When I first encountered this project I did what I usually do when I don't understand something: I go to either the Webster dictionary or the Oxford dictionary, or the Concise Oxford, or the abridged Americanized version of the Campbell abridged version of the unmitigated, unexpurgated Oxford... and, anyway, I found out that “integrity” means something that I didn't think that it meant at all. I went to good old Eric Partridge, who died only a couple of years ago (July 11, 1979 - for me it was a couple of years ago). He wrote a book called Origins, A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. I looked up the word “integrity” and I was really shocked to find words like “tact” and the root words for “integrity”.  “Tact” comes from the Latin and Greek meaning “to touch”. And whether you read that as touching one another, or being touched, or, in modern American, getting touched, then there are all kinds of other associations here with such things as “tactile”, meaning touching; texture; the word “tangent”', a line touching the edge of a circle; “tangible”, that is, according to our senses perceptually there (as far as we believe in that); “taste”; unfortunately “tax”, “task”, “attainment”, “contact” and, consequently, “contagious”; “contiguous”... all those words that have a relationship to something touching. The word that I didn't expect to find in there - after I was freaking out over all the definitions - was the word “tangible”, as originating from “tact”. And when I think of how they danced the tango - it is, like, the most limited dance in Western culture, other than when we used to stand opposite each other and pretend that we could dance although we'd never been to any dance lessons. If you remember, there was “disco” dancing, which used to be called "go-go" dancing: you'd stand in front of someone and sort of move, and try to tell them that that's what you did in bed, if they went to bed with you. Dancing has always been like that anyway; but in the tango you just touch some fingers out here and look in the same direction, and you touch shoulders, and you suddenly switch.  And that's sort of how it is with love and affairs in Vancouver!

   I was worried about tonight: I got butterflies and they turned into lunar moths after a while. At least they didn't turn into cockroaches, because they don't inhabit this area, as far as I know - at least not my apartment. But I was thinking of associations, like "Last Tango in Terrace", or "Last Tango in Agassiz", or whatever you call that place. [laughter] "Last Tango on the Ferris Wheel” - and then you can start playing around with "Last Tangle..."; it's all got to do with touching.  Anyway.... “integrity” - I wrote this down without having looked in the dictionary the night that John and I and Barbara talked about it, and I'll read it verbatim - “integrity” (my definition): 

"Like into, no matter how abrasive, no matter how or whether submergence, in and out; involves from, over or under, outside or inside, sideways or upside down, a total immersion in a school of hard knocks, by which one’s concern primarily was living out one's chosen structured behaviour manifestations, which are based on a set of deeply believed ideas, codes of ethics, personal and social concepts of morality, and, particularly, acquired or self-developed codes of aesthetics."

   I think that one of the biggest problems in the present culture, as manifested right in front of me all the time at the Emily Carr College of Art, is the fact that people have a terribly American-type confusion between the words “morality” and “aesthetics”.  Morality is something to do with the society; aesthetics is something to do with the person. And I think that to say that someone has good moral concepts is not only bad English but absolutely unrelated to the problem. People may be governed by morality, because it is a concept that deals with a social group, or a social milieu, but there is no such thing as a person “having a morality." I think that this is where some of the confusion comes about with people and their response to my work.

  One tries to survive in a dog-eat-dog culture. And I don't want to make a criticism about Vancouver, but when one moves from a large centre like Toronto in a province of fourteen million people, combining the eight and six of Ontario and Quebec, and one is recognized there and accepted, and given the right to do what they want as an artist, and then one comes to a place where there are two point eight million people, which is the same as the population of Toronto, and people begin to question your aesthetics and your morals, you begin to realize that you probably, by going across the mountains, have been thrown into a pre-Mosaic culture, a pre-Christian, pre-Buddhist, pre-Taoist. pre-Confucianist, pre-Zoroastrian culture. And that was one of the things that I have been trying to deal with for the five years that I’ve been here - that most of the people that I have met I no longer have any association with, because they had absolutely no integrity. It's as though when you come over the mountains you move into an area that is "pre” all faith. Part of that faith is undermined by the fear of the possibility of this coast sinking when the San Andreas fault cracks away from California, but that is as insane as living day to day trying to burn yourself out because you know that Ronnie Reagan is going to push the red button tomorrow because he is insane. All you have to do is watch rock videos for about a week and see how misinformed the youth of our culture are: they don't know what they're doing, they're just making money on songs that are motivated by politics!  It makes me sick.  [applause]

