Editor’s Note by Randy Kennedy
On vacation in the late 1990s, my wife and I visited the Laurentian Library in Florence for the first time and approached those magnificently scalloped Michelangelo stairs when a guard blocked the way and wagged a finger. Dreading a Kafkaesque Italian closure, we began to protest but then heard a voice from somewhere above calling out: “ACTION…WENDY!” And up on the landing emerged the familiar stooped and bewimpled figure of Sister Wendy Beckett, the television art nun, shuffling slowly across the doorway to the reading room, silhouetted by the glow from its linden ceiling. If it was not exactly a holy moment in my art education, it was impressive. With the recent passing of Sister Wendy (eulogized elegantly by Linda Yablonsky, page 26), the day came back to me clothed in all its golden raiment. And it prompted some thinking about a kind of love so obsessive as to roust a deeply private monastic woman from a life of prayer and put her on the road for years proselytizing to the masses about the joys of art. This issue of Ursula, our second, is brimming with such obsession. The painter Luchita Hurtado, on the cover and in conversation with Andrea Bowers inside, recently turned 98. She has lived in or around the art world her entire life and has been making work all that time with almost no recognition, until recently—painting diligently, ecstatically, laboriously; with no choice, as she says. The Michigan outsider-folk collector Jim Linderman, an underground hero to a certain strata of contemporary artist, is another inpatient in this ward of the devoted. He’s the subject of a new column introduced in this issue, “The Keepers” (page 74)—inspired by Massimiliano Gioni’s madcap 2016 New Museum show “The Keeper,” which cast feverish collecting as an alternative form of art-making. Traditional collectors may gain entry into this company if their zeal burns brightly enough, but it is comprised principally of people with limited means and uncommon fixations: the editor who builds a private collection based on a doomed and obscure early modernist poet; the optician who hoards the used eyeglasses of the famous and the infamous; the folklorist (Harry Smith) who stockpiled hundreds of paper airplanes found on the streets of New York City; the museum director who collected salt and pepper shakers (this was Marcia Tucker, founder of the New Museum, whose shaker holdings amazed me). The late Glenn O’Brien was another such polymath accumulator, of art, people and passing scenes. In this issue we hear him in a conversation never before published, about the life and work of a kindred spirit, the artist and bookmaker Dash Snow, gone too young, in 2009, at the age of 27. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Bill Powers—writer, gallery owner, culture surfer—for coming to me with his interview of O’Brien, along with a magnificent previously unpublished poem by Rene Ricard, mad crown prince of no-choice art makers, whom I like to imagine as addressing the ancient affliction in his 2006 poem “Boy Running.” Go away I don’t want you here that way unless you Bring the rope yourself
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Exhibition catalogue: Courtesy New Museum.
spring 2019
PIPILOTTI RIST ÅBN MIN LYSNING [OPEN MY GLADE] 13 Pipilotti Rist, Mercy Garden, Audio-Video Installation, 2014 (Video Still). © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine