Interview of June Wayne

1. Transcript

1.1. Session One (January 25, 2011)

STUART: This is Carolyn Stuart interviewing June Wayne on January 25, 2011, at the address of 1108 Tamarind Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90038, and we’re going to begin with an answer to the question of why June Wayne “accidentally,” quote, unquote, started the Tamarind Institute.

WAYNE: I have been thinking before this interview, but as a result of many interviews that I’ve given over the years, about the problem of answering reliably to a question that is put presumably to a person whose opinion is being sought. In this case, whose opinion or information is being sought in this case, myself, a ninety-three-year-old bag of bones and an artist who is at the moment quite discontented with having lived so long as to achieve those numbers. I’m not at all accustomed to being ninety-three, having remained in my mind the same person I always was, and what that age was I have no idea, except that I was always competent to do whatever I wanted to do, and right now I find that I have a lot of handicaps, so I’m very irritable as a ninety-three-year-old and wish to hell that I could be eighty again, which was a very frisky time in my life. Anyway, the subject really is how does one handle an interview and still tell the truth? Is an interview an oral history event where whatever you say comes off the top of your mind and you are fed into the general reactions of people that other interviewers have reason to question? Maybe you’re a one-legged owner of a Laundromat, and it’s important to find out what a Laundromat owner with one leg thinks of people who come in with shorts for two legs. There is about oral history an implicit sense of the eminence of the statistics. How many people think this way, whatever the interview happens to be? How relevant is this? Is it an entertainment? Is it really the taking of the temperature of the times? Is this person who most of the time is thought to be an ordinary person just picked up for reasons of democracy, maybe, the way Studs Terkel did? I suspect that even Studs was very careful about who he sought to interview, because what he wanted was an amusing half hour on the radio. I know because he interviewed me once, and it was a very boring interview because it was about the subject of the male artist as stereotypical female.I had written an article on that subject, and I saw the feminization of men because they were artists, whereas women artists were not feminized or masculinized; they simply became invisible. That was the topic, and it was maybe two recherché a topic for Studs Lonigan [Lonigan is character in James Farrell’s book]. Sorry. Studs Terkel. Of course, James T. Farrell was very much in Chicago at the same time, and both Studs and I knew him, and that’s why I made the mistake and referred to Studs Lonigan instead of Studs Terkel. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that if you’re going to interview me, you should be able to rely on what I say. What I say should have some merit as history. I should at least make an effort to be accurate about whatever I’m going to sound off on. And when one is interviewed for oral history, that requirement is never made by interviewers. They don’t say, “Now, are you telling the truth or are you making this up?” And, of course, all of us make up everything whenever we talk, because we want the best possible interpretation on our images.

STUART: Well, I’m not sure it would help if you were to swear on the holy Bible right now.

WAYNE: Well, and that’s something I would never do, because the fact is, I’m an unregenerate atheist, so I don’t swear on anything. But I do try to be as accurate as I can, and therefore having just listened to myself sound off on an interview for oral history [refers to her previous oral history taken by UCLA in the late 1970s] on how I happened to create the Tamarind program, my answer was, “Oh, it was really all just an accident,” which is a damned lie. It’s a lie. And what the devil was I responding to? I wanted to please the interviewer. He had very limited time. I didn’t want to give myself too big a role, because “nice ladies” are modest.Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, could speak for three quarters of an hour without ever using the personal pronoun “I,” and I loved Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought she was really a wonderful model, I realized, for women. I thought she was much smarter than Franklin [D. Roosevelt], and together I saw them as a remarkable political team, because she was always out there where the news reporters would follow her to the latest strike, the latest mine disaster, whatever the social issue happened to be. That would get into the newsreels everywhere. So Eleanor could bring up the topic and then Franklin could propose a solution to it to the Congress, which the Congress would already feel it was obliged to cooperate with because the reporters were showing you the mine disaster victims. How could you vote against safety in the mines? I don’t know quite how I got there, but my point being, if there is a point, that it is very difficult to be interviewed and also tell the truth. Not that one is trying to lie, but that it is difficult really to be accurate about anything. Since hearing that transcript about two months ago, I’ve given a lot of thought to the way in which I have answered questions over the years, and decided that I had better try to be more accurate so that if anybody is foolish enough to spend the time to transcribe it, they have a reasonable chance to get a bit of accurate information and not just blather of the moment. So where did I start from?

STUART: Well, you were going to tell me how Tamarind wasn’t an accident and how events actually led up to that.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, I had been asked, “How did you happen to do Tamarind?” which already sets the idea that it just happened. If we look at that moment to look at the condition of lithography, and if I look at that moment as though I were talking about somebody else, not me, the fact is that I had already been ten years of intensive work making lithographs. I was doing them in California where lithography was hardly a popular art form, and I was doing them with Lynton [R.] Kistler, who was from a commercial family of lithographers, commercial printing in lithography, and Lynton wanted to start working with artists, and it happened. It was quite accidental that the litho shop he opened to work with artists was about six blocks from where I lived, and in Los Angeles that’s quite a convenience. I was working on some problems in my art. I was working on certain optical ideas, and I was working in paint, in oil paint on canvas, and the solution, the aesthetic solutions were just—the work was not good. It wasn’t working out. No matter how hard I worked, there was something missing. A good friend of mine, the critic Jules Langsner, who witnessed these struggles that I was making, suggested to me that maybe if I changed medium, the change of material might shock the process and I might find what it was that was not working out in the resolution of the aesthetic that I wanted to do.

STUART: Could you tell me what those problems were?

WAYNE: Yes. I was working on optics. I was interested in the relation between focal and peripheral vision, and that had happened because one day riding through the Second Street Tunnel downtown [Los Angeles], I noticed that at the end of the tunnel everything seemed to be standing still. The cars at that distance didn’t even seem to be moving. Everything was sharp, clear. But the closer I got to the end of the tunnel and the faster I traveled, the more the tunnel seemed to whirl, and the walls curved and broke down, and the lines in the middle of the road seemed to rise up and then to separate.What I was witnessing was, of course, the breakdown of form as we experience it from focal and peripheral vision. This interested me a lot because I saw the opportunity to create certain kinds of visual effects if I could master this phenomenon, figure it out, and if I could control areas of focal vision, I might have a way of dealing with narrative in a painting. I know that sounds very esoteric, but it’s really quite accurate. These were the ideas I was working on and did work on for many years so that the tunnel—eventually I created one painting that really is the very essence of the illusion that I was after in the painting. But at that time I was struggling with the idea and not getting anything out of it that was, I felt, a work of art. So when Jules suggested that I try another medium as maybe a way of clarifying what some of the issues were, I took myself over to Lynton Kistler’s to see what litho was about. That’s how I found litho for the first time. And there I found a three-story wood-frame California house. Probably there were three apartments, may have been. But, anyway, Kistler owned it, and in the middle floor he had put a lot of large tables, and on the tables were little litho stones about the size of books, and seated at the tables were a number of women, middle-aged women, none of them professional artists, but really who wanted to learn how to make drawings on stone, which had been a very fashionable thing to do at very high-ranking parties in Britain. In fact, the nobility would, someone told me—I don’t know how accurate this story is, but told me that people would give a dinner party and then pass out little litho stones and the guests would make drawings on the litho stones, and they would bring in a printer who would pull prints of the images they had made as their dessert, as it were, and they would go home with their very own lithograph. So there was that funny little connection between a moment in litho’s history when it was a kind of parlor game, and this setup that Kistler had.Well, I was very interested in the medium, but I did not wish to join the class. I think it was some modest sum, maybe $5 a week. You could come and make lithos there. But I gave him a deposit of $5 and persuaded him to let me take one of those stones home, which I did, and I also took some material, crayons and liquid touche, which he provided to me. That evening I began fiddling around with this litho stone, and we just got on like a house afire. There was something about it that was right for me, and it made me very curious about its property, its physicality, and I drew. One of the first litho I drew dealt with this optical problem that I was trying to solve. Not that I solved it in that particular print, but my very first lithograph did make the connection between the litho and optics, which I was to explore for some years after that.

STUART: Do you remember what that lithograph was?

WAYNE: Yes, it had a focal area and then a peripheral breakdown of the forms. I must have a print of it somewhere or a photograph of it somewhere. It’s a little thing. But there was about the material an instant recognition between my hands, the stone, and my sensibility. And it was absolutely true that eliminating color made the problem simpler, and I was able to make progress with understanding this optical phenomenon that intrigued me so, because your vision is the means by which you protect yourself in space. And I went on to really get into optics, that is, the biology of it, how the eye is constructed, how we see, and this information got built into my aesthetics, my art. I just learned about it the same way that if you’re taking anatomy you learn what trapezius is and where the deltoid muscle is located. It was nuts and bolts information. But there was a long history of the interest of artists in optics as David Hockney’s brilliant book [Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Techniques of the Old Masters] makes clear.So that was truly a kind of accident. My finding was purely a suggestion by Jules, but who was Jules, and who was I at that point? I was already a pretty sophisticated person. I had a long history. I had a long history in work, in the world. I had held a number of jobs. I had moved from New York to California. So I wasn’t just an uninformed blob of something. And Jules was a highly developed critic and had been raised from a pup in Chino, California, along with [Reuben] Rube Kadish and [Philip] Phil Guston and other artists who became the heart of the Abstract Expressionist movement. You could say that we were two very sophisticated molecules already.

STUART: So after you brought home that stone that you made and started experimenting with it, when you went back into Kistler’s workshop, how did you proceed?

WAYNE: From then on I began making lithos and working with Kistler. I would take the stone home. They were no longer small stones.

STUART: How big were they?

WAYNE: Some of them got to be very big. In fact, Kistler had to build a kind of carrier like you would put a coffin on, with four handles, and lay a stone on, and then I would have to find four guys to invite to dinner, because it was much too heavy to bring up to my studio, which was up a flight of stairs, and so I would invite men to dinner. They would bring my stone up. Then after I had drawn it, some weeks later I’d have to give another dinner.I always worked at home alone with the stone, and I did most of my work during the night so that I wouldn’t be interrupted. But I came to know lithography from doing it, from struggling with it, from needing certain kinds of effects which I would invent. As a result, I began pushing what a lithograph looked like for me. It wasn’t just a crayon drawing; it expressed. The lithos of that time were very clear steps on the way to the larger aesthetic that I would be exploring and painting and theories that I use to this day, a methodology that gives a certain kind of look to my work. So when I first discovered Kistler and litho, there was a kind of instant affection between me and the stone and the materials and the pores of this stone, even pores of the stone, because that’s what you’re working with. You were working with those literal pores in the stone. If you looked at a stone in high resolution, you would see that it looks like a bunch of little mountain peaks and you’re drawing across the top of those mountain peaks, and the air around those mountain peaks are the part of the stone that will later attract water. And where you have drawn, you had drawn with grease and the mixture later on during the procedure, the printing, these tiny little pores that are hydrophilic or oleophilic, that is, attract either grease or water, and it’s out of that delicate mixture that the fog of lithography is created. It’s in the manipulation of its basic characteristic of that kind of stone, of that geologic age of that material that lithography comes from. Now, of course, we have so many technological changes that have nothing anymore to do with the original stone, and we still call many of these things lithographs, but they’re not actually anymore. And neither have we developed appropriate words by which to designate them.

STUART: You pursued the lithograph thereafter and then moved into working in the Tamarind Institute and developing materials and techniques there, and then thereafter you established your own workshop at Tamarind.

WAYNE: Well, that’s a little mixed up. I spent ten years working with Kistler and realized that he would never be able to do certain things that the Europeans knew how to do, so I decided to go to Europe, and I had identified who I thought was going to be the greater painter that I wanted to work with. So when I went to Paris for the first time to do litho, it was to do the John Donne Suite, on the poetry of John Donne as a book, and I already knew and had gone through all of the seductions that would allow, make it possible for an American woman artist to work with a high-caliber French artisan who, naturally, had not worked with women before and who would think badly of Americans in any case, as the French in the fifties tended to do. So it took some months to develop my own sort of United Nations diplomacy, and when I went in 1957 to work on the John Donne prints, I had to learn French. I had to discover Paris. I had to make myself acceptable to the quartier, the local quartier, which you really need to do, or not so much anymore as they are more or less accustomed to Americans now. At that time, not so much so. And to get [Marcel] Durassier to do what I wanted him to do, not what he was accustomed to doing, but what I wanted to do. We had many a battle, but I did find a way, and we became great collaborators and eventually I was a member of the family. He and his wife, they had no children, no other relatives, and he was very paranoiac, as most good printers are, by the way.Whenever I arrived in Paris, which was several times a year, one day would be set aside by the Durassiers for him to cook for me. He was a great cook. I am a very small eater, so that was a very difficult day that I had to put in each time I arrived in Paris to be able to eat my way through the myriad of special dishes that he not only would provide, but then stand over to me to make sure I ate every morsel of it. And there would be wines to match. I don’t drink at all. And to find a way to get through that day without drinking, because it puts me right to sleep, you know. Some people, I guess, just have no biology for it, and I certainly didn’t. Anyway, I began working with Marcel, and in that way I became acquainted with the folkways of lithography in Europe, in Paris. I became acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of faking prints. And who were they selling these [unclear] Paris things to? American tourists were spending big bucks for prints made in France or Europe and expected to spend five to fifteen dollars for American prints which American dealers and the American curators thought was great because lithography was supposed to be the common man’s artwork, the democratic art form. People who couldn’t afford art could buy a print, and of all the prints, lithography was the lowest on the totem pole. You were lucky to get fifteen dollars for a litho at that time. So I became, through Paris and Marcel and the artists that I knew in Paris and through Los Angeles and the printmakers in this country and the museum hierarchy, I became acquainted with the sociology of both the continent and America. This was critical to my ability to put together the Tamarind project. So that was one part of who I was in the fifties.In the fifties, the late fifties, ’57, ’58, I was thoroughly integrated into art. I was for some reason just literally biologically French. They took me for French. I learned French on the hoof. I learned at first from Durassier, who was Basque, and that is why every time I left him and went out and spoke the same words that I’d been speaking all day, nobody knew what I was talking about. I had to find somebody, a phoeneticist, to come in. The first hour of my day in my hotel room was to clean up my French so that it would be useful to me to somebody who is not Basque. Anyway, I became very much at home there and met many French artists and developed a whole milieu of my own, and I was able to do litho without its being a stigma, because in the United States, printmaking was low on the totem pole as far as the arts were concerned, and lithography was the lowest of all. If, for example, the Brooklyn Museum held its annual print show and artists sent in work from all over the country, let’s say there were two thousand submissions. Fifteen hundred of them would be etching or engraving, and another couple of hundred would be woodcut and other media, and maybe twenty would be lithos, and they’d be pretty crummy in terms of technique. So it was not widespread. It was not something that the critics or the curators were eager to even look at. “Oh, well, now we’ll get to the lithos.” So when I went into lithography, it was not very popular. We did not have good printers. There were only three. There was Kistler, who had very limited printmaking capability; there was George Miller in New York, who mainly did crayon; and there was one other guy in Colorado—I’m sorry, his name escapes me at the moment—also very well know. But it was shoddy. The paper was poor. We were not sophisticated about how you choose paper to go with the technique of the litho that you are proposing to print. Materials were poor. There wasn’t a good textbook, and very few people taught litho in the art schools. The litho presses in the art departments were always backed up against a wall, covered with dust, and piled with lunch pails and clothes. It was not a very active print medium.Only I—well, I should say—I don’t mean just I, I mean only I saw in this something very special and I missed the good paper and I knew there had to be better ways of doing this. It was a kind of love affair between me and this medium which I felt was so responsive to the kinds of images that I wanted to work with. So by the time, by ’58, I had made a number of lithos that were pretty adventuresome technically and that pushed along my own aesthetic. And I had done enough prints about the poetry of John Donne, which I titled with a line from a poem, I began to feel that I was forcing Donne to collaborate with me. After all, the poor guy was dead, and here I am making things that refer to his poem and I’m using one of his lines for the title. I began to think that maybe I should face him face to face and do a book in which his poem appeared and my lithos appeared, and that became my very next project for France. I returned to the United States for a brief time to plan for what I would do next. It was on that next trip to Paris that the planets moved around in such a way that it become possible for all I had learned technically but also sociologically about the condition of this art form, so that when I got on the plane to go to New York, to take the ship to France again, to do the John Donne book, this was not June Wayne who had been designing jewelry, who had been born in Chicago, who had worked in an automobile-parts factory, who had this odd family configuration of women, who was a great believer in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, but that person now knew a heck of a lot about the condition of artists. That person knew a lot about how they made lithos, how their attitude toward printmaking in Europe, all over Europe. I knew about print clubs in Europe which would later inform a part of Tamarind, the structure of Tamarind.My time on the WPA [Works Progress Administration] was very influential in how I would later design Tamarind, and aesthetic and social choices that I made in building Tamarind. So I was not this sort of willful artist who got an idea. I was a bundle of attitudes and beliefs, and quite a lot of it based on hard information. I was an improved property when I left to do the John Donne book, when I left Los Angeles to go and do that John Donne book. It was at that moment, a day or two before I left for that trip to do the book, that I received a routine letter from the Ford Foundation. It was a survey letter asking—they must have sent it to a thousand people in the art world—asking what we thought of what they were doing for the arts. I read this thing and tossed it in the wastebasket because I was preparing to leave, and then I fished it out of the wastebasket and answered the letter. They were giving grants of $10,000 to artists, which was very nice, but I wrote and pointed out that however nice that was, it didn’t solve anything, because the artist would spend the money and be in exactly the same predicament except that everybody else would be angry with the artist because they felt they should have got the grant. So while it was helpful and showed that the Ford Foundation had a good heart, it was not really going to help very much, and I said something about when you irrigate a field, you don’t run with a pail of water for each plant; you [unclear]. Now, that letter happened to reach, because in those days you got a letter in one day. It wasn’t a whole migration across the country to mail a letter to New York. So the letter arrived the very next day, and something in that letter attracted the attention of the man who had sent it, McNeil Lowry, who was the director of the Fund for Adult Education. No, no, he was the director of the program in humanities and the arts. And my letter resonated with him, because he was an improved property. He had been the head of the Cox newspaper chain Washington bureau during the Second World War, so he was a reporter and, in point of fact, had had a good deal to do with unearthing the oil storage scandal that ended up defeating [Thomas E.] Dewey in that election. He also was a professor of English literature, and he was a close friend and worked on ballet issues and other kinds of arts issues with Lincoln Kirstein. He was really in the top hierarchy of arts people in New York.I arrived in New York and was about to get on the ship, when I got a phone call forwarded from L.A. to please call McNeil Lowry, and I did. He said, “I read your letter, and I’d like to meet you.” I said, “Well, I’m leaving for France tomorrow morning.” “Well, could you come in now?” “No, I couldn’t come in now,” I said. “But I could come at eight in the morning if you have some breakfast for me. I have to be on the ship by eleven.” And that’s how I met Lowry. One day difference, a delay in that letter, suppose I had not dragged it out of the wastebasket. That was the accidental part of it. But there was nothing accidental about him or me. We met. We talked very rapidly. He asked critical questions. They were questions to which I had answers not just because I had already worked in France, not just because of lithography, but of this whole history of my life, which took me willy-nilly from one kind of crisis to another, which it always is for young people. None of us lives a tidy sequence of development. So we talked, Lowry and I, and he said to me, “What can I do for you?” I said, “Nothing, unless you do something about lithography so I don’t have to travel 6,000 miles every time I want to make a decent print.” That’s where we left it.He said, “Will you let me see this book when you get back from France?” And I very nearly forgot about it, and I came back at the end of the year and sent him a penny postcard, “I’m back if you still want to see the book.” And from then on, it was natural, it was a given that he and I would talk about the condition of lithography, what was different in Europe, what was here, what would be the advantages of doing something to support the art form. Why should we support lithography and not everything else? These were the kinds of questions we talked about, and the result was, of that conversation, that he said, “Why don’t you write something for me of what you think should be done.” And I began to think, much more practically, if I had the chance to improve the well-being of lithography, what would it look like? How would you do it? What kind of people would have to be involved? What would it cost? How long could it last? What influence? What benefit would it have for a broader sociology of the art world? These were all questions in our minds. And the design of Tamarind, it took a good six months or more for me to write that plan, and I worked hard to do research on this thing, consulted a lot of people. It was anything but an accident. Tamarind was intended to be a template, a model. If we could succeed in restoring lithography to an aesthetically viable and worthwhile level, if we could do that, could it be a model for how other art forms could be similarly integrated with the art world and maybe even with some part of society?Those years, ’57, ’58, ’59, and ’60, were conceptually terribly important. I trusted Lowry. He promised me I would not have to work with anybody else, that I could design something that didn’t have a great big bureaucracy, and I didn’t promise that I would be able to come through. He used to call me, “Well? Well? Well?” You know. I remember at one point I wired him and said, “I need to do some traveling, and I’m not going to do it on my own nickel.” I wasn’t being paid. By now it had become an intellectual challenge. Could you really do something like that? And I don’t think it could have been designed by somebody who wasn’t an artist, because artists really know what we need. That is how Tamarind came about. Lowry called me when I finally sent in the plan. You’ve seen the original that I wrote. I had to go and learn a lot of things. I didn’t know anything about cash flow. I didn’t know much about capital. There were a lot of things. I had to go and educate myself. When I sent it to him, he received it and he said it appeared adequate, which was kind of lukewarm, but I was working very hard anyway. My own life was very stormy at the time. Then he called me one day and he said, “I sent the plan to a hundred people in the art world,” with which I broke into a torrent of anger. “I thought you and I were working only now.” “Well, don’t you want to know what they said?” I said, “No, because I can’t think of a hundred people. I can’t think of twenty people who know anything about this subject. So why would I care what they think about it?” He said, “Well, 95 out of 100 are dead set against it.” I said, “I’m not surprised.” But he said, “However, you did pick up a few champions, and I am one. I’m going to recommend this program.”It was years before I found out who those other people were, because they responded on the basis of confidentially, so I didn’t know who they were. Later it turned out there was James Johnson Sweeney and Lincoln Kirstein and Gustav Von Groschwitz of the Cincinnati Museum and Ebria Feinblatt of LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art]. Anyway, that’s how Tamarind, the idea of Tamarind, the plan of Tamarind and that was all written before we knew or I knew that it would go ahead. It had become an intellectual challenge, not really all that different from what I was trying to do with optics. I’m a problem solver. I enjoy that kind of constructive imagination. And that is how Tamarind came about. What were the chances that a creature like myself, a high-school dropout and a female and an artist nutty about peripheral vision, what’s the chance that a creature like myself and a creature like Lowry would ever cross paths? Not that I wasn’t accustomed to crossing paths with important people, because on the WPA in Chicago, just the writers—Saul Bellow, James Fitzgerald, Meyer Levin, Richard Wright, there were several others—you know, these were guys on the WPA like me. And the same in theater. This was our normal habitus. Chicago was like Paris. Everybody wanted to get to Paris. None of us could afford to. And we were stuck on the WPA, but we did remarkable things on the WPA, as the writers all over the country documented, cities and towns. We know about our own history in a way we never would have if it hadn’t been for the WPA. Norman Corwin I know from Chicago. He’s still alive, teaching at USC [University of Southern California], radio writer, because for a part of my life I was a radio writer at WGN when Studs Terkel was passing me in the hallways. So I was lucky. I came from a seed bed. That was accidental. That was good luck.

STUART: What kind of work did you do when you were on the WPA?

WAYNE: What kind of art?

STUART: Yes.

WAYNE: There are a few reproductions of those paintings. They were Ashcan School, like everybody was doing. Mine had a certain stylistic similarity to what I do now. And right after the WPA, I was invited by the Mexican government to come down there and did a lot of painting down there, which moved my art along and also gave me the experience of being an eighteen-year-old gringo in a third-world country where I was nothing but tail bait. You know, I really grew up quickly in that respect.

STUART: You weren’t really knowledgeable about or involved with prints at that point.

WAYNE: No. No.

STUART: You weren’t working with [unclear].

WAYNE: No. I was painting. I was painting. And I had a show at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. I did all the paintings while I was there, and then came back to the States.

STUART: You had to leave many of those paintings behind?

WAYNE: No, but I don’t know what happened to them. I know what happened to some, because I still had some of them when I went to work in New York. And when I left New York, I just closed the door to my place and went away, left the paintings, furniture, everything, to come to California. I had no options about that. I didn’t have money. My job had disappeared. I was designing jewelry, and all those factories in New England were converted to war-production factories. They used to make lapel pins and were now making bullet casings. The war made a tremendous difference to what was possible, and I was kind of a free-floating molecule in that sense. Who was affected if I went somewhere else? Nobody. And that was when I came to L.A. for the first time.The Tamarind project and my role in it was accidental only in the sense that if Lowry and I—if that letter had not come, if it had not been delivered in New York when it was, if I didn’t have those couple of hours with him before getting on the boat, all of these ifs—and they were really accidental. If we had never met, there never would have been a Tamarind. Would I have thought of this by myself? I don’t think so. But it was possible because Lowry was the kind of molecule he was, located where he was, and I, speaking the same kind of language, was the kind of creature I was. There was nothing accidental about that. I had worked my ass off for everything I knew at that time, because life is hard and risky. I had a lot of good luck. My friends, most of my personal friends were musicians. By the time I did Tamarind, I had a really phenomenal knowledge of classical music. I could identify not only the composer, but the K number [“K” stands for Köchel, the man who catalogued Mozart’s musical compositions] if it was Mozart, and of chamber music, that kind of thing. All the people around me were musicians. I was the artist in the room.

STUART: You had played piano as a child, right?

MEYER: By ear.

STUART: By ear?

MEYER: By ear. I have a very good ear. I don’t do that now. I don’t. Well, I have too much respect to. But that piano that I have belonged to a friend of mine. She bought it in 1934. Her husband was a concert pianist who had studied with [Artur] Schnabel and was in Germany at the time of Kristallnacht and came running back to the United States. They had two pianos. This Baldwin was hers. He had a Steinway. When they broke up, she took her Baldwin. And when she died, I couldn’t bear for her piano to go to a stranger, so I bought it from the estate and had it rebuilt, and it’s been here with me ever since. It’s getting old. Its sounding board needs—they get thin in sound.But the point about this is I was just born into a slice of the pastry where certain things were easily accessible to me and I took to them like a duck to water: writers, musicians, visual art, that kind of thing. And the habit of living underground, of being an outer, not an inner, living underground because I was female, and a lot of things were not accessible or were accessible with you as spectator to what the guys were doing. With Tamarind, I was empowered to run the thing, but I behaved like every other woman. I was much too grateful to any man who did anything helpful for Tamarind, because women just didn’t— [End of January 25, 2011 interview]

1.2. Session Two (February 1, 2011)

STUART: Today is February 1, 2011. This is my second session of my interview oral history with June Wayne. My name is Carolyn Stuart. We were talking last session a week ago about how Tamarind [Institute] was not an accident, and there were some issues that arose that you and I feel maybe could be discussed a little bit further regarding your aesthetics and how lithography specifically played into the development of your aesthetic and also how it perhaps addressed, in more specific ways how it addressed some of the problems about optics that you were coping with.

WAYNE: Okay. So I’m going to take a running jump off the cliff. I do not have my hang glider attached. If I land headfirst, you won’t get a very good report, but if I land on my ass, as is usual, the talking end of me will still be operative. I want to recount a little memory because it’s been an influential one. Many years ago, in fact, when I was about six or seven years old, I was reading the Sunday funnies, lying on my stomach on a faux oriental rug in the living room of one of the places that I lived in Chicago, about a foot away from an upright piano. That’s irrelevant. I just want you to know what the room was furnished like. It was old-fashioned and reasonably posh for poor people. My mother had very good taste, and she provided as well as she could for me and my grandmother, who had been left a widow very young, and so we were essentially three girls living together who happened to be exactly eighteen years apart. My mother was eighteen years older than I, my grandmother eighteen years older than she, and I’m sure that if I did the math or the research, I would discover some other number-eighteen elements in my life that would provide the basis for some harebrained theory of life, all of which flourish, as you know, in California, but which I do not intend to pursue, much to your relief, I see from the expression on your face.Okay. So it’s Sunday. The funnies are stretched out on the floor. I am lying on my stomach and I am wearing a pair of beautiful new shoes. It’s absolutely irrelevant to the story, but I have to surface those shoes. They were black patent Mary Janes in front, front half, and the back half of them was covered in silver brocade. They were very classy shoes. Undoubtedly, my mother got them for me. I was aware of reading the funnies in those shoes, and therefore I’m setting the stage so you understand that. Looking at the Katzenjammer Kids, I noticed, of course, as was the style of whoever the cartoonist was, that there were lots of solid colors. All the shirts were orange or blue or yellow or whatever. I was nearsighted and so the shirts brought forth a message to me that there was something about these colors that was odd, and I looked closer and I saw that the orange shirts were made up of red and yellow dots. The red shirts were all red dots. They had no other colors in them. The green shirts were made of yellow and blue dots. That was an astounding experience to discover that colors could be made of millions of dots of different colors and that the distribution of the colors’ dots would determine the color of the shirt of these cartoon characters. That insight or that bit of information, because I really didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t know what to call it, but I had discovered the screen of Ben-day dots in commercial printing. The idea that something solid could be made up of a lot of little things really struck me, never forgot it, never forgot how powerful dots of different kinds could be and, of course, it prepared me for the idea of molecules, of mixing colors, of differing opinions, that everything in the world could now be measured somehow by the mix of what went into it. So the Ben-Day dots remained a formative insight that really affected me.It was not surprising, therefore, that when I discovered that the stone was made up of all these pores, that there was a one-to-one transfer of insight and opportunity, and then later on into everything that I did, the idea that we are made of miniscule particles was a natural thing for me to accept. To this day, even now when I’m watching the riots in Egypt, for example, I’m asking myself, “Who let out those prisoners?” Somebody opened those prison cells to create that kind of havoc. Was it [Hosni] Mubarak? Were the people responsible for that? Were the Israelis responsible? Did [Barack] Obama do it? They didn’t get out all of a sudden by themselves. Or maybe they did. The point being that everything is infinitely more complicated than you think, and if you scratch an idea, you’re bound to find many smaller versions of what that idea is made up of, which leads you directly, of course, to science of these days, to every political situation, and even to my address to lithography. Now I want to close this. [Begin File 2]

WAYNE: Is it ready? Is it recording?

