. I've asked myself a lot...there's a certain drive level in New York, which is to say ambition, that I haven't found anywhere else in the United States –– looking for some place that's commensurate with one's internal drive. Diversity is also paramount for me. I was on the subway the other day and it was very crowded, [during] one of those torrential downpours. The trains weren't coming. [One] finally came and everyone is packed into a car. Each one is trying to get their own piece of the post, you know, to hold on. [WJL places his fists one atop the other.] Exactly! One fist over the other. And every fist was a different color.
WJL: Cool!
RB: Exactly! I got a chill even as I said that. Everyone knew this was a kind of meta moment; like everyone was in that elevated moment. No jerk. No asshole. No one pushing. It was like, okay, we're all in this together. I love that about New York! It's a kind of energy that –– it's weird maybe because of its dichotomous nature –– but it's an energy I find in the desert too. Where there's an elevation and you realize you're part of something much bigger than yourself.
WJL: Robert Buck, thank you so much.
RB: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
WJL: I’d like to thank Robert Buck as well as Takako Tanabe at Ulterior. You can see my portrait of Robert in his studio at www.williamjesslaird.com/imageculture as well as on Instagram @william.jess.laird or @image.culture You can find more information on Robert Buck at https://www.robertbuck.net/ and http://www.ulteriorgallery.com/ This show is produced by Sarah Levine and our music is by Jack Staffin and Eliza Callahan.
1. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar XI: The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis"
2. Portrait of Robert in his studio at www.williamjesslaird.com/imageculture as well as on Instagram @william.jess.laird or @image.culture
3. WJL points to a large print of Kipland Kinkel shirtless lying nearby on a table in the RB studio.
4. "On May 21, 1998, 15-year-old freshman student Kipland Kinkel opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in the cafeteria of Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, United States, killing 2 of his classmates and wounding 25 others.[1] He had killed his parents at the family home the previous day, following his suspension pending an expulsion hearing after he admitted to school officials that he was keeping a stolen handgun in his locker. Fellow students subdued him, leading to his arrest. He later characterized his actions as an attempt to get others to kill him, since he wanted to take his own life after killing his parents but could not bring himself to." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Thurston_High_School_shooting Accessed 8/16/2025
5. "The Columbine High School massacre was a school shooting and attempted bombing that occurred at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States on April 20th, 1999. The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 13 students and one teacher; ten were killed in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently died by suicide. Twenty additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was exchanged several times with law enforcement with neither side being struck. Another three people were injured trying to escape. The Columbine massacre was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history until December 2012. It is still considered one of the most infamous massacres in the United States, for inspiring many other school shootings and bombings; the word Columbine has since become a byword for modern school shootings. As of 2025, Columbine remains both the deadliest mass shooting and school shooting in Colorado, and one of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Accessed 8/16/2025
6. "Intending to depict 'something to do with New York', and taking inspiration from Marcel Duchamp's 1923 work Wanted, $2,000 Reward (in which Duchamp put his own photograph in a wanted poster), Warhol decided to print large-scale copies of images from a booklet published on February 1, 1962 by the New York Police Department, titled "The Thirteen Most Wanted," showing 22 head-and-shoulder mug shots of the wanted men. Silkscreens for the panels of the mural were created in early 1964, printed in silkscreen ink on Masonite panels, and the completed 20 feet (6.1 m) 5-by-5 square of front and side views (including three blank frames) was installed at the site by April 13. [...] Government officials quickly objected to the images, and on April 16, 1964—less than a week before the fair was due to open—Philip Johnson, the pavilion architect, told Warhol that he must remove or replace the work within 24 hours. The stated reason was that the Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller was concerned that the images—mostly depicting men of Italian descent—would be insulting to an important segment of his electorate. In an attempt to save face, Warhol and Johnson told reporters that Warhol himself had been dissatisfied with the work. The mural was obliterated with aluminum paint [by Warhol] before the fair opened to the public." Accessed 8/16/2025
7. "Alphonse Bertillon (French: [bɛʁtijɔ̃]; 22 April 1853 – 13 February 1914) was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who applied the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement, creating an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified by name or photograph. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting. He is also the inventor of the mug shot. Photographing of criminals began in the 1840s only a few years after the invention of photography, but it was not until 1888 that Bertillon standardized the process, notably with his file on anarchists." Accessed 8/16/2025
8. Stephen Craig Paddock (April 9, 1953 – October 1, 2017) was an American mass murderer who perpetrated the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. Paddock opened fire into a crowd of about 22,000 concertgoers attending a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, killing 60 people and injuring approximately 867 (at least 413 of whom were wounded by gunfire). Paddock killed himself in his hotel room following the shooting. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in United States history. Paddock's motive remains officially undetermined, and the possible factors are the subject of speculation." Accessed 8/16/2025
9. The cabin is located fourteen miles northwest of the Terlingua Ghostown in the Solitario of Terlingua Ranch, a 200,000-acre area in the Big Bend region of far West Texas.
