Oral history interview with William T. Wiley, 1997 Oct 8-Nov. 20

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with William T. Wiley, 1997 Oct 8-Nov. 20, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM T. WILEY
AT THE ARTIST'S STUDIO IN WOODACRE, CALIFORNIA
OCTOBER 8, 1997
INTERVIEWER: PAUL J. KARLSTROM

WW: WILLIAM T. WILEY
PK: PAUL J. KARLSTROM

PK: Smithsonian Institution, an interview with William T. Wiley, at his studio in Woodacre, California, north of San Francisco. The date is October 8, 1997. This is the first session in what I hope will be a somewhat extensive series. The interviewer for the archives is Paul Karlstrom. Okay, here we go, Bill. I've been looking forward to this interview for quite a long time, ever since we met back in, it was the mid-seventies, as a matter of fact. At that time, in fact, I visited right here in this studio. We talked about your papers and talked about sometime doing an interview, but for one reason or another, it didn't happen. Well, the advantage to that, as I mentioned earlier, is that a lot has transpired since then, which means we have a lot more to talk about. Anyway, we can't go backwards, and here we are. I wanted to start out by setting the stage for this interview. As I mentioned, Archive's [of American Art] interviews are comprehensive and tend to move along sort of biographical, chronological structure, at least it gives something to follow through. But what I would like to do first of all, just very briefly, is kind of set the stage, and by way of an observation that I would like to make, which is also, I think, a compliment. I remember one very early on, I think, it was in the mid to late seventies when I was thinking about there was a possibility of doing an interview with you, and even at one point we talked a little bit about a possible article, and it never came to pass. But it got me thinking at that time about you and how I would interview, and what I needed to try to ferret out, what I needed to discover. One of the things that struck me, and I still feel this way, is that despite the fact that in some ways your work seems to be iconoclastic, and has been described as coming out of Marcel Duchamp, and to have a sort of a Dada aroma to it, or a Dada interest and an interest in popular culture, certainly, looking even at the illustration in a comic book, and so forth, and this kind of humor. These are all observations that people have made, and it's a way of looking at your work that seems to disconnect it from a tradition, from art history. What I came to understand was that I personally didn't find it easy to understand your art, despite its, in some ways, accessibility and attractiveness. It was fun. I couldn't read it. And I think that that's an important word to introduce right off the bat, because you certainly were one of the artists who early on incorporated language, words into your imagery. It became like a fusion of words and puns and sayings with the images. I wasn't always sure I was getting it. What this made me realize is that you're a very complex person, and I think your art is very complex. This is just an observation I want to make to get us into our interview. Also, I wanted to mention this catalog for a little exhibition that was done at the [M.H.] de Young [Memorial] Museum. It was called "William T. Wiley: Nothing Lost From The Original." "William T. Wiley Looks At Art History." It was in 1996, a little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, an exhibition I saw. What was striking about it, and what I think may have surprised some people who knew something about your work, but maybe not in depth, was an obvious awareness of, and respect for, on your part, for art history, and for what we call the Old Masters, that, apparently, you saw yourself as connected to these traditions. I'd like to start out with that. Maybe you want to have something to say about that show and what it meant, and maybe about this observation that I just made--Bill Wiley and art history.

WW: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is just wanting to keep the experience, or the image, or the relationship to art, me, and life in some accessible tangible media. So, just common everyday materials, art that's been art for a long time. I wanted to work somehow and stay in that framework more so than into twentieth century televised digital framework. But as it turns out, you know, whether you enter into it or not consciously, you're already involved in it. But one connection--a little bit like Wendell Barry's essay of why he wasn't going to buy a computer. It has something to do with that, wherein he says the reason he won't buy a computer is it, first of all, would have to be an improvement on the pencil, which he doesn't think it is. But the most important reason, he would have to be able to fix it himself. So it's a kind of wanting to keep in touch with something that doesn't have anything to do with--

PK: Technology.

WW: --technology, I guess.

PK: Vulgarity in that sense. Technological vulgarity.

WW: I don't know if that's exactly. Maybe it's just wanting to stay in touch with something on some real intimate level that doesn't require any form of technology in some ways, not to lose some contact with whatever human beings find about that kind of exploration that's vital to being here from when we were first here. Charcoal and stuff, from the cave. Just wanting some kind of--there's so many things that want to be between you and that in some ways, I think, culturally and society things. So, the other part, as far the art history part, is, I guess sometimes people talk to me about it in terms of being eclectic and no one particular recognizable style evolving, which I thought for a long time should happen, and I still sometimes wish it would.

PK: You mean for you in your work.

WW: Yes. Sometimes I think of it in terms of language. It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with them. So any of those that I'm interested in to be available to me, and also want it to be available and some low technical, quickly adaptable means. And in another sense, just in terms of what the work's about--I was thinking about this. Well, in some ways, I know I've used this metaphor before. I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there. The imagery I find from various sources sometimes just kind of filtered through me and other artists, but sometimes more directly taken from a specific source, because I feel the imagery will convey what it is. I'm being a little bit like the Afterburner show, which got me off into really literally kind of translating from [Hieronymus] Bosch and [Pieter] Bruegel] who have been inspirational for me. I've just always been attracted to those people that are in the catalog there for all the various reasons. So I also see them as a little bit like helpers that also come to you at different times when you're struggling to be an artist, make images, stay in touch with that that I'm talking about, that various artists from the past, and sometimes more in the peer group will occur or give me an idea, a bridge, something. So I think a lot of the work is about homaging those connections, since we're all kind of basically involved in the same thing, putting up a blank of some kind and letting it or filling it in when things happen at that point.

PK: It seems to me, looking through this very nice little catalog, that you are especially attracted, have been especially attracted, to Bosch and Bruegel. I'm curious to know why that's so. What is it about them, or about the images, about the compositions, maybe the stories that they're telling, that resonates for you, in which you feel somehow connected?

WW: Gee, just some of the images in there are so potent, powerful. And I think there's some part of my person that is a recycled medieval--some connection with medieval art for a long time, just when I first saw it. I think it also has to do with--well, in this particular case, I mean, using the burning village after Bosch, just to mention a few. I never thought--I mean, I've been attracted to imagery and occasionally I've drawn from it, but I never thought I'd be painting these paintings. I didn't have any desire to. I didn't want to. I didn't think there was any reason to. Although I found just the colors and the strange imagery in Bosch, just the fantastic imaginative devices, the combinations--duck creature on ice skates, and so lovingly painted in some ways and the strange, kind of partial primitive quality through Bosch, less so in Bruegel. I just found all those things--maybe it has something to do with that Francis Bacon statement--not the painter, the other guy. "There's no thing of excellent beauty," something to this effect, "which does not have within it some proportion of strangeness." I think the same thing attracted me into [Giorgio de] Chirico. It doesn't look quite professional. It looks slightly untutored. So there's a little more edge to it. It's like if it gets better than that, it becomes acceptable in some way that the mind doesn't engage.

PK: Or maybe even becomes what they called at one time "mannered." It becomes about facility and style, rather than something more basic. Already I'm getting this feeling from what you say that part of what you seek, or are attracted to, is this connection with the almost first principles of art, and certainly in materials, you're talking about that. Of course, materials and use of materials in combinations and investigations has been very much a part of your work. You've been very open to that. But what interests me, as we talk, is that that seems to be within a basic, a broader structure, or perspective, that although appearing to break with these traditions, has them very much in mind, that they're very much present.

WW: Well, the interesting part for me with the Bosch and Bruegel things was, like I say, I drew them occasionally just for imagery, or not even really sure exactly why, other than I found it attractive, and I didn't need any more reason than that. That's enough. Somebody else can figure out the reason. I don't have to. Because you can lose a whole lot of time over that one. But the thing that brought it back to me in some way was my friend, Holbrook Teeter [phonetic], going to the Chernobyl area and sending me that material of the Afterburner show did with Rena [Bransten]--all this material, people living in heavily radiated areas and eating radiated food, and their psychological and physiological responses and coping. It was just absolutely stunning, devastating material. I immediately wanted to respond to it as, like, looking at the landscape and seeing a sunset that moves you. It was some part of the landscape. It was very overwhelming in a way, and moving. I tried a drawing and contemporary imagery thought, laser-beam writing, all seemed too--

PK: Contrived?

WW: Yes, contrived and beside the point. You would just [snaps fingers] add it right in. The material that he sent me just literally knocked me out. I was sitting on this couch and I read it and I tried to do the story and I couldn't. I wanted to do something. I was just really wanting to respond to that, and it just wore me out. I just fell over on the couch and went to sleep for about twenty minutes. When I woke up, the Bosch book was laying on the floor, and I opened it to that burning village. I said, "That's the imagery. What I just read is reflected here." And it started me thinking, well, the other things got into it, in terms of Bosch and Bruegel. I started to see it in the landscape here, walked down a San Francisco street and there's Bosch and Bruegel right there in front of me, a guy looking for a handout. And suddenly the streets of 1996 on the edge of millennium look a lot like medieval times to me out there--rocket ships, you know, and guys from medieval times all totally intermingled here in modern times.

PK: I didn't see the Afterburner show. Could you tell me just a little bit about that? Tell me again the name of your friend who put [unclear].

WW: Holbrook Teeter.

PK: What were the images, the kinds of images, that he sent that moved you?

WW: Here, let me find them. This is excerpts from Byelorussian Supplement to the Mental Health Promotion Manual: a Practical Response to the Chernobyl Tragedy, by Holbrook Teeter, November 1993. "Milk and Honey. We're in the village of Grebney [phonetic], deep in the contaminated zone. The village has 240 self-described forgotten souls. One and a half years ago, the evacuation order was received. Panic ensued and all activity stopped. The collective farm chairman said people had only one thing on their minds: the word 'radiation.' The chairman is young and energetic. He is determined, but no one knows what direction determination should take. Like the others, he left this open handsome village, but now he and his family have returned, living in the close quarters of a tiny apartment in the Mesa. 'The city was like living with garbage,' he said. Now he is back. He goes hunting in the forest. 'We will live here forever,' he says. But there is a problem in the forest. The physicist who led our group is a hunter, too. Last year he shot an elk, and he tested the meat. It exceeded the capacity of the monitor which is 9.999 units of radiation. This borders on the fantastic." Skip to another part. "A woman brings in honey to be tested, and the honey, however, was contaminated eighteen times the acceptable limit. The pregnant woman whispered to the Byelorussian psychologist on our team that she had been giving honey to her son as a cold remedy. Her family and friends had all eaten the honey. The physicist told her to get rid of it, they should not eat honey again, and they are to destroy all the hives. Quickly, and without a word, she turned and left the room." It talks about visiting a collective farm where a calf has been born with its organs on the outside. It can't stand up. It's so radioactive, nobody wants to touch it. Nobody will come and get it, because when they come through the dust, it raises all the radioactivity again. So he just describes this group of farmers standing around this dead calf, kind of silent, stricken, not knowing quite what to say. So it just goes on and goes on.

PK: I certainly get the idea.

WW: Testimony. So that's the initial drawing where I tried to draw and record some of this stuff, and then wasn't happy with that. Then got into the Bosch and Bruegel and some of those--there's Bruegel portrait in there. The title is, "We Eat the Berries and Blush." They're talking to one of the guys, one of the villagers. He says, yes, he still forages in the woods for mushrooms and berries. They said, "But don't you know the berries are heavily radiated?" He said, yes, he knew it, but he eats them anyway. When he said it, he blushed. So, some of those things surfaced in there.--

PK: Well, it seems to me that you, to a rather unusual degree, see the human story. It's premature to jump to these kinds of conclusions, but you see the human story and the march of history as very much of a piece, rather than in the old-fashioned modernist notion of progress, progress toward perfectibility, whether it's technological or social or anything like that. Because from what you said, and I think it's really interesting, you see, in the imagery that you were trying to seek out of written descriptions of Chernobyl, parallels, or connections, to imagery from the Middle Ages, the early Renaissance, that are of a kind. It appears to me that you're interested in extremes to a certain degree. Is that so? The extremity. And in this case, the consequence, the catastrophe from human, I suppose, arrogance, would be one way to put it. Then, of course, in the older times, this imagery that seemed so attractive to the surrealists, those who are interested in that kind of thing, was finally addressing religious issues, issues of sin, and consequences of sin. Am I over-interpreting this?

