Singer flexes new artistic muscles
Guided By Voices' Robert Pollard takes up collage
The speed with which Robert Pollard speaks is exceeded only by the rate with which he produces albums and, now, art. The onetime Guided By Voices leader, now 50, is about to release his first book, "Town of Mirrors: The Reassembled Imagery of Robert Pollard." It's a collection of more than 180 of his collages - including more than a dozen created exclusively for this volume - and it will be released Friday by the graphic-novel specialists Fantagraphics Books.
Earlier this year, Pollard's art was exhibited at former "Sopranos" actor Michael Imperioli's Studio Dante gallery in New York City, and his work has been featured at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in his native Ohio. We recently caught up with Pollard to talk to him about his burgeoning second career, his new band Boston Spaceships (which comes to the Paradise Rock Club on Sept. 30), and why cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them together isn't as easy as it might look.
Q. Congratulations on your book. It seems fitting, given how both your original artwork and your covers for Guided By Voices's early, out-of-print albums have been highly collectible among fans for some time now. Look at [1992's] "Propeller." [Each copy featured a different, handmade cover.]
A. People think we did that on purpose, pressing only 500 copies of that album with the different covers. But we didn't have any money. We wanted the first "Propeller" cover I did to be the cover, but it was full color and expensive to make, and we couldn't afford it. So we said, "Well, let's just make all the covers different to cut down on the costs." And now they're worth $4,000 or $5,000 apiece. It's exciting because I'm being given a little bit of credit now as being a viable collage artist, which some people think is ridiculous. Like this guy who said, "Wait a minute: You had an art show where you just cut out pictures and then glued them back together?" And I said, "Yeah, that's pretty much what it is." There's more to it than that. It's about having the eye for detail, moving things from one environment and reassembling them into new environments. Sometimes it's almost like painting, where only the artist knows with the last stroke if it's finished or not - like when I put Mao Tse Tung's head on the New York Knicks basketball player, and I called him "Chairman of the Boards." That's finished! (Laughs)
Q. Was there a point where your artwork struck you as a route you could go professionally?
A. Not really. I think maybe it was when a couple of people that I know from New York said, "Hey man, let's do a show for your collage work," and I'm like, "Are you sure that's something that's worthwhile?" At first it was kind of like a pipe dream, but then it became real. I was kind of nervous at first, but we drank, it was kind of like a show where everybody was getting drunk. It was fun, and we sold a lot of pieces. I'm just happy that I'm kind of able to make a living doing this. But some people misconstrue that I'm hard-up. I get people who say, "Aren't you some kind of rock star? Aren't you rich?" And I say, "No, I'm not rich - I never got paid a lot of money from labels." Also, a lot of people think that when I broke up Guided By Voices that I retired, which couldn't be further from the truth. I'm doing more than I've ever done, right now.
Q. Do you have any favorite magazines whose images particularly suit your aesthetic?
A. I like the old '50s and '60s magazines like Look and Life. I like the Technicolor of the older magazines because my collages have mainly to do with color and contour and depth, where stuff comes out at you. I'll sit there all day and before I know it, eight hours have gone by and I've come up with nine or 10 collages. Sometimes they're funny, and sometimes they're pretty, and sometimes they look like a photograph. To me, collages are interesting because there's something surreal and strange about the combination of photography and art, and the fact that you're bringing things from different eras and time periods together in one environment. Everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well.
Q. Do you have any formal art training?
A. No, only from classes I took in high school and college. I made album covers when I was younger, from junior high to high school, because I couldn't be in a band. So I figured, at least I'll pretend I'm in one. That's why I felt like GBV was rescued from obscurity, because I had done these album covers, and we practiced our rock moves before we knew how to play. It went from complete fantasy of visual imagery and sound to the point where we could actually do it. I used to say we were the Pinocchio of rock. We became a real boy. 