STUART: Yes.

WAYNE: I don’t want to waste any of my Ben-Day dots. [laughs]

STUART: This is the second track of session two on February first, June Wayne.

WAYNE: The lesson of the Ben-Day dots that I learned that day, which I probably would not have learned if I hadn’t been nearsighted, I probably never would have noticed them because those dots were much too small for someone with normal vision. Anyway, they did echo, and the template of the computer, the dots of the computer, they echoed. They were a form of echo of the pores not only of skin but of the stone, and seemed to set a biological model for everything that an artist uses and does, the manipulation of strokes, the uses, the mixture of colors. All of it prepared me for that other world of the miniature, which, when combined in the right proportions, produce the maximum of effect that you’re after in visual representation.It is, of course, very hospitable to Impressionism, to broken color, which I favored from the time I was a kid, and who knows but what the Ben-Day dots may have influenced the way I thought, because I made many drawings when I was a kid made up of colored dots mixed together, and I broke things into these screens, kind of. I could build up a field rather than just draw a field. And I think some of the paintings I did in Mexico show very clearly the influence of and the use of broken color, which one of the critics in Mexico referred to as a kind of unconscious association with Impressionism. The way I painted in large broken pieces of color all came out of that nest of the fact that dots could in proper mixtures lead to much larger shape and forms, and it was a way of working and of seeing that fed into the natural organic way in which the pores of the litho stone accept the drawings. When you have a really beautiful wash, litho wash, or beautiful crayon passage, it’s all the manipulation of those dots how well you have drawn across the little peaks of the mountains that constitute the surface of a brain stone, that gives you the clean air threaded texture that constitutes a beautiful litho surface, at least beautiful to me. In any case, I mention the Ben-Day dots because I think that that visual experience had a rather wide intellectual impact on me. It’s nothing remarkable. It’s something that one can take for granted. Everybody knows about Ben-Day dots today, but when I was a kid, we didn’t know about it, and it was a big knock on the head for me as I applied the idea to how we are made to the putting together of smaller elements to create large elements. Whether they were social elements or they were visual elements hardly mattered.

STUART: Was this putting together of the smaller elements with the larger elements, is this the way in which there was an answer to be found to your optical questions? Because I’m not sure I understand how the lithography specifically helped you with your optical questions.

WAYNE: Well, it didn’t. It was the other way around. The optical question that I was trying to solve, the relation between focal and peripheral vision, how to represent that and use litho to do that, I tried to do it in painting. I used many media to accomplish it, and theoretically I used that idea that there are areas of focus, there are areas of improvisation, of transition between focal area that parallel the biology of vision. I would say now, of course, that obviously that is true in other fields of neurology, certainly true in your hearing. You hear some things very clearly and they resonate and lead you to other things on a similar sound plane, for example, and there are other things that one recognizes as intermediate sounds. It was, in terms of vision, a principle that applied to everything in life, to the biology of life, that if you knew how to read the language, the sensory language of any of the art forms, you would find that they all have similar structures that do not look alike or sound alike, but once you take them apart, oh, yes, there it is. There it is. There’s the focal area. I hear that all the time when I’m listening to music, when one instrument takes up the theme and then passes it to another and one sound becomes the dominant sound and all the echoes around it serve to support it. It is, for me, a parallel to focal and peripheral vision.So this way of looking at the world, a way of understanding the world, derived from that insight on the comic strip and was enormously useful to me, and it still the way in which I listen. When I’m talking with somebody or speaking or making a work of art, I’m looking for the relationship between the main theme, its echoes, its support system, its aesthetic. What about it is not working? Is it a conceptual problem, a theoretical problem, or a physical problem? Is it the wrong color or is it the wrong sound, or is it the wrong configuration politically? For example, we just looked at the news from Egypt, and the people are furious because [Hosni] Mubarak says he’s not going to quit until he quits, which is an ambiguous statement if ever I heard one. People are reacting in eight thousand different ways to this mixed message, which means that for the moment he’s going to stay put if he can. We listen, react, build, do or don’t do according to certain kinds of patterns, and I believe that for me the comprehension of any situation depends on my being able to decipher what is the main—where is the focal part of this idea. What parts of this idea are just resonance or are supporting structure or are passages to yet a development of the idea? That’s how I think.

STUART: So perhaps this ties into the relationship between what you’re experimenting with and how you were thinking about narrative.

WAYNE: Yes, yes, it does. Its means, its methodology for accomplishing something, whatever it is, whether it’s a story or an image or the development of an image as in a film, for example, or in a painting. The painting that is above your shoulder tells a story. It’s a narrative painting. It has two themes. It’s the race. It’s a race of two creatures, and as they race across the canvas, they take on each other’s characteristics, which they could not do if there were no intervals between them. So as the figures move across this painting, which is called The Chase, there is the opportunity and enough time for them to exchange physical characteristics so that by the time the figures have reached the right end of the canvas, they’ve exchanged characteristics and the winner is the loser and the loser is the winner, my point being there ain’t much use running those races, because they all come out the same anyway, maybe kind of a cynical point of view, but it is fun.The other thing about it that interested me is that in order to relate to that painting, you have to spend a certain amount of time on it. It’s a narrative. It has a beginning; it has an end; it has a middle. Was that possible to do consciously through the use of optical devices that could speed up or slow down the rate at which you read—or what’s equal to the word “read” is the word “experience”—the rate at which you experience the painting. That is a narrative problem, how to tell a story. So I found that if I could control the eye path of a spectator, I could tell a story, make a point, cause them to spend a certain amount of time with my work, decipher it, figure out does it mean this or does it mean that? In other words, to wallow in it a little bit and to leave enough room in the picture for a viewer to have their own version of it, not to make it so tight that every detail is preordained by me. A short story, a very short story, a twenty-second short story. And I’m still making things like that. Last week I made film of the collage. Did I show it to you? Yes, you saw it. The collage with the figures in it.

STUART: Yes. I didn’t know the name of the work.

WAYNE: Yes, it reminds me of a scene in a film, and I was the director actually deciding where the characters would appear, why they would be upstage or downstage. And people tend to read that collage in the order in which I wanted them to, so I suppose it is a matter of my wanting more control over the spectator.Can I get someone to look at the painting the way I want them to read it? That would give me the opportunity for narrative, telling stories, making a comment. Not necessarily a story, but just an observation about something. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is this whimsy or is it serious? So that one would be offering to visual art some of the resources that are available to writers or filmmakers. Why not? Anyway, these were ideas that interested me and that’s what I worked on during those early years of the forties and fifties.

STUART: And you said that that informed your later aesthetic as well.

WAYNE: Yes. I’m still interested in that. I want to be able to communicate a very complicated idea, if that’s what’s on my mind, or a very simple one, if that’s the way my work is going that day, but I don’t want to be closed out and confined to the instant image only, and I want the spectator to get the point I’m making, not just any old point where they look at a picture and they project onto it the meaning that they prefer to give it. I want them to read the meaning I put there. That’s not an expression of power as much as it is a means of communicating.

STUART: When you advanced with your lithography skills after you had been running the Tamarind Institute for ten years, you did begin to introduce color into your lithographs. I’m mentioning that because maybe you could talk a little bit about the Visa Series that you were in the process of working on. It’s a group of lithographs that you were working on when you last conducted an oral history.

WAYNE: Well, color lithography, Tamarind cannot take credit for introducing color lithography. Color lithography was very well established long before Tamarind. I think that we improved the quality of color prints. We had very strong opinions and we modified the inks and we did a lot more with tertiary color than was the norm. We researched a lot of technical problems in color because you can very easily overprint the color in such a way that it shines like an oil slick on pavement, can be very ugly, but quite marvelous color lithographs had been made long before I was born.

STUART: What did it mean to you to be introducing color into your lithography? Because for a while lithography opened up a path because it had removed color for you.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, that was just coincidence. It was good that it removed color because the idea was so complicated that I couldn’t handle all of it and color too. That was more a limitation of mine. I just wasn’t smart enough to handle it all at the same time. It took time for me to be able to be so at home in the medium that I could add complications of color and have enough energy to solve them. Color, the introduction of color into the problems of optics was an aesthetic but also a highly technical problem because color in the eye is received by the cones of the eye, the focal area of the eye. The outer rim of the eye is made up of rods, and these only perceive black and white, but the rods are highly sensitive to movement so that when your eye is scanning a field of vision, you think everything is in focus and it’s all in color. Actually, it’s the constant movement of your eye that is allowing that small focal area to register all that information, and most of the field that you’re looking at, as your eye is moving, is coming in to you in black and white, and you read it as movement. So that if you’re walking down the street and some kid tosses a baseball at you, you duck because something is coming and you don’t even know what it is, but your eye has warned you to get the hell out of the way because you’re liable to get hurt. It is the way in which the body protects itself from moving objects that it can’t see.That’s very interesting, because if I could create an image in which only certain areas carried color and the intermediate areas faded out and then came back into color, it would starts to duplicate something that you recognize as a biological experience without necessarily being able to explain it. I just wanted to use this information for what it was worth to me as a mean of controlling eye path. So that many of the optical paintings have areas of color which are quite clear and sharp, and then it has areas which sort of fade out in between. Those are the areas of movement between the focal areas where you’re not seeing this clearly because the cones are doing the work. I mean the rods are doing the work rather than the cones. Anyway, this seemed to me a useful way to control the eye path of the spectator, and I did a lot of work on that. How much control could I exercise? For example, could I get people to read a painting backwards; that is, against their normal habit of reading from left to right and from top to bottom? I did experiments like that.

STUART: Which one are we talking about?

WAYNE: In the big room. It’s called Cryptic Creatures. By that time, by the time I did Cryptic Creatures, I already had also developed my own lexicon of symbols, of images, some of which I called Kafka symbols. They were very ambiguous images, two of which constitute the themes for The Chase, for example, and one of which resembles a playing card, and the other, a time glass, a sand glass of time. Its head is made up of three cross-sections of a mushroom, which is the symbol of [unclear], intruding myself into the lexicon.But anyway, these creatures which I first developed as a litho of sixteen symbols, completely arbitrary with my own meaning to them, was a lexicon, and I expected to do an independent work based on each one of them. In fact, I actually did do independent works of some of them, not all. New things crossed my path and I didn’t always fulfill my own instructions or ambitions, but enough to try it on for size. My creative life is full of false starts and stops, intentions that I partially realize, and some things that I actually carry all the way through. Sometimes I stop because a given idea seems no longer as interesting as it was when I started out. Sometimes I stop because a new and more powerful idea has displaced it. And sometimes I have enough discipline and a good enough idea to go the whole goddamned length, as in The Dorothy Series, for example, or others, other things I’ve done. But The Dorothy Series comes to mind.

STUART: That’s a very interesting series in terms of another way of approaching narrative.

WAYNE: Yes, and it does actually—I call it a film in twenty frieze frames, and I actually made what I think was a very good video to go with it that plays in the gallery while the show is on, so that you hear Dorothy’s voice speaking. I cannot account for my interest in narrative except to say that I was a voracious reader all my life, including when I was very young. My mother’s nickname for me was “Dusty,” which was short for [author Fyodor] Dostoyevsky, because I was reading the Russian novelists. I was reading all the time, and I was sensitive to how a sentence is put together and the subtleties of communication. This was very important to me, and it was important to me in music as well as in art. The most resistant form for narrative is art, because suppose you put a great battle scene on a canvas. It’s that moment, you know. With [Marcel] Proust, for god’s sake, you can spend hours for the guy just to turn over in bed, right? You really get to know him. You know what his linen is like. And the way the sentences are put together, the sense of time and meaning become three-dimensional experiences. You really feel time as a force. You experience every dreary moment of it, every joyous moment of it.The experience of time in a painting often takes place because the painting is frozen, nobody’s moving, and you stand there contemplating the painting and you melt it out of its frozen state into a living state for you. I needed something else. I don’t know why. I just felt that there were other possibilities, not just the instant image when you look at something and everything looks like it’s going to cooperate with that story, but that when you look at a painting, you should be able to give it multiple dimensions. Now, you could do that by projecting your own fantasies onto it. Doesn’t mean it’s there. What is the role of the artist in presenting that drama, that instant image, static object which, nonetheless, resonates in your being and triggers all kinds of sensations and reactions? Because a great painting will do that. That seemed to me worthwhile. So many of the paintings that I saw just are themselves flat-out and nothing else happens. No matter how I try to get more out of it, I don’t. But every once in a while something comes along and you do. What is that essence? And is that normal for a visual experience? Visual experiences depends so heavily on your psyche, your imagination, on what you bring to it, that sometimes I think the artist isn’t even entitled to sign the damn thing, because what they’ve done is merely trigger free association in the eye of the spectator. So what I was looking for—and I don’t know that I’ve ever achieved it. Maybe I have. Some things, I think I have achieved, doing something so fully that there is more than an instant image, but a resonance that the spectator not only gets, but gets it because I put it there and they are the other half of my communication. It’s like writing a letter to somebody and their being able to read it.I feel that way about writing. I feel that way about music. I feel that way about a political communication. I feel that way about the Tamarind project and many other kinds of projects which I would hope were for the public good, and we certainly know that many of these kinds of communication come out of the most evil side of humanity. I mean, what the hell kind of communication were the Hitler years? And was not every art form used to promote them? We look at the Egyptian riots now. We really don’t know what the hell’s playing. We don’t know who’s doing what. We look at it and we try to deduce, and we hope that the reporters are bringing us the best possible clues, but everything is really difficult to decipher. Everything’s a big puzzle, and I find it very intriguing to try to figure out what the hell I’m looking at. What is it really? I don’t even know what “really” means. All this is very stimulating. It is, I suppose, the confession of a curiosity pervert. [laughs] I’d like to know who’s home there in that person. Who is that person? What are they made up of? How did the table get that way? Why is the drawer warped? There’s one of those drawers now which, after twenty years, and it’s beautifully made, is suddenly warped and won’t go properly into the slot. What force is at work there? You could spend a whole evening trying to figure that out. So this kind of curiosity about ideas, about feelings, about people and how they relate to each other, what’s going to happen tomorrow? What’s going to happen to our country tomorrow? It’s all part of this same thing. You try to derive the meaning of the clues that you pick up and hope to hell you come out of it alive. [telephone rings] [recorder turned off]

STUART: It’s on again.

WAYNE: Let’s see what I was doing then.

STUART: There’s your catalog résumé. Beautiful.

WAYNE: Yes. What years are we talking about now?

STUART: Probably the late—well, it depends whether you want to talk about Tamarind or you want to talk about the decade after that.

WAYNE: Well, are we in the fifties or the sixties?

STUART: Picking up on the—

WAYNE: On the idea of narrative, really.

STUART: Okay.

WAYNE: Yes. Let’s pick up on the idea of narrative. My interest in narrative was generic, in the sense that the optical patch, as it were, gave me maybe a new means of presenting something more than the instant image. Because of my love of books and friends who were writers and my intimacy with these arts, these other arts, I was approached by a philosopher who was quite a hot rock at the time at UCLA. He was head of the philosophy department. His name was Abe Kaplan, a marvelous aesthetician, very witty guy who wrote some enchanting fables, and the fables were about basic stories of the Tower of Babel and good and evil, the creation of the first man, and so on, and Abe’s stories essentially end up making a fool of God, which exactly fit my view of anything that was, quote, “spiritual,” unquote. I came from a family group that was not on good terms with God because my grandfather died suddenly when I was six. My grandmother was in her early forties or late thirties, whatever it was, and she was furious that such a good man should be struck man, presumably by God. Well, you’d have to believe in God to be that angry with him. And I remember being at the graveside and my grandmother was as small as I am, and she stood there with her fist raised and cursed God and spat for doing this terrible thing to her husband. So I didn’t get the impression that God was somebody you were respectful of. He was like a bad boy on the block and worse, an unmentionable. He was somebody she spat after. And we never went to a temple or to services of any kind. I was really raised innocent of all that stuff, and it was really believed by my mother and my grandmother, who were the main influences.Anyway, Abe Kaplan comes out with this group of very witty fables which, in effect, make fun of God. Now, I’ve never said that, because why should I bring down the wrath of all the religionists on my fables, which are really quite spiritual-looking? The devil appears in some of them. But it was the drama of the fables. How do you represent convincingly the moment of the creation of the first man? What the hell does that look like? So that the narrative of the Kaplan fables really interested me a lot. I was doing litho and I developed a technique for the kind of radiance that you would have to attribute to something that’s taking place where there is no Earth, there’s nothing but space, dark, and light. What did they look like? What do these creatures look like? So I made a number of drawings of “First Man,” whom I kept seeing as rather coltish because it didn’t know how to walk yet, it didn’t know what its muscles were for. The Tower of Babel, here’s the first critic. Here’s the first man. Here is Lucifer at the moment when he’s changing from an angel into a devil because God, having called all the angels together to show them this first man, and Lucifer says, “What’s it supposed to be?” The name of the fable is The First Critic. So I worked on that to try to—how do you commit both an angel and a devil at the moment of changing? What does the first man look like, and what does God look like? These were the literary problems of illustrating that fable. How do you do it technically? Clearly, it’s not something that you draw.From this I developed a technique in lithography that I was able to use for many things, many quite wonderful lithos, but they’re based on the narratives of Abe Kaplan, and there were paintings as well as—

STUART: How was it that Abe Kaplan came to contact you?

WAYNE: I knew him. He was just one of the people I knew well, a very witty intellectual. I accumulate them the way magnets accumulate iron particles. They just appear. And all of these are narrative works, narrative stories. For example, I had already done a whole series on justice, on juries, and if you follow them in their order, you can see the structure developing, how it develops. The jurors look—this was my first litho on the jury.

STUART: In the catalog, number 87.

WAYNE: Yes. Here’s the drawing and this is a litho. This one is called The Curious, in which a group of figures whose heads are made of light are holding light, but one gets away from them and just sort of floats there. This idea of lights, what things are made of, and the use of dots to suffuse the atmosphere, these are the kinds of problems I was working with, the kind of narrative that you could tell and where the means of telling it appropriate. I couldn’t imagine drawing a [unclear] for that. It had to be something that became a whole atmosphere in which this kind of event could take place. These were the technical problems. These tied into—here’s the optics, you see. Here I have—

STUART: Which work is that you were just pointing to?

WAYNE: —a circle, one texture weaving through another.

STUART: That was Strange Moon you were pointing to.

WAYNE: Yes. And, of course, it had a cosmic quality. And here these were jurors from the Justice Series. I had had occasion to witness a trial, and I was fascinated trying to figure out what the hell people had in their minds. Each juror was clearly seeing everything through the prism of whatever the hell they were made of, so the image of jurors in tubes separated by but also imprisoned by whatever they were. You can see, as these go along, they become more and more sophisticated as design, as works of art. The textures of the tubes in which they are encapsulated become the actual stuff of which they are made, which you would have to say about any juror. What walks in dressed in a suit or whatever it is, is already a fully formed creature with a way of seeing, and the task of the lawyers to make their vision consistent with what the lawyers’ vision, that’s why no lies are barred, you know. Anyway, I had approached some of these problems earlier simply by trying to pass one form through another module, so that these modules—

STUART: In [unclear].

WAYNE: Yes. This is a wonderful painting. I’d love to be able to buy it back.

STUART: The Dreamers.

WAYNE: Yes. A funny story about The Dreamers. I was working on that—that was in the fifties—and everything I knew I put into that painting, yet when I walked across the room, it didn’t sparkle. Nothing I did. I was getting depressed because I couldn’t make the light move the way I wanted it to. Finally I went back to my eye doctor and complained, and she said, “You’re just neurotic. There’s nothing wrong with your glasses.” So then I went to another eye doctor, who looked at my glasses, looked at my eyes, and said, “Where did you get these glasses? In the dime store? These have nothing to do with your eyes.” And that was when I discovered for the first time that I had never seen leaves on the trees. I lived in an Impressionist world, and actually the word was siennese. The world was siennese. When I could see through the new glasses, I saw every leaf on the tree. I saw the texture in the carpet. I’d never seen it before. Just from bad glasses.So the idea of glasses and how valuable, I mean, when I put on my glasses it makes me smile because now I have four eyes, not two, you know. The whole visual experience became so much richer because of these lenses. And I was already trying, you see, to move the form through a module like the Ben-day dot. This was another expression.

STUART: With the module geometric shape [unclear]?

WAYNE: Well, in this case they were triangles, and it’s the identical module. It’s just got different emphasis on where I put the emphasis, to try to stage one kind of creature by way of its passage through another kind of creature, in that case the triangle, but, look, these are the identical size and module, but look how different they are in emphasis.

STUART: Goes back to the idea of the Ben-day dots.

WAYNE: Well, it goes back that everything is made of something else, and that by altering your emphasis on it, you can make it quite different, but there are many possibilities within these. Look at these lithos.

STUART: The Advocate, The Bride.

WAYNE: And The Suitor. They are all the identical module, but they don’t look it. This is a very feminized, as of that time, pattern. This one is absolutely neutral. This one is phallic, of course.So this seems like such an esoteric isolated kind of an interest, looking—

STUART: The interest of the modules?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Well, I guess in the fifties, the popular art was more Abstract Expressionist.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: So it was quite different.

WAYNE: Yes. Absolutely.

STUART: What was receiving media attention.

WAYNE: Absolutely anti-literary, and I kept falling into storytelling of one kind or another.

STUART: Did that create any—

WAYNE: A big handicap, yes. I absolutely was unacceptable, and since I had no hopes of success, it didn’t matter, because even if I conformed, if I did Abstract Expressionism, they weren’t going to admit me anyway.

STUART: Why is that?

WAYNE: Because I was a woman. There were no women successes in those days, at least none that weren’t hanging off a man, as [Georgia] O’Keeffe and [Alfred] Stieglitz, for example. There weren’t women artists around. Only on the WPA [Works Progress Administration], and that’s because we were poor and on relief. That’s what qualified us, that we needed jobs. So there were some very good women artists on the WPA, but that doesn’t mean that we got teaching jobs or that we sold or that we had dealers. To have a dealer in those days simply meant that you had somebody in your surround who was as poor as you were. [laughs] As is still the case with most dealers. Most dealers are very bad businesspeople, don’t have capital. They think they’re doing an artist a great favor when they hang a show, you know. The artists pay for the champagne and the mailers, and leaves the work there and so on.

STUART: You did receive some acclaim, though, for the John Donne series in ’58.

WAYNE: Yes, I did. I began receiving attention by way of prizes or citations. In 1952, the L.A. Times named me Woman of the Year for Modern Art. What the hell was that? I had a show at the Pasadena Museum of a lot of this early painting, and someone important saw it, who was a friend of [Dorothy] Buffy Chandler. Buffy Chandler had herself just established this new award. So one day I was working in the studio and the phone rang. I was varnishing a painting, airbrushing a very fine varnish on this, and the phone rang. I put down the airbrush. “Miss Wayne, this is so-and-so of the L.A. Times. You’ll be pleased to know that the editors of the Los Angeles Times have just named you Woman of the Year for Modern Art.” And I said, “Oh, that’s nice. Thank you,” and I hung up. And I go on varnishing, and I’m thinking to myself, geez, that’s a funny phone call. So when I finished what I was doing, I called the Times. I said, “Do you have a such-such person there?” “Yes.” She connects me. I said, “My name is June Wayne. Does that mean anything to you?” She said, “Why, Miss Wayne, I just spoke with you. I’m so glad you called me, because we have to make an appointment for our photographer to come out and take your picture, so that when we announce this at the end of the year—,” and that was around the fifteenth of December—“for the January first edition of the paper, we’ll have your photograph.” So they make an appointment, and a few days later I see this car pull up the driveway to my place, and a photographer gets out with all the equipment of those days, you know. There were tons of it. The guy comes up, and I usher him up into the studio. He looks around, looks at me, shakes his head, “No.” He says, “No, you won’t do.”[laughs] “What do you mean, I won’t do?” He says, “You don’t look like an artist. Haven’t you got a peasant skirt you can put on?” I was wearing pedal-pushers, you know, and gym shoes. So he got a photograph. After January first, arrives again, carrying a box with white damask paper and a big white satin bow around it, about so big, and what looked like a diploma wrapped in white damask with a big white satin bow, and he presents these to me and then goes away. So I open up the diploma-looking thing first, and it’s three tear sheets of the L.A. Times’ picture announcing Woman of the Year. That’s what that was. And in the little box was a silver cup inscribed with my name. It was a silver moustache cup designed by Paul Revere, a very fine replica of a moustache cup by Paul Revere, and that’s what my prize was for Woman of the Year. If you think that that didn’t make me laugh, it certainly did. Nearly every prize I’ve ever received has been ironic in one way or another that way, because how do you honor an artist, you know? As a matter of fact, as a result of that prize, I lost a pair of friends. Elsa Manchester and Charles Laughton were friends of mine, and when this thing was announced, Elsa called me and she said, “June, how did you get that prize? I want my publicist to get it for me.” I said, “Elsa, I haven’t the slightest idea how I got it. I didn’t do anything.” She didn’t believe me. She thought I was trying to bar her from getting the Woman of the Year Award. They were no longer friends of mine. E : Charles Laughton?

WAYNE: Yes, the actor. They’re wonderful actors and they had a wonderful collection of Mark Tobey watercolors. They lived at that time up around Gardner [Street] and Sunset [Boulevard]. So the lesson I learned from all of that is that prizes may bring you as much pain as pleasure, and that there’s no rhyme or reason to them. [laughs] But I had received already by that time maybe, I don’t know, any number of prizes. Sometimes they carried money with them, maybe $15, as much as that, you know. I have a very low opinion of most of these encomiums for artists. I suppose it’s better than nothing, but you’ve got to admit it’s not a very dignified profession. [laughs] No, I’ve had some grants that were very valuable. One recently was the Lee Krasner-Jackson Pollock Foundation gave me a grant last year, and I really was glad to have it. They did it in a wonderful way, you know, very thoughtful and dignified way.

STUART: Was there a specific project proposed?

WAYNE: Yes, yes. I was short of money. [laughs]

STUART: Got it.

WAYNE: They couldn’t have been nicer. I’ve had maybe, I don’t know, most of them are listed, maybe fifty, sixty. I have five doctorates and have turned down the rest, but have been offered, which is funny, considering that I’m a high-school dropout, you know. I always feel as though they’re not real, because I didn’t earn them the hard way, you know. Anyway, those years—

STUART: The fifties.

WAYNE: I was working on themes and I would do many versions of a subject, pushing it, exploring it, and it’s in here, about this time, that I really start going into litho at a whole new level. These are drawings.

E: Your self-portraits.

WAYNE: Yes. The National Gallery [of Art] owns that one. There are some quite beautiful ones, and these are the lithos that I did on John Donne. This begins the John Donne lithos in Paris. These were all done in Paris. I did about, I don’t know, thirty or forty of them, something like that, in ’57, and then decided that I should face the poems by doing the actual book and including the poems, so that was ’58, and it was on that trip that I met [W. McNeil] Lowry. The Donne poems and that experience added what I needed to know in order to make a rescue effort for Tamarind.

STUART: Were you able to push your needs with the printer, with [Marcel] Durassier, further than you had before?

