Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022 by Gagosian Quarterly

72 Pat Steir

Max Dax and Andreas Gursky discuss the photographer’s new work, the roles of techno music and art history in Gursky’s process, and the necessary balance of beauty and honesty in the contemporary.

On the occasion of her exhibition of new paintings in Rome, Pat Steir met with the artist Sarah Sze to discuss the role of accident, the lessons of japonisme and Chinese landscape painting, and the effects of scale. And in response to Steir’s work, the poet Anne Waldman has composed the poem “What Sky Limit?,” debuting here.

46 Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Theaster Gates The second installment of the series.

50 Mary Weatherford: The Flaying of Marsyas Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice is presenting new paintings of Weatherford’s inspired by Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas (1570–76). Francine Prose traces the development of these works.

58 Fashion and Art, Part 10: Pieter Mulier Pieter Mulier, creative director of Alaïa, presented his second collection for the legendary house this past January in Paris. After the presentation, Mulier spoke with Derek Blasberg about the inspirations behind it, including the ceramics of Pablo Picasso, and about his reverence for the intimacy and artistry of the Alaïa atelier.

84 At the Edge Chris Burden: A Prelude to a Lost Performance In this new series we look at professionals of different kinds who work alongside artists in support of their work. Here, Michael Auping gives us a glimpse into the mindset of a young, aggressive, and ambitious artist in the early stages of his career.

92 Alexandria Smith Artist Alexandria Smith speaks with author Nalo Hopkinson about what it means to depict the body, the struggles to embark on new projects, and the contours of space and place in the creation of fiction and art.

98 An Eye on the Market: Mary Rozell Mary Rozell is the Global Head of the UBS Art Collection and the author of The Art Collector’s Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Acquiring and Owning Art (Lund Humphries, 2020). Here she speaks with Gagosian director Jill Feldman.

64 Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through 102 History Memoirs of a Bridging the digital and Poltergeist: Part 2 the physical, the three-part presentation of paintings and sculptures that makes up Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through History at Gagosian, New York, builds on the ongoing collaboration between the artist and RTFKT Studios. Here, Murakami and the RTFKT team explain the collaborative process, the necessity of cognitive revolution, the metaverse, and the future of art to the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier.

108 There Is No Neutral Space: The Architecture of Donald Judd Julian Rose delves into the archives to examine three architectural projects that preoccupied Donald Judd from the late 1970s to the 1990s, asking the question, What does it mean for an artist to make architecture?

120 Story of the Editor

150 Louise Bonnet and Dodie Bellamy The painter Louise Bonnet entertains the poet and novelist Dodie Bellamy in her Los Angeles studio as she prepares for an exhibition of new works in Hong Kong and the inclusion of one of her paintings in the Venice Biennale.

156 Feliza Bursztyn

Fiona Alison Duncan profiles six literary editors who are changing the standards of publishing.

Salomé Gómez-Upegui sheds light on sculptor Feliza Bursztyn’s vital role in the twentieth-century artistic and literary scene of Colombia.

128 Francis Bacon: The First Pope

180 Game Changer: Annie Flanders

Richard Calvocoressi tells the story of Francis Bacon’s creation of his first image of the pope, ‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator,’ c. 1946.

Aria Darcella honors the founder of Details magazine, enumerating the many ways in which Flanders changed discourses around fashion, nightlife, and photography.

134 Rebecca Cammisa The filmmaker sat down with Carlos Valladares to talk her chief inspirations, the countercultural radicality of being a nun, and the shifting landscape of the documentary.

140 Vera Lutter: Time Travel Jean Dykstra reports on Vera Lutter’s new series, produced on the occasion of a commission to photograph in Athens.

144 Performance Space Jenny Schlenzka and Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda speak with the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab about Performance Space New York’s radical shifts and upcoming programming.

The second installment of a short story by Venita Blackburn. Front Covers: Andreas Gursky, Viktor & Rolf II, 2022, inkjet print and Diasec, 120 ⅞ × 81 ½ × 2 ½ inches (307 × 207 × 6.2 cm) © Andreas Gursky/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York Takashi Murakami, 108 Bonnoˉ MURAKAMI.FLOWERS, 2022, NFT Production Director & Dot Flower design: Yoshihisa Hisamoto (ZIKU Technologies), Data Director: Kazami Hoshino (Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.), Data Operator: Juri Nomura (Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.) ©2022 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

SUMMER 2022

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

36 Andreas Gursky

TABLE OF CONTENTS

he explosion of interest in digital art, with the growth of NFTs, the development of blockchains, and the rise in cryptocurrency wealth, has brought forth unprecedented possibilities and opportunities. In both artmaking and collecting there is plenty of overlap between the realms of the online and the traditional, but fundamental differences remain. Artists have long tested the edges of the unknown, exploring areas of uncertainty, pushing for something new. In this issue, Takashi Murakami and the RTFKT team discuss the future of art and a series of recent shared projects that will advance the engagement between the IRL art world and the online collecting community. Andreas Gursky’s large-scale images often straddle the digital and the classical in both their subject and their construction. With an objective eye, Gursky balances the unlimited potential of computerimaging technologies against historical structures of order. We take a look at his latest photographs while he speaks with Max Dax about the influence of techno music and art history in his creative process. We present dialogues of different kinds between novelists and painters: Francine Prose responds to new works by Mary Weatherford, while Dodie Bellamy talks with Louise Bonnet, Nalo Hopkinson with Alexandria Smith. And Fiona Alison Duncan takes us deeper into the world of literature with profiles of six book editors making waves in publishing. We inaugurate At the Edge, a new series in which we share stories from the sidelines of art history, offering the behind-the-scenes perspectives of people who—as art installers, photographers, gallery assistants, and more—have been firsthand witnesses to iconic moments. In 1974, Michael Auping was a preparator at California’s Newport Harbor Art Museum while Chris Burden was setting up a performance there. Burden was already getting a reputation for going to extremes and audiences were anxiously waiting to see what he might do next. Auping takes us inside that time, guiding us through the intense preparations and institutional tensions that formed around an event that ended up never happening. Theaster Gates answers Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire on the occasion of his presentation of Black Chapel for the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion. Richard Calvocoressi dives into the riveting history of a recently rediscovered painting: Francis Bacon’s first depiction of a pope, a motif that would become one of his most celebrated. Our Game Changer feature honors Annie Flanders, founding editor of Details magazine and a passionate HIV/aids advocate.

72 Pat Steir

Max Dax and Andreas Gursky discuss the photographer’s new work, the roles of techno music and art history in Gursky’s process, and the necessary balance of beauty and honesty in the contemporary.

46 Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Theaster Gates The second installment of the series.

64 Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through 102 History Memoirs of a Bridging the digital and Poltergeist: Part 2 the physical, the three-part

Julian Rose delves into the archives to examine three architectural projects that preoccupied Donald Judd from the late 1970s to the 1990s, asking the question, What does it mean for an artist to make architecture?

120 Story of the Editor

156 Feliza Bursztyn

Fiona Alison Duncan profiles six literary editors who are changing the standards of publishing.

Salomé Gómez-Upegui sheds light on sculptor Feliza Bursztyn’s vital role in the twentieth-century artistic and literary scene of Colombia.

128 Francis Bacon: The First Pope

180 Game Changer: Annie Flanders

Richard Calvocoressi tells the story of Francis Bacon’s creation of his first image of the pope, ‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator,’ c. 1946.

Aria Darcella honors the founder of Details magazine, enumerating the many ways in which Flanders changed discourses around fashion, nightlife, and photography.

134 Rebecca Cammisa The filmmaker sat down with Carlos Valladares to talk her chief inspirations, the countercultural radicality of being a nun, and the shifting landscape of the documentary.

140 Vera Lutter: Time Travel Jean Dykstra reports on Vera Lutter’s new series, produced on the occasion of a commission to photograph in Athens.

144 Performance Space Jenny Schlenzka and Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda speak with the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab about Performance Space New York’s radical shifts and upcoming programming.

SUMMER 2022

presentation of paintings and sculptures that makes up Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through History at Gagosian, New York, builds on the ongoing collaboration between the artist and RTFKT Studios. Here, Murakami and the RTFKT team explain the collaborative process, the necessity of cognitive revolution, the metaverse, and the future of art to the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier.

108 There Is No Neutral Space: The Architecture of Donald Judd

TABLE OF CONTENTS

36 Andreas Gursky

gucci.com

#GucciLoveParade

1932 COLLECTION THE STARS ALIGNED

In 1932, Gabrielle Chanel created BIJOUX DE DIAMANTS, the first high jewelry collection in history. Inspired by the allure of the stars, it was designed to be worn freely in a brand-new way. Mademoiselle then turned her concept of jewelry in motion — part of her vision for women — into a manifesto. In 2022, CHANEL High Jewelry celebrates this celestial revolution with the launch of the 1932 COLLECTION, based on the perpetual motion of the stars and tailored to the natural movements of the body. In the same spirit, CHANEL asked an author known for his reflections on movement to write a manifesto for the new collection.

After winding around from the nape of the neck, the string of diamonds suddenly bursts into a shooting star, trailed by a cascade of sparks leading to a sapphire that fits perfectly into the negative space of a crescent moon of diamonds. A fragmented nimbus then explodes around a profusion of carats pulsating at the neckline. A line of precious stones rises and falls with the rhythm of the breath, trapping the gaze in their bewitching depths. Beneath this blue eclipse, a string of crystals leads the eye toward the heart, where a diamond sun blazes, its early-morning rays oscillating and sparkling with the wearer’s movements. In this theater of precious stones, celestial bodies undulate on the skin’s “Milky Way,” sketching new landscapes each time the head moves or tilts. Like the necklace, the collection is a series of celestial bodies journeying across the skin and enhancing each movement of the body as the planets travel past twinkling stars. The beauty of the world lies in this radiance. The glow of the stones is tangible, sculpted into the diamond, itself becoming a jewel, liberated, as if the aura could be removed and worn as a brooch. What was a parure has become a jewel, a stone cut in stone, made even more precious by what has been removed from it. From the depths of the Earth to the Cosmos, there is little light, but it sometimes burns beneath the eyelids in insistent lines. The gems begin to dance within us: diamonds, blue diamonds, rubies, yellow diamonds, sapphires and rings running along the fingers, orbiting, spilling their brilliance over the hand. Bracelets and diamonds give way to a streaking comet on the skin, a virtuoso play of light and the ever-changing gestures of a woman who is suddenly the center of the universe. Hugo Lindenberg

TRANSFORMABLE ALLURE CÉLESTE NECKLACE IN 18K WHITE GOLD* AND DIAMONDS, WITH A 55.55-CARAT OVAL-CUT SAPPHIRE.

chanel.com

THE NEW 1932 COLLECTION CELEBRATES THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIJOUX DE DIAMANTS COLLECTION, CREATED IN 1932 BY GABRIELLE CHANEL.

FINE JEWELRY

Used by permission of the Jack Kerouac Estate and The Wylie Agency, LLC.

dior.com - 800.929.dior (3467)

LA SCULPTURE WWW.MAISON-ALAIA.COM

6 Place Vendôme

Paris

repossi.com

davidyurman.com

888 dyurman

Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Published by Gagosian Media

Associate Editor Gillian Jakab

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Text Editor David Frankel

Associate Publisher, Lifestyle Priya Nat

Online Editor Jennifer Knox White Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Online Layouts Andie Trainer Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio Covers Andreas Gursky Takashi Murakami

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard Distributed by Magazine Heaven Distribution Manager Alexandra Samaras Prepress DL Imaging Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors Wyatt Allgeier Michael Auping Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda Dodie Bellamy Venita Blackburn Derek Blasberg Louise Bonnet Richard Calvocoressi Rebecca Cammisa Aria Darcella Max Dax Jean Dykstra Fiona Alison Duncan Jill Feldman Theaster Gates Salomé Gómez-Upegui Andreas Gursky Jeff Henrikson Nalo Hopkinson Gillian Jakab Alison McDonald Pieter Mulier Takashi Murakami Hans Ulrich Obrist Francine Prose Julian Rose Mary Rozell RTFKT Jenny Schlenzka Alexandria Smith Pat Steir Sarah Sze Carlos Valladares Anne Waldman

Thanks Karrie Adamany Pauline Agostini Kazim Ali Bechet Allen Richard Alwyn Fisher Julia Arena Chris Berkery Priya Bhatnagar Sabina Bokhari Yuko Burtless Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Vittoria Ciaraldi Nicole Counts Tiffany Davis Andrew Fabricant Kate Fernandez-Lupino Mark Francis Hallie Freer Brett Garde Callie Garnett Jean Garnett Emma German Lauren Gioia Darlina Goldak Agostino Guerra Freja Harrell Jackson Howard Delphine Huisinga Sarah Jones Flavin Judd Rainer Judd Raphael Lepine Vera Lutter

Kelly M. Quinn Lauren Mahony Hannah Marshall Avery McDonald Rob McKeever Olivia Mull Caitlin Murray Alexis Myre Louise Neri Ashley Overbeek Kathy Paciello Stefan Ratibor Angeline Rodriguez Nancy Rubins Antwaun Sargent Denise Shannon Yayoi Shionoiri Diallo Simon-Ponte Nick Simunovic Micol Spinazzi Jessica Steele Natasha Turk Louis Vaccara Andrea Walsh Mary Weatherford Benedict Winkler Penny Yeung Katharine Zarrella Opposite page: Alexandria Smith, Here comes the sun, 2021, mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm) © Alexandria Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Richard Calvocoressi

Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. He has served as a curator at Tate, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and director of the Henry Moore Foundation. He joined Gagosian in 2015. Calvocoressi’s Georg Baselitz was published by Thames & Hudson in May 2021.

Salomé Gómez-Upegui is a Colombian-American writer and creative consultant based in Miami. She writes about art, gender, social justice, and climate change for a wide range of publications, and is the author of the book Feminista Por Accidente (Ariel, 2021).

Takashi Murakami Takashi Murakami earned a PhD from the Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Fine Arts. He began exhibiting his work while still at the university and in 1996 established the Hiropon Factory studio (today Kaikai Kiki) to produce it. In addition to making and marketing Murakami’s art and related work, Kaikai Kiki functions as a supportive environment for fostering emerging artists. With the curation of the 2000 Superflat exhibition, Murakami advanced the Superflat theory of Japanese art. He has exhibited widely both in Japan and overseas. Photo: Claire Dorn

Fiona Alison Duncan Fiona Alison Duncan is a Canadian-American author and organizer. She is the founder of Hard to Read, a literary social practice. Duncan’s debut novel, Exquisite Mariposa (Soft Skull Press), won a 2020 Lambda Award. She is currently developing a narrative biography and critical study of the transdisciplinary American artist Pippa Garner.

RTFKT RTFKT is a creator-led organization that uses the latest in game engines, NFTs, blockchain authentication, and augmented reality, combined with manufacturing expertise, to create one-of-a-kind sneakers and digital artifacts.

Jeff Henrikson Jeff Henrikson is a New York City– based photographer whose work focuses on portraiture and revolves around the eclectic worlds of art, fashion, and music. He has contributed to many publications including W, Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue, and A Magazine Curated By. Photo: Daniel Arnold

Andreas Gursky Whether working from nature or from cities, crowds, and arrays of commercial products, Andreas Gursky makes existing elements into new worlds. Constructed tableaux based on methodical observation, his large-format, high-definition photographs privilege neither foreground nor background, with hyperreal results.

Jenny Schlenzka Jenny Schlenzka is the executive artistic director at Performance Space New York. As a curator she specializes in time-based media and performance. In the past she worked at MoMA PS1 and in the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Max Dax Max Dax is a German writer who investigates art, music, and pop culture. As editor-in-chief of the magazines Alert, Spex, and Electronic Beats, Dax has shaped pop journalism in Germany for more than three decades. He curated the recent museum shows Hyper! A Journey into Art and Music in Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen (2019) and Black Album/White Cube in Rotterdam’s Kunsthal (2020). As a musician, Dax is an active member of both the band Brandt Brauer Dax Frick and the art/ music collective LAWBF. Together with Luci Lux, he runs the Santa Lucia Gallery of Conversations, Berlin. His first novel, Dissonanz, was published in the spring of 2021.

Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda is currently the Head of Community Access and Inclusion at Performance Space New York. Her main interests lie in the intersection between art and social justice, with an emphasis on the empowerment and inclusion of underrepresented communities in the cultural sector.

Venita Blackburn Venita Blackburn’s writing has appeared in thenewyorker.com, Harper’s, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, and other publications. The winner of the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017, she is the founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative-writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl, was published in the fall of 2021. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Gillian Jakab Gillian Jakab is associate editor of the Gagosian Quarterly and, since 2016, the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

Aria Darcella

Michael Auping

Aria Darcella is a fashion and culture writer based in New York. Photo: Zachary Headapohl

Michael Auping is an independent curator and art historian. He is well-known for his in-depth interviews with artists. His book 40 Years: Just Talking About Art (Prestel Munich) includes interviews with some of the most important artists of our time, including, among others, Lucian Freud, Robert Irwin, Agnes Martin, and Frank Stella.

Mary Rozell

Carlos Valladares

Mary Rozell is the global head of the UBS Art Collection. An art lawyer with a master’s in modern art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, she was formerly director of art business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She is the author of The Art Collector’s Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Acquiring and Owning Art (Lund Humphries, 2020).

Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, programmer, journalist, and video essayist from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford and began his PhD in History of Art and Film and Media Studies at Yale University in the fall of 2019. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Jill Feldman

Rebecca Cammisa

Jill Feldman is a director at Gagosian. She lives and works in New York City.

Rebecca Cammisa is a two-time-Oscar-nominated and Emmy Award–winning filmmaker. Her first feature film, Sister Helen, won the 2002 Sundance Film Festival’s Documentary Directing Award. Cammisa won a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her next film, Atomic Homefront, which received a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Film Grant.

Alexandria Smith Alexandria Smith is a mixed-media visual artist based in London and New York. Her work interweaves memory, autobiography, and history to explore the complexities of Black identity and its relationship to the body. Photo: © Amoroso Films

Nalo Hopkinson Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica in 1960. Her first published short story, “A Habit of Waste,” appeared in 1995 in the Canadian feminist journal A Room of One’s Own. In 1997 she received the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, leading to the publication of her novel Brown Girl in the Ring the following year. She has published six novels, numerous short stories, and comics in DC’s “Sandman” universe. In 2018, the Eagle-Con convention gave her the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award in recognition of her contributions to science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. In 2020, Science Fiction Writers of America made her its thirty-seventh Damon Knight Memorial “Grand Master,” a lifetime-achievement award in recognition of her writing, teaching, and mentorship.

Pat Steir With a storied career spanning more than five decades, Pat Steir is a trailblazing presence in contemporary painting. She was one of the relatively few women who came to prominence in the New York art scene of the 1970s, initially pairing iconic images and texts to interrogate the nature of representation. In the mid-1980s, inspired by East Asian art and philosophy, she adopted a looser, more performative approach to painting. Harnessing the forces of gravity and gesture, she developed techniques of pouring, splashing, and brushing thinned paint onto canvas, often working at a monumental scale.

Derek Blasberg Derek Blasberg is a writer, editor, and New York Times best-selling author. In addition to being the executive editor of Gagosian Quarterly, he is the head of fashion and beauty for YouTube. He has been with Gagosian since 2014.

Sarah Sze Sarah Sze’s art utilizes genres as generative frameworks, uniting intricate networks of objects and images across multiple dimensions in sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and video installation. Her works prompt microscopic observation while evoking a macroscopic perspective on the infinite.

Julian Rose Julian Rose is an architect and critic based in New York City. He is working on a book about museum architecture, Architects on the Art Museum, forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press in 2024.

Anne Waldman Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, literary curator, cultural activist, and a founder of both the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, New York, and Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School, Boulder. Her recent books and projects include Trickster Feminism (Penguin, 2018), Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha: Poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha (cotranslated with Sanskrit translator Andrew Schelling; Shambhala, 2020), and the libretto for the opera Black Lodge, which will have a film/stage production at Philadelphia Opera in 2022. She works with the Mexico City artist/activist coalition Rizoma.

Alison McDonald Alison McDonald has been the director of publications at Gagosian since 2002. During her tenure she has worked closely with Larry Gagosian to shape every aspect of the gallery’s extensive publishing program and has personally overseen more than 500 publications dedicated to the gallery’s artists. In 2020, McDonald was included in the Observer’s Arts Power 50.

Louise Bonnet In softly luminous portraits of bulging, distorted figures, Louise Bonnet explores sensations of discomfort and angst to probe the experience of inhabiting a body. Her protagonists—faces and individuality obscured by dense helmets of hair— are more emotional receptacles than people. Engaging in mundane domestic activities such as lying in bed or eating dinner, they appear in impossible contortions, body parts bursting out of scale and proportion. Photo: Lucas Michael

Dodie Bellamy Dodie Bellamy writes genre-bending works that focus on sexuality, politics, and narrative experiment, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. In October 2021, Semiotext(e) simultaneously published her essay collection Bee Reaved and a new edition of her 1998 PoMo vampire novel The Letters of Mina Harker.

Theaster Gates Theaster Gates’s practice traverses an extraordinary range, from collecting to social gathering, architectureand object-making, experimental music and sound, and the ethical and physical reconstruction of civic life. His interdisciplinary fusion of archiving, performance, institution-building, painting, and sculpting is deeply rooted in African-American histories and cultures and revolves around the transformation of objects, edifices, and communities through art and cultural activity. Photo: Chris Strong

Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. He was previously curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell

Francine Prose Francine Prose’s most recent novel is The Vixen (2022). Other books include Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, Reading like a Writer, and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she writes frequently about art. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College.

Jean Dykstra Jean Dykstra is a photography critic and the editor of Photograph magazine. She has contributed to the Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and Broadcast, Pioneer Works’ online magazine, among other publications. She has contributed essays to many books, exhibition catalogues, and monographs.

Andreas

Gursky

On the occasion of an exhibition at Gagosian, New York, from May 5 to June 18, 2022, Max Dax met with Andreas Gursky to speak with the photographer about his new work. Here, they discuss the consequences of the pandemic on certain works, the roles of techno music and art history in Gursky’s art process, and the necessary balance of beauty and honesty in the contemporary. Andreas, your work today increasingly seems to me to be a work of revision. Like Pablo Picasso, who went back through early phases of his work again in his late work, and like Bob Dylan, who constantly rearranges and deconstructs his old songs live on his Neverending Tour, you seem to be working on refinements, clarifications, and variations of earlier images. I think this is clear in Rhein III [Rhine III, 2018], which exists in earlier versions from 1996 and 1999. ANDREAS GURSKY I guess you’re right. The works to be exhibited at Gagosian in New York, especially, refer strongly in part to existing pictures. In total, I’m showing seven previously unpublished large-format works, as well as some works from the last two years. It’s important to me that Politik II [Politics II, 2020] is included. It refers not so much to my early work as to a more recent one, Rückblick [Review], created in 2016. For Politik II I arranged the images of thirteen politicians of the German Bundestag in front of a painting by Ed Ruscha. Only later did I notice that Leonardo da Vinci also painted thirteen people in The Last Supper. But I didn’t intend that analogy. MD Let’s talk about the new work. I’d like to highlight Eisläufer [Ice skaters, 2021], which, for me, recalls your early Dutch-landscape photography. AG The initial photo was taken exactly a year ago. Last February we had a massive cold snap after a flood in Düsseldorf, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The entire floodplains of the Rhine, the Rheinauen, were flooded, and then the cold snap iced them over, along with snowfall. Many Düsseldorfers took advantage of the moment and took walks on the icy Rhine meadows, and I also played ice hockey there with friends. Day by day it got more and more crowded, and I decided to capture this amazing scene in a photo. The finished picture recalls [Pieter] Brueghel, inevitably, but above all it’s a snapshot of that pandemic winter: people are wearing masks and keeping their distance from each other. This is a completely new picture, and it will be shown in New York for the first time, but as you say, it’s in the canon of my early landscape pictures. MD Unlike Brueghel’s paintings, Eisläufer is gigantic in size. AG Yes, it measures 7 by 13 1/2 feet, many times larger than any Brueghel. But the real difference lies elsewhere, in terms of content: the imagery suffers from sickness. On the one hand, people are wearing pandemic masks. On the other hand, on the day I took the photo the snow began to melt, the landscape was in the process of disappearing. The following day the scenery had collapsed because of a sudden warm snap. MD What other works will debut in New York? AG Streif [2021] is very important to me: it shows the Streif downhill ski slope in Kitzbühel, Austria, in January 2020, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic. In earlier years I’d regularly been in MAX DAX

Thailand in January, but that year I finally found myself in Kitzbühel, so I photographed the Streif. The picture shows the slope in long shot. Anyone who has ever been there will immediately recognize the ski track, but parts of the picture are fictitious—I partly re-created the track on the computer. It’s because I missed photographing the Streif year after year that this picture is so close to my heart. It just took me a very, very long time to finally be able to take it. MD Almost all of the images you’ll be exhibiting in New York include portents of a period of upheaval. The terms “climate change” and “the Anthropocene” seem to me to run through the pictures like a red thread. The Streif slope exists not least through the use of snow cannons, an obvious environmental sin. AG Streif shows the hubris of humanity—as, incidentally, did the TV images of the downhill slopes at the 2022 Winter Olympics in China, where snow cannons painted white slopes on anthracite-colored mountains. Whether in Kitzbühel or in Yanqing, all of these tracks are somewhat similar in their iconography: they’re always white ski slopes bordered on their fringes by red track boundaries and featuring a blue-marked inner track. Given their identical structure, we may be able to speak of a visual vocabulary defining these slopes. MD One new work, V&R II [2022]—again a reworking of an earlier work, V&R of 2011—features fashion models on a catwalk. At first glance one might think it falls apart from the group because it shows a fashion show. But in the context of the other pictures, you can read a lot into it. AG The new work is much more stylized than the 2011 picture: it shows only a beige stripe, the catwalk, on a black background, with the models walking on it. The picture is very two-dimensional and therefore also very abstract. Again, I used old material from ten years ago in Paris. MD You probably have a lot of unused photos on your hard drives. AG It often takes me a long time to really get to a picture. I have a lot of photos in my library, and when I take photos, I know that I’m not forced to translate these photos into images immediately. Pictures need time and distance. And I’m patient. I didn’t travel during the pandemic and had the time and leisure to review my archive of images. MD When a photographer presses the shutter, they freeze a moment in time. That’s our idea of the photographer. But you let images rest, bring them out into the daylight years later and recompose them—you turn them into new images that never existed in reality. In this sense, as a photographer and an artist, how do you think about concepts like the past and the present? AG I have to think about that for a moment. Actually, every tense can appear in my pictures. The present is always captured in them. In Eisläufer I don’t just quote Brueghel, that is, the past; the

Previous spread: Andreas Gursky, Salinas, 2021, inkjet print and Diasec, 80 × 160 3⁄8 × 2 ½ inches (203.2 × 407.2 × 6.2 cm) Interior gate, left: Andreas Gursky, Eisläufer, 2021, inkjet print and Diasec, 84 5⁄8 × 160 ¼ × 2 ½ inches (215 × 407 × 6.2 cm) Interior gate, right: Andreas Gursky, Rhein III, 2018, inkjet print and Diasec, 93 5⁄8 × 160 ½ × 2 ½ inches (237.6 × 407.6 × 6.4 cm)

picture needs a clear reference to the present. One could perhaps speak of a sort of dismantling of homage here. With Eisläufer, you can clearly see that it was created in the ’20s of this century; you can even name the year almost exactly, through the people’s masks and clothes. But the compositional aspect transcends time. And of course I take that freedom as an artist—even though I’m working with photography, I fall back on compositional schemes that already exist in art history. In theory there’s a canon of expression that artists fall back on again and again. I don’t believe that as an artist you always have to completely reinvent the wheel— instead, you have to fill it with new life. MD In that sense, when you revisit and rework your images, they’re images about images. And about third parties: if Eisläufer refers to Brueghel, Bauhaus [2020] refers to Ruscha’s gas station pictures and Rhein III refers to Barnett Newman. I’m not the first to see that in your photography. AG Sure. Ruscha, of course, is an artist I admire and always have in the back of my mind. But honestly, when I did Toys ’R’ Us [1999], I hadn’t really discovered Ruscha for myself yet. Only later did I consciously start to refer to him. MD With your pictures in general, but also with the selection of new works in the show, you position yourself as a chronicler of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One of the three pictures in the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank series [2020] shows that bank’s façade, which has a gigantic LED wall mounted on it, in a moment of broadcasting pause. The other two images imagine possible screenings of this LED wall: an image of the umbrella protests in Hong Kong and a series of English-language terms, scraps of words recalling Jenny Holzer’s Truisms [1977–79] but remaining strangely apolitical. AG I do see myself as a chronicler. My pictures try to encapsulate our time. I photographed the Hongkong Shanghai Bank in 1994. Encountering this building again twenty-five years later, I saw that the façade is now completely covered with an LED carpet. They “curate” this LED wall with quite banal narratives: at Easter, for example, they show Easter bunnies, Easter eggs, and so on. So I came up with the idea of displaying my own narratives on this wall. I waited for a moment when the wall briefly glowed a complete monochrome, an orange. This image became my basis for working with the building independently. If I were an installation artist, I might have contacted the bank and asked whether I could contribute to this wall with my own stories, though realistically, of course, I’d never have gotten permission for that idea. For the first step, it was obvious to me to cover the wall with a picture of the umbrella protests, not least because they took place right in front of the building. MD In the second picture the LED wall shows terms like “Romance,” “Vaccine End,” “Goethe Italy,” and “Clicks If.” These text fragments remind me of concrete poetry. But they’re not from Holzer, or are they? AG I met Jenny two years ago in Seoul and l considered asking her to collaborate. But then I said to myself, Come on, try it yourself! I originally wanted to use only words created in the pandemic era, but I soon found that approach too narrow and I opened up the spectrum to other terms. MD In general, what roles do language and typography play in your work? Certainly not as dominant as with Ruscha, but Amazon [2016] makes prominent use of the perseverance slogans

“Work Hard,” “Have Fun,” and “Make History.” AG But those slogans are actually on the wall on-site, I didn’t write them. There are a lot of management slogans like that at Amazon. MD To make your work, you travel constantly around the world. To what extent does travel influence your pictures? AG It used to be more important. I used to use what I found on location much more as a source of inspiration, but during the two years of the pandemic I almost never left my studio, and here in Düsseldorf I have my extensive image archive to draw on. I could keep doing that for a very long time. So I’m no longer dependent on travel, but if I come across an event or a place that captivates me on the Internet or in the media, of course I go there. Unlike Thomas Ruff, who no longer touches the camera, it’s still important to me to take photographs myself. I create my own material, not least because my pictures are so large. I show a great deal of detail in my pictures, so that you can read a lot in them, and you can only do that if you take your own photographs at high resolution. MD In a recent conversation with Jeff Wall, you mentioned that you admired your father for his drawing talent. Is that why you keep approaching painting in your pictures? AG There was definitely a painterly phase, but in all honesty, it’s already over again. In 2012–13 I had an exhibition at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, for which they published my catalogue Bangkok. In the Bangkok images, I addressed painting very strongly, not only in the works themselves but in conversations and interviews. Since then, though, I’ve increasingly gone back to the specifically photographic. Of course the Bangkok pictures are certainly photographs too, clearly showing objects floating in water, but at the same time there’s an obvious and deliberate analogy with Abstract Expressionism. And with that series I felt I’d reached a limit. I didn’t want to cross that line into becoming an abstract stylist, becoming untrustworthy. MD But you moved into the realm of the painterly long before Bangkok. I think again of the Rhein pictures, and also of your untitled pictures of tulip fields in the Netherlands. If you squint a little as you look at those works, you think you see brushstrokes, painted surfaces. AG Exactly—in those works there’s a clear formal similarity to Mark Rothko. But I came to the point in the painterly images where, in the process of editing, I often asked myself how arbitrarily I could and might place image information within the framework of a conceptual dictate. A concrete photograph, on the other hand, is the opposite of arbitrary. MD You say that some of your pictures remind you of the painting of Rothko, Newman, and Ruscha. Do you collect painting? AG Sure, I collect art—sculpture, painting, and of course photography. MD Has being able to look regularly at paintings you’ve acquired changed the way you look at painting? AG Certainly. In my studio, I look every day at a very early black-and-white painting by Gerhard Richter. It’s one of his very few that, because they’re painted gesturally, seem abstract but actually refer to a photographed landscape. It’s basically a gray painting, and in bad light it just looks gray. In bright daylight, though, you see an insane amount of gradation. Every brushstroke is precise and deliberate. 43

What can you tell me about Salinas [2021], another new photograph? It stands out because it really shows beauty—a breathtaking starry sky and a natural spectacle, salt flats. AG That’s probably the most important work for me right now because it may open the door to a new approach, we will see. My family’s second home is on the island of Ibiza, we spend a lot of time there every year. But I’ve found it difficult to find motifs there until I saw this one sunset by Las Salinas. These salinas are natural facilities where seawater is channeled into individual fields where it evaporates and becomes salt. The process was brought to Ibiza by the Phoenicians many centuries ago. So this is an ancient landscape, but an artificial one, and it’s the foreground in my picture. The sun has already set, and over this landscape, which is impressive in itself, a chromatically colored sky opened up one evening. I simply had to photograph it. It wasn’t kitschy; it reminded me of Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert [The Green Ray, 1986]. And after I photographed this surreal image that presented itself to me, it once again lay in the proverbial drawer for two or three years. I actually wondered for a long time whether it was appropriate to compose a simply beautiful image in a time as politically troubled as the one we live in. MD And? AG I searched for a long time for something to transcend this image and place it in the present moment. It hung here in my studio for a long time so I could look at it. I mentioned my conflict with the inherent beauty of the picture to a curator who visited me in the studio once. She said that the picture didn’t need anything more—after all, there are beautiful moments, poetic situations, in our world. That set something in motion in me. But I still wanted to add a detail to the picture, the contrails of two airplanes flying through this natural spectacle. So I started to look at contrails. I learned in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s class [at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf] how to approach motifs systematically. What do contrails actually look like? What is the range here? For weeks I observed and photographed contrails in the sky—and each one looks totally different. I reduced the selection to two variants. One looks like a transparent, jellyfishlike thread. Taken on its own, it’s a completely abstract image, one would never think an airplane had produced it. The other is more tangible, more tactile. It’s like a textured cord. By incorporating a contrail like that into an image of perfect beauty, I’m toying with the tension between sublimity and destruction. We all know that smog can make a sunset look picturesque. To photograph such an image is to encapsulate its beauty while knowing that the balance of this landscape is hanging by a thread and could tip over if environmental destruction continues to advance. In all my images I try to allow both, the threat and destruction but also the beauty. In this way I may also prevent my images from being understood too quickly. A clearly accusatory image with a political message is not my thing, because the image then loses its appeal. It needs a form, a coding. MD As a curator, I have a personal concern with the tension between music and art. So I’m interested in the influence of music in your work. You’ve photographed concerts and raves, but you’ve never photographed Kraftwerk. Wouldn’t that be an obvious next picture of yours? AG Ralf Hütter is my friend and we exchange ideas more or less every day. Occasionally I visit MD

him in the recording studio, but so far no picture has come to mind. Instead, we discovered the Bauhaus distribution center in Krefeld on our bike tours, which led to Bauhaus. MD W hen did music star t to play a role in your work? AG It started around the time of Union Rave. That was the period of acid house, when techno started. Shortly after that I attended the first Mayday rave in Dortmund. MD That picture is dated 1995. AG Yes, but again, the picture was preceded by a phase when the photos were lying around. The Union Rave was a big, influential techno rave at the Philipshalle in Düsseldorf. For long stretches of the ’70s I listened to rock, from Pink Floyd to Jimi Hendrix to the Doors. Then later, psychedelic rock like Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, Can, and Soft Machine. But through photography, and that’s why I love my profession more than anything, I eventually wanted to photograph dance floors. I not only took my first dance floor picture at the Union Rave, I also came into contact with house and techno for the first time. I was immediately struck by it. So afterwards I went to [the] Mayday [rave], where I became friends with [the DJ] WestBam. Through my regular visits to raves, techno began to play an increasingly important role in my life. Exactly twenty-five years ago I met Sven Väth in Thailand, and he still has a significant influence on my taste in music today. MD Techno music essentially follows one rule: same but different. Techno tracks follow strict formal guidelines, but within those guidelines the microstructures of the tracks change continuously. That understanding can also be applied to the production of art, like a matrix—that’s what I mean when I talk about the invisible influence of music on visual art. That was the theme of my exhibition Hyper! A Journey into Art and Music, at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, in 2019. You participated in the exhibition with a Mayday, a Cocoon, and a Madonna picture. AG I definitely consider musical analogies in the composition of many of my works. You mentioned the tulip photographs earlier—the patterns I laid out the tulip fields in are like the structure of a techno track. It’s a very repetitively structured image, like techno. MD So you translate music into images? AG Yes. Also, when I’m alone in the studio on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I always listen to loud music. On the other days I have my people present, working through whatever needs to be worked on, but on the days between, I have the studio to myself. And as far as music goes, I’m really spoiled. Sven Väth got me on the right track there. By the way, while working on the rave pictures I noticed more and more that I could photograph the dancers either as a densely packed, raving mass or on a less crowded dance floor. In the first case, the images evoke a surging landscape, in which case they fall into the tradition of the German Romantics. But in the second, such as Mayday IV [2000], individual people emerge. You see their clothes and maybe their shoes, and everyone has space around them. There’s always talk around techno music of “deindividualization,” but when I look at my pictures, I see hundreds of individuals, not a collective of the masses.

