Chivas Clem

It was really well-received, and people really liked it. To be honest with you, I was quite nervous, because there’s some provocative images in the show – like there’s one image with a guy with a Swastika tattoo. This was a while back and King Kong Magazine did a big spread on me, and they ran this photograph in the magazine, and it caused a huge scandal. People were asking me to state that I was against racism. Which is absurd to me that I would need to say, I'm against swastikas! (laughs) There was a large photo in this show of that guy, and I was worried it wouldn't go [down] well. It didn't seem to create as much of a problem as I thought it would. I have a couple of people that have sat for me, that have swastikas and they get these tattoos in prison. It's not that they're sympathetic to fascism. It represents danger and it represents menace. It's a way for them to indicate how tough they are, and they can't be abused or something like that.

People don't really understand, but, in that milieu, tattoos are like shadow narratives about their whole lives. They all have enormous meanings to them. It's the history of their time in prison, they've had family members that have passed and it's all the things that they're interested in.

Well, what happened with this work was I had hired a couple of these guys to help me in the studio, to help me do things like stretch canvas, or move things and they were terrible at helping. So, I said why don't you just come over and, you can lay around in the studio and smoke and take a bath – you can just use the studio and I'll take pictures of you and they were like, oh yeah, that's great – we’re being paid to do nothing! When I moved back to Texas, I had created an archive of found images off the Internet. I was interested in what Hillary Clinton years ago called deplorables. What does a deplorable look like? And what does white male range look like? So, when these guys started sitting for me, there was a huge discrepancy between the way that they presented themselves, which was, they looked dangerous or menacing or hypermasculine. There was a big discrepancy between that and what they were like on the inside, which was, vulnerable, fragile, gentle. So, the work really was about tapping in into that. In terms of my creative process, it's not like I work with them once and then move on. I usually work with them over a long period of time, and they would start by coming to the house and kind of laying around – it happens very organically. I don't really write a script or think of something for them to do. One day, one of them came over. It was summer, and somebody was selling watermelon on the side of the road. So we went, bought a watermelon and he cut up the watermelon on the front porch, and that's how the watermelon photographs came about. They all have this charisma or magnetism, which gives them a sort of actorly quality.

I had seen him before in the neighbourhood, I knew him. He broke into my house while I was out of town, and I found him in the bathtub. If I recall correctly, I think he said, “Are you going to call the police?” And I said, no, but will you let me take your picture? And he said, yeah. It was a kind of quid pro quo. I've met all of them in very kind of strange ways. One of them was hitchhiking, some of them also lived in the neighbourhood, and I would see them walking around in the neighbourhood.

Yes, when I was a child, it was not a queer friendly place at all. I did feel really tormented by these men who dominated the place that I grew up in. I think when things happen to you, you never really get over them as a child. When I moved back and I saw those men again, I wanted to reconcile that in some way. I wanted to find out where that fear came from. Also, the work has a lot of eroticism to it, I think that a lot of that fear turned into eroticism. Part of that was this fear or desire that came from that. Texas is a very big place with lots of different kinds of people in it. The area that I live in is North-East Texas and it's very close to Oklahoma, Arkansas – Louisiana is not too far away. So, it really feels more like the Deep South than it does Texas. West Texas has more of a rugged individualism with the myth of the cowboy and the settler. It's a different sensibility than the Deep South.

I came back for a couple of reasons. Mostly I was tired of being in New York and I was exhausted from the hustle and bustle. I needed to get out. I also had a pretty bad drug addiction, and I needed to get sober. So, I came back to get sober, with the idea that I would move back to New York and then I ended up staying because I didn't really have to work in Texas. I could just get a studio and make work. If I had moved back to New York City, I would have had to cough [up] more money to live in the city. So, I just thought I'll just stay here, get a studio for nothing and make work.

Yes and no. Some of my models use drugs and some of them are addicts. I think everybody's on their own journey. I didn't want to hide their addictions because it was part of their identity. A lot of them are second or third generation addicts. It's not new to them. They grew up pretty rough – not all of them.

There’s some mystery to that. Being an artist, I think they saw me as somewhat of an outsider. They view somebody like a doctor, lawyer or businessman as people that might look down upon them. They didn't really think of an artist as somebody that would look down upon them. I think it gave me an in, in a way. But they also didn't quite understand what an artist meant – none of them have ever been to a gallery or a museum. After spending all that time with them and establishing these bonds with them, I had a real brotherly kinship with them. They saw me as one of their own in a certain way, even though, I came from a different world than them. They're much more open-minded than you would think they would be.