WAYNE: Yes. By the time I came back to do that project, he was very respectful, because it was a big project and we had worked well together. He had become trusting of me, and we were more like family than just client. He, his wife, and I were a very odd trio because they’re French peasants, Basque peasants, couldn’t be more different than I. I brought him to California during Tamarind to do a month of demonstrations here on how he would print, and it was a hilarious time. It really was. Durassier was an unregenerate resistor. He resisted everything and everybody. When he walked into the workshop for the first time and he saw the press, he grabbed the scraper bar out of the press and smashed it on the press, and we almost died because it was so hard to get hard wood, wood hard enough for that, and we didn’t understand his rage. He said, “You know better than that. It has to be really hard wood.” And I said, “This is a young state. We don’t have trees old enough for that. We can’t get that kind of wood.”And he said, “It’s really very simple, you liar, you menteuse. All you have to do, go out and find an oxcart and then take the axle from the oxcart and make it.” So I said, “There isn’t an oxcart in California old enough for that.” Well, that evening I took them for a walk on Hollywood Boulevard, and we passed Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and as luck would have it, they had a display set up of a covered wagon with a stuffed ox. And he turned to me and he said again with scorn dripping, “Menteuse! You see, you lied to me.” Anyway, that month was full of these hilarious confrontations between us and Durassier about technique in litho. For example, he had a secret for how to keep the ink from shining. If you had two layers of ink, the second one would not shine. What was it finally? You crush a clove of garlic into the ink. Well, you know we weren’t going to make prints that smelled of garlic. [laughs] There were so many of these confrontations, and he would get all excited, very excitable, but when he printed, all of the grantees were, like, mesmerized. It was like watching a great conductor conducting an orchestra. It was just so beautiful. But he was quite a handful to shepherd through. I had originally intended to start Tamarind with him. I was very lucky that I didn’t, because he was such a handful to handle, really very difficult, very difficult. Anyway, they’re both dead now. Whenever I went to Paris, I would have to put aside a day, because he was a great cook, Durassier. He would cook for me. I’m a very small eater.

STUART: You were telling me this story.

WAYNE: Yes, and that was so hard.

STUART: So when he came to California, did you put him through the wringer on California food?

WAYNE: Well, no. I took them to restaurants. He never got a chance to cook here. He would have torn apart our stoves. He would have broken up the whole joint, you know. That was how he did things.

STUART: Were things different after he left Tamarind? He’d broken this—

WAYNE: Only that he loved us, loved me, and he did begin showing off by telling his secrets to our printers. I continued in touch with him to the day they died, the two of them, as now I’m still in touch with Serge Lozingot and Liliane. They call me every two weeks, and I call them. We have this long enthusiastic conversation in broken English and broken French, just goes maybe fifteen, twenty minutes at long-distance rates. Not easy at their end to do it. But anyway, litho, for me and through Tamarind, through Tamarind, not during Tamarind, but after Tamarind, I was able to make a lot of progress in my own way, because I did not—the only time that I did a Tamarind print was when there was a piece of press time between grantees, so that I did a total of twenty-eight prints during the ten years of Tamarind, and I did at least thirty or more in the first year after Tamarind left.

STUART: With Ed Hamilton.

WAYNE: No, it was earlier. It was with Serge Lozingot, who worked for me, and I had several others before Ed came aboard. So I had for some years lithos going all the time, and many of them were just extraordinary. Even at Tamarind we could not have done what I could afford to do with my own printer, very exotic inking, very exotic registration, some quite wonderful lithos, the Tidal Waves, the Stellar Winds, the Solar Flares, suites that are bound, which are largely sold out now. I don’t own examples, even, of some of them. And, of course, The Dorothy Series, which was a big project of twenty works.I would like now to do a suite which I would call The Finger, because I have discovered—did I tell you this?

STUART: No, I don’t think so.

WAYNE: Looking through some photographs for this documentary film that they want to make, I discovered that the first picture I have of me at eight months old, I’m sitting in front of the Field Museum in Chicago, on the grass, about this big, all lace and a cap over my head, fat, ugly, a homely baby sitting there, and my hand is doing this [demonstrates]. And in every damn photograph for years, I am pointing to something for absolutely no reason, this way, that way, that way. I didn’t know until recently how much I use my hands when I speak. I use them all the time and am not aware of it. And pointing, look. The exhibition in Chicago. See, look. I’m pointing to the exhibition in Chicago. The exhibition in Chicago, all those photographs I’ve received, damn near every one of them I’m pointing at something or at somebody.

STUART: Why did that come up when you were thinking about The Dorothy Series?

WAYNE: It didn’t come up during The Dorothy Series.

STUART: No, I mean just in our conversation. You mentioned that you did The Dorothy Series, and “By the way, I’d like to do the series on The Finger.”

WAYNE: Well, because the problems of The Dorothy Series is a technical forerunner of what I would like to do now, not the same thing at all, not even technically, but the experience of doing The Dorothy Series would stand me in very good stead now. I have other problems. I’m too frail to do them directly as lithos, to run every day to a litho shop. There are several very fine ones here of people that I trained or that trained at Tamarind, with whom I could work, but I’d have to book the time for it and I’d have to hurry to get it done, because, you know, I’m going to croak one of these days, and it may very well be quite sudden, so planning a big project is kind of a dumb thing to do. I have to plan it so that anywhere it stops, it’ll still have structural integrity. Also it will be very expensive, because I have to buy all the work time of whatever that shop is, and right at the moment my funds are in bad shape. My tenant went bankrupt, and my buildings have been bringing no rent for quite a while now. It may be some months before I can get them out, even. So that’s a big financial blow. And now that I am so frail, I have a payroll. In order to work at all, I need Larry [Workman] and I need Shu [Shuichi Sonokawa ] and I need Luce *[NAME?] to keep the place going. So that plus the fact that some medications cost as much as $5,000 a month has really knocked me for a loop. No matter how well I do as an artist, I’ve not reached a point where I can support that kind of an outflow. So I’m kind of frantic about it, unless I were to get a grant of some kind to do The Finger, and I think it would be a very funny, sweet—I can just see what it would look like.

STUART: It wouldn’t be lithograph?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: It would be lithograph.

WAYNE: Yes. That’s how I would want to do it, but I would have to take over a litho shop so that it could be done with all possible speed, and I cannot drive up and back for proofing, so it means whoever does it, I really have to buy them for a period of time in order to make this feasible. I need money to accomplish that suite. And there are a couple of other projects I’d like to do that I have in mind. There’s never a dearth of stuff that would be interesting to pull up. It’s just, you know, whether it’s realistic or not. I don’t know. That’s why I’m also very dubious about doing the film. I’m not sure I want to put my energy into something which is fundamentally capricious, unless it’s going to be a great film. But if I don’t make it, why would it be a great film? [laughs] I can’t control what other people do, necessarily, and I could be risking very valuable time for something that is— [interruption] [End of February 1, 2011 interview]

1.3. Session Three (April 29, 2011)

STUART: Today’s date is April 29, 2011, and we’re at the residence and studio of June Wayne. The interviewer, myself, that’s Carolyn Stuart.

WAYNE: I’m suggesting that perhaps this interview might take us to this moment in time when the country outside this studio has undergone some remarkable changes which, for the most part, seem not to have been noticed by very many people. One of them is that Benton Harbor, Michigan, is suddenly a totally new political entity. All its elected officials have been summarily ejected from office, and the governor has put a manager or a—I don’t know what they call him—a business manager or something with total power over everything in Benton Harbor, Michigan. It’s a formula for a political takeover of the fascist nature that is so radical, so awful as a precedent for the United States, that I wonder how it is that the country is going about its business as though nothing had happened. I cannot get this event out of my head because it represents a total negation of the electoral process and a substitution of government by fiat by a politician or his flunkie, the governor of this state. Why the whole country isn’t reeling and screaming against this happening, I do not know. Maybe it is screaming and I can’t hear it because the media may not be adequately reporting it, hardly reporting it at all. It’s part of a change in the United States that maybe was going on for a long time but didn’t really become visible until [Barack] Obama was elected, when the Tea Party Movement and the Birthers and all of those fringe nuts came out like roaches out of the wall to threaten and maybe to absorb what had been the leading democracy in the world. Of course, I have always thought that there were other countries that handled democracy with more grace or more loyalty than we Americans did, countries that are not as devoted to guns as we are and to other idiosyncrasies, both of personality and of self-image, that allows us to think that we are the most admired country in the world, that we are the smartest, the most generous, etc., etc. That whole image of what America is has, in fact, fallen apart since our last interview, at least in my mind, because the steps that have been taken are so drastic and the American people are reacting or non-reacting anywhere near in relation to the size of the events that are going on.So why do I, a ninety-three-year-old artist sitting in my studio, bring this to the fore in an interview that is theoretically about the art historical facts of the ninety-odd years that I have been making images? I must say that the politics of the last few months have shoved aside many of the subjective imperatives that have been part of my life. Names of artists, bits of the art history, all of this has been swept away, in my opinion. I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see a reversal of the damage of the mayhem that is going on in our society at this time, and I have great doubts as to whether we will come out of this and the next several years in anything like the format that I have known all my life, which, however messy, was nonetheless more or less working pretty well in terms of democracy, of the right to petition the courts, of the right to create groups with which one could identify and push one’s issues, because not all of American self-protection, self-expression has come just through union, the formation of unions, but also other kinds of social groups which, nonetheless, were able to express the desires and ambitions of the American people. We are in a moment when the arts are particularly vulnerable, where education is in terrible condition, where the Congress is deliberately going after destroying the idea that every American citizen is entitled to an education. That is now absolutely up for grabs under the guise of budget cuts and deficits, but actually as a political movement to create a country where a few can dominate and control everything and where the people live in the kind of boot-smacking files, boot-marching the way the Nazis do, the way the Koreans do, the way the Chinese do, maybe less than before, but still very government-controlled.But our government control is of a different order, because what is happening now is that while the democratic institutions are really being dissolved, the Benton Harbor matter, which is, fortunately, so small and clear, it’s such a clear example of what a dictatorship can do, that I’m hoping it will catch on and startle people to the degree that I am startled. I believe that if the Benton Harbor example is allowed to stand, then everything that we value in terms of freedom of expression, the opportunity to make art, the opportunity to earn a living decently, to have certain civil rights guaranteed, I think all of that, with this one example, can be wiped away. If that stands, then people like me are simply outside the pale, and this is no time for me to be wondering whether I have forgotten to mention what this artist or that artist or some particular nuance of my life which is only justified, that that attention is only justified, by the assumption that quite a number of people have made, including the oral history program, that it is worthwhile to record what my life has been, what my experiences have been, and especially those that pertain to other events in the art world that seem so important to us now but which wouldn’t even constitute a ripple on the turbulent ocean that is the state of the country at this time.

STUART: Did you feel this way, though? I mean, you’ve lived it in different eras where it’s been pretty difficult, like the [Great] Depression, when you were working on the WPA [Works Progress Administration]. The sixties were tumultuous, the seventies even here in Los Angeles when Tamarind [Institute]—these have been transitional periods.

WAYNE: Yes, but this is a new kind of transition for America. It’s a transition from a democracy to a dictatorship. The governor of Indiana is the dictator of Indiana. With one law, he has swept aside the entire Constitution, and it is very questionable whether it will be possible to take this into court. It’s without precedent, absolutely without precedent, that a governor can issue a law or whatever it is—I don’t even know what its legal format is, but all of the elected officials of Benton Harbor have been kicked out of office, and a manager has put in who is answerable to nobody and has total authority for whatever he wants to do with that city. Nothing like that has ever happened in my experience, during my ninety-three years. I think it’s unique for the country.

STUART: This is really on the top of your mind because it seems to be—I don’t want to be putting words into your mouth, but it’s putting into question for you the value of your legacy, not just this recording, but what role your art will have down the line.

WAYNE: I don’t see it as having a role. I see that in this one example they have been successful in raping that city and killing that city, actually, and removing all of the civil rights of those people. That is, so far as I know, without precedent in our history, and there are parallel things that are going on that are moving us more and more in that direction. For example, the attempt to make it illegal to have unions. If this isn’t a fundamental American right that is under attack and which has passed the legislature of several states—in several states it’s fait accompli that American citizens are robbed of their opportunities, of their rights under the Constitution, and I don’t know where these things are in the legal process. I’m not sure that the courts have not been disenfranchised under this process. If your vote no longer has a meaning and if your whole city government is now at the mercy of one individual who, however benevolent—let’s say he’s a prince of goodwill—the principle itself is a death to voting, to the power of the people to have a constitution and to have it obeyed.Now, I realize that I have selected one out of many crazy things that are going on, and the country itself is experiencing unprecedented weather at a level that has astounded us in the last three days. Tornadoes, two hundred tornadoes in that small group of midwestern states, we’ve never seen anything like that before. I don’t know that it’s ever happened before, that entire large cities suddenly disappear into rubble. What does this mean? These are earthshaking cosmic kind of events. One is intellectual political. The other is literally a physical upheaval of the planet. It impresses me because I’ve never seen anything like that in my lifetime. I’ve never heard of anything like it. What has happened in Japan, about at least a third of it has virtually disappeared and become uninhabitable, and Japan has been, for the last thirty years at least, the chief competitor to the American business community. The events of the world have accomplished a level of intensity and of chaos, a kind of chaos—I call it that, although I believe that there is an integrating pattern that I cannot describe. I don’t know enough to describe it. Not only is it physical in terms of what the globe is doing in the universe, but also what people are doing in this universe. It was bad enough when we saw this kind of thing happening in Germany, but the same kind of thing is happening in the United States, and there are other countries where it may be in progress, and I’m not hearing or seeing publicly anything much except sort of knee-jerk reactions to something unpleasant going on.All of this has a way of making my personal concerns look unworthy, miniscule, really beside the point, hardly worth discussing, in fact, not worth discussing at all, and it has changed my attitude toward many things about which I was once passionate. I see much of what I have done as really foolish, and had I understood what was coming, I don’t think that I would devoted my life to the kinds of things that absorbed it, certainly not to making art, certainly not to making art to hang on a wall over a dining room or over an end table or over a couch. There’s been a shift in scale as well as a shift in the quality of the kinds of considerations that should be occupying not just me but everyone, which brings me to the question of women’s rights, feminism. I have long been worried about the literal disappearance of a clear feminist movement. Feminism, the feminism of the seventies and eighties, allowed women who were artists like me to enjoy the illusion that there was some sort of possible natural place for us in the aesthetic cultural aspect of American society. It’s a very long time since anyone has had the mandate to speak for American women. They are not speaking for themselves. Does this mean that there are no feminists? Does this mean that there aren’t many thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of young women who are still concerned about women’s rights, their rights? I think there is somewhere in this 2011 century. There is a sector, particularly in the colleges and in the workforce, of young women who are concerned about their place vis-à-vis men, vis-à-vis establishment, vis-à-vis opportunities for a good life, but I don’t see the leadership for them. I don’t see the strategists. I don’t see spokespeople who properly can speak for the rights of women the world over. Reporters have no one to go to for the feminist view, for the women’s view of a myriad of social problems from which women still suffer and which we would like to correct.In some ways, that is just a mechanical problem, because one could, using well-known P.R. techniques, find and spotlight maybe twenty or thirty women around the country, geographically, so that reporters, so that the media could go to them and say, “So what is the feminists’ position on this?” or that or the other thing. Because attacks on women as a group have become really devastating in the same political climate that I described five, ten minutes ago. The drive to deny women adequate healthcare is not only evident but shamelessly so, and I do not see that voice, that unified voice, that mandated voice of not only American women but women all over the world who are on the same page about their problems, but also on the same page as to what they should be doing about their problems, as has been the case with some of the revolts of the population of Egypt and in the Middle East. There doesn’t seem to be a unified voice of leaders. There isn’t an experienced group, so far as one can tell, guiding the ordinary people who are pouring out of their homes to protest the excesses of dictators. I have been thinking for a long time now, several years, that exactly because of the Internet, the electronic revolution, which I personally despise for other reasons, nonetheless, for the first time it really is possible to create a virtual state of women. All we would need is a skyscraper. We don’t need an army. We will need a constitution. We will need a constitutional structure. We will need leaders identified as such, who can, through the use of dual citizenship, which is established, recruit citizens in this women’s state from all over the world, not only women but men as well, because there are many men who see the advantage of some kind of parity with women, for people all to be people rather than men and women.I believe that if you can organize a Facebook, you can organize a women’s state, and I think it’s time for that. I’ve even been looking for a name for it. The nearest I can get to it is Herland, one word, H-e-r-l-a-n-d, but I don’t think it’s the best. It doesn’t have the vigor that such a word should have. But what I am saying is that we not only need a hierarchy—no, not a hierarchy, but maybe a plenary group of women from around the country representing many skills to form a constitutional congress and create a women’s state, but we need to make that international and begin speaking on issues and acting on issues as an interest group. We have allowed women’s issues to be subsumed into education, medical care, all these other categories of things, and we have disappeared. Many women who are as concerned as I am deliberately feel that we must abandon the word “feminist” because it has some sort of bad rep now, but what takes the place of that word is a challenge. I believe that “feminist” is still a good word. Why are we afraid of it? What is there about women that has made us so compliant? Just look at us. Look at what each age group looks like and all of the expression, nearly all of it, nearly all of it, is responding to the same old idea of a woman being pretty, having to be pretty, having to be concerned about her weight, her skin. The products that are sold tell us already where money is investing itself to keep women as the objects and fools that they have been for so many centuries, to keep them down. And, of course, all of the religions are driving to keep women in their place. Against that, we have the fact that many women have entered important job skills and are working, but they are earning three-quarters of what a man earns, and that makes a huge difference. For every $10,000 that a guy earns, a woman earns 7,500, sometimes 7,200. Why is that not more bothersome, and why can’t you use the word “feminist” to state your position about that?

STUART: Did you use to use the word “feminist” and stop at some point?

WAYNE: I don’t know. I really don’t. No, I didn’t. It was more a word that described us than we used it, but occasionally it would appear in the name of some feminist group. An example doesn’t come to mind. But I’m talking about this because I realize more than ever how rapidly this craziness, the present craziness politically, is affecting us, and we’re not even noticing it. All of this, all of these ideas, come to me at this time because I am, in fact, trying to wind up my life. I’m trying. I know that I have a fatal illness, just a matter of when I die, and it’s a struggle, and I see in small ways from day to day how my abilities are diminishing, and in a tidy kind of way I’m trying to leave my life, what there is left of it, in such a way that everything’s indexed properly, disposed of, located, bills paid, and some provision made for people who are dependent on me. And yet, looking back over my life, I see what a terrible struggle it has always been to do the things I’ve done and now even to be able still to say this is what I have done. In relation to Tamarind, I have vanished. It’s true that they included me at the fiftieth anniversary of Tamarind, but it must be ten years or twenty years since they asked my advice about anything. And when they honored me, they made a paper crown such as you would give to a child on a birthday, which only caused me to make a series of very fierce photographs of me looking like an ancient dolt, like some kind of a monkey wearing this crown. How people look at women, how women look at themselves, how I look at myself as a woman and doing the things that I’ve done, even the kind of art I’ve made, how I am working now in order to continue being an artist where most of what I did as an artist I’m not physically able to do, all of this appears to be so absolutely unimportant, so unworthy of attention in the light of what I just said about Benton Harbor.I have in the last year been experiencing a kind of cosmic storm. I call it cosmic because it’s so much bigger than I am, that there’s almost no way to deal with it. I call it a storm because it is expressed by way of the art world and its issues, so it’s local in that sense. And these things which have happened in the last year, I cannot find a way to deal with. Maybe I can’t deal with it because I’m exhausted physically.

STUART: What specific things do you have in mind?

WAYNE: I’m talking about what is, in fact, the disaster of my relationship to the Art Institute of Chicago and this seemingly triumphant grand acceptance of the eleven big tapestries that are still on display there from three months ago. It’s a long time for an exhibition in a major museum. I could walk around and I should project the triumph of having such a show. I’m not eager for people to know how badly it has turned out for me. That’s not good career management. You only want to emphasize the positive, and as I think I said once, that you do your curriculum vitae—I said it to you, I think—nobody expects you to print your failures. But my relationship to the Art Institute and the real story of what has happened says something quite else. I believe that a lot of the problem is the fact that I am a woman. Part of the problem is the fact that crafts such as fiber art and tapestry is thought of as a female kind of stitchery, as tapestry is not accepted in this country the way it is in Europe. It’s understood as an art form more in Europe than it is here. So I made a very bad choice in going into tapestry, because I was only thinking of aesthetics, not of marketing and how people’s minds perceive this art form.I had the luxury for many, many years of simply thinking of myself as an artist and that therefore I could just go and do what I wanted to do because I was an artist, but part of the reason I could go and do what I wanted to do is that I was so unimportant as a woman that who cared and who cares now, because that assessment of women who were artists in the hard statistic of shows, you can look at the ads in Art News or any of the art magazines, and wherever there’s a group show, the names will be all male or there might be two or three women included. Let’s say if there are twelve names, there might be as many as three women, and they will always be the same three women in all these shows, or very nearly that. The Guerilla Girls’ task is still calling it, and we have whole new generations of people for whom those statistics are unknown because it hasn’t been going on and on and on as feminists have, whether from fatigue or from belief that they have accomplished it all or because new generations have different things to learn and aren’t very conscious of their social position. I don’t know what accounts for it. But, you know, from generation to generation, folkways get lost. That’s just normal. We do not have, as women, the—is the sound interfering?

STUART: I’m not sure. I just paused it.

WAYNE: Well, you might check it.

STUART: I guess it’ll make another track. I think they wanted to have lunch. It’s just you were on an important—I haven’t turned it back on, but, I mean, the whole, as you said, the fiasco with the Art Institute.

WAYNE: Well, I am leading somewhere.

STUART: Yes, I figured. Okay, So I’ll let you know when—Larry was standing over there, but I didn’t alert you to it because you were—

WAYNE: All right.

STUART: All right. So—

WAYNE: Can I hear the last part of that sentence? What was I saying?

STUART: It may turn into another track, but so be it. Let’s see. Oh, wait, it’s still recording.

WAYNE: I think we should stop.

STUART: It’s still recording, actually.

WAYNE: Okay. All right. Let’s stop this moment. [End of April 29, 2011 interview]

1.4. Session Four (May 8, 2011)

STUART: Okay. We’re recording, May 8, June Wayne, Carolyn Stuart, Tamarind [Institute] studio. Tapestries are a monumental form.

WAYNE: Yes. When I decided I wanted to make tapestries, in fact, it was not my idea. I had a friend named Madeleine Jarry, who was a great French inspector principal of Gobelin [Gobelins National Manufactory], and she was also in charge of the Mobilier National [Mobilier National et des Manufactures des Gobelins] of France, antique furniture. She had been sent to me in the early fifties by [Theodore] Ted Heinrich, who at that time was a curator at the Met [the Metropolitan Museum of Art] in New York and a friend of mine. He had been out here in California where I met him, and then he went there, and then he became the director of the Toronto Museum. But it was the custom in the fifties, and still to some degree, that when a visiting bigwig comes to town, somebody has to take him around because this is not a town that’s easy to get around. In those days—I’m talking about the fifties—if a curator or a dealer or somebody was coming to town, usually they would know somebody who for the next few days would squire them around. It was in this fashion that Madeleine Jarry was sent to me by Ted Heinrich, and we instantly became friends. We took to each other. That was before I’d ever been to France. Madeleine was very interested in my work, and she saw in it that she felt I was an appropriate artist for tapestry, like that work, that print you saw there of The Sanctified. You can imagine that as a weaving. So she began at that time, and for many years thereafter, to urge me to come into tapestry.Well, I was just writing up the plan for Tamarind. I may not have the sequence of dates right. But I was not able. I was committed from 1959 on to doing Tamarind, so I certainly couldn’t enter this. But by that time, Madeleine and I were very old friends and we had a long history together in Paris already. We used to meet for dinner maybe once, twice a week and go to a movie or see a play or whatever. She kept after me, and so the idea that when I was free of Tamarind, I would see what I could do with this medium was planted a long time in advance, and Madeleine was the vehicle by which I entered the medium, which meant that I entered it at a very sophisticated level. When I was going to do it, I had already done the Tidal Wave lithographs. I had done the Genetic Codes lithographs. I had dealt with Tidal Wave, Genetic Codes—

STUART: Visa.

WAYNE: —and some of the Cosmic. I had done the Stellar Winds and all of that kind of stuff, which because of litho and the fact that a litho is made up kind of of dots, it’s true they’re organic dots, but one is really drawing on the pores of the stone, which is not dissimilar to the stitches.

STUART: Is that what Madeleine saw in—

WAYNE: No, that’s what I think. That’s what I found, and it gave me a kind of insight into tapestry and what I might require of it, but I also at that time made a decision that tapestry, to be really effective, had to be large. A hanging has to have something, someplace to hang to, if you know what I mean. The great tapestries that I knew of, there was only one that I thought was good that was small, and it happened to be a [Georges] Braque weaving of a Cubist image that I saw at the Arts Club in Chicago in the fifties.So I made a fundamental decision. I saw a tapestry as having to be large, and the tapestries I made are, most of them, too large to hang in anybody’s home. So, without knowing it, I greatly limited the possible places where I could sell it. Rather, I saw my tapestries as having much the same function that tapestries had had in the Middle Ages, to warm up the walls of these cavernous churches and medieval buildings. Only now the cold buildings were lobbies of Mies van der Rohe and the International Modern School. So several of the tapestries I made were deliberately made as modules that sort of matched, because I thought I could use them to pitch the sale of these tapestries to people who had big buildings, modern buildings. I saw them as complementary to the international modern architecture of the time. Now, that decision is still costing me because ordinary collectors don’t have walls big enough for these things.

STUART: Not even extraordinary collectors, probably.

WAYNE: Well, I’ve had to find them. But among collectors, maybe one in a hundred would have a room big enough for one of these things.

STUART: What do they measure, generally?

WAYNE: Well, like this one is eight-by-eleven feet, and I have a number of them that are ten feet tall, when most ceilings are eight feet tall, you know. So that decision was very costly to me. It was an aesthetic quasi-practical decision, but I turned out to be wrong. I’m not so sure that I was wrong about the scale of tapestries. I think I’m right about that. I very rarely see anything woven that is good in small scale. Looks too much like an antimacassar or something, you know. Then the relation of the size of the stitch to the size of the weaving itself, the stitch is too large compared to the size of the thing. I thought only about the art itself. I didn’t think nearly profoundly enough.

STUART: You went to the Gobelins factory. That’s where the workshop they used? No?

WAYNE: No. No, no, no. The Gobelins is state-run, and only state commissions are made there.

STUART: So Jarry’s connection—

WAYNE: I never applied for and I never thought of myself in that category, and the opportunity didn’t present itself, but it was a very good resource for me, and when I was ready and had made some cartoons to take, she took time off and she drove me around France to the workshops that she felt were of the best quality for me, and so she eased my way into it.

STUART: Were any of those workshops working on tapestries on that scale?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: They were?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: But they were not to be hung?

WAYNE: They were French or European. There weren’t Americans. [Alexander] Calder did. I saw a Calder tapestry, although I didn’t think it was very good as tapestry, because Calder’s linear style didn’t speak to me for that medium, not that I have anything—I’m not saying that I’m right, either. I don’t [unclear]. On the other hand, I did see the Guernica [Pablo] Picasso made into a huge tapestry the size of the actual canvas, and it was simply superlative. It was marvelous, just absolutely marvelous. Anyway, the thing about it is that, in a sense, my predicament in terms of marketing it was self-generated by the decision I made about scale. On the other hand, I did sell five of them. Then I stopped even trying. Two of them I sold to a businessman for his building in San Diego, and it’s still there, although I just heard that he now has full-blown Alzheimer’s [Disease], and his wife called to ask if there was any place or any way I wanted her to do anything about disposing of these tapestries. She was going to get back to me, because I asked her does she want to sell them or does she want to give them.

STUART: Who is this woman?

WAYNE: Enid Gleich.

STUART: Were they in her home or they were in a corporate office?

WAYNE: No, they were in his office building. Anyway, the marketing, I didn’t think about it at all. I just plunged ahead making the tapestries, and I had this huge commission to do that seven-story tapestry for the atrium of the building in Chicago. But that’s when the Terry Sanders film thing [unknown title] broke over me, and finally it was so intrusive that I had to notify my client that something had happened and I would be unable to carry through the project. So I had to cancel that, but I had put in more than a year preparing and went to France, took all those photographs—

STUART: So you had the cartoons?

WAYNE: No, I don’t have the cartoons.

STUART: You didn’t. But you had—

WAYNE: But I have all the photographs, because I intended, in the making of these tapestries, I intended to do a documentary film. So I went and spent several months in the weavery preparing the photographs for my storyboard, and I could see just how it was going to be. I knew what I was going to do, how it would be installed, and in the film the viewer would come along with this project, watching it unfold.There would be many a crisis within the steps of making seven such huge tapestries to interlock in this atrium, and I was designing it in such a way that they could be used individually. They could be used all horizontally or vertically. So it was like a Rubik’s Cube in that sense, that each part of the design would interlock with others. And the audience for the film would only see the finished work at the moment of installation when this huge thing goes up. So I had the film very much in mind. But the problem that I had legally for Tamarind and for myself was such that I just couldn’t carry it off. I knew that I would be subject to constant harassment.

