Ursula: Issue 11

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Hauser &Wirth Fall/Winter 2024

A Magazine of Contemporary Culture

Issue 11 Fall/Winter 2024

MY DIOR COLLECTION Yellow gold, white gold, pink gold and diamonds.

Zoe Leonard on the Border Plus: An Exclusive Postcard Steve Martin: Mao & Me Rei Kawakubo on Roman Signer Simon Wu on the Rituals of CrossFit

“I Was Born Free” Rujeko Hockley on Amy Sherald

Drink responsibly

VENICE BIENNALE EDITION

JULIEN CREUZET & A LV I N L I

SADIE COLES & ANGELINA VOLK

MICHAEL ROCK & IRMA BOOM

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE & C A R O LY N C H R I S T O V BAKARGIEV

TREVOR YEUNG & HILDIGUNNUR BIRGISDÓT TIR

VICKY KRIEPS WITH ANDREA MANCINI & EVERY ISLAND

K I M B E R LY D R E W & ANDREW DURBIN

COURTNEY J. MARTIN & SIMON CASTETS

ADRIANO PEDROSA & YA N A P E E L

WITH PENNY MARTIN

William Kentridge & Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

A R T S . C U LT U R E . I M A G I N AT I O N .

P ODCAST SE ASON 4 . LISTEN NOW.

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Departments

Editor’s Note p. 18

Celebration For Ursula Hauser’s eighty-fifth birthday, a card from Mary Heilmann p. 24

Letters Roni Horn writes to philosopher Hélène Cixous p. 20

Antiphony A new poem by Victoria Adukwei Bulley in response to a work by Miranda Forrester p. 22

Unknown Pleasures The Body Ecstatic: Simon Wu’s relationship with CrossFit p. 26

Epitaph A remembrance of avant-garde musician Damo Suzuki (1950–2024)

by Elliott Sharp p. 33

Glitch Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster on respiration and desire p. 36

The Keepers Oddur Roth on the Roth Bars and their foraged parts p. 90

Studies Phyllida Barlow’s life as a teacher, remembered by her students p. 98

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Features

Conversations At Work in the Garden: Uman in conversation with Matthew Higgs and Annatina Miescher about displacement, community and letting art speak for itself p. 40

The Cover “I Was Born Free” An essay by curator Rujeko Hockley on the autonomy within Amy Sherald’s work p. 62

Profile Planned Serendipity: Barbara Pollack on the performances of Aki Sasamoto p. 56 Essay Toward the Act of Knowing: Voices on Eduardo Chillida, in honor of his centenary

by Use Lahoz p. 48

Portfolio River as a Verb: A conversation about Zoe Leonard’s Al río/ To the River and the uses of photography p. 78

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Departments

Book Reviews Some new and forthcoming titles that we love p. 112

Books Fit to Print: Rei Kawakubo on Comme des Garçons’ artistic collaborations p. 114

Books Conversation Maria Morris Hambourg, Chloé Obolensky and Olivier Renaud-Clément on the life and work of photography curator Pierre Apraxine p. 118

Fiction “Every Maid”

by Serubiri Moses p. 122

Site Leah Singer on Le Corbusier and Nek Chand in Chandigarh p. 130

Retrospect Mao & Me: Steve Martin finds an old friend p. 149

In the Details A close consideration of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Morning Toilette (1914) p. 138

Material Daniel Turner on tuning into the frequency of materials p. 140

Non Finito The Meaning of the Sun: Nicolas Party at work in Korea p. 152

fall / winter 2024 editor in chief

Randy Kennedy managing editor

Alexandra Vargo

assistant editor

Jana Horn

art direction

Common Name production

Christine Stricker head of digital content

Francis Till

digital content coordinator

Ellie Dunbar

marketing manager

Francesca Cosslett

sales & distribution

Siân Edwards Chris Else

director public progr ams & events

Russell Salmon publisher

Hauser & Wirth Publishers

Editorial Office: 443 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011 Tel: +1 212-790-3900 ursulamagazine@hauserwirth.com Subscribe: shop.hauserwirth.com/ursula Single copies may be purchased for $18/£16.

Postmaster: Send address changes to address above, care of Ursula Subscriptions.

hauser & wirth Presidents Iwan and Manuela Wirth Marc Payot Chief Executive Officer Ewan Venters Global Creative Director & Partner Neil Wenman Executive Director Publications Michaela Unterdörfer Senior Director Global Marketing Adele Santarelli

Vol. 5, Issue no. 11: Ursula (ISSN 2639-376X) Published twice a year by Hauser & Wirth Prepress by Prints Professional, Berlin Printed by Offsetdruckerei Karl Grammlich Pliezhausen, Germany Advertising Cultureshock Media London

Senior Director Marketing Europe Anna-Maria Pfab Director of Marketing & Communications Asia Tara Liang Marketing Director United States Michael Wooten Front cover: Amy Sherald, Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), 2024 (detail). Oil on linen, each panel: 128 x 68 x 2 1/2 in.

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Contributors MATTHEW HIGGS is the director and chief curator of White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative art space, where in 2015 he organized the artist Uman’s debut solo exhibition.

Since 1993, Higgs has curated more than 250 exhibitions and projects in North America and Europe, and his writings have appeared in more than fifty publications and magazines. (See p. 40.)

VICTORIA ADUKWEI BULLEY is a poet and writer. Her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET (2022), won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber in the U.K. and in North America by Knopf. (See p. 22.)

Author, independent curator and consultant MARIA MORRIS HAMBOURG is the founding curator of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She led the curatorial and conservation team at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for a digital and print publication, Object: Photo; Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949 from 2012 to 2014, and co-curated “Irving Penn: Centennial” at the Met from 2015 to 2017. She continues to work with photographers and to write articles on significant figures in the field. (See p. 118.)

MARY HEILMANN is one of the preeminent abstract painters of her generation. Heilmann’s work overlays the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous ethos of the Beat generation. It is distinguishable by its often unorthodox, yet always joyful, approach to color and form. Heilmann has spent her life living near the ocean, first in California, where she was raised, and then, since the late 1960s, in New York, both in Manhattan and Bridgehampton. (See p. 24.)

RUJEKO HOCKLEY is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the curator of the retrospective “Julie Mehretu” (2021), and co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined” (2017) and “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017” (2017).

(See p. 62.)

RONI HORN’s work consistently questions and generates uncertainty to thwart closure, engaging with many different concerns in a range of materials, including photography, installation, sculpture and literature. Important across her oeuvre is her longstanding interest in the protean nature of identity, meaning and perception, as well as in the notion of doubling, issues that continue to propel Horn’s practice. (See p. 20.)

FLORIAN ILLIES is the author of the books 1913: The Year before the Storm (2012), Love in a Time of Hate (2023) and Zauber der Stille: Caspar David Friedrich (2023), soon to be published in English as The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich.

He has worked in publishing as the editorial director of culture at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit, where he is still on the advisory board. In 2003, he founded the contemporary art magazine Monopol. (See p. 138.)

CHARLOTTE JANSEN is a British Sri Lankan author, journalist and critic based in London. Jansen writes on contemporary art and photography for The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, and British Vogue, among others. She is the author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze (2017) and Photography Now (2021). (See p. 98.)

ADRIAN JOFFE was born in Johannesburg. After studying Japanese and Tibetan at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, he joined Comme des Garçons in 1987. He is presently the CEO of Comme des Garçons International and Dover Street Market International. (See p. 114.)

REI KAWAKUBO was born Tokyo.

She is the founder and creative director of Comme des Garçons, a company engaged the pursuit of the new. She studied fine arts and literature at Keio University in Tokyo before pursuing a career in design. In 1969, Kawakubo founded Comme des Garçons Co. Ltd. Its first collection was presented in Tokyo in 1973. (See p. 114.)

USE LAHOZ is the author of seven novels, including Los Baldrich (2009), La estación Perdida (2011), Jauja (2019), Verso suelto (2023), and the travel book Paris (2019).

His narrative work has won several prizes. He currently teaches at

Sciences Po University in Paris.

As a journalist, he won the 2011 Pica d’Estats Prize. He is a regular contributor to Radio Nacional de España and El País. (See p. 48.)

New York-based artist ZOE LEONARD balances rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work, which merges photography, sculpture and installation. By employing strategies of repetition, shifting perspectives and a multitude of printing processes, Leonard probes the politics of representation and display. Her work explores themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement and the urban landscape. (See p. 78.)

ALEXIS LOWRY is a curatorial director at Hauser & Wirth. Prior to joining the gallery, she held positions at Dia Art Foundation, David Winton Bell Gallery and Creative Time.

As an art historian and writer, she is interested in the legacies of Minimalism, Postminimalism and Land Art. (See p. 20.)

Actor, comedian, author, playwright, screenwriter, producer and musician STEVE MARTIN is one of the most acclaimed performers of his generation. Martin’s work has earned him an Academy Award, five Grammys, an Emmy, the Mark Twain Award, an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award and a Kennedy Center Honor.

As an author, Martin’s work includes the novel An Object of Beauty (2010), the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile (1993), a collection of comic pieces Pure Drivel (1998), a bestselling novella Shopgirl (2000) and his memoir Born Standing Up (2007).

(See p. 149.)

SCULPTED BY THE LIGHT A contemporary rose that emerges in an unexpected chiaroscuro.

Intense accents of Bulgarian Rose on a background of Cedarwood meet a bright Italian Bergamot, enhanced by the spicy nuances of Black and Pink Pepper.

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ANNATINA MIESCHER is a Swissborn, naturalized American psychiatrist and retired clinical assistant professor at New York University.

She ran Bellevue Hospital’s chemical dependency outpatient program from 1987 to 2010, and with her patients she created the Bellevue Sobriety Garden. In 2012, artist Bjarne Melgaard invited her to bring self-taught artists to his studio to collaborate, after which she founded an artist collective to allow these artists to continue developing their skills. (See p. 40.)

SERUBIRI MOSES is an author and curator based in New York City. His numerous book chapters, catalogue essays and academic articles have been translated into five languages.

His curatorial work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Texte zur Kunst, Art Papers and Le Monde. His first poetry book is THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK (2023). He is a contributing editor of e-flux journal. (See p. 122.)

CHLOÉ OBOLENSKY is a renowned designer of sets and costumes for opera, theater and film. Her long-standing collaborations with director Peter Brook include The Mahabharata, The Cherry Orchard and Carmen, among others. In 2011, she won the Abbiati Prize for best costumes for a production of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice at La Scala. (See p. 118.)

NICOLAS PARTY is a figurative painter known for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits and still lifes. His visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is skewed to uncanny effect. In addition to pastel paintings, Party creates public murals, pietra dura, ceramics, oilon-copper paintings, installation works and sculptures. Based in New York, Party studied at the Lausanne School of Art in Switzerland before receiving his M.F.A. from Glasgow School of Art. (See p. 152.)

Contributors BARBARA POLLACK is the co-founder of Art at a Time Like This, a nonprofit that provides a platform for free expression to artists whose work addresses pressing social issues. Pollack is the author of Brand-New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise (2018), and she curated “Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity” at New York’s Asia Society in 2022.

She has been awarded two Asia Cultural Council fellowships and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writer grant. (See p. 56.)

OLIVIER RENAUD-CLÉMENT has organized exhibitions and acted as an advisor to artists and estates in the U.S., Europe and Japan for many years. He has worked frequently with Hauser & Wirth, collaborating with the gallery on more than thirty exhibitions. He is based in Paris and New York. (See p. 118.)

Artist ODDUR ROTH, a grandson of the late German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth, has lived and worked in Bruton, England, since January 2024. Alongside a team including Einar Roth, Bjarni Grímsson, Sigrún Holmgeirsdottir, Thrandur Gíslason Roth and Gudmundur Oddur Magnusson, he reimagined the Roth Bar as a new site-specific artwork and fully functioning bar within the Threshing Barn at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Oddur and his father, Björn Roth, were among Hauser & Wirth’s first artists-in-residence in Somerset, in 2014. (See p. 90.)

ELLIOTT SHARP is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist who leads the projects SysOrk

and Terraplane. His compositional strategies encompass fractal geometry, chaos theory, genetic metaphors and new techniques for graphic notation. He has received the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. (See p. 33.)

DANIEL TURNER is a New Yorkbased artist. His works have been exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel; Chinati Foundation, Marfa; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand-Hornu, Belgium; and Musée d’art Moderne de Paris, among others. (See p. 140.)

Known for her use of grisaille in the depiction of her subjects, AMY SHERALD documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, intimate portraits.

In 2017, Sherald was invited to paint the official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama. Her work can be found in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She lives and works in the greater New York area. (See p. 62.)

For the last fifty years, Swiss artist ROMAN SIGNER has been redefining sculpture by producing elementary actions and installations known as time sculptures. Signer has described nature as his studio.

Through experiments with natural forces such as wind, fire, earth and water, everyday objects such as umbrellas, kayaks, boots, tables and bicycles are activated into poetic visual installations. (See p. 114.)

UMAN’s visual vocabulary reflects her life and expansive cross-cultural experiences. An intuitive artist, she draws from memories of her East African childhood, a rigorous education in traditional calligraphy and a fascination with kaleidoscopic color and design. Her work contemplates both the physical and the spiritual, intertwining abstraction, figuration, meditative patterning and a reverence for the natural world. (See p. 40.)

JAMIESON WEBSTER is a psychoanalyst in New York City, a teacher at the New School for Social Research and a regular contributor to The New York Times and many psychoanalytic publications. She is the author of Disorganisation and Sex (2022) and the forthcoming On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe (2025). (See p. 36.)

ROSS SIMONINI is an artist, essayist, novelist, composer and multi-instrumentalist. Exhibitions of his work have been held at François Ghebaly and at anonymous gallery in New York and at SHRINE in Los Angeles. His novel The Book of Formation (2017) is currently being adapted into a feature film.

(See p. 90.)

LEAH SINGER is an artist and writer based in New York. (See p. 130.)

SIMON WU is a writer and curator.

His first book of essays, Dancing on My Own, was released by Harper Collins in 2024. (See p. 26.)

W W W. JANECARR . SHOP

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Editor’s Note “Drafting a prose piece puts me in a devotional frame of mind.” —Robert Walser

This issue of Ursula is devoted to its namesake, Ursula Hauser, one of the great art patrons and collectors of her generation, who turned eighty-five this year. Of her many decades in the art world, she once said, with considerable self-deprecation: “I’m not a professional … but I think I don’t have a bad eye for artists.” Her eye, in fact, has been prophetic, not least because she began to befriend, and collect the work of, visionary women artists at a time when the art world was just beginning to undergo a transformation (still very much a work in progress) from its centuries-long default of male domination.

When we launched this magazine in 2018, I remember a long list of potential names for it sitting on my desk. Despite all the thinking that went into compiling the possibilities, they were depressingly generic. (Manifest had somehow risen near the top of the list, as if we were launching a commercial sea-freight journal.) Then the idea of naming it for the matriarch of the gallery went off like a light bulb, for several reasons: It personalized the magazine, in meaningful and esoteric ways; it denoted strength—the name is derived from the Latin for “she-bear”; and it possessed not only an elegant sound but also a striking graphic presence on the cover, with the parallel uprights of the U’s and the L playing off the curves of the R, S and A. When Ursula began building her collection, one of the first American artists she met was Mary Heilmann in 1994. Mary had moved to New York from California in 1968 and recalls how brutal it was in those years, especially in New York, for women artists. “Being a female was definitely a disadvantage in those days when girls weren’t supposed to have fun—they were supposed to be fun,” she once wrote. “It took me a long time and a lot of maturity to learn to negotiate the complexities of that.”

It’s incredibly fitting that thirty years after meeting Ursula, Mary has made a new painting for her birthday, The Green Room, Hawaiian Wave for Ursula (2024), which we’ve included in these pages as a kind of public birthday card to honor a collector who prefers to foreground artists while she remains in the background.

This issue is also a testament to the more open and adventurous art world that Ursula Hauser has helped create. The cover is a detail of a striking new painting by Amy Sherald, whose work, soon to be the subject of surveys in San Francisco and New York, is written about with deep historical insight by the curator Rujeko Hockley. Inside are pieces by and about the work of Phyllida Barlow, Roni Horn, Aki Sasamoto, Rei Kawakubo, Uman and Zoe Leonard, whose recent in-depth body of work focused on the United States-Mexico border and its political valence will be on view at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, an hour’s drive from the border, as the United States presidential election and its immense stakes play out around it.

In 2018, as part of her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Cover of Robert Walser, Prosastucke, 1st ed.

(Zurich: Rascher u Cie, 1917) Art, Leonard created a work called Homage on the walls of the museum’s staff offices, embellishing them with excerpts from art historian Linda Nochlin’s landmark 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (The answer, Nochlin wrote, “lies not in the nature of individual genius or the lack of it, but in the nature of given social institutions and what they forbid or encourage in various classes or groups of individuals.”)

More than half a century after Nochlin’s essay, the art world is changing but not nearly as quickly or fundamentally as some believe. “There is still a huge gender gap,” as Leonard has stressed in interviews. “Perhaps even more exhausting than all that is the way that our authority—in regard to our own work—is constantly called into question. Women who speak up, who have clear and definitive ideas about how one’s work should be displayed, described, produced, etc. are often pegged as difficult … Of course there are the exceptions, but what’s that they say about exceptions proving the rule?”

—Randy Kennedy

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letters

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Roni Horn writes to Hélène Cixous, 2003

Letter from Roni Horn to Hélène Cixous, July 19, 2003

letters

Cover of Index Cixous (Cix Pax) (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2005); Roni Horn, For Cix Pax, 2004. Chipboard, ballpoint pen and graphite, 13 x 10 in.

Titles, Roni Horn argues, “are a rare form of language where you have a brief first-time encounter and then it’s over.” A title can condense, fix; it can absorb the disparate elements of a work and distill it into a single semantic impression— yet Horn rejects this, preferring titles that resist resolution.

Horn’s titles exist alongside her images and objects as a form of doubling, where meaning is multiplied and dispersed rather than singularly amplified. “An ambiguous title,” she explains, “leaves everyone with a way out.”

The curator Hans Ulrich Olbrist once suggested to Horn that her enigmatic titles might serve as fertile ground for other artists. Taken with this idea, Horn sent letters to a group of people she felt held distinct points of view, inviting them to respond to a selection of her open-ended titles: filmmaker John Waters for his irreverent humanism; artist Louise Bourgeois for her irrepressible spirit; poet Anne Carson, because she made Horn laugh; French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous for post-structuralist analysis; and artist Mike Kelley, as a wild card. While Kelley accepted the offer, his contribution never materialized. The others eventually

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returned what became the collection of books Wonderwater (Alice Offshore), published in 2004.

Having first encountered Cixous in the form of her semi-autobiographical novel, Rootprints, Horn admired her capacity to dissolve fixed subjects. In addition to Wonderwater, the two have collaborated on a number of other projects, including a volume of seventy-four closely cropped portraits of Cixous titled Index Cixous: Cix Pax. In the spirit of its titular subject, this body of work proposes a new kind of wordless communication, where impressions of the author accumulate and subdivide, ever unstable, into “a vastly incomplete and vast collection of images.”

How then to name this “population” of Cixous images without labeling them as any one thing? As atlas or index?

Proposition or peace offering? Horn’s 2003 letter to Cixous about this subject intimately captures her sense of language’s inadequacies and its possibilities. Cixous’s response is recorded in Wonderwater on a page annotating Horn’s own Untitled (Roni Horn): “Denken Danken think thank.”—Alexis Lowry

Miranda Forrester, Arrival, 2023. Oil and gloss on polycarbonate, 72 x 55 7/8 in.

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antiphony

you’re still here, you’re gone, now / someone new

By Victoria Adukwei Bulley

“…the place of a thing is what surrounds that thing.”—Carlo Rovelli

no now without then, no there without here, finally you glimpse the truth of it: that we are bound to relation that we are we inescapably. it’s this that you feel now, here with the body that came of your body, both replica and distinct from you in turns – those eyebrows that nose more than the jazz of two beings a stranger third thing with weight. oh, good morning oblivion, good morning unpoemable otherness, with which you are intimate now and maybe, because of this, wise. good morning, you’ve arrived, you’ve left, farewell – but you’re still here, no you’re gone now you’ve become someone new. how to explain in language how all of this could be true – to have stepped through the curtain into that other place – to find the face in the mirror is still your own.

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celebr ation

For Ursula

Mary Heilmann, The Green Room, Hawaiian Wave for Ursula, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 9 x 12 in.

Ursula Hauser, one of the most dedicated and pioneering art collectors of her generation, celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday this summer. The matriarch and a co-founder of the gallery Hauser & Wirth, as well as the namesake of this magazine, Ursula has long centered her collection around the work of groundbreaking female artists, including Meret Oppenheim, Louise Bourgeois and Maria Lassnig.

In 1994, two years after the founding of the gallery, Ursula met one of the first artists with whom she would form a lifelong bond, Mary Heilmann. Mary’s journal entry from Sunday, May 8, 1994, a remarkable snapshot of the period, describes their first meeting, the previous day in her TriBeCa studio, which Ursula visited with her future sonin-law and partner in the gallery’s founding, Iwan Wirth:

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“Worked on ceramic studio/Went to Canal St for paint/To the gallery for slides/I [Irving] Blum came in/To Mitchell Algus’s/Then home/Then mtng/ Then Indochine/The(n) here with Ivan [sic], Ursula, Patty [Martori], Pat [Hearn].”

On the occasion of the milestone birthday, Mary recently made a new painting for Ursula, a lush, almost baroque evocation of ocean waves and nature’s grandeur. The painting is presented here in the spirit of a public birthday card, paired with a fitting passage from the great Swiss novelist and short-story writer Robert Walser, whose feeling for the art of his time was as finely tuned as that of Ursula Hauser.

celebr ation

“The Countess is gazing at my collection of paintings.

She does this almost every day after lunch. She loves to sit motionless for hours, looking at pictures. It’s as if she had a special bond with them, had something to say to them with multiple digressions, felt they had something of considerable length to tell her. She finds looking at an important picture more entertaining than reading a book, however important. What is contained in long, thick books, she says quite openly, is rarely more than a repetition of what we tell ourselves day after day, hour after hour. Pictures, on the other hand, are surprises worthy of being pondered and feasted on. When it comes to books, she loves poetry above all, because lines of verse contain the most art. To her, what is important and delightful about works of art is the art in them, not all the accompaniments—the storytelling, stage-setting, the wise and prudent parts. Since she herself is wise and knowledgeable about most things of this earth, she can no doubt afford to disdain having these things repeated to her again and again by writers. To her, pictures are miracles, fairytales and even stories, although it isn’t stories they tell. They speak to her of Nature, eternally riveting, incomprehensible Nature! She has no desire to have others relate to her what she already knows.

Colors and lines have a sweeter way of telling their stories.

No words ring out in them, just scents and sounds.”

—from “A Painter,” by Robert Walser (1904)

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unknown pleasures

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A writer anatomizes his obsession with CrossFit

By Simon Wu

One morning, at a nondescript strip mall, a nurse taped a small device shaped like a beetle to my chest during a routine check-up with the cardiologist. I was feeling down—also something routine and perhaps hormonal, with no specific triggers—and the little beetle (otherwise known as a Holter monitor) affirmed my sense of brokenness. Maybe the sadness was attached to being away from New York, which I had left to attend grad school. The distance was easier at first; things became more difficult when I could start counting down the months to moving back. My ennui brought weird habits. I sucked on YouTube videos like pacifiers. I watched people unbox handbags and review them. I trawled for fake handbags on WhatsApp. A few weeks before, I bought a bag and regretted it. That morning, it sat forlornly on my bed, ignored, while I rewatched videos about the bag on YouTube.

Possession only got in the way of wanting; I missed my initial yearning for it.

The beetle was making me overly aware of my heart. I had been instructed to keep a “heart diary,” noting any shortness of breath or lightheadedness, but I was more into the idea than the practice. I brushed it off as a whimsical, even poetic, notion of “listening to your heart.” Most people reacted with alarm when I told them I was monitoring my heart for seven days. Preventative! I said.

While I still have good health care! I said.

Usually only exercise can rinse me of these moods, and for me exercise means CrossFit. At the gym, I jumped onto a wooden box and stepped back down. I listened to my heart. Arrhythmia is an irregularity in your heartbeat; the internet says it sounds like a pounding, a fluttering or a racing heartbeat, but it is primarily a deviation. That’s what the beetle was looking for: some kind of deadly, organic syncopation. I wondered if it was sensitive enough to discern my activity at CrossFit from an arrhythmia.

Speeding up and slowing down your heart rate is not arrhythmia—it’s just

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The Body Ecstatic exercise, or dancing or sex. It’s not irregular, it’s just “rrhythmia.”

CrossFit calls its gym sessions WODs, or “workouts of the day.” I moved from box jumps to lateral pull-downs, stringing a resistance band onto a pull-up bar, threading both of my hands through the rubber and pulling down.

I felt the tautness in the long muscles on the sides of my torso. I took a sip of water. Jared, my coach in New Haven, the only guy I know who unabashedly loves Taylor Swift, explained the workout as we warmed up.

AMRAP 20min / 200m runs / 12 goblet squats / 12 pull-ups / increase squats and pull-ups by 3 each round “As Many Reps As Possible.” AMRAP, as we say. CrossFit’s specialized language does little to dispel the cult-like image it has for nonbelievers. The AMRAP philosophy distills the sport’s tendency to valorize overexertion, which has come under scrutiny after the recent tragic death of a CrossFit Games athlete. It is a tendency that I am thankful is healthily calibrated with safety at most of the gyms I’ve ever been to.

Over Swift’s “Cardigan” on the speaker, Jared explained that the runs today were meant to be at “an RPE 4–5,” a medium level of exertion. This spelled bad news for my bad day. In order to effectively sandblast my sadness, I really needed to get up into the RPE 8–10 range.

When the timer began, I took the first run easy, aware of the beetle. I partitioned the first set of squats into three mental sets: four squats / four squats / four squats. A lot of CrossFit involves regulating your heartbeat. You manage it, but you can’t control it—a little red animal inside. It reacts to the exertion you enact upon it, and this one was a series of sprints followed by a more reserved effort of squats and pull-ups.

What I am looking for in a workout is oblivion. The world narrows into compartments during a workout, and an

intense feeling of presentness comes over me. I work against time, but CrossFit breaks it into bearable segments, like the Container Store for the undifferentiated stream of life. * I’ve been doing CrossFit for seven years, but it feels like so much longer.

I do it when I go home to my parents in Pennsylvania. I did it in New York, and it was the first thing I looked for when I moved to New Haven. The names of my coaches run in my mind: Chris, Ashlyn, Zack, Joe, Rivka, Jared, Mike. I once did a race known as the Ragnar, in which I ran 200 miles with eleven other CrossFitters (don’t worry, it’s a relay race) and on the mile-nine leg, which I ran at 3 a.m. through a deserted town, I experienced a sublime sensation of being nothing but a body. I get a diluted chunk of that feeling daily at CrossFit. “What do I do when I bodybuild?” Kathy Acker asked in her 1993 essay “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body.” She wrote about how difficult it was to capture the experience of exercise in language. Her solution was to write while she worked out: I visualize and I count. I estimate weight; I count sets; I count repetitions. I count seconds between repetitions; I count time, seconds or minutes, between sets from the beginning to the end of each workout, in order to maintain intensity, I must continually count.

Acker proposed this minimal, repetitive language as “the bodybuilder’s language,” one that might also be called “the language of the body.” She could be describing my own experience of CrossFit: four squats / four squats / four squats.

Compared to the language of everyday speech, the language of the body is “an aural labyrinth” whose meaning derives not from its content, but from

unknown pleasures

I once did a race known as the Ragnar, in which I ran 200 miles with eleven other CrossFitters (don’t worry, it’s a relay race) and on the mile-nine leg, which I ran at 3 a.m. through a deserted town, I experienced a sublime sensation of being nothing but a body.

its repetition, and the difference that emerges from that monotony: “For though I am only repeating certain gestures during certain time spans, my body, being material, is never the same; my body is controlled by change and by chance,” Acker wrote. In this way, the monotony of exercise language—counting reps— provides access to our bodies in a way that regular language cannot. The body is like a house, Acker believed, a house with no exterior windows, dark and cool, its only windows facing inward onto a sunlit central courtyard: This architecture is a mirror of the body. When I reduce verbal language to minimal meaning, to repetition, I close the body’s outer windows.

