Rachel Seligman: Where does the title of the show come from?

Tim Davis: It’s from a piece of sheet music that I bought in a junk shop called When We Are Dancing, I Get Ideas. At first, I misunderstood it. I thought it meant that I got my ideas from dancing. I didn’t realize it was an innuendo. Of course it’s as good an explanation as any about where ideas come from. Particularly for me, because my practice is about moving through the world and gathering things that I find. I’m used to anticipating the possibility of finding something interesting to say while moving my feet.

Being a photographer is like being an emperor with no clothes, because at the end of the day, you come back and you don’t actually have anything, you don’t have any stuff. You just have these collisions of your eyes with the visual world, and your latent images. But accompanying that, for me, has always been a kind of rhizome-like reach for other kinds of collecting. One thing I collect is records. I go into the bins at the junk shops and ask people that I meet if they have any old records in their garages. And in the course of that, I’ve collected other things. I find that there’s a lot of different ways to gather, to glean significance and meaning. The show is a series of these collections arrayed around my main collecting practice, which is photographic.

RS: This feels like an optimistic way of being. Have you always been an optimist?

TD: I think of myself as eternally optimistic. There’s a kind of virginal quality to each day for me. It’s like nothing existed before and I feel like I’m starting over, in a good way. But I’m not sure a lot of other people would describe me as an optimist. I mean, just today I was walking around photographing in Schenectady, and I met a guy. I said, “How are you doing?” and he goes, “You know, hanging in there. I can’t complain.” And I said, “Yes, you can. It’s your human right. It’s part of our DNA!”

RS: I’m interested in the intersection between your optimism and your capacity for the negative. How does that sensibility inform your work? I see a combination of incredible joy, playfulness, and optimism on one hand—and irony, an affinity with the lonely and the abject on the other.

TD: I just don’t know how to see the world without that kind of complexity. Complexity feels like an old-fashioned word in art, like some kind of art school thing: “I’m searching for complexity.” But it’s like reading James Joyce or Ezra Pound or something. For me, reading those authors was great. I thought, “wow, this doesn’t make any sense to me. Interesting! I like it. I’ll search further.” That feels old fashioned now. We’re in a world where we feel like we have to deliver something with clarity. But to me, there is no simplicity. Everything either has a weird aftertaste of something else if you linger with it long enough, or, it’s like a gobstopper. The world is just a gobstopper! You lick it and it tastes like one thing and then a little while later it tastes like something else.

RS: Earlier, you referred to yourself as a photographer. But you’re an artist who makes a lot of different things. Do you consider yourself first and foremost a photographer?

TD: Photography is one thing that I’m naturally gifted at. I can express myself to the fullest in photography with hardly any effort. Almost everything else is harder. The reason this show was such a great thrill was being able to step somewhat outside of what comes naturally and work in ways that are connected to my photographic practice but require a different kind of sense, you know, a different kind of song. These works come out of examining what else I have accumulated along the way and asking myself: why have I accumulated it?

RS: What do you see as the relationship between your photography and the rest of these works?

TD: The easy thing about photography is taking a picture. The hardest thing is knowing what it all means, where it begins and ends, and what it adds up to. The works in this show were all things that I could see the ends of before I started them. All artists eventually come to a point in a project where they have a vision of the end. Conceptual artists are supposed to be able to see the end before they start. The conceptual artist has the idea, and then they have to make the thing. These were projects where I didn’t have to build up a series of blind attempts before knowing the idea. These were things that maybe started as observations at some point, but before I’d ever made any of it, I had the idea and it was basically finite. In the field, I don't always have the idea framed beforehand, but I’ve always thought of myself as a conceptualist. I’m out in the world and then I see something, like the reflection of a McDonald’s sign off a house window. And I say, “I’m gonna make a picture of that, and if I make a series of those, I’ve got something.” There’s an idea there, and it develops from walking around.

RS: You started out by saying that you are a collector and that the exhibition is a collection of collections. What does it mean to be a collector?

TD: I guess a collector is somebody who has a hunger for significance, has a hunger for divining, and then for digging the well. They just really want to find it. I think finding it is half of the battle. Owning it, or making it into art or figuring out what it all means is another thing. But the hunger to search for it. That’s got to be a totally primitive hunting and gathering thing.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between a collector and a gleaner. Because I feel more like a gleaner, in that for the most part I am taking from somebody else’s production. Gleaners go into the fields right after the harvest and they take what’s left behind. I’m not making something out of whole cloth usually. I’m not making something that never existed before. That urge to gather something is important to me. And that seems to define everything about my life. It’s such a weird and complicated urge.

