Author: Sacha Cosentino

ALBERT WATSON

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

When Albert Watson shot that iconic photograph of Steve Jobs, the one that appeared on the cover of the maverick innovator’s biography and stayed on his company’s website for a month after his 2011 death, he needed a strategy. He couldn’t ask a personality like that, notoriously headstrong and skeptical, to just stand there.

As the session began, Jobs commented, with some annoyance, on the photographer’s archaic use of film. Why not use digital?

“I don’t feel digital’s quite there yet,” Watson replied.

“’We’ll get there,’” he remembers Jobs saying, a promise that proved true. Already the two men were butting heads over their areas of expertise, and what Watson said next played right into this dynamic.

“You have something in mind but everyone in the room is against you,” Watson said, asking Jobs to imagine himself into that situation and adopt the appropriate pose. Jobs stared intently forward and put his knuckles to his chin, a more aggressive, confident spin on the familiar “I’m thinking” gesture. Watson shot a test Polaroid and then the photograph that has circulated so widely since. Jobs asked to keep the Polaroid. “He said it was the best photo ever taken of him,” Watson recalls.

Fans of the photo, like photographer Levi Sim, who made a series of images inspired by it, have pointed out that the subject’s face and features compel you so completely that you don’t think about who the photographer is, what kind of lights he used or what kind of camera.

This has been among Watson’s strengths almost since the beginning: being stylistically distinct without taking attention away from his subjects.

Born and raised near in Southern Scotland, Watson studied graphic design for three years in Dundee before going to film school in London, even he decided in his teens that, at least in some capacity, he wanted to take pictures for the rest of his life. In 1970, he moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Elizabeth, who found a teaching job that could help keep them afloat for a while, and began looking for photography work. He received his first serious assignment in 1973, when Harper’s Bazaar called, looking for someone to photograph Alfred Hitchcock for their Christmas issue. Understandably nervous, Watson devoured Hitchcock’s films in preparation.

The director had shared some goose cooking tips with the magazine, and the editors imagined an image of him standing in an apron with a platter in one hand. This struck the young photographer as needlessly tame. What if this director known for psychological thrillers held the skinned goose by the neck? Wouldn’t that be truer to the Hitchcock ethos?

“Well, you’re sort of strangling it,” Watson told Hitchcock once their session had begun, “and you’re feeling a little bit guilty that you killed this goose, but [y]ou killed it, so what are you going to do?” The goose has a bow around its neck in the finished photo, and Hitchcock’s expression is perfect — slightly regretful but not quite apologetic.

By 1974, Watson had opened one studio in Los Angeles and smaller one in New York. By 1976, he was living fulltime in New York, where ad and fashion work was more plentiful — he had started taking Vogue assignments — and where the industrious, fast-paced feeling better suited his sensibility (“You have to be careful in L.A.,” he says. “It can feel like you’re living in a retirement community.”). Certainly, the success of the Hitchcock photograph and his subsequent work for Harper’s Bazaar helped, but he is not quite sure why his career took off with the speed that it did. “It could be that I was just passionate,” he offers.

In the 1980s, he photographed Any Warhol wearing binoculars and Grace Jones looking indomitable. In the 1990s, he compiled a book of images of Morocco, photographed Uma Thurman in all yellow for the Kill Billposters and shot his portrait of nude Kate Moss squatting under sunlight. In 2003, he published a book on Las Vegas, a project that had taken root two years earlier, not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He had been in Vegas at 6’clock one evening, and saw a backlit billboard against the sunset. All it said was “GOD” with the red and white stripes of the American flag undulating behind that capitalized block letters. The sky behind it was orange-red and deep blue, seemingly as patriotic as the billboard. Watson always has his camera, and so photographed the scene. “It annoys me if you’re a photographer and you only do fashion or portraits,” he says. “I’m a photographer.” This is true in any situation.

Last winter, he returned to his native Scotland, to do a series of landscape photographs on the Isle of Skye that he plans to exhibit at Milan’s Museum of Modern Art in 2015. BBC filmmakers visited him there, shadowing him and his assistants as they worked. At one point, Watson explained to the camera that he wanted to bring his own style to this exquisite landscape, but it can be difficult to pinpoint what exactly his style is at first.

“Sometimes, photographers are recognized by what they photograph,” he says. Given his range of subjects, this wouldn’t work with him. “But there’s a very easy way to look at all of my work.” He cites the years he spent as a graphic design student before going to film school. “My work is graphics or film-atic or a combination of the two. When you look at everything you can almost drop them into these categories.” The Isle of Skye photographs are cinematic, with their majestically rolling hills and romantically cloudy skies.

His early photograph of Hitchcock had been graphic, a bold figure posed against a clear background. He remembers that, forty years ago, after he finished photographing the director, a secretary brought in two cups of tea on beautiful China. The men talked shop. “’Storyboards are where it’s at,’” Hitchcock told Watson. “’When I’ve done a storyboard, the movie’s finished. All I have to deal with is something spontaneous that might happen. When I have a plan, I follow the plan.’” The then young photographer remembered the advice, but had already begun following it, creating his own storyline for Hitchcock and the goose just like he would years later for Steve Jobs or for the pale skinned models he photographed nude in a pool in 2011, using film over digital to achieve the eerie translucency he wanted. “Now, being a photographer for so long, you tend to do these things naturally,” he says. There’s no need to overthink when he knows what he’s doing.

 

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THEASTER GATES BY FRANKLIN SIRMANS

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

“I feel I’m in a moment where people are really curious about what the next move is,” Theaster Gates offers, as I’m thinking, yes, tell me what’s next, what’s coming up? We are still early in 2015. I’m feeling as though I can still shape it. “Is he going to make a great work of art? Is he going to become a commercial artist? Is he going to retreat? Is he going to fail because actually we knew it was just a gimmick anyway?” he ruminates. I think it apropos that his first big museum exhibition was called To Speculate Darkly. “It feels good to live with a set of aspirations that are beyond the bet,” he turns the thought. “If nothing else, I could play albums to the babies so that they know who Thelonious Monk is. I am equally invested in playing songs to the babies as I am in my artistic practice,” he says laughingly but seemingly dead serious. Big questions aside, Gates emphasizes that the search is always to create perfect moments, poetic moments. “I want to imagine myself in the context of a moment and the context of a place with my ideas and see what that is all about.”

