jonathan borofsky

7/30/2019 Jonathan Borofsky

1/8

Jonathan BorofskyNobody Knows His Name, Everybody Has His NumberBorofsky took the less traveled, less commercial road to artistic accomplishment. And it worked!By Ann Curran

When Andy Warhol graduated from Carnegie Tech in 1949, he set off immediately for New York Cityand started sketching women's shoes for Glamour magazine. He gradually advanced to colorful anddazzling high-heels for I. Miller.

When Jonathan Borofsky (A'64) graduated from what he calls"a nice four-year protection," he flew off to the Ecole deFontainebleau in France for summer study and on to NewHaven for a master's from the Yale School of Art and

Architecture.

Then he went to New York City after spending three-quarters ofhis life studying art. He became, he says, "more cerebral than Ihad ever been before." He hung around his studio writing down

his ideas that he later gathered in the unpublished but exhibited"Thought Books." And he started to counton paperforseveral hours each day. Heading from one to infinity, hiscounting took a not unexpected turn. He'd think of somethingthat he wanted to draw and put it right down there with thenumbers.

After literally several years of counting, one day he thought he'dlike to paint one of his sketches. Instead of signing it, he usedthe number he had reached that day as his signature.Borofsky's 34-inch stack of 8 1/2-by-11 pages, titled "Counting,"with numbers from 1 to 2,346,502, became the center of his firstone-person show in 1975 in New York City at the Paula Cooper

Gallery. He signed the other paintings and sculptures in thegallery with the number he had arrived at when they were completed.

Around this same time and through the mid-1970s, Borofsky began to make hay of his dreams. Hedeliberately got up and wrote them down in a combination of words and spontaneous drawings. Someof the things he saw in those dreams still appear in his work today, now dominated largely bymonumental outdoor sculptures from Venice, Calif., and Seattle, Wash., to Berlin and Munich,Germany, Seoul, Korea, and Toyko, Japan. Not to mention a clandestinely painted picture of his"Running Man at 2,541,898" on the Berlin Wall, carried out in 1982 under cover of night. He makeshis models for his giant sculptures in Maine and manufactures them at La Paloma, an artists' center inLos Angeles.

In the interim, Borofsky did his time, about 15 years, as a gallery artist, as a museum artist

oftencreating installation art that lives only for the length of the show and is dismantled and painted over.He has, he estimates, "about 200 wall drawings in galleries and museums around the world...butthey're under a coat of paint."

A complex person bent on simplifying his life, Borofsky didn't strive forcommercial appeal. He left New York City in 1977 and says he's only beenback four or five times since. He sees New York as the media focal point forart. Instead, Borofsky and his wife, Francine Bisson, a retireddancer/teacher from Montreal, who now teaches French, live in Ogunquit,Maine, not far from his parents. His mother, Frances, is an architect turnedartist. She operates the Left Bank Gallery there and shows her own work.His father, Sydney, a pianist/organist, taught and played the restaurants in

the Boston and Maine area. Jonathan Borofsky borrows his abilities fromboth parents. He is at least a 20th century conceptual artist of note. And atmost, a major player in the expansion of site-specific art. He's less known


2/8

for his musical compositions and his brief stint as "Jonnie Hitler." Following are edited excerpts fromphone conversations and fax exchanges with Borofsky.

CMM: Are you still counting?JB: I'm not obsessively counting on a daily basis like when I began in 1968-69. That became my dailyobsession of three hours of writing numbers in succession linearly on paper every day and picking up

where I left off the next. The obsessive ordering, the structuring that the numbers provided and theconceptual side of my brain that it reflected, isn't quite so obsessive anymore.

CMM: You've kicked the habit then?JB: For me, numbers are like God. They connect us all together in a way nothing else does. Likemagic. You and I are now speaking from different parts of the country about ideas, and we're doing itthrough the use of numbers. Each of our pockets or purses carries all sorts of numbers, printed onplastic cards, which allow us to buy things, call people and do something. That led me to anobsession in the last few years with binary numbers that run every computer in the world. Talk aboutconnecting us all together! We're not talking about numbers zero through 10 or 100. We're just talkingabout a zero and a one. You put it in a sequence of eight like 01101101. It gives you a letter "A."