STUART: You’re talking about, like, 1973?

WAYNE: I’m talking, yes, ’74, actually.

STUART: Because we saw your calendars from that year, and they were just covered with related meetings that took up entire days.

WAYNE: Yes, yes. And then this book [unknown title] came out.

STUART: In 2002.

WAYNE: Are you aware of it?

STUART: Yes.

WAYNE: I haven’t even touched it since you were here because I don’t know how to cope with this thing at all. Of course, what they quote there is so very untrue. And a very interesting coincidence is that one of the authors is named Sanders. Now, you know that’s one in a million.

STUART: This is a Praeger-published book on law and business.

WAYNE: Yes. I don’t even know who to write to to say that their entry is totally false. What they did was cherry-pick a lot of things that seemed to quote where they want to go, and they certainly do not reveal the dual document at the end.

STUART: Can you explain what that dual document is or was?

WAYNE: Well, I’ve settled with him.

STUART: Terry.

WAYNE: And gave him an option. If ever we finished the film, if he wanted a “film by” on it as a credit, he could exercise his option, and, in fact, I even made the credit so that I could cut it into the film. But it was what that meant. You know, a credit is a matter of definition of what it means. I would not give him the things he wanted to go along with that, for example, a film by plus the right to use the film in festivals, and if any prizes were ever won, that he would get all the prizes.

STUART: So what was the credit that you were willing to—

WAYNE: “A film by.” “A film by Terry Sanders.” And he has the credit of cinematographer, which is what he did actually on the film, but I refused to give these other two things because they are business rights for Tamarind. You sell a film. You market it by taking it to festivals. If the “he” showed up and “Tamarind” showed up with the same film, what would that do to Tamarind? It would not be getting him out of our hair. We would really be in business with him forever, and if you’re in business with Sanders, you don’t exist. There could be nothing but trouble. So I refused to give him the right to use it in festivals. That’s commercial right. A judge had already ruled that he could have no commerce from the film. What he won from a judge was that he could buy from us a print of the film and he could put his own name on his print to use for job hunting, no other purpose, no commercial purpose at all. He couldn’t use it in anything else. So that’s where it was left. That’s what I knew about.What I didn’t know, that his lawyer and my lawyer and Sanders agreed that what I wouldn’t grant over my signature, that our lawyer would make a second agreement with him giving him these other rights that he wanted, and everybody in court testified, yes, they deliberately kept me out of the loop. They didn’t tell me, and I was the CEO of Tamarind. Now, how could I keep a contract, the existence of which was deliberately concealed from me and which I had no fiduciary right to do? I didn’t have the right to give away Tamarind’s business management of the film.

STUART: Who had signed that right away?

WAYNE: My lawyer.

STUART: What was his name?

WAYNE: What you don’t understand, probably, and most people don’t know, is that if your lawyer does anything wrong, the client is responsible for the lawyer. I bet you didn’t know that.

STUART: No. Which lawyer was this?

WAYNE: It was Tamarind’s lawyer. His name was Alan Greenberg, old man who made Robin’s *[NAME?] trust, made a will and stuff like that, and he was Tamarind’s lawyer. We didn’t have litigation. We didn’t have complicated things. But he was a pal of the same age as Sanders’ lawyer, Woodrow Irwin. So the two of them got together and they decided that since I wouldn’t give that, he would just do this little thing on the side which he signed with. Sanders knew about it. So he was just sitting there waiting for the opportunity to pounce, could have pounced at Film X [phonetic] or the Court Festival or any of the places where I had submitted the film and where it was receiving honorable mention, that kind of thing.So when it was nominated for an Oscar, Sanders shows up with this secret agreement, and the Academy doesn’t know the story, nor do they ask, and from that day to this, they’re still crediting him, in spite of the fact that the insurance companies for the lawyers admitted, gave up on—because I sued the lawyers and I won that.

STUART: Greenberg and Irwin?

WAYNE: Yes, Woodrow Irwin and Greenberg. I think they’re both dead. I know Greenberg is dead. He was in his seventies then. So Sanders was just waiting there, anytime I surfaced, anytime if we won a prize. Now, he never exercised his option. In the letter that I signed, the agreement I signed, I not only gave him an option, but we would notify him when we finished the film. He would come and see it. He would have to see it. I wanted him to see it because then if I put his name on and it was rejected, he could sue me for putting his name on a film he didn’t approve of. That’s why I insisted that in the agreement that I gave him on a “film by” that we would do a screening for him, and then if he wanted his name on the film, he could have a “film by.” But the meaning of a “film by” did not include these other things that the secret agreement did.

STUART: So do you mean to tell me that Terry Sanders hadn’t seen the film in its edited format?

WAYNE: No. No. The Academy filmed it for him. They had no right to use our film to screen it for him so that he could pursue a lawsuit. They took the print that I submitted for the Academy Award and they screened it for him, and, of course, Sanders said he knew it was nominated for an Oscar, said, “Yes, that’s my film.” No, he never saw it. He wasn’t interested. We notified him—

STUART: You had done the editing along with someone else?

WAYNE: I hired an editor and brought all the equipment in here, and the two of us sat and edited it, and we did some rerecording because he got a lot of it wrong. There was some footage that to this day the film is defective, because there are several scenes that he didn’t even take.

STUART: So, what scenes did you have to retake?

WAYNE: There were certain things that it was not possible to retake because they were scenes during the making of it. One of the reasons why this couldn’t be written, you couldn’t write this, who the hell knows what an artist is going to want to do? He was hired to document an event. I provided the event, the cast, etc., and it was his job to take to film it as it happened. If I show you the film, I can show you where the defects are still because he did not take the footage that we needed.

STUART: You were not aware that he wasn’t?

WAYNE: No, we didn’t know that he didn’t, that he hadn’t shot it all, because it took us three years to get the footage. What he did when he stopped filming, when he received his payment, he said he’d finished all the principal photography, I paid him his contract, but he took—he kidnapped the negative. Took three years to get the negative back.

STUART: You’re kidding.

WAYNE: Well, that’s how I got the negative, by giving him that option for a “film by.” At that time, there was no film. There was just footage. We got the film back. We had to hunt and make a log of all the footage, and I sat with [Jacqueline] “Jax” Cambas, and we edited it. She did a wonderful job. She was the wife of one of the guys in the film, so she knew a lot about lithography, you see. That’s why. She was good, but also she knew a lot about lithography. So the two of us brought this in.But there was a lot of sound that we had to record, and that we were able to record because [Matsumi “Mike”] Kanemitsu was still alive. For example, instead of the sound of the press going through, he just took the sound of a motor, some kind of motor. So we had to go and rerecord that press, which has a particular kind of rhythm and knock to do it. And there were other things like that that we had to that we rerecorded, too, so that I could have what I needed to make the film. But, for example, in the film, Kanemitsu decides to make a second state, and he draws a bird onto the stone and we print some in black and white. However, then you see there is always the artist cancels the stone, abrades it, and then you have to take a print of it abraded to prove that it was cancelled. He didn’t take. There is no proof of the abrasion. He stopped filming. He didn’t film that scene. So there was no way we could mock it up.

STUART: Did he not know that that was—

WAYNE: Of course. In the treatment that he wrote, he describes taking a print of the cancelled stone, so he can’t claim that he didn’t know about it. So the film is still defective. There is no cancellation proof. You just hear a voice saying, “And then we take a cancellation proof.” And there’s another place where he wanted to decide—Sanders decided that when Kanemitsu wanted to start color proofing, that that was not important to the film. He didn’t want to do any of the colored proofing. And I said to him, “This isn’t a subject you decide. This is for the artist to decide.” So we have one scene of a lot of color proofs on the wall, but it’s very badly shot and the color is so bad that you wonder, when Kanemitsu is explaining, “I like this green and red, but it’s a little sentimental. On this print I want it not to be sentimental. I want strong expressionism,” but you’re looking at a screen where you can hardly tell which one is blue and which is green. He didn’t really shoot the proofs, the color proofs, which is really a highlight of the film, to make our case, and that was so badly done. He just did one sweep of all these proofs.

STUART: And you didn’t see it till three years later, so it wasn’t like you could—

WAYNE: That’s right. There is no way to reconstruct it.

STUART: You had everyone on hand to redo it.

WAYNE: No way to reconstruct it. So these defects still plague the film, as far as I’m concerned. So I couldn’t finish the film until late ’73. I think the secret agreement and the real agreement that I made, that I signed, was in October of ’73, and I got the footage back and hired her and started working, and we brought in the film, did all the postproduction with CFI [Consolidated Film Industries]. CFI did a lot of the work for nothing because they felt very guilty since they had recommended Sanders. The president of CFI, with whom I worked, didn’t know that Sanders owed CFI a young fortune. I should have been talking to the chief financial officer. That’s a good thing for you to remember. The president of an organization is too high, you know. Anyway, so none of that, not his option, not the secret agreement, none of that appears in this book.

STUART: The Praeger legal tax or whatever it is?

WAYNE: Yes. That decides that he’s entitled to a producer credit.

STUART: It’s like a ten-page case study in there in an, I don’t know, probably a seven-hundred-page book or something.

WAYNE: Yes. But it doesn’t say who wrote that entry.

STUART: But there is someone named Sanders.

WAYNE: Yes. And Sanders himself, I understand, although I’ve never seen for myself, went to law school. Whether he passed the bar or not, I don’t know, but a lot of the stuff he does, he does himself. Then he’ll convince some lawyer to take the matter on spec, because I was supposed to be a jetsetter, rich woman with all this board money going in my pocket, and they would take it on spec and just hound me. So why would that change? So he’s still dogging my footsteps. If he ever comes again to where I’m speaking, I have a little surprise for him.

STUART: Oh, really?

WAYNE: I think I told you. I’m going to ask him to come up and introduce him to the audience and say, “I want you to know that this man, his name is Terry Sanders. Remember it. He’s a crook and a stalker.” I’ll flesh that out a little bit, of course, but— [telephone rings] [End of May 8, 2011 interview]

1.5. Session Five (May 15, 2011)

STUART: This is Sunday, May 15, 2011. This is Carolyn Stuart with June Wayne at the Tamarind [Institute] studios, in the studio. We were about to pull out and look at and discuss some of the filmlets, or, as June put it, the explosion, the filmlet explosion since she got back from Chicago.

WAYNE: Well, I think maybe it’s just sort of a little pop, like a bubble in a pot of soup. I thought it was an explosion, but I seem to have run out of interest all of a sudden. Maybe it’ll come back. I’ve done ten or twelve of these graphics, and I suppose I could call them graphics of despair in the sense, not of their content, but that it was an attempt to go on working in spite of the physical handicaps that make it almost impossible to go on working. I have a large accretion, a whole cabinet full of proofs, color proofs, trial proofs, of lithographs made over many, many years from the fifties to the end of this century, in fact into—let’s see. When did I do Sects in the City? I did that four or five years ago. So it covered from fifty years or more of lithography. Very often when I was printing an edition, there would be unique proofs where I was trying out colors or in what sequence the various separations would be printed, and there would be pages of colors that I would save so that if ever I needed to match a color or two, if I was trying to figure out what color I should be using, I could run through my own samples, as it were. Not so much samples as leftovers of work. Because unless you have a color printed on the paper that it belongs on, you can’t just rely on looking at the ink to know how it’s going to print. So you need the printed evidence, and in that service I had saved, I just put aside, all these proofs, some of which were quite beautiful but never made it into the acknowledged edition, and they were not signed or they might otherwise had pencil marks through them to show that they were not for sale. In fact, many of these, I have an actual stamp that says “This print is not for sale. It is imperfect. It’s to be used for sampling only.” So I literally have a stamp on some of these bits of raw material. It’s like the housepainter who has compulsively saved all the leftover paint. Now, you know very well that the paint is going to get hard and you’ll never use it, but, nonetheless, it is sort of a vapor trail of a life spent painting walls various colors.So this accretion of raw material I began turning into collages, making collages of my own detritus, as it were. Of course, psychoanalysts would have another way of phrasing that, but since I don’t think they know what they’re doing anyway, I won’t honor it. Anyhow, I began making collages, not many, just a few, and then one day sitting with Larry [Workman] at the computer, because I’m not computer-literate, very impatient with those nasty little sounds that a keyboard makes. It sounds as though people a thousand miles away are using—what’s the word? I’m having word trouble today—chopsticks. The sound of chopsticks on a table, that little wooden tap, sounds very much like a keyboard to a computer. It’s not a resonant sound. It’s a very shallow plastic sort of little tapping sound. I was sitting at the computer with Larry. We were printing up a photograph that “Shu” [Shuichi Sonokawa, June Wayne’s studio assistant] had taken in the studio, and I was altering it and telling him, “Fill this in. Make that purple. Make that area purple,” editing and, in effect, using his hands and knowledge to create an image that I wanted. I don’t remember even why I needed the image, but it occurred to me as he printed, I could say to him, “Now print that out three inches tall. Now I want to see another one five inches tall with this purple turned to viridian green.” Of course, computer cartridges don’t have colors like that, but as near as you could get to viridian.Anyway, sitting there, I began making, in effect, using his hands, his knowledge and my specs. I would call it out to him. We would come up with images that began with rather crude photographs that we would have taken of something in the studio. For example, the little figures of artists in the Chicago Plaza that I made that three-dimensional thing of the WPA [Works Progress Administration] artists bringing in their work to the WPA in Chicago in the thirties, which I remember very fondly, those little figures had been made by Shu for me. I would say, “I need another one here and make it this, doing thus and so,” and so on. And Shu’s Japanese fingers and sensibility would create my memory of the artists bringing in their—but it had a curious kind of Shu-ism about it. It was his creative sensibility making these little tiny figures that some of them are only half an inch high and others as high as two or three inches, but they had a rugged kind of vigor, and so I had him photograph those, not too brilliantly, not as though they were art photographs, but to get the essence of the figure. Then we’d turn that over to Larry. He’d put it on the screen, and I would begin editing Shu’s rough figure. You have seen one of the films, one of the images I made, in which the—here. The artist in the finished collage is part Shu, part me. The painting which the artist is carrying, is, of course, one of my graphics. That’s the Seventh Wave image. So I saw and was beginning to create out of the leftover stuff in the studio an image that I could turn into and use in this group of collages I was making out of the other leftover stuff of lithos that never made it into the editions. I was, at it were, making art out of the poubelle, out of my wastebasket, leftover bits of myself, and bringing them together with the litho collages, I was very curious how well these computerized images lay down with the litho.The litho surfaces in these collages dignify what would otherwise be very slick images. Things that come out of the computer are very slick, and especially those that we printed on shiny paper, reflective paper. But now I know that there are different kinds of paper I can print on, and so that, too, starts getting specified so that I can really select something that begins with maybe a crude photo of something else that I made. We edit it on the computer, print it out on paper that I have decided, and then Shu cuts the image out for me. These are all things that my neurology no longer allows me to do, because these years of chemo have destroyed my ability to be precise, to be predictably careful if I want to cut something out or draw something. It’s proof that the banks do not look at your signature on checks, because my signature is now so different from what it normally was. Some days it’s very crabbed. Other days it just wanders around like it had no home in me. But the checks go through anyway because nobody’s looking. They don’t care. Anyhow, out of these handicaps, these physical handicaps, I’ve been able to make something that I think works as a graphic. It’s not a litho and it’s not a photograph and it’s not a computer image, but a new kind of hybrid. At least it seems so to me, and it seems acceptable to me. I like it. Not all of them, but I’ve made enough of them so that now from time to time I can make one that is really good one way or another. Here on the table you can see that I’m trying to put together the elements from bits of torn lithos, what will I keep, what will I not keep, what needs to be done to turn that into what I’ve come to call filmlets. These images remind me, or seem to me to be like the preparation for a film shoot. They are scenes that a director is setting up and intends to shoot. That’s why I call them filmlets, because they are just scenes, moments. And together, if I can endure long enough, I could create really a kind of storyboard of these filmlets. They are moments in time. They’re all very transient in their effect, and graphics have that quality. But I brought to my graphics a much longer sense of time than these.So that is a very long explanation of what should be a very simple idea that I could, by using the skills of other people and, in effect, ordering what I wanted or sitting next to Larry, could point to the screen and say, “Take out this line,” or, “Move this line two inches over.” I could on command use what he knew. Also, he’s a designer, Larry is, and for years was in the garment business traveling all over the world making his lines, and they were shirts and suits and jackets, that kind of thing, all in the Orient and in India and places, exotic places. Larry’s been all over the world creating that line of his. So he has taste, and he knows instantly what I’m talking about when I explain what it is that I want. I sit there and then he prints it out, and I say, “No, that’s too small. Do it again on different paper and make this darker,” or that smaller or this whatever. So it’s like being able to go up to one of these current coffeehouses here in L.A. where you go to a counter and order your sandwich or your food, and it is sort of custom-made out of all the little bits and pieces that are in the display case. “I want two tablespoons of chopped tomatoes and some egg salad,” or whatever. It was a way, this way of working, to continue working and to make use of images that I had intended to do in litho.I have maybe sixty years of eyeglasses of mine, with all the corrections in them, having been nearsighted all my life, in fact, and all the styles of them. I had intended and prepared to—and somewhere there is an actual drawing that would be the set format or the fundamental idea of a series I intended to do with these eyeglasses. As all of my glasses have what they call executive lenses, the bottom half contains a different prescription than the top, I had intended to do these self-portraits as lithos, and in the executive-lens section, miniscule illustrations of what I was doing in my life at the time I was wearing those glasses. In fact, to do the portraits, the portrait heads, which would be life-size, I had saved the cuttings from my haircuts of my white—I have an envelope full of my own hair cut at—what’s the name of that cheap place?

STUART: Super Cuts.

WAYNE: Super Cuts, yes. And each time it was cut, we would fill it into my envelope. I had made one drawing, which is a kind of self-portrait, in which that white hair, the approach would be used. This thing that you see hanging here, this square or the rectangle that seems to have a lot of plastic around it, is the tent that I use when I want to make something that has a reverse. In other words, I could with that and did—somewhere here that drawing exists for that series on the eyeglasses. I made the drawing, it’s a self-portrait, and used the hair cuttings, and then with this tent over it and a very fine dilution of tusche, litho tusche, which is a special kind of ink, I literally made with those hair cuttings the prototype for how I would approach making this eyeglass series. I intended maybe to make five or six lithos that way. In other words, I wasn’t going to use all sixty, but I would take crucial years and crucially different kinds of glasses as the raw material, and I actually made such a drawing in which the hair constituted a stop-out, and using that tent, spraying a very fine mist of tusche into the air, not on the drawing but into the air, so fine a mist that it would take days for it to settle around these hairs and give me an exact footprint, as it were, a footprint of hair. [laughter] It would give me an exact image of each hair, white hair, on the white paper, and wherever there was not a hair, this mist of tusche would settle. So little by little, I could build up, in one area or another, darker and lighter negative footprints, as it were, of the cuttings from my own hair from my own profile. And in those glasses I would then be able to draw in the lower half of the executive lens illustrations of what I was doing at the time.So the whole technical address to this series of five or six works was worked out, and then I became too ill suddenly and couldn’t go forward with it, but I still have the envelope full of the hair cuttings, somewhere there is that drawing, and all the tusche that I was going to use has become a solid rock inside the bottle and is standing over there near the stove. Those are the props of which I would have been making that series of prints. So when I began making these collages and found that I could go on making images, it was natural that I would turn to the eyeglasses, although I have not really used them as inventively, thus far, I have not used them as inventively as I think they could be because eyeglasses are loaded images. They really speak to us. They are our freedom and our inherent admission that we are defective. They’re full of possibilities. Then it occurred to me, as I working on these, that I have a very large repertoire of symbols that I have used over the years. You see it in the lemmings, this little collage with the lemmings here, these tiny figures. There are a number of them.

STUART: That one’s called Cul de Sac.

WAYNE: I called this one Cul de Sac?

STUART: Yes.

WAYNE: I don’t know why. It just seemed like a good short title at the time. Doesn’t matter. I also found it mysterious and useful that the glasses had glasses, hence the two pairs, our inner and outer vision, but also our paranoia being observed or being the observer, that glasses had so much literary and physical presence as enablers, as the things that tell you things you don’t want to know, as well as the implementer of—it’s marvelous. When I first got my first pair of good glasses, it made me smile every time I put them on, because I had two kinds of vision: my own defective vision where everything was Impressionist, and then I had this Siennese vision where I could see every leaf on a tree. Then if I had glasses with different kinds of corrections in them, which just going through those sixty years of glasses gives me, gives me back the kind of vision that I could have or did have at a given period of my life, was marvelous. It was like having your own movie, you know. It was quite wonderful. There are many things that have been the furnish of my art that I could use to make filmlets or to make these collages, and all that is happening is that my desire to make art is at risk now. I’ve sort of stopped at the end of these ten. I’m not seeing the possibilities the way I normally do, and that, I think, is probably a function of age and the fact that I’m no longer effective at battling out the realistic problems that come with keeping going as an artist.

STUART: You said you had some thoughts about this image of you parachuting by the Pacific Design Center.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: This is a black-and-white print.

WAYNE: There were no photographs, hardly any. Just what you see there is all that there is, and I did start to make a litho on this theme deriving from that. I have a few photographs—I think there’s one in there—of this one, where they were preparing me either for the takeoff or else I was landing. Now, that’s Otto Piene there, the guy who makes these space sculptures, and that’s a picture of—here. On this balloon—this is at Pacific Design Center—was projected my Stellar Winds prints, but in this huge scale.When I went up, I was attached to this bundle of very long balloons that Piene had made as a sculpture. I was suspended from that clutch of balloons. The balloons were about 30 inches in diameter and about 150 feet long. It was like a bouquet of balloons, huge balloons. My parachute was suspended from that clutch of balloons. There you see it better, what it was like. There were guide wires attached to it to keep me from floating off into nowhere, because these were filled with hydrogen and, of course, if they were not attached to the ground, it would be goodbye June, you know. That was something that Hank [Arthur Henry Plone, June’s husband] was very upset about. But it did remove some of the glamour for me because being tethered to the Earth was contrary to the whole idea of the Stellar Winds and going off really into space. My complaint from the experience was that it was rather boring, because I didn’t see anything that I hadn’t seen many times from skyscraper windows, and that was about how high I went. I was maybe twelve, fifteen stories high, something like that.

STUART: You expected to be going up higher than that?

WAYNE: I don’t know what I expected. What I did find out from the dress rehearsal was that parachute straps are very painful. My weight on these straps was such that it really hurt, and, therefore, I came back in the evening with bubble wrap and I had the straps wrapped in bubble. I don’t know whether you can see it there, yes, so that I was sitting in bubble rather than directly onto the straps. I thought I looked kind of awful in this.This is Otto Piene, and these are all students from Caltech [California Institute of Technology], and any one of them could have—if they had let go, I would have been gone. Hank was very much opposed to this project. Did I tell you the story of it?

STUART: No.

WAYNE: Well, it’s a funny story, so I’ll tell you. Jim Goodwin had hired Piene to create a sculpture in the sky, and Piene has done this all over the world. Piene came to me and asked me if I would be willing to fly with his sculpture. That’s the term he used. Since they were going to be projecting my Stellar Winds images on this big balloon, I said, “Sure.” They had electronic music and everything planned. So it was necessary to rehearse. I had slides. I had all the slides, and Piene would come here, and Jim and some other people, with projector, and Hank ran the projector. Then the music would play and then Piene would say at a given moment, “And, June, this is where you go up.” Well, to Hank that meant this where my slides go up, and the more times we rehearsed, the deeper became the misunderstanding, and I was afraid to tell him that it really meant that I was going up, because I knew that Hank would have a cat fit. He was very conservative about me and always very concerned for my physical welfare as well. So comes the day before the launch, and we’re having a dress rehearsal. I come down dressed in this white jumpsuit with a white crash helmet and boots, white boots, so that I can be seen in the sky, against the dark sky. I say, “Honey, I need to talk to you for a minute. Turn off the television,” which made him very anxious, because I had never done that. I said, “You know that part where they say, ‘And, June, this is where you go up’? Well, that’s where I really am going up with that balloon,” with which he stood up, all six-feet-three of him, and he had a huge voice. He had a wonderful singing voice, by the way, a tenor, and he bellowed out, “No!” so loudly that the walls of this entire edifice just shook. He just had a cat fit.I let him go with that, and I said, “You know, I’ve really checked into it and it is so safe that if you would come with me to this rehearsal, I think you would be reassured.” And he bellowed again, “No!” He wouldn’t. “I’m having nothing to do with it.” So off I went, and that’s when I discovered that the straps on the parachute hurt. Anyway, he didn’t talk to me again for that night or the next day, but when I came down dressed to go to the actual launch, he was sitting on the couch fully dressed, dressed to go out. So I said, “I wish you’d reconsider. It would be nice if only because you’d drive me there, and I might be tired afterwards and you would drive me home.” He said, “Well, what time are you going?” And I said, “I’m going now.” And he said, “Oh.” That’s all. But he stood up, he was ready to go, and he drove. We drive all the way there, and he has not said a word, and usually Hank was babbling to me all the time, talking to him. Furious, just furious, and the way he drove, this was an angry driver, smacking on the brakes or whatever. So we get there, and he’s holding me by the arm, and it’s mobbed. They usher us in to the staging place, and at the staging place they won’t let him in, which further infuriated him, and he could see me there with all these people around me and all these ropes and the parachute and these crazy balloons, like huge insane unlit candles just streaming into the—and I’m trying to ignore this. He was afraid. It was a time when we were having a lot of snipers in L.A. Do you remember? I don’t remember what year it was, but we were having a lot of them, and he was afraid somebody would shoot the balloons or shoot me. Or maybe he wished they would. I don’t know. Anyway.Fortunately, a group of friends were there, including Elaine Jones, the wife of [A.] Quincy Jones, the architect, and he joined up with them to watch this event. He stood next to her with his arm around her, and as I went up, he held her so tight that he broke two of her ribs. He was just in a terrible fright. And I go up. Meanwhile, my daughter is there, and she has brought her son [Jevon], who was a little kid and a little difficult kid, and he’s running all over the place shouting, “That’s my grandmother up there, and she’s the greatest artist in the world!” Jevon is shouting, running around. The whole plaza is loaded with people. We go up, and the music goes on, the electronic music start now, and I’m hanging around up there, and I’m very bored. The only interesting thing was that there was no place for my feet. You don’t realize it when you’re in the air you have no place to put your feet. They just sort of dangle uselessly. That’s all I learned from this experience. And Hank was going through the anxiety of the damned. Well, I come down eventually. I was up there maybe three-quarters of an hour, very boring, and I’m really tired. So we go home. We get in the car, and he’s silent, silent all the way home, not a word. We pull into the garage, and he turns the key in the lock, gets out of the car, and as I’m getting out of the car, I hear his voice saying, “And what’s more, it was undignified.” That’s the entire thing. That’s all he had to say about it, and he was angry with me for days, weeks after that. Then later when he cooled down, he explained how frightened he was of snipers, and when he mentioned that, then I became retroactively concerned. [laughter] Anyway, that was my whole experience of flying.

STUART: So the city didn’t look particularly different from there than from a skyscraper?

WAYNE: No. Anything you see, the difference is that your feet have no place to put themselves. That’s all I got out of it. I didn’t find myself. I have no fear. I felt uncomfortable and ugly with that helmet on, and dumb, and, man, this looked very untidy—

STUART: With the bubble wrap.

WAYNE: —the silly bubble wrap, yes. These few photographs, which are all I have, gave me a look that I didn’t know I had. I didn’t realize I had jowls like that, and without my hair on head, I hadn’t thought I was very unappetizing-looking. I looked like sort of a white watermelon with some bruises on it for features. This I liked, you see. I liked the way that looked.

STUART: The photo of you in the air in the black and white.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: That is kind of [unclear].

WAYNE: Now, that is something that I always wanted to do something with graphically, and I think that maybe I could do that in this new medium.

STUART: But the print that you’re working with already has—

WAYNE: Yes, has part of that in there.

STUART: That’s already stopped-out into work.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, I don’t have any proofs of that in black and white, and I don’t know that I could ameliorate that into—I fooled around with bits of litho to see whether I could make an appropriate collage. I don’t think so. It’s not very appetizing.

STUART: Could you see the works projected while you were up in the air?

WAYNE: No.

STUART: They were out of sight?

WAYNE: Well, they were on a balloon, and I was where I couldn’t see them. I don’t think they would have worked very well myself, not only because of the blowup of scale, the Stellar Winds are relatively small images in the flesh, and if you expand the amount of white, slides are always diluted in color with the light that comes through them, so I didn’t think that was—and there would be the color of the balloon itself altering that. Still, the whole idea and doing something like that made some people think that I was either nuts or very brave, but it was not. It was being very feminine. So people who were against Women’s Lib[eration] held that against me as well, that it was unseemly for a girl to do something like that.