They all knew I was taking these photographs as part of an art project. I think they all were very uninhibited about it. Something that nobody ever talks about [in] this work is there's something about the relationship between a photographer and the model where the model is being seen. When I work with them, I work in consort with them. It's not like I'm just taking pictures of them. They work with me. There's a performative quality. I've interviewed plenty of models that didn't work out because I didn't feel a kinship with them, and I could feel them being inhibited. The models that I've photographed over the years were people that have an actorly quality to them – and they like feeling seen on camera, they like being photographed. I always tell people that in different circumstances, lots of my models would have gone on to be actors – they're really naturals on camera. This one model that I photographed all the time – he's shy and soft-spoken but if there's a camera in front of him, he's like Robert De Niro or like Brad Pitt – just like so charming. So, he becomes somebody else in front of the camera, which I think is so, so interesting. It's also a job really, so they get paid for the work. With regards to the nudity, nobody seemed to be that bent out of shape about it.

The models’ agency is conferred upon them by being seen. In being seen, there is power and dignity. There's been a lot of talk about, oh, are you concerned that you're exploiting them, but I don't think that. I feel like all of them have a huge amount of agency, but it’s because they want to be seen. They're not coming to the photographs as people that have had a voice before per se. The models come to the project with a certain amount of naïveté, and I also think that the naïveté in their agency – but there's something really poignant and beautiful about that. People are so hyper vigilant around the way that we portray things, and we lose some of the nuance of things happening in a kind of organic way.

Well, that's a very complex and layered question. For my models, I feel like masculinity is a camouflage that is able to hide them from conflict or violence, or whatever is threatening them. Sometimes interviewers say to me, oh, well, they're like wearing drag – but it's not drag because drag as a mode is disruptive and masculinity is a camouflage. It’s not disruptive and certainly America has seen in the past thirty years, a real crisis around masculinity, especially in the past eight years or ten years with Trump and the rise of fascism. I think that's one of the reasons that people are intrigued by the work because in some ways, these guys are an old-fashioned masculinity. But it's a more complex view of it. Larry Clark is the master of capturing adolescent male rage – but this work is different from Larry's in some ways. I'd have to think about what is masculine right now – I think it was something that was forced to evolve right with the advent of feminism.

Well, when I was about twelve years old, I was very, very effeminate. I would even go so far as to say, I was gender non-conforming, and I had a fear of men and boys and in state school in America, boys and men are separated for physical education and you would go into a locker room and change to do physical education. I couldn't go into the locker room without having a breakdown and hyperventilating. I had a psychiatrist, and my mother had the school write a note from the psychiatrist saying that I could not take boys’ physical education. So, the school put me in girls’ physical education. So, from sixth to eighth grade, I was essentially seen as a girl – it said girl on my transcript if I recall correctly. I don't really know what changed, but I didn't really grow out of it. Me being gender non-conforming morphed slightly – I'm still slightly effeminate now, but when I was young, I was gender non-conforming in a very real way. It starts in childhood, the way that we present ourselves. I think that also has contributed to my interest in these men.

If we were in the early 20th century, all my models would be cowboys. They would have grown up on farms, worked with cattle and horses or farming. Because of, various things – mostly the bankruptcy of the agriculture industry where I live, they didn't grow up with that. In the cowboy mythos, there's some toxic masculinity, but there's also a rugged individualism. I think some of my models feel tied to that in a way. I can guarantee you all of their grandfathers were all probably real cowboys – they all probably got up in the morning, ate a huge breakfast, had a big hat, got on a horse and worked. But because that's all gone now, it's left this generation adrift. So, there is the connection to the erosion of the myth of the cowboy, for sure. There's a little bit of irony and cheekiness to all of the work, because, a cowboy, wouldn't be appear nude but like the cowboy as imagined by you know, a gay cheesecake photographer from the 1950s – there's a little bit of a reference to that archetype. Ever since the YMCA and the Village People, the cowboy has been appropriated by gay culture.

When I started making this work, I was taking the pictures as studies for something else. I didn't really think that I would use the photographs. I was really a filmmaker, and I made a lot of short films early on in my career and I was thinking that I would use the models for film. I had a pretty substantial archive of these images, and I showed them to my friend, Peter McGough – Peter's a terrific artist. Peter was like, “Oh God – have you ever thought of showing these?” And I was like, Well, they're really studies for something that's coming. And he's like, “You’re crazy – why don’t you show these? They're great.” So, that's what I did. Then a couple of other friends of mine were like, these are fantastic, you should just show these. So that's how I sort of stumbled upon the project in a way. I had been making different kinds of work more about conceptualism and rephotographing things. When I came back to Paris, I had made a whole body of work using spray tan. I had made these paintings of the Jersey Shore cast members using spray tan.

