UD: Your work is wild, imaginative and sexually charged and yet you are self-described as a shy pornographer. Are you simply a voyeur to the images you create?
AM: The Shy Pornographer moniker I lifted from a Kenneth Patchen novel called "Confessions of a Shy Pornographer". It's about a guy who writes a children's book and an astute editor buys it, crosses out a bunch of words, and publishes it as a great work of pornography butchered by the censors. And the book turns out to be wildly successful. I don't know how exactly that relates to my life, but I'm sure it does.
The truth is that I'm simply a voyeur. Like everyone I've fantasized about being a crazy rock and roll star, living fast, dying young and throwing TVs out of hotel windows. But such things have never gone beyond the fantasy stage. I guess that's why I became a visual artist. The wild man lives in my mind, but my body doesn't have to go through with it. My wife complains that I'm a hopeless creature of habit. All in all, I lead a pretty boring life.
UD: You rely heavily on Photoshop's image manipulating abilities. How does your current work compare to life before computers?
AM: I'm very new to computers. In August of '93 I bought my computer after losing my studio. It was an unfortunate situation in which I was sharing work space with someone who turned out to be a crystal meth freak having a nervous breakdown. I always thought that I wanted to use computers but never got around to it until I found myself without a studio and burnt out with the whole art world. It's very depressing when you're rolling up all these paintings that mean so much to you and packing them into a garage. I was kind of defeated and my wife and the computer brought me back to life.
When I first started making collages I worked with photocopy machines which are kind of a poor person's version of Photoshop. Some of these old collages have been posted in the underground.net. They are in the section called Pornocopolis Server. They are basically combinations of Chanel, Malboro, Absolut, and other ads with pornography and political figures.
UD: Related...Does any of the work you create digitally get transferred to the physical realm? If so, explain your techniques.
AM: The paintings that I've done lately have come from images I've arrived at digitally. I've been using my computer as a sketch pad. I like the balance that is achieved by working digitally using cutting edge technology and also working with oils, using 17th Century techniques.
UD: How will the looming (or has it already arrived?) telecommunications age affect eroticism and sexuality?
AM: We have to assume that the age of telecommunications has arrived. And like with every new development, the pornographers are the first ones to get involved in it. Have you checked out alt.bestiality? I mean I saw some guy getting fucked up the butt by his Doberman. Then in alt.sexuality.tasteless I saw a picture of some woman inserting a bottle of beer the wrong way up her vagina. Not exactly what turns me on, and I don't know if that's sexuality or eroticism, but it's something. You know that the pornographers will be the first ones to use the Internet commercially. They were the first ones to jump on the CD-ROM bandwagon as well as the first to dive into the home video market.
Unfortunately eroticism has been mutated into pornography by our purge/binge relationship to sexuality. When it comes to sex we're like anorexics starring at a big chocolate frosting cake. We want it, but when we have it we are repulsed by it. There is so much sex in advertising, TV, etc., being presented as something other than sex, that when it comes to dealing with real sexuality, we don't know how to.
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