Kirk Maxson is an artist I met in the late 1980s. We were friends at school in that time and roommates for a summer...we were even in a quirky instrumental band together, The Galatian Carpet Service, which was described as orphan folk music. Kirk was always ahead of me; a year in school and light years in ideas. What he could do with a pair of scissors and any material always blew me away. Originally from Oregon, Kirk has been in California for more than two decades and in San Francisco most of that time.The following is an interview conducted via email:Drew:
First of all, I have to say I wish I could have this interview in person. It's been ten years since we last saw each other.
A few weeks ago I schlepped 50 blocks up to 200 Lex to see your Mallow. It was well worth the scorching summer trek. I was surprised by how much it reminded me of the very first thing I saw by you in the late '80s, which was the wall mural you made from the old dictionary etchings. The materials have changed to mallow and wild geraniums, but you handled the drawings just as delicately. The connection is that both the mural and Mallow are wall pieces and they are also roughly the same size and have the same swarming shape. I love how Mallow builds out from the wall. Do you see the similarities and is there a reason for that?Kirk:
I didn't realize the similarities, it's been a long time since I thought about all of the portraits in Isla Vista. The etching portraits morphed into that shape slowly, I think I was adding to it for several months, while the mallow was assembled in a day. I've made patches of weed in rectangular shapes: the mallow and geraniums were collected around the city from patches of rectangular dirt surrounded by concrete. Although, sometimes the patches of weeds don't fill up the rectangle and make a more organic shape.
Drew:
All the leaves looked like they were in perfect shape. I could not tell if they were real, but gilded, or made of foil. Can you explain the preservation, gilding and installation processes or is that a secret recipe you will carry to your grave?
Kirk:I collect plants that grow around my neighborhood; plants that are adapted to city living. After a week of heavy rain, I walk around with a fork and zip lock bags. I dig up the plants that grow in vacant lots and untended parts of the city. I'm careful to get the entire plant. At home, I take apart each plant and tape each leaf to pages of a notebook and record the sequence of leaves and the length of stem. In this way I have a pattern of every leaf on the plant and I know which order they go and how long the stems are.
The mallow sends up two heart-shaped leaves when it sprouts, then round leaves with a serrated edge. As the mallow matures it sends up leaves that are closer to the shape of a maple leaf. The wild geraniums send up two kidney-shaped leaves when it sprouts, then the leaves have five round numbs, then the leaves start getting more nubs and become branched. The mallow and wild geraniums attracted me because each leaf is like a finger print. They are unique. I have collected hundreds of the same species of wild geraniums and mallow at different stages of it's growth, and at different locations. Both plants look different when they grow in full sun vs shade or when they are in a location or time of year when they receive more rain vs little rain.
Once I have a bunch of plants in the notebooks I go to Kinko's and copy them. I cover the copies with clear packing tape and cut out all the leaf shapes with a pair of scissors. Each leaf is labeled with the page number of the notebook it came from, that way I can look back at the notebooks when I want to reassemble the plants. I then trace the patterns onto sheet metal. The clear packing tape makes the copies strong for the tracing step. I then use an inkless ballpoint pen to draw on the veins. The ballpoint pen rolls across soft brass sheet metal, leaving behind a line of depression without scratching the metal. I then size the brass with an clear oil size and wait an hour for the size to reach the right stickiness. I sprinkle metallic powders over the brass. I use all different shades of gold and some super sparkle and I tint the oil size with red and green to give subtle shifts of color.
Installation: The piece is a moment in time. There's been several weeks of heavy rain, seeds in a patch of dirt in the city that had been sprayed with weed killer or burned so there are no plants to compete with. It's a race: the mallow and the geranium seeds sprout at the same time but the mallow sends up larger leafs and can reach six feet in height. The wild geraniums have tiny leafs and will reach a maximum height of a foot in a half. The Mallow is crowding out the geraniums and eventually will block out the sun from the wild geraniums. I had already installed the piece so I knew the shape for New York. I outlined the shape on the wall with low-tack blue tape. I knew I wanted the tallest weeds in the middle and heavy with mallow on the right and thicker with the wild geraniums on the left.
Drew:
Our friend, Michael, took a picture of us on the evening of a wig party in the early '90s in Isla Vista. I had wired up a real wig and attached it with a turban. You had a Medusa-like newspaper and wire wig, which I believe was part of the life-sized newspaper man you made, which sat in our backyard. On the back of the picture I kept, I wrote that you switched wigs and had been wearing a wig made out of geraniums earlier in the day. Have geraniums been in your work all this time? Why did you first start using them?Kirk:
That was the first experiment with geraniums. I think the geranium wig started to wilt. I think that's why I moved on to newspaper. Or maybe the geraniums were more of a day look.
Drew:
The last time I saw you was in San Francisco. You were making metal flower sculptures and arrangements. Do you still make those or was that just a step which led to works such as Mallow?
Kirk:
I haven't made the aluminum flower heads in awhile. I guess I have moved on, although I did recently make a gold crown made up of hundred of tiny leaves and two different kinds of flowers, which brings me back to the geranium wig. And my friend Kiddie recently performed with one of my aluminum flowers glued to the side of her head. It's posted on youtube >>> click here.
