Ursula: Issue 8

THE POETRY ISSUE !

CELEBRATING THE

INAUGURAL WINNERS

FILMMAKER & PRODUCER WANG BING

DANCER & CHOREOGRAPHER

MARLENE MONTEIRO FREITAS

MUSIC COMPOSER & PERFORMER JUNG JAE-IL

ARTIST COLLECTIVE KEIKEN

GAME DEVELOPER & DESIGNER LUAL MAYEN

FILMMAKER

RUNGANO NYONI

ARTIST & POET

PRECIOUS OKOYOMON

THEATER DIRECTOR

MARIE SCHLEEF

FILMMAKER

EDUARDO WILLIAMS

DANCER & CHOREOGRAPHER

BOTIS SEVA

Creating the Conditions for Artists to dare

Christina

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2007 / 2008, © Cindy Sherman, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Editor’s Note p. 20

Departments

Letters

“… to those who are not there.” Erna Rosenstein’s correspondence with the beloved departed p. 22

Antiphony

A new poem by Anne Waldman in response to the work of Pat Steir p. 24

Unknown Pleasures

Lucia Arbery Simek on Texas, martyrdom and the mysteries of Forrest Bess p. 27

Epitaph

King of the Surf Guitar: An oral-history remembrance of Rodney Graham (1949–2022) p. 30

Glitch Cade Diehm on the beauty and existential despair of open world video games p. 38

Retrospect

The Pearl Poet: Frank Bowling’s past on the page, London, 1957 p. 122

Features

The Cover Twelve Poets:

A collaboration with The Poetry Project, hosted by Nicole Eisenman p. 41

Conversation

Imaginarium: Mark Bradford on history, painting and unstable places p. 73

Profile

A final visit with the artist Dorothy Iannone (1933–2022) in Berlin, by Gesine Borcherdt p. 82

Score

The Sound of One Hand Playing: A conversation about Anri Sala’s return to Ravel p. 92

Portfolio

From the notebooks of the Swiss-American artist Cathy Josefowitz, with a meditation by Jeremy O. Harris p. 100

Portfolio

Gary Simmons on walking, waiting, looking and remembering p. 110

Departments

The Keepers

Ninety years after the Nazi book burnings, a visit to the overflowing library of Swiss collector Martin Dreyfus, protector of imperiled literature p. 124

The Artist’s Library

Sarah Blakley-Cartwright talks with Rita Ackermann about one of her favorite books, the Thomas Mann medieval capriccio

The Holy Sinner p. 132

Books

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Philip Aarons on the history of the cult 1960s East Village picture publication Newspaper , now back in circulation p. 136

Site

Leah Singer on the history of Michael Snow’s landmark film Wavelength and the Canal Street loft where it was made p. 150

Books

Some new and forthcoming titles that we love p. 142

Fiction

Calling Occupants: Jarrett Earnest goes to the moon with the Carpenters p. 144

Material

Neon: Glenn Ligon and matt dilling on glass and noble gas p. 158

Non Finito

Peter the Poet: A salute to Peter Schjeldahl p. 168

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Vol. 4, Issue no. 8: Ursula (ISSN 2639-376X) is published twice a year by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011.

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Back cover:

Josefowitz, Untitled

Courtesy the Estate of Cathy Josefowitz and Hauser & Wirth

Front cover:

Nicole Eisenman, Under the Table 2, 2014. Oil on canvas, 82 3/16 × 65 in. (208.8 × 165.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Museum purchase with funds from the International and Contemporary Collectors in honor of Richard D. Marshall, 2015.22.

Photo: Pablo Mason. © Nicole Eisenman

Cathy

, 2005. Spray paint, mixed fabrics and paper and charcoal on paper, 8.27 × 5.91 in. (21 × 15 cm).

Nicole Eisenman, From Success to Obscurity, 2004, Oil on canvas, 129,5 × 101,6 cm, Hall Collection © Nicole Eisenman. Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation.

Photo: Bryan Conley

Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1968, RITA ACKERMANN lives and works in New York. Ackermann’s work in painting and on paper proposes a continuous shift between representation and abstraction. Employing a range of media, including oil and acrylic paint, pastel, wax pencil and raw pigment, her expression hinges on automatic gestures and opposing impulses of creation and destruction. (See p. 132.)

MARK BRADFORD is known for his large-scale abstract paintings created out of paper. Characterized by its layered formal, material and conceptual complexity, his work explores social and political structures that objectify marginalized communities and the bodies of vulnerable populations. After accumulating layers of various types of paper onto canvas, Bradford excavates their surfaces using power tools to explore economic and social structures that define contemporary subjects. Bradford engages in social projects alongside exhibitions of his work, bringing contemporary ideas outside the walls of exhibition spaces and into communities with limited exposure to art. (See p. 73.)

Contributors

SARAH BLAKLEY-CARTWRIGHT is a writer and editor living in New York. Her novel Alice Sadie Celine will be published in December 2023 by Simon & Schuster. (See p. 132.)

GESINE BORCHERDT is a Berlinbased curator, art critic and author for Welt am Sonntag, ART, BLAU International, Art Review and AD Germany. She is currently working on her first book, Dream on Baby, in which artists such as Lynda Benglis, Vaginal Davis, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei and others detail their childhoods. The book is inspired by her exhibition “Dream Baby Dream” (2020). Her next exhibition, “Your Home Is Where You're Happy,” will open at Haus Mödrath in Kerpen, Germany in September 2023. (See p. 82.)

FRANK BOWLING’s transatlantic career spans more than six decades. He has consistently pushed the boundaries of painting, rooted in both the English landscape tradition and American abstraction. Bowling experiments by pouring, dripping and throwing paint; stitching, collaging and embedding found objects in canvases. Bowling became a Royal Academician in 2005, was awarded an OBE in 2008 and was knighted in 2020 for his services to art. In 2019, Tate Britain hosted a retrospective of his work. In 2022, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston held a major Bowling show that will tour to SFMOMA in 2023. (See p. 122.)

BERTRAND CHAMAYOU is a world-renowned pianist, having performed in prominent music halls including the Philharmonie de Paris, Wigmore Hall, Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Berlin Philharmonie, Suntory Hall Tokyo, and others. He is artistic co-director of Festival Ravel in France. In 2016, Chamayou's Ravel: Complete Works for Solo Piano (Erato) won the ECHO Klassik Award. In 2019, Chamayou won a Gramophone Award for his SaintSaëns recording (Erato). He has won The Victoires de la Musique Classique award on four separate occasions. (See p. 92.)

CADE DIEHM is the founder of The New Design Congress, an international research organization working to forge a nuanced understanding of technology's role as a social, political and environmental accelerant. He studies, writes, consults and speaks regularly on topics such as digital power structures, privacy, information warfare, resilience, internet economies and the digitization of cities. (See p. 38.)

matt dilling (they/them) is a partner at Lite Brite Neon Studio LLC, located on the unceded lands of the Lenape peoples in what is currently referred to as New York. For almost twenty-five years, Lite Brite Neon Studio has specialized in the production, conservation and development of neon artworks and designs, with a focus on

works by underrepresented and underserved communities of makers, including the LGTBQ+ and BIPOC communities. (See p. 158.)

JARRETT EARNEST is an artist, writer and curator living in New York City. His book of photos and writing, Valid Until Sunset, will be published this fall by MATTE editions. (See p. 144.)

NICOLE EISENMAN lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. In 2019, her work was included in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include “Nicole Eisenman. What Happened” (2023–24), “Heads, Kisses, Battles: Nicole Eisenman and the Moderns” (2021–22), “Nicole Eisenman. Giant Without a Body” (2021) and “NICOLE EISENMAN. STURM UND DRANG” (2020). Having established herself as a painter, Eisenman has expanded her practice into the third dimension. (See p. 41.)

OLIVIER GOINARD is a French sound designer and composer who has won two César awards for Best Sound, the first in 2020 for

Photo: Daniel Turner

Photo: Nicolas Party

Photo: Frédéric Schwilden

Photo: Jonathan Grassi

Mark Bradford, 2023 © Mark Bradford.

Photo: Sean Shim-Boyle. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: © Brigitte Lacombe

Contributors

The Wolf’s Call, and the second in 2021 for Adolescentes. Over the past twenty years, he has worked with acclaimed directors such as Olivier Assayas, Naomi Kawase, Agnès Varda and Xavier Dolan. In 2022, he composed the music for Koji Fukada’s film Love Life. For more than twenty-five years, he has worked in close collaboration with Anri Sala on the sound design for his projects. (See p. 92.)

American playwright JEREMY O. HARRIS’ full-length plays include Slave Play (which received twelve Tony nominations), “Daddy, ” Black Exhibition, Xander Xyst, Dragon:1 and Water Sports; or insignificant white boys. Harris cowrote A24’s Zola (2020) with director Janicza Bravo and is currently developing a pilot with A24 for HBO. Awarded the Vineyard Theatre’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and a 2016 MacDowell Colony Fellowship, Harris is an Orchard Project Greenhouse artist, a resident playwright with Colt Coeur and is under commission from Lincoln Center Theater and Playwrights Horizons. (See p. 100.)

CHARLOTTE JANSEN is a British Sri Lankan arts journalist based in London. She has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, British Vogue, Frieze and The Art Newspaper, among others. She is the author of two books on photography, Girl on Girl (LKP, 2017) and Photography Now (Tate/Ilex, 2021) and the host of the Dior Talks podcast series The Female Gaze. (See p. 30.)

GLENN LIGON is an artist living and working in New York. Ligon pursues an incisive exploration of American history, literature and society, across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. Important solo exhibitions include “Post-Noir,” Carre d’Art, Nîmes (2022); “Call and Response,” Camden Arts Centre, London

(2014); “America,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011), a mid-career retrospective; and “Some Changes,” The Power Plant Center for Contemporary Art, Toronto (2005). (See p. 158.)

Staffed entirely by poets, THE POETRY PROJECT has nurtured new and experimental poetry since 1966. Based at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, in New York’s East Village, the project has been an accessible resource and advocate for diverse, culturally rich poetry and art from its conception, offering reading series, writing workshops, a quarterly newsletter, a website and archives for poets and the wider reading community. (See p. 41.)

OLIVIER RENAUD-CLÉMENT has organized exhibitions and acted as an advisor to artists and estates in the United States, Europe and Japan for many years. He has worked frequently with Hauser & Wirth, collaborating with the gallery on more than thirty exhibitions across the globe. He has collaborated with Takesada Matsutani and the estates of Fabio Mauri, Lygia Pape, August Sander and Mira Schendel, among others. Renaud-Clément is the founder of the International Friends of the Munich Opera. He is based between Paris and New York. (See p. 92.)

ANRI SALA works in a range of media, including video, photography and installation, He was educated in Albania and France, and now lives and works in Berlin. In his films and installations, he invites viewers to participate in his world of cultural observation, for which he often uses sociopolitical settings and personal experiences as backdrops. By juxtaposing elements of past and present, discordance and harmony, and by overlapping narrative, sound and movement, Sala creates a unique sensibility. (See p. 92.)

ALEXANDER SCRIMGEOUR is an editor at Hauser & Wirth Publishers in Zurich. Previously, he was a Berlin-based freelancer editing books for MoMA, ICA Miami, the George Economou Collection and Kunsthalle Wien, among them Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction and Shannon Ebner’s A Public Character. He accompanied Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff during their sojourn at the Grüner Salon of the Volksbühne Berlin during Chris Dercon’s directorship. Before that, he spent several years working for Spike Art Magazine and Artforum. (See p. 124.)

GARY SIMMONS is a Los Angelesbased multidisciplinary artist. Born in New York in 1964, Simmons received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988 and his MFA from CalArts in 1990. His practice combines elements drawn from popular culture such as sports, music, film and cartoon imagery, to address personal and collective experiences of race and class. Tropes of ephemerality and erasure, suggesting the fleeting nature of memory and histories rewritten, are recurring themes in his artwork. A prominent figure in contemporary art discourse, Simmons has been the subject of numerous exhibitions globally. (See p. 110.)

LUCIA ARBERY SIMEK is an artist, curator, writer and museum professional based in Dallas. She is at work on a book for Deep Vellum Publishing about the Texan landscape as read through the work of artists Forrest Bess, Myron Stout and Alberto Burri. She currently serves as director of external affairs at Dallas Contemporary. (See p. 27.)

LEAH SINGER is an artist and writer based in New York. (See p. 150.)

MICHAELA UNTERDÖRFER is an art historian and philologist. From 1997 to 2000, she was the curator at Kunsthalle Nürnberg and was the director of the Hauser & Wirth Collection from 2000 to 2005. She is the author and editor of numerous publications on contemporary art. She is the director of Hauser & Wirth Publishers and lives with her family in Zurich. (See p. 124.)

ANNE WALDMAN’s most recent books include Bard, Kinetic, a memoir with poetry, essays and interviews. She is co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive The Burroughsian opera Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. She collaborated with Pat Steir on Cry Stall Gaze and on Steir's Kairos catalogue. She is a founder of The Poetry Project and the Kerouac School, where she curates and teaches. (See p. 24.)

Photo: Wolfgang Stahr

Photo: Tito Molina / HRDWRKER © Gary Simmons

Photo: Eric Nathan / Alamy Stock Photo

Photo: Eleni Sikelianos

War Drawings, Coming of Age (detail)

2022 Acrylic, oil and china marker on linen Photo: Thomas Barratt © Rita Ackermann. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Editor’s Note

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”—H.P. Lovecraft, from “The Call of Cthulhu”

In the magnificent valediction that art critic and lapsed poet Peter Schjeldahl wrote for The New Yorker in 2019 upon learning that he had terminal lung cancer, Schjeldahl noted one of the fringe benefits of moving from the world of verse into the world of art: “Art parties were immeasurably more fun that poetry parties.”

But what about when artists and poets party together?

Nicole Eisenman’s 2014 painting Under the Table 2 , which graces the cover of the issue you’re holding, is a kind of pictorial answer to this question. Or a record of at least one memorable instance of it—a party several years ago for a new issue of Parkett magazine featuring the work of Eisenman and several of her poet friends. After a certain quantity of alcohol had been consumed, a group of artists and writers ended up in a heap beneath a table, talking about Proust while a yellow bird of Eisenman’s named Omelet flew around the room.

“It was so funny that we thought we had to get under the table,” the poet Matt Longabucco recalled. “We were already in an apartment.”

You might think of this Ursula , our first-ever theme issue, as a figurative table under which artists and poets have unexpectedly found themselves, talking about many things, a table of plenty. A few months ago, I asked Eisenman if she would be the cover subject of the next magazine, and she proposed a bargain: I could put a painting on the cover as long as we devoted the issue to poetry, working with The Poetry Project, the venerable East Village poets’ haven. “Poetry still feels like it’s the last good, pure thing in New York,” she said.

The idea turned into something more than we ever expected, a thirty-two page magazine-within-a-magazine, a chapbook filled with poets and artists knocking productively against each other in the tradition of the great downtown New York poetry magazines of their day—The Floating Bear, “C ,” A Journal of Poetry, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, A Gathering of the Tribes, and The World , The Poetry Project’s first magazine.

As the issue came together, the idea of poetry seemed to seed itself through the pages unbidden: a lovely early poem by the painter Frank Bowling, written in London just before he decided to go to art school; a piece by Leah Singer about the late Michael Snow, who described himself as a “time-light-sound poet;” a short story by Jarrett Earnest somehow starring the Carpenters, poets of Pop (“Solitaire’s the only game in town/And every road that takes him, takes him down.”); the great Anne Waldman, The Poetry Project’s first secretary upon its founding in 1966 and later its director, writing a new poem in response to the work of her longtime friend, the painter Pat Steir.

The issue could not have been made without the help of The Poetry Project, in particular the amazing Kay Gabriel, who shepherded it from start to finish and kept reminding us about those eras when art and poetry, especially in New York, sang in close harmony, a consonance happening again in some quarters. Schjeldahl believed it all fell apart for good once contemporary art became commercially successful and rock-and-roll snatched away the best poets. But never underestimate the power of elective affinity. And great parties. As a poet named John Giorno once said about writing with a painter named Andy Warhol: “We had a good time doing it, laughing and loving and resting in the play of each other’s minds…. Everything was totally great.” —Randy Kennedy

George Schneeman, Cover drawing from a booklet published by The Poetry Project, 1974. Courtesy The Poetry Project

HANGTHEPARIS REVIEW

TheParisReviewisdelightedtorevive itsprintseries,firstlaunchedin1964,with newworksbyEdRuscha,JulieMehretu, DanaSchutz,RashidJohnson,and ElizabethPeyton.Allproceedsbenefit TheParisReviewFoundation,a501(c)(3). Weareextremelygratefultotheartists fortheirwork.THEPARISREVIEW.ORG/PRINTS.

Erna Rosenstein, first of eleven manuscript pages annotated by the artist as “Listy do tych, których nie ma” (“Letters to those who are not there”), undated. Courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation and the Estate of Erna Rosenstein / Adam Sandauer

Toast

To you I now speak my departed –– ever more alive:

A line thinner than air.

A smile fainter than a butterfly.

A word more silent than thought.

A border which is not there.

I toast your health – dear dead!

To our death!

– I raise fire from shadows alone.

Translated by Marek Kazmierski

An accomplished painter and proli c writer, the artist Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004) was born in Lviv (formerly Lwów, Poland) to an upper-middle-class Jewish family and raised in Kraków. In the 1930s, she emerged as part of the Polish avant-garde and was associated with the Kraków Group, a tight-knit circle whose artistic innovations were rooted in the socially progressive, left-leaning politics of the Communist Union of Polish Youth. Through continuing political adversity, Rosenstein remained at the forefront of the Polish avant-garde for the rest of her life. Though she is widely regarded as a key postwar gure in Eastern Europe, her work is only now starting to gain broader global recognition.

Following the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1941, Rosenstein and her parents were con ned to the Jewish ghetto. In 1942, having obtained false documents, they took temporary refuge

in Warsaw with the hope of escaping to the countryside. They departed Warsaw by train but along the way were attacked in a forest near the village of Malkinia by a local man who had duplicitously o ered them help. Rosenstein witnessed her parents’ murder and was seriously wounded but managed to ee and nd shelter in one of the village huts. After recovering in a nearby hospital, she assumed various identities to remain hidden for the duration of the war. Following the liberation of Poland, she settled in Warsaw and resumed making art, marrying the art critic Artur Sandauer in 1949.

Writing was an important part of Rosenstein’s work and inextricably linked to her personal history. Throughout her life, she processed her trauma and channeled her grief in copious amounts of writing, including correspondence, poetry, artist books and fairy tales. She

published seven volumes of poetry during her lifetime and once stated, “Literature is in everything…. That’s why I do fantastic objects, painting and poetry. For me, there are no distinct borders.”

Rosenstein’s oeuvre de es easy classi cation. None of her early artwork survives, and her paintings range from abstract, biomorphic forms heavily in uenced by Surrealism to gurative works of family members and loved ones, especially her parents. Bardzo dawne (From Long Ago) memorializes her father, Maksymilian Rosenstein, who had been a judge and lawyer prior to the war, and her mother, Anna Rosenstein (née Schrager). The delicately rendered double portrait on this page functions as a haunting fairy tale, the heads of her parents magically suspended above a distant train on the horizon, evoking their fateful ride from Warsaw.

Her archive contains a group of eleven handwritten pages that she annotated as “Listy do tych, których nie ma” (“Letters to those who are not there”). Across seven individual letters, some taking the form of short poems, Rosenstein addresses her parents; Artur, her husband (1913–1989); her older brother Paul (1902–1989) and other deceased loved ones with a directness and immediacy that intertwines death with life—in her mind, they were more alive than ever. In 2001, near the end of her life, Rosenstein published six of the writings in the Polish artistic and literary journal Metafora collectively as “Toast,” which draws its title from the opening ode in the set. In this succinct yet vivid poem, Rosenstein o ers both a testament to life and an eternal ame of grief for those she loved and lost.

In memory of Adam Sandauer (1950–2023), son of Erna Rosenstein.

A facsimile copy of “Letters to those who are not there” was kindly provided by Foksal Gallery Foundation and the Estate of Erna Rosenstein. The original manuscript pages are believed to be in the Polish National Library in Warsaw and were not accessible at the time of publication. Jaroslaw Borowiec contributed to this article.

Erna Rosenstein, Bardzo dawne (From Long Ago) , undated. Paint and pencil on particleboard, 13 7/8 x 9 7/8 in. (35.2 x 25.1 cm). Photograph: Thomas Barratt. © The Estate of Erna Rosenstein / Adam Sandauer. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Foksal Gallery Foundation

Pat Steir, 9 x 7, C, 2022. Oil on canvas, 274.3 x 213.4 cm (108 x 84 inches).

© Pat Steir. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Pat Steir, 9 x 7 , D , 2022. Oil on canvas, 274.3 x 213.4 cm (108 x 84 inches).

© Pat Steir. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Phenomenological Undulation / Anne Waldman

“Happiness is being on a beam with life—to feel the pull of life.” —Agnes Martin

for Pat Steir

Aperture of art, of person, awakens heart basks in guttural energy of launch lunge releases your own topos, can sweep up, paint down constant suspension buoying up the blue one and the other one, and one and one and one and one now two where goest in a marine life, marooned life?

AI of broken undulation in new civilization’s tally, shock, horror keep the fight beyond binaries out out-of-harm sites. bless the studio where one studies phenomenal 3-folding world and comes as never before onto public space, negotiation as the poet once said “standing before war” as in standing “in front of”

stealth of life jellying in shimmer to abandon no hope

where intentionality invokes lineage

Thoreau: I went to the woods to live deliberately how curious living sheaves want wheat in a rocket seed vaults in outer space sample of cnidarian invertebrates as if we are sending samples of everything - of one thingall things one and one and one and one to be born immortal to the space station bundles of beauty spiraling black hole universe or under dark sea, primed to dusk to phosphorescent dawn our own lost Walden

childe Roland into new age cavern comes? biophilia of making when never alone, mind ameliorating a song Blake sang entering the garden of love & one waits espousal of form just arrives, heralds new pantheism composition on beam, coagulates on time embryonic. simplicity

rhythm inside silent gesture, language pausing, stutters syllable to syllable, turn the dial rocky frontal. lobe. burns. lenient.

while rocket-jellies suck and cradle and splash and grow string theory in sanctuary.

we saw the paleolithic in the aquarium the loss set in. and glory. life device floating a long time you say that's somber, that mirror that thought about such things before identity, recognition, a prize? what does Raul say now, brother silence, as he passes, slowly, elder, into night… saws away a fabric so soft you want to die in alchemical palette what form are you on? filaments of desire. collides with detritus.

sweet indulgence. tested on loop of time I want to bask my form in agency of cosmos never hoped to matter but warm like embrace, not chill lonely day & dawn of canvas canticles wanting tears for the time pouring down all night.

Pat Steir paintings, 2022 “9 X 7”, C & D in tandem

The Landscape of Eternity Travels through

Texas, with Forrest Bess

by Lucia Arbery Simek

It sometimes happens that even the person quite indifferent at home suddenly becomes alive to the animate world as soon as he gets out on the road.

—Roy Bedichek, Texas naturalist

Every time we stopped for gas that first time I drove west through Texas, I choked up a quickie of a cry, overcome with self-pity and shame about the predictable nature of this narrative: A jilted woman on a Western-tilting road trip of indeterminate purpose. My first marriage was ending cataclysmically after my husband coolly revealed one evening his yearslong exit strategy. The slow fuse of his deceit and misery stretched across the whole terrain of our union, hidden beneath the scrub brush of daily life, detonating into a florid bouquet of clichés. He offered me the consolation that he’d think of me on his deathbed.

Expelled into a new reality, I put my three kids in the car and fled Dallas toward Wyoming, where we had never been but where my parents had become professors at a conservative Catholic college. My eight-year-old daughter read off printed directions as we drove through Quanah, the town named for the last great Comanche leader, Quanah Parker, who had been as savvy a businessman as he was a warrior and who had once blessed the place—“May the Great Spirit smile on you, little town, may the rain fall in season … and contentment be with your children forever.” Now it was a string of dollar stores and understaffed fast food restaurants.

We passed Amarillo, smelling its black masses of cattle for miles before we saw them in their pens. Then we pushed on through Dalhart, where we knew that somewhere close by a ramshackle RV held

the archive of the late, great, Silver Age Marvel comic book letterer, Artie Simek, my children’s great-great-uncle. Artie’s daughter Jean had fled New York for the West Coast in a camper van years ago, but had broken down here on Highway 87 in the Texas Panhandle, had never left, and then had died, leaving the RV and the care of her father’s effects—the whams and bams of America’s superheroes—to a lover and half a dozen cats.

We spent that first night on the road in a shitty motel by the highway. I lay awake for hours as a cacophony of strangers’ judging voices, guided by my husband’s, rumbled through my head, making me fear that someone would break through the thin door and steal my children. I wadded up under the thin polyester coverlet and spooned around my little boy to protect him and myself. I thought of the circumstances that had led the father of these children not long beforehand to grow his hair into a pompadour and take up swimming laps at the YMCA.

As a child, I had struggled to fall asleep like this. Every night, I’d close my eyes and try to focus on the shapes and flashes that I perceived behind my eyelids— zigzags, constellations of blood vessels, the afterimages of whatever light leaked under the bedroom door. The practice was effective, and I’d soon doze off, the shapes I’d seen invariably segueing into dreams. The zigzags became the legs of mechanical spiders that ticked their way from the foot of the mattress up toward my pillow. The blood vessels became the paths of stars as I fell into a deep hole, like a well but as endless as space. Looking at the interior of my body was a way to ground the voices in my head, which, as soon as it grew dark outside, began to clatter and snarl—demons, angels, saints. Together and without allegiance for good or evil they would chastise and accost me as I got into my pajamas, brushed my teeth, said prayers with my family and got into my bed, my least favorite place.

The tormenting began when I was eight, after an innocent-enough though confusing physical encounter with a boy left me— knowing nothing about how reproduction worked—certain that I was pregnant. At the time, my mother was expecting my sixth sibling, our only brother, and I ran myself mad waiting for my stomach to begin growing like hers, outing me as the sort of sinner the stories of the virgin saints instructed us not to be, as recounted to us by our Sicilian grandfather, Bumpa.

In this catalogue of virgins (virgin saints are always women) was my namesake, the

Forrest Bess, Untitled (No. 1), 1957. Oil on canvas, 8 x 12 1/4 in. (20.3 x 31.1 cm). Courtesy Modern Art, London

4th century Sicilian, Lucia of Syracusa, patron saint of eyesight and sailors lost at sea, who is often depicted as a beautiful woman with her eyeballs in a dish and a sword through her throat. Having dedicated her body to Christ, so the myth went, Lucia refused the advances of a suitor, ripping out her own eyes rather than look at the man. Her furious suitor revealed her illegal Christianity to the Romans, and Lucia was sentenced to life in a brothel. But when soldiers came to drag her off to her clever punishment, they found they could not move her body—God had made her inordinately hard to lift. They tried lighting her on fire; she wouldn’t burn. Eventually, a sword to the throat did the job, a detail I ponder when I’ve uttered something I wish I hadn’t, which is often.

The worst of Bumpa’s stories, and the one that made me the most sleepless, was that of the 20th-century Portuguese mystic Alexandrina of Balazar, who spent thirty years of her life in bed, paralyzed after jumping from a window to escape would-be rapists. While she was confined to her bed, Bumpa told us, Satan would visit and taunt her, throwing her around the room to demonstrate his hatred of her piety. Bumpa would show us terrifying photos of Alexandrina’s frail body suspended and contorting in air. During her last thirteen years, Alexandrina ate nothing but the Eucharist—Christ’s body in the form of a small round wafer, scored with the shape of his cross—and prayed for the chastity of young, unmarried women. She, letting nothing but God into her body, was the example we girls were meant to follow if we had any hope of heaven, inscribing in my mind a horrendous equation: purity + torture = eternal life.

We moved to Texas from New England when I was a teenager, and I started to watch a lot of Western movies, I think in an effort to replace the saintly legends that haunted me with different ones, the myths and heroes of Texas—simple good guys and bad guys in an arid landscape in which everything was laid bare. On the screen, I could track a rider in the distance and regard the scrawny trees and silhouetted figures that sought their shade as kin. I liked how little the depicted world offered: bare-minimum provision and the just-so touch upon the darkest things— betrayal, pain, death—along with the brightest—horses, men, biscuits.

Not much later, as a new, very young mother, home with a baby, feeling unseen and trapped, I found space in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and the Wild West that it described, its deceitful theater and its truth. I’d look out across the network of Dallas highways and concrete and imagine hills and prairies with cattle. For a time, it helped me see a landscape beneath the things that sat upon it. But this world beneath a world—a reality just out of sight—became little more than a new religion, and it wore me out. So when the time came to flee, temporarily, the summer that my marriage fell apart, I took it, fueled by a profound loathing of Texas and a paradoxical desire to actually see it, to be part of it.

There’s a painting from 1950 by the Texan artist Forrest Bess, Untitled No. 44, that shows a golden, undulating prairie set against a gridded, red-black sky. At first, the prairie’s hills seem like little solid mounds, but once the eye adjusts to the movement of Bess’ brushwork, the mounds reveal themselves to be small caves, like bales of hay hollowed out to fit and hide some sleepy body passing through the field. I love beyond telling this painting’s promise of safe shelter upon the land, its tender envelopment.

In another painting, this one from 1957, Untitled (No. 1), a line of magenta mesas sits against a striated pink-and-lavender sky. In the foreground stands an incongruous object like a lamppost, a radiant yellow oval atop a post, with what looks like the silhouette of a human head at its center. More than a lamp, the form resembles a monstrance, the ornate golden tool used in the Catholic Church for holding the Eucharist for the congregation to adore, the belief being that in doing so one literally sits with Christ. I have no way of knowing about Bess’ awareness of Catholic ritual or whether it made its way into this piece, but the object’s resemblance to a monstrance has always struck me as a sort of pun—some quip about an arid, virginal landscape and Christ’s body standing erect upon it.

All of Bess’ paintings offer these sorts of puzzles and complex vistas. When I first saw a small group of them at Kirk Hopper’s gallery in Dallas just before my marriage ended, I was struck by their roughness, a quality that I initially read as a cheeky aping of amateurism. But I was transfixed by their nubby, dense

surfaces, their shoddy frames and the earnest, concentrated urgency they exuded. The more I looked at them, the more I believed their maker’s belief in their purpose—the paintings as a kind of prayer.

When Bess went to New York for the first solo show of his paintings at Betty Parsons Gallery in October of 1949, he was briefly marooned upstate with some friends, having arrived too early to the city; his show was not scheduled until December. He wrote to Betty from Woodstock—where the trees were turning

Letting nothing but God into her body, Alexandrina of Balazar was the example we girls were meant to follow if we had any hope of heaven, inscribing in my mind a horrendous equation: purity + torture = eternal life.

Forrest Bess posing nude, ca. 1955. Meyer Schapiro papers, 1949–1982. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Forrest Bess, ca. 1951. Earle and Mary Ludgin papers, 1930–1983. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

a riot of colors and the air was crisp—that he was desperate to return to his “treeless, dismal, uninteresting land” on the Texas coast, where he worked for his ailing father’s bait-fishing business. He wanted, he said, to “tend to my crab traps and catch my fish and feel clean.” He found his body greatly at odds with this leafy northern place and his usual suffering within his own skin thicker in displacement. Though Texas offers scant protection from the elements, Bess felt exposed in a more existential way in New York—seen and scrutinized by human eyes, which regarded him as a stranger—and crushed by the inescapable hug of the close-to terrain.

About his spartan life in Chinquapin, on the Texas coast, he once wrote: “It is funny, but I thought that it would be a project that would last just a month or two at the most—not years. But I found myself in love with this damn mosquito-infested swamp.”