CMM: When you stopped working and started counting, what prompted that?JB: I had just left graduate school and moved to New York City [in 1966]. I was digesting the NewYork scene. There was Pop Art and Minimal Art. Both seemed very beautiful to me. Yet each had aweakness or flaw. I was a young artist, searching for his own uniqueness. I ended up in my studio alot, thinking a lot, writing thoughts down. Less making of things and more thinking about things. Ilooked for a way to simplify the thought processes. I began to do little 1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5writing of number sequences on paper almost as a way to pass the time and not have to think sodeeply. Later, I made a decision to count from one to infinity and did write those numbers on paper.

After about a year or two of doing that solely with nothing else, counting for a few hours a day as myart activity, I began to go to painting and sculpture again. I made this connection...instead of signingthis painting I made today with my name, I'm going to sign it with the number I was on on thisparticular day when I stopped counting.

CMM: Was the counting the only break you took from art? JB: I didn't see it as a break from art as much an innovation. I saw myselfas an innovator, stretching the boundaries of art. Art critic Lucy Lippard[in New York], who almost single-handedly...helped to develop theConceptual Art movement in the U.S., put me in touch with artist SolLeWitt when I was very young [and] people who were doing similarconceptual work. My work slowly fell into a movement. Both Lippard andLeWitt were very helpful and supportive of my work. My father said, "Isent you to graduate school to learn how to count?" He said that as a

joke; he's accepting of everything.

CMM: When did you start putting your name on your art? JB: There's no real reason in this day and age to do it. It might have

made sense in the 17th century to put your name on a painting, buteverything today gets recorded by photograph and on computer.

Anybody can forge your name. I'm not too concerned with my own namebeing on a work of art. Quite often I do these big public sculptures, andthey say, "Now we have to have a name plaque somewhere to say who did it." It's not that I'm sohumble; I just don't find it too important. In 50 years it is not going to be important that I made thatparticular "Hammering Man" in Frankfurt. It's not even important now. Most people don't know it. Andit's fine. Maybe I need it [to get] more work. I actually like to play down the individualism or the egothat goes with the work of art.

CMM: You're still dreaming, right?JB: There was a period right after the counting kicked in when I began to focus in a strong way on mydreams. I would say that period started around '71, '72, '73. During that period, '70 to '80, I pretty well

did write down my dreams every day, especially the '72 to '76 period. [I] used them, too, as my subjectmatter for my work. It became almost a balance to the counting. There were these dreams that there


3/8

was no rhyme or reason why they were happening. They were fascinating to me and very personal.Many of them giving me clues to my own life. I began to see them as my personal contribution to theart world at that time. We had Pop Art, which seemed a little too tongue-in-cheek for me, and Minimal

Art, which I could relate my counting to, but I was looking for something more personal, more honestand open and direct. Hey! This is what I dreamt last night; it's kind of embarrassing about my motherand my father, some sexual thing or whatever. It's not necessarily something you normally tell in

public or even care about in public.

CMM: You're lucky you dream so much. JB: I am a student of the mind, how the mind works, why we hurt each other, why we help each other,why we do what we do. Certainly, the dreams were in the tradition of mind study from Freud to Jung.What can I learn from this subconscious area that can maybe help me? It has given me some majorsymbols. One project I'm involved with now in Grand Rapids, Mich., does use a symbol, a ruby, in arather grand fashion outdoors. Lit from within as part of a sculpture that's 75 feet high. This is a rubythat came to me in a dream early on, maybe '75. I remember it feeling and being like my heart-abeautiful stone the size of my heart. That symbol was quite often used in my installations and evennow, [26] years later. That symbol was so positive, so spiritually tuned and so beautiful. It helped tobalance out a lot of the fearful dreams that I was having-being chased through a city street orwhatever. [The ruby] and the flying dream were the two most positive and uplifting dreams that I had

at that time. I just finished an installation of flying people at Boston Museum of Fine Arts this pastsummer [2001], and I'm doing an installation, a permanent commission, at the new Toronto airport ofgiant 20-foot translucent flying figures in the skylight in the next two years. These are examples ofimages from dreams that continue on into the present. I rarely write my dreams down these days, butI'm still open to them. I try to make my public works more on the positive side.