Oh yeah, I'm so glad you said that (laughs). The only one other person – a very smart art world person that I know was like, oh, that looks like Araki and I was like, yeah. I wasn't thinking at the time about Araki or looking at him. Although I consider myself a huge Araki fan, I love how sexually provocative, his work is. Other people have compared it to Richard Kern, who I’m a huge fan of. I think he's a terrific artist and also somebody that's pretty courageous in terms of showing sexually provocative work. For the past thirty years I've been looking at Larry Clark, Danny Lyons, and Diane Arbus, Bob Mizer, Mapplethorpe – lots of people. So, I feel like when I shoot my work, I never think about one person in particular, but in the back of my head, I feel all those things unconsciously comes to me. Less so Mapplethorpe, because that work is so staged – it's all set up in his studio. That's not really what I do. Sometimes we shoot outside, like I'll take my models to like a lake. And we'll have a picnic and lay around next to the lake and I'll take pictures of them for like a couple of hours. It happens more organically than that. I never stage anything, really, mostly because I'm too lazy to (laughs). I never use artificial light. I only use existing light. So, I use outdoor light – I love the light in cheap motels – fluorescent light and the way that it looks on the body.
I'm obviously very influenced by all those people and I was very close with Jack Pierson for a period of time and Jack is a huge influence on me. I mean, it's written all over the work. But I don't ever think, oh, Arbus made this photograph and I'm gonna reference it. It doesn't really work like that. An art collector was talking to me last night about Richard Kern, and he said – there's no nudity in the Kerns that I own. The only image is her face, but somehow, they feel way dirtier and more sexualised than any of the Araki’s – like the women tied up or anything. There's this weird cloud of mystery around Richard Kern's work and I thought that was so interesting. He's able to achieve this really intense eroticism, without ever using a naked body part. I cut a few images from the show, and one of them was this man's belly, and he had a ringworm on his belly. It's like red, but it's a perfect circle. And he had hair on his belly. And in my opinion, it was one of the most erotic images in the show, even those it's just a picture of the ringworm.

Yeah, absolutely. One of them is always like – I just don't want my grandmother to see it and I was like, I can't guarantee that your grandmother won't accidentally stepping to a museum in Dallas but like the likelihood of that happening is so slim. Also, I always say – I would never use a photograph of you that I wouldn't pose for myself. One of them was going to come to the opening with me, but he got arrested (laughs). I was berating him a couple of days earlier because he got arrested, he couldn't come to opening with me. Four of them are in jail right now, well prison. A couple of them will get out before January so they'll get to see it. But then a couple of the others won't get out until summer of next year, so they won't get to see it. They all knew about the show and some of them expressed interest in it. Again, they don't really understand the concept of looking at art. There’re other kinds of art that they appreciate like tattoos, and drawing, I have one of my models who's an incredible draughtsman. He learned drawing in prison and they appreciate that, but he doesn't understand the concept of buying that and framing it and hanging it on a wall. One of them moved to Pennsylvania – he's actually a horse trainer – he breaks horses. I photographed him for a long time off and on and he had a really bad drug problem. He’s one of the ones who really pulled himself together and got out. He sent me a picture of his new car the other day and I nearly cried because it's incredible. He was living in a trailer and shooting crystal meth and then he just completely turned it all around.

Criminality is an aberration from societal norms, but I think it was Jean Genet that said, the criminal is able to organise a disorganised society for us. Part of them is being an outsider, and I think I relate to that as an artist. A lot of the early work about O. J. Simpson or the Menendez brothers, I was interested in the way that those narratives reflected society as kind of psychotic. Especially America's psychotic relationships or psychotic consciousness in regard to race and sexuality. Years ago, I took a photograph of Andrew Cunanan’s bedside table, which was all filled with art history books. I was always interested in the way that crime intersected with art. The O. J. Simpson piece was O. J. Simpson's Warhol – it was signed by Andy and O.J., and he sold it to raise money for his trial.

People have danced around that question in other interviews. I honestly don't think that they're really that self-aware. I don't think it occurs to them that they're living in some way that's undesirable. They feel like they're on their own journey, they've been given this life, they're doing the best that they can and they're just living their life. I don't think they think that they represent vagrancy. Lots of my models are in and out of prison, and when they get sentenced to prison, I'm always devastated and I'm in tears. But they're not. They're like, well, I have to go to state jail for eight months, and I'm like, oh God, I can't believe you've got into trouble and they're like, it's okay, I'll be back in eight months. It's no big deal. Sometimes going to jail, can mean getting sober for a little while and they get their health back and gain some weight. It's part of their life. We have more middle-class values, and that's the way that we perceive it maybe. People around them are doing the same things, so they don't really have anything to see outside of. My model – the horse trainer, he came from a kind of more middle-class family, and I think he understood he was living in a trailer in West Texas, and I think he was like, oh, I don't want to do this, this is bad. Like, I need to get out of here.