June 4, 2018, Episode 14, 44:31 mins.
(Apple Podcast edited for publication)
William Jess Laird: I’m William Jess Laird. This is Image Culture.
In 2008 Robert Beck became Robert Buck. He did this in response to an idea that in a state of hypermodernity the status of the Name-of-the-Father had been fundamentally shaken. In its absence as a universal, he says, each of us must invent our own, be it knowingly, explicitly or intuitively. Robert changed his by the exchange of a single vowel. It was a work that marked a major turning point in his life and practice.
I met with Robert at his studio in New York on the occasion of his recent back to back solo shows at Ulterior Gallery. The first, Vestige, premieres a collection of staged Kodak Instant photographs made in the early 80’s during Robert’s first years in New York. The second show, entitled Second Hand, presents Buck’s ongoing series of amended thrift-store paintings, a body of work he began to coincide with the changing of his father’s name.
WJL: Here I am with Robert Buck. I thought maybe we'd start...I feel like every time I talk to you what we inevitably get to at some point is psychoanalysis, Lacanian philosophy. Where did your interest in that grow from?
RB: The first thing to say is Lacan is not philosophy.
WJL: Sorry, God, you're laying into me already.
RB: It’s important because part of my interest in psychoanalysis, as Lacan defined it, is that knowledge, the knowledge of psychoanalysis, comes from the subject lying on the couch. It's not epistemology. It's not philosophy. If anything it's ethics. Lacan followed the analysand, throughout his lifetime, in the Freudian field, which he reestablished and kept alive. Thus, it is relevant in civilization into the 21st century; to repeat myself, because of what was being said and heard in the clinic. My interest in Freud came in high school with The Interpretation Of Dreams. I was like, whoa, this is so cool, there's something else going on, which I have no control of, but has a quasi-science supporting it. So, I kept that interest up. I went through the Independent Study Program at the Whitney, where Mary Kelly as one of the instructors. Mary brought Lacan and contemporary psychoanalysis. She reanimated my interest, and I stayed with it. But not as –– and this is important to say –– not as any kind of inspiration for my art. I have enough going on. I don't need Lacan or Jacques-Alain Miller or any of the others [working in the Freudian Field]. It is a way to frame my art. I felt a greater affinity with the discourse of psychoanalysis than I did with, say, the discourse of the university. The paradox, of course, is that is how I learned of psychoanalysis, through the university discourse.
WJL: What do you mean at the Whitney ISP?
RB: Yes, at the Whitney ISP, but it was also coming through Mary, whose knowledge was coming through Film Studies and her university career in England. She brought that with her.
WJL: What was she like to work with?
RB: She was great!
WJL: What was the ISP program like at the time?
RB: It was a very volatile time politically, the first wave of the culture wars, and it was often very contentious.
WJL: Do you mean amongst your fellow students?
RB: Yes.
WJL: Or not students, I guess.
RB: Fellow cohorts, yes. To be clear, the Whitney has three aspects, curatorial, critical and studio. They have a bifurcated program, artists visit and theoreticians and critics also visit. Because it was 1993, we were, as I say, in the first wave of what we now live and breathe, the culture wars.
WJL: How do you define that?
RB: The weaponization of culture for political ends; a [wider] understanding of culture at work in late capitalism. How does culture work to spread globalization, benefit globalization? Maybe on the local level it would be called gentrification, but now it works via this much wider network of globalization. Around that same time there was the Whitney Biennial, which was a very politicized one.
WJL: And you said this was in 1993?
RB: Yes, 1993. There was a lot of push back against that Biennial for "politicizing art." But it's really the atmosphere we live in today, wherein art has been politicized in a way that is conscious of its use in late capitalism and put to use for those purposes.
WJL: What was the change? Because I guess you came to New York, what, ten years before you started at the Whitney ISP?
RB: About 12 years. Yes.
WJL: I guess we should jump back even further. What was it like when you first came to New York? What were those first years like?
