Art on the Edge with Banks Violette

On this episode we host the American artist Banks Violette. While this is not an episode about fashion per se, Violette and StyleZeitgeist have much in common culturally. He has been working for over two decades at the intersection of fine art and youth culture, making compelling work that deals with the dark side of the American society and the counterculture it produces. We talk about growing up in Reagan's America, channeling teenage rage, the New York City of the early 2000s and Violette's – and his compatriots, that included Dash Snow and Dan Colen – problematic relationship with sudden fame, his retreat from the art scene and his return, a collaboration with Hedi Slimane at Dior Homme and Celine, and much more.

Transcript

Eugene Rabkin (00:01.253)
Hi everyone, this is Eugene. I am here with the artist Banks Violet, who is our guest today. And this is a bit of a departure for our podcast because I think he's the first artist on the podcast. So we are not going to be talking about fashion exactly, but Banks has done some work with fashion.

The real reason he's here is that this is a bit of a moment in history because I fell in love with fashion and started StyleZeitgeist on the premise that fashion can genuinely speak with other forms of culture, fine art in particular, and music. And Banks Violet has been sort of, his art is very much informed by

the type of music that I also listened growing up and lot of our forum members listen. So the kind of a dark Gothic beginning of StyleZeitgeist is very much in the same realm. So here we are. This is why we're here. We're really here to talk about culture in general. And of course, Banks' work. Welcome, Banks.

Banks (01:22.38)
Hello. Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:25.833)
Nice to have you here. we just started chatting on Instagram some time ago and decided to do this recently. So I've been aware of your work since around mid-2000s to late 2000s. I'm going to say 2006, 2007. 2006 is when StyleZeitgeist began, when I launched it. And one of the members was an

an artist by the name of Slater Bradley. And I think you were guys at Seam Gallery together, right? Yeah. And he was also doing, I've actually lost touch. I don't know what's going on. But he was also, yeah. So he was doing art that is also very much tied to music and youth subcultures. And he said, you will like banks. Like you should definitely.

Banks (01:59.49)
Yeah, yeah,

Banks (02:06.926)
I have this fucking thing in a very long time.

Banks (02:18.19)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (02:22.197)
take a look at his work. I remember, I think the first thing I saw was, I think it was a version of a misfit skull drawing that he did. So that must have been like late 2000s. I want to say mid 2000s. And you kind of came in and out of my consciousness, which I think mirrors the way

Banks (02:30.296)
Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Banks (02:40.259)
short.

Eugene Rabkin (02:51.185)
From what I understand, you've been in and out of the art world.

Banks (02:56.494)
That's a very diplomatic way of describing it, but yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (03:00.625)
Depending on circumstances, which from my understanding usually had to do with drugs. But anyway.

Eugene Rabkin (03:13.977)
Yeah, so and I thought, know what, who better to do a podcast about art and your art and this whole intersection of art and music and fashion? Because at the end of the day, I think what is what I really want to talk about? I think we have so many conversations about the work, but we don't really talk about the values that are behind the work. Right. So when you

Talk to someone and they're like, yeah, I listened to industrial. Cool. And you ask why and you don't get much of an answer, you know, and, the why is, I mean, at least for me, and I don't want to speak for you. I will ask you about all of this. And for me, it's about a dissatisfaction with the world that

the bourgeoisie has built, know, kind of anger angst about the unfairness and the duplicity of the society we've been thrown into without our choice, really. And the reaction against that and on and on and on. And that's what I think, looking at your work, that's what the first thing that comes out for me. But anyway, I wanted to

first thing I always ask is biographical, because we all got where we are, right? That started in our teenage years, probably, which is when we make first feeble attempts to understand the world. So I wanted to ask you about that.

Banks (04:55.51)
Yeah, I mean, I'm from where we're having this conversation, where I'm sitting while we're having this conversation. I'm located in Ithaca, New York, which is where I'm from originally, which is usually when you say upstate New York to somebody in New York City, they sort of instantly imagine that you're describing, I don't know, the Hudson Valley or the Catskills or something like that. But the area that I am is manifestly not that. It's Western New York.

Eugene Rabkin (05:18.641)
Yeah.

Banks (05:24.97)
And it's in this weird sort of little pocket where it isn't easy to access. It isn't easy to get to New York City. It isn't easy to get to Buffalo. It's barely easy to get to someplace like Syracuse, which is probably the largest urban area to me. But when I was growing up, was, you know, there were other people in similar circumstances who chose to respond to those set of circumstances by creating

little pockets of bands and venues and record labels. then those little cells interacted with other cells and created larger things and then sort of went out into the world. So that was my experience with subcultures, I think is sort of like part of what you're talking about, not just...

Eugene Rabkin (06:20.955)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (06:23.328)
not background, not just where I am physically, but how I ended up wherever I am. It's that combination of being in a small area, being deeply dissatisfied with being in a small area, and using whatever means are available to you as an inarticulate teenager with very little power to affect some kind of broader change.

Eugene Rabkin (06:25.862)
Yeah.

Banks (06:51.394)
that change takes the form of creating a community. And it was a community that is entirely structured around resisting all those things that you cannot stand. And growing up in Reagan's America, there were a lot of things to be deeply, disgusted with. So yeah, that's a very general rambling kind of description. Yeah, that's kind of my background.

Eugene Rabkin (07:16.965)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (07:20.891)
Yeah, yeah, no, I and do you remember anything that particularly where like you said growing up in Reagan's America in this sort of was it a conservative place where you grew up in or is it a mixed place? Because I know you just mentioned who we're talking like that. Cornell is pretty close. But otherwise, I imagine, you know, it's.

Banks (07:47.773)
It's sort of, you know, there are a lot of other towns that, you know, kind of map onto Ithaca as a model. It's a small liberal college town in the middle of an area that is absolutely not that. So it's a Madison, Wisconsin. It is a Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's a Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is it's an area where like, yeah, there's a very large international student population and,

Eugene Rabkin (08:04.945)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (08:16.761)
incredible university, all those wonderful, wonderful things, except it's in the middle of a deeply fucking economically depressed area of Western New York where there is no industry, there are no opportunities. know, so there's kind of, you know, I said this before, there's a joke about this area, which is that unless your town has a university or a prison, you're pretty much shit out of luck. And, you know, that is

Eugene Rabkin (08:28.475)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (08:41.618)
Absolutely. Ithaca is very fortunate in that it's got a small college, which is Ithaca College, and then this very large Ivy League University, which is Cornell University attached to it. So yeah, the world comes to this place where people generally skip over, and that's great. But then there's some downsides to it in that this town is, in a lot of ways, very similar to, I don't know, a West Virginia mining town, where you have

a company store and a company that holds the strings and, you know, defines the terms of how everybody experiences their day-to-day life. Yeah, so that doesn't answer the Reagan thing. Yeah, it's one of the other things that existed. know, I'm saying New York has always been a place that New York City is warehoused, it's less fortunate and

Eugene Rabkin (09:23.526)
Yeah, let's talk about that.

Banks (09:36.896)
Along with universities, there were also mental health institutions. So when those collapsed, know, and the funding was taken away from that and those people who are receiving care had nowhere to go and sort of flooded into these local communities. The areas like Ithaca or Syracuse saw a suddenly skyrocketing population of people who are experiencing profound mental illness. And there was no safety net coming from the federal government.

