Ursula: Issue 12

Hauser &Wirth Spring 2025

Sympathetic Magic: A David Hammons Oral History

Issue 12 Spring 2025 Hauser &Wirth

David Hammons, Concerto in Black and Blue, 2002–03

New Fiction

by Lynne Tillman Yves Saint Laurent: Letters from Marrakesh Ekow Eshun on Christina Kimeze

GENERATIONS Rashid Johnson talks with his father and his son

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Departments

Editor’s Note p. 22

Letters “My Thing with Feathers”: Yves Saint Laurent writes to dancer and friend Zizi Jeanmaire, 1969 p. 24

Bulletin For a new feature devoted to artists’ bulletin boards and studio ephemera, Ursula visits Ambera Wellmann in Brooklyn p. 32

In the Details A close read of Firelei Báez’s Huracán (beyond the triumphs of rootedness),

by Rebecca Schiffman p. 34

Antiphony For Anna Akhmatova: A poem and drawing

by Barbara Chase-Riboud p. 28

Glitch Déjà vu: A conversation with the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia about past-life remembrances p. 36

spring 2025

Features

Essay A Walker in the City: Linda Goode Bryant on David Hammons and the importance of public space p. 69

Score Branden W. Joseph, Wendy Eisenberg and Mark Flood in conversation about Mike Kelley’s singular use of music and sound p. 40

Portfolio Some Notes on Soaring: Ekow Eshun on Christina Kimeze p. 60

Poetry Ben Okri responds to a work by David Hammons p. 72

Essay Jonathan Cott on the spirit world of the Lascaux cave p. 86

Oral History A collection of voices on David Hammons’s 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles p. 74

Pairings Our cover story: Rashid Johnson sits down for dinner with his father and his son p. 47

spring 2025

Departments

Site Postmodern Palatial: Charlotte Jansen on the architectural radicality of London’s Cosmic House p. 100 Books Some new and forthcoming titles we love p. 90

The Radar A personal guide to Milan by designer Patricia Urquiola p. 117

Retrospect Beverley Calté’s recollections of Olga Mohler Picabia p. 108 Fiction Lynne Tillman revisits the pandemic years p. 94

Non Finito Jean-Michel Basquiat in the Engadin p. 120

spring 2025

Firelei Báez’s work casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, exploring new possibilities for the future. In colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures and immersive installations, Báez combines representational cues that include hair textures, textile patterns and plant life, as well as folkloric and literary references and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance. (See p. 34)

Linda Goode Bryant is a social activist, gallerist and filmmaker.

In 1974, she opened Just Above Midtown, a New York gallery that launched the careers of many Black artists. During the global food crisis in 2008, she founded Project EATS, an urban farming initiative. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Peabody Award recipient. (See p. 69)

Beverley Calté is an independent scholar and a co-author of the fourvolume Picabia catalogue raisonné (Mercatorfonds, 2014–22). In 1990, she and Pierre Calté were chosen

by Olga Picabia to found, along with William and Virginia Camfield, the Comité Picabia in Paris, of which she is the current president. (See p. 108)

Barbara Chase-Riboud, the first Black woman to graduate from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in art and architecture, is a critically acclaimed artist, poet and author of historical fiction. Her most recent exhibition, presented concurrently at eight museums across Paris, was on view from September 2024 to January 2025. (See p. 28)

Jonathan Cott is the author and editor of more than forty books, including The Search for Omm Sety and Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn. His most recent book is Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. (See p. 86)

Philip J. Cozzolino is an associate professor of research in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the UVA School of Medicine.

Inspired by research into neardeath experiences, he generated a psychological model linking healthy considerations of death to increased well-being, self-direction and authenticity. He currently investigates children’s reports of past-life memories. (See p. 36)

Ike Edeani moved to the United States from Nigeria at sixteen.

He received a graduate degree in architecture and worked in design before pursuing photography. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, The Atlantic and The Financial Times. (See p. 47)

Wendy Eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter who uses guitar, tenor banjo, synthesizer and voice. She is a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet and the trio Squanderers. Eisenberg is also an assistant professor at the New School and has published essays in Arcana, Contemporary Music Review and Sound American. (See p. 40)

Ekow Eshun is an author and curator. His exhibition “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure,” is on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art through June 29. His book The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them will be published in the United States in May. (See p. 60)

Mark Flood is an American artist.

Mark Flood is a collective identity enacted by a group of international artists, poets, musicians and deadbeats. Mark Flood is somebody, formerly nobody, who did something somewhere, formerly nowhere.

Mark Flood was born a while back and will cease to exist when you stop reading this. (See p. 40)

Charlotte Jansen is a British Sri Lankan author, journalist and critic. Jansen writes about art and photography for The Guardian, The New York Times and British Vogue, among other publications.

She is the author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze and Photography Now. (See p. 100)

Rashid Johnson’s multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking and installation. Johnson’s work is known for its narrative embedding of a range of everyday materials and objects, often associated with his childhood and frequently referencing aspects of history and cultural identity. (See p. 47)

spring 2025

Contributors

Branden W. Joseph is the Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University. He writes about crossovers between art and music.

Joseph’s publications include Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture and he served as the editor of Kim Gordon’s Is It My Body? Selected Texts. (See p. 40)

William Kentridge is internationally acclaimed for his artworks, theater and opera productions. He combines drawing and erasing, tearing, gestural painting, collage, weaving, casting, writing, film, performance, music, theater and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history. (See p. 94)

Christina Kimeze lives and works in London. She uses texture and luminosity to explore themes of interiority, belonging and home.

Her work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at South London Gallery and included in “Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists” at the Freud Museum in London, both of which remain on view through May 5. (See p. 60)

Sir Ben Okri is a Nigerian-born and award-winning poet, playwright, novelist and activist. His books include the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road and Astonishing the Gods, which was selected as one of the BBC’s “100 novels that shaped our world.” His work has been translated into more than twentyseven languages. (See p. 72)

London-based photographer Dunja Opalko focuses on portraiture, interiors and storytelling. Her work centers on authenticity, warmth and intuition while keeping the commercial or editorial storyline at the forefront. Clients include The Telegraph, Christopher Farr and Monocle. (See p. 100)

Marieta Pehlivanova is a research assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at UVA. Her research focuses on neardeath experiences and children who report past-life memories.

She is particularly interested in understanding the factors contributing to the emergence of these phenomena and exploring ways to support individuals who experience them. (See p. 36)

Rebecca Schiffman is an art historian and writer in New York.

She holds an M.A. in art history from Hunter College. She has written about contemporary art for publications including The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Art & Object, and Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art. (See p. 34)

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, shortstory writer and cultural critic. Her most recent work includes the novel Men and Apparitions and the essay “Mothercare.” Thrilled to Death, a selection of her short stories, will be published in March by Soft Skull Press, and in 2026 a collection of her essays, Paying Attention, will be published by Zwirner Books. (See p. 94)

Patricia Urquiola is an architect, designer and creative director who collaborates with prestigious international brands. In 2001, she opened her own studio. Her works are included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. (See p. 117)

Ambera Wellmann completed her master’s degree at the University of Guelph. While there, she won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition in 2017. Wellmann’s work resides in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. She lives and works in New York. (See p. 32)

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spring 2025 Presidents Iwan Wirth Manuela Wirth Marc Payot Chief Executive Officer Mirella Roma Global Creative Director Neil Wenman

Editor in Chief Randy Kennedy

Senior Director Global Marketing Adele Santarelli

Managing Editor Alexandra Vargo

Head of Digital Content Francis Till

Global Advisors Sarah Douglas Andrea Schwan

Director Public Programs & Events Russell Salmon

Contributing Editors

Tanya Barson, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, Kate Fowle, Alexis Lowry, Olivier Renaud-Clément, Ingrid Schaffner, Leah Singer

Contributors

Fabiola Alondra, Will Arbery, Daniel Baumann, Rebecca Bengal, Alissa Bennett, Homi K. Bhabha, Nicholas Blechman, Gesine Borchert, Elisabeth Bronfen, Ronald Bronstein, Linda Goode Bryant, Caroline Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Jonathan Cott, Cornelius Eady, Jarrett Earnest, Jessica Eisenthal, Yinka Elujoba, Ekow Eshun, Dan Fox, Alison Gingeras, Joseph Grigely, Jane Ursula Harris, Jeremy O. Harris, Richard Hell, Rujeko Hockley, Estelle Hoy, Gary Indiana, Lucy Ives, Lisa Ivorian-Jones, Charlotte Jansen, Jenny Jaskey, Maira Kalman, Bhanu Kapil, Rei Kawakubo, Christine Sun Kim, Carol Kino, Erik La Prade, Zoë Lescaze, Robin Coste Lewis, Gerard Malanga, Steve Martin, Carlo McCormick, Peter T. McGough, Jillian McManemin, Thomas de Monchaux, Serubiri Moses, Fred Moten, Bob Nickas, Christian Patterson, Barbara Pollack, Melissa Rachleff, Ben Ratliff, Hall W. Rockefeller, Robert M. Rubin, Alison Saar, Josh Safdie, Lucy Sante, Lucia Arbery Simek, Ross Simonini, Ksenia M. Soboleva, Judith Stein, Donna Stonecipher, Lynne Tillman, Wu Tsang, Phyllis Tuchman, Anne Waldman, Jamieson Webster, Laurie Weeks, Simon Wu, Linda Yablonsky, Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez, Stefan Zweifel

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Cover: Still from Rashid Johnson, Sanguine, 2024. Color video with sound, transferred from 35-mm film Back cover: View of visitors in David Hammons’s exhibition, "Concerto in Black and Blue," Ace Gallery, New York, 2002–03 Ursula magazine is named in honor of Ursula Hauser—patron, collector, mentor, gallery matriarch and our constant inspiration

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Editor’s Note “I like doing stuff better on the street, because the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through....”

—David Hammons, 1988

Echoing through this issue of Ursula, our twelfth, is Robert Rauschenberg’s famous exhortation about acting “in the gap” between art and life. Rauschenberg built on the work of Duchamp and Schwitters by rummaging around for art’s sake in the real stuff of life—bedclothes, cardboard boxes, old tires, road signs—and considerably narrowed the gap, whose very existence rankled him. David Hammons, the subject of three interrelated articles in this issue, has for more than half a century now reduced the gap to quantum size, working as much (or more) ephemerally in the streets as he does in official art spaces and as much for himself or friends as he does for traditional art audiences. In a sense, you might say that all of Hammons’s work is the result of an ongoing performance practically indistinguishable from his everyday life, an act of radical attentiveness that includes object-making. The artist C. Ian White, a friend and confidant of Hammons’s for decades, spoke to me for an oral history I’ve compiled for these pages and said that long walks with Hammons through the streets of Los Angeles, New York and other cities raised the concept of the flâneur—“a mirror as vast as the crowd itself,” in Baudelaire’s description—to almost mystical heights. “He’s got a gift. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do it, but David’s different. He sees things that are easily overlooked.” The activist and gallerist Linda Goode Bryant, a Hammons walking partner of even longer stead, adds, in an essay in this issue: “There are ways of looking at the universe that can keep us vital and imaginative and creative and even give us political power in our awareness. Walks with David over the years helped me to understand that.”

It’s in this spirit that Rashid Johnson, the subject of a career survey opening in April at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, became our cover artist for this issue, deciding to sit down for a talk not with curators or critics but with his own father, Jimmy, and his teenage son, Julius. The setting, a casual dinner table over a long family meal, paralleled the tenor of their conversation, one as much about childhood, parenting and belonging as about the art that emerges from a life. In these pages we also have new writing from the great Lynne Tillman that floats productively between fiction and biography, memories and ruminations from the pandemic that reiterate the importance of the quotidian in a rapidly virtualizing world: “… of daily life’s clutter, hardly anything leaves my life, or room, I keep scraps, postcards, letters, clippings, photos, manuscripts, luckily, there’s an archive for their housing, since I believe many objects are precious, not David Hammons’s performance “Shoetree” on worth money, but they hold thoughts, histories or stories, the same thing.”