CMM: Do you feel that the counting and the dreaming helped youdiscover things about yourself?JB: They give me food for understanding who I am. If I can understandwho I am, then I understand who you are, and I can understand whoeverybody else is, including our so-called enemies on the other side ofthe world.

CMM: Are the Boston Museum of Fine Arts pieces, "Walking Man"and "I Dreamed I Could Fly," temporary? JB: No, they bought them after the exhibition. I haven't worked withmuseums or galleries in the last 10 or 12 years. I have found myselfmuch more involved with outdoor projects. People who go to museumsand galleries are a very limited number. But the people who walk aroundand through my [outdoor] sculptures every day could give less of a hootabout art. Here they are being forced to interact with a piece. This is anice challenge for me to come up with things that work for people. Each[sculpture] takes anywhere from one and a half to three and a half years

from the first inception of people approaching me. But [the Boston Museum] approached me...andsaid, "The challenge will be for you to invent places to put art that aren't normally used for art. Wedon't want you to use the galleries." I set up a piece outdoors that the cars drive under, and then inthe big barrel vault of the new wing, I have these figures flying through the space.

CMM: When you do these large pieces, you do the model, and does somebody thenmanufacture the piece?JB: The ideas flow from my mind and my heart. This is probably what I get paid for. When I wasyounger and working smaller, I could make my own projects myself-sculpturally or painting-wise.When you get into 20-, 30-, 50-, 100-foot sculptures, naturally, you need 14 to 20 people working at atime with you for you to complete theseespecially when you're into material like welding aluminumor steel on a big scale, using cranes, using lifts. I'm not a great welder of aluminum. I weld steel allright, but aluminum is very tricky. The Berlin piece ["Molecule Man"] that we completed a couple ofyears ago stands 100 feet tall in the Spree River in Berlin. It's not something that I could accomplishalone in my lifetime or four lifetimes. We had many people working for a two-year period to fabricate

that piece. "Molecule Man" was commissioned by Allianz GmbH, the biggest insurance company inEurope, for in front of their new building. We decided we would put it in the river, so that boats can goby it on either side. The figures appear to be standing on the water. That isn't something I do up here


4/8

in my two-car garage in Maine. These pieces start with me. The sketches, the models often comethrough me, and then I talk with my head fabricator, Ron McPherson, in Los Angeles. This Berlinpiece was built in Los Angeles and shipped in sections. "Walking Man" in Munich was built in Los

Angeles and then flown over in a giant Israeli transport plane in sections. Each project has contracts,lawyers. The contract I'm working on with Denver is 24 pages and a lot of legalese. I have to digest itand get a lawyer to work with me. When you're building big sculptures that are the size of five- or six-

story buildings, you have to be involved with all kinds of insurance for the workers, for performancebonds. If Denver is putting up $1.5 million for a giant project, they have to protect themselves. How dothey know this artist is going to follow through? How do they know the work isn't going to be destroyedin an earthquake in Los Angeles? They have to protect themselves. I have to protect myself on suchbig projects; hence it gets fairly complex.

CMM: You are doing something for Korea.JB: "Hammering Man" [for] an insurance company in Seoul. It's a symbol for the worker in all of us. Iused a very traditional hammer image. We still have people who use hammers, of course, to build, butit can be anybody who works with their hands. My vision was to have as many of these hammeringaround the world at the same time as possible to tie us in as one installation, one people working.

CMM: How big is it?JB: It's 72 feet. The biggest one up to now is in Frankfurt, which is 70 feet.

CMM: Are you going to make "Hammering Man" bigger? JB: Yeah, it could be bigger. But bigger isn't always better. It depends where it's going. If the locationneeds a bigger one because of the site, then you build it bigger. There's a 48-foot one in front of theSeattle Art Museum. That's the right size. There's a 44-foot one in front of the Swiss Bank Corporationin Basel, Switzerland. That's the correct size for that building. If I'm lucky enough to place one or twomore around the world in my lifetime, that's great.

CMM: Are they made of steel?JB: Yes. Steel and then painted black. As opposed to say the "Molecule Man" in Berlin. It's shinynatural aluminum color. Each has its own material.