Meaning approaches breath as I bodybuild, as I begin to move through the body’s labyrinths, to meet, if only for a second, that which my consciousness ordinarily cannot see.

Japanese writer Yukio Mishima in a Tokyo gym, 1970

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I’m not a bodybuilder. If anything, my relationship to CrossFit is characterized by my antipathy to the aesthetic reign of bodybuilding; I love CrossFit because it’s about what my body can do, not what it looks like. Yet Acker’s description of exercise as meditation helped me get closer to understanding my relationship to CrossFit, which is inseparable from my relationship to my body, which is inseparable from my relationship to writing. * My first CrossFit gym was on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and I followed it when it moved to Dean Street. I had just moved to Brooklyn after college, and I went to a free week. I loved how grueling the workout was and yet how much it didn’t feel like work. Again, it emphasized what my body could do rather than what it looked like, which was important for me as a gay man—I've always associated the gym with the specter of sex, almost involuntarily.

Although CrossFit has become known for its cultlike social atmosphere, I mostly appreciated how it modeled a kind of non-verbal togetherness.

I spent weeks with people whom I saw every day, and yet I knew nothing of what they did outside the gym.

My time with these people felt like a waking dream, heightened by the fact that I went to 7 a.m. classes, barely awake.

CrossFit is addictive.

Whenever I go on vacation, I look for a gym like a junkie.

I’ve been to gyms in Berlin, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Korea, Turkey and Japan.

Although the discipline is distinctly American, I’ve been to many gyms in which English is not the operative language, and the most common members

are not American, but “locals.” The social awkwardness of going to a new gym is a toll I’m willing to pay to get to access my required sense of oblivion. I often don’t speak the language, but the body is the lingua franca.

I once held my birthday party at that CrossFit gym on Atlantic Avenue. Chris, the owner, a kind of benevolent uncle or older-brother figure to me, was nice enough to let me host it there. If you haven’t been to a CrossFit gym, or “box,” they’re typically large, vacant spaces with lots of padded areas. It’s a great space for a party because it’s usually already outfitted with a speaker system and an empty dance floor.

I think about that party a lot. Sometimes when I’m in the midst of a workout, I try to infuse my actions with the idea that we’re all participating in a strange, synchronized ballet or some modern dance piece by Yvonne Rainer and that we’ve been asked to isolate various movements with our hands. CrossFit has a particular obsession with the idea of “functional movement,” and many of the actions translate to real-world activities: lifting a heavy box, raising something from the ground to above your head. With a bit of imagination, it’s not unlike the funny, minimalist dances of the ’60s and ’70s.

But in practice I like CrossFit because it gets me away from that kind of thinking, about theory, about language; I usually treat it as a kind of reprieve in the middle of days when I’m writing. It grants me access to parts of myself and my relationships and my eroticism that might later traverse the path of language. * For the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, exercise was a route to ecstatic oblivion.

Mishima was a deeply eccentric figure, nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the 1960s (“the Ernest Hemingway of Japan”), but as he aged he became a radically conservative proponent for Japanese isolationism with a troubled, perhaps closeted, relationship to his homosexuality.

unknown pleasures

What I am looking for in a workout is oblivion. The world narrows into compartments during a workout, and an intense feeling of presentness comes over me. I work against time, but CrossFit breaks it into bearable segments, like the Container Store for the undifferentiated stream of life.

My boyfriend, Ekin, introduced me to Mishima through the beautiful Paul Schrader film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), which tells the story of the writer’s life through his short stories.

Beauty, death and overexertion pervaded Mishima’s life—as did aesthetic rigidity, which led him into political extremism.

Mishima climaxes in a dramatic re-enactment of his real-life suicide: On November 25, 1970, he and four members of his militia entered a military base in central Tokyo, taking its commandant hostage. After unsuccessfully trying to inspire the Japan Self-Defense Forces to rise up and overthrow Japan’s 1947 constitution, he gave a rambling speech, screamed, “Long live the Emperor!” and committed seppuku, a type of suicide believed to be honorable.

I am concerned by all of this (don’t worry), but I am also intrigued. A central tenet of Mishima’s thinking was a worship of the body that coexisted with a hatred of its fleshy earthliness. Muscle became a way of escaping humanity, of moving closer to God through the beauty of form. Of course, his obsession with the male form (almost a cliché at this point for closeted male modernists) was riven by contradiction. How could he escape humanity through an aesthetic standard valorized solely by humanity?

Mishima’s obsessive bodybuilding regimen is documented in multiple collaborative photobooks. In Barakei— Killed by Roses (1963) and Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man (1970), he serves as the main model. He is goodlooking, ripped and fabulously extra, almost always posing nude, draping his body across rocks, smoldering for the camera and flexing in a loincloth. But the images have an unsettling morbidity: In Death of A Man, he poses in various states of seppuku as a fisherman, a sailor, a samurai and other archetypes. It is an uncanny twist that in the months before Death of a Man was set to be published, Mishima took his own life.

In his 1968 manifesto-essay “The Sun and Steel,” he lays out the connections between his writing, the body and

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transcendence. In much the same way that Acker brings feminist politics into her bodybuilding essay only at the end— arguing that “the language of the body” might alleviate self-alienation, a view of our own bodies as “dangerous others”— Mishima also rarely speaks in direct politics. His interest is primarily in politics via aesthetics. He describes the kind of beauty, or brilliance, he hoped to achieve through his writing. “Later, much later, thanks to the sun and the steel, I was able to learn the language of the flesh, much as one might learn a foreign language. It was my second language, an aspect of my spiritual development.”

Unlike Acker, who sought a language of the body, Mishima wanted to free the body of language; writing was an “intellectual corrosion” responsible for his “abnormal bodily existence” and was best purged:

tries to ward off, what is elided in the gym. It is one of the key elements of my relationship to CrossFit. I hated high school sports because they were where my gayness was most at risk of being revealed. Nothing like being good at kicking a ball to portend the size of your penis, to indicate how well you can attract girls. It was all so evolutionary. And I was so bad at sports. No matter what my brain did, my body could never wield unselfconsciousness the way the other boys seemed to be able to.

CrossFit saved me from this. There are no winners or losers—it’s about achieving a state of harmony with your body. When I was no longer closeted but imprisoned within that other cell, the cell of gay body standards, CrossFit freed me again by emphasizing what my body could do over what it looked like. *

…the ideal body—the ideal existence— must, I told myself, be absolutely free from any interference by words.

Its characteristics could be summed up as taciturnity and beauty of form.

Conversely, he laid out what he believed to be ideal writing: I decided that if the corrosive power of words had any creative function, it must find its model in the formal beauty of this “ideal body,” and that the ideal in the verbal arts must lie solely in the imitation of such physical beauty—in other words, the pursuit of a beauty that was absolutely free from corrosion.

For a writer, Mishima was almost comically disdainful of words. Ecstatic oblivion could be experienced only through radical em-body-ment. A language of the flesh had to escape language, and the best writing was a perfect body.

All of this—Acker, Mishima, CrossFit— is very gay. Eroticism is the subconscious thread that runs through this discussion about bodies; it is what masculinity

The Holter monitor results came back with good news: no arrhythmia. But in losing the monitor I had also lost the newfound consciousness I had developed in listening to my heart.

The next time I am in New Haven I go to visit Jared. He’s the same. He’s recently purchased some Taylor Swift merch.

A new person comes into the gym and Jared introduces him to the movements.

He starts simple: squats, push-ups. I see how deeply unfamiliar the movements look on the new guy, how the sinews move in his legs. I’ve considered becoming a CrossFit coach myself, many times. I’ve heard that people enjoy it. I’d probably enjoy it. The workout starts.

Sometimes in therapy, I bemoan the fact that I’m able to analyze and name the emotions I feel in my body and yet I have trouble accepting them.

I get disappointed with my therapist because she’s unable to give me physical exercises to deal with this problem, to understand the interior of my self— where it hurts and how it hurts—and then I remember that, for me, that’s what CrossFit does.

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epitaph

Neverending Tour / Remembering the life and music of Damo Suzuki

Damo Suzuki, ca. early 1970s

By Elliott Sharp

Snow blanketing the sidewalks and streets, and more on the way, that morning in February 2003. A blizzard, actually. I was following an invitation from my old friend and colleague Jonathan La Master to join a spontaneous gathering of musicians at New York’s Knitting Factory, with Damo Suzuki singing. I’d seen a marathon performance by him in 1998 in New York’s meatpacking district at the Cooler, where he acted as antenna and translator for the cosmos. His shamanic presence was the focal point even when he wasn’t singing, moving with the sonic currents onstage or in the audience.

Jonathan was traveling with Damo and assured me that not even a blizzard would stop them from appearing for that night’s show. And indeed, when I arrived early for sound check, the musicians and Damo were already setting up, making noise, tuning instruments. Assembled onstage wwere Keef Roberts on keyboards; Jonathan on bass and violin; Ulli Putsch on drums;

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Shu-ni Tsou on Chinese bamboo flute; Rik Hambra on percussion and voice; Jameela, who was belly dancing, and myself; I had come to add my electric guitar. Though we’d never met, Damo greeted me with a warm hug. I asked if there would be any structure to our performance, and he told me we would be “instantly composing,” making the structure as we played.

By showtime, the Knitting Factory was full, far exceeding our expectations given the dearth of traffic outside in the mounting bluster. Even before we began, Damo was in an excited state, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. The music we made grooved hard, with a strong pulse, even when it was quiet and still and the beat subliminal. Global listening ruled. A sense of inevitability prevailed when the improvisation worked.

A duet between Shu-ni and Damo?

Percussion alone? Psychedelic guitar noise?

Damo whispering? Full band grooving? All

of it could and did happen, as Damo swooped in and over and under the sonic flux and the band keyed in to his every gesture and sound. He led the ensemble’s instant composition without saying a single word or offering any direction.

In an interview with the writer Steve Hanson for Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine in 2002, Damo said: “I was not born to write lyrics. My art is nothing to do with technique or text. It is complete energy ...

What I do is just imagine. If you see paintings by Joan Miró, my favorite ... you don’t have to know how he painted or what the meaning is. If you see it, you can feel it.

You make your own experience.”

Joan Miró painted The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings in 1953, three years after Damo’s birth. I’ve always liked to think there was some astral correspondence, a parallel resonance between the two events.

In the painting, the sky is illuminated with an ambiguously tinted field of white,

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“Yes, there are moments I’m just losing myself and reaching out to the other world.... During our shows I’m very concentrated, I have contact with somewhere. I even feel that the voices I use are not mine at all.”—Damo Suzuki

yellow, gray and green hues vibrating with textured lines of pigment. We see an asymmetrical, five-pointed blue star, a recurring image of Miró’s, and another star that appears more spare, skeletal.

Dominating the work are two gargantuan figures—or aggregations—that our pareidolia transforms into faces or entities.

A large circular form, intensely red, evokes an orb at high temperature, or maybe the Rising Sun of the Japanese flag. We can accept Miró’s description that we are seeing a smile. The entire painting radiates an ecstatic acceptance of reality in all its unpredictable beauty and wonder.

Damo left Japan in 1968, at the age of eighteen, and by the following year was living in London, selling his own abstract paintings near Green Park and in the metro.

By his own admission, he was not technically accomplished, but he had a pronounced sense of what he wanted to paint. The sale of these works gave him enough money to move to Germany, where he performed in a production of Hair and busked with a “scat” style of singing on the streets of Munich. It was there that he was discovered one day by the drummer Jaki Liebezeit and the bassist Holger Czukay of the band Can, which would go on to become one of the most influential experimental groups in the history of the rock and roll. Liebezeit and Czukay asked

Cover of Ege Bamyası (1972), third studio album of the band Can. Released by United Artists Records

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Can performance in Nörvenich Castle near Cologne, Germany, ca. early 1970s

Damo to perform with them that very evening at the Blow Up, and his impromptu tryout must have been auspicious. When vocalist Malcolm Mooney departed the band, Damo was recruited as singer.

“It’s a pity that I don’t paint nowadays,” Damo said to Hanson in the 2002 interview.

“I wish to paint again, but I think I’m painting at the moment in a different way … I paint on space and time ... everything is coming out a beautiful thing, ugly thing, light thing, heavy thing, peaceful, madness, cool, freaky, sausages, sushi, fish and chips.…”

After first recording with Can on the 1970 album Soundtracks, a collection of pieces composed for various films— Damo’s contribution perhaps a bit more ornamental than integral, confined by the measure of Liebezeit’s motoric drums— Damo began exploring the musical heritage of his native Japan, letting the transcendent qualities of gagaku court music and Noh plays inform his sonic vocabulary. Seen in restored videos of Can’s gigs in 1971, Damo is a charismatic onstage presence, channeling and focusing the band’s energy as much with his body as with his voice. “Yes, there are moments I’m just losing myself and reaching out to

the other world,” he told Hanson. “During our shows, I’m very concentrated. I have contact with somewhere. I even feel that the voices I use are not mine at all.”

In 1971, he returned to the studio to produce Tago Mago, a landmark in Can’s discography, widely considered to be the band’s greatest album. By this point, Damo was a fully realized presence within the band. The album begins as a fairly conventional psychedelic rock production, but then Damo enters gently with the initial lyrics and the band explodes around him in their classic rhythm—dynamic but, at the same time, a flat color field over which events play.

Against the band’s crushing celestial pulse, Damo’s voice whispers cryptic phrases as it moves into focus. The radiance and clarity of his vocalisms provide a center, whether in singsong lyrics, wordless chants or undefinable sounds of pure emotion.

Tago Mago is a dark and ecstatic record sustained by heavy grooves that reveal an indebtedness to the voodoo electronic funk of Miles Davis in Agharta or On the Corner, as well as the sonic experiments and techniques of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. A

epitaph

The radiance and clarity of his vocalisms provide a center, whether in singsong lyrics, wordless chants or undefinable sounds of pure emotion.

Damo Suzuki, Junk in the Eggburger, 1969. Drawing on paper

sublime balance is struck between extreme experimentalism on the one hand, and trance-inducing songcraft on the other.

Can returned to the studio for their classic Ege Bamyası in 1972 and then Future Days in 1973. The former shows the band at its most aggressive: Damo shouts and screams, even performing sprechstimme (speak-singing) in a protopunk sneer over hyper-charged drums and menacing drones.

By contrast, Future Days is ambient and tranquil, textural. Damo sounds as if he’s absorbed Brazilian Tropicalia, and the band’s groove dips into a Mediterranean pool, warmer and softer.

After Future Days, Damo felt he had reached a kind of apotheosis with Can. He left the band to become a Jehovah’s Witness, and shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with cancer, told that he would probably

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not survive more than seven years.

Working various jobs, he managed to travel extensively, favoring deserts, jungles and mountains—above all, places not peopled with tourists. These voyages also allowed him to hear and absorb the music of many cultures outside of Europe.

In 1983, he returned to music, embarking on what he called the Neverending Tour with the Damo Suzuki Network—a society of revolving musicians, or “sound carriers,” whose mission was to meet and “create information.” It was at one of these sound gatherings, on that wintry day in 2003, that I met Damo.

As sound carrier Mark Spybey once described the Network’s dynamic: “There are no egos involved. Musicians send smoke signals to each other. They respond in kind.

Damo selects musicians who have the

potential to communicate freely and who are able to respond honestly to each other in the here and now. This also involves a respect for and dynamic communication with the audience.”

As it turned out, Damo lived twentyfive years after his cancer diagnosis, touring on and off with the Network, sometimes taking yearslong breaks to battle recurrences of cancer. But in sickness and in health, his Neverending Tour went on. I’m certain that if asked right now, he’d say that it’s still going on, beyond death. In the 2022 documentary Energy, which explored his life and work, Damo tells us: “If anything exists having limits, for me it is boring. Time is going.… Time is endless.

So why don’t I do something endless? ...

Why should I calculate, if I make music, when I should stop?”

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On the mechanics of respiration and desire

Breathe for Me

By Jamieson Webster

Alina Szapocznikow, Cendrier de Célibataire I (The Bachelor’s Ashtray I), 1972. Colored polyester resin and cigarette butts

In 1895 Freud recounted the story of a patient’s hypochondriacal worries: “A woman suffered from attacks [of] obsessional brooding and speculating . . . The theme of her worry was always a part or function of her body; for example, respiration: ‘Why must I breathe? Suppose I didn’t want to breathe?’ etc.” While Freud was interested in the woman’s symptomatic brooding about her body, I’ve always found her question stunning in its lucidity and subtle suicidality. Indeed, why must we breathe? What does wanting have to do with the functioning of my body? And if there is a connection—meaning, my body isn’t simply a machine that works regardless of will—what if I didn’t want to breathe?

What if, like Bartleby, I simply preferred not to? What if I gave up breathing?

Like a lot of us, or at least a lot of psychoanalytic patients, the woman was inquiring principally into the state of desire. Breathing is a striking example of a bodily function poised between conscious and unconscious control, tied to our evolution from fish into earth-bound creatures who breathe air; amnion is the last vestige of our oceanic past and the lungs are the last organ to develop in utero.

The development of human language—that amazing manipulation of the column of air we take in—also caused our larynx to lower and our tongues to drop into the back of our mouths, which also means we’re the only mammals who can’t breathe and swallow simultaneously, making us prone to choking.

Freud’s early reports on hysterical patients included not only breathing difficulties but fits of coughing, choking and bursts of uncontrolled language. The precariousness around breath, he suggested, might be somehow linked to the remnants of geological catastrophes, like the ice-age, which forced us to transform anxiety into a livable condition through the creation of neurotic symptoms. His patient’s neurotic brooding about breath may have been an intimation, an early sensitivity to the wave of industrialization defining the 20th century.

Of course, breathing is also a large part of sexuality. Orgasms involve the spasming of both the diaphragm and the esophagus, which are also part of intense emotional experiences from fear to sadness and joy. Our first encounter with sex, in fact, can be overhearing rhythmic breathing.

The British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott speculated that sexual play with

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strangulation was not only a transformation of something fearful into something pleasurable, i.e. erotic suffocation, but also a confusion about desires toward death.

“Active suffocating can be a perverted kindness,” he writes, “the active person feeling that the passive one must be longing to be suffocated.”

Winnicott suggests that there is something of this confusion about desire (and breath and asphyxiation) in all healthy passionate encounters. In a recent article in The New York Times, Peggy Orenstein wrote about a rise in strangulation even in teenage sexual encounters, an increase from 25 to 40 percent as reported by students on college campuses. Both strangler and strangled believed the other wanted it, but neither seemed to know where this attribution of desire came from. Might it have something to do with the air itself, to say nothing of the land and oceans, and our seeming inability to stop contaminating and poisoning them? Why might we not want to breathe? To whom do we owe the favor of choking?

An inquiry into desire and breathing feels necessary.

Anahid Nersessian, in her book Keat’s Odes, recounts a story by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut in which a patient had asked him to stop breathing. “It is unreasonable to be asked not to breathe,” she notes, then quickly adds: “But it is miraculous to breathe for another.”

It is my wager that in asking the other not to breathe, in the myriad murderous and suicidal forms in which we express this sentiment, we are asking for the miracle of another who breathes for us. Is there not something of a wish for maternal care—the last person who, in fact, breathed for us?

Why must I breathe? Breathe for me. * One way to explore these questions is to consider the life of the French philosopher and Marxist Louis Althusser, whose confusions around breathing proved horrifically tragic: He strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in 1980. In the preface to his final book, The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, he opens with an explanation of the events that led to her murder: “… in the course of a severe, unforeseeable crisis that had left me in a state of mental confusion, I strangled my wife, the woman who was everything

in the world and who loved me so much that, since living had become impossible, she wanted only to die. In my confusion, not knowing what I was doing, I no doubt rendered her this ‘service’: she did not defend herself against it, but died of it.”

There were no signs of struggle, not even a bruise on her neck. Althusser was declared unfit for trial by reason of insanity and lost his academic position.

The Underground Current, written in the ten years following his wife’s death, was dedicated to her: “For Hélène / without whom / this book/ in mourning.”

Althusser also worked on a memoir, The Future Lasts Forever, posthumously published. In a sense, this book was his theory of materialism—his groundbreaking adaptation of Marx’s science of the history of society—as applied to his own life, showing how the crisis that led to his wife’s strangulation was preceded by a strange series of chance events. After decades of manic-depressive collapses and sexual affairs by Althusser, he and Rytmann had found a new calm and happiness in their marriage. But during this period of peace, Althusser suddenly developed pains in his esophagus and difficulty breathing while eating. He underwent a much-dreaded surgery to alleviate the ulcers that caused the problems and then experienced a severe reaction to the anesthesia, plunging him into the worst suicidal depression of his life.

His doctors felt that his depression was akin to a biological shock, one that made him entirely resistant to treatment. At times, he was almost completely delirious.

In moments of lucidity, he behaved like a panicked child, filled with dread. Rytmann grew desperate and suicidal herself.

Althusser couldn’t stay in the sanitorium forever and once he was out, the couple cocooned themselves in their apartment, which Althusser described as a “womblike” place, protected from the outside world.

“In essence it had a maternal ambiance, was like an amniotic fluid,” he wrote. But he knew that this retreat was dangerous for them; their mutual agony only escalated.

Yet another chance event: During this time, Althusser and Rytmann were seeing the same psychoanalyst. The situation came about because she had fallen out with her analyst, and Althusser begged his to see her.

He agreed. When he decided that Althusser needed to be hospitalized again, Rytmann pleaded with him to give her a little more time. Then the couple stopped answering

Why must we breathe? … What if, like Bartleby, I preferred not to? What if I gave up breathing?

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his phone calls. After a couple of days, he sent a telegram, which was found the day after her murder, mysteriously undelivered by the building manager.

Remedios Varo, Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista (Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst), 1960. Oil on canvas

*

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As far back as Althusser could remember there was something about breathing, throats, air. He retained the indelible image of his grandmother shoving a pair of scissors down the throat of a chicken to cut its carotid artery; he remembered feeling horrible and ashamed to have seen such a thing. He tells the moving story of how he had been named for a dead man. This man was his father’s brother, and he had been engaged to Althusser’s mother. Louis Althusser the elder joined the air corps in France in World War I and was shot down in the skies over Verdun. “Above all,” Althusser wrote, Louis’ name “contained the sound of the third person pronoun (‘lui’,) which deprived me of any personality of my own, summoning as it did an anonymous other… It was him my mother loved, not me.” Whenever she looked at her son, she was looking through him to the long-lost uncle, and so, Althusser claims, she could never be satisfied with him.

Neither could the man who came to be his father—his parents’ marriage wasn’t a happy one. Recalling his childhood, Althusser remembers that his mother was “afraid of everything .… she always had a sore throat, as I did too until I went off to do my military service and got away from her.”

His uncle was always there, in “some infinite and imaginary sky” and the contingency of Althusser’s name “chilled and marked him” from his earliest childhood. The other Louis was both a fantasy (especially his mother’s fantasy) and Althusser’s reality. For this reason, he said, he included in his memoir events that weren’t real, that were hallucinations or wishful dreams.

The first was about men and air.

Althusser admired his paternal grandfather, a poor farmer. Alone among his family members, this grandfather taught him to take pleasure in his body, not to be ashamed of it. (His mother had shown disgust at the earliest signs of his sexuality.) In the memoir, he recounted a time when his

In asking the other not to breathe ... we are asking for the miracle of another who breathes for us. Is there not something of a wish for maternal care—the last person who, in fact, breathed for us?

grandfather took him along on a trip to the threshing machine with a load of freshly harvested oats.

“The air was thick and unbreathable with oat and wheat chaff and men were coughing, spitting, constantly swearing, and shouting to make themselves heard above the infernal racket… Then, with the help of the wine which flowed freely into large glasses and down open throats, the first artless murmurings of a song were heard.”

He ends the story with a confessional thud: None of it took place. He never heard the group of farmers belting out a peasant song. He had only longed to. “I intend to stick closely to the facts throughout this succession of memories by association,” he wrote, “but hallucinations are also facts.”

The memoir is the testimony of his self- interrogation after the death of his wife. Nothing in the book is meant as an explanation. Readers must draw their own assumptions. Althusser himself said he wrote the book from the blank space he entered after the murder, as he was never given the occasion to speak. He knew that the book would be published only after his own death, in an infinite and imaginary sky, with no one to answer for the tragedy that occurred—certainly not Althusser, who did not know what happened.

There were the opinions of psychiatrists and of Althusser’s longtime psychoanalyst.

There were the stories that friends recalled, especially from occasions when they visited him in the hospital and he was profoundly unwell. The memoir speculates that he and his wife were in a folie a deux, a kind of altruistic-suicidal pact due to the pain that Althusser’s illness caused their marriage.

Althusser recounts instances of the two pleading with one another about which should die.

He begins the memoir speaking of the fateful night: “Kneeling beside her, leaning across her body, I was massaging her neck. I would often silently massage the nape of her neck and her back. I had learnt the technique as a prisoner-of-war.”

He describes moving his thumbs from the hollow in her breastbone across her neck, one going to the left and one to the right, in the shape of a V. “Hélène’s face was calm and motionless; her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, I was

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terror-struck. Her eyes stared interminably, and I noticed the tip of her tongue was showing between her teeth and lips, strange and still.”

While psychotics are said to possess little insight into their disease, the address to the reader in Althusser’s memoir, straight away, involves an intense questioning of self. He carefully notes his confusions and doubts. He measures the words of others, favorable or not, against what he feels he can say himself with any certainty. He tries to keep track of the lacunae, the gaps and blackouts in his memory. His recounting seems to be about seeking permission to testify to what doesn’t make sense in a life.

“One final word,” Althusser writes at the memoir’s end. “I hope those who think they know more or have more to say will not be afraid to do so. They can only help me live.” * In The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, Althuser writes about the importance of acknowledging chance, the aleatory and the unforeseen. “It is raining,” he says.

“Let this book therefore be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain …” In the vein of Epicurus and Lucretius, he speaks of the materialism “of the rain, the swerve, the encounter, the take.”

Taking a cue from this thought, I believe we need to become more interested in what veers off course, in order to understand better where we are and how we have gotten here. A single event can change pathways ingrained for millennia— forcing new directions, rewriting history.

Materialism is not the exclusive property of natural reality, but is present in ideas, in language, in what can seem like abstract processes. Evolution is likewise not a linear process but a result of aberrations, glitches, hodge-podge montages of organs and environments and catastrophe amidst endlessly clashing forces and confusions.

A better understanding of this might make us more open to chance encounters, alert to surprises, humble about what we can know and more curious about what might be revealed concerning our origins or potential futures.

The facts of any life are strange— material and ghostly at the same time, overdetermined and yet full of contingencies. Nothing can act as a causal explanation for what is a real breakdown.

And yet breakdowns—life is full of them; many remain unregistered—often possess more logic than whatever passes for the course of a so-called normal life. “Catch them before they fall” is an idea espoused by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. A patient’s fear of breakdown, he proposes, is not apprehension about a future possibility but avoidance of an already accomplished fact. Catching the breakdowns before they “fall” means soliciting what they hold at bay, actively opening the breakdowns to look inside them for breakthroughs.

Amid the seemingly metastasizing threats involved in 21st century life, we must counter the wish to retreat to a womb-like-interior and instead venture outside, finding ways to be reborn to life.

In Althusser’s tragic fate, there isn’t a trace of backward-looking sentiment. Certainly, there’s raw pain over what he did. But in the memoir I cannot find an instance of nostalgia or idealization of the past. The most romantic events, in fact, are the ones marked as hallucinations.

The book is a book of ordinary rain. We bear witness in it, as we do in our own lives, to patterns of erosion, lightning strikes, to the unavoidable force of certain winds.

It is also a story of the air: its currents, dead pockets and gale forces. Something about the air reappears in spheres that are internal, private, domestic. This takes the form of choking, asphyxiation, the cutting of throats and voices. We see fantasies become reality, and we see reality evaded time and time again. The story is brutal, but it is undeniably filled with moments of extraordinary tenderness and care—a confusion in Althusser and Rytmann that feels like ours to bear.

This essay is an adaptation of selections from On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, © 2025 by Jamieson Webster, forthcoming from Catapult in March 2025.

As far back as Althusser could remember there was something about breathing, throats, air. He retained the indelible image of his grandmother shoving a pair of scissors down the throat of a chicken to cut its carotid artery.

conversation

Uman in conversation with Matthew Higgs and Annatina Miescher about displacement, community and letting art speak for itself

At Work in the Garden

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Matthew Higgs It’s a pleasure to be back in the studio in Albany with you and having this conversation. I thought we could begin in a kind of straightforward place, but also a quite complex one, which is your early life and the transition into living in New York, starting in the early 2000s.

