Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2020 by Gagosian Quarterly

26 Jenny Saville: Painting the Self Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, about her latest self-portrait, her studio practice, and the historical painters to whom she continually returns.

34 Leaders in the Arts Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, director of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, speaks with Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the Showroom, London, and member of the Thought Council at Fondazione Prada, Milan, and Sarah Cosulich, the artistic director of La Quadriennale di Roma.

40 Prouvé in Tijuana Alastair Gordon and Robert Rubin speak with Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman about their work on migrant housing and a community station in Tijuana.

48 New Interiorities Alison M. Gingeras and Jamieson Webster present a compendium of features addressing feminism in the current moment.

86 Jeff Wall Daniel Spaulding considers formal and technical developments in the photographer’s work against the background of global shifts of power and politics, specifically the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

138

Ed Sanders Raymond Foye speaks with the author, musician, and American-counterculture record-keeper Ed Sanders at his home in Woodstock, New York.

94 Fashion and Art, Part 4: Kim Jones

106 In the Studio with Neil Jenney

Derek Blasberg speaks with the designer about both his process and his passions.

An interview by Joe Bradley.

Against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election, art historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present.

Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, about the role of museums in the preservation of artists’ legacies.

122 Building 98 The Art History a Legacy Quarterly’s Alison of Presidential The McDonald speaks with Campaign Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Posters Sachs Senior Curator of

160

Tatiana Trouvé A portfolio of the artist’s drawings made during lockdown. Text by Jesi Khadivi.

Front cover: Jenny Saville, Prism, 2020, pastel on linen, 78 ¾ × 63 × 2 inches (200 × 160 × 5 cm) © Jenny Saville

134 154 The Iconoclasts Ewa Juszkiewicz The final installment of a four-part story cycle by Anne Boyer.

146 Foray Forêt: Trisha Brown’s Choreographed Landscapes

Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, considers the historical precedents for Ewa Juszkiewicz’s painting practice.

On the occasion of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s fiftieth anniversary, Hendel Teicher examines the legendary choreographer’s work through a biographical lens.

Top row, left to right: Ed Sanders at the Peace Eye Bookstore, 383 East 10th Street, New York, January 14, 1966. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970). Photo: Glasshouse Images/Alamy Stock Photo Bottom row, left to right: Tatiana Trouvé, April 12th, La Jornada, Mexico, from Front Pages March 15 – May 11, 2020, inkjet print, pencil, and linseed oil on paper, 16 ⅝ × 11 ⅝ inches (42 × 29.5 cm) © Tatiana Trouvé. Photo: Florian Kleinefenn Meleko Mokgosi, Bread, Butter, and Power, 2018 (detail), oil, acrylic, bleach, graphite, photo and pigment transfer, and permanent marker on canvas, with plastic sleeve, in 21 parts; 1 part: 108 × 72 inches (274.3 × 182.9 cm), 18 parts, each: 96 × 96 inches (243.8 × 243.8 cm), 1 part: 96 × 132 inches (243.8 × 335.3 cm), 1 part: 84 × 12 × 12 inches (213.4 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm) © Meleko Mokgosi

114

Shelley Duvall Every era has a handful of actors who embody the moods and aesthetics of their moment. Carlos Valladares looks back to the 1970s, the time of New Hollywood, and argues for the singular contemporaneity of Shelley Duvall.

172 T. S. Eliot Meets Henri Matisse John Elderfield investigates paths of potential influence between two great modernists through an interrogation of Eliot’s 1919 essay on the playwright Ben Jonson and associated primary materials.

196 Game Changer: Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles Ariella Wolens explores the patron’s role in fostering the legendary art world of earlytwentieth-century France.

126

Meleko Mokgosi: Democratic Intuition The artist writes on his series Democratic Intuition.

TABLE OF CONTENTS WINTER 2020

Photo credits:

or our last issue of 2020 we invited some of our most beloved artists, authors, and theorists to reflect on this perplexing moment in history and to speculate on how we can find hope in the coming years. A special section called “New Interiorities,” guest edited by curator Alison M. Gingeras and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, addresses ideas around feminism, control, resistance, and change. The historical rifts that divide our society have been amplified by current circumstances. We are very grateful to be able to publish this thoughtful collaboration and the wide range of perspectives it includes. In the lead-up to the US elections, Gillian Jakab talks with art historian Hal Wert about the evolution of campaign posters and their role in getting voters to the polls. Motswana artist Meleko Mokgosi explains his Democratic Intuition series, evoking the challenges and flaws of democracy as well as its promise. In a response to current headlines, Tatiana Trouvé unveils a new series of works in which she draws directly on daily newspapers, effectively blending medium and message. A conversation about design and architecture between Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman, Alastair Gordon, and Robert M. Rubin remarks on the continuing relevance of Jean Prouvé’s postwar social-housing concepts and addresses a new project in Tijuana, Mexico, that will provide shelter and a sustainable infrastructure of support for migrants living in this border region. In a surprising twist, we witness the culmination of Anne Boyer’s short-story series “Iconoclasts,” which breaks the boundaries of traditional fiction and expresses a moment that is surreal yet uncannily familiar. For our cover story, Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, about historical painters to whom she often returns and an upcoming exhibition that will set her work alongside the legendary master Michelangelo. Something to look forward to! Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY ONLINE VIDEOS Clockwise from the top: Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Pinboard), 2019, resin and cement compound, 43 ⅜ × 96 ⅞ × 4 inches (110 × 246 × 10 cm) © Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Prudence Cummings Associates Rachel Whiteread’s studio, London, 2020: Photo: Rachel Whiteread Louise Bonnet, Los Angeles, 2020. Video still: courtesy Pushpin Films and Ron Moon

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Brooklyn, New York, 2020. Video still: courtesy Pushpin Films NXTHVN, New Haven, Connecticut. Artwork: Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, Jeffrey Meris, and Esteban Ramón Pérez. Photo: John Dennis, courtesy NXTHVN Titus Kaphar, NXTHVN, New Haven, Connecticut. Artwork: Ilana Savdie. Photo: John Dennis, courtesy NXTHVN

Rachel Whiteread The artist speaks to Ann Gallagher about her recent sculptures cast in translucent resin.

Louise Bonnet The artist describes her new body of work from her Los Angeles studio.

NXTHVN Join Titus Kaphar and Jason Price on a tour of the organization’s headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut. They discuss the founding and vision for this singular arts space.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn Hear the painter describe the creation of a new work in this time-lapse documentation of his process.

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Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2020

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Business Director Melissa Lazarov

Text Editor David Frankel

Published by Gagosian Media

Online Editor Jennifer Knox White

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Assistant Editor Gillian Jakab Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio

Advertising Representative Michael Bullock For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard Distributed by Pineapple Media Ltd Distribution Manager Kelly M. Quinn Alexandra Samaras Prepress DL Imaging

Cover Jenny Saville

Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors Carlos Basualdo Alissa Bennett Derek Blasberg Anne Boyer Joe Bradley Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Sarah Cosulich Teddy Cruz Nicholas Cullinan Elvira Dyangani Ose John Elderfield Fonna Forman Raymond Foye Alison M. Gingeras Alastair Gordon Miciah Hussey Gillian Jakab Neil Jenney Kim Jones Jesi Khadivi Deana Lawson Alison McDonald Meleko Mokgosi Louise Neri Paul B. Preciado Jacqueline Rose Robert M. Rubin Ed Sanders Jenny Saville Lisa Small Daniel Spaulding Hendel Teicher Tatiana TrouvĂŠ Carlos Valladares Jamieson Webster Hal Wert Ariella Wolens

Thanks Richard Alwyn Fisher Leslie Antell Chloe Barter Jennifer Belt Chris Berkery Priya Bhatnagar Anne Boissonnault Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Jeanne Collins Cristina Colomar Andrew Fabricant Kate Fernandez-Lupino Emily Florido Mark Francis Brett Garde Darlina Goldak Megan Goldman Freja Harrell Delphine Huisinga Sarah Jones Ewa Juszkiewicz Dennis Kardon Elizabeth Karp-Evans Sydney King Pepi Marchetti Franchi Lissa McClure Rob McKeever Olivia Mull Stefan Ratibor Rani Singh Giuseppe Sperandio Iiu Susiraja Jess Topping Andie Trainer Louis Vaccara Manuela Vasco Robin Vousden Jeff Wall Hanako Williams Sarah Womble Kelso Wyeth

CONTRIBUTORS Daniel Spaulding Daniel Spaulding is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He previously worked in the curatorial department of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. He is a founding editor of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art.

Jenny Saville Jenny Saville’s treatment of the human form transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Oil paint, applied in heavy layers, becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes the pigment over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse. Photo: Paul Hansen/Getty Images

Lisa Small Lisa Small is senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Nicholas Cullinan Nicholas Cullinan took up his position as the director of London’s National Portrait Gallery in the spring of 2015, following his role as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From 2007 to 2013 he was curator of international modern art at Tate Modern, London, where he cocurated an exhibition of Henri Matisse’s cutouts with Sir Nicholas Serota in 2014. Cullinan received his BA, MA, and PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and in 2006–07 he held the Hilla Rebay International Fellowship at the Guggenheim museums in Bilbao, New York, and Venice. Photo: Zoe Law

Carlos Valladares 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 last fall. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Alison M. Gingeras & Jamieson Webster Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer in New York and Warsaw, and most recently the editor/author of John Currin: Men. Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York, faculty at The New School for Social Research, and author most recently of Conversion Disorder (Columbia, 2018). They frequently collaborate and write together, most recently on anality, utopian communes, guilt, and the artists Bjarne Melgaard, John Currin, and Jordan Wolfson.

Alissa Bennett Alissa Bennett is the author of Dead is Better, a twice-yearly zine devoted to tales of woe, depravity, drug crimes, and love. The cohost, with Lena Dunham, of the podcast The C-Word, she is working on her first novel. Photo: Leigh Ledare

Deana Lawson Deana Lawson is a photo-based artist born in Rochester, New York. She received her MFA in photography from RISD in 2004. Her work examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing themes of familial legacy, community, desire, and religious and spiritual aesthetics. Her practice borrows from visual traditions ranging from photographic and figurative portraiture through social documentaries to vernacular familyalbum photographs. Lawson meets her subjects in everyday walks of life: grocery stores, subway trains, busy avenues in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and road trips in the American South. her solo show Centropy is currently on view at Kunsthalle Basel until October 2020. She is a professor of photography at Princeton University.

Miciah Hussey Miciah Hussey is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BA in art history from Vassar College and a PhD in English Literature and Critical Studies from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Henry James Review, and Victorians.

Jacqueline Rose Jacqueline Rose is internationally known for her writing on feminism, psychoanalysis, literature, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her books include Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (editor, with Juliet Mitchell, and translator; 1982), Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), States of Fantasy (1996), The Question of Zion (2005), Women in Dark Times (2014), Mothers—An Essay on Love and Cruelty (2018), and the novel Albertine (2001). A Jacqueline Rose Reader was published in 2011. On Violence and On Violence against Women will be published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in the spring. A regular writer for The London Review of Books, she is professor of humanities at Birkbeck University of London.

Paul B. Preciado Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher and curator and a leading thinker in the study of gender, sexual, and body politics. A former Fulbright fellow, he holds a PhD in the philosophy and theory of architecture from Princeton. From 2014 to 2017 he was curator of public programs at documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens), where he started the project The Parliament of Bodies. Photo: Marie Rouge

Meleko Mokgosi Born and raised in Botswana, Meleko Mokgosi is codirector of graduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art, New Haven, and cofounder of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, New York. Reconceptualizing the intersection of art history, postcolonial nationhood, and democracy within an interdisciplinary critical framework that includes paintings of epic scale, Mokgosi explores and redresses the ways in which Black subjects have become unattributed objects of empire and institution. In this issue he introduces his ambitious painting cycle Democratic Intuition, elements of which are currently on view at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London.

Louise Neri Louise Neri has been a director at Gagosian since 2006, working across the gallery’s global platform in many capacities, including artist and museum liaison and editorial and communications. Neri was the US editor of the art quarterly Parkett from 1990 to 2001, and she cocurated the 1997 Whitney Biennial. Photo: Jack Shainman

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman is a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego that investigates intersections of informal urbanization, civic infrastructure, and public culture. Their work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, M+, Hong Kong, and other institutions. They represented the United States in the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Cruz and Forman are professors of visual arts and politics, respectively, at the University of California, San Diego. Together they lead the UCSD Community Stations, a platform of the Center on Global Justice (gjustice.ucsd.edu).

Hal Wert Hal Wert’s extensive writings on American political posters include two books on the subject, Hope: A Collection of Obama Posters and Prints (2009) and George McGovern and the Democratic Insurgents (2015). Readers may enjoy his blog on posters, From the Desk of Hal Elliott Wert. He is emeritus professor of history at the Kansas City Art Institute. Photo: Allison East Hamlin

Robert M. Rubin Robert M. Rubin is a historian of architecture, film, and contemporary art. He has published books and articles on Jean Prouvé, Pierre Chareau, Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Calder, Richard Avedon, and Richard Prince. Most recently he edited and introduced Richard Prince Cowboy (2020). His curatorial credits include Richard Prince: American Prayer, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, in 2011, and Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact, which originated at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, in 2016 and will travel in 2021 to Deauville, France, in conjunction with the Deauville American Film Festival there.

Alastair Gordon Alastair Gordon is an awardwinning critic, curator, cultural historian and author. He has written on art, architecture, design, and the environment for the New York Times, WSJ., the Wall Street Journal Magazine, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Le Monde, and numerous other publications, and has authored more than twenty-eight books on the human environment.

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Tatiana Trouvé In disquieting, entropic mise-enscènes, Tatiana Trouvé limns the boundaries between the mental and the physical, where material space and form converge with immaterial time and memory. Her situations combine intricate scenographic drawings, sculptures both linear and threedimensional, and spaces that hint at invisible dimensions. Whether found or created, Trouvé’s “environmental dramas” are melancholy yet highly charged palimpsests containing echoes of other lived spaces and realities, and oscillating between the real, the imaginary, and the phantasmic. Trouvé was born in 1968 in Cosenza, Italy, and lives and works in Paris. Photo: Alastair Miller

Jesi Khadivi Jesi Khadivi is an independent curator and writer based in Berlin. She and the artist David Horvitz run porcino, one of the city’s smallest exhibition spaces. Khadivi has curated exhibitions at Fondation Ricard, Paris; PS 120, Berlin; and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Her essays have appeared in many monographs and edited volumes.

Neil Jenney A maverick of twentieth-century American art, Neil Jenney pursues realism as both a style and a philosophy. He strives to return to the classical ideal of truth and to integrate form and content, while eschewing what he has described as the decorative, expressive qualities of modern abstraction. Photo: Debra Jenney

Ariella Wolens Ariella Wolens is a curator and writer from London. She is currently based in New York and in Savannah, Georgia, where she serves as assistant curator at the SCAD Museum of Art, in addition to working independently. Her writings appear regularly in magazines such as Spike, Flash Art, and Elephant.

Joe Bradley In his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works, Joe Bradley has produced a visual language that oscillates freely between personal and art-historical references. Constantly reinventing himself, he cycles through some of the most iconic modes of abstraction, investigating Minimalist questions of color and form, tapping into the spontaneous gesture of Abstract Expressionism, and creating cryptic signs and symbols in ingenious, lively drawings. Bradley earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. Photo: Rob McKeever

Raymond Foye Raymond Foye is a writer, editor, publisher, and curator who lives in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. A former director of exhibitions and publications at Gagosian and a contributing editor at the Brooklyn Rail, he most recently coedited Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights Books and is currently editing Collected Poems of Rene Ricard, to be published in 2020.

Anne Boyer The poet and essayist Anne Boyer is the inaugural winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a 2018 Whiting Award winner. Her latest book, The Undying (2019), won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

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.

Carlos Basualdo As the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carlos Basualdo has organized the exhibitions Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens (2009), Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many (2010), and, with Erica F. Battle, Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp (2012). Basualdo is working with Caroline Bourgeois on Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, an exhibition scheduled for spring 2021 at Punta della Dogana, Venice, and with Scott Rothkopf on a survey of Jasper Johns in the fall of 2021.

Gillian Jakab Gillian Jakab is an editor of the Gagosian Quarterly and the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail.

Hendel Teicher Hendel Teicher is a New York–based art historian and independent curator. For over a decade she was curator of twentieth-century art at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. She has organized numerous museum exhibitions on subjects ranging from photography (including Erwin Blumenfeld 1897–1969, Florence Henri, 70 Photographs 1928–1938, and Ugo Mulas Photographer 1928–1973) to design and architecture (Pioneers of Twentieth Century Furniture). Teicher has contributed essays for the aforementioned exhibitions, found in their accompanying catalogues, many of which she also edited.

John Elderfield John Elderfield is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. He joined Gagosian in 2012 as a senior curator for special exhibitions.

JENNY SAVILLE: PAINTING THE SELF

Previous spread: Jenny Saville, Self-Portrait (after Rembrandt), 2019, oil on paper, 54 1⁄8 × 40 inches (137.5 × 101.5 cm) © Jenny Saville This page: Edgar Degas, Trois danseuses (jupes bleues, corsages rouges) (Three Dancers, Blue Tutus, Red Bodices), c. 1903, pastel on paper, on cardboard, 37 × 32 inches (94 × 81 cm), Fondation Beyeler, Basel. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY Opposite: Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, María Teresa (1638–1683), Infanta of Spain, 1651–54, oil on canvas, 13 ½ × 15 ¾ inches (34.3 × 40 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jules Bache Collection, 1949

Jenny Saville speaks with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, about her latest self-portrait, her studio practice, and the historical painters to whom she continually returns. I wanted to begin by asking you about the new self-portrait that you’ve been working on. Could you talk about that work and the process of making it? JENNY SAVILLE It’s in the tradition of works of mine like Ruben’s Flap and Fulcrum [both 1999], where there are these different sections. The whole painting is made from a series of selfie photographs. It’s a play between the photographic and painterliness. NC You’ve mentioned to me in the past how you like to be surrounded by your older works, and in a similar way, you have these walls of incredible image sources that have inspired you around your studio: everything from old master paintings through to graffiti to abstract art like Cy Twombly’s. How do these references serve your work? JS As a painter, you’re constantly scanning for visual potentials you can use; I’ll stop my bike, photograph some graffiti or a blossom tree with blue sky behind or bright crimson leaves in autumn. Nature produces the most incredible light and depth. It has everything an artist needs, and it’s a cliché but it still shocks me with wonder. Since lockdown I’ve NICHOLAS CULLINAN

been photographing f lowers. You know, I don’t paint flowers. I don’t paint burning buildings. I don’t paint landscapes. But I collect all these things in photographic form and they find their way into the work. I’m forever photographing the floor of my studio. It’s got hundreds of accidental paintings, each with an incredible gravity. I see gravity as an extra arm I can use. NC It’s like Jackson Pollock’s studio, the barn on Long Island. JS Exactly. Painting on the floor is good because it takes away your conventional skill and ability to see. The material itself is playing with gravity and I make marks and merge paint with a certain energy. It’s like a way to trap nature; to hold onto a sense of time. When you crash or slide colors together they are forever frozen in that moment. I find that visually thrilling. Then when you build form off that moment—like a nose, for example—it creates a visual shock. It’s a game of contradictions, of building and destroying, or of being conscious and letting go as a way to access greater reality. Sometimes building the nose destroys the paint and you lose the magic,

and you have to reactivate the paint and go against the form again. NC What’s interesting about what’s on the walls in your studio is, the selection collapses any distinction between contemporary, historic, figurative, abstract, high, low. JS I’ve made a whole series of works based on a small ceramic bowl that my daughter made in one of those ceramic shops where kids paint teapots and things. She painted it in this sort of azure blue with brown and red spots. It held this light that was so beautiful, it felt like the sea and had movement in it, so I took the bowl to the studio and I’ve mixed a whole range of colors based on that bowl, it became the backbone for a whole group of works. I don’t value that any less than looking at a great Titian or a Velázquez portrait. NC Color is becoming much more high-keyed in your recent work. JS I think one of the reasons why colors come into my paintings so much is because I use pastels and oil bars as intermediaries between drawing and painting. Pastels come in the most incredible range of beautiful colors; when I work with this group of pastels, all the colors are just sitting there. With oil paint there’s a more limited range, and I mix the actual tones. If I need to distinguish the side of a cheek from the front face of a cheek, I can mix a precise tone to do that job. In pastels I can’t do that because they come in a set range, so it’s forced—at the beginning it drove me mad, I couldn’t hit that

note properly. It forced my hand to come up with another way to make the tone. An artist like Degas uses slats, squiggles, and layers in different colors of pastel to create the tone he’s after. Some of these colors are electric when you identify them individually. So I started to experiment with the same technique, using stronger colors on top of each other to make the tone or to do the job of the tone itself. That’s helped my painting a lot. NC When we were in Paris last autumn—when you could travel—we went to see the Degas show at the Musée d’Orsay, and I remember you looking really intensively at those pastels. JS The late pastels—they just fly. I mean, Degas can be seen as this straightforward artist who painted dancers, and people see him as quite an academic artist. But if you just stand in front of those late pastels and look: that color is broken up. It’s absolutely majestic. Small sections can be like a Willem de Kooning painting. And he did that because those pastels come in incredible colors. During lockdown, this wonderful pastel shop in Paris has been sending me pastels. I bought a set that’s based on Monet’s garden. The shop is called La Maison du Pastel. It was founded by Henri Roché; I think he was the great-grandfather of the current owner, Isabelle Roché, and he made pastels for Degas. I’ve always had a romance about finding this shop, and I found it and it’s so incredible to make a head using Monet’s palette. Since then they’ve been sending more pastels.

I’ve been working on raw linen and I asked if they could create a palette. So they’ve now sent me a set of pastels that are based on raw linen. NC When you talk about someone like Degas, you think of something “pretty.” And that’s the association with pastels—the colors are kind of muted and delicate. But the way you use them, there’s a kind of toughness, almost an ugliness. I mean that in a good way, like there’s a brutality. JS I think it’s the charged nature. I open a drawer of pastels in a shop and it’s a visual shock. The level of pigment is sensational, like staring at the light of the sun, and I started to ask myself, “How do I get this feeling into my work?” NC In thinking about the inspiration for your current work, one of the things that’s amazing about Rembrandt’s self-portraits—and I know you chose two of them to think about, a very early one and a much later one—is his ability to depict himself at all these different stages in his life. He depicts himself as a young artist all the way through to old age with such an unflinching gaze. JS He gave me a lot of confidence growing up. It’s a difficult thing to say, isn’t it now, to say, oh, “He paints the truth.” But Rembrandt is part of a group of artists who never go away. It’s like seeing a Francis Bacon exhibition: it just blows you away. Certain artists really hit—they don’t go in and out of fashion. I like to work in direct dialogue with a particular work, to really unlock it. I’ve found that’s 29

This page: Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait, 1911, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper, 20 ¼ × 13 ¾ inches (51.4 × 34.9 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Scofield Thayler, 1982 Opposite: Jenny Saville, Virtual, 2020, oil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 63 inches (200 × 160 cm) © Jenny Saville

been really useful for personal growth as a painter. If I go to New York, I spend a day at the Met. The last time, I went around photographing nostrils; some artists paint great nostrils. NC [Laughs] Go on, wh ich ones? Ca n you name them? JS Yes, Velázquez wins hands down. NC You’re thinking of the Met’s portrait of Juan de Pareja? JS No, of María Teresa, infanta of Spain. NC I never looked at the nostrils. I’m going to check them out now. JS The reason is that Velázquez sees the nostril not necessarily as black. A lot of artists just do them dark, whereas he sees the light through the nostril. That’s what makes his paintings so fleshy, they have such realism because he sees the light. Rembrandt puts bright red round noses as well, or ocher. So you can see, really feel, why certain artists are so good. NC I’ve noticed this increasingly cubistic aspect to your work—the collaging, the different viewpoints presented simultaneously— JS I admire the way Picasso approached building form in his paintings and his attempts to harness the reality of modern life. All of his paintings, however distorted, have a structural armature to them, almost like there’s a metal bar running through every body he makes. I like that in Picasso; I like that in Michelangelo. They both have a strong central core. I automatically seek for that inner structural tension when I’m working and it’s probably 30

why I haven’t become an abstract painter, because I like to build recognizable forms. NC You want a reference based on reality, rooted. JS I just automatically pull out forms. It’s an instinct I’ve got as part of my nature. I’ve found a way to work where there’s almost a fight between paint and image, and I like to work from the point of abstraction to the figure. NC On Picasso and Cubism, there’s also his incredible, very late self-portrait from 1972, the year before he died. JS I am mesmerized by that piece. At the moment I have that piece printed up and on the wall behind me as I’m working on my current painting [laughs]. The concentration of reality in that piece holds a lot of what Picasso was about. The heavy structural boulder mixed with the ghostly rubbing out of the colored pencils. It gives you the mystery. The way he plays with those contradictions automatically as he’s facing death. He’s terrified of death but at the same time he’s resisting it—the pure act of creation is a resistance to the end. And I appreciate that. NC And the thing that’s extraordinary about that work on paper is that you see the skull underneath. JS Yes, exactly. NC It’s two things. It’s life and death together. It’s the skull and the human head. JS I think there are late paintings of Twombly’s that operate in the same way. It’s just using that color to say, “I will keep going, I will use every force field I have in this color.” Those incredible green

I JUST AUTOMATICALLY PULL OUT FORMS. IT’S AN INSTINCT I’VE GOT AS PART OF MY NATURE.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self Portrait, 1984, acrylic and oilstick on paper mounted on canvas, 38 7⁄8 × 28 inches (98.7 × 71.1 cm) © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ Licensed by Artestar, New York

and yellow and red paintings, they’re almost pushing death back, aren’t they? NC You’ve a lso ment ioned Egon Sch iele’s self-portrait. You were part of a two-person exhibition with Schiele at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2014. What’s your relationship with his work? JS As a teenager I was fascinated by his work. I even liked the way he looked, with his crazy hair. His work and life spoke to that teenage angst, that rite of passage when you’re unsure about yourself. But at the same time, his line was strong and confident. What a draftsman he was! One of the surest lines in art history. But then I sort of forgot about him a bit as I was learning about other artists. When the curator Oliver Wick suggested putting our work together in an exhibition, there were so many relationships that I’d forgotten: from the low-to-high viewpoint to the mother-and-child pictures. He unfortunately died from the Spanish flu, the last pandemic we had, when he was twentyeight. We hardly got to see him at all. He made this concentrated body of work that was brilliant and unusual. He was in that fertile atmosphere of Vienna with Klimt and the Vienna Secession, but there was something unique about Schiele. NC I was recently involved with a collection of essays on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s self-portraits, which have really been overlooked. I know you have a particular interest in him and his self-portraiture. JS There’s a fluid movement in Basquiat’s work. 32

You could argue that an awful lot of his work is self-portraiture, right? Making his use of language pictorial, from writing to drawing. I’ve been looking at him a lot recently because of the thrilling way he used oil bars—writing, drawing, crossing out. I know he loved Cy’s work and you can see that sort of physical activity with panels of flat color. I admire the life force in those pictures. He’s like Van Gogh in that he burned brightly for such a short amount of time and we’re lucky to have had him. Those pictures . . . he just let it all out. They’re like deejays working in a club, building sounds and atmosphere. He’s an example of an artist who’s so convincing and persistent in his language that he eventually moves everyone to him. He was right. When you see a great Basquiat . . . like the one with the layered-up wings called Fallen Angel [1981]. The layering of that, you feel like it’s great Greek theater, like The Furies, when the chorus is singing. I feel that catharsis looking at a great Basquiat. NC We’ve talked about different artists and their careers, including artists who had very short careers, whether it’s Schiele or Basquiat. You mentioned turning fifty this year and that being a milestone. Looking ahead over the next few hours, days, weeks, what’s the future? What are you thinking about? What projects are you working on? JS There are a few different projects underway. There’s an exciting project in Florence that’s happening in 2021 with the curator Sergio Risaliti. I’m showing at Casa Buonarroti, with some of the

Michelangelo drawings they have there, and at different sites around the city. I’ve been creating drawings in relationship with the Michelangelo Pietà sculpture at Opera del Duomo, as well as paintings for other sites in Florence. It’s one of the most exciting projects of my life to be able to interact with the work of Michelangelo and the city of Florence. Recently, before the pandemic, I was going there and talking to some extraordinary men and women who are custodians of Michelangelo’s drawings, especially with Cristina Acidini, one of the greatest experts in the world of Michelangelo. I sat in a room with every book written about the artist and they brought out his drawings for me to study. It was very moving. It’s enriching to learn from these scholars about his life. I’ve been reading his letters, or maybe a shopping list, or a letter from the pope virtually begging Michelangelo to come back to Rome. The pope writes in his own hand—It’s the pope here, popes don’t live forever you know, can you come back and finish this commission! The pressure’s the same, whatever era you live in. And then I’ve got the project with you. And I’m doing a show in New York in November. I was doing a group of portraits for Hong Kong when the protest happened and the virus closed the city down. That show was called Idols. The world has changed and the work’s changed, so while the show in New York is still, broadly speaking, a group of portraits, it will be an entirely different exhibition.

PRESENTS

FRANK GEHRY Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings - Volume one (of eight volumes)

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Leaders in the Arts

Italy Edition

We invited Carolyn ChristovBakargiev, director of the Castello di Rivoli Museo dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Arte Contemporanea, Turin, to select two outstanding arts professionals to join her in a conversation about their careerÂ trajectories, current projects, and goals for the future. She chose:

Sarah Cosulich, the artistic director of La Quadriennale di Roma, and curator for mut, Mutina for Art, Modena

Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the Showroom, London, and member of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada, Milan

Carolyn Chr istov-Bakargiev Elvira, do you remember when we met? Elvira Dyangani Ose I was at Cornell for my PhD, and when you were preparing dOCUMENTA (13), Salah Hassan invited you to come to our student symposium to speak about the preparations for the project. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Yes, it must have been 2010. Hassan was on my advisory committee for documenta, so when he invited me to give a seminar, of course I did. You and I have run into one another many times since then. I’d love to hear about the course that led to your current position at the Showroom, in addition to all of your other projects—it’s intriguing the variety of paths that we’ve all taken. Elvira Dyangani Ose Well, I never intended to be a curator. In the early 1990s I moved to Barcelona to study at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; I wanted to become a writer. I thought I’d study journalism, but in my first year there I met Teresa Camps Miró, who taught in the art department, and I discovered that I could write in that context too, and that art history gave me a subject to write about. Through that program I met a group of students who were working with Teresa on a platform to engage with living artists from Barcelona and bring their art to the campus. I cocurated my first show there, Terra, in 1994. This directly provoked my interest in interventions in public space. I remained in Barcelona until 2004, and was part of a curatorial collective that used shop windows and community centers as display spaces for artists who didn’t have the opportunity to show in the city’s bigger institutions. Those concerns and interests continue to inform my work. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev You mentioned your professor—were there other mentors, or other experiences in Barcelona, that shaped your thinking? Elvira Dyangani Ose The philosopher Pep Subirós curated an exhibition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona called Africas: The Artist and the City [2001], where he invited dozens of artists to participate in the show and a symposium. That had a profound effect on me: suddenly I was able to encounter all these artists who were questioning or struggling with issues of identity, postcolonial subjectivity, and the meaning of art in the African context. That exhibition, and my experience around it, were generative. Around the same time, I also had the chance to meet and work with Coco Fusco on the production of her video Els Segadors [The reapers]. She was critical for me. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev She was very important for me too. She has come to Castello di Rivoli to lecture. I think her ideas around border zones and her performances with Guillermo GómezPeña are wonderful. Elvira Dyangani Ose Absolutely. I left Barcelona when Alicia Chillida invited me to be part of CAAM [Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas], in 2004. We worked to rethink what it could mean to produce culture from the perspective of a community that was a geographical 36

enclave between Europe, Africa, and America, and to consider that as an intellectual arena in which to develop a project. I then moved to Seville, where I worked at CAAC [Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo] for a time, before moving to the United States. After my PhD program at Cornell, I went to London to work at Tate Modern; that was in 2011. And now I’m at the Showroom and on the Thought Council for the Fondazione Prada. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Before we discuss these projects in more depth, Sarah, could you tell us about your trajectory? I’ve been fascinated by the work you did as a young woman, working closely with Francesco Bonami on the fiftieth Venice Biennale, and then in five years of curating not far from Venice at the Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art, and then later when you were directing the Artissima art fair in Turin. Now you’ve been appointed the artistic director of the Rome Quadriennale, an important event in Italy. I’d like to know a little about your education and your early work. You’ve straddled the commercial sector, in running Artissima, and more curatorial, art-historical activities—how did those coalesce in your career? Sarah Cosulich When I was doing my master’s in London at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, in 2000, there was a strict division between those who were planning to go into the commercial sector and those who were planning to work as curators. It was reflected even in the way we were seated. I assumed that was normal, and that it was the rule to decide at that early moment where you wanted to work in the art world. I always wanted to be a curator, which is what I went on doing, but in 2012, when I was chosen as Francesco Manacorda’s successor to direct Artissima, I had to learn to lead an art fair as a curator. It was a task full of challenges—the lack of close contact with artists being the most difficult one—but also full of opportunities to develop strategy and vision. I learned to recognize the talent of others—not just of artists, as when you curate, but of everyone who can make a program stronger and therefore successful. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev What do you think you contributed to Artissima that changed it? Sarah Cosulich Running any institution means thinking about the context, mission, and audience to which that project is targeted and thinking about what you can bring in terms of added value. So for Artissima I analyzed the situation of Turin. Rather than copying other international models, I wanted to be international by starting from Turin and what its network had to offer: incredible institutions, museums, collections, and much else. These were catalysts for the development of the fair’s identity. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Before that you worked closely with Bonami. What did you take away from that experience? Sarah Cosulich I’ d st ud ied a nd worked in Washington, DC, Berlin, and London, where I had just completed my master’s. I’d spent time at Tate Modern and had curated an exhibition of Pawel Althamer’s work in Trieste. I landed at the Biennale with Francesco by sending him my master’s thesis, which was on Maurizio Cattelan

Running any institution means thinking about the context, mission, and audience to which that project is targeted and thinking about what you can bring in terms of added value. – Sarah Cosulich

and the tradition of commedia dell’arte in Italian theater, literature, and film. I had the most exhilarating interview with Francesco—basically a walk through Venice—and one month later I was working closely with more than fifty artists such as Fischli Weiss, Matthew Barney, and Thomas Bayrle (whom you, Carolyn, showed so importantly at dOCUMENTA), and with curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlos Basualdo, and Daniel Birnbaum. That experience definitely gifted me with one of the greatest learning possibilities ever, in all directions. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev And with responsibilities, too. Sarah Cosulich Def initely. Francesco has an incredible ability to delegate and trust the people he works with, while at the same time transferring a precise vision and sensibility. He can be a mentor by telling you a joke or a funny story and yet you know that few people care about art more than he does. Francesco connects incredibly with artists, respects the audience, and is generous to younger curators working with him. I’m just one of the many with international careers who started as his collaborators. Elvira Dyangani Ose Carolyn, your own career is extraordinary—would you give a quick recap before we discuss what we’re up to currently? Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev My beginnings in art go back to the 1980s. The first exhibition that was important to me, Non in codice [Not in code], I did with Mario Pieroni’s gallery in 1987, in the gardens of the American Academy in Rome. Dan Graham and I picked all the artists. Thanks to his involvement I got to meet all these wonderful people, including feminist artists like Barbara Ess, Dara Birnbaum, and Judith Barry, and also Rodney Graham and John Knight. It was also my first catalogue! Sol LeWitt designed the cover. I had no idea how to design a cover, so Mario said, “Why don’t you go to Sol’s house in Umbria, he might help you.” And he did, he designed the cover, which was this beautiful gatefold. Shortly after that, working with a friend I curated Molteplici Culture [Multiple cultures], which was held in a museum of folklore in Rome. Here there were artists like a young man called Damien Hirst—his first international outing—as well as David Hammons and so many others. It was a true insiders’ escapade, with only 700 visitors. Through that show I met one of my main mentors, Alanna Heiss. From 1999 to 2001 she would be my boss at PS1, the space she founded in Queens, New York. Then in 2001 I joined Ida Gianelli at Castello di Rivoli. Feminist thinkers and artists were important to me: the theorist Griselda Pollock and artists like Etel Adnan, Anna Boghiguian, Bracha Ettinger, Carolee Schneemann, and Lubaina Himid. And I had other mentors in terms of my thinking, such as Donna Haraway and Judith Butler—meeting these women changed my trajectory. The real mentors were not in university. I ended up running the 2008 Sydney Biennial, which was on the subject of revolution as a form and also as a political engagement. “What does it mean to revolt?” was a key question. After that, from 2009 to 2012, came dOCUMENTA, a big fouryear project that took me to many parts of the world. Working in art, we’re not like businessmen,

who when they travel stay in big hotels at the airport and meet only very wealthy people—we end up in neighborhoods with local people who are very welcoming, so we end up knowing more than we would if traveling for business. This happens through alternative art spaces everywhere: from visiting Tang Da Wu in Singapore, who started the Artists Village in 1988, to hanging out with artists in Hanoi. It was an intellectual search for meaning, and that turned into dOCUMENTA (13). My biggest challenge at the time of dOCUMENTA was to prove that a singular curatorial vision could make an international exhibition that was relevant. At the time, nobody thought biennials were interesting anymore, they felt the art world’s attention had moved away from them toward on the one hand the auction houses and on the other hand the art fairs. In my view, the art fairs were connected with the emerging form of the digital. In the same way that we open files and folders on our laptops, in an art fair you can get very quick fixes, you can spend one day and get absolutely up to date on what’s going on, and you can see several projects concentrated in one place. Each gallery booth has no need for a relationship with the gallery booth next to it, because seeing them is like opening and closing digital folders. So I felt that the international exhibition that came out of the vision of one person, with a team, needed to make a resurgence. This was something I’d learned from Harald Szeemann, who taught me about the importance of the exhibition, the Kunstausstellung, that’s like a construction, or a novel. It’s made of artworks, some new, some not, but it has a value in itself as a semiotic object. Also from Achille Bonito Oliva, an Italian curator to whom we’ll be dedicating an exhibition in 2021, for his 80th birthday, comes the narcissism: if I have an idea about the world and what’s going on in the world, I’m sure it’s right [laughs], I just have to apply it. Of course we need to keep such feelings in check! But what I was trying to do with dOCUMENTA, and I think I achieved, was to shift this idea, to say, “No, it’s not true that the international exhibition made by a singular curatorial voice is obsolete. It still has relevance.” After dOCUMENTA I mostly went into teaching. I was feeling a little burned out, and didn’t want to work on exhibitions or with artists. I went into a kind of—not depression, but feeling like I should think about all these things and dedicate myself more to giving it all back by teaching younger people. So I taught at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt and I did seminars and taught at Leeds University with Griselda. I went to study at the Getty Research Institute as a scholar, and then taught at Northwestern University for some years. Also, in 2013, I conducted a seminar at Harvard that was very important for me: it was about how to reinvent museums in the future, taking the interdisciplinary outlook of the dOCUMENTA and seeing how it might be applied to the organization of museums. Now, similarly to what I did in dOCUMENTA as a temporary museum, I’m doing with the Castello di Rivoli in terms of what the museum is or can be. In May 2019, for example, we incorporated the Cerruti Collection. That has to do with collecting the collector: it’s still a museum of contemporary art, but why did he buy that Jacopo del Sellaio Madonna and Child, in that year, in that moment, and put it next to a contemporary work by Giulio Paolini? So we can traverse different historical periods and resolve our problem of going beyond

So we can traverse different historical periods and resolve our problem of going beyond the notion of “contemporary art,” which I find obsolete, because everything that exists is contemporary— whether it’s my old shoe or my new cell phone, it’s all in the field of my perception, and therefore it’s contemporary by nature. I’m thinking of the museum as a time capsule that can transport poetic aggregations into the future, and therefore not become obsolete. – Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 37

There’s a need to create a cultural environment, and I think individuals should be encouraged to invest in that, almost as a way of giving back to the context they’re from—not only to generate art, or to support the intellectual labor of curating, but also to help people to envisage what it means to build an institution, what it means to meet the technical responsibilities of those institutions, what it means to conserve a legacy. – Elvira Dyangani Ose

the notion of “contemporary art,” which I find obsolete, because everything that exists is contemporary—whether it’s my old shoe or my new cell phone, it’s all in the field of my perception, and therefore it’s contemporary by nature. I’m thinking of the museum as a time capsule that can transport poetic aggregations into the future, and therefore not become obsolete. Sarah Cosulich Do you think this is a direction other museums too should take? Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Of course, it’s the only way to survive. The thing that public museums have that nobody else has is eternity. The normal cycle of collections is that they eventually get broken up and sold. The provenance of an artwork grows with those sales, and there’s something lovely in that, but there’s also a loss of all these visions of art that once were, so in the idea of collecting the collector we’re working on that. At the same time, we’re also working on another important matter: the rewriting of the canon. Elvira Dyangani Ose Today I was asked what the fact that some of the biggest collections are owned by individuals meant to me. Controversy aside, that’s a twentieth-century question. The question should be a different one: how to sustain a healthy art ecology. There’s a need to create a cultural environment, and I think individuals should be encouraged to invest in that, almost as a way of giving back to the context they’re from—not only to generate art, or to support the intellectual labor of curating, but also to help people to envisage what it means to build an institution, what it means to meet the technical responsibilities of those institutions, what it means to conserve a legacy. And then, to me, the second part of the argument is the understanding of art in so many of these communities and cultures—it needs a proper context. The fact that something is purchased by an international collector doesn’t change the need to build institutional knowledge that can engage with understandings of art that are different from what signifies in the West. Sarah Cosulich It’s true. Looking at the renegotiation of the canon, there is this question of who is more able to do that— Elvira Dyangani Ose It’s important to define the position of privilege we’re in and to work from there. For instance, when I joined Tate Modern as the curator of international art, I decided that I couldn’t think about a strategy to enhance the collection’s holdings of art from Africa and its diaspora without bringing all the protagonists, experts, and agents of that field to the Tate in one way or another. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Speaking of bringing people in from far and wide, Sarah, can you tell us what the Quadriennale is and what your goals are for it? Sarah Cosulich When the Quadriennale was founded, in 1927, it focused on Italian art, while the Venice Biennale was more dedicated to international art and the Milan Triennale to design. That was the vision for the positioning of these three projects. I want to rethink the role of the Quadriennale in this new global landscape, creating ties beyond the country’s borders and

opportunities for Italian artists to engage in dialogue and exchange. Internationally there’s a vast amount of knowledge and awareness of historic Italian art, but contemporary Italian artists, younger and mid-career, don’t have that many opportunities to exhibit in institutions worldwide. I want to understand why, and to envision strategies and initiatives that could extend the Quadriennale beyond Italy. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev How are you working to achieve that? Sarah Cosulich The Quadriennale is first of all an exhibition. The 2020 edition, titled fuori (Out) and curated by me and Stefano Collicelli Cagol, is scheduled to open on October 29, featuring forty-three artists in the 4,000-square-meter space of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. It will focus on Italian art of the ’60s but will give a lot of space to younger artists as well. The show will offer an alternative narrative of Italian art outside the classifications that for a long time dictated the canon, like those between disciplines or gender. The Quadriennale d’arte 2020 is the main and final part of my three-year program with the institution, but not the only one. We have also developed Q-International, a grant aimed at helping institutions abroad to show Italian artists, and Q-Rated, a series of workshops around Italy that puts fifteen artists and curators aged under thirty-five—different in each place, and selected through a public call—in dialogue with relevant art-world figures, from museum curators to established artists. You hosted us at the Castello di Rivoli, Carolyn, and it was great; the other workshops took place in Naples, Sardinia, Turin, Milan, and Lecce. They not only offered opportunities for discussion of different themes but gave Stefano and me the chance to do research for the Quadriennale exhibition. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev That’s great. And in a way your work is now more local than it was before, because you’ve taken on this institution that traditionally deals with artists from Italy; this is timely during covid, when travel has become extremely difficult. After covid we’re going to have to do a lot of rethinking of how much we were traveling—of how practices need to be rooted while at the same time staying open. Elvira, what you’re doing at the Showroom and Fondazione Prada ties into this key concept of exchange. Could you say a bit about what you’re doing there? Elvira Dyangani Ose The Showroom is a small organization that began in 1983 as an artists-led pop-up exhibition in London’s Covent Garden. My predecessors transformed it, positioning it as a collaborative institution providing a critical stance on core issues in the field. Working with Louise Shelley, Emily Pethick created the Communal Knowledge project, which aims to develop artworks and discourses in relation to our neighboring communities. As a way to build knowledge through collaborative practices, experimentation, and transdisciplinarity, that project now informs the organization’s program as a whole. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev So the Showroom’s activities take place throughout the communities you’re engaging?

