"Son, You'd better get it right" 2000
From tales of the life of Michel
Auder as told to Jeremy Blake, October 14 and 15, 2000
Q Where were you born? Michel Auder I was born in 1944 in
the north of France in a small, industrial town – it’s called
Soissons. When people ask about France they usually ask if you´re
from Paris, or from the south, because they don’t know the north
– or because they know that you don’t want to go where I
was born. People who know the place usually act like, like I was a coal
miner´s uh, a coal miner´s daughter or something like this.
But we left Soissons when I was four years old, and I was raised mostly
in a small, almost medieval town about an hour and a half south of Paris.
Q What are the strongest impressions you have from
your childhood? MA I was fairly alone, all the time. Our house was
basically in the woods. My backyard was like, one of Louie XIV’s
hunting grounds – and it was pretty much just as he left it. My
father had rented a house that was much more extravagant than he could
afford, and he was never there. We found out later that he had another
family in some other town.
Q When did you find out about the other family? MA My first wife Viva, she found out from my sister
when we visited her in Paris. I was probably twenty-eight by then. Both
my parents were very nice, you know, just not always around. I wasn’t
abandoned or anything like this. My mother was very sweet, but she was
often in Paris. My older sister married when I was eight, and moved
away. I walked twenty, twenty-five minutes to school by myself.
Q Somehow I don´t imagine you as a model student. MA (Laughs) Well, I didn’t have friends and I
couldn’t really get along at school. My parents couldn’t
really do anything to help me. The problem with the schooling I had
was that it was very old fashioned. I don’t think it had been
updated since the revolution. It was all memorization, and I didn’t
do well with that. In fact, I was usually last in my class. But I was
very quiet. I wasn’t making trouble, you know, physically. I wasn’t
a nuisance.
Q So your schooling was too conservative for you. Were
your parents powerless to help you because they were too old fashioned
as well? MA Not really. Actually my father was a Communist.
Not a party member, but very left wing for his own reasons. He worked
as an engineer, but he never paid his taxes, so he always got fucked
in the end by the government. They would come by every few years and
take all his money. That’s probably where I got the idea to go
to America. From him, but indirectly. Because he was always going on
about Russia.
Q Did you watch television or go to the movies? MA No. Never. We didn’t even have a phone. When
I got out of school each day I went into the woods, and started, you
know, dreaming about things. But I didn’t do my homework of course.
Q So you had no early exposure to film at all? What
about photography? MA My father had an old Rolleiflex in the house and
that kind of fascinated me but I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t
really see movies until I went to Paris. We got thrown out the house
the same year I finished school, when I was like, sixteen or something.
This was in, you know, ’60. My father hadn’t paid the rent
in a couple of years. So I went to Paris after that, and I began to
watch films. But really I started as a photographer. When I got to Paris
a friend of my sister said, ”You know Michel, you really should
do something.” The only thing I could think of to do that I liked
was to use the camera.
Q So you went to work as a commercial photographer? MA Yes, I started as an apprentice, and discovered
that I was very good. I worked very fast and I could basically see in
the dark. I opened my own studio around ’63 and I started to do
very well shooting fashion. I took my first trip to the States to work
with Hiro on a job for Harper’s Bazaar. I loved New York. I had
a fifteen-day visa, but I ended up staying for five months. I went to
the Fat Black Pussycat every night, you know, and I saw Taylor Mead
there for the first time.
Q Were you and Taylor introduced at that point? MA No, but I recognized him when I met him later because
Taylor is so fucking weird that you remember it all your life. Anyway,
after five months finally I went to immigration and said, ”I love
this country and I want to stay.” They said, ”Great! Fantastic!”
and then they sent me directly to jail. I was in the jail for immigrants
down on Broadway. In a few weeks they put me on a boat back to France.
As soon as I got back to Paris I found out that I had been drafted to
go fight in Algeria. Of course the government came after the dropouts
and the poor kids first. I lost the lease on my studio, my apartment,
everything.
Q Wait – you fought in Algeria? MA Not exactly. When I was drafted I was off working
in the States. Because I didn’t show up, they put an order out
for my arrest. My mother notified them when I got back – she was
worried they would hunt me all my life otherwise… They were going
to send me off to fight, but at that time my mother’s lover was
the bodyguard of the minister of the entire French Army. He stepped
in and had my orders changed so that I was in the photo and film division.
