Document issue2 final by Nick Vogelson

www.proenzaschouler.com

822 Madison Avenue New York

ÂŠ 2013 adidas AG. adidas, the Globe, the 3-Stripes mark and Y-3 are registered trademarks of the adidas Group. Yohji Yamamoto is a registered trademark of Yohji Yamamoto, Inc.

Y-3.COM

new york

los angeles

paris

london

eli photographed by juergen teller

On the CoverS Karlie Kloss

Photography by Daniel Jackson. Fashion Editor Benjamin Bruno. Hair stylist Didier Malige. Makeup Francelle. Denim Smock Top by Miu Miu. Knitted knickers by Prada. Leather loafers by Sebago.

Jamie Bochert

Photography by Cedric Buchet. Artwork by Bjarne Melgaard. Fashion Editor Sabina Schreder. Hair stylist Charlie Taylor. Makeup Pep Gay. White mens shirt by Proenza Schouler for Bjarne Melgaard. Laceup strap heels by Proenza Schouler. Ossie Clark sofa and dolls courtesy of the artist and Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery from the exhibition, “A New Novel” By Bjarne Melgaard.

Spring/Summer 2013

N O.1 1

Editors’ Letter N O.1 2

Contributors and their Documents

Profiles & FEatures N O. 1 5

SPENCER SWEENEY: A SELF-PORTRAIT

C U R AT E D B Y PA R I N A Z M O GA DA S S I art w or k by spencer s w eeney N O. 2 0

THE ART ACTIVIST: LIA GANGITANO

I N T E R V I E W B Y L inda YA B L O N S K Y P H OTO G R A P H y B Y C AT H E R I N E S E R V E L N O. 24

MoMA’'s PEDRO GADANHO on SLUMS, PUNK AND POP intervie w B Y

N o. 3 5

Te�te-àA�-Te�te: Larry Clark and Chloe Sevigny

I ntervie w by C hlo Ë S evigny P hotography by Dan M artensen N o. 3 8

Alanna Heiss, founder of PS1 and The Clocktower Gallery I ntervie w B y T im G oossens

David Hallberg thinks of ballet in existential terms

I ntervie w by C harles R en f ro P hotography by Daniel S ann wald

N o. 4 6

N O. 2 8

Jack Goldstein Natural Complications by R achel P idcoc k

N o. 5 0

C AT H E R I N E S E R V E L

Amnesia in Mesopotamia: Bagdad’'s National Library

N O. 3 0

P hotography by R oger L emoyne

P H OTO G R A P H Y B Y

Kembra Pfahler Resents art with a capital “A” I ntervie w by R ic k O w ens

P H OTO G R A P H Y B Y C AT H E R I N E S E R V E L

In full Bloom by L e w is M ille R

P hotography by J amie C hung N o. 6 0

Galitzine designer Sergio Zambon by R achel P idcoc k

photography by H ugh L ippe no. 6 3

N o. 4 2

P H OTO G R A P H Y B Y C AT H E R I N E S E R V E L

I N T E R V I E W B Y D E S I S A N T I AG O

the shades of spring

P hotography by H ugh L ippe

P I E R R E A L E X andre D E L O O Z

Performance artist MARIE Karlberg goes on sale

N o. 5 5

B y Z ainab B aharni

Delfina Delettrez Diary

photography by C arlotta M anaigo fashion editor Francesca C e f is

no. 6 6

Glenn O’'Brien remembers photography by E do B ertoglio

no. 7 0

Tabboo! The muse as artist B y J ac k P ierson

N o. 7 2

Required Viewing: Michele Bubacco

intervie w by Kathy B attista art w or k by michele bubacco

On the CoverS Karlie Kloss

Photography by Collier Schorr. Fashion Director James Valeri. Hair stylist Holli Smith. Makeup Jeanine Lobell. Leather sleeveless jacket by Proenza Schouler. Bra by Kiki De Montparnasse. Leather cap by David Samuel Menkes.

Lindsey WixsoN

Photography by Paul Wetherell. Fashion Director James Valeri. Hair stylist Kevin Ryan. Makeup Pep Gay. Beauty by Diorskin Nude BB Creme, Diorskin Nude Concealer, Diorskin Poudre Libre, Dior Krayon Khol, Diorshow Iconic Overcurl Mascara, Diorshow Brow Pencil, Dior Contuor Lip Pencil #223, Dior Addict Lip Balm. Fragrance by Miss Dior Eau de Toilette.

N o. 7 5

Vivienne Westwood and Andrew Bolton on the Met’s spring Punk show

intervie w by B enjamin - É mile L e H ay N o. 7 8

Anti-Social Butterfly: Benedetta Barzini intervie w by C hiara B arzini

portrait by L aura S ciacovelli N o. 8 6

Mario Testino

intervie w by S adie C oles , w ith remar k s by D onatella V ersace , D omenico D olce , S te fano Gabbana , C hristopher B ailey and others N o. 9 9

Julia by Maripol

P hotography by M aripol fashion editor Tom Van D orpe N o. 1 07

Pure Murder: An American Honor Killing by David M c C onnell

photograph by B ela B orsodi

Fashion

N o. 1 7 0

Prep Steps

Source materials

photography by Daniel J ac k son N o. 1 1 2

Bjarne Melgaard in collaboration with Proenza Schouler

photography by C edric B uchet

fashion editor B enjamin B runo N o. 1 7 8

A celebration

photography by Paul Wetherell fashion director J ames Valeri

fashion editor S abina S chreder N o. 1 9 2 N o. 1 24

Double Vision

photography by B ela B orsodi fashion editor S abina S chreder N o. 1 3 6

It’s a fine day

photography by Daniel S ann wald fashion director J ames Valeri N o. 1 4 6

hazardous domesticity

photography by C atherine S ervel fashion editor C atherine ne w ell- hanson N o. 1 57

This is what it looks like

photography by L u k e G il f ord

Thursday morning, studio 7

photography by J ac k P ierson fashion editor V ictoria B artlett

N o. 2 7 7

A yacht and a boy

by L aw rence O sbourne N o. 2 8 2

A. W. AND THE ART OF BETRAYAL

S uppositions by B ruce B enderson

The perfect wave

photography by Will Davidson fashion editor S tevie Dance

N o. 2 8 7

Good Boy B y T C ooper

N o. 2 2 2

Ivoire

P hotography by M acie k Kobiels k i fashion editor J oanne B lades N o. 2 3 0

The King

P hotography by Dan ko S teiner fashion editor A na S teiner art w or k by jared buc k heister N o. 24 6

Sterling Ruby on Lucio Fontana’s ceramics

MatthiAs

by E dmund White

N o. 2 0 9

artist Z ac k ary D ruc k er N o. 1 6 4

N o. 2 74

Private arrangements

P hotography by C ollier S chorr fashion director J ames Valeri

A note on the type

The display type, Portrait Condensed, was designed by Commercial Type in 2013. The condensed style takes cues from French design in the ’60s, particularly the work of iconic designer Roger Excoffon and his collaborators.

Creative Director & Publisher

Editorial Director & Publisher Nick Vogelson

James Valeri

Managing Editor Rachel Pidcock Editorial Consultant Pierre Alexandre de Looz Contributing Editors Charles Renfro, Maripol, Eva Munz, Ann Binlot, Troy Chatterton, Chiara Barzini Director of Strategy Alyssa Bishop West Coast Editor-at-Large Shay Nielson Editor-at-Large Thomas Rom Literary Advisors David McConnell, Darrell Crawford Art Advisors Andrea Schwan, Daniele Balice Copy Editors Walter Ancarrow, Caitlin Blanchfield

Fashion Director james valeri Contributing Fashion Editors Sabina Schreder, Benjamin Bruno,

Victoria Bartlett, Ana Steiner, Joanne Blades, Tom Van Dorpe, Stevie Dance, Catherine Newell-Hanson Fashion and Accessories Market Editor Ronald Burton Beauty Editor Tara Lamont-Djité Fashion Assistants Kadeem Greaves, Christin Radomilovic Fashion Interns Meli’sa Smith, Yohana Lebasi, Robert Perez, Jordan Dominguez

Design Director Nick Vogelson Art Direction Townhouse Creative Production Director Kevin Roff Typeface Design Commercial Type Junior Designer Mike Nguyen Art and Design Assistants Renata Herminio, Evon Coleman Contributing Writers

Edmund White, Glenn O’Brien, Linda Yablonsky, Bruce Benderson, Vince Aletti, Tim Goossens, Zainab Bahrani, Chiara Barzini, Jack Pierson, David McConnell, Lawrence Osbourne, T Cooper, Sadie Coles, Benjamin-Emile Le Hay, Kathy Battistsa, Rick Owens, ChloË SEVIGNY, DESI SANTIAGO

Contributing Artists

Daniel Jackson, Cedric Buchet, Bjarne Melgaard, Collier Schorr, Paul Wetherell, Jack Pierson, Maciek Kobielski, Will Davidson, Maripol, Danko Steiner, Catherine Servel, Bela Borsodi, Daniel Sannwald, Luke Gilford, Laura Sciacovelli , Jamie Chung, Dan Martensen, Hugh Lippe, Carlotta Manaigo, Roger Lemoyne, Edo Bertoglio, Jared Buckheister, Spencer Sweeney, Michele Bubbaco, Sterling Ruby

Document Journal is a book series published semi-annually in the fall and spring by Document Publishing, LLC. For all inquiries, e-mail inquiry@documentjournal.com Advertising For all inquiries, e-mail ad@documentjournal.com Subscriptions Subscription info can be found at www.documentjournal.com Distribution United states

SpeedImpex—Jennifer DiMaggio JDimaggio@speedimpex.com

UK, Europe, Worldwide

WhiteCirc Ltd.—Stuart White Stuart@whitecirc.com

Document No. 2 Printed in February, 2013. Copyright © Document Publishing, LLC. ISBN 978-88-6208-259-4 ISSN 2280-8701 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical—including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system— without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Special Thanks

Patrick Crowley, Matthew Adams, David McConnell, Darrell Crawford, Jessie & Ashok Childs, Valeri family, Vogelson family, Michele Saunders, Alexander Galan, Laurent Claquin, Kyle Hagler, Jennifer Ramey, Helena Suric, Lorenzo Re, George Speros, Antony Bourgois, Christiana Tran, Tammy Francis, Jennifer Baker, Michael Masse, Bryce Ebel, Carrie White, Michael Bruno, Christian Schwartz, Berton Hasebe, Matthew Mitchell, Stewart Searle, Micah Perta, Ana Sanchez, Jean-Marc Houmard, Stephane Jaspar, Camille Hunt, Florent Belda, Jenny Kim, Vince Aletti, Nancy Chilton, Theodora Sopko, Chris Constable, Anton Aparin, Scott & Gillian Pidcock, Sally Borno, Lia Gangitano, Tim Smith, Kerry Youmans, Pierre Rougier, Lorcan O’Neill, Myriam Ben Salah, Mark Holgate, Luciano Cirelli, John Allan, Anne Olivieri, Candice Marks, Michael Kiel, Marissa Pucci, Daniel MotTa Mello, Natalie Rawling, Cedric Edon, Jennifer Sagum, Massimiliano Di Battista, Andrea Caravita, Marilena Di Battista

N o. 1 1

Editors’ Letter

or this issue of Document, we explored collaborations between artists, authors and intellectuals whose differences simultaneously make visible their shared endeavors. We met up with Mario Testino, a photographer known chiefly as the master of joy, glamour, and sex appeal, and invited him to sit down with London gallerist Sadie Coles to discuss a passion of his that most don’t know about: his personal art collection, which Coles has helped cultivate over the years. This is the epitome of what we try to do—to document different angles of people, their interests, passions and inspirations, crossing over from what we usually know about them into their own private world. We also met up with a number of people whom you might say have been a kind of muse. Director Larry Clark spoke with original ‘90s “It girl” Chloë Sevigny to discuss their shared past, and what they’ve been up to since Kids, the controversial film released nearly 20 years ago. Fashion designer Rick Owens sat down with Kembra Pfahler, an artist known for her live performances and band, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, to talk about her role as a creative stimulus for several of his collections. We spoke with a lot of powerful and compelling women in this issue, like the pioneering gallerist Lia Gangitano on the tenth anniversary of her alternative arts space, Participant. Alanna Heiss, the founder and first director of MoMA PS1 in Queens, recounts the making of her artist real estate empire that she started in the ‘70s as she worked vigorously to create safe spaces for creative people. Benedetta Barzini—once the muse to Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Salvador Dalí—traces insights into her time in New York in the ‘60s. Delfina Delettrez, the rising jewelry designer, shares a diary of her inspirations. And Vivienne Westwood, who has stayed fiercely true to her punk roots all these years, and curator Andrew Bolton discuss the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring punk show. We explore the historical and cultural value of documenting with art historian and archaeologist Zainab Bahrani, who takes us on a journey to the National Library in Baghdad immediately after it was burned in 2003. Mesopotamia, as Bahrani reminds us, was the location of the first written languages. She explains how the destruction of the library housing the region’s documents—land rights, marriage certificates, even historical data—amounts to the obliteration of a culture. This issue also introduces “Source Materials,” our new literary section advised by David McConnell and Darrell Crawford that is full of rites of passage, thwarted expectations, inconvenient truths, and heroes made and unmade. A hearty thanks for Bruce Benderson, Edmund White, T Cooper and Lawrence Osborne for trusting us with their captivating original writing. And a huge thanks to our cover trifecta—Karlie Kloss, Lindsey Wixson and Jamie Bochert—as well as artist Bjarne Melgaard who created the original art work for one of the four covers, along with photographers Collier Schorr, Cedric Buchet, Paul Wetherell and Daniel Jackson. It’s been exactly one year since the conception of Document and the better part of a year since we moved into our Chinatown office shared with a type foundry that produces the most exquisite work in the business. The office has been our sanctuary, with newly laid plywood floors with a high gloss finish. It’s beautiful, full of light and also the quietist office we’ve ever worked in, replacing the bustle of a magazine with the penitent solitude of a monastery that allows for real thinking and work. Nick Vogelson & James Valeri

N o. 1 2

Bjarne Melgaard : “I’m more interested in telling a good story than a boring truth (1 ).” EDMUND WHITE: “A photo with my grandfather on the left and my dad on the right. Edmund V. White I, II, and III (me) (2 ).” We asked our Victoria Bartlett : “This is a tale contributors of a plumber and judge—a comedy of for some of errors and an account of small town injustice (3 ).” LINDSEY WIXSON: “This their most double exposed image is important important to me because of the spontaneous documents. composition and colors (4 ). Chiara Barzini : “A paper Santino icon depicting the Madonna of the Ceri Sanctuary close to Rome. This Madonna is a constant reminder of the things we can pull off as teenagers (5 ).” Catherine Servel : “Here is an image of my dog, she’s definitely an inspiration (6 )!” Luke Gilford : “This photo is from a book my dad made in 1975 called Sculptors. He was in his early 20s and hung out in Venice, surfing and working on cars. He befriended a few bodybuilders on Muscle Beach, and eventually began documenting their lives inside the gym. They initiated an incredible sense of creativity, which I had never experienced before. Now I keep his book in my apartment—I’m pretty sure it’s the only copy that exists (7 ).” Bruce Benderson : “The document I cherish most is a letter from Joan Crawford on blue stationary, shortly after her last birthday, a few days after March 23, 1977. The words ‘Miss Joan Crawford’ are printed in embossed letters at the top. She died suddenly two-and-a-half weeks later (8 ).” Linda Yablonsky : “I used to have a car. I miss it terribly. I love driving. Movement is seductive. Over the last several years, my work as a journalist covering the international art scene has put me on a plane to somewhere or other nearly every month. I like crossing borders. It represents the freedom I desire and its stamps and visas are memory markers for the record of my life (9 ).” Sadie Coles : “The lease in my new space in Mayfair (10 ).” Bela Borsodi : “Me and my father both having a mustache (11 ).” Zainab Bahrani : “This is volume 10 of the 26 volume work, The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, one of my favorite books, and yes, I own all 26 volumes. The photo shows the volume open to the entry for the word which means ‘something’ or ‘what there is’. It also means ‘whatever.’(12 )” Daniel Sannwald : “A photograph of my late friend and muse Rose. She taught me many tricks in our short but special friendship (13 ).” Dan Martensen : “My very first passport. I got it when I was 20, and it lasted me 10 years. I used it as a wallet from age 20-22 so there are still a few notes and things I collected along the way (14 ).” Kathy Battista : “I cherish this postcard of the Queen sent to me by Dan Graham. It encompasses three of my favorite things: Britain, Dan Graham, and astrology (15 )!” Tim Goosens : “My best friend, the amazing photographer Roen Trigvue, and I share a diary that we send back and forth between New York and Antwerp, which is full with our inspirations, souvenirs and thoughts. It helps us stay close and makes up for not seeing each other often enough, and emails don’t always works that well when talking about our heartaches and dreams (16 ).” Zackary Drucker : “This Polaroid is me at age five, my mother or father took it, and it’s among a dozen or so surviving images from my adolescence that documents me as a little girl (17 ).” Lawrence Osbourne : “A Thai movie poster for a film about the King and Queen circa 1950 which I have in my study. I found it at the Rot Fai Train Night Market and immediately saw that it had something strange and talismanic about it (18 ).” Benjamin-Émile Le Hay : “My Parisian grandmother, Hélène Maximilienne Léchauguette Le Hay, was one of the most fabulous, dynamic and important parts of my life. I cherish her French passport probably the most (19 ).” T COOPER: “My marriage certificate (20 )!” David McConnell : “Tourist jeeps in the White Desert, Sahara el Beyda, north-western Egypt. They call the chalk formations 'mushroom rocks. (21 ).” BENJAMIN BRUNO: “This was my first and last business card. Business cards make life stationary (22 ).” GLENN O’BRIEN: (23 ).

Original Documents

19 10

2 14

20 1

23 4

3 13

17 8

6 21

9 16

U n t i t l e d , 2 0 1 2 / O il on linen

UG NU T ITTTLEERD,C2R0E 1D2I /TOGI LO O E SN HL E I NREEN

N o. 1 5

Spencer Sweeney: A Self-Portrait C u r at e d B y pa r i n a z m o ga da s s i

The painter created a series of self-portraits for this issue of Document. Parinaz Mogadassi curates the story. “Think about Magritte and his ‘Vache’ period: painter as self-deprecating clown. ‘Stupid as a painter,’ Duchamp famously said. Beguiling, generous painting that questions what is good? what is bad? what’s ugly, who’s pretty? Direct painting in and out. Where’s the filter painting? Kimono painter man, erotic itamae master—fresh gestures left to filet the eye. The eye is always open to the touch and the touch is where it’s at. Never revealing his gaze, he takes it all in to impart what we have missed. Don’t underestimate the man in shades, he’s eyeballed everything and your dinner will be delicious.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

16 U GnUtTiTtElRe dC, R2E0D1I0/ T O GO ilEon S HE linen RE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

UG nU t iTtTlEeRD ,C 2R0 E 1D2I /TOGilO on E S Hlinen ERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

18 UGnUtTi t T lE e RdC, R2E0D1 2 I T/ O Gil O Eon S Hlinen ERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

UG nU t iTtTlEeRd ,C 2R0 E 1D2I /TOGilO on E S Hlinen ERE

The ARt Activist

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

H airstylist L eonardo M anetti f or I O N S tudio. M a k eup S erge H odonou using M AC C osmetics f or F R A N K R E P S . M anicurist Daw n S terling at M elbourne A rtists M anagement using C H A N E L . je w elry by J elena B ehrend.

phy that has influenced a number of other artists and shape discussions of commuN o. 2 0 nity, sexuality and the underground of that time. Lia— Not everyone in that group even liked each other. It was the loss of family members and friends to AIDS that brought it together. Nan came up with Lia Gangitano never planned the title, “Boston School.” We thought it a life in the art world. Here she was funny and grandiose, as if the Boston speaks with Linda Yablonsky School was some kind of 19th-century painting style. Not that we were making a about the ICA’s seminal “Boston joke. We didn’t anticipate that it would be School” exhibition and taken so literally, because it was a messy Participant, her non-profit group. But it stuck. alternative space continuing Linda— Do you ever wish you had arrived in Boston 10 years earlier, when to foster new artists. these artists were starting out? Lia— Yeah, I think maybe I came to New York 10 years too late as well. Michel I ntervie w B y L inda Yablons k y Auder and Taylor Mead were some of photograph by C atherine S ervel the first people I met here. Historicizing a movement doesn’t really make sense when people who are involved in it are still around and making work. I’m working on a monograph with Tabboo! Linda— I know you came from the ICA in Boston but I don’t know right now and I showed Shellburne Thurber’s work at Participant. These artists are totally relevant to me and Participant is a place where what brought you there. Lia— I sort of grew up there. I took a work-study job when I was a the politics of art are still present. sophomore at Boston College and stayed for 10 years. At the time of Linda— What prompted you to move to New York right after “Boston my departure, I was associate curator. School”? Linda— Did you study art history? Lia— I had been at the ICA for 10 years and had been through four or Lia— I was an English major. It was a very different time, when learn- five directors. Milena was leaving and I felt like it was time to go. I heard ing on the job was still a possibility. I worked in every department and about a curator’s job at Thread Waxing Space, and applied—because I for a long time was the registrar, touring shows. Then I became an as- thought I needed practice applying for jobs. I’d never done it. Much to sistant to Elisabeth Sussman [now a curator at the Whitney Museum] my shock, I got the job. I was the first staff curator. In the early period, the founder, Tim Nye, curated the shows. I did a show that was based and I loved it so much that I started cutting school and hanging out. on John Cassavetes—a sort of reply to Christian Lee’s exhibition, “I Am Linda— So you never planned a life in art? Lia— It wasn’t a plan. It may sound weird, but I loved being a registrar. the Annunciator,” which was based on Alfred Hitchcock. Aside from the administrative work, it was very logistical: book plane Linda— I remember that show. tickets for Karen Finley, the performance artist, or find five tons of salt Lia— Thank you, Christian Lee, for the brilliant concept of star curafor whomever. Because we only did temporary exhibitions and crazy tor! That’s really caught on too. installations, my idea of what a museum did was unusual. Linda— I remember Thread Waxing as a huge, old-school SoHo loft. Linda— Can you remember some of the exhibitions? Lia— Seven thousand square-feet. Lia— I toured a Rosemarie Trockel exhibition that was organized by Linda— How did you go about organizing shows that would make the ICA and the Berkeley Art Museum, and it traveled to the Reina Sofía. sense in a space like that? I toured an exhibition called “American Art of the Late ‘80s,” and that Lia— We had a lot of music, so people thought of it as a kind of club. was how I met some artists who are still in my life, like Tony Oursler. We did shows for the CMJ festival every year. That was how I first The one that really stuck with me was called “Dress Codes,” in 1993, worked with Antony, Justin Vivian Bond and Le Tigre. But the first exwhich I curated with Bruce Ferguson and Matthew Teitelbaum, who is hibition I curated there was “Spectacular Optical”, which had already director of the Art Gallery of Ontario now but was briefly director of the been on the books. It came out of a relationship with Fern Baer, David ICA. It was about cross-dressing. That’s how I met Hunter Reynolds Cronenberg’s archivist. I went to Toronto and rummaged around in the and Lyle Ashton Harris. It was Cathy Opie’s first museum exhibition. archive, and found early work that predated his B-movie, horror stuff. Nan Goldin was also in that show, and that was also the beginning of So the show became very different. That was Jeremy Blake’s first exhimy relationship with her. And how I met the drag performer Vaginal bition. Laura Parnes had a major installation. So it wasn’t just about Davis, who I worked with again just recently. My job was to bring the Cronenberg, though he was in it too. In a way, it was an early iteration women’s aspect to the show, which led directly to “Boston School.” of an art and cinema exchange that has also become prevalent. Linda— So that was an important show for you? Linda— So you’ve been quite an innovator. Lia— Absolutely. My first actual project was an exhibition for the first Lia— Unintentionally. A show about a director or some sort of corWorld AIDS Day. My background was very much in this moment of art ruption of the body could have been so predictable. It was just amazing and AIDS activism and identity politics. That exhibition was also the to look a little deeper and find companion themes that weren’t so first time I collaborated with [art dealer] Pat Hearn and with [artist] predictable. Mark Morrisroe, and then we went on to do “Boston School”. Linda— Like what? Linda— Remind me which other artists were included in “Boston Lia— Jeremy Blake loaned me a book that Jeff Wall wrote called “Dan School”? Graham’s Kammerspiel.” It’s a lengthy essay about oppressive archiLia— Jack Pierson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian) tecture that is super interesting and it had a big influence on the project. and Shellburne Thurber. They had crossed paths and overlapped 10 “Shivers,” which is about parasites, is also about the oppressiveness of years before I moved to Boston, in 1986. So I had to look back to find living in an isolated high-rise. something that would make Boston seem more interesting. Linda— How was that show received? Linda— It seems to me that show helped to define a kind of photograLia— It was wildly successful, which made it hard for me. Afterward, he first I knew of Lia Gangitano was in 1995 when she asked me to contribute an essay to the catalogue for “Boston School,” an exhibition that she co-organized with Milena Kalinovska for Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The show nailed an aesthetic and a transgressive subculture particular to the moment before the AIDS epidemic struck in the ‘80s. It also anticipated a pattern of art activism that Gangitano has followed ever since, first as curator of the now-defunct Thread Waxing Space in New York and then as founder of Participant, the nonprofit she established—rather bravely—in 2002, when the alternative-space movement was nearly dead. Gangitano continued to mount innovative exhibitions and visionary projects by artists who form a vital cultural underground that others barely know exist, often publishing a book or pamphlet that later becomes an important historical reference.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

audience for what we do, but our biggest individual supporters are artists and always have been. Linda— How would you describe Participant? Lia— The program is artist-driven. Some really expanded the exhibition format by including live or durational elements. I mentioned Charlie Atlas. His exhibition in our first season was totally live. There was also Julie Tolentino, who did a piece called “For YOU,” where she performed a 15-minute piece for one visitor at a time. They brought different audiences—people associated with the dance world, or performance. The sitters in Charlie’s piece—people sat for a live video portrait that Charlie filmed while using both analog and digital editing tools—included Yvonne Rainer and Merce Cunningham. Visitors watched a live projection upstairs. It redefined the concept of what was an exhibition. It was nothing like Chelsea. It led to other projects with artists like John Bratten, who shot a film in the gallery because he didn’t have a space. I really got tired of hearing people say there was no way to make an independent film in New York. If someone says something can’t be done, you sort of just do it. Linda— The artists at Participant form an underground that doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else in the city, where everything seems to go from conception to commercial exploitation very quickly. Lia— That’s true. It’s always been frustrating that the visual art world has not been connected with the experimental film world. That has changed in the 10 years of Participant, with John and Luther Price. Recently I worked with Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis, to my mind iconic underground artists, though that term is kind of strange. They’ve always made exceptional work out of very limited resources. Kembra calls it Availablism and that philosophy describes what we do—making use of what we have. Linda— You don’t attempt to make a show look polished and ready for consumption. It’s raw and almost encourages discomfort, which I regard as a good thing. There’s so much complacency in art now. Lia— That goes back to needing a sense of intimacy for artists who operate in transgender or subcultural community. It’s not about individual geniuses. When I worked with Breyer P-Orridge on their first exhibition as a merged identity, Genesis said the most transgressive thing now is intimacy. Linda— So you’ve had Participant for 10 years—five on Rivington Street and five on Houston. Can you see yourself doing this for another 10 years? Lia— In some ways I feel like I’m just getting started. I think it’s important for a space like Participant to constantly assess what is needed most. We co-produce solo projects with artists at least once a season. Artists remind me what exhibitions can be, what constitutes art. They also introduce me to ideas in a way that refreshes the program. So my wish for the future is to continue that and spend more time on being a curator. Write more. Linda— How would you describe your social life? Lia— I run the gallery with Tom Leach, who is both my romantic and business partner. My life is very social with the gallery and so there’s not a lot of separation between work and not work. I enjoy the sort of social character of the art world, but sometimes I need to step away and to hang out with my cats. Linda— What about money? Are you saving for your retirement? Lia— I barely have a personal bank account. Participant has been a success, but I’m an Aquarius, head in the clouds. I always believe that at some point things will become more stable or we’ll be able to have salaries. It’s some sort of weird optimism. When things are really frightening, I always tell myself that money problems are the best problems to have, because when you get some money it goes away. It would be worse if I felt that the work we’re doing were irrelevant. That would be horrible.

it was always, “Can you top that?” I’m not sure it mattered, because of the relationships I formed with artists in that show. Like Lutz Bacher, whose “Huge Uterus” had to do with technology and the body. We also worked together on a major installation at Participant. I really felt that the purpose of an alternative space was to have a deeper relationship with the work, whereas theme and group shows fostered superficial relationships. So towards the end of Thread Waxing Space, we were mostly organizing solo shows. Linda— When did it close? Lia— In 2001. So I’d been there about four-and-a half years. Linda— Did you consider looking for another museum job then? Lia— Honestly, no. Before Thread Waxing closed, I was already writing a business plan and putting together a board to start a new space. Linda— What was the closing show? Lia— It was Sigalit Landau’s first show in New York. She created a giant, spiral trough for five tons of sugar and every day she labored in this vat making cotton candy. It was a bittersweet experiment in futile labor—and a fitting goodbye to Thread Waxing Space. We already had an arrangement to give the programing archive to CCS, the Center of Curatorial Studies, at Bard College. It was the first institutional archive, which they’ve since given to the Smithsonian, and it’s now part of the Archives of American Art. Linda— Why did you want to create Participant at a time when the alternative space movement was at its lowest point? That was a bold move on your part. Lia— I think it was pure stubbornness. Some of the shutting down at Thread Waxing meant talking to artists and doing a lot of soul-searching. It told me that the alternative space model was still relevant to artists, and that artists in New York weren’t getting all they needed from commercial galleries or institutions. Even when I was at the ICA, I would spend a lot of time in the archive of the museum, reading manifestos that devalued the whole notion of collecting museums. The founders were against it, and thought that museums should not exhibit the accumulated wealth of individuals. So I guess I didn’t know any better. And my closest relationships with dealers were with Pat Hearn and Colin de Land. Linda— Yes, their galleries functioned as if they were not-for-profit. Lia— My experience is in activism, and with artists who function like dysfunctional families, who have unusual interpretations of what it means to be successful. Lutz is a good example. So is Charles Atlas and Renée Green. These artists are my heroes. Their exhibitions at Participant are testament to artists who want a different kind of experience. Pat Hearn introduced me to their work long ago and she is a big part of who I am and how I look at art. Linda— How do you look at art? Lia— Well, I certainly don’t see it as a commodity. I guess I look at it as an experience, which is why so many of our shows are ephemeral. There might not be a whole lot left after the show. Linda— So by 2002, you managed to raise enough money to lease a space. Lia— Tim Nye gave small startup funding, but things got really challenging after 9/11. The question was where to go. We were looking in Harlem, Brooklyn, Long Island City and the Meatpacking District. It was always about, What’s the next neighborhood? I live on the Lower East Side so my thinking was, Why not here? I had some experience raising money, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. And I can’t say it’s gotten much easier. Linda— Even though there’s now so much money in the art world? Lia— The New Museum might have a waiting list of trustees who give a certain amount of funding each year, but I don’t think a place like Participant offers the same sort of social status. I think there’s a great

“It told me that the alternative space model was still relevant to artists, and that artists in New York weren’t getting all they needed from commercial galleries or institutions.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

NYC

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

1993:

EXPERIMENTAL JET SET, TRASH AND NO STAR

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Pedro— I want to explore how megacities are evolving. I’m very interested in Rio, Buenos Aires, or Johannesburg— how these cities present problems and solutions of the future. In Rio, there has always been an intention to have the city grow in the right way. Rio is beautiful all the way to the favela, which have some of the best views. Mumbai is the only other place where you feel the presence of slums in such a powerful way. The big difference is that in Mumbai they are tearing the slums apart in the face of gentrification while in Brazil, by law, you cannot expel people from their homes; they plan how the slum will evolve in a much more careful and effective way, which I think is the only acceptable model. In the end it’s not so different from what Europe did with its medieval cities. That’s why I see Rio as the city of future, and they have the opportunity to demonstrate now. Alex— When you consider Brazil’s crucial role in the global economy, at all levels, and that it has started to divert revenue from new oil production for social causes including slum urbanism, it speaks to this civic ambition. Pedro— There is also a belief in democracy and growing into a more equal society. Because it’s so bad, that’s the only possible way to move forward; and in political terms, they have created programs that are lowering the poverty level, whereas in Europe we may be more equal, but our trajectory is slowing down. Alex— When it comes to keeping pace, MoMA historically has been a soapbox for good, middle-class taste and what it means to be modern and American. Your background is Portuguese—how does it affect what you bring to the job? Pedro— It relates to my pleasure in discovering the world. I think that MoMA until very recently was still very focused on the American reality—although it had represented many modern European architects. There is willingness now to change this focus on modern western history. That has been my trajectory in a way, because Portugal, being a small country, is very open, with connections to Brazil, Africa, Europe, Latin America and Asia with Macao; there is something genetically open to the world. Alex— When the MoMA underwent its major renovation nearly a decade ago, it emerged more willfully modern and set in its ways then it had been in recent history, as if announcing an era of neo-modernism. Is this attitude changing? Pedro— That’s an aspect that I think we are overcoming. Our role is to select and show the different directions in which culture is evolving. The current moment in architecture is actually quite interesting because there is so much happening that explores possibilities of architectural expression. I’m talking about work that is characterized by an anti-formalistic approach, which totally rejects the language of modernism or

N o. 24

IN Da House and OUtside the Box

MoMA Curator Pedro Gadanho’s unorthodox hunger for architectural styles, slums, punk and pop.

I ntervie w B y P ierre A lex de L O O z photograph by C atherine S ervel

star architects. People I think of as “performance architecture,”— like Raumlabor, EXYZT and Didier Faustino for example— are using ideas that are less about form than integrating performance into their work. There is also “pop-architecture,” if you will, appearing here and there with the return of ‘70s super-graphics. With people like FAT in England and others, you also have an ironical return to architecture’s post-modern languages. Alex— Isn’t architecture today in an extended DJ mix on post-modernist turntables? Pedro— My next exhibition is actually about collage culture because I think that’s what’s happening at the moment. We are a culture that has assumed all these layers as part of the possibilities that we work with, and architects are finally embracing that without their old style wars. Alex— Are you saying architects are not as it might appear totally confused about style; they are in fact freer than ever? Pedro— They feel freer to choose the language they use to express their ideas. They don’t feel so constrained by the idea that they have to be neo-modernist or post-modernist. And by the way that’s part of why I think it’s interesting to connect architecture culture with lifestyle and visual culture in general. Architects have tended to think they’re outside the realm of trends, the movements of fashion and so on. Still, in any case, it’s important to retain the idea that architecture is a cultural production not a commercial one, necessarily. You don’t have to sell out. Alex— How do you do that? How do you talk about architecture as part of popular culture but not also part of capitalism and buying one’s self a good time? Pedro— One theory is that everything you do will be absorbed by capitalism. Capitalism is the most plastic thing, always absorbing all the positions that rise up against it. Myself, I was influenced by British independent pop, punk and post-punk. Punk has been absorbed by capitalism as punk chic. But I think the historical message of punk, as a resistance to the mainstream culture, is still relevant even though it was absorbed stylistically. Alex— Part of your role as a curator might be exactly this, to keep these radical historical messages alive. But, today the role of the museum and its responsibility towards a creative field like architecture is completely different, just given the media revolution. How do you see the museum competing with the Internet? Pedro— From the mumbo-jumbo of everything that is out there, the curator is selecting, bringing people together, pointing out shared characteristics. This connects the profession of the curator with trend analysist, because it’s like identifying trends that are not so obvious, that people may be seeing and have recognized but have not yet figured out what they mean. For me, the important thing is to bring meaning to trends, so they become readable for a larger audience. Otherwise it’s just a collection of different individual attitudes, which is what the Internet has created: everyone is a curator; everyone curates his own collection of favorites, which can be very uncritical.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

G roomer L eonardo M anetti f or I O N S tudio and S erge H odonou F R A N K R E P S .

hat sound does an architectural curator make? When it comes to Portuguese-native Pedro Gadanho, hired by the MoMA just over a year ago to oversee its contemporary exhibitions and the yearly Young Architects program in conjunction with MoMA PS1, it’s akin to a global reconnaissance satellite. Never mind a loquacious stream of insights on what’s happening in architecture now (Gadanho blogs, tweets, publishes and lectures), his international travel schedule since arriving at MoMA, including stops in Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo and Inhotim, Brazil, makes the case. One part realist, two parts futurist, a touch fanciful and apocalyptic, Gadanho’s message seems aimed at zapping his audiences into a creative awareness of their built environment. One leaves his recent pocket exhibition at MoMA, “9+1 ways of being political” (September 12, 2012–March 25, 2013), thinking architecture today isn’t taking real risks anymore, or is taking them for all the wrong reasons. A graduate of `90s London (while studying at the Cant Center of Art and Design). Gadanho can talk counterculture as much as columns. Architecture is not just nuts and bolts, housing and shelter, he argues, “it’s imbuing the city and shelter with thinking.” The lover of medieval and renaissance cities, Pedro Gadanho tells Document about his latest urban fascination, the challenges of taking a desk job at MoMA and why ugly architecture is good.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Alex— But the Internet can also be the most ferociously critical, most political context to debate ideas, while at the museum aren’t you beholden to the institutional point of view? Pedro— My position is to work with what is possible and available to me even within the constraints of the institution and the big production machine that is MoMA, to infiltrate and bring out readings and positions that I think are relevant at this moment. Alex— Are they supportive of you? Pedro— Yes, actually MoMA is trying to reposition itself as an institution that has something to say on the contemporary, rather than just doing retrospectives on established artists. I certainly have some difficulty considering that if I were to propose a big exhibition today that I will be given space only in 2015 or 2016. Given the way I work, it is difficult to predict what will be important then. I have had second thoughts, because I came from an independent career. Changing to a 9-to-5 is quite radical. And getting into the institutional way of working is quite hard for me. There is a limitation with working only with materials from the collection, for example, but then at the same time there is the challenge of how to activate the collection so as to produce a message that is contemporary. Alex— What would you say are MoMA’s strongest holdings from its architecture collection? Pedro— What I consider the most interesting and radical material at MoMA comes in great part from one collection, the Howard Gilman Collection. This represents a major holding of all the radical architects of the `60s and `70s, and that one donation totally changed the nature of MoMA’s archive. Until then only the most important master builders were followed through every move of their career. Alex— Are you doing any acquisitions yourself ? Pedro— When I was considering ways of being political for my recent exhibition, I thought one would be to deal with areas of social discrepancy and inequity within the city, the way the city is built for some but not for others or the way social housing stigmatizes the people who live in it. But, I didn’t find much material that could represent this logic looking through the collection. So actually most of the pieces that are in that section of the show are recent acquisitions, some of them brought in by me, like work from Alvaro Siza from the `70s, Didier Faustino and Raumlabor. And the work of the Spanish architect Andres Jaque, which is the first performance piece in the realm of architecture to enter the collection. Alex— Why is it so important that architecture be political? Pedro— I started to become more interested in politics over the last two or three years, maybe because I was affected by the way the economic crisis has been changing society. More and more there are savvy people who have an interesting way of producing an aesthetic statement, like Didier Faustino, but at the same time are criticizing the current state of consumption and politics. At a certain point I decided in my own activity as an architect, not to build anything other than interiors. Western society is so full of buildings—especially in European cities there is so much recyclable space—and because of poor distribution of resources some own empty houses and others are living in the streets. I produced an article titled “Stop Building” in 2009 which defended the idea that architects should be the first ones to tell society to stop building and start processes of reusing, re-doing the city, learning ways to transform existing structures and occupied lots. This coincided with my idea that doing interiors was a political statement, because it resumed to refusing larger commissions to build anew somewhere. Interiors can also carry powerful messages especially when you use the media. The house I designed, the GMG house, for example, has been through this media circus in an amazing way— it surprised me. It spread like wild fire on the web. I think this phenomenon of how architecture is taken up as an

image is fantastic and amazing. And critical. Alex— Does politics stop at the image? Pedro— The image is like a mating call. I do believe in this subversive way of using a sexy image to provoke thinking because eventually, if people dig in, there are ideas that are interesting. Fiction can also carry messages. The short story is a format that people still enjoy to learn something of human reality. I started what I call a bookazine, titled Beyond, thinking that we should go back to the idea of excellent writing and fictional techniques to communicate architectural ideas. The third issue was on trends and fads and started with a philosophical essay by Georg Simmel analyzing fashion, because if you don’t understand fashion then you don’t understand most of the things you do. It was a provocation to architects who consider themselves immune to fashion. What are the values that we cherish? What are the values that we transmit in architecture? It’s a much more philosophical take on how architecture is a form of culture, and is expressing what is happening. Alex— But what is the world of architecture portraying now? Pedro— In part, performance architecture, for example, is anticipating a potential impoverishment of the world. We have to learn new ways to position ourselves as architects. Maybe we will no longer build objects but we will teach people how to build what they need. Architects may be part of a larger process, as orchestrators, as informers, as people who translate a certain technical knowledge for people to use. The favela is the ultimate example of where you can apply that sort of knowledge. I see performance architecture as preparing us to face a certain reality that is dominated by the informal. Alex— If cities are getting bigger, riches more unequally spread, and resources scarcer, then does fiction become even more crucial? Pedro— Fiction is important already because it is trying to picture what is coming. It is trying to tell us truths that we don’t want to accept otherwise, or that we face as very difficult. We want to maintain our lifestyle; we don’t want to regress. But, it’s not rational that we can keep it. We have had colonialism and resource exploration to support our levels of consumption until now. And technology. But, will we really be able to produce all we need with technology? The kind of technology and social media that will be available in the future will produce a very different reality. That future might be impoverished in terms of material life, but it could be very rich in terms of ideas and creation. That’s where I think architects, designers, artists may be even more important than they are now. Alex— It sounds like you are inaugurating a priesthood of practical thinking. If architects are so focused on all these very serious issues, will they lose their tradition of form making? Pedro— I don’t like to see myself included in the world of preppers. The aesthetical is one of the powerful aspects of our activity. That’s why I say a project is successful politically when it’s also successful aesthetically. What do I mean by that? I mean that that project is also relevant to the architectural field. It’s relevant to aesthetic innovation in the field. And then it has an effect on the world at large. Things have to be an aesthetic attraction to be really effective. You will not relate to an ugly or a bad work, bad in the sense of bad form, badly organized or conceived. That’s why I think Raumlabor when they produce these things that look like they are made of out of garbage, which they are, that I find have a very powerful beauty. It’s not only an aesthetic shift. People have been discussing this especially in the world of design, which is appreciating ugliness as the new aesthetics. And this happens in the world of fashion as well. The fact that we adapt to the idea of the ugly as the new beautiful is actually preparing our old system to accommodate new solutions for problems that we can no longer achieve with notions of purity and modernist balance.