Elvira Dyangani Ose We work with communities and agents of those communities, operating both hyperlocally and worldwide. That may mean working in a library or a hospital corridor; it may mean working with people in São Paulo or Madrid. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev And what are you doing now? Or are you in a bit of a pause due to the pandemic? Elvira Dyangani Ose We’ve been on hiatus for a while. But next year we have exhibitions with the Arab artists Haig Aivazian and Inas Halabi, part of a collaboration with the Brussels consortium Mophradat. Then I have other projects in the pipeline as an independent curator. One is a sort of artists-led festival, HacerNoche (Crossing night), which will happen next year in Oaxaca. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev You both had incredible mentors. How do you approach younger arts professionals and curators—what does it mean to mentor somebody else? How do you approach mentorship within and beyond your institutions? Elvira Dyangani Ose Well, you don’t approach a mentee, they come to you, no? [Laughter] There’s much I would say. I remember that when I was a student, and deciding that I wanted to work around modern and contemporary African art, I was living between Barcelona and Las Palmas, so I was determined to e-mail everybody I was interested in as my sources of knowledge. I wrote to so many people—academics, curators—some of them responded and some are now good friends. I also traveled to Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, and London, hoping I could meet them, hoping they’d be in their office and I’d just knock on the door and find them. Then at some point in your career, you realize all of a sudden that people are asking, “Can I come work with you?” They’re not your students, they’re people in the field who want to sit down with you. I don’t think I’m a mentor in that respect, I don’t see myself as that, but perhaps people perceive me as such and I welcome that perception. What I’m trying to do is have a lot of dialogues, to offer platforms where it’s possible to indicate possibilities, but also to encourage others to believe in what they want to do, because that’s the only way forward. Ask unapologetically for what you want. Proclaim your wishes. And then start walking toward that space. When I see young artists and curators, I tell them, “If you don’t find what you want in the space where you are, invent it. Find alliances with others who perhaps feel the same way.” Disenfranchisement can be the catalyst for so many other possibilities.

After covid we’re going to have to do a lot of rethinking of how much we were traveling—of how practices need to be rooted while at the same time staying open. – Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Sarah Cosulich I feel the same. “What advice would you give?” is really a difficult question. We’re not working in a field that gives you many opportunities, so it’s about balancing a realistic attitude with an inspiring message. It’s such a privilege to be active in this field. And Elvira, what you said about choosing I think is very important: the idea that you continue to dream and do many things, but there’s a moment where you have to choose, because the choice is what gives you credibility and a position. How about you, Carolyn? Any advice?

close to artists—that’s not a given, but it’s one of the forms of power that curators have. On that topic, the important rule is to be honest, to lay it straight. Good artists hate beating around the bush, and hypocrites, and people who want to get something out of them. The other thing I’d advise has to do with writing. I think the Internet has brought a collapse of intellectuality. A lot more information is available, and a lot of data to process, but the minute you try to scratch a little bit, there’s almost nothing on the Web if you truly want to learn about anybody’s work. It’s important to read outside the Web, and to write—and not only to write one’s personal opinion but to contribute scholarship to scholarly publications. Working deeply and slowly on individual artists is important to me. Another thing I’d say is, don’t be scared to break beyond the boundaries of the fine arts. The field of art, the way we discuss it, whether at Gagosian or the Quadriennale or the Castello di Rivoli, is based on eighteenth-century Enlightenment concepts. In the Europe of the Middle Ages there was no idea of art as this autonomous practice of aesthetic research that is somehow a form of embodied philosophy. That’s a very eighteenth-century, [Johann Joachim] Winkelmann–like concept, which first became universal in the West and then was imported to the rest of the world. Today the canon and the concept are breaking down. We now believe that the boundaries around the so-called fine arts—between the fine arts and activism, say, or urban-development studies, or science and research—are ending. I’m proud to have put quantum physicists in dOCUMENTA, and the geneticist Alexander Tarakhovsky. In a few years, probably, there will be new fields of knowledge and knowledge production, and new boundaries around what those fields are. But in the meantime, here we are, alive, and I say this paradoxical thing, which is that although art may not always exist, artists will, and what artists do will continue to be done. Also, individuals aren’t popular right now— instead we have these fake individuals, like certain politicians, who are complete constructions. We’re in an era where the collective subject is dominant. Nothing comes out of this incredible Internet that isn’t the fruit of a sort of collective subject. Even when it aggregates around certain opinion leaders, they’re ultimately vacuous figures of spectacle onto whom all these collective feelings are projected. No scientific papers are published today with just one author, it’s always a collective, because there’s just too much data. But I don’t personally see the collective nature of knowledge right now as a challenge toward which I need to move; it’s just the status quo in an advanced digital era of social media and of an attention economy. What’s more a challenge for me is to see what procedures of individuation occur, or can occur. So my advice would be to go a little against the grain of what the tendencies are right now—not for the purpose of pure originality, but just because the work of an individual person would otherwise be lost in this wave of big data. It’s so important to collect the pieces and the poems and the letters and the artworks and the paintings of just one little person in one little corner.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev I don’t think there’s an objective, absolute advice that always works. As you both know, I think it’s very important to be 39

PROUVÉ IN

TIJUANA

n a settlement on the outskirts of Tijuana, immediately adjacent to the US-Mexico border wall, construction of a new housing project for migrant refugees began earlier this year. Based on a framework of prefabricated structural elements produced in collaboration with a nearby factory, the building is part of a larger initiative led by architect Teddy Cruz and political theorist Fonna Forman. The two are professors at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and principals of the research-based practice Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman. Their work has long centered on issues related to urban policy and development, particularly in this border region, and on the capacity of design to help tackle urgent challenges and crises. Cruz and Forman recently joined cultural historian Robert Rubin and critic Alastair Gordon to speak about this project and its connections to the modernist designer Jean Prouvé, whose innovations in modular building systems included designs for housing that placed architecture in the service of pressing social needs. Their discussion 42

took place this fall, in the lead-up to the US presidential election. This seems like such a timely project. Does it have an official name? TEDDY CRUZ That’s a good question. There are actually two projects. One is a social-housing project, and that’s the one that’s now under construction. There’s also a community center, a “People’s House”—a reference to Jean Prouvé’s Maison du Peuple, in Clichy—that will be built within the same settlement. So I don’t know . . . we’ve been seduced by the idea of Prouvé in Tijuana, or . . . ROBERT RUBIN Prouvé at the Border. AG Or, how about Prouvé Challenges Trump’s Wall? FONNA FORMAN There you go! AG Where are they geographically? FF Both projects are located in Los Laureles Canyon, in an informal settlement of about 90,000 people that crashes right up against the border wall on the western periphery of Tijuana. Both sites lie in the shadow of the multinational factories that have sprung up since nafta, producing ALASTAIR GORDON

global exports and drawing labor from the canyon settlements. TC The social-housing project is in the heart of a refugee camp, a UCSD Community Station designed for over 300 Central American migrant refugees. [Four UCSD Community Stations link the university’s Center on Global Justice with marginalized communities across the border region for teaching and research collaborations focused on poverty and social equity.] The housing is a seed project for an evolving sanctuary neighborhood that we’re developing with the migrants and with the Iglesia Embajadores de Jesús, led by the activists Gustavo Banda-Aceves and Zaida Guillén. The Maison du Peuple project is part of a new Community Station connected to Colonos de la Divina Providencia, a nonprofit organization, led by the activist Rebeca Ramírez. FF Right now, Divina has a small community center that addresses very basic needs: food, senior services, a weekly health clinic. With the new Community Station we hope to increase their capacity for social, economic, environmental, and cultural programming, in partnership

with the university. Our aspiration is that the Community Station becomes a genuine civic hub for that community. AG The project ser ves a populace that has been completely demonized in this political moment. How is it to deal with the barrage of antiimmigrant propaganda? You’re in a sense coming up with metaphors to counter the inflammatory ones coming from the White House. FF It’s true. The region has become a lightning rod for American nativism; we see ourselves as weaving counternarratives, drawing on what we see as counterhegemonic practices. Things happen differently in this part of the world: there’s a lot more cross-border trust and cooperation, a lot more resilience and democratic agency, than the political rhetoric and sentiment would have you believe. Of course we also see terrible pain here, fear and pain. US migration and asylum practices are ripping families apart. Because of the proximity to the border wall, there’s a lot of ice monkey business and extralegal deportation, the proverbial knock at the door. If the police don’t like somebody in the neighborhood, they can literally pluck them out and deposit them across the wall. TC For us, conflict and crisis have always been creative tools—tackling the crisis, exposing the mechanisms that produced it. The Trump administration has declared the border region to be a place of criminalization and polarization, manifested by the border wall. But we have always told a different narrative, one that sees the region in terms of hybrid identities, empathy, interdependence, and the kind of porosity that moves through the wall in terms of social aspirations, economy, and, ultimately, a migrant architecture. Instead of building that stupid wall, can we not invest in an informal settlement in order to increase its capacity and chart a common destiny? RR There’s a bottom-up creativity in Tijuana that’s filling a void of neglect—people are moving to do what the government is failing to do. The demonization of poor people and people of color by the current US administration adds a layer of challenge, but also a layer of motivation and inspiration for these counternarratives. AG And it’s not just about migrants moving through. There’s a possibility of continuity and permanence, of putting down roots.

Yes, that’s central to what we do. There’s a tendency to think of migrant shelters as ephemeral, transitory spaces. What we’re trying to do is reimagine the migrant shelter as a more permanent infrastructure of inclusion and economic self-reliance, where staying is an option and where the migrant and her children are welcomed into the civic, cultural, and economic life of the city. As migrants wait in line for unjust US asylum processes that are never going to happen for them, Tijuana is increasingly becoming their home. AG Robert, you’ve been involved in this project as well. How did the three of you come together? RR In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] in New York was putting together a show called Home Delivery about the history of prefabricated housing. The curator, Barry Bergdoll, convened a focus group to which Teddy and I were invited, along with several other architects who had their finger in the prefabrication pie. Teddy—I had no idea who he was at the time—started excoriating the group for drifting toward a yuppified conception of prefabrication. He suggested that if they wanted to do something really radical, they would provide a basic framework for people in need to kit out their own homes. I sought him out afterward and made him aware of my work with [Jean] Prouvé’s architecture. [In 2000, Rubin restored one of Prouvé’s Maisons Tropicales (designed in 1949) in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo; he and his wife, Stéphane Samuel, then donated it to the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Rubins also curated the exhibition Jean Prouvé: Three Nomadic Structures, shown in New York and Los Angeles in 2003–05.] We talked about Prouvé’s engagement with the housing emergencies of the mid-twentieth century, and also about his integration of design into activism. We continued to exchange thoughts over the years. TC Our studio ended up being invited to be part of that show at MoMA, because of our work engaging nafta factories and their prefabricated systems to support emergency housing inside the informal settlements that surround them. But this early research work wasn’t yet connected to Prouvé. RR When I went to Tijuana in the early 2000s, for the first time since 1975, I was amazed at the impact that nafta had had on the manufacturing base. The city had become a sea of factories, and its FF

Opening spread: Rendering of framework for the new UCSD-Alacrán Community Station housing project on the remediated site, Alacrán Canyon, Tijuana, Mexico. Rendering: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Marcello Maltagliati) Above: Mecalux structural components adapted to create a bus stop, Los Laureles Canyon, Tijuana, Mexico, 2020. Photo: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman Right: Assembling the prototype of a demountable house designed by Jean Prouvé, Ateliers Jean Prouvé, Nancy, France, 1944. Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Image © CNAC/MNAM/ Dist. RMN–Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

slums had expanded exponentially. More recently I went again with Teddy and Fonna, and we visited a company called Mecalux, a key participant in their program. Mecalux produces prefabricated big-box storage buildings for companies like Amazon and Walmart, and they make a very Prouvé-esque product: they use the buildings’ shelves as structural elements. TC Yes, we proposed adapting Mecalux’s typical shelving systems into flexible scaffolds for incremental housing, transforming them into anticipatory frameworks to support the evolutionary patterns of informal urbanization, which happen through time and in layers, as resources become available. The president of the factory, Angel de Arriba, loved the idea. FF He’s been a wonderful partner. He and his engineering manager, David Felix Mancera, are genuinely moved by what they see as the humanitarian potential of our work together. Angel has subsidized the materials, and he’s been really receptive when we bring him prototypes and show him how we’ve been able to do things. TC This had been a conceptual dream: While Tijuana is a tax haven for these multinationals, could we, as architects, hold these institutions accountable, and help to redirect their resources to communities in need? FF One of the interesting things about a border region like this is that for the conservative business community, flow and porosity are just as important as they are for the human-rights community—another counternarrative to conventional US antagonisms between left and right. RR That’s a great point. The people who are most positive about open cross-border flow are the people who actually live and work in these cities. FF They think about the region in terms of economic development. We’ve tried to make that concept more accountable and equitable. TC Once we started working with Mecalux, Prouvé became an inspiration in the shape of the system. We communicated with Bob and agreed to collaborate. That was when Bob said, “You know what? I have this container in Paris with the remnants of the Maison Tropicale. Why don’t I send it to you in Tijuana?” RR My project in taking the Maison Tropicale out of Africa was to restore and display what I thought

was Prouvé’s magnum opus. The house was sitting there in war-torn Brazzaville, and I thought it was an important prototype to rescue. Afterward I had a lot of leftover pieces. The Maison Tropicale was a prototype of an industrial building system, and any iteration of those parts is as genuine as any other iteration, so for various reasons we’d made a building a bit smaller than it had been in Brazzaville. A number of panels had been cut for air conditioning, for example, and rather than repair them we just put them aside. The guy who was storing the pieces in Paris was bugging me to get them out of storage, and I initially said, Well, I could give them to artist friends and they could make work with them. But I realized that would run counter to everything I’d been doing as a custodian of Prouvé’s legacy. The light bulb went off and I said, I’m going to send this stuff to Teddy and Fonna and let them figure out what to do with it. They’re the rightful heirs. The project we’re undertaking now is really about resituating Prouvé’s legacy by creating a counternarrative to the collecting of his furniture, or the recycling of bits and pieces of his buildings, into redecorated lofts and the like. AG Besides the Maison Tropicale parts that you shipped to Tijuana, you also sold a Prouvé chair at auction? RR That was another “aha” moment. I was pitching the project to an architecture critic, and she said “It sounds great, come back when you’ve built something.” So I was looking around the living room and I saw this Kangourou armchair, the mate of another that I’d sold at Sotheby’s in 2005, at an auction I’d organized to finance the restoration of the Maison Tropicale. I’d been living with the chair for two decades and I said, Well, why don’t we sell the chair to create the cornerstone grant for the social-housing project? That was very much in the spirit of Prouvé, who used the profits from his furniture-manufacturing business to fund his social-housing experiments. It’s a testament to him that the chair brought $400,000, which was enough to launch the social-housing project. We’re about two-thirds funded at this point. Like Prouvé, we used profit from the furniture to underwrite a social-housing experiment. AG It’s a brilliant concept and you’re shaping a different narrative. It’s extending Prouvé’s social vision, which has probably been submerged in the Left: Rendering of the new UCSD-Alacrán Community Station housing project, Alacrán Canyon, Tijuana, Mexico. Rendering: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Marcello Maltagliati) Above: Example of incremental housing construction in the Tijuana–San Diego border region: a metal frame is infilled over time with recycled materials. Photos: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Marcello Maltagliati, Jonathan Maier)

past twenty years. I like to think that you’re saving DNA specks of Prouvé from art-world fetishization. Teddy and Fonna, how will you incorporate the pieces Bob gave you? Will they be integrated in a structural way? TC We have about thirty pieces to work with, some of them very small. Initially, Fonna and I were thinking, Let’s do a house! But then we said, Wait a minute, that would keep them in the private realm. Why don’t we make the pieces part of the Divina Community Station? After all, it’s like the Maison du Peuple, the house of the people. So we’re going to hybridize somehow. The building will be a scaffold that will be flexible for a variety of changing programs—an informal market and other temporal activities. One idea that’s growing from the heart of our activist partner Rebeca Ramírez is to create a small high school—there isn’t a single high school in this 90,000-person settlement. Through UCSD, we have connections in San Diego to help support such a plan. So there’s not only architectural DNA in the project, but DNA for a new cross-border public imagination.

Is this insertion of the Prouvé elements a benefit? TC That’s an interesting thing. Having Prouvé as an interlocutor obviously brings visibility to the project, but there’s also the idea of knowledge exchange, since this community has been building its own architecture, “Prouvé-like,” through adaptation and retrofit. When we do workshops with our community partners, we always talk about how we’re learning from the entrepreneurial processes of informal urbanization. These settlements recycle the waste of San Diego: garage doors, disposable structures, entire houses. So the waste of San Diego is repurposed into a secondhand urbanization, as we call it. We’re there to collaborate on figuring out how to scale that up, proposing structural support systems. So in our minds, Prouvé is understood in this spirit of coproduction and reciprocity, through which prefabricated systems can support bottom-up creativity. What I’m trying to say is that in this conversation with our partners, we’re talking not about an imposition or an act of colonization but about an opportunity to amplify the story AG

This community has been building its own architecture, “Prouvélike,” through adaptation and retrofit. —Teddy Cruz

There’s a tendency to think of migrant shelters as ephemeral, transitory spaces. What we’re trying to do is reimagine the migrant shelter as a more permanent infrastructure of inclusion and economic self-reliance. —Fonna Forman

of entrepreneurship, enabling Prouvé to become a seed to stimulate economic development within informal settlements. RR You can certainly critique Prouvé for some of the colonizing aspects of his projects, but he was a principled activist. He refused to collaborate with the Germans [during the Occupation]. After the war, the Allies named him mayor of Nancy. He oversaw a major postwar emergency-shelter program, and he collaborated with the great Abbé Pierre on housing for the poor. At some level I’m engaged in an income-redistribution project here, trying to redirect funds from the art and design collecting milieu by provoking some kind of a social conscience. Even if you don’t know exactly who Prouvé was, there’s something to be said for having important historical precedents for social justice and design coming together in such an entrepreneurial way. FF We are really mindful of the power dynamics whenever an institution like a university arrives in a community with ideas of how to make life better. Our work is horizontal and participatory, a project of mutual learning and coproduction. The

way we’re appropriating Prouvé’s legacy, even our integration of the pieces themselves, is respectful of local building vernaculars and building practices. What we’re proposing is a kind of hybrid of local practices and a modular prefabricated vision. Our incremental building process is respectful of local labor and of the participatory energies and vision of the people who will inhabit the structures they’re building. We’re also thinking about how the arrival of Prouvé in a site like this can help us communicate to larger academic, architectural, and design circles about his intentions and how they can be reappropriated to address the challenges now faced by people across the world. Migratory shifts are dramatic, and the housing crisis is going to become more and more intense in the next decade because of climate change, political instability, and nationalism. This is the challenge of our time. AG You were mentioning how the actual structures are put together in a grassroots way. TC Yes. This is an architecture of parts, right? It’s an architecture that accepts the heterogeneous and the idiosyncratic. For our community partners

to understand the potential and the transformability of these parts, we created a bus stop to be replicated across the canyon. We built it with our students and local labor. Now the social-housing project is increasing the scale of this whole thing. We believe that social housing cannot be understood only as “units.” It needs to be embedded in an infrastructure of productivity and support with social, pedagogical, cultural, and economic programming. Part of the idea is to thread the housing with economic incubators within the building—a construction shop with fabrication machines, a tool library, two tractors. After the project is finished, the community then has a mechanism for generating revenue to support the social programs. AG The upper levels will have residential space while below it will be industrial? TC It’s both. We have capacity for twenty-five units for families and two economic incubators on the ground, but there will also be other units above, on lofts and mezzanines. We’re building in layers: first the overall structure, made of Mecalux frames over concrete columns and beams. That’s going to be covered by sliding plastic doors and shading—very affordable systems that are accessible in Tijuana. Once we finish the envelope, the migrants will move into one of the wings, because they’re living in tents right now. The other wing is where we’ll install the construction shop, so that they can begin to fill the interior with a variety of living and working environments. AG Will the materials be made available by the nonprofit organization, Colonos de la Divina Providencia? TC At that point it will be partly hybrid. We want to provide a compendium of materials, but it will include recycled materials because those are so ubiquitous as part of everyday life here. RR These are the materials that come over on trucks from San Diego, right? TC Exactly. There are houses being built in this area with recycled garage doors and pallet racks, retaining walls made from old tires, a kind of concrete post-and-beam vernacular with recycled houses on top. AG These are mainly from US landfills and dumps?

Yes, and construction debris. There’s a whole economy of brokers who bring this stuff across. RR What has always appealed to me about Teddy and Fonna’s practice is that so much architecture today is either preciously self-referential or overly focused on its formal qualities. So how do you reinvigorate the practice of architecture? In the twenty-first century you have to inject a social-justice element. Architecture isn’t very interesting unless it’s making the world a better place. AG I agree. In many ways, architecture has become a lost art form. Without a social or environmental dimension, it’s little more than glorified window dressing. TC One question that always drives our work is, Where is our public imagination today? Who is the client for architects today? It used to be that the public was architecture’s client, and architecture was supported by a broad commitment to investing in the public good. Now, with the privatization of everything . . . For us, and for Bob in this case, we need to reimagine the client to shape a new public commitment from the bottom up. And we have to intervene in the contexts that the profession has maybe not been looking at as the places from which to begin to reconstruct and rehabilitate. RR What Teddy and Fonna have demonstrated in their practice is that architecture really doesn’t have any meaning unless the end users are part of the process. They’re not just clients, they’re participants. That’s a key distinction. Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale could be erected by two people without using any machines. This was a logistical requirement. What we’re layering onto that logistical imperative is another kind of imperative, a social imperative. We’re recycling Prouvé to keep his ideas alive. FF

Above: Rendering of the new “Maison du Peuple,” UCSDDivina Community Station, Los Laureles Canyon, Tijuana, Mexico. Rendering: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman (Jonathan Maier) Right: Perspective drawing for one of Jean Prouvé’s demountable houses, detailing the installation of the first roof span, 1947. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Photo: George Meguerditchian © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN– Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York

NEW IN� IN �RIORITIES GUESTEDiTED TED BY: i ALSON M. GINGERAS AND JAMIESON WEBSTER

CONTENTS

Becoming Together Alison M. Gingeras and Jamieson Webster

Living Death Jacqueline Rose

Vera, Lateral Puncture Deana Lawson

You Should Leave Alissa Bennett

Pathologically Optimistic A conversation with Paul B. Preciado

Resting Place Miciah Hussey

Opening image: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976, gelatin silver print, 5 ¼ × 5 ¼ inches (12.7 × 12.7 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY Opposite: Andrzej Wróblewski, Child with Dead Mother, 1949, oil on canvas, 47 × 27 ½ inches (119.5 × 70 cm), National Museum, Kraków © Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation/www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

BECO MiNG TOGE Tï¿½R

the mother: under the bell jar Everyone was obsessed with the “Mother.” We tended to her, feeding her as her breath slowly bubbled up— proof of life—as she grew in our homes. The Mother distracted us from our new interiorities, as she fermented in jars of flour and water—across the borough of Brooklyn, in the genteel climes of San Francisco, and beyond. She was the subject of a thousand social-media posts, vicious memes, and the catalyst for nasty scuffles among the urban bourgeoisie who hoarded bags of tipo-00 flour and organic yeast. Not only did the Mother spawn millions of mediocre sourdough loaves across the country, she helped us cope with the sudden caesura of everyday life. A virus had confined us. The threat of community spread had turned us all inward, so far so that some of us felt like we had been transported back to the nineteenth century, shut into a traditionally feminine domestic sphere where we were compelled to maintain hearth and home while supervising home school (and, since we do live in the present day, juggling endless Zoom calls). Little wonder that our “Mother” problems—the love-hate codependency we developed with our lactobacillus starter jars—became such loaded harbingers of the lockdown. In those early days of spring 2020, those of us who had the privilege of sheltering in place—unlike the millions of hospital staff, the homeless, and a newly minted class of “essential workers” on the frontlines of the viral unknown—experienced this new condition of forced domesticity as an unexpected rupture in the globalist hive of our neoliberal lives. If the twentyfirst-century world had seemed to be accelerating at breakneck speed, a microscopic pathogen had suddenly slammed on the brakes. Life for many was suddenly caught under a covid bell jar. fang (Facebook Amazon Netflix Google) kept the newly confined classes comfortable, leaving uncertainty as the primary symptom of this new plague. When would it end? How would it end? In our newly stillborn lives, to quote Sylvia Plath, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”1 Revisiting Plath, herself no stranger to traumatic self-isolation, provided some depressive echoes for our first phase of confinement. Yet the Mother continued to haunt us. She was a matriarch whose fourteen-day fermentation cycle mirrored the mandated quarantine period for coronavirus, yet whose infinite divisibility always left her unimpeachable—a little like our president, who had performed the perfect patriarchal yang to the Mother’s slow and silent yin. His daily “China virus” briefings were hysterical, contradictory, cruel, and mesmerizing. He was the Ur-Father spectacle while the Mother was a domestic balm for our collective anxieties. For every crazy tweet that Trump issued in those early days, every individual bell jar seemed to double down on the 53

protection of neurotic familial bonds. The home that we may have spent decades escaping and dematerializing was now the only refuge in the face of the torrent of fake news, counternarratives, speculative science, and sheer fear in the face of this unknown enemy called covid-19. When the Mother fails, schadenfreude abounds. How many articles declared that finally, all the others, at once, understood what felt like one’s own private experience of unwellness: the hypochondriacs, the agoraphobics, the lonely and bereft, the envious with their incessant fomo, and, most of all, the stay-at-home helicopter mothers and Mister Moms. In this period of collective confinement, symptoms surged forth—along with domestic-abuse statistics, shockingly. For all of our Internet-connected outward-facingness, we had forgotten what we had been spared. Jacqueline Rose writes powerfully and soberly on this future of feminism in the time of covid in “Living Death,” her lead essay for “New Interiorities.” In our new reality we could boldly re purpose the manifestolike mantra of the trans-woman writer Andrea Long Chu: “Everyone is female, and everyone”—in this moment of forced confinement— “really hates it.”2 Yet if the coronavirus generates a forced femaleness, it should be remembered that feminine interiority was a motor of so much great literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—even if it was also a trap. Alissa Bennett discusses this motor in the work of Patricia Highsmith, a motor that required her to travel at all costs to leave herself behind and write. Despite the triumphs of first-, second-, and third-wave feminisms, here we all were imprisoned again—and the toolbox of mainstream feminist liberation was insufficient to quell our angst about our sourdough Mothers,

displaced as it was from the harsh realities of abuse, death, and poverty and the real-life reckoning with Sense and Sensibility in the age of Trump. As we wrestled with life in this first phase of our confinement, Francesca Woodman’s ghost could be summoned forth as a poignant image of our own privileged (white) feminism. In a rare color photograph that she staged in 1979 as part of a failed attempt to build up a fashion-photography portfolio, we see Woodman grimping up the door frame of an East Village apartment with crumbling seafoam-green walls and flamingo-pink molding (see page 85). Her frizzy long hair obscures her face, picturing her as an everywoman driven to literally climb the walls. A small oval mirror, reflecting nothing, sits at the bottom of the frame, countering the hard edges of the room, drawing our attention to the void in this charged interior landscape of traditional feminine inter iority. Woodman committed suicide at the age of twentytwo, not long after constructing this self-portrait—a doomed icon of a woman struggling for a public identity to lift her out of a suffocating depression. With a bit of our own narcissistic jouissance, we often gazed

at Woodman’s dark interiors during these long months of confinement. We also read the prose of another suicided woman, Ingeborg Bachmann. Though her death was more along the lines of an “accidental” overdose and fire caused by a cigarette fallen on a mattress, one German newspaper declared it to be exactly the kind of thing she would have dreamed up for one of her heroines. With claustrophobic intensity, Bachmann writes of women driven into madness, silence, disappearance, cramped spaces. While these stories can be seen as the epitome of a kind of writing of feminine interiority, something about that isn’t quite right, since Bachmann works at the very limit of language. Her women’s lives are barely spoken, even barely written, as her writing drifts into fragments, bodily symptoms, fits of dissociation, abandoned or lost careers, and crumpled letters. Her unfinished trilogy Ways of Dying took flight from the idea that “fascism begins in relations between people. Fascism is the primary element in the relationship between a man and a woman. . . . in this society war is constant. There’s no such thing as war and peace, there is only war.”3 The

coronavirus quickly became the disease most rampant in fascist countries; Bachmann might have argued that that was rooted in the domestic sphere. For Bachmann’s heroines, their lives reduced to a daily struggle with what she called the “virus of crime”—something that escaped to who knows where by growing so subtle that dealing with it would require the sharpest of minds—vigilance is difficult and the escape inward leaves you all-too-humanly vulnerable to outside forces. 4 Indeed, it was very hard to stay vigilant and sharp in our bubbles. As if writing about our loss of a sense of time during lockdown, Bachmann states that “today” is the most impossible of words, a “too gripping” word that makes her “breathing grow irregular,” a word that should perhaps belong only to suicides.5 And every day in lockdown felt like an impossible “today,” forced to rely on Andrew Cuomo, a GovernorDaddy we wouldn’t have tolerated for a second before covid, to tell us, in his joking, patriarchal fashion, that in our untethered reality “today” was Saturday, which he, as we, only knew because his intern had put it on his PowerPoint.

the body: a prison full of organs Let’s take a deeper and darker trip through history, diverting into our bodies, thinking of these scenes of domestic interiority amid a shelter-in-place order that continued as the death toll rose to nearly 2000 a day in the United States. The anchorites who emerged in the eleventh century in England and Northern Europe embraced complete confinement. Anchorite women outnumbered men three to one. To be an anchorite meant being enclosed in a room for life, such that the day of one’s confinement began with one’s funeral ceremony. These women sought refuge from the savagery of medieval life, and felt that a life of isolated contemplation could serve as an opening onto divine love that would strengthen them not only spiritually but bodily. In one of the few reports of their routines, they are said to have dug the graves they would eventually be buried in within the very room in which they were cloistered, and then were encouraged to kneel or lie in these graves daily for sessions of prayer. While this seems macabre—just another way of burying a woman alive—anchoritism offered a way to avoid the dangers of childbirth and forced marriage; it gave these anchorite women a position of authority and social standing that rested on them alone. Anchorites—unlike nuns, who were tethered to the patriarchal institution of the Church—were able to write, to invent their own version of religion, creating wild practices of prayer and contemplation. “It is no small irony,” writes Mary Wellesley, “that one of the few ways women could achieve autonomy and social standing was by imprisoning themselves.”6 One of the most famous anchorites was Julian of Norwich, an ecstatic mystic whose writings are fascinating for the immediacy of her relationship to the suffering body. In 1373, when Julian was very ill and preparing herself for death, she received a series of mystical visions. When she came to, she was completely recovered. She went on to write about her “shewings” in the book XVI Revelations of Divine Love, first published in the seventeenth century, over 200 years after her death. Noteworthy is Julian’s sense of Christ as the mother—not merely like a mother but literally our Mother. For Julian, no other bond could explain the closeness and goodness of our relationship with him. After her encounters with “Mother,” she famously chanted, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”7 When you let go of the fears instilled in you by the illusions of the world, you can be delivered into the calm arms of God, who is always near at hand. While we may venerate the anchorites as models for the kind of wild imagination and healing that isolation can bring, nothing, sadly, could be farther from our own experience of lockdown. We lack the anchorites’ brave ability not only to become acquainted with the idea of their own death but to do so while looking squarely at the terrifying reality of the deaths surrounding them. (Julian of Norwich, for example, lived through the arrival

in England of the Black Death.) For us, that acceptance was only possible by becoming somehow deadened ourselves. Testimony after testimony showed that so many of us were decidedly not well as the pandemic progressed— as important ceremonies of mourning were curtailed, as we took in the sites of mass graves, and as we wrestled with governmental failures that left health-care workers unprepared and unequipped, that exposed with impunity the elderly and already impoverished and neglected black and brown families, and that we could do nothing about. Weren’t we practically crying for our Mothers? Helplessness overwhelmed an already mounting feeling of collective dis-ease that rivaled Freud’s sense of death-driven civilizational discontent. If the anchorite prisons were the conditions of women having souls, our prisons were showing us a contemporary soullessness that exceeded even the most pessimistic of us. While the anchorite women took possession of their bodies, healed their maladies, and found their Mothers, illness for us meant having to hand over our bodies to the broken machinery of medicine. We now understand that the decision to immediately intubate people whose lungs were ravaged by covid-19, confining them by coma and machine, betting against an 80 percent mortality rate, was medically unsound. We clearly knew next to nothing about this virus, but could only watch as the effects it had on organ after organ revealed themselves. We could track time not by the day we started to forget, but by our knowledge of the organs that we learned it had the ability to inflame: phase one, lungs; phase two, kidney; phase three, heart and circulatory system; and the last, phase four, brain. It was a prison full of organs—think of Gaetano Zumbo’s anatomical wax Venuses in the Florence naturalhistory museum La Specola. Kept under glass, their meticulously splayed intestines, wombs, and lungs not only confine them but transfix the female body in a state of permanent scopophilic spectacle. But there is an irony here, as philosopher Paul B. Preciado points out in our interview with him here: we are transitioning through different ways of conceptualizing interiority, from the empty body that is a host for the soul, and mirrors the empty rooms of the anchorites awaiting divine intervention or salvation after death, to the body as a pure object for modern science, seen as a collection of organs to be studied and kept alive, without, at times, concern for the person’s quality of life, or for any conception of life beyond biological life. As many recent philosophers have argued, following Michel Foucault, this opened up the body to new forms of governmental control: law became the power not just to engage in war, or to ensure the rights of citizens, but to decide what counts as life and which lives will be grieved. This new war with an “invisible enemy” makes almost 7 million American infections and over 200,000 deaths (at the time of this writing) an acceptable outcome. These lives will not be officially mourned or regretted. As Freud warned us in 1917, failed mourning is a recipe for violent melancholia.8 56

Preciado ultimately wants to push us past these modes of thinking interiority, or, better, to push us out of them, to see that interiority is now external, just as our bodies have been externalized by technological prostheses, Internet avatars, and the multitude of cultural institutions that prop us up. This is why it is important not to forget that the lockdown was also an entirely new experience, because of technology that made it possible for everything, and we mean everything, to take place in and from the home: school, work, shopping, socializing, even dating. It wasn’t that death or sickness burst the bubble each of us lives in, but that the technological expansion of the bubble was creating new, dizzying contours for interior life. With every tool we invent, Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, we perfect our bodily organs and remove their limitations. Freud’s vision of modern man in 1930 has reached its apogee: “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.”9 Humans, Freud concludes, with his typical sober sensibility, do not feel happy in their God-like state. Who can forget a sudden and irrational rise in anger when the Zoom connection wasn’t steady, as if it always had been and always should be, even though this was a decidedly new reality? No wonder some had to create a paranoid conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was none other than our new souped-up 5G networks making us feel ill—every paranoid fantasy containing a powerful kernel of truth. The classic psychotic fantasy of being a body without organs, an ecstatic sack of skin with an energy unknotted by organ sites, couldn’t be further from our lives in a domestic prison chock-full of and overflowing with organs. america: lose your mother Our confinements were suddenly ruptured by the cries “I can’t breathe” and “Momma, I love you.” A viral video showed George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a police officer, uncannily named Chauvin, who choked him, knee on neck, while he beseeched his already deceased mother. This video broke through the claustrophobic early days of the covid pandemic, revitalizing the Black Lives Matter movement fighting police brutality and systemic racism and becoming an urgent external call to action, rousing us from our forced interiorities. Our melancholic female confinement, the desperate search for our Mother in a time of radical uncertainty, gods covered in organs, and the coronavirus were conflated in a completely unexpected way. Repeated endlessly on social media (unlike the video of the Rodney King beating of 1991, before the social-media era), the documentation of Floyd’s murder became a catalyst for the perfect reversal of the slogan “Stay inside to save lives” to “Out on the street to save lives,” changing our idea of what it means to save or take a life. It was also now absolutely clear that the coronavirus was killing black and brown bodies at

a much higher rate than it did their white counterparts. In showing us history in the present, in real time, the video rendered another form of danger in this country: the streets are not only a place for a pandemic to seethe and spread, but a place where some people can never feel safe, irrespective of microorganisms, because they are killed with impunity. The organs now weren’t just our inflamed bodies, or our umbilical attachment to our iPhones and computers, but suddenly the batons and guns and tear-gas canisters of riot police and armed white-supremacist militia, egged on by the president of the United States. As we contemplated not only George Floyd but Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and countless other victims of our self-created social illness of racism, we began to synthesize the effects of the infodemic that had also driven us inwards. The fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories that fueled the absence of science-based understanding and cohesive policies to tame the biological threat of the coronavirus were also fueling the racial and political polarization of society. The infodemic stoked fears about violence, undermining the grassroots coalitions that began to form as we collectively burst through this period of unprecedented confinement. We were jarred into the realization of our failed state. Joining the massive crowds of protesters marching through cities that had until recently been ghost towns, we blew up the hypochondriacal routines that we had carefully crafted over months. We screamed the victims’ names through our masks, our PPE no longer a muzzle. As a Minneapolis police station burned down, our personal bubbles of self-protective measures and compulsions to follow stay-at-home orders imploded. In a flash identification with Floyd, and by extension with all the descendants of slavery, we were put in contact with those who, as Saidiya Hartman powerfully shows in her book Lose Your Mother, had only known existence in this country by losing all ties to their mother—all of them. To be a Black American was a complete opacity. The limit of being-inthe-world. The heart of darkness. The myth of the mother, Hartman says, is the myth of return, of redemption, of a name, and this myth, at this point in history, is not only impossible for Black Americans, it is pure violence—as in the inherent racism of Make America Great Again. Hartman wants to stay close to this loss, to excavate this wound—the lack of common ancestry or history or unconflicted narrative. She wants to hold onto this loss against the power of others to determine whether you live or die. This loss, she says, is a “call for freedom, a rallying cry against the imperial states and their soldiers, an admonition to steer clear of the merchants of death and the rich men cannibals, a lament for your dead.” Importantly, 1. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, 1963 (reprint ed. New York: Harpers Perrenial Classics, 2005), 237. 2. Andrea Long Chu, Females (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 13. 3. Ingeborg Bachmann, quoted in Peter Filkins, “Introduction: Darkness Spoken,” in Bachmann, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, trans. Filkins (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995), viii. The

original is from Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden: Gespräche und Interviews (Munich: Piper, 1983), 144. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Bachmann, Malina, 1971, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: New Directions, 2019), 7. 6. Mary Wellesley, “This place is pryson,” London Review of Books 41, no. 10 (May 23, 2019). A review of E. A. Jones, ed., Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200–1550

“this loss and desire gave meaning to the words we who become together.”10 We all have to acknowledge this loss and its perversion. The value of human life has to be rethought: does “value” apply simply to those who are privileged in their bubbles by birth or by economic success? Is it merely a question of biology, of the life of bodies seen as collections of organs and fluids? Or is it about attachments and dependencies? The privilege of birth, economics, and bodies converge with the problem of racism, which tears a hole in all possible attachments, degrading the value of all life. It is from this hole that a new vision of life must be completely reimagined. We are not in it, we are not out of it, but, to repeat a refrain of Vera’s in Deana Lawson’s stunning portrait, we are “going through it.” Vera, a name that means “faith,” might give us a sense of this new coronavirus interiority, one that Lawson names “Vera, Lateral Puncture.” It’s the chance encounter of feminine lateral moves, the discovery of a rhinestone bodysuit that also happens to point to Dogon cosmogony: namely, the intuition of how matter behaves through a connection to ancestors. This is not a slavish devotion to information, nor is it female rebellion as the solitude of a room of one’s own, nor is it the question of the sick, enslaved, or phallic body, nor is it even a question of politics, be it protest or procedure. Art, Lawson seems to tell us, moves laterally . . . and, as Miciah Hussey writes in his discussion of Iiu Susiraja’s self-portraiture, it is a body that functions in a network of things, things that vibrate, are an excess that is physical, not just psychic or abstract. Interestingly, both Lawson and Hussey see embodiment of this kind as a piercing of the bubble—a “puncture,” a “barb,” a “gash,” that is a blow to the order of the world, allowing values to become indeterminate again and so, potentially, to be redetermined. This is the possibility of a new extension of interiority into the world, one that can repurpose the objects in it by rendering them strange, as strange as life in the coronavirus womb where we lost our mothers. It has taken confinement, the threat to life, the loss of markers of identity, exile, guilt, losing our mother, to bring us to this breaking point where we can find something actually hopeful—a “becoming together.” Gone are the bubbles—no longer me in mine and you in yours, or me in my body and you in yours, or me in my state and you in yours. Despite the threats of a second wave of the virus, and the ominous predictions around the approaching election, we can no longer retreat, or passively endure a second lockdown. Our new interiorities are now shared, our agencies are inflamed, our desire to create through puncturing is activated—transforming the old models of passive female interiority into a collective, radically empathetic action. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). Available online at www.lrb.co.uk/thepaper/v41/n10/mary-wellesley/this-place-ispryson (accessed September 24, 2020). 7. Julian of Norwich, quoted in ibid. 8. See Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, 1917, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,

1966), 14:239–58. 9. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930, trans. and ed. Strachey, with a biographical introduction by Peter Gay (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1989), 44. 10. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 234.

