Photo: Keith Newell
Who are you, reading this? A New Yorker? Then you might not care about any of this. You already have art, film, crusties, eight year olds with baseball bats creeping up on you keeping your adrenalin going. But if you’re someone else… maybe if you’re Hawaiian… Jackie and Miles’s films on YouTube, and what they talk about, and how they live, will be like hearing about people eating when you’ve been locked in a glass room by a Russian cop and you’ve had no food, no visitors, just an intravenous drip. Or, like, if you have a house and children. Any way your life got over, the nervous little nonsensical films these lovahs make is your back door out of over.
VICE: What do you call what you guys are? Going out? Going steady?
MILES: What is this, Happy Days?
JACKIE: Yeah, we’re going steady. He was in a band with three different exes. He’d keep on being in a band with a girlfriend and then break up with her and then get another girlfriend and add her to the band. He did that with me.
Will you guys kiss each other while holding your cigarettes up? [nervous laughter] You refuse?
MILES: This is such a weird interview.
JACKIE: Miles doesn’t like PDA.
MILES: It offends the lonely.
Photo: Keith Newell
You should do everything that offends you, or anyone. If you’re an artist. You HAVE to do it now, now that you said you didn’t want to. [They do it for half-a-second then laugh nervously some more.] Did you guys both smoke constantly like this when you met, or did one of you influence the other?
JACKIE: We’re both heavy smokers.
I never see a smoker with a non. They’re always walking together, similarly smoking… re-lighting at the same time. There are less and less of your kind, so when you find each other, you have to hold on tight. You put all those break-up videos on YouTube, and then there was the playing computer-Chess video. That was riveting.
MILES: Hahahaha! We did that the day Michael Jackson died.
LISA:I loved it, because you got all worked up over it. That’s what people DO. Sit around playing video chess. They’re not in high-speed car chases and murdering people all day.In the film where you pretend to be animals, were you drunk or just happy or that’s normal behavior for you?
MILES: We were on a lot of Adderal.
JACKIE: It was really late at night. We had heat madness. His bedroom doesn’t have any windows. He wanted to shoot from all angles. We did it for about 16 hours.
Did you want to quit filming and he kept making you and making you?
JACKIE: Yeah.
You looked sweaty and exasperated, but animal-exasperated, like: “Why won’t you open this door for me?!”
MILES: Jackie thinks people should always be like in that video.
JACKIE: People stage performances at galleries and everyone shows up for it; they ATTEND. It makes it not real or not matter. Instead of if someone just gets on a table randomly and–
MILES: We’re reacting to the death of parlor games. People watch television now, passive.
JACKIE: We always try to play parlor games, or make films or performance or art. It’s hard to find people to collaborate with because even if you present an idea to them, even if you’ve already started, it just seems so awkward to them. They say, “Why?” They don’t recognize it. It doesn’t translate.
MILES: Manhattan, Williamsburg, is like… a mall. A mall of art galleries. I picked Brooklyn because there’s this commune that I wanted to live in. There’s 35 people. Like eight bedrooms.
That would be a nightmare for me. I live with two people in three bedrooms and that’s bad enough. And they’re my children!
MILES: It used to have 60 people. They’re crusties who like drink and cook all day, food that they dumpster-dived.
JACKIE: Cleaning is an impossible task. I stayed there this summer. I’d wake up and do all the dishes, and ten minutes later the sink and counters would be filled and dirty. I’m meticulous and organized. Miles is instinctive and doesn’t judge. He tries to make as many videos as possible and doesn’t care if they’re any good or not.
MILES: Quantity over quality. I want to do a video of stage slaps. Where it devolves into domestic violence. Little mistakes and you end up really slapping someone. The other idea was… I’ve been cutting up pictures of food for the last month. I have a whole box of it… see? It looks like vomit.
Photo: Keith Newell
It does. It also looks like a crazy person’s project.
JACKIE: Especially because that box looks like a retainer case. It really grosses me out.
I like how you edit.
JACKIE: His editing style is him sitting at a computer chain-smoking, editing one little piece for hours.
MILES: It’s all about sounds for me.
JACKIE: Rhythm.
MILES: This girl and I used to sing different songs at the same time and I’d do choppy sound splotches, and now I apply that same technique to [film] montage. Our generation has a weird relationship to the form that art takes because of technology, YouTube, instant, interactive sites — everyone has a participatory part. We’re able to post a comment and so interact with entertainment. Performance art was meant to smash those boundaries, make art participatory, and now it IS already. The avant garde idea of breaking art into everyday life, the death of art…. The goal has been met.