Eugene Rabkin (09:43.206)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (10:06.414)
because fuck it, pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you're what, a schizophrenic who is previously homeless, how does that work? Nobody bothered to explain that. So if that was sort of the immediate experience of growing up and here's what America looks like, there's this rhetoric about self-sufficiency and all this horrible shit it is, sounds great if you're very, very stupid, right? But

Eugene Rabkin (10:14.086)
Yeah.

Banks (10:34.978)
doesn't work if you're looking at somebody who is, you know, experiencing severe mental illness or has been institutionalized in some other respect or, you know, that disjunct. you know, Ithaca isn't distinct in its experience of that, but because it is so a kind of little microcosm, you know, isolated for the rest of it's, the rest of, you know, Western New York.

Eugene Rabkin (10:43.451)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (10:50.683)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (10:59.669)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (11:05.005)
Um, it, it ended up highlighting that in an extraordinarily dramatic way, at least for me as, as a, as a kid growing up, like, yeah, it's broken. This doesn't work.

Eugene Rabkin (11:05.7)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (11:10.639)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, well, my first assistant is from Cooperstown. So it's a very familiar story from what he has told me. And it seems in places like that, are two ways to go, right? You either find escape goal and the Republicans have been incredibly good at

Banks (11:25.646)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (11:45.467)
creating the scapegoat narrative. Or you do understand that this is all a bunch of propaganda and you just go completely the other way, right? And I think that's what you subcultures used to be for, right? Channeling, you know you're not crazy, you know you're not stupid, you see clearly through the propaganda, but where do you go if so?

many people around you buy into it, you know, it's the blacks, it's to choose, it's the international conspiracy of the elite and the old Democrats, etc, etc.

Banks (12:20.268)
Excellent.

Banks (12:26.882)
Yeah. No, it's it's I mean, and that's what really that was the most important lesson that I took away from subcultures. It was it was a way, you know, to simultaneously, you know, orient yourself against these things that you could see and identify were transparently broken. Right. But also create this entire

alternate model or means to resist that by creating not just the culture that you were digesting, but the distribution system for engaging with a larger audience by starting record labels or making t-shirts or whatever. This was like, everything is broken, so fuck it, but not in this nihilistic way, but fuck it.

Eugene Rabkin (13:01.157)
Hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (13:21.073)
You

Banks (13:23.896)
we're just gonna do our own thing over here. And that is on one hand, yeah, that's a really simplistic way of like reducing enormously complex problems, but sometimes it works.

Eugene Rabkin (13:27.003)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (13:36.689)
Yeah. Well, what else is a teenager to do? You know, you're not, mean, I went through the same thing in my own way. I think, mean, so many of us have, and this is why counterculture exists or exists. Ed, I don't know if we've got a speaker in the past tense by now, because the triumph of neoliberalism has been so complete in terms of popular.

Banks (13:40.354)
Yeah!

Banks (13:55.447)
Thank you.

Eugene Rabkin (14:06.277)
culture, is kind of astounding and we will definitely get into that. There is no question, but I want to continue with your work first. so you said you were, were you playing music or what were you doing?

Banks (14:24.152)
I played music, played in a few bands and played shows and put on shows with friends and that kind of stuff. But mainly did album cover art and t-shirt art. And at a certain point, I figured out that my strength was not necessarily in playing music, even though I enjoyed playing it. It's just I don't.

Like there's only there's a limit to how many aptitudes you can pursue. that was just one I wasn't sort of orient towards whereas with like making drawings, like that was like, fuck, here's this thing that I do, you know, and part of, you know, those like punk rock or hardcore metal or whatever, like, they're such visual things, you know, being able to contribute to that by producing imagery that goes along with that.

Eugene Rabkin (14:50.49)
of shows.

Eugene Rabkin (14:59.205)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (15:14.152)
in sort of filling out the details of how this looked visually. That was how I could contribute to that. So it's, from being involved with record labels and venues and bands and all that, at some point, think small enough operation, everybody wears all the hats.

Eugene Rabkin (15:26.097)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (15:42.64)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (15:43.372)
my experience with that.

Eugene Rabkin (15:45.839)
Yeah. And how did you end up as a fine artist? What was the trajectory between that and ended up in some of the best galleries in New York City, the Whitney Museum, Moabia Swan and so

Banks (16:05.742)
I dropped out of high school relatively early and left home relatively early. And this entire time, I had this ability to make drawings. And I had this weird thing with it. My mom was raised essentially by a single mother in North Carolina.

the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. But my grandmother was an illustrator who illustrated. She was part of the King Feature Syndicate group of artists who did like, you know, syndicated comic strips. And she also did things for the Wizard of Oz and she did all sorts of stuff. She was a very successful, you know, illustrator and was able to support my mom while she was growing up. All which is to say that my mom, when she was presented with like, here's my kid who likes making drawings for her.

That was, it looked like I was making a very fucking practical decision about what my life. It was like for her in her experience, it was like, my son is like a dentist or a lawyer. just, you know, so when I was like, I'm going to go to art school, that didn't look like, I'm pursuing something impractical. looked like a very practical decision. you know, that's when I went to art school, my intention

Eugene Rabkin (17:01.457)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (17:25.942)
was for it to be that, for it to be practical. I wanted it to be a graphic designer or an illustrator, something commercially oriented. had no experience and no exposure to, certainly not contemporary art, much less really modern art, fine art, that kind of thing. And then when I was in art school, I had that wonderful experience that you hope for everybody in school, which is you get exposed to new shit and your world expands. so I went in.

Eugene Rabkin (17:40.209)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (17:46.192)
Yeah.

Banks (17:54.264)
Pursuing it as almost a vocational kind of thing, you know, going to be this, you know, sort of trades person who just makes drawings as my trade. It sounds fucking terrible, but like, I got exposed to other stuff and I got exposed to the idea of, this is what art is. And this is how, this is the function it plays within, you know, society. which I did not understand that before. There was a blind spot.

Eugene Rabkin (17:57.766)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (18:23.616)
And then was, was, yeah, it was very easy to just segue into like, this is what I want to do. Because it felt really co-extensive with how I was describing subcultures earlier. It is a way of, of, of organizing and affecting the outside world in some kind of direct and immediate sense. And, and, you know, that, that was, and it still is, that is what I find attractive about the idea of producing contemporary art and engaging with an audience.

Eugene Rabkin (18:42.843)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (18:53.42)
You know, yeah, it's it's coextensive to that that first experience of manufacturing culture as a 14 year old who's pissed off at, you know, how broken things are around you.

Eugene Rabkin (19:05.355)
Yeah. I wanted to ask you, so you already then you were in New York City and this is like late 90s, early 2000s, right?

Banks (19:18.018)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (19:19.601)
And from what I read about your work, it sounds like you became successful fairly quick.

Banks (19:30.766)
Yeah, I I went to undergrad. I went to grad school straight afterwards. And when I was in graduate school, I did a two person show at a not-for-profit in Brooklyn and the gallerist that I ended up working with for a long time after I got out of grad school saw that show in Brooklyn, invited me to do a solo show. So I already had a solo show lined up before I graduated from grad school.

Eugene Rabkin (19:39.857)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (20:00.163)
Hmm.

