While Jim Jarmusch may be most visible as the director of (most recently) feature films such as The Dead Don’t Die, Paterson, and Only Lovers Left Alive, he’s also a producer, an actor, a musician (in the band SQÜRL and with the Dutch lutist Jozef van Wissem, with whom he’s released three albums), a composer of music for film, an occasional poet and—unbeknownst to most until now—a dedicated collagist.
Next month sees the Anthology Editions publication of Some Collages, with a foreword by Luc Sante and an essay by the writer and curator Randy Kennedy, along with a show of Jarmusch’s work at the James Fuentes Gallery. His collage work displays a very particular style, featuring grainy images pulled from the recent-ish newspapers, some of them more identifiable than others, with faces—some of them recognizable, from Prince and Patti Hearst to Andy Warhol and Christopher Walken, others not—transformed and identities switched or transmogrified.
We rang up Jarmusch at his studio in the upper Hudson Valley/lower Catskills—“where I have the best chance of creating things,” as he told us—to learn a bit more about how, and why, he does what he does.
Vogue: How long have you been making collages—and what’s the time frame of work represented in this book?
Jim Jarmusch: All of these are from the last three years or so, but I’ve been making collages for maybe 20 years off and on—I probably have 500 or 600 total—and I have some new series since the book that are a bit different—different backgrounds, a little more raw, on damaged cardboard and things like that.
You seem to have arrived at a very particular style. Are there any collagists or artists that have informed your work, or did you consciously set out to make this more of a punk DIY or détournement thing?
Almost all of them have been extremely minimal—removing something, replacing something, finding backgrounds that I find interesting. They’re kind of little dream worlds for me, and it’s been therapeutic, because while I make them I’m solitary, and it’s a way of remaining calm. The idea of dismantling basic information is something very interesting to me and goes back to when I knew William Burroughs—I worked on Howard Brookner’s film [Burroughs: The Movie] in the late ’70s, and we spent a lot of time with Burroughs, and I watched him constructing some of his journals and scrapbooks that he and Brion Gysin had been cutting up for years, manipulating information or finding it randomly reordered—but there have been many in the past doing similar things, from Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists to the OULIPO group in France that used a kind of Oblique Strategies for creating texts and poems.
I find them interesting because I can change so many things in one little move—I can reorient where the character or characters in the image are looking; I can change sizes, species…they’re very simple and basic, but I find them very fun. I tend to like the ones where people can’t quite tell—“What did you do to this one?”—over the ones which might be a bit more obvious. I’ve shelved or discarded the ones that I found a little too cute, or that looked like they had a bit too much intention behind them. For me it’s more like a surrealist procedure of automatic writing, in a way—I try not to analyze what I’m doing and just react.
I recognize some faces and backgrounds in your work, but most of them seem like they’re just on the edge of my memory…should I really be knowing more about who these people are, or what news event the background setting was pulled from?
No—sometimes people identify subjects in them that I wasn’t aware of, such as the former prime minister of Australia—I didn’t realize who that was. I’m more interested in variations and repetitions—in all the things that I create: in films and music, but in these things especially so. In a lot of these pieces, I don’t know who the people are, and some of the ones I think are the best are the most abstract, when you don’t know who it is, or if it’s even a collage—for me, anyway.
That’s a relief—I was concerned that maybe I was just too dense to figure out the play you were making with some of these people.
If it’s like that, I’m also too dense to figure it out [laughs].
Where and when do you make these?
I have a portable collaging case—cutting tools, tweezers, backgrounds—and if I’m going on a trip I’ll take it along, and if I have a chance, I’ll make some. And I also have a place in my art and recording studio that’s basically one bay of a former car garage where I have all my musical equipment, but I’ve got a big art table there. Some years ago my mother in Ohio was not doing well, and I would stay with her, and I made a lot of collages upstairs in her house as I spent time with her in her last years. But I can do them anywhere—though I can’t do them in a moving vehicle: Some of these are very tiny, and you only get one shot at gluing the head or whatever you’re doing onto another piece. Obviously my approach to them isn’t perfectionistic—I like it when some of them are a little crooked, or when I make a slight mistake or tear pieces by accident—but I at least have to have a stable surface, so no moving trains or things like that.
What else have you been working on this summer?
Quite a few things: I’m working on various musical projects, one of which is a new collaboration with Jozef van Wissem. And I’m creating some new tracks with Carter Logan for our band SQÜRL. We’re preparing a little tour of Europe, several weeks in early February where we play live scores to the surrealist films of Man Ray. I’m also remixing something—well, maybe I’m not allowed to talk about that yet…and I’m working on a new script, which I’m still preparing to write: I do it in the same way as I make collages: I gather a lot of things and all of my ideas, and then when I’m ready I sit down and write them in the script. I’m almost ready to do that, so by the end of the year I will have a new script written. I’m working slowly on a book of poems. What else? Lots of stuff going on, I must say—I’ve been trying to keep busy. And a new series of collages, which I continue to make.
Will we see them at some point?
I don’t know! The first book is called Some Collages, and I’ve been teasing the guys at Anthology: “Okay—the next one’s going to be called Some More Collages, and the third book can be called Even More Collages, and we can have three of them and put them together in a boxed set. [laughs] I don’t know—we’ll see how this one does. But I’ll continue to make them, because it’s something that helps me—not quite as much as doing tai-chi, I must say, but it’s something positive for me to create them.