{"id":95288,"date":"2016-03-07T12:57:57","date_gmt":"2016-03-07T17:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=95288"},"modified":"2016-03-07T16:43:57","modified_gmt":"2016-03-07T21:43:57","slug":"a-quiet-meditative-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/07\/a-quiet-meditative-place\/","title":{"rendered":"A Quiet, Meditative Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Gibbons on his drawings from Rikers Island.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Andrew Lampert<\/p><\/div>\n

Over a forty-year career, Joe Gibbons has become a legend in the world of experimental film. His work so thoroughly wrinkles the cloth woven by art and life that the question of which imitates which becomes moot. In his 1985 film Living in the World<\/a><\/i><\/em>, <\/i><\/em>he stars as a working stiff named Joe Gibbons, just trying to make it through the eight-hour day with his dignity intact. Existentially bereft, he laments, \u201cI read the paper and there\u2019s so much going on that I have nothing to do with.\u201d He quits his job and turns to crime to make ends meet.<\/p>\n

When the real Gibbons made headlines last year in an unlikely heist story, that same voice was quoted in the papers as evidence of his moral degeneracy and criminal intent. FORMER MIT PROFESSOR \u201cROBS\u201d BANK, FILMS \u201cHEIST<\/small>,<\/a>\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/small>the New York Post<\/i><\/em> said. And, later, in the\u00a0New York Times<\/i><\/em>: FILMMAKER JOE GIBBONS GETS A YEAR IN PRISON FOR A ROBBERY HE CALLED PERFORMANCE ART<\/small><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1953, Gibbons grew up reading Jonas Mekas\u2019s film criticism in the Village Voice<\/i><\/em> and started making films at Antioch College, where he studied with Tony Conrad. He holds an M.F.A. in film from Bard College and has taught extensively, most recently as a lecturer on video at MIT. Gibbons\u2019s works in Super 8, PixelVision, and sixteen millimeter\u00a0are revered for their unprecedented disturbance of the medium\u2019s intimacy. In his films, Gibbons\u2019s charming countenance addresses the camera directly. Joe\u2019s close-up is fundamentally conspiratorial: alternately self-aggrandizing (\u201cI don\u2019t need a job. I\u2019m Joe Gibbons! I take what I need\u201d), self-doubting (\u201cI should\u2019ve quit while I was ahead\u201d), and self-afflicting, as when he documents his heroin use. He\u2019s known to apostrophize nonverbal costars: in The Florist<\/i><\/em> abusing roses for their smug vanity, in Confidential<\/i><\/em> pleading that the camera quit its unflinching voyeurism, and in His Master\u2019s Voice<\/i><\/em> facing the hard truth that his dog, Woody, has no knack for foresight when a world-conquering plan goes awry. His films, with their diaristic approach, are filled with clich\u00e9s and fantasies, like a self-help book with an unreliable narrator. Insidiously poignant, his work has the unsettling effect that returning home from a vacation does, when routines once ingrained become hideously apparent.<\/p>\n

