Rascals and Saints
Ruttkowski;68
September 1–22, 2024
Paris
A late friend of mine, Alastair Reid (1926–2014), a Scottish poet and a scholar of South American literature, once told me about Robert Graves, the author of the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both published in 1934) who once was asked how he manages to write such massively popular historical novels while maintaining his work as a poet. His response was, “Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.” Having met Matt Dillon through our mutual friend the painter Richard Jacobs over a year ago, I realized this ever-complex multidisciplinary artist is simultaneously an actor, a film producer and director, a writer, a musician, a collector of art and vinyl records of jazz and Afro-Cuban music, and above all a painter with equal passion and seriousness. Those of us who have read Sir Isaiah Berlin’s classic essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” know it was written to be an intellectual game, yet countless many in academia took it seriously. The hedgehog describes an intellectual or artistic personality or temperament for whom everything is conceived of and judged by one single perspective, as opposed to the fox, for whom the world cannot be boiled down to one singular point of view.
Whatever our goals or ambitions are in life, there are many paths: for some it may appear as clear as the daylight though it requires them to be highly focused on one singular objective by avoiding all unnecessary distractions which can distract them or simply slowing them down in getting close to the finishing line. For others, the thrill of divergences is considered an essential part of their journey—as in the legendary Jonas Mekas’s nearly five-hour-long epic As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), which testifies precious personal celebrations and joys in daily life—and the non-eventful occurrences can be seen as beautiful distractions. I recently spent a good few days re-watching many of Matt’s known films, including three of four S.E. Hinton book adaptations—Tex (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), and The Outsiders (1983); leading to Drugstore Cowboy (1989), The House That Jack Built (2018); and watching for the first time the two films Matt directed City of Ghosts (2002), and El Gran Fellove (2020). All that said, I must confess Matt’s many roles as a rebellious teenager, as were written with empathy from broadly teenage perspectives by Hinton in her novels, did broaden my greater understanding of the generation of teenagers I was newly adopted into when I first arrived with my family to Northeast Philadelphia, right next to Bensalem Township of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Like the rest of many immigrants who made their new home in the US, mine was no exception. The only pleasure I should mention, having struggled for so long to find my own voice in life, is finding ways to contribute to this free and open society I love in spite of its endless imperfections. On the occasion of his first solo exhibit, Rascals and Saints, at Ruttkowski;68 in Paris (September 1–22, 2024), I paid Matt a lengthy visit to his Upper West Side studio in late July to see what he was making, then Matt came to Rail: headquarters in mid-August to have this lengthy conversation about his life and work as an artist of all colors. The following is an edited version for your reading pleasure.
Phong Bui (Rail): The last time that I visited your studio, you said a few things that struck me as a self-discovery. You said that your mistakes are better than your ideas. You also confessed that you’re not a precise painter but if you can feel the weight of an image, how it sits in space, then the painting is true to you. Can you elaborate further on these two remarks?
Matt Dillon: For me figuration doesn’t have to be anatomically precise or to obey the rules that representational art prescribes. I believe you can break those rules as long as you can feel the gravity, the weight of things.
I got that from the drum. I started playing congas years ago. I’m more of a bad student than a real drummer but I got hooked on rumba, guaguancó and all that. I had some great teachers like Eddie Bobè, a mad Puerto Rican rumbero from Brooklyn who was always going on about time and space. We would start a one hour session and it would end eight hours later. It was crazy. This went on for a long time. Eddie would say funny things like “Don’t hit the drum, it will hit you back.” Rumba gets under your skin. So I started a series of collage and drawings of fictional rumberos with names like Gabino and Lefty, and there was familiarity in drawing these guys; I knew what it felt like, what it sounded like, more than what it looked like. From my fingertips to the full palm of my hand, the slap, the muff the tone or the hand resting on the drum. If I can feel the weight of the figure, then I can also feel the weight of the picture. I like to keep things messy.
Rail: Do you think it’s your way to rebel against your family’s artistic background? I mean your grandmother and your father were portrait painters. Your great uncle was Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon.