  We are in a post-Christian era. A lot of people don't know what that is; they don't have  any recall of what "Christian" means. "Who? Where was he from? Was it Nazareth, Bethlehem?  I don’t know. It doesn't matter to me. He was a good guy, so they nailed him to wood." A lot of people, Roman Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise, get really messed-up by religion because if they are taught about a guy who did good things and was nailed to wood, they tend not to do good things... because they're going to get nailed to the wood too. So people do as bad a thing as they can to see if someone’s going to nail them; and some get away with it, they don’t get nailed ever. I always get nailed. I can't even turn left between three and six p.m., like everyone else: the fuzz is right there, "Pull over, sir."

  Anyway, one has to manifest their own selfless behaviour. One has to decide correct personal behaviour that fits in and is accepted by the culture. One has to conduct oneself socially in a manner that is not abrasive, unless one is objecting to unworthy authority. One has to maintain a state of perception and cognition - the difference between seeing and knowing. And one has to constantly interface with the people who are surrounding one in the environment, and, you know, you go through that behavioural psychology thing of either you're in control of your environment or it's in control of you.  And every day you get up, and every day you go to bed, you have been through the ups and downs of whether you're being controlled or whether you're controlling.

  I looked up the word "integrity" in the dictionary and it said "uprightness; correctness; purity; honesty; incorruptness; moral soundness; probity; candour; honour; rectitude; faithfulness; righteousness; constancy; trustworthiness; loyalty; merit; wholeness; virtue; fidelity; completeness; chasteness; reformed; improved; amended; unimpaired..." If I were to say I had integrity I'd be telling you a white lie. But I would like to talk about some of the things that I’ve encountered in my life that have to do with integrity.

  The first thing I remember which has to do with honesty and truth was being forced by my mother to return an orange I stole to the store from which I stole it. I went back to that store and I took the orange back to the man who managed it and he said, I didn't know you stole it. And I said, But I did. And he said, Thanks for telling me. Then he said, Don't ever do this again. Which I didn't do, and I haven't done since. I have never stolen an orange since. [laughter] The second thing is sort of “charity begins at home". I had a paper route: I was the "boss" of a paper route after I had been a helper. Being a helper means that you help the boss: you do seventy-five papers and he does forty. And then, if you really do a good job you fold them correctly and you don't throw them from your bike, you go right up and put them inside the screen door, and you collect the money, then you get to be a boss. Well that is what happened to me. And on my route there was a family that was poverty stricken. The mother was considered to be a whore, a prostitute. She was [Native?] Indian; she had four boys and a girl. They lived in the most disgusting place I had ever seen in my life (until I came to Vancouver): it had a dirt floor. These people had nothing to eat, and they raided garbage cans. This is 1947. I was asked to hire someone to help me in my route. I hired one of those kids in that family. That kid was entrusted with collect-ing the money from the people who had subscriptions to the paper. Every time, for about eleven months, that I went at the end of the week to his place to collect the money, he never had it. Consequently I had to contribute the profit that I made on my route, which I was supposed to keep, in order to make up for what he could not give me. When the newspaper found out about it I was fired. I was fired because I was such an asshole for letting someone use me like that. My plea was that the people were starving; it didn't matter to me if they kept everything. They had to eat. That was the second thing. That’s called "charity doesn't begin at home." There is a relationship there to my father's behaviour because I remember him telling me when I was very young that he was fired from a bank in Manitoba for being seven cents short in his till, as a teller. And he resigned rather than be accused by the bank manager of embezzling it.

  I went to private school in Ontario. I went from Alberta to Ontario at age sixteen. By the time I got to Winnipeg I had already been corrupted by dirty, filthy, corrupt jokes that were passed to me by our Services’ men in the smoker. I learned to smoke, and I learned to drink from a thirteen-ounce flask of whisky, and I learned a lot of new words. I went to this private boys' school in Ontario and while I was there... [...]

