BYRON BLACK

The following interview was printed in N D 14.
(c) N D 1993, Austin, Texas.
Please notify N D before the use of any of this material in part or in entirety.

BYRON BLACK (Jakarta, INDONESIA)

Byron Black is a mailartist, film maker, video artist, radio broadcaster, and teacher who currently lives in Indonesia. For the past twenty years, he has lived in Thailand, Japan, the Philippines, and now currently in Indonesia where he teaches and also does American language radio broadcasts. While he lived in Japan, he worked closely with the people at AU and Shozo Shimamato; informing them about mailart. Last year Bryon Black made it down to Austin for a day. His home town is the same as mine - Fort Worth. We had some great conversations, with the following interview done through the mail.

N D: You've been involved with mailart and the networks for a quite a long time now. Could you talk a little about how you got started in all of this? Byron Black: I find it surprising that mail artists around the world, or at least the ones whose essays I've read, have not given more credit to the fact that when they were younger, they had penpals. I think many of us had penpals. I think penpals are rare these days, at least compared to then. It is really too bad, because pen pals were a wonderful way to open up the world. I can recall as a child of about 15 getting a photograph and a letter from a fifteen year old boy in Sweden. The contents of the letter was,"I did this, and I look like this, how about you?" The fact of the matter was, like mailart which often is minimal in terms of its artistic value, of being part of a network; being able to exchange artwork, values, greetings or whatever throughout the world with people who you would never meet. That's the essence of the thing. That's the point. Being part of the mailart network started with me having penpals. I corresponded less with people I knew and started more with strangers. For a while I was even writing famous people which is one of the aberrations of pen pals. I got some very interesting responses. When I was about thirteen I wrote General David Sefhoff who was the big cheese of RCA corporation and got a response. I sent some short story or poem to Gore Vidal when I was young and he wrote back, "Success is your's my boy, if that's what you want". He was a little bit wrong. But it was very nice to get a response from someone I respected. Yet famous people can not really respond on an equal level. Even when two famous people get together it is like strange dogs smelling assholes and growling. Penpals were important because they enabled communication across national, cultural, and conceptual boundaries. They also force an expression through a medium which has traditionally been seen as purely utilitarian. There is nothing very romantic about the mails, with notable exception of a few poems such as, "through sleet, through snow or rain the mail must go", or however that poem goes. That is an expression I think is there to create some romance where there is none. The mails are not romantic traditionally. I think that the Universal Postal Union (UPU) is a great conceptual net around the whole world. Mailartists must have been at the last UPU meeting. The last one was in '88, I think? I was toying with the idea of going, but it was somewhere inconvenient like Prague, and I didn't have a way to get there. The UPU is basically an utilitarian organization that lets various postal systems fix things between them. But it also opens up this romantic exchange. I have made a lot of friends through mail art, pen pals also. I was involved with the Vancouver artists since the early 1970's with the infamous Anna Banana, at present an adversary of mine, along with Dr. Brut, Michael Moores, and Vincent at Image Bank. Lady Burt and the artists of the Western Front, who were previously Intermedia. There were several art organizations in Vancouver, with members involved to a lesser or greater extent with correspondence and exchange, mainly with New York and Los Angeles and Toronto. Actually Ray Johnson was a friend of Michael Moores, but none of them took mailart per se as a serious exchange. In Vancouver we were somewhat peripheral to the main art scenes of the 70's. There is a kind of cultural imperialism which emanates from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and to a lesser degree from Chicago and other places. But Vancouver is rather far from other places where artists work. Yet, Vancouver is a extremely international city and by its very make up is a new city, mostly made up of immigrants, many of whom came since the '60's. There are many Asians and Europeans so it's very cosmopolitan with no great pride of history or being. So it is a natural place for the attitudes necessary for equatable mail art exchange to take place. After starting off in the early 1970's, I began to exchange with people in the network. I was working in small format video in 16mm pictures primarily and cable TV. The distribution of film and video is of course the hardest part of it. Setting up my own shows; performances, video and film exhibitions, required a lot of correspondence. It required correspondence with people who were doing "correspondence art", by that, or other names. So I naturally got into it. I also have been doing rubber stamps for many, many years. I was cutting my own stamps in the 60's, and then in the 70's, because I was in Vancouver, I wasn't able to make stamps very easy because they were expensive. Back in Japan I bought stamps and found out ways to make them cheaply. Between video and being involved with artists here and there, the mail art discipline arouse. I went to Japan in 1980 and was invited to teach video. From there I published a collage publication which was mostly clippings from English publications in Japan and throughout Asia. Many of them picturesque misuses of English. Or articles about sex crazied High School teachers who do naughty things to their students. I was living in Western Honcho which is called Kinki, so the publication I called the "Kinki Nippon KooKoo". Then being in Japan, first from 1980 to 1984 and being in Thailand, working for the Government of Thailand from 1984 to 1986, naturally