Opposite: Andreas Gursky, Streif, 2021, inkjet print and Diasec, 120 7⁄8 × 94 1⁄8 × 2 ½ inches (307 × 239 × 6.2 cm) Artwork © Andreas Gursky/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Hans

Ulrich

Obrist’s Questionnaire

Theaster Gates

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the second installment, we are honored to present the artist Theaster Gates , who will be presenting his Black Chapel for the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion in London.

What is your definition of art?

Materialized thought made with intention.

What is the role of titles?

Titles are a second artwork.

What is your unrealized project?

I have so many. I keep thinking about a studio on the ocean where I only draw for myself. There is tea, a volleyball, and a brazier for stews and warmth.

Does money corrupt art?

Money doesn’t corrupt art. People are corrupt. Corruption moves in us. If we are not trading for blankets or lucre, we would trade for notoriety, society pages, or favor. You have to choose to keep a good heart and a healthy sense of why you make. That’s the hard part.

What is your most recent work?

I am making a pavilion for you! Well, for me. Well, for the world. I am making a pavilion in London. Sir David Adjaye and his team supported me with the design. It was a really good process for me to go through. I hope to make many more pavilions.

What role does chance play?

Chance is everything for me. The relationship between chance and time is central to the way I make. I rarely overplan.

21.

What achievements of yours are you especially proud of?

I’m super happy that I became an artist.

10.

Who do you admire most in history?

My mother.

22.

Do you have rituals?

I bathe a lot. When I was young, we didn’t have showers. We only had clawfoot tubs and I came to love the immersion. Now, I try to soak as much as possible and love the traditions of water therapy from around the world.

What keeps you coming back to the studio?

The studio has so much of my DNA in it. It feels like an extension of my dreams, my body, my aspirations. It’s the “me-ness” of the studio that keeps me there. Like a good stretch. I love being with my extended thoughts.

38.

Any miracles lately?

When I talk about the resurrection of buildings and the work that happens as a result of bringing a once dead building to life again, the process feels miraculous. It makes me believe more in our ability to create and participate in miracles.

MARY WEATHERFORD

THE FLAYING OF MARSYAS

Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, an exhibition at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice presents new paintings by Mary Weatherford inspired by Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (1570–76.) Francine Prose traces the development of these works.

f the recent lockdowns and quarantines meant that we saw less art than we ordinarily do, perhaps one consolation was that our longing for art, as longing so often does, made us think about it more. Solitude encouraged baby steps back to first principles and basic questions, for example: what does art do, exactly? It’s hardly a new subject, but our newly available spare time enabled us to have that talk in the privacy of our homes, during sleepless-night conversations with (among others) Van Gogh, Frank O’Hara, Dave Hickey, and Sister Wendy Beckett. This heightened sensitivity to meaning and purpose may be what is meant by the expression “to see with fresh eyes,” a phrase I’d taken too literally, “fresh” as in seafood or lettuce. But what if it meant something closer to the ability to access the pure uncluttered space-alien vision with which David Bowie watches TV in The Man Who Fell to Earth? So what exactly does art do? The most obvious thing that visual art can accomplish is to command our attention. It’s hard to imagine walking into a room in which one of Mary Weatherford’s paintings is installed and not noticing that it’s there, not looking to see what it is that so engages our interest. Clearly, we look at lots of things that arouse our curiosity, for somewhat more understandable reasons. We know why we’re rubbernecking the crash on the highway, we know what emotions we feel, but it’s trickier with art. Its hold on us, and what it evokes in us, is so much more mysterious. With Mary Weatherford’s work, what initially catches our eye are the bold splashes of dark or bright colors that make us rethink our notions of what color is—and isn’t. We’re drawn to the work by

Previous spread: Mary Weatherford, The Flaying of Marsyas—4500 Triphosphor, 2021–22 (detail), Flashe and neon on linen, 93 × 79 inches (236.2 × 200.7 cm). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

Following spread, left: Titian, The Flaying of Marsyas, 1570–76, oil on canvas, 83 × 81 inches (210.8 × 205.7 cm), Archbishopric of Olomouc— Archdiocesan Museum in Kroměříž, Olomouc, Czechia. Photo: © Olomouc Museum of Art, Zdeněk Sodoma

Opposite: Mary Weatherford, The Flaying of Marsyas—Natural White and Satin, 2021–22, Flashe and neon on linen, 93 × 79 inches (236.2 × 200.7 cm). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

Following spread, right: Mary Weatherford, The Flaying of Marsyas—4500 Triphosphor, 2021–22, Flashe and neon on linen, 93 × 79 inches (236.2 × 200.7 cm). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

its willingness to let the material take control, by its ability to stay within certain parameters informed by art history without having to sacrifice the tawdry gorgeousness of neon, by its ability to make us reconcile something as old as the paintings on cave walls and something as (relatively) new as neon. Another basic question: why does visual art make us think about light, an aspect of the visible world that we generally take for granted except at moments—sunsets, the first day of spring, power outages—that refuse to be ignored? One reason Caravaggio affects us so strongly is not only that we know where the light in his paintings is coming from, but that we can almost feel the light seeping inside us, illuminating us from within, warming us as it does so. In much of Weatherford’s work, there are at least two sources of light—one the light that falls on the canvas and one in the glowing neon tube that crosses its surface. Her paintings say to us: you can have color, you can have light, literally and metaphorically, separately and together. You can have darkness and light. Weatherford’s work can send us down one of those seductive and informative rabbit holes with which the Internet is pitted: the history of neon light. In 1902, a French company, Air Liquide, tried unsuccessfully to market these tubes of gas for domestic lighting, but the brilliant red glow that the gas emitted failed to appeal to homeowners. Industry and the advertising business were quicker to see its potential. In 1923, a Packard dealership lit up the skies of Los Angeles with two large neon signs that attracted attention—and sold cars. For Weatherford, the story of neon is the story of modernism in America; it came from Paris, skipped New York, and went straight to California, which

happens to be where the artist lives. It was in Bakersfield, she says, a town not often celebrated for much else, that she first understood the potential and fell in love with those thrilling corridors of light. Her work takes its cues from cave painting, from the Italian Renaissance, from Mesoamerican art, from Goya and Picasso, but the neon reminds us: Art is timeless, beyond nationality, but the fact is that we are here and now and in the United States. Weatherford’s new paintings, slated to be exhibited at the Palazzo Grimani, Venice, to coincide with the Venice Biennale, reinterpret the compelling and endlessly relevant myth of Apollo and Marsyas. Among all the violent, unjust, and punitive Greek legends, it is among the most extreme. The satyr Marsyas, the teacher of Orpheus and a talented musician whose instrument is the flute, challenges Apollo, the god of music, to a contest. Which of them is the more skilled and gifted artist? It’s agreed that the loser will submit to any punishment that the winner can devise. The Muses are appointed (or volunteer) to judge. Marsyas loses, having failed to realize that the god could sing and play the lute at the same time, whereas the satyr’s instrument prevented him from doing both. His punishment is swift and vicious. Tied to a pine tree, he is flayed, and (in some versions) his hide is repurposed as a wineskin. In Zbigniew Herbert’s great poem “Apollo and Marsyas” (1957), the satyr’s cry of agony is itself a kind of music, and the leaves of the tree to which he is tied turn white in the wake of his death. In general, myths privilege magic over logic, yet this one may strike us as particularly illogical. Why would the satyr agree to such a risky bargain? Why is his punishment so extreme? Others have suffered for excessive hubris, for insulting or thwarting the gods, or for rejecting their sexual advances. Guilty of stealing fire from them, Prometheus is chained to a rock and doomed to have his liver devoured by an eagle, a torture repeated daily for

eternity. But mostly these transgressors’ sentences involve transformation rather than torture; being turned into a calf or a flower surely seems preferable to having one’s skin removed in strips. Yet like so many mystifying narratives, the myth continues to fascinate us. Is it warning us that art cannot save us? Is it reminding us that artistic talent doesn’t necessarily increase our reserves of moderation, forgiveness, and compassion? Is it telling us that—to paraphrase the last words that Ovid has Marsyas cry out—a human life is worth more than a flute—the classics’ answer to the question (Moral Philosophy 101) of whether the masterpiece or the old woman should be rescued from the burning museum? The mystery—and the drama—of the myth inspired Titian, whose painting The Flaying of Marsyas (1570–76) provided a more direct inspiration for Weatherford’s new work: a fittingly Venetian source for paintings destined for exhibition in Venice. Titian has never failed to speak to us, but his voice—amplified by the recent exhibition of his mythological paintings at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—has never seemed louder or more clear. Maybe it’s because these paintings are so violent, because they find such ineffable beauty amid the disorder and chaos that we feel so strongly, closing in around us, at the present moment. It’s hardly coincidence that although Weatherford saw the Titian painting in a show at Rome’s Quirinale in 2013, she filed away the idea then, waiting to begin work on these paintings until January 7, 2021, the day after we watched bloodlust—that Apollo is satisfying—erupt in our nation’s capital. Lucian Freud described Titian’s mythological scenes as possessing the “little bit of poison” that every great painting requires. He speculated that the poison in the paintings may be “a sense of mortality.” But if Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (both 1556–59) possess that drop of poison—the venom of mortality—The Flaying of

Marysas strikes us as having been steeped in it. The painting is the scream that Herbert transmuted into song. Dating from the 1570s, it is one of Titian’s last works, painted in his old age, when we can assume that mortality would likely have been at least intermittently on his mind. I can’t think of another painting that so brilliantly depicts the ways in which horror can exist in the midst of great beauty. Hanging upside down, the dying Marsyas cleaves the painting down the middle. He’s half man, half meat. But Apollo, crouched in the lower-right-hand corner as he painstakingly goes about the work of flaying Marsyas, looks so pretty, so cherubic in his laurel wreath and blond curls, we can hardly believe that he is the same deity who ordered this grisly execution. It’s a party, a social event. A cute little dog is licking up Marsyas’s blood. What a treat! There’s even live music: an angelic creature is playing the violin. There are spectators, among them a child. The old man watching the execution is said to be Titian’s self-portrait. The paintings in Weatherford’s series The Flaying of Marsyas examine the ways in which time has worked on Marsyas and on Titian. The story is still in there, hidden within these new works, but we have to search for it. If we look long and hard enough, or, alternately, if we let our eyes drift out of focus, the little dog will pop out at you, and look! There’s Apollo, over there. Another thing that art can do is make you see something that you didn’t see a minute ago. It’s a primal pleasure when something comes into focus. Weatherford has credited, among her influences, a 2009 show at the Grand Palais, Paris, Une image peut en cacher une autre (One image may hide another), a major exhibition of works containing hidden images, from the faces Arcimboldo constructed from fruit and vegetables in the sixteenth century to the bodies that emerge from Edgar Degas’s Normandy landscapes. I remember being told, probably in college, that you weren’t

supposed to see things in, say, a Jackson Pollock. But Weatherford’s work makes you think: why not? Isn’t it a human impulse to try and find something concealed inside something else? And why should we deny that in the service of art? How many of us—I’m including myself—can recall the profound and joyful shock of first seeing, as children, the vintage trompe l’oeil print of the two fashionable ladies at tea (or are they sipping ice cream sodas?) that, on second glance, reveals the skull at its center. Speaking of Caravaggio’s light, the color of these paintings recalls the vast expanse of darkness at the top of his Burial of Saint Lucy (1608), a chasm of brown that seems lit from within. Weatherford speaks of warm earth tones, and they’re certainly here, but one doesn’t evoke The Flaying of Marsyas and go toward browns and deep reds without having the viewer think, as Titian so clearly thought, about the flesh beneath the fragile and terrifyingly vulnerable protection of skin. I suppose you could say these are dark paintings. I suppose you could say that it’s a dark moment. As I write this, war is raging in Ukraine, and as we watch it, in our homes, on television, each of us becomes a version of Titian’s self-portrait: a spectator at a tragedy. Weatherford’s works call to mind Goya’s black paintings, Picasso’s Guernica, and of course the Titian. Complicated, cautionary, dark, they nonetheless make us grateful that art exists, that artists have been able to create something out of our bleakest moments. They make us glad that there are artists making something, trying to say something, attempting to give us pleasure and at the same time remind us that this is life, in all its horror and violence, and in all its beauty and grace. Among the things that art can do is to remind us of something we need to keep in mind: that human beings can not only destroy but create, and that those creations are, as time has shown, what (we can only hope) will survive and endure.

Mary Weatherford, The Flaying of Marsyas—3500 Spectra, 2021–22, Flashe and neon on linen, 112 × 99 inches (284.5 × 251.5 cm). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio Artwork © Mary Weatherford

Constellation Necklace, 18K gold and blue topaz. judygeib.com

FASHION AND ART Pieter Mulier, creative director of Alaïa, presented his second collection for the legendary house in Paris this past January. After the presentation, Mulier spoke with Derek Blasberg about the show’s inspirations, including a series of ceramics by Pablo Picasso, and about his profound reverence for the intimacy and artistry of the atelier.

PART 10: PIETER MULIER

Derek Blasberg: I’m sad I missed your first collection, in the summer of 2021. But I have a good excuse: my twins had just been born.

PM: He was. It was all about proportion. I thought it was beautiful to link the two.

Pieter Mulier: That is a good excuse.

DB: Is it typical for you to have an art-world reference in your creative process?

DB: But I watched the show online and I thought it was incredible. How was it for you? PM: I was very stressed, but I wasn’t afraid, and that combination was a good thing. Actually, the first collection was easy because it was about putting the Alaïa codes back on the map. The second collection was more difficult. DB: That’s the one that was presented in January of 2022. Why more difficult? PM: Because I want to slowly build a new creative map. So I began to install new codes, and what I’ll want to say, and then there’ll be more in the third collection. DB: This is how you slowly inject yourself into the house of Alaïa. PM: Yes. And it will come gradually, the way everything does in this house. Everything takes time and is built on a creative map. But after that second show I was dead. DB: [Laughs] PM: I was really dead. We’re such a small house. I have a studio of only three people, three creative people who do everything. DB: That’s only six hands! PM: The size of the atelier is also its beauty. This is why I came here, because it’s small, it’s human, it has relevance to it. Honestly, after the initial waves of covid, and after [my jobs at Calvin Klein and Christian Dior, both working with Raf Simons], I was actually ready to say goodbye to fashion. I was like, Okay, it doesn’t interest me anymore. I mean, you must think the same thing sometimes, that this industry has became a circus, blah, blah. It’s changed so much in the last five years.

PM: Yes. In the new collection, all the colorways are based on Sarah Lucas sculptures. But I’m not like my colleagues who do something identical to a reference. I don’t love that, when fashion does something so— DB: Literal. PM: Exactly. With Picasso it makes sense. It was also the only way we could do it with the Picasso estate, to make it as close as possible to the artwork. I thought about it for a long time. The ceramics are very elongated, so the interesting part of the project [for the estate] was to mix his vision on a real body, a feminine body. DB: I know you from your work before Alaïa, of course, including at Dior and Calvin Klein. Is your work with Picasso and Lucas and any other art influences a departure? Or something you’ve done in previous roles? PM: I often did it with Raf at Dior, especially with Sterling Ruby. But I was never the boss then, I was working for someone who did it, and actually did it well. But I was educated about art through fashion, I discovered art through fashion. I knew art a little bit, but from the moment I worked in fashion, art was always the world that makes us dream, the world where everything is possible, whereas in fashion we think nothing is possible. Artists have full freedom and can do whatever they want. DB: I love that idea! In art, you can do something miniature or you can do a mural or a sculpture. Whereas in fashion, you need to be able to put it on a rack, or on a person. It’s harder to dream beyond the body. PM: Yes, we’re physically limited, but also conceptually limited. Because at the base of everything, there’s turnover— we need to sell something. Artists also have to sell something, eventually, but they have the luxury of this romantic view of what an artist should be.

DB: Absolutely. But what else am I going to do? Ha! DB: Would you want that view? PM: When [Richemont, the owners of Alaïa] called me, I was like, Okay, at least there’s something relevant for me to do. It’s both one of the biggest and one of the smallest houses, and it has so much to say. That’s why I like it here: it’s human and we touch everything. DB: In these conversations with fashion people we inevitably talk about the relationship between fashion and art. Your designs are inspired by Pablo Picasso’s ceramics this season—talk to me about how you landed on Picasso. PM: It started two years ago. To be honest, I wanted to do it even before I signed the contract to work here. [In preparing for the job] I designed a full runway collection and I had at least ten silhouettes based on Picasso. The ceramics that we translated were in it because I always thought they were very Alaïa. Very Alaïa. Alaïa talks about silhouettes, it talks about feminine beauty, and there’s a roughness to it. In a lot of people’s minds, it’s like this übergoddess thing—there’s always a pagan quality to it, this rough vision of what feminine beauty is. And Picasso flushed that out, these impossible silhouettes that he built around bottles. For me, it’s about sculpture, and Alaïa is a sculptor. The biggest sculptor in fashion. DB: For sure. 60

PM: I don’t know. It’s quite a romantic view. I think it’s rare to be as free as that. But in a way, I have it here. Alaïa is a house with its own rules. DB: Azzedine never did anything according to schedule, and he had his own retail strategy. PM: We work with no merchandisers whatsoever. Although financial strategy is important, we don’t talk about it because it’s part of the DNA of the house. I’m not saying we’re creating art, but the house is built more like an artist’s studio than a fashion house. Which is actually quite interesting. DB: It’s funny you say that because I was lucky enough to go to Mr. Alaïa’s house a couple of times when he was still alive, and he had more artists in there than fashion people! There would be Julian Schnabel, or Francesco Clemente, or— PM: Yes! Julian was actually here yesterday. Azzedine was obsessed with everything creative. Also, he worked quite alone. It was one person—although he had a small atelier around him, everything came from his hand. He had obsessions the way an artist has obsessions with certain things.

Opening spread: Pieter Mulier. Photo: © Paolo Roversi, courtesy Alaïa Previous spread, left: Pablo Picasso, Vase, Femme à la mantille, 1949, white clay with engobe colors, 18 ½ × 5 × 3 ¾ inches (47 × 12.5 × 9.5 cm), Musée National Picasso, Paris © Succession Picasso 2022/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Adrien Didierjean © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York Previous spread, right: Alaïa Fall/Winter 2022 Prêt-à-porter. Photo: courtesy Alaïa Opposite: Alaïa Fall/Winter 2022 Prêt-à-porter. Photo: courtesy Alaïa This page: Pablo Picasso, Vase: Femme, 1949, white clay, turned and modeled, 18 ¾ × 6 ½ × 4 3⁄8 inches (47.5 × 16.5 × 11 cm), Musée National Picasso, Paris © Succession Picasso 2022/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: B. Hatala © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

DB: I love that Schnabel still comes over. I guess artists are still intrigued by what’s happening at Alaïa, right? PM: They still come, which I love. They still come to the atelier, to the fitting rooms. That’s very new to me, because normally a fitting room is behind closed doors. Here that’s not the case— people come, people go, and I quite like it. It feels more like a Bauhaus thing than a pretentious experience. I didn’t know Azzedine but I think that’s what he liked too, being inspired by everyone during dinners and lunches. DB: What’s fascinating about Alaïa is that so many people were close friends in his life, and they didn’t all speak the same language. Alaïa didn’t speak English, and so many of his friends—Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour—also don’t speak French. But they considered him a family member and a confidant. PM: They would go on vacation together. I’ve heard stories that Peter Brant, another of Azzedine’s great friends, would go to galleries and art fairs in Paris with him, and they’d spend the whole afternoon without saying a word to each other. Their shared language was creativity. DB: Beyond! PM: It’s another way of expressing creative souls. DB: Did Azzedine call himself an artist? Would you call him an artist? PM: I wouldn’t. There’s an artistry to fashion but I myself don’t think it’s art. Azzedine’s clothes are really like sculptures if you’re in front of them, but I don’t think they’re art, no. DB: I’ve seen many exhibitions that treat his designs like art in the gallery space attached to the Alaïa atelier. PM: Completely. And I think he saw the exhibitions like exhibitions of sculpture. DB: Are there still people in the studio who worked with Azzedine? How has it been to work among those people? Because it’s like you’ve entered an artist’s studio, isn’t it? PM: It is like that. They all stayed, I work with the same team as Azzedine. They’re all here. I came alone, I didn’t bring anyone.

so important because they’ve been here since the beginning. We work with some Italian craftsmen that have been our partners since 1981. DB: Wow. PM: Another woman I work with often is almost eighty-five. She still works every day with us. It feels like a family. A Bauhaus family, perhaps. And everybody has something to say. When I joined, I just wanted to be one of them. I really have this idea that I’m not the most important thing at Alaïa. DB: That’s not what the creative directors of most fashion houses say! PM: No, but I really think it. The name’s more important than anything else. I’ve been here nearly a year and a half now, and it really, really works. It’s just another way to do fashion. DB: Do you remember the first time you ever saw an Alaïa piece? PM: Yes, very well. I saw my first Alaïa exhibition in Groningen in the north of Holland, in the famous Mendini museum. DB: Did you ever think maybe one day you’d work with the man who designed it? PM: Ha, absolutely not. But I remember being blown away by the design. DB: What did you think when Richemont called you about the job? PM: I had to think twice. I was like, “Who is this?” And they said, “I’m the CEO of Alaïa.” I said, “I’m sorry? Who?” DB: Did you think it was a prank call? PM: Yeah, could have been. DB: Another thing I admire about Azzedine is that he maintained his own rhythm. We all know there’s this fast pace in fashion. It’s seasonal, four shows a year, or eight shows a year. But Azzedine, like artists, would do a show when he had something he wanted to show. PM: Which is so beautiful if you think about it. Azzedine could do that because he had that force. We’re going to keep that pace of twice a year, because that way you can think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. We’re not going to do four, we’re not going to do six. It stays two. So far, after a year, we thought we had something to show. And we’re going to maybe show differently from next season on. DB: I’m excited to see what you do next. I’m a fan of Azzedine’s and I’m a fan of yours, so it’s exciting to see everything you’re working on. PM: I had the first fitting for the new collection today and I was very excited about it. You know, it’s a difficult time now for fashion. With everything going on in the world, you have to think twice about what you want to say. It’s not that easy now to be creative. DB: It was a surreal juxtaposition to be in Milan when the war in Ukraine began. Kiev didn’t seem that far away.

DB: That’s not typical, is it? PM: No, but I quite like it. I wouldn’t have done it that way in another house, but here I wanted to come alone because it’s its own world. I see it more as a collective than something else. The ateliers we work with here, all of our partners, are

PM: I can imagine it was. If you think about a presentation or a show, the question for us is really, Is it relevant, what you want to say? If you say something, it has to mean something. And that’s the beauty of this house.

Bridging the digital and the physical realms, the three-part presentation of paintings and sculptures that make up Takashi Murakami: An Arrow through History at Gagosian, New York, builds on the ongoing collaboration between the artist and RTFKT Studios. Here, Murakami and the RTFKT team explain the collaborative process, the necessity of cognitive revolution, the metaverse, and the future of art to the Quarterly’s Wyatt Allgeier.

Wyatt Allgeier How did you get introduced and start working together? RTFKT We’ve all been huge fans of Takashi-san. He’s been a part of our history since day one, even before we officially started RTFKT. When the three of us met, he was the artist we wrote down in our “dream to work with” list. Then one day we saw that Takashi was following us on Instagram. This was when we were launching our Punks sneakers project. We immediately sent him a message, telling him we loved him and his art and that we’d love to do something together one day. This was done mostly via emojis in our DMs. Takashi Murakami My awakening to the metaverse happened in the summer of 2020, the first year of the pandemic, when I saw the way my children interact with the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. One day they were watching some fireworks display within the game while talking on Zoom with their school friends (whom they could no longer meet in person), admiring wholeheartedly how beautiful it was. I saw the reality of our shifting values when I realized that these children could see beauty within a small video-game screen. This experience was similar to my own when I first encountered contemporary art, at the age of twenty-six: I was shocked by the gap between what you saw and the concept, and I realized that once I understood the context behind the gap, the artworks took on an entirely different appearance. I wanted to roar in excitement. So I simplistically decided to make a game, thinking it shouldn’t be too hard to make one in the style and level of the Tamagotchi game. I looked for a developer and found Yoshihisa Hashimoto. One day during a development meeting, Hashimoto-san said, “Have you seen the craziness around NFT art at the auctions?” He gushed about the Beeple auction and related news, including CryptoPunks, CryptoCats, and, yes, RTFKT: “They’re making AR sneakers! Doesn’t that connect to the kinds of things you did with ComplexCon?” Then he went back to the subject of our Tamagotchi-style game, but six months or so later, RTFKT reached out to me for some reason, proposing a collaboration. I was totally taken by surprise. The tone of their message was so frank and carefree, typical of energetic young people, so I thought it could be a lot of fun and decided to join them. RTFKT A couple of months later, while working on our Clone X project—a series of NFT avatars conceived as three-dimensional figures bearing distinctive motifs—we

thought we should ask Takashi if he’d like to be a part of it. We DM’d him, again on Instagram, and then got on a legendary call where he showed us around his amazing studio and we agreed that we could do something incredible together. Then we just got to work! TM I kept sending images according to RTFKT’s requests and ideas. They were creating the Clone X images using a quite realistic type of modeling with 3D CG, and I happened to be working on sculpture using 3D files, so we managed to exchange files and data quite smoothly. WA RTFKT, what were some of your initial ideas once it was clear that the collaboration was picking up steam? RTFKT We had a series of realizations right at the start. One, it’s great to meet your idols, because they may be even more talented and cooler than you expected. Two, Takashi’s work is structured by a methodology and artistry that aren’t limited to any one medium. He gets the culture, and understood very early on that we were in the middle of a revolution. Three, it doesn’t matter where in the world you are or what ecosystem you’re a part of, you can merge worlds and invent with no limits if you’re good at what you do and have a vision. TM It’s true. I’ve discussed the project with RTFKT mainly on Zoom. In fact I’ve yet to meet them in person. Everyone from their team attended our calls from different locations— Costa Rica, Paris, Utah, Dubai. . . . I saw how they managed to execute a very complex project while scattered across the world, and was shocked by the difference between their reality and mine. Truly, I was made to acknowledge the generational difference. WA Can you explain what a digital artifact is? What distinguishes it from other endeavors you both engage in?

RTFKT In video games, we grew up with the term “artifacts.” These are the items you find at the end of quests, or loot in your explorations, and use to customize your character and level up. We’ve been seeing our releases as cultural artifacts and collectibles that help shape your identity in the metaverse and build on your story. The NFT is the medium we’ve been waiting for to replicate these items we’ve collected in video games all our life. Hence the name RTFKT. TM When I work on creative production, I make no distinction between digital and analog. I’m always working in the context of contemporary art, and that context is all about whether I can be involved in events that manage to trigger a cognitive revolution. This may be a little off topic, but let me give you two such examples in my life: I had an experience where my existing values collapsed because of Jeff Koons’s work. When I visited New York for the first time, in the late ’80s, I saw the porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles [1988] and other works and didn’t at all get why people would spend so much money on something in such poor taste. But then I read later in an art magazine how the show had been a cutting-edge simulationist exhibition, and when I looked at the work again, I felt as though I totally got it. It made me question my ability to make my own judgment, and I became increasingly absorbed in contemporary art. Another time this happened was with coffee. About a decade ago, Fuglen Coffee from Norway made its way to Japan and I heard it was delicious, so I went to try it. I almost spat out my first sip of cappuccino, it tasted to me like orange juice. The barista told me that I was totally right, because coffee beans are actually fruits; only old beans are roasted dark, the way I was used to drinking coffee. Fresh coffee is fruit, he told me. So I drank again, my consciousness restructured itself, and I felt I’d never tasted such delicious coffee. In both cases, my brain was awakened in a way. And it doesn’t matter whether I was just ignorant before, or whether

the knowledge I gained after the first encounter was true— the recognition constitutes the reality. And I think my job as an artist is to somehow expand the cognitive domain in this kind of way. I think what RTFKT has been doing, especially with NFT art, also has to do with cognitive revolution, and with the basic mechanism of how our conceptual brains get activated. Right now we still fuss about whether a product is corporeal, and whether or not we can touch it with our fingers and bodies, but that will soon be a nonissue in the reality of the metaverse. WA How do you distinguish between “art,” “NFTs,” “NFTs that are art,” and digital artifacts? Where do they meet or overlap, where are there gaps? RTFKT Everything overlaps if the base of the project has a bigger vision or view of the world than pure utility. That’s what makes art art. NFT’s are just a new medium for artists to tell their story. It’s a medium that not only allows artists to think of new ways to express their vision, alone or with their community, but also allows anyone to be a collector, or be an artist. Good or bad, it doesn’t matter; it’s not the traditional curators or institutions defining art, it’s the Internet, powered by blockchain and a live, transparent market. The only gap is the time it takes people to understand how overall this is a revolution for art and creativity. The longer you take to get it, the later you’ll be to the party. The NFT medium is made for creators, and empowers the ecosystem as a whole. TM Since RTFKT just discussed the creative side of this question, I’d like to talk about distribution. The most relatable aspect of NFT-art trading, in my own experience, is the concept and method of managing and selling editions. I’ve been offering prints, for example, in editions of 50 to 200, posters in editions of 300 to 1,000, and Sofubi figures in editions of 200 or so for sale in the market. They may then come up in Internet auctions, where, if they’re doing too sloppily, I buy them back, keep them in storage, and sell them again ten years or so later at art fairs or at my store, synching the price with the market value at the time. But in the NFT market there’s an active concept of setting the price with the secondary market in sight. And the speed of trading is very fast, at the level of Internet trading of stocks and cryptocurrencies. That’s because in NFT art, unlike with the art of the offline world, everything is data. I think whether or not an NFT work is completely consumed at that speed will determine its future valuation. 67

WA What’s most interesting to you about this project’s merging of traditional art and this new way of approaching art? RTFKT RTFKT has always been about merging worlds, and Takashi has the same radical vision. It’s two worlds that are born from the same passion but feel like they’re apart. Merging happens when the two worlds start to communicate, work, and learn from each other. While we think NFTs will become the dominant art medium worldwide, broadening art’s reach, all the knowhow and talent of the traditional art world will be more needed than ever. Concepts and curating will become among the most sought-after skills. That’s where AI will start to play a role, too. But it also works in reverse: how do we bring the incredible features of the NFT medium to the traditional world? Could museums be curated by a DAO in the future? Could a Picasso be minted as an NFT and fractionalized so that many collectors could own a small piece of it? Every industry has been disrupted by the Internet except, so far, art, because its market was made by institutions. Art on the Internet was just a file you could right-click-save. NFTs and blockchains are now unlocking thousands of new artists and collectors to make what was a small world into a leading culture for the future. TM I read a review of the 1989 Whitney Biennial, which included Koons and Donald Baechler, and it had a “Worst Ten” list where I think Koons was listed at the top. I thought that was tremendously cool. The fact that his work was criticized as the absolute worst meant that he was exactly the person to tear the era apart, meant that he was utterly right. I admired the mood he established of disgust-inducing poor taste. So with the new paintings and sculptures related to my NFT projects in this show, I’m proud and confident that I was able to create pieces in that context of poor taste and the worst art. About twenty years ago I showed two sculptures, My Lonesome Cowboy and Hiropon, that embodied the twisted

sexuality of the Japanese, and Paul Schimmel, then chief curator at LA MoCA, chose the exhibition for Artforum as one of the best of the year. For the first time since then, I’m confident that I’m managing to create works in the fullest sense of bad taste. The meaning of the Clone X avatar paintings or paintings of Murakami.Flowers may on the surface seem thin compared to that of a rich oil painting, but the point of these works is the very question they ask: are these art? In my studio, we’re being even more sensitive than usual to production quality; we’ve never produced paintings of realistic CG-style images like the Clone X’s, so the process has been extremely difficult. We had to waste over twenty canvases before we managed to make one satisfactory sample. Yet the essence of these works doesn’t reside in their quality—what makes these works art is the questions they pose. WA So if I may be so bold, what is the future of art? RTFKT To make it short: it’s artists taking control and communities forming around art and tokens, forming the equivalent of digital nations. It’s happening right now—we’re all building the foundation in front of everyone’s eyes. TM Since the moment the pandemic started, the landscape of values has changed. I think everything has completely shifted from the offline real world to the online virtual world. Art too must make a major turn in a new direction. Over the past several years, there’s been an increasing need for straightforward, entertainment-minded art, but from here on, I think the abstruse, abstract, outlandish leaps of image that contemporary art originally entailed will make a comeback. That’s because our cognitive zone has changed. Until now, for example, we in the world of art haven’t been able to approach the essence of the game culture that began in the ’70s. But it’s starting to become possible to create a work of art, in raw form, in the way our brains signal while we live in symbiosis with games. WA How do artifacts and art and NFTs function in the metaverse, if at all? What are some future uses for NFT collections in cyber worlds? RTFKT They function the same as in the real world. Collectors display art NFTs, or the artifacts and collectibles to be displayed or worn by your avatars in the future, in their homes or metaverse galleries, like the space pod we created for all our Clone X collectors. We believe that

Traditional art is usually more on the discreet side of collecting, but the anonymity of the Internet allows a mix of both worlds: you can keep who you are secret while making your collection public to the eyes of all, and if you’re the type of collector who wants influence, you can have it. These are the early days and we’ve already seen some of the good and bad effects this can have. Going back to the digital-nation analogy, collectors can play an important role in the ecosystems they’re collecting in. We’re living in a new renaissance.

a lot of our passions, even our sins, will appear primarily in the metaverse—your digital possessions will be more valuable to you than your physical ones, both economically and emotionally. The metaverse will be the place where you do everything you love, more creatively and connectedly. Our vision is that you’ll shift to valuing your IRL life more, becoming more minimalistic, closer to nature, and consuming less. It’s a radical way to think of saving the planet: completely changing the way we live IRL and in the metaverse.