It was a very good assignment because you stayed in Paris and got to
go home at night. The unit was basically full of rich kids – well-educated
people. These rich motherfuckers were pulling up to the fort in their
Jaguars and shit like that. The only thing is that you had to be there
every morning at 6 am. Of course I could never be bothered to show up
on time. It was a good enough assignment for everyone else, but not
good enough for me. They threw me in jail few times, and finally when
they’d had enough of me they sent me to Algeria.
Q They sent you into combat as punishment? MA As a combat photographer, yes. But the idea was
basically to get me killed. This was in ’63, during the last big
fight for independence, and you had no business there unless you were
there to shoot someone.
Q Were you politically against the war, or did you
just hate the army? MA Both. I was not a Communist but I was very left
wing, very much against the war, and I was seriously disturbed about
the way I was drafted. I began to hate De Gualle and blame him personally
for all of these problems. I tried to make a statement by never changing
my clothes – I wore the dirtiest shirt I could stand – I
had long hair, and I refused to do anything that I was asked to do.
Very shortly after I got to Algeria, I was thrown in jail for visiting
a whorehouse. I didn’t mind because jail was the safest place
in the country at that point. The whole country was a bloody mess, and
there was deep conflict in the French army about whether or not the
war should continue. After three months in jail some general looked
at my case and said, ”What the fuck is that crazy long-haired
guy doing down here anyway? Send him back to France!”.
Q So you didn’t end up shooting any film during
your stint in the army? MA No.
Q When did you make your first film? MA I saw some movies by Roger Vadim when I moved to
Paris, and some other, you know, French guy kind of films. I hated American
films. French films at that time were extremely sexy, and I started
to get the idea that maybe fashion photography wasn’t enough for
me. I refused to do anything in the army as I said – but after
I got out I met a woman who gave me the money to make my first film.
I can´t remember her name.
Q Are you sure you can’t remember? MA Not right now. But I got a script from some writer
she knew called Anne Evadées Des Saisons. Anne was played by
a woman named Sabine Surget, a former Ms. France. She was my girlfriend
at the time – but the movie had nothing to do with Ms. France
or anything like that. It was a realistic character sketch, kind of.
On 16 milimeter. I didn’t follow the script for the most part.
It was never released. In fact, we lost it. It was at this point when
I first became an artist, although I didn’t tell anyone that I
was an artist until ’79 – in America. When I came back to
America, in 1970, you could meet Andy Warhol at a bar and if he likes
you he talks to you. That’s why I love America. In Paris at that
time it was so clubby that you couldn’t get mixed up with art
people unless you wanted doors slammed in you face all the time. This
was especially true for me because I am self-taught. Even so, independent
art film is what I was making from about ’64 on. I fell into it.
It was the only way I could do what I wanted with sound and image.
Q It sounds like you have always basically worked alone,
for your own reasons. MA Right. Well, I have collaborated with Gary Indiana
and so on. The only group I have ever participated in, even a little
bit, was Zanzibar. This was in the sixties, in Paris. These guys were
more like dandies, like me. Guys like Phillip Garrel, and so on. They
were very accepting of my work.
Q So between ’64 and ’70 you made how many
films? MA Probably six or seven, one hour long films. Everybody
was really reacting in this period to Godard, of course. He told his
own stories, and he was so free from the Hollywood system, the Hollywood
mentality. I shot my films myself, and I also edited them myself using
a hand-wound Moviola machine. These movies never had any synched sound.
Sometimes I would just use whatever was on the portable radio as my
soundtrack. I haven’t changed that much really since then. I have
always been a voyeur, but a voyeur with a very poetic sensibility. I
have always edited heavily, but not in an obvious way, you know. One
of early these films had beautiful Ectachrome footage of the protests
in ’68, shot of course from the point of view of the protesters.
They’re all lost, all of these films.
Q How did that happen? MA I put them in a Swiss film festival in ’69.
I was with Viva by then, and we moved to Rome and then to America, and
I never talked to the guy who organized the festival. Maybe he’s
dead now, who knows? In ’69 I didn’t care because I had
gotten some money from Sylvina Boissonas. She was a member of the Schlumberger
family and when she turned 21 she inherited some money from her grandmother
so she funded Zanzibar. She never told the group what to do with the
money. She didn’t want any control. So Zanzibar decided to throw
me some crumbs. Enough crumbs to finally make a film with synched sound.
This turned out to be Keeping Busy, starring Viva.