meant that I was out of touch; I couldn't have a lot of communication with Western artists. So mailart really flourished, my expression really flourished because I found it necessary to maintain the intellectual exchange and the conceptual connection with artists in other places. Whereas, if you live in San Francisco, or even Austin, you can pick up the phone and have a conversation very cheaply. I couldn't do that. In Osaka there were very few Westerners. Actually at any given time there are very few Westerners involved in any sort of contemporary artistic expression in Japan. They don't stay. They may come and do shows or do events, but they don't stay because there is no way to make a living, You have to be an English teacher. I happen to have a degree in linguistics, so thank God this has been my ticket for survival the past 30 years almost. Also I like to teach. I like the students and it is a way to quickly to find ones way inside a society. You can penetrate any given society anywhere in the world if you are a teacher, because you are performing a viable service, if you are a language teacher. I did that in Japan and Thailand and now doing that here in Indonesia. Whereas, if you are a visiting artist, you are in their eyes a tourist. In Japan I taught video as well as made video. I just happened to get there at the point in which Shozo Shimamato, who was a seminal figure of the Gutai movement of the fifties, somehow had gone through a complete cycle of artistic expression by the late 70's and was looking around for something new. Being a really sharp observer of things as they are, he was kind of pissed off with the art he saw in Japan, which is very ritualized, mannered, following literal clumsy fashion so that the form would be there, but the content minimal. He didn't like being involved with that. I showed up three months after he opened up Art Space, also known as Artist's Union or Art House. It's located between Holbe and Osaka just off of the national railway line. It is a very large building with a office space below. On the second floor is a small room, which is used as a classroom, and a large exhibition space with a tall ceiling, and a coffee bar. On the third floor a storage area with small rooms in it. I showed up one day with an introduction and started talking about mailart. They had never heard of mailart as a thing of itself. Shozo became enthralled with the idea and seized the initiative and began publishing his AU poster and newspaper. Which is now on it's 100th or so issue. He pays for everything like all the publishing, which in Japan is very expensive. He is a professor of art education at Kyoto University of Education which is primarily a women's University for training teachers; that's his gig. But he puts a lot of money into the activities of AU, because there is no government or foundation money for art in Japan. There is no way to sell anything. Very few artists manage to sell anything in Japan as a matter of fact. I did a number of performances and became involved in making color prints with the earlier version of the Canon color copy machine. I spent literally thousands of dollars at Canon and taught English there also in order to sort of worm my way into the company. I showed up at the business copy center and lay raw squid and flowers and things onto the machine and make collage prints. This was the kind of thing I would show at AU. I also helped them to a certain extent get set up and I was involved with the Chris Burden visit; the "Burden of Christ" showed up, and made a real spectacular asshole of himself. Showing no sense of gratitude or understanding of Japanese culture and communication. Just being a Californian superstar nerd. Shozo appreciated all of this and we got along very well. He is a rather old fashioned Japanese man in his 50's who embodies, as far as I'm concerned, the very best aspects of old Japan. The art scene in Japan seems to have a lot of sophisticated, loose, sleazy characters who are not pleasant to be with. Whereas Shozo is a model. He does what he says he will do and does it well. He is extremely helpful to people; students, visiting artists, journalist, the public and has made the center something from nothing. I was involved with a performance that AU did at an art village. They had a huge crane that extended an arm out so that various artists were lifted and hung in the air. I did a Zen meditation for New Years up there. I got my picture taken for the newspaper. Shozo was able to get publicity out for Artists Union. Ryosuke Cohen, who also was a painter, drinker, man about town, but not a very happy guy, began to get involved with mail art. I think I was probably the main inspiration for that, just being there at the moment at the right time. He used to spell his name "Kooen". I told him, "Look, you're a big heavy set fellow, with a big banana nose, and you sort of look Jewish, why don't you call yourself Cohen, and maybe people will think you are part Westerner." He did this, and there was this delightful confusion which has arisen ever since. Brain Cell has been quite successful. These people, the ones at AU, are very unlike most Japanese artists, who tend to be extremely clique and feudalistic and suspicious of other groups. The art scene in Japan is really terrible. What is happening is confined to either loners or a few people in groups who are doing things very well, but have problems getting them out. The stuff you see in the galleries and magazines is astonishingly abysmal considering the state of Japan, the economy, and the rest of the civilization today. They have a very hard time, because they are raised in this militaristic mentality. That's why I call it a "Please" State. It's a cooperative "Please" state. "Please come over", "Please sit down, and now all together now","Oh, Johnny, you are doing your painting differently than everybody else, why don't we do ours all the same". When you are raised this way from age 3 or 4, in a very confined, regimented, and conformist way, and then at age 18, you are told, "Be creative". What are you going to do? Well, you are going to do what you do, but you aren't going to be creative that's for sure, not originally creative I mean.