CMM: Is "Hammering Man" always mechanized?JB: Yep. Goes up and down.

CMM: What are you doing in Denver?JB: "Dancers." It's going in front of the new Denver Center for the Performing Artstwo figures thatare sort of interacting in a dance fashion. I'm still working on the contract. This started two and halfyears ago, going down and making a proposal in Denver, bringing a model with me. Them having tofind funds, having to go back and forth. City Hall, whatever. They finally came up with the firstpayment of $60,000 that goes right through my bank account to my engineer out in Los Angeles. It's avery complicated piece engineering-wise. Out of that came a very complicated set of drawings that Idon't understand, but engineers understand. That set of drawings has to go to the engineers inDenver. They have to approve everything according to Denver code. And engineers naturally have togo back and forth. Slowly, four or five more months pass. We're getting closer. It looks like the plansare approved. If we start [fabrication] within the next two months, we should be finished in the springof 2003. Some we can finish in seven months, and others like this, it's going to take over a year tobuild. The project in Berlin had to be approved by the Berlin Senate. It had to get approved by localauthorities in the section of Berlin where it was going.

CMM: In Udo Kittelmann's book, "Jonathan Borofsky," you say, "I want life to be better bothfor myself and for other human beings." Do you feel that you've made life better for others? JB: We all do. Everybody in their own waywhether you're raising a child or whatever. I just do itthrough my talent. I have my specific abilities; a lawyer has his or her abilities. Each of us tries tomake the best of our world. Some of us become damaged goods a little early, and I think beingdamaged goods sometimes you spread that damage around to others. That's the downside of the

human condition. We try to lift each other up, so there are not too many damaged people who go onto damage other people.


5/8

CMM: Tell me about the role of fear in your work. JB: I'm trying to understand what fear is, where it comes from, how natural it is or is not. How can wehave less of it? I did a project relating to Hitler, trying to understand the ultimate fear-maker of the20th century. We've already crowned the first fear-maker of the 21st century on Sept. 11. Why dothese events happen? Why do these people feel the way they do and create fear in all of us? I'velearned from my studies up to now that it's important to feel good about yourself. If you feel good

about yourself, there's a certain confidence that comes to you and comes to your life. If you have that,then I think there's less fear. I've simplified it. That's my goal. I want one or two words to answer allthe problems of the world.

CMM: Some have noted that you are the subject of all your work. JB: I can't really study somebody else's dream. Every artist's work is their self-portrait. That's truewhether it's Mondrian [putting] one box of red, next to a box of white next to a box of blue andbalancing those boxes. It's still a self-portrait of the inner working and the inner soul and the innerfeelings of the artist. Some of those self-portraits are more abstract than others. Because I'm anongoing work myself, my artwork becomes kind of a record, an ongoing portrait of my life.

CMM: Are you still teaching?JB: No. It has a certain exhaustion factor to it. There's just too much going on in other areas.(Borofsky taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, 1969-1977, and at California Institute of the

Arts in Los Angeles, 1977-1980.)

CMM: Curator Michael Auping at the Fort Worth Museum identified you with New Imagepainting and Neo-Expressionism. Where do you fitconceptual artist or all of the above?JB: It's been my goal not to become a Pop artist or this artist or a Minimal artist. I have some spiritualgoals, some ways that I like to be able to be helpful. There's no label out there [for that]. I look for afeeling of oneness, and I look for a feeling of just being happy to be alive. My work serves that search.

CMM: You told Auping in "Drawing Rooms: Jonathan Borofsky, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra" that"I realized I could make these personal drawings public without being overtly commercial."What's the problem with being overtly commercial?