Bess had worked as an artist for a while in San Antonio but decided to settle permanently in Chinquapin, a little place accessible only by boat, without electricity or phone until the late 1950s. He’d gone there to help his father, but he had also gone to escape the burdens of a big-city art scene, detesting the constant art talk and interruptions in his studio. He wanted to be alone. Also—though it took him a while to admit it to anyone he loved—he was gay and wanted to avoid the dangers posed by his sexuality. Through error he had discovered that his sexuality was too masculine for the gay communities in Houston and San Antonio. He grew to feel as disenfranchised as he’d been in the army, from which he’d been dishonorably discharged after making a pass at another soldier, ending up in the hospital with a cracked skull.

In remote Chinquapin, Bess was alone enough to maintain his identity without threat of judgment or reproach, and he felt a connection to the land and to his family that surprised him. “I found my dad to be an altogether different person than I had known. Underneath his rough exterior and mannerisms I found a philosopher who had inherited from his father a theory of God in Nature, rather than God in church—a theory that I could accept.” Photos of Bess from that time show a tall, attractive man smiling, holding fishing nets on a small boat.

But the isolation also left him disoriented: “I try to tell myself that only by breaking completely away from society can I arrive at a reasonable existence,” he wrote to a friend. “This is far from being the truth. In doing so, I further block the sex urge and this, no matter how it looks, is not normal.”

The suppression and subsequent social

complexities exacerbated another aspect of Bess’ life just as integral to his being: From the time he was a boy, he had been visited by visions that came to him in the liminal space before sleep. This oneiric landscape grew fertile, full of coded symbols that affected him so profoundly he recorded them in a bedside notebook as soon as he awoke. The symbols became a lexicon of his waking mind’s perception of its own subconscious and also his guide to understanding himself and his paintings.

For years, he didn’t understand what the visions meant, but his compulsion to paint them was absolute, deeply connected to his feelings about nature itself. As he told Parsons before the first painting show: “The canvas I paint is as close to what I saw as I could make it and I know when it has been truthfully followed […] Betty, the feeling that they (the paintings) needed to be seen came from the same source as did the sense that there were shrimp in the bay—and they were where I had seen them.”

Bess’ development as a painter ran in parallel with increasingly anguished efforts to plumb a sense of his own body and fundamental being. He came to understand that his visions were urging him to an undertake an extreme act: the joining of the male and female sexes within him, a transformation of himself into a hermaphrodite. Such a unification, according to all of his studying and discernment, would grant him nothing less than immortality. His little paintings served, in fact, as a depiction of the search for this very unification of the sexes and freedom from death. Guided by conviction, Bess performed a series of botched at-home operations to create a “vaginal” opening at the base of his penis, above the scrotum. The ultimate goal was to find sexual partners to penetrate the opening and ejaculate into him, fomenting a kind of magic that he believed would reverse the aging process when the semen struck the inner wall of his body. To Bess, such coupling promised to tap into the deepest generative mysteries of the world, the strings at which sex plucks—desire, dreams, the human spirit and the animal one.

By the time he died in 1977 in a nursing home, his body had become a desiccated map. Its surface described a life lived in the sun: His nose was partially missing, claimed by cancer; the rest of his skin was discolored, pocked, leathery, consumed by alcoholism, making him look far older than he was, at sixty-six. His deep dimples, a fine attribute on his once-handsome face, held in parenthesis a mouthful of jagged yellow teeth, like ancient rocks, made lopsided by

the constant grip they had kept on a pipe. His self-created sex organs, which he had once believed offered the promise of eternal life, only intensified the agonies that sped him toward death.

As I drove out of Texas that summer nine years ago and decamped to a red cabin facing a Chugwater bluff in the middle of Wyoming, I thought often of Bess. Broken by a network of betrayals—by my spouse, my religion, my own trust in everything I’d chosen—I found that his paintings provided some kind of balm, a consolation. A ravine below the cabin was laced by a creek in which the kids would bravely wade through freezing mountain runoff after coating their legs in mud. On our way back up, we’d spy in the thicket the corpse of a doe that my father had covered in lime, slowly vanishing into the dead grasses.

Bereft of words and too addle-brained to use my hands, I simply framed the world as I saw it, like Bess. In hundreds of quick videos and photos, I recorded every small indication of the earth hiding or withholding or spewing out or cramping up or giving in or cracking open: ants let loose from a log on fire, flies on manure, mud nests full of swallows high on a cliff, snakes beneath the porch, spiders in neglected sheds, June bugs in the mailbox, mayflies ascending from lifted wet towels, hot springs with phosphorescent algae, gold flecks in the river, a llama weeping, seashell fossils on a mountaintop, a horse’s twitching flank, a burnt-black forest, Old Faithful right on time.

Forrest Bess, Here is a Sign, 1970. Oil on canvas, 15 1/2 x 11 5/8 in. (39.3 x 29.5 cm). Photo: Robert Glowacki. Courtesy Modern Art, London and The Museum of Everything, London

King of the Surf Guitar

oral-history remembrance of Rodney Graham (1949–2022)

the Warehouse recording studio, June 2016. Photo:

Compiled by Charlotte Jansen

An

Rodney Graham, year and photographer unknown. Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio Graham playing guitar in

Scott Livingstone

“I remember one piece involved him being given a sedative and driven around asleep in the back seat of a van… and I also remember being quite impressed by the sheer peculiarity of it.”—William Gibson

The Canadian artist and musician Rodney Graham was widely known and admired for his idiosyncratic, far-reaching interests, insatiable curiosity and humor, traits that informed all of his work—his highly conceptual pieces in the 1980s; his meticulously staged films; the cinematic photo lightboxes for which he became famous; his music, and eventually his paintings. Here, those who knew him and who lived and worked closely with him speak about his life and career.

Shannon Oksanen

Rodney was born in Matsqui, British Columbia, a small suburb of Vancouver. His father worked for a lumber company, and Rodney always told stories of working as a very young teenager in the lumber camp, peeling potatoes and washing dishes. On weekends, they would screen films using a projector, which greatly influenced him. He especially fell in love with Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes. In the summers, he often traveled with his family and cousins to the interior of British Columbia, a vacation spot near the gorgeous Lake Okanagan. Rodney was an ace water-skier; his family often boasted about him doing a handstand on a lawn chair while water-skiing on a disc! They moved to various places in and near Vancouver, but when he was around sixteen, they moved into the city. He hated the high school he attended in Vancouver because the teachers were often cruel, and he was becoming a hippie, which did not go over well. He was sent home for wearing jeans, for example. He and his mates had a blues band and generally missed as much school as possible.

William Gibson

Rodney and I first met in 1972. He was already an art student at Simon Fraser University, and he did speak often of a very early piece, Illuminated Ravine (1979), which was mostly just what its title describes. I assume we were introduced by David Wisdom, whom my

wife had known here in Vancouver before moving to Toronto. Rodney, David Wisdom and Jeff Wall were all neighbors, and David liked to have friends over for drinks and conversation. I hadn’t yet written anything, and Rodney hadn't yet made any art.

I remember one piece involved him being given a sedative and driven around asleep in the back seat of a van [Halcion Sleep, 1994], and I also remember being quite impressed by the sheer peculiarity of it. Matchbox photographs, which began with his camera being stolen in Italy, then gradually grew into his splendid inverted camera obscura images of trees. I remember a bookmark work he made for an edition of the Ian Fleming novel Dr. No, which inserted a new scene into the story, a description in Fleming’s style of a centipede crawling over the flesh of a paralyzed James Bond—which may have been around the time I’d begun, however secretly, to think about writing fiction myself.

Oksanen

Rodney started attending the University of British Columbia, taking general arts. There, he took a class with Ian Wallace that made him want to study and become an artist.

Rodney and I met in the late ’80s when I worked at a coffee shop near his studio. He would come in for hours a day and just chat. Soon we started dating, working together and generally having the jolliest time despite being incredibly poor. We were obsessed with London and spent as much time as we could there. We loved Brit Pop (specifically Saint Etienne and Suede) and were the biggest Anglophiles ever. After twelve years together, we reluctantly split up because I wanted children, but sadly he didn’t. Happily, Scott [Livingstone] and I got together and did have children (Ray in 2003 and Coco in 2007). Scott had worked with us for a few years, and we had all traveled together. So we were already like a family, and although it might sound scandalous, it was never anything of that nature. Rodney was very pragmatic, knowing he was already

older and couldn't cope with babies. That said, he ended up being like a parent to our kids, although he didn’t have to deal with the sleepless nights of being a parent.

Stan Douglas

When I first got to know Rodney in the 1980s, the thing that most impressed me about him, aside from his charisma and boundless enthusiasm, was his indifference to artistic genre or style. Like the true conceptual artist he was, he would follow the logic of his ideas wherever they led him: If he discovered a permutational element in Wagner’s Parisfal, he would produce an impossibly long musical score to play it out, and if he had a hallucination while reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, he would write an entire novel in the style of Raymond Roussel to fully realize it. I am, of course, referring to his The System of Landor’s Cottage (1986–87), which is still a favorite of mine. Unlike most people to whom he gave a copy of the book, I cut the pages in order to read it. By doing so, I immediately diminished its monetary value, but it was totally worth it. It made the act of reading performative and, like Rodney himself, the book was by turns hilarious and audacious.

Oksanen

So many things inspired Rodney. Learning to look at things the way he did was a gift. In the ’90s, he and I would go to thrift stores and make funny displays with dishes or clothes. Although we were killing time, more often than not an artwork would come out of it, like his Carole King paintings [Black Tapestry (2014), twenty-four copies of Carole King’s 1971 album Tapestry overpainted in dark inks]. We would always put the Carole King Tapestry albums out in front of every pile of records. They were ubiquitous at the time (not so much now), and it was just one of our gags. Music was his number one passion. He always knew about the latest, oldest and rarest music; he was a true savant but he was not a music snob. He would get as excited about a Tiffany song as he would about his newest obscure indie

“Like the true conceptual artist he was, he would follow the logic of his ideas wherever they led him… if he had a hallucination while reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, he would write an entire novel in the style of Raymond Roussel to fully realize it.”—Stan Douglas

discovery. I don’t know what motivated him exactly, but he was very driven. The man always woke up early and wanted to get to work immediately, although “work,” could take many different forms.

Alessandro Vincentelli

Rodney had such restless energy. I think he was driven by a fantastic curiosity and by a real polymath’s pleasure in crossing different disciplines—an exploration of the sciences, physics, the mechanics of vision. He had a remarkable way of making genuinely joyful work that was coded, layered and complex. The first time I met him was during a performance at the old space of the David Roberts Art Foundation [now the Roberts Institute of Art] in Camden, north London. It was at one of those performance evenings during Frieze art fair weekend. There was a buzz to it because Kim Gordon was playing guitar, too, next to Rodney, and it was set against a projected backdrop of the film loop with all of the

love scenes in the dunes from Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point

Lisa Spellman

I flew to Vancouver to meet Rodney to ask if he would join the gallery in 1992. We met at a hotel and had breakfast together. I proposed a three-person show with him and Allen Ruppersberg and Hans-Peter Feldmann and he agreed. Then Rodney and Shannon showed me all of their favorite spots, from vintage record shops to the best Thai and the Vancouver Art Gallery. I left so happy.

Mark Godfrey

He followed his own impulses to make work, without caring what other people thought about it. He came out of the Vancouver School of Conceptualism in the 1980s, and the audience then was very small indeed. The pleasures of engagement you could have with it required you to be immersed in understanding other conceptual artists and their theoretical debates.

I think a shift started in his practice with the film Vexation Island (1997), where the complex research and theoretical basis was still there, but he had found a way to be more visually entertaining—to make works many different kinds of people could look at and appreciate and get the humor of without overloading the theory, which had been the case in the works of the 1980s, where if you didn’t know Donald Judd, you might not get the point of what he’d done. I fell in love with his films—I saw the 2005 retrospective at the ICA Philadelphia, curated by Lynne Cooke. The props and outfits became sculptures, which was very effective.

Vincentelli

I remember traveling up to Newcastle upon Tyne for the second Tyne International in 1993, where there was an installation of Parsifal (1990), the early conceptual work by Graham in a room consisting of a self-playing piano and framed scores on the walls. It was an unusual and puzzling work. It brought together ideas of time, philosophy, mathematics and music. So much of it was about the non-visual! It felt like a distinctively European kind of conceptualism. I could see the humor and an obsession with mirroring and repetition. Much later, there was a psychological probing going on, I think, of the male psyche and the role of being an artist. There was also just sheer joy in the work, humor, gently poking fun at himself and at art history in general. Just when you thought you had a handle on his references, it seemed more would be introduced. He even had a photo lightbox work called Can of Worms (2000). Understanding and decoding some of his most engaging works was indeed like opening a can of worms.

Florian Berktold

I met Rodney twenty-five years ago when he did one of his first major exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, where I was working at the time. I saw one of the books he had made at the time, and it was one of those very artsy artist’s books, and I thought it looked

Rodney Graham, 3 Musicians (Members of the Early Music Group “Renaissance Fare” performing Matteo of Perugia's “Le greygnour bien” at the Unitarian Church of Vancouver, Late September, 1977), 2006. 3 painted aluminum lightboxes with transmounted chromogenic transparencies, Ed. 4/4 + AP, 120 3/4 x 147 5/8 x 7 in. (306.7 x 375 x 17.8 cm). Photo: Sampo Linkoneva. Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio and Hauser & Wirth

kind of boring and very conceptual! But then we met. He was traveling with Shannon. We hung out a lot, went to concerts and had the best of times.

He would always leave for an afternoon nap—an excuse to get away from standing around when the show was being installed; later he actually recorded a song called “Afternoon Nap.”

The exhibition in Vienna also featured for the first time his music. He created a listening lounge, a platform with beanbags and headphones to listen to the very first album he had recorded. He had actually needed only one song as a soundtrack for a new piece, but in true Rodney style, he ended up recording a whole album. Sometimes he’d joke: “Is being an artist just a good excuse to have a band?” He liked the idea, taken from Freud, that while you’re doing something serious, your main job, it can lead to something much more interesting.

Oksanen

Our work life together was incredible fun. Rodney was always enthusiastic about everything and full of concepts, but he relied heavily on both of us for ideas and was always very kind about acknowledging us. Scott designed all the sets for the lightboxes and has the most incredible eye for detail and authentic details. Rodney and I were into the decor part of the sets, and I was into designing the costumes. But it was all three of us in discussion on almost everything. Scott and I always say it was the best job in the world, and we are gutted that we won’t be doing any more lightboxes.

There was no typical day in the studio. Scott took care of the administrative side of the studio, while Rodney and I were slackers, but we also would take drives together to discuss ideas. When we were in production mode, we were all at the studio all the time.

Watching a set come together was exciting and put us all in the best mood. When Rodney wasn’t working on photos, he often experimented with painting and making sculptures—that guy could make the best assemblage sculptures of all time in no time flat. But he was also the messiest artist ever when he was in the process of working. I would always be nagging him to cover the floor and stop using so many sparkles— they’re still floating around the studio! But honestly, despite the destroyed studio floor, watching him work was magic. He also played the guitar constantly, which was a treat when it was an acoustic guitar and torture when he decided to plug in an amp to try one of his new electric pedals. The fact that he liked to jack the amp up to eleven probably damaged his hearing, but it didn't seem to bother him.

Very Spinal Tap!

Rodney Graham, Awakening, 2006. Monochrome diptych photograph, Ed. 4/4 + AP, 94 1/2 x 57 1/2 x 1 3/4 in. (240 x 146 x 4.5 cm).

Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio and Hauser & Wirth

Vincentelli

I loved the way he dressed. He was so damn cool. I believe he got that from his mother, Janet Graham, who always immaculately dressed, too. One of my favorite memories is of walking around Dublin with him, browsing record stores and guitar shops. He would always try to get time to find a cool guitar shop, striking up conversations with the owners. On more than one occasion, I was given instructions from his studio team, something along the lines of: “Please don’t let Rodney buy another guitar!”

Douglas

I hadn’t intentionally listened to Black Sabbath since high school, but when I heard that their farewell tour was coming to Vancouver I was curious to know what that would look like. When I thought about who would like to join me, Rodney came immediately to mind. He was totally game.

Godfrey

I remember when I visited him in Vancouver, he had an old amplifier, made decades ago, but it sounded better than anything I’d ever heard. It was an astonishing bit of kit. You never knew where ideas would come in from. Sometimes it was from his Anglophilia. The cover of his British Weathervanes book was based on the design of a series of old English how-to books that he had collected.

Iwona Blazwick

He was interested in anachronism and the obsolete. He would reinvent things. He made a 19th-century postal carriage in the 1990s, just as email and instant communication were becoming the norm. He had that eccentricity and slight

denial of the contemporary. He was also interested in repetition and circularity, and of course how it connected to Freud’s ideas about neurosis. He embraced absurdity and never took himself too seriously; there was always the deadpan delivery. I think he remains very relevant—for instance, right now with all the revisionism in art history and the focus on the absurdity of heroic male figures.

Vincentelli

I remember the care he took when Dan Graham was seriously ill five or six years ago and how they looked out for each other. There was a real concern for others. Rodney was part of a very special community—his studio, his friends, his galleries.

Godfrey

Tacita Dean did an exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre where they projected his work Rheinmetall ⁄ Victoria 8 (2003). He’d set up this gorgeous German typewriter from the 1930s he’d found in a Berlin junk shop and had fake snow falling on it to ruin it. The film is silent, projected by an Italian Victoria projector, a kind of a tank of a machine. Rodney once described it as “two obsolete technologies facing off.” It’s an astonishing work for its conceptual tightness and how evocative it was. It’s one of my favorite works of art by him.

Blazwick

In 2008, we had raised the money to buy the former library building next to Whitechapel and absorb it into the gallery. It was an amazing project, but when we got the permission from English Heritage, they said we could proceed to acquire on only one condition: that we had to install a weathervane on the roof. I looked at the drawings, and in fact there was a stand on the roof where a weathervane should have gone, but it was never actually made. A month later, Rodney was in town, and we had lunch together. I asked him what he was working on, and he said “Well, I’m making a weathervane.” I nearly fell off my chair! He’d been researching Erasmus, and in particular In Praise of Folly, a riposte to the absurdities of superstition and religious dogma. He fashioned an Erasmus figure based on a photograph of himself in costume, riding backwards on a horse, inspired by an anecdote that Erasmus had written the

Left: Graham playing guitar, ca. 1970s. Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio. Right: Graham playing with UJ3RK5, Arcadian Hall, Vancouver, June 1980. Photo: Gordon McCaw. Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio

Rodney Graham, Illuminated Ravine, 1979. Production still (Graham in the foreground). Photographer unknown. Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio

book while traveling on horseback from Italy to England. It was just perfect. He made a photograph first, then a cast in bronze, and it was made as an edition of three. We acquired one for the roof of the Whitechapel, and it’s been spinning around up there gloriously ever since.

Godfrey

One of the last times I visited him, he was already in his seventies, and he was talking about taking up surfing. It was totally believable that Rodney might stop being an artist and become a surfer. There was no value judgment to something like that. He didn’t see being an artist as any more important a calling than anything else.

Blazwick

The Gifted Amateur was one of the extraordinary series of lightboxes he worked on for about a decade. In it, he takes up the role of the 20th-century genius, of Modernism, in the figure of the AbEx artist. It’s an enormous work and very bright—in fact, it was so dazzling that with Rodney’s permission we had to take some of the lights out when we presented it at the Whitechapel’s “A Century of the Artist’s Studio” exhibition in 2022. Again, he did huge amounts of research and made this huge life-size lightbox, which I believe was based on

Morris Louis, the Color Field painter, who worked in his parents’ dining room. In this tableau, the painter appears smoking a cigarette, wearing silk pajamas. And every single object in the scene—the piles of books teetering around, the sound system, the brick stone fireplace, the Tupperware bowls— everything was so precisely 1950s. The figure is presented as a genius, but at the same time he’s called an “amateur.” He’s taking up the role of genius. It’s an act—something he steps into. It’s an ironic reflection on what we think of the artist, the role of the artist. It’s funny and reflexive. He offers conundrums in the works that you have to unpack, and that’s the pleasure of it.

Godfrey

In the lightboxes he’s a chef on his lunch break, a media studies professor, a hunter, a lighthouse keeper, an interior decorator, a member of a 1970s musical group playing “medieval” music. They’re such strange decisions. Why did he get interested in fake medieval musicians from the 1970s? But once you go there with him, the image pulls you in and makes you think about culture. No one else could’ve made those jumps that way except him, and each one was so perfectly done.

Berktold

I think his art was very deeply rooted in a Modernist tradition between the two poles that sort of sum up the 20th-century— Picasso and Duchamp. He was trying to achieve something timeless. He would often say that he made his early work late: He picked up painting very late, after having never done it as a young artist, and he picked it up only because he needed a prop for one of his lightboxes. So he started fiddling around in the studio to achieve what he wanted and from there it took off. There were always these riddles and diversions, conundrums that were elegantly put together and very open to interpretation. You don’t have to like it, but it doesn’t polarize. And that’s how he was a person. He was never difficult. He never made a fuss about the context.

He wasn’t the sort of person who was constantly cracking jokes, but there was always humor, and he used humor as an entry point into his work. It was a bit of a strategy. But if you dig deeper, a more fitting sentiment for his work is perhaps melancholy—not sadness, not resentment, but a little bit of positive melancholy. In his music, you get a little closer to his persona than you do in his art, which is maybe meant more for critical audiences. In his music, he is more open—laid back, funny, and there, too, a little bit melancholic.

Oksanen

I know Rodney would want more people to hear his music. That’s what he took the most seriously, and it’s still underappreciated. He was a beautiful songwriter!

David Carswell

I was out on tour the last few months of his life and unaware how serious his illness had become. The last time he called me he was convinced he could see a vocal coach to be able to sing again. We had one track that we had tried a million different ways, and he hadn’t put a vocal on it yet. He was calling from hospital saying that he wanted to do it. It’s still so hard to believe he’s gone.

Gibson

Two things I’m sure we never discussed were the two things we were known for, art and science fiction. We probably mainly discussed whatever popular music we were listening to. He was a person with an extraordinary mind and a uniquely delightful sense of humor. I imagine him coming to be seen as having transcended something quite central to the direction of art in his day. But in any case, he leaves the legacy of having been a very kind and amusing man.

Rodney Graham, Vexation Island, 1997. 35mm film, 9 min.

Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio and Hauser & Wirth

“One of the last times I visited him, he was already in his seventies, and he was talking about taking up surfing. It was totally believable that Rodney might stop being an artist and become a surfer.… He didn’t see being an artist as any more important a calling than anything else.”—Mark Godfrey

a

Stan Douglas is a Canadian artist.

William Gibson is an American-Canadian author.

Mark Godfrey is a British art historian, critic and curator.

Shannon Oksanen is a Canadian artist.

Lisa Spellman is founder and director of 303 Gallery, New York.

Alessandro Vincentelli is a freelance curator.

Florian Berktold is a partner of the gallery Hauser & Wirth. Iwona Blazwick, OBE , is chair of the Royal Commission for Al-Ula’s Public Art Expert Panel. David Carswell is

Canadian musician.

Rodney Graham, The Gifted Amateur, 2007. 3 painted aluminum lightboxes with transmounted chromogenic transparencies, 112.5 x 219.9 x 7 in. (285.7 x 558.5 x 17.8 cm). Courtesy Rodney Graham Studio and Hauser & Wirth

The allure and desolation of open world video games

By Cade Diehm

On a twilight autumn morning in the middle of the 2020 pandemic lockdown, I pull open my ship’s navigation computer and plot the nal jump to Sol. I feel a disassociation I commonly experience on a long-haul international ight, the sense of being in two places at once. In one world, I’m in Berlin, slumped at my home o ce desk in the pitch dark, shivering in the unseasonably cold morning air. In another, I’m ying a two-person spacecraft with my passenger, a close friend who has agreed to my excited and persistent invitation to “come see home.”

We are playing the virtual-reality version of Elite Dangerous, a popular massive-multiplayer online space exploration game. We have been playing for four hours because we are traversing space back to our home solar system, across a stunning and physically accurate 1:1 representation of the Milky Way. As I carefully plot a faster-than-light path through

(TOP)

After journeying through the deep space of Elite Dangerous for several hours, my playing companion and I return to our own solar system and approach the dark side of Earth.

Image: Courtesy Frontier Developments

(BOTTOM)

Within the vastness of Elite Dangerous’ interstellar world, sightseeing players find planets or systems with visually stunning landscapes or landmarks, and then often share the location on Reddit and Discord. Here, I am standing on a mountaintop as directed by a player from the broader Elite Dangerous community, watching a neutron star as it passes through the interlocking orbit of two suns. It’s like watching an eclipse.

Image: Courtesy Frontier Developments

(RIGHT)

Approaching Earth as a ship pilot and experiencing the hyperreal game design leaves me in a state of being fully immersed in the “para-real.”

Image: Courtesy Frontier Developments

The overwhelming beauty of visiting Elite Dangerous’ future version of our solar system is famous among the game’s player base. Players who livestream on Twitch have broken down in tears in front of their audiences as they watch the sun rise from orbit upon returning to Earth…

space, we gaze upon the alien constellations, dwarf stars and dual suns that we jump to along the way. Our path through the galaxy is depressingly devoid of life, save for the two of us and an ever-expanding (and violent) player-driven human colonization. We talk a lot, with the intimacy of a late-night road trip. My ship heaves like a truck at every faster-thanlight jump. We can almost feel its vibrations.

Adjusting my VR headset, I glance again at the navigation computer and am surprised when our own, recognizable solar system becomes visible. The planets, moons and satellites of Sol are tiny specks against a sea of stars and black, but my ship’s augmented reality interface highlights them for us. Their names and orbital locations spark a weird familiarity, like pulling up a Google Street View of the neighborhood where you grew up. My passenger and I have talked for hours, but our conversation dies down as we draw closer to Earth. The space tra c around Mars is teeming, and although these are likely non-player characters, our relief at seeing human activity after hours in the isolating ink-black of deep space is palpable. Cutting through the silence, my passenger blurts out, “Mars is busier than I remember.”

In Elite Dangerous, the game world is set far in the future, the year 3306, but the clock is synced to Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C. My passenger and I are coming home to Earth but also to a di erent millennium. We arrive in the shadow of the planet, right above the Baltic Sea. Before us is home, the Blue Marble—Earth. It is dark in the Western Hemisphere, and the glow of civilization at night is visible from this vantage point. Given the trauma of the recently locked-down pandemic world, I feel a strange comfort that the planet is safe in the future. The physical world and this metaverse line up perfectly to give way to a third space—what I’ve described in previous writings as the “para-real.” For a few ephemeral minutes, I am both here and there, dazed by the beauty of the arti cial wilderness before me. The sun is rising in my apartment, and I also watch it rise from 45,000 kilometers above my own body, 1,286 years in the future. I can feel myself above me.

It is an eternity before my shipmate speaks: “I wonder if this is how astronauts feel the rst time they see Earth.” A thought occurs, lling me with sadness. I realize that we are the middle children of human history—born too late to explore the Earth, too soon to explore the stars.

The overwhelming beauty of visiting Elite Dangerous’ future version of our solar system is famous among the game’s player base. Players who livestream on Twitch have broken down in tears in front of their audiences as they watch the sun rise from

orbit upon returning to Earth or after tracking down the Voyager probe and hearing recordings of peace. This is the appeal of the open world genre, where play and exploration mechanics mix with in-game social interactions in a beautiful and often hyperreal environment that can engender profound and unexpected interactions between players. These experiences are also deeply bound to the social and personal lives of the players. As players come of age and abandon games targeted at younger audiences, such as Minecraft, the servers containing their worlds are often left behind and forgotten. But they remain online, in vast, always-on data centers that are full of the digital dreams of youthful players, awaiting connection requests that will never come. Dedicated online communities—such as the /r/Minecraft-Archeology subreddit—have formed to discover and archive these abandoned servers. In the process, the archivists often uncover intimate remnants scattered across these spaces—memories and markers of irtation, rst loves, journals chronicling teenage loneliness, remote monuments of grief for lost friends. Elite Dangerous features large structures oating in the darkness of space, in which players can leave messages to memorialize deceased players or other people from their lives. It is not uncommon to come across one of these structures and see a lone player spacecraft drifting alongside it, quiet in contemplation.

Minecraft and Elite Dangerous are only two of the more celebrated examples of this kind of digital-born, game-based social phenomenon. There are many more— Elden Ring, Animal Crossing, Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft —all, despite their commercial success, vastly under-appreciated touchstones of late 20th- and early 21st-century cultural life. Central to the genre is the creation of immensely elaborate simulated worlds that contain countless details similar to ours, making them highly believable and appealing places to spend time. The complex narrative capability built into these worlds is key to their importance in our lives of as the middle children of history. For one thing, the capability satis es a desire to explore

GLITCH

The open world genre reveals itself as a silicon sarcophagus holding a vast archive of environments lost.

the Earth itself at a troubling, atomized time, one of shrinking mobility, loss of public space, rising instability and the depredations of late capitalism. The games’ verisimilitude also taps into much deeper longings concerning the planet.

When my friend Edward Anthony and I rst described the concept of the arti cial wilderness in a co-authored 2020 essay, we described how climate grief manifests itself in open world gaming. Whether by design or not, the wilderness and its mechanics serve as a sort of barometer of the damage wrought by the e ects of human-caused climate change. The games, particularly those set in vibrant oceans, lush forests, untouched 19th-century American landscapes and similar environs, represent carefully crafted, opulent depictions of a younger planet, snapshots from long before the Earth began succumbing to environmental ruin. As open worlds took steps toward breaking through into such uncanny valleys, they created dioramas of ecosystems that had ceased to exist and are too late to explore.

These arti cial wildernesses are, of course, brought into being by insatiable, market-driven forces such as the desire for new intellectual property, technological advantage and pro t—a vulgar hunger fed by massive data centers, 3Drendering farms and exponentially expanding computer storage. Examples abound, but the release of the NVIDIA GeForce 4090 dedicated graphics card in 2022 marked a turning point in the appetite for simulated environments, a piece of hardware capable of rendering individual rays of light, accurate shadows and re ections. The card represents a massive increase in graphics processing but also requires substantially more power to operate than previous iterations.

As these constructed landscapes assemble an antimonument to the decline of our planet, it depends upon digitization as actual material, infrastructure that demands endless extraction and consumption of the same dying planet it memorializes. In other words, the real planet is being devoured to fuel simulated, idealized versions of it.

Alongside the replica of our known universe, Elite Dangerous also sports a complex model of galaxy-wide human economic and political activity. These systems ebb and ow in real time, shaped by AI simulations and actual market forces, as well as by narratives from the game’s creator, Frontier Developments. Markets and balances of power can be in uenced over time through coordinated e orts organized by factions within the player base.

A few days after our visit to Earth, we log back into the arti cial Milky Way. My passenger, still a ected by the “parareal,” gazing upon the simulated Blue Marble, is keen to build a pilot’s pro le and acquire a better ship to explore the vastness of space. We visit outposts and stations, scanning contract boards for lucrative job postings. As in all video game quest systems, the contracts on o er within the Elite Dangerous

universe are partially determined by game mechanics and narrative. As we sift through glori ed Uber Eats deliveries to destinations thousands of light years away, we see that the most lucrative jobs involve outright moral turpitude: human smuggling, environmental sabotage and assassination. Well beyond the activity known as “player grie ng”—in which malicious, trolling players ambush and destroy unsuspecting or under-armed players for their own pleasure or bene t— Elite Dangerous presents a universe full of malevolence. Despite great scienti c and technological advance, the year 3306 is as riddled with su ering and inequity as 2020: In one particularly barbaric act, my wingmate and I end up choosing to eject recovered human escape pods into the vacuum of space in exchange for a signi cant payout that allows us to a ord a second long-distance ship.

Of course, Elite Dangerous is built as dystopian science ction, and such atrocities are core to the genre and its gameplay systems. But viewed against the game’s visual and environmental backdrops, the poetically beautiful reimagining of our familiar and decaying world, the contradictions of such narrative begin to take on a political resonance. In a video titled “Minecraft, Sandboxes and Colonialism,” prominent YouTuber and critical theorist Dan Olsen details Minecraft’s mechanics of landscaping, crafting, hunting, resource harvesting and treatment of non-player character inhabitants. Seemingly benign and entirely rooted in the philosophy of play, these mechanics can easily combine to create situations that mimic similar acts of environmental, imperial and social brutality throughout human history, including ones happening right now.

