Interview Assignment
I stepped into ‘Casey Rubber Stamps’ late last Friday to see if I can talk to one of the East Village’s known eclectic, John Casey. . It’s very easy to miss the East 11th street shop, a basement among a long line of up and coming boutiques, high end thrift stores and old school bakeries. His shop is a small, huddled mass of tall stacks of shined wooden stamps. Stamps sit in bins, on shelves to the walls, depicted in catalogues and outdoors on a table. The back end is the workshop, open for view to customers, who can watch as a clutter of time worn machines, rubber sheets and metal inlays somehow churn out intricate, polished stamps. Alas, the bearded Irish artist wasn’t there but three of his young assistants-all art school students or graduates- were happy to discuss art, technology and the intersection of the two with me as I learned more about an art-form that isn’t actually, a dying business.
Me: We’re at the Stamp Store in the East Village. I’d like to ask you, what sort of artwork you do?
Rob: I do mostly print-work and a little bit design and some drawings.
Me: What draws you to print-work as opposed to other mediums?
Rob: Well, we’re surrounded by print materials. Our world, especially in New York, is made out of print. I think it’s interesting to have a kind of more intimate understanding of it.
Tim: It’s about leaving an impression, like a caveman.
Rob: Yeah, leaving impressions like cavemen. Also understanding what makes something graphically interesting or evocative is different than what makes something interesting in like a painting.
Me: How do you make things interesting and evocative in print making?
Rob: Oh boy.
Tim: Repetition.
Rob: That’s one way to do it. Prior to the industrial revolution, you’d have like single objects being always independent but with mass manufacturing, any object you see in the world is like a guarantee there’s another object like it somewhere. In printmaking, you see an image but you know it’s reproduced in some other place.
Me: Do you feel like the reproduction decreases the value of the art?
Rob: I don’t think so nowadays because even one of a kind art has lost its value like inherently because of reproducibility. I think that even if you have something that is one of a kind, people have become used to buying things in a world where mass manufacturing is the norm. So if you hand someone a handmade leather shoe, a pair of beautiful ones made by you know, a real artist, people are not going to be willing to pay what that object is worth in time and expertise.
Me: What fascinates you most about stamp making?
Rob: Actually, John Casey fascinates me most
Me: Does he have a philosophy about stamps?
Rob: Make more. Haha, I think that’s his philosophy. Until your fingers bleed and you cry.
Me: What kind of people are most attracted to stamps?
Rob: F***ing goofballs.
Keith: Little girls. Three year olds.
Rob: Yeah, three year olds and scraggly weird dudes.
Tim: A lot of housewives.
Rob: Businessmen. People who want to be entrepreneurs
Tim: Musicians
Rob: There’s also a collector’s element because they’re these little objects. There’s an object fetish quality that a stamp has. It has weight, a very pleasant weight and feel. There’s the wood.
Me: How long did it take you to learn how to be a stamp maker?
Rob: Not long.
Tim: About a week.
Rob: Yeah. But to really understand the woo of stamps-
Keith: The nuance.
Rob: Yeah, it takes a long time.
Me: Can you tell me why the founder of this store wanted to focus on stamps?
Keith: John collected stamps and his dad ran a dance hall that needed stamps so he took John to the stamp-maker to make stamps.
Tim: John became fascinated and wanted to do it for the rest of his life.
Rob: He founded the store or the business in the 70s.
Tim: 80s
Me: So, what’s your personal background as an artist?
Rob: I went to the North Carolina School of the Arts. Keith went to SVA and this guy goes to Cooper Union, currently.
Me: So how do you come up with an idea for a stamp? What’s the process?
Tim: Our boss tells us.
Keith: For stock, basically we just look at an image and if it’s going to be a seller we just make it and then kind of test-market it. You make five of them and put them on a shelf. If it sells- we make more. If it doesn’t, we just don’t make them anymore. Pretty basic.
Me: So what’s your bestselling one?
Keith: There are a lot of bestselling ones- guns, skulls, lot of animals, anatomy pieces, Alice In Wonderland… Depends on who is buying and what they’re using it for. Like Christmas is coming up and a lot of people are going to be buying a lot of Santa stamps and Season’s Greetings and stuff like that. Like a lot of bars will get little things and we get a lot of drug dealers coming in, they want little things- but we’re not supposed to sell to drug dealers.
Me: Oh that’s really interesting. I know that different drug dealers have different signs so that you can tell what is theirs.
Keith: Mhm, yep. Same thing like branding.
Me: From a business perspective, wouldn’t that [market] be useful?
Keith: To cater to that market would be problematic-
Me: Morally?
Keith: There’s that, but also legally. We had a colleague who also runs a stamp shop and he was called to court because some drug ring was caught and they found out that he made the stamp.
Me: Do you see yourself moving to digital design and image making?
Keith: I don’t like to categorize things.
Rob: Right or like put them on a scale like, ‘We used to do things by hand but then computers came along, and we started to do it that way.’ There are still things that are done best by hand and there are things that computers are better at, and things done by computers that have never been done by hand. It’s just different things. I’m with Tim. I prefer to do things by hand.
Tim: There’s another stamp shop that our boss refers people to when he’s freaking out and can’t do their stamps and he prints by laser cutter. And with laser cutting you can’t really do half the things. In solid images, it’ll cut out solid spots but it can’t do a half turn image like this; so there are some things you can’t do with them. These are all done by hand, mostly. I mean you do need the computer to do it but the majority of our work is by hand. It’s a mechanical process. It comes out a lot better and different.
Me: Do you think that the success of an art piece depends on the financial success that it gets?
Tim: No.
Rob: Just no. Because if you start thinking that way your just f***ed. Game over.
Me: Can you elaborate on that?
Tim: Jeff Koons- it’s funny how his sh*tty work can go for so much. He had some kind of awareness event and the piece itself went for 2 million dollars. But its cast steel, its hollow inside. Bullsh*t.
Rob: I think that sh*t comes from what he’s talking about. There’s the art scene and there’s art- like actual work. And then there’s the gallery/fashion thing. The gallery concept has like tried to supplant actual art- its biggest achievement is that its convinced the whole world that it is the art scene somehow or it is like what art is; like that giant f*cking stupid balloon puppet thing that was sold for that much money. But that’s just self-created value. That’s just fashion. That’s just silliness. Like the whole white wall gallery thing is not the extent of art, though most people would go there to find it- which is sort of a shame.
Tim: I started doing art for street art purposes, or because I was motivated by street art.
Me: Would you say that art is your primary passion in life?
Tim: Well I’m f***ed if I want to do anything else.
Rob: Yeah, it’s a passion. I’m passionate about a lot of stuff but it’s probably what all of us feel like we’re best at doing and enjoy most. What else would we do, you know.