Yes, they are. There’re several photographs that I've made with guns. I inherited a gun from my grandfather – a shotgun, which is used for hunting, which is a very common where I live – they hunt deer and boar, and what have you. I personally have never shot a gun and I'm actually pretty afraid of them, but I had it in my house because it was this great kind of object and it was also, you know, my grandfather's, so they would pretend to shoot the gun. And then I had a toy gun from Walmart, like, a child's gun, which was also used, but that was like a pistol, but I'm not a gun person – to me, I couldn’t shoot something.

Men don't wield the same kind of power that they used to, and I think that has something to do with the rage. America's values are changing, and men don't get away with the kinds of things that they used to. The reason that my models get into trouble is because they've grown up with abuse and poverty. Some of them have terrible health problems. I think that makes people commit crimes. Somebody that I know was talking recently about criminals and the crime problem and I was like, the reason these people are committing crimes is because they don't have enough to eat and the food that they're eating isn't healthy. And they live in such a precarious situation – of course, they're committing crimes. Certainly, in the South there's this desire to go back to a time when men had more power. That's what Trump is about, right? It's a nostalgia for a time when women knew their place and only interacted with men as sexual objects or were our wives, back when Black people didn't have the same rights.

Okay, I can answer this very firmly. They have no concept of that. They don't read newspapers, they don't pay attention to that kind of thing. They're not a part of a political class, they don't vote – most of them can't vote because they're felons. In America, you commit a felony, you can't vote. So, most of them can't vote. They don't think that it concerns them. They would never think, oh, I wanna support Trump. I mean, they would probably idolise Trump because Trump would try to sell them the idea of the past, which is something that they would probably be sympathetic to. None of them even know about [these] things. Maybe somebody that their mother's friend [knows], who goes to church, posted something on Facebook about Haitian immigrants eating animals. Maybe they would talk about that but like not really. It's a different kind of milieu – they just have not had access to things. Several of them have learning disorders, so they dropped out of school – it doesn’t mean they’re not smart. I have one guy that sat for me for years. He's very, very, very bright. He just can't focus on anything because he has such severe ADD but they don't participate in our politics.

They can’t conceive of the idea of owning property – it would never even occur to them to buy a home or to pay taxes. They really can't even imagine what it would mean to be even vaguely middle class. Another interesting point is, they can conceive of being Puff Daddy, or Drake or Kim Kardashian. They know about a rich fancy person in a limousine or in a private plane or something like that, but they would never know how that person got that way. For instance, I travelled somewhere, and he was like, will you bring me a Louis Vuitton cap when you come back? Like, but they understand things like that – things that exist on the Internet, or what have you.

Well, the state is using them as a political point, at least in Texas. The bogeyman is the welfare state. This is like one of the things that the right is obsessed with – all of these lazy, bad people that are living on welfare and sucking all the money off good, hard-working Americans. That's all horseshit. That's one of the things that they function as, the bogeyman. It's not that any of them are lazy. They live in this systemic poverty and there's no way out of it. A huge part of that is our education, and I can guarantee you that when they were kids, they were not treated well in school and one of the reasons that they dropped out is because they were treated so badly. Middle class, good, nice, well-behaved, polished well-dressed kids are treated better than these kids are. The right profits off these people because they're privatising prisons. So, they want people that are destitute and poor because when they end up in prison, they can make money off them.

If you look at Hollywood or television, I don't think that there's an actual portrayal of these people. There's a lot of mystery and hiding of these people. They're not really portrayed unless they're the bogeyman. I had spoken with a museum director – she wanted to screen some films that were about this, she wanted me to speak about the movie Deliverance. It's about three men from the city, and they go rafting out in the Deep South in the woods and they get attacked by these country people. It's about the civilised versus the uncivilised, the myth of the hillbilly. I think people use narratives around them. And I know that horrible guy that's running as vice president [to Trump] wrote Hillbilly Elegy about how he fought his way out as poverty in Appalachia – the narrative of that is that, because of various systemic governmental and socioeconomic things that it created this kind of poverty class and addiction. I didn't read Hillbilly Elegy and I didn't really see the movie. I don't think that America thinks about them, yet it's a huge part of America's underclass. Republicans are constantly complaining about the rise of the homeless. One of the reasons that the rise in the homeless happened was because Ronald Reagan shut down all the mental health hospitals, during the 1980s and put all those people on the street.