“For me, the important thing is to bring meaning to trends, so they become readable for a larger audience. Otherwise it’s just a collection of different individual attitudes, which is what the Internet creates.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

soleil froid FEBRUARY 27TH - MAY 20TH, 2013 PALAIS DE TOKYO

JULIO LE PARC NOUVELLES IMPRESSIONS DE RAYMOND ROUSSEL FRANÇOIS CURLET DANIEL DEWAR & GRÉGORY GICQUEL JOACHIM KOESTER EVARISTE RICHER PALAIS DE TOKYO 13, avenue du Président Wilson F-75116 Paris

Everyday from noon to midnight, except on tuesdays D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3 WWW.PALAISDETOKYO.COM 27

image: Julio Le Parc, Modulation 1125 (detail), 2003. Courtesy de l’artiste. Photo : Atelier Le Parc.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

cold sun

SELLING MARIE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

H airstylist L eonardo M anetti f or I O N S tudio. M a k eup S erge H odonou using M AC C osmetics f or F R A N K R E P S . M anicurist Daw n S terling at M elbourne A rtists M anagement using C H A N E L .

used to do our makeup, we looked like new-goth prostitutes. Desi— I think coming out of nightclub performances is coming from a stronger background. You think that the art world has a certain legitimacy perhaps that the nightclubs don’t have. “I’m not real until I’m in the galleries.” But then you get older and you realize fuck that, it doesn’t really matter. Desi— What’s up? I tried to be a little professional and I thought up some points. I wanted to start talking about, I first met you at a party in Marie— I definitely had problems with my past, coming from a nightParis, and you squatted with blue eyebrows. life performing scenario. I didn’t think it was intellectual enough. But it was the most pure form of expression. Today I’m making things more Marie— Oh my god, I can’t believe the blue eyebrows, that’s so past. intellectual, but it’s because I grew. Desi— You were part of that crew, the House of Drama. Marie— I was living in Paris and I was completely isolated from realDesi— I just saw you did a performance at 1:1 on Saturday. I noticed ity. I understood the language, but not really. You know, when you that in that performance, it was a much more sober you. It was much live in the city and you’re not in society, you basically create your own more serious. I was surprised by it. I was expecting strobe lights and reality. I was living with two Swedish girls and we would just go out in rolling around, and squatting and showing pussy but it was more like a fur and huge platform shoes and fake eyelashes and basically looked life class. So talk about that performance. like prostitutes. But we didn’t know if people were talking shit about Marie— Well, I already had done the strobe light and pussy. I had us or not, which was great, because we would just continue with our done something with my husband when we were more active two years look that we created. We started making videos in our small flat, we ago. You reach a certain point. I am calmer now, I read more, I also had a flat smaller than 20 square feet, it was work at a gallery, Reena Spauling Fine Art. molding. We just destroyed it with our own The artists we represent, I work tightly with N o. 2 8 stuff. There was not one single space on the them, that is really influential. Basically, walls that was painted, it was just covered I’ve just been growing. And I have a great with stuff we were creating. Then I concontext of people around me. I don’t really tacted Lionel [Bensemoun] from Le Baron have that need of being eccentric naturally Swedish artist Marie Karlberg and I told him I wanted to do a party and in performance. I don’t have that need. has turned her life into one the party became a productive way for us to What I wanted to do was something that hell of a piece of performance. make more videos that we would project. I was “subtle psychotic” but also something would perform at every party. I totally relate to as a woman and a femiNow she goes on sale. nist. Metamorphosizing myself into a projDEsi— And you would make some money ect that was going to be for sale. For a lot of from it, so it was a way to finance things and reasons. The whole thing was satirical and have fun. I ntervie w B y desi santiago ironic. I was going through these stages to Marie— I was living cheap, and rent is not photograph by catherine servel get rid of everything that was characteristic as high when you’re living in a shithole with of me, but with a twist. I’m also really fasthree people. So we started doing that. And cinated by prostitution, the sense of somethen I started having ego issues from being in a group, a collective group, that split up. Then I joined House of one buying you. I’m a laborer. I’m a worker. I actually got an offer today Drama ,but it was never my project, it was Aymeric Bergada Du Cadet’s from someone who wants to buy me. project. But my best friend was Igor Dewe at the time and that was after Desi— So you are for sale as an art piece. Or is it for an experience of the group split, so of course they wanted us to be a part of it because some sort? we were colorful people that lived in Paris, but I actually created the Marie— So they discussed the pricing and labor. What do they want performance scene before that. I was the one that started it with the me to do? That also has a price. If someone wants to have a coffee with three girls. me then maybe that’s a little cheaper than, say, tantric sex. Desi— What was the name again? Desi— What was the offer? Marie— Dead Muse. House of Drama got inspired by that. We started Marie— Definitely not just having a coffee. I feel a lot of the arts going doing reactionary performance but we chose nightlife instead of a gal- on today has become somewhat strategic and dry in a way. I’m not a lery because that was the only place we fit into. It wasn’t like our parties fan of Marina Abramovic and that shit. I want to be humble. I want to were packed, but they were definitely understood by a community in talk to the people and thank them for coming. The aspect of putting Paris that galleries and stuff like that would not understand. yourself in danger is something I’m also fascincated by and I want to Desi— So those performances are violent, a sort of different energy expose myself to. that in a nightlife setting is synergetic with the experience. Desi— Where are you going to go with that? Opening yourself up to dangerous situtations? Marie— Exactly. I think at that time I was 23 or 24 and I discovered my darkness. You know what I mean. When you discover something that Marie— I think about that all the time, like a paranoia. I think about you always have, maybe I was a late bloomer, I couldn’t pinpoint down putting myself in situations where I’m going to get killed or fucked up depression. When I discovered my darkness, I just wanted to swim in but that I’m comfortable with. I’m a sadist and a masochist at the same it, it was like water for me. I don’t have the same need today. I’m aware time. Especially with the tape recorder, because it was my voice. of my darkness, but I’m also aware of the light. When you first realize Desi— You were submissive to your own voice. I like these power something you just want to indulge in it. plays of “who is master, who is servant” and how do they play with each other. Desi— Absorb it and consume it. Marie— Yeah, exactly. You’re like “Oh my god! Yes! This is how I feel!” Marie— Exactly, the dialectic between master and servant is someIt starts. You start reading and getting inspired by people who have thing I’m really fascinated with, too. Especially with human relations. depression and artists and writing. You can pinpoint your writing and Desi— I think in all relationships there’s that element, with different get inspired. It’s a total experience. levels of subtlety. Desi— So you completely absorbed it into your persona. And then Marie— I wanted to put that in my performance. after you’ve completely absorbed it in you realize you don’t need to Desi— That was my favorite component really, you being the puppet completely be this thing, then it becomes an element that you draw to your own voice. from later but balance with the light. Marie— I needed to metamorphosize into a product and remove as Marie— Yeah, it was a part of me. I was glad I explored it through much of Marie as possible. I need to control. And Marie was removing nightlife and not through the art scene. Because that would have put that. I am curious now if someone will buy me. How much part will that a stamp on me that I don’t have right now. Like in the moment how we be of the performance? wedish-Iraqi New York-based performance artist and host of the late night rave XTAPUSSY, Marie Karlberg knows how to throw a party. But she doesn’t end there. Karlberg sits down with the artist Desi Santiago to discuss the price of a soul.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Artist and muse to Rick Owens, KEmbra PFahler SITS DOWN WITH THE fashion DESIGNER TO DISCUSS HOW SHE resents art with a capital “a.”

intervie w B y R ic k O w ens photography by C atherine S ervel

ith her electric blue body paint and jetblack wigs, Kembra Pfahler is a dynamic force in the New York art scene. While continuing to perform as Karen Black in the band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Pfahler has set herself to working on Future Feminist art and Hawaiian percussion. Here she talks with fashion king Rick Owens. Heralded by Anna Wintour and American Vogue in the early aughts, Owens, an American fashion designer, won the CFDA Perry Ellis Emerging Talent Award in 2002 and now lives in Paris where he works on his own label known for its confluence of grunge and minimalist-sophisticate aesthetics. Kembra— Hi. Rick— Hi. Kembra— You look so cute. Rick— So do you. Kembra— So they are doing...Someone

bought my building and they’re doing demolition downstairs. It’s like being in World War II, which is kind of interesting. It’s kind of fun, but it’s really loud so you might hear this chaotic sound. Rick— Do they start really early in the morning? Kembra— Yes, they do. Rick— Is that a problem for you? Kembra— It really is but I’m just kind of going with the flow, you know? I haven’t been staying here a lot. I was in Hawaii for a month. Can you tell? I’m not really tan anymore. My tan is gone. Rick— You can live at the Y? Kembra— Hawaii. Rick— Oh, Hawaii! I thought you said the Y and I was thinking, well isn’t that a homeless shelter? Hawaii. Kembra— I don’t even think the Y exists anymore, like the old school stay-at-the-Y type thing. As you know, New York is a boutique city. Rick— Right. Kembra— So we just shot all day. It was really pleasant. It was like a glamorous vacation. Rick— You guys shot in a studio? Kembra— Yeah. Rick— Who shot you?

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Rick— Did you do a project with Vaginal? Was there something you guys did? Was there a collaboration? Or was it just her coming to town? Kembra— We’ve been doing work with Lia Gangitano from Participant Gallery, which is one of the last remaining not-for-profit organizations in the city. We’ve done a lot of performances and friends have been doing shows there lately. So I essentially just did a show for Ms. Davis, not with her. Rick— I know that Vaginal Davis told me that she liked my clothes; and between Vaginal and I, Vaginal wanted to do something nice for [Gangitano] so we sent her a jacket on behalf of Vaginal, and Lia reciprocated with a beautiful whip sculpture from...You know I can’t remember the name of the artist right now but it’s a whip that has two handles for two people to use. Kembra— Oh, yeah, I know that piece. Participant does really beautiful projects for the shows. Rick— And I have it in my library right now hanging up. Kembra— Well, Lia has incredible taste. Rick— Right. Kembra— So, no, I didn’t do anything with Vaginal but it was nice to see her because people can’t really come to New York that often anymore. It’s so culturally genocided that it’s hard for real artists to come to New York. It’s like Vaginal used to say, she used to call it the cultural high white snow. She used to call these boutique people the high whites snow, like the Kennedy’s. Rick— She always has a little turn of a phrase doesn’t she? What was her show? Kembra— She did the HAG Gallery. The gallery she had in Los Angeles, which maybe you had an exhibit in as well in the early days, did you? Rick— I never exhibited, I just was there. I just was a fan. Kembra— So she kind of redid the HAG but it was so idiosyncratic; she baked bread sculptures. One of Justin Timberlake with a 10-foot cock made out of bread. And they built an illusion so that Ms. Davis would appear dainty and tiny. It was like a circus illusion that you looked inside of a box. Do you remember in Knots Berry Farm they had some sort of illusion room? Rick— Is it like the distorted mirror? Kembra— No, it was an illusion room that you looked in and you could become tiny in. Rick— Dainty Vaginal Davis. Kembra— Yeah, a tiny and dainty lady. So that was interesting. That was quite a good show and she made wallpaper. And I didn’t really get to see her because of the storm Sandy. The blackout happened and we were right in the middle of Sandy, in the Lower East Side. Rick— How did that affect you? Kembra— We were in the darkness. We were in complete darkness. Rick— I can’t imagine. I’m sure there are things that I’m not even considering that happened.

M anicurist Daw n S terling at M elbourne A rtists M anagement using C H A N E L . S k irt by R ic k O w ens .

In My Own Fashion

Kembra— Catherine Servel. She was very demure, very quiet, very attentive and sweet. Rick— Oh, yeah, that’s so great. Justinian Kfoury [Servel’s agent] actually just came over a couple of hours ago and knocked on my office door but I was taking a nap so I didn’t answer it. Kembra— Is he there for a while? Rick— I don’t know, maybe he left today and that was my last chance to see him before he left, but my nap could just not be interrupted. Kembra— Yes, I understand. You’re on a very intense Oleg Cassini schedule. Very rigorous. Rick— I am so not. Kembra— Did you ever read the book by Oleg Cassini? Rick— I totally did. Kembra— You did? Rick— Yeah, and he was such a cocksman. I love that he was such a cocksman. Kembra— Was he? I didn’t get that. I don’t remember that part of the book. Rick— All he talked about was chasing pussy. Kembra— Really? Rick— Yeah. Kembra— I must have blacked that part out. I just remember that he got up everyday at 6:30 to look at fabric. Rick— Oleg Cassini, am I thinking of a different biography? I think it was called In My Own Fashion. Kembra— Yes, it was In My Own Fashion by Oleg Cassini. Rick— Pussy chaser. Kembra— Really? Well, do you think you ever might write a book like In Your Own Fashion, a Rick Owens book? That would be nice. Rick— I thought about it. But I thought I would come out so despicable if I was honest. I really would. Kembra— Really? You are so angelic, what are you talking about? Rick— Underneath it I’m just petty and just wrong. But it could be really interesting. And if I’m just brutally, brutally honest it would just be a horror book. Kembra— Can you hear [the construction]? Rick— Yeah, I totally can. It’s really bad! It’s concrete. They’re drilling through concrete right? Kembra— I don’t know. It’s a mess. They’re trying to make me move, you know, because I have this beautiful home. As you can see I live in this total luxury of glamour here and they are obviously trying to get me out. But we have a high pain tolerance. They don’t really know that I sewed my vagina shut. Rick— Yeah, that will slow them down. Kembra— They probably do now. Rick— But how long have you lived there? Kembra— I’ve lived here since the ‘80s. Rick— You’ve lived there a long time. Kembra— Yeah. So I’ll try to remain focused on discussing important things. One important thing I feel is Ms. Davis [Vaginal Davis] just had an incredible show here. Rick— Oh! How did that go? I haven’t even seen Ms. Davis for a long, long time. Kembra— She looks beautiful.

H airstylist L eonardo M anetti f or I O N S tudio. M a k eup S erge H odonou using M AC chromaca k e body paint f or F R A N K R E P S .

N o. 3 0

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Kembra— Yeah, people’s homes were flooded. And people’s homes were completely wiped away in Far Rockaway on the beach. So you could imagine, say, like Hermosa Beach had been completely obliterated. Rick— Right. Kembra— So the flooding was really bad, and I missed having my basement and house flooded by four blocks because the Lower East Side is on a landfill. I’m used to it, in the ‘80s when I first moved here the conditions were very dire so to be in complete darkness for a week wasn’t that traumatizing. Rick— And food and water? Was that complicated? Kembra— Yeah it was. The government was giving away RCMs, Already Cooked Meals. Essentially it’s like space food or astronaut food they were giving out in the projects. Rick— I would love to eat that all the time. Does it taste good? Kembra— Well, I collected it but I never opened the packages because it was hermetically sealed. I don’t know how astronauts can open these kind of food products. It was so difficult. Rick— But I’ve bought these army surplus; they are so beautiful they are in this army green color with beautiful printing and it’s in a metal kind of plastic thing.

Kembra— Yes, yes. Aesthetically they are very collectable which is why I got them, but I never ate them. And then they have these foods that are self-heating as well. Rick— Right. Kembra— So, I am going to go back to Hawaii. I’m thinking about getting a place there because my parents moved there so I might stay there half of the year. There is beautiful scenery and the water is incredible; I swam everyday. And it’s filled with Hawaiian ghosts. There are support groups for seeing certain ghosts around the island. There is a support group if you saw the green-faced lady with the long black hair and no feet. There is a support group for her. Rick— I’ve never been to Hawaii. I was actually thinking of it recently because it sounds great. I don’t know why, I just assumed that after all this time it would be a big mess. Kembra— It is a big mess in a way. Because of the depression the tourism has really diminished so everyone is chasing you around the island trying to get you to go on a turtle watching expedition for half price. So it has a strange dying touristic quality that I find to be kind of interesting actually. It wasn’t very chic at all. People don’t have a consciousness about culture necessarily, but the Hawaiian culture is so interesting. The native culture and the

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

native mythology are very inspiring. The music, the ukulele, dance and all of the folklore I love. Hawaiian people are very warm. Rick— Do you remember when The Creatures did that album, that Hawaiian album? Remember The Creatures? Kembra— Yeah, I totally know what you’re talking about. Rick— And it was a lot of percussion. It was very Hawaii. They were obviously influenced by Hawaii. It was really nice, that album. Kembra— I know, I love the visuals for that too. My friend Scott Ewald said this recent Karen Black album that we’re doing, Fuck Island, is reminiscent because there is a lot of tom-tom drum. There is a lot of that kind of percussion. Karen Black isn’t really doing a double-based drum anymore. We’re not doing heavy metal; we have more of a tropical sound right now actually. Rick— But I thought Fuck Island was a show, is it going to be an album now? Kembra— Yeah, it started out as a song and then that was the show I had at Lia’s gallery. And it’s the title of the next Karen Black piece. And it’s all about cock, too. Rick— Yes, you sent me the one with little mirrors all over it and I gave it to my pattern maker in Italy for inspiration. I said, “this is the silhouette for the new collection,” and they put it up on the wall in their little workroom. Kembra— That would be wonderful to have kind of wheels or balls at the base of your feet. Rick— It was just such a fun celebratory image. It just put you in a good mood to look at it. So I though it was a good spirit. Kembra— Yeah, that was a collaboration [between] my friend Spencer Sweeney and Urs Fischer. They took my sort-of-papiermâché cock over to their studio and did the mirrors. Urs Fischer did the mirrors. It became a collaboration. It was fun. Rick— But then it looks like they [had] shown light on it somewhere, was it used for something? Kembra— I’ve been experimenting with day-glo body paint so we actually did the show with the mirror cock in the dark. Rick— So Fuck Island is the name of the whole album? And it’s a show revolving around these cocks? Kembra— Yeah. Cock. Karen Black has never really been about adult sexuality and I don’t even think Fuck Island is necessarily about adult sexuality, but it just has really loathsome song titles like “Magnum Man,” “Rebel Without a Cock” and “Soldier Female.” Rick— So cock songs set to a tropical beat. Kembra— It is really joyful. It’s very joyful. And I got around to doing all this cock imagery and stuff because of my Future Feminist Group. I’ve been so involved with the Future Feminists but I asked the Future Feminists if it was okay to be a dick pig and a feminist at the same time. Rick— And the answer was? Kembra— Well, they had to think about it actually. Rick— That sounds kind of deformed.

Kembra— It is totally. It’s the truth. So yeah, Fuck Island was really great to do at Lia’s gallery. She was really supportive. We made a choking poster, that’s also a name of a song too, “The Choking Poster.” Rick— Oh, that’s my favorite one I think. “Choking Poster.” Kembra— I have some to send to you. Rick— Okay good. Kembra— So let me think of some important things. When are you coming to New York? Will you have an art exhibit here? Rick— Well, I’m supposed to do a furniture show. You know those are the shows that I’m doing. I don’t really do art, I do furniture. Kembra— I believe that furniture is art as well. Rick— I like the idea of it. To tell you the truth, when I first set out I wanted to be a painter but I didn’t think I had the intellectual stamina to call myself a painter. Or I didn’t think I could really qualify intellectually to call myself a painter so I chickened out and became a designer. And I still kind of feel that way; I can’t imagine doing something and just calling it art. I don’t know if I have low self-esteem or what. I have to do something functional. Kembra— That means that what you’re doing is in the spirit of what is the decorative arts. And at the turn of the century that was the Decorative Arts movement where a lamp from Tiffany, or a door from Tiffany and decoration was considered art. I just think that the language for now, the vernacular for now, is a bit conservative or it has been for a while. Where you know you had this sort of classicist vision of what art was. I believe that decoration is fine arts. Rick— All of us deep, deep down inside know that art with a capital A is more heroic than decorative art. Kembra— Well, I think that my decoration is. I mean, it takes a hero to live like this, I’m sorry. Rick— I totally agree. I mean as far as I’m concerned you are totally heroic. Kembra— Extreme decoration is an art. How about this, I’m proposing to the culture and to this discussion for us to remove the capital A from art. Capital letters don’t fit anywhere. Rick— Yeah, I don’t know. If I did, I would just be like sour grapes. Is that what they call it? Sour grapes? Bitter grapes? Kembra— Well, I do understand that like, say, Michelangelo’s David... Is that art with a capital A? That sculpture? Rick— You know that in my head, that is kind of decorative. Kembra— In my world it’s just sexy. Rick— Do you go to a lot of those art fairs? Like Basel? Kembra— Honestly, I don’t really like going to art galleries or to art fairs or anything like that. That’s not where I find my inspiration. I’m not really interested in contemporary art in galleries. I would rather go to the comic book store or walk across the Williamsburg

Bridge.

Rick— I love galleries, but a lot of it is just

about the glamour and about the money and about big white empty spaces with monuments. And kind of the whole idea about mythologizing these monuments and these big white spaces is just irresistible to me. And it’s just so contemplative, it’s so corrupt and kind of sinister at the same time. I love going to galleries. Kembra— No, I do enjoy going to those galleries, but I feel like artists are not creating art for art’s sake, or art to communicate with other artists. They are making art for curators and collectors. Rick— A lot of it is very smarty-pants. Kembra— Yeah, I’m definitely not theoretical or I don’t have an academic interest in art. I like extreme decoration. And in New York what’s also very popular right now is really colorful abstract stuff, and I’m more interested in figurative work. And I don’t know if that’s popular or not. I guess I should try to go to more galleries maybe. I’m being very close-minded but I don’t have time. You know, starting these new movements is really time consuming. We are doing a new Future Feminist movement and it’s time consuming. Rick— When was the last time that you spoke to [performance artist] Ron Athey? I haven’t seen Ron in years. Kembra— Ron Athey was here doing something at Participant. And he did an incredible performance for his 50th birthday that was so beautiful. Lia organized for him to do a performance in a loft down near Canal Street. And he did this piece that was a bloody-blood letting piece. It was so gorgeous, oh my god he looked beautiful. And to celebrate his birthday he did this strange contortion at the end of the performance: after a complete blackout he turned around and put his fist up his own tushy and then started laughing. Rick— You look so beautiful Kembra. Kembra— I do? You do, Rick, you look beautiful. Rick— We’re ageing gracefully aren’t we? Kembra— Yeah, I think so. I mean, really I guess it seems like it. I mean, I’m a lot less ugly than other people my age. Rick— You and Ron should do something together. You should fist fuck Ron. Kembra— I know that I built this cock and stuff but I don’t really like doing that kind of realistic bodywork, it is not for me. It’s not in my vocabulary. I’m more of an anti-naturalist. Rick— Says the women who sewed her vagina shut. Kembra— Well, there was no penetration in that. Rick— No, it’s still seems kind of invasive. Kembra— Maybe there is just something too erotic about fisting that is a little too grownup for me. I still like doing things, like my adult sexual things very clandestinely. Rick— A hug and a kiss. Kembra— Well, other things too, but maybe a little less publically or something. I never wanted to do fornication or anything in my

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

performance artwork. I think Ron’s work is more about that extreme, more provocative and sexually referential stuff. I don’t think Karen Black is adult sexual at all. Rick— Well, it’s there but it’s not the highlight. Kembra— So maybe someday Ron and I will do something together but I’m not very good at doing performance. I think I’m just not a very good performance artist. Like I can’t do endurance performance, it’s like longer than a concert. Rick— Well, you know what you need? You need a nap. Kembra— I don’t want to do endurance performance. It’s not for me. Rick— Well, I don’t blame you. Kembra— If you were on a game show, Rick Owens, what would be your prediction for the next 10 years for the world? Rick— Oh, dear! I wouldn’t presume to predict anything. I can’t even predict exactly what I’m going to do next week. So I’m not a very good predictor. Kembra— Okay, good answer. I’ll have to say the same thing really. I feel like I can’t really think farther than my next project. I think that your designs are like your babies in a way. Rick— They totally are, and that was the only way I know how to communicate with the world and feel like I participated. So I do feel like when I die, I’m not going to regret [it]. I’m going to feel like I made an effort to participate. And I think that’s good. And I think I made an effort to participate to add something to the party and I think you are too. I think that’s tremendously valuable and I’m kind of proud of that. I’m proud of us both. Kembra— Yeah, I totally love what you do and I think it’s very generous. And I think when you have the kind of attention to detail like that and put it out into the world you have to create a climate for yourself that’s protective and maybe a little isolatory in order to have that concentration. Rick— It is frayed off, I agree. Kembra— I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. I think that you have to have all sorts of boundaries up so that you don’t get distracted. I feel that with Karen Black, if I let too much stuff in the eyebrow changes or something in the wig is not right. And it’s a constant job to keep things within the Karen Black aesthetic because it can so easily flip and become Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Creatures, Vampira or something that is not specifically Karen Black. So that requires some kind of boundary. So are you going to be in Paris for the next couple of months? I want to have my Giverny show at the l’Orangerie, the classic antique impressionist museum. I can come whenever I want but I want to come when you’re there. Rick— You know the l’Orangerie is right across the Seine from us. Kembra— You’re kidding. Rick— No, it’s like a three-minute walk. Kembra— Really? Oh, that would be fantastic. That would be wonderful. I’m so excited.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument — S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

N o. 3 5

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Perpetual Adolescence

L’enfant terrible Larry clark sits down with Chloë Sevigny, who first appeared in his cult classic Kids , to discuss his new film Marfa Girl , underage sex scenes and dating someone with roommates.

Interview By ChloË Sevigny p h o t o g r a p h y b y Da n M a r t e n s e n

D ocument — S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

fter the 1995 cult hit Kids, which received an NC-17 rating, director Larry Clark continued to make provocative films such as “Bully” and “Wassup Rockers” which analyzed the roles teenagers play in contemporary society. His use of unknown actors and non-professionals for his low budget films’ main roles set apart his body of work in relation to the big-budget, big-star, big-profit machinery of today’s blockbusters. Now in conversation with Chloë Sevigny, Clark talks to the actress he discovered about his new film Marfa Girl, the microcosm of west Texas and the magic of on-set teenage puppy love. Larry— Hi, Chloë. How are you? ChloË— Hi, Larry. Larry— So you’re in Los Angeles? ChloË— Yeah. Larry— Nice. Nice. ChloË— I just got a little guesthouse

because I was dating a boy out here and he lives with a roommate and I was like, “I don’t do roommates,” so I had to find my own situation. I’m 38 years old now; I’m not going to do roommates. Larry— That’s funny. I’m actually going to Marfa in the morning to photograph Adam and Mercedes for a Japanese magazine, more press for the film; I’ve been very impressed with this film, almost like every day, it’s amazing. ChloË— You’re really inundating everywhere. You went viral with the Rome Prize. Larry— I was a model this month for Italian Vogue and I felt like a piece of meat. I know what it’s like now. ChloË— Who was taking the pictures for Italian Vogue? Larry— Lele Suvari. He was very nice. They dressed me in Louis Vuitton by Marc Jacobs, and you know the suits are so tight you can see my balls it was like the ‘60s; a 70-year-old man wearing these ‘60s skin tight suits. I just did what I was told. ChloË— That reminds me of when we did that Details shoot. Before we even made the movie. We all had to wear those bad clothes. Larry— That’s right that’s before we made the film. We all needed money and it was good press for the film. That was funny. And here we are and now it’s 19 years later. ChloË— We should have a 20-year anniversary party or something. Larry— Yeah, we should do that. You’re the most interesting. I just got an email from somebody. I never got money for Kids for all these years. I never saw a penny. It made $50 million. Every year since then it’s been one of the top DVDs sold. I just got an email from someone who was trying to get a hold of it, the rights go back to the producers. I’m going to get a hold of them and say, “Now motherfuckers it’s time to get some money out of it.” The guys that produced it were those two venture capitalists. They were young and their fathers were like Washington millionaires and gave them $10 million a piece to play with. So they

wanted to make movies. That’s how Kids got financed. And they made one more movie and that was it. I don’t remember what it was. What they did, when we went to Cannes, was sell it territory by territory and what Miramax would do was package it with all their losers. So whoever bought Kids would have to buy like five other films. They have all these ways to mix up how much money the movie was making. They’re all fuckers. ChloË— They’re all fuckers. Larry— I never got a penny. When I won the Best Film at the Rome Film Festival and stood up and said fuck you all the corporate producers, the first guy to shake my hand when I came off the stage was my lawyer back then, who had one foot in production, but he was a lawyer, ChloË— I remember, he worked on The Last Days of Disco. Larry— He smiled and said I hope I wasn’t one of those guys. He made a lot of money. I had a great contract for Kids, I was supposed to get 15 percent or 12 percent and then my contract said that he negotiated that I had all the rights, but when I never got paid, a few years ago I looked at the contract with my attorney now and said this is a great contract but there’s no auditing rights. Even my lawyer was a crook. I remember it was you and me and it was trial by fire. And there would be scenes where we didn’t quite know what to do. With all the crew standing around and we would take 15 minutes or half an hour and discuss how to play the scene. It was really interesting. ChloË— Who financed Marfa Girl? Did you self-finance it? Larry— A young guy who has family money financed it. It was very good, it was very clean, because whatever movie comes into the website after he gets paid back, we split the money 50-50. It’s very clean. Family money, he’s an heir, which is good. He’s a very nice young man. He’s 34. They’re all kids to me. ChloË— Thank God for family money, huh? The trilogy is all Marfa? Larry— Yeah because at the end of Marfa Girl so much has happened to the kids in the last 10 minutes of the film, you know some physically some stuff is going to happen but psychologically you don’t know what’s going to happen. Marfa girl is lying on the floor. It just kind of ends. It’s fun now writing what might happen to them in the second one. I’m making it all up. I’m really having a good time. Since it turned out that Adam and Mercedes, that it was their 16th birthday, and he’s one day older than her. I want to do Marfa Girl 2 on their 17th birthday, I want to follow them. ChloË— Are they real life boyfriend and girlfriend? Larry— I cast them both separately. They are locals from the town. It turns out when I brought them both in that they had known each other since they were 8 years old, and had that kind of puppy love on set. I told the DP to stay on them on set, shoot through all these people and stay on them. They were playing around and falling in puppy love.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

That really helped the film. I really liked their love-making scene because it was so pure and innocent and fun. It was difficult to do. ChloË— You can’t really show them naked, you have to show them simulating right because they are under eighteen? I remember all that controversy from Kids. Larry— It was really tender and innocent, because they were doing it for the first time. It was a really funny scene too. I turned around during it because I was directing them and the producer was the only other guy in the room in the corner, and I said, “am I going too far?” I wasn’t sure. I was starting to get scared. They were just barely 16. ChloË— They’re like the most beautiful girls in the town. They’re so beautiful. That scene where they are standing at the fence, and they both have the holes in their jeans. It was so beautiful. Larry— It was actually an improvised scene with them standing there. I saw it and told the crew to get in front of them. I’ve always been really aware. When we had the scene with the four guys on the couch in Kids, that was the only improvised scene. We made up that scene on the couch. ChloË— That guy Javier works at Supreme on La Cienega. Larry— He was 12. Wow, 19 years, he must almost be 30. ChloË— People come up to me and go, “do you remember me?” And it’s like “No!” We were children. Larry— We’ve done a lot since then. You’ve done so much work. Did you do the English TV drama? ChloË— Yeah it was a series called Hit and Miss that I did over there. I think it’s going to be on Netflix. Larry— Was that fun to do? ChloË— It was really hard. It was my first time starring in something. It was my first time carrying something and feeling that responsibility. Larry— Well I want to see it. That’s really good. ChloË— But in England, with TV, they are all about the directors. It’s a director’s medium. Whereas in America they are all about the writer’s medium. Do they have any professional actors in any of these movies you’re doing? Larry— The young people from Marfa in the film were all first-timers. The people in the band were all local musicians. They were young. They were all 20, 22 years old. ChloË— How about Adam’s mom? Was she an actress? Larry— Yeah she was living in Marfa, and that was her house with the birds and the chickens, she hadn’t actually acted but I knew her in New York 21 years ago. She was Matthew Barney’s first wife. I had known her. ChloË— Oh right, the bird breeder. Larry— Yes. Mary Farley. When I went to Marfa and I had the idea to do this film, it was kind of like a microcosm of what was going on in America with all the racism and everybody

picking on the Latinos. It was like the ‘50s there, you couldn’t buy a condom in the town. It’s a little town of 1,800, there’s white ranchers. There’s still corporal punishment where they paddle the kids in the school. But they still have internet. The kids know what’s going on. Their dream is to get the hell out of west Texas. Mary went to Austin for the weekend to see her boyfriend and then stayed a month. So I had the house to myself, and I had fresh eggs every morning. I would go out and talk to the hens, talk to the chickens. And I had the idea why not have Mary play Adam’s mother? Adam would live there and get up and do his chores. All the other actors, like Donna and the border patrol agents, were all professional actors that I cast in Austin which is about a seven hour drive. There’s a very good acting school near there. Robert Rodriguez is near there. There’s a lot of actors there and it’s kind of an acting community. There was a mix of actors and first timers. Get this, I’m going to Paris to finish preparation on this French movie I’m going to make. We start shooting at the beginning of March. It’s kind of like a French Kids. But it’s different. There are all these roles for French actors. There’s this role for a 65-year-old woman. I’m going over to cast the professional roles in France. It will give me a chance to work with some of the great French actors we’ve seen over the years. Then I make the film. We have five weeks more prep, then shoot for five or six weeks and then edit. I’m doing it in French, and I don’t speak French. It’s going to be an adventure. ChloË— Better get a good translator. Larry— I’m confident. The kids speak English. The French are not so hard to figure out. I’ve been working with these kids. And I’m really excited. And it’s a challenge that I’ve always wanted to do. It actually goes back to Cannes when I spoke with Harmony, we met some kids there in France and I photographed them. We met the only skateboarder in Cannes I think. ChloË— He kind of stalked Harmony for years after that. Larry— Yeah. That’s right. I remember that. Harmony and I met his parents and everything, and his friends and it was really interesting. I remember telling Vince that I would love to make a film in French, and he said “Nah, you could never make a film in French.” If someone tells me I can’t do something, I always want to do it. I’ll try and prove you wrong. ChloË— You know Jim Lewis called me and said he was friends with one of the girls in the movie and said, “would you get on the phone with her and talk to her and maybe give her some tips on working with Larry?” and I said “No Way!” Larry— Drake Burnette was really great. She was in Louisiana. Jim kept telling me there was this girl you have got to see. He kept saying it and he wore me down. I was having trouble casting it. We actually Skyped for about four hours and we brought her in and

Drake Burnette

she’s wonderful. She’s living in Brooklyn now and modeling. ChloË— I feel like there’s a lot of press on her. Like with Kids, they are focused on the white girl. You think 20 years later we would have moved on from that. Larry— That’s true. There’s a lot on Mercedes too, she’s lovely. It’s going to come out, starting this month. An Italian magazine went down with me and photographed her and taped a conversation with her and Adam and I. I’m going down tomorrow to photograph her and Adam. She’s really lovely and quite beautiful and growing up. She was just 16. They’re teenagers. I went down a few months ago, I had to do a couple of lines with them. I needed to fill it in. I went down there and I met her. And I said, “you look tired, did you have a big night last night?” And she said, “yeah I went to a keg party last night.” I’m sure she’s going to be invited to any party in west Texas. The kid is going to have fun. I turned vegan five months ago and I’ve lost 20 pounds, it melted off of me. ChloË— I know you’ve been on this big health kick for a couple years. Larry— Yeah, I have so much more energy. I wake up and my energy is way up, it is through the roof. I’m strong and I’m healthy. I quit

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

sugar too.

ChloË— Good luck with that in France. That’s going to be difficult. Larry— I have found a few vegan restaurants there and they make great meals. So time’s are changing. You’ve like known me for 20 years. It’s extremes. How long will you be in California? Are you coming back? ChloË— I’m going to Paris on Monday to do press for the mini-series because it’s going to come out there. Then I’m going back to New York. And then I might come back and give it a whirl with this boy. Try to get work in the movies again, it’s been very difficult. Larry— I certainly hope you and I can work together again. It would be great to do it again. The gallery is having a birthday dinner for me on the 20th. Hopefully you can come. ChloË— Not at the Austrian place. Somewhere vegan. Larry— It’s the great Italian place in the Village, Sant Ambroes. Leo will come. The usual suspects. ChloË— I’ll be there.

Larry Clark will be featured in the upcoming “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” at the New Museum in New York running February 13—May 26, 2013.

a very egotistical endeavor so, when I’m bossing an artist around and being too dictatorial—which is my nature—I often try to flip back and ask myself if I’m being a good accompanist which is a good question for every curator to ask themselves.

s a pioneer of the Alternative Art Space movement, Alanna Heiss has been a key figure in the New York art world for over 40 years. As the founder and previous director of the legendary art museum MoMA PS1, located in Long Island City, she is a mentor to both an army of curators (including yours truly) and artists alike, since so many of them have passed through the halls of the former public school-turned-kunsthalle at some point in their career. In total she has curated over 700 exhibitions: from guerrilla-style shows under the Brooklyn Bridge in the early days of SoHo’s rise as an art mecca to major museum retrospectives worldwide. We met up just steps away from The Clocktower Gallery, the downtown art space she has been running since the early ‘70s, and where she has recently relocated her office to once again. As always our conversation covered the past, present and a lot about the future.

TIM— How do you feel about the enormous amount of curatorial studies that have developed all over the world in recent times? ALANNA— This background of being an accompanist, or having been vulnerable yourself on a stage, has been a very good training and much more useful for me than to have gone to a curatorial academy such as Bard. Honestly, I feel it is not the best training for curators. It eludes the most important thing which is working with living artists. By being their assistants or working closely with artists in a show, it’s information you can not get in a program, and you could be in such a program and never get it. You won’t be willing to work as an assistant because you are already “too important”—you got your masters in a curatorial program, and no internship will ever give you a real taste of working for an artist. It’s like getting into a sauna for two minutes. To be a good, experienced person who works with artists means being able to stay in the sauna for a really long time—to know what it’s like to sweat. I’m not very interested myself in those programs, and I tend not to hire people who have been in them. That is not to say they don’t learn anything, it’s just not the only way good, young curators are coming through the ranks.