Dillon: Yeah, and his brother Jim Raymond was also a cartoonist, who took over the comic strip Blondie, after Chic Young’s eyesight had failed around 1950. That whole side of the family were artists, so that was what I was exposed to as a kid. My father wasn’t formally trained but was very classical in his style. “Dark values first,” he would say. He never discouraged me from what I was doing. However we were very different. I was looking at everything. Back in the early nineties I met and became close friends with the art gallerist Patrick Painter. He had a gallery in LA as well as Patrick Painter Editions out of Vancouver where he made incredible editions with Jeff Wall, Richard Prince, and Ed Ruscha, etc. We shared an apartment in LA for three or four years. Through Patrick I began to embrace art as the result of ideas. Conceptual art, etc. In some conceptual art circles painting would be dismissed as nothing more than “pretty pictures” but not with Patrick. He showed a lot of great painters. He gave André Butzer his first show in the states. He was way ahead. Mike Kelley was there. Mike was intense, he had a wealth of energy and liked to debate. He was brilliant. Everyone knows Mike had a great brain, but he had a great heart too. I would go see these shows with him and I always felt smarter whenever I left. Patrick would try to get me to do a collage show in Tokyo! Never happened. I’ve always kept sketchbooks, making drawings and collages, photos, for years, whatever I could fit in my luggage. There were long periods where I made no work. I felt I had nothing to say. And then boom, I remember about ten years ago, I was at a friend’s place, and they had a big kitchen table with crayons and paper on the table for their kids, and I started to doodle. I started to remember how much I loved making images. Soon my kitchen counter became the studio. I was doing mostly collage with drawing and painting, but I didn’t really embrace oil until I rented a studio near my home around 2016.
Rail: How would you describe the differences between how certain images arrive quickly, painted fairly thinly, and those that seem to have lived through endless revisions, with surfaces that are more built, thickly painted?
Dillon: Sometimes the first thought is the best thought. You just bang it out and there it is. But a lot of times it takes countless wrestling matches. I’m more of a rewriter. Either way, I’ve learned to trust it both ways, as long as I don’t let my obsessive tendencies get me, and I can walk away from a painting and call it done. But it’s not up to me to decide when it is. Just like it’s not up to an author of a book or a film to decide what the character does next. Like falling in love, being in love, like a film performance or a piece of writing: if the feeling is sustained throughout you can let it go, whether it’s a fast painting or a slow painting.
Rail: I thought what Andrew Woolbright observed about your work regarding those two tendencies was interesting: “Impasto is just a hair’s breadth from imposter, and it keeps the heckling voices of each painting that could-have-been present as a rabble chorus.”
Dillon: I like what he said about elements of a painting speaking out of turn—Rascals and Saints.
Rail: Later he wrote, “[your] works are meant to be felt, more than read.”
Dillon: It’s good to start with something and then let yourself get lost, and I’m very much okay with it when a painting fails. I just scrape it off or go over it. In some cases, I start to do one thing, but it turns into something else. For example, the painting Expeditionnaire (Tom Crean) (2024) started off as a portrait of Ella Waldek, a female wrestling champion of the 1950s. How the portrait of a woman wrestler became a male explorer is beyond my control. There is another painting in the show called King Vitamin (2023); it’s a painting that was based on a series of black and white linocuts I made for a show in Leipzig a few years ago. I was reluctant to do the linocuts at first because of the constraints of the medium, but I found working monochromatically helped me with composition and the use of negative space.
Rail: Which brings me to my next question about the use of repetition in the three paintings Seated Figure 1, Seated Figure 2 (both 2024), and Seated Figure 3 (2023), all of which share an identical silhouetted image, however the first two are painted with one color, say blue for the image against a white background, and then reversely white against a red background—yet both are the same in dimensions, 48 by 60 inches—as for the last one it was painting white against black background?
Dillon: Normally I would get bored with just doing one thing, that’s why I bounce around a lot. I don’t do a lot of series works. But every once a while, I can get very focused on just one thing. These black and white silhouetted images were born from my experience working on Zoetrope: All Story—a quarterly literary magazine founded by Francis Ford Coppola—I was invited to be the guest designer for the Fall 2022 issue [Vol. 26, No. 3]. It was a lot of work, but I loved it. They give you total freedom.
Rail: How would you describe the opposite of the rather implicated simplicity of flattened painted silhouetted images (as the “Seated Figure” paintings)? I mean the more overtly painted figures like, for example, The Caseworker (Peter Lorre) or say In the Radiance of The Lord (both 2024)?
Dillon: A painter friend of mine in Rome was looking at my work once and said “You have two souls.” And he’s not wrong in one sense. Sometimes I’m looking to find a character in the work with a narrative or some element of story without sacrificing the atmosphere or losing the sense of mystery. Very much like in film. However, in painting I’m not limited by plot or character logic. Things don’t have to add up. For example, I can’t tell you anything about that Peter Lorre movie from which the image comes. Because I don’t even know the title of the film. I got it out of an old Italian movie magazine. The image struck me as something comedic that I could draw well, so I tore a page out of a book called The Case Worker and drew the image on it with a grease pencil, and later I did it as a large painting and I called it The Caseworker. Sometimes in the movies if you’re lucky, you get all the complexities, the richness of the characters, the atmosphere and mystery, and so on, all in one, without compromising. I felt that working with Lars von Trier.