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What exactly is being asked of people when they are told to “stay at home” or “self-isolate” in response to the covid threat? In a recent BBC Panorama report on women who have managed to escape their abusers during lockdown, one woman was asked, “What did the ‘stay at home’ message mean to you?” “Death,” she replied almost inaudibly, and then repeated the word as if not expecting to be heard.1 Her partner damaged her internally, she said, and burned her with cigarettes “so no one would want me.” He also never left her alone in a room: she was isolated, yet never by herself; cut off from most human contact and at the same time deprived of privacy, robbed of the capacity to find a way through her own thoughts. This is isolation without interiority, solitude leeched of its inner dimension, loneliness without redress. It leaves you with no one to turn to, including yourself. The “self” in “self-isolate” is therefore a decoy. It forgets all those situations—incarceration, torture— where isolation is something that one person (with the power) inflicts on another. Above all, it leaves no room to ask what happens, during a time of collective trauma, to the mind’s innermost relationship to itself. No less misleading is the mantra, at the center of lockdown policies worldwide, that staying at home will save lives (or, in one sinister government ad widely circulated on Facebook, “If you go out, you can spread it. People will die”). Without consideration of whether staying home is possible, or what might follow when it is, this turns the body into a lethal weapon outside the sacred precincts of the home. The formula is an avatar for privilege and injustice. What are the advantages of staying indoors for a family crowded into an airless slum? Or for the low-paid workers living in cramped conditions as a result of the rising, pandemic-fueled demand for cheap factory-produced food? Against decades of feminist argument, the phrase also makes the fatal error of suggesting that the moment you reach your front door, you are safe. In the United States, women are being prevented by their abusers from washing their hands so that, even in isolation (especially in isolation), their fear of infection will increase.2 In England, one couple sat listening to Boris Johnson on the radio when he announced the lockdown. “He looked over at me,” the woman later described her husband, “he had his arms folded and his chest out, ’cause he knew that would intimidate me, and he said, ‘Let the games begin.’” He then raped her in an invisible, silent world: curtains closed, front door locked, TV and music both turned up so loud that no one could hear her screaming “for someone, for anybody.”3 This is isolation at degree zero, trampling over the relics of what, not so long ago—though it feels like the distant past—was meant, for some at least, to have been a relatively safe world, a time when women in many countries, though not all women, felt more or less free to walk out the door. Neither health benefit nor saving grace, the official guidance has proved itself to be the hidden accomplice of cruelty, a spur to violent gender-based crime. 59

Slowly these stories are coming to light. The problem is global—the “shadow pandemic,” in the words of a United Nations report4—yet for some reason it does not seem to have crossed the minds of those in government that lockdown would be a nightmare for women trapped in abusive relationships (though I am not sure why this should come as any surprise). Visits to the website of Refuge, the United Kingdom’s largest domestic-abuse charity, have increased during the pandemic by 950 percent; at one point there was a 700 percent increase in calls in a single day.5 True, there was a clause in the UK Coronavirus Act of April 2020—intended, we have since been told, for women abused in their homes— allowing that not everyone would be able to self-isolate. But the only person who seems to have made use of that clause is Boris Johnson’s unelected chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, to excuse his breaking of lockdown rules when—infected with covid-19—he traveled with his family to stay with his parents in Durham. By doing so, he smashed any remaining confidence in government policies, putting thousands at risk. Britain shares with the United States one of the highest infection and death rates in the world. It took nineteen days after the lockdown began for funds to be released to women’s refuges, which were desperately straitened after years of government austerity policies. During that time, eleven women were murdered by their partners—more than double the average number for such killings during an equivalent period before the pandemic.6 “If you think it was bad before,” the husband said, “you are in for a rough ride.” (“Let the games begin.”) Lockdown had emboldened him, giving him a new lease on life and on death. Another woman, pregnant, was force-fed—it started as a game, almost like a fetish, she said. Her partner boasted that he didn’t have to “cover up” any more while repeatedly assuring her that she was safe at home (he would not let her leave the house to attend a hospital pregnancy scan).7 Annie (not her real name) had endured two years of domestic abuse when the restrictions were imposed: “It was at this moment she finally started to believe her partner would kill her.”8 Abuse in a time of pandemic—angry men walking into shuttered rooms with “guns” blazing and a soft voice. Or, as one poster plastered across London puts it, “Abusers always work from home.” Although more men than women worldwide are dying of covid-19, we are faced with a new “femicide,” the term originally coined by Diana Russell in 1976, and that the pandemic has brought out of the dark. With reference to covid, psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva uses the term “feminicide,” since it is women’s presumed “femininity” that is at stake.9 There is, Kristeva suggests, a central “phobic core” to all humankind, an inner fear of mortality and of life’s fragility that we normally push to the back of our minds, stuff into the back drawer of the arrangements through which we organize and delude ourselves. Against such unconscious knowing,

it is above all the task of women to make their partners, children, and dependents feel secure, to sweep the dirt and debris away. This is the heartbeat of so-called “femininity,” to which, of course, in a time of pandemic, no woman can possibly be equal (nor at any other time, it should be said). Feminicide, then, is the enraged response to women who betray this prescribed essence of the feminine. They are being punished—paying with their lives—for a death that has become too visible, for the bodies that are failing and falling all around, as defences start to crumble and the phobic core of being human rises to the surface and explodes. To which we might add that women are being assaulted by men who feel, as they too are confined to the home, that they are being turned into women.10 We are living an epoch of permanent grief, a time of psychic reckoning that feels too much to endure. Cherished illusions are suddenly stripped bare—it is as if the end of illusion, an end that Freud fervently desired in relation to religious belief, had suddenly come upon us without warning out of the skies, summoning the deepest fears of the soul. It was Freud’s argument that religion served above all to keep fear of mortality at bay; his mistake was to think that, for that very reason, any such belief was an illusion that, over time, the powers of the reasoning mind were bound to dissipate. (Surprisingly for Freud, that argument runs contrary to a basic tenet of psychoanalysis: nothing perishes in the unconscious.) Today, faced with this new psychic dispensation, many rulers across the globe are battening down the hatches, laying down the law as to what they can or will tolerate, internally and in the world they claim to own. It is not working. The world refuses to bend to psychotic conviction, to the omnipotent belief in the powers of the human mind (Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump). In a time of pandemic it rapidly becomes clear that you cannot force the world to your will—the wager of dictators throughout history. Nor can you pretend that the body is within your control, now or ever. A virus mutates, shunts invisibly through the atmosphere, carries itself by means of droplets we cannot even feel on our face (which is why the reassurance provided by wearing masks is so flimsy). At any given moment, and regardless of the precautions we take, covid-19 could be anywhere. And yet, in the teeth of this unbiddable reality, the mind’s capacity for delusion, for transcending and at the same time wallowing in the mire, if anything intensifies—especially for those who feel power slipping from their grasp. As the extent of viral spread registered in Brazil, a spread largely the outcome of Bolsonaro’s denials, he boasted that the people of his country could swim in excrement and emerge unscathed (why they would want to do so is unclear).11 The analogy is as revealing as it is nonsensical: unlike shit, a virus does not respond to muscular exertion, which in fact it often fatally undermines; it cannot be expelled. Bolsonaro has 60

further stated that if we must fight the virus—a major concession—we must do so “like fucking men.”12 The only reason, he insists, that he has a daughter, who was born after his four sons, is because at the moment of her conception, he had a moment of weakness and failed properly to concentrate.13 The options for women are stark: back to the 1950s, “the Great Leap Backwards,” as it is being termed (backlash with a vengeance); or straight into the eye of the storm.14 Today, all women’s hard-won workplace victories in terms of hours, promotions, and equal pay, and in relation to child care and domestic labor at home, are in danger of being lost (not that any of this had been fully achieved prepandemic). “With the schools closed,” Eliot Weinberger writes in his essay “The American Virus,” “45 percent of men say they are spending more time home-schooling than their wives. Three percent of women say their husbands are spending more time home-schooling than they themselves are.”15 The problem, then, is not only that women are being sent back to the home, where they are once again taking on the lion’s share of domestic work, home schooling, and everything else; it is also that, according to a well-worn tradition and grievance, this reality is unseen. (I remember my shock as a young woman when a friend made the obvious point that the success of domestic work is measured by its ability to wipe out every last trace of itself.) Angela Merkel has warned of a creeping “retraditionalization” of roles.16 The domestic workload of women in France has tripled since March.17 In Spain, more than 170,000 people have signed a petition protesting against this “regression.”18 In the United Kingdom, the “early years” sector is on the brink of collapse: one in four preschool nurseries risks closure within a year.19 According to the British campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed, more than half of pregnant women and mothers expect the pandemic to have permanently damaged their careers.20 We might then ask how it is that according to a survey of 194 countries conducted by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum, countries dealing much better with covid-19 are led by women: Germany’s Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, Finland’s Sanna Marin, Barbados’s Mia Mottley—a fact that has received little attention.21 Fewer cases. Fewer deaths. Women leaders are apparently both more risk averse with regard to fatalities and more willing to take risks with the economy, which, for most male leaders, is the privileged, inviolable domain, the driver of the “normal” to which they are so keen to return (as if, given the state of the world, “normal” is something that anyone should want or believe themselves to be). Taking the true measure of death, it would seem, is paradoxically the only way to prevent it from carrying off thousands, if not millions, of people before their time. In Barbados, tests

were carried out several weeks before the first case had even been identified. “The evolution of civilisation,” Freud wrote in Civilisation and its Discontents, “is the struggle for life of the human species.”22 But to struggle for life, you first have to recognize death as its inevitable outcome, which is why Freud could also assert without contradiction that the human organism wants above all to die after its own fashion.23 To live, you have to allow death into the frame. You have to open the inner world to what is most painful to contemplate. In a letter of 1929 to Albert Einstein, Freud warned that psychoanalysis will always provoke resistance, because getting people to turn inward, away from the outer world where “dangers threaten and satisfactions beckon,” is so contrary to nature that it feels as if someone were “twisting their necks.”24 Today, psychoanalysts—faced with the strained intimacy of the virtual session—are confronting an outpouring of anguish, unbidden memories, traumas never before spoken of, alongside a struggle to hold on to one of the few spheres in our culture where the task is to accept the fullest psychic responsibility for oneself (psychoanalysis as the opposite of housework in how it deals with the mess that we make). Needless to say, this fractured shared space could not be further from a threatening home in which your only options are to smother your thoughts, get the hell out, or hang on in

there for dear life. It might be too that this, or something close to it, is a space in which aesthetic work becomes possible, offering us another form of creative accountability, exposing the fault lines of the moment, providing a countervision in an unjust and collapsing world. In these remarks I have overstated the division of the sexes—focusing on the worst-case scenarios as, under the pressure of the pandemic, the most forbidding versions of sexual difference are granted an ugly new freedom to roam. At the same time, we should remember that it is the—life-saving—wager of psychoanalysis, for both men and women, that everyone in the unconscious and in their deeds is capable, even under duress, of being more flexible in their identifications, less obdurate in their hatreds, always potentially other to themselves. Nor, crucially, as Black men are gunned down by police and vigilantes, is gender division the only fake division in our culture that, underscored by the pandemic, is tearing people apart on and off the streets. Nonetheless, the harsh fate of so many women in lockdown, alongside the gift of women leaders who are beating their unique path through disaster, might have a lesson to teach us. If the hardest task in the struggle for life is to give death its place at the core of being human, then perhaps one reason so many women are being punished during this pandemic is because they are more willing to do so.

1. “Escaping My Abuser,” Panorama, BBC, August 17, 2020. 2. See Andrew M. Campbell, “An Increasing Risk of Family Violence during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Strengthening Community Collaborations to Save Lives,” Forensic Science International Reports, April 12, 2020. Available online at https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7152912/ (accessed September 7, 2020). 3. “Escaping My Abuser.” 4. United Nations, Policy Brief: The Impact of Covid-19 on Women, April 9, 2020, 19. Available online at www.un.org/ sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/ uploads/2020/06/report/policy-brief-theimpact-of-covid-19-on-women/policy-briefthe-impact-of-covid-19-on-women-en-1. pdf (accessed September 7, 2020). Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director, UN Women, “Violence against Women and Girls: The Shadow Pandemic,” April 6, 2020. Available online at www.unwomen.org/en/ news/stories/2020/4/statement-ed-phumzileviolence-against-women-during-pandemic (accessed September 7, 2020). 5. Mark Townsend, “Revealed: surge in domestic violence during covid-19 crisis,” Guardian, April 12, 2020. Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/ apr/12/domestic-violence-surges-sevenhundred-per-cent-uk-coronavirus (accessed September 7, 2020). Gaby Hinsliff,

anything-as-covid-19-cases-rise (accessed September 8, 2020). 12. Jair Bolsonaro, quoted in Phillips, “Brazilian left demands Bolsonaro resign over Coronavirus response,” Guardian, March 30, 2020. Available online at www. theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/ tp-captain-corona (accessed September 20, 2020). 13. See Kate Lyons, “Far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro wins presidential vote—as it happened,” Guardian, October 8, 2018. Available online at www.theguardian.com/ world/live/2018/oct/28/brazil-election-2018second-round-of-voting-closes-as-bolsonaroeyes-the-presidency-live?page=with:block5bd63991e4b05fc14b59ed46 (accessed September 8, 2020). 14. Hinsliff, “The coronavirus backlash.” 15. Eliot Weinberger, “The American Virus,” London Review of Books 42, no. 11 (June 4, 2020). 16. Angela Merkel, quoted in Kate Connolly, Ashifa Kassam, Kim Willsher, and Rory Carroll, “‘We are losers in this crisis’: research finds lockdowns reinforcing gender inequality,” Guardian, May 29, 2020. Available online at www.theguardian. com/global-development/2020/may/29/ we-are-losers-in-this-crisis-research-findslockdowns-reinforcing-gender-inequality (accessed September 8, 2020). 17. Ibid.

“The coronavirus backlash: how the pandemic is destroying women’s rights,” Guardian, June 23, 2020. Available online at www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/ jun/23/the-coronavirus-backlash-how-thepandemic-is-destroying-womens-rights (accessed September 7, 2020). 6. “Escaping My Abuser.” 7. Ibid. 8. Jamie Grierson, “‘I live in fear of the unknown’: Life in a Refuge under Lockdown,” Guardian, May 21, 2020. Available online at www.theguardian.com/ society/2020/may/21/i-live-in-fear-of-theunknown-life-in-a-refuge-under-lockdown (accessed September 8, 2020). 9. Julia Kristeva, “La situation virale et ses résonances psychanalytiques,” webinar, June 14, 2020. Available online at www.ipa.world/ IPA/en/IPA1/Webinars/La_situation_virale. aspx (accessed September 8, 2020). On femicide see Diana E. H. Russell and Nicole Van de Ven, Crimes against Women: Proceedings of the International Tribunal (Millbrae, CA: Les Femmes, 1976). 10. See Andrea Long Chu, Females (London and New York: Verso, 2019). 11. See Tom Phillips, “Jair Bolsonaro claims ‘Brazilians never catch anything’ as Covid-19 cases rise,” Guardian, March 27, 2020. Available online at www.theguardian. com/global-development/2020/mar/27/ jair-bolsonaro-claims-brazilians-never-catch-

18. Ibid. 19. Hinsliff, “The coronavirus backlash.” 20. Ibid. 21. See Jon Henley, “Female-led countries handled Covid-19 better, research finds,” Guardian, August 19, 2020, available online at www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ aug/18/female-led-countries-handledcoronavirus-better-study-jacinda-ardernangela-merkel; and Judy Stober, Letters, Guardian, August 25, 2020, available online at www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ aug/24/women-excel-in-handling-covid-19 (both accessed September 8, 2020). 22. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, 1930 (1929), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961), 122. 23. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, in The Standard Edition, vol. 18 (1955), 39. 24. Freud, letter to Albert Einstein, March 26, 1929, quoted in Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Back to Freud’s Texts: Making Silent Documents Speak, trans. Philip Slotkin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 11.

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Among the most oft-repeated anecdotes of author Patricia Highsmith’s life is one that reputedly took place before she was even born. Pregnant and facing the calamitous uncertainty of a failed marriage, Highsmith’s mother, Mary, is said to have resorted to drinking turpentine in an attempt to abort the fetus inside her. “It’s so funny,” Mary would later tell Highsmith, who as an adult found pleasure as a Sunday painter, “that you love the smell of turpentine.” That one might eventually develop a fondness for the agent of their would-be death sits neatly within the broader scope of Highsmith’s work, which recurrently deconstructs the intimacies between criminally minded charlatans and their accidentally complicitous faux-amis. She is widely hailed as the high priestess of suspense fiction, but her power as a writer is often most acutely revealed in the interstitial moments of calm that interrupt her depictions of violent rupture—the anxious hours that pass before understanding that a force-fed dose of poison has not killed you after all. A critical component in Highsmith’s development and deployment of literary tension is the construction of the prismatic identity, and though frauds, fakes, and counterfeits surface with great regularity across her pages, at each antihero’s core is a profound desire to locate the supplemental other. In Strangers on a Train (1950), Guy Haines objects immediately to Anthony Bruno’s train dining-car proposal for a quid quo pro murder, but the liminal space that stretches between stations offers sufficient suspension of reality to stoke Bruno’s fantasy that he has encountered a partner in crime. Highsmith often used travel as a literary device, and the exchanges and self-contemplation that unfold between departure and arrival typically serve as stages on which her characters can rehearse the manifold consequences of possibility. It is only in these caesuras that Highsmith’s antiheroes can manage to consolidate their identities, only in the in-between that they find ways to briefly stave off the burden of their profound alienation. Much analysis of Highsmith’s work has been dedicated to her own notorious misanthropy: she has been characterized as an eccentric, an alcoholic, a misogynistic lesbian, and a profligate fibber with ugly prejudices and an acid tongue. Despite her legendary distaste for humanity at large—she famously once remarked “I don’t like anyone”— she perhaps came closest to confessing her longing for a steady collaborator in The Price of Salt, a work that is widely referred to as her “lesbian novel.” Published in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan and later rereleased under Highsmith’s own name and with the title Carol, the book details the relationship between a nineteen-year-old shop clerk and a dissatisfied housewife whose chance encounter in a department store sets into motion a socially verboten love affair. Fleeing an impending court case that threatens to expose Carol’s lesbianism, the women leave New York and drive west until they are sufficiently liberated by distance to act on their mutually repressed desire. To move, in Highsmith’s literary universe, is to defy the bondage of identity, to cast off the claustrophobic psychic genealogies that dictate to each of us how and what we are supposed to be. It is telling that Highsmith returned most often to the character of Tom Ripley, the strangely sympathetic 73

psychopath whose aud ienc e root s for his continued freedom despite the homicidal i m moral it y of his actions. The writer’s devotion to this particular protagonist, and the literary acrobatics she repeatedly employed to ensure his freedom, are perhaps indicative of a fantasy that all transgressions dissolve if we are only able to get far enough away from them. Much like Ripley, the writer expatriated to Europe in the early 1960s, a gesture that established geographic distance between herself and a personal history she thought better off discarded. In both fiction and life, Highsmith viewed peripateticism and relocation as the only true opportunities for reinvention of the self (or selves). To remain rooted too long, to be too fixed to one place, opens one up to the violence of discovery. “No writer would ever betray his secret life,” Highsmith once wrote to a friend. “It would be like standing naked in public.” If Highsmith did not betray her secret life, she certainly detailed her tools of evasion. The impressive volume of her work—she completed twenty-two novels, 8,000 pages of journal entries, and eight collections of short stories—suggests a woman compelled to write herself out of the intractable oppression of reality. Though her characters’ sociopathic restlessness often brings them to the verge of exposure, they constantly find another forgery, another boat or bus or car that loops them back into a perpetual process of becoming. And what would Highsmith make of 2020’s global lockdown and grounded planes? Of our hermetically sealed borders and dry-docked steamer ships? I do not imagine her weeping over flabby loaves of dough or wistfully text-messaging a hairdresser in commemoration of a missed appointment. I envision no artificially cheerful toasts conducted via computer screen (Highsmith preferred the company of her pet snails to parties anyway), no piles of doomed arts-and-crafts projects going to seed in wicker baskets, no half-finished jigsaw puzzles. Like all professional fugitives, Highsmith would have known that the interstice is the perfect place to plot an unlikely getaway and that the best crimes are hatched while we are locked up tight in our cabins, late at night and drifting across the sea. It seems particularly fitting that in her own final moment of transit, Highsmith tried her hand at one last bluff. Lying in a hospital in Locarno, Switzerland, she reportedly drove her devoted accountant from her bedside by repeatedly uttering the phrase “You should leave” with a grave insistence. Once safely unattended in the room, Highsmith closed her eyes and promptly died. We are, she maybe wanted to suggest, always able to figure out who we want to be next when we get to be alone.

PA�OPA� l LOGICA� ICA� Y : OpTiMISTiC o A CNVER SaTiON Wi WiTh PAUL B. PRECIADO

jamieson webster/alison gingeras: Paul, we found a poem we thought you might like, Paul Éluard’s “Interior” [1921]: In a few seconds The painter and his model Will run away. More virtues Or fewer misfortunes I notice a statue A kind of almond A varnished medal To my greatest boredom. paul b. preciado: Thank you. Éluard is one of the first poets I read in French, but I haven’t reread his work in years. I wonder how we’d read this poem today; with certain variations, I’d imagine. Like this?: In a few seconds The male white painter and his black female model Will run away More virtues Or fewer misfortunes I notice a statue . . . Or how would it be if it were a black female painter and a male white model, for instance. JW/AG: Sorry to hear you’ve been sick with corona and it hasn’t gone away. Can you tell us about your experience of the virus? PBP: I’m better. A lot of ups and downs. It was really unsettling, as I lost sight in my left eye—the same way corona can affect your smell, it can affect the optical nerve. You don’t think you’re just losing vision, you think you’re dying, and you don’t have the sense that physicians can tell you something coherent anymore; they tell you this and that, and then do this, and maybe we’ll pick you up in an ambulance, and you think: maybe? But it was the first summer in my life that I was able to relax. I didn’t do anything. JW: Did you ever think doctors could tell you something coherent? Maybe we’re just realizing how incoherent they’ve always been? PBP: I’m obsessed with the issue that we’re in a paradigm change. We’re right on the edge, like in the time of Galileo, when the paradigms for the production of truth were changing. The words we use are the same but the 75

meanings are changing constantly and sometimes there’s a void behind the word. I’m not saying that what came before was coherent and true, you know I’m critical of the medical regime, but for a time it made sense for some subjects, it could be decided what was normal and what was pathological. I wish we could make a map of these changes—changes to the world that was created by patriarchy and colonialism—but what’s tricky is, we don’t know yet how new standards of truth will be produced. AG: We don’t know what’s going to emerge from all this. PBP: Exactly. Today words are becoming orphans: they’ve lost their normative meaning and they’re looking for new significations, other ways of relating to reality. And this, I think, is good news. And I think that more than ever before, we have the impression that we’re participating in the undoing and redoing of history. We’re globally conscious that we’re doing this together. And when I say this, we don’t have to agree, there are huge conflicts of course, as well as extreme forms of violence and economic and political nodes of the concentration of power, but we’re fighting together to create a new paradigm. AG: Do you think the catalyst for this was the lockdown? A first-ever global caesura? PBP: Partly, yes. For me, this rupture wasn’t just a question of the medical or political management of a collective body; it was an aesthetic crisis. As subjects we engage in reality as sensitive living bodies, and as political subjects we always think of action, but by not doing anything, by not rapidly engaging, we had to think about our living bodies. Extreme conditions brought about political awareness. Confinement and sudden confrontation with vulnerability and death created a moment of global aesthetic and political awareness.

JW/AG: There’s a love/hate of interiors, as an old paradigm, in your work. This is perhaps best seen in your ambivalence toward Virginia Woolf and the consulting rooms of psychoanalysis, which you see as the alltoo-bourgeois spaces of domestic daydreaming. These spaces, you also show, are easily co-opted, from bedroom to museum, by necro-capitalism, which you model on the scene of Hugh Hefner in his bedroom in the Playboy Mansion surrounded by cameras, telephones, audio recorders, and TVs. As you say, this is a space in which we evade the fact of war. Can you speak about interiors? PBP: I’m just questioning whether the house—the family home, for instance—can be a place of growth and realization, as Western liberal democracy has pretended. A good deal of institutional critique has referred to public and state institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons, etc., as places of discipline and confinement, but the house is never sufficiently studied and criticized. Virginia Woolf is already halfway into this critique, since she feels trapped in the position of a woman without a place to write in the house. When she claims the need of a room for herself to be able to write, she is identifying the possibility of self-confinement and privacy as a way of extracting her female body from the disciplinary rituals of reproduction and heterosexual domesticity. Virginia Woolf’s room is the opposite of a home; she wants to dedomesticate the home by setting a room of the house outside the patriarchal rules. We could say, using the terms of Gilles Deleuze, that her room is a feminist fold of the domestic space. But of course she makes this claim from her position as a highly privileged bourgeois white woman. So, yes, in modernity, being able to construct and protect your own interiority is a form of political privilege. In the case of psychoanalysis, don’t you find it interesting that Freud decided to treat his so-called patients in his own private domicile, having them share his home? Why is the patient going to the place of the analyst, for instance, and not the opposite? Psychoanalysis implied a move from the hospital into the domestic realm as a place for therapeutic treatment. This move was partly due to the not-yet-established condition of psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, but curiously enough, the practice of domestic treatment remains, despite the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the century’s second half. The problem is that this displacement represents a privatization of the words of the so-called “patient.” Being at the analyst’s house is also coming into the analyst’s interiority. In both cases—in the feminist struggle for a room of one’s own as a quest for an interiority not defined by heteronormative demands, and in psychoanalysis as a practice of exploration (or creation) of the patient’s interiority (an interiority that can also be called the 76

unconscious)—to invent dissident cultural practices means also to invent new spaces, or to inhabit traditional spaces differently, to fold them, segment them, open them. This is why I’m so interested in a shift that took place after World War II: the relocation into the house of activities of economic production that were traditionally placed outside the domestic realm. I was fascinated when I discovered how Hefner, the creator of Playboy, intentionally confined himself in his Playboy Mansion and, surrounded by media technologies, started a new form of production directly from his rotting bed. My contention is that the highly media-connected pod he created was a laboratory for the building of contemporary digital interiority. JW: I’m curious about your thoughts on psychoanalysis; I can’t say I’m not sick of my office—it’s set up like a communal space where patients feel invited to stay, lectures sometimes take place in one part of it, it’s confusing what’s even an office or who’s even a doctor— but, still, it’s easily routinized. Zoom work, which can happen anywhere and on less of a schedule, feels like it loses the body and affective intensity. These folds are so fragile. PBP: Psychoanalysis came into being at the end of the nineteenth century, at the climax of patriarchal, colonial, and imperial times. As our time is dominated by the coronavirus, that time was dominated by syphilis, and sexuality—questions of reproduction, marriage, lineage, sexual difference—is therefore at the core of psychoanalytic discourse. What corona will do in relation to today’s changes in physics, and in the idea of life and the human, will be a major transformation. I wish psychoanalysis could engage the political condition of the unconscious, that it could question the patriarchal/ colonial model of the body and the normative idea of subjective interiority. I’ve been trying to think about what my problem with psychoanalysis is, and I think it’s the power position that psychoanalysis has had about the interiority of the subject—a sort of monopoly over dreams and imagination, and an obsession with the family plot. It’s not so much about doing away with this power but more the idea that psychoanalysis is at odds with reality now, with what’s shifting. So can it work the same way? I say this, and yet I want what I call a “mutant psychoanalysis,” not a quest for interiority but a space for collective transformation of consciousness. I have so many questions, and Jamieson, you and I should talk—I don’t think you’re representative of the kind of psychoanalysis that’s practiced. JW/AG: What kind of interiority is (or is not) a body? PBP: This is a very interesting question in terms of the political history of the body. Bodies have not always had interiority. In a certain sense, if we think about

the premodern Western body, it is a flat body, a skin on which the law is inscribed as a sort of somatic writing. Torture and social blood rituals are forms of inscription of the law on this body without interiority. With the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a new form of interiority is invented, but through what I could call an architectural dualism between flesh and the spirit. The body—still a thick skin, a facade of flesh that encases bones, blood, water, and semen, for instance—is nevertheless seen as hollow, empty, to be able to host the soul—which, although strictly speaking nonmaterial, needs a nest, a container. Interiority always demands a shell, a skin, a membrane. In Christianity, the body is thought of as the temple (in a strict architectural sense) of the soul. Here the interior of the body is by definition invisible. This theological understanding of an immaterial interiority of the body has survived in more secular notions of the unconscious—in psychoanalytic theory, for instance, as well as in contemporary transhumanist theories that see the soul as a software that can be channeled in and out of different bodies. In modernity, this premodern tradition of the flat body enters into conflict with another understanding of the body as a full space. In the sixteenth century, with Vesalius and the advent of anatomy, the body is no longer pure exteriority or skin. It becomes an endless collection of organs. This might be one of the most important transformations produced by anatomy: interiority is invented as a visible space that can be accessed, described. The interior of the modern body is a museum, an exhibition space that can be visited. This form of visual rationality brings with it the understanding of a body as an automaton, a collection of pieces that work according to a master plan. Modern anatomy—but also slavery, the market, functionalism, 77

and Taylorism—invented the body as a private (or unprivate) object. It is an enormous political problem that we continue to work with this notion of body as object. Besides, the relationship between exteriority and interiority is going to become more and more complicated as many of the functions of the “soul” or the “spirit” are externalized and transformed into semiotechnical prostheses. This isn’t a question only of computers and artificial intelligence; the most important externalization of bodily (and/or soul) functions starts with writing. So my last answer to your question is that the interior of the body today lies paradoxically outside what we know as the physical individual “body,” that object invented by modern anatomy. This is why, instead of using the notion of “body,” I propose to speak about the “somathèque,” looking at the body as a living political archive composed not only of biological organs but also of artificial political prostheses, social institutions, fictions, codes. JW/AG: You write about your need to travel as far as . . . Uranus, to get out of the coded systems inherent to this world. You’re the consummate nomad. What did the coronavirus lockdown and the new border patrols do to you? Is it still possible to feel alive? PBP: I think thanks to the coronavirus I have managed to sleep in the same bed without moving for five months. It has been a foundational experience of change for me. JW/AG: The lockdown certainly brought to the surface questions of policing, passivity, confinement, detention. This has transformed into a call to defund/abolish the police. It’s surprising to hear mainstream media in the United States even consider a proposal this radical. On the other hand, as Judith Butler has noted, everything in the United States is playing out around the question of the superego, Trump being a figure who defies the policing of identity politics. Is this a series of displacements from the general question of surveillance? Even if our telecommunication devices are our new jailors, the police still insist on the traditional strategy of physically surveilling, killing, or jailing black men, at least in the United States.

JW/AG: After a public breakup with Virginie Despentes, you wrote about a kind of skepticism about notions of romantic love, or, dare we say, a transcendence of them. Then the lockdown happened, and as you wrote in Artforum, you got sick and imagined that with this great mutation, wherever you are, single or coupled, life will now stand still like this forever. Skin contact will only be afforded to those who are trapped with their pandemic partners. You wrote a letter to an ex and put it in a recycling bin. What can we say, to recycle the endlessly recycled and reified title of Gabriel García Márquez, about love in the time of corona? PBP: When I broke up with someone whom I’d thought I would live with forever, I had a moment of the negative theology of love. I learned that love wasn’t romantic love. This is such a banality that I feel sorry I only discovered it when I was fortyfive. How silly! But this doesn’t mean I don’t believe in love. Love is not happiness in a couple; love is a disturbing truth that transforms who you are, that mobilizes memories, affects, and desire in unexpected ways. In a sense, for me love is revolution. And in this respect, the corona times as times are not just revolutionary times, but also times of love.

PBP: I think we’re at the end of one historical and political regime and moving toward a new one. This is a time of planetary transition. With digital and biological technologies, traditional notions of surveillance are shifting rapidly. At the same time, the biopolitical techniques of colonial and postcolonial capitalism, such as imprisonment and police surveillance, have not yet been overcome. This is why, in my view, hyperbolic forms of violence, lynching, and physical punishment coexist with new practices of management and control of the population. I’m not saying that the new techniques of biosurveillance and digital control are not violent, but that they work in a different way. They operate in the area of interiority that we were talking about before, for example, or of the individual body and the brain, and not so much at the level of traditional institutions of confinement. 78

JW: You’re so optimistic about living through this time? PBP: It’s true. I’m pathologically optimistic. When I was sick, I did go through a political depression—I was disappointed by politicians and how they dealt with the crisis, by a kind of chain reaction of countries moving toward the right when we need the opposite. But I think optimism is a political duty. It’s not the idea that things will be better—that, I don’t know—but the desire to transform things. Even beyond that, this is an extraordinary moment, a revolutionary time, and for a philosopher I can’t think of a better moment to be alive, to be able to participate in this. And I want to let this transformation vibrate in my thoughts, almost as if I’m becoming a receptive organ for it. I’m not interested anymore in stable institutions, like couples, families—there can

be joy as much as misery there, but for me, this is not my way of life, it’s not what I have to offer, and I want to jump into the sense of chaos and change in the world, which I like. Maybe that’s because I was born into the end of fascism in Spain, and everyone around me was dead—they kept living but they’d been killed within, since fascism is a structure of the subjective colonization of a subject’s desire. That was so scary for me. So in relation to what’s happening now, it’s much, much better, no matter how difficult it looks.

It isn’t physical, it’s a fictional body that is able to incarnate the nation state and sovereign power. That’s why, when a king dies, it basically doesn’t matter, because we put another king into the same envelope. For me, Trump is a little like that. And this is precisely the problem. [Vladimir] Putin, [Jair] Bolsonaro, all of them at this moment, they’re fictional; they’re hyperpatriarchal, hyperracist content for the violent envelope of the nation state. Their bodies are— AG: Almost like a meme!

JW/AG: I think in New York City we don’t know if we’re dead or alive. There’s something very exciting happening right now, the feeling that the city could be something other than what it was, but there’s also what’s happening in the rest of the country—the election, overt racist violence, armed militia. It’s scary, and makes it feel hard to throw yourself into the transformation right now. PBP: The situation in the United States is extremely complex. Looking at it from Paris, we’re trembling, especially about the possibility of a civil war, but we do have the sense of the United States having a history for the first time. We always spoke about the country as if it was its early morning, it had this newness. And suddenly, and again I’m optimistic, no matter how difficult what you’re going through, and I’m a little Hegelian here, but this is your beginning, the beginning of your historical consciousness. So this is absolutely necessary. And maybe it has to become even more— AG: Degraded. Maybe it’s a Leninist moment, the whole thing has to blow up. PBP: I also see the dangers ahead: in order to stop or prevent these epistemological and political paradigm shifts that are upon us, the state could go into an extreme form of technofascism. That would be even worse than the fascism in Spain in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Today we’re living under advanced systems of surveillance and biotechnology at the same time that reactive notions about the nation, the state, and the family are being enforced by right-wing governments. JW: Don’t you think Trump is the weirdest hybrid? He’s an unmoored, euphoric figure, who represents no institution at all, at the same time that he’s a complete technocratic fascist. He’s an old-school family ideologist surrounded by his clan. He’s almost like a surrealist assemblage: if you had to pile all of these images on top of each other, it would be this man. PBP: Yes, absolutely. Yes, I totally agree with you, but it’s also a fiction. Probably you know Louis Marin on absolute power? He basically explains the king as having two bodies: a physical, mortal body and something else. 79

PBP: Absolutely, a transcendental meme. They’re bridging the lowest and the highest. And this is the danger— this is why it’s not just a Trump or a Bolsonaro. We could never have imagined these technofascists of the twenty-first century. A room of ten writers couldn’t have invented a character like Trump, because he’s way too outrageous, too odd and ridiculous, right? And I think that’s exactly what’s interesting. And that’s why the radical left is struggling with this moment. Trump, for instance, his physical body, is incarnating this political fiction of a technopatriarchal racist power. The radical left must propose a counterbody. I’m thinking about bodies like Angela Davis in the 1970s, bodies that could incarnate collectively. JW: We need an alternative. PBP: Exactly. But it isn’t easy for the subaltern movements, racialized, trans, or nonbinary, to incarnate those fictions because our bodies are precisely what’s at stake. Our bodies are the ones that aren’t being fully recognized as political subjects. The problem is that subaltern bodies are mostly visible and recognized as victims, objects of violence, killed bodies. It’s very difficult for emergent figures to manage to incarnate a political living fiction able to condense collective desires of transformation. AG: Maybe that’s why, in the summer of 2020, the Black Trans Lives Matter movement in New York presented such an incredible coalition, one unthinkable a year ago. Rainbow capitalism was completely shunned and everyone rallied around this amplification of Black Trans Lives. I think this was in the spirit of what you’re talking about, not a singular figurehead. PBP: Absolutely. Black Lives Matter, the trans and gender-queer movements, Ni una menos, the migrant movements, the indigenous movements, the sex workers, the queer-crip . . . all of them are constructing critical counterfictions, demanding the enlargement of the democratic horizon in order for new bodies and new subjectivities to be recognized as political subjects. This is a very difficult moment, but also an extraordinary one.

REsTiNG REs : PLACE i MICAH HU� HU �EY

It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. —D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971 Bodies are unruly things, and we are preposterously entangled with them. But Finnish photographer Iiu Susiraja unknots this relationship by positing embodiment as just another readymade in an object world held under the sway of her fecund interiority. In a series of humorous, formally complex self-portraits, she interacts with a battalion of banal household items, employed as part prop, part costume, part dramatis personae. In one, she poses in a simple blue bathing

compel an accounting for excess that that is not merely physical but also psychic. The static portrayals held within the confines of Susiraja’s photographic frame riff off British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s notion of the “transitional object”—those soft or hard toys that usher the infant into the realization of things that are “not me.” While neither the teddies nor the blankets nurtured by the child, the readymades of late capitalism engage Susiraja in a cathexis that enacts, in a visual idiom, what Winnicott calls the transitional phenomena of experiencing. He claims that this space between interior and exterior life “shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interre-

suit with a single crooked mannequin arm swimming between her fleshy thighs, in another she holds a fish whose eyes have been popped out and placed on her shirt like nipples, and, in one of her more baroque tableaux of dollar-store fever dreams, she is dressed like the Easter bunny, rides an elliptical machine, and holds a grim reaper’s scythe blunted with a faux cottontail. Below the surface of her eccentric compositions is an investigation of a number of issues clustered around the body—issues of size, of gender, of performance— that questions how we see ourselves as functioning with and among a network of things. Articulating a series of playful if provisional object relations, her photos

lated.”1 Susiraja animates this resting place by representing herself at play, treating her own body with the same plastic objectivity with which she approaches the plungers, folded shirts, balloons, and other items in her photos. Like Melanie Klein’s “depressive position,” which offers part-objects to nourish a self in process, Winnicott’s resting place, especially as illustrated in Susiraja’s work, is a potent site of creation—not only resulting in striking compositions but also illustrating a surplus stratum of self. Both the fun and the pathos of her photographs come from its striking inversion of Winnicott’s notion of “fantasying”: the empty daydreams of a false omnipotence in which “what happens

happens immediately, except that it does not happen at all.”2 Susiraja instead makes images of real life and relationships to the world. The more oddball the object she employs, the wackier the mise-en-scène, the more she explores herself beyond the boundaries of a body, extending her interiority to repurpose an object world into a site where dream and life can be the same thing. But what glimpses into psychic interiors do Susiraja’s photographs offer in this time of sequestered isolation? More astute than the Tik-Tok danceoffs that occupied many in the recent quarantine, these works confer a plentitude of formal rigor and intellectual pleasure on the kind of domestic play that Susiraja elevates into incisive cultural critique. Via outré interactions with the inanimate, her work dismantles the 82

old Enlightenment standby of mind/body dualism: in blurring the dichotomy between obdurate physicality and dynamic being, she is able to capture a self constantly querying itself. Through her props, no matter how banal, how perverse, or how silly, Susiraja actively rethinks the underpinnings of embodiment— its physicality in space, its culturally induced performances of gender, and its biologically compelled sexuality. Susiraja’s blank stare at the viewer—registering a moment of affectlessness just prior to the surprise of being caught in flagrante delicto—defers narrative and the closing in of the violence of overdetermining signification. Susiraja is fond of her own translation of Swedish poet Bruno K. Öijer: “As long as they have the wrong

picture of you, they can’t harm your life,” which is an apt motto for both visual and psychic rhythms in her work. In presenting “the wrong picture,” she obviates cultural conclusions many may draw from a kind of body that is alternately demonized or fetishized. But further, she draws a stark line in the sand between art and life—a line all the more necessary because of how her body may invite insidious autobiographical readings. As any person of size may tell you, sneering eyes of fellow commuters and unsolicited health advice from strangers are just two of the many ways in which the overweight body signifies a sort of crowdsourced narrative of not-so-tacit judgment and blame. However, the “wrong picture” becomes the armor for a “life” unharmed by a barrage of violent 83

“body-negative” sentiments encased in the biased cultural eye. Furthermore, such barbed whimsicality more importantly points to a creative interior life that is cele brated as the agent of visual provocation. Susiraja disregards the autobiography determined by others in favor of the prelingual chora of her own off-kilter accoutrements. Stripping the contemporary object world of its use value, she resuscitates it for its indeterminate formalism, humorous non sequiturs, and potential to articulate a visual dream logic of self-creation out of domestic detritus.

1. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971 (reprint ed. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. 2. Ibid., 37.

image credits p. 53: Lee Miller, Tanja Ramm under a bell jar, Paris, France, 1930 © Lee Miller Archives, England, 2020. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk p. 54–55: The Anatomical Venus, c. 1784–88, Josephinum, Vienna pp. 63–71: Artwork © Deana Lawson p. 73: Dennis Kardon, Transfixed by the Past, 1999, oil on linen, 26 × 22 inches (66 × 55.8 cm) © Dennis Kardon. Photo: Pierre Le Hors, courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong p. 75: Hugh Hefner working from his bed at the Playboy Mansion p. 77: Angel of Death taking the soul, in the form of a child, from a dying man. Woodcut from Conrad Reiter’s Mortilogus, 1508 p. 78: “Mouth of Hell” from Office of the Dead section in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Utrecht, Netherlands, c. 1440, illuminated manuscript, Pierpont Morgan Library. MS M.917/945. Photo: courtesy Faksimile Verlag Luzern p. 81: Iiu Susiraja, Badminton, 2018 © Iiu Susiraja p. 82: Iiu Susiraja, Eyes, 2017 © Iiu Susiraja p. 83: Iiu Susiraja, Dinner, 2017 © Iiu Susiraja p. 85: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979, chromogenic print, 3 3⁄8 × 3 ½ inches (7.6 × 7.6 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

We would like to thank Alison McDonald, Wyatt Allgeier, and their team at Gagosian for their support in producing this supplement and the trust and free reign they gave to us. We also must thank our contributors for writing, speaking, thinking, and imaging, with stunning clarity, the aura of this tenuous time. Thank you to the artists Iiu Susiraja and Dennis Kardon, as well as the Woodman Family Foundation and the Wróblewski estate for allowing us to include their imagery. And much love to our pandemic partners, Piotr and Richard, for fielding waves of melancholia, hysteria, and outrage in close quarters. —Alison M. Gingeras and Jamieson Webster 84

DEATH VALLEY ’89

Daniel Spaulding considers formal and technical developments in the photographer’s work against the background of global shifts of power and politics, specifically the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

JEFF WALL VS. PHOTOGRAPHY

latant digital manipulation turned out to be a vanishing mediator in Jeff Wall’s art. He still uses digital tools, as does nearly any photographer working today. But no longer do they seem like the point of any of his pictures. It was not always thus: for a few years in the 1990s, computerized interventions were the most noticeable or at least the most novel aspect of the Canadian artist’s practice. I have in mind pictures such as A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993), which broadcasts nonoriginality in its title—it is indeed a digital collage based on a print by the Japanese master. Or, The Flooded Grave (1998–2000), in which a hole in the ground opens to a tidepool complete with sea anemones and like fauna, also plopped in via computer. Composition is emphatically in play in these works, and they f launt a degree of subjective fantasy that photographs often avoid, or pretend to avoid. But then, why do photographs more usually flaunt their reality effects, their resistance to being just any odd thing their makers want them to be? That is, why do they so often insist on belonging to the world outside, in a stronger sense than most art? Why do questions of truth, ethics, and ontology (the nature of the medium and its connection to the real) loom so large in the canon of photo theory 1 when painters can mostly go about their business without similar baggage?2 Wall’s career is one long answer. The pictures to which I’ve referred have often, and persuasively, been construed as a turning point in that career. For example: the art historian Michael Fried identifies three major phases, pinned symmetrically around 1990–93. The first is that of Wall’s initial mature works, the big light box transparencies he started making in 1978, “whose fictional or staged or otherwise constructed aspects 88

are in different ways positively announced.” The second is “a phase of far more spectacular or indeed ‘theatrical’ productions” in the early 1990s. And the last, from the mid-1990s onward, introduces “a quieter, more ‘realistic,’ above all more ordinary-seeming though nevertheless carefully constructed kind of picture.”3 This final stage probably deserves internal periodization of its own by now. In 2017–18, for example, Wall produced the astonishingly paintinglike work Recovery, which picks up directly on issues of pictorial organization last probed by Georges Seurat and Henri Matisse. Whether a one-off or a sign of things to come, the picture marks a return to, or indeed an intensification of, the “authorial” mode of the artist’s earlier production. This is just one potential Wall’s method now permits, though, alongside the “quieter” track; there is no reason to dispute Fried’s overall chronology. But we do have reason to probe the timing of what Fried labels the “theatrical” interregnum, which all but begs to be interpreted as a symptomatic rupture. The key pictures are these: Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) (completed in 1992, although work began as early as 1986, the date in the work’s subtitle); The Vampires’ Picnic (1991); and A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947 (1990). In the context of Wall’s wider oeuvre these works are aberrant, or at least exceptional: all are hallucinatory images of the living dead. 4 Two of the scenes are blatantly impossible. Dead Troops Talk is a “vision” (Wall does not explain whose) of Soviet soldiers killed by Afghani mujahideen. They speak, laugh, and roughhouse— unexpected behavior for the recently deceased. Of this work the artist has said, “I was going to advance a claim to authenticity that couldn’t be satisfied” (in this case, a claim to the authenticity of

war photography, a privileged instance of the documentary mode since it records the most extreme of human experiences).5 The Vampires’ Picnic does much the same: it’s an elaborate blood-feast in the periurban periphery, the setting for many of the artist’s tableaux. A ventriloquist, finally, is odd in less over-the-top ways, but hardly less uncanny. The dummy is clearly a figure for art, and maybe Wall’s art in particular: it casts a spell by virtue of occupying the “uncanny valley” of close yet unconvincing similitude to life. The scene also happens to be a weirdly precise historical reenactment, weird because there is no reason why October 1947 should be a particularly significant date.6 Of these three pictures, only Dead Troops Talk, the last completed and most ambitious, is in fact a digital composite. The other two all the same adopt a “cinematographic” procedure (Wall’s own term) that viewers may easily confuse with computerized postproduction, given the latter’s current omnipresence.7 Whether digital modification was actually in play or not is hence somewhat undecidable, at least without the benefit of extrapictorial data (such as the production notes in the artist’s catalogue raisonné). What is evident at first glance, though, and what persists in memory beyond the technical question (“Is it Photoshop or not?”), is an unusual plasticity and obtrusiveness of real or virtual mise-en-scène. The production of such photographs would have required elaborate staging either way. The tilting upward of the background in Dead Troops and the rhythmic arrangement of spotlit figures in Picnic make it clear that they have been arranged expressly for our eyes: these are devices of old-school history painting, the most prestigious genre of art until the later nineteenth century. Such compositional gambits contrast or even conflict with the sense that these scenes have not been arranged for us but rather that we have happened

upon them in a delirious instant, to which attaches the embarrassment of seeing something we are not supposed to. Each projects a vision that is vividly present, full of minutely recorded incident, and that yet manifestly does not belong to the realm of the real. What we are seeing is the unrepresentable: death. Or, rather, undeath: a moment of illogical fluctuation between living and dead, a moment of unnatural reversal. The ventriloquist’s dummy is the sign of that. It bears emphasizing that the photographs made immediately before this interregnum—the photos of the late 1970s and ’80s—had a different relationship with truth. The earliest of the light boxes amounted to an inquiry into the workings of representation, in diagramlike images such as Picture for Women of 1979 (a work heavily influenced by psychoanalytic film theory—everything here is about the play of the gaze) or The Destroyed Room (1978), which cites Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting The Death of Sardanapalus. These are pictures very much of the sort that a smart young art-history professor might produce—no coincidence, since that is in fact what Wall was at the time.8 By the mid-1980s, though, his practice had mutated into something different: a full-fledged representational project. In fact, it was a specifically realist project, both in a philosophical sense and in its revival of the aims and to some extent the appearance of nineteenth-century realist painting. It was grounded in a belief not that representation could be transparent or unmediated (that a photograph could be a “message without a code,”

in Roland Barthes’s memorable phrase) but rather that representation could have some link to its referent. And Wall had come to reject the varieties of postmodern antirealism that were all too current at the time: To say, for example, that when I take a photograph of something, and then display that photograph, that the thing itself is made absent in the process and to say, moreover, that the reality of that thing is suppressed in its representation is to make an exaggerated, spurious “critical” or “political” point. We cannot remain at the level of this elementary formal paradox, which proves nothing about what is far more important, namely the ability of representation to be adequate in terms of meaning, to its referent, to its subject.9 Which seems reasonable enough. Isn’t that why we look at photographs in the first place? Wall aimed to realize this “adequacy” in staged images that, in this period, often had a socially conscious edge: pictures of neighbors gathering to witness a family turned out of their home (An Eviction, 1988/2004), or a seemingly momentary, though no less staged, racist gesture on the street (Mimic, 1982). His aim was to renew the “painting of modern life”—the painting of modern capitalist society— that Charles Baudelaire had called for in the middle of the previous century, and which, at least in some respects, the poet saw fulfilled in the paintings of his friend Édouard Manet (whose 1882 painting A

Bar at the Folies-Bergère was Wall’s direct model in Picture for Women). Wall’s reference to Baudelaire was explicit: Some of the problems set in motion in culture not only in the 1920s, but in the 1820s, and even in the 1790s, are still being played out, are still unresolved, we are still engaged in them. I guess that’s why, at a certain point, I felt that a return to the idea of la peinture de la vie moderne was legitimate. Between the moment of Baudelaire’s positioning this as a program and now, there is a continuity which is that of capitalism itself. . . . I feel I’m working within and with a dialectic of capitalism and anticapitalism, both of which have continuous histories within, and as, modernity.10 Hence Wall’s adoption of “capitalist realism,” to appropriate a term that artists in West Germany had concocted some years before. 11 A realism of a long and unfinished epoch. The sticky wheel is this: Wall pursued his project in a medium then commonly judged to be already inherently realist. Photographs were supposed to be an imprint of whatever was in front of them and nothing more. One of Wall’s merits is to show that matters are more complicated, and he did so precisely in photographs meant only to fulfill that original pledge by a more circuitous route. What exactly did it mean to make “realist” photographs, then, when from a certain perspective it would seem he had little choice? Let’s put the question differently. What do

Previous spread: Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992, transparency in lightbox, 90 1⁄8 × 164 1⁄8 inches (229 × 417 cm) Opposite: Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993, transparency in lightbox, 90 1⁄8 × 148 3⁄8 inches (229 × 377 cm) This page: Jeff Wall, Mimic, 1982, transparency in lightbox, 78 × 90 inches (198 × 228.5 cm)

photographs do when they are not being “realistic”? One answer: not being photographic. They might indeed be painterly, or composed, calculated craft—ostentatious, as opposed to neatly self-effacing, about their own mediation. The cinematographic photo, then, whether computer assisted or not, is a photograph invaded by something else. Call it intention, perhaps. Or premeditation. Or even painting. And this is something the medium always held in store, though as a mostly unrealized potential, at least so long as the documentary ideal held good. Yet it was after all only a couple decades after Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot invented the process (each in a different way) that Victorian photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Rejlander began making large-scale composite prints, a clear precedent for Wall’s early digital montages, if one he disallows. 12 Photographs have always had it in their bones to metastasize into something other than a record of the real. In a moment of crisis, this foreign body that is other than the “that-has-been,” as Barthes described photography’s “noeme,” or most irreducible meaning, may burst forth, take over the whole surface of the picture. For Wall, the turn of the 1990s was such a moment. What I’ve been saying is that Wall’s art involves a dance between photography and not-photography. These terms shouldn’t be taken as ontological—words for the essence or nature of the medium—but rather as historically freighted notions about the kind of intentionality involved in the making of photographs. Thanks to Wall, along with many other photographers working in a similarly “authorial” mode, some of these assumptions have faded: at least among art audiences, it is no

longer controversial to say that photographs may diverge from the documentary truth. The omnipresence of digital photo-editing in mass culture (even before the memelike proliferation of “fake news”) has further loosened whatever grip the real may have had on images. The real now operates, then, less as a regulative ideal than as a phantom of what photography used to be thought to be— thus leaving the medium, in a curious way, external to what was once considered its ontology. Yet photography, once presumed to be veracious, still trades on that reputation even when blatantly defying it. The afterlife of ontology—or rather of ideas about ontology, to put the old hegemony of the thathas-been at a further remove—is long. Roughly, “photography,” in these historically specific terms, is contingency and the momentary: the unpredictable, the flash of the real, mechanical automatism, the click of the shutter. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” marks the apex of this once powerful idea, though it was always just one notion of photography among others. (Man Ray’s Surrealist concoctions, or, in a related example, the careful artifice of fashion photography, represented different models.) In Milk (1984) the decisive moment is the spray of white liquid against the grid of a brick wall. In Mimic it’s the racist gesture, which as we’ve seen is a piece of play-acting under the photographer’s control. Not-photography is that control. It is composition, calculation, subjectivity; it is painting, but not only painting. When not-photography inserts itself into Wall’s photography, it is through the interjection of staging, allusion, politics—in short, of the artist’s intention, and of (coded) meaning. Conversely, when photography appears within the architecture of not-photography, it will often be as dumbness, blindness,

or, at the limit, meaninglessness. It takes the absolute form of a stain, like the stain of a shadow on a wall, or on a silver film.13 Not-photography reaches its apex in the ghoulish pictures of 1990–93, which are “the painting of modern life” taken to a level of hypertrophy and self-parody. These pictures represent the climax and passing of the politicized truth-claims that had been crucial to Wall’s art in the 1980s. Those claims had not been founded on a naive belief in the camera’s mechanical veracity but rather on a conviction that all-too-real social relations require conscious mediation to become appearance—and that this is realism properly speaking, since it unmasks aspects of the real that might otherwise go unnoticed. Mimic, for instance, reproduces an offensive gesture that on the street would probably pass by too quickly for anyone to capture. Mimic is not-photography in the service of photography, so to speak—the point was to keep representation viable, not to deconstruct it into oblivion. The advent of digital manipulation, however, amounted to a further massive invasion of the not-photographic, pushing the 1980s model to the breaking point. This passage ran through the uncanny valley of hyperreality—the end of the “adequacy” of signifier to referent. What comes after? Inadequacy, perhaps. The argument can be put less negatively. What really emerged on the far side of the uncanny valley, from about the second half of the 1990s on, was neither further grotesquery nor mourning for lost powers. It was, rather, a return to the photographic itself, a turn to understated yet impeccably fictional verisimilitude: Fried’s “quieter, more ‘realistic,’ above all more ordinary-seeming though nevertheless carefully constructed kind of picture.”

(Although, as we have seen in the case of Recovery, this new emphasis did not preclude other possibilities.) This is not really all that different from what the realist strand in Western painting had been doing for centuries. What is remarkable is how belated photography was in achieving this status. It is not so much that Wall’s photographs ape paintings as that they aspire to function in the mode of post-Renaissance paintings precisely inasmuch as the latter are disenchanted, perspicuous about their condition both as the legatees of a primordial, near-magical mimetic charge and as modern, unmagical commodities among others. “Fictionality”—the fact, so straightforward and yet so tricky, that an authorial statement is neither true nor exactly a lie—is something paintings began to pull off in the sixteenth century, and literature even earlier, at least if we follow the art historian Christopher Wood.14 A modern secular portrait is different from a medieval icon of the Virgin Mary because the former is understood to be only a representation whereas the latter, to a believer anyway, provides direct access to the supernatural. Premodern artworks tended to be embedded in a world of cult, ritual, and magic. They were enchanted: an artwork was more than just an object on the wall, or a set of representational conventions. It is in this respect that the secular painting is, by contrast, disenchanted, that is, only an image rather than a vector of salvation or of magical causality. The strangeness of photography with respect to all other art forms is that despite being among the youngest of media, it partakes of the most archaic of mimetic faculties: the nearly inescapable sense that there is a physical (or, in semiotic terms, an

indexical) link between the image and its referent—a direct instantiation of contagious magic, or of the notion that things once in contact remain in contact, even at a great distance. It is this link that Wall’s art begins to pick away at. This is what makes his work a chapter in the disenchantment of the world, against which the “liquid intelligence” of photography’s mimetic promiscuity mounts its resistance. In an essay called “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” Wall notes that the literally liquid elements of photography, which are also the metaphorically liquid reserve of its nonhuman agency (to be literal again: the solutions and water used in developing analogue film), have steadily retreated from the medium’s technical process. 15 Yet in good dialectical fashion they strike back. Mimesis always moves laterally, not in a line. Take a work that is a conscious echo of Picture For Women, the quasi-documentary Vancouver, 7 December 2009: Ivan Sayers, costume historian, lectures at the University Women’s Club, Virginia Newton-Moss wears a British ensemble c. 1910, from Sayers’ collection (2009). It is what it says: a restaging of a lecture the artist actually saw, with the two figures playing themselves. The weirdness of the picture, which never quite evaporates, is that the living female model looks either more or less than living, half mannequin, half zombie, a vivification of the dummy in A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947. A compact adjective I’ve already used for this quality is “uncanny,” and it fits. There are worlds of discourse to unspool here: Walter Benjamin’s insistent pairing of fashion with death in his Arcades Project (and the horrendous gender politics of that equation), for example.16

Opposite: Jeff Wall, Milk, 1984, transparency in lightbox, 73 5⁄8 × 90 1⁄8 inches (187 × 229 cm) This page: Jeff Wall, The Vampires’ Picnic, 1991, transparency in lightbox, 90 1⁄8 × 131 7⁄8 inches (229 × 335 cm)

The point though is that the final product wears these concerns lightly, in a mise-en-scène that is entirely unconcerned with either the literal truth or the literal falsehood of the diegetic event. An event just is, whether staged or spontaneous. Here is a Nietzschean intensity of aesthetic untruth. It is also perhaps this intensity that makes art art. And finally, this intensity is deeply not-photographic. The noeme “that-has-been” is present yet unstressed here, in silent opposition to a century and more of the discourse of photography’s truth. The scene is ordinary yet a fiction, and comfortable with being fiction, something strange only because it is happening in photography. In this viewer’s experience at least, the dissonance involved (the scene occurred . . . and yet it didn’t occur) does not trouble its integrity in the way the more emphatic made-upness of Dead Troops Talk, for instance, upsets the tropes of war photography. That itself is the work’s new and subtler uncanniness: Wall’s photos can now “do” reality effects without even bothering about tipping their hand one way or another. They’ve learned to look at truth and lie “in a nonmoral sense,” to borrow from Nietzsche again. As a particularly unnerving instance of what I’m talking about, take the 2011 work Boxing, an unintentionally resonant picture in the era of covid-19. Wall shows us a hermetically sealed modernist living room where two adolescents face off in boxing shorts and gloves. It could suggest either real estate staged to sell or a porn set; either way, it is not a place in which to live. Consider the weird incongruity, and the weird formalism, of the amateur boxing match, which seems lifted from an archaic Greek frieze. All of this is exceedingly artificial yet by no means monstrous, as is The Vampires’ Picnic (another picture that turns on the too evidently 92

staged quality of the tableau). This is simply a thing photography can do now. When and why did this happen? I have already suggested that the pictures of the ghoulish interregnum are a helpful pointer. They belong to a very special moment in history. Dead Troops Talk was conceived in the waning days of the Cold War and completed after its end. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. This is also when images of the undead begin to proliferate in Wall’s art, making explicit the oft noted “zombielike” quality of his figures.17 A few years later—in 1998, specifically—The Simpsons ran an episode in which a cutaway gag reveals that the Soviet Union never really collapsed but was only biding its time for a counterattack: zombie Lenin punches out of his mausoleum, intoning the words “Must . . . crush . . . capitalism.”18 Jacques Derrida’s book Specters of Marx had appeared in 1993; here the French philosopher proposed “hauntology” as a replacement for old communist solidarities. It was Derrida’s first and only significant engagement with Marxist thought, after looking in other directions through the uprising of May ’68 and the “red decade” that followed. Hauntology is the ontology of ghosts, of traces, the only forms that century-long dreams of freedom could then take, it seems. It’s as if throughout the decade of the 1990s, the collapse of actually existing socialism remained difficult to believe, even for its bitterest enemies; as if the absence of any alternative to liberal capitalism— Francis Fukuyama’s famous end of history—could not quite tolerate itself, could not do without some specter, however ridiculous, haunting Europe (and everywhere else), to invoke the opening line of the Communist Manifesto. 19 If Dead Troops Talk partakes of this cultural formation, the issues the picture raises are not just formal.

I am not exactly saying that the epistemology of the new postdigital photograph is keyed to the end of the Cold War, which likewise marked the passing of a specific, material opposition between politicized representation (the socialist realist model) and capitalist phantasmagoria. I am not saying we can exclude the possibility, either.20 It seems indisputable, at least, that after the collapse of the sclerotic socialist empire that had sent the dead troops off to die, there was no longer even a notional baseline of correct representation (the “anticapitalist” pole of the modern dialectic) against which Wall could play his distortions. Without such a baseline, all there is to see in any given picture is one specific perspective on the world, to which another may oppose itself with equal legitimacy—every perspective, then, laying claim to just as much of the real as the next, because the real is nothing but the concert and conflict of these points of view. And thus the total perspectivism of Wall’s newer work is at the same time a new realism (since there is now no other world to represent but this world, as Wall sees it). The remainder in this division of the picture from reality is photography itself. For one thing, as we have seen, the medium’s tie to the real does not disappear in the flight to fantasy, nor in the more modest ambitions of the “ordinary-seeming” work that followed. It is likewise worth noting that, at the same time as Wall’s ever more proficient use of digital technology banished the “liquid” farther and farther from his practice, he was also moving in the opposite direction, toward a reengagement with photographic tradition. His partial turn toward standard photographic printing in the 1990s (where light box transparencies had earlier been his signature) is one sign of

this, as is his limited but noteworthy production of unstaged “street” photographs from the same moment onward.21 But beyond the technical level, even, there remains the steady drip of photography (of the contingent, incalculable real) against the grid of not-photographic control. More subtly now than in the 1980s, photography becomes a persistent source of uncertainty and dialogue within the apparently unified fabric of the image. Above all, it remains external to the artist’s agency, though not perhaps to agency altogether: “In photography, the liquids study us, even from a great distance,” Wall writes. 22 What if photography is something that arrives in Wall’s art from the outside? What if it’s nothing but the Outside as such? 1. See, most importantly, Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), and Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977). Another important factor is the theorization of photography as an “indexical” medium in the work of Rosalind Krauss and others. See in particular Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1” and “Notes on the Index: Part 2,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1985), 196–220. There have been strong counterproposals to the above, for example John Tagg’s argument that photography has no essential identity but is instead constituted solely by the regimes of power and knowledge that surround it (Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988]), or George Baker’s that photography has come to occupy an “expanded field” not unlike the condition of post-Minimalist art (Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field” October 114 [Autumn 2005]: 120–40). But neither these nor unorthodox interventions by Vilém Flusser (Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews [London: Reaktion Books, 2000]), Kaja Silverman (The Miracle of Analogy: Or, the History of Photography, Part 1 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015]), Ariella Azoulay (The Civil Contract of Photography [New York: Zone Books, 2008]), and François Laruelle (The Concept of Non-Photography, trans. Robin Mackay [Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2011]), among others, have thus far really provided photo theory with a new orientation—by which I just mean that Sontag and Barthes are sure to anchor any syllabus on the topic.

2. I am not saying that painters are unconcerned with the nature of their medium. Far from it! But there is a specific way in which photography has from its beginning been concerned with the problem of what photography is—perhaps because photography has a specific, datable beginning, unlike most art forms, and furthermore because of its obvious and innate mimetic exactitude. Over the long run this concern has proven foundational in a way that, for example, Clement Greenberg’s modernist account of painting’s “flatness” (to name the strongest ontological claim ever made for the medium) has not. What I am saying is simply that, with the exception of certain highly charged material (think of the uproar over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till’s mangled body, shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2017—and think of the total lack of moral concern with the subject matter of any of her other works), painters can paint whatever they want. Photography discourse circles around the ethics of representation in a different and more intense way. Sontag is the key reference here. 3. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 63. 4. Tom Holert, for instance, writes, “The years of 1991 and 1992 mark an interlude in Jeff Wall’s work. One could also call them the years of the digital grotesque.” “Interview with a Vampire: Subjectivity and Visuality in the Works of Jeff Wall,” in Jeff Wall: Photographs, exh. cat. (Vienna: mumok, 2003), 128. Wall himself concurs: “A picture like The Vampires’ Picnic was an experiment with or an attempt at a comic allegory. That was a direction, or an impulse, which I value but which I don’t feel I’ll go much further with, unless the mood strikes me again.” Wall, quoted in David Rimanelli, “Entries,” in Artforum 41, no. 3 (November 2002): 41. I cannot in fact think of a more recent work that approximates the same “mood.” 5. Wall, in Craig Burnett, “Interview,” in Burnett, Jeff Wall (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 59. 6. The party in the photo is clearly for a somewhat older child than Wall would have been in 1947; he was born on September 29, 1946. 7. Wall, in Burnett, “Interview,” 59. 8. Wall had earned a master’s degree in art history at the University of British Columbia in 1970, then studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, for the next three years, before returning to his native Vancouver, where he taught at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the Vancouver School of Art (since renamed the Emily Carr University of Art and Design). 9. Wall, “Representation, Suspicions, Critical Transparency,” in Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 209–10. 10. Ibid., 208. 11. Namely Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, who staged an exhibition and performance by this name in Düsseldorf in 1963. 12. In an interview with James Rondeau in Peter Galassi, Jeff Wall,

exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), Wall dismisses Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar Rejlander, and the other early exponents of combination printing by saying that instead of imitating the worst “Salon trash” they should have been imitating Edgar Degas. 13. Or the mark of a crushed centipede on a wall in Alain RobbeGrillet’s 1957 novel La Jalousie. 14. Christopher Wood, “Countermagical Combinations by Dosso Dossi,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49/50 (Spring–Autumn 2006): 151–70. 15. Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jean-François Chevrier and James Lingwood, Un Autre Objectivité/Another Objectivity, exh. cat. (Milan: Idea Books, 1989), 231–32. Repr. in Selected Essays and Interviews, 109–10. 16. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 62-63. 17. Citations could be multiplied here. David Campany, for example, writes, “Jeff Wall’s art is on some level an art of zombies.” Campany, “‘A Theoretical Diagram in an Empty Classroom’: Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 1 (2007): 25. 18. “Simpson Tide,” The Simpsons season 9, episode 8 (first screened March 29, 1998). 19. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 20. This suspicion is not mine alone. My interpretation of Dead Troops Talk is largely in agreement with that of Terry Atkinson, who writes that the picture is “an allegory of the death of the Red Army,” and thus of the “capitalist experience of the disintegration of communism.” Atkinson and Wall, Jeff Wall: Dead Troops Talk (Basel: Wiese Verlag, 1993), 29. The art historian Thomas Crow similarly calls Dead Troops Talk an “allegory about the end of the Cold War,” although he does not explain how or why. Crow, “Profane Illuminations,” in Modern Art and the Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 168. 21. A still earlier example that sticks out precisely for being so un-Wall-like is An Encounter in the Calle Valentín Goméz Farías, Tijuana (1991), which the artist’s catalogue raisonné lists as a “cinematographic photograph” without digital montage. The term “cinematographic photograph” indicates some degree of staging, but the work’s unusual site of production (Mexico, as opposed to the Vancouver locations that account for the vast majority of Wall’s pictures) and relatively unstructured appearance evoke the rhetoric of street photography. The work depicts a chicken and a dog looking at each other across a steep, unpaved, fiercely sunlit rubble-strewn street. The artist has said he thought the picture could have an “interesting, fable-like effect.” Wall, untitled statement, 1991, repr. in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné 1978-2004 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 336. 22. Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” 110.

Opposite: Jeff Wall, A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947, 1990, transparency in lightbox, 90 1⁄8 × 138 ¾ inches (229 × 352.5 cm) This page: Jeff Wall, Boxing, 2011, color photograph, 87 ¾ × 120 1⁄8 inches (223 × 305 cm) Artworks © Jeff Wall

FASHION AND ART

Kim Jones’s day job is as a fashion designer. He’s the artistic director of Dior men’s collection and, starting in February, takes the reins of the late, great Karl Lagerfeld as the womenswear designer at Fendi. But his longtime hobby has been collecting: paintings, fashion memorabilia, books for two libraries (one at home in London and one at home in Paris). Derek Blasberg spoke with the designer about his process and his passions.

PART 4:

KIM JONES

Derek Blasberg: I thought about you during quarantine because you travel more than anyone I know. How have you handled being grounded? Kim Jones: I’m not going to lie: I’ve enjoyed being at home. I moved into my house a year ago and I’ve finally unpacked every box. Now I know where everything in the house is. I went to thirteen countries this year— and that was all before lockdown. So it’s not like I’m missing out, because I’d already done so much. DB: The last time I saw you was at Art Basel last year in Miami, which has become a huge fashion and art mash-up. Since we’re talking about the convergence of fashion and art, I guess we can start there. KJ: First, Christian Dior was a gallerist for fifteen years before he was a couturier. Not everyone knows that. He had links with all the major artists, he was one of Salvador Dalí’s main art dealers, he worked with Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Georges Braque, all these people I’m interested in. So for the Dior show in Miami, I thought it was a good spin to take that idea through Dior with contemporary people, like kaws . I worked with Shawn [Stussy] because I wanted someone whose graphic most of our generation recognizes. He isn’t necessarily considered a contemporary artist, even though he’s trained and I think what he does is cotemporary. DB: Had you been to Miami for Art Basel before? Previous spread: Kim Jones. Photo: Nikolai von Bismarck This page, top: Amoako Boafo in his studio. Video still: Chris Cunningham’s Dior men’s Summer 2021 collection This page, bottom: Dior men’s Summer 2021 collection in collaboration with Amoako Boafo. Photo: Jackie Nickerson

KJ: I’d been, but not for a long time because it falls at a busy time for work. I’ve either got another show or we’ve got really intense fittings, and I can’t really move those things around to go and do that sort of stuff. But I’m always keeping an eye on the fair because galleries are in touch with me. DB: I had so much fun in Miami at that Dior event. It was a show, it was a concert, it was an after party, and the gallery was open so we walked through there too. KJ: I’m happy to hear that. When you do a trip for a show, and if you’ve come a long way, you want to be able to do a lot. Obviously, it was also nice to have the whole studio there because you’re working and then you can go out for a little sunbathe when you’re waiting for a fitting. DB: Tell me about the video you premiered in July, which was a collaboration with the Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo. KJ: As you know, I have a childhood connection with Africa—I spent a large part of my childhood there with my family, and I grew up in a house full of African art because my father collected it. From the age of three, when we were living in Ethiopia, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, the first art I really saw was from these African cultures. I have memories of the way people dressed in those countries and the kind of art that was being made, like these incredible Tanzanian paintings that were on the wall in my bedroom when I was a kid. I kept them all the way through to now because, let’s be honest, I don’t like to get rid of things. When I saw Amoako’s work, I loved it. It spoke to me. I could see a fashion identity immediately. DB: You were familiar with his work but this was the first time you’d seen it in the flesh? KJ: Yes. And it was important. The way he uses his fingers to paint: that looks different in person than it does in a picture. In Miami, I said to Mera Rubell, “You know, I’d really love to meet this guy and talk to him.” We met his gallerist, and then I met him and his friends. What’s funny is he’s a fan of Dior, and his friends started wearing what I do. Finally we sat down and we were like, “How can we make this work?” DB: Is that sort of a typical timeline? You hear about an artist, you go see their work, and then you collaborate? KJ: Originally it was meant for next summer, but then I had this feeling that this was the right time to do it. It was going to be for a fashion show in Paris and it was all planned, and then the lockdown happened. I have a list of dream artists I’d like to work with. Preferably, I’d like them to be alive, because then you can collaborate with them properly. With Raymond Pettibon, for example, we used existing works and then he created new works for us. DB: I don’t have to tell you that 2020 has been such a surreal year, and there’s been so much stuff that’s bubbled to the surface. I thought the tone of the video you did with him, the collaboration with a Ghanaian artist, and the collection all hit the right note for what has been a very difficult year. KJ: A lot of things happened with Black Lives Matter shortly before [we released the video], and I was very aware that I wanted him to be the spotlight. It was to celebrate a Ghanaian artist. We all know there’s not enough funding for kids to go to college and for creative endeavors in any walk of life, but it’s particularly difficult in Ghana. The one thing he wanted to do when he started was to set up a foundation to give kids in Accra residences and allow them to move forward with what they want to do. At some point,

when you do something, you get a feeling where it all just clicks in place. My childhood was based in lots of different parts of Africa, and I wanted to make sure that this was done correctly from day one. I wanted to celebrate this artist; it’s not really a Dior thing. DB: I’m always fascinated by your childhood. Naomi Campbell once told me that you can identify any bird by its sound. KJ: Yeah, I did that in Vietnam one night when we were having dinner, and she was laughing her head off. I wanted to be a zoologist before I got into fashion. [Alexander] McQueen, who was a good friend of mine, also had an aspect of the appreciation of nature. That was one of the conversations we had all the time. DB: One of my all-time favorite collections of McQueen’s was the one that was inspired by his diving in the Maldives. KJ: He was obsessed by that completely. DB: You’re a bit of a collector too, Kim. What is your eye drawn to? KJ: I only buy things I love. I buy a variety of new things and old things. I’m looking around my library here and I see some works by [René] Magritte, Raymond [Pettibon], Frank Sinatra. . . . I like all different things and they’re really mixed together. DB: You have so many books, too. KJ: The main thing I collect is Bloomsbury, which is Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Omega Workshops furniture. And first editions of Virginia Woolf, stuff like that. When I was a kid, we used to go to Charleston House, and I found it very inspiring how they all were rebellious, even though they were the English aristocracy. They didn’t want to go to war, they didn’t believe in fighting for the country. And they were creating a lifestyle, which seemed very decadent for a time when it wasn’t meant to be like that. DB: How is everything organized? For example, where is your sneaker collection? KJ: That’s one thing I did in lockdown: get everything out of storage and catalogue it, from every photo I have to every schoolbook I have. I’ve always liked the same stuff, it just gets bigger, I guess. I’ve been reading a huge amount in lockdown. I’ll be reading a book and then I want to find out what inspired that author to write the book and then what other books inspired the author to then write in the style of so-and-so. So it gets quite, you know, lengthy, I guess, over the years. DB: One question I like to ask people who collect things—and they always have an answer that comes straight to mind—is what’s the one thing that got away? KJ: Oh, God, I don’t know! Probably a couple of books. Frank Sinatra’s drinking jacket was something I wanted to buy—it was like a varsity jacket with the name of everyone he went drinking with on it, and it was at his estate sale. But I did get the self-portrait he painted that’s in that corner over there, I don’t know if you can see it. DB: I don’t think I’ve seen a Frank Sinatra painting. KJ: Yes, this one is interesting because he got told by his therapist to paint a self-portrait of himself after Ava Gardner broke up with him. This clown face is how he portrayed himself. DB: What do you say to someone who asks whether fashion can ever be

This page, top: Dior men’s Fall 2020 collection, presented in Miami This page, bottom: Dior men’s Fall 2020 setting in Miami. Credit: Kris Tamburello

art? Or how does art inform fashion? KJ: I’d say, “Andy Warhol.” DB: That’s a good answer. KJ: He did everything, didn’t he? Did you see the Warhol Look exhibition [a traveling exhibition of 1997–99], with all the clothes that were pretty much designed by him or inspired him? I love that. Especially in the early New York downtown scene, that was really important. I think art is something you buy and you keep forever, and just because fashion is more disposable, that doesn’t mean people throw it away six months later. It’s always there. DB: Do you think you’ll work differently when things go back to normal because of the skills we’ve been forced to learn? KJ: This is the third Zoom call I’ve done in my life. I did one with Victoria Beckham and I can’t remember the other one. I didn’t want to get into the habit of looking at things on a screen. If a customer is paying that much money for something, I want to make sure the fabric is correct, the way it’s made is correct. That’s probably what’s been so successful with Dior: the sales are kind of nuts, even now, through a pandemic. I feel quite fortunate about that. I enjoy having the pauses between the work, not having to jump on a plane, having time to yourself. I’m going to be very busy when I get back, but I’m ready for it. 97

THE ART Against HISTORY OF the back PRESIDENTIAL drop of CAMPAIGN the 2020 POSTERS: president AN INERVIEW ial election, WITH historian HAL WERT Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert high lights an array of land mark posters and the artists who made them.

Gillian Jakab You’re the author of two books on presidential campaign posters, George McGovern and the Democratic Insurgents [2015] and Hope: A Collection of Obama Posters and Prints [2009]. They’re both gorgeous publications, filled with stunning rare images and gatefolds revealing full posters. What draws you to study campaign posters as a historian and to share them with readers? Hal Wert Thank you. I do love bells and whistles—they’re really hard to get published! I was very pleased my editor agreed to have the jacket of the Obama book fold out into a poster. I’ve always been fascinated with campaign posters, ever since I was a kid. I grew up in a political family, comprised of both blue-dog Democrats and liberal Republicans. We lived in a small town in Iowa, a Maytag company town, which was divided politically between blue-collar workers and white-collar workers. My mother worked in the [Dwight D.] Eisenhower campaigns and later my grandmother did too. But they were not happy about [B a rry] G oldwa ter i n 1964. T hey were Rockefeller Republicans. They were the ones who got me interested. I collected a few campaign posters, but mostly campaign buttons. I was teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute and one of my friends there, Carl Kurtz, a well-known calligrapher, kept saying, “You need to start writing and talking about posters.” So,

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with his encouragement, I did. I decided in 2008 that I would really go with the Barack Obama posters. GJ When did you start noticing them? HW During the Iowa caucuses, of course, Obama was not picked to win. Searching around on the Internet one night, I saw up near the state capitol building, on the window of the headquarters, this really cool poster. So, I called them on the phone the next day and they said, “Well, this really nice man came through and put it up for us.” I said, “Do you know his name?” They didn’t. I said, “All it says on the poster is CRO.” It was a Ray Noland poster. He didn’t put his name on anything because, like many outsider artists, he wanted anonymity during the campaign. Shepard Fairey came on a little later. But Ray was out there on a skateboard with wheat paste in the middle of the night, slapping up posters [laughs]. I was never able to figure out who some of these artists were, but I found out that CRO stood for Creative Rescue Organization and it was Ray Noland who had been putting them up in Chicago. I got hold of him and we started to really connect—he ended up writing the introduction to the Obama book. So that’s how I became involved with campaign posters. I decided, okay, I’ve got to stay with the Obama poster phenomenon, though I had no idea it was just going to turn into a tsunami. GJ You were prescient. You knew something was different about this one. So these two

presidential campaigns—the subjects of your books, Obama in 2008 and McGovern in 1972—drew a flurry of posters, they really excited artists. What do artists provide candidates in terms of sharing their message, rallying support, or even just getting out the vote? HW Rarely if ever do posters persuade voters to change their minds, except undecided ones maybe. But they do rally the base. Looking at our current election cycle, Ed Ruscha’s “ ee - nuf !” poster is a beautiful design but it won’t tempt anybody not already on board, given what’s written around the work’s edges [laughs]. At the Art Institute, I taught a course called “Prints of Persuasion,” in collaboration with one of the print-making instructors; it had a studio component. The Institute is located in a Democratic county on the Missouri side of the city, but right across from it is a Kansas county that’s very Republican. The final assignment was to design a poster that you could put up in Johnson C ou nty, i n the Repu blica n a rea, tha t would tempt people to vote for the candidate you’re putting forward. Nobody could ever even come close to it [laughs]. They always did the Ed Ruscha routine, which would, of course, alienate half of Johnson County [laughs]. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t beautiful and incisive posters. Until Obama, posters created by prominent artists were rarely associated with a winning campaign.

Previous spread: Alexander Calder, McGovern 72, 1972, lithograph, 34 ½ × 23 ¾ inches (86.4 × 58.4 cm) © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York This spread, left to right: John De Yongh, “Bill”, 1908, color lithograph showing presidential candidate William Howard Taft, 20 × 12 inches (51 × 30.5 cm)

N. Currier, Grand Democratic Free Soil Banner (Martin Van Buren and Charles F. Adams), 1848, lithograph with watercolor, 33 ¼ × 23 inches (84.5 × 58.4 cm) Kurz & Allison, Benjamin Harrison, Levi P. Morton, Republican Nominees, 1888, lithograph, 18 × 24 inches (45.7 × 61 cm) Posters Inc. of Philadelphia, Let's Back the Team of Kennedy Johnson, 1960, jugate-cardboard poster, 14 × 22 inches (35.5 × 55.9 cm).

GJ What was it about Obama, and about McGovern, that drew artists in? HW Historically there have always been great posters, but they’ve been extremely limited. In every election there’s usually half a dozen to a dozen well-done posters. For example, there are a few good ones for Hillary [Clinton], like the one done by Tony Puryear in 2008, but neither Hillary nor Trump cares about posters. Some candidates really don’t care about them. In the 1960s, Gene McCarthy really fired up the artistic left. Many art schools— at least the one where I taught—had up until then always been culturally to the left, but never overtly. Art students were supportive of political issues but weren’t provoked to get involved in a hands-on manner. McCarthy did that first. He always said he would have won California had there been two more universities. And then the same crew came out for McGovern, big time. Certain candidates can do that, but they’re not usually candidates who are going to do well in the general election [laughs]. The rule has always been, Great posters guarantee defeat. GJ Until Obama. HW Until Obama, exactly. And at first the Obama campaign was very reluctant about bringing the outside artists in. Fairey’s Hope poster, which is so good, initially worried the campaign: Obama has his head up, sort of FDR style, in that poster, and the pose looks like he might be

running for a dictatorship. And it’s a Russian Constructivist–style poster with a lot of red. Well, they did some research and found out that most Americans had no idea about Russian Constructivism [laughs]. But still, when they had Fairey do his first official poster for Obama, they had him pull the head down. GJ Interesting. HW I think it is too. So they were running dual campaigns, the insiders and the outsiders. American youth were on fire for the Obama campaign and eventually, largely Fairey brought a few in. We talked about posters that can bring people in; a lot of people who were left in orientation but not very politically active really got fired up on the poster and the Obama campaign in general. GJ So posters rarely change someone’s mind entirely, but they can turn apathy into excitement. HW Yes, they really can. Obama was certainly a candidate who produced incredible enthusiasm, but you have to keep in mind that 2008 was definitely a Democratic year. GJ Right, the pendulum was ready to swing. So your campaign-poster journey began with this Obama moment, and then, right after you finished that book, you took a look further back in history at the outpouring of posters for McCarthy and then McGovern. You’ve also written about the beginning of campaign posters, all the way back to the nineteenth century. How does the history

of these posters contextualize what we see today? Have there been any overarching patterns or trends in the evolution of campaign posters? HW For the epilogue of the Obama book, I wrote an essay on historical posters that went back to 1844, because I thought they needed context. What are posters if they’re not in context? How have previous campaigns influenced those posters? During my research, I’d come across some fabulous McGovern and McCarthy posters. I thought, Nobody has written about these, so I’m going to start to research and find out how they came about. It was the 1960s, and the ’60s counterculture, that produced them; there was a dearth of posters in the 1940s and ’50s. Part of that was the new international style, which was more formal. But then the counterculture came on board with entirely new styles. I love the way these young artists thought about making posters. Appropriation was the name of the game in the 1960s; they called it “going to the toy box,” or “the image flea market.” They just took any images they wanted, historically or otherwise. The artists who made the stand-out rock ’n’ roll posters— occasionally the same artists who made political posters—would mix colors right as the printing was taking place. Even though they were offsets, they’d run them through the presses four or five times to get those great colors. And then, of course, there were maybe three or four black-light

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This sperad, left to right: Ben Shahn, I Can Tell You One Thing, 1964, photoscreen print on acetate in black, 23 3⁄8 × 16 5⁄8 inches (59.3 × 42.2 cm) © 2020 Estate of Ben Shahn/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

political posters. I’ve found one McGovern black-light campaign poster. The wonderful thing about political posters is that anybody can make them. But if they weren’t made by the great artists or major manufacturers, nobody knows who did them. Posters currently unknown keep popping up, even ones from the last century. GJ Let’s go back to the beginning. You mentioned 1844 as the year the first American campaign-posters were made, after the advent of the lithographic printing process. You shared with me a few of these posters from the nineteenth century. Will you speak a little about the 1848 Free Soil Party ticket and its iconography? What wou ld the ni neteenth- centu ry v iewer take away from these posters that we might not? HW Many of the posters of this time were created by either Kellogg or Currier & Ives. They’d run a monolithic graphic process that just printed the lines, the lithograph, in black, and then the posters were hand colored by women. With this technique they attempted a trompe l’oeil effect, in an effort to add depth to the posters. Currier & Ives had maybe a dozen women who painted posters. Less is known about the Kellogg operation and the posters are a little more obscure; they usually sell for more than the Currier & Ives do because they’re more rare, and often the iconography is more elaborate too. If we look at the bottom of the 1848 Free Soil Party poster, where you’ve

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got the Free Soiler plowing with the horses, do you think those are laurel leaves or oak leaves? GJ Oh, I do not know. Maybe laurel? That’s a wild guess [laughs]. HW If they’re laurel, they signify something a little different from oak. Oak leaves of course represent strength. Laurel leaves, in classical Greece, meant a person had succeeded on an Olympian level. Either way, the leaves are telling you: these people are the greatest invention since sliced bread. This is 1848, and the Free Soilers are antislavery people; the Whigs and antislavery Democrats founded this party. It only lasted for about six years. Most of them joined the Republican Party, which was founded in 1854 and put forth its first candidate, John C. Frémont, in 1856. Frémont didn’t get elected but [Abraham] Lincoln did in 1860. You can see there are storm clouds on the horizon of the poster, and then up above, at the very top, they’ve got “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech.” My great-grandfather was a Lincoln Republican and a Free Soiler and a Free Laborer, as well as an abolitionist and a prohibitionist. If you go up a little bit, you get the Temple of Liberty, with Liberty herself standing under it. She’s holding a spear and on top of it is a Phrygian cap. People wore those in classical Rome and they eventually became a symbol for freedom. If you look a little further up on the poster, you see arrows. On many posters there are thirteen of them, usually bound

Andy Warhol, Vote McGovern, 1972, screen print, 42 × 42 inches (106.7 × 106.7 cm) © 2020 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Ed Wong-Lidga, Outrageous, 1972, screen print, 25 ½ × 30 ½ inches (64.8 × 77.5 cm)

Corita Kent, Shirley Chisholm Unbossed and Unbought, c. 1972, offset lithograph, 22 × 17 inches (55.9 × 43.2 cm) © 2020 Estate of Corita Kent/Immaculate Heart Community/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York courtesy the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles

together, representing the first thirteen states. This comes from the Roman fasces— we throw around the word “fascist” all the time now, but the fasces meant “to be bound together.” In the classical Roman iconography, it was usually wooden rods that were bound together around an axe to represent collective power, the law, and governance, but Americans would often substitute arrows and spears for the rods. The original symbol did show up on campaign posters into the early twentieth century. Above that are laurel leaves again. At the bottom I think they’re probably oak, but at the top they’re definitely laurel leaves, as a way of leaning over the candidate and anointing them. And then, of course, the American eagle. Coming from the Temple of Liberty are the rays of the sun behind it. Notice the rays of the sun are pushing the clouds down. Above are the stars for the thirty states that existed at the time. This a nineteenth- century version of Fairey’s Hope poster made in the American Romantic period, the 1830s to the 1840s. In representations of the famous, togas were in vogue. From the founding of the country on, people worshiped classical Greece and classical Rome. GJ You can certainly see it in all the references. What’s the next development in American campaign posters? HW We should take a look at the poster for Benjamin Harrison and Levi Morton’s presidential campaign in 1888. It’s a Kurz

Following spread, left to right: Alexander Calder, McGovern for McGovernment, 1972, lithograph, 34 ½ × 23 ¾ inches (86.4 × 58.4 cm) © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, New York

Roy Lichtenstein, Dukakis 88! Poster, 1988, offset lithograph (from four-color process) on 90# Eloquence Gloss Book paper, 36 × 24 inches (91.4 × 60.9 cm), edition of 1,250 © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein Ray Noland, Next, 2008, 4-color offset print, 24 × 18 inches (61 × 45.7 cm) Ed Ruscha, EE-NUF!, 2020 © Ed Ruscha

& Allison, a Chicago firm that issued a very popular Civil War print series and in 1888 created exceptional, beautifully detailed campaign prints for the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Union Labor Party. It has George Washington at the top. This poster references the string of Republican presidents who preceded Benjamin Harrison: Lincoln, [Ulysses S.] Grant, [Chester A.] Arthur, and the assassinated [James A.] Garfield. GJ And they’re just floating heads. HW Right, I love floating heads. Some of my favorite posters are floating heads. I’ve spent a good deal of time talking to people about where the design comes from. There’s a 1908 [William Howard] Taft; they show up in Lyndon Johnson for Senate posters, one shows up in 1940, and then by 1944 and on, they sort of become the wave, and in the 1950s, and up to about 1968, floating heads—I mean, no collar at all, just totally floating heads— are everywhere. And then they just disappear. The working theory right now is that jobbers just decided to do it that way. It wasn’t a grand designschool concept. GJ Just a whim. HW Jobbers decided to do it and people liked them. But it’s interesting— do you like them? GJ They’re certainly funny. They seem to be coming out of the page [laughs]. Actually a disembodied head is a little unsettling. Do you like them?

HW I’ve always thought they were just amazing, but that’s because they’re so kooky [laughter]. Anyway, back to the 1888 Kurz & Allison. This was a pivotal moment in terms of color. You could do color prints earlier on, in chromolithography, but that was really expensive. And you had to run the print through the press for each color, making it very hard to control the register. If you look at the front of my McGovern book, it shows a screen print from the 1972 Wisconsin primary. They were done quickly, dried, and handed out to hundreds of voters, but see how the white shows up along the edges? GJ Yes. HW That’s because they haven’t taken the time to really control the register, so when they pull the screen print, it’s not going to be perfect. So to produce color prints commercially was one giant pain in the derrière and extremely expensive, but by 1888, the color-lithography process was good enough that you could do the poster you’re now looking at without hand coloring. It was a whole new world of color, made possible by Jules Chéret in Paris, who invented the three-stone process. Color swept Paris in the belle époque—you’ve seen the posters of ToulouseLautrec. Color was sweeping the world, in everything from baseball cards to advertising and an avalanche of circus and Wild West–show posters. GJ It’s interesting that for the posters before the color revolution, the people doing the

hand coloring were women, and they were anonymous laborers. Just like the people who have run for and held office in this country, those making campaign posters have historically been men. Sister Mary Corita Kent’s poster for Shirley Chisholm comes to mind as an exception—not only a female artist but a female presidential candidate before the twenty-first century. Will you tell me more about that poster? Are there any other prominent ones by women artists? HW Sister Corita also did Come Home America for McGovern. I placed it on the back of the McGovern book. I think she made some of the most dynamite posters. The one for Shirley Chisholm is one of my all-time favorites. GJ It’s beautiful. HW It is. It’s extremely well done, with the Langston Hughes poem. She uses a really simple graphic, just black on white. There’s another poster for Chisholm that has largely been ignored, partially because of its rarity. It has the word “Outrageous” printed across it and was made by a couple of guys in a garage in Berkeley—they ran maybe no more than 120 or 140. Very small print run. In the hippie language of the time, “outrageous” meant “really great.” Sometimes posters done by first-timers have more punch, more hit. I think that’s a dynamic poster. GJ Sometimes a poster will come across as being against a particular candidate more so than for one. I think of the iconic Andy

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Warhol print portraying Richard Nixon as demonic, in bright colors, with the words “Vote McGovern” beneath it. In the current election cycle, many artists have created posters as part of the “Enough of Trump” initiative. We’ve discussed Ed Ruscha, and there are also some by Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and a handful of others. What role do these anticandidate designs play in the history of campaign posters? HW They occur throughout history. There’s a 1948 one that tries to hang the Ku Klux Klan on [Harry S.] Truman. The California street artists who were hanging out with Fairey did some just outrageous posters against John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008, and they had a place where they posted them; they called it “The Wall of Shame.” They didn’t let them go nationally, they didn’t sell any of them. I chose not to include any of them in my books, because I didn’t want to feature negative posters about any of the candidates I was dealing with. GJ Some are extreme in their negativity or aggression, and others strike a more delicate satirical balance. HW The Warhol poster, from my point of view, is absolutely brilliant. It’s been used as a model by other artists. In every campaign, at least after 2008, there are two or three posters out there that use the Warhol as a model. There’s one for Obama with McCain’s image.