Drew:I see you have recently posted photographs that you convert into flurries of butterflies, which have a nice three-dimensional collage look. You also posted one of wolfish creatures in a diorama, which I really liked. What inspired these?
Kirk:
The butterfly piece, Bookworm, is made of books that have been important to me throughout my life. It starts with books I had when I was a child, Squirrel Nutkin, by Beatrix Potter (and the first Nutkin I bought), a photo book on the architect Gaudi; and my parents' books, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which was my mother's, and books on Frank Lloyd Wright, my father's; and books my brother and I both read by Frank Herbert, and Ray Bradbury. Then the installation gets more adult and there are butterflies from Querelle of Brest, by Jean Genet, Tom of Finland butterflies and butterflies of Trannies.
The hyenas are a return to work I did in college. I have cut out hundred of animals out of paper from guide books. I'm attracted to science illustrations; animals that are artwork, not photographs. I think it fits nicely with the metal plants, paper insects, and paper animals set in artificial environments and photographed.
Drew:
We were both Ann Hamilton students at UC Santa Barbara in the late '80s, early '90s. I think she had a lot of influence on your work, more so than mine, although I was probably more enraptured by her. Is that fair to say?
Kirk:
I think she did have a huge influence on me. I sat in her tub of ash in the Santa Barbra art museum, behind me was a wall of bugs pinned to the wall. A lot of her work back then involved animals insects and wall surfaces. But I don't recall her working with plants.
Drew:
What else have you been up to? Is drag still a big part of your life (or at least weekends) and how does that kind of performance enter your work?
Kirk:I haven't done drag in long time. Whoops that's not entirely true. When Trannyshack closed down Heklina had a month of recreating the history of the club and Kay White came out to perform. She wore a skirt suit and carried a cane. It had been so long since I had been on stage I forgot how time slows down and how you can't hear your music when your on stage. Because it was the end the of club and it was so crowded, you couldn't get a drink (the bartenders were more interested in what was happening on stage than the customers) which was a good thing because there's no way, if I had a drink, that I could have ever made it to the bathroom and back. Recently I've been taking photos of Kay White and Mr Nancy and cutting them up into butterflies and moths.
Drew:
Speaking of performances...one of my favorite memories of your creativity was how you dealt with those itsy cockroaches in the apartment you were living in when I first met you. You rigged your cabinets with lights that turned on when the cabinet doors were closed. You also sprinkled gravel on your carpet every morning and then vacuumed, hoping the little rocks would hit the roaches on the head when they were sucked up together.
Kirk:
That infestation was so bad we could see tiny cockroaches in the display of the stereo behind the plastic. I would wake up in the middle of the night and turn on the lights and vacuum all of the cockroaches I could find with the vacuum cleaner. I think that fight was futile. Eventually, the landlords tainted and sprayed the whole building to kill termites and all the cockroaches disappeared.
Drew:
I see you read my review of Prag. It was so weird how the plot seemed to need a gay turn to make it more interesting or shocking. It was really silly because the last place I would expect a gay Dane would go in the mid 1980s is to an even more repressive and intolerant society, especially behind the Iron Curtain. It made no sense. Why not go to Berlin, Paris, New York or San Francisco? But what was most offensive was that the father's coming out was all around accepted as the reason why he needed to abandon his son, as if gay men cannot be good fathers. Am I barking up the wrong tree?
Kirk:
No, I moved to San Francisco. I wouldn't have moved to the former Eastern Bloc. More and more gay men in San Francisco are becoming fathers.
Drew:
Even though this is an interview, I feel like I am asking you too many questions? Is this a question you would like to ask me?
Kirk:
It doesn't feel like too many questions. Have you continued making graphic novels? I remember your typewriter piano, have you made any more musical instruments?
Drew:I will make the third of the Infinous Space series in 2015. I stopped doing the graphic novels because they consume time I do not have anymore and I really have to be removed from society at a certain level to focus on them, which I no longer am. But...I am committed to making one from this series every 12 years. I should, however, make more graphic novels/comics like these because this cartoon style is perhaps my most authentic voice and my first medium. I still love reading my old cartoons...I love how my drawing and writing share the same space. Sometimes (in other pursuits) I take myself too seriously and it does not do me any good.
As for the typewriter piano, which I called the Typar, and the other instruments I made: the hip banjo, the stand-up accordion and the musical chime box gourds....I have not made others. I miss those projects. I started them because I was not a good student of music when I was younger and I did not grow up in a musical household so there was always a distance from musical instruments for me. When I wanted to play music in college, I found it easier to make the instruments first and determine their sounds and establish how they should be played. The Typar was probably the best example of this. I used an old, mechanical typewriter, built a long casing for it (which looked like a small coffin that I carried on my back) and strung it with guitar strings, which were amplified. It sounded a bit like a sitar, which was the sound I was going for, but it used QWERTY typewriter keys. It was great because you could play it by typing either what was on your mind or from a text.
Thank you for your time. I hope to see you soon in New York or San Francisco!