JB: There is not a problem for other people. There has always been an underlying problem formyself. It's just a question of how much you need to please someone else and how much you need toplease yourself. Every artist struggles with this. When I was doing very personal installationsanentire room-and creating these walk-in environments, I was not emphasizing the salable object. At thetime, some galleries would have eight paintings by Joe Schmoe, the famous painter of the moment.There would be red dots next to each one, and they were going for $120,000. They'd say, "I'm sorry,Joe Schmoe only paints eight paintings a year, but you can be on the waiting list for next year." I wasinterested in a walk-in oneness, created [with] 100 objectspainting, sculpture, drawings, drawingson the wall, whatever. That tended to deemphasize the commercial side. I had to find what worked forme, what I needed to create to feel good, what I had to create to teach other people what I thoughtwas important. It doesn't mean that those people who were focusing just on beautiful paintings wereincorrect. Right now, I make very big objects and sell them for $500,000 to $2 million, so I can't sayI'm against selling my art and being commercial and giving in to the public when I just want to do what

I want to do. I do just the opposite. I choose images and symbols that I think are going to work verywell with as many people as possible. I'm as commercial as anybody.

CMM: Is humor important in your work? JB: The dreams definitely had some funny [stuff].

CMM: There were a couple of "molecule" type people in a dance in the middle of a gallery. Thatwas kind of funny or fun.JB: That was the two black figures coming together. That was an early molecule indoor figure that gottranslated to a big outdoor piecea 30-foot one in Los Angeles, a 100-foot one in Berlin. Two figureswere coming at each other, and their arms connected in the middle. Many people saw that as sort of aviolent image.

CMM: That's surprising.JB: Everybody comes from a different tradition. For me, the 30-foot "Molecule Man" that I placed in


6/8

Los Angeles was three aluminum figures coming together connecting in the center with their arms.For me, it was peopleall of us made up of molecules coming together to create the world in asense. But a newspaper wrote, well, only in Los Angeles do we make a monument to drive-byshootings. The actual original drawing of the "Molecule Man" was really traced off of a magazinephotograph. [It] came from two college basketball players that were rushing to congratulate eachother for having just won the NIT [National Invitation Tournament]. They were on the cover of Sports

Illustrated.

CMM: You told zingmagazine that "I had a dream...that I'd done everything that I set out to do."Is it over?JB: If I have to leave this world tomorrow, I'm quite happy with [my achievements]. It's much morethan I expected. But I have in my brain now at least five or six or eight large pieces that aren't evenclose to being made yet because I haven't been given the right sites to make them. I don't think mycareer is over. But if it is, that's all right, too. I'm not driven to be any more famous than I am.

CMM: What's your reaction to art critics?JB: I haven't felt too comfortable with them. There's been one or two or three that have been verysupportive and helpful in my career, or in helping a city to understand a piece that otherwise, the citymight say, "Why the hell do we have this thing here?" The problem, of course, is the word "critic." It'sgot a built-in negativity to it that's unfortunate. It could be an "art explainer" or "art helper" or "artists'helper." People work too long and hard in their lives, and somebody comes alongwhich hashappened to me, and I'm sure has happened to others-[and says] this is positively crap. I know it isn'tcrap. Second of all, it's embarrassing. It's being read by 2 million people in The New York Times and,thirdly, this person has totally not got a clue as to what I'm doing. I mean I barely have a clue. Sothey're hurting me, they're hurting art; that's the worst thing. People care so little about art these daysanyhow. If you can't write something nice, don't write anything at all. People walk away with an angryattitude toward art because they don't get it. But very few people deal with my work today. I'm just notwritten about. I managed to get outside of it. It's too late once my sculpture is up in the public arena.You can say all you want. It's staying. They're always successful. They always work out. You find away around obstacles in your life.

CMM: What about your documentary video, "Prisoners"?(Borofsky's documentary toured with his 1980s traveling show to major U.S. museums, wasshown in Germany and Japan with subtitles and resides in the collections of the Museum ofModern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.) JB: I produced and directed a documentary on prisoners. I did 30 interviews with men in San Quentinand women in Chino prison in Californiaan hour-long documentary culled from about 42 hours ofinterviews. My partner in this project, Gary Glassman, did the video and a lot of the editing. We talkedto them about their livesvery personal questions "How does someone like yourself end up in acement box like this?" This project aimed at understanding why people hurt other people. You can

jump back and forth between that and what's going on now in Afghanistan.

