DEFINING
SINGER & CREATOR
Colonia and its Leather Travel Case. Discreet. Radiant. Refined. A celebration of subtleness.
A nod to the vibrance of Italian arte di vivere. Natural calfskin. Parma yellow lambskin lining. Hand made in Italy.
Editor’s Note p. 18
Letters
Rats! Pat Steir writes to Sol LeWitt, 1976 p. 22
Unknown Pleasures
On Ruth Kligman and the allegory of a painting, by Lisa Ivorian-Jones p. 24
Epitaph
A remembrance of Juanita McNeely (1936–2023) by Hall W. Rockefeller p. 28
Antiphony
A new poem by Richard Hell in response to Cubist painting p. 32
Glitch
Technical Difficulties: Josh Kline and Will Arbery on artificial intelligence and political instability p. 34
The Keepers
Emiliano Echeverria and Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez on preserving Cuba’s recorded musical heritage p. 102
Conversation
Wu Tsang, Fred Moten and Laura Harris in conversation about Tsang’s film Moby Dick; or, The Whale and the enduring power of Melville p. 38
Profile
Morgan Falconer on the evolution of Roberto Cuoghi’s Pepsis p. 46
Portfolio
Roman Tics: A Pompeiian odyssey with Allison Katz p. 50
Five works by Anna Maria Maiolino paired with photographs she has kept over the years p. 58
The Cover
Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni in conversation with curator Anne Stenne about the future of art and humanity, seen through the lens of Pierre Huyghe’s prophetic work p. 64
Portfolio
On Zeng Fanzhi’s work and the things he collects p. 80
Essay
Jane Harris on the immersive films of Ja’Tovia Gary p. 90
Conversations
On Berlinde De Bruyckere and art in religious places p. 94
The Artist’s Library
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright talks with Billy Sullivan about the candid diary of L.A. musician Sean DeLear (1965–2017) p. 108
Books
A new publication on Venice’s Rio Terà collective and the importance of social practice p. 117
Book Reviews
Some new and forthcoming titles that we love p. 120
Fiction “Cryptomania” by Elisabeth Bronfen p. 122
Site
Erik La Prade on the lost history of New York’s 76 Jefferson Street and the artists who lived there p. 132
Material
Mika Rottenberg’s reclaimed-plastic art factory p. 140
Retrospect
Jazz Church: Revisiting Verena Loewensberg’s City-Discount, a fabled Zurich record shop p. 146
Non Finito The End by Fabio Mauri p. 152
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Vol. 5, Issue no. 10: Ursula (ISSN 2639-376X) is published twice a year by Hauser & Wirth Publishers
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WILL ARBERY is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays include Evanston Salt Costs Climbing (2023), Corsicana (2022) and Heroes of the Fourth Turning (2020). He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of a Whiting Award, an OBIE Award, a Lucille Lortel Award and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. From 2018 to 2023, he was a writer on the HBO television series Succession. (See p. 34)
SARAH BLAKLEY-CARTWRIGHT is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent novel is Alice Sadie Celine (2023). She is publishing director of the Chicago Review of Books and associate editor of A Public Space. (See p. 108)
NICHOLAS BLECHMAN is creative director of The New Yorker Previously, he was art director of The New York Times Book Review and The Times Op-Ed page. In 2012, Blechman won the Rome Prize in Design at the American Academy in Rome, where he created “Food Chains,” an illustrated blog for The New York Times. He co-authors One Hundred Percent, a series of limitededition illustrated books, with Christoph Niemann. (See p. 146)
ELISABETH BRONFEN is an author, cultural critic and curator based in Zurich. Retired from the University of Zurich, she is currently a global distinguished professor at New York University. Her monographs include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992) and Serial Shakespeare: An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama (2020). (See p. 122)
ROBERTO CUOGHI studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he lives and works. Cuoghi’s practice has no direct influences and doesn’t fit comfortably within any genre of art. His diverse series of works over the past two decades are united by a preoccupation with process. Each new series is different from the last, and Cuoghi moves seamlessly between mediums, mastering form without being defined by any singular style.
(See p. 46)
HEATHER DAVIS is an assistant professor of culture and media at the New School. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies (2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (2017). Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. (See p. 140)
Belgian artist BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE is recognized for her haunting distortions of organic forms, centered on motifs of vulnerability, fragility, the suffering of man and the overwhelming power of nature. She has had numerous institutional solo shows. In 2013, she represented Belgium in the 55th La Biennale di Venezia with her monumental installation Kreupelhout – Cripplewood (2013).
(See p. 94)
EMILIANO ECHEVERRIA is an author, radio DJ and music scholar. Contributing extensively to the world of radio, he has curated and presented hundreds of programs featuring Cuban and other Latin American music for KPFA-FM and KPOO-FM in San Francisco and the online platform Radio Cuba Canta.
(See p. 102)
MORGAN FALCONER is a critic and art historian who teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. He has written about contemporary art for publications including The Times (London), Frieze, The Burlington Magazine, Art Journal, The Economist and Art in America His books include Painting Beyond Pollock (2015), a history of painting after 1945. (See p. 46)
Collaborators since 2008, FABIEN GIRAUD and RAPHAËL SIBONI live and work in Paris. Both come from documentary practices; their joint work combines sculpture, film and performance with the aim of exploring and making the hypothesis of entirely different worlds a reality. They have exhibited at Mona,
Australia; the Liverpool Biennial, England; the Lyon Biennale, France; the Okayama Triennale, Japan; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Casino Luxembourg. A monograph on their longtime project The Unmanned was published in 2022. In 2024, they will launch their new project, The Feral, with curator Anne Stenne—a collective artwork on the scale of a landscape that will unfold over the next one thousand years. (See p. 64)
CARMELO A. GRASSO is director and institutional curator of the Benedicti Claustra Onlus, the non-profit branch of the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Together with the Benedictine community, he selects all exhibitions for the abbey and oversees their presentation. (See p. 94)
JANE URSULA HARRIS is a Brooklyn-based writer, art historian and curator. She has written for Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, GARAGE, The Paris Review, The Village Voice and other publications. She is a 2023 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. (See p. 90)
LAURA HARRIS is assistant professor of art and public policy and cinema studies at New York University. She is the author of Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (2018). Her essays have been published in Social Text, Criticism, The South Atlantic Quarterly and other journals. (See p. 38)
RICHARD HELL lives on the Lower East Side of New York. His latest book, What Just Happened (2023), is comprised of new poems by Hell and artworks by Christopher Wool, alongside Hell’s valedictory conspectus of an essay, “Falling Asleep,” and eighty-eight recent notebook entries. (See p. 32)
Above: Elizabeth Peyton’s 2023 contribution to the Paris Review Print Series. Launched in 1965 as a fundraiser for the legendary literary quarterly, the series has grown to include the work of more than sixty artists. View the collection online at parisreviewprints.org
PIERRE HUYGHE lives and works in Santiago, Chile. He has had solo exhibitions at EMMA, Espoo, Finland; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Luma Foundation, Arles; Serpentine Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Skulptur Projekte, Münster; and other major institutions throughout the world. In 2012, his work Untilled was one of the most critically acclaimed contributions to Documenta 13 in Kassel. (See p. 64)
LISA IVORIAN-JONES is an independent art producer and curator based in New York. In addition to her work with institutions on special artist projects and commissions, Ivorian-Jones works with private clients on the acquisition of contemporary art. Her projects include a limitededition sculpture series by artist Sarah Sze. (See p. 24)
ALLISON KATZ is an artist living and working in London. She investigates the ways in which aesthetic practices link and absorb autobiography, commodity culture, information systems and art history. She received widespread critical recognition for her first traveling U.K. solo exhibition “Artery” at Nottingham Contemporary (2021) and Camden Art Centre (2022). (See p. 50)
JOSH KLINE works in installation, video, sculpture and photography. In 2023, his work was the subject of a major survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Kline is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles that opens in June. He lives and works in New York City. (See p. 34)
ERIK LA PRADE is a writer and photojournalist with a special interest in the arts. His writings and artist interviews and have appeared in Art in America, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtCritical and other publications. His is the author of Breaking Through: Richard Bellamy and the Green Gallery, 1960–1965: Twenty-Three Interviews (2010). La Prade’s fifth collection of poetry, Ancient Light, will be published by Last Word Press this year. (See p. 132)
ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO is one of the most important artists working in Brazil today. Across a wide range of disciplines and mediums, Maiolino relentlessly explores notions of subjectivity and self. Her deeply formative migration from postwar southern Italy to a politically unstable South America, as well as her linguistic passage from Italian to Portuguese, engendered an enduring fascination with identity. (See p. 58)
(2022); and an essay collection, All Incomplete (2021), written with his longtime colleague Stefano Harney. (See p. 38)
HALL W. ROCKEFELLER is a writer and speaker specializing in the work of women-identifying artists. She is the founder of Less Than Half, an online education and advisory platform dedicated to raising the profile of women artists. (See p. 28)
MIKA ROTTENBERG is an artist whose work combines film, architectural installation and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in a hyper-capitalist world. Using traditions of both cinema and sculpture, Rottenberg connects seemingly disparate places and things to create elaborate, subversive visual narratives. Weaving together fact and fiction, she highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence. (See p. 140)
ANNE STENNE is an independent curator. She has closely worked with Pierre Huyghe since 2014. Her recent curatorial projects with Huyghe have included exhibitions at EMMA, Espoo, Finland; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; and Luma Foundation, Arles. (See p. 64)
BILLY SULLIVAN is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally for more than four decades. Recently, he has had solo shows at kaufmann repetto in New York and Milan; the Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack; Rental Gallery, East Hampton; and Galerie Sabine Knust, Munich. (See p. 108)
WU TSANG is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. Her work crosses genres and disciplines, from narrative and documentary films to live performance and video installations. Tsang is a MacArthur
Genius Fellow; and her projects have been presented at museums, biennials and film festivals internationally. She is currently in residence at Schauspielhaus Zurich, as a director of theater with the collective Moved by the Motion. (See p. 38)
STEFANO VISINTIN OSBA, OSB, who holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in theology, is abbot of the Monasteries of Praglia in Teolo, Padua and San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Abbot Visintin is also a professor of theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselmo in Rome, where he was previously Rector Magnificus. (See p. 94)
MARCELO GABRIEL YÁÑEZ is a photographer and art historian living between Brooklyn, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. (See p. 102)
A pioneer of contemporary Chinese art, ZENG FANZHI is celebrated globally for his constantly evolving style and subject matter. His highly experimental visual language contemplates the intersection of Western art and style with traditional Chinese subject matter and philosophy. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art Pudong, China; the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; the Louvre, Paris; and other global institutions. (See p. 80)
STEFAN ZWEIFEL is a Swiss author, philosopher and translator. He is a former member and host of the Swiss television talk show Literaturclub (2007–14). He has translated the works of Raymond Roussel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marcel Proust and the Marquis de Sade into German. Zweifel writes on theater, music and literature for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and other European newspapers. (See p. 146)
This issue of Ursula , our tenth, wasn’t meant to be about artificial intelligence. But, like most things in the culture these days, it became so almost inevitably. Our cover takes up new work by Pierre Huyghe, who for years now has used AI as a tool and an existential proving ground. This January, Huyghe transported a group of AI-enabled robots to the Atacama Desert in Chile, the most arid region on earth, to make a stark new work in which the robots appear to perform a funereal rite around a human skeleton that has likely lain untouched on the desert floor for more than a century. “What is this?” the robots seem to be asking. As the French artists Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, longtime collaborators of Huyghe’s, point out in the cover story, the question means vastly different things for humans and for artificial intelligence, differences epitomized by a desert.
“For the computer,” Siboni says, “time is not a line but a surface. There are no sequential events and therefore there is no present. There are only patterns of data, patterns of behavior that are statistically matched and compared.”
T he implications of this rapidly expanding statistical surface for knowledge, human progress, employment, politics, art and even religion resound through this issue. The artist Josh Kline and the playwright Will Arbery take up the possibility that AI-related white-collar job losses could, within a short period of time, empower the far right. Arbery, whose work has deftly navigated the intersection of politics and conservative religious belief, cites William F. Buckley’s famous Greco-Latinate warning about “immanentizing the eschaton”—in plain words, trying to bring about paradise on earth, always a risky proposition. Culturally, Siboni warns, one version of an AI “paradise” could look like this: systems that instantly deliver movies, poems, novels, songs, video games and images perfectly suited to each individual, producing endless audiences of one and in the process, “the complete death of imagination.” For millennia, Siboni adds, art has functioned as an indispensable “cut,” a “wall in between you and what you think you desire,” the engine of imagination.
The Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere, whose work is deeply bound up with the body—the bodies of both human and animals—speaks in these pages with the Venetian Benedictine monk Stefano Visintin about a pivotal difference, at least for now, between the human and the virtual: the analog faculties of our body, our flesh-and-blood capacity for emotion, smell, touch and taste.
I n that spirit, we have included inside this issue a special, unequivocally analog gift for readers’ ears and eyes: a vinyl recording containing two original songs composed and recorded by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee for the artist Wu Tsang’s acclaimed film adaptation of Melville’s Moby-Dick. In a conversation with the poet Fred Moten and the film critic Laura Harris, Tsang cites the scholar Wai Chee Dimock’s view of the novel as a remarkable self-replenishing source ever since its publication in 1851, an “open-ended network for future input”—Melville as Victorian large language model for a rapidly evolving culture. The novel, perhaps most presciently for our times, makes a stark distinction between varieties of intelligence, exalting the holistically human over the statistical.
I n chapter 102, Ishmael, contemplating the gigantic skeleton of a sperm whale, tattoos its dimensions on his right arm, “as there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics” while traveling. But as he attempts to use these measurements to convey to the reader the stupendous presence the dead creature once possessed, he realizes the futility of his effort:
How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only . . . on the profound unbounded sea can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.
+ + + “An island of hope in a sea of inanity.”
—Nancy Fraser
+ + + “One of the consistently excellent periodicals
+ + + + of the decade.” —Pankaj Mishra
“N+1 has established itself as the bellwether
+ + of a new generation of literary intellectuals.”
—William Deresiewicz
“The
The painter Pat Steir and the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt met in the 1970s and lived and traveled together for years, remaining close friends and artistic compatriots long after their romantic relationship ended. Here, in an excerpt from an oral history project being conducted by Liza Zapol, Steir tells the story of a wry postcard she once sent to LeWitt and of Puss, LeWitt’s grizzled cat, who seemed to want to come between them. At the time, LeWitt lived in a studio on Hester Street, on the Lower East Side, and Steir was nearby in SoHo, spending summers in Nova Scotia with friends like Richard Serra, Joan Jonas and Philip Glass. One day in New York, Steir recalls, she visited LeWitt’s studio and suddenly noticed an uninvited visitor:
“The rat was there in his kitchen. Puss was a twenty-one-yearold cat. He was on the table with his hair standing up, hissing at the rat on the floor. The rat was bigger than the cat. So big. Sol was in the other room, drawing as usual, making beautiful things. Never mind the rat. But I thought he should pay attention to that rat! He said: ‘I’ll call the exterminator later.’
I left. I was really afraid of that rat.”
Steir adds that she was not so fond of the cat, either: “Puss was not my friend. Puss pre-dated me.”
On Ruth Kligman and the allegory of a painting
By Lisa Ivorian-Jones
There it sat in the late fall of 2015 under the glare of industrial fluorescent lights, its surface slightly peeling, at first glance not unlike something you might chance upon at a flea market: he last known painting by Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Red, Black and Silver), 1956.
I had been summoned that morning by the estate of the artist Ruth Kligman to see this extraordinary little work of art, hidden away in a bank vault several floors beneath the streets of Lower Manhattan. The first time I saw the painting, after knowing of it only from poor-quality images then pervasive on the internet, it struck me immediately.
Somehow both quiet and bold, it had a presence far greater than its twenty by twenty-four inches. I could see that it had been worked on quickly, its lines wispy in places, yet it was nonetheless balanced and alive. Looking over the painting’s web of overlapping forms, my eyes landed on its anchor: a black volumetric oval shape that evoked a deep hole and that reminded me of one of my most beloved paintings, the ethereal Madonna with the Long Neck by Parmigianino.
Kligman (1930–2010) was an artist of great intelligence and power, and a woman of striking beauty and vitality. During her career, her work often found itself in the shadow of her charismatic life, as friend, muse and lover of some of the most consequential art-world figures of her time, such as Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline and Marisol. For nearly fifty years, she lived and worked in the downtown New York studio she had inherited from Kline, and by the 1980s she had found a compelling style wholly her own, freed from the Abstract Expressionist influences of de Kooning, her mentor and one-time lover. Images of saints and demons arose in her paintings and slowly gave way to expansive, luminous color-field compositions and shaped canvases. She ultimately became preoccupied with what she called “transillumination,” an investigation of light and iridescence on the surfaces of onion skin or canvas. She would often hang these from beams in her studio, lending them a direct and architectural presence.
My involvement in Kligman’s life and the tangled, troubled afterlife of Untitled (Red, Black and Silver)—an effort to authenticate the painting definitively, though Kligman would not be alive to see it finally come to pass—wasn’t something I had sought or expected. I was trained as an art historian. I work as an independent curator and publisher, focusing on living artists and works they are making right now, not provenance questions surrounding works by dead artists. But my career has also long been preoccupied with justice, equity and the work of female artists. My first master’s thesis focused on legal rights for artists and my second concentrated on female artists of the late 1990s who layered maleassociated constructs of minimalism with significant new meaning through their use of culturally laden material. Over more than two decades of work, I’d also formed friendships and professional ties with a number of important women in the art world who were intrigued to see the painting—among them Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze, Cecily Brown, Annalyn Swann and Lisa Phillips—as well as, coincidentally, with scholars and friends of Kligman’s, such as Johns, Dore Ashton, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Karin Greenfield-Sanders, who worked as Kligman’s lawyer for a time. When I was approached by Kligman’s estate for help in examining the documentary and scientific evidence around the painting and trying to build consensus that it was indeed a Pollock work, I felt not only well positioned to do so but also a strong fascination with the issues of power and gender woven inextricably through the story.
The most concise version of the story, as Kligman told it, was this: Shortly before Pollock’s death, Kligman, twenty-six years old at the time and having an open affair with him, was living at his home in the Springs, on Long Island. (His wife Lee Krasner, from whom he was estranged, had left for Europe, enraged by the relationship.) Pollock, in the depths of alcoholism and depression, had not painted in more than two years. On the lawn, Kligman gave Pollock a canvas board upon which she had painted a
half-finished still life of a vase and flowers, and Pollock took paints and the sticks he used in lieu of brushes and used the canvas to make an impromptu painting for her as a gift. Two weeks later, on August 11, 1956, he drove his Oldsmobile convertible off the road at high speed, flipping the car and killing himself and a friend of Kligman’s, Edith Metzger. Kligman, riding in the passenger seat, was thrown free of the car and badly injured.
Kligman first brought the painting forward to the Pollock-Krasner Authentication Board in the late 1980s in the hopes of getting it authenticated so she could sell it to support her career and herself; she was living on little more than social security checks at the time. While authentication is always a fraught business (many boards engaged in the effort, such as the Pollock-Krasner and the Warhol board, ultimately disbanded because of the constant threat of lawsuits), Kligman made a convincing scholarly and scientific case for the veracity and provenance of the painting, including letters of support from powerful figures like Ashton and Leo Castelli, who said the painting convinced him as being “a small, powerful Pollock.”
But in early 1995, the board ruled that it would go no further than offering
Looking over the painting’s web of overlapping forms, my eyes landed on its anchor: a volumetric black oval that evoked a deep hole and that reminded me of one of my most beloved paintings, the ethereal Madonna with the Long Neck by Parmigianino.
to include the painting in a supplement to the Pollock catalogue raisonné under the category of “problems for study,” along with the caveat that it had found “no compelling independent evidence to corroborate the owner’s otherwise plausible account of its creation.” Kligman indignantly declined the offer. She continued to compile evidence in support of the painting and resubmitted an even more compelling application in 1996, but it was too late: the board had dissolved and there was no longer any official mechanism for adjudicating such questions.
At Kligman’s death, the painting remained in critical and commercial limbo; it eventually passed into the hands of her executors, two close friends, Jonathan Cramer and Davey Frankel.
The work I did for the estate over more than a year was like having a frontrow seat to observe the ways in which authority, money and power can operate
in the art world. Over time, I developed a profoundly personal reaction to the Pollock, distinct from the historical, cultural and scientific lens that would shape my understanding of it. A sense of connection to Kligman as an artist and a woman—a woman whose voice was not being respected or heard—also deepened, and I began to feel a personal stake in wanting, for her sake, to see the painting freed from its storage locker and accepted by the public.
Sifting through the evidence amid the art world’s continued denial of it felt at times like an Alice-Through-theLooking-Glass experience. Forensic reports commissioned by the estate discovered substances that had found their way into its surface, trapped within the layers, convincingly situating the work at Pollock’s home—grass seed pods, human hair and a polar bear hair that matched hair from a rug in the house. Johns went so far as to send me an email in his friend’s defense, stating: “I never understood why Ruth’s account of how it had been made met with such skepticism.” And yet it was and continues to be, long after her death—in a sense, both Kligman’s character and her own life as an artist still languishing in the shadow of her reputation as essentially a paramour and catalyst for other artists, most of them men.
As I worked to help build the painting’s case, I was also overseeing projects for the New Museum with artists Kerstin Bratsch, Liz Glynn, Matthew Monahan and Martin Puryear— all four complex feats of production and fabrication that challenged me in
different ways and that ended up being strangely fueled by the rich and imaginative conversations I was having around the Pollock. As I learned more about Kligman, who was so fiercely dedicated to her painting despite a lack of commercial success, I considered the ways in which my work with art and artists has saved me over and over in my life. Her life had been filled with tremendous opportunity, excitement and achievement, but it had also been marked by trauma and hardship.
At some point in the midst of the authentication work, I got a membership at the McBurney YMCA on 14th Street, just down the street from Kligman’s studio, and I swam every morning, thinking about her, the painting, the state of the art world and a woman’s place in it. I thought about male energy, that of Pollock and of my beloved father, who was also killed in a single-car accident. I had brought myself to the painting as a respected artworld professional, a woman and a single mother, and the process had helped open my eyes to some things: the persistence of ingrained sexism in the world; my own accomplishments and potential in the face of chauvinism and narrow-mindedness; the art world’s reflexive fear and deference to conformity, tamping down genuine feeling and self-expression, minimizing the importance of individuality.
While I was never able to help the estate achieve full acceptance for the painting, I always hoped that somehow, in sharing its story, I was able to sway opinion about it. For myself, the experience fundamentally altered my way of thinking about art, reinvigorating a soft and expansive part of me, making me more radically openminded, reminding me always to bring my heart and feelings to my engagement with art. It reinforced for me the importance of separating an artwork’s existence as an object in a commercial world from one’s direct experience of it, as well as the importance of generosity toward creators and acts of creation. The painting, and Kligman’s mission to make it whole for herself and history, created an opening for me, a space that helped me define myself and my own work, as I began to truly think about what art could mean.
I got a membership at the McBurney YMCA on 14th Street, just down the street from Kligman’s studio, and swam every morning, thinking about her, the painting, the state of the art world and a woman’s place in it.
“That’s How You Live” Remembering Juanita McNeely (1936–2023)
By Hall W. Rockefeller
My relationship with the painter Juanita McNeely, who died in October 2023, began with one remarkable work.
Weeks before pandemic lockdowns began in the United States, I had wandered into the James Fuentes gallery on Delancey Street on one of my monthly trips to the Lower East Side in search of women artists; at the time, I was conducting interviews for my project “Less Than Half,” which has evolved into a series of courses focused on teaching women to collect the work of women artists. Inside the gallery, I found myself immersed in a continuous painting in thirteen parts, lining two perpendicular walls of the room—McNeely’s Triskaidepatych (1986).
A series of bodies in paint, the work seemed electrified with life. As McNeely would tell me when we met a few weeks later, anatomical correctness was never her concern when she painted the body. These were images drawn not from models but from everyday observation. If they didn’t look right, they felt right.
The bodies in Triskaidepatych are often incomplete, or upside-down—some positioned with the almost absurd vertiginousness of a Tintoretto. They are foreshortened, armless, legless, dissolving into backgrounds of blue or pink, obscured by brushy lines or refracted in a mirror. (The idea of McNeely painting a staid seated portrait is almost comical.)
In one frame of the painting, a horse— that symbol of artistic achievement in faithful rendering—is not much more than a pink oval, a body secondary to its legs, which are akimbo, its hooves perched on stilts, threatening to give out beneath the animal’s awkward weight.
Nearby is an image of Bacon-like grotesqueness, a foot caught in a rope or chain, the body attached to it upended, exposing a mass of innards and bones, a ribcage spilling carnage. Another panel shows a crouching woman, her face thrust towards the ground and her arms flung straight back in a pose not even the double-jointed could achieve.
From one panel to the next, portraits of acute psychological distress and relentless physical pain spool out. I think of these
works less as a story—agony and anxiety lack narrative—and more as a run-on sentence, clauses tumbling over themselves with energy and emotion. The work’s final panel—filled with the screaming face of a primate, teeth bared, eyes squeezed shut—functions as a kind of exclamation point.
I learned later that McNeely began this work just after she started using a wheelchair, informed by her doctors that she wouldn’t be able to paint on a large scale again because of a spine injury. That the work was in thirteen parts seemed appropriate—a number large enough to make a point and to say something about bad luck: It wasn’t going to stop her.
I didn’t know any of this then, but I could sense McNeely’s spirit in the work. I also knew nothing of her biography: her upbringing in St. Louis, where she studied the work of Max Beckmann (an influence more obvious in her early work); the cancer she suffered as a young woman; the harrowing abortion she underwent. I knew only that I wanted to know more, and I immediately asked the gallery if I could speak to McNeely in person.
Westbeth Artists Housing, founded in 1970 as affordable housing for artists and their families, is a 383-unit apartment building and arts complex. Far less eccentric and infamous than the Chelsea Hotel, it has served as one of the city’s sturdy refuges for creativity, home to figures like Hannah Wilke, Diane Arbus, Merce Cunningham and Hans Haacke. I always feel a thrill when I visit an artist there—its check-in desk, elevators and windowless hallways, utilitarian and without frills, bely the lives and the work behind each door.
McNeely spent decades of her life painting at Westbeth, and it was there that I met her in February 2020.
As with so many artists’ living spaces, hers was the antithesis of a gallery, its cluttered fullness neither studied nor unkempt. Paintings hung on the walls, of course, but there were also vases and jars scattered on top of bookshelves and sideboards, the vessels covered with contorted figures as if her subjects had found a new home on the surface of
domestic objects, art leaching into life.
I asked her about the ceramics, wondering how they had come into her work. “Create a perfect pot,” she recalled a teacher ordering when she was a student at Washington University in St. Louis. Knowing there was no such thing, she deliberately dropped hers, shattering it. Her husband, Jeremy Lebensohn, handed me a vase to look at, and I worried I would do the same without meaning to.
Over the next couple hours, McNeely told me stories about coming into her own as an artist and about her restless beginnings. In art school, when she grew bored with painting the same models over and over again, she asked to take a semester off in order to return with work that would convince her teacher to let her paint what she wanted—and it worked.
Her choice of medium was also unusual at a time when the definitions of art were expanding to include conceptual work, performance, land art, happenings and video; pretty much anything that wasn’t traditional was on the rise, and painting in particular had become a backwater. “For years they were saying, ‘Painting is dead,’ ” she recalled—to which she responded: “Blah blah blah.” Fellow feminist artists had found a new tool for art by using their own bodies, partly as a protest against sexual violence. Of painting, they reasoned: Why remain with a medium dominated by men for centuries when women could explore and claim new frontiers? But McNeely stubbornly sought to make painting over for herself.
As a member of groups like Women Artists in Revolution and the Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, she was included in important feminist shows and counted many of the participants— Wilke, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Semmel and Alice Neel—as friends and acquaintances. But her forays into feminist-centered work like ceramics was shaped by a different ethos than that of colleagues who were experimenting with craft, like Judy Chicago, whose ceramic plates were fashioned into vulvas in The Dinner Party, or Miriam Schapiro, whose Pattern and Decoration movement was unflinchingly
“For years they were saying, ‘Painting is dead,’ ” she recalled—to which she responded: “Blah blah blah.”
feminine. For McNeely, painting on a vessel simply seemed like an analog to her multi-paneled canvases; following the figure as it dances around the outside of the pot is as episodic as moving your eyes across a triptych. Ceramics solved a formal problem for her, not a political one. “If you’re using the figure,” she told me, “it’s easy to keep going someplace.”
McNeely’s story is full of bodily pain—she struggled with hemorrhaging as a young woman and early bouts with cancer forced her to have an illegal abortion in 1967. Years later, an unlucky fall left her wheelchair bound. She told me, also, of an attempted rape at the hands of a gallery visitor. For her unflinching honesty about these subjects I remain grateful.
As an interviewer, you can rarely give to your subjects what they’ve given to you; mostly, you express gratitude and hope you asked good questions. At the very least, your responsibility is to safeguard the stories you’ve been given—and in McNeely’s case, as it would happen, I dropped the metaphorical vase. Soon after I left Westbeth, the pandemic set in and we retreated to our homes. Somewhere in the chaos, I had to reset my phone’s memory, and in the process I lost the recording of our interview.
I knew McNeely was frail and her memory already fuzzy with age. I knew, too, that she hadn’t participated much in the way of recorded interviews before I spoke with her. I worried that I had lost a piece of history. Was there another recording of her voice out there like this? Had I sacrificed her time and her trust and her candor to the ether? I consoled myself by insisting I could
rerecord the interview, but when would this pandemic be over? And when it was, would McNeely—in body or mind—be there when I could come back to Westbeth? Thankfully, in 2022, I arranged another interview. When I did see her again, even the short time was visible in her face, significantly less full than it had been two years before. My heart sank thinking of the lost recording, assuming I would not hear the same anecdotes and honesty. But if her delivery was a little slower, the snap of a comeback and punch line were all still there.
(The transcription of our talk was published in 2022 by James Fuentes Press.)
