Whose Fault Is That

We first met Jason Polan when he submitted a film to Wholphin, a DVD magazine published by McSweeney’s. His film was entitled “How to Draw a Giraffe” and was exactly as advertised. We really loved the film and ended up collaborating on a whole giraffe drawing contest, which he ended up winning. We’re not sure how that’d be considered fair, but that’s the internet for you. Since then, he’s drawn every piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and explained the law for the Texas State Bar. We were joined by a friend of his, fellow artist Rich Jacobs. We apologize in advance for all the taco talk.

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Rich Jacobs: Apparently Sun-Ra was from Saturn.

Jason Polan: Really?

RJ: Yeah, that’s what he claims.

JP: How’d he get here?

RJ: I don’t know. Probably through Philadelphia.

Whose Fault Is That: Maybe we can start by–

JP: Identifying ourselves?

WFIT: Yeah, sure.

JP: I’m Jason Polan. Hey Rich, identify yourself.

RJ: I’m Rich Jacobs.

WFIT: What are you guys–

JP: And who are you?

WFIT: Oh, I’m David.

JP: Now we’re official. Where’d you get that paper?

WFIT: There’s a Japanese dollar store near here.

RJ: I saw a drawing.

WFIT: Yeah, I’m trying to learn how to draw.

RJ: That’s Stravinsky. That’s my favorite Picasso.

JP: We should do a trade, I really like that.

WFIT: One of the things that really draws me to your work, Jason, is that it seems like you spend more time producing and interacting than you do thinking or worrying about your work.

JP: I take everything very seriously but I don’t want it to seem that way, I guess. So, yeah.

RJ: You think undercover-ly?

JP: Sometimes I think under the covers. I like the idea of people seeing a finished product and being excited about it. I don’t necessarily want them to see how hard I had to work to get it that way. Somebody was asking me questions about my films and I said, “You know what? I don’t know if I want to talk about this.” I don’t want people to know that I’m stressed out when I’m doing it, or that there are things going into the equation other than me just drawing. Because I want it to be very simple and fun. Like you’re watching the thing and you’re not worried that I’m gonna mess up.

WFIT: Rich, I don’t actually know that much about your work.

RJ: That’s okay, I’m just a beginner.

JP: Rich is one of my favorite drawers. And people.

WFIT: What do you like about Rich’s work?

JP: Actually, that’s a good thing to talk about. I met Rich at an art show once and he’s one of the nicest people I know. I find that I judge people’s artwork on how much I like them. So, I’ll like somebody’s artwork a lot and then I’ll meet them and they’re not a super nice person so I’ll be put off a little bit and I’ll have trouble enjoying their work.

WFIT: That makes sense for you, because you put your own self out there with your work. Since that’s how you perceive other people’s work, it makes sense that’s how you would create yours…

JP: Yeah, I want it to be fun and I want people to enjoy the experience. I don’t want them to be uncomfortable. I just want it to be simple and easy. But I’m willing to work really hard to get it that way, I guess. What’s this guys name?

WFIT: Stravinsky, a composer.

RJ: One of my favorites. Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring. When he played it, the audience had a really weird reaction to it and started tearing up the seats of the theater and throwing them. It was almost a pre-punk moment.

WFIT: Have you guys ever had any responses to your work that surprised you?

RJ: I remember when I first started I went through this phase where I started showing in galleries, so all these different types of people would be seeing my work and then all these middle-aged housewives kept buying and collecting my artwork and I couldn’t figure out what I had done to induce that. But it only lasted for two years. My theory, which is probably not correct, but I thought maybe they sent faxes to each other telling each other about it. I can’t figure out how they knew. I didn’t have a website or anything, so… I think it was probably due to faxes.

JP: It’s the fax machines. And when those went out of style that’s when they stopped buying your work.

RJ: Yeah.

JP: I did a project called “The Thrilla in Manila” where I was drawing with a lady in a gallery and we invited people to come draw with us. A lady came in and dropped off her son, so we watched him for like an hour. Before she left she whispered to me, she said, “Draw with him. Talk with him.”

RJ: Sometimes growing up I had a hard time talking, communicating verbally. I was kinda shy so I turned to drawing to make that happen. I think with a lot of artists they tend to draw more and talk less. But, it’s funny, because we’re talking about it…

JP: It’s funny to be interviewed about that.