CMM: Explain Jonnie Hitler.JB: After the prisoner project, I found myself heading into this Jonnie Hitler phase, which lasted about

seven or eight months. I record a lot of music and have a recording studio. I started taking my musicand rerecording it, listening to it and enjoying it very much. For that music I decided to take on thename Jonnie Hitler. "Jonnie" was the name I was called as a child. Jonnie Borofsky. And I was borninto the world in 1942at the moment of Hitler's prime. Hitler was an early model for me to study.Even as a child, I tried to understand why somebody like this existed. [I] was fascinated by theconcept of concentration camps and why this happened. I did take on this Jonnie Hitler role andproduced a fair amount of music and photographs, including a small exhibition of drawings. I wouldtake a drawing of my own framed and take a drawing of Hitler's framedthese were reproductions ofHitler's workand put them next to each other. He tried to get into art school, but I think he gotbounced. He made OK drawings of landscapes. It was really a study of the dark side. It was a logical

jump from prisongoing out into the world and studying folks that had done damage to people,picking the ultimate damage-doer of the 20th century, looking for issues within myself that might beparallel. Anger that I might be feeling, fear that I might be feeling, the need to control (and that's the

big one) that I might be feeling in my own life, that each person feels in their life. When do you feelpowerless? When do you need to lash out? When do you need to control another human being?


7/8

When do men need to control women? It was just a period of study, trying to get into his mind andtrying to understand. Studying his childhood: How was he raised, what possibly made him what hewas, what led to it? If you confront the causes, then you can possibly find the solution to keep it fromhappening the next time.

CMM: Tell me about the "Ballerina Clown" in Venice, Calif.

JB: That image is a lot tougher than most of the images that I put out in the world. I thought it wasacceptable [because] it was right along the beach there, a block away, where people are dressed inall kinds of costumes and outfits. There's a lot of street performers. It seemed like a very appropriateplace to put an image that deals with the duality within all of us. It's a male and a female mixedtogetherthe male clown and the female ballerina, and the duality of performance: the streetperformer and the ballerina, the traditional, classical performer. A mixing of opposites [in a] splashy,showy kind of way. Now it's accepted pretty much as an icon in the city. But for the first few years, ithad its detractors. There's an example of where the art critics in the city came to its defense.

CMM: Did "Running Man" go down with the Berlin Wall?JB: That "Running Man" took me about two hours to make. I had a ladder so I could paint the imageall the way up to the top of the wall. Three quarters of the way through the image, the patrol truckcame. We all scattered and hid behind some rubble. We left our ladder leaning up against the wall.The British [patrol was] trying to figure out what the heck is this ladder doing here. They were about totake it away, and we came out from hiding. I said I was an artist working in an exhibition in this spacenext door called the Martin-Gropius Bau, an international exhibition space, doing this project on theoutside. They said, "Well, have you gotten permission to do this?" And I said, "Not really. But I'malmost finished." They gave in. "Don't tell anybody that we said you could do it." I think the paintingwent down with the wall [in 1990]. Somebody sent me a chip from it.

CMM: How did "Man with Briefcase" develop?JB: "Man with Briefcase" came together after the "Hammering Man."It was another worker-more of a white-collar worker as opposed tothe blue-collar "Hammering Man." At that time, I was carrying abriefcase to my exhibitions because I had all my transparencies ofwall drawings in it. I would pull them out, put them on the projectorand start [aiming] them around the room. It was my own personalself-portrait, but it also translated to an archetypal image of theworker with briefcase.

CMM: Are you still using the opaque projector? JB: Unlike Sol LeWitt who has many people working for him to dohis wall drawings, mine had to be done by me. They usually weretaken from small drawings that I did. I used the projector as a way toget the drawing up there on the wall, 10, 20, 30 feet [tall], and makeit within an eight-hour period. This was my way of filling a room withwall drawings within a short period. Bring in my sculptures, bring inmy sound, bring in everything and help create these walk-in

environments.

CMM: You seem interested in victims. Is that part of an interest in the dark side? JB: The idea of oppression is everybody's fear, and it's been restimulated and in a totally new waywith Sept. 11. Can they walk into your home and kill your daughter or son? Can they fly into yourhome and kill 5,000 people? These are our classic archetypal fears as hunters from millions of yearsago when you're protecting your fire and your little piece of land. You have neighboring tribes comingin; you either fight for your people or you lose it. This is very archetypal, very traditional. We put lockson our doors for just that reason, and now we have to put a lock on our country.