RB: Amazing. Because–
WJL: Where were you coming from?
RB: The suburbs of Baltimore. New York was like this shining city on the hill, especially for a young man who wanted to get out from where he had been brought up for freedom and expression and all of those things that a city can offer. The city was not, of course, the city it is today. 9/11 was the fulcrum, the flexion point when the city became more monetized and capitalized. Back in the day, there was a certain freedom and a young person could eke out a living for nothing. I remember moving almost every two years because I could. It was like, oh, let's live in Jersey City or in Hoboken or the East Village, Chelsea, etc. There was a sense of freedom and that was culture-wide. It was before there was an awareness of the political impact culture could have. I was brought up in the shadow of the 60s...is that a blessing or a curse?
WJL: It’s interesting to think about these first years in New York for you. We should say that you have at Ulterior Gallery right now the second of two consecutive shows. The first was a collection of instant photographs, Polaroids that you made in the first couple of years you were in New York?
RB: Yes. They were Kodak [Instamatic Colorburst 250], not Polaroid. It's an easy mistake to make because the Kodak technology was on the market for only four years.
It was Kodak's version of Polaroid. Polaroid brought litigation and won.
WJL: It’s funny, it's one of those things that is kind of like Kleenex, right?
RB: Exactly. That's my example. Like Kleenex. The images I took were indeed during the very first years I was living in the city. The interesting thing is I hadn't yet made a distinction between artistic pursuit and life. I just was doing. I was this nascent artist. You can see in those photographs later themes. But although I did not make a distinction, I was still drawing on something I refer to as know-how. An artist has a certain intuition, whether you professionalize it or whether you don't. It's a way of dealing with life or experiences that otherwise could not be processed or sustained. As that goes nothing's really changed. I'm still doing the same thing, but there's a different way that I've positioned myself and my art in the world.
WJL: If you're coming to New York and you have this––you call it an intuition, right?
RB: Yes.
WJL: Was that there before? Was it there when you were living outside of Baltimore? What I mean to say is when did you know that you were–
RB: I knew I was an artist at a very young age.
WJL: How young?
RB: Five or six.
WJL: Wow, that's wild. Do you remember? Do you have a moment?
RB: I know that this is kind of artist bio sort of thing, but it was an activity I would do with my mother. When my mother was making art, things were calm at home. I was speaking to someone quite recently and realized that for my mother too art was a way to handle trauma, turmoil, the void, if I can put it like that. So I was getting two things, time with my mother, and a means, without language, about how to make sense of or handle life. You mentioned the first show at Ulterior or, excuse me, the two shows at Ulterior. The second one is titled Second Hand, in which I modify paintings that I find at thrift stores across the country, second hand stores. My mother was a Sunday painter. That is the link.
WJL: Making those sorts of paintings?
RB: Yes. Not formally trained, but the drive, the satisfaction, the enjoyment of making art, I would argue is the same.
WJL: So there's something familiar about picking up those paintings.
RB: Exactly.
WJL: Interesting.
RB: And then bringing them from one context or economy, which would be a thrift store, El Paso, into another. You've probably been to Savers in El Paso.
WJL:Yeah. We've talked about it. There's a very distinct [painting] genre of desert landscapes.
RB: Yes.
WJL: And they're completely on their own spectrum; like what's good, what's not good. They have their own logic to them. And some of them are amazing and actually super beautiful.
RB: That's my point, and my pleasure, to reclaim those paintings. And then bring that economy and that context into the context of a contemporary art gallery.
WJL: Right.
RB: In doing that, bring the signatures of contemporary art gallery goers, superimpose one on a painting using a grid –– which is how artists would transcribe from one source to another before the overhead projector –– and then put the paintings again into circulation. So it circulates from, say, from El Paso to New York and then into a collector's home wherever. That idea of recirculation has something to do with the body. My contention is that any work of art falls from the body of the artist, like a feather from a bird, and then it's recuperated by the museum, by the gallery, what have you. 1 I see this idea of the body both with the signature that's left behind [in a gallery guestbook] and with the painting that's left behind [in the thrift store].
WJL: What is the significance of the trellis that these paintings hang on?
RB: The immediate significance is that it has a relationship to the context of a second hand or thrift store. I think everyone can understand or apperceive that immediately; like, oh, I saw that at the Goodwill store. Of course, it also has a relationship to the street because first in SoHo, then in Chelsea, now in front of the Whitney, people often sell their wares. Sunday painters, not formally trained painters, on these trellises.