This criticism cannot be leveled against Minecraft or Elite Dangerous alone. Other games involve scenarios like the arbitrary slaughter of animals to craft rare equipment or the demolition of procedurally generated but often pristine environments for raw minerals, and the open world almost always absolves the player from consequences for these actions in service of play. No Man’s Sky , a amboyantly colorful competitor to Elite Dangerous , allows explorers to land on planets teeming with life and extract minerals and chemicals with impunity to power their characters’ life-support systems. Players are generally free to shape the open world based entirely on their own needs, with no regard for the non-player characters—a stark simulation of the consequence-free vibe of capitalism.

As the arti cial wilderness continues to consume the real, so too does the player consume this replacement digitization. Perhaps the mechanics of extraction and destruction in realization of a player’s manifest destiny in fact complete the historical record—through gaming, the middle children of history are bequeathing the most detailed testimony available about how this all happened to planet Earth. Could they also come to understand how to stop it?

TWELVE POETS

A collaboration with The Poetry Project, hosted by Nicole Eisenman

For Ursula’s first-ever theme issue, we asked a dozen poets to create a chapbook of verse within the magazine. Over the next thirty-one pages, a poets-and-artists special section.

Bahaar Ahsan

Kimberly Alidio

Joss Barton

CAConrad

erica kaufman

Shiv Kotecha

Matt Longabucc0

Ted Rees

John Coletti

John

Renee Gladman

Laurie Weeks

Simone White

Attend the missing referent:

The new way to spell ethics is M-O-D-A-L!

How does one trill?

I lluminate very well

Very flatten.

Pendulous prompting

Prompted titration

Titration prompt begets

Even titration of vision.

The new way to spell leaf is T-W-I-S-T!

How does one enunciate?

Sustain flattened crisp

Framed deceit.

Padding forms circle

Sugar pierced

Disclosure no prompting

Never touching.

The new way to spell condom is S-Y-M-B-O-L-I-C!

The new way to spell condom is S-Y-M-B-O-L-I-C!

How does one arpeggiate?

Crumble feature

Contact loss timbre.

Undone so actional

Coordinates not withheld

Vehicular imperative

Uncongeal musically.

The new way to spell style is I-N-S-T-R-U-M-E-N-T-A-L!

How does one ascend?

Immersion submersion Pickled submersion sustains.

I ncensed privacy upturned Line through held up Upturned cradled in service Blue sphere foregone.

The new way to spell fictive is P-R-I-V-A-T-E!

to

How does one make clear?

Grain metaphor not holding.

Caulked disjuncture

Never dwindle sever mirror

Munch unwanted

Munch unwanted

Reflexive munch.

Bahaar Ahsan

Top: Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, Composition , 2022. Dermatograph pencil on paper, 15.5 x 12.25 in. (39.37 x 31.115 cm). Courtesy the artist and West Gallery, Metro Manila, Philippines

Bottom: Kimberly Alidio, Composition II , 2023. Dermatograph pencil on paper, 8x11 in. (20.32 x 27.94 cm). Courtesy the artist

By the hand a schooling the hand in infamy long-winded oratory incanting with Fetish of mini eye in triangle surprise a random

Face in the back alleys

O f

Of Time clutch a moving hand With narrowing eyes zoomed From drone above writing’s

Fields edicts writs

Brush never lets up

From a ceremonial score of sur Face swelling with graphisms red

From a ceremonial score of sur Face swelling with graphisms red Embroidered day-of-the-week set

Of panties scarlet

Letter’s carnal Iconoclasts

S crawls A nd

Scrawls to hang onto “scratching And pawing at their paper with Tools the scale of their hands”

Such as dermatographic refuse of spiral derma like a future tense reversal of a such as universe creation which in this by

Such as dermatographic refuse of spiral derma like a future tense reversal of a Non-event such as universe creation which in this Case is the boundary by which no other Letter crosses

andyetyears cronediaspora entropymarks

Kimberly Alidio

you can’t smoke even outside at Lincoln Center or take photos in the Frick

fuck marry kill in the Dutch portrait galleries, two schoolmates sidle past, one declares Rembrandt “looks dumb,” the other replies, “If you’re saying that then you’re saying he thought he himself looked dumb”

he looks many things, but not dumb— bewildered by his own face, beat up— is that rouge on his cheek, or a scrape?

bewildered by his own face, beat up— or fly to the door

using his resources without illusions

it’s erotic but what isn’t—seltzer makers, books packed to bursting on the shelf, time moves so slowly on the canvas but even there can never fully be stopped, the blood held an eon in the fist of her heart will one day flow again, and in the next instant do her eyes fall to her hands or fly to the door

coincides with and solidifies the specter of my intentions

in search of a lens that grips when focused, closes in by tinier and tinier increments without suddenly slipping past the point of greatest clarity before dialed back in hopes of alighting upon a thread or fine strand where resolution coincides with and solidifies the specter of my intentions when in reality composition’s one of those ropes, wide around as a waist, that make you wonder in the musty old ship museum which sailors were crushed in the bum-rush of the tides

Matt Longabucco

Original drawings by Nicole Eisenman in collaboration with poetry by CAConrad, 2023. Courtesy the artist

Zachary Wollard, Sky Advising , 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 14x18 in.

(35.56 x 45.72 cm).

Photo: Thomas S. Barratt. Courtesy the artist

Poplars

pyrite-flecked manure blueberries in fields and arcs

no need to build that stories-high, dull chartreuse watering can to get to the place of your need

safely lit candles dozens of them fence abalone hardware paint

beyond sunlight in three parts out of my face as talon vinyl fluoride

Sprite harbor foam dressing a French fry in harmonics

morning sax for bottle fish all marinas swell moon forms glass cleanser

manure hardware paint glass cleanser

patience

the steady, relaxed smell of cover stock try answers toward me leave a lake

John Coletti

sure, i hear myself say, i would stay here couch simple google search prototype for sailor say who giveth rooster

understanding how long before fashion week notice “return”

to landscape kitchen stories preseason brawls let’s not pretend times change or it’s okay just watch temporarily mute myself hero tossed aside like paperwork redacts allegorically vapid is

as vapid becomes wanton puddle of procedures feeling birds wait

no one helps sort debris worship metallic

feet in retrospect what is work for but to flag here i am don’t notice giddy up in small ways

get attention expensive carpet hair dye cell phone

tactics i try to happen realize our protagonist polite sanitized instead of an event carry forest forward crib figures upend movement is not a place

erica kaufman

Renee Gladman

I swear to god.

I don’t know how to look at paintings. I don’t know how to see them. Anymore, or at least, now. No I don’t, no I swear it. Look, you can watch me. Watch me try it.

I just tried it, using my eyes in the way you’re supposed to, taking it all in, feeling the painting’s presence, but if someone were to say to me, do you see that, it’s a foot, I would have to disagree with them and say no I don’t see a foot because I don’t see one, and if they were like fine, do you see a swirl of color, I would have to tell them no, I don’t see a swirl of color or a see a foot, I don’t know how to look at paintings I would have to tell them, I swear, and that I’ve spent a few minutes confirming it,

It’s possible that this has always been true,

About what I can and cannot see and it’s possible That it isn’t true, movies are still easy to see, And I’m on the fence about photos, But yes of course I’m angry about it all. It’s not like I want to give up looking at them.

do you see that, it’s a foot, I would have to disagree with them and say no I don’t see a foot because I don’t see one, and if they were like fine, It’s not like I want to give up looking at them. I like paintings, but also I don’t want to be a liar. I want to be able to speak to others accurately

I like paintings, but also I don’t want to be a liar. I want to be able to speak to others accurately about what I’m looking at or have at some point seen inside or on paintings, or along my way to them, or all of a sudden, when I’m standing inside a gallery or a museum or hanging out at my house or the home of a friend who puts art on their walls with faces and places I’m afraid of not recognizing, as if I were invited over to do just that. But it’s possible that for years I’ve been lying for years not just to myself but to everyone about how I know when I see at a painting, what I’m looking at, a big liar.

when I see at a painting, what I’m looking at, a big liar.

Maybe this is why I like to read books

Maybe this is why I like to read books that represent my condition and hide their paintings behind or inside something else like an elaborate plot in which no one is tasked with description but the potential of a painting’s theft, replacement, or total destruction, as in the novel Cigarettes by Harry Mathews, in which Walter paints Elizabeth so well that everyone around them,

two generations of horse-and-dog set, upstate socialites and their downtown art world friends squabble over who but the painter sees its subject better than anyone else but the reader who learns that the painting in question isn’t by Walter at all but by Phoebe, whose training involved making an immaculate copy of it, which Owen, her frustrated father destroys in a fit of jealousy and self-protection. Even when I was young I liked books, they are so nice.

“Tintoretto was squiggling all over the place,” writes Mathews, calling out Henry James—who always put the beast in the jungle, and the figure in the carpets of his novels and who had said of the Italian painter that he had never painted an immoral line—for his bullshit.

I better watch what I say about paintings he

I better watch what I say about paintings to magazines in the case that someone like Mathews calls me on my bullshit. Shiv was wrong, Kilgallen’s blocks of bikinis are not on her canvases they’re in his head; the “mottle and mince” he uses to describe how Ellis’s paintings look “like how forgetting feels” a more correct description of his addled mental state than of contemporary technique; that the “slow rub” he uses to describe the butts of Majoli’s blueboys are the products of fantasy; etc. Now that I can’t confirm it.

Yep, nope, it’s right, really, to see absolutely nothing and to say there’s nothing there in front of me or to admit

Yep, nope, it’s right, really, to see absolutely nothing and to say there’s nothing there in front of me or to admit from time to time how I don’t understand what I’m supposed to look at or do but replace the ask with a question like Is this is what you call a gallery, I’m standing in an empty room.

Shiv Kotecha

Smoothly constructing what?

The attempt to make freedom comprehensible, magnifying this most tender pink bile just about so long pretending my lips are pennies mightn’t work gazing into his bobbers—how many fathoms is the pits then

fathoms is the pits then hollow we hear once and shake

I find my index, sigh as petals skirmish thus around his cheek defying esthetic standards of conformity meaning skinny punch or rested in green terror the young painter knew of its beams’ first interruptions along this spin, along the dread creek we splash into again ever hollow we hear once and shake

footprints in the dew, overshot

footprints in the dew, overshot this rancid loom cannot spoil the weft moreso than present, pretty blossoms come out and smile at the husk in the shallows, his and his cold hand on shore.

Ted Rees

Laurie Weeks

of

“A city should be a place where a little boy walking through its streets can sense what he would someday like to be.” Louis Kahn The golden glow characteristic of Philadelphia’s morning light is best viewed from the southwest corner of Market Street facing east facing the Delaware, natural boundary of the Colonial City. Ben Franklin, of course, alights from that body in legend, first of his kind on legs, to originate the history of boys, apart from the history of light.

None of the significant historical scenes that shaped the landscape of ideas in Philadelphia’s power structure in the 1980s or any given time would have anticipated the life of the black teenage girl running the low-slung stairs leading to the concrete plinth that supports Claes Oldenburg’s Clothespin (1976).

low-slung

Ed Bacon’s keynote Downtown project does not contemplate six year old black girls who use the buses and trains alone, fear pissing her yellow carpenter pants as she lifts the gate-latch outside a Mt. Airy river stone seconds before she can use the brass key she is clutching in her little fist. Sixteen, she can run, though no one credits her athletic or physically creative in any way, 2 miles in under 13 minutes, a clip that assures a decent chance of a getaway from your lunging crackhead or rapist; she navigates the dank crap subway to nowhere, ho strolls and black commercial Avenues North, South, Northwest of her location. In the heart of Philadelphia black children get bombed, so knowing how it’s built is good.

Ed Bacon’s keynote Downtown project does not contemplate six year old black girls who use the buses and trains alone, she can in a of it’s

Not sensing what she would like to be who is before you sprinting the stairs emerging from the commuter rail concourse,

Not sensing what she would like to be who is before you sprinting the stairs emerging from the commuter rail concourse, she runs the tunnels past luminescent below-grade tulips shoe shine SEPTA tokens Dietz & Watson hot sausages the places urine pools abandoned unplanned violent Simone White

Manifesting a process most people did not realize was going on power most did not know even existed.

Her father, as it happens, could have seen her if he looked out his office window, but he is not in his offices on Chestnut Street. He is being humiliated in a meeting with Senator Arlen Specter, one block north down 15th Street at City Hall. Specter snaps, “What is it you want?” Her father consults his notes on index cards, doesn’t react, tells the motherfucker what he wants and gets it. Her father has been watching the girl turn feral and done nothing to stop it. She is going to i.goldberg for Timberland boots with his cash in her pocket. She is free when she has his cash in her pocket. But I have stranded the girl on the unsightly Penn Center stairs, whipsawing between aesthetic and financial rejuvenation of a major downtown, also known as redevelopment, and its failure as an innovative matter of cooperation between reform and capital such that the object is reduced to its absolute essentials and totally deprived of its function. Let us go back to the Laurel Canyon scene of the 1960s that both begins and arrests the girl’s movement unto the the big world where an image of Joni Mitchell’s Blue is affixed to the wall on a record sleeve Joni hanging there no one listening.

She is going to i.goldberg for Timberland boots with his cash in her pocket. where an image of Joni Mitchell’s Blue is affixed to the wall on a record sleeve Joni hanging there no one listening.

Unborn at the moment the picture was made, the girl’s radiant identification with the saturated blue light, countenance in shadow, suggests the presence of that which is sonically feminine prior to its actual emergence Joni before the microphone becomes a manner of awakening to a form of speech or life not directed to the politics of the (black) father possible and possible to examine

only on and as a conjunction of several elemental planes. As the curves of Joni’s face resist the light the camera requires and implies, and break out in a fury of shadow, in childhood segregation was not allowed the girl, who is essentially unhanded by Jim Crow the last little plinkety SOS barely on a t-shirt, which results in incidental denial of Joni Mitchell who implies segregation and also somehow allows through the girl distortion of the interpretive tools that would tell us what she would be allowed to become in the built city and her movements through and away from it, in the accidental discovery of the fact that art would not necessarily kill her.

and break out in a fury of shadow, in childhood segregation was not allowed the girl, who is essentially unhanded by Jim Crow the last little plinkety SOS barely on a t-shirt,

Without knowing the precise angle of ascent of Penn Center Plaza’s stair, it’s hard to say whether Alexander Calder’s statue of William Penn would be visible at their Crest without considerable craning of the neck.

The site of the Clothespin is 200 yards, give or take, from the western walls of City Hall, 22 feet thick in some places, anti-modern or faux ancient, as was tacit agreement of t he banker class to build no structure higher than 548 feet, or, the top of Penn’s hat, for nearly a century.

banker

548

straight

Besides, the girl is diminutive. Looking straight ahead, the girl is eye level with the hot dog cart obstructing her view of Dilworth Plaza, a filthy, dim slab covering two square blocks on a good weather day, otherwise recalling the drippy malignant toad, now squashed, that was the Chinese Wall originating at the old Broad Street Station.

obstructing weather day, otherwise recalling the drippy malignant toad, now squashed, that was the Chinese Wall originating at the old Broad Street Station.

No one ever mentioned that the old Station had existed; it had never existed. She read about it in a book.

Her father was a toddler when it was demolished in 1953 and no one knows anything about Philadelphia before her father, who did not know his father who was not in Philadelphia or from it. The girl’s attachment to the place is loose, belonging to a separate politico-economic history, that of her paternal grandmother who lived within the system of municipal authorities that produced AFDC and the Richard Allen Homes,

politico-economic her within and then died at 41 when the girl was 9 months old. Her grandmother’s cancers and death loosely contemporaneous with the death of the old industrial city and the full geographic

then died at 41 when the girl was 9 months old. Her grandmother’s cancers and death loosely contemporaneous with the death of the old industrial city and the full geographic installation of the deep underclass outside the purview of view the “aesthetic.” That is, the PCPC’s self-understanding as world strategist, seeing to it that by the year 2009 no part of Philadelphia is ugly and depressed,

demanded the removal of the prospective existence of the sixteen-year-old black girl waiting for a friend, as usual, at the hexagonal guardrail beneath the Clothespin.

self-understanding guardrail

Pink gloss glows in waves

Across stern Lake Michigan

Our eyes red cracked bowls

Our debts fucked on patchwork quilts

While the client talks about

His daddy issues

He pays us 400 down

For double TS

Time spent drunk rambling on His surgeon father’s cocaine

Addiction and his European oil paintings

Pastoral fields

Sissy bard strums in rose silk

All these old racist masters

Framed in gold carved leaf

French provincial and So fucking CAMP until he

French provincial and So fucking CAMP until he Brags about their price tags to Us the two whores bored in

Ombre blonde wigs and Inky vinyl thigh-high boots

The timer rings and We get dressed while he begs us

To stay but doesn’t want to pay

In the cab ride home

In the cab ride home

We hear a judge ask about Americans and

We hear a judge ask about Americans and Our obligations to wealth

We pout pricelessly stoned.

Joss Barton

“I Put Language on Top of It”

Nicole Eisenman, erica kaufman and Matt Longabucco in conversation about poetry and art

We gathered at my apartment on a Friday afternoon. Matt and I opened a bottle of wine but erica wasn’t drinking. She had a Nixie instead. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so there was a bunch of catching up.

Matt and I told each other about our kids. erica talked about her dog. We edited that out of the conversation (they’re all well).

Nicole Eisenman, Brooklyn, March 10, 2023

On Process

N Okay, let’s just talk about the fact that we haven’t really hung out together for—it’s been a few years. Ursula bringing us together.

It’s true.

N It’s true. We did it two years in a row. The second year, we were writing about superhero women or something.

eThank you, Ursula

e Thank

M You

MYou want to see the pictures I dug up? I think I’ve probably sent them to you before. This is the best one.

eOh right, I forgot that we did that.

e Oh It

N It looks like we’re doing lines. So we each wrote stuff and then we cut it up and mixed it together, was the idea.

M This was the first time, this was at Nicole’s place.

eOh whoa!

e Oh

N God, I should get my hair cut.

M We did it twice.

eThat’s right.

e That’s

M Nicole, what made this issue into a poetry issue?

N Well, Ursula invited me to be the cover story and I deflected by dragging The Poetry Project into it.

M You’re so bound up with poets.

a lot of pictures and I sit with images. That’s how I do a lot of generating of language. I remember you had a show in Chelsea years ago, and I gave myself the assignment of trying to make a poem that included titles for all the paintings that were untitled. And I wish I remembered what that became. I’ll do things like that. My phone is full of photos of art that I’ve come across, whether it’s on the street or just different images that I then try to figure out how to think through as a way to get to language.

N That surprises me somehow. What do you take pictures of?

NPoetry still feels like it’s the last good, pure thing in New York, to me, and I always turn to poetry for ideas, so I read with an agenda. I try to not do that all the time and maybe being friends with you two has helped me with that because I’ve got your books and I just want to read them and see what you’re doing without trying to take, you know?

N Poetry I’m

M I’m always using poems to try to get myself going. But it doesn’t always work, or it makes me feel bad.

N Poems of other writers?

M Other writers—it’s much more satisfying when that happens. I will do this thing where I’ll carry around a poetry book for months, and every time I need that jolt, I will read it. But at some point those books are like: Enough. Stop doing this to me.

e I often start from images. I tend to do the opposite of what you do. I wish that I could be a visual artist and I can’t do that, so I take

just collect

e I could show you. I also just collect words that I find interesting from other places too, so.

N Oh,

NOh, that’s cool. I’m trying to think of what the painting equivalent would be. Like collecting a drawer full of paint marks?

MYou’re a ransacker of the tropes of art history!

M You’re

NYeah, but a word only equals a paint stroke.

M It doesn’t equal a gesture?

N Don’t you need two or three words to make a gesture? Or no, I guess you could have a one-word gesture: Fuck. That’s definitely a gesture.

N Yeah, words to make and then

e I get fixated on a single word and then suddenly the word appears in places. This is a picture from when I was in Budapest in July. Here we go. So this is something that I’ve been totally obsessed with.

N This is an image of a wall… e…in the Jewish quarter.

e …in

N A

NA nd it almost looks like Pepé the Frog or something. It’s these very cartoony space-alien psychedelic frog faces. There’s one with celestial eyes and then there’s an eyeball with the words “Para Man.” Para Man is an eyeball on a wiggly stick.

e W

eW hich is the thing that I was the most excited about, because “para” is the word I’ve been thinking about and I was like: Oh my God, there it is. And then I was like: This is weird.

mean? Is it like, almost?

N What does “para” mean? Is it like, almost?

eYeah, kind of like alongside, near. I’ll show one more.

N I met you guys through Litia Perta. I was invited to do a section of Parkett. I was like: All right, well, let’s invite poets to use my images as a jumping-off point instead of the usual art writing, and that turned into an epic night.

e The party after the issue?

M Yeah.

N You

NYou were under the table, and you were also under the table!

M Did you come under the table?

N We all did. And Jess Arndt was under the table. Ariana Reines was holding court. I remember she was talking about Proust and time, but I don’t remember anything she said.

M We talked about the moment when…

N You remember the conversation?

M I remember her telling about the moment

N I can’t believe this is your inspiration! This one is a roll-down gate with a very big Memphis-y looking cartoon of a three-eyeballed animal with a boom box and a little spray can…who is a friend of his? He’s holding a spray can friend?

e Yeah, it’s street art in Tel Aviv.

N And it says, “Frenemy.”

This -

M And there’s an animate rain cloud. Also, the boom box is just about to come alive.

N And then there’s a little wig, a little character with a three-dimensional wig next to it. That’s psychotic.

e This block is amazing.

N This is your inspiration. What the hell? This is funny and surprising, and, sorry, but I’m a little shocked. What happens when you encounter that? You’re just surprised it exists in Tel Aviv? Or are you just happy?

when an image, or spectacle, seems to be telling us directly what we should see. Resisting those moments is useful to me. I don’t know if that makes a lot of sense. But I compulsively read a lot, too.

M Feels a little compulsive sometimes.

This This Matt?

e I feel really happy about it. And I’m also totally baffled because it’s kind of insanely joyous and somewhat of an act of dissent. There’s something about the encounter with something that’s surprising and compelling in its bigness and brightness that helps me find language. The language one generates

N Are you a compulsive writer, Matt?

MI’m not a compulsive writer. I’m a blocked writer. But I am a compulsive reader.

N A searcher?

M Increasingly, I don’t finish anything.

N You I was

Under the Table

NYou don’t finish writing or finish reading?

M I often don’t finish reading books. I just want to hang out with voices that I like.

N Do you know too much? And you’re like: Okay, I got it.

M Or I’m only going to the book to take something from it.

N Maybe you need to go on a beach vacation and be stuck with one book.

M I think you’re right.

-

in the third volume with Swann, who we’ve followed through a lot of the story. Swann is a Jew who disavows it. He has this big romance that brings him low. But he’s friends with princes, he’s wealthy and has legendary taste, and he’s also a dilettante who never really did the thing he was supposed to do and write a great essay about Vermeer or whatever. He’s friends with the Duchesse de Guermantes, whom Marcel has worshiped the whole time. One night Swann goes over to pick up the duchess and her husband to go to dinner. She comes down and he’s like: I need to tell you something. The doctors say I’m going to die. And this is the moment he’s chosen to tell this to this woman, you know, after they’ve been close friends and allies in society all these years. They’re this pair of great wits, and then her husband comes down and she’s like: Oh, you know what, I should have worn the red shoes with this dress, and she runs back inside to get the red shoes. Devastating.

N Oh my god, I remember this fucking story. I remember Ariana telling it! But it’s funny, because now I think about us, and I see us

from afar. I know we were under the table together, but I don’t see us from that point of view. I see us from above. It’s this weird thing that happens with memory. I like, float away from my original first-person perspective. I’ve been reading Annie Ernaux, and it’s a lot about remembering memories and trying to get back to the authentic place, like trying to re-embody an old version of yourself. I was thinking about that when they sent me the cover for Ursula earlier—it’s a painting I made of us under the table.

e With the salami?

N Yeah,

NYeah, that’s the one. I was trying today to remember if I could see it how I saw it as it was when it was happening, but it’s very hard to step back into your eyeballs, to step back into the self you were then. You can kind of get there, sometimes. But I was thinking: Oh, I want to have an authentic memory of this. What did it look like? And then I thought: Oh, right after that happened, maybe the next day, I thought that I wanted to make a sculpture where a table was on the ceiling and we were always under the table.

M But it was so funny that we thought we had to get under the table. We were already in an apartment.

e I remember. I feel like I was the last to give in.

But it was I

M To come under?

N Did you read that before Ariana told it?

M I had read it. But to hear Ariana tell it, I realized how it had stuck with me.

N And it’s like three books into the story. He realizes his friend is completely superficial and doesn’t give a shit.

NYeah, you were! We had to pull you. We had to convince you.

e Yeah, because I remember I was wearing a skirt.

N Well, it was a good story we heard.

M I remember that moment very vividly.

N Yeah, vividly

M Or maybe she just can’t handle that moment.

e I can see Ariana telling the story. But I didn’t remember what the content was.

M She’s a powerful describer, that one.

I had He I can see that one.

N Yeah. It’s funny. I just read this interview

On Medium

you did, Matt. You were talking about Great Expectations and how that girl tells Pip exactly what she is, at the beginning of the story. She’s like: I’m cold.

M Yeah.

NAnd then you have to go through the whole thing. And then finally you realize: Oh, she’s cold.

e Did you have birds?

N And I did. I

N I did. I had a yellow bird named Omelet. She was flying all around that night.

NWould you ever want to be a painter? Would I want to be a writer? I can’t be a writer because I suck at it. So that’s case closed.

e I can’t be a painter because I suck at it.

N Would at it. Do

N Do you remember the time we did a class together? We should do that again.

not everything mushing or spreading out. Talking tech talk here.

e The second I make something, I get super frustrated and then I put language on top of it.

M I don’t think anyone believes you right now.

N You don’t believe…

M…that you’re not a good writer.

M …that you’re not a good writer.

eI would love to do that. That would be fun.

N Drawing and writing poetry from life.

e It’s interesting because I’ve been trying to make things, as Matt knows. I’ve been trying all kinds of visual expeditions.

N What are you making?

e Well, I had a resin phase, where I just was trying to resin everything. And the only ones that are remotely okay have words and poems in them. They look kind of like something you would make in preschool. Lately, I’ve been trying to learn how to make watercolor stuff.

N Oh, that’s nice. Watercolors are nice.

e I are nice.

e But I don’t really understand how to make it not look like a big glob of brown.

N Yeah,

NYeah, watercolor is hard because it requires some technique. It’s finicky material.

e Yeah,

eYeah, I’ve been trying the wet-on-wet technique.

N You back

NYou could go back into them after they dry. Because then you get a clean mark that’s

.

N Oh, that’s great. So you’re writing on top of them? You should put one of these in Ursula . You’re going to do something, right, Matt? Do you doodle when you’re on the phone?

M I draw.

N You draw!

M I usually hate what comes out of my pen. But I really want to be able to draw.

N What do you have? A sketchbook and you make drawings in it?

MI go to “drink-and-draw” right down the street.

N Tell me next time you go. I’ll go with you.

M Please do! It’s a place called the Bat Haus. Every Wednesday night, they hire a live model. The model does a series of poses.

N Naked?

M Naked. Does the poses. And there’s, like, sixty people in there, drawing away. I go and make a mess.

M I I’m as bad at

N That’s great. It’s so funny. I’m as bad at writing, but I do try to write occasionally.

NYeah, it’s terrible. I mean, it’s … no, it’s not terrible. It’s that I really don’t understand what I’m trying to do. It’d be nice to take a class, I guess. But it’s intimidating to have to read your stuff out loud.

M erica is the great writing educator.

N Yeah, educator

e We could do a little private class, the three of us. Because Matt is the best at coming up with prompts that will get you to make something excellent. Every time I don’t know what to do, Matt gives me good prompts.

NYeah, good prompts. All you need is a good prompt.

M Will you teach me a drawing technique?

NYeah, I can. Although, if there’s sixty people in the room, it’s a little hard to be like…

M You’d get scared off?

N No, it just sounds crowded. I just think maybe we have to go out and draw in a bar.

M For sure. That’d be better.

N Yeah, N Yeah, better

N Which I’d be totally game for, by the way.

On Embodiment (and Process Again)

“There's something about the encounter with something that’s surprising and compelling in its bigness and brightness that helps me find language. The language one generates when an image, or spectacle, seems to be telling us directly what we should see.

N All right, I have something I want to talk to you guys about. So I had this conversation with Monika Baer, yesterday, about painting, and she was describing this really surreal thing of moving back and forth, when you’re doing the work. You’re in the room, the thing is there and you’re stepping back and forward, approaching it and then stepping back again and again. And this rhythm begins to happen and out of the rhythm energy begins to percolate, and out of the energy a kind of animus, a sparky thing, happens. I was thinking about poetry and sitting at a desk and writing gestures because I’ve been doing desk work the last couple of days. I’ve been doing these two-by-two-inch drawings. I don’t know if you write longhand, or how you’re doing it, but what do you think of your body as you are writing? What relationship does your body have to the thing that’s coming out?

M For me, the poetry experience that I compare to all others is, you know, that poem of mine “Lucky 7s”? I was walking through Williamsburg on a very cold day, and every hundred yards I would stop and write three more lines, leaning on a mailbox. On the move, picking stuff up as I went. It was a truly embodied writing experience, and I’m often trying to replicate that very physical aspect of noticing and connecting. Also, it’s very hard for me to sit still.

N That’s brilliant.

And

didn’t

M And I didn’t ever do it exactly that way again because I thought: Oh, it’ll come out kind of forced. But it’s how I want it to feel.

NWalking a hundred yards, you’re going from one world to a completely separate world. Then there is the much smaller gesture of moving your pen, picking it up and putting it down and picking it up. Is there anything that accumulates or is it just wrist cramp and exhaustion from sitting?

M erica, can you talk about how you compose?

Resisting those moments is useful to me.”

when be those

—erica kaufman

e I do a combination of generating a ton of language and collecting language from other places. I do it all by hand. This big kind of repository of language. And then once I have a lot, I type it all up, I print it out, and then I make poems. I write by hand, and I color-code, and I cross things out as I’m moving them around.

N Editing yourself down to a poem.

e Yeah, sort of. It’s more like collage. I pick and choose, but I constantly have to recopy because a lot of how poems happen for me is what they look like on the page and if they sound the way that I think they’re supposed to sound.

N But they don’t sound collaged.

e That’s because I keep working on them until they’re there. So it’s a lot of drafting, reading, then trying it a different way, and then trying it a different way again. So I keep the notebook that has the raw material. And then I have a notebook where I have one set of drafts, and then I have a notebook where there’s what I imagine it’s going to be. If I feel like a poem’s finished, I recopy it again. Because when I write something, I hear it in my head. I have three notebooks with me today, and this is the notebook where, when the things feel finished, they go here. So it looks really clean.

N Oh, wow. And your handwriting is really small and precise. It’s like green ink on blue paper, it’s really pretty.

M Graph paper, too.

N That’s like shorthand. It looks like code language. Well, also, I’m looking at it upside down.

e And then this is a different version of one of those. So sometimes they’re like this. [Showing the notebooks.]

N Your process is super complicated.

e Yeah,

eYeah, and then I’m constantly confused about the best place to put things. I’ll show you the other layer. And I also have to travel with all of the options.

N You

NYou have to carry all the notebooks, all the different stages. Is Para Classic the new book?

e Pre-Classic maybe.

N It’s a trilogy. This is a wonderful way of working, because this goes back to what the Dadaists did, but you’re using your own language.

e But then you could see, I typed it. I cut it. And then I started to recopy. And then it stops, because I was like: Oh, this isn’t actually going to work.

N This is a really beautiful page.

e It’s not close to being done. This one I had to give up on for a little while. I always have at least two notebooks. Most of the time it’s three. And I’m always moving things.

N I like

NI also like how you draw these boxes around things. Sequestering them.