RJ: It’s interesting, because I think that’s what’s at the very essence of making art, the kind of need to communicate. The need to get out what you have inside of you. I always found it interesting that people think of art as a special thing. To me, it was, “Oh, that’s just how I talk.” I feel the same way when I see someone dance or doing something that I can’t do. That’s just how they’re talking. But, for myself, I’m very awkward and it’d probably hurt people’s feelings if I danced. So, I try to just draw.

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At this point, we realized that Jason’s parking meter was about to run out. We decided to move the interview to a Taco Bell in Pacifica that Jason and I are both fond of. During the ride (despite my plea to not say anything of interest) Jason recounted a visit to a Taco Bell in Alaska. I should also note here that Jason is the creator of the Taco Bell Drawing Club.

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JP: I’m just warning everyone, I might order more.

WFIT: So, we’re here at the Taco Bell in Pacifica.

JP: This is an official meeting of Taco Bell Drawing Club: West Coast Edition.

WFIT: Can you tell me that story again about Alaska?

JP: So, I was in Alaska and I went to a Taco Bell, I think it was in Anchorage. I ordered my meal and I showed them my Taco Bell Drawing Club membership card and I said, “Do you guys accept these here?” and the guy who rung me up said he had to go ask the manager. The manager came up, inspected the card, and said, “We don’t accept these anymore.”
I pointed out, “Well… I made it myself.” I got my food we were all having fun drawing and then he came over and gave me a certificate for ten free tacos. That’s the story of the Alaska Taco Bell. How is the volcano taco?

RJ: It’s pretty serious.

WFIT: Since we’re at Taco Bell, can you tell me more about Taco Bell Drawing Club?

JP: Yeah, I was spending a lot of time at Taco Bell drawing, because I like Taco Bell and I like drawing and they have free refills. I’d sit there for a long time and I thought I’d invite people to draw with me. The real important part is the membership cards because people like having membership cards. I was traveling around a bit and I invited a lot of people in the club. Now there’s over a hundred and twenty members around the country. So that’s the story of Taco Bell Drawing Club.

WFIT: How many Taco Bells have you been to?

JP: I’ve probably been to three hundred Taco Bells.

WFIT: And out of all of the Taco Bells, this is the best one?

JP: I think this might be the best one.

RJ: You should tell them that.

JP: I will.

RJ: But you’ve gotta put it in context, say that you’ve been to three hundred.

JP: “If you knew how much I like Taco Bell, you’d understand how important this is, what you’re hearing.”

JP: Is that a good burrito?

RJ: Yeah, but you have to put a lot of sauce on it.

JP: Oh, tell them you’re secret about the sauce.

RJ: The trick is to get a mild and a hot, because the mild tastes better but it’s not hot enough. So you gotta mix both together.

JP: The hot doesn’t have a good taste.

RJ: That’s my theory.

WFIT: I’m impressed that even though you’ve been to three hundred Taco Bells — so you’ve probably been to Taco Bells thousands of times — that you get two plain hard-shell tacos.

JP: I always order something different when I go up. I just make the decision when I go up there. But, I think the best menu item at Taco Bell is the hard taco. That’d be my take.

WFIT: Is there anything that they’re removed from the menu that you miss?

JP: Tostada was always my favorite. Sometimes they’ll make it for you but it’s not usually on the menu. But they brought it back for a while when they did that Crunch Wrap Supreme thing because the center shell was the tostada shell.

WFIT: Those Fully Loaded Nachos look like they could be turned into a tostada.

JP: It’s kind of like a fancy tostada. Did you like the double decker?

RJ: I liked it because it was weird. The texture was really weird.

JP: It was almost slimy.

WFIT: I was a big fan of the Cheesy Gordita Crunch.

JP: That was a fan favorite.

RJ: Tell me about that one.

WFIT: It was a similar thing where it was two shells and there was cheese in between them instead of beans.

RJ: That sounds cool.

JP: So yeah, Taco Bell Drawing Club is very open. Anybody who sends me an email saying they drew at Taco Bell, I’ll send them a membership card.

WFIT: Are there clubs that exist outside of New York?

JP: Yeah there’s a Chicago one, one in Florida and there’s one in Kansas. The Chicago one is every week, the New York one is every week, the Florida one is pretty regular I think.

WFIT: Have you approached Taco Bell about this at all?