TM Basically, I think the point of an artwork is to provide the opportunity for expanding the cognitive domain. Going forward, I think experiences that can lead us to that kind of expansion, triggers of sorts, will become significant for the art in the metaverse world. As for collections, I think that’s a difficult issue. At the moment I’m trying to pose just that question in my project. For an artist to take an image, construct a contemporary-art context for it in the real world, and transfer it into a handmade piece of artwork involves the dexterity of a chef. But an NFT is also an ingredient for a dish, and you can experience it in different ways depending on how it’s cooked, whether Italian, Chinese, or Japanese kaiseki. This time, I cooked NFTs as a contemporary-artist chef. That’s how I see it. Depending on how you think about or express through an NFT, a variety of different expressions will arise, and depending on what they are, ways of collecting them will also entirely change. WA What are some interesting differences and similarities between collecting traditional art and collecting NFTs? RTFKT The joy of collecting is no different except that everything is faster with NFTs. And knowing a lot of collectors are self-proclaimed art addicts, the addiction will be even harder to curb. But the general culture of collecting, and the relationship between collectors and artists, are very different, since it’s different people who are in play, not traditional art people. NFT-art relationships follow a more Internet-based cultural ethos. Collectors will often speak with the artist, for example, or even sometimes DM the artist during an auction to ask what price he wants. We were shocked the first time that happened to us. Also, for some people collectors are influential authority figures, because of their collection or how they made financial smart bets and moves. Artist are joining the NFT movement faster than collectors are, which makes collectors very much in demand—they’re like Louis XIV, with thousands of artists following them hoping to get their attention. 70

TM What I glimpsed inside myself when I tried collecting Clone X was the madness of gambling. . . . Not that I normally gamble, but it seemed extremely similar to the way dopamine erupts in your brain when you try to buy a work at an auction in person, raising the paddle in your hand. It’s like, Aaaaah! My brain’s exploding! Like a gambling addict, I lost all sense of money, buying Clone after Clone without thinking about the numbers. Then I’d suddenly come to my senses and get alarmed. I’d feel a refreshing sense of malaise, or perhaps despair. I’ve also experienced this sense of euphoria when visiting art fairs. I once went on a shopping spree at famous galleries at Art Basel, and when I got back to Japan, my company’s accountant reprimanded me severely for bringing the company to the brink of bankruptcy. The sense of immorality I felt then was quite similar to what I felt when buying NFTs. Really, the sudden outburst of brain chemicals is no joke. WA When thinking about NFTs, how do you think about stability, and how do you ensure longevity for a project such as this? RTFKT First, the art must speak for itself. A project with bad art, or a concept that doesn’t resonate with the culture, will never have longevity. Second, and this is again one of the key innovations of the NFT, your art isn’t static. It can be updated, like a video game, or can be a key to unlock or

requires working in teams, and they’re sent out into the world as “products,” but RTFKT says without hesitation that they’re generating art, and that’s really stimulating for me. It’s very refreshing that making their work as a team is a given for them. WA Takashi, what has been rewarding about see ing your vision take on these new forms and new modes of communication? provide access to new art or experiences. RTFKT has been building on that, on giving our collectors and supporters utilities. Clone X, for example, being avatars, their first utility is to be able to be used to express yourself on the metaverse. It’s art you can use as your metaverse core identity. True longevity isn’t about the main creator, it’s about the community you build around the project, and how you empower them to build on top of your foundation and become an ecosystem. TM Telling the authentic from the fake in art is really difficult, even at a master-class level of distribution. In the digital world, the difference between people who know the logic of that world and those who don’t will be even more pronounced. Still, the same can be said about appraisals in the real world. In Christopher Nolan’s movie Tenet [2020], the wife of the villain is an appraiser at an auction house who is tricked into authenticating a forged artwork. Even when something is numerically recorded on blockchain, I imagine it’s still possible to tweak the numbers. Ultimately it’s the living brain of a human being that makes the call, and with that comes room for defrauding and whatnot. So although the fact that the data is written on a blockchain may ensure NFTs’ trustworthiness, if the sequences are even just slightly off they become unrecognizable to some of us human beings, and can no longer be guaranteed. But issues of fakes can’t be shaken in old-school art, which are also appraised by humans, so in that sense, in my mind the credibility and security of NFTs and conventional art are at the exact same level. WA RTFKT has a clear and focused aesthetic DNA. What has it been like to collaborate with Murakami and push this aesthetic through the lens of his vision? RTFKT It was genuinely one of the smoothest experiences ever—everything clicked. His vision is so powerful, and is executed to the finest degree, it just worked. Again, Murakami is one of the inspirations on which we built RTFKT, we always dreamed of working with this legend. It seemed like it was meant to be. We can’t wait to continue to merge our visions, aesthetics, and worlds. TM I was greatly interested in the way RTFKT functioned as a group. The fact that the entity generating art was a group made me happy—I’d found a kindred spirit. They’re producing their work as one, from the manager, through the programmer who does the minting, to the visual designer, the concept builder, and more. Making films and games

TM My kids are still young, and the domain they recognize and communicate in has completely changed since before the pandemic. As I saw them witness and experience that change, I grasped in a very real sense that from here on the world will be drastically different. I will be happy if I manage to transform that feeling into art. Look, for example, at how fake news and deep fakes have spread regarding Russia’s war on Ukraine. The shift in the ways we communicate and recognize things has become a huge theme. The pandemic is winding down, the political situation around the world is extremely unstable, and the fear of World War III is becoming increasingly real. This is the time for a major shift in the story of the larger framework of humanity itself, and as I create works that embody that chaos, I keenly feel the fact that I’m alive in such an era. I hope I don’t sound self-congratulatory, but I truly believe that the paintings based on my collaboration with RTFKT, and the body of work based on Murakami.Flowers, revolutionize things. Of course, only the future will tell whether or not that’s true.

Opening spread: Takashi Murakami, CLONE X #59 Harajuku-style Angel, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 39 3⁄8 × 39 3⁄8 inches (100 × 100 cm) Second spread, left to right: Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #0113 Throbbing, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #0085 Smiling Girl, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) Takashi Murakami, CLONE X #15750 Boy Linked with Metaverse, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 39 5⁄8 × 39 5⁄8 inches (100 × 100 cm) CLONE X #5 - CO-FOUNDER CHRIS LE (CLEGFX) Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #0880 Shocked and Dizzy, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #1027 Kyushu Ramen, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm)

Fourth spread, left to right: Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #2614 One-sided Glare, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm)

Third spread, left to right: Takashi Murakami, CLONE X #4725 Innocent Boy Angel, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 39 3⁄8 × 39 3⁄8 inches (100 × 100 cm) Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #1527 Drunk with Draft Beer, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #1947 Headband, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) CLONE X #4 - CO-FOUNDER BENOIT PAGOTTO (BENIT0)

Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #2102 Summer Vacation, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) CLONE X #6 - CO-FOUNDER STEVEN VASILEV (ZAPTIO) Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #3758 Waterfall of Tears, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) Takashi Murakami, Murakami.Flower #4832 Tobacco Pipe Smoke, 2022, acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 23 5⁄8 × 23 5⁄8 inches (60 × 60 cm) Artwork ©︎2022 Takashi Murakami⁄Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

On the occasion of her exhibition of recent paintings in Rome, Pat Steir met with fellow artist Sarah Sze for a free-ranging discussion; they discuss the role of chance and incident in painting, as well as the effects of place, time, and scale. Poet Anne Waldman, longtime friend and collaborator of Steir, composed “What Sky Limit?,” as a special element of this feature.

PAT STEIR

Pat, when I think about your work, my mind goes to Fan Kuan’s Tra ve l e r s a m o n g Mo u n t a i n s a n d Streams [late tenth/early eleventh century], one of my all-time-favorite paintings. Were works such as this important for your own work in any way? PAT STEIR It’s a long journey! In 1978, I started a painting called The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style). I took a vanitas flower painting from Brueghel and divided it into eighty-four sections; in each section I utilized the style of a different artist. I addressed each work of art as a separate thought and painted each of the panels in the style of one of eighty-four artists.

ARAH SZE

Through that, I discovered japonisme, and through japonisme I got to Chinese painting. One thought led me to the next. SS This reminds me of my great-aunt Mai-Mai Sze’s translation of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting [1679–1701], t he fa mous Chinese guide to painting landscape, which I believe you have seen. Does the practice detailed in that book—painting a certain rock over and over again, or making a chrysanthemum with this exact way of using a brushstroke—feel similar to how you work? PS Well, I got there a few ways; John Cage’s thinking, his system for making chaos, was a major influence on me; chance, meditation, and studying,

if not the actual works, then reproductions of the works. And more than that, studying the philosophy that brought artists to their images. SS It’s interesting when observation isn’t about actually engaging with the primary object but is copying an already existing work, like drawing the figure from a sculpture. One is not imitating nature, but rather imitating the human hand imitating nature. In Mei Mei’s book, the instruction creates a meditative process, because the decisions are so whittled down—one can repeat things and find specific, unique differences within that repetition. PS That doesn’t have much to do with me, but it’s a good idea [laughter]. When I’m working, I actually don’t think about anything. John Cage said:

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” So I don’t speak much about my work because there’s nothing to say. I make the work. I’m very influenced by the idea of chance, of accident, by both the process of observing nature and of observing nature through art, and then letting my more or less random process make the thing itself. I try to make paintings without talking too much about them. They’re not abstract and they’re not theater; I think of them as both a picture of a waterfall and the waterfall

itself, because what the viewer sees is what gravity makes, what the weight of the paint makes, on the canvas itself. I like very much that the paintings make themselves. Sometimes I work and then I come back the next day and I marvel at what the paint did. The paint does its work during the night; the weight of the paint and the air in the room make the painting happen. SS As Richard Serra said, work comes out of work, and at a certain point the work starts talking back to me and telling me what to do; it might sound like a cliché, but that’s the thrill in the whole process. And that’s why when people ask me if I’m satisfied with a painting, it’s really the wrong question, since it’s really about that one moment where

you come into the studio and you realize that the materials are telling you what to do. But to return to the ancient art of repetition, of drawing a rock over and over and over again: it’s not so different from what you’re saying in terms of how you clear your mind out, right? But then the question becomes, what is the vessel in which you can create emptiness? PS Yes, repetition is the main point here. When I started painting, I thought of painting as a research project, and I was looking for something that I could find in myself but that was more than myself. So I started with research, first with small images on a big canvas and then with an image of a rose, crossed out in the background, thinking that

Previous spread: Installation view, Pat Steir: Paintings, Gagosian, Rome, March 10–May 7, 2022. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto Opposite: Pat Steir, Roman Rainbow, 2021–22, oil on canvas, 108 × 108 inches (274.3 × 274.3 cm). Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein This page: Pat Steir, Small Rainbow, 2021–22, oil on canvas, 84 × 84 inches (213.4 × 213.4 cm). Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

would make a white painting, or a black painting, if the image was there but crossed out thoroughly enough. So I worked very slowly up to what I’m doing now—for more than fifty years. When I got to where I am now, where the painting makes itself, I thought it was more than me because the painting wandered away; it spoke for itself. I didn’t want to express myself, which is what makes it different from poetry. Poetry is a form of expression. I mean, of course there’s abstract poetry, but my favorites are [Rainer Maria] Rilke and [Constantine] Cavafy. They tell you something—Cavafy clearly tells you about his past, and his thoughts about where he is from the past, and Rilke tells you the same in a different way. But I didn’t want to say anything

[laughs]. So it took me all these years to get to say nothing. SS Can you talk about whether and how nature has impacted your work, given that you had a second studio in Vermont and now on Long Island, overlooking the sea? Is there a difference between working in nature and working in your Chelsea studio, with its view of the Hudson River? PS Working in nature is relatively new for me. Before that, I always felt that I had to work in a city, in a place with no nature—that I couldn’t make paintings that imitated nature in nature, because I’d always be outdone by nature. I’d have a sense of failure because nature itself is so breathtaking. But about fifteen years ago I overcame that feeling in

Vermont. When I was there, I would sit and sketch in the air the birch trees in the snow, all black and white. Winter paintings. SS In that case the work takes on a different feel, because of place, but has the time of the pandemic also been interesting for your work and working process? At the beginning of the pandemic, I was living right next to my paintings, I’d literally wake up in the middle of the night, get up, do a few things on the painting, and go back to sleep. I was integrating making almost seamlessly with the day-to-day household activity. And I loved that, the flow of it becoming blurred into everyday life and having the option to make a move in a work of art at any point in the day or night. It’s a very

This page: Pat Steir, Blue Pour, 2022, oil on canvas, 132 × 60 inches (335.3 × 152.4 cm). Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein Opposite: Pat Steir, Winter Daylight, 2021–22, oil on canvas, 108 × 108 inches (274.3 × 274.3 cm). Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein Artwork © Pat Steir

different way of working and it creates a different kind of work. You told me that when you were in Long Island, for example, you were working on small-format canvases, at least small for you. That was one change, obviously—the big canvases were by necessity relegated to the city studio because of the scale and simply managing them. PS When I was in Long Island at the beginning of the pandemic, I just did drawings. I didn’t do paintings there. And I used to live in my studio too, many years ago now; it was interesting, but I like having the studio separate. I like not having paint on everything. Though you’re right, waking up in the middle of the night and making a change on a painting can be very good, very pleasant. It can be

helpful. But changing my work never really leads to anything. When I change it—I can add to it, but I can’t change it. SS Has that always been the case? PS No, just for the last thirty years [laughter]. SS What happened thirty years ago that changed your work? PS I discovered japonisme, and then I discovered Chinese literati paintings, and then I started to pour paint. When I started to pour paint, there was no return—you can’t unpour it, it’s there. I can start a new one, but I can’t change what I have. Like life. SS Right. Are there particular Chinese paintings that you are tied to, or was it more of a philosophy?

Well, let’s say I generalized the philosophy [laughter]. I like a lot of different theories but I was first attracted to the literati paintings. Which are not the most highly esteemed, but perhaps because I’m a Westerner, they were easier for me to understand. What I like about them is very simple. The painting is five feet tall and there are mountains and water and moon and trees, and then at the bottom you see a monk looking at the moon and he’s half an inch tall, and that’s the landscape. They put him in eternity in the landscape, like how we all fit in. I want to disappear from my art. I hope the viewer will become the monk looking at the moon— the quantum of life. PS

What sky limit?

by Anne Waldman

“never idle sun and moon hurry” Qu Yuan (340 bc –278 bc)

We promise to meet

That is struggle

Sisters on the path

We were always women of precepts

By light, sweet melon moon

How can empty and false endure?

We’re in adjoining houses

How can we be in apocalypse all the time

Yet leagues far away

The real time of imagination

How fast is mind?

Sixth Extinction a Taoist perspective

Poetry would build a house

is a world of opposites and silence

Painting would be the bigger one

Is that it? or destruction

Roof it with lotus with telepathy

In on itself, no fuss but gestures

In your garden together, now

Her brush makes, line consumes

I feel a branch brush a cheek

Its memory for shadow

Clasp your arm

A play, tick o’ life

I grieve not seeing you, it’s too long

Trick that we savor, laugh off

Entangled in struggle

The inner sanctum

And beauty you are not easy

Our world is losing humble life

The struggle for kindness - now distant

How many things nod, turn, goodbye

Fall Equinox 2020–Solstice 2021

Break and disappear?

My hypnogogic love, I’d say so

Laments how many laments

Water crashes over stones

What limit? to tender hearts

Fire burns forests, precipices give way

The shaman queues up medicine

Fall into magma, ash, rescue is moot

Ch’an ritual sings about exile and magic

We always honored time’s measure

Spheres float like bubbles

We looked up often

Trails of chaos to come, all syndicates

Reanimating language its pitch

The time is weak and leaders are infamous

And travelled between clouds that parted

A crucible within the invisible

And when we went way, way up

Like plague upon a vanquished land

Floating our aspiration

Revelations about revelations won’t help

We looked down over them,

Adornments of the past disappear

Sentient beings who could know

Perpetual fog restrains the mind

How the world might wake up at last

Birdsong - hear it? - was that your crimson bird?

As if we were the sun pouring

Your blue? your yellow? speckled?

For the first time

Are we already on the steep cliff, my dove?

Onto writhing life below.

“Anne is one of my closest friends and collaborators. We have worked together many times over the years. I am close to and admire so many poets—Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is another. The American poets of the 1950s are among my favorites, as well as English Romantic poetry. I love reading poetry.” —Pat Steir

Color tests in Pat Steir’s studio, New York, 2021. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

In this new series we look at people who work alongside artists to create new work, the professionals of different kinds—technicians, art historians, curators, other artists— whose efforts make it possible for artists to achieve their most ambitious goals, organize their landmark exhibitions, install their public projects, and overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. As firsthand witnesses, these individuals are often able to take us behind the art-historical currents that flow around a work of art at the edge of coming into being. Earlier this year, Michael Auping unearthed two photographs that he had saved since he was a graduate student—forty-eight years ago—documenting the preparation of a performance that Chris Burden planned for the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Southern California, in 1974. The performance never happened. That said, it almost happened but was abruptly canceled because of the possibility that the museum might burn down, endangering the artist, his audience, and a number of Mark Rothko paintings on site nearby. In this first installment of our new series, Auping gives us a glimpse into the mindset of a young, aggressive, and ambitious artist in the early stages of his career. ALISON MCDONALD Let’s start by setting the scene: it’s

1974 in Southern California. What is the LA art world like at this point? MICHAEL AUPING There was a lot going on in the Southern California art world of the 1970s, but in my young mind there was an aesthetic holy trinity: Ed Ruscha, the father of California Pop, and in my eyes the Jasper Johns of the West; Robert Irwin, a phenomenological guru who trained our eyes to navigate the Light and Space of architecture; and Chris Burden, a young artist who wasn’t looking for light, but rather the psychological and political shadows of people and institutions. AMCD Do you consider Chris’s early performance work a reaction to the Light and Space movement? MA There was an initial backlash to Light and Space, mostly from outside Southern California. The talk—generally from New Yorkers—was that creativity came from an artist’s discomfort with the world. The perception was that Southern California didn’t have this discomfort. The Light and Space movement—which I loved and still do—seemed to be, and in fact was, a pure meditation on perception. There appeared to be no discomfort, only pure seeing. Then along came Chris, who woke us all up from our meditations. You could not ignore his drama and I have no doubt that he was conscious of constituting an assault on Light and Space as a term and a phenomenon. Even then, in the moment, you had glimpses of what was happening. Irwin taught on and off at the University of California, Irvine, when Chris was getting his masters there. It’s easy for me to see now that his grueling

AT THE EDGE CHRIS BURDEN: PRELUDE TO A LOST PERFORMANCE

masters show—which consisted of Five Day Locker Piece [1971], in which he locked himself in one of the school’s small portfolio lockers for five days—was a twisted reaction to Irwin’s and James Turrell’s use of a nasa anechoic chamber to sensitize themselves to space and light. Even then, in his earliest work, you could see that Chris was transforming a widely admired movement into his own personal kind of darkness. AMCD What’s your connection to this moment? Were you a student? MA I was a graduate student in art history at Cal State Long Beach. To support myself I was working part-time at the Newport Harbor Art Museum as an installer/preparator alongside a young photographer, Brian Forrest. The two of us were assigned to assist Chris with the preparations leading up to his performance there. For a young art-history student, it was fascinating to see how Chris could upend what I thought of as a traditional hierarchy, one that put art history at the top, museums second, and artists third. Over the course of two weeks, he flipped that whole hierarchy on its head: Chris was going to be on top, art history second, and the museum third. He created a kind of chaos in the museum that I haven’t experienced since in my years as a museum curator (with the exception of working with Anselm Kiefer, but that’s another story).

How was he able to do that? Can you walk me through the process from your point of view? MA From the beginning, the negotiations between Chris and the museum were fraught with secrecy and tension that gradually built up, to a greater degree than what I now think of as a typical process. There were tensions from both sides, the artist and the museum. To understand that tension, which Chris often generated in his pieces, particularly early on, it’s important to understand the context. Chris always understood and often built his work upon the context of a situation. By 1974, Chris was already internationally infamous. He had already made some of his most controversial works, the most well-known being Shoot [1971], in which he stoically stood at the end of a white gallery and had himself shot by a friend with a .22 caliber rifle. Among other messages, that piece announced early on that Chris would not back down from danger or controversy, even for a museum show. Newport Harbor would have been his first show or performance in a museum. The way Chris thought, he wouldn’t have felt it worthwhile to do anything benign, he had to make a strong statement. It’s hard to describe the psychological uncertainty that Chris could create in those early days among his audience, institutions, and even art-world friends. You either loved him or you hated him. AMCD

Tel l me about t he New por t Ha rbor A r t Museum. I know that much later, in 1997, it became the Orange County Museum of Art. But what was the institution like at that moment in the mid-1970s? MA The Newport Harbor Art Museum had an early history of being on top of the SoCal zeitgeist. There were two curators there at the time, Phyllis Lutjeans and Betty Turnbull. They wanted to be the first museum bold enough to do a Burden piece. These women had a lot of guts. Newport Beach is in Orange County—sailboats, yachts, palm trees, and dichondra lawns. Burden was the perfect artist to scare beachy suburbanites out of their complacency and self-satisfaction. Phyllis was a true renegade and a classic example of how Chris could manipulate your psyche. Two years earlier she’d been at the center of Burden’s TV Hijack: during an interview she was doing with him for a local television station, Chris pulled out a large knife and held it to her throat. He threatened to cut her if the station stopped the live transmission. According to Phyllis, Chris didn’t tell her in advance that he was going to turn the interview into a confrontational performance. When it was all resolved without bloodshed, Phyllis said she didn’t think Chris would have hurt her, but she didn’t seem absolutely sure. Phyllis understood how smart Chris was, but also how twisted. She wanted to do a show at the museum and you could argue that he owed her one. So she brazenly approached him and he said he’d think about it. As it turned out, the performance was as much about prelude as about final act. After some cat and mouse, Chris eventually agreed. Everyone at the museum was excited . . . for a few days. AMCD Then what happened? MA Well, the plot thickened. The museum had just hired a new director, James Byrnes. He wasn’t an expert in contemporary art but he was well versed in Abstract Expressionism. Jim, bless his heart, wasn’t prepared for Chris Burden. Chris’s performances were like guerilla warfare. You never knew when one would happen; they weren’t advertised, you had to be invited, and the mailing list was small, his audiences were small, but intensely loyal. Usually no one except Chris knew in advance what he was going to do. There was always a sense of nervous anticipation, which he cultivated. Not knowing the plan for Chris’s performance didn’t sit well with the new director. As the liaison between him and Chris, Phyllis was put to the task of finding out the nature of the piece the artist would do. Chris was silent on that subject during all the preparations. Now, it’s impor tant to ment ion t hat t he museum had just closed Mark Rothko: Ten Major Works, which Jim had organized. It was a stunningly beautiful show. To bring out the light in the paintings, the walls were painted a dark maroon. The darkness of the galleries and the nuanced light that seemed to emanate from the paintings was much talked about. That show was well attended and extended due to its popularity. I think, and a few others did as well at the time, that the Rothko show provoked and inspired Chris in various ways. Doing a performance in the wake of the Rothko adulation would be a challenge. There were still a few Rothkos in the museum’s storage room at the back end of the main gallery that hadn’t been returned to their owners. Rothko was still in the building. And Chris insisted that we keep the maroon walls that had been used for the Rothko show. To me, that was a sign that his piece would be AMCD

Previous spread: Photograph of the installation process of an unrealized performance by Chris Burden at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, California, 1974. Photo: Brian Forrest, courtesy Michael Auping Opposite: Chris Burden, Five Day Locker Piece, April 26–30, 1971, University of California, Irvine, performance. Photo: Diana Zlotnick. Burden’s description: “I was locked in locker number 5 for five consecutive days and did not leave the locker during this time. The locker measured two feet high, two feet wide, and three feet deep. I stopped eating several days prior to entry. The locker directly above me contained five gallons of bottled water; the locker below me contained an empty five gallon bottle.”

This page: Photograph of the installation process of an unrealized performance by Chris Burden at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, California, 1974. Photo: Brian Forrest, courtesy Michael Auping

to some extent about Rothko. AMCD Let’s talk about the performance itself. What were you tasked with preparing for it? MA A week before the proposed performance, Chris had not given the museum a title or any sense of what the piece would be. He did say he’d require some assistance so Brian Forrest and I met with him. He was specific about what he needed: we had to get some bales of dry hay, a video camera with a long cord, and two monitors. A member of the museum’s board lent us a truck so we could go out to a ranch in the foothills to get the hay. There were two trips, as I recall. Chris asked us to break up the bales and spread them around the perimeter of the main gallery, which was a large, cavernous space. Once that was done, Chris placed two large pieces of masking tape in the center of the gallery, making a cross shape. The ladder that appears in Brian’s photos wasn’t there for the performance itself but for the setup: we hung the video camera from a high beam in the ceiling, its lens pointing down to the cross, which inhabited a relatively clean, circular area of the floor not quite encroached upon by the hay. Chris didn’t want any lights on in the cavernous gallery, except one pointed down on the cross. The hay was spread around the f loor, and its brown-yellow color, surrounded by the maroon walls, gave the room a moody beauty. I thought of the hay as a Rothko on the floor. AMCD The stage is set and I’m starting to see connections to other, realized artworks of Burden’s. It sounds beautiful but also a bit unnerving, all that hay. What happened next? MA Chris asked me to find two sticks, fairly sturdy and each about a foot long. It sounds like a simple ask, but it actually took a while—Newport Beach doesn’t have a lot of trees, other than palm trees. I found a handful. He picked two that he liked. I asked him what they were for. He simply said “Primitive technology.” That didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but I didn’t push him to explain. Throughout the whole process I don’t think he smiled once. That’s how he always seemed in those days—he was always quite serious, which sometimes felt on the verge of alarming.

Two monitors were then mounted on the wall of a kind of anteroom just outside the gallery where the performance, whatever it was to be, would take place. The audience wasn’t to be allowed to enter the main gallery, but would watch the performance from this small room via the video monitors. As we were spreading the hay around the gallery perimeter I tried to make small talk with Chris, some of which was revealing. I asked him if he had seen the Rothko show. He said he had. Like everyone, I mentioned the mysterious light that I saw in the paintings. Chris said, “It’s an old light. I’m trying to bring a new fire.” It took me a while to see this seemingly casual statement as connected to the artist’s fascination with fire and electricity. To my mind, some of his best pieces involved fire or electricity—Prelude to 22, or 110 [1972], Dos Equis [1972], Fire Roll [1973], Doorway to Heaven [1973]. AMCD I think I see where this is going with the cross, the interest in fire, especially when thinking about earlier works such as Dos Equis. This must have gotten someone’s attention at the museum. Ultimately, how did it get decided that after all of this preparation the performance would get canceled? MA T he per for ma nce had been vag uely announced in the regional papers as something like “Chris Burden Performance at Newport Harbor Art Museum,” but even forty-eight hours before the performance the director still didn’t know what this preparation was about. As much as Phyllis pressed him, Chris said nothing. At that point Byrnes demanded to know, and said that he’d cancel the performance if he wasn’t told within hours. Finally, Chris matter-of-factly told Phyllis that the performance would consist of him rubbing two sticks together to create a very small fire, using a tiny pile of hay where the cross was. AMCD Oh my. Art institutions certainly don’t like to play with fire, especially not with borrowed Rothkos in the building! MA The new director and the curators became almost hysterical. Chris told them that he wasn’t sure whether he could even get the fire going with the two sticks I’d found, but that didn’t come close to calming them: if he were to make even one small spark in

This page: Chris Burden, Dos Equis, October 16, 1972, Laguna Beach, California, performance. Burden’s description: “On the evening of October 16, I placed two Xs constructed of sixteen foot beams in an upright position blocking both lanes of the Laguna Canyon Road. The timbers had been soaked in gasoline for several days. I set the Xs on fire and left the area.” Opposite: Chris Burden, Do You Believe in Television?, February [18 or 26], 1976, Alberta College of Art, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, performance. Burden’s description: “The performance took place in a bare concrete stairwell within the underground parking structure. A trail of hay led from the bottom of the stairwell, spiraling three flights up to the outside. There was a large video monitor suspended above each landing. The spectators were let in, and allowed to situate themselves around the monitors at the different

levels, but were prevented from going below the first landing by a chain. All three monitors displayed the image of a black Swiss cross surrounded by hay. The image originated at the foot of the stairwell where the monitors were connected to a single, stationary camera. The real cross was not visible, however, from any point in the stairwell and could only be seen on the monitors. After the crowd had assembled and quieted down, a loud voice coming from the monitors asked, ‘Do you believe in television?,’ and a hand holding a lighted match appeared on the screen. The match which was centered over the cross was used to ignite the straw. Flames and smoke began to work their way slowly up the staircase. The narrow path of straw burnt up to and past the first level before it was extinguished by spectators.” Artwork © 2022 Chris Burden/Licensed by the Chris Burden Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

a room filled with dry hay, there was the possibility that the whole place could go up in flames. Hours were spent talking about the fact that the audience would be in another room, somewhat distanced from the performance, and that while the Rothkos were in the building, they were in a back storage area. If things did go wrong, Chris would have been the one most in danger. Unfortunately, most of the talk centered on the safety of the Rothko paintings that were there in storage, as well as various insurance issues. At that point Chris was furious. When asked if he’d consider pretending to light a fire but not light one, he laughed. It was a John Wayne–style standoff (at the time, John Wayne was one of Newport Beach’s most famous residents). As much as Chris had put himself in peril in many of his previous performances, and his audiences in psychological dilemmas about whether they should help or intervene, he was now going head-to-head with an institution. Chris was right: Rothko had his fire and Chris had his. It was like Muhammad Ali against Sonny Liston: Ali got into Liston’s head by acting so erratically. It’s said that a strong man isn’t afraid of another strong man, and a skilled man isn’t afraid of another man’s skills, but everyone is afraid of a wild man, because you have no idea what he’ll do. The performance was canceled. It was the day before it was meant to take place. It was already promoted, so people still showed up on the scheduled day and time. I was working in the museum’s bookshop the night the performance should have taken place and there was a crowd lined up around the block. There were a lot of pissed-off fans. It was a moment when Ruscha’s famous Los Angeles County Museum on Fire [1965–68] almost became literalized in Orange County. Knowing Chris, he could have been referencing that as much as the Rothkos. AMCD What made you think about this unrealized

performance again after so many years? Why did you hold on to these photos for so long? MA Brian gave me two photos he had taken of our installation because I’d intended to write an article about my experience at some point. In the end there was no essay, and decades later, when Brian’s archive of photographs went digital, the negatives were lost. Somehow I kept my prints in a file for forty-eight years! They capture those dark, Burden-esque moments in Southern California art history. I like the gritty darkness of them, depicting an empty stage, as it were. The audience and the actor have to be imagined. The audience and the actor have all gone home. AMCD Do you think of Chris as an actor? MA Yes, in those days I did. He was an actor in the best sense because he could make you feel in yourself the complexities of fear, or something like fear. Later in life, when Chris began working more specifically as a sculptor, he stopped being an actor. I appreciated that period of his being an actor and performer. As others have said, Chris played a Jesus-like character, on the edge of some type of a darkly spiritual breakthrough. The cross on the floor of the Newport Harbor Art Museum was a prelude—a word Chris liked to use—in which one act was building toward the next. Months later he would literally nail himself to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle, creating a self-crucifixion. AMCD Would you say that there was a general consensus about Chris’s work at that time? MA There were two ways of reacting to his work back then: hate it as a form of masochism or romanticize it as a form of spiritual energy. He used his performances to channel deeply hidden energies. The Church of Human Energy, which was a great text-based print that he made in 1973–74, helped me see his art in a new way. I always wanted to buy that print. By the time I could afford it, they were sold out. If he was nothing else, Chris was a romantic, and a philosophically smart one. A fair amount has been written about Western art history being a metaphorical struggle between the dark and the light. One could imagine the ’70s in Southern California as mimicking that struggle, the Light and Space movement representing a new enlightenment and Chris Burden depicting what the romantic poet Novalis called an urge toward “the holy, unspeakable, mysterious night.” Now clearly I’m romanticizing, but the bottom line is that I think I kept those photos because I treasure that moment in Southern California art. AMCD Why do you think that there’s no mention of this unrealized performance in the artist’s archive? MA It’s fascinating that there are no notes or drawings anywhere for this piece. I talked to Chris about it only once afterwards. I asked him what he thought about the outcome. He thanked me for the help on the preinstallation and said it was a partial success. He indicated that he wouldn’t have burned down the Rothkos or harmed any of the people who came, but said that he had to do what he had to do. AMCD Looking back on this now, do you see any influence this piece may have had on subsequent works? MA In my mind, this unrealized piece set the stage for a number of subsequent works. A few that come to mind are Transfixed [1974], with its religious overtones, and Do You Believe in Television? [1976], which involved the spreading of hay in a concrete stairway. The hay was set on fire, and spectators were allowed to watch the fire from different levels of the stairwell. In that case Chris used matches rather than sticks, though. The title notwithstanding, he knew that the question wasn’t whether we believed in television but what we believed of Chris Burden and his motives. That was always the question in those days.