M The trilogy has a trajectory, right? What are the three parts?

e Well,

eWell, the part that I’m on is changing. The first part was Milton. And it was about reimagining what an epic hero could do in a world where everything is always fallen. And then with the second book, which intended to grapple with Homer’s Odyssey and Gilgamesh, suddenly everything fell as I was making it because there was Trump. So I had to rewrite the whole thing. And that changed the contour of how I was thinking about the trilogy. That book became more about translation and disobedience through language than it was about the epics that it began with. For this book, I thought I’d work through Virgil and Dante, but I’m having a really hard

time, so it might just be Virgil. There’s something that I’m drawn to in the idea of fleeing the fall, something that feels more writable than a slow descent (even if Dante’s Inferno as an epic is more interesting to me). There’s also a moment in Virgil that Milton echoes, the seeing of the future—that moment in Milton is what set this entire trilogy idea in motion. But with this last book I’m somehow not able to stay close to any text, and I am trying to only work through language that I generate. This is a shift for me, away from word banks and found vocabularies, so I’ve been relying on images to spark lyric. So my process is a bit unconventional in some ways, I guess. And then if I feel like I can’t do anything, I just recopy and recopy.

e I push up against that, too, because I work so much with found material that at a certain point I feel like—and this is a point that I’m hitting now—I don’t want to work with found material. I want to work with my voice.

N It’s good, too, to be part of this lineage of writing. When you’re taking other people’s writing and putting it in your own, or taking things, do you feel like you’re undermining that stuff in some way? That question’s for you, dude.

M It’s a good question. I hear what you’re saying.

that have to do with Bitcoin. So that’s my word bank. But the poem’s not working well. So I wonder what that word bank is doing that I’m not able to figure out how to say myself. And then how do I figure out how to say it. What am I hiding from, by giving myself all of these limitations?

N It feels like limitations when the thing’s not working. You’re actually giving yourself a lot of new and insane language!

M Blockchain.

e Crypto-currency.

N Fungible

NB ecause we’re talking about Virgil and Dante.

gives. Matt,

N And then something shifts and gives. Matt, somehow I picture you on a computer.

M I actually do a lot of the same things that erica does. If I don’t cut things up, I’ll turn into a bad narrative poet. I’m definitely on my hands and knees on the floor with lots of little pieces of paper. I learned a lot from erica, and from John Coletti, who walks around with a binder.

e Keeping something

eKeeping the different versions is something I learned from John.

M He walks around with these binders.

e Full of different drafts of poems.

Full of different in the

M The edits get reprinted, then go back in the binder.

N Collage. It works! It’s something I’m trying to do—more slicing and dicing. I do paintings that are really narrative and built on a space that’s stable. But there are these other things I’ve been trying to do where space collapses, story collapses, and it’s just, say, a head or a body part. A hand or a head. And how far can you push things around and have it still be that thing? I think my work has had so much gathering—this idea of gathering material and weaving it into your work. And sometimes I want to step back from that and not have anybody else’s voice in my head. It means looking at less stuff. Because everything I look at, I’m like: That’s the perfect way to do it, you know? There’s so much good work.

M Everyone at this table is interested in the canon. But I know what you’re saying: What if I actually reached down and accepted that I have all the tools? And that the ideas are digested in me. Could I just make a thing that’s mostly me—everything’s been metabolized enough that I can make a gesture and I don’t need another hand to help. I think about that as a good place to aim for. I love writers who are so singular in that way. I mean, Pessoa—he never mentions another writer. Of course, he has also fragmented himself.

N But do you think it’s hermetically sealed in its own space bubble?

M Kind of. I don’t quite know how to get there. But I do think it’s worth trying to make your own leap.

N Doing both at the same time is a good idea. Having some corner of your practice for that. Because the canon is incredible and inspiring and needs to be fucked with and played with.

N B But the

e I was thinking yesterday about the last book of the trilogy and how I’ve been struggling with it a lot. I think that maybe the problem is that I have the arc of the constraint set up, and that runs counter to how I think about what I do when I make a poem, which is in some ways intuitive. It just feels a certain way to me. I was working on this poem that’s called “Prophecy,” and I’m working through pieces of language that I’ve been collecting from newspapers

M I have a question.

N Okay.

My

M My question is: The painting with the ladder, the bicycle, the two people… [Destiny Riding Her Bike (2020)]

N Uh-huh.

M Do you feel like that’s full of gathered material, or mingled with someone’s voice? I think of that as quintessential you in a way. I know you work in many registers, but that kind of psychodrama thing you do…

N Yeah.

NYeah. I feel like with that one, I wasn’t looking at anyone else’s work. I was thinking about Douglas Sirk, or it could have been a still from a Todd Haynes movie. The style of that painting is no-style style. It’s a workhorse painting, where you are just trying to tell the damn story.

M But there is that vein, in others of your paintings—the people pulling the cart, the town flooded with shit…

N Yeah.

NYeah. Although I think even those paintings have a more painterly weirdness. The bike one is a very illustrative painting, even for me, but it has to be like that because there’s so much plot in that painting. I wanted it clear that the two people are looking at each other as they’re in the midst of this accident. That painting was torture to finish.

On Overlaps, Covers, Capitalism

It

“I was walking through Williamsburg on a very cold day, and every hundred yards I would stop and write three more lines, leaning on a mailbox. On the move, picking stuff up as I went. It was a truly embodied writing experience, and I’m often trying to replicate that very physical aspect of noticing and connecting.”—Matt

Longabucco

e There’s a question that Kay Gabriel asked us about working with both visual and verbal media and the overlap between poets and visual artists: “The Poetry Project started at a moment of pretty significant overlap between poets and visual artists, which tapered off in the decades afterwards and now sometimes feels resuscitated, at least in pockets or in particular scenes. In your careers as writers and artists, have you seen particular changes in the social overlaps of writers and artists?”

N It seems like there’s more overlap now than there was, say, in 1995.

e How did you come to do Eileen’s cover for Maxfield Parrish?

N It was like ’92 or probably ’93 or maybe ’94. I met Eileen through Laurie Weeks, and then they asked me to do the cover.

e That was how I first knew about your work. When I was in college, I used to go to the Strand. I would take the train from New Jersey and I would go, and I was just trying to read as many poetry books as I could, and I liked what the Black Sparrow books looked like. So I bought any Black Sparrow book I saw, and that was how I first learned about Eileen. And then that cover. I was like, wow, what is this?

M erica’s books.

N Is it okay if I say that those covers are kind of perfect for the poems.

e Yeah, I think they’re both absolutely perfect. I feel like there’s a conversation that happens between the cover and the book that feels like a human conversation.

N Yeah, like it front-loads something, right?

e And the Pathetic Literature book, that looks amazing.

N There seems to be more attention for poetry now in general. I don’t know if that’s because of The Poetry Project. There aren’t so many ways, when you are making things, to resist the market, and if you are outside of it, often you’re trying to get into it—like, so many painters are trying to grab the golden ring. And I don’t think that’s the case as much with poetry, because the golden ring is like…

e It’s aluminum.

N Poets should get paid a lot. I mean you’re trying to pay bills!

M I’m not sure either of us expects to make any money from poetry, but I think you’re right that sometimes people come to poetry because it still feels like people are truly doing it as amateurs. Although there is professionalization in poetry, of course.

N Oh, that’s cool. Yeah, I like that cover. I just got it in the mail a couple weeks ago from Eileen. It’s a picture of a flower being built by a bunch of little flowers. I like seeing my work on the cover of poetry books!

Oh, that’s cool. just

N It’s a pathetic painting so…

M So you’re having overlap with writers. But what about other artists?

e There’s been a shift in some of the even more mainstream magazines. Like, there are good editors, too. So I think poetry that people wouldn’t have encountered otherwise is there. Eileen had an amazing poem in The New Yorker last week, which made me so happy. And The Nation has been having really good poetry. Anne Boyer’s been editing for The New York Times Magazine. There was a beautiful Peter Gizzi poem in there recently. So there’s a way in which it’s suddenly made its way into places where people are encountering it who would never have seen it before.

N It’s never going to be mainstream, because it defies reality.

“Nicole Eisenman. What Happened” is on view through September 10 at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich.

Bahaar Ahsan

Bahaar Ahsan is a poet from the Bay Area living in New York City. She is the author of Gay Girl Hyacinth (Eyelet, 2021).

Kimberly Alidio

Kimberly Alidio is the author of four books of poetry, including Teeter, which will be published July 2023. Her video, sound and visual poetry appear in FIVES, Bæst, Juf and Anamorphoseis Her writing has been awarded the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the Bill Waller Award in Creative Nonfiction, and nominated for the United States Artists Fellowship and the Lambda Literary Award. She lives on Munsee-Mohican lands along the Mahicantuck River, otherwise known as New York’s Upper Hudson Valley.

Joss Barton

Joss Barton is a writer, journalist and spokenword performance artist exploring and documenting queer and trans* life, love and liberation. Her work blends femme-fever dreams over the soundtrack of the American nightmare. Combining prose poetry, nonfiction confessional essays, drag artistry and spoken-word stage performances, Joss examines the myriad states of queer trans* womanhoods from historical, political and pop cultural identities of death, desires, dreams and disco.

CAConrad

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), won the 2022 PEN Josephine Miles Award. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects, with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal. Their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. A new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Wave Books in 2024 titled Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return.

John Coletti

John Coletti is the author of Peppermint Oil (PUSH, 2020), Deep Code (City Lights, 2014), Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further, 2008) and Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs, 2005). With Anselm Berrigan, he is the co-author of Skasers (Flowers & Cream, 2012).

Renee Gladman

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017) One Long Black Sentence, a series of white-ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020) and Plans for Sentences, an image/text-based meditation on black futurity and other choreographies of gathering (2022). She makes her home in New England.

erica kaufman

Poet, writer and teacher, erica kaufman is the author of POST CLASSIC and INSTANT CLASSIC (both from Roof Books) and censory impulse (Factory School). She is coeditor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards and a collection of archival pedagogical documents, Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974. Recent poems can be found in e-flux. kaufman’s prose, focused on contemporary feminist poetics and pedagogy, appears in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein; The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times; Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies ; and Reading Experimental Writing. kaufman is the director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking.

Roof School).

Shiv Kotecha

Shiv Kotecha is the author of The Switch (Wonder, 2018) and EXTRIGUE (Make Now, 2015). His writing appears in publications including 4Columns , Aperture , Artforum , BOMB, Frieze, The Nation, Notebook at MUBI and The Poetry Project Newsletter. With the artist Pradeep Dalal, he edits Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of innovative arts writing produced by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He lives and works in New York.

Matt Longabucc0

Matt Longabucco is the author of the poetry collection Heroic Dose (Golias Books, 2022) and M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021), a book-length essay about a landmark of French cinema and its creator. His essay “Poster Syndrome” appears in the Nicole Eisenman catalogue Incelesbian (2020). He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing, innovative pedagogy and critical theory at New York University and at Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.

Ted Rees

Ted Rees is a poet, essayist and editor who lives and works in Philadelphia. His most recent books include Dog Day Economy (Roof Books, 2022) and Thanksgiving: a Poem, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, which was published by Golias Books in 2020. Recent essays have been published in SPT’s The Back Room and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He is editorat-large for The Elephants, as well as founder and co-editor of Asterion Projects with Levi Bentley. Since the summer of 2020, he has been running Overflowing Poetry Workshops, an extra-institutional online workshop space.

Laurie Weeks

Laurie Weeks is a writer, pataphysicist and educator who divides her time between New York City and Idaho. She is the author of Zipper Mouth, A Novel and I Watch The Human . Weeks is the founder of the Institute for Lifelong Juvenile Delinquency: Investigations into Psychomagic, Resonance and Shapeshifting. She is also the founder of Summer of Bad Plays, in collaboration with Nicole Eisenman, Charles Atlas, Dancenoise (Lucy Sextion & Ann Iobst), Mike Iveson and Stinkmetal. A chapter from her latest novel-in-progress, Worms Make Heaven , appeared in the recent anthology Pathetic Literature, edited by Eileen Myles.

Simone White

Simone White is the author of the collections or, on being the other woman, Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed and House Envy of All the World. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Frieze

THE TOWN, THE COUNTY, THE DESERT, THE DROP

Mark Bradford on history’s imaginarium

CONVERSATIONS

In preparation for the exhibition “You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice,” Mark Bradford’s rst show of new work in New York City since 2015, on view through July 28 at Hauser & Wirth on 22nd Street in Chelsea, Bradford sat down with Randy Kennedy in his studio in Los Angeles to talk about ideas that gave rise to the show. These are condensed and edited portions of their conversation.

Randy Kennedy

Maybe we could start talking about this new work with some basic background, which is your long-standing interest in embedding your abstraction deeply within the facts and documents of the world—among them the histories, particularly the racial histories, of Los Angeles, Tulsa, New Orleans and other places; parts of the Constitution; the story of Pickett’s Charge, the turning point in the Civil War.

Yes.

Mark Bradford

Kennedy

And in this new work, it seems to me that while you’re still deeply grounded in the world, the lines of thought you’ve been following lately have led you in more speculative directions. There are, in a sense, three places inhabited in this work—a ctional place, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, the Mississippi setting for almost all of his novels; a second place, which did exist but does no longer, a ghost town, the town of Blackdom in New Mexico, which was homesteaded in the early 1900s by African American families eeing Jim Crow; and nally the desert, the reality of the desert but also the idea of it, particularly the Chihuahuan desert, which covers parts of northern Mexico, West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. And then there’s actually a fourth place in this work, so to speak, which we’ll talk about later, which is really the place of yourself, your own history, approached in a way you’ve never quite done before. How did all these things start to come together?

Bradford

It really began with me starting to research ghost towns. About three years ago, I was asked to be part of a show that had to do with the Great Migration. And I started to do some research, to think about the idea of Black

migration at the turn of last century, the early 20th century. And in a way I always return to the merchants, merchant culture, because it’s what I’m part of, the son of a hairdresser and once a hairdresser myself. So it’s just ingrained in me, local businesses, local merchants. And I was thinking about how a merchant would think about migration, nding a place to continue to ply a trade. With the ghost towns, it became something about places where people had gone to set up new lives and had gone with a certain amount of hope and expectation and then it just didn’t take, you know, for whatever reason. I had lists of lots of unincorporated towns, tiny places that were around for a little while, a few decades. And then—this is the way my brain works— thinking about those towns and about charged spaces and history, I remembered Faulkner’s, Absalom, Absalom! And I started thinking about Faulkner again, for the rst time in a long time, his greatness and, of course, also all the ways his version of the South is problematic. But it was more about a ctional place where realworld problems can be looked at, experimented with. I’ve always felt the same way about Samuel Delany’s great science- ction novel, Dhalgren, this ctionalized space that he imbued with so much thinking about how the world works. But Faulkner’s county and these ghost towns just became huge rabbit holes that I went down.

Kennedy

Then what brought the desert into it? I grew up in West Texas, on the edge of the Chihuahuan desert, and it’s always seemed to me that of all the places on the earth besides maybe the ocean, the desert is the most liminal, imaginary space that we have. Of course, people live in the desert, but it’s one of those places that doesn’t seem designed for human life, sometimes barely even for animal or plant life. It’s often brutal, and it’s a place where people disappear, or go to disappear.

Bradford

Right, it’s like the Arctic, except it’s not remote. The desert started to come into it all, I think, because I was looking at the history of Blackdom, which is such a powerful name and an interesting history. You have a group of Black families escaping Jim Crow, all those repressive laws. They took an opportunity to get out of the South and that violence and nd a better life. But they chose New Mexico. And I was like,

“Johnny the Jaguar came on the Mayflower. It should have said ‘Johnny Buys Houses’ on the side of the Mayflower when they hit Plymouth Rock.” Bradford

“The town was called Blackdom, which sounds like a very contemporary reference. I was thinking: ‘Okay, but we weren’t called Black until the ’60s, so how did they come up with the name Blackdom?’ It must have been their thinking of the idea of a kingdom. You know … Welcome to Blackdom, a Black kingdom, a Black heaven.” Bradford

(p. 74)

Mark Bradford, You Don't Have to Tell Me Twice, 2022. Mixed media on canvas, 120 1/8 x 209 x 2 1/4 in. (305.1 x 530.8 x 5.7 cm). © Mark Bradford. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth (p. 76)

Mark Bradford, Manifest Destiny, 2023. Mixed media, dimensions variable. © Mark Bradford.

“Oh, that’s odd. New Mexico, the desert. Why is that?" You would think they would have gone to Northern or Western cities. But W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis and other magazines for Black readers advertised opportunities like this, land opportunities, and I’ve always been obsessed with going through ads like that, guring out how movement and commercial settlement happened in real time. So with Blackdom, I started thinking about how they were on the edge of a desert, how that desert united Mexico and the states that had once been Mexico. And, I don’t know, there was just something about the desert that had that “Go West, young man!” feel to it, the ring of Manifest Destiny in my ear, which really interested me.

Kennedy

Did the idea of the desert interest you in a visual way as well, for the ways it could work with abstraction?

Bradford

(p. 80)

Mark Bradford, The Hunters Enter the Woods, 2020. Mixed media on canvas, 144 1/8 x 120 3/8 x 2 1/4 in. (366.1 x 305.8 x 5.7 cm). © Mark Bradford. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the artist and Hauser

Yeah. One thing was that very rarely do I ever deal with ora and fauna in my work. I’m always a city boy, you know? Everything’s urban or gritty. But the desert started making me think about the natural world. And it made me think of Henri Rousseau, the way he painted his imaginary jungles and forests in that amazingly at, perspectiveless way that played with abstraction. And so I approached these paintings of the desert in a pretty Rousseauian way, with my imagination: This is what I think the ora and the fauna of the Chihuahuan Desert would look like, the plants, the animals, the creepy crawlers, especially the predators. I did some research about birds and animals and plants and apex predators but I also just started imagining colors and shapes and sizes. So it became this fantasy place that I had never visited. I mean, I had driven through New Mexico on my way to Albuquerque and Santa Fe a couple of times, so I wasn’t unfamiliar with driving there from Los Angeles. But mostly what I got from those drives was the atness and the sky. You can’t tell up from down sometimes. It’s amazing to think about Blackdom being there, those Southern families who put down roots in the middle of such emptiness and isolation.

Kennedy

They lighted out for a place that was still almost the frontier, that had been the frontier not many years prior to their arrival.

Bradford

Right, Blackdom hit its zenith around 1908 and was essentially abandoned by the early 1920s because of water shortages. But if you go back just a little bit further from its founding, in the last half of the 19th century, that was still Manifest Destiny at work, relentless expansionism—to go west and take all the

land and resources you can grab and pillage and burn as much as you need to. Get the gold. Butcher anyone who gets in your way. I was thinking that the history of the South and that history lay on top of each other in many ways. There are a lot of African American people who are mixed with Indigenous people in the history of the West and its conquest. I’ll tell you another thing that really fascinated me about Blackdom. One of the ads promoting the town and trying to get new settlers in The Crisis said: “Looking for 500 Negro families.” At the time, that's what we were called, Negros. But the town was called Blackdom, which sounds like a very contemporary reference. I was thinking: “Okay, but we weren’t called Black until the ’60s, so how did they come up with the name Blackdom?” It must have been their thinking of the idea of a kingdom. You know, like kingdom of heaven. Welcome to Blackdom, a Black kingdom, a Black heaven.

Kennedy

In this work, there are a couple of recognizable characters running through the pieces, one being the gure of the jaguar, which was once the apex predator in the Chihuahuan desert.

Bradford

The jaguar is now endangered there. But at one time it did roam as the king of that land, so in my imagination, he’s still roaming. He’s the apex predator, and he came to stand in for all kinds of predators throughout history. The jaguar immediately became tied up in my mind with the gure in a commercial sign that I started seeing in L.A., a predatory housing buyer. The sign said, “Johnny Buys Houses.” I was immediately fascinated by it because very, very few times with those kinds of signs do you see someone’s name mentioned. It’s usually just a business behind the predatory systems, but “Johnny” was the rst time the merchant posters became personalized, in a sense. They became familiar because it sounded like your neighbor. “We buy houses. I buy houses. It’s never “Randy buys houses” or “Mark buys houses.” And when I saw that I was like, “Oh, Johnny.” This is a gure I can think about, do something with. When you're dealing with people who are desperate, who want another life, an escape, that’s when the predators and speculators show up, to get people at their most vulnerable. And so there was Johnny, and then in my mind he became Johnny the Jaguar. And I let him roam. He was roaming in Yoknapatawpha County in the embattled post-Civil War South, and he was in the desert, and he was chasing me, too, when I was a kid and guring out that I was gay and getting beaten up. I made him Johnny the Jaguar, Johnny the Speculator, Johnny the Bully. Johnny

Photo: Mark Bradford studio. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

& Wirth

the Jaguar came on the May ower. It should have said “Johnny Buys Houses” on the side of the May ower when they hit Plymouth Rock.

Kennedy

You’ve been collecting those kinds of urban advertising posters and using them in your work for a very long time, right?

Bradford

Since the riots in 1992. Because that’s when you really saw them start. When everything burned down, there were so many vacant lots. Cyclone fencing went up. And when the fencing went up, people said, “Oh, hey, wait a minute. We could use these as a place to do our local advertising.” The rst wave was in the African American community, African American merchants advertising to African Americans. The second wave came with immigration in the late ’90s and early 2000’s, people coming from Mexico and Central America. That’s when you saw more handymen services, labor notices. And then the last wave has been the predators. “We buy houses. We buy your houses. We prey on your distress.” In some ways, the land that ended up being sold to those families for Blackdom had to have had elements of the predatory in it. It wasn’t a place with enough water. And the families eventually had to leave it, to disperse. It became just one of those historical markers that say:

“Here once stood…” But there’s nothing there at all anymore. You just have to project your imagination onto the tumbleweeds. I liked that it was part of the Great Migration into the Southwest, into New Mexico, because that just opened up the narrative even more for me.

Kennedy

And Johnny is like some kind of Western gure walking around out with the guns on his hips, Johnny Ringo.

Bradford

Exactly. Johnny the Cowboy. He’s out to get you. He’s a predator in a place full of predators, especially the Southwest. You think about the plight and su ering of Indigenous people in the Southwest, the kinds of hyperviolence that Cormac McCarthy gets at in Blood Meridian . And you think of the su ering of Black people in Faulkner’s South. How do we grapple with places that have these horri c histories?

Maybe I do it through abstraction and in other ways in the work. I think back to the series I did when I made paintings based on part of the United States Constitution, a document that has so much blood on it.

Kennedy

There’s of course a lot of actual history in these new works. But there also seems to be a high quotient of the ctional or the fuzzy in terms of the historical record, which maybe gives you

room to move around in these themes, themes that you've explored for a long time in your work?

Bradford

Fuzzy and oating are good words for it. I purposely chose spaces that were fuzzy, that were never there or that existed no longer because to me, in 2023, living in this world, being part of this world, being aware of what's happening around me, it is very hard to turn away from. It’s hard not to acknowledge what we’ve been living in—Trump, the pandemic, what George Floyd’s murder showed and set in motion. It’s troubling on every level, politically, emotionally, psychologically, socially. It is just a troubling, troubling, troubling time. And it’s so real that I almost had to create an alternate universe to be able to deal with the reality. Does that make sense?

Kennedy

It does. It’s a fantasy land in which all these things exist, all the history is there, but you need to be able to look at it in a way other than square on. Like that line from Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Bradford

Right. I wanted to use my subjectivity to create a site where I felt like maybe I could control it and I could move through it. And so I’m going between this site that I create and the reality that I see around me every single day. It was di cult to make work these last three years. And I guess I wanted to make work. And it’s interesting because this is the rst time in my work that I ever brought my childhood imagination into the equation. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, just entering puberty, I started to build these little imaginary places, scenarios and dioramas, and I would lm them with a Super 8 movie camera. It was me creating a space that I could control and that I could move around in. Because the world at that time for me was becoming hostile. I had less and less agency in the world.

Kennedy

I’m wondering if this direction in the work might also be coming from the fact that you’re an artist who is now very well-known and widely shown and written about and so expectations begin to get built into that, into your reputation. Maybe people expect you to address things in a certain way, especially about Black life in America, and you don’t want to nd yourself being boxed into creative corners.

Bradford

Well, I don’t want to be someone who is just responding to the news, to current events, to historical fact. It’s a lot more complicated than that and di cult to explain, to attach words to.

Kennedy

Could we return for a minute to you talking about your creative world when you were young, the ways you responded to the world starting to come at you?

Bradford

Well, you know, it’s puberty, right? Which is hard enough in any case. And in my case, I’m understanding that I’m gay, and I’m suddenly becoming this very tall, very skinny kid who stands out in a crowd, six foot seven. I got classi ed as a sissy. Sissy was the word then. So sports was o the table, along with so many other things. Any interactions with little heterosexual men were o the table. I was much more susceptible to being beaten up and chased. And so I retreated into myself and started making things. I created safe spaces where I could be my own subject, because in puberty I felt like I had become an object of other people’s opinion. I was becoming an object either of disappointment or of ridicule, because of my sexuality. In my own world, I could make my little lms. I could call my own shots and play who I wanted to play. I could read books that I wanted to read. Just sit all day on the beach and read books and make movies with my friends.

Kennedy

You’d set up some sort of a tableau or scene or characters …

Bradford

All of it. For one thing, I was fascinated by airport crash movies. And so with refrigerator boxes I created the entire inside of an airplane, with ight attendants, and it crashed. The stars were all girls around my age. In the crash scenes, everyone’s screaming and falling on the oor. I also loved Blaxploitation lms like Foxy Brown, with the Black woman in control. I liked Wonder Woman, all these women in control and kicking ass. So I made my own versions of them. That was kind of my bridge between ages thirteen and sixteen. And then at sixteen, I was old enough to start getting into nightclubs. Then nightclubs and the dance oor and dressing up became another space where I could express my creativity.

Kennedy

When you were making those lms, did you

have an audience of friends for them, or were they were mostly for you, for your family?

Bradford

Mostly for me and the people that starred in them. I always knew that parents would nd it kind of odd, so I never showed much to them. The parents of the girls would have probably been like: “Why is he having these girls dress up like this? Wait, you’re going to have my daughter in a bathing suit running down the street? With a cape? And she’s eight!?”

Kennedy

Right.

Bradford

And I would have been like, “Yeah, and she's going to be fabulous!” But they wouldn’t have gotten it.

Kennedy

The particular lm that is included in the exhibition contains the dramatic still that you’ve had enlarged, of you performing the motion of a fall from what seems to be a gunshot. And even though it was clearly a part you were playing, it reads now—as it probably read then—as stark shorthand for violence in general against Black people in America.

Bradford

In that movie, I was actually playing the bad guy, and o camera there’s a girl standing with a gun. You just can’t see her in the frame. There was no slow-motion capability on those home movie cameras in the ’70s. So I had to do it all myself by moving in slow motion, like the Bionic Man, slow, slow, slow, with my body. And we could only do one take because there was no editing with those cameras. You mailed o the lm and waited to nd out what you’d gotten. I remember when I was doing it a Doberman from the next house over jumped on the fence and kind of pulled my jacket through the fence, but I had to keep my composure because I was dedicated to the craft. And what really caught me looking back at my adolescent lm as an older adult was this very vulnerable body falling through space. You see it repeated over and over again in the news: young Black males falling, falling, falling, falling.

Kennedy

How long had it been since you had seen that lm?

“What really caught me looking back at my adolescent film as an older adult was this very vulnerable body falling through space. You see it repeated over and over again in the news: young Black males falling, falling, falling, falling.” Bradford

Bradford

At least twenty years. And when I looked at it again, I was very uncomfortable. There was something about it, that singular gesture. It kind of reminded me of the Little Red Riding Hood story. And that’s a very dark fable, let me tell you. I saw my jacket as red and thought of myself as being highly aware of the predators all around me at that moment in my life.

Kennedy

And those frames of you falling then led you to start thinking about the history of the death drop as a dance move, as a performance move, which gures into the show?

Bradford

Not really at that time. God knows I did enough death drops myself when I was spending time in clubs. But actually what happened was that I was thinking about the Great Migration train timetables that I was using as the basis for other paintings. I really love that kind of early numerical mapping, showing places and bodies and travel and trains in graphic form. In looking at those, I started to think about other migrations within the Great Migration. I started thinking about queer migrations, people who had to leave their own families and their communities and go to Europe or elsewhere to be able to be who they were without fear. I started thinking about Bayard Rustin, the great civil rights leader who was kind of forgotten in the history of the movement because he was gay. I started thinking about James Baldwin and Audre Lorde and other gay Black Americans for whom the Great Migration meant something very di erent. I thought about women on the run from abuse and discrimination. And then, when I started thinking about a show, I thought: “Let’s put something else in this show. Something other than a painting, something unexpected.” And I just knew it had to be about the death drop. In the gay community, that dance move is a very layered, complicated thing.

Kennedy

It’s such a dramatic, creative act that’s also simultaneously an evocation of death.

Bradford

The historical origins of that move are very di cult to trace in club and vogueing culture, and the use of the name “death drop” isn’t something that’s widely agreed upon. But I’ve always seen in it at least some symbolic reference to death and violence. And to me, it’s important to think about that context right now, because violence and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community is still very, very prevalent.

Kennedy

And on the rise right now.

Bradford

On the rise all over. And at a certain point I started to know that I didn’t just want to have only paintings in this show. The paintings would have been ne by themselves, but they would’ve looked almost like a Rothko Chapel. It felt too modernist, too clean in a way, for me. So putting this uncomfortable object on the oor and connecting it with the lm I made when I was young became the answer. It’s a very personal thing, putting my face, my own body in a show. It’s probably the rst and only time I’ll do it. But it felt right. It’s me. I’m personalizing the Great Migration to talk about my own migrations, in a way, my exoduses, my predators, my nomadism, my memory. I think about the social fabric and the community in which I understood who I was in the ’80s. AIDS decimated it. It was gone. It is gone. And so the idea of memory and place and belonging to a chosen family is something I had to rewrite. In this show, I’m doing it with my body. For this one, it had to be me.

“I purposely chose spaces that were fuzzy, that were never there or that existed no longer because to me, in 2023, living in this world, being part of this world, being aware of what’s happening around me … I almost had to create an alternate universe to be able to deal with the reality.” Bradford

“Mark Bradford: The Underdogs” is on view through August 6 at the Museo de Arte Zapopan (MAZ) in Mexico.

A final interview with Dorothy Iannone, Berlin, April 4, 2022

by Gesine Borcherdt

This page: Dorothy Iannone, Ease at the Helm, 1968. Felt pen on Polaroid, 3.35 x 4.25 in. (8.5 x 10.8 cm).

Photo: © Hans-Georg Gaul. Private Collection, New York. Courtesy Air de Paris, Romainville, Greater Paris

Opposite: Dorothy Iannone, First Thought Best Thought, 1968. Felt pen on Polaroid, 3.35 x 4.25 in. (8.5 x 10.8 cm).

Photo: © Hans-Georg Gaul. Private Collection, New York. Courtesy Air de Paris, Romainville, Greater Paris

Remain Forever True

It was one of those cold, windy days when you’d rather be anywhere than gray Berlin. Deep in the west of the city, almost at the end of the Kurfürstendamm, the rain had turned the lawn on Olivaer Platz into a muddy brown patch where a few people were listlessly walking their dogs.

Shivering outside the entrance of an inconspicuous building off the square, I scanned the list of names at the door, mostly offices and law firms. When I finally spotted the right one, I pressed the doorbell and started freeing the tulips in my arms from their protective wrapping. I’d picked a shade that I thought might suit Dorothy Iannone and her home: orange, the color of enlightenment in Buddhism. After all, Iannone—whose joyously copulating figures, explicit text, and religious symbology has been frightening the art world for more than half a century—was a devoted Buddhist. And after decades dedicated to depicting earthly love, especially for her longtime partner, the artist Dieter Roth, she had

found ecstatic unity with herself, along with an abiding love for this city, where she had lived since 1976.