And while in the films Joe goes to great lengths not<\/em> to work\u2014to achieve the life of idle luxury we\u2019re all taught to want\u2014the irony is that all along we\u2019re watching the work itself. Gibbons\u2019s films are a rueful comment\u00a0on the fact that, pages away from his own headline, there\u2019s a section called Arts & Leisure, and that more time Joe spends on camera, the more difficult Gibbons finds it to support himself. As his role sways between the antisocial artist and the downtrodden worker, Gibbons\u2019s performance centers on ideas of work, art, leisure, and privilege. Experimental film isn\u2019t easy to monetize, and despite his accolades, Gibbons has faced financial hardship. His arrest motivated a generous outpouring of support, with fundraising screenings held across the country. At Light Industry last year, Ed Halter introduced Living in the World<\/i><\/em>, saying, \u201cJoe\u2019s work, like Joe himself, can be fugitive and hard to find.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A still from Living in the World<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Having served his full one-year sentence for third-degree felony robbery at Rikers, Gibbons was released in September and is now out on bail, awaiting trial for an earlier alleged robbery in Rhode Island. In the interim, he\u2019s having his first exhibition of drawings, at Southfirst Gallery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With a rickety line, Gibbons copies the mundane objects of American life, creating satires of the everyday more acerbic for having been drawn in Rikers. Deprivation is apparent in his choice of subjects: an unappetizing meal tray, \u201cfound\u201d pills, Halls cough-drop wrappers\u2014the latter portrayed flattened, so as to make legible encouraging slogans: \u201cDon\u2019t try harder. Do harder,\u201d \u201cGo for it,\u201d \u201cTough is your middle name.\u201d A week after seeing the drawings, I came down with a cold and, unwrapping a Halls cough drop, found the same overbearing marketing I had thought was too Gibbonsian to be real. You can hear Joe\u2019s voice reading aloud the advertisements word for word, highlighting their absurdity. \u201cThe Gibbons Effect,\u201d Tony Oursler said, speaking at Light Industry, \u201ccontinues whether the camera is recording or not. Brilliantly articulate, wildly inventive, Joe may be the funniest man alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gibbons\u2019s drawings, and the interview that follows, offer a view into life in Rikers, albeit one strikingly peaceful compared to the accounts of Kalief Browder, Candie Hailey, and many other inmates who have undergone abuse, all while held without trial. Those tragic stories, coupled with demands to close the dilapidated, inefficient prison, have put Rikers in the news recently, and make Gibbons\u2019s show disconcertingly timely.<\/p>\n

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Joe Gibbons, Untitled (Halls Wrappers)<\/i>, 2015, pencil and color pencil on paper, 9 \u00be” x 7 \u00bc”.<\/p><\/div>

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Untitled (Kellogg\u2019s)<\/i>, 2015, pencil on paper, 9 \u00be” x 7 \u00bc”.<\/p><\/div>

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Untitled (Sunset Over Rikers Island)<\/i>, 2015, pencil on paper, 5 \u00be” x 7 \u00be”.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

I read that Rikers had the most violent year on record.<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, they call it the \u201cSummer of Slashings.\u201d Mostly the adolescents take their ID cards and they break them in half and cut each other with that.<\/p>\n

That atmosphere seems completely absent in your drawings.<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

It makes it seem more like an artist colony, but that\u2019s what it was for me. It was like a retreat. The guy that lived across the hall from me was an artist, and he would bring me drawing paper and pencils. In Rikers the inmates spent all this time out of their cells telling stories and there was a lot of hilarity. But then there were other people who had terrible experiences and were cut up. A lot of people have a hard time in jail, especially if you\u2019re young. But it wasn\u2019t like I was escaping some intolerable reality in jail to make these drawings. They give you a designation as to how dangerous you are, and for me it was a pretty low classification. Where I was, it was the over-fifty population, so there wasn\u2019t any violence really going on there. It was a quiet, meditative place. Just once in a while a fight would break out. And of course I would try to break it up. That\u2019s how I lost my several teeth. Well, that\u2019s one of the stories anyway.<\/p>\n

So were you choosing your subjects from things that happened to be around, or would you seek out things to draw?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

The camera one was my first attempt. Anne Turyn\u2019s suggestion was, \u201cDraw your Super 8 cameras,\u201d but the only camera I could remember was an old thirty-five millimeter Mitchell camera, and it\u2019s not a very good likeness of it. Imagination isn\u2019t my strong suit, really. The glove in the cup took the most imagination, because it was spring and I knew that there were flowers growing outside, so I tried to make a daffodil. If I had the right drugs I probably would have been able to believe in it, but I didn\u2019t. There were a few things, like the medicine cups I would pick up every day, or the corn flakes. But then later on I focused more on things that I didn\u2019t<\/i><\/em> have, like the drawings of watches and diamond rings. They wouldn\u2019t even let us have watches, and they hid all the clocks, so you didn\u2019t know what time it was. And the\u00a0New York Times<\/i><\/em> style section was flaunting all these things that most people couldn\u2019t have, but especially if they\u2019re locked up in Rikers they couldn\u2019t have.<\/p>\n

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Untitled (Movie Camera)<\/i>, 2015, pencil on paper, 7 \u00be” x 5 \u00be”.<\/p><\/div>

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Untitled (August)<\/i>, 2015, pencil on paper, 9 \u00be” x 7 \u00bc”.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

