A Little Leather Suitcase Leads to Nam June Paik
PHP: And how did that happen?
RS: A family friend who was a filmmaker and had kind of a wild and very creative mind basically called us out of the blue and said “I have a job for you. Would you come to New York? I’m starting this art center blah blah blah, and we need you to come here.”
PHP: What was the art center?
RS: I really don’t remember, but she was working with Louis Malle and was a dance critic, and she had been involved in very great scenes in New York. So she knew what she was doing, but she was a bit of an eccentric. I thought this would be the best thing to do—one of the biggest cities, a great challenge—so just go. My mom bought me a ticket, found me a place to stay for a month and then we got $2000 in my pocket. I arrived with a little leather suitcase and figured it out from there.
When I first arrived there wasn’t a job available at all for me. But when I did find my contact, she put me in touch with Frances Alenikoff, who lives at 537 Broadway, which happens to be the building that George Maciunas found, purchased and started his first studio in, which was a Fluxus nexus in New York.
So I found a room in this building where I had very illustrious neighbors. There was Tricia Brown who was living across the way at 539 Broadway. I could see her from my window in the morning when she was walking around taking coffee. And there was Nam June Paik who lived two flights above, and Yoshi Wada, Simone Forti and Emily Harvey. So I basically landed in this building that was a very influential and powerful art center for artists from the 60’s.
PHP: So you went from provincial Beaux Art where they had this real devotion to 60’s art and then landed smack dab in the center of the real thing.
RS: Yeah, it was incredible. And actually I didn’t even know where I had landed, although I had a sense that I’d landed somewhere cool (laughter). But then of course once I arrived I was basically without any real money, and my parents aren’t rich. I met these people who were doing theater, so I started painting sets and scenery for this French group; it became a way for me to meet people and make sure I was making art. I tried to get on the art scene but just wasn’t ready for it or attracted to it at that time. So theater it was!
PHP: How did you actually connect with Nam June Paik in your building? Did you know who he was?
RS: Well I didn’t, really, but eventually I figured it out. I was scratching my head a lot because I thought “Alright, I’m living in the building where Nam June’s living, and I would love to work for him. This is easy. Why go anywhere else,” but then after I looked at what he was doing, I thought “I have no training in video.”
So, I went off and continued working in theater. But then I started working for Frances Whitney, who was making multi-media pieces with video. I offered her my help to make one of her larger sculptures—a fiberglass sculpture. She said “yes, no problem,” and so we started building this spiral that was to hang in St. John the Divine for her Winter’s Solstice. That led to my working with her collaborator, Norman Ballard, who was also working with Nam June Paik. So I asked Norman after the second or third year of working with Frances if I could possibly work with him and Nam June. He was a bit hesitant at first but eventually asked me to help shop for pieces that he was proposing for Nam June’s Guggenheim retrospective.
PHP: So you started out shopping, and then this metamorphosed into a pretty tight collaborative effort with Nam June Paik.
RS: Well, it was collaboration with the studio in general. From the day that I set foot in the studio I realized that I really loved being there because I’d found my place. I loved the people that were there, and I loved their sense of humor. It was just this sort of mutual appreciation—you’re meant to be here. The people that stayed more often stayed because their personality fit with the very eclectic and idiosyncratic environment. The personality was more important than the technical skills. If the personality fit then the rest was just a matter of figuring out, which I did.
So, I made myself useful in any way, shape or form. I started participating in making the Video Fish and the different pieces. Nam June would let us come up with his pieces sometimes or at least propose ideas which were really large-scale, and we often talked about shooting to the moon. Whatever is the biggest scale of what a human can do we were talking about, and it was within my job description to have to think about those possibilities and come up with ideas. Throughout this, I learned. I learned the technical things that I needed to know. I didn’t actually know any of it when I walked in the door.
PHP: That’s funny, because I think of you as a very technology-oriented artist.
RS: I’m totally not. If anything I was anti-technology at the time. You know southern France: marginal, we don’t believe in progress. We believe in tradition and knowledge of the past being passed down from generation to generation.
