(gentle country music) - They always say that you can tell an artist not by what he does, but by the materials that he uses.

Some people can use stone, some people use metals, I use cardboard.

You know, I love cardboard and paper, and I think it speaks about how I feel about everything, you know, about fragility, and my own terror, do you know what I mean of, you know, what I mean, of life.

(gentle country music continues) (truck engine whirring) I'm Jimmy Grashow, I'm an artist It took me a long time to be able to say that I'm an artist.

But at this point in my life, I feel like I've paid so much into it, that that's what I am, that's my definition of myself.

And without doing work, I don't know what I am.

(knife rustling) I'm building a corrugated fountain.

So the idea with this fountain is, you know, build it.

I try to make something eternal, something extraordinary, a Grashow Bernini.

But in the end, the plan is to set it out someplace and to have the rain and the elements wash it away.

Like the Afghan Buddhas, like the World Trade Center, like everything has its time.

All artists talk about process, but the process that they talk about is always from beginning to finish.

And nobody really talks about full term process to the end, to the destruction, and to the dissolution of a piece.

Everything dissolves in eternity I'd like to speak to that.

(gentle country music) An artist is a detective on the trail of his truth and on the trail of whatever's gonna happen, but you build it piece by piece, never knowing exactly where you're going.

With each show, I've tried to follow the trail, but I've come to this realization that I've only followed the trail up to a certain point, and I feel like it's been an incredible kind of deception.

(gentle country music continues) Today, I want to try to see if I can start the legs on the central figure.

So I'm gonna try that.

Even if it doesn't work out, you know what I mean, it'll be a beginning, right?

So, so here, so I'm gonna start with these.

When this idea first happened, I was asked to teach a class in Italy, in Florence, which never happened.

So I was trying to think of a project, you know, to do, and I thought it would be a great idea to build a cardboard fountain, you know, with all the students in this class.

And then at night sort of sneak it out, put it in a piazza, have this new unbelievable cardboard fountain, and there's some piazza in Florence, and then watch the rain come and just melt it.

To me, I thought that that was, like, I thought it was, you know, phenomenal.

In a way that's sort of like the little synopsis, a little sort of note of what I would like to see.

I would love to really do something extraordinarily heroic and then put it in a great venue and then watch it as the rain came and the snow came and see it, you know, tilt, do you know what I mean?

Dissolve, you know, mold, you know, whatever happens to it.

You know, and when you turn the corner automatically, it has a kind of a strength to it, do you know?

So it really, it starts to, it starts to have a strength.

You are on this incredible journey all the time, step by step you sort of pick your way.

You do that in your work, and you do that in your personal life, in your marriage.

- My parents had a house in Fire Island, and I spent every summer in Fire Island.

We'd go into the bars at night and dance and stuff.

So I saw this really cute guy dancing with somebody, and I knew he was new.

- When I first met my wife, I really didn't know what I was getting into or what was gonna happen.

But I found as a relationship deepens, or even as your relationship with your work deepens, it gets richer and richer.

(cheerful country music) - The whole, the neck should come out, you know, the whole neck should come out.

If you pay for great papers or great canvas or fabulous paints, you can't make a mistake.

Every inch of what you do with it is valuable.

Cardboard, it's so worthless.

It's so grateful to be rescued from trash.

It's just like humans.

We aspire to be something more, to be holy, to be grand, to be eternal.

But we're tied to mortality.

Cardboard and people.

We are made almost from the same kind of DNA I think.

You know, you'll cut it, you'll put a nose on or something, you know what I mean, or it'll make the skull shape.

Wherever the hair falls, you can round it off, you know.

But the thing is, just to get it, just to get a start.

You can start to see him, do you know?

You can start to see him.

(gentle music) When I was a little kid, my parents would bring me these, you know, presents like for Christmas or for holidays or something, and I couldn't wait to get rid of the present and start building things with a cardboard box.

My evolution as an artist, I think started with cardboard boxes and toilet paper rolls and the interiors of shirts.

You know, you used to get your shirts home from a cleaners, and there used to be a little cardboard insert.

And to make things with that, those were all little precious little items.

Where I started using chicken wire, papier-mache, you know, making bigger and bigger things.