TIM— Let’s start at the beginning: How does a young woman from the Midwest end up in New York in the early ‘70s and create these new things? ALANNA— I am happy and grateful that I spent a significant amount of time doing one thing—music—playing the violin and the piano. I was much better at the piano than the violin. I got a scholarship to go to conservatory for the violin. What I discovered was that I wasn’t very good compared to the young TIM— You have always surrounded yourN o. 3 8 people my age from around the country. self with great team members. What’s And simultanteously, that I was interyour secret? ested in a lot more things than just music. ALANNA— I’m proud to say that because When you are a serious musician of the of the circumstances at PS1 in the last 40 classic sort you spend maybe a quarter of years, or at The Clocktower until today, alanna heiss has made a your time in the practice room: you don’t the people that I chose or who chose to run around, you don’t have the same kind work with me (even if only for a couple of first- rate impression on of information coming your way like a libyears) are recognized for their brilliance new york’s art world. eral arts degree. When I realized I wasn’t and for their ability to produce. A PS1 team so good I talked to my teacher (this was member has, at some point, been involved in my second year), I was about 18, and in almost every major important institute B y T im G oossens he said, “You’re absolutely right, you’re or staff position in the world. I don’t know photograph by H ugh L ippe just not good enough to be an individual how it happened, people call me up all the performer.” So I asked, “I can always play time asking me about it. I don’t know. I in orchestras, right?” He replied, “If you do know I’m a very good scout for people stop running around with all these boys to work with. I have a good nose for this, and stop going to parties and you really I can pick good artists, but I’m actually recommit yourself to a solid five hours a day practice, you might be able even better at picking people to work with good artists. We had Carolyn to be second chair, second violin, in a third-rate orchestra.” So this was Christov-Bakargiev, who is now at Documenta; Chris Dercon, who just a staggering piece of news to me. It put it in concrete forms, and I worked with us in the ‘80s now runs The Tate, and Claudia Gould is could just imagine killing myself for the the next three years and then now the director of the Jewish Museum. And Klaus Biesenbach is cursitting in that second chair: the person who has to turn all the pages and rently doing a truly brilliant job of running PS1 today. You can almost is sort of the “bring-coffee bitch” for the first chair. Playing the second name a place and there is someone there in some role from PS1 in the violin is a very dreary place to be. You’re always doing the rhythmic side. past. I think that the skills taught through PS1 have been enormously I realized that what I wanted to do was be with first-rate people in helpful to the people in all these jobs. a first-rate city in a role which I would feel at the time was important within our cultural context. So it meant going to the U.S. and studying TIM— So with that background we just spoke about arriving in New contemporary art. I’m lucky that I realized this early on. York: Why become a curator? Why not a gallerist or impresario? Also, as a person who was going to be a performer and single per- ALANNA— I can speak now with the very happy feeling of success: former, it helped me understand what living, contemporary artists I feel I’m a very good chooser and producer and the last 40 years has faced. In either performance, or visual arts. You have to become vul- proven that. I never had the slightest interest in running a gallery. I don’t nerable, exposed for an audience that is just sitting there or that is serial know anything about retail or exchange. My husband says I’m almost and going there daily to look at your work. Many curators or art admin- allergic to it. It interests me so little that I don’t even know how much art istrators don’t have any idea of how scary it is to be an artist. is worth. It’s not something to be proud of, it’s just an absence of interI also learned a great deal from musical performance that I carried est. I find out how much something is worth when I fill out insurance over into the art world. Ever since I was 12, I had been living in small forms for their value. I hate selling—I hate selling anything. places in the middle of the country, performing as a rehearsal accompanist. I accompanied choirs. I played the organ. I played a lot of churches. TIM— But you’re so very good at selling shows. I worked a lot with quartets, and while working with them they taught ALANNA— No, I’m not (laughs). I’m really good at doing a good show, me a lot about harmony and how people work together. But there has but have only had a few touring exhibitions in my life because I can’t to be someone who is leading this and that person needs to be ready at put together a good sales pitch. I am very impetuous and I only want any time to give a note, or to pitch and do it with the least possible ten- to do shows when I want to do them—which is the next day. What I am sion, as softly as you can when someone is off key. But being an artist is capable of doing is convening my belief or passion for an artist to do a

Never Second Violin

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

show, and while the show is up. Or sometimes when it’s down. I really am responsive to an impulse. It’s a serial passion problem. Another reason I could never be a dealer is because I would never want to work with the same stable of artists. That would not interest me at all. TIM— Being a mentor for so many people, how was it to be a pioneer? Lonely? ALANNA— When I came back to England from 1969-1970, I had a lot of good ideas. I had done a lot of stuff in New York interning, working at the Hayward gallery, being an artist assistant. But it was during Vietnam, and as much as we liked being in the U.S., a lot of us chose to not surround ourselves with the daily horror of war. In Europe you could escape some of that. But after living in Europe for four years, I came back to New York with ideas mainly related to space. For instance, I went up to the Whitney, MoMA and the Guggenheim and asked them if they wanted to be part of an art storage project where we could have a storage facility to store their art and I would curate it, so people could come and see the art not on display. Back then, it made no sense to these museums, and through this year of proposing projects to museums I finally learned that, in fact, they didn’t want to show that art. I assumed they didn’t have the facility, I didn’t understand they just didn’t want to show it. It was a hard thing to realize, but it made me realize I didn’t want to work in one of those places at that time. I figured I will do a job, and then I will do others things too. I will be a producer, I will do shows. I often wonder why I didn’t become a producer in a film setting, and why I didn’t move to Los Angeles. Probably because I was in love with people in New York. That would have been a very happy place for me, not as a director and certainly not as an actor, but I would have enjoyed putting it all together. This passion did make me look into film producing and a little later—thanks to Francis Ford Coppola and his artist friends—I was able to go to the Philippines and hang out on the set of Apocalypse Now for the last three months of the production. Also, I knew Dennis Hopper from before because he was an artist and a very good collector, so I did know some of the people in the film and that was a mind boggling adventure. I was actually pretty happy to go back to the art world after hanging around the madness and strangeness of the film world. It was only much later when I started to know filmmakers that they told me Apocalypse was a notorious decadent and extraordinary circumstance. But at the time I thought that was the way things were and I wouldn’t want to sign up for that. It made the art world look tame, but also made it seem like the art world was full of people who cared about ideas that were more interesting to me. The difference was who was having the ideas and how they were being expressed. I just realized I wanted to be around artists. So no, I never felt lonely. Everything I did in those years always was with an artist and art-related people. We were a team, Gordon Matta-Clark was a special friend of mine. He was a terrific organizer—anything from dinner parties to exhibitions—and cook. He helped me organize the lists of people to contact for the first shows. Richard Nonas continues to be a best friend, we did many shows together—and still do, including one that will be opening in May. We all worked together every day–there was no internet. There weren’t any civilians in SoHo at that time, except some people who owned bars and were very happy to have the artists around because they drank all day and night. The area was an isolated village that we only left for exhibitions uptown. TIM— So then you start doing temporary exhibitions all over the city. Would you now call them pop-up exhibitions? ALANNA— My concept in the ‘70s was to use spaces and buildings in the city. It was a very depressed city and so much was closed down, over all boroughs. I decided the places I would use should be owned mostly by the city, but I also experimented with private ownership. The difficulty in that was to make owners feel comfortable lending the space for a certain amount of time. Most people don’t realize, but having a sitting tenant in New York is one of the most horrible things to happen to real estate people, because an empty building is safe and then they can wait until the market picks up to rent out. Having it bound up with art projects was a nightmare for them. Really, only in last 10 years it has become a viable option for anyone. In the ‘70s it was almost im-

possible to get these spaces, but I would figure out ways to get them. I was always following five buildings at the same trying to get my hands on them. At the height of my ridiculous non-profit real estate empire I was probably running nine or 10 spaces. That means they were open and running but it doesn’t necessarily mean they were open all the time. In many cases I would put artists in the space with the idea they would build the show and it could open in three months. One space that came through very early on was a private space on Bleecker Street which was a source of two to three years of shows in a burned-out warehouse that was free, but it had no windows or no doors. Our space had no water or electricity either, and people would walk by and see through gaping windows that someone was in there. There was no way to guard it so the artists for those places were very carefully chosen. I also had a place in Coney Island that was owned by a development agency within the NYC government called the Coney Island Sculpture Museum, it was a huge warehouse and we did a series of shows there over the course of two years. I also had the two top floors of a police station in Crown Heights, which was a dramatic failure. I wanted to use it as a studio location for neighborhood artists who really needed the studios. The spaces available of course were the jail cells. The police were also quite mystified because they had hoped that the artists in the studios would be wearing berets and would be painting on an easel with naked models everywhere. So that of course was not the case and a downer for them too. So we gave that up in about a year, but you always learn from your failures. TIM— The space you currently still run, The Clocktower Gallery, dates also from that early stage. ALANNA— The Clocktower is something I looked for, constantly almost every day for about two-and-a-half years. I finally opened it in 1972. I looked at towers all over New York, climbing to the roof, making notes before moving on to the next building. I wanted the Chrysler Building tower, but it turns out to be a very rotten space for art. It was being used as a radio station at the time. But The Clocktower is of course the most beautiful tower, designed by Stanford White, this great cube of 28x28x32 feet: the golden ratio. It took about a year before we finally did got it, and we’ve had it ever since. I also had a house on top of a roof on John Street, near Wall Street. To get there you had to walk across the roof. The building was governed by the Dutch Reformed Church and nobody was remotely interested in walking across a roof to a house which had no plumbing. There was always something missing in my places: plumbing, electricity or heat and occasionally it was up on a roof. That cute little house became my office while I was managing all these different buildings. We had an umbrella organization called The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, which is too long for the police to remember when they issue summons. Eventually I moved my office to The Clocktower, and gave up the John Street address. These shows were as far away from pop-up as you can get. But I also had the Idea Warehouse in Tribeca. It was hugely important in setting a standard for how to show performance art. The idea at the time was that an artist would be in a show for three-and-a-half-weeks and in the two day period before the next show very farsighted dealers like Paula Cooper would invite a dancer to do something in that gap. Since performance was so much part of the ‘70s community I reversed the gap: you were in residency for three weeks, and in the gap between the next performance you need to do a public performance for us. The first person at the Idea Warehouse was Philip Glass, and that set the bar very high. Anthony McCall was in a beautiful show there. A little bit later the place caught fire, and we had to give it up. The spaces were so successful that in the middle of the ‘70s city leaders came to my team with the idea of opening an art center in one of the boroughs. I could choose and they would back me. The one in Brooklyn was in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, the one in Queens was PS1. The one in the Bronx was more like an area in the South Bronx, but at that time it was unworkable. I had spent a lot of time in the South Bronx when I first moved to New York, actually one of my first jobs was as a woman parole officer for male offenders between 18 and 25. It was an experiment to choose a 100 pound blonde woman, and for six months I saw all these criminals who took me to the Apollo Theater, so I learned

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

ferent. So let’s do the next next thing, let’s get in with the best museums in the world. No longer second violin in a third rate city, but first-rate museum in a first-rate city. Once PS1 was in the MoMA family, it had to prove itself within that setting. I found that enormously interesting and still think it was a great thing to do. It has been said by many that the old PS1 is now gone, but I think the new animal is worth it. TIM— New York has also changed, so maybe a place like that can’t and doesn’t need to exist anymore within this context? ALANNA— Right. We never had any money, and many of the shows were so good because of this spontaneous approach we were impulsive and largely driven by artists. We didn’t have the luxury of sitting back, we made choices like medics in war zones. But these days, with galleries having emerged as really important show makers—which I say with sadness—I don’t see the romance in the whole artist-gallerist relationship. Now, often galleries show the artists first. It was unimaginable to me in the first 20 years that I would be showing artists that I saw first in a gallery, I would have seen that artist first in another exhibition or their studio but never through a gallery introduction. Today’s challenges are just so very different, and I think that PS1 has been meeting those challenges in very different ways. Klaus Biesenbach has embarked on a very ambitious program, with projects that need money, like the Performance Dome. We together talked for years about a circus tent, which was for a long time a wild dream. Him being the much better fundraiser, dreamed of a dome, and he found the money. At The Clocktower, I am so happy that everyone who works there do projects that they want to do and that we don’t have budget meetings every day. It’s a very differnt model. I know it means that nobody has any money, including me. I wish we had the money, but that’s not really the point. It has been a joy to be there in this old-fashioned way. Visitors come and they say they feel like they are in a time-warp. Artists that are older, and who remember the old days feel like they are back in the ‘70s or the ‘80s music scene. It’s utopian, not realistic, nothing that helps pay the rent, but it does help foster truly original ideas. Security has gone up significantly since the attacks in 2001, so we don’t get a lot of visitors but the online radio station we run since 2003 is a way to reach many people who tune in to hear about our projects from all over. It is not pop radio, but it is more music and talk show for artists, and people can learn about many things.

F r o m l e f t t o r i g h t: Sebastien Levin, volunteer; Sean Ernest Carter, volunteer; David Weinstein, Clocktower Program Director & Member; Richard Pandiscio, Clocktower Design Consultant; Todd Eberle, photographer; Mary Heilmann, artist; Marina Abramovic, artist and Member, Clocktower Board of Directors; Alanna Heiss, Clocktower Director and Member, Clocktower Board of Directors; Lawton Fitt, Chairman, Clocktower Board of Directors; Sanford Krieger, Esq., Member, Clocktower Board of Directors; Beatrice Johnson, Clocktower Managing Director; Will Corwin, artist and Clocktower radio host; Dan Taeyoung Lee, Clocktower Web & Systems Technologist; Rufus Wainwright, musician and Member, Clocktower Board of Directors; James Franco, artist; Jeannie Hopper, Clocktower Station Manager; Lex Fenwick, C.E.O., Bloomberg Ventures; Ben Gottlieb, Clocktower Production Assistant; Joe Ahearn, Clocktower Curator of Performance and Installation.

TIM— Do you see places in the world that remind you of New York in the ‘70s? ALANNA— The place that was always a particular parallel world for me is Berlin, and thanks to friends, I was an early invitee to be a judge for the DAAD program. The grant program brought in artists from all over the world before the fall of the Berlin wall. Because I was involved early on, visitng at least once or twice a year from 1974 on, I feel as if I really know the city. Right now I have two places that really interest me: one of which is the Bronx. It’s hard to get to, and I don’t want to be so sadistic as to make everyone visit places they don’t want to go. But the Bronx seems wide open, the people there are “big city people” but they are also very friendly the way people are in a small town. The city is planning to sell The Clocktower building, which is horrible for me because I love it so much, and for the organisation, but progress is progress. We are hoping that whoever the developer is would want to keep this landmark art space and give it a future, but if we have to look for another space, with the city of course, we can hopefully find a space in Lower Manhattan, even though Brooklyn is a logical place to go for us since there are so many musicians, but The Bronx is very tempting, and there are so many good people working there like Holly Block. Another place that I don’t know much about, but would love to go to is Detroit. There seem to be a lot of interesting artists, and they are there for some of the same reasons why artists came to New York in ‘70s: it’s the wild west, an environment that is decayed and any answer at all must be listened to. I think the idea of reopening the Homestead acts, allowing people the have an acre of ground is a remarkable idea in an urban city. TIM— Sounds like you found your next project.

about early hip hop. I was a good experience for me, I wasn’t scared of the Bronx, but I also wasn’t willing to put any more effort in burned-out buildings. The artists and collectors I took around all said PS1 is the place–the light comes so beautifully off the river, and it was easy to get to. Instead of being a guerrilla and using all these empty spaces—which by then was being done all over the U.S.—I thought great I’ll keep The Clocktower and PS1. But PS1 was never about alternative spaces: I wanted it to be an antimuseum, to run it like a kunsthalle, European-style—no trustees, ticket distributions or collecting. Once you are passed the age of 26 you start to recognize that it’s very easy to be a radical or guerilla by saying “this is no good.” But it is hard to be a builder, because you have to say this is good for the following reasons. I changed from being the adored child of the radical art world to being that person that had to go to work to the same place every day, and answer a lot of phone calls, and do a lot of things that were not my first choice. I of course hired people to help me and created terrific teams throughout the years, allowing me to be the chaotic one, which was true all the way through the merger with MoMA in 2000. PS1 had proven by then it was what it was, it wasn’t going to be anything more than it was, or any better than it was, it could only be dif-

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

is now being shown in cinemas, Black Swan was a blockbuster, So You Think You Can Dance is very popular, so there are little infiltrations of these traditional artistic forms into popular culture. But it’s not like when Nureyev was dancing and on the covers of magazines. Charles— I wonder how much of ballet’s popularity or lack thereof is its restriction to traditional theaters? As you know, my firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, while primarily an architecture firm, dabbles in all forms of cultural production including dance and theater. One of our preoccupations is the space of the theater itself—we’ve been tearing it apart and reassembling it for years, trying to make it new or unrecognizable. And a lot of performance and time-based art has broken out of the traCharles— I don’t want to start this discussion with the typical “how ditional theater, moving into the city and street, expanding its audience does it feel to be the first American dancing at the Bolshoi” or “how old and making its subject matter more contemporary. Should ballet atare you” but rather go for the jugular: Why ballet? I’m curious about tempt a venue shift? Could it survive such a change or is it completely this from both a personal and cultural point of view, from a place that’s dependent on the sense of remove and magic that only a proscenium larger than you and will outlast your direct contribution to it. What does can provide? ballet mean in the 21st century and what do you hope to do with it? David— I think it certainly is a place of remove. That’s something I absolutely love about it. Not just in terms of value, but the act of sitting David— What a great kickstarter. For me it’s more of a question of not just, “why ballet, but why art?” I like to think of myself as more than in an actual theater, not being allowed to check your phone. For me it’s just a ballet dancer. To speak in basic terms, ballet chose me. I had no therapy, because I have to sit there for two hours and listen or watch. It’s amazing where your mind goes and choice. It was this gust of wind or force what is hashed out while you’re watching stronger than myself, working behind me N o. 4 2 a piano recital or an opera—about your and propelling me forward. It’s more of a calling than a profession. Consequently I day, your stresses, your relationship or love it and I have huge amounts of respect whatever, not to mention the pure bliss for it. But to answer your question, why of the experience itself. I find that experiare people drawn to art? Why are people ence extremely sacred as well. Too often drawn to people creating art? For me, it’s we are allowed to distract ourselves with Dancer David Hallberg thinks the questions of life as a whole. It’s not alother things. of ballet in existential terms. ways about beauty. I think it goes deeper Charles— Contemporary visual artthan that. I think it begins to uncover disists are more than ever working multiAS Part of the Bolshoi BAllet, he turbing existential questions of why we modally and multidisciplinarily. You have wants to propel the ensemble are here. My work addresses questions mentioned your respect for the Ryans: into the the 21st Century. that I am asking about my life. I cry with Ryan Trecartin, Ryan McGinley and Ryan HEre he speaks with Architect art, I cry about what I do, I laugh, I want McNamara. Each of these artists resists to kill myself, I want to crawl in a hole and traditional classification and is making Charles Renfro about disappear. All of the above really. It’s bigwork that is antithetical to the rarefied Proficiency and the ethereal ger than ballet I think. space of the theater or museum. These place of remove. guys are working right in the moment, Charles— When you and your Rusmaking work which reflects or informs sian Bolshoi partner rose to your feet after popular culture with media being a comyour first performance of Romeo and Juliet, mon thread. I was curious about how you you were both in tears. I almost started I ntervie w B y C harles R en f ro photography by Daniel S ann wald use media and social media in your work crying when I read about that moment. and in your personal life and how artists What was going through your mind? like Ryan Trecartin either factor into the David— I think for once in my career I actually wasn’t portraying the character, I was the character. I have had way you think about your art or not. There must be a crossover there. a really hard time differentiating between being an interpreter of classic David— Social media can be so completely self-centered or shallow ballets and being the character I’ve been given. That was one of the very, or obvious with everyone fed a boring and predictable obsession about very few moments where I felt like I was Romeo, and over the course Gaga or whoever. But I think it’s also a platform to express what you of three hours, I lived a lifetime: from a child screwing around with his like, what you deem worthy. I have a public life on Twitter and Facefriends being an asshole, to falling in love at first sight, to conflict, to pain book and Tumblr where I post what interests me. Ryan Trecartin and and death. You don’t know what has hit you. Life has forever changed. people who are using media and the “now” as their content make for Both my partner and I experienced all of that for real on stage that night. quite a disjunct with a ballet dancer. Because ballet is a classical art Charles— That’s an amazing catharsis to have shared with the audi- form, it demands a certain aesthetic rigor and physical discipline to uphold the standards of the form. A complete career is made out of simply ence. That wasn’t you being Romeo, that was Romeo as you. Ballet is a pure art form based on specific language handed down being a classical ballet dancer. But my insatiable curiosity always gets through generations. It’s not as open as modern dance or time based the best of me, and I do wonder about doing some sort of multi-media, art so it would seem that much of the mission of contemporary classi- Trecartin-esque dance piece. I think it would be interesting. I am atcal ballet must be about preservation and education. Is that an accurate tracted to artists who keep you guessing. Artists who are challenging what you think of them. What I’ve run into as a classical ballet dancer assessment? is that people typecast you. People say “you’re the prince.” I’m grateful David— Yeah. I think that is the one of the biggest challenges in classical ballet today. There is an idiom and there is a technique that has been for it, I don’t take it for granted. But I would love to try and show people preserved for hundreds of years which is in and of itself beautiful. The the dirty side. Bolshoi has financial support from the government to uphold certain Charles— I think the dirty side is really interesting. Do you choreostandards, which might seem to be archaic. A lot of what is presented graph or want to? or expected of a dancer appears archaic, particularly in relation to a David— I don’t. I feel like choreography is something that is your callcontemporary audience. Most kids aren’t exposed to ballet. It’s not part ing. My standards for choreography match my standards for dancing. of mass culture and it makes me question what I’m doing a bit. I won- I demand a lot from a choreographer. It’s daunting to think about. der how I can move ballet forward in lockstep with my passion. Opera I don’t have a natural calling to test movement out. I could very well go

Le Grand Jeté Forward

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

G rooming by A drien P inault at M anagement A rtists and Tomo J idai at S treeters .

avid Hallberg raised more than eyebrows after his appointment as the first American principal of the Bolshoi ballet, including public critique directed at the Bolshoi’s artistic director. Dividing his time between Moscow and New York, where he is also a principal of the American Ballet Theater, Hallberg is as active as he is exacting. The dancer sat down for a conversation with Charles Renfro, the renowned architect and partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who himself is responsible for designing some of the most acclaimed dance spaces at Julliard, Alice Tully Hall, the ICA in Boston, and the American Ballet Theater studios.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

into the studio and test something out but more often than not it would be total bullshit. Charles— We must respect the experts for their expertise. Though we are good and have opinions about everything, we’re not always the best in everything we’re involved in. We want the best. This suggests that the best work is made in collaboration with others. Is that something you seek out in your work? David— Completely. The challenge is finding the right collaboration. I have tried to forge collaborations before and they haven’t worked because my ambition gets the best of me. Sometimes working with an artist that I truly respect doesn’t flow naturally. It feels forced. Charles— Can you name someone you’ve worked with? David— Sure. Jerome Bell. He’s not a dancer but he created deconstructed dance in France. Beautiful. I was 24 and sent him an email through his website. I saw a piece of his in New York and thought it was the greatest thing I had ever seen. I sent him an email and told him that and added that I’d love to work with him if he ever had any interest, though that wasn’t my intention for writing the email. He said something like “how does a ballet dancer want to work with me, this is so weird, who are you, I’m intrigued.” So for about a year and half we traded ideas. Then I travelled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on my own dime where he was doing performances. I met him cold to see if we could work something out. It was so ballsy. Charles— It’s like when my mom brought home other dogs to mate with ours. She got all the family around to watch them do it but it would never happen. David— I have the same childhood experiences. We put the golden retrievers in the garage. And we kind of just watched them. I was like five. Charles— Middle America! How did that meeting end up? David— It prospered for about a year and a half. We were in final stages in Paris closing in on the piece and had about 45 minutes worth of material. Jerome said, “Where is the conflict?” and I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “This doesn’t show me any conflict. It shows me that you like what you do; you respect what you do; and you’re curious. But why are you here? Why are you meeting me? Is there something you aren’t telling me or aren’t ready to tell me?” And he said, “This isn’t going to work out right now.” I was devastated. I was 25 at that point. But maybe when I’m 45 we’ll do something together. We still talk and see each other whenever we’re in the same town. Charles— Do you feel hesitant to reach out to potential collaborators because of that? David— I’m cautious. I’m cautious because what I’ve noticed is that people have preconceived notions of a classical ballet dancer. And especially with the artists I want to work with. I’m not calling up the equivalent of George Balanchine, I’m calling up Ryan McGinley or whoever. Charles— It does suggest that there is a bit of you that is trying to determine where a moment of intersection with more populist, contemporary art practices might be. It seems like you would let something emerge naturally out of a found or discovered situation rather than force it top down. David— Yes. Again it’s my insatiable curiosity. Charles— Speaking of curious, I’m curious who is out working in the ‘classical’ world that is right on the edge of what would be considered classical. A dancer or choreographer that’s about to be ‘ejected’ from the classical club because they are pushing the envelope a bit too much. Perhaps they have a foot in two camps. Is that interesting? David— Yes. A perfect example is Pina Bausch and people who are still working in the classical idiom like Christopher Wheeldon or Wayne

McGregor. Wayne is going to be doing a new ballet at the Bolshoi and he’s really pushing things forward though still using classical ballet dancers and form. But Pina is a great example of someone that had classical training but then expanded her outlook. She went to Wuppertal and said “this is how I see art.” Everyone said it was bullshit for a while. No one could see that her work originated in the classical idoim. It had narration. It was somewhere between theater and dance. It was beautiful, brilliant, amazing. Charles— And Forsythe. David— He has such a mind. I have nothing but great things to say about him. I don’t know him well but he’s going, he’s pushing. It’s unbelievable. Charles— We thought of the High Line as an unfolded theater with visitors alternating between spectator and performer. The city plays an active role as well, impacting the actions of the visitors. It constructs performative narratives between people. Would you ever think that your dance could invade the real world? Could it be more imbedded in life? Or does that cause it to lose its power? David— That’s a good question. It loses its magic. I think there’s such unbelievable beauty in the theater, in maintaining the forth wall and the voyeurship that theater imbues. I have watched performances where you witness love, death and every emotion. When you take it out of that rarefied place it’s a completely different kind of atmosphere. Perhaps it’s just a problem with classical ballet. There have certainly been amazing examples of artists interacting with the viewer. Marina Abramovic is a good example. Charles— Breaking down the fourth wall has been such a preoccupation in the second half of the twentieth century whether it’s in art or performance art or dance or theater. Jerome Bell places cardinal markers on the stage to lock the theater into a real place, making the walls “transparent.” But he’s not asking you to suspend your suspension of disbelief, he’s actually fictionalizing reality— he’s commodifying the outside world by bringing it into the controlled environment of the theater. The theater guarantees a fixed point of view and allows careful construction of effect. David— And you’re confined by certain requirements. Charles— I want to talk about age. A ballet star is kind of like an athlete. You will lose physical ability over time. How does one deal with that? Do you anticipate a moment where you take your art into a place that is related but an offshoot? David— This is a sensitive topic for a lot of dancers but not for me. I turned 30 in May. It was the greatest birthday I’ve had. And 30 in the real world sounds so young, but 30 is a milestone in the dance world. What I got when I turned 30 from a lot of dancers was “oh, but you look 22.” What exactly were they implying? Ballet dancers have an expiry date. There’s no two ways around it. I have made the conscious decision not to be afraid and not to be ignorant to the aging of the ballet dancer. My job is to stay as alert and aware of as many art forms and realities and questions and desires that can facilitate me being an artist in a bigger way. I know I’m not going to do Sleeping Beauty forever, but I can always create. I don’t have a choreographic voice but I would love to lead some sort of arts organization, kind of act as a curator. If that means being director of a ballet company, great. If that means being a facilitator in bringing artists to an organization, great. The medium has yet to be determined. Charles— I know we all think of professional athletes that way. Baryshnikov has defied a lot of people’s expectations. David— Totally. He has done theater, TV and film. Charles— I imagine one of the things you want to do is educational in nature, preserving the art form and introducing it to new audiences.

“Every artist— a ballet dancer, or a painter, or anyone, even an architect— needs their place of creation; a private place of creation more importantly. When you are being gawked at, when you are being watched, it inevitably changes the conditions of creation.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

You have the advantage of working in a media-centric age. Your work is already being archived and disseminated throughout the world. This may be a first in the ballet world. David— There is the question of responsibility as well. What is my responsibility to this art form? What do I owe to it? I have dedicated years and years of training and care and respect to it. So now with that knowledge, after years of a professional career, what is my responsibility to it? Charles— What do you think that is? David— Well, first and foremost, it’s still very much alive. It still has a beating heart. People may think that Swan Lake is over but they still want to see it. Part of my responsibility is that ballet stay crisp, clean and modern. Not modern in a Raf Simons way, but stylistically fresh. For this reason, I’ve started a scholarship at ABT that mentors young students. It’s a small way I can help kids who are aspiring to be who I am. Charles— DS+R worked at ABT, making two glass enclosed studios within two existing ones. Between them we made a transparent gallery for parents to watch their kids. We wanted to reveal the process of making ballet. But the school wanted more control, so the glass is electronically dimmable, blurring views into the studios at the touch of a button. It allows for an expanded audience while guaranteeing a safe creative space. David— Every artist—a ballet dancer, or a painter, or anyone, even an architect—needs their place of creation; a private place of creation more importantly. When you are being gawked at, when you are being watched, it inevitably changes the conditions of creation. You are never not aware of someone looking at you. When the likes of Anna Wintour would call and ask for access to ABT for a profile in Vogue, even if it was pitched as non-invasive, the school would recoil. It’s not like the fashion or film world. We’re not media based. Leave us alone–we’re doing our thing.

Charles— Everyone and everything is overexposed. To navigate the litany of information we’re constantly exposed to, we’re forced into a defensive position. We can’t let new things in, only things we already know and experience. We are determining in advance what makes us happy and gives us pleasure. We’re eliminating the process of discovery. Ironically, ballet may offer a recourse to this predictability. While it’s part of an artistic continuum, it’s so removed from the here and now it just may be the escape we need. David— That’s a really great way to explain the ethereal side of dance. It’s live and it’s real. That amazing performance can never be repeated. How can you capture that on film? Charles— What about growing up gay? For me, being gay in Texas forced me to focus as a way to escape persecution. I became quite good at clarinet. I got a full scholarship on music at Rice University. Though I didn’t plan it that way, my defensive escape became my ticket to success. I wonder if you’ve had a similar experience? David— Take your classical music experience and change it to dance. I grew up in suburbia. I went to Desert Shadows middle school, a public school. I was called every name in the book. I was really affected by it. I didn’t raise my fists, I didn’t fight back, I just took the abuse. Now, I’m involved with an organization that is called Live Out Loud that empowers gay youth. It’s very anti-bullying. When I was being bullied and being called a faggot every day it didn’t always have to do with the fact that I was a dancer, it had to do with my affectations or my character. But being a dancer obviously added fuel to the fire. Other dancers tried to hide it, but I never questioned whether I would continue dancing. Every time school would end, six times a week, it was my escape. And thankfully that blossomed into all of the above. My life. Charles— You’re amazing to watch as a dancer and as a person. I wish you the most luck.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Natural complications

Artist Jack Goldstein’s legacy lingers as a master of minimalism, video and appropriatioN.

T ext by R achel P idcoc k

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

N o. 4 6

B I m ag e S

Previous spread: Untitled, 1981 Acrylic on canvas. This page, clockwise from top left: Burning Window, 1977, Installation; The Jump, 1978, 16mm film, color, silent; Untitled, 1981, Acrylic on canvas; MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, 1975, 16mm film, color, sound; A Ballet Shoe, 1975, 16mm film, color, silent; Untitled, 1988, Acrylic on canvas; James Welling, Jack Goldstein, the Pacific Building, February 27, 1977, 2012, Inkjet print Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.

eing aware of Jack Goldstein in his resurging posthumous glory of existential exploration and insular nihilism lends itself to questioning the greater picture of an artist. Goldstein’s trajectory of work, from conceptual performance to photorealistic painting, begs a comment on the vulnerable nature of artistic success despite time, place or medium. As a person Goldstein struggled with his own demons and as an artist he struggled with the art world’s demonizing of his later paintings. With the upcoming show “Jack Goldstein x 10,000” at The Jewish Museum this spring, viewers can revisit and perhaps reinterpret Goldstein’s work not only in terms of an artist whose suicide in 2003 brought a distinct close to his story but also as a contemporary master of anxious minimalism. After studying under John Baldessari at CalArts in the ‘70s, Goldstein moved to New York and pursued his art along with others such as Robert Longo, Matt Mullican and Cindy Sherman in what is now known as The Pictures Generation. The group appropriated photographs and everyday images to make art that came into popularity for collectors in the late ‘70s. Goldstein’s use of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion and pink ballet shoe for two of his short films echoes the stylistic decisions of those around him. But more distinctly in Goldstein’s work there is a hovering darkness that envelopes and sinks into the viewer as if one was looking at a scene that could turn into a disaster at any moment and you’re not sure where you should run to get away from its impending momentum. You want to flee but you’re also insanely curious. Even today his films and paintings have a remarkable ability to initiate a sense of yearning for something beyond what the material world can provide. Looking at Goldstein’s paintings through an apocalyptic lens of insecurity, one notes the tense visualization of phenomena that appears natural but are actually catastrophic and eerie. In “Untitled,” 1981, one can hear the whirring of the plane’s engines circling and circling over the black desolation below. Goldstein relied on the help of many assistants for his airbrushed acrylic paint on canvas works, including his primary assistant for many years, Ashley Bickerton. For the recent show, “Where is Jack Goldstein?” at New York gallery Venus Over Manhattan, Bickerton wrote a catalog essay on Goldstein that includes some insight into the artist as a chain-smoking, complicated man and his “perfect, impenetrable opacity.” Bickerton notes Goldstein’s preference for looped sound and “exploding landscapes” which today remain two elements that signify his artistic legacy. Collectors’ interest in Goldstein’s paintings dwindled by the late ‘80s and he slipped rather seamlessly into obscurity until the 2004 Whitney Biennial where his films appeared with renewed interest. Goldstein’s ability to distill an image to its most basic view, like the isolated figure of “The Jump”, expressed his pure minimalistic tendencies to single out essence while making the piece available for 1001 readings. Today his pivotal works are muddled with his tragic end in the California desert. The desire Goldstein must have had to communicate to the world his insides—his struggles, his thoughts, his satisfactions, his discrepancies—radiates from his work, but his path into isolation has enclosed him in history, and the viewer feels a bit cut off from any current interpretation. However, the relevancy of his work and his influence over contemporary practice remains unquestionable. And so one can continue to look, and interpret, and sort for ourselves the darkness that radiates and consumes. “Jack Goldstein X 10,000” will open at The Jewish Museum on May 10, 2013.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

N o. 5 0

AMnesia in Mesopotamia

In ��, Bagdad’s National Library was reduced to rubble Eradicating a complex culture, whose ghosts loot the Iraqi psyche indefinitely. art historian and archeologist Zainab Bahrani shares her story.

By Zainab Bahrani p h o t o g r a p h y b y R o g e r L e m oy n e

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

urned books transformed to ashes, drenched and pulverized fragments of documents scattered on the ground. This is what remained of the greater part of The National Library and State Archives of Iraq after the US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. A centuries old archive of not only state events and political concerns, but also the Ottoman era documents of people’s lives, of land deeds and marriages, of inheritance and kinship ties had been both burned in fire and damaged by water. The buildings in which they were housed transformed into burned-out shell-like structural ghosts of iron beams, soot and ashes. Soon after the invasion, some archival material of historical importance was either removed or confiscated by the U.S. At the same time, it became clear that finely made old books— hand calligraphy Medieval manuscripts— were

also stolen by looters for an international market in rare books and manuscripts. At the Iraq Museum of Archaeology, clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing, thousands of years old, were stolen along with the other looted archaeological artifacts and works of art; and even today, cuneiform tablets continue to be smuggled out of the country. All of these written documents, letters, books, manuscripts, legal and official papers, and even the files that the surveillance-obsessed police state of Saddam Hussein kept on its own population (similar to the Stasi files), are what form the stuff of documents in a literate culture. And Mesopotamia, let us remember, is the world’s first literate culture. The damage, destruction, erasure and theft of its written archives, no matter how seemingly mundane, whether it is a matter of police surveillance records or land deeds, is poignant to those who

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

“The remains of the Ottoman archive, the history of Iraq for over four hundred years, were for a time stored in this bombed building, held together by an old kitchen freezer.”

what remained of monuments, archaeological sites and museum collections after the destruction of the 2003 ground war. When I arrived in Iraq I quickly realized that I shared this archive fever with the head of the National Library, Dr. Saad Eskander, and with a number of other Iraqi intellectuals, students and museum professionals, each of whom applied her or himself as if driven by some Medieval genie let out of a bottle from the One Thousand and One Nights. We had in common a reckless obsession with preserving history, things and documents. Many told us we were misguided, that we should not focus on inanimate things when people were dying, but we saw these forms of annihilation as two sides of the same coin. The first two years of war and occupation were a violent time of horrendous destruction. I remember driving through the streets of Baghdad searching for any buildings still standing that we might reappropriate for housing what remained of the collections of the library, since the library building itself had turned to ruins. At one point, the remains of mildewing historical papers had to be kept frozen so that continuing damage could be stalled until conservators could come, and proper paper conservation methods applied. Dr. Eskander had found an abandoned freezer in the kitchen of bombed-out remains of the private club where formerly the Baathist elite officers had gathered for an evening’s entertainment. There was of course no electricity, so he acquired a generator to keep the freezer going, and hired a guard to stand in front of the generator. The remains of the Ottoman archive, the history of Iraq for over 400 years, were for a time stored in this bombed building, held together by an old kitchen freezer. This is the kind of bricolage and creative thinking that went into the conservation work of people like the director of the National Library, when little help came from the outside world and from the occupying authority. There are many such stories to tell about heroic efforts by what remained of the Iraqi scholars and intellectuals in the first years of the war. Hundreds of university professors and intellectuals were also assassinated in those years, and, like other Iraqi War dead, no official record has been kept of their deaths. The Baathist secret police archive was airlifted out of Iraq by U.S. forces, and is now housed in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Destruction of archives incites a collective amnesia, an eradication of memory by means of erasing its documentary and historical apparatus, consigning it to the flames. Because of the destruction of documents and the record of the history of kinship and ties to place that all the peoples and religions of Iraq have, those who wish to incite ethnic hatred and religious intolerance can rewrite history as they please. When documents are confiscated by foreign powers the result is similar; without them there can be no reconciliation for Iraq, and there can be no peace.

are aware of world history. History begins in Sumer, as the great American scholar Samuel Noah Kramer once said, and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminds us that the word archive has its roots in the Greek word for beginning and for authority. Without control of the archive there is no political authority, he said. In Iraq of 2003, the loss of the archives was the first step to the loss of a national collective memory. In 2003 and 2004 while working on the preservation of cultural heritage in Iraq, I first encountered the destroyed remains of the National Library and State Archives, an institution which is equivalent to the Library of Congress in the United States. The war had induced in me a fixation, a type of archive fever that led me to Iraq in the first two years of occupation, where I had hoped to do whatever I could to save

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Da r k B e au t y

Black anthirium, amaryllis, black privet berry, red peony and purple/black vanda orchid—the idea here was to use the deepest, darkest flowers available and play off the textures: the gloss finish of the anthirium next to the velvety petals of the amaryllis; the folds of the peony against the graphic nature of the berries and orchids.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

N o. 5 5

In Full Bloom

Floral Stylist Lewis Miller and photographer Jamie Chung explore the shades of spring.

Text By Lewis Miller Photography by Jamie CHung

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Green Envy

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Real study in texture using monstera leaf, mahogany fern, ribbon fern, ti leaf and umbrella fernâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the large smooth surface of the monstera leaf in contrast to the delicate fronds of the umbrella fern; the ruffled ribbon fern in contrast to the bicolored mahogany fern.

