The Modern Word - Zak Smith Interview (link)
Erik Ketzan: So you created an illustration for every page of Gravity’s Rainbow. How long did that take?
Zak Smith: It took like 9 months, but I was working on other stuff, too, at the same time. People always go “Wow, you must’ve had a lot of free time on your hands,” but, y’know, it’s my job to. You do something 14 hours a day every day, you can get a lot done. I think people are conditioned by the art they usually see in galleries to think that it takes an artist a full 8 months to—say—glue a dixie cup to a rug and write “Slander!” on it in lipstick—so when they see something where an artist had to actually work as much as a person with a real job does it seems like it must’ve taken forever.
Zak Smith is probably the most sensible artist/pornstar in the history of the world. He’s like a young Szarkowski for me.
Also his take on drugs and the arts is accurate:
Terri Saul: Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the most drug-ridden novels ever written. When considering your illustrations of it, I thought about Glenn Gould, a musician who experimented with both drugs and classical music. Do you ever use drugs while working?
Zak Smith: 1-Drugs are very popular among people who are interested in interesting things but are not themselves very interesting.
2-Drugs make your body do weird things–so they’re interesting if you’re in the performing arts.
3-Drugs make boring things seem interesting, so products created by people while they are on drugs are often really boring.
(via)
Click the link in the header.
Posted 2 years ago