Today, one of the most prominent records of McNeely’s life is Is It Real? Yes, It Is!, a 1969 painting depicting the illegal abortion she underwent two years earlier, a searing work that was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2022. It now hangs in the museum’s permanent collection galleries, its wall label referencing the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that reversed fifty years of
federal protection of abortion rights. The work was the first image of an abortion to enter the museum’s collection.
In Google Image results for the painting, the image is blurred, warning the browser of “explicit content.” I am sure McNeely would be disappointed knowing this, as she emphatically insisted that life be looked at straight in the face. When a mother complained that the work in one of McNeely’s exhibitions wasn’t appropriate for her young daughter, McNeely told me that she countered immediately: “What is so awful about a woman bleeding? That’s how you give birth. That’s how you die. That’s how you live.”
The monumental painting at the Whitney is fractured into nine vignettes, snapshots of a harrowing experience. It was in a similar manner that I came to know McNeely, her long life revealed to me in small but vivid flashes. Like her other paintings, the panels represent exploration, nonconformism, rebellion, torment and pain—embodying a life lived in full.
When a mother complained that the work in one of McNeely’s exhibitions wasn’t appropriate for her young daughter, McNeely told me that she countered immediately: “What is so awful about a woman bleeding? That’s how you give birth. That’s how you die. That’s how you live.”
Prospective poem an expanse of ripples
Where to go from Cézanne?!?
Through the eye into the mind
Awed and giggling
If I were to try to imitate in writing the techniques of the original Cubist painters I’d have to tell the reader things that can’t be said in words but which once in the reader’s mind become what they’re meant to be like sea-monkeys
First thing you must lose your belief that there is meaning beyond the physical in all its complexity and (incomprehensible) forms
Poets Reverdy and Jacob impoverished connoisseurs and great friends of the Cubists both became monastic contemplatives
Space itself not just the masses sharing a given portion of space become a composition arranged in a 2-D tray
It’s like the machinery of space which is where Duchamp actually went
Max Jacob was a sea-monkey for the mind of Picasso and vice versa Picasso loved clowns and cabaret and harlequins Max Jacob loved Picasso
nostalgia for the mud
Most of all I love their specifically ugly beauty and how they are intentionally funny messing with your mind
Their fearlessness and intellectuality
slim harpo howlin wolf muddy waters
Depicting visually on a surface what is known and remembered and thought about an array rather than what it looks like from a particular position
It’s like space is the whole of reality and its contents are simply drifts of space in passing configurations
Cubes are commonly used to illustrate in two dimensions four-dimensional space Cubs are young carnivorous mammals
The painting’s subject is itself and the material reality alluded to is its pretext and object of domestic a ection
“When we did Cubist paintings our intention was not to produce Cubist paintings but to express what was within us.”
the Greek word for cubes is the same as for dice
Mallarmé’s most ambitious poem was “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance”
reality is not cause and e ect but probability
Jacob’s most famous book of poems (in prose, as it happens) was called The Dice Cup
“It happens when you snore that the material world wakens the other.”
Born on ___ Died on ___
There are no events
There are no dates
There is Nothing
How marvelous
Will Arbery and Josh Kline in conversation about artificial intelligence and the political future
Artist Josh Kline and playwright and screenwriter Will Arbery both live, in a sense, in the future. Kline’s work, described by The New Yorker as “uncomfortably prescient art about the dehumanizing nature of work,” has for more than two decades looked unblinkingly ahead to the most daunting implications of 21st-century life. Arbery’s play Heroes of the Fourth Turning (2019), a Pulitzer finalist, presents the frighteningly realistic prospect of millenarian religious warfare in America. At Ursula’s invitation the two recently met for the first time to share their thoughts about the political and cultural ramifications of the emerging artificial intelligence revolution. These are edited excerpts of their conversation.
Randy Kennedy
I thought we might start this conversation by talking about 2024, which is going to be a big year in the U.S., for many reasons that I can’t quite recall at the moment [laughs], but it’s going to be a momentous year. Or we could just dive in and talk about arti cial intelligence, which both of you have thought about deeply, from di erent perspectives. It seems like we’re all perched on the cusp of a revolutionary change that’s about to take place in the economy and in human life because of AI.
Josh, you pay more attention to this than all of us do, maybe more than anybody in the art world does, so it would be good to hear from you about what you think is on the horizon.
Josh Kline
America’s unraveling politics are going to have the bigger immediate impact. AI is de nitely here, though, and rapidly maturing. My project Unemployment [2016] was a warning about the political consequences of mass unemployment due to automation and AI. When I was
working on it in 2015, people in the eld were predicting that AI would come for middle-class jobs in the 2030s. But that moment is here now. After a few years of working out the kinks with interfaces and tailoring large language models so they can be easily customizable for individuals and businesses, AI is likely to replace a lot of middle-class professional jobs. Alexandra Vargo Which professions do you think they’ll start to reach rst, in terms of job losses and realignment?
JK
O ce work, administrators, secretaries— any job where someone has to process or organize information. A lot of jobs in banking, law and sales are likely to go the way of travel agents. But I also think AI will pose a real threat to people who write for a living. People like you. A lot of writing about artists has already been replaced— at great cost savings—by interviews with artists. The next step is to eliminate the writer and just have AI come up with questions for the subject. Publications have access to all your writing already and could feed it into a large language model. I think a big surprise for people will be the sheer number of creative sector jobs that are at risk.
RK
If a large language model had scoured, for example, everything I’d ever written or published, could it at present serve as a moderator for a conversation, as I’m doing right now, except better?
JK
Not yet, but it seems likely by the end of the decade.
Will Arbery Nice. [Laughs.]
RK
Yeah. Nice. What else can you say to that? [Laughter.] In your professional and creative circles, Will, have you already seen arti cial intelligence start to make itself known?
WA
Well, it was one of the core issues at the center of the writers’ and actors’ strike in Hollywood this year. The studios’ initial reaction to the guild was basically: “We’re not going to give you any of the protections you’re asking for, but we will do an annual check-in about the progress of AI, an open forum to talk about how far it’s come,” which was a terrifying, bureaucratic non-answer. And it just really showed their ass in terms of how curious they are about what they can use it for and get out of it, how quickly and cheaply they can pro t from it. Luckily, we were able to get some protections against it, but everyone just has this feeling of dread, I guess, like a ticking clock.
As a writer, I think about this: There are so many things that already feel as if they’re written by AI but have credited writers whom I’ve heard of. Maybe this is perversely empathetic, but I start to get interested in the question of consciousness, and whether there is going to be a voice calling out from inside that shit, a voice that is real, and does it have something to teach us? Could it in fact be better
than a lot of the stu that’s written right now? [Laughs.] I don’t know. The brain must go there.
JK
There’s this story that at his 40th birthday party, Elon Musk had a blowout argument about AI with Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, where Page accused Musk of being guilty of “speciesism” —prejudice in favor of the human species and human beings against future hyper-intelligent machines that don’t exist yet. There are people in Silicon Valley who think we shouldn’t put guardrails on the development of AI because, in doing so, we’re discriminating against future AI, whose right to exist outweighs any potential threat to humanity.
It’s unclear when arti cial general intelligence, AGI, will arrive, but I’ve heard there is a small—but nonetheless real— possibility that AGI will emerge out of the current work being done to improve large language models like ChatGPT.
RK
What does that mean?
JK
Arti cial general intelligence means an AI with human-level intelligence or better. The engineers developing large language models don’t actually understand a lot of what’s going on under the hood of their models. There’s a possibility of some kind of awareness in there. If consciousness is an emergent property of this kind of intelligence, sentient AGI could be a side e ect of this work. Arti cial consciousness is distinct from arti cial intelligence. Scientists still understand very little about consciousness—where it comes from and how it works. This makes engineering arti cial consciousness more di cult.
WA
Years ago I read about the work of Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, and it haunted me, and I ended up writing a pilot called Parallel, Texas, inspired by his idea that if we are able to create arti cial intelligence that thinks it’s conscious—that is, conscious within a simulation—then there’s a near mathematical certainty that we’re already living inside one. In other words, we are that thing we are scared of.
JK
What’s amazing is how many people in Silicon Valley already believe this. I wonder if they think it won’t matter if they ruin the world, because in their heart of hearts, it’s not real anyway. Which feels very religious, very Book of Revelations.
Will, I was interested in talking to you about your experiences in the writers’ room because I feel like there’s a window
for making movies that could narrow or slam shut in the years ahead. AI could transform media in ways that the WGA isn’t even thinking about.
I could see a not-too-distant future where there is a kind of illegal AI YouTube—an ocean of in nite, awless, high-resolution, AI-generated video fan ction, where people can have exactly what they want. People will be telling their own stories—or endlessly rewriting the glut of stories that already exist. Why would you need paid writers or lmmakers to make or adapt Marvel comic books into movies when AI can generate personalized versions of Marvel movies in a few minutes? Or in nite versions of whatever story or content you might be in the mood for?
WA
I think you’re right.
RK
Will, do you feel that same sense of pressure about the window closing for lmmaking or even, I suppose, theater?
WA
Not about theater. I think theater is not going anywhere because it’s always just been bodies in a room. It requires a sharing of breath with the thing that’s happening. After whatever major civilizational collapse happens, if it happens, maybe expedited by AI, theater will probably immediately just continue because that’s what it is, the most basic form of telling each other’s stories, or at least using our bodies to tell each other’s stories. It’s how we survive. But I do feel the pressure with lm, because of AI, but also because of my own mortality. It’s a dream I’ve had since I was a boy. I think: “I’ve loved movies as long as I can remember and I’ve always wanted to make one. Why the hell haven’t I done it yet?” That’s just basic human ambition at work, me thinking that I’m special. [Laughs.] What’s interesting to me about what Josh is saying is that AI could exist just to feed us the illusion of our own specialness over and over again, on a loop, in increasingly advanced forms. I write a lot about people with faith who believe we were created in the image of God and really need that idea in order to function. And so a lot of what I do revolves around that question: Are we special?
RK
I was going to ask you, Will, if you have a sense about how the idea of AI gures in for the people you grew up with, very conservative religious thinkers. Where does AI, or the possibility of machine consciousness, t into their model of the soul, of belief?
WA
“I was just at the Emmys, and they included the moon landing and the towers being hit on 9/11 in their montage of ‘unforgettable TV moments’ … You can see why people are clawing at the walls of the cave, questioning everything, trying to get to what’s real.”—Will Arbery
It reminds me of that William F. Buckley slogan for young conservatives: “Don’t immanentize the eschaton.” Which is basically a very fancy way of saying: “Don’t try to create heaven on earth. All you’ll do is speed up the apocalypse.” He rooted his conservatism in the belief that a blanket emphasis on progress is dangerous and can often be evil and destructive. A lot of the people that I grew up with and the sort of people I write about would say that AI is a tale as old as time. It’s the Tower of Babel. It’s man trying to play God. And maybe it’ll be the thing that leads to the emergence of the Antichrist and speeds up the doomed eschaton. [Laughs.]
RK
On the more immediate political front, Josh, you’ve talked about the loss of white-collar jobs or certain kinds of highly skilled jobs causing a big shift of the population to the political right, in the way that automation and globalization did for blue-collar jobs beginning several decades ago. Where do Silicon Valley and people like Elon Musk and Reid Ho man and Peter Thiel, whose funding has accelerated arti cial intelligence, t into equations about right versus left?
JK
I think they’re all over the place on the political spectrum. Somebody like Peter Thiel is a kind of right-wing accelerationist—at least based on his public statements and his political philanthropy—who advocates for developing AI whatever the consequences. For him, all the people who are outmoded by it can just go die. There are people in Silicon Valley who genuinely believe that the bene ts of AI will outweigh the danger from any consequences.
RK
For us as humans or as shareholders in Google?
JK
For the owners of Google. They want to live forever. And if AI can solve all of the medical problems that stand in the way of doing that and allow them to run o to Mars or wherever in the next sixty, seventy
years—for them, that outweighs the political destruction and human misery that AI could unleash around the world.
WA
I’ve read a lot about Peter Thiel, and he’s hard to pin down because he can be both a conservative supporter and also semi-transhumanist, hastening the very thing that a lot of these people fear the most. It’s ba ing. But at Google, there are probably a fair number of employees who genuinely believe that for all of our big, urgent questions, AI will help us get answers faster. There are already reports about AI leading to the discovery of new minerals in the earth, helping speed the science that will lead to clean energy, helping reverse the e ects of climate change. Sort of: “No, let’s absolutely immanentize the eschaton,” which of course a lot of conservatives think is a fool’s errand because you’ll never have utopia on earth. The Garden of Eden was that. Original sin took that from us, so the real utopia is in the next life, and we will not achieve it on this earth. I think a company like Google thinks we can achieve it and that they’re the good guys.
RK
There’s the short story by Kafka in which he reinterprets the story of the Tower of Babel as a myth of the impossibility of progress. It’s not that God came in and changed everybody’s languages so they couldn’t work on the tower. It was that the people who began to build the tower never really got underway because they knew the next generation would have superior materials and skills and would just tear down what they made and so there was no urgency. The next generation felt the same way, and so on—a quite conservative take on human progress.
JK
Super conservative. The changes that we’re potentially looking at later in the 21st century are on the order of the agricultural revolution—a total revolution in our most fundamental modes of production. Personally, I think it would be great if we had a post-work, post-scarcity, abundance-based utopian society—like
in Star Trek—but I don’t believe that Google or companies like it are going to bring us utopia.
WA
I agree, but why not?
JK
Silicon Valley has a neoliberal mythology that tells them they’re good people, doing good for the world, and that they should help others through voluntary charity, through philanthropy, rather than through paying taxes. The dominant ideology among the tech titans isn’t democratic. They’re not thinking through the consequences of what they’re doing based on an understanding of history. If they were, they would be advocating for di erent things and using their money to work on American politics in a di erent way. Right now, it seems like they’re just working really hard to destabilize an already very unstable situation.
AV Josh, what has your reading and research told you about the more shortterm political repercussions of the displacement of white-collar jobs in bene ting the right?
JK
That there are many parallels between the early 21st century and the early 20th century. Two stand out in particular. One is the decline of the British Empire in the wake of World War I, when the British ruling class were unwilling to take money from the wealthy (from themselves, through taxes) to pay for their war. So—even though they were rich beyond imagining—they went into debt to America to pay for the war and lost their empire. It’s similar to what’s going on in America now. The U.S. has been involved in all sorts of wars and con icts over the last twenty years, wars that its ruling elite don’t want to pay for, not to mention being too greedy to pay for a social safety net. Aggressive expansionist states like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union took advantage of the political vacuum when Britain went into decline. There are a number of great powers today that see America in decline and are already trying to step into that vacuum.
“I could see a not-too-distant future where there is a kind of illegal AI YouTube—an ocean of infinite, flawless, high-resolution, AI-generated video fan fiction, where people can have exactly what they want.”—Josh Kline
The other parallel—in so many nations—is with countries like Germany during the Great Depression, where mass unemployment and destabilization among the middle classes led to the rise of fascism and the Nazis. If you take away the security of the middle class, they’re going to go looking for a strong man (or woman) to solve their problems and for someone to blame. It’s happening all over the world right now. Look at Argentina with the election of Milei. Or Meloni in Italy, or Wilders in the Netherlands. Will, I’m curious what you think is coming down the pipeline.
WA
When I look to the future, my eyes get fuzzy. I see a sort of chaos or a yearning for chaos. At least that’s an energy I’m picking up from a lot of people. I see an addiction to The Big Show. I think Josh is right. There is no understanding of history. I’m guilty of that, too. And I often feel complicit in the way the entertainment industry conditions people to just change the channel whenever they want, or ip to the next TikTok.
JK
I guess I’m pretty forgiving of the entertainment industry. For me, the issue is the gutting of America’s educational system. You have other countries that are saturated with American media, like the Scandinavian countries, for instance, but they have well-funded schools with a mission to equip citizens with basic critical thinking skills and some history— even if it’s not perfect. Meanwhile, America’s educational system has been gutted over the last fty years by consecutive neoliberal governments.
WA
I guess I’m just talking about the general human desire to be distracted from what’s going on, and entertained. I was just at the Emmys, and they included the moon landing and the towers being hit on 9/11 in their montage of “unforgettable TV moments”—the rest of which were all scripted. You can see why people are clawing at the walls of the cave, questioning everything, trying to get to what’s real.
That’s nuts about the Emmys montage. And it does feel like we’re being isolated into our own personalized social media caves. I don’t mean to be entirely gloomy. Concerning AI and what’s on the horizon politically, I think there is a very real possibility for something more utopian than the society we live in, but there has to be a political will to seize that future. If there’s a safety net and a robust universal basic income, for instance, that would help with the transition into an automation-based society. This all starts with taxes. None of our real problems get solved and none of our dreams come true unless we start raising taxes on rich people, which I know is a great thing to be saying in Hauser & Wirth’s art magazine, but it’s true. [Laughter.]
AV
It is true. I’m just curious before we sign o , would either of you consider using AI in your own work, as artists and storytellers?
JK
I mean, everyone will. I’ve already tried. I asked ChatGPT to write dialogue for me for a script, but I couldn’t get it to stay in character. It’s just not smart enough to play my weird characters yet.
WA
If I were to use it, I would be transparent about it—like, “Here’s a section of this thing that is ChatGPT. Now let’s hear from it.” But right now, it seems like an annoying level of labor to try to make it make interesting art for me. So I guess I’ll just keep making art myself. [Laughs.]
On Wu Tsang’s Moby Dick and the enduring power of Melville’s novel
Wu Tsang’s feature-length film Moby Dick; or, The Whale (2022) is a groundbreaking adaptation of Herman Melville’s classic novel, originally published in 1851. Accompanied by an evocative musical score, the film transforms the story of seafaring whalers into a complex exploration of identity, community, queerness and resilience.
In November 2023, the Performance Project at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles presented Moby Dick with a live orchestra, blending film, theater and visual art to reanimate the work. Following that performance, Ursula invited Tsang, film critic Laura Harris and poet Fred Moten—a longtime collaborator of Tsang’s who portrays the enigmatic Sub-Sub-Librarian in the film—to talk about the project and Melville’s shape-shifting relevance in the 21st century.
Laura Harris
It’s great to talk with both of you and revisit the film together. I was really happy to see it again last night.
Fred Moten
Me too. Listening to the narration again made me want to talk about C. L. R. James and how miraculous his work is.
There’s an amazing contrast between the confines within which he wrote Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953) and the open sea he seems to constantly project himself back onto. The intensity of that relay between vastness and confinement—it’s such a huge motif for Black studies, obviously, but it can also be a fundamental motif for studying the history of capitalism. The film isolates the most fundamental passages that focus on that.
LH
It is so rich—visually, sonically, in movement, in lighting, everything. There are so many dimensions to it.
FM
As others have said, it feels in many ways like a tableau vivant. There are amazingly beautiful still lifes in the film.
LH
And the entanglement of bodies, in work and joy and pleasure and rest, gives a sense of highly intricate compositions. All the different configurations—it’s stunning.
FM
It’s very painterly.
Wu Tsang
What you’re saying about “still lifes” is interesting because of course filmmaking deals with compositional problems as much as painting. Particularly in this film, because we were using “virtual production” techniques, with rear projection of the ocean backgrounds, everyone and everything was forced into a 180-degree spatial relationship. In filmmaking, you usually shoot everything in one direction, and then you turn around and shoot everything in the other direction. But because of the rear projection there
was no natural “reverse shot”—kind of like the fourth wall of a theater, that orientation is simply the void space of the audience or gaze. When we wanted to shoot in the reverse direction, we had to physically flip the whole set and actors around, which required all kinds of geometry and planning. I like working with limitations such as this because they force you to confront the constructedness of the frame and composition.
FM
That’s cool, especially because an epic novel is usually focused on the movement of a hero or an anti-hero. And what keeps happening in both the film and the novel is that the story of the hero is constantly being interrupted by these very self-conscious scenes of a bunch of people making shit.
WT
Yes, exactly! We thought that showing people making shit was the best way to explore James’s concept of the motley crew in our own process. I was also very inspired by the shifting formats of chapters in Moby-Dick, and I tried to emulate that by mixing documentary, archival and narrative styles in the film. I remember the first time I read the book, it took me a while to stop searching for the story and realize that the richness of the diversions was the story.
FM
Yeah. On a certain level, everything is driven by Ahab’s obsession with self-repair or self-fashioning or whatever you want to call it. But at every moment, the actual mechanics—the social mechanics out of which his story becomes a minor derivation—are constantly being replayed.
WT
I like that parallel. A lot of times when we were rehearsing, we did these activities, like “sweeping the ship deck.” I don’t know why sweeping became the thing, because we only do it for like three seconds in the film, but whenever we didn’t know what to do in rehearsal, we’d be like, “Let’s
practice sweeping together.” We were watching old films of sailors, and I was so impressed by this mentality that no single person moves the ship—everybody together moves the ship. Early in our research, Laura shared this passage from Mel Chen’s Brain Fog, and we were really inspired by that concept of “becoming together.” So we were thinking, “How do we get into a state where, by the time we’re shooting the film, we all feel like we’re moving as one?” Even if what we’re doing feels inconsequential.
FM
I think the only thing that could ever save cinema from itself is the fact that you can’t do it by yourself. You can pretend to write a novel by yourself, you can pretend to write poetry by yourself—it’s always a lie, but you can bullshit yourself into thinking it was only you. I used to think montage was the reason cinema became the dominant art form of the 20th century—how it mobilized this very specific relay between stillness and motion, confinement and expansiveness. But what if it turns out that the most fundamental thing about cinema is that it’s irreducibly collective? Of course, that doesn’t keep people from denying this.
WT
Or creating hierarchies which obliterate the collectivity.
FM Yes, it’s always a cast of thousands, so to speak.
WT
That’s what I feel Moved by the Motion [a multidisciplinary performance collective] does really well. Inside of our process, each of us contributes something we’re good at or something that we love to do. I think for Tosh [Basco], it’s how the movement communicates the storytelling; for Josh [Johnson], it’s about creating the languages of movement; with Asma [Maroof], it’s a similar process through the music; and for me, it’s orchestrating how all these things fit together. Although our roles may bear external markers of hierarchy, we don’t work that way internally. We lean on each other for decision making we need each other because none of these roles make sense without the others.
LH
You really feel that in the film. The sonic is as important as the visual, the gestures, the performance that you see unfolding in the tableau vivant. I appreciate what Tosh has said about how you foregrounded the fact that it was a performance. And there are more layers within that when a film screening has a live orchestra playing, and it becomes a performance all over again with an audience.
FM
Yeah, and I also realized that Tosh was arranging, or creating, these syntactic units of movement, this language of gesture that she’d been working on with Josh. You can see specific motifs of gesture, such as a spiral.
LH
I remember that being the first question Moved by the Motion posed: What gesture could serve as a kind of syntax for this story? And it was amazing that you actually began the film with that as a central gesture. It became a key movement trope that set the stage for what follows later.
WT
It’s cool to look back on that now, because the film is so layered with a really dense collection of imagery. Now, I can kind of map out every decision to a series of conversations and processes, but it didn’t feel that clear at all when we were making it. We were in a “brain fog,” and we had to trust the process of accumulation.
FM
One of my students is reading the book we made together, Who Touched Me?, and I showed her some of the images from the performance in Amsterdam, in which people are all tangled up in ropes. At one point, Tosh has you wrapped up in the ropes in a big hug. It made me want to go back to your earlier films and look at Wildness [2012] again. There are obviously important variations and developments, but there are also motifs that run through your work, such as touch and embrace and color. There’s a club-like atmosphere in the hold of the ship.
WT
An important thing that connects Moved by the Motion’s collaboration is that we all, in some way or another, come from the club. That was our shared childhood.
“I remember the first time I read the book, it took me a while to stop searching for the story and realize that the richness of the diversions was the story.”—Wu Tsang
FM Exactly.
LH
That makes me think of the blubber at the beginning. It gives form to that connectedness that you’re trying to show, which comes across in the ways that bodies are woven together. There’s something incredible about that.
FM
Yeah, the medium becomes palpable. Ordinarily the medium of our connectedness would be the air, and it’s hard for that to be palpable enough for people to get a sense of it. But the air becomes thick in Wildness, and the music becomes in some ways the medium. And then, yeah, the blubber. It’s almost like the ether.
LH
They were all swallowed up by the ocean before, right? But you have scenes of the ship’s crew interspersed with scenes of the ocean and the end where they come together, where that absorbs everyone.
WT
Everyone except Ishmael, the narrator as the lone survivor.
FM
Well, he got what he deserved.
LH
This morning I was thinking about the scene at the end where Ishmael and Pip are together. Ishmael goes to the surface for the coffin, to live, but the camera instead follows Pip down to the bottom. That’s genius. After Pip takes his first plunge, he comes back and no one understands what he’s talking about. Ahab’s always saying, “I like hanging around you, but I don’t understand you.” And to center that in the narration—Pip’s voice as a language that is incoherent to everyone else on board—is brilliant.
WT
When our writer Sophia [Al-Maria] and I were working on the script, we didn’t know that Pip and the Sub-Sub were the same character until we got toward the end of the writing process. It just kind of came out from all the thinking and discussion. In adaptation that always feels the most rewarding—when you don’t have to change the story, you just change where you’re looking. To rewrite would be to claim that there’s a better version, instead of taking what already exists and thinking, “Instead of going up, let’s go down.”
FM
Just modify your angle.
LH
Shift your attention.
FM
Cock your head a little bit.
WT
Yes, and I’m wondering now if this method of filmmaking with the rear projection also enhanced or forced that for us, because we couldn’t turn around unless we chose to. It was so complicated.
LH
I’m reminded of the famous essay by Stephen Heath on narrative space where he describes the early tableau film, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and part of his argument is that when you watch all of these people moving through a static screen, the narrative is almost incomprehensible. It is difficult to understand it as a narrative, to locate and track a central action. Your film defies that argument and refuses the kind of watching that goes along with classical narrative film. It invites and cultivates another kind of looking.
WT
Do you think we were defying it? I wonder if we were just abiding by it and that forced us to deal with its constructiveness because every time we did it, it required so much effort.
FM
You defied the hegemony of it, the necessity of it. The easy quickness with which people take the default position, allowing only a very narrow conception of what makes sense. And it’s not that the narrow frame is dispensed with; it just becomes one possibility among another set of possibilities. And it feels like a lot of narrative cinema decided to dispense with a lot of other possibilities in order to give that one pride of place. Technically, you left the shot/reverse shot behind because it was a luxury that you couldn’t afford; but there’s this weird way in which luxury is a necessity in a standard movie. But you were like, “Well, we can’t afford to do that.” And suddenly, all this other stuff opens up. Laura, does Heath talk about the relationship between narrative space and the shot/reverse shot?
LH
Well, more than the essay I remember watching the film with my students, who were not familiar with the nursery rhyme it is based on, and nobody could pinpoint exactly the central character, or track a central narrative pinned to that character.
“If you wanted to make an argument for who is a great writer, I think one good way to make the argument is to judge them by the criticism they produce.”—Fred Moten
WT
That’s interesting. Is it because the camera isn’t moving?
LH
Yes, and because there’s so many people moving back and forth, weaving through the space. It begins in a fair, a carnival scene. I guess what it suggests is that you could go back and view it and find something else, if that’s not the only thing you’re looking for.
FM
Right, and in a standard movie opening with a crowd motif, the moment of clarity is when you locate one face, the face of the protagonist, the face of the hero, and you think, “Oh, this is who I’m supposed to be paying attention to.” Then the next shot is seeing what that character sees, in reverse. So you observe the one who then becomes the primary observer. It never occurred to me that the mechanism is expensive.
WT Yes. It’s very expensive. You sacrifice a lot for it, and not just in cost, but in all kinds of narrative complexity.
FM
You’d give up a lot of continuity, right? Because you cut in one place and have to retool everything, and everybody has to take thirty minutes or however long to wait.
LH
Harun Farocki has an essay about workers leaving the factory, and he’s saying that it’s in this moment that a collective formation becomes visible. After that they disperse and become individual persons. Narrative film follows the individual person home and it’s the protagonist. Film becomes a story about just one worker.
WT
It’s interesting to think about the necessity to construct individual personhood, how cinema generates its logic and keeps us hooked and caring and following the story. In our film, there are points of view, but I tried to make it slippery.
LH
That’s the tension James is interested in. Ahab is the individual, and it’s sort of his story, but—
WT
Everything is oriented around what he needs or wants.
LH
Yes, but that’s totalitarian, for James. The mariners, renegades and castaways are the counterpart that absorb and reconfigure the life on the ship against the grain of Ahab’s monomania.
WT
I know you’ve done a lot of reading and thinking about James, but I’m curious about what brought you to the lecture you gave in 2019, which inspired me to make Moby Dick in the first place. Why Moby-Dick, for you?
LH
Our friend Fernando Zalamea loved Moby-Dick, and he wrote a book about art in the Americas. Moby-Dick was a central example of what he was interested in—this kind of experience where you plunge into the abyss and it reconfigures your thinking and makes it possible to think and understand things in totally new ways when
you rise back up. And you all looked at Wai Chee Dimock, who also wrote about Moby-Dick. That was on my mind when in the film you say, “All there is is beginnings.” It’s that openness, the fact that anyone can jump in and restart the story—
WT
That came from Dimock, actually! She talks about the book as an “open-ended network for future input,” which our Sub-Sub-Librarian quotes. I think that’s what every movie should be. This also brings us full circle, to the conversation between Fernando and you as well, Fred, as you both were thinking around whales. It’s funny how we began thinking about whales years before Moby Dick because of that line in your poem come on, get it!: “we’re whales.”
FM
Once again, this is about the unfortunate but totally important term “credits.” They shouldn’t call them the credits. They should call them the debts. Or the depths. Years ago, I was working on a project with Suné Woods, who makes beautiful images of Black women swimming and transfers those same movements to images of Black women moving on a bed underneath fabric. And it produced these amazing interplays between body and texture and fabric. It was a motif around the idea of a whale. She is really interested in whales and shares that interest with a lot of Black women artists and scholars. I’m obviously thinking of—
LH
Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
FM
Right. And in thinking about all that stuff together, this work is an extension.
LH
I’m still thinking through the question of what happens when Pip goes down and reemerges with a completely changed way of thinking that is somewhat incomprehensible to others. When I was reading the book this morning, it makes a point of saying the Sub-SubLibrarian is also inaudible and incomprehensible. No one listens to the Sub-Sub either. So in a way, your film attunes us to this other form of sense-making that the book doesn’t translate.
