Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2018 by Gagosian Quarterly

e are thrilled and humbled by the enthusiasm this magazine has been receiving. This Fall issue will reach more people than ever before. Our mission has always been to bring the stories of visionary artists directly to you; this season is no different. We are delighted to present a new work by Nate Lowman on our cover, an evocation of recent political discontent emerging out of the language of art history. We discuss with Anselm Kiefer his long-term dedication to exploring the human condition through mythology and history. And we celebrate his first major public sculpture—years in the making—to be shown in the United States. We accompany Ed Ruscha as he considers the paintings of Thomas Cole, with their ruminations on society, power, and empire and on how utopian desires may result in cycles of creation, destruction, and war. The viewers of Robert Therrien’s large-scale sculptures must literally shift perspective; dwarfed by his table and chairs, we find a new way to examine familiar objects of domesticity, while we are simultaneously returned to the private universe of our memory’s invention. Mary Weatherford’s paintings capture a blink of time. Whether it’s a glimpse out of the window of a moving car or the lights of a distant city after nightfall, she brings to us the fleeting moments of life. The films of Harmony Korine explore the complexities of contemporary society by going for the beauty that teeters on its edges. Embracing what others avoid, Korine has made a resounding impression on our culture through art and filmmaking that focuses on the experience of those most often overlooked. It was a wonderful honor for us to be able to speak with two of today’s greatest living biographers, Sir John Richardson and Jed Perl, who treated us to a discussion of the joys and complexities inherent in documenting the life of an artist through the written word. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

34 Spotlight: Jean-Michel Basquiat Fred Hoffman reflects on the creation of JeanMichel Basquiat’s Tuxedo (1983).

54 Under the Table Blake Gopnik challenges the traditional readings of transformation and the purpose of scale in Robert Therrien’s No title (folding table and chairs, green).

48 70 In Conversation The Lives Sir John Richardson and of the Artists, Jed Perl discuss the art of Part Three: writing biographies. Muse × Two A short story by Francine Prose.

Waterborne A poem by Natasha Trethewey after Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic (2018).

82 Cows by the Water Curator Caroline Bourgeois ruminates on how Albert Oehlen’s exhibition at Palazzo Grassi was organized around the artist’s continuing engagement with music.

102 From Mortal Bodies to Immortal Crowds The themes behind Taryn Simon’s dual exhibitions at Mass MoCA are uncovered in a text by Angela Brown.

108 Transcendent Criminal Dream

Anselm Kiefer The artist speaks with Richard Calvocoressi about universal symbols, mythology, and his recent sculpture, Uraeus, on view at Rockefeller Center®, New York.

Harmony Korine reflects on the rewards and challenges of filmmaking, revealing what’s in store for the future in a wide-ranging discussion with film critic Emmanuel Burdeau.

118 Losing Nothing: Arakawa and Madeline Gins Mary Ann Caws considers the art and life of Arakawa, exploring the philosophical, poetic, and aesthetic dimensions of this singular creator.

128 Bataille’s First Glance Dr. Philippe Roger considers Georges Bataille’s thoughts on art and his concept of the “Critical Dictionary” on the occasion of an exhibition that pays homage to the iconoclastic thinker.

Cover Nate Lowman, Memory Quilt For A Large Ball, 2017, oil, acrylic, alkyd, latex, dirt, sugar, and nylon thread on canvas, 91 ½ × 145 inches (232.4 × 368.5 cm) © Nate Lowman

Work in Progress: Mary Weatherford We visit the artist’s studio as she prepares for an upcoming exhibition in New York. Interview with Jennifer Peterson.

Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2018 (detail), watercolor, oil, pencil, varnish, and cut paper on paper, 29 ½ × 39 ⅜ inches (75 × 100 cm) © Ellen Gallagher

Ed Ruscha, Blue Collar TechChem, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 48 ¾ × 109 ½ inches (123.8 × 278.1 cm). The Broad Art Foundation © Ed Ruscha. Photo by Paul Ruscha

Mary Weatherford, The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars (Take the A Train), 2018, Flashe and neon on linen, 117 × 234 inches (297.2 × 594.4 cm) © Mary Weatherford. Photography by Fredrik Nilsen Studio

Ed Ruscha, The Old TechChem Buliding, 2003, acrylic on canvas, 48 ½ × 109 ½ inches (123.2 × 278.1 cm). The Broad Art Foundation © Ed Ruscha. Photo by Paul Ruscha

134 Romuald Hazoumè

150 The River Café Cookbook

André Magnin, scholar and curator of contemporary African art, discusses Hazoumè’s work in anticipation of an upcoming exhibition in New York.

In celebration of the River Café’s thirtieth anniversary, chef Ruth Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss her new cookbook, the history of the café, and her hopes for its future.

138 Uncharted Territory James Lawrence considers the implications of Caruso St John and Marcus Taylor’s Island as part of the British Pavilion’s 16th International Architecture Biennale.

144 Digital Pompeii

Course of Empire Ed Ruscha, Tom McCarthy, and Elizabeth Kornhauser reflect on the continuing resonance of Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire paintings.

Anselm Kiefer, Uraeus, 2017–18, lead and stainless steel, 298 × 441 × 346 ½ inches (757 × 1120 × 880 cm) © Anselm Kiefer. Photo by Nicholas Knight

Marc Ribot and Billy Martin speak with Brett Littman about New York in the 1980s and how the visual arts have informed their music.

154 Book Corner: Yves Klein Yves Klein’s various publishing projects are revealed in a discussion with Michael Cary and rare book specialist Douglas Flamm.

168 Game Changer Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey (1961). Text by Derek Blasberg.

TABLE OF CONTENTS FALL 2018

Photo credits:

Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2018

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Executive Editor Derek Blasberg

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

Managing Editor Shannon Cannizzaro

Published by Gagosian Media

Assistant Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Text Editor David Frankel

Advertising Manager Mandi Garcia

Design Director Paul Neale

Advertising Representative Michael Bullock

Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com

Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio

Distribution David Renard Distributed by Pineapple Media Ltd Distribution Manager Kelly McDaniel Prepress DL Imaging

Cover Nate Lowman

Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors Derek Blasberg Caroline Bourgeois Angela Brown Emmanuel Burdeau Richard Calvocoressi Michael Cary Mary Ann Caws Douglas Flamm Blake Gopnik Fred Hoffman Anselm Kiefer Harmony Korine Elizabeth Kornhauser James Lawrence Brett Littman Billy Martin Tom McCarthy Jennifer Peterson André Magnin Jed Perl Francine Prose Marc Ribot John Richardson Philippe Roger Ed Ruscha Natasha Trethewey Mary Weatherford

Thanks Dean Anes Camille Beinhorn Anthony Bigot Adam Caruso Serena Cattaneo Adorno Claudia Chow Matthew Cross Simon Davison Mary Dean Jean-Olivier Despres Sara Douglas Dorothée Dujardin Victoria Eatough John Elderfield Ross Finocchio Emily Florido Aimee Gabbard Ellen Gallagher Brett Garde Leta Grzan Romuald Hazoumè Stephen Hepworth Mary Ho Sarah Hoover Delphine Huisinga Emily Kenselaar Georgia Kirsop Sarah Kisner Perry Levine Sandy Lu Lauren Mahony Daniel Melamud Charlotte Ménard Bob Monk Lily Mortimer

Albert Oehlen Sam Orlofsky Stefan Ratibor Ruth Rogers Taryn Simon Peter St John Marcus Taylor Miwako Tezuka Robert Therrien Roubin Vousden Gary Waterston Mollie White Lilias Wigan Ealan Wingate

calvinklein.com/205

www.marcjacobs.com

photographed by steven meisel

CONTRIBUTORS

Anselm Kiefer Anselm Kiefer’s monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions as well as symbols from religion, mysticism, mythology, history, and poetry. In this issue he sat down with Richard Calvocoressi to discuss his sculpture Uraeus (2017–18), recently on view at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Peter Rigaud c/o Shotview Syndication

Richard Calvocoressi

Blake Gopnik

A scholar and art historian, Calvocoressi has been a curator at the Tate Gallery, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and director of the Henry Moore Foundation. Photo by Miriam Perez

Blake Gopnik is at work on Andy Warhol: A Life as Art, a comprehensive biography of the Pop artist based on unprecedented access to his records. Gopnik has been the staff art critic at the Washington Post and Newsweek and is now a regular contributor to the New York Times and Marketplace radio. Photo by Lucy Hogg

Caroline Bourgeois

Philippe Roger

Caroline Bourgeois has been curating exhibitions of the Pinault Collection since 2007, including Passage du temps (2007) at Lille’s Tripostal; Prima Materia (2013–14) with Michael Govan at Punta della Dogana, Venice; The Illusion of Light (2014–15) at Palazzo Grassi, Venice; and Debout! (2018), at the Couvent des Jacobins and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes. Photo by Matteo De Fina

Philippe Roger is a scholar and the editor of Critique, the journal founded by Georges Bataille in 1946. He has written extensively on history, literature, criticism, and the arts. He is a senior research fellow at France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique and a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, both in Paris.

Ed Ruscha Ed Ruscha’s deadpan representations of Hollywood logos, stylized gas stations, and landscapes distill the imagery of popular culture into a language of cinematic and typographical codes that are as accessible as they are profound. This summer, an exhibition of the artist’s Course of Empire paintings was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art, London. In this issue Ruscha speaks with Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Kornhauser about the Thomas Cole Course of Empire series, from 1834–36, that inspired his own. Photo by Gary Regester

James Lawrence James Lawrence is a critic and historian of postwar and contemporary art. He is a frequent contributor to The Burlington Magazine and his writings appear in many gallery and museum publications around the world. Photo by William Davie

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Natasha Trethewey

Elizabeth Kornhauser

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2012–2014). She is the author of four collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall (2012). In 2010 she published Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Photo by Nancy Crampton

An expert in American painting, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser has held a number of museum positions, including Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. She is currently the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sir John Richardson

Mary Ann Caws

Jennifer Peterson

Picasso biographer, John Richardson, son of Sir Wodehouse Richardson, was born in London in 1924. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, then began writing for the New Statesman, Burlington Magazine, and other British journals. In 1950, he and the modern art collector and scholar Douglas Cooper moved to a chateau in the south of France where Picasso was a frequent visitor. In 1980, Richardson began writing A Life of Picasso. The first volume was published in 1991, the second in 1996, and the third in 2010. He was appointed Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1995 and knighted by the H.M. the Queen in 2012. Sir John continues to live in New York where he is completing the fourth volume of his Picasso biography. Photo by Brian Gilmartin

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright fellowships, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an officier in the Palmes Académiques.

Jennifer Peterson is a film historian and a critic of art and culture. Her academic articles have been published in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, and the Getty Research Journal, among others. She is an Associate Professor and Communication Department Chair at Woodbury University, Los Angeles.

Jed Perl

Mary Weatherford Mary Weatherford’s latest work is on view at Gagosian, New York, this September in her exhibition I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By. Her paintings comprise grounds of spontaneously sponged paint on heavy linen canvases, surmounted by one or more carefully shaped and placed colored neon tubes. The grounds, startlingly varied in color and treatment, are redolent but not descriptive of climates, places, and situations. In this issue Weatherford speaks with Jennifer Peterson about her studio process, new works, and the upcoming exhibition in New York. Photo by Lee Jaffe

Fred Hoffman Fred Hoffman’s most recent book, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, was published in 2017 by the Enrico Navarra Gallery (New York and Paris). In 2005–06 he co-curated the artist’s most recent American retrospective, at the Brooklyn Museum and then traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Jed Perl was for twenty years the art critic for The New Republic, for a decade a contributing editor to Vogue, and is currently a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Among his many books are Calder: The Conquest of Time, Magicians and Charlatans, Antoine’s Alphabet, New Art City, and Paris without End. He has written for Harper’s, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and many other publications. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and teaches at The New School in New York.

Emmanuel Burdeau

Angela Brown

Emmanuel Burdeau is a film critic. Formerly editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, he is a writer for Mediapart and the author of many books on film, including recent publications on directors Vincente Minnelli and Werner Herzog. He is currently working on a biography of film critic Serge Daney.

Angela Brown is a writer, artist, and researcher from Yonkers, New York. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in art history and her writing has appeared in the magazines Artnews and Routine.

Brett Littman

Billy Martin

Brett Littman is the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Long Island City. He has contributed news and commentary to a wide range of international art publications and critical essays to many exhibition catalogues. Photo by Mari Juliano

Best known as a member of the musical trio Medeski Martin & Wood, Billy Martin is an American composer, percussionist, visual artist, educator, and record producer. He has worked in diverse musical contexts, from free improvisation to chamber compositions to film scores.

Tom McCarthy

André Magnin

Marc Ribot

Tom McCarthy’s debut novel, Remainder, was initially rejected by mainstream publishers before being published in 2005 by the small Paris-based publisher, Metronome press. Following widespread critical attention, the novel was republished by Alma Books in 2006 and Vintage in 2007. It became a bestseller and was adapted for cinema by Omer Fast. McCarthy followed Remainder with Men in Space (2007) and C (2010). His novels C and Satin Island (2015) were finalists for the Man Booker Prize for fiction. A fluent commentator on both written and visual arts, Tom has made guest appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Today program and writes for a wide variety of print publications such as the New York Times, the London Review of Books, and Artforum. Photo by Nicole Strasser/VISUM/Redux

André Magnin is an independent curator and researcher of non-Western cultures. He worked on Hubert Martin’s exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, (1989). From 1989 until 2009, Magnin ran the Pigozzi Collection, Geneva, which focused on subSaharan African contemporary art. He later founded magnin-a, which promotes contemporary African art within the international market. Photo by Malick Sidibé

Marc Ribot, whom the New York Times describes as “a deceptively articulate artist who uses inarticulateness as an explosive device,” has released twenty-five albums under his own name over a forty-year career. He has collaborated with Tom Waits, Lounge Lizards, Marianne Faithfull, Medeski Martin & Wood, the Black Keys, and many more. Photo by Barbara Rigon

Harmony Korine Harmony Korine is a film director, screenwriter, and visual artist who rose to prominence after writing the script for Larry Clark’s infamous film Kids (1995) at the age of nineteen. In the years since, he has created critically acclaimed cult classics, including Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, Mister Lonely, Trash Humpers, and Spring Breakers, as well as the lauded streetart documentary Beautiful Losers. Korine’s creative practice extends to photography, drawing, and figurative and abstract painting.

Fred Hoffman looks back on the creation of JeanMichel Basquiat’s Tuxedo (1983), examining the work’s significance in relation to identity and the hip-hop culture of the 1980s. What up? No, what up? My name is Jamie Foxx. Give it up, give it up… New York City; Saturday Night Live, Make some noise. And I'm dressed in all black. It's good to be black. Black is the new white. I'm telling you. How black is this right here? How do I know that black is in right now? Cuz the Nets moved to Brooklyn! How black is that? They have black jerseys, and a black court. I mean, how black is that? And Jay Z is the owner. A rapper! How black is that? and Jay Z only owns about this much of the team. But he acts like he owns all of New York! How black is that? Speaking of blackness, my President, President Obama is back up in the White House four more years. How black is that? And not only that, he's so black, he was playing basketball on election day! How black is that? But he was also late for his acceptance speech. Ok, all the white folks out in the audience, How black is that? –Jamie Foxx, 2012 1 Shortly after Jean-Michel Basquiat settled into a new studio in the gallery of Larry Gagosian’s Venice residence, in 1982, he and I started the production of the first of his large-scale silkscreen works. Composed from fifteen individual drawings and one collage on paper, this work, which upon completion would be titled Tuxedo, required a fair amount of technical know-how and some interesting choices by the artist. Basquiat wanted to reverse his original artwork from black images and text on a white background to white images and text on a black background. This was achieved photographically, turning the artist’s original artwork into one large silkscreen. During production, I didn’t give much thought to Basquiat’s intention in reversing the original artworks, but from the moment Tuxedo was completed, it became clear that his decision to turn everything black in the work into white and everything white into black was not merely a look he desired to achieve. Basquiat’s aesthetic decisions were his means of questioning certain social and cultural assumptions, with identity most important among them.2 Tuxedo was completed at virtually the same time in early 1983 that Basquiat produced the early rap record Beat Bop. Released on the label of the artist’s own Tartown Record Co., the long-playing album was made in collaboration with Fred Brathwaite, Toxic, A-One, Al Diaz, and Rammellzee. Basquiat’s cover art shared Tuxedo’s reversal of blackand-white imagery, further testifying to his fascination with the aesthetic look he had explored in that work. We timed the production of Tuxedo so that the completed artwork could be included in Basquiat’s exhibition at the Larry Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood (March 8–April 2, 1983). It became a striking counterpart to the rich, colorful paintings, laden with multilayered images, that formed most of the exhibition. The reaction to Tuxedo was complicated. One of the artist’s biggest collectors at the time immediately committed to acquire the example on exhibit, only to change his mind on learning 34

SPOTLIGHT

JEANMICHEL IN BLACK AND WHITE

that the work was not unique, but one of an edition of ten. When the New York gallerist Tony Shafrazi asked Basquiat for a work for his upcoming exhibition Champions, the artist was excited to send another example of Tuxedo, only to be informed that the gallery had expected a painting for its “important” exhibition. Somewhat despondently taking Tuxedo back to his studio on Crosby Street, Basquiat responded by actually painting on this version of Tuxedo. Basquiat’s desire to include Tuxedo in the Shafrazi exhibition is meaningful for a number of reasons. Champions was the first important survey of the emerging generation of artists whose work reflected the new social and cultural currents in the downtown New York of the 1980s. Before their introduction in this and subsequent exhibitions (at the Shafrazi and Fun galleries), certain of these artists worked primarily on the streets. They soon became identified as “graffiti artists,” because they tagged primarily outdoor locations with images and texts. The Champions exhibition quickly became seen as marking the arrival and validation of this new generation, and their transformation from artists of the street to an accepted presence in established galleries. By presenting Tuxedo in this context, Basquiat wanted to introduce a completely new look; not only was the work distinctive, it was “cool.” It was for this reason that he named the work Tuxedo: the work conveys the qualities of elegance, refinement, and a sense of mystery that a tuxedo might bestow on its wearer. Basquiat’s choice of Tuxedo for this groundbreaking group show suggests his confidence that the work would immediately be perceived as a manifestation of cool, and, as such, would assert his unique voice in downtown hip-hop culture. Although he had a brief history as a graffiti tagger, he had moved on to the New York art world establishment. Tuxedo represented Basquiat’s new way of tagging, of making his aesthetic activity a declarative act. Just as all taggers have their “own arrow,” the key artistic choices resulting in Tuxedo, and especially the decision to reverse the whites and blacks, resulted in Basquiat finding a completely original means of expression.3 Tuxedo became his declaration that he still embraced the spirit of street culture. Tuxedo shares hip-hop’s blurring of identity. Much like the voices of the early rappers and black poets of the early 1980s, the work pulls the viewer back and forth between the world of a black man in a white world and that of a white man in a black world. The aesthetic appearance of many of its individual text/image sections also acknowledges hiphop and rap culture. This is especially clear from the fifteen drawings that were the basis for the silk screen, two of which are in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and four in the collection of the Brant Foundation. Executed in oil stick and ballpoint pen, the drawings present layerings of individual words and short lines of text with the occasional insertion of an image. In their density and compactness, these drawings, along with those used in the follow-up silkscreen-on-canvas Untitled (1983), also produced in Venice, California, are unique in the artist’s oeuvre. Basquiat’s working method in each of these works is unclear: it is unknown whether he began at the top or the bottom of the paper, and whether he worked first in oil stick or ballpoint pen. He probably went back and forth, a word or phrase inspiring a new association, resulting in an intertwined web of text and imagery. Words and phrases are often repeated, sometimes multiple times. 36

Previous spread: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tuxedo, 1983, silkscreen on canvas, edition of 10, 102 ¾ × 59 ¾ inches (261 × 151.8 cm). Photo by Rob McKeever This spread, left to right, top to bottom: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mostly Old Ladies), 1982, oil paintstick and ballpoint on paper, 19 5⁄8 × 15 ¼ inches (49.8 × 38.7 cm). Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Jackson), 1982, oil paintstick and ballpoint on paper, 19 ¼ × 15 ¼ inches (49 × 38.7 cm). Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Plaid), 1982, oil paintstick and ballpoint on paper, 19 5⁄8 × 15 ½ inches (49.8 × 39.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase with funds from Mrs. William A. Marsteller, The Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation, Inc. and the Drawing Committee Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Olive Oil), 1982, oil paintstick and ballpoint on paper, 19 ¼ × 15 3⁄8 inches (49 × 39 cm). Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Quality), 1982, oil paintstick and ballpoint on paper, 19 ½ × 15 ½ inches (49.5 × 39.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase with funds from Mrs. William A. Marsteller, The Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation, Inc. and the Drawing Committee Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Cheese Popcorn), 1982, oil paintstick and ballpoint on paper, 19 ¼ × 15 ¼ inches (49 × 38.7 cm). Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT Following spread: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Beat Bop, 1983, album cover and back cover, Tartown Records, 12 ½ × 12 ½ inches (32 × 32 cm)

In his mixing, combining, and layering of words, images, and graphic references in these drawings, Basquiat turns the recognizable and obvious into the new and unexpected. Hip-hop and rap artists employ similar strategies, and their lyrics have a similar density, intensity, and diversity, driven by an underlying beat that echoes the raw edges of street life. Yet while Basquiat shared a certain spirit with hip-hop culture, and some of the same historical and cultural influences, he stood apart. Being based on fifteen drawings and a collage, Tuxedo comprises fifteen distinct sections along with an image of a crown at the top. The texts and images are highly structured and ordered: each of the bottom two rows contains four distinct, blocklike configurations of text, followed by three sections in each of the two rows above them, followed by one section directly below the crown. Within several individual panels Basquiat has drawn ladders and arrows, and these, combined with the work’s basic structure, invite the eye to move from bottom to top, implying ascent toward a spiritual place symbolized by the crown. While the pathway depicted is, predictably, not diagrammatic, and is far from a reliable road map, it nonetheless directs us upward, with Basquiat’s arrows literally pointing the way and the ladders in at least one section of text, and images in each of the bottom three levels, inviting us to climb. As we move up, the information becomes increasingly sparse: we have moved from a vast array of facts, symbols, and references toward a realm less well defined. The large crown at the top announces an arrival. Freed from references to the constant bombardment of information and stimuli experienced on the street, Basquiat’s crown declares a state of liberation. If the lower part of Tuxedo, paying tribute to the spirit of hip-hop, captures the visionary quality of Basquiat’s social observation, the positioning of the luminous white crown at the work’s summit indicates a leaving behind of one’s daily experience. Text published in full in The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gallery Enrico Navarra, Paris and New York, 2017 Artwork © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

1. Monologue from Saturday Night Live, December 8, 2012 2. It is interesting to note that Jean-Michel Basquiat’s large silkscreen-on-canvas Untitled (1983), produced immediately after Tuxedo and sharing with it the reversal of imagery from white into black and black into white, was the first of his works to enter the collection of an American museum. Untitled was given to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984, in honor of Basquiat’s inclusion in the museum’s 1984 exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. The work was illustrated in the catalogue but not included in the exhibition. Over the subsequent thirty-two years the museum completely overlooked it, and excluded it when first putting the MoMA collection online. It was not exhibited in the galleries until 2015. In 2014, when MoMA began a collaboration with the clothing store Uniqlo, a cropped image of Untitled was used as the signature image for the marketing of the store’s “SPRZ” collection of iconic artworks applied to clothes. Only then did the museum publicly recognize the work as part of its collection. 3. The idea that graffiti artists should have a unique look or expression, which they refer to as their “own arrow,” appears throughout the literature on graffiti culture. See, for example, Ilyse Spiegel, “The History and Evolution of Arrows in Graffiti Art,” February 10, 2011, available online at http://ezinearticles. com/?The-History-and-Evolution-of-Arrows-in-GraffitiArt&id=5896977 (accessed June 2018).

This summer Uraeus, a new sculpture by Anselm Kiefer, sat between the towering skyscrapers of Rockefeller Center®. The artist and Richard Calvocoressi discuss the range of mythological and historical symbols inherent in the work, as well as the planning behind the sculpture’s installation.