I think of everything I do as a kind of “groking,” which is from Stranger in a Strange Land1—a pure way of understanding something. Heinlein’s Martian word has the literal meaning of “drinking,” and to me it means drinking stuff in. And that’s what I do all day. I make photographs, and in between the eruptions of pictures, I write songs in my head. And I collect records, I make little art projects, I think about essays. I write about photography while I’m making it. I’m doing all this stuff at once.

RS: Music is clearly a huge aspect of your work and of your life. Can you talk a little bit about where that interest comes from?

TD: Music is something that I’m not naturally good at. But I think of it as being the religion of my life. It’s the thing that I’ve poured over the details of the most, that I can sit down with other old men and discuss the particularities of, for hours on end. I’ve never really had a religious practice, but thinking about music, listening to music, collecting music, is close to it. I come from a musical family. My father is a musician and I’ve been around musicians all my life. I started out making music by writing songs with my little brother. He would make up these crazy songs, like, “I’m the Weirdest Person in the World” and “Big Hair.” And then, even though I wasn’t trained as a musician, eventually, I started writing my own songs. I’m getting better and better at it. And I now have this band, and we practice a lot. If I had a life coach, they would tell me, “Don’t waste your time with this.” But I am increasingly spending more and more time with music.

Music is a communal thing. And being a photographer is very solitary. Even if you’re out in the world, it’s just you pressing the button. So it’s an interesting, incredibly joyous thing for me to be able to cede control. Music is also this incredibly relevant art form. It’s not something that feels specialized and separate from people’s lives. It’s so intertwined—people are listening to it all the time.

RS: How has music entered into your art making?

TD: I haven’t made any music that isn’t contingent upon something visual. I made the album It’s Okay To Hate Yourself, but I always knew that the real work was going to be the accompanying videos. And the songs I’m writing now are largely written while I’m photographing, and a number of them are about photography. This week, I’ve been writing a song called “The Acid Casualty’s Farfisa.” Farfisa is a great vintage Italian organ. Well, I was in this weird junk shop in upstate New York, and there was a Farfisa, and it was just scribbled all over with all kinds of crazy things, and I photographed it. And then I sent the photograph to everybody in my band, and the bassist, John Rosenthal, sent back a text, “It’s the acid casualty’s Farfisa.”

So while I was on this big photo expedition—I drove all the way to Rochester and back from Tivoli via back roads—I was driving along singing, “the acid casualty’s Farfisa, is missing almost half its keys-a.” So now I’ve got that, and that’s a song. It’s now evolved to be a song about things that I’ve observed in junk shops and antique stores, and the chorus is: And the Salvation Army band, is taking smoke breaks, when they can, to sit and watch us buy a little piece of the past, And so in a way, everything we’re describing is a little bit like if you move through the world, you generate friction, like sparks. You generate little sparks as you move through the world and things that you see and observe provide these sparks.

The video Counting In was an attempt to show that. They are mostly young people, just living the American dream of starting a band. There’s a vicarious thrill in it. I thought about making a self-portrait at one point, and I thought, “people make self-portraits, what would I do?” I thought about that Dylan record, Self Portrait.2 So, I made a self-portrait that is a bust made up of copies of that record. And you know, luckily, I did it in a time when you could still get them pretty cheap.

RS: Aren’t you single-handedly responsible for driving up the price of that album?

TD: Yeah, I did. It was written about in Freakonomics. How one person can affect the marketplace for something. It’s OK to Hate Yourself could have been its own show. I think a lot of people react to that piece much more enthusiastically than they do to everything else in the show. I think it has a really strong emotional content. The songs, in particular, were written at a very unhappy time in my life. So those songs are more personal in a way, and they have a little more pain in them than I’m currently experiencing. Also, it came at this time where I was shooting video. That happened not because I wanted to make video, but because they made a camera that could also shoot video, and everybody was talking about this camera, and everybody seemed to be getting one. So, I got one. And I actually didn’t really like it as a camera at all.

RS: For still photographs?