Banks (20:00.632)
So I got out of grad school, I did that show, that kind of went out into the ether, nobody paid attention to it, that's fine, it was great because I was able to make a bunch of mistakes, which is what I think you should do. And then I did another show and that also kind of just went out and just sort of disappeared. But I learned from it and some people saw it and I was able to get some attention and I started working on, you know, it's just...

all this is always this sort of constant process of refining or changing and responding to different inflation and all that kind of stuff. So I was working on your work and one of the curators for the Whitney Biennial for 2004 came to my studio and saw that and invited me to do this installation I was working on and have it at the Whitney. So it was, it seemed like it was a very fast kind of thing, but there's, there were a couple shows, there's I think like.

Eugene Rabkin (20:35.013)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (20:56.624)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (20:57.346)
basically three shows where there's no attention given to it. you know, so it was, it was fast, but I was also working fast at that moment. It compressed the timeline a great deal. wasn't one of those like you do your first show, people go fucking nuts. There's a waiting list and you know, it was, it was a little bit spread out.

Eugene Rabkin (21:08.229)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (21:14.832)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (21:18.585)
Yeah. Well, I think it's a good time to talk about the work specifically, right? Because for now, it all sounds. And we're going to put up some visuals, obviously, on our Instagram when we release this. But what was the work? What were you doing? What were the references? How did it manifest in the final artwork?

Banks (21:48.174)
The first few shows that I did, funny enough, were really heavy on painting. you know, it's one of those, painting has this kind of authority to it in a way that other mediums don't. They just look like art. They can't be anything but art. Like, sculpture, you can be like, maybe it's a bench. You know, like a drawing is, maybe it's intended for something else. A painting is declaratively

Eugene Rabkin (21:55.643)
Hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (22:08.773)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (22:12.325)
Right.

Banks (22:17.898)
a capital A art object. in a very kind of parasitic fashion, my first few sort of public things were very painting focused because it allowed me to try to insert this vocabulary that I thought was really important, which was stuff that I had called from subcultures and black metal and hardcore and all these kinds of things.

Eugene Rabkin (22:20.081)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (22:41.262)
but present them in a way that was beautifully crafted. It was this idea of seducing people into adopting a position they wouldn't necessarily find themselves relating to. Because I like this marginal set of information, and I'm trying to translate it to a larger public. And how do I do that? And one way to do that is by...

Eugene Rabkin (22:49.733)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (22:56.059)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (23:01.937)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (23:07.074)
parasitically deploying beauty for lack of a better description. It's a kind of simple for the devil posture. So yeah, and that's just very in broad strokes kind of what those things look like, but the ideas behind it were something entirely separate, but that's kind of the shell.

Eugene Rabkin (23:11.429)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (23:25.425)
Yeah, elegant angst.

Banks (23:29.442)
Yeah, I mean, like it's it's, you know, trying to get somebody to sympathize with like, hey, here's this horrific event. How do you do that? You know, in some way, it's in there's something very interesting about establishing beauty as like a circuit that creates a kind of complicitous relationship to something that like, if you see yourself in this to some degree, then

Eugene Rabkin (23:51.504)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (23:58.402)
there is the possibility of culpability down the line that like, instead of being like, look at this thing over here, this is exterior to me. Instead being like, this is something I'm capable of. That is a much more interesting position, which sounds like, you know, I'm arguing in favor of cynicism, you know, because it is a cynical position. We're all fucking monsters.

Eugene Rabkin (24:02.597)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (24:09.243)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (24:14.149)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (24:20.774)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (24:24.175)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (24:26.498)
Sorry, I'm now going to your chair.

Eugene Rabkin (24:27.589)
Yeah, no, no. See, thing is like, I don't think it's cynical. I think it's actually the opposite of that. I think it is inviting. I think it's a type of vulnerability actually, and inviting people to say, hey, we all have a dark side and part of civilization is managing that, right? On some level. So I think I want, know, let's get specific because

I think what you're talking about is one of your first big successful pieces, which is the church. Can you describe it for the listeners?

Banks (25:02.072)
Sure.

Banks (25:06.366)
Sure, yeah, mean, in a lot of ways that sort of synopsizes this. mean, these are the ideas I'm going to describe are themes that I've explored in a lot of other things and are constant preoccupations of mine. But in a lot of ways, the church was sort of the first successful instance of me sort of presenting this out in the world. So to answer your question, the

Eugene Rabkin (25:27.441)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (25:34.892)
This was a installation that I did at the Whitney Museum, I believe in 2005. And I collaborated with a band from Norway, specifically a musician named Snorri Ruk, who was a participant in this very kind of seminal criminal event in the history of Norwegian black metal, right? There was a murder that took place in Oslo, Norway, and there was a getaway driver for this murder. And that getaway driver was this...

musician, story Rook. And that's a really important point to make. I did not collaborate with the murderer. I collaborated with the accomplice to this murder. And again, that goes back to this idea of complicity and trying to create a situation where the audience is an accomplice to witnessing something. So the show itself was a big...

Eugene Rabkin (26:12.049)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (26:31.424)
empty room, black room, and inside of it there was a big giant black polished stage and on top of it was the skeleton of a burnt church. And the church had been made out of wood that I had individually cast in salt that was bonded with polyurethane. So was this kind of white ghost of a burnt skeletal church that had this kind of crystalline.

ghostly quality to it because it was sort of white and translucent. And then in this room, there was a soundtrack that was provided by the musician that I was describing, Sverig Ruk. So you walk in and you don't need to know anything about, you know, like Norwegian black metal and the series of church arsons that took place, you know, in the early history of this specific subculture in Norway.

And you don't need to know the history of the musician who's playing this music. Instead, you just have to respond to this beautiful, seemingly fragile kind of sacred space, right? And the interesting part of that to me is that it isn't, yes, on some level, yes, it is very specifically about these series of events that took place in the 90s in Norway, but it also connects to Casper David Friedrich in German romanticism and sort of

Eugene Rabkin (27:35.556)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (27:53.15)
destroyed churches in that pictorial tradition. these things aren't just about, here's this one instance and we can treat it as alien, but instead as part of a broader continuum that has a historical set of antecedents, has this contemporary instance that I'm presenting to the viewers, and it has this ideally broader resonance, which is the audience seeing themselves within it.

Eugene Rabkin (28:10.63)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (28:20.656)
Yeah.

Banks (28:21.23)
in establishing this sort of complicit circuit for lack of a better description.

Eugene Rabkin (28:25.585)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And hopefully that complicity, like you said, makes us reflect on ourselves. So a more philosophical question for you in that case. Do you think beauty is amoral?

Banks (28:44.15)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's it's an amorality is a really, really important word in this that I think that like, it's not immoral. It's not moral. is the the absence is the void state of that. And that there's there tends to be in response to this almost this kind of epistemic panic, you know, when when you aren't given a series of hand hand, you know,

there isn't a path laid out for you in response where it is like, here's this thing that is all the terms surrounding it are resolutely moral, but in its interpretation, the burden of that is shifted over onto the audience and is delivered as an amoral kind of summation and then do with that as you will. And I think there's something very interesting about that. This feels like I'm being very vague.

Eugene Rabkin (29:14.884)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (29:36.143)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Yeah, no, no, no. Well, to me, you're not because I think along the same lines and I think we are in a very small minority. And I think that's important to point out. You got me thinking about two things. One is so this Belgian designer, Dris van Noten, he just launched the foundation in Venice. It's very beautiful. And and the

Banks (30:06.072)
Yeah, I saw it.