ANSELM

KIEFER

In Rockefeller Center this summer, Anselm Kiefer installed a huge winged book held aloft twenty-five feet above the ground, with massive wings outstretched as if in flight, attended by a serpent wrapped around a supporting column and a field of colossal books strewn at its base. This iconic sculpture is a majestic new image for New York. Deftly using lead, the heaviest of all base metals, and working on an architectural scale, Uraeus evokes classical mythology in form and content. It resonates with the many allegorical figures—including the winged figure of Mercury—embedded in the art and architecture of Rockefeller Center itself. —Nicholas Baume RICHARD CALVOCORESSI Does the column encircled

by a snake refer to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing, who carries a staff with a snake twined around it? ANSELM KIEFER Yes, but the snake has so many symbolic meanings. In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, for example, the snake and the eagle play important roles. Nietzsche describes the eagle in the air and the snake wrapped around the eagle. RC Entwined. AK Yes. Normally, eagles eat snakes, they kill them, but in Nietzsche they have a kind of love dance, they embrace. And in this context the snake is also an expression for how Nietzsche understands time. Time is not linear for Nietzsche, it’s cyclical. RC Eternal recurrence. AK Yes, and in Greek philosophy t here’s Ouroboros, the snake who eats its own tail, an image alluding to infinity. There are a lot of allusions to snakes in Christian mythology; obviously the snake appears in Paradise. Snakes are often symbols of both intelligence and its dangers. RC The snake was used in healing ceremonies in ancient Greece—the most famous one was at Epidaurus, in the Peloponnese, and there was one on the slopes of the Acropolis. Nonpoisonous snakes were used as part of the healing process. In your painting Seraphim, from 1983–84, there’s another snake. Seraphim appear in Christian, Judaic, and Islamic traditions; in Christian iconography they’re a higher form of angel, with six wings, which is the highest one you can aspire to. AK That painting describes the first fight in Christian mythology, the fight of the angels. There were angels who wanted to be more powerful than God, so there came to be two groups: one fighting for God and one fighting against them. The angels fighting for God won, so after the battle, the rest were sent down to Earth in the form of dragons and snakes. You know, when Alexander conquered Egypt and wanted to go to a sacred place, he asked the snake to guide him. It’s fantastic to have all these historical allusions. RC The title of your sculpture is Uraeus. Can you talk a little about that? AK I thought about the title for a long time, because there are so many possible allusions with the snake and the eagle. Uraeus is the symbol of the reunified Egypt. There was Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, and they had two different gods: Lower Egypt had Wadjet, a god represented by a cobra, and Upper Egypt was represented by a vulture. (In my case it’s an eagle, but a vulture is even bigger and more impressive.) And when these two Egypts were unified, in about 3000 before Jesus

Previous: Anselm Kiefer with Uraeus, installed in the Channel Gardens at Rockefeller Center®, New York, NY. Photo by Atelier Anselm Kiefer Opposite and following spreads: Anselm Kiefer, Uraeus, 2017–18, lead and stainless steel, 298 × 441 × 346 ½ inches (757 × 1120 × 880 cm). Photos by Nicholas Knight This page, top: Anselm Kiefer, Quaternity, 1973, oil and charcoal on burlap, 117 ½ × 174 ¼ inches (297.5 × 435 cm), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Center: Anselm Kiefer, Resumptio, 1974, oil, emulsion, and shellac on burlap, 45 ¼ × 70 7 ⁄8 inches (115 × 180 cm) Right: Anselm Kiefer, Icarus–Sand of the Brandenburg March, 1981, oil, emulsion, shellac, sand, and photograph on canvas, 114 ¼ × 141 ¾ inches (290 × 360 cm)

Christ, the god was represented by a combination of a snake and a bird. RC Why did you choose Rockefeller Center as the work’s site? AK Oh, that’s a long story. We started the conversation eight years ago. I had different ideas: first I wanted to do something on the pier in front of the Standard Hotel—it was an old pier, there was nothing there, it was wonderful—and I had the idea to build a house on it, like one I did in the South of France. And then the next year the pier was gone, kaput. So then I had other ideas, and we continued. My idea was that the artwork, regardless of whether it was a sculpture or a painting, should have its own room. It should not be exposed. You have to be very careful with something like this: if you put a great work in the wrong context, it gets ruined. And I needed time to reflect. In the end I chose the location on Fifth Avenue, where I’m not dominated by the environment. In fact the skyscrapers act as a frame for the sculpture. RC Yes, the scale and setting are actually perfect. AK When I was a child, you know, five, six years old, I lived in a small village without television or radio. It was really very primitive. And I was always drawing skyscrapers, I was fascinated by them. RC When you incorporated the eagle into Uraeus, were you thinking of the Reichsadler, the imperial German eagle? AK No, not at all. Germans are not the only people who use power, there are others too. It’s everywhere. For me, the eagle is not just a sign of power, it’s a sign of globalism. RC These symbols of power have appeared throughout your career. In 1973, you made a painting called Quaternity. AK The painting shows the attic in my first studio in Germany. RC In the works of this period your attic is a setting where you dramatize certain ideas or metaphysical concepts. AK Yes, I made a lot of installations and actions with this attic. RC A winged palette appears in a painting from 1974, Resumptio. Why the palette? AK For me, it was much more powerful than depicting a figure. The palette was a symbol for the spirit, for an idea. RC The winged palette crops up again in Icarus— Sand of the Brandenburg March (1981). I’m sure everybody knows the story of Icarus, again from Greek mythology, who flies too close to the sun with these wings made by his father, Daedalus, out of feathers and wax. AK You find that myth all over the world. RC A nd the landscape in Icar us, can you explain the significance? AK The Märkischer Sand is the northeast part of Germany, where the Prussians developed their power. I literally took the sand from my pond— RC And incorporated it into the painting. AK Yes. RC I think of these works as antilandscapes, in a way. AK For me, a landscape is never a landscape, it’s the memory of history. You see the ruins of history in the landscape. RC Yes. You hack at these things, you burn them, you blacken them, you attack them with sharp instruments, and so on. Sometimes they incorporate straw and sand. 44

AK RC

lead.

Yes. It’s also interesting to think about your use of

It’s nice to do a wing out of lead because it’s heavy. So it’s contradictory, a paradox, you know? RC Yes, exactly. Lead is heavy, but also very fluid when brought to a certain temperature. AK With lead, you can do what you want. It’s a wonderful material. In alchemy it’s called the prima materia and it’s the first step to get to gold. All alchemists started with lead. RC You have long included books in your practice. AK Sixty percent of my work is books. I don’t print them, they’re unique. RC Unique books, yes, one-offs. AK I have a lot of them still in my personal collection. RC You started off by making actual books, book works, but of course you also make sculptures of books in lead. AK The first time I had the idea to add wings to a book was in 1985. The book looks like it belongs in a church. RC Like a lectern. AK The book is a symbol of wisdom that can travel all over the world— RC It’s a universal symbol. AK —It holds wisdom, a Bibliothek. And when you combine it with wings, it’s about wisdom that goes around the world. RC Last year you had an exhibition in Copenhagen, dedicated to the French writer Céline— AK For Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit. RC —an extraordinary story of World War I. And in that exhibition lead spoke of life, of regeneration. AK Yes, and it’s a paradox to create a lead airplane. Lead never flies, you know? It’s too heavy. RC They weren’t real aircraft but were based on real ones—they were lead versions of fighter planes. AK I just invented them. RC Sunflowers sprout out of them. AK And poppies. And I called it Mohn und Gedächtnis, poppy and memory. RC Oh, after the poet Paul Celan. AK From Celan. RC And the landscapes that were shown are of deserts— AK Yes. I once walked through the Sahara for three weeks, and I took a lot of photos, and these are the landscapes. And there are sunflower seeds glued on, so the seeds could be waiting for rain in the desert. Or they could also be stars. RC It was a powerful installation. Let’s wrap up by talking about your very early work. There was a series you called Besetzungen [Occupations, 1969]. They’re staged photographs of yourself doing the Nazi salute in a number of European cities—in the Colosseum in Rome, for example—some but not all of which had been occupied by the Germans during World War II. AK Not Italy, they collaborated. It wasn’t occupied until later. Switzerland wasn’t occupied—but I occupied Switzerland! RC What I think you were doing in Besetzungen— correct me if I’m wrong—was, in this provocative way, confronting the collective amnesia that you experienced among your parents’ generation in Germany. AK I had no idea what happened, you know? And I wanted to know what this was. I found a recording, something the Americans made to educate the Germans. It had a lot of quotes from Hitler, AK

Goebbels, you know. And I was fascinated by these Hitler speeches. I was born during the war, so this was my first naive understanding about what had happened, about my history. RC You were faced w it h a k i nd of col lective denial or repression among your parents’ generation. AK Yes, sure. RC What did people think of you? What was the reaction when these photos were published? AK Oh, it was horrible. The Germans thought I was a neofascist. I made Besetzungen to graduate, and today it’s the first work I accept as mine. Everything before it was student work. And my professor had a difficult job [laughs]. There was one teacher in the school who had been in a concentration camp. He was the only one who understood the work—he said, “That’s good.” And you know, I made my career in America, not in Germany. All the Jews who had fled to America, they understood this. RC Many of your works are in public collections in this country. When was your first show in New York? AK It was in 1981, with Marian Goodman. RC It seems to me that the memory of war and its aftermath have been following you since you were a child. AK Yes, I was born in ruins. I was born in the cellar of the hospital because our house was bombed that night. RC So you’re very lucky to be alive. AK As a young boy, I always played in ruins. I had no toys but I had old bricks. For me, ruins are the beginning of something new. Not the end, the beginning.

Anselm Kiefer, Seraphim, 1983–84, oil, straw, emulsion, and shellac on canvas, 126 ¼ × 130 ¼ inches (320.7 × 330.8 cm), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Andrew M. Saul, 1984 Artwork © Anselm Kiefer

IN CONVERSATION

SIR JOHN RICHARDSON AND JEDÂ PERL: THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY Picasso biographer John Richardson sat down with Calder biographer Jed Perl to discuss the dynamism of these two artistic geniuses, the inadequacies of fixed methodologies, and the importance of keeping a fresh perspective.

WHAT GUIDES THE BIOGRAPHER IF NOT SOME FIXED METHODOLOGY? HOW DO YOU PROCEED? I THINK WE SHARE AN APPROACH TO THESE QUESTIONS THAT IS MORE INTUITIVE THAN ANYTHING ELSE.

AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED, WHAT YOU WANT TO DO AS A BIOGRAPHER IS TRY AND TELL, AS CLEARLY AND SHARPLY AS YOU CAN, WHAT YOU KNOW AND WHAT YOU PERCEIVE.

JED PERL I went back to the beginning of the first vol-

you handed over the story to her, you allowed her to tell it in her own words. And you showed us that she was willing to speak about these intimate matters. I’m left wondering if there are things that you know about Dora Maar and Picasso, or Françoise Gilot and Picasso, that you might not put in a book? JR In Dora’s case I left out a lot of personal stuff. I mean, I was very close to Dora and I didn’t want her to think that I was just a shitty guy who wanted to get all the dirt he could and write about it. There was a line that I didn’t really want to cross. Also, I wanted to go as far as I possibly could without offending Picasso’s family, or writing something that somebody else might get hold of and turn into something completely different. I was also very close to Picasso’s friend and rival Georges Braque, but there was nothing scandalous about his private life. Braque’s private life is seldom reflected in his work. JP With Calder as with Braque—they were friends—there was nothing scandalous about the private life. But I’ve still found myself wondering how far to take certain lines of inquiry—whether that’s the few details we have about Calder’s

John Richardson

Jed Perl

ume of your biography of Picasso, where you said a few things about the art of biography. JOHN RICHARDSON Oh dear, did I? JP I’m going to read you something you wrote back then. It interests me greatly—as you know, I’ve been working on a biography of Alexander Calder for ten years, and I’ve become fascinated by the whole question of biography and how one interprets an artist. This is what you wrote: “Picasso was such a mass of contradictions that according to his son, he used to repeat again and again, ‘Truth is a lie. Truth is a lie.’ No wonder so much of what has been said about Picasso turns out to be equally true in reverse. Since quicksilver would be easier to nail down than his precepts, methodologies have proved unequal to the task. I have therefore tried wherever possible to respect this ambivalence, to present the artist’s life inside and outside the studio in the light of it.” I think you’re making a very important point here, about the limited usefulness of methodologies. JR I think what I wrote there holds up. JP I agree. And this leads us to an important question: what guides the biographer if not some fixed methodology? How do you proceed? I think we share an approach to these questions that is more intuitive than anything else. And I think many people have a certain embarrassment with the idea that one might be intuitive about the connection between events in the life and something in the work. It seems to me that part of your great gift as a biographer has been to be intuitive about these questions. JR Well, I think I had to be intuitive because I’m self-educated, essentially. I’m not an academic, I went to a public school in England but I left it when I was fifteen, and then I went to art school at the Slade. So, I didn’t end up with the typical English education in the classics that I would have had I gone to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, I’ve been able to approach the subject of art and artists with a training in fine arts rather than a background in classical scholarship. And I think that probably was an advantage [laughs]. I didn’t approach my writing with a whole lot of preformed ideas, whether good or bad. I hadn’t been taught all this methodology, you know—so I had the freedom to cobble together my own process and develop my 50

own readings from books and picking it up in the streets and conversations with a few people, but I didn’t have much formal training. But in a funny way, my writing was probably fresher, because I didn’t have a stock of stuff at the back of my mind. I mean, I wrote about what I felt. JP Right. You didn’t come at it with preconceptions. JR No. I didn’t think, “Oh my God, so-and-so wrote all about this and I should really take that into consideration.” I hadn’t read any of the great art historians or theorists. I was free of all that. So it all depends on my own experience. JP For several years after I started working on my Calder biography—that was a decade ago—I felt I didn’t know how to evaluate a lot of the information. There are still many people alive who knew Calder. People would tell me stories and I had no idea, for the first three or four years, whether the stories I was hearing were important or unimportant. But at some point, after five or six years of working, I began to develop what I felt was almost a sixth sense. I began to feel that I understood something about Calder’s mind; I had a sense of when he was saying things that were important and when he was saying things that were disingenuous, maybe playing the trickster with people who were interviewing him. Do you know what I mean? JR Yes, I do. Picasso is slippery in that way too. JP But it took a long time to get to that point. It must have been different for you, because you knew Picasso quite well. JR Yes, quite—in the end, very well. JP How did knowing him in some of his later years shape your understanding of the earlier years? How did that affect you as you began to write the biography? JR What I enjoyed most about visits to Picasso was the opportunity to study the recent work with the artist. Not that he cared so much about his friends’ comments; what he really wanted was a shot of their energy. On one of my earliest visits he had shown me some drawings. When I shyly tried to explain what impressed me about one of them, he was surprisingly responsive. Three months later, on another studio visit, I was amazed to find that he had taken this particular drawing out of its portfolio to have another look at it. That Picasso should have cared enough to remember was astonishing—tears welled up in my eyes. The third time

he played this trick, I realized it wasn’t my opinions he valued, it was the tears he squeezed out of me. It was proof that his magic still worked. Once I caught on to this, I’d watch him manipulate anyone who seemed vulnerable into an emotional response to his work. He would switch on the magnetism and let his ego feed on whatever admiration or devotion could be extracted from those around him. At the end of the day, Picasso would have made off with everyone’s energy; it would fuel a night of work in his studio while the rest of us lapsed into nervous exhaustion. JP One thing I find myself wondering about a lot now—and it’s certainly relevant to the art of biography—is whether there are kinds of information about a person, private or intimate facts, that shouldn’t be shared, even after a person has died. There was a time, not too long ago, when there were certain lines that you didn’t cross in a biography. What happened in the bedroom was not discussed, right? JR I remember that. JP There were things that might be discussed quietly, among friends, but not out in public—and to some degree biographers followed those conventions. Today, of course, there’s hardly anything that isn’t discussed in public. What I’m wondering is how the shrinkage of what used to be a private realm affects the work of the biographer. One of the chapters I greatly admire in the third volume of your Picasso biography is the chapter where you turn to Marie-Thérèse Walter. You do something very interesting: you step back from what would be regarded as a straightforward narrative and instead begin by writing about the interviews that Marie-Thérèse gave late in life. JR That’s right, yes. Thanks to a brilliant scholar named Lydia Gasman, who has passed away now— she shared these interviews with me, which were intimate to say the least. JP And you talk about how frank she was in those interviews, as a way of giving us a pretty good idea of what the sex between her and Picasso was like. But you don’t exactly do it as part of the narrative—in your own words. The chapters before and the chapters after this are conceived in a more “conventional” way. I liked that you changed your approach when you turned to the intimate details of Picasso’s affair with Marie-Thérèse; it was as if

romantic life before he married Louisa James, or the details of medical records that have remained with the Calder family. I find myself wondering if there are conventions of privacy even now that a biographer should be respecting. What you’re saying, and I think you’re absolutely right, is that the decision to discuss certain private matters must be justified by the possibility of illuminating the creative process. JR Exactly, yes. JP So even today, we could say that a detail in a biography is prurient if it’s merely there to show that you know it or can play gotcha. It’s prurient until—unless—it actually helps to illuminate the artist and the art. JR Yes. Well, I’ve given these things a lot of consideration and I think that on the whole, I hope in the case of Picasso that I’ve never been prurient. If I felt that anything was, I would chop it out immediately. I’m trying to think of other people I’ve written about, if I’ve let all the cats out of the bag. I don’t think so. JP For me, many of the biographies of visual artists are pretty weak; your Picasso is one of the

great exceptions. People are sometimes surprised, when they ask what biographies I admire, to hear me talk about biographies of creative people other than visual artists. I’m a great admirer of Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce and Leon Edel’s of Henry James. I’m wondering, when you started to think about biography, were there biographers you thought about? JR Many biographies I read were so full of gas and gossip and names of great thinkers who were cited and whose words just created a lot more gas. As far as I was concerned, what you want to do as a biographer is try and tell, as clearly and sharply as you can, what you know and what you perceive. Occasionally, I would feel I was way off the mark, but on the whole, I’d like to think I was ok. And I’m not a—you know, I was going to say I’m not an intellectual, but I suppose in the end I am to some extent. JP Yes. Oh, you are very much an intellectual. JR But I was never an academic, I think that’s the main thing. I went from art school straight to earning my living. There was a great deal I hadn’t yet considered, in terms of philosophers, et cetera. So I was open to a great many things. JP Well, I g uess we have that in common, because after college I went to art school—I have an MFA in painting and I don’t have a PhD. I think sometimes people decide that being an intellectual is knowing all the answers, when in fact, I think really being an intellectual is having a mind that is playful and willing to look at different sides of things. JR I absolutely agree with you on that. JP I very much admire the close of the third volume of your biography, when you bring in Carl Jung’s critical writing about Picasso, and although what Jung says is anything but sympathetic, you confess to finding it very interesting. What you show us is that although Jung is knocking Picasso, he’s actually getting at interesting things about him. What you demonstrate there is that there’s such a thing as a play of ideas, and that in fact, even something thumbs down can be illuminating if it gets at some deeper truth—a truth we can only get at when we reject a fixed agenda, right? JR Yes. Initially I had a problem, because I didn’t think that I was nearly clever enough to write on artworks and artists—to come out with opinions 51

I THINK ONE SHOULD ALWAYS QUESTION THINGS, QUESTION THINGS, QUESTION THINGS, AND NOT SETTLE BACK AND SORT OF BE SMUG AND SAY, WELL, IT’S ALL NICE AND IT’S ALL JOTTING ALONG, EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE. IT DOESN’T. EVERYTHING NEVER MAKES SENSE AND SHOULDN’T MAKE SENSE. John Richardson

thing. Not at all. And I think one has to see this as sometimes a sort of fight between one way of thinking and another. And this is a good thing and it keeps things alive and it keeps arguments going, which I think is very important. JP You’re saying that there’s some dynamic or almost dialectical unity to the work, which puts it all in a chain of some kind of— JR Yes, but it also fails— JP Fails—okay. But that impulse— JR That impulse, yes. JP T he re’s a n i mpu l s e t h a t l ie s b e h i nd everything Picasso did. And that’s important, because eclecticism has been one of the points of attack against Picasso. JR Yes. I mean, it’s mistrusted by virtue of being what it is. JP Right. Well, there’s a problem that can at least in part be blamed on Clement Greenberg. There’s a sort of standard-issue modernism—I think it’s still taught—that goes back to Greenberg’s idea that modern art is defined by a push toward ever greater purity. Since I was a kid, I’ve known that this doesn’t jibe with the work of Picasso—or Braque or Henri Matisse. It doesn’t even jibe with Piet Mondrian, whose work becomes more complicated and in a way related to nature in his last days. So it’s a very strange thing, this idea of modernism as a kind of purism. JR Well, that’s what they wanted it to be, I think. I mean, a whole lot of people tried to find ways of making it all make sense and fit tidily together. And, needless to say, it’s nothing like that at all. What I like is sort of not trying to gather all the bits together and getting them to make sense and make a lovely jigsaw puzzle. I like it all still alive, still touching people in very different ways and having very different results. I’m always interested in the ways that people’s views over the years change, and in a way they change the original statement, it doesn’t have the force it once had, but it’s got another kind of force according to what’s happened in the world or what’s happened in philosophy or whatever it is. I think one should always question things, question things, question things, and not settle back and sort of be smug and say, well, it’s all nice and it’s all jotting along, everything makes sense. It doesn’t. Everything never makes sense and shouldn’t make sense.

Yes. One of the things I love about Calder is that his work doesn’t take a straight path—he does his purest, most simplified abstractions in the very early 1930s and then he complicates things later on, and there are even phases toward the end of his life where he returns to figures and images that are related to what he was doing in the 1920s. And of course this horrifies purists who think an artist is supposed to be on this sort of one-way train. But this is one of the things I love about Picasso, that he goes in one direction and then another. And then I think of Suite 347, of 1968, and the narrative richness there at a time when that’s all supposed to be over in the history of art— JR Yes, it’s all this narrative stuff—people were shocked by this. I mean, gallery-goers wanted the artist to be faithful to one vision, and if the artist went ahead and suddenly went in a different way, oh dear, they couldn’t follow that. And I understand that. I mean, you do need to have a specific kind of mind to take in these extraordinarily abrupt changes that these great artists were making. JP Well, there’s the whole question of Picasso’s response to the world around him, it’s a fascinating kind of dynamic. I mean, how do you— JR God knows how [laughter]—I mean, I was really close to Picasso, he was incredibly warm and generous to me, but looking back on it, I still don’t fully understand him. He’s too big to understand. And I think that if you try to make a coherent view of all this, you figure out it’s not possible. Picasso was exceptional, he made these amazing leaps, and if you try to put them all in a neat row, it doesn’t really work. JP You’re saying there’s no one key. You know, people often want to have this sort of “Rosebud” moment, the famous childhood sled in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane—the clue, so it’s suggested, that will explain the whole life. People want to have that one key that unlocks everything, right? That doesn’t seem to me to be very much the way life really is. It seems to me most of us—and I’m not talking at the moment about genius, but just us mere mortals—are made of many things with many different sides. JR Yes. And it is seldom that we make that leap. You know, it’s easier to go on doing what we’ve done before. Those leaps take a lot of strength. JP

Photos by Brian Gilmartin

judygeib.com Studio Sweep Giant Chandelier earrings in 18k gold

and so on. My best friend was the philosopher Richard Wollheim. I’d known him since I was sixteen or seventeen, and we remained friends throughout our lives. And Richard was so intelligent and so well read in different fields. He was a key figure in my life in that he did sort of hover round and say, “Well, John, you really should read this,” and he would explain things to me. But you’re right, a fixed agenda was never part of my general process. JP Something else I very much want to discuss with you—and in a sense it’s a philosophical matter—is the great question of whether there is a unity to Picasso’s work. You said something about the 1980 Picasso retrospective that William Rubin mounted at The Museum of Modern Art that I find amusing and spot-on. You wrote, in The New York Review of Books, “The pattern of stylistic infidelity can be said to follow the pattern of amorous infidelity” [laughter]. JR Oh, that’s rather profound [laughter]. JP You also said—of both the Rubin show and the Picasso show that Dominique Bozo had mounted previously in Paris—that “they have emphasized the continuity of Picasso’s development.” You then went on to suggest or imply that this might give a spurious logic to the oeuvre. Do you think there’s a unified logic to that development? You know, Meyer Schapiro wrote a long essay in which he said people talk about unity as a virtue and wondered where that left Picasso’s work. Schapiro argued that transformation—a perpetual process of transformation—was the unifying principle in Picasso’s art. What’s your view? Is it just stylistic infidelity, or is there a deeper— JR Oh, I think there’s a much deeper logic to Picasso’s genius. JP And what is that? How would you characterize that unity? JR God knows. I think he just had that extra amount of—it certainly wasn’t knowledge, but a sensitivity, a sensibility, so that he could sort of see the pattern in the carpet that nobody else could see. That’s rather inadequate, but I mean— JP Are you saying, then, that all the stylistic variety fits into some pattern? JR No, I wouldn’t say that, but I can see how these different aspects of Picasso’s work relate to each other and very often antagonize each other. I mean, they don’t always end up saying the same

Robert Therrien’s investigations of form, perception, and subjectivity often isolate recognizable elements and objects from everyday life. Blake Gopnik challenges the traditional readings of transformation and the purpose of scale in Therrien’s No title (folding table and chairs, green).

UNDER

TABLE

THERRIEN’S ENLARGEMENTS MAY OFFER THE BEST MODEL FOR AN ART THAT IS TRULY ABOUT DOCUMENTATION AT ITS MOST THOROUGH. AFTER AT LEAST A CENTURY OF FLAGRANT NEGLECT, WHATNESS HAS AT LAST GOT BACK ITS PLACE AT THE TABLE.

hink, for a minute, about the difference between a horror-movie housefly nine feet high and a normal housef ly seen through a microscope. What we perceive in both cases is pretty similar: those faceted eyes, barbed legs, and voracious jaws completely fill our field of vision. But the effect is utterly different. One is about spectacle and scale and a fantastical world that’s out of whack. The other is about information and understanding and our desire to explore the real world all around us. A decade ago, when Robert Therrien first showed a folding card-table whose top soared high above our heads, with four folding chairs scaled to match, I think many viewers read them as props from the latest sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. After all, Therrien has long worked in Tinseltown, so reading his objects in terms of spectacle and fakery—as a bid for Hulk-sized impact—would have seemed to make sense. But however likely such a reading might be, I don’t think it does justice to the subtlety of Therrien’s art. There is something almost devotional in the utter perfection of the rust stains on his sheet-metal chairs—the way the rust gathers around hinges and joints, leaving flat surfaces less affected. We feel Therrien’s respect for the just-cheap-enough Masonite that gets conjured on his table’s underside. His commitment to accurate reproduction, and therefore to respecting the integrity of the things reproduced, has a quiet, even contemplative quality that denies a connection to blockbusterism. Anyone who has spent time with Therrien himself—as thoughtful and retiring a character as you could hope to meet—would have a hard time imagining him having flashy impact as his goal.

The essence of Therrien’s practice comes even clearer through the standard but inapt comparison between his Brobdingnagian sculptures and the Pop enlargements of Claes Oldenburg. Oldenburg left out a lot of detail in his classic oversize pieces, so you could instantly tell that his seventeen-foot-tall shuttlecocks, for instance, were sculptures shaped like sports equipment but scaled up to fill the role of monument. Bigness was meant to be instantly tangible, and stylization helped do the trick: objects whose goal is to seem vast and impressive rarely fuss the little details that small objects do. (Think of the monumental sculptures of Roman emperors versus the life-size funerary portraits of those emperors’ subjects.) With Therrien’s modest furniture, on the other hand, bigness can seem almost incidental. The size of his table and chairs can be thought of as a by-product, even a necessary evil, in his attempt to give us maximum information about his subject—to make table-andchair-ness unavoidably present. If my reading is right, it ties Therrien into a vitally important function of art that writers have tended to neglect, either in favor of form (what a picture looks like) or of semantics (how to read it). Before a picture works at those levels, however, it points out something in the world and tells us that it’s worth our attention: depiction is first of all about “ostension,” to borrow a term from philosophy. With ostension, what matters is not how you have chosen to depict something, or how it might be interpreted, but the simple fact that you have chosen it for depiction. The pointing finger of art can be dressed up any which way—in the simple planes of an icon, the high realism of Leonardo, or the dots of a Monet—and it still does its job so long as it manages to say nota bene. That is what a microscope does when it lets us take note of the hairs on a fly.

Previous spread: Robert Therrien, No title (folding table and chairs, green) (2008) on view at Frieze New York, 2018. Photos on page 54, from left to right, top to bottom: Seth Combs, Christine Brown, and Joseph Brown. Photo by Diane Brown; Anthony Gelfand. Photo by Olga Henkin; Brett Garde. Photo by Rose Farrell-Garde; Sophia Cohen. Photo by Aleksandr Schiavetta; Emily Weiss. Photo by Alison Sweeney and DeWitt Stern Fine Art; Photo courtesy Dean Anes; Beckie Warren and Nina Blumberg. Photo courtesy Beckie Warren; Photo by Dean Anes. Photos on page 55, from left to right, top to bottom: Sara Medici. Photo by Cassandra Nollmann; Katy Kotiadis. Photo by Brandon Friedman; Photo courtesy Lorrie Cardoso; Alexandria Deters. Photo by Alex Santana; Photo by Dean Anes; Aleksandr Schiavetta. Photo by Ilana Wolfson; Photo by Dean Anes; Mila Myles.