(knife rustling) - Jimmy's been very lucky because he's always earned a living.

From the moment I met him, he was always, whether it was selling his art or selling the prints, or he was, you know, did a tremendous amount of illustration.

There was always income coming in.

That's not to say there, you had to get used to feast or famine.

- You know, if you make 20 little flower paintings, you know, you know, or if I were to do, if I would go out to a field and paint tractors and make 20 tractors.

There's something unbelievably thrilling, you know, thrilling about standing out on the ledge and doing something heroic that nobody wants.

When I was working on the original show, and I was making these giant figures of 15-foot-high figures, you know, and Eramus sitting up on a ladder, I have an incredible memory of taking, you know, the red thread and putting threads in the eyeballs for the veins and in these big giant figures.

And I kept on thinking to myself, how great is this?

Do you know?

I'm like, I mean, how great is this?

If the illustration in every other part of my life was a way to legitimize myself so that I could pay for my habit of standing out on the ledge and doing stupid things, and I was willing to do that.

(upbeat country music) - [Interviewer] That's your portfolio?

- Well, this was, I mean, there's nothing in here anymore, so it's all been cannibalized and things taken out.

But I used to carry, I used to carry this around.

You know, see, here's the, here's, right, and that was the, and that was the print.

A long time ago.

But there are millions.

Now there are so many wood cuts.

Here, this was when I did the city piece, they used it in "New York Magazine."

I did the logo for, I did the eagle, cut the eagle.

Timmy furs, you know, save the tiger.

You know, I did, you know, here, you know, "New York Times" art, these were all "New York Times," but there were billions.

There were, yeah, there were billions and billions.

I don't even know where they are.

(upbeat country music) This would be impossible to do without the support of my wife, So I'm unbelievably grateful for that.

- I feel like I grew up in an enchanted home, and my father is like a wizard.

And sometimes people say that behind every great man, there's a great woman, or that a woman is like the wind beneath your wings.

And when it comes to my mom, I think more than a wind, she's more like the tornado that picked up Dorothy.

And whereas my father is a wizard, and a real wizard, there'd be no Oz without my mom.

- We've always been very, very close.

I can never escape him because he was always home.

You know, I wasn't the best student.

So if I would get these report cards coming in, telling me that, you know, I wasn't doing it so hot, and I tried to beat him to the mailbox to get it, but he always got it first.

So that was, you know, probably the only problem I had with him being home all the time - I was at a party the other night and somebody said to me, "Did you have any mentors?"

I said, "My mentor was my childhood pain."

I mean, like, you know, I like that, you know, like, I like that.

I was classic middle child, you know, my younger brother was very smart, accelerated in school.

My older sister was supposed to have like 170 IQ, and my parents adored her.

I basically thought I had to fight for every scrap of respect.

I felt inadequate in every way.

I know that I'm dyslexic and so I did miserably in school, you know, and the only thing I ever could do was draw.

And my parents, I remember them always saying, how lucky it was that I, with all my deficits, that I had talent.

And I always thought that talent was sort of like a slap in the face.

It was sort of like a secondary gift.

It took an incredibly long time to realize that talent wasn't a secondhand gift.

It was a gift of the highest order.

(pencil rustling) The insanity of doing seahorse scales seems to be perfect.

So I have to angle all of the, you know, all of the cardboard so that they all can scallop like shingles, right?

(sander whirring) Here, see, da-da, two, little, little, little, a seahorse scales, I can, so.

So I can make a million, I'm gonna make a million of these, and then I'm gonna start to, you know, to put, to start the other side of the seahorse, you know, the rear end of the seahorse, okay?

There's an incredible marriage, always in art.

There's the material, like the page or the stone, and then there's the artist, right?

The most wonderful pieces, the works of genius are the works of this incredible marriage of the work becoming, and an artist giving.

For me, you know, like Rembrandt and Goya, you can look at them, you can see the process in the work.

You can feel them working and painting and the pieces growing.

And in sculpture, you know, there's nobody better than Berni who feels the, you know, the stone, and allows it to become, you can feel it growing and evolving.

Bernini's will is unbelievably impressive.