WW: Well, you're talking about them, I guess, not me. [Laughs]

PK: Well, no, but in your work it seems, at least to me, that this is a parallel interest, or exploration, or in your images these issues are present.

WW: Yes. Sure. Well, I think part of it is just the artist role. I think part of it is just that sensitivity and a whole lot of that which you don't see as being addressed in the world. It has to find expression somewhere, and artists often are where the shadow resides, where the thing that nobody wants to see is. It has to appear somewhere. I had a devil of a time getting that text published in that catalog. Rena didn't want to put it in there.

PK: Why?

WW: It's just too depressing.

PK: Rena said that?

WW: Yes.

PK: It seems to me it would have to be in there, because that was the impetus.

WW: You know, it's interesting in that people always want to know, where'd this work come from, or what stimulated the work, or whatever. And I said, "Here it is. I have it literally right here. This is what this work came out of, reading this text." I mean, it's part of the thing that the work, in a sense I just stated is about, is that people not wanting to look at the full picture, or deny it. It's denial of death.

PK: So you're dealing, in part, with, if I understood that, with the human capacity to not confront their world. The reality realm.

WW: Yes, if you want to present the full landscape, not some Walt Disney version of it, which is, with technology, where the world is heading ever faster into wanting the instant, always entertaining, digitalized reality there. So I think being an artist, or just being creative, or imaginative, or aware, right away, where I think everybody starts out, and by about the age of ten, that's been pretty effectively whipped out by education. All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. Somebody pointed out recently who wrote a book called, How to Drop Out of School and Get a Life, before your training starts, to be part of whatever the culture has decided you should be, you've got all the poetry and dancing and creativity and all that stuff, and seeing the world in a really full pageant rather than that kind of chopped, schizophrenic view that eventually is moved into place. Where all that part that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed. finally doesn't have any place to come out, except at McDonald's with an occa [phonetic], and you slaughter a whole room full of kindergartners, because you're living some life that's detestable and no longer fun or creative. Doing jobs you hate.

PK: Did you feel that if humanity is to be redeemed from whatever evils we're subject to, and many of our own doing, that it's necessary to reestablish contact with, as they say, the child? The pre-educated child, one might say. Aspects of human nature that have been programmed through education. Or another way to put it is with the primitive, with the basic, with the fundamental. Does that fit at all with your thinking?

WW: I don't know. Those words are so loaded. In some sense. A little bit like Suzuki Rosche's [phonetic] Beginner's Mind, but I think, at sixty, the child part--hopefully, just when you talk about the interviews, enough time has evolved, and you're still alive on the planet, that you can still be in touch with that and bring another dimension.

PK: Continuing this first session with Bill Wiley. Sorry, Bill, you were interrupted.

WW: Just thinking about, to not have access to that aspect of consciousness really reduces the quality and the experience of just having been alive on this planet. Of course, if you don't know that, then I guess you're not missing it.

PK: Well, isn't that maybe part of the artist's job, to make sure that you do know the story, at least help you to see in a way that well.

WW: Yes, but for that to be heard or make sense, there has to be a spark inside of the onlooker as well. If that's been shunted and buried, then it's not a real transaction taking place, or at least it's not a sole transaction taking place. It's something maybe more monetary, or social, or culture, but that's not probably really feeding the spirit, or the soul's [unclear].

PK: Well, it appears that spirituality in some form, or the spirit, the soul, this kind of ember, if you will, of humanity, is a concern of yours, and something that you, no doubt, want to touch on in your art, which is not always the case with many contemporary artists. It strikes me already, although I, again, don't want to jump ahead, because we have a lot of ground to cover, but it strikes me that it's not that you're unique in this, but these kinds of concerns seem to be very important to you, and seem that perhaps it informed your world view, and therefore your art for a number of years.

WW: Yes, very true.

PK: You certainly have a relationship to nature. It's always been there. I've known this from looking at your work. I don't want to sound pompous or corny, to say that it's like a tribute, or honoring Mother Nature, but it certainly comes through that for the human experience to be a successful one, for any chance for us really to continue, we need to pay attention to our own relationship to it.

WW: Yes. We sure neglected that, I think. Yes.

PK: We were talking a little earlier, and again, this is a theme I know that we're going to touch on and return to, so we certainly don't have to dispatch it, but lest I forget. When I first showed up here, I was looking around in the studio and glanced over at a work tacked to the wall down there, with old Mickey Mouse. We talked a little bit about Mickey, and I was telling you about my interviews that are going on right now with Llyn Foulkes [phonetic] in L.A., who has appointed Mickey Mouse, he calls him Mickey Rat, as the symbol of some of the evils that you identified, as well, but particularly corporate Disney, Disney as the evil empire, standing, of course, for an overwhelming corporate presence that seems to have imposed its own morality, if you will, its own terms on existence.

WW: Well, as Noam Chomsky--I mean, I'm kind of ignorant of lot of this stuff, but Noam Chomsky is very clear, I think, and he just pointed out real simply in some ways that corporations with all the advantages of an individual and none of the responsibilities. [Laughs]

PK: Well said. That's pretty straightforward.

WW: About as a clear as you can get it. So the whole Disney thing is really interesting, in a way, how that's so permeated life and the world and the planet. Well, the song. I love the song, it's a good song.

PK: Yes, what was that song that you mentioned earlier?

WW: Let me sing it for you.

PK: Oh, great. That would be terrific.

WW: Easiest way to remember it. This is a song that came through--started out, I was doing a painting called "Hinge," and what I thought was the total song turned out to be the chorus. It was about the time, I think, I first heard of cryogenics and that's where right at point of death the body is dropped sub-zero temperatures and entombed in a case. Anyway, I'll just sing the song. It's called Blind Mickey's Blues. In the vision I had when I was doing the painting, hearing about this, Mickey came to me older and blind and sang this little blues chorus to me. Later, about two, three years later, the rest of the song came, and the first part turned out to be the chorus. [Playing guitar] "Well, somewhere in the hills of California, deep underground, in a stainless steel container liquid nitrogen Walt Disney's buddy can be found. He's waiting for the resurrection and he hopes it's comin' soon. Meanwhile, there in the darkness, Walt, he's floating like a big balloon, and he's icy, too. [unclear] and he knows it. Took Uncle Walt's body and they froze it. Why, Mickey Mouse, didn't you know that I can see, whatever happened to Walt could have happened to you or me. Timothy Leary [unclear]. "Now, his mamma didn't know it, 'cause she was long since gone. His daddy didn't either, he'd already mingled with the lawn. Just his trusty keeper keepin' Walt real cold, keepin' that body frozen, so it will not get more old. I'm told he left a lot of money, here with me and you. Keep that body frozen now in that icy brew, they say it's true. [unclear] and he know it, yes. Took off Uncle Walt's body and they froze it. Oh, blind mouse you know that I can see, whatever happened to Walt, whew, happened to you and me. Mickey. "He wants to be revived one day. We can hardly wait. Technology will haul him back again for another dinner plate. Donald, Goofy, and Minnie, they'll be dancin' all around. Pluto, he'll be barking somewhere off in the background. What a happy day when Walt is back with us, humanizing animals and other fancy stuff. Old Walt's [unclear]. And that's enough. [unclear] and he knows it. Took Uncle Walt's body and they froze it. Bye, Mickey Mouse. You can see, what happened to Walt, whew, can happen to you and me. Baby. "How's this opera gonna end? We can only guess. If we don't keep old Walt real cold, it could be a mess. I'm glad he's gonna be here to speak right up for us about how we kept him frozen just to give him back to us, without much fuss. Sacred trust. [unclear] could we suppose it? Time came for Walt's body and unfroze him. I don't know what happened you know, 'cause I wasn't around. I wasn't rich enough to get frozen, so I just got stuck in the ground, under a little mound, without a sound. "Now, you know the story and what has come to pass. How we're using advanced technology to save Walt Disney's ass. Oh, what class. Permanent pass."

PK: [Applauds] That was great. Thank you. I love it. Boy, that sure fits.

WW: Tells the story. [Laughter]

PK: It sure does. Now I'm out of questions. Well, you see, that's what art does and music. It tells the story. I guess that's what this is all about. I'm going to, if you don't mind, play that for Llyn.

WW: Well, sure.

PK: I'm mean, he's going to absolutely love it. I swear, you guys have to get together. Anyway, it seems to me that at this stage in your career, a number of things that really matter to you have sort of surfaced, come to the core, or at least this is what I assume, because this often happens--how old are you now?

WW: I'll be sixty this month.

PK: Really.

WW: Yes.

PK: What day?

WW: Twenty-first.

PK: It's coming up. Well, happy birthday in advance. In fact, we're going to do a second session right about that time. I'll have to bring a cake. At any rate, I think the theme of our interview, as we continue it, is going to be, to a certain degree, maybe tracing some of these concerns and interests and themes that then have maintained themselves.

WW: I think pretty easy to trace in some ways. Part of it, I think, just growing up as a kid, spent a lot of time in the country, with animals. Had a horse, I guess about three different horses, through my dad, anyway, growing up. Dogs. I spent a lot of time outside playing and working, too. So I always had a strong connection. And lived, probably the longest time, in San Francisco when I was going to the Art Institute. Probably the longest city dwelling I've had. Really kind of a semi-rural or some area like that. So it's been pretty necessary to me. Not even that conscious of it, but just kind of gravitated over to Marin [County] when I could. Like access to the mountains and the beaches and all that stuff, important. But I think, as far as the concerns and regard to art, that started as a kid. Just like I said, I think most kids just like drawing and painting and wasn't discouraged, and got into drawing and comic books. As I mentioned before in interviews, Fred Harmond [phonetic], who did Red Rider, was kind of an early example of somebody who combined the life and his art work. I also was, at the time, very interested in horses. So here was kind of somebody who looked like he had worked it out. He had a ranch in Colorado and he drew this comic strip. The comic strip, I don't know about the stories, but the drawings were quite good. He was a good draftsman. He could really draw.

PK: I sure remember that. I used to read Red Rider and Little Beaver.

WW: Big frieze with lots of action and a little bit of the same quality of Will James. I don't know if he was the illustrator, but Smokey--somebody doing some very nice, kind of Frederic Remington kind of drawings in that. So, connected to those things. Then that teacher I had in high school, in Richland, Washington, McGrath [phonetic], that [Robert] Hudson and Al and I all had, kind of really focused some of the ideas in terms of art. McGrath's approach was very inclusive. There just wasn't anything ruled out as a potential art voice or poetry, dance, music. It could all--

PK: What was his name again?

WW: McGrath. James McGrath.

PK: Of course, there was also, although we'll get to him, McCracken [phonetic].

WW: McCracken was a friend of McGrath's. Yes. Phil McCracken. So that whole Northwest early experience, I think with McGrath specifically, were things like spiritual values and connection with the land, and I think a more pantheistic--not named in any kind of doctrinal sense or anything. I think those things intermingle, just because McGrath brought the environment, made me aware of the environment in some way there. The desert, which was kind of being used as--I didn't really know it at the time--a radioactive garbage dump.

PK: Oh, really. Up in Washington?

WW: Yes, Richland, Washington. It's one of the most polluted areas on the planet. It's so polluted, they don't think they can ever clean it up.

PK: Where is Richland?

WW: It's southeast corner, about thirty miles from the Oregon border, where the Yakima and the Columbia converge. It's where, along with Oak Ridge and New Mexico, where some of the first plutonium for the bomb was processed. My father was there working on construction, pouring cement. So, interesting. I mean, at the most advanced frontier of science research at that point, into that milieu comes McGrath, who, totally alive to the desert, brought native people in to lecture at the high school, and kind of brought the art world in some ways. Really an interesting man with a big range, inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness, and touched a lot of lives beyond the obvious people I've mentioned.

PK: So Bill Allen, was there, and Hudson as well? So it was the three of you, if I remember correctly, and then they actually kind of moved on as--

WW: We all three got scholarships to the Art Institute.

PK: Probably at a strong recommendation of McGrath, no doubt.

WW: Well, sure.

PK: Did he direct you there?

