Autre Magazine Spring/Summer 23 Utopia Issue

S/S23 Utopia

George Clinton by Kennedi Carter

Mark Mahoney by Nan Goldin

S/S23 Utopia

Marina Abramović by Justin French

RINA BANERJEE

BLACK NOODLES

APRIL 26 — JULY 7, 2023

Dawoud Bey: Pictures 1976 – 2019

April 29 – June 30, 2023

Dawoud Bey, West 124th Street and Lenox Avenue, 2016, archival pigment print, framed: 40 3/8 x 48 3/8 x 2 inches, edition of 6 with 2 APs © Dawoud Bey, Courtesy: Sean Kelly

MARKUS LÜPERTZ

MARKUS THE PAINTER

OR THE RATIO OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

APRIL 21 - JUNE 11, 2023

VITO SCHNABEL GALLERY

OLD SANTA MONICA POST OFFICE

Bonn

BRACH TILLER

ARTISTS: KEITH BOADWEE | HEATHER DAY | HOWARD FONDA | BELLA FOSTER

ERIK FRYDENBORG | TAMARA GONZALES | KELLY LYNN JONES | CRAIG KUCIA

LIZ MARKUS | ANTHONY MILER | HEATHER RASMUSSEN | JENNIFER ROCHLIN

ADRIANNE RUBENSTEIN | RYAN SCHNEIDER | NORA SHIELDS | DEVIN TROY

STROTHER | JAMES ULMER | BENJAMIN WEISSMAN | MARYAM YOUSIF

WWW.THE-PIT.LA

IMAGE: JENNIFER ROCHLIN, RIDING WAVES & BIKES, 2022, GLAZED CERAMIC, 21 x 18 x 18 IN., 53.3 x 45.7 x 45.7 CM, JR0099

22 Agnes Denes

Survival Structures for Humanity

Text by Abbey Meaker

24 Diva Amon

Deep Sea Discoveries

Interview by Kaylee Gibson

28 Halcyon Days

Photography by Mat+Kat

Styling by Shana Arnold

34 Nikki Maloof

Domestic Tableaux

Interview by Oliver Kupper

38 Extra, Extra

Photography by Jermaine Francis

Styling by Naomi Miller

46 Mindy Seu

Cyberfeminism Index

Interview by Lara Schoorl

48 Ken Layne

Take Care, It’s a Desert Out There

Text by Oliver Misraje

52 The View From Future’s Past

Text by Mike Davis

Photography by Zoe Chait

56 Norman Klein

Diamonds on Black Velvet

Interview by Benno Herz

Photography by Pat Martin

62 Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

Interview by Oliver Kupper

70 Ant Farm

An interview of Chip Lord

78 Volvo

Human Design

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Photography by Kuba Ryniewicz

86 Pippa Garner

Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Photography by Jesper D. Lund

96 Adrián Villar Rojas

Rhizomatic Utopias

Interview by Oliver Kupper

102 Korakrit Arunanondchai

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Portraits by Jason Nocito

110 Mark Mahoney

Interview and

Portraits by Nan Goldin

124 Scent Memory

Diana Widmaier Picasso, Manuel Solano, and Rodrigo Garcia in Conversation

Portrait by Vincent Wechselberger

132 Javier Senosiain

Organic Architecture

Interview by Dakin Hart

Photographs by Olivia Lopez

140 Frank Gehry and Charles Arnoldi

What The Fuck Is A Glass Box?

Portraits by Magnus Unnar

150 Ariana Papademetropoulos

Interview by Jeffrey Deitch

Portraits by Max Farago

160 The Source Family

Isis Aquarian and Jodi Wille in Conversation

166 Sisters of the Valley

Interview by Summer Bowie

Photography by Damien Maloney

174 Robert D’Allesandro

Another Way Of Living

Interview by Julie Ragolia

180 Salmon Creek Farm

Fritz Haeg

Interview by Jay Ezra Nayssan

Photography by Ethan DeLorenzo

188 François Dallegret

Utopia Is A Pile Of Shit

Text by Justin Beal

194 Haus-Rucker-Co

Günther Zamp Kelp

Interview by Charlotte Martens

200 Funktopia

George Clinton Interviewed by Lauren Halsey, with Overton Loyd

Portraits by Kennedi Carter

Styling by Julie Ragolia

220 It’s all in the process: A call for intellectual integrity in fashion

Text by Angelo Flaccavento

222 One, In A Sum Of Many

Photography by Parker Woods

Styling by Julie Ragolia

236 Dysfunctional Bauhaus

CELINE HOMME

Spring/Summer 2023

Photography by Davey Adésida

Styling by Julie Ragolia

248 Excavation

Photography by Jaime Cabrera Huidobro

Styling by Julie Ragolia

272 My Body, My Pleasure

Gia Love by Katsu Naito

Styling by Julie Ragolia

292 Marina Abramović

Interview by Miles Greenberg

Photography by Justin French

304 Italian Radical Design

Featuring Superstudio, Archizoom, UFO, Gruppo 9999, & Gaetano Pesce

338 In Every Dream A Heartache By Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer

Featuring Jawara Alleyne

352 Craig McDean In Antarctica

328 The Earthly Community

Reflections on the Last Utopia

Text by Achille Mbembe

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Oliver Kupper

MANAGING EDITOR

Summer Bowie

FASHION DIRECTOR

Julie Ragolia

MARKET EDITOR

Cathleen Peters

FASHION EDITOR

Hakan Solak

JUNIOR FASHION EDITOR

Camile Ange Pailler

NEW YORK EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Alec Charlip

ART DIRECTOR

Martin Major

TYPEFACES

Dinamo

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Craig McDean

Damien Maloney

Davey Adésida

Dustin Lynn

Ethan DeLorenzo

Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer

Jaime Cabrera Huidobro

Jason Nocito

Jermaine Francis

Jesper D. Lund

Justin French

Katsu Naito

Kennedi Carter

Kuba Ryniewicz

Lea Winkler

Magnus Unnar

Mat+Kat

Max Farago

Michael Tyrone Delaney

Nan Goldin

Noua Unu

Olivia Lopez

Parker Woods

Pat Martin

Robert D’Allesandro

Vincent Wechselberger

Zoe Chait

CONTRIBUTORS

Abbey Meaker

Achille Mbembe

Angelo Flaccavento

Benno Herz

Charlotte Martens

Dakin Hart

Francesca Balena Arista

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Isabelle Adams

Jay Ezra Nayssan

Jeffrey Deitch

Justin Beal

Kaylee Gibson

Lara Schoorl

Lauren Halsey

Mike Davis

Miles Greenberg

Naomi Miller

Oliver Misraje

Shayna Arnold

INTERNS

Chimera Mohammadi

Rebecca Kremen

SPECIAL THANKS

Bottega Veneta

Clearing Gallery

Dream Factory LA Studio

Future Perfect

Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

Lorraine Two Testro

Marian Goodman Gallery

Max Shackleton

Melahn Frierson

Michael Slenske

Nicodim Gallery

Nicole Mahoney

Nicoletta Morozzi

Perrotin

R & Company

Rena Bransten Gallery

Salmon Creek Farm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Shamrock Social Club

Stars Gallery

The Noguchi Museum

Thomas Mann House

Uncle Paulie’s Deli

V2_

Verso

Vito Schnabel Gallery

Von Bartha Gallery

PRINTING

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Industrijos g. 12, Kaunas, Lithuania

www.kopa.eu

OFFICE

AUTRE LOS ANGELES

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Cover 1: MARK MAHONEY by NAN GOLDIN.

Cover 2: GEORGE CLINTON by Kennedi Carter, wearing Balenciaga S/S 2023.

Cover 3: MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ by Justin French, wearing Peter Do.

Cover 4: ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS, Edging, 30"×45", oil on canvas, 2023. Courtesy the artist. Painted for AUTRE #16 S/S23. Interview by Jeffrey Deitch.

Cover 5: QUILLAN DE BOECK by Davey Adésida, wearing CELINE HOMME S/S 2023.

Cover 6: GIA LOVE by Katsu Naito.

Allen Ginsberg, Heroic Portrait of Jack Kerouac , New York, 1953 Courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Exhibition August

Letter from the Editors

What is utopia and why does it seduce us? What we learned through the making of this issue is that utopia is antipodal, contagious, fragmented, and holographic. It is a mirror of our repressed desires like a conceptual camera obscura. It is also a work in progress—continually writing itself in and out of history. We have watched utopian movements rise and fall with fascination, but the utopian urge is still forever important, because what else is there? These contradictions are what make the search for paradise so inherently quixotic, elusive, and tantalizing. This issue is an exploration of these edenic visions—past, present, and future.

In the early 1500s, social philosopher Thomas More dreamed of an imaginary island society. Egalitarian in nature, this new world had no war or private property, there was freedom of religion, socialized medicine, and other echoes of communal living. He called this island Utopia; a combination of the Greek roots ‘ou’ (not) and ‘topos’ (place), which translates to nowhere. Even More knew a place like this could probably never exist—not truly, especially in a Europe just waking up from the Dark Ages. But More’s road to nowhere would inspire future societies in ways he would have never imagined. Even before the burgeoning Age Of Reason, these ideal cities, shangri-las, and arcadias have deeply informed the political structures of our contemporary industrialized society—through revolutions, architecture, art, philosophy, literature, design, sex, pleasure, desire, and even our domestic environments. What psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and philosophers like Karl Marx— and later Herbert Marcuse—knew is that utopia is not really a place, it is a primordial desire, a stand-in for eros, forever trapped inside us as we try to navigate the modern world.

In the 1960s, a new wave of utopian thinking began to swell among young people around the world. The old systems were failing, as the rise of mass consumerism and the ideologies of capitalism were killing them. They experimented with communal living, started radical architectural collectives, and lit the fuse for a psychedelic and sexual revolution. We explore these movements closely. From the Radical Design movement in Italy where young designers waged a war on traditional architecture, to Haus-Rucker-Co in Vienna who attempted to mimic the hallucinogenic experience through mind altering environments, to the California acid modernism of Sea Ranch and the commune of Salmon Creek Farm, which has undergone a 21st-century, queer rewilding by artist Fritz Haeg. We also take a funkadelic journey with George Clinton through a dialogue with artist Lauren Halsey, digging into his Afrofuturist vision of a new, Black utopia.

As the world becomes darker, dreaming of utopia is more important than ever. Our survival depends on imagining a better future, a better world. We invest in our imagination of the ideal, not only because our current reality fails to satisfy, but because the status quo poses an existential threat to our entire species and many others. In an excerpt from Achille Mbembe’s The Last Utopia, we underscore his notion that a radical decolonization of the planet is not a geographically specific concern, but a generational one. In the end, our most pernicious enemy doesn’t belong to any particular party or ideology, it is the seduction of nihilism that afflicts each and every one of us.

— Oliver Kupper and Summer Bowie

The point is not of planning utopias; the point is about practicing them. And I think this is not a question of “should we do it or should we persist in the existing order? It’s a much more radical question, a matter of survival: the future will be utopian or there will be none. – Slavoj

Žižek

Utopia is not a place; it’s a shooting star: it appears suddenly, in the eye of the mind, bright and mesmerizing, mysterious. It demands our full attention before vanishing. Utopia is not a place; it’s a moment in time, a note in tune. Utopia is a transgression. It is a question, a confrontation. It can only exist outside of our imaginations in small gestures. We can’t go there; we can’t live there, and the moment we try, the dream collapses. Utopia is not perfection; it’s freedom. In the tide of our experience on Earth, moments of utopia find us in the awareness of our interconnectedness, of acknowledging our finitude without being silenced by it. For a moment, it liberates us, and with the wind it goes.

There have been periods throughout history when the notion of utopia becomes part of the cultural zeitgeist, contemplated by artists, philosophers, and writers in the realm of an imagined paradise. Marie-Hélène Brousse opened her 2017 lecture entitled “Identities as Politics, Identification as Process, and Identity as Symptom” by arguing the fact that the dominant conception of identity is an ideal identity, whole and stable, unified and intentional (utopia). Contrary to such a view, Lacanian psychoanalysis posits that life is something which goes “à la dérive” (adrift). In other words, the idea of a unified identity is a lie, as the structure of the unconscious goes against the possibility of such a unity. The real utopia—cultivation of identity to oneself and the world around them—is one of quotidian practices. It is not an existence free of antagonisms. Our murky origins and inner workings have depth. From this dusky bloom we come with questions, compelled by curiosity and a need for connection. We follow that drive to dark places, and there we find a lighthouse, the artist. Artists are stewards of meaning, and as I consider experiential notions of utopia, I continually return to the work of Agnes Denes.

Utopia is an offering made by the hands of an artist. It is an act of creation. It is planting a wheat field on two acres in lower Manhattan as the artist Agnes Denes did in 1982. Wheatfield — A Confrontation, was sited on a landfill created when the World Trade Center was constructed in the late 1960s-early 1970s. This artwork was intentionally and aptly placed in the shadow of the towers, a stone’s throw from Wall Street with the Statue of Liberty in view. It yielded over one thousand pounds of healthy amber wheat, and in the months the wheat was maintained—on this property worth billions, representing some of the world’s greatest wealth—a compelling paradox was unearthed, a profound statement on the implications of global commerce, wealth disparity, and misplaced priorities on the culture and condition of the earth itself. Forty years later, this prescient work echoes with overwhelming urgency.

Agnes Denes, whose work has never been easy to categorize, is an artist who has continually engaged with the notion of utopia in tangible ways. Her practice, which investigates philosophy, science, linguistics, and history, is grounded in socio-political concepts and ecological concerns. Her work is motivated by a curiosity about the human mind, how we think, how we evolve, how time changes us, and how previous

generations inform current and future generations. Denes describes her entry into visual expression as an exit from the ivory tower of her studio into a world of concerns. For more than fifty years, Denes has used her work to call attention to and protest damaging systems of power, deteriorating values, and the ways in which our interests, choices, and problems interfere with and harm the whole of Earth’s ecosystems.

Her poetic eco-philosophical work Rice/Tree/Burial, first realized in 1968, began with a private ritual, a symbolic event and declaration of her commitment to the environment and human concerns, namely how one informs the other. Like chapters in a story, Denes began by planting rice. In the 1977 iteration of this work, the ritual was re-enacted and realized at full scale in Lewiston, New York. She planted a halfacre of rice in a field 150 feet above the Niagara Gorge. The site marked the birthplace of Niagara Falls between Canada and the US, twelve thousand years ago. Rice represented a universal substance, that which brings forth and sustains life.

She chained together a series of trees in a sacred Native American forest. The chains symbolized connection, linkage in time and material, and our interference with natural processes. Reorienting these trees created, in a sense, a new ecosystem. Introducing new elements and materials, like a dam in a river, sets a cascading change into motion. The echo of interconnectedness sound.

The final chapter included the burial of a time capsule to be opened in one thousand years. It contained only the filmed responses to a series of philosophical questions that had traveled around the world, and a long letter the artist addressed "Dear Homo Futurus." The contents of the time capsule sym-

ENTERING A WORLD OF CONCERNS:

“The threads of existence have become so tightly interwoven that one pull in any direction can distort the whole fabric, affecting millions of threads.”

bolized human intellect and evolution, clues as to the values of previous Earth generations.

Though conceptually rigorous, the acts involved in the rituals are everyday practices: hands in the soil, sowing seeds, burying the sacred, the symbolic, total absorption in the mundane. This work reminds us that ideas in the context of art can be more than flimsy imaginative notions, they can be used in the deconstructive remaking of the world. These gestures, the enactment of utopias, will bleed out, soaking our tightly interwoven fabric with new color and texture.

In my exchange with Agnes, she told me, and asked that I share with you, that we must turn around inside ourselves and look through a different window. To make sure we ask the right questions, questions that open the soul. The artist said she wanted to sit down with everyone reading this and start a conversation they would walk away from with a full heart, an open mind, and enough curiosity to kill a cat. I propose that we speak with Agnes, ourselves, each other, the past, the future, through a series of existential questions she buried in 1977:

1. What governs your actions? Do you think there is a force influencing what happens?

2. How do you feel about death?

3. What would you say the human purpose is?

4. What do you think will ultimately prove more important to humanity, science or love?

5. What is love?

6. What would perfect existence consist of?

Text by ABBEY MEAKER

SURVIVAL STRUCTURES FOR HUMANITY

A photograph of Agnes Denes, standing amid her 1982 public work, “Wheatfield — A Confrontation,” in Lower Manhattan. Courtesy of Agnes Denes and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects; John McGrall

Back in 2021, I found myself at the Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by scholar Hashim Sarkis, which sought to answer the question: “How will we live together?” One of the most poignant exhibitions was held at the Danish pavilion, which was completely transformed by architecture studio Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter and curator

Marianne Krogh. In an exposed cyclical system of piping, rainwater was collected from outside and taken on a closed-loop journey through the space. Visitors become part of this system—a poetically visible merging of nature—by drinking a cup of tea brewed with leaves from herbal plants that absorbed the water. Sipping my tea, listening to the calming streams, traversing the city by water taxi through its

KAYLEE GIBSON: What roles do the deep oceans play in our planet’s ecosystem?

DIVA AMON: Our deep oceans are a reservoir of biodiversity, but it goes beyond that—it is a journey through time. Because of their huge size, they provide over 96% of the habitable space on Earth, they cover a vast percentage of our planet's surface, and that size is what really allows them to play such a significant role. They regulate the climate by absorbing heat and sequestering carbon. They provide food for billions with their provision of fisheries. And then, there’s nutrient cycling. Cycling nutrients on the planet is everything … it is life as we know it. It also plays a large role in detoxification. So, we have nutrient cycling, elemental cycling, and really big services like

Interview by KAYLEE GIBSON

DIVA AMON

famous canals that pour out into the Adriatic Sea, I pondered our planetary water system, and how it links us all. Deep sea marine biologist Diva Amon feels the same obligation and urgency to highlight this link. The deep sea, which is defined as a depth where light begins to fade, is the largest habitable ecosystem of our planet, yet it lies furthest from our reach. Not only does it regulate our planet’s climate at large—it also has the potential to solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

primary production. They provide a home for so many animals. There are also so many potential pharmaceuticals that could come from the deep sea. Life in the deep ocean evolved in these extreme conditions: high pressure zones, close to freezing temperatures, darkness, so many of those animals have genetic material that could be quite interesting to us in the future—for pharmaceuticals, or biomaterials, or for industrial agents.

GIBSON: Biomaterials are so interesting. Can you give a few examples of these?

AMON: Sure, there’s a species called a glass sponge, it’s not actually made of glass, it’s made of silica. They look like fiberglass and have these beautiful, intricate structures. These creatures have been used as inspiration to make more efficient fiber optic cables. Another example of biomaterial comes from dead whales. When whales die, they usually end up down in the deep sea where they become food and shelter. Some bacteria break down the

Glass spicule stalk collected from Cape Range canyon, showing fiber optic properties. Courtesy Schmidt Ocean Institute

fats in whale bones most effectively at deep sea temperatures, so 3-4 degrees Celsius. These enzymes have been utilized for more climate-friendly laundry detergents because they remove stains at lower temperatures.

GIBSON: These are very new findings and applications, but it seems like there’s still a lot to discover.

AMON: We’re just scratching the surface. There are only maybe thirty of these applications so far. We know probably 1/3 of the multicellular species. They think there are close to 1 million species that live in the deep sea, and about 2/3 of those still have not even been discovered, and that’s not even taking into account unicellular species. There’s so much to be discovered, so much that we could potentially use. All of that life is linked to the functions and the services that keep our planet ticking. There’s this untapped reservoir of potential use and benefit to us that could help with some of the most profound challenges of the future.

GIBSON: Can you predict the potential of those undiscovered species in any way?

AMON: In terms of microbial life, there will be things that are entirely unexpected. And there are single corals that can live for over 4,000 years. Think of how much has happened in human history in that time. There are sponges that live for over 10,000 years. Not only are we seeing new life, but we are also seeing it in new ways. There are these teams in California that have been doing amazing work on bioluminescence, a phenomenon where animals create their own light. In the past ten years, we’ve realized that it’s far more common than previously thought. The majority of the species in the deep sea create their own light, and because of the vastness of the deep sea, bioluminescence is possibly the most common form of communication on the planet. So, it’s really rewriting paradigms, which is what I think we’ll see more of in the coming years. We’re at a pivotal point in ocean exploration, and we’re conducting research in more effective ways, which is leading to discoveries that we never could have dreamed of.

GIBSON: That’s so fascinating.

So, much of our understanding of life on Earth has been linked to our reliance on both oxygen and sunlight, but our deep oceans func-

tion so much differently.

AMON: It wasn't very long ago that we realized there are entire ecosystems in the deep sea that can exist completely in the absence of sunlight or oxygen. A lot of life in the deep sea relies on food from the sea surface: dead animals like whales, plankton, and fish. But about fifty years ago, hydrothermal vents were discovered, and those are these incredible environments where life doesn’t actually use the photosynthesis-related food chain that 99.9% of life on Earth relies on for its existence. Instead of using sunlight as their ultimate source of energy, they use chemical energy. So, there’ll be methane seeping from the sea floor, or hydrogen sulfate, and life has evolved to use that as the starting block of their food chain. You get to those places in the deep sea and they are booming with life.

GIBSON: What do you think this

means for the future of society and how we think about our oceans?

AMON: A hundred years ago we thought of the ocean as this deep, dark place, like a vacuum with no life. Since then, our explorations and discoveries have shifted so many paradigms, allowing us to realize that life not only finds a way, but thrives in these places, changing everything we previously thought was possible. I think that lends itself to life on other planets. If life can exist in these extreme places on our own planet, what’s to say it doesn’t exist on other planets that exist under extreme conditions? It’s really about showing what’s possible and rewriting the laws of biology.

Apart from that, the slightly cynical answer is that while more people are engaging with the deep sea than ever, it’s still not enough. Many people still have this idea that there’s not much to conserve there, and as a result, I worry

Sea Slug.

Photograph by Alexander Semenov

that it’s seen as this final frontier on Earth, which is a very challenging mentality. Economists have a term called the ‘blue economy.’ It’s a real push to harness all the resources the deep ocean has to offer. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as it’s done in a way that is not just sustainable, but also restorative. What we are seeing now with some of the industries that are pushing into the deep sea are attempts to exploit it. Fisheries have been operating for decades in the deep sea and there’s been purposeful dumping in the past, but now there’s an accidental sort of pollution. We’re seeing oil and gas going deeper and deeper, we’re seeing deep sea mining on the horizon, and a lot of those industries benefit from the notion that there’s not a lot of life down there. All of this knowledge is not as mainstream as it should be, so we risk losing species, losing habitats, losing those functions and services that we rely on.

GIBSON: How can we engage the public more? What do you think that looks like?

AMON: That's really the challenging

question. Unfortunately, deep sea exploration and deep sea science is incredibly expensive. It's akin to space exploration. It’s very high tech and very high skill, which means it’s not accessible to the majority of humankind. And that has resulted in it being colonized by a small set of humanity. If we can begin to remove those barriers so that more of humankind can participate in those conversations, we can develop a better understanding of what’s there and how best to manage and protect it. Ultimately, there's a big geopolitical issue here. Scientists have had the privilege of researching these parts of the planet that no one else has seen. I do wish that more scientists would utilize that privilege to the benefit of the deep sea itself. Thankfully, we’re seeing a rise in scientific exploration being live streamed. We're also seeing more mainstream documentaries being made such as it being featured on The Blue Planet. There’s a lot in the works that will bring the deep sea to millions of people around the world. We need to take it to the policymakers who are

drafting regulations now that will be in place for decades, if not centuries, and will be pivotal for our ocean and its management. We ourselves have a big role to play.

GIBSON: It is so wild to me that the International Seabed Authority (an off-shoot agency of the UN) is essentially deciding the fate of the deep oceans. Are they playing an effective role in their protection?

AMON: There are so many issues happening around the ISA. Since 2018, I've been going to their meetings twice a year, and you see in the room that not every country is at the table. They all have a seat, but they're not necessarily present. That is often due to a lack of resources. It’s not considered a priority. Many countries can't afford to send delegates there for three weeks a year. As a result, the voices that tend to be the loudest are the ones that are ultimately going to benefit. Intergovernmental processes are not perfect, but it's particularly glaring at the ISA.

GIBSON: I had no idea until

Diva Amon diving with Manta Rays.

Photograph by Michael Pitts. Courtney Diva Amon

recently that permits are being issued to mine the deep sea, nor that the ISA even existed. How likely is it that deep sea mining will happen?

AMON: Very likely, unfortunately. That devastates me. But I think there are so many brilliant organizations doing their best to at least delay it. As of now, the Republic of Nauru, Pacific Island triggered a two-year rule. That means by June 2023, they could be issued an exploitation license and that’s it. Not only is this entirely out of step with much of what humankind is talking about now, but what’s most distressing is the fact that biodiversity loss is the highest we’ve seen within human history, the climate crisis is spiraling out of control, and here is this UN-related body that is essentially trying to kick-start what is going to be an extremely disruptive industry in one of the most pristine parts of the planet. It’s completely at odds with what we should be doing. A lot of people are saying, “Well, we need the metals for the climate crisis.” But that's a band-aid. Let’s not mince words. We’re working our way through the planet's resources and ultimately just finding new things to use and destroy.

GIBSON: If deep sea mining were to happen in just a small area, would that have effects on very large areas?

AMON: We really don't know. A big part of the problem is that more than 99% of the deep sea floor has never actually been visualized with human eyes, nor with a camera. A lot of it is based on modeling. We're using the best

data we can to inform those models, but it's still mostly unverified. I used to work for the University of Hawaii and the contract I was working on was for one of these mining companies trying to understand which lifeforms exist in the Clarion Clipperton zone (between Hawaii and Mexico). We went out on a cruise in 2013, which was the first time anybody had seen that sea floor, and over 50% of the large animals we saw were entirely new species to science. And now, more scientific teams have been observing through CCTV that 70-90% of the species there are new to science. And that's just multicellular species. We're not even talking about microbes. So, we're operating in this real dearth of information, and not just about what's there, but how it might be impacted. If we don't know how the animals will be impacted, we don't really know how the functions and services that we rely on will be impacted. The parts of the planet that have been licensed off in these areas, and there are about eighteen licenses out there, each of them is about the size of Sri Lanka. These are not small places, and we know that all life in the path of the machine will be killed. There will be huge dust plumes kicked up off of the sea floor from the mining machinery, all of the minerals will be pumped up to the surface, they will be separated from the water, and that water will be pumped back into the ocean. That water will have metals, it will be a different temperature, it'll be a different chemistry, and it will essentially be a form of pollution. That's going to create another one of these plumes that has the potential to suffocate animals, or render them blind. The currents have the potential to take these plumes to further areas and the footprint will be much, much larger, and we're not even talking about noise, which travels huge distances in the deep. There’s so much to consider and it's been acknowledged that there will be species extinctions. Ultimately, when those things happen, there will be impacts to the fisheries that much of the world relies on. There’s grave concern about the impacts on the carbon sequestration capability of the deep ocean. There are so many unknowns that it's really worrying to think about an industry on this scale. We should be taking a very precautionary approach. And, if we do decide that we absolutely need these metals for our survival, then

we should start small—just license one entity to begin with, and then do lots of monitoring around it. But that's not what’s expected to happen. There have been thirty-two licenses granted globally, and most of those places don't have protected areas in place yet. Most of those places don't even know what lives there.

GIBSON: Is there anything we can do to keep this from happening?

AMON: That's the real challenge about the deep sea. It’s not like we can go out there and protest. So, the first thing we can do is talk about this, the more people who know about this, the better. Many well-known countries are participating in deep sea mining. France has a contract area, Germany has several contracts, and so does the UK. Apart from that, it's about consumption. The oil companies came up with ‘carbon footprints’ to try to put the onus on us, the individuals, for pollution, rather than themselves. But there is something to be said about living more consciously, and thinking about where everything we buy comes from. Each of us has a cellphone, and those use about sixty different types of metals. So, trying to consume less is important and also pushing for technology that can be recycled more easily, or technology that can be fixed. I think we are seeing those shifts in society. It's just not happening quickly enough. It's a tough one. People aren’t engaging firsthand with the environment of the deep sea, so it’s a hard one to get people on board, even though it’s absolutely essential to us being here.

GIBSON: I did read that Samsung, BMW, Google, and Volvo vowed to not use any metals mined from the deep oceans.

AMON: Yes. Steps are happening. These four major corporations have come forward and pledged to not source any of their production materials from the deep sea, at least until it is deemed to not be destructive. Seeing these big corporations willing to take a stand on this was probably the most hopeful thing that has happened. I hope it really is this pivotal event where after these four, we see more and more coming forward. Ultimately, many corporations know that they are rewarded for good behavior by their consumers, so their leadership in this area has been very refreshing.

Pelagia noctiluca. Photograph Alexander Semenov

HALCYON DAYS

Photography by MAT+KAT

Styling by SHAYNA ARNOLD

Zamir wears Rick Owens cotton tank top, Shayna Arnold metallic lamé necklace

Zamir

Rick

(left to right) Kathy wears Issey Miyake polyester dress, and Shayna Arnold metallic lamé earrings; Seffa wears Loewe steel mini dress.

wears

Owens cotton tank top and ripstop pants, and Shayna Arnold metallic lamé necklace.

Kennedy wears CDLM cotton sateen jacket and washed satin dress, Shayna Arnold metallic lamé sleeves, and cotton spandex and metallic lamé tights.

Amandine wears Shayna Arnold metallic lamé head scarf.

(left to right) Amandine wears Pucci sequined nylon dress; Mikala wears Pucci lycra dress; Ayan wears Pucci lycra dress. All wear Shayna Arnold metallic lamé head scarf, belt, and leg bands, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh leather shoes.

Tytianna wears Giovanna Flores cotton dress and Maryam Nassir Zadeh stone bracelets.

Denzel wears Loewe nappa calfskin jacket and nappa leather shorts, Shayna Arnold metallic lamé cape, and Adidas sneakers.

Casting: Harper Slate

Models: Zamir Fair, Seffa Klein, Kathy Klein, Amandine Pouilly @ Heroes Model Management, Kennedy Vance, Mikaila O'Conner @ No Agency NY, Ayan View, Tytianna Harris, Denzel Simmons

Denzel wears Shayna Arnold metallic lamé cape.

Nikki Maloof, The Apple Tree, 2022.  Oil on Linen. 70 x 54 inch.

Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

NIKKI MALOOF

Interview by OLIVER KUPPER

Nikki Maloof’s domestic tableaux are startling and at the same time humorous reminders of our own existence. Bright, prismatic, and dreamlike, her paintings grapple with unexpectedness— freeze-frames before the tragicomedy unfolds. Fragments of a scream before a murder. A foot descending a staircase, a hawk’s talons moments from clutching a dove, a hand behind a curtain. The uncanniness is haunting and visceral. Maloof’s exhibition, Skunk Hour, which was on view at Perrotin gallery in New York, explored a new suite of paintings, many of which feature culinary activity in the home. The title is borrowed from a Robert Lowell poem of the same name. “I myself am hell;” he writes, “nobody’s here— / only skunks, that search / in the moonlight for a bite to eat.” Living and painting in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Maloof’s rural surroundings invite a poetic interiority that is rife with symbolism akin to Dutch still life—the bones of fish on a plate, a dog’s hungry eyes, the artist’s own reflection in a knife blade, her paintings invite us into another, stranger world.

OLIVER KUPPER: Where are you based these days?

NIKKI MALOOF: I live in Western Mass[achusetts]. My husband is from this area originally, and we would visit a lot when we were still living in the city. About six years ago, we decided to move. So, this is where we live.

KUPPER: I love that area. It has a weird, mystical quality.

MALOOF: Very hippie-dominated, kind of arty. But also, the colleges bring a lot of young people, so it's a cool place.

KUPPER: I want to start with your chosen medium, which is still life. I'm curious what first attracted you to the medium?

MALOOF: Well, I went to Indiana University, and it's a very traditional painting school. So, I really learned how to paint from painting still lifes. When you paint something from life, you turn off your brain and you're just doing it. It’s something I would pepper in with other things that I was doing in the past that had more to do with my imagination, and it's just always been there. But, when it came to this body of work, I retreated more into the home as a setting. I started wanting to treat the spaces in a home like a character and not necessarily paint the people that inhabit them. That lent itself to looking to the objects that we surround ourselves with for ways of conveying meaning. I'm very attracted to houses and the things that we compile. I'm always following a little trail of crumbs and one painting will lead to the next. It started with animals, but then it slowly became about our interaction with the domestic space.

KUPPER: I think of the Dutch still life painters and how portraiture completely started dropping out of those paintings in this very surreal way.

MALOOF: For a long time, that kind of painting would not have been the thing that I related to as a more developed painter. As a young painter, I would always walk past those paintings, and it's been an interesting challenge to try and make a still life catch your attention or convey emotion because they're sort of inert.

KUPPER: Even though those paintings are about objects, each object has this deeply spiritual quality.

MALOOF: When I started to look deeper at those works, I became aware

of a whole language that is lost at first when you just think, oh, like fruit, whatever. I find that really intriguing—that there are little messages all the time.

KUPPER: Seafood became part of those Dutch still lifes because of their connection to water. In your work, there are also some symbolic notions of seafood. Can you talk a little bit about the symbolism in your work and about some of the different objects that reoccur?

MALOOF: Painting things like seafood began years ago when I was painting a lot of domestic animals—trying to make stand-ins for us. I was thinking about the way that we interact with animals on an everyday basis. One of the biggest ways we interact with animals is by eating them. It's this relationship where we tend to look away really quickly because it can be a weird reckoning, especially when you look at the industry of it. So, I was thinking I should enter the kitchen because that's where we actually interact with animals. I thought it might be a challenge to make a fish seem emotive, and I wanted to borrow from the realm of the Dutch fish paintings, but make it my own by breathing some weird life into them. Fish are strange because we feel almost nothing for them, but then they look so alive compared to any other thing that we come in contact with. There's a dark humor there—something that’s kind of ridiculous about it all. Also, painting fish and food is extremely delightful, and I think if something seems weirdly fun, there’s usually some reason that you need to go there. If the desire is there, I usually follow it, and then see if it has any repercussions.

KUPPER: There's also this humorous, dark side to a lot of the work. During the pandemic, and also during the Plague, painting started to become very dark and strange, and people started dealing with their emotions in different ways.

MALOOF: Yeah, I'm really attracted to anything that is on the line. All art forms that are one foot in lightness, one foot in darkness are really intriguing. I feel like that's what it is to be alive. Ideally, you want to be on the light side, but that's an almost impossible place to remain. Being a human, there are too many factors to grapple with. So, that tone really makes sense to me.

KUPPER: The title of your new show, Skunk Hour, was inspired by a Robert Lowell poem. It’s interesting to hear about an artist’s inspirations outside of painting.

MALOOF: I've been really interested in poetry since grad school. I look to it for answers in a way that I can't with painting. A poem conveys meaning without telling you exactly what the answer is and I found it very freeing when I realized that you don't have to explain everything—that the artwork takes on a life of its own. I like that Robert Lowell poem because you're basically following him as he drives around his town and notices things. He's describing it and slowly coming to terms with his own mind. It goes from being somewhat light to this intense, dark place. And when you're in a space that's so familiar to you, like your home or your neighborhood, those things do occasionally hit you. That’s the whole point of the show: the realization that there are moments in our everyday lives that are so intense, and we notice them, but they’re always in the background, and then we have to move on. Skunk Hour is like nighttime when we're alone with our thoughts. It’s about the way that we deal with existential experiences in everyday life.

KUPPER: There's this interesting sensorial notion of being reminded of your own mortality.

MALOOF: Yeah! When I moved out here, I realized that when you're a little bit closer to nature, it hits you all the time. You could be walking, and then see a hawk dismembering something, and it makes you think of so many things, but then you just carry on with your day. I wanted to paint those experiences and feelings. As far as other inspirations, I like the more confessional poets, like Sylvia Plath. She is definitely a figure that looms large in my mind. Stylistically I get a lot from her work. She would often take instances from everyday life and electrify them into a kind of psychodrama or operatic grandeur full of darkness and pathos.

KUPPER: And you're sort of in Sylvia Plath territory now.

MALOOF: I am. She is a figure who created under intense pressure … pressure to be a good mother and the pressure of her intense ambition. I relate to those struggles a lot. Under all of that stress her work took shape almost like how a diamond is formed. The facts of her death aside, her art can be a

reminder that sometimes the difficult aspects of life can also be the fuel to a fire that’s within us. I guess that’s a utopian view of art making for sure.

KUPPER: I read about the epiphany you had with this exhibition: seeing a newborn deer in the morning and then a dead neighbor being wheeled out of their house.

MALOOF: That was the craziest day. It was this perfect spring day and so strangely bookended like that. I woke up, was having coffee, and then I saw these little ears poking out of an iris bed in my neighbor's yard. When I went over, it was a brand new, baby fawn. And then, at the end of the day, there was a neighbor of ours who had been ill for a while, and it was just so surreal to see the car drive up and take him away. But homes are where everything happens. They’re full of humdrum experiences— chopping onions, folding laundry—and then they’re peppered in with these very dramatic moments as well.

KUPPER: Would you say there's a sense of psychological self-portraiture, even in the still lifes?

MALOOF: That's really what the goal is—to convey what it's like to feel like laughing and crying on the same day; to exist in that. I grew up playing with dollhouses, and imagined worlds were a big part of my being a child. That has to inform some part of it.

KUPPER: There's also a societal aspect of it where the woman's place is in the home.

MALOOF: There's a residue of that, for sure. I'm from the Midwest and was raised by people who were very patriarchal. We went to school, but while it was clear that you were to get married, there wasn't such an emphasis on becoming a successful person.

KUPPER: The heteronormative American dream.

MALOOF: Yeah, there's tension there with having this type of career and having kids. I'm watching their experience of the world from a different vantage point. I garden a lot, which has made me acutely aware of how we’re not that different from that fawn or any of the creatures we come across. That's another thing that I think about in the work: how do we fit into it all?

KUPPER: Would you say that your work is utopic in any way?

MALOOF: I don’t think of my paintings as utopias, but I definitely think of the act of painting as the closest

thing to a utopia I can imagine. It’s not unlike the way I would arrange a dollhouse as a kid. It’s where I can have everything the way I want it and play with ideas freely.

KUPPER: In your work, it feels like the reality comes from the sense of paradise lost. The apple tree has a very Edenic quality to it. Can you talk about that painting specifically?

MALOOF: Well, I try to grow food all the time here, and I fail at it most of the time, but the orchard attracted me because of how it would work, paint-wise. In a tree, of course, there's birds and bird nests, and I immediately was like, oh, bird nest and then a hawk devouring a bird right next to it. I was thinking about the way that you move a person's eye around a painting, almost like the way that a child would draw a life cycle. This was also the first time I put myself in a painting in probably a decade. Mostly because I was thinking about the way that scale changes meaning in a painting. I made myself almost the same size as an apple to address the way we’re not as important as we think. I feel like that painting hit every note that I was trying for.

KUPPER: There's a strong sense of time in it. It's like a clock.

MALOOF: Time is definitely a thing I don't talk about enough in the work. When you have kids, you suddenly feel like everything is a clock. You're really aware of it ticking, and it's deaf-

ening sometimes. I did it in one other painting called Life Cycles. It's a dinner scene where you follow the fish from an egg to the bones.

KUPPER: There's a sense that you're watching a time bomb of our mortality.

MALOOF: It's something I think about all the time. Does it seem very morbid to you? (laughs)

KUPPER: No, you deal with the morbid aspect of it with a lot of humor.

MALOOF: Humor is definitely the thing that I use to offset all of these intense thoughts—to try and lessen the blow or something. That's where color and paint come in. The meaning comes from finding a way to manipulate this weird material that just is so deeply fun and pleasurable. I want you to experience that as much as all the darker things. There's a lot of levity with paint.

KUPPER: Art can be fun, and it should be fun. That's where the utopian idealism comes from.

MALOOF: Maybe they're utopias and I didn't know it. Do you think they're utopic?

KUPPER: I do. I think they're your own invented utopias.

MALOOF: Maybe they are a place where I can have everything I want, and arrange it just so, and live in it for a while. I never thought of it that way because I don't think our reality lends itself to utopia. Our everyday life is

far from it. It's not the first thing I think about, but I guess it is the place that I go to make sense of it all. So sure, it can be a utopic place.

KUPPER: I think that if you can invent your reality in a painting, and even if they're based in realism, there's still a utopic urge in that creation of a world. There's also this clash—psychologically and philosophically—between your Judeo-Christian upbringing with its heteronormative ideas about one’s place in society and the realization of our own mortality.

MALOOF: There's definitely a theatrical element to it all. The worlds that I create are far from my actual reality. The Judeo-Christian thing isn’t such a big part of it, but there’s always a residue in how you approach things that are based on your early conceptions from childhood.

KUPPER: Where do you think that humor you employ originated from?

MALOOF: I have four sisters, and I'm the middle, so I was probably the one who was trying to make people laugh most of my life. But I've always gravitated toward things that have humor embedded in some way. I think about musicians that do it and I’m always trying to strike a balance with each painting. You're balancing the color, the composition, and the tone so that the song works. Humor is one aspect of that orchestration. It’s putting together all these harmonies and trying to make them work.

Photograph: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

wool top and skirt, fish-shaped shoulder bag, mirrored bag, and leather sandals

EXTRA,

merino

Photography by JERMAINE FRANCIS

Styling by NAOMI MILLER

EXTRA

Alexander McQueen polyfaille dress, Hobo jeweled leather bag, Slash leather bag, and metal earrings

KNWLS polyester top and leggings; Louis Vuitton canvas XL key pouch

Prada leather jacket and skirt; Supernova leather bag, Top Handle leather bag

Rejina Pyo wool blend jacket; Margaret Howell heavy cotton poplin shirt, cotton linen trousers and tie, pebble leather Doctor’s bag and Rambler’s bag

Chloé Patchwork calfskin leather bag; CELINE by Hedi Slimane Triomphe leather bag; Gucci Jackie 1961 leather bag and Jackie 1961 canvas and leather bag

Lemaire polyamide, linen and cotton parka, cotton poplin shirt, silk and polyamide trousers, metal flask, leather flask, leather flask case, Mini Camera leather bag, Case leather bag, and Croissant coin purse

Acne Studios cotton sweatshirt; Uniqlo U denim jeans; Acne Studios

Musubi leather bags, and Micro

Distortion leather clutch

Model: Alicja @ Storm Management

Hair: Tosh

Makeup: Claire Urquhart

Casting: Tytiah @ Unit C

Fashion Assistant: Flo Thompson

Thanks To Studio Too Young Too Simple

Hermès nylon coat, cotton turtleneck, Pansage Plumes leather bag with ostrich feathers and leather sandals

MINDY SEU

LARA SCHOORL: Do you think it is possible to invent a new type of cyber-utopia outside of the surveillant, capitalist, algorithmic framework?

MINDY SEU: During the Cyberfeminism Index panel at the New Museum with E. Jane, Tega Brain, Prema Murthy, and McKenzie Wark, we tried to trace the evolution of what’s happened from the early ’90s until now. This idea of the utopic internet was very palpable in the ’90s because it was the first introduction to this new technology that promised global connectivity, the ability to be everywhere all the time with those that were not in close physical proximity. However, people quickly began to realize that, while the internet did afford these new potentials, it was also very much guided by the infrastructure that the internet was created on, which was born from the military industrial complex. This ultimately shapes the platforms we use now and the behaviors that these platforms perpetuate: things like surveillance, censorship, and data extraction. In my essay, “The Metaverse is a Contested Territory” for Pioneer Works, my good friend and Cyberfemi-

For over three years, designer and technologist Mindy Seu has been gathering online activism and net art from the 1990s onwards. Commissioned by Rhizome in 2020, the growing collection of text and imagery forms the always-in-progress web database Cyberfeminism Index. By way of a “submit” button, anyone can contribute to the project making both the creation and outcome accessible to everyone. In 2023, the Index was translated to print by Inventory Press and includes over 700 short entries with scholarly texts on the hacktivist utopias of the internet’s nascent years.

Interview by LARA SCHOORL Portrait by LEA WINKLER

nism Index collaborator Melanie Hoff describes what pushes people to imagine is the need to imagine: a survival mechanism to find release from the pressures of your current reality. Some examples of this were given throughout the panel.

E. Jane talked about the liberatory potentials of bespoke and local experimental music communities. Tega Brain talked about projects that consider the materiality of the internet and the physical implications of these seemingly ephemeral networks that we use. There are definitely potentials for how we can begin to think of not necessarily a utopia, but broader views of how the internet might be able to serve more people rather than the smaller minority.

SCHOORL: It seems as though the internet is almost showing us that this need to imagine is universal. Even if the status quo might work for some—arguably it does not work perfectly for any person— the internet has made visible the failures, corruptions, shortcomings, and discriminations of and within all kinds of systems. Perhaps free imagination is not fully possible on the internet itself

now, or not as was anticipated, but it has made visible the need for imagination and change across the globe and all demographic groups.

SEU: Absolutely. And as you are saying, in some ways the internet did allow more people to publish these kinds of narratives online without the gatekeeping of more “legitimate” institutions.

SCHOORL: Typically, things are now translated from print to online, but you did the inverse. What are your thoughts behind turning the online archive into a book?

Something that continues to morph organically through submissions into a more or less fixed, prescribed format?

SEU: Because my background is in graphic design, I have always believed that print and web are very complementary. In Richard Bolt, Muriel Cooper, and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Books with Pages” 1978 proposal to the National Science Foundation, they describe how soft copies are seen as ephemeral and dynamic whereas hard copies are seen as immutable, permanent, or more reputable because of how academia valorizes printed volumes. But, with my

website collaborator Angeline Meitzler, we tried to flip this hierarchy. The book, while it did come after the website, acts like a snapshot or a document of the website’s mutation, whereas the website acts an ever-growing, collective, living index, to grow in perpetuity. Even since we (my book collaborators Laura Coombs and Lily Healey) froze the website’s contents to create the manuscript for the book, the online database has already received 300 more submissions. The book functions as a call to action for the website to continue gathering ideas of cyberfeminism’s mutation moving forward. That said, with my publisher Inventory Press, we made sure the book was included in the Library of Congress. When creating these revisionist histories, grassroots information activism must contend with the perceived legitimacy of “forever institutions” by penetrating it, hacking it.

SCHOORL: Thinking about physical versus online spaces, where do you think safety and accessibility of both people, information and/ or archives, like the Cyberfeminism Index, are better achieved, online or in print? Or does a hybrid environment foster these more widely?

SEU: Generally, especially with people who resonate with cyberfeminism, there is an appreciation for complexity. It is never the binary of this is better than that, but rather seeing the pros and cons of both media and how elements of both can be used to achieve the community’s goals. For example, with print, you do have these connotations of legitimacy, but we also see the rise of sneakernets, which are physical transfers of digital media rather than using online networks as a way to avoid different methods of surveillance. With the web, there is the ability to have a dynamically changing environment that updates over time. The co-existence of print and web allows both to grow.

SCHOORL: I keep returning to the word “hybrid” when thinking about the future. I recognize it in so many of the entries in the Index: William Gibson’s cyberspace, Donna Haraway’s cyborg, E. Jane’s anecdote about us needing air to breathe, Ada Lovelace and Jacquard’s loom, and more. How do you consider a hybrid online-physical point of view?

SEU: It makes sense why people think the internet is ephemeral and accessible; we have these computers in our pockets that have become extensions of our bodies. It is harder to see the physical infrastructures that make this thing possible: fiber optic cables running along the ocean floor, or the rare earth minerals that make up our phones, typically mined in Latin America in places that have very few or non-existent labor laws. Even after our devices die, they are very hard to recycle so they end up in e-waste graveyards in Guiyu, China where people break apart the phones to sell different parts, and the remainder is burned, leading to a very cancerous environment for those who live there. I expand on these ideas in a forthcoming essay called “The Internet Exists on Planet Earth,” commissioned by Geoff Han for Source Type and Tai Kwun Contemporary that attempts to unpack the materialism of the internet. For one of the people who coined cyberfeminism, Sadie Plant, materialism is a huge component of her seminal book Zeroes and Ones (1997). In it, she gives a retelling of techno-history, redefines what technology actually includes, and details the ecosystem in which technology lives.

SCHOORL: Do you think it is possible to be completely inclusive, even if attempted? Is it more conceivable for utopia to be actually plural: utopias? Or, are they indeed meant to literally exist “nowhere?”

SEU: Generally, universalisms cannot exist. The utopias that are evangelized do not account for the many different perspectives and demographics that true equity requires. Rather than thinking of utopia as a space, we can think of utopia as principles. There are principles that could be embedded in our current landscape to benefit the masses, such as file sharing, basic income, open borders. Lately, I

have been thinking about scalability. A couple of years ago, I co-organized an exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery with Roxana Fabius and Patricia Hernandez called the Scalability Project, whose title was borrowed from Anna L. Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World [2015]. Scalability was also a tenant of this year’s Transmediale in Germany. Scalability implies a smooth, seamless, hyper-efficient growth pattern, but the breaking points it reveals inevitably create conditions for change. Legacy Russell writes that “the glitch is the correction to the machine.” Instead of the glitch as an error, it is an amendment, a reexamination of the problem. Another activist and scholar, adrienne maree brown, and her collaborator Walidah Imarisha, introduce the concept of fractalism, the creation of principles for a small local community that can grow as a spiral, with clear mutations at different levels in order to bring in more and more people. It is this idea of constant evolution rather than seamless scalability. We’re embracing glitchiness, bumpiness, and the errant. SCHOORL: I know the project does not aim to define cyberfeminism, but do you have a particular understanding of the word “cyber”? SEU: I think about “cyber” in the context of how it has been used in history and through its etymology. The prefix “cyber” first emerged in Norbert Weiner’s cybernetics in the ’40s. In simplistic terms, it proposed the idea that you are impacting the system just as it is impacting you. It’s all about feedback. Then, cyber appeared in cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer [1984]. This sci-fi novel was important because it predicted the sensory networked online landscapes that we are very much talking about today. But Gibson’s Neuromancer was also shaped by the white male gaze, with fembots and cyberbabes and depictions of women with assistant or robotic-like roles. He also created a very oriental landscape that is devoid of actual Asian figures. When “cyber” was then fixed to “feminism” to create “cyberfeminism” by VNS Matrix and Sadie Plant in the 1990s, it felt like a provocation for feminists, marginalized communities, or women to reshape what cyberspace could be.

Text by OLIVER MISRAJE

Photography by MICHAEL TYRONE DELANEY

Illustrations by ISABELLE ADAMS

It’s 10:30 PM and we’re much deeper into the Mojave than where we met Ken Layne at the Joshua Tree visitor center. It’s full dark. No stars—yet. Clouds drifted in an hour ago, making for bad UFO-hunting weather, but if we drive far enough east, we might beat the overcast. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 is playing from the speaker system in his Subaru. “What’s that?” Ken Layne interjects suddenly in his characteristic sandpaper drawl, “It’s very low, it just went out.”

“I saw it,” says Isabelle Adams from the backseat. She’s an LA-based painter and inaugural member of our off-brand Scooby gang. “If you look in the corner near the base of the mountain … oh wait it’s gone.” Michael Tyrone, the photographer, and I strain our eyes to no avail.

“Was it blinking?” He asks, "If it blinks, it’s probably just a navigation light for aircraft.” He tells us that most sightings of unidentified flying objects are easily explained; extraordinary things rarely happen when you’re looking for them. Twinkling lights are usually just planets. Stationary orbs that blink out after ten minutes are probably military flares (the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center carries out frequent training drills nearby). Then, there's an aerial phenomenon that isn’t as easily explained, “now and then you see something that simply doesn’t make any sense,” he says,

“It’s just silly. It’s not dramatic.” The third kind of sighting (not to be confused with the Hyneck’s scale commonly used by ufologists) are experiences so awesome—in the biblical sense of the word—that you brush up against something ephemeral and undeniably original. Ken has only experienced this once in his life. In 2001, he was driving down Highway 395 with his then-wife in the passenger’s seat when they noticed a light to the north. It seemed innocuous enough, though something felt off. It moved erratically as though untethered from the horizon. The pair debated what it might be for a few moments, when suddenly and without warning, it was gone, and in its place was a large, black triangle, about 200 feet in diameter. Its corners glowed and a spotlight emanated from its center, illuminating the desert floor below with a brilliant intensity, like a “great, unblinking eye” as Ken described it. He hit the gas. The car got nearer. But when he pulled to the curb and rushed out, the mysterious triangle was gone, vanished without a trace or residue to affirm its presence.

Life above a fault line can be a perilous thing—the threat of the San Andreas fault swallowing the county notwithstanding, the constant tremors seem to inform the psyche of those living above it. Ken is something of an antenna himself for the murmurs and reverberations of California’s inland desert, picking up and broadcasting

tales of the uncanny to all the lot lizards, and hippies, and hipsters, and occultists who color the landscape. On his radio show and newsletter, The Desert Oracle, for which he has attracted a cult following since its genesis in 2015, Ken adopts the cadence of an old time-y creep show host, but with a folklorist’s edge. His stories—whether they be about haunted petroglyphs, the Yucca Man, or missing tourists—are about the cryptids as much as they are about the people who encountered them. It’s the vestiges of his past career as a journalist, including a stint as a crime writer in Oceanside, that appeals to his more skeptical readers.

Ken grew up in New Orleans but moved to Phoenix when he was in middle school. His formative years in the Sonoran Desert are visible in the structures of his narratives. They unravel like a meandering stroll in the desert—winding, and seemingly aimless, until you reach the open expanse of a question mark where you were expecting a period. It’s that big, looming uncertainty that is so tantalizing; the suggestion that maybe, there really is something out there lurking in the dark. “Storytelling, which is the oldest form of human entertainment, probably after sex and mushrooms, has to involve set and setting,” Ken says to us after pointing out the rusted exoskeleton of an incinerated car next to a sign welcoming us to Wonder Valley, “To tell a story by

a fire is one of the most primal things, a perfect setting. There’s not a lot of hyperbole in a good campfire story, you should just tell the narrative and the place, and everybody’s personal experiences all conspire together to make something greater than the parts.”