Document— How did your upbringing in California affect your desire to be a floral designer? Are there still natural elements from out there that you use in your designs? Lewis— I grew up surrounded by the most beautiful gardens in a place where everything grew, and everything grew FAST. Roses, wisteria, olive groves, citrus, etc. Gardens were (and are still) my first love. Document— You studied horticulture and landscape design out in Seattle and then moved here to New York, what differences do you see in the general field of floral design and event planning between the two cities? Lewis— Seattle is a very lush and verdant city, and one is surrounded by nature at every turn. Thus, it is commonplace, and the need to bring it indoors is not so important (to many). New York, by contrast, is a study of steel and concrete, and nature is one of the biggest luxuries. I love bringing in armloads of natural elements to soften and thus transform a room or space into something that is magical, warm, inviting, lush and always referring back to a garden. Document— Can you speak to the floral and natural elements you used for our shoot? Why did you choose the plants and flowers that you did for spring? Lewis— The elements chosen for this shoot were based on the individual flowers fullness, translucency and form. I have a proclivity towards flowers that have a life span—they open, grow and die—as opposed to some of the more stiff varieties that don’t move or change (just slowly rot). Flowers that are on their last breath, seconds from expiring—to me that is when they are most beautiful.

A n E n c h a n t i n g ENd

An example of flowers on their last breathâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; tissue thin petals that are almost to the point of collapse, so fragile and yet perfectâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;using anemones, parrot tulips, gloriosa lilies and garden roses.

Russian-Georgian princess Irene Galitzine’s 60’s pyjama designs are back and long out of the bedroom

I ntervie w B y R achel P idcoc k photograph b Y hugh lippe

ergio Zambon, the creative director of Galitzine, has taken his international sensibility for modern fashion and reignited the Italian brand, infusing it with a renewed appreciation for structured silhouettes and classic pieces. Zambon’s clothes

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

H air S tylist O w en G ould at T he Wall G roup. M a k e - up A rtist Z enia J aeger at T he Wall G roup

Power Pyjama

taste of Galitzine which is a mixture of the chic old Europe and the functional American. RACHEL— The Spring/Summer 2013 collection clearly maintains the history of the label, can you speak to the importance of classic pieces and their role in contemporary fashion? Sergio— Yes, the Spring/Summer 2013 collection reworks pieces from the ‘60s and there is a subtle line for me that goes from the ‘60s to now which is the constant evolution of modernist style adapting every decade to the new version of it. It’s a collection based on evolving. RACHEL— What is your vision for the label and how does it consider the history and importance of fashion houses in Rome? Sergio— My vison for the label is contemporary luxury starting with the capsule collection of 23 pyjamas palazzo presented at 10 Corso Como in September 2012. So I put the focus on the invention of the house. From that I want to grow organically every season from the capsule, for example Fall/Winter 2013 will include coats and knitwear and a side project like bijoux. I will probably develop a line with a Roman jewelery house that has heritage.

M odel G iedre K at Women M anagement N YC . Fashion D irector J ames Valeri .

N o. 6 0

have been featured in a number of movies, including I Am Love with Tilda Swinton. Having spent time at Fendi and Max Mara, Zambon now speaks about ‘60s influences and the label’s mix of European and American taste. RACHEL— You were kind enough to send us the letter from Jacqueline Kennedy as a special Galitzine document, can you elaborate on why this letter is important to the label and perhaps explain who Jayne, Marella and Lee (the ladies referenced in the letter) are? Sergio— The letter of Jackie Kennedy is important to the Maison Galitzine because it has the synthesis of what Galitzine has been in style. The word “uniform” written in the letter by Jackie Kennedy describes the smart invention of the pyjama palazzo as contemporary, elegant pieces, and all the ladies mentioned there— Marella Agnelli, Lee Radzwill, Jane Waitzman, represented the natural milieu of Princess Galitzine and her fashion. RACHEL— How does the Galitzine silhouette affect your ideas for designs? Sergio— I always liked sleek modernist silhouettes and a masculine side on women’s fashion. So I completely feel at home with the

Pa j a m a Pa r t y

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Far Left: A letter from Jackie Kennedy to Irene Galitzine discussing Jayne Wrightsman, Marella Agnelli and Lee Radzwill. Left: Irene Galitzine, Diana Vreeland and Baron Niki De Ginzburg. This page: Flower damasque Pyjama Palazzo by Galitzine by Sergio Zambon.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

groomer E M I L I A N O R E S T U C C I . location : H otel D e R ussie R ome . T his Page : D ress by Fendi . J e w elry ( w orn throughout ) by D el f ina D elettrez . O pposite : C ardigan by P rada .

Dal Ă courtesy A rtists R ights S ociety. D uchamp courtesy P rivate C ollection , N e w Yor k ; photograph courtesy Francis M . N aumann Fine A rt, N e w Yor k . fashion editor F R A N C E S C A C E F I S .

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

N o. 6 3

Delfina’s Diary

Rome based jewelry designer Delfina Delettrez creates stunning, unique pieces that meld surrealist and pop sensibilities. As the daughter of Silvia Venturini Fendi, Delettrez draws inspiration from amber remnants, Man Ray, Duchamp and others. here she shares some of her personal inspirations.

Text by Delfina Delettrez D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

p h o t o g r a p h y b y C a r l o t ta M a n a i g o

A rt ÂŠ L ouise B ourgeois T rust/ L icensed by VAGA , N e w Yor k , N Y.

T his page : D ress by Fendi . O pposite : D ress and shoes by Fendi . G loves by S ermoneta G loves .

M an R ay courtesy A rtists R ights S ociety. T rench coat by G ivenchy by R icardo T isci .

N o. 6 6

This is the New York skyline circa 1980

Photographer Edo Bertoglio captured a timeless beauty WHILE EXPERIMENTING with his Camera. Glenn O’Brien Remembers the atmosphere.

B y G lenn O ’ B rienn photography b Y E do B ertoglio

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

orget the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the twin towers. These faces are the real monuments of the evanescent time, the wonders of our world and the glories of our landscape. These were the stars in our local firmament, the glittering bodies that twinkled in the night, whose mysterious movements predicted our fates and our fortunes, and whose double-ended candle flicker illuminated our imaginations and ignited our desires. You never saw most of them? You missed something special. And it’s hard to explain, but I’ll try. Today there is no excuse for beauty to be missed. They are in your face, on the global broadcast. Scouts scour backstreets for the tracks of grace, for hints of charm, traces of refinement. Publicity enshrouds the planet with images non-stop. Nothing is held back. But back then there were secrets and mysteries. There was a private world, membership only. It was exclusively anonymous, hiding out invisible in plain sight. There were certain initiations and a certain price. You had to find it; it didn’t advertise. You needed a certain sense, a sixth or a seventh to enter this small world, but once inside it opened up like a hall of mirrors. If you could follow the clues and your instinct there it was–an unknown galaxy of magnetic beauty. In Edo’s pictures it’s always dusk, or is it dawn? We always saw both. Trying to rise before dusk and beating a retreat home at dawn, trying to sleep before the birds drove us mad with their disgustingly happy chatter. But here the right light is always fleeting, a small window between darkness and brightness where the beautiful face outshines the sun and moon, and the personality seems to be its own source of light. Here’s the all-star team of the age: ingénues and leading ladies, starlets and strumpets, muses and genies, tarts and temptresses, divas and desperadoes, seductresses, teasers and torturers, vamps and tramps. All of them true personalities with style that ran deep. They were their own creators, their own stylists and their own designers. They didn’t buy a look or borrow one from a couturier, they conjured glamour out of thrift shops and thin air. These pictures make me miss makeup. Nothing looks naturalistic about this paint. They weren’t going for healthy, outdoorsy looks but something between a geisha and an houri, a Bourdin mannequin and a Maori. Their faces weren’t art’s brave remake of nature. What did Gloria Swanson say in Sunset Boulevard, “We had faces then.” Look how different these are. No model agency composite here. These are the calendar girls of the last judgment. The Miss America candidates of the Lost Continent of Atlantis. I feel privileges to have known them and chased them, to have flirted and laugh and gotten high with them, and slept with them perchance to dream. What dreams they had. I wish dreaming would bring some of them back, just as they were, better than perfect and full of promises that they kept but the world broke. Edo’s roof was no penthouse. It was a New York tar beach with an overview of downtown when it rocked and staggered. It was a roof for posing on or jumping off of, but it was mostly an open-air studio that captured the way we were for an eternal instant.

“They were shot on our roof on the east side near the water tower. I had ample wardrobe and I stood as a girl scout, make up artist, stylist and assistant. When you look at the C-prints its like looking in a mirror.” —Maripol

Lisa Rosen, 1979

Clockwise: Terrence Sellers 1981, Susan Mallouk 1982, Kiri 1982, Eva 1978, Valda 1980, Anna Sui 1981, Karin 1979, Chica 1979.

he first time I laid eyes on Stephen Tashjian was about 32 years ago probably to the day. It was my first day of art school in a class called Studio for Interrelated Media, which one would loosely define as “performance.” I was awestruck, astonished and instantly smitten with his physical beauty as well as his incredibly articulated style. He wore: red wide wale corduroy pants and a sort of zoot suit cut; a rust-colored ‘50s shirt with a vertical-striped marcella front tucked in with a perfect skinny belt; and a very worn red windbreaker à la James Dean in RWAC, although I’m sure that was not a reference he was hoping to make. He is a superb colorist, and the clash of many different reds could have been horrible, but instead it was marvelous. What held it all together were his Persian features and jet-black hair in a burst of full ringlets on the top, but short on the sides, what may have been called a “poodle cut.” It sounds unfortunate now but he made it work. He also used an eyebrow pencil to further smudge his face into what looked like an Emil Nolde painting come to life. I thought he was the most incredible thing I ever saw. The shoes were black and very pointy, not exactly Beatle boots but Beatle shoes, slip-ons without a Cuban heel. He shuffled as opposed to walked, giving him a cartoonish quality, like how they walked in cartoons. To reference yet another genius akin to his own, you might also picture Charlie Chaplin. Yes, he may have artily mismatched his socks, but the combination exploded rather than irritated. He was amazing at a radical but comfortable looking presentation. I was rather less so. Fresh from the suburbs, I might have actually been wearing Britannia jeans and a white button down shirt with some kind of “masculine” jewelry and a black jacket, hoping to affect pictures I had seen of Patti Smith. Stephen was, albeit a few years ahead of me, so self assured and un-needing of outside affirmation that it made all his moves bold and fascinating. I fell under his thrall. Although, I can’t imagine I dared approach him—not that he was cool or aloof, just that I was painfully shy and sort of, as I said, enamored. But I do remember that we connected on that day and were off, as the saying goes, to the races.

Stephen rarely gets sentimental until you actually die. I suspect, though he didn’t ever return my ardor, he was joyful to have such a receptive dauphin. Speaking of dolphins and poodles, I remember at that moment they were powerful archetypes for Stephen. The first performance I saw him do, I say, although I’m not sure, was called “Dolphins Are Homosexual.” Unless the first was actually, “Gigs Steven’s Incredibly Hot Drag Review.” Who knows? In any case, it very likely proceeded along these lines: Stephen would struggle into a strapless, ‘50s tulle prom gown, no wig, no makeup. At that time those contrivances were anathema to him, indications of some old Combat Zone drag queen lip-synching in a bar. By eschewing those conventions, he was able to transform with a pair of pink vinyl spike heels into a ginchy New Wave visionary. The performance essentially consisted of him changing records and costumes over and over with a horrendous scrape of the needle across the record each time, at a frantic pace. Then he might twirl around and declaim, “Did you know dolphins are homosexual? It’s true!” The effect was both horrifying and enchanting. I wonder what he meant to express. Here’s another anecdote Jimmy Paul suggested I tell, and it does speak to the interconnectedness that artists hope to achieve by being creative. Stephen had a job in the admissions office at Mass Art. Get into that sentence for a moment why don’t you? Sometime after we had become friends, he realized that he had “made a case” a year earlier for my portfolio to the admissions officer. I applied as a graphic designer, and, it being 1980, most of what I submitted was color Xerox collage with a rock-and-roll feel. One of them had a typewritten Roxy Music lyric and a homoerotic postcard. Stephen, never prone to over-zealous compliments, told me he thought: “Well, this is at least something different, might as well get him in here.” And switched mine from the “reject” to “accept” pile. In a weird way I guess, I owe him my life. Tabboo! The Art Of Stephen Tashjian will be published by Damiani this spring.

N o. 7 0

The Muse as artist

Stephen Tashjian, aka, Tabboo!, has long been an inspiration to artists including Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson, David Armstrong, Mark Morrisroe, and Peter Hujar. This spring marks the first tome of his profilic work as artist.

T ext and photography by J ac k P ierson I llustration by Tabboo !

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

N o. 7 2

NUde Fragility

As the son of a venetian glass blower, Artist michele bubacco creates powerful compositions of faceless figures.

art w or k by M ichele B ubacco I ntervie w B y Kathy B attista

ichele Bubacco is a young artist from Venice who draws inspiration from the ebb and flow of this legendary city. Bubacco works instinctually, making paintings that express the range of human pathos—from lust and desire to conflict and trauma. Kathy Battista interviewed the artist about his technique, subject matter and process. Kathy— Art history is full of paintings of nude women. You often paint male nudes. Is this is a conscious effort on your part to rebuke tradition? Do you see it as a liberation of masculinity? Michele— I don’t paint idealized or symbolic nudes, rather denuded men or those being denuded. Anyway, men give rise to a dissonance with their everyday clothing—a pair of underpants or a shirt, a well-waxed

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

shoe or necktie–as though man’s instincts are restricted by mere cotton accoutrements. Kathy— Your paintings often take place in nondescript, stage-like settings. They remind me at times of Francis Bacon as well as Philip Guston in this respect. Can you say something about the backgrounds of these paintings? Michele— The bare stage on which the scene unfolds is the line of the landscape—conceivably an evocation of a lagoon sandbar. This represents a muted limbo for experts that renders or hides, supports or eradicates, the anatomical evidence of the subjects. The landscape, even if it appears to always be the same, is constantly changing. Kathy— You paint on canvas or paper attached to the wall. Do you use old master techniques such as the giornata of fresco painting? Michele— In my painting, as with much

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

“I don’t paint idealized or symbolic nudes, rather denuded men or those being denuded. Anyway, men that give rise to a dissonance with their everyday clothing–a pair of underpants or a shirt, a well-waxed shoe or necktie.”…

painting in general, the principle of serendipity applies (as you rummage around for a needle in the haystack you might just chance upon the farmer’s daughter!). This rule— improvisation—is tricky to adapt to fresco painting’s strict methodology. Kathy— The great Venetian canvases have given life to the walls of churches and palaces without succumbing to the damp. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for most of the frescos. That said, the impulse to cover walls with pictorial annotations is compelling, as if the room could become the scaled-up projection of the mind’s enclosures. In this respect, I’m drawn towards the nocturnal navigation carried out by Goya in his pinturas negras. You are an autodidact. Who are your major artistic influences? Michele— A certain Venetian tradition that starts from the later Tiziano and Tintoretto, and arrives at Emilio Vedova and Zoran

Mušič, taking in Luigi Tito, guides me from the outset to read the environment in which I was born and live, offering me my favorite pictorial coordinates. Now I must list the painter who never was—Frenhofer—as well as Richard Gerstl, the choreographer Pina Bausch, and some works by Cy Twombly. I’m also intrigued by the rhythms and silences contained within them and the point at which the noise unwittingly becomes decipherable. Venice, and Murano in particular, are known for traditional glassblowing techniques. Kathy— Have you taken anything from that technique in your painting? Michele— Beyond the results achieved through glassblowing, the process is based upon an urgent rapport between time, intrinsic occasions, and the force of gravity: essential recurring qualities in my work too. Kathy— Your work for Document includes images of groups of people rather than indi-

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

viduals. Can you say something about why you paint groups? Michele— Groupings of people create a community—perhaps to be part of a group is obligatory in life. It can terrorize, or be seen as a threat, but to remain excluded would be worse. Thus, the only option for an individual is to synchronize oneself with the orchestra of one’s counterparts. Everyone seeks to bond with another in order to fathom a facet and make it their own. Kathy— Violence and sexuality seem common themes in your work, from the subject matter to the titles such as “Melee.” Would you agree? Michele— Attempts to communicate may entail “gnawing away” at one’s neighbor as the price of affinity or intimacy. The rhythm of the composition is punctuated by primal instincts that, although contradictory, must strive towards harmonization. Kathy— Are you interested in religion? Michele— Painting has taught me to consider something beyond the material, while maintaining due regard, and to strip away doctrines and taboos. Obviously I’m influenced by my epoch and culture. Every day I can question these limitations, carrying out investigations based on principles thrown up by experience.

punk and New York punk. He was extraordinarily helpful and there were also designers who lived through punk in New York [such as Anna Sui]. She also dated a punk rock star so she traveled between the London punk and New York punk scenes. She was somebody that was incredibly helpful in terms of the theme, and Jon Savage has written the introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue. Richard Hell is writing the preface and he was the lead singer of Television and The Voidoids. He was one of the main people who established punk in New York. And Johnny Rotten! John Lydon is his name now. He’s writing a preface so we got a lot of London covered by Johnny Rotten or John Lydon and New York by Richard Hell. In every gallery there’s going to be a punk hero, there’s somebody who represents the aesthetic of the particular gallery. For example, in the gallery called [Brit Collage], about found objects and incorporating found objects on to your body, it’s Wayne County, who was a punk star in the ‘70s, who was well known for incorporating toilet bowl, bottle cans, even Tampax on her body. The “graffiti gallery” is The Clash and they were known for splattering their clothes with paint à la Jackson Pollock. Debbie Harry is going to be imbued by either the grafN o. 7 5 fiti or DIY, we haven’t quite yet worked it out. Debbie Harry also wore trash bags Benjamin-Émile— One question that almost as clothes. Johnny Rotten was we were curious about was why The Met— extraordinary complicated about his and you in particular—feel that now is a presentation and really articulated punk great time to stage this exhibition? for many people in London. Sid Vicious, Andrew Bolton— That’s such a hard he’s going to be in the exhibition, he question to answer! It’s something I’ve used to be in The Ramones, they’re gobeen planning for a while actually. I did an ing to be there. Jordan [Pamela Rooke] exhibition in 2005 called “AngloMania” This spring, the Met Museum was the main salesgirl in 430 Kings Road and the last room was an analysis of lookwill stage its much of Malcolm [McLaren] and Vivienne ing at punk as an attitude, looking at anticipated Punk retrospective. [Westwood]’s shop [Let it Rock] and she the connection between dandyism and really, really was the queen of punk in punk—but it was primarily focusing on Curator Andrew Bolton discusses New York and the ‘70s. Throughout the punk more as an attitude than the aespresenting punk for a new show there’s going to be punk heroes thetics of it. Since that show, I’ve always generation and what and heroines who represent a particular wanted to do something more in depth Sid Vicious would think of theme of the gallery. about punk and look at its legacy in terms of high fashion. Benjamin-Émile— I know you coldesigners corrupting the laborated with Nick Knight for this— Benjamin-Émile— It seems as though movement’s language. how did you consult with him? you have some sort of personal interest in the subject matter? Andrew— Well, we’ve always wanted to collaborate with Nick on an exhibiAndrew— I was a little bit young to live tion and Nick is somebody who, to me, through it growing up, but it was someI ntervie w s B y B enjamin - É mile L e H ay is at the forefront of fashion imaging thing I was very much aware of and I had and technology. Something we’ve alan older brother and an older sister who ways wanted to do is to incorporate new were very much into music, so I was aware technology in new ways to show vintage of punk through them. I lived in a very imagery from the period, whether movsmall village in Lancaster in the north of ing image or static images. He wrote a England and I was always a regular subbook called Skinheads (1982); he was a scriber to sounds and musical expresskinhead himself actually, he wasn’t a sions, and punk was always one that I was mostly interested in, mainly because of the look of it. I always had such punk, so he’s somebody who engages very deeply, in countercultural admiration and respect for punk in terms of the aesthetic, and I loved movements personally. In his own work he’s very philosophical as a the music as well. I feel since punk there’s been no other counter-cul- photographer and he’s somebody who engages in new technology very tural movement that’s been so radical. I think there was nothing that deeply in a way to show fashion in new ways and make it more acceshas happened before punk that has been so radical and nothing since sible to a contemporary audience. I was very much aware that a lot of punk that has been so radical and the music, particularly in terms of the the people who would be coming into the exhibition would be younger look. I’m one of those awful people who are so romantic and nostalgic kids who didn’t experience punk first hand or [weren’t] aware of it, and about punk and I know that punk was totally anti-nostalgia and it was I thought that Nick would really be able to use technology as a way to anti-romantic, but I always found deeply romantic figures and deeply engage the audience in a more direct way. I never wanted it to be a trip down memory lane, it was something I wanted people to engage with charismatic figures and they always had a special place for me. and to realize that punk as an aesthetic and an attitude permeates every Benjamin-Émile— Focusing on fashion and design “influencers,” which punk pioneers did you consult or have you included in the exhi- aspect of our lives today without them knowing about it. I very much wanted them to be engaged as much as with the internet and new techbition and used as references? Andrew— One of the main people that we started with in terms nology that also updated the do-it-yourself aesthetic. of punk, just the history of punk, is Jon Savage who wrote the book Benjamin-Émile— Why did you choose to stage it thematically? Did England’s Dreaming (1991) . He really is the voice of punk; [he was] a mu- it just make sense? sic journalist in the ‘70s and he’s written extensively on both London Andrew— No, I wanted to show the different manifestations of the

C ourtesy o f T he M etropolitan M useum o f A rt, P hotograph © D ennis M orris .

lways eagerly anticipated events among the style set, the exhibitions of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art have explored fashion from both a macro and micro view, in recent years investigating the ever-evolving ideals of beauty with “The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion,” in 2009, and the transformation of women’s fashion in the United States through “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity” in 2010. Ever since the provokingly exquisite Alexander McQueen retrospective “Savage Beauty” stormed the art institution in 2011, attracting a record amount of visitors, it’s been a tough act to follow. Last year’s show, “Schiaparelli & Prada, Impossible Conversations,” which juxtaposed the creations of the two designers, attracted only half the visitors of its predecessor. This year’s show, “PUNK: Chaos to Couture,” will explore the punk influence on the evolution of fashion, from its emergence in the 1970s through the movement’s impact on modern-day runways. Document spoke with curator Andrew Bolton, who has already been responsible for several of The Costume Institute’s most stunning exhibitions.

Anarchy in the Metropolitan

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Benjamin-Émile— Is it safe to say that “PUNK: Chaos to Couture” visually compartmentalized to some degree? Andrew— Absolutely, and I should say that the design of the exhibition—I wanted the whole show to look like a couture atelier, so a very traditional couture atelier like Chanel, Dior, Givenchy with 18th century embroidery and wood paneling, but I also wanted it to look punk—so in all plaid and punk materials like tabloid newspaper, duct tape and feather tape and Styrofoam; you walk through the exhibition as if it were an atelier but it’s all plaid and these punk materials. Benjamin-Émile— Do you feel that examining punk through the scope of fashion and style limits the punk movement or its dialogue? Andrew— I think it’s one way of looking at it; I think you always need an entryway into a bigger subject matter, which is punk, and I felt for me that fashion is a demographic that is so accessible everywhere it is. Everyone has an opinion about it like they do about punk, so I thought it was a nice entryway into punk as a movement but also the legacy of punk. You can look at it at from the point of view of art, you can look at it from the point of view of music, you can look at it from the point of view of literature, of film, so there’s all those aspects

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

as entryways into punk as a movement, and to me fashion is one way of those things that it’s such a—people engage in it—it’s such an immediate way. Benjamin-Émile— In curating the exhibition were there any pieces or elements in the show that you weren’t able to find or include that you think would have enhanced the experience? Andrew— Well, I’m still in the process of finalizing the object list; so far, we’ve been lucky in being able to lend a lot of the pieces that we’ve asked for and we have a great collection of early Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the original punk garments and we have quite a collection from Adam Ant several years ago that incorporates a lot of the early Westwood punk material; we’re also working with Vivienne Westwood’s archive to fill in the gap of what we’ve got here so hopefully we’ll have a pretty comprehensive display of early punk material. Oh! There was one piece that I would’ve loved to have in the exhibition but unfortunately it’s on loan—it’s a coat that was designed for David Bowie by Alexander McQueen. Benjamin-Émile— If you could hear one person’s opinion or response to “PUNK: Chaos to Couture,” whose would it be? Andrew—Oh my gosh, that’s such a good

by C live A rro w smith f or Z andra R hodes A rchive

DIY aesthetic, and to me there are several main aspects of punk that designers engage with: one is the hardware, which is safety pins, the zippers, the studs and buckles. There’s one gallery that exhibits designers who incorporated those elements of punk into their work, primarily couturiers like Chanel, Dior, Balmain, Balenciaga, Givenchy—every section is DIY or manifestations of it. Another manifestation incorporates collage. The idea of incorporating found objects and trash culture or graffiti culture into your work much like [Maison Martin] Margiela who has broken plates as an over-the-top way of incorporating it into his work, even plastic bags incorporated into his work; and another aspect is graffiti, for people like Dolce & Gabbana, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano for Dior or with his own label. The last gallery is called “Destroyed,” which features designers who really incorporate the idea of deconstruction or repair. Punks were really known for ripping and tearing their clothes and either putting them back with safety pins or just leaving them open. The [labels] like Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto—these are all designers who employed the aesthetics of destroyed or deconstruction in their work, and to me they were the main manifestation for DIY aesthetics inherently punk.

C ourtesy o f T he M etropolitan M useum o f A rt, P hotograph

“I think that the best exhibitions are controversial, it should generate controversy, it should generate debate, so I’m looking forward to it.”

Vivienne Westwood and Her Climate Revolution

The fashion queen of punk discusses the ever changing meaning of the word.

ivienne Westwood has been a visionary fashion designer and artist, pioneering activist and a vocal champion of environmental issues for over 40 years. It began in 1971 when Malcom McLaren and she opened the punk boutique Let it Rock (later known as SEX) at 430 Kings Road in London. Then came their revolutionary “Pirate Collection,” which hit the runway in 1981. Vivienne Westwood’s refined French and English-inspired “Anglomania” period, between 1993-1999, has been lauded by numerous fashion critics as some of her best work. Today, she continues to embrace political progression, environmental sustainability and the unexpected in her designs. Benjamin-Émile—When the term punk first surfaced—what did it mean for you culturally? Vivienne—Punk clarified an attitude passed on from the hippies (who politicized my gen-

eration)—Don’t Trust Governments, Ever. The punk stance gave a framework. It was a stand against the mismanagement of the world and the corruption of power. That’s what punk was for me. And that’s what anarchy meant to me—that people would have more control of their lives and more control of government.

C ourtesy o f T he M etropolitan M useum o f A rt, P hotograph by P eter L indbergh .

Previous spread: Sid Vicious, 1977. This spread, left to right: Zandra Rhodes, 1977, Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, 1982

question! I think perhaps several—Jordan is one of them. I would love to take Jordan around the exhibition, I would love to hear what she would have to say about it, because she was somebody who had such an impact on punk in London especially, in terms that she was so brave in what she wore—the most extreme version of Westwood and McLaren. She had such a regal way about her. Obviously Vivienne Westwood, I would love to take her around and see what her reaction is, in terms of punk stars, it would’ve been amazing—and luckily John Lydon is working with us so I’ll get to know what he thinks about it. In terms of people who aren’t around anymore, it would’ve been amazing to hear what Sid Vicious would have said when he toured the exhibition. I think that the idea of designers corrupting the language of punk would be horrific to them. I feel comfortable with what we ended up with and there’s a lot of people weighing in, a lot of people have different expectations about it, it’s such an emotional subject that matters to so many people, and that’s what’s nice about it, it’s going to be controversial. I think that the best exhibitions are controversial, it should generate controversy, it should generate debate, so I’m looking forward to it.

Benjamin-Émile—Tell us about how your boutique SEX came to be? Why was it personally exciting and significant for you? Vivienne—In the beginning we were selling ‘50s rocker clothes in our shop on Kings Road. At the time it was called Let it Rock, then we changed the name to SEX. We were inspired by S&M and took t-shirts and ripped them up, made bondage trousers that tied the legs together and put safety pins through the Queen’s mouth and through clothes. The inspiration for many of the graphics was taken from the Seditionaries who were a French art movement in the 1960s. The clothes that Malcolm [McLaren] and I were making at the time, along with the music of the Sex Pistols, were rebellious and heroic, they were meant to shock and get people’s attention. My rebellion was a gut reaction against the corrupt power maniacs, who daily become more powerful. When I first started out, I was walking around in S&M clothes and no one else was. In those days (not now) I believed in anarchy and hated the older generation. Punk was our creation; the look was the urban guerrilla and it was put together from the iconography of our earlier collections. Benjamin-Émile—How does the meaning of punk differ from times today? Vivienne—Since punk collapsed for me with the death of Sid Vicious and the breakup of the Sex Pistols, I have been contemptuous of the movement in general and in particular of its token rebels and career gurus who claim social significance for it. I think they’re all posers. I realized it wasn’t enough jumping around wearing safety pins and a “Destroy” t-shirt. You need ideas to be subversive. That is why the movement folded: the punks didn’t have any because ideas don’t come on a plate—you have to get them yourself by becoming engaged with the world and its past. I was very political at that stage and I still am. But if people don’t think then nothing can change, and I think it’s through culture that you might change people and if you don’t have culture then you can’t change anyway. You must inform yourself of everything that is going on in the world. The fact of man-made climate change is accepted by most people. Through every walk of life people are changing their values and their behaviour. This continues to build the Revolution. The fight is no longer between the classes or between rich and poor but between the idiots and the eco-conscious. Climate revolution is the only means towards a sound economy. When the general public massively switches on to this fact we will win. Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth’s treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply. This shows up as a symptom; the symptom which is the proof of climate change is the economic crisis. Climate crisis and economic crisis are like serpents who eat each other’s tail. Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the human and environmental cost. The old, blind, mechanistic and life-threatening view of economists prevents a true analysis. If they included climate change in their analysis we could work towards a better future. If we want a sound economy we have to have a sound environment. What’s good for the planet is good for the economy, what’s bad for the planet is bad for the economy. For more information on Vivienne’s climate revolution, visit activeresistance.co.uk.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

The Anti-Social Butterfly

Model Benedetta Barzini, muse to Richard Avedon and IrviNG Penn, Answered The Curse Of Her Cold Italian Dynasty Upbringing With Radical Feminism, Anorexia And A Surrogate Family Composed Of Salvador Dalí, Philip Johnson, Lee Strasberg and Andy Warhol. Despite The Good Company She Is No Fan Of New York City.

I ntervie w B y C hiara B A r Z ini P ortrait by L aura S ciacovelli

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

I talian V o g u e , 1 9 6 7, P hotograph by P eter Knapp. C ourtesy David P orter .

N o. 7 8

her unapologetic streak of white hair, more abundant. She claimed her choice to live a quiet lifestyle, where ghosts and glories of the past would hardly ever be revealed or spoken about. That was the Benedetta I knew. When I moved to New York, through friends in the fashion world, I started, like an involuntary detective, putting together the pieces of a woman I had never met: a supermodel who inspired members of Andy Warhol’s Factory, an icon who had been the muse of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, an actress who had worked closely with Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio, an artist who prepared lightshows for Velvet Underground concerts, a women intimately involved with Dalì and courted by the Kennedy brothers. “Intelligence invents beauty is the personification of the feeling I had when I first stood in front of Benedetta,” says poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, who introduced Benedetta to Andy Warhol’s Factory, and was intimate with her while she lived in New York. I could not help but wonder: why did my aunt hate New York so much if she had lived there the life that anyone else would dream of living? Benedetta— New York is noise to me. Even though I was born in Italy my mother hated everything Italian. She moved my sister and I around compulsively around the world to make sure we would never feel at “home”. I was in New York the first time from 1950 to 55, the McCarthy period, living in a hotel with my mother and sister and our governesses, and going to a French school on 96th street. I was miserable living in a hotel and wanted to have a normal family like my like my friend Roberta Fryman. She would tell me stories about taking baths with her family on Sundays and I thought it was incredible. I had no contact with my mother. She lived on the 16th floor. I was on the third with my governesses, maids and sister. On Sundays the governess would say: “Come and say good morning to maman”. We would say “good morning maman” and leave. Most of the personnel of the hotel were Italian like me, but I wasn’t aloud to speak that language, just French and English. Italy was mysterious to me except for the scenery. In summers I would drive through the country by car looking at everything through a glass window. We would be locked up at La Cacciarella, (a majestic summer villa and private park on the shores of Mount Argentario in Tuscany) and couldn’t even

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

V o g u e , 1 9 6 6 , P hotography by R ichard Avedon . courtesy C ollection o f V ince A letti .

spent a Christmas with my aunt Benedetta Barzini the year before I moved to New York. I asked her for words of wisdom as she had lived and worked there as a model during the most wild and fervid years the city has probably ever known, the ‘60s. She stared into my eyes and said: “It’s a cold, cold, noisy place.” We left it at that. Up until I moved, my understanding of my aunt was that she was a fragile soul with a profound sweetness and intense vulnerability. Each time we saw each other she would lean towards me, batter her lashes on my cheeks, and give me what she called “butterfly kisses”. I had experienced her as a family member, living communally with her two children, Irene and Beniamino whom I adored—her first two youngest children, twins, having already grown and moved out. I knew she was a former model, a mother, a professor and, as I could tell from the imperious Lenin poster that reigned in the entryway of her Milan apartment, a true Marxist. Even though she came from a sophisticated background, being the daughter of heiress Giannalisa Feltrinelli and Italian journalist and author Luigi Barzini, Jr. in her apartment no rooms were designed for formal activities. Christmas was not celebrated; dinners were served in the kitchen, as opposed to the dining room where most Italians eat. The house doors were always open. Her beauty and charisma of course shone through despite her will to keep them under control. Her eyes became deeper and softer with time and

in the idea that my body was vanishing, that there was no body. When you’re deeply anorexic, you don’t feel anymore: not pleasure or pain. No needs, no hunger, no emotions. That was restful for me. Also there is a very ancient link between anorexia and family dynamics. Refusing to eat is one of the very few things that women in the past could do to go against the will of their families. Not eating or refusing to eat is a political protest against some form of establishment, and I slipped into this rebellion. I don’t think one is ever really cured of anorexia. I learned a certain form of stoicity. When you’re that skinny and the only thing that’s alive is your mind, a kind of rigor sticks with you. You have incredible, mysterious energy that comes through your mind. That has stayed with me as well as the idea of “invisibility”. I now live a very solitary life. I am not a very social person. I don’t care to be seen anywhere. Chiara— So the period before getting back to New York was quite an odyssey! Benedetta— I escaped the last Swiss sanatorium by jumping over a wall and a barbed-wire fence. I hitchhiked to Zurich where my friend Giuppi Pietromarchi and her husband took me under their wing and helped me get legally emancipated from my parents. I loved them and am grateful to them because they never said I was crazy. At that point I was 18, I wanted to draw, and I managed to get into the Brera Academy drawing class. I found a job in an art gallery. I started regenerating myself. When Diana Vreeland called me to shoot for Vogue, I felt for the first time that someone wanted me, specifically me, and it felt good. So I told myself I would do my very, very best to please them for having wanted me. Eileen Ford came to the airport to pick me up. I was a little skinny thing traveling alone. They placed me in a hotel and life began. New York was still too big, too noisy, too much, but I loved the MoMA where I went for drawing classes. It was my refuge. I also found a therapist and went into intensive therapy and started getting well. My period came back, my tits started growing. I wasn’t going to play with life and death anymore. Working in New York was my medicine. Chiara— Who were your first new friends? Benedetta— Frederick Allen would take me out to eat. He taught me how to love Bach. David Whitney and Philip Johnson invited me to spend my weekends in Johnson’s amazing glass house in Connecticut. We would sit there in front of the fire and talk. I was also saved because I followed Lee Strasberg’s classes in Carnegie Hall. Chiara— Even though working helped you heal from anorexia, as far as I remember you’ve never spoken too generously of modeling as a career. Benedetta— Working as a model is a scheme. It’s the same as working as a prostitute. It’s the merchandise of the body. It’s not on an absolutely sexual level, but your body is for sale; your face is for sale. It drove me, when I came back to Italy, straight to work in the women’s movement, not because I shared their political ideas, but because I wanted to fight the idea that women represented “pleasure” and men represented “reason”. You can see this in clothes. In menswear there is a form of respectability and credibility, but if women want the same effect, they must wear a jacket. Chiara— Was there any time that you actually enjoyed the shoots? Were they ever fun? Benedetta— No. I resent the word “shoot.” My feeling is that it is exactly what it means—a sort of sexual thing, also. The hunter has to get the prize. “GIVE ME THE LOOK.” My feeling was that I had been shot all day long. Of course I got along with everybody. I was gentle. I learned how to behave professionally. I would walk in the studio and concentrate on how to convey in the photo the shape of the dress I had on. No matter what they did with my hair or my make-up or shoes or accessories, what was important was how I could portray the style and the significance. Chiara— In your photos from that time, especially the ones by Irving

go to the village for an ice cream because my mother had given orders that ice creams in Italy were “bad” and everything that came from Italy was “bad”. Don’t ask me why. I have never really known her. Chiara— So though New York was a temporary first home, you never lived the emotions of a family nucleus there? Benedetta— Once my mother invited me to sleep in her room on the 16th floor. It was the only time I had ever been allowed into her environment. She had a box of gummy blackberry throat candy and I ate them all. In the Navarro Hotel there were a lot of Italian Americans and I genuinely became homesick for a home I never had. I became extremely conscious of the problem of immigration, of feeling eradicated and without a base. I would listen to an open radio show under the sheets where Italian-Americans were allowed to speak freely to their relatives back home. You would get this atrocious feeling of people in New York crying out “Mamma! Papà! Figlio!” across the ocean, as Claudio Villa sang about the “Terra Straniera” [foreign land]. I cried listening to those voices, even though I often did not understand what they were saying because they spoke in regional dialects. Chiara— When you moved back to Italy in the ‘70s after your modeling years, you became a real political activist and joined the Communist Party. Do you think, perhaps your early relationship to immigration had something to do with this? Benedetta— Since I was young I knew I belonged to the left wing. I remember the poverty in Rome after the war. I would be strolling with some nanny around the Terme di Caracalla and would see the people who had remained homeless, all standing behind a metal fence. That vision left a mark. I also had a very strong link to my brother Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli [the pioneeristic European publisher who was deeply involved in the Communist party and died in 1972 while trying to ignite a terrorist bomb on an electric pole near Milan]. We had been harmed by the same mother and so I could observe what too much money could do to people. Chiara— What was your relationship with the Feminist movement? Benedetta— A very strong base for continuing to observe women’s conditions. Feminism, whether or not organized in visible movements, is inevitably part of modernity. My coming back to Italy in ‘72 after modeling meant “ok, now I can begin to ‘live’.” I entered The UDI, Unione Donne Italiane [Italian Women’s Union]—an organization created by mostly Communist women after the war. I became responsible for a work committee. The most formative experience was coordinating the 150 hour project – helping organizing female factory workers in the outskirts of Milan. Now I am not a member of anything and hardly go to marches, but when I teach my classes [Benedetta is a Professor of Fashion and Anthropology at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan] I explain why men have one outfit and women thousands, and the fact that having thousand of outfits basically equals having nothing. Chiara— Let’s rewind back in time for a second. When the “empress of fashion” and at the time director of Vogue, Diana Vreeland, saw a photo of you that Consuelo Crespi took in 1963, she phoned and asked you to go back to New York and shoot for Vogue. You had been living between Italy and Switzerland then, and had been anorexic for some years already. Your family had sent you in and out of high-end private clinics and facilities. I’ve always found it interesting that this sickness was with you before you became a model. Benedetta— My sickness came from the fact that everyone that I had ever loved could not last. All my governesses (once I counted 17 of them) were constantly fired. The people who belonged to my so-called family did not exist. I was a very unwanted child. I consider my anorexia as the beginning of coming to sanity because it’s insane not to be sick if you have a really broken-up life. Sickness is a sign of sanity, a desperate need for sanity and normal life. I had a sense of calm and tranquility

“"""I never walked around with heavy make-up. Same thing now. I don’t worry about my hair or the wrinkles on my face, and the Editors of Vogue don’t like that.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Benedetta at home, 2013

Penn, there is something in the way you interact with your surroundings, the symmetries you create, and the way you are in relationship with what you wear and the accessories, that is very signature “you.” Benedetta— As streetwear was coming to life, high fashion was becoming the “dreamland,” and that’s what we created. We invented shapes or movements where reality was not involved. My role, my “talent”, was how to bring out the significance of what the author of the dress wanted. I worked 80 percent of the time with Penn who was just as detached about fashion as I was. He was a very distant person, very educated, gentle, sweet and proper. I felt like he was working in fashion to have money to do his own thing. Normally there would be a table of accessories, shoes, hats, gloves and scarves. And Penn would fall asleep under the table waiting for the girls to get ready. Chiara— Avedon was different though… Benedetta— Avedon was a jumping bean with wild music going all day long in his studio, whereas Penn’s studio was behind the public library, a quiet place. Avedon was playing the part of the fashion photographer, hopping all over the place: “More rouge!” I think he was high. I didn’t like working with him at all, because it was totally phony. “Jump, jump!” he insisted, instead Penn was extremely composed. I met up with Avedon many years later in Milan where he was doing an art show and finally admitted to him that I had hated working with him. “You know what, Benny,” he told me, “I really hated working with you also.” It was nice to be upfront, outside of our “professional” context so many years later. In fact we ended up working on a campaign just after that encounter. It was honest. Chiara— In New York you rejected the fashion world and Eileen Ford’s parties - even though the Rolling Stones would play at them because you were in search of something different. Was Andy Warhol’s factory a good alternative to the fashion world?