WW: He made us aware of the junior scholastic art competition. In that you can put together a portfolio, and on it you list your first five or six schools. I didn't have any particular direction. I mean, he had recommendations, and he thought [unclear] and the Art Institute, although it was called California School of Fine Art. Bill Allen, who I didn't really know very much in high school, I knew him through McGrath, I knew the work. I think I saw it in the art room. He had come to the Art Institute on a scholarship, and came back one Christmas, and knew Hudson and I were really interested in art and stuff, and recommended the school to us. Personal recommendation. And I said, "Yes, okay, I'll try for it." So that was first on my portfolio. I got down there on that same scholarship. Hudson came down as an alternate. He didn't hit it first off. I remember he phoned me. We were buddies. We hung out together in high school, went drawing and hiking and stuff together. So, looking forward for that to continue. He initially didn't get the first pick, but he was an alternate, and the guy dropped out, so he went on the same scholarship. So, yes, McGrath really helped that happen. Still in touch with him. He's still around.

PK: Really.

WW: Yes. He's still teaching. He teaches now. He went from there, he taught for the Army in Europe. All the American schools in Germany, Europe, he was doing that. Also taught at the Santa Fe Indian School. He's very interested in cross-cultural conversation and imagery. He teaches Arabia and he taught at Yemen. A lot of adult teaching. Children as well.

PK: Where is he now?

WW: His home base is in Santa Fe. Santa Fe, New Mexico.

PK: Gee, I wonder if I ever met him, because, you know, I go there--it's part of my territory. Lucky me. I wonder if--gee, I must. I know a lot of people there. I wonder if he knows Terry and Joe Harvey Allen?

WW: He knows of them through me, but he's been there a long time. He's often travelling. He knows some of the older people around Santa Fe, but he just knows of Terry and Joe Harvey. I don't know if they've ever met McGrath. Last time, Dorothy and I were still together, we were there, we went to see McGrath, he happened to be in town.

PK: I should look him up.

WW: Oh, yes. Really an interesting man, I think. Really creative.

PK: He sounds like it. Well, he also, obviously, played a very important role in the life and lives of three--

WW: And Dorothy, too.

PK: Really.

WW: Yes, he was Dorothy's high school art teacher. Yes.

PK: So you guys were in high school together, right?

WW: I didn't know Dorothy in high school. She was ahead of me. There's actually another McGrath student in Mill Valley, Jim Scoggins [phonetic], who's an architect. And a poet who's moved back up to Washington, William Winthrop [phonetic], a published poet. Another painter, John Houdsey [phonetic], who's in Portland now. Those are just some of the students I know that worked with him that are still--

PK: Extraordinary.

WW: Yes. He's really an extraordinary person. Just kind of hammering the basics again, he just had the belief and knew that everybody had an artist in them, and that it needed tending, that you needed to recognize that on some level. He didn't necessarily confine it to painting and drawing; it really was more a state of mind, I mean, something verging on Zen, although I don't think I ever heard the word "Zen." Maybe heard it in relation to Grades and Toby. But my first kind of run-in with that was at Paul Elders Books, which used to be on corner of Stockton and Sutter. I worked at Duncan Vail [phonetic], a little art store down mid-street. At noon, coffee breaks, I'd go up to Paul Elders and look through the art books and came across Paul Repps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones there. That was kind of my first significant encounter with Zen.

PK: I never saw that. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones?

WW: Yes.

PK: Paul Repps?

WW: Yes. Paul Repps. He died not all that long ago, and he had a wonderful statement. Before he died, he said his one ambition while he'd been here was to try to land a human being on Earth.

PK: Well, a lot of directions to go with this. What I would like to do, if I may, is now get very much into biographical, chronological mode. I would be really interested to hear about your own background, including your family and where you came from. Grandparents, perhaps. To get more of an idea of where Bill Wiley comes from, I guess. You were born--I forget, was it in--

WW: Bedford, Indiana.

PK: Indiana. What about your family, the things that you remember, where your ancestors came from?

WW: As far as nationality, Irish is the prominent nationality in the family, but beyond that, I really don't know. I knew my grandfather on my father's side. Never knew my grandmother, don't remember her. Knew a little bit more of my grandparents on my mother's side. I see a lot of influence coming, especially artistic or creative influence, coming through on that side of the family, because my grandfather on my mother's side, named Zabel [phonetic], he was a blacksmith. He was also a little bit of a musician and could draw some.

PK: This is your maternal grandfather?

WW: Grandfather, yes. Then one of his sons, my Uncle Marshall, took over the blacksmith shop. I had some kind of relationship with him, because I had a horse, and I used to take it in to be shod. I liked the blacksmith shop a lot and that whole, what was going on around there. It was attractive to me. My father really worked pretty much in construction most of the time, road-building and cement work, laborer, foreman, occasionally superintendent, usually running a crew, laborer. For a long time in Indiana, did a little surveying and some roadwork. Laid a lot of road in Indiana. Mother worked most of the time.

PK: What did she do?

WW: Generally worked in the bank. Teller.

PK: So was this a medium-size town, Bedford?

WW: Bedford, yes. Small, medium-sized Midwest town with a square.

PK: Fifty thousand, maybe?

WW: Gosh, now probably maybe 50,000. At the time probably a little smaller. And lived briefly in town, maybe the first five years of my life. Then somewhere around first grade, moved out into the country, a little five-acre farm.

PK: So you're a farm boy.

WW: Yes, basically. Although mini farm. My dad had been raised in a kind of partial rural atmosphere, so, horses and chickens and pigs and gardens, and, you know, things like that usually. Even Washington, later on, after we'd moved from Indiana, lived in a house trailer for a number of years. We sold the farm when I was ten and moved to the state of Washington, bought a house trailer.

PK: Why was that?

WW: I had an uncle, another uncle, who was in similar business, who also shared some interest in horses. He had a little pony ring outside of Bedford. I used to go over and break his ponies in the spring for riding for kids. Anyway, he'd decided to come to Washington because of Hanford, all the construction going on, the atomic stuff. Although this was after the war, moving into Atoms For Peace kind of syndrome. So, still people came from all over the United States. A huge trailer city. So we went out kind of following him, and just stayed a year. Actually, don't quite know why that was. But took off after a year, and ended up in Texas. Traded in the house trailer on a café and filling station about fifty miles south of Dallas.

PK: This is you and your folks?

WW: Yes.

PK: Do you have any siblings?

WW: My brother, yes. Five years younger than me, my brother, Chuck.

PK: What's his name?

WW: Chuck. Charles. So, ended up there for a year. We'll say that had a probably a little bit more effect on my artistic career, because I was still drawing. Actually, my parents, during that brief stay in Texas, which I sometimes forget about, did sign me up for an art course one spring there, that a lady taught privately in a little town, Corsicana. I can remember going for a few sessions and kind of doing these standard charcoal still-life renderings.

PK: That was your first formal training?

WW: Well, I messed around with it, you know, art, but it was just art classes. But, yes, that was something a little outside the usual, and a little unusual for my folks to do something like that, although they weren't particularly discouraging. My dad, once I got older in high school, and he saw I was really hooked on art, he had a lot of trepidation about it. He didn't know. If it had gone off into architecture, or drafting, or something practical--

PK: Professional.

WW: Well, it's just he didn't have any relationship to fine arts, other than the standard cliché artist star, "They're no good," blah, blah, blah. So he was highly suspicious of that as something I was going to survive on.

PK: Well, that was interesting then that they started signing you up for--

WW: Yes. Well, my mother was basically supportive through all that, soft-pedaled the practical. "Don't worry and just go ahead and try and do what you want and try to satisfy both things, your father, and get good grades." But as it turned out, he got me in the labor union. I worked on construction all the time I was going to school in the summer.

PK: Sounds like he was pretty supportive, basically.

WW: Basically.

PK: Given the natural limitations.

WW: I knew they loved me and cared for me.

PK: That's what matters most.

WW: Yes.

PK: Continuing this first session of interview with William T. Wiley. Bill, we now have you as a youth, I guess about eleven or twelve years old, in Texas, some town--what was it, below Dallas somewhere?

WW: Yes. Really the closest town was one called Rice, which was about a mile off the highway. It lay almost in the middle between Corsicana and Ennis. Those were the two towns of any size. We had a little café and filling station and house, and, actually, a little bit of land. I had enough for a horse there. My dad bought a beautiful little filly. Bought off a truck going to a slaughterhouse. Never actually got to totally mature that horse, because we moved again.Those summers between moving to Indiana, I think another important thing in terms of my work, my imagery, my exposure to language, and some of the pun stuff, and all that thing, came from between Indiana and Washington, travelling out there, very important, just everything you kind of encounter along the way. And then from Washington to Texas, the whole summer was spent travelling. My dad really was looking for, what he ended up buying in Texas, his own business. Had things been better business-wise in Texas, we might have stayed there, but the business wasn't that good. And water was a real problem there.

PK: Was it a drought?

WW: Just low water table and not much water yearly. So we had a lot rain barrels and things which captured a lot of water that you used.

PK: Were you on a highway there?

WW: Yes, it was the main highway between Houston and Dallas, Highway 50, I think it was. Yes. When you were mentioning Spike Jones, I saw Spike Jones at the Dallas State Fair one year. Spike Jones--it's funny, you know, the connections, the cross connections there [unclear]. My uncle, the blacksmith uncle, loved Spike Jones and I got first exposed to Spike Jones records and stuff in Indiana. A fun connection. But, yes, the summers in between Texas and Washington, and in between Texas and California, ended up spending time outside Visalia, California, in another trailer. We traveled a lot, mainly through the South, Midwest. Probably the only states we didn't get into were the New England states. But all the other states, Florida and all through--

PK: Where does this wanderlust come from?

WW: He was looking for another form of work besides construction and to, I think, be in his own business. Cafés-filling station combinations and motels, we looked at a lot along the way. Generally, moving on, but school year finally coming down and making a decision. Well, we had the trailer and here's the café, and they made a deal, and so off we went to school. But then at the end of the year, sold it and took off again. Ended up in California for a year.

PK: How long were you in Texas then, actually?

WW: A year.

PK: Just a year.

WW: Yes.

PK: So you really got moved around a bit.

WW: Yes, fifth grade in Washington, sixth grade in Texas, seventh grade in California, and then back to Washington again for the eighth grade.

PK: That was in Visalia?

WW: In California, yes. Just outside of Visalia.

PK: Then one year, and then back up to Richland?

WW: Yes, Richland. But as I say, I think important just in terms of my development, my exposure to things, those summers travelling. Actually, when you wanted to be outside playing, having spent the year inside school, summertime, have to climb in the car, and that was hard. But I think a lot of the artistic interest and reading filled in a lot of time there, and even music. Kind of taught myself to play the harmonica. So that kind of enforced period also caused other certain things to happen.

PK: So this was the way you would entertain yourself and fill your time. Did you stay at campground-type places?

WW: Yes, when we had the trailer. Yes.

PK: So it was really kind of a gypsy life, almost.

WW: Yes, a little bit.

PK: Which sounds romantic, but I guess for a kid it's not.

WW: It had both pros and cons, good and bad stuff. But I think a lot of this stuff with messing around with language and a lot of the humor in things, you run into that a lot in that on-the-road kind of [unclear].

PK: Again, a way of passing the time and entertaining.

WW: Narrative stories. You pick up a lot of that. And in the café itself, operating that for a year, you're kind of privy to a kind of theater. You're behind the counter there and these characters come and go.

PK: God, this sounds like a Sam Shepard play or something like that to me.

WW: Yes.

PK: Real middle-American blue-collar experience.

WW: Yes.

PK: Would you describe that pretty much as your background?

WW: Yes. Very much so.

PK: What did you read? I'm real interested in this. The growing interest in literature, or in stories anyway, if not literature. Do you remember?

WW: Yes. I was into reading pretty early, and some through parents and some through gifts from people. I had Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer pretty much under my belt, probably at the right ages. Being interested in animals, a whole series of books by a woman, I'm not sure of her name, but they were historical novels. A woman writer. Since I was pretty involved in horses--a series. One was called Misty of Chincoteague, and it was based on those islands off the coast of Virginia that have wild ponies. Every year they bring them across. So that one, and another wonderful book, King of the Wind, which was based on how Arabian horses and European horses interbred.

PK: I think I know that.

WW: Yes, I can't think of her name. Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. Interesting. I think in school there, too, a couple of teachers, end of the day, if everybody had been good, would read you a story. My mother read to me as a kid, The Yearling.