But of course, the trellis is an echo of the trellis or the lattice on the painting by which I transcribed the signatures. It's an echo and I think of them as skins. But going back to psychoanalysis, there is a way in which that screen, lattice, lace, or embroidery of some kind, functions as a screen over the void.
I know it's a bit heavy, but that is what art does. Art essentially is a way, as I've been saying, to handle the real. And in the 21st century we're living closer to the real.
WJL: The Lacanian real?
RB: Yes, originally defined by Lacan as [one of] the three consistencies, imaginary, real, and symbolic.
WJL: I guess you started collecting these paintings at the same time you're doing the photographs, correct?
RB: No. I only started collecting the paintings maybe ten years ago to coincide with having changed my father's name by a single vowel. The Second Hand paintings are a way to illuminate or explicate what that change is about. The name, we're going a little bit further, so bear with me, the name is also second hand.
WJL: Right. Or it's inherited?
RB: For me it's the same thing. You inherit it, but you had no choice in making it. You can make a name for yourself but the one you're given is the one, unless you do something else with it, that you carry through life.
It's there before you begin and after you leave. What I've done by just the exchange of two vowels is to question that, the status of the Name Of The Father in the 21st century. Where it differs from artists who have done this in the past, I did not do it in the imaginary. In other words, it's not Rrose Sélavy of Duchamp nor is it Ziggy Stardust of Bowie.
Neither is it in the symbolic, Philip Goldstein to Philip Guston, Andy Warhol to Andy Warhol. What I did was in the real. So how is that apprehended? How the name is put back into circulation is a question, and it's an open-ended question.
In a way, I want it to remain an open-ended question because it rattles you, it causes perplexity, which we are confronted to increasingly in the 21st Century, in hypermodernity. Let's talk about perplexity for a moment, and the real. How can Columbine happen? And then Sandy Hook? And then Parkland? And now Santa Fe, Texas?
These are random acts. They have no sense. They have no...there's nothing in common to them.
That is something we must all manage. What is this senselessness? And there's a kind of move now that differs from what was happening in the 20th Century, which is a kind of sliding or scanning or slipping.
This is not just because of technology. Perhaps it was brought on, or precipitated, or accelerated by technology, but it's in life. It's in the everyday that we deal with it, this going from one news item to another, to another, to another, to another. It's kind of like an event horizon.
The more that we do it –– you can feel it with Instagram –– the more we're compelled to do it. Donald Trump is a kind of an engine for this.
He's the father of this kind of perverse enjoyment, I would call it.
WJL: A perverse enjoyment of tragedy, of national tragedy, things like that?
RB: Yes, a dark enjoyment. Because we have to ask ourselves, if we wanted these things to stop, they would have stopped. Right?
The show that I did in 2004––
WJL: They’re tolerated, in a sense.
RB: Yes, they're tolerated. I would even say they're enjoyed. The touchstone text for this is Civilization and Its Discontents.
WJL: Yes, Freud's text.
RB: Exactly. Why do these acts continue to manifest themselves at an increasing rate? Again, bear with me, the pillar of the Name Of The Father was the screen against the real.We didn't have to question the real, but we do now, because the Name Of The Father has fallen. The status has changed. So we are confronted to this real. And about this idea of sliding or metonymy, we could say that the Father was metaphor. When the symbolic was in place, we worked with metaphor. Now the paradigm is metonymy, and metonymy is why we could say the future is feminine. Not female, because female is of the same binary as male, female. Feminine is...I could identify as feminine, you could identify as feminine. The idea of identification is left open with the feminine.
WJL: What’s the nature of the shift from the symbolic to the real? What is it like to live in a world where we deal mostly with the symbolic?
RB: That’s your father's world, or your father's father's world. In other words, war, there were world wars. They were localized. They had a reason, they had sense, they had meaning. Wars today, terrorism, do not have meaning. We are always talking about the senselessness of something.
This idea that we are living without sense is what I mean when I say there has been an unprecedented shift in civilization. We could say it began with May of '68, Stonewall, Selma, let's go back further.
WJL: Sure.
RB: We have these diverse groups, who from the margins, become the center. This begins to erode the Name Of The Father because that one name, so to speak, that universal symbolic excludes people. It doesn't work for minorities, ethnicities, etc. It's not like I could say it happened at one particular time. They are flashpoints. It happened gradually. Technology is the elephant in the room because technology creates another dimension, and this is fascinating. Is it Duchamp's fourth dimension? Maybe. It's certainly an infra-thin because you can't really put your finger on it. But it creates something that we all have to manage. It accelerates the news and this strange appetite we seem to have as human beings, speaking beings.
