From TV Repairman to Artist, One Man Makes Art Out of Parts | Short Film Showcase

[Music] I saw a video once, and it showed the house of the future: TV set in the refrigerator, TV set in the counter, TV set everywhere. You know, controls for this, for that. There I thought, oh, this is funny. You'd have to have another room in the house for the repair man, because he'd always be fixing this [Music].

Stuff. A third of the people fix everything; they don't believe in throwing things away. That's our base. And then there's another third that thinks everything new is better. In the middle are people that can go either way, and so it's always this battle between these three groups of people. We get a lot of older electronics in, you know, stereos from the 60s, tube TV sets, tube radios. A lot of people are very thankful that somebody can do stuff like that; otherwise, they got to keep buying something new.

My art is based on found objects, and I pick up stuff that people bring us here. I get all kinds of stuff that I use in my work. I use electronic parts; I've been using that in my earliest pieces. Whatever works in a piece, I'll use. My work is California assemblage; is the word I like. There are lots of different words: found objects, sculpture by addition. But for me, California assemblage fits the best.

I started working as an artist in 1962. My father was a machinist, and he'd bring home all kinds of metals and things that scrap, you know. I started putting things together, and then I had the idea that an artwork should look back out at you. You know, what would that be? And so I put an eyeball in and hooked it up to this Volkswagen wiper motor and an old D there, and that made the eyeball open up. That ended up being my very first sculpture, and I named it the frus. I guess I liked just working with the objects; I didn't even realize that it was really art. I was just having fun playing with these [Music] things.

You can make art a living off doing this stuff, you know. This is art; it wasn't just the paintings and drawings I was doing; it's sculpture [Music]. I spent a lot of time trying to get galleries' attention. I took a $100 bill, I put it behind glass, put a frame attached, a hammer to it, and with lettering on it, I put "in case of emergency." I sent this off to a local art gallery, and I get a letter back saying, oh well, we had a lot of fun with the piece. We broke the glass, we divided the $100 amongst ourselves, and then we threw everything, everything in the trash can. But we kept the hammer, 'cause you can never have too many hammers in an art gallery.

I realized later I should have signed the hammer, so at least I would have had a piece in an art gallery. Some artists, they make the same thing for 10 years, the same piece, with a little variation over and over and over. I thought when I started that's what I had to do, and so I did several like that. By the fifth one, I said, that's it; I can't do this. I want to do stuff differently. So I took off in my own direction. I mean, I want to do something different. I want to play with different materials. I mean, I've used concrete; I used nails; I use cement; a spaghetti up there. I mean, I like to work with different stuff.

One of the most difficult pieces was a rendition of Van Gogh's Starry Night with nails. To figure out how to take that painting and render it with nails was quite a feat. That piece took 135 hours to build. The Spruce Goose took 500 [Music] hours, and the erector set piece, I've lost [Music] count. I had gone to this antique store, and I saw the erector set down there, and I said, well, how much for that? He said 125. I said, okay, okay, great. I didn't realize there were 13 of them. He starts pulling one out, and another out, and another one out. It's massive.

So I made all these little elements that move, that you could do with these toys. I've been working on that piece for off and on now for 20 years. It's just the biggest, massive piece I've ever made. It's important for me to sell my work, especially now, because the store that has supported it is getting tougher and tougher to survive. Now, more than ever, I really have to cut back on certain pieces I like to do because I don't have the money to do them.

I sometimes think that Van Gogh had it pretty easy. He had somebody sending him money; rents were cheap. You know, he went nuts and went into the asylum. I'm thinking, who paid for that? I mean, today, if you went into an AS, you'd be bankrupt when you came out. I mean, how? I mean, I can't go nuts; I mean, I can't afford it. It's a real shame to throw something away that has just a loose ribbon cable or small parts in the power supply.

Since things are being made more cheaply, sometimes people just go buy a new one and don't get it fixed. Somebody else came by here, a um rider, and he says it'd be a shame to break up this collection. He says, what if somebody bought the whole thing? I thought, yeah, that's a great idea—100,000, 200,000, and keep it together. One sale would be beautiful.

When I make art, I don't feel anything. I mean, I'm just—that's my vacation. I get to have a vacation every weekend. I can relax, and if it wasn't for that, I mean, what's the point? [Music]