Anton Perich has been at the forefront of media and culture for more than thirty-five years: he was the first artist to air his work on television, his seminal publication NIGHT paved the way for generations of zines to come, his machine paintings were made before the first inkjet printer, and his photography is an insider’s tour through Max’s Kansas City, Studio 54, The Mudd Club, and CBGBs. A populist to the core, his massive output reaches from the gutter to the heights of the social stratosphere, and is widely available in print and online.

Anton, you came to New York from Paris in 1970. What did you find when you got here?

When I got to New York I met Andy Warhol and started working as a photographer for Interview magazine. I hadn’t taken many pictures in Europe, but after my first night at Max's Kansas City I bought a still camera and started shooting. Everybody was there, and everybody looked great. All the boys looked like girls, and all the girls looked like boys. It was an absolute reversal of senses and it was so powerful.

Your pictures are very democratic: everyone you photographed was a star, whether or not they are remembered today.

Yes, a kind of democratic empire, but with a discriminative eye. Most photography is done by shooting the surface, without reaching the soul, but when I take a photograph I know I’m taking away something from the individual. Photography isn’t just work of the eyes—it’s more like a trinity of eyes, intuition, and instinct.

To look great in a picture, to become an icon, you have to project yourself into the future and stay there, contemporary, forever—immortal, beautiful, and young. And I was seeking that every night. Commercial photographers chasing Hollywood stars would all be gone by midnight to sell their photos to tomorrow's papers, but I was never up that early. The late night was as different from early night as night is from day.

Is there a late night that you remember particularly?

Once Victor Hugo got naked and sat on an upside-down chair, so he was penetrated one of the legs. Another night R. Couri Hay asked Warhol on my cable TV program if he was asexual. Andy said yes, and Couri said: What, you don't like fucking and sucking? Andy said yeah. You can see it now on youtube.com/antonperich.

Before youtube existed your TV show Anton Perich Presents was the first art project to be broadcast to millions of people weekly.

My hour-long show on Manhattan public access first aired in 1973. Television was the most powerful media we had then, and at the time it was the only media domain untouched by artists… It was so pure and clean, a dry zone.

I had the first portable video camera and I had an agenda, a revolution on my mind. My shows were shot in the darkest places of the downtown New York. Max’s backroom where all the falling angels were, SoHo lofts, and later at Studio 54. So you could only imagine what kind of content it brought to your living room, and your children, if you let them stay up that late.

Taylor Mead was a regular, a kind of Dan Rather gone absolutely mad. Susan Blond was a housewife who flashed her tits a dozen times during the show. Jerry Hall sang dirty songs. Salvador Dali was locked up at the St. Regis suite with a bunch of girls covered only with a coat of silver paint. Mohammad Ali read his poetry to Victor Bockris.

I really wanted to trash television as we knew it, to radicalize, to make it punk, to put sex on it. It was truly the first underground TV show. Glenn O’Brien and Warhol came years later.

Did the network ever have problems with being radicalized?

My program was perpetually censored. It was a big scandal, big news in the press of the day. And I’m still being censored: youtube recently took off a video of Victor Hugo slashing a big Warhol portrait of himself with a box cutter, and emerging naked out of the destroyed painting. It’s funny how I am wrestling with the giant windmills again, a generation later.

But I recognized the power of the cable early, and knew it was important to fight for it. And look at the TV landscape today: MTV and Sex and the City could never have happened without the pioneering work of the early seventies. You know I was the first to publish Candace Bushnell, in NIGHT magazine.

NIGHT has featured everyone from Peggy Guggeheim to Kembra Pfahler. 

I published the first issue of NIGHT in 1978 as an outlet for my photography: I was shooting thousands of pictures every month and no publication in the world could accommodate my output. It was oversized, with hundreds of pictures and no text, not even captions. Captions weren’t necessary because if you didn’t recognize the people in the pictures, NIGHT wasn’t for you. It was bigger than life, totally narcissistic, glamorous, punk, elegant, useless. No information. No written messages, only icons, idols, fetishes, talismans, memento mori.

How did the magazine evolve into what it is today?

NIGHT immediately attracted many new young artists, photographers, and writers. My friend Robert Rubin joined as a coeditor, and we’ve worked together ever since. He interviewed Peggy and Kembra, and he talked with Angelina Jolie years before Larry King. He interviewed hundreds of the most fabulous people.

NIGHT constantly transforms itself, now it is an artwork, a collage. It is put together like a corps excuisite, so the surprise never ceases. Surprise is very important. I destroy my own work if it doesn’t surprise me.

What’s next for NIGHT?

It is still early to predict the next issue, but it will be published in Rome and called NIGHTITALIA. I’m making it with my friend the great Italian artist Marco Fioramanti. We hope to print it quarterly. NIGHT being reborn in Rome is an ultimate dream.