Pranks!

V. Vale is a documentarian who champions underground art-world figures. He has worked with subjects such as J.G. Ballard, W.S. Burroughs, and Mark Pauline, as well as early punk rockers, tattoo artists, Incredibly Strange musicians and filmmakers, and many other non-commercial, on-the-edge artists. Vale has contributed to countless literary undertakings, films, and events, and has published over 40 books with RE/Search and Search & Destroy, his imprints. Vale has documented underground culture and the characters that inhabit it for almost 50 years.

John Waters is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, visual artist, prankster, comedian, and cultural icon. He first became famous in the 1970s for his transgressive and audacious cult films, including Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Multiple Maniacs. These films were banned in some countries. Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs dubbed Waters the "Pope of Trash".

Karen Finley is an American performance artist, musician, poet, and educator. Her performance art, recordings, and books are used as forms of activism. Her work frequently uses nudity and profanity. Finley incorporates depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement in her work. The case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998), argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, was decided against Finley and the other artists. She is a professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Carlo McCormick is an American culture critic and curator. McCormick was Senior Editor of Paper and he is the author of numerous books, monographs and catalogues on contemporary art and artists. He lectures and teaches extensively at universities and colleges around the United States on popular culture and art. His writing has appeared in Effects: Magazine for New Art Theory, Aperture, Art in America, ArtNews, Artforum, Camera Austria, High Times, Spin, Tokion, Vice and other magazines.

Mark Pauline is the founder of San Francisco-based Survival Research Laboratories (since 1979). Along with partners Matt Heckert and Eric Werner, he designs and manufactures machines of legendary destructiveness and horror. Sometimes SRL integrates found animal corpses into their menacing mechanical metaphors. Their city-block long shows have been documented on several videos as well as 16mm, and generaly feature newly-invented mayhem-marauders engaged in incendiary combat of mythic dimension against the backdrop of an amazing apocalyptic set.

Mar McCloud is a post-psychedelic sculptor whose energetic work,
like his conversation, is by turns bright, zany, erotic, eccentric and
rich in perverse anecdotal detailing. Currently he is curating a show of
"LSD Art," researching art, music and literature of the sixties,
working and teaching at Santa Clara University, all the while
maintaining his weirdly dazzling gallery/salon through whose portals
pass the most interesting visitors to San Francisco. Mark McCloud grew
up in boarding schools where pranks functioned not only as initiation
rites but also as tests of character and flexibility. Here he
recapitulates a brief history of pranks both traditional and
contemporary.

Gerald V. Casale, DEVO member, a highly articulate conceptualist
and media critic in his own right, is a founding member of the
band Devo, which produced many albums and videos. He's full of ideas for
future film projects, effortlessly spinning off scenarios, mixing in
anecdotes and analogies, all the while engaged in a running complex
critique of society's deficiencies. In this interview he expounded on
the philosophy and principles of pranks.

In 1957, Bruce Conner moved from Kansas to San Francisco just in
time for the Beat Generation art/poetry scene, where he became a
well-known artist and filmmaker in the company of notables such as
Dennis Hopper, Michael McClure and others. Subsequently he lived through
the Hippie and Punk undergrounds as an active participant, all the
while creating a huge body of work ranging from sculptures, collages,
photograms, etchings and assemblages to films and photographs. Some of
the best documentary photos taken of the early punk rock scene in S.F.
are his. He also ran for Mayor of San Francisco--a prank as he saw it.
Conner's pioneering 1958 montage film, A Movie, amazed viewers
when it was first shown. Using only found footage, he juxtaposed cowboy
and Indians with tanks; catastrophes (including a spectacular bridge
failure) with feats of daring--some laughs, however, being caused by
death or seriously accident. He also made a film on the JFK
assassination titled Report, which angered most reviewers. All of
his films are eccentric and humorous in some way; that could be said of
almost all his art.