PK: Oh, yes. I loved that. Marjorie Kinnon Rawlings.

WW: Yes, beautiful illustrations. Those big N.C. Wyeth kind of--I don't know if he was the illustrator or not, but they had that kind of quality to them.

PK: Maybe an edition. Certainly, though, some of the Robert Louis Stevenson. I don't know if you ever read any of those.

WW: Yes.

PK: Wyeth did wonderful illustrations for those.

WW: Right. So that's another, I think, important art and literature. I've mentioned that in other interviews, kind of looking at pictures while you listen to words, before you're able to read. So, I guess, intermittent exposures do some really good, interesting books, kind of haphazardly in some ways. Then on my own, just by sheer accident, stumbled into [J.D.] Salinger, as a junior in high school, yes. The only reason I got it was I thought it was going to be a little sexier than it was, because it was something about a young boy's underground adventures in New York. I was about to take a bus trip to see my girlfriend, who had moved to the coast in high school, and the cover had been double printed, so it had a jitter to it. Catcher In The Rye. Strange title. So I picked up that and somebody else. I was already into [John] Steinbeck. I bought Of Mice And Men. I climbed on the bus and rode over to the coast and read Catcher in the Rye on the way, and just kind of flipped out. I mean, it was a really interesting encounter with that at that point, just perfect. But there wasn't anybody to talk to about it, because nobody had read it. I didn't run into it again until I got to the Art Institute and it was assigned [unclear].

PK: Of course, that was like a generational, almost [unclear], Catcher in the Rye.

WW: Yes.

PK: I certainly remember that. Did you identify with it in anyway, beyond just enjoying the story? I mean, did it suggest--

WW: Well, the multifaceted aspects of it, and the other members of the Glass family. I found it, in some ways I probably couldn't have articulated at the time, but just the implications, the intellectual aspects of it, symbolic stuff. The language, just his entering into that kid that he created there, I suppose himself, Holden Caulfield. And it being pretty much outside of my particular field of experience at that point, but still able to connect with it. And the poetry of how he wrote it in some ways.

PK: It's interesting that you were--well, not necessarily surprising, but attentive to these kinds of qualities that the writing itself, that there were differences, which, of course, is obviously a literary notion, but that some stories simply are told better than others, and the aspect of that kind of enhancing communication. Maybe drawing the reader or the viewer in. You mention Steinbeck, and I can't help but think, although I'm not citing your situation was at all the same, but the itinerant kind of experience, the experience of moving around, searching, seeking, more better opportunity, a business as your dad was. Did you--I'm sure you read Grapes of Wrath? Did you identify in any way with that?

WW: Oh, to some degree. Yes, it wasn't totally a foreign experience to me having worked farm work in Washington. Of course, I was--well, that was about the same time doing some of that picking stuff and working in fruit-picking and so forth. So, yes, I could identify with it to some extent. Dad was a little bit at the time in science fiction. Isaac Isomov. But not very much, actually.

PK: Did you read any [Robert] Heinecken, by any chance?

WW: No.

PK: I used to like Heinecken.

WW: No, just Isaac Isomov, I. Robot, I remember I read that. Oh, I know, probably the next guy when we were still driving around, reading was important, Ray Bradbury.

PK: Yes.

WW: Very important, interesting writer there for me at my age at that point.

PK: It really is interesting to me what it is that draws us as individuals, and, to a certain extent, an age group, to certain writers or certain stories. When you're a kid, you certainly aren't concerned with the list of great books or anything like that. It's got to work.

WW: Yes, it's got to connect.

PK: It's got to connect. Have you analyzed, at all, in your own experience in that respect--you've gone down a list of books, and actually explained why, in many cases, they were appealing to you. But do you remember how they worked for you, in what way, what it was? Was it creating a world that became your world that you could enter into by opening that book?

WW: I'm not sure. Yes, I think it's voyeurism on some level. It's like experience, vicarious experience. I was thinking, just recently I read Robin Davidson's Desert Places. The first book of hers I read was one called Tracks, where she took camels from Alice Springs to Perth.

PK: Oh, yes. Yes.

WW: In this most recent book, she's travelling with some of the last nomadic tribes in India. It's one of those books like the one I read when I was in Australia, Antarctic exploring. Just one of those books, I was glad she was taking the trip and I was experiencing it through her, rather than me being there with the nomads. [Laughs] It's amazing how literature, in that sense, when you're reading something you really connect with, it becomes part of you, becomes part of your experience to some degree, and maybe in some ways even more so than your actual experiences. I heard somebody explaining that the other day. Their reason for--they said, here you live sixty, seventy, eighty years, what do you remember of it? Pretty gappy, you know. So what's the good of all those experiences, if you only remember a dozen or so when you think back? And why do you remember those over some other experience, this particular one where you can name this and this? Why really is that one, and some really insignificant are locked in? Why am I thinking that again? The time somebody stuck their head around the corner and said, "Cuckoo." Why am I plagued by that memory? Anyway, they were speculating that those things you can recall that way were when you were fully present, that Zen totality present, that all your consciousness was there in some way, and so really you can re-illuminate that, because you weren't partially there, like we are most of the time.

PK: Like most of the time. I gather the connection then with reading, with literature, with fiction, is that, in fact, if you're drawn into the story, you are entirely there. Perhaps as you suggest, more so than most of the--which is an interesting--that's a pretty interesting philosophical question, because how is your reality and memory constructed. If it's through books, to a large extent, it's through others' stories, not your own. Although, of course, you adopt them. Let me carry that idea just a little bit further in connection with you and your art, because it seems to me, to a degree, your reality, and that is the images, or your artistic expression, is constructed from--and I don't want to say appropriated, because that's the post-modernist term, and we don't need to use that necessarily--but really is drawn--if you look around you, as we all do, and then draw on these various elements, bring them together to create the world according to Bill Wiley, which, of course, is your right, but it is interesting to consider how much of that may be drawn from other people's stories, perhaps Mr. Bosch and Mr. Bruegel. Where that leads us, I don't know, but it certainly makes you question the notice of autonomy, individual autonomy.

WW: Yes. Well, some of those twin studies they've done, the guys separated at birth and end up picking the same town to vacation in. The only reason they found each other is they both chose the same barber. He said, "No, you know, I cut your hair yesterday. It can't grow that fast." They both married, I think, women with the same name. They both had dogs that were the same. They both named their dogs the same name, Toy. Not Spot or Fido. Toy. They both flushed the toilet before and after they pissed. I mean, it just went on, on, on, right down the line.

PK: That really is, of course, extraordinary. I've heard of things sort of like it, but that sounds like a pretty extreme example.

WW: Yes, this was documented. Just really vastly similar.

PK: What about in art, though, since we're on this subject, sort of musing about it, I guess, but this idea, this phenomena we're discussing in fiction, in reading, where we, in some cases, maybe even get confused eventually about what our own experiences were, because they're so colored and conditioned. There are so many elements that we've drawn from literature.

WW: Boy, I run into a lot. I can remember certain things that happened a minute ago, but my memory since--especially things for songs, for voice, "You've got a phenomenal memory, you can remember that. When did you last sing that?" Twenty years ago. Yes. So the thing that's surprised me, among a number of friends, John Houdsey for one, who come back and tell me things that they remember, and they've remembered them wrong. Things they think they said that I said and vice versa, and if I didn't have such a keen memory for that, for some of those things, I would go along with it, but, you know, immediately know that it wasn't you who said that, I said that. But it's totally blurred, and people attributing things to me that I, "No, I didn't say that. I know that I didn't." So in some ways it doesn't matter, it all gets moved around where one wants it, in a sense.

PK: Well, now I think that's for sure. Everybody knows about selective memory, which, of course, is entirely self-serving, all of this is. We want to create a satisfactory world around us, not just the world around us, but our own history, if that's possible.

WW: Right.

PK: It's a kind of revisionism. It's why maybe we like to go back to reunions sometimes to, well, to get another chance, to project back in time and improve.

WW: Well, some psychiatrists say that you can do that if you can literally get yourself in the mood to whatever it is in the past that debilitated you. If you can get back there, you can literally relive that and relieve yourself of that anxiety. I heard her try to do it with somebody on the radio one time, who couldn't give it up. Said, "Now's your chance. We're back here in time. You can change this." They couldn't see--it was an interesting [unclear]. They couldn't let go of the thing. Which makes me think in some way real recently in Gerchef [phonetic]. He says, "People give up everything but their suffering." [Laughs] Absolutely refuse to give up the suffering.

PK: I suppose, although, let's bring it back to you, if we may. You mention that there are actually precious few things that you remember very well, and it has to do with this phenomenon of being totally present, or at least this is one explanation, and that gets imprinted. We, of course, then by a process that we certainly can't fully understand, do select. What about you? What are some of those few moments for you that really are vivid from the past?

WW: Gee, there are so many. [Laughs] Which to pick? The thing that's most prevalent in my mind now more than that, what we're talking about, is history, revisionist history, hearing Howard Zen one day on the radio, who has written a book called The People's History of the United States. He says as a young man growing up he'd always been interested in history and followed it up in college, and finally realized in college that year after year they'd publish these history books, new history books, and they all say the same thing. Not only that, they're all wrong. [Laughs]

PK: Well, he's right, it gets reinforced.

WW: So he said he decided to write a history book, instead of from the top looking down from the bottom, looking up. So he wrote The People's History of the United States.

PK: What's his name?

WW: Howard Zen. He said that a high school teacher up in Oregon now uses his history book to teach history with. He walks around his class, and he sees a girl's purse laying on her desk, and he takes it, and she says, "Hey, you took my purse". He says, "No, I discovered it". [Laughs] He says then, he, Howard Zen, gets all these crazed letters from high school students saying, "Where do you get this stuff? I never heard anything like this before." He says, "It's easy. Columbus's diary. It's there. It tells what he did to the Indians." So the whole idea of history and what one remembers, and what we think went on, and what actually went on, and what did actually go on. [Laughs]

PK: That's a collective, or sort of cultural, or rather society's collective memory, which, as we're talking about it, seems to me, not at all unlike what we've described as happening with the individual, that it gets reinforced. Information is brought back to us. Our own memories fail. We then rely on other people's accounts. But I ask again, I'm just curious, if there are certain things that really are more vivid for you from any stage of your lifethan others. Those things that, what should we say, in some ways you carry with you then as maybe even determining moments, but at least identifiers for you at certain times.

WW: Sure, yes.

PK: Can we turn the tape over? I don't want to get you in the midst of something and have to cut you off. Okay.

WW: Sure.

PK: Continuing the interview with Bill Wiley. I prematurely turned this tape over, because I didn't want to interrupt you. I'm trying to get you to share some, what should we say, significant memories following in this line of thought about how some things that we carry, they get more impressed when we carry them.

WW: Yes. We look at our own stupidity in terms of relationship to life, to each other, to the planet. How can you know, really, that the one's you think are significant are the ones that are really the directing forces? Probably the ones that you're not paying any attention to, or that you don't know really how they're operating in your life, though it's really shaping you. The easiest thing to respond to in that sense is just, well, when I was thirty and ran into an art wall, and kind of changed my relationship with art and myself, and started doing watercolors and then narrative, and that kind of thing. That's an easy kind of epiphany, significant in my own development, you know, which happened roughly thirty years ago. That was very significant.

PK: Do you explain it to yourself in anyway, though? What is your understanding of why?

WW: Of why that took place?

PK: Yes.

WW: Oh, I think maybe--I don't really know. Could be just some inevitable point that one reaches in regard to the inner self and the outer self, all the kind of things you've accumulated up to that point. I think, probably, chronologically thirty, it's about when you're no longer the boy. Supposedly these chronologically "more the man." "I ain't a kid no more" kind of thing. In some ways you start to get that advantage of what we're talking about, starting out with, not doing the interview at thirty, more interesting to do it at sixty. Orson Welles said, "Youth only knows youth, but age knows youth and age." Of course, that's another selective, selective term. But I think it was just an inevitable point in my own personal development that I really was just trying to--and a lot of it focused on the art, the art void. What is the art to be about? What is the subject matter? What are my concerns? I think it was just reaching some point where just making art, without knowing why, or just the raw impulse, was finally in question. I didn't know why I was making it, or what for, and went through the first probably real crisis of "Maybe I'm not an artist. Maybe I'm not going to be painting and drawing for the rest of my life like I'd always imagined I was." Here I'd had a year off from [University of California-] Davis, I got a Creative Arts grant, and was real dissatisfied with my work. There was stuff there that wanted to get through, and I'd had some success with it. It wasn't that it hadn't been recognized or responded to--it had--but I wasn't happy with my relationship with it.