Eugene Rabkin (30:09.243)
first and the theme of the first exhibition is something like beauty is the only true form of protest. And I was like, and everyone is singing praises of that theme. I'm like, I don't know, is it? Because to me, beauty is also amoral. it, I surely I don't, I don't know how

Banks (30:18.21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (30:39.121)
effective beauty as protest is.

Banks (30:42.41)
And it's also one of those things where it's like pretending that beauty is somehow a term that is trans historical trans cultural just just is this thing this monolithic thing that you can refer back to without being like, well, shit, what constitutes beauty? Who gets to define beauty? Like, what what ideology is being expressed, you know, under the the the blanket?

Eugene Rabkin (31:02.705)
Hmm.

Banks (31:09.102)
term that is beauty. This isn't a benign word. This is a word that has been used to bludgeon many, many fucking people hideously over my time on earth. I find that one weird and I saw that too. I've seen images of the installation there and...

Eugene Rabkin (31:14.833)
Yeah.

Banks (31:34.05)
You know, it's it sounds great. It's one of those things that sounds great and bold and sweeping and wonderful. And then you like dig into it you're like, yeah, no.

Eugene Rabkin (31:37.797)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (31:42.417)
Yeah, it's if you really start, I agree. well, I hate to say it, but one of the problems with the fashion media, we are not very reflective. But just that the fact that no one seems to have stopped and thought about this. I thought, don't know. I know the intention is good behind it, right? To me, there is no question. But I feel like this wasn't thought through a

Banks (32:04.312)
More.

Eugene Rabkin (32:11.265)
especially today, especially under, and yeah, I, you know, especially under the Trump administration and all the ugliness that's around us. And I agree on some level, you know, Trump and everything about him, it's not just immoral, immoral. It's, it's kind of ugly, right? It's, you know, we can say that everything around it is ugly. And I feel like you're not wrong when you say that.

at the same time, like, and I get the temptation to say, we're going to use beauty as a tool of protest. just don't think it's, I don't think it's effective. And I think it's a problematic thing to say if you really think about it.

Banks (33:02.062)
Yeah, no, no, I'm agreeing. Yeah, absolutely.

Eugene Rabkin (33:07.089)
And because there's so many examples we have in art history where beautiful things were used for, know, aesthetically pleasing things were used for ugly purposes, right? And that work, Church, a new explanation for the work, it also reminded me a little bit, and I read in one of the New York Times,

2016, 2017, they mentioned that one of the reasons I think you moved to Ithaca because your dad wanted to study with Vladimir Nabokov. And the whole point of Lolita, right, is that he makes a pedophile very aesthetically appealing. He's very charming. He's very urbane.

Banks (33:46.284)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (34:02.939)
He's very well educated. He's very cultured. Right. He's beautiful. Yeah. And at the end he's like, no, no, no. Did you forget that he's a pedophile?

Banks (34:07.118)
Yeah, he's beautiful. Yeah.

Banks (34:16.91)
Yeah. And that is an astonishing fucking thing. that. And that's something I find really interesting. Like that is much more interesting than this sort of like bland assertion of beauty as a sort of motive force. When you're like, no, no, no, no, no. Like it is much more complex than that. Like in that Nabokov example of like this is I'm deploying beauty as as this thing, as this mechanism to seduce you.

Eugene Rabkin (34:47.302)
Mm-hmm

Banks (34:47.304)
into identifying in the most immediate way possible with something truly fucking hideous. And if you have that capacity within you, and we all do, then it is morally incumbent upon you as a citizen of this, you know, a member of this species to be super dramatic, to police yourself, to constantly question, like, why am I doing this thing?

Eugene Rabkin (35:11.493)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Banks (35:16.204)
Like, and am I doing it for selfish reasons? And like, I think that's great. I think we benefit from, I don't know, hating ourselves a little bit more than we do. I'm an advocate of self-hatred. I think it's great.

Eugene Rabkin (35:26.993)
Hahaha

We can add the podcast right here. It's a bang. Another aspect of your work that I wanted to talk about is this kind of, you are a member of the species, but you are, I am too, even though.

Banks (35:40.142)
Done!

Eugene Rabkin (36:00.259)
immigration, but we're both Americans. And there is a lot of kind of, well, we are, mean, look, I think one of the things that is responsible is to recognize, you know, we are not part of this shit, like whatever is going on right now, we are definitely counter that. And yet we are.

Banks (36:02.412)
Yeah.

Banks (36:08.184)
Yay!

Banks (36:23.596)
Yeah.

Banks (36:30.05)
beneficiary, which makes us direct immediate beneficiaries of so much awfulness. That's the part of it where it's like, that sense of moral distance, I think is really fucking dangerous because it skips over the like, no, you by existing in this situation, you were benefiting from this and being conscious and aware of it and trying to do something to

Eugene Rabkin (36:30.125)
American citizens.

Eugene Rabkin (36:37.627)
Yeah.

Banks (36:58.158)
correct that is a moral obligation, you know, for not to be histrionic about the entire thing. But like, I think it is a really important thing. And when you get to be like, well, I know, I disagree with this, cool, and yet you still benefit. It's like being a tax payer and going cool, my money is going instead of to, I don't know, fixing infrastructure is going to bomb refugee camps. Like, in that is

Eugene Rabkin (37:04.302)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (37:14.8)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (37:25.009)
Yeah.

Banks (37:27.596)
The dollar that I spent, or many dollars that I spent, doesn't give a shit what my moral position, alignments happen to me. It's like, be happier with bridges, but here we are.

Eugene Rabkin (37:37.966)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (37:43.107)
Yeah, exactly. Well, that's exactly part of what I'm what I was getting is that so there is a lot of kind of a deconstructed inverted Americana in your work. And I want to talk about that is, you know, your preoccupation with that, where does it come from? What is it that you want to say with this?

Banks (38:09.752)
Sure. mean, so I am as described before, I'm from Africa and this is where I was raised. My entire family is all from the South. I'm the only person in my family who does not have a Southern accent. they've both sides of my family have been in the South for many, many generations. So there's all sorts of fucking ugliness that goes along with that.

You know, and so I was raised with my parents are wonderful people who are deeply sort of progressive in their worldview, but they sort of came out of backgrounds where they're appalled by the history of their families. You so I was raised with like this sort of, you in the north in upstate New York, very, very cold, very, very far away from southern accents.

with these stories about kind of, well, here's your family and this is where it's from and all this kind of stuff, which is, you know, that's one sort of brick and the wall for lack of a better description, but like, you know, this sense of like, there's this history to this country that is fucking complex and is dark and is cause for shame, you know, and is this thing that has to be chewed on, you know.

for you to understand yourself. So that's a part of my understanding of who I am from a very early age, know, familial history. And then again, going back to sort of growing up in Reagan's America and watching like, cool, you know, fuck you, you're on your own, but we're gonna call it self-sufficiency and we're gonna say that that's a value.

Eugene Rabkin (39:45.777)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (39:59.44)
Yeah.

Banks (40:01.26)
you know, that all these things sort of combine together and then just, you know, being associated with subcultures and kind of lessons that you learn from those where, you know, it's like, yeah, you thought it was bad, but check this out. It's way worse than you thought. Like, so all those things in aggregate sort of work together to a, you know, I heard this great line. I think it's an Arthur Jaffa quote recently, which is like, yeah, we, we all love America is demonic, but we all love it.

