BOROFSKY: COUNTDOWN TO CONFRONTATION

In some circles ritual counting is regarded as a mildly neurotic activity requiring psychological therapy. In the art world, the compulsion made one artist count in more ways than one. In 1969 Jonathan Borofsky began toting up to infinity by recording numbers neatly on paper. He eventually tired of this autistic pursuit and took to churning out all manner of artwork from painted posters announcing, “Art is for the Spirit” to graffitied walls, flashing neon, paintings with sound tracks and huge motorized figures fashioned from bubblewrap. Continuing the count-up, he now numbers each work, a practice that has become like unto a signature. When last observed he was hovering around 3 million.

Now, at 43, Borofsky splits his time between studios in Venice and New York, is among the undisputed masters of Neo-Expressionism and the subject of a wonderfully sprawling carnival of a retrospective exhibition that enjoyed both critical and popular success at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and New York’s Whitney Museum. Kids love a huge revolving ballerina with an Emmett Kelly clown head that sings “My Way” and a Ping-Pong table where they can play. Critics natter happily on about Borofsky’s social conscience, his Jungian archetypes and autobiographical revelations.

Wednesday the exhibition opens at UC Berkeley’s University Art Museum to remain on view to June 16 and will appear here next year at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It seemed like a good time to ring the artist for a chat.

“Hello? . . . Yes, that’s possible, but I’m going up north that day to start setting up my show, so what about a time? Let’s see, 1 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 7 . . . 4:30 . . . 8 . . . 9. . . . Excuse me. Come at 3:30.

“Well, no, I don’t feel comfortable about a photographer. That puts me in a retreat posture. Maybe we should just forget the whole thing. No offense. I want to be helpful, but on the other hand I haven’t learned to deal with that yet. Maybe I’ll be like the movie stars and have a picture taken and hand it out. Maybe it’s vanity. No it’s posing. I just get paralyzed.

“I don’t mind if I am working and I can ignore the photographer. All right, send somebody to Berkeley and they can shoot me installing. You come at 3:30. Let me give you the street number and the phone number. What’s your number, in case something comes up? Parking is hard but you shouldn’t have to walk more that one or two blocks. Maybe four, not five. Three at most. Three. Sometimes you can find a place on the street after three. Then it’s just a few steps. Ten maybe. I like to be precise.”

At 3:30 the main intersection in Venice looks like a drawing by underground-comix master R. Crumm. A blotto black guy in winter clothes sits gibbering, girls with big feet sashay by in bikinis while fetish motorcycles jockey for position against BMWs at the signal.

The guy who opens the door could be Borofsky, but much smaller than imagined. “Hi, I’m Ed Tomney. I’m helping John with the music for the show. He’ll be right with you. He’s on the phone.”

The studio was once a contemporary art gallery, but its pristine looks are disorganized with strewn artworks, including a realistic flying Borofsky self-portrait sculpture and a projection of a cartoon self-portrait with rabbit ears.

The artist is behind a huge white work table that somehow reads as a Hollywood executive’s desk. Borofsky’s lingering East Coast accent and excited delivery add to a sense of hiya-baby showbiz in the unintelligible call.

Free, the artist comes forward in cutoffs, sandals and nondescript shirt. He is much taller than imagined. No wonder he did a drawing called “I dreamed I was taller than Picasso.” He is. A director trying to cast a performer to play the artist could do worse than Elliott Gould, although the actor would have to be less droll and cuddly than usual.

“Ed and I are collaborating on some computer music. I sing the scale and the computer assigns a number to each note and we make a composition. It’s a little complicated. Come and sit where it is quiet.”

Borofsky ambles to a nook with a bare table and chairs. An adjacent large window is barred Venice-studio style and a fence blocks the view of the alley outside. It feels like an interrogation room. “Some of the images in the show are scary. I think those are about the fear of personal privacy being invaded. I made one of them in Berlin where people are walled in. In another I talk about dreaming of a ‘Hitler-type person.’ That can be anybody who wants to have control of your life, even a mother who is always telling her child not to do this or that. If a person grows up with a mother like that, by the time he is 21 he is going to have trouble with women.

“No I was not such a mistreated child. I grew up in Newton, Mass., a suburb of Boston. I was an only child and received ample loving attention. My mother painted and was an architect and my father was a musician and athlete. Middle-class people. I was taking painting lessons by the time I was 10 or 11. When college time came, I went to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh for their good art department, then took my graduate degree in sculpture at Yale because I planned to teach to survive and just make my art on the side.