Richard Serra’s sculpture T.W.U., 1981 Elsewhere in the issue, in a new feature called Bulletin—offering glimpses of artists’ bulletin boards or other surfaces where they keep the technically worthless but visually invaluable miscellany of their lives—we visit the Brooklyn studio of the painter Ambera Wellman, who says of the imagery she puzzles together from voracious daily looking : “Somewhere in there is a diagram for painting and the specific way it has of performing an image.”

The late French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou wrote one of my favorite formulations about the mystifying commerce between life and art: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.”

Duchamp, for his part, said impishly: “My art is that of living—each second, each breath, is a work which is inscribed nowhere.”

Hammons once described himself as the “C.E.O. of the D.O.C.,” the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic—“We have a vaccine for that smartness virus that’s been in the art world for the last fifty years,” he said—but the malady under treatment existed long before the readymade and is in all likelihood incurable. Hammons seems to acknowledge as much. “I have been trying to stop making art for a long time,” he said more than three decades ago. “Just shut it off and not make it, just not do it. But I end up hanging out. After examining what happens when I don’t do it, I think it’s better to do art.”—Randy Kennedy

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letters

Letter from Yves Saint Laurent to Zizi Jeanmaire, 1969. Felt pen on paper. © Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent

Flights of Fancy Yves Saint Laurent’s letters to Zizi Jeanmaire, 1969

letters

With her extravagant outfits, elegant dance techniques and distinctive cropped hair, dancer and singer Renée Marcelle “Zizi” Jeanmaire (1924–2020) was regarded by many as the epitome of 1960s Parisian glamour. Her sense of style was so admired in her native France that the poet Louis Aragon was said to have declared, “Without her, Paris would not be Paris.”

Jeanmaire was a classically trained ballet dancer, but her signature look—both on and off the stage—broke with the traditions of conservative performance attire.

She was known in particular for flamboyant, shimmering concoctions of bird feathers, rhinestones and other daring creations by Yves Saint Laurent (1936–2008). The two met in 1956, when Saint Laurent was working as an assistant for Christian Dior and took on an assignment that involved set and costume design. Saint Laurent began spending time socially with Jeanmaire and her husband, the director and choreographer Roland Petit (1924–2011), and the three bonded over an appreciation of the stage, sparking a creative friendship that would last more than fifty years.

In 1961, Saint Laurent conceived a billowing, elaborate design of pink ostrich feathers for Jeanmaire’s rendition of “Mon truc en plumes” (“My Thing with Feathers”). The song became a durable hit and one of her most recognizable musical performances—according to Petit, she sang it to audiences more than 1,460 times during her career. The following year, Saint Laurent founded his namesake label, and over the next four decades he designed hundreds of dresses and couture pieces for Jeanmaire and other celebrated figures in the worlds of theater, ballet and cinema.

In 1966, Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé visited Morocco for the first time. Saint Laurent had been born in Algeria and had fond memories of his childhood there. Upon returning to North Africa as an adult, he rediscovered the region’s bold colors and dramatic landscapes, which provided endless sources of inspiration for his work. Saint Laurent and Bergé were so enamored of Morocco that they immediately bought a home there and returned each year, usually in June and December, when Saint Laurent would design his collections for the upcoming season.

While in Morocco, he sent hand-drawn letters to friends and loved ones, missives often adorned with vibrant sketches of the plant and animal life surrounding him in Marrakesh. In December 1969, he sent a holiday card to Jeanmaire, Petit and their young daughter Valentine, surrounding his words with North African-inspired forms: a traditional djellaba robe, palm trees, a vividly patterned snake. At the time, Saint Laurent and Bergé still lived in their first Moroccan home, a property known as Dar elHanch (Arabic for “Snake’s House”), and snakes quickly became a recurring visual motif, both inside the residence and in the designer’s correspondence.

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That same year, he sent an intricately drawn letter to Jeanmaire filled with tenderness and playful humor. The drawing imaginatively transforms her famous feathers into palm-tree fronds, with the caption, “Mon truc en palmes” (“My Thing with Palms”). In an accompanying note, Saint Laurent wrote: This is what would happen to your feathers if you came to Marrakech, dear Zizi, and what a saving! No more Madame Février, the palm grove would suffice.

The facetious threat of cutting ties with Madame Février is a reference to Maison Février, the Paris feather atelier still renowned for adorning the dresses and costumes of iconic

Zizi Jeanmaire performing “Bing Bing Bang” at the Casino de Paris in a design

by Yves Saint Laurent, February 1970

letters

Letter from Yves Saint Laurent to Zizi Jeanmaire and Roland Petit. December 8, 1969. Felt pen on paper. © Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent

French performers. (Jeanmaire was one of Février’s top clients at the time.) At the bottom of the letter, Saint Laurent added a lighthearted postscript: But palm feathers would make a very pretty Mademoiselle Alaska / Fondly, Yves “Mademoiselle Alaska” was an upbeat musical number of

26

Jeanmaire’s for which Saint Laurent designed a song-specific stage costume in 1970 on the occasion of her music-hall show “La Revue” at the Casino de Paris. It dazzled both music and fashion critics. Another dress for the song “Bing Bing Bang” was a stunning ensemble of pheasant feathers, rhinestones and sequins—and in a notable homage to Marrakesh, Saint Laurent embellished it with the unmistakable silhouette of a palm tree.—Alexandra Vargo

W W W. JANECARR . SHOP

antiphony

Akhmatova’s Cenotaph

By Barbara Chase-Riboud Whose victory, was it?

I don’t know.

Perhaps poetry itself?

Certainly, Pushkin and Pasternak were there A multitude stood before her tomb Bareheaded in Leningrad’s March winds, Boys and girls recited her verse by heart From two or three in the afternoon Until the light leaped away and darkness crept in At ten when it was still tricky white night, And everything shone without the sun Which wrapped itself around harsh throats congested With unreleased tears and KGB agents who Mingled everywhere looking on and taking notes, The crowd advanced slowly on foot following the cenotaph Through the miniscule cemetery flanked By pale hills pierced with black pines Until it reached a bouquet of Evergreens Men without hats, women without scarves, Who dares to disturb them?

They have their rights: the right of grief The right of vengeance, the right of memory The right of broken heartedness, the right of Mothers, sisters, brothers, students all claiming Relief—against death and oblivion, authority Censure, terror, oppression and for instruction Resistance, humanity, the rights of man The coffin is crowned with ribbons and blossoms, The air of triumph and victory, the music in everyone’s head is That of Richter playing Prokofiev’s Possession All the old women stood straight and tall Martha Ioudina, Nina Tobidze, Vana Khaltourine Olga Iriskala, Rita Wright, Mari Petrovych

28

[ continues on p. 30 ]

Barbara Chase-Riboud, Anna Akhmatova Monument, St. Petersburg, 1996

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antiphony

Marina Tchoukorski, Lydia Tschoukovskïa Natacha Pavlenka, Frida Vigdorova Old women with graying hair and ravaged faces Though they like she had all been beauties, Aligned like the surrounding cypresses As dark as death they scrutinized each other Searching for those already dead ghosts: Boris Osip, Marina All dead before her, Tsvetaeva a suicide; Mandelstahn hounded To death by Stalin, Pasternak exiled Old friends, old enemies, old lovers, old prison mates Joined in pain, in torture, in mourning, in perfidy The tiny cemetery packed with the crowd’s sneaking shadows Overrun the walls and line up in silence as if awaiting A firing squad—no one cries “long live the Revolution” But a boy recites Pasternak’s Hamlet There is no Christian voice—no theologian As if Akhmatova had not been a Russian Orthodox Only the verses chanted by heart by young people proved it.

Poem without a hero, Rosary, Plantain, Requiem KGB agents reappeared like sprouting mushrooms The fresh tomb yawned and opened its arms Embracing clumps of deaf and dumb earth The coffin groaned into its place like a tulip bulb Under the hail of clay and dirt that blinded all, “Deafened” as Pushkin would say “by the noise of inner anxiety,” This solitude is nothing like the solitude of the before, This solitude is either the ultimate prison or the passage to Paradise Which will never erase the voice we still hear From beyond the grave, you hear her voice And you accord it faith Whose victory, was it?

I don’t know Perhaps poetry itself.

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HANG THE

Photograph courtesy of Sam McKinniss and Publicide Inc.

PARIS REVIEW

Above: Sam McKinniss’s 2023 contribution to the Paris Review Print Series. Launched in 1965 as a fundraiser for the legendary literary quarterly, the series has grown to include the work of more than sixty artists. View the collection online at parisreviewprints.org.

bulletin

Ambera Wellmann, Brooklyn

For our first installment of Bulletin—a new recurring feature that focuses on artists’ bulletin boards and studio ephemera, the casual image banks they assemble for inspiration—Ursula visits the painter Ambera Wellmann in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

“I’m a representational painter, so reference images—both the search for and accumulation of them—are embedded in my painting process,” Wellmann says. “The pictures clustered on my studio wall come from art-historical texts, screenshots and Google image searches over the years and sometimes take on a weird cumulative energy. Visual rhymes emerge, or the images lose their picture-ness and start behaving more like a chorus. Somewhere in there is a diagram for painting and the specific way it has of performing an image.”

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in the details

A close consideration of Firelei Báez’s Huracán (beyond the triumphs of rootedness), 2024

By Rebecca Schiffman

Báez enlarges a historical map to form the backdrop of the painting. The Vetus Mexico was included in Scottish cartographer John Ogilby’s infamous atlas, America (1671). Ogilby promoted the atlas as “the latest and most accurate description of the New World,” but it was riddled with inaccuracies and embellished with fantastical accounts of the peoples and animals of the Americas. The map creates a richly saturated composition while also underscoring Báez’s interest in exploring subjects such as colonialism, enslavement and bureaucracy.

In the late 19th century, the severed hand symbolized the brutality enacted upon Central Africans during Belgian colonial rule in the Congo. Belgian colonists––along with other European colonizers, such as the British in Kenya––would amputate the hands of enslaved Africans when they failed to meet quotas for extracting rubber. For the enslaved, a fist stood for protection and resistance, transforming an act of oppression into an emblem of resilience. For Báez, the hand and fist raise profound questions: Can brutality be confronted without mutually destructive rage? Is it possible to respond with a kind of love that recognizes shared humanity? The severed hand functions as more than just a symbol of trauma––it becomes a testament to collective healing and the artistry of survival.

Delicate silver cords tie the azabaches and other charms and talismans to the serpent, suggesting complex narratives of memory and connection. The cords imply ways in which peoples carry both broken and unbroken stories from the past, histories that are never truly lost but are transformed in surprising, sometimes invisible, ways.

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Atop the cartographic landscape sit two serpentine figures adorned with intricate patterns, engaged in a knotted embrace. The figures are inspired by the Ayida-Weddo, the “rainbow serpent” myth of African and Caribbean diasporic spiritual traditions. According to the myth, serpents represent access to higher knowledge. By depicting the snakes as intricately entangled––almost indistinguishable from one another––Báez suggests that such knowledge requires, among other things, recognizing the corporeal and spiritual limits of human existence. Coiling and twisting, the serpents embody the rich interior landscape of our experiences and invite us to contemplate the delicate negotiations between limitation and transcendence.

Báez adorns the serpentine figures with numerous bunches of azabache charms––small, hand-shaped talismans with deep roots in Cuban cultural history.

Traditionally crafted from jet, these protective amulets were believed to shield against evil forces. In the painting, they serve as testaments to Indigenous resilience and spiritual preservation.

In the foreground, Indigenous people are mostly shown naked and hidden in the shadows or sitting with their children and cattle, watching the Spanish conquerors pass on horseback on their way to the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán. The triumphant colonizers are depicted in fine clothes and beaver hats.