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

P hotograph by L A U R A S C I AC O V E L L I .

Benedetta— The Factory was a bit like a medieval piazza and maybe that reminded me of home. There was a group working with music in one corner, another group of poets in another corner, people shooting up in another corner. Everything was happening simultaneously in one flat huge loft: minstrels, mad people, strange drug addicts and Andy would be in one corner. My days were before the Chelsea Girl days, before the filming began. We went with Nico on tour in Boston. All my students now tell me: “Oh my God, you used to hang out with Lou Reed!” But at the time I didn’t know he was Lou Reed. At the time he was just a scruffy-looking guy. Sure I am angry with myself for not realizing what was in front of me. If I had saved three scratches by Andy or Dalì, things would be different today. There I was, walking in Central Park arm in arm with Dalì, going to the Hutchinson where he had his show, and the last thing to come to mind was “Hey, give me a scribble.” At the time I was just walking with a friend. Chiara— What was your relationship with Dalì like? Benedetta— He liked me and was somewhat like a “father” figure. I was curious and often had tea with him. It was a strange friendship that easily went down the drain, but I think he understood my uneasiness about life and I understood his paraphernalia and excess baggage. Once we were sitting in the Saint Regis having tea and he was going on with his imperious, loud tone, and I said: “Why don’t you stop? Tone it down.” He grabbed my hand and said dramatically: “You know Benedetta, if you had had a brother who died when he was 9 and they called you like him, and everything you did, he had done better, you too would have invented things that your brother would not have done.” I froze right then. We couldn’t do much for each other, that’s for sure. We were publicly involved, but I think Dalì had no interest in sex and neither did I, so that was something in common between us. Chiara— Still, it was a very intense and interesting moment in history and art. Maybe you didn’t realize it, but surely you must have felt it? Benedetta— I felt it was important, it was interesting. But I didn’t have the awareness of going beyond that, investigating more, studying more. I remember attending the opening of the Whitney Museum and seeing all the American art there. But then again, it didn’t go very far. I was locked up and trying to get well, and doing my job and not going to bed too late, and not getting drunk or doing drugs. Timothy Leary was living in New York and everybody was on LSD . . . I mean everybody. And I didn’t want to touch drugs. Chiara— Did you ever do LSD? Benedetta— I did, once, but it scared the wits out of me. I had to keep myself under control. I was scared stiff. I was at the house of a hairdresser called Galant and there were other people there. In the morning we all went out to get coffee and I remember sitting on the stool and falling off because I felt a river pushing me away. Chiara— Did it seem like it was a bit much? Maybe you were overwhelmed by the times? Benedetta— If you want to create a world where there are civil rights, no racism, and young people and hippies expressing their movements, proposing communes and natural food, you are bound to be scared and look for solutions. It’s a scary thing to bring into the world so much novelty. Drugs help you overcome the fear of going against the establishment somehow. They give you courage and keep you open to the dream world. Chiara— How did you decide to do the lighting for the Velvet Underground tour? Benedetta— Andy asked me. There was a big rectangular building with a balcony and a stage and the Velvet Underground was playing downtown somewhere in the Village. We were on the balcony, me on one side, Andy on the other, and there was a projector that projected behind the Velvet Underground. I didn’t like that music; I didn’t like anything. I mean I liked Joan Baez. I didn’t even like Bob Dylan. But everybody was playing Bob Dylan all over the place. In the end I liked Bob Dylan ok but I didn’t like the noisy things like the Rolling Stones… The Beatles? Yes, but boring. That was my spirit. I wasn’t caught into any net of that kind. Then I got back to Italy and started to appreciate it all. Chiara— You were not a scenester, but you were curious and because

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Full-Service Equipment Rental in Studio and on Location 4 Studios • 16,000 Square Feet • Drive-in Access • Huge Cycs • 16' Ceilings Private Entrance • 3 Skylights • HMI and Tungsten In-House Digital Capture and HD Video Capture Packages

WWW.FASTASHLEYSSTUDIOS.COM

718.782.9300

95 N10TH ST. BROOKLYN NY 11249

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

you came from a rather sophisticated European background you could easily pick and choose any milieu. You went from the downtown crowd all the way up to 5th Avenue in Jackie Kennedy’s apartment. Benedetta— Jackie had invited me to her house because she had read my father’s book “The Italians.” She had loved the book and liked him very much. We had dinner at her place then we would all go to Robert’s [Kennedy’s] birthday party down the block on 5th Avenue. Stokowski, Bernstein, and Mike Nichols were there. My memory of the soirée is “beige.” Jackie wore beige and looked like a cartoon. We ate beige food and wiped our mouths with beige napkins. I went to the bathroom to see what it looked like— if you want to understand something about someone you have to go to their bathroom— and it was very chic and elegant, and of course beige. After dinner we went to Bob’s birthday party. There were lots of elite socialites in the powder room, fixing their dresses and putting on make up. I didn’t now what to do with myself. I remember Teddy sitting next to me and saying: “Oh Barzini, did you know we are the Caesars of America?” At the party the lights went off in came a huge cardboard cake brought in by four men. They put it on the floor. We all sang and out popped a bunch of playgirl bunnies… I just kept thinking “The Caesars?" Then Teddy told me he would have liked to see me sometime. I said, sure, but when he finally had his secretary call me, he told me he could only see me at 1 am in the night and asked to please enter through the back door. I said I was sorry but couldn’t go in the back door in the middle of the night, so he stopped calling. I realized I was supposed to act like an escort, very similar to what Berlusconi does in Italy today. But I had a sixth sense and knew where to stop. Chiara— Just a few years after being courted by the Kennedys and hanging out with the crème de la crème in New York, you returned to Europe. Benedetta— Like I said I did not want to marry a rich American to have my paperwork, and I didn’t want to go to Eileen Ford’s parties to flirt with her clients, so soon enough the phone stopped ringing. I couldn’t be used for commercial work, because I was too “exotic” and “Mediterranean”. I would have sold only to Latinos and Italians.

Today models are more aware of the fact that their bodies are their “company.” They change the color of their hair, their eyes. They resell themselves on the market. If you treat yourself like a company, people will really make money from you, but if you don’t, you will stay right where you are. The amazing thing about the momentary occupation of being a model is that if the phone doesn’t ring, there is nothing you can do. You can’t send your CV. You can’t go on auditions. You can’t do anything except wait. Chiara— What is your relationship to Vogue Italy now? Benedetta— They don’t like me and I couldn’t give a damn. Every once and a while they call me and ask me to write something for them. I never went around with my book looking like a model. People would look at the photos then glare at me, “Is that you?” I thought it was a plus to not look like I did in pictures, but it was a minus. I never walked around with heavy make-up. Same thing now. I don’t worry about my hair or the wrinkles on my face, and the editors of Vogue don’t like that. Chiara— Today in Italy you’re not just teaching the history of fashion, you’re teaching people that what we wear is representative of something else, so you’re teaching younger generations how to think and what to question, which in a sense is what you did with me when I came to you for advice. Benedetta— You cannot study history without facing women’s conditions. The clothes they were forced to wear absolutely determined their role in society. There is not one woman who said in the past “bullshit! I’m not going to wear a corset.” When I came back to Italy I didn’t have any nostalgia about modeling. My problem back then was the fact that traveling so much I hadn’t gone to school, I hadn’t finished anything, and hadn’t graduated from a university, but when I got asked to teach, I started studying like an animal. It dawned on me that to teach fashion I needed to study history, sociology and anthropology. I needed to know how to place clothes in various periods and to place them within the realms of politics and power. Being invited to teach the meaning of clothes in history was a way of giving significance and making sense of my modeling career, and being able to help others on their own paths.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

S creen test © G erard M alanga . B enedetta and Dal í courtesy o f B enedetta B arzini .

Benedetta Barzini Screen Test, 1966 by Gerard Malanga & Andy Warhol from Screen Tests/A Diary; Benedetta and Salvador Dalí.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

N o. 8 6

MARIO TESTINO

interview by SADIE COLES

with remarks from Donatella Versace, Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Christopher Bailey, Natalia Vodianova, Stephen Gan, Tom Pecheux, Marc Lopez, Francesco Vezzoli, Karla Otto and James Kaliardos Glamour, joy, sex appealâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Mario Testino has long mastered the means of his trade. We celebrate some of the photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most powerful images and private snapshots, and collect candid anecdotes from friends and longtime collaborators. Sadie Coles goes behind the lens to unshutter the radiant personality of an iconic photographer.

all photography by M ario testino

Patricia Schmid, Paris, 2006, Vogue Paris.

This page: Los Angeles, 2009. Opposite: Reese Witherspoon, Paris, 2008, American Vogue. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Both: Untitled, Amsterdam, 1999, L’Uomo Vogue. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

conversation Sadie— Do you remember when, where and how we met? I think you just came in the gallery, but maybe it was at the recommendation of someone specific. I remember that your first purchase was a Richard Prince Cowboy, one of the best ever, and I think we were both pretty excited. mario— I remember Johnnie Shand Kydd said to me one day that if I was starting to collect photography I should go and meet you and take it to a more serious level. The first piece I was interested in buying was by Liza May Post. It was quite interesting because even though I really liked it, I didn’t buy it. I suppose it wasn’t my favourite of what I had seen of her work. In the beginning, looking at the work of people that used photography as a medium and not an end, I decided I would stick to photography. I remember you offering me a Richard Prince cowboy picture quite early on. It was difficult for me at first to understand the idea of appropriation and its relevance to the art world. I remember seeing a Cecily Brown painting at Deitch Projects and wanting to buy it. A close friend said to me that I had a great collection of art—why would I sway from it? Only to regret it three years later when the price had multiplied by 10 and I couldn’t afford it anymore! sadie— Most of the early purchases were photography based but it didn’t take long until that became too restrictive. By 2002 you were buying other things, mostly work on paper. And by 2005 things got major! Your Visionaire 42 issue was the culmination of your personal involvement with some of the artists you were buying. I am thinking particularly of Angus Fairhurst, Sarah Lucas, Simon Periton, Cecily Brown, Tracey Emin and others in that issue. I remember a very jolly party at your home with most of them in attendance and there was a lot of smoking and laughing on your terrace. You have now done many collaborations with many artists and they always seem to enjoy it. Which has been your favourite? mario— It is hard to determine one as my favorite. I like the process. As I have discovered in the art world, not everything you love at first is what you will love the longest. I hate to make an opinion about something for those reasons. Although, I can say that a collaboration with Angus Fairhurst was really exciting. I gave him some of my pictures that I wanted him to work on and he decided to delete everything manmade in black, and leave only what nature had made. I was blown away by the thought behind it. When I did a collaboration with John Currin, I loved how he left the picture intact— it was a portrait of him and all he had done was turn his face into a caricature. Collaborations in general are trial and error; it’s almost like acting as an editor—you send something to be done and you never know what is going to come back, and when it does you have to to be happy with what you get. It has helped me understand what editors

go through at different magazines because when they commission something they never really know what they are going to get. sadie— What was the first work of art you bought from anywhere? mario— It is hard to really remember unfortunately. I remember buying vintage photography—Cecil Beaton, Madame Yevonde, Angus McBean, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, Paul Outerbridge. After this I got into the more fine art world. sadie— Were you interested in art as a child? At what point did your enthusiasm for collecting take hold? mario— I was obsessed by fashion from a young age and observing what people wore and how they expressed themselves, giving a sense of who they are and what they wanted to portray. In a way it is an art but one that everyone can be attracted to, as we are exposed to it on an everyday basis. I only became interested with fine art when I arrived in England in the 1980s. My friends took me to the Thérèse Oulton show at Malborough Gallery and I began to realize how important it was to be exposed to things that we are not used to seeing. With the years I got closer and closer to it. Collecting is an obsession. It is discovering. Once you discover one thing, you discover another, and another, and another. You become insatiable. sadie— Do you have collections of anything else other than art? mario— The only thing I really collect aside from art are books, as they have been a source of inspiration for me. I came from Peru with very little knowledge of anything but the beach and rules of our society. Coming to England I started to be exposed to all the different forms of art and all the different people that have been influential in these. Books, for me, became a great way to navigate through and enjoy it. sadie— If you could keep just one work from your collection [on a desert island], which one would it be? mario— That is impossible to answer. sadie— Has there been a particular show, over the years, that changed the entire way you thought about art? mario— I think that it is difficult to pinpoint one, as my opinion has changed many times, mainly because the more you see the more you learn. I would say that Sarah Lucas has been one of my biggest influences in the way I look at art today because she delved into so many things that one wouldn’t normally and it was fascinating and enlightening. sadie— What is your biggest regret in terms of an artwork you didn’t buy? mario— The [Richard Prince] nurse painting that you offered me, and I stupidly didn’t buy one of the Rudolf Stingel paintings. sadie— Which artists or shows are your top picks for 2013? mario— At the moment I am looking at established artists and artists at the verge of becoming such. The likes of Ryan Sullivan, Matias

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Faldbakken, Oscar Tuazon, Eddie Peake, Helen Marten, Fredrik Vaerslev, Ryan Trecartin and Nina Beier. sadie— Do you enjoy art fairs or biennials? I always use them as a useful research opportunity— taking the temperature. Many collectors are now preferring fairs to actual exhibitions which is a bit depressing for a gallery owner. mario— I prefer working with the galleries directly and doing studio visits. My relationship is more a relationship with artists and gallerists than it is ticking the boxes, as I am privileged to do studio visits and collaborations, discovering artists at an early stage. sadie— How has the art world changed, for better or worse, since you began collecting? mario— I think that people have begun to tap into the art world on the more economic side rather than an artistic side. This comes with the good and the bad. It has allowed artists’ work to expand and thrive, but on the other side, it has inflated prices that are not always in relationship to the state of the artist and in a way creates false expectations that don’t always seem to hold. But like in life, it is impossible to ever say it is wrong because life is about change and moving forward. I guess in a way it has also been a way to help clear the air. sadie— When I was at the opening of your museum in Lima, Peru, many of your longterm collaborators were there, including Patrick Kinmonth, Hamish Bowles, Victoria Fernandez, your brother and sister, current and ex-assistants. I was struck again by the fact that your relationships with all sorts of people tend to be long-term. It is a very pleasing thing to be part of that crew of Testino ‘lifers’. Who is the longest serving member? mario— I have to say the longest would have to be Hamish Bowles, Patrick Kinmonth and Georgina Godley. Unfortunately Patrick did not make it to the opening in Lima, but he has been to many of them and has helped me throughout the whole process. I have grown with all these people. sadie— You have just inaugurated your own permanent foundation in Lima. I loved seeing your mother and her friends sitting in state at the opening like the Queen and her ladies. How has the response been locally and what are your plans for the future. mario— The response has been amazing. Reading the book of comments has been the most satisfying of it all because I realize that even if you touch just one person, it is great to have a reaction. I think that it is only the beginning of what we hope to be able to do. I want to help Peruvian art be exposed to the whole world by showing it abroad. I want to bring to Peru what they have not seen before in order to further the development of Peruvian artists and culture. I have many plans and I hope to be able to make them come true. Mario Testino’s upcoming exhibitions include the Prism Gallery from February 26 to March 30, 2013 and Alta Moda at MATE—Asociación Mario Testino, opening on April 20th, 2013.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Paris. Lima, 1997. London, 2002. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Mariah Carey, Donatella Versace, Beyoncé Knowles, Milan, 2002. Rio de Janeiro, 1998. Cannes, 2003 .

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

We asked some of Testino’s longtime collaborators to give an insight into his world. C h r i s t o p h e r B a i l e y, Designer

“I feel honored to have worked with Mario for more than a decade. He is someone that I admire greatly, not only as an incredibly talented photographer and creative partner but also as a very dear and wonderful friend. Mario has enormous charm, the warmest character and the biggest smile that shines through everything he touches. I love everything about the way that Mario works, the sense of humour, the humanity and the sophistication that he brings to every shoot. Quite simply, he is able to capture all the different facets, moods and ideas to tell a compelling story through his lens—from the romance and emotion to the interaction his audience—and it is incredible to watch.” F r a n c e s c o V e z z o l i , Artist

“I am very, very vain, but unfortunately not as good-looking as my vanity would demand. Mario managed to portray me like some sort of sexy Serge Gainsbourg. And he made me feel and look like a credible heterosexual man too, fully aroused by Daria Werbowy graces. My father was so proud. Sincerely I don’t know how he did it, but he did it . Thanks forever, Mario! You fulfilled my addictive narcissism more than anyone else ever did.” J a m e s K a l i a r d o s , Make-up Artist, Founding partner of Visionaire “Mario Testino has something very rare as compared to most other fashion photographers, he loves and knows fashion, and he relates in a very personal way to his subjects. Like the great late Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton, this quality shows up in his ability to take arresting fashion pictures that are personal and allows us viewers to enter a situation that seems very private, intimate and truly sexy. In an era where many photographers and models are digitally disconnected— the action is on screen and not on set— Mario directs the focus between him and subject as the main event so there is true relational electricity and excitement in the air as he shoots. His personality shines, entertains and inspires his subjects to let go of inhibitions, trusting they will be shown in their most beautiful light. Mario makes people look alive, healthy and great. His recent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was an experience. I felt envious to not have been there in each shot. Everyone looks like they are having so much FUN! and the truth is they probably were. Mario guides his subjects often by taking respon-

sibility off of them to be the star of the show as he takes that place; the subjects can relax into their place as muse to Testino’s Svengali-like transformational ability to show each in their best way. I remember Madonna telling me Mario got her to relax by kicking her gently as he shot her. He strips one veil off his subjects as he applies another, of his own making, so that he can mastermind an image from his own exotic and fruitful imagination. He loves life, he lives the dream and his own vibrancy is what we see projected onto his subjects of the most beautiful and famous in the world.” Domenico Dolce and S t e fa n o Ga bb a n a , Designers

“We’ve known Mario for many years, and we’ve worked together having lots of fun in many projects. Maybe for his Latin roots and his love for life, Mario completely understands our aesthetic, translating it into the images— simply genius!” K a r l a O t t o, Publicist “I remember clearly the first Mario Testino image I ever saw. It was almost 30 years ago in Lei magazine, which was an Italian Condé Nast publication edited by Franca Sozzani. The picture was simply of a model sitting on a chest of drawers, but everything was so sleek and beautiful. I really loved the image. A little while later [British Vogue’s] Lucinda Chambers introduced me to Mario, and I was captivated by this exuberant, funny and entertaining young photographer. He stood out immediately even though he was not yet famous. It’s his personality, coupled with such striking work. Everybody just loves to be photographed by Mario.” M a r c L o p e z , Hair Stylist “One of the most remarkable things I noticed since I first started working with Mario is his ability to make everyone around him feel instantly at ease. He consistently displays generosity and encouragement towards his team and inspires everybody to be the best they can be. His charismatic and affable nature is something that makes working with him memorable, every time. There are so many things I can say about Mario, but ultimately, his sense of humour always makes me laugh and I can say that after all these years, our connection is still vivid.” N ata l i a Vo d i a n ova , Model “My late beloved Grandpa used to say that he goes to work like to church. He worked in a factory and I know it was very tough day for him. I always wondered where this feeling of love for what he does derives from. Now I know that it was people he worked with, his colleagues, that made the difference and the reason why he was so happy to get up at 6 a.m. every morning to go to work. I found that ultimately I love my work and what I do for the same reasons, for the people I work with. Mario has been one of those

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

people for me. On and off set he is a pure joy to be with. He can be light or very deep, laugh with everyone and even at himself. Through his eyes everyone and everything is beautiful, people are healthy, sexy, free and happy to be alive and who they are. He loves life and it is contagious. I am so grateful that some of his magic brushed off on my life too.” D o n at e l l a V e r s ac e , Designer “My first memory is how very impressed I was with Mario’s directness and the fact that he was a bit bold in his way of addressing people. But, he was, and is, always honest. He is one of the few people who doesn’t need to talk about you behind your back. He is straightforward with a smile on his face. My favorite memory of Mario is when we were in Rio for the launch of his book Mario de Janiero Testino. He convinced me to walk from the hotel to the venue saying not to worry, that we wouldn’t be bothered by anyone. All of a sudden, there were hundreds of fans surrounding us. We couldn’t move. Mario was laughing hysterically, but I wasn’t. I love him to death.” T o m P e c h e u x , Make-up Artist, Creative Make-Up Director of Estée Lauder “Well, you know, when people ask me what I think about Mario, I’m not just thinking professional, but personal, after knowing each other for 18 years. The way I would describe him, I would call Mario the Rolls Royce. There is nothing more incredible and chic and sophisticated than the Rolls Royce. And if I say that about Mario, it’s because of working with him for 18 years; it’s just not the quality of the picture and the work, but it’s also the relationship he has with the people that he takes pictures of and the communication and the relationship he has with his team. People see that you work as a team and it’s a true collaboration. That makes the joy of the days so pleasant and incredible, and those people that are that quality are so rare. It’s really, you know, a family. He treats people with equality; it doesn’t matter who you are or what your job is on the shoot, it’s pleasant. We don’t always work together, but we stay good friends. I just received a text from him today; he’s in Peru working. He sent me the most lovely email, about a wonderful holiday and everything. He’s on the other side of the world. As a friend, he’s thinking of me and sending me wishes. It’s not like Dear All, it’s Dear Tom. That’s why Mario is my dear, dear friend. I think that most people value the connection he has with people, which I don’t see in other people. I went from a photo shoot that was insane and incredible in Berlin with girls from all over the world. It’s unique. He’s the best.” S t e p h e n Ga n , Creative Director “There are no problems in Mario’s world. Everyone’s happy. Everyone’s good-looking. Everyone’s chic! He’s always there (at cool parties) for people. And he’s always there for people (I mean, for his friends)!”

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Jimmy Nail, Paris, 1999, The Face. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

“

On and off set he is a pure joy to be with. He can be light or very deep, laugh with everyone and even at him self. Through his eyes everyone and everything is beautiful, people are healthy, sexy, free and happy to be alive and who they are.

—Natalia Vodianova GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

”

Natalia Vodianova, London, 2006. Alexander McQueen, Jake Chapman, Dinos Chapman, London 1999. British Vogue. Naomi Campbell Sean “P Diddy” Combs, London 2001, British Vogue.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

“

“My first memory is how very impressed I was with Mario’s directness and the fact that he was a bit bold in his way of addressing people. But, he was, and is, always honest. He is one of the few people who doesn’t need to talk about you behind your back. He is straightforward with a smile on his face.

Raquel Zimmermann, London, 2008, Vogue Paris. At Mr Chow’s New York, 1998. Donatella Versace and Gianni Versace, Paris .

—Donatella Versace

”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

Gold jacket modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own. Earrings by Erickson Beamon.

N o. 9 9

Julia by Maripol

Fashion editor Tom van dorpe

Model Julia Restoin Roitfeld at IMG. Hairstylist Yannick Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Is at Management + Artists. Lighting design Neil Francis Dawson. Photo technician Ray Henders. Makeup

Romy Soleimani for Beauty.com at Management + Artists. Makeup assistant Mari Susada. Stylist assistant Carrie Wiedner. Equipment Bath House Studios.

Fur coat by Helen Yarmak. Black cat suit (worn under coat) by Kiki de Montparnasse.

Patent trench coat by Prada. Earrings by Erickson Beamon. Sunglasses by Selima Optique.

Fur coat by Helen Yarmak.

Black cat suit (worn under coat) by Kiki de Montparnasse.

Fur coat by Helen Yarmak. Sunglasses by Selima Optique.

Gold jacket modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own. Earrings by Erickson Beamon.

Jacket by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci. Bodysuit (worn under jacket) by Chanel. Clear bangles all by Patricia Von Musulin.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

106

Boy, Man

N o. 1 07

Now reports came out that the victim’s legs, or both his hands and legs, had been n March 22, 2009, a Sunday, the bound with duct tape. An informant menactual drama—murder, flight, tioned rough sex. There was no evidence capture—was almost over. But A Thrill-Seeking Kid and the of forced entry, so the victim knew his the news was coming out faster “Underage” Middle-aged Man— killer or at least opened the door for him. and faster, like the spokes of a David McConnell Recounts Word got out that drugs and alcohol were wheel going blurry, then oddly a True Story in which involved. Erotic snapshots were found in static: there was too much information the apartment. to process. Everyone involved, down to Innocence and Experience TV cameras were trained on the ’60s the accused murderer’s family cat, Fluffy, Aren’t What They Seem. modernist 76th Precinct building when had a presence on the Internet. MySpace, the Middletown captive was led out. A Craigslist, YouTube, twistedsiblings.com, young, thuggishly handsome man, shaved georgeweber.net, ibeatyou.com, XTube, B y David M c C onnell head, olive skin, handcuffed, he wore a vampirefreaks.com. photograph by B ela B orsodi teenager’s, or criminal’s, default expresA body was found in the parlor-floor sion of scorn. He looked at the cameras apartment of a brownstone in the Carroll with black-eyed indifference. His upper Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, right around the corner from the 76th Precinct house. This wasn’t the fanci- lip was swollen, injured during the capture in Middletown. His black est section of rapidly gentrifying Carroll Gardens; the buildings on this sweatshirt and khakis were oversized, though not in the fashionably stretch of Henry Street weren’t all fussily restored. The area looked a lot baggy way. In fact, the police had given him these clothes. They kept as like neighborly New York of a long time ago. Indeed, many old-timers evidence what he’d been wearing when caught. The kid was John Katehis (the middle syllable is stressed and still lived there, and newcomers had adopted their habit of weekend stoop sales. You got a few dollars and unloaded junk like LPs, that iron- rhymes with “say”), and, though he looked older, he was only 16, a miic Elvis plate, or a birdcage spray-painted gold. But the March Sunday nor. sixteen! rough sex! murder! famous newsman! Even the dourest when the body was found was too early in the season for the sales to observer must have felt a shiver of tabloid fascination. start. It was cool. The street was empty. Stubborn brown leaves from The media and gossip website Gawker, an aggregator and comthe previous fall hung on the ends of twigs. menter on the news, had already noted Weber’s murder over the weekFor the rest of the day it was cop cars, news vans, the medical ex- end. The site, which is famous for half-put-on/half-real Manhattan aminer’s truck, yellow tape, idling videographers. A man in a white dreadfulness, has a keen moralistic streak invisible to many of its readjumpsuit appeared at the front door and ushered out two others in ME ers and, especially, to the targets of its scorn. Hamilton Nolan wrote a windbreakers, who maneuvered gingerly down the stoop carrying a rueful post imagining the Daily News’ description of the suspect as a body in a thick black vinyl bag lashed to a spine board. male “companion” (his ironic quotes) and expected the Post to up the Because it was the weekend, the story began the old-fashioned ante to “Sex Slay” in the title of a Tuesday article. “Not what . . . you way: information was gathered by reporters who called up police press would want your legacy to be immediately after your untimely death,” officers and wrote squibs for newspapers and wire services. The local he noted. TV stations made a chopped salad of old images of the victim, of the Tawdry or not, Nolan pursued the story with the you-decide black bag coming down the stairs, of God-I-can’t-believe-it interviews completism of modern Internet journalism. He found Katehis’ eerie with neighbors. As those images shuffled in the background of one MySpace page and countless photos of the accused killer posing with broadcast, a plummy voice-over droned the usual platitudes: “A man items from his very scary collection of knives. Nolan posted everything who lived for the news, who, with his tragic death, is now making the on Gawker, including links to Katehis’ childish YouTube videos of himnews . . .” Because, ironically, the victim had been a reporter too. self: the boy giggles helplessly while listening to the crank phone calls The victim, it turned out, was well-known locally. He had that hale- he made for his site JSKCranks. In another he boasts with tough-guy fellow-well-met retail fame that prompts the owners of your favorite profanity about a $75 bottle of “fucking” absinthe he just bought, kisses bars and restaurants to ask if they can hang your picture on the wall. it and concludes, “Now I’m gonna go try me some of this fucking shit.” (Best Lasagna in New York!) He was an ABC Radio newsman, George Nolan even put up a link to the diciest item Katehis had online. As Weber. He even had a jaunty trademark, George Weber, the news guy. So, “greekjohn92,” Katehis had posted on XTube a 46-second video of fairly or not, the news was already a little newsworthier than your aver- himself with the descriptive title, “Wanking my semi-soft uncut cock.” age murder. From a steep overhead angle, against a background of dun carpet, the Mainstream reporters got the hard information efficiently. Weber faceless video shows an olive hand doing exactly what the title says to a was 47 (48 if he’d lived until Monday, his birthday). He’d worked for darker olive penis. “Semi-soft” may betray a touch of cautious underabout 12 years on various shows at the big New York affiliate WABC selling from an otherwise cocky boy, but the video is just what you’d NewsTalkRadio 77. On Monday, the police fanned out around the expect from a kid showing off his junk. A Gawker commenter pointed Henry Street brownstone. But the end came quickly. By Tuesday, with out that since everyone now knew greekjohn92 was 16 instead of 18 (as his own father’s agonized participation, a suspect was captured (in his XTube profile claimed), maybe it was best to leave the link alone for Middletown, New York, about halfway to the Catskills). legal reasons. Gawker removed it. When the suspect was driven back to the 76th Precinct from What kind of a 16-year-old was this? Would his MySpace self-porMiddletown, he was apparently talking pretty freely. A Brooklyn as- trait really be so eerie except in retrospect? sistant DA, Marc Fliedner, showed up at the precinct house to discuss charges. He spoke to the father. He interviewed the suspect on video. My name is John, I am sixteen years of age and live in Queens, New The city’s police commissioner himself, Ray Kelly, gave a press conYork. I enjoy long conversations, drinking, bike riding, hanging ference describing in appropriately staid terms what sounded a lot out, roof hopping, hanging off trains, any type of Parkour exercise, like a gay hookup gone awry or even a hustler murdering his john. Extreme Violence (chaos, Anarchy, ect..) Video Games, Violent Apparently, the suspect had confessed. Movies and listening to my ipod. I am a very easy person to talk to. I Details started coming out that hinted at a salacious underside like to do crazy and wild things.im like an adrenaline junkie, I’m alto Weber’s eulogies. It had already been reported that he was stabbed ways looking for a big thrill, I’m a big risk taker and like to live life on anywhere from 10 to 50 times, including defensive wounds to his the edge. I am an Extremist, an Anarchist,and a Sadomasochist. As hands. A witness had seen a man on a cell phone pacing in front of the long as you show respect for me i will show respect for you, if you disHenry Street brownstone on Friday night. A neighbor had later heard respect me, then i will fucking break your neck. To learn more about a thump. me just send me a message or catch me on aim, my screen name is

Pure Murder

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

107

johnkatehis92, my yahoo is greeksatan92@yahoo.com, johnkatehis92@yahoo.com and my msn is greekjohn92@hotmail.com. You can ask me any kind of questions, I am always happy to chat with a new person. Oh and be sure to check out my crank call videos at youtube.com/JSKCranks, and see if u can beat any of my challenges or beat my scores at challenges, at ibeatyou.com my screen name is crazyjohn92. [sic throughout] The “92” that keeps showing up refers to his birth date, June 26, 1992. It’s simple to identify the quotes that caught journalists’ attention. Here was a kid who would break your neck if you dissed him. But maybe it wasn’t as scary as that. XTube has convenient switches to indicate your own sex and the sex of the person you’re interested in. Katehis was signed up as an 18-year-old male interested in women. His hobbies were buying swords, playing video games, fighting and sex. His self-presentation, including flaunting his penis, makes him look like a precocious and arrogant 15-year-old trying to intrigue dream-babes. Since he hadn’t logged on for a year, the babes must not have been beating down his door. Based on his confessions, the story came out that Katehis had responded to Weber’s “Adult Gigs” post on Craigslist. That could have been a one-time thing, an easy 60 bucks. What really seemed strange was Weber’s fetish. The title of his post was “Smotherme.” He liked to be smothered, and that’s what he’d hired this risk-taking kid to do. Soon this material was all over news sites, and Internet commenters started to weigh in. Katehis had to be at least bi. He was gay and obviously couldn’t deal with it. No! Weber was the criminal! A 47-yearold pedophile having sex with a kid. He deserved it. Katehis just went over on a lark and freaked out. But look at those pictures of him with his machetes! What about his parents? Anybody who would do that is obviously a demented fag. Good riddance to both of them. Some, who claimed to know Katehis or to be fellow students of his, said, “He was quiet,” “He’s not a tough guy,” “It’s so weird.” To most people, Katehis seemed troubled and troubling. He went to a special school in Westchester. Online he claimed to be a satanist. As “John Psychedelic,” he put up a page on twistedsiblings.com (a Goth-oriented social site linked to but not affiliated with MySpace) that included a self-description more or less identical to the MySpace one. But instead of breaking necks, he warns, “I don’t take shit from anybody, so if your [sic] looking for problems, fuck off!” And between “anarchist” and “sadomasochist” he adds that he’s a “LaVeyan Satanist.” John Psychedelic’s twistedsiblings page is a red and black symphony of pentagrams, a horned devil and a large background photo of Anton LaVey. There’s an image of a lapel button with the slogan I HATE christians. But how seriously can you take a 16-year-old’s infatuation with Satanism? Even with the tattoo. Heavy metal music and antisocial anger are part of the classic teenage bag of tricks. Furthermore, Katehis specifies LaVeyan Satanism. Though books on Satanism were found at his family home (Katehis’ father later tells me they were his own), it’s unlikely Katehis could have read deeply about an occult practice that has hardly any depth to begin with. LaVeyan Satanism isn’t what it sounds like. A 1960s Hollywood invention of Anton LaVey, it began as more of a Playboy Mansion party than a coven. The satanic details are beside the point. If Katehis had been going to Exeter, say, instead of a school for troubled kids in Westchester, he might well have fixated on Nietzsche. Katehis’ LaVeyan Satanism is the masculine ideal of perfect self-reliance. Many boys are drawn to that fantasy. For them, the simplistic seems stronger than kryptonite. When

they read, “Anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” they feel like they’ve been struck by intellectual lightning. How serious could this boy be? At the same time, George Weber now appeared before the public completely exposed. You just couldn’t get more naked. He would have hated it. He would have raged or died of shame. First off, he didn’t think of himself as gay. Besides harboring a different set of desires, he had the waning white-picket-fence hopes that often afflict very cheerful, very public personalities. Apart from the bar friends and the media friends and the neighbors, Weber’s social world revolved around his beloved dachshund,Noodles, and, for more articulate intimacy (and sex), hustlers. They talked to him. And he talked to them. It was friendly. He explained to one that the smothering thing started when he was a kid. An older boy had wrestled him to the ground and put his hands over his mouth. Somehow Weber remembered liking it—the scare, the contact eroticism. For an irrepressible talker like him, a story was a much better explanation than anything as dryly descriptive as “autoerotic asphyxiation.” In any case, smothering worked for him. One guy who answered his “Smotherme” ad on Craigslist explained that Weber never even took his clothes off. He would lie supine on the bed, maybe gripping the thin steel bars of the headboard. The hustler said all he had to do was straddle him, clamp down on Weber’s mouth and nose, and Weber, staring at his own reflection in a cheval glass tipped over the bed, would eventually come. Meanwhile, the hustler gazed at a black-and-white art photograph of a movie house marquee hanging on the wall over the bed. If he got bored, he confessed, he might press down a little to make George come faster. But that was it. It was hardly sex at all. George went on, though. He got into light bondage. Sometimes he was short of cash. Perhaps, every time he had sex, he felt a self-disgust as elaborate, as ceremonial, as his sexual practices had become. But outwardly he was a sweetheart, loved by neighbors, coworkers. His secret hustler family liked him too. In fact, the hustlers worried about his getting into trouble. All was innocent enough while George sat watching wrestling on TV until he was aroused, but then he’d lead any stranger into the bedroom where everything was set up. One of his regulars, a young man who bore a striking resemblance to John Katehis, said he talked with friends about the danger George ran of meeting the wrong guy.

“I am an Extremist, an Anarchist and a Sadomasochist. As long as you show respect for me i will show respect for you, if you disrespect me, then i will fucking break your neck.”

John’s Version

fter he was tackled in Middletown, John told police his name was Nick Smith. The playacting didn’t last long. As Detective James Normile tells it, he explained to his prisoner that it was going to be a long drive and that John could ask for a bathroom stop if necessary. John began to relax. He said he was 16. This was apparently his first truth. Maybe he believed it would make a difference in the long run. When asked what he wanted to be called, he told Normile his real name was John. And he said he’d killed Weber by accident, because the man had pulled a knife, and . . . At this point, Normile says, he told John they could get into the story back at the 76th Precinct (Miranda and all that). So the exchange turned to small talk. John may have been a little disconcerted to find the detectives so unvengeful. Asked if Middletown was quiet, he told the older men about the area’s demographics. A lot of Mexicans lived there. When a marked law-enforcement vehicle appeared on the highway next to them, he noted their own car was going over the speed limit and wondered jokingly if the Impala could make a getaway if this turned into “hot pursuit.” By the end of the trip he was laughing now and then. He was still handcuffed.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

108

The DVD

he DVD shot back at the 76th Precinct opens with a shot of what looks like an old movie clapper. A hand appears and writes in black marker, “0423”—the time. The hand then moves to the space for the name of the interviewee, “Jonathan Katehis,” and crosses out “Jonathan,” replacing it with “John.” The camera pans to show who’s in the room. After that, it’s one long, unflinching shot of John. John is wearing a black bomber jacket over a T-shirt. He speaks with a trace of the tough guy’s “d’ese”-and-“d’ose” outer-borough accent. Sometimes his voice rises in a staccato “ha-ha-ha” of nervous laughter. A man-among-men baritone returns abruptly. Throughout the interview he has a blustery confiding tone, as if he believes that, through sheer energy, he can make his listeners understand what it was like to be in his shoes. While his right hand, the injured one with an immobile, slightly curving forefinger, is surprisingly kinetic, his left hand is even busier. Whenever he isn’t making explanatory gestures or stroking the side of his nose, which he does a couple of times (a tic reputed to betray liars), John uses his left hand constantly to dust donut crumbs from himself. He does this with an unexpected, aristocratic finickiness. He doesn’t often pick up a piece of the broken donut. He takes a bite two or three times at most. But his elegant fingers twiddle endlessly over the plate as if his hand were an infinite source of crumbs or stickiness. In response to assistant District Attorney Marc Fliedner’s questioning (on the DVD the ADA comes across as abundantly patient and relaxed yet serious), John tells the story, some details of which were soon to leak.

ohn says he sold a Sidekick and another smartphone on Craigslist and he was checking around the site and found a “smother thing” in the “Adult Gigs” section. He figured it would be an easy $60. He and George exchanged pictures. George’s weren’t explicit, just hands over his mouth and nose, and John thought he could do that. They had a back-and-forth about setting up a time, and John finally took the subway to Carroll Gardens on a Friday afternoon. He picked up a pack of M&Ms and a Stewart’s root beer (probably at the Rite-Aid next to the subway entrance on Smith Street). He says he followed George’s directions to 561 Henry Street, which was a straight shot past Carroll Park, down President Street. In front of the Henry Street brownstone, John continues on the DVD, he phoned George. George came to the front door and let him in. John was still carrying his root beer, but he must have been about finished, because George offered him a Bud Light as soon as they got in the apartment. In an odd detail that must refer to Noodlepalooza 2, John says the older man joked that he had a lot of beer left over from a party. His friends had run through all the hard stuff. George was drinking something himself, but John doesn’t know what. It was in a red plastic glass later found in the bedroom—maybe rum-and-Coke. After a minute of beer talk, George said, “Let me show you what’s going on in the other room.” On the bed in the bedroom (here, John speaks to the ADA and detective Normile with a buddylike expression of shared distaste) were mirrors, black duct tape and rope and scissors. George explained how he like to be smothered, and John tried it, gingerly putting his hand over George’s mouth and nose without pressing down. After that delicate introduction to his fetish, George led John back into the living room. George had a chest he used as a coffee table. According to John, the inside of the chest was strewn with loose cocaine. On the DVD John tries to be helpful: “I assume it was cocaine. You guys have got to test it.” George took some out and cut three lines for John but had none himself. “I was hyperjumpy after that. I don’t take drugs. I’m—I got super paranoid.” He says George explained that he wanted “the stuff you use to clean VCR tapes” sprayed on a sock and held to his mouth. (In the written statement he’d called this stuff “poppers.”) “VCR tapes?” the ADA wonders. John lets out a high-pitched

laugh, “VCR, yeah, I thought it was extinct.” George and John returned to the bedroom. They were both clothed. George got on the bed. John says he wrapped the duct tape around the man’s ankles three or four times. Helpfully again, he explains that if police found any tape on his hand it must have been from when George was trying to get it off his ankles later, after the struggle. But George was on his stomach at this point. John says the older man turned over and pulled a knife from his pocket, probably just to show it off or something, but “I’m jumpy as shit from what I just told you.” On the DVD he examines his dirty nails for a moment. Fliedner asks, “Are you on the bed?” John shakes his head and spits out a fleck of something before saying no. Then, in order to demonstrate how George must have pulled the knife from his right pocket after turning over, John briefly makes as if he’s George lying on the bed. He says he (John) freaked out and grabbed for the knife. Like someone patting a ball of dough into shape, he mimes their wrestling for the knife with his hands. Pressed, he says, “I’m leaning over the bed.” He leans. “He’s lying on his back.” He leans back. He raises his voice a bit: “Both of our hands were on the knife. We were fussing over this knife.” He was cut himself in the struggle. He holds up the injured finger. More questions: “What were you talking about? Was there any conflict?” In a striking flash of anger, John raises his voice: “NO! It was like I just told you. We were fussing over the knife and it slips and goes into his neck and he starts cursing and shit.” John is at once calm again. He returns to the scene. “I’m bleeping paranoid. Here I don’t remember the sequence.” Now, on the DVD, the wheels of John’s chair squeak suddenly. He leans forward and grabs his right thigh. He’s felt a shooting pain. Fliedner asks if he wants to stand up or stop. But John says the pain is “from the antibiotics or something.” Meanwhile, in court, while the DVD is being played, John’s cheeks have turned distinctly red under his terra cotta complexion. No one enjoys seeing themselves “played back.” John’s father, Spiro, has scuttled from one side of the courtroom to the other to get a better view of the video. He can’t stop sniffling, sobbing almost, as he watches.