(laughs) You know what I mean, he is fantastic, but he has an ally in the stone.

He's not working against his material in a way.

He's yielding and bending to the will of the material too.

You feel that incredible bond and an incredible marriage between, you know, between the artist and the media.

(gentle country music) - My dad used to tell us a story when he went to Indian Head Camp, I think is where he went to camp, and he was creating a big kind of totem for the camp, for one of their games.

I wonder if there's a part of this piece that is related to that very early first outdoor installation.

- I would sneak out every day from the camp, from my little bunk, you know, in camp.

And I would take chicken wire and I would wrap this chicken wire up, and I made a big giant, a big giant man in the woods, you know, with, you know, all out of papier-mache and chicken wire.

And I think it probably was about maybe 10 feet tall, I don't know, but it was big.

So I made this, I painted it up.

It looked, you know, primitive, but fantastic, I think.

So anyway, so they're gonna use it the next day.

I go back to my, I go back to my bunk, I'm laying down.

I'm excited about the next day, when I start hearing raindrops on the roof.

And I knew that the piece was in jeopardy.

So I get up in the middle of the night with my flashlight, and I go back up into the woods, and there it is.

You know what I mean?

Just melting in front of my eyes.

The whole piece was just falling apart.

And in the morning when the rain stopped, you know what I mean?

It was just a gigantic pile of mush.

But the chicken wire frame was still intact.

This was one of my first lesson.

If you're an artist, you're always on the precipice of disaster.

It's how you rescue yourself from the pit that makes you into what you are.

So anyway, so I ran around the entire camp, and I stole all the toilet paper from each bunk, you know, I got all their toilet paper.

I ran back up into the woods and I stuffed, you know, the toilet paper into all the holes in the chicken wire.

So the piece looked like a giant marshmallow.

It looked like a big giant, I don't know, Michelin Man.

There's something unbelievably great about facing disaster and surviving.

(solemn guitar music) And here this was the staff of "The Erasmian."

You know, I did the, actually I did the cover for "The Erasmian," and I'm probably the only one in the history of the school who did a cover who spelt Erasmian wrong.

Well, I graduated from Erasmus in 1959, right?

And then went to Pratt for four years.

And I did great, had great, great teachers and great experience.

And then I got this Fulbright to, you know, to Italy.

And I was in Italy for a year, seeing every piece of work that I ever wanted to see.

I think it was probably 1966 or something like that.

I went to the Biennale, and there was a gigantic Oldenburg hamburger sitting ther And I said, "Oh my God, I'm home."

I understood I couldn't be a 16th century Florentine.

I could never have the color sense of a guy that looked at olive trees and, you know, had looked at those beautiful terracotta roofs all day long.

The Arno didn't flow through Brooklyn.

My aesthetic was totally predicated on what I saw around me on the funny papers that I grew up with, or the "Saturday Evening Post," or the horrible color sense that my mother had.

Everything that I knew, all my sensibility was formed from 1950 Brooklyn.

You sort of learned that no matter who you are, you have to be what you are.

I didn't want to paint like Rembrandt anymore, or I didn't want to try to be da Vinci.

You know, the only thing I wanted to try to be was the best Grashow I possibly could be.

(upbeat country music) I've been trying to work for all these, all of these splash splashes out.

Do you know, you know, these pieces coming over and on this, that they sort of overlap and interconnect, and I wanted to keep this, all this negative space, do you know, everything really working.

So let me.

You always feel your mortality, but you know, when you get older, it becomes undeniable.

It doesn't become some sort of abstract metaphor that you deal with, it becomes an absolute reality.

I love life.

I really, I love it And I'm terrified of not being here, you know.

- I think my father has a low quota of happiness, and even though there's so much happiness in his life, he sometimes has trouble believing it.

So you know, there's every reason to be happy.

And I think just naturally, chemically, he can only go so far.

- A friend of ours from out of the beach this summer even said, "Jimmy is a tortured soul."

He is a tortured soul, because you can tell, you can see that, you know, it's there, it's under the surface all the time.

- The funny thing is that a lot of his work sometimes is mistaken for adorable.