JP: Yeah they sent me a letter. Because… I’ve been sending them a lot of letters. They sent me a letter saying, “We appreciate what you’re doing. Here’s gift certificates for your Taco Bell visit.” And they sent me twenty-five Taco Bell bucks. So they’re aware of it, someone there is.

RJ: I wonder if they have video surveillance and you could make a video of every week you went there. That’d be pretty awesome.

JP: It would probably be a pretty depressing video. What else can we talk about? I want to make this an extensive, substantial interview.

WFIT: We only have twenty more minutes right?

RJ: Say something super heavy.

WFIT: The conversation was getting pretty heavy before and now it’s about Taco Bell.

JP: Yeah, what we were talking about?

WFIT: Have you started any projects and got pretty deep into them and realized there was something wrong and you had to stop?

JP: Yeah. Usually I’ll think of the title first. So I’ll think of, like, “The Every Piece of Art in the Museum of Modern Art Book” and then I’ll have to do it. So the exciting part is the thinking of the title. The other exciting part is when it’s done. But the working at it… you need to have a lot of stamina. So there was one I did where I came up with the idea of a book called, “All of the Hair on My Head” so I had my mom shave my head and we had all the hair in a bag and I was gonna draw all of it and make a book of it. And I got seven or eight pages in and it was literally a pinch of hair. I didn’t realize how much work it was gonna be. So then I quit. And it was failure of a project.

RJ: You can go back to it later.

JP: I still have the bag of hair.

WFIT: You like drawing collections and things of large scale. It sounds like when you create an idea for a project you do something that’s specifically going to lock you into something long…

JP: But, I don’t even think of it that way, it’s just ridiculous. I did one called, “An Entire Bag of Popcorn” where I drew every piece of popcorn in a bag. I just like the fact that you can hold onto an entirety. Luckily, the ones that I’ve thought of have mostly been ones that I can do. Like the hair one was not.

I did one called “All of the People in the Phone Book” because there was a phone book in Skykomish, Washington and their phone book was a front and back piece of paper. The population was like 217. I got to meet a lot of the people there. So, yeah, a lot of the projects are endurance challenges, almost.

WFIT: What projects are you working on right now?

JP: I have an art show that’s up right now in East Hampton, New York and it’s called “Points of Interest”. I was driving in Michigan and I saw a sign that said “Point of Interest” and there was nothing around it, so I didn’t know what it was signifying as interesting. And I thought that itself was kind of interesting, so I decided for this art show to make a book called Points of Interest and I just picked things that I liked and I drew them out in East Hampton, near where the gallery was. I drew a bunch of things like shrubs or street signs that I liked and those were the points of interest and we did a small edition of the book that also came with a sign that I made, a “Point of Interest” sign so that people could decide their own points of interest.

WFIT: And you’re still working on “Every Person in New York”?

JP: Still working on that one. People ask me, “When are you going to be done?” I think that’s funny because I’ll just be working on it forever.

WFIT: Once people stop moving to New York you can have a goal set.

JP: Right. People take that one very literally. It’s just been funny that people ask me those questions, like, “What do you with tourists? Do you draw tourists?”

WFIT: Who are some artists that you really admire right now?

JP: An artist named Derek Erdman. He’s from Chicago. He’s one of my favorites now, he makes a lot of work that’s very available to people. My friend Katie McDonough is a really good drawer. Rich is one of my favorites. Mostly people that make their work available to people and are very approachable, I guess. It’s that idea where you produce a work and if somebody really likes it I want them to be able to have it and I think it’s something that I appreciate when other people also have that feeling. Did that make any sense?

WFIT: Yeah, it definitely did.

RJ: Round two.

JP: What’d you go with, another volcano one? I’m gonna get some more. I’ll be right back.

WFIT: What are you working on right now, Rich?

RJ: I’m curating a show at a museum in Holland. That and working on a collection of 80’s skateboard magazines, self published zines.

WFIT: Do you work mostly here in the Bay Area?

RJ: That’s where I live, I moved here a little over a year ago from New York.

JP: Don’t look at this. You guys get one guess what the sauce on the volcano taco is called.

WFIT: Lava?

JP: Yeah.

RJ: Did you ask for extra lava?

JP: I asked, “Can I get it minus the sauce?” and she said, “The lava sauce?” and I said, “What!?”

RJ: That’s awesome.

WFIT: What differences do you see between New York and San Francisco?