We reach a roadblock. Michael suggests we utilize the dim glow of the traffic cone to take some portraits. “We are now officially in the wilderness,” Ken says, stepping out to the dazzling, unobstructed spine of the Milky Way. Izzy and I take turns holding flashlights pointed toward Ken, casting ominous shadows on his face. He’s a natural model. No longer Ken Layne, this is the Desert Oracle in action. His gaze twinkles with a discreet intrigue that softens his otherwise shrouded face. The alter-ego has itself become an integral part of the mythos of Joshua Tree; an archetypical wandering stage that retains fragments of his heroes, like Edward Abbey of The Desert Solitaire and Art Bell. Between camera flashes, Ken tells us about his closest companion, a German Shorthair Pointer dog. It’s a breed of hunting dog that are usually cast away for their aggression, but Ken is drawn to outcasts.

As we get back into his car, I ask Ken about that aforementioned journalistic scrutiny. He pauses a beat, then says, “A story, warts and all, is much more interesting than the kind the UFO fanatics tell, which is something like ‘Oh, a person of the most unimpeachable character, never touched liquor, blah blah blah.’ Like, c’mon. He’s already sounding really weird. When stories gauge the reality of the human condition, they’re naturally more real. They resonate. No one’s trying to sell you anything along the way. No one’s trying to convince you the government is cov-

TAKE CARE, IT’S A DESERT OUT THERE

ering up aliens eating strawberry ice cream in an underground base somewhere.”

“Weren’t you on Ancient Aliens?” Michael asks from the backseat. Ken laughs. “Touché. I’ve repented down in the river for that.” And in his defense, he was only in two episodes. One was a history lesson on the Integratron out in Landers, a cupola structure built by aviation engineer and ufologist George Van Tassel, allegedly capable of generating enough electrostatic energy to suspend gravity, extend our life spans, and facilitate time travel. The other segment was a cultural debriefing on the viral meme about storming area 51 to see dem aliens.

Fans of The Desert Oracle often occupy a more cosmopolitan demographic, which some journalists have attributed to the “escapism” of his stories. Escapism is a misnomer. The appeal lies in the return to meaning and a resistance to the sinking feeling of post-modernity that we are losing our archetypes— the haunted house at the end of the street, knowing how to differentiate between good and bad winds, which roads a ghostly woman in white frequents. I grew up in Sun City, a small town in the desert not terribly far from Ken’s haunts. Like him, my dispositions were shaped by the landscape. I discovered The Desert Oracle in my senior year of college while working on my thesis, a hauntological study of our local monster, Taquitch—a shape-shifting, child-eating, “meteor spirit” that prowls the San Jacinto Mountains. Taquitch originally appeared in the mythology of the Payómkawichum tribes who still occupy the area, but legends persist today. I was interested in the ways these paranormal stories were a metaphorical vehicle for sociological phenomena. The Inland Empire is riddled with poverty, addiction and despair, and as a result, experiences higher rates of domestic violence and lower child expectancies. It is haunted either way you look at it. Ken talked about Taquitch on the twenty-first episode of his radio show. On our way back to Joshua Tree, we make a stop at Roy’s Motel and Cafe, a defunct relic of Googie architecture. While poking around abandoned motel rooms, we discuss the merits of the hauntological approach. Ken ultimately disagrees with the notion of trauma as a prerequisite for a haunting; some things are older than us and more original to this world than we can comprehend. Even so, he is

well aware of the ‘cultural dressings,’ as he puts it, often applied to paranormal phenomena. Take UFO sightings— while observed across cultures since time immemorial, explanations of such often reflect the dispositions of the times. He tells us that there’s nothing actually connecting UFOs to extraterrestrials. The theory appeared in conjunction with the Cold War and the space race. During the Industrial Age, many explained them as the inventions of eccentric, steampunk robber barons. In Medieval times, they were thought to be witches with lanterns hanging from their broomsticks.

The fault line that the Inland Empire (which includes Joshua Tree) sits upon, demarcates it geographically, as well as symbolically. To the Western imagination, it is the ultimate nowhere; a psychic space to project its dreams,

ideals, anxieties, and nightmares. The idea of the desert as barren is a colonial project, one that has historically been used to justify its desecration since the frontier period. We’re driving through Amboy when Ken tells me, “One of the biggest misconceptions about the desert is that it’s barren. Desert means wilderness. It’s Greek, borrowed from the Latin deserto. Not arid, not barren, but untamed, uncultivated wilderness. It’s where Pan ran around in the primal wilderness. Ancient Greece was the desert. Civilization is born in the desert.” The Desert Oracle repopulates the landscape. While his documentation of hibernating birds native to the Southwest might seem mundane in comparison to shape-shifting monsters, it's where his Transcendentalist musings are most poignant, revealing a gentle, more meditative side to Ken.

Cultivating a sense of awe for the desert is an important part of its conservation. Advocates for environmental personhood also seek to reimbue the landscape with soulfulness. In 2020, tractors in Arizona leveled the earth for the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, unceremoniously demolishing 200-year-old Saguaro cacti in the process. The Saguaro are sacred to the Hia-Ced O’odham tribe, whose ancestral grounds lay 200 yards away from the site. After fiercely resisting the construction, the tribe successfully passed a resolution affirming the legal personhood of the Saguaro. In an op-ed piece for Emergence Magazine, tribal member and activist Lorraine Eiler wrote, “When something is acknowledged as a person with rights, it is much more difficult to overlook the infliction of harm. This resolution has brought us one step closer to bridging our spiritual understanding of how to sustain life with the practices of the dominating culture.”

We’re driving down Amboy Road when Ken stops the car. He pulls the keys out of the ignition. The road is empty beyond the receding taillights of a distant car far behind us. “I had us meet up on a weekday because I wanted to avoid the traffic going into Death Valley. You lose the mystery when it’s filled with Audis.” He tells us to watch the taillights until they disappear beyond the bend. We oblige. After several minutes, the lights blink out.

“It’s a long way, right? About ten or eleven miles. One night, I was coming back from Death Valley and I was the only car on the road. Moonless night just like tonight. I’m doing 65 or something. It’s a 55 limit so you’re always watching for that occasional CHP dispatch. Suddenly, I see what seems to be a car’s lights appear, and what I notice in my rearview, is that it is racing, like Roadrunner, Coyote cartoon speed. I'm driving, and my first thought, of course, is it’s a cop, so I slow down, and it keeps on coming up-up-up-up,” Ken says, stressing the word up like a rapid-fire machine gun. “It’s like the brightest high beams, and it comes right up to my ass. So now, I’m thinking it’s just some jackasses coming back from Vegas. I start slowing down to let the car pass me. I’ve come to a complete stop. And it’s still there, just blinding me. I turn around to look out, and this is the first time it occurs to me: the

lights aren’t attached to anything, they're just floating there, and I have just a moment to try and rationalize it, when the lights retreat at the same speed they came up ZUUUUUUUUERRR. It doesn’t turn around. No sound. No nothing. All the way down, until it blinks out in the end.” Ken lets the story dangle in the air for a moment. Beethoven’s Symphony no. 13 opus. 135 plays quietly from his sound system, lending itself to the eerie atmosphere. We stop at Out There Bar in 29 Palms for a nightcap. It’s neon-lit inside and the walls are painted with murals of varying cowboy iconography. The bartender and several straggling patrons look at Ken with a glimmer of recognition. I forgot my ID card at home but the bartender winks at us and says she’ll make an exception just this once. While Izzy and Michael go head to head in shuffleboard, Ken and I drink tequila at a table and talk about the Puritan origins of the environmental movement; how theologians like Emerson and Thoreau saw corruption in all things made by man, so they glorified nature as the true expression of god. When I mention that my father was a pastor, he tells me, “There’s nothing better in the world for maneuvering through life than a semi-educated, literate redneck.” Afterward, the four of us take pictures in a photo booth (Michael sits on Ken’s lap) then Ken drives us to the Joshua Tree Visitor Center where we left our car. On the way, we share stories of our respective encounters with the otherworldly. Michael tells us about a night in Griffith Park when he saw a coyote stand upright on its hind legs and run off into the chaparral. A few weeks later, the tale of the Coyote Man appears in The Desert Oracle.

As Izzy drives us home to our remote outpost in Landers, the absence of Ken is palpable. Peggy Lee croons on the radio and the shadows cast by the Joshua trees look a bit more animated; the world a bit more occupied.

The View From

The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future. Standing on the sturdy cobblestone foundations of the General Assembly Hall of the Socialist city of Llano del Rio - Open Shop Los Angeles's utopian antipode - you can sometimes watch the Space Shuttle in its elegant final descent towards Rogers Dry Lake. Dimly on the horizon are the giant sheds of Air Force Plant 42 where Stealth Bombers (each costing the equivalent of 10,000 public housing units) and other, still top secret, hot rods of the apocalypse are assembled. Closer at hand, across a few miles of creosote and burro bush, and the occasional grove of that astonishing yucca, the Joshua tree, is the advance guard of approaching suburbia, tract homes on point.

The desert around Llano has been prepared like a virgin bride for its eventual union with the Metropolis: hundreds of square miles of vacant space engridded to accept the future millions, with strange, prophetic street signs marking phantom intersections like ‘250th Street and Avenue K’. Even the eerie trough of the San Andreas Fault, just south of Llano over a foreboding escarpment, is being gingerly surveyed for designer home sites. Nuptial music is provided by the daily commotion of 10,000 vehicles hurtling past Llano on ‘Pearblossom Highway’ —the deadliest stretch of two-lane blacktop in California.

When Llano’s original colonists, eight youngsters from the Young Peoples’ Socialist League (YPSL), first arrived at the ‘Plymouth Rock of the Cooperative Commonwealth’ in 1914, this part of the high Mojave Desert, misnamed the Antelope Valley, had a population of a few thousand ranchers, borax miners and railroad workers as well as some armed guards to protect the newly-built aqueduct from sabotage. Los Angeles was then a city of 300,000 (the population of the Antelope Valley today), and its urban edge, now visible from Llano, was in the new suburb of Hollywood, where D. W. Griffith and his cast of thousands were just finishing an epic romance of the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation. In their day-long drive from the Labor Temple in Downtown Los Angeles to Llano over ninety miles of rutted wagon road, the YPSLs in their red Model-T trucks passed by scores of billboards, planted amid beet fields and walnut orchards, advertising the impending subdi-

vision of the San Fernando Valley (owned by the city’s richest men and annexed the following year as the culmination of the famous ‘water conspiracy’ fictionally celebrated in Polanski’s Chinatown).

Three-quarters of a century later, 40,000 Antelope Valley commuters slither bumper-to-bumper each morning through Soledad Pass on their way to long-distance jobs in the smog-shrouded and overdeveloped San Fernando Valley. Briefly a Red Desert in the heyday of Llano (1914-18), the high Mojave for the last fifty years has been preeminently the Pentagon’s playground. Patton’s army trained here to meet Rommel (the ancient tank tracks are still visible), while Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier over the Antelope Valley in his Bell X-1 rocket plane. Under the 18,000 square— mile, ineffable blue dome of R-2508—‘the most important military airspace in the world’ - ninety thousand military training sorties are still flown every year.

But as developable land has disappeared throughout the coastal plains and inland basins, and soaring land inflation has reduced access to new housing to less than 15% of the population, the militarized desert has suddenly become the last frontier of the Southern California Dream. The pattern of urbanization here is what design critic Peter Plagens once called the ‘ecology of evil.’ Developers don’t grow homes in the desert—this isn’t Marrakesh or even Tucson—they just clear, grade and pave, hook up some pipes to the local artificial river (the federally subsidized California Aqueduct), build a security wall and plug in the

‘product.’ With generations of experience in uprooting the citrus gardens of Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, the developers—ten or twelve major firms, headquartered in places like Newport Beach and Beverly Hills—regard the desert as simply another abstraction of dirt and dollar signs. The region’s major natural wonder, a Joshua tree forest containing individual specimens often thirty feet high and older than the Domesday Book, is being bulldozed into oblivion. Developers regard the magnificent Joshuas, unique to this desert, as large noxious weeds unsuited to the illusion of verdant homesteads. As the head of Harris Homes explained: "It is a very bizarre tree. It is not a beautiful tree like the pine or something. Most people don’t care about the Joshuas."

With such malice toward the landscape, it is not surprising that developers also refuse any nomenclatural concession to the desert. In promotional literature intended for homebuyers or Asian investors, they have started referring to the region euphemistically as ‘North Los Angeles County’. Meanwhile they christen their little pastel pods of Chardonnay lifestyle, air-conditioned and over-watered, with scented brand-names like Fox Run, Mardi Gras, Bravo, Cambridge, Sunburst, New Horizons, and so on. The most hallucinatory are the gated communities manufactured by Kaufman and Broad, the homebuilders, who were famous in the 1970s for exporting Hollywood ramblers to the suburbs of Paris. Now they have brought back France (or, rather, California homes in French drag) to the desert in fortified mini-banlieues, with lush lawns, Old World shrubs, fake mansard roofs and nouveaux riches titles like ‘Chateau.’

Photography by Zoe Chait

Future’s Past

Text by Mike Davis

But Kaufman and Broad only expose the underlying method in the apparent madness of LA’s urban desert. The discarded Joshua trees, the profligate wastage of water, the claustrophobic walls, and the ridiculous names are as much a polemic against incipient urbanism as they are an assault on an endangered wilderness. The eutopic (literally no-place) logic of their subdivisions, in sterilized sites stripped bare of nature and history, master planned only for privatized family consumption, evokes much of the past evolution of tracthome Southern California. But the developers are not just repackaging myth (the good life in the suburbs) for the next generation; they are also pandering to a new, burgeoning fear of the city.

Class war and repression are said to have driven the Los Angeles Socialists into the desert. But they also came eagerly,

wanting to taste the sweet fruit of cooperative labor in their own lifetimes. As Job Harriman, who came within a hair’s-breadth of being Los Angeles’s first Socialist mayor in 1911, explained: "It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bad, capitalistic or otherwise, until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living." What Llano promised was a guaranteed $4 per day wage and a chance to "show the world a trick they do not know, which is how to live without war or interest on money or rent on land or profiteering in any manner."

With the sponsorship not only of Harriman and the Socialist Party, but also of Chairman W.A. Engle of the Central Labor Council and Frank McMahon of the Bricklayers’ Union, hundreds of landless farmers, unemployed laborers, blacklisted machinists, adventurous clerks, persecuted IWW soapbox orators, restless shopkeepers, and bright-eyed bohemians followed the YPSLs to where the snow-fed Rio del Llano (now Big Rock Creek) met the edge of the desert. Although they were "democracy with the lid off … democracy rampant, belligerent, unrestricted," their enthusiastic labor transformed several thousand acres of the Mojave into a small Socialist civilization. By 1916 their alfalfa fields and modern dairy, their pear orchards and vegetable gardens — all watered by a complex and efficient irrigation system—supplied the colony with 90% of its own food and fresh flowers as well). Meanwhile, dozens of small workshops cobbled shoes, canned fruit, laundered clothes, cut hair, repaired autos, and published the Western Comrade. There was even a Llano motion picture company and an ill-fated experiment in aviation (the homemade plane crashed).

In the spirit of Chautauqua as much as Marx, Llano was also one big Red School House. While babies (including Bella Lewitzky, the future modern dancer) played in the nursery, children (among them Gregory Ain, the future modern architect) attended Southern California’s first Montessori school. The teenagers, meanwhile, had their own Kid Kolony (a model industrial school), and adults attended night classes or enjoyed the Mojave’s largest library. One of the favorite evening pastimes, apart from dancing to the colony’s notorious ragtime orchestra, was debating Alice Constance Austin’s design for the Socialist City that Llano was to become.

Although influenced by contemporary City Beautiful and Garden City

ideologies, Austin’s drawings and models, as architectural historian Dolores Hayden has emphasized, were "distinctively feminist and California." Like Llano kid Gregory

Ain’s more modest 1940s plans for cooperative housing, Austin attempted to translate the specific cultural values and popular enthusiasms of Southern California into a planned and egalitarian social landscape. In the model that she presented to colonists on May Day 1916, Llano was depicted as a garden city of 10,000 people housed in graceful craftsman apartments with private gardens but communal kitchens and laundries to liberate women from drudgery. The civic center, as befitted a 'city of light’, was composed of "eight rectangular halls, like factories, with sides almost wholly of glass, leading to a glass-domed assembly hall." She crowned this aesthetic of individual choice within a fabric of social solidarity with a quintessentially Southern California gesture: giving every household an automobile and constructing a ring road around the city that would double "as a drag strip with stands for spectators on both sides."

If Austin’s vision of thousands of patio apartments radiating from the Bonaventure Hotel-style Assembly Hall, surrounded by socially owned orchards, factories and a monumental dragstrip sounds a bit farfetched today, imagine what Llanoites would have made of a future composed of Kaufman and Broad chateaux ringed by mini-malls, prisons and Stealth Bomber plants. In any event, the 900 pioneers of the Socialist City would enjoy only one more triumphant May Day in the Mojave.

The May Day festivities of 1917 commenced at nine o’clock in the morning with intra-community athletic events, including a Fat Women’s Race. The entire group of colonists then formed a Grand Parade and marched to the hotel where the Literary Program followed. The band played from a bunting-draped grandstand, the choral society sang appropriate revolutionary an-

thems like the "Marseillaise," then moved into the Almond Grove for a barbecue dinner. After supper a group of young girls injected the English into the radical tradition by dancing about the May Pole. At 7:30 the dramatic club presented "Mishaps of Minerva" with newly decorated scenery in the assembly hall. Dancing consumed the remainder of the evening.

Despite an evident sense of humor, Llano began to fall apart in the later half of 1917. Plagued by internal feuding between the General Assembly and the so-called 'brush gang’, the colony was assailed from the outside by creditors, draft boards, jealous neighbors, and the Los Angeles Times. After the loss of Llano’s water rights in a lawsuit—a devastating blow to its irrigation infrastructure—Harriman and a minority of colonists relocated in 1918 to Louisiana, where a hard-scrabble New Llano (a pale shadow of the original) hung on until 1939. Within twenty-four hours of the colonists’ departure, local ranchers (‘who precariously represented capitalism in the wilderness’) began to demolish its dormitories and workshops, evidently with the intention of erasing any trace of the red menace. But Llano’s towering silo, cow byre, and the cobblestone foundation and twin fireplaces of its Assembly Hall, proved indestructible: as local patriotic fury subsided, they became romantic landmarks ascribed to increasingly mythic circumstances.

Now and then, a philosophical temperament, struggling with the huge paradox of Southern California, rediscovers Llano as the talisman of a future lost. Thus Aldous Huxley, who lived for a few years in the early 1940s in a former Llano ranch house overlooking the colony’s cemetery, liked to meditate "in the almost supernatural silence’ on the fate of utopia. He ultimately came to the conclusion that the Socialist City was a "pathetic little Ozymandias," doomed from the start by Harriman’s ‘Gladstone collar’ and his ‘Pickwickian’ misun-

derstanding of human nature—whose history “except in a purely negative way ... is sadly uninstructive.”

Llano’s other occasional visitors, lacking Huxley’s vedic cynicism, have generally been more charitable. After the debacle of 1960s–70s communitarianism (especially the deadly trail that led into the Guyanese jungle), the pear trees planted by this ragtime utopia seem a more impressive accomplishment. Moreover, as its most recent historians point out, Huxley grossly underestimated the negative impact of wartime xenophobia and the spleen of the Los Angeles Times upon Llano’s viability. There but for fortune (and Harry Chandler), perhaps, would stand a brave red kibbutz in the Mojave today, canvassing votes for Jesse Jackson and protecting Joshuas from bulldozers.’

But, then again, we do not stand at the gates of Socialism’s New Jerusalem, but at the hard edge of the developers’ millennium. On May Day 1990 (the same day Gorbachev was booed by thousands of alienated Moscovites) I returned to the ruins of Llano del Rio to see if the walls would talk to me. Instead I found the Socialist City reinhabited by two twenty-year-old building laborers from El Salvador, camped out in the ruins of the old dairy and eager to talk with me in

our mutually broken tongues. Like hobo heroes out of a Jack London novel, they had already tramped up and down California, but following a frontier of housing starts, not silver strikes or wheat harvests. Although they had yet to find work in Palmdale, they praised the clear desert sky, the easy hitchhiking and the relative scarcity of La Migra. When I observed that they were settled in the ruins of a ciudad socialista, one of them asked whether the 'rich people had come with planes and bombed them out.’ No, I explained, the colony’s credit had failed. They looked baffled and changed the subject. We talked about the weather for a while, then I asked them what they thought about Los Angeles, a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua and the May Pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite. One of my new Llano compañeros said that LA already was everywhere. They had watched it every night in San Salvador, in endless dubbed reruns of I Love Lucy and Starsky and Hutch, a city where everyone was young and rich and drove new cars and saw themselves on television. After ten thousand daydreams like this, he had deserted the Salvadorean Army and hitchhiked two thousand five hundred miles to Tijuana. A year later he was standing at the

corner of Alvarado and Seventh Streets in the MacArthur Park district near Downtown Los Angeles, along with all the rest of yearning, hardworking Central America. No one like him was rich or drove a new car—except for the coke dealers—and the police were as mean as back home. More importantly no one like him was on television; they were all invisible. He argued that it was better to stay out in the open whenever possible, preferably here in the desert, away from the center. He compared LA and Mexico City (which he knew well) to volcanoes, spilling wreckage and desire in ever-widening circles over a denuded countryside. It is never wise, he averred, to live too near a volcano. “The old gringo socialistas had the right idea.”

Norman Klein On Los Angeles and the Imaginary Utopia.

Interview by Benno Herz

Portraits by Pat Martin

Urban historian Norman Klein, author of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997), examines the social and political implications of why Los Angeles has invented its own extraordinary myth. Los Angeles, a kind of imaginary utopia built by a few powerful men and the industrial illusion makers of the Hollywood studio system, continues a racialized, infrastructural erasure of its history as a mechanism to build the city’s allegory. Klein sees through the lines both figuratively and literally, taking people on an ‘anti-tour’ of the City Of Dreams to examine its recurrent amnesia.

Diamonds on Black Velvet

Benno Herz In the History of Forgetting [1997], you describe a phenomenon you call “the social imaginary,” which is the “collective memory of an event or place that never occurred, but is built anyway.” Can you tell us a bit more about this social imaginary? What led you to these ideas, and how did LA as a city play a crucial role in these concepts?

Norman Klein Well, there’s no doubt that Los Angeles is filled with real-estate absurdities that came out of the promotional power of the oligarchs who ran the city, “the boosters” they’re called, up until the ‘40s. I noticed it all the time. I lived in a house, for example, that was built in 1908. It had a special roof to handle heavy snow. It had a basement for curing apples; it had a basement door for tornadoes (laughs). It had nothing to do with Southern California, except they had put special windows so you could cool the house and never need air conditioning. So, it's an odd version of the practical and the completely improbable, and of course, it was someone from the Midwest who moved there. The term social imaginary comes from this former Trotskyist philosopher, [Cornelius] Castoriadis. I didn't like the way he used it, but I liked the idea, so I invented my own version, and luckily no one has noticed. But my notion is something like the city of Venice in Southern California. There are thirty-five Venice's that I know have been built; it's the most copied city on Earth.

BH In the Pacific Palisades, a neighborhood on the Westside of LA, in the early ’30s, real estate developers came up with this idea of recreating the Italian Riviera by naming all the streets San Remo, Napoli, Capri, Corsica, etc. NK There you go. In a part of Silver Lake, they loved Victorian versions of the Middle Ages, so there's a Rowena next to Sherwood Forest near Ivanhoe Street. The entire neighborhood is one gigantic Victorian imaginary of the Middle Ages. It's a Gothic Revival, cute version of nothing. The social imaginary is very easy to work with. I get that it's fun. I get that it's cute. I get that it's all about the movies. But what's its value beyond that? Does it have any other political meaning? And, of course, it's very easy to see in our era of media illusion, of AI, the social imaginary has reached a very malevolent stage in politics. We have social imaginary presidents. You begin to realize that it has something to do with the commodification of desire and how a fiction can be more solid than a bridge. If you believe a fiction, nothing will ever change your mind. It really is expensive, too. People pay a lot of money to get you to plant an imaginary image in the audience’s mind. I

remember when I was first thinking of this, Disney was on sale [2006]. Part of the idea was to figure out what the Disney brand was worth. And then, they had to figure out how valuable Mickey Mouse's face was. They came up with the figure of $750 million, and I thought that was cheap. I knew the history of how Mickey Mouse had been used to market things. So, Mickey Mouse is also a social imaginary.

BH This urban imaginary keeps playing an important role in your work. Most recently, in your book, The Imaginary 20th Century [2016], which blends fact and fiction. Can we only approach, understand, and study a chameleon city like Los Angeles by performatively using the city's own tools and methodologies of fantasy, fiction, and speculation? What role does the imaginary play in how we think of Los Angeles today?

NK One issue I notice with imaginaries is that they are always incomplete. They always miss something. And the gaps between them are my specialty. If you don't say it to me, it screams, because why would it not be said? It must be very important. Part of the issue is no matter how thorough the imaginary may look, the spaces between are where you really exist. And if you're any good at generating an imaginary like a filmmaker might be, it's the mental picture of the viewer that's more powerful than the movie. In literature, that's so crucial because literature is basically a blind art. The more tactile, visual, and colorful the language, the more the viewer can enter. The Situationists were obsessed with this—with all the French puns they used to describe this inversion process. You simply have to look at what's in between, and then you see commodity, then you see power. You see point of view, you see stupid mistakes, and then you begin to see the silence really screaming. Today, there is a culture that is filled with AI absences. The AI doesn't understand. It doesn't read. Inside those absences, you can see greed. You can see confusion. You can see madness. When I take people on my Anti-Tours of the city, I only show them what's missing.

BH I was just thinking that this idea of the gap or space in between is also where ideas of utopias emerge.

NK Oh, certainly. Why would you want a utopia if life were okay? If life weren't good enough, you'd fix it. Utopia means life is so dystopic you have to replace it, or you're so blinded by the present you need to imagine a future, which is really a present, to simply come up with a plan. So, utopia has a desperation to it. Utopia is a desperate attempt to imagine what's missing.

BH When you think of LA, it's so often associated with these ideas of reimagining itself or reinventing itself over and over

again. So, on the one hand, you have these very progressive cultural narratives about LA, but on the other hand, you have LA's infrastructure being depicted as a history of failures and bad decisions.

NK The scale of the city is surprising, isn't it? In Europe in 1880, there were metropolises of one to three million people. London had reached something approaching that before the end of the 19th century. The population of Los Angeles in 1880 was twelve thousand. The photographs are strange—it's like some valley at the edge of the moon near Mexico; you don't know what to make of it. And then by 1923, it reached a million. So, it went from twelve thousand to a million in a very short time. The infrastructure that was put in was sensational. It had the largest trolley system in the world, bigger than London's. By 1913, it was the capital of the oil industry in America. It became the capital of agriculture in America. It built its own harbor in the middle of nowhere. And it built an aqueduct that the Romans would've died to invent because it had no electricity, no machinery—it just rolled down 300 miles. And they did all this by 1913. The infrastructure was extraordinarily advanced for a city that prided itself on not being a city. You came to Los Angeles to not be in Chicago. They promised no skyscrapers because they were convinced that skyscrapers gave you tuberculosis. They had a health food industry in the 1890s in Pasadena. But what did they build? By 1923, they went from about 25 square miles to 480 square miles. That means they grew over twenty times in a matter of years. So, you can imagine how many mistakes, how many gaps, and how many confusions there were. That's when the film industry came in and joined the infrastructure. In fact, the imaginary of the film industry and the imaginary built by LA were not friendly to each other. And then, of course, it flipped because this industry became so important. If you look at movies through the 1940s, Humphrey Bogart always wears a raincoat. Why is it raining in these movies? Because it was raining a lot. The floods in Los Angeles have been famous. How did the Army Corp of Engineers solve it? They cemented over the LA River. Now the five-bedroom houses along the river were looking at a cement ditch. LA has a tendency to go big. When LA fucks up, it does so in a fairly grand and stupidly enthusiastic way.

BH It seems to me that the non-fiction, urban infrastructure book or novel about LA has become its own genre and canon of sorts, from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz [1990] to Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of Four Ecologies [1971], and of course your important works, such as The History of Forgetting [1997] and Bleeding Through [2003]. Just by looking at some of the titles and cover images on these books, this utopian, ungraspable character of Los Angeles keeps fascinating academics as much as non-academic writers. I was wondering what you think it is about LA specifically that gives it this almost gravitational pull to write about it.

NK There are only a few cities that seem to operate on this scale. Jerusalem is the only city that exceeds or rivals, in some perverse way, Los Angeles' strange grasp on the world. Shanghai has a quality too. And then, I guess, Rome. Then you think, oh my god, how did LA wind up in such a strange category? Even Paris is imagined, but LA has this plastic quality that's different from Paris. There's something about the flexibility of LA and its double impact because of its importance as a very powerful crossroads city between continents, but also this media thing that many cities don’t have. So when LA changes, it has this quality, like a triple-word score in Scrabble. It hits three or four ways at once.

And even though many movies are not shot in LA, you still get this feeling it's an LA film somehow. LA has become this gigantic superpower in the world economy, so we now begin to see the reality catching up with the imaginary. The fact that LA’s ports are shifting is of world importance, whereas before, who would've cared? But still, there's always this wiggle room, this absence, this mental ghost.

BH It’s probably too reductive to say that LA basically becomes a screen to project anything onto, but this “plasticity” you mention seems important here. Can you say more about this?

NK LA has become like a parasitic little disease, something that crawls in your stomach like a bacteria. Even the LA light is famous. This magical world has gone on for generations now. The idea that it can continue for another century seems hard to believe. Even Rome began to fade after Keats died. It just withered in its meaning. You could say Rome invented some connection between piety, power, and greed, the great kleptocratic Vatican tradition. And Rome in the 18th century was the city of dreams, you might say. So, it's very possible the dream will move, but the way it moves is very interesting because the impulse is not just about a city. It's about the industrialization of desire. LA is the city that invented the commodification of desire on a scale that no other city had.

BH You write about Los Angeles as "a city that was imagined long before it was built." To me, this could sound like a very utopic idea.

NK It's something that happened in the 1890s into the 1910s. It was the sense that they wanted to beat San Francisco. A very clear political war was going on between these two cities. But in trying to win the battle, they promised improbable things. You would walk through Chicago in the deep winter and someone would walk up to you with an orange stamped “Sunkist, From California.” They were literally marketing the imaginary. The problem with the navel orange was that it didn't have seeds, but that was also the wonder of it. How do you make a new tree without a seed? They were in competition with Florida. So, the orange becomes a social imaginary. In fact, they even dropped little oranges on Joshua trees, took photographs, and said, "In Southern California, wild oranges grow in the desert!" You must never think of a social imaginary as anything but a balance sheet, a contract.

BH I am curious to hear your take on the dark flip side. Because every utopia, especially LA, comes with its very own dystopia, its nightmarish version. One can't think about the progressive hippie movement without thinking about [Charles] Manson and the cults. You can't think about mid-century modern architecture in LA without thinking of its depiction as hideouts for the supervillains in Hollywood movies. You can't think about the self-optimizing yoga mentality of LA without acknowledging that it's the center of Scientology. I was wondering if this post-modern darkness is some sort of necessity to elevate people's need for utopias.

NK A dream only works if it has a bit of darkness. I mean, let's go to Disneyland—there's an ultimate dream for you. Main Street is designed to make you look a little taller than you really are; it's 7/8ths scale, so you feel like you're 6' 2” instead of 5' 7”. Why is it magical? Even though in 1955, the freeways had just been approved, Walt helped pay for the exit to Anaheim—mid-century modernism was crashing these main streets. You could already feel the memento mori in these old downtown streets—there's a noir quality to Main Street. They've frozen something that needs to be kept in a bottle, because ten years later, that something will

not survive. The only time a utopia works is when the tension of dystopia and madness is in it. And people who work in the movie industry are dreadfully self-conscious about it. I remember when I was in Universal Studios Hollywood's City-Walk doing something with the BBC. They were trying to sell City-Walk, which is this copy of Los Angeles. It's a social imaginary of Los Angeles. They gave me someone who was supposed to keep the BBC from seeing the wrong thing because they were afraid it might affect tourism. There's no one more nervous than someone grinning with even, white teeth to tell you how wonderful things are. The nervousness of maintaining a utopia is so neurotic. If you ever meet people in the film industry, it's extraordinarily strange their gift of keeping things going but never saying things are going well.

BH Let's talk a bit about films because you write a lot about them, and film is a key LA medium. In Tom Anderson's Los Angeles Plays Itself [2003], which tells the story of LA through clips from films shot in LA, it’s noted that one of the reasons that LA is so photogenic is the city's horizontality versus New York's or Chicago's verticality. How would you describe this intrinsic relation between the dream factory, LA's specific geographical condition, and our perception of the city?

NK First, we have to talk about the air itself. Because LA has this faint mist, similar to what you find in parts of the Middle East, like Lebanon or Israel through the Mediterranean. When you have dry mountains and water within twenty miles of each other, it creates this very strange mist that makes the smog a certain way, but it also tends to collapse the foreground, and you have this endless

middle ground. So the camera loves Los Angeles. LA has a very peculiar, magnificent edge to it.

BH The light after the rain!

NK Yes, the light, oh my god! The sunsets! You could put a camera on a chicken and let the chicken walk across the street in LA and you'll have a beautiful film.

BH (laughs) I'm surprised Werner Herzog hasn't done that yet. NK I live above a canyon in Los Angeles, and no one films the hillsides. The flatness of the city is what they decide to shoot, when in fact, LA has many, many hillsides, valleys, canyons, and they're very beautiful, but there's almost no film record of them. It is interesting to imagine why the horizontality of it happened. I don't know why that is. The movie Mulholland Drive [2001] tries to play with that a little bit, but in such a way that you can't even figure out if it's really there. When in fact, Mulholland Drive is a hillside, but there are very few. There's also the ‘diamonds on black velvet’ business, when you have an overhead shot from the sky where you see the lights of the city. But then no one asks, "Where did you shoot it from?" The horizontality in Los Angeles also suggests the city has no boundaries, right? LA's so big they're trying to make it look almost like an empty horizon. And I think it's a political statement even more than a physical one.

BH It's pressed against the edge of the Pacific. It is the furthest west you can go in the American West.

NK Yes!

BH This also comes with a different set of natural disasters that are very present in the city. From floods to droughts,

“Utopia means life is so dystopic you have to replace it, or you’re so blinded by the present, you need to imagine a future, which is really a present, to simply come up with a plan. So, utopia has a kind of desperation to it. Utopia is a desperate attempt to imagine what’s missing.”

to earthquakes and tectonic shifts. Films about LA are obsessed with these natural disasters too. So, how would you say that these geographical settings influence our conception of the city?

NK We have a double narrative. One narrative is the city as it was built or imagined by these leaders, seventy-five men. And then the city that was imagined by Hollywood. But the former did not want LA to become part of the American West. They hated the American West. The American West was people coming in, ripping all the metals from Nevada, and killing the place.

BH Virginia City, they're all ghost towns now.

NK They hated that. They said, "We're not a cowboy town. We'll make cowboy movies for you if you'd like but out in the hills there.” The issue is that LA was determined not to be the West, so it became this city at the end of the rainbow. And maybe that's part of what attracted Hollywood to it, because you could copy so many climate zones. I understand that Frankenstein [1931] may have been shot in Big Bear, partly because it looked like Germany to them (laughs). But Los Angeles really was part of the West, and yet it refused to be. It's a very neurotic form of capitalism.

BH My partner works at UCLA, which has played so many other US campuses in films. One day, I walked onto campus and they had a couple of snow machines, turning Royce Hall into Harvard or something.

NK They've been world builders from the start. Do you want the audience to know it's fake? I believe you do because the audience is in a special place, at least they used to be. You want to feel the hand of artifice embracing you. I think people love that it's fake. They want the illusion to be improbable. The staging, the scripting, the strange relationship of enjoying a film is that it doesn't matter how real it is. The fake is a machine that delivers the illusion, so therefore, the illusion is industrial and real. And then, you watch and think, ah, I love that you've industrialized my illusions. Film must be partly artificial—that's part of its magic.

BH And probably also part of LA's magic.

NK Yes, absolutely. It's a city that, no matter how artificial it gets—I mean some of the outdoor malls, The Grove—when they dress a street to look like a shopping mall, I find that appalling.

BH We could have a whole other interview about the utopic character of mall architecture.

NK The balance has been broken. It's a special teeter-totter between illusion and fact. All cities are built on illusion. In Rome, they would pour water into the center of the city and have sea battles. I understand the illusion is wonderful, and when you're inside the vertiginous, the effect of the skyline, the buildings in Manhattan, the epic sense of the 20th century is crashing down on you. You feel your smallness, you feel some sense of presence, and you think of King Kong crawling up the building. It's just that the balance is getting fractured now. The commodification of this imaginary is getting out of control, and I think it's getting harder for us to find the balance. All these hipster vegan breakfasts that I have in these attempts to bring back the city, and it still feels to me like I'm in a suburb.

BH I wanted to ask you about a past utopia, namely what many scholars often refer to as Weimar On The Pacific [German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, Ehrhard Bahr, 2008], the 1940s émigré  community of mostly German, Austrian, Hungarian, and Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who all settled in Los Angeles, mostly the West Side with some exceptions. The term was inspired by the idea that this vast, still empty city on the Pacific Coast, gave this community enough space culturally

and geographically to recreate the ideas of Weimar Germany and its culture. They didn't recreate Weimar amongst the palm trees, but something completely new emerged in this reciprocal back and forth between continents, languages, ideas, and formats. And certainly, the postmodern aesthetic and style found its way into the works of some writers like Thomas Mann. But, I think this sudden darkness emerging with, for example, the LA noir films, which were very much influenced by the style of German and Austrian expressionist theater, set designers, and light technicians, ended up creating something very unique to Los Angeles and the city's identity. What is your take on the role of the 1940s émigré  artists?

NK In 1948, Robert Siodmak, who didn't really like LA that much, made a film called Criss Cross [1949]. Criss Cross was based on a novel from the late ’30s. He decides he wants it to look like Weimar, so he hires one of the great cinematographers, Franz Planer, who specializes in shooting Weimar. And he makes sure that Bunker Hill—this famous thing that eventually gets destroyed and becomes so imaginary in many people's minds—looks sort of like Weimar. There's this nightclub in the film where you're expecting some cabaret music, but instead, they have this Latino music thing. And then, he hires Daniel Fuchs from Brooklyn, who hates Los Angeles, to write this dialogue. Burt Lancaster came from Harlem when it was more mixed, so he was able to easily fit into the dialogue, but this is not how LA people talked. Even though the camera work is famous because it's this lost neighborhood that became very well remembered, it really was designed to look like another city. How real are we? Why would a man who made all these great dark films in the 1920s as a cinematographer be hired then to design I Love Lucy? In the opening scene, you see this house is on Bunker Hill. If you stop and freeze the frame, you notice that only one house was painted. All the slums behind it were left ugly. As filmmakers, they knew you wouldn't even notice the slum. It's just extraordinarily convoluted and wonderful. I love the schizophrenia of LA Noir because it's always lying with a truthful sense, an agonized version of what is going on next. There's a real moral tension in these films that's built into their relationship to the city. It's not because it's right; it's because it's psychologically crazy.

BH I wanted to talk briefly about Theodor Adorno and critical theory because one of my favorite essays of his is "The Stars Down to Earth," in which he analyzes three months of the daily column “Astrological Forecasts” by Carroll Righter in the Los Angeles Times, of course, focusing on the irrationality of this culture. Adorno was clearly influenced by having lived in Los Angeles. While there's lots of talk about the classic Hollywood movies. People tend to overlook that the Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944] was written in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades and not in Frankfurt.

NK With [Max] Horkheimer! You can't just blame Adorno for it.

BH What's your take on LA's role in the creation of critical theory?

NK It's interesting because Adorno obviously never quite left Germany. The Frankfurt School of 1920s Germany stayed with him. And now, in Frankfurt, they still keep his office like a shrine. The worship of Adorno as a sustaining force between before and after, but I think he never left the before and after. And so, Dialectic of Enlightenment was almost like a memoir, a remorseful memoir about the loss of Germany. What's interesting about his complaint about mass culture [in relation to Los Angeles] is that it's a little bit like [Sigfried] Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament:

Weimar Essays from the 1920s. So I feel that Adorno, even when he wrote the book, was still living in two countries at once. He had this funny house he kept going back to all the time that he never liked, but he lived there anyway.

BH On Kenter, yeah. That's still there.

NK It really isn't very much, given how glamorous he sometimes liked to live. So, we have this person feeling overshadowed and annoyed. LA was an annoyance. It was kind of like a busboy who's making too much noise for Adorno. I can just imagine him with [Arnold] Schoenberg tinkling at the piano, Fritz Lang with his eye patch walking around with his new mistress, and Adorno with that dour look on his face. Somehow his resistance to LA was a resistance even to the whole process of modernism, destroying the world he loved. The inability to repair the world was part of what that book is about in my mind.

BH In the end, it's a book about lost utopias.

NK Yes, the lost utopia was what Germany might have been and didn't become. He was determined, of course, when he went back to Frankfurt to create continuity forward. He believed in continuity, and he definitely felt there was a lost utopia.

BH What I admire so much about your work is your self-reflection on the role you play as an author within your work. In The History of Forgetting [2008], you say, "If I painted myself as a parody, I would probably be in a Caspar David Friedrich painting staring at a construction site.”

NK I guess to follow the theme, I have a very strong connection with German representations of failed utopias.

BH I was quoting this because I was actually wondering

if someone who has lived, worked, and thought in and through Los Angeles for almost fifty years now, are you still looking for new utopias?

NK Southern California is a crossroads city. The New Byzantium. It's become extraordinarily complicated in its ethnicities and racial connections, and it's going through another change. It was rescripted, if you will, to deal with the ports. It's a complicated story as to how much LA has changed since The History of Forgetting was written. But I get this feeling that I must watch carefully because LA is going to be restaged economically. I wonder how it will be culturally. Globalization has no answer to any crisis. LA, once again, is going to reflect that process. We're going to see restructuring in many areas of the city, and areas like the Inland Empire nearby, which has grown faster than Los Angeles. I have a feeling we're going to watch an inversion of globalization leading right into Southern California. Southern California became the way out from the ocean, from the ports to the rest of the country, and now. We're going to see it going in the other direction. I'm quite fascinated and also terrified.

Benno Herz is the program director at Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. He is the co-author with Nikolai Blaumer of Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Stories from Exile 1940–1952 (2022).

“The fake is a machine that delivers the illusion, so therefore, the illusion is industrial and real. And then, you watch and think, ah, I love that you’ve industrialized my illusions. Film must be partly artificial—that’s part of its magic.”

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

← Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, San Francisco Museum of Art program guide, July 1970, 1970 offset lithograph; 7 x 7 in. (17.78 x 17.78 cm)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of the artist

© San Francisco Museum of Modern Art photograph: Don Ross

→ Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Made In Hollywood #1, 2011 Graphite, colored pencil, paper 8.5 x 11 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

Courtesy the artist and Von Bartha

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Barbara “Bobbie” Stauffacher

Solomon studied graphic design in Switzerland under the legendary Armin Hofmann in the late 1950s. Her most famous project, the graphic identity for Sea Ranch, a planned community imagined by architects Al Boeke and Lawrence Halprin on the Sonoma Coast, was a blend of Swiss Style and California Modernism, an amalgam of irreverent hippie cool and clean straight lines in oversized texts and symbols called ‘supergraphics.’ The logo depicted two seashells that formed a ram’s head. When the tide of ‘60s and ‘70s idealism rolled back, Sea Ranch lost its utopian ethos. It now remains a relic of what could have been. Solomon, now ninety-five years old, is more prolific than ever.

Oliver Kupper

Right now, you are working on some new supergraphics for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Yes. I’m doing absolutely enormous “OKs” with stripes. We're going to make it so visually nuts. It’s like choreography, where you get everybody to walk in one direction with the design.

OK Like the old dance step footprints that would be painted on the floor.

BSS Yeah, kind of like that! Only it'll be on the ceiling. “OKs” will lead you to the Mario Botta building. So, people will go through the “OKs,” which is where the information and tickets desk is, but then they get into this kind of maze of stripes.

OK You have also been working on a series of books, like UTOPIA MYOPIA [2013], which has a page that is a five-act play set in Hollywood, between angels and palm trees.

BSS That one section is totally illiterate. I never went back and cleaned it up, or I just gave up and decided nobody's ever going to read this, the type is too small. But you did!

OK I dissected it immediately because the lore of Hollywood attracts me. Did you spend time in Hollywood?

BSS I've been down there a lot—with my first husband who was a movie maker, Frank Stauffacher. All the screenwriters loved him. That’s how I knew George Stevens and Frank [Capra], who was an angel! My husband, who had a brain tumor, started fading after he presented one of his movies. We went out for a drink, and my husband passed out. Capra, a strong little Italian man, just picked my husband up and carried him to the car. I mean, he's a mensch. We knew them towards the end when Frank was dying, and we were quite a scene. I was this beautiful little chick, and he was more handsome than the movie stars.

OK That was the golden age of Hollywood.

BSS They made the American Dream. For Capra, it was the American Dream to get out of Italy and the mess there and live in Hollywood. And make these democratic movies, teaching everybody to be good little democrats.

OK You were well acquainted with Man Ray. What was he like when you met him?

BSS Oh, he was sweet. He never said anything. He only talked about money. He was always short of cash. He always wanted to sell a drawing or a painting. He always wanted to have the next show because he needed money. We had dinner at their house one night and Julie Man Ray was teaching me how to make risotto in the little kitchen. Think of yourself out on the corner of Hollywood and Vine and just walk about six houses south, and that was where they lived. That was in 1948. We went down and saw them on our honeymoon. And we took a walk around the block to look for the sites where all the novels had been written. I was very young. I was sixteen when I first met Frank [Stauffacher]. He was fifteen years older than I was. He was fancy, and he knew all the surrealists.

OK Where did you stay when you were in Los Angeles in 1948?

BSS I would always stay with Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado. All the men were madly in love with her. She was so good at being charming, and she was just marvelous. She had been my best friend since I was about sixteen. I mean, she would tell me what to do, and I would do whatever she said. We were very close. They had a glass porch on the front of their house with a little cot in it. It was about three feet wide. That was my bed. OK Wow, that’s an amazing memory of Luchita Hurtado.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Supercloud 22, 2020 Mixed media: Pigment print collage, gouache, ink, graphite, colored pencil, white-out, cellophane tape, rubber cement, paper 8.5 X 11 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) Courtesy the artist and Von Bartha

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, The Sea Ranch brochure, 1960-1970 offset lithograph; 9 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. (24.13 x 24.77 cm)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of the artist

© Barbara Stauffacher Solomon photograph: Don Ross

BSS I didn't even know she had her own last name. She was either Luchita Paalen or Luchita Mullican. She had so many husbands and names. And as long as the men with their egos were alive, they were the painters, and she was the one who cooked dinner. She never really let herself paint until she was a widow and had time. She always knew she could, I think, deep down. And the minute that Lee died, she started doing it, and was immediately very successful.

OK I wanted to talk about your thesis book, Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden [1981]. Why is the union of architecture and landscape so important?

BSS It's everything. They are two sides of one wall. First, the architect destroys all the trees and builds his precious little house. And then, the landscape architect comes back and puts the trees and nature back. The world is all one big landscape. Inside the house and outside—they're all one thing in a way. They're extensions of each other. But in the architecture department, they hate each other. Architects think the landscape architects are the stupid ones who didn't have enough brains to be architects. And the landscape architects think the architects are the shits that are tearing down the trees.

↙ Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, The Sea Ranch Lodge brochure, 1960-1970 lithograph; 9 x 4 in. (22.86 x 10.16 cm)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of The Sea Ranch Archives

© Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

photograph: Don Ross

↓ Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Sea Ranch brochure, 1960-1970 offset lithograph; 9 x 9 in. (22.86 x 22.86 cm)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of The Sea Ranch Archives

© Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

photograph: Don Ross

Well, a lot of architects are building now with organic architecture in mind, where the landscape is more seamless with the architecture.

BSS Well, the landscape architects have won. The landscape architects are going to save the world because otherwise, it's going to get too hot, and everybody's just going to burn up.

OK When did you start becoming interested in green architecture?

BSS Somebody in art school once said, “Never use green. It's a very hard color to deal with, and never put empty space in the middle of your painting.” So I did both, actually. I have hundreds of those goddamn green architecture drawings. The ones with square trees that look like buildings. I just visually like green rectangles and want to make the world look that way. I was born in San Francisco and lived all my childhood in the Marina District, where there's the Marina Green. Every night with my mother, we'd walk around the Marina Green. And the grid of San Francisco has all these green squares where there are parks scattered around. At a certain point, the tops of the hills were just too difficult to build on, so they made them into parks—little rectangles on top of almost every hill.

OK San Francisco is such a beautiful, green city. And the surrounding areas like Marin. The utopian ethos has been so strong in California. Why do you think that is? And what does utopia mean to you as an architect?

BSS All architects think they're building utopia. Even if it's just a gas station, they think it's utopia. I just think California is—I mean, open your golden gates! Since we found gold here, they assumed California is utopia. Californians have that feeling about California. That's why I came back. I could have lived in Europe. California is just an extension of people's bodies.

OK Where do you think your rebellious spirit came from?

BSS I don't know. My father was a lawyer, and he told me there's no such thing as god or the president of the United States. Don't have respect for any of those things. So, there's no reality. There's nobody you believe in and listen to. It's all absurd. My mother was like that too. She was a pianist. She was a rich girl that was no longer rich and loved walking among the redwood trees. She thought god was in the redwood trees.

OK Can you tell me about Sea Ranch, and your contribution with the Supergraphics? When did the Swiss Style start to merge with California Modernism?

BSS When my husband died in 1955, I went to Basel, Switzerland to learn how to make money and how to be a designer instead of just a painter. I came back with all this training in me when they handed me Sea Ranch in 1962. Al Boeke and Lawrence Halprin, two of the architects, wanted Sea Ranch to be like the French new towns. Also, Lawrence had been raised on a kibbutz in Israel. First, he gave me an office in the same building as his firm. When they told me to do Sea Ranch, I designed it the way I had been trained under Armin Hoffman at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel. I had no idea what I was doing until I did it, I have to admit. But I was such a modernist. I went up there in a truck with the two sign painters. Everything had to be straight lines because they were sign painters and could only do letterforms. So, my vocabulary consisted of what a sign painter could do. I started with that big blue wave on the west side of the building. The wave went up the shed roof, and then it came down, and turned green on the other side. We only had black and white, vermilion and ultramarine blue, and I think one small can of yellow—primary colors. It was kind of like De Stijl. I was best friends with all the architects until I got all the press.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon Why? Why Not? #2, 2017 Graphite, colored pencil, paper 8.5 x 11 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) Courtesy the artist and Von Bartha

Charles Moore never spoke to me again because I got in Life magazine and forgot to tell them he was the architect.

OK So, who did they hope would live in Sea Ranch? Was it supposed to be for artists, for intellectuals?

BSS No, Al was very square. I mean, it was supposed to be just plain old nice people. They weren't supposed to be intellectuals. And it certainly wasn't supposed to be second homes for the rich. That happened when they started making it so you could save on taxes with your second home. And that's when everybody was buying second homes up there. They hired a couple of salesmen to come in and take over selling off the land. All of a sudden, it wasn’t about a nice town with a church and a school.

OK Sea Ranch is really an example of an almost failed utopia.

BSS It really is. It's very successful if you're rich. A lot of people from Los Angeles are coming up and buying property. Now, it's all diamonds up there and the richest, trickiest people.

OK Do you think design can be dangerous, especially if you are designing for a dangerous philosophy?

BSS Of course, but that's what design is: it's the bullshit on top. It's making things look good.

OK That's a good answer. I wanted to ask you if there is any connection to your time as a dancer and graphic design?

BSS Every once in a while, it used to feel like it. When I used to work with the crew, and when I stretched my body big and long or got on the floor, I felt like I was making the same moves I made as a dancer. You're moving with the paint with your arms stretched out. And you know, where I feel like a dancer again is when I’m at the SFMOMA making these stripes that'll make people walk from the entrance and up the stairs. They’ll wonder, now, what am I supposed to do? And now, I'm going to give them big red stripes to have something to do. I’m choreographing them with art.

OK Looking back on your career, what's the one thing that's been most misunderstood about you as an artist?

BSS Well, nobody remembers that I was a widow with a child, and I needed money. The whole damn thing has been to support myself and my child. My husband, who died, his family just dumped me because my daughter has cerebral palsy. They were scared I'd ask for money. Then my second husband dumped me because he was young and cute. I aged, and he seemed to not. And I always had to support myself. I had two daughters, and I have a granddaughter. It was like, "Grandma is painting some supergraphics. I guess we can have oysters tonight!” If Frank hadn't died, I would have been a painter. And if I hadn't gone to Switzerland, I probably would have painted big color fields.

OK Well, I'd say you came out on top.

BSS Look, I was talented. I mean, when I had those two big rooms in the Sea Ranch to do, I was lucky, I got Charles [Moore] and Bill [Turnbull’s] architecture. The walls had beautiful shapes, and I just followed the shapes and played with the shapes, and thank god it came out right. It's just dumb luck if it really works.

OK Do you have any advice for people reading this and thinking about building a better world, their own utopia?

BSS I remember when I was teaching at Harvard, I asked the students, "What is art?" The answer: It's nothing; just learn to see, and you'll learn that everything is art. The problem is that people look, but they don't see. If you look and see, the whole damn thing is certainly art.

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, A formal/ agrarian landscape #1, 1986 Graphite, colored pencil, vellum 11 x 8.5 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm) Courtesy the artist and Von Bartha

Ant

↑ Cadillac Ranch by Ant Farm (Lord, Marquez, Michels) under construction, June 19th, 1974. Amarillo, Texas. Courtesy Chip Lord

↗ Chip Lord returns to Cadillac Ranch. Amarillo, Texas. Courtesy Chip Lord

In 1975, Ant Farm—the techno-utopian multidisciplinary architecture collective founded in San Francisco by Chip Lord and Doug Michels (joined later by Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier)—drove a customized 1959 Cadillac, renamed the Phantom Dream Car, at full speed into a wall of flaming television sets. Media Burn was an excoriation of Post-War American popular culture, mythos, and the consumerist imagination, particularly our obsession with broadcast media. This singularly powerful act came to exemplify Ant Farm’s irreverent architectural examinations, where the blueprint was the message itself. Armed with portable videotape cameras, Ant Farm turned the gaze back on those wielding the power at a time when America was entering its mirror stage, and millions of young people were realizing the country’s intrinsic hypocrisies and instincts for violence. From its inception in 1968 to its dissolution in 1978— from the last flickering embers of the hippie love fests to the early days of disco—Ant Farm experimented with alternative modes of living with detailed cookbooks for building inflatable shelters and a Truck Stop Network for flower children searching other flower children out on the open road. Ant Farm also buried Cadillacs in the Texas sand, reenacted John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and they had plans for an embassy where humans could communicate with dolphins. In the end, a fire at their studio was a symbolic curtain closing for the underground collective whose prophetic visions of the future can be witnessed today in a digital epoch of surveillance capitalism, artificial intelligence, and the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Oliver Kupper I want to start with talking about the day you kidnapped Buckminster Fuller. I think it says a lot about your generation’s fascination with his mode of utopian thinking, and it set the tone for the radical, utopian antics of Ant Farm.

