Jim McWilliams Invisible City Audio Transcription

Sid: Today is September 15, 2014 and we are here talking to Jim McWilliams for Invisible City and the Vernacular Avant-Garde funded by PEW Center for Arts and Heritage through a discovery grant. Thank you Jim for coming out to Philadelphia. You were born in 1937 in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania which is south-west of Pittsburgh? It is known primary for Perry Como and Bobby Venton?

Jim: Correct.

S: You went to school with Bobby?

J: He became pretty famous towards the end of his senior year. Years later I was with a friend who became the caretaker of his kids in Hollywood. There were a lot of bebop singers there. When I first came to Philadelphia the big dance craze was the Twist. Edna Andrade and I use to go out dancing in South Philly. We could do the Twist really well.

S: Do you remember the names of the places where you went dancing?

J: I don't know where we went but it was somewhere in South Philadelphia. She knew where all of this was and I just went along. We really had some good time. The Rolling Stones came here and I had students who had permission to photograph them and we made a little movie on their concert here. Edna and I saw Sonny and Cher.

S: Who photographed the Stones?

J: I can't remember, they did the second year book.

S: How did you first get interested in art?

J: I got interested in art by having a friend of my father's who ran a supply store that all the schools around bought their art supplies. After school I would go to his place and he would give me craft paper and anything I wanted. I would walk up the hill and every day after school I would come home and make pictures. I didn't play ball, I just took piano lessons and made pictures after school. I did that for a good while, all through grade school and high school. When I got to high school I took classes in art even though you couldn't get credit for it. I was the art editor of the yearbook and I was also the president of the class. When I got to college I discovered type.

S: You went to Carnegie Mellon?

J: Right. I learned about the technology of printing and typography. I spent a lot of time there making images on the Vandercook, moving type around, and changing colors. The New York Times directors were impressed by the work I made senior year. What happened to me was that I had a teacher by the name Jack Stauffacher, who is still living in San Francisco and has Greenwood Press. He had gotten a grant to go to Florence and study a specific typeface. When he came back he was going to revive the Laboratory Press at Carnegie Mellon. That press was very famous for printing books and he was going to revive it. He was a big influence on my understanding of typography. He made it a sacred thing. I really enjoyed that. Typography became really big in 1959 and 1960 when I was graduating. Magazines were using illustration with big things of type that had a word and a picture in the middle of the word. Because I knew a lot about type I was able to get a good job at the Curtis Publishing Company, which is how I landed here in Philadelphia.

S: That was right after Carnegie Mellon?

J: If there is two things to choose between I always choose the wrong one. I had two choices Rochester, New York and Philadelphia. What did I choose? Rochester, New York. How long did I last? Six weeks. My father came and got me. I called Curtis Publishing and asked if they still wanted me and they did. So in August of 1959 I came and started working at Curtis Publishing Company. Philadelphia was a much bigger city than Pittsburg was. It took me about four years to really have the city accept me, to also know what was going on, and be able to do things. S: You took photo class?

J: Yeah I took photography class at night and once I was talking about type and Sarah was behind me and we started talking and became really good friends. I had dinner with her and she was quite enamored that I had all that type. She was doing her book called the Country Doctor. After I had gotten the interview to come to school here, Curtis Publishing Company didn't know I was leaving, but I had all of this type for this book. During lunchtime I had this raincoat and I would put the galley of type in my raincoat and walk home. I don't know if they knew what I was doing or not but they didn't bother me. There wasn't any real value to it.

S: How did you meet Eugene Feldman?

J: I worked on projects at night, little books, as a way to escape Curtis. I had an obsession to figure out what was accepted with what I was doing with type. So I sent them out to people. I sent them out to the dean of the school, to Gene Feldman, Harry Truman, the Rare Book Library, and the University of Kentucky. Gene Feldman was leaving to go to the University of Pennsylvania so there was an opening and I was hired as a placeholder. But I wasn't a good placeholder because I took over. It made for a much more interesting experience for the students because it was dark and dirty. Gene would send his assistant over to teach and he would come for a crit. So I had an interview and I passed the interview and was hired. The summer I was hired I completely redesigned the two big rooms in the back of the building. I brought new typecases and painted. There was a copy camera, a platemaker, and the offset proofing press. All sorts of things like that. I made a little exhibit area outside for typographic stuff.