Firelei Báez, Huracán (beyond the triumphs of rootedness), 2024. Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas, 95 x 117 in.

glitch

A conversation with researchers at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies about normalizing the inquiry into extraordinary experiences

Selected published manuscripts displayed in the Ian Stevenson Memorial Library at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

Cases of the Reincarnation Type

In 2021, when I was in a graduate program for creative writing at the University of Virginia, I heard from a friend, who heard from a friend, about a professor who had access to a database—a “binder,” as this poet put it—of solved “cases of the reincarnation type.” Left with only this baffling crumb, I eventually reached out to the professor to ask if it was true. From there I was introduced to the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), a department of the School of Medicine founded by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson in 1967 for the research of “survival phenomena”— evidence of life after death—which has broadened over time to include the study of fields such as mediumship, psychokinesis and remote viewing. This past fall, I sat down with Marieta Pehlivanova and Philip Cozzolino, two current members of the division, to talk about the particular focus of their research: children who report memories from previous lives.—Jana Horn Jana Horn What drew you to DOPS? Marieta Pehlivanova As a teenager, I was interested in the question of what happens after death. A few deaths happened around me, and I was reading books trying to make sense of it.

It was comforting to read about how life continues, and maybe reincarnates, but on an intuitive level, it rang true. I had a deep recognition that there was something to it beyond the fact that it brought me comfort. Later, I was studying statistics, but still very interested in these topics—not only in pursuing them alongside academic studies but in actually applying my research skills to these phenomena. So I went to grad school for experimental psychology, because I thought that was one way to get into this work.

Philip Cozzolino I think I was eight years old when the documentary Beyond and Back came out in 1978. I asked my mom to take me to see it. What eight-year-old says, “I want to see this documentary about near-death experiences”?

Twenty years ago, I was fearful because I was a grad student doing this work, and I had a paper that I wanted to submit. It was around the time that I discovered the work of Bruce Greyson, my now-colleague here at DOPS, in medical journals. It gave

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A case with a birthmark corresponding to the previous personality as documented in Reincarnation and Biology (Praeger, 1997)

me a sort of gravitas to say, “I can refer to near-death experiences now,” because there was a real scholar out there talking about these outcomes. I put out the paper, it was accepted by a mainstream journal, and my career began, of talking about neardeath experiences and what we can learn from them. I did that for seventeen years at the University of Essex in England, in a mainstream psychology program. The end of this story is that one Friday I said, “I’m giving notice”—I would be unemployed for the first time in twenty-five years and had no idea what I was going to do—and the very next morning, a job opened up on LinkedIn at DOPS. It was just one of those moments where I’ve felt like something was more than coincidence.

MP For most of us here at DOPS, it’s dream work. We’re led to this place through our own experiences, or being exposed to other people’s experiences, something that got us very curious, while also knowing the risk to our academic reputation.

JH I was going to ask.

MP I knew that once I touched this, I was not going to be able to go back to mainstream academia. I was OK with that.

PC I left a tenured job, but for me it was, in some way, a perfect end to the cycle of what my career was. There are critical people out there, sure. There are people who are critical

about what brand of bean you should eat, too. But there are also people with cognitive neuroscience training who are open to these ideas, or at least open to the idea of asking questions, because that’s what science should be, being open to asking questions.

JH Do other programs like this exist?

MP We try to collaborate as much as possible, but DOPS is unique, a division dedicated to studying “survival phenomena” within a public university in America.

JH It’s amazing you’re on a college campus.

PC The word we use here a lot is “normalize”— normalize the experiences, but also normalize the study of the experiences.

JH What are you taking from the study of these experiences?

MP The more compelling cases for me suggest there is something extraordinary going on that can’t be explained with our current understanding of how information is transferred in one’s mind. Whether that’s reincarnation or not is a whole other question. Even within the field of parapsychology, it’s a bit of a debate.

JH If not reincarnation, it might just be some sort of— MP Anomalous access to the memories or

“There are critical people out there, sure. There are people who are critical about what brand of bean you should eat, too. But there are also people with cognitive neuroscience training who are open to these ideas, or at least open to the idea of asking questions.”

—Philip Cozzolino

consciousness of another person who lived, which is still fascinating.

JH So fascinating. What would a “more compelling case” be?

MP A famous case in America is James Leininger who, from a young age, was very interested in airplanes. When his dad took him to an aviation museum, he knew the names of the different types of fighter jets and specific terminology he hadn’t been exposed to. At the same time, he was having a lot of nightmares, which were very distressing to him and the family, in which he was seemingly reliving another person’s death by plane crash. He would then reenact the crash in his play. It was later determined by his statements that he was referring to James Huston, a World War II pilot who died in battle. This included matching the details of the friend who flew with Huston, because the child provided the name of that friend, Jack Larsen.

PC He even named the boat that Huston was stationed on. His father asked, “What boat were you on?” The kid said, “Natoma.”

The father said, “No, that’s a Japanese name,” and the kid said, “It was Natoma.”

As it turns out, there was a boat named the USS Natoma Bay that Huston flew off of before he died.

JH Wow. Is the evidence for these cases primarily statement-based?

MP The statements themselves are not the evidence. It’s identifying the person who constitutes the evidence— a deceased person who closely matches the child’s statements, behaviors, birthmarks and phobias, if present.

PC Statements matter, because they start the process, but there are other factors. I’m working on a paper looking at cases of a very rare phenomenon called xenoglossy, in which children speak a language they shouldn’t know. They’ve never been exposed to it, they don’t understand it, but they’re speaking it in some manner or form. There’s a select number of children whose xenoglossy links to the country they claim to have come from in a previous life.

Just to give you a sense of what happens around here—I was gone for a few days last

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Utensils manipulated by DOPS research subjects and faculty purportedly using psychokinesis—the mind’s influence over matter

week, and in that time I got an email from a mother in New York saying, “My twoyear-old is saying things in Russian, and I don’t understand why or how.”

JH I’m just going to keep saying “wow.”

PC And my xenoglossy paper hasn’t even been published yet! Whether it ends up being a legitimate case worthy of investigating or not, the prevalence of it just isn’t zero.

Another “wow” feature are the birthmarks on some children.

MP The biological birthmark evidence is compelling within the parapsychological community because if we assume the memories are real, meaning that they’re authentic—the child is authentically connecting to the memories of a person who once lived and died—the child could still have acquired these memories without having been the person. Maybe it’s not reincarnation, but it’s still extraordinary and anomalous that the child appears to have access to these memories.

JH Right.

MP But evidence like the birthmarks

complicates that. It’s not just the memories, but a physical, direct connection to how this person died.

PC Of the cases in which we’ve been able to identify a corresponding past personality, a birthmark relates to a fatal wound about twenty-nine percent of the time. These are cases that have been verified by medical records or by multiple people who knew the previous personality. It’s more like fifty percent if taken at face value, without available records to corroborate. Either way, it’s a huge part of the database.

JH I was thinking, your data set is probably rather small, even if it’s large. Because, what are the odds a parent is going to take what their child is saying seriously enough to mention it to someone else, much less the Division of Perceptual Studies at UVA, which most people, even students at UVA, don’t know about?

PC Exactly. We have 2,254 documented cases, and there is no question that that is an undercount. It could be massively undercounting how many children out there we could have studied.

“Historically, there’s been a barrier because our work gets censored. We've had success getting published, but we have to modify the language and make our findings ‘purported’ and ‘alleged.’ Hopefully one day we will not have to submit sanitized versions of manuscripts.” —Marieta Pehlivanova

MP Just to give you some statistics, on average we hear from about 120 to 150 families a year. These are just the people who find us.

JH Have you thought about going out there and recruiting?

MP We will be.

PC We’re in the middle of studying a 1,000-person representative sample with which we’re trying to estimate: What is the actual prevalence of this? If you have a kid between certain ages in America, what is the likelihood that they are one of these kids? I think it’s a question we need to actually try to answer. There was a long Washington Post story on CORT [Cases of the Reincarnation Type] which documented some cases, including a young girl who talked about a numbered tattoo on her arm and how she died in a cloud of blue gas. Her mother was like, “How could she know about the Holocaust?” But what was interesting was the comments, about 5,000.

All of these people saying, “Oh my God, I had no idea that people studied this....”

Then they’d say: “When I was a kid....” or “When my kid was....”

MP That study will be super exciting, depending on what we find. If it’s a nontrivial percentage, I think it will help advance this work and, again, normalize it. Historically, there’s been a barrier because our work gets censored. We’ve had success getting published, but we have to modify the language and make our findings “purported” and “alleged.” Hopefully one day we will not have to submit sanitized versions of manuscripts.

JH I do think that there’s been a rise in curiosity about these things that could reach the mainstream.

PC It just seems like people are getting to a point at which materialistic science is no longer satisfying, because their lived experience is different. We sometimes refer to these things as anomalous, but more and more research shows it’s not anomalous at all. People have out-of-body experiences.

They have near-death and psychedelic and mystical experiences. I mean, it’s happening.

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MP The “anomalous” thing is another example of how we’ve had to sanitize the language.

JH By saying that it’s more random, or rare, than it really is?

MP Yes. If you poll people on a range of these experiences, the vast majority have had at least one of them. In that sense, it’s normal. It’s anomalous not to have had an experience. I do think we’re riding a wave of people becoming more open.

PC I agree. There are physicists out there talking about theories of many universes, and time-space issues that map consciousness as its own entity and not just a byproduct of flesh. I see that as part of the wave.

JH Is there something in the database that personally motivates you? A question that you’re hoping to answer?

MP Something that excites me is the idea that we could look at certain phenomena—such as gender nonconformity, on which a lot of research has been done—to see if pastlife memories could have something to do with it. If there’s a unique factor that’s neither genetic, as far as we understand, nor environmental, that could be contributing to some behaviors.

PC Or prodigious talent. One of the approaches we’re taking is not just looking in our database to see if a child has a skill but actually going out and finding people with great talent who were prodigious as children and asking the parents, “Did they ever say things like this?” Because it’s just a kid, and most people don’t know about our work. What if some non-zero percent of prodigies were trying to express past-life memories?

JH That kind of answers my next question.

Why don’t I remember my past life? I must not be particularly talented!

MP That’s a big question of ours, too. If reincarnation is real, do we all reincarnate?

Is it just some kids? Or is it just that some kids happen to remember?

PC If reincarnation is real . . . let’s just play

the game. Maybe these kids are a glitch in the system. These things are probably not supposed to be remembered. “Supposed to” sounds like there’s a plan, but I guess I’m just saying that you probably don’t want to be a four-year-old talking about when you died in that fire.

MP Or to feel disconnected from your family.

PC And maybe the glitch has to do with the trauma, the emotion, that somehow mucks up the process. I don’t know. It’s fun to speculate about.

JH Are you ever dealing with parents who are a bit . . . excited?

PC We’re very attuned to that. I have a paper under review right now that looks at parental attitudes and whether they are encouraging or suppressing—suppressing to the point of physical punishment, slapping a child, saying, “Stop doing this.” You would think that the greater the strength of the case, the better the story and book they’re going to sell. But one of the big findings from that study is that the stronger the case, the more likely parents were to suppress the child’s statements.

JH Parents don’t want their kids saying they’re not their parents.

PC No, it freaks them out. It’s fun to have these conversations, but at the end of the day, these are parents with children who are, in many cases, in a very challenging situation, with other kids, and jobs, thinking, “What am I supposed to do?” The phenomenon is real. What’s behind it, we don’t know.

But it is qualitatively different from other experiences that children have. We have to remember that, amidst all the sexy stuff about reincarnation.

MP It’s important for us to put some studies out there that specifically talk about the experience of parents, to raise awareness that this is a normal childhood experience that in most cases doesn’t seem to be affecting people very deeply. Kids tend to grow out of it. The more we can normalize this, the better it’s going to be for the kids, for the parents and also for the research.

“Just to give you a sense of what happens around here—I was gone for a few days last week, and in that time I got an email from a mother in New York saying, ‘My two-year-old is saying things in Russian, and I don’t understand why or how.’” —Philip Cozzolino

The Sound of Return

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Branden W. Joseph, Wendy Eisenberg and Mark Flood in conversation about Mike Kelley’s use of music and noise

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p. 40 Mike Kelley, Ectoplasm Photograph 10, 1978/ 2009. 1 of a series of 15 photographs (chromogenic prints), 14 x 10 in. p. 41 Mike Kelley, Spirit Voices, performance at LACE, Los Angeles, 1978. Left to right: Don Krieger and Mike Kelley

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Branden W. Joseph When did you first come across Mike’s music? For me, it was that three-CD set of Destroy All Monsters on Ecstatic Peace! and Father Yod, which I found at Kim’s Video and Music in the West Village. I was a grad student, so the three-CD set was sort of a big investment, without having heard anything from it.