TD: Yeah. I didn’t like it at all. But the video quality was extraordinary. A couple of months ago, I was photographing in Rensselaer, which is a magical place. And I encountered one bizarre, beautiful thing after another. I was up around the top of the city in a residential area and I decided to go back down. As I start walking down the hill I hear a car alarm, and I turn around and there’s a car completely on fire. The car was just parked on the side of the road, and there was nobody around. And flames are shooting out. But there’s a moment in the middle of photographing this where I stop, because I’m making a new video called Symphony, about music, which is made up of musical things or sound things that have a visual component, and this thing was making a crazy noise. So, I’m trying to make the best possible picture of it, but I then have to turn the camera off and put it down and shoot video in the middle of it. And it was very hard for me to do. It was like talking in a completely different language in the middle of a sentence. I think I missed the best picture . . . because I switched.

RS: When you were making It’s Okay To Hate Yourself, you set out to make videos. Were there moments when you thought, “I should be taking a photograph here”?

TD: The basic structure of what I do is that gathering, collecting, and gleaning, but I can put different filters on my glasses as to what to look for. That was a year where I didn’t really make many photographs, because I didn’t like that camera. But I loved the way it shot video. I was at the house in Iowa where Grant Wood painted American Gothic. And I had my 4 x 5 camera because I was working on a different project. But I also had that other camera and there was a lawnmower going back and forth in front of American Gothic. And I thought, “I’ve got to take a film of that.” That started me thinking about what happens when you make photographs where there’s something moving around. And it was really fun, really special. It was like one of those dreams you have where you discover that there is another room in your house or your apartment that you didn’t even know was there.

RS: You said, in talking about It’s Okay To Hate Yourself, that a lot of people respond to that differently than some of the other pieces in the show, perhaps more emotionally. How is it that you manage to capture this quality of playfulness, but also poignancy?

TD: I just don’t know how to see the world in any other way. And my sense is that if everybody went with me and followed me around, they would feel that way too.

RS: I don’t know if that’s true.

TD: I wonder. If anyone had walked with me through Rensselaer the other day, and met the immigrant from Senegal who had a six-month-old baby in his arms and kept pigeons. And had seen him take a white pigeon out, and hold it with the baby drooling in the sun . . . he was so beautiful, and he was so sweet a person but also somebody who doesn’t have the easiest life. When you get out into the actual world, beyond statistics and beyond ideology, what you find is that people are complicated and that the world is beautiful and painful, all at the same time. And there just isn’t anything else. There are just gobstoppers everywhere.

RS: I know that if we were walking with you, and you stopped and saw that thing, then we would see it too. Because you say to us, look at this and see the essential nature of humanity, which is all of this complexity. But without you as our guide, I worry that we just walk right on by.

TD: That’s hard for me to understand. When I made the music videos I would meet somebody, and I would put the camera, which looks like a still camera, on the tripod. Then I would say, “I want to take a portrait of you, but I have to go get something out of my car, hold on a second, I forgot something.” And then I would just leave the camera rolling and they didn’t know it. And I was gone like five or ten minutes and the person would just kind of stand there and be completely relaxed. That was probably on the verge of being unethical. I could see how somebody would say that it was unethical. On the other hand, these people were all beautiful, amazing, vivid people. And I never made them look bad. I mean, there’s a woman who’s clearly been beaten up in one of them and that image is in a song that’s about heartbreak and the complex beauty of femalehood. Overall, the process that I really believe in as a photographic artist is that we find analogies for our inner world in the outer world. I think it’s healthy. It keeps people sane.

RS: There is plenty of humor in your work and some of your work is very funny. Why is it that most artists are generally afraid of humor in their work?

TD A fear of not being taken seriously. But do we have to make a distinction between comedies and tragedies in Shakespeare? Not really. The comedies are filled with tragedy and tragedies are filled with comedy. There’s no real reason to distinguish. Artists think they have to be taken seriously.

RS: Why?

TD: I don’t know. I think it’s stupid. You know how you have friends who are overly serious and ponderous and take themselves too seriously. You don’t want to hang out with them, you don’t want to invite them over to dinner.

RS: They’re not the life of the party.

TD: I’m not going to go camping with those people. We all navigate the world through humor, everybody does. And yet most of that vanishes, it disappears. How many times in every person’s life have they saved a terrible situation with humor? Like making a child laugh who’s crying over something. So much of that stuff disappears. My first big cultural heroes were comedians: Steve Martin, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. I had their records, I memorized them. I knew Monty Python and Firesign Theater by heart. I think in my own life, it was a way of handling pain. I like art where I can feel the artist trying to reach me. Humor is one of the ways that you can sense the artist saying, “I got something for you.” And there’s a lot of art that isn’t like that.