ALEXANDRIA SMITH Artist Alexandria Smith speaks with the author Nalo Hopkinson about what it means to depict the body, the struggles to embark on new projects, and the contours of space and place in the creation of fiction and art.

ALEXANDRIA SMITH Nalo, I’m so excited to speak with

you. I’ve been reading your books since college— Brown Girl in the Ring [1998] and The Salt Roads [2003] are over there on my bookshelf. They’re old copies [laughs], they’re in my permanent stack: Toni Morrison, you, Gabriel García Márquez, Octavia Butler, and Samuel Delaney. NALO HOPKINSON Thank you, A lexandria. I’m delighted to be in such great company—Delaney is one of my go-tos, for sure. AS What drew me to your work was your rich, clever use of language and these spins you’ve made on folklore, in Skin Folk [2001] especially. NH My dad was a well-known poet in his generation in the Caribbean, and my mom worked in libraries. So I think the bent to wordplay happened early on. AS You were surrounded by words! NH And people doing things with them. I mean, Caribbean writers can make a sentence dance for its supper [laughs]. AS I don’t have that, as a writer [laughs], but I hope I do that with my visual work. NH It’s there. It’s there. Looking at your work, part of what’s intrigued me is what’s buried in the titles. Like Backbend, part of the Ibeji series —that’s a clever use of language. AS Oh, that’s good to hear! NH That particular one intrigued me—apart from the character being an Ibeji, it looks like one of them has an injured arm. 92

Or never had an arm. I tried to play with expectations, thinking through our own reality and the reality of the world these characters exist in. Sometimes people think they’re missing limbs, but for me, they’re whole. They’re full beings with the limbs that they “have” or “do not have,” you know? I use air quotes because it’s perception, right? NH Yeah. AS I’m trying to push that a bit. It’s easier to do now because I’m using a lot of color, whereas before, when the characters had skin tones that were similar to ours, another layer of complexity was projected onto the figures. But now that they’re multicolored, I hope they resist that kind of read [laughs]. But who knows? NH I like that. I spent two years recently working on a comic series for DC. The main character was the deity Erzulie and I opened the comic with a huge party she was throwing on a large riverboat. I wanted there to be a ball competition in the middle of it and I wanted one of the competitors to have 1 1/2 legs. I told the artist, you know, “I want the crutches to go flying, I want this person to be in the most dynamic position you can imagine, because they’re not limited. They have the body they have.” And he did an amazing job. This person is doing a somersault and just flying through the air, and that’s the feeling I wanted—that’s their body and they do what they do with it to the utmost and it’s not a question of, Oh, he’s missing . . . he’s got lots. AS There’s this interesting play with duality too, AS

in that. It’s the lack versus abundance that I think a lot about. I’m thinking more about body as material, body as a space. In this new work I’m trying to depict the body as a utopic space, not just in a utopic space. There’s the motif of the island landscape, which is what you tend to think of as Utopia, this warm climate surrounded by water and sun. But in these newer works, the figures are becoming that space. They’re inhabiting and taking on these architectural or geologic poses. That’s why using wood, and assembling and collaging, became so key to the work: I didn’t feel like the bodies could just exist in paint. They needed to infiltrate our space, too, by coming out of the rectangle a bit. NH I like that. I think we experience text through the body as well. When I’m writing fiction, I’m not trying to just get to your eyes or ears, I want the reader to be experiencing it from the body out. Metaphor does that most strongly, because readers have to map their own experience onto it. I’m constantly trying to find ways to pull readers in so that they’re living through the story while they’re reading it, rather than just watching it happen at a distance. I find lots of people use camera metaphors to teach writing, and I’m like No, no, you are the camera [laughs]. It’s not this thing you’re carrying around, you know, putting on a subject. AS Oh, that’s really interesting. I think we came from a different educational style from what students now are used to—the way we learned our craft was by experiencing. That happens less with the

Previous spread: Alexandria Smith, London, 2022. Photo: © Amoroso Films This page: Alexandria Smith, Iterations of a galaxy beyond the pedestal, 2021, mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 × 3 inches (152.4 × 121.9 × 7.6 cm)

younger generation; they try to plan and prepare everything in advance, to the point where they’re afraid to learn by allowing chance or failure. NH Students say to me, “So what do you want me to do in order to get an A?” and I’m like, “I don’t know.” AS That question [sighs]— NH [laughs] You realize this is a creative pursuit? So what I’ve started doing is talking about the writing they do in the class as experiments. I don’t know what perfection is, and I don’t necessarily want to see it. I want to see you throw everything out there and make a hot mess and see what you discover from that. And it helps remind me I should do that too [laughs]. AS I always tell my students that I’m a facilitator—I have a level of experience that you don’t have, but at the end of the day, this is a collaborative endeavor. NH I was talking to a group of Black high school students from the Vancouver area and they asked me if I ever feel impostor syndrome. I said, Well, not about writing. But about teaching—Oof, baby. Because it’s not my training, I still walk into a classroom and feel like I’m fumbling around, because I am [laughs]. AS [laughs] I feel it too. I feel it in the classroom, as well as in art-institutional spaces. I know I’ve worked my ass off, I know I belong here, but I also don’t feel like I belong here. But I don’t feel that in the studio. 94

I notice the only people who feel impostor syndrome are people who are actually doing the work. AS Oh yes [laughter]. NH So they’re already not impostors. But something is telling us, you know, we’re not good enough, we’re not something enough. And you’re right about institutional spaces; it was a few years into being full-time in academia before I realized just how nastily competitive it is, like how it sets scholars against each other and is forever implying that they’re not good enough, so you get this weird competition/fear thing happening. AS Speaking of space, do you think there’s a difference between place and space? How do you think through these terms in your work? NH I’m immediately flashing on Sun Ra, Space Is the Place [1972] [laughs]. AS Oh yeah [laughter]. NH I t h i n k I have a n a n s wer to t hat , but Alexandria, you’re working in physical space in a literal sense with your work. Maybe you could speak to that question first? AS It’s tricky. To me, space is more spiritual, metaphysical, emotional, and place is an actual locale. But I think in my work I’m playing with ambiguous places, and how they interact with liminal and fluxus spaces, playing with those two and separating them. Sometimes those emotive spaces take NH

you to a place, or reference a place. They can transport you. NH I might tend to use them interchangeably, but would do so differently in each instance of using them [laughter]. What I can say, I’m very much about intentional community, about people coming together and building their own support networks, both emotionally and in physical space. So that shows up a lot as taking place in a space, to make room for yourself and others like you. I’m from the Caribbean, so I think a lot about ocean-level rise and was actually talking to a Jamaican marine biologist who said, You know, it’s going to be much worse than we think, because people are talking about it in terms of an incremental rise when, in fact, it’s exponential. So I have a community living on the water in what used to be the Caribbean Sea, and as I think through it, it’s not so much taking back the space but remaking it, and remaking it in a way that acknowledges the actual geography—that there’s this changed place, but it’s still theirs. Humanity played a part in ruining it, and humanity can play part in both survival and in undoing some of the damage. I talk a lot about place-making but it’s also space-making, because I’m usually talking about marginalized groups of people. There’s that sense that I need to elbow up some room. Can I ask you a technical question? Typically, how do you begin a new project or work of art?

Alexandria Smith, set adrift on Memory’s bliss, 2021, mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm)

It’s always a drawing for me. I don’t put brush to panel or canvas without having a drawing. The drawings are my safe space, and they aren’t made as blueprints for the paintings in any explicit manner. They’re independent, they have their own power, but then when I’m looking at them, it may sound corny but I let the work tell me whether it needs to also exist in another media. There are some drawings I’ve never made into paintings and then others that I’m like, Yes, this is definitely going to be a painting. Because I’m excited about being able to move this paint around and fully engage with the materiality of paint to see what can come from this composition that the drawing has provided. NH That’s cool. I’ve been looking at your drawings, and for me, without the training, putting pencil to paper, I’m shaking [laughter], literally shaking. And you know, when I started trying to do that, it was at a time in my life where I was about to go homeless. So when I bought paper and pencil, I didn’t want to waste it. I look at your drawings and I see freedom and experimentation. What you do with line and shading and color, so that they aesthetically stand on their own, is very liberating for me. Because it’s so difficult for me to look at my own work when I try to do that and see anything useful in it. AS Oh, interesting. How do you start? NH It varies. When I was writing mostly short AS

stories, it would often start with the title. It’s difficult to know what it is that my mind is approaching, but a title has this power of encapsulation. I collect snippets, I call them my “ideas file,” but if I write something down as an “idea,” it’s usually pretty static and I don’t do anything with it. Usually it’s stuff I overhear, often wrongly, but what I’ve heard tends to be more interesting than what they said [laughter]. So I keep that file, and I will look for two things in it that seem to not have anything to do with each other, and push them together and see what happens. Because I’m not so good at plot. I have to really work at plot. AS Really? NH I have to scare plot up out of the story. AS Wow. NH But all the questions about “how do you work,” I always feel like I’m lying [laughs]. AS Well, what’s the real answer then [laughs]? NH That’s the thing, I don’t know. I fumble around until something happens. Sometimes it’s deadline pressure that pushes your brain into that space of desperation where creativity can happen. AS Yes! NH I’ve had to learn to make peace with the brain I have. I’ve got ADHD, I’ve got nonverbal learning disorder, I’ve got fibromyalgia—a bunch of things that convene around organization and decision-making and memory. I was diagnosed fairly late in life, in my forties, so I’d been fighting

my brain all this while, thinking there was something wrong with me, I’m not doing it right, I’m lazy, you know, and then realizing there was nothing wrong with me, it’s just the way my brain is wired. So I have to talk to my brain when it’s fighting doing something. I say, “So you know you want to do this thing,” it says, “Yeah.” I say, “All right, so what do you want to do now?” “Go watch bad TV.” “Okay, so let’s do that and you let me know when you’re ready to open the file.” “Okay, maybe” [laughs]. AS Wow. NH And I find that’s way more likely to work than me calling it a “block.” Often, if I’m in the middle of the piece, the block is really my hindbrain saying, You’re going down a route that’s not working. AS Ah. That’s a good way of looking at it. I’ll have to start shifting my perspective toward that as well. I find that every time I finish a new body of work and I’m ready to start something else, I always forget how to paint. It’s just the most crippling, debilitating feeling, and I’m like, Wait, you’re, what, almost forty-one now, right [laughs], and you didn’t forget how to paint. It never happens in drawing, it’s painting only. It’s weird, and I don’t know if I’ve figured out a solution—because it happens every single time, for as long as I can remember. NH That’s the kind of thing I would decide is part of the process. AS Yeah [laughter]. 95

Aquati ipitis eum reperspernam nullaut aspienit odi ommoluptur, con nis quo desequidipsa el incim quas necusapid que esendi veni cus remque et Ficit volorep elique volupta vita si nonsedia corepero eiumqui dempora tiust, sinim sent et lant, officatae escimodio. Ad quis eliquis quibus autem et lam, ut q i corem exere, velit

It’s like going through labor. We’re not at the part where we’re going to push yet. AS Oh, that’s so true. NH And if you make it part of the process, then you think, Okay, this is where I am and then there will be another part of the process. I’m that way a bit about novels, which are really hard. AS Do you prefer short stories over novels, then? NH I can’t tell anymore. I used to prefer short stories because my brain could encompass the whole of it. I mean, a novel is like a country [laughter]. But once I started being able to perceive form in a text, then the length of the story doesn’t matter so much, except that [laughs] novels are really hard to get to the end of. But to go back to art and the body, and how you explicate the body in art, there are ways in which it becomes helpful that you’re getting older. AS [laughs] How so? Enlighten me, please. NH Particularly in fiction, and in the type of speculative fiction I write, the go-to body is the superhero body. You know, it’s perfectly symmetrical, it’s perfectly powerful, it’s young, it’s slim. And I can’t write that anymore, especially not now, as I’m writing through the body myself and I think about something like throwing a basketball into a hoop, this shoulder’s like, “No you don’t [laughs], you’ve got to use the other hand.” So you remember that bodies have particularities, bodies have uniquenesses. They each have their own language. NH

I think we’re both so immersed in our work, and trust ourselves, and trust our intuition, that we pull in material from the outside world and situate it within. Alexandria Smith

I write so much through the body and it’s easier for me now to remember that everybody’s body is different and to celebrate that as much as I can. Even things like putting on weight—I mean, my main character for the comics, Erzulie, is sometimes a mermaid, and I wanted an artist who could draw a thick Black woman who was strong and powerful and sexy. Because I kind of think that a skinny mermaid is a chilly mermaid [laughter]. So I wanted somebody who could represent that beauty and gravitas, and it was lovely to be able to describe how I wanted her to move, how I wanted her to look, and to have to remind myself constantly, No, her body’s more like yours than, you know, Supergirl’s [laughs]. AS I definitely do the same thing. It’s funny, my mom even said, That looks like my body in The Intuitionists and I was like, “Oh, yeah. I guess it is your body” [laughter]. NH Oh, of course. And that’s such a great title. AS Thank you. I mean, my titles are borrowed— stolen—the same way you accumulate snippets. I have running lists in my notebook, and in the Notes section of my phone, where I write down things that I read, titles from books. I mean, one of my paintings is called Skin Folk, like your story collection. NH That’s lovely. AS I was drawing from the title of your collection, but also thinking about “All skin folk ain’t kinfolk,”

Opposite: Alexandria Smith, [Ruminations on] the joy fantastic, 2022, mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage 48 × 60 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm) This page: Alexandria Smith, Libations for soul wares, 2022, mixed media on three-dimensional wood assemblage, 60 × 48 inches (152.4 × 121.9 cm) Artwork © Alexandria Smith

right? So it’s also these very Black colloquialisms that I’m drawing from, too, where I’m chopping them up and remixing them. NH T hat ’s where I got it f rom. Not bei ng American, it wasn’t a saying I’d grown up with, so when I discovered it, I was like, “That’s nice” [laughs]. AS It’s so perfect. NH That’s so cool that stuff echoes and recapitulates and remixes. AS Speaking of this, I have to say that I have a real love/hate relationship with change. I’m always moving because I like change, but change is also a coping mechanism for me. I’m always moving past something, and sometimes I think I move past it or through it a little bit too quickly; I don’t necessarily fully explore myself being in a space, or the work existing in this style of making. But I also trust myself, and I know that part of it is because it wasn’t doing exactly what I needed it to do. Moving from the Duality series and the Ibeji series to this new body of work, my goal was to make work that looked like my collage installations and my paintings had a baby. So I returned to canvas—I’d been working on wood—and the canvases were large, because I love collage installations where my whole body was engaged in the making and I would throw out my back [laughs] from how physically involved the work was, you know? So

I think change is important, but I’m also hyperaware of it, and I almost overanalyze it to make sure that it’s supposed to happen, to make sure that it’s me being true to myself and not me running away from something. NH That sparks, because with my impatient brain [laughter], I do have the problem of not going deep enough into a practice or an idea before I want to be doing the next thing. I mean, I’m working in a time-based medium. Change has to happen in a story. There’s always that moment when you go, Okay, something has to happen [laughs]. AS It’s interesting to think about what it means to be contemporary and how that figures into speculative fiction or utopian thinking or disregard for traditional temporal relationships. How do you keep it contemporary in addressing the present moment, if you need to at all? NH Do you find there’s a way in which people, because we’re Black, are forever trying to throw us back into the past? AS Oh yes, I totally do. Especially making figurative work, I feel I’m fighting this upward battle throughout my career. I think part of it is that it doesn’t look like a lot of what’s out there. I’m not making portraits of other Black people doing leisurely things, you know—they’re not realistic depictions of Black or brown people, they’re sort of futuristic, surrealist. And I don’t think there’s

been much space allowed for Black people, especially Black women, Black queer women, to exist in that space, to make that work. I can name some, but I didn’t know about them until much later. And I think that’s part of it too. It’s like when you start using the body in your work, people only see the body you inhabit and look at the work through that lens and place this expectation or projection onto you and the work. Do you feel that happens in your field as well, in your career, that you’ve sort of had to— NH Yeah. It’s happening less as the field educates itself more, but it still happens. And often it’s when people want to use it as a way of saying that my work is lacking. They don’t want to analyze it in terms of where and what it is, they’re like, Oh, well, it’s not like, you know, Black literature. Well, clearly it is, because I made it [laughter]. AS Yeah [laughs]. To the contemporary question, it’s like, yeah, we’re definitely contemporary, but I think it’s automatic—there’s no effort that has to be made. I think we’re both so immersed in our work, and trust ourselves, and trust our intuition, that we pull in material from the outside world and situate it within. NH And just temporally, what else would we be? We’re contemporary. AS Yeah. We’re not going anywhere.

JILL FELDMAN Mary, tell us about your

current position as the Global Head of the UBS Art Collection. MARY ROZELL Since 2015 I have overseen and managed all of the activities related to our 30,000-work-plus global art collection. That includes acquisition, stewardship, and all of the activities related to the collection—exhibitions, loans, client events, and so forth. We currently have Art Collection team offices in Zurich, Hong Kong,

an eye on the market

My goal was to craft an education that I would have wanted. By way of background, I have a law degree, and when I was a young person considering my future career, I thought maybe I wanted to be a museum director. This was a time when a number of museum directors, people with their PhDs in art history, weren’t equipped for the demands of running institutions, so it became clear that having another type of degree would MR

necessarily need to know the ins and outs of tort law or property law or criminal law when you’re in the arts. On the other hand, I had a fabulous education at the Courtauld but I graduated with very little practical knowledge of the art market. There was no context to enter the working world unless you wanted to be a scholar. So the goal at Sotheby’s Institute of Art was to bring in all those elements, to

intellectual property, contracts, the moral rights of artists, maybe tax and estate planning, just to name a few. Law is also a way of thinking and a mindset: to ask questions, to close loopholes, and to avoid problems before they happen. JF Yes, anticipation, clarification, and proactive protection are such critical parts of everything we do. When you wrote The Art Collector’s Handbook, what were some of the

Mary Rozell is the Global Head of the UBS Art Collection and the author of The Art Collector’s Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Acquiring and Owning Art (Lund Humphries, 2020). For this installment of our Eye on the Market series, Rozell speaks with Gagosian director Jill Feldman about collecting and the art market, her development of the artbusiness master’s program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and the history and future of the UBS Art Collection. Frankfurt, London and New York. JF Before UBS, you were the director and helped form the art-business m a s ter ’s prog ra m at Sot heby ’s Institute of Art. What were some of the core tenets of the program that you developed? What gaps in arts education did you aim to fill?

be helpful—especially for a woman. So I went to law school, and then I received a master’s in modern art from the Courtauld [Institute of Art, London]. While knowing the law is extremely valuable in the art field—I use aspects of it every single day—it’s onerous to attend three years of law school and sit for the bar exam, especially when you don’t

provide scholarship, but also to have a thorough grounding in the art market and a full year of art-law education. When I speak with alumni, they all say that the law courses were the most valuable, even though they were the toughest for them. There are a lot of art-business programs out there now, but I do think we were the leader in creating that kind of education. JF The educational and professional paths are otherwise so stratified, so the negotiation, communication, and critical and analytical thinking skills that one develops with a law degree–these are absolute requisites for so many aspects of daily operations in the arts. MR Exactly. If you’re working in the arts, at some point you’re going to encounter issues of copyright and

things, just generally in the market or that you were dealing with day to day, that you felt were most important to share with the public? MR W hen I moved back to t he United States after several years in Berlin, I started working with private collectors. The first had a stellar collection that spanned eras and media. There I was with all this experience—I was an art lawyer, I’d been a journalist, I’d curated, worked in an auction house, etc.—but when it came to running this major collection, there was so much I didn’t know. The nuts and bolts of collection management— insurance, climate control, conservation, logistics—were just things that I didn’t have experience with. There were also complex estate and tax issues across various jurisdictions.

an eye on the market

And within four days into my new role working for this collector, 9/11 happened, so I was immediately thrown into emergency planning for a collection that I had not yet had the opportunity to become acquainted with. Emergencies are another thing collectors have to think about, particularly with climate change—we’ve seen a lot of natural and unnatural disasters in which art has been lost. Overall, I learned a great deal from the network of experts that we regularly brought in. When I moved on to Sotheby’s Institute of Art, I started an elective course on collecting and collection management because I felt there was a need for it for anyone interested in working in the private-collection space or even in a public museum. There was no book on the subject; instead, I had a file full of different articles. Over time it became clear that it would be helpful to have a comprehensive reference resource where all this information could be compiled. That is how it started. JF There’s an incredible amount of administrative and logistical information in your book—things that most people don’t learn until they’re already in the midst of doing them. One’s collection database and archive are really only as strong as they are precise and comprehensive, and filling in the blanks retroactively can be an insurmountable task. So for a collector it’s a significant advantage to have that information and infrastructure up front. MR Right. That’s the starting point. The book looks at the life cycle of collecting, starting with acquisition

through the ultimate disposition of a collection. As the data related to any given artwork is so crucial, one must consider early on how to choose the right database, which is ver y much based on t he unique aspects of any given collection. JF From the f irst edition to the second, which was published last year, what has changed, and what are some of the things that you feel will continue to change? MR It’s astonishing that so much change happened in the industry over a five-year period. It seems these shifts are accelerating at an ever more rapid pace. New art-business models emerged and boundaries continued to blur, between, say, the traditional roles of auction houses and galleries. The market also continued to become more financialized, it expanded in that way. Technological advances have also had a huge impact in recent years, both in terms of transactional developments and with respect to art production itself, with virtual reality and interactive works becoming more mainstream. So while there were a lot of basic updates to make, we also felt it was important to add a new chapter on private collections due to the explosive rise in numbers over the last several years. There’s much to mine from the examples cited—some superb models, but a number of cautionary examples, too. Both editions put a big emphasis on sharing collections, with opening a private museum being the most extreme example of that. The new edition also has more of a market orientation; there’s a greater focus on how to navigate the art market itself. JF Yes, anyone collecting art today will have an awareness of the market. Even if it isn’t a priority or doesn’t factor into acquisition decisions, it’s still part of the conversation. MR Absolutely. I would say that not all have an awareness, but they should.

JF What advice would you give to a new collector just starting to acquire art? MR The best collections are created out of personal passions, so always follow what you’re interested in and ask yourself why you’re drawn to certain artworks, what are you responding to in any given work. It’s really about engagement. There’s something disappointing in encountering a collection that lacks any personality or originality. Of course you also need to do research and not just fall in love with a piece without looking at the greater body of an artist’s work. Also, ensure that you’re paying the right price, which is important [laughter]. Again, I encourage all collectors to follow the market and not be shy about asking dealers for prices. JF You can collect from a place of emotion and curiosity and passion, but it doesn’t mean you have to be blind to the market— MR Exactly— JF —especially because so many conversations, even among artists themselves, relate to the market. So there’s an opportunity and an impetus or even an onus to be aware, even if it’s not your motivation. We’re all participating in a market, whether we choose to be responsive to it or not. MR Right. It used to be a lot more taboo to talk about the market and serious collecting in the same breath. JF Yes, and that’s the irony, too, is that it was taboo, and at the same time, exclusionary. There’s somet h ing much more democrat ic in expanding the rhetoric and giving everyone access to that conversation. MR Agree. JF How would you characterize the art market at this moment? What are some of the larger global factors central to its health? MR Well, after the initial covid shutdowns we saw that the art market remained surprisingly robust. Part of that is a reflection of the great global wealth that exists today, as well as of the geographic and demographic expansion of the art market over the last twenty years. We’ll

have to see how the war in Ukraine affects the global art situation; it’s hard to predict what the impact will be, but I do think there will be repercussions. Certainly the sanctions will have some impact, but overall, the art market feels strong. JF How did the pandemic affect the UBS Art Collection? MR In the beginning, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We had all these projects we needed art for, but there was so much uncertainty. Ultimately, we continued collecting at the same level; in fact it was refreshing to be able to focus more on it. Many of our activities were cut, such as art fairs, but that created more time for deep dives, and the galleries did such a great job—the digital aspect and online programming were really helpful. You were at home with extra time, so you could listen to artist talks or do virtual studio tours, and at a more organic pace. I listened to a lot of podcasts while out on walks. JF There have long been images of exhibitions and selected works online, but with the lockdown, artists, galleries, and museums made such an effort with their digital programming and editorial content. The quality of the content you could access online grew exponentially. Do you expect these new technologies and modalities to endure? How have you observed them evolve since the pandemic, and do you expect they will shift the role of traditional, physical art fairs? MR Certainly this technological change was already underway, particularly with the larger galleries, which had the resources to create online viewing rooms even before the pandemic struck. But the situation jumpstarted the technological side, and everybody had to get their websites and OVRs established in record time. I think this is a really welcome evolution, this whole idea of a hybrid approach going forward. And we did the same at UBS. Our exhibitions were canceled during the pandemic, our New York gallery was closed, so, together with the Artland platform,

100

we worked to create virtual-reality exhibitions instead. That had long been on our radar; it just wasn’t a priority when we could stage physical shows. We’re excited to have this infrastructure in place now, so that we can keep a hybrid approach going forward. It allows us to share our works with an even greater public. As for the traditional fairs, people still welcome them for the learning that takes place there, the connections that can be made with other people, and the opportunity to see works from around the world all at one time. Still, technology will likely make people more comfortable with feeling they don’t have to attend every fair. Something positive that has emerged—a nd I do hope t hat it endures—is a greater focus on the local. For me, it was a pleasure to visit galleries during the pandemic in the

an eye on the market

mandated, with industries having to give a certain percentage to art— with PaineWebber, which had an American sense of innovation and risk-taking. Don Marron, CEO of PaineWebber, was the emblem of that; with his incredible eye, he was a connoisseur who was willing to take leaps of faith. These three collections were unified as one in 2000, and formally within the bank in 2004. Once they were combined, an art board was appointed to oversee all the art activities of the bank. Since then, we’ve continued our acquisitions at a steady pace, and of course we’ve introduced new initiatives as well. In the last years it’s been a priority to revive artist commissions, a great legacy that UBS had from Europe for about thirty years starting in the 1970s. We’re once again quite active in the commission space.

few exceptions here and there to fill a gap or a certain need, but since the 1960s, across the board in Europe, the United States, and now globally, UBS has always collected “the art of our time.” We look for art that pushes boundaries, that reflects what’s going on in our society today, that sparks inspiration. JF Are there consistent qualities that you look for when making an acquisition, or qualities you tend to avoid? MR We’re looking for something original, whether conceptually or in technique or visually. It’s about new ideas, things that aren’t redundant. We try to avoid overpriced works, which sometimes means we miss the moment—we didn’t hit that sweet spot where an artist has a certain recognition but you’re still ahead of the curve with respect to prices. JF This is where being mindful of

With respect to any given artwork, there’s no way to be certain that the work will appreciate in value in the long term. I should note that we don’t collect for investment purposes, even though the collection has greatly increased in value over time. That said, it’s always important to feel like you’re making a sound investment, that there’s potential for the value to increase. We don’t know what the future’s going to bring, where the market’s going to go, but I do feel quite confident that we’re doing our best in terms of the due diligence needed to bring long-term value. JF And in line with what you’ve been affirming throughout: buying out of genuine passion and not just checking a box, but also being mindful of the market. MR Yes. Getting the best examples of the most compelling artwork at the MR

Something positive that has emerged—and I do hope that it endures—is a greater focus on the local. For me, it was a pleasure to visit galleries during the pandemic in the limited way that we could, because it’s hard to do that when you’re traveling abroad often and I really appreciated what New York had to offer. — Mary Rozell limited way that we could, because it’s hard to do that when you’re traveling abroad often and I really appreciated what New York had to offer. Having access to attentive and savvy gallerists here—such as yourself!— can make all the difference. It’s been a great reset in that sense. JF Could you contextualize how UBS began collecting art in the first place, and how that initiative has prospered over time? MR UBS is unique among corporate collections, certainly among those of financial institutions, because the collection is built from a number of collections that were combined over the decades as different institutions merged. Three institutions formed the core of the collection: Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, and PaineWebber in America. So there’s a combination of this long European tradition of patronage—some of it government

We’ve also opened a new public gallery at UBS America’s headquarters, at 1285 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. This is something I’m really pleased about, because corporate collections often remain private. The UBS Art Gallery is free to the public, it’s open five days a week, and people can just walk in with no commitment. They can stay for five minutes, they can stay for an hour. It gives us an opportunity to show different aspects of our collection. JF How would you characterize UBS’s approach to collecting overall? To what extent do you consider your acquisitions conservative versus risk-taking? MR We only buy work on the primary market, because part of our mission is to support artists and the galleries that nurture their careers. So we only acquire work at the time of its creation, and that’s always been the case. There have been a

the market doesn’t undermine your passion, but it’s still relevant. MR Exactly. Sometimes it’s a subtle shift—between one show and the next, you suddenly realize that a body of work is out of reach, you’re just too late. It takes a certain amount of discipline to know where to draw the line. Another point is that we never want to acquire our second choice (unless it’s very close to the f irst choice). Often you want to add an artist’s work to the collection and you can’t get the pieces that you want, that really resonate, and you’re offered other material that you don’t feel is as good. We won’t add an artist’s work just to tick a box of having the artist. Waiting for the right work requires patience. Sometimes it takes years to be offered the right piece. JF What gives you confidence that you’re bringing long-time value to the collection?

right price over time. JF To that end, what is the collection focusing on at the moment, and in the year ahead? MR This is an exciting moment in that we’re going back to “real life.” We just mounted our first show in two years at the UBS Art Gallery, presenting new acquisitions in the collection made over the last few years. We also have some commissioned projects, including one for the UBS Arena on Long Island and another for our flagship in London. I would say the most exciting endeavor this year is a new book project we’re working on with Phaidon. The publication, Reimagining: New Perspectives, focuses exclusively on new acquisitions and is scheduled to launch at Art Basel Miami Beach at the end of the year. The book is a testament to the new directions we’ve taken with our collecting and our activities over the last seven years.

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

·A·POLTERGEIST· · · · A POLTERGEIST

PART·I·BY·VEN · · · PART 2 BY VEN

· · ITA BLACKBURN ITA·BLACKBURN·

·· OF MEMOIRS MEMOIRS OF

102

Rebecca and Sadie made an unspoken and painfully frustrating decision not to have sex until later. I don’t know which of us was more frustrated really, me, Rebecca, Sadie, or my dearest ghoul deep in the spiritual husk of Rebecca. Ugh! I imagine my ghoul lounging on a settee, dressed in a nightgown regardless of the time of day, black and white, lips and eyes darkened for the accentuating effect, a coy panda, a demure doll, surrounded by satin draped from the ceiling and walls for no practical reason other than the mystique of it all, the sex of it all. I can’t breathe. I literally can’t breathe while possessing a body; that’s just not how this works. I’m not even supposed to speak this language. The gnashers of this town, a newborn to the twentieth century, were just like them all. They liked to be heard and not seen. The cadence of their speech was like rain hitting dry earth. They sang and cried and whispered and prayed. Pretty poems of revenge and deception flowed into each other’s ears. I learned their languages over and over, how they change with each new generation and burst forth with the same genetic knots of fury and desire. Words provide the key to every grim destiny. People draw blood from every inch of skin under the guise of honor, righteousness, insanity, God, and the devil. They spend half their lives engineering a tragedy for themselves and feel good because of words like “legal” or “justice” or “scripture.” I’m supposed to think them crude to watch and I lurk like a wolf among sheep or a butcher strolling through his racks of bacon, but the meat is a chorus to me; it howls and the words dance in my mouth. For this, I’m hated—well, for this and a lot more to be honest. The seasons were changing for Sadie and Rebecca’s people. I’ve been carried in the throats of men for so many generations that I’ve learned one thing: all can be justified. Righteousness is a learned mantra to be filled with the loot of personal desires and that desire is the judge, the god of men above all else. I will always wait for a ghoul, a real one, not some psychotic sprite high on shrooms with a grudge against a village for cutting up her dragon-lily garden. For a goddamned ghoul I would until the sun eats this planet in a fiery death belch heard across the heavens. I would wait outside a Sephora in Santa Fe for seven hours while they tried out every fucking body cream in the store and asked so many maddening questions about retinol side effects that the clerks clawed out their eyes and ran screaming into the desert night. I would walk across the Gulf of Mexico during an oil spill while they splashed in the ink like divorcées on vacation, backstroking through the failure of mankind, the greed, the destruction, the choking off of young life. I would watch the reverie and tremble. They would glow. Shimmer. At the time, though, I could only dream. My dreams were vivid and sticky or maybe those were just Sadie’s. I was beginning to forget, and forgetting for my kind is always a warning. The earth in that place was clay, blood and dust red as if remembering death or calling for it like a storm before harvest season. The people there wanted revenge, a tribe in crisis, one of their own, Rebecca’s own, taken for daring to be a man. The creativity of cruelty among men is second to none. The ability to forget the details over and over is second only to childbirth in women. The meter of that peculiar suffering vanishes. That morning after the crowds in the church planned and stirred their fury into the will to murder, there seemed to be that kind of forgetting in the air. Rebecca and Sadie went to their corners of the world, one in a school and the other in a bar. The day was going to be hot, but the morning defied that under fat clouds and misty shadows. The creeping things in the mud and trees stayed quiet. Windless. Chilled.