Wendy Eisenberg When I was really young, it was seeing his artwork on the Sonic Youth cover, and then later, playing in punk bands and seeing the poster designs and learning about the history of punk poster designs.

The way Kelley explains his work is incredible, about the relationship between ritual and memory and inheriting. He’s a reactionary artist in the sense of reacting to how people read his work. And I feel the same way. When I encountered him, I was like, “Yeah, he’s inheriting so many readymade things from culture and then perverting them, or just understanding memory, or cultural memory, or his idea of childhood, from receiving stuff.” So it’s interesting that in encountering Mike’s relationship with his own work, you also encounter the first time you yourself started a noise band, your own experience of being a young person.

Mark Flood To me, Mike seemed like someone who went to thrift stores and gathered all this commonplace cultural stuff, like Corita Kent, the nun and artist who made kind of Pop art screen prints. But Mike is picking up all the little toys and making that trademark work, and then explaining it with Marxism—that it’s about the exchange value, and you can never do enough for a person who made you something like this. I found that kind of wild. The first music I heard of his was in front of an audience, and it felt much more like recognizable “songs.” But I’m related to both of those worlds. I was a painter who ended up being in a band. There was this club in Houston down the street from where I was living in the late ‘70s, and there was a band there that was totally punk in my eyes, that had been inspired by Iggy Pop, and I was obsessed. Iggy was so ahead of his time. And so of course I think about Detroit, which was such

a fateful crossroads for music, and about what else Mike must have been listening to.

BWJ You bring up some things that I think are really important. One is that a lot of Mike’s music was out of time. He talks about that—how the reception for Destroy All Monsters couldn’t come for twenty years, and the same with The Poetics Project. Detroit is sort of inevitable with Mike and his music. He talks about receiving avant-garde art practices through the performances of, on the one hand, Iggy Pop, and, on the other, Sun Ra—two figures who, for him, represented strategies of bringing the audience into the performance, letting them lose themselves and then sort of pushing them away and bringing them out of it. Detroit is a signifier of a certain musical culture, as Houston and Seattle and New York and Eugene, Oregon, have been at different times. But I think that Detroit thing is strong for him.

WE Absolutely. I was just there on a tour. I talked with people about the various ebbs and flows of musical culture in Detroit being facilitated by the idea that the city is always being left, that things are being left behind. So if you’re going to do something minimalist, and you’re coding it by saying that it’s Iggy, and then you’re going to do neo-Dada collage, you kind of have both, because you have the space to contend with a minimalism that’s very natural in a city characterized by decay. And the collage element is made even easier because there’s so much stuff around, even though you’re in a kind of spaced-out place. It’s a very catalyzing place to play because the people who live there won’t come out to see you for the first two years of you going there, if you’re not a local. They’re very self-protective and know what they have. Then you find out that the singer [Caroline Crawford] on all those legendary Bohannon records in the ‘80s works in the record store right next door, and you can talk to her about this whole historical thing. And you find out that what she does now almost sounds like Kelley’s Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile performance with the actress Molly Cleator and Sonic Youth [at Artists Space in New York in 1986]—she will do a stream-of-conscious vocal over a long sequence, and you’re like, “Holy shit! You were on those Bohannon records, and now you’re doing this!” As the bearer of a kind of Detroit Motown history, she becomes like a collage because she has that space and all this stuff from . . . not a “fallen” city, because the city is incredibly strong, but a city that was once the site of a specific kind of life that now no longer exists. I see that in Kelley’s art.

It’s not as if he’s saying: “I’m working really hard to get something.” It’s more like, “I have all of this stuff around me. What am I supposed to do with it? Where does ritual fit in? What’s the memory of the things that are all around me?”

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“The way Kelley explains his work is incredible, about the relationship between ritual and memory and inheriting. He’s a reactionary artist in the sense of reacting to how people read his work. And I feel the same way.” —Wendy Eisenberg

p. 42 Mike Kelley, Silver Ball, 1994.

Aluminum foil, polyurethane foam, wood, chicken wire, speakers, 4 boom boxes, space blanket, 3 baskets, artificial fruit and audio ball: 57 7/8 x 57 7/8 x 53 1/8 in.

MF I’ve never been to Detroit, but the city you’re describing sounds a bit like Houston. The locals won’t just come out for everyone, and so finding that club down the street where people were actually paying attention was like something out of a book for me. It became the most important thing, for me to get up on that stage and be part of it, even though I couldn’t see any path to actually doing it. Before that kind of punk stuff happened, the idea of music was that you had to be Neil Young or somebody like that just to get in front of an audience. And then suddenly, it was very accessible, if you had the nerve. So I jumped up there. But it was not natural to me like painting and making art were. It was a whole other thing.

BWJ This makes me think of the Plato’s Cave performance, too, because it seems like the moment when Mike became a sort of art-rock star. Mike takes on the persona of the rock star and undermines it at the same time. He’s coming out and confronting you but then falling down and being your dog, in a sense.

It’s a good example of utilizing not just the music but the rock concert as a format, the stage presence.

He brings the audience in while also appropriating the whole cultural construct of the “star.”

MF I feel like when you destroy a tradition, it also eases your entrance into it. That’s what I hear him doing.

He’s like, “Yeah, I’m up on a stage, but I don’t have that pressure, because I’m negating the tradition that takes place on this stage.”

WE Yeah, he’s subverting a ritual, which is a constant throughline in his work. Even his fixation with titles, where he focuses on something that stands in for its cultural association: Plato’s Cave, for example. Very rarely do we think of Plato without thinking a little bit about the cave. There’s a part of Kelley where he’s asking, “What is the thing that the ritual of being a rock performer does to the world?” That’s probably why he didn’t just do all of his music as a band that people would later rediscover. Sonic Youth was huge at that point. They were advocating and drawing people in to see this very important artist by providing the sound for his performance poem, but some people probably just went to see Sonic Youth.

BWJ That’s what he expected, because they’d just had their breakout record. He’s definitely playing with audience expectations.

p. 43 (top) Mike Kelley, Ectoplasm Photograph 4, 1978/2009, 1 of a series of 15 photographs (chromogenic prints), 14 x 10 in. p. 43 (bottom) Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35 (Dour Gnomes) (detail), 2010.

Mixed media with video projection, dimensions variable

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WE He’s just so committed to that impulse. He’s saying: “Maybe I’m big in my world, but this band is huge, and they’re huge because of their relationship to this ritual that I’m also interested in as an artist who works in performance.” To be successful at it requires an almost pathological interest and conviction. It’s like the Kim Gordon quote: “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.”

BWJ And to have themselves abused. In Plato’s Cave, Mike was debased by Molly Cleator.

WE Which is how it feels to tour.

BWJ What do you think about The Poetics Project which, to my mind, is so much more conceptual? At certain points they’re a dance troupe and then they’re a radio program and then almost stand-up comedy. It’s interesting to me that he’s doing this while studying at CalArts at the same time as Laurie Anderson is teaching there.

WE I think about the bands people start in grad school, and I don’t want to seem like I’m dismissing The Poetics Project, but there’s something that happens that tells me this could only have been done by artists.

Not because the music isn’t good, or well done—it’s kind of perfect—but because you’d need a sort of baffled approach to come at it like that, which I think true artists have, musical or otherwise. At the same time as Kelley was doing that project, he

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was studying Conceptual art with the level of focus that one of those defining prog rock geniuses—who are insane shredders—were purported to have. To me, as somebody who’s thought about art at way too intense a level while at the same time playing in basements and bars and sleeping on floors, I hear The Poetics in a kind of high/low way. I relate to it, but also I don’t, because I was also studying how to be that shredder.

BWJ What you said—about not meaning to dismiss it but about it being a college thing—is kind of perfect for that project. I think it was that, and then it became a much bigger thing when Mike and Tony Oursler did The Poetics Project twenty years later, in 1996.

They recovered this minor moment, which was still very important for them. Of course, I’m particularly interested because I saw the installation when it was first done, and it blew me away. I think that high/low thing is really part of the project. Mike was always deadly serious and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. Those dichotomies exist within the work and are also an engine that drives the work across many, many years.

WE When I encounter The Poetics, I like it. I really like it. But what I love about it as a project in the macro sense is: What artist doesn’t have that relationship with their first band? If something is really important to you and helps you become the thing that eventually gives you access to restage the thing and your work is about ritual and memory, the least and most important thing you could do is historicize it on your own terms. You’re like, “Damn it, remember when I was twelve and playing the stupidest music in the world? What if that was important because I now have this role? Would I go back?” Grad school is different from being twelve, but— MF Maybe only slightly.

WE Right, everybody’s always twelve until they’re a famous artist.

MF I feel like if you’re aspiring to be an artist, you’re entering a world of coded activity, and you really have to study to keep the pace. And it’s unpopular.

But if you’re in a band, the rules are completely different. In the ‘70s, being in a band played out great in the art world, but being in the art world played out terribly for being in a band. I remember people would use “arty” as a derogatory term.

BWJ The ‘90s felt to me like a moment when a certain segment of the music world caught up. It was the post-grunge, post-rock moment, and noise came in, and I think Mike really felt like: “My people have arrived. I can play out, with somebody like Violent Onsen Geisha [the stage name of Masaya Nakahara, a Japanese artist, writer and director] or others, and we can do this stuff that I was doing twenty years ago, and it will have a different audience.”

WE I feel like being in a band might be cooler than being an artist, in the sense that it’s more democratically accessible. But Kelley’s music, or sound, kind of goes against that. In the late ‘80s or ‘90s, possibly even through today, if you say “I’m in a noise band,” it probably holds the most cachet for people who also like a certain kind of art.

BWJ I think about what you said about virtuosity, because noise is sort of this anti-virtuosic thing, and yet some people are better at it than others.

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“Mike takes on the persona of the rock star and undermines it at the same time. He’s coming out and confronting you but then falling down and being your dog, in a sense.” —Branden W. Joseph

p. 44 Cover of Destroy All Monsters The Detroit Oratorio CD, released by Compound Annex

WE It’s kind of like free jazz. You know if someone is following a credo that they actually care about when they do it, or if their relationship to chance is just so superb that it ends up being better. But it doesn’t matter so much if it’s better. It just matters if it hits you, which I think is what the art world, in a kind of Kelley-ish duality, wants to protect and also defend a viewer from seeing. You can’t be hit over the head with an artwork if you can’t see it, but you also can’t be hit if you’re seeing it in a place that’s completely devoid of context. Either way, there’s a relationship to access there.

BWJ I think that noise in the ‘90s allowed Mike to just have fun and access an audience that wouldn’t necessarily know who he was. He was sort of playing with the high and low but also with the allowable and repressed—what’s allowable and legible within a certain context and what’s not?

He liked not mixing them together but dialectically playing them against each other. Have you heard the 2002 Destroy All Monsters Swamp Gas CD? I’m thinking of “Dexter 1966,” where he riffs on a spate of UFO sightings that took place in Michigan that year.

WE Yes, and I love it.

BWJ I love it too.

WE There’s this sense of homecoming, and of not being able to come home, in his relationship with Michigan.

And then, with the UFO sightings, it’s as if he’s touching down from another zone and doing it in a way that sounds to me like his earlier performances.

The point is that you can’t really return, but you have this vestige from the thing that you can’t return to.

For me, that’s what’s so poignant about that piece.

First of all, it sounds like everything I actually want to listen to. And second, I think it’s what it sounded like for him to return. It was him coming back into a specific kind of grace, back into a certain kind of performance. I was really moved by that aspect of it because it seems so rare in his work.

BWJ That’s a beautiful way to talk about it. The singsong of his voice in that work really is the cadence of his

p. 45 Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #17 (Heartthrob Split), 2004–05. Mixed media with video projections and photograph, 85 x 54 x 101 in.

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early performances. I hadn’t thought about it until you said it, but you’re right: It’s him coming back. I also love the way he puts a Conceptual art structure on it. He’s going through the top song of every month of 1966, the year of the Dexter, Michigan, UFO sightings, and then parodying and transforming the songs—yet not fully.