We caught up with each other as Gates was fresh off his second TED Talk and a couple months past his Artes Mundi 6 prize win, preparing next for his second solo show at the White Cube gallery in London at the end of April—Freedom of Assembly—and his participation in the Venice and Istanbul biennial exhibitions, in May and September respectively.

The TED Talk is a perfect platform for Gates—a hands-free microphone and a rapt audience of people who think as big as he does. “I was able to finally tell a kind of comprehensive story about Dorchester but also about the kind of impact that artists can make in the world—kind of beyond the practice, but in a way, we can only make the kind of impact we make because of the way we’re trained and the way we think.” Dorchester is Gates’ most well known gesture, performance and artwork, Dorchester Projects, which opened in 2009. It started with one abandoned two-story building converted into a library, slide archive and food kitchen. It is now a cluster of formerly abandoned buildings that have been renovated and rehabilitated to support and encourage redevelopment on Chicago’s South Side via the sharing of culture and ideas. Far from the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art, there were few cultural centers in the lower-income neighborhood.

“If we were to talk about the arc of a decade, the way that I started my TED Talk was by saying, ‘I’m a potter, and one of the things I learned pretty early in clay was that potters had the ability to make something out of nothing.’ And that the limitations of our sculpting were based on our hands and our imagination. So from the beginning I felt that the burden of transformation was always on me, and that it could only be as beautiful as I could imagine it and as I could build it. So if you were to carry that kind of vocational understanding through the next decade, then it was like—it went from shaping my house to shaping a block, to shaping city policy, to imagining that there was a model inside of this that meant that artists could shape the world.” And while some bad fools sling incredulous mud at Gates as if he were a prophet of trickle-down economics, the proof is in the proverbial pudding. Sure, the work travels the world to all the usual places, yet the beating heart stems from the streets of Dorchester on Chicago’s South Side. In addition to the international collectors on the art circuit, the city’s civic leaders are engaged.

“He had a vision on the South Side. And since we, as a city and as a country, have tried almost every other form of redevelopment, I said, ‘Why don’t we try the one that’s most obvious—the arts?’ Theaster has a commitment to his art and to the community that’s unique,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a 2014 New Yorker article on Gates.

Like several of Chicago’s political leaders, Gates comes from a foundational experience with the church in early childhood. In addition to two degrees in urban planning, the artist holds a degree in religious studies. Liberation theology is understandably deeply embedded in his work. Gates’ art was included in Josef Helfenstein’s Experiments with Truth: Gandhi and Images of Nonviolence last year at the Menil Collection in Houston. The piece presented at Artes Mundi in Wales earlier this year—where Gates shared his (40,000 GBP) winnings with the other nominated artists—was titled A Complicated Relationship Between Heaven and Earth, or, When We Believe. That work sought to challenge Western ideas around Christianity, but Gates is level about specifics, and much more of a spiritualist. For the sake of the comparison, the art historical foundation for Gates in my mind is a cross between Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg and Doris Salcedo. “Art is not power for me. Do I believe in the power of art? Yes, but I understand that the power of art and the power to create is part of a larger power … All of this stuff is given to me through a rich spiritual muscle that I flex alongside artistic belief.” Whether he’s walking the walk or stumbling beautifully, Gates aspires to a spiritual character that is always genuine. He is quick to call BS on himself when something flies out of his mouth that he realizes after the fact is disingenuous or just plain wrong.

The music of the church is the music he feels. Early on when we met, Theaster and I were on a panel together with the curator Naomi Beckwith, who is also from Chicago. I was surprised by the fact that when it came time for Theaster to speak, he bellowed into a deep moody song that had definite reference in Negro spirituals. Naomi laughed as though she had seen this before, and eventually we both nodded to the gospel. Another significant part of his practice to date involves musical collaboration with the Black Monks of Mississippi, the experimental ensemble assembled by Gates in 2008. The Monks, with their obvious nod to “Eastern ideals of melodic restraint,” combine that with the “the spirit of gospel in the Black Church and soul of the Blues.”

“I can’t even call what I do singing,” says Gates. “It never had that burden. I think what I did was that I learned to talk. I learned to communicate beyond my body, and that was a training that happened every Sunday. Every Saturday at choir rehearsal, there were these notes and you had to memorize words, but past that you were learning to communicate emotion. So … it was the church, but the church is just a word—it was more like school. I’ve always said that I’m always just looking for the best language to communicate ideas, and in some cases, a material object is not the best way. Practice!”

 

“The Black Monastic” |  Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi perform during residency at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art | Porto, Portugal (2014) | Photo by Sara Pooley | Courtesy of the artist

 

Work from Gates’ Tar Painting series (2014) | Installation view, Prospect 3, New Orleans

 

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STERLING RUBY

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

Much seems to have been made of the studio painter in the course of the past three years: Walker Art Center mounted a show (of largely abstract pictures) called Painter Painter; MoMA recently did its first painting survey in more than 50 years, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World; and LACMA even tried to enter into the conversation with Variations: Conversations in and Around Abstract Painting. (Full disclosure: I co-curated that last one and Sterling Ruby was in it.) But if I think of Sterling and of his work, I would never imagine him as being part of that discourse. It is hard to find a more intellectually ambitious artist than Ruby.

Well, no matter how much we all know and love that studio painter—the consummate artist of doing one thing really well over and over again with slight variation—we will always need the magician who can do it all! Art is the last place where alchemy and magic are actually expected. So Ruby makes use of all kinds of materials in a sincere quest to make magic objects that are hard or soft: Clay, Formica, nail polish, urethane and denim are some of his ingredients, to name just a few. He also works in video, sculpture and ceramics in addition to painting, in addition to collaborating with his friend Raf Simons on a fashionable clothing line.