S: Did you throw away type?

J: No.

S: Rumor is that you came in and threw away type.

J: No. Some of it wasn't worth saving. If the typecases aren't being kept clean it is a problem. I had made arrangements with this typesetting company here over in the industrial area and he was a big supporter. He gave me all this cheap type. They had really good clean type and then I had my own collection of wood type that I brought in.

S: Do you know why Eugene Feldman called his press Falcon Press?

J: Eugene had Falcon Press since he was a kid in New Jersey. I don't know why it was called Falcon Press. When I went to the interview I hadn't met Eugene. He was somebody who never shaved. He always had a beard, round glasses, and very strange looking. I was sort of taken a back . He was always smoking a cigarette. He interviewed me and then he went away for the summer and gave me the job to design books for him while I was fixing up the typecases. He was always a big supporter of mine. He helped me out a lot.

S: You were saying how important Emmanual Benson was?

J: Yes because as I was fixing up he was coming back to see what I was doing. He was impressed with what was going on. Anything I wanted I could ask for and he would approve it. I never had a budget for three or four years. I could buy paper for students to print on. It was a really powerful time. He encouraged me. He was a big help and he was my friend.

S: He was also important in transitioning the Museum School to Philadelphia College of Art.

J: He was moving up because he was able to get a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania. He went there and had his own workshop. He didn't have to share it with students or his business. He always had to bring in his own stuff to print to make money. He came in at night to do his own printing. He was a great person. Of course Gene taught me how to run the darkroom. I was also doing the same thing at Curtis because phototype setting was coming in. I was responsible for looking over that. The first show I had was at the Print Club of photographs I had made at Curtis. That was right after I started here.

S: 1952?

J: 1962.

S: So you came here in the Fall of '62.

J: No early summer of '62.

S: Do you remember Billy Klüver's Pop Art show at the Y? That was in October/November of '62.

J: No.

S: What about Howard Wolfe?

J: He was mainly concerned with the Museum School in addition to PCA. He was a very nice guy and a friend.

S: Tell me about Edna Andrade.

J: Edna was a fantastic teacher. She was at the foundation program when I first started here. She would always find out about things. She was very inquisitive and when she saw I was doing everything she invited me to dinner and we hung out a lot. We talked about things and I would see what she was doing. She encouraged me to be what I was trying to be. She was a good critic for looking at stuff and very positive. We went on trips with an organization that a lot of people went maybe it was the College Arts Association. We would go out dancing and she had a group of people who would cook. They had these fancy dinners and that is how I got interested in good food and cooking of that sort. She knew almost everybody that was an artist. She was showing around. I never met anybody like her. Sol Mednik was a good friend. He could make anything like wood benches. We became really good friends and I would see him on the train when I was teaching at Cooper Union in . He had his studio in New York. He was very successful commercially.

S: Do you remember the Warhol retrospective at the ICA? Can you describe your reaction?

J: I remember and there was this party at Mcelhinney house. I went there and sort of observed Warhol. He was more interesting than some of his stuff. I just watched how he operated. He hardly said anything; he just leaned against the wall like a mannequin.

S: After you left here you went to New York and worked at Cooper Union. You also worked at the Port Authority and did freelance work. You also worked on the posters.

J: She did work for twelve years and I did posters for ten of those twelve years. After awhile she always needed something spectacular to do. At a certain point Nam June was doing TV things and he was trying to pull away from just being identified with Charlotte. That is how I ended up doing performance pieces. At the end of the festivals on a Saturday night we did some spectacular thing. We did one at West that was when she flew with balloons and the cello. She didn't get much higher than a street sign. We had to get a permit from FAA to do that. The first thing I had done with balloons was here in Rittenhouse Square. Charlotte took over my idea of floating. I only floated one other time by the Delaware River and it was a stormy night.

S: Eugene Feldman brought to Philadelphia. Can you tell me about Eugene bringing him here?