MF It’s amazing to me how intellectual and drenched in theory he is, and yet you don’t have to read the label to understand what’s going on. It just gets to you.

WE I imagine that, growing up where he did, Kelley felt like an alien, with the massive throbbing brain he had.

I’m sure he felt like he had touched down there like an alien, and then went wherever he went to become the person we’re talking about now. Some aliens probably feel like aliens in their native context, too.

But this feels to me like he’s making it very explicit: “I was an alien then. Now, I’m an alien from that, but I’m coming back, and I’m talking about that return.” It’s such a multilayered, multidirectional thing. You hear it in the way that he’s playing with time, based on the musical-chart hits.

BWJ I don’t know if either of you got a chance to see “Day

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“In the ‘70s, being in a band played out great in the art world, but being in the art world played out terribly for being in a band. I remember people would use ‘arty’ as a derogatory term.” —Mark Flood

Is Done,” but it was such a monumental installation that involved music in so many ways. It’s a touchstone of the last part of his career, but, in my mind, it looks both backward and forward. I particularly love “Tijuana Hayride,” which mixes yodeling and melisma. Melisma was widespread in pop singing at that point. Mike once described that track to me as “hick Mariah Carey,” which is exactly what it is.

“Day Is Done” is also when he started working with the producer Scott Benzel. With Scott’s help, he was able to start playing not just with different musical styles but also with forms of music production. He could mash up whole genres of sounds.

MF This was also him coming into the digital age, which made that easier. Plus, he had reached a kind of mainstream success and had the resources to make those vast installations possible. He could kind of do whatever he wanted.

BWJ It was the early 2000s and definitely a step up, production-wise. I was able to go and see the installation at Gagosian, where each of those segments was shown on its own semi-sculptural screen. Instead of hearing one after the other, you actually walked from one to the other and they caught your attention in different ways. He used that interpolative quality that popular music has, that earworm quality, the way you hear it and sort of go to it, spatially. You would hear the Mariah Carey yodeling and be like: “Where is that!?” And you’d wander over. He was using the popular aspect as an attractor and at the same time distancing it and throwing it back at you.

Everyone I knew was just blown away. You just got carried along with it, no matter how ridiculous it was, no matter how intellectual and artistic. You were like: “I want to experience that.” That relationship Mike had to experience, not just looking at it and puzzling it out but actually making you feel things—I think music was a big part for him in being able to trigger that dynamic in all phases of his work, including his art practice.

WE Absolutely.

MF I admire that drive to go beyond your natural tendencies to stay in one medium and to head instead into the unnatural, out to the limits, on such a massive scale. It’s amazing when an artist casts a shadow so far into the future that they can’t really participate in it. Kelley is like that, along with a few other artists.

He was so far ahead of people’s perception of what he was doing. It makes me think of Rauschenberg.

People are still getting used to the Combines. He was at least forty years beyond them. Kelley was also carving a mark into culture. I think it’ll take a long time for society to absorb it.

“Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit” is on view at the Tate Modern, London, through March 9, and at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, from May 10 to October 12.

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“Mike Kelley: Vice Anglais” is on view at Hauser & Wirth London through April 27.

Laplace

luislaplace.com

pairings

Passing Down

A conversation about family, art and history: Rashid Johnson at the dinner table with Jimmy, his father, and Julius, his son

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pairings

This is the first installment of Ursula’s new column Pairings, which features a conversation between an artist and guests over a meal. In this edition, Rashid Johnson sits down with his family at Manuela in SoHo, New York.

RASHID JOHNSON OK, it’s really nice to have the three of us sitting down here together for a meal, taking time to be together. But I think that if left to our own devices, we’re probably going to just talk about things that aren’t going to hold a lot of interest for magazine readers out there. So maybe I’ll kind of play MC for this meal. I have a natural director’s sensibility—I can’t help myself. I’m always thinking about how scenes are going to play out, the shape of the images and dialogue. I’m sitting here now thinking about whether we’re giving the photographer the best angles. [Laughs.] OK, dad, I’m going to start with you. I’m going to ask you questions I already know the answers to, but I want to hear your stories again.

And maybe Julius hasn’t heard some of them yet. So, tell me about where you were born and your early life.

JIMMY JOHNSON Alright. I’ll tell you. I was born in Whitehaven, Tennessee, right outside of Memphis, a place that’s now really a suburb of Memphis. It was named for a railroad tycoon and slaver named Francis White. But eventually so many Black families lived in the neighborhood it’s now known as Blackhaven. On the northern end of the neighborhood is Graceland, Elvis’s home.

the floor very quiet and I didn’t pop up until the middle of the night and when I did they said, “Jimmy, good God! What are you doing?” And that’s how I got to Ohio.

[Laughs.]

RJ And how early was it in your life when you left Tennessee?

RJ Julius, do you want to ask a question about this?

JJ I was five. I went from Tennessee to Youngstown, Ohio.

And I really kind of came on my own, my own doing. You see, I was in the backseat of my mother and father’s car. They didn’t know I was there. I was hiding. I had seven brothers and sisters, and when my parents would drive north for work, they would take us kids back into the cornfields near a relative’s house and leave us with the relatives. And I was very much aware of that, at five years old, of what they were going to do when they left. So one day, when they dropped us off and all my siblings ran out to play under the houses— these were raised-up houses and you could see underneath them and it was a great place to play—I waited until no one was looking and I went and got in the car, on the floor in front of the backseat. I didn’t know where they were going, but wherever they were going, I just decided that I was going with them. It was bright daylight and I stayed back there on

JULIUS JOHNSON Yeah, how different was Ohio from Tennessee? What do you remember?

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JJ Well, the main difference for a five-year-old was that no one understood the language I was speaking. I mean, it was like I was unintelligible to people in Ohio.

JULIUS Why? JJ Because of my accent, really a double accent, a Southern accent, and then the Black accent. I’d say something and people would say, “What’d you say?” All the time. All I remember is: “What?!” and “Excuse me?” I started trying to

I’d be in your shop, which was filled with technical books, really complex pieces of electronics. It was a place where physical things got made, got fixed. I have a studio, and when I work in it as an artist, it doesn’t feel so dissimilar to the shop. It’s where we make things, at the end of the day. Artists are workers. We’re people invested in labor.

—Rashid Johnson

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speak up because I thought I was talking too softly, but it wasn’t that.

Eventually I was old enough to realize that part of what was happening is that white people, mostly white people, just wanted me to repeat myself because they had that power and authority over me. When I finally went to school, it was like I was learning a different language. We didn’t speak that language in my house or in my neighborhood. I struggled for a while, trying to be accepted. It was like a foreign place to me. I felt like I was there but wasn’t really there.

RJ I’ve heard so many of these stories from you, since I was so young, that they really feel like they’re a part of me. And oral history, particularly in Black families, is really the most familiar and pronounced history we have. So I know these stories quite well. It’s interesting to think about how we didn’t grow up near your brothers and sisters, even after the whole family was in the Midwest, the entire family migrating to Youngstown, Ohio, and to date all of them still living in Youngstown. You were the only member of the family who moved away, to Illinois. And so I didn’t grow up like a lot of people with big families do, in close proximity to aunts and uncles and cousins. It wasn’t isolating, exactly, but it was a different experience. With you, and with mom, we kind of had this family unit of our own that was pretty small and that became very close. What do you remember about thinking that I might have artistic inclinations when I was young?

JJ I first started to understand that you had any interest in art, Rashid, when I was learning about astrology, and in astrology they say Libra, which is your sign, has a lot of artistic abilities. And since you and I have the same birthday, in a sense I was learning about myself, too. And so I said, “Hmm, I’m going to test that.” Around that time, when you were little, I actually made a painting, my first piece of art, a four-by-eight piece, oil on canvas. I had also studied photography when I was in the service and did darkroom work, too, so I decided I wanted to paint something in black and white, because I had a sense of black and white. In Munich, when I was in the army, I was exposed for the first time to art museums and art in churches and historical installations that dealt with the Holocaust, which I’d visit when I was off duty. I began to understand for the first time the nature of expression through art and how important it’s been to human life. Had art not existed, we wouldn’t know so many things about so much of our past. Drawings on the

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walls of caves thousands of years ago tell us what we were hunting, what we were eating, how we thought, you know?

Those drawings still help us understand ourselves. Being in Europe like that was very important to me at the time. I saw things I couldn’t have seen any other way. And it made me think about myself differently. Pretty early on, you did those photographic pieces about homeless men you met on the streets of Chicago. That one called Jonathan’s Hands shows a man with his hands covering his face. At least a part of the experience of seeing that work was to think: “That’s how people want me to feel about myself, ashamed of myself.”

But the more important part was me thinking: “Wait a minute. The image that we have in our heads of homeless people is of people who don’t have any hope or dignity, people who don’t take care of themselves.” And that’s not what you did with those pictures, that series called Seeing in the Dark. You showed people in all their humanity. You brought those men to life.

In Munich, when I was in the army, I was exposed for the first time to art museums and art in churches and historical installations that dealt with the Holocaust, which I’d visit when I was off duty. I began to understand for the first time the nature of expression through art and how important it’s been to human life. Had art not existed, we wouldn’t know so many things about so much of our past.—Jimmy Johnson

RJ That body of work was really a formative one for me. I had moved from Evanston, Illinois, where I’d grown up, to downtown Chicago. That move came with a lot more exposure to people who were unhoused, people in different states of a housing crisis in their lives. And I thought a lot about these men, mostly Black men, and their experience in opposition to mine. I grew up in a middle-class home. Mom was a professor. You had a small business. I was from a divorced family, but family life was always very stable. You lived a block away from us during my whole childhood.

Doing that series, I started to question my own agency and opportunity and privilege in a different way than I’d expected. Also, because I shared race with the folks I’d been photographing, I encountered an immediate assumption in the art world that I must have some shared experience with the subjects I was photographing—that I was somehow sharing some of my own pain, had some kinship with those men. And that made me realize, for the first time in a serious way, how easily we flatten people’s experience based on easy assumptions. I remember thinking to myself, “The coalitions that we build via race in this country are so significant and strong that class and agency and opportunity and privilege barely penetrate the conversation enough to recognize the vast differences between people.” And it continues to inform how I articulate positions in my work and understand my

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intentions. I wish I could say that I had the predictive skills at age nineteen to know how those photographs were going to be flattened into a read based mostly around race that I didn’t expect. It was a huge learning experience for me. I would even say it was shocking. And it taught me to ask a lot more questions of the things around me.

JJ It was interesting to watch how intensely you questioned things when you were growing up. You always did.

RJ In what way?

JJ When you were two years old, I took you to spend time with me in the electronics shop, and there were thousands of little things in there, electronic parts, radios, televisions, gadgets. And you would say: “Dad, what’s that?” and I’d explain what it was. And you’d say: “What’s this?” And I’d explain and explain. You’d ask a thousand questions. You never got tired of it. You were curious about everything.

You’d tell me that you wanted to be like me when you grew up, to have a shop like mine. And I thought, “Maybe, but let’s be careful and let him figure out what he really wants to be.” I was always a very strong believer in letting

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children find their own way. I didn’t want to impose my own desires for them on them. That’s how you end up with unhappy people. One thing I knew about both you and your brother was that when you were interested in something, you spared no amount of time and effort wanting to know everything about it. With sports, for example. Both of you could have been sports announcers.

RJ It’s really one of the things that led me to have the tools to know so many things about art and art history. It started with sports and statistics. I was the kind of fan who would check the paper every day to find out how, you know, the shortstop for the Cubs was doing, what his batting average was. Then I’d watch the game on television and convert the batting average in real time in my head as he came up to the plate. I would figure out other advanced sports statistics. I was really into the numbers, particularly in baseball. I knew everything.

JJ And you loved it so much that you wanted to be a professional baseball player. Which is just about as hard to be successful at as being a professional artist. The odds are very long in both professions. Julius, you’re a very good basketball player.

JULIUS Yeah, I love basketball and I love science. Also art, but I think basketball and science top those right now. I love being on the basketball travel team.

JJ Well, you have a great shooting eye. And a quick first step.