I see some of the drawing as props for your films, like the calendar with the days marked off.<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jail wouldn\u2019t be a bad place for an obsessive person. I wasn\u2019t really one of those people who counted days, but I thought I should. I\u2019m attracted to that kind of obsessiveness. I\u2019ve been saving creditor bills for about fifteen years, all the letters saying, Where\u2019s our money? I think it would make a nice installation\u2014to fill up the whole room, wallpaper it. I wanted to call it Deadbeat<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Were there any films that you were working on that were interrupted by your jail time?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

I was making a film about that situation I was in, living in those flop houses. I started shooting in 2008, back when I still had a job, and the economy started crashing. I wanted to make something like Sullivan\u2019s Travels<\/i><\/em>, about a guy who just decides to throw everything away. It was just like all my other films where things go downhill. I was late for work all the time so I was speeding to school, then my job at MIT ended. I wouldn\u2019t say I got fired. And then I got evicted and the marshals came to clear out my apartment. It was all very cinematic, because I had a high-resolution large sensor DSLR. I think it\u2019s funny, but it was really tragic. My main theme was just psychic deterioration and desperation, and finding some comic relief in that.<\/p>\n

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Untitled (Will You?)<\/i>, 2015, pencil on paper, 12″ x 9″. (Click to enlarge.)<\/p><\/div>\n

In many of your films you go by Joe Gibbons, but would you say your on-camera\u00a0persona is a self-portrait?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

Usually I tell people that especially Confessions of a Sociopath<\/i><\/em> is all real, but the persona is not real. Even if everything that\u2019s depicted is true and not made up, it\u2019s still contrived, because I\u2019m creating a persona, not just in my behavior but in the things I choose to do, like getting in trouble. I really wanted to construct this personality because I didn\u2019t think I was an interesting person. I thought I was just a sheltered, innocent kid who needed to live life a little more. And I had to push that as much as I could. When you go to art school, you realize you need to find a niche. And I learned pretty quickly mine was psychopathology. So I started making a film that I haven\u2019t finished. Well, I made Confessions of a Sociopath, <\/i><\/em>but I thought I didn\u2019t go far enough with that, because some people think it\u2019s ironic, like that I\u2019m not really such a psychopath in it. But I\u2019m going to make another one that\u2019s convincing. I was reading some psychology books in Rikers.<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you see your persona as an artist? I sometimes feel you\u2019re satirically playing the so-called normal person, speaking in clich\u00e9s, looking for jobs in the newspaper classifieds.<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s more like the life of someone who, regardless of what career, just isn\u2019t cut out for any kind of normative life. When I was making the films like Living in the World<\/i><\/em>,\u00a0<\/i><\/em>I would avoid having a job for most of that time. But I was working almost every day, not in a legal capacity, just to get money, sometimes to make the film, sometimes for other purposes. I also think I\u2019m normal anyway, no matter how hard I try. Even when I was at MIT someone told me when they saw me out in the hallway they were surprised that the art teacher looked so square. I\u2019ve gone overboard to try to counterbalance that. And it\u2019s easier to do it with a film than in real life because you can fudge things more in film. You control them more. I\u2019m interested in deviant personalities and usually an artist is deviant. So it\u2019s a caricature of what I thought an artist was when I was a teenager. I would read about these tortured artists like Arthur Rimbaud or Baudelaire or Artaud or Burroughs, and before that blues musicians were my role models.<\/p>\n

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Untitled (The Paris Review No. 209)<\/i>, 2015, pencil on paper. (Click to enlarge.)<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s funny because Rimbaud ultimately just ended up getting a job.<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah, I think he wanted to be a regular guy like his father.<\/p>\n

Do you see yourself giving up and joining society?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I\u2019m not ready to renounce anything. I wish I could go further. I\u2019m just unfortunately not as deranged as I\u2019d like to present myself to be, so I can\u2019t really go that far.<\/p>\n

Tristan Tzara wrote about how he admires Rimbaud for being an antisocial artist, literally anti-society. Do you subscribe to that idea?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was a teenager I liked the Dadaist approach, which was destroy everything. But because I spent so much time as a Catholic, I can\u2019t really subscribe to a nihilist approach, because I probably wouldn\u2019t live that long. I mean, it\u2019s surprising I\u2019ve lived as long as I have, but it\u2019s because I haven\u2019t been that nihilistic. But I used to make a joke that the reason I make the films that I do is so that people can learn from my mistakes, and that gives them a social dimension. I don\u2019t really feel that, but I know when they see films like Living in the World<\/i><\/em>, people are really grateful for that sometimes, people who have jobs and fantasize about quitting their jobs.<\/p>\n