“If Katehis had been going to Exeter, say, instead of a school for troubled kids in Westchester, he might well have fixated on Nietzsche.”

he video interview continues. “It’s all out of sequence,” John says. “This dude’s fucking stabbed and I’m bleeding the hell out of my hand . . .” He says he “ran around searching for shit.” He took a bottle of whiskey and “chugged” some, but stopped because he wasn’t sure if it might thin his blood and make the bleeding worse. “I don’t know how I did it so fast,” he explains when asked why he went through George’s collection of children’s lunch boxes—20 of them lined up atop the kitchen cabinets. He found “like just sippy cups” inside, “Ha-haha!” Up on the countertop he started to feel dizzy. He ran water from the kitchen faucet over his deeply cut finger. He went into the bathroom and tried to rinse the finger again but the water was too hot, so he took the lid off the toilet tank to soak his hand in cold water. He found some gauze bandages and tape in “the— like—the—” he makes an oddly elegant movement with his left hand and Fliedner supplies the word “mirror.” “Yeah.” His clothes were bloody, so he took them off. He didn’t want to get blood on his sneakers or on his Harley jacket. Mentioning this, his hands gesture toward his lapels. “That jacket?” Fliedner asks in a howbout-that tone of voice. Yes. John was trying to keep blood off the very jacket he’s wearing during the interview. He explains he sprayed himself with some Axe body spray he found in the bathroom and dressed in some of George’s clothes. He wore one of George’s leather jackets and carried the Harley jacket in his left hand. “I’m tripping, I’m paranoid,” he emphasizes repeatedly. He says he went back into the bedroom where George was still mumbling. He reached into George’s pocket and took $60, “what he was going to pay me for this smothering garbage.” (It’s a different-sounding dismissive

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

109

from when the judge picks the phrase up later.) As John reached into George’s pocket his hand dragged the older man’s pants down, and the body, or still-softly-vocalizing man, fell onto the floor. “He still has his boxers on,” John answers Fliedner’s question with a little frown of propriety. He says he picked up the knife and took it with him, a flip-knife with a tiny knob on the three-inch blade so it could be opened with one hand. In the written statement he’d judged it a pretty good knife but added that he had a nicer one in his own collection. (“Yeah, I like my swords and knives,” he admits defensively to Fliedner on the DVD.) “I close the door behind me. That’s something I do everywhere.” At the foot of the brownstone’s steps, he says, he turned right, then right again on President Street. “I dispose” of the knife by throwing it by a tree. “I was walking calmly. I was walking quickly.” Whatever John had used to bandage his finger wasn’t holding. He’d severed a small artery, so blood pulsed out with every systole. He’d need stitches or a tourniquet to stop it. In the subway, he says, a “Hindu” couple swiped a MetroCard for him at the turnstile. He took the G train north, back toward Queens. He moved from car to car; his bleeding was attracting too much attention. Wherever he sat, his throbbing forefinger filled the shallow depression of the plastic subway seat next to him with blood. A stranger fished a fresh sock from his gym bag and handed it to him to stanch the flow. In Long Island City, at Court House Square, John left the G line to switch to a eastbound 7 train. That would take him to 90th Street and Elmhurst Avenue, the stop closest to home. At Court House Square, an elevated station, an MTA functionary wasn’t as helpful as the Hindu couple. He refused to buzz John through the emergency exit for $2. He sold him a single-ride MetroCard instead. John made it up to the platform, but by now he’d lost so much blood that another MTA worker promptly sat him down and called 911. An EMT later testified that his pulse was undetectable. He lost consciousness several times and was, in fact, near death. But he recovered quickly as soon as the injury was treated. So why did he flee to Middletown after getting stitched up at the Cornell Medical Center? “I was reading all this shit about like 20 stab wounds and no mention of the coke, so it looks like he was killed in cold blood. I panicked.” He says he spent a night in Penn Station before taking the train to Middletown where he had friends. He got a call from his father, who told him he’d finagled a ride upstate from somebody for $50 and would bring $300 to John. “You know the rest.” In Middletown, Spiro called John from a parked Ford Explorer with tinted windows. John approached. Even before the three detectives got out, he could see his father wasn’t alone. He ran. There were four other cars, ten or twelve detectives in all.

“His secret hustler family liked him too. In fact, the hustlers worried about his getting into trouble.”

Discrepancies

n March 18, John posted an ad on Craigslist: “Iphone 3G 16gb Unlocked . . . Also comes with alot of games. $500. Call me at 347 612 6013. Anytime after 6pm. or reply to this message.” A few minutes later he posted another ad offering to sell “my Sidekick 08 for 120 bucks, phone only.” Apparently he needed money. Six hours earlier, giving Craigslist the same reply email, greeksatan92@yahoo. com, he’d posted in the “Casual Encounters” category, “I Blow 4 Cash – m4m.” Though John had to enter 18 as his age for the system to take the ad, the body of his post read, “I am a 16 yo dude looking for quick cash, im bi, white, and uncut. but im only into oral play. will blow guy of any age. but only 4 cash.” Within 15 minutes he got a reply from George Weber. He got other replies, too. In his responses he presents himself as young and sexually savvy, but the details shimmer a bit uncertainly. “Hey dude, i would come over and jack off for you. is that all ur asking for? im in need of serious cash, im an uncut white male, 19 yo . . . lol u can even take pics or record if u want.” “hey dude, im a 17yo white greek irish and italian dude, uncut 5inch dick, but I only like oral play . . .” In a message to one guy the next day, the day before the murder, John sounds almost plain-

tive: “Hey whats up dude? don’t you wanna meet me and have some oral fun. do u have a car? im available today from 5pm . . .” Only the exchange with George seems to have gone anywhere.

John: ok ok. cool. how much are you willing to offer. im available everyday . . . i attached a few pics. George: cool . . . thanks for getting back. i have a few guys who [do] this tie up/smothering thing on me and I usually do $60 for 30-minutes. let me know if ur interest . . . oh and what r ur stats? John: oh yea dude. im totally interested. what do you mean by stats???? George sends some smothering pictures to see if “Satan Katehis” is all right with it. John: lol yea I saw the pics, pretty cool stuff. im aprox 150lbs, 5foot 11inches.

They have some trouble setting up a time. At one point John teases the older man, “youve been a bad boy eh. lol . . .” First the meeting is set for Thursday, then Saturday, then Friday. The last message from John comes Thursday, the one in which he gives George a new phone number. A couple of oddities stand out in these emails. Though he gets the sexual lingo down (as anyone could who’d spent a few minutes looking through ads of this kind), John doesn’t know what his “stats” are, and he says his dick measures five inches, which sounds perfectly realistic but too honest for an experienced hustler. Unless John was underplaying his measurement, because he had a notion that submissiveness in dick size, age and all the rest is a plus in attracting another man (an idea one could argue was curiously masculine, even straight, since gay men are more used to the paradoxes of sissified or boyish tops and hairy, big-dicked bottoms). Furthermore, the photos John sent of himself don’t look quite right for a hookup. He’s fully dressed and doesn’t appear particularly friendly. In one he leans back like a rock guitarist making double devil’s horns with his hands by his thighs. In fact, the whole “I Blow 4 Cash” premise is a little odd, since guys like John, if they’re straight and at all experienced, know they can get at least 60 bucks for just standing there while someone else blows them. A slight aura of inexperience means nothing when it comes to the business of sex, of course. Everyone’s a beginner at some point. But it raises two interesting, contradictory possibilities: maybe John was a little into the idea of sex with a man, or maybe he was trying to entice a victim based on an imaginary version of gay sexuality. Either way, he wasn’t responding to George’s ad as he later claimed. George was responding to his.

hen he was found by EMTs at the 7 train station, John was in shock, sweating, pale, cool to the touch. The EMTs elevated his legs, raised his bandaged hand, and took him in a scoop stretcher to an ambulance where they gave him oxygen. He soon had a detectable radial pulse. The whole time he was being treated John couldn’t stop worrying about a bag he’d been carrying. “I need my bag. Please don’t forget my bag,” [EMT] Valerie Vera-Tudela recalls him saying over and over. He explained that he’d came from Coney Island where he’d cut his finger on a Snapple bottle. (Later he said something about juggling bottles.) He told her he’d had no drugs or alcohol. His pupils looked fine. On the ride to the hospital, Valerie says, John’s color came back, and by the time they reached Cornell he was even laughing a bit and “flirting” with her. Routine toxicology testing on John’s blood showed no traces of alcohol or cocaine. As for the white powder found in George’s chest and other places in the apartment, it tested negative for cocaine and opium alkaloids. Furthermore, a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry test showed no “extra peaks” that would indicate any other controlled substance or medicines like aspirin or acetaminophen.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

110

ankles and feet were visible. When the comforter was raised, George’s face appeared covered with a dense scattering of white pills—aspirin. An aspirin bottle rested by his head. George had been stabbed 50 times front and back. Some of these wounds were random cuts and slices, but the majority weren’t. Both hands were injured in a messy way consistent with warding off a blade. From under his left ear to the area of his Adam’s apple, there were four stabs and three incised wounds (wounds made by slicing). The carotid artery had been cut. The left temple had been stabbed, as well as the right cheek, a deep stab that penetrated George’s cheek and tongue. There were also two incised wounds and a stab to the back of the head and one behind the right ear. The haphazard nature and changing angles of these injuries suggested to the ME that the victim was alive and struggling when they were made. On the pale-as-flour skin of George’s back, six stab wounds were grouped at his left shoulder and eleven on his right side below the scapula. These were up to two inches deep, and some went through his ribs to penetrate his chest cavity. The ME explained that clustered wounds like these are made when the victim is not (or no longer) moving. Seven more stab wounds formed a cluster in the middle of George’s chest, including a deep one near his heart. Finally, six gaping incised wounds, roughly parallel, running down George’s pale left arm, made it look like a ghastly version of an unbaked baguette. George was wearing a black T-shirt which had been pushed up over his chest. His pants were unbuckled, unbuttoned and unzipped. They were pulled down below his knees. So were his boxer shorts. The shaft of his penis was bruised from possible squeezing. An additional circular area of bruising to the head of the penis was reportedly consistent with a bite. The scene as described differs so much from a single accidental poke to the neck that left George still mumbling and cursing when John disappeared that night.

ring of black duct tape was found around one of George’s wrists. It isn’t plausible, as John casually suggested on the DVD, that this was a piece of tape George tried to get off his ankles. The duct tape around his ankles was still intact. The ring of black tape around George’s wrist was sticking to the skin on one side, loose on the other. The medical examiner reported it slipped off with ease. The loose side of the ring was badly stretched and twisted. It seems obvious that the tape originally bound both wrists and that George was able to free one of his hands during a struggle. In a coup de théâtre, the prosecutor, Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, began her summation by claiming John had admitted as much. She cued the DVD interview to the moment Fliedner asks John how George was holding the knife when the struggle began. John mimes George’s starting position by bringing his wrists together and raising them to just under his chin. “He was like this . . .” The prosecutor paused the DVD at the image.

hirty or forty crime scene photographs were introduced into evidence. Hundreds were taken. Tavis Watson of the 76th Precinct was what’s called the “first officer,” the first cop on the scene of a crime and the one responsible for securing the area. He was the one who came to Henry Street at 8:30 that Sunday morning. George’s door was locked, but Watson and his partner roused a neighbor in the ground-floor apartment and made their way to the backyard. At the top of a few steps, the door to George’s parlor-floor apartment was unlocked. As soon as he entered, Watson says, he recognized the smell of a dead body. In the bathroom the water in the tub was running onto a crumpled pair of black jeans. A bloody washcloth and a bloody gauze pad were on the edge of the bathtub. An oval rug on the floor was splattered with blood. There were also bloody spots and partial footprints all over the tiny hexagonal floor tiles. More gauze pads and their Johnson & Johnson paper wrappings were strewn on the rug along with a bloody towel. The kitchen was a mess. Ordinary stained wood cabinets, all agape, lined the walls above and below a counter cluttered with kitchen equipment. Paper bags and dishware, apparently from the ransacked cabinets, littered a narrow kitchen rug. (A closet in the short hall back to the bathroom also spilled its contents.) A bottle of Dewar’s scotch was on the floor. A DNA swab later confirmed this was the whiskey John had chugged. In the sink, inside a large cooking pot, were an empty can of Stewart’s root beer and another of Bud Light. Twenty nostalgic lunch boxes lining the top of the cabinets were in disarray. Each had been methodically opened. Though blood swabs were taken from many places in the kitchen, the room’s true “bloodiness” only showed up after the surfaces were painted with leucocrystal violet and photographed under UV light. All over the wood floor, all over the white countertop, dense footprints of stockinged feet glowed in an eerie blue. You could all but see someone—someone with a spade-shaped big toe—shuffling along the counter opening lunch box after lunch box. There were more signs of a ransacking in the living room. The bedroom, too, was in complete disarray. Closets and armoire drawers spilled clothing. At the foot of the bed, a chest with a flowered paper interior had been emptied of everything but the ubiquitous white powder. The walls in the bedroom were painted a glossy ox-blood red. The real blood all over the floor was redder. The bed, front and center between two shaded street-facing windows, had a barred metal headboard and footboard. Miscellaneous objects were strewn across the bed’s brown-striped sheets: an empty camera box, a bottle of Nic bug powder, an empty Verizon phone box, a paper bag, an encyclopedia, an empty vodka bottle, scissors, a roll of duct tape, a length of rope, a cylindrical black plastic container, a bottle of lube. On the floor were a bloodied cable box, a pile of folded white T-shirts, one stamped with a bloody shoe print, aspirin, snippets of rope and scraps of black duct tape. George was on his back in a pool of blood. He lay under the heap of a tan comforter which was partially blackened by blood and which must have slipped or been pulled from the bed. Only his duct-taped

The Trial

fter almost a year, during a stretch of heartbreakingly golden latefall weather in November 2011, John Katehis was tried a second time in Brooklyn Supreme Court. The first trial ended with a hung jury. John was 18 now and had been moved from the Robert N. Davoren Complex (detained male adolescents) to the Otis Bantum Correctional Center (detained male adults), both on Riker’s Island. An 11th grader when he went in, he’d passed his GED while imprisoned (with very high scores, Spiro insisted to me proudly). There’d also been a serious fight and a stretch in isolation. Along with the sense of hurry came a sort of callused energy. Much more horrible photographs were introduced this time than in the first trial. The language was more graphic. Defense was more aggressive about disparaging George Weber’s behavior. We even saw a shocking picture of the bruised (bitten?) penis. As the actual murder receded into the past, memory seemed to grow colder, more brutal. “I just need five more minutes, judge,” Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi snapped at Judge Firetog before her summation. Then she delivered her speech with stiff passion. Though this time they were given the option of a second, lesser charge—manslaughter—the jury was slow. Perhaps they couldn’t forgive Weber’s strange sexuality. Or they couldn’t bear throwing a young man’s life away. You could see the strain on jurors’ ashen faces and imagine their weariness. They chose murder in the second degree, finally, the more serious charge (and the highest possible in New York, where first-degree murder has to involve “special circumstances,” like a police officer victim, multiple murders or torture). They’d decided John meant to kill. Until the foreman spoke the atmosphere had been heavy. Now Spiro looked faint, cameras chittered like squirrels, glances collided and retreated in the courtroom’s suddenly frictionless air. John’s mild self-confident expression froze. Poked on the shoulder by a court officer, he turned to give his father a big those-are-the-breaks smile and a shrug. A tough guy. American Honor Killings by David McConnell will be published by Akashic Books, Spring 2013.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

111

N o. 1 1 2

The Pleasure of Being Unwanted

Artist Bjarne Melgaard recently collaborated WITH PROENZA SCHOULER FOR his show at Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery. HERE THE ARTIST PRESENTS AN EXCLUSIVE portfolio for document no. 2. PhotographER Cedric Buchet Fashion Editor Sabina Schreder

Artwork by Bjarne Melgaard. Model Jamie Bochert at Elite NY. Hair stylist Charlie Taylor. Makeup Pep Gay. Manicurist Tracylee at Tim Howard Management. Fashion Assistant Natasha Devereux. White mens shirt by Proenza Schouler for Bjarne Melgaard. Lace-up strap heels by Proenza Schouler. Ossie Clark sofa and dolls courtesy of the artist and Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery from the exhibition, “A New Novel” By Bjarne Melgaard.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

113

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

114

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

117

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

118

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

119

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

122

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

123

N o. 1 24

Double Visions

Photographer Bela Borsodi fashion editor Sabina Schreder

T-shirts and boots by Kenzo. Pants by Bernhard Wilhelm. Earrings by Dolce & Gabbana.

Baseball cap, veil, swimsuit and boots by Jeremy Scott. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

125

Models Katlin

Aas, Patricia van der Vliet at Marilyn.

Hair stylist

Charlie Taylor. Makeup Angie Parker at Nars. Manicurist Holly Falcone. Stylist assistant Natasha Devereux, Mia Fernandez, Cornealios Danzy. Photo assistant Ramon Fernandez, Christopher Baker. Studio Sunset Studios. Retouching Lutz + Schmitt.

Dress by Maison Martin Margiela.

Collar and shoes by Givenchy

by Riccardo Tisci. Cane by Abracadabra. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

126

Dress, hat, necklace, cape and shoes by Saint Laurent.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

127

Dress, Scarf, earrings and shoes by Dolce & Gabbana.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

128

Corset, earrings and shoes by Vivienne Westwood. Pants by John Galliano. Belt by A.P.C. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

129

Cape, corset, shorts and earrings by Vivienne Westwood.

Shoes by Pierre Hardy.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

130

Top, pants and shoes by Celine. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

131

Dress by Tom Ford. Hat by Vivienne Westwood. Shoes by John Galliano.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

132

Dress, pants, collar and shoes by Givenchy by

Riccardo Tisci. Ring by Basile & Pape. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

133

Dress, shirt, leggings and shoes by Y-3. Glasses by Jeremy Scott

for Linda Farrow.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

134

Jacket and skirt by

Junya Watanabe. Hat by Albertus Swanapoel. Socks by Bernhard Wilhelm. Shoes by Vivienne Westwood.

Umbrella by American Apparel.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

135

N o. 1 3 6

IT’S A FINE DAY Photographer Daniel Sannwald Fashion Director James Valeri

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

136

Opposite: Hat and bra by Jeremy Scott. White bodysuit worn throughout by Stylist Studio. Boots by Meadham Kirchoff. This page: Dress by Lanvin. Boots by Meadham Kirchoff. Silver bodysuit worn throughout by Stylist Studio.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

137

Shirt by Marc Jacobs. Boots by Jeremy Scott. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

138

Model Ashleigh Good at Ford. Makeup Adrien Pinault using Nars at Management Artists. Hair stylist Tomo Jidai at Streeters. Manicurist gina edwards at Kate Ryan Inc for Essie. Producer Stacee Robert. Photo assistants Guillaume Blondiau, Pawel Wonicki. Hair assistant Ayae Yamamoto. Fashion assistants Kadeem Greaves, Christin Radomilovic. Pailette dress by Ashish. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

139

Dress by Alexander Wang. Boots by Jeremy Scott.

Shirt and pants by Junya Watanabe.

Dress by Proenza Schouler. Earrings by Jean Paul Gaultier. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

142

Dress by Anthony Vaccarello. Boots by Jeremy Scott. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

143

Red bodysuit by Opening Ceremony for Adidas. Glasses by Ann Sofie Black. Boots by Jeremy Scott.

Embellished bodysuit by Balmain. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

145

N o. 1 4 6

HAZARDOUS DOMESTICITY Photographer Catherine Servel fashion editor Catherine Newell-Hanson

Sweatshirt by Kenzo. Top worn underneath by Topman. Fishnet Top by Sonia Rykiel. Skirt Vintage from Screaming Mimi's. Stole by Pologeorgis. Earrings by Dolce & Gabbana. Bracelets by Saree Palace. Socks by Falke. Sandals by Kenzo. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

147

Model Anniek Kortleve at New York Model Management. Hair stylist Leonardo Manetti at 2b Management. Makeup Serge Hodonou using MAC Cosmetics for FRANK REPS. Manicurist Julie Kandalec at Bryan Bantry Agency using Tom Ford Beauty. Digital operator Brett Moen. Set design Josephine Shokrian Studio. Stylist assistant Amber Harris. Coat and pants by Louis Vuitton. T-Shirt by 3.1 Phillip Lim. Slip by Julianna Rae. Bracelets by Saree Palace. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

148

Dress and necklace by

Gucci. Robe (worn under dress) by Juliana Rae. Pants by 3.1 Phillip Lim.

Bracelets and anklets (worn throughout) by Saree Palace. Stole by Pologeorgis. Socks by Falke. Sandals by Nike.

This page: Vintage jacket by

Family Jewels. T-Shirt by Acne. Skirt by Giorgio Armani. Vintage jeans by Maison Martin Margiela.

Necklace and rings by Pomellato.

Opposite: Fur coat by Pologeorgis. Jacket and pants by 3.1 Phillip Lim. Shirt Vintage. Sweater (worn underneath) by Bottega Veneta.

Earrings by Dolce & Gabbana. Vintage bracelets from Screaming Mimiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Sandals by Nike.

Cardigan by Burberry Prorsum. Vintage slip from Family Jewels. Vintage turtleneck from Screaming Mimiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. All rings by CZ Kenneth Jay Lane.

Coat Vintage. Slip by Julianna Rae. Jeans by J Brand. Sandals by Nike. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

153

Jacket and pants by

Stella McCartney.

T-shirt and dress Vintage. Bracelets by

CZ Kenneth Jay Lane. Sneakers by Nike. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

154

Top by Hermes. Earrings by Erickson Beamon.

N o. 1 57

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

This Is What It Looks Like

Photographer Luke Gilford Text & Performance Zackary Drucker Hair is the primary signifier of gender. We have a plethora of decisions regarding how we manage and modify our hair, decisions that have far greater implications and echoes than the lifeless cells hair is made of. Hair is death manifested and continues growing long after one’s expiration. What one does with the hair on their body and the hair on their head ultimately directs how a person’s gender is perceived, how they operate in the world. Being transgender is at times as vulnerable as being naked in public; sometimes I wish I was covered completely. I’ve had all of my body hair lasered off and grown the hair on my skull, long down my back. Sometimes I attach tracks, more hair, to look more feminine, more nubile, more like the 16-year-old celebrities on television. Britney Spears famously shaved her hair in a climactic moment of meth-fueled narcissistic insanity. Culture is delivering us there. I want to be covered.

Producer Meagan Judkins. Hair stylist Isaac Davidson. Lighting Jeff Marlowe. Assistance Lucca Dahan, Michael Parada.

eramics is one of the oldest forms of art in human history. The availabilty of the material, its durability and versatility continues to fascinate artists. For this issue of Document, we asked American artist Sterling Ruby to select a series of ceramic works by Lucio Fontana. Known for his strong sculptures and incredibly powerful installations, Ruby works extensively with ceramics and creates vivid, sharp shapes inspired by the California Craft Movement and German “hot lava” vessels from the ‘70s. His enthusiastic approach to this material produces some of the most interesting pieces in the genre today. Known for his monochromatic razor-cut paintings, Fontana was also a fervent ceramist, focusing on the art form in the later part of his life, after WWII, when he returned to Europe from Argentina. In this phase, the manipulation of the ceramic keeps its organic vitality, but also introduces new theoretic elements that we can find in his manifesto about space, architecture and painting. Realized shortly after the war, these works also express the pain and the violence of the conflict. Both Ruby and Fontana have this unique talent of combining the spontaneity of the process with an incredible sophistication. Looking at works of Fontana through the Ruby’s eyes is a new way to review the modernity of the late artist’s oeuvre.

N o. 1 6 4

Sculpted Psychograms

Late Italian painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana, chiefly known for his dramatic “slash series,” monochromatic paintings consisting of cuts or holes in the canvas surface, has a lesser known—if equally beautiful—body of ceramic work. Artist Sterling Ruby selects his favorites.

T ext by Daniele B alice I mages courtesy Galerie Karsten G reve C ologne , Paris , S t. M oritz

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

164

I l Gu e r r i e r o 4 9 S C 2 . photo : S a š a Fuis , C ologne

E D I T G: OSEaSš a H EFuis R E , C ologne A r l e c c h i n oG4U8T TSECR 8C. Rphoto

C o n c e t t o S pa z i a l e , Nat u r a C at. rais . 5 0 - 6 0 - N 2 0, 1 7 5 9/4 9. photo : J รถ rg von B ruchhausen , B erlin

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

168

C o n c e t t o S pa z i a l e 1 7 5 9/3 6 . photo : Friedrich R osenstiel , C ologne

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

169

C r o c i f i ss o 3 7 5 0/ 1 . photo : Wol f gang M eier , C ologne

N o. 1 7 0

Prep Steps

Photographer Daniel Jackson Fashion editor Benjamin Bruno

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Silk jersey dress (worn as skirt) by ralph lauren.

Vintage sweater by Calvin Klein Jeans from Beyond Retro. Black leather loafers (worn throught) by Sebago. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

171

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Hair stylist didier malige. Makeup francelle. Model karlie kloss at IMG. Manicurist elena capo. Stylist Assistant Natalie Cratella. Producer nikki stromberg. Retouching gloss studios.

Tweed top and skirt by Balenciaga by nicolas ghesquiere.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

172

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Wool and leather fringed sweater by Celine.

Satin and white netting dress (worn as skirt) by Celine. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

173

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Embroidered sweater by Marc Jacobs. Wool kilt by J. W. ANDERSON. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

174

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Ruffle bralet by

J. W. ANDERSON.

Knitted ruffle skirt by

Azzedine Alaia. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

175

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

“Broderie anglaise” shirt by Stella McCartney.

Pleated cotton skirt by Azzedine Alaia. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

176

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Lace bra top by Versace.

Hooded sweater by Commes Des garÇons play. Pleated skirt by

Azzedine Alaia. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

177

N o. 1 7 8

A CELEBRATION Photographer Paul Wetherell Fashion Director James Valeri

Satin top (worn as mini-dress) by Louis Vuitton. Veil by Bridal Veil Falls. Gloves by LaCrasia Gloves. Garter belt and hoisery by Falke. Earrings by Ten Thousand Things. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

179

Model Lindsey Wixson at Marilyn. Hair stylist Kevin Ryan at Art + Commerce. Makeup Pep Gay at Streeters. Manicurist Dawn Sterling at Melbourne Artists Management. Prop stylist Zac Mitchell. Assistant to prop stylist Carrie Hill. Photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assistant Sam Nixon, Remi Lamande. Fashion assistants Kadeem Greaves, Yohana Lebasi, Mike Nguyen. Digital tech Eran Wilkenfield. Location Pier 59. Top by Celine. Pants by Meadham Kirchhoff. Sunglasses by Linda Farrow for Jeremy Scott. Earrings by Ten Thousand Things. Necklace by Tom Binns.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

181

Silk mirelle bustier and skirt by

Calvin Klein Collection. Hat by Meadham Kirchhoff. Earrings by Ten Thousand Things. Gloves by LaCrasia Gloves. Garter belt and hoisery by Falke.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

183

Bra by Jenna Leigh. Skirt by Dior. Veil by New York Vintage. Earrings by Ten Thousand Things. Hoisery by Falke. Gloves by LaCrasia Gloves. Shoes by

Meadham Kirchoff. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

184

Assymetrical top and bunched skirt by Comme des GarcË&#x203A;ons. Vintage hat by Saint Laurent at New york vintage. Earrings by Van Cleef & Arpels. Gloves by Carolina Amato. Hoisery by Falke.

This page: Dress by Chanel. Sunglasses by Linda Farrow for Prabal Gurung. Earrings by Tom Binns. Belt by Vionnet. Ring by Delfina Delettrez. Shoes by Nicholas Kirkwood.

Opposite: Sequin coat by Fendi. Rubber dress by Christopher Kane. Veil by Bridal Veil Falls. Earrings by Delfina Delettrez. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

187

Fox stole and silk top by Miu Miu. Knitted knickers by prada. Pearl shawl by New York Vintage. Hat by Ellen Christine Millinary. Pearl earrings by Ten Thousand Things.

Fingerless mesh gloves by LaCrasia. Garter belt by Falke. Hoisery by Agent Provocateur.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

188

Silk satin patchwork stole by

Prada. Bra by Eres. Silk knit shorts by Prada. Hat by Leah C. Millinery. Earrings by Ten Thousand Things. Hosiery by Falke. Gloves by LaCrasia Gloves. Shoes by Prada.

Dress by Valentino. Gloves by LaCrasia Gloves. White gold and diamond bracelets and earrings by Van Cleef & Arpels. Boots by Meadham Kirchhoff. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

190

Silk dress by Marc Jacobs. Veil by Bridal Veil Falls. Gloves by LaCrasia Gloves. Earrings by George Jensen. Garter belt by Falke. Hoisery by Agent Provocateur. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

191

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

208

N o. 2 0 9

THE PERFECT WAVE

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Photographer Will Davidson Fashion Editor Stevie Dance

Cotton asymmetrical deconstructed gathered dress by Comme des Garc˛ons.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

209

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Model Meghan Collison at Next. Makeup Pep Gay. Hair stylist Tamara McNoughton. Set design Lauren Nikrooz. Photo assistants Sam Nixon, Jonathan Tasker, Matt Magelof. Stylist assistant Steff Yotka. Production Nikki Stromberg at MAP. Location Factory Brooklyn. Equipment Fast Ashleys Studios. Peplum top and skirt by Marni. Earring modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own. Sandals worn throughout by Eckhaus Latta. McCallum surfboard used throughout by Saturdays Surf NYC.

Lace shirt and satin bustier by Calvin Klein Collection.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Dress (worn as top) by Fendi. Skirt by The Row.

Top and pants by Maison Martin Margiela. Skirt by Eckhaus Latta.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Top and shorts by John Galliano.

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

This page: Jacket and shorts by 3.1 Phillip Lim. Top by Missoni. Opposite: Hooded top by Alexander Wang.

N o. 2 2 2

Ivoire

Photographer Maciek Kobielski Fashion Editor Joanne Blades

Dress by

Alexander Wang. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

223

Model Marie Piovesan at Marilyn. Stylist assistant Marcelo Gaia. Hair stylist Stefano Greco

at Bryan Bantry. Makeup Maki at The Wall Group.

Cape and dress by Rick Owens.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

224

Chanel Vitalumière Aqua Foundation. Guerlain Météorites Compact Powder. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

225

Dress by Maison Martin Margiela.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

226

Top by Celine. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

227

Tank dress and deconstructed gathered dress by Comme des Garc˛ons.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

228

Cardigan by Ralph Lauren. Panties by Donna Karan. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

229

N o. 2 3 0

THE KING

Photographer Danko Steiner Fashion Editor Ana Steiner Model and artwork Jared Buckhiester

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

230

Black leather jacket, hoodie, button down shirt, leather pants and leather shorts by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

233

Black leather jacket, hoodie, button down shirt, leather pants and leather shorts by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

235

All clothing modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

239

Black leather jacket, hoodie, button down shirt and leather shorts by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci.

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

241

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

244

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

245

N o. 24 6

PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS Photographer Collier Schorr Fashion Director James Valeri

Vest, top and pants by Emilio Pucci. Choker by Proenza Schouler. Shoes by Alexander Wang.

Models Karlie Kloss at IMG, Wyatt Grimmer at Ford Models, Otto Pierce at Red Citizen, Tomek Szalanski at Soul Artist Management, Jamie Wise at New York Models. Hairstylist Holli Smith at Total Management. Makeup Jeanine Lobell at Tim Howard Management. Manicurist Gina Edwards at Kate Ryan Inc. FOR Kiss Everlasting Gel Polish. Casting director John Tan. Prop stylist Robert Sumrell. Assistant to prop stylist Devin Rutz. Photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assistant Emily Hope. Fashion assistants Christin Radomilovic, Kadeem Greaves, Melisa Smith, Mike Nguyen, Renata Herminio. Light designer PJ Spaniol. Lighting assistant Tyler Cancro. Digital tech Ramon Fernandez. Location The Metropolitan Building. Special thanks to Brent Adams, Jason Evans, Eleanor Ambos, Michele Saunders, NewYork-Locations.com

Hat by Stephen Jones for John Galliano. Choker by Proenza Schouler.

On Couch: Jacket and pants by Dior Homme. Shirt by Martin Maison Margiela. Tie by Hugo Boss.

Pants by Hermes.

Leather jacket, top and belt by Balmain. Suede shorts by Hermes. Ring by Maison Martin Margiela.

Suede shorts by Hermes. Cap and leather vest by David Samuel Menkes. Shoes with leather straps by Alexander Wang.

Jacket and shirt by Louis Vuitton. Bow tie by Marc Jacobs.

Leather Dress by Dsquared2. Choker by Proenza Schouler. Shoes by Tom Ford.

Clockwise: Pants by Louis Vuitton. Suit by J.W. Anderson. Pants by Hermes.

Pants by Hermes. Shoes by Dior Homme.

Shirt by Fendi. Tie by Ermenegildo Zegna.

Top by Stella McCartney. Bra by Eres. Shorts by Francesco Scognamiglio. Shoes by Celine.

Hat by Stephen Jones for John Galliano. Choker by Proenza Schouler. Dress by Maison Martin Margiela. Cane by David Samuel Menkes.

Jacket, trousers and shirt by

Emporio Armani. Bow tie by Marc Jacobs. Rubber gloves by Stylist Studio. Whip by David Samuel Menkes.

Standing: Jacket, shirt, trousers and tie by Dior Homme. Cane and mask by David Samuel Menkes.

Sitting on stool: Top and trousers by David Samuel Menkes.

This page: Romper by Prada. Opposite: Vest, top and pants by Emilio Pucci. Choker by Proenza Schouler. Shoes with leather straps by Alexander Wang.

Hat by Stephen Jones for John Galliano. Choker by Proenza Schouler.

Harness and chaps by David Samuel Menkes.

Top and skirt by Francesco Scognamiglio. Choker by Proenza Schouler. Cuff by Maison Martin Margiela.

One of the premier photo rental spaces in New York City, Bath House Studios is the ideal space for virtually any type of shoot.

540 East 11th Street New York tel 212 388 1111 manager@bathhousestudios.com D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

272

Source materials

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

Rights of passage, thwarted expectations, inconvenient truths, heroes made and unmade, sobering moments of maturity come at any age and to everyone about anything. Our literary agents reflect on these life lessons in this issue’s collection.