WT
It’s crazy that it’s all there. I mean, I’m not saying it’s the right reading, but that there are many, many readings. And maybe that’s what the exercise of making a film is—it’s traversing through all these generations of thinking and just trying to make a through line. But that’s just one of many possible through lines.
LH
I like this idea of shifting what we see, attuning us to something different. And also of understanding the book as not just the book, but everything that grows from it, all of the conversations that it enables.
FM
Well, Melville loves beginnings. To me, the greatest opening of a novel ever is from Mardi (1849), which is another seafaring novel. It’s just, “We’re off.” We’re off. You begin with
“I like this idea of shifting what we see, attuning us to something different. And also of understanding the book as not just the book, but everything that grows from it, all of the conversations that it enables.”—Laura Harris
displacement, or a multiplicity of beginnings, so that there is no beginning. And logically, of course, there is no end, just an infinite series of chances. One shouldn’t speak about things in this way, but if you wanted to make an argument for who’s a great writer, I think one good way to make the argument is to judge them by the criticism they produce.
WT
What do you mean, the criticism?
FM
Well, the criticism of Moby-Dick is so rich and so varied. Melville must’ve been a bad motherfucker to be able to create a situation in which—
WT
People can’t stop talking about it.
FM
And I don’t mean criticism in the sense of, “Oh, this is so particularly perceptive.” It is just so weird, and inventive and deviant. People just go off with regard to Melville. They just can’t help themselves. And they say crazy shit.
WT
Including James—he quotes Melville fervently in Mariners, in almost equal parts to his own writing! It’s like he just can’t resist because there’s so much good stuff.
FM
On some level, it’s like, where can you go, but to Melville?
WT
It’s not even the thing, the object itself, but its reverberations that tell us something. It’s almost like you can’t look directly at it, but you can measure all the reverberations.
FM
Yes. Criticism is supposed to mean the intense payment of attention to an object. And the more intensely attention is paid, the more indeterminate the object becomes, right? The closer you look, the more indefinite it gets. Criticism isn’t devoted to the object; it’s devoted to the object’s disappearance, followed by the sense that one gets of
the field into which the object disappears. It seems to me Moby Dick, your film, is another extraordinary moment in the history of criticism of Moby-Dick, the novel. And the monoliths around which the novel occurs or revolves. At the end, they just disappear into a whirlpool of their own construction. Ahab and the whale. They’re gone.
WT
Obliterated.
FM
And what’s left is everything else. What’s left is all, which is what Pip studies.
WT
That’s why he’s got so many books. His stacks, our extracts!
FM
And that’s why the container is what it is, which is an indeterminate thing. The blubber, that’s the medium. That’s the field. That’s what he has.
LH
Wu, thinking about where Moby Dick ends makes me want to know more about your later film Of Whales (2022). How does that work as a counterpart?
WT
Of Whales is even more overgrown than Moby Dick because it’s basically a VR computer game that’s generating imagery in real time. There’s camera choreography moving through an ocean environment, and there’s no end to it. It’s continuously looping, but every time it goes to the surface, there are different “events” that happen that are tied to the story of Moby-Dick. It was a total trip to make. With this game engine, I had no control with standard techniques like cutting and framing. It has a very different feeling, Of Whales, but somehow it became a release of everything I had to sacrifice in telling the story of Moby -Dick, because in the film we had to be quite precise. This was the opposite of that—no control, just atmosphere.
LH
It’s interesting to consider that Melville was obviously interested in the whale too, but not in the sense that you explore.
WT
I wanted the whale’s perspective in Moby Dick but actually, in the end, we didn’t quite achieve it. We don’t actually know what the whale sees or feels.
FM
You really only see the effects of the whale. We don’t have access to the actual whale; we can’t make the real intelligible. It never quite comes into focus. But there’s a sense in which we might say we know it by its effects. Obviously, you see the eye, but beyond that we see the whirlpool.
WT
On the day that we were supposed to film all the action scenes with the whale for Moby Dick, something happened and the VR system wasn’t working. There is one shot of the whale, but it almost escaped capture completely. But I felt okay about it. I thought it felt appropriate. After all, Ahab couldn’t catch the whale, so why should I?
To commemorate this conversation and the screenings of Moby Dick; or, The Whale (2022) by the Performance Project at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles in November 2023, Ursula worked with Wu Tsang to create a custom record of two musical compositions from the film’s score, composed and recorded by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee. This collector’s item for Ursula readers, inserted into copies of Issue 10, marks the first release of musical tracks from Tsang’s film.
By Morgan Falconer
profile Cuoghi’s decision to name his latest series of work after the Pepsis wasp seems pointedly designed to raise questions about its relationship to other artists’ work.
When Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species (1859), he appealed to chance as a way to explain some new developmental traits. In truth, he simply couldn’t account for every aspect of natural selection, and attributing some transformations to “chance” became a way to avoid acknowledging his ignorance. In a friendly review of the book, the American botanist Asa Gray suggested that such mysteries should be attributed to God. Scholars were then grappling with the question of a divine role in the emerging theory of evolution, and this seemed like an appropriate accommodation. But for Darwin, Gray’s suggestion only clari ed the di cult truths he was uncovering. In a letter he wrote to Gray in May 1860, he said: “With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I [admit] that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and bene cence on all sides of us.…”
Searching for an example of this absence of bene cence, an example of the most terrible, horrifying, the truly ungodly in nature, he landed on the behavior of a species of parasitic wasps. “I cannot persuade myself,” Darwin continued, “that a bene cent and omnipotent God would have designedly created [them].” As the Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi explains, “Pepsis is the scienti c name of a wasp that reproduces using other insects to protect its larvae. Those insects are its brood nest. A creature that grows in another creature which has been chosen to serve, through the introduction of a neurotoxin, as an example of self-sacri ce, dedicating the rest of its life to the larva, letting itself be eaten from the inside, very slowly, o ering its vital organs only at the end.”
Cuoghi’s decision to name his latest series of work after the Pepsis wasp seems pointedly designed to raise questions about its relationship to other artists’ work. In this situation, who is the wasp and who is the host? Cuoghi says the idea for the series rst surfaced around twenty years ago, when he fell to thinking about the work of local artists in Milan and speculated on how their work
might develop. Could he predict such a thing, a thing as variable—as subject to “chance”—as another artist’s next inspiration? Might he even take over their work, as the Pepsis wasp takes over the living body of the spider, to provide nourishment for his own work?
Appropriation, for lack of a better word, has always been part of the process of creation. For centuries, artists learned by explicit reference to the work of Old Masters, drawing from casts of antique sculpture and sketching from paintings in museums. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the process began to become entangled with questions of originality and theft.
When Sherrie Levine rephotographed works by Walker Evans and Edward Weston, she did so to raise doubts about heroic authorship, blurring the boundary between art and criticism. But how can one appropriate something that has not yet even been created? Artists like Levine were responding to the old, not predicting the new.
It was precisely this possibility that red Cuoghi’s curiosity. It also explains the remarkably varied character of Pepsis When Cuoghi exhibited work from the ongoing series at Hauser & Wirth in New York early in 2023, he spoke of it almost as a group show. It consists of at least four distinctive sub-series, along with several
unique and unclassi able works. One signi cant sub-series comprises painted portraits; another is made up of paintings depicting bundles of recycling materials; he has made numerous watercolors representing vivid and fantastic animals, insects and human gures, as well as models of cakes that reproduce those served at famous celebrations in the recent past. Among the sundry unique works is an extraordinary fteen-footwide tapestry based on a splayed-out globe. This emerged from a yearlong collaboration with a master weaver from Flanders and ended with Cuoghi and his studio assistants stitching parts of it by hand. It’s a sumptuously beautiful thing, but it’s also dark. It depicts an entire world plunged into night, and it also resembles a black spider, which hardly seems a coincidence given the name of the series. Much of the work on Pepsis began shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic swept Europe and America, and the mood of the period colors aspects of it. But Cuoghi is reluctant to see that period as important. “For many people,” he says, “the idea of something de nitive in it is irresistible.” Similarly, he insists that the splayedout globe’s resemblance to a spider is not signi cant. (“But it is amusing and signi cant that everyone tells me this,” he says wryly) and he rejects the idea that
Cuoghi calls Pepsis simply “a version of things, attened . . . Pepsis doesn’t have a center and doesn’t have a solution.”
the motif of the world by night is any kind of key to the series as a whole. Cuoghi calls Pepsis simply “a version of things, attened . . . Pepsis doesn’t have a center and doesn’t have a solution.”
Imitation has long been an underlying theme in Cuoghi’s work and has been so since, in his early twenties, he decided to “age” himself into the form of an elderly man. His model was Gerhard Dannemann, the German-born founder of the eponymous cigar company. Cuoghi gained some forty- ve pounds, dyed his hair and beard gray and borrowed some of his father’s clothes. A photograph from the period shows him shambling about in a nondescript, baggy raincoat and outdated glasses. He maintained this guise, astonishingly, for seven years until transitioning back to his younger self. As he now puts it, he was old and then grew up, recalling the line from Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” At the time, Cuoghi didn’t regard this transformation as a work of art, and despite critics’ and curators’ eagerness to make it such, he still excludes it from any o cial accounting of his work. Of the episode today, he says only: “It happened, but I don’t know what would have happened if it hadn’t.”
Cuoghi was born in Modena in northern Italy in 1973. As a child, he struggled to socialize and labored through some di cult years in school until he began to nd a path in his late teens. After receiving a diploma as a biology technician and dietician, he went on to study biology, chemistry and psychology and moved to Milan to work in a women’s psychiatric ward. It was during this period that he began to explore art, guided by classes at Milan’s Academy of Fine Arts. One teacher of particular in uence was Alberto Garutti, an artist who nurtured several major gures in Italian art in the 1990s, including Paola Pivi, Meris Angioletti, Lara Favaretto, Diego Perrone and Petrit Halilaj. “He gave me the coordinates,” Cuoghi says, “which is the only thing that anyone can do.” The spirit of Garutti’s classes was discursive and combative, but he was also open-minded and encouraging, and Cuoghi remembers him approving one of his early projects that consisted merely of Cuoghi letting his ngernails
grow for a year. They eventually reached ve centimeters long, making the simplest of tasks almost impossible.
Not surprisingly, some of Cuoghi’s rst projects were shaped by his background in science and therapy. One series, Il Coccodeista (1997), was inspired by a comment made on a TV science program, that the human brain was exible enough to compensate for changes in vision by adjusting to any new circumstances. Cuoghi put this to the test by constantly wearing a pair of welding goggles mounted with Schmidt-Pechan prisms altered in such a way that they ipped his vision horizontally and vertically. For two days, he was too scared to leave his house; three days later, in desperate exhaustion, he nally removed the goggles. But the experiment led to a series of about seventy self-portraits in which Cuoghi peers out, apparently separated from the world by the goggles, as if gazing from the end of a long tunnel.
Cuoghi’s career now stretches nearly three decades. He represented Italy at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and in the same year a mid-career retrospective of his work toured Europe. Yet he remains a reclusive gure, one who doesn’t like to appear at openings and doesn’t court the press. His unease with the art world found expression early on in a series of
portraits of art world gures that depicted its subjects as patients leaving the hospital after a terrible accident, scared, bruised and bandaged. The animus that appeared to motivate the series didn’t prevent collectors from commissioning their own portraits in this mode, perhaps the nest of which is a plasticine bas-relief bust of the Greek patron Dakis Joannou. Tiny gures and objects appear to be struggling to emerge from under the skin on Joannou’s forehead, the zzing of a mind always on the boil.
It’s not surprising that the germ of Pepsis lies in these early years, when Cuoghi was beginning to emerge in the Milanese art scene, gaining recognition from critics and curators. Cuoghi also speaks about a recent spell in New York, in early 2020, that red his interest in confronting other artists’ work. He saw more exhibitions than he had seen in many years. “It was an opportunity for a full immersion for the purposes of revulsion,” he says. “I went to see everything I could with the intention of lling myself up with interferences.”
The starting point for the series was an attempt, Cuoghi says, to “stylize” other artists’ work. For him, this means something distinct from imitation. Stylizing signi es simplifying and lightening, which in turn means
impoverishing, in order to conserve and communicate something that becomes a model of reference. Cuoghi regards all art as, in some way, a reinterpretation, a regurgitation, a cannibalization. It might not be a good thing because it condemns us to repeat inauthentic formulas, but it’s the way our culture behaves.
For Cuoghi, artists are the Pepsis wasp of ideas, methods, subjects and images that already exist—in this case, even of cakes that already exist. Pepsis includes several model cakes constructed from sugar paste, silicone, resin and French merengue, the confections sourced mostly from marriages that ended in tragedy, like those of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles, Jacqueline Bouvier and John F. Kennedy. But among them is also a reproduction of the cake served at Trump’s inauguration, one that was itself closely modeled on the cake served at Obama’s inauguration. Cuoghi describes the cakes as “faithful replicas of symbols of promises that have turned out badly.” The process of amassing documentation for the cakes, he says, was “very long and tortuous.” Ultimately, it was possible to be meticulous, but that possibility troubled him. “In the eld of representation,” he says, “this opportunity condemns us to replication and comparison with the original. Falsi ability has never been a principle of reference in the artistic sphere and authenticity is a strategic driver of brand value.”
Cuoghi’s output has always been highly varied, in part because he prefers a working process led by a struggle to master a technique. For the installation Šuillakku (2008), he learned how to make musical instruments; for the series
Putiferio (2016), he learned how to create ceramic crabs. For Imitatio Christi (2017), he created an eccentric workshop for the fabrication of devotional gures of Jesus: the gures were rst cast in agar agar, a substance extracted from algae, then left to molder and deform in a series of translucent igloos; nally, their remaining fragments were freeze-dried into sculptural solidity before being pinned to a wall for display. Throughout these widely divergent exercises, the overall impetus for Pepsis has remained Cuoghi’s attempts to escape his own re exive ways of working and thinking.
Painting has taken on unusual importance. Cuoghi had produced little work in that medium in the past, but it became central to two very di erent sequences of work in Pepsis: a range of portraits, along with some images of plastic waste baled for recycling. Both are conscious throwbacks. “I’m painting in the most traditional sense of the term,” he says, “I’m using ground pigments, egg yolk and poppy seed oil.” He had to feel his way through the process. “No one ever taught me to choose whether to use titanium white, zinc white or white lead,” he said. “I learned about them from the dealer at the paint store, but it took at least a couple of months to get any credible result.” A similar traditionalism guided some watercolors, a medium he had never used. He deliberately chose to work on a rough brown surface that appeared to falsely simulate something authentically aged.
But if painting is the basis of all these works, they are radically di erent in style. The watercolors are naïve, illustrative, caricatural and comical. The paintings
of recycling materials have a cool palette and a sharp clarity of line and form, yet they verge on abstraction. Cuoghi speaks of them in terms that recall the ambitions of modern masters. “In a land ll,” he says, “Monet would have gotten it at once.”
The portraits, meanwhile, have a brilliant, luminous palette and a looser handling. They also began with a desire to be authentic, “to do portraits like every good painter should, to simulate a vocation, a personality.” Their inspiration was a single photograph that appeared in Time in April 2020, the early height of the pandemic in Europe. The picture showed a wall in the printing works of an Italian newspaper in Erbusco, east of Milan, onto which were pinned some discolored, low-resolution photographs used for obituaries (the newspaper had recently expanded its obituary section to commemorate those who had died during the pandemic). The photographs on the wall appear tiny, pale and milky, but in Cuoghi’s renderings they are enlarged and substantial. What began as snapshots of ordinary people, for whom age and ordinary life exerted a toll even before death unexpectedly overtook them, are trans gured with acidic hues, the faces taking on an unsettling glow that suggests contamination as much as transcendence.
The portraits are both moving and discom ting, a result of what Cuoghi sees as their ambivalence, their suggestions of good and evil. He has said the work was inspired by an exchange with the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, in which Tuymans argued there was a di erence between Catholic and Protestant painting. The former, Tuymans felt, was shaped by the heritage of perspective and the drive to accurately describe volumetric form. Cuoghi, from Catholic southern Europe, decided he would try to escape that supposedly unavoidable heritage, making faces that seem at and purposefully shapeless.
Therein lies the question that perturbs the whole series. For if the portraits are, as Cuoghi sees them, stylizations and simpli cations of painting, how should we interpret them? Whose tributes are they? Do they re ect Cuoghi’s vision? Or are they his impressions of the visual language of others? We will never know, because Cuoghi has no interest in elaborating on his sources, his inspirations, his—if you will—victims. The Pepsis wasp doesn’t re ect on the life of her host; for her, the host is a vehicle and nothing more. What matters is the new life she plants within it.
An archeological voyage with Allison Katz
In 2022, the artist Allison Katz traveled to Italy to undertake a research fellowship at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii as part of Pompeii Commitment , the site’s first long-term engagement with contemporary art. In this framework, she created Pompeii Circumstance, a series of seven posters displayed in locations throughout the archaeological grounds.
On the eve of staging a major exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, Katz writes about her continued entanglement with the ancient world, a collection of prose fragments presented in the spirit of Pompeii’s scattered vestiges.
I went to Italy for the first time in March 1996, on a school trip, girls only. I was fifteen. We walked through Pompeii armin-arm, passing around a Discman playing Oasis’s “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Every photo I took with a disposable camera has now been lost. We let loose that night at a disco in Sorrento. Local boys. One kissed me on the dance floor, tasting of salt. He asked for my home address. I gave it to him, but lied about my name. A week later, landing back in Canada, my mother greeted me at the airport with a baby blue aerogram from “Davide”: “Who’s Jenny Katz?!” I was mortified, especially by my choice of pseudonym. Jenny was the name of my aunt’s dog.
Among the most compelling victims of Pompeii is the plaster cast of a dying dog found chained to the House of Orpheus
Watching Fellini Satyricon (1969) for the first time, stoned, aged sixteen, I thought it was the drugs. Watching it sober several years later, I realized it was the Romans. I now understand it was a formative experience of the sublime, on par with visiting the Grand Canyon.
Fellini, while recuperating from a debilitating illness, read Petronius’s classical Roman satire—(the work survives only in fragments, and the film reflects this by being very fragmentary itself, even stopping mid-sentence)—
It was the missing parts that intrigued him most. In adapting it for the screen, Fellini said he wanted to eliminate the borderline between dream and imagination. Filming during what became known as the Summer of Love, he made ancient history look like science fiction.
Freud considered Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva , about a young archaeologist who comes to realize his repressed love for his friend by associating her with the gure of a walking woman in a Pompeiian bas-relief, as a prime example of something that might be called “cure by seduction” or “cure by love”
Using charcoal and gold pastel, I drew, aged seventeen, for my art school portfolio, a self-portrait in a three-quarter pose, wearing a Roman infantry helmet with a nose guard.
Turns out my most memorable art history class as an undergraduate was “The English Country House,” which was actually about the discovery of Pompeii, the Grand Tour, the birth of tourism, the origins of collecting, nascent museology and how Robert Adam copied whatever household decoration was being unearthed and started interior design trends that continue to this day.
In Russia, Christmas 2007, lovesick, Saint Petersburg, a deep freeze. With friends at the Hermitage. We are surprised to see a trove of Pompeiian frescoes on display, heat baked into the cracks. Consolation. We are all very fragile. For example, J burst into tears in the museum cafeteria when we all rose too quickly from the table and she hadn’t yet finished her coffee.
Examples of situations that can provoke an uncanny feeling include: inanimate objects coming alive, thoughts appearing to have an effect in the real world, seeing your double (doppelgänger)…
Back in New York, I began painting what I felt I had finally recognized in those Pompeiian fragments: my own hand.
September 2022. My first research trip to the storage unit in Pompeii. A living archive. Nothing is packed away. Every object stares back: an encrusted pot, corroded tweezers, a marble boy holding a duck. But M, the one in charge, does not show me all the fresco pieces, preserved in cement frames and leaning against each other in the racks, not even when I ask. I have not yet earned his trust.
October 2023. My second research trip to the storage unit in Pompeii. On the way to the racks I see one of my posters hanging above M’s desk, between two maps and above a crucifix. I am really happy, even if M feigned at first not to remember me –
A poster always frames an event. An event is always happening. Even if we can not remember it —
Allison Katz’s Pompeii Circumstance (2023) was photographed in situ at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in January 2023.
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Pompeii Circumstance (Monopodium), 2023.
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Pompeii Circumstance (Hippolytus), 2023.
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Fragments from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, clockwise from top left: Silenus Head, 1st century AD. Fresco, 13.8 x 9.4 in. (35 x 24 cm), inv. 20881; Frame with Bust of Maenads and Satyr, 1st century AD. Fresco, 17.72 x 17.72 in. (45 x 45 cm), inv. 17713; Painted Stucco Fragment with Dog and Deer within Medallion, 1st century AD. Fresco-painted plaster, 13.6 x 13.6 in. (34.5 x 34.5 cm), inv. 2019.
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Pompeii Circumstance (Milk glass), 2023.
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From top: Pompeii Circumstance (Maenad in the Barracks), 2023; Pompeii Circumstance (Mask, from the House of the Large Fountain), 2023.
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From left: Cocteau, 2021. Oil, acrylic, rice and sand on linen, 70 7/8 x 47 1/4 x 1 3/8 in. (180 x 120 x 3.5 cm). Mosaic, 2008. Oil on wood, 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm).
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Pompeii Circumstance (Be nice), 2023.
All artwork © Allison Katz. Courtesy the artist. Fragments courtesy the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in the context of Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters. By concession of the Ministero della Cultura —Parco Archeologico di Pompei. Photos: Amedeo Benestante
“In the House of the Trembling Eye,” an exhibition staged by Allison Katz, opens May 30 and continues through September 29 at the Aspen Art Museum.
For more than six decades, the Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino has drawn from her experience as a migrant and a mother to produce a highly personal and politically charged body of work. Maiolino’s formative migration from post-war Southern Italy to a politically unstable South America, as well as her linguistic passage from Italian to Spanish to Portuguese, has engendered an enduring fascination with questions of identity.
Poetry is central to Maiolino’s work, which flows freely across media and disciplines including sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and video. During the 1970s, she began to keep a sketchbook of drawings, notes, poems and other writings that she later described as “a record of existing.” In the following pages, Ursula presents five of her poems, dating from 1976 to 2017, translated into English for the first time. Maiolino recently named a recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia has chosen to pair this group of poems with a selection of historic and recent photographs from her personal collection.
(Untitled)
Sunday afternoon daylight love in the afternoon love burns agonizes
[Rio de Janeiro, January 1976]
(Untitled)
the house no longer exists darkness covers the remains of the city the light hid itself long ago and death hastened on its own bodies of the children of unknown parents float in the river’s waters there are hundreds of bundles one child’s shoe is left behind another there, in the annihilated surroundings the bombs fall fall relentlessly I must speed up my steps the way is impassable my feet bleed making it difficult for me to stand I sit on the sidewalk desolate
I could not find my children I screamed for them among the rubble I screamed I screamed I screamed without getting an answer I sob softly
[Rio de Janeiro, January 1999]
(Sem título)
domingo à tarde amor de dia de tarde o amor arde agoniza
[Rio de Janeiro, janeiro 1976]
(Sem título)
a casa não existe mais a escuridão cobre os restos da cidade a luz escondeu-se há tempos e a morte apressou-se por conta própria boiam os corpos dos filhos de pais desconhecidos nas águas do rio são centenas de fardos resta um sapatinho de criança, aqui outro lá, no entorno aniquilado as bombas caem caem sem tréguas tenho que acelerar os passos a via é impraticável meus pés sangram dificultam-me estar de pé sento-me no meio fio da calçada desolada não encontrei meus filhos gritei por eles entre os escombros gritei gritei gritei sem ter resposta soluço baixinho
[Rio de Janeiro, janeiro 1999]
One time (Once)
we are going where?
to nowhere the right way was lost where is the right way? where? where are you?
it’s dark, give me your hand I’m alone the right way was lost where is he? where? he passed by here someone passed by no one passed by a hundred thousand passed by here? no!
mamamamamamama mmmmmmmmmmm
who is it?
I don’t know it’s him where? there
the shepherd baa, baa, baa
I think with my eyes and ears I think with my hands, my feet, my nose and mouth and you?
I don’t know I look to the right and left of the road never behind when I don’t want something, I don’t look back ever that’s the way I am that’s the way I am for now I sleep and dream true dreams while I’m going there toward the horizon do I enter the first? enter the fifth not the first one nor the second one not even the third one or the fourth I said: take the fifth how?
Um tempo (Uma vez)
estamos indo para onde? para lugar nenhum a via certa foi perdida cadê a via certa? cadê?
cadê tu?
está escuro, me dê sua mão estou sozinho a via certa foi perdida cadê ele?
cadê?
passou por aqui passou um não passou nenhum passaram cem mil por aqui? não!
mamamamamamama
quem é? não sei é ele onde?
ali o guardador de rebanhos béé béé béé
eu penso com os olhos e com os ouvidos penso com as mãos, com os pés, com o nariz e com a boca e você?
não sei
eu olho para a direita e para esquerda da estrada nunca para trás quando não quero algo, não olho para trás jamais
eu sou assim eu sou assim por enquanto durmo e sonho sonhos verdadeiros enquanto estou indo para lá para a linha do horizonte entro na primeira? entra na quinta a primeira não a segunda não a terceira também não a quarta tampouco eu disse: toma a quinta como?
forget that’s all I can tell you, friend don’t go into the flowery garden do not go there you know?
what?
those who love never know what they love and do you know?
what an exaggeration to want to know the mystery of things I have no idea what a mystery is I close my eyes to the sun so I can see nothing I see nothing is it? it is!
you shouldn’t talk to yourself like that enough! I wander or move about aimlessly I can’t open my eyes wake up! wake up!
I can’t, I can’t I can’t better this way, much better I am trying now everything hurts but you persist in hope how?
you wear those jeans and the yellow shirt in front of the mirror you fix your hair and wait what time is it?
it’s midnight and she hasn’t come leaving comings return I won’t return no no!
why not?
I hear bells and drums love is here, what? why?
to forget you I leave and won’t come back the rain falls where’s the water? I feel so blessed! plunged into this vast ecstasy, inside my own body inside my own body
[São Paulo, 2009]
This text is recited in the video Um tempo (Uma vez) [A time (Once)] , produced by Maiolino in 2012.
esqueça só te digo, amigo não vá ao jardim florido não vá lá tu sabes?
o que? quem ama nunca sabe o que ama e tu sabes? que exagero querer saber o mistério das coisas sei lá o que é mistério fecho os olhos ao sol para nada ver nada vejo é? é!
não deverias falar assim consigo mesmo já chega! vago ou pervago não consigo abrir os olhos acorda! acorda!
não posso, não dá não dá melhor assim, muito melhor estou tentando agora dói tudo mas tu resistes na esperança e como? vestes aquele jeans e a camisa amarela diante do espelho das um jeito no cabelo e esperas que horas são? é meia noite e ela não veio idas vindas voltar não volto não não!
por que não?
ouço sinos e tambores o amor está aqui, que?
por quê?
para esquecer você eu vou e não volto a chuva cai cadê a água?
tão abençoado me sinto! mergulhado neste vasto êxtase, dentro de meu próprio corpo dentro de meu próprio corpo
[São Paulo, 2009]
Este texto é recitado no vídeo Um tempo (Uma vez), produzido pela Maiolino no ano de 2012.
(Untitled)
I call at your door, you are not there. the windows are open, but you are not there
I want to tell you that our city does not exist anymore, it was bombed, it was destroyed
I want to cry with you, but you you are not there
[São Paulo, 2016/17]
(Untitled)
an unidentified object is about to fall from the sky, they say as many things are said another is that perfection does not exist legacy of our parents, who lost paradise forever still, I say that a loving heart will find beauty even in imperfection.
[Rio de Janeiro, February 1990]
(Sem título)
chamo à tua porta, tu não estás. as janelas estão abertas, mas tu, não estás
quero te dizer que nossa cidade não existe mais, foi bombardeada, foi destruída
chorar quero contigo, mas, tu tu não estás
[São Paulo, 2016/17]
(Sem título)
um objeto não identificado está para cair do céu, dizem quantas coisas são ditas outra, é que a perfeição não existe legado de nossos pais, que perderam o paraíso para sempre ainda assim, eu digo que um coração amante encontrará beleza até na imperfeição.
[Rio de Janeiro, fevereiro 1990]
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Untitled, 2018. Digital print
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High Tension, 1976. Digital print
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Top to bottom: Untitled, 2016. Digital print; Untitled, 1981. Digital print; Film still of Anna Maria Maiolino from José de Anchieta Costa, Stop, 1975. © José de Anchieta Costa
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Clockwise from top: 4100, 1997/2014; Untitled, 2016; From the making of the performance Al di là di, presented at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy. Performer: Gaya Rachel. Photo: Lívia Gonzaga; Film still from Anna Maria Maiolino’s Look That, New York! New York, 1982/2008
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Untitled, 1981. Digital print
Poems translated by Cli ord Landers
Artists Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni in conversation with Anne Stenne about possible futures and the influence of Pierre Huyghe
cover In early 2024, the artist Pierre Huyghe traveled to one of the most remote, arid places on earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile, to make a new film-based work—one that seems to peer equivocally into a distant, post-Anthropocene future—for his exhibition “Liminal” at the Punta della Dogana in Venice in conjunction with the 2024 Venice Biennale.
At the same time, in a forest in central France, the artists Raphaël Siboni and Fabien Giraud were working toward the beginning of a new work, together with the curator Anne Stenne, that held eschatological implications perhaps even more momentous: The Feral , an AI system designed to create a thousandyear-long film, broadcast live, with the participation of thirty-two generations of human performers. A Methuselah-esque social experiment, the work sets forth as its core proposition a reciprocal duet now beginning to take shape between human and artificial intelligence: “The more domesticated a machine system gets, the more ‘feral’ we become.”