Uman Well, I grew up in Kenya and Somalia. My parents wanted me to learn English, but there was no English-speaking school in Somalia. A large part of our family lived in Kenya. Early on, I was making things, mostly clothes, and I doodled and drew a lot, which my family was not 100 percent supportive of. Education was very important for them. They wanted us to succeed beyond where they were.

Higgs So you’re ten or twelve years old, and next you find yourself no longer living in your home country, having to leave because of the civil war. You’re living adjacently, in Kenya.

Uman Which I felt was my home, too.

Higgs So in some respects they were the same.

Uman They were the same. As a child, you didn’t think about it. It didn’t affect me as it affected the adults in my family, who didn’t speak Swahili or English. The war just felt like, “Okay, now things are different. Not everybody has a home.” We had people camping in our house, and it was a terrible time for them. But I thought it was fun, because I didn’t have to go to school. There was this whole interrupted period.

Higgs But clearly for your parents and aunts and uncles, it was a significant, traumatic scenario.

Uman They lost everything. A lot of people lost everything. You had to start from scratch, like a foreigner in the country. I felt like a foreigner. You would get asked for identification, even as a kid.

And there were always police

rounding people up, similar to how Americans treat people who come here illegally. The refugee camp still exists to this day, thirty years later.

Higgs And the displaced Somali people living in Kenya are still not fully embraced or absorbed into the culture?

Uman Somehow.

Higgs As a young person, with this shift from Somalia to Kenya, do you have any memories of your relationship with creativity changing as well?

Uman I remember having a little film camera and thinking it was the best thing ever.

Higgs Do you remember what you took pictures of?

Uman A vase or a table or a car, odd things on the street. Once, my mom went to pick up photos from the development place, and she said, “What are these? These

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“I would pick up things on the streets to paint on.

I never bought canvases. I worked everywhere, even when I was sleeping in Union Square.”—Uman

conversation

“I thought to myself, ‘This is a person with an extraordinary talent who, when she’s in the creative mode, is totally herself.

There’s no hierarchy, no self-consciousness. Only her creating.’ ”—Annatina Miescher

p.41 Uman, Untitled, 2022. Acrylic, oil and oil stick on canvas, 62 1/2 x 62 7/8 in. p.42 Uman, Untitled, 2016.

Acrylic, oil, enamel, and plaster on canvas, 30 x 30 in.

are not pictures.” She thought it was a waste of money. But I didn’t think that. I thought they were interesting.

Higgs You then moved to Denmark in the early 1990s. I can’t imagine a starker change, between Kenya and Denmark, especially for a thirteen-year-old.

Uman It didn’t feel very different. You have this thought of the West as a kid, that it’s like the movies. And then you find that you’re living among the same types of people that you lived among before. You live in the same neighborhood with the same immigrants, as though you’re stuck in the past.

Higgs There’s a quote I read in an interview you did with Chris Martin, where you said that you were excited to be in Scandinavia and in Europe because it was “one step closer to the United States.”

Uman I watched the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America (1988), and I was like: “New York looks

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crazy! I’d love to go to New York!”

I was such a dreamer. I wanted to be in New York, in Paris. I wanted to do these things and be part of this creative, thriving world.

Higgs So at that time in your early adolescence, you were already starting to think about the idea of yourself as a creative individual who might find a community and contribute and participate in ways unknown?

Uman In ways unknown, yes. But I would say the freedom to be myself was very important. I wanted to be around people who were like me, to feel that I wasn’t judged or stuck in a community.

I wasn’t particularly religious, even though I grew up very indoctrinated in religion. I didn’t feel like I believed in anything.

Higgs There’s a quote from another conversation with you, in which you said, “I’ve always been trans. I always knew that was a part of me.” I can’t image how complicated that must have been in Somali and Kenyan culture.

Uman It was complicated. People could tell that I was different. I needed to leave Kenya because my parents didn’t know how to protect me, and they felt that the best thing for me was to move to Europe. I was in a society where I could get killed or beaten to death. A few times I was attacked by kids. My mom didn’t want me to leave, but it was something that my parents had to concede.

Higgs I think you mentioned somewhere that you had a one-way ticket, which suggests not coming back.

Uman I was never coming back. I thought, “I’m going to be a painter.

I’m going to go to New York and do this.” It’s the only thing that made sense to me. I didn’t imagine being homeless, which I became in New York. I never even knew what that was, living in Scandinavia.

Higgs Where there’s a social safety net.

Uman Yeah. New York taught me a lot of things.

Higgs What was New York like for you when you arrived?

Uman I was actually happy to have nothing. There was such freedom in having nothing to lose. I didn’t know anybody, but I made friends everywhere I went. I didn’t have money, but I could go into any bar and people would buy me drinks.

It was just one of those places where I felt free. I think a year after is when depression started to hit me.

Higgs What brought that about?

Uman Poverty. Plus the fact that I didn’t have papers, and I couldn’t go back. It was complicated. I got jobs washing dishes and things like that, coffee shops that paid me under the table.

Higgs And during this early period in New York, between the sort of

conversation

p. 43 Uman, From Birth, 2023. Acrylic, oil and oil stick on canvas, 83 3/4 x 143 3/4 in. p. 44 Uman, Sumac Tree in Roseboom, 2022–23. Acrylic, oil and oil stick on canvas in artist’s frame. 86 11/16 x 86 5/8 in. p. 45 Uman, Matthew Higgs Planted Some Seeds, 2022.

Acrylic, oil, and oil stick on cotton canvas in with poplar artist painted frame, 74 1/2 x 74 1/2 in.

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euphoria of arriving and then the reality, let’s say, of the city, were you able to keep making work?

Uman I would pick up things on the streets to paint on. I never bought canvases. I worked everywhere, even when I was sleeping in Union Square. I met a few struggling artists, other people who sold things on the streets. I never really met a real professional artist until I met Annatina, in 2005.

Higgs So you meet Annatina within a year, at the beginning of this sort of downward spiral of depression?

Uman Right. I needed therapy, and Annatina had her clinic, which had classes and fed you, and it was free if you had Medicare or Medicaid. I went there and met her, and she asked me if I wanted to volunteer on the weekends at the garden. I started that same week, which was such a great structure for me.

Dr. Annatina Miescher In the garden, there were all these benches with bald spots in front of them, and it looked sad. They had changed the partitions in the hospital bathrooms from marble to some disgusting thing that they thought was more hygienic. The masons had given me these bins full of broken pieces of marble, and I wanted to make islands of that. I was on all fours, preparing the ground, and I showed Uman the bins of marble—there was pink, white and black to choose

from. And she just got into this zone, going to the bins and putting the pieces down as if she knew exactly what she was doing.

It was like she was possessed.

She did one island and the next and the next, and then we were done. I said, “Uman, look. You just wrote your life story.” And she was like, “What?” There was this beautiful black turtle walking toward the next island, and that was her. She walked slowly but steadily. Next was a black sun.

Next was her whole family: her mom as a big camel and her dad as a smaller giraffe, creating a frame under which Uman stood with her boyfriend, who was installing solar panels. We were a little stunned afterward. It was amazing. Then she stood up and saw the biggest space in the garden and said, “Next weekend I’ll do something there.” I was like, “Who are you? You’re choosing the most important, central place, and it’s not your garden.”

And I thought to myself, “This is a person with an extraordinary talent who, when she’s in the creative mode, is totally herself.

There’s no hierarchy, no selfconsciousness. Only her creating.

Higgs Are those early interventions by Uman still there?

Miescher I think so, yeah. The Bellevue Sobriety Garden is on the map of New York City now.

Higgs How, in your mind, did the work that you were doing with Uman sit within your idea of therapy?

Miescher We all have different languages.

In my clinic, there were a lot of men with rough histories, and the last thing they want to do is what the art therapist says: “Today we’re going to paint feelings.”

They would rather throw up. In the clinic there was the garden and many avenues to reach people and find the seeds that would let them grow. Some were running groups; others prepared meals. It was like a little village.

Higgs Uman, what effect did the clinic’s approach have on your depression at the time, and the idea of yourself as an artist?

Uman It had a big impact. This idea that you could start and finish something, and then it’s physically there in front of you.

I learned a lot about discipline. I didn’t have that before.

Miescher Right, the discipline to stay in that zone. And also, you were safe with me, in the garden.

Uman I had a sense of belonging. I had one or two people in New York whom I felt safe with. And Annatina was one of those people, in that setting, that environment.

Higgs How long did the two of you work together at Bellevue?

Miescher It wasn’t very long. Uman disappeared from my radar for years. Looking for a community and identity was also very important to her.

conversation

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“There was a part of me that was so free at one point. Now, even just being on social media, I’m like: ‘Oh, I can’t share certain things about my life or what I’m working on.’ Of course, I always wanted to be a successful, well-known person, but it’s very different when it comes to the work.”—Uman

conversation

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“It’s interesting to me. For the most part, in recent years, you’ve worked in a rural or intentionally removed context.

You’ve chosen to create circumstances that allow you to work, and those circumstances have informed the work.”—Matthew Higgs

conversation

Uman, Camel #4, 2019 . Oil and acrylic on canvas, 84 x 84 in.

Uman, Octopus #1, 2019–20. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 96 x 74 in. (Has since been painted over by the artist)

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that an artist could do anything.

I’m assuming that was quite a liberating moment for you and for your work, which seemed to grow in... is confidence the right word?

Or ambition?

Miescher I would say clarity, too.

Uman Something I really got from Bjarne was the energy of somebody who did what he wanted and didn’t care, who didn’t feel selfconscious about things that I felt scared of—being explicit, raw, honest. It was a very important period for me because I came away from it feeling that I could be wild on the canvas.

Higgs Annatina, did you feel a responsibility in trying to keep an idea of a group together, the group of artists who came into your orbit through Bellevue?

Miescher It was a dream of mine to see what happened if all these talented people got a chance to develop. I was around a very heterogeneous group of artists at that time, and somehow they managed in a small space. After Bjarne’s studio, we didn’t have 25,000 square feet anymore. We had 600 square feet, on 14th Street. I had Bjarne curate one show there during Frieze, and people would come in and see Uman’s works. Some collectors from Texas came in, and they didn’t even ask the price. They knew it was what they wanted. Later, one of my friends offered to empty her photography studio for us as long as I would paint the walls and prepare everything and put it back in place once we were finished. I went to every gallerist that I could imagine would be interested in self-taught artists, including you, Matthew. But nobody came.

Then one day, a lady walked in with an ego so huge that the walls had to make space for her. She stomped in, took one incredibly fast scan, zoomed in on two pieces of Uman’s and said, “Those are mine,” and stomped Miescher out. I was like, “Who the hell is In Bjarne’s studio in Bushwick, he had prepared a limitless amount of this?” Through some connections canvas and paint, and Uman would in the art world, I found out it was paint big, beautiful paintings there. Anne de Villepoix, the Parisian That lasted nine months, working gallerist. I found her and pinned down the sales, and then I was at Bjarne’s place. able to call Matthew again and all Higgs the others and say, “Excuse me, Uman, you’ve said one of the Anne de Villepoix already bought things you took from that experience of working alongside two pieces,” and that’s when you came.

Bjarne was the idea of freedom, Higgs When did you reconnect?

Miescher It was 2012. I was no longer working in Bellevue, and by chance somebody sent me a patient named Bjarne Melgaard.

He couldn’t pay, but the person who sent him said: “You might be interested because he’s an artist.”

And it was love at first sight.

Bjarne has a lot of troubles, but he is a beautiful person. He told me that he wanted to collaborate with crazy people. I said, “Bjarne, maybe ‘crazy’ is not the appropriate word, but I do have a lot of creative people.” He had a 25,000-square-foot studio, and I would bring people there so they could collaborate, and I wanted to bring Uman but I couldn’t find her.

It had been a long time since I’d seen her, 2005 to 2012. So I went to people in the trans community in New York, and I asked them if they would let me know where she was. And they were like, “Hell no.” So I gave them a piece of paper with my number and said, “Well, if you see her, please just give her this piece of paper.” That was in December. Uman finally called me the next April, and then she started coming to stay with me, which was a great thing.

Uman I would take the bus and stay over the weekend.

Higgs I don’t remember the Anne de Villepoix part of the story, but I do remember coming late.

Then visiting the studio and seeing all these works in what could be described as sort of compromised circumstances, and a word you mentioned earlier that strikes me is clarity—the clarity of Uman’s thinking, wholly present in the work. We ended up making a show relatively soon after at White Columns, which was Uman’s first solo show.

Uman When you offered me the White Columns show, I was driving back upstate, and I was euphoric.

I started working the minute I got home. I worked outside at the time and had a tiny room in a three-bedroom house that was my studio. The White Columns show came directly out of that small room. I used everything, including the ceiling. It’s a weird thing when you just feel lost for so many years and then all of a sudden you know exactly what you want to do. When I look back, I wish I waited a year because it was such a short period to prepare, from June to September, and I could have done better. I’m constantly thinking this way. I can be embarrassed about the things I did ten years ago. It’s a strange feeling, but I’m also very proud of that show for what it was.

Higgs From that show, you started to have other opportunities, initially with David Fierman in New York, and then with galleries in Paris and Greece and, more recently, with Nicola Vassell and Hauser & Wirth. How did becoming public or visible through your work, after spending so many years not being visible, affect your way of working?

Uman There was a part of me that was so free at one point. Now, even just being on social media, I’m

conversation

The Bellevue Sobriety Garden, New York, 2024.

Photo: Uman Uman in her studio, Albany, New York, 2022

like: “Oh, I can’t share certain things about my life or what I’m working on.” Of course, I always wanted to be a successful, well-known person, but it’s very different when it comes to the work. I’m very conscious about everything and self-conscious about everything at the same time.

Higgs On the acknowledgments page of the catalogue you made with Nicola Vassell, you thank a town, Roseboom, New York, a tiny upstate place with a population of 650 people where you’ve made your home. It’s interesting to me that for the most part, in recent years, you’ve worked in a rural or intentionally removed context. You’ve chosen to create circumstances that allow you to work, and those circumstances have informed the work.

Uman I wanted to come to New York all my life, but at a certain point I realized that there was something about working in the country. It’s like I don’t have any—inhibition is the wrong word, but...

Miescher Inhibition isn’t a bad word, because you remain a very private person, even though your art is now all over the world. It seems like it’s your responsibility to that incredible gift that nature gave you.

Uman I do want a private life. I cringe when I see the videos of me and things like that. I don’t know what it is. My biggest dream is to be a hermit and paint and show my work and not have to be so exposed. Even a talk I did in London was so different for me.

I’ve never done anything like that.

Higgs In front of an audience with the work behind you?

Uman Yes, and the random questions.

I still think about some of those questions to this day. I have control when I’m up here working, and a little bit of privacy.

Higgs On a few occasions, I’ve heard you describe all of your work as a kind of self-portraiture. And this morning you suggested to me that you’d like to move beyond that idea, that it’s not so important that the work is legible in a biographical sense anymore.

Uman Yeah, that’s the goal. To be separate from the work. That’s one of the things I really wish, to just be a painter instead of having multiple things added to that: my nationality, where I’m from, everything. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. But the world wants to categorize you.

Higgs You would rather that the work function on its own?

Uman I want to push and continue to grow, and that means I have to take myself out of the work. It’s something I’m interested in, how much to add or remove myself.

This is what I’m going to be experimenting with over the next half of the year.

Higgs There’s an upcoming survey exhibition of your work at the CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College which will bring together all of these threads from the past decade. It seems like an interesting moment to step back—or to the side, or around, the work and all of the circumstances that informed it, and have another kind of clarity about where you are now. To have a first survey exhibition seems incredibly useful.

Uman I went to visit the museum and when I was driving back here I felt a little sad. I was like: “This feels like the end of my career!”

But a survey is useful, you’re right. I think it will be good. And I’ll also have the opportunity to contextualize the work and talk more about it.

Higgs It’s interesting that it’s happening upstate.

Uman When the curator Lauren Cornell offered me the show last year, I said it was the best gift I could get, to have a first survey in upstate New York. I love upstate New York. It’s the place where I’ve lived the longest, having been a nomad most of my life.

Toward the Act of

essay

Recollections of Eduardo Chillida, in honor of his centenary

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Knowing Recognized for his monumental iron and steel public sculptures, Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002) is among the most revered Spanish sculptors of the 20th century. He called himself an “architect of the void,” and his attention to negative space permeates the spirit and body of his work. A landmark of his artistic legacy is Chillida Leku (“Chillida’s Place,” in his native Basque)— a twenty-seven-acre, open-air museum he developed with his wife, Pilar, where more than forty sculptures stand in harmony with the surrounding Basque landscape.

Chillida would have been one hundred years old on January 10, 2024. His centenary is accompanied by the yearlong initiative “Eduardo Chillida 100 Years,” led by the Eduardo Chillida–Pilar Belzunce Foundation, which includes major presentations at Chillida Leku and Hauser & Wirth Menorca. On the occasion of this celebration, writer Use Lahoz interviewed several members of Chillida’s inner circle, including family, friends and collaborators. Their recollections and observations are compiled here into a new essay about his life and his influential quest to unite nature and art.

By Use Lahoz Translated from the Spanish by Ania Hull

In 1950, after two years at the Colegio de España in Paris, Eduardo Chillida said, in a moment of weakness, “Pili, I’m done.” Pilar Belzunce, his soon-to-be wife, corrected him. “No,” she said. “The thing is, you haven’t even started yet.”

Soon after, Chillida rejected what he had produced up until that point: sculptures in plaster and terracotta, torsos influenced by Greek antiquity. Though Chillida had a torso on view at the Salon de Mai in Paris—his first artwork selected for an exhibition—the acclaim it won left him cold and dissatisfied. In 1951, he returned to his homeland in the Basque country to, in his words, “gently watch the grass grow,” reflecting, reading and working to outgrow his early artistic boundaries.

In his writings, Chillida said, “Limits that are seemingly impossible to reach are crucial to me; without them I would see the world as flat.” With this resolve in mind, he ultimately manipulated steel into the massive rhythmic forms of Peine del viento XV (Comb of the Wind XV) (1976). Located in the bay of La Concha in San Sebastián, the steel forms blend with elemental forces, uniting earth, sea and air. This sculpture and the Chillida Leku site, outside the town of Hernani, are regarded as two of his greatest achievements. Like Chillida, they are Basque to the core and without limits or borders. * “The first direct contact I had with Chillida was during the installation of Comb of the Wind,” says photographer Jesús Uriarte, who had known Chillida as a patron of Casa Cámara, Uriarte’s family restaurant, an establishment frequented

by Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles, Deborah Kerr, and other notable regulars. Upon seeing the eighty-meter temporary walkway that had been constructed for the installation, Uriarte recalls, “I thought of the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. It seemed like a crazy and risky idea—but graphically wonderful—to set up that walkway in the Cantabrian Sea in the middle of September, with spring tides, and transport a ten-ton sculpture above the waves.”

Uriarte began collaborating with Chillida in 1983, photographing the artist’s works and documenting the process of many of his public sculptures. “Eduardo spent the mornings in his studio or the small forge,” Uriarte says. “At noon, he’d visit the Zabalaga farmhouse in Hernani, where he’d meet with Pili and Joaquín Goicoechea, a dear friend who was instrumental in making Chillida Leku a reality. It was always easy to know where Eduardo was: working.”

Architect Rafael Moneo, a longtime Chillida collaborator, says of Comb of the Wind that “the careful and precise name Chillida gave to this work—which he wanted to bear witness to his life in San Sebastián in front of his sea—echoes the personal and site-specific nature of the work.

The wind as time, the comb unperturbed before it, anchored to a rock where Eduardo, I suspect, must have spent many hours sitting.” Anita Feldman, deputy director of curatorial affairs at the San

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pp. 48-49 View of Eduardo Chillida's Peine del viento XV (Comb of the Wind XV), 1976, San Sebastián, Spain. Photo, ca.

1980s p. 50 Eduardo Chillida, Torso, 1948 p. 51 Top: Chillida in Paris with Mural Atoxta Villaines, 1951.

Bottom: Eduardo Chillida, Proyecto Tindaya, 1995 (sculptural maquette for the proposed and ultimately unfulfilled Tindaya project).

Photo: Jesús Uriarte

Diego Museum of Art, which will present a major Chillida exhibition in 2025, adds that Comb of the Wind still resonates six decades after its creation. “It combines the strength of the surfaces of Corten steel, with views of the changing sea and sky, the smell of the ocean, and the sound of the waves breaking and receding. The hollow channels carved into the stone below the visitor’s feet produce musical whistles or surprising bursts of sea spray depending on the tides.” * Describing Chillida Leku—a museum that doubles as art itself, where beeches and oaks coexist with steel and granite—Chillida said: “I once dreamed of a utopia, of a space where my sculptures could rest, and where people could walk among them as though through a forest.”

Architect Joaquín Montero, who met Chillida in 1973 and became a dear friend, was key to the materialization of this dream. The pair ultimately collaborated on eleven projects together in Paris, Helsinki, Munster, Lausanne and Whitehaven, England. He recalls how, after three years of observation and doubt, he and Chillida decided to keep the Zabalaga farmhouse bare inside, as it was “already an empty space produced by deterioration.”

Montero remembers another curious detail of Chillida’s commitment to reflection and self-improvement: “Eduardo recognized early on that he could draw quite easily with his right hand. Later, he realized that this facility probably kept him from doing things with greater depth. His right hand not only did not help him—it also hindered him. And so he made a decision that would mark his life and career forever: to draw only with his left hand.” From then on, he noticed that his voluntary clumsiness forced his mind to spring into action before his hand joined in. * The Basque curator Peio Aguirre emphasizes that Chillida’s sculptural work existed hand in hand with his works on paper.

“The close, formal relationship between his sprawling graphic work (drawings and prints) and his sculptures is obvious,” Aguirre says. “The morphology in both shows similarities that indicate that he first thought in two dimensions before tackling the third. However, his graphic work, being of a reproducible medium, dispels the aura and mysticism that surround his sculpture. When his work moves to mass reproduction in posters and logos that lend themselves to different designs and applications, Chillida reaches the popular and infiltrates the collective memory.” Aguirre continues, “His political commitment

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“It was always easy to know where Eduardo was: working.”

—Jesús Uriarte

to different humanitarian causes in the ’70s and ’80s was unmistakable: freedom of expression, amnesty for political prisoners. He was against terrorism and for peace. He was against the nuclearization of the Basque coast. These social struggles took on a ‘Chillidan’ visual identity.”

Chillida’s son, Ignacio, who worked as his father’s studio assistant, remembers, “My father started with plaster and wood and moved to iron when he and my mother left Paris and settled in Hernani, in the house his mother had left him. The house was called Vista Alegre [“Joyful View”].

Everything that happened after that did so because of a forge that stood opposite this house, with a workshop full of mechanical things for factories. There, my father worked with a blacksmith whom he had asked to teach him.”

“When we were children and lived in Villa Paz, in San Sebastián, he’d make us go up the hill every day, to the fronton, to play soccer before lunch,” Ignacio says of his father. “He was very skilled. When he was still the goalkeeper of the soccer team at the Marianist school, they called him one day to tell him that they needed him as goalkeeper for Real Sociedad, a first division team of which his father, my grandfather, was the vice president.

My father became the team’s starting goalkeeper. But then during a match in Valladolid, an opposing player broke my father’s knee, and he had to quit soccer. My mother used to tell me that whenever she’d go shopping in the old town of San Sebastián, everyone would stop her to say, ‘Oh, what would have become of your husband had he not been injured?’ But that player did him a favor in the end.”

The principles of soccer, however, stayed with Chillida long past his playing days. The artist himself described the necessary abilities shared by the goalkeeper and the sculptor—intuition, spatial awareness and the use of the hands. Peter Murray, founder of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the U.K., which has exhibited Chillida’s work, says, “Like Chillida, my father had been a goalkeeper in his youth. Chillida and I talked about soccer and what he had learned about space when he had played for Real Sociedad. We talked about the landscape as a place for sculpture, and he became fascinated with the English landscape of Yorkshire. The time I spent at Chillida Leku influenced the choreography of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park exhibition.”

Susana Chillida, a scholar and documentarian of her father’s work, remembers him as “a loving man who liked to play with us children.... He adored the innocence of little ones, their fresh gaze, their trust,” she says. “Later, when I approached him with my cameras hoping to understand his work better, he welcomed me with open arms into the intimacy of those places no one had ever filmed before. My work brought us closer. I easily switched from my role as filmmaker to that of a loving daughter, so as

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“During a match in Valladolid, an opposing player broke my father’s knee, and he had to quit soccer. My mother used to tell me that whenever she’d go shopping in the old town of San Sebastián, everyone would stop her to say, ‘Oh, what would have become of your husband had he not been injured?’ But that player did him a favor in the end.”—Ignacio Chillida

to bring out in him the authenticity I knew so well. The only thing he told me at the beginning was, ‘Follow your intuition.’ And occasionally, he would check and say, ‘Are you doing what you set out to do?’” *

p. 52 View of Eduardo Chillida, Gravitación Fieltro, 1990, at Chillida Leku, Hernani, Spain p. 53 Top: Chillida with soccer team Real Sociedad, 1943 (pictured back row, center) Bottom: Chillida family portrait in Villa Paz, 1963

Although he first showed his work at the dealer Aimé Maeght’s gallery in Paris in 1950, it wasn’t until 1954 that Chillida joined Galerie Maeght’s roster of artists. By then, Aimé was already a close friend and, thanks to this connection, Chillida had direct contact with the likes of Braque, Miró, Calder and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote for Chillida’s first catalogue with the gallery.

Until Aimé’s death in 1981, Eduardo and Pili would spend their summers at his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Isabelle Maeght, his granddaughter and the current director of the gallery, says, “Eduardo Chillida was the youngest artist on show at the inauguration of the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation in July 1964. One of his huge wooden sculptures occupied a prominent place in the largest room. It made a strong impression, standing there surrounded by masterpieces by Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, Vassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall and Joan Miró.

Eduardo’s arrival every summer in Saint-Paul with Pili and their children allowed us to gather as a family: the Maeghts, the Mirós, the Artigas, the Chillidas, the Bazaines, the Riopelles.... Several generations came together. What wonderful days we spent together!” * In an essay, Chillida noted that “art is learned, not taught.” He came to understand any work of art as a step, or an aid, to seeing what remained in the shadows: “Experience points toward knowledge; perception toward the act of knowing.” In Susana Chillida’s documentary Chillida: Arte y Sueños [Art and Dreams] (1999), her father told her that he had been interested in the idea of perception even as a child: While playing, his father would lock young Eduardo and his siblings in a dark room and after a few minutes invite them to come out and explain to him what they had seen.

This practice may have been the seed for Chillida’s long hours of observing the sea and horizon in San Sebastián and his patient attention to the music of Bach. “Bach is my master,” Chillida wrote. “He revealed to me the subtle relationships between time and space.” The affinity that Chillida felt for Bach is clear in their respective oeuvres, in which mastery of variation, sense of timelessness, capacity for synthesis and profound mysticism are all present.

The spatial concepts behind Chillida’s work connected him with thinkers and poets such as Bachelard, Heidegger, Emil Cioran and Jorge Guillén. The idea for his final project, though ultimately unfulfilled, was inspired by a realization that the work quarrymen do—extract stone—was akin to his own practice of introducing space into matter. An ambitious project of intervening within the space of a quarry to transform it into art began in Tindaya, Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, in 1994.

Architect Lorenzo FernándezOrdóñez, son of Jose Antonio

Fernández-Ordóñez—an engineer and close collaborator of Chillida’s—describes it as “a work void of materials … a large interior space (a roughly fifty-meter cube) in the belly of the mountain.” He adds that “Chillida valued the mountain’s surroundings as something precious—an empty and essential place, just like the sculpture itself. His work presents the island with a monument that resembles the essence of the land itself: sky and earth, silence and horizon.”

Chillida felt that he was more than just a sculptor, but rather a conceptual artist. He wrote, “A concept is elastic. That is, you can establish the period of the concept’s performance not in its moment, but over a period of time, within a process. My work contains a conceptualism that’s constantly self-limiting and self-criticizing.”

