Below is an interview with Richard, taken by the former director of the Berkeley Art Center. It says a lot about who he is, why he's a natural CF volunteer, and the future of our partnership with Works & Conversations.

Interview: Richard Whittaker by Robbin Henderson, Berkeley Art Center August 23, 2006

Robbin Henderson: I'm Robbin Henderson, the director of the Berkeley Art Center. Richard Whittaker is the editor and publisher of works & conversations magazine. Richard came to the Art Center several years ago and suggested that he'd like to do some collaborations with us. One of the things he suggested was to do a series of conversations with artists. We did several and then Richard came up with the really excellent idea of calling them 'Berkeley Treasures.' I thought it was a great title and, in fact, stole it for a series of shows we've been doing here, too. I also thought it was a great premise to bring to the Art Center audience artists who may or may not be well known but who, as Richard felt, contribute something to public discourse and the vibrancy of the arts community.

So we started this Berkeley Treasures series and Richard interviewed several people who are vital to the art scene in Berkeley. Recently we were casting around for who would go next and I said, 'Well, Richard, you're a Berkeley Treasure. Why don't you let me interview you?' He was a little reluctant. But he generously agreed and so we're going to turn the tables on Richard tonight and let him be the interviewee. So you'll get to feel what it's like in that seat.

RW:  That will help my sensibility evolve, I'm sure [laughs].

RH:  So we've heard a little about your background, but can you give us a brief bio.

RW:  Well when I was young my family moved around and by the time I was twelve, we'd lived in twelve different places in the east and southeast. We moved out to California, east of LA, when I was twelve. Growing up near Los Angeles, I went to various schools. I went to junior college and five schools later, miraculously, got a B A from Pomona College. Then I moved to San Francisco in 1966. So I've lived up here for 40 years. I feel like a Bay Area native almost.

I didn't have a head start art wise in the sense of growing up in an artistic family. But there certainly was some creative thinking on my father's side. I credit my father with having an important influence, particularly in learning to think for oneself. My father was extremely strong about not accepting conventional views automatically, not just accepting what one read. He felt it was important to find out for oneself what might actually be the case.

To elaborate a little on my own art history, when I was about sixteen a person I didn't know too well, but who I held in high regard, committed suicide. I was working for the University of California as a lab tech in a lemon grove, of all places, working on off hours. I was monitoring instruments etc. as part of a study being conducted by the university and this man was the owner of this lemon grove, Mr. Moffitt. He struck me as the quintessential western man with all the positive aspects you could imagine in this role. He had a wonderful direct personality and was a lean, manly man, friendly. He knew the territory, the land, all the back roads. One morning I came into work and was told this man had committed suicide the night before.

It was just a great shock. That night I sat down at my desk and I started to write. In a way, that was my first experience of what I would call the transformative power of, let's just call it creative expression. I didn't know what I was doing, but this entire experience left a deep impression on me, and then what happened in the writing about it. It helped me.

RH: I think one is particularly impressionable at that age. I think young people that age, think a lot about life and death and the meaning of life and that sort of thing.

RW: I think that's true, and we forget that. I sat down one night at my desk, maybe I was fifteen. I remember this, having the blank page in front of me and sort of gathering myself. My aim was to explain everything that I understood about existence up to that point in my life. I got about two sentences and things began to get too complicated. What was it that I knew? But that impulse toward meaning you're talking about, that's an important impulse. What is it that causes that impulse in us to get buried or trained out of us?

RH: I think that age is an incredibly complicated time of life. You're really in between a lot of things, but your mind is really starting expand.

RW: You're speaking from your own experience, right?

RH: I think so, and also as a parent watching my children go through that. The whole beginnings of questioning existence starts a lot younger than we usually think. Some kids can be very young and start thinking about life and death and the meaning of all of it.

RW: Right.

RH: You mentioned to me some time ago that you had done ceramics at one time. When was that and how did you get involved with that?