Ruby forces us to ponder big questions. To paraphrase Peter Schjeldahl from long ago, 1982 to be exact, Is it possible to “be radical indefinitely in any effective way?” Perhaps more to the point, is it possible to be radical and be a painter? And further, can one make abstract paintings that are the work of a radically inclined artist? Sterling Ruby does. He makes abstract paintings that recall Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, but there’s something amiss. Their tones and colors vary but they are all raining with drips of paint unlike that saturated into the surface. There’s the mark and the drip of spray that gives his paintings their tai-chi touch, recalling wall paintings and the preferred medium of the graffiti artist and writer. While they are usually all-over paintings with equal weight across the entire canvas, sometimes he uses black to outline space, creating either organic shapes or controlled blocks of color. Some recent ones are pinkish and pure candy-col- ored happiness. Others are brooding and dark. Some are clearly landscapes, filled with endless horizons. Sometimes I think Ruby makes the paintings bigger, as if to dare collectors to admit that they can’t afford to house such large works of art. Sometimes the really big ones conjure the feel of a wall and further recall the tradition of painting on walls under duress, when the drips are part of the process, intended or not. He calls those SP paintings. The Spray Paintings, of which there are approximately 300, are only one little piece of Ruby’s practice. It’s the most visible part of what he does, but it’s only a piece. If the paintings were all he did he’d probably be seen as an astute practitioner and one worthy of much success, but he wouldn’t be so special.

The surface demarcation of graffiti is something that Ruby has explored in great depth in another body of work, which consists of minimalist sculptures that have been colored like the paintings in some instances but also as simple cubes that are then tagged on by cutting into their Formica surfaces. Without going into detail on the works that involve Supermax prisons, which has been a major thematic in Ruby’s work over an extended period of time, one gets the sense that Ruby’s psychosocial space is not one of innocent wonder. His worldview is large.

Though born in 1972 in Germany to a Dutch mom and an American father, Ruby grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a rural area known for having a large Amish population. Sources online describe it as “a picturesque landscape. Rolling hills with lush landscapes and crops, farms with windmills dotting the horizon and horse and buggies sharing the road remind you that things are simpler here.” Things might be simple on the surface, but for the young Ruby, who saw the juxtapositions of the past and the present and the rural and the urban, it was a surreal place to grow up that provides a glimpse into the development of his art. Ruby absorbed his surroundings, in the country and in the cities, sensitive to the different sides of the tracks. “For me, it was about how as a kid I started to identify with visuals and aesthetics. The only culture I could get my hands on was surrounding me. It was where I grew up. I remember the landscapes of some Amish farms. They seemed drab, usually gray or beige, but then you see these super vivid quilts, kind of out of whack but also not. That’s the stuff that really drew me in, and I started identifying with the power of the visual in this context.” It also let him know early on that art had many contexts and was not only something for the museum. “ ‘Art’ is so narrow at times. It gets down to a very narrow group. I have a hard time with that.”

Not to say something so glibly, but the diversity of Ruby’s interests, matched by his materials, is perhaps unparalleled. His interest in art developed holistically out of the wonder of nature. Hunting and farming were familiar concepts. He attended an agrarian school before enrolling at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design in Lancaster a year after graduation from high school, a year in which he worked construction. “They had an art history department but it was pretty steeped in Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. And I think that I realized about three quarters of the way through that in this day, that’s not really where or how good art happens.” In between adolescence and during school he also spent a lot of time in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., soaking up vastly different experiences as a curious youth open to that which was foreign. “In Pennsylvania, I often felt as though I were in a hostile, fascist community. It was so blind.”

When he moved to L.A. in 2003 in order to attend the MFA program at Art Center in Pasadena, he had recently earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. But probably more important in terms of learning, he had worked at Video Data Bank in Chicago. Founded by the SAIC, VDB has been archiving video by and about contemporary artists since 1976. “That was my real segue into theory,” he says. Sitting alone in a room with the archive of archives in terms of contemporary video, Ruby would learn more than a few things on how to make good art. Imagine the combined holdings of the Louvre, Tate, Met and MoMA at your disposal every day in the same place if you are a painter.

Ruby is certainly no archetypal studio painter. But he’s a studio rat in the best sense, and his new studio is a big, living, physical archive space. He manages his own output on a desktop as we all do but he has also recently created a real living archive with the massive new studio operation. Works from his past are grouped according to materials and series, usually in a separate room. The new studio allows for presentations that approximate Ruby’s gallery spaces around the world, where the works debut to the public in meticulously thought-out juxtapositions. Walking around with him in the studio not far from downtown L.A. but far enough, you see his mind inspired by the work that has come before, as he dreams up new pieces to come.

 

SP293, 2014 | Spray paint on synthetic canvas | 96 x 84 x 2 inches | (243.8 x 213.4 x 5.1 cm)

 

Transcompositional/Pig Pen Strip Club, 2010 | Nail polish and Collage on acrylic | 72 x 96 inches | 182.9 x 243.8 cm(collage)

 

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CHIYONOFUJI MITSUGU

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

It was the snip heard around Japan. When champion sumo wrestler Chiyonofuji Mitsugu cut off his traditional topknot to signify his retirement from the ring in 1991, the whole country was mesmerized by the televised ceremony. For his eldest daughter, Yu Akimoto, it was a moment she’ll never forget. “When you cut your hair back to normal length, we had a lot of snow that day,” Yu tells her father in an interview. Just 8 years old at the time, Yu skipped school for the special occasion. “After you got your hair cut short, I was asked in a television interview, ‘How do you like your papa’s new haircut?’ ” Yu adds. “And I remember that I was very embarrassed. And I said, ‘It looks great,’ and that was broadcast by the show. The next day I went to school and I was teased about saying my dad looks good. I said to them, ‘What is wrong with that?’ I was mad.”

Until this moment, Chiyonofuji hadn’t encountered a pair of scissors in more than 21 years. Born Mitsugu Akimoto on the island of Hokkaido, the young sumo began wearing a topknot at age 15, which marked the beginning of his professional career. Standing 6 feet tall and weighing only 270 pounds (in a ring that often saw competitors 500 pounds or heavier), Chiyonofuji (nick- named “The Wolf” for his intimidating stare) became known for agility in the ring, and the swift moves with which he felled his larger, overbearing opponents.