Though he proclaimed his love for wrought iron throughout his life, his explorations nevertheless continued into other materials like stone, wood, alabaster, paper, felt, chamotte clay, concrete and Corten steel. Chillida’s prolific career was shaped by his spirit of inquiry and experimentation, moving forward always, as he said, with “doubt and wonder.”

Peio Aguirre is an editor, writer and independent curator.

Rafael Moneo is a Spanish architect and a longtime friend and collaborator of the artist.

Ignacio Chillida is a master engraver and a son of Eduardo Chillida. Joaquín Montero is a He was his father’s Basque architect and a studio assistant. collaborator on Chillida Leku.

Susana Chillida is a filmmaker, psychologist Peter Murray is the and pedagogue and a founder and former daughter of Eduardo executive director of Chillida.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Anita Feldman is the deputy director of Jesús Uriarte is a curatorial affairs at the photographer and San Diego Museum of collaborator of the artist.

Art. Previously, she was head of collections and exhibitions at the Henry Susana Chillida’s Moore Foundation in memoir, Eduardo England.

Chillida and Pilar Belzunce: Memories Lorenzo Fernándezof a Daughter (2024), Ordóñez is a Spanish is now available architect and teacher. from Hauser & Wirth Publishers.

Isabelle Maeght is the general manager of the Galerie Maeght and sits on the Maeght Foundation board.

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p. 54 Top: Eduardo Chillida, Elogio del agua, 1987, Barcelona.

Bottom: Installation of Chillida’s Comb of the Wind XV, 1976, San Sebastián, Spain. Photo: Jesús Uriarte p. 55 View of Chillida Leku, 1990

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PLANNED SERENDIPITY On the unexpected turns of Aki Sasamoto’s work

By Barbara Pollack

Aki 56 Sasamoto, Delicate Cycle, 2016. Installation and performance at SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York, September 2016

“Sometimes it’s not about finding a solution; it’s about finding the better question.”—Aki Sasamoto

Did you know that most snails coil in a single direction—clockwise—which makes mating nearly impossible for the few who curl the opposite way?

This fact had never occurred to me before walking into Aki Sasamoto’s installation, Sink or Float, the centerpiece of her survey show “Point Reflection” on view at the Queens Museum earlier this year. I stood in the exhibition among what looked like foosball tables made with industrial sinks and air compressors, contraptions that set dozens of polished snail shells in motion in a kind of ballet mécanique. The mollusks spun, bumping into plastic bottle caps and sponges cut into neat white blocks resembling sugar cubes. As the shells twirled, only a handful, equipped with incongruous feathers, turned the opposite direction from their mates.

Watching this display—part Frankenstein laboratory, part high school science fair—my instinct was naturally to try and impose meaning on it. Was a commentary on global warming? A metaphor for diaspora identity? Then I thought: In Sasamoto’s view, I’m surely being too reductive, limiting the implications and humor of her work in my desire to explain it.

“Sometimes it’s not about finding a solution; it’s about finding the better question,” says Sasamoto, who was born in Kanagawa, Japan, in 1980 and, after a stint in New York, now lives in New Haven, where she teaches at Yale.

She already misses her Brooklyn studio, which I’ve been told resembled an old man’s garage workshop, filled with tools, machines and metal artifacts. At fortyfour, she looks more like a college student than a mechanic, with her long black hair and deadpan expression.

Sasamoto tells me that she has arrived at a place in her career and life—married with a young child, a full-time teaching position and a string of biennials and gallery exhibitions—that feels more right-turning-snail than the direction she’s used to. Taking discomfort with comfort as a point of departure, she has begun to question her middle age, or “point reflection:” a mathematical term for the moment a curve turns 180 degrees on its axis, creating a mirror image in the second half of the graph. What would be

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the image for the other half of Sasamoto’s life? Faced with this question, some might turn to therapy. But Sasamoto has always used her interest in science and mathematics to deal with what she describes as family dysfunction and a culture of conformity in Japan.

“I have to fight normalcy because the default thinking can be very dangerous,” she says.

As a young girl, she was awarded a scholarship to attend a private high school in the U.K. Since graduating from Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in 2007, she has worked in a space between sculpture, installation, sound play, video, dance and performance, finding humor in ideas about how things should work. In Delicate Cycle (2016), she crawls inside a reconfigured laundromat dryer and takes the machine for a ride; in Squirrel Ways:

Thickness of Borders (2022), she moves a mobile wall of an exhibition space, closing it in on her audience until they are forced to leave.

Her interest in absurdity often disguises the sophisticated engineering that makes such acts come off without a hitch. How close is her way of making art to the way she played as a child? I ask. “Actually,” she tells me, “it is what was lacking from my childhood—just the opposite.” At the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, she placed a trampoline at the bottom of a deep round hole dug into the gallery’s floor and met her audience by jumping and poking her head above the edge. “I never had a backyard for a trampoline, which I desperately wanted, so I built this one.”

Encountering a bobbing head in the middle of the gallery is funny—both

Aki Sasamoto at the Atelier Calder, Saché, France, 2021

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“I just love when things line up and you suddenly see a clear path.…

That’s what I am going for and it is never stable.” —Sasamoto

ha-ha and strange. Curious about her methodology, I asked about her interest in performances and installations. Why not just draw graphs and equations to convey her ideas? “I want to touch the beauty of that graph and the dramatics of the graph in a kind of extreme geometry,” she tells me, laughing at her obsessiveness. “I want to feel it and I want you to experience it for yourself.”

When Sink or Float was featured in “Milk of Tears,” the main exhibition at the Arsenale in Venice for the Biennale in 2022, there was no budget for an accompanying performance. The exhibition at the Queens Museum was the artist’s first chance to add what she considered to be this essential element.

She made the story of left-turn snails and other unconventional phenomena into a riveting experience, without the use of special effects.

“I think movement is key to the artwork,” says Sasamoto, “It may seem like emotion is part of it, but that’s not really the case. It’s the physics, the timebased and spatial orientation. I often start now with kinetic energy.”

At the performance, the audience huddled against one wall while Sasamoto entered a space outfitted with three cardboard pipes acting as columns.

Soon, the artist was crawling in and out of the pipes wearing a miner’s helmet,

acting as a kind of human flashlight, accompanied by a jazz soundscape by composer and saxophonist Matt Bauder and Sudanese singer Alsarah. Sasamoto proceeded through a series of visual cues and narrative shaggy-dog tales that led to no apparent conclusion. Visually, the performance was anchored by a glowing platform to the left of the stage, shaped like a lopsided infinity symbol and lit from within. As gusts of air rose from the platform, Sasamoto mounted it to dramatic effect. Cameras came out, but the moment was already gone.

Though the performance seemed improvisational, it was a result of the artist’s carefully coordinated collisions of stand-up, storytelling and physics experiments to achieve a kind of alignment among space, light, sound and words. “It’s not the emotion,” she says of the effect she’s after. “It’s more the movement.”

I thought of the scene in the silent classic Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), in which Buster Keaton stands in the middle of a street during a tornado, unaware that the building behind him is about to collapse.

When the façade falls forward, Keaton— perfectly aligned with the open bedroom window—escapes unscathed. It feels like what Aki means by “alignment,” a well-planned pratfall so serendipitous it seems accidental.

Aki Sasamoto, Point Reflection, 2023. Installation view at Queens Museum, New York, 2023–24

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Sasamoto’s work inevitably calls to mind the pioneering Japanese women of the Fluxus movement—Shigeko Kubota, Yoko Ono, Takako Saito and Mieko Shiomi—who were featured in the exhibition “Out of Bounds” at the Japan Society in New York earlier this year.

Their performances, captured on films and videos, also pushed the use of found objects toward a kind of absurdity and countered conventional notions of the art of their time. “Being an outsider is an incredible power, actually,” Yoko Ono told an interviewer about her own approach.

“You should never be in the center.

Center is a blind spot because you can’t see anybody. You are being seen, but you can’t see anybody.”

But Sasamoto does not see herself as part of this lineage, except for the fact that American Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks was on the faculty of Rutgers University, where she taught for a time. “If you are looking for something Japanese in my work, my concern with normalcy is a little bit Japanese. When you use the phrase ‘question normalcy,’ it may be a very Japanese statement, even if it could apply everywhere.”

Not all of Sasamoto’s works involve interaction or performance. Past in a Future Tense, the second element of the show at the Queens Museum, originally created in 2019 for Bortolami Gallery, featured whiskey glasses spinning within oversize round glass receptacles. Each glass seems to be spinning on its own, like a whirling dervish or a drunken raver, the effect mesmerizing in its simplicity, despite the labor-intensive research— consultations with technicians, glassblowers and atmospheric scientists—that went into the work. Every detail had to be perfect. Unseen by the viewer, for example, is a slight alteration in the shot glasses that makes them spin them at different angles, adding an element of precarity. The glasses seem poised to fly out of control or lose momentum at any second, but they go on.

Despite its technical dynamism, the piece had its roots in a fairly prosaic occurrence in Sasamoto’s life. Due to a minor illness she suffered while she was pregnant, she was forbidden to drink for more than a year after. While a teetotaler, she became obsessed

Aki Sasamoto, Point Reflection, 2023. Installation and performance at Queens Museum, New York, December 2023

with the accouterments of drinking, such as the dive bar with its glowing bottles and empty glasses. Although the video accompanying the installation makes more of this situation than mere craving—referencing the weather and statistics about the barometric pressure necessary for the piece to function— the artist insists that the work is not about climate change. “I think about the phenomenology of weather, but I am not using artwork to be the catalyst for activism,” Sasamoto says.

She is less interested in Freudian than in Jungian therapy and less interested in artificial intelligence than in artificial life (creating life-like processes within software, hardware or chemical systems).

“When I’m looking for things that explain my work, I’m never relying on a dominant theory. I always go to the subcategory. My work is the opposite of programming. It is the study of things that behave like life.”

According to Sasamoto, even in the chaos and unpredictability of life, there is the possibility of alignment. “I just love when things line up and you suddenly see a clear path,” she says. “That’s what I’m going for and it’s never stable.”

Several weeks later, I thought about this comment—and about the

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uncanny feeling of Sasamoto’s work— as I watched the sun, moon and Earth align, standing in the path of totality in a suburban backyard in Cleveland. The birds stopped chirping. The sky turned purple-slate, and a diamond ring formed in the sky. We stood there mesmerized

for nearly four minutes. When the moon finally shifted and the sun returned, my companions and I laughed, oddly, just as the audience had watching the aquatic gyrations in “Point Reflection.” It seemed like the kind of reaction Sasamoto would appreciate. I wished she had been there.

Aki Sasamoto, Squirrel Ways: Thickness of Borders, 2022. Installation and performance at Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan, July 2022

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I WAS BORN FREE The Liberation of Amy Sherald

By Rujeko Hockley

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listen, you a wonder. you a city of a woman. you got a geography of your own. listen, somebody need a map to understand you. somebody need directions to move around you. listen, woman, you not a noplace anonymous girl; mister with his hands on you he got his hands on some damn body!

—Lucille Clifton, “what the mirror said” (1980)

* The first thing you notice is her posture: very straight and upright, almost stiff. Her elbows are bent just so, with long, delicate fingers primly holding a black purse between her and us. The purse, paired with the black hat, emphasizes the black flowers printed on her white sheath dress. Nothing about her is casual or unplanned. Her eyes are piercing yet guarded— shielded from direct view by the large, floppy-brimmed hat falling softly over one perfectly arched brow. Emerging from the hat’s shadow, her mouth is set, resolute. The longer you look, the more details emerge: the pearls shining in her ears, a

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band of skin on the third finger of her left hand, almost unnoticed, now seeming to glow with what isn’t there.

At once, a story tumbles into your mind about this woman in Amy Sherald’s Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman. You got a geography of your own (2016). This is what happens in front of a Sherald painting: Her subjects compel you to imagine their lives, their stories. Maybe she’s Beyoncé’s church girl, “... tryna do the best she can / Happy on her own / With her friends, without a man ...,” rooted in her knowledge that “Nobody can judge me but me / I was born free.” But one thing is for sure: She is “some / damn / body!”

Sherald’s own story as an artist began when her sixthgrade art teacher in Columbus, Georgia, took the class to the Columbus Museum to see the work of contemporary artist Bo Bartlett. On that visit, Sherald came across Bartlett’s painting Object Permanence (1986)—a domestic scene of a family arrayed in and around a simple redbrick house—and in it, she was surprised by something she had never seen before in a work of art: a Black person.

The main subject, a confident and warm Black man staring out at the viewer with his hands on his hips, brought to her attention two critical things: how rarely, if ever, such depictions existed in art history and museums; and that she wanted to make paintings like this—large-scale depictions of people that revealed stories.

With this latter realization, Sherald began working to position herself within the tradition of American realism and of the history of Western art, generally. Every European art history course includes the hierarchy of genres by which painting was judged from the Renaissance through the 19th century: history painting at the top, portraiture a close second. Sherald’s paintings do a bit of both in a thoroughly contemporary vein, not least because of her decision to exclusively depict Black people.

Considering her mission as an artist and her placement within a particular lineage, Sherald has said: “I consider myself an American realist. For me, it means … recognizing my American-ness first and … wanting the work to join a greater ongoing conversation. Edward Hopper or Andy Wyeth—they’re telling these American stories, and I’m also telling American stories.”

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The question of which, and whose, American stories are being told is at the heart of the matter. American realist painters of the 20th century like Robert Henri, Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois, all of whom were included in the founding collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, were committed to showcasing what was “real,” but of course they could convincingly portray only the reality that they knew.

As a result, they had rare, if any, occasion to portray African Americans. Hopper’s South Carolina Morning (1955), for example, is the only painting in his career of more than four decades to depict an African American woman.

The painting is based on a chance encounter that Hopper and his wife, Josephine, had in Charleston some thirty years before with a woman standing outside her home. Whether the woman they saw and the woman of the painting share an affinity is difficult to know but, as with Sherald’s paintings, the subject tells a story with her tightly crossed arms, her matching red dress and hat and her stern facial expression.

In the almost surreal background—an endless sea of grass swaying under a perfect blue sky—there is something

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reminiscent of Sherald’s Planes, Rockets, and the Spaces in Between (2018) and Precious Jewels by the Sea (2019).

Despite these similarities, the artist is himself a character in South Carolina Morning’s story: There is a sense that what we are seeing as viewers is the woman seeing Hopper seeing her, rather than actually seeing her.

Of course, a work recalling an encounter with a stranger is very different from one based on a studio photograph of a styled, street-cast subject, as Sherald’s portraits are. It’s also different from a painting completed over multiple sittings with a well-known figure who has a particular public image to project. This is likely how Henri created his commissioned portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the eponymous founder of the museum.

An artist, patron, socialite and heir to the fortunes of two of the wealthiest American families of the 19th and 20th centuries, Whitney is presumably portrayed by Henri as she wished to be: nonchalant, self-possessed, modern, direct.

The same adjectives could easily be applied to most of Sherald’s subjects, but they are not heiresses or art collectors or museum founders—and they are not white. The effect, the impact, is not the same. The best corollary within

Sherald’s subjects keep themselves to themselves.... This is in stark contrast to the way images of Black people, and Black people themselves, more frequently exist in the world, which is to say externalized, made available for consumption. This is what Sherald calls the performance, the “public journey,” of Blackness.

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This is what happens in front of a Sherald painting: Her subjects compel you to imagine their lives, their stories.

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Sherald’s oeuvre to this traditional kind of portraiture—the only one, in fact—is her commissioned portrait of the forty-fourth first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama.

When Sherald’s portrait Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (2018) was unveiled, Obama emphasized to the audience that she did not come from a family whose members sat for portraits—like Whitney, who was also painted by John Everett Millais (at the age of thirteen) or her father, who was painted by John Singer Sargent. As Doreen St. Félix wrote in The New Yorker about the portrait, Obama was the first, a “variation of the classical American pioneer” in this and many other aspects.

The subject that Sherald presents is “a different Michelle, a woman evacuated of celebrity, who appears provisionally

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dreamlike, nearly a shadow,” St. Félix added. One could say she appears modern and direct, like Henri’s Whitney, but also gracious, private, self-contained, inward-looking—a feat of representation for one of the most famous, photographed and scrutinized women in the world, particularly as a Black woman.

Sherald’s Obama is comfortable, beholden only to herself—in a word, free. In this way, the painting places her in a liminal, “both/and” space—both everyday Black girl from the South Side of Chicago and ultimate African American first: a descendant of enslaved Africans in the White House. Sherald captured both sides of her persona, but the deeper sense of identification and commonality is with the artist’s usual subjects, everyday Black people, not the forty-three first ladies who preceded Obama.

Sherald’s subjects keep themselves to themselves, are quiet yet firm in presence and less concerned with how they are perceived beyond the frame than with their own interiority and imagination. This stands in stark contrast to the way images of Black people, and Black people themselves, more frequently exist in the world, which is to say externalized or made available for consumption. This is what Sherald calls the performance, the “public journey,” of Blackness.

Her mission with her work, as she once said in a conversation with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, has been to “[let] go of looking at people looking at [her]” and discover who she really is, thus giving others permission to do the same. She and her subjects are interested in the self that is liberated from the performance of race, gender, religion or other preconceived notions. To further her point, Sherald often uses phrases from literature as titles, quoting among others Jane Austen, Lucille Clifton, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison—all authors whose work was concerned with people oppressed in body, mind or spirit getting free.

In 1997, Sherald received her B.F.A. from ClarkAtlanta University, an H.B.C.U. in Atlanta. She had entered as a pre-med student, but in her junior year she switched to fine art, telling Vogue in 2009, “I had to do it. I came out from under the thumb of my mother, shaved my head, started dressing grunge, got a labret.” In school, she worked closely with Arturo Lindsay, a professor of art and art history at Spelman College, the women’s college and H.B.C.U. In 2004, she received her M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art. While there, she lived through a traumatic event: She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and later received a heart transplant.

In the years she lived in Baltimore, painting mystical, alien-like self-portraits, the discourse

The audacity of Sherald’s project is that it privileges self-regard and realization over everything, even the shackles of history—which is not the same as ignoring or denying history and its impacts.

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around Black artists was shifting, specifically in response to exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The year 2001 brought the landmark exhibition “Freestyle,” which proposed the idea of “post-Black”—a post-civil rights generation whose artists were, as the curator Thelma Golden put it, “adamant about not being labeled ‘Black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of Blackness.”

In 2002, the Studio Museum exhibition “Black Romantic: The Figurative Impulse in Contemporary African-American Art” was conceived to explore the “(mutual) exclusions perpetrated within the Black cultural community,” which is to say, to attempt to account for an entire parallel art world of contemporary Black artists working in “Black figurative imagery, romanticism, realism, and/or social realism.”

Many of the artists in the show had gone unnoticed and disparaged by mainstream art galleries, institutions and, at one time, perhaps by the Studio Museum itself, even as white artists working in figuration, like John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton and Lisa Yuskavage, were being celebrated. And yet the Black middle class loved the artists in question, providing them with commercial success and support via distinct circuits of distribution and value.

Describing this parallel art world, Golden said: “Their résumés speak to a world different from mine, populated with juried exhibitions, culturally specific and regional art spaces, corporate commissions and numerous awards and prizes.” In both the catalogue and critical reviews, the artists’ earnestness and apparent lack of irony were noted, as was their desire for their work to function as an antidote to “negative” images and conceptions of African Americans in art, popular culture and media.

After “Black Romantic,” the art world’s pendulum generally swung back toward the artists of the other stream, but two decades later, the distance between the two has shrunk considerably. Ernie Barnes, the real artist behind the paintings of the fictional character J.J. Evans in the 1970s sitcom “Good Times,” an artist whose direct-to-consumer selling of affordable prints was typical of the “Black Romantic” artists, is now posthumously represented by several mainstream galleries, and his paintings have commanded eye-watering prices in recent auctions. Kadir Nelson, another of the artists featured in the show, has frequently contributed cover artwork to publications such as The New Yorker and Ebony, and has illustrated children’s books by Debbie Allen, Will Smith and Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee. Kehinde Wiley, one of the few artists who straddled both art worlds at the time, was commissioned alongside Sherald to paint the companion portrait of President Barack Obama.

Though she was not in “Black Romantic,” Sherald resonates with those artists in her desire to capture the multivalence of being Black, of existing for and as ourselves—with seriousness, yes, but also with frivolity, wonder and lightheartedness—as wielders of the full spectrum of human experience.

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A product of the American South, steeped in mainstream and African American art history and, on occasion, the juried exhibitions and prizes of Golden’s “parallel stream,” Sherald counts among her creative ancestors Hopper and his peers, but also Barnes and his.

That such a distinction should have been made between two related approaches to American realism is telling of the racial bifurcations in American life and the difficulties African Americans have faced in finding their way as “fully realized entities on this planet,” as the curator Lowery Stokes Sims so memorably described the struggle.

The audacity of Sherald’s project is that it privileges self-regard and realization over everything, even the shackles of history—which is not the same as ignoring or denying history and its impacts. Forged in the crucible of her own mortality and through the strength of her ambition to portray what she has called the “wonder of what it is to be a Black American,” Sherald renders a rich Black world, unconstrained and untrammeled.

“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on November 16, 2024, and will remain on view through March 9, 2025, before traveling to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

p. 63 Amy Sherald, Listen, you a wonder. You a city of a woman.

You got a geography of your own., 2016. Oil on canvas, 54 x 43 x 2 ½ in. p. 64, left Bo Bartlett, Object Permanence, 1986. Oil on linen, 120 x 168 in. p. 64, right Edward Hopper, South Carolina Morning, 1955. Oil on canvas, 30 3/8 x 40 1⁄4 in. p. 65 Robert Henri, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916. Oil on canvas, 49 15/16 x 72 in. p. 66 Amy Sherald, Precious Jewels by the Sea, 2019. Oil on linen, 120 x 108 x 2 ½ in. p. 67 Amy Sherald, As American as Apple Pie, 2021. Oil on canvas, 123 x 101 x 2 ½ in. p. 68 Amy Sherald, Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018. Oil on linen, 72 1/8 x 60 1/8 x 2 3/4 in.

p. 69 Ernie Barnes, In Rapture, 2000.

Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 24 in. p. 70 Amy Sherald, Freeing herself was one thing, taking ownership of that freed self was another, 2013. Oil on canvas, 54 x 43 x 2 ½ in. p. 71 Amy Sherald, A Bucket Full of Treasures (Papa Gave Me Sunshine to Put in My Pocket), 2020. Oil on linen, 54 x 43 x 2 ½ in. pp. 72–73 Amy Sherald, Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), 2024. Oil on linen, each panel 128 x 68 x 2 ½ in. p. 75 Amy Sherald, Untitled (Opal), 2019. Oil on linen, 54 x 43 x 2 ½ in.

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Take 30% off print subscriptions to n+1 with discount code URSULA. 76 Three mixed-media works on handmade paper by Zeng Sculpture: Ernst Barlach (1870–1938), The Singing Man, conceived in 1928 and cast before 1939

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River as a Verb

Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (detail), 2016–2022

A conversation about Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River and the uses of photography

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“We exist in a space of existential doubt reinforced by a policing lens whose primary question is: Do you belong? Do they belong? Do we belong?

Even to some extent: Do we participate in humanity or at what level of humanity do we participate?”—Tim Johnson

Tim Johnson This is the second in a series of conversations relating to Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River. The first appeared in the book of the same name, which was conceived as a version of the exhibition, engaging the photobook’s tradition of reaching audiences outside of museums and changing the temporal conditions of a work’s reception. That conversation was led by Aimé Iglesias Lukin and featured remarks by Nadia Rivera Fellah, Esther Gabara and Roberto Tejada. Today, our subject is the role photography plays and has played in building and unbuilding our various realities. In particular, we’ll be addressing photography’s role in the interrelated realms of politics, border politics, colonialism and nationalism, and the way contemporary photographic practice and discourse contest, protest and attempt in various ways to change these systems. I’m joined this time by three people who have contributed significantly to this field as artists, writers and researchers. For me, the defining note of Al río / To the River is the atmosphere of surveillance, of the co-presence of multiple agencies of policing, each representing different jurisdictional claims that are concerned with managing a network of inclusion and exclusion and all the market-driven forces that stand behind them. Socially and photographically, this relates first and foremost to how we see each other. A condition of ambient surveillance defines the riparian corridor between the cities of Ciudad Juárez, El Paso and the Gulf of Mexico, which is the physical terrain of Al río, but I believe this condition is one that all of us know.

It plays out differently for each of us, and differently according to each situation.

But in general, there is a saturation of image production produced without our consent, photographically, which has ramifications for our sense of self and community and which operates on us at a cellular level. We exist in a space of existential doubt reinforced by a policing lens whose primary question is: Do you belong? Do they belong? Do we belong?

Even to some extent: Do we participate in

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humanity or at what level of humanity do we participate? My first question to you all is basically, in a very broad sense, how did we get here? In looking at the history of photography, what do we see about photography’s role in the production or construction of this present condition of omnipresent photographic or videographic surveillance, and all the subsequent questions about inclusion and exclusion that has produced for us?

Ken Gonzales-Day As someone who teaches for a living, I’m always trying to help students navigate this question of what to do. In the current environment of images and image-making, how do you move forward as a person who makes work? Why do we keep making images? I always want to reframe this conversation around the idea that there are people who make artwork. If their practice, or part of it, is to use photographic images, photographic technology, they’re implicated in this conversation, as I am.

There’s not going to be an outside place for me to speak from, because I am in this scenario, part of the problem. I’m an image-producing individual. And I teach it, so I’m creating more such individuals.

What I’ve found recently is that my students are having new challenges. For example, let’s take recent protests on college campuses. A lot of protesters were covering their faces. In class, we’re looking at the history of civil rights photography, of protest marches, and I think in my generation we thought of the empowering uses of photography to represent struggles for equality on many different fronts, the camera as a liberating device. Now, the students are facing another challenge, in which they don’t want to have their fellow students identified or arrested, and facialrecognition technology plays into that, has changed the environment. Also, the whole idea of photographer and subject has changed. Barthes once wrote that he had never made a photograph. Remember that?

There’s practically nobody alive today who could say that. That’s the framework we have to think within. We’re all implicated.

That’s why a border is such a wonderful

metaphor, because we all imagine ourselves in relationship to it. In fact, we might actually be it, right? We might be the border. It’s within us.

Pradeep Dalal I encountered this body of work of Zoe’s first through the book she did with the publisher Gato Negro, El río /The River, a collaboration with the poet and activist Dolores Dorantes. Seeing the images in that book and the images of installation views from shows, it struck me that one of the incredibly important things she’s doing is making the images modestly sized and scaled, not monumental.

There are hundreds of images, and she sequences them and thinks of them as a continuum of experience rather than as individual images. Even encountering the work online, as I’ve had to do, since I’m in Mumbai, the installations seem like breathing, pulsing, living things. It’s not easy to pull something like that off. I also like the idea that there’s no beginning or end. You just step right into it. She’s working across genres—landscape, infrastructure, bridges, checkpoints, train tracks, river flows, flowers. But the tonal range, the gradations of the gray, the milky skies, the image quality of the gelatin silver prints, are exceptionally consistent. That might seem traditional, in a particular way, but I think it’s actually speaking to our image culture, to how we process, absorb and look at images. As a reference point, I was thinking of Lewis Baltz and what he wrote in an essay for his book Park City (1980), that working in series allows points to be raised, asserted through repetition, critiqued, restructured into subcategories. A visual syntax can be evolved. The effect is comparable to that of a nonnarrative film. He uses the term that Larry Sultan used for nonnarrative film, a “paper movie.” So that’s my thought about my direct experience with Zoe’s images, but I also wanted to add a thought about something I recently read about immigration and borders. It was a review of a new video work by Javier Téllez, in which he found eight Venezuelan immigrants living in New York and hired them to be

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“There’s something that’s making noise and, in that noise, if we listen more closely we might have the power to make the grammar of violence legible.”

—Natalia Brizuela

collaborators in making the work, which riffed on Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). One of the collaborators, Jesús Ramírez, described fleeing Venezuela pursued by military assassins and the seven months of brutal travel that followed. In the video work, he was asked to play one of a group of storm troopers who marched to the real army chant that Venezuelan soldiers used to declare themselves as war machines. Ramírez said it made him start to think about the kinds of war machines that migrants must become to reach safety, because, he says—and I’m quoting from him here—“we need to focus so hard, so intensely, and to just keep going and going and going to confront all kinds of danger.”