Eugene Rabkin (40:13.764)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (40:29.75)
like, which is a thing like I'm a drug addict, like I'm a recovering drug addict. And that role, that is the best description of my relationship to this country, which is, is deeply fucking awful and toxic. And I go back to it again and again and again, expecting a different set of results. But I don't get that because I'm a fuck addict. That is definitely what an addict is and how they relate to things.

Eugene Rabkin (40:40.016)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (40:43.889)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (40:56.901)
Yeah. Yeah.

Banks (40:59.756)
So.

Eugene Rabkin (41:01.499)
Yeah, I see that in some of your recent work and that deconstructed American flag sculpture with neon lights that was also going to put up a visual. That really... And there was, I think there was like a black sack next to it that reminded me of like Abu Ghraib.

Banks (41:30.25)
yeah. Yeah. I those are sandbags that are just sort of props that are like so some of the a lot of the stuff that I use uses the sort of the vocabulary of theater, you know, so like these are props. These are, you know, contingent structures that exist just for like, you know, like a performance or stage or things like that. And, you know, looking at these, I don't know, sort of social media feeds of like MAGA people who like

Eugene Rabkin (41:34.363)
Yeah.

Banks (41:59.464)
have these, they're the people who are deeply in love with AI nonsense. know, so AI aesthetic is like heavily coded in the MAGA direction. And how many of these fucking people have like pictures of like white America with an American flag except because AI being AI puts like the wrong number of stars on it or the wrong number of stripes. The patriotism, you know, I mean, there's a code of how you're supposed to treat the American flag.

Eugene Rabkin (42:03.919)
Hmm

Eugene Rabkin (42:21.713)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (42:28.62)
Right? Like, and then you look at like a Trump rally and these people have like a cut open and uses a suit lining and like, it is just this, this pure instance of post-modernity, like the performance of patriotism, utterly divorced from any kind of true content or like any core, you know? So like, fuck it. I've got my AI flag as my profile pic, but it's got like 50 stripes because I don't shit and I don't know any.

Eugene Rabkin (42:44.08)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (42:49.006)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (42:53.071)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's also, it produces a phenomenal amount of kitsch.

Banks (43:04.568)
Yeah, God, It's incredible. It's incredible. like, the part, like there's a, I think it was Trump's first term, him sitting with some kids, it was one of those photo shoot things where he was attempting to humanize them and put them next to children and as a consequence, it ended up being deeply fucking terrifying because that is an individual who should never be around children because you can tell how...

Eugene Rabkin (43:06.619)
Yeah.

Banks (43:30.592)
utterly sociopathic he is because there's no like, it's kids. Like you can see this person eat the children if the room was locked. And he was like drawing, he was coloring on a, it was a coloring book and he was like coloring in an American flag because of course he is. And he gets the colors wrong. Like, so he gets the flag wrong. So it's like him like sitting and being asked like, what's your favorite Bible verse? And he says two Corinthians, you know, like with it.

Eugene Rabkin (43:36.079)
Mmm.

Banks (44:00.0)
All of this is such a hollow performance, you know, and it's it's kitsch, but at least kitsch has like some kind of like, you know, it's embarrassingly sincere. This is kitsch that is embarrassingly insincere.

Eugene Rabkin (44:03.086)
Of course.

Eugene Rabkin (44:13.094)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (44:16.977)
Yeah, yeah. mean, and also, mean, part of, yeah, I guess like Kitsch can be cute. A lot of it is like cute, right? It's not beautiful cute. And this is just sheer ugliness on all accounts.

Banks (44:29.006)
And it's sentimental, but like this is cynical. Like, so it's, it's, it's like, we need a new term to describe this because.

Eugene Rabkin (44:33.041)
Yeah, exactly.

Eugene Rabkin (44:38.779)
That's true, that's true, that's true.

Banks (44:41.484)
because it's kitsch, but it's also the opposite of kitsch. It's not sentimental. It's not sincere. It's not cute. But it is kitsch still. So we need a new term.

Eugene Rabkin (44:45.627)
Yeah, and it's not cute.

Eugene Rabkin (44:54.225)
Yeah. You talked about being a recovering drug addict as far as America goes. I, you know, I don't know what I would put myself into, but I will say that

There's always been a narrative that I subscribe to because maybe for my own like mental, you know, for my own sanity is that, yeah, you know, America can be an awful place, but there is this undercurrent of common sense from the common folk that serves as an inevitable self-correcting mechanism as the arc of history.

You know, it's long what bends toward justice. Since the first Trump administration, I no longer believe in that common folk, you know, wisdom or common sense that has been such a part of American mythology, right? The common sense, know, Thomas Paine, right? We kind of, one of the founding documents of America is called common sense, right?

Banks (46:11.0)
Yeah, yeah, First kind of like mass piece of media that exists. yeah, yeah. It was the first instance of like a mass media success was fucking common sense. And here we are.

Eugene Rabkin (46:18.011)
Yeah, exactly. Biggest bestseller, right?

Eugene Rabkin (46:26.629)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I can also see that reflected in your work. There is a sense of loss. There is a sense of ruin. There is a sense of closing of possibility that I also see not just on a political level, but on the cultural level as well.

You know, we all live in a time of death of counterculture, in the time of populism, in the time of where neoliberalism, you know, this unabashed pursuit of profit at all cost.

Banks (47:16.959)
it complete disappearance of culture as a value. Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (47:22.449)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or culture, the only value of culture is to make money. This is what it seems like.

Banks (47:28.524)
Yeah, it purely as an extractive proposition, but as a thing in and of itself as a value in and of itself that like, hey, fucking ambiguity is necessary to the human experience. And this is what art provides. Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (47:45.583)
Yeah, Yeah. banks. We're at good. We're not good at ambiguity. Like this is that is gone. That is completely gone.

Banks (47:49.932)
Yeah. yeah. And that's like, that is the the the thing I love the most is why I love art, because I have this opportunity to encounter something that leaves space for me to make up my own fucking mind. Like there is an ambiguous space within an art object that allows an audience to have a role when they're interacting with it and gives me credit.

Eugene Rabkin (48:16.699)
Hmm.

Banks (48:18.518)
for being an active thinking human being. It is a profound kind of generosity. And when you shut that down and turn everything into illustration, advertising, propaganda, things that communicate in a mechanically sealed way, that disallow for an ambiguous space for an audience to find themselves because you have absolute contempt for that as an idea, because there is no value you can extract from that ambiguous core.

Eugene Rabkin (48:23.11)
Yeah.

Banks (48:48.418)
then fuck we're

Eugene Rabkin (48:50.609)
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's no, I think that's totally valid. But I think that has also penetrated the fine art world. One of my next sub stack articles will be about how the labels for artworks in museums are now literally telling you what to think, closing that possibility of ambiguity that you were talking about.

Banks (49:20.418)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (49:21.361)
That to me is profoundly disconcerting.

Banks (49:26.754)
Yeah. mean, the, the, the fact, I, like, I always feel bad because it's, it's artists are artists and God bless them. It is a difficult fucking job on the best day, you know? So it always feels pretty shitty to be like, well, you know, this art sucks and it's reflective of this. But, know, like the fact that for the past seeming decade, while there's been this glut of money and we're now watching it collapse and watching people sort of wake up.