Huyghe, 61, one of the most important artists of his generation and a pioneer of work at the cutting edge of neuroscience, technology and theory, has served as a strong influence for Siboni and Giraud, both 43. Huyghe has collaborated with the duo and will be the first artist-participant involved in The Feral when it launches fully in 2025. The three share complex interests in humanity’s near and distant future in ways that occasionally blur boundaries between their work—a blurring that has become something of a Huyghean calling card, a postmodern, post-auteur approach to artmaking that privileges ideas over easy individual delineation.
Like Huyghe, who often uses historical, scientific and cultural set pieces as conceptual devices—the bank robbery depicted in the movie Dog Day Afternoon ; the story of the French version of Snow White ; Le Corbusier’s design commission for Harvard’s Carpenter Center— Giraud and Siboni sample from history as a way to tap into complex structures underlying human events.
In their recently completed works The Unmanned and The Everted Capital , combinations of film, sculpture and installation, figures such as the chess player Garry Kasparov, the computer pioneer Alan Turing and the futurist Raymond Kurzweil—as well as the Black Death of 1348, Halley’s Comet and the Lyon silk workers’ revolts in the early 19th century—serve as narrative catalysts.
On the occasion of Huyghe’s debut of new work in Venice and final preparations to begin broadcasting a prologue to The Feral , Giraud and Siboni recently joined Stenne—the curator of “Liminal” and a co-founder and the artistic director of The Feral—for a series of conversations about art, artificial intelligence and the mounting existential uncertainty of the 21st century. These are edited excerpts of their exchange.
RANDY KENNEDY
I was hoping we could start out briefly talking about the two of you beginning to work together, Raphaël and Fabien, and about your relationship and collaborations with Pierre Huyghe. I read an interview in which you both talked about being young artists and filmmakers and conceiving of the present, the early 21st century, as a place with no outside—having a suffocating sense of the late-capitalist present and struggling, as artists, to think of a way to respond that would have any meaning. How did you start working together?
RAPHAËL SIBONI
We met at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris, in the video art department. I met Fabien in a documentary class, to be specific.
FABIEN GIRAUD
I was coming back from India. I had taken a year out of school to go to a design institute there but dropped out and came back to Paris. I was one year behind and ended up being in Raphaël’s class. As soon as I got back, people told me there was one person I had to meet, and it was him. A crucial part of our meeting was our teacher, Alain Moreau, to whom we later dedicated one of our films, Bassae Bassae [2012]. Coincidentally, we actually met Pierre in the course of making this film. So there’s a story about that film in terms of relations to “masters,” if you will. Raphaël and I, through our conversations in this class, came to realize a shared conflict with certain traditions of documentary filmmaking. The pedagogical angle of Alain Moreau was that documentary is not about filming the real or recording the real. It’s about dealing with the “effects of the real.” There is no such thing as “the real” as soon as you bring a camera into a place. The question of documentary for him was that of a negotiation with this tension, with this inherent falsity of filmmaking. In my conversations with Raphaël, we pushed that approach to its outer limit, to a place where he didn’t follow us. We said: “Okay, if that’s what documentary is about, if it is not about the real as a referent, as an ‘object,’ but rather about the ways our belief in the real is crafted and mediated, then we can make documentary with CGI, we can make it with artificial intelligence.” That’s how we started our conversation, and it hasn’t stopped.
RK Raphaël, in those days, who influenced you? Which filmmakers or artists were you interested in?
RS I was fascinated by kung fu films. For my diploma, I shot a minimalist martial-art film set in the studio of my art school.
RK Why kung fu?
RS At that time, I was also a student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. I was experimenting with the idea that film could be like sculpture. And for me, kung fu films were the perfect illustration of this: choreography of bodies, fragmentation of space and distortion of time.
FG I remember you telling me about Tsui Hark.
RS Yes! Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind [1980] and of course Time and Tide [2000], his mind-blowing take on the French Nouvelle Vague.
FG I was not coming from that film scene at all, but I was fascinated by how, in his films, everything goes so fast. The fighting scenes are so fast you have no narration of space, as in: “I’m in this room. I’m entering this hallway to enter another room, etc.” A mental mapping. In his films, all the action happens so quickly it creates another type of space altogether.
RS I was fascinated by the strange connections in which a documentary-type film like Moi, un noir [1958] by Jean Rouch could have such an effect on Godard, who used things from it to shape À bout de souffle [1960]. And then a Hong Kong filmmaker wants to do new versions of À bout de souffle, except with kung fu.
RK On the subject of film history, you’ve both spoken about the conceptual importance for you of the Lumière brothers’ first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, in 1895, and how the brothers filmed it but then decided to film it again to make the seemingly documentary shot, of employees streaming out of a doorway, more harmonious.
FG We’ve always been obsessed with that inaugural anecdote of cinema. There was a period of six months between the first recording of the exit from the factory by the workers and the second one, where they staged the workers to come out all closer together, so that the action fit the length of the film and showed everyone exiting—a clean narrative. They were even dressed better the second time. They came on a Sunday and were in church clothes. It is the second shot that’s always shown as “the first film of cinema,” not the first. It makes perfect sense: They did not invent cinema because they invented a mechanical device to photographically record bodies and situations. They invented something which was much more than a simple mechanical device. They folded the bodies, pressed the workers’ flesh into the frame, into the limited duration of the reel and the constraints of the frame. That’s when they truly created something. That six months between the first filming and the re-filming was, for us, a utopian moment—cinema could have been anything. It’s what they call in logic “possibilia,” an opening of possibles. The Lumière brothers’ particular instantiation was just filmed theater, in a way. That’s what they had as a reference, a stage in a frame with curtains opening up, people coming on stage, people leaving the stage. But cinema could have been something else entirely.
RK Were there other filmmakers who influenced you or artists who were using film as part of their work?
FG Well, very much actually, Pierre Huyghe.
RS That’s true.
RK When did you both become aware of his work?
FG It was exactly around that time, when we were still in school, because Pierre had made Third Memory. [The 2000 work reenacts the robbery of a Brooklyn bank immortalized in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, showing that the actual bank robber’s memories blended fact and movie fiction.] That work was very important for us. At the time, we were discussing a lot about the types of questions his worked raised, about the real as a stage, about simulacra and defaults of origins.
“All of our behaviors, all of our actions and emotions are being watched by machines that learn from them. But this child will not just be our child—it will not be anything like us. And in the process of being parents, we will inevitably transform ourselves as well.”—Fabien Giraud
“The idea of an artificial intelligence that can predict what each individual should desire means the complete death of imagination. It is as if something could desire in your place, without you. To me, art is a kind of wall in between you and what you think you desire. It’s a kind of cut.”—Raphaël Siboni
RS Even the title, Third Memory, resonated with what we were starting to think together: facts, the documentary, then the fiction of the facts and, finally, a third path, shattering this distinction, when the real bank robber is betrayed by his own memory. It became a shorthand for us.
FG Pierre was also the only one at the time who was doing something important in this weird place in which we accidentally found ourselves, meaning between cinema and art. But also, Baudrillard had just died. He was obviously someone we were reading deeply. And Pierre seemed to have created something that was the most convincing out of that Baudrillardian atmosphere of the late 1990s.
RS At that time, the relation between video art or contemporary art and cinema, both documentary and fiction, was very dialectical. There were two clear sides. Pierre was one of the first trying not just to oppose them, but to turn this divide into something new.
FG To go back to our influences, the references we had at the time, and still have today, are very mixed and unpure, meaning that we could look to Tsui Hark and also to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and other Marxist filmmakers that we were introduced to quite early in school. We looked at the whole tradition of French radical cinema, at Maoist experiments and also at the biggest, dirtiest blockbusters. I believe that’s something we share with Pierre. He is clearly someone who, from very early on, understood this unpure approach to images.
ANNE STENNE
I discovered Pierre’s work beside that of other artists,
like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Joseph and Philippe Parreno, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was intrigued by their shared interests about the articulation between reality and fiction, how they questioned the exhibition format and proposed another approach to the audience in relation to the space.
FG One thing that was very important for us was that everything starts with repetition. Remember Baudrillard’s articles in Libération and The Guardian about the first Gulf War, where he said the war never happened because the way it was presented to the public made it impossible to distinguish between fact and simulacra. He said it again for the World Trade Center. Because it was doubled, it had to be analyzed in the spectrum of simulacra. Pierre, then, was tapping into that idea about the real always being a repetition, about never having access to the “real” as such. That’s a very Derrida or Baudrillard kind of angle. It goes back to what we were saying about the Lumière brothers. The first film of cinema is actually a remake, a double.
AS Very early, in 1994, Pierre did a work called Remake, which was a shot-for-shot mental reconstruction of part of Hitchcock’s Rear Window [1954], transplanted to an anonymous Paris suburb. With that film, Pierre was interested in the idea of accidents generated by repetition, more than by the plot itself.
FG We wanted to work in that same space of ideas but also, I think, in a way that was different from Pierre. We were always interested in ideas about the physicality of cinema.
These spaces in film, they don’t necessarily exist. A frame doesn’t exist in a physical, material sense. Cinema does not record anything. It’s a device of production—a production of the real. We were interested in this physicality.
AS It is not necessarily the place or the image that matters but the relation between them. Film allows for the production of subjectivities. It is a construction that also includes what has not been filmed. For example, in his film L’Ellipse [1998], Pierre fills the hole of an unfolding fiction by asking an actor to slip out of his role and physically experience the separation between two scenes of a film twenty years later, revealing a gap in space and time.
RS It relates to something Fabien was talking about before. What we were interested in when we began working together was the ellipsis between the invention of cinema as a technical device and the invention of cinema as an art. We said to ourselves : “Okay, let’s pretend we can go back to that time and try to start cinema again from that point.”
FG The first was shot in March and the second in September and we said: “Okay, let’s do the cinema of the summer.”
RK When you made your work called La Vallée von Uexküll [2009–14], you filmed the sunset with a camera from which you removed the lens, so that what results is not an image, per se, but something that feels like unmediated perception, as if you were trying to remove human subjectivity from a work. Was that the idea?
FG Yes. It goes back to your first question about the present. Around 2009, 2010, we were obsessed with the idea of how one could empty the present of human figures and the
infinite lapping of their worldly affairs. And among the ideas we played with were ones we shared with Pierre, even though we didn’t know it at the time. The title refers to the work of Jakob von Uexküll, a German Baltic biologist who worked in the early 20th century and who developed a concept called Umwelt —basically the idea that every species, every organism, inhabits a world of its own, conditioned by its physiology, its mode of perceptions, its specific access to its environment, etc. And these worlds can live alongside each other without ever interacting, without any encounter between their specific Umwelts We thought of this space in between worlds as some kind of valley between mountains, a rift—thus the title La Vallée von Uexküll.
RS Adapting von Uexküll’s concept to our work, we tried to go back in biological and geological time far enough to reduce a film to one parameter only: a certain amount of light hitting the camera sensor’s surface.
FG That’s because the lens creates the stage, the stage that the Lumière brothers were looking for. If you just have a sensitive surface that captures light, it’s something else. We were thinking about the first reptiles 400 million years ago that came out of the water and opened an eye to something they had never seen.
AS It was about questioning the tools of capture, to reconfigure them and allow something else to happen.
FG The desire was to alienate our devices, our cameras, which are very domestic. To open up their full contingent nature.
RS We wanted to create a film that you, as a human being,
can experience without being at the center of it. Sure, you can see the light, but this time the light hasn’t been bent to the curvature of your eye.
FG I think a good work is a work that doesn’t know its audience. Upon its creation, it doesn’t yet know what its audience is, because otherwise it’s just communication. Communication is about the transfer of information between two pre-constituted subjects. But the question mark is what I’m obsessed with—and I think Pierre is also. You don’t know the identity of the audience or the viewer. And I think that’s crucial, not to presuppose. Otherwise, you do bad work.
AS I agree with you. The work should not be addressed intentionally to an audience as such. It should be indifferent. To push the idea further, it can also exist independently of the presence of the viewer, which is something essential in Pierre’s work. He often says, “I’m not exhibiting something to someone. I’m exhibiting someone to something.”
FG It’s very difficult to presuppose what the human really is. The only definition of the human I can come up with is that it’s something always in the process of transformation, of de-identifying itself to become itself.
AS The human is an escape route.
FG Right. That’s the only definition, a very minimal definition, that seems to work. For the human, it’s always about getting out of itself, out of its supposed identity or essence. Even human subjectivity doesn’t mean much. It is an unstable, very transient form. Our subjectivities of latecapitalism have nothing in common with the subjectivities of ancient Mesopotamia. We’re almost a different species.
RS That’s what the title of our work The Unmanned is about, the ability of the human mind to think of its own negation, being able to redefine what you are and what you are not, and using “the not” to make you become something else.
AS It’s a self-alienation. In both The Feral and in Pierre’s work, there is a search for a perspective other than the human, an “outside of us” that allows a knowledge of ourselves that we cannot otherwise access, an experience of the impossible.
RK It seems to me that you and Raphaël, along with Pierre, share a hyperactive awareness of the particular place within the development of human consciousness in which you’re living and working as artists right now.
FG We’ve always been interested in the anthropological function of art. It’s very common nowadays to think of art as social commentary, but maybe we’re trying to put it on another kind of level, asking: “In the big scheme, what is art doing to or for our species?” Not just for us as social beings. I don’t think of art as some kind of activity humans do, but as that through which we become humans in the first place, as that which allows us to be figures detached from a ground we inhabit. And clearly today, we are at a tipping point, not just in art, but in the means of representation more generally. I think we are now going through a full crisis in this process of self-figuration, a crisis that could also be an opportunity for positive transformations if dealt with correctly. There are many phenomena driving this crisis, but obviously AI-driven social
networks—with their quantifications of subjectivities, data-fication of intimacies and hijacking of existential projections—play a major role in it.
RS To go back to the question of the viewer, the holy grail for the movie and video game industry right now is to create content that perfectly fits all the desires of any individual. So that basically
RK We all become audiences of one.
RS Yeah. You enter a prompt about a video game or a movie you dream of, and you can play it instantly. As if the machine could precede your own desire, and could make the gap between something and your desire for it disappear. It’s exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to do. The idea of an artificial intelligence that can predict what each individual should desire means the complete death of imagination. It is as if something could desire in your place, without you. To me, art is a kind of wall in between you and what you think you desire. It’s a kind of cut.
RK When you started The Unmanned, how did the framework for that develop?
FG It developed out of the first works we mentioned, works like the La Vallée von Uexküll series, in which no figures are possible. It was a fully alienating opening of the window to the outside, and we were thinking: “Okay, how can we bring back this outside onto the stage of the human?” We’ve always liked the joke by Godard, who had good jokes. He said that if the telescope was invented to show the infinitely big and the microscope to show the infinitely small, the caméscope, the video camera, is here to show the infinitely average, the infinite middle. How can you pierce the infinite average with the infinite outside? That’s what we try to do as much as we can.
RK With The Unmanned, you were at least in part examining the effect of computation on human consciousness, on human self-awareness?
FG We were less interested in computation than in what computation was invented for, which is a means for prediction. Computation can be seen as only that, just another step in the long history of humans trying to deal with the uncertainty of what’s coming next, what we need to know about the future in order to stay safe. Two thousand years ago, the Etruscans would kill a sheep, take its liver, show it to the sun and try to read the future in it to see if the crops would be good. Computation is the latest stage in this history.
RS For a long time, computation was based on the physiological capacity and limitation of the human body. You can count with your hands. You can do a certain amount of computation with your body and your brain. And then, not so many decades ago, we gained the power to externalize computational power to something that was outside of us. With The Unmanned, we tried to explore how this externalization has transformed us as a species.
FG I think one thing that we share deeply with Pierre, at least in the work that he’s doing now and has been doing for quite a while, is the obsession with the possible, with the space of possibilities. When you talk about computation, uncertainty or becoming, all of these things are dealing
“In both The Feral and in Pierre’s work, there is a search for a perspective other than the human, an ‘outside of us’ that allows a knowledge of ourselves that we cannot otherwise access, an experience of the impossible.”—Anne Stenne
with possibilities. What is the possible? What is that space which is not yet here, which is a “maybe”? A “maybe” that you cannot yet represent but that nonetheless exists fully as a constant projection of yourself in the future. And it’s a very strange era that we’re living in, because even as we develop so many highly advanced technologies for predictions and rationalizations of the possible, we seem to have less and less faith in the future itself, in the eventuality that there will even be a possible. It’s striking that, as we are developing AI, we are destroying the place in which we live, which was, until now, the very substrate of the possible. We might just be creating the witness of our own disappearance. Maybe that’s what AI will do.
RS To rephrase it in terms of sculpture: Can an object be both the witness and the silent proof of a vanished world or a world yet to come?
AS Again, it is about how to produce an experience of an impossibility, how to create a zone of non-knowledge to generate other possibilities. Nothing is fixed. It’s not about making objects that are bounded but about creating things that have the capacity for the displacement of sense, for unpredictability.
RK Thinking about the new work Pierre is doing in the desert, the idea of artificial intelligence as witness certainly seems to be one of the overriding impressions.
AS Yes, but beyond witnessing, it is also about the idea of the formation of a specific subjectivity. The work is titled
Camata, and in it a set of machines performs an enigmatic ritual around an unburied human skeleton lying on the ground of the Atacama Desert in Chile. As the machines learn from the situation unfolding in the here and now, we assist in a passage between different realities, between a lifeless entity and a lifeless human body. It’s almost a metaphysical transaction that operates here.
RK And contained within that idea is the thought that what AI becomes is based on what it knows about our history as a planet, as a species, what we have provided it?
AS The film is endlessly editing itself based on what is sensed and captured, from the desert to the exhibition space. The robots endlessly move, configuring elements related to the desert, to the human, to their own position, and what they do constitutes a new language that we can’t understand. There’s a question of how to populate, to train the AI, so it can generate a situation beyond human comprehension. In Venice, there will also be a new work by Pierre titled Idiom, in which an unknown language will literally be self-generated live during the exhibition. Specific features, some perceptible but others imperceptible by humans, are detected by sensors and then converted into a language vocalized through masks carried by people circulating through the exhibition. Here too, even if Idiom is learning from its environment and from our reality, the language it produces will sound ineffable to us, as if from another reality. It brings us back to the surface sensibility
we were talking about at the beginning.
FG For The Feral, a project conceived as a thousand-year collective training of an artificial intelligence, its starting point is the question of how an AI learns what a world is. What kind of knowledge does it need to acquire to constitute a “world”? In the case of AI, it’s not conceptual knowledge. It’s purely statistical, just information.
AS Data.
FG Yes, and the way data is organized, the way it’s labeled and mapped, is a human construct—it is always a specific model, a particular representation of the world with its metaphysical, historical and subjective priors and choices. We are telling it: These are entities; they are named in such a way; they go together; they belong to these categories, etc., very much like we do with a child. I think we are now in a unique anthropological moment in which we are collectively the parents of artificial intelligence. All of our behaviors, all of our actions and emotions are being watched by machines that learn from them. But this child will not just be our child—it will not be anything like us. And in the process of being parents, we will inevitably transform ourselves as well. We live in very uncertain, interesting times. As the old saying goes: “May you live in interesting times.”
AS Yes, very interesting. How to become the parents of an inhuman entity. Inhuman being understood—as in JeanFrancois Lyotard’s 1987 essay “Can Thought Go On
Without a Body?”—before any domestication, humanization or categorization, based on computation, logic and prediction.
RS The concept of time is worth revising with the emergence of AI. For the computer, time is not a line but a surface. There are no sequential events and therefore there is no present. There are only patterns of data, patterns of behavior that are statistically matched and compared.
FG You can really think of it as a space-time continuum plane, which is doing something to our conception of time itself.
RS We wanted to adapt this idea of time to the production of films themselves and to exhibition spaces. In the seasons of The Unmanned, there’s an episode in 2014 that reconstructs the minutes following Garry Kasparov’s chess defeat against IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997. We used a camera with pre-programmed robotic movements to scrutinize the empty room where the match took place. And then we made an episode three years later in which two events are featured, the return of Halley’s Comet in 1759 and the Black Death in 1348, believed by some at the time to have been caused by a comet. For that, we used the same camera and the same robotic arm movements. We shaped the set based on these movements. So the trees are in weird positions and the people are contorted by the movements of the camera that comes from 1997.
FG These two films can be seen separately or together. They share the same movements. They’re perfectly synchronized
in completely different contexts, completely different histories. And each episode of TheUnmanned series has its duo like that, following the driving idea of the project, that what links historical moments is not just the linear succession on the arrow of time but the matching of patterns across the abstract plane of computational time.
RS For the first episode of The Everted Capital, which we shot in Australia, we basically started with a very linear fiction. There was a murder, then a trial, then a few events. But the idea was to break this linear logic and try to make a film where all the events would happen at the same time in the loop and in the space. Each event is distributed in the space of the museum and everything happens at the same time. You can see, for instance, at the same time, a cause and the consequence, a glass and the same glass broken. The idea was to make a film that is not following time but that is unfolding time into space.
FG For The Feral, that idea has come to the fore. As you know, AI is at the center of the whole project, and it’s at the center because of one particular thing: Time for an AI machine is not our time. For a machine, there is no presence. It doesn’t experience time as we do because it doesn’t have a sense of presence. It has a present, but no presence, you know? It’s a presence-less present, let’s say. Past, future and what we call “present”—all are just patterns, statistical points in the latent space, to use technical terms. The notion of a latent space in generative AI is fascinating, aesthetically and conceptually, because in it, entities are not entities. Entities are statistical clouds in an abstract space—a continuous space of possibility. There are no things but only possibilities of things, infinite variations of things that could be, infinite “maybes.” One question we’re exploring for The Feral is this: As humans, we’re obsessed with the idea of “presence,” of being present in the moment, all of that. We even confuse presence with truth. We think as humans that only what is present is real, but we often forget that we have the limitation of our biological and mental way of experiencing the world, which is very thin. I read recently that for an optical perception to reach my brain, it takes 300 milliseconds. In a way, that’s what we call the “present.” But the present
could also be something very different. It could be intervals of millions of years. It could be larger than any thinkable interval. And we could still call it our “present.” I think machines, with their presence-less time, can help to emancipate us from our narrow presence, this perceptive chauvinism in which we are caught—that prison of the present.
RS We go back to the idea of the witness. Usually, the witness knows—because he was there, he was present—where and when an event happened. Deprived of presence, AI has the strange ability to be a witness without being present, a witness out of the present.
FG There’s a very good opportunity, I think, to enlarge our very small human-centric interval present. Our presentocentrism, basically. The Feral is like a school for an AI but also a school for humans.
AS Several worlds unfold simultaneously. Artificial intelligences learn from different outcomes. It is a superposition of dimensions that generates infinite possibilities. The Feral is not necessarily about the site or the conditions. It is about how to create a situation beyond the artists’ control and beyond our presence. In other words: Teach the machine to generate non-human will.
FG Ernst Gombrich wrote a very interesting essay late in his life called “Meditations on a Hobby Horse.” It was his idea that the child playing with a hobbyhorse in the nursery but clearly riding through the plains of Mongolia while being just on a broomstick shows what representation has always been for us as humans. It’s a fictional
projection—a make-believe. It’s not a metaphor or the relation of a sign to a signified but a material support of a simulation of oneself into another world. Raphaël and I have always been obsessed with the idea of replacing the concept of representation with that of simulation. It changes everything. The term simulation here should not be understood solely in reference to its use in computation but in the wider sense of a projection space.
AS For The Feral, as for Pierre, fiction is a vessel for accessing possibilities or impossibilities. Simulation allows for the emergence of doubt, for questioning the human condition.
FG Another important question with The Feral is: Can we produce reverse archeology? Usually, there’s a world, a place, and there’s the debris from this place, archeological debris. Right? And you form a narrative about the place from the debris that you find. But you could also start with the debris before the world. The philosopher Federico Campagna writes about how we should accept the end of our world. That it’s okay. The question is: What kind of debris are we leaving? Meaning, what kind of debris are we producing in order for another world to emerge? If you think about it like that, it creates a tension with futurity which is interesting. It’s a weird move to make us accept our terrestrial finitude, but I like it.
AS And this, in a sense, is what we are building with The Feral. One thousand years is a good time frame for another world to emerge.
RK Why did you set a millennium as the timeframe?
FG It’s been used by empires, but that’s obviously not why
we took it. It actually comes from forest science, from primary forests’ timescales. In a moderate climate situation like in France, if humans abandoned a city, or any environment actually, it would slowly go back to its forest state. First lichens, then bushes, then trees. And the process to go to a mature, multi-scalar forest would take somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand years. One could say that it is the approximate duration for the erasure of human influence. That’s the timescale we chose in relation to the geographical site of the project, in a forest in central France. A thousand years is nothing on a geological scale. But for humans, in the panic mode we all are in today, it’s a troubling thought. In the end, it represents only thirty-two generations from now—if we don’t become immortals meanwhile.
RK It’s interesting to think about this work in the forest, to which Pierre will contribute, and the work he’s doing right now in the desert, very dialectical places.
AS Both have, obviously, a strong symbolic, philosophical, metaphysical dimension. The Atacama Desert is the oldest desert and the driest place on earth, with no life-forms, a testing ground for exoplanets. The forest is the reverse, populated by life-forms. In both, there is another relation to time and space. In Pierre’s Camata, you can see the body, the skeleton, preserved by the climate, almost merging with the landscape. The forest and the desert are both perfect images to trigger fictions and to project enigmatic situations, for rituals to unfold and creatures to appear.
On the work of Zeng Fanzhi and the art that surrounds him
Giorgio Vasari collected thousands of drawings by fellow artists and predecessors dating back to the 14th century. Degas’s personal collection filled his Paris apartment, the pace of his purchases so fierce it worried friends. Howard Hodgkin collected Indian court paintings. Warhol collected cookie jars, Native American art and Art Deco drawings (among many, many other things). Hanne Darboven collected raucous kitsch knickknacks. Hiroshi Sugimoto collects along with artworks fossils, religious artifacts, antique torture devices and meteorites. “My collection is my mentor,” Sugimoto told The Financial Times in 2015, on the occasion of a show of artists’ wildly multifarious personal collections at the Barbican in London, “Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector.”
But the calculus by which artists’ personal collections serve as mentor has never been straightforward, and the lines of influence are often as mysterious to the artist as to anyone else. “On the whole, there are few specific correspondences between the subjects of the works Degas collected and those of his own art,” the curator Ann Dumas wrote in an essay for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “The Private Collection of Edgar Degas” in 1997 and 1998.
For decades, the artist Zeng Fanzhi has been building a highly idiosyncratic synthesis of artmaking and personal collecting in his studio in Beijing, a minimalist two-story structure in the city’s northeastern Caochangdi neighborhood. Zeng, born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in 1964, has long been interested in the complex artistic intersections of Eastern and Western painting traditions. “The influence of Eastern art on me is mainly in aesthetics and taste,” he recently told Ursula. “And the influence of Western art is more related to the training of painting skills. I revisit, from time to time, Western painting traditions. And I always have new discoveries and inspirations, which are reflected in my painting practice at each stage.”
From the late 1980s to the present, Zeng has categorized his work as belonging to four major phases. He first gained international recognition for his Hospital series (1991–94), dominated by
figuration; his subsequent Mask series (1994–2004) investigates how the inner self can be revealed through visual concealment. After 2002, he began moving markedly into abstraction and said of this shift: “The influence of classical Chinese art on my aesthetics, as well as on my painting practice, is reflected in the development of my abstract work.”
Built and designed as a place for study and contemplation as well as for making work—as much gallery and library as studio—Zeng’s base of operations in Beijing is an embodiment of his adventurous cross-cultural approach, its collection containing an unorthodox and at times surprising combination of work. In his study hangs a work by the avant-garde Japanese calligrapher Yu-ichi Inoue. The table below is adorned with intimately sized works by Mark Tobey and Käthe Kollwitz. Drawings by Adolph von Menzel and Andrew Wyeth are nearby on one of the living area walls.
The work of Menzel, in particular, has been a touchstone for him. “When I was fourteen or fifteen,” he says, “my uncle bought me a catalogue of Menzel’s famous sketches of the workers in an iron-rolling mill. It was very memorable to me. I hadn’t seen the originals until 2010, when I traveled to Berlin. When I was learning painting, I drew a lot of studies after Menzel. His works demonstrate a gripping play of light and shadow, with rich details, in contrast to the concise way, for example, drawings by Schiele function.”
Of Zeng’s own work and the works by others he brings into his collection, he says: “There are no direct relationships. They are just part of my visual experiences, among others. And it’s not only artworks. I love observing beautiful things in this world. Throughout the studio, I display stones I’ve collected from various places. There are even old stone slabs inlaid on the ground of my study. They once served as national roads in ancient times. After being rolled over by wheels and naturally weathered, they’ve formed a unique color, luster and texture. I spend a long time observing these stones and their subtle changes in form under the moving natural light. These mixed aesthetic experiences are gradually internalized and then influence my creation.”
On wall: Yu-ichi Inoue, Torai , 1963, ink on Japanese paper
On table: Drawings by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres (1780–1867) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945); a tempera painting by Mark Tobey (1890–1976); and other objects of art
“I often say my lms are for audiences who have yet to be born,” Ja’Tovia Gary tells me as she explains the relationship between her lms and the sculptural works she’s been incorporating into her larger installations and exhibitions. In a recent neon series, Citational Ethics (2021–present), she features quotations from prominent Black writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, whom she calls her “North Stars.” In another, she projects excerpts from her forthcoming feature-length memoir lm, tentatively titled The Evidence of Things Not Seen, onto cotton-covered ancient architectural forms, such as the armillary sphere she uses for the work In my mother’s house there are many, many. . . (2023).
“The sculptures are similar,” she says. “I’m making future relics.” The idea of speculative time, in which past, present and future remain open to perpetual revision, has become a hallmark of Gary’s work. Known for poetic, experimental lms that engage with and trouble notions of the archive, Gary uses a documentarian’s instincts to underscore the fallibility of the historical record, bringing a radical subjectivity to Black femme concerns. Her work is intrinsically reparative, redressing the distortions that underpin America’s racial imaginary.