Q You met Viva in Paris? MA Yes. In ’68 there was a showing of Chelsea
Girls at Iolas gallery. I went in by accident and totally flipped –
I thought it was the best fucking film I had ever seen in my life. It
seemed to validate my own self-taught approach. Anyway, I remembered
Nico from that movie, and one night I saw her on the street with another
girl. I didn’t know her but I said ”Hey Nico! You want to
go to a party?!” She said ”Yea, sure!” The girl she
was with turned out to be Viva.
Q And you fell in love right away? MA We ended up getting together pretty much right away.
We left Paris for Rome in ’69 to make Keeping Busy, then to the
States in 1970, where we were married. We had a lot of money in New
York, after the book Superstar was published, so we lived like the fucking
Rolling Stones until the money ran out. I bought one of the first portable
video cameras with some of the money. I was in heaven with that thing
even though it weighed a fucking ton. I finally had image and synched
sound together, on the spot. Instant gratification!
Q So you moved from France to America, and from film
to video, and you never looked back ? MA Maybe I’m making this period sound like it
was all so easy, but it wasn’t – it wasn’t painless.
Like when the money ran out, we would be in the fucking street you know,
and we would have to put something else together right away.
Q Where did you and Viva get married? MA In Las Vegas.
Q Did you propose to her? MA No. We were living in LA at the time. We came out
from New York City because Viva was starring in a film called Lion’s
Love by Agnes Varda. Also, you know who wrote that film? Those two crazy
motherfuckers – the two guys who did Hair. Everybody on the set
was getting drugs sent to them in wooden boxes from Dr. Feelgood. He
was here, in New York.
Q You mean Dr. Robert? The guy in the Beatles song? MA Right. He made a special mix of speed, heroin and
Vitamin B-12. Motherfuckers were shooting this shit into their arms.
One night we were all at a very like, hot party thrown by Roger Vadim.
Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were there, like, probably a week before
she was killed. Jane Fonda was with Vadim at this time, and she was
in the kitchen using a dildo on herself like a choo-choo train…
Q Like a choo-choo train? Why did she leave this off
of the exercise tapes? MA (Laughs) She said like, ”Here comes the choo-choo,”
you know. So I was downstairs in the kitchen with Barbarella, and Viva
was upstairs with Roger. Driving home Viva got very upset and depressed
about all this fooling around and insisted that we drive to Vegas and
get married. I didn’t give a shit about the fooling around because
I’m a fucking voyeur, but I loved Viva, so that’s what we
did. We interrupted the Lion’s Love shoot to do it.
Q And you and Viva have kids right? MA I have one daughter with Viva, who was born in February
of 1971, and Viva has another daughter also that is like a daughter
to me. They´re both fantastic.
Q I was born in ’71 as well. The son of a runaway
choo-choo… MA Ah, so you’re young enough to be my son. Well
listen to me my son, you’d better get it right – every goddamn
thing that I’m saying! (Laughs).
Q You mentioned drugs on the set of Lion’s Love.
When did you start doing drugs? How did they effect your work? MA I didn’t really even smoke pot until ’67
or ’68. I really didn’t like it because I had been plaugued
by paranoia all my life and pot only made it worse. In ’68 I was
at a party thrown by this huge international drug dealer on a small
Spanish island called Formentera. They were giving out LSD and opium
at the gate. I pretended that I had done LSD for some reason, so they
gave me a lot. So I start getting high and my paranoia grew to a ridiculous
level. I heard laughter from the party and thought everybody was laughing
at me. I ran out into the fields and spent the night hiding the haystacks.
The hay was decomposing and it gave off like, 100-degree heat. It was
like a natural sauna so I began to relax. At sunrise I stumbled back
to the party, heard people laughing and realized that they were just
having fun of course. My childhood paranoia was almost gone after that.
I got other kinds of paranoia later.
I was a heroin addict from ’78 to ’86. This was my Prozac
really. It was mood control that I took so I didn’t kill myself.
I never used a needle. But none of these drugs ever affected my work
formally really. I think I have been fairly consistent in my interests
no matter what drugs I may or may not be taking.
Q Why would you have killed yourself otherwise? MA I was often very depressed, isolated, and I felt
like an outcast all my life. I took heroin thinking I could moderate
my intake, but that´s not the way it works – nothing comes
free, you know? But I had never had a problem with anything before.