N o. 2 74

MatthiAs

by Edmund White N o. 2 7 7

A yacht and a boy b y L aw r e n c e O s b o u r n e N o. 2 8 2

A.W. AND THE ART OF BETRAYAL

Suppositions by Bruce Benderson

N o. 2 8 7

Good Boy By T Cooper

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

273

N o. 2 74

Matthias

by Edmund White

y great love during those years was a Swiss cinema meister from Zurich, whom I met in Venice. I’d been spending several weeks every year in Venice with my best friend, David Kalstone, who lived in New York, taught English at Rutgers and in the summers lived in Venice. David spoke Italian and loved Venice because he was nearly blind, and Venice was a great pedestrian city if you were a good walker, and he was. Its walkways were well lit and the steps over bridges were clearly outlined in white pebbles. It was a city without cars and, though it was awesomely labyrinthine, David knew all the byways. He was a great friend of Peggy Guggenheim and we spent many evenings in her historic, if tedious, company, always accompanied by her little dogs. In her garden (a garden was a rare feature for a Venetian palazzo) Peggy had a white marble Byzantine throne and around it her various shih-tzus were buried. Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she’d assure them she wasn’t. D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

274

Every artistic or political or entertainment personality who came through Venice felt obliged to contact Peggy and if the dignitary was sufficiently important she’d give him or her a cocktail party. That’s how I first met Gore Vidal who in those years lived full-time in Italy. I met my Swiss cinema magnate one night on what we called the molo nero, a “dark dock” for cruising, a pathway between the little Piazza San Marco and Harry’s Bar—by day a major thoroughfare for tourists heading to the vaporetto stop but at night a byway where gays could be found milling around, to the extent that they congregated anywhere in this least gay of all cities. (In those days, they also went to a gay beach out on the Lido and to Haig’s Bar across from the Gritti Palace Hotel and to the public toilets on one side of the Rialto Bridge). There, on the molo nero, around midnight when the crowds had dissipated (most tourists were day-trippers since hotels in Venice were so expensive), a few gays would linger, though they could be scared off by the glare of approaching boats. One evening, sitting on a fence all dressed in white, was a tan, smiling man not in his first youth, one closer to my age—a decade younger, as it turned out. As I approached he said in accented English, “You must be American.” “I am. How could you tell?” “The way you smiled at me even though I’m a stranger.” Later, I thought it must have been my sloppy appearance that gave me away, the fact my shirt wasn’t tucked in. I couldn’t imagine why this handsome man would be interested in me so I said, “You should come back to the palace where I’m staying. It’s pretty spectacular. The kitchen was John Singer Sargent’s studio, and Henry James slept in the library in a sort of medical metal bed.” I’m not sure he knew who James or Sargent was; the past interested him not at all. When we were standing in the middle of the immense marble floor of the library, he took my glass from my hand and put it on the floor then he kissed me passionately. It turned out that he had my novel A Boy’s Own Story in his bag. His longtime lover, the art dealer, Thomas Amman, had just broken up with him but brought back from New York the new gay book everyone was talking about, so I think it pleased This—short for Matthias, pronounced “Tees”—to have the author of the new vogue book in his bed. Thomas had left him for George, a beautiful, young, Greek man who was a model and who’d just had an affair with Rock Hudson (Hudson’s AIDS had not yet been made public). This was disease-phobic, and used not one but two condoms. (“I’m Swiss,” he explained.) Within a few years both George and Thomas would die of AIDS. This asked me if I’d been “careful” and of course I said yes, though just the night before I’d slept with a young Spaniard who’d worked my nipples so hard they were still aflame and I winced whenever they were touched. But at that time in the early 80s there was no test for AIDS and no one knew exactly what caused it. We suspected it was caused by sex, but how? It seemed too unfair to us that just a single exposure could infect someone; in our guilt-ridden way we wanted the disease to be the punishment for a long life of vice. But even by those standards I’d been what the French called “vicieux” (a compliment in the world of gay French small advertisements). I’d slept with some three thousand men, I figured, and big-city gay men of my generation asked, “Why so few?” My figures were based on the rate of three a week for twenty years, from the age of 22 to 42 in New York, but many of my coevals “turned” two or three “tricks” a night, using the whore’s slang of the period (a “trick” was a once-only encounter, a word I had to explain recently to gay grad students). Truth be told, I would often go to the sauna, where I’d meet a dozen men a night. But

to This I pretended to be far more innocent. He was reassured because he thought of me as a sort of responsible gay leader thanks to my work with the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. I wasn’t ready to change my ways. I was so used to undressing mentally almost every man I met (and often went on to do so literally) that promiscuity was my first response to the least sign of reciprocity. I loved sex but I never experienced it in its “pure” state; to me, it was always blended with at least some shred of romantic fantasy. Soon I began to visit This in Zurich every other week and he came to Paris occasionally. When he traveled to my city we stayed on the Rue du Cherche-Midi in the beautiful apartment belonging to Andy Warhol and his business associate, Fred Hughes. It was reached by crossing a formal French garden, mainly of gravel, that was dominated by a sphinx with the head of an eighteenth-century female courtier. Inside, in the salon, there were a newly upholstered Second Empire couch and a huge circus painting by José Maria Sert resting on the floor. The kitchen was the latest in stylishness and efficiency, designed by Andrée Putman, a French woman who looked like a man in drag. In her store in the Marais, Putman was recycling designs from the past by Charlotte Perriand and Jean-Michel Frank. The whole shop was dominated by an immense door filled with bubbling water designed by Robert Wilson (a beauty salon on the rue St Honoré, the Maison de Beauté Carita, also had such a door). Warhol’s apartment looked as if someone with money and taste hadn’t quite moved in. I wasn’t used to going out with mature men my age, more or less, who already had strong opinions and spoke confidently of their defining life experiences. The boys I dated tried to fit into my crowded world because they had only the smallest, thinnest world of their own. Their feelings were often hard to sound because they themselves didn’t know what they felt. This knew how people should live and in what surroundings. He had opinions on everything that interested him, and what didn’t interest him he shrugged off. Maybe because he was involved with two visual arts—he exhibited and sometimes produced films and he collected contemporary art—he was very concerned about how everything looked. We spent a whole day at Puiforcat in Paris choosing silverware for his table. He cared how I cut my nails. He didn’t like me to be thirty pounds overweight and we went to a Swiss spa and ate nothing for ten days. Clothes were important to This. His ex, Thomas, was regularly listed among the Ten Best-Dressed men in the world. He flew the king of Spain’s tailor from Madrid to Zurich for fittings. They both pioneered the beautifully cut blazer-with-jeans look. Thomas’ cook/maid had worked for a Spanish ambassador and knew how to iron shirts expertly and gave ironing lessons to This’s maid. Once when I suggested we go to the Canary Islands for a vacation, This said the only snobbish words I ever heard from his lips: “Oh, that’s where we send our maids for their holidays—Putzfrau Insel, we call it.” I got an assignment from Lucretia Stewart, then the editor of Departures, the American Express travel magazine, to write about Egypt, and I invited This along as the photographer. It thrilled me to be able to offer him the trip since I was so much poorer and was always so self-conscious about my gifts to him. He took the assignment very seriously and was up every day before dawn, since the early morning light was the best. We traveled slowly down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor in a Hilton boat, the Osiris, which served wonderful international food and provided us with a luxury cabin at water level. We’d look out our cabin at dawn at the ibises and hoopoes in tall reeds. This had never been to the “Third World” before and he’d agreed to come along to Egypt with much trepidation. Travel for him had always been traumatic. The first time as a child he’d crossed the Alps into

“I couldn’t imagine why this handsome man would be interested in me so I said, ‘You should come back to the palace where I’m staying. It’s pretty spectacular. The kitchen was John Singer Sargent’s studio, and Henry James slept in the library.’”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

275

M atthias by E dmund White

Germany in a car with his father, he’d fainted, so frightened was he to leave Switzerland for Germany. This knew a woman who worked for the Swiss embassy in Cairo who managed to get us a hotel room looking out directly on the Great Pyramid. And in Luxor, she put us up in the old Winter Palace, King Farouk’s former palace, in a room with a big, dusty balcony overlooking the huge, scraggly garden complete with monkeys. Outside our door, a servant slept on the floor, ever ready to serve us. Servitude of that sort bothered me but I didn’t want to object lest the man be dismissed and plunged into total poverty. In Aswan, we stayed at the old Cataract Palace, with its louvered wood shutters, ceiling fans and balconies facing the Nile. We felt we were in an Agatha Christie novel and we pitied those tourists who’d ended up in the new, Stalinist-cement Cataract Palace. This had an exaggerated respect for me as “an artist” and would never let me pay for anything: “Because you are an artist—artists should never pay!” He also had a Swiss respect for work and he exaggerated how hard and long I worked on my books; I had an equal but opposite adherence to my amateur status and a corresponding disdain for work and exaggerated how easy it all was: “First drafts only!” In fact, I labored over my manuscripts and walked around town sounding out phrases in my head, but I wanted to pretend it all came effortlessly to me; that was my myth of myself. He seemed torn between his cult of friendship and sincerity and his pursuit of celebrities. He wanted to keep up the valuable friendships he’d made through Thomas. Valuable to Thomas who said it was easy to sell paintings by famous artists but hard to find them. That’s where the celebrities came in, since they often knew collectors who needed to sell. At the same time This didn’t want to admit he was motivated by feelings other than natural affection and admiration. As a result he spoke with heightened affection, even love, of the most vacuous celebrities: “Oh, I love Bianca. She is so intelligent, fighting for her little country at the U.N. And she’s so warm, like a sister to me—she sleeps in bed with me, hugging me!” Everyone famous he approved of, usually in ecstatic terms: “He’s the most wonderful man on earth, so kind, so generous.” His unrelenting esteem for everyone rubbed off on me, and my friends said that suddenly I was a bit Pollyannish and no longer so tart-tongued. The French weren’t sure they approved of so much enthusiasm. But it wasn’t really a matter of national character but of class. This and his successful friends were confident enough to be able to approve of people; my loser friends (except the ones in AA) only rose in their own opinion if they denigrated everyone else. This went with Thomas every winter at Christmas to Gstaad, where he and Thomas were among the few Swiss who rented a chalet. Most of the real Swiss millionaires were too tight-fisted to spend a $100,000 a month on a rented chalet. The old women, the real Swiss gnomes, did their own housework, drove a ten-year-old Mercedes, ate at the local vegetarian cafeteria and had the biggest savings accounts on the planet. They wore brown woolen stockings and black sensible shoes. In Gstaad This and Thomas hobnobbed with Valentino and Elizabeth Taylor and Gunther Sachs, a German playboy they knew, as well as with a Belgian banker-baron I’d had sex with. Gunther Sachs had been married to Brigitte Bardot and was the “iconic playboy” of the 1960s. He committed suicide at Gstaad in 2011 when he discovered he had Alzheimer’s. My Belgian baron was an ugly but sexy and intelligent man

who died of AIDS early on. His sister-in-law remained my friend as did her husband, my friend’s brother. He, the brother, was very handsome and had once been the lover of Rita Hayworth, but he was a bit dull. The sister-in-law said that as long as the fascinating gay brother-in-law was alive she had someone in the family to talk to. After he died she had to make do with her beautiful but dumb husband. Although I make the ‘80s sound light-hearted and frivolous, I was haunted by AIDS, as were most gay men. I was diagnosed as positive in 1985. Although a diagnosis has galvanized many writers, I just pulled the covers over my head for a year. I was very depressed. I felt so isolated and read about Act-Up in America with envy. I belonged to no AIDS community in France. Larry Kramer attacked me for devoting seven years of my post-diagnosis time to Genet. Larry felt every gay writer must write about AIDS alone. I wanted to remind readers that there were these great gay contemporaries (Genet died in 1986) who had nothing to do with the disease. Our experience couldn’t be reduced to a malady. I survived because I turned out to be one of those rare creatures, a “slow progressor,” someone whose T-cell counts fall but only very slowly. I didn’t know that when I was diagnosed; I thought I’d be dead in a year or two. I’m not a mystic and I don’t meditate, but one day in 1986 when I was meditating in my amateurish, mudpie way I interrogated my body and it “told” me I was going to survive. It was not until ten years later that my doctor explained to me why I’d survived. People tried to ascribe my longevity to my Texas genes or my new-found sobriety, but I knew it was just a freak of nature and I could claim none of the merit just as the victims couldn’t be blamed. This insisted we be tested in the mid-’80s. The test had just become available and a blood sample had to be sent all the way from Zurich to San Francisco, then the results had to be mailed back— a three-week procedure. Nor would the doctor, an arrogant young heterosexual who’d interned in San Francisco, give the results over the phone. I had to make the trip from Paris to have a consultation in person. As we were going up the snowy path to the university hospital, This suddenly chickened out. I was the one who insisted we keep our appointment. I already knew in my heart that he, with his two condoms, would be negative, whereas I, with my thousands of tricks, would surely be positive. I said that to This and added, “I’m a good enough novelist to predict you’ll be very tender and kind with me and within a year you’ll break up with me.” Sure enough, the beautiful young doctor leaned back in his office chair; he’s crossed his legs and now pointed at me with one of his expensive, light tan lace-up shoes and said, “You. You’re positive.” Then he swiveled and indicated This with his shod foot: “You. You’re negative.” He’d just delivered a death sentence to me, for all we knew, but there was no follow-up, no appointments made with a counselor. For some time This and I had planned a romantic trip to Vienna. We stayed in the city’s oldest hotel, the Kønig von Hungarn, right in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Of course it was all beautiful and we had time to visit Mozart’s apartment around the corner but that night I was in anguish and couldn’t sleep, not because I was afraid of dying but because I knew my wonderful adult romance with This was doomed. I kept getting out of bed and going to the toilet, which was at the end of a long corridor. There, at a safe distance, I’d close the door and sob. I felt so bereft. On my third trip to the bathroom This woke up and padded down the hall and comforted me, though with my bleak “realism” (my most French attribute) I was profoundly inconsolable.

“I’m not a mystic and I don’t meditate, but one day in 1986 when I was meditating in my amateurish, mudpie way I interrogated my body and it ‘told’ me I was going to survive. It was not until ten years later that my doctor explained to me why I’d survived.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

276

N o. 2 7 7

A YACHT AND A BOY By Lawrence Osbourne

ne night in April when his wife Ellen was away, Richard Gilchrist met a man named Ludo MacPherson at a party held in a private club on Ratchadadamri Road called the Toga Club. MacPherson was a young New Zealander, reputedly rich, a common sight in the city’s more expensive restaurants (he had a reserved table at the Normandie) and Richard was sure, when he first caught sight of him at the Toga, that he had seen him before. It was just that he could not quite remember where. As a university lecturer and antiques expert much in demand in High Society circles, Richard could have met him anywhere. There was even that nightclub on Soi 33 that he had been fond of for some time, a place called Demonia. He might have seen him there. It was a fine name for a nightclub—the suggestion was that the men who went there were temporarily possessed. The Toga was a white building with two domes and a line of Ionic columns. Inside, an imperial red carpet inscribed with the word SPOR led to a circular vestibule. Its niches bore three-foot polychrome statues of distorted classical gods. The ceilings were painted in the Alma-Tadema style: a banquet scene with naked dancers and a half-Chinese Caligula eating a yellow fig. There were three buttons for the elevators. The bottom one was “the atrium,” the middle one was “the emperor’s palace” and the top “private villas.” The doors opened directly into a reception of dark Pompei red, and down a short flight of steps to one side there was a large bar and restaurant area with tables draped in the same color and lit by candlesticks in the shape of bronze olive branches. As he was standing awkwardly by this buffet holding a Vestal Virgin cocktail, Richard was approached by Macpherson, a man of about thirty with a flop of sandy hair falling leftwards over his right eye and a garish garnet ring on one hand. “Awful party,” the man said, and then just stood there looking at the girls and the men in fancy dress and the general absurdity of it all. “It would be better,” Richard said haughtily, “if we didn’t have to wear these togas, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know, I rather like the gear. It flatters our legs.” Ludo, as he called himself, had a clean New Zealand accent, and there was a cold beauty about him, a feeling of racial purity. One could sense that his eye, and his tenderness, were drawn to men; the women produced no flicker in his instinct. The snobbish Richard, who had left New York only a year earlier after an unfortunate affair with one of his students at Columbia, was attracted and, in a few cold instants, liberated and shattered by it. He was not gay in the least, but there was a sexual pull to Ludo’s charisma. There was gravitational pull in his quiet vowels. “Ludo’s short for Ludovic,” Macpherson went on cheerfully. “It’s a horrible name, but I never said anything bad to my parents. I just changed it to Ludo.” “Dicky,” said Richard sarcastically, holding out his hand. “I believe I know who you are. I go to lectures at the National Archives quite often. Didn’t you do something on the Bridge on the River Kwai last year? I am obsessed by the Bridge on the River Kwai. It was a marvelous lecture, if you don’t mind my saying. Now I remember it.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

277

A yacht and a boy by law rence osbourne

“Not at all.” “You did the timeline so well,” Ludo said. And it’s a tricky one to get right.” Ludo turned up the heat of his smile. “I don’t have to call you Dr. Gilchrist do I?” “Not at all, not at all. Just not Dicky.” I am talking like a girl, Richard thought coldly. “No Dicky then. I was particularly fascinated by the stuff about the timber and about the sadistic Captain Kurasaki. I don’t suppose many scholars here know about Captain Kuraski.” “The truth is, the Thais would prefer to forget their collaboration with the Japanese.” “I’m sure you’re right.” As the conversation moved on effortlessly he felt the pressure of Ludo’s soft blue eyes fall upon his face and throat. An alpha mind, the professor thought smugly. They walked close together along the length of the concave window, which gave off a sterile cool from the air conditioning units running along its base. The younger man hung back an inch or two to give the older man the unconscious impression that he was leading in some way, spearheading their joint movement. They began to talk. How quickly the ice had melted. It was then that Richard suddenly told Ludo that he and his wife owned a house on Koh Samui and also a yacht which they never used because neither of them were qualified to sail it. Such, he went on ruefully, was the folly of rich people with too little to do and too much capital to do it with. “As it happens,” Ludo said slowly, “I used to sail yachts professionally. It used to be my thing.” “Oh?” “It was really.” “I see. Then perhaps you should come down as our guest and try the boat. I’m sure my wife would be on board—as it were.” “Well—” “It’s an Oceanstar. Fully equipped.” Richard leaned forward. They told us it’s a point and shoot yacht, simple as apple pie.” “That’s exactly what it is,” Ludo nodded knowledgeably. “Still, we couldn’t sail it. We’re incompetents.” Plans can be hatched on the spur of any moment. It’s a matter, Richard thought as his laughter died down, of intuition and empathy. In the event they flew down to Koh Samui together. Ellen met them at the airport, and she was unpleasantly surprised to see that Richard was not alone. The younger man came forward to shake her hand, and she was taken aback by the paleness of the eyes, the strength of the grip. She wished Richard had at least asked her before inviting him down. It was an improvised impertinence typical of her husband. “Surprise, surprise,” he whispered in her ear. “And Ludo here knows how to handle a yacht. We’re going on a trip to some undiscovered islands.” “You could’ve called,” she protested quietly. “He’s thirty if he’s a day. What were you thinking?” “He’s a civilized fellow. He’ll be good company.” “Will he?” she said angrily. They drove down the eastern coast road through Chawaeng Beach. From the south came the monsoon clouds, the hiss and sway, the shudder that touched the tops of the reed-thin Indian Trumpet Flower trees. The bungalows gleamed with the rain of an hour ago, the pools swollen and choked with fronds. Yet only yesterday it had been perfect dry weather. It was see-sawing now in the balance. They didn’t talk, and she watched the back of Ludo’s neck from the rear seat. He was too beautiful to be good news, and he didn’t shift in his seat. He observed everything carefully. At dinner that night he told them about his life. His father had bequeathed him an estate in New Zealand that had gone to seed. It was at Kaitaia on the North Cape. Single-handed, he had rescued it from nature, re-

plowed and cleared its spaces. He had restored its pastures and re-built the main house which his father had neglected in the years leading up to his death. He was the only child and heir. His mother had died a decade earlier. He had the estate and nothing else. “When my travels are over,” he said, “I’ll go back to it and turn it into a serious farm. I want to cultivate oysters in my river. The Maoris call it Otou, and it looks out on a wonderful island called Murimotu.” “And how long have you been traveling?” she asked. He turned his eyes upon her as if for the first time, gentle and equilibrious. “Four years. I gave myself five to find whatever I was looking for. Or until my inheritance ran out.” “I see.” She couldn’t help smiling, it was so boyish. Slowly, she began to change her mind about him. There was a modesty and tact about him. He was close-shaved, with the side burns clipped perfectly and his skin scrubbed beyond the norm. It was a little too much, just as Richard was always a little too little in the same department. His curiosity about her was not hidden and she was not in any mood to reject it anyway; it had been a long time since a man had shown any real interest in her. In Thailand a farang woman is mostly ignored by both Asians and white men alike. And Ludo’s interest was detached and truly driven by curiosity, as far as she could tell. There was nothing even remotely sexual about his gaze. His body language was reserved, inhibited even. It was her husband’s motives for inviting him down that struck her as immodest. The next morning, after her morning gym session, she left her hair wet and went out into the raw, mind-shattering sun, under which the dark palms of the plantations always seemed to be phlegmatically restless. Sawdust from the mill tinged the air’s brightness and something in her winced and then settled down. She walked up to the lobby car park where her Vespa was parked under the magnolias. The chrome was thick with wasps. She saw that the two men had packed everything and were ready to depart to Nathon and the boat. Soon they appeared, as if they had been up together for hours without her knowing, and she disguised the irritation she felt as being excluded from their male complicity. All night, in fact, she had slept alone because the men had stayed up drinking. That morning they had been swimming, they said, to the bathing platform and back. They looked like a couple of sneaky boys, still faintly wet and odorous from a breakfast of French toast. Her husband kissed her and snaked an arm around her waist. “Look who’s here. Anxious to set off ?” “Hardly,” she muttered. They drove in a taxi to Nathon. The Poirot was a fairly new Oceanstar built in Taiwan, sixty feet with holly and teak interiors. Two nautical miles a gallon made her a longranger capable of hitting the remotest islands, and she could do three thousand miles at seven knots without a stutter. The Naiad stabilizers made her fit for beam and head seas and ten foot waves. You could sunbathe on the aft deck in a rough sea and not feel it unduly. The high flared bow and spray rails were classically lovely, and the cockpit had a water-tight door that gave directly into the Master cabin. The countertops were granite, the kitchen appliances were Miele and Bosch. There was a breakfast bar, a trash compactor, a convection microwave, Kohler Gensets and John Deere engines. They went through the whole boat opening the curtains of the port-windows and flinging open the brass hinged doors. On the deck they opened up the three deck chairs and rolled back the canvas awning. A sweet, musty heat rolled through the boat and dissipated as the breeze broke it up. She leaned against the elegant rails and stared down into the oily water of the harbor where mango peel and burned cigarettes sat all day. The mooring ropes glowed blue in the depths. She listened to Ludo’s feet testing the gangplanks, gripping them stealthily as if they had to be mastered. He started the engine for a while and she listened to that as well. It

“As the conversation moved on effortlessly he felt the pressure of Ludo’s soft blue eyes fall upon his face and throat. An alpha mind, the professor thought smugly.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

278

A yacht and a boy by law rence osbourne

sounded like a goaded animal. She sat below while they prepared the boat and even when it was moving finally towards the entrance of the harbor she stayed there listening to them talking together as Ludo explained how things worked. He knew the Oceanstar model back to front, as if he had sailed one hundreds of times. He walked around it confidently, as if he was the owner and not they. It was a windless day, slightly misted at the edges, and islands lay low on the horizon, a dark green like prepared seaweed. Dolphins tailed the boat, with its sad trailing Thai flag. By midday they had reached an island called Ko Taen. It was circled with limestone bluffs perforated by hundreds of holes like a multitude of letter boxes. They moored and swam around radiant lemon rocks and vasesponges, the sun beating upon their heads. They swam in circles, two at a time, while a third guarded the ladder dropped from the end of the boat into the water. It was an old rule of the sea, Ludo said. A boat was never left unmanned. As she swam with him in a circle, in the bright completely clear water shimmering with the refracted color of Christmas tree worms, he explained that boats were often found abandoned in waters far from shore, the inhabitants mysteriously vanished. Whereas it was not a mystery at all, he said. They had had simply forgotten the cardinal rule of yachting. They had all jumped into the water and forgotten to lower the ladder. It often happened in hot climates where people were too anxious to cool off in the sea as soon as the yacht threw anchor. For lunch they made a barbeque of captured wrasse on deck. The island rasped with cicadas, the trees metallic and pale in the heat. There was a slight rise at the center of the island and a sound, from time to time, of running dogs. Richard seemed not to notice. He wore a chef ’s toque and, stripped to the waist, tossed the gutted wrasse about on his Econo Grill. He would never have been in such a good mood if they had been alone, she thought. It was curious. He needed a third person as a catalyst. They had brought a cooler filled with German white wine and Singha beers. Ludo lay on his back on the deck in his trunks and a pair of topsiders, golden and puckish, and told them about his year sailing the Gulf on yachts for rich people. It was strange, she suddenly thought, that he had not mentioned to either of them that he had done this before, though now obviously he was not doing it as a job. But some people are like that. They let things about themselves be known piecemeal. She tried not to distrust him. The year before, he said, laughing about it, he had gone out with a group of wealthy Malaysians. They had a game called Kill the Shark. They would anchor by a very small uninhabited island. Then they threw dice and whoever got the lowest number had to jump ship and swim clockwise around the island by himself. “I didn’t quite know what the point of the game was, but I noticed that while one person was away the others would all talk about him. Or her. They would say all the things they couldn’t say to their face. It was funny, very funny. We had a good time with it.” “What a typical Asian game,” Richard said. “It’s all about losing face.” She walked across the island by herself in the afternoon’s height. She could smell the wild dogs in the undergrowth as she toiled to the top of the rise and looked back at the gleaming white yacht. The men lay on the prow smoking cigarettes, a faint penumbra of smoke suspended above them. They had waited for her leave to light up, because among them it was she who was the anti-smoking militant. She stood there heaving with heat and sweat and gazed at this little cloud of static smoke and then she noticed something odd. Both men were entirely naked. They had taken off their trunks and were lounging about with their cigarettes entirely naked. They were looking out to sea, lying on their sides, talking. She felt a jolt of mild outrage, but aside from that it was just irritating. They had waited for her to leave before taking off

their trunks, and when she paddled back in the dinghy by herself they were wearing them again. What had Richard meant by “losing face”? They up-anchored and started the motors. They sailed off north-east and other islands materialized out of the waters, low, densely forested, with limestone outcrops defining their edges. They went between them, through fragments of coral shelf and sand-colored rocks aglow just beneath the surface. They discussed spending the night on a beach. Ludo advised against it. They anchored a mile from one island, therefore, and slept onboard, the beds tilting gently through the night. The Gilchrists read with a storm lamp, quiet and slightly anxious, attuned to the sounds emanating from the water all around them. “All the same,” Richard said without looking up from his novel, “that Malaysian game might be interesting, don’t you think?” “No.” “I’m just curious,” he muttered. You’ve been curious all along, she thought. “Why would we need to play a game?” she asked tartly. “Maybe you and Ludo. Not me.” The following morning they hove to by a beautiful beach and ate some snapper bought from a passing longtail. The maritime vendors seemed to be aware of their presence and to be following them at a distance. They were sea gypsies, wild and hard, and they took dollars as readily as Thai baht. The beach was cusped and soft, backed by high teak. Wasp nests could be seen high up in the timber. They made beds on the sand with their silk cushions. They ate the snapper with coffee for breakfast. This island was so small you could walk around it in minutes. She put on her sun protectant oil and went for a short swim. The boat looked so handsome set against a still sea, and shoals of yellow fish darted around its line. She felt much calmer this morning, as if the spirit of the ocean had passed into her. She cared less about the men. The oily taste of the snapper had aroused her and she was happy to be in a sarong and flip flops trudging about the edge of a jungle with hummingbirds investigating the coconut scent of her sun oil. Richard set up his iPod speakers and they played salsa and Ludo and she danced a little. “That’s the spirit,” Richard said to her. “Swing those hips a little.” From the cooler they drank a little, even through it was early. By midday, as the sun scorched the beach, there was an unsteady mood between them, a gap (as she thought of it ) through which an inevitable mischief could pass. They went back to the boat and only then did it occur to her that they had contravened what Ludo had called the fist law of yachting by abandoning the boat even for a short while. They showered and Richard served drinks on deck. Ludo was full of laughter and slinky good will. He put his arm around her for a moment. “Aren’t we moving?” she asked. “Richard says we should play Kill the Shark.” “I simply couldn’t swim around that island,” she snapped. “Richard, I bag out.” “Alright, my love. Ludo and I will play alone.” She tensed and realized that it was already too late to dissuade them. They mixed rum and Bacardis and threw a hand of dice and Ludo lost. “I knew it,” the boy whistled, and pulled off his newly installed T-shirt. “I always lose at dice.” “What if you lose a second time?” she blurted out. “Then I’ll get a lot of swimming in.” Richard found it all uproarious. “He’s actually going to do it. Ludo, swim front crawl and I’ll make you a rum and Bacardi while we’re waiting.” Ludo turned to look at her as he walked to the prow and arched his body ready to dive. The water below him was transparent, inviting, and for a second she was jealous. The far side of the island must be so beautiful, especially when approached from the water. He put on an Arnold

“he explained that boats were often found abandoned in waters far from shore, the inhabitants mysteriously vanished.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

279

A yacht and a boy by law rence osbourne

Schwarzenegger voice and said, “I’ll be back.” Then he dove in. He was a good swimmer, practiced and swift. Soon he was out of sight. “Drink, darling?” Richard asked her, shaking the ice bucket and grinning. “No. Not now.” Within a few minutes she was acutely worried about Ludo. Her heart began to race a little, making her sweat. He was swimming in open sea, however close to land he was. She slumped into a deck chair and they melted into the silence. Richard swirled the ice cubes in his glass. They both thought of Ludo alone in the sea. His fading strokes as he rounded the far side of the island. “We should have stopped him,” she thought. “What an idiotic thing to do.” “He’ll be alright,” Richard said at length. “He seems to know the sea better than we do.” “He’s not a merman,” she said flatly. “He’s been around. He knows the tides.” Her lips went dry and she felt an expectant dread as her gaze slowly moved to the left and the side of the island where he would reappear. As this feeling rose in her it was twinned with a sudden detestation of her husband. Should he not have stepped in and prevented Ludo from jumping? He was the only one who could have stopped him. He was such an arrogant provocateur when he got rolling. And the worst thing was that his motives were always obscure, even to himself. He enjoyed being a callous bastard when he thought he could get away with it. She got up and went to the prow where she gripped the metal rail and strained to see the edge of the island. She was terrified. What if Ludo drowned? Richard leaned back in his deck chair and sipped. “He won’t drown,” he said. “It’s me who’d drown if I had to do it.” “I hope you do have to do it. I really do. It would serve you right.” “You’re drunk,” he drawled. “You always say things like that when you’re drunk.” “So what if I’m drunk? So are you.” The heat rose. The water grew dark and oily, impenetrable. Two hours passed, which was far too long, and at length she turned irritably to Richard. “Start the engines. We have to go look for him.” “Not at all,” he replied coolly. “Neither of us knows how to operate the boat. You know that.” She was about to shout something at him when from afar, near the rocks that marked the outer edge of the island, there came the calculated and regular splashing of the swimmer’s arms and Ludo came into view. A head bobbed between small waves, with something leisurely and unconcerned about him that not only instantly laid to rest her fears, but also reproached their very existence. She let go of the rail and her relief almost made her burst into tears. Richard got up and came to the rail with a smug, satisfied grin and they watched Ludo glide up to the boat and then tread water before finding the ladder. He looked up at them with a sunburned nose and his eyes were silently merry. “How was it?” Richard called down. “Marvelous. I found some lovely sponges.” And he held them up out of the water, a clutch of lemon and orange specimens. And yet, she thought, there was a dagger in his eye. Later in the day a wind blew up. They toiled towards another island further out to sea. The winter monsoon was so unpredictable here. At dusk they anchored near an inhabited island and watched lanterns floating up from the beach into the sky. It was the festival of Lon Krathoi. It made her think of New York, and the life they had left behind. Not a glittering life, but a life with a little momentum to it, and one that for a while she had enjoyed. A circle of friends sharing comparable privileges, a life of books and dinner parties and those discussions that seem vital at the time but which one can never remember even hours later, or even minutes later. Life as wind and glitter and motion, and pleasures that are not easy to summarize to strangers. It was Ludo to

whom they now had to summarize them. “The idle rich?” Richard was saying, as they smoked. “There’s nothing idle about us at all. If only we were idle.” “But why did you leave?” the boy asked. “It’s a long story. We needed a change. I suppose we came to feel dead over there. It’s what happens after a while—a sort of inertia—” High in the atmosphere, the lanterns twinkled as they neared the cloudline and then began to disappear one by one. They could see children on the beach, running about like small crabs on the dark. That night she slept better. She had a curious dream. She was alone in a house, waiting for her own birthday party to start. A large bus drew up outside her house— it was on a prairie somewhere—and out of it tumbled a hundred or so people. As she looked at them through the window she realized that they were all the people she had known when she was ten years old. Forgotten faces, half forgotten friends and loves and old people from her childhood who had once been kind to her, and perhaps only once. She looked down and she saw she was wearing baggy pyjamas of dark green silk. As the faces came up the garden path searching for her, she realized that the ones who were now dead were painted green, while the living were unpainted but still vaguely unrecognizable. She scrambled to fix names to these faces, as they waved and called her name. Then the boat pitched a little and she woke, daylight pouring through the port window and a smell of frying sausages coming from the deck. She stirred awake fully and lay there with Richard snoring beside her, sexually indifferent to him. She knew at once that Ludo was up and cooking for them. “I may as well be ship cook,” that person said brightly as she came up in her bathrobe, blinking in the sun, and there he was standing behind the grill with a spatula, as if he had been up for hours. “I slept so well I needed sausages. Thai sausages, got them in Nathon.” “You’re an angel,” she smiled. “They smell like galangal.” The morning was changeable and tender, a light wind from the north. The island lay behind them, the trees glistening and moving slightly as the wind pushed them. She sat and drank some fresh coffee. Before she could correct it, she was aware that the lapels of her robe had come apart slightly and that Ludo’s eye had swept across the spaces between her breasts. He was in topsiders and navy shorts, and a white t-shirt, quite fetching, and for a moment she didn’t mind. She thought, “They haven’t gone entirely to waste for once.” From the prow she looked at two islands. They seemed identical, symmetrical, their masses roughly equal. The jungles hissed, a quiet, monotonous sound that rose clearer than the slop of waters. When Richard emerged, they sat on deck and read the four-day-old American papers they had brought with them, but from which there was nothing remarkable to absorb. As he read, however, slowly waking up, Richard idly thought back to his first meeting with Ludo at the Toga Club. He had never discovered why the New Zealander had been there that night. Not that it mattered, but it was still a little disconcerting. He raised his gaze over the edge of the Herald Tribune and watched the youth fishing from the edge of the boat with a simple line weighted with a lump of coral. There was something disconcerting about him, something that made him envious. Feeling this, he was gripped by a compulsion to persist with the idiotic game that had commenced the day before. “Ludo,” he said, putting sown the paper and getting. “You and I are due for the next round.” The boy looked up smiling, and said that he didn’t relish swimming around an island again. “Come on, let’s throw.” Ludo sighed. ”If you insist.” They did so over a glass of rum, and Richard lost. For a moment his face twitched, but then again, she thought, he must have expected it,

“They went back to the boat and only then did it occur to her that they had contravened what Ludo had called the fist law of yachting by abandoning the boat even for a short while.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

280

A yacht and a boy by law rence osbourne

he must have known it might be him who had to go for a swim. Reluctantly, he took off his clothes and stepped to the ladder that led down to water that was now the unappetizing color of pewter. Ordinarily, he knew, Ellen would have stepped forward at once, cried “Stop this nonsense” and held him back. Protesting noisily, he would have given in to her with private relief. Now, however, she did nothing of the sort. She watched him with spiteful mockery. “She’s still mad at me,” he thought dismally. Now, moreover, there was no question of him losing face in front of both of them. He went down. The water was warm, swelling, with slow, brutish currents that seemed to move around the island clockwise. He went with them, therefore, and with slow, forceless strokes made his way around the small headland of limestone boulders that marked the first turn. He swam his way out of sight, and soon he was tired. Hauling himself out of the water he sat panting on the stony edge of a cove. Trees hung low over the water, their tips brushing the surface and there was a dusty scent of cardamons. His plan now was to creep across the island and reappear in the water on the far side, thus neatly faking his circuit. When he had gotten his breath back he rose and lumbered into the wood, brushing the branches aside with his hands and stooping low so that he would not be seen. He traversed the island in a few minutes, then sat among some bamboo and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He had a clear view of the boat. As he did so, Ludo turned to Ellen and said, “He’ll make it, but rather slowly. We could sail off if you liked.” She laughed shrilly. “He’d catch up, that one.” Ludo’s tone was sufficiently ambiguous for hers to be ambiguous in return. “God knows what he’s up to,” he said softly. “I’m just playing along with it. You’re playing along with it too. But we have a choice.” She looked away, and she wondered—it was a cold, logical question—whether she was as worried about her husband as she had been about Ludo. She was not. Her hand shook as it sought out the rail and she steadied herself. His arm had come around her and something turned her sideways towards him. His face was close to hers as he stood against the rail next to her. He seemed as if he knew exactly what to do. He let her fall against him, but not entirely, as if there should be a correct space between them all the same. “There you are,” he said hammily. And yet in that same moment she kissed him, not the other way around, and her arms encircled him for a few moments. “They held still and then she drew away. As if her consciousness were returning to its proper default settings, she pushed him away gently with one hand and twisted away from his grip, and he let her go because he was sure she would return of her own accord. When Richard reappeared, he kept up the pretence that he had swum around the island. At first she said nothing to him in their cabin, but when he turned down the storm lamp she said at once, “Did you get exhausted, you stupid fool? It serves you right. Can’t you see he’s playing with you?” “Who?” “Stop playing the fool. You’re like a couple of sixyear-olds. You could have drowned.” “Well, not really darling. As proved by the fact that I didn’t. And who is playing with whom?” All her resentments of the past came flooding back. Richard’s affair with the student at Columbia, the deplorable cover up and lies, the shameful departure for the East where he could start again. Because, of course, it had not just been any old affair. Richard’s dark side had been on glorious full display. The details had shocked even his closest friends. She lay in a cold fury letting this sordid episode return to her memory. And the more she let it corrode her the more she relished Richard’s humiliation at losing their game. It certainly did serve him right, and he deserved no pity. The next day was so fine that they motored into open

ocean. They cast lines from the front of the boat and caught some small barracuda to grill. On the far horizon the clouds massed yet again, hovering just out of range. Ellie kicked off her flip flops and announced that she’d like to go have a swim. She tore off her sun hat and said nothing more before making her way there. The men had said nothing. When she resurfaced she swam around the boat and saw Richard about to dive in beside her. Annoyed, she kicked herself away and made for open waters. Richard jumped. The splash itself was ugly in some way, made to annoy her. He went in head first, struggled and then surfaced with a great gasp. Ludo rose, sauntered around the midships and coolly took in the two people slapping each other in the water a hundred meters away. They looked like a male-female Laurel and Hardy, their blows half meaningful and half feigned. Ellen was now screaming the loudest, laughing and cursing in equal measure. She poured out her considerable recriminations and gradually her husband was forced to listen to them, to acknowledge them. They became oblivious to everything around them, and eventually they trod water and went quiet, whispering bitterly, jabbing their fingers at each other, but then bursting into giggles. Husband and wife, borne up and down by gently swelling waves until they themselves calmed down and began to reconcile. “Are you crazy?” she said very quietly. “You think I would go with that idiot?” “How would I know?” Ludo strolled back to the cabin and thought for a while. Then he went to the back of the boat and lifted up the ladder. Richard and Ellie didn’t notice this manoeuvre at first, and he returned to the prow to watch them. Carried by the current they were drifting away from the boat. Gradually they became aware of this. Startled more than alarmed, they began to paddle back towards it, but without any urgency. Richard led the way. His thin white hands darted through the indigo water, his eyes uplifted towards the deck where Ludo stood with the greatest calm, smoking a cigarette and watching them coolly. The ominous tension between them was novel, and it had sprung out of nowhere. The ash from the cigarette fell as powder into the water, disdainfully. “There’s a current,” Richard called up. “Can you slow the boat a bit?” “How would I do that?” The Gilchrists broke into a crawl and reached the back, from where the ladder had disappeared. They hung back in surprise, a little confused, and Richard called “What’s the idea?” to Ludo, who came sauntering back. Ludo looked at him blankly, then at his repulsive wife. Richard’s hand came against the slippery side of the boat. He clutched at it and failed. Ludo lit a cigarette and leaned against the rail looking down at Ellie with a questioning expression. She seemed to understand. He smoked it down and then threw the butt down into the water by them. Without condescending to utter another word he went back to the cockpit, inserted the ignition key and turned it. The engines roared to life and he spun the wheel forty degrees to the left. Within a few minutes he was far out of sight of the island and headed across the Gulf towards Cambodia. An hour later he cut the engines in open sea and went down to the galley to make himself a tuna sandwich. He cracked open a Foster’s and brought his extemporized lunch up onto the deck. The sun had come out and marlins danced below the surface of a sea whose surface was almost white with sun. He lay on one of the sun beds and drank the cold beer and let his eyes close and his mind close with them. Now he could hear nothing at all but the waters. All the same, he thought lazily, reconsidering the ill-timed kiss that she had placed upon his mouth, and the hassle he would now have to endure to sell the Poirot on the black market in Kep, there were certainly easier ways to steal a yacht.