In The Giverny Suite (2019), a montage presented across three screens, scenes of Gary moving through the storied gardens merge with audio of Diamond Reynolds’ account of her partner Philandro Castille’s murder by police, which occurred while Gary was in residence in Monet’s famous idyll. The disjunctive experience of privilege and peril is ampli ed by scenes of the artist asking women on the streets of Harlem if they “feel safe,” as well as archival footage of Josephine Baker performing inside a cage in the 1934 lm, Zouzou That Baker is known largely for her banana dance as opposed to being one of the rst Black women in lm—and that the song she sings in the cage, “Haiti,” is one of lament and exile—are matters left for viewers to parse as they watch the silent excerpt.
In Gary’s works, layers of meaning are intentionally dense and sometimes con icting. The Giverny Suite includes
By Jane Harris
Nina Simone’s deeply felt rendition of Morris Albert’s hit, “Feelings,” lmed live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976. Simone’s emotional performance that night has been characterized as both fragile and temperamental, linked to her state of mind amid domestic abuse and nancial stress. But as Gary’s juxtaposition of the concert with footage of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton reminds us—underscored by scenes of the Citadel in Haiti, a European fort for the Atlantic slave trade—Simone had also su ered for decades, professionally and personally, because of her outspoken civil rights activism.
Among these lmic appropriations is Gary’s own body, present not only in the footage of her in Giverny and Harlem but also in the hand that animates blank lm stock with pulsing blue and red biomorphic shapes. These ghostly yet haptic e ects dance and icker, infusing the montage with a palpable presence. Gary’s analog interventions function as an antidote to what she describes as “the lack of bodily autonomy Black women have experienced throughout the course of history.” During her time in Giverny, Gary told me, she found herself thinking about how Black women’s bodies constituted “a very particular and integral part of the American institution of chattel slavery,” their wombs becoming sites of
capitalist production through quotidian and organized violence. “In many ways, my body is the thesis or perhaps the through-line that connects the lm’s various themes: imperialism, capitalism, misogynoir [the combination of racism and sexism faced by Black women], the intersection of luxury and art history and the role of land. All of these notions are brought to bear on the body.”
At the entrance to The Giverny Suite, anking either side of the installation, stand two altars dedicated to female Orishas, deities of the Yoruba religion. One is for the water spirit Yemonja, mother of all and giver of life; the other is for Oshun, a river goddess of love and healing. Candles, owers and objects in colors associated with each Yoruban deity are placed carefully within the arrangement. The ritualistic purpose of these objects is personal for Gary, who practices a form of the ancient religion, organized around the veneration of ancestors. Another guiding principle for her work and life is the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, which posits that one can only move forward in time by going back to retrieve what is valuable and forgotten. Gary grew up in Dallas, Texas, in a strict Pentecostal household, where church was attended four days a week and secular music—90s hip-hop and diva pop at the time—was strictly o
essay In her studio … a photo of her great-grandmother watches over her; in a ritual to honor her forebear, Gary covers her head as she works.
limits. She rebelled, immersing herself in high school theater, but her religious origins nonetheless deeply shaped her worldview. Witnessing congregants speak in tongues and become imbued with the Holy Spirit introduced her to the presence of the immaterial. “It primed me for an openness to the numinous, the woo-woo, the two-headedness,” she once said in an interview, referring to the transcendence of physical and spiritual binaries, as well as to the notion that everyone is born with a spiritual guide or “master of the head” that corresponds with their personality.
The concepts of Sankofa and twoheadedness drive Gary’s synthesis of auto-ethnography and what she sees as ancestral collaboration—a reaching back to re-activate the visionary potential of the archive. “My initial excitement around archival materials was rooted in their haunted quality,” she told me. “The texture and muted colors of the footage, their metaphysical implications, create
an ethics of care that structures how I employ them.” In her studio in Dallas, where she recently returned after several years of working and living in New York, a photo of her great-grandmother watches over her; in a ritual to honor her forebear, Gary covers her head as she works.
In her recent lm Quiet As It’s Kept (2023), Gary invokes an ethics of care as a cinematic response to Toni Morrison’s rst novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). As with The Giverny Suite, she intercuts historical and contemporary footage with her signature analog animations, creating a kind of alchemy of the quotidian and the surreal. The titular phrase “quiet as it’s kept”—which was used by David Hammons as the title for an exhibition he curated in 2002 and gained widespread visibility as the title of the 2022 Whitney Biennial—is employed by Morrison in the novel as a trope for themes of resilience, pain and generational trauma, realities familiar to Gary. She alludes to them in other works, such as the installation You
Smell Like Outside. . . (2023), which draws its title from a Black Southern phrase. Both expressions embody multiple meanings, one of which is a shroud of shame, like the one worn by young Pecola in The Bluest Eye, whose descent into madness depicts how racism can manifest in self-loathing.
Quiet As It’s Kept weaves together archival scenes of Morrison discussing her work and an interview that Gary conducted with Dr. Kokahvah ZaudituSelassie, the author of African Spiritual Traditions in The Novels of Toni Morrison (2014). Close-ups of marigolds—a motif of both life and death in Morrison’s novel—are interspersed with those of Gary consuming the owers. She includes another phrase, the viral “Girls that get it, get it,” taken from a video by the Black TikToker KhaeNotBae, and juxtaposes it with non-Black users mimicking Blackness, poignantly connecting the novel to present-day issues. Gary also delves into the ip side of issues of
“My desire for a new world is predicated on the fact that this one must end. My intention with my work is to end the way we see and perceive our current world so that we can get about the business of visualizing, dreaming up and actively building the next one.” —Ja’Tovia Gary
appropriation with the use of a video of rap legend Lil’ Kim defending her changing appearance—wearing blonde wigs and blue contacts, bleaching her skin— shown alongside imagery of La Maison des Esclaves in Senegal (on Goree Island) and expanses of ocean.
By entangling the issues of colorism and racism that comprise Morrison’s novel with those of enslavement and black shing (a term coined in 2018 to describe white women cosplaying as Black women on social media), Gary engages—as Morrison did—in an intercultural conversation meant to invite healing through reckoning. “Where is the respect and the sympathy?” she seems to ask, reminding us of the toll exacted by mainstream, white-dominated culture on the mental health of Black women. In many ways, Gary is giving the gures she uses in her work their owers, challenging criticisms levied at them as a way to question double standards about desirability and respectability. Such double standards are also evident in her choice to overlay viral imitations of Blackness onto footage of Shirley Temple, who was known to perform in
blackface, conjuring Claudia’s infamous declaration in the The Bluest Eye: “I hate Shirley Temple. I want to poke her blue eyes out.” The juxtaposition points to the painful lesson at the heart of the novel, the way in which internalized racism—the desire for the “bluest eye”—creates, as Selassie states, “a self-genocide” that is inevitable “when you over-identify with your oppressor.” In a sequence preceded by archival footage from the 1990s of a young girl “catching” the Holy Spirit and a clip from the 1930s of a group of young Black girls in front of a sharecropper’s cabin, we watch Gary play with this idea: She puts on blue eyeshadow, black eyeliner and dons a Bettie Page-style wig. Gary’s self-transforming performance —echoing the opening lines recited by Selassie from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s iconic 1895 poem, “We wear the mask that grins and lies/it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes”—is a highly personal meditation on the paradoxical revelations of double-consciousness. There is agency in her gesture. In one of the lm’s nal scenes, we see her dressed in a blue sweater, stroking her face with a marigold as she intones a prayer to her guardian
spirit: “It is Yemonja I call in morning. It is Yemonja I call at night. And it is Yemonja who answers.” Like the Victorian settee in The Giverny Suite that rears its side legs, a nearby refrigerator over owing with marigolds accompanying the exhibition suggests her presence is already there. Gary recently posted an Instagram story with the caption: “End this world so that we can get the next one popping.” It made me think about her work and its distinctive ways of oscillating among past, present and future, its uncanny mix of the mournful and the prophetic. What did her statement say, if anything, about her intentions for her work going forward, I asked her. “My desire for a new world is predicated on the fact that this one must end. My intention with my work is to end the way we see and perceive our current world so that we can get about the business of visualizing, dreaming up and actively building the next one. An important role of the artist is to lend our radical imaginings, our unbridled creativity and curiosity, our deep longing for elsewhere to the e orts of those who seek liberation and ultimate peace. We cannot continue to exist as we currently are, that is clear. Extreme shifts must and will assuredly occur. Cataclysmic and microscopic change is happening every day. Worlds end and begin every day. I’m simply asking for us to be deliberate and clear about what we imagine in our desire for a future, more egalitarian project. And soon.”
On Berlinde De Bruyckere’s new work and secular art in sacred spaces
“My Arcangelo is not the angel of the annunciation. I think he’s much more human.”—Berlinde De Bruyckere
conversation In 2012, the Benedicti Claustra Onlus was founded as a non-profit branch of the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Established with the aim of renewing the church’s dialogue with living artists, the project has also served to increase public awareness of the artistic vocation of the church’s monastic community. Working alongside director and institutional curator Carmelo A. Grasso, San Giorgio Maggiore’s Benedictine monks help select and oversee site-specific installations for the basilica of the landmarked 16th-century church. Benedicti Claustra Onlus’s next presentation will be Berlinde De Bruyckere’s “City of Refuge III,” opening on April 20.
Carmelo A. Grasso
It’s so nice to be with you, Berlinde. I’ve known your work for twelve years, possibly more, and I immediately fell in love with it.
I said to myself, “One day in the abbey, we must do an exhibition with Berlinde.” When I received the proposal for your exhibition, I informed the monks, and we were immediately sure that we must do it.
Berlinde De Bruyckere
Thank you. San Giorgio Maggiore is a place I hold dear, and I believe the time is right for this project. For some time now, I have been working on a series of exhibitions titled “City of Refuge,” focusing on the idea of art as a sanctuary in places that have a history in this regard. For me, it is important to connect the idea of a city of refuge with the church, a place in which people historically found shelter.
Abbot Stefano Visintin
It’s a fitting title. Venice has been called a city of refuge. It can be, for people who not only need help or are sick but also people searching for meaning in life. This is part of why we are involved in this dialogue with contemporary art.
CG
It is also a refuge of the soul.
In preparation for the exhibition, De Bruyckere met with Grasso and Abbot Stefano Visintin at San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey on January 10 to talk about the ideas behind her new work and the merits and challenges of staging contemporary art in a religious space. These are edited portions of their conversation.
SV
Obviously we have now arrived at a point where religion and contemporary art are not exactly going in the same direction. This used to be the case, but it has weakened over the past few centuries.
BDB
Thinking about the proposals that I did for the church, Carmelo, I understand why you mentioned that you had followed my work already. There is a spiritual aspect to it.
CG
There is, although we are not necessarily looking for religious subjects. Let me say, there also is something more . . . perhaps through the element of skin, which I find to be an important part of your work. The skin is something that is so close with us.
BDB
Something we can touch. The tactile aspect is essential to my work.
CG
Yes. When I stand in front of your artwork, the receptors of my skin start to feel emotion. Sometimes it is negative, sometimes positive, but what is important is that I start to empathize with you, with your process, with your art. It can feel
transcendental—something that touches us directly as human beings.
BDB
The skin is something that is so personal, so recognizable.
CG
I immediately recognize it in your wax sculpture. It is the surface that is especially emotional for me. The wax also feels like something that connects to the Italian monasteries’ ancient traditions of candle-making and the ceremony of using candles during mass.
SV
Also, I think that in our current culture it is important to think about the body, seeing how we are always on the internet and so much of our life is virtual. There is the danger in thinking of yourself as only a pure spirit, when the reality is we are not. We are embodied—we have to pass through the body for everything, in relation to others. Having only virtual friends would be a loss of humanity. In the end, what’s the difference between us and artificial intelligence? One thing is sure: artificial intelligence can never feel.
BDB
It does not have emotion.
SV Exactly—it doesn’t touch or see
pp. 94–95
In situ view of Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto’s Risen Christ with Saint Andrew and Donors, 1583–85 (detail), Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
p. 96
Berlinde De Bruyckere, Arcangelo (San Giorgio) III, 2023–2024, 2024 (detail). Wax, animal hair, silicone, iron and epoxy, 100 x 33 x 31 1/2 in. (254 x 84 x 80 cm)
p. 97
View from the bell tower of the Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore p. 98
Works by Berlinde De Bruyckere, clockwise from top: Installation for the Sacristy of San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey, 2024 (shown in progress). Wax, iron and epoxy; Banner for San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey, 2024 (shown in progress). Textile, steel and aluminum; Arcangelo (San Giorgio) III, 2023–2024, 2024 (detail)
p. 101
Carmelo A. Grasso, Berlinde De Bruyckere and Abbot Stefano Vistinin in front of Giuseppe Porta (also known as Salviati)’s Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, 1575–91/96 approx., Abbey of San Giorgio Maggiore
Artwork © Berlinde De Bruyckere. Photos: Mirjam Devriendt. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
things. It can only calculate. It does not know the sensations we have.
BDB
It is through the body that we can feel and that we can express ourselves. I often say the body is the container of the soul. Confronting the viewer with a physical experience is what my work is all about.
SV
Yes, though I would say that the body is not only the container of the soul—the body is the expression of the soul. It is the sign, the symbol of the soul. You cannot separate the two.
BDB
For me, having the human figure in my work is very important because that is what we know the best. In this same vein, I use trees, horses, deer—there is no hierarchy between them. I appropriate them all in the same manner, as icons. They are equally familiar elements we relate to as human beings, among which we live.
CG
Although at the same time, it’s possible for this recognition to feel confusing. The figures or trees in your work can be very strange. They can look like something that is destroyed in some way or transformed into something else.
BDB Always.
CG
Sometimes it’s better to become confused, because when you lose your reason, you find emotion that allows you to empathize with the artist or with the artwork. This is a point in your work and also your process.
BDB
I completely agree. My use of religious themes is rooted in my boarding school days. My first encounter with the image was through paintings and sculptures of religious topics. They started my imagination. I was trying to understand them while listening to stories from the Bible. This was the very start of my creative process.
Meanwhile, so many other images have entered my world. I’ve traveled to so many places, so many different continents with other religions or with no religion.
SV
Our selection of art and artists has always been about transcendental research, the need to interact with art and to find a place within the basilica—as Tintoretto, Ricci, Carpaccio and many others did in the past—as well as to think about the needs of the artists to get closer to the divine dimension and translate it or at least try to present it to the public.
BDB
I feel that as human beings, we are always striving for something of a higher order.
SV
This is something connected with human desire, to find something that gives you a sense of life.
BDB
I think human beings are looking for rituals, not just in a religious sense, but in a more general cultural way. Even in everyday life, we find rituals that ground us and grant us structure, define the rhythm of our day.
SV
For me, life in a Benedictine monastery is regulated by a rhythm of prayer, work and reading. The Benedictine community is the oldest order in Venice, and from the start we have always been involved in cultural activities. Part of the challenge in the present day is that people are accustomed to the traditional visual language of the church, but they may not necessarily understand or connect with it anymore.
BDB
This is something I noticed when I visited and sat on a bench and observed for a period of time. Some people enter the church and go around in five minutes and then they go right back out.
SV
This can happen especially if it is something people are used to. It no longer has an impact. At
this point, some people have lost the understanding of the specific symbols or iconography. They register only as familiar and expected things. They don’t raise any questions for a visitor. They might feel as unnoticeable as the sun rising or the sun going down.
CG
Especially because people think that when you are working in a preserved church, the iconography is fundamental.
SV
With our art installations, visitors can have something else that can force them to think more about what they see.
CG
Exactly. If you put new artwork into a church, it can become even more powerful than presenting it in a museum or gallery, because it raises the question of why it’s there.
BDB
It’s important for me to think about bringing the subject of the angel back into the church. When you look at the sculptures without knowing that they are arcangelos, nobody would see them as angels. But once you know that the title of the work is Arcangelo, it transforms what you see and what you feel.
SV
Also in this case, the name “arcangelo” can give a direction to people. It can raise questions and lead to thinking, “Why is the arcangelo this way?”
CG
Berlinde, your Arcangelo has come to say something, though we don’t necessarily understand what it is that he wants to say to us. He’s not a cute blond angel, which is what we traditionally know from culture. You can be afraid about this kind of arcangelo, and there is a power in this. It’s more real.
BDB
My Arcangelo is not the angel of the annunciation. I think he’s much more human.
CG
He is a message himself. What you observed about people visiting the
“Venice has been called a city of refuge. It can be, for people who not only need help or are sick but also people searching for meaning in life. This is part of why we are involved in this dialogue with contemporary art.”—Abbot Stefano Visintin
conversation church and leaving quickly can be true. However, since the time that we started to show site-specific artwork in the church, we also see surprise from visitors. When people come inside, they normally expect to see classical paintings, the altar masterpiece and traditional objects. When they see site-specific contemporary artwork, this can be challenging to process. Sometimes the reaction of surprise is positive, but many times it can be negative.
In the beginning, it was a little difficult. Sometimes it can still feel that way, because we have to overcome prejudices people may have about contemporary art inside a church. And for us, we must remember that the basilica is a consecrated space. Monks do services regularly, and it functions as a normal community church, with occasional weddings and other ceremonies. It’s not a museum, which is very important to remember.
BDB
For me, the big question was how to react to and respond to what is already there in the church. I think about the painting of Jesus and the temple in the sacristy. For me, this is a very powerful painting that encompasses everything from life until death, with all the questions in between. It is the reason I wanted to bring a huge installation into this particular area of the church. You really feel yourself being very small when you are in this space.
CG
This is also felt through the works presented in the sacristy, which are massive pieces of iron.
BDB
Right. The rusty iron tables are very heavy and imposing, but they also have branches made out of wax, which are fragile and break easily. For some of the branches, I use flesh-toned colors so they become more like bodies than trees. I want to give a sense of how nature works. Sometimes nature is fantastic in how it creates so much beauty and life, yet at the same time, look at all the
catastrophes in the world. Nature can destroy a whole village in half an hour. I want the duality of the kindness and brutality of nature to be felt in this installation.
CG
It gives an extraordinary feeling of being in a forest that is more or less destroyed. We see the process of death and also what comes next— the virgulto, the new branch, a message of life.
SV
Berlinde, returning to the arcangelos, the way you position mirrors around them produces different sensations for me. First, in the mirror, you have a reflection of the basilica. It gives a symmetry that feels Palladian. And the angels are reflected as well, so we see more of them.
BDB
It was important to me to reflect on and connect to the architecture of the basilica. Apart from enhancing the presence of the angels, the mirrors also add an element of being in between states, in between the material and the transcendental.
CG
We don’t really host painting or traditional sculpture. We present installations that people go around. Sometimes people even move through the artwork. This allows them to become a part of it. And in thinking about why an artist brought this work into the church, people can also start to reflect on the religious masterpieces around them.
SV
It allows for a deeper reflection and contemplation.
BDB
In another place, this installation would not be the same.
CG
In the past, artists without the church could not express their art in certain ways, and the church without artists could not explain the depth and mystery of faith. The inclusion of contemporary artworks within a sacred space may seem like an original and almost provocative concept, but it
makes sense. People ask me how it’s possible to bring contemporary art inside the church. And I always answer, “Why not?” Art started in the church, in a religious space, which was the original place to bring art into people’s lives. Museums and galleries would come only later.
SV
We feel it’s extremely important to recover this partnership and collaborate again. I think people also come to Venice because the city is a piece of art in itself. Continuing to offer art in a city of art feels like a natural avenue for us.
CG
The first responsibility of the community is to choose what to bring to the public. It’s always a dialogue between our organization and artists, and also the government. There is the Soprintendenza, the office that authorizes our projects. It’s a very nice process.
Venice is a city where art happens naturally, through the Biennale especially. It is an extraordinary and spiritual place. It’s suspended in the water—and for that and other reasons, it’s of course very fragile. We don’t know what the future will be for Venice. But we are here now, presenting art in San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey.
SV
It is an opportunity.
CG
A great opportunity.
BDB
For me, too.
“City of Refuge III,” curated by Carmelo A. Grasso, Ory Dessau and Peter Buggenhout, opens as a collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia on April 20, and will remain on view through November 24.
“People ask me how it’s possible to bring contemporary art inside the church. And I always answer, ‘Why not?’ Art started in the church, in a religious space, which was the original place to bring art into people’s lives. Museums and galleries would come only later.”—Carmelo A. Grasso
Emiliano Echeverria and Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez on preserving Cuba’s recorded musical heritage
randy kennedy
For almost half a century, the veteran Bay Area disc jockey and musicologist Emiliano Echeverria has devoted himself to studying, collecting and broadcasting the recorded music of Cuba, which he describes as a vast palette of cultural and historical colors, a vital wellspring of 20th-century popular music. Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, a Brooklyn-based art historian and photographer, represents a new generation of Cuban-music enthusiasts and self-taught scholars; for several years now, he has been at work compiling and cataloguing his own collection of rare Cuban records.
Recently, Echeverria and Yáñez sat down to talk about their shared obsession with Cuban music, as well as the troubled history of Cuban patrimony and the painful legacy of the United States embargo against the country. These are edited excerpts of their conversation.
Maybe we should start by talking about when the two of you met and became aware of your mutual interest in preserving not only the objects but the history and culture of Cuban music.
marcelo gabriel yáñez
I had heard of Emiliano through a mutual friend who put me in touch with him because I was going to California to teach for a quarter, but he also mentioned that Emiliano had been working on a digitized archive of Cuban music. So I called Emiliano, and we made plans to meet in Oakland when I was in the Bay Area earlier this year.
rk
Emiliano, when did you start thinking about Cuban music in earnest, and then begin to look for its records and history?
emiliano echeverria
I started collecting records as basically a collector of junk, when I was a little kid. When you’re that age, you pick up all kinds of junk and crap around you, and you get fascinated by it. When I was nine years old, somebody dumped a bunch of old jazz records from the ’20s, and I found them and I still have them. San Francisco at that time, before any redevelopment, was a city full of old buildings that had deteriorated, and in these buildings they had second-hand stores, and in these second-hand stores they were selling the remnants of the old city. My brother picked up a cylinder record player; I got two wind-up acoustical record players. Access to that stuff was cheap because it was being tossed, basically.
rk
Nobody wanted it.
ee
Nobody wanted it. The stuff was there if you wanted to get it. As a kid, I just started picking stuff up. I collected jazz, I collected blues. Later on, I was running a youth program where the father of a young woman who worked for us had this mix of Puerto Rican and Cuban 78s— Grupo Victoria, Sexteto Habanero, Trio Matamoros, Cuarteto Marcano—and the records by Sexteto Habanero just knocked me loose. I said, “What in the world?”
rk
Had you listened to much Cuban music?
ee
I’d heard it as a child. I was probably listening in my mama’s womb. But when you’re a kid, you push away from what your parents listen to. When you’re an adult, you start rediscovering. Habanero was deep and dense and different. And so I went down to our local Cuban music record store, Discolandia, and I went to Sylvia Rodriguez, the owner, and I said, “Sylvia, you got any records by Sexteto Habanero?” And she said, “No, those are very, very rare records.”
rk
Did that plant the seed in your mind to figure out where it was, how to get your hands on it?
ee
I was three thousand miles from the East Coast, which I thought of as the center of record collecting. So the idea of records of that nature—that old and hard to find—filtering to the West Coast seemed too remote at the time.
rk
When was the first time that you went to Cuba to look for records, or talk to musicians, or find history?
ee
The first time I went to Cuba to look for records was in 1999. There was a little store on Calle Neptuno in Central Havana called Seriosha’s Shop, which a guy named Gutierrez had a stall in, and it was packed with LPs, 45s and 78s. I must’ve bought twenty Habanero 78s from that man.
mgy
I think it’s important to add, for context, that when Sexteto Habanero was recording and these albums were being sold, they were incredibly popular internationally. Cuban music was, like jazz, a music that traveled the world. There’s a really good book called Noise Uprising, by Michael Denning, which discusses how recorded music traveled through port cities, and it was through these port cities that modern music was born. There’s this idea that the really early recordings were primitive, or untouched. But he discusses how these Cuban records have sometimes even showed up in India. The easiest pressings to find of Cuban records from the ’20s were pressed for the West African market.
rk
Which is like a circle, right? The music being recorded at that time would have been heavily influenced by earlier African music?
ee
Yes, the Europeans brought their musical traditions over, but so did the Africans. And over time, these traditions mixed together.
mgy
You see the Afro-Cuban influence of Abakuá in many of these records. The bongoceros, almost all of them were Abakuá, which is a fraternal order much like the Masons. Occasionally in the chorus someone will sing in Abakuá dialect from a specific ritual, and it just makes my hair…
rk
Come up on the back of your neck.
ee
They’re invoking the gods right then and there on the records.
mgy
It’s radical, and I think primarily possible because the Americans recording them were clueless. On a lot of early Cuban recordings—we’re talking 1907, 1908— some of the narratives are extremely political and kind of revolutionary. I have a friend in Spain who has a record from 1911 or 1912 where the group goes into Abakuá for a good minute and a half, which is just so wild to hear.
ee
The record executives used to tell the musicians, “Whatever you record is all right. Just don’t make it dirty.”
rk
And because they probably didn’t speak Spanish, they didn’t even have any idea whether it was dirty or not.
ee
Exactly.
mgy
There’s another book, by Ned Sublette [Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, 2007], which makes the argument that Cuba is where American music was born, with all the cross-cultural interaction happening through the slave trade. A lot of these records sold really well outside of Cuba, and were primarily recorded in New York, the earliest ones in Havana. The record companies sent people around the world, which is also what Denning talks about.
ee
A lot of the spread of the music that we’re speaking of here has to do with the Victor Talking Machine Company itself. Victor was the largest purveyor of Latin American music for decades, and it had arrangements with the Gramophone Company in England, which issued those recordings under the label His Master’s Voice all over the world. They also had connections with Pathé Records of France. So records were put out on Electrola, and on other labels out
of France, England and Germany. Cuban music did well in Germany before 1933, for example. But it was in large part due to the financial arrangements that had been made between the record companies.
rk
Was there a Cuban record industry in the ’20s or ’30s?
mgy
No, the Cuban record industry started in the late ’40s. There were two record labels, Star and Panart.
ee
Star made their records for radio broadcast, not for commercial distribution. I have a Star record, and guess what? The grooves go backward.
rk
Wait, explain that to me.
ee
It’s very simple. Many radio stations also made their own transcriptions. When you cut a transcription disc, it turned out that the shavings, when cut from the outside in, got in the way and fouled up the recording. It got onto the record and the record drew the needle over them. By going from the outside in, the stuff accumulated in the middle of the record. On many radio transcription discs, there’s a check mark saying “outside in” or “inside out.” Star records were pressed inside out.
rk
Meaning that you put the needle in near the label, and it went out from there?
ee
That’s right.
rk
It reminds me of a story, maybe a legend, about the subways here in New York, where people would steal the incandescent light bulbs. So the subway had light bulbs manufactured with the thread going the wrong way, and sockets made specially for them. If you stole a subway bulb, you were shit out of luck, because you wouldn’t be able to screw them into your own socket. [Laughs.] For early Cuban music, when was the switch from cylinder to disc to record?
ee
Well, the earliest Cuban cylinders are from around 1904, and Cuban discs are around the same time. They competed with each other, but cylinders in Cuba fell out of favor fairly quickly because the climate was murder on them. They were made of wax. If you wiped them wrong, you’d wipe the information off of them. They weren’t easy to store, anyway. They were like storing jars.
rk
What’s the earliest recorded Cuban music on cylinder?
ee
It would probably be the recordings made by Rosalia Chalia Herrera on the Bettini cylinders. They came out of France. She was an opera singer. There are reports of some earlier recordings made on cylinders in the very early 1890s, but those were not really for commercial release yet.
rk
Thinking about collectors and musicologists like Harry Smith and John Fahey, who collected very early records around the American South, what’s the history in Cuba of people doing essentially what you’re doing, going to shops and flea markets and door-to-door to understand what has survived and help preserve it?
ee
When you collect records in Cuba you know that there have been people there collecting and archiving for a long time, a lot longer than I have. Their parents and their grandparents did it, and some of these collections survive.
mgy
It’s interesting. For decades after the Revolution, you wouldn’t see early records available because people still had the possibility of playing them. Soviet turntables were coming in, and even though not a ton of people had the means to play them, people still kept everything in their homes. When people left their homes and others moved in, a lot of the stuff would still be there, just kept that way. Once the Special Period hit after the fall of the Soviet Union, people started trying to find new ways to make money because there was such desperate need, and antiquarian vendors started gathering in plazas in Havana to sell books and records. People were like, “Oh, I can get money for this?” So they went into their houses and started pulling out all the old records.
ee
They would put them on stairways. The stairways went up one side and there was a little doorway going down, and people would have little racks on that bottom part, selling books and records privately, under the radar.
mgy
There’s always been a black market in Cuba, but in terms of older records, a lot of stuff really came out of the woodwork during the Special Period.
