THE RJ RUSHMORE INTERVIEW
*Photography by SARKI
*Art Direction by LK SHERWIN
Mr. Rushmore has a cool haircut. He likes his street art. And like most of the artists, he works for free. I think we have ourselves a wonderkind cause the dude is twenty and VANDALOG is running shit.
TRA: So how was the flight back to London? Were you stuck in a middle seat?
RJ: Not bad…got an aisle seat. Delta sucks a lot less than people say.
TRA: Ha. So how did Vandalog come about? What was the inspiration other than your obvious love of art?
RJ: I started Vandalog for two main reasons: 1. So my dad would only need to read one art blog. He and I love a lot of the same art, but he wouldn’t have time to read a bunch of blogs to try and keep up to date on everything. So with Vandalog, he can (hopefully) read about everything that would interest him.
2. I didn’t get the Editor-in-chief position at my high school newspaper and it was my senior year, so I figured I’d half-ass the position I did have on the paper and start a blog.
TRA: Well I would say that was a fortunate thing being denied editor in chief status. It seems really great people need to be disappointed at least once in life. Perhaps you are one of the great ones?
RJ: Haha I guess it worked out okay…but your site has a much better long-term way of paying off. Kick ass photos = paying jobs. Vandalog takes a lot of time and doesn’t pay so well, but that may be a good thing.
TRA: The Ripe Apples was born out of disappointment as well. Speaking of long term…what is the goal? Maybe you can become a world-renowned curator?
RJ: I don’t even know. I’ve got three years left of college, and I definitely want to finish that. It would be great to keep putting together pop-up shows and making t-shirts with friends, but I’m intentionally not studying art at college in the hopes that there will be other options for an actual career.
I like having Vandalog as a side-project rather than a full-time gig.
TRA: I don’t know man. I used to think that my going to school for an art degree was ridiculous and at least from a career perspective a waste of a degree. But the world seems to be shifting in a more artistic direction and now people with art degrees are being hired for all sorts of “Career” positions.
RJ: True. I just saw a chart about that in Wired. Of course, they also suggested that jobs were shifting towards manufacturing and engineering things, but it’s Wired, so they have to say that.
TRA: So how many times have you made your father buy a piece of artwork? It must be nice recommending a purchase that will appreciate in value. It seems everything I recommend to my father depreciates.
RJ: Our art collecting relationship tends to go like this: I suggest some artist he should check out, he ignores me, six months later a friend tells him to check out that same artist, he asks me where he can find some artwork from this artist he says he has never heard of haha…but it works.
TRA: Of course. So what is the process at Vandalog? How many staffers do you have? Do you assign people to find different artists or does the art seem to find you?
RJ: There are about eight of us regularly contributing. I let the other 7 writers do pretty much whatever they want, so long as it’s relevant.
Where that gets really fun is if someone writes something that I disagree with, and then I’ll comment on the post after it is live saying that I disagree. I don’t know many sites that work that way…but I respect the opinions of all the other Vandalog writers.
TRA: That would be amazing to go on the New York Times website and find comments under an article with the paper’s editor saying “no fuck you Roger Cohen you are completely wrong”.
RJ: Exactly!
TRA: I like this format.
RJ: I saw something like that recently with an article that Jerry Saltz wrote. One of the other art critics at the same publication wrote an article disagreeing with him. That was a great dialog.
TRA: I think it adds a great amount of credibility to a paper.
RJ: Definitely. That’s what I hope comes across with how we do things at Vandalog.
TRA: So do artists ever solicit you to check out their work? Does ESPO ever write you asking why you have not checked out his roller on Grand St. etc.?
Or is he going by Stephen Powers now? I love him, my favorite for sure.
RJ: I had a really great experience meeting him last month actually. I was in LA and he had an installation at MOCA with Barry McGee and Todd James.
TRA: Would have loved to seen that.
RJ: I went up to introduce myself and I was like “Hey, I’m RJ and you hate me” because he’d made some fun of me on twitter a while back. But he was totally cool about it.
It was a great installation; his work was one of the highlights of that show (which was an entire show about street art and graffiti). Guys like Steve don’t email me too much asking for publicity, but up-and-coming artists definitely do.
TRA: Yeah I would imagine…I just wanted to talk about Mr. Powers because I respect him more than the others.
RJ: Definitely. I have a lot of respect for pretty much the entire Beautiful Losers crowd.
TRA: Yeah I have to check that thing out. Perhaps you have a link where I can stream it?
RJ: They worked their asses off for years and didn’t have the advantage of the Internet to spread their message, so they just had to rely on word of mouth among these random disparate skate communities.
TRA: Awesome. Yes I seriously hope the Internet doesn’t destroy the idea behind street art. It would be a shame if getting up started to mean blasting all over the Internets.
RJ: Yeah the “street art over the internet” thing has already gotten to that point with some artists. There’s a lot of work that only lasts for a few hours, but spreads like a virus online…which can be a good and a bad thing.
TRA: Sounds like a lame concept.
RJ: Well it means that guys like Mark Jenkins can do awesome sculptures that might only last a short time before being removed, but they can still document the work and get credit for doing something cool. But it also means that people can pretend to be more up than they are in a sense. Someone can do a dozen street pieces that are pretty good, go viral and then just go to some gallery and sell art on that basis…that gets annoying.
TRA: I don’t know…don’t think I can board that train quite yet.
RJ: Fair enough. On the other hand, Space Invader just put up his 1000th piece in Paris, so that’s one guy who is definitely getting up. Space Invader is great because he doesn’t “need” to get up to make a career with his art, but he still gets up illegally because it’s fun. There are too many “street artists” out there who ditch the streets these days.
*Check out more shots from the shoot HERE
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