I’m tremendously proud of Brian Belott’s Wipe That Clock Off Your Face. It’s a trip deep into his sensibility. Brian is a true innovator—a masterful humorist, designer, and painter. We traded emails for this interview, which, with its idiosyncratic spellings and high flown language, gives a pretty good idea of the Belott experience.—Dan Nadel

Tell me about the bodies of work in Wipe That Clock Off Your Face. Do they represent specific periods, or just your usual flow?

Well I always want to keep busy, first I whore on the street then I go underwater or the water meets me. Most sections of the books come from games that I set up and then cram the raw material through the games parameters. For instance, the group of drawings under section 51: “No Two People,” was edited from a larger body of notebook drawings, titled “The Card Players.” I had been watching Goodfellas when I saw in the film, the picture of the dogs playing cards at the human table, then Blammo! I realized that I could easily spend months drawing opponents in a toe to toe showdown of cards. The card players are just pairs of heads and cards. The game, like cards, is to have a back and forth reaction of dyslexic connections. Actually most of my work is born out of card game like operations -small-nothing heroic- just playful connections. The card players were my antidotes to boredom while working at Johnny rockets.

And how do you relate the three primary components: photo, collage, drawing? Are you expressing similar ideas with all?

First off the photos, collages and drawings are paper. That is to say they’re not a mongoose or a massive painting. Nor are they some all involved dense installation of 40,000 square feet. No, they are paper, relatively the same proportion reprinted in a paper book. They are all intimate and meant to be held in the hands and examined. I love reading books with pictures and zero words. I try to convince my friends that word books are bad. I was even reluctant to write this.

Primary themes in the collages, drawings and photos would be color, slapstick playfulness, making connections and oh yes also, meeting the lead singer of Ah Ha. Collage and the found audio and photos have a special place in my heart because both are tapping on people’s memories. I can sample any printed scrap in a collage or a blurred moment in a found photo, and without filtering that through my hand or a new medium, it can fire off dormant memories or personal associations in the viewer. And, for me, the more chances for personal association, the better. Charles Ives made music that could be called collage music. In 1918, he was sampling popular ballads, classical overtures, ragtime, hymns and everyday sounds. His pieces focus on the intersections of different audible groupings and the gradients of recognition. Of course, he was filtering everything through his own hand and orchestration, but his intent to capture the beauty in the crashing combinations as well as his interest in refuse has continued to inspire me.

How is bookmaking different than making single images? And do you enjoy both equally?

By now I think you can tell I’m partial towards paper work. For many of my early shows in NYC I hung my paper works without frames and I liked it that way. I had a million nudges to frame the work. I remember during my first show at Canada, the Rubells left me a message: “Tell Brian he doesn’t need to make his work look so crummy”—aka frameless. Inevitably most paper work gets framed. The collage books were my solution around the frame.

A single work is autonomous like a bloated yodeler or an exclamation mark. The book format I use allows for book(s) to be collaged together. Not just a cool tiger face or a baseball cap but multiple images or scenes from one book can be collided with multiple scenes from another book. Years ago I wondered what would happen if you took the musical Anything Goes and smashed it into Fiddler on the Roof. I had whimsical images of bearded Russian gangsters on a rickety wooden roof boat. Fielding Melish may help me with the score, if not, my landlady will.

Do you consider this book to be narrative? If so, how?

It’s almost impossible to avoid narrative but then again I’m as massive as a glacier with radioactivity on top. The book has a mocked or collaged framework, i.eh., the intro, table of contents, chapter headings and outro. Then the sections are pretty clearly different mediums and different approaches. A dominating structure in the book is collection and the presentation of the collection and hence the use of the grid in multiple layouts. But beyond that this book is crammed with imagery and even if it looks like a blending of meaning it still reaches out to peoples own narratives and associations.

For the record, tell me about your philosophy of Found, and how it’s different from others.

A “Found” item for me is a personal homemade article that is not mass-produced. A baseball card, an air freshener or an old Knick’s ticket is not found for me. A grocery store list, an answering machine cassette, a mix tape or a diary is Found. Especially if you find it in the garbage or thrift store, though you can submit your own family member’s efforts. Found is like America’s Funniest Home Videos: jus Rudies gettin Rowdy. I guess the most important or key attribute of found is a unprofessional candid nature meant for limited consumption. Some of the scenes are from High schools, family gatherings, vacations, we see lovers, brothers, sisters, friends and sometimes even imaginary friends represented in these Found documents.