RW: That happened just before I got into Pomona College. I had a girlfriend at Scripps. She was taking ceramics. Paul Soldner happened to be teaching her class. She took me into the ceramics studio one evening and there was Paul Soldner. I got a demonstration that evening of throwing on the wheel. I wrestled around with the clay a little myself and Soldner gave me a few pointers. The whole thing was really quite exotic being there on the Scripps campus with this beautiful young woman and then with Paul Soldner, who himself had a remarkable quality. Of course he's a very well known potter. After that I took a course at a Junior College. If any of you have ever tried working with clay you probably know what a wonderful and seductive experience it is to have your hands on the clay. It kind of captured me. So I did that for a while and, in fact, I was still interested in ceramics when I moved up here in 1966. I built a couple of kilns and I had a little studio, but I found it so lonely going out there and throwing pots by myself. It just wasn't an activity that was feeding a flame that could keep going. I found that I loved building the kilns more than struggling with the clay and trying to throw a good pot. So it didn't go very far, but I did have some real experience of all that.

RH: So do you think that the tedium of production pottery was just not engaging enough.

RW: Yes. And I'm kind of impatient. Anyone who has tried working with clay knows that impatience is not a good thing to have if you're going to persist with clay. And I wasn't in possession of the ideal of a pure craft object, either, something like a mingei type thing, where I might be searching for the pure cup or something. I just didn't have that. And it was a lonely activity. Coming from Pomona College with a degree in philosophy I was full of existentialist ideas, and sitting in the studio alone was all too existential.

RH: But writing is a lonely activity too, and you spend a lot of time doing that.

RW: That's true, but in a way, writing can give you an immediate reward. At least, for me, there are these moments that can come, which are transformative in a way that I was not finding with the clay.

I should have been a better writer a long time ago, but the truth is that I didn't really write that much, although I thought I was going to be a writer. I did get a lot of strokes for some writing I did at Pomona College. I was on fire with poetry. But somehow there were things that hadn't been worked out for me in my life, things that stood between me and a direct route to actualizing my self. There were issues. It's amazing how some people, right out of the chute, seem to know what they want to do, they engage with it and they go right through life and achieve great things. That was not the way it was for me at all, just the opposite. I was really quite lost, I would say.

RH: That's hard to believe now.

RW: I'm a very late bloomer.

RH: Sometimes it just takes a long time for the flower to open.

RW: Well, it does for some people. I think I could use myself as encouragement for some people who are having trouble finding a vocation in this world. According to me, it can happen fairly late.

RH: What are some of the interests that engaged you along the way.

RW: hmm. I used to read a lot. Probably the other thing I've pursued the most in the last twenty-five years would be photography.

RH: And you still do that.

RW: Yes. That began for me in 1976. But, other interests? That's a hard question for me. I dabbled. I couldn't find anything that I could really, wholeheartedly engage in. I worked in the post office when I came to San Francisco, the worst job I ever had.

RH: [laughs] I know so many people who had jobs in the post office in the sixties and seventies.

RW: I painted houses, too. I know a lot of people who did that. That wasn't so bad, actually. I worked for this Irishman, a real character. Climbing up on these tall ladders in Daly City and South San Francisco in the beautiful weather, looking out across the city and painting'it was pretty great. And listening to Sean McCaughn tell about his adventures as a horse rider and nightclub singer in Ireland. That was fun.

RH: So when did you start writing really seriously. Did that start along with the photography or were they two separate activities.

RW: No. When I got out of college in 1966 I really thought I was going to be a poet. That was my passion. Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot were my models. I came up to San Francisco and I was writing some poetry, sending things out, getting rejection slips. I'd read at the 'I and Thou' on Haight St to a small group of people, but one evening sitting at my desk, I sort of came to myself while I was writing some very poetic thing. I suddenly came to and asked myself, what about my real life?

Here I was living with roommates in this flat in the inner Sunset scraping by in a job that I hated. I had no prospects for any career and didn't really know what I was going to do. Was poetry really it? There I was trying to create a great piece of wisdom for the ages and the incommensurateness of sitting there, really this sort of lost person, on the one hand, and having this rather grandiose vision, on the other hand, struck me suddenly as such an unbearable contradiction that I made a resolution. I wouldn't write anymore until I was able to have a body underneath myself, I would really have under-standing. My wonderful vision would have to reach all the way down through my feet to the ground. I would have to inhabit myself. There wouldn't be such a gap between this grand vision and the fact of my actual life.