RJ Your mother’s side of the family and your grandfather here, both are math and science people. So it’s not unusual that you’re interested in those things, I think. I was less of a math and science person, but I was actually always pretty good at them. I’ve always been very pragmatic that way.

JJ I think you started working first with photography because of that pragmatic sense. That it was something you wanted to explore and understand.

RJ As a teenager, there were those years I started doing lots of jobs to earn money. At around fifteen, I started working bagging groceries, shoveling snow, cutting people’s grass.

Then I got that job working for a wedding photographer,

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assisting him. And I actually just liked all the material that a photographer was involved with. I liked the click of the shutter. I liked that a photographer was mobile and moving around, not stationary or stagnant, which was interesting.

Dad, you had a bunch of photographs that you used to keep in my bedroom, remember? They were old images from Vietnam that you’d taken and kept in a shoebox in my closet. I used to pull them down and look at them. They weren’t tragic or scary images. They weren’t war pictures.

Just soldiers and other people doing things. Lots of pictures of palm trees and buildings. I loved those pictures.

They were just beautiful nostalgic things. Mom also had cameras around. She had an old Canon A-1, and that’s when they used to have really beautiful, ornate camera straps. They were just wonderful as objects. Really, for me, so much of the material culture around your shop and mom's house and office were important to me. You both had a lot of books around. Mom had all these complicated titles that felt like questions that I would one day have to ask or answer. I would look at a book like, for example, Harold Cruses’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, from 1967, and know that I had to figure out what that was about. And then I’d be in your shop, which was filled with technical books, really complex pieces of electronics. It was a place where physical things got made, got fixed. I have a studio, and when I work in it as an artist, it doesn’t feel so dissimilar to the shop. It’s where we make things, at the end of the day. Artists are workers. We’re people invested in labor.

JJ In my profession, there were people whose work was like a Volkswagen, which is pretty good. And then there were Rolls-Royces. I knew which one I was going to be. I do that quality of work. I was never interested in lesser. I wanted to do special, custom, top-notch work because there’s just a pride and satisfaction in making something. I’ve watched your work evolve, Rashid, and I see things like attention to certain kinds of detail that deepens as you get older.

JULIUS When I’m in your studio, it’s always cool to me to see how you can have an idea and then just make it into something.

I’ve also learned that when you look at a work of art, especially a painting, you kind of have to look inside it to figure out what you think. You have to look at it for a long time to get inside it.

JJ It’s made me happy that you were able to do what you wanted to do in the art world. For me, where I was when you were young, there was always the knowledge that I had to have a check at the end of the month. Rent, groceries, expenses for a family. It had to be consistent and I knew it.

When I’m in your studio, it’s always cool to me to see how you can have an idea and then just make it into something.—Julius Johnson

JJ You were always really good from the beginning at talking about what you were doing, presenting yourself and the work.

RJ Well, your shop was important to me. I think about the physical and also the conceptual things I got from it. The use of CB radios as a sculptural material, for example. Not many people remember CB radios now, but they were such a huge thing in the ‘70s and ‘80s, before personal computers and cell phones. For me the interesting thing about the CB was the idea of calling out into the world and the potential anonymity of it. It was a proto-internet space, where you could reach people and your identity wasn’t necessarily the first thing that was known. And communities were created through it, through people talking and connecting thousands of miles apart. When you got on a CB radio, you were opening yourself up to a kind of communication that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to have. I loved that. And early on I also loved the look of the radios as objects, in a nostalgic way. In the early work, I was using lots of iconography from my childhood, because it was what I knew.

JJ I remember that for a lot of years when you were starting out, you were really scrapping to make ends meet.

RJ Yeah, I mean, I had some success right from the beginning. I had work purchased by the Art Institute. I had a show in Chicago when I was about twenty, photographs that sold out. I started showing with a gallery. But there was an extended period of time when all of that attention did not necessarily mean resources. I had a critical embrace but I was still broke, after moving to New York. And that went into my thirties. I had to borrow money. But I was always very, very focused. There was never really a moment when I thought I was going to try something else. It was art or nothing. Even in school, I had that determination. I didn’t get good grades in drawing. I just didn’t draw things like they wanted me to, I guess. But I kept at it with art classes. I was invested, focused. I loved drawing. I loved doodling. I loved messing around. I got into graffiti early and that was a big part of my story, too, before photography.

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RJ To be honest, I didn’t always necessarily want to. But the way the art world works today, there are more questions or at least more demand to hear answers from the artist about the why. And that why extends to “why you?” There are so many of us out here making art, trying to say something, trying to be successful, making pictures and sculptures and film, all of us having had access to privileged educations.

And it’s a fair question for people to ask: Why do we need your voice amplified? Why the hell should we be paying attention to your contribution? Why should you be successful? When I talk about my work, part of my intention has also just been to be generous. Not only generous with the audience that is already invested in my work or the ideas that I’ve presented, but an audience that has yet to be introduced to it. And there’s also the issue I talked about earlier, that there are too many simplistic assumptions made about the work of artists of color. So, I think part of what I’ve been interested in doing is making clear, when I can, what my intentions for my work are.

JJ The longer I see you make work, the more I think about the thing I talked about earlier, about prehistoric art in the caves, how art captures a time in history in ways other things don’t.

I think a lot of your work will show what being Black during your time was like, at least one version of it.

RJ From the beginning, I wanted to articulate my individual experience as a Black man.

JJ It’s funny thinking about what we think we are and what we think we’re doing and how that all plays out in the real world. Sitting here with you and Julius, I think about what we say as parents. What we think really sticks with our kids.

And how it’s almost impossible to know what it is that you say or do that makes a difference, even with a parent’s best intentions.

RJ [Laughs.] Right. The thing you do that they remember you being really bad at is probably the thing you thought you did well—you thought you crushed it. And the thing you don’t even remember saying is the thing that makes a huge difference in their lives. How do you think I’m doing, Julius?

Sitting here with you and Julius, I think about what we say as parents.

What we think really sticks with our kids. And how it’s almost impossible to know what it is that you say or do that makes a difference, even with a parent’s best intentions.—Jimmy Johnson

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JULIUS Well, my friends think you’re cool, so that’s nice. [Laughs.]

Not everybody has a dad that kids think is cool.

RJ [Laughs.] Okay, I’ll take that! I think about what Mom did and what you did, Dad. And I’m pretty OK as a human being. So maybe if I just do as well as that as a parent, I’m alright. I’m not overthinking it.

JJ What do you think having a big retrospective is going to do to your head? Seeing all your work over the years together like that in one place?

RJ Going back over all my work, especially early work, there are moments when I see pieces that were pledging allegiance to an idea or praying at a temple that I don’t necessarily know is still brick and mortar anymore. You know what I mean? I guess the basic thing that having a survey is doing for me is making me realize I don’t always have to tell the same story. I’m allowed to contradict myself. I’m not only allowed to, but I expect myself to contradict myself. If I’m the same man at fifty that I was at twenty-five, there’s something really wrong. I want my work to reflect where I am at different stages in my life in an honest way.

“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on April 26 and remains on view through January 18, 2026.

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p. 47 Still from Rashid Johnson, Sanguine, 2024. Color video with sound, transferred from 35- mm film pp. 48–49, 50, 51 Photos: Ike Edeani, taken on location at Manuela restaurant p. 52 Rashid Johnson, Jonathan’s Hands, 1998. Van Dyke brown print, 22 3/4 x 23 3/4 in. p. 53 Rashid Johnson, Manumission Papers, No.11, 2000.Van Dyke print on deckle-edge paper, 49 1/2 x 38 in. p. 54 Rashid Johnson, Community Bandstand, 2009. Welded brass, wood, DAK CB radio, shea butter, 90 x 48 x 14 in.

p. 55 Rashid Johnson, Standing Soul Sculpture “Care Free,” 2024.

Bronze, 100 x 79 x 79 in. p. 56 Photo: Ike Edeani, taken on location at Manuela restaurant p. 58 Jimmy Johnson and Rashid Johnson, ca. 1985 (left); cover of Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (Morrow, 1967) (right) p. 59 Rashid Johnson, Antoine’s Organ (detail), 2016. Black steel, grow lights, plants, wood, shea butter, books, monitors, rugs, piano, 189 x 338 x 126.75 in.

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Ekow Eshun on the work of Christina Kimeze

SOME NOTES ON SOARING Christina Kimeze’s Soaring III (2024) depicts two female figures moving through a realm rich in flora. Kimeze’s family belong to the Baganda people of Uganda, and we recognize the rich plant life of that country in the painting.

The setting is dense with matoke, a broad-leaved banana plant ubiquitous in Uganda. Kimeze renders her women in the same shades of teal, sage, citrine and juniper as the foliage around them, conjuring them as denizens of a landscape abundant and mysterious with life—from the creatures that rustle through the undergrowth to the flowers that unfurl their petals with a faint sigh at the first light of day.

In the creation myth of the Baganda, the first person on Earth was named Kintu. One of his first acts was to plant a matoke tree, which thrived in the East African soil and became a staple of nourishment for his descendants. The belief held by the Baganda in their exceptionalism, as the first peoples of Uganda, was exploited by the British under colonial rule in the 19th century. Used as “agents of imperialism” by Britain, according to the scholar Colette Armitage, the Baganda invaded and annexed their regional neighbors. On whichever territory they conquered, they planted matoke trees as a means of asserting their dominance over the land. Victorian-era British presence stoked ethnic and regional tensions that continue to reverberate through the present day in Uganda. It also helped build a colonial imaginary of Africa and its peoples as irredeemably uncivilized. This was the view of Africans that Joseph

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Conrad described in Heart of Darkness, casting them as “rudimentary souls” who “howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces” from deep in the tropical mire.

With that legacy of conquest and misrepresentation in mind, Kimeze’s nature-suffused paintings can be read as acts of reclamation.

Maybe the woman who stands with arms raised in a glade of purple- and orange-leaved matoke trees in Soaring (1) (2024) illustrates the form a Black relationship with nature might take when it is not predicated on legacies of colonial power, but instead on kinship and connection and a belief in the worth and wonder of people and place. So that to walk on the land is to walk with the land. It is to raise your hands up into a canopy of purple and orange leaves and feel a kind of soaring as you do.

This is perhaps what Édouard Glissant had in mind when he spoke of tremblement, or “trembling thinking,” a rejection of ideologies of terror, domination and “all categories of fixed and imperial thought” as a precursor to establishing “real contact with the world and with the peoples of the world.”

Kimeze’s Soaring paintings also prompt thoughts of a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, when the preacher Baby Suggs gathers the local Black community together in the Clearing, a “wide-open space cut deep in the woods.” Baby Suggs explains that the difference between liberation and subjugation lies in how one carries and cares for oneself in a world governed by white hostility to Black people. In the small but sovereign space of the Clearing, untroubled by white presence, the community members are free to love themselves and to draw upon that love as the basis for life ongoing. “ ‘Here,’ she said, ‘in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.

Love it. Love it hard.’ ” I am reminded, too, of standing on the Atlantic coast of Ghana one afternoon a few months ago. I watched a bird soar upward and then hover motionless in the air, scanning the water below for the telltale ripple of a fish. I thought: How does it stay aloft? It has to do with hollow bones, yes.

And with the tapered shape of its feathers. But maybe also because a bird takes flight presuming the air will hold it up.

And nobody has told it otherwise.

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p. 61, left Get Rollin (1), 2024. Gouache on paper, 22 1/4 x 12 3/8 in. p. 61, right Get Rollin (111), 2024.

Gouache on paper, 26 3/8 x 13 3/8 in. p. 62 Arches, 2024. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard, 40 1/8 x 31 7/8 in. p. 63 Screen (1), 2024. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard, 40 1/8 x 31 7/8 in. p. 64 Soaring (1), 2024. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard, 80 3/8 x 63 3/4 in.

p. 65 Soaring (111), 2024. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard, 80 3/8 x 63 3/4 in. p. 66 Chase, 2024. Oil, acrylic, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard, 80 3/8 x 63 3/4 in. p. 67 Soaring (11), 2024. Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard, 80 3/8 x 63 3/4 in.

“Christina Kimeze: Between Wood and Wheel” remains on view at South London Gallery through May 5.