My philosophy of Found is that it is a livewire of immense power, one that puts us in direct contact with the psyche of humans. When I listen to Found recordings, I feel like Edgar Cayce visiting the Akarshic records witnessing a profound collective memory. In fact the myth about a camera stealing your soul is completely incorrect–sound recordings do. The amount of information about someone’s character in a sound recording is staggering. The playback of one’s nerves, tones, hesitations, deep breaths, mess-ups and word slips percolates the postulates. In the early twentieth century a man named W. A. Bentley from Vermont took on the poetic task of archiving snowflakes. Constructing a frozen photo studio, he patiently caught, then analyzed every given crystal sample, seeing whether it was able or worthy of archiving. I find my efforts in archiving found photos a similar task. Found photos come to me in droves, shaken loose from the chaotic environment of the junk stores. Once taken home, I have the task of ordering the samples into a massive archetypal family photo album. Mr. Bentley’s snow crystals were photographed against the intensity of a bright white sky so to further set our focus on the prize. He would duplicate a negative and painstakingly trace the edges of the crystal, cutting out the sample so that it could be reprinted with black around it. Similarly, I edit the material in order to focus the viewer. Intact family photo albums usually get disassembled so that their parts may be reordered to a larger pigeonhole of photographed impulses. At all costs the sample should be allowed to sing on its own merits without too much toying or distraction by the presenter. Many presenters of “Found” material have cute stories and schmaltzy wizard robes. I personally want not to disturb the viewer’s intense voyeuristic leap into the found space.

Let me, kinda, wrap this thing up-because I can yap a bap about this. Nourly. The Found content luckily marches into the digital era with full force. The amount of personal data on a thrown away hard drive is staggering. I got herds of nerds working in a basement on this, right now! Mp3 and file sharing sites encourage contemporary found material to be leisurely exchanged. The YouTube phenomenon is another massive chapter in amateur homemade archiving. So you see I got tons of work ahead of me. Lastly, let me return your razor.

And finally, who are some of your visual influences, or visual enemies?

Sometimes it isn’t safe to ask me a simple question. This is one of those times. I’m filled with love and hate and am not interested in a middle ground—sorry Zen heads. Originally I was going to answer this question with two lists—“The Greats” and “Shitheads”, but I started to think I have enough enemies as it is. Years from now I may need one of the Shitheads to get me a cosy university job. Any artist that has worked long enough knows that their visual influences are always in a gradual state of flux. What you like one day you may hate the next only to like it again five years later. For instance I’ve loved and hated Salvador Dali 14 times already.

I’ll tell ya, visually speaking, I’ve always hated jeans. A cross in urine is pretty fucking stupid. Also a sliced up cow is pretty dumb. High Fashion meets Deep Space Nine is pretty boring to me as well as Self Lubricating Frames. Martix influenced illustrative war paintings, going for half a million, is just plain disgusting! I’m not too interested in permanently drawing on my body either. It pisses me off that they get all the prime slice. Ryan McQuinness? Since when is graphic design fine art? He should get an advertising job at Dunkin Donuts. I really don’t like work that has been ejaculated on. I don’t know what it is, just a pet peeve of mine! I mention my enemies first because my work is the machete snap! I love raw stuff, dense stuff too. Bruegel is awesome. I was very influenced by my Dad’s work, as well as, all my friends. I’m soooo proud of all my friends!!!! We are here to knock all you suckers out! National Geographic photos are pretty shitty, way too clear. I also hate the shiny paper their printed on. Collages that only use this source I think are pretty lame. I tend to love the rich colors of older printing methods. I like a dry, almost tempera feel to some older printing inks. I do try to expand my paper pallet but time and time again I gravitate towards vintage printing. I like when stuff looks explosive—not illustrating a explosion but embodying it. It could be an explosion of kindness splattering smiles everywhere. To achieve this look I believe you have to court accidents and mistakes and be ready to have your precious plans scrapped. Lastly, I believe that there is a certain spirit that must be present if a work of art is to resonate with humankind’s keepers. Not only ambition and scale but awe and humility and humor in the magic show is in the art I value.