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GJ I think I saw a Deborah Kass poster for Hillary with Trump’s image in 2016— HW Yeah, and Ben Shahn did one too. Have you seen Shahn’s anti-Goldwater posters? One shows Goldwater as a whiny baby in diapers. I mean, it’s really good. The other, and I think Warhol got his idea from this poster, presents Goldwater as diabolical, a Dr. Strangelove, and underneath it reads “Vote Johnson.” And then Shahn did the 1948 poster pro Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket, contra [Thomas E.] Dewey/Truman. GJ Oh right! Let’s talk about that one. It falls within the period of dearth in the ’40s and ’50s you were talking about. HW It’s a brilliant poster; it doesn’t do Wallace any good, but it’s still a brilliant poster. Shahn parodied the famous photo of Lauren Bacall atop Vice President Harry Truman’s piano, taken in early 1945, but puts Dewey atop the piano. The idea of Tweedledum and Tweedledee has been around for a while. It was a theme George Wallace pushed in his 1968 run as the American Independent Party candidate. There have been some fairly significant third-party presidential candidates in American history—Eugene Debs as a socialist starting in 1900, Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose effort, I mentioned Wallace in ’68, and Ross Perot in 1992. This 1948 Ben Shahn poster, and other posters by famous artists, get picked up by the art community,

which loves them, and they become part of the art world. GJ Some pretty prominent artists have made campaign posters. In addition to the Warhol there’s Alexander Calder, and a couple of posters by Roy Lichtenstein, right? There’s the 1988 one for Michael Dukakis? HW Yeah, Lichtenstein did one for the Clinton White House, too, which is the more famous. It’s a great poster. There wa s some re a l cont roversy a b out t he Lichtenstein poster— GJ Oh? H W It wa s done for t he C a l i for n ia Democratic Party, for the Dukakis campaign there, and when they printed it, they printed it with a black border around it, and Lichtenstein was not happy. The one that probably had the most effect on a campaign was the Calder poster that says “McGovern for McGovernment.” That became a campaign slogan. GJ Oh, yes. I love that one. HW I do too. I’ve got it in my collection; I’ve got all the Calder posters. Thomas W. Benton also did some incredible, powerful posters. He ran around with gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson; they were buds and worked together. I wrote the introduction for Daniel Joseph Watkins’s book Thomas W. Benton: Artist/Activist. For a leftist artist, Benton was very formal, probably because he was trained as an architect. He did a lot of Color Field painting. But his

political posters, they just go right for the gut. His “Bloody Nixon” is outrageous. A good political poster should bypass the rational and hit you right in the stomach or the heart. GJ Like good art, to an extent. HW Like good art, yes, I mean it really gets you going. As for other artist-made posters, there’s also an Ed Ruscha that he did for Gary Hart. It’s almost exactly the same poster that he did when he was asked to do a poster for the Bicentennial. GJ And he’s still making posters for presidential elections, like the one we discussed earlier. To take our discussion up to the present, have there been any really notable or artistic posters since the 2008 election, in your opinion? HW The big question after 2008, with the advent of all the electronic devices, was what would be the future of the poster? The bubble of Obama support broke not too long after he was elected, about a year after the campaign. There was a brilliance in the campaign that I thought led to difficulties in governing for Obama, because the posters said “Hope,” and “Progress,” and “Change.” I like posters that are simple, direct, and use visual language, and these posters really do that well, but the brilliance of the campaign was that they never specified anything with those three words. That’s a great election technique: whatever you hope, whatever you see as the future, you fill in the blanks. But that can lead to difficulties

in governing. In any case, by 2012 there was far less energy behind campaign posters. And then, of course, you know what happens in 2016: Bernie Sanders. There are hundreds and hundreds of Bernie Sanders posters. One of my favorites is the Cheech and Chong poster. And of course, Shepard Fairey and Emek went big-time for Bernie. GJ What about this time around? HW In this 2020 campaign cycle, in the primaries, Julián Castro had one or two good posters, Kamala Harris had one good poster, Andrew Yang had one good poster. Joe Biden started out with a really great poster, a yard sign for Iowa and New Hampshire, and then he abandoned it: it used his aviator shades, and looking out of the shades, just in the lenses, you could see scenes from Iowa—cornfields, of course—and from New Hampshire. That’s a great design idea. But overall, during the primaries, even before covid hit, posters were essentially as dead as a pharaoh’s mummy. Plenty of yard signs, but they’re sort of graphic burnouts, there’s nothing to them. There’s a lot of that in every campaign, but there’s always some crème de la crème that rises to the top. I would guess because of covid, and the way we’re shut down, that there’s not going to be much. And it’s late in the game. One of the reasons I think the poster really prevailed in the 2008 campaign is that they documented everything online. Some of the artists who made really vibrant

Obama posters did a run of fifty or a hundred, either offset or screen print, and signed them in limited editions, small numbers, but they were online free to download. You could send them everywhere. Back in 1972, McGovern had 100 signed Thomas W. Benton screen-print posters in his headquarters in Washington for sale for ten bucks, but without the online realm we have today, nine-tenths of the country had no way of knowing they were there. By the time you get to Shepard Fairey, when he announced a poster, if you didn’t get in and buy it in the first thirty minutes, the 300 in the edition were gone. This instant communication of images really changed the ballgame. I’m guessing here, but it would seem to me that it’s covid that’s really hampered posters in this election. There’s no reason to assume they won’t come back. GJ You think we’ll continue to see a mix of outsider artists, graphic designers, and wellknown artists in campaign-poster endeavors moving forward? HW The outsider artists only come in on occasion. But unless lightning strikes, you’re only going to have exciting, artistic graphic posters if candidates to the left become nominated. That’s where the energy and the excitement are, that’s where the art community and young artists are, and that’s where the posters are.

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IN THE STUDIO WITH NEIL JENNEY AN INTERVIEW BY JOE BRADLEY

Previous spread: Neil Jenney’s studio, New York City, 2020. Photo: Pushpin Films

Neil, I’d like to start at the beginning. You began making art in Boston, right? NEIL JENNEY I did go to Mass Art in Boston, but I’d been painting since 1957. I first saw Abstract Expressionism when I was nine years old, in 1955, and I’d never seen anything like it before. The painting was by Truman Egleston, who was a native of my town, Westfield [Massachusetts]; he’d been sent away to the Korean War, and when he got back, he used the GI Bill and went to Mass Art. I saw the painting at a neighbor’s house, and I thought I’d try making my own. I worked on rectangular paintings between 1957 and 1964, and when I went to Boston to attend Mass Art I decided I’d just work on squares because I didn’t know of any other Abstract Expressionist who worked on squares. Working on squares was a much more intriguing, intuitive challenge. JB The square is considered one of the most challenging formats for a painter. NJ That or the roundel, yes. The circular painting is supposedly the most difficult to balance and keep solidified, but the square is a real challenge. Alongside the squares, I was working on another series where I was using the dotted line; I thought I really had something solid with dotted lines, I’d never seen them used in abstract art before. My upstairs neighbor at the time was William Wegman, and I’d tell him, “Come on down, tell me what you think.” He came down and said, JOE BRADLEY

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“Oh, [Marcel] Duchamp did it.” I said, “Oh. Okay, thank you.” JB [Laughs] Forget it then, right? NJ Then, at some point I felt I had to get more shape in my canvas—the square, yeah, it’s a shaped canvas, but I need a more exciting shape. So by 1965, while keeping the hard-edge line, I began to use unorthodox formats. JB Who were some early influences you were looking at? NJ Well, Truman Egleston, who I mentioned earlier, was definitely an influence. He would come home and visit his parents in the summer and that’s when I got to know him. He was able to use the terminology and clued me in to this whole game of balance, harmony, and all these compositional terms that made me more conscious of the elements I was dealing with. The artist I was most attracted to when I was in Boston was Kenneth Noland, because he’d taken formal abstraction even farther than Egleston. I loved his targets—the dimensions and rhythms of the circles and colors just knocked me out. Then he went to the diamond-shaped paintings with the bars running up on a diagonal. And to me that was like the be-all-end-all of formal abstraction. When I moved to New York, I had a little three-room apartment on the Lower East Side, 723 East Sixth Street between C and D, in a very dangerous neighborhood. You couldn’t go out at night.

[Laughs] You couldn’t go out during the daytime either. NJ You couldn’t! You had to do everything early in the morning and be home by 11:00 am. It was easy to be a disciplined artist under those circumstances. And I didn’t have a telephone or anything. Because I was very poor, I didn’t have a lot of room, so I couldn’t do big paintings or sculptures; I had to come up with something small. I decided that I could use the same vocabulary of the hard edge and the organic line in a sculptural form, and I could do it in a linear form. I’d bend these aluminum rods, which wasn’t so easy, and I coated them with a rubber paint that I developed out of brand-new spaceage material—this was fifty, sixty years ago—called silicone rubber. They used silicone rubber to seal satellites when they went to outer space. I realized that if I painted these bars with any other paint, the paint would crack and fall off and be just a mess. So I mixed powder pigments with silicone rubber and painted these metallic bars in various colors, so it was more antiminimal. A piece from this series was the first piece I showed to dealers. JB How did you make your break into the gallery world in New York? NJ Luckily, one day I bumped into an ar tist named Paul Thek and ended up becoming his assistant. JB I remember reading somewhere that you helped him build The Tomb [1967], is that right? JB

This spread: Neil Jenney’s studio, New York City, 2011. Photos: Rob McKeever Following spread, left: Neil Jenney, Modern Africa #3, 2016–20, oil on canvas, in artist’s painted wood frame, 69 ¼ × 88 ½ × 3 ¼ inches (175.9 × 224.8 × 8.3 cm)

Yes, I did all the castings for him. One day I was with Paul, it was February, and he said “How’s your work going?” I said, “Oh, pretty good. I’ve got a couple of pieces that I think are solid.” And he says, “You know, now is the time to go around to galleries. February, nothing is happening and the dealers are beginning to think about next season and maybe you can get in a group show.” So I wrapped up one of my linear pieces and marched up to Leo Castelli to show it to Ivan Karp, the most powerful man in modern art. JB Straight to the top [laughs]. NJ You always start at Castelli. I went in, and he was kind of busy. I said, “Can you look at something?” “Oh yes, yeah”—he was wonderful. Ivan was the greatest of them all, in my estimation. And I knew them all. Ivan looked at the piece and said, “Virginia Dwan should see this.” Now Virginia Dwan was the only bicoastal dealer in America. She had a gallery in LA and she had one on 57th Street. I loved her LA gallery from the pictures I used to see of it in Artforum magazine. She was pushing the real severe minimal people like Arakawa, who was her star. Eventually she sold Walter De Maria, who was one of Dick Bellamy’s guys. Anyhow, I said, like a stupid teenager—I was twenty-one—I said, “Would you call her up?” He says, “Yeah, okay.” He flips the Rolodex, calls her up, and says, “I got a kid over here, you know, you should take a look.” So NJ

I go over there and I lay that down and she really didn’t know what to think. She asked that I come back to show her more later that week, and so I came back the second time and her assistant, John Weber, was there and her star, Carl Andre, was there. I put the works down and they didn’t know what to think; it was so far away from their aesthetic. She asked what they were painted with and I told her about the rubber paint that I’d developed. She looked around to Weber and said, “Isn’t Dick Bellamy doing a rubber show?” And I said, “Dick Bellamy? Would you call him up?” And she said, “Sure.” So she called up Dick Bellamy and he said, “Can you come up tomorrow?” I said, “Yes, I can.” I went up there, I showed it to Bellamy, and he came out and he looked at the piece on the floor, and then he looked at the ceiling and he took off his glasses and he put on a different pair of glasses and looked at the piece. He looked at the ceiling again and walked around to the other side and took off those glasses and put on the first glasses, looked at the piece. Then he put on the second pair of glasses and said, “I like this piece very much. I’d like to represent you.” I was twenty-one years and three months at the time. He says, “Okay, I’m having a show in April.” That’s how Dick Bellamy became my dealer. JB That’s a good place to land as a young artist, right? NJ I know. With Bellamy I started doing these

Following spread, right: Neil Jenney, Modern Africa #1, 2016–17, oil on canvas, in artist’s painted wood frame, 74 × 101 × 3 inches (188 × 256.5 × 7.6 cm) Artwork © Neil Jenney

found-object pieces that were important in my development. They were described as environmental. Some critics call them theatrical. For me, their importance was that they mutated to a format of “these things and those things.” And I realized that was a great structure. But I couldn’t sell any of these things. I was moping around and I asked, “Dick, how come nothing sells?” He said, “Well, you know, Jenney, nobody’s got f loor space. Everybody’s got wall space.” So I had to come up with wall ideas. I had linear wall pieces, and that was something, but I knew I needed to develop somewhere new. I went back to my analysis of art history and I realized that there are only two styles in art history: one is abstraction and the second is realism. They’re both equally ancient. The pyramids are abstract art. They’re the greatest minimal art ever made. With the head of Queen Nefertiti right next to them, you have the most refined, sophisticated realism and the most refined, sophisticated minimalist abstraction. This led me to the desire to make something on the wall with realism. Now in 1966, American realism was Pop art. Artists would pick an image of America and make it big, like a hamburger—an eight-foot hamburger. JB Clearly you didn’t, like some artists of the time, feel compelled to dig in and defend abstract ar t. You were comfor table making the move to realism. 109

NJ Well, I loved abstraction because it was so pure. It was so entirely intuitive. For me, there wasn’t a necessary opposition; abstraction was the perfect compositional exercise for a realist. And after Pop, there was this whole movement of photorealism. I hated photorealism. It was the same formula as Pop. I was always saying, “It’s a stale idea done pretty.” I said to myself, Wouldn’t it be better if you had a good idea and did it terrible. JB [Laughs] And the Bad Paintings are born. NJ Exactly. I decided to do realism, but sloppy— you know, forget about beauty. Just get the idea and do it as fast as possible. My painting Accident and Argument [1969], for instance, had this duality in it that my sculpture had when I was making “these things and those things” relating. This had the format of “these things and those things” relating, which is the foundation of realism itself, or at least the content of realism. Accident and Argument has all the drips, and it’s got the figures, which means it’s from near the beginning of the series. The absolutely first iterations had a horizon line, but I realized I was better off getting rid of deep space, so I cleaned it up and eliminated the horizon line. JB What sort of parameters did you set? Did you give yourself any rules to play by when you were making the Bad Paintings? Could you erase, could you go back into them?

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No, no, it was a one-shot thing. They were done with acrylic paint and you had to do them fast. I’d start at the top and work down, and I had to keep the edge alive. JB And did it fail? Did you have ones that didn’t work out that ended up getting tossed? NJ No. The way I had it set up was, no matter what happened, I’d accept it, okay? I didn’t really care what it looked like as long as the message was communicated. JB Are there bad drawings on paper? NJ No, the drawings were done directly on the canvas. I’d have little drawings in my pocket, but it was never the completed thing. JB Did you start this project with a list of the pairs of “this and that” that you wanted to paint? Or would you come up with an idea and bang it out in the afternoon, or— NJ Sometimes it was a visual idea and sometimes, a little later, people used to go really Freudian on their analyses of the paintings. I’d show them and then I’d get, you know, No no no, it’s girl and doll, really simple. I realized I had to have titles to harness the viewer’s consciousness a little bit. From there, I’d come up with ideas through the titles. Accident and Argument, for instance, started as a title. JB And then you’d go about illustrating— NJ Then I’d illustrate the title, right. NJ

I didn’t tell Bellamy I was working on bad paintings. He heard about them through the grapevine. He came over to my studio and when he saw them he hated them and he said, “Listen”—he was looking at them and shaking his head no and saying, “Jenney, Jenney”— JB This was a serious departure from the sculpture. It must have been a big surprise. NJ Correct. It was. So he said, “Jenney, Jenney. . . . ” I said, “Dick, it’s a good idea.” He says, “Listen, Jenney, you want to sell these paintings, go ahead.” So he made me a dealer—I loved it. At some point he said, “Well, clean it up a little bit.” And so I said okay, and went from bad drawing and bad painting to good drawing and bad painting. Man and Challenge [1969], which falls into this category, belongs to the Metropolitan Museum now. At some point I realized I really wanted to do good drawing and good painting. I’d done the bad painting, now I wanted to go all the way to Vermeer. JB The new realism. NJ Yeah. JB And Neil, would you mind talking a little bit about the frames for these works? NJ I stopped making bad paintings in 1970 and started on my search for good painting, and the first thing I did was go to the library. I wanted to learn all the secrets I could learn in books about this realism game. I had really never used oil paints

and I knew I was going to have to use oil paints because I wanted to mix in a leisurely fashion and you couldn’t do that with acrylics. So I figured I’d do some reading and I basically read the Greek analysis of what a painting is, which is that you’re looking through a window onto this scene. I realized, wow, the frame is really the window. The frame is the architectural foreground and presents the illusion. I used to think of frames as decoration; I didn’t want to decorate bad painting, but I realized that frames being functional, I had to have frames, and they’re a perfect place to put the title, which I loved, because I used to put the titles on plaques next to the painting and it was very clumsy. I was suddenly back in the sculpture business again, which is really where I wanted to be. I started drawing frames, and basically the frames you see on my paintings now—the mantled atmospheric frames, the biosphere frames—were drawn in 1971 and 1972. JB At the time, did you refer to the paintings as bad paintings and good paintings or did the title of the 1970 show, Bad Paintings, inaugurate that term? NJ That was invented by Marcia Tucker about nine years after I had the first show. I kept saying new realism, new realism, new realism, but Marcia, thank God, put it really in the perfect context. She called me up and said she was organizing a group show and she wondered if I might be interested in

being in it. And I said, “What’s it called?” And she said, “Bad Painting.” I said, “You’re talking my language” [laughter]. JB So you started these good paintings in 1971, hot on the heels of the bad paintings? NJ No, I didn’t start to paint until maybe the middle of 1972 or 1973. All the things I did in 1971 and 1972 were drawings. I was reading. I’d spent all my time trying to educate myself. There’s not a lot of secrets in the books, let me tell you. JB [Laughs] So when you say educate yourself, you’re talking about just developing the painting chops to— NJ Trying to learn the secrets of the guys I loved. I loved realists who had brushwork with snap, like Frans Hals. How did Frans Hals do it? He never told anybody the secrets, unfortunately. JB How did you hit on this format of the long horizontal kind of cross-section of a landscape rather than a more traditional format? NJ I didn’t want to repeat what other people had done. My way of doing that was letting the frames determine what the images could be, in a way. JB So how do you prepa re? W hat ’s you r research process? NJ I draw. You know, my whole technique is stay inside the lines. JB But say for the North American paintings, are you up in Connecticut by that point? Can you

go outside and get a pussy willow branch and draw from life? NJ Yeah, I draw in the field. I don’t paint in the field. Painting is tough enough without having the birds and the insects and the leaves falling. It makes a difficult thing more difficult. And I don’t want to do anything in a rush. JB What’s your routine like? Do you report to the studio every morning? NJ Yeah, I work days and I work nights. I work seven days a week [laughs]. And I’ve been doing this all my life, basically. I worked six days a week when I delivered papers as a kid. JB So you had that rhythm and work ethic early on. NJ Yeah. I realized that work was inevitable and that I wanted to be the boss. JB You’re now work i ng on you r Mode r n Africa series. How did you arrive on this subject, through travel? NJ No, never traveled. I’ve never been to Italy, never been to England. I’ll never go. I hate traveling. It’s bad luck. I’ve never had a show in California, never would. They’re all imagined scenes. Like the North America series, it’s about Mother Nature, it’s about environment. Nothing is stopping the Sahara Desert, you know, it’s just like, Deal with it.

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And therefore the rich poets . . . have obviously no limits to their work except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” 1844 I observe people. Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved to watch people, their movements, and their attitudes. I think that’s how I learned to act. I took two or three acting lessons from Lee Strasberg, but I found it to be not necessary for me. Not as beneficial for me on a personal level. I guess I’m instinctive. I just do it and feel it instinctively. I use the moment. —Shelley Duvall, 1977

Every era has a handful of actors who embody the moods and aesthetics of their time. Carlos Valladares looks back to the 1970s, the time of New Hollywood, and argues for the singular contemporaneity of Shelley Duvall.

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There’s no straight path to kindness, no formula to realize it. You seem to fall into it, it glows from you based on how you were born or whom you’ve hung around. Shelley Duvall is breathtaking precisely because there doesn’t seem to be an unkind bone in her being. And most of the people who were lucky enough to orbit her vicinity were that much hipper to kindness in the raw precisely because she was its rare source. She seems preternaturally incapable of vengeance, pretension, boredom. And that’s because she never imagined for a second she would grow up to become a big deal. She was a star despite her intentions. She never cut herself off, icily, as the greats did before her (Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe), yet she towers alongside them. She’s the quintessence of New Hollywood but she went farther than any of those fancy auteurs: Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, even her beloved Robert Altman, who still had to cut off the world with their four-sided shots. Shelley Duvall glides off the frame into lowercase divinity itself. When Jean Epstein raved about photogénie, the cosmic simplicity of a movie face and the secrets of life contained therein, he had no idea he was dreaming of Shelley Duvall.1 Pauline Kael, who normally pours adoration on her pet actors like hotcake syrup, is flummoxed when it comes to Duvall: “She looks like no one else and she acts like no one else. Shelley Duvall may not be an actress, exactly, but she seems to be able to be herself on the screen in a way that nobody has ever been before. She doesn’t appear to project— she’s just there.”2 It’s the old line that’s been trotted out ever since the first movie-mad Europeans caught a glimpse of Lillian Gish: She doesn’t act, she is.3 What Kael detects, though, is unique in the grand scheme of movie star history. Facing the one-woman phenomenon of acting that was Shelley Duvall, the pinning-down language of the critic collapses in exhilaration. From the moment Duvall burst onto the screen in Brewster McCloud (1970), Kael required an entire decade to adequately evoke her spirit, in a review of Popeye (1980) in which she praises Shelley as equal to and more than the sum of her kooky parts: There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she doesn’t seem to owe anything to anyone. She’s an original who has her own limpid way of doing things—a simplicity that isn’t marred by conventional acting technique, but that by now she has adapted to a wide range of characters. . . . Shelley Duvall takes the funny-page drawing of Olive Oyl and breathes her own spirit into it. Possibly she can do this so simply because she accepts herself as a cartoon to start with, and, working from that, goes past it. So far past that we begin to find chic in her soft, floppy white collars and her droopy elongated skirts. 4

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Duvall seemed to float about with an oh-gosh bemusement in defiant ignorance of the constantly jaded 1970s. The mood of New Hollywood films in Duvall’s time was directly opposed to her own, what with the bias toward a clean pictorial cynicism (e.g., the paranoid landscapes of cinematographer Gordon Willis) and a gritty reality consciously pitched against the idealizations of classical Hollywood (not the “pretty lies” fed to the previous generation by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, whose romance was too perfect for the new movie brats). We’ve unquestioningly anointed the doom-laden Chinatown (1974) as the perfect realization of wretched US history on the silver screen, the popular imagination anointing the Great American Screenplay award to this perfectly coiffed noir, the movie that tells it like it is, Hollywood’s greatest achievement (along with the equally nihilist Godfather movies). Now I’m told that Ben Affleck has decided to make a useless film out of the recent superfluous book of the making of Chinatown, in a desperate gambit to keep reveling in the comfortable Roman Polanski–Robert Towne–Jack Nicholson–Faye Dunaway darkness over and over again. So, too, are we obsessed with the defeatist popular visions of that era: Taxi Driver, Mikey and Nicky, The Panic in Needle Park, The Godfather, The Long Goodbye, The Last Picture Show, The French Connection, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, New York, New York, Halloween, Blue Collar, and Deliverance: a storm of bad vibes. But that bleakness was foreign to Duvall (the star of stars in New Hollywood), who somehow weathered the storm for miraculously long—until Stanley Kubrick got his hands on her, forging a masterpiece from the flesh and sweat of her battered will.5 Beneath her sunny exterior, Shelley never lost track of the morbid truths that so trapped the lives of the bitter Petra von Kant and her creator, Rainer Werner Fassbinder: that “people are terrible” (Bernice Bobs Her Hair), that they are “hard and brutal” (The Shining), and that “everyone is replaceable” (3 Women). Without mucking about in generic lethargy at the state of an ugly world, she accepted and skated across these jaded truisms with her wide eyes and her warm grin and her oh-dear-oh-well attitude, all so bafflingly transparent and lovely. You want to hang out with Shelley’s characters at bars, covertly jotting down ideas for your next wardrobe or folksy aphorism. At the same New York bars, after long rants about disappointing people, toxic love, and other daily sociopolitical abuse, my friends and I will suddenly raise a toast in the name of, who else, Shelley Duvall, our oasis in despair. It’s for no reason other than to hope she’s on the mend, that we may stave off the dross of dispassion for as long as she did. When bars come back, I’ll toast to no one else. Pure-hearted—that’s what gets me about Shelley. There was no reason she had to be that goddamn cheerful all the time! In her movies with Altman, the grand bulk of her work, we grow intimate with her eccentric characters stuck in lose-lose situations: tour guides by day, getaway drivers by night, falling for bird brains (Brewster McCloud, 1970); sex workers in a love-shot, turn-of-the-century tundra (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1971); ’30s ragdolls who play Gangbusters with kindred boys marked for death (Thieves Like Us, 1974); the First Lady as a piece of cheap, kitschy china (Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull ’s History Lesson, 1976); a hungry body in search of an identity (Nashville, 1975); a hungry identity in search of a body (3 Women,

1977). Not to mention her non-Altman outsiders: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s frumpy sad girl torn apart by Yale-Princeton-Harvard conformists (Joan Micklin Silver’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair, 1976), a troubled wife who loses her husband to drink and her mind to the ghosts of territory (Kubrick’s The Shining, 1980), someone in a Woody Allen film (Annie Hall, 1977). None of these are hopeful situations; yet in all of them we grow to love Shelley’s resilience, she of the gnarly boots, the weaving walk, and the outsized heart. We love her whether she’s playing a knotty human or a cartoon—and sometimes, incredibly, she’s both (as in Altman’s Popeye, 1980—one of the only good, genuinely original comic book movies). She was born in Houston on July 7, 1949. (That makes her a Cancer; are we surprised?) According to a 1977 New York Times profile, she admitted to a mundane childhood: “I was a bookworm who loved science and art.”6 She studied, of all things, the science of food for two years at a Houston junior college, majoring in nutrition and diet therapy. Her dream in life, in her words, was to “make great discoveries in food research to help mankind.”7 Dr. Duvall would be working on rice at Rice today had she not gone to a fate-defining party in 1970. It was to celebrate her recent engagement to a local Houston artist, Bernard Sampson (whom she later divorced after four years but with whom she remained good friends). At the party she was approached by members of a local film crew who were scouting actors to appear in their movie. Thinking the offer was an invitation to appear in a porno, Duvall and her parents immediately said no, but she was told more: the movie was Brewster McCloud and the director was Altman, who had just wrapped production on what would become his meal ticket to Hollywood, the ribald war comedy mash (1970). Duvall was asked if she had any experience in front of a movie camera; she did not. In fact, she said, “I know nothing about acting. I’ve never even seen a play.”8 That didn’t faze Altman, who, after a conversation with her in which he figured out that her friendly demeanor was not an act, cast the greenhorn as the main female love interest who seduces Bud Cort on his path to becoming the first human to spread wings and fly. The movie, a zany outlier in Altman’s oeuvre, failed either to impress critics or to entice an audience and has been wrongly dismissed as a lull in between mash and Altman’s revisionist western McCabe & Mrs. Miller.9 But it’s a beautiful work, a sick specimen of US culture in its own right: twisted, deranged, nihilist, vile, bitter, and bold. Of course, the MVP’s are Duvall and her incantatory delivery, in that Houston drone of hers, of lines like: “Oh, diarrhea. That’s tough. I’m a race-car driver.” In cartooned anticipation of her 3 Women identity crisis, she plays an absurd number of roles, all at different temperatures: a tour guide of the then new Houston Astrodome (warm, nice, soft), a cop-hating drag racer like Jean-Pierre Léaud’s manic numbskull in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Le départ (asphalt hot, spiky, a menace to society), and a teenybopper with mile-long eyelashes, a candycane blouse, and 3D-printed green and purple lollipops tacked onto her bedroom walls (lukewarm, a lousy caricature). Her eyes are strangely, gently open all the time—not the bug eyes, forced open by Clockwork Orange–style terrorism, for which she would become iconic in The Shining. Here she demonstrates how the actor doesn’t need to be bodily present to successfully command film space, her voice a disembodied presence that haunts the Astrodome via its PA system. Her voice 117

spews out inane non sequiturs, real spit takes that might escape less eagle-eared viewers: “There are bathrooms every fifty feet—but they’re not really bathrooms, ya know—they don’t have a tub or anythin’ like that.” Later, brainwashed by the Houston Police Department and her own tragically misplaced horniness, she suggests that Cort’s Brewster patent his flying wings so that he can become a millionaire and they can get married and be on top of the world, a convoluted but charming metaphor about the impurity of first loves taken in the name of glory-seeking capital. In Brewster, Duvall gives Altman’s miserly cynicism its goofy face and solid dimension. But her shades of vulnerability, a soft strength, balance out Altman’s perpetual disappointment in stupid Americans. Duvall crafts an extraordinary balancing act in Thieves Like Us: she, Keechie, a Depression-era teen who cribs her identity from the chatter of radio programs and the emaciated pigtailed girls in Coca-Cola ads, has been lied to by her pacifist-romantic-bank-robber boyfriend Bowie (Keith Carradine). She hollers “Liar! ” to his face in a fit of unusual anger; she sulks about their cold wood-paneled motel room; she decides to leave him; she packs a valise. Suddenly, in a crappy makeup mirror more appropriate for a fun house or an Orson Welles movie than for a gangster melodrama set in the South of the ’30s, Keechie notices an out-of-place cowlick on the left side of her hair. She tousles her bob, trying to straighten it. Then she looks at her mirrored face. The image is frightening, grotesque. Finally she says out loud, not really to Bowie, not really to her mirrored self, even: “I don’t wanna leave you.” To us it’s clear that the mirror is the problem, but like the movie screen, it only slightly exaggerates the imperfections the viewer detects in her physical self. Trying to conform to the distorted looking glass, she can only see the neck of a strangled goose, a badly lopsided bob (like Bernice’s in the Silver film), eyes pinched in, sugary and too-thin lips to match Coke-guzzling body and soul. “I don’t wanna leave you”—because who’ll love this later like you do now? In her films, Duvall is consistently the target of degrading, passive-aggressive barbs about her body. A year after Thieves, she and Carradine reunite in Nashville; now it’s 1975, he’s a hotshot country/folk superstar, she’s a wannabe groupie from LA. She wears wild platform boots and an array of campy dresses and hairdos: a hippie girl’s wig of silver gray, a rusty-brown afro the color of vintage Dr Pepper ads. But to Carradine they only serve to distract from the obvious: “Damn girl, you better get off that diet before you ruin yourself.” Always the cracks about being “the Texas Twiggy.” Always the sneers at her haggard look in her most famous character, the screaming Wendy Torrance in The Shining, hair falling out of her scalp in chunks for the good of cinema. There must have been some trepidation in her acceptance of her final role in an Altman film, the role that (in his triggering words) she was “born to play”: Olive Oyl in Popeye. Born to play Olive Oyl: that’s also what Duvall was told when she was bullied mercilessly by the more popular, more conventionally pretty jet set of girls at her Houston high school—the jet set her Millie still desperately wants to join in the Freudian mythopoetic desert of 3 Women, years after she’s graduated and none of the cliquery matters. It was 3 Women that won Duvall the Cannes best-actress award in 1977—and when you see her performance, you understand why. When the merits of American movies in the 1970s are extolled 118

Herein lies the genius of Duvall, who generously gives such huge chunks of her real twangy warmth without ever giving the viewer or the camera a gram of her real self. ad nauseam, what’s really being praised are the rambling monologues of Duvall’s Millie in 3 Women. I wish there was an album of these surreal, largely improvised runs of the Duvallian mouth that I could listen to in my headphones all day: “Purple ’n’ yellow are my favorite colors. Like irises. Like flowers. And candlelight. They’re so romantic. Surefire way to win a man in one night: Good atmosphere ’n’ food. Remember that ol’ sayin’? ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’? Well it’s true lotsa times.” Why does Millie talk and talk and never stop talking, especially when no one around her listens? Out of justified paranoia that to shut up, to stop moving, to stop advertising her banal existence every second of her waking life, is in her day and age not to exist? Out of a need silently mandated by US mores that one must voice every meaningless fact about oneself that no one else could possibly care about: how you prefer your hot dogs (burnt to a crisp in microwave ovens), or the rules of the games you play (Scrabble, but no dirty words, gosh no)? Millie self-brands as a dinner hostess with the mostest, a ’70s gal with great taste: “Tonight, we’re havin’ pigs-in-a-blanket ’n’ chocolate-puddin’ tarts!” A terrifyingly automatic speechifying machine, she spews out talk for talk’s sake. It’s not really a nightmare for us, because Duvall’s jeez-louise cadences are always a pleasure, even to the hard-to-impress skeptic. But it’s a nightmare for her colleagues—she works at a health spa for the elderly—who are constantly praying that she leave them alone to eat their flavorless tapioca in peace. And the more you dwell on the character Duvall has brought to sad life, the more the nightmare grows. Weaned on color-supplement magazines and nauseatingly romantic TV movies since childhood, Millie is a swell gal-pal: nice, annoyingly self-involved (because American), she is an eerie reflection of the rosy-cheeked, midcentury, TV brand of femininity that so many of the women in Altman’s films 10 rebel against. At the end of the day, when Millie leaves work and “converses” with her co-workers, Duvall makes no attempt at conversation. She just stares ahead, trailing an awkward three paces behind them, marching to her car like an abandoned robot programmed to chatter and go—and go she does—and stop she never does— about zebus, penthouse chicken, or an exotic hula dancer who gives $12 lessons at the local Macy’s, “real sexy.” Hers is a kind of disturbing automatism, a mix of kitsch and inexplicable behavioral tics out of Elle (“12 Tips to Be Popular and Get the Guy”), never cohering into a solid movie woman. But that’s the point! What nerves! What tics! What mess! What won Duvall that award at Cannes was the fact that the tail of her English-mustardcolored dress keeps getting caught in the door of

her French-mustard-colored car. (These absurd national divisions are Duvall’s improvisations.) It’s the perfect image of the ’70s woman who wants to seem “with it,” but isn’t—and in fact is gloriously out of it, unlike the bourgeois antikink squares who want to be hepcats and whom Paul Mazursky deflated mercilessly in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). It makes perfect sense that Sissy Spacek’s inexplicably childish Pinky looks up to Millie, for Millie is the refined copy of a messy image: TV’s glamour girls. Elsewhere, Duvall has no qualms asking the guy she has a crush on to check her neck glands because “they’ve felt swollen all day, ’n’ I’m so taiiired already.” This neither kills the eroticism intended in the come-on, nor stokes it; this is the pure weird, bulldozing and mesmerizing. Neck glands, even! She can’t just say “My neck hurts, it needs a rub, your rub”; she has to push the failed flirtation over the edge into the technical, the grotty, the TMI. And herein lies the genius of Duvall, who generously gives such huge chunks of her real twangy warmth without ever giving the viewer or the camera a gram of her real self. She’s more wont to compel viewers to dissolve their identities totally within her lanky oddballs, in the manner of 3 Women’s mysterious tagline: “1 woman became 2, 2 women became 3, 3 women became 1.” She’s singular, yet you fall into her. She’s not a stable being; you can’t predict what will come out of her mouth, just as one can’t predict what genre 3 Women will morph into next. (3 Women, as I see it, is Altman’s most ambitious film in its total suspension of narrative logic and the conventions of classical movie language.) Duvall is one of the few clear bright presences in Altman, whose world is otherwise defensively hard-shelled, hard to hear, pockmarked with languid zooms from the perspective of a hungover lapsed idealist. Duvall’s Millie is the viewer without a filter, incapable of reading the room, stubbornly resistant to the polite starting- and stopping-points ingrained in all girls like her since they learned to chat. O Shelley: so many words when your way is best, the backdoor poetry of your smile that can demonstrate to a drip what he’s missing in the art of living. Walt Whitman, in the preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), already had someone like you in mind: “The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new. It is to be indirect and not direct or descriptive or epic.” Even when you’re in a bit role, among the Grand Ole Opry crowd of Nashville or the Wild West Show of Buffalo Bill, you’re beaming with such illogical intensity, centering the busy Altmanesque chaos of the crowd with your exuberance. You had no ambitions toward the epic. You wouldn’t be caught dead near gilt culture.11 Give you a Scrabble night and a coke, country pop and Popeye’s, any day of the week. When you said Kubrick taught you the most about acting, you really meant Acting; for your Shining performance, the element that turned that film into a marvel of terror, the terror was beaten out of you by a director who had little patience or collaborative calm to ease into your understanding of a wife’s horror at her maniac husband, the cabin-fever-induced traumas endured by an independent (unlike, say, the way Altman gently coaxed the same emotions out of you at the climax of 3 Women). For you, acting was not a matter of powerhouse crying, the huffing of plagued rabbits. It was a matter of living your best on a crazy island, on a motorcycle out of Easy Rider, in a rowdy saloon—in short, in a good atmosphere, with good food, but no man (or at least, no man for too long).

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Opening spread: Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977). Photo: Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo Second spread: Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974). Photo: United Archives GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo Previous spread: Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970). Photo: MARKA/ Alamy Stock Photo Opposite: Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980). Photo: AF Archive/Alamy Stock Photo This page: Shelley Duvall in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Photo: Ronald Grant Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo

In a wonderful Fitzgeraldian scene in Bernice Bobs Her Hair, you taught me how much barbed poison can be contained within the politest reactions imaginable. There, you tolerate Cort’s gnat of a know-it-all Yale boy, that most tedious of creatures, a writer full of energy but self-absorbed in his own problems—all during what he considers to be “the late stages of [his] life” (the boy is nineteen, for Chrissake). Your poetry came out—casually, as usual—with the coy corner-cheeked smirk you gave him in the middle of his screed against a world that doesn’t understand him and that he can’t understand. Your smile, Shelley, was so unconsciously, patiently, generously civil (geared to the Jazz Age, high-society milieu) yet dripping with snark, eye-rolling, a subtle amusement with these highfalutin rich white boys who can only see you, Bernice-qua-Shelley, as the geeky indigenous girl with the crazy hair. You don’t realize that you exist in a separate sphere from all these petty youth; you don’t even realize that you look terrific in a Louise Brooks bob. You don’t realize—or if you do, you couldn’t care less. Such is your way of being, Shelley, so heartbreakingly kind and trusting even when the world around you will never be. At the end of the day, this, too, was the Altman way, but he gets too much credit—and he would be the first to admit it, the first to point the finger back to you (this rare, rare wisp) as the conscience, the core, of his jaded world—of the world, maybe. To your health, Shelley—and to your poetry, the lilt that I and many others don’t have to strain in the din to overhear.

1. For more on Jean Epstein and photogénie see Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, Film Theory in Media History, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). Epstein is notably evasive when it comes to defining photogénie, which he describes in the following terms: “For how can one better define the undefinable photogénie than by

saying: photogénie is to cinema what color is to painting and volume to sculpture—the specific element of that art” (“The Photogenic Element,” 300); “I would describe as photogenic any aspect of things, beings, or souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction” (“On Certain Characters of Photogénie,” 293). 2. Pauline Kael, “Love and Coca-Cola,” The New Yorker, February 4, 1974, quoted here from Kael, Reeling (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, an Atlantic Monthly Press Book, 1976), 267–68. 3. See, e.g., Béla Balázs’s thoughts on Lillian Gish’s physiognomy and “shattering play of expressions” in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920): “We would need many printed pages to describe the storms that pass over this tiny, pale face. Reading them would also take up much time. But the nature of these feelings lies precisely in the crazy rapidity with which they succeed one another. The effect of this play of facial expressions lies in its ability to replicate the original tempo of her feelings. That is something that words are incapable of. The description of a feeling always lasts longer than the time taken by the feeling itself. The rhythm of our inner turbulence will inevitably be lost in every literary narrative.” Italics in the original. In Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghan Books, 2010), 35. 4. Kael, “The Funnies,” The New Yorker, January 5, 1981, 80. Available online at https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2018/03/07/ popeye-1980-pauline-kael/ (accessed August 30, 2020). 5. For more on Duvall’s and Kubrick’s contentious relationship on set, see Vivian Kubrick’s Making “The Shining”, a 1980 short on the making of the film. In 2011, Lee Gambin conducted an interview with Duvall in which she talks at length about the role (in more retrospectively positive terms); the complete text was published on the website Comingsoon.net in 2016: www.comingsoon.net/ horror/features/787573-interview-shelley-duvall-on-the-shining (accessed September 8, 2020). 6. Duvall, quoted in Judy Klemesrud, “Shelley Duvall, an Unlikely Star,” New York Times, March 23, 1977. Available online at www. nytimes.com/1977/03/23/archives/shelley-duvall-an-unlikely-star. html (accessed September 8, 2020). 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. One notable fan of Brewster McCloud was Leonard Cohen, who gave Altman permission to use his songs in McCabe & Mrs. Miller on the basis of his love for the experimental comedy. 10. I think, in particular, of Julie Christie in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Susannah York in Images (1972), Shelley Duvall and Louise Fletcher in Thieves Like Us (1974), and Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Cristina Raines, Barbara Harris, and Ronee Blakley in Nashville (1975). 11. “Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators . . . seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything.” Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Film Culture, no. 27 (Winter 1962–63). Available online at www. moca.org/storage/app/media/cropped-images/02_White%20 Elephant%20Art%20vs.%20Termite%20Art.pdf (accessed September 8, 2020).

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Building a Legacy In this ongoing series we speak with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship to offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staffs, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment the Quarterly’s Alison McDonald speaks with Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, about the role of museums in the preservation of artists’ legacies.