“I went to New York. That was the natural thing to do. Money wasn’t a problem because my parents supported me until I got little teaching jobs. It was nice of them, but I never thought of that. Parents should support their children as long as necessary and then when you grow up you do the same for your children.

“I have never been married but I’ve lived with a few women. I just split up with a lady. I don’t go to parties or drink or smoke, except a little marijuana, which just makes me more withdrawn.

“My life is a series of exhibitions with two-month breaks to get ready for the next one. My friends are the young artists who collaborate and work with me on the shows. I don’t know any of the artists in Venice. Oh, I say ‘Hi’ to the guy next door but I’ve never been in his studio and he hasn’t been here. Don’t print his name, I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I came to L.A. to escape the New York scene, so I don’t want to get into that again. I want privacy.”

Borofsky punctuates his conversation with short waves and jabs of his fingers as if conducting an inner orchestra.

“I watched people coming to my show. At the Whitney they’d get off the elevator and they’d stop in their tracks, or their jaws would drop like, ‘Wha! This is hitting me all at once.’ I suppose an ordinary person who didn’t like it would say that it was just too much to take in and they couldn’t understand the point. An art connoisseur might find it not serious enough or too entertaining. They might want something less crazy.

“I think most people pick up on my attempt to be open, honest, free and truthful. People have told me that and that they appreciate the work not having any set style and a lot of variety.

“I don’t like to talk about influences in my work because I think I’ve carried them all into a new place. I admire Duchamp’s emotions and Pollock’s mind and Seurat for his structure. Naturally, there is some Surrealism, but I’ve gone beyond that the way a new generation of people goes beyond their parents. I’d rather look at artists unlike myself, like Turrell, Nordman and Asher. They give me information I don’t already have.

“At first, it made me uneasy to go from making art that reached almost no one to a kind of ‘showman’ artist. I never expected such a broad spectrum of appreciation. I get this incredible feedback in letters from all kinds of people who see many readings from intellectual to entertainment.

“There is a little of everything there, from humor to political things. I use my dreams and personal experiences a lot, and occasionally somebody asks if that isn’t a bit narcissistic, but I think people understand that I only use myself to try to get at archetypal experiences we all have in common. I have a certain relation with my own mind that no one else has, so I study myself as a model. I am not so different from anybody else. In the end, I want to benefit you because essentially you are me and we are searching for joy.

“Mainly, I think the search is about freedom. By that I mean having peace of mind, being free of disturbing thoughts. That is hard to do if you are aware that the planet has many people oppressed by the human condition, as in Africa. I may never be safe from the dark side of myself. White people tend to be afraid of black people because they symbolize their own ‘dark’ side.

“I mean freedom to do what you want to do and freedom from fear of dangerous neighborhoods or weapons build-ups, or being a child frightened by the idea of going to war.

“I am not particularly fearful but rather sad and hurt and sometimes angry at these injustices. But one must be a student of these things and learn to rationalize them without giving up the yearning for purity.

“The idea of making money from art used to make me uneasy. I believed that the only true artist were those whose work doesn’t sell. When I had my first show at the Paula Cooper Gallery everything was unframed, put up with pushpins and scattered around to fight the idea of salability. Now collectors have it under glass and framed. That can’t be helped. It doesn’t belong to me anymore.

“It’s dangerous to equate great art with what sells, but I can’t say I am against the art scene. I am in the art scene and I get rather extreme sums. It’s nice to have money, but it doesn’t solve any major problems, like bringing people into closer understanding. The only thing to do is try and plow it back into the system so that it does some good. Right now I am collaborating with a video maker named Gary Glassman. We are going into the prisons taping interviews with the prisoners. We’ve been to San Quentin and in the women’s facilities around Chino. So far we’ve done 21 interviews and hope to end up with an hour presentation. It will cost me about $50,000 but maybe it will get some positive energy flowing. It should be ready to incorporate into my exhibition when it comes to MOCA next year.

“No. I don’t feel neglected because I’ve had few exhibitions around Los Angeles. Galleries have approached me and I haven’t been interested. Actually my whole life has gone the way I wanted it to.”

Borofsky giggled guiltily. “I’ve never said that in public before.”