WJL: I want to talk about this in the context of your life and your work because when you talk about the experience of changing your name from Robert Beck to…
RB: My father's name.
WJL: Excuse me. Yes.
RB: That’s the distinction.
WJL: When you talk about changing your father's name from Robert Beck to Robert Buck it obviously has everything to do with what you've just been describing. But it also seems like there must be a point where you say, this is something I'm going to do. Looking at the world, you can understand it in these terms, but what was it for you?
RB: Okay. The first thing to say, again, is that whatever I have to say about my work, in relationship to, whether it's the university discourse or the analyst discourse, comes after the fact. As we were saying earlier before we set up the mics, the artist works in the blind spot. If you're not working in the blind spot, why do it?
WJL: What are you doing?
RB: Exactly. I felt at a certain point that my work had created a vocabulary or a lexicon for experiences that I otherwise couldn't contend with. But I knew there was a beyond of that.
I knew there were another set of circumstances or experiences that had to be unpacked, as scary as that was. So that's partly what precipitated the name change. And I wanted the work to be commensurate with the work I had grown up with, work that shook or rattled or perplexed me. Like Jackson Pollock [or others], when artists would create new knowledge. That seemed to me in the early aughts to be changing. Art became more transactional. It became more monetized. That's the first era in which hedge fund guys got involved.
WJL: Right!
RB: Art was seen as investment rather than a discourse. It was a way to respond to. And it did a lot at once. It responded to the personal aspect, which I'll talk about in a moment, the cultural aspect and then the work itself. Whatever artist you might name, I would contend is devising a vocabulary for experiences that would otherwise go unspoken, in quotes. I felt I had done that. I had come up with this glossary and now it was a dead end.
WJL: Right.
RB: The word buck, I felt like I got four things at once that were very much specific to the work. The first, money, art market.
WJL: Big bucks.
RB: Sure! The son in Native cultures, American Native cultures. The stag, which is littered in my work as Robert Beck, on the cover of an artist book, in fact. I thought it was like some kind of spirit animal. I was making a transition. But the beautiful one is to dislodge, to throw something off one's back. And it was also a way to prod or to push or to move me forward.
WJL: To buck you forward.
RB: Exactly! It did that, and in ways I couldn't begin to imagine when I thought I would do this. Speaking of Utah, as we just were, I was in Utah, it was August 2007, and I knew I wanted to do this. I didn't know how. I was looking for anagrams of my name. I think the best one I came up with was Trek Cobber, which just didn't work. And I wanted something that was in the real, let's say. The word or signifier is in the symbolic. The letter is in the real. And it came to me like a thunderclap; almost as if I had been called to do this. We can call it a work of art, but I think it's more appropriate to call it an act of art, or a maneuver, because that way it keeps circulating and is unknowable.
WJL: What was the first work you made after the change?
RB: These works that are hanging behind me. The Cell (Winter Mimicry 1.0)works.
WJL: Really?
RB: Yeah.
WJL: That’s serendipitous.
RB: Yes, it is. We can refer to the photograph for that. 2 There were [one among] a series of works I did that in some way, and I can see this retrospectively, had to do with metonymy.
The cell pieces were created using a process called hydro-graphics. A small object is pulled up through a bath. On the surface of the bath is a film with a print. When the object [is pulled up] through the film it retains the print and then it is laminated. The inlay of automobiles like wood is done hydrographically. The cells can be installed on the floor, in corners, on the ceiling. They're meant to evoke the idea of things morphing or splicing, dividing, multiplying. That, for me, was this kind of creeping sensation that we were moving to a horizontal plane from a vertical one, speaking topographically.
Plus, the the signifier cell became important because I felt the very beginning of an atomization in culture, where each one was moving into some kind of autistic or cellular life. The cell phone was new then. The idea is that each of us are now in our own kind of pod, or singular life, a kind of one-by-one approach.This is important to say too because the universal of the Father no longer holds. Thank goodness! We can't say that the experience that my good friend Lyle Ashton-Harris has, who I was on the Whitney program with, is the same experience that I have. Let me put it this way, the singularity, in a way, has already happened. I don't mean the singularity of artificial intelligence. I mean the singularity of each person, one-by-one, wanting a part of the larger culture. The only universal is singularity. That is the paradox that we're living.
