Robert Atkins: Tell me about your background. I know you're an Easterner and went to Yale. Did you do graduate work in art?

Frank Moore: I didn't go to graduate school. In my last year as an undergraduate I got into a program called "Scholar of the House" that allowed 12 students to spend their senior year of study as a graduate student in their chosen field. That was enough for me.

RA: I take it art was your chosen field?

FM: Always.

RA: You're very well known as a painter, but I know there was a moment in the eighties when you contemplated a life in the theater. Can you talk about that?

FM: I didn't just contemplate it, I went for it whole hog for about seven years. A close friend, Richard Elovich, took me to see a dancer named Jim Self who was performing with Merce Cunningham's company. They were performing in Paris where I was living at the time. This was the late seventies. Richard and Jim proposed that I collaborate with them on a piece they were doing which was first performed in 1980 in Merce's studio in Westbeth.

RA: What was the piece like?

FM: Richard came onstage with a suitcase and started reading a piece about a dancer named Billy Skat. Jim entered, opened the suitcase, and pulled a little, bright red stool out of a cloud (I put dry ice in the suitcase). Jim did stuff with the stool. The movement and text were at times independent, at times connected. I made costume suggestions for that piece, and dolled up the props. As it turned out there were two other pieces on the program, a solo for Jim and a trio with two other dancers, which I did costumes for.

Jim and I continued to work together for ten years. We did a film together, "Beehive," which won a Bessie award. My loft turned into a set for two years, with giant cardboard honeycomb replacing all my furniture. The film was a 15 minute domestic comedy with a lot of sight gags and slapstick, danced by people in bee outfits. You have to remember that this was anathema to the minimalist dance aesthetic of 1984.

RA: Who else did you work with?

FM: I worked with some other people like Charlie Moulton. We did a piece for the Joffrey Ballet which premiered at Lincoln Center, but the really odd piece we did was "Splatter" at PS 122. This was a series of Vaudeville vignettes with a text by Jim Neu. I did costumes, some sets and worked with Charlie on concept. Dance and theater work didn't pay as well as the sheetrocking and electrical work I was doing, but it was more satisfying. And I could get unemployment between gigs which gave me time to paint.

RA: Was it the freedom to choose your own content that finally made you decide to be a full-time painter?

FM: When I began to have some financial success with this work towards the end of the eighties, my focus naturally shifted back to the studio. It didn't really have to do with content because I was having an increasingly free hand with the content of the theater and dance work as my experience and reputation grew.

Theater work is great because it forces you to make instantly comprehensible gestures, there's not a lot of time to ponder ambiguity or you risk losing the audience. As [artist] Thomas Woodruff says, the problem with subtlety is that nobody notices. I also liked the communal nature of theater, the family value. But there's also a downside. You are often under a lot of pressure, there are constant deadlines and people are depending on you. Theater is also much more expensive to produce than painting, what with salaries, space rental, and the like. Also, unlike a painting, theater is ephemeral. Another factor that really pushed me out of theater was the long illness of my lover Robert Fulps. I had to be at home.

RA: Was he also in the theater?

FM: Robert was a clothing designer who seemed to have no other ambition than to live well, have fun, and look fabulous doing it. His career had a rapid ascent, in part because he didn't care about recognition. He worked for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Liz Claiborne. He had no pretensions. He was very funny.

RA: How did theater impact your painting?

FM: Clarity, drama and message all became stronger.

RA: I see a trajectory in the subject matter of your work from gay issues like coming out, to AIDS issues and then to environmental issues, which of course impact especially hard on PWAs. Is this a gross simplification?

FM: If there is a trajectory in my work it is a really messy one. The first paintings I showed in New York in 1981 were inspired by life insurance advertisements--picture a window shattering into your living room at night. There were also sharks swimming around people as seen from below. Threatening. This remains a flavor in the work, although it's much less pronounced. During the eighties I dealt with a variety of subjects, including gay issues, but there was always a focus on nature both as Eden and as a language we communicate with. At the end of the decade AIDS came to the fore simply because it was affecting every aspect of my life.

RA: Another trajectory I see is toward increasing complexity at a visual and conceptual level.

FM: Some of the paintings have been getting dense. I think it started with a painting called "Arena" (1992) which was kind of a breakthrough for me. I decided to represent everything in my life at that moment, every aspect of the image would directly correlate with something that was actually happening to me. Robert, who had passed away the year before, was at the center of the picture having a Port-a-Cath implanted. There were so many parts to that painting, but I knew that on some level for me they were all true. It was the same way with "Wizard" (1994), which portrayed a doctor I was seeing in Marseille, Jean-Claude Chermann. These pictures began to feel like novels.

RA: How is your health now?

FM: My health is really good right now.

RA: What are your earliest activist memories?

FM: My first serious activist effort landed me in a heap of trouble. A friend, Richie Ruchman, and I wrote (and I illustrated) a broadside attacking the physical education program at the public high school we were attending in Roslyn, New York. We criticized the fact that the girls' gym facility did not provide showers; I guess girls weren't supposed to sweat, especially since their principal physical activity was tap dancing. We complained that freshman phys-ed for boys consisted primarily of marching maneuvers, since all the male gym teachers were ex-Marines. The boys were being called "pansy" and "sissy" during wrestling class to make them wrestle harder. We reported that this, coupled with little or no instruction in technique, was resulting in physical injury to participants. Many of the criticisms were aimed at one teacher, Mr. Castronova, who was extremely abusive and punitive. We did not name him, we didn't have to.