So I didn't write for a long time after that. I've only slowly begun to write again in the last fifteen years. I don't know if I'm a writer. I don't know what to call myself. I do, at times, enjoy writing, although it's a struggle.

RH: It strikes me that one of the things that you've done, and that you do very well, is the interviews you conduct for the magazine. Maybe that's a way of kind of engaging again without having to necessarily pull it all out of yourself, but instead illicit it from outside and then incorporate it, make sense of it somehow'because you do shape the interview and you are very engaged. I think that's one of the things you do so well in these interviews is that you are very curious about the person you're interviewing, and you ask searching questions. But it seems to me that's a way of getting back into it without having to pull it all out of yourself.

RW: That's very astute. That's absolutely true what you're saying, and I'm actually quite aware of that. I'm thrilled when I hear the person I'm speaking with put into words something that I think is profound and wonderful, and true. That, to me, is not one hundred percent different from my having written it myself. I feel, if I have a hand in helping to bring about the articulation of something deep and true, I'm just absolutely delighted with that. That's what I hope for in an interview.

RH: Well, that really is the nature of conversation, isn't it? It's not about two people sort of taking turns making a monologue, but it's shaping something else between the two of them.

RW: Well, yes, in the best sense, but how often does that happen in ordinary exchange?

RH: But it's such a delight when it does!

RW: I would say, that on average, or quite often, when I talk with an artist and I ask a probing, possibly 'stupid' question, that is, just a simple, direct and na've question'which turns out to be a wonderful question' the artist tells me 'no one ever asks me things like that! My artist friends and I never talk about these things!' So there is something paradoxical about that. I think that to have a real discourse, an exchange, a conversation where people actually cross a line, even a little bit, into sincerity, how often does that happen? My experience is that it doesn't happen too often, actually.

RH: But don't you feel that it does in the magazine?

RW: Well, yes. I certainly try to find that material and to put it into the magazine. Absolutely. Yes.

RH: To get back to the photography a little bit, can you say anything about what attracted you to taking pictures or what you hope to do with that?

RW: I was living in San Francisco and for some reason I'd find myself crossing the Bay Bridge to the East Bay. It might have been in the fall and it might have been happening late in the afternoon. The sun would be low and, as I'd cross the bridge, I'd see the reflections of the sun in the windows of houses in the East Bay Hills, these little jewels of light. And there might be a very atmospheric condition in the air on certain afternoons. On certain afternoons, driving across the bridge, maybe the windows would be down, the marine air would be coming through, there would be a quality of light, maybe a little haze and sometimes I would get such a feeling from looking at these things. It would just touch me in this very poignant and maybe nostalgic way. Well, it occurred to me, out of the blue, one day, what if I took a photograph of this? Would it be possible to create a photograph so that when I looked at the image it would create something of this same feeling? Because I had no interest in photography whatsoever. I regarded it, at that time, with some prejudice, as an inferior art. But this question occurred to me. So it actually propelled me to get a cheap little camera and I remember looking through the viewfinder and instantly understanding why people needed different lenses. So that was actually the beginning for me, this wish to make an experiment. That was in 1976. Then I began to experiment to see if I could get a picture that could hold any of that feeling.

RH: Do you feel that you have from time to time?

RW: Yes. And I found that, at times, looking would become almost a religious experience. Simply encountering the beauty that I would sometimes find. I don't think it's a big exaggeration to say it would sometimes actually get me into a state of ecstasy.

RH:  You mean at the time you were taking the picture?

RW:  Before and during. I would see something, and the beauty of what I would find myself looking at would just, this feeling would be called forth. I would have to find the composition and all that. I would search for that in this extraordinary state, sometimes almost a desperate state because I'd be so much in the grip of it and trying to capture it. I would have these experiences and then I would pick up an art magazine and read these incredibly obtuse artspeak things. And I would just be baffled. I would get angry, too. I didn't much appreciate what I'd find in these articles.

It's one of the main points of the genesis of the magazine. Nowhere did I recognize my own experience in the art writing of the time, which was in 1980, 81 and 82. The curators and writers had different fish to fry. That was a whole different world.

RH:  And yet you are interested in ideas. You mentioned that you have a degree in philosophy. You still are very involved in philosophical issues and ideas.