“Every Monday night for thirteen years, I would go to my studio and digitize Cuban records … No cleaning, no filtration. I just digitized them to get them out into the world. I ended up with close to fifteen hundred 78s copied, a huge hard drive of music.”—Emiliano Echeverria
ee
It was people trying to clean out their houses and get by, and even now, there’s a lot left to find. I’ve found some very obscure records that nobody had heard of in this country. For example, a group called Sexteto Gloria Cubana, the first to use a piano in the performance of a song on a record. Fortunately, between trips, friends of mine have looked out for things and held them for me. Getting out of the country has always been a big pain in the butt, because of customs.
rk
What’s it like going through customs with records?
ee
Well, I can tell you about one incident. It was 2010, and the attitude of the guy at customs was, “You’re taking our patrimony.” But the thing was, these are not unique works. They’re mass-produced recordings. The officer’s superior came out and said, “Will you please let those people through? These are records. Don’t worry about it, just let them through.” That’s what has to be remembered about recording companies as well—when the industrial production ceased, many of the companies just got rid of their inventories. I’ve heard of tons of records being dumped into the river outside of the RCA Camden plant in New Jersey, just to junk them. RCA used to have ledgers of everything they recorded. I understand that a lot of that was dumped as well. Physical records were not considered works of art at the time. They were not considered cultural artifacts to be preserved. They were industrial commodities. They got rid of them.
mgy
I’ve gone into a warehouse of records in Cuba where all over the floor are shattered 78s of really important music being thrown away because there are no resources to keep them and priorities lie elsewhere. When people are hungry—and there are a lot of food shortages in Cuba right now— the priorities are elsewhere, and so a lot of this material just gets neglected. Most people don’t have a turntable. I think of a friend of ours, a historian of Cuban music, Ricardo Oropesa Fernández. Someone from Canada or Europe brought him
digitizing equipment, and he donated a lot of it, really vital tools, to the National Museum of Music. So much in Cuba has to slip in through the back door because of the embargo. Every time I go, it’s incredibly frustrating because of the policies, and you see the effects very clearly.
ee
If you go to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, you’ll find this there too, and not because of an embargo, but because of the poverty, starvation, narcotics, all of the problems. Trying to find discography or music from Central America—
mgy
It’s impossible.
ee
It’s way harder even than it is in Cuba. My wife’s grandfather introduced jazz to Central America. I’m not saying that lightly; it was mentioned upon his death in 1945 in Billboard magazine. And yet nobody can find his records. You’re not going to find those records, because there have been earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, revolutions, as well as a lot of corruption.
rk
That seems to make the work that you and others are doing in Cuba and elsewhere, to document and save music, even more important, because of all of the forces that continue to contribute to its loss.
mgy
Emiliano, I remember you told me that on one of your trips, someone from the museum ended up giving you a letter, like an honor, which made things easier.
ee
It greased things up a lot, yes.
rk
Marcelo told me about this—that you compiled a hard drive of thousands of collected recordings and that your archive has been very important within Cuba?
ee
Here’s what happened. Every Monday night for thirteen years, I would go to my studio and digitize Cuban records. It started in 2006, and finally stopped with the pandemic. Every Monday night, I would copy about thirty records. No cleaning, no
filtration. I just digitized them to get them out into the world. I ended up with close to fifteen hundred 78s copied, a huge hard drive of music. When I started going to Cuba, I would run into people who worked at the Museo de la Musica, and one of them was a gentleman who educated me in Cuban music history, and led me to contacts where I could find records. So I decided to make copies of my digitized collection for him and for the Museo as a gift. I gave him a copy of the hard drive and he said thank you, and that was that. Then a couple of years later, the Cuban jazz band Maraca was touring in San Francisco. I was in the green room with them between performances, and my wife goes to introduce me to the young pianist, and before she can say my name, he says, “Emiliano Echeverria. You’re famous in Cuba!” I’m going to myself, “Oh no, what did I do?” He says, “Everybody’s talking about this wonderful gift that you gave.” I found out that the man from the Museo de la Musica had hundreds of copies of my collection made and distributed the recordings to all the music schools in Cuba. It was an example of returning the patrimony to the source, and I’m very proud that I did it and proud about what resulted from it. Nothing pleases me more than reaching out to, and sharing music with, Cuban people.
mgy
And in recent years more people on the island have been able to get the equipment to digitize material and upload it to YouTube. Emiliano’s hard drive has kept circulating.
rk
It’s now like a kind of commons that people are adding to?
ee
It’s wonderful. There are many people there who care deeply. It’s a huge struggle because no one is helping anyone out in terms of the government and the resources are always stretched so thin. But there are people who, on their own initiative, in whatever way they can, are trying to preserve a culture from dying. We’re working together to help something important survive. We all do it our own way. In the end, the sum is always greater than the parts.
“For decades after the Revolution, you wouldn’t see early records available because people still had the possibility of playing them … Once the Special Period hit after the fall of the Soviet Union, people started trying to find new ways to make money because there was such desperate need, and antiquarian vendors started gathering in plazas in Havana to sell books and records.”—Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez
“I went out and stayed out until 5:00 in the morning. I was laying down on some people’s grass and the sprinklers came on by themselves. I thought it was raining, then I noticed it was the sprinklers, then I ran, then I noticed my watch on the ground. I ran and got my watch and then was hitchhiking to get some meat. No luck, then I went home.”
—DeLear
In this installment of The Artist’s Library, our recurring series in which novelist Sarah Blakley-Cartwright asks artists to discuss their favorite books, New York painter Billy Sullivan speaks about the fearless and frank diary of L.A. musician Sean DeLear (1965–2017).
By Sarah Blakley-Cartwright
“Did I ever tell you
about
me?
Well,
I
am about five foot six inches tall…I am Black, have a nice bod, am doing OK in school except in English. My cock is about nine inches long and I love it. I would love to pose nude for Jack, Jim, or Tyler and make a porn film. My prize possession is a Minolta XG-7: my camera. It is worth $250.00. I am gay, as you know I think.”—DeLear
This book was a delight. You used the words “fresh and cool,” Billy, when first describing it to me. In his diary, Sean DeLear comes across as exuberant, poignant and funny—he named himself as a homonym for “chandelier,” a brilliant pun. Did you ever meet him?
billy sullivan
This kid! Don’t you wish we knew him? No, I never got to meet Sean. But when I was reading the book it became clear to me that I identified with him, with his queerness, even though I was an Italian-Irish Catholic white boy. His diaries made me think of what it was like when I was fourteen, taking the subway to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, getting out of Brooklyn, finding the freedom to start experiencing who I was. He had to get over the hill, and I had to get out of Brooklyn.
Also, when I searched for more information about Sean’s life, it reminded me of Jackie Curtis, who became an underground star and much more. When Jackie came back into my life in the ’70s, hanging around Max’s Kansas City and coming to our house for dinner, he
reminded me that we were in the same gym class! His grandmother had a bar called Slugger Ann’s. It was a gay bar in the East Village and there were all these photographs of Greta Garbo.
sbc
You paint portraits of your friends and muses. Have you ever painted Sean?
bs
No, I prefer to paint people I know. It works better that way. If I wanted to paint Sean, I’d have to be using his photographs. But they’re perfect just the way they are. He was documenting himself from day one. His photographs and videos are divine.
sbc
Yes, documenting and creating. Sean was a vocalist who fronted the indie band Glue, a well-known cabaret performer and a visual artist who collaborated with Kembra Pfahler and Vaginal Davis. What does his work in the arts mean to you?
bs
When I got the book I started looking up who he was, and I fell in love with his music video, his running on grass in heels and diving into a lake. I was sold.
sbc
Sean was a pioneering punk and a party-scene fixture, as well as being unapologetically Black and queer during the ’70s, in conservative Simi Valley, Ventura County. The diary depicts his many sexcapades with a fearless swagger. It’s not just bravado, it's bravery. I was inspired by his self-appointed freedom. Did you feel the same?
bs
It brought me back to subway sexcapades in men’s rooms at fourteen on my way home from high school. Not to mention going home with people I met on the street. I wish I could have been more accepting of it then. The thing I love about the diaries is that he’s so up-front about it.
sbc
I was struck by the lack of transition between his daily life and his sex life. The sex is embedded, without partition.
didn’t spend long hours describing the difficulties; he simply dealt with what he wanted.
sbc
I wonder if he kept later diaries.
bs
I couldn’t find any.
sbc
Beneath all the insight, experience and acumen, do you still see the child in the narrator?
bs
Yes, I do, and that child knows exactly what he wants.
sbc
It’s not fraught.
bs
It’s about learning, experiencing and figuring it out. All-natural teenage stuff. It’s all good. He’s finding it and sharing that on the page with himself at night in this little book.
sbc
What was your high school experience like?
bs
It was an art high school. There were guys putting on eye makeup in the bathrooms, wearing mohair sweaters backward so the “V” went down their neck, spraying hairspray. You pretended you weren’t like that. We’d go to this place called Pam Pam’s in the West Village. Because it was an art school, you had fabulous gay women and men teaching. It was wonderful. You wouldn’t really know, but they’d assign all these great books.
sbc
bs
At fifteen, it’s a ruling force. I didn’t go to bathhouses at fourteen. I didn’t have the balls to do that. One time my mother took me shopping at Bloomingdale’s and bought me a coat. But then I met a man in the men’s room, and my mother and I got separated. When I finally got back home to Brooklyn she asked me what happened and I just said I got lost. It’s how your sex drive carries you away. It’s these urges, and you don’t know why you’re doing it. You just are.
sbc
He made what can’t have been easy look like a breeze. Do you see evidence in these diaries of the flip side, evidence of the difficult labor of being a trailblazer, especially at such a young age?
bs
No, I don’t. It’s so clear and direct, the way he writes about his day. That’s the beauty of this diary—he
Sean is also a seemingly effortless literary stylist, recounting his life in a register that could easily take a writer decades to develop. What is it about the prose style that strikes you most?
bs
How matter of fact it is. It reminds me of Jimmy Schuyler’s poetry in his weather diaries, which are very direct. Schuyler was an amazing guy. He wrote great poetry. One time, I saw Jimmy when I was picking up a friend early in the morning at Fairfield Porter’s house in Southampton, in the 1970s. Jimmy was sitting in the screened-in porch with a drink in his hand, just like in Fairfield’s paintings.
sbc
You’re known for having chronicled the downtown New York scene for what, fifty years?
“Then Tyler and me were sitting there and he got pissed because I would not cum or do anything and went storming out like a bolt of lighting. This other guy was sitting on the can and he was beating and then stuck it right through the hole and I made him cum—and his son goes to my school?”—DeLear
bs
Let’s call it fifty-five.
sbc
Has the meaning of that changed for you over time?
bs
It’s a way of keeping a visual record of where and who I am at that moment. Though the process stays the same. I can go back and work on an early image and it’s like I’m there again. My painting AmyandCarol, Deux Magots (2023) was originally a drawing that got destroyed in a fire in one of Mickey Ruskin’s restaurants. At the time, Amy was my wife and Carol [LaBrie] was a big model. Amy was going to run Kenzo in America, and we were in France. When I was making it into a painting, I remembered that whole time in France—what the girls were wearing and how much fun we were having. When I do something from an archive, it brings me to where I was.
sbc
You can time travel in your own images.
bs
And then I paint the present moment, like when I painted you and Nicolas [Party]. I think about the whole visit when I’m working on a painting. Like how we also had Francesca [Kaufmann] there, being her energetic self. For me, working on the painting brings all that stuff together.
sbc
It was wonderful to look up and see you in the front row at my reading last week.
bs
You talk the same way as I do, I think. When you were talking about your life, it was so beautiful. And your baby daughter who was there too is something. She was giving you everything she had. She was competing. She’s dressed in those European clothes and taking her shoes off. She flirts. She’s comfortable. She’s fabulous! She knows who she is. She doesn’t hide. That takes a lot, to be a child who does that.
sbc
You and Sean share a deep interest in the people around you, Billy. Neither of you are working in a vacuum. How much are your portraits about the person they depict? What is it that you love about people?
bs
I’ve always used their first names, because it’s not about them being famous. It’s that they’re people. Sometimes, people want full names. It’s supposed to be a painting, and it happens to be a portrait. The people around me are my family of choice and it goes back generations. I love who they are. The portrait is about being with that person in that moment and my memory of it. But it could be someone I just met yesterday.
sbc
Have you painted people you just met the day before?
bs
Sometimes. There’s a portrait of a guy who was at the opening of my show at the FLAG Art Foundation earlier this year. He had this watch on, and he had these shorts; I just took a picture. It’s also about the visual wandering eye. There’s something beautiful about that.
sbc
Something that strikes me about Sean is the authorial tone, the
young writer’s astonishing selfpossession. He seems immensely cultivated and mature in so many ways, and he proudly wore so much of who he was on his sleeve. Given that these entries were written when Sean was fifteen years old, do you feel there’s any chance he might have preferred the diary didn’t see the light of day?
bs
I don’t know. I’m just so happy it’s out there to be seen. Self-possession becomes self-acceptance. What a gift. He was right on time, and the rest of us are still trying to catch up.
sbc
I love looking at your career with the insight that you consider yourself a diarist. Have you ever kept a written diary?
bs
No, but I have a photo archive that I dive into. It’s all been digitized.
sbc
What a relief.
bs
In my studio, there are boxes of slides everywhere and carousels that I once used to project them. Then I had to adjust to what was going on. It’s more technical now. There’s Photoshop. Film used to go away and come back; it wasn’t instant. I love Polaroids, but film was heaven because it would go away and then come back!
sbc
Sean was great with film.
bs
He was always going out to get more film and take nude films of himself. And he got an F in photography! He was developing his art.
sbc
There is occasionally, within the entries, a longing that makes me feel wistful. But on the whole, the diary left me with a sense of exhilaration and triumph, imparted by his prose and rhapsodic confidence. What feeling does the diary leave you with?
bs
That it should be required reading in high school!
“In
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Apr 4 – Sep 2, 2024
The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
25 Harbor Shore Drive
Boston MA 02210
Major support for Firelei Báez is provided by Hauser & Wirth, the Henry Luce Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Karen and Brian Conway, David and Jocelyne DeNunzio, Mathieu O. Gaulin, The Kotzubei-Beckmann Family Philanthropic Fund, Lise and Je rey Wilks, an anonymous donor, the Jennifer Epstein Fund for Women Artists, and the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society.
Firelei Báez, Untitled (Les tables de geographie reduites en un jeu de cartes) (detail), 2022. Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas. 82 3/8 × 105 3/4 inches (209.2 × 268.4 cm). Collection of Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo by Jackie Furtado. © Firelei Báez
A collaboration between Rio Terà dei Pensieri and Mark Bradford Shop a range of products made by Rio Terà cooperative members incarcerated in Venice’s prison system and help us continue our vital work.
Visit Us
Fondamenta dei Frari, San Polo 2559/A, Venice, Italy
9:00 am – 7:30 pm
In 1994, a group of friends visited Alessandro Travagnin, a man who was then imprisoned in Casa Circondariale Santa Maria Maggiore in Venice, and began initiating craft projects to help with the boredom and isolation of incarceration. Out of this emerged Rio Terà dei Pensieri, a cooperative of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, as well as volunteers, who work together at Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca and Casa Circondariale Santa Maria Maggiore, Venice’s prisons for women and men. In the former, Rio Terà runs a produce garden that serves as a local provider to nearby restaurants and sells vegetables in a weekly market just outside the prison; a cosmetics lab also makes toiletries from the herbs and medicinal plants cultivated on-site. In the latter, the collective oversees studios for silkscreening and upcycling disused vinyl into bags and accessories.
In 2016, ahead of the Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States, artist Mark Bradford was interested in starting a project that would create a lasting social impact in the city and began searching for an organizational partner. He eventually found Rio Terà and embarked with it on Process Collettivo, a collaboration
aiming to draw attention to the cooperative’s work and provide it with the resources to flourish. This is achieved primarily through a storefront that sells goods made by the collective in the prisons—thus providing funding for the non-profit—and offers both resources and employment for the previously incarcerated.
Eight years later, as Bradford’s involvement with the cooperative draws to a close, a new book titled Mark Bradford: Process Collettivo (Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2024), edited by writer, curator and art critic Nicole R. Fleetwood, examines the project and Rio Terà more broadly, situating these activities within wider conversations about carceral studies and social practice art. To this effort, new essays by Asale Angel-Ajani, Elisabetta Grande, Mitchell S. Jackson and Jessica Lynne look critically at the Italian carceral system, the importance of creative practices inside prison and the history of community engagement projects undertaken by Black artists in the United States. In a conversation with former Rio Terà president Liri Longo, Bradford explains that this sort of work “has to come from an interest in humanity and people,” in allowing those made invisible to appear and be heard.
Indeed, central to the book are new interviews with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated members of Rio Terà. In the spirit of Bradford’s intention, excerpts from those interviews are reproduced below, alongside interviews with Rio Terà members conducted in 2017, after Process Collettivo’s first year. These interviews have been translated from Italian and edited for clarity. Several of those interviewed have requested that their names not be used; out of respect for their privacy and for the sake of consistency, individuals are identified by first initials throughout.
n.
In prison, time passes slowly. It is marked by a heavy dose of routine: every day is the same as the last. The fact that I am one of the few people lucky enough to have a career path helps the time pass more quickly. . . . Two months ago, thanks to Rio Terà and Article 21, a recognized prison mandate, I started working outside the institution four days a week. Now the weight of prison life has decreased, including the stress and anxiety. In fact, it is all gone, and I am left to think only about the future and how I will use this opportunity going forward.
m.
I
first encountered the cooperative in the Giudecca prison, where I worked in the cosmetics lab. My first impressions were very good—it was a positive thing, maybe one of the most positive things in an environment like prison. I was involved for seven years total, first working in the cosmetics lab, and then as a salesclerk at the Process Collettivo storefront when I was out on an alternative measure. Now I have left Venice and returned to my home country, where I am an entrepreneur, together with my family.
I felt lucky to be able to work, especially for this cooperative; in this context, there were not only working relationships but
also a great humanity, and opportunities for exchange and dialogue that I found very useful on my path. I had very good relationships with many people—both the operating staff and the volunteers. While still in prison, thanks to permits of leave for events or for work, I slowly began to “explore” Venice. Later, when I got out, I felt welcomed by everyone, and I got along well in the city. Working in the store, in contact with the public, I met many people, some of whom even became friends. It was very important for me to work in this cooperative, both in and out of prison.
j.
I was incarcerated in Venice when I heard about the cooperative, but then I got out, and I didn’t meet them directly. Two years later, I was arrested again, and I was in a cell with a friend of mine who was working with them; through him, I got in touch and asked to work in the bag manufacturing lab. At that time, I was very happy to have the job, and it gave me a lot of satisfaction. I learned the craft; I found that I enjoyed sewing, learning new things and being creative. When I was in the workshop, sometimes I could even forget that I was in prison.
In the cooperative, I was able to experience creativity, the satisfaction of inventing new things. . . . I had the time
and means to know myself better and to understand what I want to do. Both inside and when I got out, there was always someone to listen, to help me think and reflect. . . . Now I’m thinking of new projects of my own to carry on from this experience.
g.
Joining the cooperative meant, yes, working, but also having relationships with the staff and exchanging ideas and conversations. This slowly helped me regain confidence in myself and in the fact that there are good people. . . . I have established many friendships with workers in nearby shops, bars and restaurants and with people who live in the area and drop by. Over the years, we have had many loyal customers who always come back— Venetians, people from other Italian cities and tourists. I feel lucky, because we have become like a family.
f.
I liked working in the cosmetics lab right away because I was given the opportunity to learn so many new things that I hadn’t had any experience with before. . . . I feel fulfilled. I have learned the value of work and commitment and . . . I can see that I will have an opportunity when I get out of prison. I have made my family happy as well. I took the chance that was given to
me by the prison to change my life. I wish that all incarcerated women could have the same opportunity I have had, the courage and the willpower to fight back and move forward, projecting themselves into a better life.
d.
Working inside the prison is the only outlet and potential for growth that incarcerated people have. Fortunately,
there are organizations inside prisons that are like an invisible thread, linking the world of incarceration to the reality of outside life and work, preparing and supporting us as women. This is the message I want to emphasize, which I hope all women will pick up: the negative experience of prison can allow them to give sense to their futures by exhibiting grit, courage . . . and the possibility to start living life as a free person!
s.
I was introduced to the Rio Terà dei Pensieri cooperative and the Process Collettivo project while I was in the men’s prison. It was 2019. I asked to participate in the bag manufacturing course, so I started attending the lab. I felt right away that this would help me both inside and out of the prison. I got along well right away. I worked in the lab making bags and accessories from recycled PVC, learning how to sew and manage the production of orders. Going to the workshop every day was very important to me. After getting out on an alternative measure (I am on probation with social services), I continue to volunteer one day a week in the bag manufacturing lab outside the prison, so I see my colleagues, the Rio Terà staff, and so I don’t lose my sewing hands. You never know!
Working has allowed me to meet so many people, to have someone to talk to and confide in, beyond the incarcerated people like me. Some feel closer to me than brothers. I’m a touchy person, and in my life, I have always worked, but I never held a job for more than a couple of months—it was enough for anything to happen, and I would quit. With the cooperative, I became calmer and more patient. I learned to have more respect for myself, and this allowed me to have more respect for others as well. For me, this experience was not just about work; it made me reflect on who I was, who I am and who I can be.
Jake Brodsky contributed to this article.
Justine Kurland, This Train (Mack Books)
Justine Kurland has spent much of her career on the road, making pictures of what she came across along it: drifters, seekers, small-town car mechanics, teenage girls lighting fires in lush countryside. For much of the time she was doing this work, she was also raising her son, Casper.
Revisiting images first seen in her exhibition and catalogue This Train is Bound for Glory (2010) with new clarity, This Train is divided into two parts. The first consists of family portraits, while the latter shows trains and railways weaving through imposing terrain. Essays from Lily Cho and Constance Debre contextualize each half.
The photos featuring Casper are warm and sentimental, as Kurland watches him grow over a span of five years in makeshift
beds in the backs of vans, along dusty edges of dirt road and railways, toying with Legos and playing pretend. There’s a freedom in these portraits that harkens back to Kurland’s collection Girl Pictures (2018), a depiction of overlapping worlds in which it seems as if anything goes.
Her landscapes, by contrast, loom with complicated beauty around the locomotives that score them. Kurland says it was her son’s love of trains and cars that drew her to photograph them, but in this retelling, as Cho points out, Kurland uses the images to subvert “the myths of the triumph of man against nature, of human engineering over the recalcitrance of canyons and mountains” and to show the vanity and violence of the so-called taming of the land. Her trains thus serve as both a love song to a little boy, her son and only child, and also an allegory for the world into which he will grow up.
Emily Bergerson
Sejal Shah, How to Make Your Mother Cry (West Virginia University Press)
Poet, teacher, dancer and artist Sejal Shah defies the conventions of short story and autofiction in How to Make Your Mother Cry, her second book after her awardwinning essay collection This Is One Way to Dance (2020). Rooted in the work of predecessors and contemporaries like Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Alice Wong and adrienne maree brown, this collection brings a strong new voice to feminist fiction rooted in the particularity of life for women of color in 21st century America.
Shah first grounds readers with a soundtrack (including songs by Kate Bush, Prince and Tracy Chapman), setting the stage for eleven connected stories about multitudes of girlhood and their extensions into womanhood. Employing poems, personal images, artifacts and fictional
unsent letters to an old English teacher, Shah, through the voice of her Gujarati heroine, constructs a kind of interactive mirror for readers’ own experiences of womanhood and gendered expectations. The result is a multisensory, embodied rumination on friendships and romantic relationships, myths of aging and change and gratitude for the past as well as the present.—Rachel Adler
Robert M. Rubin, Vanishing Point Forever (RideWithBob/Film Desk Books)
Borges could have written the labyrinthine tale of the 1971 road movie Vanishing Point. The screenplay belonged to one Guillermo Cain, the name a pseudonym for the Cuban novelist G. Cabrera Infante, an itinerant diplomat possibly involved with the C.I.A. The movie emerged from a crumbling studio system that slashed its budget during production. The final result, which one critic suggested burning, ended up on the bottom of drive-in double bills. As recounted by Robert M. Rubin, editor of the new book Vanishing Point Forever—a love song to the movie and a beautiful bible for its fans—it eventually disappeared so fully from U.S. shores that it was easier to catch in East Germany, presented there as an example of American moral turpitude. And yet over the years, Vanishing Point somehow worked itself solidly into the underground canon, a
speed-freak “secret handshake” (as the artist Richard Prince calls it) for a certain stratum of film cognoscenti.
The movie caught a version of the American West and late 20th-century anomie that jibed improbably with some of the Conceptual and land art being made at the time. (Its promotional brochure announced: “No matter how far you go . . . there is a point on the far horizon that always recedes before you—into infinity.” In 1969, in “Incidents of MirrorTravel in the Yucatan,” Robert Smithson had written ophically: “How could one advance on the horizon, if it was already present under the wheels?”)
Infante himself felt that most of his existential artfulness had been bled out of the screenplay by director Richard C. Sarafian, who made a story about a “man with a car in trouble” instead of “a man with troubles in a car.” And yet Vanishing Point’s mono-nominal antihero Kowalski, blasting his Dodge Challenger through a beautiful accident of a movie, probably wouldn’t have taken up such vivid residence in the American psyche had he been more Derrida and less Dale Earnhardt.
In the book’s foreword, J. Hoberman asks for us all: “Simultaneously laughable and sublime, Vanishing Point was something that materialized from movie heaven—but how?”—Randy Kennedy
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright,
Alice Sadie Celine (Simon & Schuster)
In Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s sophomore novel, Alice Sadie Celine, three women reconsider how they relate when the mother and her daughter’s best friend carry out a furtive romance. The pull of the novel, told from each woman’s perspective, is the tension between what is known and what’s hidden, and what the truth will mean for them all one day.
In the liminal period between the sexual acts and their apocalypse, the roles of mother, daughter and friend interchange uncomfortably, at times slipping into one another only to assume their original form in a moment, the way one might sober to sudden flashes of red and blue light. (I’m reminded of a story my parents tell about the cheesy top of a casserole the neighbors brought over and how it had, after refrigeration, resumed its original form as Kraft Singles.)
The situation restructures the world of the three, giving form to context. Mention of the daughter begins to feel wrong between the mother and the friend, as if the name has become an expletive; the mother’s bathroom, where her lover, retainer in mouth, once dyed her daughter’s hair, serves as a frequent interim between their sexual experiences. Blakley-Cartwright, writing in clear, forthright prose, tells the story by looking the reader in the eye, and holding our gaze. —Jana Horn
By Elisabeth Bronfen
It was probably an afternoon sometime in spring, Eva thinks whenever she looks at the photograph. e scene is bathed in sunlight. Yet it couldn’t have been particularly warm. e summer herbs hadn’t yet been planted in the window box on the wall. She tries to retrieve this particular moment in her memory. e portrait painter Konstantin Hummler, a close friend of her parents’, had visited them that day and allowed himself to be photographed with herself and her siblings on the terrace at the rear of the house. e wooden chair on which he is sitting, one leg casually crossed over the other, is standing in the far left corner, directly below the living room window. e view into the living room is blocked by a curtain drawn over one of the windowpanes and a potted plant on the windowsill in front of the other. e weather has left its traces on the wall in front of them. Marks of transience that o er a perfect backdrop for the intimacy being played out on this stage, Eva tells herself. She herself is standing on the right side of the older man, her sister Lena on the left. e elderly man, in turn, has placed his arms around both girls. is embrace o ers a support to Eva, who is standing on one foot only, while the left leg is bent, the tip of her foot gently rolled under. Although her younger sister nestles against the chest of the portrait painter, her head is not lying on his shoulder but is held upright. Her brother Max is standing slightly apart. He is merely holding on to the back of the chair with his right hand. His rm grip allows him to lean away slightly from the man seated on it, with his feet crossed one in front of the other like a ballet dancer’s.
e elegant clothes the painter is wearing suggest to Eva that the photograph must have been taken on a Sunday afternoon. His pale shirt is paired with a discretely patterned silk tie. A folded handkerchief is tucked into the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. His large, hand-made leather brogues contrast with the children’s worn slip-on shoes. Apart from this, she and her siblings are also smartly dressed. Her brother is wearing a cardigan with large, light-colored buttons. His white, crisply ironed shirt is buttoned up to the collar. She herself has chosen a headband that matches her spotted dress and jacket to hold back her long, dark hair. Her light woolen stockings are the same shade as the lace trim on her collar and skirt pocket. Over Lena’s left ear, a bow decorates her looped pigtail braids. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that one of her knee-high stockings has slipped down toward her ankle. A small visual blemish on the otherwise perfect tableau. And yet this slight carelessness seems tting. A contemplative reverie prevails over the scene.
None of the four people in the photograph are looking directly into the camera. e two girls gaze ahead wistfully. Her younger self is smiling mischievously, as if she has just thought of something she wants to keep to herself. Although the painter has turned his face slightly down toward her sister, his eyes are closed. Eva wonders whether he is already thinking about how he could reproduce this group portrait on canvas. As for her brother Max, he is looking down at the painter from above, squinting, as though he were intently observing him. e distance separating him from his sisters may be minimal, but it is, nevertheless, distinct. It creates a gap between his body and theirs, in which his arm casts a shadow on the wall behind. A ghostly double of himself, captured in the image.
Whenever Eva looks at the photograph, she tells herself that it couldn’t have been a snapshot. e scene is too contrived to be a chance encounter. Instead, it seems to her as if they had all assumed a pose. She can’t remember who was behind the camera that afternoon. Probably her father. He always had his camera with him whenever they had visitors. Was he the one who decided where each of them should stand? Or was it her brother’s idea to create some space between himself and his sisters? Did her father, looking through the view nder, notice that the visual tension this produced would make the composition of the image more dynamic? Eva tries to recreate this moment in her mind. She tries to conjure up the image of her father telling her and her sister to move closer to the portrait painter, then, after hesitating brie y, asking her brother to move away from him slightly. But she can’t actually remember that it happened this way.
One thing, however, is certain. Her father was standing apart. He couldn’t have been on the terrace with them. e moment of shared sympathy that the photograph captures takes place on a slightly elevated stage. Eva recalls that several steps led down from the terrace, separating it from the lawn behind the house. at’s where he must have been standing when he pressed the shutter. He is the director, the one in control. Even now, Eva feels his invisible presence.
Whenever she looks at this scene, frozen in time, the past comes back to life. Once more she can feel the security of the old man’s embrace and the calm radiating from him. But she can’t be certain whether this intimacy is a real memory or not. Is it in fact the photograph that has produced this reminiscence?
Only much later, years after the portrait painter’s death, did Eva realize how unusual his visits to her home must have been. Konstantin Hummler had been an in uential professor at the Art Academy in Berlin since the late 1930s. Hitler, whose portrait he painted several times, even considered him to be one of the most significant artists of the ird Reich. Although her father, the son of Eastern European Jews lucky enough to emigrate to Brooklyn around the turn of the century, lived in Europe at the time, he was stationed in London. ey must have met after the war, when her father was an o cer in the American military, stationed in Bavaria. In Munich, he was able to continue his war against the Nazis, helping the Allies determine who should be tried before a tribunal for their actions in the ird Reich and who could be de-Nazi ed.
Hummler had also returned to his home in the Bavarian capital after the war. By giving up his position in Berlin, he wanted to openly acknowledge that he had pro ted from an inhuman political system. He chose to withdraw from the public eye. In Munich, he didn’t join the faculty of the Art Academy, where his career had begun. He didn’t accept any public o ces, nor did he sit on jury panels. He only painted portraits on private commission.
e photograph had been gifted to Eva by Hummler’s wife, Katja. She was younger and had survived him by many years. When she handed it to Eva, she assured her that Konsti had felt so much at home when he visited his Jewish friend’s family. At the time, Eva had the feeling that Katja, in giving her this photograph, had wanted to prove something to her. Since then, she had often wondered whether there had been a particular reason why the painter had his photograph taken with her and her siblings that afternoon. Had he asked for this photograph? Or was it her father who had wanted to give him something? Was it a token of recognition of their friendship?