Chip Lord The kidnapping? Well, Doug Michels and I were teaching at the University of Houston. It was the spring semester of 1969. I don’t think Ant Farm was at all well-known at that point in time. We heard that Buckminster Fuller was coming to speak to the engineering school at the U of H, so Doug basically called Fuller’s office and said, “We’ll be coming to pick you up, and this is what we look like.” And then, he called the engineering school and said, “I’m calling from Buckminster Fuller’s office, and he won’t need a ride in from the airport.” (laughs) And so, that’s what we did. We met the plane, I think we were fumbling in my turquoise Mercury Comet, and we drove him to the campus of St. Thomas University, where there was the machine show exhibition [The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age]. And in the machine show was the Dymaxion car [1933]. At that point, he said, “Oh, I don’t want to see it, that was a bad episode.” (laughs) But we took him in anyway, and when he did see it, he was very excited. The front seat cushion of the back part had fallen, so he reached in to make a little correction. And of course, a guard came over and said, “You can’t touch the art.” And that was about it. But then, we took him over to U of H and delivered him to the engineering school.

OK Obviously, his thinking about the world was hugely inspirational, but what was it about Buckminster Fuller? Where did you learn about his ideas?

CL For me, it was through Whole Earth Catalog. Every issue, for several years, began by publishing something by Buckminster Fuller. I didn’t really have that personal connection to specific ideas until I started reading Whole Earth Catalog, which was a graduate education. Because a degree in architecture is not really an intellectual degree. It’s an art degree, basically, and there was no theory introduced into architecture during the 1960s.

OK What brought you to architecture?

CL As a high school kid, I was more interested in customizing cars and hot-rodding, but for my parents, that would not lead to a career. I also liked walking around in houses that were under construction in my neighborhood in St Petersburg, Florida. Especially when the walls had gone up, but they weren't solid yet, they were just the studs and you could walk through walls. Out of that experience, I thought, well, maybe architecture would satisfy both the creative instincts I have toward cars and yet, it’s a more professional career. I mean, that decision was made kind of at the last minute, so I went to Tulane. For an undergraduate architecture degree, you start right as a frosh, embedded in a culture that’s based around drawing and the studio, which was exciting at the time. But later, I realized I didn’t really get much of a broad education out of going to college.

OK You were also at the forefront of witnessing the post-war boom of the American economy—car culture, and the suburbs—which must have been fascinating.

CL When I was eleven, we moved from a small town in Connecticut to St. Petersburg Florida, and that was a huge transition. It was not really a subdivision, it wasn’t Levittown, but a nice, small development. Not really knowing it at the time, I was embedded in the world of advertising around the automobile in the mid-1950s, the tail fin era.

OK Politically, right around the time you started Ant Farm—the

late 1960s—Kennedy was dead, modernism was proving its failures, pollution, Manson, Vietnam. There was a lot going on. What was the ultimate epiphany that turned the youth to this kind of radicalism and distrust of the system? Can you talk a little about the sociopolitical miasma that was happening during that time?

CL On a personal level, of course, it was the Vietnam War; how to make a personal choice. I really didn’t want to go. I was actually in the Navy Reserve program. I was a year behind in school, and it was the only way I could finish without being drafted and losing my college deferment. But once I had graduated, more than ever, I didn't want to be drafted. So, I went to the Halprin Workshops in San Francisco in the beginning of July 1968. It was a thirty-day workshop for architects and dancers, which is a great combination, of course (laughs). There was a third leader of the Halprin Workshops in addition to Larry and Anna [Halprin], a psychologist named Dr. Paul Baum. Eventually, he wrote me a letter that got me out of going to Vietnam. But it was only a little bit later within Ant Farm where I think we started to react or create works that were reflecting some of the craziness of living through that moment.

OK That craziness definitely seems like it forced Ant Farm to think about this utopian impulse, that you needed to create a better world.

CL Or to add to the world in some way. I mean, the Eternal Frame [1975] was a pretty strange idea, to reenact the Kennedy assassination. But you know, there was this huge interest in literature around it and all the swirling conspiracy theories. And at the same time, that decade in the seventies was such a utopian moment in the art world, and all these additional mediums were being explored. One of them was performance art, and another was video art, and they kind of came together in the Eternal Frame. Maybe there was a truth in actually reenacting it, going to Dallas and being in that place, and recreating the image of the assassination. And it was frightening, actually, to be there, to do that.

OK Marshall McLuhan also had a big influence on Ant Farm and the idea of the “medium is the message” and the “global village.” Using technology was an example of this utopian thinking as well. How did his ideas influence you?

CL I was a student when his book The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects [1967] had just come out. And what was interesting was that it was a collaboration with a graphic designer, Quentin Fiore. It was actually reprints of things McLuhan had written as text and more theoretical analysis about the ‘global village.’ But in The Medium Is the Massage, it was put into a visual form, and I think that really influenced me. I never saw him lecture either, but the way images were used to amplify his ideas

Clean Air Pod performance by Ant Farm, U.C. Berkeley, Sproul Plaza, Earth Day, 1970 (Andy Shapiro and Kelly Gloger pictured) courtesy Chip Lord

about the global village, it was so different from the discipline of architecture. At the same time, the realization that architecture was this kind of privileged, elitist profession, that you had to have clients, and the clients had to have the money for whatever they wanted to build. So, for my generation, graduating in 1968, so many people wanted to avoid going and doing the typical architectural career.

OK What was Ant Farm’s interpretation of the global village? How would you define it?

CL I guess as the collectivity that existed in the counterculture because there was a lot behind what we were doing as Ant Farm that came from the knowledge that there was a much bigger community exploring alternatives. Whether it was going back to the land, living in communes, co-housing, so many different ways to reject the existing set of expectations. I think that gave us the strength to keep going, to keep experimenting, and producing the work that we did.

OK One of the most incredible works that encapsulates those ideas was Electronic Oasis [1969], and also your idea of an ‘enviro-image future.’ It was way ahead of anybody’s time. Can you talk about the enviro-image future?

CL The idea that a computer could generate environments and put you in places was part of hoping to make another psychedelic experience, without drugs, without taking LSD. It just seemed obvious that it was going to happen. It’s only now really happening with AI. There was, of course, the enviro-man, who was connected to a computer, and sitting next to him was enviro-woman, and this was just a visual stunt that was done while we were teaching at the University of Houston. But that project was about simply creating that image in to show that it might be possible. Most of our presentational form was through the slide show and that also came from architecture. It’s a very good way to contrast and to create a narrative between the images.

OK And then there was the Truck Stop Network [1970], which is really interesting.

CL A lot of people at the time were either building campers on a pickup truck, or modifying the Volkswagen bus. And there was this idea within the counterculture of nomadics. So, we were conceptually and architecturally combining the idea of the truck stops that already existed as a network across the US, and making them countercultural truck stops. You would stay for a few days or a week, plug in, and each truck stop had services built in that would make it more of a community. There's access to computers, there’s daycare, there's all of the social community structures.

OK Another work that explored automobiles is Cadillac Ranch [1974]. It was installed around the time of the oil crisis. Did that have anything to do with it?

CL Well it did, absolutely. It was 1973 when that actual embargo from the OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) countries happened. You had to wait to get gas in California, to fill up. And so, Cadillac Ranch was conceived at that moment. It was easy to be very aware of the social hierarchy attached to the Cadillac. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler all had multiple makes and the idea for General Motors is you might, as a young man, buy a Chevrolet and be loyal to GM, then move to Pontiac, move to Oldsmobile, Buick, and then finally in your fifties, making a good salary, you would achieve Cadillac status. The funniest thing was, we realized that our fathers, none of them ever made it to Cadillac. The furthest they made it was Oldsmobile. So, you could say we were realizing the final two steps of the social hierarchy by making Cadillac Ranch, but also putting these gas guzzlers in the ground.

OK One of Ant Farm’s most iconic works that used a Cadillac was Media Burn [1975] because it was a combination of two things, which were Kennedy and America’s fascination with television and cars. Can you talk a little bit about where that piece came from?

CL When we traveled in the Media Van, we went to the East Coast and met the publishers of Radical Software. There was an identifiable idea that there should be an alternative to the three major television networks, and it may be possible with portable video, which had just come out. The Sony Portapak was designed for education, schools, and businesses for producing training tapes. But artists and community activists immediately started using it as an alternative form of television and that was kind of solidified in “Guerrilla Television,” which was an issue of Radical Software. The editor, Michael Shamberg, had asked Ant Farm to design it. So, we did. We were engaged in the idea of alternative media and alternative architecture, and that became part of the idea of Media Burn. The idea was to create an image that would be powerful in its own right, but would also attack the monolith of broadcast television, which seemed to have a hold over the American public through advertising and image control. Seeing the car crash through that tower of televisions would be symbolic of an attack on that monolith. It was as simple as that. It took two years to realize that one image, and in that time of the planning, other meanings expanded out of it, and it ended up being a huge community effort. But we had to have a speaker, hopefully a politician. And that is where the conceptualization of using a Kennedy impersonator as a speaker at Media Burn came in, and it was just a short jump to “Well, if we’ve got Kennedy, we might as well reenact his assassination.” And that was Eternal Frame.

OK That also connects to a little bit of your personal work later with Abscam [1981], the recreation of surveillance footage; a statement on the power of these images of Kennedy’s assassination. Nobody, at that point, had ever really seen anything like that before. It really speaks to our voyeurism and thirst for seeing this kind of violence.

CL And also, taking control of it too, because it was such powerful imagery that made the viewer almost powerless in the face of it. So, could we take control of it in some way?

OK In 1978, your studio burned down. Why was that the official end of Ant Farm?

CL Well, at this point, Ant Farm had become a three-person partnership, Doug Michels, myself, and Curtis Schreier. Doug Michels wanted to move to Australia to develop the Dolphin Embassy. Curtis and I were not interested in moving to Australia. There was a woman involved and Doug wanted to go back to see her. I think in ’76, there was a period of time when he was not present, and the studio space had become kind of just Curtis and me showing up, but it felt empty and people would often knock on the door asking, “Is this the Ant Farm?” (laughs) We would give them the little tours, but it had become almost a museum of itself in a way. It was over as a working partnership, and then the fire was a symbolic ending almost exactly ten years after the founding, in 1968. So, that seemed appropriate, to have such a spectacular ending.

OK After Ant Farm disbanded, how do you think your utopian thinking changed? I mean, there’s that incredible piece you did called American Utopia [2020]. Do you think that your view of the system became more cynical after Ant Farm?

CL There was certainly a cynicism within Ant Farm, I must say (laughs). No, for me, it was like, Well now how am I going to make a living? It was a different era, the counterculture wasn’t

The Eternal Frame, 1975, Production Still, Dealey Plaza, Dallas.

All photos by Diane Andrews Hall (T. R. Uthco) Courtesy Doug Hall

← Ant Farm, The Phantom Dream Car shown in cutaway, 1975, San Francisco. Courtesy Chip Lord.

↙ Ant Farm's Phantom Dream Car crashing through flaming TVs, Media Burn, Cow Palace, Daly City, July 4, 1975. Photograph by Diane Andrews Hall (T. R. Uthco). Courtesy Doug Hall

↓ Ant Farm Media Van—on the road, 1970 or 1971. Courtesy Chip Lord

→ Still from Easy Living, Chip Lord and Mickey McGowan. 1984, 18:15 min, color, sound. Courtesy Chip Lord

↘ Ant Farm, Chip Lord, Curtis Schreier, Cover design for Radical Software magazine, summer 1971, 1971 offset lithograph; 11 x 15 1/4 in. (27.94 x 38.74 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier © Ant Farm photograph: Don Ross

dominant. A lot of people in counterculture had opened businesses, natural food businesses, and other things. Some people had successfully lived off of the land, but everybody had to confront, “How do you make a living, how do you survive?” I tried different things, like freelance photographer, and writer, having a contact at New West magazine, but you know, that was never going to pay the bills. I thought maybe teaching was going to be a collaborative venture, which was an aspect of Ant Farm. So, I applied for a job at UC San Diego in the visual arts department. The irony was that the work of Ant Farm was my credential, and there weren’t that many art departments where it would actually be effective (laughs).

OK What do you think now, post-pandemic in this weird political climate we’re in—what would Ant Farm be exploring now?

CL (laughs) It’s funny because that question was also asked at the end of a lecture, and I turned it on the room full of students. I said, “It’s really up to you, the next generation, to make that utopian gesture.” So, I don’t really have a good answer to that, except that now I’m not such an optimist. I think that after the Ant Farm exhibition, which was at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2004, I traveled to a few places. When I came back to make videos afterward, Elizabeth Kolbert’s book had just been published, the Sixth Extinction [2014], and I realized that we’re in the process of creating this extinction of our own species with climate change. So, I created several works in video about that, which had to do with the rising sea levels. One is called Miami Beach Elegy [2017], you know Miami Beach maybe isn’t going to exist by the end of this century. Another one is New York Underwater [2014], and that was preceded by Hurricane Sandy, which flooded so much of Manhattan. So, I’m trying to shift my love of cars into loving trees.

OK You mentioned that you’re not so much of an optimist anymore, but do you think utopian thinking is still important?

CL You know, I’ll have to think about that question. I guess yeah, of course it is, but maybe utopian thinking is shifting now. I love the book, To Speak for the Trees [2021], by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. As a child, she was orphaned and went to live with her uncle in Ireland for the summer, and the people of that community decided to teach her Celtic knowledge. She had this intense learning experience about plants and other species, which led her to becoming a professor with a specialty in botany. So, that’s now utopian: understanding Indigenous people, and Indigenous ways, and the integration with other species we share the planet with. That’s so utopian now because it’s so different from the mindset we’ve lived with throughout the 20th century. The Dolphin Embassy is one the most popular projects by Ant Farm. Again, it was simply a very symbolic idea, and we didn’t have the personnel, or the budget, or the power to find the scientists and work with them, to make Dolphin Embassy a reality. It was a utopian idea, to focus on trying to communicate with another species.

Human

Design

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Photography by Kuba Ryniewicz

Founded almost a century ago, Volvo Cars has always looked toward the future. Safety, quiet elegance, and conscientious luxury have always dominated the ethos of the Scandinavian automobile brand based in Gothenburg, Sweden where its headquarters is still based today. The first automobile rolled off the assembly line in 1927. Protection and the well-being of its drivers is not just a priority for Volvo, it is part of its DNA. In 1959, Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt, which has saved millions of driver's lives around the world. Today, Volvo Cars are equipped with a broad range of electronic sensors and safety airbags—all without sacrificing aesthetics. Their vision is that no one should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car. Volvo also has plans to become a fully electric car company by 2030 and climate neutral by 2040. The Volvo EX90 is the newest pure electric vehicle. Using bio-attributed and recycled materials, Volvo is still looking toward the future. We visited Cecilia Stark and Marie Stark, Senior Design Managers of Color and Material, in Sweden to discuss their roles in imaging the Volvo of tomorrow.

Oliver Kupper What are both of your personal definitions of Scandinavian design?

Marie Stark I would say light is a big source. In Scandinavia, we celebrate light and it affects us. Sometimes it’s clear, it’s soft, in the winter it’s crispy. And because we are outdoors a lot, we are very connected with nature. It’s in our heritage. That's why we put nature and wood into our interiors. And then, of course, we design with a function in mind, which is always connected with Scandinavian design.

Cecilia Stark We always start with the human aspect, as well as timeless, thought through proportions, and calmness. Of course, we do more vivid and creative arts kind of design, but I think then we might be more simple in a way. We tend to focus on the beauty of the material instead of hiding it with lots of bling and we're quite down to basics. We want to lift out the best of the material and focus on its essence.

MS But with a sense of humor. We have some self distance.

CS Yeah. Not too serious, which is part of the human aspect.

OK Can you talk about how humor is such an important part of design?

CS We’re very affected by a sort of melancholy since it's quite harsh and dark up here in the winters. We have to bring humor into everything we do, otherwise we would die. It's very inherited in our personalities.

MS There are also a lot of hidden delights that have a function, but you don’t see them at first glance. That’s part of the humor. OK Do you have any personal inspirations that have informed your design approach?

MS We always design as a team, but fashion and architecture are a big inspiration that we look at. Especially for the EX90, we looked at Iceland as a country with its contrasting colors—dark meeting light. We also looked a lot at Gotland and its open landscape. The light that they have there is very special. And of course, Skön. If I should pick one, I think nature is the biggest inspiration.

CS I never look at other cars. I get inspiration from art, music, interesting people. It can be fantastic architecture, or a feeling in a song; it’s usually some sort of emotional feel you want to bring out.

MS When we started with the EX90, we looked at a lot of different movies and music. I asked them to look at the London Grammar. They’re a Swedish group I listen to, and I asked the team to share music that they listen to.

CS Also, since I'm ten years older than Marie, we’ve talked a lot about artists that are very timeless or ageless, like Bowie, Patti Smith—it doesn’t matter what age you are—they influence younger people and older people alike. Also, when we talk about fashion, for example, with a white shirt, it's about how it sits on your body. You can make it really rock n roll, but you can also make it elegant. It’s about classical elements that you can tweak in different ways. These kinds of ageless trends were very important to us when designing the EX90. We work with products that should last, and they’re designed many years before being released, so we do go to the same trend seminars as those in the fashion industry, but we translate that into our products and try to find the more timeless threads that will last.

OK Yeah, there's a lot.

MS This wool blend we use for the seating is a good example of this tactile feeling we want to create of being at home in your living room.

OK Volvo is so synonymous with Swedish design in history. I want to ask about your personal connections to the brand. How does nostalgia inspire your design approach?

CS It was the first word I learned to write. My father worked in marketing for Volvo. So, I'm a Volvo product. I look a lot at our old imagery and I think we kind of try to maintain the same tonality. If you look at images from the ’60s or ’70s, it's still the same message with the family and how you use the car. Of course, it’s more related to our time, but I love that. Going to our summer houses, driving with our parents for ski trips in our 740 … I actually worked building 740s and 760s at the line when I was eighteen.

MS Everybody can connect in that way, because you have memories from the car brand that are really nice.

OK Yeah, the archives are amazing. There's 100 years of archives and I don't think there's another car brand where the images are that dynamic and fun. How important are the archives to your process?

CS It's super important. We just did a big legacy workshop where we brought in lots of our old cars to talk about what makes the Volvo a Volvo and sometimes we do the same things over and over without realizing it. For example, we looked at an old Duett in there that had nearly the same wool blend that we have now in the EX90. I went down to the archives in the plant to look at old colors that we might want to bring back into production, since it's always been super important for us to keep to our DNA and refine it. We always work with the light coming in and large glass surfaces. Now, this is becoming more popular globally, but people who come to Sweden are always surprised that we don't often have curtains because we always have big windows and want to let the light in. That’s the same with how we design the cars—that airy feel is very important.

OK Is that living room approach a core part of the design process?

CS It is. It's also about starting with the human aspect. It's important to have light headliners and stuff to have that airy feel. You should never feel cramped. This living room feel is also connected to safety, because it's important that you feel calm, so that the design doesn’t take over.

MS And wellbeing.

CS And wellbeing, exactly. There’s so much time you spend in your car and it's such a personal object, so we want you to feel comfortable and at home.

OK Being in a Volvo in Los Angeles for ten days during art week, we spent a lot of time in traffic. But, when trips that should take ten minutes turned into forty minutes, we didn’t really feel it. It really felt okay because that “at-home” experience of the interior is so pleasant. It's quite remarkable.

MS That's really nice to hear.

CS We talked a lot about how you should feel energized when you go out into the world and arrive at your destination. The journey should give you energy rather than taking it away.

OK I want to talk about the EX90 and where the design process starts. How many people are in the room and how much ideating happens before you start putting things on the mood board? Where do you look first?

MS Of course, we have a strategy and our main pillars, but we started with our customer base and then we looked at different mixed media, architecture, and nature when putting together our mood boards. It’s a living document that changes over time, and then we sit together as a team to connect everybody and brand.

CS We have a pre-concept phase for all projects, then we get material, sometimes we even visit customers to see how they live and try to go deeper.

MS Personalization is very important.

CS We are trying to understand how they live and what inspires them, and then from that we design. We always do an early concept with very wide ideas, and then we take it down. We have three pillars in our design strategy: the first one is confidence, and that's based on traditional, down-to-earth Scandinavian design, and the others are elements related to activity and creativity.

OK What are some of the most significant design leaps in the EX90?

MS The light ash wood is very unique because you see it in Scandinavian homes, which gives a brightness to the cabin. The wool blend combined with the light dash also gives this luxurious feeling and touch. The dawn color also gives more freshness to the interior. And then, cardamon is a favorite. This interior color is inspired from home interiors. It's a new, light brownish tone that makes you feel calm, which is also inspired from nature.

CS We were one of the first brands that really didn't want to have lots of lacquer and other stuff on our woods. In some cars, we have a wood that is inspired by driftwood. Keeping the forms as calm as possible brings out the tactility and the sense of the material. We wanted to emphasize the way that luxury today is the real stuff, like time being with your family. It’s that kind of honesty that we reflect in the craftsmanship.

OK That brings me to to my next question, which is about luxury design in this age of extreme climate change. What are the most important design choices in the luxury milieu?

MS As a designer, you need to question much more and you need to do so all the time. You need to have a much wider knowledge of the material sources, which is fun but it’s also a challenge.

CS We’ve had a lot of philosophical conversations about defining luxury. Having the chance to be with people you love in beautiful environments—the real stuff—that's luxury. It's a challenge for us Scandinavian people to talk about luxury, because it can be a bit vulgar. We are quite understated and humble, so we don't want to scream and bling. We want to bring Scandinavian luxury into this kind of minimalism by using luxurious materials like Chrome that draw focus, but we want it to be understated all the time.

MS When it comes to sustainability, we also need to learn that some things can be more beautiful when their surfaces have aged over time.

CS Yeah, we have to change our customers' perception of luxury; to get people to understand that used material can be beautiful. We have to recycle things because those kinds of adaptations are essential to our survival on this planet.

OK Volvo has factories in Europe, the US, China—it really is a global brand. I’m curious how close you are to the assembly line process and the quality control aspect of things?

CS We have super high standards and quality assurances to maintain. There are so many regulations for everything. So, we have to design in accordance. I've been working in the business for twenty years and when I started, I wanted to be much more free, but I'm still here because it is very interesting to have such hard regulations. It's so tricky to make a car that fits the needs of people all over the globe, which keeps it interesting. If we weren't interested in working within those restraints, then we would have become artists just doing our free art. Even if we can get super tired of all these regulations, it's really fun to find solutions.

MS Definitely. That is what makes the job fun.

OK Marie, you went to school for textiles, and now you're focus is on sustainable materials. What is the sourcing process like? How far and wide do you have to search for materials that are both luxurious and sustainable, and what fascinates you most about textiles?

MS Textiles are a passion because you can use them for so many different applications. They’re so connected to your body—you have clothes, you sit on sofas and car seats—everywhere you go, they are with you. We look at short, mid, and long-term use. So, we’re always looking at various points in the future. We’re very open to looking at a wider scope of options, but of course, we have a lot of regulations to consider, and we also need to work with what can be done in the short term.

CS One way we differ quite a bit from other core brands is that we never take anything off the shelf. We always design everything from scratch.

OK And Cecilia, color is really your expertise. What is it about color in car design, or in art as well that you fell in love with?

CS Color is so much about different tonalities and it's always changing. It all depends on the context of where you’re using it. When I was in design school, I loved to print textiles. I have a bachelor’s degree in painting, which is all about colors and building up different environments. I never get tired of colors. I also think colors are very important when you decide to buy a product. If you buy a car, you ask, what model? And then, the next question is what color? And it's very personal to everyone. It's a lot of emotions. I'm also very interested in music and for me, colors and music are very much the same. You can create so many different harmonies and expressions with both.

MS From a heritage point of view, there are some cars, like the 244, which comes in this light blue that people remember because it inspires that feeling of the sky. We have used many exterior colors that leave a lasting impression.

OK It's a very complex process of choosing a color for the interiors. Where do you start with that process?

CS As a designer, you look everywhere, just like a sponge. I was home for a year having a child and when I came back, I felt like I was so far behind because I hadn’t been following design trends. But then, I realized that it doesn't matter because I'm always looking at everything around me and I've always been quite good at seeing trends. It's not solely connected to my job. It's more just how I am.

MS For a new interior color, it takes time and a lot of research. We sit in the car a lot and we look into people’s homes.

CS For me, fashion and nature is the biggest inspiration.

OK There’s a lot of intuition involved. As car designers, it's a multiple-year process, which is a very utopian way of thinking about the future. How do you think the utopian ethos of Volvo has been maintained over the 100-year process? And why has it become more important in this century versus the last?

CS People don't change that much actually in what they need and what they want. You build on your heritage and make small tweaks. It’s the same with people. You don't like people whose personalities are changing all the time. You have a personality that you build on. You get older, but you're still yourself.

MS It's a process that we do with many of our team members. We listen to a lot of ideas before we make decisions.

CS If we were making new exterior paint, for example, then of course, we don't just do one. We might do ten for one color and then we paint it on different cars, and forms, and with different lights. So, many people are involved in the process. It's all the way up to our CEO who makes the final decision.

MS Our real success is the product of us being so open and sharing discussion.

Pippa

Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Photography by Jesper D. Lund

From the auto body to the human body, artist Pippa Garner is one of the most pioneering artists of our time.

Serving first as a combat illustrator during the Vietnam War, Garner’s radical practice took on the form of utopian inventions that satirized our lust for objects and teetered on the edge of fine art and commercialism. A backwards car, an umbrella with real palm fronds, a half suit; even Garner’s own sex change, transitioning from man to woman, became a materialistic invention, her sexual organs equal to the raw material sent down the factory assembly line; body and thing becoming one and the same part of capitalism’s bioindustrial complex.

Hans Ulrich Obrist I wanted to ask you how it all began. How did you come to art or how did art come to you? Was it an epiphany or a gradual process?

Pippa Garner Well, I was a misfit to begin with. It seems like the growth process can be enhanced by the situation you're in. I was a war baby. I was born in ‘42, and I still have a few memories of what life was like during that time. Everybody knew somebody that was in the Army. Even a small child can get a sense of what it feels like to have the world be at war. I didn't pick the time I came to life on Earth. The war years were a time of deprivation. And this is a country of extravagance—it was based on independence and outlaw thinking. And all of a sudden, the whole thing was thrown away because of the war. But living was good for me then because I went through adolescence just as consumerism was really born. The assembly line technology that had preceded World War II was advanced by war needs, so there were all these companies suddenly producing the fastest, best things they possibly could, from airplanes to shoes. Advertising was born out of that because they had to convince people they needed things they didn't realize they needed. Suddenly all these stores were flooded with consumer goods. Things that nobody could imagine: chrome blenders, waffle irons, ovens, and lawnmowers. And I was fascinated with that, particularly automobiles, because the cars that I grew up with all had very distinct faces— the eyes, the mouth, the nose. You could recognize whether it was a Studebaker or a Ford. They had a certain character and I felt like there was life there. It goes back to another childhood thing of wanting to bring things to life. I think all children go through that with their stuffed animals. They get off of it pretty quickly, but I never quite overcame that. Clear into my puberty and beyond, I still felt that cars were living. If I’d see a bad crash where the face of the car was all smashed, I’d burst into tears. I found that it was a useful tool as an artist because a lot of the stuff that I was making was a kind of consumerism.

HUO You were in the Vietnam War with the US Army as a combat illustrator. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience? It also brought you to photography because you got these state-of-the-art cameras from Japan and started to take personal photographs, which became important for your later magazine work.

PG I was drafted in college. I used up several student deferments. Finally, they sent me the notice. So, I was sent to train as an unassigned infantryman in Vietnam, having no idea what I was going to be doing. I went over on a big plane full of people who were going to be assigned to different units. Once I got there, I thought, gee, I wonder if there's something that might have to do with my art background. I did some research and sure enough, one of the divisions, the 25th Infantry, is the only division with a Combat Art Team (CAT). A group of people who had some art background were given an itinerary to go out with different units and document with drawings, pictures, and writing. The camera thing was interesting because the military store on the base had all this expensive Japanese camera equipment, very cheap. And I got a really nice Nikon camera for nothing and trained myself to use it. A lot of times things were going so fast that you couldn't really hold the image long enough to document it, so that's when photography became very much a part of my life.

HUO Then you studied transportation design at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, an extremely well known institute. You had one of the first major epiphanies in 1969. You presented your student project, which was a half car,

half human. Can you tell me and our readers about the epiphany that led to Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car). And also how people reacted to it?

PG There was a Volkswagen sports car in the ’60s called the Karmann Ghia. It was considered a very sophisticated sports car during that time and that’s why I modified the spelling and called the sculpture Kar-Mann. I started going to art school fairly early. I went to the ArtCenter College of Design, which at that time was called Art Center School and it was in Hollywood. My father, who was in charge of things, saw that my interests were leaning toward art. To him, that was bohemian and something he didn't like. He was a businessman and wanted me to go into business. And so he tried to direct my art to car design because I was so interested in cars. He did a lot of research and found out that the school where all the car designers were trained was this Art Center School in Los Angeles. So, I went out there in 1961 and found myself alienated because all the other students there wore suits and loved cars in a much different way than I did. I cherished [cars] in a way that was sort of comical. I thought some of them were really funny and stupid looking, so I felt pushed into a satirical corner. I quit that school and went to the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, which is a wonderful fine art school, and I started doing a lot of life drawings. I fell in love with life drawing. To study the form, you have to understand it from the inside out or else it doesn't look lifelike. But I got quite good at it. So, eventually I went back to the Art Center. I still had the design classes, but they had life drawing work. And so, I began doing tons of life drawing and sculpting the human form. It just fascinated me. But the idea of making this half car, half man, was something that I did as a sketch. There was a wonderful teacher that encouraged out-of-the-box thinking a bit more, and when I showed him the sketches he said, “Why don't you make that?” So, I figured out the proportions—I wanted the human part to be about the size of a small male figure, and then I found a toy car and was able to integrate that using styrofoam to make the basic sculpture. And then, I covered it with resin to make the surface hard and did all the detailing. I was making fun of cars.

HUO I’ve just written the book Ever Gaia [Isolarii, 2023] with James Lovelock, who invented the Gaia Hypothesis with Lynn Margulis. He was a serial inventor. In a similar way, you are a serial inventor. You created all these objects between design and non-design, and then images of these objects were published in magazines, like Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Playboy It's interesting that you then decided to go beyond the art world. I've always been very interested in that. Can you talk about how you bring these objects to a bigger audience, through magazines, but also appearances on talk shows?

PG When I was doing all that work in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there was a real barrier between fine art and commercial art. If your work occurred in magazines, it was low grade. No matter what it was. It was degraded by the fact that it was published. And I reversed that in my mind. I thought, well, gee, that's not right. Here's an opportunity to have things out there reaching thousands of thousands of people, as opposed to an art gallery. I love the idea of having as much exposure as possible. Even though I've had close friends that were recognized fine artists, and in a bunch of the galleries—I never really cared much about it. I did have a couple of gallery shows here and there, but mainly the thing that fascinated me was the fact that I could reach people clear across the country, and sometimes beyond, with these images. I didn't have much money during those years, but I always got enough out of the magazines.

And of course, one of your key inventions, which is so famous today, is the backwards car from 1973. It's also interesting because it was a different time in magazines—when they paid for these extraordinary realities to happen. Can you talk a little bit about the epiphany of the backwards car and how it then drove on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco? PG There was a period in all the major American car companies after World War II when they started having these really huge design departments. They used a lot of references to jet planes. The Cadillacs in the ’50s were huge, and they looked like they were moving even when they were standing still, which is called directional design. After my half car, half man, I started seeing cars in a context that had nothing to do with their purpose. The Cadillac particularly fascinated me because of the huge fins. And I had a good friend that was a designer who worked for Charles Eames in the early ’70s. He and I would go roaming around sometimes on our bicycles. One time, we went by this used car lot and there was a ‘59 Cadillac, and it just popped into my head, what if that thing was going backwards? It was just devastatingly funny and that convinced me that in some form it had to happen. So, I started sketching and figuring out how to do it, and I made a nice presentation. Esquire magazine in New York responded and said, “Oh my god, we have to do this. How much do you want? How long will it take? We’re going to send a photographer to take pictures of the process.” But it couldn't be a Cadillac, because you couldn't see over the fins. So, I started looking in the papers until I found the car I wanted: a 1959 Chevy, two-door sedan, six-cylinder, no power steering or power brakes. I wanted a drive train as simple as possible so it would be easier to reconnect. It had fins, but the fins were flat, so they didn't obstruct your vision. And so I did the whole thing myself in a little garage space. Now, it was a matter of, how do I lift this thing up, turn it around, and set it back down on the frame? I didn't have access to any sophisticated technology to do it, so I got everybody I knew and we had a little party when I finally got everything cut away. Once everyone got a little bit high from the alcohol, I said, “Okay, folks, everybody around this car, shoulder to shoulder. When I give the command, I want you to lift the car up, and then walk it back, turn it around, bring it forward, and set it down again.” I thought it was going to be too heavy, but fortunately they didn't have any trouble. Once it was set back down, there was the backwards car. One day it was ready to try out and that was it, we went out and drove it around the San Francisco coast.

HUO The other day, I visited Judy Chicago, and of course she worked with car elements. There was also John Chamberlain. And during the same era, there was also Ant Farm, the architecture collective with whom you actually collaborated. And Nancy Reese was a big influence on you because she made you realize that you can identify yourself as an artist. Can you talk about this?

PG Well, that was an interesting evolution, especially when you think back on it from the Information Age. Now, everything is shrunk down to nothing. There's no presence. Even cars look almost identical. You can't tell one from the other. The only way you can tell the difference between a Mercedes and a Kia is by getting close enough to look at the logo. Other than that, they're identical. They all get the same input. They use CAD design. So, that whole era really stands out. Everything was so unique. There was such an emphasis on trying to make things attract attention and to design things that make people say, gee, I gotta have that.

HUO In 1995, you did this great project where you tried to get a custom license plate that said “sex change”—spelled SXCHNGE. But the authorities at the Department of Motor

Pippa Garner, Neopop Businesswear (Half-Suit), 1980–1981,

Photograph by James Hamilton.

Pippa Garner, Backwards Car (Golden Gate Bridge 1), 1974, Photograph by Jeff Cohen.

Vehicles turned it down, so you resubmitted with HE2SHE and it was accepted.

PG For me, the sex change thing was a material act. I never had a sense of being born in the wrong body as one of the expressions that they use goes, or had the trauma of being treated badly because of my sexual feelings. I never thought of any of this until I had already lived in my thirties as a male. And then suddenly, I ran out of interest in the assembly line products that I was so fascinated with. Even with cars, I felt like I had done as much as I could do. So I thought, there's gotta be something new, something else. And that was just about the time that changing your gender worked its way into the culture. The first example was, of course, Christine Jorgensen, way back in the ’50s. But it wasn’t until the ’80s when terms like transsexual started to be used. Leading up to that was the whole gay revolution. When I was growing up, you couldn't be gay. It was the most horrible, evil thing that could happen to a person. Gay culture was completely concealed. So coming out of these cultural biases became a real issue. And the human body—flesh and blood—fascinated me because I could still be using existing objects and juxtaposing them, but at the same time, making it fresh again. So, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, you know, I'm just an appliance, like that radio over there, or the car sitting outside. The body that I was assigned to, I didn't pick it. I didn't say I want to be white, middle class, and heterosexual. So, if I am nothing more than another appliance, why not have some fun with it? Why not play with it and alter it in a comical way? Finally, that escalated into my deciding to go through with the surgery, which I went to Brussels for in 1993. I had what they call a vaginoplasty. Now, part of me is European (laughs). I came back from that and thought, this is great, I’m in my forties, I've had a penis for all these years, and now I have a vagina. What an amazing thing—I live in an age when you can do that. You could go and pay somebody some money and say, “Here, I want to have my genitals turned the other way around.” And they said, “Fine, here's the bed.” (laughs) I was fascinated with the fact that I could do that with my body. It gave me a sense of control and a sense of a whole new area that I could explore. Meanwhile, the culture was changing and becoming more open. It's still not good, but it's much better than it was. I was kind of a pioneer with that perhaps.

HUO There’s this amazing conversation, which you did with Hayden Dunham, about the struggle of being inside bodies. You say that because the advertisements and consumerism background in your life were always very gender oriented, you were forcing yourself to become more masculine. And at a certain moment, you decided not to conform anymore.

It’s so pioneering. Can you talk a little bit about that?

PG Everything is structured in the culture to try and keep people in a comfort zone. Unfortunately, that doesn't fit everyone. But how do you deal with that? How do you let people be what they want to be and still have a sense of the culture being unified and functional? Again, all these things are just a point of evolution. Things keep changing and moving forward, and they always will. I think about my life being one frame of an endless film—just my little thing, and then it goes to the next frame. And that goes on into the distance forever. I think that my perceptions of gender were very materialistic. I’m a consumer and this is what I do with my body. It was no different than someone putting on makeup, or somebody going to a gym, taking steroids, and building this huge body that doesn't have any purpose at all except for looks. I didn’t have anyone that was going to suffer for it. If I had a family, it might've been different, but probably not. At this point, I was

single. I had nobody to be responsible for, except to keep things moving forward. I don't want my life to ever get stagnant, to start losing its rhythm. And that's what I'm fighting now, because at this age, how do I maintain that? It's very hard for seniors to keep one of the things that I think is essential for life, and that is sexuality. Everything for me represents the lifespan—from baby to aged person. Whether it's called puberty, adolescence, middle age, old age, I feel the need to incorporate that thinking in my work to keep that sense of life going, and the most obvious way is by maintaining sexuality. If I don't have any sex drives, all of it goes flat. I take estrogen and testosterone so that I can keep an endocrine system that's young and still is attractive and wants to be attracted, even at 81. That’s one of the real essential parts of my inspiration. If I lose that, I don't have any ideas. It's funny because hospitals are all divided into these clinics. Because I’m a veteran, I've got this ten-story VA hospital building at my disposal and there are clinics for everything but sensuality. So, they’re really missing the point of trying to make people want to stay alive.

HUO In this conversation with Dunham, you say that you see the body as a toy or a pet that you can play with. You can change the shape of it. You're an inside and an outside.

PG Well, that's it right there. That keeps things interesting and keeps a sort of question mark floating in the air over everything. So, you're not quite sure what will happen, you know, maybe it will be a drastic failure, or maybe a revelation.

HUO We know a great deal about architects' unrealized projects because they publish them. But we know very little about artists' unrealized projects. I wanted to ask you if you have any unrealized projects, dream projects, which are either censored or too big to be realized, or too expensive to be realized?

PG Well, it's funny, because I always do. The problem is—and this is fairly recent—I was diagnosed with leukemia that was ostensibly from my time in Vietnam. I was there for thirteen months in the mid-60s. They were spraying Agent Orange, a defoliant, which turned out to be extremely toxic. I actually went on several of the missions with one of the planes that were spraying it, and there were no masks or anything. It stayed dormant until only a couple of years ago, when all of a sudden, it caused pneumonia, which put me on life support for over six days. I was unconscious and I was in the hospital for a month in intensive care. Life support is terrible because it causes you to melt basically, mentally and physically. I've never gone through anything like that. All of a sudden, I found myself like a baby. I was able to go back home, but I still haven't fully recovered from that. I don't think I have the will. So, that's one of the problems. Now, I have this obstacle in my thought process because I'm constantly thinking, am I going to have some more time or not? You can be very isolated in Long Beach. Most of my friends are in Hollywood. So, I spend a lot of time alone, and I'm not good at that. I need to have back and forth. But I'm on the rules of the hospital. They did a five-hour infusion, which was a good thing. I'm lucky to have somehow survived to this point. I did something today with this young woman from the gallery who helped me take some pictures. It was a little thing I do for every April Fool's Day, which is my holy day. And so that was something that represents my thought process. I didn't have that two weeks ago. Then, all of a sudden, there it was. The same little mechanism back there was working. One thing that will be interesting is when we get autonomous cars. I want to live long enough to see that—something tangible. Something that affects my life that I feel stimulation from. Maybe I’ll just have one final burst left and then I drop dead. Or maybe not. I might be able to spread it out.

Adrián

Rhizomatic Utopias

Adrián Villar Rojas’ artistic career began with his own suicide—not an actual suicide, but a digital one. Playing Counter-Strike, a popular early aughts computer game, Villar Rojas would allow his avatar to get killed so that he could wander the cyber dreamscape and document his journey through screenshots. This earned the artist his first representation by a major gallery and established the future paradigms of Villar Rojas’ multi-faceted practice, and also the possibilities of art in the 21st century. Much of his artwork defies anthropological definitions of creative production, instead functioning as a journey through the cosmos on astrological time, an experimentation in world building. His practice is nomadic, large scale, theatrical, and rhizomatic. The work he leaves behind at galleries, international museums, and institutions is meant to disappear, disintegrate, and self-destruct. These “theaters of disappearance” and suicided utopias force us to confront the impermanence of everything, even paradise.

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Rojas Villar

The Most Beautiful of All Mothers, 2015. Organic, inorganic, human and machine-made matter including cement, resin, white polyurethane paint, lacquer, sand, soil, rocks, fishing nets, wood, snails, raw beef, corals, mollusc shells, feathers, petrified wood, collected in Istanbul, Kalba, Mexico City and Ushuaia. Installation view on the shore of Leon Trotsky’s former house on Büyükada Island, 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and kurimanzutto. Photo credit: Jörg Baumann

Oliver Kupper

The etymological roots of utopia come from the Greek ‘ou-topos,’ which means ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere.’ I think your explorations of these no places, or interstitial spaces, post time and post place, even post human, make your work very utopian. Would you agree?

Adrián Villar Rojas In order for utopia to start, everything else we know has to end. The end of art, the end of the world, and the end of language are then one and the same thing: the same end. I am driven by these speculations about the “art” that might emerge at the edge where the human species’ cultural project as a whole ends, after which it could be approached only by non-human or more-than-human awareness. I’m trying to get as close as possible to an impossible paradox: subjectivity without culture, without an anthropocentric point of view. For my latest project exhibited in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, my team and I developed a digital tool, an amalgamation of software systems collectively described as the ‘Time Engine’ that was used as the sculptural or modeling force for the work. ‘Time Engine’ emerged because I was feeling extremely frustrated with the way we were using digital modeling tools, software like ZBrush or Rhino, or whatever other interface. Those platforms are designed to replicate the analog human-centric experience of modeling but in the digital realm. With the ‘Time Engine,’ I model a digital space that itself has agency. In this way, we can place objects inside this modeled reality and see how they are affected. I wanted to know what would happen if we model worlds that model sculptures, then materialize those sculptures in the real world. The results are digital, 3D sculptural forms, generated by the software: impossible objects that perhaps no human being in our lives, the lives of our grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-great-grandchildren will ever witness. With the ‘Time Engine’ we ask questions like: what monuments might be created to commemorate the end of postcolonial struggles for independence on the Moon’s Mare Nubium [sea of clouds] in the year 34,340? What would a sculpture that was left in the canyon of the Valles Marineris on Mars for 500 years look like? What is its texture, what remains of its volume? How do you model wind in 7,374,000 BCE? In that sense perhaps the ‘Time Engine’ could be seen as a machine that generates speculative utopias.

OK You were born in Argentina in an incredibly unstable and violent time—all of South America has been impacted by colonial powers that left lasting scars—how has this influenced your work and your nomadic practice?

AVR I was born in 1980, two years before the Malvinas/Falkland Islands War and three years before the return of democracy to Argentina in 1983 with the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín. Therefore, yes, with hindsight I can see that being raised in such a traumatic period for Argentina led me to understand that there is not just one, but multiple ends of the world, as many ends of the world as there are ways to inhabit it. And many of these ends are lying beneath our feet.

In South America, Argentina shaped its modern identity through the denial of its Indigenous roots, literally exterminating natives and whitening the population by promoting the massive immigration of Europeans in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Argentina is a biopolitically designed country, a racist project carried out by a local modern political elite that was in power right after the Independence Wars against the Spanish colonizers. Scientific excavation in Argentina has contributed to building our contemporary identity in a paradoxical way, by searching into our recent

and remote past, with no intermediate scales. On one side, the Argentinean Group of Forensic Anthropology has been key in finding the burial sites of some of the 30,000 disappeared persons who were tortured, murdered, and buried in unmarked graves during the last Military Dictatorship [1976–83]. The uncovering of their remains is the main material proof of the massive crimes committed by the state on its people. Not only are the forensic teams finding these unmarked common and single graves, but they’re also identifying to whom they belonged and returning them to their families. At the other extreme, archaeological excavations carried out over the last thirty years in Argentina have led to the discovery of the dinosaur Argentinosaurus Huinculensis, one of the biggest animals to ever exist, which lived in the Patagonia region around a hundred million years ago. Charly García, an important Argentine rock musician, linked these distant extreme points of our DNA string in a 1983 song entitled “Los Dinosaurios,” a nickname he gave to the military leaders in office during the dictatorship who masterminded the disappearance of thousands of citizens.

So, we have here a quite particular relationship between our national identity and what lies beneath our feet. It takes us from the recent past—the discursive construction of the disappeared as the foundation of our current democracy—to a remote past—the image of this hundred-million-year Argentinosaurus, which was “Argentinean” before Argentina as a republic even existed. But also before the Argentine state conquered the territory by genocide of the Indigenous Mapuche, Tehuelche, Qom, Mocoví, and many other First Nation communities, who now understandably hold profoundly critical positions in relation to Argentina as a “nation-project.”

OK Your family was an important part of you building your version of utopia—what did your parents do and how were they integral to your artistic pursuits in your early life?

AVR My family is the best world-building experiment I have ever experienced in my life, and this is thanks to the love my parents have for each other. Together, they world-made a wonderful ecosystem for me and my brother to inhabit and dream since our very first moments on planet Earth. In 1980, the year I was born, my mother, Silvia, was a medical student and my father, Luis, was a Peruvian immigrant who had come to Argentina to complete his university education in psychology. Before I was one, my mother would sit me beside her with pencils and paper while she was trying to memorize huge pharmacology or physiology books. Apparently, I was a quiet baby and could spend several hours doodling. The habit has stayed with me since that age.

The support of my family is best understood by reflecting on the period when I was between twenty and twenty-seven years old, when I gradually transformed our little home in Rosario into my “workshop.” This was the first space that I “parasitized” in my practice. It would reach a paroxysm with the development of Pedazos de las personas que amamos (Pieces of the People We Love) for the ArteBA-Petrobras 2007 awards, an important prize for young artists in Argentina. With six friends, I invaded the entire house 24/7 for two months, without a single word of reproach from my family. On the contrary, I remember my mother arriving home from work and peacefully going to her room while we were distributed in every corner of her house, cutting through styrofoam with her knives that we had heated to red-hot on the stove, or modeling dozens of figures with epoxy putty on the dining table. When we moved the work to Buenos Aires, it was like an occupying force leaving a country in ruins.

Getting the freedom to work like that begins with parental support that enables what for others is unthinkable.

OK We are children of the digital age and a digital future. I read that one of your first works explored these interstitial spaces or “blind spots” in the world of video games. Can you talk about your earliest fascinations with these worlds that would later take shape in your art practice?

AVR In 2003, my high school friends and I would often meet in a cybercafé to play Counter-Strike, a multiplayer video game of terrorists versus anti-terrorists. Something that fascinated me about it was that when you were “killed,” you remained in the game, able to wander through the different levels without any agency until the moment all the other players had also died. In this way, I could become a ghost, flying to the liminal spaces of the programmed game-space, which uncovered digital territories and generated glitches that distorted the game’s orderly landscapes and architecture. I started to let myself be killed to investigate and take screenshots of this phenomenon. Then, I edited these screenshots and sent them in a portfolio to an open competition for emerging artists held by the major Argentinian art gallery, Ruth Benzacar. I was shortlisted and went to Buenos Aires to print and then submit this work, winning the prize, and by extension, being invited to join the roster of artists in the gallery. It was only then that I could see the route to art, art-making, and art practice as a possible career, or rather a potential way of living life.

OK There is a collectivity to your practice—when did this nomadic collectivity start?

AVR Nothing can be done in a state of solitude or emotional-relational-vacuum. I have always believed no one does anything alone, no matter how much we—the human species—push epistemologically to think of artists, writers, or scientists, to name a few, as single operating genius minds. Humans live in a state of hyper collaboration with each other and with the others that came before us.

Another way to answer is by mentioning the theoretical infrastructure I have constructed over the years—with the assistance of my brother Sebastián, a playwright—around notions related to theater and conviviality. Since 2013, I’ve been developing the metaphor of an itinerant theater company that wanders around the world, building and dismantling nomadic workshops that could be described as scenographic spaces for active explorations based on improvisation with “roles” or “scripts” that the “actors” take and the “director” transforms with each new “staging,” based on their weaknesses and strengths. This group of actors, who become experts in improvisation during the work process itself—a process that can range from a few weeks to several months of activity—exercise a fluid and dynamic relationship among themselves and with the director. Through multiple channels such as pen and paper drawings, 3D rendered simulations, WhatsApp texting, screen-grab sharing, and/or online conversations, the director transmits information to them. In theory, these operations will lead to the realization of a “play”—that is, an exhibition. OK World-building is very much a utopian practice, but where do you start when you receive a commission from an arts institution? Most painters might start by preparing paint, but your practice defies the artistic process in a lot of ways. Where does this ontological investigation begin and where do you feel it ends?

AVR My work maintains a fluent and constant dialogue with the symbolic and material qualities of the space that hosts it. I don’t make a distinction between “artwork” (content) and “art space” (container). Hence, I’m interested in every component part of the so-called “art space,” from the political or historical use of its architecture to the electrical outlets, cables, or unpainted walls.

The Theater of Disappearance , 2017. Nylon-printed and polyurethane cnc-milled reproductions of human and non-human animal figures, food and artefacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection, coated in bespoke automotive paint, porcelain tiles, diamond plate flooring, hollybush hedges, public bar, signage, benches, adapted and repainted pergola. Installation view, The Roof Garden Commission at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2017. Courtesy the artist, kurimanzutto and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo credit: Jörg Baumann

The End of Imagination, 2022. View from live environmental simulation generated by an amalgamation of software systems described as the Time Engine. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2022. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and kurimanzutto, commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Every one of these elements generates meaning to me. I don’t feel there are beginnings or endings in my investigation as these concerns are in an ever-constant state of accumulation and interaction, I let the investigative work remain in a porous state that permeates past, present, and future projects. I like to think that I try my best to not work in linear ways. To me, the concept of reality as a non-discrete, therefore continuous space, is ontologically foundational.

I call the way I connect with the spaces that host me and my work housekeeping, which means someone is taking care of a

specific place and its status by sweeping the floor, painting the walls, or changing the lightbulbs. This is the hidden labor that enables other types of labor to happen, the type of labor that, if well done, is completely invisible. This is the political agency of housekeeping.

But, this is not about me transforming spaces as a foreign entity. I want to cooperate with my hosts and allow them to use me as a platform for transformation. A perfect example is the project mentioned earlier, The End of Imagination, the inaugural commission in the Tank, a former Second World War fuel bunker that forms part of the new expansion of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. There, I took the unique opportunity to dramatize and radicalize the experience of this subterranean former wartime bunker that few have seen before. Set in extreme darkness, a “host” of moving lights operated as sentient beings seeking, surveying, locating, following their own paths and patterns, changing them according to their own needs and will, not ours. Among the shadows, this collective artificial gaze uncovered the sculptures, these conflicted objects placed in a space that was itself born of conflict. Because of this use of light, I wanted to implement, the museum created a fixed lighting tracks system, which is now part of the lighting possibilities this exhibition space will offer to every artist they want to show there. This system is far more advanced than I had originally planned. These “invisible miracles”, these “ecological transformations” that happen through sustained and intense dialogue and collaboration with my hosts, are constitutional of my practice ethos.

OK Why do ruins fascinate you? Why archaeology? Are these artifacts more psychological or physical?

AVR I recently heard Federico Campagna—a philosopher I am a fan of—say we must leave interesting ruins for future generations. That would be one way to answer your question. I am interested in the notion that there are never endings, only beginnings; that endings actually hold the symbolic means for new world-making.

Thirteen years ago, I wrote a story about the “last art work” on Earth. In this fabulation, the last five humans on Earth encounter a ruin of a theater and together, they decide, compelled by the need to affirm their existence, and the history of humanity, and human presence on Earth, to hold the last play and therefore last human-symbolic exercise in the world. Although, I did present this work publicly as a presentation and performance for the Serpentine Galleries Map Marathon, writing and storytelling have been a less visible or public component of my practice, but it is one of the most important to me.

OK I want to discuss cultural memory—a big part of the Western colonial gaze and project has been the capture of artifacts as spoils of conquest. How do you dialogue with a museum, like your project at The Met, while contending with their fraught history and present? Are museums doing enough to repatriate these artifacts and come to terms with their colonial pasts?

AVR I love the opportunity to discuss the Roof Garden commission at The Met in 2017 called The Theater of Disappearance

My starting point for the research of this project was to meet with each of the seventeen curatorial departments of The Met, as well as the conservation, education, publishing, building, and imaging departments.

As you include in your question, the status of the displayed objects and The Met’s political agency produces the context in which these objects are generally encountered by the public.