Opposite, top: Artist’s Polaroid of folding tables and folding chairs (2005) Opposite, bottom: Polaroid of No title (folding chairs, stacked against wall) (2007). Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com Left and following spread: Robert Therrien, No title (folding table and chairs, green), 2008, paint, metal, and fabric, dimensions variable. Photos by Rob McKeever Artwork © 2018 Robert Therrien/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

It’s also what so much modern art has led us away from. An Oldenburg Shuttlecock is much less about noting a badminton birdy than about the power and wit of sculpture; in the best tradition of the modernist mainstream, it’s about transformation, not presentation. That’s why Oldenburg’s gigantism is a false friend to Therrien’s enlargements, while Andy Warhol’s first soup cans are their true antecedent, despite being so very much smaller. When Warhol’s Campbell soups first appeared on the scene, they came across as absolutely nothing more than ostension—as just pointing to the contents of our larders. They were reviled and ridiculed for their rejection of transformation, and were treated as a kind of absurdist joke. Only a very few brave critics understood that, after a century of obsession with style and abstraction, it was time for a return to an earlier tradition of content-for-content’s-sake. Therrien’s oversize sculptures may represent the maximum in ostensive power. The 2D imagery that Western art has privileged for the last few centuries has limited the artist to a single point of view, meaning it can only point to the aspects of an object that face the picture’s audience. (And no, Cubism did not solve the problem: it just gave us more single views onto smaller bits of a scene.) Flat pictures have also encouraged us to see them as patterns and surfaces whose virtue lies in their look, rather than as access points on a world that might just as easily have been

rendered differently. Whereas, as old master sculptors always argued, a 3D depiction gives a richer opportunity to get to know the sheer whatness of the subject at hand. Therrien can point out to us both the black-rubber glides on his chairs’ feet and the smooth arches at the top of their backs, both the underside of his table and the tiny wrinkles in the vinyl that covers it. The magnification in his furniture just multiplies the amount of information at hand and our opportunities to access it. As we walk around and under Therrien’s table and chairs, we register an ostension that knows no end. It’s as though the artist had a thousand index fingers to point with. Yet the sheer perfection of Therrien’s simulations means he’s engaged in a kind of trompe l’oeil, and that’s a mode that has had a bad rap for some time. It has been seen as shallow and trivial trickery, a sleight of hand that has no goods to deliver. Therrien’s version, coming at what seems like the exhausted tail end of the tradition, may help us to rethink its origins and understand the appeal it once had. If depiction’s first goal is to point at the world, how better than by giving it to us complete and unaltered? And even enlarged, in Therrien’s case. Pending the arrival of immaculate macrophotographic virtual reality, Therrien’s enlargements may offer the best model for an art that is truly about documentation at its most thorough. After at least a century of flagrant neglect, whatness has at last got back its place at the table.

THE MAGNIFICATION IN HIS FURNITURE JUST MULTIPLIES THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION AT HAND AND OUR OPPORTUNITIES TO ACCESS IT. tamaramellon.com

WORK IN PROGRESS

MARY WEATHERFORD With preparations underway for an exhibition this September, we visit the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s California studio. She speaks with Jennifer Peterson about her new work, studio process, and the artists who have inspired her. Photography by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.

This new show is a collection of big paintings. Can you describe your working process? MARY WEATHERFORD To start from the beginning, I’ve seen the fields where flax is grown in Belgium. And from flax is made linen. I have the linen woven for me at a mill in Belgium, so it’s a very special linen, it’s rough. There are hills and valleys to it. I’m leading you through from the ground up, as it were. JP Starting with the materials. MW We could do an entire interview on linen, and why it’s special to me. I grew up sewing. I learned a lot about fabrics from my mother. The first time I saw this linen, at New York Central Art Supply in the 1990s, I thought, “I don’t have to do much to this to make a good painting, because it’s already incredibly beautiful.” JP But t hen of c ourse you do prepa re it , extensively. MW I got John Zurier’s secret formula for doctoring up the gesso. I want the paintings to have the transparency of my ink drawings. So this ground has an absorbency to it, but if I make it too absorbent, the colors are dull, and if I don’t make it absorbent enough, the colors sit on the surface. JP Some of the paintings are the same size and double-square format as your commission for Claremont McKenna College in 2014. JENNIFER PETERSON

from the Mountain to the Sea, the painting for the dining room at the college’s Athenaeum. I love dining room paintings. There was one in the cafeteria at the LA County Museum of Art when I was a kid. I would sit there and eat coconut cream pie after my art class and look at the big painting. What’s the most famous cafeteria painting of all time? JP I’m not sure. MW The Last Supper. JP That’s some cafeteria. MW There’s a [José Clemente] Orozco at Pomona College that was painted in situ. Prometheus. The students eat with this incredible mural. Looking at paintings in museums is sometimes such a ripoff, I don’t get to exist with them for long. I have a technique: if there’s a bench and not many people around, I try to just take a nap and then wake up and see the painting. I try to have the experience of looking away and coming back. If I go to a museum, especially in Europe when I know I’m only going to be there once, I visit the gift shop, look at the postcards, determine which paintings in the museum are the great paintings, then go into the galleries and look at the paintings, and then I go back to the gift shop. I read up. Then I go to the café; then I go back to the museum. It’s a whole long process. The best thing would be a painting in your MW

Previous spread: Mary Weatherford in her studio, Los Angeles, CA, July 2018

dining hall, like the Picasso that used to be at the Four Seasons. JP So you’re giving a durational aspect to painting, which isn’t usually thought of as a durational medium in the way that, say, film is. MW Yes. JP But in fact painting is durational. There are so many open-ended kinds of experiences you can have with paintings. But we don’t always get to have food with paintings, and you’re saying you particularly like eating as an experience that goes with painting? MW Definitely. I was in somebody’s apartment and they had Dubuffets in their dining room. What a great thing. I have a painting in my kitchen that I’m so fond of that I sit and eat and look at. JP You’ve said your paintings aren’t landscape paintings. I think they resonate more with history painting. MW These are getting figurative. I kept trying to say they weren’t landscape paintings, and now I’m proving it. I love history painting, like Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana. I made this one about Teotihuacán— JP This silver-and-yellow painting? MW —after a symposium at LACMA about the discoveries there. Mayan and Aztec cultures showed up in the picture. Teotihuacán was a grand city. A population of a hundred thousand, trading with other cultures down on the coast, on the peninsula. . . . JP The Yucatán. MW Yes. They found turquoise in Teotihuacán. The closest turquoise mine is in New Mexico. JP You were thinking about the history of Teotihuacán? MW Yes. I think there were a couple of things: history, and I’d already made some bright paintings and needed to make a gray one. JP Something to absorb or give a pause. MW Yes. If you look at a Matisse or a Gauguin, or any bright-colored painting, the way they keep it from being garish is to use gray. Your eye doesn’t realize, “Oh there’s some gray in it,” but what gray does is, it quiets down parts of the painting so that the very bright parts can sing. And that holds true for an exhibition as well. JP What other historical elements were you thinking of? Tell me about these shapes. MW These all seem to be magical creatures. I want to see a jaguar there. The jaguar is important in the Yucatán, in pre-Columbian art. I saw all that stuff at the Museo Antropología with my ninth-grade Spanish class. JP The Museo Antropología in Mexico City? A field trip? MW We were really turned loose there. It was a trip that kids couldn’t take today. I mean, I went to the bazaar in Mexico City by myself. We had a free day and— JP That is amazing. It definitely wouldn’t happen today. MW I still have the dress I bought. JP Well, this is part of your landscapes— MW And we went to the pyramids. Back then they had a light show. I mean, it was really the 1970s. JP This is part of what I think is distinctive about your work. You’re informed by European art history, but your work features a different geography in your references to California. And now you’re talking about Mexico. MW I think so. New York painters are more attached to Europe. JP Color is one of the things I wanted to ask you to talk more about. You say red is hard to paint in. 64

I can’t think of a color that would not be difficult to work with, really. MW Blue. JP Tell me why blue might seem more manageable to you? MW There’s a painting for the show that’s 100 percent cobalt blue, with a little corner of a more lavender blue. I conceived it when I was in bed for ten days with a terrible flu. It was the first of these big, double-square, mural-sized paintings in the series. I thought, “I’m going to make a completely cobalt blue painting. Just straight cobalt blue, that’s what it’s going to be.” And I came in—I was probably still sick—but I came in and worked all day. I put a lot of water in it. And it’s just—just beautiful. I thought that it was going to be difficult to coax a painting out of one color that wasn’t black, because with black you can go all the way from white through all the tones— JP The grays. MW Essentially, I was cutting off the piano keyboard below middle C. If you’re using just cobalt blue, you’re operating from middle C all the way on up. JP Right, because the blacks aren’t in there. MW So you take out the bass. A lot of times I think of colors as musical notes. I think of paintings as chords, trying to hit an emotional chord. That’s the reason colors can so easily be thought of as notes. That’s an Agnes Pelton thing. JP Yeah. MW And the reason they can be thought of as notes so easily is that color is relative. Even the white you put down counts. Every color hits an emotional note. But the note, the color with another color next to it, then makes a chord. So you can have a major chord or a minor chord or a seventh chord or—you know the famous Leonard Cohen song, Hallelujah? I think everybody loves that so much because he’s demonstrating what going through that chord progression feels like. So when I’m making a painting, what I’m doing is demonstrating what the chord progression feels like. JP Right. This is so fantastic. There is, of course, a long tradition of this, from experiments with color organs in the nineteenth century, where artists would play a piano and a note would correspond to a color. There’s a tradition of so-called visual music. Vasily Kandinsky was interested in that. MW Kandinsky! Yes. Exactly. Then it gets into, of course, the lights. This Red Writing painting, with the blue light: when I paint the paintings, sometimes I go all the way, but then sometimes I paint a picture knowing that there’s something left out. I knew when I made Red Writing that the light would be the other color. It’s the third color, because the ground is slightly gray, honestly. The red is a medium cadmium, and then the light is turquoise. So that’s a beautiful chord. I have another painting right here that’s that turquoise blue with cadmium red, which is always a super-wonderful combination. And then there are paintings that surprise me, like this painting which I love, the Cosmos painting. JP It doesn’t have the neon on it yet. MW I used a lot of colors that are sort of like undergraduate mistakes. When you’re an undergraduate, it seems that somehow everything ends up purple. You end up using too much alizarin crimson, which is really transparent. Everything mixes together into purple mush before you learn what paint does, actually physically, and not in theory. Color theory is taught as theory—

WHAT GRAY DOES IS, IT QUIETS DOWN PARTS OF THE PAINTING SO THAT THE VERY BRIGHT PARTS CAN SING. Mary Weatherford

Opposite: Mary Weatherford, The Gate, 2018, Flashe and neon on linen, 112 × 103 inches (284.5 × 261.6 cm)

Right. —and then there’s the actual dirt that you’re painting with. And how to get that dirt to match what you have in your head, as in blue plus red equals violet. Well, what kind of blue? What kind of red? And then what violet are you looking for? And then mixing grays, which Stephen Westfall taught me to do. I substituted for him at one of his classes at the School of Visual Arts twenty-five years ago, and the students had to mix up dove gray and bird-shit gray using opposite colors. So cobalt orange and cerulean blue make a beautiful gray, and then you add white. Another gorgeous gray is burnt umber and white. Learning how to make the grays is ground-zero colorist stuff. You can study it by looking at Chardin. It’s all Westerncanon stuff. JP Right. MW Watching the progression of color through the history of Western art is fascinating. Getting up to the candy pinks of Fragonard and Bonnard. You know what’s really interesting color, because it looks like there isn’t any, is Rembrandt. You know that saying, “Well she’s no Rembrandt!” You can stand in a room full of paintings and go, “Now that’s a good painting!” And you walk up to it, and it’s a Rembrandt. A Rembrandt jumps off the wall. JP Yeah, they’re stunning. MW They’re just bananas! That creamy white that he uses for the lace. JP You think of Rembrandt as being so dark, but then the little bits of color he uses are so powerful. MW I wouldn’t call him a tonal painter. It’s all in the browns and the greens. . . . Rembrandt you just think of as glowing gold. JP Because it’s about the light he captures. MW All that beautiful gold. I have a reproduction of a painting of his son Titus on my bathroom door, and Titus just has the most lovely pink cheeks. JP Nice. MW Goya is a wonderful colorist. Even in the Black Paintings. There’s a picture in my show that’s a political painting straight out of the Goya Black Paintings. Even though all the paintings in the show are political in their way. JP Which painting? MW See the evil floating figures? Like the Goya, with the figures floating in the air? These figures JP

Opposite: Mary Weatherford, Bird of Paradise, 2018, Flashe and neon on linen, 117 × 104 inches (297.2 × 264.2 cm)

have a jubilant stupidity to them, but evil, deeply evil, in their kind of dancing and their movements. It’s a scary painting. JP So all of these works are political. MW Well, everything always is. I thought about Guernica a lot this spring. In fact, here are pictures that I’ve printed out when I’m painting. JP What were these used for? MW We have Picasso’s Guernica; we have a Gauguin of a gray horse, a Gauguin of a yellow Christ; then versions of The Rape of the Sabine Women— JP Oh yes. MW —which has different titles. JP Part of the Art History I canon. Poussin, Rubens, David. . . . MW That subject matter was popular, right? JP Yes. MW Mass rape. Mass abduction. JP Of women. MW So there’s a lot of drama to capture. JP Does that painting have an animal in it? MW This one was so beautiful the way it happened, because every morning—I’m sure it was a subconscious thing—there’s a rooster that crows in the canyon here. But really, this painting started because on my drive down here to the studio, I see these beautiful toyons. JP Oh, the trees! MW The toyon trees— JP Those are gorgeous. MW Right there on Museum Drive. JP Yes! I’m fascinated by these bushes, because they have red berries. There’s a theory that Hollywood is called Hollywood because of those berries. The native toyon trees look like holly. MW That makes sense. JP So it’s a native plant. MW There’s a particular toyon tree that I see when I drive from my house to my studio. It must be the particular amount of sun and the particular amount of shade, because the bowers of red berries are extraordinary. The color of the toyon leaf is a deep bluish green. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to paint this toyon bower. That’s what I’m going to do today.” Then I got to the studio and there’s this big blank canvas, and I worked very hard to mix up paint that was the color of the toyon leaves. So I put that in, and then I went to put in the red bowers, and I got this far and I thought, “My God, that 67

looks like a chicken.” And it struck me that it was just this incredible image. You and I have talked about animals in film. JP Yes. MW So I left it. I stopped. It answers the classic question “How do you know when you’re done?” Well, I’m done when there’s something so compelling that I don’t want to lose it. JP It strikes me that at this point that you know when you’re done in a very confident way. MW There’s a violence to this painting that’s extraordinary. JP In this painting it’s as much about what isn’t there as what is there. Have you painted animals before? MW Cats. Cats are magical creatures. I’ve titled paintings things like Supernatural, or made paintings that have to do with the supernatural, or astrophysical slippage. Cats seem complicit in that kind of thing. They have a way of disappearing. They’re there but not there, like an image can be there and not there. JP How did the neon first enter into your work? MW I was driving around Bakersfield trying to think about the paintings for a show there. I saw old neon signs for restaurants and factories that hadn’t been taken down, mainly the Padre Hotel. As I was driving around, the sun started setting

and I saw the color of the sky. Who doesn’t love the sight of the sky turning color and the lights of the city coming on at night? That moment. So I decided to paint the experience of driving around Bakersfield. After that it occurred to me, that’s how I could paint about people’s lives. They became paintings of cities, and paintings of places where I’d lived, namely New York and Los Angeles. JP Have you been thinking about New York while painting the works for this show? MW There was one painting where I wanted to use every color, and I just started, and I didn’t really have any other plan. And then it was just so exciting because it was so urban. Someone even said, “This is the most like graffiti writing I’ve seen you do.” It reminds me, in a really beautiful way, of how the subway trains looked when I got to New York. JP In the 1980s. MW So this one has got to be called A Train. The famous Duke Ellington song— JP Yes, “Take the A Train.” Speaking of titles, the upcoming exhibition is called I’ve Seen Gray Whales Go By. MW Seeing a whale is one of the best things in life. Whales are there, and glorious, then they’re gone, under the water, on their way.

MILANO! MILANO! MILANO! BAR BASSO Artwork © Mary Weatherford.

MSGM.IT

the lives of the artists iii

francine prose

The billionaire is so generous with his recreational drugs that from the moment they wake up until the moment they fall asleep, everything seems hilarious. Every sunny morning, which is to say, every morning, Mattie says, “Let’s go out and lay by the pool and accelerate the aging process.” It cracks Lee and Mattie up. The aging process is for giant wheels of cheese, for pheasants turning green, for whiskey in barrels bigger than the art-school apartment where they met and fell in love, back when they were poor. They will never get old—a conviction both secretly hold but that they have never discussed, A, because it is boring, and B, because both secretly fear that their belief in eternal youth might not withstand the scrutiny of reason. And C, because both of them are superstitious and afraid to jinx themselves. They would love to spend a few more days at the billionaire’s house on the channel or canal or archipelago or inlet or whatever the body of water is. But this coming Monday, someone’s intern and someone else’s assistant will be pushing food-cart-sized racks of clothes into Lee and Mattie’s loft for a fashion shoot. An hour or so later, hair and makeup will arrive, dragging their pressed-aluminum wheelies and their fabulous tattoos. Their all-time favorite was a guy who had a Keith Haring squalling baby in three colors on the inside of his forearm. He was a little older than most makeup people, and he was surprised by their enthusiasm: did they even know who Keith Haring was? Of course they knew who Keith Haring was, and they shared the good feelings that came from the dead hero-artist being immortalized on the make-up guy’s arm. The other reason they need to get home is that neither Lee nor Mattie has picked up a paintbrush in months. And they tell each other (and themselves) that they can’t wait to get back to work. On the flight home from Miami, they each drink two airplane signature cocktails—doubles, actually—and Mattie says, “Enjoy this moment, darling. You know it’s not going to last.” It’s true. They both know the odds, which are zero in their favor. It couples are only it couples for the briefest moment, social darlings are only social darlings for a heartbeat. That is the meaning of itness. That is the nature of social darlingness. But every so often an it couple becomes an icon, like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. After the second cocktail, Lee says that Mattie is being pessimistic, which is true, and that Mattie is always pessimistic, which is untrue. Lee and Mattie take turns being light and dark, realistic and hopeful. Like Mattie, Lee doesn’t really believe that their shining moment will endure, but Lee thinks, Why spoil their present joy with worries about a future that might never happen? Lee and Mattie wear the same size, they’re the same height and weight, but there are always two racks of designer clothes brought in for the fashion shoots: men’s clothes, women’s clothes. Each of them is free to choose from either rack, to mix and match, to try on garments, wigs, and accessories in any combination. It helps that both Mattie and Lee are gorgeous examples of any gender anyone can imagine. They’re equally androgynous, if such a thing can be measured. It’s loads of fun for the stylists, and though Mattie and Lee used to think that only one magazine would want to do this, every magazine seems to want to do what the others have already done. Their New York dealer, Sandor, is delighted by everything that’s happened. Free publicity, lavish dinners, invitations to stay at the beach houses of billionaire collectors. Fun for all, money for everyone, good news up and down the food chain. In interviews, Lee and Mattie thank their moms for giving them gender-neutral names. They like playing with gender in their work and in their private lives, and they believe in absolute and (if they choose) perpetual gender fluidity, which includes their right to remain silent—to refuse to talk about—which gender they identify as, even with one another. They insist that the subject never comes up, in their personal relationships or in their work. They have no interest in marriage or children, and as far as anyone can tell, their parents seem to have conveniently disappeared after

giving them the perfect nonbinary names. Of course they know that any jealous art-world gossip or diligent reporter could track down their birth certificates or their high school yearbook photos, but the resultant outcry against whoever outed them would be a billion times worse than when Elena Ferrante was outed, besides which, that didn’t make her books stop selling. If anything, it helped. Their itness comes partly from their youth and beauty, from their sense of style. But they are also good painters, very good painters, at a time when so few artists paint any more, or care about painting. They make people care about painting. Though they share the same studio and show together at the same galleries here and in Europe, and though they frequently serve as one another’s models, and often paint each other from photographs and from life, their work is very different. Mattie paints large, lush, thickly painted nudes of Mattie’s head on Lee’s body, and of Lee’s head on Mattie’s body, while Lee works in something closer to an old master style—fragments of Mattie glimpsed from the back, a whirl of hair, the side of a head, the corner of a shoulder, always with a Netherlandish-style landscape in the background. The landscape isn’t painted from life, but based loosely on the photos Lee takes of the garden that the couple grow together in their summer house just outside Hudson. They’ve incorporated as Muse × Two. Muse was already taken. Their nasty sunburns from that final day at the billionaire’s beach house are not only painful but (politically, culturally, aesthetically) as wrong as wrong can be. They have to cancel the fashion shoot and they don’t leave the studio for a week. All of this turns out to be the best thing that could have happened. They order out for food and spend all their time painting. Their sunburns are a blessing in disguise, compelling them to suspend their social-darling lives and to return to being artists. It’s also fortunate—provident, really—because they have a show coming up in April. A few weeks before the show opens, three critics pay separate studio visits to see the new work. The critics look and nod and say nothing. They ask Mattie a few questions but seem to have no questions for Lee. The critic who files first (for a small art journal) writes a review that Mattie and Lee might not even have seen if Sandor hadn’t brought it to their attention. Sandor reads it to them on speaker phone. The critic has written that Mattie’s work has continued to grow, with its increasingly sly challenges to embodiment and gender. Whereas Lee’s painting, the essay says, is in danger of becoming derivative and static. . . . In fact, the critic writes, Lee’s work not only made the critic think about other artists, but it made him wish that he was looking at those other artists, among them Vermeer and Bonnard. Mattie looks at Lee and mouths “Bullshit,” but Sandor is already saying an almost unforgivable thing: despite the critic’s opinion, Sandor says, Lee’s work may actually prove easier to sell. Buying Lee’s paintings is less of a commitment, less of a . . . statement. The second two critics seem (at least it seems that way to Mattie and Lee) to have read the first critic’s review, and they say, in more or less the same words, that Mattie’s work is breaking new ground while Lee’s is losing its edge. They tell Sandor that they want to call the show Breaking the Losing Edge, but he says it would be double suicide, under the circumstances. When they insist, he says, Fine, if that’s what they want to do, fine. It’s their call. First Mattie caves, then Lee. They call the show New Work. Mattie says they’re in this together. Lifetime contract, says Lee.

In the past, Sandor always phoned on the studio landline, and they’d put the call on speaker phone so all three could talk. But now, for some strange reason—a reason that seems stranger to Mattie than it does to Lee, who understands why Sandor is calling—Mattie’s phone rings and Sandor’s picture comes up. Mattie’s work has sold out well in advance of the show, whereas it’s “still up in the air” what will happen with Lee’s. All the reviews say the same thing. Progressing. Standing still. Fresh. Familiar. Cutting edge. Old story. Like. Don’t like. Buy. Don’t buy. Not until the show comes down does Sandor tell them what they already know, or at least suspect: Mattie has sold out, and has orders for future work, while Lee has failed to sell even one painting. It’s a shock, a blow, and they decide to go to Venice to heal. They went there when their work first started making real money. They spent the weekend in a suite at the Gritti Palace and ordered Champagne from room service and made love from morning to evening, emerging only, like vampires, to prowl the nighttime city, the dark alleys empty and silent but for the sloshing of water and the echo of their footsteps. Like Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now, but without the scary red dwarf. Sometimes they stopped and made out in doorways until their knees were so weak they could hardly stand. This trip, there’s no making out in doorways. It’s February, and they’d thought the city would be empty, but—surprise!—it’s carnival, and the doorways are crowded with rich Italian families in eighteenth-century gowns and velvet breeches and tricornered hats, and with elderly British people dressed as cardinals and nuns, all seeking shelter from the rain. It’s a nightmare, Mattie and Lee agree, but not a sexy nightmare like the nightmare in the film. They still have plenty of the money they earned together, but this time Lee can’t seem to shake the thought that Mattie is paying the bills. Is Mattie thinking the same thing? Lee’s not going to ask. It does nothing for their libidos and at night they lie in bed watching Italian soap operas and squabbling about what they’re going to do the next day. Lee wants to turn off the sound on the TV, but Mattie says they can learn Italian that way. They have sleepy sex, with the TV on, and one of the things that makes it so unsatisfying and detached is that both are thinking (and trying not to think) about the last time they were in Venice. One night, returning to the hotel from a restaurant whose food wasn’t as good as they remembered, Lee thinks they’re being followed. They’re not. The footsteps turn off and cross a different bridge. Lee’s relieved, but Mattie won’t let it go. Who did Lee think was following them? Who’s the pessimist now? They have agreed not to check their messages until they get back to New York. They return home to find Mattie’s inbox full of invitations to give talks and attend conferences and accept residencies in glamorous cities and beauty spots throughout Europe and Latin America. Lee is never mentioned in these emails, though a few of the residency websites mention that spouses are welcome but cannot expect to be given studio space. Mattie offers to turn everything down, but Lee says that would be self-defeating. Both of them will suffer if one takes a hit for the other. Together they stand, divided . . . and so forth. Besides, who knows how soon there will be a reverse, and it will be Lee’s turn to prosper. They are there, fully present, for one another. Muse × Two indivisible. Invited to run a program in Romania helping young artists to paint murals on abandoned apartment buildings, Mattie has the kids paint pictures of Venice, which makes the residents laugh, because Bucharest is not Venice, and also a little sad, because Bucharest is not Venice. Even as Mattie is on the plane back to New York, the Bucharest project is nominated for an international prize.