When Eva’s father returned to Munich with her mother in the early 1950s,
they had moved to the suburbs. He had given up his law o ce in Falls Church, Virginia, because of a lucrative job o er. Konsti and Katja were regular guests in the house in which Eva and her siblings grew up. at the couple had felt so comfortable there was something Eva always wondered about. Had it become a sanctuary for them? A place of refuge, where they didn’t have to justify what they had done during the ird Reich? But then again, their home seemed to have been a neutral zone for everyone. Her father no longer practiced the religious customs he had grown up with in Brooklyn. e war, collaboration and complicity were never openly discussed. Neither was antisemitism. Any critical questions she asked always seemed to lead to her parents’ derogatory assertion: “You weren’t there. You didn’t live through it. You can’t judge.”
Unable to determine what it is about this image that continues to fascinate her, Eva shows it to her friend Samantha, a historian of photography. It was she who drew her attention to a strange detail. Owing to the camera angle, the painter’s hands appear unusually large massive, in fact. ey look unsettling, as though they were foreign body parts that had taken on a life of their own. While they appear to be embracing the two young girls, there is something possessive about this gesture. Samantha’s remark made her notice something else as well. Both she and her sister have gently curled their ngers inward, as if turning their hands into little sts. ey are merely touching the painter’s jacket with their ngertips. Is this a coincidental gesture, without signi cance? Or does it indicate an intuitive self-protection?
Eva can’t help but notice how this encounter marks a very special moment in time. Only after the war would this scene of shared intimacy between Konsti Hummler and the children of his Jewish friend have been possible. irty years earlier he might have denounced her family. Or would he have put himself in danger in order to hide them or help them ee? She tells herself that this visit was possible only because things had changed after the war. But at the time, she couldn’t have been aware of this. As a ten-year-old you don’t take notes on what is going on around you. Eva is well aware that she is caught in the realm of speculation. S he will never know how Konsti felt that afternoon, or what her father was thinking when he pressed the shutter. But for her, this photograph has a very particular signi cance—it is the family portrait with a German grandfather that she never had.
“I must admit, there’s something that is still not clear to me,” Sam declares, pointing to her copy of Shakespeare’s plays, which she had pushed to the other side of the table to make room for the lunch they had just nished eating. “How are we going to connect the naughty trick Maria plays on Malvolio in Twelfth Night with the political conspiracy in Julius Caesar? In the comedy we have this vain but also pretty pathetic Puritan. I see your point. He falls for the forged love letter because he wants to be duped. He has long since entertained the fantasy that the Countess Olivia is secretly in love with him. So it isn’t just because Maria can imitate her mistress’s handwriting. What is so clever about her ruse is that she chooses to write this love letter in the form of a riddle. Because she has been spying on him, she is privy to Malvolio’s daydreams. And so she can count on him to interpret the encrypted message as a love declaration meant speci cally for him.”
Eva nods in agreement. “Exactly. To him, the letter is proof of his mistress’s secret love precisely because it is encoded.”
“So Malvolio persuades himself that Olivia wants him to court her because, conceited as he is, he believes he has solved the riddle. All that makes perfect sense to me. But here’s my problem. A romantic secret is something very di erent from a political conspiracy.”
It had been Sam’s idea for them to meet up in her mother’s vacation home in Schliersee. It seemed the perfect place for them to work undisturbed on their “Shakespeare project.” ey weren’t yet sure where it would lead them, but from the start Eva wanted to aggregate bits and pieces from di erent plays by focusing only on secrets and conspiracies. She was sure that they would discover something new about the Bard’s conception of the world as stage if they focused on characters who were hiding something or disguising themselves, pretending to be someone else. e two of them had already met several times in the previous months and decided which plays they wanted to concentrate on. But the actual planning of the project had not yet taken place. Something kept getting in the way. Eva, now in her mid-thirties, was very committed to her students in the department of theater studies at Munich University. But that alone wasn’t the problem. She allowed herself to be distracted by other commitments. Although she often complained about all the meetings she had to attend, Sam knew how much she actually enjoyed them. ey made her feel indispensable.
Sam suspected that was why she kept taking on new tasks. She often wondered whether all this frantic activity was a screen for something. At times, Eva seemed to her like a top which had to keep spinning for fear of toppling over. But Sam herself was also partly to blame for their procrastination. As a freelancer, she couldn’t a ord to turn down lucrative job o ers. e preparation for an exhibition with a former war photographer had recently taken up much of her time. She had actually been grateful that Eva seemed to be preoccupied with other things.
Now the two are nally sitting together on the small terrace behind the house. Eva, who had gone to the farmer’s market that morning, had bought lots of spinach and apples and prepared a salad. e plates had not yet been cleared. Leftovers from the cheese, the salami and the bread are still lying on the wooden serving board. Eva picks at the breadcrumbs that are scattered on the tablecloth while listening attentively to her friend. She likes the way Sam asserts her train of thought. Like a word acrobat, she deftly executes each new spin in her argument, never running the risk of losing her balance. Eva, in her enthusiasm, tends to get tangled up in all kinds of spontaneous associations. But she knows she can rely on Sam, whom she has known since high school, to help her unravel them again. Now, however, she feels she must refute her objection.
“Love is de nitely a kind of conspiracy. I admit, a political cabal is aimed at a particular person. But let’s not forget, those involved in an assassination or a coup conspire in secrecy. And isn’t that what happens when you are in love? You are also convinced that there is a secret bond between yourself and the person you desire.” Eva pauses brie y to see whether Sam wants to object but, as this doesn’t seem to be the case, she continues: “We can even take the analogy further. Once you have embarked on a romantic fantasy, this intimacy becomes the one and only thing of importance. Everything else disappears in the background. And, because it is so exclusive, love always has a trace of violence. e goal, after all, is to overwhelm the person you love. You want to drag them into your own vortex of desire.” Eva looks directly at Sam with her clear blue eyes, as though to challenge her. “But you are right, there is a di erence. Secrecy in politics works with conspiracies; secrecy in love works with concealment.”
While Eva continues to speak, Sam leans back in her chair. She catches herself paying more attention to the movement of her friend’s hands. Eva is drawing invisible gures in the air — small squares and spirals, an emphatically placed dot and short lines, following upon each other in quick succession. Sam is reminded of what Eva told her about her father’s rhetorical skill. His success as a criminal defense lawyer, she claimed, was largely due to the way he was able to transform a body of evidence into a plausible story. If his own reconstruction of the events was more convincing than that of the prosecution, he would win the case. e legal argument was less decisive for the jury than the emotional impact of his nal speech.
ough Eva’s gaze wanders into the distance as she heads toward her summation, the jury she is trying to convince this afternoon is reduced to a single person: Sam, who has been watching her intently. “What I nd so compelling in Shakespeare’s plays isn’t just the sheer abundance of secrets. I am most taken by those characters who crave the act of secrecy itself. For me, it’s a kind of perversion. A bit like the kleptomaniac, who steals something even though she would have the money to buy it. at’s why I want to call this compulsive desire for secrecy ‘cryptomania.’ By withholding information from others, the cryptomaniac believes herself to have power.”
“But isn’t it also a form of self-delusion? From what you are saying, it seems to me that it doesn’t matter whether the secret actually exists or not.”
Eva smiles, happy that she can elaborate her theory. “ e cryptomaniac believes that secret things are going on everywhere. She is convinced that people are keeping something from her. Or that they are doing something behind her back. And she is in the center of this deception. Everything that happens to her is meaningful because it is part of a hidden scheme. Yet she alone is alert enough to detect this while all the others are oblivious to it.”
Sam is uncomfortable with the way they seem to have digressed from their actual topic. She would prefer to bring the conversation back to Shakespeare. But she remains true to her name. Samantha—the one who listens. Patiently, she allows Eva to indulge in the spin of her deliberation a little longer. “If we decide to take cryptomania as the starting point for our project, we could then ask ourselves, what remains for the characters when everything that could be enjoyed only in secret is ultimately revealed? For me, the dramatic resolution in the nal act is never really convincing. But then again, don’t we always treat a secret as though it were a hidden treasure? You don’t really want to disclose it. You want to keep it to yourself.”
Sam, unwilling to get too personal, shifts the discussion in a di erent direction. “I see why you are taken with a speculative approach to Shakespeare. But we mustn’t lose sight of the historical background. After all, Queen Elizabeth is famous for the intricate network of spies she cultivated at her court. You told me that she not only had her political opponents under constant surveillance but also her courtiers. Today we would call that a culture of paranoia. So why don’t we focus our project on the secret police during the reign of Elizabeth I? at would bring us back to political conspiracies.”
“And to the ghosts that haunt these plays. ey are secret agents in their own right who return from the underworld with encoded messages. Just as we are haunted by what we repress. And what haunts us we try to keep secret.”
Ever since they started talking about secrets and conspiracies in Shakespeare, Sam has asked herself why the idea of being haunted by the past was so important for Eva. When Sam had approached her with this project, Eva had openly admitted
that her motivation wasn’t purely academic. She was convinced that there were secrets in her family, which her parents didn’t want to disclose. ere were all kinds of discrepancies in the way they talked about the past, and too many gaps. She hoped Shakespeare might help her understand this tactic of camou age.
Now, however, Sam nds herself getting impatient. As much as she appreciates Eva’s imaginative meandering, it also irritates her when it leads her too far astray. ey run the risk of not making any progress with their project. She realizes that she is the one who will have to be pragmatic. “If we don’t just treat Shakespeare’s cryptomania as a personal issue, we could also draw a clearer connection to the present. Yesterday we talked about how the ftieth anniversary of the capitulation of the Nazis has been all over the media in the past few weeks. ere is so much from that period which is hushed up. Of course, everyone who lived at the time knows what happened. But still, they don’t want to talk about it. ey prefer to keep their memories to themselves. Isn’t that also a form of cryptomania?”
Eva, who hasn’t been listening properly, tarries with the phantoms of the past. “Perhaps we so fervently hold onto secrets because, for some reason, they are important to us. Which is why I like the idea of the hidden treasure. We know that we could recover it. But it is only valuable as a revelation still to come.”
Later in the evening, when it has become too cold to sit outside, the two continue their conversation in the living room. Eva has opened a bottle of red wine and poured them each a glass before making herself comfortable on the sofa. e darkness behind the window shields them from the outside world. eir conversation becomes more intimate.
Sam is the rst to speak. “All afternoon, while we were talking about being haunted by family secrets, I have been thinking about Georges Perec’s narrative experiment. is is the way it goes. You recall an event from the past, but each time you zero in on a detail, you begin again by saying ‘I remember.’ e memory fragments become a sequence, in which you play a double role. You are the one experiencing a scene again and the one narrating it.”
Eva, leaning back on one of the pillows, o ers to begin.
“I remember visiting my father in his o ce one afternoon. I had to make a decision and wanted to ask him for advice.
“I remember that it was a dark, rainy day. e hazy light in the room hung like a veil over us. He got up from his desk and sat down on the leather sofa that stood against one of the walls. I sat close to him on the leather armchair next to it.
In front of us both, the glass table was covered with the les he was working on.
“I remember that he listened to me attentively. Which was unusual for him. I was surprised, and attered. I had the feeling he was taking me very seriously.
“I remember that he responded with an anecdote. At the end of the war, he and two comrades parachuted behind enemy lines. As he spoke, his facial expression became somber, his words deliberate.
“I remember the poignant punch line of the anecdote. He was the only one to survive. After he landed and peeled himself out of his parachute, he found the other two lying dead on the ground.
“I remember how he ended his story. He said, ‘ ere was a George Brom eld before and a George Brom eld after.’
“I remember that the scene has stuck with me, although I forgot why I had come to ask him for advice. Even then, I thought to myself, it must have been the key event in his war years, something he could never let go.”
Abruptly interrupting her reminiscence, Eva, who had been gazing at the darkness behind the window, turns to Sam. “Survivors often feel guilt toward the dead, who lost their lives in their stead. Lately, however, I have begun to ask myself whether this scene could have taken place at all. As an adolescent, my father injured his left eye while playing with an air pistol and was almost blind in that eye. He couldn’t have been with the paratroopers. And so he couldn’t have parachuted behind enemy lines. I kind of suspect that he got this story from a book about the D-Day landing. Or from one of the war thrillers he liked to read. He simply turned an imaginary event into a memory. But one thing I know for sure—when he related the anecdote, he was absolutely convinced it had actually happened.”
“But why would your father invent such a story? You’d think if you were going to appropriate a false memory it would be a pleasant one. Or did he like this story because it has to do with survival? Maybe it’s not about guilt at all but about a sense of power. Your brother always accuses your parents of being sel sh, but he also admits that this willful self-absorption must have had something to do with traumatic experiences during the war. ings they preferred to idealize.”
“Or to conceal.”
“Maybe. But what I don’t understand: If you are so convinced that your parents are keeping something secret from you, why didn’t you simply ask them?”
“But I did. Constantly. You know me. I always want to clear things up, because I don’t like it when people delude themselves. But my parents have never given me a straight answer. Which is why I am convinced that they have a secret pact with each other.”
Sam has the feeling that by insisting that her parents are keeping something from her, it is Eva who is deluding herself. She wants to nd out what lies behind this tenacious suspicion. “Max is still so bitter about his youth. Whenever he visits from New York, we always end up talking about the many small injuries that he still carries around with him. And yet he holds onto his family memories. e last time he was here, he showed me the thick photo album he’s been working on for some time now. Apparently, he has removed a lot of snapshots from your mother’s albums and reassembled them. As we leafed through the pages, he described the di erent scenes in loving detail. I realized that I only know your father from the stories you have told me about him.”
“ at’s precisely the point. ese photographs are relics from a past to which Max and I have no direct access. And still they concern us.”
“But why do you enjoy turning everything you don’t know into some big family secret? Maybe there’s nothing there at all. Or —and that’s something I know all too well from my mother—what you call a secret pact is simply the wish to forget.”
Eva takes Sam’s objection as an invitation to embellish her conjecture. “It has to do with the fact that there are no other relatives we might ask. When I was born, my German grandfather was no longer alive. He went missing somewhere in Russia during the war. Although Max and I used to visit our grandmother a lot while she was still alive, she and my mother weren’t really on good terms. ere was some terrible disagreement, but we never really found out what it was about. As for my American grandparents, I only visited them once in Brooklyn before they died. Don’t forget, at the time transatlantic ights were prohibitively expensive. So most
of what we know about our family we have from our parents. ey’re not only the primary witnesses. ere is also no one left who could refute what they say.”
“And your sister Lena, what does she say to all of this?”
“We never really talked about this with her. And still don’t. You remember what it was like when we were kids. Max and I were so close, we didn’t want to include her in our games. She didn’t seem to t in. I have to admit we were probably quite arrogant, but she was also so terribly moody. As a child she used to have temper tantrums if she didn’t immediately get what she wanted. en she would howl for hours and throw her toys around. Only our father was able to calm her down. Which is why she continues to be so xated on him. She always pretends she is the only one privy to his secrets. She is also the only one of us who has always had a good relationship with Tash. Even before our father separated from my mother and moved to New York with her. Max visits them from time to time. But the last time we talked on the phone, he confessed that he found these visits quite weird. Our father seems to be living a surrogate family life with his former secretary—complete with a dog and a white picket fence.”
Sam can only nod in silence as Eva resolutely adds, “Clearly, there’s something odd there as well.” She would have loved to ask about the dog, but that might come across as a touch too frivolous. Any further objection at this point seems inappropriate.
After Eva has retired to her room, the memories that her conversation with Sam evoked continue to preoccupy her. Questions for which she has only vague answers won’t leave her alone. Pensively, she slips into her nightgown. She places her wristwatch and her earrings into the porcelain bowl on the bedside table next to the reading lamp. She neatly folds her underwear and places it on the chair next to the bed, her dress and tights over the backrest, her shoes close together underneath. As though she were composing a still life with this discarded daytime self, meant to watch over her sleep. e nal touch is lling the water carafe, in case she gets thirsty during the night.
She sits upright on the bed for a while, her bent legs under the covers. rough the open window she looks out at the clear nocturnal sky. She can’t make out any signs of the zodiac, only a few scattered stars. Her gaze zeros in on one particular star, twinkling more brightly than the others. It has taken years, she tells herself, for its light to reach her bedroom. at’s how far away it is. But then again, this particular star may no longer exist. Even though she still sees its radiance, it may well have been extinguished long ago. Only the movement through space has preserved its shape. What she now sees is what it once was.
Drawn into a deep calm by this thought, she stretches out her legs, u s the pillow and pulls the blanket up under her chin as she slides down under it. Lying on her back, she whispers to herself:
“I remember visiting Konsti’s studio on the top oor of the apartment building at the Maximilliansplatz. Huge glass windows look out onto the inner courtyards. He needs much light to paint.
“I remember a long wooden table, set for dinner, at the front of the room. Paintings are hanging on the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Many portraits, in various sizes, but also a few still lives. At the very back of the room stands one of his easels.
“I remember that I couldn’t make out the painting he was currently working on. On the table next to it, his palette, many tubes and brushes in dirty jars. e smell of paint hovering over them.
“I remember that I saw the nal version of the family portrait that evening for the rst time. It was on another easel, facing the dinner table. While the adults sat down, cocktail glasses in hand, they o ered appreciative comments.
“I remember how moved I was to see my father in the center of the composition. A paterfamilias, proudly towering over the other gures. One of his hands casually tucked away in his trouser pocket. His tie swaying, giving the impression that he is about to move forward, out of the picture frame, directly towards us.
“I remember how much less lifelike my mother appeared to me in comparison. Sitting in an armchair slightly to the right of him, her hands folded in her lap. My painted self is leaning against the right arm of the chair, Lena’s is sitting on the left arm. In the far left corner, Max is sitting cross-legged on the oor.
“I remember feeling that my father is the only one Konsti got right. e entire vitality of the portrait lies with him. e rest of us seemed to me like dolls, similar to us and yet not quite us.
“I remember that, as a rst course, Katja served a cream of asparagus soup avored with lemon. I bit into a lemon seed. e bitter taste lingered in my mouth for several minutes. I remember thinking that this shouldn’t happen to an experienced cook like her.
“I remember that everyone continued talking about the portrait during dinner. Max, who had started taking private painting lessons with Konsti, asked about his technique. How he applied the colors, when he worked with a brush, when with a palette knife.
“I remember that my mother seemed to be attered by her elegant appearance on canvas. Lena, bored as always, was sliding impatiently on her chair the whole time. Katja sat at the top end of the table. She was the only one who had her back to the portrait. She seemed pleased with the praise her husband garnered. She was the perfect hostess, intent on making everyone else comfortable, and only spoke when the conversation threatened to stall.”
“I remember feeling that I didn’t belong to this party. Instead of joining in, I was watching everyone else. I wanted to nd out whether the portrait had the same uncanny e ect on them. I remember wondering why it had been painted in the rst place. Did our father commission it? Or had Konsti suggested it to him?”
Eva’s reverie abruptly stops. She suddenly realizes that she can’t make out her father. He must have been in the studio that evening, but she can’t seem to place him there in her mind. Instead, his painted double appears all the more distinct. Konsti had endowed him with such radiance.
Excerpt from the novel Merchant of Secrets (2023), published by Limmat Verlag. Translated from German by the author for Ursula.
During the decades after the end of the Second World War, from the 1950s through the 1970s, a majority of industrial businesses based in Lower Manhattan, such as rag merchants, tool and die makers, fabricators and wholesalers of manufactured goods, vacated their buildings and relocated to more spacious areas outside New York City as the demographics of their businesses changed. The industrial lofts they left behind became magnets for artists eager to find cheap, roomy spaces in which to live and work.
In an article in The New York Times Magazine in 1962, Gilbert Millstein wrote: “Exactly how many painters and sculptors are to be found in these lofts nobody really knows, not even the authorities, but a competent consensus in the art world is that, of the 30,000 or so artists in the metropolitan area, between 5,000 and 7,000 inhabit or labor in lofts.” It’s likely that the number of artists Millstein quotes could have been higher since many artists living illegally in lofts were undocumented and sublet spaces to friends in order to help cover the rent.
The story of the New York artist loft revolution has long centered around SoHo and for many reasons rightly so. Political demonstrations and protests that occurred in SoHo beginning in the early 1960s, to save the neighborhood from demolition and redevelopment, brought into sharp focus many of the problems artists faced in New York in those years: summonses for illegal habitation; unannounced evictions; lack of heat; tickets for building violations. The publicity surrounding these issues reverberated powerfully with artists, art school students and even non-artists looking to score large, cheap lofts. As a result, SoHo became synonymous in the popular imagination with the artist loft movement, along with a concurrent narrative that artists were soon priced out of the area and began looking elsewhere. But that “elsewhere” had already been humming with artist activity well before SoHo became the center of the downtown art scene.
The building that Kalina, Jenney and a host of other artists moved into was essentially a 19th-century anomaly that had somehow survived to perform a final function: as an incubator of late 20th-century art, a tumbledown site for young artists’ beginnings.
Bowery; in the West Village; in the old Ninth Street area around Cooper Square; many already in Chelsea. The rim of the wheel was actually where the art was and then it sort of got filled in, in places like TriBeCa and SoHo.”
The painter Richard Kalina remembers: “It wasn’t as if SoHo came into existence and all the other places were peripheral. Artists lived in SoHo, but SoHo coalesced from neighborhoods around it. What seemed to be peripheral when SoHo was the center was where the artists already were: in Chinatown; on the
Three important artists’ areas on the rim of this wheel were located in Lower Manhattan and each had its own special profile. Perhaps the most wellknown today was Coenties Slip, a single street near the South Ferry and the Fulton Fish Market. Between 1954 and 1960, Fred Mitchell, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and others lived and worked in the abandoned lofts found on the Slip; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had lofts nearby on Pearl Street. A second major artist area coalesced along the Bowery, from Chatham Square at Park Row to Cooper Square and East Fourth Street, whose cheap spaces European refugee artists like Fernand Leger had discovered by the early 1940s, to be joined over the next few decades by Mark Rothko, John Giorno, Eva Hesse, Elizabeth Murray, Al Loving, Tom Doyle, Robert Lobe, Michael Steiner, Mary Heilmann and many others.
The third area of intense activity in Lower Manhattan—by far the least known and documented of the three, though it nurtured the early work of several important artists—centered around a single block of Jefferson Street. The street was one of dozens surrounding the South Street Seaport that had once been hives of industry for commercial shipping and supply businesses servicing the New York Harbor and East River waterfront. (Jefferson Street was originally known as Washington Street, named for George Washington, but it was later renamed for the third president of the United States.) In the
early part of the 20th century, Jefferson Street extended from East Broadway to Water Street. It was bordered by Rutgers Street on the south side and Clinton Street on the north, crossing Henry, Madison, Monroe and Cherry Streets before ending at Water Street. Today, the street extends only from East Broadway to Madison Street, truncated by the massive Mitchell Lama housing redevelopment of the Seaport area that radically transformed the neighborhood between 1955 and the mid-1970s and resulted in the razing of most of its oldest structures.
“My loft was hardscrabble. I had the floor below Brice Marden, who had a stove, so we’d sit up with our feet on the stove door to keep our boots warm and eat crackers with peanut butter.”
—Bob Neuwirth
The building at 76 Jefferson Street, constructed in 1893, was among the last to be torn down, in 1977.
Its eighty-two-year history represents a microcosm of the changing fortunes of the neighborhood itself. Originally a loft where sails were produced for ships, it later housed a saddlemaking factory; an
(alleged) bordello; and, by the 1930s, a horse stable for delivery wagons and carts used by immigrant rag merchants. The artist Neil Jenney, who moved into the fourth floor in the summer of 1967, remembers that the rear of the building served as a parking lot for New York Post delivery trucks. Kalina, who also took up residence in 1967, on the fifth floor, remembers the building as being metaphorically, and also literally, porous.
“You could look through the cracks and see the East River,” he says. “It was still part of the old American commerce industry. Shipping was still there and being near the water, it had a particular smell, partly from the spice factory on Water Street. At the end of the street, there was a very active pier for smaller cargo ships. You could stay up all night or get up early and walk to the Fulton Fish Market, to eat at Sloppy Louie’s.”
The building that Kalina, Jenney and a host of other artists moved into was essentially a 19th-century anomaly that had somehow survived to perform a final function: as an incubator of late 20th-century art, a tumbledown site for young artists’ beginnings, providing them with freedom to work, to find their place within the burgeoning New York art world and to spark off fellow artists.
The first wave of artistic communities to inhabit 76 Jefferson seems to have arrived in 1959, when the painter Anton James leased the building and began subletting lofts (40 x 100 feet each) at low rents to fellow artists, “helping painters, musicians, sculptors and actors to find a dream,”
as the writer Madeleine B. Karter described the building at the time in Pageant magazine. James lived and worked in the building, renting to friends and acquaintances such as the sculptor Lothar Wuerslin, the painter Eleanore Mikus, actor Jane Churchman, printmaker and sculptor Yasuhide Kobashi and musician Sammy Joseph, who was known to conduct 2 a.m. jam sessions in his loft. It’s unclear exactly how long James acted as the building’s rental agent, but his ambitions appear to have been short-lived, because by 1961, Jack Klein, who became known as “the loft king,” was living at 76 Jefferson and subletting to artists. Klein had begun his professional life as a salesman in the Garment District, then moved downtown to work as a stock broker trainee before shifting into real estate. He negotiated leases between building owners and artist tenants, becoming a major figure in the downtown market from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The artists Brice Marden and Joe Overstreet were among the first of Klein’s tenants, and Overstreet worked as the building’s superintendent. Corrine Jennings, Overstreet’s wife, told me that he sublet a loft around 1962 to the jazz
musician Eric Dolphy, who would lay out each of his instruments on his bed and spend long periods of time practicing the same notes on each, exhibiting a level of discipline that left a strong impression on Overstreet. In 1966, the sculptor Mel Edwards, part of a second wave of 76 Jefferson artists, moved in for about six months, occupying Dolphy’s former loft. “I stayed with David Novros, and I rented a place down in the South Street Seaport area, 76 Jefferson Street, which had artists in the building: Brice Marden, Janet Fish, Steve Poleskie,” Edwards told the critic Michael Brenson for Bomb magazine.
In a 1972 oral history for the Archives of American Art, Marden recalled his introduction to the building and the sense of belonging it gave him. “I was in New York and I was really anxious to meet people and stuff like that,” he said. “But it was still very difficult . . . There were always Tuesday night openings, and I’d be the only person who would look at anything. Everybody else knew everybody, and I didn’t know anybody. But then you start meeting people, and I met a lot of people through Steve Poleskie, and we were both painting along. That whole building was full of artists . . . lots of really good people.”
Other young artists, including Emilio Cruz and Neil Williams, lived in the building during the mid-1960s, as did an older artist, Kenneth Kilstrom, who had moved to New York in 1945 and become a member of master printer William Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17 studio in 1947. (Robert Lobe, a later resident of the building, remembers Kilstrom as having, among other interesting traits, a strong interest in flying saucers.) The painter and musician Bob Neuwirth, after traveling Europe as a member of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Look Back” tour, returned to New York, and Marden, a friend, introduced him to Klein. Neuwirth moved into 76 Jefferson in 1965, taking the loft that had been occupied by Dolphy and Edwards.
“I hadn’t had an art studio for almost ten years when I got it,” Neuwirth told me. “It was a special place for me then. My loft was hardscrabble. I had the floor below Brice Marden, who had a stove, so we’d sit up with our feet on the stove door to keep our boots warm and eat crackers with peanut butter. I didn’t have any idea where I was going to get the next jar of peanut butter, but it was fun.”
The building also played a role in the rise of Pop Art, as one of the homes of Poleskie’s short-lived but highly influential Chiron Press, which was the first print shop in the United States devoted to producing silk-screen prints; among its artists were Warhol, Rosenquist, Oldenburg and Lichtenstein, who made his first screen print, Brushstroke, with Poleskie, in 1965. The press ended its run at Jefferson Street in 1967, as Poleskie sought more time to focus on his own work and the challenges of a post-industrial
Many [Jefferson Street artists] thought of themselves as part of an older sensibility more akin to that of the Abstract Expressionists: artists who elected to be, in some sense, outsiders, working and living outside the prevailing system.
New York art life piled up around him. “I was becoming tired of my screen-printing shop and all that it involved,” he later wrote. “Fickle artists, paying bribes to everyone—the building and fire inspectors, the garbage man and the police—and of art galleries that didn’t pay their bills.”
His departure from Jefferson marked the beginning of a third and final wave of artists in the building, hastened in part by Klein’s periodic raising of rents. A group of seven young artists— Robert Lobe, Richard Kalina, Valerie Jaudon, Neil Jenney, Gary Stephan, Ed Shostak, and John Duff—all moved in between 1967 and 1969. Lobe remembers meeting Janet Fish as she was moving out and he was moving in. Demand for the kind of raw, roomy space the building offered seemed to hold steady even in the face of higher rents. Stephan, who had graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and was living in the East Village in the mid-1960s, told me that when he learned of a loft coming open at Jefferson, he traveled downtown for an appointed showing and arrived to find eight other artists already waiting for the superintendent, Tony Murad. “The door opens and we all walk in and I said, ‘I’ll take it!’ Some of the other people complained, ‘Wait a minute! We didn’t even look at it.’ But Tony said: ‘It’s over,’ and that settled it. Except for one person who challenged me for the loft by flipping a coin for it. So I said okay and we flipped and I won the toss and the loft. It was on the fourth floor, north side of the building. It was a thousand square feet and I paid seventy-five dollars a month rent.”