You know, he did a hundred monkeys all acrobatting through the air, and people would walk in and say, "Oh my gosh, that's so cute.

They're so adorable.

Look how happy they are."

And when you talk to him about it, he'll say that it's really about the futility of life and the fragility of man, that basically ultimately we're just empty primates, you know, playing, but ultimately trash.

And there's something existential and miserable about it.

But at the same time, did he have to make them so cute and smiling?

So his tortured nature is hidden in a way beneath all of that, all of that joyous expression of life.

- It's a difficult, it's a difficult question.

Here, I always, if you do like waves, do you know what I mean?

And you think of yourself as an iceberg, you know, you know, and you, you know, like, and here's your iceberg, you know?

You know, and like, and I say like, like 3/4 or maybe a quarter of an iceberg is on top, and the rest of it is on the bottom.

How much of you is revealed?

You know what I mean?

And how much of you is really is on the bottom.

I think, I think for me, I have a big subterranean factor, you know.

- Terrific man, Rabbi Danny Symes was at the house, and he said, "If you could change one thing about Jimmy that bothers you, what would it be?"

And I was very surprised at myself, because this came out pretty fast.

I said that there were a lot of things that bothered me, but I would be very concerned that if I changed, if one thing was changed, that it would completely, that it would change Jimmy, and it wouldn't be Jimmy anymore.

If you take away one thing, it wouldn't be that whole package.

So I can't really change anything because I love Jimmy the way he is.

You know, I love this Jimmy.

- All of the shows in the beginning when I first started out, you know, they sort of walk the line between this fantasy and this reality.

And people would always say that some of the early pieces were cartoons, do you know what I mean?

And the word cartoon, it seemed to always stick in my throat.

It's like trivializes the work and stuff.

I mean, one of the first shows with those big figures that were up at Allan Stone, and I thought they had a presence, and it made this extraordinary statement.

But people looked at them and saw cartoons, you know, they thought I was doing cartoons, you know?

So not that I have anything against cartoons, right?

(solemn country music) I built this piece called "The city."

It was anthropomorphic figures and buildings turning into people, or people turning into buildings.

All of the pieces were covered with fabric.

You know, it was all dots and stripes, all dyed gray.

It was this incredible collage of texture.

But year to year, I would see the color, all those incredible blacks and whites and gray.

Everything changed as it was exposed to the light.

You know, all the grays and all the blacks became almost red.

And at some point, it no longer was really the piece that I made.

I didn't own it anymore.

And I think that that's what happens, that as you move through your life, you lose ownership of your work.

You know, maybe even like the way you lose ownership of your kids, you know.

(solemn country music continues) I started thinking in the last couple of days that maybe working with cardboard is, you know, is a herald for the whole future of the nation, all the monuments and the homes.

And they, you know, the riches and everything that you accumulate in your lifetime are transient and, you know, are, you know, are like cardboard, you know, are like cardboard.

So doing this piece in this time, in a way, has become almost more poignant for me.

Graduate school was impossible, you know, the idea of being a student again was so ridiculous when the only thing I wanted to do was, you know, my own work.

Up to that point, I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a sculptor, a graphic artist, or, you know, I didn't know, an illustrator or a painter.

I had this idea.

I built all of these canvases, had about like 10 canvases, you know, like arranged around a room.

And I built figures out of unbleached muslin, chicken wire frames and unbleached muslin.

And I had the idea that I would paint the portraits of the figures that I would make.

I put the figures up, and then I started painting their portraits, and then I would paint the figures.

So I would paint from the canvas to the sculpture, you know, and go back and forth.

But I became so interested in building the sculptures that the paintings became, you know, ridiculous.

And the whole idea of making a painting or painting on an object that I could walk around, that would change every time I walked in it, and through it became, you know, really fascinating.

(solemn country music continues) I had this show at Pratt, and then brought it back to my studio down on Broom Street.

We got a phone call from Allan Stone.

Allan Stone was a great, great gallery.

And I had never gone out.

I had never solicited anybody.

You know, the idea of doing your work is one thing, but the idea of going around and peddling your work was something, I think at that point, which was really impossible for me to do.

So it was a miracle that this gallery called, and he came and he came down.