  It says in the résumé about me that I was responsible for starting two art schools in Toronto. The first one was the New School of Art which began in 1965. Robert Hedrick, the sculptor, and John Syme, an English entrepreneur, and I, decided to open a full-time - that is, two classes a day, five days a week - art school, as competition to the Ontario College of Art. And at that time the population of Ontario would have been around seven million. The only art school that one could go to that had any credence was the Ontario College of Art, but none of the teachers at that school had any kind of résumé or biography, nor had they exhibited at all outside of being teachers, so that what we were faced with was a hiatus in the history of Canadian art, which is very important to me, where there had been no one produced from that school between roughly 1956 and 1965 of any note in the fields of fine art, of sculpture, and painting, mainly because the school decided to go in a direction relating to advertising design, industrial design, and interior decoration. In that intervening period, 1952 to 1965, thirteen years, only two artists emerged who are still working and who are important today. One of them is very important in Canadian art history, that's Greg Curnoe, and the other one was Ed Zellinack. They went to that school but both left in their second year. Both of them eventually taught at the school that I started. The people who formed the New School of Art include some of the major names in Canadian art history who were post painters-eleven - that is, second generation abstract expressionist artists: Graham Coughtry, Gordon Raynor, Robert Markle, Michael Snow. Those are my buddies, who I have been involved with for twenty-five to thirty years. Those people were hired; we were paid (would you believe it) fifteen dollars a class. And by the time all twenty-eight of us resigned, in 1977, we were being paid thirty-two dollars a class.(three hours). We had gotten over one million five hundred thousand dollars in that period as tuition, as Ontario Arts Council grants, as Canada Council grants, as municipal grants from Toronto, and as private donation. We were used by that English entrepreneur, who never took out Canadian citizenship, from 1965 to 1977. He pocketed the money and at the end of that period we were still teaching for only twice what we were paid at the beginning. We had no equipment; there was no heat in the winter. He believed in the concept that artists must suffer, therefore your students should wear their mitts and their hats and their ear-muffs and their scarves while they do a painting from a nude model, because she's got all the heaters. 

  Anyway, we all quit, twenty-eight of us, in April of 1977, and by September of that same year thirteen of us incorporated and started a new school, which would replace that other one. It was called Arts' Sake Incorporated. Alan Fleming, the great Canadian graphic designer, who designed the CN symbol, did our letterhead. We had support from the artistic community, from dealers, collectors, from all of the directors and supporters of the major galleries in Ontario. We were well-known, exhibiting, Canadian artists. I'm sort of proud of my fifty-four page résumé. But if some of my friends, like Michael Snow and Graham Coughtry were to write down every-thing that they have ever done in art they might have biographies that would be - and I don't mean double-spaced - up to sixty-four or sixty-five pages. THEY ARE STARVING TO DEATH IN ONTARIO RIGHT NOW!  I am lucky; I'm in Vancouver; I've got a job. Do you know what's going on in this country? Think about it. The best artists of the last generation are buried! There’s no money from the Canada Council. There're no municipal grants any more.  Anyway, what happened to our school? The Ontario Arts Council  waited four months to give us the cheque that they had promised us as a grant that was in the region of seventy thousand dollars. And in that four months our premises, our equipment, and everything the students had done, and portfolios of work, and a whole print portfolio, were "possessed" by the landlord and we still haven't got them back. That was going on down there in 1979. It hasn't even gotten here yet, that attitude, but it's coming.

   Anyway, to reward me for my integrity, the Ontario Arts Council  gave us that grant. Whereas they'd given us eighteen thousand the first year to operate, twenty-eight thousand the next year, and the third year, when we were supposed to get the seventy thousand, the Council went through several of those committees that report on the committee that report on the committee that was supposed to investigate arts funding in Ontario - I went to about eighty-four meetings and sat with people who were in the business community, and what they wanted was "a formula for funding." Well how can you find a formula for funding? What is it, like “e = mc²”?