Miles, your premise is just WRONG. Making comments on other people’s videos is not participatory. It’s the same as sitting around talking shit about studio TV shows with your roommates.
MILES: Yeah. Yeah. I was trying to pretend I was Marshall McLuhan for a minute. We could comment more about the dadaists and the fluxus.
You guys ARE dada, so you can’t comment. You can either be the frame, smash the frame, or comment on frame/not frame, right?
MILES: I was hoping I’d come out much smarter.
You’re coming out enthusiastic. Nobody loves art anymore, or thinks about it, or will admit they have ideas about it. Maybe I just think that because I never went to art school and don’t know anyone who does.
MILES: I majored in political philosophy, but I think that’s what avant garde is. I would never want to make propaganda, so I’m not political about content, but I am about form. I’m attracted to theories about form, like what Dick Higgins calls concrete poetry and the dawn of a classless society needs art that isn’t strictly within one form. You wouldn’t just go to a theater and see a play. And Russian montage, Eisenstein, editing through rhythm.
How old are you?
MILES: I’m 22.
JACKIE: I’m 19.
So young and such big ideas! No wonder you smoke so much. It takes energy to free people’s minds… nicotene fuel.
MILES: I don’t really know if I’m freeing people’s minds.
Yes you are.
MILES: Fine.
It’s embarrassing to talk about, but it’s noble. I think people should at least try. People are so mean about other people’s souls; they don’t care.
MILES: It’s all about commodification. People have an aesthetic — gay culture or any subculture — and try to push everything in it, divorced from politics or thoughts about form.
JACKIE: Borrowing the aesthetic but not even know about anything attached to it, what it came out of.
MILES: Appropriation is fine, but if you’re a white college student with dreadlocks who smokes weed, are you actually ever going to stick up for Jamaican people, or are you just going to–
JACKIE: — wear that scarf.
MILES: Yeah, you make a claim with that scarf, but you don’t back it up by sticking up for the PLO.
I didn’t know people were still wearing that scarf. I live in Dover, New Hampshire, so I don’t see much culture — just through my computer screen. On my computer, I see a competition for who can care the least. Who can find something to laugh about that someone else won’t… like child molestation.
MILES: Indifference is THE political stance. Besides nationalism, that’s what this era is breeding: the vacuum of the apolitical. To not believe. They think that’s not political. They think that’s culture. But that IS the politics of the day. Along with attachment to one’s own oppression.
What do you mean by that?
MILES: Like refusing to unionize.
JACKIE: One of my roommates was saying, “I’m not working class.” And she is!
MILES: People try really hard to be normal and, like, helpless, when what they used to do was stand up passionately for what they were and reject oppression. There’s no willingness now for solidarity.
JACKIE: They don’t want to be part of anything, be considered part of anything.
I haven’t heard anyone talk like this since I lived in Europe 20 years ago. Look at you, you’re shaking. It’s because you’re bucking the whole world! Bucking your era. Trying to break form.
MILES: Deleuze called it the body without organs.
So what does it feel like to be 19?
JACKIE: The college I go to, it’s an early college so people drop out of high school and go there from 15 to 17, and my roommates are both 18, so I’m usually around younger people, so I suppose I feel younger than 19. But my younger sister just moved into my bedroom, so I can’t go home and be a child anymore. So this is my house now. [laughs]
Do you worry about money?
JACKIE: I watch him constantly unemployed, so yes, but I’m still supported by my parents for another year.
How do you survive unemployed?
MILES: My rent is $350 a month, so that’s easy to come up with by doing medical tests from the back of The Village Voice. I dumpster food. And Jackie shares food with me. But bakeries put out bags of fresh bread every night, it’s just sitting on the corner. I’m really fascinated by the way Americans consume and discard food.
JACKIE: He always talks about these black mushrooms he’s never had, and foie gras, the most gourmet foods.
MILES: In the Napoleonic code, it’s okay to steal up to $50 of wine, cheese and bread as long as you don’t get caught, and when I lived in New Orleans this guy tried to convince me that law is still in effect.
LISA: Do you go to art openings for the free wine, cheese and crackers?
MILES: They just have free vodka.
JACKIE: There’s never any food. Even supermarkets… there used to be free samples.
MILES: Every once in a while I’ll be a Mystery Shopper.
Do you ever dine and dash?
MILES: No, because then the waitress has to pay for it. It scares me that I would run into the waitress the next day and she’d say, “You owe me eighty dollars
Ever get courted by companies who want you to do camera work for them? They’ll take you out to eat.
