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David: If you could sum up some of the basic messages that you're trying to communicate with your work, what would they be?
Robert: I'm a product of my situation. I'm trapped in a matrix of circumstances, like all the rest of us are. What I obviously represent is this artist that does representational artwork that's trying to force his way into fine arts. When I went to art school in the Sixties, the predominating art of that decade was abstract expressionism, which was, to me, a very limited thing. To a lot of people it was a free form of revolution, but to me it was like a very confining thing. You were limited to working with a small pallet of earth colors and maybe blue. Draftsmanship and craftsmanship was really discouraged. When I entered art school my head was full of EC images, Salvador Dali, and other things that put a stop to you right away in art school. My peer group pressured me, referring to me as an illustrator. This happened not only to me, but to a lot of the artists in Zap Comix.
David: Are you saying that being called an illustrator was a put down?
Robert: Yeah, it's very derogatory to refer to someone as an illustrator. I'm facing the same problems that Fredick Remington, James Montgomery Flag, and other real capable artists who were categorized as illustrators faced. For maybe fifty years the established art world has been in a very loose form of abstraction. In the last ten or fifteen years it's just been ridiculous. It's formed itself over into situations like minimalism and conceptualism, and it's got further and further away from a graphic language. It's like an absolute revolt against anything to go with a graphic language.
So in my generation, and two or three generations before me, people who were technically capable stayed out of fine art. They went into illustration, movie posters, and this whole variety of other sub-arts. I represent a percentage of people who are like the waves coming back on the shore, the chickens coming back to roost. This is a valid language. What's happening is comic books are demanding their position in the art world, and cartoon imagery is the art of the Twentieth Century. Just like in the future rock-n-roll music will be the music of the Twentieth Century, cartoons will be the art of the Twentieth Century. This is coming to be realized, and that's what I tend to see myself as representing.
David: There is something about cartoon imagery that particularly appeals to both children and people who do psychedelics.
Robert: It's a language.
David: How do you differentiate then between what is cartoon art and what is fine art?
Robert: The difference between "low-brow" and "high-brow" art is that the later is real snobby. To be snobby you have to make it very stoic and boring. In other words, it's got to be profoundly bland-- like holding your nose against a brick wall and looking at it for an hour. You're just looking at a fucking brick wall, and you can walk down eight paces and see the same brick wall with a little different texture. What it boils down to is we're manipulated by a priestly elite of cultural directors in the art world, that's telling us what is and isn't art.
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