J: Eugene wanted to bring him to America to do something. I wasn't aware when he came to PCA that it was his second time in America. Eugene had seen his di- cut books and he had thought Dieter Roth was going to work on a new book at the Falcon Press. Eugene had done Louis Kahn books and other really beautiful books. Dieter Roth was messing around with rubber stamps and cutting stuff up. He had some ideas, he would explain what he wanted to do but Eugene did like it. He didn't invite him over to do that he wanted him to do the di-cut books. It was decided because Eugene had a financial commitment to Dieter Roth to pay for all of this. Dieter Roth came here and hung out with me and Claire at the print and type shop. He stayed there for well over a semester. He did a fantastic project and book. He interacted with students that in a way weren’t like teaching. They would ask him something and he would always say good and use it, all mistakes were good. The students were always being criticized. We started something called off hand design. We would throw stuff on the press until the image disappeared. We printed on the big lithopress upstairs. When it was time for him to go he put all of the prints up in the gallery. Some of those prints were put into the book. Dieter Roth was sneaking off to New York on the weekends and Charlotte Moorman had her first avant-garde festival in 1963. Dieter Roth went there and one of her agents was Norman Seamen who was her producer for classic music. It was across the street from Carnegie Hall. But Dieter Roth saw it and met all of these people. He was excited by that stuff. He invited Charlotte down to do this event. Being the showgirl that she is, she starts playing this cello, playing Bach, and after so many measures she would take off a piece of clothing and throw it away. I don't think she went all the way. I was sitting in front of her completely mesmerized. I don't think I had ever seen anything so interesting or unique. It wasn't just making music, it was acting and making movement.

J: I just want to backtrack and say something to get some excitement going. In my involvement with students and things of that sort, I had one thing I called soft assassinations. I would get pie, and I knew were certain students where in certain like in an art history class. I would go in completely unannounced, straight in the face. I did that so many times that there use to be a cafeteria down the bottom of the school, and somehow I was in the corner and about 10 or 12 students and just bombarded me with everything you can imagine. I was just covered in whatever type junk you could image. So once I came for weekend as Superman and did all that crazy stuff. Believe it or not I shaved my head and George Bunker thought that was like the craziest stupidest thing that somebody would do. I mean it would seem to me, I didn't have that much hair anyhow. I got students to paint pictures on my head, one picture a day and I would walk up and down Broad Street at noon-time, showing people my picture and that became a supplement in the Philadelphia Inquirer because I had a seascape, a landscape, and a patriotic painting. Five different images painted with theatrical makeup paint on my head.

S: What year was that?

J: I am telling I was trying to go into the archive of the Inquirer and I haven't figured that out yet but I know it exists. I know that Rose DeWolf wrote articles about what I was doing and so did Joe McGinnis. They wrote during the middle of the week usually on a Tuesday or a Thursday. They wrote on the South section, they wrote stuff, from politicians to somebody like me doing stuff in Philadelphia.

S: The audience of the video will not understand, when you started teaching here you were only 25.

J: 23.

S: 23, when you are teaching here.

J: I had tenure when I was 26.

S: So you were only a few years older than your students?

J: Yes.

S: So that was a part of the energy of what you were doing.

J: Yes. And some of them were Vietnam veterans and they were my same age. One of them was one of the toughest students I had. He questioned everything, very conservative, I moved and he questioned it. It was a real challenge. I liked it in a way. But we had all night concerts. Students brought things to sleep on. It went on and on all night long. I think I got that idea from Charlotte Moorman. She went to Europe and had done 8 hour performances. I knew about through Charlotte. But they all knew each other. None of these people had cars. So I would take Selma's* big station wagon and go up and pick these people up and bring them down and there wasn't that much equipment, usually, you know Charlotte's cello was the biggest. His stuff was all in tapes and boxes and things like that. It was very interesting to see how this tape would go through different things and keep picking up sound and keep multiplying and everything. It change your mind about how you can make between Dieter Roth just making a lot of stuff and then this music and everything of multiples and a printing press is nothing but a producer of multiples. So you could put it in this way and turn it and then put it in this way and turn and there was a picture… Not what you thought it would be. Even when I do graphic design today, I never plan it out; I do it the way you would do a painting. I just start with something and build from that. I did that because I never liked to make sketches about advertisements or that sort. I was always making a painting in a way to do graphic design stuff. Whether it's an annual report or a poster or whatever.