In any portrait of any of my models, there's an incredible tenderness in their eyes. I cast all of my models – I photographed lots of people, but not everybody made the cut to be photographed over and over again, and the people that I cast, I cast them because there was a real gentle quality to them and that was something that that appealed to me. I have photographed a couple of people who were actually sociopaths. I had this model who is really a dangerous person. But even the photographs of him, I feel there's a gentleness in his eyes as well. I didn't have to cultivate it or fake it - it was already there. I just got them to open up to me and show it to me. It’s like that old adage – when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them, right?

I've always been interested in the psychosexual component of pop culture and certainly in all my early work, there was some reference to that. The most interesting artists of the late 20th century are people that have dealt with these kinds of uncomfortable conversations about sexuality. In terms of this body of work, I think there is a little bit of winking – a homoeroticism. They're all heterosexual which is very interesting, but they were all happy to engage, and portray themselves as an object of desire, which says a lot about the fluidity of sexuality. The videos online were a different body of work. I had just moved home, and I wanted to do a body of work where I would explore genre. So, something would be like Adult Comedy, Action, a Drama. I didn't explicitly make one of each but there's one that's a Drama. There is one, that's a Thriller, there's one that's kind of Adult and then Got Milk – at the time people were being tortured off-site. There was a lot of talk about the ethics of torture and that was called Love Letter to Dick Cheney – it was kind of winking. I was fascinated by the imagery around that – it was all incredibly homoerotic. There was so much sexual coercion amongst people that were being tortured and the forced positions and the nudity. So, the work was about dealing with a kind of extreme violence, but taking it to a more campy, theatricalised version, which is why I use milk, because milk represents lots of things - it represents the maternal, but also ejaculate. I actually had him waterboard me with the milk. At the time I was making this kind of pop conceptualism, and I actually loved that disco car wash piece. And I've never shown it publicly. One of the reasons I made that was because, cars are very important to living here. Everybody has a car, and people really value their cars. And I loved the idea of using the car wash, as a disco.

Yeah! It's like if you go to a fraternity, and they haze you. I was always very intrigued by hazing rituals, which is what they did in the off-site torture sites.

That's an old piece of mine from 1995. I'm always intrigued by performers that use their body in some kind of way, and Chris’s comedy was so much about his scale and the size of his body. He made a comedy, where there's this long episode of him falling down a hill. He gets up, he shakes himself off and then he falls again and it's just kind of extreme self-flagellating violence. That photograph of him was taken by a paparazzi outside of a party. It was taken right before he passed away. The piece is called The Marriage of Comedy and tragedy, and there was something always really dark and sad about Chris. I've used that image several times. He used a lot of coke, there was a kind of fearlessness about him. Years ago, I made some work about Anna Nicole Smith – also somebody who was used and spit out by the entertainment industry, but had a very, very gentle soul. It was so interesting to me – people felt so comfortable being cruel to her. Like, Howard Stern had her on and he wanted to weigh her in front of the audience, and she said, no “Howard, I'm not gonna do that, I know that I'm heavy”, and he said, “well, I think you're wearing clothes you don't really understand how the clothes fit you.” It's just incredible the way I think this happened with Chris as well. The way that the spectacle of cruelty becomes entertainment. I think there's some element of that to my work.

I had some really firm ideas in my head when I was young about what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be, and what I wanted my work to look like and I feel like now, I don't have that. I never really intended to be a photographer. And that's a great feeling. I feel like a lot of artists set out to do things and they really put themselves in a box. Being an artist is not about just having one skill. The work is really about the ideas behind it. I consider myself a conceptual artist, because I dip my toe into various kinds of formal and stylistic strategies. But I'm always intrigued when somebody that's a painter, makes photographs or somebody that's a filmmaker makes photos or paintings. Sometimes it's a failure. Larry Clark is the best artist turned filmmaker that we have. He took to filmmaking in such an incredibly organic way. It’s like the photos are studies for the films. I like the idea that I can do whatever I want. At some point, I'd like to make a movie – I don't know if that would be like a narrative film – like a Hollywood film. Probably not. It would be something like a non-narrative film.

Weirdly I've never shot anything commercial and this magazine in France has asked me to shoot a fashion story. I think sometimes photographers can make really good work shooting in a commercial way. This was 20 years ago, Nan Goldin shot all these ads for Kenzo – they were really good. Sometimes if you give an artist parameters, it can be good for them. I've never shot something where I've styled it – so that'll be interesting to try that.

[If] I was going to shoot fashion ads, I would want to make something that was really provocative.