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Pop Culture
Jan 27, 2015, 09:50AM

You Got to Draw a Line Somewhere

A Baltimore City Paper interview with jailed gangster/author Linwood Rudy Williams vs a Bomb magazine interview with artist Robert Gober.

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Linwood Rudolph Williams: If you’re busy, working and all that, then you don’t really know where you are.

Robert Gober: Oh, how interesting. (pause) How do you translate it in formal terms?

Williams: You got to kill me before I tell you some bullshit like that.

Gober: I wish it were that simple.

Williams: I handwrite everything.

***

Gober: What I cull is more of an emotional feeling, and to me it’s not important to put that into words.

Williams: People still dying out there, probably more so.

Gober: Mmmm-hmmm. Oh, I envy people who do.

***

Williams: Yeah, I sold out, man. You got to draw a line somewhere.

Gober: What do you mean? With the sink, only after I was making it as a series did I realize that I had had, years before, a recurring dream about finding a room within my home that I didn’t know existed. That room was full of sinks, but it was very different—there was sunlight pouring in the room, and there was water running in all the sinks.

Williams: You’re hypocritical, you didn’t care back then.

Gober: The Church that I knew was an extremely hypocritical institution.

***

Williams: But, it’s funny, they don’t know how many lives I’ve saved.

Gober: Humor, to me, is very important.

Williams: No, no. It’s opportunism.

Gober: You make it sound pejorative.

Williams: Depends on what you eat. But you can’t get the American Dream doing that.

***

Gober: They say it preoccupies me, but to me what’s interesting is that it seems to be preoccupying them.

Williams: If society don’t create no outlet for that, they going to keep doing it, no matter what.

Discussion

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