  My reward was being included in an exhibition of Ontario artists that traveled to Europe, to all of the countries west of the Iron Curtain. But instead of sending us as cultural envoys, instead of sending Murray Aiken, instead of sending Karen Kain, instead of sending Mavor Moore, instead of sending Dennis Burton, instead of sending Norval Morriseau, they sent our coffins. They built four-by-four-by-four-foot eight-foot high explanations of our lives as artists in On-tario. The exhibition was called "We Among Others." I don't want to sound like I’m putting it down, that I’m cynical, or that I’m black, but, you know, when you walked into the exhibition and saw twenty-four red coffins, with all these people's lives...  like, Karen Kain’s first toe-shoes? A real garter-belt stapled and stretched across the thing about me? You began to wonder... was that a reward?

  You might wonder: what is he talking about, is this integrity? Let me hit you with something else. I had an exhibition at the Isaac's Gallery in Toronto in 1972, and as a result of sales of my work to Charles Laughton, the actor - who then introduced my work in M.C.A. and Review Productions in Hollywood and Beverly Hills - got sort of a name in Canada, because I had sold to Americans. That’s like a tobacco auction for Lucky Strike, you know?  I got in the press for selling to Laughton, who was a major art collector, and he informed a lot of people about how they should come to Toronto and buy my work. When he bought my work he bought it at full price, including the dealer's commission. But, you know, it was one of those days, which I have had many of, where you’re down on the floor looking at the newspaper, reading the want-ads and wondering whether maybe it’s time you were a computer programmer... you know? [laughter] Maybe it’s time you did go into a bank and start from scratch, because you sure as hell aren’t making money on your art. And God’s been really good to me - or whoever it is up there (I think it's my father (he died in 1957), or else it’s Marcel Duchamp... whatever) - I am really lucky. I smoke these all the time, because they’re a symbol of my life: Lucky Strike. 

  I got a phone call and it was a woman from Detroit. She was at my dealer's gallery, where my exhibition was on. She wanted to meet me. She said, Meet my husband and I at the Park Plaza Hotel, on Avenue Road, and bring your wife.  I said, Well we have a little baby about eight months old. And she said, Well, get a baby-sitter. We can't afford it. She said, Bring the baby.  We went and we had dinner. She arranged for someone in the hotel to look after my eldest daughter and we had this marvelous dinner, then we went back to the room for drinks. They had rented the honeymoon suite. After a lot of drinks and talk she said, I would like to close the deal with you, because I’m very interested in your work.  She said, Would you come in here please, because that's where my purse is. We went into the bedroom and she locked the door. She then removed her blouse and undid her brassiere, then walked over to the desk in the bedroom, took out her pen and her chequebook and said, I want so and so, and so and so... four paintings which were priced regularly at five hundred dollars each. She said, I want all four for a thousand dollars. And I said, No. She stood up, and she put the pen down, and she rubbed her breasts against me and she tried to kiss me, and she put her arms around me. And I kept saying, No, no, no. And I unlocked the door, left the room, went out and said to my wife, We’re leaving, picked her up, and went home. The next day that woman went into the gallery and she bought two paintings, and she paid a thousand. That's what I call integrity. What a fool I was.

  I've been married three times. Two of the women I married I married because they were pregnant and I knew that I was the father. The first one I married was ten years older than me. I learned integrity from her. She was in show business, an entertainer. I would go with her, because I was totally enamoured with her, everywhere she went. I was, like, on a chain, and I had, like, a stud collar around my neck, and I was down on all fours because I had a bad back. She would take me to listen to her and her agent deal, and I learned how you get what you want without compromising anything, whatever sex you are. It depends on your belief in your work and your honesty.