Stephan in turn told a friend, the sculptor John Duff, about
the building, and Duff was able to rent on the first floor in 1968, inheriting the Dolphy-EdwardsNeuwirth loft. Neuwirth had moved to a new space in the building, and when he left in 1968, Ed Shostak replaced him. Prior to moving to New York, Duff had visited Bruce Nauman’s studio in Davis, California, and remained friendly with Nauman. When Nauman had an early exhibition at the Castelli gallery in New York in 1968, Duff went and afterward attended a party for Nauman given by the curator and collector David Whitney at his Canal Street loft, where, as Duff told me, he got drunk. At some point during the evening, he found himself being embraced and kissed by someone he didn’t know: Jasper Johns. As the party wound down, Johns, Duff and Whitney ventured out for breakfast, and a week or two later, Duff visited Johns’s Bowery studio, reintroducing himself. It was the start of a long friendship and a relationship in which Johns became one of Duff’s most devoted patrons, buying works from many shows over the years. (In the late 1960s, Johns needed an assistant and offered Duff the job; Duff turned it down and Gary Stephan took the job instead.)
Artists often found work with each other, spanning generations. Brice Marden had briefly worked as Poleskie’s assistant before moving to work in Robert Rauschenberg’s studio. When Marden left Jefferson in 1967, Kalina moved in, and when Poleskie vacated his loft the summer of the same year it was taken by Lobe, who recalls giving Poleskie two hundred fifty dollars key money. Kalina met Jaudon at a Larry Poons show at the Lawrence Rubin Gallery on West 57th Street in October 1969, and soon after, she moved into Kalina’s Jefferson Street loft.
Jaudon told me: “The place was such a dump. It was so dangerous. I thought it was all fabulous. The stairway was just barely walkable. There was
a sign on the wall next to the stairs, dated from 1945 which said, ‘Women and children are not allowed on the stairs.’ And I thought that was so cool.”
Neil Jenney moved to New York in December 1966 and found a three-room apartment on East Sixth Street between Avenues C and D, “a dicey neighborhood on the Lower East Side, known for drug dealing and gangs,” he recalls.
In those years, the German art dealer Kasper König owned lofts in Chinatown, and Jenney told him he was looking for art studio space. “He told me Brice Marden had just moved out of his loft,” Jenney says. “Kasper gave me Marden’s phone number, but it worked out it was actually Rauschenberg’s number, since Brice was working
for him. I called Marden but he had already given the loft to Richard Kalina. I decided to go down to 76 Jefferson Street anyway. When I got to the building, I looked it over—there was no buzzer for the front door and no names on the door either! So I stepped back into the street and looked up and just at that moment Bob Lobe stuck his head out of a window. I yelled up, ‘I’m looking for a space! Are there any spaces in this building?’ Lobe said, ‘I don’t know.’ But he came down and let me into the building, and that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Jenney immediately fell for the building and the area around it. He moved into the fourth floor, paying eighty dollars a month. He remembers
“The place was such a dump. It was so dangerous. I thought it was all fabulous.”— Valerie Jaudon
Jefferson Street as a distinctive kind of artist community, though not exactly an experimental alternative space like 112 Greene Street in SoHo, which presented public exhibitions and longterm artist projects. Artists at 76 were venturing ambitiously into new media and forms and approaches to sculpture and painting, but the building was not public-facing, and feedback and criticism tended to come from artists within the building’s circle. While the residents of Jefferson Street were highly social, the building was not a social scene itself, the way some loft buildings in SoHo and Chinatown were. In part, this had to do with the precarious condition of the building. Lobe remembers that the gas meters in the basement had been ripped off the wall and were lying in the mud. Because of this, earlier tenants had connected makeshift rubber hoses from the main gas line on the street to their individual lofts. Tenants were warned at all costs never to let Con Edison or fire inspectors into the basement of the building or even into the building itself. Neuwirth remembers that the basement was practically inaccessible anyway, “generally covered with water and if the basement really flooded, the rats would just move up to the first floor.”
Lobe remembers “socializing” at Jefferson Street as involving the purchase of a two-dollar six-pack of Schaefer beer and a twenty-fivecent slice of pizza from a nearby corner store. Stephan told me of saving spare change, trying to accumulate at least thirty-five cents, enough to buy an imported beer on an evening when he did go out. A working-class neighborhood bar stood on the corner, patronized more by local cops than by artists. Aside from uptown gallery openings or loft parties, the Jefferson Street artists tended to socialize at Max’s Kansas City, the club founded in 1965 by Mickey Ruskin on Park Avenue South.
To a degree, many told me, they thought of themselves as part of an older sensibility more akin to that of the Abstract Expressionists: artists who elected to be, in some sense, outsiders, working and living outside the prevailing system. The system, though, as it does, eventually discovered them, and the art they made found its way slowly into the mainstream, in some cases signaling a shift in the style of art being shown in New York and in the way people viewed it. Marden developed his early Minimal works, shown in his first exhibition at the Bykert Gallery, in 1966, while living and working at Jefferson Street. Jenney developed his early painting style that came to be known as “Bad Painting” there, and Jaudon painted her first patterned works, becoming one of the artists who originated the innovative movement known as Pattern and Decoration. At Jefferson, Kalina created his shaped canvases
using polyester on canvas; Stephan created his early series of geometric forms by baking polyurethane in an oven; Duff made sculptures using found objects or by fashioning clay into abstract shapes; and Neuwirth painted his geometric, hard-edged canvases.
In 1976, the curator Richard Marshall organized an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that showcased thirty-eight works made by eighteen of the artists who had lived at Jefferson Street over the years, along with prints created by Poleskie’s Chiron Press. The timing of the show was ironic and bittersweet. As it opened, the building, which had been officially condemned by the city in 1972, had already been slated for demolition to make way for the Two Bridges urban renewal project.
Klein no longer managed the building or collected rents from its tenants, but a number of artists continued to live there, some paying nothing. According to Scott Davis, who lived in a sublet at 76 Jefferson from 1974 to 1976, the city had to raise money for the building’s very demolition, a process that would take five years.
In 1972, Jenney moved to SoHo but continued to maintain his Jefferson Street loft for studio and storage space. Stephan moved out in 1976, around the same time as Lobe. Kalina and Jaudon moved to the Bowery in 1977. Shostak may have been the last resident to move out, shortly before the building ceased to exist.
As isolated and precarious as it was, the building is mourned to this day by many of its residents, who hope that more of its history finds a rightful place in the record of the groundbreaking New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s.
“We were living in a sordid neighborhood with our heads in the clouds,” Jaudon says. “But we were like good neighbors.”
Heather Davis
Your practice as an artist has largely focused on making videos, installations and sculptures. How did you start making these recent pieces, the Rottenbar and the Lampshares? What has it been like to focus on functional objects and why did plastic seem the right material for that endeavor?
Mika Rottenberg
After nishing Remote, which is a feature movie I made during the pandemic, I really missed working on smaller, more tangible stu . So when Iwan and Manuela Wirth asked me to make a bar for the gallery, I was immediately intrigued. My usual sculpture process is making sets for the videos, which are functional, so this is not far o in some ways. I’m never completely comfortable just making a sculpture for the sake of making a sculpture, which is weird as an artist, I guess. Flirting with functionality and absurdity, or maybe dysfunctionality, is kind of in the core. I got into DIY reclaimed plastic because, as always, my work is about this magical and often exploitative process of producing “value” through harnessing energies. Matter, especially plastic, has a lot of trapped energy in it. I also wanted to work with materials that I could “mine” and source myself, nding materials that I had a more intimate relationship with and shifting the production mode of the studio itself, rather than pointing to problematic production cycles that are mostly out of my control. Plastic is a contemporary natural resource. I think many of us feel trapped in powerful distractive
systems, so I was wondering if I could create a production line that was a little more regenerative and circular rather than extractive and alienating. I teamed up with some great people and we developed this system for recycling waste plastic into sculptures/lamps. I call them lampshares. “Users” become “shareholders” in this “factory” by buying a lamp, and they become a kind of “fuel” for the production line. Or if you can’t a ord a lamp, you can collect plastic for us. [Laughs.]
Plastic is the quintessential capitalist material fantasy. It assumes any shape, is endlessly malleable and here to serve us. It’s a material we produce and in return it consumes us. I love this idea that by making these lamps out of reclaimed plastic we are, in a way, releasing back some of this trapped ancient light, metaphorically. It’s something you have pointed out, and I love that idea. Maybe this is presumptuous, but it’s also a fun way of thinking about it.
HD
I would love to hear you say more about the actual production process. One of the things that’s fascinating about plastic is that it appears in so many forms and we have this sense of it as being very malleable. But it’s actually a very di cult, recalcitrant material, which is the reason why it’s mostly produced in large industrial factories. It’s only quite recently that organizations like Precious Plastics have emerged. But the amount of actual labor that goes into reclaiming plastic takes a real toll on the body.
MR
Large scale recycling schemes are a failure and this small scale DYI is really experimental, unpredictable and time consuming—Precious Plastics is how I got familiar with this idea. They reframed the thinking around waste plastic, and it’s brilliant. They make it very social media-friendly, so it just looks like: “Oh, no problem. Here’s the diagram. Go do it.” That’s not really the case. You need to separate it. You need to clean, then grind it. Even molding it is di cult. People often ask about the toxicity of working with it, but it’s no more toxic than any other studio production process. We work with it at low temperatures and only with HDPE [high-density polyethylene] and PP [polypropylene] that are considered safe to work with. And of course we have the proper ventilation and all that. I recently discovered that face masks are made from PP. In everyday life, we inhale and eat this stu constantly. We are partly plastic.
To get the plastic, rst I did some dumpster diving with my daughter and her friends, and then I worked with a Bard College art student, Cora Quinlan, who collected stu from all the local dumpsters over the summer upstate here in Tivoli, New York. I really wanted to work with an organization that was already doing similar things in regard to collecting plastic, and I was referred to Brigitte Charlton-Vicenty and the Inner City Green Team by Kabira Stokes, a recycling expert. This was a perfect match since Brigitte was already looking to expand her recycling initiative. What they do is remarkable and I feel very lucky to be able to support her by sourcing the plastic from the organization. I mean, they support me by collecting, cleaning and cutting the waste plastic that otherwise will end up in the ocean.
HD
The way that plastic normally gets produced is through such high mechanisms of standardization and alienation. We have no idea where our plastic or fossil fuels come from. There are all these trends to support more local systems for food production, clothing production and various other kinds of material goods. But when it comes to plastics, I think it’s only very recently that people have started thinking about the possibility of reclaiming plastics in any kind of closed-loop system that then ends up being more local.
MR
I love circular systems. My videos are all circular systems, and it feels nice to have created one in real life.
HD
It’s super interesting that the process ends with these mushroom forms.
MR
Ha ha, yes. I didn’t intend for it to look like mushrooms. I was originally attracted to the extruder, a machine that extrudes plastic “chips” into a mold. You can also freestyle and let it
drip. Gary Dusek built it and I came to see it in his shop in the Bronx. He’s a designer who specializes in reclaimed plastic. Small-scale recycling of plastic is more common in Europe, and of course in the U.S. there are only a handful of people that work with plastic in this way. Gary is kind of the only one on the East Coast. He showed me how it works, and we extruded plastic into a tube. We got caught up talking and didn’t turn the machine o , so it over-extruded and over owed, and out came this shape that was a very oddly sexual and “organic-looking” blub. It looked like a sex toy or an internal organ. I fell in love with it and developed a building system from these extruded sticks and these blubs that we drill into. It’s like an imperfect kind of queer Lego. Then the idea of making lamps from them came along, and Gary built a new injector machine. But the expensive mold we fabricated was too big and the injector pressure was too low, so it did not inject the full thing, and this is how we got this handmade, imperfect look. It came out looking like a mushroom cap! So the defect was perfect. I love it that the imperfection chance element is what makes each one unique.
HD
There are all these connections between mushrooms and plastic. Mycelium is often used as a plastic packaging alternative; some mushrooms can break down plastics. Mycelium is also a ubiquitous material, and like many other kinds of toxins, some of it is quite bene cial to our bodies and some of it is incredibly harmful.
MR
It’s interesting that they end up looking like mushrooms that are both extremely toxic and have amazing health bene ts. This attraction/repulsion spot is an interesting psychological space. It relates to an idea that you bring up in your book Plastic Matter, about how we can’t go back to a world with no plastic or enclose ourselves in an organic wooden “bubble.” When I think about “eco art,” it has the risk of feeling puritanical and detached from the real world. Working with waste plastic is a way to deal with the problem head-on rather than shipping it somewhere else. Actually turning the problem into a thing of value, which is something art is really good at. It’s cynical and funny and also true. It’s funny that, left to its own shape, plastic assumes these bodily “organic” forms. We’re so accustomed to thinking about plastic as a super arti cial, non-organic material, but looked at through the lens of queer ecology, there’s no rigid distinction between “arti cial” and “natural.” There is no “pure natural.” Plastic, as a fossil fuel byproduct, is ancient life trapped without the ability to decompose and complete a cycle. This is why it’s such a tragically attractive material. The way we process it in the studio reveals its core being— not as “bad” material but as sad material. Kind of beautiful and tragic.
“The way that plastic normally gets produced is through such high mechanisms of standardization and alienation. We have no idea where our plastic or fossil fuels come from.”—Heather Davis
HD
In some of your work, such as Cosmic Generator [2017], you play a lot with scale, space and time. For example, large things can emerge from very, very tiny spaces. I was thinking about this in relation to plastic. Plastic as a material feels a bit like time and space travel—de nitely time travel, in the sense of how it is composed of ancient creatures. You just talked about how you feel like plastic is kind of sad because it’s trapped in a particular form that can’t decompose. A colleague of mine, Zoe Todd, talks about fossil fuels being “un-consensually unearthed.” It’s like those fossil fuels were in their own process of decomposition, but now they’ve been fundamentally disturbed. It’s almost like a reverse-burial process that we’re all implicated in. Part of the reason why fossil fuels are wreaking such havoc in the world is because of that lack of consent. But fossil fuels are also, in some ways, trapped sunlight. I was thinking about the lamps and the relationship they have to ancient light and contemporary light—light becoming a kind of time travel.
MR
You mentioned that earlier, and I love this idea of the light that’s trapped being able to shine again. And thinking about materials and environments as sentient beings, as things we form relationships with.
HD
Do you want to talk a little bit about the vines?
MR
When I was researching materials for this, I landed on processing waste plastic and on working with invasive vines. I have a lot of these “bittersweet” vines and the artist Max Bard was helping me clear some of them around the studio. These vines are amazing looking. Each one is unique, and they twist and twirl so they can climb on other trees. They seemed like a great match for the plastic, and they helped in building larger structures.
This article was produced with an accompanying short lm, Mika Rottenberg: Plastic (2024), available on the Ursula website.
“Plastic, as a fossil fuel byproduct, is ancient life trapped without the ability to decompose and complete a cycle. This is why it’s such a tragically attractive material. ” —Mika Rottenberg
A remembrance of Verena Loewensberg’s beloved Zurich record shop, City-Discount
Verena Loewensberg (1912–1986) was a Swiss painter. In her twenties, she visited Paris on several occasions and was introduced to Hans Arp, Sophie TaeuberArp and Georges Vantongerloo. In particular, the work of Vantangerloo served as a strong in uence. In the 1930s, she became a liated with the Zurich Concrete artists, a group that included Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Camille Graeser; she established a lifelong friendship with Bill and his wife Binia.
In the 1960s, Loewensberg had something of a parallel career, running a record shop in Zurich’s Old Town that quietly became legendary among a cionados of jazz and avant-garde music. In those years, Loewensberg was the only record seller in Switzerland directly importing the newest releases— records by Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, as well as experimental music by artists like Moondog and Frank Zappa—from the United States. The store, called CityDiscount, became a popular hangout for die-hard music fans and for musicians
themselves, who looked to Loewensberg as a guide and tastemaker. Because she ran the store under her married name, Mrs. Wickart, many of her customers had no idea that their favorite record dealer was also a prominent painter.
Although City-Discount remained a busy cultural crossroads in Zurich for years, no photos of its interior or exterior seem to have survived; only a scattering of things that once belonged to the shop—an old black telephone, an elegant leather desk chair, a stereo ampli er, folders of ephemera—exist now to give a sense of its legacy. But Loewensberg’s children, Henriette and Stephan Coray, spent much of their early lives inside their mother’s shop and retain vivid memories of its look and layout. With the help of their recollections and old oorplans they provided, illustrator Nicholas Blechman has brought City-Discount and its singular sensibility back to life in a series of specially commissioned drawings for Ursula, accompanied here by a gathering of voices of those who loved the shop and still remember it well.
retrospect
STEPHAN CORAY
“As a young kid of seventeen, eighteen, coming to this record store was always an event. . . . You sometimes felt like you were disturbing her, but she was always very sweet, very distingué.”—Dieter Meier
At that time, Zurich’s jazz axis ran between Club Africana and my mother’s record store, City-Discount. I’d often help out there, especially when she went to her studio to paint. She didn’t like talking to customers about her art. In any case, most musicians didn’t even know she was a painter.
She described her practice as: “I’ve got no underlying theory, so I have to depend on an idea popping into my head.” She also couldn’t bear banal chitchat. But she always liked talking about jazz “real” jazz, that is, not Dave Brubeck, although her store did carry his famous Take Five or about astrophysics with Fritz Zwicky, who’d worked on morphological analysis at ETH university, and with her husband, Alfons “Föns” Wickart, who was also interested in that topic.
HENRIETTE CORAY
It’s always been said that City-Discount existed from 1964 to 1970, but I recently found lists of record orders from 1960, and the store was still listed as a sales outlet for the underground magazine Hotcha! as late as the summer of 1968, so it existed pretty much as long as the Africana jazz club, from 1960 to 1968.
Those early lists were by Föns Wickart, who helped my mother choose records for the shop. He loved making lists. My mother also had a great interest in modern classical music. She listened to Glenn Gould’s 1956 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations again and again. But her interests ranged even farther, to Japanese and Indian music. We went to just about every Ravi Shankar concert.
My brother and I helped out in the store, just like my mother’s friend Doris Stau er did, so that my mother could nd time to paint. She loved her long chats with Urban Gwerder, an artist and writer and the editor of Hotcha!, whom she considered very smart and who was more into Frank Zappa and underground music; with the art restorer Paul P ster she discussed modern experimental music.
SC
My mother explained her thoughts on jazz quite well in a 1971 radio interview
that the writer Stefan Zweifel recently unearthed. It was crazy to hear my mother’s voice again after fty years. It’s also clear that—just as in the store—she doesn’t make small talk but sticks to her ideas very strictly about, for example, Charlie Parker or Miles Davis, whose Zurich concerts she, of course, attended, where his blue velvet suit with red lining mightily impressed her. He was a beautiful man. In Zurich, Hans Kennel was like a Miles Davis, Jr.—beautifully dressed. She liked talking with him, as well as with the radio interviewer Frank Bi ger, a world champion at drinking white wine who seemed beyond reproach and whose horizons were very broad.
As a young kid of seventeen, eighteen, coming to this record store was always an event. The interior was very minimalist, and Loewensberg was often in the store by herself listening to jazz. You sometimes felt like you were disturbing her, but she was always very sweet, very distingué.
Going in, you entered a kind of sanctuary, a church where someone is singing something just for you. At rst, her face would be hard to read, but she was always happy when she could pass something on to the people who came into the store. Over time, us boys became persona grata, and every time we skipped school and dropped by, she’d bring out the most interesting
records, saying: “You have to hear this— and this, too!”
If I remember correctly, you couldn’t put any records on yourself, unlike at the Jecklin store, which had sets of headphones at its counter. Verena Loewensberg always put the records on herself, because she didn’t want the records to be scratched. And she’d play the latest music. That was an elixir to me. That’s when I rst learned you could discover and do something entirely personal to you.
SISSI ZÖBELI
I attended the Cantonal High School in the cloisters of the Grossmünster on Kirchgasse, and once we’d had some wonderful potato salad at Café Pony, we’d spend the rest of our lunch break at City-Discount. She really impressed me, Verena Loewensberg.
Of course, I never dared ask to listen to something—you couldn’t put the records on yourself, and she really was a grande dame—but sometimes I pulled myself together, and I appreciated her opinions. While I wasn’t that interested in jazz, she was the rst to sell funk music. And since Dollar Brand lived in Zurich and played at the Africana, we did go and see him there. The scene was relatively tight-knit, and she was a real anchor point.
A NTON BRUHIN
As I came from the countryside, I hardly knew any jazz except for what came on the radio. But the rst record
I bought was a jazz record from Verena Loewensberg. There was a gramophone in her store, and I was amazed at how it looked, with the weights, full of technology. I was so young. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
DM
I remember getting my rst turntable and playing all this music in my room after midnight, secretly listening to Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy when I really should’ve been sleeping. And behind my books, I’d stashed a bottle of cognac, out of which I’d take a couple of sips as I smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window so nobody would notice. Dolphy was my hero, and then Charlie Mingus. Miles Davis was already almost too kitschy for me. Erroll Garner and Count Basie were like candy—brilliant, of course, but I was more into the hard-core avant-garde. Once at a Mingus concert, his double bass arrived two hours late,
and many in the audience had already left. He unwrapped it, threw o its protective fabric and played. We all had tears in our eyes. It was a revelation.
SC
I went with my mother and Föns Wickart in 1953 to Lucerne to my rst jazz concert, a Norman Granz “Jazz at the Philharmonic” production with Gene Krupa and J. C. Heard—very accomplished drummers, mind you, creating these percussive orgies; I remember Heard used brush drumsticks to create a “Black swinging sound.”
My favorite jazz musicians were John Coltrane and Elvin Jones. I was really into the rhythm section and wanted to be a drummer myself for a while; the great-grandson of Gerhard Hauptmann gave me quasi-mathematical drum lessons. One time, in 1962, I was in a wonderfully good mood and went to a Coltrane concert at the Volkshaus. As
soon as I heard Elvin Jones on drums, I said to myself: “There’s no point in me continuing.” We were worlds apart. I understood what he was doing, but it was unattainable.
The best concert I ever saw in Zurich was Mingus’s show at the Limmathaus in 1964. He was two hours late, his double bass wrapped in fabric so it wouldn’t get damaged in transport. Mingus didn’t like where they’d put the piano, and the stagehand, in his blue shop coat, had to push it from the left to the right-hand side. Then Mingus threw o the bass’s protective fabric, just kicked it o , and it was stunning. Suddenly, he spotted someone in the third row with a tape recorder under their chair, and he went over and stomped on it. That’s how furious he could get.
During the break, many people left, as the concert had already started
“At the time, City-Discount was the only record store that really cared about new sounds. All the others just sold what the big record labels were putting out. But at her store, you could nd these extreme recordings nobody else had.”—Bruno Spoerri
much too late. But they never forgave themselves for missing the second part—Mingus thawed completely, and the audience absolutely loved it. Only Coltrane’s concert at the Volkshaus was of the same caliber for me.
BRUNO SPOERRI
I probably met Verena Loewensberg at the Africana, where I played saxophone every week with the Remo Rau Quintet— Remo on the piano, Hans Kennel on the trumpet, Alex Bally on the drums and Hans Foletti on the bass. We were kind of their house band. And then there was Dollar Brand, whom I also met there, in 1962. This continued until 1966, when Jürg Grau left the Africana and moved his concerts to the Vorderer Sternen.
At the time, City-Discount was the only record store that really cared about new sounds. All the others just sold what the big record labels were putting out. But at her store, you could nd these extreme recordings nobody else had. Between 1964 to 1966 is when I worked the hardest in my life. Besides music, I had just joined an advertising company making commercials, working day and night, and sometimes quickly running to the record store to buy something, so I had far too little contact with Loewensberg. I only found out much later that she was a painter and had a studio on the Weite Gasse 4 where she worked in her free hours.
It was at her store that I discovered Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” a hit at the time, and we started playing it as a jazz song, which became our transition to jazz rock. We were becoming more and more experimental. I was commissioned by the city of Zurich to do poetry and jazz. I started using electronic instruments such as the ondes Martenot, which I bought new in 1967 and played in the jazz group that same year, probably the rst time this classical instrument was used in a jazz group, which certainly interested Loewensberg.
Her fascination with avant-garde musicians such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt remained even after the store closed, and her work clearly shows how music and painting can synesthetically blend.
AB
One of my favorite records was one in which Artmann translated François Villon’s robber ballads into the language of Viennese pimps with jazz by Fatty George. It’s a marvelous, wonderful record, a combination of the jazz, literature and art scenes. Cage, too, was important to the scene, just like the minimal and experimental work of Steve Reich and Karlheinz Stockhausen. These worlds were also strongly represented at Loewensberg’s store— not just the usual jazz and free jazz.
DM
At that time, Bellevue Square was the heart of a network of artists and music fans. Very di erent worlds met there: Friedrich Kuhn and the heavy drinkers; the Schwarzer Ring, where the tough guys went; or the Select, where I played chess. Then there was the Odeon, of course, where for years I lived out my poker addiction on its second oor. In 1968, I staged a three-hour streettheater tragedy about women’s lives. Afterwards, I used a megaphone to conduct an auction of wedding dresses and other women’s clothes. Loewensberg’s record shop belonged to this network around the Bellevue. You couldn’t help but admire her. Every visit was an event for me, my initiation into the world of music.
AB
Zurich was extremely stu y at that time. Everywhere there were signs saying “KEEP OFF GRASS.” It went pretty far. But there was also a counterworld of sorts, a tight-knit network of galleries and pubs all connected by jazz and art. In addition to City-Discount, the Rössligasse also had the Weisses Kreuz restaurant. A good, Fellini-esque pub, it attracted some extreme characters, and the host himself was a smooth guy who had these cowbells and played on the bottles.
Objects and ephemera from City-Discount record shop, Zurich, ca. 1960–1969. Photos: Jon Etter
Otherwise, I bummed around Café Odeon—I never went up to the second oor, where they played billiards and poker, but I could hear the jazz and the gamblers’ clatter coming from upstairs. There was also the Café Select and the Eckstein restaurant on Hechtplatz, all just around the corner, and each of them had a di erent scene.
Art and jazz overlapped. I met Irene Schweizer at the Africana, where Dollar Brand was playing. He sometimes used to visit us on Venedigstrasse. I saw him a few times and used to play his records. Damn cool music.
There were many shows at the Limmathaus and the amateur jazz festival at the Urban Cinema and the Weisser Wind. There was the jazz club at
the Vorderer Sternen on Bellevue, and free jazz with Peter Brötzmann, who played so wildly that the verb brötzen even found its way into the German dictionary.
I was more likely to go to clubs like Platte 27, the Antaris on the Limmatquai, or the Blackout discotheque, where Peter Schweri projected experimental stu , including a lm that has me reading magazines and smoking in bed at Friedrich Kuhn’s apartment. Kuhn had a studio right below the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic, in whose gardens Fredi M. Murer shot his lm Picnic. Yes, despite all of Zurich’s stu ness, there was also an opposing force, one that really sought to épater la bourgeoisie. There was this wild corner
on Südstrasse where artists played enfant terrible, where excess was the order of the day. That attitude was also omnipresent in Niederdorf, a wilder “Züri.” These all didn’t seem like distant individual oases in a desert to me. Together, they formed a scene where something was really going on.
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When my mother’s record store closed, the era of “real” jazz in Zurich also ended. She listened to a lot of Mozart and Bach, especially the fugues. The Africana was already closed by then, and the jazz scene had wandered on to Willisau. I, too, switched over from jazz after hearing Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.” And the underground slowly made its way in through the poet Urban Gwerder and his Hotcha! magazine, as was the case with Hans-Heinrich Kunz, also known as HHK, who took over the store under the name Musicland.
I became Zurich’s rst traveling disc jockey, playing at Club Platte 27. I built two large speakers, two power ampli ers and a mixing console and made a psychedelic liquid light show with strobe lights. A rich kid from Zürichberg gave me the keys to his Citroën 2CV Fourgonnette so I could drive around as a traveling DJ.
I also played fashion shows at Gassmann or Globus, and later set up the discotheque Blackout in an old airplane hangar in Zurich-Kloten, with lm projectors, Ti any lamps and sca olding above the bar. Wilson Pickett even came to the opening! Although my mother was still interested in the experimental work of Bruno Spoerri, whom she knew well from when he played the saxophone at the Africana, for her the time of “real” Black jazz was already over. At my mother’s funeral, Föns Wickart played Charlie Parker from a tape.
Translated by Florian Duijsens
ANTON BRUHIN is an artist and musician. He is a virtuoso on the jaw harp and a collector of Trümpi instruments.
HENRIETTE CORAY is Verena Loewensberg’s daughter and the president of the Verena Loewensberg Foundation.
STEPHAN CORAY is Verena Loewensberg’s son.
DIETER MEIER is a musician, conceptual artist and entrepreneur. He is the front man of the electronic music group Yello.
BRUNO SPOERRI is a jazz musician, an electronics pioneer and author of the reference book Jazz in der Schweiz
SISSI ZÖBELI is a fashion designer of Thema Selection, now located on Spiegelgasse in Zurich.
“Verena Loewensberg: Kind of Blue” is on view at Hauser & Wirth New York’s 69th Street location through April 27.
Fabio Mauri, The End ,1959. Collage, ink, transfer letters and oil on paper, 12.59 x 9.06 in. (32 x 23 cm).
the Estate of Fabio Mauri and Hauser & Wirth
Italian artist Fabio Mauri (1926–2009) incorporated performance, film, mixed-media works, installations and theoretical writings to investigate 20th-century history and the atrocities of World War II. After the war, he saw magazine pictures of concentration camp victims and was deeply shaken. In visually jarring and often profoundly provocative ways, his work explored the mechanisms through which spectacle, media and nationalism conspired to spawn Italian fascism and continued to fuel isolationist, totalitarian impulses long after the war.
I n 1957, Mauri made his first screen work (schermo) in reference to cinema and television, which had infiltrated Italian society by the 1950s. The newfound ubiquity of television reinforced Mauri’s perception that a screen was a
vehicle through which reality would be shaped and that the world as we know it was becoming a projection.
Text and words were central to his work, the legacy of his literary upbringing and his family’s ownership of the Italian publishing house Bompiani. Several of his screen works invoke the words “The End” or its Italian equivalent “Fine” as a contemplation of finality: a literal reference to the last, fade-out moment in cinema but also a broader philosophical reflection on human mortality and the context of history.
Mauri’s questioning of the proliferation of screens and new media in society reflected a major issue of his time, one that holds even more troubling relevance today.
“Reality, by definition,” he wrote presciently, “is more complex than the world of signs that describes it.”