During my investigative process, the extreme hierarchical and departmental structure of the museum immediately manifested

The Theater of Disappearance, 2017. Organic, inorganic, human and machine-made matter including: freezer, recreation of homo erectus ‘Peking Man’ and neanderthal ‘La ChapelleAux-Saints’ skeletons, recreation of orangutan skeleton, rubber molds, tree branches, fungi, vines, sprouting tubbers, robotics, shark fins, hornero bird nests, charcoal, salt, collected in Los Angeles, Istanbul, Mexico City, Rosario, Turin, Ushuaia and Yangji-ri. Installation view, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2017. Courtesy the artist, kurimanzutto and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo Credit: Michel Zabé studio

The End of Imagination, 2022. Installation view, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2022. Layered composites of organic, inorganic, human, and machine-made matter including metals, concrete, soil, plaster, wood, sand, marble dust, glass, salt, wax, resin, pigments, water, tree barks, adhesives, spray paint, salvaged auto parts, recycled plastics. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and kurimanzutto, commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photo credit: Jörg Baumann

itself, generating both obstructions in the form of red tape and bureaucracy, and an opportunity to reflect on what lies beneath the surface of so-called encyclopedic institutions like this one. I was looking for alternative vertices in the departments’ official history, many of which copied the model of 18th-century, mostly European museology, but also in the demarcation of the departments themselves. I looked into the forgotten peripheries: Cyprus in Greco Roman, the Amerindian woman in what’s perversely named the American Wing, but primarily includes colonial and early United States Republic artifacts. Furthermore, the American Wing could be seen as the museum’s subconscious mind, which betrays a series of meta-postcolonial interpretations: its entrance is a vast atrium filled with Neoclassical sculptures in front of a reconstructed façade from a Wall Street bank, and in front of that venerated and preserved façade, one encounters a 19th-century white marble sculpture called Mexican Girl Dying, possibly the most profound expression of “culture” within The Met. Being someone from South America, to see all these elements in a clear state of conflict constituted a very visceral experience. This becomes even more staggering when we consider that the rise of capitalism can be traced to the conquest of the “New World” by the Spanish Empire; gold and silver spoils arrived at the center of Europe and formed a proto-international monetary system. The American Wing is the blind spot of the institution and to make that evident was one of the main axes of my project there. This is the reason there was a moment in the more than 100 years of history of the Metropolitan Museum where the Mexican Girl Dying occupied a privileged position as a centerpiece of my rooftop commission. The commission on the Roof Garden included almost as the culmination of the audience’s walk-through of 5000 years of material human culture that The Met contains, with the backdrop of New York City skyscrapers, one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world in one of the most powerful countries on planet Earth. The question, or conversation around repatriation was almost impossible to consider as something occurring effectively in such a short period of time in the context of The Met when I was there in 2016. Now, it is part of its survival, and the survival of all museums around the world that hold similar collections.

OK Most art is made for the sake of the artist’s immortality—a testament to the artist’s brief time on Earth. Even in a practice that exists on a cosmological scale, it seems like this temporality connotes a sense of earthly time. Why does temporality and the entropic fascinate you?

AVR I have answered this question many times, rightly so, and always chose to say more or less the same thing, which may sound a bit too naïve and tender. Anyhow, I do believe in the power that naïveté—therefore, some sort of lack of self awareness and self importance—has. Since my first year in art school in Rosario in 1998, I had the fantasy, or the conviction, that what we were taught to produce, “contemporary art,” shouldn’t last forever. This was—as said previously—a premature and intuitive concern. My practice has thus been traversed by the paradox of dealing with intangibility (disappearance, hyper-objects, huge amounts of time, etc.) from the trenches of tangible materials, producing—for instance—large-scale sculptural installations. But I’ve never actually been interested in sculpture. The only sculpture that interested me was our own species, which is certainly both entropic and degradable. The eventual disappearance of my “sculptural products” makes the interface evident: behind them is the human hand, the action of the human being on Earth.

OK What is more important, memory or documentation—the archival process? Because your work is about cultural memory, is it more important for it to disappear completely?

AVR My work is about disappearance. Earlier, we were mentioning how it was impossible for institutions like The Metropolitan Museum to consider the possibility of repatriating art. The idea of a pandemic as a potential end of the world or end of anthropocentric-systems was something exposed in Motherland (2015), a work I made for the Guggenheim in New York. The project is only known as a covert ritual. Motherland is a minimum material substrate that forms the basis of a script—a minimum set of actions—only known by the staff of the museum and by no one else, so in many ways it’s an invisible project or one that will generate visibility after the accumulation of years of being re-enacted. This ritual will be carried out once annually on the same day and hour, until the Guggenheim ceases to exist. The hypothesis then was that we can’t imagine the Guggenheim disappearing any more than we can imagine the White House or the United States vanishing. Motherland is a literal project about the end of the world we know and the beginning of a new one. Of course, in 2020, exactly that happened: the ritual was impossible because of COVID-19, and thus the hypothesis was in some way corroborated.

OK Is a true utopia only possible absent the presence of humans, or are humans capable of creating a non-colonial, partnership utopia on planet Earth?

AVR I think it’s no longer enough to just think about planet Earth. I have often been preoccupied with the new frontiers of our species and recently I developed a project for The Bass Museum in Miami that touches on subjects related to your question. The work starts with some questions. For example: what will happen when our terrestrial fictions, the ones that cement nations and identities, travel to outer space? Will any terrestrial museum be able to keep its fictions untouched after we have conquered and terraformed Mars? Exactly as the market price of gold would fall dramatically if mining corporations were able to ship an asteroid containing three-billion-dollars of that metal to Earth, perhaps the colonization of space and celestial bodies will radically change our approach to all previous museological fictions, and will generate new ones adapted to this new amplified context. Can anyone imagine another “white-general-ridinga-horse” or any variation of him: a male astronaut on a plinth? Should future heroes of space conquest have a human face, an ethnic belonging, a religion, or should they be replaced by, for instance, neutral avatars? How will we deal with the human need of a face, a body, to give a human shape to this cosmic enterprise?

I wonder if one of these future monuments might be the Moon itself, with all the physicality and memory of humanity’s attempted interplanetary endeavors imprinted on its lunar soil, or if it already is a memorial-museum of such conquests. After all, the airless atmosphere turns the celestial body into a freezer, so unless struck by a meteorite, each boot print, rover track and flagpole will remain there in perpetuity. With its lack of legal jurisdictions or environmental hazards, the Moon is the utmost preservation device: the Solar System’s ultimate anti-entropy chamber.

OK You mentioned housekeeping before. Does utopia require housekeeping and what does that look like from your perspective?

AVR In my opinion, every activity on Earth—and beyond—requires a good amount of healthy housekeeping.

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Arunanondchai

Interview by Oliver Kupper

For Thai artist Korakrit

Arunanondchai, fire becomes a symbolic and sacred portal to another world. Fire’s plural cosmologies of meaning figuratively burn away the layers of our corporeal existence to access a realm of ghosts. In this haunted realm, Arunanondchai communes—through painting, video, performance, and installation—with friends and ancestors on a spiritual plane of posthuman consciousness.

Portraits by Jason Nocito

Oliver Kupper I want to start by talking about the invention of fire and how it pertains to your work. And also the idea of utopia as this new world that can be accessed by fire?

Korakrit Arunanondchai I started this painting series called "Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names" over ten years ago. I use fire to burn denim, which is a material I regularly employ in the paintings. Fire is this threshold between form and formlessness and access to this other space. I started thinking about this idea of people standing around a fire and coming up with stories and rituals and abstract thinking, which is very authentic and real. But in another sense, the idea of sitting around a fire is really trite and mundane—it’s almost past that point where it feels like it doesn't mean anything because of its ubiquitousness. When you sit and look at fire, you see this sacredness that also feels very profane. In the beginning, I think that’s why I wanted to use fire in my work. I use fire as a process, but afterward, the photographic reproduction of the fire burning the painting or denim turns the fire into a subject. So, it straddles this thing between authenticity and simulation. When you pull a sacred object close to the profane, when or where does that object lose its sacredness? This is where fire also becomes a symbol. You can think about every big historical human event, every rupture, every revolution almost as a kind of burning away of something and then a renewal. My video, Songs for living [2021], and also the last two painting exhibitions, dealt specifically with the idea of the Phoenix, the mythological bird that is on fire and turns back into ash. You can imagine the ash gathering on the ground, which is almost like this space of death. And in that thinking, the Phoenix is sort of what people gather and pray to. It becomes this hope for utopia.

OK The burned dollhouses and the mix of soil on the ground in your recent show at Clearing Gallery were these beautiful symbols of fire and renewal.

KA In a sense, fire becomes this subject for me to think through narratives and storytelling. Thinking about protests and revolution, or even praying, people gather and burn things. Literally or not, often there’s some kind of promise of utopia after. And most of the time, that promise is never fulfilled, or maybe it is for a limited amount of time, and then it changes. And that also connects to the cycle of the Phoenix, the idea of the Phoenix turning to ash and rising again, and then extinguishing again. It’s almost like the cycle or spirit of revolutions. It starts, finishes, and goes back again. And when you witness a fire, it’s durational. It can never be held for long. It’s like a burning passion, the burning of the materials, the fire will lose energy and turn to ash again, which is kind of like a death.

↑ Korakrit Arunanondchai

“Songs for Living”, still from video, Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic, 2021 courtesy of the artist and Clearing

→ (Next page) Korakrit Arunanondchai, From Air to Fire, 2023

Acrylic polymer on metallic foil on denim on inkjet print on canvas

94 x 70 inches (238.8 x 177.8 cm) courtesy of the artist and Clearing

In Buddhism, fire is very symbolic. There’s the fire sermon. Can you talk about that aspect in terms of your work, that Buddhist spirituality?

KA The Buddhism I experienced growing up was very animistic. My father's side of the family migrated from China, so once a year we would burn these paper objects, like paper money. The idea is that these paper objects would transform into actual money on the other side. The idea of fire transforming a wish into an actual physical object in the afterlife is really interesting. Or in a Buddhist funeral, fire returns the material of the body to the earth. In some versions of Buddhism, the mind and the body are separated through the process of burning. The body remains in the physical realm while the mind goes into the spiritual realm.

OK Human consciousness lives on but the remains stay on Earth.

KA Yes, and something about the not broken, nor fulfilled promise I mentioned earlier is really interesting. Our limits of knowing end at this ceremonial fire. What I’m interested in with my work, and even the things I research, is the border between where you can know something and where it becomes a collective belief system. And within that system, where people start to gather around this negative unknowing space, we don't actually know how that negative space could affect us. It could affect historical structures, social structures, and even how we feel in the present. There’s a lot of collective subjectivity that could be open to mistranslation. When I think about religion, I think a lot about the propaganda of how they try to shape this story using whatever means are necessary to support that belief system. That kind of corruption and mistranslation is really interesting to me.

OK In a sense, this connects to the dollhouses that were on view at your show in LA, which your mom initially made, and then you ceremonially burned and turned into these spirit houses.

KA My mom worked at a wooden toy company that designed Western dollhouses. It's interesting because they were made in Thailand for Thai people, and it was already anachronistic when she was making them. But she kept a few of the houses she made, and they were in bad shape. I liked the idea of turning these Western dollhouses into Thai spirit houses. And what’s interesting about the spirit houses, in general, is that every culture has the idea of creating this miniature enclosure after death, from the pharaonic tombs to Philippine burial traditions. And in the Thai spirit house, which more closely resembles Hindu animism, but looks and feels like Thai Buddhism through the language, the spirit inside is a non-human spirit and the house is more like a portal. Usually, the spirit would be offered an object, like a piece of bark, and then you buy all these different statues, which become like servants for the spirit. So, it’s like a mini mansion. But when you get into the realm of land ownership, you have to realize that the land has a more powerful spiritual owner. So, when you buy a building in Thailand, it will come with a spirit house, which you inherit. And the actual deed and the spiritual deed work together. But these individual, personal, or local belief systems often contend with larger sociopolitical forces, like the forces of colonization, or the state, or gentrification, or military power. You see it all the time. When a big developer buys land, there’s this fear of displeasing the spirits. And then, the spirit house becomes this site where people have to pray all the time, so nothing bad happens. It’s the idea that spirits have the power to negotiate with the powers of statecraft or capitalism.

OK I mean, your work deals with a lot of these colonial battles between East and West, and spirits become players in this battle. For instance, you’ve explored the tradition of the ghost cinema in Thailand, where monks would watch movies with spirits. Can you talk about those ideas a bit?

KA Growing up in that culture, the ghost becomes almost like a medium, or a metaphor. Most of the time, it doesn't actually refer to the spirits of dead people. The ghosts are a placeholder for a non-human subject that can possess or influence. In certain videos of mine, the ghosts become stand-ins for the power and organizing structures of the hegemonic system in Thailand, which are the military, the royal family, and religion. Or the ghost can be a cross between American hard power and soft power, which has this unique ability to influence. By making these things a ghost and turning it into a story, in a writerly sense, I can give a voice to it, and its own subjectivity. I think the same thing is going on in the process of god-making myths. And the thing about the ghost cinema that is really interesting is the idea that gathering around a fire has at some point turned into gathering around the screen. Animism always crafts its own storytelling power from this far, unreachable past, this mystical time. The time of giants or gods, or whatever. If you think about science fiction, it always points towards this far distant future, and both distant past and far future feel like a utopia for me. So, what’s interesting about the ghost cinema is that it’s using a light-projecting machine and some sound to hack, simulate, or borrow the power of the unknown and replace it in the actual present—not the far future or past. The monks that projected these movies on these temple walls were literally showing movies to ghosts. First of all, it’s interesting that ghosts would like to watch movies, similar to how spirits in the ground would like to live in a nice, decked out house with servants (laughs). It's the same impulse. Secondly, you have people come watch movies with the ghosts and it physicalizes or anthropomorphizes this idea of a group or committee, which is people watching a movie together. Somehow, it’s as powerful as reenacting a ritual. And, I guess the reason why monks chose to do this in the first place is that it was economical—instead of building a whole temple or shrine. And the more rituals there are, the bigger the religion becomes, and the place where the religion is practiced becomes more sacred. It’s like a PR machine. OK Cinema as a ritual has a big place in your work as well. KA I forgot who said this, but you know when you remember a dream, or a distant powerful memory, it’s almost like a metaphor for possession. It's like something possesses you enough to linger and stay and change. And there’s something about the invention of the cinematic black box, the theater, where you go into a space and lose this sense of body. You join an almost collective possession as you watch a movie with an audience. And what that does to personal time, the idea of breaking time—how it can kind of compress, expand, and cut time. A few minutes could feel like a few hours, a lifetime could be a few minutes. This is a really powerful form. I started making videos, seriously, in grad school when I got a DSLR camera. They became cheap enough to buy and easy enough to use. And then, when my grandfather started losing his short-term memory due to Alzheimer's, making videos almost became about making time. But more so, it was creating an activity to do together. I would film him and then afterward, having this documentation that I could edit and use as creative material became like a ghost I could talk to. I could personally open up another space or world where I could talk to him—because I couldn’t talk to him in real life anymore. And maybe this goes back to the theme of utopia—film as a medium becomes a wish in a way.

Time is an interesting element in your work. Not only in the ‘history paintings,’ but also there's this clash between anthropological and cosmological time. When did you become interested in time as a medium?

KA I think the best way to answer this is to tell you how I first came up with the ‘history paintings.’ I have been making them for ten-plus years now, but I think in the beginning I was struggling between having ideas and embodying them in the process, and then making an artwork out of these ideas. A lot of my regrets had to do with failures and mistakes, which had to do with the limitedness in materials, the limitedness in scale, and being really disappointed with the results of my idea. Back then, I was working a lot in the digital sphere with Photoshop, which is a painting tool built on the idea of Western painting. There’s the color palette and the brush tool, and then, of course, the layers, transparency, and light. All of this is through the screen in a simulated space. So, there are many impossibilities in the physical world that are possible in Photoshop. I was always going back and forth between digital painting and physical painting and trying to link the two, which wasn't that successful. But one of the tools that I really liked was the history brush; a tool where you can selectively take things back. There was the idea that in the digital painting life, I can live in a different way with fewer regrets knowing that nothing is really precious. And I was always trying to find that feeling with physical painting. I was trying to find what my history brush would be. And then, I started painting my own abstractions. I thought about bleached denim as everyone's abstraction, almost like a Rorschach test or generalized abstract form. It’s like fire in a way, because it looks a certain way, but it almost looks like nothing—it’s a total abstraction. Even denim has these links to an authentic American identity—it’s sort of homogenizing. And then, when fire burns something into ash, the ash could be from different materials, like a person, a book, a tree, but in the end, all ash is the same and there’s this point where everything, even us, becomes unclassifiable.

OK We become carbonized.

KA I think that fire and the digital recreation of fire became the physicalization of the history brush. I would make a painting for a while and then I would burn it, and in the moment of burning it, you destroy this precious thing. All the labor, action, thought, gets burned away forever. And what you have left to hold becomes these digital files of the process. And then, I started to follow the same thought process with my video work.

OK The idea of controlling time or being able to control human time is really interesting.

KA But in the end, it's kind of like not being able to hold onto it. It's almost the same relationship to praying or to ritual. Even something as profane as going to a concert or having any experience that could actually be impactful or powerful. It could have had a major impact, but the things that you held onto are these vague memories. It’s like the movie as a memory, or the dream as a memory of itself.

OK So, we talked a little bit about distant time, past and future, but do you think that utopia is possible in the present?

KA I think we need to break the way we, as individuals or collectives, form the idea of utopias. I think you can be most sincere about something when you also express doubt about it. It’s like knowing something isn't real, but you're also still able to believe in it. There’s that extra part that makes you believe enough to hold space for it. For me, that's what makes utopia possible. Particularly in a collective sense, when you're able to join in and do that activity together while holding on to both the wish and the doubt,

it’s sort of like holding the positive space and the negative space of something at the same time. I'm interested in that edge, that minimal point where a collective group of people can still hold on to the idea of something or believe in a story. That’s what my work explores—how these corrupted ideas of utopias travel back, either through the regime of statecraft storytelling or different people telling these stories. From that, what do you choose to believe or hold on to? What can you still believe in? I think if you can, that is a utopic vision of the future.

↑ Korakrit Arunanondchai, eye, 2019 Acrylic and inkjet transfer on canvas 6 1/4 × 8 1/2 inches (16 x 22 cm) courtesy of the artist and Clearing

↗ Korakrit Arunanondchai, Shore of Security, 2022 Repurposed wooden doll house made by the artist’s mother, wood, house paint, polyurethane, fabric sculpture, ceramics, snake skeleton, LED lights 30 x 29 1/4 x 29 1/4 inches (76.2 x 74.3 x 74.3 cm) courtesy of the artist and Clearing

by

NanGoldin Mark

Mahoney

Photography and interview

by Nan Goldin

With the aura of a gritty, but warm benediction, legendary tattoo artist Mark Mahoney sounds and looks like a gangster angel that landed on the Sunset Strip. Priestly with high cheekbones, electric blue eyes, tailored suits, handmade Italian shoes, and a perfect pompadour, Mahoney’s shangri-la is Shamrock Social Club; one of the last true Irish tattoo parlors. Mahoney got his start tattooing the Hell’s Angels in Boston. Today, he is one of the world's most famous living tattoo artists. He was responsible for popularizing fine line tattooing, the black and grey style that originated within the Mexican gangs of East Los Angeles. Photographer and artist Nan Goldin met Mahoney in art school when they were just kids. Some of her earliest photographs are of the young tattoo artist: young, free, piercing skin with ink and riding around in cars. They have been friends for over forty years. Mahoney inked Goldin’s first tattoo. On a grey day in Los Angeles after the Oscars, where Goldin’s documentary All The Beauty & the Bloodshed (2022) was nominated, she caught up with Mahoney for an intimate interview and a new document of portraits.

Nan Goldin Did you learn anything in art school?

Mark Mahoney Zero. I just remember these two lesbian drawing teachers—they described themselves on the first day, one of them was like, “I like earth tones and natural fabrics.” And I’m sitting there in shark skin and pointy-toed shoes and I’m like, fuck, we’re off to a bad start. And then, they asked us to draw flowers. So, I went home and drew, you know, flowers. And I come back and she's like, “No, I want you to draw how flowers smell, not how they look like.”

NG So you came to only a few classes?

MM I came to only a few classes and then all the cool kids were going to New York. I went with you guys.

NG You went earlier than me, with David [Armstrong] and Bruce I think. I came a year later. And Cookie [Mueller] and Sharon [Neisp] came around the same time.

MM Yeah, yeah. Was it before you went?

MM It wasn't much before.

NG Were you tattooing in New York? You didn't have a parlor, though, right? It was still illegal to tattoo.

MM Yeah. I worked at people's houses. I worked in the Chelsea Hotel quite a few times. I'm going to tattoo you again at the new Chelsea when I do my residency, which I'm excited about. You are going to be the first person I tattoo.

NG I love that idea.

MM Returning to the scene of the crime.

NG And so, when did you move to LA?

MM 1980.

NG What was the name of the guy who was doing fine line tattoos? Who moved to Hawaii.

MM [Don] Ed Hardy.

NG What happened to him?

MM You know, they made that ugly clothing line with his name, they licensed it. It was supposed to just be t-shirts, but they started making everything else. So, he had to sue the guy who licensed his name and he ended up getting a ton of money.

NG Good. Did you work with him when you first came up?

MM Yeah, I did. He changed the game.

NG He was the first fine line tattooer.

MM He encouraged it. He was more into color, but when they sold the shop where black and grey [tattooing] started, he bought it so that Freddy [Negrete], Jack [Rudy], and I would have a place to work.

NG So good! Freddy's been with you all this time?

MM On and off, you know. Freddy, how about that? A famous Mexican gangster tattooer. And then, when he wanted to get clean, he asked me to help him. And the only in I had was at this Jewish rehab, Beit T'Shuvah. A guy I tattoo was the intake manager. I'm like, “You gotta do me a favor, you gotta get Freddy in.” And he goes, “Mark, this is a Jewish rehab.” I'm like, “Don't worry, Freddy’s Jewish as a motherfucker. Let him in. Let him in.” (laughs) And you know, he finally broke down. And he did let him in. But, it turns out Freddy's mom was Jewish from when East LA was transitioning from a Jewish neighborhood to a Mexican neighborhood. So, his dad was a pachucos zoot suiter and his mom was a nice Jewish girl from East LA. He got totally into it. And he got Bar Mitzvahed.

NG Now that's a beautiful story. But you know, it's against the Jewish religion to be tattooed. You can't go out of the world with anything that you didn't come in with or something.

MM I think the jury is still out on that.

NG I came to film the people at Beit T'Shuvah like four or five years ago.

MM You did? That’s crazy. (laughs)

NG Yeah. We were filming with a cameraman who was pure German. He had never probably met a Jew and he was going to the Passover Seder play—they did one of those. He had no idea what he was looking at. It defined corny.

MM I think the rabbi is an ex-convict too.

NG Yeah he was wild. Is the place still there?

MM Yep. It actually helped a lot of people, man.

NG A year and a half before Laura Poitras was on board as the director, when I first started this movie, we shot our own movie. But we couldn't get any money. Then Laura came on and we shot All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. But at the beginning of the movie, we were looking for radical approaches to sobriety.

Oliver Kupper How did you guys meet originally?

NG We were at art school together. It was me and David and Mark, and Kimberly, and Bruce.

MM We would drink beer and drive around in cars.

NG That's what we did. We sat on suburban lawns, drank beer, and drove around in cars. Sometimes with the teachers. That was art school. And I lived with Mark’s sister for a while in Cambridge.

MM It was great fun. You know, something I remember about living in New York, man, we'd go to three great gigs a night and then we'd go to the Mudd Club afterward, but you could never say you were having a good time. You had to say, “Oh, I'm so depressed. It sucks.” (laughs) And in retrospect, we were having a ball. Right?

NG No, we didn't have to say we were depressed. We just had to act like it.

MM But I don't ever remember someone saying, “This is so much fun, ain’t this cool.” (laughs)

NG It's true. I never thought of that (laughs). We missed our happy days.

MM Yeah, right.

NG Well, we’re picking up where we left off.

MM That's a good line. We missed our happy days. I think it's absolutely true.

NG We're having our happy days now.

MM Right? I think that's why we're happy. Yeah. Happy enough. We’re cherishing in a way we didn't really then.

NG So, did you come out to LA with Bruce?

MM No, I came out with this girl from high school. We drove out and I went to the tattoo shop the first day. I asked them for a job. They said, “Well, bring someone down tomorrow and tattoo them. And if it works out good, we'll give you a job.” So, my friend who lived out here was in the Merchant Marines, he didn't have any tattoos. I told him, “You're getting a fucking tattoo.” So, I brought him down, and I did a little tattoo on him, and I got the job.

NG Wow. The second day you were here. And were you living with Bruce?

MM We lived together in San Pedro for a while, yeah. We had a cool house. It was crazy.

NG Was David here too?

MM Yeah, yeah. They came out together with the monkey, Joseph, who died en route. They went to a Pizza Hut in Mississippi and left him in the car with the windows rolled up.

NG Oh, Jesus. Do you remember going to my parent's house?

MM And the monkey got loose?

NG Joseph escaped to the backyard and we had to call the zoo to come … no, the fire department. He wasn't coming back. And my parents were out of town and we were having too much fun in our house.

MM Wild. I didn't think we would ever get him out of that tree.

NG I found a good picture. It's Bruce with the monkey.

OK Nan, can you talk about your first tattoo experience with Mark?

NG Yeah, that was at Bruce's house on Elizabeth Street. There's pictures of it. I'm high as a kite. Happy as hell. Laying down on the bed with a beer in my hand. The first tattoo was a bleeding heart on my ankle.

MM Yeah, like a sacred heart.

NG I collected sacred hearts.

MM And the ankle sucks. It hurts.

NG Yeah, it's not doing so well.

MM We could redo it someday. Clean it up. You've earned that shit.

OK So Mark, how long were you in New York between Boston and Los Angeles?

MM A few years. I went back and forth to Boston and worked on the Hell's Angels.

OK Tell me about that experience. Working with biker gangs.

MM You know what, I look back on that now, those guys were so nice to me. I was so lucky. I think they were happy they didn't have to drive to Rhode Island and they liked that I could draw whatever they wanted on 'em, and I'd go to the clubhouse and have a ball. Yeah. That was wild. That was cool.

OK Did that experience inspire you to open your own social club?

MM You know, when you’d go to tattoo shops in the old days, you'd go to Rhode Island and the guys were just mean, man. I remember asking a guy like this if there was a school for tattooing. And he said [imitating a growling voice], “Yeah, reform school.” There was this veil of secrecy around the tattoo world. It’s impenetrable. But I told myself that if I ever have a shop, you know, I want people to be nice to people. And that's why I call it the social club. It’s okay to socialize.

OK I feel like you've developed your own sort of countercultural shangri-la. Can you talk a little bit about that, and what your personal definition of utopia is?

MM Well, I have been wanting to get Nan to move out here for a very long time because I know that the sunshine and California has been good for my mental health. You know what I mean? My mother had depression in that fuckin’ grey Boston weather. She said the Irish are given to the melancholy and I think that's true. But being in the sunshine, being in LA, it’s utopia to me. And I think Nan would thrive out here. I think she would be directing two movies a year and saying no to ten other ones.

NG Jews are given to depression, too. There are two different kinds of guilt. Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt. I like Catholic guilt better than Jewish guilt. It’s more concrete and the imagery is beautiful. The Jewish guilt is endless.

MM When you’re Catholic, you can go to confession and all your sins are forgiven.

NG And if you’re Jewish you go to a Jewish psychiatrist and never get forgiven.

OK Nan, what's your personal definition of utopia?

NG Utopia evades me. I'm a very dark person. My last show was called, This Will Not End Well. It's a major career retrospective, you know, being sixty-nine and saying, “This will not end well,” it says a lot. I mean, if I could, I would have my friends back. That would be utopian to me. All my friends and the way I feel now. The way I relate to people now with them alive as opposed to being young and an insecure person and all that. So, the way I feel now with them alive, that would be utopia.

MM There’s that cherishing thing again. That’s really good.

NG And maybe we'll meet them on the other side.

Photo assistance by Pat Martin

Scent Memory

↑ Manuel Solano, Charlotte Gainsbourg, 2022. Painting, acrylic on canvas 150 x 110 cm (59 x 43 in) Courtesy Peres Projects

Diana Widmaier Picasso & Manuel Solano & Rodrigo Garcia

(inConversation)

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death and influence on art history, nearly fifty exhibitions have been organized globally by the Spanish and French ministries of culture. Writer, curator, and the artist’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, recently collaborated with Rodrigo Garcia, founder of Amen Candles on a series of fragrances inspired by four black-and-white Picasso drawings. They speak with artist Manuel Solano, a trans visual artist who lost her sight in 2014 due to an HIV-related illness about the potency of sense memory, love letters, and the power of mycelium in a potential world without plastic.

Diana Widmaier Picasso I was looking at your recent work and there's a portrait of a friend of mine, Charlotte Gainsbourg. It's really wonderful.

Manuel Solano Oh, I love her. That portrait was important for me because right before I became blind, I started making more cartoon caricature drawings, very quick sketches of actresses, and I made one of Charlotte Gainsbourg. I had just seen Melancholia [2011] and I was really captivated by the movement in this scene where she's walking. So, last year I decided to make a painting in memory of that drawing.

Rodrigo Garcia Since you mentioned this memory of Charlotte, I would love to know what memories come to mind when you think of a Picasso painting?

MS I had my primary education in a Northern suburb of Mexico City. It was a bit like a cult and it was in the Montessori system. It was tucked away in a very woodsy area—a beautiful environment to grow up with a small group of kids in the forest. But, unfortunately, the woman who ran this place had something personally against my best friend and me. So, she had us separated when we were little. She had this studio where she would repeatedly call me up in private to sit on the floor and make me look up into her eyes. And she said she could see that I was still under the influence of a negative, evil leader. That's what she said my best friend was. This went on for years, and the logo for the school was Picasso’s Dove of Peace [1949]. It was everywhere at school. We wore it on our t-shirts. And I even made work about this and the symbology of the white dove later on as an adult. Years later, in art school, Picasso of course, was a recurrent theme. We had this painting teacher in my first year. It was supposed to be an atelier course, but instead he made us sit down in a circle around him. He didn't like it if we spoke or went to the bathroom. He didn't like it if we moved. His method for teaching us how to paint was to show us this big book with thousands of Picasso images. He would turn the pages slowly, pointing out that we would never be like this. All of this is to say that, unfortunately, Picasso and I haven't had a very good connection, but I don't think it's either of our faults.

Summer Bowie Rodrigo, how did you and Diana meet, and how did the Amen Picasso collaboration come about?

RG Diana and I met when I did this art installation, "Mushroom Conversations," at Dover Street Market in 2020 with mirrors and blocks of growing mushrooms, which is the material we use for our packaging. She mentioned that Pablo never used plastics across all his work. At the time, she was curating an exhibition of paintings called Maya Ruiz-Picasso, fille de Pablo. We thought this was an amazing opportunity to share the "no plastics" manifesto at museums around the world. When you received the candles, did you feel the packaging?

MS Yeah, the mycelium. I like the way it feels a lot. As it becomes older, it acquires a very interesting texture. It feels almost like fur.

RG It's like velvet, exactly. We grow the mycelium, which is the root of the mushrooms—it's the beginning and the end of life—and each package takes one week to be done by hand. I'm very happy that you kept it and felt it in the studio because each of them is unique. Some of them have more of a velvet structure, and they can even grow after we ship them, which is amazing. But, tell me about how you liked the candle scents.

MS You sent me the amber and the jasmine. And they also have notes of vanilla, I think. It smells almost like a cake in front of me, and I would maybe put my finger in the frosting, and lick it, which is nice, but I don't know if I could eat the cake. I’m

Interview by Summer Bowie

Portrait by Vincent Wechselberger

Styling by Camille Ange Pailler

Makeup by Lee Hyangsoon

Sia Arnika nylon jacket and Our Legacy transparent top

more of a dry martini with an olive person. I've always loved jasmine tea, though. I have very old memories of drinking jasmine tea with my mom and dad in a Chinese restaurant back home. Jasmine also has a special connection to the place where my dad is from. I don't think it's a native plant in the region, but a lot of "huele de noche" [night-blooming jasmine] grows there.

RG Diana, how did you come across the letter by Picasso, which became the inspiration for this jasmine candle?

DWP I first saw the letter when my mother organized an exhibition in Japan and felt the need to give an intimate context to her collection of drawings that were about her mother, Marie-Thérèse, her father, and herself, Maya-Ruiz. When they met in 1927, it was a very private relationship because he was married, so they started by exchanging a lot of letters. There's a lot of reference to jasmine in these letters because it was one of my grandmother's favorite scents. And just like in the paintings, she's also likened to the moon, the sun, and to rhododendrons, a symbol of fertility.

MS Ah, that's lovely.

DWP It's also very significant because 1935 was the year that Picasso stopped painting for a few months in order to devote his life to writing poetry. In the letter he says, "You are always on me, Marie-Thérèse, mother of sparkling perfumes pungent with star jasmines."

SB Are there certain fragrances that each of you are very attracted to and others that you have aversions toward?

RG For me, fragrances are like music. I like to use eucalyptus, for example, in the bathtub. And then, something more like sandalwood when I want to get into a meditative state of mind, and maybe vetiver to ground. I like jasmine when it's more of a festive or celebratory moment. It's just like music. Sometimes the Sex Pistols can annoy you, and sometimes they can bring you to an amazing energetic state of mind that you're looking for. Fragrance has the same power. So, there isn't one that I love or hate, but it is about the state of mind that I want to get myself into. Scent is something that brings you to the present moment like nothing else.

MS What about you, Diana? What's your relationship to fragrance?

DWP I also change. It usually depends on my mood and on the season.

MS I have a very clear recollection of the way my grandfather smelled. He died when I was six years old, and I don't know what fragrance he wore, but it was very common. I had a boyfriend one time who came back from Christmas smelling like this. We hadn't seen each other in two or three weeks, and when he held me in his arms, immediately I pulled away, and I'm like, "You're wearing a new fragrance?" And he said, "Yeah. Do you like it?" And I'm like, "Mm, I don't know” (laughs). I can only associate it with an older man. I'm drawn to fragrances that are very neutral and atmospheric. I love the smell of rain—the bark of trees after it rains, the collection of smells after it rains in a city. I come from Mexico City where it's super rainy in the summer, and I was born on July 1st, so I used to love going out for a walk by myself around the neighborhood on my birthday just to smell the wet trees and asphalt. I usually go for fragrances that convey more of a climate than a flavor or specific ingredient. If I could combine the smell of wet soil with vapor and something pungent, but not sour, like grass, maybe vetiver and combine it with something very human. For example, I was wearing a fragrance a few months

ago that I had never worn, and I found it a little too pink, a little too girly. But I put it on, and then went to a party. The next day, I took a shower, but I didn't wash my hair because I was going to a party the next night, and in Berlin, you don't want to wash your hair before you go to a party. At some point before the party, I took my hair down, and as it fell I could smell some of the remnants of that fragrance that I had worn two days before with the smell of my own hair, and the smell of the wet, grey day outside. That felt very accurate.

RG You had your sight until you were twenty-six and you describe that fragrance as very pink. How would you describe pink to someone who has always been blind?

MS I would show him that fragrance and maybe make him touch very tender skin, the inside of somebody's elbow or biceps where it meets the armpit. It smelled like if I was a mom, and my kids were going to Montessori school, and I drove a big van. That's what I would wear. It's a very light fragrance, just maybe not as playful or gender-neutral as I would like it.

SB What I find interesting about the candles that you sent to Manuel is that they were based on Picasso works that are black and white. What was it about those pieces in particular that felt like they lent themselves to specific fragrances?

DWP I thought it was very sensitive that Rodrigo chose a particular moment in Picasso's life when he felt a big, passionate love for my grandmother. And for Picasso, it was a big subject, the black and whites. Some might think, it's like a drawing. It's unfinished. But for him, it's even more important. Like, Guernica [1937] is also black and white—it’s in neutral colors. So, I thought it was a particularly interesting choice because he chose some very intimate works.

RG It all started with a 1927 figure painting that inspired the whole direction. She showed me the “MT” written on his piece Guitare à la main blanche, and told me about the love letter from Pablo to Marie-Thérèse, who is referenced as MT on the painting. And there's also a more metaphysical interpretation that you describe in your book Picasso sorcier [2022], Diana.

DWP Yes. It's not only the works of art that were important, but I wanted to go back to the very essence and personality of Picasso—the way he was attached to both superstition and religion. I wanted to get closer to the man and his love affair with my grandmother. So in a way, the candle is a perfect result of the works of art mixed with the sensuality of this love affair. The other candle that I also have in mind is a photograph I have at home of candles by Nan Goldin [Fatima Candles, Portugal (1999)]. The object of a candle is so poetic. It's like death. It turns out that my mother died on the last day of the exhibition, just a few weeks ago. So, everything is full of meaning.

SB And why did you choose amber for Nu couché [1932]?

RG Diana wrote a book called Picasso: Art Can Only Be Erotic [2005]. So, there had to be a more sensual candle and the answer for that scent was amber.

MS I'm smelling them now, and I have to say, the jasmine feels more like an object, and the amber feels more like a being, a person maybe. So yeah, it makes sense that you associated it with Nu couché.

RG How would you describe the Nu couché painting to Manuel, Diana?

DWP Well, it talks about a beautiful landscape. And what is interesting about that period is that it's very cosmic, a lot of

association of the feminine with the masculine, and with the animal, and of the earth, and the sea. It's a very poetic period where Picasso is reading a lot of surrealist poetry. So, that's what I see in Nu couché.

SB Diana, you’ve been working on Picasso’s catalogue raisonné of sculpture for quite some time now. Do you know yet when it will be available to the public?

DWP Well, it sounds crazy. I've been working for eighteen years on it and I'm still not finished. When you talk about a catalogue raisonné, it's about the artistic process. So in a way, it can take a lifetime to understand one's artistic process. It'll probably be done online because that allows you a deeper understanding of the work than the traditional paper catalogue raisonné. But, you know, Pierre Rosenberg, the former director of the Louvre, has been working on Nicolas Poussin’s catalogue raisonné, and after thirty years, he's finally publishing it. So, I have good hopes that in the next ten years, I can finalize it. (laughs)

RG How many pieces are included in this catalogue?

DWP Two thousand.

SB This issue is all about utopia and, Manuel, I feel like there's a certain hope conveyed in your choice to paint. What inspired you to continue your work as a visual artist in spite of your loss of sight?

→ Pablo Picasso, Nu couché, 1932 Charcoal on canvas, 97 x 130 cm. Private collection © Private Collection / Photo Béatrice Hatala

↘ Pablo Picasso, Guitare à la main blanche Paris, 1927, Oil and charcoal on canvas 27 x 35 cm. Private collection © Private Collection / Photo Béatrice Hatala

↑ Manuel Solano, Pilates, 2021 Painting, Acrylic on canvas

215 x 250 cm (85 x 98 in)

Courtesy Peres Projects

MS Well, I can't know the answer exactly to that question, but I think maybe it was a combination of impulse and my sense of humor. I can only make art that is, on some level funny to me. When I became sick, I started seeing that. I started making these other works I couldn't find a good reason for making—these funny drawings of Uma Thurman or Charlotte Gainsbourg, or painting the cover of a cassette tape I had growing up. These are all things that seemed irrelevant having been in art school. Then suddenly, I saw that the very fact that I am able to see parts of myself and my desires in these things that I'm portraying, that is what makes my work. And when I became blind, it was a very painful experience, of course, but I realized that that impulse was still there.

SB You employ so many interesting techniques that help you to make these very scrutable, representational works. Were there techniques that you developed before losing your sight that you held onto? Or did you have to develop completely new ones?

MS Yes and no. The techniques that make it possible for me to make representational paintings, I developed those after I became blind. But, I would say there's another more important manual skill that was triggered in part by this performance by David Hoyle. I saw that I could use my sense of humor and my sense of taste to sharpen and polish the things that I put in my work. So, even if I'm making a painting that is not very well done, or it is not very accurately portraying somebody, it still is a faithful synthesis of this thing that I'm portraying. I learned from that video that I needed to trust my instinct and not let other art, or teachers, or circumstances tell me that this isn't valid. If it's interesting to me, if it catches my artistic inspiration, it already means it's valid. I just need to be aware of my own taste and desires, and sense of humor.

DWP I was intrigued to read that you were not so interested in going to the obvious—making sculptures—that you prefer to pursue traditional paintings. Do you see yourself ever exploring different techniques, like sculpture?

MS Yes. I actually have been experimenting with sculpture for about a year now, but I haven't finished any of them. A few years ago, I was invited to a group show at the Palais de Tokyo and I wanted to reference the time that I studied for one semester at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where I saw several sculptures by François Ponpon. He made these beautiful, minimalist sculptures of animals, and I thought he captured the movement of animals brilliantly. So, I ended up making three sculptures of dinosaurs, but in the same manner that François Ponpon used to portray birds. It's very satisfying to be able to make something that I can shape and get to know with my hands, but it's very time consuming and my sculptures grow little by little, almost like a living animal. There are pieces in my studio that I've been working on for over a year, and they're still not even halfway finished. At this point, it's more a therapeutic activity for me than an active part of my practice. But, I do wish in the future that I can include sculpture more in my work.

DWP I think for Picasso, it was really the essence of his work. It helped him to shape the whole body of work.

SB I'm curious if there are any technological advances, either imagined or already developed, that you each would like to aid in your life and your work? And what are your greatest hopes for the future impact of the work that you're doing individually?

DWP The exhibition I did was an occasion to invite a lot of children

and people from all walks of life within France to experience Picasso's work because art is still a very closed circle. I want to use my name and my passion for art to do more in the field of art and education for the underprivileged.

RG I do believe that we can live in a world without plastics, and I will keep fighting until that happens. Solving climate change is much more difficult because it involves many political factors, but a world without plastics is only economical. If there were subsidies for biodegradable alternatives and plastic solutions became more expensive through taxes and regulations, these alternatives would easily become more affordable. I have been an activist for a world without plastics for almost three years, and my aim has always been to realize this dream within ten years. I want to share this message to the younger generations that we shouldn't assume that we need to live around plastics because this option didn't even exist a hundred years ago.

MS This is not so much about my work, but it's been a big change in my life recently that I'm going out more and I'm being more intrepid with my nightlife. Berlin is a really great place to do that. Because I'm blind, I used to feel that I needed to be with my friends all the time at a party. But in the last couple of months, I've been trying to be more independent and spend more time alone exploring the dance floor and the party. Walking canes are traditionally white so that they're easier to spot. However, because I wanted to feel very alternative and cool, a couple of years ago, I got one that is metallic black, which sounds really cool, but in a nightclub, it's not very visible. I realized recently that using my white cane when moving around the club is useful because it shows other people that I am blind, and that way, if somebody wants to talk to me, they know that they need to either speak really loudly to me, or put their hand over my shoulder, or touch my hand. And then I thought, well, what if I could have a white cane that flashes now and then? Then everybody would see it. People probably wouldn't know what it is, though. I know that's not about my work, but it’s been a very interesting experience to have some independence in my nightlife.

RG I wanted to ask Manuel, what do you think could be done to make museums and gallery experiences more friendly for the visually impaired?

MS That's a very good question. However, I've been living in Berlin for three and a half years now and I haven't been to a single museum. I just never even think of going. So, as a blind person, I'm not very familiar with how accessible or not a museum can be, but I'm interested in experiencing something tactile and interactive, sculptures that I can touch, or an art installation that makes sound would be more fulfilling to me than standing there and hearing a description of which colors this canvas has. Or if anything, I would like to hear the story of why the painter made this painting. In my own work, the story behind each painting is always the main ingredient. Often, when I travel somewhere new, people tell me, "Oh, you should visit this museum. There's the opening of this show at this gallery.” Or, “You should meet this artist." And I'm often wondering where's the food? Where’s the party? Where's the live music? But it's never a conscious decision. It's just my character, I guess.

DWP You know, at the Neue Museum in Berlin, they have a bronze replica of Nefertiti for the blind that you can touch. So, maybe when I next come to Berlin, I’ll bring you there.

MS Yeah, let's do that. I used to love that Nefertiti bust.

Architecture

A conversation with Javier Senosiain and curator Dakin Hart

Photography by Olivia Lopez

Interview by Oliver Kupper

asa Orgánica is a romantic elegy to living in harmony with the natural world and natural forms. Built by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain in 1985, the house is located in Naucalpan de Juarez, a stone’s throw from Mexico

City. Senosiain’s architectural philosophy was to build a home that more closely resembled the habitats of animals and prehistoric humans: a cave, a womb, a snail’s shell, an igloo. Sinuous earth-tone tunnels lead to different living chambers, giving the feeling of entering the earth. From the exterior,

the domicile is barely visible through layers of grass, trees, shrubs and flowers, which, by evopotranspiration, produce oxygen, reject pollution, and filter dust and carbon dioxide, creating a unique microclimate. The house and work of Senosiain were recently featured in a landmark exhibition at The

Oliver Kupper We should start with the connection between utopia and organic architecture.

Dakin Hart One of the interesting things about organic architecture for me, is that to some extent, it offers a path back to Eden. It suggests an entirely alternative family tree of development—of the idea of how we live on the planet—that could have departed from the one that we’ve ended up on very early in human history. So, it’s nice to think about following it backwards the way that Javier does in his scholarship, and if you think about utopia as an umbrella category for a way of living that we might recapture, one that has different characteristics and a different value set, that seems really interesting to me.

Javier Senosiain In the case of organic architecture, I believe that utopia could be a reality.

OK The exhibition catalog goes back to the original cave dwellings, which is the prehistoric idea of organic architecture.

DH Every time modern architecture has tried to address the idea of utopia, it runs into such trouble because the version of abstraction that it leans on is mathematical. And that doesn’t really have to do with life, it has to do with a kind of pure notion of what life could be or should be. Maybe it’s fundamentally religious or spiritual too, which is also highly problematic because it gives it this messianic quality. Organic architecture potentially offers a salve to that.

Natalia Senosiain Modern architecture involves a lot of technology. When you think of sci-fi movies, it’s all about technology and not really about humans.

DH Right. The closer we can get to stainless steel, the better everything will be is sort of the premise of modern, International Style, architecture. Javier, what kind of utopia do you think organic architecture could build in contrast to something like the Corbusian notion of utopia, which is total uniformity, total cleanliness, total purity.

JS We are in a very difficult world situation now, mostly because of climate change, and to solve really big issues, we need big solutions. Corbusier used to say that the house is a “machine

Noguchi Museum,

entitled

Praise of Caves, which was organized by Ricardo Suárez Haro and curated by Dakin Hart. Alongside projects by Mexican architect Carlos Lazo, Mathias Goeritz, and Juan O’Gorman, the exhibition was a metaphor for reexamining how we live on planet Earth.

In

for living.” That statement doesn’t really apply anymore, it would be better if we thought of the house as the nature of living. Maybe going back to our origins can take us closer to utopia, even if it sounds weird.

OK I’m curious about how the exhibition came to be, how it was curated based on Javier’s work, and why the Noguchi Museum?

DH Ricardo Haro was thinking about this lineage of organic architecture that Javier has invested so much of his life and career in, in terms of scholarship and practice. And I think he just intuitively recognized that this group of artists could work really well at the Noguchi Museum. So, Ricardo just sent us an email out of the blue in 2018, and part of what we do with these exhibitions at the Noguchi Museum is we try to treat the museum like nature. We treat it like a park or a natural environment. So, we started trying to put together a structure that could work at the museum, and this was a perfect opportunity to show a different side of it. We're always trying to split the Noguchi beam into different aspects, or peel the onion. I had never even heard of the term ‘organic architecture’ before Ricardo wrote, and while it’s not an ‘ism’ that’s currently in art history textbooks, it may well be in the near future because there’s obviously a strong seedbed of interest, which our exhibition proved. I think it may be the most popular show that we've done in the last ten years. The response to it was just extraordinary, and really worldwide too. It was exciting to have hundreds of young architects and architecture students coming to see the show. We don't know how exactly it's going to ripple out, but young architects want different solutions. They’re not satisfied with the status quo, and here is a serious body of work that's well rooted in history, cultural traditions, building traditions, and it's still current. It's being taught and practiced by somebody incredibly inspiring. I think it has a real chance to offer an important counterpoint to what most people are learning in architecture school, and when they come out into their practices or go to a big firm, they're still expected to do whatever it is they choose to do.

OK Javier, when did you first start developing your scholarship around organic architecture?

JS When I give a lecture, I start by showing the students a couple of projects I did when I was at the university, which already had some resemblance to organic architecture. I was very lucky because I had Matías Goeritz as my teacher. At a school where all of the other teachers were very rigid, he was very abstract and would let us do very free work. When I went to do my social service in a small village, I proposed a sports and cultural center with square shapes and then realized that I could start working with more freedom. That was when I started thinking about curves and realizing that curved spaces are far more human. I started doing research on the natural shape of a human being. This is one of the features of my architecture—the continuity and the space. When you walk through the space, you can see the continuity and the flow. So, organic architecture has a lot of that.

DH The difference between that and someone like Frank Gehry, who's a contemporary of Javier’s, or Zaha Hadid, a generation behind, is that Javier’s architecture is organic from the inside out. It's based on organic models, and it's developed in a craft methodology that emphasizes the connection between the eyes, the hands, and the brain. From the outside, those other structures look organic in that they’re not strictly quadratic anymore, but that's just an expression of technology. They demonstrate what modeling programs were gradually able to accomplish over time as they pushed the technology, but that form of abstraction isn’t any more inherently organic than square buildings. Javier is start-

ing from a completely different premise that isn't CAD models, or what a manufacturer can do. He’s using thousand-year-old technology to approach building as an expression of our innate, human instinct, as opposed to just putting the latest processor through its paces in coordination with modern manufacturing. I just read that article about the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, and all of its delays in LA. A lot of them have to do with the complexity of fabricating those fiber panels that cover the whole thing because every one of them is unique throughout the entire structure. It's one of those examples of trying to push beyond what modern manufacturing can do. It looks like a spaceship, or a fish, but it’s not really organic, even though it's not rectilinear.

OK Casa Orgánica truly is a masterpiece example of contemporary organic architecture. Can we talk about that?

Ricardo Suárez Haro Natalia grew up in it, and it seems utopian when you visit it. I can only imagine the type of brain connections it forms to grow up in that house, as opposed to the one that I grew up in, which was a California tract house.

NS It was my normal. But, when my friends used to come visit, I could see their reactions—the way they loved the house and instantly wanted to play and everything. Now that I'm grown up, I can see the impact that it has. My father always says that he wanted to create a more humane architecture, and now I believe that he accomplished it because all types of people want to go visit the house. You can be an engineer or a mathematician and still find it remarkable. But, I believe that I did grow up with a different mindset, just because of living in that house. Once, when my sister was in kindergarten, the assignment was to draw your house. So, she (laughs) just painted grass and round windows, and the teacher was confused. She called the school psychologist, and then the psychologist decided to talk to my mother, and my mother was like “Oh no, it's just that my husband is an architect and he does this really different type of architecture.” And the psychologist said, “Oh, maybe I should be speaking to your husband.” (laughs)

OK So, where did the idea for the house come from? I've read so many different things about where the ideas came from around its shape.

JS The idea was to take into account the physical aspects, environmental aspects, cultural aspects, and the necessities of the human being. It was part of an investigation in which I took all these aspects into account while putting aside the very rigid aspects that are taught in university. The idea is sort of like a peanut, but in some interviews, it has been misunderstood. I had the concept and the philosophy of the spaces that were needed to live, and there are two spaces: one is the day space, which is much more social, and then the night space, which is more intimate. The zoning was like a peanut because there were two spaces, but it was sort of shapeless. We adapted that peanut into the shape of the house, taking into account the topography of the land, and there was a big eucalyptus tree that was in the middle, so the house surrounded the tree. There was a lot of stone on that land, so originally the idea was that the walls were made out of stone, and the roof was made out of wood, but I didn’t like it because there was no continuity in the material. That’s when I came up with this constructive method of ferrocement. It’s a very noble constructive system that can allow you to build practically any shape and respect that continuity.

DH Javier gave this beautiful talk at the opening of the exhibition about the Casa Orgánica and the way that once we leave the womb, we end up living and dying in a series of boxes. If you think about it, it's a form of torture, to go from the womb into a

shipping container. And that’s essentially what modern architecture is; just a series of hard, square spaces. The whole philosophy of organic architecture offers an alternative to that regime, and that's where the humanity comes from. The Casa Orgánica is a nest. It's the most enveloping and natural form. When I walked through, I couldn’t help thinking about what it would have been like to grow up in those bedrooms, the way that using the faucet is like starting and stopping a stream. It really is like living in a forest glen. It's the ultimate fort. All kids try to achieve that by building forts out of pillows and blankets, but at seven you don't have the resources to do what Javier accomplished with the Casa Orgánica. It’s the most sophisticated version of what we all want as children.

OK So, how do we protect organic architecture, especially when we're so obsessed with putting people in these boxes? Of course, the Casa Cueva [built by Juan O’Gorman] was tragically ruined, but also, how do we cement its importance in the history books and in scholarship?

JS I believe they're very isolated examples of organic architecture. O’Gorman's house and Carlos Lazo's house were made in the ’50s. Now, with the climate crisis and with people being much more conscious about the planet, these houses could be more affordable than regular housing. They're also much more resilient in certain climates and in response to natural disasters, like earthquakes. So, they could possibly become more commercial in the way that they're built.

NS When I lived in the Casa Orgánica, I remember my friends really enjoying the house and telling their parents, “Can we live in a house like this, please!” And the parents would be like “Okay, yeah, it's interesting, but I would never live in a place like this.”

I believe that the generations are changing, so people will look more for these types of experiences.

RH What’s interesting about exhibiting organic architecture in museums is that in a typical painting exhibition, the audience is passive, and they only contemplate whatever they're looking at. But when you see these kinds of shows, you realize that we can all be active players in our own homes. Just moving the furniture from one side to another, you can see if you feel better, if you gain more natural light, if it makes more sense. We can start interacting and see how we feel, and that's something very organic as well.

DH That's really what Noguchi's work is about—empirical intelligence—trying to train us to think better through our bodies, to think better physically. We've all been taught that the use of language is the highest expression of intelligence, but it's just one expression of intelligence. There are many others, and we would all be better served if we had more empirical literacy. The neat thing about organic architecture is that it's one discipline for doing that, and if you live with it, it formats your brain differently. You have different expectations, which leaves you open to different solutions. The Noguchi Museum is trying to do just that; to open up a universe of other solutions. And organic architecture is an extraordinary example of that, one that's incredibly important to society.

What The FuckIsAGlassBox?