WJL: To go along with that, I guess we're the most individualist we've ever been, right?
RB: Yes. The tricky part is how is a collective then formed politically? That becomes the tricky part. We can see this in what's happened around school shootings, using the name that comes to mind, Emma Gonzalez, and that movement, that youth movement. There is this moment in which young people put singularities or distinctions aside for a common cause.
WJL: When did you first make work about school shootings?
RB: In 2000.
WJL: In the wake of?
RB: In the wake of Kipland Kinkel, who shot his parents in 1997 in Oregon. That was the [first] shooting that caught my attention. Then it was, yes, that's Kipland there, with bullets taped to his chest. 3
He was suicidal after shooting students, I forget how many now, maybe nine, and then his mother and father. 4 This was followed by Columbine. 5 In 2001 I was invited by the Queen's Museum to participate in an exhibition titled Crossing the Line. The artists were asked to create a new work based on works that had been exhibited at the Queen's Museum. For me the one that really crossed the line was The Thirteen Most Wanted Men by Andy Warhol, because he famously, the work was famously, censored. Rather than remove the work he painted over the, I forget how many canvases, thirteen, with a silver paint. 6 It was kind of like an erasure. You could still see a ghost of what had been there. For that context, I produced a portfolio of prints called Thirteen Shooters, thirteen boys at the time who had carried out school mass shootings.
WJL: There is something interesting in that work, the way it's titled. Correct me if I'm wrong, but each work, each print, is not titled with the name of the boy, but rather the name of the news outlet in which they appear.
RB: Yes. Thank you for your eye to that detail because it's important to make that distinction. I did the work in 2000, before there was a move culturally to omit the name of the shooter. That's not why I did it. [The omission] predates that injunction by culture by about fifteen years. My idea, speaking of intuition, I "knew" that this was the way to do it. It's easy to say that by using the media source I'm indicting the media. Sure, that's partly there. But what I was really doing, blindly, was putting a name of the father, or rather putting the true name of the father to these boys. Kipland Kinkel was one of the thirteen. But Kipland, something of that name failed, or [perhaps] otherwise he wouldn't have done this. There was something in the symbolic that didn't hold for him. What his true name is...was that fame, that elevation.
WJL: "NBC News shooter" [for instance].
RB: Yes, exactly.
WJL: Because that's what he is now.
RB: Exactly. Yes. So that was my very early play with the Name Of The Father. That name was missing [or deficient] for the shooters. The name that held them, that holds them now, exactly as you say, is [for example] "NBC News" or [any of] a thousand other news sources.
WJL: It's interesting because that move to omit someone's name is so strange now because it's [also] a practical concern, because you can find these people [shooters] easily.
RB: That’s true. That's an example of where technology kind of accelerates or fuels or facilitates this idea of identity, subjectivity, availability, transparency, etc.
WJL: It’s much like a photograph too. A lot of this reminds me of those early criminalistic photographs, Bertillon, trying to understand what a criminal looks like and the crazy theory that you can predict who's a criminal and who isn't by what they look like, by what their photograph, by what their measurements are. 7 So, it's almost like this strange version of that with profiles online, where, after the fact, you feel as though you can look at someone's profile and can kind of understand that something was wrong the whole time.
RB: Or not.
WJL: Well, I don't think you can. That's what I'm saying, it's an illusion. But I think people project onto these things.
RB: Exactly. They basically...there's a rupture. There's a rent in reality. A confrontation to the void or to the real. Then we, civilization, circulate around that hole. Like, let's watch the towers come down seven, eight, nine [times] repeatedly. How many times? We go to Facebook again and again trying to find a reason, and there is no reason. For me, the shooting that kind of is an emblem for this is Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas last October. 8 He did not fit the profile of any of these young men. So, what? He had money. He did it, we have to conclude, it's chilling, because he could. And here's another chilling thing. This is an answer for some people to contend with these unprecedented changes. There was a show I did in 2014, which the poet and writer Kenneth Goldsmith, called my "Death and Disaster" series. These were paintings that contended with recent acts of American violence or malfeasance. I call it "My American Carnage Show." [At the time], I would talk about the idea that it's not the changes in civilization that are most concerning, but the effects they have on subjects who cannot handle them, mostly young men. Because of the lack of any laws against the NRA and [mental] healthcare issues in this country, we could say the NRA facilitates these acts of violence.