N D: You have lived in Indonesia and have lived in Thailand and Japan. What sort of impressions do you make of this part of the world, and what sort of environment is it for doing your film and artwork?

BB: I choose to live in the Third World mainly because I prefer the nature of human discourse. Not the content, but the quality of human relationships. I don't like the way people are treating themselves and one another in the West. Especially in the big urban centers. I spent a year and half of hell in New York City, finally asking myself, "why am I here?", then trying to escape. Seeing how people are abusing each other and generally not respecting anything; not really expressing any sense of joy, wonder, surprise or social grace. Then I came to Indonesia which is a very secure dictatorship politically. There are no politics here. Politics is a dead issue here. The dictator has been in power here for the past 25 years. He's very securely in power; all the opposition has been crushed or silenced. The economy is growing reasonably well. But, there is no contemporary artistic expression. Classic cultural forms do well. Contemporary cultural expression has to come from Indonesians who have traveled overseas and when they come back they find that they have changed so much because of their experiences. There is a huge gap and they find that they can not communicate with their fellow Indonesians here. I like to live in the Third World also because of my own personality type has been effected so much. I'm 49 years old. Since the age of 22 I have been spending a lot of time either living in Asia or living with Asians in Vancouver, primarily Japanese, Filipinos and so on. My own personality type seems to get along better with Asians than Caucasians. In a way, I think I have been formed in the fashion similar to those Americans who went to Europe in the 1920's and '30's, the Getrude Stein bunch. They found that when they got back to North America they didn't fit in, because they had been changed so much by the experience of living in Europe, that they were marked. Somehow they were different. Now that is taken for granted. Especially with the very rich, and are very urban Euro Americans. The same is happening now with Asians. You have people like me who, speak fluent Japanese or Thai, and they know how to get along in these societies; spending half or more of their lives in the Asia Pacific region. So they are naturally affected by that. People look at my face and say, "Are you part Japanese?" For a long time I thought it was because I spoke the language so well. Then one day I realized what has happening to my face. When I was in Latin America, I was teaching elementary Japanese to some immigrants from third generation Japanese, who were pure blooded Japanese, but who didn't quite look Japanese. Then I realized that it was expression. For example, smiles; the Japanese smile a lot, so you strengthen the musculature of the face, around the eyes which is used for smiling. Whereas, Latin Americans tend to keep a poker face, so consequently they have flat looking faces. Although the face is Japanese physically, it has been developed in a Latin American fashion. In a similar fashion, I since the age of 22 have been speaking Japanese, acting Japanese, and using Japanese expressions so my face has actually changed. I look somehow different; part of what makes it impossible for me to live and fit in North America, assuming I wanted to live there, which I don't. There is also the fact of growing up as a homosexual in the USA in the 1950's. Which is to say growing up as a kind of spy figure, secret agent paranoia. Knowing that I could be sent off to prison or worse. I can recall people getting frontal lobotomies because their parents were sure they were crazy. Then you come to Asia and find out it is a non issue. People don't approve of it, if you asked them point blank. People are supposed to get married, be normal and have children, because these are conformist societies. But if you just keep your mouth shut and do what you do, you find that people accept you and they don't question you and you can get along quite well. I always have ,since 1963 when I first went to Japan, and found a number of lovers with people to exchange with and enjoy time with and not have that paranoid aspect that you do in North America. People in Vancouver would probably be saying, "Byron only stays there because he can get off with the boys", and it's not that simple. It's kind of in a way like being a Black in Africa. It's not a good analogy, but your not an African, but an American, you don't basically fit in. Here I've learned that you don't try to fit in, you just be a polite person, be the Western guest and that's what I am here. The fact of sexuality just does not come up. You do what you do and people except you. If they say, "yes", fine, if they say "no", fine. But, there is no sense of living a secret life. And with the current plague upon us, it is also very welcome to come to a place where this is not an issue. In North America, by making it a big issue, it has been nice and not nice. It's nice because it is out in the open finally and people will somehow have to deal with it. But at the same time you've blown your cover haven't you? So there is none of this, "these two bachelors are sharing a flat together" - nonsense. Anybody who is not married is under suspicion. People are so hip and aware of everything. You can't have someone's child on your knee without thinking, "I better be careful where I touch this child". This is just a natural outgrowth. And it is really sick American paranoia as far as I'm concerned. First it was killer bees then it was Iranian hostages, child molesting and then the war in Iraq and will be something else next week. But it has created such an atmosphere of fear and poison that I'm glad not to be there frankly. The drawback to living here, or even to a certain extent Japan, is the tremendous intellectual void. People here are interested in Michael Jackson. They are not interested in what is happening with the New York art scene, music, or experimental video. Modern art is difficult to access. They don't want to work hard for things. I have given up trying to get people to understand what I'm doing here, in part because it is guaranteed to fail. What I miss very much is intellectual exchange and stimulation with the ideas of others and finding out what other artists are doing; which is next to impossible in this part of the world, with the exception of mail art, which is still limited. The channels are just not here. That is why when I get back I tend to launch at people and hungrily discuss things for hours, because I'm starved for that kind of intellectual exchange. It's unfortunate. I'm starved for cultural exchange. It is too bad. This is the fifth largest country in the world with a 170 million people; It is pretty bare. With Thailand the people are pretty satisfied with their own culture. They take foreign ideas, concepts, and styles and integrate them in Thai society, but in a very casual paint by the number fashion. Classical art expression is very interesting in Thailand. Modern art expression is kind of a dead letter there, or here, or Japan for that matter. Then you have a place like the Philippines, which is so desperate economically, that people can't afford to do anything except survive. Or if they do have money, they try to flee either the country or flee into a wealthy lifestyle defending themselves against the poor. I have really been frustrated to even share my knowledge with my students, such as with videos or art. I brought all these art videos of my own, dubs of things I've got. Nobody wants to see them. I show them to people and they look, and they are trying to understand, but don't get it, haven't got it. I find it a very stimulating environment in spite of the inability to exchange concepts and to involve people in my work. I've been able to create a good body of work in every country I've been in, artworks that are primarily Western oriented, they are works created to a certain standard of my own. Probably works which require a Western aptitude of conceptual range to be able appreciate. The most recent long work is called "Cologia". It's a personal documentary I've created with a long time Filipino friend who I have known for 14 years, who happens to be in Indonesia right now. His village in the very northeastern most corner of the Philippines, Aparia, which is where there is a strong communist insurgency; kind of a slow motion breakdown and stagnation. Using the contacts of his family, we have gone in there several times, which is dangerous to do. I've managed to create a three to four hour personal documentary, which requires a lot of stamina on the part of the viewer. It is something along the lines of a thorough look through our eyes, Edie the Filipino and myself who knows the medium of video. A lot of contemporary social matrix that doesn't get the treatment in the popular medium.