Rail: Would you say the same for Coppola’s Rumble Fish?
Dillon: Rumble Fish was the film that Francis really wanted to make. Perhaps more than The Outsiders—he was co-writing the script for Rumble Fish with Susie (S.E. Hinton) while filming The Outsiders. It was amazing how fast it all came together. He had us all watching old films as research. He set up a screening for me of Yojimbo in the high school gymnasium in Tulsa, where the production office was. We watched The Last Laugh, a silent film starring Emil Jannings. Francis loved the fact that the character of the Motorcycle Boy, played by Mickey Rourke, was colorblind. He was really creating his own language but not without influence.
Rail: That was the reason why the whole film was made in black and white except for when the short segments of the Siamese fighting fish appeared in colors.
Dillon: Well, you know, you bring up color, it’s interesting because I remember when I was doing Drugstore Cowboy and Gus Van Sant and David Brisbin the production designer came into the costume fitting. They started to talk about the color scheme of the film, blue and green. I remember thinking that I was not going to have my character’s wardrobe dictated by a color scheme. There were a pair of blue and green bell bottoms hanging on the wall—the film was set in 1971, but this was 1988, and bell bottoms weren’t happening then. I didn’t get the idea of a color scheme. But those pants were still staring at me for three days straight and I ended up wearing them in the film. And then, of course, when I directed my own film, I was totally into the idea of a color scheme. And then with Lars in The House That Jack Built, there were only six or seven things colored red, nothing else was allowed to be red. During each incident in the film there is a red object: the car jack, the grocery trolley, the thermos and then, of course, the van. When I think of the film the color is overwhelmingly red.
Rail: Of course, every killer has a van.
Dillon: So those things were part of a color scheme. Anyway, to your question about why The Caseworker (Peter Lorre) was painted in a green color scheme and In the Radiance of the Lord painted in black and white—well, except for a bit of Naples Yellow in the bottom area. I can have a lot of color on some occasions, but I don’t oversaturate. I don’t really know how Asger Jorn used so many colors in his paintings. It’s incredible.
Rail: I don’t either, except for the fact that he did go to Paris to try and study with Kandinsky. And Kandinsky, as you know, had something to say about the inner meanings of color.
Dillon: That makes perfect sense.
Rail: Is it fair to say that you think tonally yet flatly at the same time?
Dillon: I’ve never thought of it, but maybe you’re right.
Rail: Just to change the subject a bit here: I had dinner with Paul Schrader not long ago at the home of my friends David Meitus and Angela Westwater, and he spoke of the immense influence that Pauline Kael had on his early career as a film critic. Do you remember Paul’s book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, which argued beautifully for films as works of art, not spoon-feeding products that condescended viewers calculatedly? I learned Paul was among others who were associated with Pauline Kael, including Roger Ebert, Terence Rafferty, James Wolcott—
Dillon: And David Denby.
Rail: Yes, and they all were known as her “Paulettes.” Pauline Kael had written a positive review of Tex (1982), the first of the S.E. Hinton trilogy, as she wrote on your performance “mysteriously effortless charm … a gift for expressing confused and submerged shifts of feeling.”
Dillon: To be honest, I never read reviews as an actor, but I do when I direct, because then I’m responsible for the whole film. As an actor you are playing a role and have a responsibility to the character, but that’s your department, like every other department on the crew has a specific role. But the director technically doesn’t do anything specific and yet makes all of the decisions in the end, unless someone takes it away and butchers it. If as a director I made all the decisions, I can take the heat if a critic doesn’t like the film or whatever they have to say. By nature I don’t make compromises that easily. When I shot City of Ghosts in Cambodia my mantra was “Don’t compromise” and what I mean by that is, if you have to change something, don’t settle for something less. Stay flexible, but make sure it’s at least as good as the thing you started with. You end up inevitably compromising a little bit. Even in the beginning you do in the writing. It sometimes comes down to, “Hey do you want to get your film made or not.” Thankfully I like storytelling in the spirit of classic cinema, I like a good old fashion yarn, like the way Sam Fuller told stories in film. We referenced him a lot while making City of Ghosts. Especially House of Bamboo with Robert Ryan, which is one of my favorite films. Robert Ryan at his pathological best. When I couldn’t make up my mind about what to do or where to put the camera, I would ask “What would Sam Fuller do?” And then take it from there.
Rail: Matt, would you consider yourself a self-taught artist?
Dillon: As an actor I studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute for a few years when I was in high school, but as an artist, I guess—but is anybody completely self-taught? I’ve picked up a lot along the way.