The door buzzed and I crossed the lobby. A suited man joined me in the elevator and, spotting my flowers, asked: “You visiting our neighbor?” When I nodded, he smiled: “She’s very charming!” Iannone, who was eighty-nine, met me in her doorway, dressed in black from head to toe, including her Reebok Classics and elegant turban. Only her horn-rimmed glasses displayed a fleck of color, a burgundy rim matching her lipstick, and little embroidered golden hands waved in welcome from the front of her woolen sweater. Her apartment and studio seemed like a carefully composed refuge, reminiscent of a temple, the walls and shelving white, the curtains and sofa cushions in oranges and deep reds. Her own work filled the walls between shelves bearing hundreds of bookmarked books, records and video cassettes. She worked at a large desk

equipped with a laptop and a magnifying glass. Above the corner of a sofa hung an artfully knotted kilim that matched the cushions. “I bought them about forty years ago in a small shop in Camden Town, London,” she told me, her voice high and hoarse. “The guys who owned it had been living in Afghanistan during the time of a drought, which forced the nomads to sell their treasures. By the time I arrived at the shop, the Rolling Stones had already bought the larger part, but they missed several masterpieces, so I was very fortunate!”

I noticed that our tour followed a deliberate staging, ending with her bedroom and the meditation room that opened off of it, its walls filled with Tibetan Buddhist paintings, both of the spaces inextricably linked with her work, which sought to be nothing less than a celebration of love. “Would you like some tea now?” she asked. As she steered us to the kitchen, it struck me again how few people I knew in the art world were

Dorothy Iannone in her Berlin apartment and studio, July 2022. Photos: Paula Winkler

familiar with the work of Iannone, who had lived and worked here for so many years, building such a profoundly individual body of painting, drawing, collage, photography and sculpture, a collective work that she describes as “an ecstatic unity.”

Born in Boston in 1933, Iannone was two when her father died. Her mother, Sarah Pucci, raised her alone. Her ancestors came from Italy, as one might guess not only from her name but from the objects lovingly showcased in display cabinets in Iannone’s apartment, little handmade devotional art pieces her mother began making after Iannone married and moved away—glittering hearts and balls decorated with sequins and pearls.

In 1958, Iannone had just finished an English literature degree when, on a summer break in Cape Cod, she met James Phineas Upham, an Abstract Expressionist painter. Iannone had been awarded a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at Stanford, but she left it behind,

married that same year and moved to Greenwich Village with Upham. As she later recounted in her Notes for an Autobiography (Part VII), it didn’t take her long to understand that though she was “filled with a sense of the vast promise of the world around me … marriage was in no way a substitute for one’s own work … And somehow I knew that having a child, which was the natural next step prescribed by society, would not have answered the need I felt to become myself.” So one afternoon she began to paint, gently and humbly at first, fumbling with her fingers. “Something clicked and there was never any question about going on,” she said. She was twenty-six. Her first paintings were strikingly twodimensional and ornamental, influenced by extensive travels with her husband to North Africa, India, Cambodia, Thailand and Japan. Early on, however, a key figurative element began to emerge from her abstraction—genitals attached to small naked men and women.

This radical turn in Iannone’s work took place in 1967, shortly before she and her husband embarked on a transformative boat trip to Iceland. She began making a series of works called People, decorated wooden figures whose genitals were clearly exposed. From then on, all her work turned toward the figurative, cheerily mixing illustrative and ethnologically staged compositions in order to tell her own story.

In Notes for an Autobiography (Part II), she recounted laying eyes on Roth for the first time: “On Saturday, the 24th of June, the Brúarfoss arrives in Reykjavík. And Dieter Rot [sic], that great, great beauty, is on the pier waiting for us, with a very fresh fish, wrapped in newspaper, under his arm. Dieter, so fresh himself, so immersed in responsibility, so immersed in the urgency of his art, Dieter, nonetheless, a lover of beauties, is there waiting for us. And when I saw Dieter I knew I would change my life.” What Iannone describes here is not only a powerful erotic spark

Dorothy Iannone, The Sta tue of Liberty , 2019. Acrylic on wall, dimensions variable. As shown, 140 x 104 in. (355 x 265 cm). Ed. of 3 pl us

1 AP. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin, Milan, Seoul

Top: Dorothy Iannone, Luminous , 2012. Acrylic on wood, 74.8 x 59.06 in. (190 x 150 cm). Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin, Milan, Seoul

Bottom: Dorothy Iannone, My Beautiful Laundrette , 2014. Gouache and acrylic on paper on wood, 16.73 x 21.46 x 7.87 in. (42.6 × 54.5 × 20 cm).

Photo: © Trevor Good. Courtesy Air de Paris, Romainville, Greater Paris and Peres Projects, Berlin, Milan, Seoul

Szeemann … decided to preemptively cover the genitals on Iannone’s pictures with tape. Roth withdrew his work in protest, and Iannone removed hers, too. Instead, she drew an art gravestone, inscribed with : “Here goes Dorothy Iannone / who has only one complaint / She thought her friends were artists / but it turns out they ain’t.”

but the foundations of an oeuvre that, over the next seven years, would revolve around Roth, one of the great loves of her life, who was living in Iceland at the time with his family. With the confidence of a male artist, she described Roth as her muse and, setting aside any sense of shame or fear of sexist or prudish rebuke, she revealed their sexual acts in densely drawn pictures. Titillating phrases such as I Love To Beat You or Suck My Breasts, I Am Your Beautiful Mother (both 1970/71) served as titles and boldly adorned the surfaces of the paintings themselves—work so free-spirited and enthusiastic, so intimate, indecent, humorous and full of iconographic references that there seemed to be no artistic movement to put them in. Even the rambunctious, irreverent work then coming out of Chicago’s Hairy Who scene and the city’s Imagist movement seemed well-behaved alongside Iannone’s exultant saturnalia.

In short order, Iannone divorced her husband. She then dove headfirst into Roth’s Fluxus-centered world, which included artists like Emmett Williams, George Brecht and Daniel Spoerri. She accompanied Roth to Basel, London and Düsseldorf and began showing her work, beginning with an exhibition at Galerie Hansjörg Mayer in Stuttgart—where a work from People was promptly confiscated by the police. It would mark the start of an exhibition history profoundly affected by censorship. Iannone never made work purely for the sake of provocation, but neither did she moderate herself or back down from a fight. Just how central the issue of censorship was for her had already become clear in 1961, when she carried Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer with her on a trip back to New York from France and it was confiscated at Idlewild airport because the book had been declared obscene under United States law. She filed suit against the Collector of Customs, arguing in part, with the help of the New York Civil Liberties Union, that she wanted to read the book “for her private pleasure.” She won the suit, joining cases that ultimately

reached the Supreme Court, which overturned the ban on the book in 1964.

In 1969, Iannone was to show work at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. Its director at the time, Harald Szeemann, had just presented his landmark exhibition “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” and its decidedly unartistic-looking objects had raised hackles. Next, he decided to invite four artists, including Dieter Roth, to exhibit works alongside their artist friends—and Roth of course chose Iannone. But even before the opening, Szeemann and some other “friends” decided to preemptively cover the genitals on her pictures with tape. Roth withdrew his work in protest, and Iannone removed hers, too. Instead, she drew an art gravestone, inscribed with: “Here goes Dorothy Iannone / who has only one complaint: She thought her friends were artists / but it turns out they ain’t.” She eventually told The Story of Bern in a kind of graphic novel, cheekily portraying the participants with their genitals hanging out in every picture.

In 1968, Roth accepted a graphic design professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, and the city became Iannone’s new home for seven years. Roth soon began traveling frequently for work and to visit his three children, who remained in Iceland. Iannone grew lonely, but instead of complaining, she processed her feelings through lyrical letters and paintings. Working at night, her companions, she said, were music, cigarettes and plentiful vodka. She was among the few female artists working in Düsseldorf at the time, and she was prolific. She created drawings, collages and large-format paintings, built colorfully decorated chairs festooned with feathers, designed card games, artist's books and Singing Boxes, elaborately decorated containers with cassette tapes and integrated players inside, featuring songs she recorded with the then-still-emerging electronic band Kraftwerk. Hardly anyone understood that her love for Roth, to whom her work was dedicated, was a synecdoche for a more universal kind of love and that she saw

her personal narratives as philosophically complex, feminist-pacifist statements.

Roth was just establishing himself on the art market, which was gaining momentum through the founding of the big art fairs in Cologne and Basel. While he began to secure solo shows at important museums, Iannone’s difficultto-categorize work struggled to find an audience. It wasn’t only the graphic nature of her sexual fantasies that baffled people but also her “naïve” folk-art style, which tacked hard against the prevailing pared-down, conceptual direction of the time. She did not receive an institutional retrospective until 1980, at the Neue Galerie Aachen, though many of her fellow artists revered her as a pioneer. “Dorothy Iannone’s work has a unique place in modern art,” George Brecht once wrote, “in an area practically untouched by other artists.”

It had grown dark. Iannone got up to turn on a light and pull out a book she’d created listing all the lovers she’d had before Roth. He wanted to know about them, as lovers do, Iannone explained. One only has to think back to Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995) to understand how far ahead of her time Iannone was with such work. She pressed a record into my hands, its pink cover bearing a drawing of a naked woman under a shower of stars and the inscription “EWIG GRÜN”—words from the song “Solang’ noch unter’n Linden,” made famous by Marlene Dietrich, about her love for Berlin. “When I was living in France in 1975, I made an audio cassette, singing lines from the song, ‘Wenn keine treu Dir bleibe, ich bleib Dir ewig grün. Du meine alte Liebe, Berlin bleibt doch Berlin.’ [‘Even when no one stands by you, I’ll remain forever true. My old love, you, Berlin, will always stay Berlin.’] I didn’t have any particular plan when I started to sing, but somehow as I went along, I started caressing myself and my voice changed according to my feelings. Yet, despite what I was feeling, the discipline was to keep singing those four lines. The voice itself expressed the stages of sexual arousal. Shortly before orgasm,

I was almost completely breathless and could hardly continue repeating the lines between gasps, and then suddenly, as the orgasm began, my voice became really strong and loud, soaring into the air for some moments before subsiding, as I very softly, managed to utter the concluding lines.” Iannone told me all this as casually as if she were talking about a stroll along a river, and then she told me to take the record as a gift.

In 1974, she and Roth split. They remained friends, but she left Düsseldorf and moved to the South of France. Her money soon ran out, and she applied for a fellowship in Berlin. The artist Konrad Klapheck wrote her letter of recommendation: “Her work combines elements of folkloric ornamentation with an unfettered eroticism. Far from any obscenity, Ms. Iannone’s paintings are filled with a paradisiacal zest for life that can only be enjoyed by an artist who wants to share her inner wealth with others."

She moved to West Berlin at the age of forty-three, in 1976. Though the walled city still had only a small art scene, it did have plenty of discos and drugs. The only good restaurant (and the first with white tablecloths) was Exil, where outcasts and artists felt equally at home. Roth was a regular, having decorated the back room with wallpaper patterned with beer glasses. The restaurant had been founded by Oswald Wiener; his wife Ingrid; and Michel Würthle, all from Viennese Actionist circles. Iannone showed work in the restaurant’s exhibition space and around the corner at Mike Steiner’s Studio-Galerie, one of the first

spaces in Berlin to exhibit video art—including Iannone’s I Was Thinking Of You (1975): a painted wooden box as tall as a person, equipped with an embedded monitor displaying her face in increasing expressions of elation—it's clear she’s masturbating.

Nothing sold, but after the fellowship expired, Iannone stayed in Berlin, applying for city funding three times before she received her first grant, in 1980. It was a time when male-dominated, wildly expressive painting was being rediscovered (had it ever been forgotten?) and the art world continued not to know what to do with Iannone. But as always, and perhaps even more so as she grew older, she was patient. She became a Buddhist in 1984. The influence of tantric painting, which she had known from travels to Asia, soon found its way into paintings such as My Caravan (1990). There, embedded amidst stars and hearts, sits a naked woman in the lotus position, on either side of her face the lines: “GOING ON WITH THE JOURNEY TOWARDS ULTIMATE UNION BUT NOW, BELOVED, NO LONGER SEEKING YOU OUTSIDE OF MYSELF WHERE ECSTATIC UNITY WITH YOU USED TO TAKE PLACE, SPORADICALLY, UNDEPENDABLY AND WAS, FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER, ENOUGH TIMES IMPOSSIBLE TO MAINTAIN, SO THAT FORCED FINALLY TO REALIZE THAT WAY WOULD NOT RESULT IN COMPLETION, I BEGAN TO LOOK FOR YOU IN MY OWN HEART.” Tibetan Buddhism, in which the sexual act

symbolizes the dissolution of opposites, allowed Iannone to move beyond earthly love to a more spiritual kind.

We were standing in her meditation room. I asked to what extent Buddhism determined her daily life. “While sitting, you learn to calm the mind through mindfulness and awareness,” she said. “When thoughts arise, if you don’t follow them, they will dissolve, and after a while another thought will arise, and with practice the space between thoughts will increase. It is one thing to do that while sitting, but more difficult when you rise from the pillow and try to integrate that knowledge into your everyday life, where distractions are plentiful.”

It wasn’t until 2012 that the Berlinische Galerie finally organized a much-deserved German museum retrospective of Iannone’s work. Before that, she had received considerable international attention at the 2006 Berlin Biennale, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik. And in 2009, the New Museum in New York organized a solo show. But Iannone never had gallery representation in the United States and is scantly represented in public collections there. Things were slightly better in Europe, where she had a big solo show in 2022 at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. But she was not included in the most recent Venice Biennale, which focused on longoverlooked or deliberately ignored women who worked fearlessly and steadfastly, often in isolation, as Iannone had.

Perhaps things would have been different had she left Berlin to work and show in London, New York or Paris, but it’s hard to say. Why was she among the few American artists of her generation who stayed? “Although I loved Paris, somehow it was Germany which caught me,” she said. “For one reason or another—love, work, exhibitions—I stayed on, year after year, until it was too late to ever want to leave. Berlin had become my home. And I am happy here.” It was late and our visit drew to a close. I thanked her and said goodbye, and with her album under my arm, I stepped out into the cold, spotting lights where it had been dark before. I couldn’t know that I would be the last writer to visit her as I did, spending time with her to write about her. Eight months later, on December 26, 2022, the day after Christmas, Dorothy died—or perhaps she was simply reincarnated into an even more pleasant vessel.

Translated by Florian Duijsens

Dorothy Iannone and Dieter Roth, Reykjavik, Iceland, 1967.

Photo: © Ferdinand. Scans by Hans-Georg Gaul, Berlin, 2015

“Although I loved Paris, somehow it was Germany which caught me. For one reason or another—love, work, exhibitions—I stayed on, year after year, until it was too late to ever want to leave. Berlin had become my home. And I am happy here.”—Iannone

Dorothy Iannone in her Berlin apartment and studio, July 2022.

Photo: Paula Winkler

Dorothy Iannone, I Love To Beat You , 1970/71. Acrylic on linen mounted on canvas, 74.8 x 59.06 in. (190 x 150 cm).

Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin, Milan, Seoul

THE SOUND OF ONE HAND PLAYING

Anri Sala’s return to Ravel

In June 2021, I received a request from the Festival Ravel in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France (birthplace of composer Maurice Ravel) to show Anri Sala’s Ravel Ravel , the complex, powerfully moving sound and video installation based on Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (1930), which Sala originally premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

That summer, Sala and I took an overnight trip to the Basque country, on an ultimately unsuccessful mission to secure a place for the work to be installed there. Before our departure, we met with the festival’s artistic co-director, the renowned pianist Bertrand Chamayou, who told us about his experience with functional dystonia, a debilitating condition that can cause varying levels of paralysis in one hand. Stricken by the affliction in his mid-twenties, Chamayou spent two years in rehabilitation to recover full mobility in his right hand.

With this story in mind and facing the impossibility of screening Ravel Ravel as he had envisioned it, Sala began developing an idea that ultimately grew into a new live work, Ravel Ravel Revisited, adding another layer to an already deeply layered body of work. Chamayou immediately signed on to the project as pianist, and Sala’s longtime collaborator, Olivier Goinard, resumed his critical role as sound designer. On the occasion of the recent exhibition “Anri Sala: Time No Longer” at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, the Pinault Collection became a co-producer and hosted the new piece’s two premiere performances in January 2023. The work will be performed again in August at the Festival Ravel.

In January, I met with Sala, Chamayou and Goinard in Paris to talk about their collaboration. These are edited and condensed portions of our conversation.

—Olivier Renaud-Clément

orc

We are here in Paris, the day after the second premiere performance of Ravel Ravel Revisited at the Bourse de Commerce. Anri, would you give us a little background on your original Ravel Ravel from 2013.

as

It began with my interest in the piano repertory for the left hand. This is a repertory that had started before World War I, but it grew afterwards because of the large number of dismembered men, chiefly soldiers. Back then, society prioritized the use of the right hand, and consequently it was more exposed to harm. I was thinking about how to represent the resulting void, the fact that the body no longer has both hands but still must cover the full anatomy of the piano, the full length of its keyboard. One important part of this repertory are the commissions made by Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, older brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. When the war started, Paul joined the Austro-Hungarian army in a moment of patriotic élan and lost his right arm on the Russian front. He was convinced his destiny was to continue as a pianist. He commissioned the best composers of his time to create piano concertos for his left hand, to be accompanied by an orchestra. Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand was among these pieces.

orc

I’m very interested in how you chose Ravel’s Concerto over other musical pieces.

as

At first, I was trying not to choose it because it felt like skipping to the obvious, but it was impossible not to—it is one of the most beautiful, emotional, technically accomplished pieces in this repertory. Conceiving it for the occasion when I was invited to represent France at the 2013 Venice Biennale also played a role. As we decided to swap pavilions with Germany, playing Ravel in the German Pavilion felt much more complex and interesting than playing

Images from the first of two nights of the Ravel Ravel Revisited premiere at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris, January 5, 2023. © Anri Sala. Photo: Yasmina Gonin. Courtesy the artist and the Pinault Collection

him in the French Pavilion, in terms of the representation of identity.

orc

Musically, Ravel’s Concerto creates a lot of adrenaline for the listener. Your Ravel Ravel created even more adrenaline—two videos, two pianists [JeanEfflam Bavouzet and Louis Lortie], the moments when it is sometimes in full sync and then completely off.

as

From the very beginning, I wanted to produce an interval between two executions of the same concerto that are in unison and eventually go out of sync, with one ahead and one behind, then catching up and running ahead. There is a bit of a Tom and Jerry dynamic. Sometimes Bavouzet is ahead of Lortie, but then Lortie goes before Bavouzet—it’s very elastic, in a way. Producing a succession of shifting intervals creates a space that is consecutive to the lag between the two executions, because all the notes are repeated twice. In a way, it is a bit of a composition of echoes, because every note and every sound are repeated a second time.

orc

For Ravel Ravel , was each pianist recorded with a different orchestra? Or was the orchestra recorded once?

as

The same orchestra [Orchestra National de France] performed separately with each pianist. For each recording, we did this in two rooms. I wanted to film only the piano performance in one room and the orchestra in an adjacent room. Conductor Didier Benetti was in the room with the orchestra. He could see and listen to the pianists on the video monitor, and vice versa, but for reasons of

production, the orchestra could not see or listen to the pianists. It’s not only that the orchestra was meant to sometimes go out of sync with the pianist—there are even parts of the score where some sections of the orchestra are not in sync with the rest of the orchestra. These parts were recorded separately.

orc

So you are altering the composition.

as

Not a single note, but all the spaces between the notes.

orc

This idea gets even more reinforced when you begin working with Bertrand.

as

Absolutely. There's something in the original structure of Ravel’s Concerto, a tectonic strata, that allows for it to be disjoined, to be disunited in order for it to come back together again. In Ravel Ravel Revisited , we are adding more layers to the strata that have existed since the creation of Ravel Ravel . It’s a bit like building a house. There is a foundation, which I envisioned in collaboration with Olivier and Ari Benjamin Meyers, then we built the first floor with Bavouzet and Lortie. Now, with Bertrand, we added another floor and I would say even the roof.

orc

Olivier, you were the sound designer for Ravel Ravel . How was it for you to come back to this idea ten years later? You are not exactly the artist, but I see you as the conductor of the production.

og

The custodian of time!

orc

Yes, exactly.

og

With this project—and all the other projects with Anri—it is always alive. It is never dead in a box. For Ravel Ravel , of course the premiere was in Venice in 2013, but it has since been installed in Tel Aviv, New York and Mexico. Each time, we completely reconsidered the sound of Ravel Ravel according to the acoustic characteristic of the space, and as time passes we have new visions of the work. Now, it’s a new era with Ravel Ravel Revisited—as Anri said, it is the second floor, maybe a roof.

orc

It would be interesting to hear how this new project developed.

bc

It began when I was planning the Ravel Festival. One of my very first ideas was to screen Ravel Ravel , but we could not find an appropriate location in which to present it.

orc

One thing that struck me when we first met in Saint-Jean-de-Luz was our conversation about the left hand. You had a problem early in your career when you lost some of the use of your right hand.

bc

Yes. There is a disease called dystonia, which is a sickness that many musicians have. I know a few pianists who have had it in the left hand, but most of them— including myself, when I had it—have it in the right hand. There are many different levels, the most extreme being not able to play a single note. Mine was not as terrible as that, but as a pianist it was very stressful, of course. In my case, it happened just after I learned Concerto for the Left Hand. It was the first time I was practicing completely with the left hand alone like that. I love this concerto so much. Everything was very emotional for me in working on it.

as If one were to imagine the concerto as the script of a film, one could also imagine that this script brought you into the role. Ravel composed this concerto for Wittgenstein to overcome the absence of his right hand. In a way, it was as if you were inflicting yourself with loss to be able to play the concerto, a little bit like an actor who inflicts himself with the narrative of the character to be able to inhabit the

Diagram of Touchdesigner video and light playback for Ravel Ravel Revisited as designed for the performance space at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris. Courtesy the artist and the Pinault Collection

character more fully. I think this is part of what makes the whole project so striking.

orc

Because there are so many layers to this piece, can you take us through how it's structured?

bc

It is a live performance with two pianos, but with only one pianist. I play the first part on a Steinway Spirio Model D, a self-playing model that can record interpretation and reproduce exactly what I just played. There are two screens that sometimes show what I am playing and other times show moments from Ravel Ravel—echoes of the past, a kind of memory. For the second part, I move to a traditional Steinway Model D and play alongside my “double,” which is the Spirio reproducing what I played first. At the end, the elements reunite and the puzzle is completed at the end.

orc

You have an earpiece. Do you hear cues?

bc

We create some cues with Olivier—these could be signals, but also musical parts— that help me follow the time code. They also guide me when I want to be perfectly synchronized and when I want to be more free. This freedom cannot be too extreme. When you create a space or an interval, it has to be calculated. If you have an interval that is too long, it will create a kind of chaos. For example, if you have an interval of more than ten seconds, you will be lost. That is not the purpose of this project.

orc

Was there any desire to let that freedom edge up occasionally towards cacophony?

bc

Never. You don’t go to a place where you deconstruct completely. It’s more to create a feeling like tracing paper.

orc

During the premiere, at some points, it felt like you were quite behind—like eight seconds—but you still manage to catch up. Everything comes back together and is in complete sync.

bc

When you say eight seconds, it’s a kind of illusion, perhaps. It’s never more than two seconds.

orc

It feels so long.

bc

The really important thing is that it’s never random. There is a flexibility that I can play with, but the way we conceived it to work, it is very precise.

orc

When Bertrand is behind, I think the audience really feels a kind of tension that he is indeed lost. When he comes back and catches up, it is a big joy. It’s an incredible feeling.

orc Bertrand, do you get lost?

bc

No, never! But my big joy is when I am not together in the piece.

orc

Anri, in your exhibitions you don't always face the public directly, in person. With this piece, you get a full-on reaction—the clapping at the end, the energy. How do you feel about being a live artist?

as I have staged live works as part of larger group presentations. But this performance brings new sensations and has a very different feeling. With exhibitions,

“I wanted to produce an interval between two executions of the same concerto that are in unison and eventually go out of sync, with one ahead and one behind, then catching up and running ahead. There is a bit of a Tom and Jerry dynamic.”—Anri Sala

people do not need to—nor are they asked to—respond right away. In a theater or concert, the response is immediate. This project is also different because I like to develop my exhibitions so that people do not necessarily enter from the center, and the audience passes by the narrative. In this case, the audience is seated, and the stage is symmetrical with the two pianos and the two orchestras. The only asymmetry is time-based. Bertrand plays first on the Spirio positioned on the left of the stage, and then later he moves and plays on the regular Steinway on the right.

orc

Olivier, do you feel like you deal with the public, also?

og

I don’t need to. [Laughter.]

orc

Have you done many live performances?

og

Not really, but my role with Anri is to take ideas from concept to concrete realizations. Here, my role was to put in relation eight actors: two pianists from before [Bavouzet and Lortie] on the stage screens; two orchestras; two lights; and Bertrand’s playing, which has a first and second part. The light is completely linked to the sound of the orchestras, and to the Spirio and the regular Steinway.

orc

The light is seen behind a glass wall beyond the stage, so it is not in the auditorium proper. What was your idea behind that?

as

The idea was to develop a visual landscape in tandem with the music, using the quality of the Bourse space. The glass wall visually connects the stage and the foyer beyond it, where people come in. When the public arrives, they see Bertrand through the glass wall and hear him play, and it’s a bit like the performance has started before they arrived. Then during the performance, the lights in the foyer are triggered by the respective sound of the orchestras.

orc Is this a brand-new orchestra?

as

No. We use the light to expand the presence of the recorded orchestras. Seen behind the glass wall, the light program also produces a split feeling between here and there for the audience.

og

We are creating relations between different worlds—sound, light, videos, the Spirio, a live pianist—that are not meant to naturally connect or to have contents that interact with each other. But this is exactly what we are trying to do, and it’s a big challenge.

as

This project is a bit like open-heart surgery. Because all the elements are live, something is always at stake. There are certain moments when the video projections flicker, which I conceived with the help of Dominik Hildebrand through a program called TouchDesigner. It’s written so that the video projections become visible only during certain moments, when Bertrand plays certain notes. These moments depend on Bertrand and how he plays his part— whether he is in sync or not with what we conceived will change the outcome. These elements are all connected and symbiotic, which can be very precarious, but I like that.

orc Does the Spirio save every nuance?

og

We are recording everything, yes.

as

Although there is a chronology of what was recorded first, Bertrand is central to the way it comes together in Ravel Ravel Revisited—both in the first part, playing the Spirio, and then later playing the second reiteration with the regular Steinway. Other elements—the two videos with Lortie and Bavouzet, the respective orchestras—were pre-recorded, and we edited everything in such a way that often Bertrand is alone. I would say that the live performance is the last echo in time, the last layer we are adding. It's happening presently, currently. This is what makes us lose our grasp of chronological time, what comes first and what comes later, because sometimes something that Bertrand plays live precedes what will be heard soon like an echo, whereas other times it will succeed what we just heard, as if it were an echo.

orc

And we will hear the piece again at the Festival Ravel this summer. Bertrand, could you tell us how you became involved with that?

bc

Ravel is very important in my life and my work. I grew up in the Southwest of France, in Toulouse, which by chance is not far from Saint-Jean-de-Luz. I have spent a lot of time there with family. During the pandemic, I worked to join forces with the music academy where I had studied and the existing music festival to obtain funding and develop this new Ravel festival. We do not celebrate only Ravel. It might sound a bit silly, but once you know the personality of Ravel, it leads in so many directions. There is his musical taste, but there is also the spirit of Ravel, which is about an open mind and a multiplicity of strong ideas.

og

Working with Bertrand has given us new ideas about experimentation. We could have other ways to do this piece with him for example, with live musicians from the orchestra. We don’t know if this is the end of the project.

orc

Anri, is there anything you would like to add?

as

There is something I was thinking about yesterday. The Ravel Concerto is indirectly a reflection on war because of the left-hand repertory and how the changed anatomy of the body now has to crisscross the unchanged anatomy of the piano. There is a beautiful textbook, Phantom Limbs , by Peter Szendy, that includes a whole discussion about phantom limbs in music. Of course, the entire concerto is about the right hand being the ghost hand, but in our second part, when Bertrand moves on to the Steinway, the left hand that had just played also becomes a ghost hand. It becomes the hand that we no longer see playing the Spirio.

bc My son said that!

orc He said what?

as Bertrand’s son told him that he saw a ghost.

bc He’s going to be just four!

orc

Maybe you need to do a Tom and Jerry version next, for him. [Laughter.] as Exactly.

“When you create a space or an interval, it has to be calculated. If you have an interval that is too long, it will create a kind of chaos. For example, if you have an interval of more than ten seconds, you will be lost. That is not the purpose of this project.”—Bertrand Chamayou

Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein performing Maurice Ravel's Concerto

For The Left Hand at Salle Pleyel, Paris, January 17, 1933. © Critical Past, LLC

“We are forever in the midst of dying and being reborn with each other. I’m not sure if this is healthy or destructive, but it feels like love.”

—Jeremy O. Harris

of destructive, but it like love.” O.

Instantaneous, Present and Direct: From the notebooks of Cathy Josefowitz

Cathy Josefowitz (1956–2014)

The lyrical, unsettling work of Cathy Josefowitz remains little known in the United States, the country of her birth. She was born in New York and at three moved with her family to Switzerland, where she developed an early love of drawing, influenced by her parents’ paintings, then by Surrealism, Cocteau, Boris Vian, Jean-Louis Barrault, Nijinsky and others. At sixteen, she entered the Théâtre National de Strasbourg to study theatre design, then moved to Paris and entered the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Her first works were large expressionist and figurative paintings on craft paper, featuring motifs of the circus, games, costumes and eroticism. In 1977, harboring doubts about painting, she went to Boston, where she discovered dance and primal theater. She moved back to New York for a year, and then in 1979, at the age of twenty-three, she went to England to study dance at the Dartington College of Arts in Devon. There, she met two postwar dance pioneers: Steve Paxton, a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York, and Mary Fulkerson, a founder of “anatomical release technique,” which influenced dance movement therapy.

These were years of great experimentation for Josefowitz, particularly through her interest in dance. This period was also notable for the numerous pastels she created in her notebooks, numerous examples of which can be seen in these pages.

She described the work of her notebook drawings as a kind of warm-up, an opening of things, a jump start to creativity. They represented her inner world, the events of her life, the world of the night, the bed, the meaning of dreams.

After graduating from Dartington, Josefowitz created the dance and theater company Research and Navigation in Wales with Mara de Witt. She was active in feminist circles and highly involved in the gay-and-lesbian liberation movement. In 1991, her son, Pierre, was born, and in 1995 she moved to Paris to dedicate herself fully to painting. Ever more tied to the body and gestures, she began creating very large-format paintings on the ground. Beginning in the 2000s, her notebook practice, which never left her, evolved from drawings to collage. Josefowitz’s use of language in drawings and collage— sometimes as part of the work, sometimes as titles—was integral to their meaning. The notebooks were Josefowitz’s primary means of expression.

“I work using old fabrics, bits of old papers I’ve come across,” she wrote. “In my studio I have a mountain of material, of colors. I like the haphazardness of rummaging through. I may find something or nothing…. Usually, I have eight workbooks on the go, all open, and I work on them really fast. Like an assembly line, a bit like automatic writing.” In 2004, she and her son moved to Geneva, and she continued to paint in a studio in the town of Carouge. Gradually, figures in her work disappeared completely, giving way to almost monochromatic variations of hazy surface. Josefowitz died of breast cancer on June 28, 2014, in Geneva.

PORTFOLIO AN INDETERMINATE LONGER:

Jeremy O. Harris on the work of Cathy Josefowitz

“I’m calling these the ‘Cathy Meditations.’

I looked at these paintings and drawings every few days, and in the morning I wrote lines inspired by them.”

—Jeremy O. Harris

“Date-night makeup”

Red lip

Heavy eye

Never bold.

“Sometimes I think about dying.”

The monotony of the world around us. The collection of sounds that make up a day that slowly wear at our sense of self.

Is there not a more humorous way to contemplate why we all must be here?

“I don’t want to be from you!”