This illusion of control is what the video My Last Bag of Heroin (For
Real) is all about. Junkies always say that each bag is the last one
they’re going to do. It just so happens though, that this was
my last bag. I made this tape in ’86 and forgot about it until
’88 when I was cleaning up the studio.
Q Don’t you think the fascination surrounding
junkies is a bit corny? Isn’t it corny to romanticize self-inflicted
damage? MA Like I said, for me it was self-medication, not
romance, although when I was young I was always intrigued by the idea
of the dandy, Baudelaire and so on. I would say that using heroin is
better than killing yourself, and it’s a great high of course,
but I never romanticized it. I was surprised when Cindy (Sherman) wanted
to get married. I mean, I would never marry a junkie. I know what you
mean though. I hate it when people clean up and then act like they’re
holy all of a sudden. You know, people like Lou Reed. They want to judge
everybody who is still on drugs, and at the same time act like, ”Hey
look, I’ve been through more than you,” to the people who
have never done them.
Q When did you meet Cindy Sherman? MA I met her in New York, at the Kitchen in the early
’80s. The Kitchen was really a regular gallery thing for me for
a while, thanks to Tom Bowes who was the video curator there. Cindy
and I were married at city hall in ’83. She was fantastic of course
– she’s very shy, very easy to like. Cindy was an inspiration
to me as well because she was totally dedicated to working, and she
helped me to stabilize my life, and eventually to clean up. After I
cleaned up I kind of disappered for a couple of years behind the wall
of her money and fame and tried to figure out what to make next. During
our marriage I met all the biggest curators in the world of course,
but I never tried to talk to them about my work. They were there to
meet Cindy. Of course I was delighted for her, but after many years
it got to be difficult.
Q And you’re hardly what I would call a careerist,
or a schmoozer. MA Right.
Q Who else besides Cindy helped you or inspired you? MA Taylor Mead, Gary Indiana, Bob Smith…
Q All gay men. MA Right. I was roommates with Bob Smith for a while.
Gary wrote A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking as a vehicle
for Taylor to be able to make fun of Truman Capote. Taylor is brilliant
in that thing. We all had fun being outcasts together I guess.
Q Did you ever meet Jack Smith? MA I did meet him at some point through Jackie Curtis,
but he was pretty far into his own world by that time.
Q Who else were you close to? MA Alice Neel was a totally incredible friend to me.
She did a portrait of me and I did a video of her talking also. I was
really inspired, not so much by the paintings directly, but by her energy
and her outlook. I think we are similar also in that the work seems
like, too present or too close to real life at first, but then as it
ages great things begin to come through.
Q I agree. MA Thank you son! (Laughs)
Q Yeah, I mean it’s striking to me that even
though you were one of the first artists working seriously with a portable
video unit, I think it probably wasn’t until the early ’90s
that the art world could really be considered a friendly place for your
sort of proto-slacker, sometimes staged, sometimes diaristic approach. MA I had some great critical responses here and there,
from Jonas Mekas in the ’70s, from Bob Riley in the ’80s,
but you’re probably right in general.
Q Now there’s everything from Sam Taylor Wood
to Dogma ’95. MA It’s funny because I never see films in the
theater, but some students in Denmark talked me into riding bicycles
with them, something like twenty fucking miles, to see Dancer In The
Dark. I didn’t want to but I loved it. I mean it was totally annoying
to watch Bjork crying all the time, and it was totally annoying to find
myself crying also, but it was really, really well done. I think writing
up a list of the rules is a little much though – I don’t
know. People use manifestos to make money. I have used a lot of the
Dogma rules at various times, and many years before Dogma, but I thought
it was obvious what I was doing. I was just doing what I was naturally
drawn to do.
Q Was there anything else that you liked in the theater
recently? MA I liked Eyes Wide Shut in some ways.
Q Really? Wasn’t that whole orgy thing a bit
thespian? MA Not really. I think that’s realistic. I mean
it’s realistic to people like Kubrick. As a young man in Paris
I went to orgies at a place called Le Marroniers. You would go through
the kitchen and there was a family making food for everybody, and then
you go behind and there are all these rooms with rich people fucking
each other. There were always rumors about who had been there the last
time. ”You just missed Alain Delon!” That kind of thing.
You had to get your name at the door somehow. My friend got us in because
we were both young and ready to do whatever, you know. I think that’s
what Kubrick is showing – he’s showing what he knows.
Q Right, right. I know what you’re talking about.
I get invited to stuff like that all the time. MA (Laughs)