Constructive Engagement
I’d like to do any number of things, but it’s never been what I was doing, in terms of categories of experience, it’s always what do you do with it, whether it’s a book jacket or a movie house. For me the thing has always been to work with people you like, so that the experience was pleasurable, and figure out a way to do something that isn’t fundamentally what everybody has already done--to see if there’s anything you can move forward about the subject.
The worse thing is to get a practitioner who says, just do anything you want. I want to have a boundary--otherwise, there’s chaos. You first have to understand the brief [a description of the objective] of any job. Very often you have to redefine it. I was asked to do a project for a big beer manufacturer, who wanted to figure out an event to improve morale. I said, “how do your workers get paid compared to other beer companies?” They said, “they make a little less.” I said, “Having an event is a waste of money, particularly if you could have given [your workers] a 3 percent [pay] increase.” Sometimes you have to say no, that’s not what you should be doing.
Citizen/Designer
It’s important for people in communications to be concerned about being a good citizen. You take a role, stand up for what you believe and use whatever skill you have. The difficulty is access to the world. How do you do something that [makes] people see and pay attention? And that’s complicated. I’ve done it any way I could--by doing posters and billboards. There’s one at [SVA] now about Iraqi refugees. After 9/11 I had a thing made [that said], I love NY More Than Ever. It was all around the city, because the kids from school posted it. You have to figure out the entry point. That becomes the real design problem.
Woodstock Regulars
I guess it was in 1962. [My wife and I] came back from Europe in ‘58 or ’59 and we had friends in Woodstock. We used to sleep in their corncrib. After a couple of years, we thought maybe we should buy a place. We stumbled on this house and bought it and have been adding onto it ever since. It’s a wonderful house. We love the cranky, peculiar quality of Woodstock. We love the idea of the art colony and we have a couple of friends [here], so before you know it we were regulars.
For a long time we used to go up Thursday nights or Friday mornings, but less so recently. Some years ago [my wife] Shirley and I said, at one point we have to make up our minds where we live. Either we’re going to live in the city, or we’re going to live in Woodstock. I’ve become a danger on the road, so it became clear that it would be New York. But I still go up [to Woodstock] on weekends. It’s just glorious
A Devotee of Classicism and Piero della Francesca
I saw my first Piero when I was 18 at the Frick and I almost passed out, it was so astonishing. Every time I went to Italy I went on a pilgrimage to see every painting of Piero’s. [His work] has absolutely stuck in my mind because of his formal qualities and the exactness of the relationship of forms. He is the most modern of figurative artists, because of this reduction of form and the geometric relationships. He’s a classicist. Everything is resolved, everything is stable, everything is spaced where he wants it to be. He is just astonishing for an artist of his time and anticipated everything that was going to happen. I would say generally I have more affection for classicists than the romantic thing.
Childhood Miracles
I grew up in the Bronx. My father was a tailor and I remember seeing him cutting a pattern. The idea of him picking up those pieces and putting them together to make a dress, something that provided warmth and display, [was] miraculous. The most glorious thing one can imagine is seeing something you thought of become real.
The brilliant experience of my childhood was being in bed [for a year with rheumatic fever] and having my mother bring me this board, which was about this long [stretches out his hands]. It had a big knothole in the middle and several lumps of clay. Every day I would start by making horses or houses or trees or something and create a little universe. And at the end I would pat it down and look forward to the fact that I could start all over the next day.