Frank Gehry & Charles Arnoldi

Portraits by Magnus Unnar

(inConversation)

For legendary architect Frank Gehry and artist Charles “Chuck” Arnoldi, the environs of Venice Beach is a tabula rasa. Natural forms and industrial mechanisms, the flotsam and jetsam of a metropolis spilling out westward into the fog, into the sea, and back again are materials and tools for examining artmaking and architecture from a completely new perspective. Arnoldi uses a chainsaw to slash and sculpt blocks of wood to create his chainsaw paintings. Gehry’s twisted towers are sinuous, bulbous, and circumvoluted, mirroring the world around them; ancient, futuristic, and unclassifiable all at the same time.

Chuck Arnoldi I think what drives all artists and creative people is a sense of feeling unsatisfied.

Frank Gehry When I graduated architecture school, there were some architects who were practicing in LA, and they came around, sniffing at what I was doing, and they were very negative about me. In fact, after I did the Danziger Studio, they were very negative about that. And while it was being built, Ed Moses was on the construction site. I knew who he was because I used to go to the Monday night gallery openings on La Brea. I knew Ed Moses’s work, and I knew Billy Al Bengston’s work, and I knew all those artists because I was into their work. Ed was friendly, and he was an artist I liked. And the architects were unfriendly and complained that I wasn’t good. So, I thought, well, what do I need them for?

CA You were thinking more like an artist than an architect. You weren’t trying to fit in with those guys, you were trying to make a personal statement.

FG Well, I didn’t know that I was trying to make a personal statement.

CA No, you didn’t know that, but I think part of hanging out with the Venice guys, the aesthetic and that attitude, you liked that because there was a kind of freedom to that creativity and that experimentation. You felt validated.

FG Well, experimentation and freedom, yes. But the images were staggeringly beautiful. I mean, look at Billy’s paintings. They are beautiful. And Larry Bell, messing with glass. That hit close to home because I was doing the Joseph Magnin department store and I had to use a lot of glass. So, I called Larry and asked him for his help on how to hang the glass.

CA I remember when Larry redid his bathroom. He put in a new shower and a toilet, and he did all this plumbing, and he loved the way the pipes and everything looked. Instead of putting Sheetrock down, he installed glass so you could look at the plumbing! All of us guys would rent storefronts or lofts, and we'd need a white wall, but we couldn’t afford to put Sheetrock on, so we’d leave the two-by-fours visible. And I think you could see that there was something nice about leaving the structure visible. It had a beautiful integrity. Plus, it was an aesthetic move that all those other architects hated. They couldn’t do that if their lives depended on it. (laughs)

FG Well, it had a relationship to Russian constructivism too. It resonated with me, the whole vibe of Billy and you, Larry and Moses. I especially gravitated to Moses. I don’t know why. He tried to hire me to remodel his house, and then when I told him it was $300 in fees, he said forget it. (laughs) But he liked the Danziger Studio, so he copied it on the beach right next to Gold’s Gym.

Oliver Kupper What do you think it was about Los Angeles? All of you guys come from these middle-class backgrounds and gravitated to this city, not for the glamor, but for the blank slate quality of it.

FG I was brought here by my family. I didn’t have a choice.

CA I came from a dysfunctional family in Dayton, Ohio. I thought Dayton was the center of the universe. I’d only left twice, once to go to Kentucky, once to New York City when my father’s father died. My father escaped Little Italy because they referred to Italians as wops, and he was trying to avoid that. He was a womanizer, an alcoholic, and a gambler, and he left us when I was in the fourth grade. Then, I got in some trouble in high school and they were going to put me in a foster home, so I called him. He lived in Thousand Oaks and he let me stay with him to avoid foster living. When I got to California, I’d never seen a freeway, never been on a jet airplane, never seen the ocean. It looked pretty damn good. All of a sudden, Dayton didn’t seem like the center of the universe. I got in

trouble and they sent me back, but a couple of days after I graduated from high school, I got in my car, got three of my nastiest buddies, and headed back to California.

FG I never heard that story.

CA The details are kind of interesting, actually. (laughs) It’s a complete accident, and one of the things that amazes me, I barely got through high school. I spent about eight or nine months at Ventura Junior College, I spent about a week and a half at Arts Center—I got a scholarship, they never gave one before—I spent about eight days there and realized it was bullshit, quit, went to Chouinard for six to eight months, quit there. So, despite all that, no education, no degree, I’ve had this wonderful life—mostly because of meeting people like Frank, Larry Bell, Ed Moses, Kenny Price, and Billy Bengston. It was like this dream came true. But the great thing about these guys was the materials they were using. Bengston was working with lacquer on Masonite. Then Frank Stella and all these guys in New York thought, “God, that’s a good idea.” All these people with resin and glass, and doing shit that is not on the list. And that’s what you have done for architecture. I think, inadvertently, you realized, shit, any material’s good: corrugated fucking iron, chain link fence, what’s wrong with that? It’s great! Two by fours, all that had to do with these Venice artists going, “I’ll make paintings out of fucking tree branches or I’ll make glass boxes.” I mean, if you thought of that out of the context of the art world, what the fuck is a glass box? (laughs)

FG (laughs) Well, my choice of materials always had to do with the projects being small and not having budgets. So, I had to use whatever I could, and that’s what got me into corrugated metal. I liked it aesthetically, this galvanized stuff, and then the chain-link was fascinating to me because it was produced in quantities that are bizarre. I went to a chain link factory Downtown and spent an hour there one day, and they had four people running a 200,000-square-foot warehouse with only one machine making chain link. And in one hour the guy told me they made enough chain-link to cover one lane of the freeway from Downtown to Santa Monica. And I thought, if my artist friends can make art out of anything, and architecture is art, I can make architecture out of anything . It was powerful stuff. I was also inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark who was slicing buildings in half. Or Robert Smithson who did Spiral Jetty [1970]. I was doing the Concord Pavilion and I did the space with earth. It was starting to be a spiral, so I called Smithson, sent him some pictures of it, and said, “I invite you to make this exterior. It’s just starting, and you can do whatever you want.” He said, “I’ll call you next week.” In between that time, he got killed in a plane crash.

CA One thing that was kind of interesting—a lot of it has to do with Gemini G.E.L. Gemini brought all those New York artists out to LA. Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, [Robert] Rauschenberg. I never thought of them as famous, great artists, they were just these great guys from New York, and they would actually communicate with you. I remember Rauschenberg once said “You know what’s really interesting? You and I both make art out of junk.” (laughs)

FG I remember they loved you. And they were nice to me, so they must have liked me too. Slowly, for me, over time, the LA and New York thing started to mix. I remember ending up at the Factory up in Warholville with [John] Chamberlain, and Ultra Violet was his girlfriend.

Well, Christophe de Menil was great too. She’d have a dinner party and there'd be ten of us there. Then, there’d be three, four limousines, then four, five, six other people would come in, and there’d be a couple more limousines. As soon as the dinner was over, all the limousines would be like a train out to Studio 54, and they’d just part the ropes and we’d all go straight in. Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg would say, “Hey man, come to New York, stay at my place.” And it was weird because they kind of had this reputation of being these assholes, but Chamberlain just loved hanging out with us Venice guys.

FG I took him sailing one day. Do you remember Michael Asher, the artist? He was also a great sailor. I had a Cal 25 sailboat. Michael and I decided to go sailing on the windiest fucking day—storm warnings and everything. So, we got geared up, and we’re driving down Main Street or Pacific, we get to the corner where Larry Bell’s studio was, and Chamberlain was standing there dressed in a suit. It was raining. I stopped and said, “Well, what are you standing out there for?” And he said, “I’m ready to do something. Where are you guys going?” I said “We’re going sailing. Want to come?” So, he got in the car and we got to the boat. It was the wildest ride in the ocean I’ve ever been on. I mean, it was dangerous. Chamberlain loved it.

CA He was in the Navy, I think. He showed me his feet one time, and he had roosters tattooed on them because supposedly if you have roosters on your feet you won’t drown.

FG Well, there was something there. A year after we took him sailing, I was in New York, and he called me up saying he had his new boat at 95th Street and whatever. He’d been sailing since he went with us. He went down the coast to Florida and sailed back and forth. He became a great sailor.

CA I really loved New York. When you’re young, it's great. As you get older, you want to escape, but the problem with New York, is if you want a fucking quart of milk, it takes half a day and you're always in somebody’s face—confrontations with strangers. The thing about California, is you're with friends or people you know, or you're alone in your car, you have time to think, so you don't have to deal with all this crap. There’s something super attractive about California. I mean, just the weather.

FG Chuck, we used to share a studio. In the morning I’d have a coffee, and you would show me a painting by 9:30, 10 o'clock. And I used to go, “It's great,” and you’d say, “Yeah, I gotta think about it.” And then, I’d come back at 4:00 and you would change it. I always thought it was better, of course, without you changing it. So, I used to try to get you to stop, but that’s not in your DNA. You can't do that.

CA (laughs) Look around this place. When you get a client, they’re just excited. They'll have a problem for you, and you’ll work out a scheme that takes you six months or something. The client comes in and they always go, “Oh my god, that’s great,” and you go, “No, it’s not ready yet. You have to come back in six months.” So, you do what you accuse me of on a huge scale, but I understand you’re doing a $300-million-dollar building. Whereas, I’ve got the cost of materials and a little bit of time.

FG It’s different because I have to go to the building department, I have to go through engineers, and I have a budget, which you don’t have.

CA At a certain point, you were having a hard time with the technology aspect of what you were building. Architecture used to be pencils and T-squares and stuff, and you were doing interesting enough architecture that you got approached by a

company and thought, hey, we should computerize architecture. And you were smart enough to go along with this thing. So, if you want to do a building with a million curves in it, it’s figured out.

FG What happened was I was working in Boston and I had a lawyer doing our contract. He was a big guy in the AIA [Americans in Architecture] at the time and I had made a building in Switzerland—The Vitra Design Museum—where there’s a curve in the plaster. I was taught to draw those curves using a geometry system that everybody used at that time to make forms. So, I used that system that I was taught, but they built the curve and it had a kink in it. They swore they built it exactly as the drawing. So, we scoured the thing and sure enough there it was: our two-dimensional drawings of three-dimensional stuff had a failure in the system. I discovered that the hard way. So, I called IBM and asked them if they had any software, because they had CAD at the time, which was two-dimensional. We were using that, but it was unwieldy and tough to do, and it still didn't deliver the exact curve. The reason I was interested in curves is that I wasn't happy with modernism or postmodernism. Modernism was rigid, geometric, ninety degrees. Once MoMA's architecture curator, Arthur Drexler, had a show with some really beautiful, seductive premodern buildings, it jump-started the postmodern architecture movement. Within a month or two, Phillip [Johnson] did the little building for AT&T, Robert A.M. Stern started doing his stuff, and Charles Moore and Robert Venturi went into postmodernism. They were all going down the rabbit hole and it was very upsetting to me when they did that. I was at a conference somewhere and everybody had twenty minutes to speak, and it was my turn. I got up, I looked at them, all and said “Why the fuck do we have to go backward? Isn’t there anybody going ahead? There are cars and boats and airplanes and a lot of movement out there, and you guys are happy doing this? It doesn’t fit our time.” I don’t know where this came from. Then, I said, “Well, if you have to go back, why not go back 300 million years before man, when we were fish? Fish look architectural. If you look at them, they express movement, and we are in a time of movement." That's all I said, then I sat down and shut up. From then on, I started drawing those fish. It did inspire form and I looked at all these Japanese Hiroshige prints. There was so much architecture to be inspired by.

OK Can we talk about how and where you two met originally?

CA We met so long ago. The thing is that everybody used to party and hang out together. It was a very small art scene, and the Venice scene was even tighter than any place, so when we had any reason to have people over, we’d always be there. And Frank was always part of the group.

FG Well, I remember you were declared the youngest, the new guy. You and Laddie John Dill hung out and I was interested in what you were doing. I was always interested in your work, and always couldn't figure out why you’d change it in the afternoon, but I learned to live with that. But when you did the chainsaw paintings, that expression of anger was just visceral. And then, you painted it and took away the anger. Richard Serra’s pieces are about anger. They’re beautifully composed and fabricated and all that, but there’s a lot of anger. He builds the piece and finishes it, and they're beautiful, but they’re still fucking angry. Whereas Chuck, you diffused it. And that’s your personality. You're a nice guy.

CA I had a studio in Venice. It was a fluke, I ended up with this big building and Frank needed a place to move his office. One of the guys moved out, so Frank moved his office into the building, and we saw each other every day. We collaborated more than just talking and arguing and stuff. (laughs) But the thing is, we all really suggested things to friends. Like I had a friend, Bill Norton, who was our partner in the building. He directed a movie and wanted to build a house, so Frank got to build a house for him on the boardwalk. He used to be a lifeguard, so Frank built what looked like a lifeguard tower in front of the house.

OK I think both of your work is uncategorizable, and that’s why LA is so interesting. It's an uncategorizable, make-believe city that came from nothing, and both of your work has come out of this milieu. Can you guys talk a little bit about being in that realm? I was reading an essay that Reyner Banham wrote about your architecture Frank, and this was before the Pritzker Prize, but he said, “If people understood your work, maybe you’d be the biggest architect in the world.” It’s funny to read that now.

FG Reyner Banham called me after I had finished the Danziger Studio. Esther McCoy was the architectural writer in Los Angeles at the time and she was confused by my work because I did that apartment building that looks like a Monterey Spanish. This was a time when I was fitting into the neighborhood. That was my trying to make a building that was a good neighbor. I was into that. I’m not going to shake up the neighborhood, I’m going to make a building that is great and show them how you can keep going. I got whooped for that one. That was postmodernism before anybody heard of postmodernism. After I did the Danziger Studio, they all came running. So, Reyner Banham called me—he came to LA from Berkeley, and he told me he was writing a book, and he wanted to interview me, and I said, “I’m not ready for that.”

OK Maybe we can close things out by talking about the world right now. How do you see yourself as an artist in the world right now? How do you see yourself as an architect in the world that we’re in now?

CA When I got to the art world, I never thought of fame and fortune at all. In fact, when I met all those artists, they weren’t famous people. I consider the Rolling Stones and the Beatles famous. But the world today is so driven by the commercial, and I think it’s immoral. It’s like real estate. When they can sell paintings for $50 to $100 million, maybe 8 to 15 million for a young artist who’s, say, in their forties, something is wrong. Because in the old days, you had to earn the position you got to. The great thing about Frank is you can spot a Frank Gehry from a mile away—not that they’re all the same—but they’re like sculpture, they’re a statement unto themselves. It’s a form, it’s something where you go, “That must be a Frank Gehry.” Other buildings might be tasty and everything, but they just don’t stand out. Frank, I don’t know what you think about contemporary architecture, is it the same as the art world?

FG I haven’t been paying much attention to the new, younger architects. LA is not as blank as it was. I did the commercial project across from Disney, which came out really great for a commercial project. I’m really proud of that. I had no idea it was going to come out that good. The feeling and the scale and the humanity of it is what I was trying to do and it does work. As an art piece, it’s a different story. It’s a different connection to humanity. I think that architecture takes itself too seriously, and so does art.

Cosmic

Interview by Jeffrey Deitch

Photography by Max Farago

Ariana Papademetropoulos’ paintings are thresholds— portals into alternate utopian universes. Oneiric interiors are grand stables for a fantasy menagerie and translucent figures that haunt with languorous decadence where beds become symbols of sexuality and dreaming. Painting these distinct worlds since her early childhood, Papademetropoulos was inspired by the occultist environs of Southern California, particularly her hometown of Pasadena where rocket scientist Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron once held magickal rituals at his estate in the 1940s with a coterie of believers in the esoteric. Coming from a family of architects, Papademetropoulos uses Renaissance techniques to build a world that is uniquely her own.

So, we're here in Mumbai, sitting in the lobby of the Oberoi Hotel. Ariana Papademetropoulos Yes. We’re in a kind of utopian setting.

JD This is, yes. An artificial utopia. But let's transport ourselves back to Pasadena, California.

AP Okay, let's go.

JD I’ve always been impressed by how you were so rooted in Pasadena, Los Angeles, but somehow your artistic outlook is so international. Your work encompasses influences from Italian Renaissance, French Surrealism, and many other sources. But the key is your California background. You are California all the way through. A lot of the artists in Los Angeles come from someplace else. But you come from Los Angeles, you went to school in Los Angeles, you apprenticed with artists, and that's where you work. So, let's talk about your background. You come from an artistic family.

AP I come from a family of architects on both sides, Greek and Argentine, so although I was born in Los Angeles, I’ve always known a world outside of it. I suppose my interests are very influenced by both architecture and by my surroundings of Los Angeles, and so that follows through in all of the work.

JD I met you in a very organic process. That's how I like to meet artists. It’s not like I saw your art in a group show and contacted you, and you didn't send me an email with your images.

AP We met at the Autre dinner! We talked about Los Angeles history and that's how we connected.

JD That’s correct. We were seated next to each other at the Autre dinner at a hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.

AP And here we are doing an Autre interview.

JD I already knew a little bit about your work from some mutual friends. People said, “Oh, you have to see Ariana’s work. She's brilliant. She's such a great artist.” So, I was already intrigued. And then, I visited you in this storybook house in Pasadena. What a romantic place. It was kind of an outbuilding, like a stable, a barn, connected to a grand estate. It was a little bit shabby, which was perfect. And I went into your studio. There weren’t just paintings propped up and easels—it was a total work of art. A gesamtkunstwerk: book covers, astonishing objects, stools that have human legs coming out of them (laughs). It was an entire prosthetic world, and that's my favorite kind of artist. Where it's not someone who just makes a painting or sculpture, it's an entire artistic universe that you created. And it seems that you were born into this artistic universe. I mentioned to your mother once how talented you are, and so young. And she said, “Oh, well, she's been doing this since she was six years old or earlier,” that you were born to be an artist. AP I feel like it wasn't really a choice, it's just the way I've always been. But ever since a young age, I was highly sensitive to my surroundings and I figured out that the way I create a space affects my way of being. An architect creates a space and ideally it will affect the way that you behave in that space. Frank Lloyd Wright believed that the functionality of a space could enrich the life of whoever inhabits that space. In a way, it’s obvious, but I instinctively picked up on that ethos and knew that how I decorated my room would have an impact on my perception. JD And most of your artworks are set in an interior. AP Exactly.

JD There may be figures, there might be a fantasy animal, like a unicorn. But almost always set in an interior.

AP An empty room for me is like a portal to an imaginary realm. It always starts off being basically bored in a house. That kind of suburban, empty room allows the fantasy to come through. It takes you to this middle world.

JD You're interested in volcanoes as well.

AP That's true. (laughs) I'm interested in archetypal subjects from fantasy, but I'm also interested in geological wonders and the natural beauty that exists on Earth. Volcanoes, crystals, waterfalls, flowers, geysers, bubbles, caves, you know, there is a lot of beauty everywhere if you look for it. Utopia does exist in some sense. It's just that we have to choose to see it.

JD We've had a number of conversations about the special occult history of Pasadena. It’s a very unique place because on one side it's very Midwestern American, but on the other, it has attracted extraordinary people who enter into alternate realms. We talked a lot about Marjorie Cameron.

AP And Jack Parsons.

JD I'm curious to hear how you learned about this as a child in Pasadena and how that alternate history of Pasadena has shaped you.

AP I've always been very drawn to esoteric subjects, including magick, Aleister Crowley, all that kind of stuff. And then, when I came upon Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron, I got very excited because it really is this crossover between all the things that I love: the occult, science, and art. But what's remarkable is that the mansion where I had my studio belonged to this woman named “The Silver Queen.” She inherited silver mines. Her husband died and she got married eight times—one was a prince in India. But I was convinced when I was working there—because it's very close to The Parsonage, where Jack Parsons lived—that she threw parties and that Jack Parsons attended. I imagined this whole scenario. And what's wild is that, one day, I went to the studio and it was transported to the 1930s. The house was often used for movie sets. They brought in all these orange trees and everyone was dressed in suits and hats. They were filming a show about Jack Parsons and my studio was The Parsonage in the TV show (laughs). I found the script, and my mind was completely blown. That crossover between what's real and what's fantasy is so present in Los Angeles. And speaking of utopias, Jack Parsons wanted to create his own version of utopia. The Parsonage was an eleven-bedroom house where people from all walks of life had rooms and performed sex magick. It was basically this place of free love and they believed that sex magick could take you to an alternate realm. L. Ron Hubbard lived there for a while. Also, professors at Caltech, bankers, and people like Marjorie Cameron.

JD It was a fascinating fusion of art, science, technology, the beginnings of space exploration. Religion was all there. Los Angeles art, for a long time from the perspective of New York City, was all about light and space and minimalism; high-tech materials. But there was always this undercurrent of homegrown surrealism; this utopianism. You mentioned Marjorie Cameron.

AP Yes, Aleister Crowley told Jack Parsons she was the Scarlet Woman, the woman that would move us out of a patriarchal society, the age of Osiris, into the age of Isis, the age of women. JD It's fascinating that from the beginning you embrace that side of Los Angeles history in your art.

AP Los Angeles is a place that's built on myth. The idea of the city came long before Los Angeles was there. It has always had a

Ariana Papademetropoulos, Glass Slippers, 2022, Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm);  © Ariana Papademetropoulos; Photo by Argenis Apolinario; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery

Ariana

all stone is flesh, 2022

16

(50.8

40.6

Papademetropolous,

Oil on canvas, 20 x

inches

x

cm); © Ariana Papademetropoulos; Photo by Josh White; courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery

history where fantasy becomes reality, and not just in Hollywood. And then, we created the concept. Beachwood Canyon had The Krotona Inn where the theosophists lived, which had very utopian architecture. There were the Nature Boys in the 1930s, who were like the first hippies—these Germans who moved to Laurel Canyon, and were vegan, and had long hair, and looked like they were from the ’70s. The Native Americans say that Los Angeles has always had this magnetic quality to it that made people delusional. So, it's always this place of smoke and mirrors. Even hundreds of years ago, there was some type of energy that made things unclear. That opens possibilities for people to believe whatever they want to believe. That's what Scientologists believe—you create your reality and however you choose to live becomes the basis of your reality—which can be dangerous and idyllic. Growing up in LA, all of this has been embedded in my work.

JD We presented a fascinating exhibition project together called The Emerald Tablet. It was quite unique. I'm not sure any other artist has ever done anything like this. It encompassed a very impressive solo exhibition of your work with epic paintings. And then, in the other part of the gallery you curated an exhibition that articulated your unique aesthetic and it was a fusion of what we've been talking about. This Los Angeles occult history with The Wizard of Oz, and that myth. You should talk a little bit about The Emerald Tablet and Unarius, who did a performance in front of the gallery as part of the opening.

AP L. Frank Baum [who wrote The Wizard Of Oz] was a theosophist. He named The Emerald City after The Emerald Tablet, an ancient alchemical text. The most famous line is “As above, so below.” I wanted to basically do an esoteric version of The Wizard of Oz. Instead of leading you to the Emerald City, it led to the Emerald Tablet, which is a place of collective unconsciousness. It's this place that all artists go to—a timeless universe. And that's why the green room had artists from the past hundred years. They all looked similar because they're all from this world that some of these artists connected with. It's why the Mike Kelley piece looked so similar to the Agnes Pelton. The Jean-Marie Appriou piece looked like it was out of a Leonora Carrington painting. Everything was connected because it's this place that we can all enter into. Unarius believes there are these crystal cities on Mars, which was really similar to Mike Kelley's Kandor piece, which is where Superman was born. Unarius is a belief system, but they also functioned almost as a film studio because they made so many movies. They had their iconic bird release at the opening.

Ariana Papademetropoulos, Phases of Venus, 2022, Oil on canvas, 91 3/4 x 108 1/4 inches (233 x 275 cm);  © Ariana Papademetropoulos; Photo by Argenis Apolinario; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery

JD Unforgettable. They drove their spaceship up North Orange, parked in front of the gallery, and had their cosmic release.

AP I think perhaps Ruth, who started Unarius, was a performance artist without knowing it. She dressed as an angel and flew down for her sermons suspended by a rope, surrounded by beautiful, young angel men. She lived out her dream.

JD And I love the way this exhibition tied together your work with that of this special Los Angeles history by Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and artists from an earlier era, some connected to Los Angeles, and also artists like Leonora Carrington and Agnes Pelton.

AP Agnes Pelton is a big influence for me. She's very connected to that other realm, that collective unconscious that I'm always interested in, and theosophy is a religion that has been very inspiring to a lot of artists. Kandinsky was a theosophist. It's just a fusion of worlds that almost looks musical, and it comes from this idea of thought forms; where the best way to describe a feeling is not through words, but through pictures. I think that's what art is. It's not articulated, but you can feel it. Those were the ideas of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant.

JD So, you have an exceptional technique and you paint almost like a Renaissance master. I'm fascinated by the art education you gave yourself. You told me you were kicked out of about five high schools. Then, you attended CalArts where I'm sure you got very good artistic insights, but you didn't quite fit in. But then, you did something very interesting. You created an old-fashioned apprenticeship. You worked for Noah Davis. You worked for Jim Shaw and absorbed artistic techniques and approaches the old-fashioned way. AP I think that's the best way of doing it, seeing how an artist

operates in the world. Because, in a way, I do think art schools are a bit problematic. I can tell when an artist goes to CalArts. I can tell when an artist goes to Yale. You go to an art school with your own way of being and then you come out as a product of that school.

JD You didn't let CalArts do that to you.

AP I just don't think I could have. I don't have that personality. I've been interested in the same subject since I was ten years old. I am so through and through myself that I'm not successful at being anything but that. Some of my favorite artists are self-taught because that is what being an artist is. It’s figuring out your own path. I mean, there’s a way of being a successful artist where you follow all the rules, but ultimately, you can also get there by doing it your own way.

JD Your perspective is also very international. Your name is Greek, but your mother is from Argentina. And you have a natural affinity for Italian culture—some of your wonderful paintings were painted in Rome, which suits you very well. Somehow, you're channeling the Renaissance in what you do—a sort of fusion of this unique California underground aesthetic and channeling Botticelli.

AP I definitely have my fantasy version of Italy. I first went there as an escape, but the longer I'm there, the easier it is to see the real-world version versus my Dolce Vita version. But I think Rome and Los Angeles are similar in a way. And the churches of Rome are basically installation art. It’s all about trompe l'oeil. You don’t even know what you're looking at anymore. Is the sky really opening up to the heavens above? You go into those churches and you are overwhelmed by the beauty. It’s almost a religious

“Utopia does exist in some sense. It’s just that we have to choose to see it.”

experience because beauty is a portal to get you somewhere else. And I think that's something that I really strive for in my own work. I try to use beauty as a gateway to get to another thing.

JD I'm fascinated by your studio practice. You remind me of my friend Jean Michel Basquiat who was out all the time enjoying life in the clubs, yet astonishingly prolific. He obviously spent hours and hours in the studio. And so, unlike many artists, you have a very full and interesting life. Here we are in India, but your work is so demanding. It must be hours and hours in isolation doing this repetitive, exacting work.

AP I travel and I live my life, but I don’t think an artist is ever not working. I get inspiration from seeing the physical world. For the show we are doing together on Nymphaeums, it will take a lot of research and visiting grottos. And then, I’ll go into my studio for a prolonged period of time and work out the ideas I’ve absorbed. The physical nature of the work does require a long time, but it's almost meditative, and I enjoy the peace. I’m either working or I'm exploring, but anything in between, I've just never learned how to do that. It's either I work really hard or I'm wanting to live life to the fullest.

JD So, a fascinating example of how you experience the world. You accompanied me some years back on a trip to Germany and you had read on the internet that there was some house built by a madman. It was the architecture of a schizophrenic and we were determined to see this house. When we encountered people in the art world and told them we were going to see this house, nobody else had heard about it. So, we rented a big Mercedes—I asked you to drive—and we saw this house. It was absolutely amazing. And that's typical of how you take in the world. I haven't seen the image of this house in your work yet, but something from this house is going to be there soon, I’m sure.

AP That trip was actually the first time you mentioned to me this idea of a gesamtkunstwerk, or a total work of art. I never knew that word existed. And you were saying to me that that's what I'm doing. There's the work that I make, but it's also an extension of the world that I live in. And that idea really resonated with me. Now that I have a word to describe this thing, it’s opened so many new possibilities, because I've always been a little bit afraid of being anything other than a painter. There are always magical, beautiful things if you look for them. And there are things that are out of this world, that are in this world.

The Source Family was a spiritual commune founded in the Hollywood Hills by suspected bank robber turned guru James Baker, also known as Father Yod. Practicing a blend of Eastern mysticism and Western esotericism, the family was supported by The Source restaurant on the Sunset Strip, which was the first organic, vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles. Isis Aquarian, or Charlene Peters, a former socialite, became one of Yod’s fourteen wives and de facto archivist. Together with curator, filmmaker, and scholar of alternative communities, Jodi Wille, they have released a new monograph, FAMILY: The Source Family Scrapbook, published by Sacred Bones.

Isis Aquarian & Jodi Wille

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TheSource

Oliver Kupper Isis, where are you based right now?

Isis Aquarian Hawaii. I love it. It’s my soul home. But LA is my heart home. By the way, I really appreciate the topics you are covering in this issue.

OK I feel like people are thinking about building a better world again and thinking about utopia. There’s a new utopian urge.

IA I remember Father Yod saying it would be our children’s children to carry it forth. We were the foundation, the pioneers.

OK I want to start with the intro to the scrapbook. It’s so interesting and brilliant, that exploration into the dynamics of the Source Family. In it, there’s this Buckminster Fuller quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, you need to make the existing model obsolete.” Why do you think there was such an overwhelming global urge toward this utopian way of life in the late ’60s and ’70s?

IA My very simple understanding of it is that we all made commitments before incarnating. And when the timing is right, you get encoded, for lack of a better word. You step into that commitment you agreed to, so it was a no-brainer for many of us. Without even analyzing it, we stepped into that new paradigm. When I met Father Yod, he was still Jim Baker, and we drifted apart at first. Then, we met again when I stepped into the Source. When I saw him again, he looked like Moses and that was it. I never questioned it, I never turned around, and I’m still working within that paradigm with him.

Jodi Wille Looking at history, things come in cycles. Studying the astrology of the time, it’s pretty wild to see how these cyclical energies come through the world and manifest in different ways at different times. They’re always different, but they have these similar threads. In the late ’60s, you had these very dissatisfied people. You had the Vietnam War, which was affecting young people more than we could possibly imagine, and you had industrialized food and medicine reaching this high-profit breaking point. A lot of people were fed up with the food that they were eating and the drugs they were getting, and wanted to explore other pathways. Jim Baker had a lot of experience in that zone when it was very unpopular. Astrologically, these shifts break down into 20-year periods, but then there are also these 100-year periods, and of course, you’ve got Pluto going into Aquarius again. So, Los Angeles was filled with people like Father Yod who helped give birth to The Source.

OK Isis, you were a beauty queen way before joining the Family. Can you talk a little bit about your life before?

IA I think socialite is a better title. I was a complete socialite and I was a model too. My dad was Chief of Documentations for the Air Force, so I grew up pretty entitled. I grew up being archived and photographed, which wasn’t an issue for me. I moved to DC and worked for a senator and then I was a socialite out of the house at night in Washington under President Johnson. So, there was a whole elite circle that I was a part of. In the ’50s, people were drinking, becoming alcoholics, and everything that came with that. And then, I moved to New York and slid into a whole other socialite scene with Warhol and Salvador Dalí, and I was dating one of the heirs to Smirnoff’s Vodka for a short period. Then, I started hearing about the hippies and flower children, and everything that was happening in LA. New York was just a dark zone. LA seemed very light and bright, and I was so pulled to it. I went, I want to wear flowers in my hair, I want the sunshine, I want to drop out. When I moved to LA, I very quickly walked into the Old World [Restaurant] and met Jim Baker and his wife Dora.

OK Jodi, how did you discover the Source Family?

JW I went over to visit a friend one day—this was 1999—and he said, “I have this box and you’ve gotta see it.” It was this big 12-by-12-inch black box with this man who had a white beard and hair, and a bunch of small people collaged onto his belly area. At the top of the box it just said, “God And Hair—Yahowha Collection.” It was a complete collection of all the Source Family records that they turned into a CD box set. I was just blown away by it. I had been studying and researching occultist intentional community groups for many years at that point and there really wasn’t anything on the internet about the Source Family. Five years later, my then-husband, Adam Parfrey, came home with a student film that he’d found at Amoeba Music and it was about The Source Family. I was just like, “Oh my gosh, I have to find these people.” (laughs) So, I went online and it just so happened that there was a

website that Isis had created. I wrote to the email address and asked her if they’d ever considered doing a book. Isis wrote me back right away and said, “My brother, Electricity, and I have been working for seven years on a book and we just finished it.” That conversation led to me coming out to Hawaii to go through the archives with her—this massive collection of photographs and documents, and putting together the first Source Family book, The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, YaHoWha 13, which also led to the documentary years later.

OK Isis, when you joined The Source, what did your birth family think of this new family? And what was the dialogue between them and you during this time?

IA Well, they were used to me being off the grid. I was the uncontrollable, dark horse. Between DC and New York, there were plenty of energies that shocked them. Also, my dad was in the CIA, so he had a good handle on DC. He checked in on me a lot and found out what was going on with me in New York and LA. But no, they weren’t happy about it at all. How would you understand what was going on at that time if you weren’t in it? There’s just no way. And my dad was quite controlling to begin with. But my mom was fine with it. She loved Father Yod, by the way. She said, “I know where you are. You’re clean, you’re being fed, it’s safe.”

OK These utopian movements at that time, for some strange reason, really became the number one enemy of the CIA.

IA I know, we had helicopters flying over the house, we had men in black suits that we caught spying on us.

OK And Jim Baker sort of had a reputation before becoming Father Yod. He had this outlaw persona, which is very American.

IA Yeah, extremely. He was, and he loved that part of himself.

OK What brought him to this new spiritual movement? Was it something about his upbringing? Because he was older and came from a different generation.

IA He was searching his whole life, and he had a habit of just leaving every situation when it wasn’t giving him what he needed anymore. He knew when he was done with a certain part of his life. And unfortunately, he didn’t handle it very well with the people around him. He would just take off and leave. Always leaving a trail of women—wives and kids. Because he was just moving on. He was on his journey and he was going full speed. He had Hollywood and he was on the start of his journey toward a spiritual path. Dora, his wife, was younger than him. She was a French girl. She smoked a lot of marijuana and that influenced him. She turned him on to the music, and it really was the music of the time that got to him. It struck his soul. He eventually got into that groove and he dropped out himself. Then, he met Yogi Bhajan, which got him into yoga, meditation, and the spiritual path. He wanted to merge the Western and Eastern vibrations, and the yogis didn’t like that. They were stuck in a 3,000-year lineage. And so, that’s what he did. He opened The Source [restaurant].

OK The Source Family had a lot of alternative views about love and sex. This was at the height of the sexual revolution. Why was it such an important part of this new utopian model of thinking?

IA Because we made everything sacred. We smoked marijuana, but we called it the sacred herb. We only did it once each day for morning meditation, a spiritual process. We took our sex and it became what they call tantric. Most people now are aware of what tantric sex is. It's sacred sex, and usually the man doesn't use his seed unless he wants to have a child.

He’s in control. It’s not lust. Our food was also sacred. We gave people an alternative to see everything in a different way.

JW Teenagers during the sexual revolution were sexualized at a very young age. It’s a very unpopular thing to discuss now, but the reality was, from what I heard, there were a lot of underage women in the Source, and they were among the most highly sexualized of the women in the Family. For all of them, the women and the men, it was a very different kind of sexuality. It’s almost hard to imagine. It was not just like a free love, free-floating sexuality, it was a spiritual discipline.

IA There were no orgies. Father Yod had fourteen wives, but we had our one-on-one time with him. Everybody got what they needed. The young girls that came into the Family—we had a couple of young guys too—they came in from the street for a place to crash. Nobody came in as a virgin, except one guy that I know (laughs). And when most of those young girls came in, their parents at least knew where they were and that they were safe.

OK It’s interesting because the sexual revolution is such a big part of the utopian model that started to develop in the ‘60s, but sex seems so retro to kids today. When they hear that Father Yod had fourteen wives, I’m sure they immediately think of these big orgies.

IA (Laughs) First of all, not many people could have pulled it off. Dude, you better be able to handle it. You better be able to have yourself in control on all levels to begin with, or it’s going to be a shit mess. And it wasn’t. The women were sisters before we were his wives. We knew each other inside and out, and we liked each other, which made a difference. It’s not like we were all thrown together and didn’t even know what the crap was going on. And he didn’t separate us, we were in this together.

There’s a lot of misconstruction between the words ‘cult’ and ‘commune.’ What is the line between the two?

IA After Charles Manson, they associated the word ‘cult’ with him and that’s what stuck. That was the downfall of the whole thing, but a cult is just culture.

JW The word cult didn’t really become weaponized by the corporate media until the ’70s. Back in the 1930s, there was a rash of love cults that tabloid magazines would write about. And there were new religious movements—that’s what most of the scholars call them these days. They’re basically just nascent religions. Of course, there are cults with leaders that actually do control people’s minds (laughs). All the way back to Pythagoras, you could call him one of the first cult leaders. Oftentimes, these groups are led by people who question things. They’re creating a group because they’re unhappy with the status quo, because they feel alienated by the larger society, and a number of these groups rise up when a society is in decline. They’re often seen as a threat to those who want people to stay in their boxes, who want consumers to keep buying things (laughs), to do as they’re shown on television.

OK It’s interesting how fearful the Judeo-Christian, capitalist enterprise really is of these groups. Why is that fear so important and why has it been so effective, because a lot of these groups have fallen apart?

JW Well, a lot of them have, but a lot of them haven’t. We know about a handful of them—the worst of the worst. We know about the groups who have murdered people, who have committed mass suicide, who have done horrible things. But there are literally thousands of these groups that exist now. They exist across the world and they’ve existed forever. Those are the ones you don’t hear about because they don’t murder anybody. The Source Family disappeared and nobody even remembered it until we put the first book out.

OK It also takes a lot of privilege to drop out. A lot of these groups are white and middle class, but the Source Family seems relatively diverse. Can you talk about that diversity and why so many other communes come from predominantly white, middle class families?

JW For a lot of people, it does take a certain amount of privilege, and coming from a white, middle class family gives you the leeway to experiment and explore. Although, I think it’s important to note that in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the economy was really challenged. There were a lot of people who were struggling financially. Timothy Miller claimed that one of the main reasons these groups lived together was because it made sense economically. They pooled their resources and that’s something that’s happened throughout human history.

OK The blending of Eastern mysticism with Western esotericism was a big part of these communes. What do you think was so magnetizing about this amalgamation?

JW Manly P. Hall wrote about Western magickal tradition in Secret Teachings of All Ages [1928], which was a foundational book for the Source Family. Jim Baker was an avid student of Manly P. Hall for many years before he formed the Source Family, so he had this foundation in Western mysticism and magick. Then he met Yogi Bhajan, and immersed himself in that too. He also had some personal issues he was really working on, and one of those issues was that he was an itinerant philanderer. So, he became celibate for a while, and celibacy really suited him. After a while, he started seeing the limitations of celibacy. At the same time that Jim Baker got to know Yogi Bhajan very well, he started learning about Yogi

Bhajan’s hypocrisies and corruption. So, he had less respect for that ascetic, Eastern mystical way of life. Yogi Bhajan had all these mistresses that he was hiding in the closet, and what really fascinated me when I was learning about Jim Baker and the Family was how he folded in some of the best tech—this incredible breathwork, the chanting, and then brought in Western magick.

IA What he realized was that part of him was what he called his animal man. And to me, Jim Baker became the ultimate animal man. But then, when he started switching over with the Yogi to his spiritual evolutionary process, he had to deal with his godhood. There was his animal man and his higher spirit. This meant controlling all parts of his life: what you eat, what you think, what you say, what you create, and your sexual practices. And that’s where tantra came in, which he took to heal that animal part of his being and became the spiritual godhead within his sexual practices. He had fourteen wives because he had threads with all of us. He had karmic issues for payback. He said, “[They are] my wives in this incarnation either because I owe them or we need to heal something, end something, or as a gift to them for completion of a very beautiful past lifetime.”

JW A lot of materialist cynics think there’s a con man who’s drunk on power, so he starts a group that he can do this to. But, what I and other scholars have found with these groups is that they are led by people who have skills. They’ve got interdimensional skills (laughs), psychic abilities, they’re intuitive, and they have a high ability for that. That’s why the Source Family attracted a lot of people who are also intuitive and psychic, like Isis. All of a sudden, you have a father figure who actually understands your internal experience, which is one that most people don’t know anything about, unless you can feel or see energy, see auras, and a number of people do. Another incredible thing I’ve discovered by researching and getting to know these groups is that when you have people who are focused on the same practices together, meditating, setting magical intentions, doing these chants, it becomes this incubator. It’s not only a social and cultural incubator, but it’s a spiritual incubator. They’re just clearing all of the clutter of (laughs) the materialist death culture in these situations. That’s why they stay a long time, even though the situations are really messy and dangerous. What do you think about that, Isis?

IA Well, he tried to disperse us three times. He said, “I’m done. I’ve given you everything I know. It’s time for you to go out on your own path.” And we tried three times, but he really took us on his journey, and in the process of that, he told us everything. I know everything about Jim Baker, Father Yod, the darkest, most embarrassing, horrible things you can imagine, like robbing banks. He held nothing back. He processed what we call his “river of life” by orally giving us the history of his timelines. He gave us everything about him, which taught us how to do it with ourselves.

JW We didn’t capture it in the first book, or the film, but we mentioned it in this new scrapbook. During morning meditation, Father Yod would look back on his life with brutal honesty and even a sense of humility. Years ago, Omni Aquarian told me at one of the morning meditations, Father Yod said when one of his early wives, Elaine, was divorcing him, she very gently told him that throughout their marriage, she’d never had a single orgasm, and he had no idea. He didn’t even know what a female orgasm was because most men didn’t at that time.

He continued to tell the Family how he learned about female sexuality, which was through his best friend Gus, who was a butch lesbian. She was also running a harem of twelve of the most elite prostitutes in Los Angeles at that time, and they were all madly in love with her. So, Jim Baker learned about how to give an orgasm through Gus. Father Yod would often say that the only constant in the universe was change, right Isis? And he was always changing everything up in the Family.

IA Daily. It was an ideology, and you had to really step up if you wanted to move with him, which happened on the day he left his body. We didn’t know until that morning he was going hang-gliding. Nobody knew. He just got up right in the middle of our morning meditation and he said, “Do you have the kite ready? Let’s go hang-gliding.” If you weren’t in two seconds following him, you were going to be left behind.

OK So, what would be your advice to young people who might want to make the existing model obsolete, and is the utopian urge still important or relevant?

IA It is still important, and nothing has to be obsolete. That whole thing in the ’60s and ’70s with the Source Family was a foundation. It was part of being the pioneers, something this generation can now take, make it better, continue with it, and do it in their way for this era. There’s so much from that time that they need now, just like we took from things that happened in the 1920s and 1940s, going back to the 1800s. We were taking stuff and incorporating it. People are going to know what to do, just like we knew what to do in the ’60s and ’70s.

JW I’d like to say one thing that I learned from several Source Family members over the years, which they considered one of the most valuable lessons that Father Yod taught them, and that was to be fearless. They learned to be fearless because they had to encounter so many intense situations over and over again. There were extreme risks that they took, and to me, that seems as good as any guidance that I could get from anyone.

IA Being fearless is a warrior’s mentality. We were spiritual warriors.

Sisters of

Photographs by Damien Maloney

Interview by Summer Bowie.

Located in the impoverished, but agriculturally rich Central Valley, Sisters of the Valley is a nondenominational sisterhood whose mission is to bring the healing powers of plant-based medicines to the world. During the Harvest Moon of 2014, Sister Kate, originally a Reaganite Republican who transformed into a liberal anarchist, activist nun after discovering the medicinal powers of weed, developed her first line of cannabidiol teas and tinctures. Inspired by the Beguines of medieval Europe who formed semi-monastic communities but did not take formal religious vows, the Sisters of the Valley abide by their own spiritual order, which includes wearing the traditional habit worn by nuns, praying together, and respecting Mother Nature. Their products, which are all made according to the moon cycle, are shipped globally to anyone seeking to heal their suffering.

the Valley

how does a Reagan-voting, suburban mom become a gun-toting weed nun in the Central Valley?

Sister Kate (Laughs) Well, I would say a long journey of being shit on. That would be my short answer. The longer answer is that it was a journey of realization that I was living in a bubble, that my attitudes toward the poor were formed by propaganda, that there is no safety net, and that even good, hard-working people end up with nothing by a turn of the circumstances in our society, which offers them no help.

SB Your life story thus far really has attested to the fact that you can work hard to build a nest egg for yourself and it can all be taken away from you without any legal recourse.

SK Exactly, and no help from the system. There are some ridiculous rules that stack the deck against you. We live in a very transient society now, and the rules in the courts for custody don’t consider that. There’s no safety net for those like us who have moved around a lot. And also, my journey of living in the Netherlands where, yes, they pay very high income tax, but they don’t pay for a hospital bill. In fact, the hospital gives them bus fare if they need it on the way out. They don’t pay for their children's education. They don’t pay for care in their old age. Over there, capitalism and socialism live side-by-side in a very happy way like we do with our Postal Service and our transport services. They also don’t have the same pushback from a corporate oligarchy that has to gain from us not having these things. So yeah, it was all of that that made me go, “Oh my god, I voted for Ronald Reagan. I was part of the problem.”

SB I’m curious about your first experience with cannabis. What was that like and how old were you?

SK I was very afraid of it. My first marriage lasted less time than the Iran Contra affair, but he was a weed smoker, and I remember visiting him in his apartment for the first time in Chicago. I got there before he got home and his roommate was rolling weed at the kitchen table, so I locked myself in the bedroom because I was pretty sure he was gonna rape me after he smoked that joint. That’s how stupid I was. I had also bought into the alcohol culture in those days. I bought into a lot of the things that were fed to me. Three or four years later, while I was working in the corporate world, I experienced smoking weed in a new setting and realized that this was much better for me than alcohol. It was always a recreational thing to me then. But then, when I went through menopause, I was living in the Netherlands having hot flashes, and I was an emotional, crazy woman. So, I go to see my doctor and he says, “Have you ever smoked weed?” And I said, “Yes.” And he goes, “Well, you're not smoking enough,” (laughs) “You need to smoke a whole joint before you go to bed and lay off the alcohol and caffeine.” And then, my symptoms went away. I don’t know if that would work for everybody, but for me, it worked. At the age of forty-five, I started to really have renewed interest and respect for the plant.

SB Do you consider the farm a utopia in some way? And how do you feel about utopian thinking?

SK Well, some moments it’s a utopia and sometimes it’s hell (laughs). It’s like everything else in life. I’m a very practical person, so I consider utopian thinking to be kind of insane. What I’m aiming for is a monastic style of life without the dogma: the quiet, the contemplation, the meditation, the people living by a code of some sort, together in harmony without there having to be a scary god or a religious bent to anything that we do. Though, we

do follow the cycles of the moon. And we make our medicines in a spiritual environment. But, we don’t try to export our dogma or our religion. We don’t care if people know or understand that side of us. It’s for our own healing. So in many ways, I feel like I have achieved something close to a utopia on Earth, which would be a compromised utopia. But, I feel like it’s succeeded because we have achieved so much harmony. And we have done that through a persistent, diligent effort in following the rules that we set up.

SB What do those rules entail?

SK Well, you're allowed to have a difference of opinion. Sometimes people trigger people without even knowing it. Those things are allowed to happen, but you have to mend it. We have a 3-to-5-day rule. Like if it was really bad, they get five days, but they have to talk about it and resolve it. We also have a no surprise rule. You're not allowed to keep secrets or things that are going to surprise us. I’m talking about secrets that are going to impact everybody. Like, you've been planning to leave for three months and you decide to tell us the day before. We like to plan our lives. We don’t like to be rushed. You see something, you know something, you report something. If there's a burst pipe flooding out back, you don’t walk past it without telling anybody. You'd be surprised how many people live in their own worlds and don’t understand that when you live in a community, you have an obligation to keep your eyes and ears open for the enclave. SB Can you talk a little bit about your Beguine ancestors—who they were and why they're so important to the Sisters of the Valley?

SK The Beguines are timeless. I even know some Catholic nuns who agree with me on this. There is no point in time that they began. But, we know from historical evidence that the Beguines operated probably as early as the 600s. They were women who lived together, worked together, prayed together on farms, and identified their enclave by their clothing. They served the castle in the town with medicine, soaps, textiles, and they were known for their excellence. If you look them up today, though, you are only going to find information from the 1300s forward. The Catholic Beguines. You have to really dig to find out about the pre-Catholic Beguines because they originally were not Catholic. They didn't affiliate with any religion, but those that survived had to turn Catholic at the point of the sword of the Inquisition. They were religious scholars who studied all religions. They would not affiliate themselves with any one religion and they could make or break a priest or pastor in town because they were so well respected. So, we set out to emulate them. We want it to be known that we do it in a spiritual environment and we wear a uniform to identify our enclave, but we don’t export any dogma, and neither did they. They farmed, they provided medicine, they were spiritual, but they didn't have a message to preach to the people.

SB You grew up in the Catholic religion. What was that experience like?

SK It was good. I was born in 1959, so it was in the mid ’60s and there were six of us kids. My parents were part of the home and school, and very active with the church. They were both scout leaders. So, it was normal for us to be very involved; to be sent on errands to the convent or the rectory. It was normal that we'd be called on when the teachers or the nuns needed help with something. It was very interesting to me, very enriching. I loved the nuns. I loved how one could be sick and another one would just take her place, and no one missed a beat. I loved how they stood for excellence and they stood for their work. There were some I was scared of, but I just had a good experience. We had thirty blind kids in our school and one of the sisters translated all

their books into braille. Their mission was to get the blind kids to study with the sighted kids.

SB I’m curious about your vow of chastity. I understand that it’s not forbidden to have intimate relationships, but that they're privatized. Can you talk about the importance of that?

SK We live in a world where sexuality is just squandered all over the place, in my opinion. The energy of healing and the energy of seduction are opposite energies. We're in a meditation to be in touch with our mothers, to make them proud of us, to have them guide us through this process of making medicine by the cycles of the moon—the same way they did. Most of the elders sisters here are celibate and are devoted completely just like if we were Catholic nuns. But there's no requirement on anybody because we think intimacy is important and a very healing part of life. We would never want to deny our sisters the ability to participate in something that can be quite nourishing and healing to the soul. But, the relationships and the sexual activities are kept far away from the enclave and the brand. So, as I say to the cats when I hear them screwing, "If Sister Kate isn't getting any, no one gets any."

SB Many of you in the enclave come from all different parts of the world. How did you find one another?

SK People like you (laughs). If it wasn't for the media, we probably wouldn't have found each other. If you ask Maria, she'll say she saw a Facebook post and then Sophia will say that she saw a news report. And then they reached out to me, which started a long, organic dialogue, and multiple trips to the farm where we made medicine together. We're so small and we've grown so slowly because we're not gonna do a nun-in-a-kit thing, which people have so disgustingly suggested. We have to get to know them and then we have to figure out how they're gonna start commerce in their part of the world.

SB The politics around legalized cannabis in California is pretty tricky because each county has its own rules. Where are the sisters in this fight?

SK We've always ignored the county rules and it’s pretty much how we've survived. When we started doing this in 2015, they considered CBD the same as cannabis and it was totally outlawed, but I kept doing it. And then, I was harassed by the police, but I was doing everything by the book. I was paying every cent of tax. Recently our Drug Czar admitted to the Dutch media who were here interviewing him that they've tried every way to shut me down and there's no way. That’s because we're very diligent. We don’t care what the county says, but we care very much about paying our state tax, our payroll tax, and having a bookkeeping team. We have everything sewn together and clean so that no one can accuse us of doing any wrongdoing. In the eight years we've been doing this, they went from outlawing it completely to saying, "It’s allowed, but only on quarter acres and only in particular cities," to saying, "You have to have twenty acres," to "Okay, you can do it on a quarter acre." I would have whiplash if I tried to keep up with the county. They quit hassling us five years ago and that’s where we are.

SB I've always found it so interesting the way that the federal government raids farms in states where cannabis is legal, but they also collect income taxes.

SK Exactly. And I was in a fortunate position because I do keep such control of the numbers that the last time the sheriff visited, I reminded him and his guy on the way out that we pay enough taxes in a year to pay for both of their salaries. I think that’s important because if you're playing in their system, they're gonna

find a loophole to shut you down. That’s why we don’t take cash sales ever. Our poor postman, if he wants a $10 tin of salve, we're like, "Sorry, you have to do a PayPal transaction or something, because we won't take cash." Because we know that’s where they'll try to get you.

SB A lot of cultivators use pesticides and other fertilizing chemicals that aren't very natural. How do you approach things like nitrogen enrichment and pest control?

SK As naturally as we can. We order boxes of ladybugs and put other plants that attract pollinators around them. That way we don’t have to use any chemicals. In fact, we do regular clean green testing with our lab, which is quite expensive. About a year ago, we determined that we had a bad crop and about 40% of our products failed. It was a real crisis where we had to pull products off the shelf because they all had mercury and lead. Even though the lab scientists said, "Yeah, but it’s not in harmful amounts." We're like, "Yeah, but any mercury and lead is not cool. We don’t want it in our products." I've been testing the soil since I moved to this farm and it’s never been there before. It might have been from the droughts, but it was in the water. So, we had to put in a system at the well to clean it out, because we want to make sure that we're not doing harm in delivering medicine. That’s the realm of the pharmaceutical companies.

SB Can you talk about your visit to the Tule Mountain Native American reservation and how their connection to the natural world inspired what you're doing now?

SK That was incredibly powerful. I was delivering cannabis to patients in 2014 when I received a special invitation. Once a year, members of tribes from Alaska to Mexico make this pilgrimage to Tule Mountain Reservation. I was invited into circles with these elder medicine makers and I was overcome with the fact that they weren't sharing their information. They were gonna die with a lot of medicinal knowledge because they felt there were no young girls walking the Red Road. This is the way they've always worked. I told them that I have this Sisterhood, and I work with this medicine, and with your permission, I'd like to take this knowledge with me and walk kind of a Pink Road. They all thought that was hilarious, which started a conversation that has been going on for twelve years. This year we were honored to be on their route to Alcatraz. We fed them on the way there and back, and sent medicine with them to give away. There's nothing official about it, but we're connected.

SB Can you explain the significance of the Red Road?