While Mattie is still on the plane, Lee sleeps with Sandor’s attractive gallery assistant, in the bed that Lee shares with Mattie, and where Mattie finds them (where Mattie is meant to find them) on coming home from the airport. Mattie says, The big disappointment, the biggest disappointment, is finding out that Lee is jealous and vindictive because Mattie is, at the moment, more successful. It’s the first time that either has acknowledged this. In another situation, it might have ended the conversation, but Mattie is angry, Lee is defensive. Lee and the assistant got drunk, and the assistant made the first move, though obviously the assistant knows that Lee and Mattie are a couple. Mattie was gone, not picking up the phone. What was Lee supposed to do? There was spotty reception in Bucharest. It was hard to call. Mattie has told Lee that, many times. Lee’s excuses are not excuses. They consult a couples therapist, a fact they keep secret because, A, it’s boring, and B, it doesn’t fit with their image. But not even professional help can save the love that has descended into sniping and suspicion, each of them make belittling remarks about the other’s talent, insults that they instantly take back but it’s already too late. They make an effort to do things that are supposed to be fun, but aren’t fun, because of the effort involved. When their breakup becomes public, they agree not to see each other for at least a year. Mattie becomes the it person and Lee takes a one-year teaching gig in Nebraska. Lee’s faculty colleagues are married or resentful to the point of not wanting to be seen with Lee for fear of alienating the other teachers. The students are off-limits romantically, and Lee wastes both semesters pretending to paint and grieving over Mattie. When Lee returns to New York, Mattie is opening a solo show, not at Sandor’s gallery but somewhere much more prestigious. Lee is not invited to the opening, nor would Lee go if Mattie tracked Lee down and begged Lee to be there. But Lee does drop by to see the show, in the middle of a weekday afternoon, a safe ten days after it opens. Mattie’s canvases are still large and flashy, but the style has changed. They’re more like Lee’s, more wrist painting, more nods to the old masters. Each painting depicts the inside of a cave. A hairy person of indeterminate gender is painting on a wall. The cave paintings are very beautiful, not exactly like the cave art people know. They make Lee think of the paintings Audubon would have done had Audubon been a cave dweller, and more than anything, Lee longs to be able to say this to Mattie. Mattie and Lee used to talk about visiting Lascaux and Altamira, even if they could only see the replicas next door, models of the caves constructed to preserve the originals. On the cave walls in Mattie’s paintings are herds of bison, antelopes, wading birds, but also zoo and circus animals, elephants and tigers. A nod to Edward Hicks, to The Peaceable Kingdom. One of Lee’s favorite artists. The cave paintings are different on every canvas but the cave dweller is the same in painting after painting, hunched and hairy, barely human, but in every other way looking more or less exactly like Lee. Lee stands in the middle of the gallery, astonished and frozen. It feels a lot like the time Lee thought they were about to be mugged in Venice. Now too Lee thinks Help! and looks around for someone who could intervene, someone with the authority and the power . . . to do what? To take these paintings off the wall? Lee would never do that. The receptionists seem to be staring, just as they were when Lee walked in. They know who Lee is. They are watching Lee’s reaction, but Lee’s not going to give them that. Lee walks from painting to painting—Lee the cave artist painting a dog, Lee the cave artist painting a dragonfly of exquisite beauty. In the last painting the cave dweller who looks like Lee is wielding a club instead of a paintbrush. And then there’s a little drawing, smaller than the paintings. Lee looks at it long enough to see that the cave person, Lee, is crouched beside a fire and eating the arms and legs of small children. It’s like one

of Grimms’ fairy tales only set in a cave. Does this signal that Mattie was lying about not wanting children? Does this mean that Mattie blames Lee? Lee thanks the receptionist and leaves, trying not to run. Is this libel? Defamation of character? Should Lee consult a lawyer? Lee cannot bear to imagine how hard the imaginary lawyer will laugh at the skinny young artist who comes in to complain that a former lover is painting pictures of Lee as a Cro-Magnon. Expensive pictures? the lawyer asks. In that case, something might be done. Were they married? How long did they live together? Lee imagines explaining to the imaginary lawyer that it’s not money but . . . what? The fantasy ends when Lee tries to imagine telling the lawyer what charges should be brought. Lee just wants those pictures not to exist. Lee wants to still be enjoying that golden moment with Mattie, being in love, joking about getting toasted on the lounge chairs beside the billionaire’s pool. Lee wants what half the world wants: to make time run backward to the point before the fatal mistake. Lee tries to paint, but the phrase “going through the motions” seems like a wildly positive euphemism to describe the situation. So Lee retreats for another year, this time to Montana, to teach at an art college so small that they may never have heard about Lee’s problems. More likely they know the whole story and want Lee around as an object lesson. The art world Ozymandias. Behold how the mighty have fallen. Once again it’s a full year before Lee returns to New York. Lee’s started painting again, tentatively, but at least it’s a start, and there’s a little something to show a few dealers who have politely pretended that they want to look. On the way to the first appointment, Lee passes one of the very top galleries. Lee is surprised to see (in fact Lee isn’t at all surprised to see) that there is yet another show of Mattie’s paintings, with the original title New Work. The gallery represents yet another, higher rung on the ladder that Mattie is climbing. Pushing open the heavy door to the gallery, Lee feels glad that things are going so well for Mattie and makes a resolution not to feel angry or ripped-off if Mattie is still painting Lee, and by the new (and possibly even more unflattering) uses to which Mattie has put Lee’s image. Mattie’s gone back to painting enormous nudes, with a generous, thickly loaded brush. Giant, glorious male nudes, this time a man’s body and a man’s face, the face and body of a man as beautiful as one of Caravaggio’s boys, though hunkier and more “masculine.” Why was Mattie pretending not to care about gender only to wind up celebrating this clichéd specimen of male beefcake? Lee is shocked by the change in Mattie’s work. Does Lee like this new direction? Lee can’t decide that yet, because the truly shocking thing is that the face and the body in the painting aren’t his. Mattie has found someone else to love. The paintings amount to a public declaration, though in the past Lee and Mattie were always so determined to maintain their privacy, to not let the viewer read anything definitive about sex or gender in the work they made about one another. But what kind of privacy had they maintained, inviting the fashion photographers into the place where they made art? Why should that still bother Lee? All of that is over now. Lee drifts from canvas to canvas, pausing for the requisite time in front of each one, then sleepwalking on to the next. From across the gallery the receptionists’ eyes find Lee like lasers. The model’s face and body seem to grow more beautiful—more irresistible—in each successive painting. Seeing the paintings one by one is like watching a person—the artist—fall in love. It’s way more intimate and revealing than spying on an ex with state-of-the-art electronics. Lee has the sense that something has been taken, stolen, though Lee cannot say what exactly is lost. Time? Success? Confidence? Talent? The love of Lee’s life? Lee cannot and will not think, My entire life. Allowing that thought will only make it much harder to recover, to wait until everything changes once again—and reverses itself, for the better. “The Lives of the Artists, Part Three: Muse × Two” by Francine Prose. Copyright © 2018 by Francine Prose. All rights reserved.

B:336 mm T:330 mm

B:336 mm

T:330 mm

At the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, a careerspanning exhibition of paintings by Albert Oehlen, entitled Cows by the Water, went on view in the spring of 2018. Caroline Bourgeois, the curator of the exhibition, discusses how the show was organized around the artist’s relationship to music.

COWS BY THE WATER

lbert Oehlen is a painter who challenges classical categorization, aesthetics, thoughts, or approaches to painting. He varies his subject matters as well as the painting methods he uses. In doing so, he opens windows on the very definition of what a painting can be. He moves from abstraction to figuration, from collage to Computer Painting, from Finger Malerei (a work painted with the fingers) to the brush, from gray paintings crisscrossed by brushstrokes to multicolored abstract ones. I often heard about him that he is a sort of punk, always radically questioning a posture, a sacred rapport with art. Starting with something akin to revolt, refusing all clichĂŠs and relying on a deep sense of humor, he questions all our references: our relationship to nature, portraiture, abstraction with its heroic references, and collage when he uses advertising posters of popular products. His works call us to go back to them several times and to always find new ways to read them. Many artists refer to him as their hero, from Christopher Wool to Wade Guyton and Julie Mehretu, for example, because of his radical relation to the work and the way in which he always displaces the subject, both in the way he paints and in the materials he uses. In order to grasp his work, we built on the relationship with music, and specifically free jazz, as a metaphor for his approach. The free-jazz musician is a virtuoso who, in each of his improvisations, risks failure in order to, maybe, find a new sound, a new experience of music. Cows by the Water, featuring works from 1980 to today, seeks to use the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relationship with music as a key to follow his trajectory and his work from their beginnings. In selecting the pieces, we also chose to display those more rarely seen. We started from his most recent work and mixed different time periods. The angle is thus to have an original display, which is not chronological but rather based on a syncopated rhythm, mixing genres and years. The exhibition layout, inspired by the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice, is meant to be a metaphor of his own approach, in which rhythm, improvisation, repetition, and the density and harmony of sounds can illustrate artistic gestures. Oehlen is an artist who likes persevering. If certain themes reappear throughout his work, it is to delve deeper, to test his own work, to tackle these themes differently each time, and to always try 84

All images: Installation view, Albert Oehlen: Cows by the Water, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, April 8, 2018–January 6, 2019. Artwork © Albert Oehlen. Photo by Matteo De Fina © Palazzo Grassi

again. For example, in Elevator Painting he combines eight paintings from 2016 and one from 1996. I am very interested in improvised music, of course. First of all, because I like it, and also because my painting—particularly what I am doing now, but also the older work—always suggests that it was done quickly, and is therefore comparable to improvised music.1 As we look through Oehlen’s work, some approaches return as punctuation, for example in the Computer Paintings series, in which a digital image is silkscreened onto a canvas, then reworked in oil paint, a method he first adopted in 1992, or in his series of trees. By using a recurrent theme, it seems the artist is using a simple way of giving his work a framework of reference, which allows him to push his work further without being preoccupied by the “subject.” Normally the computer helps you to do something that otherwise you wouldn’t do. Computers open a window onto the future. Here things are reversed. The painter corrects the pixels, and ultimately the computer image gives rise to a hand-painted picture.2 His paintings are complex and cannot be reduced to a single explanation or description. Oehlen thinks from the start that any subject can be addressed; that even if we start with a figurative representation, it will eventually lead us toward abstraction, perhaps the ultimate form of his work. Oehlen ends up asking: is this (this painting) a painting? The exhibition proposes to look at the different experimentations carried out by the artist throughout his career, in which he demonstrates that the development and realization of a painting matter more for him than the subject of the work itself. Freedom for me means playing. It does not mean to be in a void and make crazy moves. It means to play with your own rules.3 Oehlen’s research expands in multiple directions, and in his interviews over time he has given some of his references (Salvador Dalí, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Jackson Pollock, Robert 86

I am convinced that I cannot achieve beauty via a direct route; that can only be the result of deliberation. Otherwise, we would be back at

the pure sound that creates happiness—which I don’t believe in. That’s the interesting thing about art: that somehow, you use your material to make something that results in something beautiful, via a path that no one has yet trodden. That means working with something that is improbable, where your predecessors would have said “you can’t do that.” First you take a step toward ugliness and then, somehow or other, you wind up where it’s beautiful. 4 Oehlen also uses the collage technique, which brings the street and advertising into a new pictorial relationship in which the manipulation of our gaze is reduced. No seduction; no reliance on color to manipulate you; no affirmation of acquired knowledge; no reliance on these techniques; but instead, constant transcendence. Oehlen pays more attention to method than to gestures and thus avoids the trap of “easy” pieces. On the contrary, his work requires the viewer to pause, to take time to look, feel, and think. He also incorporates an element of random chance, for instance when he uses colors he still

has in store rather than buying what he doesn’t have. He has a flair for paradox, as evidenced by his Computer Paintings, inkjet printed and then painted, and his collages that become “paintings.” Oehlen has been refining these qualities since his early days, but he keeps them both at a distance and close, aware that there are several “histories of painting” and of the relationship with reality. His work also alludes to the realities of the world, although never in a demonstrative manner, but rather as an echo. In doing so, Oehlen leads us to constantly push back our limits and our preconceptions and to let us be guided by a hitherto unknown music. Text originally published in the tenth issue of the Pinault Collection journal. Republished here with their kind permission, April– September 2018. 1. Albert Oehlen, quoted in Andreas van Dühren, Albert Oehlen, Elevator Painting (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2017). 2. In Albert Oehlen (Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, 2011). 3. Oehlen, in an interview with John Corbett, 2013, in Albert Oehlen: Fabric Paintings (New York: Skarstedt Gallery, 2014). 4. Oehlen, in an interview with Rainald Goetz, published in Monopol (2010).

BOWL SCULPTURES DESIGNED BY PASCAL OUDET

Rauschenberg, Georg Baselitz…), which show his taste for singularity, far beyond “good taste.” At the start of his career, in the 1970s, his painting—and more broadly, the whole practice of painting—was fiercely criticized. Using a range of media (mirrors, cloth, posters, etc.), he eventually freed himself from the most strident usages and direct subjects to approach abstraction in the early 1980s, taking ever greater risks. The same concerns seem to reappear throughout his work, in particular those related to abstract painting, to questions of color, form, meaning, but always pushing their treatment further. The Computer Paintings series, the Conduction series (inspired by orchestra conductors), the so-called Trees series, or even the Finger Malerei series are all examples of a work on lines, gestures, movements, but which put us in a paradoxical position between expression (subjective, heroic) and commentary (thoughtful and controlled).

WATERBORNE

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind... robert duncan As now, this meadow of seagrass, tangle of history—a nest of myriad, mirrored faces. How not to think of words like cargo and jettison, each syllable a last breath, vesicles rising to the surface of the sea. How not to think of loss, how it takes hold and grows: like lacuna snails, slow and deliberate, on a reed? Why is everything I see the past I’ve tried to forget? In dreams, I am a child again, underwater, my limbs sluggish as I struggle to wake. Always,

AFTER ELLEN GALLAGHER’S “WATERY ECSTATIC” NATASHA TRETHEWEY

I am pursued. Waking, I am freighted with memory: my mother’s last words spoken, after her death, in a dream: Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals? And now this thirst: how many times have I cupped my hands to drink, found—in the map of my palms—this same pattern: lines crossed and capillary as veins in the body, these willowy reeds? How can I see anything Ellen Gallagher, Watery Ecstatic, 2018, watercolor, oil, pencil, varnish, and cut paper on paper, 29 ½ × 39 3⁄8 inches (75 × 100 cm) © Ellen Gallagher Text © Natasha Trethewey. Poem originally published in Poetry London

but this: how trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters of forgetting. In every resilient blade I see the ancestors, my mother’s face.

ELIZABETH KORNHAUSER

In 2005, Ed, you were asked to represent the United States at the fifty-first Venice Biennale. Dealing with the theme of progress, your installation evoked Thomas Cole’s famous painting cycle The Course of Empire (1834–36), but while Cole’s grandiose vision deals with the rise and fall of a classical civilization, your Course of Empire focuses on the industrial buildings of Los Angeles, simple, boxlike utilitarian structures with no pretension to beauty but still redolent of economic might and global reach. Cole painted his great series after taking a grand tour of Europe in which he studied works by old master painters. He was particularly moved by the historical rise and decline of ancient civilizations, in particular Rome. Upon his return to the United States in the early 1830s, he began his magnum opus

against the backdrop of President Andrew Jackson’s second presidency, and of the destruction of the wilderness through Jackson’s populist and expansionist policies. Cole began his five-work series with The Savage State, showing the beginnings of human presence in God’s pure creation. His ideal state for humans was living in harmony in an Arcadian environment, as seen in his Arcadian State. Here you see the beginnings of all of the arts, including architecture, dance, and music. Passing through the Arcadian state, we come to The Consummation of Empire, a moment of greed where humans have overbuilt the landscape in an excessive way. There’s no sign of nature any longer and the emperor figure dominates. Next is the ultimate destruction that greed leads to, where the built environment is completely destroyed; on the

right you see burning buildings, with beautiful marble columns. Then finally comes desolation, where the human presence disappears altogether, nature returns, and the historical cycle begins again. Here, in typical fashion, Cole puts a smiling face on the moon—he always embedded these wonderful symbols in his works. TOM MCCARTHY Yes. For me, Cole’s and Ed’s works are part of a long tradition of legible landscapes. But I’d like to start, Ed, by asking you about your Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967). Because here you are, hovering above a landscape like Thomas Cole, though you’re in a helicopter, documenting this beautiful geometry of the lines and arrows, reading it like hieroglyphics. Can you tell us how those works came about? ED RUSCHA If you put yourself back into the time of Thomas Cole, the only way he would have been able

Top: Ed Ruscha, Blue Collar Tires, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 120 inches (137.2 × 304.8 cm). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Above: Ed Ruscha, Expansion of the Old Tires Building, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 120 inches (137.2 × 304.8 cm). Collection of Donald B. Marron, New York

Ed Ruscha sat down with Tom McCarthy and Elizabeth Kornhauser, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to discuss the nineteenthcentury artist Thomas Cole, whose Course of Empire paintings inspired a series of works by Ruscha more than a century later.

COURSE OF EMPIRE

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car. This shape you’re holding here in this image, this winding strip that could be Cole’s river, is just the unspooled ribbon of the typewriter, and you hold up other broken bits too—it’s like you were literally smashing language into the landscape. The tarmac is the canvas and the letters get caught up in the bushes. Then you do this forensic retrospect, where you photograph each bit like a road-accident investigator. I’ve heard so many origin stories about this work, but I’d be really interested to know your version. ER I can’t divulge the real secret behind this [laughter], but I can talk about the beginnings of it, and it was a comedy of errors. Two friends of mine and I were driving back from Las Vegas and we had a broken typewriter in the car, one with a broken frame. It was no longer useful whatsoever. It

I would visit [Cole’s paintings] every time I came to New York and I’d always find something new. This progression of the passage of civilization seemed really profound. Ed Ruscha

of them, and parking lots. It was a Sunday so I saw empty parking lots, which ushered me into making this official statement for myself to photograph empty parking lots. TM You’ve also done a lot of photography at street level. And you’ve talked about how words and landscapes to you are similar: they’re both horizontal, and letters follow one another with spaces and pauses and then more letters, just like houses and storefronts. Letters are like houses and storefronts, and houses and storefronts and vacant lots are like letters and words, with gaps in between. So landscape for you is a kind of syntax. And you’ve talked about the idea of the ribbon—in your Every Building on the Sunset Strip book (1966) the whole of the Sunset Strip is a ribbon, and you’ve said streets are like ribbons, and you’ve made these ribbon-word drawings

to look at something from the air was to be way up on a mountain. So he favored mountains. We don’t really do things like that now, we have airplanes and easily accessible photography. Curiously enough, Cole knew about daguerreotypes, and as against progress as he was, he was really in tune with them, so he may have known about the camera obscura and the camera lucida as well. Still, he was a painter who went to his site, looked over the scene, and then interpreted that scene. I see things a little differently from Cole—I see things through the eyes of today, and photography, and aerial photography in particular, appealed to me because it enabled me to see things you weren’t conventionally able to see. I took a helicopter ride over Los Angeles one day and I noted two different things: swimming pools, just the enormous number

would’ve almost been better to have a nice working typewriter to throw out the window, but we ended up tossing this out at ninety miles an hour and continuing on our way for about another forty miles or so. Then we began thinking about it and we realized that maybe there was some kind of treasure chest back there. Maybe we should revisit this place, go back, and see how it fell and came apart. So we returned. We had a little bit of trouble finding the point of impact. One of the friends was a photographer, Patrick Blackwell, so he decided to record the scattering of the elements that came apart. We looked at it almost like a crime scene, recording and measuring between each location. Then we gathered all the parts together, not really knowing why, and put them into a big box, a box larger than the actual typewriter, and brought it back to Los Angeles. We

and ribbon-word paintings. What suggested the ribbon form to you, and what led to it serving as a metaphor, a material, and a medium all at once? ER I think it goes back to traveling on a highway. I did a lot of hitchhiking and driving across the United States, just driving and looking. I became interested in the idea of the landscape, and the leftto-right vision that happens. Things that were long and skinny appealed to me—they were sort of like a tail with a beginning and an ending, and I thought that was something I needed to get down on paper or on canvas. TM Or on tarmac, right? ER Yes. TM For me, one of the most important works of the last hundred years is Royal Road Test (1967), where you threw a typewriter out the window of a speeding

Below: Ed Ruscha, The Old Trade School Building, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 120 inches (137.2 ×304.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President

took the box to a typewriter-repair man [laughter] and had this man identify each piece by name. Each one of those little screws and fittings had its own name in the typewriter world. We didn’t know what to do next, but my friend Mason Williams and I thought there might be a book here. We put the box of typewriter parts outside the back door of his apartment and his maid threw it out. So we lost all the parts but we had the photographs. It just grew from there. TM To me it seems loaded with symbolism. The typewriter was not an Olivetti or a Remington, it was a Royal; and the word “royal” has appeared a lot in your work. Already this is course of empire: you’re showing sovereignty, kings and kingdoms getting trashed. This is about the downfall of royalty, right? Or is that just totally an accident?

Above: Ed Ruscha, Blue Collar Trade School, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 120 inches (137.2 × 304.8 cm). Neda Young, New York

96 No, I want people to read into it [laughter]. Any idea is acceptable. TM Well, let’s talk about your actual Course of Empire. When did you first come across Cole? When did you decide to do this kind of reprise? ER I stumbled across these five paintings in the New-York Historical Society in the 1980s. They stopped me in my tracks, especially when I realized what they were and what they meant as a narration, a series put together to tell a story. I would visit them every time I came to New York and I’d always find something new. This progression of the passage of civilization seemed really profound. And then I wondered how many artists in the course of art history had tackled this subject, and it was hard to think of anyone else who had done that up to the time of Thomas Cole. There might be, but I don’t think so. ER

In the early 1990s, I had done a series of black and white paintings of boxes with words on them that got me thinking about traveling in industrial parks and visiting places that were cold and turned-off-ish. Later on those paintings began to itch in the back of my mind. And then I thought about what’s actually going on with these works, and that they have a life of their own. They can grow and change. So I made them grow and change in little isolated, individual imaginations. TM You made the black and white paintings in 1992, and then the color ones in 2004–05, right? ER Yes. TM In each case, it’s as if you’re painting (in the second iteration at least) desolation over and over again. In each case, the place is run down, the phone booth is gone, the trade school is fenced up . . . which is

interesting because it seems to come straight from Cole. All of the structures appear to be industrial units. The critic Mary Richards calls them minimalist boxes. It strikes me that an industrial unit is like a double box: it’s a box itself, and it’s there for making boxes and putting things in boxes. It’s a box that boxes. It’s totally abstract and at the same time it embodies an economic, political disquisition on globalization and capitalism. Is this all instinctive or are you trying to work through ideas about economic cycles? ER Maybe it’s a combination of all those things. I’m not trying to come up with any educational concept; this is only a trial by imagination, not something I’m driving a point with, as maybe Cole is with his five paintings. TM Let’s talk about titles. I’ve learned that “course” comes from the Latin word cursus, which means

Above, right: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Pastoral or Arcadian State, c. 1834, oil on canvas, 39 ¼ × 63 ¼ inches (99.7 × 160.6 cm). New-York Historical Society. Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts

Above, left: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Savage State, c. 1834, oil on canvas, 39 ¼ × 63 ¼ inches (99.7 × 160.6 cm). New-York Historical Society. Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts

Below: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1835–36, oil on canvas, 51 ¼ × 76 inches (130.2 × 193 cm). New-York Historical Society. Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts

98 99

Below: Ed Ruscha, Site of a Former Telephone Booth, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 120 inches (137.2 × 304.8 cm). Collection of Joan and Irwin Jacobs

sense of panoramic sweep was the seemingly endless wilderness of the United States, but also the idea of unfolding stories across time. ER He opened up a viewing chasm. My intrigue here came about through movies, through seeing a train coming out of the lower-right-hand corner of the screen and zooming through the picture. They use that technique often in movies, it shows travel and movement. Somehow that cinematic format worked for me, and I began to see it as a zoom effect in my work. TM I want to bring up another type of temporality. We talked about repetition and cycles, which connect to how Cole saw everything and also feature in your work. Another way of thinking about time would just be degradation. ER Well, Blue Collar Tires (1992) depicts a standalone building on the highway out near Palm Springs

Above: Ed Ruscha, Blue Collar Telephone, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 120 inches (137.2 × 304.8 cm). Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation

that I would pass every time I went to the desert. It was so lonely, and it seemed forgotten. It said “tires” on it but it didn’t look like it was in business. So it became iconic to me to get this down and make it official in a painting. TM How do Self-Portrait of My Forearm—1960 (1960, printed 2013) and Self-Portrait of My Forearm—2014 (2014) play with temporality? ER When I was in high school, I came to class a little late and I was leaning on a friend’s shoulder and I stiff-armed the door, which had panels of glass in it. I was stunned—my hand went right through the door and smashed it. I healed up, life went on, and a few years later I photographed my wrist, where I had a big scar. I’ve stared at this picture for fifty years and thought about the passage of time. So I reenacted the photograph in 2014. I’ve been doing a lot of

literally “flow.” The Italian Enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico had this idea of history moving in corso and ricorso, flow and reflow. It was cyclical. This was important for Nietzsche, Marx, and James Joyce: they get all their ideas about cyclical time from Vico. But what’s interesting about his word ricorso is, it doesn’t mean repetition. It’s more like a reenactment, a repeat loop that’s aware of the last one, so there’s a kind of forensic, historical thing happening. Joyce built the whole of Finnegans Wake around this idea of ricorso or reflow. And then I read an interview with you where you were asked what your favorite poem is and you said any random page of Finnegans Wake. ER Finnegans Wake is a tumble and it’s difficult, to try to get through it is perplexing, but nonetheless, it’s provocative. These things you don’t understand have properties of importance.

jumping in time. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but the man that started this thinking was Thomas Cole. Somehow I’ve picked up on this, repeated or extended it in different ways, tried to lasso it in or to have some discourse that emphasizes the passage of time. EK Well, you had mentioned really liking Cole’s binary paintings of before and after, for example the artist’s pair of paintings The Past and The Present (both 1838). You know, he did many examples of these works. ER Yeah. These Course of Empire paintings of Cole’s—I know the flagship painting is the third one, the one in the middle, which is larger than the other four. But I began seeing the remaining four as standalone paintings, paintings unto themselves, so that made the middle painting, The Consummation of

One of your earliest works, 3 Standard Envelopes (1960), is a tribute to Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14), in which he cut the string and let it find its bending shape on the canvas. So, through their repetition of the same word, which the envelope work has already flagged up or staked out, your beautiful Standard gas stations seem to be reprising a moment of European visual modernism. Is this ongoing working-through itself worked through, or does it find its path more intuitively? ER I get my inspiration from just about everything, even things I hate, and they all combine into a Mixmaster of thought and activity. My pictures come out of this Mixmaster, they’re tumbling when they come out, and they can be difficult to grasp and understand. But they are still pictorial to me. I’m making a painting, I’m making a picture, just like Thomas Cole TM

Ed Ruscha

I get my inspiration from just about everything, even things I hate, and they all combine into a Mixmaster of thought and activity.

made a picture. I don’t analyze it. When I’m driving a car, I might have the radio tuned to any given channel, but it’s a soundtrack to what I’m seeing out my windshield. I imagine that all paintings could have a soundtrack, and if they did, Cole’s might be religious music. My soundtrack might be something like the overlapping of two unlikely radio stations that produce crackle and aggravating noise. EK I’m struck by the panoramic quality of Cole’s work—he was very influenced by the popular panoramas of the day, large circular paintings, installed in purpose-built buildings in major cities including London and New York, where viewers were surrounded by landscapes of great natural wonders, such as Niagara Falls, or major urban centers, including London. Your Course of Empire works are even more exaggerated panoramas. What inspired Cole’s

100 Left: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1836, oil on canvas, 39 ¼ × 63 ½ inches (99.7 × 161.3 cm), New-York Historical Society, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts Artwork © Ed Ruscha. Photos by Paul Ruscha

Right: Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1836, oil on canvas, 39 ¼ × 63 ¼ inches (99.7 × 160.7 cm), New-York Historical Society, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts

Works by

Elliott Hundley, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, Anselm Kiefer, Ragnar Kjartansson, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Ed Ruscha and more from the Broad collection.