WJL: You have this relationship with your mother, painting with her growing up. You come to New York and you're doing this work. A pivotal point for you, it seems, is in 2008, shedding that name. So, what about your father?
RB: Theoretically, the father always fails. The father cannot live up to the status of the symbolic father. So there's always a faltering. My father was in the work consistently that I did as Robert Beck. But I felt as if that wasn't enough. The earlier phase of the work is so much about rituals of masculinity, rites of masculine passage. I can say that my father functioned for me for a while artistically. He was there just enough. I'm not [a full-blown] psychotic. There is some hold I have on reality. But he could not handle and was absent from the chaos that was created otherwise at home, which is to say, the maternal enjoyment. I always use enjoyment in quotes. The French term jouissance is what I mean. [The term] is now coming into American [English] vocabulary. Jouissance is a kind of exquisite enjoyment, a dark voluptuous enjoyment. One enjoys too much. There's a surplus.
WJL: The one that we were talking about earlier.
RB: Say more.
WJL: The kind of enjoyment that the American public has over [repeatedly] watching something terrible unfold. A fascination.
RB: Yes.
WJL: Jouissance.
RB: Exactly. That jouissance was something I had to handle then for myself, which is what the new work as Robert Buck does. Whether that jouissance is in civilization or whether it has to do with my mother specifically...it's both at the same time. This is also why the future is feminine, because of this jouissance. On the feminine side, for women, that sliding, that movement, that Not All is prevalent; as opposed to the All, the all of the phallus, [by which] everything could be handled by the universal. There is no longer a universal. So we're on the side of the not all. It's uncharted territory. On the personal side, the canvas that we see here, the mink stole used to belong to my mother. That is one way of handling the material, you could call it, that I was really aiming to contend with as an artist. All artists, you know this, have to challenge themselves, no, don't even have to, we have no choice.
WJL: When did you start going to Terlingua?
RB: I went to Terlingua ––
WJL: We couldn’t get through this without talking about the shack.
RB: No, it's good, I love it. They're related in some way. I went to The Big Bend for the first time in 2007. And I just knew –– something went off inside –– I wanted to be a part of that landscape.
WJL: Do you think there's something about being raised on the East Coast that primes people for that?
RB: Yes.
WJL: Yeah, I think so too.
RB: Or not. When I first went through [far] West Texas, it was in 1997. I was with someone who could care less. He kept saying, there's nothing here.
WJL: But there's so much here!
RB: Are you kidding? Everything is here! When I bought the cabin in 2008, February 2008, people were like, what have you done? You're just going to be looking at the same mountain range every day. And I'm like, it's not the same mountain range every day. It changes by the hour! The cabin became my extimate studio, more of a studio than my [NYC] studio that we're sitting in. The [cabin-studio] is where I get inspiration. Ideas come to me there that are not premeditated.
WJL: Right. We talked once about the relationship you have [with the place] and said that you conceive of what you should do in Terlingua, and then execute here [in NYC].
RB: Yes.
WJL: Is that fair?
RB: Yeah. Maybe not should do, but a desire to do. To be clear, my place is not in Terlingua. It's an hour's drive off-road outside of Terlingua. 9
WJL: If you could manage to make it even more remote. [Laughter]
RB: [Laughter] Yeah! There's something about that isolation that allows for quiet. No demand coming from the phone. No demand coming from email. No injunction. That time is so precious to me. One really has to fight for it. We were talking about this when you were setting up. You can have that in Marfa as well.
WJL: Yes.
RB: Where you are there just with the sky and the field and the mountains in the distance.
WJL: When did you move into this studio that we're in?
RB: 2003.
WJL: It’s interesting. I ask this, for people who have been in New York a while, do you still like being in New York?
RB: Yes.
WJL: What is it about the city?
RB: Diversity. The speed of life. The demands. There's a kind of push in New York that once you get used to, that tempo, it's hard to let go of it. I've asked myself a lot...there's a certain drive level in New York, which is to say ambition, that I haven't found anywhere else in the United States –– looking for some place that's commensurate with one's internal drive. Diversity is also paramount for me. I was on the subway the other day and it was very crowded, [during] one of those torrential downpours. The trains weren't coming. [One] finally came and everyone is packed into a car. Each one is trying to get their own piece of the post, you know, to hold on. [WJL places his fists one atop the other.] Exactly! One fist over the other. And every fist was a different color.
WJL: Cool!