Eugene Rabkin (49:45.172)
Heh.

Banks (49:56.312)
from this cocaine hangover, at least in the art world, it's been this sort of the most conservative shit possible, like figurative painting. You do not get much more conservative in form and content, regardless of whatever variation it may take at its core, just as a categorical declaration of this thing. It is a painting of a figure.

Cool, man. Like, this feels deeply conservative.

Eugene Rabkin (50:29.541)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to switch a little bit and to talk about something you and I chatted about before. it is, I guess the highfalutin way of saying it is the place of an artist in the city, right? And we talked about New York City, you and I, which we can extrapolate that to talking about cultural capitals in general and how

impossible it has become to produce art in these cultural centers because of how expensive it's gotten. I want to start with what was your experience in New York City like? Because I know you, you you, and this group with Dash Snow and Dan Cullen.

What was that scene like for you? What was your experience of New York City in late 90s, early 2000s? We seem like, think we are basically the same age and I think we are close in our experience of New York City. I moved to New York in 92, but the late 90s is really when I started experiencing New York City as a cultural center.

Because I in Brooklyn, but I might have as well been living on Mars. So what was that like and what happened in the intervening years to now?

Banks (52:04.322)
Right.

Banks (52:14.958)
I mean, just, I have my nephew who I love to death and is in his twenties and he works as a chef at a really great restaurant in the West Village, know, and lives out in Brooklyn and talking to him and comparing notes to his experience, you know, being a young creative who is, you know, doing something ambitious and living out in Brooklyn and commuting into the city for his job because that's the creative

core of what he cares about, It maps over like the Venn diagram of his experience in my experience. It's pretty close to a perfect circle, right? Except when it comes to, well, how does this in capital letters work? When I was his age and similar situation, I was able to do an art handling job or tattoo or whatever, like a fairly low impact.

kind of occupation for enough money that it would allow me to have a studio space and like, you know, also a social life and go out and see shows. And now his experience is just work all the fucking time and then go back to an apartment where he's hot housed with a number of other people his age who are doing the exact same fucking thing and all they can do is work. And it's just like, yeah, you're living in New York.

Eugene Rabkin (53:30.577)
Mm.

Eugene Rabkin (53:38.811)
Yeah.

Banks (53:43.663)
but you're not living in New York because you're working in New York. It's now a binary. You're working in New York and that's what you do and that's how you experience New York, but you're not living. And then there's another strata of people who are enormously fucking wealthy and they're living in New York and fuck those people.

Eugene Rabkin (54:07.601)
True, but here's the thing. We talked about this recent essay by the artist Josh Klein about how impossible it has become to live in New York. And again, it sounds like you and I were both in the minority where we were like, sure.

That is so obvious. Like, why did this article hit?

And I know you were very frustrated with it.

Banks (54:51.168)
Yeah, and again, I'm not frustrated with Josh Klein or his art. I don't know him. I don't know his art tremendously well, but what I know I like, the essay, his conclusion and his overall thesis, I'm not disagreeing with. What I found profoundly fucking dismaying about that essay was its response, like the reception to it. The fact that so many people, from my perspective, what he was writing was just purely self-evident. It was somebody standing

to their neck in water declaring water is wet. And the reception to that across the board for the art world is like, holy shit, this is revelatory. Where the sense of dismay that something that is so transparently obvious and self-evident should be treated as if this is deeply insightful. No, it's not. This is what this shit looks like. is as close to like, I don't know,

Eugene Rabkin (55:31.407)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (55:46.161)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (55:48.748)
journalistic exactitude, as you could find in an essay, like these are the conditions on the ground. And it's just a measure of the disjunct between the audience that consumes art. And I mean that quite literally, the people are in to transact that and the people who produce it. And that gap is just yawning wider and wider and wider. But again, his overall thesis, like, fuck it.

Eugene Rabkin (55:51.835)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (56:02.662)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (56:13.264)
Yeah.

Banks (56:17.536)
I'm all for decentering New York from the conversation. I live in upstate New York. I'm on the page with that. I'm all for, hey, let's look at different modes of creating and communicating and distributing work and all that stuff. And he even sort of points to subcultures as a positive, productive model to look at. Fuck, I'm all on that. Like pretty much going,

Eugene Rabkin (56:22.576)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (56:47.596)
point by point by point down the majority of his essay. I am not arguing with that or do I object to any of it? It is, again, is purely the fucking reception to it and seeing treat that as like a ray of light from heaven was just like, holy shit, where are you fuckers looking?

Eugene Rabkin (57:01.967)
Hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (57:11.057)
Yeah, it seems that it was used as a kind of again, moralizing moment and everyone like wrung their hands and then everyone's gonna move.

And to me, the thing was like, yeah, okay, so let's create new cultural centers.

Banks (57:35.63)
It's, I mean, this is, this sounds very sour grapes and that's not my intention, but I just did this, this, I haven't done a solo show in New York city in a really long time, you know, and that's by my choice. But I just did a project out in Brooklyn, which was, you know, I have a friend who's got a house that is just overlooks the BQE and he's got a backyard with a garden shed and this weird sort of you know, that he's turned into a gallery. This is an example of how to

respond to diminishing opportunities. Like find the cracks, find the spaces that haven't been co-opted and occupied and use that to promote the culture that you want to see, right? So that is what I did in Brooklyn. I did this show at a friend's house, it's still up. And that's sort of like getting people to go out and see that, you know.

Eugene Rabkin (58:28.102)
Yeah.

Banks (58:28.59)
It's this thing where you're if you are disgusted or exhausted or frustrated with how things are going, the status quo, and you don't support an alternate to that status quo, don't know what to say. that again, it sounds very sour grapes and is very specific to my experience. But like, yeah, I'd love for people to see that. But I love for people to see every

Eugene Rabkin (58:45.765)
Yeah.

Banks (58:57.47)
random weird fucking things because I guarantee there's a lot of people who are mobilizing their little small garden shed in response to opportunities being shut down. know, it would be good for that.

Eugene Rabkin (59:09.775)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah. But I also think we need to get over these ideas that there are only a few cultural centers and you have to be there. To me, today is increasingly starting to sound like you got to be close to the market, not to the art market, not to the art, but to the art market. Like you have to be close to the client.

Banks (59:34.636)
Yeah. Because everybody consumes shit through social media or the internet, you know, that like they're not going to go see the show. You know, I mean, this is experience with art. Like, I'm not sure how that translates with fashion, but like the they're they're digesting a show by seeing it online, you know, and then their consultant is telling them that this is a good move to make. And here, check the auction results that you can.

Eugene Rabkin (59:44.366)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (59:57.392)
Yeah.

Banks (01:00:03.374)
look at on, know, by Googling it, you know, like all this stuff that doesn't, no point in this, is there a demand for somebody to actually go physically interact with an object? And yet, in my understanding of these things is as a physical interaction, like I go and I look at stuff and I love it. And it's just very terrifying when that suddenly is no longer a

Eugene Rabkin (01:00:15.629)
and experience it. Yeah.

Banks (01:00:32.714)
valued as this.