“He was a good swimmer, practiced and swift. Soon he was out of sight. ‘Drink, darling?’ Richard asked her, shaking the ice bucket and grinning.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

281

N o. 2 8 2

“Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.” —from a fortune cookie

A. W. AND THE ART OF BETRAYAL Suppositions by Bruce Benderson

ost revolutions in culture and the arts end inevitably in their own self-destruction. Those who lead them are more often than not doomed to see themselves become exactly what they were rejecting. At the end of his life, a great artist whose efforts began as a rebellion against the status quo discovers that he has traced a circle: there he is face to face with the people who provoked his revolt, and now the world accepts him. There is no solution but to reject his old principles and find a new credo. But at this point he lacks impetus, is at the end of his strengths. All the young artists see his quest as a botched one, and he has become what he detested: an artist welcome in any established salon, museum or bourgeois home. On his deathbed, he is bound to be surrounded by some of his former enemies. All we need to prove such a formula is a glance at some Modernist trajectories. In his old age, Pablo Picasso saw himself associated with artists he detested, such as Dubuffet. As a result, he became one of the few “geezers” of his times to attempt a revolt, intensifying his production to such a frenetic pace that he produced an astonishing number of new paintings late in life. Unfortunately, his attempt to prove his vitality was identified by many critics as a grotesque circus act. He never succeeded in his attempt to escape becoming “sensible.” Other artists of the same generation chose other alternatives: why not rob the opposition and count the profits? That choice produced the commercial detritus of a Salvador Dalí, who passed the last two decades of his life surrounded by tacky household objects bearing his signature: napkins, champagne glasses and even sofas that were reproductions of some of his Surrealist images. For the majority of people who lived a middle-class life, these objects furnished a first encounter with the artist’s vision. Like the artists of the avant-garde who preceded him, Andy Warhol began in a spirit of rebellion and a bohemian atmosphere—this time the New York of a few years before the beginning of the 1960s. His earliest successful Pop pieces exposed the ruses of merchandising and the hypocrisy of our media. Like the best of the black humorists, Andy juggled the American institutions of high and low culture, both of which we hold sacred. He disemboweled the illusions of Hollywood by the agency of transvestism, put products off the grocery aisles into museums and replaced the homophobic tyrannies of our Puritan culture with sexualized males. His ability to turn it all upside down was in part

nourished by speed, and several of his most dynamic subjects and cohorts were the speed freaks as well as the junkies of many of his movies. But the ambivalent nature of his predilections also offered a back door into his heart to all the materialistic phenomena he brutally mocked. Elegant heiresses, secretly bored by their cloistered lives, came to him to be liberated—even if this process entailed a purgatory of derision. Part of their liberation consisted in an opportunity to have contact with the people of the street. Coming from a working class Central European immigrant family, Andy shared the fantasies of many who begin life trapped in poverty. His dream was one of social ascendancy, glamor and riches. His visceral reactions to all things visual and his talent for reproducing them in two dimensions developed within him in a context of amorality. It’s an established fact that his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans were not entirely satirical; they were also a tribute, an expression of his fascination for the red and white fonts chosen for the labels of the brand and for other elements of the design. In an important sense, Warhol was convinced that the cans could be revealed as images of sublime beauty. He also saw them as doors of perception into some of the basic codes and myths of modernity. However, perhaps because his brilliant satires of capitalism were not quite vigorous or exterminating enough, he became more and more attracted to the forces he was lampooning. The moment would come when he would be invited to the other side of the dichotomy. His work would lose its former critique of materialism. Accepting commissions for portraits of the wealthy and powerful

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

282

allowed him to fulfill a nearly impossible dream: escaping the final vestiges of a sense of class inferiority. The discrepancies that fed his original radical vision were no longer of interest. Metaphorically, it was almost as if the silkscreen process he’d used for years to produce his trademark mismatch between the lines of his images and their colors had gradually moved the two into perfect juxtaposition to create a banal, flattering salon portrait. One of the most common critical analyses of the Andy Warhol phenomenon is the mirror-of-late-capitalism argument. By a kind of evasion of the unconscious protections governing the perceptual, Andy was able to step into some privileged space for a crystal-clear analysis of the visual ties that bind us to the objects of commerce (most of this vision being due to right-brain rather than left-brain activity, since he could not verbalize it). For the first time in the history of humankind, he was able to show us an object such as it is, expertly stripping away the veil of hidden significations that turned us daily into Pavlovian reactors. His habit of pulling apart color and line to reveal the inherent fragility of the image, as well as his talent for isolating the image from its socio-cultural ground, suddenly showed us its nature. Repeating that image in assembly-line style revealed something else about it: it was dead, and we were cheerfully hastening to join it in its grave—without noticing that our pocketbooks had fallen open on the way. We would learn from Andy, then, that all merchandise (thanks to skillful commercial artists like Andy himself ) is enwrapped in a magnetic net that endows it with a promiscuous attraction and stimulates the subliminal thought, “I-HAVE-to-have-it!” Ho-hum. Don’t tell me you’ve heard it before? Perhaps Andy resembles the Venice about which Mary McCarthy claimed nothing could be said that hasn’t been said before. For how many years have deconstructive analyses in critical theory classes around the world been relying upon the same discourse? A little Barthes and a pinch of Derrida, a liberal sprinkling of Debord— and lots of Andy. There is even a bit of irony in the fact that one of conventional Warholian theory’s early communicators, John Coplans—who was founder and editor-in-chief of Artforum from 1972 to 1977—echoed such analyses of Warhol’s work beginning in the early sixties, yet two decades later would exhibit a nearly antithetical aesthetic in his own stunning photographic self-portraits of his aging body—works that stressed a much more humanistic position and still did not return to many of the outmoded specifics of portraiture, such as showing the face. For anyone who doubts that Andy’s original quarrel was with capitalism and that his methods were characterized by subversive mockery, consider the following anecdote: having been asked by Philip Johnson to produce a mural for the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, Andy came up with one based on the mug shots of criminals called “The Thirteen Most Wanted Men.” Told by Johnson that Governor Rockefeller was ordering it replaced or removed in 24 hours because of its potential to insult Italian Americans, Warhol tried, unsuccessfully, to substitute an image of Robert Moses, a city planner who had transformed New York, often plowing through traditional neighborhoods and uprooting immigrants to make faster thoroughfares, but who also happened to be the organizer of the fair. Andy’s second idea was rejected as well (1). This is also not to say that there aren’t more dignified ways of elevating Andy’s meta-insights. In fact, in an interview I did for Vogue Homme of John Giorno (2), Andy’s long-ago ex and an artist in his own right, Giorno claimed that Andy had achieved a sort of cosmic consciousness by revealing the essential being of the signs and symbols of our culture. Andy’s art, in fact, was a Zen practice. I do believe that Andy so savagely stripped away the levels of meaning surrounding objects of modernity that he came close to undermining the act of perception itself—or could have done so. But

being the agent of such an upheaval was too much for his gentle heart, and he began to lose his nerve—at the same time perceiving that those who stood the most to lose by such an undermining were the very rich and powerful. Not only that, but such glamorous people, whom he was finally getting a chance to encounter, even had a taste for a smidgen of subversion now and then. They could enjoy being the good-natured butt of mockery and savored playing the somewhat endangered targets of an operation striving to reveal that the emperor had no clothes. They were no different from the rest of us. Guilt about their appetite for acquisition had made them just a touch masochistic. Thus did a potential revolutionary, who could have overthrown some of the fundamentals of capitalistic exploitation—instead of just our basic conceptions about what is considered art—capitulate in favor of a cushy position as a court jester. But that’s been said before, hasn’t it? It would be more rewarding to examine some of the scenes that attracted Andy outside the domain of merchandise. Andy was capable of appropriating horrific images of human pain from newspapers and magazines as one method of constructing black humor. But the shock value of the imagery, its sensationalism, seemed to hold less value for him than the number of spectators it could attract. Victor Bockris goes so far as to suggest the same in his biography The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (3). Whether it was a plane crash, a bloody image of innocence mangled in battle or an electric chair, Andy seemed fascinated by its audience potential. How many people, he surmised, would be repulsed, and compelled at the same time to study such an image in awe? In such perceptual experiences was the sacrament that created the aesthetic of that period: repetition, hyper-sensory, incandescence, obsession with certain unremarkable details of daily life (such as filming someone eating one mushroom over an impossibly long period of time), and the mood swings that give birth to the extremes of emotion seen in some of Andy Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s films. All of this dehumanized identity, deconstructed romance, elevated chance and spontaneity to the level of art, championed the visceral, pointed to materialism as the standard of all value, promoted nihilism and made a mockery of the old concepts of beauty.

“He disemboweled the illusions of Hollywood by the agency of transvestism, put products off the grocery aisles into museums and replaced the homophobic tyrannies of our Puritan culture with sexualized males.”

evertheless, Andy’s attraction to such imagery had to be more complex than that. Perhaps it also entailed a wish for vengeful aggression against the viewer, who represented the entire world he was convinced had rejected him, or against a divine power that had decreed he be brought into this life as irredeemably unattractive—something he constantly claimed to be. It’s hard to decide if the concupiscent charge provided him by the grotesque imagery of, say, the electric chair had to do with imagining himself as the one strapped into it or the one pulling the lever to turn on the current. Critics have spoken endlessly of the deathlike steeliness of Andy’s gaze, as exhibited in the hardness of his decidedly “non-expressionistic” paintings and prints. They’ve interpreted the monosyllabic style he developed as a kind of industrial coolness and his insistence on the neutrality and emptiness of his creative process as an attempt to remain impenetrable. But what if we were to take some of his explanations for his creative process and his own personality at face value, giving up our futile attempts to penetrate to the strange psychic enigma beyond the black leather jacket, silver wig and pounds of make-up? Would we find the sweet and shy little boy of his youth, blushing behind the embroidered peasant skirts of his Ruthenian mama with her nearly nonexistent English, next to whom he would actually pray on his knees, even after he was a working adult and they had moved to New York together? Was he sensitive enough to possess the proverbial “Slavic soul,” and was he really a poignant model of meekness? Absolutely. Everything Andy produced issued from that identity,

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

283

A . W. and the art o f betrayal , suppositions by B ruce B enderson

and he created a nearly perfect objective correlative of it in his work. Perhaps to his credit, he was able to universalize his own weakness, emptiness and humility, not only into an essential characteristic of humankind, but also into a prophetic representation of the endpoint toward which late capitalist culture was rushing as inevitably as a train headed for a brick wall. In Andy’s own opinion, it seems, he was fearful, shallow and afraid he lacked courage; but so was America, and he intended to show their kinship. Unfortunately, touching and endearing as his vulnerabilities were, it was another discovery he made in the course of his ambitious strivings that would corrupt his innocence. He would falter at the pinnacle of his accomplishments, too sheepish, not enough of a guerilla, and perhaps too physically enervated by a previous attempt on his life to carry out the insurrection he had catalyzed. But that is only half of the story. The rest comes from the tenacious drive for survival of America’s mistreated immigrants. Andy may have been too meek to finish the revolutionary cultural operation he had started, but as he was beginning to abandon it, he also saw a glaring opportunity that promised some miraculous advantages. Because he took that opportunity, he left us a legacy of compromise that might even be interpreted as a betrayal. One can even discover such conflictual compromise in the minds of his critics and their repetitive theories. Most biographies or critical books about Andy begin by declaring his character to be as slippery as an eel, evading any attempt at description or moral categorization. Inevitably, however, explanations for such character ambiguities slip into conventional methods of character analysis involving the psychoanalytic diameters of his deprived childhood in the seedy industrial immigrant world of Pittsburgh and focusing on the Oedipal drama he played out with his mother Julia Warhola. Usually, the joke is on the critics themselves, because the central character in this psychic drama, Julia, to whom Andy has been portrayed as inextricably bound, presents more of an enigmatic public face than he does. Expecting a cabbage-stuffed Central European grandma with the sky-reflecting eyes and powerful haunches of the peasants I myself had seen in several trips to Romania, I thumbed through some biographies and googled those several images of her available to the public. What I saw instead was a shrewd-looking woman with a rather lean face I would have believed was that of a Jewish European intellectual if someone had said so. A sharp-eyed Hannah Arendt or Emma Goldman isn’t exactly what I mean, nor an elegantly existential Simone de Beauvoir; but in every photo the eyes looked out at me with a deep, penetrating, determined intelligence. Reading about Mrs. Warhola was no more enlightening. Was she merely a devout, largely uneducated mother, surrogate maid and cook for the Warhol operation, who drank too much, kept too many cats and was completely clueless about Andy’s social involvements or sexual orientation? Or was she a canny eminence grise who understood Andy’s aesthetics and commercial strategies only too well and played a covertly powerful role in the construction of his social persona? All I can say is that Victor Bockris has her returning back to New York to move in with Andy a second time, after leaving him to go back to her family in the Pittsburgh area. She arrives, slamming her suitcase on the floor and announcing, “I am Andy Warhol.”(4) Reminiscent of the climactic scene in Spartacus as this is—when every slave protects the life of the real Spartacus against the Romans by claiming to be Spartacus—this declaration by Julia, as well as certain reported others, seems to be not about solidarity but about ruthless competition. If Andy’s power came partially from the denial of his own personality and the concealment of the personality of certain key figures in his life like Julia, can one claim that his work, especially after the creation of

The Factory, was somehow about the cult of personality? Did he erase some of his own particulars in hopes of creating a vacuum into which would rush the idiosyncrasies of his performing subjects? Saying the work was about the cult of non-personality is closer to the truth. There is the common assumption that Andy obliterated, or at least hid, his own character traits and replaced them with the acting out and exhibitionism of his colorful entourage. But I think that Andy’s methods involved a “fracking” of personality—applying explosive pressure on a personality to unearth its sacrificial aspect—the aspect that could be exploited by the particular medium he was using. Such a technique is neither the genuine “portrayal” we see in the narrative fiction of a film nor the documentation of a subculture. It was merely Andy’s narcissistic attempt to hook a loud speaker to the hidden insecurities in others that he himself secretly shared. He was much more interested in reaction than he was in personality. In a way, the technique resembled some of the primitive directing methods of old Hollywood. Legend has it, for example, that in Sudden Fear, director David Miller drew out Joan Crawford’s terror-stricken, Academy Award-nominated performance during the film’s climax by marching her around the set and whispering in her ear until she was in a state of hysteria, and then turning on the cameras. Andy was, of course, lazier; but he intuitively created environments that would have produced powerful and perverse reactions in anyone. Just as Andy’s directorial motives were always connected to his partly unconscious class objectives, his various other aesthetic practices and social manipulations all carried his career in the same direction. At first they were concerned with peeling away the sangfroid and poise of America’s financial elite. He put Baby Jane Holzer, who was the daughter of real estate investor Carl Bruckenfeld and the wife of an heir to a New York real estate fortune, Leonard Holzer, on the couch in his film of the same name (Couch, starring Gerard Malanga, Naomi Levine, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Taylor Mead, Billy Name and anyone else he could cram into the film’s 40-minute length) making her part of a long series of polymorphous sexual encounters; he exploited the boarding school accent, perverse repartee and unsanitary speed-shooting sessions of Brigid Berlin, daughter of the chairman of the Hearst media empire; he rode a spell along with Edie Sedgwick, daughter of Alice Delano de Forest and philanthropist and sculptor Francis Minturn Sedgwick, on her beautiful and bumpy gallop toward self-destruction; he dragged collector Edith Scull, who expected to have her portrait taken in Richard Avedon’s studio, to a Times Square photomat. Such aggressions must have salved Andy’s unshakeable sense of immigrant inferiority. However, the final cure for this syndrome had to wait, perhaps, for the last years of his life, when he traded in transgression for drinks with Nancy Reagan at the White House or welcomed Diana Vreeland or Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his daughter Maura to his late night public access television show. Like the now-elegant Hollywood actress who strives to hide not only her real birth date but also the class conditions of her origins, Andy had several methods for snapping his fingers to make both recent and long-ago events and relationships disappear. Early in his career as a commercial artist, Andy would go to the picture collection of the New York Public Library in midtown New York for his research, tracing or even tearing out and stealing what he thought he could use (5). He preferred to pay huge late fines rather than get them back on time, for fear that the fact that he was using the pictures to trace parts of his own drawings would be discovered (6). One could say he did the same thing later with real people. Perhaps they couldn’t be made quite as disconnected from his life and work, but the story of their contribution could be amputated, and they could suddenly be shut out. Accordingly, one sometimes

“Like the actress who strives to hide not only her real birth date but also the class conditions of her origins, Andy had several methods for snapping his fingers to make both recent and long-ago events and relationships disappear.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

284

A . W. and the art o f betrayal , suppositions by B ruce B enderson

wonders how an object of such blatant libidinal potential, Tom Hompertz, that impossibly beautiful young man featured in Lonesome Cowboys whose last appearance is in a recently unearthed film called San Diego Surf that may or may not be the work of Paul Morrissey (the question of Morrissey’s authorship vs. Andy’s for all the later narrative film features will probably never be settled), could possibly vanish into thin air without a trace—even on the Internet. Other “deletions” from Andy’s creative trajectory are more explainable. What for example, happened to the trio of astounding transvestites—Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn—who brilliantly enlivened several Warhol-Morrissey movie hits but never even appeared as extras in his later Hollywood saga, Heat (7)? According to the Candy Darling documentary Beautiful Darling (2010), Andy declared himself finished with “chicks with dicks,” having realized they couldn’t travel very far along with him on the Hollywood track. Andy’s partly subconscious class objectives were complicated and full of perverse elements, but his early “self-portrayals” as he confronted the commercial art market followed the grain of future manipulations. He moved erratically up the professional ladder using tactics that were roundabout, seemingly self-defeating and sometimes hilariously comic. Bockris has him subjecting new shoes to a soak in water, dripping paint on them and defacing them in other ways so that they’d match the seedy workmanlike outfits he wore during the period when he was first visiting the design departments of classy magazines to present his drawings (often of shoes—as he was, in fact, a genuine shoe and foot fetishist). The downtrodden look was supposedly an attempt to make himself charmingly pitiful, which he felt was the best way to wrangle an assignment out of an editor. Andy compared being on time to show his portfolio, then waiting for hours, with merely arriving very late, and decided the latter was the best way to generate enthusiasm from his clients (8). He claimed that he was hired one time by Carmel Snow, head of Harper’s Bazaar, because of the pitiful sight of a cockroach crawling out of his portfolio (9). The point, again, is that he seemed to think every task involved some sort of manipulation. And whether or not these manipulations were really necessary, they were always an expression of a socio-sexual insecurity on his part—emotionally, they were absolutely necessary. By the time he had reached a professional level that no longer required playing Raggedy Andy, Andy changed his look and dispensed with any cockroach-like effects, turning his manipulations toward more aggressively balancing the scales between him and those from better backgrounds in as personally gratifying a way as possible. That is when he began placing the elite in the subversive positions I’ve sketchily referred to. One would have thought that the art world shakeup instigated by Andy Warhol would have left us a rich legacy that would give birth to new vitality on the cultural scene, but instead he seems to have left our culture depleted and disabled, by effecting a sharp detour in the history of art. In order to understand this, it’s necessary to go back a few generations. Most of us tend to forget that Pop Art finds its origins not in Andy, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg or any other Americans, but in a group of London artists known as the Independent Group, who would gather together as early as 1952 to express their ambivalence about American commercial culture. Apparently, it was the discussions of sculptor Edouardo Paolozzi, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, the critic Reyner Banham and several others that placed comic books, automobile design and rock music in the context of high art in order to examine the resulting tensions. Their ascendency rather than Claes Oldenburg’s, Roy Lichtenstein’s or Andy’s in the years to come might have defined Pop as something more rigorously analytic; but, perhaps more importantly, it was the curtailment of experiments in Color Field painting by the much more accessible world of Pop that, in my opinion, derailed the normal evolution of contemporary art.

Color Field painting had begun in the late ‘40s with the experiments of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and others. Although most of it preceded the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism that was to follow, it might also have returned to provide a logical epilogue to Abstract Expressionism by extending the tortured, claustrophobic psychology of that school into a wider, more universal perspective. Spreading their stretches of color to the very edges of the canvas, the Color Field painters attempted to suggest that abstraction could lead into some mythic dimension. Perhaps it’s a stretch, but I associate Color Field painting and its subsequent curtailment by Pop Art (Rothko resented this so much that he aggressively snubbed Warhol on at least two documented occasions) with the replacement on the French scene of the aesthetic, sexual, psychological and cultural theories of philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist and novelist Georges Bataille by such morose deconstructionist ideas as those of French critical theorist and visual artist Guy Debord, who cleared the way for repetitive conceptual and appropriationist experiments and abandoned more spiritually inclined practices. Like Bataille, the Color Field painters felt that the mythic aspect of cultural production needed to be investigated rather than precipitously deconstructed for the purpose of active political resistance (often in a spirit of paranoia, in my opinion). Color Field painting was an attempt to connect with the collective primordial emotions locked in myths while doing away with any suggestion of figurative illustration. Pop artists—and especially Warhol—were more like the deconstructionists in that they carried out an early process of cultural semiotics. By peeling color and image apart to emphasize the immateriality of cultural signs, Warhol was (at least, in the early part of his career), some say, dismantling the power of the image over us. Artists and critics like Debord, though more politicized, strove to perform the same surgical process and to defeat what Debord saw as the grip of “the Spectacle” on our hypnotized minds. Not so Bataille, who searched beneath signs for the profound historical links between the sacred and the obscene in human behavior, which he thought were revealed by rite and ritual. The next step would merely be relocating such fundamental rituals in contemporary life and finding new enrichment in them. Color Field painting was an aborted attempt to destroy the artificial gap between form and its ground, thereby converting both into one infinitely expandable space of consciousness. All that Warhol did in his sinister—and eventually self-serving—method of deconstruction was to rip color, line and image apart and widen the gap between image and ground to reveal the former as sham. Debord sought resistance but was on the road to extinguishing almost all of the symbols and values we live by in his paranoid fight against the Spectacle. Warhol was doing something similar, but being apolitical, at least on the level of verbalized theories, was exporting a blanket cynicism that he later exploited for his own gain. Bataille threw the profoundly pornographic and violent imagination of the human subconscious in our faces and connected it to mysticism, albeit in quite a sensational manner. The Color Field painters merely asked us to immerse ourselves in perception for a completely abstract experience with the promise of spiritual awakening. If Abstract Expressionism had somehow branched into Rothkolike experiments in new abstraction, today we might still be hoping to contact the human soul through the practice of art rather than denying the existence of it for profit. Just as Debord led us away from Bataille, Warhol cut off our awakening interest in more universal values of abstraction, even if he did tend to make a slight tip of the hat to Abstract Expressionism by adding some loosely controlled dribbles in painting and silkscreens. What is amusing, or ironic, is the fact that whereas Debord’s demonstrations of deconstruction and resistance were eventually stunted by his unyielding political orientation, Warhol’s became sterile because of the fact that his rebellion found no stable political perspective.

“He claimed that he was hired one time by Carmel Snow, head of Harper’s Bazaar, because of the pitiful sight of a cockroach crawling out of his portfolio.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

285

A . W. and the art o f betrayal , suppositions by B ruce B enderson

f Color Field could have shepherded a natural evolution away from representations of claustrophobic interior turmoil painted by the abstract expressionists and reached simultaneously inward and outward with its own abstractions, it might then have mutated gently into another, less unyielding and less hard-edged form of the Minimalism that lay on the horizon. Things just didn’t happen that way. Like an accident caused by a bunch of hot-rodding and resentful teenagers out to smash the powers that be, Pop Art unseated Abstract Expressionism with barely the slightest regard for transition, more concerned with replacement than it was with any kind of evolution at all. Take-no-prisoners Minimalism was the only rebuttal to the Pop takeover, but what it mostly accomplished, in my opinion, was the announcement of a new sterility that was hetero-centric. The question remains: was Andy Warhol an early gay liberationist? I’d be willing to pay a lot to learn why his struggle as a rather repulsive dandy, who predictably had to deal with anti-homosexual prejudice in both the commercial and fine art worlds at the beginning of his career, has suddenly been reinterpreted in the academic context of “Queer Studies.” In my opinion, it’s a political crime to go back and create a revisionist political identity for an apolitical person. The curators of the exhibition “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” which ran until the end of last year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and who aimed to reveal Warhol’s influence on a number of disparate artists, went so far as to dub an entire section in this immense show “Queer Studies (10).” Whose? I had always thought that artists like Peter Hujar or David Hockney were merely documenting, quite aesthetically, naturally and reverently, the figures and environments of their personal lives without really considering any specific political agenda. Perhaps someone can manage to make contact with Candy Darling’s ghost to ask about her and photographer Peter Hujar’s academic politics on the day shortly before her death in Cabrini Hospital in 1974 when she convinced Peter by phone to take her portrait on her deathbed, using her last ounce of strength to be outfitted in a black negligée and perfectly made up. To me there’s not the slightest thing that is “queer” about it. It’s simply one of the most stunning deathbed portraits I’ve ever seen of anyone of any gender or sexual orientation. How did Andy operate on a homosexual level? The general take on Andy’s characteristic crushes on young, attractive but unattainable men is that they had to do with his anticipation of rejection, which intimidated him into settling for pleasure on a visual level (voyeuristically, in other words). Therefore, his curiosity about the love affairs of close friends was boundless, whereas he himself wasn’t supposedly very sexually active. His central trauma involving love and sex is always identified as taking place in Honolulu in 1956, where his crush, Charles Lisanby, with whom he had decided to make his first voyage around the world, picked up another boy (11). Years later, Andy would claim—evidently jocularly—that he had his first sexual encounter when he was twenty-five and became celibate at twenty-six (12). It doesn’t, of course, jibe with his well-known affairs with, among others, John Giorno and Jed Johnson, however sexual each of them may or may not have been. Although there is probably a grain of truth in Andy the sexually frustrated voyeur, I beg to differ about the prime motive for Andy’s frequent displays of sexual shyness. Why consume libidinal possibilities when they can be turned into product? There would be more and more proof that it was Andy’s standoffishness that eventually generated all kinds of extended opportunities for aesthetic and professional exploitation. Sexual consumption is in a way the most profligate of expenditures, leaving very little behind for other uses. Untouched beautiful men are a better investment and can serve as reusable resources for a variety of (business) pursuits. In fact, Andy himself had once related a fantasy of himself as a madam and The Factory as a brothel, consisting of a series of beds undivided by partitions (13).

And yes, in case you were ever kept up all night wondering: Andy also occasionally enjoyed a real sex life. My take on Andy’s first contribution to gay liberation was that, during the period of the ‘50s and very early ‘60s, when he was struggling to make it in the world of commercial art and dreaming about penetrating the world of fine art, anyone who was effeminate or suspected of homosexual involvements was going to have to put up with a lot of risk, some of which could even have led to violence or legal problems. The fact that Andy exaggerated his feyness during that period as a kind of self-promotional gimmick certainly qualifies him as a bold gay liberationist. It would be extremely easy to reveal the ocean of hurt passion under the thin patina of Andy’s problem skin, narrow shoulders and short supply of pigment, which makes his audacious social pose during that early period all the more impressive. Of course, one cannot mention his contribution to gay liberation without discussing how he finally unfettered imagery of the male body and helped it eventually find its way into mainstream media. The supreme example of this is Joe Dallesandro, who started in films by playing himself. As director John Waters, who worked with him, has stated, Joe “forever changed male sexuality on the screen.” Dallesandro was the first actor to film extensive frontal nudity scenes in a film that was extensively distributed on a commercial level. Born in 1948 in Pensacola, Florida, he had grown up in a series of foster homes, after his mother was arrested for grand larceny and his father decided that he could not raise Joe and his younger brother on his own. A frequent runaway who received his education on the streets, Joe became a junky, petty criminal and male hustler by the time he was an adolescent. One day, he and a group of others happened to venture onto one of Warhol’s film sets at The Factory after Paul Morrissey had taken over direction of Andy’s films. Morrissey immediately understood that Dallesandro’s apathetic manner, his beautiful face and body and his laziness when it came to forming judgments about others could be shaped into a convincing film persona, especially when he was paired with talkative, aggressive, dysfunctional interlocutors. All of these characters, who were often women, or at least female personae, walked all over Joe, but regardless of their efforts they seemed to become less and less powerful faced with the monolithic indifference of this gorgeous naked man. Even with garrulously clever Holly Woodlawn, his charismatic, witty co-star in Trash, Dallesandro stole many scenes because of the radiant nature of his adamant passivity. On screen, Joe became a detached sex object, possibly using his experience in acting in pornographic films to project an availability for the viewer at the same time as a certain remoteness, vulnerability, sadness and cool distraction. The best scenes in his Morrissey-directed films (he would later star in others as a legitimate actor, mostly in Europe) were probably the result of pairing heroin with amphetamines: Joe on heroin would stay calm and vacant while the other performer on speed acted out, using him as a prop and sexual target. Joe was, then, the theatrical “straight man” (sexual meaning unintended), suffering the manipulations and witticisms of his partner actor with incredible patience and making the show a success by his very non-reaction. This was the first time that a male actor had been shaped into a sultry sex god who is also a victim of desire (there are many female examples), and Joe’s saintly sexual oppression radiated great power. And thus, Joe changed the cultural implications of the male body in art and popular culture forever. He brought male allure to the fore and was the catalyst for all the contemporary masculine imagery we now take for granted, including that found in Playgirl, in explicit underwear ads, in objectified celebrities like David Beckham and in other manifestations of metrosexuality. All of it can be traced back to Joe, and even to the day in 1971 when he may have become the model for the well-known photograph taken by Andy Warhol of a male crotch for the cover of

“The general take on Andy’s characteristic crushes on young, attractive but unattainable men is that they had to do with his anticipation of rejection, which intimidated him into settling for pleasure on a visual level.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

286

N o. 2 8 7

the Rolling Stones album “Sticky Fingers.” However, many of us were living in homosexual subcultures at the same time—including myself—so why couldn’t we accomplish what some of Andy’s subcultural cohort did? Perhaps it is this mystery that helps qualify him as a genius. What is unfair, or merely too bad, is that some of the antics of the Factory people were not revealed as a sensibility that was sweeping large portions of our generation. So many of us memorized Kim Novak’s lines in Jeanne Eagels. But one—the inimitable Candy Darling—was given the opportunity to recite them under the spotlight and did it better than anyone else could. I only wish it could have been pointed out that, at the time, she stood for so many of us. Andy didn’t leave us a legacy like other artists before him had. He left behind stale blood, sucked from popular culture. The tragedy of the current generation is their gradual discovery that there is no metadimension to perspectives on culture any more. (I wish they’d hurry up and find that out.) They look for exploitive traditions to subvert and parody, without realizing that they are only the products of that subversion and postdate that parody by too many years. It saddens me to some degree to witness them searching for a complex cynicism. Cynicism is a creative resource that can be used up. Since Warhol, there isn’t any available, unless you’re content with being Jayne Mansfield to his Marilyn Monroe. We could go back into history and try to force a comparison with the Weimer Republic, but the devastation that was to come after that period can’t seriously be compared to the cultural sterility we are already facing. Describing the “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” exhibition at the Met, Roberta Smith remarked in the New York Times, “That it can seem that just about any artist from the last three decades could have been included testifies either to Warhol’s influence or the show’s shapelessness (14).” Almost. But perhaps Roberts should have also added that “shapelessness” also characterizes Warhol’s gargantuan output. Like the hoarder he was, he has crowded our world with so many repetitive instances of his work that the individual examples have rudely begun to elbow one another, necessitating, at least until recently, aggressive price-control measures on the part of the Warhol Foundation. One of several things about the show at the Met that puzzled me was the curators’ decision to juxtapose the rude apocalyptic violence of a Neo-Expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, wonderfully crammed with Expressionist detail, to an orange Warhol silkscreen of predictably repeated electric chairs. Certainly any relationship between the two is better expressed in Basquiat’s own words, uttered at the time of his joint show with Warhol at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery: “I think I helped Andy more than he helped me (15).” Are we living today the fears expressed by critic Calvin Tomkins way back in 1970 when he contributed to the monograph Andy Warhol (16) and discussed the apolitical nature of Andy’s world: “Will his face inhabit the Seventies as it has the Sixties? … At the moment, though, what we seem to see reflected in that strange face is a sickness for which there may be no cure. This is the new shudder brought by Warhol’s art. Andy, in what one fervently hopes is just another put-on, begins to look more and more like the angel of death.”

Good Boy By T Cooper

y father used to buy up the losers, even though he never watched any of the fights himself. Instead he’d creep around back after the spectators and gamblers dispersed, and quietly make the losing dogs’ owners offers they’d be fools to refuse. Most of those guys were secretly happy not to have to kill their own dogs, so I suppose the re-introduction of money into the post-competition equation was a welcome culmination of those furtive, adrenaline-and blood-filled nights.

E n d n o t e s (1) Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World, Gary Indiana, p. 92-9. (2) Bruce Benderson, “John Giorno and the Half-full Glass,” Vogue Homme International, Spring Summer, No. 11, p.137 – 139. (3) Bantam, 1989, p. 57. (4) The Life and Death of Andy Warhol by Victor Bockris, Bantam, 1989, p. 96. (5) Loner at the Ball: The Life of Andy Warhol by Fred Lawrence Guiles, Bantam Press, 1989, p. 79. (6) Bockris, p. 73. (7) 1972, directed by Paul Morissey, with Joe Dallesandro, Sylvia Miles and Andrea Feldman. (8) Bockris, p. 72-3. (9) Bockris, p. 53. (10) Roberta Smith, “The In-Crowd Is All Here: ‘Regarding Warhol’ at the Metropolitan Museum,” The New York Times, September 13, 2012, online edition. (11) Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol by Tony Scherman and David Salton, p. 29. (12) Andy Warhol, Prince of Pop by Jan Greenberg, Sandra Jordan, Laurel Leaf, 2007, p. 33. (13) Bockris, p. 195. (14) Smith, September 13, 2012, online edition. (15) Bockris, photo insert after p. 84, caption for invitation to Palladium, Tony Shafrazi Gallery. (16) Andy Warhol by John Coplans, Jonas Mekas, Calvin Tomkins, New York Graphic Society, 1979, p. 14.

From as early as I can remember there were infirm and mangled pits in my father’s house. Missing limbs, eyes, ears, an entire half of a jaw in one case, blown apart by an errant bullet in a botched assassination attempt. But I never really thought about the source of all the walking wounded until the first time Papá took me along with him on a sweep after the fights. I was about ten when he looked at his watch one hot and quiet August night, switched off the TV, and then silently walked me a few blocks over to the boarded up house my mother had always warned me to avoid. It was slightly raised from the rest of the houses on the block, two-stories high with arched windows almost like an elegant lady’s eyes, a big backyard with a ten-foot wooden fence that had been haphazardly added only recently in light of the illicit activities being conducted there. The house looked old (even for Los Angeles), and there were always thugs and wannabe thugs hanging out on the dilapidated front porch. Slinging dope, and—according to my mother, who shuddered theatrically when she said it—women. Papá rarely touched me the way you see a lot of parents do, but that night he gripped my hand firmly and in a decidedly fatherly way as we waded against the current of people pouring out of the house— many drunk and energized, a few solemn. Others’ pockets bulging with rolled bills, advertising their good luck. A lot of these latter guys’ arms, I noticed, were slung around heavily made-up, pretty girls who looked mostly bored, but also vaguely optimistic that the best part of the evening might still be to come. When we reached the walkway alongside the house, my father suddenly dropped my hand and turned to me: “Don’t move from this spot,” he said softly in Spanish. “Right here.” He pointed to the buckled concrete between us, some weeds pushing shin-high through a

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

287

good boy by t cooper

substantial crack. I heard a man’s voice holler something I couldn’t understand, followed by yelps from what sounded like two different dogs. I tried to see around my father into the backyard, but he grabbed my chin and forced me to look into his eyes for a few uncomfortable seconds, something I generally avoided during the couple years since my mother left. Regardless, I knew what this look meant. So I stayed there in the dark and narrow space between the old house’s paint-stripped wood on one side, and the neighboring property’s shoulder-high chain-link fence on the other. My father disappeared down the path and casually turned the corner into the yard, and I heard the same dude’s voice saying in a jokey way, “St. Francis!” upon his arrival. And then an incredibly loud gunshot, probably a nine-millimeter, followed by two low woofs. I was certain my father had just been killed by that bullet, and I must confess my first thoughts were not of fear nor sadness, but instead involved visions of the foster family I would eventually end up living with (when my mother couldn’t be located), perhaps in the hills above Hollywood, or maybe even somewhere over those hills in Sherman Oaks or Encino, where my half-brother Tino worked nights at his parole job cleaning toilets at a Jewish kids school. But that was not to be, as I soon caught my father’s voice speaking calmly in broken English, playing up the language barrier to his advantage by being the stupid old man, a threat to nobody. I couldn’t stand being unable to see what was going on back there, so I squatted down to check whether there was a view through the crawl space. But there wasn’t any room for me to slide under. I could hear more random laughter, and sporadic ribbons of conversation, but mostly it was indecipherable. There was another gunshot then, which again didn’t seem to alarm anybody. Well, besides me: I reached down to touch myself, and when I brought my fingers back up to my nose, I realized I’d pissed the front of my shorts a little. I knew I’d pay if Papá caught me, but I couldn’t stand not seeing what was going on any longer, so I crept up the pathway and peeked around the back of the house into the yard. There were rows of beat-up and rusty kennels, stacked two and three high. Some old tires, kicked over dog bowls, a thick rope hanging from a tree, a hose dripping into a dirty kiddie pool, blood smeared across the plastic. About seven or eight guys stood around my father, some of them linked to dogs with chains, some smoking. A couple of the dogs were standing, but most were lying panting in the dirt. One or two mauled half-to-death, it seemed. Both the impulse and command to fight vanished, almost like no savagery had ever erupted between them in the first place. In the far corner of the yard was the guy with the gun. He stood over five dead dogs, their barrel-chests heaped atop one another: two black and whites, one blue, one brown. I couldn’t make out the color of the dog on the bottom. Or maybe there were two. I noticed my father’s posture, the stiffness; it seemed apart from any other time I’d seen him interacting with people. He was formal and detached in his quiet negotiations, taking a small wad of twenties from his pocket and counting out the bills in front of the guy with the sickest-looking dog. Everybody of course knew of my father by then, but there were always new dogs from different neighborhoods brought in for fights. And, as I later learned when my father came back pistol-whipped over an ear one night, some owners didn’t like the old guy trying to take out their garbage before they were ready to toss it. My father handed over the money then, and in exchange was passed the end of a heavy chain. I strained to see what it was connected to, sticking my head farther out into the yard than it had been. This attracted the attention of the guy with the pistol, who looked in my direction. But before I could duck back behind the house, he caught my eye, smil-

ing lazily, lips sealed. I don’t know whether it was really the case, but in my mind now—through what feels like a century of hindsight—he looks like Eazy-E, short and compact as one of those dogs, Jheri-curl tucked into a snap-back L.A. Kings cap, and an oversized black Raiders jacket. He kept staring at me, and I wondered whether he intended to let my father know I was there, or alert the other guys. But instead he calmly chambered another bullet, lowered it, and—never taking his eyes away from mine—squeezed the trigger again into the lifeless pile of dogs beneath him. Back at the house, panting and sweaty from the three-block, full-on sprint, it felt like my entire body would revolt. Tears, vomit, spit, shit—I tried to hold it all down. Some of our dogs rushed me with tails wagging, jumping up to lick my face when I entered the living room. The little one-eyed one, Paco, sniffed forcibly at my crotch as I slipped by him, and I shoved his nose away from my dick repeatedly until I could shut the door to my bedroom. I peeled off my underwear and shorts and stuffed them under the bed, then changed into cleaner clothes, and by the time I made it back out to the living room, I could hear my father coming into the kitchen through the back door. “Jose Carlos!” he yelled. Angry as shit. “Put everyone outside.” I looked into the kitchen. He was carrying a slick, jet-black dog, about fifty solid pounds of dead, limp weight in his arms. His shirt was covered in blood, feces, urine. Through a gash two of the dog’s white ribs were visible, as well as the pink meat in between, like he had just been hanging at the butcher’s or something. I stared. “Do it!” he hissed, and I started grabbing up dogs and funneling them out into our backyard. They were excited, anxious, sniffing at the air. Some were whining, others barking, but after a few minutes, I managed to wrangle all of them—must’ve been about eight or ten at the time—and then the house was still and silent but for the new dog’s panting and wheezing. When I came back into the kitchen, my father had already laid a clean sheet over the dining table and placed the black dog on top, and I could see that his wounds were far more extensive than just the hole on his side. His face and ears were torn apart, bite wounds all over, and it looked like the flesh and fur around his neck had grown around a thick chain collar that had been slowly embedding for years. Pus and blood oozed around the chain in the places it surfaced through the skin. The thing was terrified, so dark and matted with blood, the only flash of white from the corners of his eyes as he strained to look up at my father for a clue as to what might be coming next. My father didn’t speak to me, just pointed at various items he required as he methodically cleaned and shaved the dog, injected some Novocain and got to stitching him up in spots where there was enough skin to sew. I sat beside the dog’s face while my father worked on its side. I couldn’t look, still trying to hold it all in. The dog watched me while I stroked the only place on his head that was not cut up or stitched, an unbelievably soft and warm spot behind his left ear. He did not require a muzzle, not even a loose cloth reminder tied around his snout to keep it shut. I tried not to conjure in my head any of the things that had been done to him, as recently as an hour before, much less for the few prior years he was in circulation, likely bait. He wasn’t afraid though. His breaths steadied, and he tried lifting his head a couple times to lick my father’s busy hands. “He needs a name,” Papá said quietly, as I gently eased the dog’s head back down onto a towel. He let out a long sigh. I had named almost all of the beasts that Papá brought into our house, in fact I’d always eagerly done so, thinking of each one as if it were a new mallbought, pure-bred puppy jumping out of a box under the Christmas tree. But I didn’t know what to call this one.

“When I came back into the kitchen, my father had already laid a clean sheet over the dining table and placed the black dog on top, and I could see that his wounds were far more extensive than just the hole on his side.”

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

288

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3

289

GUTTER CREDIT GOES HERE

e! lif g tin por s a

Hermes.com

D ocument— S pring / S U mmer 2 0 1 3