S: So tell me about you involvement with the Y Arts Council and the people who were involved in it?

J: Audrey Sabol was always investigating things. For some reason at the end of the first year I was here there were student shows. Every department had to put work in exhibit. I had all these little books the students had done so I had a little exhibit area back there and she wandered through and she's couldn't believe what she was seeing. She thought it was fantastic, we start talking and she introduced me to Joan Kron. I would be invited to parties, you know I was very social, they've always wanted me to do things. I also was making clothes at that point. I made pants with an open crotch and ass and I would go to these parties and I had a taught that would just cover me, just a little bit. Maybe a half-inch would show. I would go to all of these conservative parties; people wondered what on earth is this one doing. Blair Sabol wrote about that and it appeared in the Village Voice. So Audrey came and got me involved in what they were doing and would use me as a resource and then she always wanted things made. So I started making projects for her and I still do. We talked about one we’re going to do this Christmas. She is 92 and she is still doing projects. I did a lot of them, but it was cool because it would give me enough money right before the New Year, I could go to Jamaica or Key West or someplace and have a nice vacation with what she would pay me. That was good.

S: So students at PCA were really intuitive and they still are. But I know Tony Lane, for example, was a photo major but he would sit in on your classes and he printed Brown Paper, which had Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and other avant-garde. The other students were involved in Billy Klüver's and also the Museum of Merchandise. John Ollman was talking about how great your class was. Can you talk about students and how you became known as “Jim Millions”?

J: Joe Millions. The last two years that I taught I arranged a course that was really basically performance art and anybody in the school could take— freshman, a senior painter, whoever they were, could just come in. A lot of people came into that class and I was really interested Artaud, the theater person, and that's where I had the idea of making a netting that you could crawl up into, 3-D, and trying to build stuff. The idea of the “Joe Millions” came because Audrey Sabol was having a lot of things made. One of them was a billboard, outdoor billboards, and she had something called the Durable Dish Company. She had a big opening; she put a 32-unit billboard in her front lawn. What is the painter with all the dots? Roy Lichtenstein. He was there. So everybody came to that party. I, at that point, could bring whomever I wanted. So I would bring about 10 students with me. One was David Kaufman; he became a pretty good friend. So we were sort of having a lot to drink, somebody said who is this, and then he said Joe Millions. So he named me. Because he couldn't say McWilliam at that point. So he said Millions. And I thought gosh that is pretty good! I'll be Joe Millions, and a lot of stuff I did it says Jim McWilliams wishes to pass special thanks to Joe Millions who made this possible. I did a lot of stuff under that name. That's how I had that name. I had dinner with Audrey a couple nights ago and in that house, which is this big room, before people had big rooms in the houses, and I was thinking about how I became Joe Millions in that room. It was sort of like I was birthed in that room. Because I did a lot of stuff under that. So that's how that was. All those art people would have big parties and I would always go to them. It was a chance to talk to people, to give some notoriety or something. One of the things I made was clothing for fat women and one of the girls was pretty fat, from the students, and she was game for it. So she modeled. I think Fred McDarrough came in New York City, in Cooper Union, to photograph these things. They were big bands of terry cloth with yellow, magenta, and blue dots all over them. And everything was just stuck to you. It was a joke but somebody reading the Village Voice called me up and said would you be interested in doing a line of clothing for us? And I said no. I did that with Blair Sabol too. I did a lot of different things here.

S: Can you tell me about this performance where you are in a coffin?

J: That is called, A Live Performance of a Dead Event, so I put myself on exhibit, in a coffin, went to the undertaker had my face done by his cosmetic person who never, he put the make-up on hard because he had never done somebody that had feeling. S he is pounding the hell out of my face. But he did my face and I have this nice coffin, a wooden coffin, I don't know where I got it, but it had fake little lillies and a dove coming down. I could put myself in a trance, and people could come up and try to make me laugh, but nothing. I was just into this whole thing. I did that for about 3 hours or more. Laying in this coffin. Charlotte and I were a part of a deconstruction happening thing, a negative thing. I put Charlotte in coffin, we planned this out, she had flowers everywhere and then I start performing this rite of making, like a way for communion. So I piss on all of these little toilet paper squares, you know, and I start giving them out to the audience. And the only one who would take one was . He took one. That was another live performance at a dead event with Charlotte.