SK The Red Road is working with Native traditions. I would have to spend a lifetime with them to truly understand it, but it is about honoring and taking care of the women. What we ended up with here in Fresno is a diversity of tribes that came together for survival reasons, because the Trail of Tears ended here. So, Fresno has become a hub for many of the tribes. The Red Road is also about taking care of the land. For example, before they take down a tree, they pray and they need to understand that that tree wants to come down and needs to come down. We only have trees taken down by the Natives because they have a whole spiritual ceremony around it. We have huge respect for that. The Beguines organized and made their medicines by the cycles of the moon, and so did the Native Americans of this land in the year 800. We're trying to honor all of them in what we do.

SB What is it about cannabis specifically? What are its greatest healing virtues?

SK For some people, cannabis can take the anxiety that renders them completely dysfunctional and make them functional again. I don’t know if that’s called healing. The new science on

mushrooms is that they have the power to rewire the circuits in your brain, and mushrooms have the capacity to heal, whereas cannabis is more of a survival tool that helps mitigate symptoms. I can smoke a joint and mitigate my anxiety, but what I'd really like to do is not have that anxiety. I'd really like to have a brain that manages its own anxiety. I’m talking about both functional mushrooms and psilocybin mushrooms. They all contribute to this and you don’t need to have a trip. You can either microdose the psilocybin or introduce a combination of six functional mushrooms, like we have in our mushroom coffee.

SB What are the six varieties of mushrooms that you use in your coffee?

SK We use cordyceps, chaga, lion's mane, turkey tail, shiitake, and reishi. Then, we also add ashwaganda, turmeric, and ginger root, which all add to mood stabilization.

SB Is there anything you feel is misunderstood about your mission that you would like to correct for the public record?

SK Yes. We say we do a million in sales and then the editors in the media turn that into a million in profit. That’s insane. We are not magicians. A million in sales means we're lucky if we can preserve $90,000 in profit. And we've been about half that since the pandemic, so we're climbing our way out.

SB Lastly, do you have any advice for other women who want to start their own businesses and/or healing communities?

SK I would say that women should be bold and know that there's an awful lot of funding available in certain states. There are microloans and other funds that are available to both women and men where you can start a cottage industry on somebody else's money with low interest, and there's more money now for minorities than ever. So, I would recommend that they look for those resources. And there are resource centers available to aspiring business owners. I think the only way to heal the world is to have women owning and running more stuff. I highly encourage women to follow their passion and not hide from anything. Most businesses fail from procrastination. The owner gets a notice from the Employee Development Department of California and they don’t wanna open it, so they leave it on their desk for two months. My advice to anybody starting a new business is get in touch with your most proactive self. Don’t let any problem deter you from facing it head-on, so no uglies grow. Put everything in place so you don’t have any surprises.

“Another Way Robert D’Alessandro

Robert D’Allessandro has captured the powerful countercultural undertow of the 1960s and 1970s with stark black-and-white images akin to the historical photography of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. In 1970, he left the urban decay of New York City for the communal hippie settlements of Placitas, New Mexico where hundreds of young people, disillusioned with the post-war doldrums of the American Dream, turned on, tuned in, and dropped out—there was another way of living.

of Living”

Placitas, New Mexico 1971–1975

A photo document by Robert D’Alessandro

Interview by Julie Ragolia

“There’s a certain sickness in this country where we don’t face the impact of our philosophies, so whenever there’s something good, they absorb it and sell it back to you.”

“I always thought of Placitas as a collection of refugees from the ’50s trying to find some other way to live without a roadmap.”

Julie Ragolia I went to this gallery talk the other week, and the artist had his students there. I found it interesting because he thought it important that his students understand his practice, but you never shared your practice with us. It wasn't until we reconnected that I got to know your personal practice.

Robert D’Alessandro Well, I care a lot about my own practice. But particularly in a place like Brooklyn College, I was dealing with students that weren't pretentious. A lot of the richer people are already planning to start galleries and make money out of it. I just wanted the people to know that it really required them getting in touch with their own feelings and issues—that they didn't need somebody telling them what kind of style or philosophy they should have. Over the years, you start to realize what it is you're feeling about what you're seeing. And that was the important thing for me because I had to get free from the culture of the ’50s. In the ’50s, you couldn't even say the word pregnant. You couldn't talk about sex, you couldn't talk about anything in any kind of real way. Everybody was playing the role.

JR Where were you at this point?

RD I was from the Bronx, but I moved to Long Island, and I wanted to fit in. So,[Bob] Dylan came along and said, "How does it feel to be on your own, like a Rolling Stone," and that just blew it all open. And the ’60s blew it open. One of the things that happened to me was I started hanging around with musicians. Then I met Ben Fernandez. He was a Puerto Rican-Italian guy who grew up in Spanish Harlem, and he had become successful as a protest photographer. I had just become a freelancer with New York magazine, and he asked if he could see some pictures. So, I opened my trunk and showed him some pictures. He said, "You want a job?" So, I got a job with him setting up the photography department at the New School for Social Research, and that was a great time. But, the best thing was he had created an organization called the Photo Film Workshop, which was in the basement of The Public Theater, and Joe Papp gave us a dark room space where students from all over New York could go and develop their photography.

JR At that time a lot of the kids were making protest photography, right?

RD Right, a lot of it was centered around protest photography at the time. But, I wasn't really a protest photographer. I was walking around the city and looking at what was happening. I had just come back from Brazil, where I was in the Peace Corps, because I didn't want to go to Vietnam. And then, I met this fellow from New Mexico at a party who married my girlfriend’s sister, Amy. One day he came up and said, "Hey, Amy and I are going back to New Mexico, you want to go?" I said, "Sure." And that's what we did. A bunch of my friends opened what they called the Thunderbird bar in Placitas, New Mexico. Everybody played there: Willie Nelson, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. I was going back and forth in the van, still working with New York magazine, doing freelance work, and I was teaching at Brooklyn College.

JR So all of this is still in the ’60s?

RD Well, this is about 1970, or so. Placitas was a small, Spanish village that had a lot of artists and poets living there. Only a few houses were available for rent, but the Hispanics and the counterculture people interacted and everybody was pretty cooperative with each other. So, the houses were passed on to different people if they liked you. I eventually quit my job at Brooklyn College and moved out here.

JR When did you leave Brooklyn College?

RD Well, the thing was, I was working with Ben

[Fernandez] at the New School and I remember talking to Garry Winogrand who said, "If you want to keep going in this teaching and the photography business, you gotta have a degree."

JR Wow. I didn't think that was as important back then as it is now for younger artists coming up.

RD Well, at that time, all you had to be was a photographer, because people wanted to know about photography. But, as it grew, they started to come up with programs and the attitude was changing. They wanted a more academic kind of thing. So, if you wanted to keep teaching, you had to get a degree. What was great about Placitas was it didn't matter who you were as long as you said who you were and you lived by it, and you didn't screw anybody over, and you weren't into any kind of major exploitation. So, I think it's funny that you call some of the pictures from that era naked, hippie pictures because we never really considered ourselves hippies, per se. Not like the California crowd. We were just people who lived and worked together, and who were helping each other. I always thought of Placitas as a collection of refugees from the ’50s trying to find some other way to live without a roadmap. Except of course, the roadmap might be reading Allen Ginsberg or the Beat Poets. Then, the art historians and the people who ran the universities started to teach the students strategies: what to become, how to get your work in the Museum of Modern Art, or whatever—as opposed to just doing the work that artists do. Maybe I was naïve. I'm probably still naïve.

JR It's funny you say that because it was a big lesson that I took from you as a student. You would look at my photography and say that I see like a child. I still see like a child. That naïveté is an important part of who I am.

RD Picasso said that the goal of an artist is to see with the directness of a child. You have to make something that you actually feel something for. To me, art was a way of keeping my head above water, trying to figure out my own philosophy of living, as opposed to the philosophy that you saw on TV or that other people would try to get you into communism, socialism, whatever kind of ism they wanted. I couldn't take the pressure of trying to be a success, which of course, I wanted to be, but it would have influenced the kind of work I did. I was in this show here with my friend Tony, who is an astronomer. He got me to do the first hippie pictures that I sent to you.

JR So, you refer to them as hippie pictures as well?

RD Well, I'm talking to you (laughs). I don't know what else to call them. Those pictures were about people trying to live together and make something work. If I used the word hippie with my friends, they'd probably say, "Would you shut up?" but when I'm talking to other people, that's the only word they may understand. But Tony first tried to approach some friends of mine here who had started the Thunderbird bar, and he mentioned wanting to talk to them about the counterculture. They hung up on him immediately. Like with the flag book [Glory, 1973], I didn't know I had a theme there until Tony said, "These pictures are about people." As a matter of fact, the curator from Santa Fe came here and said, "We don't see many pictures about people interacting the way those pictures show." So, Tony pressed me to do a show, and I started to put it together, but my friends didn't want much to do with it because they said, "Bob, the ’60s are over." But I was tired of people thinking the ’60s were about sex, drugs, rock and roll, and Charlie Manson. The real thing was a very positive philosophy of people who were trying

to work together, trying to be honest in what they did, and cooperative, and have fun. Dropping out was not a big deal. You just did what you did. The media made it like this whole rebellious thing. They always had to characterize things and sell it to the average American. They tried to make the hippie thing a warning about drugs—it was a warning about the anti-commercial world. But of course, everybody had to get into the commercial world at a certain point, because you couldn't survive in America without somehow relating to the commercial world. Eventually, part of that plays in, and I'm not opposed to that, but the adulation of the commercial world can be as bad as the adulation of the hippie world.

JR When did you notice the shift from this communally-oriented world to a more commercially-driven one?

RD I remember watching TV and seeing Merrill Lynch's “Bullish on America” commercial. This was in the early ’80s, and I said to my brother, "Well, I think the torch has been passed from the artist to the businessman," because in the ’60s and early ’70s, people looked to what the music was saying and what the artists were doing for a philosophical frame of reference. And then, everybody started to become really concerned about their credit scores and their 401k investment. It became imperative once you couldn't go down to Soho and get a loft for a hundred dollars. People came in and started turning the lofts into beautiful homes because they were bigger than the apartments on the Upper East Side, and you could absorb the aura of the ’60s era, but you could live like you were the King of England. There's a certain sickness in this country where we don't face the impact of our philosophies, so whenever there's something good, they absorb it and sell it back to you. It becomes a crazy vortex that people's minds get caught into and then they don't know what their values are.

JR How does the notion of utopia play out in the current era as compared to the '60s?

RD Well, the ’60s were just a burst of creative energy that relied on the prosperity of the '50s. Of course, the parents were pleased because they had been delivered from the horrors of both the Depression and World War II, and they wanted good things for their kids. But it became this entrenched philosophy that the rest of the world wanted to take away from us. In Vietnam, we saw this poor little country that had been ravaged by both the French and the Chinese, and they were gonna go communist, so we got into a war about it. My generation, who had mostly been privileged, felt this contradiction and they said, "What the hell is this? You taught us one thing and you're doing another." It caused a real schism; it caused the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of John Kennedy, I remember when Malcolm X got shot. So, when the ’80s came around, everybody resorted to so-called conservative values, which were really business values. It created a mini psychosis that turned into all the shootings and the eruption of race relations that keeps coming back. On the one hand, it's great when you're watching television now and you see Black and trans people, gay people, you even see men kissing in a commercial. And on the other hand, they don't want women to have control of their bodies. There's this extreme working out of what the hell we really believe in.

Interview by Jay Ezra Nayssan

Photography by Ethan DeLorenzo

Located in the mystical ancient coastal redwoods, in a town called Albion, Salmon Creek Farm was founded in 1971 by a group of brave young communards who became disillusioned with society and decided to live closer in harmony with the vibrations of nature. They built their own homes, grew their own food, and lived communally until the late ’80s. In 2014, Fritz Haeg—best known for his Edible Estates project, which encouraged people to turn their front lawns into edible gardens—purchased the property to continue the legacy of the original commune while imagining its future. For the past decade, with many volunteers, Salmon Creek Farm has undergone an exhaustive renovation, and something close to a queer rewilding, which has brought back to life many of the old cabins and amenities. Now a non-profit, Salmon Creek Farm will begin hosting seasonal land-based programs for artists starting in 2024, with limited residencies during other parts of the year. Jay Ezra Nayssan, who is the founder of the dynamic alternative art space Del Vaz Projects and sits on the community council of Salmon Creek Farm, speaks to Fritz Haeg about art, architecture, ecology, and the utopian ethos.

Jay Ezra Nayssan When I think about utopia, it's not an actual place, but rather a sequence of inquiries into not necessarily how to live but why to live. I've always admired how your practice has reflected that. I think we can start by talking about the pivots in your career that led up to Salmon Creek Farm. And how academically and professionally you started as an architect?

Fritz Haeg Every single thing that I've done my entire life stems from a very early impulse to make new worlds. Starting with Legos, starting with forts, starting with all forms of imagining other ways of living. This probably came from being a little queer kid in a very repressive, suburban, white Catholic environment. That very early motivation to think about making my own spaces led me to architecture. Later, I became aware of the limits and the inher-

ently conservative nature of architecture and drifted away from it. Every seven years or so, I experience a massive shift. It's almost like an earthquake—the pressure builds up and there's a seismic shift. When I moved to LA, my migration away from architecture was really through gardening, teaching, and hosting gatherings at my house. So, these three activities that are very feminine and not taken seriously at all were really the foundation of my art practice. All of the work that I was doing, like the Edible Estates gardens and the Animal Estates projects, were connected to urban ecology, urban rewilding, and productive landscapes. And then, there was a long period of mostly commissioned art projects around the world that had me living on the road for a very long time. And I knew that I wanted the opposite at some point. I wanted to be settled, rural, and connected to a piece of land. So, it was a pretty dramatic shift when I found and bought Salmon Creek Farm. I changed my email address. I didn't travel anymore, do lectures, or teach. I just shut it all down with a

singular focus on this one piece of land, and without any real clarity of what it would become. It was just a selfish desire to be settled in a rural place, working with my hands, with friends around.

JEN Is there something you think is missing from architecture that led you into more of an artistic practice? And then, what's missing from the artistic practice that's fulfilled with the built environment?

FH I've been so consumed with daily chores at Salmon Creek Farm for eight years now that I haven't given myself a chance to really think critically about any of these things. I feel like, at my core, I'm an architect, but half of me is an artist. That can be very confusing, especially if you're younger. My worst fear is that I would be bad at both or compromise both. But I do think it provides me with a certain skill set that I can move back and forth with. Just being outside is always helpful. I was much more of an outsider as an artist too. I think the profession of architecture is inherently conservative because

Creek

you're dependent on clients with money to tell you what problems they want to solve. It’s inherently a passive position because you're waiting for someone to give you a commission. As an artist, and especially an artist that's attained a certain kind of autonomy and agency, you have the freedom to identify what you want to pursue. You wake up to a blank canvas, which can be the scariest thing about being an artist. With architecture, on the other hand, it's not a blank canvas. There are a lot of parameters that you're working within, and I find those helpful. You've seen at Salmon Creek Farm the fuzzy line between architecture and construction, and art and craft. Looking at architecture, art, and ecology, you can't really pull them apart; they're all connected.

JEN Art, architecture, and ecology—I think you've understood what might be lacking or desirable in each of those that could then be fulfilled by some kind of social practice.

FH If you just think of the container of a structure, an inhabitable structure for humans, you have this external world of the environment and the interior world of people, in theory. I'm always thinking of architecture as that. The most important conversation is that one between the environment and an engagement with people. But I think ecology and community are the most pressing forces on making spaces, whether you're an architect or even if you're an artist creating environments. This might sound really obvious, but for most of the last 120 years, this has not been the assumption.

JEN I think you're also challenging what an art audience is, or what an architecture audience is.

FH The perception of rural spaces is that serious

art only happens in cities. Or you have to put on some big, spectacular, very expensive show if you're going to be rural. But I feel very strongly that modest rural things can be of great significance. Maybe you see this more in Europe. There are very sophisticated art institutions in small villages in Europe, like the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, for example. But spending time in the desert and also being up in Mendocino, those communities are full of older artists who never moved to the city, who've been making work in the shadows for a very long time. A lot of them are women. Of course, there are infinite art worlds, but I think this dominant commercial world of art is not very representative of the most interesting work that's out there. I'm interested in Salmon Creek Farm being a welcoming space for young artists where there's no place for them in the conventional institutional spaces that exist now.

JEN We often talk about your childhood growing up in the Midwest and how this notion of moving west is an ideal versus the reality of living in the West, specifically California. I feel like the difference between that ideal versus reality has consistently informed your practice. I'm curious about this pivot from the Midwest to New York, and back West to Los Angeles before Salmon Creek Farm. FH I'm a fifth-generation Minnesotan. That is where I was born and grew up. They call St. Paul the last city of the East and Minneapolis the first city of the West. But we used to go to California every spring. My mom's family is there. If you can imagine being a kid in the winter in Minnesota and then getting on a plane and going to Santa Barbara.

We would stay with my fabulous uncle who was a decorator. I mean, just the smell of citrus blossoms, it really was powerful for me. But I lived for a few years in Italy and then for five years in New York. One morning in my East Village tenement loft, I just opened my eyes with this flash that I had to move to LA. Six weeks later, I packed everything in a van and drove west. This was 1999. My friends in New York thought I was giving up. LA still had this inferiority complex and was not considered a place you would go if you were really serious, which is hard to imagine now. But that first year in LA was incredible. It makes me emotional thinking about it. It was my first year gardening for real and it was revelatory. That became not just a hobby or a casual interest, but really part of the focus of my practice. I just had this feeling that gardens are important. Of course, that led to a whole series of projects after that, like the Edible Estate Garden series, which was in fifteen cities around the world. And then, my very last project, Wildflowering L.A., which was across fifty sites in the county.

JEN I’m curious about this last shift from rewilding the urban, to urbanizing and even tending the wild. What was that in response to?

FH All of my art projects were around this question and this focus on resisting certain parts of the city. Resisting the isolation from our food, from wilderness. I wanted to make the city more porous to urban wildlife and native plants. It was rewilding, but also just a general kind of resistance. In LA, you're so aware of the landscape, the natural world around you, in a way that's not the case in Manhattan. LA is a very exciting place to think about these things.

I needed to think about how to operate within it and short-circuit it, or undermine it, or just question it in a fundamental way. So then, going to Salmon Creek Farm, it was this complete inversion because you're in these thirty-three acres of coastal redwoods that were chopped to the ground in the late 1800s and then again in the ’50s. It was a traumatized landscape, but still a very beautiful, picturesque landscape. The first urgent needs are around infrastructure, architecture, and construction. Building and urbanizing. It was really the opposite of everything I was doing in my city life as an artist. I was worried about water heaters, and leaky roofs, and furnishing all of these cabins, and just getting them habitable. The irony of that isn't lost on me. So, it was returning to architecture, returning to that kind of practice, but in a more modest and hand-spun way.

JEN Before Salmon Creek Farm, you were on this global search for the right piece of land. You spent a significant amount of time looking for that piece of land in Italy following your

time at the American Academy in Rome. There's a considerable amount of utopian or fantasy architecture in Italy, like Palmanova or La Scarzuola, or even Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden, or Hendrik Christian Andersen and his idea of the “world city.” This bridge between art and architecture, between a social or ecological practice, does it have anything to do with Italian agriculture?

FH I moved to Italy for the first time when I was twenty and studied under Aldo Rossi at the School of Architecture in Venice for a year. I started thinking about this American obsession with doing things quickly and efficiently. What I've always loved about Italian culture is its inefficiency, this lack of obsession with productivity, and this connection to ecology and community. I've done extensive traveling around the country over the years and visited farmers in small villages. It’s very moving, the artfulness of growing food and how that food is then turned into recipes that feed families. It's the whole culture of the ta-

ble and the kitchen. I have always been much more interested in the "peasant culture.” When I was living at the American Academy of Rome, I became really fixated on Puglia, where I spent some time. There's this certain building type there called the masseria. It has very problematic politics because this feudal lord would live in this palatial estate on the upper floor. Downstairs, all the peasants did the manual labor. There are these beautiful courtyards surrounded by little production spaces and subterranean cisterns. You would have donkeys going in a circle in the courtyard, turning a stone underground that was milling the olives that would turn into olive oil, which would age in the cisterns. I was obsessed with the idea of doing something there, but even my Italian friends were like, "You know, nobody's coming here, right?" It was a completely impractical fantasy. I was constantly thinking of this rural utopian life. It's the kind of thing that kept me sane during that period when I was just living on the road. Once my community became Los Angeles, it just made more sense for me to stay in California. It was just very lucky that Salmon Creek came up when it did. It was on the market for two and a half years and I feel like I conjured it.

JEN I guess that's a good transition to the theme of this issue. Thomas More wrote this book [Utopia (1551)] at a time when European empires were conquering “the new world” and exploiting human bodies and natural resources from the earth. Since then, these notions of utopia, utopian architecture, and utopian societies keep appearing in response to either social, political, economic, or environmental anxieties or tumult. So, I want to talk about 1971 specifically, and Salmon Creek Farm, and who these original communards were. What were they looking for? What do you think they were responding to?

FH I think in times of tumult, or when things aren't working right in mainstream society, people go off and look for other ways of living. 1968 is when the hippie movement, the “Summer of Love,” turned dark. You had the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. You had a growing resistance to the Vietnam War. You had a nascent environmental movement, the civil rights movement, gay liberation, women's liberation. It's such a dramatic and powerful time of imagination. Young people were coming of age and really questioning this society they've been born into and are inheriting. So, as things got dark, there was just a mass global migration, from urban to rural. Some say the biggest in history. The communards at Salmon Creek Farm were mostly white, middle-class, educated youth in their twenties who were drawn to places like this. Salmon Creek Farm was a blended family with six boys between the ages of nine and thirteen, and young people who just showed up. That's the way the communes worked at that time. People would literally just show up at the gates. There were weekly meetings where they would make decisions about how the place would run. Basically, it was resisting mainstream society and looking for something else, and they were really searching in a way I identify with. In retrospect, I can see the gaps in their naive appropriation of Native American rituals and the whiteness of it all. Some people have even called it an extreme version of white flight. Who has the privilege to be able to just leave and move to a piece of land in the woods? They must have had some sort of safety net. But the core people at Salmon Creek Farm I've gotten to know really well. I mean,

they really didn't know what they were doing. They didn't know how to build. Each of them had different skills. They would take turns cooking and cleaning for the group. But I think there was just this feeling of possibility and they figured it out.

JEN You didn't have those specific anxieties or questions for yourself, but you personally saw a need for a global community.

FH My artwork has always been led by what I craved personally, and then feeling very strongly that if there's some impulse I'm having, there are probably some others who have a similar one. I believe in a collective subconscious. And I think we all crave a connection to a piece of dirt, plants, clean air, trees, views, and just everything that comes with a rural space. There are many queer people and people of color who don't feel safe or welcome in those kinds of spaces. And for me, Salmon Creek Farm is, if nothing else, a sanctuary space that offers people the opportunity to have time in an environment like that. At the height of COVID, at the height of Black Lives Matter, when we were doing free POC retreats, I could see it on people's faces after they had driven nine hours from LA. But I think the word utopia is really interesting, and I'm not afraid of it. I'm interested in it. It's a helpful lens to look at certain projects. But I do think utopias can be really dangerous if they're imposed on people who don't want them.

JEN I remember first understanding Salmon Creek Farm as an art project by Fritz Haeg and how it resembles similar projects by other artists and architects: Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum, or Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin, all of these places have such a strong tie to their creator or founder.

Is this Fritz Haeg's Salmon Creek Farm?

FH The art world today is driven by notoriety and cultivating an image and persona. I didn't have a real plan or an idea when I got to Salmon Creek Farm. It was a commune that had been abandoned twenty-five years earlier. This was in 2014 and I was ambivalent about it, but I got on Instagram at the beginning to tell the story of what was going on there. What's interesting is that you can't tell the story of the beginning of Salmon Creek Farm’s renewal without Instagram because, unfortunately, that's the way the story has been told, and that’s the way everyone knows about it (laughs). There will be books at some point, but I've been very private. It was Salmon Creek Farm before me. It will be Salmon Creek Farm after me. I'm just kind of a custodian that's shepherding it through this period. I think the bigger issue is that it's been my full-time home for eight years and my only home, so it's very personal. The last thing I'll say about that, though, is I've always hoped that my projects would be better known than I was—that Edible Estates or Salmon Creek would have a bigger identity than me as a person.

JEN There’s also this idea of co-authorship, much like [Anna] Halprin’s Initiations and Transformations did with choreography. Instead of being dogmatic and didactic, there are these very essential, basic instructions providing dancers or users with inspiration and freedom to apply their own creative sensibilities. How important is co-authorship in the success of a utopia? And if Salmon Creek Farm is not a utopia, then in the success of Salmon Creek Farm?

FH All of that Halprin work is around communal creativity and short-circuiting this idea of the heroic, solitary genius. Instead, the role of the artist is

a guide, someone who's shepherding a community or a group through their own creativity, project, and place-making. I really love that idea. And I do think Salmon Creek Farm is maybe less of a utopia and more of a sanctuary with a philosophy because it's not going to be a place where people are living full time. There's a philosophy there that's inherent to the physical landscape and the original commune. What I bring to it is peeling apart the layers, letting it breathe, and bringing it back in a way. There's a lot we can learn from that period and those utopian impulses that those kids had in the ’60s and ’70s. Younger people today don't have the financial freedom to just go to the woods and make a commune together. They come out of college loaded with student debt. They're already indoctrinated into a financial system that they didn't choose.

JEN When you said a “sanctuary with a philosophy,” for me, one of the philosophies for Salmon Creek Farm is "the work.” I remember my first trip to Salmon Creek Farm was

followed by a visit to the Hippie Modernism show, and the subtitle was “The Struggle for Utopia.” On the outside, it really does look like a paradise, and even when you're staying there, it feels like a paradise. But as a frequent visitor, I've become familiar with the work, and based on what I heard from the original communards, it really seems like the work is the reason why Salmon Creek Farm succeeded in those early years.

FH Just making the cabins habitable with wood stoves, hot water, kitchens, having them furnished with an outhouse, and working WiFi, it took a very long time. There was so much work to do at the beginning. There are always seasonal projects to do, like splitting wood for firewood, or weeding the garden, or endless repairs in the cabin, or trailblazing, or harvesting the apples, and making our cider every fall. I finally have a seasonal calendar of all the chores that come up every year. It's become more overwhelming because the more we fix up, the more we make,

the more there is to take care of, the more people come through. When it's manageable and when I'm not overwhelmed, it's a pleasure. I love working outside with my hands, building those gardens, and creating these spaces. It's just a matter of figuring out how that works. Every "utopian project," especially these early American ones, was always a struggle to figure out how to get people to work, or how to get people to contribute. As Salmon Creek Farm transitions into a nonprofit arts ecology program, that's something I really want to hold on to. I've done a lot of incredible artists' residencies where they really take care of you—where they deliver your lunch in a basket and you have all your meals prepared for you. I don't know if Salmon Creek Farm will be that kind of place. It's going to be more of a place where people go to see what it feels like to be a part of the land; where we have toilets that are creating compost, where we're growing food, where everyone who's on the land is responsible for the land at any given time. I didn't go there just to live an easy life. The question I always go back to is: how are you leaving a place for the next person? That could be the planet for the next generation, or it could be the kitchen for the next person who's coming to use it, but that is ultimately the job. The work is just taking care, and that kind of work is invisible. It disappears and it's only apparent when it's not being done or when things are falling apart. That’s been the invisible work of women for centuries. I think it's inherently feminist to say this labor is all of ours. It should all be shared. It should all be celebrated. It should be beautiful, and creative, and a daily practice that we can all be a part of.

JEN We're almost coming upon ten years, so it's not only a decade of work, but also the precipice of another shift, which is Salmon Creek Farm turning into a nonprofit. You are stepping away in order to provide more opportunities for co-authorship. What does this next stage look like?

FH The nonprofit is not something I really wanted to rush into. I really love having the place be fluid and undefined, and ambiguous. I would always prefer that. What I've gradually realized is that this is only possible when I'm just killing myself. To put this place in the hands of other people has required setting up a formal structure, like a nonprofit and the LLC that owns the property now. That way, I can have some freedom again and set up groups that can help run the place. I don't know what form the programming is going to take. I would imagine half the year, maybe from October to April, the cabins will be available for month-long rental residencies or something. And the other half of the year would be for nonprofit arts ecology programming. I think there's enough we do know about the place to guide it. There are limits. We don't have white box studios. We don't have a big gallery space. We have an 1800-square-foot dance deck, an outdoor kitchen, gardens, private cabins in the woods. I think it's a great place for certain kinds of work in groups. And specifically, I would like to focus on young artists who are dealing with kinetic work. This could be dance, food, it could be something involving performance, or ecology, or plants, or gardens, or trees. But it's probably not going to be people whose life's work is involved with the conventional mediums of art practice today, like sculpture and painting. So, I think it's going to be a place for people to have the kind of experience that I was going there for, which is to be outside and be with other people. For young people, there is—with climate change—an awakening to the world we're living in now, and artists will have to be at the forefront of that.

The Kiik, which was described by its creator as a “hand pill” for “breaking bad habits or starting good ones,” is a difficult thing to explain. It is a barbell shaped piece of polished stainless steel. It is two inches long, three-quarters of an inch wide, and it weighs about eight ounces (a very satisfying heft for an object of its size). It could be a pacifier or a paperweight, a sex toy or a piece of jewelry; a fidget spinner avant la lettre.

I always wanted a Kiik. Once upon a time, you

could buy one in the MoMA gift shop, but now they are harder to come by. I had been looking for years and last winter I finally found one, offered for a fair price by an antique dealer in Mexico City. Several weeks later, I arrived at a small shop piled with furniture on the sunny side of Avenida Obregón in Colonia Roma. The Kiik did not have its box or its original certificate of authenticity, but it was otherwise in perfect condition, gleaming inside its little brown apothecary bottle. Back on the street, I took a photograph of the Kiik in the palm of my hand and posted it online. Minutes later, my friend the Canadian artist Kara Hamilton sent me a text explaining that she had known its designer, the visionary artist François Dallegret when she was a girl growing up in Toronto. Her father, the architect Peter Hamilton, was a friend of Dallegret’s

and she proposed that we reach out to him.

Several months later, Kara and I arrived at Dallegret’s front door on a beautiful June morning. François greeted us with a mischievous smile at the door of the house he has shared with his wife Judith in the Westmount neighborhood of Montreal for fifty years. Over the course of the afternoon, we tested chairs and thumbed through old magazines while François pulled prints and posters, pins and

Utopia is a Pile

Justin Beal on François Dallegret

The Kiik, a quintessentially Dallegret-ian object, began with an invitation from Reyner Banham to participate in the 18th International Design Conference in Aspen in the summer of 1968. In response, Dallegret designed a series of posters, envelopes, and folding paper hats with an attenuated barbell shape as their central motif. He then contracted the Montreal Screw Machine Company to render that shape in three dimensions, designed and trademarked a logo, and developed a system of packaging. In time, the Kiik became a prototype for a lamp, a design for a new US Dollar bill in Avant Garde magazine, a fabric pattern for Knoll, and a proposal for a public playground at the University of Chicago.

This is how Dallegret works. An idea becomes first one kind of thing, then another, then another—the cycle of production is not a closed loop, but a spiral that churns out variations and multiple forms in a variety of media until that original idea becomes yet another familiar character in Dallegret’s universe. In the 1979 film, La Toile d’Araignée (The Spider’s Web) made by Jacques Giraldeau for the National Film Board of Canada, Dallegret appears surrounded by a menagerie of his own creations—Kiik, Lit Croix, Super Leo, Atomix—props in a world that is definitely more playful and more interesting than the one the rest of us occupy.

and Yves Klein (both of whom seem to have made an indelible imprint on Dallegret’s idea of the artist as showman). Despite this early success, Dallegret was restless. “Paris and ultimately France,” he later recounted to Alessandra Ponte, “just seemed like places to leave.” Dallegret arrived in New York on the SS France in 1963 and took up residence in the Chelsea Hotel. Soon after, he received a commission that would launch his international reputation when Art in America editor Jean Lipman invited Dallegret to collaborate with architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham on the publication of his seminal essay “A Home Is Not a House.” It was a brilliant pairing and Dallegret perfectly captured the mechanical systems—the “baroque ensemble of domestic gadgets”— that Banham imagined consuming American architecture from within.

One drawing in particular, The Environment-Bubble—which depicts Dallegret and Banham lounging nude in a clear plastic dome—became a touchstone for a generation of designers interested in inflatable, mobile, dynamic forms of architecture that could push back against institutions of authority and the rigid structures (both metaphorical and physical) they occupied. The first time I encountered Dallegret’s work was in a book called The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ‘68 by the architectural historian Marc Dessauce. The book tells how a long history of inflatable architecture reached a climax in the politically fraught spring of 1968. At the center of the story is the Utopie Group: the trio of architects Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann and Antoine Stinco (with help from a team of collaborators that included the philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard) and their March 1968 exhibition Structures Gonflables (Inflatable Structures) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Dallegret was born in Morocco in 1937. In 1958, he enrolled in the École des BeauxArts in Paris. After graduation, he began his career with a pair of shows at the legendary Iris Clert gallery that situated his meticulous pen and ink drawings, like Space City Astronef 732 and Litteraturomatic, in a context that included Clert artists like Jean Tinguely

Pile of Shit

prototypes from small drawers and vitrines throughout the house and from a basement full of flat-files packed with thousands of drawings and photographs. By the time we left his house, we had begun making plans for an exhibition of his work.

All images François Dallegret, Tas de Fumier, 1982, photograph by François Dallegret, courtesy of François Dallegret

← Kiik, photograph by Shunk-Kender, 1969, courtesy of François Dallegret

↑ François Dallegret, Kiik, photograph by Shunk-Kender, courtesy of François Dallegret

→ Packaging insert for Kiik, 1968 photograph by Lois Siegel, courtesy of François Dallegret

Despite the fact that The Environment-Bubble (which appears in Part II of Dessauce’s book under the subheading “The Inflatable Realm”) was an early and important contribution to the radical architecture movement, Dallegret has always been quick to downplay his investment in politics. Unlike many of his contemporaries—designers like Archizoom, Superstudio, Ant Farm, Cedric Price, GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel), Hans Hollein, Haus-RuckerCo and Utopie—Dallegret was always more invested in spatial freedom than political dissent.

While a generation of designers pushed, with increasing urgency, towards a more political form of experimental architecture, Francois maintained his focus on a world very much his own. He did not want to be a situationist or a surrealist. He did not want to be part of any scene, so he moved on. When I asked him recently how invested he was in the politics of that moment, he replied simply: “In the mid-sixties I was remote from politics. The only world I cared about was my own. And doing so many projects at once I had no time for it anyway.”

●

Despite his disavowal of politics, there is an undeniable utopian dimension to Dallegret’s practice, his focus always fixed squarely on a future not yet entirely imaginable. One early insight into what utopia might mean in a Dallegret universe appears in a caption accompanying the 1966 publication of his project “Art Fiction” in Art in America

French architect François Dallegret imagines that soon most human activity will occur not on earth but in space. He sees the artist of this future time as a man who is, like his predecessor over the centuries, endowed with some special innate talent. This artist of the future differs from his predecessor, however, in that he creates no material objects, such as paintings or sculptures, but rather makes environments in space which induce a variety of specific sensory reactions in the people who enter them… Dallegret says, "in this future everyone will understand the artist's intention. His intention will be to create all sorts of natural and supernatural feelings we don't know about yet.

It is a beautiful conception of a speculative future.

●

When the exhibition at Yale opened, Kara asked François about his childhood in

Morocco. Never one to answer a question directly, François told a long story about his parents moving from Le Bugue, a small town in the southwest of France to Morocco so his father could work with the Génie militaire on the Trans-Saharan Railroad. Every evening, François’ father would tell him the same story. The engineers would work all day laying the train track only to find the next morning that their work had been buried by the shifting sand leaving them no option but to start again—a futile struggle of technology against nature. This was, of course, just a story, but one that made a lasting impression on the younger Dallegret. As I listened to him retell it, it was clear to me that this was a remarkably apt metaphor for the Sisyphean nature of making art.

The story continued several years later in a swimming pool where François and his brother would pass the stifling Moroccan afternoons. His only memory from that pool was a chameleon that would change color as it flitted from surface to surface near the pool. If it was on a red towel, it would turn red. If it was on white tile, it would turn white. If it was on brick, it would turn the color of brick. That, Dallegret claims, is how he learned to be an artist. “It showed me,” he recounted, “that I could go from one thing to another with no problem, like a chameleon.” ●

After less than a year in New York, Dallegret made a second career-defining transition. Lured by the prospect of new design opportunities in the lead up to the Montreal World’s Fair—Expo 1967—Dallegret moved to Canada. Reflecting on the move in 1968, Dallegret told Time magazine, “New York may be where the action is, but in Montreal you can be a pioneer.” That is exactly what he did and by the spring of 1968, Dallegret was far from the political flashpoints in Paris and New York. In his first five years in Montreal, Dallegret produced a prodigious amount of work, establishing himself as a central figure in the Canadian architectural avant garde of the 1960s and 1970s.

Dallegret’s first built work was Le Drug, a pharmacy-cum-discotheque in downtown Montreal commissioned by the eccentric pharmacist William Sofin. At street level, Le Drug was a glimmering geometric pharmacy with an exhibition space— Gallery Labo—where Dallegret showed works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Paul Thek, Arman, and others. Downstairs, Le Drug was a clinically white, sensuously sculpted underground nightclub featuring stalactite-like forms sprayed with cement

and white epoxy. As with the Kiik, Dallegret produced a variety of merchandise with his sleek, black and white Le Drug logo— matchbooks, buttons, paper bags and coffee cups—which allowed Le Drug to live on well after the two years that it remained open. It was sort of an early-career Gesamtkunstwerk, combining the many facets of Dallegret’s production into a single, self-contained universe.

●

For the show at Yale, we restored a piece called Tubula—a prototype, in Dallegret’s words, for an “automobile immobile”—that had not been exhibited for over fifty years. It was last on view, in fact, hanging from the ceiling of the Saidye Bronfman center in Montreal in that year of legendary political unrest, 1968. As we re-hung it from the massive concrete floor slab of Paul Rudolph’s Yale School of Architecture—a building which was badly damaged in a fire allegedly lit by student protesters in 1969—it was hard not to see it as an artifact of a very specific political moment. When I asked François how it felt to encounter it again and if he thought it might have a different meaning in the current political climate, he replied simply, “seeing it again I realized that Tubula is a bit like me—it floats high above all the tumult of the world below.”

Even as projects like Le Drug began to be realized, Dallegret continued to push his ideas well beyond the limits of what was feasible in the moment. The Villa Ironique, for example, proposed a device that would perform a sort of architectural alchemy, collecting space junk and transforming it into usable material. The funnel form of the

machine itself was a direct reference to a traditional Nova Scotia silo, but its function was re-imagined as a technology capable of collecting, transforming, and producing an ‘ultimate shelter’ by composting space junk. The same way, Dallegret explains, “that you might contemplate moon building out of lunar dust.”

In 1982, Dallegret began Tas de Fumer, a series of photographs of a looming mound of manure near his farm in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. In each image, Dallegret attempts to domesticate the mountain of shit and straw with the addition of a single object—a column, an antenna, an umbrella, a Canadian flag. A standout in the series shows Dallegret, knee-deep in shit, emerging from behind a wooden panel door that has been jammed into the side of a straw-covered pile of manure. When I asked him if this might be characterized as a utopian work, he just laughed and said, “Well, not really, it’s just me coming out of a palace of manure and waving to crowds—a small message of hope amidst the pile of shit we are in.”

The exhibition François Dallegret: Beyond the Bubble 2023, curated by Justin Beal and Kara Hamilton, opened at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery on January 12, 2023.

← Le Drug, Montreal, 1965, photograph by Marc Lullier, courtesy of François Dallegret

↑ ↗ Artist at home, 4825 Sainte-Catherine West, Montreal, 1966, photograph by Shunk-Kender, courtesy of François Dallegret

HausRucker -Co

“Our balloons will help you to discover an unknown feeling of tranquility, of security, of relaxation. And love. We want to heighten your sensitivity. You will take a journey. Together with someone you love. Into inner space. Like Astronauts. Only an inward trip. You will attain a higher level of thinking and loving…” — Haus-Rucker-Co.

Haus-Rucker-Co, founded in 1967 by Laurids Ortner, Günther Zamp Kelp, and Klaus Pinter, later joined by Manfred Ortner, was a radical architectural group whose mission was to expand people’s consciousness through experimental architecture. During the sexual and psychedelic revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, Haus-RuckerCo’s temporary pneumatic structures attempted to mimic the hallucinogenic experience through a bombardment of sensorial stimuli. Large spheres and balloons fixed to physical structures expanded living environments to allow a physical crossing of the threshold through the doors of perception. Prosthetics fixed with headphones and color-tinted bug-eyed lenses, and PVC skins embedded with electrical currents allowed the wearer to shift their existential awareness. One activation involved building

a fully edible model city and allowing guests to devour the metropolis. This smörgåsbord was followed by a philosophical Q&A about what it means to live in modern society.. Haus-Rucker-Co’s most experimental years—from 1968 to 1972—will be the focus of an upcoming exhibition at Kunsthal

Rotterdam. Organized by the Kunsthal’s senior curator Charlotte Martens, Mind Expanders will be on view from April 28 until September 3. In the following interview, Martens talks to founder Günther Zamp Kelp about mind expansion and urban consciousness.

↑ Haus-Rucker-Co, Laurids-Zamp-Pinter Environment Transformer / Flyhead, 1968. Photo: Ben Rose. Courtesy Archive Zamp Kelp

Charlotte Martens I was just looking at Rem Koolhaas’s new Taipei Performing Arts Center building with the big globe on the exterior, which looks very much like a Haus-Rucker-Co Oasis project.

Günter Zamp Kelp It shows that we are still influencing. (laughs)

CM This influence is very interesting because one of your most utopian projects is Oasis no. 7 [1972], which was described as “an emergency exit leading people to another realm.” This started with Balloon for Two in 1967. Can you tell me a little bit about these inflatable balloon projects and how you started Haus-Rucker-Co with Laurids Ortner and Klaus Pinter?

GZK We participated with the projects Mindexpander and Pneumacosm, which have been quite well published in the media. Our first public presentation was the Balloon for 2, which was structurally based on Pneumacosm, a living unit for ten to fifteen inhabitants, which functions like an inhabitable electric bulb with a diameter of fifteen meters that could be plugged into an urban hyper structure. To realize a project like this was far out of our financial means, so we decided to do a smaller version, which became Balloon for 2. Part of the Mindexpanding Program was that the projects and realizations are usable. Therefore, Balloon for 2 was designed for a couple sitting in the center of a spherical space with a diameter of three meters. Realizing that we had to create something spectacular, the balloon was put together in an apartment in Vienna's 7th district. Mounted on a steel scaffold, the balloon deflated out of a window that was ten meters above ground on a Sunday afternoon at the top of each hour for ten minutes. To make the whole thing secure, there were six people standing on the scaffold inside the apartment. If one moved, the whole thing would fall to the ground. It was really something. Balloon for 2 made us realize that pneumatics are a way to achieve our spatial ideas. Oasis no. 7 was the last pneumatic project we realized at documenta 5 in Kassel Germany, which was technically similar to Balloon for 2

CM Why were inflatables so utopian for you guys?

GZK For us, it was all about expanding. The balloon was expanding the apartment. Now we have this new space. And that also had to do with the name Haus-Rucker, which means “house mover.”

CM I read that with the Balloon for Two you were designing or creating a new alternative for LSD and other mind expanding drugs.

GZK In America, Timothy Leary had a very influential philosophical attitude. We thought that was well and good, but in Austria why don’t we create a contrast and try to do something inspiring in an architectural way. To do something strange in architecture, which could be like its own kind of trip. On one hand, it was a fascinating adventure to create a structure that would hang outside the window, but on the other hand, it was very scary to be ten meters above the ground. So, it had both aspects of LSD: it could be a good trip or a bad trip. You never knew. And that, for us, was the experimental part.

CM What I always thought was funny was that the seats where the man and woman sit in the balloon are made of a plastic baby bathtub cut in two.

GZK Our resources were very simple (laughs). The Balloon for 2 was very simply constructed. Also, music and smells were a very important part of this new, strange architecture.

CM Speaking of new, strange architecture, can you talk about the Giant Billiard [1970] project?

GZK We received an invitation from the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna. It was a building designed by Karl Schwan-

zer, who was one of my teachers at the university, and did the BMW administration tower in Munich. The museum was built by Schwanzer for the Austrian World Exhibition Pavilion in Brussels and was moved to the Schweizergarten in Vienna. So, we thought, what can we do with this big modernist space? Then, we decided to put down a big mattress and do a human billiard table of sorts. Big and spectacular was very in fashion then. The spectacle also allowed us to raise awareness in the urban consciousness.

CM Environmental concerns, pollution, ecology, and solutions for global climate change, how did this influence HausRucker-Co’s objectives?

GZK In 1970, we got an invitation to Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany. There was this experimental museum that used to be a villa for the director of an industrial firm. It was designed by Mies van der Rohe, so we realized we had to do something in dialogue with this building. We decided to construct an air-supported inflatable over the entire villa. The idea was that the inflatable was an element of protection against the pollution outside. When we presented the idea, it was really important to have the director of the museum there, Paul Wember. He was very important in the cultural scene of Germany in those days. Luckily, he was very impressed with our idea. We thought he would tell us our idea is too crazy. But he said, “Well, let's do it. That's great.” He was totally open-minded and allowed this whole project to happen. There was a very fascinating drama between the translucent, white skin of the inflatable and the stone bricks of the building. And it was also great that it was snowing outside because it was so warm inside that flowers started to bloom, while it was winter outside, which created this very interesting sensation. We also had a soundtrack with wind, rain, and thunderstorms. For people visiting, they might have thought it was really scary, which was good in some ways because we were trying to present this dystopian environment, a potential future if we don’t change our ways.

CM Were you inspired by Buckminster Fuller for these types of inflatables?

GZK He was very present in our studies. And, of course, we knew about the dome over Midtown Manhattan, but I think in this case, the inspiration was very subconscious.

CM This also seemed like it inspired the Rooftop Oasis Project [1976] when you moved your studio to Broadway in Manhattan. You did a number of silkscreens with buildings that had similar inflatable coverings over them.

GZK After the show in Krefeld, we still felt like we had to work on this theme of climate control a bit further. In New York, we saw an optimal area to develop this concept. The first silkscreen was of an inflatable over this rooftop garden on top of the building where we had our studio, where we would sit in the evening and have barbecues, which is what you do in the United States (laughs). We felt like these rooftops were a perfect place for these concepts.

CM What’s interesting is that most of these radical groups disbanded in the 1970s, but Haus-Rucker-Co stayed together until 1992. What kept you guys going?

GZK I knew Laurids and Manfred from the tennis club. So, very early on we became friends playing tennis. We knew Pinter because we are all from upper Austria and these friendships lasted a long time. I would say it was friendship that kept us together. We had a working relationship that went quite well. There have been complications and disagreements, but it worked for us.

CM The exhibition I curated focuses on the early years between 1967 and 1972, which is when Haus-Rucker-Co made the most conceptual and utopian projects. This is when you

were very inspired by the Situationists. After that, it seems like many of the members were working on their own projects.

GZK We had a feeling that this very conceptual way is not enough. We wanted to go into real architecture. So, we entered architectural competitions, which can be problematic because you see how much time you invest and what you actually get back. For me, it was important to transfer the experience we had early on into a professional architecture career. Some of my personal projects, like the Neanderthal Museum and Millenium View have a lot of Haus-Rucker-Co in them.

CM I want to talk a little bit about the architectural developments going on in Vienna in the late 1960s. You had Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler with their manifesto, "Absolute Architecture," or “Alles Ist Architektur” [1968]. And then you have Haus-Rucker-Co. How did you fit into this scene?

GZK Hollein and Pichler were a generation ahead of us. Of course, we paid attention to their works as students. We had a lot of talks, especially with Pichler, about collaborating together, but nothing materialized. In the ’60s, Hollein and Pichler were creating something that was super influential, especially for all the groups that came around in ’67, ’68, like Himmelblau, ZündUp, and all the missing links.

CM Haus-Rucker-Co experimented in playable arts, wearable arts, and edible arts. Can you talk about the project, Food City [1971]? You did it in New York and in Minneapolis.

GZK We did it in several places. The first place we did it was at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, then in Houston, and then we did it in Central Park. Again, the purpose was to get this question to the people: What is architecture? How do you want to live? We wanted to introduce a discussion.

CM You wanted to inject some consciousness into urban architecture, into the urban space.

GZK Yes, to make people contemplate the relationship between themselves and their urban surroundings.

CM And then, you had all those people eating buildings (laughs). It looks wonderful. We will show the footage from Walker Art Center at the upcoming exhibition. But after the guests have eaten in the whole city, Haus-Rucker-Co introduced scenarios for the future environment of the city. What kind of concepts did you show people, what did these scenarios look like?

GZK Well, we showed them Pneumacosmic Formation, for instance, which was a conceptual drawing of a sphere superimposed over downtown New York. And we explained this very uncommon way of living in a sphere. It was the idea of bringing to the people new strange possibilities of how to live everyday life.

CM Did they understand it, or were they like, Okay, we had some nice food and it’s time to go home? Or were they really interested?

GZK The reactions were different. They were open-minded people. Other people asked me, “How do we clean this sphere outside?” (laughs)

CM One pneumatic project was Yellow Heart [1968], which is

actually one of the most colorful projects you have made. How did the moon landing, the space program of the United States, and other technology inspire the design of the project?

GZK The Apollo project was a big influence on us in the ’60s. Not just in Vienna. It was omnipresent. Everybody was fascinated by the design. And so the idea behind Yellow Heart was to do a capsule for two people. We designed it for an exhibition application. Like the Apollo project, the Yellow Heart capsule was suspended from the ground by a steel pipe construction, and in this way, it seemed like it was floating over the ground. With this feeling of zero gravity, there was a sense that the capsule could go anywhere—it could go into the sea, it could go into orbit.

CM So, it could float or fly. You also attached the insect dots, which were actually pulsating.

GZK That was connected to the first heart transplant, performed by Christiaan Barnard in 1967. So, there was the heart, the orbit, and the whole thing came together in Yellow Heart

CM We're lucky to show the little film. Do you think Yellow Heart brought Haus-Rucker-Co the most publicity?

GZK In combination with the [Mind Expander/]Fly Heads it was a very utopic image, and it got a lot of attention. But, I think the Environment Transformers [1968] are just as important.

CM Speaking of manipulating the environment, can you talk about Electric Skins?

GZK Electric Skins came from the idea of creating architecture for the body. They were made out of PVC, and if you moved, or shook hands, or touched a door knob, you would get a static electricity shock, which is why we called it Electric Skin

CM It’s very Barbarella [1968]. So, what would be your advice for new creative thinkers imagining a utopian future today?

GZK We are, in some ways, living in end times. But on the other hand, I think the rising problems with climate change and artificial intelligence is a good challenge. Maybe we should take this chance to do something in a new direction. The interesting thing is that we actually don't know what will happen. So, with this flexibility of thinking—it will give us the decision to fight for life or to die.

← Haus-Rucker-Co, Laurids-ZampPinter Giant Billiard, presented as part of Haus-Rucker-Co LIVE! at the Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna, 1970. Courtesy Archive Zamp Kelp

→ Haus-Rucker-Co, Laurids Ortner, Günter Zamp Kelp, Manfred Ortner, Klaus Pinter Environment Transformer / Flyhead, 1968

↘ Haus-Rucker-Co, Laurids-ZampPinter Yellow Heart + Environment Transformer, Wieselburg, 1968

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Funktopia

Funktopia

Lauren Halsey Interviews George Clinton, with Overton Loyd

Photography by Kennedi Carter

Styling by Julie Ragolia

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time. For y’all have knocked her up. George Clinton, “Maggot Brain,”

Song by Funkadelic, 1971

From straightening and braiding hair at a New Jersey barber shop frequented by pimps and preachers to forming one of the most radical Black musical collectives in history, George Clinton’s sonic cosmology changed the future of music. The P-Funk mythology, which erupted in 1970 with the debut album, Funkadelic, was an electrical amalgam of soul, rhythm and blues, psychedelia, and the occult. Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership Connection (1974) is not just a platinumselling funk masterpiece, it is also one of the most important and pioneering works of Afrofuturism. The term, which was coined in 1994 by cultural critic Mark Dery in his famous essay “Black To The Future,” could be defined as an aesthetic exploring the Black experience in

a liberated, futuristic reality often using themes of science fiction and intergalactic travel. It is currently used by scholars to retroactively describe works that predate its emergence in the vernacular and is the focus of a landmark exhibition at The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Clinton’s funktopia, full of alter egos, recurring characters, and neologisms (mostly incorporating some use of the word funk), was a decade-long full-scale invasion of the status quo. Artist Lauren Halsey, founder of the Summaeverythang community center; and a self-proclaimed heavyweight funkateer, sits down with Clinton and album illustrator Overton Loyd for a rare oral history of the funk multiverse.

Balenciagawoolandcottontrench, silkblouseandwooltrousers

Lauren

Growing up in South Central in the early ’90s, G-Funk ① was everything. When I think of the backdrop, it's the Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield fight, ordering Gino's Pizza, and G-Funk is playing. I attribute so much of my taste to my father. He's driving me to school down Manchester, up Western, taking shortcuts, G-Funk is on the radio—92.3, 105.9…

George Clinton Steve Woods, Steve Woods.

(laughs)

LH As I got older, my palette changed and I would listen to “Aqua Boogie.” I would be like, “Oh, what is that!?” It was like an animation in my head or something. Luckily, I had parents that let me do whatever I wanted in my room. So, my room became my first art installation. I was listening to Parliament and just going on these funk excursions from “Chocolate City,” “Underwater,” “Outer Space,” “Ancient Egypt.” Then Digital Underground's Sons of the P [1991], Ice Cube, and all of the production remixes and sampling. I mean, it’s just infinity. I was able to finally see visually what that looked like by the time I turned eighteen and I was like, I want to make stages for Parliament. I grew up in a Baptist church doing sets for the church plays and Parliament had created these spaces in my head that I feel compelled to build for Black people. But, I realized very early on that was impossible up until this moment. And so, I decided to go to school and do sculpture. That was my first introduction to articulating the life force of funk. Funk gave me the audacity to want to build space to experience myself differently. It's a space where I'm able to project into and experience my most funkiest self, which is true freedom.