STUART: Is that what Hank meant when he said it was undignified?

WAYNE: I don’t know what he meant. “Undignified” says it all.

STUART: Did you participate in other—I mean, this is really performance art.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Did you participate in anything [unclear]?

WAYNE: I may have, but if I did, it was probably undistinguished; otherwise, I would remember it. I think there were a couple of things, but nothing that I really believed in. Most of the performances that were done in those years, at least, were very boring. Chris Burden had done the hanging on the wall bit for days and getting shot deliberately, and in Paris there was certain amount of performance stuff. Yves Klein was doing performances and painting up women in ultra marine blue and impressing them on walls and that kind of stuff.I would pass—I’d lived near that gallery, so I often saw that kind of thing being done. But I was not impressed. I thought that the symbolic, the evocativeness of what they were doing, was not rich enough. It didn’t move me to see an imprint of a girl. Tits and ass and all that kind of stuff, it was not a message that I was going to be thrilled with. Maybe I would have felt differently had it been a man or a man with a hard-on, which I don’t think the situation would have encouraged, if you know what I mean. [laughter] It takes a special kind of guy to get that physical in front of a lot of people, especially in a gallery. What was the name of the dealer? Yves something. Or was it Rene something? I don’t remember. It was on Boulevard St. Germain. Anyway, performance art was only in its infancy at that time. It was older by the time Otto Piene got around. He was here for two months doing lithos, so it was natural that this evolved while he was here.

STUART: This was post Tamarind. Isn’t this the late eighties?

WAYNE: I don’t remember when the hell it is. Is there a date on it? Yes, ’88.

STUART: So he came to your private studio, basically, to do—

WAYNE: Well, no. Well, yes, he had to have done that. In ’88? But he had been to Tamarind, let’s put it that way, because he made lithos then, and so it would have had to have been well before that. We got on very well. I liked him. I liked his wife. Anyway, I don’t think it was a great moment in art history. It was an amusing one for me, and certainly this kind of image is one I could now exploit, but there are a lot, a lot of things that I have used as themes. The work that I did on justice, on religion, those are all images that I would be entitled to go back and develop in this, but I’m bored with all that. I’m thinking ahead to how the hell we get out of the fix we’re in as a country, as a world, and that interests me more than making art at the moment. So I’ve not been very witty with these bits and pieces.

STUART: Although you did do one called Same Old Story, which is very humorous.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, all of these, I think, have a certain wit to them. As a matter of fact, a lot of my work is funny. It’s satiric. I remember Sad Flute Player. People just simply loved it, and it was a very funny print. I don’t have any. The last print I have of it was subjected to a roof leak and it was ruined.

STUART: What was it of?

WAYNE: As a matter of fact, it was inspired by my then mother-in-law [Eva Wayne], who had huge eyes, had a quite fat face, pale fat face, and bleached blonde hair, and she wept all the time. The Sad Flute Player’s body—it’s kind of inset, but its body is made of eyes, sort of, and it’s playing a flute, and on the end of the flute is my mushroom, just sitting there. But it was a print that really appealed to people. But I got the idea of Eva being made up of her tears. She was constructed of the tears. Fortunately, I didn’t have to see them very often or spend any significant time with her. But there was always a satiric aspect to my work of that era, and some of my best things, I just wish that I had had better paper, better ink. A print like The Sanctified couldn’t be better made today. I would just love to have that print scanned and printed digitally so that I could get everything out of it that [Lynton] Kistler was unable to provide me with, because he was my printer at that time. It was printed on damp paper, so the ink couldn’t be black. The paper would reject the oily ink. It never really fell in the way it should, but the drawing itself was beautifully done, and the relation of the images—and it’s an early application also of building images out of modules. So I think a lot of that print and of the things that I did about that time when I was very involved with optics.

STUART: That would be an interesting thing to digitize that in the same way that you’ve digitized these other and tweaked these other parts of your collage.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, I don’t like the idea of giving in to the computer age. On the other hand, I have always been technically available to whatever would make the print the way I wanted it made. What’s the word I’m looking for? I recognize the fact that I’m taking two opposite positions that there is. And why am I trying to rationalize that? It’s because that’s what I do. I’m always thinking about what it is that I’m thinking about, you know what I mean, especially aesthetically. Is this justified? Is this good enough? Is the proposition sound or does it only seem to be sound? It’s so easy to do things that look so finished and yet have this—it’s like eating too much sugar. You get a rush and it’s bad for you. So I expect a work to hold up. I don’t mind if you get a rush, but it shouldn’t be bad for you. You should get the rush because it’s really good and because the rationale and the wholeness of the image is a complete statement. That’s not the easiest thing to do, but it’s the most interesting part of making art for me. It’s like getting a sentence right, you know, not too many words, exactly the right word where you want it. That gives a point of view a certain resonance that it can’t have if it’s leaking somewhere. Anyway, so these are the eyeglasses ones. Now I can show you the bigger ones, the later ones. These are the first ones I did. I’ll put these back where I found them, if I can remember where.

STUART: I’ll pause this for a moment. [recorder turned off]

STUART: So this one that we’re looking at here, it says “Filmlet, Scene One.”

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: You say that’s the one that gave you the idea to do the filmlets?

WAYNE: Yes. What had happened was that Larry and I and Shu went over to Denny’s for lunch, and the food was exorable. When we left, we swore we’d never go back, and I was feeling silly, and I said, as we were walking, the three of us—as you see, I was walking so poorly that Larry really had to kind of hold me up, and I said, “Now is when we should dance. Let’s do a shuffle off to Buffalo.” So we began trying to dance, and Shu split off. He had the gun—the camera.

STUART: The gun. [laughs]

WAYNE: The gun. And he took some pictures of us trying to dance, and we were laughing hilariously because I was so awkward and I couldn’t do it. As you see, we were really doubled up. Since Shu took pictures of us, then Larry took the camera and took pictures of me with Shu. I made one, not of this, but I made one of these prints. I gave this one to Larry, I made one for Shu that’s different, and the third one for myself, which is also different. So those were in there, because there were all one of a kind. I’m not making editions. But it was when he was printing these photographs that I saw the possibility, their vividness, that I would try—and as it happens, this separation was right out there. We were cleaning out the cabinet, and so when I saw these photographs, I asked Shu to cut them out for me very exactly, and I changed the scale, had them printed differently, cut them out, laid them on here, and it was perfect. So this was the primary example of what would become all these other. I could see in this the possibility of combining litho with digital and tell a story. I’ve always been interested in narrative in my work, and here it was just perfectly. So that said this was the prototype for what became this whole series of collages.Then I immediately understood that this litho—and I saw the photographs coming in from Chicago, this picture next to the limo in the Chicago airport, and this made the connection in my mind and I saw these two as just an absolute natural.

STUART: This is “Filmlet, Scene Four.”

WAYNE: Yes. It’s item four. The first three are the three that are this one, then the one with Shu and then the one for me. I started calling them scenes. I couldn’t think of titles.

STUART: So here is the—

WAYNE: So here is the litho of the cell, the original drawing for which I had done in 1943.

STUART: Oh, wow.

WAYNE: Then I turned it into a litho in 1996, and this is from the edition. It’s the trial proof one that I used, and it also is printed on my watermark paper. This is the chop of—

STUART: Is that a hand?

WAYNE: Yes. I don’t remember whose chop that is, who printed that, but this is now the chop of The Gang of Three. This is me, this is Larry, and this is Shu, and this says in Japanese The Gang of Three. We made a stamp for that. This is drawing. I drew that in.

STUART: In ’96?

WAYNE: No, more recently.

STUART: That’s you inside of the airliner.

WAYNE: Yes. I had often considered doing that, and it was very tempting to put myself into the cockpit, but then I thought that was too obvious. That’s where you would expect it, and it would have added a different kind of dimension to the aesthetic of the surface. The line would have been very hard against that blank paper.

STUART: And that’s all drawing?

WAYNE: Yes, that’s just drawing. But all of this is taken from the blueprints. I mean, where you see a rivet, that’s where a rivet is called for.

STUART: What was your job at that—

WAYNE: Well, I was taking a course in production illustration. This was my graduation thing. It was a bigger document that I only took that part of it. I have the original drawing, but then I turned it into a litho using lightened sensitive techniques on an aluminum plate and then added this force field to the drawing. The blueprint drawing is, of course, just the line. It’s an architectural kind of blueprint drawing. So it’s been made use of. I just loved that photograph, and I thought that the limo and the plane were so good with each other.

STUART: Is that a particular hand signal that you’re making, or it’s just a wave?

WAYNE: Just a wave, as I recall. Let me see what I was doing. Oh, I am thinking about doing a series called The Finger. Didn’t I tell you this?

STUART: A little bit, yes.

WAYNE: Yes. I was totally unaware until very recently that from the time I was an infant to now, I was pointing with my finger.

STUART: And you’re doing it again in this recent photo. [laughs]

WAYNE: Yes. And there I am, and I still do it all the time. I was totally unaware of it. There is a photograph of me at eight months, sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders in front of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and my hand is up like this.

STUART: Same gesture.

WAYNE: Yes. It was the finger.

STUART: Then this, the Same Old Story, you take—

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: That’s a photograph from your childhood that you’re putting on this collage. Right?

WAYNE: Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

STUART: It looks like there’s a second title. This one says Same Old Story and then it says Jock for Sports.

WAYNE: Yes. This was an actual litho edition, and I took an actual print from the edition of Jock for Sports. I did a series called Next of Skin, and in preparation for The Dorothy Series, I was trying to figure out what kind of brassiere should fit into the sequence of The Dorothy Series, of which I had made already about two-thirds. When you’re doing something like that, the more of it you have, the harder it is to fit in the pieces that are missing, still missing, because you really have to accommodate two large pieces of narrative that visually, as well as from the viewpoint of storytelling, have to exactly fit that vacancy in the narrative, in the visual, both visually and from the story point of view. So while I was exploring that, I just took the idea of Next of Skin, and I made a number—I made two jockstraps, two brassieres, and a merry widow.

STUART: What was the merry widow?

WAYNE: The merry widow is one of those cinch bustiers. It’s a marvelous lithograph, just extraordinary lithograph. So this was one, one of the two jockstraps. This was Jock for Sports, and the other one is Jock for Cocktails. [laughs]

STUART: What’s the difference?

WAYNE: Well, the cocktail one is much more elegant, and the fabric has unicorns in it. [laughter] Then I did a number of photographs. That comes from a photo.

STUART: The blue brassiere.

WAYNE: Of all of these things. I’ve taken hundreds of photographs which I never took seriously, and now I realize they were quite good photographs. But, anyway, putting together this particular filmlet, I think the narrative works very well. The title is Same Old Story. I think that works, but there I’m four and a half, five years old, maybe, hanging onto the back of this perfectly confident young snot-nosed boy, riding a tricycle, and the expression on my face is part utter panic and delight to be hanging onto something. I’m riding on a tricycle. So Same Old Story seemed appropriate to me. Now, getting the exact balance between that jockstrap, which, incidentally, is drawn from the inside—just a little private joke—and the brassiere, I had the brassiere printed out in three or four different sizes and colors, just the right amount of translucence.

STUART: That’s not from the outside in?

WAYNE: No. They’re confronting each other. They really are. The striped pattern comes from Adidas sports stripes, in the style of. I really love this. I can’t imagine how it would be framed. It’s so in your face. Everything is so close, you know.

STUART: The colors just clash so beautifully.

WAYNE: Yes. Yes, they do.

STUART: They’re so bold.

WAYNE: It’s no joke to draw that goddamn thing. It’s a very good litho group as lithos.

STUART: You can’t really tell that it’s a drawing.

WAYNE: Well, it’s a litho. It’s drawn on litho, crayon on stone. I had a lot of patience in those days. And this shadow projecting upward as it does is useful, very useful in here, as it implies a certain space. Otherwise, this would be sitting on here. You know what I mean?

STUART: Yes.

WAYNE: So that gives the brassiere some space, and gives this space to come out of the blue. These I just invented for the fun of it.

STUART: Those are fun. Did you complete this series, Second of Skin?

WAYNE: Next of Skin.

STUART: Next of Skin. Sorry.

WAYNE: Well, there were just five prints in it, because I found the approach that I needed for that print in The Dorothy Series. It wasn’t any of the brassieres that I drew in Next of Skin, but it eliminated, I could see [unclear].

STUART: What was the one that sort of resulted out of these?

WAYNE: Well, the one that I eventually drew was the black lace bra that was her best seller, not that that’s known by people who see The Dorothy Series. But in the sequence of images, the twenty images, it was loosely drawn. I had done a brassiere that was very detailed. It was the Rudi Gernreich “Little Nothing,” he called it, was the name of that brassiere. And it’s a beautiful lithograph, that particular one, but the series, I mean, just those five prints are really a statement.

STUART: Did those ever get shown together?

WAYNE: I think they were in shows together, but never that alone. So they never got that kind of emphasis if they had been just on one wall as the group of five.

STUART: The Dorothy series was multimedia. You were telling me that you did a sort of movie. You had that camera.

WAYNE: Yes. I did a video made from slides on my Caramate machine with a soundtrack, and I bought the rights to use all these popular songs of the era so that I have Walter Houston singing “The September Song” and similar popular songs.

STUART: Those are songs your mother played?

WAYNE: Yes, these were all songs that were meaningful to her and of the era that was being dealt with, so the soundtrack alone was a very expensive enterprise for me, but I hunted it out. I was going to do it no matter what, and it had to fit, it had to be right, because everything in The Dorothy Series has its meaning and its place in the narrative. The narrative does not present Dorothy’s life; it presents those aspects of her life that she might have been willing to talk about if she was out to lunch with friends. She was very private. There were a lot of things she wouldn’t talk about.

STUART: With you, too?

WAYNE: Yes. Yes. She was very discreet, very aware always of the fragility of her position, of the limits of what women could do. She was very proper, even though she was radical politically. But she wasn’t as radical. It was ironic that the communists could have possibly recruited her, but they felt that she was too bourgeoisie because she had a mink coat, she was properly dressed always for her job, and that she couldn’t go as far as the communist position, but she was very pro peace, pro women’s rights. She didn’t like [Joseph] Stalin at all. Dorothy was really very upper-class in the refinement of her sensibilities, the appropriateness of how you dressed and how you behaved.

STUART: Did she get that from her mother?

WAYNE: No. She got it from earning a living as an immigrant and learning the right things to do for a woman. She referred to her company as the Cadillac of corsetry. She wouldn’t represent a lesser brand. She would spend her money on designer clothes. They had to be just right and properly fitted. She had an awareness of the importance of how you looked and how you behaved as a lady.

STUART: So did she make sure you had all the right clothing on before you went out the door?

WAYNE: Well, she tried to, but I was impossible. She would send me these marvelous pantyhose, panty girdles that were part of her line of corsets, and I wouldn’t wear them. They were much too constrictive. I would go to Lerner’s, and for ninety-nine cents I could buy two-way stretch with garters. They were tiny little garments, but they had a lot of stretch. So when she’d come to visit me and she’d find one of these in a drawer or surprise me getting dressed, and then she would draw herself up to her full four-feet-eleven and she’d say, “You’re taking the bread right out of my mouth.” [laughs] And her panty girdles, she would say to me, “If you wear a girdle like this, you can never be raped.” And it was true. They were full of whalebone and zippers. How could some guy who was panting hot figure out how to get a garment like that off of you? And he certainly couldn’t fuck you through it. [laughs] She was quite right about that.

STUART: When did she teach you that? After you’d left the house?

WAYNE: Oh, yes. Yes. But she wouldn’t use language such as I have used. Dorothy spoke beautifully. She had no accent. She came when she was a kid. She was maybe seven, eight years old. And she was good in school. One of the prints includes one of her report cards which I managed to dredge up, and I was pleased to notice that she only got a “G” in deportment instead of an “E,” which meant that maybe she was a little mischievous, because she was always so proper when I was around. But she was out there earning a living at a time when women worked twelve hours a day as bookkeepers in [unclear] laundries or banks or wherever, and early on she began rising in jobs. At one time she was the credit manager for a lamp manufacturing company. And how did I find that out? I wrote away to the phone company in Chicago. I had her phone number at the time. I don’t know what I was asking, maybe the address of where she lived. Anyway, what they sent back was a photocopy of all of the information she had to submit in order to get a telephone, which included who her father was, what he did for a living, what her mother did. My grandmother is listed as a seamstress. My grandfather is, I believe, an ironworker. And where they lived and her various jobs, and there among these jobs is as the credit manager for the Rembrandt Light Company. I would never have known that. There were many things in this form that she had to fill out in order to get a telephone.

STUART: Before you were born.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, no, I think I was—maybe. I don’t remember the date. All of those papers are at UCLA. I gave all that stuff to UCLA.

STUART: No wonder part of what took you time to do The Dorothy Series was culling together all of this information.

WAYNE: It took about five years. And I had somebody working for me, a librarian, writing away to research. Then once I got the stuff, to make the selection of what I would use and what I wouldn’t use. The Dorothy Series included a lot of librarian-style research, and it was focused on her. Now, in it there’s probably some stuff about me. If I were going to try to do a biography of myself the way I did of her, there may be things there that would be useful, but that is not going to happen, so it’s not an ambition of mine to do that.

STUART: Are there many pictures of you from your childhood? Were those taken? I mean, you said when you were a baby and you were fairly small—

WAYNE: Yes. Well, they’re all here, such as I have. I think they’re all here. There may be pictures out among cousins, accidentally out, you know. People will still occasionally send me something that included me from years ago, or I send off to a cousin something that I discovered somewhere. But this, I remember this photograph, exactly that photograph when I was working on this.

STUART: Oh, you pulled that. You went specifically looking for you on the tricycle with the little boy?

WAYNE: Yes. I knew. I knew that that would be the ideal photograph. There was about the tension and the hanging on for dear life and that kind of expression, the precariousness of it all, but in contrast to him. There’s not a moment of doubt in that boy.

STUART: That was probably like the 1920s, late 1920s.

WAYNE: Yes. It was ’23, 1923.

STUART: It’s got a very snapshot quality to it.

WAYNE: Yes, and it is. It’s a Brownie.

STUART: The Kodak Brownie.

WAYNE: The Kodak Brownie, I’m sure, that that was taken. Now, let’s see. Now, this one—

STUART: I’ll pull that one over here.

WAYNE: That’s very Parisian, and it made me think that one of the things I should do is to do much more about litho.

STUART: Rue Cassette?

WAYNE: Yes. Rue Cassette is where [Marcel] Durassier’s little cave, workshop, was where I did all my lithos, and this map of Paris is of the area where Rue Cassette is on there somewhere.

STUART: I see St. Germain, which you mentioned a little bit ago.

WAYNE: Yes, and that cafe is right near 7, Rue Cassette. And, of course, I included the two litho pencils. This is Durassier and me dancing together here in California. I brought him to Tamarind for a month with his wife.

STUART: You’re barefoot.

WAYNE: Yes. We were dancing actually next to my swimming pool in the house on Londonderry, and the shoes were from that, the fifties. There they are up there. I just printed them in blue, and the triple glasses seemed right for that. But I used to go to that café to have a coffee from time to time. It’s just walking distance between my hotel and his. It was near [Rue de] Grenelle and—let me see. The Hotel [de] Lutece was right near there as well. The Lutece had been the S.S. headquarters during the occupation.

STUART: You knew that at the time?

WAYNE: Yes. Yes. This field is from a litho, it’s a separation from a litho, and had exactly the atmosphere I wanted. I don’t have many proofs that have the possibility that this particular print had.

STUART: You sold a copy or you sold a version of this one, this filmlet, or no?

WAYNE: Did I what?

STUART: Did you sell one of the pieces?

WAYNE: Yes. This is it. This is it. This is the one that sold. He’s coming next week to pick it up.

STUART: Oh, wow. Who was that? How did they find out about it?

WAYNE: An English collector. I don’t know quite how he got here, but he came on a motorcycle, young man. He’s in production of publications and makes a lot of money, collects prints, and he had seen some of these earlier. I had just finished this. So this is, in a way, a more classic thing, and the atmosphere of it is distanced and rather halcyon. It’s Paris on a good gray day.

STUART: The social critique element is not in there.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Not that I discern, anyway.

WAYNE: But when I did that, I put in those litho pencils and decided that I should do more that’s an homage to lithography, so we began fooling around with whether we could make three-dimensional objects that would include crayons and bits of litho stones. There’s a piece of it there where we were trying kinds of glue in that direction. We haven’t solved the technical problems yet.

STUART: What is the thing with the three glasses motif? What is the particular appeal of that for you? 1:29:39.1

WAYNE: It’s just that the shape felt right, and they’re facing each other.

STUART: Well, it’s the same pair of glasses, right, three times over?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Have you used that in some of the other filmlets?

WAYNE: No, I don’t think so. I tried to, but I haven’t found the right vehicle, and I don’t think I will. Now that I have this, I probably will not. I try not to repeat anything. So I won’t be doing more shoes. I have used shoes several times. There are a couple of quite beautiful collages in there with shoes, but that’s enough. There’s lots of stuff around that I can use. As I say, the detritus of my life, stuff that should be tossed out. Anyway, I do think it works beautifully. It’s a perfect laydown; that is, each piece really lies into the climate of the print.

STUART: The color schemes are very coherent. I like that.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Well, we will pause here. [End of May 15, 2011 interview]

1.6. Session Six (May 22, 2011)

STUART: May 22. Sunday, May 22, 2011.

WAYNE: Seven-thirty p.m.

STUART: June Wayne, Carolyn Stuart. We’re going to record a little bit about Franz Klein.

WAYNE: No. No, no, about Franz Alexander, the psychoanalyst.

STUART: Franz Alexander. Okay, sorry.

WAYNE: And his views on art. I’m trying to recall what year it was. I think it was in the mid fifties.

STUART: You were still married to George?

WAYNE: Yes, I was married to George Wayne, and therefore was the wife of a psychoanalyst, and I knew many of the psychoanalysts in the Los Angeles community and many from New York, whom I would meet when they came through L.A. I do recall that the first time I met a psychoanalyst through George, I was living on Rampart Boulevard. I was painting in half of the garage, which constituted my studio at that time, and George brought in a very well-known analyst who was visiting him, named Martin Grotjahn. I don’t know. Grotjahn was a big wheel in the Psychoanalytic Society. Through me and George, he saw a book, the Garden of Delights. Do you know the name of the—

STUART: By Bosch.

WAYNE: Yes, Hieronymous Bosch. He became aware of Hieronymous Bosch, and through the illustrations of the Garden of Delights, he felt that that proved Freud’s theories about art as an anal erotic behavior pattern, etc.So when Grotjahn came out into the garage where I was working—as it happens, I think I was working on The Chase, which is the painting on the wall—and he said to me, “I know you think you’re painting,” he said to me, “but you’re really smearing feces,” which really endeared him to me. That was my first big confrontation with a psychoanalyst. I came to look upon them as very odd and neurotic people. Anyway, in the course of the years, I had occasion to have some of these people in for dinner in George’s behalf and so on. It was always a high-stress time, because psychoanalysts, at least here and in that era, were very critical, tight-ass people, and they were very easy to insult, so that if you got their name wrong when you were introducing people, they would never forgive you for that. All these little clues that were supposed to be so meaningful about your mindset or your behavior or whatever was socially a very difficult thing. I remember, for example, Milton Miller, who was one of the much respected analysts here at that time, who would not leave his coat in the closet unless he was sure where it was, and he would come every ten or fifteen minutes to make sure that nobody had moved it. Grotjahn would come with a white plate. He would not eat off a plate that had any pattern to it. So over time, I came to know these little idiosyncrasies of these psychoanalytic geniuses who were so changing everything in the United States, because the language of psychoanalysis permeated. It ran through society. Words like “penis envy,” “castration,” “She’s a castrating bitch,” or all of those phrases, psychoanalytic sum-ups of what you were, and they were really putdowns.

STUART: Oedipal complex.

WAYNE: Yes. Yes, that’s right. All of those things were just running through the language of Americans as spread by the movie industry, because who were the main patients of these people? They all had their offices on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. Not all, but I mean in that neighborhood. The writers in the film industry were nearly all of them at that time on the couch, so they would go to their hour, that hour, psychoanalytic hour, and then they would go back with the interpretations of their analysts as the fodder for the next screenwriter job, you know. If you look in the compendiums and the research material on films, you will notice a single change in the titles of films, which began to represent psychiatric influence on the plot lines of the film industry. So these analysts, whom I knew personally because they would give parties—for example, Judy Strick’s father was an analyst, and apparently I have been to their house, although I don’t remember. And I have other friends who came from a psychoanalytic family. Anyway, I began to resist, and I would challenge things that they would say about artists, because when the artist believes that kind of crap, that we are emotionally unstable and that when we’re creative we really don’t know what we’re doing, that we get inspirations, we don’t have projects, we have inspirations, and all of this I could see had a very bad effect on artists’ attitudes toward themselves, just as psychoanalytic versions of what constituted womanhood had very deleterious effects on women’s self-image, really prepared them to be servile, to see themselves as—

STUART: You saw this? It didn’t happen to you. It wasn’t an influence on you?

WAYNE: No.

