Greg Sholette & the late Tim Rollins – An interview from 1996
Greg Sholette reflects back on the life and work of late artist Tim Rollins and shares this interview he conducted with Rollins in 1996:
“Make Not Take,” Tim Rollins speaking on Group Material, democracy, Da Zi Baos, public art, and critical theory in a 1996 interview with G. Sholette
What follows is a partial transcription of an interview I made with Tim Rollins on March 27th, 1996. Our discussion pivoted on Group Materials’s 1982 guerrilla art project at Union Square entitled Da Zi Baos (big character posters), but our conversation also meandered into such topics as the relationship between artistic form and political content, theory and practice as well as the general cultural and intellectual atmosphere of early 1980s New York City. Just a few months ago (on December 22, 2018) Tim died at the age of 62.
Knowing him since my arrival in New York in the late 1970s, but also being almost his same age and of similar political and artistic outlook, his death was a personal loss for me, just as it was a loss for the cultural community at large. This interview that was sitting on my hard-drive for years is full of Tim’s energy and insights. It has moments of humor, as well as abrasion and irony, qualities that always went hand-in-hand with the man. Never published, this conversation was used as research for my 2010 book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture about which Tim once told me at our Christmas dinner in Inwood NYC: “its going to be a slow-burn.” That comment was very “Tim.” It also seems like a hundred years ago now.