RW:  Well yes, you could put it that way: 'Interested in ideas.' It's like saying 'interested in architecture.' You could say that anything that is a building is architecture, but would that be very interesting? So what is it about ideas that's interesting?

For me, what's interesting are ideas that have some resonance to the deeper questions in the face of life. It doesn't help me too much when I read a book that purports to explain that a certain kind of experience is actually an electro-chemical phenomenon in the brain, for instance. That ecstatic moments are actually electro-chemical phenomena of the organism. You have epinephrine and so on. You can have these very interesting names for these different molecules as if they can explain the impulses. And so what do you get? You get the illusion of an explanation. What happens with a lot of explanations is that you get a kind of death sentence. The illusion that you actually now know something puts one to sleep.

So what ideas bring one to life? That's the question I've got. That's a very difficult problem we face today. What ideas bring one to life, and what ideas put us to sleep with the illusion that we actually know something, or that we have actually made some sort of progress?

RH: Well, where do you see your interest in art and philosophy intersecting? When you talk about having an ecstatic moment where you see something that is really really beautiful and profound, I mean, in itself, you wouldn't have to explain that any further. That's a phenomenon that needs no explanation.

RW: Right. But the problem is, it seems to me, that experience is not honored in our culture. We're free to indulge in experience, but it's not honored as a potential source of real knowledge. The question is where do the ideas and the experiences intersect, right?

RH: Yes.

RW: I think they intersect in the realm of experience. That's where I live. That's where we all live—in the realm of experience. But somehow we have the idea that we live in the realm of matter, of things. We're convinced that it's a world full of things. But, really, the only way things come to us is through the experience of them. But the problem with the realm of experience is that it's not a quantifiable realm. It's not subject to academic, scientific, technological access. So therefore, in a way, it's a realm that has fallen into dishonor, or just disregard.

For instance in psychology thirty or forty years ago, there was still this idea of the unconscious, and what was required was a psychotherapist who was an artist of sorts, who could somehow interact in a way so that the unconscious, which used to be regarded as a reality, so that something was allowed, or made possible to take place there that would be healing. But nowadays we live in a different world. We've got neurochemistry and pharmeceuticals. We've got expert chemists, expert druggists. We have psychiatrists who give pills out to everybody.

So that is just one example where the realm of experience has lost its footing as a source of meaningful mystery, a kind of grandeur, a potential place of great secrets and discoveries and of great reality. I'd say that art, at its best, is operating somewhere in that realm. I call it the realm of experience, but even more specifically, in a way, it's the realm of a quality of feeling, I'd say.

Feeling. We don't know how to talk about feeling much. Music causes people to have feeling, and so everyone is feeding themselves with iPods. But isn't that really kind of a poor substitute?

RH: I don't know if you'd agree with this or not, but I see around us the cell phones, the iPods, the individuals driving alone in a car and, too often, I am one of them'

One of the things that strikes me about this in relationship to art is that it seems the participation in art, whether as someone who is just receiving it looking or listening or whether you're someone actually engaged in making it has, in the past, been much more of a communal experience than it is now. It used to be that you would go to concert and there would be actual human beings there. It seems to me that something different happens when you're listening to a live performance instead of to a recording. It seems that even in the visual arts there used to be these enterprises that many people would be engaged in, even, in western art, to make a cathedral. Much of that is lost to us now.

RW: Well, something is happening, for sure. That's a very interesting and troubling question. I don't pretend to understand the answers, but I think it's interesting when Jean Baudrillard says, and I don't know where Baudrillard really stands, where his heart is, so to speak, but he says some things that I can't help but feel are largely true. He says, for instance, that art is no longer able to perform a vital function in this culture. I don't say that to demean anything in this room, and I'm doing an art magazine myself, after all, but I feel there is something to that.

I talked with Paolo Soleri, I interviewed him. Soleri is this amazing visionary architect. He's still alive, probably 86 or 87. Late in his life he came around, for some reason, to the acceptance of the proposition that computers and artificial intelligence will lead to the next step in evolution and the human will be left behind. As he put it, maybe we'll be like animals in a zoo, or pets.

RH: Because of the computer?

