1988.11.DD - MTV - Interviews at Robert Williams' art exhibition (Axl, Duff, Slash)

TRANSCRIPTION:

Robert Williams (in front of one of his paintings): Dealing with geometry and color is part of the composition. These paintings deal in anxieties, things that tend to upset people.

Female attendant: They make me shake a lot. It’s kind of wild.

Male attendant: I think it’s good to stir people up.

Williams: We’ve got a picture here of a gulloty gipsy, a fortune teller. It’s forcing the future out of the crystal ball with an old Smith and Weston pistol. (Another painting is displayed) With a painting like this I’m not selling violence. And I’m not suggesting anything or telling people that the child should be electrocuted. And I’m not even making sport of this child that is going to be electrocuted. But I have expressed the feeling of the situation here. (Another painting is displayed) This painting deals with all the anxieties and the trouble in things that we just really wouldn’t wanna think about in Peter Pan; like cross-dressing and transvestite. (Another painting is displayed) This is done in that classic rat pink monster style. Hot rod, speeding, and bug-eyed monsters and all kind of devices showing energy.

Female attendant: Sex and decadence, and cool cars (laughs).

Williams (in front of the original Appetite for Destruction artwork): If it commands attention it’s culture, if it matches the couch it’s art. It’s that simple. This is the image that caused all the trouble. This is the particular oil painting that was used on the album cover Appetite for Destruction by the band Guns N’ Roses.

Axl: I loved the picture but I kind of submitted it as a joke. It was so outrageous that the band, and the management and everybody loved it, so... And I was like, “You mean, you wanna use it?” (?) “This is great!” (laughs). So then we just went for it. People thought that we were promoting rape or something, which is ridiculous, but, you know, people interpret... everybody interprets a painting in different ways.

Williams: Let me explain the painting to you. It has a red monster in it. The red monster is jumping over the fence. It is killing the robot, because the robot, in some way, violated the female vendor of small toy robots.

Duff: You don’t like us? Don’t listen to us!

Slash: (?)

Duff: If you don’t like him, don’t look at his art. Simple!

Slash: It’s such a waste of time!

Axl: I think that since it was such an outrageous picture, that, like, the skill and the talent involved in making it gets overlooked. And I wanted to be a part of, like, showing people, “No, this is art.”

Williams: What we’ve got here, is we’ve got an example of music and art merging. This album cover was not a commissioned commercial job to go on the record and in the music. This was a separate piece of art from an earlier period. We’re dealing with culture. Music and art, two things that ran together with mutual interest.

[cut to MTV News]

Kurt Loder: Robert Williams, what a guy!