By the time he decided to retire at the ripe age of 35 (most wrestlers at his level leave the sport by age 30), Chiyonofuji had not only ascended through the ranks to win 1,045 matches and earned the elite status of Yokozuna or “grand champion” but had also won a place in the heart of his nation. Upon retirement, Chiyonofuji took on a new name, Kokonoe Mitsugu, and the role of stablemaster for the Kokonoe Stable (one of the 54 communes where wrestlers live and train, including Chiyonofuji himself). “I liked the training,” Chiyonofuji tells Yu, reflecting on his days in the ring. “There are few people who like training, I think. But most likely, by training I was able to get something back. If you do not get tired doing something, you don’t win.”

“What is the difference in the training between your current disciples and when you were younger?” Yu asks. “It is much less now,” he responds. “There are many wrestlers who have injuries. To develop a build that is not easily injured, you have to do a lot, I think.”

“When [you were] competing, I was small, and I don’t remember everything,” Yu continues. “Mama said it was not a horrible thing to lose, but [you] said you hated to lose,” adds his daughter, who was named after the Japanese character “yu,” which means friendly, and the Japanese word for winner, “yu-sho.”

It’s a work ethic that was passed down to both of the champion sumo wrestler’s daughters, who have forged their own paths in their respective fields. Today, Kozue is a rising star in Japan’s acting and modeling world, while Yu is one of the country’s fashion icons and an accomplished DJ. “Nobody was able to succeed you in the business, since I am a daughter,” muses Yu. “What do you think about that?” “That doesn’t matter at all,” replies her father. “Becoming a wrestler is not easy. But looking at it myself, if I had a son who wanted to do it, that would have been OK. But this is the life I love.”

 

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千代の富士貢
レスリー・マッケンジー：文、チャーリー・ガルシア：写真

鋏の音が日本中に響いた。1991年、大相撲の横綱力士であった千代の富士が引退を表明し、その断髪式はテレビ中継され、横綱の髷が 切り落とされる姿に日本中が心を奪われた。彼の長女である秋元優にとって、それは忘れることのできない光景である。「お父さんが 髪を切り落とした日は、大雪が降っていたのよ」とインタビュー中、優は父親に話しかけた。まだ8歳だった彼女は断髪式当日、父の特 別な日ということで学校を休んだ。「髪が切られた後、テレビのインタビューで“お父さんの新しい髪形はどう？”って聞かれたの。 とても恥ずかしかったのを覚えてるわ。そして“とてもかっこいいです”って答えたんだけれど、それがテレビで放送されたのよ。次 の日学校に行くと、父親をかっこいいと言ったことを友達にからかわれて、“それのどこがおかしいの？”って言い返したわ。とても 頭にきたんだもの」と優は続けた。

断髪式のその日まで、千代の富士は21年以上の間、髪に鋏を入れたことはなかった。千代の富士、秋元貢は北海道で生まれ育ち、15歳 で初めて髷を結って以来、力士としての道が始まった。土俵で戦う力士の多くは、体重が約226kgまたはそれ以上という中で、千代の富 士の身長は約182cm、体重は122kg程度であったが、相手を威嚇するような鋭いにらみから「ウルフ」と呼ばれ、俊敏ですばやい動きを 持ち味に自分より身体が大きく、威圧的な相手力士を倒し、その名が世間に知られるようになった。

横綱レベルの力士のほとんどが30歳までに現役を引退する中で、彼は高齢ともいえる35歳で引退を決意した。そのときまで、1045勝を あげて横綱の地位に上りつめただけでなく、彼は国民の心もつかんだ。引退後は新しく九重貢となり、力士たちが生活と稽古を共にす る場所である54箇所の相撲部屋のうち、彼自身も過ごした九重部屋の親方となった。

「稽古は好きだったな」と当時を振り返りながら、彼は優に話した。「稽古が好きな力士なんて、ほとんどいないと思う。だけど自分 は、稽古することによって何かを得たという経験が多かった。同じことを飽きもせず続けるだけでは、勝つことはできないんだ。」
「今のお弟子さんたちとお父さんの若い頃を比べて、稽古に何か違いはある？」と優は質問した。「稽古が少ないね」と彼は答えた。
「怪我をする力士が多いね。簡単に怪我をしない身体を作るには、稽古をたくさんしないといけないと思うよ」 優は続けた。「お父さんが力士だった頃、私はまだ小さかったから、全部は覚えていないんだけれど、お母さんが“負けるのはそんなに ひどいことじゃないわ”と言ったのに、お父さんは“俺は負けるのが嫌いだ”と言ったのよ」彼女の「優」という名前は、「優しい」 と「優勝」の文字から名付けられたのだった。

元横綱の仕事に対する姿勢は、それぞれの分野で自分の道を進む二人の娘にも受け継がれている。現在、梢は女優、モデルとして人気 急上昇中であり、優はファッションリーダーの1人、そして名DJとしても活躍中である。「私は娘だから、誰も力士になって部屋を継ぐ ことができなかったんだけれど、それはどう思う？」と優は思いをめぐらせながら聞いた。「それは全く構わないよ」彼は答えた。「 力士になるのは簡単なことじゃないからね。自分自身を省みて、もし力士になりたいという息子がいたら、それはそれでいいと思うけ れど、お父さんは今のこの自分の人生が好きなのさ」

 

 

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PAT TENORE BY JOSEPH TENORE

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

My dad was 19 and my mom was 17 when I was born. My mom left Corona del Mar High School because she was pregnant and went to a continuation school. She started at Cal State Fullerton when I was three weeks old. She ended up studying education and becoming a sixth-grade teacher. Four years later, they got married.