A man on a plane

His English

Accented in a Indistinguishable Middle-Eastern accent

“An indeterminate longer”

the house in the Cotswolds experiences an ecstatic

I no longer worried about money, yet money brought me worries. So I knew the house in the Cotswolds could not be photographed. I could see the likes that would come from a post of me in the kitchen pouring milk from some grand jar above a caption that said “Cotswolds Creamery ”. The notification high as my lock screen experiences an ecstatic orgasm. Then the deflation.

Cigarette smoke kept webbing its way into the flat as I sat next to the window battling the country cold and watching a Japanese man die of lung cancer.

There he was on shrooms crying. How typical.

Tapped me

Tapped me

From across the aisle

Then whispered, “People move to France only if they have some poetics or something poetical about them.”

poetical about them.”

“Some poetics on immigration”

I looked up and six months had passed. I had decided. I would stay longer. How long mattered less than the fact that it was decided. Definitive decisions were uncommon for me. And yet.

The sounds of birds fucking, dying, then mourning, filled my ears as I wandered up the stairs, readying myself for sleep.

I looked up and six months When

I wanted to live in the countryside for the month of July. When else might a boy from North Carolina have the opportunity to wake up and have a “morning constitutional” before taking to the lawns to sojourn with a novella.

There are moments when your eyes die right before mine. As you ascended the steps I saw life fading away. I wonder which dagger I threw that did it? How did I end you? We are forever in the midst of dying and being reborn with each other. I’m not sure if this is healthy or destructive, but it feels like love.

We became metal forks against porcelain plates whenever we went to dinner, the only sound that accompanied being the occasional sigh at Instagram.

I had barely seen the Amalfi coast and already it bored me. White people have a gift for creating myths of the mundane. Perhaps I will join them with this text.

cold this but feels had the woke

Last Thursday I woke up wealthy and decided to start living as though my trust had finally opened. Perhaps I’ll become a dancer?

“Is there not a more humorous way to contemplate why we all must be here?”

—Harris all must be here?”

“Cathy Josefowitz. Forever Young” continues through July 22 at Hauser & Wirth on 69th Street in New York.

Josefowitz made these pastels on paper in Boston, New York and Dartington, England, in 1978 and 1979. She initiated the collages in France and continued them in Switzerland from 2004 to 2012.

Lab Table Sound System, 2023. PA speakers, wooden table, ratchet strap, 98 x 71 7/8 x 24 in. (248.9 x 182.6 x 61 cm).

Photo: Keith Lubow

Original Man, 1993. Latex on canvas and aluminum grommets, 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8 cm)

Left: Just for One Day, 2013. Photo emulsion on mesh and wood, 144 x 240 x 96 in. (365.8 x 609.6 x 243.8 cm), overall.

Photo: Brian Forrest

Above: Landmark, 2008. Pigment, oil paint and cold wax on canvas, 84 x 84 in. (213.4 x 213.4 cm). Photo: Keith Lubow

Right: Star Fall Giant, 2014 (detail). Enamel on wood, two panels: 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm) each; 100 1/4 x 48 in. (54.6 x 121.9 cm) overall. Photo: Thomas Barratt

Right: Marnie’s Nightmare,2006. Pigment and oil stick on wall. Dimensions variable. Installation view, “1964,” Bohen Foundation, New York, March 11–May 26, 2006

Below: The Stadium, 2013 Enamel and screenprint on panel, 96 x 144 1/4 in. (243.8 x 366.4 cm). Private collection

Ghost Town Skies, 2023. Oil paint and cold wax on canvas, 84 x 108 in. (213.4 x 274.3 cm).

Photo: Keith Lubow

In the 1990s, the artist Gary Simmons, a New York City native, began long walks around the city that came to serve as a wellspring of inspiration for his work. Along the way, he would gather things: business cards, music ephemera, other pieces of urban flotsam and jetsam that he taped into sketchbooks along with drawings and pictures of whatever fascinated him, subjects as disparate as sports stadiums and discarded sofas. The act of walking became a vital means for Simmons to contextualize and combine ideas, memories and references to American pop culture back in his studio—a process he has likened to “visual DJing,” a highly individual version of the flânerie that has fed other urban artists’ work for more than a century. Even now, living and working in non-pedestrian Los Angeles, walking and taking pictures remains integral to his art.

For this portfolio, Simmons takes Ursula through a selection of photos, sketchbook pages and artworks from 1993 to 2023 that connect several major and overlapping themes in his work—urbanism, music, sports and architecture—and often lead him to the unexpected.

Gary Simmons:

Notes from the Field

1 2 3

Graffiti inspires me all the time. Being an ex-writer myself, I’m drawn to the way tags layer over each other and sometimes they get cleaned. Walking in New York is where my poster pieces come from, that aesthetic of overlapping and overlaying things.

Things from the street have made their way into my work. A discarded red crate became an early speaker sample construction.

Gleason’s Gym has a huge effect for me. It has beaten-up hanging heavy bags that for me are beautiful sculptural objects. All the boxers have their own locker. I love the way they save and put up pictures of themselves, that configuration on the lockers. I could do an entire show just based on Gleason’s Gym.

4 5 6

I love the old font kind of thing, the way the signage works. It has a Wild West vibe to it.

The structure of stadiums—there’s an awe you get when you come down the tunnels and enter with an emerald field in front of you and the game isn’t even played yet. Hopes and dreams played out on fields. They’re almost like a modernday Coliseum. They have so much symbolism for me that I keep pictures of stadiums around all the time.

I was starting to make connections between sky constellations and dance, the romantic idea between dance and the stars. The constellation found its way into a sketchbook. I find some little thing in a book somewhere and tape it in and start thinking about it like that. It's literally my brain on paper.

“Gary Simmons: This Must Be the Place” opens May 25 and continues through July 29 at Hauser & Wirth London.

“Gary Simmons: Public Enemy” opens June 13 and continues through October 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The Painter’s Poem An unseen side of Frank Bowling

In 1953, Frank Bowling arrived in London from Guyana as a nineteen-year-old aspiring poet. During his first few years on the London art scene, Bowling wrote poems and considered a career in writing before making the transformative decision to enroll in art school.

Written in 1957, “Aspirin Poisoned” is among the last poems Bowling wrote before embarking on his path as a painter. Today it is just one of ten original poems still in existence in the artist’s archive, none of them published until now. We present it alongside The Pearl Poet , 2020, which draws its title from the 14th-century Middle English poem “Pearl.”

“Frank Bowling. Landscape” opens May 26 and continues through August 5 at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood.

Frank Bowling, “Aspirin Poisoned,” 1957 (typewritten as “Asprin [sic] Poisoned”). © Frank Bowling. Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive

Frank Bowling, The Pearl Poet , 2020. Acrylic and acrylic gel on canvas with marou age, 115 x 74 in. (292.1 x 188 cm). © Frank Bowling. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The most notorious of the book burnings that took place throughout Germany ninety years ago was that next to Berlin’s opera house on May 10, 1933. The German writer Erich Kästner watched his own books being burned alongside those of his Jewish and leftist compatriots in a bon re of literature condemned as “contrary to the German spirit.” Writers and publishers who managed to escape Germany did so in two big waves, one in 1933 and another after the Anschluss of Austria and the Kristallnacht of 1938. “The exiles Hitler made,” the historian Peter Gay later wrote, “were the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent and scholarship the world has ever seen.” Numerous books that could no longer be published in Germany for political or “racial” reasons found a home in the publishing house run by Emil and Emmie Oprecht in the o ces now occupied by Hauser & Wirth Publishers in downtown Zurich, where a small presentation featuring publications by writers including Ignazio Silone, Else LaskerSchüler and Thomas Mann is on view through the end of May. These books are part of the huge corpus of “exile literature”—a broad category that includes writings critical of National Socialism or expressing a con icted relationship to the German language. The Swiss book collector Martin Dreyfus is a specialist in the eld and an expert in this period of publishing history. Here, he talks about how he came to accumulate his remarkable collection and the connections between books and people’s lives as writers, emigrants, publishers, readers and collectors.

THE EXILED WORD

The Zurich-based book collector

Martin Dreyfus on barbarity and literature

with Alexander Scrimgeour and Michaela Unterdörfer

Alexander Scrimgeour

What is the story of how you started your collection?

Martin Dreyfus

Reich—contemporary history, as it was fty- ve years’ worth of acquiring books

It all began when I rst became interested in history at school, particularly that of National Socialism under the Third Reich—contemporary history, as it was at the time, and still is, in fact. The rst book, which I bought in 1967 or ’68, was published in 1936 by Editions du Carrefour. Der gelbe Fleck (“The Yellow Spot”) was one of the rst publications to deal speci cally with the persecution of the Jews but also with the whole Nazi system after 1933. Most of my acquisitions during the rst few years were books about this period—some of them new publications but others second-hand, as I simply didn’t have the money to buy many new ones. In the early 1970s, I turned increasingly to exiled writers and those whose books had been banned or burned. My collection is the result of fty- ve years’ worth of acquiring books and looking for them. Other people spend their time gol ng; I go to secondhand bookstores.

AS

So how big is the collection now?

MD

No. was born here in Switzerland in 1882, and the family later moved to Frankfurt. So he

pre-war times. They married that same year. He then practiced as a gynecologist

MD No. It’s rather complicated. My great-greatgrandparents came to Switzerland from Riga and Jelgava in around 1880, before my grandfather’s time, and managed to get Swiss citizenship. My grandfather was born here in Switzerland in 1882, and the family later moved to Frankfurt. So he was Swiss, and consequently spent four years in the military here during the First World War. During that time—luckily, as it turned out—he sat his medical licensing examination. As soon as the war ended in 1918, he returned to Frankfurt, having already met my future grandmother in pre-war times. They married that same year. He then practiced as a gynecologist in Frankfurt until 1933/34 and became a professor at Frankfurt University. By 1933, his safety couldn’t be guaranteed. Because he wasn’t a German Jew, they couldn’t just dismiss him. Instead, they advised him not to lecture any more, and so he stopped.

That led in turn to my interest in ction and poetry. And that to my interest in publishers who specialized in books on Jewish themes and material, particularly after, but also before, 1933. Schocken was the biggest Jewish publishing house of the 1930s, but there was also the Jüdischer Verlag, founded by Martin Buber and others back in 1902, for instance. One book leads to another. It’s like the ripples a stone makes when you throw it into a pond. There is no end to it.

AS

so he stopped.

My mother and her younger sister

the Jüdischer Verlag, founded by Martin German publishing, he writes that the German emigré book industry had special such or Editions du 10. Mai in Paris—what you think about this idea of exile literature as part of or a forerunner of a certain kind of

In Ernst Fischer’s book on the history of German publishing, he writes that the German emigré book industry had special importance within a kind of global history because publishing houses and people associated with them were spread so far and wide. I wonder—also in relation to your collection, and the more well-known publishers such as Querido in Amsterdam or Editions du 10. Mai in Paris—what you think about this idea of exile literature as part of or a forerunner of a certain kind of internationalism?

MD

Querido

40,000 books in total, though not all on the

There must be between 35,000 and 40,000 books in total, though not all on the subject of exile and emigration. There’s also a whole section of Judaica, mostly published from around the turn of the century to the end of the 1930s.

AS

No one could read that many books, of course.

MD

Impossible. No way. Other people collect stamps. That way they can at least look at them all.

Michaela Unterdörfer

You can look at books, too.

MD

the outside—like a stamp or a painting—

Yes. I think if you cultivate a suitably visual memory, you come to recognize them from the outside—like a stamp or a painting— without needing to look inside. I think it’s something you learn. Then you can pick them out purely by sight, as you say.

AS

Was that early interest also connected with your family history?

MD

MD

My grandparents came to Switzerland from

My grandparents came to Switzerland from Frankfurt with their two daughters in 1933. That was undoubtedly what rst got me interested in the history of the Third Reich.

AS

So they were refugees?

My mother and her younger sister came to Switzerland straightaway in 1933, to join an uncle who had stayed here. My grandparents then came for good in 1934. Because he had sat his licensing exam during the war, my grandfather was able to practice here again without further ado. That was a lucky break for him, if you like, or for the family as a whole.

That was a lucky break for him, if you like, or for the family as a whole.

AS

And when you started collecting, this period was your initial focus.

MD

Yes. The starting point was, as I say, history books on the 1930s and beyond.

Cover of Walter

Querido and Gerard de Lange, who invited

Münzenberg to run the program of his publishing house, Editions du Carrefour, which had already established a publishing house but would publish émigré writers where possible. In Palestine, meanwhile, for a German-speaking immigrant readership. In Mexico, there was El Libro Libre.

In my view, these were all very individual developments. To take Querido and Allert de Lange in Amsterdam rst: Here you had two Dutch publishers, Emanuel Querido and Gerard de Lange, who invited three editors from the publisher Gustav Kiepenheuer in Berlin—Fritz Landsho , Walter Landauer and Hermann Kesten— to set up a department for German émigré literature within their respective publishing houses. This they did, and very successfully. In Paris, Pierre Lévy invited Willi Münzenberg to run the program of his publishing house, Editions du Carrefour, which became a home for highly political German books. In other places, publishing houses emerged through di erent sets of circumstances. Oprecht was a Swiss publisher, one of a few, among them Steinberg in Zurich, too, where a Swiss citizen had already established a publishing house but would publish émigré writers where possible. In Palestine, meanwhile, Martin Feuchtwanger, brother of the German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, was running Edition Olympia. Its aim was to publish books by German-speaking immigrant authors in Palestine, primarily for a German-speaking immigrant readership. In Mexico, there was El Libro Libre.

That was initially cofounded by writers who had emigrated there and the publisher Walter Janka. And over in New York, Wieland Herzfelde founded the Aurora Verlag. That was a kind of successor to his original publishing house, the Malik-Verlag, which had

That was initially cofounded by writers who ter Janka. And over in New York, Wieland

Mehring, Die Gedichte Lieder und Chansons (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1929)

moved from Berlin rst to Prague and then to London, but was ultimately reestablished as a new company in New York. So they all had their own stories.

AS

But were they aware of what was going on elsewhere?

MD

Yes, I think so. Particularly in the case of Fritz Landsho , you can see from his published memoirs that he was pretty well informed. He may not have been aware of what was happening in Palestine at the time, but there was a lot of contact with France or England up to 1940. Hermann Kesten and Klaus Mann for example traveled more or less regularly to the South of France and Paris, among other places. That way they could cultivate their contacts with the authors who were spread around Europe, as well as with other publishers.

AS

When you look at the collection as a whole, one thing that strikes you, of course, is the sheer volume of books published. Distribution wasn’t easy. Despite no longer having access to the largest German-speaking market, publishers, booksellers and authors obviously managed somehow. Is that something the collection also shows?

MD

It never ceases to amaze me, all the books that were published and that I am still nding—books I never even realized had been published, and by small publishing houses at that, ones that only published one or two books in German. The other point—that they managed to operate

Czech Republic up to 1939 at least. Many

speaking immigrants lived, continued up

at all—was probably partly down to the fact that there was still an Austrian and Swiss market until spring 1938. Not that they could compare with the German market at the time, of course. There was a large German-speaking public in the Czech Republic up to 1939 at least. Many intellectual readers from Germany had already emigrated to these countries. After 1940, the Netherlands and France were also occupied, so that production was no longer possible there. Exports to what was then Palestine, to South America, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and North America, where many Germanspeaking immigrants lived, continued up to 1940. In New York you had, for example, Arthur Adler and Mary Rosenberg. They dealt in imported books and made a point of bringing German-language books from Europe to America for a German-speaking émigré audience.

AS

I’d also like to pick up on what you said in a lecture on exile poetry you

I’d also like to pick up on what you said in a lecture on exile poetry you gave in Darmstadt in 2017. How would you describe the role of the German language, particularly from the perspective of Jewish writers?

MD

from a language.” It wasn’t just that, for

it you

talk about it, whereas it would take much longer to read a novel, and there was no knowing whether you had that amount of time. I also think there is an additional aspect when you’re discussing poetry, which I’m not quite sure how best to express. I don’t mean that I read novels more super cially, but I can engage quite di erently with a poem in the sense that I spend more time thinking about and analysing it because there is much more scope for interpretation.

MU

You could say poetic language is a resonating chamber that naturally generates images, and so allows for a di erent kind of exchange

MD

Yes.

AS

which I’m not quite sure how best to express. I don’t mean that I read novels more super cially, but I can engage quite resonating chamber that naturally generates images, and so allows for a to

There are bound to be lots of things in the collection that are no longer talked about or weren’t really even talked about much back then. Is there a volume of poetry that comes to mind that has grown very important to you but that hasn’t gone down in history, for which there is no secondary literature?

MD

I can’t say that it has grown very important to me, but I can give you an example. I own a volume of poetry by an author named Hans Stein that was published in Shanghai in 1943. That’s all I’ve managed to nd out so far. Neither the book nor the author seem to be known to any library. What’s more, the name Hans Stein is quite common. The book was published in

name is

that fascinates me. Most of them, apart from the younger ones, some of whom his words—bequeathed us the most memorable poetry.

Schalom Ben-Chorin once said: “You can emigrate from a country but not from a language.” It wasn’t just that, for émigré writers, language was of course one thing they could take with them from their homeland—and many could take almost nothing or very little, in terms of physical objects. It was also an inalienable possession. That’s something that fascinates me. Most of them, apart from the younger ones, some of whom only began to write while in exile, still wrote in German, including—most notably—poetry. The literary scholar Walter Muschg says that the German emigrants who continued to write in their own language have—to paraphrase his words—bequeathed us the most memorable poetry.

MU

MU

response

and his wife at the time—than to read a long novel, when you never knew how far

On the subject of poetry, didn’t the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki also say that people’s response to literature changed in the 1930s, that people were much more likely to turn to poetry and read it to each other—I think he was referring to himself and his wife at the time—than to read a long novel, when you never knew how far you’d get with it?

MD

Yes. He describes that very vividly, and you’re right of course. A poem is relatively short. We can read it to each other and

Bookplate of Curt and Lilli Sobernheim, with text reading "Books Unify Thoughts." Designed by Charles William Sherborn, 1894. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Cover of Bruno Schönlank, Lass Brot Mich Sein: Gedichte (Zurich/New York: Verlag Oprecht, 1940)

1943, probably in a tiny edition, and somehow found its way here.

AS

Do you mean it was in a secondhand bookstore?

MD

Yes. Though it’s also worth noting that there are books that are very much back on the radar after being ignored for decades. It never ceases to amaze me. There are waves where an author is suddenly hyped up again, while others remain consistently popular.

AS

AS

Has collecting as an activity become easier with the internet? Is it more or less enjoyable now that it can be done online?

MD

ask

I

And where does exile literature itself sit in terms of these waves?

terms of these waves?

MD

On the whole, I think interest has declined a lot in recent years. There will always be the odd author who suddenly resurfaces, only to fall into oblivion again. It’s probably also because there are so many new and young contemporary writers, which can make things harder for long-dead authors, regardless of their signi cance. What you then need is a publisher brave enough to reprint and champion their books, which is not easy either.

AS

me. Unless I need something speci c, I price. But again, that has to do with these

If you ask me as a collector, I have to say it doesn’t make much di erence to me. Unless I need something speci c, I still go to ea markets and secondhand bookstores. If you ask a bookseller, they’ll tell you things have become incredibly di cult, as the market has changed completely—not only, but mostly, because of the internet. A book might be available online in better condition for half the price. But again, that has to do with these uctuating waves of interest.

MU

Reading books used to be the classic way to spend one’s time. Now there are so many others. The role, the status of books has changed a lot—also in comparison with visual art, for example.

MD

MD

As a collector, are there books you would like to own that are already well-known? Or, conversely, surprises, when you come across something that you may have been searching for for years? Could you tell us a bit about the business of collecting, and what your experiences have been?

MD

Every year there is an antiquarian book fair here in Zurich, at the Kunsthaus art museum. On a visit there, I suddenly discovered an author, Lilly Rona, about whom I knew nothing. She didn’t publish very much. She came from Vienna, was an academic, and played a signi cant role in the work of her scientist husband, the physician Felix Ehrenhaft. They ended up emigrating to America. But she published a slim volume of poetry while still in Vienna. I had never heard or read about her before, and there was this poetry book, together with a few of her postcards from an estate sale. That sort of thing happens quite a bit. To this day, we are still far from having a comprehensive knowledge of all the books published in exile or all the authors who were forced to emigrate, either before or after publication of their work.

regardless of their signi cance. What you across something that you may have been discovered an author, Lilly Rona, about in the work of her scientist husband, the and there was this poetry book, together before or after publication of their work.

The way prices have shot up in the art to know who they were. He had worked as a banker in Frankfurt and emigrated

I don’t have any children myself, and my nieces and nephews think they have a rather peculiar uncle: You can have a good chat with him! But they haven’t a clue about this collection, and it doesn’t matter to them. That’s not a criticism. I’m just stating a fact. The same goes for the generation of grandchildren who should or could now lay claim to their grandparents’ book collections. They hardly know what was in them. So it is quite di erent from paintings. Books don’t have the same nancial value. They have sentimental or intellectual value, but not a nancial one.

I’m just stating a fact. The same goes for the generation of grandchildren who should or could now lay claim to their but not a nancial one.

AS

AS

And then there is the question of what will happen to a collection like this in the future.

in

MD

AS

AS

Is that a moment of joy, when you come across a volume like that?

MD

Joy if it costs ve francs—perhaps less so if it’s ve hundred.

small, nondescript little volumes, but how did they get there? Given that books aren’t generally comparable in value to art, the refugees leave his library behind. His private book collection was integrated into the Vienna

number of books from this collection, Gottfried Fischer is by the artist Gunter Böhmer, and there is also a National Library stamp and an accession number. In this case, as

The way prices have shot up in the art market is totally disconnected from reality; books are another story. It’s also interesting in terms of the whole restitution debate. I have two books belonging to Curt and Lilli Sobernheim that I found in a secondhand bookstore; I happened to know who they were. He had worked as a banker in Frankfurt and emigrated to Paris, where he died in prison in 1940 after he was arrested by the Gestapo during the German occupation. Lilli Sobernheim seems either to have died in Paris around then, too, or after being deported to a ghetto in the East. Two small, nondescript little volumes, but how did they get there? Given that books aren’t generally comparable in value to art, the question of whether they were salvaged by refugees or looted by the Nazis is at best of marginal interest. When the Germans marched on Vienna, Gottfried Bermann Fischer, the publisher behind the Fischer-Verlag, was forced to ee and leave his library behind. His private book collection was integrated into the Vienna National Library and restituted after the war, and I recently obtained a small number of books from this collection, from his daughter’s and granddaughter’s estates. The ex libris of Gottfried Bermann Fischer is by the artist Gunter Böhmer, and there is also a National Library stamp and an accession number. In this case, as in others, a lot of material will have been restituted where possible, but sometimes there is not anyone left who could shed any light on what happened. The grandchildren can barely remember.

Yes. That’s a good question! You know, that’s what people say when they don’t know the answer! [Laughs.] But I am on the way to nding a solution at least for part of my collection.

know the answer! [Laughs.] But I am on the way to nding a solution at least for part of my collection.

MU

I guess it’s not easy. You’re right, of course, that there’s less historical awareness among the younger generation. Perhaps it’s also something you grow into over time, so at some point you engage or identify di erently with it all. Is it really always the book itself that interests you, or is it also people’s lives?

that point identify di erently with it all. Is it really always the book itself that interests you, or

MD

know nothing about Hans Stein. How can I best express it? Let me put it this

The biographical element is de nitely key. We know a lot about many of these authors. For instance, we know almost everything about Thomas Mann. But we know nothing about Hans Stein. How can I best express it? Let me put it this way: I know a lot about Bruno Schönlank that hardly anyone who comes after me will know. That applies to others as well. We just got onto Schönlank somehow, and he happens to be one of Oprecht’s authors. There are some archives that are, quite frankly, a bit sni y about collecting books. I realize that they might not have the resources—books take up space and cost a lot of money. I get all that, but they really are losing a lot of information that way. I can show you two books inscribed by Schönlank. If they were to be lost, no one would know who they belonged to or who he gave them to. They may not be very important people, but it means we’re missing out on a whole web of relationships.

are, quite frankly, a bit sni y about collecting books. I realize that they might not have the resources—books take up they belonged to or who he gave them to. They may not be very important people, but it means we’re missing out on a

Translated by Sharon Howe

The photographs on these pages showing Martin Dreyfus’ book collection were taken by Ayse Yavas for the exhibition “Frisch und Fein. Exil Zürich 1933,” which focuses on women translators who emigrated to Switzerland. The show continues through June 10 at Galerie Litar, Zurich. A photo essay with additional images of Dreyfus’ collection is featured in the gallery's . Further information journal, Edition Litar is available at www.litar.ch

Rita Ackermann (with Rachel Rosin) on The Holy Sinner by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann, The Holy Sinner , 1951 Knopf Edition. Courtesy Penguin Random House, New York

By Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

The Holy Sinner, originally published in German under the title The Chosen One, was the last novel by Thomas Mann to appear during his lifetime, and it served in many ways as a tting coda to the life of a writer whose enduring themes were sin and redemption. A retelling of the popular medieval legend of the apocryphal Saint Grigorss (Gregorius)—the child of an incestuous union who goes on to marry his own mother and then redeems himself, rising to become one of Rome’s most illustrious popes—the novel was conceived by Mann as an improbably playful meditation on impossibly thorny moral questions.

“It is light, it is serene,” he wrote his American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. “It has a certain aloofness without being cold.”

Now obscure in Mann’s oeuvre, the novel, published in English in 1951, has long been a favorite of the Hungarian-American artist Rita Ackermann. In this installment of The Artist’s Library, our recurring series in which novelist Sarah BlakleyCartwright asks artists to discuss their favorite books, Ackermann (with the help of her studio assistant, Rachel Rosin, a fellow fan of the book) traces its Oedipal, ontological paths. The following is edited and condensed from email exchanges among the three:

S arah Blakley-Cartwright

In what he calls his preface, the narrator in this very strange book introduces the story as “a tale at once fruitful and highly edifying.” What keeps drawing you to return to the novel, Rita?

Rita Ackermann and Rachel Rosin

I think it’s the multitudes of ways to read into the story, paired with the theme of the perpetual cycle of the highest and lowest states of a human’s life. The novel is lyrical: A mother prays to God, looking up at a glorious image in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin, and cries out, exclaiming her romantic love for the young knight, her son. The entire prayer is full of rhymes. It’s like a poetic symphony to the heavens above. How can a story of such sin—such incest!—be so beautiful, so expressive and melodic?

SBC

The narrator opens with a stunning pronouncement of his own power. “He is as air, bodiless, ubiquitous, not subject to distinctions of here and there.” He says: “All the bells were ringing; and, in consequence, it is he who rings them.” Of course, Mann lies somewhere behind this narrator.

RA/RR

He was a Nobel Prize-winning writer who could easily have become the cultural face of Nazi Germany, but instead he chose to ght fascism and ed the country. He nevertheless struggled greatly with his own demons, which dragged him to such lows that I think he needed to psychoanalyze the dangerous desires and dark thoughts of characters like the ones in this book, characters who might narrowly have been versions of himself.

SBC

The narrator is the embodiment of narrative, the “personi cation of the spirit of storytelling.” But bodies in this novel are suspicious, insofar as they are often the instruments of sin. The narrator remarks upon the body’s “urgent need and its repulsiveness.” Why might Mann choose to make the narrator himself straddle these two realities, his ideal and his actuality?

RA/RR

This book has preoccupations similar to the ones in Death in Venice and Tristan and Isolde, in which the human body is set out to destroy the soul. It is possible that Mann wished to make himself into a kind of spirit narrator to wash his own sinful thinking clean. As you say, Sarah, Mann writes a narrator who lives quite comfortably in the in-between: as embodied and disembodied, as storyteller and subject.

I do not care for this word “embodiment” so much, since (of course) it derives from the body and the eshly shape which together with the name of Morhold I have put o , and which in all ways is a domain of Satan, through

him capable of abominations and subject to them, though one scarcely understands why it does not reject them. On the other hand, the body is the vehicle of the soul and God-given reason, without which these would be deprived of their basis; and so one must regard the body as a necessary evil. —The Holy Sinner

SBC

The narrator is intrusive, unsubtle and seems to have trouble blending into his own story.

RA/RR

Right. The narrator sprinkles his own feelings on the characters throughout the novel. Although the narrator is omniscient, he cannot help but also have feelings, thoughts and opinions on the characters and their choices. The narrator exists in between narrator/character, between objective and subjective entity. Maybe Mann con gures the narrator in between these two realities to allow for a speci c exibility in the narrative, to discourage a xity or rigidity in the story and instead to encourage nuance.

… human reckoning does not go far, except in the narrator’s case, who knows the whole story up to its wondrous ending and as it were shares in the divine providence— a unique privilege and one actually not proper to the human being.

—The Holy Sinner

SBC

Equipped with pre-vision, the narrator is (like Grigorss) unnatural, inhuman. Holiness and humanity are hopelessly interwoven throughout the novel. Why does Mann want to make it so hard to tell the two apart?

RA/RR

Mann’s narrator is one man, and then within a paragraph, or a page, he becomes another. In The Holy Sinner, there is the sense of a story in ux, one that can easily succumb to change. Though there is a particular narrator telling a particular story, it feels all-at-once present. Mann has the narrator describe himself as the

“incarnation of the spirit of storytelling.” He has the power to be everywhere, even more than the usual omniscient narrator. This “everywhereness” relates to in-betweenness, which allows the storytelling to feel alive.

SBC

Despite his protests to the contrary, the narrator is an aesthetic snob. He says he will try to tell the story as well as his “monkish understanding can.” But then he snobbishly dismisses the words of an Augustinian monk: “That is indeed scarcely tolerable, stylistically as well as also in other ways, and probably such peasantly rubbish could never ow from a Roman pen.”

RA/RR

Mann’s own vanity is ashing there. He is one of the most celebrated authors of his time, and he knows it!

SBC

The limits of language seem to keep haunting the narrator. Attempting to describe a nightmare, he remarks: “The dream was incomparably more fruitful than it sounds in words.”

RA/RR

To me, this relates to a state where things exist beyond understanding, comprehending—the highest state, from which art can be originated without explanation. The novel is interested in the way in which words fail us, especially, perhaps, in spaces of the unconscious, or in places of the dream.

Throughout The Holy Sinner, the characters speak in French, German, Latin and oftentimes in a mixture of all three. One character notes that the war would end if only the Duchess would simply marry a neighboring prince, as he wishes. But the Duchess says, “Niemalen de la vie!” (meaning, in a mix of French/ German, “Never in life!”). It is quite interesting, this uidity of language, or the coalescence of multiple languages.

SBC

The novel’s rst act tells of two noble children, brother and sister, who fall in love, fatefully, and conceive a child. The brother remarks, “I did not know that sin is so fearfully fertile.” What do you think Mann is trying to have us understand, if anything, about the nature of sin?

RA/RR

The brother is commenting on the fact that, for their mother and father, who married lawfully and righteously, it was extremely di cult to have children—they had to su er, waiting twenty years to have children. And yet, he and his sister sleep together in sin and bear a child almost instantly. In the novel, in other words, sin quickly reproduces itself. Mann might be exorcising sin by writing a novel that epitomizes the downfalls of desires—an attempt in old age to rid himself of darkness by embracing it.

SBC

The tragedy springs from the idea of hierarchy, an inclination not to tarnish a noble family’s integrity by fraternizing with associates of lowly proximity. Their divine favor is their undoing. They are not meant for the world. A secondary character chastises the sister: “The greatest disorder have you set up and a ba ement of nature.”

RA/RR

Death surrounds the relationship of the sibling-lovers. They were born out of death (their mother dying in childbirth), they make love the night that their father dies, and their dog is even killed in the act of their love. The characters alternate between being the chosen ones and being the greatest sinners. They move up and down a kind of ladder of good and evil, of holiness and sinning. It’s an idea from

“Mann could easily have become the cultural face of Nazi Germany, but instead he chose to ght fascism and ed the country. He nevertheless struggled greatly with his own demons, which dragged him to such lows that I think he needed to psychoanalyze the dangerous desires and dark thoughts of characters like the ones in this book.…”—Rita Ackermann

Hermit, ca. 1480, woodcut. Artokoloro / Alamy Stock Photo

Jewish mysticism: “The lower the dip the higher the reach.” The harder you fall, the higher you can climb.