ALISON MCDONALD Museums are critical in the pres-

ervation of artists’ legacies. What’s the most important question you think artists or estates should consider when deciding which institutions to entrust with that responsibility? CARLOS BASUALDO That’s an interesting and complex question. Often, requests being made of an institution are different coming from an artist than from an estate or foundation. And it’s certainly a different matter altogether when you’re talking to a collector. While it’s fair to say that collectors, artists, and estates typically have similar goals when it comes to the preservation of legacy, they have very different ways of thinking about what’s needed to ensure those goals. I’ve found that the artists I’ve worked with tend to be concerned with the representative quality of the institution’s collection, how prominent the institution is in the field, and its role in the promotion of contemporary art. It’s critical to them to have an affinity with the collection and the wider programming, and it’s important to them to consider the weight their contribution will have in the context of that institution. A lot of this is very personal: it has to do with their own histories with the institution, or with their connections to people in the institution. Foundations and estates, meanwhile, are trying to interpret the desires of the artist. In my experience, their decisions are very attuned to questions about what the institution can do moving forward. Of course, each relationship has its own concerns and nuances. 122

AMCD Yes, and while nothing is going to be true for

all artists, there does of course need to be a desire on the institution’s part to make a commitment. The artist has to feel that the institution wants to be a steward of their legacy. CB Yes, absolutely. AMCD Most artists give to more than just one institution. CB Yes, that’s right. AMCD A hometown museum could also be important because the artist’s work might stand out in a different way in that context? CB Indeed, that’s an interesting example. AMCD You work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art [PMA]. Philadelphia is a big city and your museum has a magnificent collection, but New York has wonderful museums that must be attractive to artists who are considering gifts. How does that competition work for you? CB Visitors and artists are often surprised by the PMA collection, not only by its quality but by its depth in certain areas. I actually feel it’s great for us to be so close to New York, because it means increased accessibility. You’re right that New York has many powerful institutions, and that the city has its own gravitational pull, but when people venture out of it they find extraordinary collections at the PMA and nearby at the Barnes Foundation. And our collection has areas of depth—certainly Marcel Duchamp is one of them— that are very attractive to artists. In fact, the [Walter and Louise] Arensberg collection, with its focus on Duchamp, attracts artists and the public from all

over the world. The collection was formally given to the PMA in 1954, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg took the train down to see it here in ’57—there’s been a constant flux of people traveling from all over to see it since the early days. Anyone who feels a connection to that legacy may feel a connection to the museum. That’s an amazing opportunity for us. New York has extraordinary institutions, but they’re bunched in a relatively small area, and a lot of distractions come with that proximity. The pressures that result may preclude the kind of attention that institutions outside New York can give to artists and their legacies. That’s definitely been the case with Duchamp. Philadelphia has the largest collection of his work anywhere, with more than 200 pieces. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has exceptional works as well, but you wouldn’t be so quick to associate it with Duchamp, right? AMCD Your Duchamp collection is always on view. When Philadelphia was entrusted with that gift, was that a promise it made to the Arensbergs? CB When the Arensberg collection came in, there was a disposition that it had to be on display in certain galleries for twenty-five years. After that, when the museum was able to reinstall it, Anne d’Harnoncourt, the director at the time, decided to dedicate a permanent gallery to Duchamp. But that didn’t happen until the mid-1970s. AMCD Before the Arensberg collection came to the PMA, the museum received an entire collection on loan from Albert Gallatin that later turned into

With collectors you develop a partnership over many years; with artists, on the other hand, in my experience it’s love at first sight. But in all cases there is a need for trust and empathy and generosity on both sides, and that needs to be very tangible.

a major gift. Gallatin was a prominent collector, writer, and artist in the realm of abstract art. Part of his collection was displayed at New York University [NYU] from 1927 to 1942, in a space he called the Gallery of Living Art—an important place in the history of modern art’s exposure in the United States. CB The PMA’s first collection of modern art came from Gallatin—or actually the second, the first being the collection of Christian Brinton, which came to the museum in 1942. In the early ’40s the trustees of NYU basically told Gallatin, “You have to take out your collection because we don’t have room for it.” AMCD Wasn’t it hugely inspirational to figures like Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning when it was on view at NYU? CB It was. But the location was small and the collection was seen as occupying space that it needed for books. We have to remember that modern art was then a new idea. In fact, Gallatin started showing his collection at NYU a couple of years before the opening of the Museum of Modern Art. Anyway, a newspaper article reported that the collection had been pushed out of NYU, and Fiske Kimball, our director at the time, got on the phone with Gallatin and took the train to New York to see him. He was able to bring it to Philadelphia, first as a loan and then ultimately as a gift. So we had the Gallatin collection by the late ’40s, and it was Gallatin himself who prompted the museum to start pursuing Walter and Louise Arensberg. If you look at encyclopedic museums at the time, Philadelphia was an anomaly. In fact,

when those collections became part of the museum, they formed an entire section called “The Museum of Modern Art of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.” So it was a museum within a museum. AMCD It seems fair to say that Gallatin’s gift helped to shape the future of the museum. In 1949, Georgia O’Keeffe chose several institutions, the PM A among them, to receive gifts of work from her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Please tell us more about that gift and the impact it had on shaping the museum’s photography department. CB Indeed. I asked my colleague Peter Barberie, t he Brodsky Curator of Photog raphs at t he museum, about the impact of that gift and he responded, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1949 gift to PMA was foundational for our photography program. There were no other comparable gifts of photography before that time. Subsequently, the museum slowly expanded our photography holdings, adding important works by Eugène Atget and Man Ray, among others. In 1968, Dorothy Norman committed her large collection, including hundreds of prints by Stieglitz and building upon O’Keeffe’s initial gift. That year, we founded the Alfred Stieglitz Center. One more thing to say about O’Keeffe’s gift: it included most of the American artists Stieglitz had championed at his gallery, An American Place. So it opened our museum up to the importance of modern American art (until then we were much more focused on European artists).” So the gift included paintings as well as photographs. Stieglitz passed away and O’Keeffe was the sole executor of his estate. Some of her own paintings

were included in the gift, along with paintings by artists such as Marsden Hartley. It was a very significant collection of modern American art. AMCD In terms of the museum, what do these gifts mean? Do you build around them or start new conversations because of them? CB There are gifts that are completely transformational and that open up doors for generations. And then there are gifts that allow you to build up your holdings more slowly, over time. With Anselm Kiefer, for example, we made an early show, we acquired some work, some collectors in the museum family acquired works that they later donated, and now we are fortunate to have a substantial group. Once you have that substantial group and you acknowledge it as such, it starts a whole range of different conversations. That’s a very good case of building from strength. But at other moments you might recognize that there are certain areas you want to develop, so you try to find ways to bring specific groups of work into the museum. Anne d’Harnoncourt once called museum collections “orchestrated chaos.” You have certain attractors and the collection is built around those attractors, and around thoughtful decisions that might create new attractors. AMCD What’s the benefit of donating groups of works, as opposed to single works? At the PMA you have quite a few rooms dedicated to only one or two artists. CB We talk about the artist rooms in Philadelphia as if they’ve always been there, but that’s not the 123

For conceptually based art and artists from Duchamp on, documentation becomes crucial: it tells you what role artists have in the fabrication of their work, for example, and gives you insight into what was in their minds. Some artists have actually drafted their own press releases. So an artist’s agency gets distributed beyond the objects they produce.

case. We already discussed the Duchamp room. Then for a long time we had rooms dedicated to Constantin Brancusi and Piet Mondrian, and those two spaces created a precedent for Mark Rosenthal, the museum’s first curator of modern and contemporary art (at the time it was called the Department of Twentieth-century Art), to start thinking about creating rooms with contemporary artists. That’s how we acquired Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam [1977–78]. Mark went to Cy and told him, “I want to make a room of your work,” and that was very attractive to Cy, so he facilitated that acquisition. Once there’s a room, there’s a relationship with the artist, and it’s up to the curators to maintain it. If you invest in that relationship, then the collection keeps growing. Our Jasper Johns room was created ten years after the room dedicated to Twombly’s Fifty Days. There was a relationship and a precedent, and [curator] Ann Temkin assembled an extraordinary room of Johns’s works. AMCD The PMA seems to allow these rooms to stay on view long term. CB Fifty Days at Iliam has been on view continuously since it was acquired, in 1989, except when it went to the Twombly retrospective in Paris. AMCD Is that relatively common? It feels quite unique to Philadelphia that I see these rooms on every visit. The Dia Art Foundation does that, but do other museums? CB No, it doesn’t seem very common to me, although I’ve seen many more museums temporarily creating rooms devoted to individual artists in the last five or six years. 124

AMCD What was the inspiration?

When Anne d’Harnoncourt devoted a room to Duchamp in the mid-’70s, I think she was inspired by the way the artist himself thought about his work. Duchamp clearly felt his works benefited from being seen together. That’s exactly what he did in the Boîte-en-valise [1935–41], a work that’s basically a display of everything he’d made up until that point. Anne, being a Duchamp scholar, may have thought it quite natural to create an extension of the Boîte in reality. Then that logic generated more rooms. We have a room for Ellsworth Kelly, and I’m very interested in creating new rooms, with different temporalities. In some ways it’s a series of understandings and misunderstandings that generate a tradition. And then people say, “Oh, that’s always been there.” Nothing has. AMCD Recently the Cy Twombly Foundation gifted you several sculptures related to the Iliam series. Are there often conversations about complementing an institution’s existing collection, or perhaps finding different works that show a more diverse side of the artist’s output? CB Yes, Anne d’Harnoncourt felt it was important that the museum acquire a sculpture by Twombly, so I asked Cy if he’d produced a sculpture with the Iliam series. He actually had; there was a sculpture in process in the studio when he was making the paintings, it’s owned by Glenstone now—almost horizontal, like a boat with a sail— but when I asked him, he said, “No, but there are works that could resonate with the paintings.” So I asked him if he would select a group of works CB

that could be shown in dialogue with Fifty Days at Iliam. That’s how the whole thing started. AMCD In the overall context of the museum, you see so many different artists and time periods, and then when you get closer to modern and contemporary art, it feels as though you’re more immersed in the work of single artists. With an artist like Cy, that lets you see the work in a new way: if you isolated one of those paintings from the rest of the series, it would take away from what he’s trying to do in the entire body of work. CB That’s absolutely right. They’re meant to be seen together; in fact they’re one painting in ten parts. And going back to the question of why artists make certain decisions: the European model has been for artists to create their own museums—Pablo Picasso is a good example—so the idea of a space dedicated to one artist is very much an artist’s idea, and possibly much older than the modern period. AMCD Would you say that one of the most important considerations for artists, when they’re thinking about gifts, should be to find an institution actively committed to showing their work as often as possible and as in-depth as possible? CB Yes, ultimately artists want their works to be seen by as many people as possible, and in the right context. AMCD What about combining artworks with more archive-type gifts, such as sketches, preparatory drawings, and other studio source materials? Are museums suited to the responsibility of maintaining gifts of that type? Or is it more practical to gift those types of materials to institutions in which archives are primary?

There are gifts that are completely transformational and that open up doors for generations. And then there are gifts that allow you to build up your holdings more slowly, over time. Once you have that substantial group and you acknowledge it as such, it starts a whole range of different conversations.

That’s an important question. Many institutions don’t have archives, or don’t have good ones. In Philadelphia we didn’t have an archivist until fifteen or twenty years ago. But when the PMA received the Arensberg collection, the gift came with all of the Arensbergs’ papers, which contain a trove of information, for example about their friend Duchamp. And that archive was increased later on, when Anne d’Harnoncourt coorganized the Duchamp retrospective in 1973. So we have one of the most important Duchamp archives, and in Duchamp’s case the archive is essential to understand the work. For conceptually based art and artists from Duchamp on, documentation becomes crucial: it tells you what role artists have in the fabrication of their work, for example, and gives you insight into what was in their minds. Some artists have actually drafted their own press releases. So an artist’s agency gets distributed beyond the objects they produce. For many artists, an archive is crucial, and curators should be as mindful about bringing archives into their institutions as about actual artworks. They also need to create a dynamic relationship between archives and displays—that’s something we need to do more and more. That said, not all museums are prepared to maintain archives. You need to have trained staff, dedicated space, and more—it can be very expensive. And there are institutions, for example the Archives of American Art and the Getty, that have enormous archival collections and astonishing facilities. CB

AMCD Giuseppe

Penone recently gifted over 300 drawings to the PMA, making it the most significant repository of his drawings in the United States. He gave a similar gift to the Pompidou, in Paris. He himself meanwhile lives and works in Italy. I’m curious how complicated it is for international gifts to come into the museum. CB Another good question. When we think about the art history of the last fifty years, we see extraordinary figures working not in western Europe or the United States but in other parts of the world. Someone like Hélio Oiticica, for instance—his work was for a long time preserved by his family and a few friends in an apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Then the city of Rio gave it a space, but the family and the city never truly managed to work together, and ten years or so ago there was a fire in the storage that housed his work and much of that material was tragically lost. The care of contemporary artworks and collections is expensive and demanding, and that can lead to them leaving the sites of their cultural heritage. AMCD There’s an element of security in having works distributed across multiple locations. In the long term, the work is more protected by not being all in one place. Is that connected to what you’re saying? CB Yes, it is. And when artists are thinking about the preservation of their legacy, they sometimes find that the institutions in a position to do the best job for their work are not in their home city or country. AMCD Forgive me if this is too sensitive or direct,

but in terms of practical considerations, what legal or tax benefits are there for living artists making donations? CB Unfortunately there are none, at least not for us, because we can only acknowledge the cost of the materials. I wish there were more of a benefit, that would be a blessing for us. AMCD But if it’s a collector making a donation— CB The collector gets a tax deduction, of course. That’s often a pivotal motivation for a collector’s giving, but not for an artist’s. For artists it just has to be about the preservation of their legacy. AMCD How do conversations with artists differ from conversations with collectors? CB They’re equally engrossing but completely different. AMCD Do collectors expect an understanding of the context of their collection, or is it more about— CB Yes, their own legacy as collectors, and their association with certain artists, are often very important to them. If they give on a large enough scale, for example, their gift may be associated with the naming of a gallery, or even a wing. AMCD Collectors tend to be closely affiliated with a museum over many years—these are long relationships. Is that true of artists as well? CB With collectors you develop a partnership over many years; with artists, on the other hand, in my experience it’s love at first sight. I would say it’s the difference between a strategic partnership and a passionate alliance. But in all cases there is a need for trust and empathy and generosity on both sides, and that needs to be very tangible. 125

Meleko Mokgosi

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Democratic Intuition

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Democratic Intuition is an epic of southern African life and folklore by Motswana artist Meleko Mokgosi, who lives, works, and teaches in the United States. Several of the work’s eight chapters are currently on view at Gagosian Britannia Street, London, in Mokgosi’s first-ever solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and Europe. Inspired by a lecture by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, in 2013, the project’s guiding principle is the importance of reciprocity and equality in democratic process—an idea that is simple to grasp yet, it seems, difficult to achieve. As Spivak argues, democracy is, in essence, a counterintuitive rather than an intuitive practice: the practice of democracy, the recognition of others’ freedoms, and the ability to participate in governance depend on access to state apparatuses, but these apparatuses would have to be utilized in such a way that their electorates are educated toward the ethical, as well as toward some kind of collective consciousness that would take into account class interests—which is rarely, if ever, the case. In the middle of the Quattrocento, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted the six-part fresco cycle The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico as a civic commission for this city republic. Centuries later, Mokgosi engages the concept of democratic process and its internal contradictions by painting compelling genre scenes, often involving prominent figures from public life in Africa and the African diaspora, which jumpcut between the confines of manual work, the freedoms of intellectual enterprise, and their ties to gender and race. Drawing on his own extensive research and archival photographs, Mokgosi uses the strategies of cinematic framing and montage and the lessons of history painting to storyboard in meticulous detail scenes from the narrative of postcolonial southern Africa—right down to the last, seemingly spontaneous brushstroke. Out of this long and arduous research process, which for some chapters took years, a parade of finely drawn characters emerges out of raw canvas, portraying the asymmetries of power that underscore the traditional divisions of labor. In each of the eight titled chapters that make up Democratic Intuition, Mokgosi attempts to break open another facet of democracy and to grapple with the cultural biases that complicate and impede the attainment of equality by peoples around the world. And in reconceptualizing where art history, postcolonial nationhood, and democracy intersect within an interdisciplinary critical framework, Democratic Intuition seeks to redress the many ways in which Black subjects have become unattributed objects of empire and institution. —Louise Neri

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When I began conceptualizing Democratic Intuition, in 2013, my approach was rooted in historical and theoretical research and shaped by confronting my limited understanding of the ideas and practice of the democratic. Before this project I had spent the previous five years examining national identification, xenophobia, the political ramifications of nation-state discourse, the asymmetrical nature of globalization and how this affects where I am from—and, last but not least, the notion of postcolonial aesthetics. The focus on the nation-state led me to inquire how we practice the democratic through various political discourses. At the outset, I quickly realized that apart from vague and populist conceptions, I did not understand the practice of the democratic. Therefore, I moved forward with an abstract question: if democracy is founded on the impossible choice between exercising my nation-state-granted freedoms as an individual while having to recognize the individual freedoms of another, how can I reciprocate democracy? Moreover, how would I use representation as a tool to unpack and investigate this question? The question felt—and still feels—urgent. It is clear that the ways in which the economic, political, and social situations were established and how they now function do not produce wholesale equity, shared access to resources, beneficial participation in governance, and the well-being of the general public. I had previously thought that the role of representation is a straightforward one. There is a direct link between political discourse and what I try to do as a painter. An artist aims to represent, to depict, to render something. In politics, “to represent” could be defined as a way of “speaking on behalf of” or “to stand in for” or “decide for.” As a painter who focuses on the human body, this project resonated with me because the body is fundamental to coming to terms with all notions of representation. Consequently, Democratic Intuition examines the complexities of what it means to represent something or someone. The intricacies of representation bring to the fore some of the most pressing epistemological and gnoseological concerns. From the beginning, skepticism about democracy was built into the project because it was evident to me how almost all of society’s institutions and systems came with built-in biases and injustices. Such a sentiment was captured well by W. E. B. Du Bois’s theorization of democracy, which I encountered early on in my research. For Du Bois, democracy always involves a tense and delicate balance of multiple opposing perspectives. Most importantly, he argues that democracy “is the method of showing the whole experience of the [human] race for the benefit of the future.” Democracy depends on recognizing the worth of each person’s “feelings and experiences to all.” According to Du Bois, any social system or institution that excludes anyone automatically reveals that democracy cannot be realized. Or to put it differently, the practice of democracy remains impossible because it is an ideal that can never anticipate the effects and progression of capitalism (with which democracy is always intertwined) and its abuses. The subject who can realize the democratic project does not exist and cannot be constructed through Western humanism. Regardless of the pessimism and troubled histories of these ideas, this project proved to be a great learning curve for me. First and foremost, I discovered that to access the democratic

Meleko Mokgosi, Bread, Butter, and Power, 2018, oil, acrylic, bleach, graphite, photo and pigment transfer, and permanent marker on canvas, with plastic sleeve, in 21 parts; 1 part: 108 × 72 inches (274.3 × 182.9 cm), 18 parts, each: 96 × 96 inches (243.8 × 243.8 cm), 1 part: 96 × 132 inches (243.8 × 335.3 cm), 1 part: 84 × 12 × 12 inches (213.4 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm) © Meleko Mokgosi

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In order to negotiate these representational spaces, I use allegory to rewrite or reimagine preexisting texts with the hopes of compelling the viewer to acknowledge and reconcile their biases and methods of interpretation.

through apparatuses of the state, one must utilize particular models of intellectual labor in order to perform the kind of abstract thinking needed to develop reflexivity, critical analysis of systems and institutions, and participation in governance. This is the main premise behind “Exordium” (2015), the project’s first chapter. The core of these ideas, the title of the project, and many other concepts derive from the seminal work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The complexities of access to resources, education, and class structures are further explored in “Comrades I and II” (2016), “Bread, Butter, and Power” (2018), and “Objects of Desire” (2019). “Comrades” looks at anticolonial sentiment and liberation struggles and the effects of those movements, mostly within the confines of Botswana and South Africa. By coupling group portraits with Setswana texts that detail dinaane (a form of storytelling rooted in the oral tradition), I had hoped to highlight the roles that language and education play in self-actualization and various forms of resistance. To give a primary example, the 1976 Soweto Uprising was triggered by these two elements. After years of underdevelopment and racist policies in education under the apartheid system (mainly done through the Bantu Education Act of 1953) came the directive that Afrikaans had to be used on an equal basis with English as one of the languages of instruction in “African” schools. This mandate—to forcefully instruct South Africans in colonial languages (English and Afrikaans) while at the same time disregarding the numerous African mother-tongues that had nourished the imaginations of millions of people and were connected with invaluable histories of cultural, personal, psychological, and pedagogical import—sparked outrage. These populations were being forced to comply with an education system that was specifically designed to devalue them. The Bantu Education system was meant to train Africans to perform only cheap manual labor; i.e., the aim was to ensure that Africans could only occupy the roles of laborer, worker, and servant in apartheid society. As H. F. Verwoerd, the architect of the Bantu Education Act, explained: “There is no place for [the African] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor. . . . It is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community.” Those who valiantly fought for colonial liberation under the auspices of egalitarianism, equity, and equality did so with the aim of toppling racist and violent colonial regimes. However, given how most postcolonial nations on the African continent have progressed since liberation, it is difficult to argue that there exists comradeship across ethnicity, race, gender, and class lines; in other words, not all comrades are equal. “Bread, Butter, and Power” furthered my research and knowledge around issues of class, equity, and gender in relation to democracy and self-actualization. Of particular importance was the interrogation of intersecting oppressions, with a main focus on the subject of the Black African female. As Patricia Hill Collins has remarked so well, intersecting oppressions reproduce themselves by corrupting and distorting sources of power within oppressed groups that provide energy for change.1 Through this chapter I conducted research around the history and politics of Black and African feminism. In trying to understand how individual citizens gain access to the democratic, I realized

the importance of acknowledging and engaging with the idea of gender. Just like race, gender is a discursive construct that has been transformed into a systematized fact that occupies an important role in subject formation. Consequently, gender is a psychosomatic object that makes itself felt most forcefully on the body. Yet gender is not just a construct but a meaningful social and relational sense of one’s body that is produced through systems of difference. This differentiation conditions methods or protocols of interpreting our experience of reality within a symbolic structure that exceeds and precedes any subject. A subject and his or her partner in interaction are located and able to speak only on the grounds of mutual recognition within this symbolic structure. In the geopolitical areas I was looking at, these divisions of labor have particular manifestations and results. One that I considered closely, through historical texts and personal experience, was the field of informal economic enterprises, which is mainly occupied by women who do not have access to capital and resources. Toward the end of completing the chapter, I came to understand that feminist discourse does not travel effortlessly between cultural manifestations of femininity and gender roles. Therefore this political movement has to be transcribed and transformed in the continued process of building alliances. In addition to exploring how laws, customs, and emotional attachment (say, to a flag or a native tongue) are linked to the democratic space, these chapters further pose questions around representation with their focus on unconventional compositional structures and display strategies, the structure and shape of the picture plane, and narrative tropes such as allegory. Central to all of these are the politics of Blackness. Having spent considerable time trying to construct representations of the Black subject, I became more ambivalent about how representations of Blackness are always used to refer to race and injustice. Representations of white subjects are seldom affected by the politics of whiteness because it is these very politics that have rendered the white subject universal and therefore not immediately subject to race discourse. What then can one make of representations that take the Black subject and render it within an allegorical context? Is it possible to overcome the baggage of Blackness when viewing and analyzing representations of a Black subject? Convention stipulates that the representation of any Black subject function as a hermeneutic limitation. The Black subject is never just a subject but a Black subject, never universal. Therefore, a polysemic interpretation can only happen theoretically, because the Blackness of the Black subject always comes with cultural, symbolic, and emotional histories. Put another way, race discourse always accompanies the Black subject. In order to negotiate these representational spaces, I use allegory to rewrite or reimagine preexisting texts with the hopes of compelling the viewer to acknowledge and reconcile their biases and methods of interpretation. A viewer cannot help but be cognizant of the method of reading and interpretation at the moment he or she begins to engage with any allegorical narrative, whether visual or textual. Because allegory is contrived to show something else (as an extended metaphor within a structured system of meaning), it presents itself as first and foremost a constructed thing. This constructedness of presenting itself as one thing with the promise of saying something else necessarily places emphasis 131

Book List Meleko Mokgosi shares forty-three books that have informed Democratic Intuition. 1. The Color Purple – Alice Walker 2. The Keepers of the Kumm: Ancestral Longing and Belonging of a Boesmankind – Sylvia Vollenhoven 3. Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora – Gay Wilentz 4. So Long a Letter – Mariama Bâ 5. Our Sister Killjoy – Ama Ata Aidoo 6. The Boer Whore – Nico Moolman 7. Gender – Claire Colebrook 8. Woman Native Other – Trinh T. Minh-ha 9. The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon 10. Sisterhood Is Global – Robin Morgan (ed.) 11. Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class in the Anti-Racist Struggle – Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis 12. Recasting Postcolonialism – Anne Donadey 13. Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers under Apartheid – Jacklyn Cock 14. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World – Kumari Jayawardena 15. Beloved – Toni Morrison 16. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures – M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty 17. Gerard Sekoto: ‘I am an African’ – N. Chabani Manganyi 18. Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry: 1900–1980 – Iris Berger 19. African Perspectives on Colonialism – A. Adu Boahen 20. The First Next Time – James Baldwin 21. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses – Oyèrónké ˙ Oyěwùmí 22. African Gender Studies: A Reader - Oyèrónké ˙ Oyěwùmí (ed.) 23. At Home with Apartheid: The Hidden Landscapes of Domestic Service in Johannesburg – Rebecca Ginsburg 24. The Souls of Black Folk – W. E. B. Du Bois 25. Changes: A Love Story – Ama Ata Aidoo 26. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa – Walter Rodney 27. Reflecting Rogue: Inside the Mind of a Feminist – Pumla Dineo Gqola 28. Love in the Time of Treason: The Life Story of Ayesha Dawood – Zubeida Jaffer 29. 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 – Winnie Madikizela-Mandela 30. Burger’s Daughter – Nadine Gordimer 31. A Question of Power – Bessie Head 32. Discourse on Colonialism – Aimé Césaire 33. Nervous Conditions – Tsitsi Dangarembga 34. Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke – Zubeida Jaffer 35. Triomf – Marlene van Niekerk 36. The Spivak Reader – Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (eds.) 37. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity – Chandra Talpade Mohanty 38. Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy – Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, Donna-Dale L. Marcano (eds.) 39. Black Families in White America – Andrew Billingsley 40. We Need New Names – NoViolet Bulawayo 41. Winnie Mandela: A Life – Anné Mariè du Preez Bezdrob 42. Black Feminist Thought – Patricia Hill Collins 43. African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood - Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí ˙

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on the method of construction and reading one will employ. In a way, the allegorical has a built-in alibi for the viewer in the sense of an elsewhere that is accessible through the viewer’s idiosyncrasies. These preoccupations led me to a chance encounter with William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s 1883 painting The Motherland. It struck me as a peculiar allegorical history painting that did not feel right in its representation. I began an in-depth examination of the French painter, his tropes, techniques, and history. Added to this inquiry was the coincidence that most of Bouguereau’s paintings I was looking at were painted around or during the Scramble for Africa. Although coincidence is sometimes arbitrary, it was an important factor in this case because it revealed something quite important: that history, with a big H, is better understood through historicity. History is not an event or collection of events but rather a number of “unfoldings” that bear the mark of things before. I tend to think of history as something that is already present. “Acts of Resistance” (2018) was site responsive in two ways: over the course of two years of research, the chapter engaged the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, examining the politics of representation in its holdings. Additionally, the project occupied institutional space not ordinarily granted to contemporary works of art (namely the exhibition rooms that display works by European masters). I was particularly drawn to Madonna Adoring the Child with Five Angels (c. 1485–90), a tondo by Sandro Botticelli. The painting is an emblem of a master narrative in Western painting that has taught viewers to read spirituality and adoration in the specifics of a subject’s gender and race. Additionally, I greatly admired the defiant stance and expression of Little Gypsy (1850), by the French nineteenth-century painter Alfred Dehodencq. But my appreciation was no doubt tempered by Dehodencq’s exoticizing of his darkskinned subject. The pose of resistance portrayed by the subject captures one of the central questions I wanted to explore in this installation: namely, what should the viewer make of the subject’s gestures of resistance when the person who created that representation of defiance is more empowered than the subject? Contradicting this painting was Portrait of a Young Lady (1560), attributed to the Flemish painter Caterina van Hemessen. The painting depicts a fashionably dressed white female subject adorned with gold chains. She addresses the viewer directly. I was drawn to the extraordinary technical and formal elements of the painting, even more so when I discovered that van Hemessen is credited with creating the first portrait of a painter seated in front of the canvas while painting—unknown during the preceding Renaissance period. Furthermore, I was fascinated by the metaphors embedded in the use of golden chains, which the wall label makes out to be about costume and fashion. The fact that van Hemessen was a talented young female painter (who made about ten paintings in total), but was unable to continue as a practitioner due to gender roles and divisions of labor, signaled to me that the chains were used as a protofeminist symbol. Overall, the chapter focuses on an expansive notion of resistance. Regardless of whether resistance is formal or informal, it must always involve self-care for those who are marginalized and thus made to feel less valuable. It is important to emphasize that resistance does not solely involve scrutinizing external pressure acting on

your subjectivity; it also involves interrogating how we understand and conduct ourselves. Just as we have to resist things from the outside, we also have to resist internalized pressures that work against who we want to be. For the most part, informal resistance finds its expression through cultural resistance—and I was drawn more to this element. As a result, “Acts of Resistance” made evident that in order to practice or support resistance against institutional forces, it must always involve radical forms of intimacy with systems that perpetuate systemic injustices and abuse those whose voices and demands are illegible to dominant structures and political mechanisms. “Objects of Desire” and “Chimurenga” (2019), the final chapters of the project, returned to some of the key questions in the previous chapters, but in them I decided to invert the shift of power within the subgenres of painting. Whereas before I had relied on large canvases and grand narratives, which mostly suited history painting, the last two chapters utilized formal and technical elements mostly found in still life paintings. Furthermore, the materials did not rely solely on specific politics in southern Africa but directly responded to formative exhibitions and aesthetic precedents by looking at how the art institution as a whole creates systems of value, legitimizes certain practices and objects, and creates discursive parameters that are meant to leave out many for the sole benefit of a few. Elements I focused on were: the invention of “primitive art” and its relationship to “African” art and artists; the development of “modernism” and its racist politics and histories; and, last but not least, the correlation between linguistic systems and semiotic ones and the results of privileging one over the other. These two chapters allowed me to closely examine the historical and epistemological effects of the Western art canon and its relationship to political discourse and democratic ideals. With Democratic Intuition complete, it has become clear that democracy is incompatible not only with the foundational elements of the human subject but also with the various systems and institutions that support dominant forms of subjectivity or humanism in general. Put another way, democracy is incompatible with structural racism and institutionalized or systemic violence; democracy is incompatible with neocolonialism and neoimperialism; democracy is incompatible with the instruments that reproduce the conditions for and possibilities of capitalism; democracy is incompatible with race discourse, Eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, and humanism—all of which have become the dominant ways in which reality is conceptualized, interacted with, and historicized. Text excerpted from Meleko Mokgosi: Democratic Intuition, published by Pacific (October 2020) on the occasion of the exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery's The School.

1. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1991/2008).

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PART 4

e stared a lot at uncrossed thresholds and stared a lot at screens. We watched aerial footage of a hambur ger wrapper floating on the breeze past a closed nail salon. We saw a pug dressed in a Tyvek suit and booties leading its human companion, also in Tyvek suit and booties, down an empty boulevard. We saw grandfathers dressed in full-body rainsuits with bra cups strapped over their mouths. Sometimes a standing man would fall to the ground— first in China, then again in Iran, then again in Italy. We saw piles of body bags in vestibules. To be spotted outdoors at all was soon to be thought of as criminal. Interiors suffered: HVAC systems grew exhausted from our sensitivities, floorboards acquired new scratches, the filaments burned out of light bulbs, plumbing grew clogged from our waste. We wore the enamel off sinks with all our cleaning. Every wall, out of weariness at its human inhabitants, grew thinner. If a newly unemployed assistant manager two doors over couldn’t stop coughing, the walls not only let this sound through but seemed to issue it an invitation. Ambulance sirens, phone calls to insurance companies, domestic disputes over finances, and sex grunts passed freely between houses and rooms, like the smoke from vanilla-scented candles and cherryscented vapes. It wasn’t only that the walls became thinner; they also started closing in. Where we could once move about freely, we were now met with multiplying obstacles: a stepladder, an ottoman, piles of bills, small children, roommates. We were aware that the walls of the now-empty opera houses and museums and courthouses were expanding

in proportion to the constriction of ours. Basketball arenas mocked us with their calm emptiness. Those in prisons, ware houses, cruise ships, and meatpacking plants watched their walls close in faster than the rest of us, so much so that those within them sometimes revolted, grew ill, or died. We saw nursing home patients press handwritten signs to their windows. We watched videos of incarcerated men burning files in a ransacked office, shouting about health care, the contraband cell phone camera momentarily resting its sight on a barred window, and then past it to a white cloud in a blue sky. Office towers, schools, and airports became the loneliest of all buildings. Even shopping malls mourned. What had once been sites of dizzying, bustling circulation became as empty as cathedrals at dawn. Elevators ceased to rise. Fluorescent lights rarely had the opportunity to flicker. Biometric scanners had nothing to measure but dust. Bats hung from the eaves of parking garages. Swallows inhabited the dim hulls of financial districts. Rats missed the ease with which they once found dinner. Termites now nibbled, untroubled, at once important beams of wood. We became obsessed with the freedom of the other animals. Dolphins cartwheeled in the Bosporus. Jackals overran a park in Tel Aviv. Pumas lounged on the street corners of Santiago. Flamingos blanketed Mumbai. Lions sunbathed on highways. Coyotes crossed the San Francisco Bay Bridge. In Argentina, sea lions nudged open the doors of closed surf shops. Everywhere there were monkeys and temples, monkeys ransacked temples. If we had been told that vultures held mass in the Sistine Chapel, or that polar bears were now legislating at Westminster, we might have agreed it was true. We believed

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that doves, honeybees, ocelots, salamanders, sharks, badgers, catfish, and possums could now express the desires they had hidden from us for centuries. Grasshoppers might eat all the gold in Fort Knox. Beavers could build neon-lit dams in Las Vegas fountains, and perhaps did. Except for our delivery drivers, who had become like pigeons, and our politicians, who had remained vipers, many of us had become like moles. Moles, on the other hand, had become like eagles: expansive and undeterred, expropriating golf courses and suburban lawns. Now molelike inside our shrinking rooms, caught up in the sounds of our increasingly desperate neighbors, fixating on our unopened doors, not one of us thought to break her computer screen, crush his phone’s sim card, or throw their hard drive out the high-rise windows. Instead we worked harder to flatten life so that it might fit into code. Space and time fainted from the shock. Live streams and Web meetings stampeded through satellite waves and buried cables. We had already, for years, masturbated to screens; now we had our dying relatives, alone in the ICUs, say their final goodbyes to them. Our infrastructure stuttered in the onrush of all of this abstracting. It tripped, barely caught up, tripped again. The cloud spread out over all of heaven, now irrevocably imbued with idolic intensifications. Its earthly twin—the data centers erected in ocean waters or in faraway fields—grew hot with human need. The cloud became the cradle for our fears: bioweapons, toilet paper shortages, economic collapse, tech billionaires implanting microchips in an unwitting population, and martial law. We woke each morning to enter all we were into the cloud’s capacious being. Our love, work, school, shopping, sex, law,

medicine, and death all now resided there. The cloud held how we humiliated and punished each other, too, both for entertainment and for profit. It held how we felt angry and also how we felt ashamed. There were not enough metaphors for the cloud and all it was to us, so it went by many names, including The Skewed Account, The Infinite Repository, The Final International Bank of Vindictive Memory™, Nimrod’s Reversal, The No-Mercy Engine, Bad Collectivity, and The Omega and the Omega. If we left our homes, we did so with our cameras ready, hoping to gather up and donate the last fugitive instances of our embodiment. We had taken all that was once us and now, seeking a new form, pressed ourselves flat, offered this up to the cloud, which then rendered it into math and glass and light. The screens on which we did this became the altars of the new gods, ones that we were only beginning, in these early days, to name. First, however, the old gods had to fall. When we finally opened our doors again, it was to gather, enraged, around pedestals. The old harms and the new had joined together, and for this reason, everything monumental needed to fall. Statues came down wherever they stood: slavers, presidents, prime ministers, war lords. Men with guns gathered to protect them. The statues continued to fall. So many statues fell that some of us suspected the gathering crowds were against the form of “statue,” the form of “pedestal” itself. Any rendering of a man standing in a posture of the Enlightenment, strong faced and unsmiling over once public places, was a form of the old and unworkable world that had to go. The president of the United States stood in front of a mountain carved with strong-faced and unsmiling men of the Enlightenment, promised he

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would throw all iconoclasts in federal prison and build a grand park full of statues. The statues continued to fall. They fell like the angels at the hands of Cromwell’s men, fell like the ancient Buddhas that fell to isil. That is, they fell the way icons were supposed to fall, in that this is what they were made for, but this time they fell as three-dimensional life itself also fell and wouldn’t stop falling. Between the monument and the moving image, it was clear to us which had won. This is when the first of the new religions crawled into the open. Its sacraments involved reposting memes and defying the algorithms meant to defeat it. Its hashtags were prayers—“Where we go one, we go all,” and “God will win.” Its initiates circulated screenshots of expensively priced office furniture that they imagined hid enslaved children—e-commerce sacrifices to Moloch, to be sold to blood-drinking celebrities or art-world satanists who served their flesh at dinner parties. The converts pledged by the thousands, then the tens of thousands, to become soldiers in a holy war, swearing to “trust the plan,” piecing together scripture from what they called the “breadcrumbs” left by an anonymous Internet prophet on a pornographic image board. Its adherents began to gather on the streets, yelling about crusades and cheese pizzas. This new belief—syncretic, opportunist, diffuse—galloped across borders, recruiting all who were unhappy in those days, and so many of us were unhappy that it was a surprise we did not all fall under its spell. It was, as many things seemed to become suddenly and without warning, Manichaean. The president of the United States was the prince of light. Tom Hanks and Oprah were the demonic forces that had been, for thousands of years, attempting to devour the earth.

There were twin hurricanes and summer snowstorms. Baghdad reached a record high of 125 degrees. Locusts swarmed the Horn of Africa. A million people died of the plague. There was no public mourning. There were no Elton John songs or saccharine or melancholy televised extravaganzas of grief. No one decorated with black crepe ribbons the refrigerator trucks full of cadavers. No one piled up teddy bears and bouquets of flowers. There was no increase in the sales of wreaths, not even a website with a gif of a flickering candle looped in endless remembrance of those we’d lost. There was no common grief, just mistrust and fear and celebratory jeering when a tyrant fell ill, but none of the tyrants ever bothered to join the dead, who all now stood aghast around the living. The ghosts were now too disheartened to haunt. By the time the West Coast of the United States was on fire and the sky had turned orange all the way to Great Britain, people had already begun to kill each other for new reasons, ones we had not yet invented before the plague had come. Perhaps it was a miasma moving across the land that caused poor judgment, like whatever had inspired those with boats to line them up for a parade, biggest to smallest, so that the smallest boats were sunk in the subsequent wake. There were, at times, actual flagellants. The rich got so much richer they ceased to be in the grasp of math. Rumors spread of the blackclad enemies of all, invading small towns, defacing gravestones, setting forests on fire. Men in white trucks gathered in militias to chase down what was never there. Hundreds of elephants in Botswana fell dead of no known cause. Every fiction lost its purpose. A star two million times brighter than the sun disappeared from the sky.

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Raymond Foye speaks w th the author, musician, and Americancounterculture record-keeper Ed Sanders at his home in Woodstock, New York.

Previous spread: Ed Sanders, Woodstock, New York, May 29, 1981. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images This page, clockwise from the top: Ed Sanders and Janis Joplin, Anderson Theater, New York, 1968. Photo: Elliott Landy Ed Sanders, Glyph for the Muse of Sudden Clarification, 2008 Invitation to Ed Sandersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s obscenity trial, January 2, 1966

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Poet and writer, bookstore owner and publisher, peace activist and environmentalist, and founding member of the musical group The Fugs, Edward Sanders turned eighty-one on the day I spoke with him in August of 2020. Sanders is one of the last great figures of the American counterculture, and from his home in Woodstock he remains as vital and productive as ever. His latest book, published in 2020 by Brooklyn’s elegant small press Spuyten Duyvil, is A Life of Olson—a biography of the poet Charles Olson, told in verse and glyphs. The hieroglyph has fascinated Sanders since he took classes in ancient Egyptian at the New School in 1961, and he quickly saw how it could be adapted to his early imagistic style. I’m not sure how many poets are composing in hieroglyphs today; suffice it to say that he is preeminent within that small group. Among Sanders’s many fans was the late David Bowie, who listed The Fugs, the band’s self-titled second LP (ESP, 1966), as one of his top twenty-five albums, noting, “This was surely one of the most lyrically explosive underground bands ever.”1 Bowie also listed Sanders’s Tales of Beatnik Glory as no. 78 on his list of top 100 books.2 Running to almost 800 pages, Tales of Beatnik Glory is a brilliant and sprawling collection of Chekhovian short stories chronicling the subterranean life of creative rogues on New York’s Lower East Side. A pioneer of the mimeograph revolution, in 1962 Sanders began publishing Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts—surely one of the more eyecatching titles in the annals of literary appellation. In 1965 he opened the Peace Eye Bookstore at 383 East 10th Street, where the decor included four silk-screened flower paintings donated by Andy Warhol and hung as banners. Antiwar and legalization-of-marijuana activities regularly landed him on trial and in jail. As courtroom attire, his blue suede shoes particularly outraged Judge Julius Hoffman at the Chicago Seven trials in 1970. In the 1970s, close encounters with Charles Manson resulted in yet another underground epic, The Family (1971, revised third edition 2002). Since then Sanders has published dozens of books of poetry, history, journalism, and biography. He has released over a dozen albums of original material with The Fugs, in addition to eight solo records, including the genre-bending country-and-western albums Sanders’ Truckstop (1969) and Beer Cans on the Moon (1972). The scope of Sanders’s work is daunting, so in this conversation I chose to focus on the unifying element behind it all: his vast archives. Since the 1960s he has been preserving the cultural artifacts that have passed through his spheres of interest. As a passionate researcher myself, I understand the talismanic power and unmediated narrative that historical objects possess and emanate.

Sanders met his wife, Miriam, at New York University in 1959. Miriam studied geology and Ed would graduate with a degree in ancient Greek. Sixty-one years later they are still together, living in a small cabin in Woodstock, where they moved in 1974 to raise a daughter, Deirdre. Here Sanders continues his work promoting the green agenda: historic preservation, zoning regulations, water rights, and conservation. Miriam’s book of nature essays and drawings, Our Woodland Treasures, was published in 2020 by Station Hill Press. Raymond Foye How do you maintain your focus in the midst of so many diverging interests? Ed Sanders You need to pare down what you do in the world. Compartmentalizing: I’ve done that pretty well. I’m able to build these Protestant walls to divide projects up. RF Protestant walls? You mean your upbringing? ES Yeah, my mother was very religious and taught a Sunday school class, like Janis Joplin’s mom taught a Sunday school class. Some of us wound up being pretty bacchic during our wild youths but some of us hung on to a certain discipline. RF When did you first get a sense that you were going to keep an archive? ES Early on in the 1960s I started saving things, mostly items that came to me in the mail when I ran a bookstore and a little magazine. First I discovered manila folders, which were very useful to keep track of things you needed. Then I was involved in the nonviolent peace-activist movement, which generated a lot of files that later became useful for court cases. Slowly I began building a history of all my activities, alphabetical and chronological by subject. But the real breakthrough came in the 1970s, when I discovered banker’s boxes, which are letter and legal size and very sturdy. You can stack eight of them on top of each other without them collapsing. So I began to measure out my life in banker’s boxes. When I moved to Woodstock I acquired several baby barns that I’ve now filled up with my archive. I have a writing studio attached to our garage and I filled that up, and there are more archive boxes out in the woods in something called the duck barn. In the house there are numerous filing cabinets and boxes of active materials. I have well over 500 boxes in my archive now. At a certain point it becomes a question of what should be excluded from the archive. An archive is never done, it’s never complete. I have it all listed on a computer. My rule is to be able to physically locate any particular item within a minute or two: any photograph, any manuscript, any tape.

