Revolt in Provence
PHP: Tell me about when you first came to New York. Did you come here because you wanted to be an artist?
RS: Yeah, I did. I had been living in the woods in the country for twelve years. My mother had a large house in Aix-en-Provence that we’d inherited from my grandparents. There were a lot of extra rooms, and we’d have renters who mostly were writers or artists. I just realized recently that I was living in an ad hoc artist residency. I had a studio in the house, and we would all go off and do figure drawing, and I also had a darkroom. It was this kind of paradise. At one point I realized that I needed to leave paradise and be in a big city and meet people and see what was being done.
PHP: Okay, so you knew enough that you wanted to be an artist and that you wanted to be in the New York milieu. Why did you not think, “Maybe I should go to art school”?
RS: I tried. I applied to two schools and went to the one in Aix. That year was a very profound year. Unfortunately, the Aix school was a pilot, and they were doing all sorts of teaching experiments. Nothing was really quite in place, and I arrived in the school when it was in a state of limbo somewhere between classical and progressive training. We couldn’t figure out what they were teaching us.
They were trying to have us do experimental work based on the 60’s artists in New York—Minimalism, happenings, body work, Fluxus and Earthworks—and yet the professors had styles that were almost from old France, very disciplinarian and severe and putting down the students.
PHP: Really?
RS: Yeah, yeah. The students would make work, and the professors would just put them down and say that it was bad for these reasons.
PHP: So it was just an authoritarian, unilateral weigh-in based on subjective aesthetic standards?
RS: It had a bit of that style—it’s a school from the provinces—provincial. At some point the students asked me to be their leader, because from the get-go I was openly critical and speaking with the professors. And then I found myself in a political quagmire between the students and the professors. It got to the point where they sent down someone from the Ministry of Culture because we were causing such a stir in the school (laughter).
Eventually, I couldn’t concentrate on making art because I was so focused on the politics. So I made a categorical decision that I was not there for politics. I was there to make art, and therefore at the end of the year I just decided I shouldn’t continue; I was too divided and not able to concentrate on the one thing that mattered.
PHP: Did that just completely sour you altogether on art school?
RS: It was confusing. To punish us they put us through perspective classes. After that we had three months of severe, very precise perspective drawings that we had to make of this very ugly school. We had to draw it for three months. So I took two years to meditate and figure out what I should do next. That’s when I got a call about a possible opportunity for work in New York as a graphic designer and thought, “Alright!”