CMM: Do you think the nation reacted correctly to Sept. 11? JB: In an ideal world, it's probably not the right response. For me, it's very understandable given theworld and the human beings in it. It's quite traditional. [If] somebody comes into your house and kills

your mother, you go out and get them. You don't want those killers roaming the streets killing othermothers or other people. In a perfect, ideal world, I'd like to grab those people, isolate them and study


8/8

them as prisoners. Find out what made them go wrong. But how to do that so clinically and cleanlywithout going in and bombing the hell out of a country [where] most of the people are 18th-centurypeasants. Unfortunately this is what's happening. It doesn't feel right. It feels stupid to me to bedropping a $2 million bomb on a tank in the middle of some desert. Is that really going to solve theissue? It goes back to people feeling disenfranchised like a Columbine student who might be pickedon enough to feel bad about himself, feel hated enough that he wants to get back at those people that

he feels weaker than, and finally goes out and gets the gun and shoots it all up. Do you call up binLaden and say, "You just killed 5,000 of our people. You can't do that again. Let's have a meetingbecause I want to hear your gripes." It's just not going to work. It probably would have been betterbecause there's going to be a lot more people killed on both sides because we can't do that. Thenatural instinct of the human being is [to think] they killed 5,000 people; well, there's no way I'm goingto sit down with that guy and talk to him. I'm going to sit down with him and cut his head off. It'sunderstandable what we're doing. I wish there was another way.

CMM: Could you comment on alumnus Andy Warhol (A'49)? JB: [Sigh.] He had quite a major influence on art and society at the end of the 20th century. When Icame to New York, he was the symbol of success within the art world that I found both intriguing anda little depressing. He represented just a bit too much concern for money and splash, and parties anddrugs. Just a little too much for my own taste. But that doesn't mean it's bad. Artists notoriously lean in

that direction. Let me say: beautiful work that he's done, to a point. I looked for something a little lessflashy, a little more honest. There's definitely a genius there of sorts that I don't quite understand orrelate to. Warhol really was the focal point of the whole vision for New York. In retrospect, it was alittle excessive. I just think everybody finds his way. And if that was the way that related to the publicat the moment, so be it. It wasn't my way.

CMM: Philip Pearlstein (A'49)?JB: Beautiful work but totally different energy and a totally different spectrum that he's working.

CMM: How do you progress spiritually?JB: Minute by minute. [Laughter.] I'm looking for ways to bring peace to myself, and I think I can dothat if I can bring peace to others. That's a religious goal. If you don't call it religion, call it a spiritual

goal, call it just common sense. I like the word "God," and I'm aware that it's a word that we'veinvented to describe something that we don't fully understand or can't quite picture. I would have tosay that God is a feeling of everything being connected, all human beings, everything. It's just all oneorganic interacting whole. You can say that word "God," but to feel it is something else. The more youfeel it, the closer you come to God.

CMM: How was your experience at Carnegie?JB: Great. I liked walking across campus and hearing trumpet practice coming out of the Fine Artsbuilding, walking into a building where there were architects working, and drama students walkingaround campus with their egos out there in the wind. I liked being thrown in with a bunch of engineersas well. I ended up joining a fraternity [Tau Delta Phi]. Not only were the living conditions better thanthe dormitories, but I also played a lot of sports. Fraternities were much better for that. I did end up onthe track team. I liked the fact that there was a whole building devoted to the arts. You had the real

world there, a full spectrum of different minds running together. My fraternity had a lot of architects,artists; yet it had a lot of engineers. It was good to learn from each other, different ways of seeing theworld.

CMM: What do you do when you're not doing your art, making contracts, taking your mother tothe hairdresser?JB: I'm going to try to get my walk in at 11. I'm going up the beach and back; that takes me an hourand 20 minutes. Then [I'll] sit down, watch CNN and see what the news of the day is and eat mylunch. And then meet with my computer person who can run the damn thing, which I can't. We'llcontinue working on my Web sitewww.borofsky.comand doing some other stuff that I have to do. OrI'll work on work.
http://www.borofsky.com/http://www.borofsky.com/http://www.borofsky.com/

jonathan borofsky

Documents