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Voices on David Hammons More than any other American artist of his generation, David Hammons has lived and worked in a word-of-mouth tradition—a Homeric, hermetic method of information exchange that tends to confound at least as much as it conveys. Even his most famous work, the 1983 performance that has come to be called Bliz-aard Ball Sale—in which he peddled various-sized snowballs on a blanket in Cooper Square—remains shrouded in hearsay. When did it occur? Probably Sunday, February 13, but no one to this day, besides maybe Hammons himself, can say for sure. Did it in fact happen more than once?

How were the snowballs made? How were they priced? The answer depends entirely on the teller and sometimes shifts depending on the time of the telling.

On the following pages, Ursula has gathered, with Hammons’s blessing, a host of stories about his life and work. The reader should, as the curator Elena Filipovic once wrote of Hammons, proceed with circumspection: “Some of what you read here might, then, be apocryphal.”

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Linda Goode Bryant on David Hammons and the importance of public space For David, walking is absolutely imperative.

I’ve known him since 1973. I’ve always known him to be a fairly nonverbal person. Yet he communicates well and to the point. And when I say that he communicates well, I mean that he does it mostly with his eyes. You see what his eyes say, how he responds with his face, how he responds if he starts drawing something or just moving something around on a table. Eventually, you come to understand the responses and what they mean. And the way that the responses often function is to tell you more about who you are than about what David thinks. That’s his whole flip.

Over the years, a lot of that back-and-forth has occurred while we’ve been walking together. In the first months and years when we were getting to know each other in the ‘70s, we just walked and walked and walked through New York City.

What you see when you walk with David is the world through his eyes, mostly with no conversation happening. You’re walking with him and you think to yourself: “Why are we here? What is he looking for? Where are we going? Why is he staring at that thing on the street?” You think to yourself: “Am I seeing everything he’s seeing or am I seeing absolutely nothing?” It all somehow translates, over time, into you looking into a mirror of yourself.

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Thinking about walking with him inevitably brings me back to “Concerto in Black and Blue,” the exhibition he created at the Ace Gallery in Lower Manhattan in 2002, which was radical in its simplicity: a series of cavernous, unlit, completely dark galleries; a bowl of tiny blue flashlights near the door that visitors could take to navigate around the space, just barely, registering each other only as flitting points of light. That was it.

Nothing more. David hadn’t had a show in New York in a few years at that point, and I think a lot of people went into that gallery with great expectations, eager to see new work, see what he’d been up to. And when they walked through the doors into the exhibition, they couldn’t see anything. Initially, they used the lights to see each other and to find the art. Then they used the lights to make shadows and create different shapes and forms. Then they started collaborating, moving from one gallery to the next, looking for something that wasn’t there, feeling the presence of the rooms and the other people around them.

I hadn’t talked to him about his plans for that show. I had no idea what he was up to. I don’t even think the gallery knew. I was as shocked and bowled over as anyone else in the space. There was nothing for the gallery to sell, no way to turn the art into money. I think it was really the apex

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of David’s genius, a kind of clarity of purpose that he had been working toward for many years.

The show was about the art that you made in the space yourself. You came to see something and ended up being aware mostly of yourself, in a way that he orchestrated.

He allowed me to be inside for the opening, to make a short film of what happened inside. And what people didn’t know is that David was actually in there himself that night. I only knew where he was because I had a microphone on him. But he was otherwise totally invisible, moving around among everyone else, watching what they did and what they made, present and at the same time absent.

When we talk about visual art, we tend to talk about it in terms of our connection to it. It tells us a story, visually, even in the most abstract work, as far as I’m concerned. “Why is that purple against that green? Why am I drawn to this canvas, to that sculpture?” What David created in that show was a kind of embodied silence that was really magisterial, a silence that allowed you to hear yourself and others, that took you to a new place of seeing that was both visual and internal.

When David moved to New York from Los Angeles in 1974, I was working at the Studio Museum as director of education and the artistin-residency program. Since he was new to the city, he was trying to learn a lot of things quickly.

He would come up to Harlem and we would go on long walks. I lived on the Upper West Side, and so there were a lot of times we walked around my neighborhood, too, which I knew well and could talk to him about. Sometimes, I’d want to take the subway to get where he said we we’re going, because it was a long way. And he’d usually go, “Ah, let’s just walk.” He began to focus on specific detritus on the streets of New York, as he had

in Los Angeles—greasy bags that he’d take out of garbage cans, chicken bones from takeout containers lying on the sidewalk, the hair on the floor of barbershops. He started to know where he wanted to be, wanted to walk. He’d say, “Linda, meet me down at so-and-so street.” Or, “Meet me on this corner.” Or, “Let’s have dinner over here.” He wasn’t silent when we were walking.

But when I’d say something it would usually take me a paragraph, and David would say as much in a word. What you come to realize is all of the things that are around you that you’re oblivious to because you’re busy running your mouth or just not paying enough attention to your environment.

When he had gained enough of a compass between Harlem and the Upper West Side and down into Midtown, he started walking around the Lower East Side and the East Village a lot.

For many years, I’d always meet him somewhere downtown. He had discovered his folks on the sidewalks there, a lot of them the gregarious guys who would scavenge things from the street, from the trash, and sell them on blankets, which was a big influence for David’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale in 1983, when he sold snowballs in various sizes from a blanket in front of Cooper Union. All of those blanket guys knew David because he spent so much time around them and was just this silent man, unobtrusive. His walks, I could see, became a more and more multifaceted way for him to observe, study, come across inspiration from anywhere.

I remember a period of years when teenagers, particularly Black teenagers, weren’t tying their sneakers or were sometimes even tying the laces of one shoe to the other. It was a style and David was just fascinated by it. He would stare. I mean, he would sometimes just stand and stare and I’d stare with him. He was examining it, like: “Whoa, the foot comes out of the shoe.

How is that affecting the walk?” I am saying this out loud, of course, but he never said it out loud. Probably the performance, or intervention, or however you would describe it, that he did in 1981 with Richard Serra’s T.W.U. sculpture in TriBeCa, when he tossed pairs of tennis shoes, with their laces tied together, over the top lip of the sculpture, making a piece of his own called Shoe Tree, came indirectly from his fascination with the way shoes were being worn. That was the most brilliant use of that sculpture, by the way. It made it look like a part of the city and not like an interloper that had nothing to do with its surroundings or people. For me, as a walking partner over the years, David’s walks count among his most amazing

On his walks, David pushes beyond the merely observant, even the acutely observant, into something much more profound.

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works. And I think he does see them not only as preparation or ways to find material but as a part of the work itself, along with so many ephemeral things he’s done on the streets, things that maybe only he or a few other people around him ever knew about. On his walks, David pushes beyond the merely observant, even the acutely observant, into something much more profound.

There were times when he would do some things that were so extraordinary it was difficult to process them. For example, for a long time, he would put on a tall Cat in the Hat hat and a mask and go stand somewhere on the sidewalk, as people walked past him. He would just be in the crowd and stand still—for hours. And I really mean hours. And somehow people didn’t even see him, which isn’t something I’m saying as an exaggeration. It was as if he wasn’t there. People just walked right by him without stopping or even glancing at him. Sometimes, when I was just walking around a neighborhood where I knew he spent time, I’d really tune myself into the surroundings, thinking to myself: “David might be down here and I might walk right past him.” His stamina when he was doing it was just amazing.

He was soaking up the world passing by him as an unobserved observer. He saw things from different angles than you’re otherwise able to.

I began to notice that he was really good at just being invisible, which sounds like a joke but it’s not. He eventually developed the ability to stand without a mask and not be noticed even by people who knew him. One evening, the Studio Museum had an opening. I was walking there from the subway. A big group of people had gathered outside, jamming into the show, and I was thinking to myself: “God, am I up to dealing with this kind of crowd tonight?” As I was getting closer to the door, I just sensed something. Suddenly, I sensed David. He was standing at the edge of the curb. I looked up and I knew not to say anything. People who would have been amazed to see him there and who knew what he looked like just walked right by him, not seeing him at all. He motioned to me and I went over quietly and we stood there together. Now, I do not know how to be invisible.

I have not studied the art of how you make yourself invisible in plain sight. But we stood there together and it was if we weren’t there. To this day, I have no idea how it worked. I said to him: “How is it that no one is seeing us?” And he said: “They’re not looking for us.” We stood there a good twenty or thirty minutes as the crowd died down. He didn’t even go in. Eventually, he just walked away.

As memorable as that was, there’s another experience that sticks with me even more.

For many years, David would go to a Japanese restaurant downtown that he liked a lot, around SoHo. One night he invited me and when we finished he said, “Let’s take a walk. You got time?” We walked to a bodega maybe half a block away from the restaurant and he stopped on the sidewalk and looked at something and had a kind of expression of pride on his face. He said to me: “What do you see?” It was nighttime. There were lights on the bodega. I said: “I see the bodega sign. I see the shadows they make. I see a garbage can. I see the windows and what’s in them.” He just nodded. And I thought: “OK, what the hell am I supposed to see? Let me try again.” Finally, I just got frustrated and said, “I’m not seeing it, David.

What is it?” He said, “It’s right in front of your face.”

He pointed to a spot on the sidewalk, which had a kind of dent in it. I said, “So why does it have a dent in it? Did someone drop something on it?” He started to get exasperated. He said: “Look back at the garbage can, Linda.” The can was metal, and I finally saw that it had a little hole rusted near the bottom and there was a rivulet of water running out of the hole, water that was dripping into the can from an air conditioner above. And I followed the rivulet and realized that the water, that tiny stream of water, had created the indentation in the sidewalk, over God knows how many years, like the beginnings of the Colorado River carving the Grand Canyon. He lived for something like that, to notice how the city works, to see how things become the way they are. I wish I could find that little dent in the sidewalk again. It’s probably long gone by now. I’ll never forget it. It was a huge lesson for me and had an important effect on how I think, to this day.

Through the organization Project Eats that I founded, an urban farm initiative for communities of color in New York, I work a lot with plants now. I watch how plants will bend and twist to get what they need, to get as close as they can to the sun or to water. The plants know where they are. In some respects, we as Homo sapiens have forgotten where we are. We don’t see what’s right in front of our faces anymore. And if we don’t see it, then we’re not aware of it. If we’re not aware of it, we can’t question it, can’t question the world and try to change the things we don’t like. We come to think of the world as an absolute, but nothing is absolute. If we think so, then we allow fear to shape everything we do. But there are ways of looking at the universe that can keep us vital and imaginative and creative and even give us political power in our awareness. Walks with David over the years helped me to understand that and to understand the meaning of art in a way that changed my understanding of life.

Suddenly, I sensed David. He was standing at the edge of the curb.

I looked up and I knew not to say anything. People who would have been amazed to see him there and who knew what he looked like just walked right by him, not seeing him at all.

David Hammons, Untitled, 2015, Mirror with tarp, 78 x 36 7/8 x 7 in.

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poetry

A HISTORY OF NEW FORMS For David Hammons

By Ben Okri

hairy stone on white stool on metal stand. brooding about lost air, incandescent paint. those tarpaulin concealments. mirrors dripping dark celestial matter. the fan in which wind is still. yellow table where caravaggio is beheaded. old testament of duchamp made into the history of harlem. beyond masks floating on sea new dream breaks through hands of silent enchanter. here’s where new african genius is made, changing the dream– less lids of duchamp into the spring of hammons.

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blue time passing. smaller form, bigger conversation. keep moving it away from what it was. from old field, new time. music in the stone. alchemy in the transcended american air. art is that book in which history of new forms is written. by the firedreams of harlem. throwing the stone into open sea into sunrise over brooklyn.

oral history

Compiled by Randy Kennedy

The Best Tailor Makes the Fewest Cuts

An oral history of David Hammons’s 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles

Hammons with Untitled (Basketball Drawing)

Photographs included in the Hammons 2019 exhibition. Left: Nathan Hunt at work, carving; right: David Hammons with Fannie Mayfield

Stacen Berg (partner and executive director, Hauser & Wirth) The origins of the show were all fairly mysterious. At some point in 2018, Marc Payot had me hold a slot for an upcoming show but didn’t tell me what it was going to be, which is very unusual. Finally, he told me that he was working on a Hammons idea. It all felt very tentative at that point. We had gotten David to agree, but first he had to come see the gallery. I knew it could all fall apart in a second.