GC I mean, everything that we was trying to say—the cartoons, the storytelling, Overton [Loyd], myself, Pedro [Bell] ②, the whole band. We thought we'd done a good job with Ice Cube and Dre, and that generation of people, G-funk you call it. And the same thing happened on the East Coast and in Detroit. So, to hear somebody younger than them getting it the way you explaining it right now, I feel like we succeeded. And not only did we succeed, it actually opened me back up to revisiting it by way of art. I've done the music. That was a lifetime, which was basically art too. You know, the dress, the space.

LH Oh, you're my art history.

GC That made me see that. I never looked at that part of it. I knew we had some nice haberdashery. I came from a barbershop, we dressed people, we knew what styling was. That came so natural to me, but I didn't pay that much attention to it. I knew how to do outlandish things, cool things. And when it came time to be a bum look, when it came time to look funky, we knew how to do that. But I was in a suit and tie from grade school. We had our suits made.

LH I’m thinking of that classic image of you and The Parliaments ③, where you're Motown clean, like The Temptations.

GC We were dedicated to being cool.

Overton Loyd How did you go from pimp style to the hippie thing? Was that influenced by the mod style?

GC First, it was just the beatniks in the village reading poetry and making folk music, while we were into doo-wop—Temptations. The Beatles had this mod look at first, but when they did Sgt. Pepper’s [Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967], that became the dominant look. It was jeans and patches and all that. But we tried to be funkadelic no matter what the style, sometimes you'd be completely out.

LH But you didn't conform to disco.

① G-funk, short for gangsta funk, (or funk rap) is a sub-genre of gangsta rap that emerged from the West Coast scene in the late 1980s. The genre is heavily influenced by 1970s psychedelic funk (P-funk) sound of artists such as Parliament-Funkadelic.

② Pedro Bell was an American artist and illustrator, best known for his elaborate album cover designs and other artwork for numerous Funkadelic and George Clinton solo albums. Bell also wrote many of the liner notes of the records under the name Sir Lleb.

③ Parliament-Funkadelic started as The Parliaments. Formed in the back room of a barbershop in 1956, the quintet was named after the cigarette brand. The Parliaments initially performed doo-wop music.

Maggot Brain, 1971 vinyl with ink on paper and cardboard 12 x 12 in. (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Published by: Westbound Records, Recorded by: Funkadelic

Produced by: George Clinton, Written by: Garry Shider, Written by: Eddie Hazel

Written by: Ernie Harris, Written by: Billy Nelson, Written by: Bernie Worrell

Written by: Ramon Fulwood, Written by: Tall Ross, Written by: Clarence Haskins

Art direction: David Krieger, Designed by: The Graffiteria/Paula Bisacca

Photograph by Joel Brodsky, featuring model Barbara Cheeseborough

Funkentelechy Vs. The Placebo Syndrome, 1977 vinyl with ink on paper and cardboard 12 x 12 in. (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Published by: Casablanca, Recorded by: Parliament-Funkadelic

Produced by: George Clinton, Written by: Garry Shider.

Written by: Bootsy Collins, Written by: Bernie Worrell

Written by: Glenn Goins, Written by: Ron Ford, Written by: Billy Nelson

Illustrated by: Overton Loyd, Designed by: Tom the Leatherman Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Caleb and Eli Tucker-Raymond, © 1977 Casablanca Record and FilmWorks, Inc.

Motor Booty Affair, 1978

Recorded by: Parliament-Funkadelic, Published by: Casablanca

Published by: Thang, Inc., Produced by: George Clinton

Illustrated by: Overton Loyd, vinyl with ink on paper Diameter (a. vinyl disc): 11 7/8 in. (30.2 cm)

H x W (cardboard jacket): 12 5/16 x 12 1/4 in. (31.3 x 31.1 cm)

H x W (paper sleeve) 11 7/8 x 12 in. (30.2 x 30.5 cm)

Repro. Credit Line : Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, © 1978 Thang, Inc.

Trombipulation, 1980 vinyl with ink on paper and cardboard 12 x 12 in. (30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Recorded by: Parliament-Funkadelic, Published by: Casablanca

Produced by: George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Ron Dunbar, Ron Ford

Art direction: Overton Lloyd, Artwork [Inner Spread]: Stan Watts

Artwork [Nose Sculpture]: Tim (Mr. 2 Hep) Bruckner

© 1977 Casablanca Record and FilmWorks, Inc.

We acknowledged that disco is dance music, so it was definitely funk, but it was just one beat of the funk. It was like making love with one stroke. You know, it gets boring after a while. Disco and hip hop were sampling, they both had the same groove, just that they started rapping over it. They'd call it rap at first, but it's all booty shakin' music. To me, that's funk. Once you get popular, you become the main thing, but we always tried to find something to make people say, "Why did you do that?" I did some things just to be obnoxious. Like, when R&B Skeletons [In the Closet, 1986] came out I knew hip hop was getting ready to be the thing. So, we used not only the hip hop beat sampling, but the scratching part was your boy from Digital Underground, [DJ K-OS]. Debra Barsha was a Broadway pianist. She do classical music. So, we had her write the charts and had a five-piece orchestra in the middle of the scratching. We was making fun of hip hop from the get-go, knowing that it was gonna be big, but not knowing it's gonna be that big. And not knowing that "Atomic Dog" would be one of the staples. When people started sampling it, that was like a whole other thing.

LH Cloning.

GC I thought I was deep when I did [The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, 1976] because I had just learned about genetics and nobody wasn't talking about genetics. You didn't hear about that until you saw OJ [Simpson] on TV talking about DNA. When I realized they started sampling us, that's another version of cloning. You'd sample a little piece and make a whole new record out of it. I can say, "Yeah, that's what I planned." But, hell no. I didn't have no idea that was happening. What you've done with the set out there—you did what we had in our head about the history of P-Funk—[Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow, 1970] and Maggot Brain [1971]—that was a whole era by itself. And then [P-Funk] Mothership ④, that's a whole nother era.

LH How did the collective work come together? At one point you had like 250 people in the band. You look at the liner notes and a lot of those people are the "extraterrestrial voices" and "good time hand clappers," and all these puns. How did you control all of that?

GC We had three studios going 24/7. People was asleep under the table waiting for anybody to say, "We need somebody to sing. We need somebody to play.” Because you had Parliament Funkadelic, then you had Parlet ⑤, the Brides [of Funkenstein] ⑥, Bootsy [Collins] and Bootsy's Band, Maceo [Parker] ⑦, and Fred [Wesley], who was the horn player from James Brown. Everybody had a record coming out. Not only did we have the bands, but we had members in the band. We recorded the roadies. I got a couple albums with a couple of the lawyers. We recorded everybody that was around. And Pedro Bell wrote me a letter when he was in high school asking to do our album art. I got the letter and the Postmaster General thought we was part of some subversive thing ⑧. After I saw what he did on this letter, I said, “Put those same characters on Cosmic Slop [1973].” Because the album before that was America Eats Its Young [1972], which was really scary.

LH Who did the [Funkentelechy vs. the] Placebo Syndrome [1977] album cover? Is that a collage?

GC That was a collage by a guy named Ron Slenzak who had a new camera that took those still shots and then you transformed 'em. So, when he took a picture, I'd move around, duck, turn around, and that's one picture.

LH And then Overton, when's the first time you heard Parliament? And what compelled you to start drawing for Parliament?

OL I was drawing since I was a baby. I grew up in Detroit, nurtured on The Temptations—Motown. And so, everybody in our

④ The P Funk Mothership, also known as The Mothership or The Holy Mothership, is a space vehicle model belonging to Dr. Funkenstein, an alter ego of funk musician George Clinton. An integral part of the P-Funk mythology, the Mothership existed conceptually as a fictional vehicle of funk deliverance and as a physical prop central to Parliament-Funkadelic concerts during the 1970s and 1990s.

⑤ Parlet was a female spinoff group from P-Funk formed by veteran background vocalists Mallia Franklin, Jeanette Washington and Debbie Wright. Washington and Wright were the first female members in Parliament-Funkadelic in 1975.

⑥ The Brides of Funkenstein were originally composed of singers Dawn Silva and Lynn Mabry. Previously background singers for Sly Stone, Lynn Mabry and Dawn Silva joined the P-funk collective in the mid-1970s. George Clinton named the group from a storyline and characters from the Parliament album The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein

⑦ Maceo Parker is an American funk and soul jazz saxophonist, best known for his work with James Brown in the 1960s, Parliament-Funkadelic in the 1970s and Prince in the 2000s.

⑧ The albums Maggot Brain (1970) and America Eats its Young (1971) liner notes are a polemic on fear provided by the Process Church of the Final Judgement, an obscure Satanist religious cult. According to author Rickey Vincent, the organization's presumed association with mass-murderer Charles Manson, along with the album's foreboding themes and striking artwork, lent Funkadelic the image of a "death-worshipping black rock band.”

⑨ The 20 Grand was one of Detroit’s most famous night clubs. It was located at the intersection of 14th Street and Warren Avenue. It opened by Bill Kabbus and Marty Eisner in 1953.

①⓪ The Family Series was designed to present previously unreleased recordings done by various bands in the Parliament-Funkadelic musical stable.

class thought The Parliaments was trying to be the new Temptations. To us, they sounded like drunk Temptations, we didn't know from weed, but it captures the imagination, that sound. Then, “(I Wanna) Testify” came out, and once you get into it, you can't stop.

LH That's my point.

OL Can't stop. And what was after “(I Wanna) Testify”?

GC We came out with the suits on, but we weren't out more than three weeks before we had flipped to Funkadelic.

LH And that's when you had that haircut and the diaper.

GC We had diapers on, rings on our toes, a hookah pipe. Now this is '67. We caught everybody's imagination, man.

LH Is this before Sgt. Pepper’s?

GC Same time. That's what did it. Sgt Pepper is what made everybody realize you can wear something other than the suits. That was the license to go crazy.

LH What made you attracted to that? Because everyone didn't do that.

GC The generation was goin' there anyway. The Village in New York, London, Canterbury, Haight Ashbury. That was the look. But the Beatles did it as a group. They just changed the whole thing. ’67 was the beginning of that really psychedelic cultural shift. We got over to Europe in ’68 and saw that it was classy. In America, we thought, oh you poor and couldn't afford nothing else. Once you got over there, you saw stores where you could buy jeans with holes already in them. That became the look, and the hippies in New York was the look. And so we got Overton to do Parliament in that psychedelic way. We got Pedro who was already going out another way. Then, we had another guy, Ronald [‘Stozo’] Edwards.

LH What did he do?

GC He did Parlet’s Invasion Of The Booty Snatchers [1979]. And Fred Wesley and the Horny Horns, Horn To Be Wild [1979].

OL Ronald wore a rubber clown nose around all the time. GC All the time. We had styles for everybody. And that way we didn't clash once we got a lot of records out. Just the politics of the record companies interfered.

LH How did you plan those characters? Did it start musically first?

GC We discussed the looks—Overton, Archie [Ivy], myself, Ramon [“Tiki” Fulwood]—we’d sit down and debate over nonsense to see how silly we could be and still make it relate to what we were talking about.

OL Who was first, Parlet or The Brides [of Funkenstein]?

GC Parlet was first, but the Brides got the record up first.

OL And this was a time when girl groups were out. This was after The Supremes.

LH Was [Patti] LaBelle dressing like that? I know you did her hair.

GC No, but we grew up together pretty much. We had the same designer, Larry LeGaspi, and we had the same law firm, and everything. They were out before us as Patti LaBelle and The Blue Belles. They didn't wear those rocket ship clothes until the late '70s, but they came out in the early ’60s.

LH What's the history of Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk?

OL I used to stalk The Parliaments from Detroit. I was sixteen or seventeen, riding the bus home from the library. One day, I saw The 20 Grand [club] ⑨ out the window. Everybody in school heard that these crazy "drunk" (laughs) guys turned out The 20 Grand. Someone told me, "Just get out and look at The 20 Grand. You're too young to get in, but it’s daytime." This is the stupidest thought in the world, but I get off the bus and as I'm looking at it, y'all come out. And I'm nearsighted, so all I could see was these blurs of crazy colors. I'm like, wait a minute. It's daytime. They're not performing, right? So, that's what took me out. I was expect-

ing, you know, clean pimpage, but I didn't know what this was. It looked like either Mardi Gras or outer space. I was scared to be honest with you.

GC He'd draw a picture, hand it to you, and leave. (laughs)

OL I had a book called Soul Is, and I think I forced you to take the book and some pictures. Later on, maybe at Cole Hall, they opened for Ray Charles. We was the new, young generation. Nobody wanted to see no old man Ray Charles. We went backstage, and I kept trying to get him to remember me, but he didn't. So finally, I get to New York a couple of years later, I'm in my early twenties, and I feel like I'm a grown up. A friend of mine was working with you guys and he invited me to a listening party for The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein [1976]. I went in and I was tired of trying to get him to remember me. But he says, "I remember you. Come on, sit down." So, I sat down and then Bootsy came and sat down, so I'm in between Bootsy and George, and suddenly I'm not a grown up no more. Remember, you asked me if I could draw a mad scientist who was a perfect human from the head to the waist. And then, to make it from the waist to the floor, an elephant's head? You don't remember. He was probably high, but you asked this kid straight outta high school to draw a half human, half elephant head. He's introducing me to the idea of clones. And you was saying, "Who's gonna stop cloning from looking like that in the future?”

GC I was thinking of Pegasus and Greek mythology. I thought that they might have been clones.

OL I almost ran out screaming, but I just drew it anyway. And you had me draw a couple other crazy things. And the next day, you asked me if I could draw an astronaut with a pimp suit on, with feathers (laughs). So I do that, and he says, "Can I have that?" And the next day, Archie called and asked me to hang out with you guys. So, we hung out and you did some radio junkets, then we got back to the hotel, and Nene Montes walked in with a big box of noses. He opened the boxes and George is mad excited, right? He's playing with it like he's five years old. I was embarrassed to be in the same room. I thought I would never see him again, so I started sketching secretly just to show my friends that this actually happened. He busted me like, "What's that?" And when he grabbed the drawing, I thought he was gonna throw me out. Instead he started trying to name the character.

GC Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk.

OL But before it got there…

GC Cyrano de Bergerac. That was the theory. I already had his name when I did the record. We was trying to get his crew together, that's when we added Duke Minus the Groove and all the Motor-Booty Affair [1978] characters. Those same characters lived through all those albums. It started in “Children of Production.” Now, I'm getting ready to do a play with the Motor-Booty characters.

LH Do you have artists for that? Can I sign myself up? You'll need a backdrop.

GC You already been inducted.

LH Oh my god. Beam me up to the mothership.

GC The thing is, you have the knowledge of the infinite tricky parts. We was listening to songs yesterday and she knew all the right songs. Not the hits, but the ones that the kids over the years knew. The Bootsy songs, the Brides, the Family shit. Nobody know about the Family [Series] ①⓪.

OL What songs did you grab onto?

LH Oh, where do I start? "How to Be a Good Person." Especially when I was emo and sad as a kid, "Good thoughts. Bad thoughts," "How Do You View You.”

GC I was so high when I did that. I don't know how I even thought of that stuff.

← George Clinton, K9 Perception, c. 2022

acrylic, spray paint, vine charcoal, charcoal, oil pastel and chalk on canvas 60 x 48 inches, 152.4 x 121.9 cm

courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Josh White, JW Pictures

↑ Custom made stage by Lauren Halsey for the exhibition

George Clinton: The Rhythm of Vision

On view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery November 5 – December 23, 2022

courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Josh White, JW Pictures

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“We had three studios going 24/7. People was asleep under the table waiting for anybody to say, "We need somebody to sing. We need somebody to play.” We recorded the roadies. I got a couple albums with a couple of the lawyers. We recorded everybody that was around.”

LH It's so philosophical.

GC It came off so good that thirty years later, I listened to that like, where the fuck did you get that from? But it really made sense.

LH I was listening to "Paradigm" just randomly on a kick for the past three weeks every day.

GC That was the one me and Prince did. That's the only song I did with him and it came out so good.

LH It's incredible. I texted it to Flea as I was driving, cuz he's the only hardcore funkateer that I know. But this is "Good thoughts, Bad Thoughts" (plays song). Listening to this as a 13-year-old, you couldn't tell me anything. There's so many moments that are symbolic of freedom. I'm even thinking of the beginning of "Munchies to Your Love." It's just gorgeous. (plays song)

GC That's Bernie [Worrell]. He did his first recitals at seven with The Philadelphia Orchestra. He was in Juilliard at fourteen. That's him, and Bootsy, and Garry [Shider] there performing.

LH P-Funk is just this endless thing.

GC It was so many of us. So many styles.

LH How did you recruit all these people?

GC They was all working, running around the barbershop [in New Jersey]. I'm like seven, eight years older than them. Bernie was going to classical training, and we were singers. They would clear up the shop and we took 'em to the boys club and bought the equipment. So, when bands became the thing, like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, we already had our little young band members playing in church with they dad. So, they grew right up in the group.

OL Didn't you get Bernie in trouble, though?

GC Well yeah, his mother wanted him to play classical, and he'd run around playing doo-wop with us. He went on to Boston and played with The Tavares Brothers and he was playing with Donna Summer before she ever became a star. We were around when most people got started and we ended up with a lot of stars. Fred [Wesley], Maceo [Parker]—they came with Bootsy [Collins] from James [Brown].

OL Was Dionne Warwick with you guys?

GC I lived next door to her father's store. She was one of the first ones to make it really big. You know, "Don't Make Me Over" with Burt Bacharach—Motown was it!

OL How did you get to Motown?

GC I worked for Berry's [Gordy Jr.] wife. She came to New York to run Jobete, the Motown publishing firm, and got her office in the Brill Building, and she hired Sidney Barnes, who was a friend of mine. So, we all like twenty, she was nineteen, and we had to travel out to Detroit and audition. We failed as a group, but I got a job as a writer and producer.

LH Who wrote, "All Your Goodies Are Gone?”

GC I did.

LH Such a great breakup, love, “I don't trust you” song. GC I was trying to be Smokey Robinson. Smokey was my idol. But at the same time, the Beatles had taken over. So, it wasn't like your regular R&B song. Now we had to do cartoons. We wanted to have our own P-Funk world, the way the Beatles had “Yellow Submarine."

LH That's what makes me so obsessive as an artist with my palette. You guys covered all angles. Stylistically, sculpturally, just the presentation. When I do a work of maximalism, especially a Black aesthetic maximalism that's funky, I attribute that tightness to you guys. Even listening to “Funkentelechy [(Where’d You Get That Funk From)”] there's so many layers of that song, but it's controlled. You

Hermés cotton shorts; L’enchanteur brass nail caps; Wolford cotton and nylon socks

have all these people in the collective, they all have their own output, yet aesthetically, it's so tight.

GC We call it artsy fartsy, you know. It’s about how much good you can get in there without it getting in the way of each other. You can have a lot of stuff in there, but it cancels shit out. Being at Motown makes you particularly conscious of getting shit just right. Because they was like polished. Funk was the opposite. You can go in there and be sloppy, you can feedback like Jimmy Hendrix. He made feedback famous. So now, you got to contend with that and we could balance both of them. The cleanness, the rowdiness that don't make sense at all. Maggot Brain [1971] don't even have no other instruments but two guitars, but it's so artsy fartsy with the technical electronics in the feedback, and I didn't know what I was doing. It's just that I heard his records doing that. The engineer didn't want his name on the record, cuz I was overdoing it. He wouldn't put his name on it until fifteen years later when the song became famous.

LH How does it feel seeing your paintings come together at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery?

GC You know, suddenly we had a crew of people that was seriously into art, and I had to intellectualize the conversation. That's the funniest part about it, cuz I always made fun of stuff like that. But, you have to say the truth. Whatever that is.

LH I'm so honored to be in a show with you, I could cry. It means everything. I was saying to Jeffrey, “It's like you've allowed me to graduate from one level of my interplanetary funkmanship to another level of funk.”

GC That's so well said. Thank you. I feel like I succeeded. You too, Overton. When you hear somebody say it back to you, you realize the point got across to somebody. And your work. You know, when I heard who you were from Flea…

LH …That day was crazy. I did that show at the Hammer Museum, and people got the metaphor of Egypt. But, when they got to the images, only the hardcore funkateers could decode the images I was sampling from you. Then, Flea saw them, called you, and you two were my audience for that show.

GC And the way you picked up on the Cro-Nasal Sapiens. We thought that was the funniest. We was clowning. The thing is to make something sound real, but make it silly as hell.

LH My father used to come in during half time from the Raiders game with all his studies of pharaonic architecture and say, “Look at your bloodline. Look at who you are.” And I’d be like, “Yeah, yeah yeah, but I’m listening to Trombipulation [1980].

GC You know, we used to say, "My people was here before mankind. My lineage goes back…” Cuz you find elongated headed people in Egyptian mythology, but then you start finding people that actually looked like that. It wasn't an elephant nose, but they had a proboscis and the long head. We just put the elephant nose on there to be stupid, and we called the album Trombipulation, because that's the art of being able to pick up something with your nose.

LH Who did that album cover? Was that you, Overton?

OL No, I did the drawings.

GC We took the pictures and I put the nose on and got my hair done.

LH Yeah, the finger waves and the fur coat.

GC I felt the coolest of any picture I took, and with that nose on. (laughs)

OL Who made that nose?

GC I got the people who make prosthetic penises to make it (laughs). Oh god, that thing was on my face so thoroughly, you could pick me up. It took them three hours to get it off.

OL He had all that stuff on and I drew the cover, but I got

Balenciagacashmerecoat, silkblouseandwooltrousers

Nathalia Gaviria beaded shoulder piece; George’s own necklace

nervous because I had done a few album covers before, and I thought people would get tired of looking at the art. So, I convinced George to get a photographer to shoot it. But he said, "People get scared of seeing Black people in photographs." In those days, they liked drawing. And so, the album came out and I saw a bunch of them in the window of the store in Detroit, and I freaked out. I was like, "It is scary! It's too scary!" And then, that was the last Parliament album, right?

GC Yep. That was the last one.

OL I thought I ruined his career. I thought I ended Parliament (laughs).

GC No, that was inevitable. You can only do it so long before you have to go sit down. But, it just changed names and came back as George Clinton with "Atomic Dog.”

LH Were you painting this whole time too?

GC I wasn't calling myself a painter, but I was doodling. Matter of fact, somebody just showed me some paintings that I did for Prince before I even thought that I was painting. It had to be ’87, cuz it was at Paisley Park. That was before The Cinderella Theory [1989] came out.

OL But you was making the little dog in your signature. GC I was doing that in the ’70s, but I'm talking about with canvases.

LH What is it about the dog? I've heard you talk about the dog most recently in the Questlove podcast and the different types of dogs, like in Dope Dogs [1994].

GC That was just the continuation of it. Rufus Thomas was a DJ in Memphis that had a record out called Walking the Dog in 1963. He had two hits on that, "The Dog" was first and then "Walking the Dog." That record was huge. He was fifty years old when he did that. I'm a songwriter, so I remember things that worked and find a new way of doing it. That dog has got such a primal instinct thing with us. There's always been something about dogs that we relate to. But I always thought about how ironic our relationship with dogs is. Dog is man's best friend, but when we really want to treat somebody bad, you treat 'em like a dog. I used to think that's pretty weird. And then I saw a thing in Detroit where they was doing tests on dogs for cosmetics. So, I started studying for a concept. I found that the dope dog that they use to find drugs—the way they train him is they have to give him a habit first. You know, if you smell that, it goes up your nose, you gon' get high. So, you get it hooked, and then you have to give him a reward. Otherwise, he won't do it. Then, when they retire him, they leave him strung out. So, that's when I did Dope Dogs. That's supposed to be our best friend.

OL Do the dogs have any connection to outer space?

GC Sirius. That's called The Dog Star. The Dogons, the No Mos, all of that.

LH That goes back to what you were saying yesterday, the concept of the Afronauts, cosmic travelers, and the Dogons.

GC It’s amazing to see people like you pick up on that, but I didn't know it was Afrofuturism. That's what timing is. Everybody's into that Afrofuturism right now as a concept. We were doing it without even thinking of it like that. But now that we're thinking of it like that, when you look at all this red, black and green, and spaceships, and sci-fi, and dogs…

LH I mean, I started making hair works in 2012 thinking about your wigs. That was a whole body of work and people give language to it—“it’s about painting…” and it's like, "Really, it's George Clinton's hair.”

GC Being colorblind, I had to train myself to intellectualize it—I know which colors do what, I know those are the African colors.

With Overton, I found something that just looked like something but ain't got no definition. I made sure I got some red, black and green in there, and nobody questions that. But now that [Afrofuturism] is so pop, with everybody doing it, I say, “Do the best you can and funk it, and it's always gonna be there.”

LH I didn't know it was that until I got to school. And they said, “That's what you're doing.” I thought I was just doing funk.

GC We was actually thinking of it as African outer space. You know, I seen Star Trek and Aurora was the only Black person there. So, we did songs about that because we had never seen us in outer space.

LH It was more than outer space for me. It was an escape, but it wasn’t even escapism cuz it wasn't about beaming to the stars and not acknowledging anything else. It was more like, I’m not oppressed by anything you’re putting on me. I’m outta here, but I'm here.

Hair: Jadis Jolie Makeup: Holly Silius Studio: The Dream Factory Catering: Uncle Paulie’s Deli

WillyChavarriabrushedsilkcoat; Loeweacetatesunglasses

It’s all in the process … a call for intellectual integrity in fashion

We may be living through fashion’s most creatively conceptual era of all time, although it might also be the poorest intellectually. We are witnessing a rise of amateurism all around: owning a craft and taking the time to hone material mastery no longer appears to be taken seriously, nor does it guarantee the top job. It’s the ideas that count: so they say. Everybody can be a creative director, a fashion editor, or whatever else, so long as their ideas are crazy, outlandish, and apparently disruptive. Knowing history is a minus. Asking questions, even worse. Delving into the process does not even apply. All you need is to be efficient with googling the references and copy-pasting them in the most haphazard of ways. There are even self-proclaimed— and globally acclaimed—creatives whose only ability is to sell themselves as creatives.

It’s time to break the cycle; to bring craft and metier back. This is the only way to generate effective and permanent progress, as opposed to applying endless coatings of varnish on nothingness. This uncultivated cycle will ultimately lead to decline, which all considered, is quite a thrilling prospect.

But let’s do away with doom and gloom and try to remain constructive; to look at things without facile filters. Ideas are easy, especially the crazy ones, but it is the execution that makes the fundamental difference. Execution requires practice, application, perseverance, coherence, conceptual strictness, and the ability to deliver a clear message. These days, the matter is rather one of if you can’t convince ’em, deceive ’em. There is a tendency to opt for gimmicks that entice and arouse the proverbial WOW, but leave one feeling empty and numb, as though nothing notable was achieved. There is a lot of haphazardness around, and very little method, if any at all. Things look like they were made at home in the kitchen, or in kindergarten. Amateurism is nice: it has a spontaneous energy. Professionalism, however, is better: it has clarity. Professionalism relies on process above all else. There is no other way to truly bring an idea to life.

In the general lack of method and metier, chaos and confusion have turned into aesthetic principles. However, it is not the ancestral chaos, the primeval soup in which life lingers and everything happens. Rather, it is the chaos of anything and everything goes, the blur where telling the beginning from the end becomes impossible. It’s the piling up of stuff, as opposed to the virtues of vigorous editing.

In our current climate, everything is presumed possible. Carte blanche has become de rigueur. Creativity is borderless in ways never seen before. And yet, does this

Text by Angelo Flaccavento

state of things produce good work? If it does, it is impossible to see. We’ve forgotten that limitations are good for the spirit of the inventor. Overcoming them has always led to a wellspring of creativity with craft offering the tools to achieve novel results. Artists give their best when they confront a paucity of means and a ticking clock. That said, they can only develop their style when given the time to invest in a working process.

Style matters. Style is substance. But a very slim few possess a distinct style these days. Everybody wants to capitalize, and to do so with a signature, although this is different from style, it is a prime vehicle. Real style, which is akin to handwriting, is something that requires time. No one is giving talent the time to grow: not the agents nor the industry. Instead, everybody wants to milk the cow as soon and as much as possible; to capitalize hard and fast.

Oh, money, the great corruptor. Not to sound overly moralistic—I beg your pardon, I am—but once money becomes the priority, everything rots. A lethal injection of capital in culture poisons the scene. As a result, action becomes devoid of spontaneity and meaning. Everything is accepted, and originality is sacrificed on the altar of blatant commerce. Don’t get me wrong. Fashion, and whatever revolves around it, is a commercial industry. Yet the pursuit of commerce must be disregarded within the creative act. This part of the process is about expression, invention, beauty. Creatives can contribute to shaping the cultural climate of the moment under the aegis of commercial activities, and in doing so, promote progress. But their intentions are inevitably corrupted when commerce makes its way into the creative act.

This is a call for intellectual integrity. Honesty is a fundamental aspect of creativity: knowing who you are, why you do what you do, for whom you do it, and for what

purpose; being authentic to oneself and to the craft. Within this extremely rigorous frame, there are no limitations on creativity, and progress can actually take place.

Know thyself. Delve into the process. And act.

Angelo Flaccavento is an Italian fashion journalist who has contributed to Fantastic Man, L'Uomo Vogue and The Business of Fashion.

One,

Marla wears Bally wool suit; and Prada leather shoes.

in a Sum of Many

Photography by Parker Woods

Styling by Julie Ragolia

(left to right) Marc wears Prada mohair blazer and trousers, cotton poplin shirt and faille tie; Marla wears Prada panama cotton coat; Catheryn wears Prada panama cotton jacket.

(left to right) Catheryn wears Zegna waxed polyester raincoat; Ehizoje wears Zegna wool and mohair jacket and trousers.

Stephanie wears Dior Men wool suit and cotton shirt; Marc wears Dior Men cotton shirt and wool trousers.

Marla wears CELINE HOMME by Hedi Slimane mohair silk double breasted jacket and trousers, cotton poplin shirt, and silk jacquard tie.

Ehizoje wears Louis Vuitton wool wrapped martingale jacket, cotton shirt, and wool trousers.

Marc wears Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello silk shirt, wool trousers, and patent leather slippers.

Stephanie wears Gucci wool-polyester 70’s twill double breasted jacket and trousers, cotton shirt, poplin boxer shorts and leather shoes.

Performers: Marla Phelan, Stephanie Crousillat, Marc Crousillat, Ehizoje Azeke, Jesse Kovarsky, Catheryn Clifford

Movement Director: Elena Vazintaris

Hair: Adam Markarian

Makeup: Courtney Perkins

Special thanks: Duncan McVerry

Catheryn wears Loewe nappa asymmetric shirt

Dysfunctional Bauhaus

Photography by Davey Adésida

Styling by Julie Ragolia

Dysfunctional

All clothing CELINE HOMME by Hedi Slimane. Washed satin silk shirt, wool pants, metal frame sunglasses

Mohair silk jacket, cotton poplin shirt, mohair silk pants, acetate sunglasses, canvas bag with David Weiss wave print and calfskin leather boots

Mohair wool jacket and pants, cotton poplin shirt, silk jacquard tie, rhodium finish necklace and calfskin leather boots

The Thomas Mann House—in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles—is the former residence of the towering Nobel laureate in literature, writer of Death

In Venice (1912), and Magic Mountain (1924). Mann and his family spent the war years in this mid-century Julius Ralph Davidson-designed home. We present CELINE HOMME’s SS23

Dysfunctional Bauhaus collection in the same library where Mann would broadcast intrepid communiqués against fascism across the Atlantic via his radio show German Listeners! This message for democratic renewal

Washed satin silk shirt, wool pants, metal frame sunglasses, calfskin leather boots

and freedom, with its emphasis on transatlantic debate, is now the ethos of the Thomas Mann House; a cultural center for globally prescient dialog.

Satin teddy jacket in collaboration with Alyss Estay, cashmere wool sweater, cotton poplin shirt, mohair silk pants and vintage calfskin leather belt

Technical cotton mac coat, mohair wool jacket, cotton poplin shirt, silk jacquard tie, acetate sunglasses and rhodium finish necklace

Cashmere wool sweater, cotton poplin shirt, mohair silk pants, vintage calfskin leather belt and calfskin leather boots

Mohair silk jacket, cotton poplin shirt, mohair silk flared pants, silk jacquard tie, calfskin leather zipped boots

Model: Quillan de Boeck @ Unit

Hair: Nikki Providence

Makeup: Yasmin Istanbouli Location: Thomas Mann House

Photography by Jaime Cabrera Huidobro

Styling by Julie Ragolia

Excavation

The Row wool vest and pants, cotton t-shirt, and leather loafers

Prada cotton poplin shirt and pants

Louis Vuitton leather and cotton jacket, and leather dress

Loewe cotton wool parka, cotton padded shirt, and cotton and leather pantaboots

This page and next: Jil Sander by Lucie and Luke Meier cotton jacket and silk shirt

Bottega Veneta printed flannel leather shirt, cotton tank, printed leather pants, and leather heels

Opposite page: Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello leather trenchcoat and viscose knit dress. This page: Christian Dior pearl bracelet

Hermès leather coat and cotton dress

Loro Piana linen, cashmere and silk jacket and pants, and silk shirt

Opposite page: Maison Margiela wool tabard, wool sweater, herringbone skirt, and leather belt; Rouge Hermès limited edition lipstick in beige croisette

Dior cotton blouse and leather skirt; Akoni palladium glasses

Calvin Klein denim shirt and jeans; Longchamp leather water bottle case with strap; Billy Kirk belt

Model: Litay Marcus @ IMG

Hair: Alexander Soltermann @ Home Agency

Makeup: Eny Whitehead @ Home Agency

Casting: Barbara Nicoli and Leila Ananna

Set Designer: David de Quevedo @ Cadence

Photo Assistant: Maximilian Mair

Stylist Assistants: Jon-Guorun-Carlosson, Rithul Zeus

Project Management: Bene Studio Shot at Studio La Brique Rouge, Paris

My Body, My Pleasure

Photography by Katsu Naito

Styling by Julie Ragolia

Collina Strada rose sylk gardenia gown; Gucci metal earrings with palladium finish (sold individually)

Puppets and Puppets faux fur coat; Merve Bayindir Fayette mask

Trash and Vaudeville shoes (worn throughout)

Gucci silk vintage gauze embroidered dress

Simon Alcantara handwoven sterling silver fringe necklace

Miu Miu jersey top (two), cashmere silk top and silk georgette crepe brief

Ren Haixi knitted gown; Gucci metal with palladium finish head accessory

“I felt like this story was made for me to tell. I was able to lean on my own experiences and imagination to release the darkness and light that were in me at the time. I thought about the stories shared with me by elders, about the days of working the strolls in the West Village and Meat Packing District. I thought about Octavia Saint Laurent, and her dreams and aspirations of being a star, as detailed in Paris Is Burning (1990). I thought about how I quit my job years back to become a full-time sex worker. I thought about the love of community and how it has saved my life. I used my own experiences to tell my story, and to shed light on others that show up at the intersection of love, identity, community, and healing. I am a Black trans woman; an activist that curates joy in spaces where pain and suffering is often the leading narrative known to the world. I am a fighter. I will be seen and I will be heard. I said I was a model and, look, I am a model.”

— Gia Love

AZ Factory x Lutz Huelle viscose dress

Eckhaus Latta polyester spandex bubble cardigan and mini skirt

Gabriela Hearst merino wool dress

Louis Vuitton textured silk carrot pants (worn as top) and draped linen layering skirt

Thom Browne draped silk taffeta tailcoat

Model: Gia Love

Hair: Hikaru Hirano with Oribe

Makeup: Dan Duran using Make Up For Ever

Casting: Ben Grimes

Special thanks: John Mollett @ Willbees, New York, and Little Man

Calvin Klein cotton unlined bralette and bikini brief

Celine by Hedi Slimane gold maillons triomphe pompons necklace

Marina Abramović

Abramović

PeterDowool oversizedblazercoat andcottonwrappedblazergown;Prada leatherboots

Interview by Miles Greenberg

Photography by Justin French

Styling by Julie Ragolia

Performance is a kind of collective action. It is one of the truest collaborative art forms. Since the 1970s, Marina Abramović’s main collaborator has been the audience to some of her most iconic, dangerous, and breathtaking performances, which are often durational and test the limits of the human body. For Abramović, the artist is a universal vector for experiencing all emotions. To protect her art form, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute, which regularly holds workshops, lectures, seminars, and performances around the world. She was recently chosen for the Pina Bausch professorship in Essen, Germany, where she has been working with a multidisciplinary group of performance artists over the course of a year in preparation for their tenday durational performance at the Museum Folkwang. Miles Greenberg was one of her performers in a six-day production NO INTERMISSION at Theater Carré in Holland that took place earlier this year. They caught up to talk about the transformative power of durational performance and the importance of freedom in one’s artistic process.

Miles Greenberg You came up as a young performance artist in Amsterdam. Can you talk about how the show we did together at Theater Carré reflected those years in its format?

Marina Abramović It was inspiring that the space where we did the performance is not a museum space, it’s not a kunsthalle, and it’s not the kind of space where you traditionally show art. This was a theater, and to actually break all of these rules that the theater imposes and create new rules—the playfulness was a very important part of the show. After doing this stuff for fifty years now, I’m so fed up with the rules, with the political correctness, and with all the shit that’s going on. Now, with a bit of nostalgia, I'm looking to futurists, to dadaists, to surrealists, to all these people with groups that actually created a history of art by playing. They weren’t afraid of mistakes. This is such an important situation where real, live art can happen, and also shit can happen, and both of those things are so exciting for me. We chose the artists but the artists were free to propose the things that fit them best. Normally, if you have a show in a museum, you have to send the title of the performance, the duration, and what space it’s going to be in. All these regulations have to be followed, and then the work is made. I mean, who could have predicted that on the last day, the audience and the performers would jump into the canal, just like that (laughs). Normally, you don’t jump in the cold canal in Holland, apart from it being dirty, but never mind.

MG I totally feel that. I think it resonated so much on a personal level when I went and participated. On the flip side, I had a museum show that I was working on back home in New York that was very regimented. Every single day I was having to deal with another tiny issue. There was so much preconception that it completely lost the spontaneity. It was great, but that process is so different. The performance we did in Holland, I had no idea what to expect, and that was such a palate cleanser—to be able to feel the immediacy of how the performance came to be. It’s an immediate art form. How does immediacy in that way—and the gratification of being able to create something and see it immediately with your body, with the audience’s body—how does that still play into your work and your practice today?

MA Jan Hoet was one of the very few great curators in art history, he was the director for documenta IX, and at the time, he took from Joseph Beuys' 350 secret potato recipes. So, every day we would have a new recipe and we hated potatoes. We wouldn’t get anything else, but he created this kind of family situation where you eat potatoes even though you hate them and you create art, because we all have to be in the same space with the same chemistry for this to happen. We need this feeling of freedom to create anything. It's from chaos that things actually happen, but you have to have that kind of vision. Your project went through so many different phases. You were proposing one idea and then something else completely. What makes it great is when it's not just the artist who is doing experimental stuff, but the people who organize the performances need to have the same attitude. Did you feel the freedom to change the concept and everything else as you went along, even once you were in performance?

MG Oh, things changed up until the last moment of the very last performance, absolutely. There were so many decisions that were made while making and while doing. The opportunity of having six days to feel it out with that audience

Marc Jacobs merino wool, baby alpaca and polyamide hooded cape; Gucci moiré smart coat

Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello leather trench coat

Peter Do wool oversized blazer coat

every single day in a different way was great. Not everybody performed every single day. There were different versions and configurations, and everybody was working so much internally. For example, the way that Ying Mae walked through with her singing vase—it made the performance radically different from the day before.

MA When the public normally comes to a performance, they’re led into an auditorium, they take their seats as they’re used to. But then, they had one person, which was me, actually watch over them. And my watching was designed to turn them toward something they’re going to see, something that would be for a long duration, where they can just relax and take this as an experiment. I was trying to make this kind of dream for them, and after that, it struck them that some could go to the left side, others to the right side, and some could go up. They were all free now to move around. But to start with a very simple exercise—let’s all breathe together twelve times—these simple exercises are so important to energetically connect everybody who would normally come to the theater not connected, and it works. So, the only structure was that one, and then everything else was so free, and whatever happens will happen.

MG I love the way that you describe the difference between theater and performance. In theater, it's a fake knife and you’re seeing ketchup, whereas in performance, the knife is real and so is the blood. You like to bring people into the universe and prepare them to see something. I’m wondering how that differentiation exists in the audience’s body?

MA What we were doing at the Carré was so interesting because it was a mix of everything. There was a big performative team that was very theatrical, but also there was the Spanish guy who would really take a drug that would knock him down, and then he was left to the public to take care of him. It was absolute exposure, vulnerability, and danger. This was real and you could immediately see how the public reacted emotionally on each day. Your work was extremely emotional too, it was dance, but you

↖ In Miles Greenberg’s Landscape with Figures, the floor of the Carré’s ballroom is covered in sand. At the centre of the ballroom, three performers stand atop mirrored surfaces, cradling stones in their arms. Their bodies are dripping in a viscous liquid, evoking the amniotic fluid of the womb. This is a space to amend the rift between our violent, compulsive nature to expand, and the ontic expanse of nature.

Photograph by Dustin Lynn. Miles Greenberg Landscape with Figures (2022), “No Intermission,” Royal Theater Carré, Amsterdam

introduce this physicality of endless time, where you could come and see it in the ballroom and then you could have a full dinner, come back, and it's still there. It’s never-ending, that investment of time, of possible danger, it brings a lot of emotion to the public. The durational performance form is so unique because it has this transformative function. You’re not just doing it because you’re going through the process and changing yourself, you’re also changing the public. That’s the key. It was so interesting how every day more and more people came. They would invite their friends, and those friends would invite their friends because they couldn’t believe what was happening. At the end, it was this huge celebration and the audience was no longer looking at something, they were a part of something.

MG Can you talk a little about teaching at Essen, the legacy of Pina Bausch, and that crossing over with your performance work?

MA My love for Pina Bausch really dates back a long time. In the ’70s, she had an incredibly radical approach to dance, made some amazing pieces, and there’s hardly anyone left from the original company because everyone is so old, but the new group is still performing these pieces. Every time I see their work I’m in shock by how relevant, how contemporary, how incredibly important it is, and how many other choreographers take from her to create their own work. For her, dancing was everything. It was walking in the snow with bare feet, standing in the forest, smoking a cigarette—there was no limit to what dancing was. And also, working to the point of trance. I went to see The Rite of Spring, which I had already seen several versions of, but I wasn’t prepared for this one. They went to Uganda and they took thirty dancers from fourteen African countries, male and female. The moment they started to act, you’re elevated to this spiritual, shamanistic, energetic level where you hardly even notice you’re breathing. Unbelievable. It was so spectacular because they add their own culture to the dance, which she made space for. This was really something.

I stopped teaching a long time ago, but I got a phone call from Pina Bausch’s son and he said that when she died, she wanted to establish this academy in Essen where people from different disciplines could create a multidisciplinary group, and I was the first teacher who’d been asked. It would only be teaching for one year and we could propose different people. I got 150 proposals and I chose twenty-six people. These people are coming from physical theater, from drama, from dance, there's a male opera singer who is a soprano, there are jazz vocalists, composers, and none of them have ever done anything durational in their own fields. So, we’re working together for this big event and they gave me half of the museum where they’re going to perform for ten days, six hours a day. More and more, I want to create new work that mixes performance and dance. The Pina Bausch approach to the physicality and the spirituality of dance really speaks to me the most.

MG I’m curious about your group of students. What kind of work are they producing?

MA The way I’m teaching, I want to be just a conductor to their own ideas. I don’t want to push my ideas, so I don’t even talk to them about my work. They can look on Google, but I’m not giving it. They bring their own stories, problems, investigations, dramas, whatever they want to do. There’s one student, she’s working on physical theater and her biggest drama is feeling ignored in public but being too chicken. So now, she studies chickens. She went to several farms in Germany, she covered herself completely with feathers, and she’s going to do ten days, six hours a day, being a chicken. It’s perfectly done and I just give her space, time, and the facilities.

It was very funny also to tell them how to value their performance projects financially. Because they are students, they are not going to be paid. The school pays for the production, plus they get a museum show, TV show, catalog—I mean, I’ve never seen such a thing in my life. But I said to them, “In real life, you have to be paid for what you do, so put the price.” Some of them put like 300 bucks and some like $10,000. Very interesting how they value their work. (laughs)

MG You’re an extremely good teacher because nobody ever teaches that.

MA You know, I never got paid for any performance in my entire life until The Artist is Present [2012], and they had to pay me because I performed for three months in the museum and I had to pay my mortgage. Tino Sehgal is a genius because he really found out how to sell a performance. Kiss [2003] was the first thing he ever sold and he sold it for $250,000. It’s an edition of five plus two artist proofs, and lots of museums bought it. Every museum has to pay for the piece plus the performers, but at the same time, you have to control who they are. I saw this piece performed really wonderfully, and then another time I saw two shitty guys who had no charisma, nothing. So, you have to set up rules for how the piece should be performed in the future.

Lighting:

Retouching:

Special thanks: Nicodim Gallery

Hair: Adam Szabo

Makeup: Rommy Najor

Pierre Bonnet

Frisian

Isidafauxfurcoat

Radical Futures

↑ Archizoom Associati, No-Stop City, 1970. Internal Landscape. Courtesy Studio Branzi

Featuring Superstudio, Archizoom, Gruppo 9999, UFO and Gaetano Pesce.

DesignItalianRadicalinthe1960s

In 1966, a flood washed over Florence, Italy. Over one hundred people died. Millions of Renaissance masterpieces, artifacts, rare books, and monuments were destroyed when the Arno overflowed and consumed the capital of Tuscany. But this was not the first time the city was overtaken by chaos and destruction. Twenty years earlier, the Nazis began a year-long occupation of the ancient Roman citadel. Allied and Axis forces shared a brutal exchange of fire and shelling that destroyed many of the buildings surrounding the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge, which was miraculously spared by Hitler himself (all the other bridges were destroyed). Out of the rubble and loam of this violent miasma came a group of radical young architects who formed avant-garde collectives and declared a philosophical war against architecture itself. Against the violence of the past. Against the barbarity of fascism. Against formality. Against history. Against rigidity and conservatism. These groups had names

like Superstudio, Archizoom, Gruppo 9999, and UFO. They were more concerned with ideas than structures—building conceptual visions of new worlds rather than erecting edifices in the present. Although they only existed for a brief period, burning wild and bright and visionary, their output would leave a lasting architectural impression—later inspiring architects like Rem Koolhaas and the late Zaha Hadid. But while Florence might have been the epicenter of this new psychedelic activity, these ’superarchitettura’ groups spread across Italy—from Milan to Turin, to Naples, and Padua—as highlighted in the landmark 1972 exhibition

Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Emilio Ambasz. The new landscapes of these radical utopians explored speculative visions of domesticity that included themes of anti-design and protests against objects as status symbols—anchors of materiality that exemplified the hubris of a hyper-consumerist, post-war society.

Courtesy

↖ Protone “Big Meadow." Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, and Riccardo Rosso, manufactured by Gufram©, Pratone®, designed 1971, made 1986, polyurethane foam and Guflac® Courtesy of Gufram

←←← Alessandro Mendini, Lassù, object designed and destroyed in 1974. Image for the cover of Casabella No. 391, 1974.

Alessandro Mendini Archive

←← Dressing Design: Nearest Habitat System, Archizoom Associati, 1972, shirt of gauze produced by Brevetti Bernè (worn by Benedetto Gravagnuolo); clothes worn by Donna Jordan and friends of Archizoom. photograph by Oliviero Toscani for L’Uomo Vogue. Courtesy Oliviero Toscani Studio

← Alessandro Mendini, Gorilla Beringei with halo, graphic work on a postcard from the Diorama in the Museum of Natural History New York, 1973. Archivio Alessandro Mendini

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Translation by Gianluca Pierangioli

← Superstudio, “Misura series” for Zanotta, 1970 plastic laminate with silkscreen print Photographed in Panzano nel Chianti, Italy © Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

Superstudio

Founded in 1966 in Florence, Italy by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, and shortly thereafter joined by Roberto and Alessandro Magris, Gian Piero Frassinelli and Alessandro Poli, Superstudio’s psychedelic universe was an attack on modernism’s inherent failures. Utilizing photo collages, films, and exhibitions, their vision was utopian at its core but also examined the anti-utopia’s of urban planning pomposity with works like The Continuous Monument (1969), which was a singular gridded monolithic structure that spanned the globe. It cuts through meadows, cities, deserts and beyond. For Superstudio, the Cartesian grid, a system of x-, y-, and z-axes to control space, became their signature. Tables, benches, and storage units are sold today with this pattern. In the following pages, the only surviving member of the group, Gian Piero Frassinelli discusses the group’s ambitions and his unique input, which was deeply steeped in his fascination and studies in anthropology. This translated to a vision of humanity returning to its nomadic roots, free from the slavery of labor and consumerist desires.

Oliver Kupper Why did you gravitate towards architecture and were your architectural dreams before Superstudio always so radical and utopian?

Gian Piero Frassinelli At first, I didn't have this utopic idea when I studied architecture. It took me a bit longer than usual to finish my architectural studies—about eight years. The word ‘radical’ wasn't used until after the creation of Superstudio, Archizoom, and all the utopian groups that were born during those years. The Superstudio group was formed during some of the toughest years for the university because classes were often interrupted. First, because of the flood in 1966. And later, in 1968, because of the student strikes. Those strikes were to fight the educational system in Italy and also to support peace all around the world. We were against the Vietnam War. Also, there was a huge gap between the ideas of the students and the teachers. So, we started to search for new ways of imagining what architecture could be.

OK You got your degree in 1968 and joined Superstudio the same year. How did you join forces with Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia who founded the group only two years before?

GPF Shortly before I received my degree, I saw Cristiano on the street in Florence. I hadn’t seen him since before the flood because I was preparing for my graduation project. Christiano told me about his studio that he founded with Adolfo and he told me to visit them when I graduated. After a few days, I finished my studies. When I arrived at their studio, they told me what their ideas of architecture were. At first, I didn't understand because my ideas were very different from the academic approach, but also from their point of view. But my architectural ambitions were very similar, so I decided to put my ideas aside and follow them.

OK You had an early interest in anthropology—why was that field of study important in the context of architecture?

GPF To be honest, my interest in anthropology came before my interest in architecture. I found myself in the architectural world because my dad used to sell building materials. His studio was packed with architectural magazines and books. My interest in anthropology started when I was a child. I got sick in a bunker during World War II, so I stopped attending elementary school for a few years. But I was lucky because I had an aunt who was a retired teacher. She taught me a lot to make up for the years that I had lost due to my illness. She was one of the first teachers to use the Montessori method. [Maria] Montessori was an Italian professor who changed the way of teaching. And she was a very religious person, so she did a lot of missions in Africa and other places. That’s how I learned about people who were very different from me, that had a very different culture and lifestyle than mine. I was around eight years old at this time. And from my dad’s architectural magazines, I got a passion for architecture. So, after high school, I enrolled in the University of Architecture in Florence. Over the years, I kept learning more and more about anthropology. My graduation project was a study about an anthropology museum.

OK Speaking of the war years. How did the ghosts of fascism in Italy, but also Europe at-large, and in post-war Florence—a city steeped in the classicism of the Renaissance—inspire you as an architect?

GPF I was born in 1939, the exact day that Hitler invaded Poland. The next year, the bombing started in Italy. The bombing first started in La Spezia, which was the city where I used to live. Every night, we heard the sirens. We had to spend most of our life in the bunkers there. We actually moved from La Spezia because our house was destroyed in the bombing. So, we moved east and arrived in

an area close to the Apennine Mountains, which was the location for a lot of Nazi killings. You’ve probably heard about Marzabato, which was the location of one of the biggest Nazi massacres. We were lucky to survive. It was a miracle. So, when we arrived in Florence, it was almost the end of World War II, but a big part of the city was destroyed, and there were land mines everywhere. Seeing the destroyed architecture was really influential for me and for my architectural point of view.

OK In connection to these totalitarian regimes and architecture, most people associate the Cartesian grid with rigid structures, conservatism, and staying within the lines, but Superstudio’s imagination existed way outside these lines. What did the grid represent and why was it so important?

GPF The grid was actually developed casually. I was working with Superstudio for a year, and I was more like a draftsman than a researcher. At one point, Adolfo and Cristiano had the idea of building the Continuous Monument. They needed someone very good at drawing perspective. I was actually hired for drawing perspective and also photo collages. During my studies in high school and university, to draw perspective, I always used the Leon Battista Alberti method. He was one of the most important architects and artists in Florence. And that method consists of dividing each volume into squares using a grid. This is also how the grid made its way into the photo collages.

OK And the grid sort of took over everything—even tables and chairs. It became a main symbol of what Superstudio did.

GPF With architecture, we later moved forward from the grid. For the design aspect, the grid became iconic. A lot of people requested it. And Zanotta still produces Superstudio furniture with the grid. As for the drawing, the grid was just a way to emphasize the bi-dimensional volume.

OK This Cartesian order of the natural world through dominating monuments of architecture, like The Continuous Monument, which could soon be a terrifying reality in the Saudi desert, was described by Adolfo Natalini as an “anti-utopia.” Where did Superstudio’s intuition about the terrors of architecture’s future anti-utopias come from?

GPF The Continuous Monument was first an idea that Adolfo and Cristiano had to connect architecture from all around the world—to connect all the architectural methods. And the grid helped to put this in order and to be more rigid. But the problem for me, because of my anthropology studies, was that it led me to think that the interior of the Continuous Monument would be terrible to live in. So, the Continuous Monument was born as a utopia but died after my talks with Adolfo and Christiano, and became an anti-utopia.

OK One of your major contributions is “The Twelve Cautionary Tales [12 Ideal Cities],” which was extremely anti-utopian. Can you talk about this?

GPF “The Twelve Cautionary Tales” happened during a period when Adolfo was teaching at a university in the United States, so it was just me and Christiano here in Florence, and we didn't have that much work to do. It was a better way for me to explain to Adolfo and Cristiano what life would actually be like inside The Continuous Monument. I took the ideas of the other eleven cities by focusing on crowded urban places all around the world that somehow don't work. Each city, each cautionary tale, is a different thing that doesn't work in those cities. I chose the number twelve because twelve is a very important number for Western culture and literature. OK Film was a powerful medium for Superstudio. I'm thinking about the short thesis film made for the exhibition at MoMA, Supersurface [1972]. Can you talk about that film and the power of moving images?