RS: I’m interested in humor in art not being taken seriously. You said humor is this thing that has saved so many of us, and it brings us pleasure. Why then is it off-limits, as the subject of a work of art?

TD: Maybe for photography it’s all a vestige of some kind of older thing about the medium. I wrote this essay about photography and humor in particular, about how photographers have always felt second-rate. They need their own special galleries sometimes. Or like in the slide library at the Yale Art Gallery, there were categories like “Sculpture” and “Painting,” and then there were “Minor Arts,” which included photography.

RS: A little inferiority complex?

TD Yeah. I think with photographers, you have to measure up. I think there’s also a whole other thing, editorial photography, and the idea of a sense of purpose. And it has to be this self-righteous, concerned photography. I think that the comedians of the times are the philosophers of the times. Somebody like George Carlin, who is basically reckoning with the meaning of language. He’s somebody that if you really wanted to take a measure of what his cultural time was, you just listen to him. And it would tell you more than lots of essayists. And today, it’s people like Dave Chappelle—he had these two comedy specials last year that were just deeply profound. And delivered in a way that’s consumable. That’s another complicated thing. Humor and music are ways in which the delivery system of the work is a little bit more palatable.

RS: Why do you think narrative is important for us as humans and how is it also maybe our downfall?

TD: I don’t believe that it's possible to experience the world in a nonnarrative way. There is no way to experience language without narrative. If you randomly pick up any two words and you put them together, no matter how disjunctive they are, you create a little narrative. They bounce off of each other and they create friction and bonds start to form between them. I also believe very strongly that narrative is the thing that makes us human as opposed to animals. I really believe that storytelling is what makes us who we are. And art comes from that.

RS: What are your thoughts on the American dream?

TD: It’s alive and well! I feel super patriotic about America. Part of it is that everything I do is a little bit contingent on the fact that nobody is paying much attention to much of what’s going on, in that we don’t live in a codified culture where you know what your place is. I feel privileged and special to be able to pay attention to the things I pay attention to. The American dream is a little bit dependent on a kind of alienation where you don’t know your place. I have never felt like I really had a home. I never felt that I necessarily had a people. I’ve never had any money and I’ve never had too many connections. But I’ve always felt like I can make whatever I want to make out of whatever I can get a hold of. And that feels really thrilling.

RS: I consider the subject matter of much of your work to be the American dream. Do you see it that way?

TD: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been really surprised at all the discussion about religion in this country and yet I don’t think this is a profoundly religious place compared to other places. And I don’t think that even the people who are claiming to be religious really are. But I think it’s obvious that the most powerful religion is daily life; the pleasures of daily life and that people know how to enjoy themselves and take comfort in small acts of daily existence. I am drawn to places that are not succeeding by traditional measures of the American dream necessarily. In a way, despite everything that’s said about Americans being lose-minded and self-interested, the reality is that we live in this open way where we’re available and can be seen by lots of people—on our front porches and in our suburban back yards and most people don’t have a fence. That’s my American dream.

RS: How would you characterize this exhibition?

TD: It’s a kind of fun house with lots of sensory information—maybe a little overstuffed. There’s an aspect of the humor in it which is a little unsettling. I don’t mind making somebody feel a little bit uncomfortable. For example, Uneasy Listening is both funny and a bit difficult to listen to. These things might not all be the most profound things in the world, but they feel really important somehow.

RS: Sometimes you are showing us things that might not be the most important things in the world but they are really important for us to see.

TD: Cleverness is something I value. And it’s another thing that’s marginalized and considered kind of louche. But it’s really important. The grave rubbings, for example. If you’re walking through a graveyard and some of the names are funny, you should do something with that. If you really want to explain who I am as an artist, here it is: He’s in a graveyard, he sees a funny name and thinks, “I want to make a grave rubbing of this.” I’m a photographer, so my initial instinct would be to take a picture of it but then I thought, “you know, I can use a cultural form that already exists to make something that will totally upset our expectations.” It’s definitely not being proper, right? It’s not the reverent thing to do to laugh at somebody’s name. And yet, in the show, there’s also my own gravestone. My own funny gravestone, that I made because I wouldn’t want it any other way. Do you want people to cry for the rest of their lives that you’re gone? No, you don’t. You want them to remember you with the joyous things and the things that make you laugh.

1 Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961).

2 Bob Dylan, Self Portrait, Columbia Records, 1970, Vinyl LP.