I’d never ever thought of immigrants and the hardships they face in such militarized terms before, but seeing Zoe’s images of the access points to get to America and the militarized architecture that’s been built up around it at the border reframed my thinking.

Natalia Brizuela I’ve been thinking both about this work of Zoe’s and why she would’ve wanted me to participate in this conversation.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about the fact that at so many points throughout the history of photography there has been an intense global political scenario taking place. If we go back to the so-called origins of photography, the 1830s and 1840s, a certain world that was organized around empires and bordering was beginning to crumble. Then you go to the 1970s and the place of the world that I focus on, which is Latin America and the Caribbean, and the domination of military dictatorships as capital was reorganizing the ways in which it would continue to control the world. In that context, I was thinking of Zoe’s decision to make this project and to spend so much time at the border during the rise of extremely fascist or neo-fascist or proto-fascist governments, both in the U.S. and in a lot of other places around the world. I came to feel that Zoe, or Zoe’s project, as opposed to taking something from the border, was a gift. I say this because the long history of the relationship

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between photography and extractivism is something we are all aware of, that has been talked about a lot. Constructing borders is also a way of taking away the possibility of movement, primarily from people, and photography has been part of that. We look at the photographs taken by the United States border commission, formed to establish the exact border locations between the U.S. and Mexico.

They are very unspectacular photographs that assisted in the making of permanent political boundaries, fixing the precise divisions. Zoe is asking: What is the relationship between photography and fixing? I think she turns to the border and instead of fixing something, taking away movement and possibility, she gives.

Even the title she gives to the project, in Spanish, Al río—to the river—suggests this. It’s giving something to the river, an offering. You give something to someone.

The violence imposed on the river through bordering and through U.S. expansionism is, in a way, returned to the river in this gesture. There’s an attempt to undo what colonial habitation and photography as its tool have tried to take from the place.

As I looked at the book, I kept feeling I was watching a film, but a film that itself is questioning what a film would be. Photography is always generating borders as a medium—what is inside and what is outside of the frame? Al río seems like a gesture toward trying to undo something that is natural to bordering, to liberal democracy and to the medium of photography itself.

Johnson I think the paper movie idea is totally in keeping with this work because it works between photographic fixity and autonomous surveillance. The exclusions, I think, are actually where the work happens—a rejection of any claim of mastery or sublimity in the images, which has historically contained a certain idea of control of the land and also a right of extraction. One of the next questions I wanted to ask you all is about the presence, or mostly the absence, of human subjects in this work and the role of portraiture,

in which subjects become subject matter.

Also a related question about the absence of words. The photos don’t have orienting text, such as individual titles or captions or place names. Text appears sometimes in the frame, in the world.

I feel like the presence and absence of people and the conditions under which people appear is one of the most interesting things about the project. As social documentary work, it’s very unexpected.

Dalal There is an element of scrupulousness with the way Zoe approaches it. It made me think of a film by an Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, titled, in English, A River Called Titas (1973). It’s about a community around a river. One of the opening frames is a lovely image of the river. There is a woman standing on the banks as it’s raining, and the camera pans from her feet and goes up to her midtorso and then the image gets washed out with the rain. It made me think about the human body as part of the river and of nature—and, in this case, brown bodies in a particular landscape that they belong to, which is East Bengal. I was really struck by that image and it made me think more critically about social-documentary ways of documenting migrants and their paths across borders, across rivers.

Brizuela In the Al río book, Tim, you and Zoe chose to include a poem by Natalie Diaz in which she reminds us that the river is in us and that we are the river, not least because we are mainly water as human beings. It’s not about the river, Diaz tells us, but about rivering. It’s not a thing, but an action, and it has to do precisely with movement. So maybe that’s one reason why there’s no centrality given to the human figure in the work. Because the human figure, at least the one that photography can represent, would inevitably be an inscription of a form of habitation of the planet that exercises violence, historically, against another understanding of habitation in which human bodies and bodies of water are one and the same, necessarily

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“Barthes once wrote that he had never made a photograph. Remember that?

There’s practically nobody alive today who could say that. That’s the framework we have to think within. We’re all implicated.”—Ken Gonzales-Day

interrelated. Portraiture would actually complicate that, would make it very problematic. A large number of the photographs don’t even show the river or something that looks like a river. You’re seeing something else, the surroundings, or places where you can’t reach the river.

As to the absence of text and titles and captions, it’s very interesting to me. If she had named the photographs, she would’ve been pushing the images into that old relationship with the cartographic, with taxonomy, which is at the heart of the history that has been told around the medium. So the refusal of naming is another attempt, just like the refusal of privileging the human body, at re-inscribing the river as part of a particular kind of ontological understanding of the world.

Johnson Ken, you’ve made a kind of epic, epistemically profound body of work and a book, Lynching in the West, 1850 –1935 (2006), that has so much to do with presence and absence, including your own role as a modifier of existing images and producer of new ones. What does the idea of human absence in Al río say to you?

Gonzales-Day Obviously, there are lots of things that resonate for me in her project, and one is certainly the region. My family is from the Southwest back to its beginning, and this idea of who belongs where and who gets called what is something that I’ve been around all of my life as part of the identity politics of the region. It continues to surface in our political debates around who belongs and who doesn’t, and the threat of the other that has reached a fever pitch with Trump. I started approaching the killing of Latinos in the Southwest, the lynching and other acts of violence perpetrated by mostly white community groups that also targeted Native Americans, Asians— mostly Chinese, but also Filipino—and others. I was trying to find a way to tell that history because most Americans, along with others, still don’t know it.

Those histories are always erased. In every conversation, they’re erased over

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and over again. They don’t get into the textbooks, don’t get anywhere. And so the act of erasure, in my own work, is a part of a frustration or realization that I won’t live long enough to see a change in these dynamics, that there’s no way anything I can do as an individual will make a difference in a history that’s written over me and continues to occupy spaces where some of my family has lived for a couple hundred years. By removing the body from historic images of lynchings, I create a visibility. When I look at Zoe’s work and books, I think about all of the invisible histories of Latinos who were lynched on both sides, by Mexicans and by Americans, and all the Indigenous Mexicans who were lynched. What I recognize in her strategy, which is moving and powerful, is bringing in so many other voices, including us in the conversation here today, and adding those voices to an unembodied representation of this region. Rather than her owning the discourse, she’s using her authority to create a series of venues where different voices might emerge. She uses openness— what I have probably called absence in my work—but you could think of it also as a kind of openness, a discursive space, a symbolic space, an ambivalence space, territory that is uninhabited and that can be reclaimed or not reclaimed. I think maybe each of us here brings some new life out of that space, some perspective that we’re trying to open up.

Dalal I agree with Ken about the importance of the other voices that the work brings in, and I would push even a little harder to urge that these voices are made legible in other parts of the world. For example, Zoe’s books are not available in India, and I don’t know where these images are going to live in a public way. How accessible are they to artists and photographers in other parts of Latin America, or in Asia? So I think it’s a very important point, not just for her work but for that of many other artists and thinkers. Last year, there was an exhibition in Mumbai about 19th-century British photography of architecture and archeology, drawn

from the British Library’s collection and shared with a museum in Mumbai. What was really interesting is that they said the glass negatives and the paper negatives were too fragile to travel. So they made digital negatives and had prints produced in Kolkata. All the documentation of architecture and archaeology in India from the 1840s to the 1950s is British, primarily. There were a couple of Indian photographers who had access to a studio and a camera, and who could afford to print, but very few. A vast amount of knowledge of photography in India, the archaeological sites of India, the architecture of India in the 19th century, is held in Great Britain. And the claim about the fragility of the original negatives was perhaps just the British Museum thinking: What if we send the originals and the Indian museum refuses to return them?

All of those things were unsaid, the subtext of these kinds of exchanges. If you go to the British Library’s website, for example, and try to find these images for research, you find nothing. I mean, nothing comes up. So Indian photographers, Indian architectural historians, have no way to study it here. And this thought about access is connected to the Mexico-United States border issues. The third-largest group of migrants coming in through the southern U.S. border are Indian. The fifth largest are Chinese. So no longer is it just a Latin American and Caribbean question.

The border is ultra real for many groups of people coming from all over the world.

So the dynamic of Zoe’s work and what it’s speaking to is much broader than we might imagine. And I think it behooves us to think about how these images and stories are made available to larger audiences.

Brizuela I wanted to get back, briefly, to Ken’s point about, as a photographer, asking yourself whether you should continue making photographs. Why do you make them? As an intellectual, professor, academic and critic, I ask myself the question of why I do what I do. And I’ve been asking it a lot lately, in the face of so many horrors that are happening, of a planet that we

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“The third-largest group of migrants coming in through the southern U.S. border are Indian. The fifth largest are Chinese. So no longer is it just a Latin American and Caribbean question. The border is ultra real for many groups of people coming from all over the world. So the dynamic of Zoe’s work and what it’s speaking to is much broader than we might imagine.”—Pradeep Dalal

all somehow participate in destroying, even if we’re critical of the machinery and the systems that are destroying it. How to make what we do relevant? How can we make the privilege that we all have in different ways matter? I’ve spent most of my professional life thinking and writing about images. But recently, I have been thinking a lot about listening. The kind of crisis of hegemony that we are all witnessing now, the hegemony of the image, the hegemony of liberal democracy, of the nation-state and its borders, presents a time when we have to become even more attentive, practice a form of intentional, careful listening. Because there’s something that’s making noise and, in that noise, if we listen more closely we might have the power to make the grammar of violence legible. In my teaching, I’ve come to realize that young people often do not know how to listen, because all they do is consume bits of information. Our hyper-modern world has robbed them of the ability to listen, which means an ability to concentrate. And in listening, what you start understanding are the intervals, which is why the visible borders on Zoe’s photographs are so important. They’re a reminder that, as much as what you see matters, what you don’t see matters. The question is how to translate that into our practices, whether as a photographer or a critic, a curator or a poet or just a member of society. I don’t have an answer to that question, but I just want to put that on the table. In the absence of words in Zoe’s project, there is an invitation to listen, because words, once they get written, seem to signify a predetermined set of things.

Johnson I think you point out one of the key elements in the work, to me. The quietness in the photographs is both at the surface of the images and between them. It creates places of attunement.

Gonzales-Day To Natalia’s point, one of the things that I’ve experienced in coming back from the pandemic is that idea of different listening, of getting students to slow down and see

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the world differently and to disengage from the social media experience that now shapes their reality. And photography, especially film, has been one way I’ve tried to make that happen. I emphasize the idea of the in-between space, the moment up to the photograph. I use the metaphor of sketching, that their first roll is like a sketchbook. I also tell them they don’t even have to put any film in the camera at first.

Just look through it. Then when we do take a picture, how’s that going to change what we’ve seen and thought? That idea of listening and slowing down is, for me, part of the energy-giving power that we still have even in these dark days. That’s where art—or whatever we want to call that space—keeps giving, replenishes me in ways that nothing else can.

Dalal We do have to think about how the camera now shapes our perception. This afternoon the monsoons broke in Mumbai, and I was taking a picture out of the window and the sky was dark, gray on gray. But my phone camera compensated and gave me a much bluer sky and a much sharper rendering than my eyes could actually see. What are the phone camera and the algorithm doing to the process of perception? I think of Zoe’s photographs, the gray and muted tones. There is something about a gelatin silver print that reads completely differently from the glass on your phone or your monitor. It changes the way you encounter the image and how it correlates to your actual experience. But then again, the availability of the phone camera and the means for sending images immediately out into the world has changed equations of power. When Zoe’s work asks what happens when a part of our control is given to others, it’s a timely question. In India now, for example, there are so many cheap camera phones suddenly on the streets, so many tools now available to people who are not part of a professional class, not trained as artists. And some of the stuff I’ve seen on Instagram by kids from small villages is fantastic, game changing. America and Europe are different equations altogether.

Wealth creates its own set of concerns.

Here the vibrancy in the street and on the ground is incredible and this is being shown in ways that feel authentic and new.

Brizuela It makes me think, in an odd way, about the great Brazilian photographer Claudia Andujar. She had begun her career working as a photojournalist. She was sent on a trip in the 1970s to photograph the Yanomami people, who live on the borders of Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil. She went into the rain forest and the climate, the heat and humidity, literally broke her camera. She realized she had to adjust her camera. She ended up making very interesting images with all kinds of filters, putting gel and wax on the lens. But more interestingly, the situation moved her to begin to ask the Yanomami people to make images themselves, not using a camera but using felt-tip pens, to make drawings.

And so her images and the drawings end up living together, making something in between. I came upon this story when I was young, in my early twenties, and I became obsessed with it in terms of what it offers us, an invitation to pay attention to the break, to the effect of things not working. I’m very curious right now to see where breaking or allowing things to break and not needing to fix them could lead us.

Why are we always repairing? Maybe it’s time to let some things break.

Natalia Brizuela is a writer and a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley.

Pradeep Dalal is an artist and writer. He cochaired the photography M.F.A. program at Bard College from 2015 to 2020. He directs the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in New York.

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construction of race and the limits of representational systems.

Tim Johnson is a poet and editor. He runs Agave Festival Marfa and the Marfa Book Co., a bookstore, publisher and gallery in Marfa, Texas.

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pp. 84–88: Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (detail), 2016–2022

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Support for the artwork has been given by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth.

“Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River” is on view at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, through June 22, 2025.

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The non-profit supported by people like you www.clientearth.org 89

keepers

Oddur Roth on the family practice of shoring fragments for the Roth Bars

‘We Stick to

By Ross Simonini

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What’s Real’

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keepers

pp. 90–91 Oddur Roth, Roth Bar, 2024. Installation view of Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, U.K. pp. 92, 94, 96 Roth Bar materials sourced locally and stored in facilities in Iceland and New York. p. 93 Polaroid photo of Dieter Roth working on Bar 0, Stuttgart, Germany, 1998 p. 95 Einar and Oddur Roth at “Dieter Roth/Björn Roth,” 2013, Hauser & Wirth, New York

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Dieter Roth likened his art career to a farm, a kind of creative territory cultivated over a lifetime, which could later be tended to and harvested by his children, primarily his son, Björn, and his grandchildren, Einar and Oddur, who carry on the work to this day.

Dieter rarely spoke of “art,” according to Björn and Oddur, who both learned the family business through working in the studio, not through formal art education.

Dieter considered himself a “nebulous persona,” and his presence became more and more diffuse as the Roth family art-making machine evolved over time. Even his name was unstable; he played with the spelling, such as his preferred, alllowercase variation, “diter rot,” which evoked one of his favored techniques for creation: decay.

Roth is perhaps best known for his sculptures made from old food—wedges of cheese tucked into suitcases, sausages in vitrines, chocolate self-portraits, all of which have continued to undergo biological transformation through the collaboration of maggots and mold.

He often exhibited work in a raw state, privileging the messy process over the refined product.

Roth’s works are known for their obsessive accumulation of material.

He exhibited, among other things, his used worktables, his cluttered shelves, stacks of automatic drawings, hours of surveillance-style footage from the studio, libraries of catalogued trash (his “flat waste” works) and an ongoing series known as Roth Bars, tumultuous largescale sculptural assemblages flanked with stools and countertops, works intended to function as communal pubs.

Each bar is built from hundreds of cast-

off objects: hoses, toasters, televisions, lamps, carpenter’s tools, electronics, metal gears, paint cans, children’s toys, clothing, bowling balls, buckets, sports equipment, studio detritus, photographs and practically anything else that caught or catches the Roths’ eyes.

After the first iteration (Bar 0) in Stuttgart in 1978, the bars became a repeating motif in Roth’s exhibitions, allowing visitors to sit inside a “material painting” and enjoy coffee and spirits.

Oddur describes the works as “social sculpture” in a nod to Joseph Beuys’s utopian concept about life’s relation to art.

Since Dieter’s death in 1998, Björn, Oddur and Einar have all taken over the Roth project, creating several ever-changing bars at Hauser & Wirth locations, each one an entirely distinct work of craftsmanship.

My first viewing of a Roth Bar took place in 2013 awt Hauser & Wirth in New York, for “Björn Roth/Dieter Roth,” a feast of an exhibition that included a chocolate factory, two wall-size segments of wooden floorboards ripped from the Roth studio in Iceland and a freshly installed bar on West 18th Street in Chelsea. I visited the show with another artist and we found the bar so welcoming that we sat down to drink coffee and ended up drawing for hours. A week later, we returned for another drawing session there; we continued to do so while the show was open, eventually producing a small zine of our time there, called RotDraw. It was, for me, a manifestation of the generous and generative energy behind the Roth project, the ways in which the bars naturally open themselves to visitors and fellow artists, as well to the Roth family members.

Twelve years later, this past spring, I spoke with Oddur about the process of constructing the bars and about his childhood in the studio, learning the family business. The next day, he and Einar opened an expanded Roth Bar at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, reimagined for the tenth anniversary of its original construction there—a monumental work of community, intuition and joy.

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How do you arrive at the objects you use in the bars?

They are found objects.

At some point, they had a function or they were dear to someone’s life, which is how they escaped being discarded as trash. So we find these things and we use them. But we are not focusing on the object—just the form and how it balances out the whole. The function is irrelevant. But still, when people see them in the bar, they might have a connection with them, a memory from their childhood.

Going to an antique store and picking stuff off the shelf is not the same as finding these objects the way we do.

But there is the problem that sometimes the people who have these objects don’t want to give them up. That is why you cannot fake Roth objects.

What may be valuable to me may be worthless to you.

All this stuff must require tremendous storage.

There are containers of Roth stuff at Hauser & Wirth locations around the globe.

It’s interesting shipping this stuff, because the customs officers think we are trying to pull a fast one. But once they open the boxes, they clear them quickly. Nobody wants to go through the boxes. We shipped five tons from Iceland and picked up about the same amount here. It’s a lot.

You can get people to realize that life is not straight and narrow. It has many secrets and dark corners.

continue this once it became a commercial project. There would be no space for art anymore.

Is your home filled with these kinds of objects?

If you are asking if I live like a hoarder, I don’t have a pile of this stuff in my living room, Are any of these objects but there are containers personally important everywhere. For instance, to you? There’s an old I just located a box of the synthesizer from the studio interior of a restaurant that of my grandfather in Iceland. was being torn out. I’m And there’s a photograph always collecting, because of me wearing pajamas, we bring extra material for probably seven years old, all the bars. We often need playing the synthesizer. to make bars bigger when we reinstall them. They are Do you have particular Do you ever use objects with each a growing organism, methods of sourcing dark histories? Teddy bears and it’s an ongoing process. objects? It’s hard to source are the weirdest. Or dolls It’s all the same methods these things. Each object missing an eye. I think there’s used by my grandfather, needs to be unique. You can’t a whale harpoon in New York. from the beginning. There’s a just go out and buy most of That thing definitely has a continuity across generations. these things, but I do like darkness behind it. going to flea markets and How did the first bar come reclamation yards. We will use That soccer ball looks like to be? It started as one of anything, though. My friend it’s been peeled. I mean, it’s Dieter’s material paintings was ripping out a bridge in been kicked around [laughs]. and then the bar was added. It Iceland and I told him to leave When you take something became a social sculpture. It’s some of the parts in my yard. out of context, in a photo or not about drinking. It’s about We will use them. something like that, against people enjoying themselves a gray backdrop, like we did, and changing the boundary of You also collect local you suddenly see all of the art. People always ask, “Can I objects from wherever you history. If you saw it on the sit here? Can I touch this?” are installing. Yes. When I side of the road you wouldn’t show up to a site, I drive from think twice about it. And In the beginning, every place to place with a local then you put it in a prestige bottle of beer that was person who has knowledge location like a gallery, and consumed wound up back in of the area. It’s a different people’s minds get going, and the sculpture? method for every location. memories start to come up.

Yes. But we could not

How did you begin to work with your grandfather?

It started when I was ten or so. If my grandfather was in Iceland, I would skip school and just go to the studio and work with him on material paintings and sculptures.

Then I became more involved in my late teenage years, but I never looked at it as art. Just as life. You have a different view when you are born into this. What I was taught was: Believe in yourself and do what you want to do and maybe somebody else likes it or not. But then again, it wasn’t really a “teaching.” I only realized later that I was being taught how to balance colors and work with forms and master the materials.

Most of the objects point toward a deep past. You can feel their age. Many people go through life without looking at the ground or sky, and they don’t notice how many objects pass through their hands. For instance, how many cell phones have you owned? You don’t think about it. If we are cleaning out a studio, we always create a pile that is the object pile. We filter the objects that have meaning to us. These objects are old but they are still good, better than many things made today.

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Was your working relationship with your father, Björn, similar? Yes. We worked on many of the projects together. The idea of the bar was revived when we created the bar in Iceland and moved it to New York in 2013. Then we made one in Somerset in 2014.

How long did it take you to construct this bar? In a way, it’s never finished. But you

“Each object needs to be unique. You can’t just go out and buy most of these things, but I do like going to flea markets and reclamation yards.

We will use anything, though. My friend was ripping out a bridge in Iceland and I told him to leave some of the parts in my yard.”—Oddur Roth

keepers

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have to stop at some point, of course. We install until we are satisfied, but then it moves at some point and grows again. This process for Somerset has been about four months. All on-site. We turned the whole residency at Hauser & Wirth into a design office, metal shop and photography studio.

And the bar in New York at the new 18th Street site has taken thousands of manhours, as it’s been moved from one location to another, always changing, always adapting to the space to get the right atmosphere around it. And each time, we also must consider its function.

Some bars are more visual, but the one in Somerset serves 200 to 500 people a day.

Do you think about the future of the Roth lineage?

None of this is intentional.

This is just what I’ve done and what we are doing. We’ll see what happens. There’s no higher scheme. It would stop being spontaneous and real.

It would stop being crazy. It would be commercial. But, of course, you need a lot of money to fund these things.

It’s a slippery slope. So we take one piece at a time. One idea at a time. Some ideas are good and some are bad, but we don’t know until we’ve done them. It has to intrigue us. Otherwise, there’s no point. So we stick to what's real. We don’t change for better critiques or new trends. Wherever the road takes us, that’s what we do.

Is this a lesson from Dieter?

Yes. You have to make your own opinion and believe in yourself. If someone likes it, great. If they hate it, that’s great, too. But these things do not interfere with the work, basically.

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Do you try to transform the larger project that has been passed to you? Do you want to preserve it? Both?

No person is the same. And, of course, the times change.

There are now possibilities of managing things digitally.

Media has changed a lot. As soon as something is out there, it’s everywhere now.

That was not the case before.

But generally, the ideas are the same. The end goal is the same. It’s about trying to figure out what life is about and have fun while doing it.

And making art that is also a bar—it doesn’t sound so bad.

Not at all. We do this out of sheer joy. It’s different from when my grandfather started out. He had to choose between affording art materials or affording food.

We don’t have that problem.

And we only do the projects that we like. That’s a strong position to be in. It allows you to achieve better things.

Do you have projects on the horizon? There are projects ahead, but I do not think about them until they are certain. I prefer the projects that are spontaneous. There’s so much talk in life for things that never come to be. I prefer action. You know, there are three kinds of people in this world: people who make things happen, people who wait for things to happen and people who wonder what the hell happened. So when we take a project, it’s full on. It’s like a film or a construction site. Then we move onto the next one. No regrets.

No second thoughts. When it’s done, it’s done. That’s a valuable lesson I was taught by my grandfather. It’s what you do today that counts.

( ARTISTS ONLY ) “Poets aren’t drinkers—artists are,” the impresario Mickey Ruskin, founder of Max’s Kansas City, one of New York’s most legendary artist bars, once said. While poets might disagree, Ruskin was onto something about artists, who for generations have convened around their favorite watering holes, some of which they have created themselves. Below, a highly subjective roundup of bars made by artists, for artists.

Al’s Grand Hotel, L.A. In 1971, artist Allen Ruppersberg ran a fully operational seven-room hotel, complete with a bar, as a conceptual art project.

Above the reception desk was a sign with a line from the movie Grand Hotel: "Same thing every day.

People come. People go … nothing ever happens."

The experimental venture lasted six weeks.

Passerby, New York British artist and dealer Gavin Brown opened Passerby in the Meatpacking District of New York in 1997.

A beloved haunt for artists, curators and writers, it featured an exhibition space in an adjacent room and, notably, an illuminated disco floor created by artist Piotr Uklański.

The Chalet, L.A. and Dallas Conceived in 2014 by artist Piero Golia and architect Edwin Chan, the Chalet operated as a word-of-mouth social space (on a given evening, one might imbibe with a marching band, a magician or a pair of alpacas). It was later faithfully re-created in Dallas with its original features, including a Pierre Hughye aquarium.

“Many people go through life without looking at the ground or sky, and they don’t notice how many objects pass through their hands. For instance, how many cell phones have you owned? You don’t think about it.”—Oddur Roth

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Phyllida Barlow’s life as a teacher, remembered by her students

A Brilliant Way of Looking 98

By Charlotte Jansen

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Phyllida Barlow in her exhibition “cul-de-sac” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2019

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Phyllida Barlow (1944–2023) was one of the most important British sculptors of her generation. Her work often transformed quotidian materials— plywood, cardboard, cement, fabric, plastic—into what she called “very impractical and very illogical” pieces of unexpected beauty. In addition to being an artist, a mother of five and partner to her husband, the artist Fabian Peake, Barlow was a teacher from the late1960s until 2009. Over four decades at several institutions, including twenty-three years at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she left an indelible mark on the hundreds of students she advised as an artist, mentor and friend. She finally retired from teaching at the age of sixtyfive to focus solely on her art.

Among Barlow’s artist writings is “A Brilliant Way of Looking: A Brief Account of Making a Drawing” (2011),

which describes her approach toward a central component of her work. Her meditations on art-making closely mirror her teaching ethos: See differences Change size Change point of view Be pictorial Forget sculpture Be solid Be vague Be curious On the occasion of a large-scale exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset celebrating Barlow’s transformative approach to sculpture, writer Charlotte Jansen spoke to former students and fellow educators who remember Barlow as an empathic and generous guiding light in her field.

Phyllida Barlow, Untitled, 1967–69. Colored pencil and pastel on paper, 18 3/8 x 21 3/8 inches

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Alison Wilding Phyllida interviewed me for the graduate program at Chelsea School of Art in 1970 or 1971. I was in my third year at Ravensbourne and not used to seeing a woman tutor, although I do remember seeing Elisabeth Frink on the premises.

But Phyllida seemed only a bit older than myself, and she was extremely friendly. I had a great interview with her and Matt Rugg, another teacher from Chelsea. They offered me a place on the spot, but I was set on going to the Royal College of Art, where there were no women tutors in the sculpture school and in fact very few women at all.

Bill Woodrow I first met Phyllida when I was in my final year at Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1971. I had applied

to a postgraduate program at Chelsea School of Art, and she came with other tutors from Chelsea to see my diploma show. I found out years later from Phyllida that there was one work in particular she was really keen on, and apparently she worked very hard to make sure I got a place in the program.

I don’t know exactly what it was she liked, but knowing her interests, I would think she liked the scale of the piece—it was twenty feet across—and the way it used the room and was so simple, with no glue or joining. I entered the postgraduate program at Chelsea, from 1971 to 1972, and I met her again there.

Sam Taylor-Johnson I met Phyllida in the early 1990s, when I was at East London

Polytechnic. It was a very tough, very macho art college then. The sculpture department was in a large shipbuilding yard, and everything was about how big and how strong you could make something. I was trying to figure out my place in the world of art school. I had landed there from a dysfunctional childhood, and I was very grateful to be there, but I had no idea what I was doing.

Natasha Kidd I was at the Slade for a long time, from 1992 to 1998. I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees there, and afterward I went on to teach at Chelsea. I lived on the end of the same road as Phyllida in Finsbury Park, so even after I left the Slade, I kept bumping into her. We’d have conversations in the supermarket. I was a young mum and trying to figure out how to teach and make work—even if the work wasn’t visible—and she really legitimized that space for me.

Jess Flood-Paddock I met Phyllida at my interview for the Slade in 1996. I was eighteen. I remember she was there with fellow tutors Bruce McLean and Bernard Cohen, and they stood in a big circle around us. They opened my portfolio and spread it out on the floor—all my drawings filled the floor of that big room. I remember being surprised that they did that. Phyllida asked me at the end whether I wanted to come to the Slade, meaning that she was offering me a place if I went into sculpture.

She was quite direct about it, and I was surprised because I had applied to do painting. But I just trusted them, and it felt right from the beginning. Phyllida became my tutor for the next four years.