STUART: You saw it happen to friends or—

WAYNE: Well, yes. I could see that in the early days of feminism one of the things we had to fight was the stereotype of what a woman is. I don’t think that we have succeeded nearly to the degree that we need to succeed in order to liberate ourselves from the domination of men. The idea that I do know for my own self, that because I had a daughter, I have never been able to put aside the idea that somehow I was responsible for her for the rest of my life, and it still affects me. It still affects me, even though we don’t like each other. So the Freudian profile of artists, but also the profile of artists as feminized, curiously feminized, was, in my opinion, very bad for artists, and it made it difficult for us to organize ourselves into a financial sector. It had direct financial impact. For example, artists really expect their dealers to take care of them. They look to the dealers for the kinds of things that a woman would look to a husband for, and that is still a problem, self-identification of artists. When we say that we can’t sell, we just can’t sell, that’s nonsense. That’s absolute nonsense. I say that. I don’t like to sell. I will do everything I can to avoid asking for that check. I never say, “Shall I wrap it or will you eat it here?” which is the closing line for any kind of sale, you know. So I would have to say that my generation and I, myself, was considerably influenced by many of the values of both of the society, but of the very religious-like tone and attitude and definition of what woman’s place was as expressed by psychoanalysts. All right. That’s a very long preview, or foreword to the story about Franz Alexander that triggered this unexpected interview that we’re taping. Anyway, Franz Alexander was, I believe, a European psychoanalyst who specialized in creative patients and who was considered to be an authority on the neurosis of artists, writers. It was that kind of reputation that he had. He had written a paper about artists and the fan, the proposition that the more abstract the artist, the nearer the artist was to insane, that realism in art that you could recognize was equivalent to mental health, and that if the artists did anything else, they were progressing toward insanity. He was touring the country giving this lecture. I don’t remember the name of the lecture. It was a slide lecture in which he would show the works of artists like Picasso, Matisse, and others, and compare them to carefully chosen works by people in mental hospitals, so that it would be very easy, for example, to take something that a mental patient had scratched, because it would look like a Picasso drawing or something of that kind. He announced, and it was announced, that he would be speaking here in L.A. The year had to be 1952, because we were in the middle of that great fuss with the City Council in which all artists were said to be tools of the Kremlin, and the police were arresting artists and the McCarthyites were after artists and people in the film industry as well. I could see that Franz Alexander’s thesis would provide the meat and potatoes for justifying the political persecution that we were experiencing at the time.So I wrote to Alexander and asked him to consider postponing the date of his lecture, because I explained that we were having political problems and that he would become the authority that artists were madmen. It was a letter to that effect, and I hoped at least to postpone it for a few months because things were very hot here in L.A. on the politicization of modern art by the City Council. He sent the message back that he would not change the day because the truth is the truth, no matter what the truth causes to happen.So then the question was what would take place. I sought to ameliorate or at least embarrass the psychoanalysts about his lecture by offering to hold a reception for Franz Alexander after he gave his lecture, thinking that this might cause him to at least modify some of the terrible things that he was saying. So everybody accepted, and I invited a lot of people from the art world as well. Then the evening came, and it was held in the auditorium of a school near Wilshire Boulevard, somewhere near Hancock Park. I don’t remember the school, but it sat a thousand people and a thousand people came. On one side, the left aisle, all the psychoanalysts and their patients sat, and on the right side of the auditorium, the art people sat. There was a fair amount of interest in me because everybody knew that I had tried to head off this particular lecture. So I went to the event, and, of course, George Wayne was furious with me because I was interfering, in effect, with the psychoanalytic hegemony, challenging Franz Alexander, which would be politically bad for him in the psychoanalytic society where those analysts could, if they wished to, throw you out. So he had a big stake in my not ruffling any feathers. Anyway, so Alexander is introduced with a fifteen-minute introduction with all his qualifications and all these long titles and honors and all the rest of it, and he comes out. As I recall, I think he was Hungarian and had a slight accent. Anyway, he gives his opening speech, and then he has two projectors. On one side would be the work by the famous artists, on the other side a work of a madman that he had dredged up, and sometimes he got them mixed up, so it was clear from those of us who were literate in art that he didn’t know art very well, because he would call a Picasso a work by a patient and so on. There was a lot of that.The art people were fidgeting. The analytic people were enthralled. Then when the lecture was over came the time for questions. I had become increasingly nervous because, of course, he’s made all these terrible mistakes, which I’m just dying to expose, and yet I’m very tense about it because a lot of these people are coming to the house, and then there’s George’s fury with me, and I knew that artists would be looking to me. What was I going to be doing about this? It was really a disgraceful lecture. Anyway, so comes questions, and I’m not the first to get up, but finally I raise my hand, and finally he recognizes me. I turn to the audience and say, “I’m very impressed with Dr. Alexander’s credentials, but I want you to notice that all of them are medical credentials, they are not art credentials, and that he has consistently—,” and I’d call out the fact that he has frequently misidentified the works as by madmen when they were actually by somebody else, and what it meant to select on such a basis. Well, from the art side came applause, from the psychoanalysts came hissing and booing, and generally it was a very difficult experience for me because I felt that I was the only person who could have challenged that the way I did, exactly because I knew everybody in the psychoanalytic community and they knew me and they knew that I was the wife of an analyst, you see. So who else in this town could have challenged Alexander on his own ground? But I was trembling. I was really upset that I had to do it, and I just felt that I had to. So then comes the reception at the house. Alexander and his buddies show up. They go into one part of the house. The art people go into another part of the house. Milton Miller visits his coat four or five times. Grotjahn has his plain plate and dinner. It was not an evening where any people from the two sides got together at all. So that was a wasted effort, and I was very naïve at that time. I thought that social mores might tamp this thing down, but it was a dumb Beverly Hills kind of idea that I was too stupid at that time to realize what a dumb move it was.Anyway, it made a tremendous wave of anger in the psychoanalytic world, and George probably suffered for it. I don’t know. He was never ejected. As a matter of fact, he remained quite operational. But on rare occasions after that when he and I both went to social events given by analysts, I was often challenged or hurt one way or another or called out publicly in front of other people for what I had done. For example, the guy who became the national head of the Psychoanalytic Society, Romeo Greenson was his name, on one occasion when George and I were in San Francisco and he was attending a Psychoanalytic Society meeting, we went to the Top of the Mark to a gathering of analysts in a bar, and as we walked in, “Romie” Greenson stood up at the other end of the table and he called out across the room, “Mrs. Wayne! Mrs. Wayne! I understand you think you’re an artist,” he said. And I said, “Romeo! Romeo! I understand you think you’re a doctor.” There would be these kinds of public confrontations from then on between me and individual members of the Psychoanalytic Society, and that was a problem between me and George that never got ironed out, because I felt that they were so off base and so destructive to their patients as well. I mean, there was absolutely no scientific verification of all these crazy things that they were telling people. They made it up as they went along. “Your problem is that you never got over your mother not giving you her left tit,” or something, you know, all this crazy stuff that people—and people were talking about penis envy and castration complex. Inferiority complex entered the public language coast to coast and went around the world in Hollywood films, which was the vector for psychoanalytic language. Its language was very useful, productive, imagistic, convincing, and since nobody could prove otherwise, it really had a very bad effect.It made women certainly more submissive because it aroused all sorts of guilt that they were withholding or they weren’t good, whatever it was that was a psychoanalytic explanation for why you were a bad wife. If you weren’t a good cook, for example, you were withholding as an active resistance to your family or you were a bad mother, all of these booby traps, these mental booby traps that they were laying for people. I could see it and read it and hear it in the language as it entered common currency for speech. Anyway, so that was the [unclear]. Now, many, many years later, it must have been twenty-five or thirty years later, I had occasion to, by accident, be invited to a lunch, breakfast, a brunch at the Bel-Air Hotel, and who was there but Franz Alexander. He remembered me, and he said, “You know, maybe you weren’t so wrong after all.” Then it turned out that he had married a woman artist who was crazy as a loon, and he said, “Well, maybe I was acting out a little bit against artists,” still using that foolish language, “acting out.” So we had this face-to-face meeting, and he admitted that it might have been because his wife was so cuckoo.

STUART: Because he was with her at the—

WAYNE: No, no. I don’t know. I don’t know whether she was dead. She wasn’t there. So that’s the whole story. But it was a big political thing here in town.

STUART: Did it affect the way people spoke about your art or the way George understood your art?

WAYNE: Well, George never understood and was never interested in understanding it, and it made no difference. We were just two people who never would have got married. I told you it was Hitler’s fault. [laughs] I dated him a couple of times when the war was just breaking out. If that hadn’t happened and I’d dated him two more times, I would have known that I couldn’t stand him. But he went overseas for four years, and you didn’t write a “Dear John” letter to a guy overseas. Anyway, that’s the accidental incidental mark of the times on my life.But the story of Franz Alexander and me and that lecture, I think, was worth recording, and it made a big stir here in town, although that didn’t hit the newspapers that way.

STUART: Do you remember some of the artists who were there at the initial—

WAYNE: I really don’t. I really don’t. I do remember that Jules Langsner was there, because Jules and I were working together politically a lot at that time to try to stop the City Council’s definition of modern art as a communist conspiracy. So, no, I don’t. I would suspect that [Bernard] Tony Rosenthal might have been there, and that Lorsen Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg would have been there. A lot of the artists I knew were there, so you could pretty run down a list of artists of that decade and find them. I’m not sure that the artists really knew what I was doing in defending them, because not all of them were in treatment, and it was such an exotic—they were such a bunch of weirdoes, these doctors. It isn’t as though they appeared to be the crème de la crème of the Beverly Hills world. And how would artists know? My trouble was that I always knew a little more about what was going on and felt a certain obligation to try to clean up the riverbanks, like the Mad Woman of Shiloh. I identified with her a lot. I thought I was just as dumb as she was because I did take on impossible tasks over the years. Don’t ask me why. Anyhow, so that was Franz Alexander, the psychoanalyst, and June Wayne.Oh, many years later, many years later I ran into Romeo Greenson again at the Mark Taper Forum. I had just seen a play, and somebody tapped me on the shoulder, and it was Greenson. He said to me, “June, I don’t understand what it was about you that I didn’t like you, when you’re so talented and accomplished now.” I said, “Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me. I don’t like you any better now than I did then.” [laughter]

STUART: Is he somehow related to the whole sales issue of your work in some way?

WAYNE: No.

STUART: That didn’t relate to this?

WAYNE: No. Well, yes. I told the story about how they kept saying they wanted to buy something of mine.

STUART: Who did?

WAYNE: Greenson and his wife.

STUART: Oh, really?

WAYNE: Yes. And they came. I think I told you this story.

STUART: I’m not sure.

WAYNE: And they came and they looked at some drawings, and I could just see that they were not going to decide. I couldn’t get them to decide. So I finally said, “Listen. Take these five or six home and decide at home,” and then I couldn’t get them to bring them back, and they wouldn’t decide. So I called and I said, “If they’re not here by tomorrow, I’m going to sue you.” I couldn’t get the work back from them.So they were delivered back along with a letter, and they said, “Selected one,” and there was a check. I think the whole sale was maybe $125, something like that. The letter said, “We love your work so much, that’s why we couldn’t decide which one to buy. And if we see another one that we like better than this one, will you credit this purchase? We’ll return the one we just bought against another one.” So I called them up and said, “Listen. You’re not ready to own my work. I want you to return everything, and I’m sending you your check back,” and that’s what I did.

STUART: Wow.

WAYNE: They just couldn’t part with that money to save their lives, and I must say that the psychoanalysts were the stingiest people I have ever met.

STUART: Wow. That’s incredible. I doubt you ever had that kind of situation happen ever before or after.

WAYNE: No, nobody else. No, no, no. Not ever before or after.

STUART: Did that occur before you saw him in the seventies at the Bel-Air lunch?

WAYNE: Yes. Yes. No, that was Franz Alexander. I’m talking about Romeo Greenson. And his sister’s name was Juliet Greenson. It was Romeo and Juliet Greenson. [laughter] They were very funny. One of the pictures out there and one of the snapshots of the things I’ve assembled has him in it, as it happens, in a group, and there is Greenson sitting there.

STUART: Like a party scene or something?

WAYNE: Yes. I had a little gathering of people up. Why he was there, I have no idea because the other people in the picture were artists. But it’s just the detritus of my life, sweeping up the crumbs, you know, after the toast. [laughter]But the Franz Alexander thing and the impact of the psychoanalyst on the artist is also—let me remind you, very much was a problem for Jackson Pollock and all those drawings that his analyst caused him to make, which he then claimed to own. He would ask Pollock to make drawings and bring them in, and then he made a collection of them, and after Pollock died, the show was sent around as Pollock’s drawings for his psychoanalyst as though Pollock didn’t have the right to privacy, you know. I was just infuriated by that.

STUART: They were given to Pollack in the—

WAYNE: No. Pollack—

STUART: I mean, Pollack gave them to the doctor in the context—

WAYNE: In the context of therapy.

STUART: Got it.

WAYNE: And he turned them into—it was his records.

STUART: But that’s an interesting question when you’re looking at an artist’s biography. I know that when I’ve looked at Eva Hesse, that her sister is taking care of her estate and that many of the personal diaries of Eva are in there and some of the confessions with the doctor and things like that.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, these are all very interesting questions, and they are questions that I’m trying to deal with now, of what things I throw away, what things I talk about or don’t talk about. I’ve been very careful not to talk about a lot of things. The print that I’m making now, if I succeed in pulling it off, really is, in terms of my autobiography, the first time that any of this content of these people would be known.

STUART: This is a filmlet that has pictures of some of these individuals from psychoanalytic community?

WAYNE: Yes. No, no. No, no. Lovers. Lovers. I have never, never revealed anything about my personal life, but here I have the lovers who were important to me as an artist and culturally important to me.

STUART: Shu and Larry, do they know that that’s part of the content?

WAYNE: Yes, yes, they do. I think they do.

STUART: Oh, you haven’t—

WAYNE: Well, we may—I was making fun of it by calling it the title of Lovers and Other Leftovers, but I think a lot of the men that are involved, and each of them was a big contribution to my life.

STUART: Even if they were left over?

WAYNE: Well, they weren’t left over. It isn’t that they were left over. They’re all dead now. My daughter has not the slightest idea of any of this, so for me it’s very brave to even consider making this. But it doesn’t matter now. I’m too old. [laughter] It mattered a lot when I was young. But if I decide to do this now, it would just be memorabilia. Nobody’s interested in who I went to bed with. [laughter] But that each one of them was culturally so important to me, and some, to some degree, even I could say mentors.

STUART: And you’ve spoken about some of them in your life in intellectual connection that you’ve had with them and how that made some of their lives uncomfortable.

WAYNE: Well, or they would have. They would have made.

STUART: This is a different set of [unclear].

WAYNE: Yes. Now I don’t think it matters. And even if it does, fuck it, you know. [laughter]

STUART: That’s the privilege of being ninety-three.

WAYNE: If it made no sense aesthetically as a filmlet, then I wouldn’t do it, but I think it adds interest. In all of the filmlets there is some portion of actual truth.

STUART: Right. Behind the humor.

WAYNE: Yes. It was in that context, and because Shu found for me this proof, only a portion of which I would use, of a self-portrait, so that if I’m able to ring in this drama of all these people and do it in a way that is aesthetically convincing, then it’s still a work that may or may not happen. It depends the degree to which I can solve the aesthetic rationale. But all of these filmlets have truth in them. It’s not all just made up. It has to do with the appropriateness of the image somehow expanding from the original work itself and then the additions of current images that continue it as in the cell, the plane, and then the limo in Chicago. These things have a certain—from the viewpoint of storytelling, they have a rightness, and so that self-portrait with the portraits of these men. Now, my question is, one of the questions I’m asking myself, because there were men in my life who were not that close to me, who were not lovers, but who, nonetheless, were very close friends. I’m thinking of [Buckminster] “Bucky” Fuller, John Entenza. There are others there who aren’t as famous as they are. And it’s an aesthetic question but also a literary question of whether I just confine this to my face and the lovers, men who were in my life seriously. And you don’t find George there. It’s only people who have had a constructive impact on my life. I’m just looking now for a good, an appropriate picture of Hank [Arthur Henry Plone]. I don’t have nearly enough photos of Hank. Those were years where we weren’t taking photographs all the time like we do now. It’s hard. You know, it would be hard to commit a murder today without somebody taking a photograph of it while it’s in progress. [laughter] But we weren’t oriented toward that kind of collection of data. That’s very different.

STUART: It really is.

WAYNE: It’s a very different society now.

STUART: Maybe that’s one of the things that’s on your mind. I’m not trying to put words into your mouth.

WAYNE: No.

STUART: But when you talk about sort of the differences that you see between generations.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, that one doesn’t bother me so much. But on the other hand, I get packets of photographs that I really don’t want.

STUART: So, a recent photo?

WAYNE: Yes, recent events that are really covered over and over again. Then I often find now going back, I don’t know who the people are in the damn photograph, because it’s a lot of work to annotate them when they come in, you know, and what are you saving it for? Not everything is a golden moment that you really need to remember. And why are we always grinning into the camera? And we lace our arms around each other. At the Trusteeship [for the Benefit of Women], every meeting there are photographs taken, and we’re always looking just the same way. You follow these meetings, and we’re getting older and older and older. [laughter] And we’re still just lacing our—and they always call me and put me in somewhere where being short is useful to the photograph, because many of the women are much taller than I am. So there are plenty of those photographs around. If I were accused of committing a murder, I could probably provide—what’s—

STUART: The lineup? You would be in the lineup?

WAYNE: There’s a special word for your proving where you were.

STUART: Alibi.

WAYNE: Alibi. Providing an alibi. You see, I was taking this picture. And on the back of the picture there’s usually the hour it was taken. We collect all this meaningless information as thought it’s historic. And think of the profits being made and the trees being consumed by all this extra technical facility that people have. It’s just appalling. It’s as though we’re just racing through some kind of egotism to plunder the planet. We use much more paper than we did before we were on computer, much more. Do you find that’s true?

STUART: I see that it’s true.

WAYNE: All the email that you really don’t want that you unload and it’s printed out.

STUART: I don’t print that stuff.

WAYNE: Well, Larry [Workman] prints a lot of stuff for me that he knows I’m interested in and that he runs across, so my paper bills are much higher than they use to be. We buy a case of paper at a time. So, anyway, that was the great Franz Alexander-June Wayne battle of the century.

STUART: That would definitely get the psychiatrists to remember who you were.

WAYNE: Well, yes. They didn’t love me, I can tell you.

STUART: Did it make it—I don’t know, was it uncomfortable?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: I mean, you were tremoring, but, I mean, when you came to your art, did you think about, oh, this is going to be read such-and-such a way?

WAYNE: I’m aware of that all the time. I’m very aware of and very interested in what messages I’m sending out in an image, because I usually have a reason for a shape, and people do get messages, even though they’re not aware of it. It does bias them to react one way or another. I’m very aware of that in the same sense that I think a playwright is aware that the entry of a person at a given moment has such-and-such an impact in the play. I think a lot of artists do this, although they may not do it as consciously as I do.

STUART: And you’ve always been that way?

WAYNE: Yes, always have been. Jules and I have talked a lot about the spectator and that [unclear] modern art program that we did. We made people literally prove what they thought they were seeing, because every meeting, there was an actual work of art that was the focus of our attention. If somebody said, “Well, those colors make me feel thus and so,” we’d say, “What colors? Point it out. What is it that’s making you feel that way?” Or a shape.

STUART: To give them better visual literacy?

WAYNE: Yes, to accustom them to connect their brain to the eye, because until this series, what people felt was always expressed, “It’s so beautiful,” or, “It reminds me of the place where we had our honeymoon.” They would buy a painting because it reminded them of something. We tried to make people conscious of what it was that was playing in their response to the picture, and we actually used words like “projection.” Are you just projecting that onto the picture because you associate it with something? You know, to try to make people aware of the nature of their responses and which ones were appropriate, because people could have really crazy responses. They like something, but they don’t know why. If you know why you are enjoying something, somehow it adds something. I really believe that. It becomes a richer experience.

STUART: But as the artist, you can never anticipate or control certainly what the spectator is going to bring.

WAYNE: No, but you can tip it.

STUART: You can tip it but you can’t—

WAYNE: You can tip it. No, you can’t do that. But the artist has to assume a literate spectator, and we have a right to assume that. Otherwise, we don’t care. We’re not interested in your response if it’s inappropriate. So, becoming aware of your own reactions, you look at a painting and there is a passage that particularly attracts you, why does it attract you? What is there about it? What do you associate it with, or do you simply like that a certain stroke is repeated a number of times so it’s the rhythm of it that please you, or does it remind you maybe the way a certain note may be repeated a number of times by Mozart or how differently it would be repeated by Beethoven? These kinds of things to draw down on the conscious pleasures, and what do you think the artist intended by doing that?

STUART: You want people to ask those questions?

WAYNE: Yes. It’s not just an accident. Somebody set out to make this thing. What did they have in mind? That’s why I call it the scene of the crime, that all the evidence is there and it’s up to you to deduce it. You can become so sophisticated that you get a picture immediately and you don’t have to be constantly asking yourself about it. The more experienced you are as a listener, as a viewer, as a reader, as anything, as a seamstress, you know, why would you want to work on something for a year, for example, and have people to expect to understand it in two seconds? Either you’re stupid for taking so long or they’re geniuses for figuring it out so quickly.

STUART: That’s true. [laughter] How can an art historian spend years researching one work of art?

WAYNE: Yes. Is it worth it, and how quickly do you find out whether it’s worth it or not? You can’t research a thing for a year if it’s shallow to begin with. Not if you have any brains, you can’t do it. If it isn’t there, you can’t find it. You can miss it, but you can’t find it. [laughter] Well, anyway, so now you heard about the Franz Alexander episode.

STUART: And the Greens—

WAYNE: Greensons. Yes. You see, they would say you were resisting his name, because you keep misidentifying him. [laughter]

STUART: Must be my Oedipal complex.

WAYNE: Or something, yes, something like that. Actually, he was very helpful twice in testifying in behalf of artists who were arrested for their work. He testified once in one of Connor Everts’ trials, and he testified also in a case that was brought against David Stewart, the art dealer on La Cienega [Boulevard] who did an exhibition of sexual dalliance by children. I was quite shocked when I saw the show, and I thought, “David, you’re a braver man than I am.” [laughter] I wouldn’t do a show like that because I felt sure the police would get him, and they did. Both of us were witnesses in both those trials, I as well as—

STUART: In the Connor and the Stewart trial.

WAYNE: Yes, and the Stewart trial, and also I twice testified in two trials of Connor Everts, and Greenson testified in one.

STUART: What was your role in your testimony on the Stewart trial?

WAYNE: I don’t recall. Something to do with freedom of expression. I might also have talked about the skill of the drawings and the long tradition of that kind of art, even though you don’t see it very often, and how skillful the works were. That I would have testified to. I didn’t testify, but I would have been willing to mount such a show because I would not have been willing to pay such a price for it, because it must have cost him a fortune in legal fees. But Greenson did testify. Greenson sort of considered himself an artist’s analyst, although he didn’t know shit about art. And I very much resented that he became the president of the Print Society at LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art]. He and his wife served as presidents, served on the board of the Print Society at LACMA. I felt that they had too much power in my world.

STUART: Where did he come up with the expertise?

WAYNE: Yes, exactly. Exactly. I could see no basis for that. But these lay groups, curators do use them as fundraising sources and to support the veracity and necessity of even being a curator of prints or of painting or whatever it was. Curators have to do a lot of fundraising, so they need followers, whether they know anything or not, to give luncheons or receptions or put their name on something, but just pleading for support. So that’s how Greenson got to be president of the Print Society. I really resented it, didn’t do anything about it, didn’t say anything about it. I was busy with Tamarind [Institute].

STUART: What did the Print Society mean to you?

WAYNE: Well, it was the support for the print department at LACMA, the lay group, like the Textile Society in Chicago supported and paid for the expenses of the opening of my tapestry show. They were paying for the fiber show, but they also took on a portion of that as applied to my exhibition. At least I didn’t pay for that. So I have no idea how much money was involved, but there was a real question whether they would, because up to that time fiber and tapestry were considered in competition with each other, as not consistent with each other.

STUART: The difference being?

WAYNE: That one was in fashion, the other was not. It’s as simple as that. The fiber movement of the sixties, fifties and sixties, declared tapestry old-fashioned. If you were called old-fashioned, you were dead. I think I told you that Mildred Constantine, who was the curator of textile at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, would not accept one of my tapestries for the Lausanne Biennial because it was old-fashioned to do tapestry.

STUART: That wasn’t how she explained—

WAYNE: Yes, that’s how she explained it to my Paris dealer.

STUART: It wasn’t the Bill Lieberman, anything to do with—

WAYNE: No, that was before Bill Lieberman.

STUART: Bill Lieberman was at the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art] later?

WAYNE: Yes. Well, she was at MoMA [Museum of Modern Art].

STUART: Oh, she was MoMA?

WAYNE: Yes. Millie Constantine had the biggest nose I have ever seen on a woman. [laughter] It was just huge. Imagine remembering that.

STUART: That is a funny thing to remember.

WAYNE: Big sort of hawk nose, great big thing, great big thing.

STUART: And she had the power to just make that decision?

WAYNE: She was the chairman of the jury of the Lausanne Biennial, yes. That’s that they told La Demure, which was my gallery. I was very pissed by that.I had run into Mildred Constantine once before. It was when I was in Mexico, and she had spent some time in Mexico. She had a boyfriend who was a schoolteacher in New York, and when I was in Mexico, I met him, and he and I had a bit of a fling. I didn’t know about Mildred Constantine at that time, and I don’t know whether his affair with her was after or before. In any case, did I tell you that when I came back from Mexico to Chicago—his name was Sam Schiffer. He was a very tall, quite handsome man, with a little mustache, and a schoolteacher from New York. He lived on 34th Street, on the west end of 34th Street, in a tall building and he had an apartment of his own. He really liked me and persuaded me to come to visit him in New York, which I did. I spent that night with him, but before that, we went out to dinner. He ordered for me, and he ordered a shrimp cocktail, but he also ordered all of the ingredients for the dressing that he would have on this shrimp cocktail. And I’m sitting there watching this guy fussing around with these. He’s putting in a couple of drops of this and a sprinkle of pepper and so much of this and that, and I could see him suddenly in a whole different way, and that was the end of it for me. If he hadn’t bothered with that shrimp cocktail, I might have ended up with Sam Schiffer.

STUART: If only. [laughter]

WAYNE: I know. If only. No, but can you imagine such a thing putting me off?

STUART: Yes. [laughter]

WAYNE: What was he fussing with? And it seemed so pretentious to me, and it was foreign to me. My attitude toward food did not include that kind of gourmet approach to it. Anyway, so that was the end of Sam as a serious contender for my hand. [laughter] I remember that very well.But it was many years before I learned that he and Millie Constantine had been a couple, so I preferred to believe that it was not my tapestry that she was rejecting, but that she saw me as a competitor. I even thought that maybe I should call her up and say, “You know, I really never was involved with Sam Schiffer,” that maybe this would end what I felt was a prejudice against my tapestry. But, fortunately, I had the good sense not to do that, because I don’t know for a fact that they were a couple.

STUART: That’s only hearsay for you.

WAYNE: For me. Listen, anything I don’t see with my own eyes is hearsay, and that’s still the case. I’m always questioning what is that I’m looking at? What does that really mean? So I end up being entirely too involved in the meaning of what I’m seeing. Maybe a thing just is what it is. I’m always trying to make sure that it is what it is, which is where paranoia sets in, curiosity ends and paranoia sets in. [laughter] Anyway, those are funny little—

STUART: But did you ever have a situation other than that where someone blatantly said, “I’m sorry, your tapestry is old-fashioned. We won’t have it in this show,” or that show?

WAYNE: No, I can’t say that I have, but I do know that it was very hard to get people to look at tapestry as a separate medium. By that, I mean curators. As a matter of fact, early on when I decided that I would try to sell my collection, I went to see the curator of modern art at LACMA. What’s her name? I know it well. I have chemo brain today. Anyway, so I went to see her and I said, “I just want you to know, because I think you deserve to know, that I’m doing something that I don’t ordinarily do, and that is that I’m putting my tapestries into the markets because I hope to sell them. I need the money.”And she said to me, “You know, you might be able to sell them through the gift store at the museum.” And she’s the big curator at LACMA. That was her reaction to the idea of tapestry. Now, she was not the textile curator, of course.

STUART: She had no idea what your tapestries were either.

WAYNE: No, she had no idea at all what they represented.

STUART: But they didn’t have like a textile-specific curator?

WAYNE: Yes, they did.

STUART: They did?

WAYNE: They did, but she’s not important, nowhere as—oh, I’ll think of her name when you’ve gone home.

STUART: I will as well.

WAYNE: But she’s a very good curator. She’s a difficult person. I’ve known her for years.

STUART: But that’s such an interesting choice you made to tell her and not the textile person.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, I made that choice because, as I say, the textile person had no power at all, and if I had wanted to get LACMA to buy them, it would be this curator I would have to get by, not the textile curator, because she’s so much more powerful at LACMA. She has an international reputation. She’s the curator of modern art. She’s just recently had a big show.

STUART: Was this a phone call that you made with her?

WAYNE: No. No, I just went to see her.

STUART: And there was just that short a conversation?

WAYNE: It was very short. I didn’t want her to think that I wanted anything from her. I didn’t. But I let her know what I was doing with other museums, and Bernard Kester thought I should, so I did. But it didn’t matter, wouldn’t have mattered to her.It’s still very difficult. Christa [Thurman] has often commented on it, that there just are so few people in the country who know anything about tapestry. As it happens, the current director of the Met was the previous tapestry curator, [Thomas P.] Campbell. He knows about tapestry, but I don’t have the energy to approach him, and I figured that he must know about the tapestries because he’s very friendly with Christa. What we did do was send him the disc of the opening. I haven’t heard anything from him. And so far as I know, women simply do not make it at the Met. They just don’t. But I’m not willing to agree that it’s sexism that’s a problem for me, although I know it is. I mean, I can’t give it that because I’m helpless in the face of that point of view. What can I do about it? Not a thing. I will always be thought of as a pushy woman, which was the reaction to me with Tamarind. Fortunately, I was not a pushy woman to Ford [Foundation], although there may have been people in Ford who thought that. But my connection was high enough and powerful enough to protect me.

STUART: “Mac.”

WAYNE: [W. McNeil] Mac Lowry, yes. So I was constantly dodging and bending and scraping, as though I was running down the football field, when I ran Tamarind, because there were so many subtle problems in acceptance. Whether it was from within my team or from the people that I had to deal with, everybody was annoyed with me because in some way I was upsetting them. Print dealers, for example, felt that I was affecting their market, and I was. Print curators felt that I was affecting their hegemony, and I was.Lessing [J.] Rosenwald, when he read this plan when it was sent to him for reaction, he opposed it, and he opposed it because he said it was discriminating against all the other media, and that to open one workshop in Los Angeles favored Los Angeles and they should open them in at least eight other cities as well, which was stupid, because even to find someone to be the master printer for one job was like moving heaven and Earth, it was so difficult. He didn’t understand any of those things. So he was quite gentlemanly in his opposition, sent me a copy of the letter he sent to Ford, which none of the other people did.

STUART: I was going to ask you that.

WAYNE: None of them.

STUART: So that’s how you wound up knowing what he [unclear]?

WAYNE: What he said, yes. But it was years before Lowry told me who the people were that supported me, because he did it under promise of anonymity for them to answer.

STUART: Did he wait for Tamarind to be in New Mexico to tell you?

WAYNE: Yes. Yes.

STUART: Were you surprised by the names?

WAYNE: I was surprised by my supporters, because one of them was Lincoln Kirstein, and another was James Johnson Sweeney. I mean, these were all people who had enough European education to understand what prints could be, and then the idea of collaboration was no surprise to them. They were in collaborative—especially Kirstein, with the [School of American] Ballet, understood what it was to train artisans. And Ebria Feinblatt of LACMA, she was the print curator, and I knew her personally, and Ebria also supported it. She thought it would be good for L.A., as it was. And Lowry. There was one other person, Gustav Von Groschwitz of the Cincinnati [Art] Museum, who also knew something about litho. He was a big enthusiast for color lithography, which at the time I thought was very vulgar. When we turned to color, we really improved color a lot. The earlier color prints looked like oil slick on a pavement, that iridescent look, because the ink would pile up and get very slimy-looking. So we found our way out of that problem.