S: That was in Philadelphia?

J: That was at the Judson Memorial Church. But that was toward the end of when I was transition from here to New York City.

S: Can you tell me about the Balloon Dance for students in 1968? Is that where Charlotte or you went up in a balloon?

J: In Rittenhouse Square?

S: Yeah.

J: Yeah that was the first balloon event. I think I lost about 4,000 dollars that day. Because helium was expensive, and I bought all of that stuff myself. One of the students made a poster for it. I didn't get up that high. There were a lot of balloons. I use to do a lot of balloon events also. I did one for the Artist Association, the College Art Association. There were meeting in New York City. I had in this big ballroom, I tied a different color balloon with a different length of string on every knife, fork, and spoon, and coffee cup. So we made this balloon movement, because as they would eat, they would make all these balloons change everything. They didn't like it. They didn't want to pay me for it. I don't know what they were expecting for it. But Bernard Hasten made sure that they paid me. I took a lot of people up there, a whole army of students, to tie all of this up in a ballroom banquet thing.

S: So that was in 1968?

J: Yeah.

S: You did something yellow cabs?

J: Yes, I had the idea of doing a dance for yellow cabs. By that time, I was doing things called slow dances, where I would hardly move and crawl. Especially I would like corners. For one of the avant-garde events on the Staten Island ferry, I crawled on all the benches. Me and two other students who had just graduated all dressed in black with lights on our heads. And we crawled around like that, so I was doing these slow dances, so I had an idea of doing a dance of yellow taxi cabs. So I had these ladies, most of them through the Arts Council, these rich ladies, had to get a cab on Broad Street, they had to tell the cab driver to go up to the Plaza there in front of the museum and then I would direct them to do movements. These yellow cabs, going in and out and making this movement. Then they would have to take them down where they were picked up, and that was that. That was video taped but I do not know where that went. It is one of those things that I really miss having a copy of. I thought it was a pretty good idea.

S: So what was it like to be in Philadelphia in the 1960's as a young person? Other than at PCA whom else did you know in the art scene and what kind of music did you listen to?

J: I use to go to see Mose Allison, over here; there was a place on Lombard Street where they played. These jazz people. I would go to the symphony every Friday afternoon, and listen to Eugene Ormandy. I knew we had a lot of music back there. We were always playing music when we were printing. We had a lot of the latest rock 'n roll and I went to see The Supremes in New Jersey. We went there and I think I went there with Edna Andrade. She was into a lot of that music. That is what we did musically but I would go to New York and see what was going on and somehow I thought if I would do some of this stuff in New York, somebody would have gotten some recognition or somebody would have said he did this in a certain year, but doing stuff here, I didn't care about... I just did this stuff because it was something good to do and it's having fun. I never kept an archive or a diary of what I did. Just been thinking back about all this stuff, finding out who has what of whatever I did. Students say, well they have this and that, but I never did any of that things. I always had a complaint between Otto Piene and myself about a piece Sky Kisses. I hope Joan, believed me, and it is in the book. Joan Rothfuss and Charlotte Moorman, but I did a festival on Randall's Island. I hired a plane that wrote in the sky. And it said sky poem, spelled out over and over again. I did two or thing sky writing pieces.

S: You also had a picnic in 1960's.