PK: This was around '67?

WW: '67, '68. I ended up spending that winter, I first went to Europe for the first time and spent some time travelling there. Although I'd shown in New York, I had never been there, so I decided I should go. Also made some friends at that point, knew a couple people there. So Dorothy and I and the kids spent the winter, rented a place outside of New York, actually. Had studio space. Summer rental through the winter. So in that period of just kind of a blank, okay, I gave--it's a surrender point, I think. "Okay, I'm not supposed to be an artist. I'll give up on that idea. What now?" Fortunately, the urge to work came back, and the way to work, and what the work would be about became evident and obvious in kind of simple narrative, almost comic book kind of way. That's where it just sort of came back again. As I said many times, because I've talked to people and students about it, it was just a very simple kind of straightforward relationship with art again. Not very complicated. Just doing something I loved doing. Doing it simply and not too complicated, very small scale. There again, the kind of low-tech materials was important in a way. Some non-high art aspirational, watercolors, old ladies, delicate stuff. They just didn't have any high art, like oil painting. I didn't work in oils at that point, so you know, big canvas was serious stuff.

PK: You'd just been doing a lot of sculpture before that?

WW: No. At the Art Institute, I worked a lot in oils, got out, and again built up a habitual relation, a certain way of working with oils that I kept falling into. Acrylics came out about that time, and I just kind of forced myself to work with acrylics to get rid of some of the habits that I'd built up with working with oil. Went to a small scale, actually, with the acrylics and masonite, kind of a hardwood thing, trying to just break out of certain habits and certain imagery that I was tired of, or stuck with, or whatever. Felt it was derivative, or whatever. So, just messing around with it. Kind of fooled around with constructions off and on all the way through there, but they never were ever quite under the same focus as painting or drawing was. It was more like recreation.

PK: It's interesting though, because that, certainly for some, became a Wiley signature, some of those pieces. I'm not even sure construction--of course, that's the word. Well, I mean, God, if you look around your studio, it's all over the place. Yet I can think of--well, unfortunately, my memory is going, I can't think of names of specific works right now. But there's one that for a long time was on exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

WW: "Ship's Log."

PK: "Ship's Log." So, for many visitors to the museum, at any rate, that would be the Wiley they knew. So it's interesting to hear you say that, in a sense, this was almost a sidebar.

WW: Yes, but I also enjoyed it and wanted to keep it in that category. I wouldn't drag the same concerns from--one's serious and one's for fun. Although that was more of an intellectual thing than actual, because either could be either, and I'd also watch them change places. But a part of it is just avoiding the identification so you don't get caught in the traffic of identification. You do anyway. You get typecast to some degree.

PK: How did you know to turn to these almost, as you said, almost comic book or comic strip images, simple, you know, out of democratic, popular culture sources? How did it come? Did this just happen naturally? It's interesting that that then was your way out of this era of self-questioning, trying to reconnect with art and why you're an artist. Do you remember? Is that part of this vivid memory, part of why that watercolor, but why that kind of imagery?

WW: Well, I think, again, it relates to early exposure. Perhaps if I hadn't been read from those particular books, Red Rider, those comics hadn't been around, if I instead had had a European childhood and been taken to the Louvre, it might, as Bob Johnson says about, who was it, [Eugène] Delacroix or somebody in here, that made all the difference. His father took him and the brother to the Louvre, I think it was. The brother slid on the floor, and he looked at the pictures and that made all the difference. Who knows? I might have been the one sliding on the floor. Boy, interesting in that thing of what breaks through about art. Well, to finish up your question, there again, the materials were simple and available. I never really worked with watercolor very much. It had been oil paint. I messed with water-based paints in high school and stuff, and out of the Northwest that was a more acceptable tradition as a main voice, you know, with Graves and Toby.

PK: Also a smaller scale.

WW: Smaller scale, as well, yes. Coming to the Art Institute, if you were going to be serious, it had to be big and bold. That's pretty much out of the modernist, [unclear] view in some ways. But with the McGrath background, inclusive, not exclusive, always other voices happening in there that weren't being paid attention to, weren't being honored. So it was struggle to, what am I going to do with those? Try to edit them out? So, a whole lot of that was just acceptance, self-acceptance. I think the comic book thing, just because it was the easiest way to deal with it. It was the simplest. I could just simply compose a picture and make it about whatever was foremost on my mind at the time, and do it in the most obvious, kind of simple, straightforward way. If anything was complicated about it, I dropped that out, because I didn't want it to be that kind of angry angst sort of experience making art. Enough of that. Enough suffering over--

PK: Well, you said earlier that most of our memories, that which we keep, seem to have to do with suffering. Here's clearly a case where you didn't want that to be so. You wanted to find a way to turn your back on that. Did you then start your journals about that time?

WW: Yes, more specifically. I kept them a little bit before that, because McGrath, that was one of the graduation gifts he gave you, was a sketch book that he urged you to write and draw in. I had, kind of haphazardly over time, dabbled in that. But the writing became a real accompaniment at that point, yes.

PK: It seems to me, Bill, and I've always thought that, in looking, seeing your journals, that they were very direct, personal expression. What you've described, that makes all kind of sense for me, your interest in image and text. Although that's a fancy way to say it, but we know what we mean: pictures and words. This seems to grow out of your very early interests and experience. It sounds as if, at this moment of crisis, where you're struggling with ideas of high art, and maybe a little bit of the artificiality or the danger of becoming artificial, that what you turned to was that which was most authentically you from your own experience. You know, make it simple, get honest.

WW: Yes, remove all the--because also the art and technology was kind of a real crux. Gee, do I have to get rid of all this stuff and get vacuuming forming machines and--

PK: Oh, right, exactly.

WW: --high tech, laser, television sets, and all that stuff? I thought, I don't think so. Maybe, but I'm going to try this first. Just wanting the experience to be more first-hand and more available, and no technological excuses one way or the other in some ways.

PK: Well, it seemed to have served you well, this crisis, this epiphany that you had. It also underlines what, seems clear to me, is this personalism in your work. That's a much talked about thing now, of course. In our era, as an aspect of post-modernism, autobiography and personalism, but sometimes, frankly, this gets, at least in my judgment, it's in the hands of a skilled artist, pretty cloying. Pretty annoying, as a matter of fact. In your case, it seems to fit comfortably within some bigger ideas about what art, what you said, a responsibility of art. What I'm trying to say is, it doesn't seem to be just strictly and exclusively about you.

WW: Right.

PK: It's a way for you, yourself, and in using the tools that are familiar, and the images, to confront things that are more universal and matter more. But I shouldn't be saying that; you should be saying that. Sorry. [Laughs]

WW: That's okay. In some way it's part of the landscape, and how to fit it in in some way that I believe. I think often, occasionally, the art part gets sacrificed for the message. I can't think of some good art. It's like it worked out good, I think, with the Afterburner thing. This is mingling a number of things that I'm not too happy with at this point, but I don't know quite yet how to say it. So even if the art doesn't turn out good sometimes, I think the message matters a whole lot. I'll let it survive on that level.

PK: Well, that certainly is an assumption of much conceptual art. Frankly, I don't have very thrilling, esthetics experience in connection with much conceptual art, and you have to then just say, okay, the message, or the concept, is really what it's all about, and has some beauty, or at least significance to it.

WW: To continue to say it in that same voice over and over again with slight variations loses me. You know, one was enough. [Laughs] I'm sure people feel the same about mine. But it just gets too repetitious, too boring. Starts to enter into some stream that I can't depict it any longer or something. So, it's interesting, a lot of things that used to stop me in museums and I pondered, don't anymore.

PK: Really? Like what? What do you mean? Anything that comes specifically to mind?

WW: Yes, most of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the last time through. I wasn't very interested to begin with. There was a huge Cy Twombly retrospective going on there. The blackboard Cy Twombly, those slowed me down.

PK: I saw that show down at MOCA in L.A., I think. You like those?

WW: Yes, they still--as I went through the show, those slowed me down. They looked as good to me as they did when I first saw them. I thought it was because I liked blackboard. There, again, it relates to me. It's something that I've, imagery that I've--but most of it didn't. Not to deny whatever achievement that I have responded to his work off and on over the years. But that whole museum full of it sure was not very much to hold me back in there. I have to put a lot of things back into context before I'll stop paying attention to them, in terms of the content or whatever it was I used to respond to. If I couldn't open a history book of my mind there with it, the piece itself wouldn't hold me.

PK: Interesting.

WW: Interesting. Chirico stopped me, made me go look at it. One early Jasper Johns piece. The piece itself somehow was interesting to me. I picked three or four very early Francis Bacon, one of those just barely, drawn on canvases, [unclear] and [unclear], one of those. Then a little show--I was real dissatisfied. I was just, "Ehh. Modern art. Oh, what a waste of time." Then just as I was leaving, I saw a little room full of Ray Dunes [phonetic]. A show of Ray Dunes' lithographs.

PK: Good old symbolism.

WW: Yes, and suddenly I was in there. "Well, maybe this is why I came to the museum today." So, different things from history and time and stuff. That's been kind of happening for the last ten, fifteen years. I go to see one thing, and then something else that totally turns me around, not the thing I went to see.

PK: What you're saying has some interesting implications or possible ramifications. We were talking about some of the Old Masters. We were talking about two things. The Museum of Modern Art is, of course, the canonical history of modernism according to certain views, sort of New York, European point of view. That, frankly, can get, I think, a bit stale. It's being questioned. Certainly it's being expanded, the notions of what modernism is and varieties of expression that didn't quite fit. But, nonetheless, this is supposed to be the art of our time, that which we naturally respond to. What you're saying, I think is very true, is being more and more readily acknowledged, that it doesn't have to be of a piece and engage our interest or attention, artist by artist, work by work. Then we were talking earlier about some of the Old Masters. I guess I would ask the question, then, if you went to the Met or to the Louvre or even to the de Young or Legion, you know, an historic collection, do you find that your interests are holding more or less with these admired figures--Bosch, Bruegel, Degas? You can see where my question is leading.

WW: Yes. Interesting, because I think when I was in school studying art, I wasn't interested in anything in the past. I was only modern. Now that I'm modern, I'm looking at a lot of stuff right here I never paid any attention to before.

PK: Sounds rather perverse on your part. [Laughs]

WW: Well, I'm pretty perverse. [Laughs] Mr. Cantankerous. Mr. [unclear]. Yes. So I think probably part of the reason is just--well, part of it's perverse. [Laughs]

PK: Maybe a need for change, too.

WW: Yes, sure, and having not looked at those things. Then the other part, too, is, what would I go look at? I mean, if I lived in Vienna it would be one thing. I don't. I looked at a lot of reproductions mostly, so I don't look at actual work. Things that inspire me most are reproductions and, of course, the overall sense of what somebody's works about or whatever. But in the Bosch and the Bruegels, it's those cropped version of the works I'm really interested in, whereas the whole work, like in "Temptation of St. Anthony" or "Garden of Delights," it might be a yawn, but getting down into--mainly that's a more modernist thing, what happens compositionally there. It starts to bring something back in that I'm interested in doing.

PK: I was going to ask if one of the reasons for the greater attraction now, some of the Old Masters, older art, as opposed to the modernist canon, might not have to do with the--well, at least with much of modern art--the rage for abstraction, for non-objectivity, and distillation, which, of course, we were beat over the head with that for quite a while. You were in school when that was happening. But Mr. Greenberg and Company, and you know, the formalist concerns. Not that all--I mean, that's not even the majority of twentieth century art. But I'm wondering if you, we, many of us, certainly you, don't find ourselves attracted to stories, even if we don't know what the story is. This is a true human experience. The comic books told stories. Bosch. I'm looking at a Goya up there. I don't have my glasses on. That's a cyclops, isn't it? I think.

WW: He's not cyclopean, but it's [unclear].