RA: I smell that heap of trouble.

FM: There's more. Because this was during the days of mimeograph machines we had to enlist the aid of Richie's older brother to connect us with a woman at Columbia University who was willing to copy it for us for free. When we started to distribute it we ran into resistance. The assistant pricipal, Mr. Slutsky, confiscated all the copies, or so he thought. I was president of the student body, and I had the right to post anything in certain corridors as long as I initialed it. We posted copies. They were torn down and I was called on the carpet. I was not suspended but I was told that Richie and I were chickenshits for not signing the document.

RA: By Mr. Slutsky?

FM: Yup. Anyhow when we all went to gym class Mr. Castronova had invented a new game. Richie and I were on one side of the gym, everybody else was on the other. They had four basketballs. If they hit us we were out. If the ball touched the floor first, we could grab it and throw it back, trying to eliminate our opposition. Because everyone sympathized with us, they threw lame and Richie and I trapped all the balls. We were hitting people but nobody was trying too hard. Finally Castronova jumped in and started throwing the balls hard. He hit Richie, but I was able to get two balls off and hit him. He was a good sport about it.

RA: What about the effect of your lover's death? Did it lead to depression, activism, both?

FM: Robert died on February 26, 1991 at 1:00 pm. The Ribbon Project started that spring but I don't feel totally comfortable talking about the sequence of events because there is a perception among some members of the Visual AIDS Artists' Caucus that created the project that I've tried to hijack credit for the whole thing. Everything I would like to say about it is in an interview I did with Tom Finklepearl before the controversy blew up. The interview is included in his recent book from MIT Press, "Dialogues in Public Art."

The fall after Robert's death my back went out, I was bedridden for two weeks and diagnosed with my first opportunistic infection, toxo. It was during this period that Gian-Enzo Sperone, who had seen two paintings of mine at Nabil Nahas's house two years earlier, called to ask for a studio visit. He bought a number of paintings and ultimately decided, along with Angela Westwater and David Leiber, to represent me.

RA: Your career really took off on an international level then, didn't it?

FM: My first show attracted a lot of attention because people were surprised that I had made a career jump. They came to check it out and were favorably impressed. People started to pay attention. But not so much internationally. That's been slow.

RA: You seem to have an ability as both an artist and a person to be straightforward, even angry, and get away with it. Some of your paintings, like the Niagara Falls series, are simultaneously quite beautiful and revolting. Or the print you made for [former Manhattan Borough President] Ruth Messinger with the rectal pear, the medieval torture device in a bowl of fruit. Do you think people actually look closely? Or read texts within works?

FM: People sometimes don't look very closely, and even if they do focus on the rectal pear they may have no idea what it is because you don't often see seventeenth-century torture implements. Which is why I stuck in a text culled from an Amnesty International catalogue describing this device. The text is on the sort of folded placecard you might find at a formal dinner. People will tend to read a text in an image if it's short and legible. I was actually asked by Messinger's office to remove this text from "Puritan Theorem." Which bugged me, because it seemed to reflect an unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that homosexuals were victims of historical persecution including the Inquisition and the Holocaust. My counter offer to them was to withdraw the image from the portfolio without raising a fuss about censorship. They were trying to raise money to offset severe budget cuts in the arts by publishing a print portfolio, and I had no desire to hamper this effort. In the end they included the print, in part because of the support of David White (director of Dance Theater Workshop) and Ruth Messinger herself. But I was told that the Met didn't buy the portfolio because of my print. It remains one of my favorites in part because it does homage to the early-American, Puritan theorem paintings, which I love. It's sweet and sour.

RA: Were you involved with ACT UP?

FM: Knowing what you know about me now in high school, can you see how perfect ACT UP would have been for me? I never went to a single meeting. I had a notion of what was going on, so many of my friends were going. And I certainly was angry enough, perhaps too angry. Robert was getting fucked over by Prudential, his insurance company, to the point where our doctor advised us to file a complaint with the New York State Insurance Commissioner, I believe his name was Mitch Gennaui. I was reading John Boswell's book, "Christianity, Homosexuality, and Social Intolerance," and a number of other works which inflamed me. But although this may sound unbelievably hokey, I am a love child. My childhood was very dysfunctional, and I was sick of screaming and fighting. The sixties made me. I'm into flower power. Act Up was not about flower power.

RA: I never thought of Visual AIDS from that perspective. How did it come to be such a big part of your activities?

FM: Two friends of mine were married to two of Barbara Bush's nephews. One of them wanted to talk to Barbara about AIDS, and wanted an education. I bought her Randy Shilts's book, "And the Band Played On," which she and the nephews read. I took her to meet with Richard Elovich who was then active in ACT UP and Gran Fury, and I took her to meet with Patrick O'Connell and Alexander Grey of Visual AIDS. This was also my first meeting with them. We went to a meeting of Visual AIDS at MoMA. It was small scale and positive. No Robert's Rules of Order. I knew a lot of the people there and I stayed.

RA: Do you think that art can change people's minds?

FM: It's changed mine.