Eugene Rabkin (01:00:34.001)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we talked about your connection between, you know, fine art and music and subcultures and your and now I want to bring in fashion to it. Because again, I felt when I fell in love with fashion, was falling in love with those designers who were very connected to to rock music in its various incarnations.

from noise to industrial to punk and so on and on. And I know you've had, the big thing you did with fashion was with Eddie Slimane when he was creative director at Celine, but you also did something while he was at Dior, right? I think you designed one of the stores. can you, I mean, feel free to be as freewheeling as you like, just.

Banks (01:01:23.874)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:01:33.563)
Like what's your take on the relation between fashion, art and music and just like the history of your work with fashion, what you think about it.

Banks (01:01:42.828)
Yeah, mean, in broad strokes, it's my, I don't think art always exists in a gallery. It can be fashion, it can be music. The thing that I'm looking for and that I respond to is what I was trying to describe earlier, that there's this kind of ambiguous thing that allows me to ask.

me to be a participant in the creation of the meaning of this thing. And fashion does that just as well as art is just as well as music. Like that doesn't mean all fashion doesn't mean all art doesn't mean all music. is a specific and kind of rarefied condition. And when you find it, it's fucking amazing. You know, that's my relationship to it in very generic broad strokes that

There are instances of designers in fashion who create that and have created it. And I respond to that very, very much. So my personal experience, you'd mentioned Hetty, I met him, I think, when I did the Whitney Biennial.

Eugene Rabkin (01:02:45.201)
Mm hmm. Yeah.

Banks (01:03:03.118)
That would have been 2004. And there was a period where, you know, was fairly steady communication with him. And yeah, he was the creative director for DROM at that point. And the stores under his directorship all had a changing room that all, that he had asked different artists like Hugo Ronanone and a number of other people to sort of design those spaces. So they were opening one in Osaka.

And that was right, if I'm remembering correctly, that was right when I was opening a solo show at the Whitney Museum. So that would have been 2005. So that was happening at the same time. So there was a little period where it was a brief kind of flurry of like, were interacting a number of different points and did a couple of different interviews, did a bunch of photography and we're fairly steady communication. And then we reconnected a few years ago while he was with Celine.

Eugene Rabkin (01:03:38.619)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (01:04:00.216)
for first one collection and then this larger project with a bunch of sculptures were installed all over the place. So, but he's one of these people who consistently, when I look at what he produces, you know, not just in terms of his designs, but you know, his, way he stages things, the way he photographs and documents things, there is, he is somebody who is, I feel exquisitely sensitive to that sort of that

that thing that I was talking about, that sort of ambiguous core, that space that asks you to find yourself within that. It is not dictating the terms to you as an audience, but is asking you to be involved with it in a certain way. Yeah, which I think is miraculous.

Eugene Rabkin (01:04:32.922)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Rabkin (01:04:47.057)
Mm hmm. I want to talk about those sculptures you did for Celine stores because was that the artwork that ended up being called throne first and last and always? Yeah. And I saw that at Dan Collins at the Sky High Farm Biennial, which is close to where I where I live upstate.

Banks (01:05:00.544)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Banks (01:05:09.052)
sure, yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:05:17.327)
That was my coming back to Banks Violet moment where I was like, my God, I totally forgot. know, this totally escaped me. I mean, it was by far, no offense to all the others, this was by far the most incredible thing there. And I loved you using, which is one of the recurring matzis, right? And that it unites your art.

Banks (01:05:27.758)
.

Eugene Rabkin (01:05:45.627)
connects your art to music is you use a lot of that sound equipment, of like what, you know, for concerts, all these like boxes for musical equipment, all the extension cords, this kind of like a roadie thing that's very present, these stage elements that are very present in your work. But I wanted to, because we really haven't talked in, I know some artists like absolutely hate describing their work, but

Banks (01:06:00.258)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:06:14.129)
I hope you will indulge me and talk about that work.

Banks (01:06:19.406)
Yeah, those were originally it was going to be 15, but it ended up being 14 because one of the locations ended up not working out. in essence, they're 14 chandeliers and they're chandeliers that are constructed out of they're really sort of like schematic or skeleton versions of chandeliers. They're these circles, these big sort of steel diameters. And then there are these descending lit elements, which are

In the original versions I had made had been fluorescent tubes. And then for the Celine series, there were these special LEDs because they had to sort of travel all over the globe. And there's different requirements and zoning restrictions and stuff like that. And it just, it's, it's better for long-term archival reasons to, you know, switch from fluorescence, which are being phased out and use these LEDs. they, there are 14 of these objects are sort of skeletal chandeliers. And if you.

If you almost imagine sort of doing like a stick figure drawing of a chandelier and then make a flip book of that chandelier falling from the ceiling, hitting the ground and then collapsing. it starts stable, it collapses vertically and then it collapses fully horizontally. So there were three basic forms of the chandelier and each of those three basic forms collapsed vertically and then horizontally.

So what you saw at Dan's show, I think it was three or four of those, and there different versions of, there were different stages of these things kind of falling from the ceiling and collapsing. Those were really like I had made, I referred to this a moment ago, I had made similar kind of objects in the past. So I was kind of referring to those things from my own history. I was also referring to

Eugene Rabkin (01:07:52.453)
Yeah, man.

Banks (01:08:15.394)
the series of sculptures that Martin Kippenberger, the artist Martin Kippenberger had made that were these street lamps for drunks. The really amazing thing, amazing things that are like these kind of, yeah, these woozy kind of, you know, sort of psychogeographic kind of remapping your environment as a drunk with these street lamps. So I was making the sort of Narcan, you know, heroin overdosed version of the chandeliers that...

Eugene Rabkin (01:08:25.614)
I remember those.

Banks (01:08:41.198)
if the chandelier is kind of like a stand-in or a surrogate for the human body and that the human body kind of collapsing in space in slow motion, of almost like a Muybred sequence. Yeah, so that's kind of the rough idea for it. I don't know if that's...

Eugene Rabkin (01:08:58.733)
Yeah, yeah. I think they were absolutely gorgeous. And and but also, you know, the name first and last and always. You can. Yes, you talk about the name.

Banks (01:09:09.9)
Yeah, It was very deliberate.

Banks (01:09:15.916)
Yeah, so the first one, like the first title I had made a couple of these previously, as I mentioned, that were called throne, which is a great, it's a word, sounds like, know, the way it's spelled is throne, like a seat for a king, right? Or if you just say it out loud, throne, means something violently, sort of, you you throw something, right? And then first, last, and always, sisters of mercy reference. So that,

Eugene Rabkin (01:09:35.813)
Mm-hmm.

Banks (01:09:45.676)
That's such a beautiful phrase that makes it sounds loving and sincere, but also is deeply selfish, which is a wonderful. hell yeah. mean, that is like, if Andrew Eldritch had one thing on his headstone, that should be it. Like it's beautiful, it's evocative, it's great. It's also deeply, deeply self-centered in a glee fucking way.

Eugene Rabkin (01:09:53.487)
Mm-hmm. Which is Sisters of Mercy.

Eugene Rabkin (01:10:07.012)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:10:12.76)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Banks (01:10:15.022)
perfect, but also is a great sort of stand in for like my relationship to I'm a recovering drug addict. You know, like that was my relationship to heroin for fucking years. So there's a kind of nod to that. And then there's a kind of numbering sequence in a way of like organizing these for shipping. And it's really like, you know, usually my approach to titling things is not like it's it's meant to be a license plate, you know, and it reflects

what I'm listening to at the moment, it has some kind of connection in a direct sense to what I'm thinking about, how I'm making an object. So there is a really kind of, it seems overly elaborate, but when you drill down to it, it is purely denotative.