He loved the stuff, and he said, "What about I give you a fill-in show for the summer?"

And that was the beginning.

It was so unbelievable to have somebody, you know, supporting and loving, and lovin and a place to put it when it wa (smooth jazz music) I've been with the Allan Stone Gallery for almost 50 years.

It's been a long, complicated, sometimes very insane journey.

(smooth jazz music continues) A long time ago, I had made a couple of shows.

There was one show with gigantic papier-mache figures that were about like maybe 14, 15 feet high.

They were all made from fabric-mache, and the fabrics were like, it was like walking into a gigantic abstract expressionist painting.

Allan bought a couple of those figures and brought them home and had them in his house for a while.

And then there was a whole show of a riot.

There were all these eight-foot figures, you know, all fighting and stuff.

And there must have been about maybe 10, 15 figures.

They were in a museum for a long time.

Eventually, you know, they were renovating the museum, and they came back to Allan's house, and there was no room for them anymore.

So Allan, I don't know why or what he did, but he put them out on the lawn.

He tied the two 15-foot-high figures to an oak tree in the back, and put the fighting figures like in a gigantic knot, you know, on the lawn, in the middle of the lawn.

Anyways, so Allan died, and I went down for, you know, to make a condolence call to, you know, to the house.

And there these figures were, decaying at an unbelievable rate.

To see my dealer lump it like a piece of garbage on a, you know, in the backyard, was almost a verification of all the negative feelings that I've ever had about myself, my own aspirations to do something great or something eternal.

But they were so beautiful.

They were so magical in their decay.

It was extraordinary.

The work was better than anything that I'd ever, ever, ever imagined.

I think what seeing the piece at your dad's house allowed me to do for the first time was really take my hands off the wheel.

You're always fighting to make the statement, to make the work important, you know, to make people love you.

When I saw that, it was never gonna happen, you know what I mean?

It was why fight it?

I was liberated, I think, in a way to, you know, to go with it, to be the architect, you know, of what was inevitable anyway.

All my life I have been talking about process, about building and creation and the doing of things.

And I never really owned the back end of that.

I did it up to the creation of everything, but never really worked with the destruction of a piece.

You know, it's rotting away, or what happened to it.

And it almost seemed to be dishonest to work with the front end of that aspect, and not try to address and own the back end.

So I decided with the next piece that it's something that I absolutely wanted to address.

The building of the fountains is the culmination of all that.

To make something ethereal, something eternal, something heroic, heroic beyond all proportion, but still make it knowing that it's fragile, and still knowing that it's mortal, still knowing that it deteriorates.

You know what I mean?

And it's gone.

(cardboard rustling) (birds calling) Yesterday, we glued up, we glued up this figure.

So now you can see how we made the slots, you know, try to, you know, so now this is all starting to, it's starting to become strong, really strong enough to work, you know?

And then I just want to start to, you know, trim a little bit, you know, get the edges, so you can sort of see exactly what the real shape is.

(blade rattling) Almost every area that I've planted seeds in, things are starting to sprout.

I still have this woodcut career, you know, I do the house plants for, you know, and people pay for things like that.

I do these cardboard workshops and teach, you know, like all over the country, and people call every week.

The problem is that I'm older.

I can't juggle like I used to juggle to make a living.

I could hold a million balls in the air at the same time.

I didn't sleep.

I loved being in the studio.

But now I don't juggle as well.

When I finish something, I need recovery time.

And it seems that I don't get the recovery time I need.

(cheerful country music) There's a deadline date for it now, and we're opening it up for a museum in Roanoke, Virginia.

I have to find the time to move into the details of everything.

(cheerful country music) (cheerful country music continues) (solemn country music) It is very important that you do this really, that you do this really right, because after all, it's the back of the fish scales.

It's the back of the fish scales And nobody's gonna see in a piece of, you know what I mean, in a piece that's gonna be, you know, destroyed.

So you gotta work your brains out on this.

That's hugely important.

(blade scratching) I think if I don't put everything into it, if I don't make a cosmic burn, I think it won't be painful when it goes.

Do you know what I mean?

And I think the whole thing has to be painful.

The whole experience has to be heroic, you know what I mean?