Phyllida Barlow with her work in 1971, shortly after she began teaching at the Chelsea School of Art in London.

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Mark Godfrey I joined the Slade in 2002 and was Phyllida’s colleague there until I left in 2007. We did studio critiques together every Wednesday morning.

At that time, most of the staff at the Slade could be divided

“She somehow always hit the nail on the head. That was the thing about Phyllida: She made you feel seen and heard.”—Prem Sahib

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View 102 of “Phyllida Barlow: dock,” commissioned by Tate Britain, London, 2014

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into two groups: older men and younger artists—and then there was Phyllida, who had a different mood about her. We would muck around in meetings, making silly jokes and behaving stupidly. We laughed about the pretentious things students and staff would sometimes say, or the bureaucracy and some of the mundane parts of running an art school. We got to like each other and shared a mischievous sense of humor.

Alison Wilding, Solenoid, 2015. Iranian string, wax, forged iron and wire

Bill Woodrow, Untitled, 1970. Eight split pine trees

Prem Sahib Phyllida was my personal tutor at the Slade, and during my time there she became the director of undergraduates. I remember our first meeting quite distinctly because it was my interview for the Slade. I was nineteen or so, and I was incredibly nervous and intimidated by the

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situation, but she made me feel welcome and relaxed. I remember her warm energy and how at ease her presence made me feel.

I had a big A1 portfolio that I’d lugged with me from the suburbs, and I went through every page with her. She had an amazing ability to see through the pretensions of a situation and meet you as an artist, with a kind of knowingness. In a short space of time, she detected things in my work that I hadn’t seen yet and led me to ask questions that have remained in my practice since.

She somehow always hit the nail on the head. That was the thing about Phyllida: She made you feel seen and heard.

Taylor-Johnson Phyllida came in one day as a visiting lecturer when I had started my studies at East London Polytechnic. I was one of the few women in the department and she sought me out. She heard I was a pain in the ass and said, “I’ve been told you are a troublemaker and I shouldn’t come to see you.” So we sat down and talked, and I found her very easy to talk to. She was interested in what I was trying to do with my ideas and my work, where I was heading in my mind. She took one long, hard look at me and said, “You’re in the wrong place.”

She suggested I apply to a different program at Goldsmiths, which she described as having a lot of exciting ideas and thoughts, including an artist named Damien Hirst—I had never heard of him at the time—who had just organized the influential student exhibition “Freeze.” She thought my work could fit well there. She set up an interview for me at Goldsmiths, and off I trotted to an interview.

I was offered a place and I took it. After I switched programs, Phyllida would still check in with me to see how I was getting on. She was very nurturing, and she said if it all goes wrong, come back to me.

It was a really massive influential turning point for me, and I am extremely grateful. She changed the course of my life.

Ángela de la Cruz I was Phyllida’s student from 1994 to 1996 at the Slade. She had a sort of psychological approach in getting to know each student and their work individually. She was very generous in sharing her ideas and helping students develop.

She taught me to allow myself to be more vulnerable. I was very obsessed with having things meticulously in order and she encouraged me to be more chaotic and to experiment with my visual language.

Sahib I didn’t know very much about art or the art world when I started at the Slade. I felt lucky to encounter Phyllida as my first person and my entry into all of that. She was a real artist’s artist, and that made her work very relatable. The questions she had with her work were things I could relate and respond to: how something takes up space or how certain materials can embody commentary through their physicality. The idea of where a work situates you as a viewer in relation to it is something I have thought about a lot in my own work. She made me think about tension between the viewer and the space, when things are teetering on collapse and there is potential for change. It was inspiring.

Godfrey She seemed to try to get the very best from each student, to make them understand their deepest motivations for making art. She would get to the heart of the absolutely strange and ineffable process of being a creator. I was an art historian, so my approach was very different. I remember seeing the expressions on students’ faces when they heard what she said and took it in, as if she’d gotten to the core of their hopes and fears of being an artist. She would ask the very thing that was going to drive them on to the next moment of creativity.

“I was a young mum and trying to figure out how to teach and make work—even if the work wasn’t visible—and she really legitimized that space for me.”—Natasha Kidd

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Kidd I recall some of the talks she’d give, about how the wall and painting were institutional. And how the floor, as the place for sculpture, was a more activist space. I feel like I was trying to make paintings that came off the wall but never made it. The slides she showed during talks always presented works that weren’t in galleries. They were objects that weren’t recognized by institutional spaces—they were more anarchic, playful kinds of objects, like bin bags in a field.

The Young British Artists were having a huge moment then, doing all these big gallery shows, yet someone like Phyllida was making these gorgeous, messy things that were populating spaces beyond the white cube.

Sahib Near the end of my time at the Slade, I was involved in a project where we would stage exhibitions in the back of a truck, and once we pulled up outside her house and had an impromptu exhibition.

Flood-Paddock We became really close friends, and we stayed that way until she died. It was useful to talk to her about what I was doing in the studio, and once she said to me, “Well, I’m a modernist.” And then I thought, “Okay, that makes so much sense!” Phyllida was very much about materials—about touch, weight, balance. She was not a contemporary artist, but she was teaching contemporary artists.

Sahib Her politics were implicit—in her being, in her teaching, in her interactions with students. There are things I remember her being passionate about, such as the undermining of the plinth. And she was not a fan of pedestals. You could possibly read into that, about the way she was thinking at the time. She wasn’t scared of lobbying for change. She encouraged us to be bold. She made me think that everything could be a material,

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that even the things we are going through could be transformed.

Flood-Paddock She was democratic as a tutor and did not prioritize one student over another. She treated us all like artists from the very start. It was different then—the tutorials were minimal, and you were left on your own more to make work in the studios.

She was a very good listener. She could say a couple of small things and that would trigger something in me about what I was doing. She was a mentor, really. She didn’t give particular advice, but she would draw attention to something I hadn’t realized was important. I remember in my second year, I had been away for a term in Chicago and I came back to London. I told her I didn’t know what I was doing, and she told me to come in over the summer to see her. She gave me two dates, and I went. We sat together in the quad and looked at a tree.

And she said to me, “What do you see?” and asked me to describe it. I said, “Well, I see a trunk, I see the bark.…” And she asked, “But what are you actually looking at? Are you seeing how the tree has grown, its history?” So we sat and looked at things in the quad, and it was really difficult to do! But as a sculptor, it was a really good thing to do. It put me in the moment of being able to see what is physically in front of me. That was one of the best bits of teaching she did for me.

Wilding “What about water? A wave…,” Phyllida offered during a visit to my studio in the early 1990s. I was stuck on a large work [that became Harbour, 1994–96]. I don’t know where that idea came from, but it was absolutely what the work needed and was given.

Godfrey She would not ask, “Why is it yellow and round?” She would try to draw a connection between the attitude of the object and the maker’s attitude, and help the maker understand their motives: What

is it about me as a human that is compelled to spend time with this material making this thing right now? Why could there be no other outcome of this day than making this thing in the studio?

Wilding My work Solenoid (2015) is a wrapping of waxed string. It is an attempt to make a form through repetition, which can be boring but necessary. I thought of Phyllida a lot while making it. I liked how it was different from everything else I was making, but at the same time it was not something that she would have made. Phyllida’s early work Torso (1985)—cellotape wrapped around a shelf that has gone crusty and yellow over the years—is the work that comes closest to it.

Sahib She was a big advocate of making and testing and allowing for failure—that was a real Phyllida lesson. I was at the Slade from 2002 to 2006, when it still felt experimental and unruly and there wasn’t so much pressure of professionalism.

Wilding I was teaching a postgraduate course at the Slade, and Phyllida was teaching undergraduate courses, which she ultimately ran until her retirement. Her students were obviously having the time of their lives—it was hands on with plaster, paper, rubbish, rapid building of structures, breaking stuff down and building it up again. Breaking rules, gusto, curiosity, mistakes, failure, chaos and laughter. Phyllida was a consummate communicator, and sculpture was her motivating passion. It was not the way I approached teaching, but then my practice and hers were entirely different and yet somehow complementary. Phyllida’s making was relentless, and I often could not get started.

We all moaned about the Slade bureaucracy—although I’m sure it’s worse now!

“Looking back, it was amazing how she understood me— knowing exactly where I should be. There was a sense of power in being seen for the first time and having someone understand my wild, esoteric ideas.” —Sam Taylor-Johnson

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Kidd I vividly remember the first few weeks of a sculpture workshop she ran in a huge studio upstairs.

I was nineteen, and I had not come from a family background of going to art school or to university.

I was from a working-class family, and I was terrified going into school. I have no idea what we made or what the quest was—but I remember it was chaos and someone ended up in the emergency room with an injury.

We were all these young, anxious egos, figuring out how to hold an object off the ground together because that’s what it needed.

It was about working as a group in the studio, not as individuals, and how we could figure out our dynamics as a group through the act of making together. I didn’t know that in the moment, but when I look back now, that’s what that was: how we figure things out and learn together.

Sahib Our group took the idea of artistic freedom quite literally, even by today’s standards.

There was a discussion among the tutors about how to get us back on track, and they developed “emergency crits” in which we were summoned to present work.

The result was chaos: birds flying around, people undressing and putting on each other’s clothes, alarms going off. This is the kind of vibe she would allow and a testament to the time and space she made for us to experiment. But I think we confused her with our response to it all! It was a fun time, discovering ourselves through the work—she encouraged that sincerity, and she was someone I felt comfortable being vulnerable around. It was an exciting time to be a young artist. de la Cruz Phyllida was quite personal compared with the other teachers I had—perhaps she had a motherly side to her. She taught me to respect and follow my own practice and also to look at the world around me for inspiration.

She was able to converse about many subjects. She was a real intellect. It was a pleasure to talk to her, know her and be in her company. But at times she could be a lot to handle and quite intense.

Looking back, I think it must have been difficult for her, as some of her students became very big before she did. She deserved for her fame to happen more quickly. Although perhaps in the end it did come at the right time.

View of “Phyllida Barlow: unscripted,” Hauser & Wirth Somerset, United Kingdom, 2024

Wilding In 1984, we both applied for at the same job at Brighton Polytechnic.

Phyllida got the job, but they also gave me a one-day-a-week post, which was really good money then.

The train journey to Brighton from London was when Phyllida and I got to know each other, and it was often hilarious. Teaching at Brighton entailed one-to-one tutorials—there seemed to be a bunch of incredibly bright and motivated students. I had already realized that Phyllida was a superb multitasker. I could not believe she had so many children, other teaching commitments and a fullon practice in her home studio— and I never heard her complain about any of it. At the time, I don’t think I realized how tough it was for her holding it together: teaching, family and her own practice.

Woodrow In the late 1990s, I came across a public work of hers down in the New Forest. It was a big installation in a quite remote place next to a footpath. I remember thinking it was amazing—she’s making fantastic stuff and even if no one really knows about it, she was just doing it. That really impressed me.

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Flood-Paddock I think she taught to support her family. I’m not sure she liked teaching. People assume she did, because she did it for forty years.

But she had five kids—that costs a lot of money. I remember from her time teaching at the Slade, she was in her office doing paperwork a lot. She enjoyed the tutorials to an extent, I think, but she wasn’t promoted until 2004, five years before retired. It was sexism. When you consider the financial implications, especially, I find it infuriating that female lecturers in the University of College London system don’t become professors sooner. The Slade was so male-dominated in terms of everything.

Barlow during the Nasher Sculpture Center’s Nasher Prize jury deliberations, 2017

Woodrow In the way she approached me and other people and talked about work, she was one of those teachers who went against the grain of many male tutors who would try to take you apart, saying, “This is rubbish. What are you doing?” with people ending up in tears. Phyllida was never like that. Whatever you thought of it, there was something that was positive. It could be really small or almost insignificant, but she would locate that and encourage you through it. That was a real difference between her and other teachers.

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Kidd I think Phyllida’s whole practice was about learning. She would say art schools aren’t just places where artists train; they are also spaces where you learn to not know, to play, to gain confidence and authority, to research through materials. We were sixty students, and we weren’t all going to go on and become artists but Phyllida allowed people to take that knowledge and experience out into whatever they were going to be.

and humor. And the excitement of making the object that leads on to the next one, in a neverending sequence of works.

Sahib Once I made a mash-up video of Beyoncé performances that I edited into one mega-mix spectacle.

Phyllida watched it and just didn’t know how to react. I remember someone kindly explained to her that Beyoncé was like a pastiche of Tina Turner. She had introduced me to all these amazing references—but I take credit for giving her Beyoncé!

Mark Godfrey is an art historian and curator based in London. From 2007 to 2021, he was senior curator of international art at Tate Modern.

Taylor-Johnson Looking back, it was amazing how she understood me—knowing exactly where I should be. There was a sense of power in being seen for the first time and having someone understand my wild, esoteric ideas. She made me feel safe to be able to say: This is the wrong environment. And I could leap and bound my way out of it. It is amazing and rare when people do that for you.

Flood-Paddock Meeting her really felt like fate. I feel very lucky.

Kidd I remember seeing her running a workshop with a group of primary school children at her commission for Tate Britain in 2014. I think one of them was her grandchild. I remember thinking that even when she did these massive commissions she could still be found with a group of kids.

Ángela de la Cruz is a London-based artist from Galicia, Spain. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010.

Jess Flood-Paddock is a sculptor living and working in London. She was recently selected for a summer residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, which took place in parallel with “Phyllida Barlow: unscripted.”

Natasha Kidd is an artist living and working in the United Kingdom. She is associate vice provost for cultural and creative industries at Bath Spa University.

Prem Sahib is an artist. Their work is in the collections of the Tate; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and other institutions worldwide.

Sam Taylor-Johnson is a film director and artist. Her work includes Back to Black (2024), Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and other films.

Alison Wilding is a sculptor who lives and works in London. In 2019, she was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to art.

Bill Woodrow is a sculptor. He was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 1986 and was elected to the Royal Academy in 2002.

“Phyllida Barlow: unscripted” is on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset through January 5, 2025.

Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture, 1963– 2023 (Hauser & Wirth Publishers / Fruitmarket Gallery) is now available from Hauser & Wirth Publishers Originally published by Fruitmarket and Hatje Cantz in 2015, this new edition has been updated and expanded by curator Frances Morris.

Wilding Her teaching legacy—ask any of the hundreds of artists she has taught— is love, generosity, intellectual rigor

“Phyllida was a superb multitasker. I could not believe she had so many children, other teaching commitments and a full-on practice in her home studio.”—Alison Wilding

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Barlow in her studio, 2013

22 June 2024 – 27 April 2025

“Form and content come perfectly together” Laura Cumming, The Observer

Plan your visit ysp.org.uk

Yorkshire Sculpture Park West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG

108 Bharti Kher, Djinn, 2024. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, Nature Morte and Perrotin. Photo © Jonty Wilde.

S O U T HWA RK FREE FO R TAT E M EM B ER S

TATE MODERN 3 OC T 2024 – 9 M AR 2025

Supported by

With additional support from The Mike Kelley Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate Americas Foundation, Tate International Council and Tate Patrons

Mike Kelley Ahh...Youth! 1991–2008 © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

All Rights Reserved / VAGA at ARS, NY & DACS, London.

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New issue out now blau-international.com

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Gong Co. Christian Patterson (TBW Books & Éditions Images Vevey) For more than fifteen years now, Christian Patterson has been brilliantly mining a Pop-adjacent territory first staked out by Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, with debts to Warhol and Ruscha. His 2010 project Redheaded Peckerwood —a wildly inventive retelling of the Starkweather-Fugate murder spree of the late 1950s—yielded one of the greatest artist’s books of its time, a thoroughly unclassifiable production. His newest book, highly anticipated for more than decade, continues to hold a smudged mirror up to American material culture and history, telling the story of a Chinese grocery store in the Mississippi Delta that Patterson began to visit in 2004 as it was going under. But the store seemed always to have functioned less as a business than as a time capsule, bobbing in an eddy outside the stream of contemporary commerce.

Patterson doesn’t so much document the store as attempt to bottle its essence in book form. There’s no nostalgia afoot here.

Instead, something much more complex and anthropological is going on, an obsession with place that Patterson might not be able to explain even to himself.

—Randy Kennedy

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New and forthcoming books

The Age of Loneliness Laura Marris (Graywolf)

Ghost Pains Jessi Jezewska Stevens (And Other Stories)

When I was a child in suburban Virginia during the 1980s, the edge of my neighborhood had a small creek filled with wonders: salamanders, crawfish and a mulberry tree whose berries I ate on long summer days. In the years since, new housing has covered the area, erasing the creek, the tree and the entire world around them, which exists now only in my memory.

I loved that creek, but until recently, it never occurred to me to think of it as a companion, as I would a cherished childhood friend. Reading Laura Marris’s The Age of Loneliness has forever changed my outlook. In this moving debut essay collection, Marris ruminates on moments from her life that involve love and loss, both personal and ecological, and suggests that disconnection from our natural surroundings can have the same emotional impact and consequences as social loneliness. Marris has a master’s degree in poetry, and her lyrical tone underpins her persuasive argument that ecological diminishment should be treated with the same empathy and gravity as the loss of a loved one.—Alexandra Vargo

I am taken with Jessi Jezewska Stevens in the way I have been taken by particular friends, with a kind of blatant subtlety that expects something of me—to engage, intuit, keep up. And if I am not always keeping up, there is an easy pleasure, too, in her sentences, which both bely and emphasize their weight, the way a very strong person makes a heavy thing look small. I am thinking of “lightness” in the sense of Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Of Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live.

Stevens’s story collection Ghost Pains, following the recent publication of novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors, is rife with memorable images (a bird hitting a wooden door, no window in sight) and scenes (answering the doorbell, a bed-ready narrator becomes a party host and watches as guests disrobe, following her cue) that, written with absolute clarity, retain their mystery. In the story “Honeymoon,” the newlywed narrator wants to share a singular experience with her husband, but realizes it just won't work: “Two would ruin everything.”

—Jana Horn

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From Hauser & Wirth Publishers

Distinguishing Piss from Rain; Writings and Interviews Glenn Ligon Edited by James Hoff

Gustav Metzger: Interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist Edited by Karen Marta

Few visual artists are as closely associated with the written word as Glenn Ligon.

In conversation with fellow artist Byron Kim, Ligon explains, “Words are pictures the way I paint them,” and are “just one possible way out of many of responding to a given text.”

Words are the source material for much of Ligon’s work and yet, to Kim, he takes pains to distinguish his use of words from writing, per se. Instead, he describes himself as a kind of found-object-poet who reframes what’s already there. This is precisely what makes him such an astute cultural critic, in both his visual art and his writing about others (particularly other painters). Reflecting on Julie Mehretu’s Gray Paintings, Ligon concludes that “to be an artist is to strive to say what we want, to depict the world we want to live in.”

In this volume of collected writing and interviews, which includes an introduction

by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Ligon’s intimate and conspiratorial tone is as revelatory as it is disarming. Words—as pictures and as text—are clearly part of his editorial process, a way of finding and redefining meaning with and alongside his peers past and present.—Alexis Lowry

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Shaped by profound events that formed his worldview—escaping Nazi Germany via Kindertransport to England, studying art in 1945 just as the Atomic Age dawned— the artist Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) thrived on contradiction. He was fascinated by technology yet refused a mobile phone, and edited the Computer Art Society Bulletin having never used a computer himself. Hans Ulrich Obrist, who interviewed Metzger for over twenty years after a chance meeting in 1995, describes him as “a man of generous spirit and radical intelligence” and you can intuit these polymaths’ deep relationship while reading their conversations, organized by topic over chronology, ranging from Holocaust to homeopathy, gardening to extinction.

There are times when Metzger schools Obrist and others when he sees an old idea anew from Obrist’s probing. They embark on new subjects, and delve into concepts clearly ruminated on for years. The cadence is compelling, and the ending a surprise: Out of the blue, Metzger asks Obrist for an impromptu critique of works he’s brought to their meeting. Their poignant interchange, toward the end of Metzger’s life, offers rare insight into the care shared between an artist and curator.—Kate Fowle

Illastrations Jason Rhoades Imagine the internet as a colossal sculpture, built out of lumber, buckets, neon, extension cords, appliances and other ordinary stuff. This is what Jason Rhoades (1965–2006) considered the accumulation of his art to be: a dynamic system to explore and communicate life’s questions.

Networked throughout this physical mainframe are packets of information— subjects, concepts, works of art by Rhoades and others, personal references—that this books serves to illustrate.

As much a tool as a book, Illastrations is a collection of didactic cartoons organized by keywords in a rough alphabetical and numerical order. Spelling, too, is often approximate: “arcatecture,” “stomic,” “please don’t toutch the floor.” Like many people with dyslexia, Rhoades processed the world through imaginative ways of putting the things in it together.

Rhoades positioned himself as an outsider, never relinquishing his rural practicality or punk sense of humor. He believed that making his work accessible was part of the job of being an artist.

Originally given as a present from Rhoades and his wife to their friend and patron Iwan Wirth, Illastrations is published on the occasion of the gallery’s yearlong exhibition of his work.—Ingrid Schaffner

Fit to Print On Comme des Garçons’ mail-art collaborations

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For more than fifteen years, Comme des Garçons’ direct mailers have reimagined the genre of advertising correspondence as art book, evincing a commitment to printed matter that Ursula both salutes and shares. For each edition of the mailer, the fashion house’s founder Rei Kawakubo selects works from a favorite artist’s oeuvre and collages them into new forms. For her most recent collaboration with the Swiss artist Roman Signer, she spliced preparatory sketches for his ephemeral installations with their photographic documentation—recasting his work as an unexpected visual synthesis of before and after.

Following this year's release of the Signer mailers, Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe, the brand’s chief executive, spoke with Ursula about the broader history of their unorthodox print project.

Ai Weiwei 2010

Paul Thek, 2017

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René Burri, 2012

Chris Marker, 2021

Comme des Garçons has always believed in printed matter. The experience of holding something in your hand, touching the paper, feeling the print quality, listening to the physicality of the whole thing, is far more powerful than experiencing the same creation digitally. Seventeen years ago, Rei Kawakubo had the idea to collaborate with artists to publish a brand-new annual series of communications posters. From Mondongo, an Argentinian art collective, in 2008 to Roman Signer in 2024, we have worked with a complex group of artists over the years, in a variety of ways, through this unique publication.

Sometimes the backand-forth was direct and in person.

I visited the Quay Brothers (genius stop-motion animators) in their caravan in London. I found Ai Weiwei by a pond in Barcelona, and I cherished the dinners I shared with René Burri on the outskirts of Paris.

But we’ve also worked by proxy with Raw Vision and the outsider artists associated with that great magazine; with the Rijksmuseum and its collection of 18th-century Dutch master portraits; with the creative director of Berghain nightclub in Berlin, who has worked for more than twenty years with underrepresented local artists; and with Robert Wilson’s

Watermill Center in New York, for an issue devoted to Paul Thek. From the beginning, the idea has been to ask artists to place implicit trust in Kawakubo, giving her access to their entire oeuvre, which she proceeds to contort and confound, creating something completely new. The hope is always that the artists, upon seeing the final result, have a feeling of seeing their work in an entirely new light.—Adrian Joffe 116

Performance and Art Nature, familiar scenery, primitive mechanics.

People, accidents, coincidences, failures, humor.

I don’t know how Roman Signer succeeded in putting all these elements together to make ART. I challenged myself to see whether it would be possible to get to know these performance artworks through the flat printed page and if so, how.

My works are like traps that I set for nature, so that she can intervene in the creative act as a partner, and perfect it. . . . The works come into being and pass away. And for me it is the in-between that matters, not only the result: not the aesthetic aspect but rather the process.

—Roman Signer

—Rei Kawakubo

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This page and left: Roman Signer, 2024

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Containers of Meaning A conversation about the life and work of Pierre Apraxine

Adrien Majewski, Effluvia from a Hand Resting on a Photographic Plate, 1898–99. Gelatin silver print

Pierre Apraxine (1934–2023) was one of the greatest photography collectors and cultural polymaths of his day, the architect of the Gilman Paper Company Collection, which transformed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photography holdings when it acquired the collection in 2005. On the occasion of the publication of Apraxine’s autobiography, The Image to Come: Memoirs of a Collector, written with Jean Poderos, Maria Morris Hambourg, founding curator of the Met’s photography department, met recently with acclaimed set and costume designer Chloé Obolensky and French exhibition organizer Olivier Renaud-Clément—all are longtime friends of Apraxine’s—to talk about his legacy and their memories of his place in their lives.

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I ask myself, as I write these lines, if it is necessary to continue them. Is it shyness, modesty, or boredom that cause me to doubt whether a project like this is advisable? Is it fear that I will not have the time to finish it that pushes me at once to undertake it and to put off starting it? I’m afraid of oblivion; I’m afraid of not knowing where to start and of not really knowing what to say. I know there is enough material, but I can’t see it.

My gaze has so often been directed: look over here, think about this encounter, remember when that happened. But as regards these indications that are at once so specific, so vague, and so frequent in my life, I haven’t had the patience to read them one after the other....

I am a collector, but one doesn’t accumulate objects out of love or out of passion; one accumulates them to play one’s part, to take one’s place in history, without really knowing what either of these things means.

I was born on December 10, 1934, in Estonia into a family that served the tsars. The name Apraxine is not unknown. Its posterity is assured by a character of Tolstoy’s in War and Peace, a Saint Petersburg marketplace, and a number of members of my family who played important roles in the history of imperial Russia. The most famous is Admiral Fyodor Apraxin (1661–1728), who was one of the builders of Peter the Great’s fleet, and one of whose sisters, Marfa, married Tsar Fyodor III. They were followed by a long line of servants of the Empire. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was the last imperial governor of Tver province, and in the early days of the revolution he was assassinated, not for what he was but for what he represented. At the outbreak of World War II, I was five years old. My mother, with her two sons, went into exile in Belgium, where she joined her family. My father followed us there, then returned to Estonia to look after the family business; I never saw him again. He left without me ever knowing what became of him. In Brussels, I discovered a new world and a new language. Above all a new house, so big whereas I was so small. A house that my whole life would not be enough to fill...

—Excerpt from The Image to Come: Memoirs of a Collector (Éditions courtes et longues, 2024) by Pierre Apraxine with Jean Poderos, translated by James Gussen

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“He had a kind of faithfulness to his friends, a retentiveness. He was creating his family, furnishing his world with friends that were like family, and it’s the same thing he did with photography. The pictures were not something to own. They were souls that he wanted to cohabitate with.”—Maria Morris Hambourg

OLIVIER RENAUD-CLÉMENT I know it will be one of the most difficult jobs of our lives if we want to try to define Pierre Apraxine in so short a time, as both a public and a private figure. But let’s try.

When did both of you first meet him? For me, he has always been my most important mentor, and I consider myself lucky because I met him so early in my own career.

MARIA MORRIS HAMBOURG I was a graduate student in New York, and I was working in and out of the Museum of Modern Art because I was interested in photography. There was no photography anywhere except at the Modern at that time. There were no books. There was nothing that I could get my hands on. I remember running into this guy, who was stunningly handsome, at the water cooler, and I thought, “Who is this person?” He had this jaunty style about him and this marvelous accent and soft voice. And he was, at the same time, very curious about who I was and I thought, “I’ve got to find out more about this guy.” And that was the beginning of our relationship, which would have been about 1973. He had come to America in 1969 on a Fulbright and was working at the Museum of Modern Art. CHLOÉ OBOLENSKY Well, it is strange for me, because a lot of friends just assume that Pierre and I met a long time ago because of our mutual Russian connections, or because of Paris, or because of our families, but in fact, no.

I met Pierre in New York, of all places, where I very rarely go or went. I had been working on a film for Franco Zeffirelli and the production broke down suddenly, leaving most of the people I worked with unpaid. So in the midst of working to get that straightened out, with nothing else to do, I started looking through my family’s Russian photographs, the pictures that had survived and come with them after the revolution. And I suddenly realized that there was so much in those informal photographs that said so much—not only to Russians but to anyone interested in Russian literature and theater. And I decided to try to do something with them. Jason Epstein, the head of Random

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House, was coming through Paris, and we were having dinner, and I said to him: “Look at these. What do you think?”

He said: “I think there’s a whole book in these pictures and I’d like to do it” [The Russian Empire: A Portrait in Photographs, 1979]. I came to New York to work on the book, and that’s where I met Pierre for the first time, because he was part of a group of old friends, including Ocsi Ullman, a textile dealer, and Cornelius Debousie, a decorator and antiques dealer. That was the beginning of a long conversation between myself and Pierre, which very quickly became a wonderful friendship. Through Pierre, I began to see another side of photographs and understand photography in a deeper way.