Reserve free tickets at thebroad.org Leading Partner

Image Credit: Elliott Hundley, the high house low!, 2011. Wood, sound board, inkjet print on Kitakata, paper, pins, magnifying glass, photographs, plastic, metal. 99 × 192 1/2 × 18 in. (251.46 × 488.95 × 45.72 cm). The Broad Art Foundation. © Elliott Hundley

Empire, which is actually the more important painting, not such a good painting. EK It’s so interesting you say that—Cole had a hard time with that painting. It took him almost two years to finish. He had to abandon it at a certain point, just for relief from struggling with it. It’s much larger than the other four and it was a subject he’d never worked on before, a very complex architectural port scene with literally thousands of figures. So you’re tapping into Cole’s mind here because he ended up walking away from it to paint The Oxbow (1836), which he painted in six weeks, and then returned to finish Consummation. ER The Consummation painting, with all its glory, power, and people, reminds me of the paintings of Canaletto, and of the other Venice artists who painted buildings ad infinitum. For that reason I

felt the middle painting, while it’s a very significant painting, does not stand alone. Though of course it’s absolutely necessary for the narration, it’s not that great of a painting because so many artists have done things in this manner, glory stories on canvas. EK It’s a noonday sun and he used a really hot orange brown ground for this painting. We’ve discussed the underdrawing beneath it—you can see the struggle he had. TM What about this beginning-to-end arc? The final painting in the series is Desolation, but in your paintings the cycle’s beginning again. Is Expansion of the Old Tires Building (2005) optimistic or pessimistic? It’s expanding, it’s growing, the sky is blue. But then again, it’s empty. There’s nothing. ER It’s empty, it’s nothing yet, but it shows you that time marches on. And it’s very democratic in its

position—at least there’s change. There’s probably some of my cynicism involved in it too. TM Well, you do paint “the end” again and again. Does Ruscha time move in a loop? Or does it just degrade, like Samuel Beckett time? ER Well, I always liked the abstractness of movies that had scratches on the film, these little blips and mistakes that occur when a film goes through a projector. In doing these things, I’m kind of stating some of my history of seeing these movies and liking their abstract quality. I don’t care what the movie’s about, I really like the physicalness of the scratches. It’s funny because it means something to me today, but ten years from now, young people are not going to know what this is at all. They’re going to say, “What?” There’s no such thing as scratches on film anymore. It’s going to pass on into history.

FROM MORTAL BODIES TO IMMORTAL CROWDS Taryn Simonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dual exhibitions at Mass MoCA examine the rituals of cold-water plunges and applause. Text by Angela Brown.

Nadie es alguien, un solo hombre inmortal es todos los hombres [Nobody is somebody, one immortal man is all men]. —Jorge Luis Borges, “El inmortal,” 1947 With constant streams of data weaving through our waking and dreaming states, how do we separate the real from the imagined? If there is a line between the two, do we draw it ourselves or is it drawn for us? Taryn Simon continuously asks such questions in her meticulously researched multimedia works. Her photographic projects suggest the impossibility of a universal visual language by revealing how the confines of an image can distort our perception of the world, as well as our place within it. Photographs today, especially those posted on social media, often seem to present the same scenes over and over, perhaps with slight variations in color, angle, and caption. An enormous and diverse network of people can curate, frame, and edit glimpses of their lives, to be uploaded onto a global platform, an infinite digital archive. At a time when the photographic process is faster than ever, Simon slows it down. By prioritizing research and data collection, she underscores the inherent subjectivity of the medium, showing how combinations of text and image give way to countless contradictions. In her recent shift toward performance, largescale installation, and sound, Simon raises new questions about the role of the living, breathing body as an agent within the increasingly pervasive, even ritualized photographic technologies of the past decade. In An Occupation of Loss, which had its second iteration in London in April, she gathered professional mourners from around the world to perform rituals of grief for a circulating audience. Now, in her exhibition at Mass MoCA, she 104

dives even deeper into the societal implications of ritual and performance, complicating the relationship between the private and the public spheres. Titled A Cold Hole | Assembled Audience, the exhibition includes two new immersive installations: a sound collage of individually recorded applause and a cold-water plunge. By drastically altering the environment of the museum through sound and temperature, and by using architectural elements to frame live actions and sound, these works force the viewer to reconsider the gap between spectacle and spectator, and, in the process, to consider what it means to participate—both in art and in society at large. In Assembled Audience, Simon presents a public sphere comprised of disembodied applause. The sounds were collected in Ohio, America’s most accurate bellwether state—its population closely matches the demographics of the country as a whole—and specifically in Columbus, which is known to marketers as “Test City, USA” and is a popular location for political campaigns, statistical studies, and the testing of commercial products.1 To make the aural track, Simon worked with a team of local producers to record individual audience members at every event over the course of a year in Columbus’s three largest venues: the Greater Columbus Convention Center, the Nationwide Arena, and Ohio State University’s Jerome Schottenstein Center.2 Participants were separated from their respective crowds and asked to direct their now solitary applause toward a recorder rather than a sports team, political leader, or musician. In this way they acted as representatives of the events that they attended, which included the Worship Awakening Conference, a Columbus Blue Jackets/New York Rangers game, the Black Women Empowerment Conference,

the Pretty Princess Parties Columbus Fairytale Ball, a professional bull-riding event, and concerts by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, The Weeknd, Kid Rock, and Katy Perry. Simon then built a digital program that continually alters our sense of the crowd’s size and response, so that the physical environment we stand in feels as though it is morphing from community-center room to stadium rally to economic forum. Simon also averaged colors from the main interior walls and flooring of the three venues to generate the central prism’s wall color and the color of the carpet. The constructed nature of this resulting “audience” is kept fully transparent: each participant’s name is documented on the gallery wall, along with the name of his or her corresponding event. Though each person matches up with an event, their applause was detached from its cause; instead, they clapped only in order to be recorded. Simon taps into our reflex to mirror the masses, to feel like integral parts of some larger whole. Entering this sonic terrain, one experiences the socially contagious nature of applause, which sometimes arises from heartfelt affirmation but also from discomfort with nonconformity. Community formation and participation, according to political scientist Benedict Anderson, involve ritual, media, and belief. To feel part of a collective unity—a nation, say—an individual must feel “a deep, horizontal comradeship” with all other members of the nation, including the many whom she or he has never met.3 Anderson illustrates this point by comparing a modern ritual—reading the daily newspaper—with a fading one, the recitation of morning prayers. Both are “performed in silent privacy,” he writes. “Yet, each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs

Previous spread: Taryn Simon, 2018. Photo courtesy the artist and Mass MoCA Opposite and above: Installation views, Taryn Simon: A Cold Hole | Assembled Audience, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA, May 26, 2018–May 26, 2019. Photos by Taryn Simon

is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”4 While Anderson’s prayerful citizen feels connected to a wider community without seeing that community directly, the ubiquity of photographic technologies today makes it possible to see the ways in which our actions either correspond to or differ from those of others. We no longer have to imagine our community because we see it firsthand, or think we do. And yet, despite this apparent ease of participation, the body and mind begin to experience an increased sense of isolation. In this way, contributing to the digital archive is similar to clapping into a recording device: a lot of participation, but no clear purpose. Yet we keep participating, seeking an avenue through which to find something to believe in. With A Cold Hole, Simon creates a situation in which individuals can willingly abandon conscious thought in order to experience a mental and physical reset, taking the body down to its most basic truth: the fact that it exists. A Cold Hole replaces the gallery floor with a huge frozen-over body of water. One at a time, visitors and performers are invited to enter the stark white room and jump through a hole cut in the ice. The shock of the water effectively turns off the mind for an instant, forcing the body to survive without it. The practice of cold-water plunges can be traced back to antiquity, serving to renew strength, ward off illness, and provide energy and vigor. When the body enters the freezing water, its systems begin to slow down, requiring high levels of psychological and physical strength to keep moving, to stay alive. Pushed to these limits, the diver hopes to

emerge from the water feeling balanced, strong, and, in many contexts, blessed or protected. While Charles Darwin used cold-water immersion to treat his illnesses, the Apache leader Geronimo used it to prepare boys for lives as warriors.5 In Russia, ice plunging is popular on Epiphany, a January holiday commemorating Christ’s baptism in the River Jordan. A hole, often in the shape of a cross, is cut into the ice on a body of water and Orthodox Christians line up to take the plunge. This past Epiphany, Russian President Vladimir Putin participated in the ritual. Robed monks held golden icons in the background as Putin dipped himself in the freezing waters.6 The event was recorded by state-sponsored media in photographs and videos, spreading the message that Putin is a healthy religious man, respectful of tradition, and a participant in the very same ritual performed by many religious Russians. The media event allowed the Russian public to feel a sense of camaraderie with the president while also aligning themselves with Christ, in hopes of achieving eternal life beyond the death of the body. Putin’s plunge transformed ritual into spectacle. Even if he was experiencing a corporeal or spiritual reset, the resulting images and videos repackaged his experience for media use, giving the event political relevance. Similarly, with A Cold Hole, participants choose how and when they will be seen within the ostensibly neutral, secular space of the museum. They perform the ritual both for personal and for social gain. Fully aware of his or her audience, the participant enters the room, carefully tiptoes across the ice, and stands in front of the hole. In an adjacent room, museum visitors peer in through a rectangular glass window that dramatically frames each isolated body. Simon thus 105

Left: Photo courtesy the artist and Mass MoCA All artwork © Taryn Simon

Regent’s Park, London 5–7 October 2018 Preview 3–4 October

subverts our relationship to the image in two ways. Unlike the rectangular screens of our phones, with which we may capture any image in our surrounding environment, the rectangular aperture looking onto A Cold Hole is set in place; the frame cannot be moved. And, instead of choosing a particular view, the audience must wait patiently for each participant to appear in the room, hesitate before the hole, then disappear with a splash. As the bodies quickly reemerge from the hole, shivering beneath fluorescent lights, the audience erupts into applause. In this way A Cold Hole is the reverse of Assembled Audience. In the latter, the bodies are invisible, hidden beneath many layers of distortion, manipulation, and recontexualization. The individuals become bits of data, like the many images and news-bites that populate our computer and phone screens at all hours of the day and night. Their claps resemble “likes” on social media: quick approval, involving little deliberation. In the former, on the other hand, Simon gives the body the opportunity to present itself in person. Though framed in a photographlike manner, the participants assert their existence in real, practically unmediated time, requiring patience and empathy from their audience. The fact that A Cold Hole takes place in a museum reveals the ways in which ritual and performance are related to posterity. Like the billions of people documenting their daily lives in photographs, the museum as an institution preserves the objects of the past so that they might carry historical information into the future. As such, it is a ritualistic space—a secular echo of the church. Here, paintings and sculptures may live indefinitely, replacing the mortal bodies of the artists who created them. Seeing posterity as both a religious and a 106

secular concern, the progenitors of Cosmism, a philosophical movement developed in Russia in the nineteenth century, believed that the goal for the future of humanity should be biological immortality, the resurrection of the already dead, and the spread of this immortal population across the infinite cosmos. Cosmism’s founder, Nikolai Fedorov, considered the role that art institutions might play in this pursuit, arguing that the museum should be repurposed as a site for the conservation of humans in the way that it now preserves objects.7 Bodies, like artworks, would be available as vessels of history and information. In Fedorov’s words, Each man bears a museum within himself, bears it even against his personal wish, as a dead appendage, as a corpse, as reproaches of conscience; for conservation is a basic law, preceding man, having been in force before him. Conservation is a characteristic not only of organic, but of inorganic nature; and especially of human nature. . . . For the museum, death itself is not the end but only the beginning.8 A Cold Hole, by inserting a baptismal ritual into the museum and signaling a rebirth or reset, comes closer to Cosmism’s goal than any discrete art object could. The hole in the ice is cut in a perfect square, linking the work to Simon’s ongoing series Black Square (2006— ), in which she shows objects, documents, and individuals in a black field with the same dimensions as Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting of that name. This reference to Malevich, in addition to the sleek, minimalist installation of the exhibition as a whole, uses formal language to intimate a jolt into the new. Yet actual, moving bodies interrupt the abstraction, asking whether it is possible for the

body itself to achieve the clean slate proposed by Malevich’s Black Square. Can the body free itself from the data that surrounds it? And, if the body contains its own, unique data, how can this information be conserved, and protected from distortion? With A Cold Hole | Assembled Audience, Simon makes us absorb information at the pace not of technology or photography but of the mortal body. While in Assembled Audience the bodies are invisible, allowing their sounds to be repurposed, in A Cold Hole they are on full display. Leaping into the dark water, the participants enter a representation of the unknown, as an immortal audience applauds in approval. Throughout the run of the exhibition, Simon will continue to record individual applause tracks and add them to the soundscape. The imagined crowd will thus grow and grow, like enthusiastic ghosts waiting for their bodies to rejoin them in the crowd of the future. 1. See Alexandra Foradas, “A Charged Atmosphere of Hope and Uncertainty: Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole and Assembled Audience,” in the gallery guide for Simon’s exhibition A Cold Hole | Assembled Audience (North Adams, MA: Mass MoCA, 2018), n.p. 2. Ibid. 3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 7. 4. Ibid., p. 35. 5. Foradas, “A Charged Atmosphere of Hope and Uncertainty.” n.p. 6. See Alex Horton, “Shirtless Putin takes icy religious plunge, and yes, there are photos,” The Washington Post, January 19, 2018. Available online at www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/ wp/2018/01/19/shirtless-putin-takes-icy-religious-plunge-andyes-there-are-photos/?utm_term=.739a1935a466 (accessed June 6, 2018). Epiphany is most often celebrated on January 6; in Russia, however, which follows the Julian calendar, that date falls thirteen days later than in countries following the Gregorian calendar. 7. See Molly Nesbit, “Cosmist Rays,” Artforum 56, no. 6 (February 2018):163. 8. Nikolai Fedorov, “The Museum, Its Meaning and Mission,” 1906, repr., trans. from the Russian by Stephen P. Van Trees, in e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale, available online at supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-museum-its-meaning-andmission/ (accessed June 18, 2018).

Above: Drawing by Ronan Bouroullec. Below: Philippe de Champaigne, The Dream of Saint Joseph (detail), 1642–3, The National Gallery, London. Photography: John Bodkin.

frieze.com

TRANSCENDENT CRIMINAL DREAM From Kids to his upcoming film, The Beach Bum, Harmony Korine has continually revolutionized the art of cinema. In a wide-ranging discussion with film critic Emmanuel Burdeau, Korine reflects on the rewards and challenges of filmmaking and reveals what’s in store for the future.

Movies are the first thing I fell in love with, and I became known as a movie director, but really I’ve never thought of myself in such a singular way. I write books and poems, make paintings, and take photographs. For me, it was never about mastering a medium, I don’t care about that. It’s more about expression, how can I put what’s inside outside. It’s all interconnected, a “unified aesthetic.” It all comes from the same place, inside me, and it’s all speaking the same language. EMMANUEL BURDEAU When did you start to write? HK By the time I was sixteen, I had a pretty strong sense that I wanted to make movies. I remember seeing a John Cassavetes movie, and Spike Lee’s first movie, She’s Gotta Have It (1986). Then in high school I took a creative-writing class. I’d never been told I was good at anything by teachers, or anybody, but I wrote a story for this class. I was in the back of the classroom with my head down and the teacher called out my name. I thought I was in trouble but she held up the story and went, “This is the best story.” I was shocked. She made me read it in front of everybody, and at the end of the class, she pulled me aside and HARMONY KORINE

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asked, “What do you want to do when you graduate?” I said, “I think I want to make movies.” She said. “If I can get you money from the school system, could you turn this story into a short film?” I said, “Of course.” Somehow she got some money. Then my dad gave me a 16mm Bolex camera. So I turned the story into a script and shot it with a couple of friends in New York. It was like a Cassavetes rip-off. When I went to get the film developed, I walked into this place called DuArt, which was like a lab, and the guy went “What is this?” I looked so young at the time. I said, “it’s just a film I shot.” He looked around and went, “Do you want to see it projected?” I sat in the screening room alone and watched my footage. I knew it was real. I knew I could do it. I was never scared after that. It demystified everything. EB How did you get from there to writing the script for what turned out to be Larry Clark’s first film, Kids (1995)? HK At that time I was in college and living in my grandma’s house in Queens. Between classes, I would hang out all day with the skaters in

Previous spread: The cover of Harmony Korine (Rizzoli Electra, 2018), designed by Harmony Korine Left: Character descriptions for Kids, 1993 Opposite: Kids, 1995. Film directed by Larry Clark and written by Harmony Korine

Washington Square Park. One day Larry Clark came up to me, he was taking photos. We started to talk and he asked me what I was doing. I said I was making movies. It was the days of VHS tapes, and I would keep some in my backpack with all my books, put a sticker on them, and write my grandma’s phone number. And when I would see someone famous or someone I recognized, I’d hand them a tape, say “Watch my films,” and just walk away. So I probably handed him a tape. He called me the next day. So I went over to his house, I saw his photographs, and it was pretty amazing. I didn’t really know much about contemporary art or the art world back then, but as soon as I met him, he showed me his books and I was blown away. I thought his books were like movies. Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983) are still some of the best photography books ever made. We talked about movies and he asked me if I’d ever written anything before. I’d just written a short script during my first semester at NYU. It was about a boy on his thirteenth birthday. His father takes him to a prostitute. He’s a cab driver, and he picks up a girl on the side of the road 110

and basically talks his kid through it as it’s happening. I gave Larry this script and a few days later he asked me to write for him. He had a very loose idea, and wanted to see if I could turn it into a movie. At that time I was really into certain teen movies like Over the Edge [Jonathan Kaplan, 1979], The Outsiders [Francis Ford Coppola, 1983], Los Olvidados [Luis Buñuel, 1950], and especially Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981). Movies that were based on reality, and an adolescent world, but that were pushed into the hyperreal, or hyperpoetic. Larry and I both liked the idea of using real people, not actors. I’d never written a script before so I didn’t know how long it would take. I just figured I would write it in a week. And that’s kind of what I did. I sat in my grandmother’s basement with a typewriter, or an early computer, and I just wrote the script very quickly. I didn’t have a real outline, I just knew what it was about, and the kids I wanted to be in the film, because they were my friends. I understood the language, how they spoke, and the rhythm of it, the slang and the cadences. That movie was very stream of consciousness. I just let it go. I didn’t even know what was going to happen

until I got to the ending. I didn’t think it would ever really be a movie. But Larry was really into it, and within a couple of weeks I flew out to Los Angeles and started meeting with producers and financiers. I was nineteen, I’d been in high school just the year before, and I was having conversations about what type of movies I wanted to make, or what type of scripts I was going to write. That was so exciting. When I was growing up, I was told by grown-ups all the things that I couldn’t do, or things I should do which were never what I wanted to do. This was the first time I thought that maybe I had a chance to make my films. EB What was your reaction when you first saw Kids? HK It was exciting because I’d never seen anything like it. And all the people in the movie were friends of mine. My girlfriend at the time, Chloë [Sevigny], was starring. None of us had ever done anything. So the fact that this movie existed, that we had somehow created it, was a weird, strange, magic moment in time. But it was a hard film. EB Gummo (1997) is a mysterious film in many 111

Opposite: Mister Lonely, 2007. Film directed by Harmony Korine Right: Collage for Mister Lonely, 2007

ways. It’s not easy to know how to make sense of it. HK I don’t care about trying to say anything. If the film says something, that’s great, but I’m trying to make you feel something. There’s a physical component that I’m chasing—a sense of unease, or a sense of confusion, transcendence, bewilderment, titillation, humor. I want feelings to come one after the other very fast, so you never really get peace, it’s like an attack. It’s not about being understood. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not about making perfect sense but about making perfect non-sense. It’s about pages missing in all the right places. EB You’ve said it’s hard for you to make a film, but you seem like a natural and have very often been described as a prodigy. HK It’s never easy. At the same time, when I’m making movies, I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I also believe, to some extent, that it shouldn’t be easy. There’s always more I need to figure out. I basically film until someone tells me that I can’t anymore. And even then, I try a little more, just to see what happens. When I’m making movies, I never feel like I have enough. I’m always 112

discovering it as I’m making it. The truth is, I don’t even really know what it will be until I’m editing it. EB Your third feature film, Mister Lonely (2007), deals with the dream of reinventing oneself. How did you come up with the idea of a place where impersonators would gather and create a community of sorts? HK I don’t know where it came from exactly. In some ways I feel that that’s the strangest movie I’ve made. It almost feels like an anomaly against my other films—it’s the most traditional, but at the same time it’s a very bizarre film. There are moments that are as beautiful as anything I’ve ever done, like the bicycle sequence with the nuns floating in the sky. The singing eggs. But it’s also a strange movie. I was coming out of a fog. That movie still has traces of that fog. I grew up in a commune, so some of it has to do with that. All the films actually have some autobiographical elements, but I make them because I don’t understand where they’re coming from. I try to think in terms of pure story, characters, and camera. I never have any type of conscious psychology at work. I feel something and then I act on it, mostly.

Do you remember how Mister Lonely started? I had a dream about nuns jumping out of airplanes without parachutes. I loved the idea of people having so much faith that they don’t need a parachute. They’re not suicidal, they’re just in such a state of total bliss and self-belief that they think they’ll survive. Then I started thinking about a commune full of impersonators, an isolated area where impersonators could live as the person they’re impersonating. I thought it was a funny premise, and I liked the visual component, the idea of seeing these dead celebrities together in one place. It was intriguing. And also this idea of characters living on the fringes of society, creating their own utopia. EB Why did you decide to move from Nashville to Miami? HK I’ve always been intrigued by the psychogeography of Florida. It’s part of America but it’s separate. There’s something about it that really is difficult to articulate. It doesn’t really produce anything, it’s just an extension of people’s dreams and fantasies. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty are smacking up against each other, both sides EB

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Above: Harmony Korine, Star Whores, 2017, watercolor on linen, 28 × 39 inches (77.1 × 99.1 cm) Opposite: Spring Breakers, 2012. Film directed by Harmony Korine

influencing each other, everything blurring under a pink sky. EB How different is Miami from Nashville? HK Nashville is older, and it’s the South. Miami is more like Latin America, it’s a totally different vibration. There’s a kind of anti-intellectualism that I like. I’ve spent so many years being provoked, or provoking—I wanted to go somewhere where I could just feel. I ride my bike around the boardwalk, drink Cuban coffee, smoke cigars. The palm trees, the sky, the boats, the architecture, all of that is appealing to me. EB How would you describe that vibration? HK It’s like a transcendent criminal dream. EB Like in Spring Breakers (2013)? HK Sure. It’s a mind-set. Everyone is on a hustle. EB What was the image that triggered Spring Breakers? HK I had a vision of girls in ski masks and bikinis robbing tourists on the beach. I wrote a script very quickly, just a skeleton, with thirty lines of dialogue. I wanted to make a film that was like electronic music using samples, I wanted a repetition to it. The same way DJs can loop music, I can 114

loop sequences. The narrative would explode and become more liquid, almost like a video game. So I began collecting spring-break imagery: pictures of pool parties, coed pornography, kids in cheap motels puking in the hallways, violence. There was something interesting in those images, it was a world in itself. In some ways it’s very common, and in other ways it has a pathos. Spring break is a rite of passage. I was also interested in the way it looks: the colors, bikinis, shadows from palm trees, trailer homes, resorts, beaches. How things look under neon at night, the harshness and strangeness of the lightning, the presence of water. It started to speak to me like a weird pop poem. That’s when I just made up the story. EB Were you happy with the reaction you got for Spring Breakers? HK Yes. In some ways I think it’s my most successful film. With my other films, they often made a substantial impact on youth culture, but it takes a long time. It was nice with Spring Breakers that the reaction was more immediate. EB Did you also get bad reviews? HK Of course. Every movie I’ve made has been

divisive. With Gummo I thought that people who didn’t like it would at least see the heart of the film, and that there was something substantial. But so many people were just vicious, coming after me in a personal way. Some people think about the films in terms of pure provocation, which they’re not. You can’t let that bother you though. EB Didn’t it stress you in any way? HK The films are meant to provoke. I’m not a politician, I’m not trying to get the most votes. I have something very specific that I want to see and I have a short amount of time to do it. Life is so fast, I just want to enjoy it, to make things that are beautiful, to make mistakes and entertain. Once it’s out there, the reactions are what they are. EB Do you also get strange or interesting reactions to your paintings? HK It’s different. Art takes place in a slightly more rarefied world. It’s not as popular. You usually do a show in one space at one time. With movies, you blast them to the world all at once. EB You seem to have found a good balance between artwork and movies. HK I’m slow with movies. I do shorts and videos, 115

Harmony Korine,Yum Yum, 2018, oil on canvas, 60 × 48 inches (152. 4 × 121.92 cm)

but I only make a long film every five or six years. So it’s nice to be creating other things. Actually, when I’m not in the studio for a while, I miss it a lot. I start to get agitated. When I’m working on something creative, it always comes from a similar place. There’s a satisfaction in acting on a creative impulse. The worst is when you’re not doing anything. Painting is like writing: it’s direct. You’re not in charge of a hundred people. If it comes to you, you just put it out there. I can write “A helicopter flying over Miami smashes into a yacht, blows up, and kills thirty people,” I don’t have to figure out how to execute it. Painting is even nicer because you don’t have to justify yourself. It’s something that just exists because you want it to exist. EB When did you start painting? HK I’ve always done paintings and drawings, but in a private way. I had exhibitions early on, when I was younger, but I never really pursued it fully. The films were public, the artwork was more personal. I’ve only started showing it more in the last couple of years. EB Your next project is called The Beach Bum. Is it going to be similar to Spring Breakers? 116