Eugene Rabkin (01:11:03.173)
Yeah. Yeah. Those were really, really beautiful. And I'm glad I saw them and it kind of...

Eugene Rabkin (01:11:14.033)
evoked again the impact seeing your art has on me, at least personally. And I'm glad to see you coming back. I mean, it's a silly thing to say coming back because, you yeah. But I know you've had a recent Art Forum cover, which I think for I always think like for somebody

who comes from this like subculture goth, know, industrial metal backgrounds of like, ending up on the cover of a major magazine. I was like, Whoa, what's happening? It seems so unusual.

Banks (01:11:55.234)
Yeah, very, feels very fucking weird. That one's always like very weird, but I've always like, that's been my way of relating to like anytime someone's like, yeah, this thing is happening and it's a positive. I'm always like, why? Like I've never gotten my head around the idea that like, yeah, yeah, like, you know.

Eugene Rabkin (01:12:12.741)
Mm-hmm. No.

Banks (01:12:22.594)
people respond to this thing outside of this sort of carefully siloed kind of little audience. And even though it's my intention not for it to only communicate to this tiny little audience, obviously I'd like to engage a much broader world. I'm still kind of secretly shocked when that happens. Like, this should be, only five weirdos should.

Eugene Rabkin (01:12:43.078)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:12:46.681)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:12:50.641)
Yeah, yeah. That's exactly how I feel about my writing. I'm like every time like, oh, this is so interesting that other people respond.

Banks (01:12:51.66)
Yes, you know,

Banks (01:12:58.082)
Yeah. Wait. Yeah. And it's, I know I seem like an asshole because somebody will compliment me on something. And my first impulse is always like, why are you, why, why do you like this? Like, and it's, it's, seems deeply ungrateful, but it's, it's me just responding to a like kind of shock.

Eugene Rabkin (01:13:09.969)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:13:18.999)
Yeah. But which, but makes total sense because as you know, when you do grow up, I mean, the reason they're called subcultures, right, is that they're small and the subset of people who are engaged in counterculture is actually quite small. So yes. And especially, I feel like the deeper you go, the more esoteric it becomes to the mainstream until it becomes simply off.

Banks (01:13:36.472)
Sure.

Eugene Rabkin (01:13:48.857)
or all they see is a confrontation and they don't see the examination part of of countercultures basically of subcultures.

Banks (01:14:01.006)
And that's always the very tricky line to toe, which is that you're referring to something or you're relating to something that by its very nature is meant to be kind of hermetic, you know, some degree, but you're intending it for a broad audience. So you've got to sort of translate this thing, it's arcane and esoteric in this one context.

Eugene Rabkin (01:14:15.759)
Yeah.

Banks (01:14:28.234)
and shift it somehow so other people can find themselves within that. And that's the interesting, the interesting point. But I'm always shocked like that it does work, you know?

Eugene Rabkin (01:14:33.892)
Yeah. Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:14:38.703)
Yeah. I guess there is also a danger of it being co-opted or misinterpreted. And I think that's what pains truly creative people. I think with probably, I do think it's worse with fashion because it is inevitably a commercial proposition.

and for consumption, but when these ideas become just consumption, right. I think this is when people are like, kind of like, no, this doesn't sit well with me. Cause I actually was trying to say something with the.

Banks (01:15:24.864)
And it is really interesting to see if like, is there a way to make this thing that is somehow, you know, not, not immunized to its eventual recuperation and commodity form, but they can almost function as kind of like, you know, a poison pill that somebody can use it. And then when it's orbed and transported into a new in different contexts, it then can, you know, open up and spread its particular poison.

Eugene Rabkin (01:15:45.078)
Yeah. Yeah.

Banks (01:15:54.156)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:15:54.341)
Yeah.

Yeah. See, in my darker moments, I feel like that's absolutely impossible today because neoliberalism is the water we swim in as far as culture goes, not just the economy. And to me, the sort of the end point, I don't want to say that it's end point and there's nothing after it, but it was a very dispiriting moment when, you know, that Banksy artwork that self-destructed

after an auction that was sold for a million that was then resold for 25. It's like, what do you do after this?

Banks (01:16:33.154)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, is.

Eugene Rabkin (01:16:38.425)
Like everything will be go after, you know, and yet we have to do something. We have no choice.

Banks (01:16:44.354)
Yeah, or like the KLF Foundation burning a million pounds and maybe on the Faroe Islands and making a video of this. It's not just that one instance, it's the fact that there is a set of antecedents of other people trying to resist being absorbed into the marketplace in similar manner.

And every decade, there's an iteration of that. And is equally as unsuccessful 10 years ago as it was 20 years ago. It's like, OK, cool. Where is the successful, productive model of resistance? I think that's the question.

Eugene Rabkin (01:17:26.321)
Mmm.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess the final answer is it's inside us. It remains inside us. And that is the final point, right? I I always think if I can turn on that one kid who will say, I read this and A, like, I don't feel insane anymore. Like, I don't feel like I'm a crazy person and everyone around me because, like, I feel like an alien.

And there's that confirmation and there is that explanation of what I was feeling, but I can't quite maybe put it into words because I've had those moments and I still have those moments sometimes and they're incredible. You know, I've had those moments like, I don't know, like reading Albert Camus and you're like, brain exposed. Yeah, this is exactly how I felt. I think that's what we got to do, right? Like, that's the thing that remains.

Banks (01:18:25.208)
Yeah. Yeah. mean, I'm enormously fortunate. I get to do a Zoom call later today with a younger artist who's sort of working on a larger project and wanted my feedback. I'm like beyond fucking gratified that I'm in a position where somebody would want that, would ask me to do that. And then I get to do that. that is what an enormous gift, whether they give a shit about what I say or not.

Eugene Rabkin (01:18:41.135)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:18:47.505)
Yeah.

Banks (01:18:54.814)
is less point and it's more of the like, at the end of the day, I'm always again, I'm always shocked when these things translate to a broader audience. And that's great. And that's wonderful. But in in the end of the day, if it's only five people, that's also okay. Like that, that's that's that deeply satisfying. So

Eugene Rabkin (01:18:55.078)
Yeah.

Eugene Rabkin (01:19:11.035)
Yeah. Yeah.

I agree. I agree. Yeah. Well, I think it's fitting to end our episode with Samuel Beckett. I can go on. I'll go on. That feels like the cultural moment we find ourselves in. All right. Yeah. Thank you, Banks. And I invite...

Banks (01:19:25.079)
Yeah.

Banks (01:19:33.218)
Yeah, yeah, mean, is a perfect fucking summation.

Eugene Rabkin (01:19:44.177)
the audience to check out your work. It's really fantastic. And come with an open mind, come with the sense of inquiry, because it is disturbing some of it and it should be disturbing. It is meant to be disturbing. Thank you, Banks. And we'll put up some visuals on our Instagram, which obviously your work should be experienced in person.

Hey, it's a start. Thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it.

Banks (01:20:15.438)
Thanks.

Thank you very much, I enjoyed it. Bye.

Eugene Rabkin (01:20:22.225)
Bye.