Rail: Didn’t you also drop out of high school?
Dillon: Well I never got my diploma, so I guess the answer is yes. Norman Rockwell went to that same high school and he didn’t he didn’t get his either.
Rail: And neither did the legendary Captain Beefheart, also known as the great painter Don Van Vliet.
That’s right, and his brilliant rotating ensemble the Magic Band. Throughout his music career he remained deeply interested in visual art, and by the mid-1980s he completely abandoned music and took up painting until his death in 2010.
Dillon: I only saw the two shows, one at Michael Werner, and the other at Knoedler—in what year… Do you remember?
Rail: In 1998. I saw them too.
Dillon: I love his paintings. They’re so loose and messy but with real power. Also Penck! Great examples of the potential for failure being a crucial part of the creative process. Just to go back to Lars: on the set he had these little notes printed up everywhere that said in Danish slang, “Husk go Shusk,” which basically means “remember to keep it messy” or to “remember to draw outside the lines.” I carry that with me into the studio.
Rail: That came across nicely in your interview in Interview Magazine with Rachel Harrison on her survey (Rachel Harrison Life Hack, October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020) at the Whitney. I love how she spoke with admiration for Chris Burden, when she came across his work in art school, including his famous Shoot (1971), Five Day Locker Piece (1971), and Deadman (1972), which essentially changed her life.
Dillon: His work fucked me up too. I love his work, as I do with his wife, Nancy Rubins, who makes insane works.
Rail: I absolutely feel the same way. You and Rachel also spoke with mutual admiration of Martin Kippenberger in the same interview.
Dillon: We did. He died too young.
Rail: Yes, at the age of forty-four.
Dillon: I heard that when he was in Italy he started a series of paintings and said he wouldn’t stop until he was hired as an actor. He wanted to become an actor?
Rail: He did. He also had a punk band, ran a nightclub, even ran a gallery. I love what he once said, “You may behave like an asshole, but you must never be one.”
Dillon: I’m always pleased, or feel relieved, when I discover that I have empathy, you know? I forget sometimes. Something bad will happen to someone and I’ll feel nothing, then I’ll feel guilty that I feel nothing and start thinking, is there something wrong with me? Then later something else will happen and I’ll feel empathy and it’s a relief to know that you are not a sociopath.
Rail: And such empathy is somehow revealed in how a work of art is made. In painting culture, it’s all about how the paint sits on the canvas, how it gets moved around, and between forms, and how it above all relates to the image.
Dillon: I was talking to an artist friend of mine, Pascal Lemaitre about this—he teaches at the big art school in Brussels, I don’t know the name—about gestural, fast, expressive painting, and he said, “I hate when my students do that. If you don’t know where you’re going, why are you in such a rush?” [Laughter] He also said, “Getting old is boring but my line gets more interesting all the time.”
Rail: We can also say that there are those who may think very slowly, very thoughtfully, but paint fast. And likewise, there exist those who think fast but paint slow.
Dillon: It’s all in the rhythm which must come from the heart.
Rail: Which brings me to my next question: after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, you went to Havana to explore your deep love for Afro-Cuban music. And you came across Guapachá in one record store, the owner said, “If you love Guapachá, you will love Fellove,” whom you eventually met, then made a documentary film about him and his work. Can you tell us how such a project came about?
Dillon: I was blown away when I first listened to his music in the old records he made in the fifties. It mixed elements of Afro-Cuban rhythms, scat singing and bebop. I made a tape of his music and sent it to my friend Joey Altruda, an upright bass player and band leader in Hollywood, who has the same taste in music as I do. It happened very organically. It was 1999. We learned that Fellove was living in Mexico City. Joey tracked him down and I went to film the making of the record. I didn’t know I was going to tell his life story, but this was on the heels of Buena Vista Social Club at the time and lots of the musicians in the film were his peers. When I got there, he knew nothing about me. He thought I was a member of the video crew, like a cable wrangler. But the more time we spent together his expectations grew. I knew in my heart it was a story I needed to tell but also that it would take forever to finish it. Back in the late forties Fellove was one of the founders of the Filin movement (which is the phonetic spelling of the word Feeling): a group of poor black and mixed race Cuban kids who dug American Jazz who would put together jam sessions and create songs. They were way ahead, very modern in their ideas musically. Maybe too modern. For socioeconomic reasons many Cuban artists left then, some moved to the US, to New York City. Many others, like Fellove, moved to Mexico. This film focuses on those who left.
Rail: Like how you invited Chocolate (Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros), who knew Fellove but had never played with him in Havana, to be part of the film.
