Jim Shaw is a major figure in contemporary art whose career began in music, with his early collaborative work with Mike Kelley in the 1970s anti-rock band Destroy All Monsters. Since then, he has gone on to work in a range of media, from drawing and sculpture to performance, producing a perverse and radical reimagining of American culture. I worked for Shaw for several years, getting an up-close view of how he developed his work, which often started with a joke or coincidence that would later become a beautifully crafted object. We met in October 2013 to discuss art history, psychoanalysis, and the ways that unconscious processes inform his highly conceptual practice.