There’s something very visual about disorder and chaos. It feels centripetal. Later in the book, when the two characters, who are unknowingly mother and son (also aunt and nephew, as she is his father’s sister) have a daughter together, the narrator uses the imagery of backwardness, of disorder. The narrator writes of this daughter, one who is conceived of sin atop sin, “that she had her head on the wrong way, nobody saw.”

SBC

And yet the narrator can’t help but root for his doomed characters: “Out of all bounds they loved and that is why I cannot quite rid me of well-wishing for them, God help me!” And later, “ I confess myself guilty of a weakness—not for the sin (the heavens forfend!), but for the sinners, yes….” The

intensity of their passion “should not increase my sympathy, yet it does.” Why does Mann make the narrator such an imperfect delegate of God?

RA/RR

In my opinion, it’s a personal confession, and his hope of expiation by way of his genius for writing. The most gripping of Mann’s novels engage in a “deep tissue” psychoanalysis and the consequences of the sinful desires of the esh.

SBC

Grigorss, the child born to the remarkable, highborn brother and sister, is “the child of the bad children.” And yet he turns out to be markedly handsome, brilliant, sure-footed and skillful. The fruit of sin, a child of unmatched nobility, he is at once blessed and condemned to ill fate. Both a young heir to the throne and a “nobody, otsam from the sea.” What do you make of this duality?

RA/RR

It’s the two poles of the scale of human life. Living in the sherman’s hut, he goes to a monastery to learn. Grigorss’ speech becomes more re ned: He learns to speak Latin, reads many books, learns lectures in science and religion and has a very open mind. The young boy is modest, courteous, good-mannered and lovely. He’s viewed as a true religious scholar. The townspeople speak of how odd it was that this boy—who came from the hut and a sherman’s lifestyle—was as noble as he was. Ultimately, his brother from the sherman family becomes angry, nding Grigorss too prideful: “You are a mockery through and through because you turn the world upside down and confuse the distinctions.” Grigorss did certainly feel this, an “inward struggle.” Mann sets out, in a single character, the highest highs and the lowest lows on the human scale.

SBC

Grigorss embarks on a search for identity, a kind of knight’s quest. “Only one thing avails: the journey after myself, the knowledge of who I am.” But this quest is hopelessly perverted. He discovers a duchess whose chastity he must protect; he defeats her tormentor and marries her, unaware all the while that his bride is his own mother. They proceed to have children together; sin begets sin.

RA/RR

When he unknowingly marries his mother, the narrator goes on a short rant, blaming Nature—interestingly, the narrator calls Nature a “She,” blaming this feminine power for the perversion. Notably, mother and son originally name their daughter Herrad but then change her name to Humilitas, meaning humility in Latin, once they realize their grave sin. They name their second daughter Stultitia, meaning stupidity in Latin. It’s interesting—when I looked up their daughter’s original name, Herrad, I saw it means “horseshoe” in Spanish. In literature and religion, a horseshoe is a symbol for luck or strength. I wonder what else a horseshoe might connote in this context—the connectedness of a mother and son who are husband and wife or father and mother?

SBC

Nature’s indi erence is remarked upon so much in the book: “My spirit cannot nd itself in nature… she is of the devil, for her indi erence is bottomless.”

RA/RR

Perhaps Mann is suggesting just this: that sin is contagious. It spreads quickly. Evil thrives o other forms of evil. Sin rapidly multiplies and proliferates.

Rita Ackermann, Excerpt from Sketchbook II (A Midsummer Night's Dream), 10.75 x 17.5 in. (27.30 x 44.45 cm). Courtesy the artist and American Art Catalogues

Rita Ackermann, Excerpt from Sketchbook I (For Mama), 10.75 x 17.5 in. (27.30 x 44.45 cm). Courtesy the artist and American Art Catalogues

SBC

Grigorss has prayed to be reunited with his mother. God grants this wish, but perversely. In this, Mann makes his characters move backwards, “…making a man born of a woman beget not forwards in time but backwards into the motherwomb, rousing up to himself descendants whose faces, so to speak, are turned the wrong way.” Of course, the novel is very Freudian. Many years before this in the novel, when the mother has said goodbye to her brother-lover and is pregnant with his child, she has a nightmare in which she gives birth to a dragon who cruelly tears her womb. Then the dragon ies away, which causes her great mental anguish, but later it returns and gives her even greater pain by squeezing back into the torn womb. Both the brother-father and son serve as this dragon: Both y away. Then the son returns to his mother and becomes her lover, returning to the “mother-womb.”

The young man marvels that the Earth still dares to bear him, given that he is the man most “plunged in sin there ever was on Earth.” In search of penance and abasement, he exiles himself to an island, basically a rock, for seventeen years, knowing that his young body, in its prime, is “composed all of sin.” So he returns to nature, as it were, shrinking down to a “mossy creature … what remained of him dried, evaporated…”

RA/RR

Grigorss decides he must become a beggar, to live his life in full penance, to repent for the sin he was born of and the sin he created. In this novel Mann wanted to create a human body that is pure sin.

Belching now and then, somewhat slobbering, the man lay drawn up into himself, knees at his mouth … his constant posture of being curled in on himself made him grow visibly smaller … Finally … he was not much bigger than a hedgehog, a prickly, bristly moss-grown nature-thing, whom no weather could a ect, and whose shrunken members, the little arms and legs, even eye- and mouthopenings, were hard to recognize. It knew time no more.

—The Holy Sinner

SBC

Grigorss is given over into the hands of God twice, once in his cask when he is abandoned to die as an infant and again, on the deserted island, as a young man. But fate seems to insist on his survival. Why?

RA/RR

Both times that he’s given into the hands of God, he’s an infant: in the cask and on the rock in exile, where he’s shrunken to infant size again. The “mother-drink” is what the narrator calls the liquid that sustains Grigorss on the rock. The narrator equates this milky substance to breastmilk, nourishment welling up from the “maternal organism.” He’s always latching onto the breast of the matriarch—at the breast of his mother as an infant, then the breast of his foster mother when he lived with the shermen, and nally the breast of Mother Nature. This milky substance that looks like water but satiates hunger and thirst is so much like Manna (Hebrew: ָןמ) in the Torah, the sustenance God provided the Jews in the desert after the Exodus. It is a miracle food, tasting like anything one would want and each day replenished, like the substance in Mann’s trough!

SBC

To you, what does the novel seem to have to say about motherhood?

RA/RR

A lot, I think, about how sin returns us to infancy. Or better yet, how repentance returns us to infancy. How we can become as pure as an infant even after all of our sins.

SBC

Both interludes, the rst with the Abbot, and the second on the rock, last seventeen years. Maybe there’s a way to read the book as an allegory for the years between World War I and fascism, the return of militarism.

RA/RR

That’s interesting! I hadn’t thought of that.

W hen I think with what hazards a frail bark, an open boat, is delivered thereon, mere playthings of the waves, perhaps not even manned or only in the most strangely tender and helpless way—I shudder at the brevity of the hope that such a little ship can ever come happily to land; and I marvel at God’s skill how He, when He will, knows how to steer it through dangers which He himself has heaped up in its path.

—The Holy Sinner

SBC

In the novel’s nal act, Grigorss morphs one last time. The bristly, shrunken beast of the eld transforms into the beautiful young man and takes his rightful place as the chosen one, elected by God to be the head of the Roman church. Again, there seems to be no place for him among

mankind, so in the end he, reborn as Gregorius, takes his place above humanity. Why is Grigorss repeatedly subsumed, rst on the island, then into the role of the pope?

RA/RR

Good question. The morphing of identities is very interesting. He goes from being a baby of sin to a castaway baby oating in the sea to the child of shermen to a golden child of the monks and the Abbot. Then from being a knight to a duke, a husband to his own mother, a father to a sinner, a beggar, a tiny creature on a rock and nally a pope, ruler of the land. Could it be that, with the elevation above human laws of his protagonist, Mann nally casts his hero fully from society?

SBC

The novel opens with the pealing of the city bells in Rome, which in themselves swing like a pendulum. It closes, too, with city bells, as the new pope makes his way through Rome for his coronation. How do you interpret the recurrence of the image?

RA/RR

I think Mann is relating the story to the dynamics of a fable, the most ancient oral storytelling traditions humans have, sustained mouth by mouth over centuries.

SBC

The disgraced duchess understands that Grigorss must be three things to her: her child, her spouse and her pope. What do you make of this unholy triptych?

RA/RR

Unconditional love, perhaps?

SBC

For a tragedy of mythic proportions, the novel—and the legend—have an oddly happy ending. Do you buy it?

RA/RR

Yes!

Thomas Mann in 1952. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Thomas-Mann-Archiv. Photographer unknown

Picture Press

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez and Philip Aarons on the republication of Newspaper, the cult East Village image-only magazine founded in 1968 Images from Newspaper (New York: Primary Information, 2023) showing the work of contributors Steve Lawrence (p. 136), Brigid Berlin (p. 137), Richard Bernstein (p. 138), Lucas Samaras (p. 139) and Peter Hujar (pp. 140-141). All images courtesy Primary Information. Work by Brigid Berlin © 2023 Vincent Fremont and Peter Hujar © 2023 The Peter Hujar Archive. All rights reserved

Randy Kennedy

Thanks to you both for taking the time to talk about Newspaper, which I think one can safely say is among the most fabled artist publications to come out of downtown New York in the 1960s and 1970s—fabled in part because original copies in even passable condition are practically impossible to nd now, and because much of the publication’s history seems to have been lost to history, through the devastation of AIDS and other causes. I feel like I’m somebody who’s pretty obsessive in mining the history of publications like this, but I had no idea about Newspaper. Especially considering that Peter Hujar was an editor, along with his partner Steve Lawrence, and that the list of contributors is stunning. Marcelo, I know you came to know about it when you were working as an archivist for Danny Fields, the music manager and writer. Phil, when did it rst come on your radar?

Philip Aarons

I don’t think I can give you an exact date. I’m a voracious collector of materials that deal with things in New York, California and elsewhere, material from avant-garde circles, and I have a particular focus on things that are likely to have been overlooked. Anytime I see something that I haven’t heard being ogged endlessly by the people who deal in rare books and ephemera, I’m even more excited to nd out about it. And there was very little that was ndable about Newspaper. It was a periodical without three things that otherwise pushed similar publications to the forefront of people’s interest. First, it had no text, which is remarkable. It was available for free, right, Marcelo?

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez

Sort of. They did run subscriptions, but how many people actually subscribed? We don’t know. They never really kept their promises in terms of the timeline they set out in the subscription information.

Aarons

Right. And then maybe the most important thing in this regard is that it didn’t have a name attached to it that was signi cant within the art world at that time. The publisher, Steve Lawrence, was not a household name outside of his own household, and Peter Hujar was known only within certain

circles. I think that lead to an even more marginalized existence than many other avant-garde periodicals of the time. Later, it just dropped out of the world. I found some copies. I loved looking at them. I knew that they were amazingly fragile and that anytime I looked through the newsprint of one I had decreased its life span by a not-insigni cant amount, as Marcelo can testify when we ipped through them to see which issues I had that were complete. I don’t want to take any particular credit for doing anything here other than liking the issues of Newspaper and thinking they were worth preserving.

Kennedy

Marcelo, how did Danny Fields come to have a closet full of issues?

Yáñez

Danny knew Steve Lawrence and was involved somewhat with the publication. Volume three, number one, which is the last issue we reproduce in this book, was done for the Cockettes’ 1971 performances in New York. Danny was the publicist for those infamous performances, and he had a heavy hand in commissioning that issue from Steve and Peter. Danny managed the Stooges and there are Stooges ads in some issues, with images taken by Hujar, which Danny

organized. He was essentially part of the network of the publication.

Kennedy

Hujar is so well known now, but Steve Lawrence, for all the work he did, remains a very obscure gure in that East Village scene. Can you talk about what you’ve found out about him and how he and Hujar came to make the magazine?

Yáñez

We have no documents at all as to what was going on behind the scenes of the publication, but we know Lawrence was born in Texas, outside of Dallas, grew up in the Dallas area and decided to head east, moving to New York when he was nineteen. He became friends with a lot of people who were going to Parsons, and one night cruising on Christopher Street he met Peter. They entered into an open relationship and eventually moved in together at 188 Second Avenue, which is across the street from the movie theater that Peter lived in later, a place where Jackie Curtis had once lived and which David Wojnarowicz took over after Peter's death. What Steve did in order to make ends meet when he moved to New York is a matter of speculation. I’ve heard people say that he was dealing drugs, selling to people at Max’s Kansas City and the Factory. But he also did set design

work—there are stories that he worked for Richard Avedon a couple of times, building sets for commercial shoots, as well as for Sheyla Baykal’s Palm Casino Review. He also became very close to Paul Thek and they spent summers together on Fire Island. Eventually, Steve became part of Thek’s artist co-op, constructing installations, and he also worked in advertising in various venues. In Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Diane Arbus, there’s a mention of Steve Lawrence, but his name is misspelled, which is also very common throughout his whole story. Sometimes, he’s misidenti ed in books simply as “Richard.” Avedon and Marvin Israel introduced Lawrence to Arbus, and they developed a brief friendship while he was doing Newspaper

Aarons

When I rst got to know Newspaper, I was more focused on the breadth of the imagery than I was on the prestige of the artists who made them—Arbus or Avedon or Hujar. To me, it seemed amazingly broad, non-focused stylistically and geographically. I thought a lot about how phenomenal whoever putting it together was. What the fuck was this and how did this interest in images grow so adventurous? I was amazed at the freedom—I guess that would be the right word. And how they pulled it all together.

Kennedy

This is a question for you both. What were the precedents for Newspaper or in uences on it from those years? Ray Johnson’s Paper Snake, from 1965, comes to mind because it was so unorthodox and visually wild, but of course it has text and a thematic throughline, as a collection of correspondence.

Yáñez

There’s de nitely the in uence of surrealism, I think, particularly Bataille’s Documents magazine from the 1930s. But I also think about Stephen Shore’s 1971 show called “All the Meat You Can Eat,” which employed similarly explosive groupings of appropriated popular images and art images. But that was after Newspaper was already underway.

Aarons

It’s hard to say. In my collecting, I start basically with Wallace Berman and Semina, issues of which Berman began hand-making in 1955 and which may have had some in uence. But Newspaper looked like nothing else that I can think of. To me, the distinguishing visual and organizational and probably theoretical aspect about it is the use of the grid. I think it was the very

rst time that someone said, “Well, these things may be a photograph of someone on a horse or in the desert or whatever, but at the end of the day, they’re boxes in a gridded format that are arranged that way—whereas collage is, in many senses, the opposite. It’s the interposition of images out of a frame into a frame.” There’s something fundamentally minimalist about a magazine that has no text, that has only images in a gridded format without any real identi cation of either subject or author. To me, that was the wow of it. It was radical. Nothing is totally new, but to me it was a real break. I think one of the things that needs to be constantly

mentioned is that Kynaston McShine— to my mind, one of the great curators of the time—saw Newspaper for what it was and ripped it apart and put it on the wall in his own grid in one of the most important conceptual shows in history, “Information,” in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art. Kynaston absolutely got what Newspaper was doing.

Kennedy

It would be so interesting to see a subscribers’ list, if one still existed. I bet it would be quite a snapshot of overlapping circles within the art world in those years. Even with all the factors both of you have mentioned contributing to Newspaper ’s obscurity now, it’s still

kind of stunning how far it’s fallen from the historical register.

Yáñez

Part of it can be explained through the chaotic, unstable living situations of so many artists in those days. I’m writing a dissertation chapter about Paul Thek now, and when he got evicted from apartments, all of his stu was just thrown out. Steve Lawrence got evicted a couple of times and much of his stu also ended up in the dump. Then he ended up in rehab and moved back to Texas and died at thirty-eight, in 1983, either from cirrhosis or complications from AIDS. Hujar died from AIDS four years later, in 1987. Their lives were so short.

Kennedy And so was the nature of the medium they printed on. It was almost as if it was meant to disappear.

Aarons

I think that’s an important point. I have long had con icting views as to whether certain materials should be reprinted, as you might imagine. Because nothing is ever the same as the original. Maybe if something is really worth seeing, you should have to go to the New York Public Library, ask for it, go look at it, all of which you can do. But to me, this book was necessary because the materials really would have completely disappeared, eventually. You can’t treat Newspaper

the same way you can treat a rare book or a journal or even mimeograph.

Yáñez

Right. This is a publication you just aren’t able to request at the public library. They don’t have it, but it’s also a huge conservation issue to request an item like this. The Metropolitan Museum of Art does have original copies because someone at the Costume Institute, I’ve noticed, has been buying up and saving Steve Lawrence publications, including the last thing he did in New York, Fire Island News magazine, published one season on Fire Island. Copies of that are incredibly scarce, far more scarce even than copies of Newspaper. So it’s great that the Met is actively collecting these. The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, also has great holdings of Newspaper.

Aarons

I think it’s wonderful that this will be back in circulation. It would have been a tragedy for it to have been lost. And it seems like everyone I show it to wants to sit down and go through the whole thing, every issue.

Yáñez

I showed the book to someone who didn’t know what it was, and I told them about it, and after looking for a while they were like, “Wow. I love it. But I still don't understand what it is.” Which is such a great response. That’s so hard to achieve anymore.

Primary Information’s facsimile edition of Newspaper, compiling all fourteen issues of the publication for the rst time, was published in March. Contributors to Newspaper, which was issued irregularly from 1968 to 1971, included Peter Hujar, Paul Thek, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon, Ray Johnson, Yayoi Kusama, Billy Name, Mel Ramos and Brigid Berlin.

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a photographer, art historian and archivist living in Brooklyn, NY, with stints in the Bay Area. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University, at work on a dissertation about artists on Fire Island in the 20th century.

Philip Aarons is a real estate developer, and together with his wife, Shelley Fox Aarons, he is a longtime supporter of the arts and an ardent contemporary art and artist-book collector.

New and forthcoming books

It was 1978, a year in which art photographers all seemed to want to get beneath the surface of things. Bruce Davidson descended into the subway. Cindy Sherman went undercover in filmland. Robert Mapplethorpe trawled the BDSM underground.

Larry Sultan—up to that point best known for his coolly conceptual work with Mike Mandel—decided to go underwater at the local pool during swim classes.

“I was interested in making pictures that were excessively physical, sensual and painterly,” he wrote later of the series, shot over two years in San Francisco. “They were inspired by the Red Cross swimming and life-saving manuals and made with a small underwater camera. They were made at a time when I found that much of my artistic activity was cut off from my body.

The activity of photographing and the pictures themselves frightened me.”

Looked at more than forty years later, the pictures, gathered for the first time in a beautifully designed collection, seem anything but frightening; they’re sweet and funny, a little goofy and comically surreal. They practically smell of chlorine and suburban childhood and dad’s embarrassing swimsuit. They’re Max Ernst at the Y, with “Slip Slidin’ Away” on the sound system.

The project seemed to provide Sultan with an ingenious method for photographing people without having to talk to them or even be seen (clearly) by them, snorkeling among their limbs and torsos. You get the sense that he didn’t quite understand what he was doing down there under the water, which is exhilarating and makes for a wonderful document of its wavery, unsettled era. —Randy Kennedy

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting

Edited, introduced and translated by Ara H. Merjian and Alessandro Giammei.

Foreword by T. J. Clark (Verso)

“Lucky you! Every time you raise a pencil or a brush, you always write in verse. A painter is a poet who is never forced by circumstances to write in prose.” These words, taken from a letter by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) to artist Renato Guttoso, record Pasolini’s first artistic love: painting.

Translated into English for the first time, the writings collected in this book shed light on the Italian filmmaker, poet and intellectual’s relationship with the visual arts. Early verses in the Friulian language on Piero Manzù’s David express Pasolini’s admiration for this

Larry Sultan, Swimmers (Mack)

Larry Sultan, Untitled, from the series Swimmers, 1978-82. Courtesy the Estate of Larry Sultan and Casemore Gallery, San Francisco

unmonumental sculpture. In a 1953 poem in terza rima, he attacks Picasso for his affiliation with the Communist Party. In the years before his tragic murder, Pasolini wrote about Caravaggio’s “profilmic” invention of both “an entire world to place in front of his studio’s easel” and “a new light,” as well as Warhol’s “message to the European intellectual,” which unfortunately “excludes the very possibility of dialectics.”

Pasolini’s films, politics and homosexuality are globally known, but very little has been said about art’s influence on his work. His studies in 1939 at the University of Bologna with Roberto Longhi, art historian and scholar of Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca, affected his aesthetics forever. T.J. Clark reminds us that his movies are “visions,” in which composition, perspective, movement and stillness are not ruled by cinematographic taste, but rather are indebted to the visual arts.

Reading this book more than a century after Pasolini’s birth (the same year Mussolini established his fascist dictatorship) demonstrates how writing about art can serve as a tool for formulating a critical view of society and politics— and how Pasolini’s poetic and visual idiom was informed by his knowledge of historical and contemporary art.

—Maria Elena Garzoni

Jacqueline Rose

The Plague: Living Death in Our Times Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK); Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)

Was Covid just one relatively minor stage in an escalating series of horrors, as the Spanish flu was in relation to World War II? Many of us would rather not think about it, and Jacqueline Rose’s new essay collection implies that this is a kind of repression. She notes that the Spanish flu, in spite of a death toll almost equal to that of both world wars combined, has been “more or less erased from history.” This book anchors the incompetent political response to Covid in a larger history, relating it not only to Camus’ The Plague but also to the little-known connection between Freud’s death drive theory and the loss of his daughter to the Spanish flu, a connection he himself denied.

With the acuity of a 20th-century public intellectual, Rose offers a model for countering the dispiriting onslaught of the present by looking beyond its horizon. In the face of the so-called polycrisis, solace is offered in Camus’ negotiation with death, in Freud’s bid to understand what drives us, and perhaps, above all, in Rose’s exploration of Simone Weil’s ethical, spiritual and mystical dissent, her notion that “like love, thinking is corrosive for the social order.”

Drawing from the conviction that Covid laid bare certain truths about the world, Rose helps us negotiate a beyond that operates on another level from “the spread of devastation” traveling “with such indecent haste across our futures.”

—Alexander Scrimgeour

Monica Youn, From From (Graywolf Press)

Monica Youn’s fourth collection of poetry presents her most ambitious and varied work to date. Appearing as a prelude is “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë / Sado),” which silhouettes the differences between the mythological queen and the 18thcentury prince, as well as a bond that unites them: Both are considered Asian (Pasiphaë from Colchis in Asia Minor; Sado from Korea) and therefore marked and contained by their race.

This assertive yet nuanced critique of sameness, otherness and desirability sets the thematic stage for the rest of the volume. Presented across five sections in formats ranging from taut, lineated verse to short prose poems that read like lyrical essays, the work weaves together elements of mythology, history, pop culture and personal anecdotes to engage with cultural symbols and confront anti-Asian racism. Youn wrote the poems during the Covid19 pandemic, and she takes particular aim at the history and current wave of antiAsian violence in the United States.

Her razor-sharp wit can elicit chuckles as readily as gasps, and the volume is filled with moments of raw honesty. In the closing poem, “Detail of the Rice Chest,” Youn writes: “I let you see into the box, into what is private, into what is foreign, into what is inscrutable, into what has been buried.” Throughout, she displays an extraordinary command not only of classic Greek and Korean lore but also of modern-day myths about race and belonging.

—Alexandra Vargo

The Carpenters in 1971.

Photo: Jim McCrary/Getty Images

Ken Johnson, Untitled , 2021. Gouache and pencil on paper, 30 x 22.5 in. (76.2 x 57.2 cm). Courtesy the artist

For All We Know:

Last Testament of the Carpenters of Mare Vaporum

By Jarrett Earnest

About the Severance there is much we do not know.

W hy, some twenty generations ago, should all communication stop? Why did the transports, whose arrival and departure were once a daily occurrence, cease? Why, on a single day, did every channel suddenly fall silent and every network collapse?

Initially, there was frantic speculation as to the cause. Most feared instantaneous destruction had befallen the population of Earth. If survivors remained, theirs would be an existence at its most primitive—millennia might pass before contact could be re-established. Others theorized a massive technological failure, holding out hope that Earth would devise a solution enabling reconnection and rescue. With each passing year of silence, this hope dimmed into nullity.

Ours was the rst prototype of a lunar city, given the ancient name for this region, Mare Vaporum, the Sea of Vapor. It remains the only settlement of what was to be many on the surface of the Moon. In those rst years of confusion, the stranded were forced to solve an impossible onslaught of problems. Everything we have—vegetable seeds, bits of metal, the water molecules and minerals in our bodies—was transported here from Earth, increasingly long ago. Our facilities were engineered to be selfsustaining, augmented by fresh supplies as needed. In the absence of that renewing current, alternatives were devised for the maintenance of the graduated extractors that process waste; the solar elds that convert light into energy; the balance between our large gardens and vast carbon dioxide sinks; the magnetic generators regulating our thermal and gravitational elds. ese mechanisms, upon which our presence here depends, have since become delicately, but perfectly, calibrated.

Soon a far greater need dawned: All forms of public and private communication, all images of any kind, all written and recorded accounts—scienti c, philosophical, literary: the sum total of Earth’s knowledge and ours—were held on Earth, accessed by the city remotely. With the Severance everything was lost to us in a moment, as completely as if Earth itself had vanished from the sky. Mare Vaporum was enveloped in a boundless vacuum of history.

Urgently, everyone assembled to share what they remembered, shocked to discover how little there was. Each fact, de nition, theory, story and dream was brought forward to the group to be analyzed. After the Severance, a deep distrust of all informational storage outside the mind developed. e meager pool of collective knowledge was fastidiously sorted and memorized. A chief occupation became the recitation of endless garlands of words and their meanings—words related to the materials and processes that surround us—titanium, airlock, desalinate, defecation. Special attention is paid to words related to our bygone life on Earth, upon which we meditate at length, even in the absence of full understanding of their meaning— cloud, breeze, wintertime, weepin’ willow, bird, guitar….

All possible accountings were made. Every length of tubing and meter of fabric was measured. Our complexes were scoured for evidence of our lost culture. Mare Vaporum had been out tted with standardized dishes, utensils and clothing, with which all were familiar. A few other Earth-born objects were discovered, among

them a single square of multicolored woven ber; two thin cups, shiny and hard as teeth; and a gray rectangular box with a silver clasp and handle. Laid on its side, this box, the largest and most puzzling of our discoveries, opened to reveal a at spinning mechanism with a movable lever and a sharp metal point. How these things came to us we do not know. e box would have been forgotten if not for the miraculous discovery inside it: a sti square of paper, the color of dried blood—extraordinary on its own—at the center of which, edged in gold, the mysterious name Carpenters was printed. At the right corner appeared the words e Singles and on the left 1969–1973, dates from an immemorial past. e paper formed two identical squares connected by a hinge along one side, so that the one hid behind the other. Opening them revealed an image! Incredibly pale, it overlapped and connected the inside of the folded squares, showing two humans on either side of a path leading into the distance behind them, the pair engulfed by celestial light. e man and woman look toward us lovingly, beckoning us to join them. Like the structure of the folded double square itself, these two gures came to be interpreted as terms that only appeared to be distinct—Moon & Earth, Self & Other—but that were in fact joined in a higher union, an entity within which they were subsumed, elevated out of and nally released from the illusion of separation.

Within the second square, a slim compartment contained a disc of clear plastic with an incision spiraling inward from its outer circumference toward an opaque circle, perforated at its center. A relation between the box and the disc was soon established: When the disc was positioned on the rotating platform inside the box and the point placed inside the incision, various resistances became ampli ed by contact. rough this ampli cation e Singles revealed themselves to us, invisibly encoded within the structure of the cut, transformed into continuous sound through the simplest of mechanical means. Within the non-physical—or, like each of us as Carpenters, the not-merely-physical—lay the key to who we were to become.

In the immediate years after the Severance, an inexhaustible attention was trained on e Singles. At rst, the words were memorized and then the dynamic intervals between the words in their processions. We began replicating the highly complex sonic environments with our voices—the aural fullness that the words opened within, moved into, out of and through. Modulating the tender musculature of air through the throat produced an astonishing diversity of vibrations, which could be sent to resonating chambers throughout the body and then into the space outside. A transformation occurred in combining and layering these operations within the whole of our assembled community, so that each voice—the rhythms of every lling lung and beating heart—dissolved the boundaries of part from whole.

Every touch of the metal point on the disc wore it slightly away, diminishing the vibrations inexorably with each rotation. e clear plastic object remains with us today, sealed in a transparent cube, but it long ago lost the ability to produce more than a modulated fuzz of indistinct sound. Some maintain that once e Singles had been truly learned, they left the disc to reside within us, in our bodies and the spaces opened between our bodies. Once we understood ourselves as Carpenters, even the name of our city, the Sea of Vapor, which had once seemed such a cruel choice for a barren lunar surface, clari ed its meaning. Our greatest treasures here, beginning with the carefully monitored oxygen-rich atmosphere in which we live, are invisible. Every moment we engage in a complex exchange with this enclosed invisible sea that connects us all. Making the fundamental act of breathing audible—and then ornamenting and luxuriating in it—is our highest experience. It is our singing.

On the backside of the folded square the twelve Singles are listed in sequence: 1. We’ve Only Just Begun 2. Top Of e World 3. Ticket To Ride 4. Superstar 5. Rainy Days And Mondays 6. Goodbye To Love 7. Yesterday Once More 8. It’s Going To Take Some Time 9. Sing 10. For All We Know 11. Hurting Each Other 12. ( ey Long To Be) Close To You. Within our evolving awareness of ourselves as Carpenters, we’ve come to understand the violence of separating a written word from its vocal incarnation, stripping it of myriad possible meanings. In this way, we regard e Singles as living entities, existing through us as they pass between our bodies and the Sea of Vapor.

Since we can no longer consult the original disc, fanatical energy has been spent preserving the songs in memory, lest we lose even the most minor nuance. Our devotion to this calling deepened radically between our third and fourth generations. Once all of those who had ever known anyone with direct Earth experience were gone, the true ceremonial dimensions of e Singles began to reveal themselves, such that, with only minor adjustments, they assumed the ritual forms we observe today.

In the beginning, the songs were interpreted as the history of the settlement of Mare Vaporum itself. e rst, “We’ve Only Just Begun,” recalls the utopian vision that prompted our lunar settlement, promising a new and perfected stage of human life— we’ve only just begun to live —a vision of a pre-Severance existence tinged with melancholic foresight. e rst joyous days of Mare Vaporum’s intertwinement with Earth are captured by the ecstatic “Top Of e World”—looking down on creation—but the song also contains a chilling foreshadowing: When this day is through I hope that I will nd that tomorrow will be, just the same for you and me. “Ticket To Ride” follows, chronicling the nal ight from the Earth to the Moon, its passengers unaware that they would never return. Many of us cannot sing the opening and ending words of this song without tears lling our eyes: I think I’m going to be sad…. e next two songs encapsulate disorienting loss and the slow acclimation to the sorrows of our plight. Most heartrending is “Superstar,” negotiating and beseeching: You said you’d be coming back this way again baby? e enigmatic “Rainy Days And Mondays” then shows reason itself relinquished, signaling the rst phase of the construction of a new culture from the fragments of the old.

Once the trauma of the Severance receded from immediate experience, e Singles’ importance came to reside not in the denotation of the words themselves, nor in their expanded connotation, but rather in their auditory architecture. Every moment was examined and enlarged, extrapolated for maximum sonic interplay. “Ticket To Ride,” the longest Single at four minutes, ten seconds, became increasingly attenuated until it unfolded over four hours, allowing the repeated nal iterations—think I’m going to be sad—to circle the room in a continuous breath until the entire assembly entered into a space between sound and distinct thought—a twilight of circular breathing, a continuous buzzing of swelling and receding, a living atmosphere.