RJ: For art, it’s a lot more of a tradition in New York. There’s such an infrastructure for it, there’s more of a collector-based art market there which is good and bad. It’s definitely more structured. It’s a little more open here, but there’s a lot fewer opportunities… I try to exist in and out of the real art world. I try to only deal with it when I need to. I like to encourage people to self publish a lot. I don’t think a lot of artists know what to do once they’ve made the art.

JP: Yeah, I steal a lot of those ideas from Rich.

RJ: I know some really great artists who would never show their work if I didn’t ask them to. I feel sad about that. I like to help those people, give them an outlet.

JP: Have you guys had this before?

WFIT: That is a tiny little thing.

JP: It’s a cheese roll-up, like what you’d make in sixth grade in the microwave when you got home from school.

RJ: That’s amazing.

JP: It’s seventy-nine cents.

WFIT: Impressive. Is there anything you know about Taco Bell that most people don’t?

JP: The most exotic thing is an Enchirito. Do you know the Enchirito?

RJ: Oh, yeah. They still make those?

JP: Yeah, that’s always the thing. I ordered one in New York the other day and the girl at the register didn’t even know what it was. It’s on the menu. The only rogue Taco Bell menu item is the Nachos Supreme. Usually the prices of the items follow caloric value. The nachos supreme doesn’t follow that. It’s like $1.89 usually, but it’s got 800 calories in it. Whereas the hard taco is like a dollar and it has 250 calories and it goes up from there.

WFIT: I feel like I had a bunch of things I wanted to talk about then Taco Bell totally took it out of me. Rich, you talked earlier about lots of different ways you can communicate, like dance which is something you can’t do. Do either of you guys have mediums or ways of expression you wish you could do?

RJ: I’d like to explore sculpture more. I have a strong interest in that. I like photography a lot and I don’t dedicate myself enough to that. So, maybe pursuing those avenues would be fun for me.

JP: I wish I was smarter, I wish I could do crazy experiments and figure things out.

RJ: Having a budget would be nice, too. That’s always been a limitation.

JP: Yeah, to experiment more with crazy things.

WFIT: What would you do if you had an unlimited budget?

JP: I’d make movies and stuff. I think that would be fun.

RJ: What about podcasts?

JP: I’m blogging about this right now. I think a movie would be a fun way to do collaborative projects. When you’re drawing, you’re drawing by yourself but when you’re doing a film you just find the good people that you’re comfortable working with.

RJ: One of my ideas that I’ve never realized that I’d really like to do is incorporate all of my ideas. It would be sort of a film project but it would include dimensional and three-dimensional artwork, almost like start-stop animation style. I like the idea of having the composition move. Like with a painting you have a composition and it just stationary. But if you could frame that and all of a sudden it started moving, that’d be kinda fun.

JP: I’d fund Taco Bell Drawing Club myself, I’d get everyone free food every time we went.

WFIT: You could just make a private Taco Bell.

JP: But I like trying all the different ones. I thought about that when I was younger, like if I had my own Taco Bell. But then I thought, no, I like going and finding the new Taco Bells.

WFIT: What are some of your favorite movies?

JP: I like the movie “The Red Balloon” and I like “Koko” and I like “Yi Yi”. I like the movie “The Third Man”… I like the movie… “Back to the Future One, Two and Three”.

WFIT: Maybe to close it out, since we don’t have much time left, can we come up with a project that we can all work on? We’ll start a project right now.

RJ: What if we drew tacos?

JP: Through the whole book? Just a bunch of tacos? What’s that hand thing that you did? The way you hold a guitar?

RJ: Taco riffs. You know how when people play heavy metal they’re like jh-jh-jh-jh-jh they make a taco out of their hand? So…

JP: The project will involve: death, despair, happiness, sadness, explosions, animals, exotic animals, farm animals…

RJ: What if we made fictitious Taco Bell items?

JP: We could do that, we could do a Taco Bell menu of mythological creatures.

RJ: A fantasy menu, things that they should make at Taco Bell like horchata Slurpees.

WFIT: Can we do it?

RJ: Fantasy Taco Bell. You know how people have Fantasy Baseball Leagues? Fantasy Taco Bell League. I bet you could get that going on the internet.

WFIT: If Taco Bell shut down, where would you have your Drawing Club?

JP: Nowhere, I’d shut down.

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David Cole interviewed Jason Polan and Rich Jacobs on December 16, 2008 in San Francisco and Pacifica. You can see more of Jason’s projects at his website.