J: Yeah a picnic called American Picnic. Bob Burridge helped me, one of the students; I had this Dodge Dart convertible. Which I bought because I knew it would disturb all the industrial design students because they thought that was the pits of a car. It was really tacky car, not good design. So I bought it and one afternoon I came back from McGlinchey's Bar, and these industrial design students were waiting for me. I was about a half hour late, so I got to write myself, so I said you can go to the car, it is in the parking lot, you can paint on it as long as you use permanent paint. I don't want to go to a carwash and wash it off. I want you to get real paint and paint the thing. And they did that afternoon. And the board was meeting that day, and they were driving into the parking lot, looking at this car being desecrated with graffiti and everything. And the 4,000 dollars or 5,000 dollars. The value of the car was no longer. Then I had Percy who we had dinner with last night, he painted it christmas day red and christmas day green in a diagonal. Everything, all of the chrome, the convertible top, it was like two trapezoids. If you looked at it going different ways. I was always feeling sorry for the people who came out at lunch time, out of these buildings, needing some relief from something I would consider probably boring jobs. So I wanted to give them to see this car, I would drive up and down Broad Street, with this painted car. We took it to Florida, and that was a trip in itself. Percy drove through fog, we couldn't see an inch in front of us going 60-70 mph. I thought for sure we wouldn't live through that but five of us went down there for Spring break. That was that. To the students I was someone they could talk to because they were taking drugs and no one on the faculty knew too much about drugs or what they were doing. There was a couple Bob Nerbeck and Bobby Beck, and they were really in love and living together. But Bobby became pregnant. So they wanted to get married and the parents were dead set against it. But I took them to City Hall and they got married. When the baby was due I took them to the hospital and that baby became one of the best designers and illustrators in New York City right now. She is 45 years old, has two kids and phenomenal success. Better than her parents. Melinda Beck, look her up she is quite good. It was a very exciting time for me. I learned so much and I was having such a good time. It was so good that I thought, unfortunately things changed. Emmanuel Benson left, there was a new dean. It was a more difficult time for me to exist here. I didn't have the carte blanche to do what I wanted to do. And if I did something crazy they would call me up for it. It wasn't the same. I thought, well I didn't need this because George Sadick* at Cooper Union liked me a lot and offered me a job. More money and associate professor.

S: You mentioned graffiti, there is a photograph in one of the yearbooks that says, “down with PCA professionalism start a revolution to end design, down with Jim McWilliams, down with downness.” Can you talk about that?

J: Well they could do whatever they wanted to do. I was an open book in a way. I think that more than one person wrote on there. I use to write stuff there.

S: Do you remember graffiti on the streets in Philadelphia in the '60s?

J: Well yes, the graffiti that I remember was dealing with the teensters and their voting. All along the highway down there the industrial thing, they would write on that. I did photograph that graffiti sometimes. Especially along rural roads and industrial areas. I always really liked industrial type spaces, that was sort of nitty-gritty, dirty or open. So that is why I moved over here to Waverly Street, cause when I moved in there it was a deserted garage. I lived above it. It was big as this. I had to paint it and it had skylights. It was a hard place to keep warm in the winter. It was a good place to live.

S: So can you talk about South Street?

J: South Street, well it became a place where some students, one in particular, Woofy Bubbles who was Chris Hodge, he fixed up a beautiful place. They would live there communally. They would fix up these old clothing stores. A lot of them were empty and they moved in there and painted them. That is where a lot of big restaurants started, the restaurant chains. After Bookbinder and all that crap, they started to make real food. A couple were on South Street. Society Hill had been fixing itself up. South Street became more nitty gritty, gentrification in a way.

S: Do you remember the Theater of the Living Arts on South Street?

J: The Theater of the Living Arts, I remember when it opened up and started. I went to a number of them, I can't remember who ran it. Andre William Gregory. That was a big break through for Philadelphia. There was another theater off of Rittenhouse Square. It is still there, Terrence McNally had a play a couple of years ago. I knew one of the actors. When South Street was happening like that. I had already gone out of Philadelphia. I would come back and I remember eating at one of the restaurants because one of the student's girlfriends was a waitress there. So we would always go there to eat. It was really changing. Very influenced by New York in a way. They didn't leave Philadelphia. Woofy was here a number of years before I went to Amsterdam and travelled around. He is a very devoted and true artist. He is really nice. Very strange but nice. I lived in North Adams in Florida, Massachusetts. He would come spend weeks with me. I lived by the Deerfield River and had a big garden. Two or three people would come up and stay the summer. We had big feasts, the garden was really great. Drank a lot of wine.

S: I would like to thank you.

J: I am glad to help out. Philadelphia was a pretty good place then. I couldn't have done what I did or what I was able to accomplish in New York. Philadelphia was just open for what started to happen around here. It was just virgin ground. It was really great place to do it. Frank's Bar every night. Talking and working with people. Underground Magazine Newspapers. It was really good. The Arts Council and Eugene Feldman doing experimental printing. A good time.