PK: Anyway, here we see these, and, of course, they're horrific in a sense, but they draw us in. I'm thinking that throughout the history of art, that which has moved us naturally has to do with a kind of illustration. I mean this in the highest sense--myth. Can be myth, legend, and maybe we are--God, this is a long question. Sorry. Maybe we are drawn then finally here at the end of the twentieth century, the post-modernist era, if you will, back to the kind of imagery which truly communicates, and where you don't need to read the progress of modernist art history to assign importance. Sorry about that long--what do you think?

WW: Well, for a while when this started to happen to me and I saw I was becoming disenfranchised from a lot of modernist work and thought, it got real simple for me, just in terms of like intuition. I'd kind of go into a room, and almost like a bee waiting to find out where the pollen really was. Not in terms of art, but in terms of what I needed to feed me. Actually, the nice part of that changeover that took place at thirty, although it's not so much in operation now, but I gave up judgment. I quit judging stuff, and I'd just go feed where the food tasted good, and I didn't bother on trying to eliminate anything else that didn't seem relevant. I'm still not quite in that frame of mind, but I can get there, and that's good. So, for a while, when I explain it to myself, it was that the art that was stopping me was art that was inspired by something. You couldn't not go ahead and say it. It wasn't just because you were making another painting, but the experience, whatever it was, had to find some other reflection out there and in those things would contain that imagery. Of course, they'd stop you, if you were a little bit awake or not already predetermined as to what you were gonna see. Anybody that walked into a room and told you something that really mattered to them, you would pay attention to some degree. It would be hard to ignore it, if it came out of something that literally was inspired. But if it wasn't, you know, you'd "uh-huh." There would be some frames of mind where somebody could be telling you something just absolutely be captivating, horrific, and you're not available for it. So that was part of the--

PK: Here we are again, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, continuing an interview with William T. Wiley. This is session two, October 30, 1997. It's been several weeks since we last met. The interviewer for the Archives is Paul Karlstrom and this is tape one, side A. Once again, in Mr. Wiley's studio in Woodacre. Last time we ended up having some what I thought were very interesting discussions about books and about memory. Certainly we weren't just doing a nice chronological story of your life and career. It seemed to me that we ended up pretty much in the late sixties, maybe moving a bit into the early 1970s. The one thing that seemed really important in that narrative was what you described as a kind of crisis in 1967, '68, you placed it, where you were actually asking yourself, in effect, "Am I really an artist. Why am I making this stuff?" You had that kind of, I guess, a crisis maybe in confidence or direction, which we did talk about a bit, we could talk about it a little more. But one thing that occurred to me, or I noticed, was that it was a pretty important exhibition in 1967 organized by good old Peter Selz, and that was the Funk show at the University Art Museum. You were in that. In fact, I would say prominently in that, along with a number of your colleagues. It was clearly an effort by Peter, and I don't know if there were others involved in sort of dialogue or discussion, or even how much the artists were involved, but it seemed, in retrospect, like an effort by Peter to identify and describe and group different activities and artists, but within this rubric "funk." I would love to hear what you remember about the events leading up to the show, the show itself, and what kind of significance it really had in terms of a grouping and in terms of that word "funk." What does "funk" mean to you? Was that Peter's invention?

WW: Well, no. No, it wasn't his invention. I know I've recounted this before, because people are always asking. Now and again, it comes up, somebody asks about funk. My first encounter with the word was in a catalog and it was a painting by Debra Remmington [phonetic], called Phunky. I remember it being spelt P-H-U-N-K-Y.

PK: Really.

WW: Yes, and I could be wrong about that, but I'm right about the title and who did it, I think. I remember asking [unclear], my first year at the Art Institute, 1956, I think. I was eighteen. I said, "What's this word mean, phunky?" I thought it was an interesting word. He said, "I think it's a jazz term. I think it has to do with music." So that made sense to me, although I can't say why. I wasn't a jazz listener, although at eighteen I didn't know anything about it. But then the next time I remember hearing it was just around the school, it being used in relationship to something homemade-looking. "Oh, that's funky." Then somewhere I remember hearing it's "down home." It means really down home. No bullshit. A lot of heart. Then probably when Selz did the show, I heard that other term related to New Orleans, jazz funky, that kind of, I think Peter said, it gives you that sad/happy feeling. So kind of a mixture of blues and rock or something. I don't know. But it kind of moved over. I mean, I didn't think of it in terms of music beyond knowing that as kind of where the roots of the word came from, but it got to be more a funky, no-frills, like this piece of sculpture here is kind of funky.

PK: Yes, I think you could say that. [Laughs] Sort of vaguely roughhewn a little bit, kind of scruffy, kind of thrown together, maybe.

WW: Yes, nothing too high-tech or specialized. The thing kind of manifested out of nothing, in a way. I associated the term and the work initially less so with my stuff, with Manuel Neri [phonetic].

PK: Really.

WW: Yes, his very funky approach to the plaster, working with plaster and paint, and sometimes fairly abstract. That seemed funky, not only kind of almost ready to fall apart, but a very, I don't know, down-home, deep--

PK: So the opposite would be--

WW: High-tech.

PK: Yes, or maybe even high art.

WW: Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. Yes, in terms of what we were talking about before the interview, much more female-based. Earth, mother gendered, rather than male, high, rarified.

PK: Sort of refined or controlled, constructed or something. It seems to me--it doesn't matter what I think about funk, but--

WW: A real engagement--excuse me--with materials, an intermingling, kind of, of materials, so that you're not outside it in some way. More engaged and less theoretical. All that stuff always appealed--that kind of art has always appealed to me. So I did things that were funky because I liked that voice and have continued to work in that. But I don't think as naturally--I don't know. That's probably not true. But anyway, I know when the show finally came about, initially I kind of resented it. I thought it was like after the fact and that some things were included that I didn't feel, yes, they were funky, they weren't made very well or whatever, but they didn't seem that authenticate in feeling. More you could see the attitude represented without the soul in it.

PK: More calculated.

WW: Yes, not even calculated.

PK: Self-conscious?

WW: Self-conscious, or just not understanding. Ignorant. Just ignorant, I think, in a way. But because it looks easy, because materials are found, there's still a beauty and a balance to it that's no different than high art. It's like Francis Bacon's statement, "There's no thing of excellent beauty that does not have within itself some proportion of strangeness." So, you know, high and low meet at that point where authenticate expression emerges, I think, and some inspired expression emerges, whether it's with a razor blade or an old sock, it's whatever that particular thing. So you could have something there that, the most recent post-modern term is, "Looks like art, so it must be art." So I think at the time of the show there were things in there, maybe calculated, but I don't know. Some seem authentically funky, and others just didn't. But that's like that story about Picasso, two guys that fell to arguing over the Picasso painting, and to resolve it, the one guy saying, "You know Picasso. Go ask him." They showed it to him, and he looks at it for a little bit and he says, "It's a fake." The guy, "But I know you painted it." He said, "I paint real paintings and I paint fakes. It's a fake." [Laughs]

PK: How helpful. I take your meaning,though, and it's interesting. This concept of funk has been discussed back and forth in terms of Bay Area art ever since, at least since Peter's show. I, of course, have talked with a few other artists about it, Wally Hedrick [phonetic] being one of them. He's a neighbor of yours, isn't he?

WW: Yes.

PK: He knows a lot about music and he's a jazz aficionado. So I understand that. But I said, "Well, can you describe?" It's an elusive concept in a sense. I said, "Can you describe something that's funky to me?" He thinks a minute and he says, "Yes, it's the way Jaye used to keep her underwear in the refrigerator." [Laughs] That's pretty good.

WW: I'll show you actually [unclear]. I think [unclear]. Nobody's ever going to know about this piece or probably understand the brilliance of it. Where's the book on Wally Hedrick? He's a really amazing artist.

PK: Oh, yes.

WW: And Jay.

PK: Jay's getting a book worked on for her now.

WW: Good. And Bruce Conner [phonetic], I mean, various people, I think they're incredible artists in the area that have been chronicled. Anyway, back in New York one time down in Soho somewhere, I'm walking along and I find this ruler. It's white with the numbers and stuff on it. So Wally was living in San Geronimo at the time, so I picked it up and brought it back. One day I was going down to see him about something, and Mr. Fix-It used to fix things for us.

PK: I remember.

WW: So I took it to him and I said, "Here, Wally, it's a broken ruler from the streets of New York." And one day he gave it back to me like this.

PK: "W.H. Golden rule fixed." It says, "Broken. Broken. White rule. Adjusted to the golden rule. Fixed." I like it. Is this funky to you?

WW: Yes, it's pretty funky. I think it's just brilliant.

PK: I wish we had the catalog. It's pretty rare now, by the way. But what were some of your works? How many works did you have in and can you recall what they were?

WW: Interesting. Offhand I don't. Yes, I don't. At the time, you know, thought it wasn't interesting in some ways. You have some real things in there, some not so real. I thought Peter, you know, it's just something he's doing. Later on, I appreciated it more, though. It was important. I know others, who will remain nameless, hate the term.

PK: Yes.

WW: Because it's like you're typecast as a bad guy. I see it continually in reference to me and people fix on that, "Ah! Bad guy." Or you always played a hero or the villain or something. You get that thing just keeps coming and nobody knows yet what it means exactly.

PK: Not exactly.

WW: Jay's pants in the refrigerator. I mean, that's why it's interesting. [Laughs] You know, if you have to ask them, you know, it's like the blues and stuff like that. But that's all so true, because, I mean, the things that haven't been--it's like art, it's not interested in your definition of it.

PK: Well, you've got that right. Of course, Peter had a job, and we all do, art historians, museum people, those who write about it.

WW: The other part I was going to say, in some ways I think the only thing that made sense was that it was like most of things, it's happening many places at the same time. It met with an authentic response in Italy. Europe was doing art povera [phonetic] or however you say. I think it was because it was getting conceptual and so high-tech that it was leaving the planet, and so exclusive, that people were reaching back into something. Performance art which became--and a lot of music. That elusive thing that happens with music. You hear it and it's gone, unless it's recorded. In this day and age where everything is like this, what we're doing is recorded, and whatever, nothing--it's like where's mystery left? The Rupert Shelldrake [phonetic], the hundredth monkey syndrome. That theory, that when something--

PK: Oh, the great work of art will--

WW: No, just when something gains enough momentum, it suddenly--it stops doing chronological steps. You reach a certain point and it's everywhere. It's happening.

PK: A critical mass idea or something.

WW: Critical mass idea, yes. But I think that that was true, there were echoes happening in Europe and stuff. It's just coming out of the general cultural need and appetite for an alternative.

PK: I suppose. It's interesting that, of course, Peter Selz was here and for some reason--I've actually interviewed him and I'd have to go back and look, because I know we must have talked about this show. Shows how great my memory is. But what's so interesting about it is that there's this rage, or this need of curators and art historians to name things. In this case, Peter must have, and maybe in talking with artists, having these kinds of discussions, looking at art, sensed that he saw something, that there was this quality which was, if not uniquely in the Bay Area, which you suggest is not the case, at least very strongly and identifiable here among a certain number of artists. Now, I've heard some other artists say, who were even in the show, that they didn't think that there was anything funky about their work. That's what makes it seem a little bit, I wouldn't say to this Peter, and I don't know that I mean it, but you suspect that at a certain point it's a bit contrived. Yet I gather that you came to feel kind of comfortable with it, that you saw that word somehow as appropriate for some of your work and maybe some others.

WW: I think it just appropriately, you know, the term just surfaced out of this area, again, and I think it did define an attitude and part of it initially, I think, even then it was discussed that funky attitude grew out of neglect to some degree, feeling that, gee, there's nothing much. The local population doesn't value the art here very much and we're going to take a much different attitude about making it and the whole thing. I remember at the time some people said they didn't care what the show was called, it was just nice that somebody was doing a show and there would be a catalog and they wanted to be in it. [Laughs] You know, it didn't matter what they called it.

PK: Hey, I'm funky, too.

WW: Hard-edged funk reverse. Yes, I don't care what you call it, just give me a boost. [Laughs] That's a funky attitude, I guess. Just give me a chance.

PK: Just let me in. Let me be seen.

WW: Artists, gee, you like me, you want my work? Oh, God, here take it free, whatever.

PK: Call it whatever you want.

WW: Yes.