→ Supersuperficie for 'The New Italian Landscape' exhibition, MoMA, New York, 1972. Migrazione, screen printed plastic laminate for Abet Print, 1969.© Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

↘ Amore. La macchina innamoratrice Collages et crayon blanc sur tirage, 60 x 80 cm © Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

GPF To be honest, me and Cristiano started to make a movie during our university years with a few friends who didn't study architecture. It was about the Christian Gospels, but we had to interrupt it because we discovered that Italian director and writer, Pier Paolo Pasolini was actually preparing a movie that was about that. So, we decided not to compete with him (laughs). So then, there was another movie, which was less known. It was called Interplanetary Architecture [1972], and it was before Fundamental Acts [1972].

OK Where did the love of film come from?

GPF At the time, there was no TV at home. So, the cinema was very important for all of us because it influenced our life a lot, and gave us a lot of poetic ideas. We watched the movies of Fellini, Pasolini, and Antonioni.

OK You mentioned Fundamental Acts, which explored the five fundamental acts of a person's life. It was a very poetic project. Can you talk about this series and why architecture doesn't consider the human body or experience?

GPF My awareness of architecture began when I was very young, basically when I was born. I remember our first apartment in Florence after World War II. It was my first architectural experience and I was around seven years old. My family decided to visit another family that lived in the same building. When we entered this apartment, I actually saw my own apartment, but with different furniture and organized in a different way. This was a really visceral experience that was actually painful. This memory popped up when I started my architectural studies. From that experience, I decided not to design a single apartment that was the same as another. Going back to my anthropological interests—in Western society, we have this concept of apartments and buildings that are very homogeneous, but in other societies and cultures, all the buildings are different from each other.

OK So, it's important to consider a person's life and bring humanity back into architecture.

GPF It's probably because of the humanity in architecture that

I was always inspired and interested in anthropology. A lot of architects actually ask me what anthropology has in common with architecture and why it is necessary to architecture. And my answer is always: all architecture is lived in by humans.

OK Nomadism is an important part of Superstudio’s architectural ambitions and it is also related to anthropology. Humans used to be nomads and there are still a few nomadic societies out there.

GPF Nomadism is the other face of architecture because it's actual life without architecture. In Western society, we have this obsession with work. In a nomadic society, they would work just five or six hours a day to find food, and the rest of the time is just to enjoy their own life, which is talking to each other, learning different things, or spending free time with each other.

OK On the other side of it, now with global warming and war, we have people who are forced to enter a nomadic lifestyle. Climate refugees, they are called. How do you think architecture could rectify that, or build a better future for people forced to become nomads?

GPF There are a few people trying to do that, but it's very difficult right now because the architectural world operates on a purely economic basis. There has always been a war between those who are richer and those who are poorer. Right now, there are more than a billion people not living properly all around the world, and the hope that I have is that we will try to help the people who are forced to be nomadic. This is separate from nomadic societies because these societies can actually offer us a closer look at how humans can live in better harmony with nature.

OK What is your advice to young architects today with utopian visions of the future?

GPF Young architects are the first to be in a prison of their own culture. My advice is to really change the structure of the society where you live because otherwise, there's no chance to survive.

← Supersurface: An alternative model for life on the Earth. photogravure, Fundamental Acts (1972-73). Produced for the Museum Of Modern Art © Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

→ Superstudio for Giovannetti Collezioni, Divano componibile Bazaar, 1968. The first fiberglass sofa that can close like a spaceship, © Superstudio, Archive Cristiano Toraldo di Francia

Archizoom

Interview by Francesca Balena Arista

Archizoom Associati was founded in 1966 by Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, and Massimo Morozzi. They would later be joined by designers Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini. Deeply philosophical and metaphysical in their architectural investigations, Archizoom’s major contribution was "No-Stop City," an imaginary, always evolving, never-ending future city that utilized the power of technology for a non-hermetic, decentralized metropolis that met all its citizens’ needs. In the following interview, architect and design scholar Francesca Balena Arista asks founder Andrea Branzi about his visions for these new urban environments.

↑ Archizoom Associates, Florence, 1968. Members of the Archizoom group in front of the original headquarters in Via Ricorboli 5 in Florence. In order: Paolo Deganello, Lucia Bartolini, Gilnerto Corretti, [Natalino], Massimo Morozzi, Dario Bartolini and Andrea Branzi. Courtesy Studio Branzi

Associati

Francesca Balena Arista Within the general concept of utopia, you have maintained that your work was about a realistic utopia.

Andrea Branzi Yes, I have always attached great importance to the intellectual history of transformations, being a philosophical, non-political process in history. That is, I have always considered the transformation of land as a philosophical concept, a slow transformation derived from theoretical thought. “No-Stop City,” for example, is the presentation, the vision of a territory that is altered over time, but lacks the unity of utopia.

FBA How do you define the project of “Non-Stop City?” What was its value at the time it was conceived and what is, even today, its importance and influence on the design world?

AB This type of transformation from a real project to a philosophical adaptation regarding the absence of real history, where the city no longer has a traditional sense of history, but rather a slow continuous evolution, was derived from the work of other radical Florentine architects. It is the idea of a continuous, never-ending story that has no limit, a city without architecture where everything flows without ever stopping. This is the concept of “No-Stop City.” The name anticipates the thought behind the project, yet it never ends. This is an integral condition of contemporary culture where there is never a final closure to the project.

FBA Let's take a step back to the birth of the name Archizoom. Is there anyone in particular among the group who thought of this name and what is its origin? What is the meaning?

AB Before us, there was an English group called Archigram that was very important and very pop, but devoid of any political components—a very different position from ours at that time. Our political formations date back to 1962, when we participated in student movements, especially the one led by Claudio Greppi, “Lega Studenti Architetti” [Student Architects League]. This experience was crucial to us, as it was through them that we obtained information about emerging political philosophers. This allowed the birth of the Radical Movement in Florence. A large number of avant-garde groups were born: there were Superstudio, Ziggurat, Gruppo 9999, UFO, and more. It was a generation of Florentine architects who surprised the avant-garde magazines and publications. It was a pivotal moment. That was when the first Japanese groups arrived, trying to find out what was happening in Florence, Milan, and so on. Arata Isozaki came to Florence. There was a whole international movement around these avant-garde groups.

FBA The Florentine climate, when radical architecture was created and the first groups, Archizoom and Superstudio, were born, was deeply political, even if there were differences within the various groups. I am reminded of the Superarchitettura exhibition. You have always talked about this installation as a seminal moment. What is the meaning of Superarchitettura?

AB Superarchitettura took place in Pistoia in 1966, in a sort of city center that actually sold fish, not art, but the first avant-garde works

came out from there, that’s where we first discovered The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. It was a breeding ground for movements, something very different from the past generations. Florence has always been a historic city where the avant-garde did not exist. So, the idea of realizing a new modernity there allowed the birth of a phenomenon that was completely unexpected.

FBA And the flooding in Florence, in 1966? Did it have any repercussions on your view of the historic city?

AB Certainly, the Florence flood was a striking phenomenon. The whole city was submerged in water and the monuments were devastated. However, it was like the end of an era, and the beginning of something new. It was like Pompeii; after its destruction, a new civilization was born. The flood marked the beginning of a culturally different era.

FBA Let's talk about another vital moment that was recognized by the entire Italian design world, namely Emilio Ambasz's exhibition at MOMA, Italy the new domestic landscape (1972), which saw the presence of both avant-garde groups and what we can consider representatives of a more traditional thinking. What did it mean for you?

AB It allowed us to bring together at least three avant-garde groups and some great professional designers, there were Ettore Sottsass, Gae Aulenti, Vico Magistretti, and many others. Italy presented itself through this exhibition as a land in which new things and new ideas were being born. After that exhibition, it had to be seen that the mass production industries, which were very powerful at the time, were going into crisis. Therefore, they began to experiment with craft movements, new languages and colors, new functions. The new Italian design movement was born, groups that were moving with very different logic, the Memphis Group for example. There was no longer the idea of mass production, but rather, the production of small series, of great expressiveness. It was a very important historical period that had a major influence throughout Europe and Japan. It was a seemingly unpredictable, radical change that responded to new questions of industrial and craft production aimed at small experimental territories.

FBA Years later, in response to the exhibition, Emilio Ambasz said, "Design is not only the product of creative intelligence, but an exercise in critical imagination."

AB Yes absolutely, design is not exclusively related to the market. Behind these vanguards was a new philosophy. Just remember the early examples of “Domestic Animals,” the idea of using natural materials that change over time, like tree branches that somehow become a part of a perennially diverse series. It's a philosophy whereby objects are no longer reproduced serially but change over time. It's a totally different conceptual view that changed the course of design history.

FBA In Florence, in the radical design years, how did you envision the future? What came true, and what didn't? An important component of radical design was prediction and the will to propose something new for the future.

AB All this happened following unforeseen conditions. When we came together, we were looking for our own name. I called the art critic Germano Celant and asked him what might be a suitable name for these Florentine movements. The next day, he called me and told me that the appropriate name was ‘radical,' which is different from the Italian ‘radicale.' It is a much broader concept, like ‘liberal’ to ‘liberale.’ We were not exactly aware of what was going on, at least the four of us—me, Paolo Deganello, Gilberto Corretti, and Massimo Morozzi. We constituted ourselves as a "leading" group and it came naturally. We managed to get four “30 e lode” [A’s] on the same day at the university. This surprised the whole town and spread to the others. We initiated a kind of autonomy within the university and schools in philosophical and creative thinking. This is the Radical legacy.

FBA What would you recommend to young people today who want to think and dream of a radical future?

AB I see that young Italian designers these days are making overtly hostile objects. They adopt new, unpredictable languages, which are not easily marketable. They sure have a vitality that surprises me greatly, and I think can change the rules of Italian design. There is always a kind of leading position in Italian design...I don't really know what German designers, American designers, or French designers are doing, I'm very curious to see what will happen there, and in other countries too.

FBA In this sense, you said that you have your own vision of utopia. What is the value of utopia for you, the value of critical thinking, and the value of going beyond what society offers us? When I think of the objects designed by Archizoom, I see them as "breaking" objects in the history of design. What did you want to convey to others?

AB Not everything was clear in what we were doing. Things were happening that were "typical" and inherent to the concept of the new generation, and to work that follows non-traditional logic. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, like other bands of the time, were not born in music schools, but in contexts where everything was happening in unplanned ways. There was no definite agenda or policy. The same goes for fashion: its future envisions something different from what the public expects. Fashion is now saturated with languages and quotations, so it has to turn to new and unpredictable figures.

FBA It seems like you are describing what you did after graduating from architecture school. It was clear that your Superarchitettura had different references than the traditional ones as you were inspired by pop art and those rock groups you mentioned.

AB Certainly, and that still applies. Nothing is accomplished; everything is open to be revised in radical and profoundly different ways. I used the term ‘radical' in a book in which I describe the history of the movement, "Una generazione esagerata” [An exaggerated generation]. Our creativity was not controllable, and it is the same today. There is still so much empty space to invent new languages, colors, and forms.

FBA I am reminded of the first article in Domus in which Ettore Sottsass introduces the radical groups by describing the objects being made as "Trojan Horses" in our homes, as if they have the power to influence people's behavior.

AB Yes, the idea was to make unpredictable objects, which can betray the classic expectation, surprising those who have them. (Francesco shows Andrea some new drawings of naked women wearing what looks like thin strips of cloth). You see, there is so much empty space to invent new images, and new thoughts. It is nothing gross. In fact, we could almost say it is sacred and ancient. Nudity is

not something to be afraid of, but rather a place to imagine new elegance and new sacredness. Yesterday, I made these drawings … they surprised and fascinated me. They make me think of a new sacred fashion, not a vulgar one.

FBA Right now, you have an exhibition in New York, Contemporary DNA, at Friedman Benda Gallery. What was the thinking behind this new exhibition?

AB In this exhibition I show decorated bamboo canes, chairs, and driftwood. The combination of these elements creates a completely unpredictable situation, which has nothing in common with serial production.

FBA It reminds me of one of your first works in the ’80s, Animali Domestici.

AB Animali Domestici was also done because Memphis and Studio Alchimia were at the end. They no longer had communication power. The idea of making objects, composed of tree trunks that joined together in ever-changing ways, the idea of the diversified series interested me a lot. I understood and interpreted what was previously just an idea. At first, I didn't really understand what I was doing. This was quite typical of my way of working, but also how other group members worked. We moved forward and then asked ourselves what we had done, and what it meant. I often create images that only then make sense. “No-Stop City,” for example, was born by chance with my friends. We had no guiding idea. It was, rather, a philosophical thought about the continuous and unlimited extension of the urban territory.

FBA In the ’70s you imagined the city as a flow of goods and information. It was a strongly anticipatory thought.

AB Yes. When we started drawing, we didn't know what we were doing, yet all four of us knew we were doing something absolutely indispensable. We discussed, trying to interpret our drawings, and only then the idea of this city without architecture emerged, a city that never ends, without perimeter, which extends in thought, like a philosophical discovery. It is always very difficult to explain. This often happens to artists and painters though, doing things that you are not fully aware of.

FBA What importance do you attach to nature? You often include natural elements in your projects, following the idea of the diversified series, which seems to be for you an enrichment of the design world.

AB Surely it is. I am not an environmentalist; I do not belong to the school of ecology. Of course, it must be noted that the industries continue to produce cars relentlessly. Perhaps we should do as in Japan and let them pass through the tunnels. There are many things to understand and I don't always understand what I do.

Francesca Balena Arista is an architect, a PhD in industrial design, and a member of the Italian Association of Design Historians. She teaches at the Politecnico di Milano School of Design and at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) in Milan.

↗ Archizoom Associati Mies chair, Poltronova Italy, 1969

chrome-plated steel, rubber, upholstery 30 h × 29 w × 51½ d in (76 × 74 × 131 cm)

Courtesy Studio Branzi

→ Archizoom Associati, The Four Beds, Institut d’art Contemporain Villeurbanne/ Rhône Alpes in Lyon, 1967

Courtesy Studio Branzi

Gruppo 9999

Gruppo 9999

was founded in Florence in 1968 by Giorgio Birelli, Carlo Caldini, Fabrizio Fiumi, and Paolo Galli. Deeply ecological, communal—often utilizing friends and family in their activations—and inspired by the youth culture of the 1960s, the group was drastically transformed after a field trip to the US. Crossing the country, they filmed dragster races in Southern California and visited New York’s Electric Circus discotheque, which had been completely transformed by Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground. When they returned to Florence, they made collages, films and experimented with light projections, like the one they splashed across the Ponte Vecchio (“Happening Progettuale su Ponte Vecchio,” 1968). One of their most famous physical manifestations is the Space Electronic nightclub, which opened five months before the first man landed on the moon in 1969 and stayed open for nearly fifty years. The discotheque, which was housed in a former engine repair shop, hosted happenings, vegetable gardens, and even an orgiastic performance by The Living Theatre (founded in New York in 1947 by Judith Malina and Julian Beck). No jackets or ties were allowed at the door. For a few years, the bar was a vitrine filled with live piranhas. Filmmaker and journalist Elettra Fiumi, daughter of 9999 founder Fabrizio Fiumi, discovered Super 8 tapes of these radical happenings after the death of her father whose life is explored in her new documentary Radical Landscapes.

↑ Carlo Caldini, backstage “Casa Orto” project, ca 1970

Interview by Oliver Kupper

←↓ Living Theatre performing “Paradise Now” at Space Electronic nightclub in Florence, 1969. All photos Archive Gruppo 9999. courtesy Elettra Fiumi

Oliver Kupper

In the 1960s, there was a global revolution going on, but what was it about Florence during this time that made all of the young architecture students so radical, and was there anything specific about your father and Gruppo 9999?

Elettra Fiumi That period was really the beginning of The Years Of Lead, or Anni di piombo (1968–1982). So, there was a lot of social unrest and political terrorism happening. There were student protests, there were women’s rights, civil rights. There was a lot of what was happening in the US, but in different types of manifestations. Within that context, the University of Florence architecture department was fertile ground for these guys. Most of the radical architecture groups came from that university, and there are a few professors who really had an impact on them. So, I think it was a combination of what was happening in the world, like the first man on the moon, starting to look at what the environment means, and the power of technology, but also these individual encounters, like the professors, or my mom.

OK Your mom had a major impact. She was this secret ingredient in 9999’s world. For one, she was American and your father was able to come to the United States with her at a pivotal time in American culture.

EF She’s really the spark. I wonder what my father would have done or been if he hadn’t met her. You also have to remember that there was no internet at the time. People weren’t traveling like they are now. So, for somebody from a very humble background, it was a big deal to be immersed in the underground American culture and the Summer of Love. Everything happening in America was so much more advanced than it was in post-war Italy.

OK What was it like discovering the archives? What was your first reaction to seeing this radical material?

EF First of all, my dad was a workaholic. So, he wasn’t present in my life much. And when he was, he was always working and very distant. He never sat down to tell me long stories about his memories from the past. If anything, he would be philosophical and very hard to pin down. So, when he got ill in the last fifteen years of his life, I had more of a chance to get to know him. He became much softer, more gentle, and sweet as a father, and more curious about what I was doing. He was super excited about my career as a journalist. So, we were able to restore that friendship and dynamic as father-daughter. When he died, I didn’t feel like I was bitter about him being distant because I finally had that time, but I also didn’t understand him as this creator. So, when I first saw the archives, it was shortly after he passed away. We wanted to do a commemoration for his death and my brother was like, “Hey, let’s do a video.” Almost like a photo slideshow. Since I was already making videos, it was kind of obvious I was going to edit it. We started looking through the boxes, and it was like, oh, my god—wait, there are all these Super 8 reels. What is on them? They were cryptically labeled and I had no clue what Living Theatre was, or where and when any of it was filmed. So, we quickly found some old photos of his youth and put together this first video. Besides the fact that my whole Earth was shattered without him being alive, I went back and spoke to my business partner, and said, “I can’t work anymore unless it’s to work on this archive.” I convinced her and just started digitizing one thing after another and starting to conduct interviews. Slowly, the whole film materialized as I discovered little pieces of the puzzle.

OK The Living Theatre was definitely very extreme. Was that the earliest footage you discovered?

EF That was one of the first pieces of footage I discovered. And

I got some curators really excited about that discovery. But I was really uncomfortable.

OK Maybe you could talk a little bit about Living Theatre for our readers, which might explain why you were so uncomfortable.

EF Living Theatre is a very well-known theatrical group from that era founded by Judith Molina and Julianne Beck. They were revolutionary through their theatrical acts and they came to Space Electronic to do two performances. One of them was “Paradise Now.” It was really extraordinary what they put on at the time because it started off with these people pretending to be part of the audience. Then, they would slowly get into the middle of the dance floor and start taking off their clothes, yelling, "I am not allowed to travel without a passport. I don’t know how to stop the wars. You can’t live if you don’t have money." All these statements that were very liberatory and questioned what freedom is. Just seeing the footage, which is grainy and has no sound, and not having the context as to why people are naked, entangled, licking each other and performing obscene acts, I didn’t know if it was my dad in an orgy with other people, or if he was just observing. So, that felt really uncomfortable. I had a similar sensation of something I shouldn’t be watching when I was reading the love letters between my mom and dad. That felt equally uncomfortable. But part of my job as an artist and creator is to find ways to explain that discovery.

OK He didn’t think ahead to put a warning label in case his kids found the footage.

EF No, I mean, I found some diagrams that he did for his Biennale exhibition that wasn’t realized in the end, but they’re all very sexual. There’s a big penis in the middle of the room, and then there are all these vaginas, and then he used lots of toilets. He really loved the shock factor.

OK This was also the sexual revolution, too. And later you had a very bohemian upbringing in Florence. But what was that like as a kid? Did you think it was bohemian? Did you think it was a pretty normal experience?

EF I thought everything was pretty normal. Looking back, it definitely wasn’t. Certainly, my interest in so many different stories and people today stems from being exposed to all of these situations and being dragged around without much protection. And certainly, my passion for film comes from my memories of being at the Florence Film Festival as a really young kid in front of a huge cinema screen, watching all sorts of inappropriate films. Also, my brother and sister are much older than me, so I was almost like an only child growing up. I was very much in my own world. My mom was like, “There’s no such thing as being bored, just invent something.” She would give me a few toys and I would just create this whole universe. Even today, I’m still in my own universe.

OK There’s all these layers to your father’s life, but also this film. What layer do you think was the most challenging layer of all?

EF I was really lucky that my sister was the first woman hired as a full-time DP in reality TV back in the day. I was still in high school when she wanted to do a film about my dad and started filming him. She didn’t have the preparation as a documentary filmmaker, but she did have that training of capturing somebody in real life, so that footage ended up being the most valuable part of the archival materials. It took her a while to find it when I was making the film. I got it digitized immediately, and then I couldn’t watch it for years. At first, I didn’t include that last layer of his presence, which is a very magical realist element that makes it super special, because he comes to life and, in a way, is in dialogue with me and all the other characters, and with the rest of the storyline. That sense of time collapses, so it feels like he’s still alive; there’s no past or present.

It was included in the editing process in the last month of what turned out to be a nine-year process.

OK Gruppo 9999 is lesser known than the other supergroups of the time. Why do you think that is?

EF I think there are two main reasons why 9999 is one of the least-known groups. First, it’s economic. They were short-lived compared to other groups because they didn’t come from rich families. At a certain point, they had to make tough decisions and be like, “Okay, I got to go get a real job. This isn’t bringing home the moolah.” And while most of the other groups created interior design pieces, 9999 didn’t want to be commercial. The moment that Space Electronic nightclub started having to be financially sustainable, my dad checked out and sold his share. I think if they had been independently wealthy, they might have continued making more work together as a group. Maybe they would have had the funds to also create physical objects, or would have found a way to not make it feel commercial, but still sell pieces to be sustainable. The second reason is that the archive has been mostly in our homes until recently. Before I started working on this project, Carlo Caldini was the main voice of the group, and he had the majority of the archive in his hands. But he would only share a few of the main images with scholars or curators who would contact him. And I’m not sure why he did that. Maybe he didn’t have the time to digitize everything. When I talk to scholars and curators, I often ask them, “Do you want to see more?” Or, I just send them more than what they’re asking, and they’re often surprised by the materials they didn’t know about. One of my main goals is to be able to reprint the copper-covered book that comprises all their projects, the Architectural Memoirs, or Ricordi di Architettura, because it explains both the philosophical side of their projects and the practical, like all the measurements, which can really offer a more scholarly understanding of the group’s philosophy and work. There’s only so much that I can offer with my lack of architecture training. I’m a journalist and filmmaker, so I know how to tell the story, but I think that when you bring a curator who has a certain training to the archive, it’s mind-blowing what they come away with.

OK What do you think is the most surprising element from the archive—that you learned about your father, and what do you think is the most surprising thing that scholars are discovering about the group?

EF I love that the work is starting to be studied by people beyond the architecture field; people who are in environmental studies or in visual arts, and communications. What surprises me about him, to this day, is how he was so forward thinking. He didn’t boast about past projects. He was always looking forward and that is a very rare trait that I haven’t seen in many other people that I’ve met.

OK Right now, we are living in another period of social upheaval, but are there radical architecture or design groups that exist today? Do you think that utopian idealism is lost? Or, do you think that there’s more cynicism or pessimism in today’s zeitgeist?

EF These groups do exist in Milan. Groups like (ab)Normal, CAPTCHA, Parasite 2.0, Fosbury Architecture, Zattere, Studio Finemateria—they are loose collectives. I’m actually involved with a few of them. They’re young, they’re cool, they’re super intellectual, and look at the world in innovative ways. So, I have hope that there are different iterations of that kind of radical approach to resolving our world’s problems. In the last year, I worked on another project where I followed three contemporary dance choreographers in their creative process as they prepared for their final shows, which were inspired by this historic mountaintop commune called Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland, where supposedly contemporary dance started with this choreographer named Rudolf von Laban. It was very similar to the ’60s hippie lifestyle and philosophy. So, the three choreographers reinterpret utopia in different ways. In the end, utopia may not be a realistic goal or point that we reach—one that we can hold in our hands or pin down, but it’s a process of hoping, envisioning, and striving for something. And that striving is as important to the creative process as it is to the final product that we create.

↑ 9999, Competition New University at Florence, 1971 ↖ 9999, Sketch “Casa Orto”, ca 1971

↑ 9999, S-SPACE Mondial Festival No.1, Florence, 1971

↓ 9999, Competition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”, Museum of Modern Art NY, 1971

↘ 9999, Competition Graz Urban Intermedia, Austria, 1971

Interview by Oliver Kupper

UFO’s anti-architectural expropriations of popular culture were a revolutionary affront to the societal establishment, a crumbling institution that did not reflect the new generation’s vision of the future. The group was founded in 1967 by students Lapo Binazzi, Riccardo Foresi, Titti Maschietto, Carlo Bachi, and Patrizia Cammeo, and later by Sandro Gioli, Massimo Giovannini, and Mario Spinella. The streets of Florence were their battlefield. The group employed ‘urban ephemeral objects,’ which were large-scale highly visible inflatables with messages against war and consumerism. Lamps featuring dollar signs and the logos of American film studios, like MGM and Paramount, were deeply semiotic, inspired by their professor, novelist Umberto Eco. The group also experimented with nightlife, opening the Bamba Issa nightclub at a Villa purchased by fellow UFO member Titti Maschietto’s father in the Tuscan seaside town of Forte dei Marmi. The first iteration of the club took its inspiration from a Disney comic book, Donald Duck and The Magic Hourglass , and became an allegory against extractive capitalism in the form of a constant party. These anarchical social experimentations were implemented in UFO’s Sherwood Restaurant, which opened in Florence in 1969, and had a Kremlin inspired kitchen and an interior inspired by a medieval castle. Lapo Binazzi speaks to us from Florence about his radical interventions.

UFO

Oliver Kupper I wanted to talk about your early radical years as an architect and an artist. There was the postwar transformation of Italy, a flood in 1966, there was the call of American culture (Pop Art), Vietnam, the world was changing, and young people were thinking about utopia. Can you talk about the energy and environment of this time when all of these supergroups emerged? What did you imagine was on the other side of the fight and how did you believe architecture could achieve this utopia?

Lapo Binazzi You describe the situation very well. It was the Pop Art of ’64 at The Venice Biennale, with the Golden Lion that went to Robert Rauschenberg, the Vietnam War, the “Florence Flood” of 1966 with its supergroups: Archizoom [Associati], Superstudio, UFO, Grupo 9999, Ziggurat, Gianni Pettena, Remo Buti—it was all happening amongst about 100 students at the School of Architecture in Florence. They were a movement from the very beginning, but it wasn’t really recognized until the Radical Utopias exhibition in 2017 at the Palazzo Strozzi. All the energies emerged in this period that represented so many different faces of reality. We were all very concerned with changing the way of politics, of architecture, and of teaching. It was a whole generation wanting to leave a strong trace on the world, starting with the Archigram lesson and going beyond. The deep crisis of the modernist movement, or International Style, turned into radical change.

OK Where did the name UFO come from and what were some of the defining factors that separated it from the other supergroups?

LB We called ourselves UFO because we wanted to work until a true UFO landed on Earth—to survive forever. In the ’60s, there was an experimental literary group named “Grupo 63,” which included Umberto Eco and Furio Colombo. The difference between us and other supergroups was the 1/1 scale used for our objects and the interventions we organized at happenings with visual artists, like Christo, Allan Kaprow, etc.

OK UFO was one of the only supergroups to employ inflatables, the Urboeffimeri, during the 1968 student protests. Can you talk a little bit about these inflatables—the architecture of air?

LB A great number of students were actively participating in UFO’s happenings, transforming the events into collective action. The architecture of air was an immediate challenge to traditional architecture, as in the case of the UFO-Casa ANAS in 1969, or in the Brunelleschi Dome in 2012. In the case of the Urboeffimero n.5 (the rocket) and the Urboeffimero n.6 (the dollar), they had messages that were half advertisements and half politics, which were particularly focused on our opposition to the war in Vietnam.

OK You define UFO’s genre of architecture as one of “discontinuity.” Can you talk about what that means and the manifesto that laid out UFO’s radical plans? The link between “architecture and archeology of the future” is very utopian.

LB UFO's manifesto and ideas of discontinuity revealed our intention to break with history’s oppression of ideologies in a way that was similar to [Francis] Fukuyama’s The End of History [and the Last Man, (1992)]. The relationship between "architecture and archeology of the future” was really utopian, and today, almost sixty years later, it is still too optimistic, as demonstrated by the current war that Russia has waged with Ukraine.

OK How did the city of Florence, steeped in Renaissance and ancient Roman architecture and history, factor into your work and the work of UFO?

LB Neither Florence nor the School of Architecture understood our protest. The Florentine newspaper, La Nazione, wrote: “...a group of students took to the streets carrying a tube of toothpaste … with the message, ‘Colgate con Vietcong.’”

OK In 1964, the Venice Biennale brought Pop Art to Italian artists for the first time. What kind of impact do you think this had?

LB When Pop Art was brought to the Venice Biennale for the first time, the impact was huge, but Italians and Europeans were also really critical of pop art’s celebration of consumerism.

OK I want to talk about signs and symbols, like the dollar sign and various movie studio logos. You once said that your professor, Umberto Eco, set off a "semiotic atomic bomb." Can you talk about the power of semiotics in your work?

LB We attempted to define space as language. It was like a chain reaction of meaning, similar to a nuclear reaction. It had a great liberating force. These ideas could be seen in the Sherwood Restaurant that I designed with UFO in 1969, which was then recreated as a smaller reproduction at an exhibition at the Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne.

OK You had a discotheque inspired by Disney, and also you designed a restaurant. Can you tell me a little bit about these environments and why the utopian allure of nightlife was so important? Of course, Gruppo 9999 had Space Electronica nightclub in Florence.

LB We were hoping to earn money so that we could finance our work, but things went differently. We were very young and deeply attracted to nightlife. The composition of the radical groups was similar to those of music. I was for the Beatles. Others were more into the Rolling Stones.

OK What was Global Tools and how did you become involved?

LB The first meetings for Global Tools were in my and my girlfriend's apartment in Florence in 1975. This was after the creation of the atelier Casa ANAS, and the idea was to create a new "conceptual artisanal experiment.” UFO disbanded after the 1978 Venice Biennale and I remained alone in the studio until 1985. It was an experimental school that aimed to generate a strong feedback loop between school and life.

OK Can you talk about the power of performance in your work? Personally, I think you are also a performance artist. You did a performance at Documenta. Why is performance a powerful activation in the context of art and architecture?

LB I agree and am glad that you consider me a performer. The body and its actions are fundamental in our understanding of architecture and design. They give life to inanimate objects and they are another dimension of space.

OK What is the key to maintaining a radical utopian outlook? Do you have any advice for young artists and architects reading this?

LB To maintain a radical outlook you need to consider all the infinite ways to rethink your work and your entire life.

← ↑ UFO, Discoteque Bamba Issa n.2, 1970. Courtesy of Archive of Lapo Binazzi/UFO, Florence.

↖ The UFO Studio in Florence, c. 1971. Courtesy of Archive of Lapo Binazzi/UFO, Florence.

Gaetano Pesce For

Gaetano

Pesce, architecture is a deeply radical and political act. A building is a riot. A chair is a Molotov cocktail. Born in La Spezia in 1939, and raised in both Padua and Florence, Pesce’s designs are a genius loci, reflecting the spirit of the environments they inhabit—whether they are imaginary or built. One of his most famous and speculative works of architecture is the Pluralist Tower project, which exists only as a sketch, a figment of the artist’s imagination. A reflection of diversity, the project would be a tower where each floor is designed by a different architect, a stark departure from the vision of today's homogenous city skylines. Decades ahead of his time, Pesce has a prescience that reverberates down to the foundations of his architectural investigations. In the famous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz, Pesce imagined a future civilization living in the underground caverns of our depleted oil reserves, a refuge from an atmosphere poisoned by the burning of that precious resource. These deeply poetic, theoretical visions of the future have made Pesce one of the most important and pioneering architects of the so-called “radical design” movement coming out of Italy in the 1960s. Pesce’s UP Chair, with its supple curves and ottoman attached like a ball and chain, became an icon of 20th-century design, not only because of its form but also because of its feminist statement on the need for gender equality. His revolt against traditional architecture was also a rebellion against the patriarchal systems so embedded in both Italian and global societal structures. From his collaborations with Bottega Veneta to his own personal practice, he is always finding a way to spread his message to an international audience.

Interview by Oliver Kupper

Photography by Noua Unu Studio

Oliver Kupper I want to start with your young, Marxist student days. You joined Gruppo N in 1958, a group whose work was extremely different from the work you are making now.

Gaetano Pesce Gruppo N was started with a group of friends in Padua, Italy. We were creating kinetic and programmed art. We wanted to fight the informality that was most in fashion at that moment. And we wanted it to be an anonymous production, so we didn't sign our work with our individual names, but with the letter N. I left the group because I realized that there was no relation between what I was doing and the reality of the moment, which was the Vietnam War. I was not able to say anything about that with the work I was doing. These geometric formulas had nothing to do with reality. In 1967, I had a performance in a big theater space where people were sitting on chairs that were on white plastic. In front of them, was a man sitting on a chair and there was the sound of a shooting. When the lights came up, they saw this man losing 500 liters of blood. It was a way to say there is violence in the air and people are doing nothing. We are doing nothing. We are totally indifferent. In the end, people couldn’t leave the room because of all the blood at their feet. Until a group of young people came in and dried up the blood with sponges. This was my way of coming back from abstraction to talk about reality. And then, I met this very intelligent woman who introduced me to the first school of design in Venice. And from there, I started to understand that design was another way to reflect reality, something related to politics. And I am still doing that today.

OK During the ’60s, your work became super philosophical as well, on top of the political. There were the student youth movements and the Pop Art exhibition at the Venice Biennale, and you said the Vietnam War had a big effect, but there were so many different ecological and political actions happening, and your work started to become a much more prismatic reflection of those times.

GP In general, reality is what interested me. Also, knowing the history of art. Art was always a witness to what happened in different moments of history. So, if you want to understand the Renaissance, you have to look to art. If you want to understand the Baroque time, same thing. Today, I believe that art, unfortunately, lost this kind of role as a witness. Art is, more or less, decorative and very superficial. But design can become the contrary. Design is an object that is comfortable and functional, but is also capable of speaking about the religious, the existential, about politics. And also, I believe it is very important for design to express images that people are able to recognize. With a recognizable image, people can intervene, understand, and say more about what they like or don’t like about the object. From 1972 until today, my work became driven to say that because people are different, objects can be different. And technology is so advanced today that we can produce one-of-a-kind objects more easily and affordably. That is very important because the object becomes like art, a unique piece. The other step in my work was in 1969, when I did chairs that were talking about the condition of women in the world, which is a big problem.

OK That's your famous UP Chair, with the ball and chain. GP Unfortunately, women are suffering in different countries because they are treated like second-class citizens. This is unacceptable. There is a lot of violence against women in civilized countries. Women are paid less. So, those are some of the stages of my work. Every three or four years, I change the subject of my work. There was a moment when I was talking about how objects

can be done badly because we are not perfect. We are not capable of perfection. In the past few years, I have started to say that our work must be unrecognizable. It is contrary to the style of a traditional artist, which is to be recognizable. When you see a Rauschenberg or a Warhol, you know it’s a Rauschenberg or Warhol. But we change— sometimes every week, every month. We don’t remain the same. And so our work must become unrecognizable. It’s a way to keep the brain alive, but experimenting.

OK Your work is very radical, and it’s often grouped into the Florentine Radical Design movement. Did you see yourself outside of this movement? Almost all of these architects are still in Florence, but you managed to move around the world. GP I had friends in the movement. When they all went to take a picture for Casabella magazine for a feature on the Radical Design movement, I refused to go. I was criticizing the Radical Design movement's protest. In my opinion, the protest wasn’t enough. We have to be able to explore and express alternatives to the International Style. Until today, I don’t think the Radical Design movement in Italy did enough to move beyond the International Style in design and in architecture. And with my work, I am trying to convince people that the International Style is finished. We cannot imagine that the architecture made for Tokyo could be the same in Scotland, in Madrid, or in New York or Sao Paulo. This kind of vision was acceptable only in the last century, in the ’30s when I was born, but today it’s not acceptable. Every place deserves special architecture, capable of representing that place, that identity, that history, that place’s story. I am not talking about the use of existing material in a specific place. No, I am talking about the spirit of the place. That is what my work is about. My work is fighting homogenization. I am totally against that.

OK You're against totalitarianism.

GP Absolutely. And I’m sorry that certain politicians are not able to see the danger of this. The danger is the elimination of culture, elimination of history, elimination of identity, elimination of life, and freedom.

OK When you were growing up, Italy was under a totalitarian regime. How did that inspire your later political thinking? Because Italian architecture in the International Style became oppressive under Mussolini.

GP Yes. I’ll tell you a story. When I was nineteen, like a lot of young people, I considered myself a communist. I was told that a paradise of freedom was in Russia. And so, I traveled to Moscow, with a lot of difficulty, and I discovered that there was no paradise in St. Petersburg. It was the contrary. So, I came back from the trip with the idea that that kind of system was a system I needed to fight because it was dangerous. It's a movement eliminating culture, eliminating identity. In China, there was a moment where the politicians obliged people to not only be the same, but also dress the same.

OK In China, they called it a Cultural Revolution. It was sort of like a false utopia. As you said, it wasn’t the paradise you imagined.

GP The Cultural Revolution was really a very reactionary movement. But in my work, it is very important not to eliminate diversity. We are different. We are different because we are born in a geographical place with a certain characteristic, with a certain culture, with a certain identity. And we are different from each other. And that is good, because in this diversity, we can communicate. If we are the same, there is nothing to say.

OK I want to talk a little bit about your iconic Organic Building [1993] in Osaka, Japan, which was a fully realized organic piece of architecture. Where did the idea originate?

The Organic Building in Osaka was commissioned by a Chinese client who sent me a letter saying, “We invite you to make a building and we give you carte blanche.” At the time, I was thinking that it is really important for cities to have gardens. To have a garden in a city is very expensive, because you need a lot of ground. So I thought, why not make a garden that is vertical? We can put little trees, plants, et cetera. I suggested this to the client and he was happy to realize the project. It was one of the first organic buildings with a vertical garden. Inside the wall of the building, there was a system of pipes regulated by a computer that would give water to the plants without maintenance. Then, I did another building in Milan with trees on the roof.

OK I want to talk about chairs. It's one of the most iconic sitting apparatuses, but chairs have become a staple of yours. And you are so experimental with materials. What is it about the chair? Can you remember the first chair that you made?

GP The chair, in my opinion, is a mask of the human body. Because when we sit, from behind, we see the chair and not our body. And so, the chair is something very human. But I also make chairs that are like animals, like insects—very alive with their expressions. Each one is different. I don't do chairs in a repetitive way, like in traditional design. I invented a system where a chair can be different all the time. In 1975, with Cassina, I made the first Sit Down series where each sofa and chair was different from one another. These days, there are car manufacturers that are looking into making personalized cars. And this is, I believe, the future of industrial production. We continue to have copies, but the time of copies is behind us. We are in a time of originals. So, this is a big revolution in a way.

OK In your most recent collaboration with Bottega Veneta, you made the chairs for their runway presentation, but you also created a total environment. In the New Domestic Landscape show at MoMA in 1972, you created an environment that was set in the year 2000 as an archaeological site discovered in the year 3000. Can you talk about these environmental worlds—from the exhibition at MoMA to your project with Bottega Veneta?

GP In the ‘70s, [Emilio Ambasz] invited me to be part of the New Italian Design show at MoMA. My chapter in the catalog was “design as commentary.” I was very happy about this because I presented myself not as a designer or an artist, but as an archeologist who discovered, in Northern Italy, an underground city in a huge cavity that had been drained of a resource like oil. People were living there because it was not possible to live outside and breathe anymore. It was the year 3000, and this underground city was from the year 2000. In reality, a few years later, the 1973 oil crisis happened. But today, these exhibitions wouldn’t be possible at a museum or gallery. Today, fashion brands have a lot of money and they can finance art to be realized. So, when Bottega Veneta came to me last year to make a project for the runway presentation, I was very happy because I had the opportunity to do something very political. The runway was created with different colors of resin and we created 400 unique chairs. When people arrived, there was a statement about diversity. Because Bottega Veneta is a very, very big company, the message easily traveled around the world. In a couple of days, I will have a second intervention with Bottega during Salone de Mobile in Milan. It’s very important to have a collaboration with fashion people, because they can express new artistic concepts.

OK Much of the Italian radical architecture movement was a speculative imagination of the future. Have you thought about artificial intelligence in the context of radical architecture and what the war against the International Style would

look like waged with these new tools?

GP Yes. So, this is something that’s come to my attention recently. Personally, I believe that there is nothing better than real intelligence. Real intelligence is able to promote progress, to allow the future to become present, to allow experimentation. My brain is super important because it is able to observe reality and transform it into something that can push people to understand a new culture. I don't know if something artificial can be so deep. Maybe I don't know exactly what the possibilities are, but I believe that controlling artificial intelligence is very important. We cannot allow something that is not human in society to become our enemy. The story from the beginning of human beings is that they have invented tools, from the screwdriver to the computer, that were able to make our lives easier. If this is possible with artificial intelligence, I am happy. If it's not possible, I will pay very strong attention to do something that is not against us. That is for sure.

OK I want to talk about your Pluralist Tower, which is a very important speculative architectural plan. It's maybe the most utopian project. A single building where each floor is built by a different architect has never been done before. Do you hope that one day it could be realized?

GP If I don't realize it myself, someone else will, because it is a way for architecture to be different in the future. The idea came one day when I was in Hong Kong where there were some buildings that all looked the same, and I started to think these facades were a reflection of a totalitarian society. And so, I started to think, what if each floor of one of the buildings is different? It would be a representation of a civilization based much more on democracy. So, I started to make drawings and exhibitions proposing to construction companies. The idea was to make a tower that was 40, 50, 60 floors where each floor is done by a different architect. If it was an apartment tower, each family inside is different, so the architecture would have to reflect that diversity. If a tower like this is realized, we would have an ar-

chitectural statement of the world in this historical moment. It's a very interesting project. Very important for allowing architecture to become much closer to reality and not to do something that is still in the International Style, which is a dead movement.

OK How do you think architects and designers can achieve their dreams today through utopian thinking while still remaining optimistic?

GP When I was teaching in the School Of Architecture here in New York, and also in Strasbourg, I was teaching students in their last year of school. So, I had students that were able to deal with really interesting subject matter. I would say to them, “Look, architecture is a political statement that stays in the public space. And you have to decide if you want to be positive with your project or if you want to be negative, depending on where you are going to build.” So, I proposed the idea of doing a palace of justice, either in Moscow at the time of Stalin or Santiago, Chile during the time of Pinochet. My students were supposed to have an idea that would go against these dictators. I pushed them and said, “If you are blind to reality, you have to do a project that is positive. If you want to make something that reflects reality, you have to do a kind of architecture that is negative.” It was a very interesting experiment to see young people expressing this concept in architecture. And remember, this concept was not new. Michelangelo was expressing negative architecture when he was making fortresses of power for the Medicis in Florence. So, architecture can be negative if you disagree with the reality of where you are going to build. But it can be positive if you somehow agree with that reality. This is something we have to teach in school, to make architects more capable of expressing culture. The schools of architecture don't teach students that they are in one of the most important arts. The problem is the teachers. They are old and very banal. But, I don't want to be pessimistic. I believe a little bit of my work and a little bit of work by other people will slowly put architecture in the right place again.

“Working with Gaetano Pesce was on my mindfora long time.I discovered hisworkasan undergraduate student. It was sucha new world andit changedmy viewon design and aesthetics. WhenI called himforthe Bottega Veneta Summer23 show,I wantedto simply juxtapose bothour worlds(orour own worlds).It wasan incredible experience.” Matthieu Blazy, creative directorof Bottega Veneta.

In Every Dream Home A Heartache

by Jawara Alleyne.

Concept by Fee-Gloria

Grönemeyer, All clothes

Endless worlds and endless possibilities—in 2023 humanity made mainstream contact with artificial intelligence. Using the leading text to image AI generator models—Stable Diffusion & Dall-E 2—Paris-based photographer Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer collaborates with designer Jawara Alleyne to reimagine his one-of-a-kind clothing pieces through the lens of AI technology. In these pages, the domestic and urban quotidian experience is spliced with the imaginary to unveil a brand new uncanny valley.

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Antarctica, the Earth’s southernmost continent, harkens to a golden era of exploration. Our knowledge of this mysterious ice-covered landmass dates back to the Ancient Greeks. Originally named Antarktikos by Aristotle, the philosopher postulated that just as there is an arctic pole grounding our Northern Hemisphere, there must be an antipode “bearing the same relation to the Southern.” One of the most harrowing expeditions was led by Ernest Henry Shackleton when their ship, Endurance, sank into the frigid waters. Last year, photographer Craig McDean and artist Anthony James made a once-ina-lifetime voyage to the South Pole.

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Craig McDean

The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia Achille Mbembe

mean the integral holding and exercise of “full powers over the thing-object of law.”

the second creation

Let’s thus return to the Earth. Our planet. The last utopia. It is distinguished from the other planets by its hospitality, that is, its disposition to make room for more than just one, to give space to multiplicity. Hence its participation in the form of the reserve as much as in that of the reservoir.

The Earth we are talking about here is not the exact equivalent of the world. We should not either understand by “Earth” simply ground, or plot. Instead, “Earth” refers to the idea of a self-renewing life of literally incalculable value that escapes any absolute power of mastery. This body of the Earth is thus living and animated, and one of its properties as a material is, moreover, that it is life-enabling. The Earth is consequently this living body without which we could not exist. It functions as a condition of survival for practically everything else. This makes it a metamorphic power, which is not anything abstract. It is a power that it is physical, sensible, insofar as it affects the living and lets itself be affected, even touched by it.① If this power has a body, it is also permanently actualized through a multiplicity of bodies in movement, which it constantly mingles with and accompanies, and to which it contributes to provide a relative ontological stability. This has not always been so. In order to become a vast reservoir of life, the Earth needed the sun’s radiant energy and that reflected by the continents, the oceans and seas, and the atmosphere, among other things. Of all the names it has been given, this is probably the one that suits it best. The Earth’s specificity lies in its being a place of refuge for life, when life might otherwise have been extinguished. Even after the great periods of extinction, life has endured. But nothing indicates that this will always be the case. The sun is going to get hotter and hotter, and redder and

redder. It is going to get older and will perhaps die out one day. As regards the Earth itself, should it run out of water, it will turn into a gigantic negative mass. This would then definitively seal its kinship with the other planets.

In most African cosmogonies, the Earth is given as an uncountable set of signs, the means by which life comes about, matter is animated, and movement, actualized.② As powers and spirits of nature inhabit and animate it, we cannot say that the Earth is immutable. In reality, it is always in the process of constituting itself; that is, it is disposed to foster the appearance of unforeseen figures of the existing, which it welcomes in its midst and in its hollows.

In this sense, the Earth is a substance that is both constituted prior to its inhabitants and all those who live off it, and is in turn assembled by these latter, humans included. This assembling occurs through the practical operations by which they form alliances among themselves, share it, divide it into delimited parcels, codify its uses, exploit it, confront each other, unite or separate, and redistribute its resources. As it stands, through the air we breathe and, to a lesser extent, the water we drink, the Earth includes those major links to which we are all connected, the chain of things and people, all living beings, animate and inanimate of which it is like the common fabric, both soil and shelter.

No one has absolute sovereign power across the entire expanse of the Earth. Some singular uses can be made of this common soil and shelter here or there. But no one actually owns it, and it is unable to be entrusted to the goodwill of a single person. When it comes to the Earth, no one, not even a state, has the power to act alone freely. Notwithstanding legal fictions, we are therefore not its owners, that is, if by property rights we

In truth, we are above all its inhabitants and, most of us, passers-by on it. We can, through technology, capture the Earth’s forces and recode them. But according to an animist metaphysics, we are unable to enframe the deployment of its life and essential springs. In other words, while we participate in its regulation, we do not do so as its equals. We are simple inhabitants among many others, or, better, “guardians” among inter-generational chains of solidarity. Moreover, our status as inhabitants and guardians is provisional, as our demise brings this status to an objective end. Indeed, upon dying, our ability to access that plot of land, whose owner we consider ourselves to be, for its use and its enjoyment, terminates. Besides, were the Earth to leave the world of nature and become a legal entity, it could only be as that which, by definition, is inappropriable

Thus, the Earth has an immaterial dimension that fundamentally distinguishes it from the sphere of things available for appropriation, or for integral absorption into property relations. This is precisely what makes it not a “common thing” but a “community,” an ambiguous community. Corresponding to this community of Earth is the basic universality of all its inhabitants. Taken all together, human persons cannot be said to own the Earth, nor can any other entities. Rather, they are its citizens, insofar as they are given an indisputable place on it. If they have a right to this basic hospitality, it is limited to a right to shelter, to a right to dwell on it. This right is, strictly speaking, a right of lodging, and it is unconditional. The Earth indeed provides a place for all, without discrimination. To enjoy this place, you do not need a property title. You receive it by the simple fact of existing, of being alive, of being here.④

The idea of an earthly community is thus poles apart from the concept of a “land law,” as that which is deemed to exist prior to any convention and any contract (a nomos of the Earth). Contrary to the gesture of division and appropriation, contrary to the logic of enclosures typical of the European nomos of the Earth, the faculty of inhabiting is not the equivalent of the right to dispose of things unreservedly. On the other hand, habitation necessarily supposes co habitation, that is to say, making room for others, for beings other than oneself, other than human, for All, in fidelity to the Earth’s very vocation to be a dwelling for all. In this scheme of universal redistribution, no one is deprived of shelter and everyone has the fundamental right to a share. This birthright precedes all other rights. It is the equivalent of the right to breathe.

“Decolonize” is a summons of limited interest, however, if it does not lead to genuine disappropriation, just as the late Édouard Glissant had recently outlined it. Glissant spoke about the great gesture of disappropriation as the All-World. The concept of the All-World has three distinctive features. First, it stands in total rupture with all forms of closure onto a self, whether that form is territorial, national, ethno-racial, or religious in nature. Second, it is opposed to the kind of authoritarian universalism that underpinned the colonial enterprise—a universalism of conquest that sought to actualize itself not in a multiplicity of bodies and extants, but in a single body that is arbitrarily held to be the one and only truly significant body. Third, in the spirit of the All-World, the call to know is initially an invitation to emerge from willful ignorance, to discover our own limits. Above all, it is a question of learning how to be born-with-others, that is to say, how in uncompromising fashion to break the mirrors that we inevitably expect to reflect back an image of ourselves.

The world of the All-World, as Glissant conceived it, is woven and hatched from the entanglement and relations of a multiplicity of centers. For Glissant, the greatest obstacle to its advent is an ignorance so unaware of itself that it winds up turning into a pure and simple nativism trying to pass itself off as science and as universalism. The struggle against this venal form of ignorance requires that you step outside yourself and intentionally open up the possibility of multiple passages and multiple crossings. Indeed, it is the test of passage and crossing that permits us not to talk incessantly about ourselves, or about other worlds, and often in their place, as if they did not already exist for themselves, but instead to look together and eventually to see, but from several worlds each time.

The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of disappropriation itself. Sharing or repairing the Earth means striving to listen, look, and see the real from several worlds and centers at once; it means reading and interpreting history on the basis of a multiplicity of archives. This project requires that a renewed critique of difference and segregation be urgently undertaken. For without this resolute critique of difference, what V. Y. Mudimbe called “the colonial library,” as the cornerstone of Eurocentrism, cannot be dismantled.⑤ Sharing the Earth also means learning to be born together (co-birth). Moreover, being born together is the only way to overcome the double desire, specific to colonial thinking, of abstraction and seg-

regation—the separation of humans from one another, and of humans from other species, nature, and the multiple forces of the living. The colonial illusion has thus come to an end. On its ashes we see new lines of thinking that are commensurate with the planet emerge in the North as well as in the South and East. Most of these lines of thinking concern not simply humans, but also the Earth, fire, air, water, and winds, in short all the living.⑥ They are all anti-colonial by definition, if by “colonial” we mean a refusal to “be born together,” a determination to separate, erect walls of all kinds and fortresses, to transform paths into borders, identity into an enclosure, and freedom itself into private property.⑦ These anticolonial and post-Eurocentric lines of thinking privilege not essences or compact and homogeneous blocks, but porosities. They are not tied to a nationalistic heritage. Where Eurocentrism used to cut time, space, and history into discrete elements, marked by supposedly irreducible and unassimilable differences, these lines of thinking concern entanglements.

In art, music, film, and other forms of writing, these lines of thinking are multiplying passages and building bridges. Where late Eurocentrism everywhere sees only lines of occupation, bridges that require burning, walls and prisons that need building, and points of arrival that ought always to remain unconnected to points of departure, the All-World posits that we are all traversed by multiple genealogies and wrought by sinuous and interconnected lines. We clearly bear witness today to the rise of these anti-colonial and post-Eurocentric lines of thinking, and not only in the South. Their burgeoning extends even into the heart of Europe. But at a time when people are withdrawing into their, often fantasized, identities; at a time when conspiracy and the deliberate production of falsehood and discord reigns, this flourishing and the echo they have among the younger generations arouse anxiety, fear, and panic, especially but not only in the old centers of the world.

① David gé Bartoli and Sophie Gosselin, Le toucher du monde: Techniques du naturer (Paris: Éditions Dehors, 2020).

② John Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaïre, University of Kansas publications in Anthropology (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1974), 5; Anita Jacobson-Widding, Body and Space: Symbolic Models of Unity and Division in African Cosmology and Experience (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1991).

③ Sarah Vanuxem, La propriété de la Terre (Marseille: Éditions Wildproject, 2018), 30.

④ See the reflections of Mathias Risse, On Global Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), in particular chapters 5 to 10.

⑤ V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

⑥ Édouard Glissant, La terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents: Une anthologie de la poésie du Tout-Monde (Paris: Galaade, 2010).

⑦ Tim Ingold, Une brève histoire des lignes, trans. Sophie Renaut (Paris: Zones Sensibles, 2013).

⑧ See Arjun Appadurai, “Fear of small disciplines: India’s battle against creative thought,” Postcolonial Studies 24, no. 1 (2021): 11–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2021. 1882069.

Excerpts from The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia. Copyright, 2022, Achille Mbembe. Translation by Steven Corcoran. Commissioned by V2_. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

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