On Mare Vaporum our largest residential structure is itself circular, covered by a transparent dome framing a view of Earth large above us, always in the same place, slightly wobbling, slowly turning, diminishing into shadow and re-emerging, modeling the progression of thought itself. is structure is reserved solely for singing. Its acoustics conduct maximum reverberation, redoubling and quadrupling our sounds into a quavering matrix. In the room’s center rises the cube containing the sacred disc and folded squares, around which we array ourselves in evenly spaced rows. Our singing begins not with vocalization but with prolonged periods of aspiration. We shape the sound of the breath entering and leaving our bodies, moving lips against teeth, then contracting the throat, the diaphragm, the belly, until the unvoiced air itself, inside and out, is

thoroughly prepared to channel the songs. e most exalted goal of Carpenters is to t our voices together as an indivisible sonic tapestry, being woven and unwoven in time, so that no individual is identi able, no phrase composed of fewer than twelve voices fused in a dynamic multi-tonal harmony.

e evolution of these rites is not a story of absolute agreement—indeed, periodically, some members have been known to scream discordantly or burst into tears in an attempt to interrupt a choral elaboration. It is a testament to the perfection of e Singles and the multichanneled instrument of our communal body that the whole is able to respond, instantaneously, to these behaviors—voices attending to the apocryphal sounds like white blood cells swarming contagion, softening and ultimately incorporating these outbursts into an even more beautiful construction. Presence at our daily ceremonies is not compulsory, and it is not uncommon for some individuals to absent themselves for long spells of time. Several legendary Carpenters have withdrawn from singing to remain in private meditation for years, living alone, speaking to no one. Ultimately, however, life on Mare Vaporum is so frictionlessly ordered that little consumes our days beyond the simplest tasks of daily hygiene, food preparation and machine operation. No novel sensory experience has presented itself in many hundreds of years. And so without coercion, all eventually return to the singing and the greater whole of Carpenter life.

Over the generations, ceremonial structures have emerged in our observance. We resolved to align each of the twelve singles with a synodic lunar month—a complete cycle each year. Within that month, we begin by enacting e Singles highly compressed into their original duration, as listed on the original folded squares, all between two minutes, thirty-four seconds and four minutes, ten seconds. Over the month, the time signature expands in parallel with Earth’s emergence from and submersion into shadow, so that by the conclusion the singing of just one song can extend over an entire day.

e clear disc itself contained six songs on each side. e rst side is a kind of descent, which the second side reverses, being overall the more important to our philosophical understanding of e Singles as a teaching entity. e later songs represent to us the age of our dawning self-consciousness as Carpenters. ose that span the end of the rst and beginning of the second side are always sung together during eclipses. As the sun moves ever closer to Earth we begin singing “Goodbye To Love,” which eventually abandons words completely—here we enter into the most sacred space: singing as total abstraction. At the peak of the eclipse, with its glowing red halo dominating the sky, we observe a span of almost excruciating silence—such that exists with the intensity of so many beating hearts and lling lungs. At this interval, all thought is directed upward into the darkened circle from which we once came; we send our full being into that span between the surface of the Moon and the negation of Earth, disappearing into it as into pure consciousness.

At the slightest sign of the sun’s reemergence, we begin singing “Yesterday Once More,” which thematizes the eventual reception of distant communication, a return of connection through the recollection of songs from the ancient past. It returns the wordless ending of “Goodbye To Love” within a framework of language, containing fragments of songs within the song, made of the most glorious vocal play, which Carpenters experience as their most perfect happiness—as a uni ed ensemble repeating sha-la-la-las, whoa-oh-ohs, shing a-ling a-lings and Shoobie-do-lang-langs with mounting intensity. With these syllables we imagine drawing down the consciousness that we projected toward the eclipse back onto the surface of the Moon, into the room where we gather with holy intention, unifying our deepest hearts.

From this point forward, the remaining Singles propel themselves with unyielding uplift. “It’s Going To Take Some Time,” the emotional mirror of “Rainy Days And Mondays,” moves from resignation to empowerment. Even our failures are soothed by this song, which grants the space for every vulnerability or mistake to become valuable through the consistency of practice. is attitude, one of liberation, is crowned by the purest of all the songs, “Sing,” in which enactment of the words narrates itself in a perfect union, culminating in an profusion of la la la-la-las that heap upon themselves, becoming a stairway into the heavens, a promised path by which we might leave the con nes of this place toward a higher, distant freedom.

e two most philosophical Singles begin to bring the singing to its conclusion.

“For All We Know” articulates the limits of the knowable, granting us the extraordinary opportunity of embracing our unknowing, of staying rooted within our overwhelming absence: For only time will tell us so, and love may grow for all we know.

“Hurting Each Other” presents a seeming paradox, but its two terms, unresolvable, are united by the force described in the preceding song: love. It is this power that holds us in correct relation in our most exultant moments of singing, in which we are not ourselves and not-not ourselves—we are larger than the sum of us, so that every cell in our body quivers, continuous with our Sea of Vapor.

In this way we have found ultimate purpose in our lives as the Carpenters of Mare Vaporum and our experience has crossed a threshold, as foretold by the nal song, “( ey Long To Be) Close To You.” e summation of the twelve, this song has always represented cyclical completion. For so long, it embodied loss and incalculable longing—for the experiences of the Earth, for the knowledge of its past and participation in its future. Every day, every night, we looked up at the immense blue-andwhite sphere suspended above us, with its endless promise of atmosphere and owing water. Every moment, Earth reminded us of our debased subsistence, our exile from the paradise for which we were made. But eventually Carpenter devotion granted us an understanding of the true purpose of this exile: the perfection of ourselves and the advancement of our collective consciousness, which is at all times dedicated to merging with that great cosmic light that the image of the Carpenters rst revealed.

We know how much this has demanded of us. And we are certain that we could never have maintained the necessary devotion, cohesion and clarity of purpose had we not been “stranded” here with so little, with nothing but each other and our twelve songs. We have endeavored to construct this written testament of ourselves in the hope that it will be received by living humans on Earth and that you will honor our solemn request expressed herein. is transmission is accompanied by a complete recording of our singing of e Singles, included to o er you the exalted possibility of becoming Carpenters as we are and to demonstrate what ancestors of your race have achieved for you, our fellow remnant of humanity.

After sending this transmission we will dismantle our receivers so that we may direct our attention inward and deeper still. If our message is received and understood, and if you on Earth reconstitute technology su cient to enable your return to this lunar city from so long ago—we ask you, with the entire force of our being: Do not send transport or emissary or even signal.

We need no rescue. We dream of no return. In our enactment of e Singles themselves, we send to you all that we know and are. May you look up at this shining airless surface and feel your gaze re ected in ours, as we reach our minds and hearts toward you.

But let us stay here—where we belong—as we are—forever close to you. v

Leah Singer on Michael Snow’s groundbreaking film and the Chinatown loft where it was made

WAVELENGTH

THRU FIVE OBJECTS

On January 5, 2023, the revered Canadian artist Michael Snow died. He was ninety-four. We had planned to talk that week about the making of Wavelength, the landmark 1967 film that he shot in his New York studio at 300 Canal Street.

Snow’s stature in the late 1960s was elevated by the success of the film, but his life as an artist didn’t start or end there. He had first found a calling in music. A high-school love of jazz eventually led to professional gigs and tours and a lifetime of playing— right up to the end—with his enduring improvisational ensemble CCMC. He studied design at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and later pursued painting, sculpture and bookmaking,

producing an extensive body of work that made him one of the most celebrated artists of his generation and a major cultural figure in Canada.

The creation of Wavelength synthesized Snow's interests and crystallized his vision. In a 1968 letter to the film historian P. Adams Sitney and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Snow had this realization: “It was like a crisis of all the things that I’d been doing. A lot of things came together.… the effect the film had on other people [helped] me to realize myself as perhaps essentially [a] timelight-sound poet.” Time-light-soundpoet. That description seems apt—Snow navigated his life with full sensory awareness and maintained the commitment to express it in everything he did.

In the letter, Snow said that while he knew Wavelength was a great work, he also fully expected it to disappear. Instead, the film gained a visibility rarely achieved in avant-garde cinema. At the insistence of Mekas—who spearheaded an experimental film program called Film-Makers’ Cinematheque—the film was submitted to the fourth edition of EXPRMNTL, a legendary underground film and culture festival held in Knokke-leZoute, Belgium.

On the registration form, Snow responded to the question “In what sense is the film experimental?” by simply typing in bold caps, “IT IS NEW.” Wavelength ended up taking the top prize; in fact, it beat out a short student film, The Big Shave, by an emerging filmmaker named Martin Scorsese. Remembering the experience years later, Scorsese called Wavelength “great stuff.”

As a statement for EXPRMNTL, Snow used this defining explanation of the film:

Wavelength was shot in one week Dec. ’66 preceeded by a year of notes, thots, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May ’67. I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of “illusion” and “fact”, all about seeing. The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind). The film is a continuous zoom, which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera from one end of an 80-foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows and the street. This, the setting, and the action which takes place there are cosmically equivalent. The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by 4 human events including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync sound, music and speech, occurring simultaneously with an electronic sound, a sine wave, which goes from its lowest (50 cycles per second) note to its highest (12000 c.p.s.) in

40 minutes. It is a total glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum, which attempts to utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory, which only film and music have to offer.

In her 1979 essay About Snow, the film scholar Annette Michelson wrote that Wavelength “broke upon the world with the force, [and] the power of conviction which define[s] a new level of enterprise, a threshold in the evolution of a medium.” Snow’s peers were equally exultant; Mekas called the film “electrifying.”

But for all the praise the film received, it was also polarizing; it tested the patience of audiences and challenged expectations about cinema, especially around narrative structures and traditional storytelling conceits. Years earlier, Andy Warhol had made durational silent films like Sleep and Empire, which likewise dispensed with convention. But Wavelength seemed to hit a particular nerve. It also introduced sound as an integral part; the shrill sine wave plays out like a nagging hangnail.

At a packed screening in Amsterdam around the time of the film’s release, audience members were so outraged they tried to rip the screen down. Snow’s reaction was predictably insouciant: “It doesn’t really bother me, but obviously you can’t really groove on a film when people are trying to pull the screen down.”

Snow described the film as containing four “human events.” Each are fleeting and include in sequence: two men (Roswell Rudd and Naota Nakagawa) carry in a bookshelf and a woman (Joyce Wieland) gives instructions on where to put it; two women enter and one (Lynn Grossman) closes the window while the other (Joyce Wieland) turns on the radio; a man (Hollis Frampton) falls to the ground, dead, after the sound of breaking glass is heard; and finally a woman (Amy Taubin) enters and makes a phone call to announce the death.

In a way, Snow teases the audience by including these sparse dramatic scenes—their very existence creates tension and release, not unlike what happens over the course of a musical composition when the music intensifies, raising the expectation that it will resolve. Such tension propels music forward, and in Wavelength it advances with the slow-moving zoom, ceasing only when the film is over.

Snow moved to New York in 1962 with his then wife, the filmmaker and artist Joyce Wieland, because he believed “the neurotic basis of the evolution of man is much more apparent there than anywhere else in the world and I fit in.”

After being forced out of their first loft on Greenwich Street—the neighborhood was being demolished to make way for the construction of the World Trade Center— they relocated to nearby Chambers Street, a burgeoning mecca for experimental artists. In 1960, Yoko Ono was among the first arrivals, moving into a top-floor loft at 112 Chambers. From December 1960 to June 1961, she organized the Chambers Street Loft Series with the composer La Monte Young, presenting music from Henry Flynt and the first solo performance by

Windows

the dancer Simone Forti, among others.

Snow and Wieland arrived at 123 Chambers in 1964 and were surrounded by likeminded artists. Rudd, the jazz trombonist, lived across the street and played with Albert Ayler on the free-jazz soundtrack to Snow’s 1964 film New York Ear and Eye Control. The filmmaker Ken Jacobs—who lent Snow the 16mm camera, Angenieux zoom lens and outdated film stock (Snow was curious about its unpredictability) for Wavelength lived a block away with his wife, Flo. He is credited in the film as “aid.” The composer Steve Reich lived around the corner, as did the artist Richard Serra, an ardent fan of the film, as expressed in this comment from a 1979 interview with Michelson:

Michael Snow in his 300 Canal Street Studio, New York, ca. 1967. Courtesy Michael Snow Studio

He had an interest in my sculpture and I became one of the in-the-neighborhood audience[s] for his films… When I went to Europe… I took Wavelength with me and showed it in various places… I showed it at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it stopped the house … I showed Wavelength twelve times, not because I thought I was Michael Snow’s promoter, but because I really wanted to see the film again and again… I thought it was an important film… the most interesting thing that was happening.

In addition to his Chambers Street loft, Snow rented a studio on the second floor of a five-story building at 300 Canal Street a few blocks away, a building that still stands today. He kept the studio until 1972, by which time he and Wieland had moved back to Toronto. The studio had four northfacing double-sash windows; each sash had four rectangular window panes. The windows are, in a sense, the stars of Wavelength; their appearance changes frequently depending on the light and film stock used.

Snow was interested in dualities: interior/exterior; back/forth; still/ moving; silent/loud; and he reliably looked to windows and frames as structures to convey these polarities. This is evident in earlier works like Morningside Heights (1965), for which he constructed a stand-alone window to view his painting, positioned on an opposing wall. It’s impossible to look at his immense body of work after Wavelength and not to think about the framed windows in the films Blind (1968), Authorization (1969), 8 x 10 (1969), Glares (1973) and The Squerr (Ch’art) (1978), to name just a few, all echo the studio windows.

It’s amazing how windows are influential. They seem like metaphors for the eyes in the head; when you’re in the house you’re looking out the eyes and we are the brains. That was one thing I was thinking about in making wavelength. —Snow, from a 1978 interview with Pierre Théberge for Michael Snow, the catalogue for an exhibition of photographs and films organized by the Centre George Pompidou.

Wavelength on the cover of Artforum, June 1971. Photo: Mani Mazinani. Courtesy Michael Snow Studio Michael Snow, Wavelength ( lm still), 1967. 16mm lm, 45 minutes, color, sound. Courtesy Michael Snow Studio

At the time of his move to New York, Snow was embarking on a wide-ranging series called Walking Woman, which revolved around a life-size silhouette of a female figure with hands, feet and head slightly cut off, as if once framed. The figure showed up in a variety of mediums: as paintings, ads in newspapers, drawings tucked into books, signs and rubber stamps and portable sculpture in the street. It notably appears as the protagonist in New York Eye and Ear Control (1964).

Snow ended the seven-year series with the fabrication of an eleven-figure stainlesssteel Walking Woman sculpture, made for Montreal’s “Expo 67.” But the last hurrah for these ubiquitous artworks can be seen in the final sequence of Wavelength. Snow tacked two photographs of the Walking Woman between the windows, above the penultimate image of ocean waves that overtakes Wavelength in its final scene.

Snow enjoyed living near the water. In Toronto he was not far from Lake Ontario, and for decades he summered in Newfoundland in an isolated cabin he designed and built with Wieland that overlooked the Gulf of St.

Lawrence. In 1967, the year Wavelength was released, he completed Atlantic, a large wall sculpture composed of thirty gelatin silver prints of the ocean’s waves, fitted into reflective metal boxes stacked six across and five down. Each photograph was taken from the same spot at different times during a single day, allowing for slight variations in the wave patterns. One of the photographs taken that day is seen at the end of Wavelength.

When Reich needed artwork for his 1970 album release, Four Organs/Phase Patterns, he thought of Wavelength and asked if he could use the photograph. Shandar, a French music label, released the album with Snow’s photograph on the cover.

Original Wavelength photograph, ca. 1967. Michael Snow fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario.

Original Wavelength Walking Woman, ca. 1967. Michael Snow fonds, E.P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario.

Photographs

Photo: Mani Mazinani. Courtesy Michael Snow Studio

Photo: Mani Mazinani. Courtesy Michael Snow Studio

Just below the tacked photographs is a chair with bent chrome legs; Snow painted it yellow specifically for the film. No one sits on it during the film—it functions instead as a focal point or a distraction throughout the long zoom. Snow didn’t place any importance on the

chair. As far as he was concerned, “The image of the yellow chair has as much ‘value’ in its own world as the girl closing the window.” In a letter to critic Thierry de Duve in 1994, Snow suggested that maybe there was no yellow chair or even a room for that matter—putting the cinematic experience deeper into the metaphysical. But he also called the yellow chair the film's hero.

Sitney told me that in Snow’s film Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), it is Sitney's own maniacal laugh heard on the soundtrack, emanating from the same yellow chair seen in Wavelength.

Sitney coined the term “structural filmmaking” to describe a form “in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is the shape which is the primal impression of the film.” He further declared Snow the “dean of the structural filmmakers.” In an upcoming book, Sitney revisits the backlash the term provoked among critics and academics, and he takes the time to consider his concept as he understood it then and understands it now. The yellow chair is a witness.

[Snow] overlayed [the laugh] on an image of the microphone placed in front of the vinyl yellow chair in his studio, suggesting that the chair couldn’t stop laughing its ass off. That was an even more pointed jab at my critical folly; for that very chair stood

prominently against the back wall in Snow’s Wavelength (1967). I had written of the film with gushing enthusiasm and even constructed around it my most notorious article, “Structural Film.” … I took Wavelength to be the emblematic instance of a sea-change in the aesthetics of the American avant-garde cinema … comparing it to films by Hollis Frampton, Joyce Wieland, Paul Sharits, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, and George Landow. All hell broke loose (a tempest in a teapot). The filmmakers I included were all offended to be “lumped together.” Those I didn’t mention were even more annoyed. Academics decried my use of the adjective “structural” because of its potential (mis) association with French Structuralism, and film scholars complained I had misrepresented the collective phenomenon … From the filmmaker’s point of view, the chair, the last threedimensional object one sees in Wavelength, couldn’t stop laughing. —Sitney, from Marvelous Names in Literature and Cinema, forthcoming from Crescent Moon Publishing

The chair turns up once again in 1956, A Videoprint (1974), where it serves as an experiment in distortion, as Snow transmits the chair on a CRT television monitor while manipulating its form by holding up a magnet to the screen. The chair appears bent and twisted by the electronic disruption. Sixteen different morphed states of the chair were photographed and presented as a 4x4 grid for a photolithographic print. The title of the work could easily be a reference to the first film Snow made in 1956— A to Z, an animation of two chairs fucking—created while he was working for George Dunning, best known for directing the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Snow’s wife, the writer and critic Peggy Gale, pointed out that the print is tinted red, which may allude to the chair’s original color before Snow painted it yellow. The other red chairs from the set live on today around the kitchen table and in Snow’s office. The yellow chair from Wavelength remains in storage.

Chair

Michael Snow, Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen ( lm still), 1974.

16mm lm, 270 minutes, color, sound. Still from re-voir.com.

Courtesy Michael Snow studio

Tape Reel

Snow considered a few possible names for the film—as evidenced by a note found in his archive —including the title 300 Canal Street. A fan of punning and wordplay, he eagerly pointed out the inherent pun of the film’s chosen title: A movie about a zoom that travels the length of a loft until it reaches a photograph of ocean waves, while the intensifying sound of a sine wave grows louder. He considered the sine wave’s glissando to be the aural equivalent of the camera’s zoom, suggesting that they shared a conical shape and moved in opposition to each other.

Snow’s original intention was to play a ¼-inch audio tape of the sine wave on a reel-to-reel tape deck live during the screening, assuming that he would be present on the rare occasion when the film was invited to play somewhere. He did this for some early screenings, but once the movie became a sensation, he had to marry the sine wave to the rest of the film's optical track.

Reich saw Wavelength in 1968 and was moved to write down his impressions, which he later included in his Writings on Music 1965-2000. He went through the film from start to finish, taking extra care to comment on the sound. According to interviews with Snow, Reich had originally mailed these thoughts to him and requested a meeting; they didn’t know each other at the time. Reich doesn’t recall how they met, suggesting that it may well have been in the neighborhood, out on the street, the two hitting it off right away, Reich pointing and saying, “Hey, you did Wavelength!” and Snow crying out, “You did Come Out!” They immediately liked each other and became friends.

For the seminal 1969 "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Reich and Snow were invited to participate in a companion film and performance series. Reich performed two pieces, Piano Phase and Pendulum Music, which featured Richard Serra, James Tenney, Bruce Nauman and Michael Snow as performers. Snow’s contribution to the series consisted

of two film premieres: < - - - > [known as Back and Forth] (1969) and One Second in Montreal (1969).

In a recent conversation with me, Reich spoke about Wavelength’s lasting impact on his work:

Snow wanted unplanned chaos in the midst of systematic thinking, even the film itself; it’s a zoom in a room but if it was just a zoom in a room it could have been kind of boring. The fact that a murder mystery is thrown in makes it a masterpiece and then “Strawberry Fields Forever” cuts in and there’s the glissando. That combination of factors really helped me to want to thicken the plot harmonically in my own music. Although Snow was intent on using diegetic, or actual, sound he had to make an exception when the radio was turned on:

When I shot the film, I knew that as far as the sound and the images went, I had to accept what the traffic was going to do. So when these two women go in and one of them turns on the radio, I felt that I had to accept whatever sound came through in the same way that I accepted the sound from the street. But what came out was “Little Drummer Boy” by Joan Baez, which I really hated. I just couldn’t see that it had any place in the film. If she had turned on the radio and it was scrambled news, I would have used it because it was coming in from outside, but then I was faced with having to make a choice.

“Strawberry Fields” had just come out and seemed appropriate— Snow, from an interview with Border Crossings magazine, May 2007.

Wavelength production tape, ca. 1967.

Photo: Mani Mazinani. Courtesy Michael Snow Studio

At the beginning of Wavelength, Rudd and Nakagawa are seen moving an empty bookshelf into the studio. The scene is quick, barely thirty seconds long. Nakagawa lived above Snow and Wieland on Chambers Street and ended up in the film totally by accident. Snow had called him very early one morning and asked him to come to Canal Street to be in a film he was shooting that day. Apparently, someone else hadn’t shown up, and Snow was desperate to find a replacement.

honoring Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, featured a performance by the drummer Milford Graves and included celebrity guests like Gloria Steinem, Eli Wallach and Robert Lowell.

Bookshelf

Nakagawa had been to the Canal Street studio before and remembers seeing Blind, a large walk-in sculpture of patterned metal fencing, which Frampton later commemorated in his film Snowblind. Snow didn’t entertain much at the studio, but he and Wieland were known to throw big parties on Chambers Street. A notable one, in 1969,

Just as the yellow chair was part of a family of objects Snow kept close at hand, so was the bookshelf. Snow suggested the empty bookshelf had a “metaphoric connection” with the studio windows, which also tended to look empty for most of the film.

In A Casing Shelved (1970) the same bookshelf seen in Wavelength comes to hold a willy-nilly mess of art materials, tools and other objects. Technically, A Casing Shelved is not a film but a projected 35mm slide, accompanied by a soundtrack played on a ¼-inch tape deck, from which we hear Snow’s voice giving a detailed accounting of the objects sitting on the shelves.

That particular thing, the bookshelf, I kept on thinking I’d had it for a long time and I’d just kept on enjoying it as if it were a painting, a work of art, and once I just snuck up on it and took the Instamatics that are actually in that slide. I didn’t know quite what to do about it… I finally took the slide and then that tied into the idea of the sound. What interested me also was that all the stuff that’s there is not art, but it’s art-related, because it has to do with the other stuff that I did that I called art. —Snow, from a taped interview with John Du Cane in London, 1972. Published in Studio International 186, no. 960 (November 1973)

A Casing Shelved, like Wavelength, was made at 300 Canal Street. It was the last film work Snow made in the building before he gave up the studio. The contents of the bookshelf— as facets of a life—could serve as a symbolic portrait: paint cans, paper coffee cups, a hanger, a shovel, lightbulbs, something in a brown crumpled bag. Is that a photograph of the ocean? Are those flowers?

A Casing Shelved, 1970, 35mm slide, sound, cinema theater, 46 minutes. Courtesy Michael Snow Studio

The Tenth Element

Glenn Ligon and matt dilling on neon

Glenn Ligon, Untitled (America/Me) , 2022. Neon and paint, 24 x 168 in. (61 x 426.7 cm)

Photo: Thomas Barratt. © Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

GLENNLIGON

I think neon for me, when I first started using it, was a sneaky way to make sculpture, or to think three dimensionally rather than painting surfaces. Making neon was actually making objects, and they were a way for me to think about how you occupy a space but also to think about how language can occupy space. Its thingness in neon was really interesting to me. There’s certainly the precedent of artists working with neon—Joseph Kosuth, Bruce Nauman, many others. But somehow, way back when, I didn’t really think that it was something I did. And now it’s been twenty years that I’ve been working with Lite Brite Neon, a pioneer in the field. They were located in the bottom of the studio building where I still work in Brooklyn. One day, I was walking by the shop and matt dilling, the founder, was there. They invited me in for a tour. And just as a joke, I said, “You know, I make black-and-white text paintings. So is there black neon? And they said that black was the absence of light, so there was not black neon.

MATTDILLING

Neon is the fifth-most common element in the atmosphere. We’re breathing it in and out all day long, and yet we never see it or perceive it. With neon, we’re literally taking what’s invisible and making it visible. That mystery, that edge between the knowledge that can be perceived and retained through human consciousness and the part that is greater than us is very important. To me, it’s the essence of spiritual practice, the essence of creativity. Neon is a metaphor for that edge, and it’s a literal, physical thing. We start with sand, with silica, with glass coming from that. Then we take the glass and heat it with fire. Once its heated, we attach electrodes, then we remove the carbon from the electrodes and leave oxide. And when the inert gas is introduced, it creates, under high voltage, this tremendously gorgeous spectrum of light. There’s an aspect of it that is so alchemical, so literally primitive.

LIGON

matt showed me a project they had done for Burberry, in which they reproduced their plaid in neon. The plaid has a black stripe, and the way they created the black stripe in neon was to paint a white tube of neon black on the front. They showed me the image, and I realized: There is black neon! So that’s how it started. I’d already been working on drawings that said “Negro Sunshine,” borrowed from Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives. And I thought, “Well, this is a perfect translation of that text into neon.” Eclipsed letters, as it were.

DILLING

One of the great things about working with artists is that oftentimes they’re approaching a medium in a different way, with a fresh set of eyes. In our practice, we really try to preserve and encourage a beginner’s mind, from a fabricator’s perspective. We’re asking: What is this artist looking for? What are they saying? What is at the edge of what they’re interested in, and how does that edge meet ours?

LIGON

The thing that attracts me to neon is its handmade-ness. Every neon that I make, somebody actually blew those letters, bent those glass tubes, you know? It means that within an edition of a neon, there are always variations. That’s interesting to me and maybe more akin to how I work in the studio. For the new work America/Me, some of the letters are crossed out so that what remains of the word “America” is the word “me.” I’ve never done a neon with this kind of crossing-out before. It came because I was at my friend Patrick’s house, and he had a postcard I’d sent him many, many years ago that had a picture of one of my neon works. I’d crossed out the letters of “America” with a Magic Marker until it spelled “me.” I’d probably done that fifteen years ago. I looked at the postcard and thought, “Well, that could be a neon.”

DILLING

A large part of what keeps the collaborative nature of what we do dynamic is our

interest in trying to evolve our beginner’s mind. We learn the important concerns and cares of an artist, but we remain completely open to what that artist might be looking to do that’s new, that’s fresh—or something they’re not even conscious of yet, and neither are we.

LIGON

A good collaborator or good fabricator is somebody who suggests things that you can accept or reject but who often suggests things that you might want to do because they know you and your work so well. matt’s made every neon that I’ve ever done, so this has been almost two decades of collaboration, so many years of thinking through the possibilities of neon as artworks.

DILLING

People are like, “Neon is so 1960s, neon is so 1980s, neon is so this, so that.” At the end of the day what I have come to understand is that neon is very evocative and leads people into a narrative, and Glenn’s use of it plays so well with all kinds of narrative suggestion.

LIGON

Crossing things out or making things more abstract has long been part of my work. To cross out the word “America” so that you’re left with just the word “me” seems to be the moment we’re at as a culture. You could say, “Well, America’s always in a narcissistic phase.” But I think we’re in a particularly narcissistic, self-interested phase now, a kind of me-against-the-world phase. America is such a loaded word anyway, you know? What does it mean? Who’s included in that America? I don’t know if that me is me, the artist. I’m interested in those kinds of readings. But I’m also interested in this word as a material, the way a painter uses paint as a material. Language is a material. Neon is a material. So I’m interested in playing with the word as material, to cross it out, to invert it, to put it upside down, to make it blink off and on obnoxiously. That’s all a way of playing with a word that we think we know the meaning of. But it’s a word that’s always in process, that always has to be reinvented.

“Language is a material. Neon is a material. So I’m interested in playing with the word as material, to cross it out, to invert it, to put it upside down, to make it blink o and on obnoxiously.”— Glenn Ligon

160

Stills from Glenn Ligon: Neon, a short film that takes an inside look at Ligon’s twenty-year collaboration with matt dilling of Lite Brite Neon in Kingston, New York. Founded in 1999, Lite Brite Neon has been a pioneer in helping contemporary artists incorporate neon into their work. The film can be viewed on the Ursula website.

Photography: Farzad Owrang © Glenn Ligon. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Opposite: Glenn Ligon: Neon , 2022. Film, eleven minutes. Director: Jed Moch; Director of Photography: Scott Sweitzer; Editor: Kayhl Cooper. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Sell the Shadow to Sustain the Substance) , 2006. Neon and black paint, 8 1/2 x 185 in. (21.6 x 469.9 cm).

Image: © Henry Taylor, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Nothing Change, Nothing Strange, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.

Major support for Henry Taylor: Nothing Change, Nothing Strange has been generously provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from Katie Adams Schaeffer and Tony Schaeffer, Hauser & Wirth and Anonymous donors. In-kind support has been provided by RAIR (Recycled Artists in Residency) and Hauser & Wirth.

Peter the Poet

ARS

Hi

How do you like this poem so far?

If you like it, please let me know Don’t be shy, step right up and praise me!

I need praise

Don’t worry that I’ll think you foolish or insincere

Even if I think that I’ll appreciate your thoughtfulness

And if you don’t like the poem don’t worry

Confess your dislike openly, I won’t be angry

I’ll be able to tell you exactly how you’re wrong

It will be a big relief to both of us

And do you know? if more of you tell me precisely what you think of me, my poems may get better!

They may get better than this one, even

Do you think poems about personal and professional and artistic insecurity, yearnings for love and approval and honest communication, feelings of isolation, night sweats, paranoid imaginings, hysterical loathings and doubts and self-doubts, do you suppose writing on these topics is fun?

Nor are these topics among the Great Themes to which I’m positive I’m equal, if only you bastards would cough up some admiration, even fake it a little, for me and my family and Art and the future of humankind

Peter Schjeldahl (1942–2022), one of the finest art critics of his generation, began his professional writing life working days in the city room of a New Jersey newspaper while sweating over poetry at night, in thrall to the New York School. In an interview, he once said that poetry and criticism shared, among other things, a basic utilitarian function, vital not only for the culture but also for humanity itself: “to limber up the common word stock, keeping good words in play.”

Schjeldahl kept the very best ones in play to the end, completing his last review for The New Yorker only weeks before his death. We bid him a fond farewell here by revisiting his life as a poet and returning to his hungry young poet’s mien, as rendered by Alex Katz in a 1978 aquatint portrait portfolio that included Schjeldahl’s poem “Ars.”

From Face of the Poet , 1978, an illustrated book with fourteen aquatints, various poets. Image: 5 15/16 x 6 1/8 in. (15.1 x 15.6 cm); page: 14 3/16 × 19 in. (36 × 48.3 cm). Digital Image

© The Museum of Modern Art, © 2023 Alex Katz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Poem © The Estate of Peter Schjeldahl. Courtesy Brooke Alderson

BORN FROM NATURE, ELEVATED OVER TIME

DOM RUINART, THE QUINTESSENTIAL BLANC DE BLANCS