103

I could almost sleep inside Sadie then, nudged awake by the doubts that stirred in her mind. She wondered if the fever of her lust for Rebecca ever happened or ever could have happened. Then the wondering drew her away from the bar, away from the men who drank too early or too late and tugged half-heartedly at her hips. She carried us to Rebecca, to the schoolhouse, and we watched from the trees as Rebecca’s students wandered in, a dozen children scattered in age and brilliance, mostly dim as children are. One boy had no shirt, his brown torso out to the elements. He was still too young to have the smell of men and mostly carried whatever scents of the day on him, wet leaves, smoke from his mother’s skillet and her tobacco pipe. The girls had on dresses, thin and modest, solid fabric of the summer season. Sadie considered them all too long, their futures, how they might write their names one day as men and women, become preachers or work in banks or at newspapers, telling stories of how one day they had all decided to resist the irrational torment of their neighbors and tear holes in that pocket of the earth and fill it with enemies. She thought how she might live to be proud even if she didn’t live long at all. There was a chance to do something or to do nothing and both would come with a kind of salvation. Salvation always comes with a frightening cost. The morning whispered to the town of peace, of forgetting, of blindness, of promises too. There seemed to be possibilities for many seasons like that one where fruit turned over plenty and well water stayed high. Tiny wars seemed like a place for yesterday and not tomorrow. Then Sadie and Rebecca saw each other through the doorway. Sadie had wandered closer, too close as always. Communicating the complicated nature of possession requires some examples and there are no better examples than cinema circa 1990s, specifically serial-killer flicks and teenage rom-coms. If I had no experience in the matter I might think possession is like filleting off a woman’s skin, wearing it in the mirror like a bathing suit and humming “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Almost! It changes if the skin i.e. possessed body is someone in love. Then one might think, Oh, it’s like being the Black best friend in the back seat of a Jeep convertible in Malibu, helping a white girl work out her infantile worldview on romance. Not quite. True possession is being the skin, the tremor of the song flowing over the ear, the hot asphalt where the tires meet the road, the holder of memories before they are recounted over the shoulder, the nurser of the bitterness and jealousy and selfishness that simmer in glands at the back of the throat. Sadie left the doorway like the end of an eclipse to hide out of sight. Rebecca wrote her lesson on the blackboard, trying to steady her breath. The class laughed. It’s all mixed and wild, Miss Rebecca, the shirtless boy said. It ain’t mixed. It’s backwards, an older girl said, her tone serious as a bad diagnosis. Do

you want us to do it like that for a purpose, Miss Rebecca? The class became quiet, an air of embarrassment settling. Rebecca’s hand shook. She’d written or attempted to write “Jericho” on the board, but the letters were indeed reversed. The ghoul made an oopsie. There are signs that indicate the presence of another against a person’s soul, and mirrored writing is certainly one of them, but the most disturbing evidence of course comes from those who have sight. There are people who can see us without trying, without theatrical conjuring of spirits, which is usually just a total fraud and a half. But those with actual sight, access between the corporeal and the noncorporeal, do exist, and they cause a lot of fucking problems. The little boy, shirtless and reeking of nature and parental affection,

104

stared at Rebecca in a way unlike the others. The eyes and the focus went beyond her face much deeper, and even I then, lethargic and warm, could tell he knew. He could see my ghoul. We have a few options in those cases: go to sleep, go homicidal, or go away. Sadie drifted us back to the doorway. I like to think my ghoul could sense my distress, and it wasn’t just the attraction between the women. Somewhere, I mattered where I usually did not; usually, to be seen was nearly a violation of the purpose of my very being. The children were dismissed to go eat, unceremoniously, and like children of that time, often whipped for the mildest infraction, they obeyed. The public school lunchroom had not yet been invented, a nest for dysfunction such that even my kind dared not linger. Rebecca still had wet tired eyes from restless sleep and the sallowness that a ghoul tends to carve into a body, but she seemed lighter than I remembered. I almost didn’t recognize her, and that Rebecca seemed familiar to Sadie, who stood closer than necessary to simply say hello and ultimately said nothing at all. They want me to speak tomorrow, Rebecca said.

Speak to who about what? Jim. They want me to describe how I found him killed. God, why. As with a double shot of espresso at two in the afternoon, I was suddenly wide awake. The urgency of these people in this town to pick at a wound not yet scabbed over fascinated me. We were all awake. You know how they are. They want a reason to fight even if it doesn’t make any sense. They take it all whatever we make, whatever we earn. We can’t have anything here. Not even time to mourn. Rebecca arched her back into the exhaustion of new widowhood. She was too young to have much experience with anything, certainly not the mismanagement of grief. Sadie held Rebecca by the forearm and I could feel the sensation of earnest comfort and something more selfish and even more sincere. Rebecca softened under the pressure until Sadie leaned her head onto Rebecca’s collarbone and it was enough to happily drown my ghoul and me, press us out of their bodies like popped pimples, but oh Rebecca with her shame and her dominance and her ancient tether to feminine madness knew just how to fuck up a love story. I’ll tell them how I cared for him, Rebecca said unsexily. What? Sadie replied, too horny to function. Then I’ll tell them what I’ll miss before I describe the body, Rebecca continued like the buzz-kill maniac she was. What are you talking about? Sadie asked, beginning to realize something was seriously off about the conversation. My husband, Rebecca answered, mentioning just the wrong thing in a potential gropingsesh with a woman. Chef’s kiss! Ugh, Rebecca dared to siphon jealousy from Sadie on behalf of a corpse, one mangled like a deer sacrificed to the altar of mankind’s stupidity. By human standards, Rebecca had the one thing that always attracts lovers: crazy. Oh, I’ve followed her kind across the whole of occupied earth from Naples to the Caribbean, no matter what it is there. Crazy and sex just match up like the dots on a domino, hypnotic and perfectly designed. The heaviness returned, my ghoul was fed again. Rebecca went from feather to brick in two minutes.

105

I didn’t care if I was discovered fully anymore, trapped by the stares of that sighted boy and accosted by the light of a fixed gaze. Why go spend hours ransacking some poor woman’s kitchen just to get a whiff of torment when Rebecca delivered emotional chaos like a concerto? My heart, if I had one, sang. With Sadie struggling between lust and terror, Rebecca turned silent, and they leaned onto one another for a while before parting in silence. The space between them, between us all, thick as the membrane around an eye. Like an eye held open to the air for murderous seconds, I felt exposed and tortured. So good. That afternoon and early evening I listened to the town through Sadie, a garbled mash of the people’s voices and traumas. They spoke in their tongue of leaving that bit of earth, closing the school, the bank, the church, packing it all in a box like a suit of clothes and going west. They spoke of dry air and promise, but I heard their fear and anger and how the past has shown them blood again and again, so how could the future anywhere in that bitter world be different. Still, they spoke of the possibility of life in that place, despite the frustration of having any light they produced dimmed by other men who thought like they did, who feared death like they did but were choked to insanity by pride. Night draped a curtain around the town as the church bells rang for the meeting. Rebecca agreed to speak, sat up front on the hard wooden pew patiently waiting for all to gather. Sadie couldn’t sit so close to the altar of God given her past and present. The women would’ve pecked her with their glances to the point of bleeding. We sat separate and somehow together. Rebecca glanced over her shoulder every so often, which was very often, to see Sadie and me looking right back, gaze unchanged, unable to look away even for a brief moment of relief from longing and with each look back Sadie hummed from inside like a struck bell, a metallic and wavy feeling. Most of the congregation had gathered while the leaders arranged themselves near the altar. They wanted peace. They wanted terror. They wanted revenge. It was a tight building that could fit sixty comfortably and a hundred with distress. Distress was the event of the hour. Sadie looked back at Rebecca, thinking it one last time before there were too many eyes facing forward to justify turning around, but instead of Sadie, Rebecca found the torso of a woman smelling of pipe tobacco and okra.

Excuse me, Miss Rebecca, but my Julius didn’t come home. Since when? Since he left for your school. All day really. The other children are home. I checked them. It’s just mine. Rebecca stood up and met the woman eye to eye, an ancient knowing between them. The drum of death among the melody of worry and hope. If I counseled people, I’d always advise against hope. It’s a scam. No one would listen. Rebecca told the men she would not speak. They had to look for the child now. They had to look early, not days later the way they did for her husband. They obeyed. The men and several women beat their shoes against the ground throughout the night in search of the boy. They hoped to find him lost but whole, maybe somewhat overhungry but safe. They hoped the things their neighbors had done before would stay hidden and unsaid, a memory that would rot in the brains of the dead and never be revisited. They hoped if they didn’t name the horror aloud, nothing would be true, but I hear it, in the oldest tongue, in the sweat and the fever of the body. Sadie and Rebecca took oil lanterns onto the dirt road and into the woods; their lights moving quickly and gently apart.

106

TEX T © VENITA BLACKBURN

107

THERE IS NO

THE ARCHITECTURE OF

NEUTRAL SPACE

DONALD JUDD: PART 1 109

Julian Rose explores the question: what does it mean for an artist to make architecture? Delving into the archives of Donald Judd, he examines three architectural projects by the artist. Here, in the first installment of a two-part essay, he begins with an invitation in Bregenz, Austria, in the early 1990s, before turning to an earlier project, in Marfa, Texas, begun in 1979. The letter begins with a burst of confidence: “Dear Donald Judd, A few weeks ago I did win an architectural competition for a new art museum.” But the tone quickly turns shy, deferential: “Reading your book Donald Judd Architektur and being inspired by your work for some time already, I dare asking you: Would you mind giving me an opinion (a criticism) on the project whenever you will come to Europe?” The museum in question was the Kunsthaus Bregenz and the invitation was extended by its designer, the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. 1 After the building opened, in 1997, it would garner widespread acclaim as one of the best new exhibition spaces in Europe, becoming a major stop on the international art circuit and helping to set up Zumthor for his eventual win of the Pritzker Prize in 2009. But all that was years away when he wrote this letter to Judd, in February 1990. Zumthor, at the age of forty-six, had a growing reputation but only a handful of built works, and was still regarded primarily as a regional architect.

110

Judd, at the age of sixty-two, was one of the most prominent artists in the world and was particularly beloved in Zumthor’s homeland, where he had exhibited regularly since the early 1970s. Moreover, Judd was taken increasingly seriously as a maker of buildings as well as artworks. Donald Judd Architektur was the catalogue of an exhibition devoted to the artist’s architectural designs that was held in Münster in 1989. The show was greeted with fanfare in the European press, while the book quickly sold out a first print run, then another, and another. 2 No wonder, then, at the earnest respect of Zumthor’s appeal. Evidently the respect was mutual, and conversation evolved into collaboration. By the summer of the following year, a plan had been outlined: Judd would design a new building to house the museum’s offices, to be located across a small plaza from Zumthor’s structure. It seemed like a coup for everyone involved: Judd would have his first ground-up building in Europe, Zumthor would collaborate with one of his heroes, and the Kunsthaus, newly established to promote interchange between art and architecture, would gain a unique ensemble that perfectly embodied its interdisciplinary ambitions. As Edelbert Köb, the museum’s founding director, enthused to Judd that July, “I am naturally very happy about it . . . to begin with a building by Donald Judd would definitely be a wonderful start for our exhibition house.”3 Just a few months later, in October 1991, Zumthor wrote an irate letter to Köb. Whatever Judd contributed to the project, Zumthor fumed, he must keep in mind that the state had commissioned “me, as the architect,” to design the museum and all its facilities; the entire complex should therefore be shaped according to his creative vision. Scoffing at the idea that Judd would be able to “single-handedly realize a building on the museum site,” Zumthor suggested he remain involved in some other way, perhaps with a large-scale outdoor

artwork in the museum plaza. After all, Zumthor said in closing, “that was what the artist Judd was meant to do. He should not be working as an architect for an administrative building.”4 From Donald Judd Architektur to Donald Judd “the artist” in just over a year and half—what happened? And what happened, also, to Judd’s design? Incredibly, even in the face of Zumthor’s opposition, Judd followed through on his end of the bargain: working for months, he produced numerous sketches, supervised construction of a detailed physical model, and even had a set of CAD drawings made by a young Swiss architect. If not quite shovel ready, these plans show a clearly articulated architectural vision, certainly as resolved as any number of influential paper-architecture projects

Previous spread: Donald Judd inspecting the new roof on the south Artillery Shed, Marfa, Texas, c. 1984. Photo: courtesy The Chinati Foundation Archives

This page, above: South Artillery Shed with new roof under construction, Marfa, Texas, c. 1984. Photo: courtesy The Chinati Foundation Archives

Opposite, top: Donald Judd’s notes for “R166: Italian Architecture, 1420–1560,” course taught by Rudolf Wittkower at Columbia University, c. 1960–61. Donald Judd Papers, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas. Photo: © Judd Foundation

This page, below: Donald Judd, drawing for the Artillery Sheds, February 3, 1984, pencil on paper, 12 1⁄2 × 8 inches (31.8 × 20.3 cm). Judd Foundation. Photo: © Judd Foundation

Opposite, bottom: North Artillery Shed, Marfa, Texas, c. 1939. Photo: courtesy The Chinati Foundation Archives

from the same era. Why has its story never been told? In retrospect, the answer to the first query seems inseparable from that to the second. Then as now, Judd’s project raises a confounding question: what does it mean for an artist to make architecture? Not to adorn or alter it, not to critique or consult on it— not to respond to architecture, in other words, but to produce it, realizing spaces and structures all of their own. This is a particularly fraught problem to pose in the context of a museum; at heart, it asks who should have the privilege of framing our encounters with works of art. But it raises larger questions, too. If an artist succeeds in making architecture, does this affirm that architecture is on a par with art, an art form in itself? If the artist fails, does this bear out architects’ deepest fears that they are engaged in some lesser form of cultural production, at worst complicit, at best merely utilitarian? Conversely, does it not seem that artists must succeed in making architecture if they are ever to realize the cherished avant-garde dream of merging art and life? After all, what does it mean for art to break free of the museum’s walls, to enter the city or the landscape—to become public, collective, transformative—if not to become somehow architectural? Such questions are easier left unasked, for they force a reckoning with the agency of art and architecture alike—a confrontation with both their potentials and their limits. Yet that is precisely why they are worth addressing now, as so many efforts are underway to rethink the nature of the art museum, and while so many practitioners in both fields are reevaluating their roles not only in relation to each other but in society at large. Understa nd ing what happened w it h t he Bregenz collaboration in the early ’90s—and grasping the significance of these events today—first requires recognizing an important shift in the evolution of Judd’s practice. While Judd had expressed interest in architecture from the beginning of his career, his initial forays into the field were undertaken, as he put it in a well-known essay in 1977, “in defense of my work.”5 They were rearguard

actions, in other words, driven by his frustration with the ways in which museums and galleries typically installed and exhibited his art. But this fundamentally changed when Judd partnered with the Dia Art Foundation to create a new complex of exhibition spaces in Marfa, Texas, in the late ’70s. The project, initially called the Art Museum of the Pecos, would be more public facing than the hybrid living and working spaces that Judd had previously designed to house his art.6 Most important, Dia’s deep pockets allowed Judd to undertake art and architecture projects truly in parallel for the first time, designing new works simultaneously with the new spaces that would house them. The most dramatic example of this novel working process unfolded in the buildings known as

111

YOU CAN’T EXAGGERATE THE IMPORTANCE OF PROPORTION. IT COULD ALMOST BE THE DEFINITION OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE. —Donald Judd

112

113

the Artillery Sheds, two vast, low-slung concrete boxes constructed in 1939 to provide storage space for a US Army fort then located on the outskirts of Marfa. From approximately 1979 to 1985, Judd renovated these structures to house the 100 untitled works in mill aluminum that he designed and fabricated over roughly the same period (1980–86). Partnering with regional architects and contractors, Judd undertook two transformational phases of work on these buildings. The first, from 1979 to 1981, was to design and install new windows and doors; the second, from 1982 to 1985, was to design and install new roofs.7 The motivation for the first move is practically self-evident: the original structures were dark and cavernous, and the flood of raking sunlight that Judd introduced by lining each long wall with massive windows was crucial to activating the reflective angularity of the aluminum works he wanted to install there. The roofs are harder to grasp. In published accounts, Judd explained that the existing roofs were leaking and needed replacement, but this functionalist alibi does not survive consideration. Technically speaking, Judd did not replace the defective roofs at all; he covered them over with enormous curved vaults of corrugated metal. It was a bizarre move, dramatically increasing the height of the structures without

114

increasing their occupiable area—something like a three-dimensional version of the false storefronts in an old Western town.8 And because the project amounted to erecting a whole new building on top of an old one, it was costly. “A flat roof would be cheaper,” Judd allowed when making his case to Dia’s director in November 1982. But privately he was also willing to admit that his motivation was less practical than aesthetic: “The main argument against them is their price. The arguments for them are: the buildings would be beautiful.”9 And Judd had a very particular vision of the beauty he wanted. The first construction company he approached proposed a gently curved arch some eight feet high, enough to drain effectively while economizing on material. Judd disliked these proportions and pushed back until the dimension had been increased all the way to eighteen feet, the same height as the existing buildings, to create a perfect 1:1 correspondence between new and old structures. He also became obsessed with the precise nature of the curve itself, studying different geometries until, as a Dia employee reported in a note to the contractor, “Don has decided that he wants the arc of the roofs to be the arc of a true circle.”10 Specifically, Judd wanted the arc of each roof to form part of a circle that was centered on ground level at the midpoint of the existing building. The

curve of the new roof would thus be part of an implied semicircle that exactly circumscribed the rectangular front face of each shed. This schema, illustrated in one of Judd’s sketches from February 1984, unified both the old and the new structures within a single overarching geometric framework. If this talk of corresponding proportions and harmonious geometry sounds surprisingly classical, that’s because it is. And if the classicism of Judd’s design for the Artillery Shed roofs has so far been overlooked, that is because corrugated-metal structures have strong links to industrial and vernacular architecture, especially in West Texas, where they are commonly used as agricultural buildings. Judd loved both the industrial and the vernacular, and these associations were undoubtedly part of the appeal the new roofs held for him. 11 But his insistence on the semicircular barrel vault— perhaps the paradigmatic form of Renaissance architecture, signaling the definitive rejection of the pointed Gothic arch and a return to Roman models—emphasizes the underlying classical bent. Nor do we have to look hard to find the likely connection: while pursuing an MA in art history at Columbia University, Judd spent a full academic year, fall 1960–spring 1961, studying under Rudolf Wittkower, one of the twentieth century’s most eminent scholars of Renaissance architecture. This link has not yet been seriously examined in the scholarship on Judd’s work, at least partly because Judd himself seems to have tried to suppress it. In his later years, he was increasingly open about his admiration for classical precedents, but he seldom mentioned his old teacher. 12 In a 1992 lecture, for example, he emphasized how much he felt he had learned from studying the buildings of the past, explaining, “What you learn from Brunelleschi is how good architecture can be.”13 Yet that same year he told an interviewer, “I taught myself to appreciate the architecture of Brunelleschi.”14 Judd’s notebooks from Wittkower’s classes tell a different story. By 1960, Wittkower had become famous as something of an evangelist for proportion, arguing for its importance not only in understanding the art and architecture of the past but in renewing the quality and coherence of present practice. He had even given a keynote address on the topic at the 1951 Milan Triennale—sharing the spotlight with Le Corbusier, no less—where he told the audience, “Many young artists and architects have been my pupils; and it has struck me time and again that this question of order is uppermost in their minds.”15 Judd had clearly become one of these pupils—as he said in a 1983 lecture, delivered while he was in the midst of redesigning the Artillery Sheds, “You can’t exaggerate the importance of proportion. It could almost be the definition of art and architecture.”16 But simply claiming Wittkower’s classes as some kind of “source” for Judd’s designs would be far less interesting than asking what Judd was able to do with the ideas he encountered there. And Wittkower’s novel ideas about the experiential aspects of proportion, in particular, seem to have had a transformative effect on Judd’s thinking about architecture. In a classic article of 1953, “Brunelleschi and ‘Proportion in Perspective,’” Wittkower set out to correct what he saw as a long-standing misconception: since the Baroque, the Renaissance interest in proportion had been viewed with condescension, dismissed as an idealist fixation on objective principles disconnected from subjective experience. This attitude was based on the obvious fact that buildings look

Previous spread: South Artillery Shed, Marfa, Texas, 2019. Photo: Alex Marks, courtesy The Chinati Foundation Archives Opposite: North Artillery Shed interior view, with Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–86, The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas). Artwork © 2022 Judd Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Douglas Tuck, courtesy The Chinati Foundation This page: Filippo Brunelleschi, Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy, c. 1421–60s. Photo: © Raffaello Bencini/ Bridgeman Images

different from different points of view, which surely signaled the inevitable distortion of any inner order. Yet Wittkower convincingly argued that Brunelleschi “regarded harmony and proportion in the elevations of his buildings and their changing perspective views as a single problem.”17 In fact, he had designed his buildings according to geometric principles derived from his theory of perspective—emphasizing bilateral symmetry, parallel lines, and regular spacing—to ensure that their inherent proportions would be comprehensible from any point of view, thus bridging the “gulf between absolute proportions and the changing appearance of a building.”18 Judd devoted pages of dense notes to this article, and a brief return to the Artillery Sheds shows why. 19 In absolute terms, his schema of the circle and the rectangle had doubled the height of these buildings; but for visitors approaching from the entrance to the property, the increase appears much more dramatic. The path to the sheds advances diagonally over a short rise in the ground. Because the land on which the buildings are sited is otherwise so flat, this gentle fold in the terrain is enough to obscure all but the top few feet of the original structures—but the massive vaulted roofs are entirely in view, looming at an oblique, Parthenon-like, to reveal their full volume. It is only

in the last few yards of the approach, as the visitor descends to the level of the ground at the building’s entrance, that the “true” proportions of the elevation come into view. This is obviously not a direct application of Brunelleschi’s principles, because Judd is not trying to enforce a coherent reading across differing viewpoints. Rather, he is exploring the ways in which movement through space can mediate between divergent, even contradictory readings of a structure, encouraging the viewer to focus sequentially on different sets of relationships, first extrinsic to the architecture—between body, landscape, and building—and then inherent to it, between the rectangle of the wall and the curved segment of the roof. Similar plays unfold in the buildings’ interiors. The visitor’s visual field is dominated by two grids. Above is the shed’s muscular structure—a network of steel-reinforced concrete beams nearly a foot deep—which takes on a visual function akin to that of the coffered ceiling at Brunelleschi’s San Lorenzo, in Florence (one of Judd’s favorite buildings), breaking the vast interior space down into legible units that diminish in reassuringly regular intervals as they recede into the distance. Below is the precise array of Judd’s aluminum boxes: symmetrical, parallel, and equidistant. Judd based the dimensions of the artworks on the dimensions of the buildings, and at first glance the clear correspondence suggests that this grid, too, is some sort of perspectival visual aid, not unlike the parquet flooring that was a favorite device in Renaissance painting. But as the raking sunlight hits the unique geometry of each box—the different angles of the interior partitions, the different combinations of solid and void—this apparent parallelism explodes into a riot of contradiction: empty cavities cast in shadow read as opaque, inky solids; glossy surfaces disappear, as if erased by their own reflections. And just as outside, the movement of the visitor’s body itself mediates between these two dichotomous systems. Walk twenty or thirty feet into one of the Shed’s interiors, and the building’s structural grid will track your movement reassuringly—it is almost impossible to feel disoriented in the presence of such clear spatial coordinates. Yet that same trajectory will continually reshuffle the plays of light and geometry among the aluminum boxes, unleashing a dizzying kaleidoscope of visual effects. To move through the Artillery Sheds is to experience space as both objective and subjective, structured and contingent. The relationship between the subjective and the objective has long been a thorny issue in interpreting Judd’s work. All his life he railed against what he called the “false dichotomies” of the rationalist tradition, among them not only subject/object but thought/feeling, body/mind, and form/content. But what has repeatedly puzzled critics is the fact that Judd seemed to maintain a genuine interest in both terms in such pairs, unlike many of his peers, who favored more radically transgressive approaches that used one to undermine the other—whether the absurd, antirationalist “systems” deployed by Sol LeWitt, the raw, antiformal materiality of Eva Hesse, or the vividly antiobjective spatial gambits of Richard Serra. Judd loved literally superficial effects of color and reflection; he also believed in the inherent value of a logical inner structure. He explored both the absolute truth of mathematical progressions and the contingency of embodied experience. This has sometimes been taken as a shortcoming on his part, a lack of consistency or even of sophistication. But the Artillery Sheds 115

Detail sketch of the initial proposal for the Artillery Shed roof attachment from the John Pool Corp., November 1983. Photo: courtesy The Chinati Foundation Archives

116

suggest that in architecture Judd found a heuristic that allowed him to work through such persistent binaries in a dialectical fashion; he realized that space could be shaped in a way that would mediate between subjective and objective, perspective and proportion, body and geometry. Here, even the final distinction between artwork and building is transcended. Yet differences between art and architecture do persist, sometimes in the starkest material terms. Measured against their most primordial function— keeping out the weather—the Artillery Shed roofs were an unmitigated disaster. The natural thing to do when knitting the two structures together would have been to have the new roof overhang the old so that it would shed water outward, and this was the arrangement proposed by both the first roofing contractor and the first architect Judd approached. But Judd was adamant that he wanted the corner where roof met wall to be completely flush—after all, this exact correspondence at the corner is the crux of their fusion into a harmonious whole. That seemed impossible (how would the roof be attached? Where would the water go?) and a series of architects and contractors refused to bid. One finally offered a compromise: nestling the new roof inside the existing parapet and tucking a concealed gutter in between.20 It looked plausible enough in the drawings Judd approved, but these were no fabrication drawings for an aluminum box; the material configuration they described was not a simple projection into space of the lines on the page. In reality, the junction between the undulating curve of the corrugated roof and the flat lip of the gutter’s flashing was a three-dimensional nightmare, almost impossible to seal. Worse, the design made no provision for the different rates of thermal expansion of the steel, concrete, and urethane foam that were connected at this joint. Hot days of desert sun, followed by near-freezing nights, created cycles of expansion and contraction that quickly tore open the seals around the new roofs. Within months they were leaking as badly as the old; it was obvious that the approach was fundamentally flawed. As a consultant hired to survey the damage put it, “I was surprised and appalled that anyone would design a roof system that would basically dump water inside an existing parapet wall.”21 For all its brilliance and dialectical power, Judd’s spatial practice also relied on certain untenable assumptions about space itself. If he recognized space as a means of overcoming difference—bridging gaps and contradictions, interlayering multiple ways of being or thinking and holding them together—it was because he saw space as a consistent, coherent medium. For Judd, space not only possessed a special unifying power but allowed the frictionless translation of ideas. The right spatial concept, in other words—a stack, a progression, a semicircular vault—could move fluidly from one material to another, even one place to another. This was largely true of his artworks, which evince ideas moving smoothly from wood to aluminum, plexiglass to galvanized iron, SoHo to Marfa. But at the scale and complexity of a building, heterogeneity is a fact of life, and a great deal of an architect’s labor involves accommodating difference, whether by designing expansion joints where two materials meet or creating a structural system that balances the distinct technical properties of constituent components like concrete and steel. Even space takes on material qualities like temperature and humidit y, somet imes w it h

drastic consequences. An engineering study of the Artillery Sheds undertaken in 2015 to solve the problem of their still-leaking roofs also found that the 100 untitled works in mill aluminum had themselves been “creeping” around the interiors—some apparently moving several inches a year—because of diurnal cycles of expansion and contraction similar to those that have torn apart the roof. Their poised and permanent order is not immune to the material reality of the space they inhabit. 22 This is the tension subtending the surreal collision between Judd, who tended to treat his buildings like artworks, and Zumthor, who had spent his career trying to make a new architecture inspired in part by Judd’s art. (To be continued in the Fall issue)

The author wishes to thank the many people who assisted in the preparation of this article, in particular Caitlin Murray and the staff at Judd Foundation for sharing their extensive knowledge of Judd’s practice and their help with navigating the artist’s archives; Hannah Marshall and Peter Stanley at the Chinati Foundation for their generous assistance with research related to the Artillery Sheds; Donna Cohen, Adrian Jolles, Thomas Kellein, Edelbert Köb, and Marianne Stockebrand for sharing their memories of working with Judd; the architect Leo Henke for his expert consultation on matters of architectural detailing and building fabrication; the artist Catherine Telford Keogh for her insights into Judd’s understanding of space; and Yve-Alain Bois for his incisive comments on the manuscript. The title of this article is drawn from Judd's essay “21 February 1993,” in Donald Judd Writings, ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New York: Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, 2016), 881. 1. Peter Zumthor, letter to Donald Judd, February 24, 1990. Bregenz Project Files, Judd Foundation Archives, Marfa, Texas (JFA). 2. Marianne Stockebrand, who curated the exhibition and edited the book, in conversation with the author, January 11, 2022. 3. Edelbert Köb, letter to Judd, July 18, 1991. Bregenz Project Files, JFA. 4. Zumthor, letter to Köb, October 23, 1991. Bregenz Project Files, JFA. Author’s translation. 5. Judd, “Judd Foundation,” in Donald Judd Writings, 285. 6. The name was changed to the Chinati Foundation, its current name, in 1986, as Judd and Dia parted ways. See Stockebrand, “The Journey to Marfa and the Pathway to Chinati,” in Stockebrand, ed., Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd (Marfa, TX: Chinati Foundation/ La Fundación Chinati, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 12–49. 7. These chronologies are based on a comprehensive review of the records of the project retained in the archives of the Judd Foundation and the Chinati Foundation. From the surviving evidence, it is clear that by October 1979 Judd had solicited a proposal for new windows from Stockton Glass & Mirror, based in Fort Stockton. See “Proposal from Stockton Glass & Mirror,” October 8, 1979, Artillery Shed Project Files, JFA. He eventually selected a different contractor, The Glass House, Inc., El Paso, approving their final proposal in April 1981; the project was largely completed by that October. See Activity Reports 1981, Box 20, Folder II.1.3.3.002, the Dia Era Records, Chinati Foundation Archives (CFA). By the fall of 1982, Judd had begun soliciting proposals for the vaulted roofs from several regional construction companies, but the roofs were not finished until early 1985. See Artillery Sheds Correspondence, 1982, Box 2, Folder I.1.1.1.4.003, and Suzan Campbell, letter to Naomi Newman, February 14, 1985, Box 2, Folder I.1.1.1.4.006, both in the Donald Judd Records, CFA. For the 100 aluminum works I am relying on the chronology reconstructed by Stockebrand; Judd designed the first twentyfive works in April 1980 and the remaining seventy-five over the next four years. Because fabrication lagged behind design, the installation was not complete until the summer of 1986. (The works were produced by Lippincott Inc., in North Haven, Connecticut.) See Stockebrand, “Artillery Sheds with 100 Works in Mill Aluminum,” in Chinati: The Vision of Donald Judd, 85–92. Any account of Judd’s architecture from this period should acknowledge the importance of Lauretta Vinciarelli, an architect and professor of architecture who was Judd’s romantic partner and occasional collaborator from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Vinciarelli, as well her former student Claude Armstrong and Armstrong’s partner Donna Cohen, worked on various projects in Marfa, primarily at Judd’s residence. See, for example, Vinciarelli’s “Seven Courtyard Studies for Southwest Texas Courtyard Building for Donald Judd Installations,” Arts + Architecture 1, no. 2 (Winter 1981): 36–37, on an ultimately unrealized exhibition building. Their involvement in the Dia project, however, seems to have been limited. Vinciarelli is mentioned only once in the correspondence on the Artillery Sheds,

when a Dia administrator reports having discussed the idea of adding new roofs with her, Judd, and Armstrong in early November 1982, before design work had begun. See Willie Null, letter to Heiner Friedrich, November 3, 1982, Box 2, Folder I.1.1.1.4.003, Donald Judd Records, CFA. It appears that Judd kept his work on his personal properties in Marfa largely separate from his work on the Dia project, and for the Artillery Sheds he employed architects and contractors who specialized in glass and roof construction. In conversation with the author on February 16, 2022, Cohen confirmed this impression, stating that she recalls no work on the Sheds by herself, Armstrong, or Vinciarelli. For a comprehensive account of Vinciarelli’s career see Rebecca Siefert, Into the Light: The Art and Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli (London: Lund Humphries, 2020). 8. At one point Judd examined the possibility of installing a glass curtain wall at each end of the metal vaults, which would have made the space inside visible, but there is no evidence that he ever expressed interest in making the space under the vaults occupiable. The curtain-wall scheme was abandoned because of the engineering challenges involved. 9. Judd, letter to Friedrich, November 2, 1982. Willie Null, Box 2, Folder I.1.1.1.4.003, Donald Judd Records, CFA. 10. Campbell, letter to Tom McClure, February 6, 1984. Box 2, Folder I.1.1.1.4.005, Donald Judd Records, CFA. 11. Writing about the redesigned sheds, for example, Judd compared them to an agricultural building in nearby Valentine, Texas, that he admired. See “Artillery Sheds,” in Donald Judd Architektur (Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein, 1989), 74. 12. Intentionally or not, Judd provided further misdirection by frequently acknowledging the influence of another famous professor, Meyer Schapiro, with whom he studied modern American painting. Presumably Judd was open about this connection because he liked to describe himself as heir to the American avant-garde figures whom he had studied with Schapiro, especially Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. 13. Judd, lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, March 9, 1992. Courtesy University of Texas Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin. 14. Judd, in “Interview with Gunnar Jóhannes Árnason, Ingólfur Arnarsson, and Pétur Arason, July 1992,” in Donald Judd Interviews, ed. Flavin Judd and Caitlin Murray (New York: Judd Foundation/ David Zwirner Books, 2019), 814. 15. Rudolf Wittkower, “Appendix IV: Proportion in Art and Architecture: An Amalgamation of Previously Unpublished Lectures by Professor Wittkower,” in Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Academy Editions, 1988), 145. 16. The lecture, delivered at the Yale School of Architecture on September 20, 1983, appears as “Art and Architecture, 1983” in Donald Judd Writings, 348.