It will be a continuation of that style but for a totally different world, setting, and story line. It will be like a stoner movie. When I was a kid, in the ’70s, there was a Mexican comedy duo called Cheech and Chong. They made movies, like Up in Smoke (1978), that were just about these two guys living in LA smoking huge joints. They were great. EB Rumor has it that you might adapt for the screen a novel called Tampa. HK Yes, that’s for HBO. The author is Alissa Nutting. She’s in her mid-thirties, married with a kid, and she lives outside of Cleveland. I’ve already written the script. The book came out three years ago. It’s about a teacher in Tampa who has sex with her middle-school students, like twelve- or thirteenyear-old boys. It’s written in the first person so it’s her mind, her account of how she does it, how she picks them, how she manipulates them. It’s interesting because I’d never seen that psychosexual dynamic before. If it was a guy doing that to girls, you’d hate him, but somehow, when you reverse it, when you read the book, especially if you’re a guy, it’s titillating. As a teenager I used to sit in class and HK

dream about having sex with my teachers, even the most disgusting ones. It’s a time in your life when it’s uncontrollable. So, when I was reading the book, I was experiencing it through the boy, and I didn’t know if it was so bad. But then there’s a moment and it becomes very bad. That’s amazing— very quickly it goes from titillating to sociopathic. When you’re reading the book, you know it’s fiction, but she has these elaborate scenes. It’s not like Lolita, with super-beautiful prose. The syntax is more of this time. She had to let her mind go to this dark place. EB Do you have any idea about what the next step could be for you? HK I feel like I might be starting a new phase of work. I just want to develop it. The thing is, I feel like a kid in a lot of ways. At the same time, I’ve been doing it for a long time. It’s strange. Interview published in full in Harmony Korine, Rizzoli Electa, 2018. Published in association with Centre Pompidou and Gagosian. Artwork © Harmony Korine Text © Harmony Korine and Emmanuel Burdeau

LOSING NOTHING: ARAKAWA AND MADELINE GINS

Text by Mary Ann Caws The cover of the Artnews of May 1980 shows a smiling face, with superintelligent eyes, under a somewhat unruly crop of dark hair. In a black sweater covering a blue workman’s shirt, collar just showing, the artist Arakawa, known only by his last name, points a pencil toward the viewer, his other hand pressing down on a messy stack of papers. Behind him in the photograph, by Hans Namuth, is one of his singular paintings. The opening photograph in the feature shows a young Madeline Gins, Arakawa’s wife and creative partner—a native New Yorker who had studied Asian philosophy and physics at Barnard College and painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School, and who knew Chinese and Japanese poetry—looking confidently out, and standing with her hand just touching her seated husband’s neck, as he looks sideways at us. Presented with two pictures, we find ourselves dealing with several layers of perception. A dominant feeling of potential, of ongoing work, has already been staged. Namuth’s single and double portraits correspond, as the single and double works of Arakawa and Arakawa/Gins correspond, and as the real thrust of all their work is about developing a flexibility of thought. Their work, which was their life, always concerned perception in all its various modes and possibilities. The Tale Somehow, as those of us who write biographies know all too well, it is often easier to speak of the works than of the creators. The works converse differently, of course, with each of us, in music and in art and in writing, and yet we tend—rightly, I think—to trust our own reactions. But since, in the lives of the artists, there are absolute facts, we

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would like to get them right and, insofar as possible, give them out that way also. Born in 1936 in Nagoya, Arakawa was evacuated, at the age of seven, with 200 other children, to a Buddhist monastery in the mountains, where they had to forage for their food. This was at the height of Japan’s entanglement in World War II. When he came down, almost blind and deaf from malnutrition, he was “adopted” for three years by neighbors, a doctor and his wife, for a sort of therapeutic environment. He became the doctor’s assistant and said “there had been so much death” that he was not frightened by it.1 He studied biology, biochemistry, and classical painting in school. When he was seventeen, tubercular spots were found on his lungs; he later learned that this was a misdiagnosis but at the time it led him to exercise a lot, not only his body but his voice, singing arias from Italian operas. Encouraged to attend classes in mathematics and medicine at the University of Tokyo, he instead studied drawing at the Musashino Art University before dropping out and engaging private tutors. Even at this young age, Arakawa was fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka and obsessed with the work of Leonardo da Vinci. He was, and would remain, good at obsessions, one of our mutually favorite topics. The inf luence of European modernism was still dominant in Japan, and Arakawa’s use of materials unusual in that context, demonstrated in works he showed in the annual Yomiuri Independent Exhibition (a major event for postwar Japanese avant-garde art) in 1957 and again in 1958, made him scandalous by the age of twenty. By 1960 he was a member of Tokyo’s short-lived NeoDadaism Organizers group, a precursor to the country’s Neo-Dada movement. He saw art as political, even staging a Luis Buñuel-like act, trapping dozens of persons in darkness on a balcony, while

Previous spread: Dimitris Yeros, Portrait of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Office 124 West Houston Street, NYC, 2000, black and white photograph © Dimitris Yeros Below: Arakawa, Texture of Time, 1977, acrylic, pencil, and art marker on canvas, 66 × 100 inches (167.64 × 254 cm) Opposite: Arakawa, Untitled (Stolen), 1969, oil and graphite on canvas, 72 × 48 inches (182.9 × 121.9 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Gift of “The Thieves”: Gregory, Landis, Lewis, Crane, and Kahn. Photo by Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum

Opposite: Arakawa, Hard or Soft No.3, 1969, oil, acrylic, and art marker on canvas, 95 ½ × 65 inches (242.6 × 165.1 cm) Below: Arakawa, Tubes, 1965, oil, acrylic, and art marker on canvas, 51 × 69 inches (129.5 × 175.3 cm)

hundreds more were clamoring loudly outside the venue because they couldn’t get in. His sculptures were extremely physical: formed from wet cement, gouged and incised, sometimes with found machine parts embedded in their surface, wrapped in cotton, and placed in closed, satin-lined boxes, quite like coffins and quite like the boxes of Joseph Cornell, which he and I were to discuss at length. Unsurprisingly, Dada and Surrealism, too, found their way into Arakawa’s work. A sketchbook drawing of 1963 recalls Lautréamont’s famous line from Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) about “the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,” the genesis of a work by Man Ray. Arakawa makes the overhanging lamp shine full-scale on the sewing table, as if a medical procedure—not just an artistic one— were eminent. In 1960, Arakawa participated in a demonstration against American military bases in Japan, and the newspapers said he had started it. As he would recall, “The poet Shuzo Takiguchi said I had to leave Japan at once, [and] gave me a bit of money and a passport.” So Arakawa arrived in New York in 1961, with $14 in his pocket, and phoned Marcel Duchamp, whose number he somehow had, to ask why Marcel had not phoned him! Duchamp asked (I am telling the tale as Arakawa told it to me) how much money he had, and where he was, and then said he would meet him halfway. They had for lunch what Duchamp always had: spaghetti with no sauce and a half-glass of white wine. Never doubt how a single meal can change the course of one’s life, or, in this case, of art history. Arakawa crossed paths with many other central figures in the downtown New York of the time. For

example, he met John Cage and also came to know Yoko Ono, whose loft on Chambers Street would become his home and studio. He met Madeline in 1962, while both were studying at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Some three years after arriving in the United States, Arakawa was already having his first solo gallery show, Arakawa: Dieagrams, at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles. By 1966, he and Madeline had married and moved into 124 West Houston Street, the Greenwich Village townhouse where all of their future experiments in living, painting, writing, and thinking would take place. (Also where Bob Dylan had his practice studio on the ground floor in the late 1960s and early ’70s.) If Possible . . . To borrow from the poet Charles Bernstein, let’s say that Arakawa’s multidiscursive and multimedia works are always in a “tentative relationship with their surroundings” and therefore “part of a collective project,” as opposed to participating in any sort of “romantic exceptionalism.” Hence we can associate him with artists and poets including Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Huebler, Mel Bochner, Cy Twombly, and Hannah Weiner, and can address his affinity with Richard Foreman, Ron Silliman, Joseph Kosuth, Eva Hesse, Leslie Scalapino, and the great lineage stretching from Stéphane Mallarmé through Duchamp, Cage, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. Like this roster of visionaries, Arakawa always engaged with the social, with its “participants,” and with a large matrix of other minds. Take for example a hilarious but nonetheless meaningful event that crystallizes so much of what is meant

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by “participatory engagement”: one of Arakawa’s works, with the inscription “If possible, steal any one of these drawings including this sentence,” was stolen from Virginia Dwan’s New York gallery in 1969, and the five culprits, graduate students at Rutgers University, wired Arakawa “Work completed.” He asked them to donate the canvas to a “public institution,” a gift the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford accepted, delighting the painter; “That a painting, and particularly a conceptual painting, should generate such passion is beautiful.” In all of the work, much is about ambiguity, treasured for itself. This extended to Arakawa’s delight in the double senses of words such as the verb cleave, which can indicate both sundering apart and joining together. The notion of, and expression of, the reversible prefigures the architectural workings that would come to obsess Arakawa and Madeline from the 1990s through the rest of their lives. The Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) (2008), out in East Hampton, New York, operates with the “tentative” on a full-body, immersive/encompassing scale. The diagrammatic paintings operate on the visual-mental-perceptual level in much the same way: take the visual/verbal map From Mechanism of Meaning (1971), with its “balloons” radiating out, like the speech bubbles in comic books, from a field of crisscrossing lines in the center, inviting multiple ways of 124

looking at a lemon. The work stretches the idea of definition, amusingly and convincingly, since all of these creative possibilities are contingent on the existence of a double helix, as the underlying text says. All those possibilities radiate out from a creative center, like a source of energy, and we think of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs and of all the ways in which Arakawa and Duchamp crisscross in their own energies. Here, too, the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein come into play, specifically the duck/rabbit illusion discussed in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations of 1953. The conscious mind cannot manage both perceptions—seeing the duck and seeing the rabbit—simultaneously, so we have to hold two possibilities in mind at the same time, making it stretch. In this perceptual breakdown, where visual and linguistic programming is short-circuited, the subject can move, leap, and fall into new frontiers of thought. When assumptions are undone, diverted, or cracked, light is invited in. From the early paintings on to the late architectural investigations, the work integrates information from all manner of scientists, including biochemists and psychologists and physicists and creative artists, mirroring—as in the mirror writing practiced by Arakawa—just the kind of gatherings that Arakawa and Madeline hosted at 124 West Houston. Arakawa would often allude to the plays of Samuel Beckett, and, more often still, to

James J. Gibson’s book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. All of us who were friends of Arakawa’s recall those allusions, so important for his own works. At their place, there would be discussions of Heidegger, Kant, and above all, Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Gathered there might be Geoff Hendricks and Alison Knowles of the Fluxus group, the feminist writer Kate Millett, the historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, the composer La Monte Young, the artists Don Byrd, Vito Acconci, Öyvind Fahlström, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Isamu Noguchi, and Joseph Beuys (especially important for Arakawa), the poet David Shapiro, the publisher George Quasha, the Greek Surrealist Nicolas Calas, and groups of writers on every available subject, including the postmodern philosopher and fabulist Italo Calvino, the writer and art critic Edward Casey, and the delightfully bizarre poet Edward James, at whose home in West Dean, in the South of England, a frequent guest was Tilly Losch, the dancer and heroine of Joseph Cornell. Her footsteps were traced on the stairs at West Dean, I remember, from several gatherings there. Arakawa’s and Madeline’s community continued to expand in France. It would grow to include the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, a thinker on time and technology and the author of The Postmodern Condition (1979), who wrote on Arakawa’s art and whose technological, informational, and

Above: Arakawa, Blank Lines or Topological Bathing, 1980– 81, acrylic, art marker, and graphite on canvas, in four parts, 100 × 272 inches (254 × 690.9 cm)

learning-exchange research had affinities with the artist’s thought. Another member of the circle was Gilles Deleuze, who often discussed with Arakawa his work with Félix Guattari on the rhizome and then, crucially, on the notion of the fold (le pli) in relation to Leibniz and the baroque—so essential for Surrealism. And the philosopher and writer Jean-Michel Rabaté, editor and author of books on Beckett, Ezra Pound, modernism, literature, and psychoanalysis, joined in to write the preface for the French translation of Madeline’s book about Arakawa and Helen Keller. The philosopher Arthur Danto—a close friend, and responsible for Arakawa’s brief film on the bicycle wheel, in honor of Duchamp—spoke of the artist in his Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981): When contemporary artists use words in their paintings, a complex decision as to their status always has to be made because words are at once vehicles of meaning and material objects, and because a picture of a word has to be distinguished from a word tout court. . . . The subtle tension between these possibilities constitutes much of the structure of the panels in Arakawa’s spectacular work The Mechanism of Meaning, which almost rises to the level of philosophy through the fact that it is about the sort of decision I have just described. Arakawa’s panels

look like showcards in a demonstration of some daffy IQ test, on which the words are not mere shapes but genuine imperatives, to which the viewer must respond, these not being paintings you merely look at. . . . And so after all you find yourself delivered back to the paint as something to look at and not merely heed, and the letters themselves are rewardingly painted.2 The Essential Blank In the preface to the 1988 revised edition of Arakawa’s and Madeline’s book The Mechanism of Meaning—to which architectural drawings and notes were added—the idea of blank surfaces as essential. This concept of “pushing easily past any grid of rationality, moving and expanding every which way” so as to do justice to “the poetic jump!,” is crucial to their mission. An active reader/perceiver has to be constructed, as the authors say, for the “reordering, which is what the process of art is.” The exertion demanded of the observer/experimenter, also termed “the participant,” depends on an open-ended mental situation. The term blanco, or blank, in all its sense of unlimited vast expanse and parallel possibilities, borders on the essential Buddhist concept of Sunyata. Take a look at the rightmost panel from the work Blank Lines or Topological Bathing (1980–81), which urges the reader/perceiver to approach blank amidst a field of arrows and shapes disappearing in wonderful 125

1, Arakawa, quoted in Paul Gardner, “Arakawa: Unraveling an Enigma,” Artnews, May 1980, p. 61. 2. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 88. 3. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie, vol. 5, 1936–1941, 1984 (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, a Harvest Book, 1985), p. 358.

blurred smudges. Look long enough and you, too, may dazzle at the endless “reorderings” available. Schopenhauer, one of Arakawa’s favorite thinkers, said it straight out: “Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Arakawa remained excited about the concept blanco—as in “blank,” “white,” “target,” and Joanot Martorell’s chivalric Catalan novel Tirant Lo Blanch, published in 1490 and called by the priest in Don Quixote “the best book in the world.” When we speak of blanco, targets, and genius, as Arakawa did, we find ourselves aiming at something that wonderfully runs away. All of which, of course, leaves us with a delight in “almost nothing” yet no less exciting, as in Hard or Soft No. 3 (1969), which states “These arrows indicate almost nothing.” Arakawa’s Leonardo obsession returns here, alongside all of those panels, those nothings, of The Mechanism of Meaning that existed only in Arakawa’s mind. Leonardo wrote of his projects left unfinished, “Tell me. Tell me. Tell me if ever I did a thing. . . . Tell me if anything was ever made.” In making the last sketch in his notebooks, with four triangles on the right, he breaks off “perche la minestra si fredda,” “because the soup is getting cold.” This, his final piece of writing, reminds me of Virginia Woolf ’s next-to-last diary entry, written on Saturday March 8, 1941: I insist upon spending this time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. . . . Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; & must cook dinner. Haddock & sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage & haddock by writing them down.3 These inventors—Leonardo, Woolf, Arakawa— enjoyed conception more than completion, relished every detail and the world in flux. There was, for these thinkers, something always to be learned, some detail, some word, some stroke to be added: those unexpected leaps from that related thing seen to the thing unseen. Be an Apple! One day, Arakawa told me a tale about going to see his sound engineer and saying— Arakawa: Make me the sound of apple! Sound engineer: The sound of cutting an apple? Arakawa: No, the sound of apple! 126

Left: Arakawa, Idea No. 1, 1962, acrylic, crayon, and graphite on paper, 14 × 11 inches (35.6 × 27.9 cm) Below: Arakawa, From Mechanism of Meaning: Presentations of Ambiguous Zones of a Lemon, 1971, acrylic, art marker, and graphite on canvas, 72 × 48 inches (182.9 × 121.9 cm) All artwork © 2018 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins Photos by Rob McKeever unless otherwise noted

—and I thought of Cézanne saying to his models, “Be an apple! Be an apple!” I try to remember if Arakawa was saying: “Make me apple!” The power of the ambiguous has invaded my memory. But D. H. Lawrence wrote of Cézanne, “[It’s] the appleyness, which carries with it also the feeling of knowing the other side as well, the side you don’t see… The eye sees only fronts, and the mind, on the whole, is satisfied with fronts. But intuition needs all-aroundness, and instinct needs insideness. The true imagination is forever curving round to the other side, the back of presented appearances.” That’s what Arakawa was about.

BATAILLE’S FIRST GLANCE Dr. Philippe Roger, scholar and editor of Critique—the journal founded by Georges Bataille in 1946—considers the groundbreaking philosopher’s thoughts on art and his concept of the “Critical Dictionary” on the occasion of an exhibition, curated by Serena Cattaneo Adorno, at Gagosian Paris that pays homage to the iconoclastic thinker.

rom the late 1920s until his death, in 1962, Georges Bataille stood out as one of the most original figures in the French intellectual arena. A powerful yet elusive thinker, he crisscrossed many fields, from metaphysics to politics, from anthropology to aesthetics. To dedicate an exhibition to him—Critical Dictionary: In Homage to G. Bataille, at Gagosian Paris earlier this summer—is at the same time a beau geste and a bold gesture. 1 Why should an art gallery pay “homage to G. Bataille”? Why the intriguing title “Critical Dictionary” (the phrase is borrowed from him)? Some may raise a quizzical eyebrow at seeing a tribute paid, through beauty, to a writer fascinated by foulness and the squalid. Others may question the relevance of placing art under the patronage of a philosopher who frowned on “works of art” as reified products, adamantly asserting the importance of the creative moment over the artistic artifact. This is what makes the Gagosian exhibition so unusual: a challenge, to be sure, it is also a visual and conceptual riddle for every viewer to solve. As a matter of fact, art did not rank first among Bataille’s interests: sexuality, mysticism, “negative theology,” and a very personal brand of political anthropology took precedence. Crossing disciplinary boundaries was always at the core of his work. In 1937, he joined with Michel Leiris, a writer fascinated by anthropology, and Roger Caillois, a young grammar professor with a passion for social mythologies and the beauty of rocks, to launch the Collège de sociologie, an informal debating society where, for two years, some of the most agile minds in Paris convened to discuss fascism, religion, sacrifice, and the looming war.2 This is not to say that art was foreign to Bataille; far from it. A dissident Surrealist, he befriended artists such as André Masson and René Magritte. Nor was he indifferent, as an analyst of the collective psyche, to the momentous changes in the status of art that had occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, resulting in the emancipation of artists from socially preassigned aesthetic programs, whether religious or political, and paving the way for, in his word, artistic “autonomy.” Bataille’s relationship to art, however, was always ambivalent. While demonstrating a vivid interest in painters from Goya and Manet3 to Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Klee, he wondered whether contemporary art had not reached an impasse, precisely because of the secularized individualism implicit in its newly autonomous status, and he often cast doubts on the ability of contemporary artists to innovate. “Nothing shockingly new has happened in painting since Dalí and Balthus,” Bataille wrote in 1956—a declaration that art historians are likely to find odd. 4 Questionable as it is, the statement provides us with a precious clue: the key word here is not so much “new” as “shocking,” with its rich spectrum of semantic associations, ranging from surprise to mental or physical trauma. For Bataille, experiencing art is what really matters, and this experience necessarily involves violence. The French adjective in his assertion, “choquant,” can refer to various moral transgressions; most of the time, however, it connotes deviant sexual behavior. Mentioning the sexually explicit Salvador Dalí, along with the discreetly “perverse” Balthus, as the two last great providers of the “shockingly new” makes perfect sense within the framework of Bataille’s reading of art as an unexpected, destabilizing, potentially traumatic blow to the viewer’s consciousness and 130

sensibility. In the wake of Stendhal’s famous definition of beauty as “nothing other than the promise of happiness” (and a definitely sensual, eroticized happiness, at that), Bataille associated art with Eros as lightning strokes—“fulgurations.” While eroticism as shock and awe was ever present in Bataille’s philosophical essays, it took center stage in his literary works. His most widely read book today is probably the notorious Histoire de l’œil (Story of the Eye), published (under a pseudonym) in 1928. So “graphic” were the tableaux vivants in Story of the Eye that it took another fifty years before the book could be translated into English! While the enucleated eye in the story takes on an explicit, crude sexual significance, it is also an apt metaphor, not only for our bewilderment but for the special kind of blindness required of us when facing or being confronted by art.5 Blinding ourselves to the plain and obvious is the first step toward a deeper vision of both art and life, revealed to us as part of an “inner experience,” a key phrase in Bataille’s idiom and the title of one of his philosophical essays. One year after the publication of L’Histoire de l ’œil, Bataille and his friends started writing entries for their Dictionnaire critique, their

Previous spread: Georges Bataille inspecting the cave paintings of Lascaux Below: The cover of the first issue of Documents, 1929 Opposite, top left: Guido Reni, Saint Jérôme, c. 1605–1610, oil on canvas, 26 1⁄4 × 21 1⁄8 inches (66.7 × 53.7 cm). Photo by Thomas Lannes Opposite, bottom left: Donald Judd, untitled, 1991, light cadmium red oil on plywood and aluminum, 19 ½ × 45 × 30 inches (49.5 × 114.3 × 76.2 cm). © 2018 Judd Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Thomas Lannes

critique, Bataille set out to disarticulate received social representations, thus exacerbating all forms of crisis (of art, of philosophy, of humanism, etc.). He wanted to turn words against (ideological) discourses and art against itself. Needless to say, this is not exactly what the French gallerist and collector Georges Wildenstein had in mind when he decided to fund Documents, and hired the thirtythree-year-old Bataille to run it. Many readers were appalled by the journal’s accumulation of “base” material, often verging on the monstrous. Wildenstein, however, along with the established art historians who contributed, may have been still more dismayed by Bataille’s unapologetic praise of the “formless.” How could an art magazine promote a concept so abhorrent to art lovers in the first half of the twentieth century? And how can an art exhibition today retain or revive the spirit of violent confrontation central to Bataille’s project, and reclaim his notion of the “formless” for its own purposes? Let us first dispel a possible misunderstanding, taking hints from Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Georges Didi-Huberman. In their classic analyses of Bataille’s “formless” in connection with modern art, we find them in agreement on one

Following spread, above: Installation view, Critical Dictionary: In homage to G. Bataille, Gagosian Paris, June 1–July 28, 2018. Artwork © 2018 C. Herscovici/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Thomas Lannes Following spread, below: Installation view, Critical Dictionary: In homage to G. Bataille, Gagosian Paris, June 1–July 28, 2018. Artwork © 2018 The Easton Foundation/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Thomas Lannes

Opposite, right: Illustrations from Documents, n° 1, 1930, demonstrating the idea of “space”

For Bataille, experiencing art is what really matters, and this experience necessarily involves violence. The key term here is not so much “novelty” as “shock,” with its rich spectrum of semantic associations, ranging from surprise to mental or physical trauma.

“Critical Dictionary.”6 Sharing little with the commonly received concept of a dictionary or an encyclopedia, the project instead drew its inspiration from the Surrealist taste for lexicalized pamphlets and, beyond Surrealism, from a long tradition of playful, ironical, polemical lexicons that thrived in eighteenth-century France, with Voltaire the recognized master of the genre. In its original format, the “Critical Dictionary” appeared not as a book but as entries randomly published in Documents, the short-lived but strikingly innovative journal that Bataille ran in 1929– 30. In a thoughtful and provocative way, Documents combined text and pictures, philosophical musings and “newsreels” à la John Dos Passos. It was not “about” art: it was about artfully rethinking nature and society, in a way that was a shock to many, including its sponsors, who threw in the towel after only fifteen issues. Documents promoted tension between the visual “document” (first-rate photographers such as Jacques-André Boiffard and Éli Lotar contributed) and the written word, the poetic impact or polemical violence of the texts being multiplied by the beauty and strangeness of the images, and vice versa. The entries of the “Critical Dictionary” pushed this procedure to its limits. While pictures retained their traditional illustrative role in other sections of the journal, text and photographs clashed in these “chronicles” in a strident, brutal, and often indecipherable way. The entry for “space” (published in Documents no. 1, 1930), provides an example of the “shocking” strategy developed by Bataille: the first picture, showing the collapse of a jailhouse in Columbus, Ohio, allows an easy connection with the “topic”; but what about the second picture, of a “monkey dressed as a woman”? Bataille conceived of Documents as an arena for confrontation and destruction, an art gallery turned shooting gallery. Rather than providing the reader with definitions, his “Critical Dictionary” ruined the very notion of the definition as a semantic pillar of the social order. It was not supposed to promote “dialogues” between artists, on the one hand, and philosophers and writers, on the other; rather, it was designed to create clashes between words and words, words and pictures, art and the world. Rather than articulating a social 131

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the year Documents was founded. Nothing here to scare the art historian: contextualization mitigates confrontation. But lo! Look to the opposite corner. A huge white Louise Bourgeois sculpture with a central eye, Cleavage (1991), seems to deliberately ignore the three black, eyelike holes peering blindly at the viewer in Alberto Burri’s Rosso Plastica (Red plastic, 1968).9 Both the Bourgeois and the Burri pieces, however, seem to mutely answer the silent question asked by the three wood-colored orifices in the Magritte across the room. The reassurance provided by contextualization thus dissolves into discomfort, a feeling of uncanniness reinforced by the title of both the Magritte—The Imp of the Perverse, a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s tale about a self-incriminating murderer—and the Bourgeois, Cleavage, which can refer to an eroticized part of the female body but also to a butcher’s cleaver, and more specifically to the famous cleaving of an eye performed in Luis Buñuel’s film Un chien andalou. (The epoch-making movie premiered in 1929, and Bataille, writing in Documents, described the episode of the eye split with a razor under the title “Cannibal treat.”) We will stop here and let the show reveal its further instances of conflicting closeness, such as Joe Bradley’s Real Goon (2017)—another menacingly

titled work—lurking in a third corner of the same room behind a figure from Togo echoing the fascination with Africa characteristic of Documents. In Documents, Bataille created “a stunning network of suggested relationships, of implicit or explosive contacts, of true or false resemblances, of false or true dissemblances.”10 So does this exhibition, in a less “shocking” but no less “amazing” way. Amazement, for Bataille, was the utmost symptom of artistic experience; a quarter century after Documents disappeared, he would describe the amazed first glance of the three schoolboys who discovered the cave paintings of Lascaux as the apex of aesthetic emotion.11 The ultimate (and logical) paradox of the Critical Dictionary exhibition is to multiply connections and accumulate complexity to achieve the very same goal: refreshing our gaze, allowing us to wonder at art anew. 1. June 1–July 28, 2018. 2. The society’s short-lived existence is remarkably documented in Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology (1937–39), 1979, Eng. trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1988). 3. Bataille’s Manet (Geneva: Skira, 1955) is his only monograph on a painter. 4. Bataille, “L’impressionnisme,” Critique 104 (January 1956):3–13. 5. Blindness as the ultimate emancipation of the eyes is a frequent theme in Bataille’s writings on art. In “L’impressionnisme” he quotes Cézanne on Monet: “He is nothing but an eye, but what an eye!,” adding this comment: “All Monet is in his wish to have been born blind, and thus be just this organ in its purest state.” For another approach to blindness in connection with painting, see Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, exh. cat., Louvre, Paris, 1990, Eng. trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 6. A new French edition of the Dictionnaire critique (including the illustrations) was published by Éditions Prairial, Paris, in 2016. An English version is available in G. Bataille, Isabelle Waldberg, and Iain White, Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary & Related Texts, Atlas Arkhive 3, 1996, available online at www.ferlandweb.com/encyclopaedia-acephalica-atlas-arkhive. pdf (accessed June 23, 2018). 7. Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Destiny of the Informe,” in Yves-Alain Bois and Krauss, Formless. A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 252. The book appeared in the wake of an exhibition curated by its co-authors at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris: L’Informe: mode d’emploi, May 21–August 26, 1996. 8. Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe, ou le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995), pp. 14, 21. My translation. 9. Another work by Burri, Combustione Plastica (Plastic combusion, 1964), had been introduced by Bois and Krauss in their discussion of Bataille’s “base materialism.” Formless: A User’s Guide, pp. 29–31. 10. Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe, p. 13. 11. Bataille, Lascaux; or, The Birth of Art: Prehistoric Painting, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Lausanne: Skira, 1955). An insightful account of Bataille’s fascination with Lascaux appears in Daniel Fabre’s Bataille à Lascaux, subtitled “How prehistoric art appeared to children” (Paris: L’Échoppe, 2014).