And everything that's put into it has to be, it has to be overwhelming to make it real.

(bubble wrap rustling) Somebody asked me how I was.

I said, "I'm absolutely, totally insane."

You know what I mean?

I can't breathe.

I can't think.

I can't do anything.

But I'm very happy to be here.

(upbeat rock music) I woke up today, you know, finished packing a couple of things, and then it's done, you know, you know, waiting.

So you think you'll be here maybe nine, nine, about 10 o'clock, 9:30?

Hello?

- Hi.

- Hi, Jimmy.

Yeah.

This is the biggest truck that's ever.

- Really?

- That's ever come here.

- [Mover] Just ten foot that out, and then we'll be out.

- [Jimmy] Oh, great.

- [Mover] Here we go.

- [Mover] All right.

- [Jimmy] Just get straight off.

- [Mover] Good.

- [Mover] Down low.

- [Mover] Make a conch shell.

- I got a conch shell.

I got it.

- [Mover] You got it?

- [Jimmy] I got it in there.

- [Mover] And that's a tough one (smooth jazz music) - You see the way he just whipped that piece out just there like.

- [Mover] Is it necessary to find out?

(smooth jazz music continues) - I don't know how I feel.

I really don't.

So I just have to wait and find out.

Maybe I'll wake up tonight screaming.

Oh my God.

Okay.

Hello?

We're in.

(cheerful country music) Do you have a light?

Do you know what I mean on the lights?

All over the size of the piece.

(cheerful country music continue (cheerful country music continues) - Wow.

- There's a half-eaten sign outside that says James Grashow Carnegie Hall bound.

- I really came here with kind of mixed feelings.

I think it's just an unbelievable accomplishment.

I'm still not comfortable with what the plan is.

The past six months, Jimmy has been working insanely, so much, you know, most days getting up at 4:30 and going to work, and sometimes taking a little nap in the afternoon, but working so hard and so obsessed with it that, I mean, I could really see a change, a physical change in him.

I just feel it's taken a physical toll on him.

Are you happy?

- (sighs) Man.

Oh, I can't wait for the door to open.

All right.

It took about four years, but the beginning of, but getting into it was sort of like slower.

(attendees chattering) Very, very important than the piece, right?

It kept on growing and growing.

Okay, one, two, three!

(audience cheering) All right, thank you.

Okay.

(audience applauding) (audience chattering) (gentle country music) The reaction was spectacular.

The reviews, everything was greater and more gratifying than I ever imagined, than I ever hoped for.

It was funny too, because announcing that the piece was gonna be destroyed seemed to light a kind of a firestorm.

There were people that were really unbelievably against it.

You know, there were some people that thought of it as an incredible statement of post-modernist work.

And then there was some people that thought that it was just, you know, that it was disgraceful that this piece was going be allowed to deteriorate.

This is a review from this guy, Donald Cuspid.

In one point of the review he says, "There is a personal reason behind Grashow's death wish towards his art.

It has to do with the fact that a dealer once left one of his cardboard constructions outdoors, where battered by the weather, it turned to mush.

Humiliated, and traumatized, because it suggested the dealer's indifference to his art.

He seems to have been compulsively repeating the traum as though trying to purchase hurt feelings, clearly, unsuccessfully."

I thought about that, and it's true, it's absolutely true that my relationship with Allan Stone has been a constant battle for attention, and a constant battle to face a kind of humiliation.

To be an artist is a constant revealing of your core and yourself, and exposing yourself.

And there's rejection and humiliation that constantly happens.

So building the fountain and stuff was almost saying like, I'll show you.

Do you know what I mean?

I'll show you.

I'll, you know, I'll disregard it myself, do you know what I mean, I'll take care of this myself.

In the beginning of my career, if the work was cherished, maybe what I feel about eternity or what I feel about the future would be different.

I'm still looking for the truth of myself, you know, and in a way I've come through my life up to this point.

But I still find that truth, you know, very, very elusive.

I don't know if I am the product of all of that original pain and hurt, or if this is my quest.

The journey that I was set out on.

I don't know.

I'm starting to percolate again, which I didn't think it was gonna happen.

I really, I really didn't.