17. Wittkower, “Brunelleschi and ‘Proportion in Perspective,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, no. 3/4 (1953): 276. 18. Ibid., 280. 19. In a sign of both how widely read Wittkower’s essay was and how applicable the theoretical problems it discusses seem to Judd’s work, Rosalind Krauss cited it in her early and influential text on Judd, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” first published in Artforum in 1966. This connection does not seem to have attracted much attention because in the same essay Krauss cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty more extensively, and ultimately proposes phenomenology as a primary interpretive lens for Judd’s work. Phenomenology’s emphasis on the subjective over the objective, however, makes it an awkward fit for Judd’s work, as discussed below. See: Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” in Annie Ochmanek and Alex Kitnick, eds., October Files: Donald Judd (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), 11 n. 5. 20. After securing Dia’s commitment to pay for the new roof over the summer of 1983, Judd approached the John Pool Corp., a construction company based in Odessa, as well as soliciting advice from the architect Robert Kirk, of Architectural Concrete Associates, based in Dallas, who was already consulting on the production of the large Works in Concrete located in the field beyond the Artillery Sheds. Both insisted on the overhang. Judd and Dia staff seem to have discussed the project with a number of other architects and contractors as well, but none were willing to design the roof without an overhang. As Campbell, a Dia curator based in Marfa, put it in a letter to Dia Director Friedrich in April 1984, “I have located only one regional contractor who I feel is both capable and willing to do the job.” This was Tom McClure of Target Industries, based in Midland. McClure collaborated with architect Bill Cox, a registered architect based in Lubbock, to produce the final construction drawings. See Campbell, letter to Friedrich, April 18, 1984. Box 2, Folder I.1.1.1.4.005, Donald Judd Records, CFA. 21. F. J. Hatfield, letter to Carl Ryan, November 22, 1985. Box 2, Folder I.1.1.1.4.006, Donald Judd Records, CFA. Dia briefly considered legal action against Target Industries and commissioned Hatfield and Associates, an El Paso architecture firm, to conduct an independent review. 22. James Parker, “An Engineer’s Approach to Forecast the LongTerm Effects of Environmental Thermal Cycles on the Aluminum Works in the Artillery Sheds at the Chinati Foundation,” lecture delivered at the symposium “Mid-Century Modern Structures: Materials and Preservation,” organized by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, St. Louis, August 26, 2015. See https://ncptt.nps.gov/blog/an-engineers-approach-to-forecastthe-long-term-effects-of-environmental-thermal-cycles-on-thealuminum-works-in-the-artillery-sheds-at-the-chinati-foundation/ (accessed March 24, 2022).

117

Between the lines and behind the scenes of the books you love, there are editors. Talent scouts and mentors, culture shapers and gatekeepers, they decide which manuscripts make it to print, and how. And yet, unlike the producers of films, magazines, and newspapers, book editors aren’t credited on the products they put out. Their hand is traditionally invisible, their moves covert. A new generation of editors is coming into power and changing the standards of publishing—including how transparent they are about their methods. Still modest as a group, book editors are more than ever assuming a public role, advocating for their books and authors and developing reputations of their own. The book editor’s new media-presence functions to demystify the publishing process, welcoming a new cast of talent into its traditional ivory tower. A democratization of books. From long-standing houses to new specialty imprints, from mainstream to experimental, across literary genres and formats, the six editors profiled here are taking risks, bringing exciting, necessary voices to the fore. Likening their labor to parenting, midwifery, public health, and caretaking, they take their responsibilities—to their authors, their readers, and to culture at large—very seriously. None deny that they are tastemakers, and that following their taste is their charge. The editor’s vocation is to facilitate storytelling. Their own stories are rarely told.

Identical twins with the same job at different companies, editors Callie (at Bloomsbury) and Jean (at Little, Brown) Garnett often find themselves going after the same projects. “I tried to convince my team that we should buy Post-traumatic,” says Callie of one of Jean’s forthcoming titles. “And I tried to convince my team that we should buy Little Rabbit,” Jean rejoins. When Chantal V. Johnson’s Post-traumatic and Alyssa Songsiridej’s Little Rabbit—two debut novels, “both quite sexy,” according to Jean—were released this spring, the Garnett twins promoted them equally on their shared Instagram account, as they do with all of the titles they edit. “We had to work out a situation where if one of us won the book that both of us wanted, that was a win for both,” Jean explains their social media presence. “We wanted a place where we could celebrate each other,” Callie continues. “So that was the idea behind it,” Jean concludes. “Let’s find a way to talk about our competition that’s empowering for both of us.” Jean was the first of the twins to enter publishing: she was assisting Reagan Arthur, now the publisher of Knopf, in 2014 while Callie

122

was an unhappy PhD candidate. Both had previously attended Bard College in the Hudson Valley, studying literature as undergraduates. (Callie was there first; Jean had started at Oberlin College before swiftly transferring to Bard to be with her twin.) Drawn to the work Jean was doing—“It seemed to me that her stress was more exciting than mine”—Callie was set up by her sister for an informational interview with George Gibson, then the publisher at Bloomsbury. When an internship opened up at that company, “I was there and I worked up from there.” Longing and mutual support between twins— ping-ponging with competition and envy—are the subject of a personal essay, “There I Almost Am” that Jean recently published in the Yale Review. It was Jean’s first time being edited and “such a transformative process. . . . [It] gave me a lot more empathy for the authors that I work with.” Jean only started writing herself “in a serious and regular way since becoming a mother,” in 2018. Callie, meanwhile, has published several chapbooks and one full-length book of poetry, Wings in Time (Song Cave, 2021). Each sister’s writing practice links back to the first authors and books that marked them. For psychological-intimacy-mining Jean, that was George Eliot, Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), and Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). And for expansive poet Callie: Arthur Rimbaud, Amiri Baraka, and George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous (1965). If her poetry practice connects with her job as an editor, it’s maybe, Callie suggests, about being “an arranger of materials as much as a generator of them.” The books Callie has worked on at Bloomsbury range from Anna North’s bestselling “speculative Western” Outlawed (2021) to American cultural histories such as Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises (2019), on domestic violence. Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South collects paintings and prose by Winfred Rembert, while Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is a coming-of-age from T Kira Madden, the niece of the footwear designer Steve Madden. Jean agrees with Callie in having no specific directive other than to “follow our taste,” and her list at Little, Brown is also a mix. Millennial literature is a current, though, with young authors Megan Nolan, Cyrus Simonoff (published as Cyrus Dunham), Jeremy Atherton Lin, and comedian Jenny Slate. There’s also Malcolm Harris, whose Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (2017) analyzed the economics behind their generation’s stereotypes, and Sean Thor Conroe, of Fuccboi (2022), a book that’s being lauded and disparaged (either way, read) as emblematic millennial-male lit. “More twin content,” Callie affirms Jean during their joint interview. “We really need to get on it.” (They agree to post more pictures of themselves on their Instagram @publishingtwins. In one, they say, from when they are very young, not even they can tell who is who.) “People are fascinated by twins,” Callie continues. Both she and Jean are happy to give the public what it wants, as they too are amazed by their doubling. “We literally spoke in our own language to each other,” they share, “before we spoke to anyone else.”

“I think books are public health,” says Nicole Counts, a senior editor at One World. “Books are necessary. There needs to be a democratization of books.” Reinstituted under the leadership of Chris Jackson, One World is a division of Penguin Random House devoted to, as Counts describes it, “books about and for liberation. Through fiction, nonfiction, humor, and poetry, it’s all about getting closer to this idea of freedom: individual freedom, collective freedom, bodily freedom.” Among One World’s award-winning authors is Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2017 essay collection We Were Eight Years In Power served to relaunch the imprint, “originally founded in 1991 by a few Black women” including Cheryl Woodruff, Counts explains. “Their intention, apparent in the name, was to publish books from all over the world with grace, care, and emphasis.” Counts recalls One World’s relaunch celebration with Coates, a panel event followed by an after-party with lots of champagne that she assumed would make the editorial team slow into work the next day. “All of us,” she says of Jackson, herself, and their fellow founding colleague Victory Matsui,

“arrived by 8:00 am the next morning. We were just so excited. It was like living off this high.” At One World, Counts gets to edit across formats and finds toggling between them— “poetry to short stories to [long-form] fiction to nonfiction”—instructive “because each helps me understand how to build stories in different ways.” Nonetheless, she can’t edit more than one book at a time. A self-described “binge editor” who works intensely and sequentially, immersing herself in one world after the next, Counts recently shifted from editing a nonfiction history of the crack-cocaine epidemic in the United States to something “completely different, a novel about a Black ballerina who becomes the first principal at the New York City Ballet.” Whatever the book’s format, Counts feels her role as an editor is to be a good reader and to remember that “publishing books has to also be an action,” in the tradition of bell hooks’s description of love as action. Counts also wonders if “editors are selfish to some extent. . . . Maybe we’re picking authors and we’re picking books that we want to heal us. I can’t express enough how much I’ve healed and been awakened by the process.” One of Counts’s awakenings as an editor involved Coates. When she was thirteen years old, she read Jackie Woodson’s If You Come Softly (1998), “a novel about finding your people” that inspired her career. “How do I do what she did?” Counts asked her seventh-grade teacher in New Jersey about Woodson. She was confident: “This is what I want to do.” After getting practical counsel from her teacher on how to become a writer or editor, “fast forward literally a decade later” and Counts was assisting Jackson as he was publishing Coates, who had been given an advance copy of Woodson’s latest book. Through this connection Counts was able to interview the author who changed her life. “The day I met Jackie Woodson,” Counts shares, “was also the day that I met Trayvon Martin’s parents, because Chris had published their book.” When Martin was shot and killed by a stranger in an act of racist violence, he was seventeen—two years older than the lovers in If You Come Softly, one of whom, a young Black boy, is (without ruining the ending completely) struck by a similar tragedy. Back in middle school, Counts had been moved by “the beautiful blossom of friendship and the truest kind of love” in Woodson’s book. Now its political reality was resounding, reminding her of the importance of the work that she does—publishing literature as an action—and what she loves about great books. “There’s all these truths of books,” Counts reflects. “You read it once and you feel whatever truth is associated with what you’re going through and then you can read it again years later and see a whole different story.”

123

When Jackson Howard started work as an intern at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) in 2016, he had a moment of doubt. Was he meant to be there? “It wasn’t impostor syndrome,” he explains, though that would have been understandable for a twenty-two-year-old graduate in English who found himself working in an office decorated with National Book Awards and Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. FSG had published many of Howard’s favorite books and authors, including Jeffrey Eugenides, Joan Didion, and Pablo Neruda. He’d been awed by the legacy imprint (founded in 1946) for as long as he’d understood that books have publishers. His interest wasn’t up for review, nor was his aptitude—only his extracurriculars. Moonlighting as a music critic, “I would stay out late,” he remembers, “going to concerts and warehouse parties.” He had a life outside literature. He was enmeshed in queer community. The diversity of his passions was reflected in how he read—not just FSG titles or the books on the New York Times bestseller list but also the output of small, experimental, and indie presses, as well as writing online. These tastes, though, proved to be well within the traditions

124

of his workplace. Look at Susan Sontag, a prolific FSG author: she famously spent more time in theaters, cinemas, nightclubs, traveling, and in bed with incredible women than she did at her desk. Literature is about life, after all; anything and everything can belong. Once Howard realized this, his career took off. Now in his sixth year at FSG, Howard is a full-time editor there and at its imprint MCD. He has developed a reputation for publishing successful books—reader and reviewer favorites, many of them going up for awards—that subvert mainstream literary standards. Since “doubling down on who I am as a music writer, as a queer man, and as somebody from California” (Howard grew up in Los Angeles), his list has flourished. He’s publishing Susan Straight, “who to me is the great living California writer”; he’s publishing Ryan Schreiber, founder of the music site Pitchfork; and this summer he’ll release an insider’s look at the girl fans of boy bands, Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get from You. The most culturally transformative books on Howard’s roster are—by far and so far— his queer acquisitions. Seeking a broader audience, both Sarah Schulman and Judith Butler, internationally regarded authors of paradigm-shifting academic and political literature, have trusted their most recent nonfiction works to Howard, who is four decades their junior. Meanwhile last year’s 100 Boyfriends—“an unapologetically queer and Black book,” as Howard describes it, by Brontez Purnell, a punk for life who was previously published by the Feminist Press—won the hearts both of fun boys who don’t usually read and of devoted readers with minimal access to the fun-boy lifestyle. (The book is sex and romance from beginning to end, and funny.) One of Howard’s most hotly anticipated titles is a reissue of Imogen Binnie’s out-of-print 2013 novel Nevada, which, he observes, “amongst trans people is something of a holy grail, a Bible.” The project came to him through his friend Torrey Peters, author of the bestselling-book and soon-to-be-television-series Detransition, Baby (2021). That book was published not by FSG but by Penguin Random House, but Howard had helped Peters get an agent, something he has done with many of his own authors as well. “Unsurprisingly,” he explains, “a lot of queer writers are not represented by agents. They’ve been marginalized and don’t trust the classic systems that publishing works within.” Sensitive to this, Howard serves as more than just an editor on the page—from contract negotiations through publicity tours and reviews, he is an advocate, a guide, and a confidant for exceptional talent entering an industry that is finally wising up and privileging voices like theirs. And his authors love him for it—so much that one of them even got their editor’s full name tattooed on their forearm.

Styling: Mathuson Anthony

“To entertain a sort of bioessentialist metaphor,” Angeline Rodriguez laughs, “I see being an agent and an editor as being a kind of midwife. We’re not creating the art, but we are bringing it into the world and making it a reality in a way that hopefully enables it to have a long life beyond our influence.” The boundaries between fantasy and reality—the not yet created and the soon to come—have been pushed and questioned in the books Rodriguez has published at Orbit, the genre and speculative-fiction imprint of Hachette Book Group, where she worked as an editor from 2019 until this spring, when the esteemed William Morris Endeavor (WME) agency courted her to join it. “The perennial challenge of futuristic speculative fiction,” Rodriguez says, “is to stay ahead of what’s actually happening.” This can be challenging, she allows, when our world reads more like science fiction every day. Audiences love it when a book proves prophetic, as did Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, “predicting this demagogue who’s going to rise to power with literally the slogan ‘Make America Great Again.’” But Rodriguez, a Venezuelan American who grew up in Houston, Texas, is fast to insist that “the idea of there being a firm boundary between our

world and the speculative is an illusion.” There has always been “a robust politics to imagining alternate worlds,” be they dystopian or utopian. “Someone’s utopia is always somebody else’s dystopia,” Rodriguez explains, so what seems like a futuristic prediction may simply be the documentation of a present reality that others can’t yet see. These very ideas play out in two of the books Rodriguez recently published, both of which graced best-of and bestseller lists: Lincoln Michel’s The Body Scout and Marissa Levien’s The World Gives Way (both 2021). “Set in a near-future New York overcome by income inequality, health-care debt, and failing bodies that need to be modified,” in Rodriguez’s words, The Body Scout sounds like many Americans’ lives today. The World Gives Way “takes the traditional sci-fi concept of ‘generation ship’”: with Earth suddenly uninhabitable, “all of humanity will get on this great ship and go to a new planet as if our future is boundless, the final frontier,” but the book asks, “At what cost would that come?” Unlike most “generation ship” stories, of which there are many, Levien’s is written from the perspective of a servant whose grandmother signed a contract indenturing herself and the lives of her kin in order to board the ship. Easy to read as an analogy for serfdom and the cycles of poverty associated with colonialism, The World Gives Way also mirrors a futuristic plan announced by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk the very year the book came out: to get to Mars, humans could buy or work their way there. There are whispers in the entertainment industry that Rodriguez’s first solo acquisition, Micaiah Johnson’s The Space between Worlds (2020), might soon be adapted for the screen. The story is cinematic. “A multiverse story”—many of the latest Marvel movies take place in a multiverse, a hypothetical group of multiple, parallel, or alternative universes—“about a queer woman of color who lives on the margins of a supposedly utopian society,” The Space between Worlds explores the “what if?” and “sliding door” moments of life, especially as they relate to trauma. “The dramatic action of the book,” Rodriguez details, “is very much tied to all the different versions of herself that the protagonist could have been if her traumas had been worse or better or avoided.” Rodriguez says the book’s premise of being on the margins within a seeming utopia was especially relatable to her “as someone from a traditionally underrepresented background who found herself in this ivory tower setting of publishing.” A bestseller and award-winner, Rodriguez’s first project clearly resonated with many people and set her on a course to continue to publish outstanding and diverse works in genres she has relied upon since she was a child. Now twenty-eight years old, Rodriguez describes her child self as “the archetype” of a speculative and genre-fiction reader. “I recall spending a lot of time in the Barnes & Noble sci-fi aisles,” she says, “reading books off the shelves until somebody would tell me to leave.” Her parents didn’t have “a lot of resources for splashy extracurriculars, but books were always cheap, plentiful, and accessible.” A career as a literary editor or agent hadn’t occurred to Rodriguez—“in retrospect,” she reflects, “because generally such things are not marketed to someone of my demographics”—until a college advisor suggested she look into it. Rodriguez immediately “took to the idea of being able to shape what stories were ending up on those shelves that were an emotional support system as a kid.”

125

Nightboat Books cofounder Kazim Ali feels that “every writer should do work on behalf of a writer who is underread. If every person had one other person who they looked after, the whole of literature would be so much richer.” A poet and cross-genre author himself, with nineteen books under his own name, Ali is setting the example he’s calling for—and then some. As if picking up the slack from the majority who don’t caretake, Ali has helped hundreds of books into the world, translating many from Farsi, Spanish, and French (including two novels by Marguerite Duras) as well as editing and publishing works by lesser-known, new, and young poets and writers with the same integrity he gives to established greats who he believes haven’t yet connected with their fullest possible readership. Much of this effort is carried out through Nightboat, the imprint he cofounded in 2004. “I founded the press for Fanny,” Ali avows, speaking of Fanny Howe, the first author Nightboat published. Howe is an award-winning American poet and writer whose books of poetry were “very lauded and in-print,” Ali explains, “while her fiction, her prose, was not.” In 2004, Nightboat published, first, Howe’s experimental lyric essay The Lives of the Spirits/Glasstown: Where Something

126

Got Broken, followed in 2006 by Radical Love, her five novels collected in one volume. For Ali, Howe represents “the kind of writing I like and want to do: powerful, emotionally intense lyrical writing informed by the strategies of innovation and experimentation,” writing that did not have a dedicated home until Nightboat came along. Since its founding, Nightboat, a nonprofit, has put out over 200 books in various genres from an international and intergenerational array of authors. Through all its risk-taking—not relying on “a star roster,” “publishing a lot of people’s first books”—Nightboat has consistently cleaned up in nominations, prizes, and awards. It even launched its own coveted “Nightboat Poetry Prize,” with Ali for years serving as the judge. To list some of the names Ali has nurtured at Nightboat, there’s Etel Adnan, Bhanu Kapil, Myung Mi Kim, Michael Burkard, Brandon Som, Laura Moriarty, Gillian Conoley, Joyelle McSweeney, and Brynne Rebele-Henry, who was only sixteen when he published Fleshgraphs, her first “mature, powerful, strong book.” “I’m very careful with the words of others,” says Ali of his editing style. “I do a lot of ‘shape of the book’ kind of editing,” arranging which sections should go where, but on a line-by-line level, Ali prefers to trust his writers. Citing a Bernadette Mayer sonnet—“the one where she talks about the cobra commander from GI Joe”—as an example, Ali insists that editors “have to allow for the fact that the most mysterious moves or the ones that are the weirdest could be the most brilliant. There’s a way in which an editor can become an evil figure if they are trying to normalize somebody’s work or take away the craziness, the quirkiness, the oddest parts of it. You think, why’s the cobra commander in this poem? Yet that’s what makes the poem.” Ali doesn’t work alone at Nightboat. After his original cofounder departed a few years after the house started, poet Stephen Motika joined as publisher. Three more directors and editors have recently come in. Encouraging the imprint to “develop its own identity” beyond him, Ali says, “It should represent the pluralism of all the people who are working on it together.” This has kept Nightboat fresh and relevant and kept Ali from getting too busy. In the spirit of poetry—roving, limitless—Ali also edits anthologies and book series with presses other than Nightboat, serves as a judge for multiple national writing prizes, writes and publishes himself, and is now the chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Meeting his Nightboat and teaching duties, just last year Ali also managed to publish a young-adult “Choose Your Own Adventure” fantasy fiction, The Citadel of Whispers, as well as a mature almost-memoir about one of his childhood homelands in Canada, where a local indigeous community is presently in conflict with the government over water access and health. He also edited two collections: New Moons, a volume of contemporary writing by North American Muslims, and a book in Pleiades Press’s “Unsung Masters” series by Indian-American poet Shreela Ray. “Do I regret the countless hours that I put into doing this stuff instead of my own writing?” Ali wonders about his tendency to edit, mentor, teach, publish, and promote others, often before making time for himself. “Yes,” he admits. “But these are important projects. And nobody else was going to do them. Shreela Ray’s work was out of print for twenty-five years. How much longer were we going to wait?”

EXPOSITION 16.04.2022 — 01.01.2023

Pablo Picasso, Maya à la poupée et au cheval, 22 janvier 1938, Huile sur toile, Collection particulière © Collection particulière / Photo Robert McKeever

MAYA Fille de Pablo RUIZ-PICASSO

Francis Bacon

The First Pope

129

Richard Calvocoressi tells the story of Francis Bacon’s first image of the pope, ‘Landscape with Pope/ Dictator,’ c. 1946.

130

From 1943 to 1951, Francis Bacon leased a one-bedroom flat on the ground floor of 7 Cromwell Place, a large Victorian terraced house in South Kensington, London. For most of the 1860s and ’70s the house had been the home and studio of the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. Much later Bacon told David Sylvester, “When the war started and the bombs came, the whole of the roof of Millais’s studio had been blown in, and the room I painted in was never built as a studio. It was an enormous billiard room, like the Edwardians used to have at the backs of their houses. But it was a wonderful studio.” 1 It was here that Bacon experienced a breakthrough in his art, painting a group of commanding, even shocking works including Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944, Tate) and Painting 1946 (1946), the first of the artist’s works to enter a museum collection when it was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948. Bacon shared the flat with Eric Hall, his patron and lover, a married man nearly twenty years his senior. His former nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, slept in the kitchen, helping him to organize illicit roulette parties during the London blackout. In the summer of 1946, with £200 in his pocket from the sale of Painting 1946 to the Hanover Gallery, Bacon moved to Monte Carlo with Hall and Lightfoot. For the next four years he would divide

his time between Monte Carlo and London, with the occasional trip to Paris. Among other attractions, Monte Carlo meant gambling, particularly roulette. As Bacon told Sylvester, “I became very obsessed by the casino and I spent whole days there—and there you could go in at ten o’clock in the morning and needn’t come out until about four o’clock the following morning—and at that time . . . I had very little money, and I did sometimes have very lucky wins.”2 Sylvester proposed an analogy between the artist’s gambling and his cultivation of chance or risk in his painting, eliciting the following response: “I think that accident, which I would call luck, is one of the most important and fertile aspects . . . because, if anything works for me, I feel it is nothing I have made myself, but something which chance has been able to give me.”3 In their recent biography of Bacon, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan paint a picture of his life on the Côte d’Azur as largely unproductive and ultimately depressing. Seduced by the Mediterranean climate, the good food, and the temptations of the casino, Bacon completed only a handful of paintings in Monaco, despite telling his friend Graham Sutherland that Monte Carlo was “very good for pictures falling ready made into the mind” and that “I paint dozens every week there.”4 One of the canvases he does seem to have finished, however, was a work that includes

pontiff owing to his alleged failure to publicly condemn Nazism and the Holocaust. In Bacon’s paintings he can be identified by, among other details, his metal-frame spectacles. Mention of Nazism brings us to Bacon’s fascination with press and propaganda photos of fascist dictators and their henchmen. ‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator’ is one of a small number of paintings in which attributes of a Catholic clergyman—the biretta, or square cap, that the figure wears, for example—are combined with the secular garb of a political leader, such as a suit or uniform, shirt, and tie. The microphone, which has been called “that quintessential instrument of mass persuasion of the twentieth century,” appears in other works of this period, such as Study for Man with Microphones (c. 1946–48).7 Pius XII was the first pope to use the radio for mass communication. He was sometimes photographed speaking in front of microphones, although entirely without the atmosphere of suggestibility, hysteria, and violence implied by the shouting or screaming mouth and strutting stance of the dictator. Questioned by Sylvester as to whether the open mouth in his paintings always denoted a scream, Bacon replied, “Most of them, but not all. You know how the mouth changes shape. I’ve always been very moved by the movements of the mouth and the shape of the mouth and teeth.

Previous spread: Francis Bacon, ‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator’, c. 1946, oil on canvas, 55 ⅛ × 43 ¼ inches (140 × 110 cm), CR 46-05, Private collection, acquired from Mario Tazzoli, Turin, Italy, in 1967. Artwork © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/DACS, London/ ARS, NY 2022. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd Opposite: Diego Velázquez, Pope Innocent X, 1651, oil on canvas, 32 ⅜ × 28 ⅛ inches (82 × 71.5 cm), Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London. Photo: © Historic England Archive

This page, left: “Italian Dictator: Benito Mussolini,” from Lilliput: The Pocket Magazine for Everyone, vol. 4, no. 2, February 1939, p. 150. Photo: © Keystone/Zuma Press Below: Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949, oil on canvas. 36 ¾ × 30 ¼ inches (91.4 × 76.2 cm), CR 49-07, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London (formerly Arts Council of Great Britain), acquired from Hanover Gallery, London, on January 31, 1952. Artwork © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/DACS, London/ARS, NY 2022. Photo: © DACS/Artimage 2022, Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

the very first representation of a papal figure in Bacon’s oeuvre. On October 19, 1946, he wrote to Duncan MacDonald, a director of the Lefevre Gallery in London, “I am working on three studies of Velasquez’s portrait of Innocent II [sic]. I have almost finished one. I find them exciting to do.”5 MacDonald had been the first to exhibit Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, in a group show in April 1945 that had also included works by Sutherland and Henry Moore. It was Sutherland who had recommended Bacon to MacDonald. A couple of months later, starved of the stimulating company of sympathetic fellow artists, Bacon wrote to Sutherland, hoping to persuade him and his wife Kathy to join him and Hall in Monte Carlo for the winter. “I don’t know how the copy of the Velasquez will turn out,” he added. “I have practically finished one I think. . . . it is thrilling to paint from a picture which really excites you.”6 An extensive literature exists on Bacon’s obsession with authority and father figures. In 1946 he would have known Velázquez’s full-length Portrait of Innocent X (1650, at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome) only in black-and-white reproduction. From 1947 on he could have seen the half-length version at Apsley House, London, when a selection of the Duke of Wellington’s collection went on show there, although the house itself did not fully open to the public until 1952. Head VI (1949) suggests that he may have known this smaller portrait too only in black-and-white reproduction, because he painted the pope’s cape purple (worn by bishops) rather than red (for cardinals and the pope). However, a number of Bacon’s radical 1950s reinterpretations of images of enthroned popes were based not on Velázquez’s portraits of Innocent X but on photographs of a living pope, Pius XII—a controversial

131

People say that these have all sorts of sexual implications, and I was always very obsessed by the actual appearance of the mouth and teeth. . . . I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint a mouth like Monet painted a sunset.”8 Elsewhere Bacon attributed his fixation with the mouth to “an old book . . . that had hand-coloured plates of different diseases of the mouth” that he had once found in Paris: “They always interested me and the colours were beautiful.”9 Bacon’s preference for painting on the reverse, or unprimed, side of the canvas originated during his stay in Monaco, when he was short of money to buy new canvases and simply turned round those he had already used. The back of “Landscape with Pope/Dictator” is primed but Bacon chose to paint on the unprimed side, its rougher weave being more receptive to his techniques of painting the background with thinly diluted washes of color—almost like staining—and, conversely, applying impasto to the figure at certain crucial points. The architectural detail of vertical and horizontal lines coalesces into frames, columns, and a boxlike structure that predates the glass “cage” of later works such as Study for Portrait (1949). The columns appear to have been based on a photograph of a neoclassical colonnade, such as those found in buildings by Albert Speer and other Nazi architects. Speer’s “cathedral of light” spectacle, created by powerful searchlights for the closing ceremonies of the Nuremberg rallies of the mid-’30s, is echoed in Bacon’s Study after Velázquez (1950), in which an allover pattern of vertical gray and black stripes recalling the bars of a jail cell serves to isolate and imprison the figure. The fusion of human and animal in the pope/ dictator’s blurred face and wide-open mouth, with its prominent teeth, suggests that Bacon was already looking at photographs of monkeys and chimpanzees. Passages of blue and yellow paint, dragged or smoothed across the surface, and touches of white impasto vitalize the whole, while the predominant tonality of blue/

violet anticipates the later series of popes from 1951 and 1953. Another arresting feature is the bank of delicately painted pink and green flowers, probably cyclamen, beneath the podium, evoking a crowd of waving or saluting hands. Pink cyclamen feature in the immediately preceding work in the Bacon catalogue raisonné, Landscape with Car (c. 1945–46), which in its earlier state also included an open mouth with bared teeth and a cluster of microphones. In short, this is an important early work that disappeared from view for decades. Its descriptive title, ‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator’, is set in quotation marks in the Bacon catalogue raisonné because the artist did not give the picture a title.10 He must have brought it back to London when he left Monte Carlo in 1950. In 1951, he sold the lease of his Cromwell Place flat to the painter Robert Buhler, leaving it behind among some dozen canvases that Buhler either acquired or inherited. Years later Bacon told Sylvester, “I just had to get out of [Cromwell Place] because of many things—someone I was very fond of died there and I just didn’t want to stay there.” 11 “Someone” was Jessie Lightfoot, who died at 7 Cromwell Place on April 30, 1950, aged eighty, with Bacon present. Her death affected him deeply.

1. Francis Bacon, in David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016), 212. 2. Ibid., 58. 3. Ibid., 59. 4. Bacon, quoted in Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, Francis Bacon: Revelations (London: William Collins, 2021), 241. 5. Bacon, quoted in Martin Harrison, “Bacon in Monaco and France,” Francis Bacon: Monaco et la culture française (Monaco: Grimaldi Forum, 2016), 24. 6. Bacon, quoted in Stevens and Swan, Revelations, 249. 7. Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio (London: Merrell Publishers, 2005), 92. 8. Bacon, in Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, 57. 9. Bacon, in Richard Francis and Ian Morrison, “Bacon on Triptychs, Technique, and Taking from Others,” 1985, in Francis Bacon: Couplings (London: Gagosian, 2019), 73. 10. Martin Harrison, Francis Bacon: Catalogue Raisonné (London: The Estate of Francis Bacon, 2016), 2:46–05, 176. 11. Bacon, in Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact, 212.

132

This page, left: Pope Pius XII, 1952. Photo: Keystone Press/Alamy Stock Photo Above: Haus der Deutschen Kunst, Munich (1933–37), designed by Paul Ludwig Troost. Photo: Interfoto/Alamy Stock Photo Opposite: Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez, 1950, oil on canvas, 78 × 54 inches (198 × 137 cm), CR 50-04, The Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection, United States, acquired from private collection in 2004. Artwork © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/DACS, London/ARS, NY 2022. Photo: © DACS/Artimage 2022, Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd

133

REBECCA

CAMMISA To tell stories of fictional characters, with scripts and actors slipping into personae, is one thing. To inhabit the day-to-days of people who have no persona to hide behind, who act “themselves,” is quite another. Rebecca Cammisa has spent more than twenty years quietly making films in the latter camp. Her films have burrowed into extraordinary areas of US life: a tough-as-nails nun who runs a South Bronx home for recovering addicts (Sister Helen, 2000); Central American migrant children riding on train roofs toward a notion of freedom (Which Way Home, 2009); a burgeoning Hollywood superstar who gives up the glamour life of being the screen love interest of Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, and Warren Beatty in order to love God (God Is the Bigger Elvis, 2011); and St. Louis moms banding together to confront the US government on the illegal dumping of radioactive waste in their neighborhoods (Atomic Homefront, 2017). In each film, Cammisa subtly questions the mores that uphold America’s conventional view of itself as the land of the free, home of the brave. To whom are we accountable when society abandons its poor, its poisoned, its wretched, its undocumented, its lovelorn? Cammisa was nominated for an Oscar for both God Is the Bigger Elvis and Which Way Home (the latter of which won an Emmy), but these laurels, deserved as they are, figure small in her approach to her practice. What is apparent from her documentaries is the depths she’s willing to go to see a person as they are. Cammisa sat down with me to talk her chief inspirations (one of whom turns out to be the subject of one of my previous pieces for the Quarterly, Jerry Schatzberg), the countercultural choice of being a nun, and the shifting landscape of the documentary. —CV 134

135

CARLOS VALLADARES Where did your obsession with

films begin?