My dad didn’t go to college; he took some classes, but all I know is that everything he learned was because he went out, grinded, bought computer programs and was self-taught. My dad wasn’t given an easy positionwhere you have all the resources you want and have a wealthy family. His mom was 13 when she had her first child, and she tried her best. My dad had to hustle to get his. He did a lot of moving during his childhood, from Chicago to San Francisco to Oakland to Piedmont, then to the Philippines, and eventually ending up in Orange County—all that before he was 11 years old. He did a lot of jumping around. I think having a child put a fire under his ass. Maybe college was too slow for him.

I have a vivid memory of our house in Costa Mesa, where my parents moved after they got married, walking through the backyard to the garage, where his creative kingdom was. Everything started in the garage. He had his friends over: TYKE AWR was sitting there—he’d just got done doing multiple canvases—and my dad was working on the computer. It was cool. I remember my dad got jeans, and he and his friends were in the backyard drawing on them with paint pens and then going to sell them at boutiques around L.A. and Orange County. From a young age I felt the energy of his creative work.

Growing up in Costa Mesa was fun. With the parents I have, things like skateboarding and creative thinking were pushed. Surfing was also pushed, but I didn’t get into it. I’m a skater, to be real with you. There were always a lot of people around our house, because my parents were still young. The vibe growing up with them was trippy—their friends were artists, fighters, designers, skaters, musicians and surfers; everyone was always at our house for UFC Fight Nights. My best memories of my dad and me are of us playing video games and him taking me skating, walking me to school and picking me up after—small quality time. That mattered most to me. Before he started RVCA and it kicked into full gear, he was around a lot.

I had rules, like “Don’t hurt someone unless they hurt you first,” and “Don’t instigate shit.” I feel like my parents tried their best to put rules on me, but me and my dad have more of a friend relationship. It wasn’t always like that; I had to earn it by being more accountable. That meant having integrity, being honest with my parents—through all the bullshit and the good stuff. My mom was my force field a lot. She was always really overly nice about disciplining me. My dad and I are more like brothers—we grew up together. He was older when he had my other siblings (ages 11 and13). It’s so cool to watch my dad bond with them. It’s like from an uncle’s perspective—they even call me Uncle. When my dad’s at dinner with the family, he’s always taking pictures, and then he uploads them onto hard drives. He just naturally documents. He always says he wishes he had more pictures of himself when he was growing up to show us.

We were in Italy recently, and we saw a bunch of people wearing RVCA and it was like,“Whoa.” I’m just proud of him. When I see stuff like that, I’m stoked on my dad, because he grinded and came through. His ultimate goal was to provide for his family and be a good man. That was something he verbalized a lot. Besides doing a good job with his interests and fashion and art, family is put before everything. My dad has sacrificed physical health for his family. He would do 48-hour shifts. The business went from a garage to a warehouse to an even bigger and better warehouse. He would be designing, talking to artists, curating stuff. He did a bunch of projects. He likes to do a lot of projects that aren’t involved with clothing, too. He’s always bringing up the people around him.

Do I feel like there’s a lot to live up to? Absolutely. My dad has been invited to the White House by the Obama administration as an example of a successful small business owner. That’s pretty special. I don’t know how the fuck I’m about to do that. Really, I don’t. The pressure is on.

Sometimes I think my dad is unlucky to be so warmhearted. I don’t think some people realize how much he does for others outside his family. He helps a lot of people, friends and strangers, straight up. He’s a people person. I don’t think my dad will ever forget where he came from, or the people who have been with him on the mission.
 

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HANS ZIMMER

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

This interview took six months to do. It was done in two different countries, over two different time zones, scheduled and rescheduled numerous times through various assistants. It had to be worked around tour  dates, Grammy rehearsals and Oscar press. It’s without a shadow of a doubt that I can declare Hans Zimmer the Hardest Working Man in Show Business. And I should know, because I’m his daughter.

If you’ve been to the movies at all in the past 20 years you’ll have heard a Zimmer score—they’re hard to miss. After doing some light Googling I’ve found that my father has worked on close to 200 movies since the mid ’80s—everything from The Lion King to The Dark Knight. Action, drama, romance, comedy, animated, good, bad, big, small, he’s done them all. And I’m fairly certain he’ll keep doing them all until he drops dead at the keyboard.

He is not your average father—or your average composer. And he’s definitely not your conventional human being. His work, his music, is what gets him out of bed and down the stairs every morning and keeps him in a studio until the early hours of the following morning. What he does is who he is, and I’m immensely proud of him.

My dad is my favorite person to have a long chat with about life and work and everything in between. The following conversation is just one of our many… except this time it’s on the record.

ZOE ZIMMER: OK, this thing is recording now, so let’s both try to keep the swearing and bad jokes to a minimum, yeah?

HANS ZIMMER: That’s asking a lot…

ZZ: No shit. OK, but really, let’s talk about some stuff. Let’s start easy: Where do you consider home?

HZ:Nowhere.

ZZ: Jesus, really? I guess that wasn’t starting easy after all.

HZ: Yeah, seriously. It’s something that really bothers me. I don’t know… I think language is partly home.

ZZ: Does it bother you that none of your kids speak German?

HZ: No, but it bothers me that none of my kids have the same accent as me. Anyway, I think if I had to go and declare a place “home,” it would be England, but I don’t think the English would ever see me as one of their own. Home… I don’t know, I’m a traveler, I suppose. I’m a gypsy in a funny sort of way. It’s wherever the project is, y’know? It’s wherever there are musicians I want to play with. Look, at the end of the day, I’m an entertainer, the way musicians always have been, and we just go from place to place wherever people want to hear our music.

ZZ: Well, for a long time you were definitely based in L.A.

HZ: Well, “based” is different from “home.” I suppose my studio is home. I mean, my room is more a home than a studio.

ZZ: That studio’s kind of been  everyone’s home at one time or another. I know it has been for me. I mean, I basically grew up in the back of a recording studio.

HZ: Right, exactly and you didn’t turn out so bad! The thing about the studio is that it’s an interesting place full of interesting people, and that should always make you feel at home. It’s full of possibilities, and there’s a creative dynamic that goes on there. There’s kind of a weird sense of community, but it’s not a community in the normal sense of the word. I mean, everyone’s ego is pretty big.