  I was going to try to be really funny, but I find, being up here, that I feel like I'm a minister or something, like it's time to sing a hymn.  But here's a good one, I'll close with this. I've had trouble with Revenue Canada since 1958, when I declared on an income tax form that I was in business for myself as well as working at a job. Consequently, having submitted a profit and loss statement in those days, and having  every year gotten an accountant to do my income tax, I know for a fact that I have one of the number one dog-eared dog files in Ottawa, because I have tried to claim everything you can imagine as an expense for art materials. But never anything totally insane, or beyond the pale. When an entertainer can claim dry-cleaning of a gown that she might use in singing at a nightclub, then I sort of thought, well I sure as hell can claim a shoe repair bill. Anyway, one time I was field-audited, and the guy came to my studio. He phoned me on December 24th and set up the appointment for January 2nd at eight o’clock. Thanks a lot integrity, my country, Revenue Canada; thanks for thinking about Jesus’ birthday: really nice. Thanks for thinking about the New Year too.  “We’ll get him, but we'll have to wait ‘til after the holiday!” So a guy comes to the door; he's got his pocket-calculator...  (Remember those? You can't get batteries for them anymore... you have to buy a Commodore system. [laughter] They have a new system at Emily Carr College of Art. Everything had to alter because of this computer system: whereas I used to be able to take two weeks to mark sixty-one students' work, times twenty-one assignments, I have to get it done the day after the classes close. And that's because the computer has to know the information immediately. What’s happening with computers is that, you know, they make mistakes; but they are forcing everything down there into a new mode, which is left hemisphere. What’s that got to do with art?  What’s stinking got to do with it?  Anyway....)  This Revenue Canada auditor was sitting there about ten-thirty and he was a pretty hip guy; I was really surprised. I asked him some questions. Yeah, he'd taken a degree in the history of Western art when he was at university, And he was asking me questions like, Did you join, or were you ever a member of the Communist party? [laughter]  Really.  And, You paint these things because you're an anarchist and you want the aristocracy, those people who have money, to buy your work, because you are protesting about the system. And I was saying, What?! Hey, you know my name's Burton, not Monet, not Van Gogh, and I have both ears. He was so hip that he said, Play me a Freddie Hubbard record.  So I did. You know, when a Revenue Canada guy tells you to play Freddie Hubbard you think - Wow, things are changing man!  You know, maybe things are going to get better. [laughter]  I put it on, and he's sitting there going... [tapping his fingers] and he comes across this shoe repair bill. You know, those little brown things, like number five-three-one-one. And he said, What’s this doing in here in your art materials? And I said, See that painting there?  You know, I don't stand there all day in one position putting paint on. That’s the way you used to paint. That’s called French easel-painting. Like, I am an action painter: I move around a lot. To do that painting - which was, like, eighty-four by one hundred and twenty inches - I have to back up a lot and walk forward a lot. I said, That shoe repair bill is in there because I needed new soles and heels, man, that's part of my work. And the guy said, No way.  Anyway, what happened, in terms of my integrity, is that I fought about that. It was, like, a four dollar shoe repair bill, but nobody’s going to tell me that that wear and tear is not to do with my art work. And, you know that if you have integrity you always lose, so within two months of my moving out here they had possessed all of my shoeboxes full of receipts, and I was audited by unknown names signed on a piece of paper for two years, and I had to pay them a total of almost nine thousand dollars. Because - you know what they did - they went through and they said, Here's an item: India ink, a bottle of India ink, ten dollars and sixty-one cents. That's strange; there’s India ink three times in this column. He must be fabricating. They couldn't believe I bought three bottles of ink three different times and it was the same price. Really.

  Integrity. Believing in what you think. Believing in what you are. At all costs doing what you have to do... regardless. It's very hard to retain integrity in the present year and this century. I see around me what psychologists say is the only answer for someone my age. They say you had better reappraise your values, because they have changed and you haven't kept up. Did you see Jack Lemmon in Save the Tiger? Anyone who's fifty or over, or maybe even forty-five, is going through that same kind of hassle every day. How do I deal with the fact that when I was only one of six hundred people in North America smoking dope, and I had to roll it in elastic and aluminum foil and stash it under a garbage can three miles from my studio, and go out in the middle of the night with a shovel and dig it up... how come everybody is doing it on the street? How come? What happened? I created a monster. One of the problems with being an avant-garde person in the twentieth century is that everything eventually catches up to you, so that’s why so many of the major avant-garde artists have committed suicide. Because when you did something that was a sacrament and you did something that was really important to your creativity, and everybody and his sister, and his dog, and his hamster are doing it, you get kind of pissed-off you know. So, anyway, my attitude is, go on regardless, they'll find out they’re wrong!