STUART: Was it a decision, “Okay, we’re going to start doing color now” kind sort of thing?

WAYNE: Well, it mainly had to do with the—no, the needs of the artists. Some of the earlier artists did not work as much in color, or in very limited color, but as time went on, we began having artists for whom color was a big issue, and getting it right was a big challenge for Tamarind, which we solved. Part of the problem had to do with the fact that Americans were printing on damp paper, so, of course the ink sat on the surface. But when I was able to convince Garo [Antreasian] that you could print dry, we had a big faceoff on that issue because he ignored me and went on building a damp box to damp print on dampened paper, and I said, “No, we won’t do it.”

STUART: Was that for color as well as black and white?

WAYNE: Yes, yes, absolutely.

STUART: So you never used dampened paper at Tamarind.

WAYNE: Never. We didn’t. But he used it on his own prints, and they would curl up. Then as he, himself, saw that it was possible to print dry, then he began to print dry for himself as well. But we were head-to-head on that issue, and I said, “If that’s the case, I will not open this project. We’ll either print dry or we don’t open.” I used my authority, and so since he had come out here, he’d taken a year off from school, what was he going to do? And we did. We did.I mean, I have done color prints that are almost unbelievable, the color is so marvelous, with Ed Hamilton as my printer. Each printer is like a musician; they have their own touch. And Ed was a perfect printer for me in his touch. Not in other ways. He was too tight-assed in some ways.

STUART: In how experimental he would be or just—

WAYNE: Well, he just wouldn’t break free sometime when I wanted a little less controlled approach. It was very hard to get him to do that. And he’s still a very tight printer, wonderful printer. But I’m not working in tight ways now, so I don’t know. It seems odd not to be doing litho, but the only way I would be able to do it now is if I could take over a whole shop and have every proof brought to me and so on. I’m not sure I could even draw it. So that’s the end of that. Anyway.

STUART: So you miss printing?

WAYNE: Oh, I miss litho a lot. I really enjoy it. I’m trying to make direct references in the film, some of the filmlets, to litho. That’s why I included [Marcel] Durassier and me dancing in that one that I’ve sold, so I don’t have it here anymore. The name of the filmlet is—

STUART: La Cassette?

WAYNE: No, Rue Cassette.

STUART: Rue Cassette.

WAYNE: Rue Cassette, yes. And the litho pencils are there in the image. I was thinking that I had done a little bit of work on gathering up references to lithography to put in filmlets. I just haven’t found the right context yet.

STUART: What sorts of references?

WAYNE: Well, the tools, the sandpaper, the Conte crayon, and the kind of marks that it makes, things of that kind to include in the image, but I don’t have the right vehicle yet for including that. But we have even experimented with making some three-dimensional objects that refer to litho by including pieces of litho stone and crayons and other tools, or even little bits of surface that are so typical of strokes in litho, much like you would—well, I think of the Mozart horn quintet, “The Hunt” quintet, where you hear the horns of the hunt, that kind of reference, but to litho.

STUART: That makes sense.

WAYNE: Yes. But those are dumb things that I think about when I think about making art, and I wonder what the hell am I making art for? It’s such a dumb activity for now. It’s absolutely out of sync with society. It’s absolutely archaic in every possible way. The sensibility that goes with it is not active now. The introspection of art that’s made by hand is not there. People aren’t trained. They don’t look for it. They don’t look for it in written material. They don’t look for it in spelling. They don’t look for it in their books. The typography, all of these things are not viable. They don’t have an audience big enough to make them viable as contributions to the current culture.

STUART: But you felt that way about lithography when you resuscitated it.

WAYNE: Yes, but I was—that’s true, I did feel that. Well, it was dead and no one was practicing it well, and it needed subsidy. It needed different kinds of support to recreate the human beings who knew how to do it well. We didn’t know how to do it well in this country. We had known. We had known during the WPA [Works Progress Administration] years. There were some marvelous lithos made, and then suddenly there was nothing. The lithos that came in to printeries, you picked them up like they were dead mice, the surfaces were so awful, you know. They were disgusting. [laughter]

STUART: Oh, boy.

WAYNE: Well, I’m not saying that this is a permanent disconnect. I hope it’s not. I don’t know where its audience is going to come from. The museums are not creating this. I don’t care how many people they bring through to these big events, they are not creating sensitive eyes.

STUART: Do you think curators did that before?

WAYNE: No, I really don’t, but I think that education was valued, that there were a lot of people who read a lot, that there was a cut of society that valued writers and music and knew a lot about symphony and so on. The symphonies are dying off. Their audiences are all white-haired. Who’s going to be the audience for chamber music? So these are things that might be revived if we become a somewhat smaller society that can afford to educate on these arts. There have been things that have had revivals. I can’t think just at the moment what they are, but—

STUART: They’re there.

WAYNE: Yes, yes. But I think right now is a very bad time. I don’t know enough about the level of art education at the moment as I knew it, for example, ten years ago. I thought it was very stringy, very, very chancey. It had become very loose-limbed, as it were.

STUART: What is that?

WAYNE: I mean, there wasn’t enough talk about aesthetics. There wasn’t enough conceptual thinking about art.

STUART: What was the thinking?

WAYNE: I couldn’t find much of it on the campuses. I certainly didn’t see it at Rutgers [University]. But, you know, artists really did have long arguments about aesthetics. Maybe they’re having them today and I’m just too far off the main drag to know that. You know, we used to have long discussions here about aesthetics, the look of this kind of a line or that kind of a composition or whatever. We talked about those things. Pollock and [Reuben] Rube Kadish and [Philip] Guston had long, long—they were constantly talking about aesthetics, about the rationale of what they were doing. It was a very educated and rich thing that went on. That was also true of [Adolph] Gottlieb and my favorite artist—and I’m having trouble bringing up his name, that the De Manils had in Texas—[Mark] Rothko, who I thought was a wonderful artist.

STUART: Did he ever come here?

WAYNE: No.

STUART: He was dead.

WAYNE: He was dead, yes. He was dead by then. But Guston was here and Kadish was here. Pollock was dead. Guston had a certain Hamlettian indecision when he talked about art and when he thought about it. But I don’t know because I’m very isolated now. I’m not out among the artists. Even the old artists I’m not seeing, and we’re all dying off, every one of us. Ynez Johnston is going blind and Conner Everts is having severe memory problems, and even Robin Vaccarino I rarely see. I never had important aesthetic conversation with her. We didn’t talk art very much, even though we liked each other’s work a lot. But I don’t know. Are the kids talking art?

STUART: I think it varies. I can’t say I have enough of a sampling, but—

WAYNE: Yes, I just don’t know now, whereas I was always so up to my tonsils in artists, you know.

STUART: I found it very interesting, though, that, I mean, you said that there was a point where Georgia O’Keeffe was here, and everything that was right around the assassination in ’63 and ’64—

WAYNE: Yes, when [John F.] Kennedy was—

STUART: —and how it just really made it impossible for her to continue working.

WAYNE: Yes. When Kennedy was assassinated, she was here. She had just arrived.

STUART: So she didn’t even begin to work here?

WAYNE: No.

STUART: She just packed up?

WAYNE: She was going through our folios to be able to point out what effects she would want, a passage in a print that she might be interested in so that we could tell her how to make that. That’s what we used the Tamarind folio for, so that you could see something, a technique, a color. How do you get this? How do you get that? What do you do if you want to move in that direction technically? So that’s what she was doing when he was assassinated. She was sitting and looking through the folio.

STUART: And you were there?

WAYNE: Yes. We were in the building next door. I meant to take you into the building to show it to you, but next time we will do it.

STUART: Yes, I’d like to see that.

WAYNE: It’s too dark now to go.

STUART: So you were in the studio when he was assassinated.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Was the radio on or anything?

WAYNE: Somebody came running in with the news, and we turned on the television set in my office. Some of the time we were in this building, the back building. This wasn’t built yet. He was shot in ’63. This was built in ’69. So you got some stuff anyway.

STUART: I’ll press the stop button here. [End of May 22, 2011 interview]

1.7. Session Seven (June 5, 2011)

STUART: Today is June—

WAYNE: Fifth, isn’t it?

STUART: —fifth.

WAYNE: Sunday.

STUART: This is Carolyn Stuart with June Wayne at Tamarind [Institute] on Tamarind Avenue at her studio and home. You were going to just pick up briefly with the clarification of a point that was discussed in one of our sessions about the cancellation proof for [Matsumi] Kanemitsu’s print. That is Kanemitsu, the Four Stones [for Kanemitsu] film. June’s going to explain what that is.

WAYNE: Well, after Kanemitsu had arrived at the Bon à Tirer in color for the film for the print of Four Stones—no, the name of the print was Homage to Jules Langsner.

STUART: Oh, wow.

WAYNE: Yes. I don’t think that played any part in—I don’t think we’ve mentioned that in the making of the film, the film itself. Anyway, Kanemitsu, looking at the main stones, liked it and thought he would like to alter the stone a bit. He wanted to draw a bird on it, a crow, which was his private secret symbol. I never did find out what the crow meant to him, and I don’t think it matters very much. Anyway, he wanted to change the stone, and this was an opportunity to show how an artist could reopen a stone, draw on it and pull another version of an image.

STUART: Is that something that’s done just rarely?

WAYNE: No. Well, it’s done often enough for it to be useful for the layperson to know about it, and it’s important for people to understand that it is possible for artists to do that. Sometimes an artist’s work will take one separation of an image and like it a lot and alter it to give it its own personality and a second version of the print or a third or fourth. Sometimes I have used separations of my own to make quite new works out of them. So that Kanemitsu wanted to open the stone meant that I could have an opportunity here to explain something that is rarely explained to ordinary people. [telephone interruption]

WAYNE: Now, where were we?

STUART: We were talking about how it’s rarely explained to a layperson that an artist decides to open a stone and what that means.

WAYNE: Yes. Make a variation, make a new version of the print, in this case a black-and-white state whereas the other, the original image, was in four color separations and therefore quite different from the black-and-white state. So this was an opportunity in less than a minute of film time to show a facet of lithography that people always wonder about but never really get any information about. So I thought that was a good thing to do, and I arranged to pay him [Terry Sanders] $5,000 to shoot it. It was a half-day project, so I thought that was rather good money, and it was what he asked. But we never had the benefit of that, because he didn’t shoot a good part of what was needed.

STUART: Meaning Terry Sanders didn’t shoot.

WAYNE: No, that’s right, he didn’t. He didn’t. He shot the excoriation of the stone with a razorblade, but then it was necessary to take a print of that abrasion so that there would always be proof that the stone had been destroyed after the second stage. Our editor, when she was searching the footage for that segment of the information, has Sanders saying, “Well, yeah, I didn’t shoot much of it,” or, “I wasn’t going to take it,” or something of that kind, so there is that bit of sound of Sanders saying that he’s not going to shoot the rest of it. Anyway, that’s on the second [unclear].

STUART: Okay. That’s good. I understand that better. Thank you. Now, could you say that again?

WAYNE: Because I am at the end of my life, I tend to look backwards in large sweeps to look for larger patterns, not mere stories, but for some understanding of what was actually happening during my lifetime, which saw, after all, the Feminist Movement, the liberation movements, racial liberation and lots of other social changes in the United States that were historic and which greatly changed the nature of life in the United States, the Trade Union Movement, which played such a big part in the America that we came to think of as the model for what a happy life would represent: freedom, independence, democracy, each individual pulling his own weight. And that was always placed in masculine language, although I’m sure that women contributed as much avoirdupois as the men did. Anyway, so you tend to look for explications or to see, looking backwards more clearly than you saw at a given moment. That is happening to me a lot, and I’m coming to see what a weight the sexism, the reigning sexism of the twentieth century and now well into the twenty-first century, what a weight that is to my life, at any rate, and I believe to the lives of women generally. Many of the things that bother me today are also bothering young kids whom I wouldn’t know by name or with whom I might not identify at all.I find, for example, the emergence of a new kind of young woman who is a bully, who is violent. I find that very strange, and if it existed before, I wasn’t aware of it. That’s very new to me. I’m also aware that there is a tremendous amount of feminist belief among young women. I think on college campuses, for example, there is a lot of, quote, “feminist,” unquote, activity for equal rights for women. I do not know, because I cannot physically get to see it, what the burning issues are for girls now, but I find very little evidence of a really organized and intellectual posture guiding these activities. I’m very grateful that there’s such yeasty sort of activity and consciousness among girls, but I’m very troubled by the fact that I can’t put a shape on what kinds of demands are really urgent for them. For example, yesterday on the news program there was a long episode of news reporting somewhere in this country of feminists having a “slut parade,” where the girls all dressed up like whores and seemed to enjoy it quite a lot. Those that spoke into the camera and had the word “slut” written on their t-shirts were saying that just because a woman is a slut, that doesn’t mean it’s okay to rape her, which is, in my eyes, a very crude way to present the issue, not politically very smart, and yet you can’t deny the passion, because they were protesting the continuous rape of women and the fact that the way the young women dress is commented on, in their opinion, all the time, at school, in the press, and that women judge each other by the way they look much more than men do, men judging men, but also men judging women by the way they look, and that you have to try to look like somebody else’s version of what you ought to be, which was about as sophisticated as any statement that was made in that news statement. Well, I’m glad to see that, but I don’t find a coherent feminist message coming from all this activity, which means that somewhere, somehow, we don’t have a leadership that’s enunciating issues for women well and effectively as a skill set that implements the feminist agenda.As I watched them, I thought about my own history, how much my life even today is made miserable by the fact that I’m a woman. At the moment, I’m an old woman, and that has its own special permutations as the problems of ageism as well as the problems of being a woman who is old. But there is the—I’m trying to get the right word here. There is the self-realization that I have had a way of handling sexism and going on with my life as though the problems I was having were not originating in sexism. It was too tough, really, to acknowledge the hold of sexism. It was the male point of view, male dominance, was ubiquitous my whole life, and it still is. The practical problems that I have as an arts professional, as an artist, as a citizen, as an American in these troubled times is still mired in the fundamental imbalance of the way people relate to a woman. This is as true of the way other women relate to me as it is true the way men relate to me, especially if there is the kind of business situation where my interests are not identical with theirs. Whether I am talking to the male manager of my local bank or how I am greeted by the maître d’hotel, the maître d’hotel of the restaurant when I come in and bring friends with me, the way I’m received is so different from the way a man is received. The attention paid to me, which is subtly and almost repulsively flattering. It reminds me of the gesture of European men when they are going to kiss your hand, and they seem to dive onto it with great enthusiasm until they get about an inch away from your hand, at which point they are seized with a kind of reflexive revulsion and they do not kiss your hand. They pretend to kiss your hand, but then they draw away from it, and it’s quite fascinating.I always thought it would be fun to be able to film a number of men following that gesture, and to be able to see in one after another the way in which they retreat from kissing your hand, as though there were something wrong with doing it or dirty or just whatever it is. It’s an act of revulsion. It’s not an act of just some sort of archaic courtesy. It isn’t mechanical. It has a lot of affect, bodily affect, when men do that. I see that all the time in Europe. The subtleties of sexism one tried to ignore, but the fact of the matter is that if you are a woman and you have a point to make, the automatic response, even by other women, is that there’s something unbelievable about you. You have to try harder to prove or to be believed when you make an ordinary statement, one that would pass without the slightest difficulty if it were made by men. So I have found, for example, in the Sanders matter, that repeatedly as I have sought people who were influential to help me, that I would give up before I finally would ask for help, because they were making it so damned difficult for me to be believable. They clearly didn’t believe. The automatic feeling was, “Well, there are two sides to every story,” or, “Why would Sanders do that?” Why ask me that?

STUART: Who said these kinds of things to you?

WAYNE: Oh, everybody does that, and every lawyer does that. I have now been offered the assistance of somebody high in the Academy [of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences], who is a close personal friend of my oncologist. No, no, don’t clap. When it came time to make an appointment for me to see the guy, my oncologist said, “Oh, but, first you have to show me. Show me what you were going to show him.” In other words, he didn’t do this. He wanted to be sure I wouldn’t fuck up his relationship with his connection.Recently I have a very good friend who is a professional arbitrator in the film industry, and she offered to do something. She had a friend who was high in the Academy. I spent days gathering significant pieces. I sent it to her. She handed it over to the lawyer, and I got back from him exactly the same advice that I’ve had all these years, how it doesn’t pay to try to do this and how would you—you know, as though the only way out is to allow this son of a bitch to continue to piss on me. I had no credibility and fundamentally no credibility with her, which there is an automatic default of incredibility that attends what women do. You have to somehow overcome that, and there are many situations in life where it is not possible to overcome that handicap. As I look at my life going backwards, whatever I accomplish, with the sole exception of [McNeil] “Mac” Lowry and the Ford Foundation, I have always had to struggle to overcome the fundamental disability of being a female. It just simply gets in the way with guys. They have an automatic default toward each other and against the credibility of women.

STUART: What would you consider like the first professional instance where that kind of sexism just got your attention?

WAYNE: Well, the first professional situation was when I arrived in Mexico and having been invited there by the Mexican government and all the rest of it, and when I arrived there, the two men who represented the Department of Public Education expected to come into the apartment that was provided for me and go to bed with me.

STUART: And you were seventeen?

WAYNE: Eighteen. That was the default, and all the time that I was in Mexico, this was the problem. They have this little nasty thing men do when they take your hand to shake it, and they do this. [laughs]

STUART: Ew! Anywhere, or in Mexico, you’re saying?

WAYNE: Well, I’m talking about that. That I only know about in Mexico. I’ve never had a European do that. The Europeans are a little more willing to—or at least the French. I don’t think the Italians, but the French are. There are some men who not as tough to cope with. But as I look back, every contact with the outside world, with the museum world, has been to some degree gender-handicapped. It’s gender-handicapped if you’re dealing with a female curator, and it’s different than a male curator, but the handicap is there no matter what, if you are a woman. You’re just simply not, quote, “believable.”

STUART: I know you worked with Donald Bear on one exhibition.

WAYNE: Yes. I didn’t have a problem with Donald. No.

STUART: And you didn’t feel that that interfered at all with the way your work was presented?

WAYNE: No, it didn’t. No, it didn’t. I didn’t have that problem also with John Leeper, who was then the head of the Pasadena Museum. But both of them, so it didn’t apply there. I didn’t have the problem. I think now if I had an opportunity to go back with the kind of vision that I have now, I may not have picked up, in their cases, less obvious examples of this anti-female default that I’m talking about. I don’t know. I can’t reconstruct them as sexist, but I certainly can see it very clearly, even in people who were very close to me, like Jules Langsner, who, when we were alone we were equal, but the minute somebody else appeared, he would fall into the male mode. That was very true of Henry Seldis. It was overtly true of Seldis, who was the critic for the L.A. Times [Los Angeles Times].

STUART: Were other people aware that he was that way, other women?

WAYNE: I don’t know, because all this was happening before the Women’s Movement was evident.

STUART: So you hadn’t talked about it.

WAYNE: We didn’t talk about such things. But I was very aware of my special problems, and I remember, for example, during my divorce from George Wayne, coping with the lawyers, the settlement problems. There’s some very interesting correspondence on that score that makes very evident what I was talking about. I really had to be a lot smarter and a lot more combative in order to protect myself than he had to be, because everything was tilted toward him, custom, the law, the attitudes of the lawyers who felt that they had to look out for me, and in looking out for me, they, of course, constructed a world for me that ignored my actual rights. They were building some sort of pattern that I was to inhabit like a dollhouse. In other words, for example—I think I mentioned this once somewhere—when it came to money, everything that George and I built up, I was exceedingly active in, and so it was all community property. But I was so anxious to get out of the marriage that if he had been willing just to support Robin [Claire Park], I would have left everything behind for him. So he offered me $15 a week to support Robin, and so I said, “Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, now I’m going to take half of every penny of community property,” and I did. But, meanwhile, his lawyers constructed a plan to propose to me that if ever I through my own efforts earned less than $25,000 a year, he would make up the difference from his pocket to bring my income—I don’t remember whether it was 30 or $35,000 a year. In other words, each year I would work, the first $25,000 I earned guaranteed him, protected him, not me, and he could never give me more than $10,000 a year out of all this property.So I wrote them what I still think must have been a brilliant letter explaining what was wrong with their proposal, that they were not demanding of him that he reveal anything to me if ever he made less than a certain amount, etc., etc., but I remember that it took me about a week to write that letter, to figure out the deal, to argue it, to put it so that it could be understood. Now, I shouldn’t have had to defend myself that way, you see, but everything that I could think of, including many things that happened at Tamarind, my relationship to my colleagues, the men, how servile I was. If a man did anything for Tamarind, I would write letters of such gratitude out of all proportion to what they had actually done, as though it was some kind of heroic, marvelous thing, that they did some simple thing. In other words, I and all women, we all over-responded in gratitude, in being nice, in being flattering, in being subservient, in tempering our language, and although I was considered very bold, I see how often I was really subservient because these were special people with very sensitive feelings who needed a lot of “Nice, nice, baby. Pat, pat, baby. You’re wonderful,” you’re this, you’re that, no matter how banal they were. That’s what it took to get along with men, and the only exception I ever found, really, to that was Mac Lowry.

STUART: That was something that you felt particularly when you were in the leadership role at Tamarind?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Was that what made you more intensely aware of this?

WAYNE: Well, I’m being more aware of it retroactively. I think a lot of my behavior was the way women had to behave. It was the norm. I always knew that I would have to make my point better, slicker, smarter, more flattering. Whatever I wanted to do, I would have to somehow almost seduce a man into agreeing with me, for even the smallest cooperation. If you just simply go down—you think you’re walking along the street, but you’re not. You are crawling, and the guy is striding.

STUART: One of your issues was whether to print wet or dry.

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Is that one of the instances where you’re—

WAYNE: No. No. Although I don’t think he would have been as resistant if I’d been a man. I don’t think he would have been as arrogant to go ahead in spite of my instructions. If I had been a man, I think he would have pondered, “Should I do that?” No, because I had the power and I exercised it. I don’t think he ever forgave me for it, but I don’t know. I don’t know that. I can’t crawl into his mind. But, no, because that was a factual matter where I had the authority to say, “No, I won’t permit it.” But it was very rare for me to solve a problem that way, whereas men do it all the time. I would have to try to bring them around somehow, and I would have been far better off if I had been more direct, if I had been less willing to compromise or to flatter in order to deal with what I felt was a kind of congenital weakness of men, that they sort of have to be massaged for ten minutes before they loosen up enough to do what they rationally should be doing.

STUART: You say this is all kind of in retrospect, but I would think that at the time you transitioned from heading up Tamarind to doing your own artwork again, but yet dealing with the art community, that when you no longer had that title or position, that maybe having had it made it more present for you. I’m not sure.

WAYNE: I don’t know. I think that dealing with the art world, everything is a matter of power and money, and that artists, because it’s drilled into us, it goes with the job that you have to be unique. If you are unique, and you’re unique because you’re creative, you drag along with you all the stereotypes of being creative, and there are many. The creative person is a little addled in the brain. They’re not practical. In short, they behave very much like members of a sorority, the guild, the guild. I don’t know. I just feel that the art world—you go into a board meeting, and you look. I’d love to be able to film board meetings completely. You’ll see how the women behave themselves. They are much more polite than the guys. They are deferential to the men, subtly flattering to them, or they may be just ever so slightly flirtatious, no matter how old they are. And the men will make remarks like, “Oh, what a beautiful ring you have,” or, “That’s a good color on you.” They have to comment somehow, or they pull out the chair as though you can’t sit down by yourself. But if you look at a board meeting, you will find certain women who are very assertive. They were always too assertive for their own good, as far as the men are concerned. But if they hold the wallet, they get a masculinized attention. They are called a bitch, whereas a man would just be tough because he’s a man and he’s got the money. A man can be very duplicitous as you would expect women to be, as men expect women to be very sly, to tell little lies, to giggle, get off the point, whatever it is. But a guy like Eli Broad can just barefaced break his word and that’s okay. But I see how often I was really pressured by the fact that I was entering the situation in a handicapped position, simply for being a woman. Looking back, I cannot see that there was anything else involved.

STUART: This has been largely on your mind lately?

WAYNE: Yes, it’s on my mind lately because—well, partly because I’m summing up my life. I’d like to learn a little something out of all that I’ve been through, because I still have many of the same problems that I’ve been fighting all my life as, for example, with the Academy about the goddamn film [Four Stones for Kanemitsu], that the film died long ago, that I doubt that the film ever earned $1,000 in rentals, because we didn’t dare manage it. We didn’t put it out there. And what does film rental on a documentary film bring anyway? Nothing. Nothing at all. At least a documentary on how to make a lithograph, for god’s sake, let’s be realistic about it. I would have been content if the film was only for, let’s say, a couple of hundred people, because at the time we made the film that’s all the number of people there were in the United States that cared about litho. And how many artists were doing it? The artists were all brought into it by us, so there were just several hundred of people at a time involved, and this was made so that people could understand what a litho was, because you can explain it verbally from now till doomsday and they’ll never figure it out. You see it. It’s very simple. [telephone interruption]

WAYNE: I look around now in order to sell—if I were a man, first of all, the Academy would never have done this. I point there, because that’s where it’s located here in Hollywood, about six blocks away.

STUART: You’re pointing again. [laughs]

WAYNE: I’m pointing again, yes. They never would have signed on from day one. And that they would try these kinds of slimy maneuvers to get me into Sanders’ reach again and that I should have my name linked to his, or my name erased in favor of his, they think it’s perfectly all right. In one of the letters, the guy says, “We’ve been doing this ever since 1977, all over the place, so what’s so different about it now?” You know, “I’ve been raping you all these years. Why are you protesting all of a sudden?” Why should I have to put up with that? Why do they assume that it’s all right to do that?

STUART: You communicated in writing to them that—

WAYNE: Well, as little as possible, yes, I did communicate to them.

STUART: Who the real filmmaker was.

WAYNE: Yes. And in person. They’re not interested in facts. The default is operating. After all, we went through three trials, each of which lasted at least a week, and every possible—Sanders knows how to appeal and appeal. He can appeal a comma. And that’s how you do. You just wear your opposition out, and a lot of this he does himself because he knows how. He’s been to law school.

STUART: But he’s not a lawyer?

WAYNE: Not that I know of. But it’s the masculine, the automatic assumption, even by my friend Claire Rothman, that somehow if it’s a guy it’s more authentic. It’s harder for me to prove myself.

STUART: Who is Claire Rothman?

WAYNE: Claire Rothman is my friend who is the mediator by profession and who went to a lawyer friend of hers who’s big in the Academy, and I got this long negative letter about how I should not try to pursue it. That correspondence has to be put in some kind of order. I don’t know where it is. I don’t think it’s ever been indexed. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff that needs to be indexed.Anyway, as I look back, the burden of disbelief that somehow you are not quite credible, you can turn yourself into a monkey, into an alligator, into Jesus Christ, and it won’t matter. You’re just getting over that ingrained perception. It must be very much like being black. I mean, it’s a fundamental bias. And I think that somehow I endured it, went on and found a way, and I smiled smarmingly whenever I had to. But when I look back, I have such contempt for myself. I don’t know what I could have done differently or how. I know that every time I took a stand, I was seen as excessive. I was a handicap. In court, if I answered definitely, I wasn’t likable, and in court there’s only one rule, and that is to be likable. People believe you if they like you. That’s it. And it’s hard to like a woman because she’s suspect. Is she putting on? Is she dissembling? Is she lying? Is she seductive? What are her motives? Is she stupid? All of these things have to be somehow overcome, swept aside, and they do have quite a lot of information on how to pose yourself when you go into court if you’re going to be a witness, what to wear, the exact length of your skirt, the color of your stockings, what kind of jewelry you may or may not wear, what your hair should look like. It’s a science. I don’t know. Maybe it exists for men as well. But there are people who coach you, tell you how to dress. Of course, I discovered that much too late when the trials were over.

STUART: Do you remember how you dressed for the trials?

WAYNE: Yes. The first two I dressed the way I ordinarily did, which was in short pants and dark hose and slippers.

STUART: Like mid calf?

WAYNE: Yes, what we would call Capri, or else just below the knee, a short pant.

STUART: What would you wear on top, or jewelry?

WAYNE: A shirt. No jewelry, no jewelry. But I did wear ykat fabrics, Japanese ykat fabrics, or it might be black. One doesn’t wear black in a courtroom. You wear something like “greige.” [laughter]

STUART: Is that the color you wore in the third trial?