So I was at services thinking about where I was gonna go and what I was gonna do, and, you know, just the emptiness of life and stuff or, and which is ridiculous for me.

I mean, I have like a great home, you know, wife, grandkids, and how was it possible that I was still miserable?

You know, I just, it was just ridiculous, you know?

So I'm sitting in this auditorium alone, you know, with my head down, asking myself the questions.

So what am I gonna do?

Who am I?

You know, what does it all mean anyway, you know?

I mean, what does it all mean?

All the amount of work that you do if you come up empty in the end anyway.

So what does it mean?

And then I looked down onto the floor, I looked, and in this gigantic auditorium, I had chosen a seat, you know what I mean?

And right at my foot, right at my foot was a pencil, this little pencil, you know?

So I think, I don't know, I think, I don't know, God, my mother, you know what I mean?

Somebody, some ancestors, somebody put that pencil there or made me, I don't know if it was there when I sat down, but it seemed to be, it seemed to be the answer.

That the only thing that I could do is what I had done.

Do you know what I mean?

Is just to continue to work.

That that's what I was supposed to do.

That that was my mission, was to make, was just to make art, to make stuff.

And that I should just keep doing it.

(cheerful country music) (cheerful country music continues) As we're having the interview, it's out two nights, you know?

And I haven't slept for two nights, and so.

And first night that the piece was out, I was worried.

I was as worried about the piece outside as I was about my kids when they went out on their first date.

You know, I kept on thinking about, you know, vandals creeping through the woods, you know, or, you know, or something, or the wind blowing it over.

(bolts clanking) I think letting go is probably the most difficult thing.

Basically that's all you have is control.

Control of the little bits that you assemble.

It's difficult.

You hold onto li You know, even though it's cardboard.

For me, it's life.

(birds chirping) (upbeat country music) (upbeat country music continues) (audience chattering) - Hi, hello.

- My daughter, do you know?

You know.

- We were hoping, we were saying rain, rain, rain.

We wanted to see it.

- I think it's cool 'cause it's made out of trees and it's turning back into mush or whatever you wanna call it.

- But I don't see why he would want that to.

- Melt.

Check out the shells.

- See how the raindrops on this paper make it melt.

That's the coolest part about it.

But don't pick it.

Let nature do it.

See how it's bubbling up and that fin is falling down.

(audience chattering) - [Attendee] It's totally amazing.

(rain pattering) - I didn't know if that it was gonna be so unbelievably catastrophic.

You know, this first incredible deluge.

So I was sitting, I was sitting watching it, and then I looked, and it seemed incredible that it was springtime.

The flowers were blooming and everything.

And at the same time, the same thing that was bringing life, you know, this incredible water was gonna deteriorate and wash this piece away.

So it seemed like a perfect parallel.

You know, it's just unbelievably complete.

Look at this.

It's a toe, you know, one of the toes, you know.

Poseidon's head, you know.

Yesterday I was here in the rain when it was coming down, and it was like being at your own funeral.

I realized, and I wrote that, I think now that the fountain was me.

You know what I mean, it's an incredible self-portrait, you know, conceived in corrugated board, you know, full of bluster and bravado.

It's hollow and melancholy at its core.

Doomed from the start, looking for meaning, chained to reality, and searching for beauty in all of the sadness, you know?

So I think that's what it is.

Here we are, we were coming to the Aldridge, to the final, the final viewing.

Okay?

The dumpster.

The plan today is just to take it and to put it into the coffin, right?

So, hey, this was, oh God, here, look at that.

Oh, and that's pretty beautiful, isn't it?

(cheerful music) This is like my disease.

Making, here, take that, hold it down there.

Making it, doing, making, trying to make perfect the stupidity of it all, you know?

- I'll take that one.

- Okay.

Okay.

- You got that one?

- Yeah.

(tape zipping) - Stop.

Just knock that over.

Knock it over on its side.

Great.

Perfect.

(cheerful country music continues) (cardboard rustling) (cheerful country music continues) (cardboard rustling) It's just absolutely phenomenal.

It's perfect.

An unbelievable piece.

(birds chirping) (birds chirping continues) (solemn country music) (solemn country music continues)