RW: The next step of evolution will be some sort of computer-machine entity that will transcend humans in power, intelligence and everything. I found it a sort of horribly disturbing idea and particularly that Paolo Soleri had embraced it, because everything I'd learned about him seemed to point in an opposite direction. Yet there's a world of people completely serious about this proposition that some kind of cyber intelligence will replace us on the ladder of life.

I don't know. How do you try to bring, let's say, the numinous--a moment of the numinous--to life when a lot of people are embarrassed even to ask a deep question nowadays?

I tell this story I heard from Jacob Needleman, a professor of philosophy at SF State. He was asked to teach a philosophy course for high school seniors. He met with the class for the first session, all very bright kids, and he said, 'Imagine that I'm someone you can ask any questions of and I will be able to answer them. I'll give you ten minutes. Just write the questions down and we'll take a look at them. No need to put your name on this.' He got the papers back and what he found was that written on the bottom of the page, squeezed up along the side or maybe going over on the back, that's where the real questions were, like 'who am I?' 'why are we here?'

The deep questions were written at the very edges of the paper. They were literally marginalized. There is no place today for such questions. Well, who needs them? We have plenty of entertainment. It seems as though we're beyond all that deep stuff. It's a great illusion, and yet, it's not difficult to fall into that illusion. Then one of these days you find out that you've got Alzheimers. Whoops!

RH: Well, it's interesting. You say that you're mistrustful of the New Age and I tend to agree with you, but what is it that's so disturbing?

RW: That's a good question. There's something that Chogyam Trungpa called 'spiritual materialism'' the idea that I'm an enlightened consumer. There's the idea that I am empowered somehow, as a consumer, to consume the higher aspects of life, which, in the past, and in all the traditions, have been regarded in an utterly different light. It seems to me that's there's the weekend seminar approach that promises me that I'm going to undergo the transformative experience, I guess. It could be somewhat like buying a new car.

We seem to have gotten used to the ubiquity of hype. It just seems to be part and parcel of this world of lies that's constantly washing over us. I even accept how the language has been dialed back. What 'the greatest' means is maybe it's halfway good. Maybe not. Who knows? There's no way to tell from the hype.

RH: And you know it's going to cost you money. But getting back to the magazine. How do you make decisions about who you are going to interview or what the topics will be in each issue of the magazine? I'm impressed by how cohesive each issue seems, in a way.

RW: It's like an organic process. I might have one or two pieces at the beginning, an interview or two. It's a little bit like going through your day. You never know exactly what's going to happen. You pass all kinds of people on the street. You listen to the radio and, who knows? you might hear something you didn't expect and you might even be moved to make a phone call, as I did when I heard Godfrey Reggio being interviewed. Or maybe I read something in the Chronicle. Maybe someone called me and I have a message on my answering machine. So each issue is a little bit like standing in front of a blank canvas and somehow I always manage to end up, after six months, with another issue.

RH: So it takes you six months to develop an issue?

RW: Yes. It used to take nine months.

RH: That's a nice biological period. [laughs] But is there anything that you can tell us about the kinds of things that strike you or capture your interest. I think there are a lot of artists here who would like to know.

RW: I can give you an example of something I'm going to publish in the upcoming issue, and how it came about. Ruth Braunstein has asked me to interview Richard Shaw. I just interviewed him this morning, in fact. Ruth wants to do a book on Richard Shaw. So several weeks ago we all met and talked about what the book might involve and so on. We're talking and Richard's daughter says to Ruth, 'You should have seen where I took Richard before I brought him here to the meeting.' She described this 'amazing park' where some fellow, who works for the city, he makes great things.' I didn't really get the details, but I thought, 'hmm, that sounds interesting.' So a few weeks later I went out and I found this place. There was this little Philippino man pushing a broom over in a corner. He takes care of the whole park. He keeps the plants going and all that, but not only that, there are at least a hundred sculptures that he's made all over the place. It's just amazing. The first time I went there I photographed all that stuff, but he wasn't there. The second time I went he was, sweeping in a corner. I went up to him and asked, 'Are you the one who has done all these sculptures?' He looked down sort of very embarrassed and said, 'yes.' [laughs] I mean, to me this is just a magical, wonderful thing. This guy, I hope he'll let me take his picture. I mean this is how uninterested he is in strategizing for visibility etc. A career.

