From Athens To Brooklyn

A Conversation With Jim Herbert

originally published August 15, 2007

Pete McCommons

Jim Herbert

Jim Herbert has been at the center of the art, film and music scenes in Athens for the last four decades. The legendary art professor, painter and filmmaker retired from UGA last December, and though he still owns his distinctive old Athens home near downtown, Herbert has reinvented himself as a struggling New York artist and now lives in Brooklyn. In this interview with Pete McCommons, Herbert talks about his work and his new life.

Flagpole

You came here at a time when the University of Georgia and Athens were basically dominated by kids wearing button-down shirts and khakis, and you came here in jeans and a T-shirt with long hair and a baseball cap, and now 35 years later, you still look the same.

Jim Herbert

Well, I’m not sure how I came here. There are some pictures of me back then with a crewcut, but the actual first time I set foot here, I think I did have shoulder-length hair, [dressed] pretty casual and the campus was a very strange place. It completely emptied out on weekends. People went back to their small towns, and girls had to wear raincoats over their shorts, and they weren’t allowed to go to the Varsity downtown because that was not a fit place for women to be, and I think they weren’t allowed to smoke on campus. There was no lounging around on campus, no hanging out on the green. People were very formal. If you sat down on the grass, somebody would come over and ask if you were okay. So, it was a very different place; the University was more like an extension of public school. It didn’t really have a college atmosphere.

Flagpole

Were the naked parties going on that early?

Jim Herbert

Well, they were. The whole hippie period happened a little bit later in the South, and so you go all the way up into the ’70s. But when I first arrived here in early ’63, that wasn’t going on then. It happened a little bit later, when you had a lot more exhibitionistic behavior, with people walking around with very revealing clothing and then parties where people would be nude, but of course this town was a town of parties, rather than bars.

Flagpole

When you came here, you revolutionized things in a sense. You were young enough to be aware of what the students were doing. You not only taught them, but you turned them on to art and to being themselves like a good teacher is supposed to do. And you had your own work ethic and work energy, so that you at the same time were turning out these magnificent paintings, and, later, the films. Where did all that come from?

Jim Herbert

Well, I mean, that’s very… you certainly put a good spin on it. I thank you for that. The way it happened was that, if you have an artist, you have an obsessive-compulsive, so if an artist fixes the toilet, they’ll spend all day fixing the toilet and making it perfect. There’s a perfectionist thing that happens…. With artists, it’s hard to keep them from creating if it’s a task that they’re put to and they’re responsible. That’s why artists have to be very careful about how they spend their time, because they can waste a huge amount of time that could be devoted to the art. You know, you lose all your psychic energy diving into something with all too much perseverance or whatever.

But with teaching, for me, there were a number of elements that came together to make teaching interesting and exciting for me. One was I enjoyed being around young people. That was a very good thing and an exciting thing; I enjoyed the spirit that they had, and the teaching is all about an exuberant spirit that you bring into the studio. In order to paint, you must get yourself up for it. You can’t just paint a little at a time and hold back. It’s gotta be an all or nothing kind of thing, at least the way I work.

Flagpole

And you do, apparently, work.

Jim Herbert

You can go to certain art schools and you see people hanging around with the look of an artist, but they don’t have any work to show for it. I mean, you mentioned work ethic. I have a big work ethic. I really believe people have to get a body of work and produce things. You learn by doing; you don’t learn by waiting around to get inspiration. You have to go in there whether you want to or not. If you’re too sick or too tired, that’s not a good day, and maybe you shouldn’t go in, but most of the time…

Flagpole

At what point did you start making films? You started out making those really painterly films. How did you go into that?

Jim Herbert

The painterliness of the films briefly came about through this process of re-photography in which each frame of the film was analyzed much like a painter would do. You studied the frame with the purpose of manipulating the image instead of just taking what’s there, like a still photographer would do, like [Henri] Cartier-Bresson. It’s all about manipulating moments through time. Now, however, in the last 10 years - actually longer than that - the last 13 or 14 years, I’ve been moving away from re-photography. I still do some of it, but I’m not as dedicated to it as I once was. I much more like film that is hemi-/ demi-/ semi-narrative, which doesn’t rely so much on manipulating the image as it does seizing the opportunity of people in a setting. So it’s closer to the tradition of what documentary is.

Flagpole

You also began making music videos.

Jim Herbert

Well, the music videos came about… I did a music video for myself before there were music videos. I made a little film called “Pluto” with the express purpose of having a film that went with a piece of music I liked from Moby Grape, and I said, "I’m going to make a little movie to go with that," and that’s very much a music video idea. So I made a little 16-millimeter film and without editing it or cutting it in any way just had the lab put down the music when the film started, and coincidentally it sort of ended when the film ended, and that was my first thing. But really it was R.E.M. and Michael Stipe that got me into music videos.