ORC That relationship with Osci and Cornelius existed because one of Pierre’s other great interests was textiles.

MMH How did Pierre get involved in textiles?

ORC I can answer that, actually. As Pierre’s relationship with Ocsi and Cornelius developed, he eventually met an important duo, Gail Martin and Vladimir Haustov, who were crucial in opening his eyes to the world of textiles. They founded the important Artweave Textile Gallery with Ocsi at a time when the material was underestimated and overlooked. Another friend (and now executor), Peter Koepke, introduced him to the Indigenous art from the Upper Amazon of Peru of pottery and textiles.

MMH It’s very characteristic of him. He was constantly curious and functioned in that nebulous region where you don’t exactly know the answer about something, and so he was always looking. That gave him a marvelous, intrepid quality.

ORC On that subject, curiosity, I think that was my luck with Pierre, because I met him around 1986. The first time I came to America was May 1984. I very quickly started to work with corporate art collections, amazed by the breadth of

activity in the U.S. Through that work, I fell upon Pierre’s name, and he was described in some kind of professional publication as, in fact, a collector of textiles.

But he was also listed as being connected to the Gilman Paper Company, and I had vaguely heard that company was starting a very impressive photo collection. So out of the blue I called up the company and asked Pierre for a meeting, and since he was so interesting, he received me. I was extremely eccentric and extremely young.

I showed up in Pierre’s office in a massive faux-fur coat which was multicolored, with sizzling blue inside lining. The whole office went silent when I crossed it. I had a portfolio of photos that I showed him of the work of Pierre Molinier, the French Surrealist photographer and painter, which Maria knows because this is eventually what I showed to her the first time I met her. Pierre was very amused, very curious, and he bought some photographs on the spot. He asked me when I was coming back again, and that was the start of a long friendship. And he was the one who first connected me with you, Maria. Then I moved to New York, and Pierre was in the habit, when I had a loft in SoHo starting in 1989, to call on me every Saturday with

Fred Holland Day, Portrait of F. Holland Day with Male Nude, ca. 1987. Platinum print

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“I remember he would find some new treasure … and he would become very shaky and unsure about it, asking himself: ‘Is Howard going to approve this one? Because yet again, it’s even more expensive than the previous one!’ But he somehow always seemed to succeed and Howard would buy it.”—Olivier Renaud-Clément

Cornelius Debousie, and we would go looking at antique stores and galleries.

MMH I think it’s absolutely typical that Pierre didn’t just receive you and then buy a picture and have a little discussion and that was that. He connected you with his other people. That’s what he did. He had a kind of faithfulness to his friends, a retentiveness. He was creating his family, furnishing his world with friends that were like family, and it’s the same thing he did with photography. The pictures were not something to own. They were souls that he wanted to cohabitate with. He wanted to save them from extinction and to have them around, not necessarily in his own apartment, but as part of a collection.

ORC And they had to resonate within a larger field, as well, for him. Photographs did not resonate just with other photographs. They needed to resonate with other parts of his life, other things he would have on his mind or think about in the creative world.

MMH They were little containers of meaning, like a Chekhov story. They were an entire universe unto themselves, where not all the answers were given. So they allowed for meditation, allowed for his curiosity, for multiple associations to come into play.

Photographs were a sort of perfect vessel for him to explore.

ORC When did you and Pierre start talking to

Pierre Apraxine at the Palais-Royal, Paris

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each other about the acquisition of photos?

How did that happen?

MMH I think the first photographs he bought were really from the Minimalist and Conceptual collection that was hanging in the lobby on the walls of the Gilman company. And apparently the staff wasn’t quite as urbane as the pictures were, and they said, “We’d all like to look at something a little easier to understand.”

Pierre was working at Marlborough Gallery at that point and he went back and pulled out some pictures of Paris, figuring that all Americans wanted to go to Paris or had been to Paris, and that the people in the office would like it. He started with Avedon, and then he added pictures

by Brassaï and Kertész, and I think that was the very beginning of Pierre buying photographs. As things happened, in the back room at the Marlborough Gallery, there was a very marvelous, elegant man who was the freelance photographer for the gallery. His name was Paul Katz. Paul was a photographer from early on, age thirteen.

By the time he was about nineteen, he was already working as a photographer at the Guggenheim and very involved in the art world. He also had no fear. He had seen a movie about Atget and thought, “Well, his stuff is amazing. I’d love to see more.”

Someone told him that Berenice Abbott had all the Atgets, and so he just went to see her and became friends with Bernice.

By the same token, he called up Brandt. He called up Robert Frank. Paul was so wellversed in who was around New York, who was a first-rate, artistic photographer, and he talked to Pierre at length over lunches.

As Paul liked to say, the Gilman Collection was really born at the Horn & Hardart Automat cafeteria on 57th Street, where they would go and eat a sandwich together.

It’s just marvelous to think of the two of them there.

ORC I think it’s important to put all this in context in a way, because we are at a time where photography, as you said, had not really arrived in the art world. Where would I see photographs? Where would I

see a book? Where would I see a collection, besides the Museum of Modern Art. It was a time when a lot of treasures were being discovered, unearthed, studied. It was like the box had finally opened.

MMH I think Pierre had landed on this subject in little increments, a baby step here, a baby step there. But finally, it got into his bloodstream and fascinated him. Howard Gilman was extremely responsive as well.

Pierre knew that what was happening in London—where, in 1971, the auction houses had their first photography sales, started by Philippe Garner—brought forth these amazing treasures from attics and basements and dusty cupboards, starting with Great Britain, and also France. And the panoply of 19th-century photography, little by little, came tumbling into these auctions, and it was beyond exciting.

Soon there was also kind of renaissance of 20th-century photography that happened in New York, starting in about 1970 and going through at least the middle of the ’80s, if not to the end of ’80s.

ORC I don’t want to forget to touch on Pierre’s other interests and a bit of his relationship with Howard Gilman. And this brings us back to Chloé, actually. Pierre had a lover, Woody [Heywood McGriff, 1958–1994], who was a great dancer and a member of Bill T. Jones’s company. Pierre was fascinated by dancers and their performance onstage. He was an early follower of Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown. He knew Trisha very well. And with Howard, they shared that passion. Howard was very involved with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and its impresario Harvey Lichtenstein, which led to the opening of the Howard Gilman Opera House.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, this friendship brought about a luminous collaboration between Baryshnikov and Mark Morris, two opposites, which took place on the grounds of Howard’s property in Jacksonville, Florida, where he also had a space for endangered species. Pierre also loved Peter Brook, with whom you’ve worked for so many years, Chloé. He went many times

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“He kept an unbelievable freshness in his outlook and in his constant interest in things in many different realms, along with a fantastic sense of humor, of course. In Pierre’s world, everything seemed to meet up in the end.”—Chloé Obolensky

to see The Mahabharata, which was such a major moment in theater of the 20th century.

CO The Mahabharata was a big adventure for all of us who were involved in it. It was a huge show, and we had to find a way of taking it from our theater, the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, to Zurich on the lake, then to New York at BAM. Without Harvey, we would never have managed. BAM really didn’t have the right space. We needed something more like the Bouffes du Nord, a space free enough for us to improvise things in. I remember it was snowing in New York, and Peter and I walked around that night. We went down a road behind BAM and we were in despair about a space. How could we make it work? As we walked, we saw a building opposite BAM that looked rundown but somehow like the sort of thing that might be possible.

We showed it to Harvey, and he said, “It’s the old Majestic Theater. It’s all in pieces.”

We asked if he could arrange for us to see it, and they opened it up and we sank through the planks right down to our knees. But we looked around and said, “Provided we can come in and do some things to it, this is the perfect place.” Which is the beginning of the story of how the Majestic was transformed into what is now the BAM Harvey Theater.

When all of this was happening, Pierre, because of his curiosity, was right there.

He came to see rehearsals. He came with Woody to the production on the third night.

And in that time spent with him, I came to understand what he was doing with the collection at Gilman. He really took it upon himself to convince the foundation to go after photography, to forget the Minimalist and Conceptual collections. And he was absolutely right, because this was just at the right time.

MMH And later on, after Howard had died and the collection still hadn’t come to the Met, Pierre really laid his honor on the line in order to get the collection to be a permanent part of the history at the Met. ORC He had found in Howard a real enabler.

I remember in the ’90s, when I had no

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money, and I had left my collaboration with Brent Sikkema at our gallery Wooster Gardens in SoHo. I would help Pierre. He used me as a secretary, and I would take care of the collection and keep it together and make lists, and I spent a lot of time with him. I remember he would find some new treasure from a dealer like Hans Kraus or Harry Lunn and he would become very shaky and unsure about it, asking himself: “Is Howard going to approve this one?

Because yet again, it’s even more expensive than the previous one!” But he somehow always seemed to succeed and Howard would buy it.

CO He always would.

MMH And as we’ve said before, it wasn’t about making this marvelous collection. It was more about the individual pictures. He drew some kind of—I don’t know what to call it exactly—sustenance from the collection.

It was as if there were negative spaces in his psyche that were not identified until a picture appeared, and it would give a shape to his feelings, memories, associations. He knew he had to try to articulate these things to Howard, which was never easy, but he managed it over and over and over again.

Sometimes we would even buy pictures out of the same album that, let’s say, Henry Lunn had. There were only two good pictures, and he would say, “Which one do you want?” And I would say, “Which one do you want?” And we would settle it amicably because in the end, we knew, or we hoped, that they would end up being side by side again in the Met’s collection. So it was a lovely thing to work with Pierre.

CO There was such a lightness in Pierre’s spirit, which was a relief, because one can go into something with the seriousness that Pierre had and then it becomes heavy and ornate and ultimately boring in the depth of the specialization. But he kept an unbelievable freshness in his outlook and in his constant interest in things in many different realms, along with a fantastic sense of humor, of course. In Pierre’s world, everything seemed to meet up in the end.

MMH He somehow retained the joy of childhood.

ORC The great moment in all of this was really 1993, with the “The Waking Dream: Photography’s First Century” at the Met, the show of the Gilman Collection.

It was an unforgettable opening night at the museum. It was that moment when photography, which was still considered an inferior medium, came to occupy one of the greatest museums, in spaces where you would normally see Rubens or Leonardo or any great works from the previous centuries. And suddenly, all of cultural New York is literally—I’m not overstating it—taken by storm with the power of the medium. I remember artists, colleagues, gallerists, people who had nothing to do with 19th-century photographs, going through the exhibition, and then going back again. Artists like Cindy Sherman were completely blown away by what they were seeing and finding there.

MMH And Pierre had done that. He was a vessel of so much, and he still is. And once again, he’s bringing people together, the three of us here, talking about all of these things and about him.

Adrien Tournachon, Self Portrait, ca. 1855. Salted paper print from glass negative

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Every Maid

Serubiri Moses

Saawa ya kola —Fred Sebatta I These lazy maids! she cursed.The madam, Esther Nambi, woke up this morning and her husband, Geoffrey Olupot, was gone to work. These were the gendered roles of factory work: He went to one factory, and she stayed at another. Except most people did not say that the factory at home supported the other factory where all the men went for the day. Who fed the men? Bathed them? Clothed them? Cleaned the sweat off their backs? That morning the live-in maid did not alert the madam that her husband had already gotten out of bed and hastily left the house to go to work, and the madam was now bitter because her husband drove to work that morning having spoiled the child’s doll. So what will baby Martha do without her doll? These lazy maids! she cursed. Martha will cry all day long and disturb me.

II The coming of a maid is a ritual. Some say that the family waits patiently in the living room to inspect the maid. Others say that the maid arrives unannounced and without pretext.The home produces maids – as in a factory, the home finds its division of labor, its factory workers and supervisors. In the factory, she will become part of the family album.

When Judith Namala arrived early that evening at Esther Nambi and Geoffrey Olupot’s home in Ntinda-Kiwatule, a suburb in Kampala, they were not expecting the kind of meticulously dressed woman with a model’s face i

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who walked in. She appeared like Diouana, a character invented by Ousmane Sembene: a Black girl sauntering elegantly into her white madam’s house.

Judith Namala wore her hair in neat cornrows, which she partially covered over with a silk headscarf. She wore a long floor-length maxi skirt, and a bright pink flowing blouse. Judith Namala arrived at the house at night rather than during the day because, as per ritual, both the husband and wife are to be present at the arrival of the maid.

Judith Namala sat down in a manner that proved that she was raised by parents in a home and not like a malnourished dog feeding in a rubbish heap.

The way to kneel in Buganda, the society she came from, is to kneel without clumsily falling over onto one side, and without holding onto anything for support as you slowly descend to the floor. You should kneel with care and make a slight movement with the lowering of your eyes to acknowledge the presence of those to whom you would like to give respect. Judith Namala’s kneeling was without falling to either side. Her kneeling was refined. It was the mark of style and elán. Judith Namala sat neatly on the woven sisal mat without planting either of her forearms in a way that faces outward and shows the inside of the elbow, the cubital fossa. She sat for what seemed like an eternity. Her spine was as sharp as a needle. It was the act of a gymnast or competitive athlete. She was barely a woman, but the children would come to call Judith Namala auntie. When she appeared in the family album she would be sitting on the woven sisal mat eating with the children, their cousin and the cousins’ maids. Her madam Esther Nambi would sit in the upholstered chair with the real aunties—the blood relatives.

III Every maid is a reflection of her madam Every maid is created by her madam’s economic need Every maid will become her madam She will become the madam she swore never to become When she grows up, a maid will leave her home And go into the house of a stranger Every circumstance in a maid’s life will bring her to this moment Every maid wants to be head of household Every maid dreams of taking over her master’s house IV A madam is a woman with a busy schedule. A madam has a schedule and a garden. The madam is self-aware: She knows that having a maid is really about playing madam, like Zukiswa Wanner tells us. The madam is a play.

Its main character shuttles between the various rooms of the home and the ii

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cultivated patch of land in her backyard. The maid is also a character in this play, though her role seems hidden. She is not at center stage. She is offstage and occasionally haunts the set of the play. She brings about the moral of the story. A Greek chorus. A ghost rising up to haunt the home. Where the story takes a sudden turn.

V It is seven in the morning. Ntinda-Kiwatule is already buzzing with people trying to get to work—you can hear the cars honking and swooshing by on the tarmac outside their home. Judith Namala at this point has already gotten the breakfast going and is setting the table. She prepares some millet porridge as usual, with some African tea. She lays the table, giving the children their metal enamel cups called gammas and placing the porridge into plastic bowls. She brings two flasks (one for porridge and one for African tea) and places them on the table for Geoffrey Olupot and madam Esther to serve themselves. The breakfast is accompanied by escorts, a colloquial term, of steamed muwogo, or cassava, and lumonde, or sweet potatoes, Tip Top bread and Blueband margarine.The children,Tendo and Awuor, rush to spread their Tip Top white bread slices with margarine. Judith Namala then sits down on a sisal mat laid on the floor next to the table. She holds baby Martha and feeds her with a bottle. The entire family eats in silence. Then all at once Geoffrey Olupot declares: “Saawa ya kola!”

VI When Judith Namala had retired from doing house chores in the late afternoon, and sometimes in the early evening, she would go outside to smoke taaba—tobacco leaves wrapped in thin paper. The house had an area for smoking in the backyard, next to the small patch of land on which Esther Nambi would keep her fruit-bearing matooke, or green bananas, as well as her yams (she had a variety, including a rare white yam called balugu) and ebijanjaalo (beans, a staple) and muwogo (cassava, another staple). It was a tradition: Every young woman once she entered into her own home would secure a patch of land to grow food.

Relatives would warn Esther Nambi to care for her garden by clearing the kikolo, or banana root, and by covering over any roots with dried leaves so as not to provoke the curiosity and ire of witches who would take advantage and leave hostile spirits in her garden.

Judith Namala, though a country girl, took up smoking once she arrived in the city. It was a habit she started in her teen years during the ’80s.

The three-bedroom house had one back door that led to the yard and garden patch, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence. The kitchen greeted everyone from the front. It was as though the architect had wanted the entire family to enter the house through the kitchen, an unusual design decision that went against convention. A parlor room usually came first, facing the front and welcoming guests.

In the madam’s house, one room was for the children (where the iii

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maid slept), and another for Esther Nambi and Geoffrey Olupot, as well as a guest bedroom. Like most of the houses in the Ntinda-Kiwatule area, Esther Nambi’s house was made of bricks and red-tiled roofing. Wooden beams in a raised ceiling kept the house cool on hot days. The veranda had short, white concrete columns, colloquially called pompeii, a reference to classical GrecoRoman building. Like most homes, this building had a gate that was larger than life. The gate had spikes at the top. When Geoffrey Olupot honked his horn at the gate, Judith Namala opened the metal doors outward. Geoffrey Olupot would not smile at her, as it was said that smiling at the maid was a sign of mal-intent.

VII The Baganda had a strict cosmology. In this cosmology, plants played an important role. Young women like Esther Nambi, despite their Christian missionary education, were often inclined to grow a garden of food. If a young woman did not grow food, she was often looked down upon. In her home, Esther Nambi would grow matooke rather than the mbidde, which bore only seeds.This latter plant would be found in the home of a father of twins. It was considered auspicious, as it brought wealth to such men. Buganda society collectively maintained the diversity of the banana plant. This varied greatly from the large-scale industrial farming of bananas in northern Colombia and Ecuador, which specialized in only one type of banana. Had Esther Nambi been a bit more adventurous she might have grown gonja, or plantain, in her small garden behind her house in Ntinda-Kiwatule. She could have grown ndiizi, which is a smaller kind of yellow banana. As her relatives told Esther Nambi, extreme caution was exercised in a garden to avoid the ire of witches.

For example, if you left your plants untended, the dried banana leaves and uprooted roots and cut stems strewn about in a disorderly manner, you were prone to receive what you were looking for. Witches would come to your garden and perform rituals with these discarded parts, as if teaching you a lesson in tending to your garden. It was a lesson for which you paid dearly.

VIII In the kitchen, Esther Nambi shows Judith Namala the various electrical appliances.While Judith Namala indeed came from Masaka town, she at the very least knew how to operate basic electric appliances. This is called a blender. We use it to make juice. Now, watch me and let me show you how to use it. Firstly, wash these mangoes and passion fruits. Esther Nambi said this, pointing to a heap of fruit on the countertop.Secondly, peel and cut the mangoes into small cubes and cut open the passion fruit and scoop out the juicy seeds.Thirdly, empty the peeled fruit into the blender and switch it on like so. Esther Nambi turned on the blender, which immediately made a loud screeching noise. Judith Namala, having never heard the sound of a blender, jumped up in terror:“Mama nyabo!” she cried out.“Miss mother!” She ran out the kitchen door holding up her skirt so she wouldn’t trip and fall on her way out. Esther Nambi laughed out loud. She said, “Ekyaalo kijja ku kugwaamu.” Soon the village will leave your body. iv

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Whenever this was said, it was not meant as a compliment. It was worse than: You speak good English. It was said to remind whoever was addressed that they were closer to barbarism than to civilization. If they were not careful, they would easily slip back. It was as if Esther Nambi did not know the saying “ You can take me out of the hood but you can’t take the hood out of me.” Or, as the English idiom goes: Once a villager, always a villager. Esther Nambi found Judith Namala hiding in the children’s bedroom, where she slept on the lower deck of a three-decker bed and the children on the top two levels. “Auntie Esther n’ekanze nnyo,” she said. ( Judith Namala called Esther Nambi auntie, addressing her as children addressed her.) Judith Namala’s terror was so intense that she was visibly sweating. Esther Nambi, by now having realized that this was not comedy, told Judith Namala to calm down. The blender was incapable of murder. Soon enough, she would get used to the sound.

IX The home is a factory. An itinerary for household work may include: (1) Daily washing of the car at 6-6:30 a.m., because the roads are dusty in Kampala and the car will be covered in dirt each day; (2) preparing millet porridge and black or African tea (made with cinnamon, cardamom and milk) for a family of five or more for breakfast; (3) ironing the school uniforms for the children (this is done between ages four and ten, after which the children can iron their own clothes); (4) mopping the house floors (often by hand); (5) doing the laundry (often by hand); (6) sweeping the yard (usually with a long broom); (7) preparing lunch (and packing it in heated flasks) and delivering the lunch to Geoffrey Olupot’s office in Old Kampala; (8) returning home from a long commute to give the children lunch, if the live-in domestic worker has not picked them up from school; (9) taking dry clothes off the clothesline; (10) ironing bedsheets, ready for the madam to make her own bed, and making the children’ s bed, where she also sleeps; (11) serving dinner; (12) cleaning up after dinner; (13) guarding the home against thieves, thugs or break-ins at night. Such a factory often requires four live-in domestic workers, including an askari, a house boy, a house girl and a nanny.

During those rare occasions when she was finished with her chores and had nothing to do but carry her own fingers, Judith Namala liked to smoke her taaba next to the pawpaw tree. It had ridges in the trunk and was tall enough that she could lean on it. In those cool evenings, Ntinda-Kiwatule would cool down like a pot that’s been set down from the clay cuisinère, black with soot. Sometimes this place felt like that. Judith Namala longed somehow for a reprieve from Esther Nambi’s house, from Mr. Olupot and their children, but she knew that her reprieve was not coming until the end of year. Then she would finally return to Masaka and see her mother, her grandmother and her sweet baby girl.

This text is an excerpt from a forthcoming book to be published by CARA: Center for Art, Research and Alliances. v

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ZOE LEONARD AL RÍO / TO THE RIVER OCTOBER 12, 2024 – JUNE 22, 2025 THE CHINATI FOUNDATION MARFA, TEXAS Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River (detail), 2016 – 2022. Gelatin silver prints, C-prints and inkjet prints. Dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

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Support for the artwork has been given by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth, New York.

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Figures in Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh

Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex, Chandigarh

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The Architect and the Artist Le Corbusier and Nek Chand in Chandigarh

Nek Chand

Le Corbusier

I recently traveled through Northern India across a diverse stretch from the Himalayan city of Leh to the tribal lands of Arunachal Pradesh, on to Kolkata, the triangle of Jaipur, Agra and New Delhi and finally to Chandigarh—the celebrated planned city built from the ground up in the 1950s as a symbol of the newly independent country.

Unlike much of India, with its abundance of activity and density, Chandigarh stands out in part for what it lacks. The streets are not crowded and chaotic; they look more like those of a European city, with traffic circles and wide boulevards. Bustees, or shantytowns, have been pushed to the outskirts, and it’s unlikely you’ll find a cow, a sacred Hindu animal, roaming around freely as you would elsewhere in India because they, too, live on the periphery in gaushala, or animal shelters.

The bustling bazaars at the core of Indian life don’t exist here; instead, an outdoor pedestrian shopping mall with an expansive concrete plaza serves as a de facto town square. One local told me that Chandigarh is not an Indian city, possibly for these very reasons, but Chandigarh is also unlike any other city.

The lingering effects of the 1947 partition, which displaced fifteen million people and led to the deaths of as many as a million, were still present when Chandigarh’s foundation stone was laid in 1952.

Against such a tumultuous backdrop, what happened next seems inconceivable: Two distinct architectural wonders emerged side by side—one by a renowned Swiss-French architect who finally realized his dream of building a city from scratch, and the other by a self-taught artist, a Hindu refugee traumatized by displacement, who transformed the urban waste of the new city into a landmark of art.

Today, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh administration buildings—known as the Capitol Complex—are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the nearby Rock Garden created by Nek Chand, a sixty-acre sculpture park, stands as one of India’s most popular attractions after the Taj Mahal. While Le Corbusier’s name has long been canonical, Chand’s is still not widely known outside India. And yet an origin story of Chandigarh that takes both into consideration, as complementary protagonists in the city’s creation, reveals not only the commonalities between their work but also the ways in which the city and the garden function today as mirror images of a vast urban experiment. It is believed that the two men never met.

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— When Le Corbusier was chosen to take over the Chandigarh master plan, originally drawn up by New York architect Albert Mayer, he was already sixty-three and widely esteemed, yet none of his many city-planning projects up to that point were ever constructed. Not wanting to jeopardize his other commissions by moving to India, he enlisted his cousin, architect Pierre Jeanneret, to be his on-site proxy. English architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, experts in tropical architecture, were also enlisted. Jeanneret traveled to India with Le Corbusier in February 1951 and soon took on the role of chief architect of the city, staying until 1965, only two years before his death. As a testament to his love of the region, he asked his niece Jacqueline to scatter his ashes in Chandigarh’s Sukhna Lake.

Le Corbusier designed much of Chandigarh from his studio on rue de Sèvres in Paris, but he took twenty-three extended trips to India before his death in 1965, visiting architectural landmarks such as the 17thcentury Mughal-era Red Fort, the 18thcentury Jantar Mantar observatory in New Delhi and, in Gujarat, the Adalaj Stepwell, an intricately carved water reserve from 1499, built five stories down into the earth.

Only car trouble kept him from seeing the Taj Mahal. During these trips, he kept a notebook with him at all times, making drawings of vernacular architecture and daily Indian life, referring to it often while planning the city.

In collaboration with architect B.V. Doshi—a student who worked in the Paris studio on the Chandigarh plans and who, in 2018, became the first Indian to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize—Le Corbusier extended his reach in India to include residential and institutional buildings in the walled city of Ahmedabad. During the same years he was bringing modernist ideas to India, he completed the Chapelle NotreDame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, in 1955—a stunning late-career example of his subversion of modernism through the use of curves and slopes, ideas he was also exploring for the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh.

Although Le Corbusier criticized Mayer’s original plan for Chandigarh as fauxmodern, writing to his wife, Yvonne, that he had “crushed the American” with a new plan, he ended up incorporating much of his predecessor’s work into his own design. He took Mayer’s superblocks, multi-functional, self-sufficient neighborhood units, and transformed them into much larger sectors, assigning them numbers to delineate their

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location and function. His penchant for order led him to color-code the streets in each sector with a different flowering tree; the Amalta trees with cascading yellow flowers can be found in Sector 16, while pink cassia adorn Sector 27. Le Corbusier also kept the greenbelt that Mayer designed under the influence of the City Beautiful movement, which encouraged the greening of cities, calling it the Leisure Valley. Its success has given Chandigarh the reputation of being one of India’s most eco-friendly cities. The major alterations to Mayer’s plan included changing his patchwork of curvy roads into a linear grid and moving the Capitol Complex further west to higher ground. Its secluded location situated it adjacent to the place where, unbeknownst to Le Corbusier or anyone else, Chand was at work on his secret garden.

Nek Chand’s Rock Garden

The aesthetic which will emerge from this will be a new aesthetic.

Le Corbusier

Every rock has a life.

Nek Chand — Chand was twenty-three when the partition was declared. Its impact forced his Hindu family to flee their village in western Punjab— as this was now part of Muslim-majority Pakistan—overnight and travel arduous distances to a resettlement camp across the new border. By 1952, Chand had been offered a job as a road inspector for the Public Works Department in Chandigarh.

In the dense forest near the site of his new job, Chand used empty tar drums to build an enclosure for his tools and supplies. Just beyond it, he built a private area he called “the store” to keep the thousands of rocks he collected on his walks in the nearby Shivalik Hills and along the dry seasonal rivers. He transported many of the rocks by bicycle, marking the heavier ones for later pickup in a friend’s truck. It wasn’t long before he had transformed his forest sanctuary into a fantasy land, a labor of love he kept secret for

Nek Chand’s Rock Garden

eighteen years, telling only his wife, Kamla, who soon started helping him.

Chand saw creviced human faces, strange animal shapes and abstract forms in the large rocks he collected, displaying his favorite ones like artworks on mosaic stone ledges and plinths. He believed he was creating a divine place where all of his objects would be revered like the characters in Indian mythologies and in his mother’s childhood stories about enchanted kingdoms. Every part of the garden’s construction took into consideration its function as a sacred site.

“This is for all gods and goddesses of the world,” Chand said, “so I thought that people should bow and bend their heads … that is why I made the arches so low.”