PK: Well, you know, there's certain, like Joan Brown and Manuel, some of those things they were doing even earlier, well, you know, like her famous rat, that, as far as I'm concerned is flat-out funky.

WW: Yes, right.

PK: There's some things like that, you know, it really becomes evident.

WW: The little rat bird, like the Egyptian mummy. I know he was also looking at that stuff. Yes.

PK: It's really inventive, too.

WW: It's just like this. I mean, that's a more sophisticated--I mean, Wally had more conceptual irony in his stuff, I think, than Joan or Manuel. More stuff. But it still, you can see that right--bam!

PK: I don't want to overpursue this particular topic, but since I have you here, who else, in the show, did you feel really matched or the work really matched this term?

WW: Do you have who was in the show?

PK: I wish I had that catalog with me. I looked for it. I've got a copy. It's very rare.

WW: Yes.

PK: Well, I think Bruce was in there. Bruce Conner.

WW: Bruce Conner, I would say, yes. Yes, very much so.

PK: I should know this. Actually, it was a good number. Was Harold Paris [phonetic] in that?

WW: I don't know if he was or not.

PK: He doesn't seem too funky to me.

WW: No, I wouldn't say so.

PK: Well, I guess I guess I shouldn't sit here and speculate, but more to the point was, I was just wondering if there were any of the other artists in particular who you felt--was Hudson in it?

WW: Well, yes, I think he was. Yes. Yes.

PK: Do you think that's appropriate for him or not?

WW: Boy, I think Hudson--not in the work. I think he's funky in feeling. That's all he is, is feeling, in a way. I mean, his intellect is feeling in some way. I mean, he's really a heart-based person, I think. It's funny, because the work on one level is funky, but on another level it's very high-tech in some ways. I think he's really interesting, too. He's one, I know, that doesn't like the term.

PK: Yes. I don't think Bruce Conner did either. I'm not positive about that. But then he doesn't like to be categorized at all.

WW: Right. Well, that's what artists love, is mystery.

PK: Unique.

WW: Or just love to be categorized, pigeon-holed, put in their place. [Laughs]

PK: Well, you know, hey, we've got to control you guys somehow. [Laughs]

WW: Right.

PK: You know who does, just, again, I'm sure they were both in the show, Arneson [phonetic] and Bob was in there. Also, I'll bet you Pete Voulkos [phonetic] was there.

WW: Yes, probably. Yes.

PK: Yes, some of those plates and ceramics that seems pretty--

WW: Oh, Pete, I think, is very funky. Arneson, too, less so. You're getting more into intellect again. And Meltric [phonetic] the same way, I think. Was Meltric in the--

PK: Yes, I think he was.

WW: Yes. But there's a funky sensibility there, but it's more rarified in a way.

PK: It's interesting you drawing this distinction, in fact, if I'm hearing you right, between an idea-based or laden kind of funkiness, as in Wally. That's how you described him. Then on the other hand, I get the impression that there is kind of just felt funkiness.

WW: Yes, I'm making that distinction.

PK: So that is a real interesting distinction, because the one goes much more clearly into conceptual art, and the other is more gut, sort of intuitive or emotional or something. And icky. What about icky? Is that a good word for funk?

WW: Sure can be, yes. [Laughs] But interesting recognition of what icky is, I think, is in the idea of getting a lot of your own saliva, building up a big ball of it, putting it into a glass, and then taking it back in again.

PK: That's icky. [Laughs]

WW: Yes. Why? When only moments before it was okay in your mouth?

PK: I don't know. Maybe if you let some things out into the world, they become corrupted.

WW: It's interesting that that's a real interesting way to check out what you call icky, something can be in why, because moments before it was fine in your mouth and suddenly once it's slightly been, even in a totally clean glass, you don't want to put it back in there again. It's really interesting. You have the Redd Foxx thing, that he heard about those mouthwashes that kill the germs and he didn't use that stuff, because he didn't like the idea of dead things in his mouth. [Laughs]

PK: That's funky.

WW: Yes, that's pretty funky. Well, he'd say, "Not me, because I don't use that mouthwash. A lot of people think I'm funky, they use that mouthwash to kill all the dead things, leave them in their mouth."

PK: Well, maybe all of this has a little bit to do--I'm sitting here looking at your sculpture here, which, does it have a name?

WW: Boy. Not really. Not yet.

PK: It doesn't have a name yet. Well, anyway, it looks to me like a big branch.

WW: Yes, it's a plum branch.

PK: With kind of--well, "V." It's inverted and then the smaller branch form like a "V."

WW: That's a tripod.

PK: Tripod, yes, I see that.

WW: It came from right outside there, that plum tree that goes over the walk. It came up badly pruned and this gained too much weight and broke off. So I was getting ready to cut it up and I saw, well, maybe there's a piece of sculpture here. So I brought it in and stood it up on itself and then had to add some support, because it buckled, because it was still green and everything. Then one day hung the string and got into it.

PK: With a rock.

WW: With the rock and the little baton on it with this brass bowl I had for a long time. It's a Tibetan bowl. Then just hooking it up that way to see if it worked, that eccentric kind of the rock with the string hanging off to the side, it adds some kind of funny motion to it. I can adjust the stick so I can get a wood sound, as well as just the ball sound. Then the whole branch, if you give it a real swing, rocks and moves a little bit.

PK: I should point out that I'm practically touching the sculpture here rather than the string, it's right in the studio. I'm not going to try to describe it too carefully. One would, I think, recognize it has incorporating a widely aesthetic, I don't think there'd be much trouble with that. And that's of real interest. What you've just described is something that I do associate with you, but not just with you, and that is this creative, this transformation of found material and objects and then combining in a way that's--well, what about the process? How does that work? You said you were getting ready to cut up the branch.

WW: Yes.

PK: You saw potential in it.

WW: Yes.

PK: Yet my guess is, you didn't envision straight-off this.

WW: No.

PK: That it must have sat around here and--

WW: Yes, well, actually, all these branch pieces, they partially construct themselves. It's like, I suppose, in fairy tale terms, it's "Woodman spare" me. You know, Pinocchio kind of things. That's got an interesting shape. Sculpture's always been a space for me to play in more, where in painting I got bogged down more in the history or the flatness of the piece or all the technical history. Or that I probably, early on, define myself more as a painter than a sculptor. So it's like sculpture I can play in more. I don't have to wear quite a serious hat, although I get serious about the pieces, regardless. I mean, that's the interesting part. Once you set up the thing, you find yourself being silly about serious pieces and serious about silly pieces. But I think sculpture's a much more playful, intuitive kind of approach. I wouldn't say that's true at all in terms of intuitive because it's all intuitive. But it's kind of letting them construct themselves to some degree, kind of, of the piece, for whatever it is attracts me, I bring it here and sometimes it goes right to where it's supposed to go. It's like it's been waiting. Other times I don't know why I brought the piece here and I've been on the verge of throwing it out several times, and then one day it will go right exactly where it's supposed to be and I see the reason for it. So this piece was just kind of constructing itself as it went along.

PK: When did you start it?

WW: Oh, gee, last--it's been in there quite a while. Must have been from last winter. Yes, late last winter, February. Actually, the stripped-down one, this one down here, which is also a sound piece, this one, it's off the same tree and it's the first one that kind of intrigued me, because of just all the complexity of the limbs and the suckers on it coming back and forth. So I brought it in and stripped it down. Initially, these weren't together. They were two separate pieces and one was just, I thought it was a record-holder.

PK: Bill Wiley, session two, tape one, side B.

WW: So these two pieces mushed around here is separate sculpture. Then one day this piece here, which is something I made for the boat to hold the motor up, to support the motor up here while in the water, it wasn't working and with this I could wedge that in there. We got that fixed, so I didn't need this anymore. I brought it down and I wondered, what could I use this for? The peculiarness, it looked like it was made for something, but what? And I found that it fit on here and so it was up there for a while, and then these things appeared. These holes were already in. So this piece came together. It's a little bit like that piece. It's a sound piece. Interactive. A number of the sculptural pieces I've done, even the ones I did at Lippincott, which are much different material--have you seen any of those? The ones out of steel and chrome and some of that stuff.

PK: I think I've seen a few, but not much.

WW: Yes, I mean, it's funky and it's in a different, very different way, certainly. But also interactive. In fact, this piece is at Rene's and you can play that.

PK: It's called Harp?

WW: Yes. There's a baton there that you can play that, and the other piece, the gong had a log on the other side that you could swing. In fact, most of those pieces that show was kind of arranged around are music and art mingling.

PK: I was going to comment on that. It seems to me, further, like with these moving or sound, the sound wooden pieces.

WW: Which are fairly unsound, some of them. [Laughs]

PK: It seems that you're interested in different ways of the works interacting with the viewer, let's say, and the world and the environment. You apparently like to see these different senses brought into play, and in some cases here, at least, as a work is reproduced in this catalog, like for instance, Gong, there seems to be some Wiley writing underneath. So you never really seem to let go of that either, that you bring in the text or words quite a bit.

WW: Yes.

PK: Let me make a suggestion regarding these pieces. As we're talking, I get the notion that perhaps for you, you say that there's a playfulness, playing with the sculpture, all the pieces, more so in that case than with the paintings.

WW: Yes. That's true and not true, I think. But in the sense that I think the sculpture, just in terms of construction and materials, falls much more outside of academia than the painting does in that sense. The paintings can be just as playful, I think, in terms of execution or word or whatever. Like the ocean painting next to the Van Gogh chair, or whatever that other landmine piece is, one fairly academic-looking, the other one much more playful and sketched and drawn on.

PK: What I was wondering, is there an aspect of this with these found object, sculptural pieces, of kind of a basic impulse that many of us may have to arrange things in our world? You can touch them. Kids do this all the time, they combine. For that matter, of course, if you give them crayons and paper or pencils, kids will draw. So I'm not saying that's not natural. But it seems to me we're always sort of puttering around in our worlds picking up things and arranging them. We do it even, I think, unconsciously. We also doodle unconsciously. But you see my drift on this? This is perhaps even a more--

WW: [unclear] I do it consciously? [Laughs]

PK: Yes. Yes. But is it possible that the--you know, you encounter something in your world, all you do is encounter, I think, a canvas or a piece of paper when you start with this. But you're actually encountering something like a branch, or a plum tree, right, that's fallen off. You find that and it speaks to you in a way, you maybe trip over it, you got to do something with it. That's a matter of choice, is what do you do with it and at some point you say, well, this has possibilities. Form has the possibility as art or just as something that you want to play with.

WW: Well, both. [Laughs] It kind of doesn't matter, as long as it intrigues me, I find it intriguing. As I told somebody recently in a painting I recycle, actually using Goya's "Children of the [unclear]," I said, "I've been pulling out some older paintings that had been in storage for a while, and to my amazement all the art had drained out of them." [Laughs]

PK: What do you mean by that? What do you mean?

WW: They didn't seem authentic to me anymore.

PK: These were your old ones?

WW: Yes.

PK: What do you mean by authentic?

WW: I thought they were art at the time, but, you know, in hindsight, nah, it doesn't look like art anymore. And some things I thought weren't art turned out to be art. That's also happened, too. Something I was about ready to destroy I suddenly saw this really interesting piece and I'd never seen it before. It kind of corroborates a statement somebody made to me at some point not all that long ago, it's happened before we were looking at a painting, oh, it was a Arizona ocean painting I did. They said, "I wish I could have done that painting." I said to them, "I wish I could have, too." [Laughs]

PK: It seems there's some sort of almost mystery or mysterious force at work that you don't take particular credit for. I'm not saying that you're just a receptacle.

WW: I'm a channel.

PK: Or a channel.

WW: I'm just a channel. I'm just a fuckin' channel. [Laughs]

PK: I mean, obviously that's not true.

WW: Why obviously is it not true? I mean, all those things are only obviously not true because we think they're not.

PK: Well, okay.

WW: Once you shift your perception a little bit, it could be very true.

PK: But do you think that's possible then, that artists are finally fundamentally channels through which some existing, I don't want to say just forces, but ways of perceiving, ways of organizing or manifesting?