Flagpole

Did you know him through the art department?

Jim Herbert

I knew him somewhat through the art department. You know, when he was a student of mine, he was a very sheltered, quiet kind of guy. That’s a well-known fact, and I actually don’t remember too much about him as my student. But what I do remember is an occasion in the old church on Oconee and an initial performance that they gave…

Flagpole

Were you there?

Jim Herbert

I was at that, and I remember other incarnations and changes, but Michael, I’ve come to know him over the years rather than as a younger person. But he was very kind to let me make a music video completely on my own terms, a director’s cut, if you will, where I would not have to obey virtually anything. He’d say, “Pick one of these songs.” They didn’t want a story board; they didn’t want a treatment or anything. We’d talk a little bit. Sometimes Michael would have a very severe, minimalist idea - looking at waves in water, etc. - and I would say, “Michael, somebody else can do that better than I would,” and we’d have that kind of discussion, and he’d say, “Just do what you want.” But there were occasions where he and I worked together.

Flagpole

What’s one you worked on together?

Jim Herbert

One of the earliest ones, "Driver 8," was a collaboration. There was a great moment there where Bertis hired a helicopter. It was all about trains. “Driver” in England is an engineer. We were up at the Chesapeake and Ohio, a huge yard in Virginia. We were spending a week shooting Michael with trains and stuff, and Bertis surprised us with a helicopter and said, “Come on, we’re going to do a nice aerial shot.” And the really exciting thing about that was that I had to go out and get out on the struts of the helicopter with a 16-millimeter Arriflex, and there was something called a “monkey strap,” I believe it was called, which is like what a guy in the street would have if he had a pet monkey on a leash, and Michael was in the helicopter holding onto this nylon-web leash, which was in fact strapped to a seat. It wasn’t as if he was going to let go or something. But the purpose of it was to maintain a certain amount of rigidity in the line so that you wouldn’t fall off the strut. There’s nothing holding you out there; you’re out there on the thing handling the camera…

Flagpole

You, who wouldn’t even ride in an automobile!

Jim Herbert

Well, that is a myth: about me not riding in cars. I think Ole Olesen got that started. I’ve always ridden in cars, though I’ve been aware that cars are not the safest things to be in. You know, if you’re a rider and not the driver, you are more fearful, because you’re not in control. I drove all through high school; I had a license. So, anyway, I’m out on this strut of the helicopter, and by the way, the guy driving the helicopter, the pilot, was a Vietnam veteran, and he said if you put your eye in the viewfinder, you wouldn’t freak out. But I did take my eye out from the viewfinder once, and I suddenly realized what I was doing. But anyway, I popped my eye back in the viewfinder very quickly. And then we did a maneuver where the helicopter - we’re chasing trains - and he turned the helicopter sideways so that I could actually get a better view of the train. And when we came down he said, “Well, actually, that was very dangerous, because it puts tremendous pressure on the rear rotor, and it can fall off under that maneuver."

Anyway, that’s the end of that story, which is an oft-told tale which is all true. Oh, and we never used that in the video even though it was a well-done shot. But Michael and I decided that it was very routine and very typical and why bother? Of course it caused Bertis to say, “My God, we spent $2000 for that and the record company wants you to put it in,” but Michael was adamant, and I was happy that he was, so it’s not in there, because it’s a very humble little video and it shouldn’t have an extravagant shot like that in it.

Flagpole

Have you continued with your filmmaking?

I have. I actually have a film which is being edited right now. I moved from short films to feature films. I have kept [at it] steadily… usually I go to Italy every summer and make a film, and the last five or six years, they’ve been feature films. In the last two years, they’ve been shot in high definition, as opposed to film. I haven’t been as pleased with that as I have been with film, but there are certain advantages to using that, because you can work the sound better.

Flagpole

What do you think of our new arthouse cinema, Ciné?

What I was so impressed with was, I’ve been all over the world with film festivals and seen state-of-the-art projection in Rotterdam and especially in Toronto - 70-foot screens and magnificent projection, and I’ve never seen anything better than Ciné. That was perfect projection, and sound was gorgeous. I was really very impressed. I was just floored by the quality of what’s going on in there.

On the other hand, I’m saddened by something: I don’t think this town is ever - as much as I’ve taught film classes and the drama department has film and everybody is interested in film, you never could get a film audience here. I don’t know why, and I think it is a very unusual college town in that regard. Most college towns have a following for film, and they often have more than one theater, one for the older movies that have a tradition and one for the newer films that might not have an audience in the commercial theaters.

So, the selection here in just the brief time I’ve been here is excellent - excellent films that they’re showing - but, who’s going to come to this movie theater? I’m very worried about it, you know? And then I read in the New York Times a film critic saying she preferred to see movies on DVD rather than in the theater, and I thought, oh my God, this is such a tragedy. One of the things I love about movies is the cathedral of the theater, getting away from somebody in your living room and the casualness and the interruptions.