ZZ: Really big.

HZ: And everyone’s a little bit odd…

ZZ: Really odd. But really great.

HZ: And I think the only thing that we all really have in common is not so much even the music, it’s really just that none of us would be able to get a job anywhere else.

ZZ: Right, you’re really all just a big band of outcasts who got lucky.

HZ: Precisely.

ZZ: And there are a lot of outcasts right now—I mean, the studio is just getting bigger and bigger. It might be your home, but it’s also the size of a small village. Do you think it’s just going to keep growing? Do you want it to keep growing?

HZ: No, I think we have enough buildings now, don’t you?

ZZ: I think if there were anymore buildings you would have to start handing out Segways or small ponies for people to get around.

HZ: Definitely small ponies. But you know, I like people moving in and out of there. I like the atmosphere changing and people progressing. What I love is when people get their own careers together, and then they leave and they do their own versions of it, y’know?Like Harry [Gregson-Williams, Shrek] and John [Powell, How to Train Your Dragon] and people like that. And I like new people coming in; I think it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting that I created this little magnet that draws people in from all over the world, and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s always interesting.

ZZ: Does it piss you off when people question the way the studio works? In terms of having people write for you—you know, when it’s made out to be Hans Zimmer’s Musical Sweatshop?

HZ: Well,they can’t have it both ways. Because on the one hand I get knocked for “sounding the same,” which of course doesn’t actually make any sense—look at the films I did with Ridley [Scott], and that’s just one filmmaker: Thelma & Louise doesn’t sound anything like Gladiator, which doesn’t sound anything like Black Hawk Down, which doesn’t sound anything like Hannibal, which doesn’t sound anything like Black Rain, which doesn’t sound anything like Matchstick Men…

ZZ: I really liked Matchstick Men.

HZ: So did I, but I think we were the only ones. So anyway, on the one hand there’s obviously a very strong imprint in the architecture of the studio, and on the other hand… I mean, you already know all of this. I write these pieces and they’re very complete, everything’s done on them—the orchestration, everything. But like everybody, I need assistants. I’m the architect, but I need a couple of bricklayers, y’know? Do you think Michelangelo painted every square inch of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Probably not—it would have killed him if he had to do it all by himself!

ZZ: Fair enough. So do you think people who make those assumptions are just uninformed about the system? Because assisting and writing additional music is basically how you get your foot in the door, right?

HZ: Well, yes and no. It didn’t really used to be like that. When I got to Hollywood it was slightly different. The studios had orchestrators and arrangers on staff, and they never really got credit for anything. They were just “Backroom Boys.” So now I really do fight for credits for people, even really small credits. It’s important to me that people get to participate, and that they get credit and that they are visible, so I really do fight fort hem. They might not be the architects, but it’s still their time that they give me, that they give to these projects.

ZZ: Interstellar was all you though, wasn’t it?

HZ: All me. Interstellar nobody got to write a single note on other than me. And although a lot of musicians played on it, one of the things we tried to preserve was the singularity of my touch and my vision, and literally me playing every note. I mean, on all of these scores I have at one time or another played every single note. But unfortunately the story of me just sitting there by myself and writing is far less exciting and scandalous than the idea of assistants and ghostwriters.

ZZ: Talking about all this always makes me wish I played an instrument. I thought that the other day when I saw Whiplash. I mean, you really hogged all the musical talent in the family. Do you ever wish any of us, your kids, were more musical?

HZ: No. I love that you are all musical imbeciles.

ZZ: Whoa whoa whoa. Hey now…

HZ: No, what I mean is, I think it’s really hard tofollowinthe footsteps of anybody. And I think it’s really important that you go and make your own path. What I say to all of you is “follow your dream,” but at the same time I’m saying “don’t be stupid.” There are all these people who think following a dream means that you have to be some big star or something. All I’m saying is if you want to become a great plumber, or a great chef, or a great whatever, then do it. Just be a great you, and don’t take no for an answer.

ZZ: I know. You’ve always said that. You’ve always been very supportive of whatever I’ve wanted to do. And yeah, of course it can be daunting being related to someone who’s not only successful, but so successful in such a creative industry. Growing up with that made me feel like it wasn’t about finding a job, it was about finding a passion.

HZ: I know, but I try to be a shining example to you—to all of my kids—that the impossible is possible. Having a passion for something is a tricky thing. There are many ways of going about that passion—you can make it your job or you can make it your hobby, and both are equally valid. You got one life, it ain’t that long, so you may as well…

ZZ: Make it count? Have a good time? Don’t fuck it up?

HZ: Yeah, but more than a good time. Get real pleasure out of it, not just fun. Feel it all, have conflict, have difficulties, suffer for it a little bit, y’know?

ZZ: God, that’s so German of you.

HZ: Yes! But you need it. When your mum and I were first together the electricity used to  always get turned off because I wouldn’t pay the bill, and it’s really hard to be an electronic musician with no electricity! But yeah, I know a lot of really talented musicians who will never really make it, because people realized they were talented early on so there wasn’t enough opposition. And you need that, you need friction, you need struggle. Life needs to scare you sometimes; you have to respect it and be in awe of it. So yeah, be a little scared, let it freak you out. I don’t know, maybe you shouldn’t be listening to my advice.

ZZ: No, I always like your advice. Even if I don’t always listen to it. In fact, one of my favorite bits of advice from you was: “Remember, nothing’s less attractive to a man than a weeping woman.”

HZ: [Laughs.] It’s true! It’s true! That’s some great fatherly advice! I try to be useful, y’know? We have good chats, right?When we’re together, I try to give everything there is, I try to come up with ideas…

ZZ: You are useful. I always say that I’d rather have you be the father you are now, rather than the father you weren’t when I was growing up, y’know? You were terrible at playing Barbies, but if I’m having trouble with work? Breakup with a boyfriend? Need to know where to buy the best macaroons? You’re the first person I call.

HZ: Oh, man. The Barbies…

ZZ: I know, you still have Barbie PTSD. Sorry. Let’s talk about something less traumatic. Do you get bored? I sometimes worry you get bored of writing for (insert name of generic comic book movie sequel/prequel).