When I can’t locate something I get very upset, but it’s very rare that I can’t find something immediately. RF Was Allen Ginsberg an influence on the archive? ES Yes, and Jack Kerouac too. You never would have thought that this rowdy gentleman had such a meticulous archive, but Kerouac kept everything very well organized, and he dated everything. RF It’s always frustrating in an archive when you come across a poster or invitation and it says “May 15th” but no year. Of course it makes sense: when you get an invite in the mail, you know what year it is. But thirty years hence it’s a problem. The ideal archivist has an awareness of the historical moment, in present time. ES Right. That’s another principle of archiving: you have to date every entry, every interview, every discussion. Every idea needs to have the date of when it was created, and to be labeled so it’s clear what it is. Because if you’re like me and you’ve done a bunch of things, over time a number of manuscripts can appear in an archive, and you don’t know who wrote them—there could be hundreds of manuscripts. I did a lot of work for the mimeograph revolution and lots of poetry came my way. Most poets are egotistic enough to write their names on all their poems, but in the ’60s there were a lot of space cadets who just handed in their poetry or songs and forty years later no one knew who they were. So the idea is to keep everything chronological, alphabetical, and subject by subject. And then I learned from William Burroughs, when I looked at some of his archives, he typed a description of what was in each box and taped it on the front, so I started doing that too. Because once you start moving archives around, it can get all scattered and rearranged, like pick-up sticks. RF Every archive constitutes a history in itself—a kind of secret, unofficial history, doesn’t it? ES In a way, yes. I guess an archive will ultimately be of value to scholars in the future, but in some cases just to a handful of scholars, maybe just one scholar, maybe two scholars. I had the galleys for William Burroughs’s novel The Wild Boys [1971] in front of me when I began writing my book on the Manson family, so I wrote my first ideas for the Manson book on top of The Wild Boys. Perhaps someday somebody will possibly make note of that. Or they won’t. RF A commonplace item, because of its association, can have great import. At the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, for example, they have a simple white T-shirt stenciled with the words “Greystone

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Park State Hospital.” Somehow that T-shirt communicates the tragedy of Guthrie’s situation at that stage in his life better than any biographer ever did. ES I have a pair of blue suede shoes in my archive that I wore when I testified at the trial of the Chicago Seven in 1970, and I have a gas mask from the Chicago riots. Oh, and when I went to congratulate Charles Olson after his Berkeley lecture in 1965, I noticed he’d drained a small handheld bottle of Cutty Sark scotch, and it was lying there on the podium, so I grabbed it and there it is in my collection. It’s nice and small and it fits nicely in a file folder. Ultimately the question is what to keep. It’s all just a flash of infinity—two hundred years will go by very quickly and whatever’s left of our archives will be our remains. It could end up being like an archaeological dig: an archaeologist can take a few potsherds and bronze buckles, the remnants of an old metal helmet and one or two embers of a threethousand-year-old campfire, and voilà, they can hallucinate a book. Same with the sacred relics of the Beat generation, or the hippie generation, or the mimeograph generation, or the rock ’n’ roll generation, or the computer generation. RF There’s an archaeologist named E. Breck Parkman who actually conducted a dig on the remnants of a California hippie commune called the “Chosen Family.”3 He excavated all kinds of debris, including record albums by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but he also found records by Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand and the soundtrack album to My Fair Lady. Parkman concluded that “our species is a complex and diverse one and that those who believe that we can be subdivided into stereotypes are only fooling themselves.” What a marvelous summation. So in this regard, archives often stand against histories: the objects themselves may tell a very different story from the established accounts. Speaking of archaeology, I’d like to ask about your obsession with Egypt and how that led you to think about hieroglyphs as a medium for poetry. You’ve adapted the glyph to your own uses in fascinating ways; by now it’s become a second language for you. ES In the late 1940s my mother used to walk me and my younger brother home from the movie theater in the little town of Blue Springs, Missouri, where we lived. After the movie we walked past the cemetery and I remember my mother telling us the story of the curse of King Tutankhamun—how all the archaeologists who opened up this tomb were later cursed with untimely deaths. I always remembered that. We had a wonderful art museum in Kansas City, the Nelson-Atkins, which had some Egyptian items. Later, when I came to New York City in 1958 to study at NYU, I became aware of these wonderful bookstores in

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Cooper Square and along Fourth Avenue, where I acquired some of the early books on Egyptology by Sir Alan Gardiner— really original scholarship. In the fall of 1961 I took a course in ancient Egyptian at the New School, taught by Joseph Kaster. Then when I was in jail in the late summer of 1961 for trying to board a nuclear submarine, I had an Egyptian textbook in my jail cell and all my memory cards for studying hieroglyphs—I made little index cards from the inside of cigarette packages, the hieroglyphs on one side and the translation on the other. Not long afterward I began to use what I called glyphs in my poetry. I started Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts in 1962, and there I started drawing Egyptian images and glyphs on mimeograph stencils with a stylus, mutating them to fit the language of the counterculture. RF It sounds like hieroglyphs may be the future of writing. I suppose emojis are glyphs, but a fairly impoverished species. Your new Life of Olson seems to be the fullest realization of this concept so far. Exactly how do you see the glyph functioning in your work? ES Well, gradually the glyphs evolved until I began to realize they weren’t just idle drawings I was doing. Ezra Pound uses glyphs in the Cantos, mostly Chinese ideograms. My sense of space in poetry, visually, was significantly influenced by photographs of Zen rock gardens in Japan, which seemed like living hieroglyphs. Another big influence was reading John Cage’s Silence, his arrangement of text on the page. I also related the glyphs to Henri Matisse’s cutouts, which he thought of in terms of Platonic images or “signs.” Many of my glyphs are arranged with words but some of them stand by themselves as visual poems. A glyph can be observed very quickly or can be an object of extended contemplation. RF What is it about the persistence of Egypt—what makes it so compelling to people all these years? ES It’s just a long river with a narrow civilization on either end, from the Delta south to Nubia. It had an interesting religion, the solar religion, which featured lots of human/animal transformations. But it was their artwork that remains so compelling and alive. When I started working with glyphs, I realized that one day in the future they would be able to move, to wiggle and change color—the ancient Egyptians believed the hieroglyphics on their shrines were actually alive. Matisse talked about the effect of color on emotions, and I realized that you could have color typography utilizing colors associated with certain mental moods. Long after my time here on earth, I think eventually hieroglyphs will go full color—not cartoons, but closer to literature. The human eye can detect

It’s all just a flash of infinity—two hundred years will go by very quickly and whatever’s left of our archives will be our remains. –Ed Sanders

This page, clockwise from the top: Ed Sanders and Nelson Barr inside Peace Eye bookstore (383 East 10th Street), New York, January 14, 1966. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images Postcard from Charles Manson to Ed Sanders, Christmas 1988 Cover of Ed Sandersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, vol. 9, no. 5, June 1965

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This page, clockwise from the top: Ed Sanders, Woodstock, New York, 2020. Photo: Raymond Foye Ed Sanders, Glyph for song It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest, 1968 Poster for Jail Poets Benefit, Living Theater, New York, JulyÂ 22, 1963 Photos and scans, unless otherwise noted: courtesy Ed Sanders and Granary Books

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The difference between whimsy and genius is sometimes imponderable. Warhol always had a clear idea about what to do next, and that was the difference between him and a lot of other artists. –Ed Sanders

something like 4,000 different shadings of color, so why not utilize that capacity? There are interesting possibilities. I make a glyph just about every day, when the spirit moves me. RF I know you were good friends with Andy Warhol, and he was a big supporter of your early activities. ES When I arrived in New York City, in my late teens, I started going to all the art galleries and museums. Warhol silkscreened a bunch of flower paintings for the opening of the Peace Eye Bookstore in February 1965, and he sent a lot of people by. He was always in his own world, but he would often come to Fugs shows, and I would hang out at the Factory, although I more or less admired him from afar. One of the first Fugs songs I wrote, but never recorded, was a salute to Andy Warhol. I have a rehearsal tape of it somewhere. RF So you really appreciated him at the time, as an artist? ES Yeah, sure, he was a very sophisticated conceptual artist and he also had a great interest in the counterculture. I never went along with people who deprecated Andy Warhol, I thought he was an excellent artist. He was a highly skilled draftsperson, and technically extremely meticulous: I’d watch him touch up those silk-screen paintings very carefully, getting all the colors just right. The difference between whimsy and genius is sometimes imponderable. Warhol always had a clear idea about what to do next, and that was the difference between him and a lot of other artists. If you’re in the avant-garde you can’t control the kind of people who want to hang out with you. I can remember being backstage at a Fugs show in Cleveland, surrounded by Hells Angels, and I realized you had to maintain your integrity and dignity and worth in the midst of whatever chaos happens. I think Andy Warhol was pretty good at that. I guess he would always go home to mother, which is probably a good idea. RF Did you ever go to Claes Oldenburg’s storefront? ES No, but I did go to many of the early Happenings. RF Was that an influence on The Fugs?

1. See David Bowie, “Confessions of a Vinyl Junkie,” Vanity Fair, November 20, 2003. 2. See John O’Connell, Bowie’s Books: The Hundred Literary Heroes Who Changed His Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 197. 3. E. Breck Parkman, “Digging Olompali: The Archaeology of the Recent Past,” Society for California Archaeology Proceedings 30 (2016): 175–82. Available online at https://scahome.org/ wp-content/uploads/2017/03/15-Parkman-Breck.pdf (accessed September 14, 2020).

ES It was an influence only because I realized you could rent a storefront and get a tank full of grapes, get a naked person to dance up and down on top of it, add a Fender guitar and amplifier and a smoke machine, and then you could charge admission. It was an updated version of a rent party. In the ’50s through much of the ’60s in New York, you could rent a pad for $50 a month, so you didn’t need much of a job to pay for that. It made it possible to earn a living through

one’s art. That’s how The Fugs got going, playing in galleries. Then [the poet] Diane di Prima put us in the American Theatre for Poets on East 4th Street. The idea was to make a living, or a half a living, off your art, and the performance movement pointed a big purple arrow in that direction. RF Do you ever reflect on what young artists are up against today in terms of society and capitalism, how to make a go of it, what it’s become? Any ideas about how you would get by if you were starting out, what it would be like, how it would be different? ES It’ll always be difficult for an artist, between now and 20,000 ad. To do something like art or performance or music or painting, it’s not unnatural but it’s full of obstacles. First of all, you have to believe in yourself, you have to learn to trust your heart, and you just have to keep working on your art until you’re satisfied that you’re doing the best you can do given all of the gifts you have. And then you put it out there, and if it’s not accepted, then you have to decide whether you want to go on as a neglected artist. I always think there are a lot of Emily Dickinsons out there who just got turned off and don’t survive as great artists when they could have in different, more encouraging climates. It’s hard to know. And then to be impoverished like William Blake or Charles Olson or John Wieners, none of them were overfinanced. It’s a difficult thing even to talk about. It’s hard to know how many great artists are squashed out of the game while lesser people may have more pronounced egos, or the ability to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and stay on their feet. You have to believe in yourself. Olson said you have to dare to be part of history, you have to enter the time stream in a historical way and make yourself known, but you also have to avoid arrogance. RF Did you ever have any resentment toward the art world when artists started making really significant amounts of money and somehow the poets, because they didn’t make material objects, didn’t share the same success? ES No, I always felt sympathy for inventors. An artist invents something in time, and they should be recompensed for their work. It’s true that some artists get ridiculously high prices for their work, but again, that can have to do with aggressive and pushy managers or agents. Because the more artists get paid, the more goes to agents and dealers, the same way as in real estate. I don’t know, there’s no easy answer. I don’t like to criticize creative people for making a living from their art, even if it’s excessive, because you’re dealing with capitalism, which is unnecessarily vicious.

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FORAY FORÊT: TRISHA BROWN’S

CHOREOGRAPHED LANDSCAPES

On the occasion of the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s fiftieth anniversary, Hendel Teicher examines the legendary choreographer’s work through a biographical lens. Each artist works from a single idea or image and later gauges the success of a work in comparison to that image. Not that it would look like the original, but that it would be of equal power. If this is true, then for me it is the forest, a memory of dampness, broken light, unbelievable density, stillness and secrets. —Trisha Brown, n.d. Trisha Brown—one of the most influential choreographers and dancers of her time—spent her formative years in the small town of Aberdeen, Washington, bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north by the Olympic National Forest. The forest spans nearly a million acres and is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the United States, including the largest remaining stands of old-growth trees. The scale and various topographies of that landscape deeply moved and activated Brown’s creative imagination. Brown’s dance embodies not only physical movement but also remembered movement: climbing trees, pole-vaulting, playing football and basketball, digging for razor clams, hiking; hunting geese, duck, and pheasant; fishing in local rivers for salmon and for steelhead and cutthroat trout. Brown remembered the forest as her “first art lesson,” and her activities there guided and trained her in navigating animated environments.1 To observe the forest floor, the textures of rock and soil, the living surfaces of a fallen tree, the architecture of a 100-foot cedar; to hear the sounds of birds, wind, and water; to perceive the temperature, the pressure of the air, the scent of the forest; to welcome the spectacle of the forest’s

fluctuating and transient light—all Brown’s senses were engaged as she learned how to slow down, stop, find balance, engage, and feel the position and movement of her body. The forest would be an ongoing source of inspiration, as evidenced to varying degrees of specificity by some of the titles she chose for her choreographies: Trillium, Skunk Cabbage, Salt Grass, and Waders, The Dance with the Duck’s Head, Skymap, The Stream, Floor of the Forest, Primary Accumulation on Rafts, Spiral, Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503, and Foray Forêt. Woodlands are animated, dense, mysterious places with dark recesses of their own. They demand alertness, curiosity, and a fearless physicality. These qualities, encouraged in Brown during her childhood, appear throughout her life and work. She thrived on physical challenges, always keeping herself off balance, sometimes even to the point of danger. Like the painter Willem de Kooning, Brown was a “slipping glimpser.”2 Both were virtuosos who chose to work against their natural abilities, a precarious device for remaining open and focused on process, the generator of form and image. The physical freedom that Brown experienced growing up amid a wild and powerful nature was a gift that nurtured her curiosity and courage. She recalled early experiences as a child running fast on the uneven forest floor, full of fallen trees. She had to quickly choose where to place her feet, creating asymmetrical and unpredictable pathways. She registered these stored memories as broken patterns, a prevailing subject of her work. I n 1961 , Brow n t ra nspor ted her Pac i f ic Northwest sensibility to New York, which she envisioned as an artificial forest of corresponding scale and density. She was eager to explore it, and to join the small New York art world of like-minded spirits. She danced with her friends Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Simone Forti, and early on met Robert Rauschenberg, already established as one of the most inventive artists of his generation. In 1965, she danced in his performances Spring Training and Map Room II, and their enduring friendship would later produce numerous collaborations. She was also captivated by Rauschenberg’s work with Merce

Previous spread: Roof Piece, Soho, New York, 1973. Photo © 1973 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved This page: The Dance with the Duck's Head, New York, 1968. Pictured: Trisha Brown, Steve Carpenter, Peter Pole, Elie Roman, Melvin Reichler. Photo: Jeanie Black, courtesy Trisha Brown Dance Company Opposite: Woman Walking Down a Ladder, New York, 1973. Pictured: Trisha Brown. Photo © 1973 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved

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Cunningham and John Cage, whose music and ideas had a far-reaching impact on her own work. Specifically, Brown was drawn to Cage’s use of chance procedures as an organizing principle. Chance allowed her to “reposition the units of motion that make up a phrase. They become objects that can now be put together in any order, random or determined. Abstraction seeps in.”3 Brown’s early and long-lasting attraction to improvisation had been established in the summer of 1960, when she attended a six-week workshop with Anna Halprin. Working outdoors on Halprin’s wooden dance platform in northern California must have felt familiar. Located on a steep hill, the deck was suspended in air, amid the birds and surrounded by trees. Brown remembered her first “mercurial surges of an intuitive process where physical proposals and responses were dished and dashed on a whiz-by playing field. [Halprin] also introduced ordinary task as formal structure, which found me sweeping the deck with a push broom for hours until I crossed over into levitation.”4 Yvonne Rainer, another participant in that workshop, recalled the very moment when Brown pushed so hard on the broom that “her body was catapulted into the air parallel to the ground.”5 When Brown repeated the move two years later in her solo Trillium—this time without the broom, but still giving “herself the tasks of sitting, standing, and lying down while in the air”—Rainer marveled again at her dexterity and “innate kinetic humor and fearlessness.”6 The title Trillium refers to a three-petaled wildflower, a perennial in Northwestern forests. Brown observed that it “grows in the spring . . . [and] is this beautiful creature down in the forest when you are walking through all this dark. . . . I tried to transplant it to my mother’s garden and it would never take. It would never go into the conformity of a garden. It grew wild.”7 Performed in 1962, Trillium, a three-minute improvisation, marked Brown’s first choreography and her official entrance into New York’s art and dance worlds. She continued to thrive on the elusive practice of improvising while always incorporating structure, a way of taming the unknown.

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Trillium shaped that unique quality of Brown’s work where both memorized and instinctive movements meet organizing principles. “I love the give and take between idea and physical enactment,” she said, “with instinct sorting out the problems along the way. The body solves problems before the mind knows you had one. I love thinking on my feet, wind in my face, the edge, uncanny timing, and the ineffable.”8 The 1960s were an extraordinary period of artistic cross-pollination and experimentation, with painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, poets, and dancers all exploring the connections among their disciplines. Their experiments “cracked open the door of new possibilities” for Brown, showing her that “the modern choreographer has the right to make up the way that he/she makes a dance.”9 So when, in December of 1968, she performed The Dance with the Duck’s Head in the lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a viewer might have been rattled by the work’s unexpected juxtapositions. Preparing for her appearance in this prestigious 150

location, Brown had spent weeks building her costume and had sketched several ideas for the fifteen-minute choreography. In this ambitious and arduous undertaking she performed in the lead role, stuck in her rigid papier-mâché duck costume, her movements obstructed. Quite a contrast from the lightness of Trillium. At the beginning of the performance the “half bird, half woman” moved across the stage in a crouch and sat down on a chair. This was followed by a staged “violent fight” between two performers positioned in the audience. When things cooled down, the “duck” stepped into a pair of logging boots bolted to a metal frame, which was then lifted by four men who walked around the space, twisting, rolling, and even turning the frame upside down to depict “the look of free flight.”10 The performance was at once raw, humorous, and poetic and seemed to reference the dynamics of gender relations. Looking to expand her territory, Brown would next confront the forest of the city. The New York environment began to play an essential role in her developing choreography; Lower Manhattan

Above: Floor of the Forest, New York, 1970. Photo © Carol Goodden Opposite: Group Primary Accumulation on Rafts, Loring Park, Minneapolis, 1974. Pictured: Trisha Brown, Carmen Beuchat, Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Carol Goodden. Photo © Boyd Hagen

especially offered an inspiring beauty, and the postindustrial economy provided many large, empty, and cheap spaces in which to live and work. Brown’s early performances, often short, singular pieces, were performed in spaces untraditional for dance: streets, rooftops, parking lots, parks, lofts, galleries, museums, churches. Exultant and fearless, Brown literally dove into a direct engagement with the forms of the architecture itself, as reflected in the titles of her choreographies: Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), Walking on the Wall (1971), Roof Piece (1971), Woman Walking Down a Ladder (1973). These performances tested the body with notions of gravity, pressure, weight, force, and energy. Clearly, walking down the facade of a sevenstory building, cantilevered out from the wall while remaining parallel to the ground, called for not only courage but confidence, in both the climbing equipment and the athleticism of one’s own body. The dramatic effect of Woman Walking Down a Ladder was captured in a low-angle photograph that juxtaposes the large, vertical, sculptural wooden water tank on a Lower Manhattan rooftop against the small, bare-legged figure of Brown, her body horizontal, her feet wearing only flip flops. It was, in her own words, just a “natural activity under the stress of an unnatural setting. Gravity reneged. Vast scale. Clear order.”11 Roof Piece was another inspired combination of dance and place. In the early summer of 1971, Brown appropriated the rooftops of about ten blocks of SoHo as her dance floor. Chimneys, bulkheads, parapets, and water tanks punctuated the performance space, which ran in a loose north/south line. On their various roofs, fifteen dancers, all dressed in red, performed improvised movements, signaling mysterious signs, like semaphore without the flags. The sequence began with the first dancer at the north end of the line, the second dancer repeated the same signing, and so on, all the way down to the final, southernmost dancer. The performance took fifteen minutes, stopped, and then reversed direction for another fifteen minutes. Brown was testing how accurately gestures could be transmitted over distance and time. Some communication broke down, and some movements were lost along the way—another example of a chance

operation at work—but Brown understood the necessity of documentation and its central role for her choreography. To that end she commissioned the filmmaker Babette Mangolte to film and photograph the event, creating a record of the unique circumstances of the performance. In contrast to Roof Piece, Floor of the Forest (1970) was performed indoors, at 80 Wooster Street, the “Fluxhouse Cooperative” of Fluxus leader George Maciunas. The stage that Brown constructed here was a twelve-by-fourteen-foot metallic pipe-frame across which knotted ropes formed a grid. The grid in turn was densely woven with old clothes, producing an uneven, strange, colorful surface. These manufactured products—pipes, ropes, clothes—replaced the trees, roots, shrubs, and mosses of the forest. The stage “floor” was elevated to eye level and occupied the middle of the loft space. Audience members were free to move around, crouch, or stand up in order to see the two performers, Brown and Carmen Beuchat, whose task was to dress and undress while moving across the horizontal structure from one side to the other. Here, Brown questioned the fundamental position of the body and the hierarchy of its parts. Activities normally done standing were performed above and below the horizontal plane. As the dancers slowly moved along the plane, confronting their own body weight under the pull of gravity, their efforts were arduous and occasionally comedic, especially when negotiating buttons and zippers. Sometimes they rested, lying in a piece of clothing hanging down hammocklike. Another horizontal choreography, Group Primary Accumulation on Rafts, had a different mood. First performed on the lake in Loring Park, Minneapolis, in 1974, it took as its dance floor the water surface: Brown, Beuchat, Carol Goodden, and Sylvia Palacios Whitman floated on individual square rafts, lying on their backs while executing in unison the same thirty moves in eighteen minutes. Their movements propelled the rafts. Seen in a lateral view from the shore, the dancers drifted on the lake, following a clear, choreographed order—lifting knees, stretching legs, extending arms, and turning on their sides. In the last two minutes, each dancer was seen to make a 360-degree turn atop the raft. Here,

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Brown demonstrated her love of structure by setting geometric gestures in contrast to the intangible properties of water and air. This particular performance took place on a rainy day, which added a layer of melancholy. Opal Loop/Cloud installation #72503 (1980) brings Brown’s childhood landscape center stage, this time in the cloak of fog. Working on a proscenium stage, where, in contrast to the works discussed above, the audience would only have a frontal view, Brown found her sense of pictorial focus greatly heightened. Given her collaborative spirit and her intimacy with the visual arts, she decided to join forces with the Japanese sculptor Fujiko Nakaya, who shared with her a preoccupation with the natural world: Nakaya creates cloudlike environments, controlled sculptures made solely of fog. These clouds formed an animated backdrop for Brown’s choreography. The misty formations changed every night, as they depended on the atmospheric conditions of the space. Working indoors for the first time, Nakaya manipulated the fine balance between water, heat, and air while for the dancers’ sake avoiding the condensation of fog on the f loor. Her artificial landscape enveloped the dancers at times, even to the point of making them disappear entirely. When the dance concluded, the cloud flattened and rolled forward across the stage like an ocean fog. The aural mix—the mechanical sound of water passing through high-pressure nozzles, the natural sound of the dancers’ breaths and footfalls—reinforced the haunting and beautiful aspect of this performance. Brown’s “sexy, sequential, seamless, silky, sensual” movements emerged within the amorphous and fluctuating fog formations. 12 Eighteen years later, Brow n’s childhood engagement with the forest found expression in the opera house. Opera is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, uniting poetry, music, dance, and the visual arts—an artificial equivalent to the complexity of the natural world long woven into Brown’s memory. In 1998 she was able to realize a presentation of Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo (1607) on the stage of the Théâtre de la Monnaie, in Brussels. In the Prologue, a character representing the spirit of music, La Musica, flies in an ethereal blue sphere, simultaneously evoking the eighteenthcentury Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Rococo ceilings, which depict the fluctuation of light and clouds, and Brown’s own longings for flight, a dominant motif in her work. The baritone Simon Keenlyside, who played Orfeo in this

Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503, New York, 1980. Pictured: Trisha Brown, Eva Karczag, Lisa Kraus, Stephen Petronio. Photo © 1980 Babette Mangolte, all rights of reproduction reserved Choreography: Trisha Brown

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full-scale opera production, remarks that Brown had a “wonderful way of using the edges of the canvas as if it were a peripheral vision. . . . You never leave unwatched the edges of a Trisha Brown stage. It may just be that she is talking to you, the audience, from the wings and other dark recesses of the stage.”13 L’Orfeo was one of six operas that distinguished the latter part of Brown’s career. In 1970, two years after the idiosyncratic performance of The Dance with the Duck’s Head, she had founded her own dance company with three female dancers: Beuchat, Goodden, and Penelope Newcomb (who danced under her first name only). It was a decisive step that proved to be extremely productive: Brown’s total body of work came to comprise 100 choreographies and the six operas, as well as a significant body of writings, videos, and drawings. And her emotional atmospheres continued, and still continue, to evolve, as a network of young dancers keeps her choreography alive: this year, the Trisha Brown Dance Company celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.

The epigraph to this essay comes from a typed note by Trisha Brown, probably from the late 1960s. See Hendel Teicher, “Bird/Woman/Flower/Daredevil: Trisha Brown,” in Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001 (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 2002), 283. 1. Brown, “How to Make a Modern Dance When the Sky’s the Limit,” in Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown, 289. 2. See John Elderfield, “Space to Paint,” de Kooning, a Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 20. 3. Brown, “How to Make a Modern Dance,” 290. 4. Ibid., 289 . 5. Yvonne Rainer, “A Fond Memoir with Sundry Reflections on a Friend and Her Art,” in Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown, 47. 6. Ibid. 7. Brown, in Teicher, “Bird/Woman/Flower/Daredevil,” 283. 8. Brown, “How to Make a Modern Dance,” 290. 9. Ibid. 10. Brown, notes, n.d. One of these is illustrated in Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown, 267. 11. Brown, in Anne Livet, “Contemporary Dance,” 1982, in ibid., 306. 12. Brown, interview with the author, December 16, 2000, in “Opal Loop,” in Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown, 107. 13. Simon Keenlyside, in “Music,” November 5, 2000, in Teicher, ed., Trisha Brown, 212.

TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY Founded in New York City in 1970, the Trisha Brown Dance Company celebrates its 50th Anniversary in 2020. Over the course of her career, Trisha Brown (1936–2017) created more than 100 choreographies that challenged and changed the way we define dance. She developed her own dance vocabulary, combining commonplace movements and gestures with intricate, athletic technique. She defied convention (and gravity) in site-specific works that sent dancers soaring across SoHo rooftops or walking down the side of a building; then, starting in 1979, she moved on to proscenium works that brought an equally

experimental outlook to the stage. The company’s board, staff, dancers, and friends celebrate this milestone year—and while most of its anniversary performances and tours have been canceled due to covid -19, its artists have, without missing a beat, pivoted to a series of digital dance projects, creating new work that connects them directly to the profoundly experimental impulse that drove all of Brown’s art. For more information, or to support the Company’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration, please visit www.TrishaBrownCompany.org.

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Opposite: Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun), 2020, oil on canvas, 63 × 47 ¼ inches (160 × 120 cm) Following spread, left: Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Joseph Karl Stieler), 2020, oil on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 31 ½ inches (100 × 80 cm) Following spread, right: Master of Egerton, Métamorphose de Daphné, in the illuminated manuscript of Christine de Pizan’s Épître d’Othéa, c. 1400–10, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des manuscrits Last spread, left: Matthias Darly, The Extravaganza, 1776, engraving, 13 ¾ × 9 7⁄8 inches (35 × 25 cm) Last spread, right: Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Joseph Karl Stieler), 2020, oil on canvas, 31 ½ × 25 5⁄8 inches (80 × 65 cm) Ewa Juszkiewicz artwork © Ewa Juszkiewicz

EWA JUSZKIEWICZ Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, considers the historical precedents for Ewa Juszkiewicz’s painting practice.

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Transform, dissolve my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well! —Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1, AD 8 As the beautiful water nymph Daphne tries to escape a predatory suitor, the god Apollo, she makes this plea for help to her father, Peneus. Just as Apollo is about to capture her, Peneus, a river god, grants her wish by turning her into a laurel: her flesh becomes bark, her arms grow into branches, her feet turn into roots, and “her hair is changed to leaves . . . the girl’s head vanishes, becoming a treetop.”1 T he striking and ambig uous work of Ewa Juszkiewicz brings back to me Ovid’s classical narratives of transformation and agency (or lack thereof), and their many representations over centuries of European visual culture. Juszkiewicz reimagines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings of fashionably dressed women in ways that disturb the veneers of beauty and gentility. In the historical works, by artists such as LouisLéopold Boilly, John Singleton Copley, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the ladies occupy customary settings: seated on plush furniture, or on hillsides with bucolic landscapes spread out behind them, or simply framed by a neutral background that emphasizes their colorful garments and artfully arranged hair. Their poses and body language are similar from one painting to another: they hold (but do not look at) books; rest their hands gently on pillows, tables, or in their laps; or carry flowers, fruits, or fans. We sometimes know their names, others are now unfamiliar, but, with few exceptions, their visibility in such portraits owed to their (socially and economically dependent) relationship with a man who wished to see them depicted this way and whose wealth was displayed through their finery. A mood, color, or texture, an unruly strand of hair, or perhaps the arrangement of a bit of fabric: these are the qualities that might attract Juszkiewicz to a portrait. Studying it closely (she works mostly from reproductions), she meticulously renders the textiles and trimmings adorning the subject, skillfully emulating the original artist’s painterly techniques—but in her reinterpretations, the mostly anodyne faces of the original sitters (some bearing only the hint of a smile) are completely obscured, whether by swathes of fabric, intricately plaited hair, or, as with Daphne, an abundance of leaves. By disrupting traditional portrayals in this way, Juszkiewicz draws attention to the visual tropes that defined them, to the period’s societal expectations around women’s appearance and conduct, and to the possibilities those expectations reflected. The painting Juszkiewicz references in Untitled (After Joseph Wright) (2020), for example, features a sitter wearing a voluminous dress known as a “drapery” that in Wright’s time—the work was created around 1770—was meant to evoke the fashions of the seventeenth century while showing off the eighteenth-century artist’s skill in rendering the sheen of silk. 2 The lace-making tools the subject holds (but doesn’t look at), and the scissors and workbag on the table nearby, typify the kind of industrious activity that was admired and deemed suitable for women at the time. In Juszkiewicz’s painting these objects are still evident, but the sumptuous dress fabric has metastasized to envelop the sitter’s head, leaving visible only an errant lock of hair and some pearls. Obliterated facial features can symbolize psychic erasure, and Juszkiewicz’s images visualize, with

both the clarity and the strangeness of a dream, the regimes of fashion and comportment that have constrained women’s lives. But her project isn’t only about amplifying negation or limitation. She isn’t interested in reclaiming personal narratives, or in creating specific identities for her figures; rather, by exchanging the conservative, uniform ideal of likeness—which itself is a kind of mask—for wild foliage, tangled ribbons, or masses of hair, she seeks to grant them a sense of vitality and emotional authenticity. Paradoxically, Juszkiewicz reveals by defacement, evoking traditional portraiture’s fraught relationship between outward appearance and inner life. Like Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits (1988–90), which had a significant influence on the artist, these images foreground the ways in which representations of female identity are distorted and constructed. The artist’s subversive imagery draws from Surrealist practices of appropriation and juxtaposition, and she is also inspired by contemporary fashion designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Iris van Herpen, who create alternative, nonstereotypical images of the human form through garments that embrace discontinuity, irregularity, hybridization, and biomorphism. She describes her visual interferences as “my protest against the stereotypical perception of femininity. By replacing certain patterns, I want to show women’s individual identity, complexity, and emphasize their uniqueness.”3 Displaced sartorial, tonsorial, and vegetal details may suggest hidden wells of passion and sensuality, or perhaps the transgressive or inverted identities temporarily granted in the masquerade assemblies and balls that were so popular in eighteenth-century Europe. 4 Juszkiewicz’s transformations might even read as a kind of allegory: fantastical versions of the nuanced subjectivities and inventive selfhoods that (wealthy) eighteenth-century women might have been seeking in choosing to have themselves painted in the guise of Diana, Flora, or some other mythological or historical persona.5 But her imagery also alludes to misogynist notions around artifice, fashion, and nature that have long been used to disparage and limit women. These gendered constructs were potent in the eras of the portraits Juszkiewicz so evocatively deconstructs. And because she masks women’s faces with the very elements often implicated in these discourses—luxurious textiles, stylish coiffures,

and leafy plants (signs of an eternally feminized “nature”)—her images are palimpsests through which such past cultural imperatives continue to reverberate. The so-called Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth-century period with which Juszkiewicz often engages witnessed a significant shift in the understanding of the relationship between biological sex and gender. An urgent desire emerged to delineate the qualities, interests, and demeanors that were “natural” to men and women, with the appearances of the latter being of particular concern: men were spectators, women were spectacles. Rationality and practicality were considered male attributes while women were judged irrational and silly. Vanity and a weakness for luxury and ornament had been considered “feminine” traits since antiquity, but in the eighteenth century these essentialist ideas found renewed strength around the burgeoning fashion culture that women were eagerly consuming. Fashion itself, including hairstyling and cosmetics, came to be conceptualized as feminine.6 Women’s apparent mania for fashion was perceived as a threat to the social order: in pursuit of new dresses they might trade their virtue or bankrupt their families, or they might use their fine clothes and cosmetic skills to deceive men. As one writer opined, “Women of quality in Paris display themselves . . . with a mind to taking liberties. They embellish their faces with a delicate pomade, and adorn their bodies with precious stones, whose brilliancy and flash dazzle the eyes. . . . one sees in them nothing but an agglomeration of snares, a tissue of artifices, their inflamed ambition makes them undertake the most extraordinary things in order to seduce the virtue of the grandees.”7 In fact women often instrumentalized their dress and hairstyles to express political allegiances or topical messages, or simply to achieve some measure of autonomy in a society that otherwise granted them little.8 But fashion was still widely condemned as at best frivolous and at worst an indecipherable agent of social and moral chaos: “Lift la mode’s masque and we will see that she is a hideous monster, a disorder without equal, and an abuse worthy of tears. It is impossible to depict her face because it is so plastered with make-up and covered with beauty marks that I cannot tell whether it is a human or a beast.”9 Masking, facelessness, confusion, and monstrosity: this charged language around women and their self-fashioning resonates with the unstable, unknowable identities of Juszkiewicz’s transformed apparitions. The use of cosmetics, or “the vanities and exorbitancies of many women in painting, patching, spotting, and blotting themselves,” as the practice was described in a treatise of 1653 delightfully named The Loathsomnesse of Long Haire, was subject to particular disapproval. 10 Although aristocratic Frenchmen had also worn rouge and face powder, by the mid-eighteenth century bright, unblended patches of red were primarily seen on the cheeks of women, where they suggested the glow of youth and health (in people who might possess neither), or perhaps the hectic flush of something more scandalous. Face painting was fashionable, despite being repeatedly equated with vanity and immorality (not to mention risk of poisoning from toxic ingredients such as lead). This assertion from more than a century earlier, which itself echoed longstanding denunciations, still held currency: “this painting and disguising of faces is no better than dissimulation and lying.”11 The connection between artists painting portraits of women and women painting 157

their faces—both systems of deception—was widely noted in the eighteenth century, particularly as a way to denigrate such painters as François Boucher for their “effeminate” style, which many considered all surface and no substance. 12 Beauty spots or mouches (flies) were another contested part of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century facial toilette. Popular with women of all classes (and some men), these small pieces of silk or velvet, affixed to the face with ointment, were fluid signifiers. Like tiny imperfections, they were thought to enhance attractiveness, as long as you didn’t wear too many of them at once, as the caption of one eighteenth-century French print of a woman applying them advises: “These artificial spots/Give more vivacity to the eyes and to the complexion/But by placing them badly, one risks/ Blighting beauty with them.”13 It has been suggested that the position of such spots on the face was to some degree codified as a symbolic language of flirtation. 14 These patches, though, were also associated with poor health: they could be used to cover blemishes or scars, or sometimes even as topical remedies for tooth- or headaches. They were also widely interpreted as signals of venereal disease; William Hogarth often dotted with black patches the faces of men and women whose corruption and downfall were the result of sexual misadventure. There was great concern about the social instability and moral decline that would occur if men were unable to differentiate between the uniformly painted and spotted faces of women of high and low repute, advanced and “appropriate” age, and good and ill health.15 Hair was another important site of women’s self-fashioning. Wild and orderly, intimate and public, hair lies on the blurred boundary between nature and culture. Women’s hair has been the focus of male anxieties around sexuality and power for centuries; one only has to think of the many laws across time and geography that have required it to be covered in public, or of the terrifying snake-haired figure of Medusa. In the eighteenth century, big hair was a marker of status; its complex arrangements and upkeep signaled both the labor required to create it and the leisure of the wearer. From the famed poufs of the 1770s and ’80s—“ridiculous edifices” (so called by a contemporaneous observer) built up to great heights with wool pads, powder, wires, and false hair, and festooned with fruits, flowers, and even stuffed birds or model ships16—to the sculptural ringlets, knots, and braids of the early to mid-nineteenth century, arrayed across the head like topiary, perhaps no other female body surface was manipulated more flamboyantly or with so much artifice, as many satires and fashion plates show. The ways in which the natural and the social collide and hybridize in Juszkiewicz’s figures seem to resonate obliquely with these Enlightenment self-fashionings, which provoked what one scholar has called a “pervasive anxiety about female surfaces.”17 In works such as Untitled (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun) (2019), for example, a few strands of hair escape from the fabric cocoon that encases the head and a tendril peeks out from behind the wrapped surface like a vestigial eyelash or brow. This may not have been Juszkiewicz’s intention, but the device conjures the measures taken by eighteenth-century women to preserve their extravagant poufs at night. As described in a contemporaneous account, they had to wrap their hair in a “triple bandage which everything [went] under, false hair, pins, dyes, grease, until at last the head, thrice its 158

right size, and throbbing, [lay] on the pillow, done up like a parcel.”18 One of the artists whose paintings Juszkiewicz transforms most frequently is Vigée Le Brun, to whom she has said she “look[s] for a certain intergenerational relationship, sisterhood.”19 Le Brun eschewed the restrictive and ostentatious clothes of her time and claimed to wear only comfortable tunics, shawls, and turbans (which, though, would soon become very fashionable). Her memoirs recount how she styled her own sitters: “As I had a horror of the current fashion, I did my best to make my models a little more picturesque. . . . having gained their trust, they allowed me to dress them after my fancy. No one wore shawls then, but I liked to drape my models with large scarves, interlacing them around the body and through the arms. . . . Above all I detested the powdering of hair and succeeded in persuading the beautiful Duchesse de Grammont-Caderousse not to wear any when she sat for me.”20 Juszkiewicz often enlarges and extends Le Brun’s trademark scarf wrapping. In a second painting called Untitled (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun) (2020), which references the very portrait Le Brun described, a bit of the duchess’s natural, unpowdered hair takes its place among leafy fronds, lush grapes, and tied ribbons. In what are arguably Juszkiewicz’s most unsettling images, she insinuates the (literally) outsized role that hair has played in articulating the female social body by completely replacing all facial features with dense locks. We seem to be seeing the back of the sitter’s head and the front of her body at once, as in the combined perspectives of Cubism. The styles are typically regimented, with precise partings, organized curls, or neat braids, but the hair is also rendered quite sensually, all soft, rounded surfaces and convolutions. Indeed, some of these hairy images bear more than a passing resemblance in form and feeling to an eighteenth-century print, erotic and satirical, of a female figure comprised only of an elaborately styled wig atop a bare derriere and legs wearing stockings, garters, and high heels.21 That these sharply painted curls evoke seashells or finely wrought metalwork suggests that Juszkiewicz is as much engaged with still life as

she is with portraiture. Indeed, her paintings seem to address the relationship between those two genres—the way still lifes subjectify things and portraits objectify people, particularly women. These beautiful fruit and plant compositions also evoke the trope of women as belonging to nature, a historical stereotype and limitation that interests the artist. And in referring to still life they embrace a genre that, because academicians and theorists held it in lower esteem, historically posed the least professional and social difficulties for women painters. Most pertinently, these still lifes are vanitas images. The opulent fabrics that cover the heads like shrouds, and especially the brown, mottled leaves amid verdant foliage, are there to remind us that earthly pleasures are futile, beauty is ephemeral, and all living things eventually wither and die. The word “vanitas,” from the Latin for “emptiness” and “falsity,” shares its etymology with “vanity,” leading us back to the discourses about fashion and deception that circulate around female surfaces. Like fashionable dress, cosmetics, and beauty patches, the ribbons, leaves, and swirls of hair on Juszkiewicz’s figures are unstable signs of concealment and amplification, assertion and contradiction. 1. Ovid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid: A New Verse Translation, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993), 24. 2. See the “Catalogue Entry” section of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, website entry for Joseph Wright (Wright of Derby), Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1770, available online at www. metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437954 (accessed September 6, 2020). 3. Ewa Juszkiewicz, in an unpublished interview with Bill Powers, summer 2020. 4. See Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). 5. See Kathleen Nicholson, “The ideology of feminine ‘virtue’: the vestal virgin in French eighteenth-century allegorical portraiture,” in Joanna Woodall, ed., Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 52–72. 6. See, e.g., Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004). 7. Lapeyre, Les Moeurs de Paris, 1748, quoted in Melissa Hyde, “The ‘Make-Up’ of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 460. 8. See Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (New York: Picador, 2006), and Desmond Hosford, “The Queen’s Hair: Marie-Antoinette, Politics, and DNA,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (Fall 2004). 9. M. de Fitelieu, La contre-mode, 1742, quoted in Jones, Sexing La Mode, 15. 10. Thomas Hall, The Loathsomnesse of Long Haire, 1653, 99, quoted in Rulon-Miller Books, “Hippier Hater,” available online at www.rulon.com/pages/books/46392/thomas-hall/theloathsomnesse-of-long-haire-or-a-treatise-wherein-you-have-thequestion-stated-many-arguments (accessed September 6, 2020). 11. Hall, The Loathsomnesse of Long Haire, 1653, quoted in Caroline Palmer, “Brazen Cheek: Face-Painters in Late EighteenthCentury England,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (June 2008): 98. 12. See Hyde, “The ‘Make-Up’ of the Marquise,” esp. 457. 13. The print is Gilles Edme Petit’s Le Matin. La Dame à sa toilette, 1745–60, after François Boucher. Available online at www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/388453 (accessed September 21, 2020). 14 . See Peter Wagner, “Spotting the Symptoms: Hogarthian Bodies as Sites of Semantic Ambiguity,” in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds., The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 107. 15. See Palmer, “Brazen Cheek,” 199. 16. Madame Campan, Mémoires de Madame Campan, première femme de chambre de Marie-Antoinette, quoted in Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 54. 17. Tassie Gwilliam, “Cosmetic Poetics: Coloring Faces in the Eighteenth Century,” in Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke, eds., Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 144. 18. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, The Waiting City: Paris 1782–88, trans. Helen Simpson (London: George G. Harrap, 1933), 163–64, quoted here from Weber, Queen of Fashion, 111. 19. Juszkiewicz, e-mail to the author, August 15, 2020. 20. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, The Memoirs of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, trans. Siân Evans (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 27. 21. The print is Top and Tail, “Drawn by Mr. Perwig. Engraved by Miss Heel,” 1777. Available online at www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/391903 (accessed September 21, 2020).

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TATIANA TROUVÉ When the quarantine was announced, newspapers from countries around the world being ravaged by the pandemic took on new meaning. I began, each day, to draw on the front page of a paper—it was a way of escaping the confinement, and of being connected to the strange atmosphere that was spreading around the globe with the virus. This world tour via headlines and front pages was like a journey in reverse. Suddenly, I could no longer meet the world unless the world came to me, through the newspapers. Governments and leaders around the world should have seen this as an opportunity to reconsider our societal and economic models. But no. This crisis has only heightened my anger at the inequalities we accept daily, and at the contempt we show for our planet. —Tatiana Trouvé

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n March of 2020, when the novel coronavirus prompted a wave of lockdowns around the globe, Tatiana Trouvé began to draw. Each morning she began a new work atop the front page of a different international newspaper. This daily practice, she explained to me during a video call toward the end of the lockdown, was a way to travel around the world from within the confines of her studio. By bringing together the daily rhythms of publishing and the practice of drawing—which in her hands has a diaristic quality, and a relative speed compared with other traditional artistic media— Trouvé’s suite of fifty-eight drawings captures the elasticity of time and its many different registers: its dynamic, elusive quality, its peculiarity, its equal ability to move quickly and not at all. We tend to think of time as easily measurable, an unbroken, orderly flow from the past to the future. Yet as the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli notes, “What we call ‘time’ is a complex collection of structures, of layers. . . Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multitude of them.” A state of exception creates a rupture in our sense of time, an uncanny zone. Here, elements of normalcy might mingle with an underlying sense of dread. A day might seem like an eternity, or what was once familiar might bristle with an overwhelming strangeness. Throughout her thirty-year career, Trouvé has consistently grappled with fugitive temporalities, imperceptible movements that are either, as the artist explains, “too fast for us to gain a clear image of them” or “too slow for us to discern their movement.” Her recent engagement with newspapers highlights the temporality of the print format, as well as its endangerment—threatened not only by the decline of print media but by the proliferation of fake news in a “post-truth” era. As the circulation and morphing of information accelerates, particularly when following the trail of an international pandemic, a printed newspaper today may be outdated before it even hits the newsstands. Trouvé’s recent drawings therefore form a kind of time capsule, merging an official public narrative from a fixed moment with private, hermetic reflections from roughly the same time, and generating a dreamlike space in which different times and places coexist and are superimposed. —Jesi Khadivi

Series: Tatiana Trouvé, Front Pages March 15 – May 11, 2020, 2020, inkjet print, pencil, and linseed oil on paper, in fifty-eight parts, overall dimensions variable Individual drawings, in order of preceding pages: “April 2nd, The Globe and Mail, Canada”; “April 7th, The New York Times, USA”; “April 18th, The Times of India, India”; “April 20th, Corriere Della Sera, Italy”; “March 17th, The Guardian, UK”; “April 4th, The New York Times, USA; South China Morning Post, China”; “April 13th, Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil”; “March 28th, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Germany”; “April 22nd, Mwananchi, Tanzania” Artwork © Tatiana Trouvé Photos: Florian Kleinefenn

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T.S. ELIOT MEETS HENRI MATISSE

John Elderfield asks: is it possible that the paths of these two great modernists crossed? AnÂ essay by Eliot of 1919 on a playwright of the seventeenth century surprisingly raises thatÂ question; and an investigation of primary materials reveals an unexpected answer.