Well, I come from a film-junkie family [laughs]. In our house there was always a film on the television. When I visited my Aunt Marian, we’d stay up until three, four, or five in the morning watching films. I remember as a child—I think I was probably seven or eight—a film came on one night that suddenly transfixed me. The film was The Panic in Needle Park [1971], by Jerry Schatzberg. That film just got me and I thought, Wow, I want to make films like that. Later, right before my first film premiered, I was down in SoHo and went into a gallery. Hanging on the wall was the famous 1965 contact sheet of Bob Dylan in the studio where he was recording Highway 61 Revisited. I was looking at it and I said out loud, “Oh wait, isn’t this Jerry Schatzberg’s work?” And a gallery assistant came over to me and said, “Well, Mr. Schatzberg is here in the gallery. Would you like to meet him?” I said, “Are you kidding me?” CV Oh my God [laughs]. RC A nd he wa s so g rac ious. I sa id , “M r. Schatzberg, I first wanted to be a film director at age eight when I saw your film. Strangely enough, my film is premiering at Lincoln Center. Would you come?” And he did. I thought that was a strange coincidence, yet a blessing from the creative universe saying, “Yeah, it’s the right career for you.” CV And your first film was Sister Helen, right? RC Ye s, Siste r Hele n. I c od i rec ted it w it h Rob Fruchtman. CV When you were a child, did you distinguish between a fiction film and a documentary film? RC Not really. Remember, back in those days, when films were on television, documentaries REBECCA CAMMISA

were basically nature documentaries or historical documentaries. Most of the time the movies were fiction. But take The Panic in Needle Park as an example. Yes, it has a script; yes, it’s fiction; yes, actors are portraying characters. But this was the early 1970s, so the film had a gritty realism, an authenticity of the street. Whether it was a documentary or fiction, it still had this quality that attracted me. CV When did the inclination to make films start to realize itself concretely in you? RC When I went to art school and got a photography degree. I went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and many of the faculty members in the photography department came from the tradition of New York street photography, documentary, social-issue photography. After graduating college, I acted in a play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and I used sheer emotion and tried to put that energy into the character—but I didn’t have a technique. After that experience I realized I needed to study, so I researched and read about different acting techniques, and it was Sanford Meisner’s approach that most attracted me. So I attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, and was lucky enough to have Meisner as a teacher. Attending the Playhouse was so important to my future work, but after I left it and began auditioning, I realized I didn’t necessarily want to be on the stage, in a darkened space, being an actor—I’d rather be out in the world trying to tell stories about what’s going on. That’s when I started the switch to documentary filmmaking. CV Fascinating; I didn’t know about your acting background at all. But I would imagine that these techniques came in handy when you eventually

started directing documentaries and dealing with your subjects. RC The repetition exercise techniques taught at the Neighborhood Playhouse were a really great foundation for being a documentary filmmaker. In documentary, when filming a scene of people talking to each other, one question becomes, When do you move the camera from person to person? You listen to their dialogue, take in their reactions, keep one eye on the person off-camera and then pan back to that person. After experiencing hundreds of repetition exercises, I intuitively knew when to hold camera on Sister Helen . . . listen . . . then I could feel her dialogue coming, I knew, “Okay, it’s time to pan to the other person.” And then internally I’d think, “Uh oh, their behavior is going to elicit this reaction from her,” so I’d pan the camera back to her. The Meisner approach to acting involves repetition exercises to get to the truth of a moment. You’re acting truthfully in an imaginary circumstance. It sharpens your focus. Whether you’re an actor trying to portray a character or you’re in a real-world situation with people, you’re still observing behavior, and what people say isn’t exactly what they mean. So it’s about a search for a truth. The Playhouse training also enabled me to detect false behavior, whether or not the people I was filming were being honest. W hat was amazing about Sister Helen Travis, the subject of my first film, was that she was a true Meisnerian actress [laughs]. She’d sit in that chair and watch the behavior of those around her. Remember the scene where she’s interviewing a prospective resident of her shelter while eating meatballs? Previous spread: Rebecca Cammisa, Sister Helen on 142nd Street in Mott Haven,1996, black and white silver print © Rebecca Cammisa This page: Dolores Hart and Elvis Presley promoting King Creole (1958). Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Opposite: Rebecca Cammisa and Mother Prioress Dolores Hart on the set of God is the Bigger Elvis at The Abbey of Regina Laudis, Bethlehem, Connecticut, 2011

136

Yes. For example, she’d say [to a potential resident], “Did you do a drug today?” They’d reply, “No, I didn’t.” She would then say, “No, you didn’t? You didn’t do a drug today?” “No, I didn’t.” “Okay, so you didn’t do a drug today?” And every time she’d needle them more and more, repeating what they were saying back to them. I remember feeling like I was back at the Neighborhood Playhouse—it was exactly like watching an actress use the repetition exercise instinctively to get to the truth. There was that direct connection between throwing a person’s words back to them and getting them to tell the truth. CV I was rewatching Sister Helen last night. You get a sense of the entire scope of a lived life within only about eighty minutes; it’s remarkable. How did you first approach her for the project? RC My film career started when the digital revolution happened. I grew up on film, and the visual lusciousness of what film gives can’t really be achieved in HD/digital video. On some level it was extremely helpful that I didn’t have to worry about the film and processing costs. So instead of budgeting and saying, We only have three days here, we only have one day there, I was able to immerse myself in Sister Helen’s world and keep shooting. I lived with her in that house for about a year and a half, on and off—slept on that couch, the couch where the guys would come in for the interview. Every night, I’d beat the cushions to get the roaches out of it, stick a sheet over it, and sleep there, and I’d have the camera ready, the microphone ready, battery charged and tape in the camera—and be ready to roll no matter what time of day or night it was, whatever happened. CV

I met Sister Helen Travis through my mother. My mother was a nun from 1949 through 1959, but then left the convent. The reason I met Sister Helen was that a nun invited my mother to attend the opening of a women’s shelter in Alphabet City. At the time, the Lower East Side was dicey and I didn’t want my mother going down there by herself. So I accompanied her and Sister Helen was present. We sat at Sister Helen’s end of the table and she told us of her work with drug- and alcohol-addicted men in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. So my mother had a religious connection, but on the flip side, my father was an alcoholic and I had a painful childhood because of that. In retrospect, I find it interesting that these two subjects, religion and alcoholism, ended up being the major themes of my first film. And at the time I was making the film, I wasn’t conscious of this. CV Yeah, it’s part of the unconscious. RC As a filmmaker, the question becomes, Who are you? What are you trying to communicate? What’s your place in the world? What’s your creative voice? Sister Helen was one of those unsung people—she had her bad side as well as her good side, but she was someone I thought the world should know about. CV That’s fascinating to hear, Rebecca, because here we have a spiritual and thematic connection to your later film God Is the Bigger Elvis. You could view this film and Sister Helen as a diptych around religious sisters, nuns, what it means to work in the service of some believed-in higher power beyond the mortal, beyond the individual. RC Sister Helen aired on HBO and the executive producer, champion of my career and champion of that film, was Sheila Nevins. Sheila commissioned

me to make God Is the Bigger Elvis. When she brought me in, I’d finished Which Way Home and she said “I have a project for you,” and I thought, “Oh, it’s going to be an exciting adventure.” And then she said “Nuns” and I went, “What!? But I’ve done my nun film.” But then Sheila told me the story of the former actress Dolores Hart, who entered the Abbey of Regina Laudis in 1963. I was quite resistant to the idea and Sheila’s response was “What are you afraid of? Just go to Connecticut and meet her.” Well, that got to me and I went up to visit Mother Prioress Dolores Hart. Then, while at the Abbey of Regina Laudis [in Bethlehem, Connecticut], I thought, “Oh my God, this is an incredible community.” All of the other sisters and mothers were incredible in their own right. Mother Dolores Hart, the main subject of the film, had made such a countercultural decision—I mean, most of us don’t get a million-dollar studio contract and get to choose whether we want to costar in a film with either Brando or Beatty [laughs]. But she did, at the age of twenty-three, and she turned it all down because of a conviction, a calling. That right there is about as countercultural as you get in our capitalist, egocentric, success-driven society. The reason Dolores Hart left Hollywood was an important question the film answers. There’s this temporal quality to acting of being very fleeting yet very intense, right? Film keeps these fleeting moments alive for decades. CV And film can momentarily capture the hardness and truth of physical experience. RC You’re spending months on a film, you’re with crew, you’re with other actors—you’re creating a temporary family, right? And then the film wraps and everything breaks up and evaporates. 137

Above: Aerial shot of radioactively-contaminated Coldwater Creek, Florrisant, Missouri, 2016. Photo: courtesy Subsurface Smoldering Event, LLC

Now you’re on your own again and you go back to your life and to whatever new roles you get offered. I talked to Mother Dolores about that. And you know, having a family and having it break up every couple of months, after you’re done with the film— that’s jarring, right? I think she really craved the consistency of community. Being a Hollywood star did not provide the same stability that the Abbey of Regina Laudis offered her. I think her calling to God and being part of a stable community were most important to her. That’s obvious because fifty-nine years later, Mother Dolores is still there. I asked Mother Dolores about working with Elvis Presley, and what she thought went wrong for him, and she said that there was no one there to really protect him. That was her statement about Hollywood and about that career path: unless you have a stable family or community or someone there to protect you, you’re open to being exploited. At some point the stardom, the money, and the promise of the next film no longer sustained her. I found that compelling because it goes against all the things that this American culture tells us are important. Mother Dolores chose something much deeper. CV She also walked away from romance, from love of the earthlier kind, you could say—from her husband. I find that one of the most moving moments of the film, and it’s a film full of moving moments, is when we hear his testimony at being dumbstruck that all of his love for her leaves within the ten or thirty seconds after she tells him “I’m going to God, I’ve chosen God over you.” It makes you question, What is love, then? Is its highest form in an individual person or is it in some kind of larger ideal? And is that achievable? 138

I also love how your film juxtaposes Hart’s story, which is the main story, with those of other nuns in the convent and the antimaterialistic elements that brought them there. There’s that one sister, I think her name is Sister John Mary, who talks about how she’d done everything she possibly could in today’s society: when someone tells you to be happy, you get a corporate job, and maybe you go into finance. So she climbed the ladder, got as top as you can get, and then realized she didn’t find anything there. RC Before Sister John Mary joined the abbey, her life was quite posh. She lived in England, she was a high-powered career woman, she enjoyed a highly publicized romance with a future prime minister, she was (and still is) quite beautiful. Yet whatever experiences she had, they weren’t fulfilling. Sister John Mary struggled with addiction, but her spiritual search eventually led her to the abbey. At the time of filming, Mother Dolores’s role was that of prioress. One of her roles was as advisor to younger sisters and mothers in her community. I was quite excited when we were granted permission to film a scene of Mother Dolores helping a nun who was struggling with her role in cloistered life. I feel they were very brave to do so because people think cloistered nuns live a relaxed, quiet life. But no. It’s hard to live in a community. And when you’re having a tough time, or you’re having second thoughts about why you’re there in the first place, to whom do you go for help? Seeing Mother Prioress Dolores Hart in this act was integral to seeing what she left Hollywood for and how she helps to sustain others. CV How do you see your films engaging in political discourse? Are you out to be an activist through

your films, or do you see yourself as more just the observant artist? Is this ultimately a false binary? RC I’m not interested in politics for politics’ sake. I’m interested in getting to a truth that needs to be reckoned with, and, if necessary, placing my film in front of politicians who have the power to impact injustices. There’s an essay that I always keep in mind, Albert Camus’s “Create Dangerously” [1957]. Do you know it? CV Yes. I love that essay. RC Camus was part of the generation that was directly impacted by World War I and World War II. So his view on art was that it was a “cry for freedom and responsibility.” I really take this essay to heart and, in making films, I strive for transformative results, not just a basic means of entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with pure entertainment! Politics certainly impacted the subject of my next film, Atomic Homefront, about legacy radioactive waste poisoning communities in St. Louis, Missouri. CV Yes, I’d love to hear more about that one. RC In Missouri, you have Kansas City and St. Louis, which are Democratic cities, right? And then the rest of the state is Republican. I remember talking to someone [while making the film] about the political divide in North St. Louis County and I said, “Well, who do you think radiation kills first, Republicans or Democrats? Let’s just agree that it will harm all of us, and let all of us find a way to get this situation handled. Because for decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations have come and gone and have not done enough to remediate the radioactive waste in people’s backyards.

In 2017, when Atomic Homefront premiered at the AFI Docs Film Festival in Washington DC, we were fortunate in that HBO provided a prebroadcast DVD copy to the Environmental Protection Agency. Soon after, the EPA finally announced they would move forward on cleaning up North St. Louis County. Impacting political decisions about making people’s lives better is as close to politics as I’d like to get. CV Which Way Home also reflects the fact that whatever administration is in power, whether it’s the Bush administration or the Obama administration, there will still be Central American migrants trying to get into the United States who have a stronger desire, a stronger sense of what it means, to be a citizen than a lot of people born within US borders who exist with this unconsidered privilege. Your films aren’t abstract in that sense: they root themselves within specific people and specific stories, and they let you make your own conclusions. RC What is immigration like now? Bush Jr. didn’t get it done. Obama didn’t get it done. Trump didn’t get it done. Biden hasn’t gotten it done. We’re dealing with decades and decades and decades of incompetence and a lack of political will in solving our country’s immigration problems. But who benefits from this eternal, punitive system? Clearly the reason is that people and/or corporations are making tons of money on the immigrant prison/ detention industrial complex. During 2002 and 2003, television pundits were spreading anti-immigrant discourse, and I thought some American broadcast outlets were unprofessional and were allowing opinion to overshadow real reporting. That angered me enough to make me think a film should be made to simply

remind people why many immigrants were risking their lives to come to the United States in the first place. I thought if I focused on children, then “Gee, there’d be an urgency to get something done to make it safer for them.” That’s the main reason I made Which Way Home in the first place. At the time, it was extremely hard to get anyone to fund a film about unaccompanied child migrants because the migration issue wasn’t “sexy.” The Sundance Documentary Fund came in to support it first, and then, once again, Sheila Nevins and Sara Bernstein, of HBO Documentaries, came in to develop it. My luck really changed for the better when Lianne Halfon, Russell Smith, and John Malkovich, of Mr. Mudd Productions, came on to produce. The final piece that fell into place was that I received a 2006 Fulbright Fellowship in Filmmaking. I was then able to move to Mexico and begin production. CV Have you seen the documentary-film landscape change over your career, in terms of technology, in terms of content, in terms of what gets funded, in terms of streaming? RC It’s a whole different world. I mean, it’s not even the same business anymore. I’m still trying to find ways to continue to do the films that I want to do. There’s a lot more competition, and there are a lot more filmmakers all going for the same funding, but what’s exciting is there are more voices. Because of the availability of less-expensive technology and social media platforms, people are really able to get out there and tell stories that they wouldn’t have been able to in the past. CV Do you have a guess about what future generations may say about this era through your and others’ films?

The United States is a different country from when I began directing films. I starting filming Sister Helen in 1998, which was pre-9/11 America. The political greed and cynicism that have gone on for decades have now spiraled the United States downward. The constant attacks on truth, denying people their vote, the lack of appetite for facing our country’s darker histories, and the continuous erosion of rights of privacy have clearly led to fights to restore rights that were previously secured. Many Americans don’t trust politicians to such a degree that in 2016, voters took a chance on electing a low-level real estate thug as president. When I turn the channel to American broadcast news, I find it has become slanted and, at times, superficial and hyperbolic. So the role of the documentary filmmaker has become integral to providing balance and in-depth reporting on issues and events that the mainstream news media mostly ignore. Therefore, I continue to move forward with stories that I think are important yet are underreported. Like fellow documentarians, I have to fight like hell to get my films made, and sometimes the miracle of manifestation actually occurs! That’s the fuel that keeps me going. RC

Three of Rebecca’s films—Which Way Home, God Is the Bigger Elvis, and Atomic Homefront—are streaming on HBO Max. Sister Helen is streaming on Roku, Tubi, Pluto TV, and Fandor. All four are available for rental on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

Below: Still from Which Way Home (2007). Photo: courtesy Documentress Films and Mr. Mudd Productions

139

VERA LUTTER: TIME TRAVEL 140

Jean Dykstra reports on Vera Lutter’s new series, produced on the occasion of a commission to photograph Athens. Late in the summer of 2021, Vera Lutter received a call from the New York Times. Kathy Ryan, the longtime director of photography for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine, wanted to send Lutter to Athens to take photographs for an article called “Searching for Plato with My 7-Year-Old.” In the essay, Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about passing on lessons he had learned from his own father to his seven-year-old daughter on a family trip to Athens, lessons that included an (age-appropriate) introduction to the philosophical underpinnings of Western thought developed by Socrates and Plato. Sitting among the rocks and columns of the city’s Agora, Williams wrote about feeling a shiver down his spine as he contemplated his surroundings, the place where so much of Western philosophy and wisdom were debated and developed. “An overwhelming proportion of the world we take for granted today was birthed in these cramped spaces,” he wrote.

For Lutter, who had never accepted an editorial commission before, the invitation was timely. Her father had died recently and she had spent the summer taking care of his affairs in Germany, which was experiencing record rainfalls and flooding; so it had been something of a “lost and sad summer,” as she describes it, when she got the call from the Times. Athens, by contrast, was hot and dry, with a temperature hovering around 110 and fierce winds, the meltemi, blowing across the Aegean Sea, fueling the wildfires that plagued the country that summer. The paper’s deadline necessitated a far tighter schedule than Lutter normally works on, but the opportunity to photograph Athens’s ancient structures and monuments “went right to the core of my heart,” she says. So she contacted her assistant, Lukas Vogt, and left a rain-soaked Germany for a sun-blasted Greece to photograph the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, the site of Plato’s Academy, and, some forty miles south of Athens, the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion. Lutter was able to get access to the Acropolis early in the morning, when steam rose off the rocks, rosemary and thyme scented the air, and the city of Athens slept at her feet. At the Temple of Athena, built in the sixth century bc to honor

the goddess of war and guardian of the city, the sacredness of the site was palpable. As Williams wrote in his text, “I had wanted to impress upon my daughter the feminist aspect of Athens, a city brought to life by the mythological victory of Athena, goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, over Poseidon, ruler of the sea.” Lutter makes images using camera obscuras, in which the image appears upside down and tonally reversed, with light appearing dark and vice versa; in printing them, she flips the image vertically but does not correct the tonal inversion. In her Athens photographs, then, the Temple of Athena stands not against the bright blue of a daytime sky but against an impenetrable black, while the dark shadows that pool where the columns meet the structure’s horizontal beam (the architrave) glow like a row of lights. A tree on the right of the image seems almost to explode with light, and several columns are dappled with shadows. The quiet stillness of the image allows us to take in the details carved into the columns, the surrounding rock out of which the temple was carved, and a glimpse of the city, in miniature below the hill. The dark sky— darker than it ever is in reality—gives the sense that Lutter snuck onto the site under cover of night. Her photographs of these ancient structures, fragments 141

of what they once were, convey a sense of awe, in all of the word’s meanings: astonishment, wonder, trepidation, reverence. All of this was summoned using the most rudimentary camera, a light-tight box with a fixed pinhole that lets in a narrow beam of light. That light then casts an image onto the back of the box, which Lutter lined with light-sensitive photographic paper. It should be said, though, that Lutter’s process is anything but rudimentary. She’s developed a method for determining the timing of her long, slow exposures that involves pages and pages of numbers and calculations, including, in the case of the Athens images, elevation charts, bird’s-eye views of the sites that she researched online, the timing of the sunrise and sunset, and the path of the wind. All of which allowed her to have a fair idea of how the image would imprint itself—upside down, left and right flipped, and tonally reversed— in her camera. When Lutter first moved to New York, in 1993, she turned her midtown apartment into a camera obscura. Since then she has photographed urban structures, industrial sites, landscapes, airports, museums, and other subjects using various camera obscuras, some as small as a suitcase, others as large as a shipping container. In some ways, though, ancient monuments—the Temple of Athena in Paestum, the Pyramids of Giza, and 142

more recently the Acropolis, Plato’s Academy, and the Temple of Poseidon—seem especially suited to her practice. Excepting the lucky few (relatively speaking) who have been to Athens and visited the Acropolis, most of us experience these monuments, so crucial to Western mythology and history, at a remove. In the pages of an art-history book, say, they feel familiar, unsurprising. In person, though, “There’s just such overwhelming beauty and majesty and scale,” observes Lutter, adding, “I was always marveling at what moved the people of that time to build these structures.” That sense of beauty and majesty radiates from her photographs of the Acropolis and the Temple of Poseidon, releasing a kind of collective memory of the stories that originated there, the mythological battles, the philosophical debates. The camera obscura dates back to at least 400 bc, and it’s suggested that Aristotle, appropriately enough, figured out how to view a solar eclipse safely using a camera obscura–like instrument. The mechanism has been used by artists since at least the fifteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci described it in his Codex Atlanticus, and artists have long used it as a technical aide for painting and drawing. But while Renaissance painters used the camera obscura to transfer and trace the scene in front of them onto a canvas with accuracy and verisimilitude, Lutter uses it to create images

that transform their original subjects. Her photographs radically revise their subjects, allowing us to look differently at scenes and objects we think we know. “In early photography the artists looked for an equal image reproduction of an object,” she told Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan in an interview, “whereas I look for a transposition or, as you said, transformation.” Lutter’s works rest at the opposite end of the photographic spectrum from, say, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. They have an entirely different relationship to time, capturing, instead, the slow accumulation of many moments. One consequence of her process is that while people may have wandered in front of her camera obscura—and in the case of the photographs in Athens, they almost certainly did—there is no evidence of them in the images. Not only does the site appear empty, as if it’s only just been discovered, there are no indicators of contemporary life—no tourists in shorts and sneakers, no backpacks or sunhats. It’s as if the images themselves were relics from another era. Lutter’s pictures upend photography’s relationship to truthfulness—they’re more interpretive, more revelatory and open-ended—and also our way of looking, demanding more of our time and attention. The tonal inversion that characterizes the negative image is initially disorienting, and the slow and

Previous spread, left: Vera Lutter, Erechtheion, Acropolis: August 25, 2021, 2021, gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches (50.8 × 61 cm), unique Previous spread, right: Vera Lutter, Temple of Athena, Acropolis: August 25, 2021, 2021, gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches (50.8 × 61 cm), unique Opposite: Vera Lutter, Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounio: August 31, 2021, 2021, gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches (50.8 × 61 cm), unique This page: Vera Lutter, Detail of Columns, Acropolis: August 26, 2021, 2021, gelatin silver print, 24 × 20 inches (61 × 50.8 cm), unique Artwork © Vera Lutter

patient manner of looking they require is at odds with the pace at which we swipe through images every day on our phones—or the way we rush past the works in a museum, for that matter. “Much of my response to a work is intuitive,” Lutter says. “The image that I eventually make is like a union of the original and of what I hoped to further find and bring forward. Once such a work of mine is presented to the public, it meets the memory and the imagination of the viewer and a new dialogue starts.” Creating a dialogue rather than a document: that is what Lutter has been doing with her photographs for the last twenty-five years. Even the most humble of the sites she photographed in Athens is an invitation. In contrast to the photographs of the Acropolis, which rises up on the hilltop above the city, her photograph of the steps of Plato’s Academy shows an uneven, corroded set of stairs surrounded by a ghostly tangle of leaves and branches. What’s left of the Academy is in a public park in Athens, and the staircase leads down to a lower level of the park, where additional excavation has been done. The photograph shows steps carved into the rock, nothing more, but they welcome us into Plato’s world, asking us to imagine not only what might have been there but what might have taken place there, the ideas that were shaped in conversation.

This is not the first time Lutter has photographed ancient ruins, nor the first time the characters of history or classical mythology have found their way into her work. In 2012 and 2013, she photographed in the Greek and Roman wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, focusing on individual sculptures—a marble torso of Apollo, a statue of a gowned woman, sculptures of Pan—as well as vitrines filled with smaller figurative sculptures or vessels. Lutter made three photographs of a marble statue of Pan from around the first century ad, showing a shaggy-haired, bearded figure standing on hooved feet—half goat, half man—that seems to float against an empty, horizonless background. The three images were made using different exposure times, so that the fertility deity and protector of shepherds and flocks seems to emerge slowly into being from picture to picture (or to evaporate into the ether, depending on the order in which you view them). She photographed another Pan sculpture from below, looking up, emphasizing his muscular torso while his hooved legs dematerialize mid-transformation. Pan is a slippery character, associated with metamorphosis, among other things, and in that sense, a good symbol for Lutter herself, whose transformative powers are evident in these images. Lutter’s camera obscura is a singular way of making a picture, but it also represents a way of

looking—one characterized by patient and prolonged attention. Take, for example, Vitrine, June 17, 2013. We see some twenty small figurative sculptures on plinths inside a glass case. A series of labels, in small type, tracks along the bottom of the vitrine. The glass front of the case has captured the reflections of the room behind it, so we see four patterned window grates suspended brightly in the image’s upper left, and the columns of the gallery behind the camera. The multiple reflections caught in the glass give what is actually a shallow vitrine the feel of an endlessly vast space. Out of that space emerges the beautifully carved, glowing figure of a boy—headless, like most of the other figures in the case. He is carved out of basalt, a hard, black, volcanic rock, rather than marble, and because of the tonal reversal of Lutter’s prints, the figure appears illuminated, and suspended in midair, like a spirit. In the same way that the boy’s figure in the photograph slowly, over time, absorbed the light in her camera obscura, our attention comes to rest on his figure, and everything else in the image fades in significance. “I was interested in the fragmented body, the rupture between the once perfect antiquity and what we see today,” Lutter told Michael Govan. It’s that rupture that animates the viewer’s imagination, that engages the viewer in dialogue with Lutter’s remarkable images. 143

PERFORMANCE SPACE

n 1977, when New York City was struggling to recover from financial crisis and Manhattan’s East Village was far more raw than it is today, a public school in the neighborhood, PS122, was essentially abandoned. Rented out as a community center for $1 a year, the building became home to artists who began rehearsing, performing, and convening under its roof. Eventually, in 1980, the “PS” in “public school” came to stand for “performance space” and the building was launched as an experimental arts hub. Through the ’80s, ’90s, and aughts, PS122 presented the work and hosted the residencies of Tim Miller, John Bernd, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson, Karen Finley, Sarah Michelson, and many others. A building renovation and organizational transformation begun in 2011 weathered fits, starts, and setbacks, but finally culminated in 2018 in Performance Space New York, a new phase of the storied institution. The staff had big change in mind for the fortieth anniversary, a project called 02020 that was to entail turning the artist/institution relationship upside down and returning, in a way, to Performance Spaces’s roots as an egalitarian collective. But the world had even bigger change in store. Here, Executive Artistic Director Jenny Schlenzka and Head of Community Access and Inclusion Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda speak with the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab about the organization’s radical shifts and upcoming programming.

W hat broug ht e ach of you to Performance Space? ANA BEATRIZ SEPÚLVEDA I’ve been here almost four years. I was looking for a job, and at that very moment, Performance Space was hiring an executive development assistant. Beyond that role, I was interested in all the changes that the building and the new team were going through. Since 2018, the year we moved back into the building, we’ve been defining this new time in Performance Space, not only for the institution, our community, and the audiences that join our shows but also for ourselves. JENNY SCHLENZKA And, Ana, you have a very different role from when you started. ABS Yeah, with 02020, an artist-led project for our fortieth anniversary, everything changed. The project was originally an opportunity to get out of my role in the way that I was used to it, and just approach the artists and see how we could work together. Then the pandemic hit, summer protests ensued, and we continued to shift—it was a natural, organic progression. I’m now head of community access and inclusion, a slightly aspirational title in the sense that we still feel like we’re not fully there in terms of access and inclusion and community. It’s become a collective effort to define each of our roles. We’re still in the process of defining what they are, what they serve, and how they fit with everything else we do. JS It’s my first job as a director. I’d been a curator for performance, but always in visual-art institutions. Before this I was at PS1 and before that at [the Museum of Modern Art], where I started in the media department, which then became the media and performance department. That’s how I got into performance—I fell into it and then fell in love with it. Before I got the job at Performance Space I was shown the new spaces there, and when I saw them—you know, on the fourth floor, overlooking GILLIAN JAKAB

146

downtown—I could really picture what might be possible in these spaces, knowing the history of the institution that I greatly admired. GJ Could you tell me a bit more about the 02020 project? How did you have to adapt during the pandemic? JS There are a lot of different perspectives on 02020. From my own, it was a wish to mark our fortieth anniversary, which happened to be 2020. I didn’t want to do the usual, you know, best of the last forty years; we’d already done that with our opening season, which was dedicated to the East Village, its history and present. And in a conversation with the artist and choreographer Sarah Michelson, she suggested to me, Why don’t you give the keys to the spaces to a group of artists, pay them a salary, and see what they come up with? After that, anything else I could think of for that year’s program seemed so much less inspiring. I couldn’t picture what would happen and I really wanted to know, because I feel artists are the people in our culture who lead us to the future. Then, with Sarah’s help, we invited two collectives and three individual artists. It was a complicated process to get there, but your magazine isn’t thick enough [laughs] to explain all of it. In January 2020, the group of artists—who really did get the keys, or in this case key cards, as well as the entire artistic budget for the year—were invited to pay themselves and then use the rest of the money to program the spaces. In the first month, we spent a lot of time talking to each other. The staff had to reorient because it was very different from what we’d done before, which was commissioning work from artists who would then come with very specific projects. This was way more open. I was also no longer the one making the calls; the artists were deciding what to do. All the communication and hierarchies, everything was up for grabs.

Previous spread: Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Octopus: Dreaming Otherwise, organized by Yolene Grant and Yulan Grant, 2021. Photo: Maria Baranova This page: Open Movement, organized by Monica Mirabile. Poster: Monica Mirabile Opposite: Dozie Kanu, Blood Type, installation, Performance Space New York, 2021–22. Photo: Dan Bradica, courtesy Performance Space New York

Then, I would say in February of that year, the first projects started. brujas, one of the collectives, made our lobby publicly accessible. They called it “Free Crib” and invited people in the neighborhood to come. They installed a radio show there, Radio Bonita; they had lectures and reading groups and they brought back Open Movement, a program from the PS122 of the 1980s. So things were taking shape, and then, as everybody knows, in March 2020 the whole world shut down and we went remote. Some of the artists came back in the summer, when the protests for racial justice started. When protesters got stranded in Manhattan, they offered sanctuary space in our theaters. Some of the artists had activist backgrounds, so they were really good at organizing. We became a distribution center, providing the protesters with water, food, first aid kits. Out of that grew a mutual aid project: the doors opened up, a lot of volunteers came, people went in and out, and there were ad hoc barbecues and free teachings and a lot of discussions around abolitionist strategies. It was an emotional year, full of teachings and lessons. Certain things I would definitely do differently, but the one thing that’s clear is that we’re a different institution, and for the most part, for the better. We’re restructuring and we’ve got a new mission statement. We’re right now working on a strategic plan. That’s why we had the town hall yesterday, where we invited the community to come and give input, what they think we should actually be doing and focusing on.

Wow, a lot of shifts and evolutions. It’s interesting to see what the arts and arts institutions can offer in a time of crisis. Where do the lines blur between civic space and art space? As I heard in the town hall, on the one hand you want to respond to the dire moment and offer your resources to the community, and on the other, you might not have the training to properly offer social services. What were the challenges and opportunities of expanding your work in that way? ABS The way I understood the 02020 project, it was about challenging the ways in which we worked and operated and presented work and supported artists and worked as an institution. So adjusting that to the political and health crises was also in sync with the project. In terms of the challenges, I think we’re still going through them, really. We have conversations every week, with staff and some of the cohort members, which is now called the “strategy group.” We’re still working through, What did we learn? What should we leave behind, what should we carry on? At first we were very idealistic. Then we realized that sometimes we could do more harm than good if we’re not equipped to deal with certain things—we’re not social workers. Toward the end of 02020, those community members who came in because they needed basic life-type support— housing, jobs, health care, et cetera—we tried to assist them in acquiring all of those things, but we realized we needed to ask, What can we do, what do we know? We know how to support artists. So we started having weekly check-ins with the GJ

It means a lot to me to create an artwork for a city in which I and my beloveds have suffered and struggled, and to have the opportunity to push myself and the limits of traditional theater by creating a performance designed for a specific community, in which, in a sense, there is no such thing as the old idea of a public, but rather, a culture made by and for artists, in a neighborhood with a very specific avant-garde lineage. Ariana Reines

147

artist-community members to help them develop their artistic careers or paths. We set up studio visits with other artists, curators, producers, et cetera, and we ended up producing a gallery show. GJ The town hall seemed like an important part of debriefing, taking stock, so you could move forward. I know the new mission statement consists of different affirmations: yes to risk, yes to artists, et cetera, and the last one is unwritten for the time being while you invite suggestions as to what it should be. Have you heard any ideas so far? JS One that stuck out to me is “Yes to the neighborhood.” Several others reference change and transformation. I’m really appreciative of the process of people being involved, putting themselves in the position of thinking long-term about this place, and also taking some agency within Performance Space. GJ W hat are you excited about in terms of upcoming and future programming? ABS It feels so good just to have our spaces filled up. And especially Open Movement, which I help coordinate on Sundays from noon to six. It’s led by Monica Mirabile, who was one of the cohort artists and is now part of the strategy group. It’s a really special time and space for people to come and move around, usually without an agenda. There are workshops every other Sunday led by teaching artists; they actually get pretty packed. But really, I think the sweetest thing about it is the dynamics 148

that form every week, with people just coming and looking for a sense of community. O p en R o om—for merly k now n a s ou r fourth-floor lobby—will have an installation this year by the artist Dozie Kanu. Since we’re trying to approach it as an open public space, we hope that the community gets to define it. It’s open from Thursdays to Sundays from noon to six, and we’re hoping that it picks up and gets retention and people know that they can just come at any given moment during those hours to either hang out or work or rest. We’ve already had several community activations. On Saturday there was a screening organized by a collective called “Standing on the Corner.” A couple of months ago there was a performance matinee on a Thursday afternoon organized by artists from Mexico who were visiting and reached out. That sort of thing is what’s exciting me the most. What about you, Jenny? JS Well, as the director, I’m very excited about the new mission statement because it’s so short and simple that everyone gets to remember it, more or less. The first two affirmations, “Yes to artists” and “Yes to risk,” are already in the DNA of this organization. It was founded by artists for artists, and artists are always at the center of what we do, what we think about. And then “risks,” it was always artists who took a lot of risks, be it during the aids crisis or just making risky, avant-garde, undefinable work.