HZ: Bored? No, not bored. You know, all those big movies still bring me something, they still bring a challenge. Whether it’s Spider-Man or Superman or whatever, I strive to do something different everytime. And I get to work with new people, new musicians who have a fresh take on it all, even if it is a sequel. And I try to do new things too, like the shows last year. [Zimmer played two live shows in London at the Eventim Apollo in October 2014.] That was new, it was exciting, and terrifying—I mean, you know how petrified I get about going on stage.

ZZ: Yeah, but only a few of us know. You always pull it off. And you always have a great time in the end, right? If you don’t then you fake it really well. You looked like you were having the time of your life at the Grammys with Pharrell…

HZ: I do have a good time, despite the fear. After the first show in London, which was terrifying, I thought maybe the stage fright would get better on the next night. I thought maybe I would learn something, but of course it wasn’t better. And I realized that it’s not about it “getting better,” that’s just how I’m built, y’know? I get freaked out. So just do it. Do it despite everything else, because if I don’t do it I think it would be something I would regret.

ZZ: So what do you wanna do now?

HZ: I sometimes wish I could just watch an awful lot of television in bed and not engage in the next battle, y’know? But I can’t, you know I can’t. I think part of what happens is—I don’t think there’s any middle ground. I think you’re either very successful or you’re not successful at all. I think if you’re in that middle ground then the magnetic pull is always to the bottom. I think being a guitarist playing songs in a subway station and doing a hundred-million-dollar movie are equally great. But the slithering around in the middle is not so great. And the middle ground is really where the sharks swim. They don’t swim at the top or the bottom—all the uninspiring people you don’t want to hang out with are in the middle ground.

ZZ: Do you remember telling me what the Four Stages of a Career were? “1. Who is Hans Zimmer? 2. Get me Hans Zimmer. 3. Get me someone who sounds like Hans Zimmer. 4. Who is Hans Zimmer?”

HZ: [Laughs—a lot.] Right!

ZZ: Do you worry about what stage you’re in?

HZ: Nah, not really. I’m not done, y’know? I still have more to say.

ZZ: Well, yeah, you’re not really the type to retire and move to Florida.

HZ: No way. Musicians don’t think about retirement. My hero is [the late British comic magician] Tommy Cooper, for all sorts of reasons. For his humor, for his crazy fez, for his courage for going out on the stage and failing. His jokes going wrong, his magic tricks going wrong, and mainly for having a laugh at himself. Even his death, people weren’t sure it was real for a while. And he died doing what he loved, he died in the place that he loved… standing on a stage.

ZZ: Don’t get any ideas…

HZ: That’s just it—I’m going to be here until the ideas run out.

ZZ: Glad to hear it, Daddy. Now let’s go get some dinner.

 

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HERBIE FLETCHER

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

Herbie left home the winter he was 16 with the clothes he was wearing, a surfboard, trunks and a bedroll, headed for paradise. Living in the back seat of a rusted-out Cadillac, even though it was Dewey Weber’s, was anything but. Then again, at first light, when he could see the wave peeling at Sunset Point, he knew his rash decision was perfect. He did odd jobs for a few bucks to keep eating, but when Greg MacGillivray hired him to star in his film Free and Easy, he figured he had it made. Wow, paid to surf … The pay wasn’t much by today’s standards, but he had a place to crash, a ride to the beach and the opportunity to fly to Maui to surf the Bay—he was completely stoked!

We met that winter at the Makaha contest, and two years later, I had the grand idea of leaving home. In the summer of ’68, after our brief stay in Laguna Canyon with some of the more notable characters in the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, we were off to Maui. Hawaii proved to be a haven for many years while Herb perfected his board-building craft and the entrepreneurial spirit that generated more than 100 surf film titles, thousands of stills, surf traction, documentation of surfing’s aerial revolution, jet skiing the outer reefs at Pipeline and the beginnings of tow-in surfing. The late ’80s and early ’90s were a fantastically creative time in surfing, and with our two sons, we were living the dream.

We were now based in San Clemente, and surfing had gone through another radical change, as more money was drawn in and the companies started to become more and more corporate. The rock ’n’ roll vibe that we thrived on seemed to get somewhat lost when sponsors had to worry more about reporting quarterly earnings. It was a good thing for many of the surfers, as it allowed them to make a living that would have been impossible a few years before, but now surfing’s identity was dictated by large corporations who had the advertising dollars to make stars and re-create history.

Herb and I have been extremely lucky. Owning Astrodeck, we’ve been able to keep creating and designing and have produced snowboards, wakeboards, bindings, clothing and all types of art, which has always been our passion. Since his first resin paintings in ’66, Herb has used traditional surfboard-building materials in new and unique ways. His signature Wrecktangles, made from boards ridden by the greatest contemporary surfers, broken at the Pipeline and assembled as sculptures, hearken back to his Wave Warriors photo shoots of the late ’80s, where the greatest surfers gathered on the beach at Pipeline for a group shot that Herb was able to pull together four winters in a row.

Those shots are now considered among the most iconic images in surf history. With a great personal library of footage and ever- growing collection of paintings, sculptures, photo collages and stories, Herb’s show, Path of a Wave Warrior, is being crated now for its next stop, Tokyo.

 

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CHRISTIAN FLETCHER

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

When Christian was just 10 months old, I used to have to turn his playpen upside down and set it over him so he couldn’t escape. He knew no boundaries and with reckless abandon would climb up anything, jump off everything and hang out second-story windows at my parents’ house, completely undaunted and without the slightest recognition of self-preservation.

He has lived his life with the same unique sense of purpose, kind of “to hell with the consequences, I’m doing it my way no matter what” mindset. It really chaps a lot of people who love the game of life to fit a tidy format. I think sometimes that’s Christian’s greatest gift—he makes you stretch your own boundaries, and as hard as that is sometimes, that’s where personal growth happens. From his radical aerial surfing style in the late ’80s, which is now, decades later, part of the requirements of modern surfing, to his brash, sometimes arrogant-sounding interviews that got him completely ostracized from the “established” surfing arena, he has been a lightning rod of controversy. Under the sometimes intense public criticism and scrutiny, he has managed to live his life his way as a complete nonconformist and has recently used his insight to envision a way of bringing his design talents and love of motorcycles together under the umbrella of MadHouse Kustom Designs.