WW: Yes. Yes. Everybody, I think, basically is a channeler of one kind or another. We're all in some sense, as we have, not that we're tabula rasas, because I think, like [unclear], we are born with a whole lot of baggage to begin with. One of the biggest is intelligence, the mind that's there from baby on up. They know now scientifically that at eight months you're breaking down words and you're decoding. So, full intelligence and everything is there, it's just we get shunted off into these Skinnerian versions where, "No, you're not feeling that." [Laughs] "No, you didn't have that dream." "No, it doesn't mean anything." "You can't draw or sing." Until you finally, as Noam Chomsky says, you get trained to be on time. Work. [Laughs]

PK: What were the notions of the attention, what was the term, the attention--

WW: The attentional system.

PK: Yes, attentional system. That's a Sufi [phonetic] notion?

WW: That's my understanding, yes.

PK: I know we said we wouldn't get into it, but at least the words come up now and then. There seem to be some interesting philosophical notions there. I gather at base this comes from a kind of thinking that there really are certain, what you would say, basic types and that somebody wisely has examined human beings and human behavior or maybe even cultures, I don't know, and identified these. From that, then, variations emerge. I'm just, from what you've said, that's what I'm saying. I wondering, and I may as well ask you if this fits in some meaningful way with your work or your approach to your work. I'm not going to ask you about your approach to your life or anything at this point. That can come later. But to the work, is this a useful way, do you find a useful way to think about yourself as an artist in relationship to the work and perhaps then the work to others?

WW: Well, I think, any of the things we're attracted to, or find attractive or resonate, some resonance there, then, yes. Then that intermingles with the work and with the mind and with--yes. Yes, sure.

PK: Well, does this fit then with your own self-conception? I mean, do you see yourself in a broader sense somehow in these terms and maybe even interaction with other people, not just the work? Is this too early to ask you that? I mean, in the interview, not in the day. [Laughs]

WW: Maybe. I was just thinking of what we were talking about in terms of channeling or whatever statement I heard, I think, attributed to Guston [phonetic]. He said, on good days in the studio, first of all--I forget all the different ways he identified them. The critic leaves and the teacher leaves, and so on. He says, "When I'm really lucky, I leave." [Laughs] I think that's where art and consciousness maybe in the Eastern sense of getting you out of the way and in some sense self-consciousness, which tends to make us inauthentic, rather than authentic. So I think art's a place for that. Anyplace you are is a place to practice that, but art is some kind of self-conscious attempt to engage in that in some way. It's one of the few places where utilitarian things don't have to be considered. So it's a kind of really interesting full and empty space to work in whereby you can empty it of all previous rules or you can have all those at your disposal, which I think is interesting in terms of Eastern thought of the nature of the universe being both full and empty consciousness and self being both full and empty at the same time.

PK: Do you know the work, at all, of John McLaughlin [phonetic]? He used to work out in Dana Point down in Southern California.

WW: Oh, yes.

PK: Geometric abstracts.

WW: Yes. Yes, I do.

PK: I mention him for a couple of reasons. I knew him and interviewed him. But what you're describing just now, what you have been saying, reminds me so much of the way he expressed his relationship to his work and his concept of the void and erasure of self. He wanted very much this to be case, and so he sought ways to, well, to at least hide the self, if not eliminate the hand. Which seems a little bit actually paradoxical because surfaces tended to be very hand-done and a little bit scruffy. Which is the opposite in a sense and it's quite wonderful.

WW: I little bit in the same way that [Piet] Mondrian's things for as smooth as they were, you could still--which kind of makes them human in some ways that what followed that, it became digital after that in some ways. This is still somebody painting [unclear].

PK: Well, of course, that's exactly where the evidence of the humanity and the warmth, the life, comes into it.

WW: Right.

PK: But I think that's interesting, because McLaughlin was very influenced by Japanese. He spoke Japanese. He was in the service as a translator, Second World War and, I think, studied Zen ideas quite a bit. He also was a great golfer, but those two things aren't at all contradictory. Have you always been interested--I gather you're interested in Eastern ideas and, I don't know about religion, but certainly thought?

WW: Well, always. I mean, I just ran into it when I came here.

PK: I see. How was that?

WW: Boy, interesting. It was all around. Asian Academy of Studies was under way, and Alan Watts was around, but my initial involvement was very simple. I had heard the word coming from the north, around Seattle, with Graves and Toby, anesticism and Zen. I'd heard those terms. I had no idea what they meant or anything. Working downtown at Duncan Vail Art Supply Store on Sutter and Stockton, at that time on the corner was Paul Elders bookstore. I'd walk up there on my lunch break and look at art books and stuff. One day in there I picked up a little book by Paul Repps, called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. That was kind of my introduction to Zen thought. As I read through it, I immediately resonated the many different things in there and I thought, "Ah!" I, in fact, bought the book.

PK: Now, you mentioned that before. His last name is R-E--

WW: R-E-P, either two Ps or just R-E-P-S. It's a double P or--

PK: So that engaged your interest.

WW: Yes, on Zen.

PK: Was there a point at which you saw that this is more than just an interesting way of thinking about the world and that it in some way could affect your art? Did you ever make that conscious connection?

WW: I think initially I thought of it just more in terms of what those little stories and poems could do your consciousness. Once that's changed, then everything's changed, in a sense. So that one statement before enlightenment, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers, trees are trees, and during enlightenment they aren't, and now that they've attained enlightenment, mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers. Somehow intellectually, maybe even emotionally, when I read that, I knew that was true. But there was no way I could authenticate it or say that, yes, I'm a Zen master. That resonated as really insightful as to the nature of things. Although I couldn't have told you that at the time, but I can sure feel that there was some authentic understanding in that. As I was talking to a friend, the guy I went fishing with, Dick Fishman [phonetic], who has recently survived a liver transplant, and also has studied some Eastern thought, we just were both kind of marveling at Eastern thought to give you beginner's mind. If you resonate with it at all, how it's such a matrix for dealing with consciousness in some way.

PK: Did you ever in any kind of structured way study Zen?

WW: No.

PK: You didn't, say, join any groups where there was a discussion?

WW: He did. He went and sat. Although I knew a number of people that did. I had close ties with some students, and still do, with people involved in Zen. No, I told Fishman, I said, "One of the things that immediately attracted me beyond the little Paul Repps thing, I didn't even connect at all initially. I just put Zen under Zen and I didn't make distinctions between other Eastern thoughts and Zen thought, Tibetan thought and Tibetan Zen. Buddhism was Buddhism. I thought it was all Zen, which it's like Alan Watts said to T.D. Suzuki [phonetic], supposedly, "But really Dr. Suzuki, aren't all religions the same at the base?" He says, "Yes, it's just that Zen is more so." [Laughs]

PK: What do you say to that?

WW: But I said, I felt right away one of the interesting things about it was that you didn't have to go anywhere or do anything. You could if you wanted to, but you were immediately released from that, which most other religions or philosophical thoughts weren't that open. They didn't say things like, if you see Buddha coming down the street, kill him, because that's not him. Right away I thought that was very interesting. Then in terms of religious figures that you look at, here's Christ and how he's generally portrayed, end result, and Buddha. I suppose they could show you that Buddha [unclear]. [Laughs] There were a whole lot of positive things there. But it was basically in some of those Zen poems that Paul Repps translated, I just thought what incredible, penetrating thought, wisdom, there was there. To find out later, like through the E-chain [phonetic] and stuff that, geez, it's been around for a long time. So the timelessness of it in some ways starts to make sense to you in some way.

PK: How were you raised? Was religion a presence in your family, in terms of your background when you were child? Did you go to church or anything like that?

WW: Arbitrarily and occasionally sent often, my brother and I. "It's Sunday. You guys go to church" So, a kind of haphazard relationship. So, no particular Christian orthodoxy. Just whatever was nearby, I was often sent to. I think within the household nothing too orthodox, other than just basic common sense. You know, do right, don't lie. Rough about hypocrisy. You could see alongside of that. You know, a pretty basic way. So in some ways, grew up very ignorant in terms of what separated Christian religions, denominations. Still I'm foggy about it.

PK: Would you describe yourself maybe as a Protestant, at least, rather than a Roman Catholic?

WW: No.

PK: Not even?

WW: I wouldn't have. I would have been even careful about saying "Christian."

PK: Really.

WW: Well, there wasn't enough--I hadn't been pressed into any of it enough. My mother had been raised Catholic, but left the church to marry my father, who was divorced. I think her engagement with it had only been because that's what she was born into. I don't think there was any deep connection. I'm not saying that quite right. Not that she didn't have a deep religious connection, but I don't think it was necessarily within catholicism, although I'm sure for most Catholics once you've had that, you carry a heavy brand a long time. You don't get rid of it easy.

PK: So, religion really wasn't a factor very much in forming your world view.

WW: No.

PK: So it's interesting that in some ways, I guess, you're quite open to the--I don't want to say "epiphany" at this point. That's a little bit strong. But to the attraction of a certain way of thinking that seemed to match, perhaps, I don't know, what you'd experienced or the way you saw things.

WW: It seemed to match more life experience and common sense and true engagement with things, rather than a hierarchical and a predetermined thing. It seemed like a more real engagement with actual, with what was actually going on.

PK: The stuff of the world, maybe. You know, it occurs to me, Bill, that there's a certain humbleness or humility in much of your work, I think, not just you, but certainly with you, and I'm looking right at these pieces that are pretty damn humble. Certainly that is viewed as, not a tenet exactly, but perhaps a virtue of at least what I understand to be Zen attitudes towards creation. There is also a resistance, I believe, to assigning relative values to things in that respect. Again, you said that you weren't all that interested in things that had a hierarchy imposed. It would seem to me--and you can respond to this--that this attitude then, on your part, is brought to your work. What you do is, as they say now, "privilege" objects that many people pay no attention to. They wouldn't see them as having potential as becoming part of something that might be called art and actually even exhibit it. Some of your work very much like this has been exhibited, for instance, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many other places.

WW: Shipped to Amsterdam.

PK: But doesn't this strike as interesting how these works then--I won't say they get out of your control, but they move on, they take on a life of their own, which actually and finally, much to your surprise, I suppose, becomes to a degree described or included in this notion of fine art.

WW: Yes.

PK: Fine art. Something precious.

WW: Yes, it's just amazing. Yes.

PK: Yet that clearly wasn't, as I understand it, your intention when first encountering some of these branches and other things.

WW: Well, the interesting part, I think, about art, like music more so, because it kind of, as somebody said, it leaps right into the heart. You can't guard against it in some way. It jumps the boundaries. Whereas art, you can hold it out a little bit more. In regard to what you're saying, I'm thinking about that piece that was in the de Young show, "Gays In The Military," which had a little wire and rubber construction and string. That very funky piece, I think, is a funky piece and that cardboard picture. But displayed behind the plastic display case there, it became like a saint's finger or something. You know, some crumbling thing that was suddenly precious. But the fact that you see that it was made out of things. If its voice carries to you, if its soul is authentic enough, it suspends your disbelief, then it leaps that boundary, even if you can't touch it. I guess there's one aspect of humble materials or whatever is in the technology. You know, if you set a TV set in a room and turn it on, it's just got to be interesting. It's hard to keep your eyes off of it. So in terms of art's voice and being available to people, but if it's a pencil drawing on paper that brings you to your knees, or you want to weep in front of it, or you just see the achievement and only technology alone when another human being's there with a pencil and a piece of paper, which is available to just almost anyone on the planet, or at least a substitute, then it keeps it so--it's like Zen, it keeps it so right there. So you can't have any excuses for, "I can't afford it," or, "I don't understand it," or whatever, because it's just so there. Which is why I think Zen is interesting. You don't have to sit in meditation or cut your hair or wear robes. You can if you want to and that may help, but it may get in the way. Suzuki Rosche said, "Don't be too hurried to be enlightened, because you might not like it." [Laughs]

PK: How do you know if you don't find out? Do you feel any affinity or some sort of relationship to some of the other art--

PK: Continuing the second session with William T. Wiley. We were cut off as you were beginning to say a few words in response to my question about some of the other artists who some people would say seem to have affinities to you and your work, or perhaps even a kind of shared sensibility. George Herms [phonetic] certainly, at least in some ways, seems to be one of them. Is that right? Do you feel this?

WW: Yes. When I saw his work, I thought it was very interesting. There again, a sensibility that knew how to put trash together, turn it into art. Bruce Conner, the same.

PK: Bruce,