This page: Reader at the Marathon Reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, organized by Sarah Schulman, Performance Space New York, 2021. Photo: Elea Franco Opposite: Performance by Beaujangless as part of Octopus, organized by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Performance Space New York, 2022. Photo: Maria Baranova

Personally I’m always drawn to works that are hard to categorize and pinpoint. I feel like that’s where the most interesting work happens, in these in-between spaces, you know, before everyone else catches up and defines them and puts them in boxes. I think our strength is to invite artists and be very flexible with what they want to do and in which medium they want to work. At the end of our spring season, on June 12 Ariana Reines—who is one of my favorite people in the world, one of my favorite poets and thinkers—has decided to do a twenty-four-hour performance on the theme of justice. Ariana’s very disenchanted—to say the least— with the American justice system. And she’s also an astrologer, and in astrology, justice is ruled by Venus, the planet of beauty and love and femininity. So the whole performance is around the question, How would a justice system that is actually based on the female and on love and on restorative justice, rather than on punishment, look? She’s followed by another writer from the Bay Area, Brontez Purnell, who’s a successful writer, especially recently. GJ Yes, I’m excited to learn more about his performance work. JS A lot of people who know him as a writer don’t know that he’s a trained dancer. He’s making a performance, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, based on his favorite short story by Sylvia Plath. The dramaturgy is by Jeremy O. Harris, I can’t wait to see it. That’s on June 16, 17, and 18. And then we have a community event, the annual Kiki Ball. The Kiki scene is like the younger version of ballroom. And the Alliance for Positive Change has a space in our building—they’ve been there since the ’90s, since the aids crisis, which very much affected Performance Space—and a lot of their clients are part of the Kiki scene. Since 2018, every summer during Pride month, we’ve staged a Kiki Ball. I think it’s the staff’s favorite. Lastly, we’re starting a lecture series for kids. The Keith Haring Foundation gave us a big grant.

Keith Haring had a studio in this building; many people don’t know that he experimented a lot with performance during his time in the East Village. Part of this grant is a lecture series where luminaries will talk to kids between six and twelve, but of course, you know, younger kids and older kids and grownups can come. And Ariana, for her piece, suggested Cornel West, and he’s agreed to come and talk to kids about justice. Performance Space, or PS122, has always been a community space/clubhouse, but we’ve renewed our efforts to integrate into the neighborhood, while also understanding that our neighborhood has changed so much and the artists are now living all over the five boroughs. And with Ana’s position now, we have someone on staff whose main focus is to think about how to involve people in an ongoing way. In addition to the programs she mentioned, we have the reading series, and we have Octopus, where we invite mainly artists to curate an evening-length program— ABS Yes, we’ve done the Octopus series and the First Mondays Reading Works in Progress series since 2018, since we moved back into the building. But these are things we’re really putting more energy into, because we see them as a way of tapping into other communities by bringing in different artists. Outside our bigger commissions, these recurring monthly programs are among the very special things we do. First Mondays, for example, is the first Monday of every month. It’s run by the author Sarah Schulman as an after-work type of program she organizes by theme. So next month is organized in celebration of the poet Rigoberto González. Then also, more or less every season so far, we’ve been organizing with Sarah a marathon reading. One was with Gloria Anzaldúa, right before the pandemic actually, right before 02020. GJ It’s nice to hear about the various writers involved, because reading is usually a solitary experience; performance can be more public and communal. I’m curious about the text-and-performance

interaction with the reading series, and the two performances in the current season. JS I think the writers, all three of them, Sarah, Brontez, and Ariana, are really excited about having a live audience. For a writer there’s always this distance between the writing process and the publishing process, and then people read the work by themselves. I can feel, working with writers, how exciting it is to get real-time feedback and to work with live elements. Brontez, for example, when we asked him if he was interested in a commission— and he was really happening in his career, everyone wanted him as a writer—but he was like, “Oh my God, I’m so glad you asked because the pandemic helped me realize, just sitting at home, how much I need physical movement. I need to move my body in order to be able to write.” There’s a real need for that. It just occurred to me that our new board president, Roxane Gay, is a writer. In the beginning, PS122 was famous for one-person monologues, it did a lot of text-based work. It’s great that this season it’s really coming to the fore. ABS We’ve had a lot of different text-based shows in our history. Ishmael Houston-Jones’s Them is a favorite; first performed in 1986 and revived in 2018, it involved text by Dennis Cooper. There was also Annie Dorsen’s work, a big theatrical commission. The premise was that performers were speaking out loud, writing from an Internet chatroom. Every season there are at least a couple of text-based pieces. It feels good, and having these recurring monthly programs is also the best way to be making community and practicing community. You know that the first Monday of the month, you can just go to Performance Space and see something. Octopus is supposed to be more or less in the third week of the month as well. Open Movement is there every Sunday. So there’s a consistent place where people know that whenever they want or can, they can come over. GJ I’m looking forward to coming over. ABS Yes, please.

149

LOUISE BONNET & DODIE BELLAMY

Poet and novelist Dodie Bellamy visits the painter Louise Bonnet at her Los Angeles studio as she prepares for an exhibition of new works in Hong Kong and the inclusion of one of her paintings in the Venice Biennale. The two discuss the power of horror, the intensity of memory, and their creative processes.

ODIE BELLAMY Reading through some of

your earlier interviews, I was surprised at the resonance between my experience and your experience. You’ve brought up David Cronenberg’s The Brood [1979], and Cronenberg was an incredible influence on me when I was young. In part because of his engagement with “body horrors,” if we can call it that? LOUISE BONNET Right, yes. When I was a kid in Switzerland, we used to go to a town in the mountains that looked a lot like the world in that film— the snow, the buildings, the 1970s fashion. All the adults there looked like those people in that movie, I had exactly the snowsuit that the kids wear in it. So to watch this familiar terrain turn into this horror around the mother and the children, where everything goes through a metamorphosis and people are deformed, was really powerful. DB It’s interest ing t hat you use t hat word “deformed.” When I was reviewing various press coverage of your work, people kept using that word, which I found kind of offensive. I couldn’t believe somebody would call those figures deformed [laughs]. It struck me as arrogant to presume. LB I k now what you mea n, but bec ause I love horror movies so much, to me it’s kind of a compliment. DB It’s true. And in horror movies there are these transformation scenes, transformations of the body, that are so key, which I see in your work. I even went back and read Ovid’s Metamorphosis, to come at it from another angle—these themes of being in the middle of a transformation. Which brings up another thing I wanted to ask you: what’s your relationship to narrative? LB Because my f irst loves were books and movies, I think a lot in terms of those mediums. Paintings work with time differently from those forms, but I try to explore where they could converge; I like the idea of viewing the paintings like they’re in the middle of a movie, almost like a still. There’s a story before and after what you’re seeing, but it’s not given away. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is. But back to horror movies, I think they also appealed to me because, at least in a certain subgenre, the women in the films are more powerful than in other genres, and in general, power functions differently across the narrative arc. Power is given to people who usually don’t get much in other movies, right? DB But there’s that whole thing that Carol Clover wrote in Men, Women, and Chain Saws [2015] about “The Final Girl,” you know, and how she emerges in the 1970s as this archetypal character that then recurs with great frequency. And she’s usually the virginal figure, of course— LB Yes. But that’s where those Cronenbergs are different. DB Absolutely, he’s nothing like that. LB Or in The Shining [1980], you don’t think

152

Shelley Duvall’s going to come through at all and she does, even though at the beginning of the movie she starts as a classic submissive female figure in the context of that family. That film also truly scared me because Jack Torrance reminded me of my father in some ways, and their family dynamic, without the murder or even actual violence, mirrors something really intense for me. DB Absolutely, I think many of us have that experience where the father isn’t by any means a figure of strength and safety, he’s erratic. And one of the scariest parts of the movie is when you read his typewriter. LB Yes! DB So it’s like the writing, or creation, becomes a source of horror [laughter]. LB Why do you like horror movies? DB Well, it started when I was a kid, but at different ages they’ve appealed to me in different ways. I think a lot of women I know, artists and writers, very much relate to the whole notion of monstrousness, the idea that to be female is to be treated in many ways as a monster in conventional society. In my life and work, I always want to get to some kind of visceral connection, and sex and horror is a place to do that. I was always interested in the visceral, the libidinal. So that’s a through line, but then horror became something else when I had this series of drug flashbacks for five years, so I could really relate to those transformation scenes in movies. When the flashback comes on and everything’s fucked up and creates this energy and tunnel vision—it’s really one of the most terrifying things that’s ever happened to me. That that kind of alienation from one’s physicality is portrayed and meaningful in horror is appealing. LB Me too, exactly. I had flashbacks too for a while. I was really afraid of drugs . . . well, my mom was really afraid that I’d do drugs, and thought it was the worst thing you could do, which I believed. Because of that, I had no notion of how to use drugs or what they did to you, so when I ate a piece of hashish the size of a pack of gum, it was like what I’d imagine would be having a schizophrenic meltdown. I was really not normal for like, a year. DB See, we really are like twins [laughs]. Do you continue to feel the effects of that? LB Not as much, but I think that some experiences most people don’t think twice about are more loaded for me because of it. Like, you know when you’re thinking something, but you’re also realizing that you’re thinking it, and you’re judging the way you’re thinking it, so there are two or three people inside of you? Ugh. To get out of the flashbacks and panic attacks then, I became a huge hypochondriac. I would think I was having extremely dramatic heart attacks, maybe vaguely glamorous, now that I think of it, very Madame Bovary. It was a way to deal with anxiety, to obscure it, to trick it on the wrong path, I think, because as I’ve gotten older and started dealing with,

sometimes, actual illness, reality is much less cinematic, less glamorous. I wasn’t envisioning the beige plastic bedpans. You know, being actually sick is so less momentous. . . . DB And there’s also something about the bureaucracy of the medical system; it’s so dehumanizing that you’re not in control, like you might be in the hysterical moment, actually. To connect back to what we were saying about transformations and panic-induced or flashback-induced states of being, and how that relates, or doesn’t, to our love of horror movies and our creative practices, do you see resonances in what you’re working on now? LB I think it’s all linked. The panicking about not being in your body, or being too many people in your body [laughter]—you know, it’s maybe like throwing up, where it stops you, freezes the moment, and then it’s outside of your body, where you can look at it. DB So this work in some way is an experiential kind of dysmorphia. LB Definitely. When I was a child I had a fever that developed into this thing called the Alice in Wonderland syndrome. DB Oh, I’ve never heard of this. LB I don’t know if people have it as adults—it’s a kind of hallucination where you feel your limbs growing, it feels like they’re becoming these gigantic balloons. DB That reminds me of something else I thought when I was reading about your work. You know how when you’re a child, you basically don’t know the rules of the physical world, and you learn them while growing up? When I was a kid, like very, very small, I would have these two nightmares. In one of them there’d be a rope that was thin and would get thick and would get thin. Another would be some animal, like an elephant, that would get big and small. That’s all that would happen, and it would terrify me. LB I had a friend who had this thing where she would feel like she was moving back and forth, knowing all along that she wasn’t actually moving. DB Oh, they do that in horror movies! LB Exactly. Something was doing this bouncing thing inside her and she couldn’t control it—and it was rhythmic. I think that’s the most frightening, the rhythmic thing. Because it won’t end. DB Like the drug flashbacks, there was no guarantee that they were going to end. Sensing that one little thing could change in the brain and you wouldn’t be yourself anymore . . . it’s not knowledge you really want to have, right? LB It’s terrifying. The fact that our bodies function at all is just crazy. We went to see the Endeavor, the space shuttle in the California Science Center here. It looks like it’s made of papier-mâché and Scotch tape, the most fragile-looking material. I even thought at first that it was some sort of mock-up, a stand-in for the real thing, but no. To realize that this thing could go up in space— DB And be so fragile-looking? Wow.

Previous spread: Louise Bonnet, Green Pantyhose, 2022, oil on linen, 84 × 144 inches (213.4 × 365.8 cm) This page: Louise Bonnet, Red Pantyhose, 2022, oil on linen, 84 × 70 inches (213.4 × 177.8 cm)

153

This page: Louise Bonnet, Purple Pantyhose, 2022, oil on linen, 84 × 70 inches (213.4 × 177.8 cm) Artwork © Louise Bonnet Photos: Jeff McLane

154

There were also those pods for the astronauts to fall back to Earth in, and they look exactly like Jiffy Pop popcorn bags. The fact that they had people in there they could contain, the machinery worked and everything, but that’s like our bodies, right? It makes you feel like just one thing could go wrong and it’s over, but the fact that it also goes right just seems so unlikely. DB I think more people than you imagine have had some sort of experience where they question the stability of their body and their experiences, and your work taps into that. LB That’s the negative part of it. DB Yeah, let’s talk about the positive. LB No, no [laughs], I don’t mean negative as some sort of moral evaluation; it’s just maybe something people don’t really want to be feeling. DB And the paintings have a beauty to them, as well. Journalists use the word “ugly” a lot in the articles, but you don’t see them as ugly. Or do you? LB No, I don’t. But I’m also okay with that description—ugly, to me, isn’t really a bad quality. Maybe that’s also why the figures in the paintings aren’t looking at the viewer, so you can’t really shame them. They’re in their own world, and imper vious to judgments of the beauty/ ugly variety. DB They’re not of our world. I like that. Are they also outside of gender? Some seem more male or more female, but is it more correct to think of them as androgynous? LB If they have clear sexual attributes, it’s to show something, but that something isn’t usually gender. I’m interested in seeing what your body does to you rather than defining any sort of limits or separations. DB That feels very writerly to me. I’m always telling students about the concept of foreground. If everything’s so detailed, nobody can enter; some things have to be more lovingly cared for and then other things should be more sketchy, so that there’s a contrast. LB Exactly. I’m getting more and more comfortable letting things be unclear and not worrying about it and moving on to something else. DB You mean you just take a break? Or you just end the painting? LB No, for example, if I start telling myself, “Oh, I should do . . . ” this or that, there’s this feeling of being bored and trapped that comes up, and it usually starts with my asking myself, “But what will people think?” That’s a full stop right there. I’ll just let whatever it is be what it was up until that point. Another description of how I work is that I’m getting something out, expelling something, and I want to look at it, but it can’t look back at me. DB If you saw their eyes, how would that change the gaze? LB I’m not interested in a relationship with the figure. It’s about me being able to look at it, there’s no back and forth between us. I did decide to paint a face in a painting I’d just finished and it took LB

weeks, it was very difficult to find a face that gave some agency to the figure but still wasn’t looking at me or sucking all the attention. I’m usually more interested in what emotions you can show with other things in your body than your face. DB It seems very precise, and enigmatic at the same time. You’ve talked about it in terms of voyeurism. LB Yes, exactly, voyeurism. You know how Tom of Finland takes this erotic subject, basically something he wants to jerk off to, but he puts so much work and attention into it? The work is perfectly made. He doesn’t just stop when the image fulfills its libidinal intention, he really sees it through. I like that. DB So do your paintings excite you? LB Yeah, at first, but they take so long that it wears off [laughs]. DB I know. I’m a very slow worker in my own life. LB I like it when men, usually, get turned on, but when the fact that they get turned on is very disturbing to them. DB They get turned on by your paintings? LB Yeah. DB It sounds like that doesn’t feel like a violation to you? LB I like it if they’re turned on— DB But disturbed [laughs]. That’s perfect. LB If they’re just turned on, that means they’re not getting it, I think. DB [laughs] But you haven’t heard of women getting turned on by them? LB Oh absolutely, yes. But I would say, I’m not really making work to turn people on, it’s more a by-product of the feeling of being out of control, of humiliation. DB Shame is kind of cousins with masochism, right? LB Right. DB In one of the many interviews with you that I read, you were talking about how you look at these figures with a nonjudgmental gaze, that that was important. Some of the interviewers seemed like they weren’t doing that. LB To me, these figures are always dignified, and I’m in no way being mean to them or making fun of what they’re engaged in. That’s important. DB Would you be able to talk about the influence of comic book artists and illustrators? Of course, since I’m in the Bay Area, I think of R. Crumb immediately—you’ve mentioned him in the past, and I’m curious about what in his comics drew you to them. They’re often read as really macho, guy things and it seems like you’re very much interested in this sort of female or feminine version of the body and embodiment. LB Because I grew up a bit isolated from pop culture, a lot of the political discourse that was going on in the ’80s wasn’t really reaching me. I felt a bit like an alien in life for a long time, and I didn’t completely understand all the subcurrents of the contemporary world. So when I saw those comics, probably in middle school in Switzerland—because

Europe is more like the Bay Area, where comics like R. Crumb are celebrated more than, say, Superman—I think I understood them in maybe a naïve way, or at least in a personal way outside of the context where I now realize most people interpret them. I didn’t take it as, you know, the male gaze and being overpowered. To me it was more, Oh, you can draw a woman like that and she’s amazing and she’s a giant, she’s covered in hair— DB Those women are really powerful, it’s true. LB I wasn’t very enlightened. DB And what does “enlightened” mean? LB It’s a realization that I’ve had later in life. When I was in Switzerland, I think I just accepted things as they were. If a woman was objectified, I didn’t see it as odd or unjust in the way I do now. It was just normal. DB Even in Switzerland? I thought of it being very liberal there. LB There are pockets of progressive people, but the rest is . . . they’re pretty repressed. I went to art school in Switzerland and no one was gay. DB [laughs] On the surface. LB Exactly. I’m sure the desire was there, but no one was out. It was very, very repressed. DB So Los Angeles must have seemed like— LB Oh, it was incredible. After two months I thought, I’m never going back. DB There are lots of places you could have gone. What made you come here? LB Really only because I knew people, and I could stay with them. If they’d been in Oklahoma I would have gone there. But so, yeah, I took art and comics at face value at that time—it was exciting, you could just do this or that with it. I didn’t fully get into the subtext of it until later. DB I think people have to do a lot of relearning in order to have a different version of women’s relationship to reality. It sounds like you didn’t have to do some of that relearning because you didn’t really have it down in the first place. LB I’m learning it all now, still. I always thought, Oh, what I’m doing isn’t political, or, I don’t have an agenda. And then I realized, I absolutely have one. DB Yeah, you absolutely do [laughs]. LB It had to arrive on a stream of consciousness, shutting down a lot of overthinking. DB Totally. Shutting off that censor can be the hardest part of working on a project. At least for me, with writing, I have to shut it off totally and just do these things I think are so crazy that nobody’s going to relate to them. And then, you know, this other part of the brain, the editing part of the brain, can come in. But it has to be under control or the editing part will get rid of everything that makes the piece alive. LB Right. When I want to do something, I can see it, I sketch it really fast, and then I basically shut off and do it. DB Just really enter that body.

155

156

Salomé Gómez-Upegui profiles the trailblazing feminist sculptor Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982). Prompted by this Colombian artist’s first retrospective outside her home country—on view at the Muzeum Susch, Switzerland, through June 26, 2022—GómezUpegui sheds light on Bursztyn’s vital role in Colombia’s cultural and literary community.

FELIZA BURSZTYN

Feliza Bursztyn’s entire existence defied the status quo. A key figure in Colombian modernism, she pushed the boundaries of kinetic sculpture and pioneered the use of found materials and multisensory installations. Describing herself as “a welder and a worker,” she also championed feminist and leftist political views in direct defiance of Colombia’s conservative and Catholic society. T he daughter of Polish-Jew ish immig rants, Bursztyn was born in Bogotá in 1933. Her lifelong love affair with the Colombian capital lasted until the end of her days. Her father’s small textile business afforded her the rare possibility of moving to New York, at the age of eighteen, to study at the Art Students League. At twenty-four, divorced with three children, she moved back to Bogotá to pursue her dream of becoming an artist, leaving her children in the care of their father. In response to Bursztyn’s defiant lifestyle, the Colombian press often referred to her as “la loca” (the madwoman), a moniker that she gleefully embraced and made her own. In an interview with Carrusel magazine in 1979, entitled “En un país de machistas ¡hágase la loca!” (In a sexist country, pretend to be a madwoman), Bursztyn said, “I took advantage of the crazy thing and insisted on it to really do what I wanted because I do believe that we live in a macho world. And being a sculptor and not being a man is very difficult. In order for people to take me seriously, I resorted to that trick, because they thought, ‘Maybe that madwoman does interesting things.’ And I think it worked.” Bursztyn’s series Las Histéricas (The hysterics, 1967–69) exemplifies her willingness to embrace insults as flattery and to transform hostility into art. Built from thin steel strips salvaged from a local factory, these tantalizing circular forms vibrate to no beat in particular with the help of small motors, emitting an unsettling mechanical noise. They question sexist

157

medical codifications of women and they rattled viewers to the core. Bursztyn lived and worked for over twenty years in a garage next to her father’s factory, having converted the structure into an eccentric three-story home/studio with the help of Colombian architects Rogelio Salmona and Carlos Valencia. She famously hung pictures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in her workspace and often held cultural soirées there for a wide array of journalists, writers, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and artists. “And this is my house, full of old irons, spot welders, transformers, paints, scrap metal, cats, dogs, flowers, seeds. Of course, there’s also a kitchen,” the artist says, laughing, in the short film Las camas de Feliza (The beds of Feliza, 1974), produced by the Spanish filmmaker José María Arzuaga. It is impossible to understand the trajectory of Bursztyn’s career without considering her proximity to key figures of Colombia’s artistic and literary scene. She had a romantic relationship with the illustrious Colombian poet Jorge Gaitán Durán, with whom she moved to Paris in 1957 to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine. “You know, if I’m a sculptor it’s thanks to Jorge,” she once said. 1 Bursztyn was also close to the eminent Colombian artist Alejandro Obregón, whom she lovingly called “la madre” (the mother), and was a dear friend of renowned art critic Marta Traba, who rarely missed an opportunity to defend the extravagant artist from the endless waves of criticism that swelled her way. The novelist Gabriel García Márquez, his wife Mercedes Barcha, and the journalist Enrique Santos Calderón were all in her inner circle. To say that Bursztyn lived and died surrounded by friends is not hyperbole. García Marquez, Barcha, Santos Calderón, and her then husband, Pablo Leyva, were all present when she suffered a heart attack in a Paris restaurant at the age of forty-nine. In an article he wrote about the tragedy, “Los 166 días de Feliza” (Feliza’s 166 days, 1982), García Marquez said that Bursztyn had died of pure sadness. Exactly 166 days before her death—following two trips to Cuba—she had been arrested and tortured by Colombia’s military under the suspicion that she had a connection with the leftist Colombian guerrilla group M-19. This led her to seek political asylum in Mexico and then to move to France, where she died less than six months later.2 During Bursztyn’s lifetime, her work was rarely seen internationally. She participated in just a handful of exhibitions abroad, in countries such as Cuba, Poland, and Israel, and on her premature death, most of her sculpture lay in Colombian institutions or private collections. Over the years, a few of Burstyn’s pieces have been featured in group shows at Tate,

London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and she was included in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in 2017. Even so, the international art world is only beginning to scratch the surface of her genius. Feliza Bursztyn: Welding Madness, the artist’s first retrospective outside Colombia, arose precisely as an attempt to introduce her to the global art world. Cocurated by Abigail Winograd and Marta Dziewa ńska, this expansive exhibition features around fifty sculptures, installations, films, and archival materials, most of them never before shown in Europe. It presents her as one of Latin America’s most important sculptors of the twentieth century. Bursztyn “refused to be normal,” Dziewa ńska says. “She would not be squared into how female artists should work. And that’s why we gave the exhibition the title ‘Welding Madness,’ because she was daring to go in the direction of what is seen as abnormal, what is seen as extravagant, what is seen as female excess.”3 Feminist politics are always present in Bursztyn’s work. Her desire to touch on prohibited subjects is clear in her series Las Camas (The beds, 1974), which debuted at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (ma mbo). A group of thirteen metal bed-frames furnished with electric motors and covered by vibrantly colored satin sheets, the sculptures moved suggestively against the sound of an ominous electro-acoustic beat written for the occasion by the Colombian composer Jacqueline Nova. The work brought Colombian society face-to-face with unspeakable eroticism, illustrating once again the artist’s undeniable talent in creating discomfort and defying hegemony. Bursz t y n’s renewed releva nc e, more t ha n forty years after her passing, is a testament to her avant-garde nature. Since the intransigent society she so fiercely sought to convulse is alive and well, her art remains as pertinent as ever. Referencing her brilliance in Colombia’s traditionalist society, Traba once wrote, “Many times Feliza has passed as a rebel without a cause, and this is a true injustice. All of her acts of aggression against established models are born from the same desperate desire to shake up the environment, dust it off, exasperate it. They are born, of course, out of love for the environment and her furious desire to change it.”4 1. Feliza Bursztyn, in Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, “Entrevista trunca con Feliza Bursztyn,” Cromos (Colombia), March 8, 1983. 2. Gabriel García Márquez, “Los 166 días de Feliza,” El País (Madrid), January 19, 1982. 3. Marta Dziewańska, Zoom conversation with Abigail Winograd and the author, March 8, 2022. 4. Marta Traba, “Feliza Bursztyn: Imaginación en escultura,” El Tiempo (Colombia), September 19, 1974. Previous spread: Feliza Bursztyn welding in her studio in Bogotá, c. 1979. Photo: Rafael Moure This page: Feliza Bursztyn, Sin titulo (Untitled), 1969–74, from the series Miniesculturas. Photo: Oscar Monsalve, courtesy Archive of Pablo Leyva Opposite, top: Feliza Bursztyn in her studio in Bogotá, c. 1980. Photo: Raphael Moure, courtesy Archive of Pablo Leyva Opposite, bottom: Feliza Bursztyn, Sin titulo (Untitled), c. 1968. Photo: Oscar Monsalve, courtesy Archive of Pablo Leyva

158

159

March 26 – October 29, 2022

PALAZZO DUCALE VENICE palazzoducale.visitmuve.it

SERPENTINE PAVILION 2022 BLACK CHAPEL DESIGNED BY THEASTER GATES

Black Chapel is realised with the architectural support of Adjaye Associates

Serpentine Kensington Gardens London W2 3XA serpentinegalleries.org @SerpentineUK

10 JUNE – 16 OCTOBER 2022

Headline Partner

Supporting Partners

Technical Advisor

Responsible Materials Advisor

May 21–Sept 25, 2022

on view at

Downtown Los Angeles | Get tickets at thebroad.org Takashi Murakami, Tan Tan Bo a.k.a Gerotan: Scorched by the Blaze in the Purgatory of Knowledge (detail), 2018. Acrylic on canvas mounted on board. The Broad Art Foundation. © 2018 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

SCULPTURES FOR LOVERS Thomas Houseago at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France

05.07 - 10.10.22

60’ from Paris by high-speed train

Your destination for the past, present, and future of art.

Choose from our extensive range of lecture series, special lectures, panel discussions, workshops, conferences, exhibition openings, and join the conversation.

ifa.nyu.edu/events

GAGOSIAN ART ADVISORY Curatorial Advice Appraisals and Valuations Insurance, Estate Tax, Charitable Donation Collection Management Short and Long-Term Strategic Planning Collection Database Management Global Art Market Access Galleries, Auction, Art Fairs, Private Sale Negotiation Expertise

Contact Information Laura Paulson – Director and Principal lpaulson@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.755.9233 Mary Phelps – Director of Collections Management mphelps@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.636.8126

Jenny Mittica – Associate Director of Collections Management jmittica@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.853.4459 Bernard Lagrange – Director blagrange@gagosianartadvisory.com 609.751.8303

Michael Walker – Director mwalker@gagosianartadvisory.com +44 782.729.7223 Nicole Fromer – Advisory Administrator nfromer@gagosianartadvisory.com 917.756.7518

Landon Metz, Untitled, 2021 Corporate collection of Greenberg Traurig One Vanderbilt, New York Advised by Gagosian Art Advisory

Carnegie Hall at Home Enjoy recent broadcasts and curated playlists available worldwide for streaming on demand, including programs for kids and families. carnegiehall.org/WatchAndListen

Jeff Goldberg / Esto

GAME CHANGER ANNIE FLANDERS Aria Darcella pays homage to the founder of Details magazine, enumerating the many ways in which Flanders changed discourses around fashion, nightlife, and photography. Neighborhood magazines in New York have a way of attracting national readership. Not to bolster any idea that the city is the center of the world or whatever, but there is something about its culture that outsiders want in on. In the 1980s, the culture they wanted in on was the downtown scene, where club kids, designers, and artists were innovating and producing with a fervent energy. And Annie Flanders, who passed away in March, lionized it all in Details. Details featured a little bit of everything but notably stood out for its fashion and nightlife coverage. The two were inextricably entwined. “Fashion is the most revolutionary thing going on right now,” Flanders told the Washington Post in 1985. “I am open to whatever the kids want to write about. Clothes is it.”1 “The kids,” of course, were her collaborators. Flanders, who launched the magazine in her forties, was decades older than they were. Simon Doonan even referred to her as one of the “grown-ups” in the room. 2 The phrase usually implies an air of responsibility: the experienced one, the voice of reason. But Flanders was warmer than that. The talent around her didn’t need to be refined, they just needed a shot, and she was proud to be the first to give it to them. And American fashion was experiencing a revolution at the time, one that would redefine the city’s importance as a global creative force and launch some of its biggest image producers. Flanders was there to provide attention, encouragement, and business. Flanders had been involved in fashion since the 1960s, when she was a buyer for the department store Gimbels. She eventually opened her own boutique, Abracadabra, on the Upper East Side, with the aim of promoting young designers being overlooked by larger stores. She supported talents such as Willi Smith, Betsey Johnson, Isabel Toledo, and Anna Sui (who introduced her to the photographer Steven Meisel, then still an illustrator). By the late ’70s her eye for talent had spurred a side gig: reporting on fashion for the SoHo Weekly News. The newspaper folded in 1982, but Flanders wasn’t done with writing. She opened Details a few months later with $6,000 of her own savings. It was a scrappy upstart in the best possible way. “Everyone at Details worked for IOUs for the first two years simply because we believed in her vision,” Hal Rubenstein, her restaurant critic, explained in 2015. “She was willing to risk everything for it, so how could we not do the same?”3 Rubenstein began as Flanders’s caterer at the SoHo Weekly News. He was not the only New York cultural figure to get their start at Details. Michael Musto was its movie reviewer; Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, its fashion director. Meisel published his first cover with the magazine and Stephen Gan worked in the fashion department. It was also a 180

place where more established names, such as Bruce Weber and Bill Cunningham, could publish work deemed unfit for the establishment. There was a unique collision of talents, where upstarts were put on the same level as the greats. What this accomplished, more than anything, was the creation of a tight-knit creative community. Details was the perfect integration of an emerging culture and the writing chronicling it. It didn’t report on the scene from afar, and somehow it did more than just report from within. If nightclubs were the beating heart of downtown culture, Details was the brain: projecting, reflecting, discussing. It wasn’t long before the monthly was distributed across the country. Flanders mused that its

Annie Flanders entering Area nightclub, New York, 1986. Photo: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

popularity outside New York’s downtown could be attributed to voyeurism; perhaps she was being humble, but she was selling both Details and the culture it covered short. “Voyeurism” implies little to no active participation. Readers wanted to be in the know—to keep up with the names, what to wear, how to live. They might not have been able to party with the club kids, but they could be inspired by, take influence from, even look up to them. They yearned to participate, and reading Details was, for those beyond downtown and even some within it, the closest they could get. It should come as no sur pr ise t hat when Flanders’s community needed her, she gave back without hesitation. As the aids epidemic decimated New York, while politicians were turning a blind eye to the tragedy, Flanders was one of the first to join Design Industries Foundation Fighting aids (diffa), to help raise awareness and funds.

And when Susanne Bartsch was putting together the Love Ball to raise money for the same cause, Flanders was the first person she called, using her connections to secure advertising for the event. Naturally, it was also covered in Details. Although Details was ragtag in production, its circulation rose at a rapid clip in its first few years. Other magazines jumped to compete in covering the downtown scene, and in 1985 Flanders was recognized with a Council of Fashion Designers of America award for how gloriously she had changed the game and put American talent in the spotlight. By 1988, Details had attracted the attention of Si Newhouse of Condé Nast, who bought the publication for $2 million. It was the beginning of the end. While Newhouse promised that he had “no interest in encouraging Annie to convert to a broader focus,”4 it seemed what he really wanted was a younger counterpart to GQ.5 In 1990, he shut the title down, later reviving it as a men’s lifestyle and fashion publication. Though Details was effectively gone, its impact was immeasurable. Several contributors—Musto, Meisel, Gan, and Cooke Newhouse among them—went on to become legends in their own right. Subcultural fashion ascended to the forefront of a conversation it continues to lead to this day. The streets have been inspiring couture for decades, not the other way around. If there is a throughline in Flanders’s career, it is that she illuminated what was underground, be it a singular design talent or a horrific disease. There was no strategy to it, either, just her passion, her heart. It feels strange to wax poetic about this, because Flanders herself would be the last person to overthink the scene or her magazine. She rejected stuffy intellectualism in favor of fun. After all, a party is never supposed to change the world, it’s just supposed to be a good time. “I founded Details to fill a void,” she said. “It’s the first magazine that didn’t take fashion seriously. Sometimes fashion is funny, you know?”6 1. Annie Flanders, quoted in Jeffrey Hogrefe, “Clothes Make the Revolution,” The Washington Post, March 12, 1985. Available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ lifestyle/1985/03/12/clothes-make-the-revolution (accessed March 29, 2022). 2. Simon Doonan, quoted in Penelope Green, “Annie Flanders, Founder of Details Magazine, Dies at 82,” New York Times, March 16, 2022. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/ business/media/annie-flanders-dead.html (accessed March 29, 2022). 3. Hal Rubenstein, quoted in Eddie Roche, “Daily Flashback: Meet Details Creator Annie Flanders,” The Daily Front Row, November 18, 2015. Available online at https://fashionweekdaily.com/detailsannie-flanders/ (accessed March 20, 2022) 4. Si Newhouse, quoted in Michael Gross, “In Flanders’s Field,” New York Magazine, March 21, 1988, 22. 5. See Carol Felsenthal, Citizen Newhouse: Portrait of a Media Merchant (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). Available online at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Citizen_ Newhouse/3fasCAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=annie+flanders &pg=PT241&printsec=frontcover (accessed March 29, 2022). 6. Flanders, quoted in Gross, “New Fashion Magazines: A Daring Focus,” New York Times, August 15, 1986.