N D: What got you interested in doing film and video?

BB: When I was twelve years old I had a little plastic hand viewer with a knob on the right that turned the wheel then the pictures began to move. I don't think I knew before that what made motion pictures - motions. It had a profound impression on me. I did photography from 1959,but I always wanted to get into film. I'm a self- taught film maker, making 16 mm from 1965. The first couple of years with enormous mistakes, you know the whole roll of film which didn't go through the camera, had it processed or opened it up and looked if it was processed, and it wasn't processed. But I taught myself and I've made films up to about 1979, when the Hunts, thank you very much, started to monkey with the price of silver and Kodak prices shot up. Meanwhile video was coming on stream as a good, cheap, portable, reliable compact color units. I was working with video since 1972, but was dismayed by its crudity, lack of editing ability, poor signal, lack of color, and no access to equipment. I've always tried to own my equipment, because I think it is important to have your own tools at hand. Borrowed equipment is never the same no matter how familiar you might be with it. I was a film maker for seven years before I ever touched video, so I started off making filmic kind of video tapes, Although my film is not a Hollywood format, I've always worked in experimental film. I've found documentary footage is for me infinitely preferable to things that are set up or staged, because of the limitless mystery of life, and the unpredictability which is around me.

CONTACT
Byron Black
PO Box 169
JKS 12001 Indonesia