The creation of Chandigarh required the demolition of about twenty villages. While clearing large sections for road construction, Chand came to see the potential in recycling the detritus left behind. He began stockpiling all manner of refuse: broken pottery and tiles, discarded glass bangles, electrical outlets, pipes, earthen pots, old bicycle frames. At the same time, he collected the castoffs of the very materials Le Corbusier was using to build the city: rebar, concrete, iron slag and bitumen, among other things. All these disparate materials would be put into service to build the Rock Garden, in much the same way that, thousands of miles to the west in Los Angeles, Simon Rodia had also built his obsessive masterpiece, the Watts Towers,

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from scavenged rebar, pottery, glass and other urban-industrial leavings. Chand would later establish recycling centers across Chandigarh to provide himself with an ongoing supply of materials, aware that he was also helping to relieve the city of its trash.

The Rock Garden was my playground.

Anuj Chand, Nek Chand’s son — When he moved from collecting rocks to making sculpture, Chand built a small hut on the grounds and went there after a full day at his government job, working under the cover of night with jute bags over his head and hands to protect him from the feasting mosquitoes. Chand’s son, Anuj, told me how his father was unwavering in his commitment to the garden: working through severe weather, fending off wild animals and the many snakes that made the forest their home.

Chand made the molded heads of his sculptures by pouring concrete into earthen jugs and used discarded bicycle parts to give form to the bodies. Once the metal armatures were complete, he covered them with concrete to create a kind of armor and then clad the figures with broken tiles and

crockery, small rocks and, on occasion, hair that he salvaged from barbershops. These sculptures—there are thousands of them— represent ordinary people dancing and working, Hindu deities and animals, real and imagined. He arranged the figures in sections, lining them up row upon row on high-tiered terraces facing the meandering trails.

After 1965, Chand began to envision the garden on a much larger scale, constructing multiple chambers connected by narrow walking paths with high walls of stone and concrete. The fourteen chambers in the garden are reminiscent of a typical Punjab village but also bring to mind how Le Corbusier’s sectors in Chandigarh, about twenty-five in his day and fifty-six at present, come together to form the city.

The tree was never made, joining many other unrealized Le Corbusier projects for Chandigarh, the most disappointing loss of which was the Governor’s Palace, a building that would have completed the symmetry of the complex. But Le Corbusier’s work on the city nonetheless yielded new frontiers in his creativity. A crowning achievement of his innovations was béton brut, or rough-cast concrete. Because wood, the traditional material for casting concrete, was not available to him in India, he was forced to use sheet metal for the molds. The results were more unpredictable, leaving interesting flaws throughout the final result. He called the work the most beautiful concrete he ever made (though this view was not shared by all; Jeanneret noted that every time an important guest came to the work site, workers would touch up the concrete to mask its roughness.)

Chand watched how the béton brut process was carried out on the Capitol Complex and began using it in the Rock Garden. Rather than conventional molds, Chand used the jute bags that had contained the concrete in powdered form. He repurposed the soft bags into molds for the wet concrete, creating bulbous amorphous forms that he would stack to make weightbearing columns and walls. While Le Corbusier’s béton brut was austere, Chand’s became surrealistic.

One should never see the city.

Le Corbusier Rough concrete opens a magic door for modern architecture.

Le Corbusier — Chand discovered that concrete provided an effective way to mimic nature, and during the third phase of the garden in the 1990s he used the material to create masses of tangled roots and freestanding trees, like the ubiquitous Banyan trees. Le Corbusier had also, decades earlier, thought about making trees from concrete. In 1957, he wrote in his notebook that he wanted to go with Giani Rattan Singh, his architectural model maker, to “find an acceptable tree, one of those he has seen along the roadside… coat it in gypsum or mastic, to make a cast in which to pour the concrete” for a concrete tree monument for the governor’s terrace on the Secretariat.

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— The Capitol Complex was designed to open onto nature on the Himalayan side and be closed like a basin on the other three sides.

Le Corbusier’s intention was to isolate the complex from the city, disrupting but not fully concealing the views by using plantings and artificial hills made from the excavated earth of the construction site. He used similar conceits for a few of the monuments he designed for the Capitol, the idea being to create a feeling of serene focus.

Along with the Secretariat, the Palace of the High Court and the Palace of Assembly, Le Corbusier planned a series of monuments for the esplanade that were posthumously built after years of bureaucratic setbacks.

Drew had suggested the idea of monuments, telling Le Corbusier that they would serve to reflect his personal mythology, which included an interest in the cosmos. It’s easy to imagine that the monuments were influenced at least in part by Le Corbusier’s admiration for the Jantar Mantar observatory in New Delhi, where the structures act as tools for learning while functioning as sculptures.

The Chandigarh monuments include

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Le Corbusier’s Open Hand

Le Corbusier’s Tower of Shadows

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Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex

Nek Chand’s Rock Garden

the Tower of Shadows, a skeletal structure built to test the effects of solar behavior on brise-soleil construction; the Geometric Hill, a stylized viewing platform with a concrete mural embedded at the base that depicts the twenty-four-hour movement of the sun; the Open Hand, a metal, mudra-like sculpture that pivots with the wind, conveying peace and reconciliation as it rises eighty-five feet above the Trench of Consideration, Le Corbusier’s “people’s court,” a public forum for debate that is rarely used and built sixteen feet belowground, obscuring everything but the sky. Finally, there is the Martyrs’ Monument, a sparse memorial dedicated to the victims of the partition, which incorporates Indian symbols and a ramp leading down to a void.

garden and passed an order ensuring that it “be preserved in its original form, free from interference of architects and town planners.” Chand stepped down from his road inspector job and was made creator-director of the garden, with a salary and a staff to help him fulfill his dream. The garden opened in 1976 and major work continued all the way up to Chand’s death on June 12, 2015.

The garden was an instant success with the public, but to others in Chandigarh it was a thorn. In 1989, Chand stood before the High Court, defending his creation in the face of eviction. The court wanted to expand its parking lot and create a road system through the garden; it accused Chand of violating the master plan. The threat never came to pass but the garden continued to face challenges.

While Chand was on a trip abroad, dozens of his statues were vandalized. This act prompted John Maizels, the founder and editor of Raw Vision, a magazine committed to outsider art, to initiate the formation of the Nek Chand Foundation, to ensure the garden’s protection.

The seed of Chandigarh is well sown.

Le Corbusier

I have faced many perils.

Nek Chand — In 1969, after building up the garden, Chand began to worry. The forested land he occupied was protected by government decree, which meant that he was using it illegally and was in violation of the Chandigarh Edict, drafted

by Le Corbusier to protect the city from unauthorized building. He feared that if his work was discovered he would lose his job and the garden would be destroyed. Hoping to court favor with the chief architect of Punjab, M.N. Sharma, he invited him to visit the garden. Upon seeing the beauty of the project, Sharma reassured Chand. “No one could imagine the great creative mind of this humble genius who had no political or any other support,” Sharma said later. “I did not have the heart to go by the rules and advised him to continue his work in secret.”

A few years later, the garden was discovered by government workers who came upon it by chance. Dr. M. S. Randhawa, chairman of the Chandigarh Landscape Advisory, recognized the importance of the

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— To this day, the garden remains hidden. There is no sign of it from the street or even from the parking lot—it exists behind a formidable wall made from concrete cast in the same tar drums Chand first used to build his storeroom and conceal his work. On the other side of the wall, the garden exists as an evocation of his lost ancestral home.

The spatial tension that Chand created in the garden’s structure—paths that wind through a series of stone ramparts, low doorways, narrow staircases and labyrinthian passages—was designed deliberately to force visitors to pay attention. This sense of control and play also lies at the heart of Le Corbusier’s concept of promenade architecturale, the walk of perception, in which an acute awareness of the architecture is revealed while moving through it.

In a region mired in post-partition unrest, a planned modern city to serve as the new capital of Punjab became a reality three quarters of a century ago. The dusty alluvial plain north of New Delhi where Chandigarh was built is an unlikely setting for such a monumental accomplishment, but equally striking is how Le Corbusier and Nek Chand could both triumph there as perfect foils.

in the details

A close consideration of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Morning Toilette, 1914

By Florian Illies The paintings of Ida look like stills from a continuous silent movie. When she clasps her hair, there’s no ribbon at hand; if she sits down at the piano, she doesn’t play; if she stands at a table, she doesn’t touch her cup. There’s no action—only the possibility. The canvas reveals a pentimento, a presence of repentant brushstrokes.

The painter’s testing, searching movements correspond to the movements of the woman he’s painting. As she supports herself with her right arm, her left clasps her pinned-up hair, and it’s unclear whether she’s just thinking, or whether she feels her hair might need fixing.

Her gesture makes one thing clear: She feels unobserved. The truth is: She’s being not only observed but painted. And now, 110 years later, we observe the observer observing, as Hammershøi’s delicately dabbing brushstrokes try to suggest what his wife, Ida, is thinking in this moment of self-absorption.

However precisely he tries to capture her, she first eludes his gaze, then ours. Usually, Ida appears in his work like a dream on the brink of fading, a memory, even though they shared a close daily life. This is the curious intrigue of his work: He was already looking back on his present as though remembering it. In this painting, her reach for her hair also seems like a final step: either day is dawning and she’s about to leave the mirror, or it’s just before bedtime and she’s already half in trance.

The bloodless colors of Hammershøi’s palette, its eternal twilit tone, only intensify this effect—soon, you suspect, none of this will be visible any more.

138 Vilhelm Hammershøi, Morning Toilette, 1914. Oil on canvas, 34 1/4 x 28 3/4 in.

The invention of X-ray technology coincides with Hammershøi’s creative period. Wilhelm Röntgen, the physicist who first produced radiographic images, received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1901. But an even closer connection exists: Röntgen popularized his methods by making X-ray images of his wife’s arm and hand, shedding light not only on her bones, but also her wedding ring. When we look at X-ray images of Hammershøi’s wife, we can see the strokes conveying her hand, her arm—their union translated into the language of painting, as indelible as a wedding ring.

For Röntgen, the images generated by X-rays were mere by-products—he was more interested in the rays themselves. In 1896, when a journalist asked him, “Is the invisible visible?” Röntgen replied: “Not to the eye; but its results are.” By exposing the layers of this Hammershøi painting, we can see more than our eye allows and, above all, we can see the results of the invisible.

For the exhibition “Silence” at Hauser & Wirth in Basel, this painting has been X-rayed for the very first time, making clear that the gestures along the figure’s left arm were made only in the last stages, and left on purpose. In the underpainting, the curve of her arm toward her hair is not a decisive compositional element. On the contrary, the X-ray shows that Hammershøi spent much longer on the right arm, thrice attempting to find the ideal posture. Only in the final version did he shift his wife’s figure away from the viewer, raising her left arm in the process. In the underpainting, Ida seems to be allowing a glimpse of her expression, with a visible nose and lowered gaze. But Hammershøi ultimately decided to make her a back-turned figure. With this change, as tender as it is decisive, he transformed a painting of his wife from a portrait into a mystery.

In The Magic Mountain (1924), Thomas Mann presents a sanatorium dominated by patients’ fears about X-rays of their lungs. On the lungs of the protagonist, doctors find a spot, but a fellow patient counters: “You know that the photographic plate often shows spots that are taken for cavities when there are none there? And that, sometimes, it shows no spots although there is something there?” With this, Mann leads us, through literature, to a fundamental element of painting— light and shadow. X-rays are invisible emissions made visible by the shadows that correspond to the density of the objects penetrated by the rays. What in medicine is often a matter of life and death in painting is only a matter of beauty and mystery.

Hammershøi’s intensity arises from elision. He resists the upheaval and forward rush of the early 1900s with scenes of empty apartments, casual gestures, stagnant air. Exposing these images to X-rays doesn’t rob them of their mystery. It deepens it. We have a feeling that the image might be completely different than we initially supposed. Is she really staring at herself, or standing in a box at a theatre, lost in thought? Is she smiling? We will never be able to know.

139 X-ray image of Morning Toilette

Translated by Florian Duijsens

material

Frequencies Daniel Turner on tuning in to the essence of objects

I didn’t come from an artistic family. My mother cleaned houses and worked in hospitals while my father welded in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. My family rarely traveled outside of Virginia, certainly not to Europe. There was no background in education or the arts.

I was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and grew up on a rural piece of property just outside of town, in Isle of Wight County. Portsmouth is the site of the first shipyards in America. My father welded in the shipyards at night, but in order to make ends meet he established a small-scale scrap-metal demolition company, Turner Hauling. We salvaged and processed scrap materials on this property.

I would arrive home from school and a section of a ship would be in the backyard, being cut with burning torches.

That had a major influence on me.

My earliest memories were drawing. Eventually, drawings made their way to collages, which eventually made their way to paintings. This led me to the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia. I studied there for three years before making my way to the Bay Area, to study at the San Francisco Art Institute.

My family could see that I had a facility for drawing, which was really my way to gain affection. It was the way I was able to navigate the educational system, the manner in which I was able to pay attention in class.

At some point, I came across Robert Rauschenberg.

I suppose it was in the library. And then I discovered J.M.W. Turner and his way with light. Thinking back, it was the combination of Rauschenberg and Turner that really turned me on. My earliest works were more or less Combines, working through Rauschenberg. I was working outside directly on large-scale industrial tarps, with materials like liquid aluminum, tar and resin, trying to pictorialize what was happening with the salvage operations. The paintings all lived outside in the landscape, and eventually, in 2006, I decided to burn them all, an action which I felt was necessary to move the work forward.

While I was living in the Bay Area, I had a break with reality that ended up placing me in several psychiatric institutions in San Francisco. And in those institutions I came to realize that every material possesses a hypersensitive link to geographical locations, cultural associations and human contact. Once I made that connection, the field really opened for me, and then it was just a matter of locating myself within that field.

I was trying to work around the idea of the readymade. I would come across an object and gravitate towards that object, but I didn’t want to exhibit that object.

Over time, I slowly came to realize that I could push objects beyond their conventional attributes toward a new form—meaning, I could still maintain an object’s history of function without its form and essentially push the object to its essence. Not domestic objects so much, but commercial or functional or industrial objects—materials that have been imbued with a kind of use.

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I believe that materials resonate a certain frequency, and if you're really in tune, you can pick up on that frequency. I’m after presence. I think you can feel presence when you encounter it, and I certainly wouldn’t be the first person to believe in the invisible.

I’m interested in cause and effect, in material implications that result in global ramifications. For instance, the materials that I stripped out of a Swiss pharmaceutical lab for work that I showed at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2022 are the kinds of materials that eventually make their way into your body. There’s a real provenance there.

I’m fortunate to have a background in material handling. That sort of labor provided me with a great deal of understanding. I think it’s important to lean into what was laid upon you.

My working process generally involves mining sites located near the institutions where I’m exhibiting. When I mounted the show in Switzerland, I worked with the pharmaceutical labs there. In Japan, I sourced materials from Japanese chemical tankers. In Ukraine, I mined Ukrainian neuro-psych hospitals, and so on. In regards to the genesis of the show in Belgium, it came across my desk that the historic and notorious Prison de Forest in Brussels was closing. I was able to gain access to the prison and spent about a week there, photographing the site and speaking to inmates. I was able to extract materials from the interior, which included several tons of radiators used to heat the complex, as well as the entirety of the brass prison door handles.

The handles in particular have a kind of a resonance or valence. They’re really a touchstone moment for the work—the threshold that exists between isolation and autonomy.

I’ve been working in the Catskills for several years now. The upstate studio allows me to be able to work outside again and gives me the kind of space and privacy that enables me to really push things without the headache of ventilation and neighbors. The privacy is

I would come home from school and a whole section of a ship would be in our backyard, being cut with burning torches.

That had a major influence on me.

material

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Photos taken on locaton at Prison de Forest in Belgium; Fonderies de la Scarpe in France; Turner’s studio and Fourth State Metals, both in upstate New York Daniel Turner

material

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fantastic. There are no distractions. I’m able to really work.

When I first arrived in New York, I worked as a security guard at the New Museum. As a guard, you’re not supposed to lean against the walls, as it makes you appear indifferent towards the exhibitions and the visitors. But inevitably, everyone leans against the walls, and this leaning eventually produces very faint horizon lines of exhaust on the walls. Noticing that phenomenon led to a series of burnish works that is still ongoing, made with metal wool that’s composed of salvaged material.

The wool is produced using a digital CNC lathe. For the Belgian project, for example, the brass door handles are taken apart and put on the lathe. Then they’re turned at high revolutions and machined with a calibrated router bit that produces fine brass particles, and the particles are compacted to form brass wool. Imagine a pencil spinning at a very high rate and the introduction of a razor splices out filaments that are bound together and polished or burnished onto a surface. Or in my case, into the surface.

The remains of the brass door handles from the prison are ground down to powder. That powder is spliced into manufactured wool cut from the handles and then burnished into the surface of a canvas that is specially prepared to absorb the brass.

I work very slowly. It’s a meticulous process. The paintings I’m working on look fairly similar to the ones that I made years ago. It’s about finding new entry points that feel faithful to the material at hand.

I’ve been working on the exhibition in Belgium for over three years now. These things take a considerable, considerable amount of time. A vast majority of that time is spent doing bureaucratic work. A major component

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of that work is simply gaining access to these sites and materials. Entry takes time and the right timing. Certainly you wouldn’t have a new wing of a pharmaceutical lab handing over the keys to me. It’s only when a place is on the cusp of being defunct and the materials it uses are becoming unnecessary, the moment when everything is going out the door—that’s when I’m able to gain access to these sites.

Once I locate a site of interest, I simply pick up the phone and start making calls. It’s painful. There are a significant number of rejections. You just have to stay persistent. As soon as I'm inside, I tend to move through the sites swiftly. I document everything that I’m able to document. The process is instantaneous. I’m constantly scanning. I’m working on my heels. This is where the photographic and film elements of my work take center stage. The site itself becomes more or less my studio.

Over time, you develop an eye for utility. You develop a facility that allows you to foresee the evolution of a material, directly on the spot. You’re able to retain the potentiality of a form in your memory up to the point at which you’re able to gain actual physical access to extract the materials. There are usually several site visits before extraction takes place. Once materials are removed, they either get processed on the spot, back at my studio or at a foundry. Objects are often recontextualized, cut, melted or dissolved.

The heated vats here on the land outside my studio contain a saltwater-and-acid solution that dissolves metals over time. That very liquid is then neutralized and sprayed into an environment, enabling me to distill one environment into the context of another—a process I developed through reverse engineering in the most elemental sense. In the case of the prison, the radiators will be melted and milled at a foundry I work with in France and then made into sculpture.

For me, it’s always been about reduction, stripping material and objects to their most bare essence. There’s a back and forth between what is essentially abstract and what is already made. I suppose the objects that I leave as readymades, untouched, are objects I’ve decided don’t need me. It’s as if nature itself manufactured their existence. It’s a hard thing to put my finger on—which objects are which. You either hear the music or you don’t.

Daniel Turner’s exhibition “Compresseur” opens at the Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand Hornu, Belgium on December 15 and remains on view through April 19, 2025.

This article was produced with an accompanying short film, Daniel Turner: Metal (2024), available on the Ursula website.

I suppose the objects that I leave as readymades, untouched, are objects I’ve decided don’t need me. It’s as if nature itself manufactured their existence. It’s a hard thing to put my finger on— which objects are which. You either hear the music or you don’t.

Top: Daniel Turner, Oxnard Burnish (01.07.24), 2024. Copper, lanolin, and gesso on canvas, 102 x 136 x 1 1/2 in. Metals sourced from Oxnard Generating Station Bottom: Daniel Turner, (de Forest) Radiator Bar, 2024. Iron sourced from Prison de Forest, 7 x 144 x 4 in.

November 16, 2024– March 9, 2025

Explore more than 40 works in Amy Sherald’s first mid-career survey.

Plan your visit at sfmoma.org

Lead support for Amy Sherald: American Sublime is provided by the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund and Diana Nelson and John Atwater.

Presenting support is provided by the Evelyn D. Haas Exhibition Fund.

Major support is provided by Sir Deryck and Lady Va Maughan, KHR McNeely Family Fund, Katie and Matt Paige, Stephanie and Mark Robinson, and Shelagh Rohlen, in memory of Tom Rohlen.

Significant support is provided by Maria Manetti Shrem and Jan Shrem, Jessica Moment, Deborah and Kenneth Novack, and Sonja Hoel Perkins and Jonathan Perkins.

Amy Sherald, For Love, and for Country, 2022; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

retrospect

Mao & Me

By Steve Martin

On the occasion of “L.A. Story,” a group exhibition organized in dialogue with Steve Martin, featuring work by classic and contemporary Los Angeles artists, Martin shares a wry, movie-adjacent piece from his personal collection.

“I know nothing about the origins of this little stumpy sculpture, except that I had admired it in a design shop on La Cienega, and Richard E. Grant gave it to me as a wrap gift when the shooting of L.A. Story ended. I could never figure out if it was meant to be an actual tribute to Mao or if it lived in Warhol’s Mao world of irony.

I put it on a table and haven’t moved it in forty years.”

“L.A. Story” is on view at Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood through January 4, 2025.

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Mark Bradford, Niagara (Filmstill), 2005 © Mark Bradford Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Mark Bradford

Keep Walking

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6.9.24 – 18.5.25

credits

Artists and authors retain copyright to their work, except where noted.

Images courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, except where noted.

Cover Photo: Kelvin Bulluck p. 14 Victoria Bulley: Timothy Pulford-Cutting; Mary Heilmann: Jo Ann Comfort; Rujeko Hockley: Jody Rogac; Use Lahoz: Alina Sardiñas; Zoe Leonard: Jana La Brasca; Alexis Lowry: Gabriela Herman p. 16 Serubiri Moses: Marissa Alper; Olivier Renaud-Clément: Celine Clanet; Oddur Roth: Bjarni Grímsson; Amy Sherald: Olivia Lufungula; Daniel Turner: Cameron Krone; Jamieson Webster: Katie McCurdy; Simon Wu: Jarod Lew p. 22 Photo: Deniz Guzel. Courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary p. 24 Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer pp. 26– 29 Photos: Devlin Claro (p. 26); Photo: Mario De Biasi / Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images (p. 28) pp. 33–35 Courtesy Spoon Records UK Ltd (p. 33); Courtesy United Artists Records (p. 34, left); Courtesy Spoon Records UK Ltd (p. 34, right); Courtesy Elke Morsbach (p. 35) pp. 36–39 © ADAGP, Paris. Courtesy the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow / Piotr Stanislawski / Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris / Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Fabrice Gousset

(p. 36); © 2024 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid (p. 38) pp. 40–47 Photo: Luis Corzo (p. 40); Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer (p.

43); Photo: Lance Brewer (p.

44); Photo: Adam Reich (p. 45); Photo: Luigi Cazzaniga (p. 47, left); Photo: Uman (p. 47, right) pp. 48–55 Artwork by Eduardo Chillida courtesy the Estate of Eduardo Chillida and Hauser and Wirth.

Additional credits: Francesc Català-Roca © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid (pp.

48-49); © Zabalaga-Leku. ARS, New York / VEGAP, Madrid (p. 51, bottom); Photo: Budd Studio (p. 53, bottom); Eduardo Chillida Archive (p. 54, top); Photo: Robert B. Fishman / Alamy (p. 55) pp. 56– 59 Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (p. 56); Courtesy the artist and Atelier Calder, France (p. 57); Photo: Hai Zhang. Courtesy the artist and Queens Museum (p. 58); Photo: Hai Zhang. Courtesy the artist and Queens Museum (p. 59, top); Photo: ToLoLo Studio. Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (p. 59, bottom) pp. 62– 75 Photo: Joseph Hyde (p. 63); © 2024 Bo Bartlett / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist, Miles McEnery Gallery, NY, The Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA (p. 64, left); © 2024 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY (p. 64, right); Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY (p. 65); Photo:

This magazine was made with Forest Stewardship Council certified paper and printed with inks based on renewable raw materials, free from mineral oil and cobalt.

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Joseph Hyde (p. 66); Photo: Joseph Hyde (p. 67); © National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The National Portrait Gallery is grateful to the following lead donors for their support of the Obama portraits: Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg; Judith Kern and Kent Whealy; Tommie L. Pegues and Donald A. Capoccia. Courtesy the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (p. 68); Courtesy the Estate of Ernie Barnes (p. 69); Photo: Joseph Hyde (p. 70); Photo: Joseph Hyde (p. 71); Photo: Kelvin Bulluck (pp. 72-73); Photo: Joseph Hyde (p. 75) pp. 78-88 Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth pp. 90– 97: Photo: Bjarni Grímsson (pp.

90–91) ; Photos: Einar Roth and Kris Graves (pp. 92, 94, 96); © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung (p. 93); Allen Ruppersberg, Al's Grand Hotel documentation, 1971.

Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York (p. 97, top); Passerby Stop from Gavin Brown's Enterprise Archives, MSS.029. CCS Bard Library & Archives, Bard College (p. 97, middle); Courtesy Piero Golia (p. 97, bottom) pp. 98– 107 © Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: David Parry (p. 99); Photo: Alex Delfanne (p. 100); Photo: John Malcolm Couzins. Courtesy the estate of John Malcolm Couzins / National Portrait Gallery, London (p. 101); Photo: Alex Delfanne (p. 102); Courtesy the artist and Alison Jacques, London (p. 103, top); Courtesy the artist © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London (p. 103, bottom; Photo: Ken Adlard (p. 105); Photo: Olivia Hemingway /

Bridgeman Images (p. 105); Photo: Thierry Bal. Courtesy the Estate of Phyllida Barlow, Hauser & Wirth and Modern Painters (p. 107) pp. 112–113 Book covers courtesy publishers pp. 114–117 Courtesy Comme des Garçons.

Additional credits: © 2024 The Estate of René Burri / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SAIF, Paris (p. 115) pp. 118–121 Photographs from the Gilman Collection. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY p. 122 Still from La Noir de…, directed by Ousmane Sembène, 1966. © Filmi Domirev / Les Actualités Françaises pp. 130-137 Photos: Anindito Mukherjee via Redux Pictures LLC (pp.

130, 132, 135, 136). Additional credits: Courtesy Le Corbusier Foundation © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris (p. 131, top); Photo: Suresh Sharma Courtesy the Estate of Nek Chand (p. 131, bottom); Photo: Suresh Sharma. Courtesy the Estate of Nek Chand (p. 133); Courtesy the Le Corbusier Foundation © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris (p. 134); Photo: Jürg Gasser / gta Archive ETH Zurich (p. 137) pp. 140–147 Photos by Jérôme André (pp.

140, 145), Philippe De Gobert (p. 147, bottom); Thomas Richard Mertens (p. 144), Oresti Tsonopoulous (pp. 141, 143-46) and Daniel Turner (pp.

140, 142) p. 149 Photo: Keith Lubow p. 152 Photo: Adam Reich (left); Courtesy private collection (right)

non finito

The Meaning of the Sun Nicolas Party at work in Korea

Nicolas Party, Portrait with Deer, 2024. Soft pastel on linen, 59 1/8 x 43 3/8 in.

Unidentified artist, Ten Longevity Symbols (detail), Joseon Dynasty, second half of the 18th century. Ten-panel folding screen, colors on silk, 210 x 552.3 cm.

I’ve always been interested in thinking about the collections of museums. Historically, for many centuries, artists copied the work of other artists to train. And I think painters, in particular, are obsessed with the past, with asking themselves: How can I enter into some sort of conversation with artists who came before me? It’s the idea of creating a space where time is more elastic, making work that’s not quite in the present, not quite in the past. In the sciences, for example, you’d never say, “Oh, let me go to a dentist from the 17th century. It will be much better!” But in the arts, those models of “progress” don’t really apply. When I first visited Korea and thought about working with objects from a historical collection, it was a very different experience from what I’ve done with European models. June Young Kwak, head of exhibitions at Leeum and Hoam Museum of Art, would tell me if what I was curating into my show, basically because it chimed with my own interests, was too

obvious. She’d say: “Every Westerner likes that piece, but for our visitors here, it’s just not going to be very compelling.”

So she’d push me to find pieces that expanded my thinking.

One result of that process was a reminder of something that’s important to me. In Korean art, for example, and in Chinese art, symbolism of nature is central. You don’t paint a tree without knowing it’s a clear symbol of, let’s say, longevity.

Modernism broke with that. A tree for Mondrian was structure, pure formalism. But that’s never how I’ve thought about the subjects I paint. I don’t paint the shape of the sun just because it’s a circle. I believe in the symbolism of it all, the sun and the sunset, the meaning of the natural world.

—As told to Randy Kennedy

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“Nicolas Party: Dust,” is on view at the Hoam Museum of Art, Yongin, until January 19, 2025. The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of historic works, including Ten Longevity Symbols.

Drink responsibly