Flagpole

Why the hell did you move to Brooklyn?

Jim Herbert

Well, now, here in the last act I go to Brooklyn. One of the things I thought would be good for me, given the way I exercise and keep a ritual going, one of the things I thought would be good, given that I was retiring, would be to find some new experiential thing that would get the synapses cooking again. And, you know, what better than to face something sort of difficult? And for me, New York would be about as difficult as I could make. Because I had already done the foreign thing with Italy; I knew how to live in another country and pick up language and such.

Jim Herbert

But New York was really tough, on a lot of grounds, because in fact you could see the reality of whether you were an accepted artist or not. You hide out in the hinterlands and you could always think of yourself as a genius, because you’ve never actually come up against the art world, you know, in the most immediate sense, because you didn’t live in the store. I’ve always maintained that when people go to New York, they live in the store.

Flagpole

So, was it a difficult move?

Jim Herbert

I thought there are maybe a couple of hundred people I know who have come from Athens who live in New York now. I know a lot of young people there; I don’t know a lot of older people. I know people who are successful; I know people who are struggling and emerging, and I said, well, you know, you’re not going to be completely alone there.

I also did another thing. I took a friend with me who is an artist and a former student of mine and another fellow is a former student of mine who is married and lives around the corner from the building. The two of them wanted studio space, and they were up there, so I didn’t do it completely alone. I had some backup, some bodyguards, some people to show me the stuff. Both these guys had gone to Pratt, so they knew the city. One of them loves New York and Brooklyn and Bushwick and had his studio there before he moved into mine. The other one was more wary and didn’t like New York and didn’t necessarily trust it or have such a good time with it. Well, that’s fine. We had both sides there.

Flagpole

You found a good studio?

Jim Herbert

I was able to find this wonderful space. It was very expensive, actually the lease for one year is about two and a half times the price I paid for my entire studio over on Meigs Street. But that’s just New York prices. Everybody says I got a good deal. This is New York, you know.

The main thing about having a big studio is that I do large paintings: 12-and-a-half feet. It was important to have a showplace for them, something that gave a good context for these large paintings. So when we have people from galleries over, we can really do a nice spread of work, and the light is beautiful in there; it’s almost like the light in Tuscany: clerestory windows, and it’s very beautiful light.

But about New York, of course here I am sort of a country boy at this point, or suburban boy, man, old man, dropped down in this part of Brooklyn, which many people would call a broken down sort of thing. We live near five cement plants; there’s trash in the streets; there’s empty lots, and there’s people hanging around, quite a bit of crime with holdups and stuff, robberies, and you, know it’s got a little bit of a dangerous thing to it. But what it did for me visually is incredibly exciting and beautiful. Incredibly exciting. The textures, the mixed cultures all around me; the people, the subways and the tempo: you just feel energized all day long. I must say that I’ve never had, since I’ve been here, a boring day.

Flagpole

Has the move affected your painting?

Jim Herbert

At first it was a struggle to paint in this different environment, you know, different sense of light and air; I thought that I was doing bad paintings, because they weren’t like the ones I was doing here. I brought 30 paintings with me that I thought were good to show galleries, and here I was off on another tangent, and I was devastated by this, and I said, these are crap, but the other guys said, no, they’re good; keep going. Now I look back and there was an awkwardness of not understanding, but I see that it produced an edgy kind of art that relates more to that environment. I didn’t consciously, willfully do that: quite the opposite, and the paintings I did here look much more laid-back by comparison and more meditative. There’s a value to that, too. One doesn’t disown that experience. So the paintings up there are much more jagged and more irritating to look at, but I don’t know, I think that can be beautiful, too.

Flagpole

But you’re already well known as a painter?

Jim Herbert

No, I’m not well known. I’m known only for film. Not for painting at all. I have no reputation as a painter whatsoever: only in this region. I showed in New York in the early ’70s, showed in two different galleries, had five shows in New York and was reviewed favorably in the New York Times and such as that. Then I left that gallery - well the one I was in, called Poindexter, closed, and so I never pursued it further and never missed it. So I got out of the loop, and nobody knows that I’ve been painting all this time. And filmmaking people aren’t really interested in painting. Painting people are more interested in films than the other way around.

Flagpole

That’s hard to believe.

Jim Herbert

I’m actually as much an emerging artist as anybody. It’s a huge uphill battle if you’re old. That is a very different thing. If I were in graduate school and were painting halfway decently, I would be much more attractive to them, because they want to cultivate somebody through time. And time’s not on my side. On the other hand, I think, art has never been about what age you are to do it. The paintings have a useful life, hopefully, and it doesn’t matter what the age is: we’re looking at the paintings.

Pete McCommons