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Opposite: T. S. Eliot, c. 1910–11. Photo: © Henry Ware Eliot Jr., by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University MS Am. 2560 (179a)

The speculation—and it is a speculation—that follows on the intersecting interests of a literary and a visual artist was the result of a response from a literary critic, Christopher Ricks, to an essay of mine on a contemporary artist, Brice Marden. I had quoted Marden having said in 2003, “Modernist painting has been about how the color comes up to the surface and how that affects the viewer. The whole evolution of modernism is about getting up, up, up to the surface, tightening the surface to the plane.”1 And I had asked myself, “Up, up, up from where?” Ricks’s reply was: “Have you read T. S. Eliot’s essay on Ben Jonson?” . . . 2

Eliot in 1919 Eliot’s “Ben Jonson,” a roughly 5,000-word essay on the early-seventeenth-century playwright, was first published as his inaugural contribution to London’s Times Literary Supplement (TLS) on November 13, 1919, shortly after the poet’s thirtyfirst birthday. It was followed the next day by a complementary text on Jonson of about half that length in The Athenaeum. A year afterward, Eliot inserted excerpts of the latter into the former for his first volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood; then, a dozen years later, he revised that version for his Selected Essays 1917–1932, but in both instances left unaltered the substance and most—though not all— of the words of the TLS text, which I will discuss here.3 Eliot was forever revising and reworking his critical essays, as well as his poems, to get them precisely where he wanted them, and he expected no less from the writers, and I think painters, he valued. 4 It is not unexpected, then, that he lauded the precision of Jonson’s writing. What is surprising is how he characterized the playwright’s originality: as an art of the surface, precisely opposite to the depth of feeling that is commonly thought desirable in great literature. Eliot well knew that “superficial” means “of or pertaining to the surface”; it is only in the fifth definition of this word in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that it becomes “shallow” and only in the seventh and final one “not real or genuine.” But he did not want to be misunderstood. This is why Eliot says that Jonson’s work“is ‘of the surface’; carefully

avoiding the word ‘superficial’”—while knowing that he had to defend his praising an art that lacks “a depth, a third dimension.”5 Modernist painting does not require such a defense; to the contrary. In Clement Greenberg’s often quoted 1961 summary, From Giotto to Courbet, the painter’s first task had been to hollow out an illusion of threedimensional space on a flat surface. One looked through this surface as through a proscenium onto a stage. Modernism has rendered this stage shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain, which has now become all that the painter has left to work on.6 It may be justly objected that Eliot’s “depth” and “third dimension” are not spatial descriptions but metaphors, other ways of saying “depth of character” and “well-rounded.” Nonetheless, leaving aside for later Greenberg’s own use of metaphor— his turn to the theater to explain what produced modernist painting—let us notice how, at critical moments of Eliot’s essay on Jonson, he turns to language associable with the description of painting to explain what is distinctive about the playwright’s work and should make it attractive to present-day taste at the time of his writing in 1919. Because Eliot was writing about an art of theater, it may be expected that he would think of its visual effect, but not necessarily of effects of contemporary art. Eliot wrote elsewhere that a work of history “tells more—or what it tells is more authentic—about the age in which it is written than about the past.”7 Of Jonson he says “that we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary.”8 It seems fair to suggest that, however authentically his words on Jonson speak about the age in which the playwright wrote, his essay also speaks authentically of his own age—including, at moments, of characteristics of early modernist painting. Such painting, especially French, had been well known, and controversial, in England ever since critic Roger Fry’s famous Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition of the winter of 1910–11, of which Virginia Woolf famously said, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.”9 Here are five properties Eliot finds

in Jonson’s work that unequivocally apply to some of the painting of his own time:10 Strong, simple outlines: Of a speech in one of Jonson’s plays, it “is not merely a fine speech. It is the careful, precise, filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point does it overflow the outline.” Simplification and flatness: “The simplification consists largely in reduction of detail. . . . This stripping [of detail] is essential to the art, to which is also essential a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of caricature, of great caricature. . . . He did not get the third dimension, but he was not trying to get it.” Solidity and wholeness of surface: “The verse of [Jonson’s contemporaries] Beaumont and Fletcher is hollow. It is superficial with a vacuum behind it; [but] the superficies of Jonson is solid. It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance of any part.” Before proceeding with the final two components of this list, let us pause with “superficies,” Eliot’s way of avoiding the term “superficiality.” The OED tells us that “superficies” is a term in geometry that means “a magnitude of two dimensions, having only length and breadth; that which forms the boundary or one of the boundaries of a solid, or separates one part of space from another; a surface.” In two fascinating instances in the original TLS and then Sacred Wood versions of his text, not retained in the 1932 revision, Eliot contemporized this meaning. 11 First, he said, “It is a world like Lobatchevsky’s; the worlds created by artists [interesting that he said “artists,” not “writers”] like Jonson are like systems of non-Euclidean geometry.” Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was an earlynineteenth-century Russian mathematician and geometer, sometimes described as the “Copernicus of Geometry” for his revolutionary conception of “hyperbolic geometry.” Put simply, he postulated that nominally parallel lines extending in a 173

There is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract about three thousand people in London and elsewhere. T. S. Eliot on the playwright Ben Jonson

two-dimensional plane in fact curve away from each other, effectively replacing the “flat plane” of Euclidean geometry with the model of a plane surface that variably bends and warps along its length and across its breadth. Eliot is thinking again of “flat distortion” of the solid superficies. Eliot goes on to invoke modern geometry a second time in the 1919 and 1920 versions of his essay, but apparently one reference to Lobatchevsky was enough; this time he says that from Jonson “we can derive not only instruction in non-Euclidean humanity—but enjoyment.” And then in 1932, having removed Lobatchevsky altogether, he also removed “non-Euclidean,” altering the sentence to read, “not only instruction in two-dimensional life—but enjoyment.” He is thinking of the pleasure afforded by activity brought up, up, up to the plane of the surface in fluctuating ways. Hence, a passage solely in The Athenaeum text reports of an authority on Jonson, G. Gregory Smith: “His strictures, so far as they go, and from his point of view, are just, as well as traditional: he says that the characters tend to become ‘too simple’ . . . that they have no existence apart from their setting; that Jonson makes them explain themselves by posing them in different positions; that they lack depth; that Jonson worked from the outside.”12 Again, the emphasis is on surface design—and, here, varied figural design. Two further passages of the TLS text speak of its effect. Indifference to plausible narration: Jonson’s effect is of “bold, even shocking and terrifying directness. We have difficulty in saying exactly what produces this simple and single effect. . . . Jonson employs immense dramatic constructive skill: it is not so much skill in plot as skill in doing without a plot.” Great contemporaneity: “Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson is probably the one whom the present age would find the most sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract about three thousand people in London and elsewhere.”

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These statements could well apply to many earlytwentieth-century paintings, but most patently to Henri Matisse’s; and the final sentence of the last statement reads like the description of an exhibition of such works. The question then is: what conclusion should we draw from the fact that Matisse arrived in London on November 13, 1919—the same day Eliot’s Jonson essay was published in the TLS— to install his first solo exhibition in England, which would open two days later?

And Matisse in 1919 The simple answer is: obviously Eliot could not have seen Matisse’s exhibition before writing the TLS essay or for that matter the Athenaeum one, published the next day. We know he wrote them in rapid succession after delivering the lecture “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” on October 23; The Athenaeum one probably first, since he is known to have begun the TLS text by November 5 and to have completed it at 3am on November 10. 13 He had been publishing in The Athenaeum for a while, but had been invited to write for the more prestigious TLS at the end of September 1919; it is possible that his prominent allusions to painting in the TLS text reflected his awareness of the supplement’s audience, larger and wider than the Athenaeum’s, and his reference to attracting about 3,000 people an optimistic reference to its circulation. (By contrast, The Athenaeum was losing readers and would merge with The Nation in 1921.) In any case, though, it is very possible that Eliot was thinking of Matisse while writing about Jonson—or not thinking of him but, while writing not about him, finding himself evoking interpretations that drew upon his experience of Matisse’s art elsewhere.14 Since settling in London in 1915, Eliot had become close to members of the Bloomsbury Group. In a 1918 review of a book by Clive Bell, he observed, “Mr. Bell is right with the rightness of a period, a group. . . . He is interested in the people one is interested in, from Matisse to the last show at the Mansard Gallery.”15 Members of Bell’s “group”—the Bloomsbury Group—had been attracted to this gallery of new art and design since its opening two years earlier in Heal’s department

store on Tottenham Court Road, not far from Bloomsbury. Fry had organized an exhibition of English and French painters there shortly after it had opened; and in August–September of 1919, four of Matisse’s works had appeared there in a group show, Exhibition of Modern French Art, 1914–17, organized by Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and the poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski, with a catalogue preface by Arnold Bennett and favorable reviews from the Bloomsbury art critics Bell and Fry.16 Eliot knew all of these people. It was Bell who had given him entrée to the Bloomsbury Group by distributing copies of his f irst volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations of 1917, at a party for members of the set at the country house of Lady Ottoline Morell. There, the novelist Katherine Mansfield read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” aloud to the admiring avantgarde audience. 17 The following year, Virginia and Leonard Woolf offered to publish Eliot’s second volume of poetry through their private printing press, the Hogarth Press; and in March 1919 they indeed published his Poems, a slim volume bound in a design by Fry.18 Eliot was in France from early August of that year until the first week of September, but given who had organized the group exhibition at the Mansard Gallery, he would likely have made a point of seeing it upon his return. He began writing about Jonson the following month. The four Matisses in this exhibition, though, were slight, recent works, very different from the kind of painting that Eliot’s Jonson essay brings to mind. 19 It is difficult to imagine that Eliot was impressed; he had come a long way since 1915, when he had had to ask Ezra Pound, “(please tell me who Kandinsky is).”20 By now he had seen a lot of art far more radical than these Matisses, including works by Futurist-influenced Vorticist artists introduced to him by Wyndham Lewis, and he had published a review of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s Vingt-cinq poèmes.21 Perhaps he thought the exhibited paintings were atypical, asked himself what qualities they lacked, and, like some of his Bloomsbury friends, looked forward to more exciting works in the solo exhibition.22 In any event, the Bloomsbury set, and Eliot, would naturally have been interested when Matisse came to London for

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Previous spread: Henri Matisse at work on Nature morte à “La Danse” in his studio at Issy-lesMoulineaux, c. 1909. In the background is the completed La Danse (1) (1909). The Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA 5020. Photo: Morgan Library & Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY Opposite: Henri Matisse, L'Atelier rose (The Pink Studio), 1911, oil on canvas, 70 5⁄8 × 87 inches (179.5 × 221 cm), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

a short stay, arriving on October 22, some three weeks before the opening of this exhibition—and just before Eliot began writing on Jonson. He had come to work on his designs for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Chant du rossignol, commissioned from him by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes some four months earlier.23 Matisse had been excited by the commission. On arriving in London, though, he immediately realized it was a mistake, not least because his would not be the first Ballets Russes ballet of the season: that was to be Picasso’s Parade. Matisse would have seen it in Paris in May 1917, where it had created a scandal when first presented, during dark days of the war, with separate sections of seats reserved for socialites and war victims. It fared very much better when premiered on November 14, 1919, at the Empire Theatre on London’s Leicester Square—across from the Leicester Galleries, where the Matisse exhibition opened two days later. Of the Bloomsbury circle, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were certainly in the audience. So was an unhappy Matisse.24 While Matisse was worrying about how his own ballet designs would stand up against Parade, visitors to both the performance and the exhibition would have seen the striking contrast between Picasso’s radical stagecraft and Matisse’s far more conservative paintings—for the works in the Leicester Galleries were of a similar kind to those shown in the Mansard Gallery over the summer. Both exhibitions focused on recent small canvases painted in Nice, including landscapes, still lifes, and studies of the artist’s models and his daughter, Marguerite. And the Leicester Galleries showed a lot more of them. We do not know whether Eliot saw either Parade or Le Chant du rossignol, or whether he was one of the, according to Matisse, 3,000 people who attended the vernissage of the exhibition—an uncanny match of the 3,000 that Eliot had just said Jonson’s work ought to attract in London.25 It seems likely, though, that Eliot would have wanted to get tickets for the two ballets and, more easily, would have gone to see Matisse’s exhibition. If he did, he may well have found it as disappointing as did Vanessa Bell, writing to Fry,

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The Matisses are lovely, but for the most part slight sketches. We have induced Maynard [Keynes] to buy one of the best, a small seated figure with bare arms, very sober in colour, for 175 gns. All are sold. He’s evidently a great success nowadays. These are not important works and so attractive in colour I suppose no one can help liking them. I hope he’s doing bigger things too. [Parisian poet and dealer, Charles] Vildrac has now come over with some more.26 We may assume that Eliot read not only the many laudatory reviews of the exhibition, including those in the Times and The Burlington Magazine (which delighted Matisse and compensated for his vexation with Diaghilev), but also the response to it, even more disappointed than Bell’s, that appeared in The Athenaeum on November 21, 1919. This review, by the populist critic R. H. Wilenski, decried Matisse’s lack of finish, indecision, and poor drawing—his failings, in other words, in the very qualities for which Eliot had praised Jonson in the same journal precisely a week earlier.27 One of the portraits, Wilenski observed, was “only saved from prettiness by the squint,” and it would take “only about ten minutes to convert it into a typical cover for Vogue.”28 It is tempting to wonder whether, reading these words, Eliot recalled his own just-published contrast of solid superficies and shallow superficiality. For if his account of Jonson’s work does appear to reflect a familiarity with paintings by Matisse, clearly it is not to such paintings as those seen in London in 1919. This leads to the conclusion that Eliot was drawing upon earlier experiences of Matisse’s art. In 1918, the English museologist, aesthetician, and Byzantinist Matthew Stewart Prichard came to live in London and reconnected with Eliot, whom he had known when the young poet was in Paris in 1910–11. In those years Prichard had also known Matisse, his contemporary, with whom he also reconnected when Matisse visited London in 1919.29 We therefore need to consider whether it was meeting Prichard again that reminded Eliot of paintings by the prewar Matisse, then a “poet of the surface,” that he had seen in Paris, some in Prichard’s company, and whether these memories influenced his Jonson essay.

Eliot and Matisse in 1910–11 Eliot had arrived in Paris in mid-to-late October 1910, after a short stopover in London, to attend the Sorbonne on a Harvard Traveling Fellowship.30 But for a two-week vacation in London from April 11 through 25, 1911, he stayed in Paris through the late spring of 1911; left in July to spend the summer traveling in northern Italy and Germany; then briefly visited Paris again in early September before returning to Harvard in the fall. In Paris he attended Henri Bergson’s lectures at the Sorbonne, but also spent a lot of time scouting and scouring the city’s culture, visiting museums and galleries and enjoying the metropolis. He seems to have been most interested in classical and Renaissance art, but also took note of very recent developments; and accounts of the relationship of his poetry to avant-garde visual art quite properly emphasize the importance of his awareness of Cubist fragmentation, urban imagery, and collage for, notably, “The Waste Land” of 1921–22.31 If his interests lay in that direction, however, what of Matisse? When Eliot first arrived in Paris, that year’s Salon d’Automne had been open for a few weeks. On view from October 1 to November 8, it had the particular focus of “decorative” painting, and there was a lot of it; both large canvases and small ones bold enough to carry at a distance were well represented. Of everything on view, Matisse’s two very large panels, Dance and Music (1909–10), were by far too much for the Salon audience. “On this occasion simplification has reached its extreme limits,” wrote the critic for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.32 Another, that “the provocative, poisonous colors create an impression of diabolical cacophony; the drawing is simplified almost to the point of nonexistence.” Reports speak of them evoking “constant outbursts of indignation, rage, and ridicule.” The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was almost alone in defending the paintings. Prichard was puzzled: “they were quite strange to me; they looked like posters.”33 Eliot simply had to have been aware of the scandal these works produced, and he more than likely saw the exhibition before it closed. It is conceivable that he saw it with Prichard, whom he could

We work toward serenity through simplification of ideas and form. The ensemble is our only ideal. Details lessen the purity of the lines and harm the emotional intensity; we reject them. It is a question of learning—and perhaps relearning a linear script; then, probably after us, will come the literature. Henri Matisse

(so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.37

have known in 1906–7 during his years at Harvard, when Prichard was a curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; who had been enrolled at the Sorbonne since 1908; and who had met Matisse the following year.34 Had Eliot seen nothing more of Matisse’s work, Dance and Music alone could well have been enough to represent the kind of paintings suggested by his account of Jonson, written in London nine years later. But there was more. Reminiscing in 1934 on his less-than-a-year in Paris, Eliot began by speaking of having read “the Évocations: Souvenirs 1905–1911 of our friend Henri Massis.”35 Not Henri Matisse, but a contemporary of Eliot’s who had been a severe critic of Bergson and had written “an interesting and valuable document upon a period . . . [that] includes the time of my own brief residence in Paris.” Eliot remembered “the appearance of M. Massis’s first

conspicuous piece of writing,” an attack on the Sorbonne’s teaching methods in 1911;36 and Massis appears five times in the opening dozen lines of the first paragraph of his reminiscence. At the end of the second paragraph, the turn is from “Massis” to “Matisse.” It comes preceded and followed by striking associations: [At the Sorbonne] over all swung the spider-like figure of Bergson. His metaphysic was said to throw light upon the new ways of painting, and discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved with discussion of Matisse and Picasso. I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later

We may wonder whether the discussions of Bergson in which Eliot participated in 1911 included consideration of the strongly Bergsonian passages in Matisse’s influential 1908 essay “Notes of a Painter.”38 We know that Eliot’s friend was a French medical student, Jean Verdenal, some twenty months younger than he, whom he had met and befriended at the Pension Casaubon on rue Saint-Jacques, where both were staying. Verdenal was killed in combat in the Dardanelles in 1915, just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday.39 The question is, what associates Bergson, Matisse, Picasso, and Verdenal—memories coming up, up, up to the surface as Eliot was writing of events that had occurred almost a quarter century earlier?40 It was when I had reached roughly this point in my essay that Ricks alerted me to a mention of a Mr. Okakura in Eliot’s letters of 1915. A brief editorial note in The Letters of T. S. Eliot identifies him as Okakura Kakuzo�, a Japanese scholar celebrated as the author of The Book of Tea (1906), and adds, but without offering any evidence, “In 1910 he had taken TSE to meet Matisse.”41 Kakuzo� had been a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 1904, and became the first head of its Asian division in 1910, while Eliot was living nearby—he studied at Harvard from 1906 to 1910, before going to Paris. However, if Kakuzo� played a role in introducing Eliot to Matisse, it is likely to have been through his knowing Prichard, who had been his colleague at the Museum of Fine Arts. In fact, it seems that it was Prichard who had introduced Kakuzo� to Matisse; 42 which suggests that he may well have done the same for Eliot. This issue was resolved for me by an e-mail to the Archives Matisse, which generously shared with me a letter from Prichard to Matisse of Sunday, March 12, 1911. The superscription tells us that Prichard was living at the Hôtel St. Pierre on the rue de l’École-de-Médecine, not far from the rue Saint-Jacques, where Eliot and Verdenal were, both addresses being between the Sorbonne and the Jardin du Luxembourg, to which Eliot referred in his memory of his friend. Prichard asks Matisse,

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This spread: Letter from Matthew Stewart Prichard to Henri Matisse, March 12, 1911. Courtesy Archives Matisse

If it is convenient for you, I would like to propose visiting you next Tuesday afternoon. I will bring with me my friend M. Eliot and the young Frenchman M. Verdinal [Verdenal] whom I introduced to you last Sunday. 43 In addition to telling us that Eliot did indeed meet Matisse, and about the kinds of things that Eliot and Verdenal did together, knowing the date of this visit—in 1911, not 1910—calls attention to a curious poem that Eliot wrote in the same month as the visit, whether before or after it is unknown. Titled “He said: this universe is very clever,” it features a spider, probably a reference to Bergson, and tells us that the universe “is a geometric net,” and one in which “we get/All tangled up and end ourselves inside her.”44 A twisting, reticulated surface—what in 1919 Eliot would call “a flat distortion in the drawing”—was already in his mind. And Prichard’s letter itself tells us that Verdenal had already met Matisse, which raises the question of whether Verdenal’s report of that meeting to Eliot led to the poet asking Prichard to arrange for his own meeting with Matisse as well. In any event, it is touching to imagine these two, both in their early twenties, visiting a controversial modernist painter, in his early forties, whose work in the Salon d’Automne had been almost universally condemned by the critics—an unquestionably memorable experience. And we may reasonably infer that Eliot did indeed remember it in 1917: he dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations to Verdenal that year. He had in fact begun to write “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when the two of them were together in Paris. There have been a number of contingent occurrences in this essay. A final one accounts for our knowing precisely what Eliot and Verdenal, along with Prichard, saw in Matisse’s studio in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Politeness required at least a week’s advance notice for Prichard’s request—on Sunday, March 12—for a visit “next Tuesday”; therefore, in all likelihood the visit took place on Tuesday, March 21. This was precisely one month before the opening of that year’s Salon des Indépendants, to which Matisse had submitted two portraits, only to replace one of them, after the vernissage, when most of the reviews had been written, with a much larger painting, The 178

Pink Studio, which he had just completed.45 Since a month elapsed between the date of the trio’s studio visit and the opening of the Salon, it is possible that Matisse did not begin the thinly painted The Pink Studio until after their visit, but since it is a large canvas, roughly six by seven feet in size, it may well have been in process when they arrived. We cannot of course know what Matisse and his visitors spoke about in the studio. However, while the artist began his “Notes of a Painter” by saying that painters do better not to talk about their ideas, he actually did a lot of talking about them to his studio visitors, and records exist of interviews he gave once a year from 1909 to 1913. 46 The first of these announced an essential theme: “We work toward serenity through simplification of ideas and form. The ensemble is our only ideal. Details lessen the purity of the lines and harm the emotional intensity; we reject them. It is a question of learning—and perhaps relearning a linear script [une écriture qui est celle des lignes]; then, probably after us, will come the literature.”47 Very much to the point, we can see through the thin paint of The Pink Studio that it was begun with a precise but simplified line-drawing of the Issy studio laid out directly on a white-primed canvas, its upper part in particular like a geometric net twisted in space. Then the painting was composed—like a speech in one of Jonson’s plays, in Eliot’s account—from “the careful, precise, filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point does it overflow the outline.” While offering a plausible image of the studio interior, all has been brought up, up, up to the surface, and “essential to the art [is] a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of caricature, of great caricature. . . . He did not get the third dimension, but he was not trying to get it.” In the event that Eliot did not see The Pink Studio in Matisse’s studio, he would have seen it at the Indépendants: his “friend and tutor” Henri AlbanFournier, who was tutoring him in French and introducing him to the novels of Dostoevsky, had attended the vernissage and doubtless encouraged Eliot to go there after the poet’s return to Paris, on April 25, from his two-week break in London—not that he or Verdenal probably needed encouraging. 48 They would also have seen there the debut of those of the Cubists, including Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger, whose 179

Henri Matisse, The Painter’s Family, 1911, oil on canvas, 56 ¼ × 76 3⁄8 inches (143 × 194 cm), The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo: Vladimir Terebenin © The State Hermitage Museum Artworks by Henri Matisse © 2020 Succession H. Matisse/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

work depicted urban and industrial imagery in fragmented, geometric forms; therefore, the polar opposite of what they had seen in Matisse’s studio. And whether or not they saw The Pink Studio on their visit to Matisse, they would have seen what it depicts—namely, the studio itself, and more important, its contents: some half-dozen works that Matisse had made over the past few years, the poetry of the surface in all of them. All of the works shown in The Pink Studio have been identified. 49 Suffice it to say here that their panoramic arrangement stretches from Matisse’s 1907–8 second version of Le Luxe, prominent on the wall to the left; through, on the floor beneath it, The Girl with Green Eyes of 1908, its corner protectors showing that it had not been fully unpacked after returning from Fry’s exhibition in London; to the first, 1909 version of Dance, almost hidden at the right, next to the first of Matisse’s Back sculptures. In all of the paintings “there is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours.” Prominent at the center of The Pink Studio is a patterned fabric draped over a patterned screen, with the studio wall and window seeming to rest upon it. The effect is of a stage with a painted backdrop brought up flat to the surface. As such, it constitutes a vivid illustration of Greenberg’s 1961 statement, quoted early in this essay, that modernism rendered the space of the proscenium stage of earlier painting “shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain.” Even shallower is the space of another canvas, The Painter’s Family, that Matisse made after Eliot’s visit, in late May.50 It was in progress on the twentysecond of that month when Fry, who had been struggling somewhat with how good Matisse was, wrote to a friend that now he “was quite convinced of his genius.”51 But it is unclear whether it was this work that converted him. And there is no record that Eliot returned to Issy before leaving Paris in July, and therefore of his having seen arguably the most Jonsonian of all Matisse’s early canvases.52 But we cannot dismiss the possibility. While rightly thought to ref lect the artist’s recent experience of Persian miniatures at an 180

exhibition he had seen in Munich in October 1910, The Painter’s Family is also Jonsonian in that “the characters have no existence apart from their setting” and Matisse “makes them explain themselves by posing them in different positions.” Additionally, he “worked from the outside” in a radical manner at his “careful, precise, filling in of a strong and simple outline.” He painted the work on striped canvas, possibly mattress ticking, whose horizontal lines he followed in shaping the composition, getting the ground of the painting even further “up, up, up to the surface,” as Marden would put it, “tightening the surface to the plane.” It is wholly “of the surface”—but not “superficial with a vacuum behind it; the superficies . . . is solid. It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance of any part.” Finally, a reminder of the chronology: these words of Eliot’s were written soon after Matisse’s arrival in London on October 22, 1919, and published on November 13, just short of some eightand-a-half years after Eliot, with Prichard and Verdena l, had met Mat isse in h is st udio in Issy-les-Moulineaux.

1. Brice Marden, in John Yau, “An Interview with Brice Marden,” in Eva Keller and Regula Malin, eds., Brice Marden: Drawings and Paintings, 1964–2002, exh. cat. (Zurich: Scalo and Daros Services, 2003), 51, discussed in my “Marden in Three Parts,” Brice Marden. It reminds me of something and I don’t know what it is (New York: Gagosian, 2020), 16. 2. I am deeply indebted to Christopher Ricks, the editor with Jim McCue of The Poems of T. S. Eliot (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), for his advice on Eliot and for his generous reviews of this essay as it advanced; also to two of his colleagues, Jennifer Formichelli and especially Archie Burnett, for their assistance in clarifying the sequence and dates of Eliot’s revisions of his Jonson essay. I am also indebted to Georges Matisse and Anne Théry at the Archives Matisse for answering my questions and for sharing and agreeing to the publication of the letter from Matthew Stewart Prichard to Matisse discussed and illustrated here (see note 43). And, as always, I am grateful for the editorial review of Jeanne Collins, in this case at several stages of the development of a complex text; and I thank David Frankel for his

scrupulously careful review of the final version. 3. Both “Ben Jonson,” Times Literary Supplement 930 (November 13, 1919): 637–38, and “The Comedy of Humours,” The Athenaeum 4672 (November 14, 1919): 1,180–81, were responses to a recent monograph on the playwright by an expert on Jonson, G. Gregory Smith, and a new edition of Jonson’s play Every Man in his Humour (1598). Eliot retained the title “Ben Jonson” when he revised the essay for The Sacred Wood, published on November 4, 1920 (London and New York: Methuen) and again, in unaltered form, in a second edition in March 1928; he revised the essay again for Selected Essays 1917–1932 of 1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 127–39, the editiion I cite below in my references to passages that had appeared in the TLS text. See The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 2, The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber & Faber, 2014), 150–64, for the 1932 text with annotation of variations in it from the earlier ones. Burnett’s forthcoming T. S. Eliot: Collected Prose (London: Faber & Faber, 2021) will print in its entirety the Athenaeum text together with the version in Selected Essays and the variants from the versions that preceded it. 4. Particularly to the point is Eliot’s celebrated passage on the work of “critical labour” in “The Function of Criticism” (1923). See Selected Essays, 18. 5. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” Selected Essays, 134–35. 6. Clement Greenberg, “Abstract, Representational, and so forth,” Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 136. 7. Eliot, “Of History and Truth,” in his Introduction to Charlotte Eliot (Eliot’s mother), Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1926), ix. Cited in abbreviated form in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, general editor John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 493 n. 3. 8. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” Selected Essays, 128. 9. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” a talk printed as “Character in Fiction” in The Criterion (a journal edited by Eliot), July 1924; quoted and discussed in “Commentary,” Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1:357. 10. Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” Selected Essays, 130, 138, 135, 134, 138. 11. See Eliot, Complete Prose, 2:163 n. 35, n. 44. 12. Ibid, 164, textual note 2. 13. Details of the TLS essay’s composition, drawn from examination of Eliot’s correspondence, appear in Complete Prose, 2:160–61 n. 1, where the essay itself as printed in Selected Essays appears: see note 3 above. See also Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898–1922 (rev. ed. 2011), 416–17, on the date and time of its completion on November 10, and three days later on his being tired from “writing three articles in rapid succession after the lecture,” mentioning the TLS and Athenaeum pieces and one on John Donne. I thank Burnett for drawing these letters to my attention. 14. Eliot later acknowledged possibilities of this kind in a letter to I. A. Richards of November 11, 1931, quoted in Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 15. Eliot, untitled review of Clive Bell’s Pot-Boilers, 1918, The Egoist 5 (June/July 1918): 87. According to Donald Gallup, the review is “unsigned, but almost certainly by T. S. Eliot”; see The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 1., Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker and Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber & Faber, 2014), 723–24. 16. See Richard Shone, “Matisse in England and Two English

Sitters,” The Burlington Magazine 35, no. 1,984 (July 1993): 479 n. 3. We owe most of our knowledge of Matisse in London in 1919 to Shone’s article. It is complemented by the more specialized study by Rémi Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London and his collaboration with the ‘Ballets Russes,’” The Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1,134 (September 1997): 588–99, which, with the aid of the Archives Matisse, provided the specific dates of Matisse’s twopart visit that year. 17. See Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1:368, 459. Lady Ottoline Morrell had been taken to see Matisse at his Paris studio in October 1909; see Shone, “Matisse in England,” 480, n. 6, which also lists others of the Bloomsbury set who had visited Matisse. Morell’s visit may well have come about through her role as a member of the executive committee of Roger Fry’s Manet and the PostImpressionists exhibition. 18. See Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1:462–63. 19. Shone gives the titles of these works as Lady with rings, Nude, Lady on a terrace, and Flowerpiece; “Matisse in England,” 479 n. 3. The exhibition title implies that they date from 1914–17. It may safely be said that they were not major works. 20. Eliot, letter to Ezra Pound, February 2, 1915, in Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1:94. 21. These contacts are mentioned in Nancy D. Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot’s Year Abroad, 1910–1911: The Visual Arts,” South Atlantic Review 71, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 119–20. 22. It is clear from Vanessa Bell’s response to the solo show that she had expected more from it. See her letter to Fry, November 30, 1919, quoted in Shone, “Matisse in England,” 481. 23. See Shone, “Matisse in England,” and Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London.” Labrusse’s article details the difficulties of the commission, which ended in disaster. 24. See Vanessa Bell, letter to Fry, November 15, 1919, quoted in Shone, “Matisse in England,” 479 n. 4. Writing to his wife on November 21, Matisse nastily said of the performances, “Ils sont voués à la mort car le fond est dégoûtant” (They’re doomed to death because at bottom they’re disgusting). See Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” 595. 25. That is the number that Matisse gave in a letter of November 17 to his wife; see Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” 598 n. 53. 26. Vanessa Bell, letter to Fry, November 30, 1919. The exhibition was indeed a great commercial success; Matisse’s letters to his wife of November 17 and 18 confirm that Bell was well-informed— everything had sold and the director of the gallery had asked Charles Vildrac for more paintings, adding that the important reviews had been excellent. See Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” 598. 27. See Shone, “Matisse in England,” 481 n. 14, n. 15. 28. Ibid. 29. See Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” 588. 30. Eliot therefore missed seeing Fry’s Manet and the PostImpressionists exhibition in London in the winter of 1910–11. 31. Hargrove’s extensive survey “T. S. Eliot’s Year Abroad” is a most useful account, but must be read with some caution since it discusses a wider range of examples than Eliot likely could have seen. Would he have known, for example, to go to the Kahnweiler gallery to find works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, neither of whom showed at the Salons or, with rare, minor exceptions, in commercial galleries in Paris in this period? 32. “Le Salon d’Automne,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, November 1910, 370; quoted at length in Natalya Semtonova, “The Story of an Encounter,” in Albert Kostenevich and Semtonova, Collecting Matisse (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 19–20, which also quotes the statements following. Kostenevich publishes other accounts

of the reception of these works in his essay “Matisse in Russian Collections” in this same volume, 115–17. They had been previously reviewed in Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 290–93. See also Stephanie D’Alessandro, “Opportunity and Invention,” in D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917, exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 76–87. 33. Prichard, quoted in Labrusse, “Esthétique décorative et expérience critique. Matisse, Byzance et la notion d’Orient,” doctoral thesis, Paris, 1996, 181. I am grateful to Anne Théry of the Archives Matisse for drawing this quote to my attention. 34. Prichard had been fired from the Museum of Fine Arts in 1907 for introducing then revolutionary curatorial reforms; see Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1951), 534, n. 10 to p. 105, which drolly reports that “Prichard toward the end of his life in England became convinced that he could control the weather.” On Prichard in Paris, see Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 732–34. The notebook of William King, a disciple of Prichard’s, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in an entry for May 3, 1913–February 7, 1914, tells us that Prichard “went to Paris in Dec. 1908. [Thomas] Whittemore took him to see the Stein’s collection of Matisse, and he met Matisse at his studio in the Hotel Biron by the Invalides in c. Jan. 1909. Matisse had painted La Danse and was painting La Musique. ‘I won’t say a word. I will see them again, and then, I will tell you.’ ‘I accept them. At the first time, they were quite strange to me; they looked like posters, like anything. But I knew there must be a modern way of painting corresponding to the Byzantine expression.’” Quoted in Labrusse, “Matisse, Byzance et la notion d’Orient,” 181. King also recorded a fascinating, lengthy dialogue between Matisse and Prichard on January 10, 1914, which is reprinted in D’Alessandro and Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, 143. 35. Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 13, no. 52 (April 1934): 451–54, repr. in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 3, Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934–1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 80. 36. Eliot was referring to Agathon (pseudonym of Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde), L’Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911), an attack on the Sorbonne for promoting German-style vocational training over the French classical tradition. 37. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Complete Prose, 3:80–81. 38. See Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 30–43, for the essay “Notes of a Painter” itself and for an introduction to it that includes discussion of its Bergsonian aspects, 33–34. These are addressed at greater length in Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 65–108, esp. 98, where Cronan agrees with Flam that Matisse had picked up broadly Bergsonian concepts in Paris while noting that he did not read Bergson himself before 1912. 39. The basic facts about Jean Verdenal appear in Eliot, Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1:370–71. There is an extensive literature on him, summarized in the eponymous Wikipedia article. 40. Ricks has suggested to me that potentially influential upon these remembrances of Matisse and Verdenal were the two items preceding Eliot’s in the same April 1934 issue of The Criterion that he, being the journal’s editor, would have known to be forthcoming: Ralph S. Walker’s essay “Ben Jonson’s Lyric Poetry,” 430–48, which says of Jonson, “As a dramatist he has at

last received a measure of understanding appreciation from Mr. T. S. Eliot”; and, between the last page of Walker and the first of Eliot, a two-page poem by Edward Roditi, “Trafalgar Square,” on those who “fought and fell,” the “glorious/dead forefathers on the battlefields,” and “brave young flesh.” 41. Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, 1:101 n. 1. 42. Schneider, Matisse, 773. 43. The letter reads: Cher Monsieur Matisse, Si cela ne vous gêne pas je me propose d’aller vous visiter mardi prochain dans l’après-midi. Je vous amènerai mon ami M. Eliot et le jeune français, M. Verdinal [Jean Verdenal] lequel je vous ai présenté dimanche passé. En passant par Bernheim Jeune, j’ai cherché à trouver le dernier tableau: il n’était plus là. Alors je me suis récompensé en revoyant le grand nu, qui m’attire irrésistiblement toujours, avec sa force de chef-d’œuvre. . . . Croyez-moi, avec beaucoup de respect et d’amitié, votre tout dévoué, M. S. Prichard The flattering “irrésistiblement” in the final sentence was added before the letter was sent. The “grand nu” is a painting that Matisse must later have retrieved from Bernheim Jeune since it is depicted in The Red Studio, which he painted in the fall of 1911; see Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 313 fig. 310, 321 fig. 323. It was later destroyed at the direction of the artist. 44. See Eliot, Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1:259, 1,128. 45. See Elderfield, “Construction by Means of Color,” in D’Alessandro and Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, 76–87, 108–19, esp. 111–12. 46. See Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 37 for the comment in “Notes of a Painter,” 52–73 for the yearly interviews. 47. Ibid., 54. 48. See Jacques Rivière and Alain-Fournier (the pen name of Henri Alban-Fournier), Correspondance 1905–1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 2:383–84, cited in Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot’s Year Abroad,” 103. For Eliot’s own references to Alain-Fournier see Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1:347, 458. 49. See Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 300–301. 50. Matisse made a sketch of it “well under way” in a postcard to Michael Stein of May 26, 1911: see Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public, 152–53. 51. Desmond MacCarthy’s preface for the catalogue of Manet and the Post-Impressionists was written on the basis of notes made by Fry, and the comments on Matisse are surprisingly equivocal for a project intended to introduce London to new art. Matisse is praised for realizing that “there comes a point when the accumulations of an increasing skill in mere representation begin to destroy the expressiveness of the design,” so that he “begins to try to unload, to simplify the drawing and painting by which natural objects are evoked, in order to recover the lost expressiveness and life.” But not only is the public now against him, “what is more, his own selfconsciousness hampers him as well.” Quoted in Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public, 111. Fry’s later appreciation came in a letter to Simon Bussy, quoted in Shone, “Matisse in England,” 480 n. 6. 52. Much later, Eliot would have been able to see the other contender for this description, The Red Studio, the companion to The Pink Studio that Matisse painted in the fall of 1911. It was acquired in 1927, with Prichard’s help, by David Tennant and installed the following year in his Gargoyle Club in London, frequented by the Bloomsbury set and many others, Eliot included.

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GAME CHANGER: VICOMTESSE MARIE-LAURE DE NOAILLES Ariella Wolens explores the patron’s role in fostering the legendary art world of early-twentiethcentury France. The fever dream of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 celluloid nightmare Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) climbs to a bathetic crescendo when a party of louche, decadent onlookers applaud the suicide of a lone figure on an operatic stage. Within this cabal of spectators is a sumptuously festooned, raven-haired woman of jolie laide charm, distinguished by her aquiline profile and razor-sharp cupid’s bow. This is Marie-Laure de Noailles, a childhood friend and patron of Cocteau’s—also a Surrealist co-conspirator, a devoted collectionneuse, and an artist in her own right. Noailles’s credentials as cynosure to the bizzarerie of Paris’s années folles are only rivaled by her aristocratic lineage. Born on Halloween in 1903, she was the daughter of Maurice Bischoffsheim— scion of an epically wealthy German banking family—and Marie-Thérèse de Chevigné, whose ancestry links luminaries such as the Marquis de Sade, that original icon of depravity; the Comtesse de Chevigné, a model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in À la recherche du temps perdu (“Proust? We read it to get news of friends”1); and Laure de Noves, the medieval noblewoman whom Petrarch apotheosized as his muse. Marie-Laure’s already semimythic status was solidified through matrimony, her lifelong pas de deux with the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, a dashing ambisexual whose unlimited fortune was well served by his impeccable taste. The couple’s deep-pocketed refinement and Marie-Laure’s lust for the visual imaginary guided them toward

artists whose spirits delighted in chaos and controversy. In 1930, Charles funded Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dalí’s deliciously sacrilegious film L’âge d’or to the tune of a million francs. A birthday present for Marie-Laure, the film also acted as an ironic gift to the viscount himself when the scandal around it led to his exile from the elite and ultraconservative Paris Jockey Club. To enter the Noailles’ Paris quarters, at 11 place des États-Unis, was to encounter a cacophony of treasures from both the academy and the avantgarde: Goya and Rubens rubbed up against Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró, and Cellini bronzes stood guard over portraits of Marie-Laure by the likes of Balthus, Man Ray, Dora Maar, and Pablo Picasso. While the room glittered with the beauty afforded by wealth, its importance lay in its reverence to the creed of originality; as Phillippe Jullian wrote, “From the vault, a tall Max Ernst and a car compressed by [the Nouveau réalisme artist] César shout: ‘You are not entering here to evoke the splendours of capitalism or the elegance of the aristocracy, you are with curious minds who will play you more than one trick.’”2 Between works by Delacroix, Watteau, and Alberto Giacometti lay those by Marie-Laure’s own hand. Painted on an eighteenth-century easel while the artist perched on a Louis XV fauteuil, these “blurred visionary tone poems” are abstract dreamscapes in which approximations of figures emerge from dilute earthen washes.3 As an artist Noailles may not have risen to the heights of those she patronized, Man Ray, Marie-Laure de Noailles, 1936 © Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris 2020. Photo: Telimage, Paris

but her painterly pursuits underline her passion for creativity. Within the Noailles’ Paris Wunderkammer, guests could handle the manuscript of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, a relic that set the tone for transgressive discourse. Among the sundry who attended were masters of art, music, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literature such as Jacques Lacan, Kurt Weill, and Michel Leiris, figures whose intellectual innovations are still being reckoned with today. The public dissemination of such thinkers’ radical ideas owes something to the Noailles, whose funding supported, for just two examples, the publication of Georges Bataille’s journal Documents (1929–30) and the establishment, in 1937, of Paris’s Musée de l’Homme. Each summer the Noailles’ cadre decamped to the Midi, where the couple created a pastoral modernist citadel upon the ruins of the medieval castle of Hyères. Built between 1923 and 1927, this edifice of concrete, glass, and chrome was the architectural chef d’oeuvre of Robert MalletStevens, a master of Streamline Moderne. The Villa Noailles was made legend by Man Ray’s 1929 film Les mystères du Château du Dé , which documents the pilgrimage of two travelers played by the director and the French Surrealist photographer Jacques-André Boiffard. Deciding their fate with a dice roll, they make their way from Paris to the Noailles’ villa and proceed in a clandestine exploration of its curiosities, which included bespoke fixtures by modern-design darlings Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, and Theo van Doesburg. Here the Noailles lived and entertained a Surrealist cabal with baroque decadence. Of those who came and went, the presences of Surrealist leader André Breton, poet Louis Aragon, fashion doyen Cecil Beaton, and Nobel Prize–winner and self-professed pederast André Gide were all components of the heady miasma in the air. Today, the Villa Noailles is an art center in which the patronage of this visionary couple unfurls into public view through exhibitions and scholarship. Investing personally as well as monetarily, Marie-Laure de Noailles was the consummate patron, standing with modest grace behind fearless artists such as Cocteau, Dalí, Ernst, and Picasso, whom she faithfully followed as a tacit muse throughout their careers, unfettered by the desire to cast her own shadow into posterity. She lived without fear of social condemnation or loss of power, but rather in the embrace of words, images, and song.

1. Charles de Noailles (Marie-Laure de Noailles’s husband), quoted in Alexandre Mare and Stéphane Boudin-Lestienne, Charles et Marie-Laure de Noailles. Mécènes du XXe Siècle (Paris: Bernard Chuveau, 2018), 36. 2. Philippe Jullian, “Une des maisons clé pour l’histoire du goût au XXe siècle,” Connaissance des arts, no. 152 (October 1964): 71. 3. Philip Core, The Original Eye: Arbiters of Twentieth Century Taste (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 136.

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PROUVÉ IN TIJUANA

JENNY SAVILLE: PAINTING THE SELF