(Published in Dots & Quotes No. 1)

JON RUBIN: Here are some gloves, they help with the grip.

JOSEPH DEL PESCO: Ok.

JON: The most important part of hitting a golf ball, and where the most mistakes happen, is where and how you hold the club. What you want to do is take your left hand and interlock your forefinger and the pinky of your right. The reason you interlock your hands is that you want them to move together as one piece. The way you want to hold a club is like you're holding a dove; firm enough but don't strangle it, because when you strangle it your muscles tense-up and you can't swing.

It's almost like the less you do [during a swing] the more happens and the more you do the less happens. It think its why the game is so facinating, because it's not really about effort. It's about giving up to a series of balanced motions. One problem a lot of people have is that they try to hit it really hard . . .it doesnt work. It feels good up until the point where you hit the ball.

(SOUND OF GOLF BALL BEING HIT - BY JOSEPH)

A few minutes and several swings later. . .

JOSEPH: What's the fat one for? [referring to a club]

JON: Thats the driver. It's used for hitting far.

They [the golf clubs] start with the pitching wedge which has the most loft, it's also the shortest. It's meant to get the ball up high. Then the numbers go down and the clubs start to flatten out. Then there's the driver which is one of the flattest clubs.

JOSEPH: Can I try one of those?

JON: Sure. Here. I'd choke up on it a little bit.

When you take the club back, take it lower and longer. You can get more lift if you play the ball off the inside of your heel.

(VERY DIFFERENT SOUND OF A GOLF BALL BEING HIT - BY JOSEPH)

It's kind of like hitting a baseball with an aluminum bat.

Ok, up until the last moment you were good. In that last moment you were like I'm gonna hit the shit outta this.

JOSEPH: (Laughter)

JON: It's a psychological block.

JOSEPH: YEAH (SOUND OF A GOLF BALL BEING HIT - BY JOSEPH).

JON: Good. Better.

JOSEPH: Is this game a metaphor for something else?

JON: It could be, but I don't stress that. . .it's not the way I approach it.

(SOUND OF GOLF BALL BEING HIT - BY JOSEPH)

JON: I guess the main metaphor is the less you do, the more you get. The more you try to fight everything into being the less successful it is. Golf is about taking away all the bad habits. You have to try to do certain things so you can forget about doing anything. Every time you hit the ball that lesson is reinforced.

Golf is the only sport that is not reactive. You start completely inert, you generate all the energy. You're not responding to a ball coming at you, or another human being coming at you. So because of that it's probably the hardest sport there is. You're responsible for every action. It's the most difficult game mentally. It looks like everyone is doing exactly the same thing, but it's the most challenging game I've ever played.

JOSEPH: For me it's a game of chance, I figure I have about a fifty percent chance of hitting the ball, and a fifty percent chance it will go where I want it to.

JON: My first four years were like that. Then you master the swing. . . and eventually you master the course - the specifics of where the ball is and needs to go.

It's all self mastery. When you're playing well it's effortless. You body just does what it needs to do and your mind gets out of the way.

Following our lesson at the driving range, Jon Rubin and I sat at a nearby cafe and shared stories and opinions for an hour over gigantic hamburgers. A couple weeks later I emailed him a few questions, following up on our post-lesson conversation.

JOSEPH: Just prior to graduating, you gave your MFA review panel a golf lesson. How did it go? Who have you taken to the driving range since then?

JON: Well, I was in the painting department at that time and I had spent two years at the school without making a painting, so I think they were a little disappointed with me to begin with. In fact at that time I wasn't even a very good golfer. I think I was interested in inverting the status relationship between myself and my teachers, and recontextualizing teaching and my hobbies, or seemingly non-art activities, as a creative practice. Although, of course I was teaching something I had yet to master myself. Which is interesting, now 12 years later as an adjunct faculty member at the same school I graduated from, I realize there is no such thing as teaching from mastery, at least for me. In fact it sounds boring.

Back to golf, I've taken several of my classes to the driving range, as well as the gun range, a senior center waltz class, the Hollywood Squares television show, a porn studio (in a class co-taught with Larry Sultan), a protest march, a comedy club, really anywhere culture is being produced. Artist are like sociologists, especially when we're in a group of peers, there is nothing better than taking a trip with colleagues and sharing the strangeness of the ordinary world. I love capital A art, but I get bored of talking about it in a classroom, I mean it's wonderfully monkish to do so, but it all gets so deadly theoretical after a while. I think it's vital that all work and dialogue rub directly against the real in someway, even if it's the bizarrely constructed reality of Hollywood Squares.

JOSEPH: After our golf lesson, standing in a cue at a nearby cafe, you mentioned that you'll sometimes order the same thing as the person in front of you. This strikes me as a really simple game to disturb one's sense of complacency, kind of like writing with only your left hand for a day (assuming you're right handed). What other kinds of simple games do you employ?

JON: Very similar to ordering what the person in front of me orders at a cafe, when I go to the horse races I decide I'll bet on people rather than on the horses. I mean, I know nothing about horses but I know a little about people. What I do is look around for some guy who really looks like he knows what he's doing, you know, lots of racing forums, perhaps a cigar or a limp might be my cue, and I follow him up to the betting kiosks. all the betting is electronic now like going to an ATM so I just stand real close to him and write down what he bets on and then bet it myself. There's still an element of chance, but at least I get to identify with a human. It's like some of the work that I do that involves strangers. In the end the strangers are only a cypher under which I discover my own prejudices and desires.

JOSEPH: You also mentioned during our lunch conversation that you're most compelled by artwork that rubs up against reality. Games are interesting because they're a kind of suspended or simulated reality (like the game LIFE). Where is the line between an art project and a game being played?

JON: I think I've always used my art practice as a way to engage in serious play. By serious play I mean that in someways all the roles we identify ourselves by as adults seem to be a bit absurd, constructed, and tenuous, just like when we imagined ourselves as doctors and sportscasters (in my case) as kids. The problem is that most adults tend to believe they are what their job title (or lack thereof) declares them to be, and don't recognize that they are only engaging in the exact same childhood game except with more stuff. I see myself as a sort of less exaggerated Walter Mitty. Doing something under the guise of art allows me to slip in and out of a variety of personas without having to worry too much whether I really know what I'm doing, or getting too attached to the persona as a singular self-definition. Institutionally, this has manifest in things like developing my own art college, opening a store in a indoor shopping mall, running my own restaurant, and hosting a game show. The majority of my work though is about strangers. It's funny because I'm basically reclusive most the time. I think making work about other people allows me to safely, and temporarily slip into their identities. I once created a show with Harrell Fletcher about a ten year old boy in Seattle based entirely on video filmed from a camera that he wore on his head for three weeks. We assembled hours and hours of footage and started pouring through it in slow motion, looking to cull out moments that perhaps he didn't even perceive when he was looking at them. In the end it was like curating from inside someone else's head. On the one hand the show comes off like a first person account of a boy's life, but it's really a highly biased and constructed third person presentation of my own reality via someone else's vision. I get to play at being a boy again.