RB: Exactly! I got a chill even as I said that. Everyone knew this was a kind of meta moment; like everyone was in that elevated moment. No jerk. No asshole. No one pushing. It was like, okay, we're all in this together. I love that about New York! It's a kind of energy that –– it's weird maybe because of its dichotomous nature –– but it's an energy I find in the desert too. Where there's an elevation and you realize you're part of something much bigger than yourself.
WJL: Robert Buck, thank you so much.
RB: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
WJL: I’d like to thank Robert Buck as well as Takako Tanabe at Ulterior. You can see my portrait of Robert in his studio at www.williamjesslaird.com/imageculture as well as on Instagram @william.jess.laird or @image.culture You can find more information on Robert Buck at https://www.robertbuck.net/ and http://www.ulteriorgallery.com/ This show is produced by Sarah Levine and our music is by Jack Staffin and Eliza Callahan.
1. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar XI: The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis"
2. Portrait of Robert in his studio at www.williamjesslaird.com/imageculture as well as on Instagram @william.jess.laird or @image.culture
3. WJL points to a large print of Kipland Kinkel shirtless lying nearby on a table in the RB studio.
4. "On May 21, 1998, 15-year-old freshman student Kipland Kinkel opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in the cafeteria of Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, United States, killing 2 of his classmates and wounding 25 others.[1] He had killed his parents at the family home the previous day, following his suspension pending an expulsion hearing after he admitted to school officials that he was keeping a stolen handgun in his locker. Fellow students subdued him, leading to his arrest. He later characterized his actions as an attempt to get others to kill him, since he wanted to take his own life after killing his parents but could not bring himself to." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Thurston_High_School_shooting Accessed 8/16/2025
5. "The Columbine High School massacre was a school shooting and attempted bombing that occurred at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States on April 20th, 1999. The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 13 students and one teacher; ten were killed in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently died by suicide. Twenty additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was exchanged several times with law enforcement with neither side being struck. Another three people were injured trying to escape. The Columbine massacre was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history until December 2012. It is still considered one of the most infamous massacres in the United States, for inspiring many other school shootings and bombings; the word Columbine has since become a byword for modern school shootings. As of 2025, Columbine remains both the deadliest mass shooting and school shooting in Colorado, and one of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Accessed 8/16/2025
6. "Intending to depict 'something to do with New York', and taking inspiration from Marcel Duchamp's 1923 work Wanted, $2,000 Reward (in which Duchamp put his own photograph in a wanted poster), Warhol decided to print large-scale copies of images from a booklet published on February 1, 1962 by the New York Police Department, titled "The Thirteen Most Wanted," showing 22 head-and-shoulder mug shots of the wanted men. Silkscreens for the panels of the mural were created in early 1964, printed in silkscreen ink on Masonite panels, and the completed 20 feet (6.1 m) 5-by-5 square of front and side views (including three blank frames) was installed at the site by April 13. [...] Government officials quickly objected to the images, and on April 16, 1964—less than a week before the fair was due to open—Philip Johnson, the pavilion architect, told Warhol that he must remove or replace the work within 24 hours. The stated reason was that the Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller was concerned that the images—mostly depicting men of Italian descent—would be insulting to an important segment of his electorate. In an attempt to save face, Warhol and Johnson told reporters that Warhol himself had been dissatisfied with the work. The mural was obliterated with aluminum paint [by Warhol] before the fair opened to the public." Accessed 8/16/2025
7. "Alphonse Bertillon (French: [bɛʁtijɔ̃]; 22 April 1853 – 13 February 1914) was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who applied the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement, creating an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified by name or photograph. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting. He is also the inventor of the mug shot. Photographing of criminals began in the 1840s only a few years after the invention of photography, but it was not until 1888 that Bertillon standardized the process, notably with his file on anarchists." Accessed 8/16/2025
8. Stephen Craig Paddock (April 9, 1953 – October 1, 2017) was an American mass murderer who perpetrated the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. Paddock opened fire into a crowd of about 22,000 concertgoers attending a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, killing 60 people and injuring approximately 867 (at least 413 of whom were wounded by gunfire). Paddock killed himself in his hotel room following the shooting. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in United States history. Paddock's motive remains officially undetermined, and the possible factors are the subject of speculation." Accessed 8/16/2025
9. The cabin is located fourteen miles northwest of the Terlingua Ghostown in the Solitario of Terlingua Ranch, a 200,000-acre area in the Big Bend region of far West Texas.
Robert Buck © 2018
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