I mean, this is just a pure, wonderful thing. Well, how did it happen? Just because I heard this mentioned in passing and I picked it up and explored it. So there's one example.

RH: That sounds like amazing serendipity. A few minutes ago you said something that I found very depressing, that art didn't function the way it should anymore. But I don't think you really believe that, because why would you devote your life to bringing an art magazine to fruition twice a year if you did? So maybe you can give us something of a more positive nature, why art is important. Why it might be important.

RW: When I said that I was quoting Jean Baudrillard and I said I understand why he says that. I feel there is some truth in it, but I don't think it is the absolute truth. I think there still is and there still are things that touch one, touch me, but' Why is it important? Why is art important? I think I'm really old-fashioned because to me, the art that is important is the art that used to belong in that phrase, 'art, philosophy and religion.' When I was in my twenties you would hear that phrase, or read it, those three words together. I don't think you hear that much anymore. Art now seems to me to be more 'gender politics,' cultural anthropology, 'visual studies,' and so on. There are a lot of very sophisticated things that go with art today which can be taught in the academy and which can qualify one as 'an expert' so that one can talk about texts and tropes and valorize cultural relativity and so on.

Art used to be more widely regarded as possible pathway to the numinous. I don't know who coined that word. I think of Kant. It means something that, in a way, comes from another level. Richard Shaw was telling me about his experience of looking at a painting a few days ago in Portland at a museum. There was something about it that was so alive, he told me. Something about it just hit him and moved him. He's still thinking about his painting that had this quality of aliveness. That might be an example of a numinous thing. You could almost say it was a magical thing.

If I happen to have a moment where I'm touched in a certain way, it immediately gives me the real experience that there is more to this existence than this kind of horizontal plane I'm usually in, this sort of mundane world. I forget that. We all forget that there's something like a vertical axis also. That's just a metaphor for the fact that there is a spectrum of experience. There can be these amazing moments where we feel suddenly much more alive. We are suddenly touched. There is this expansion. Such a moment brings some kind of meaning. It's hard to put this into words. One is imbued with a sense that there is a meaning being here in this world. One is reminded how this is actually mysterious, this world, and that I am here alive.

I think that art has, occasionally, the power to touch one on this level. It's rare. It's not the artist's fault. This is beyond my ability. It's beyond everyone's ability to do this just because I've decided I want to do it. It's requires' I mean, Agnes Martin, I love the way she writes about art. She says that the life of the artist is a life of suffering because I can't find that. I can't achieve it. I struggle in the studio and I look at what I've done, and it's a failure. I fail again and again, and yet, somehow, occasionally something happens, and it's not a failure. As Agnes Martin puts it, it's a 'moment of perfection.' That's her language for it. In that moment, as she puts it, suddenly the road ahead is clear. There is a kind of order suddenly. There's meaning. Then, of course, it only lasts a little while and then it's gone. But the memory of that keeps you going. So that is an example of something that may be possible in the arts.

RH: I was reading a quote that is attributed to Beethoven. He said, please let me just live long enough to have a moment of pure joy. That seems to express, in another way, what Agnes Martin is talking about. Beethoven! One of the most sublime composers of all time. So what is it that artists do?

RW: Well, there is no career path in this culture for becoming one's real self. You can become a lawyer, a doctor. My speculation is that on some level there is an impulse, one of the deepest impulses, people have who are attracted to the arts. The feeling of need, the unconscious wish or partly conscious wish to move towards one's real self. With writers there's even this understanding that if I persist and I struggle that eventually 'I find my own voice.' We know that phrase. That writer has found his or her own voice. So what would that be? I think an artist has the same search, to find my own act, my own mark, my own voice. There's no job description in the culture that tells you how to get there. You don't get money for it. That's one of the big confusions in art, the mixing of money and this other thing.

Of course, there are many different directions people can go in the arts, but to me, the interesting thing about art is that is a possible entry into a type of search into this very important part of lives which we just call 'experience.' But there is no roadmap for that except perhaps in religion. You can go into psychotherapy. There's a little bit there. What about this part of life one can read about where there are marvelous, amazing things that people have come to in the realm of experience? I think the artist is the person who feels some sort of instinctive hunger for a real life, let's put it that way. A real life.

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