MILES: No. That would be awesome.
My friend Darcy used to go on a date for dinner every night. She had about 15 boyfriends.
JACKIE: There’s this escort service my friend does… a man just wants you to go to dinner, but you get paid, too.
But you’d have to have nice clothes, get your hair done.
JACKIE: It depends. There’s this rich gentleman that takes pleasure in taking the most scuzzy girl out.
Photo: Keith Newell
Miles, you could go out with some grandma.
JACKIE: Yeah, just let some old lonely woman take you out and pretend you’re her grandson, look at her old photos.
MILES: That would be disgusting but nice. Do you have a piece of paper? We should write down ideas for the video. You guys should be in it. I wrote down “Buster Keaton, domestic violence, fake expressions of fake pain.”
It’s so much prettier when it’s fake. In the ’90s performance art got more and more into how much can you take, hanging yourself from meathooks by the nipples, and then with extreme sports and extreme everything with reality TV in the ’00s. I’d like to see some slapstick again, choreography, juvenile comedy. There can never be too much food in videos, either. And vomit.
JACKIE: I’ve been watching lots of ’70s Italian horror movies. Dubbed over. I like dubbing a lot.
MILES: Those movies are so stylized.
JACKIE: You see a knife flashing, a black glove. The music is really great, operatic. How do you like living in New Hampshire?
I hate it. I’m court-ordered to stay.
MILES: I love new england. It’s so pretty.
I’ve just been there so long. You know how you’re constantly thinking about food because you don’t know when or how you’re going to get your next meal? Well I’m constantly thinking about escape because I know I can’t be anywhere else, so I’m obsessed with it, even in my dreams. I never even noticed my surroundings before I got trapped. But now it’s constant, seeing my surroundings as walls everywhere… every street, I know it so well. I see into the future, walking down this same street, and I see into the past, when I walked down it so many times before. It looks like an endless, endless street of time.
MILES: My dad was in the army so we moved every year and a half, so I got into this habit of moving.
Me, too. I went back and forth between my parents, and both of them were constantly moving, so it was pretty much a move a season for me. I just kept that up after I left home. Now it’s been years and years I live in Dover. It’s a death sentence to a mutable soul like me. It’s horrifying. I got that move-every-six-months in my blood, and I’m coagulating.
MILES: I’d sort of given up on music, but a few weeks ago I did something with this noise band and I set down the microphone and gave up on singing and I went around whispering things in the audience’s ears. I don’t know what I said, but one guy started fighting me and then everybody started fighting me and I came home and my shirt was totally broken; I had candle-wax on me. That’s the last time I did anything involving owies.
JACKIE: Owies?
Is this what you want to do with your life?
JACKIE: I want to. I don’t know how I could ever make money from it, though.
MILES: Do you think that the sound of the slaps will be too sparse? The slaps themselves could be recorded and separately and made percussive. There’s also the space between the slaps. Sorry this is so boring.
It’s not. I love anal retentiveness about silly stuff and a happy approach to depressing topics.
MILES: [looking up slapping on Wikipedia] “Happy slapping is a fad in which someone assaults a sometimes unsuspecting victim while an accomplice records the assault (commonly with a camera phone). Several incidents are extremely violent, and some victims of “happy-slapping” have even been killed.”
JACKIE: A bunch of girls in high school would do that to a girl in the bathroom.
MILES: It happened to me! A gang of eight year olds behind me slammed me in the back of my head with a baseball bat! They didn’t even rob me. My phone went flying out of my hand. This one really fat guy came running out of the subway and the little kids were like, “Fuck this,” and scattered. This was right outside where I live [in Brooklyn].
JACKIE: Little kids are the people I’m most terrified of in this neighborhood. They’re so rowdy.
MILES: They got so rowdy this summer. They’d stand around the subway going,
“Give me a dollar.” If you said no, they’d follow you. Seven, eight, nine years old. They’re trying to see if they can scare white people.
Are they all black?
MILES: Yeah. This is mostly a Dominican neighborhood, and I never see any Dominican children do that.
JACKIE: Nothing’s creepier than 3 in the morning kids walking around, ten years old, six years old.
MILES: At 4 in the morning I left this party because everybody was on LSD so I got bored, and I saw these two little girls swinging this littler boy around in a circle on a swing set. They were laughing and chanting.
Tags: art, Being Poor in Brooklyn, Dada, Fluxus, Idealism, Jackie and Miles, Youtube