YOUTH 18 & UNDER ARE FREE #MADEYOULOOK

central point: Bataille’s insistence on the “formless” implied no rejection of form(s) as such. In turning to the word informe, Krauss writes, Bataille wanted to “evoke a process of ‘deviance,’” “a de-classing in every sense of the term.”7 While denouncing the bourgeois cult of the “beautiful form,” he never ceased, especially in Documents, to combine forms, proposing new aesthetic configurations through unexpected encounters, thereby giving new contours to the world itself. In Documents, Didi-Huberman writes, the play between words and images is “insubordinate” but is never left to chance: it is “genuinely a work on forms.” Through “figurative montage,” Bataille coerced artistic forms into “contributing to their own transgression.”8 This is an apt description not only of Bataille’s “Critical Dictionary” but also of Critical Dictionary the exhibition, a “figurative montage” in its own right. Let us enter a room, a fairly large one. Artworks are paired together, just as pictures were paired in Documents. In one corner, peaceful coexistence seems to prevail between Vasily Kandinsky’s Dicht and Magritte’s Démon de la perversité (The Imp of the Perverse). Not only are the two paintings united by their similar format and subdued colors, they are matched chronologically: both are dated 1929,

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Amazement, for Bataille, was the utmost symptom of artistic experience: a quarter of a century after Documents had disappeared, he would describe the amazed first glance of the three schoolboys who discovered the Lascaux paintings as the apex of aesthetic emotion.

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HEAVEN AND EARTH

Alexander Calder, Performing Seal, 1950. Sheet metal, paint, and steel wire; 33 × 23 × 36 in. The Leonard and Ruth Horwich Family Loan, EL1995.7. © 2018 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago; Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986. Stainless steel; 41 × 19 × 12 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, partial gift of Stefan T. Edlis and H. Gael Neeson, 2000.21. © Jeff Koons. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago; Jeff Koons, Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985. Basketballs, sodium chloride reagent in distilled water, and glass vitrine with steel support and air mounts; 60 1/2 × 48 3/4 × 13 1/4 in. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Gerald S. Elliott Collection, 1995.55.a–k. © Jeff Koons. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

HEAVEN AND EARTH: ALEXANDER CALDER AND JEFF KOONS

THROUGH MAR 24, 2019

Romuald Hazoumè is an artiste engagé, an artist who takes a position. His work is deeply rooted in the cultural, social, and political context of Benin, but more generally of Africa and the world. An African artist, he is a cosmopolitan who embraces the globe. Hazoumè has been crossing borders for almost thirty years. Recognizable by his kepi, a military hat covered with badges, like that of a soldier who has performed distinguished service, he is a man of imposing presence. In Benin he is a public figure, not only through his work as an artist but because he speaks loud and clear about what he thinks, taking stances and sharing sharp opinions. Hazoumè wants Africans to regain self-respect, wants to restore their dignity. He honors street children, his “powerful mongo heroes,” who participate in Benin’s economy by trafficking oil between the country’s capital, Porto-Novo, and neighboring Nigeria, the continent’s largest oil producer. Hazoumè, his life, his struggles, his work—a whole big story! He speaks several languages including Goun, his native tongue; Yoruba, because of his Nigerian origins; and also Fon, Mina, Mahi, Adja, Ewè, Nagot, Ouémé, Tori, and others among the fifty-five languages spoken by the people of Benin. For a long time it was said that the word, the concept, of art did not exist in Africa. Was that ignorance or contempt? Art emerged in Africa more than seven thousand years ago. Hazoumè knows where he comes from and consciously and proudly

carries on the tradition of the ares, the itinerant artists of Benin’s royal period who carried culture from kingdom to kingdom, leaving examples for future ares as they passed through. The great palaces were decorated by the ares. The donkeys and oxen that carried their forges and anvils, tools and looms, have today been replaced by cars, trains, and planes. That is the way of the contemporary itinerant, and, Hazoumè says, “I am a contemporary are.” Hazoumè, originally Yoruba, was raised in a Catholic family, but he maintained a relationship with ancestral worship and was profoundly influenced by West African Vodun. As a boy he began using salvaged materials to make masks for Kaleta, the festival of games and masks so cherished by Benin children. After high school he turned to painting and sculpture, notably using salvaged bidons, plastic jerry cans, which he minimally modified to turn them into masks that subtly reveal his critical view of African politics. He wore his first mask made from a jerry can in 1986; it established his reputation. Hazoumè has been described as the “bidon artist.” I met Hazoumè in 1988, in Cotonou. From the road I had noticed a small crowd outside a hall lit by neon. The assemblages of recycled materials that I discovered hanging on the wall inside looked like nothing I had seen in Africa before. Often filled with contraband gasoline and sold on the black market along the side of the road, those

Romuald Hazoumè’s masks are deeply rooted in the cultural, social, and political context of Benin. His masks, which use salvaged materials and bidons, or plastic jerry cans, comment on pan-African politics and culture. Text by André Magnin.

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ordinary plastic jerry cans had lost their function, their history; in their new context, on the other side of the road, they had become works of art, “assisted readymades”: Mon général (My general, 1992), L’inspirateur (The inspiration, 1992), Miss Abidjan (1992), Claudia (1999). Hazoumè’s double cultural membership— Yoruba, or animist, and Catholic—generates an inner conflict that results in a syncretic process of creation: made out of contemporary, salvaged materials, the masks show links to Yoruba tradition. Hazoumè says he sees his masks “go out,” for example; for a mask to “go out,” explains the Malian scholar Youssouf Tata Clissé, is for it to “reiterate all the stages of creation.” In another example, a mask that plays an important role in a traditional Bambara ritual is the Tourbillon (whirlwind) mask, the figure of the primordial vortex that presided over the emergence of life. Hazoumè draws on this vocabulary of initiates in his Zanzibrrrrace mask (2003), using modern materials but maintaining that earlier character. His assemblages of scraps and disused objects, which he may use as is or may form and deform, are also representations of his vision of society, events, and world problems. Between Hazoumè’s introduction to the African mask tradition and now, when he has become, as he says, a contemporary itinerant, his part of the world has profoundly changed. The social and economic context has been overturned. The live

show that unfurls in the streets of Cotonou and Porto-Novo reveals much about the lifestyle of the country, obsessed with its history at a time when Yoruba culture slips away a bit more every day. It is in that context that Hazoumè lives and wants to intervene. In Porto-Novo, some dozen kilometers from the Nigerian border, the bidon, which is used to transport the contraband gas consumed by 90 percent of Beninese, has become a cult object: it’s a work tool, it represents an income, it’s an object of survival. Since gas is far more expensive in Benin than in the neighboring oil-producing nation of Nigeria, gangs from the Ouèmè valley became gas traffickers, eventually coming to hold a monopoly of this very profitable, very dangerous activity. A moped loaded with 100 liters of gas is a moving bomb. Each trafficker marks his bidons as slaves were once marked, a metaphor for the slavery of the past. Each bidon designates the religious affiliation of its owner, whether or not he is literate, and other information. “We die for oil,” says Hazoumè, “but without the trafficking and the work and the money it generates, the political situation would also be very explosive.” Hazoumè draws from history, culture, belief, Vodun, the Fa divination system, and the vocabulary of initiates in these faiths as a way to make his work specific, all while producing an oeuvre that unabashedly reveals the madness of the current

state of the world. The strongest art in Africa is undoubtedly art that attests to community concerns; Hazoumè’s sculptures, photographs, and installations are an example of this kind of art, as his people recognize and welcome. At the same time, the work is so immediately legible and recognizable beyond Benin that Hazoumè, propelling his local culture to an international level, can legitimately claim the role of worldwide itinerant are. Hazoumè’s exhibition at Gagosian on Park Avenue in New York, opening this September, will consist primarily of masks that evoke the fragility of vulnerable peoples who are oppressed or have become stateless. Oiseau bleu (Bluebird, 2018), for example, has a head of feathers as light as America’s consideration of Native American communities; Algoma (2016) is named after the Burmese who provided the artist with the horsehair broom that tops this mask, which pays homage to the Rohingya refugees, the Muslim community chased out of Myanmar. Hanging in space, the robe of a revenant’s costume made out of plastic, with undulating shapes like the whirlwind’s, symbolizes the expulsion of “bad spirits” that hector and weaken populations to the point of destruction. Translated from the French by Molly Stevens. See also André Magnin’s text on Hazoumè for the CAACart website, online at http://caacart.com/pigozzi-artist.php?i=HazoumeRomuald&bio=en&m=35. Previous spread: Romuald Hazoumè, Oiseau bleu, 2018, plastic and feathers, 15 × 15 × 6 3⁄8 inches (38 × 38 × 16 cm) Left: Romuald Hazoumè, Algoma, 2016, plastic and raffia, 21 5 ⁄8 × 15 3⁄4 × 7 7⁄8 inches (55 × 40 × 20 cm)

Alberto Giacometti, Homme qui marche II, 1960, plâtre, Fondation Giacometti, Paris © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris + ADAGP, Paris) 2018

#ExpoGiacometti

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UNCHARTED TERRITORY

For the 16th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, the architectural firm Caruso St John teamed up with artist Marcus Taylor to curate the British Pavilion. Their design, Island, offers a profound adjustment of public space at a moment of profound geopolitical change. JamesÂ Lawrence considers its implications.

n August 2017, the sculptor Marcus Taylor approached Caruso St John Architects with an idea for the Venice Architecture Biennale. The British Council was seeking proposals for the British Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, and the deadline loomed. Taylor proposed building a platform, open to the public and supported by scaffolding, over the pavilion so that it would encircle the apex of the roof. In stark contrast to conventional proposals for a national pavilion at the Biennale, the building itself was intended from the outset of Taylor’s proposal to be open but undeveloped: an environment for recollection and discussion rather than the setting for a particular curatorial proposition. Taylor and Caruso St John submitted an initial proposal c ompr i si ng fewer t ha n 200 words and two illustrations: a photograph of a nineteenth-century church in India, ruined and almost submerged by monsoon f loods; and a lithograph showing St. Isaac’s Cathedral, St. Petersburg, under sca f folding. T h is pit hy, unor t hodox, ent ic i ng ly provocative idea eventually became Island, Britain’s national contribution to this year’s Biennale. Island is not ent irely new territory for Taylor, Adam Caruso, and Peter St John. Taylor had earlier commissioned Redshank, a one-bedroom cork-clad beach house completed in 2016. Redshank stands on steel poles above coastal marshland in the east of England. Taylor collaborated with Lisa Shell Architects on the design, which allows the marsh to reclaim the land on which the house stands. Redshank’s form suggests not only its namesake wading bird but also a type of offshore antiaircraft platform from World War II known as a Maunsell Sea Fort. These curious structures were decommissioned in t he 1950s, after which some of them housed pirate radio stations. One of them constitutes the self-proclaimed Principality of Sealand, which has maintained a quixotic claim to statehood since the 1970s. In 2016–17, Taylor also collaborated with Caruso, St John, and Rachel Whiteread on a shortlisted proposal for a Holocaust memorial planned for Victoria Tower Gardens, next to London’s Palace of Westminster. Their design envisaged an open area punctuated by resin casts after a nearby memorial commemorating the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire; and an enclosed, subterranean arena intended for contemplation, with 140

discrete areas reserved for listening to recorded testimonies from survivors. As with Island, the design proposed a binary division—higher and lower, exterior and interior—in which the spaces would be both independent and mutually reinforcing. That approach to space relies on the human capacity to assemble different registers of emotion into rich, polyphonic, and coherent experiences. Island—with its relaxed curatorial grip and its emphasis on the ways in which people and places activate each other—is appropriate right now for several reasons. It fits into the theme of this Bien-

nale, “Freespace,” which emphasizes what might be called architectural serendipity—the capacity of architecture to grant unexpected and often unintended spatial gifts as part of its active presence in the social fabric. More immediately, however, Island tacitly but transparently acknowledges the limitations of affirmative statements in the pavilion of a nation whose impending withdrawal from the European Union has placed it in a state of flux. National uncertainty, and the many different kinds of uncertainty that have emerged recently in world affairs, makes Island particularly significant.

The sight of the pavilion, festooned with scaffolding and identified above the door not merely as “British” but as “Great Britain” itself, has a trenchant wit: a nation under repair, with normal service to be resumed eventually. The fact that the Palace of Westminster is similarly graced with scaffolding as part of a massive refurbishment only adds to the mildly burlesque sense of disparity between architecture as exalted symbol and architecture as fallible matter. The meaning of scaffolding, however, depends primarily upon its relationship to the flow of time. Its presence might signify rectification of a flawed past, embellishment of a sound present, or anticipation of a viable future. Scaffolds signify change, and prompt questions about the implications of change. In most circumstances, scaffolds are to be avoided. They mark out areas of hazard and exclusion. Island exploits this quality to convey at least a fleeting—and timely—impression that the British Pavilion is somehow out of bounds. Proximity reveals the scaffolding of Island to be inviting rather than forbidding: a means of g reater public access to an open building. The staircase that leads to the roof-level platform is modular and obviously temporary, with hand-grips cut into the treads and plenty of visible joints. It nonetheless has breadth, flow, and a bolted-toget her g ra ndeur that no purely utilitarian arrangement needs or possesses. The requirements of safe public access help to shift the vocabulary away from the specialized language of the construction site toward a general lexicon of contemporary architecture in which wellknown buildings, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, have complicated the relationships among systems, substructures, and surfaces. T hat quick transition f rom one voc abula r y to another exemplifies the way Island extends far beyond its immediate modification of space. The title alone, a single word, contains a densely packed set of connotations so rich that it is difficult to explain our world in metaphors without them. It is certainly difficult to imagine literature without them. Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), in which an island is a place simultaneously of exile, rescue, and theatrical illusion, informed the project from an early stage. One might also cite another Jacobean work, John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which is today remembered for Meditation XVII and its supreme metaphor of common humanity—“No man is an island,

Previous spread and above: Island, British Pavilion, Venice. Image © British Council, photo by Hélène Binet Opposite, top: Holy Rosary Church at Shettihalli, Karnataka, India. Opposite, bottom: Auguste de Montferrand, view of St Isaac’s Cathedral under scaffolding, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1845 Following spread: Island, British Pavilion, Venice. Images © British Council, photos by Cultureshock Media

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temporarily bereft because stripped of purpose. An open but empty pavilion preserves some of that atmosphere and makes it available for public use as raw material for a loose accumulation of impressions. Some of those impressions might take emptiness as a sign of evacuation—an understandable notion in a city where buildings’ occupants often abandon flood-prone lower levels. That sense of flight bolsters the raftlike qualities of the rooftop platform, and also amplifies the notes of creative urgency that provisional architecture generates. Other associations put the pavilion in the company of works by contemporary artists who have used absence and traces of memory in order to address breaches in the social or historical fabric. All of these impressions tint Island separately and collectively.

The curators’ tactical withdrawal from the interior of the pavilion dismantles the conventional expository purposes of that space as effectively as wood and scaffolding create a new space. Exhibitions have physical and rhetorical contours that lead us along certain paths and toward certain thoughts. Island has instead two modes of being: one that expands toward the horizon with a compendium of metaphors, and another that thrives on interior silence punctuated by episodes of social interaction. Crucially, given the backdrop of impending transition for the country that commissioned it, Island presents those modes not as mutually exclusive but as complementary and permeable. It resists the oversimplification of atomized positions. If Island has a natural ancestor in Venice, it is Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo (1979–80), a floating structure of wood and scaffolding that heralded the first Architecture Biennale. It is no longer extant, but it remains an indelible memory for many who saw it as it traveled from Venice to Dubrovnik, and a striking image for those who d id not. Teat ro del Mondo, which in title and construction referred to a long tradition of ephemeral architecture in Venetian festivals and carniva ls, embod ied Rossi ’s understanding of theater and architecture as interdependent repositories of collective memory that are essential to a city. Island, like Teatro del Mondo, rests on the assumptions that our sense of past, present, and future—memor y, action, and hope—are both built and performed, and that architecture can be backdrop, stage, and character simultaneously. T h is, perhaps, is t he mos t not a ble a spe c t of Island, an aspect that places it equally in the realms of art and architecture. The relationships between visitors and the spaces that constitute Island are comparable to the relationships that have animated advanced sculpture for at least fifty years. There is, above all, no such thing as neutral or inert space in Island, any more than there is inert space between viewers and Minimalist objects or their formal descendants. We might think of Island as a set of discrete physical spaces that viewers turn into integrated and expansive conceptual wholes. In order to do this, it uses the passage of time as effectively as it uses the control of space. It employs vocabularies of construction, impermanence, and dormancy not only to evoke a range of political and existential quandaries, including secession and climate change, but also to reveal the interconnectedness of tangible and intangible components in our encounters with the material world. Island demonstrates, to paraphrase Donne, that no place is an island, entire of itself. Utopia does not exist in isolation.

NEW ID Switzerland

Whether the platform feels like a raft or a quarterdeck, precarious or supreme, is a question that remains deliberately open—and, in a city as vulnerable to the sea as is Venice, persistently relevant. In contrast to the spatial and metaphorical expansiveness of the rooftop platform, the interior of the pavilion promotes introspection. It has been left untouched since Phyllida Barlow’s exhibition folly (2017) overwhelmed the building with an exuberant sculptural sprawl. Slight traces of that exhibition remain, dispelling any sense that the pavilion is a deliberately pristine blank space. In Island, the emptiness of the pavilion is reticence rather than amnesia. That quality is native to the site. During interludes between public exhibitions, the Giardini and its pavilions become quiescent: not abandoned, nor even deserted, but

Corpus Baselitz 10.6. — 29.10.18

Colmar, France musee-unterlinden.com

Georg Baselitz, Ach rosa, ach rosa, 2015, huile sur toile, Collection Mr and Mrs Abu-Suud. © Georg Baselitz 2018 – Photo Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

entire of itself ”—which carried political meaning in an era of fateful conflict between monarchy and parliament. John of Gaunt’s valediction in Shakespeare’s Richard II (1597) presents England as an impregnable “scepter’d isle . . . set in the silver sea,” shamefully diminished from within by misrule. For the British in particular, islands have long served as instructive reflections of their own condition. In Daniel Defoe’s novel of 1719, Robinson Crusoe builds a rudimentary emulation of British civilization. The shipwrecked schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) descend into murderous, atavistic disorder. In fiction and sometimes in fact, islands are exceptions: magical, elusive, culturally or ecologically sui generis. An island might be Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a place of exile and punishment, the center of the world, or the last place on earth. Given time, an island can be many things. The rooftop platform that gives Island its name offers an unusua lly clear v iew of San Servolo, which lies in the Lagoon about a kilometer south of the British Pavilion. For nearly a thousand years, that islet was a place of spiritual and physical refuge for Benedictine monks who arrived in the eighth century, for nuns displaced by catastrophic flooding at Malamocco in the early twelfth century, and then for nuns f leeing t he Cretan War in 1647. Later, San Servolo became a place of isolat ion a nd confinement, the site of an insane asylum from 1725 to 1978, when Italy closed all such institutions. That role lent San Ser volo its unflattering nickname: the Island of the Mad. Today, it is home to Venice International University, a single campus involving a consortium of European, Asian, and American institutions. Islands can give sanctuary, enforce separation, stand in isolation, or serve as common ground in an interconnected world. The rooftop platform was always intended to be generous: an airy, elevated piazzetta available for events and performances, with newly available views of the Giardini and the Lagoon. It is by far the most decorative aspect of Island, with plywood in three tones laid in a basketweave pattern. Seats, tables with umbrellas, and treetop foliage promise respite and retreat: a peaceful area where the hubbub of the Biennale recedes, and tea is served at four o’clock each afternoon from a trolley that Taylor designed for the purpose. This is a minor local tradition as well as a stereotypically British one. In the nineteenth century, before the building became the British Pavilion, it was a café. Jeremy Deller turned one room of the pavilion into a tea room as part of his exhibition English Magic (2013). A cup of tea taken in serenity above the fray is an appropriate gift for visitors who climb to the top.

Guitarist and legendary composer Marc Ribot and acclaimed percussionist Billy Martin speak with Brett Littman, the director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, about how they met, New York in the 1980s, and the way the visual arts have informed their music.

DIGITAL POMPEII

R ETT LITTMAN I wanted to start off by asking you both what you’re listening to right now. I’ve been in this weird John Fahey, Takoma Records phase recently, listening to all of this American primitive guitar stuff. It’s been a real education to go through that whole discography. BILLY MARTIN I’ve been listening a lot to WFMU, a local station here. It’s been good because it’s turned me on to a lot of new music that I don’t know. BL You’re in discovery phase? BM Yes, I’m kind of looking for new things to inspire me. I’ve also been heavily into Morton Feldman lately. I might be a little late to the Feldman party, it seems he’s kind of hip right now. Lastly, I’m into this rare record that I found by Jean Dubuffet called Musical Experiences. Did you know about that? BL No, but that sounds amazing. BM He made a record that explored all the sounds one could make with different instruments and other objects from a musically untrained and naive approach. It was made in 1963. BL I remember driving around with you recently and listening to birdsong tapes. Are you still into those? BM Absolutely. Those are the songs from Mexican birds that I picked up on cassette. They’re a big inspiration for me. Birdsongs are just endless variations on themes. I’m always looking for ideas and birds are always giving them to me! MARC RIBOT Ok, I was just looking at my iTunes, which turns out to be an archaeology of myself with dates added. It’s all there where the volcano buried it in lava. BL A digital Pompeii. MR Yes, my own digital Pompeii. So one thing I see is a lot of B.B. King on my playlist. I was recently teaching a class and wanted to find B.B. King tunes to illustrate my own personal history of how I came to play the way I do, and also explain the sense of economy in B.B.’s guitar playing. BL Did you play them Live at the Regal? That’s one of my favorites. MR No, what I wound up with was a compilation, Do the Boogie. I found his version of “Dark is the Night,” which I had never been aware of before, and a couple of other things with amazing solos by

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him. Hmm, I also see here a bunch of tunes with the word “Satan” in the title. I tend to listen topically and Satan has been on my mind lately. You haven’t really lived until you’ve heard the Louvin Brothers’ “Satan Is Real.” BL There’s also that great Daniel Johnston tune, “Don’t Play Cards with Satan.” MR Daniel Johnston, now there’s somebody very important. We can get into a whole visual-arts discussion about him because of his very disturbing drawings. BL Well, there are a handful of musicians—Billy, you’re one of them—who also make visual art. Daniel was definitely very influential for me. I lived in San Antonio, Texas, in the early ’90s and went to visit him up in Austin a couple of times at his mother’s house. I used to mail-order his tapes with the drawings pasted onto the front of them in the late ’80s. MR That’s right. I have a couple of his early cassettes . . . I treasure them. I think one of them is from before he understood the concept of mass production, he would just record the same songs over and over again so he could make new cassettes and give them to his friends—so each one was unique. Anyway, he’s a truly visionary artist. I aspire to being a visionary artist. BL Billy, you had a couple of formative, strange, and maybe voyeuristic experiences with contemporary art early on. I remember you telling me that when you were living in Dumbo in the ’80s you looked out into Vito Acconci’s studio. Is that what started you making drawings and films and expressing yourself outside of a musical context? BM Yes, it’s true—when I lived in Dumbo with my girlfriend at the time, who was always listening to Hans-Joachim Roedelius, the Clash, and Einstürzende Neubauten, I could look into Vito’s studio. But I was always fantasizing about visual art and music together in some way since I was a kid. I used to go hang out with my dad, who was a musician as well, and he would take me to these recording sessions where he would be doing movie scores for people like Ennio Morricone. I really wanted to do that. Later, I starting drawing with John Lurie in hotel rooms during the Lounge Lizards tours, and that continued while I toured with Medeski Martin & Wood and even to this day. The film stuff came later for me, when I finally got my hands on a 16-millimeter camera.