He’s now collaborating with professors on 3D printing of fins for his custom-shaped and hand-painted epoxy flying machines, surfboards to most, with special-weave Kevlar for strength, creating light, super strong but sensitive boards for the most progressive surfing. With an award-winning custom bike builder and longtime personal friend he is opening a shop here and in Tokyo that will also carry the clothing he has been collaborating on with RVCA over the past year. It’s all a testament to his insane staying power and his ability to excite people with the idea of personal freedom that was so much a part of surfing and motorcycles’ past lore.

Christian is funny, irreverent and totally bizarre—who knew there were hundreds, maybe thousands of juggling videos on YouTube, or for that matter that they would have such a huge following. When Christian got it into his head a few years back to learn to juggle he couldn’t wait to share it with me. Now, when waiting on anything anywhere, he’s practicing, often wearing one of the scary clown masks he likes to collect. You can imagine this might cause some trepidation out there in the conservative world where labels create certainty, but this is Christian’s world, and he is truly abstract.

 

 

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WALTER HOFFMAN

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

I first met my father, Walter, when I was 4 years old. My mom, a divorcée with three kids, my older sister Joyce, younger brother Tony and myself had plans on renting out the room off the garage, kind of a standard practice on Balboa Island. I heard a knock on the front door, ran across the UPS-colored linoleum floor to swing open the door, and there stood a huge mountain of a guy in a sleeveless Makaha sweatshirt, M.Nii trunks, a ukulele under one massive arm and bare feet. I was a little peeling-nosed, sun- bleached beach kid, and I knew instantly this was a kindred spirit. Within a couple of years they were married and he adopted all of us. Quite the man.

Walter grew up in Hollywood and started surfing the California coast with his brother, Phillip “Flippy” Hoffman, in the early ’40s. Their father, Rube, was a textile converter, and after Walter’s stint in the Navy, being stationed in Hawaii, where he was able to perfect his big wave riding, he returned to join his father’s business. There he cultivated clients with the company’s fantastic prints inspired by his love of the ocean and the beach lifestyle. It was the early ’50s and California was growing at an unbelievable pace. With the nation finally at peace after WWII and the Korean Conflict, people had a feeling of prosperity and hope; art and design were able to flourish in this environment. The advanced technology developed in the aerospace industry made it possible for designers to push the boundaries of traditional craftsmanship, and this was particularly felt in surfboard building with the introduction of foam and fiberglass. With the boards going from a hundred pounds of solid wood to 40-plus pounds, surfing was now accessible to all, and Midcentury Modern outdoor casual living was the American Dream.

Prints were everywhere—wallpaper, upholstery, curtains, rugs and certainly clothing. With designers specifically going after the active-lifestyle enthusiast, right place right time, Hoffman Fabrics was there. From the swimwear designers of the early times to the young startups that were specifically targeting the surf enthusiast, my dad, with a large in-house art department, helped create the “surf look” with the prints they were creating. In the early ’60s we were spending every Christmas in Hawaii, so my dad and older sister, Joyce, who by this time was going after the women’s world surfing title, could surf in the perfect Hawaiian conditions. We would spend a few weeks there while my dad judged the Makaha contest, which he had won in the early ’50s and in which my sister now competed. Our family life revolved around the beach culture, and all my father’s friends, most since he was in his teens, were the first generation of surf enthusiasts who would go on to create the magazines, films, boards and clothing that would define the early surf lifestyle.

 

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GREYSON FLETCHER

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

After a starring role in a cable show at 16, Greyson had many offers to pursue something more in that arena. He told me that he just didn’t see the fit for him and he started to drift a bit. By 18 he was set on moving forward with his skating and decided to drop by and stay with his dad, Christian, for a while. They both came to work at Astrodeck, the Fletcher family business—what better college education could we offer Greyson than actually being involved in an action sports business? He thrived in the environment and took off early to surf or skate every afternoon.

There were domestic and foreign road trips; videos and photos started surfacing of his unchoreographed, fast, loose surf-style bowl skating. It seemed fresh and reminiscent at the same time, with many skate legends from the past rallying their support. At first, just like it was with Nathan, Greyson didn’t want to get thrown into the “Fletcher” mix, wanting to earn his own place with his own ability. Completely understandable, but it is what it is, and for better or worse there is no separating, there is only excelling if you want to stand your own ground. And excel Greyson did for sure!!!

Getting a board and a clothing sponsorship to help with a travel budget, Greyson started life on the road. He went all over Europe, Australia and the States, and his reputation as a skater—but to me more important, as a fantastic guy—started to grow. Everywhere he went he was greeted by people who knew his dad, his uncle, even his grandpa. At first these intrusions were irritating to him, but now, as he told me a couple of weeks ago, it makes him feel at home everywhere he goes. People welcome him as an old friend of their family, not as an interloper into their “locals only” vibe. The great contemporary Brazilian skaters took Greyson immediately under their wing, and he has matured as a competitive skater immensely with their help. Skating like surfing is an individual sport, but the young Brazilian skaters all practice together, travel together and push each other to be their best. Their acceptance of Greyson into the tribe has helped him develop a sense of being part of a team, and they love being part of Team Fletcher.

Greyson stopped by the Deck for a family photo shoot after returning from an East Coast filming trip. He split the next day for 12 days in Japan; he’ll be home for a week and then it’s Australia for 13 days, etc. When you say to people my son is a surfer or my grandson is a skater, they roll their eyes, like yeah, right. Everyone’s road is a road; Greyson has been blessed with talent and has pursued it with a sincerity and sense of awe that inspires me. He’s quiet, unassuming, completely shreds, and I’m sincerely grateful to have him as my friend and grandson.

 

 

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