So you see the films as cautionary tales?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Untitled (Found Pills)<\/i>, 2015, pencil and color pencil on paper, 7 \u00bc” x 9 \u00be”. (Click to enlarge.)<\/p><\/div>\n

That was another joke I used to tell\u2014that people could subscribe to my newsletter, that while they had a job I could go out and get into trouble, and they could experience it vicariously. I thought I could just go around taking on these psychopathologies and mental illnesses and then report back. That comes from Rimbaud\u2014that the artist takes all poisons into himself and experiences their ramifications and then reports back. I can\u2019t really say it without sounding pretentious now.<\/p>\n

This year, fund-raising screenings have made it easier to see your films than ever before, and now Anthology Film Archives is preserving your films, but do you think the problem with regard to visibility is that your work is hard to categorize? In the art world, it might better be understood as performance art.<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

I could have been a lot better at positioning myself, if I was more calculating. There\u2019s a lot of ways to monetize video, but I have a problem with the art world, present company excluded. I think it\u2019s mostly for social climbers, it\u2019s mystified, and there\u2019s so much pretension. I used to read Artforum<\/i><\/em> all the time and watched the language change regularly, and people would jump on different bandwagons that I just couldn\u2019t take seriously. I still do like a lot of artists, but it\u2019s a hard career to justify, morally.<\/p>\n

Now that you\u2019re out, do you think you\u2019ll keep drawing?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n

If I had the right kind of environment, I could. I would. But I\u2019m not living in a place now that\u2019s conducive to contemplation, like it was in Rikers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Untitled (Medicine Cup)<\/i>, 2015, ink drawing on paper, 5″ x 8″.<\/p><\/div>

\"\"<\/a>

Untitled (Riker\u2019s Rehabilitation Meal)<\/i>, 2015, pencil drawing with colored pencil.<\/p><\/div>

\"\"<\/a>

Untitled (Century Bank)<\/i>, 2015, pencil on paper, 12″ x 9″.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

All images courtesy Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Joe Gibbons\u2019s \u201cRecent Drawings\u201d is on view at Southfirst Gallery through March 13, 2016. A catalogue by Southfirst Gallery\u2014containing all of Gibbons\u2019 s drawings from Rikers, an interview with Tony Oursler, and transcripts of Gibbons\u2019s voice mails to Andrew Lampert from jail\u2014is coming soon.\u00a0<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n

Sarah Cowan is a freelance writer and a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Gibbons on his drawings from Rikers Island. Over a forty-year career, Joe Gibbons has become a legend in the world of experimental film. His work so thoroughly wrinkles the cloth woven by art and life that the question of which imitates which becomes moot. In his 1985 film Living in the World, he stars […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[21422,35,3212,6526,9241,21417,21420,15630,16341,12976,21414,13963,21423,21421,21413,21416,13011,7408,8902,9869,21418,21415,21419,12251,21424],"class_list":["post-95288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-anne-turyn","tag-art","tag-artforum","tag-arthur-rimbaud","tag-artists","tag-bank-robberies","tag-confidential","tag-contemplation","tag-dadaism","tag-drawings","tag-experimental-film","tag-filmmaking","tag-heists","tag-his-masters-voice","tag-joe-gibbon","tag-living-in-the-world","tag-mit","tag-performance-art","tag-prison","tag-rikers-island","tag-robbery","tag-southfirst-gallery","tag-the-florist","tag-theft","tag-tony-oursler"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Quiet, Meditative Place\u2014Joe Gibbons\u2019s Drawings from Rikers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sarah Cowan talks to Joe Gibbons, who was imprisoned for robbing a bank as performance art last year, about his drawings from Rikers Island.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/03\/07\/a-quiet-meditative-place\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Quiet, Meditative Place by Sarah Cowan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 7, 2016 \u2013 Joe Gibbons on his drawings from Rikers Island.Over a forty-year career, Joe Gibbons has become a legend in the world of experimental film. 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