Dillon: It was a birthday present for Joey, who had introduced me to Chocolate years earlier. Choco was someone who loved to laugh and have fun, a gift to be around, a great musician, who loved every single aspect of life through his music.
Rail: I love how his father said to him, “There are two things: Some people study music but the player studies the game. Are you a musician or are you a player?”
Dillon: I’m so glad you appreciate that because that was who Chocolate was. He was a player as a musician and a player in life. There is a distinction. I’d say the best thing about making this film, other than the music, was spending time with the musicians. So many fun characters I met. You really learn from listening, and in making documentaries you do a lot of that. I interviewed Robert Farris Thompson, the Yale professor and expert on African diaspora art. He wrote the book Flash of the Spirit as well as others. What a brilliant man. For his last book he was doing a deep dive into the origins of the Mambo from every possible angle. And there are many. There are ongoing debates about the Mambo, who created it, etc. I remember him saying “Fake Mambo is better than no Mambo.” I love it. Something being both fake and authentic. It reminds me of what my old drum teacher Eddie would say: “I’m not a drummer, I’m an actor playing a drummer.” And it resonated with me. I adopted that spirit. To step back and approach something from another direction. A way of tricking myself, to look at something through a new lens. Although I’m not sure how I feel about the actor playing the painter idea. It’s more about removing yourself and getting out of your own way.
Rail: Would it be fair to say then that what acting, directing, playing, and painting have in common is a sense of being surrendered to the spirit of spontaneity and improvisation?
Dillon: Yes, spontaneity is so important, something that can’t be replicated. It’s why von Trier doesn’t rehearse. Because you only get that first take once and in that take you are free to improvise because you can always do it again in a different way. With painting it’s the same.
Rail: The title Rascals and Saints suggests references to Jungian archetypes and masks as sublimations of your own eluding to being typecast or pigeonholed. It all makes sense to me now how the different pictorial tendencies are being deployed in this body of work. Can we both submit ourselves to the spirit of play now?
Dillon: Sure, I’m ready.
Rail: If we were to think of Carl Jung’s four major archetypes—the Persona, the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, and the Self—all cannot be observed directly but can be inferred by various events in our lives, including dreams, art, literature, and even religion. Expeditionnaire (Tom Crean), Dante (2024), Typo (2023), even T.V. Baby (2023) can be seen as various interpretations of the Persona, which represents all of the different social masks that we wear in different situations. The sole function of the Persona is to shield the ego from negative images, but when it appears in dreams it would take different forms.
Dillon: The Expeditionnaire was painted quickly. After I wiped away a face that looked like what my father would have done. It scared me. Harald Falckenberg, who was an ass kicker and a great collector, curated my first show in Berlin at Wiensowski & Harbord in 2021. He was against me doing any kind of interpretation of my own work. He shut me down, [laughs] but he himself liked to interpret it, which was fine with me. [Laughs] Harald was focused on this issue of the persona, the different faces in my work. Which he saw as masks. I remember having lunch once with William Friedkin, and we were talking about one of his films. He regretted choosing a location over an actor and said “The greatest location is the human face!”
Rail: It makes sense that it’s the location that provides the spatial surrounding and the atmosphere, which at times can be more if not equally as important as the story. In any case, do you think the use of various silhouetted images refers to the shadow, the dark side of the psyche?
Dillon: Are we still playing? [Laughs] Perhaps! For me, it’s also about how to create a shape that relates to something we have seen before and something we haven’t yet seen. It’s somewhere in-between that I’m interested in, and it can be very exciting because I feel it can be felt like a symbol of sorts.
Rail: Would the painting Riddle of the Raven (2024), depicting two animals in profile—one is a lion-like creature in the front facing the right, behind is a bird facing left—be potentially considered as The Anima/Animus?
Dillon: Why not? We all need to be in touch with our two sides, the masculine and the feminine parts of our beings. I mean, we need empathy, emotional connections with others, as well as practical, logical thinking that brings some form of stability. The wing in the center and the U comes from a piece I did years ago called Bantu U (2019): a painting of a Dahomey bird with university insignia on its chest. It made its way into the Riddle of the Raven for reasons that I can’t explain.
Rail: Where do the previous three archetypes lead to Jung’s last stage of the mutual integration of the conscious and the unconscious, namely The Self? I mean, is the center of consciousness also the center of personality?
Dillon: Well, one way to relate to my own stability, and for the sake of the painting’s equilibrium, I tend to center the images most of the time. The rest remains to be seen. I love what Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Once you label me, you negate me.” If curiosity is considered as a gift, then I’ll forever continue to be curious with joy, and not be tied down with the brevity of life.