WAYNE: No, no. I don’t remember. I really don’t remember. I do remember the very first one, but my lawyer had failed to tell me that I mustn’t come in boots and short pants, and he didn’t give me any advice whatever. So I was a bit on the belligerent side, and I looked arty. They painted me as a jet-set millionaire, that all this money from Ford was for me personally, so they kept talking about the 2 million dollars and describing me as this jet-set, know all the famous people that I knew and making that kind of a picture of me, you know. But I can truly say that in my personal life, in my married life, in my life as a mother, etc., being a woman was a terrible handicap. So much more is expected of a mother than of a father, and that’s still the case. It just ain’t so, and it shouldn’t be so. I don’t know how the hell you can get out and be neutral, the way things are, and they’re getting much worse now politically, because these women who are running for office, if you look at Michelle Bachmann, she looks Jewish. I don’t know if she is or not. But she’s dressed like an upper-middle-class Saks Fifth Avenue fifth-floor matron, long bob hair, impeccable makeup. In a way, she looks like a version of Nancy Pelosi, very respectable. I’ve tried to understand why they could make such a monster of Pelosi when she is the epitome of good quiet upper-middle-class taste. Her clothes are beautifully tailored. There’s nothing sexy about her. She’s quite matronly.

STUART: But what do you make of Michelle Bachmann? Because all I know so far is that you understand how she dresses, which is exactly what you were saying how people, unfortunately, evaluate women.

WAYNE: Well, Michelle Bachmann, I think, is a religious nut, and when they have money, they go to Saks Fifth Avenue and fifth floor. [laughs] But they certainly do not look European in any way. That’s the case if you look at Sarah Palin or the crazy from Arizona [Jan Brewer]. What was her name, that awful creature from Arizona? None of them look like they could possibly be anything but middle-class Americans.

STUART: Do you feel that your looks were held against you? I mean, I know you had that one incident with the Woman Artist of the Year Award from the reporter came and didn’t like what you were wearing.

WAYNE: Yes. She says, “You don’t look like an artist. Haven’t you got a peasant dress? Haven’t you got a dirndl?” Yes. [laughs] I dressed very—during the Tamarind years, pictures of me show me in a blouse and skirt. In the first few years I still wore a little heel, and then I got to flat shoes, no heel at all. And I wore black hose from Europe, from Paris. I began wearing the opaque hose or panty look, that panty stocking look, opaque hose.

STUART: Was that conservative?

WAYNE: Well, it was a Parisian look. It was a Parisian look, and it was very simple. Rarely any jewelry. Occasional rings, but not fancy jewelry of any kind. In recent years, I’ve worn that loupe, and that’s become a kind of a symbol of me, you know.

STUART: The black studded—

WAYNE: Yes. It’s, after all, a working tool.

STUART: It’s a magnifier?

WAYNE: Yes. But it’s still very difficult for women.

STUART: Would you say right now one of the biggest places where you’re feeling that, too, is over your dilemma of having eleven enormous tapestries and trying to figure out what to do with them?

WAYNE: Yes. I think that fiber and tapestry are seen as women’s work. I think the whole medium of modern tapestry is sexualized. I think that unless a museum has a collection of medieval religious tapestries, that fiber is seen as a craft, and I think that’s an added handicap that I didn’t realize that I had. It isn’t that way in Europe where most of the tapestry artists are men. They’re both. And most of the weavers are men, or at least equal number of weavers are men.

STUART: In that article that you gave me in the little booklet, you actually referred to the dangerous aspect of both printmaking and tapestry, and I hadn’t really thought about tapestry that way yet.

WAYNE: Yes. It is very seductive. It’s decorative, or people see it that way because of the handcraft, the needlework, the idea of needlework.

STUART: Those are enormous looms. They’re many times larger than the people who are operating them.

WAYNE: Yes, indeed they are. Indeed they are. And I provided for the show some of my photographs in the weavery.

STUART: Oh, you did?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: And they were included?

WAYNE: Yes, there were. There were maybe seven or eight photographs in the weavery. I don’t think that made much of a dent on anybody. But, yes, I think that’s probably a problem. I think a more serious mistake that I made had to do with the sheer scale of my work, because I really saw tapestry as being a kind of monumental art, not a weaving when it’s small and could be a runner on a table. That really would make it decorative. For it to be expressive enough, of course, all the medieval tapestries are very big. They tell big stories, grand epical stories, whole crucifixions or enunciations or the reign of kings and the huntsmen with lions and horses and all those beautiful little dogs that look like—what are these tiny little California—

STUART: The spaniels?

WAYNE: Spaniels, but smaller than that.

STUART: Teacup dogs that are popular today.

WAYNE: Yes. So I think that I limited my market to a commercial market and then didn’t follow through because my clients should have been corporations, not individuals, and I never sorted that out in my own mind. Of course, there were no real dealers for—there was no market for what I was doing. I just went and did it, and if I hadn’t been a friend of Madeleine Jarry, I doubt that I would have ever been lured into it. These are the accidents of life.

STUART: Do you consider your tapestries your most successful works of art?

WAYNE: No. I think they’re successful as tapestries. I think some of the lithographs I made are quite stunning and without competition in that sense, not only the themes, but the techniques that I developed. I don’t see my paintings as important. I think the ideas I worked on were very important, but I don’t think I stopped long enough to reproduce, to make enough of them. I didn’t persist. I never worked on the same problem twice, so everything was always kind of unique. Certainly no one could complain about the technique of anything that I did, but I didn’t really consolidate my point of view. If I had been able to contain and repeat the ideas until, like Ed Ruscha, I was making the same picture over and over again, I think it takes that, and I didn’t see art that way. Why would you want to do the same thing twice? You’d already solved that problem. Go on, move to the next level with it. That was a strategic error in my career. That’s why it’s possible, looking in there, to think that six different artists did those works, they’re so different from each other, most of them.

STUART: Well, it takes an understanding of you as an artist to recognize that they are by the same artist.

WAYNE: Yes, but that means a kind of allocation of attention to make that artists rarely get from anybody, and I certainly don’t think that I have had people who were devoted to the ideas that I—nobody said, “What an interesting idea.” That’s yet to happen. [laughs] So I have to console myself that it was an interesting idea, that it was not only ahead of its time but useful, that there is a lexicon of images and references here that I thought, in time, people would come to recognize. Just hasn’t happened, that’s all. So there you are. If you look at that thing and you see the image in the upper left-hand corner, you can’t help but sooner or later thinking of a playing card, and I even refer to clubs in the clublike foot. The bottom one with the triple mushroom head was just shot through my work. The mushroom is everywhere. But it also looks like it’s a time glass, that figure, the sand.

STUART: The hourglass.

WAYNE: So it’s a reference to time. The story can be melted out of this frozen image, the idea that it doesn’t pay, that a race, the winner always has become the loser by the time you—and vice versa as they each change characteristics. I thought that was interesting, and it also related to canons and fugues and music. Well, I found all this very interesting. Nobody else has. [laughs] So that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Maybe somebody has. Maybe a few writers have written about it, but it hasn’t set the world on fire, certainly didn’t cause a school of June Wayne to appear with other people picking up the idea.

STUART: Are there other artists who you think were largely shaped by you at Tamarind, though?

WAYNE: Not by the content. Not by the content. Technically, yes, but not by the content. As a matter of fact, I went to some lengths to avoid that. I had no interest in shaping their aesthetic. I just had an interest in their finding in litho, finding in litho new things that their aesthetic could bring to it.

STUART: Were your works hanging up on view?

WAYNE: No, no, never.

STUART: So had most of the people who came to Tamarind—

WAYNE: Didn’t know it.

STUART: Didn’t know your art?

WAYNE: No. That was a rule that they couldn’t show my work.

STUART: That was your own rule for yourself?

WAYNE: No, it was my rule for Tamarind, that they could not show my work because it would have been pushing myself. It would be taking advantage of my position. Tamarind would then have become a backdrop for me, and I believe that corruption begins at the top and seeps down. [laughs] So I didn’t allow that.

STUART: Well, that would certainly help explain your lack of prominence or what appears to be is going to be your lack of prominence in the upcoming exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts on Tamarind specifically.

WAYNE: Yes, although I’ve had so many solo shows that that should have been enough to establish me. But the fact that I was the head of Tamarind also made a lot of people angry, everybody who didn’t get a grant, for instance.

STUART: Who decided who was going to get awarded the grants?

WAYNE: Well, we had a panel of selection, and what we would ask is for them to nominate somebody that they thought would make a contribution to lithography. Had to be a mature artist and with an interesting project. Then there would be a natural attrition. Everybody who was nominated was contacted, but to take two months out of your life to come here, so there would be scheduling problems or somebody would not be interested or would be very interested but couldn’t make it this year, so make it next year. Then there was an interior problem, which is that every printer in training had to have access to the spectrum of aesthetics. So if we had just had an op artist, we would not invite an op artist again until we had new printers who would need an op, you see. So it was like a Rubik’s Cube.

STUART: That was the training component of it?

WAYNE: Yes, that was the training component, yes. So that we had to be sure that everybody that went through would be equipped to handle artists across the spectrum of aesthetics.

STUART: Were these rules and bylaws? Were these spoken rules, formal rules?

WAYNE: Well, they were practical rules. We would look at what the guys had who were in training and say, “Gee, he hasn’t had an Abstract Expressionist.”

STUART: When you say, “we,” you mean who? You and—

WAYNE: Huh?

STUART: When you say “we would look at.”

WAYNE: I would look at it, and we had an administrator and then we had the master printer. We were a small organization, after all.

STUART: So you were largely—

WAYNE: Yes, I was largely responsible for selection. But I found right from the beginning that our panel of selection didn’t pay the slightest attention to what our specs were. They were just paid off and they had friends. They would send a friend. That’s how people get grants.

STUART: Who were the panel of selections?

WAYNE: I don’t remember now, but there were about—

STUART: Were they nominated by the board or chosen?

WAYNE: The panel of selection was—early on we developed that panel, and they were all big-name people whom we hoped would recruit big-name artists for us.

STUART: Did they stay largely the same over the years?

WAYNE: Yes. James Johnson Sweeney was one, and Henry “Harry” Callahan was another, and Gustav von Groschwitz was one, [unclear] Tamarind would show.

STUART: So every artist who submitted a proposal?

WAYNE: No, no, they couldn’t submit.

STUART: Oh, you had to [unclear].

WAYNE: They were nominated. We could only take twelve a year. That was the steady heartbeat of it, and each artist stayed two months, so they overlapped on the first of the month. A new artist would arrive, and the artist who was already there was settled in and then working well, you see. Then we could give serious attention to the new artist coming in. They would each have special needs. So that’s how it worked, and we tried to get the best artists we could in each aesthetic, but litho offers different things to different people, and that was the controlling factor in selection, that it be an artist whose style had not yet been mastered by the group or they needed more.

STUART: By the printers?

WAYNE: Yes, by the printers. And I never explained that publicly. That was an interior thing. That was something Lowry understood very well.

STUART: So it probably wasn’t written anywhere.

WAYNE: No, I doubt that it was written, but we all understood that. Clinton [Adams], I would ask Clinton and Garo [Antresian] about artists, and I would research an artist if it was an artist whose work I didn’t know, and very often it was. Most of the artists I had never met before, so I’d go to the airport to pick up the new hawk and wonder what the hell I was getting into. [laughs]

STUART: You did the picking up of the—

WAYNE: Sometimes. Sometimes. I did in the beginning more than I did later. But it was a very complicated handmade kind of thing, where what each grantee was getting out of it was very much our concern, that the artist should get as much work done as they could do and at a level of quality that technically we insisted on. We did not interfere with an aesthetic. The artists had total control over that.

STUART: But some of them had issues with some of your quality, or no?

WAYNE: No, there was only one.

STUART: Bruce Conner.

WAYNE: Bruce Conner, yes. And he was doing it more to be a pain in the—

STUART: In the fingerprint?

WAYNE: Yes. Well, he was a contrarian, and there were a lot of artists who were beginning to act out in the sixties. For example, Billy Al Bengston would come with a truck and three motorcycles on it, and say, “I wonder what motorcycle I should ride home today,” like it was a purse, you know. “What purse shall I wear?” There was that kind of behavior developing and particularly among the British artists who were very acting-out kind of guys with their “birds.” The girls they called birds, and they were all like Twiggy, the size of Twiggy, you know, silent. When one of them spoke one day, I almost fell over in surprise. It never occurred to me they could speak. [laughter]

STUART: Did those artists give you respect as head of Tamarind? Were there issues like of sexism there?

WAYNE: Well, they were not in a position to bother me. They worked with their printer, with the curators. I injected myself as little as possible in any of those situations, otherwise I would have been flooded with complaints, because everybody’s got a hard-on for something, you know. They want more of this, more of that or whatever. We had trouble with—what the hell is his name? Who complained a lot about Tamarind, the British artist, older, who had a place at the New School for Social Research in New York. It’ll occur to me. A very good printmaker, by the way, and painter. He resented—he felt Bill, William, Bill, he felt—and his wife stated often in public that Ford should have given the money to him, because he had been quite influential.

STUART: To start up an organization or—

WAYNE: I don’t know what. I don’t know what. They were just furious that it came to me instead of them. There was an army of people who had that point of view, and he complained. William Stanley Hayter.

STUART: What was the last name?

WAYNE: Hayter. William Stanley Hayter. He was happy as a clam when he was here, went away and did nothing but talk lies and blasphemy against Tamarind.

STUART: Do you think that changed the way people thought of Tamarind, or it’s hard to say?

WAYNE: I don’t know. I don’t know. Some did, some didn’t. You never know what people think. They’re always very servile when they’re with you, and then they talk about you afterward. You don’t know who to take seriously. I just got on with my business. But he complained. He said, “We spend all our time raising money.” Of course, that was the one thing we didn’t have to spend any time doing. We were totally funded.

STUART: Yes, although you had to put a proposal together every year.

WAYNE: Oh, yes, I did.

STUART: And those are beautiful. They’re almost works of art in themselves.

WAYNE: Yes, I think so.

STUART: They’re hand-done.

WAYNE: Yes, but I did that. That was not anything that anybody else had anything to do, and that was by way of report and prediction, and I had to account for the money every year. That’s the law. How did you spend it? Then to predict what we would be spending when in the following year, and then the money would just come in the mail on time. That’s all. Just as simple as that. * * * [This portion of the transcript has been sealed.] * * * I worked all night. I lived on three hours of sleep for years, which is perfectly feasible to do, by the way.

STUART: [laughs] And have a long life on top of it.

WAYNE: I guess so. I guess so. I once spoke with an astronaut who had been part of that safety system that we had for many years, I think we still have it, where there are always planes in the air to protect the country against incoming whatever. Once on a trip to Paris, the man who sat next to me was one of these pilots, and we got into a conversation. He told me how they managed to do with so little sleep. The secret was in their diet. They ate no carbohydrates at all.

STUART: That’s very fashionable today.

WAYNE: Yes. So that was very interesting.

STUART: But that’s not how you ran your clock?

WAYNE: Well, I never was much of an eater. I ate more than I do now, but I was never much of an eater.

STUART: What were your daytime activities like if you weren’t working in your studio?

WAYNE: Well, when she was younger, I was taking care of her. I would take her, again, by taking her to school, and I would come and collect her at three o’clock. And I took care of my grandmother, who was about two miles away, and saw to the shopping and the house and always had a maid. We had enough money so that there was always a maid. Then I was engaged in various moneymaking projects for George. I designed and built and sold the stock to the Edgemont Hospital, which was the first new mental hospital in L.A., private mental hospital. Then we bought and I supervised the modernization of and furnishing of the Bayshore Sanitarium in Manhattan Beach, and then there was a third sanitarium, Westmoreland Sanitarium on Westmoreland and Olympic, an old mansion that I restored, and which George was the medical supervisor of these projects.

STUART: You did the physical plant issues?

WAYNE: Yes. Yes, I took care of that. My grandmother for some time was in Westmoreland Sanitarium toward the end before I sent her to Chicago. So I had work things to do and painting.

STUART: Did you have a titled position in the company?

WAYNE: No. There was no company. There was no company. Westmoreland, we owned that lease. We didn’t own the property; owned the lease. Edgemont Hospital was a limited partnership, and I was a general partner along with George.

STUART: Anyone else?

WAYNE: And there were twenty-eight partners who bought into it. I saw to the books for years and years and years, and I saw to the sale of the building when we were ready to sell it. So I was active in those business responsibilities. Then I painted whenever I could, mostly during the night, but also during the day if I could, and I did a lot of work in art matters before Tamarind. I did quite a lot of things that had to do with the arts.

STUART: Like the community of artists?

WAYNE: Yes, and then by the seventies I was very active in the feminist artists group.

STUART: Who was involved in that?

WAYNE: Joyce Kozloff; Judy Chicago; Miriam Schapiro; and Ethel [last name unknown]; Deborah Finkel; and Channa. For that matter, Channa Horowitz was in. A big group, and I did what I could.

STUART: What kinds of things were you doing?

WAYNE: Well, there would be issues that we would work on to try to get—you have to realize that there had been no women in exhibitions at any of the museums for years and years and years, so we would plot on how to get publicity and how to get the message out and how to reach people and point these things out and lobby them.Very often I would not agree with some of their strategies which I thought were dumb, so I would do what I could with the connections that I had. I created that “Joan of Art” seminar, which was very helpful to help women with professional problems, to behave like professionals, you know, and that had a big affect on mindset, how you conduct yourself. You have to understand about taxes. How do you get a dealer? How do you get a curator to look at your work? What’s the right strategy? Do you send slides or do you make a date and bring in your work? And we role-played a lot for these situations as well, so that I could be helpful from a practical point of view. But I was not interested in the continual complaint about men behaving badly. I thought the best way that I could help was to teach them whatever I had learned about that women artists needed to know up to that time, and that was effective. I did a lot of public speaking on printmaking, on the art of the print. I lobbied a lot for that, wrote articles, tried to influence people and educate laypeople, because we had to bring the art market. At the time I opened Tamarind, the average price of a print was around $10. We had to bring it to $1,000 before there would be enough in it for people to get a minimum wage out of it. So I was busy with business considerations. How do you convince dealers who have been selling a product for $15 that they really have to get 1,000 for it?

STUART: How do you convince them? And how did you?

WAYNE: It took time. It took time, and the events. We published the Tamarind fact sheets. We would send out broadsides of information, hard information about—

STUART: Costs included?

WAYNE: Yes. And we published studies of various kinds that I commissioned, to get people used to the idea that a print was not just a piece of paper. These were all very hardworking projects, and I had my people working on this kind of stuff, our mailing lists and—

STUART: Who else participated in this?

WAYNE: Well, I had a staff of people. I had three or four office people. I had curators in training, and curators often are people who are being trained to handle—how do you write the history of a print while it’s being created? It’s a very interesting subject. What kind of language do you use? It was an essential for the market for there to be documentation on the history of each work.

STUART: Were these things that you had discussed with Mac on occasions, as far as, “This is where I think things need to go for lithography”?

WAYNE: Each year.

STUART: Each year?

WAYNE: Each year. Each year, and there would be in the annual reports, the main letters would discuss things that had to have that kind of direction.

STUART: Were you the main generator of ideas for the direction?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: That’s a pretty large and important role.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, as you go along, you see, you see what you need to do, something that you didn’t think of last week, and sometimes suggestions would come in out of the group, out of the Tamarind people, so they might be at a different level. They might not be as conceptual, but some little idea. Like, for example, the fact that our printers were having back injuries, that combined with seeing that film, The Judo Saga, caused me to get into the question of the use of the body in lithography. The other film that we made had to do with that.Wherever the art was sort of scraping at society where something wasn’t going well, you’d take a look at it and you’d see something you could do that would ease the passage of the art, what was needed. We did a study of an art gallery. We found that there weren’t enough dealers for prints. So how do you encourage people to go into the print-selling business? We provided data, business data, how to build an inventory of prints.

STUART: Are there more dealers in prints now?

WAYNE: Oh, yes. So because the Tamarind program was so dynamic, what it didn’t need in year one it might need in year three, because the field had advanced to be sophisticated enough to need something that where I would intervene, just invent a way out of it or to help the situation. That’s what any business does. It has marketing problems. It has staff problems. It has communication problems. It’s really not all that different. I mean, your subject is different. You have to understand the art world. I mean, it won’t do to understand the pottery world. It has to be the art world, the print world, not the automobile business. But then there are things they do for automobiles that you also have to do for prints. So it’s a kind of business dynamism. They are the kinds of things also that you learn in any school of business management. Tamarind really crystallized my skills at looking at a social phenomenon to see what is it made of, what parts do you want to keep, what parts are relevant to your thoughts, maybe, that maybe you don’t want to have anything to do with how you market jelly, you know. It’s living in an ecology.

STUART: So this ecology that existed, was this the ecology of—we’re talking about the Tamarind years now, right?

WAYNE: Yes.

STUART: Basically where there was—

WAYNE: From 1960.

STUART: —mostly artists were getting together only once a month at the Monday night openings on La Cienega, is that the same period?

WAYNE: Yes, in L.A. That was true in L.A. But the artists in New York, the abstract Expressionists were moving in, and the Surrealists were there, and the Ashcan School was just moving out. The styles and the dealers were developing, and the art world was a lot smaller than it is now. It was very personality oriented. In many ways it was infantile, and it still is quite infantile in many ways.

STUART: In Los Angeles specifically?

WAYNE: No.

STUART: Just in general?

WAYNE: I rarely speak about L.A. per se. It’s always the larger context, because L.A. does not a scene make. I mean, the rules of the game are different here than they are elsewhere.

STUART: That was true and is still true?

WAYNE: Yes. Yes, I think so, although I certainly think that like in everything else, there are a few power centers that are worldwide, and they are in control, in charge. [telephone interruption]

STUART: June 5th, second part of our interview with June Wayne and Carolyn Stuart. We left off talking about the art world in L.A. and centers of power, and we got interrupted by a phone call.

WAYNE: Well, I think of the art world as a large Petri dish with various small accretions of bacteria, colonies of bacteria named Houston, New York, Paris, whatever, L.A. It’s the same organism, and it thrives on the same kinds of nutrients: money, chutzpah, boredom, illusion, transient affections, afflictions, and affectations. [laughter] It’s a pretentious and silly scene. For the people who work in it, as in most sectors of society today, the people at the bottom work the hardest. The people at the top take the biggest risks. Their risks are endemic to the situation, and by risks I mean that they risk losing their jobs, losing the favor of someone whose goodwill they need. It’s a pretty silly scene. It revolves around the idea that art is important, that it modifies society, that it makes for a better world, that it’s worth a lot of money, which is the most dignifying thing about the art myth, and I think that, by and large, the art scene is both superficial and unnecessary. I no longer think that it modifies our savagery. I think we’ve long since passed the point where we can expect to modify society into something that is good and constructive and worth hoping for. I think we’re in a very bad way, that the next few years are going to see some horrendous social changes for the worst, that in many ways will not be unlike the Hitler years. Therefore I do consider that most of the time that I’ve spent, most of the energy I’ve spent in my life has been a form of self-deception. I really believed that art made a difference. I no longer think so at all. I don’t know. I might change my mind next week, but I don’t think so. I think we’ve been running around delusionally and kept going by whatever money flow has been able to feed us.I don’t know where the long-term protection for learning will take place. I think libraries are at risk. I think reading and writing are at risk, and in many ways that the most hopeful things about the society into which I was born have already gone down the tubes. I would like to feel more optimistic, but I’m just not. I don’t know whether I was wrong all these years or I’m wrong now, but it certainly seems to me that I was an idiotic optimist to have spent so much energy in causes that prove to be really irrelevant now. We have lost the idea of education for all. We have developed an underclass that is intended to remain an underclass, and that’s a great blow to me. So it’s hard for me to say anything that is going to inspire you or anybody else to say, “Well, gee whiz, we’ve got to protect this work of art,” or that kind of music or that kind of a creature, whatever it is. The earth itself seems at the moment to be having a tantrum. There’s obviously serious changes in the ecology of the earth. I have no magic vision. I could say, well, things turned out for the best, and that would be as stupid for me to say now as it has always been stupid for the people who say it. Things often don’t turn out for the best. I’m not very hopeful about the art world. I think that it’s grinding down and that its role in the civility of nations has greatly diminished. I don’t think that’s going to correct itself. I think people like us are obsolete. I hope I’m wrong.

STUART: I do, too. [laughter]

WAYNE: I just don’t see where the strength is coming from, where the affirmation is coming from.

STUART: Are there things that you think could be done to change that within the art world?

WAYNE: Not in the art world alone.

STUART: No?

WAYNE: No. I think it would have to be a much more fundamental change. I think the whole world would have to give up nuclear energy. The whole world would have to stop reproducing and limit the size of its population. I don’t think that that’s likely. I don’t see any sign that we know how to control our appetites. But on the other hand, I’m not exactly out in the big world, and so I can’t be optimistic. I have no basis for optimism. My world is too limited now, in the sense that I’m here and alone and expecting to kick the bucket any of these weeks or months. Certainly I’m not living very constructively and I do feel isolated, and I don’t think that’s going to change. I don’t see how it could change. So it’s better not to take on too many airs of importance, and that way you won’t be as disappointed that what you were doing ends up not counting, not counting toward a better, richer future.

STUART: What if you’re wrong?

WAYNE: Well, that would be a pleasure to be wrong. I dearly hope I’m wrong, but I have no reason to believe I’m wrong. So that’s the handicap. You have to march in here with a whole gang of feminists who know who they are and who have already accomplished something, and a whole gang of people who want to put art into their lives and really know what they’re talking about, and you’d have to walk in here with a Board of Education that had decided that education was important for everybody, a lot of these things, and you’d have to find a politician who was not something that you really ought to crush like a centipede on your bedroom floor. It’s been a very hard time, a very hard era to live through, exactly because we had so many hopes. We really thought that—

STUART: Your generation?

WAYNE: Yes. You know, we could really get ecstatic over a phrase that was beautifully put together. [laughs] Isn’t that ridiculous?

STUART: Sounds good to me.

WAYNE: Yes, sounds good, but it’s not an environment where that’s going to work.

STUART: I think that’s certainly part of what’s playing into the feeling right now sometimes that you just want to destroy a lot of your works of art that are here in the living room, for instance.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, I don’t see any way to assure their future. One way or another, they’ll get destroyed, the way things are, whether they’re in a collection or out of it. I’ve had works at the National Gallery of Art that have never been seen since the day they arrived there, must be thirty years in the dark. So is that destroyed? I think it’s destroyed. That they would have a show of Tamarind women artists and not include me, is there something odd about that? I’m invisible.

STUART: That’s very strange.

WAYNE: Yes. Well, it’s the way of the world. You not only have to accomplish something, but then you have to have an army to consolidate and protect what you accomplished. So one way or the other, it’s war, isn’t it? It’s war or extinction. I don’t know, it might be very comfortable in the dark. But I don’t want to have to worry about—I would rather destroy a painting than to know that it’s going to molder away and be destroyed and deteriorate and all the rest of it. This is destroyed all the same. What difference does my—how can I battle for my tapestries against the Art Institute of Chicago? Even if all those people are heroes, even if they’re nice people, who there is going to take a stand to protect my work? They’ve all given up on it. They gave up on it. They were collaborative with what’s happened.

STUART: This was before the Art Institute knew or at least publicly admitted that they were having financial difficulties?

WAYNE: I don’t know when exactly, but when they arrived, about the time they arrived there, is when I learned that they were having difficulties. I never would have allowed them to go. I didn’t care about a show. What difference does a show make? Somebody walks by, looks at something for three seconds, and that’s the end of it? You’ve got to admit that artists are crazy. You would do as well to ride on the Elevated in Brooklyn and peek into the houses of people whose bedrooms are adjoining the El, the elevated tracks. That’s about as much—

STUART: A few artists did that. [laughs]

WAYNE: Yes, they did, but you’ve got to admit that that’s not what any of us had in mind and certainly doesn’t fit the airs we take, the airs we assume about the meaning of art and its importance, all of that kind of delusional behavior.

STUART: But when you’re not thinking about that entire context, I’ve seen that you’re able to get excited about an individual work of art, still.

WAYNE: Yes. Oh, yes, absolutely, but I’m a leftover. That doesn’t mean that that will happen in this new era. I know that I’m delusional, exactly because I can get excited about seeing a wonderful drawing or something of that kind. That’s very life-enhancing for me, but that’s not the normal condition. I’m peculiar. I’m the exception. And maybe you’re another exception, in which case you have my sympathy. [laughter] Yes. Of course you’ll have the fun of that moment of pleasure, but you can’t build a way of life on it, I don’t think.So I’m sorry to be so sort of down, but otherwise I’d be lying.

STUART: Well, your honestly is certainly appreciated.

WAYNE: Or maybe not. Maybe not. They’ll say, “Gee, she was a sour one,” which I am.

STUART: I’m going to stop the recording. Today’s recording will be in three sections that are all part of the June 5, 2011 recording. [End of June 5, 2011 interview]

A TEI Project

Interview of June Wayne

Contents

1. Transcript

1.1. Session One (January 25, 2011)

1.2. Session Two (February 1, 2011)

1.3. Session Three (April 29, 2011)

1.4. Session Four (May 8, 2011)

1.5. Session Five (May 15, 2011)

1.6. Session Six (May 22, 2011)

1.7. Session Seven (June 5, 2011)