Billy, we’ve worked together a couple of times on art and music projects at The Drawing Center and at Sean Scully’s studio. Most recently, I curated your new set of graphic scores for a performance entitled Disappearing at the Herman House, your gallery/studio in the back yard of your house in Englewood, New Jersey. Can you talk about what you’re trying to do with these drawings and how they’ve evolved? BM Simply, they’re just another chapter in exploring gestures through improvisation. In this case, the images sometimes inform my musical exploration and vice versa. This all led to my new percussion/prepared-piano solo release Disappearing, on my Amulet Records label. The record title highlights the journey into the unknown, which I find liberating and focused at the same time. I really appreciate your curating that work for my premier! We assembled some nice musical compositions together. BL I don’t want to be overly nostalgic but I think the fluidity between music and art was tied to that very fertile time in New York in the ’80s and ’90s when the avant-garde/downtown music scene was really at its peak. You could go to so many clubs and hear people playing crazy things, and the crowds of people seemed so much more heterogenous. Musicians, rockers, artists, drug dealers, performance artists, poets, and writers all seemed to be in the same room. BM Certainly that was true for me. If you were hanging out in the East Village and playing the Knitting Factory or CB’s Gallery, you were just running into everybody, and after a gig you might go over to someone’s studio to hang out to see what they were up to. Marc, I’m sure you were deep into that community and scene as well. MR Jean-Michel Basquiat and Michael Stewart, talk about two very different kinds of artist, used to hang out backstage at the Lounge Lizards gigs. Not that I was a close personal friend of either, but that was who was around. It’s amazing what kind of community you could build when people could get apartments for $400 a month. Today you can’t find a place for under $2,500 a month. Suddenly everybody’s wondering, “Where did our wonderful heterogeneous utopia go?” Maybe we don’t hang out with artists anymore because everybody’s struggling so hard to try to make rent that they need to spend all their time hustling. BL Marc, you’ve been pretty vocal about the need for more support of indigenous music scenes. There are empty buildings, there are places where collectives could be started and gigs could happen. I’ve surely seen a lot of these kinds of places in my travels in Scandinavia and in other places in Europe, particularly Berlin. It seems to me it’s not just about cheap real estate, it’s about what engenders a creative environment. MR Well, one thing I want to make clear is that I’m not a fan of the Richard Florida “Creative Class” argument. If the market and subsidies don’t support experimental stuff, we need to make sure to keep it from becoming the plaything of the independently rich. That said, subsidies could be part of the mix as long as you avoid a nondynamic system where people are basically hiring their friends to play gigs and no one really gives a shit. European squats are a form of subsidy. Squats were interesting—a lot of them were centers of creativity because they had to present work that the local communities and the local press cared about and supported enough to show up and literally fight for. BL

Previous spread, left: Marc Ribot. Photo by Sandlin Gaither

Opposite: Marc Ribot. Photo by Barbara Rigon

Previous spread, right: Billy Martin. Photo by Saito Ogata

Above: Billy Martin. Photo by Marco Benvenuti Following spread: Billy Martin aka illy B, Disappearing (#26), 2017, oil pastel, graphite, charcoal, and gesso on paper, 22 1⁄2 × 30 1⁄4 inches (57.8 × 76.8 cm) © 2017 illy B Martin

Also, you have to say that behind those kinds of situations were the artists themselves, who were subsidized by rent stabilization and cheaper housing. The only reason I go into this, it’s not that I want to rant about it, but when we start talking about the ’80s as a golden age, well, if we want to be more than just nostalgic, let’s take a look at what went into making the heterogeneity, making the diversity, permitting the diversity and the hanging out—the real conditions that made possible a lot of what went on then. BL You both teach a fair amount. What do you tell your students about studying music? MR I’ve often thought that if I was going to write a guitar-method book, I wouldn’t call it How to Play Guitar, I’d call it Why Play Guitar. That’s the question we face, in common with all the other forms of arts. I’ve also tried to impress on younger guitarists the importance of being literate. Not only in terms of the other music: if you call yourself a guitarist, you need to have heard a range of guitarists, but you also need to have looked at other art forms and writing. I know I’ve gotten a lot from both.

BL Well, that’s good to hear. I think in the art world right now there’s too much specialization. Sometimes I feel that when I’m talking about poetry, writing, music, or film with people in the arts, I start to lose them. It’s kind of shocking because I don’t understand how you can be in the art world and not be interested in culture writ large. But maybe that’s just me. I’m a generalist. BM Well, that’s the way you find out about new things and ideas. You have to get outside of music. We have to look at other things to find our voice and to share ideas. I look to artists, to other people expressing themselves in different mediums. I think it’s essential. MR The other thing that’s important is translating. I’ve always been translating other instruments and other ideas with the guitar. I find the act of translation or mistranslation of Cuban big-band music, or Albert Ayler’s saxophone, on the guitar very productive. BL Billy, I want to ask you about translation. You always bring a lot of different ways of making percussive sounds into everything you do. Do you

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That movie goes against the phenomenon I’m talking about because the score is so much in the foreground. I’m much more of a traditionalist—I don’t want the score to be in the foreground, and when it is, I’m wondering why that’s the case. It’s nothing against any of the music in the film; I think Jonny Greenwood did a great job. He did the big percussive things, when people were galumphing through the fields and stuff, and it worked. But I’m more interested in scores that disappear. To me, that’s the art of cinematic music, and that’s what makes it interesting—when it points to a third dimension between the music and the visual. BL Marc, can you give me an example of a film that you would say achieves that? MR Almost anything that Alfred Hitchcock did that was scored by Bernard Herrmann. Certainly. It’s very strange and interesting to me, Billy, that you mentioned Satyajit Ray when trying to think of something that you had consciously enjoyed, as opposed to something where you said, “Wow, that music was interesting.” Indian cinema is one of the only film industries in the world that had its own origin and history really kind of outside the cultural influence of Hollywood. Because it’s outside of our own culture, we can hear it. The music doesn’t work for us in the same way that music that’s deeply inside our culture works for us. What’s inside our culture is invisible, in the same way that the power relations within our culture are invisible. You don’t see them as power relations. You see them as normal. BL Billy, when you’re asked to do a score for a film, how do you approach that kind of work? BM Every time, I start from zero. I try to have a conversation with the director or the producer and then end up ignoring most of what they said. I may have a little thing that I recorded, something on my iPhone, some mistake I made on the piano or some sound that happened. That may end up being the thing they love. Generally my philosophy is that I want to add something to a film, or try not to get in its way. Recently, though, I worked with the director Yoshifumi Tsubota on the score for his film The Shell Collector. He basically sent me the first cut of the film, with no reference music and in Japanese. He wanted me to watch the movie and get a feel for it. Later we were talking about minimalist composers, Morton Feldman, and chamber music, and all of sudden the sounds for the film came together for me. MR Well, God bless you for starting from zero every time. I used to develop my own ideas and then fight with the directors forever about the music. But now I just say, “Okay, I’m a complete prostitute about it, send me your temp score and I’ll write stuff that sounds like it.” This is terrible. I have to say honestly that this discussion on film scoring almost doesn’t belong within this conversation about music and art. For me it’s like if a lawyer bought a gallery and insisted on going into the studio of every artist who was represented and said, “I don’t like red. Take a little red out of that painting. No, that one looks like a dog to me. I don’t like dogs. I want a cat.” I do love work ing w ith some f ilmmakers though—like Jen Reeves. She’s brilliant and for some reason we always get along and we can work together very well. Other than that, though, you may notice that I’ve been generally scoring films by directors who died at least twenty years ago. MR

You have to get outside of music. We have to look at other things to find our voice and to share ideas. I look to artists, to other people expressing themselves in different mediums. I think it’s essential. Billy Martin

remember walking by Chris and John’s loft down on Avenue A one day on my way to a rehearsal, and hearing you guys lost in this groove. A couple of hours later, when I was coming back after my rehearsal and a little lunch, you were playing the same groove. That was real dedication. You know, my first big gig was touring with the great organ player Brother Jack McDuff at places like Sparky’s and the Key Club. The funny thing was that Brother Jack really detested my style of playing—but that didn’t stop me from having a long-lasting affection for that kind of music. BL You’ve both done a lot of work with music and film. What’s interesting about putting those mediums together? BM Well, for me it’s a very contentious relationship, a constant battle. MR You get in fights with the directors? BM Exactly. Marc, I’m sure you know a thing or two about that. MR Well, I get in fights with everybody! It doesn’t matter if they’re the director or not. BM I love music so much, and music creates so much visual and emotional content for me, but when I see an image associated with certain music, it often pulls it in another direction and often that’s not the direction I want to go in. But when music and image come together perfectly it’s the most beautiful alchemy you could ever experience. BL Is there a particular section of a film with a score that for you is the perfect merger of music and image? BM To be honest with you, this is really probably the opposite of what you’re asking me—but Satyajit Ray’s early film Pather Panchali has Ravi Shankar playing some incidental East Indian folkloric music. I don’t know why, but the experience was unique for me and I felt I was there. So that worked really well. MR What’s interesting is, I think most people, if they’re being honest, wouldn’t be able to answer that question. They wouldn’t be able to answer it for the simple reason that when a film score works perfectly, you don’t hear it. I mean a real film score, not source music where someone sees a band playing in the film and you hear a band. I mean what you hear as underscoring—when it works perfectly, it disappears. I’m not sure there’s a visual-art corollary to that. BL I think the soundtrack for [Paul Thomas Anderson’s film] There Will Be Blood, by Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, is pretty amazing and really adds something to the visuals.

Photo by Blackletter/Patrick Crawford

view your role as a translator, or are you kind of a medium for all of this? BM I don’t know, maybe closer to a medium. I’m probably more interested in misinterpreting something than in translating it straight up. I tell my students that if you’re going to play the drums, you have to widen your spectrum. Listen to a birdsong and try to play the phrasing. Is it possible to try to make your drum sound like a violin or a brass instrument? Think that out. For some reason this conversation brings to mind the guitarist Derek Bailey, who for me is one the biggest inspirations for creative musicians. Marc, I wanted to ask you what you think of Derek? MR I’m a huge fan of Derek Bailey’s. I met him when I was in London and went to his house and jammed with him. It was funny, though, because at some point when we were jamming I tried to play what I thought was Derek Bailey–type music and he kind of instantly got bored and we started drinking beer instead. But later on, when we started playing some pieces of John Zorn’s and he was playing the role of the free improviser and I was playing these written jazz parts, he got very excited and he started talking about when he used to be a studio musician. It was really a very interesting interaction in the end. BL Do you guys remember how you two first met? Was it through the Lounge Lizards or was it in some other configuration? MR How did we first meet? Well, I think I met Chris Wood first or did I meet all you guys at the same time? BM All I remember is that Chris said “Hey, this guy Marc Ribot called me to audition for the band. Who is he?” John Medeski and I were like, “Call that guy back. We have to play with Marc!” MR Well, I remember that you guys had just come to town. I must have heard the band before I called Chris because I was really impressed with what you were doing. One of the main reasons I liked your music was that I love organ jazz, groove, and soul music and I thought, Finally some people have gotten hip to this. When I was a kid in the suburbs around Newark, that’s what we heard late at night when we drove around. I was very happy to hear a group that was influenced by this genre and I was happy that you guys were focusing on groove. I

Lunch Monday–Saturday 12–3pm Dinner Monday–Saturday 6–11pm 976 Madison Avenue, New York T. 212 906 7141 reservation@kappomasanyc.com

THE RIVER CAFé COOK BOOK

This year, London’s River Café celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Founded by chefs Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray and specializing in simple, delicious Italian cuisine, this culinary mecca is perched on a bend in the River Thames in Hammersmith. To celebrate her new cookbook, River Café London, Rogers sat down with Derek Blasberg to discuss the allure of the River Café and why her plans to keep it open for another thirty years are simpler than some Harvard Business School students might think.

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DEREK BLASBERG Three decades! That’s a long time

in any industry, and especially in the fickle world of food. When you opened the River Café, did you think it would still be here thirty years later? RUTH ROGERS When we opened, we were both totally inexperienced. We had a very small place that provided a lot of restrictions, and looking back I can see that those restrictions were good for us. We were only open at lunchtime and could only feed the local artists, architects, and designers. It was financially terrifying at the time, of course, and we didn’t make any money, but we were able to grow with the restaurant, which was terrific training. DB I’m not a foodie person, in the sense that I don’t read restaurant recommendations. But the River Café was suggested to me so often, and through the worlds of fashion designers and contemporary artists. Why do you think that community has taken to you and your food so much? RR It’s a dramatic and beautiful place, and on the river. My husband [the architect Richard Rogers] designed the interior so everyone had a view outside. Someone described the restaurant to me the other day as a place with a welcoming kind of energy. The people who work there really like to work there, the people who eat there really want to eat there. There’s a familiarity, too—I think restaurants need some drama and theatricality, but you also want to be comfortable. Since the day we opened, we wanted Italian food based on seasonal ingredients—regional Italian food. Generous portions. Our goal for the restaurant is that everyone should leave happier than when they arrived. DB I was there recently when the Newhouse family threw a dinner party for Edward Enninful, the new editor-in-chief of British Vogue, which was a fun occasion. What’s one of your most memorable nights there?

BRICE MARDEN

paper towel, Peter did a lion and two spearfishermen, Michael a coffee cup, Jonas a plant, and Ed a beautiful “Yum.” DB Was there anyone you wish you’d asked but didn’t? RR Yes, there are so many artists I admire, but there were deadlines and space to consider. Lucian Freud used to come to the River Café in the very beginning. He always told me he liked it best when it was small, when all we could afford was secondhand furniture. Once he wrote me a blank check. It was made out to Ruthie Rogers and signed Lucian Freud. I put it somewhere safe, which is to say I can’t find it now. DB I’m the world’s worst cook. I need a recipe for ice. I have your book right here: what’s the easiest thing for me to make?

ED RUSCHA

DAMIEN HIRST

I don’t like to name names about people who come into the restaurant, but one year, and this may have been about 1989, it was my birthday and Rose Gray got a Cajun band to come over and play. That night there was a dinner for Ed Ruscha in the restaurant too, and I thought, “We’d better get rid of this band before he arrives.” But he walked in and said “I love these guys, can we get them to stay all night?” I’m happy that so many artists come in here. DB I’ve seen some menus the designers have drawn on. How does that happen? RR The first artist who drew on a menu was Ellsworth Kelly, who came in for lunch and did a still life drawing of his table, with his glasses and wine glass on the table. I think he was quite pleased with it because he took another menu and went into the men’s toilet and did a self-portrait in the mirror. A little while later, Cy Twombly came in for lunch, and it wasn’t my idea, I would have been far too shy to ask him, but someone at the table said “C’mon, Cy, do something on this menu.” He wrote “I love lunch with Ruthie,” in his remarkable scrawl. Those three menus became my most treasured, precious possessions, and I kept them, of course. When we were doing this new book I thought, “Damien Hirst, his studio is nearby and he comes in here, I wonder if he would do one?” So I asked him, saying Cy and Ellsworth had done them and would he ever consider it? Later I asked Peter Doig, Brice Marden, Michael Craig-Martin, Jonas Wood, and Ed Ruscha, who are all part of the River Café family. I texted them saying “If you don’t want to, please forget I ever asked,” but their generosity of spirit was incredible. Brice did one on a RR

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Well, if you like ice, I’d suggest the blood orange sorbet, which is literally freshly squeezed juice, some sugar, maybe a little lemon. You can do that. DB I had dinner with you at a friend’s apartment a few weeks ago. I was early and hanging out in the kitchen while my friend prepared the food, and when they said you were coming I asked, “How are you not panicking right now?” I’d be too shy to make you dinner. RR Don’t be ridiculous! I’m the easiest to cook for. I’m so appreciative when someone makes that effort, and invites someone into their home. It’s one of the most generous things someone can do. DB At that dinner, someone told me that Harvard Business School did a study of your business and gave you a few options on how to handle it going forward. What were they? RR These Harvard students came to me with a question: how could the River Café expand? After all, it’s unusual for a restaurant to be successful for thirty years without expanding into other cities or other restaurants. They came back with four propositions: replicate another restaurant; do less expensive versions as multiples; do a product, like ice cream, that can be sold in stores around the world; and the last option was, do nothing. DB I think I know which one you did. The last one? RR Sort of. We’re interested in doing projects. In October we’re doing a pop-up restaurant at the Frieze Art Fair, and for Christmas we’ll be selling gift boxes, the alternative to the traditional hampers, with all of my favorite ingredients: justpressed olive oil, Pugliese tomatoes, and a special new cookbook with recipes using the box ingredients. The Harvard study was invigorating, they were the smartest students ever, and very inspiring. RR

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CY TWOMBLY

JONAS WOOD

From top to bottom: Dan Colen in his studio. Photo by Eric Piasecki; Takashi Murakami, The Golden Age: Kōrin - Kansei, 2014, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas, mounted on wood panel, 59 × 59 inches (150 × 150 cm) © 2014 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.; Nancy Rubins. Image by Pushpin Films; Gagosian Quarterly covers.

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BOOK CORNER

YVES KLEIN Rare-book specialist Douglas Flamm and curator Michael Cary sit down to discuss theÂ varied publishing projects and passions of Yves Klein.

Maybe we can begin with Dimanche— Le journal d’un seul jour, from November 27, 1960. It really encapsulates a lot of the ideas that Yves Klein was seeking to express in the other publications we’re going to discuss. I think there are two things that come to mind immediately with Klein: one is the color blue, and the other is— MICHAEL CARY Leap into the Void. DF Exactly. The Dimanche broadsheet is the first time the Leap into the Void image is published. And it’s right there, directly on the front cover. MC Interestingly, while the monochromes are a series of very similar works, this is not, right? He didn’t make more photographs of this kind. DF Correct. There are the photos that were made to create this image, since it is in truth a montage, but this isn’t part of a series. The final image, the one published in Dimanche, shows Klein leaping into space, and it looks like he’s soaring into flight. But it was two images combined. In the unmontaged image, friends of his are standing below him to catch him with a tarpaulin. The street was photographed on its own, without those friends, and then combined into a straightforward montage under the headline “Un homme dans l’espace” (A man in space), with a subtitle exclaiming “Le peintre de l’espace se jette dans le vide!” (The painter of space leaps into the void!). Klein hired the photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender to both create and, in turn, document this event. So in this one DOUGLAS FLAMM

I find it fascinating that the front page of the newspaper also illustrates a Klein monochrome. Of course it’s reproduced in black and white with benday dots—a strange way to reproduce a monochrome, to say the least. DF It’s true! When you think about the whole creation of his International Klein Blue—this search for the perfect vehicle to carry the pigment in the most pure and true sense—and then compare it to the reproduction, it does get strange. MC However strange, we can be sure it was done in complete seriousness. Everything I've ever read about Klein indicates that he was extraordinarily earnest about everything he did. He took things very, very seriously, beginning with judo: the studying, the practicing, the going to study in Japan at the source—he did not take it lightly. It wasn’t a hobby, it was this intense discipline and genuine engagement with ideas, with physicality, with materials. DF When the reviews came out after the 1961 show at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, the German and US press wrote him off as a prankster, so it doesn’t seem like they were taking his work all that seriously. I have a sense that that probably really affected him, because come 1962, he wound up in New York at the Chelsea Hotel, in a dark time for him. It’s where he wrote the Chelsea Hotel Manifesto. I don’t know the causal relationship between

Previous spread: Yves Klein, detail of Triptyque de Krefeld, 1961, gold leaf on cardboard, 12 5⁄8 × 9 inches (32 x 23 cm)

Right and below: Yves Klein, Dimanche— Le journal d’un seul jour, November 27, 1960, newsprint, 22 × 15 inches (56 × 38 cm)

image Klein asks the viewer to think through space, images, the concept of the void, sky, and more. I’ve always seen this as sort of a case in point of Klein as an artist who uses photography, rather than being a photographer. I mean, he has no interest in simply documenting something, but he’s really interested in creating an image, and he just happened to use photography in this case. I guess, more specifically Shunk and Kender created the photograph but under the direction of Klein. MC And it’s a powerful, challenging image. It’s also available for a political reading: by 1960 I imagine most of the world was aware of Stalin erasing contemporaries out of photographs. There’s a history of altering photographs for propaganda purposes. DF Yes, of course. And Dimanche is a full broadsheet, so he goes on and writes all the articles throughout. On the last page there’s an article on judo, which comes back full circle to his first publication, Les fondements du judo (The foundations of judo), from 1954. I think the notion of ephemera as something beyond just sort of collectible paper work continues through Klein’s work from beginning to end. MC Did Klein publicize that he was going to publish the paper and distribute it around Paris? DF Well, Dimanche was really just a part of his Theâtre du vide performance. It was essential to him that the broadsheet be available to the general public at newsstands that morning, along with the other daily papers, but the project was also announced at a press conference at 11 a.m. at the Galerie Rive Droite. That’s how collectors and gallery-goers, people interested in contemporary art at the time, would have known about it. 156

Below: Yves Klein, pages from Triptyque de Krefeld, 1961, pigment on paper, 12 5⁄8 × 9 inches (32 x 23 cm) Following spread, above: Yves Klein, Les Fondements du judo, Éditions Grasset, Paris, France, 1954 Following spread, below: Yves Klein, Yves Peintures, 1954, printed paper boards and glued papers, 9 5⁄8 × 7 ½ inches (24.5 x 19 cm) Artwork © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ADAGP Paris/ARS New York, 2018

these things, but it does make me think he absolutely did not want to be considered a prankster. Speaking of the Krefeld exhibition, another crucial part of Klein’s work was the use and concept of fire. That show, Yves Klein: Monochrome und Feuer (Monochrome and fire), was critically important in that regard: he really expanded on the use of fire by including a “fire wall” and two “fire fountains” outside the museum. The “fire fountains” were two shooting flames that were triggered at certain times along with the “fire wall,” which was created by constructing a grid of fifty Bunsen burners. The catalogue for the show investigated fire in another way, through the inclusion of a triptych of monochrome blue, pink, and gold sheets. MC Yes, those colors are the levels of flame—blue base, pink center, golden tips. DF Exactly. It’s a very slender catalogue—not much of a reference book—but the beauty of it is those sheets. The pink and the blue are silk screens, and then the gold is a foil with a gold-leaf appliqué added by Klein himself. MC So that’s funny, because that seems like the exact opposite of making his ephemeral newspaper. You know, if you want a catalogue to document an exhibition, you want it to last. A special edition is precious, and with a gold-leaf insert it’s even more so. And this is the opposite of Dimanche, a broadsheet available on newsstands. But you can tell Dimanche involved a lot of work—setting up photo shoots, writing over fifteen articles, printing, distributing—so strangely enough, there’s a lot more work put into something that could possibly be discarded in the waste bin than for an exhibition catalogue that’s boiled down to three leafs and a minimal amount of text. What other books did Klein publish? 157

LOCATIONS

Well, there’s the famous exhibition catalogue called Yves Peintures, from 1954. I think that’s definitely a shining moment in terms of the books that he published himself. Yves Peintures was a conceptual exhibition, insofar as it both never took place and included paintings that didn’t exist. But Klein created a catalogue as if real paintings were being shown in a real space. He gave dimensions for those works, though in the loosest possible way, leaving open the question of whether they were in centimeters or meters. And supposedly that book was published in an edition of 150 copies, though some people have said that maybe only ten were actually made. The only copy I’ve ever seen is in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. There’s been a recent facsimile, but as twentieth-century artist’s books go, it’s quite rare and high on the altarpiece for artist’sbook collectors. MC Is it the rarity of the book that makes it so elevated? Or is there something about how the book was made, the printing or the binding? DF Well, it was exquisitely made, with high-quality paper stock and precise printing, but the most intriguing thing is the conceptual underpinning. An imaginary exhibition of imaginary paintings: in today’s world I don’t think anyone would get out of bed for it, but in 1954 it paved a lot of ground. DF

So in 1954, he’s already thinking about books as a vehicle and as a medium. The idea taking precedence over the thing is already front and center. In fact, this was one of the first artworks he made—one of his early artworks is a false exhibition catalogue, the exhibition catalogue as work of art. And then he makes a false newspaper, and the false newspaper is part of a performative work of art. It’s not reporting on works of art, it’s not recording, it is the work of art. DF Right. Performance is a large part of Klein. Think of the Anthropométries paintings, for which he directed what he called “living brushes.” MC Even his 1958 exhibition at Iris Clert in Paris, Le Vide (The void)—empty gallery, white walls—but it wasn’t just an empty gallery or white walls, it was the 2,000 people who showed up, all crammed into the space. Perhaps that performative impulse, that physicality, can be traced back to one of his first loves, which is judo. DF Well, the same year Yves Peintures was published in Spain, he published Les fondements du judo in Paris. The interesting back story on that book is that he was frustrated because the French judo academy wouldn’t let him in, so he went to Tokyo to study from the source. He goes to Tokyo and receives a fourth-degree black belt, which is the highest degree a Westerner could achieve. And I think when he came back to Paris, he wanted to assert himself with the fondements book. MC Yes, the idea of teaching judo was important to him. He thought he would come back to France and have a career as the greatest living judo teacher in Europe, right? He would be hailed and lead the judokas of Europe into glory. And in fact he was completely rejected. DF Despite that rejection, he continued. I think from judo he learned this fighting spirit that’s seen continually in his work—this spearhead desire to take an idea and realize it, regardless of the hurdles he’d have to overcome. That sense of discipline and structure is evident throughout his work. MC

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Sterling Ruby, EURYDICE, 2018. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio.

Franz West : Plakatentwurf (Die Aluskulptur) [Projet d’affiche (Sculpture en aluminium)], (détail), 2000 - © Estate Franz West, © Archiv Franz West - Photo : DR © Centre Pompidou, direction de la communication et des partenariats - Conception graphique : Ch. Beneyton, 2018

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Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961, oil on canvas, 48 × 69 inches (122 × 175.3 cm) © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

GAME CHANGER Each issue we look at a particular painting that influenced the course of contemporary art. Here is Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey (1961). Text by Derek Blasberg.

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Kids say the darndest things. Legend has it that Look Mickey, Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse going fishing, was inspired by one of Lichtenstein’s sons, who, one night before bed, pointed to a comic book and dared him, “I bet you can’t paint as good as that.”1 Lichtenstein’s response, painted in primary colors with Disney humor intact, included his first use of benday dots and speech balloons, visual devices that would become central to his aesthetic vision. Graphic, straightforward, and engaged with the world of mass consumption, Look Mickey altered art’s course. For many art historians it is the pioneering piece of Pop art. Lichtenstein was thirty-eight, and had been exhibiting in New York for a decade, but this cartoon-inspired painting became the turning point in his career, bridging the gap from his earlier Abstract Expressionist works into Pop. Much of his ensuing art celebrated and mimicked the world of romance and adventure comics, which he would later say “express violent emotion and passion in a completely mechanical and removed style.”2 Upon their arrival in the public eye, these works sparked heated debate—in 1964, Life magazine published

a profile of Lichtenstein with the headline “Is He The Worst Artist in the US?”—but Look Mickey and the paintings that followed it have endured. American society’s most complex issues are often masked under a populist veneer, nor were paintings like this as unsophisticated as they appeared: “The techniques I use are not commercial,” Lichtenstein said, “they only appear to be commercial— and the ways of seeing and composing and unifying are different and have different ends.”3 Well after Lichtenstein’s work had developed into an address of art history, the painterly gesture, and other classic fine-art themes, he testified to the importance of this initial Pop painting by giving it a second life: in his Artist’s Studio series of 1973– 74, while one of the studios he imagined has Henri Matisse’s Dance of 1909 on its back wall, another has Look Mickey. 1. See Alice Goldfarb Marquis, The Pop Revolution (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010), p. 37. 2. Roy Lichtenstein, in G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art?,” Artnews, November 1963. Available online at www.artnews. com/2007/11/01/top-ten-artnews-stories-the-first-word-on-pop/ (accessed June 30, 2018). 3. Ibid.

Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2018

Articles inside

Anselm Kiefer

Jean-Michel in Black and White

Losing Nothing: Arakawa and Madeline Gins