Marc Payot (president, Hauser & Wirth) I remember becoming aware of David’s work in the ‘90s and knowing about his great piece Bliz-aard Ball Sale, in which he sold snowballs on the street near Cooper Union in Manhattan. At the time, I thought of him more as a performer than as a sculptor, though, of course, today I’d describe Bliz-aard Ball Sale as both sculpture and performance. In the early 2000s, Iwan [Wirth, co-founder and president, Hauser & Wirth] and I started having discussions with David that

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began with the help of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn [founder, Salon 94], who was working very actively with him, and Lois Plehn, who serves as David’s agent. Quite soon, he decided to do a show with us in Zurich, an installation of cardboard boxes filled with scavenged clothes and stacked on wooden pallets called Made in the Republic of Harlem. There were labels printed on the boxes that said, “Made in the Republic of Harlem,” giving them a Warhol-like feel, which was interesting.

In an adjoining gallery he showed Hidden from View, wooden museum pedestals topped with plexiglass cubes. Cubes like this would normally contain objects, but David left them empty. The feet of small African-like sculptures could be seen peeking out from beneath the pedestals, all but concealed. The sculptures were amazing—David’s way of making something seemingly unremarkable look iconic. And I’ll never forget that when he came to Zurich for the installation, he was sitting near a window in the gallery chatting with a friend, and the art handlers

asked how he wanted the works installed.

He just said, “Oh, you do it. You decide.” It wasn’t as if he was giving no instructions.

The instructions were that he wanted to cede control and see what happened.

It was a very good experience with him.

When I moved to New York in 2008, I started having meetings and lunches with Lois. I told her we’d be very into doing something again with David, regardless of what it was or where it was. And then in 2014 or 2015, Lois took me to his Yonkers studio for the first time. That was the beginning of a very long discussion that led to the show in Los Angeles.

Alex Bien-Aime (senior project manager, Hauser & Wirth) Once it looked like the Los Angeles show was really going to happen, I was assigned to be the lead art technician and, in 2019, I started regularly going up to David’s studio in Yonkers. It was the first time I’d ever gone to a big artist’s studio that wasn’t filled with a lot of assistants who are ultra-focused on the artist

oral history

they were working for. David had just a couple of guys there who were good at construction and helped him build things in and around the studio. But they didn’t really seem like art-world people, and they weren’t worshiping him because he was a famous artist, you know? Mostly, David was able to pull off massive installations in his studio all by himself, without much help from anyone. It’s a huge studio, but it always felt like it was just him in there and sometimes Chie, his wife.

Tamar Nahmias (director of registration, collection services US, Hauser & Wirth) The first time I went up to the studio in Yonkers I didn’t even expect him to be there.

But he was, and he answered the door. He’s usually the one who answers the door.

Berg In January of 2019, Marc told me that David wanted to come and see the space here in Los Angeles. David came in February. We were told that he was coming for only a day, just for a few hours.

I’d never met him before that day. He arrived wearing a pair of third-eye glasses, which makes it very tricky to read his face.

We were all very careful about everything that day. The basic feeling was: “Let’s try very hard not to scare him off.”

Emma Wheeler (associate director, Karma, formerly Berg’s assistant) We were asking the guards to kind of hide him, so that nobody would see him and go: “Oh my God, it’s David Hammons.”

Berg He came by himself that first time. We weren’t sure he was really going to show up until he did. There’s a way that he interacts and moves through space that feels very ephemeral, like he’s a puff of smoke. He came, but I didn’t know how to contact him afterward or what to do next.

He seemed interested, but you had the sense that could change quickly. I think Ian White, Charles White’s son, might have organized that first trip for him.

Russell Salmon (director, public programs and events, Hauser & Wirth) I kind of remember Stacen not wanting to say out loud that there was going to be a Hammons show, for fear of jinxing it or cursing it. It was like Macbeth. Don’t say the name. It had that Scottish play vibe.

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Wheeler Ian White is close to David, and at a certain point it became clear that he was the person to talk to if you wanted to get a message to David. There was so much mystery at first—we didn’t know if David had a phone, how long he was staying, how to contact him or when he would show up. It turned out he was staying in Venice, which is far from the gallery, but David has a deep history there. He wanted to be near the artists on the boardwalk; he would walk down the strip everyday to observe what they were making.

C. Ian White (artist and son of Los Angeles artist and teacher Charles White) My first memories of David with my father are from when I was very young. My father, David and Timothy Washington were in a three-person show called “Three Graphic Artists” at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1971. David

tells a great story about that show, maybe his first institutional show in L.A. He was hitchhiking to the museum, I think up La Brea, and no one would pick him up.

All these cars just going past him. And when he finally gets to the opening, in the galleries, he sees a bunch of the same people who passed him up on the road, and they realize he’s one of the artists.

Timothy Washington (artist) When David and I met each other, I didn’t know he was an artist. We both had jobs as custodians at the L.A. Department of Water and Power. I had no need to for the job because right out of high school I had won a four-year scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute. But my mother worked for the department, and I wanted extra money to buy art materials, so I took it. We worked in the big, beautiful new building downtown. I liked David, and what we’d do is finish our shifts in a

hurry, and then we’d meet in the drafting department rooms, and we’d draw together all night. When David found out that I went to Chouinard, he started showing up there. He’d just walk in and sit down in the classroom and start drawing from the models like everybody else, even though he wasn’t enrolled. One of the beautiful things about Chouinard is that they’d let you do that. If you wanted to be an artist, you were pretty much always welcomed.

Berg When David came to visit the gallery that first time, he didn’t talk very much.

It was hard to tell what he wanted. He was just observing and walking through the space. I was pointing out everything that I thought might be interesting or relevant to him, but also just waiting for him to react. And then he said, “I’ll come back tomorrow.” And that’s the part that really stuck with me, because he wasn’t supposed to be there more than one day.

But he ended up staying in L.A. for four days and coming to the gallery every day, usually just sitting on some benches we had along a wall, watching people come and go. He was always carrying a book that was very important to him, A Time for New Dreams by Ben Okri. Sometimes, I’d sit with him, and he'd have me read a passage from it. I asked him, “What are you looking at while you’re sitting here?”

And he said, “I’m trying to figure out what kind of medicine these people need.”

White In early 2019, I was co-curator of a show at the old Otis Art Institute campus (now

Charles White Elementary School), where David—who was never officially enrolled, by the way—studied under my father in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. The show, “Life Model: Charles White and His Students,” had work by a lot of people who were in my father’s classes, like Kerry James Marshall, Ulysses Jenkins, Judithe Hernández, Suzanne Jackson and Kent Twitchell. I put a really early print David made at Otis in the show. David actually came to the opening, which is usually not his kind of thing. But he came, and we went to dinner, and after dinner, really late, like 12:30 in the morning, he says, “Let’s go look at the Hauser & Wirth space.” I said, “Now?” But he wanted to. So they open it up for us in middle of the night and we wander around. And either that night or the next night, we just go driving around, looking at streets around the gallery, Skid Row, all over downtown. Because a show for David is not just object-driven. He’s thinking about the space, he’s thinking about how new and existing works will interact, about how the work sits in the space, about whatever is happening around the gallery, out on the streets.

He calls himself an urban archaeologist, something to that effect. So a lot of the time when you’re with him, you just wander around for hours. You’re looking for oddities and identifiers of whatever community or culture—or supposed culture—is evolving around you. He’s great at keying into that shit. He’s got a gift. I’ve seen a lot of people try to do it, but David’s different. He sees things that are easily overlooked. Things that, if you bring them to light, give you a different understanding of the world around you.

Hammons and Alex Bien-Aime working on tent installation

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Payot I got the sense early on that this was a show that was important to him because of L.A., because he had come of age there and hadn’t had a big show there in almost half a century. I don’t think he cared so much about the judgment of the art world, of what the general art world would think of it. It seemed to be much more about doing something for his friends and his peers in the city, about having the freedom to build a show into a kind of ultimate sculpture itself. It was never going to operate like a conventional exhibition. There was no checklist or price list. There were no dates and very few labels on works, except the work of others that he included in the show, like Agnes Martin, Jack Whitten and Dan Concholar.

The commercial side of the show was very limited and came very late. It would have been OK with us if it had never happened.

Most of the work was not for sale and came straight from David’s collection and went back to New York after it was over.

Maisey Cox (former senior artist liaison, Hauser & Wirth) As we got closer to the exhibition, David would continue to request certain objects including a giant red ball, a freezer, a rack of black clothing. The first time I met David, we looked at the book Going into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa, which depicts the Ghanaian burial process and these sculptural coffins that are made outside of Accra. The coffins shown in the book include cars, ships, animals, airplanes. They are meant to represent the profession or interest of the person who died. Shortly after his visit, David requested that we source one of these fantasy coffins in the shape of a rooster. Coincidentally, I happened to

Berg A lot of the install felt spontaneous—like an improvisation. And at a certain point we began to understand that Ornette Coleman was becoming the presiding spirit of the show. At first, David said he wanted to include a few of Ornette’s old suits as objects. Then he asked us to have a documentary dedicated to Coleman playing as part of the show. Ornette Coleman records were always playing as we installed.

Cox At a certain point I think he just decided, “I’m going to have to state outright that the show is dedicated to Ornette Coleman because none of you seem to be picking up on it.”

Rooster-shaped casket created by Ghanaian artist Paa Joe

Photograph of artists at work on the rooster casket

know someone who had just ordered a basketball-shaped coffin for Jonas Wood made by the artist Paa Joe, and I was put in touch. It was a very tight timeline for Paa Joe to produce and ship it from Ghana to L.A., but we made it happen. We weren’t sure what David would do with the rooster, but it soon became apparent that he wanted something that could respond to and comment on the gallery’s courtyard, where chickens live.

asphalt to send to L.A. So I went with Ben Phelps, our head technician, and he and I grabbed shovels and went down into that basement and dug up that specific asphalt, sourced from Harlem, and put it in contractor bags and shipped it out in C-bins. In the show, it was mounded on the floor with two of his big, framed basketball drawings rested on top of it.

Ephraim Puusemp (senior art handler and technician, Hauser & Wirth) We were told he wanted the rooster in the garden, and we placed it there, but he wasn’t happy with it. He didn’t know what he wanted to make it feel complete. And then one day he told me, “It’s a chicken. It needs a coop. Build a fence around it.” So we got wood and chicken wire and built a fence.

Berg I think he was waiting for some constraints to be put on him. And if we just kept saying yes, then there was nothing to fight against. Our approach was: “We’ll do anything you want. If you want that space, you can have that space. You want all the spaces? You want the courtyard? You can have it.” I mean, he also carried around a book titled Tell Them I Said No, by Martin Herbert, about great artistic refusals.

Bien-Aime One thing he wanted for the show was some asphalt chunks. But it couldn’t be just any asphalt. David has an old studio in Harlem in a storefront space, and he asked us to go there and go down into the basement and shovel out some

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White Something you need to understand about that asphalt is that it’s not just asphalt.

It’s the court. It’s the surface where basketball is played on the street in New York, in cities. David has a fascination with things like that, with the surface of the city. One time years ago, I was in New York with David and John Outterbridge.

We were going around the city and David was giving us tours of some places. And downtown, near Cooper Union, David was like, “OK. I want to show you guys something.” And he says to me, “Go into that Duane Reade pharmacy over there and get me a toothbrush.” I was thinking, “What the hell does he need a toothbrush for right now?” But I parked the car and bought one and then we walked over to a little hole in the sidewalk and he’s like, “Give me the toothbrush. I’m the curator of this project.” He takes the toothbrush and cleans leaves and trash and gunk from around the hole and has us get on our hands and knees and look down into the hole and there’s a crazy sculpture down there that looks like a miniature city.

Someone else had done it—who knows who—but somehow David had become became privy to it. He had appointed himself the caretaker of it.

Autumn Beck (freelance art registrar and consultant, formerly head registrar, Hauser & Wirth) The Ornette Coleman concept of “harmolodics” and harmolodic thinking was a huge part of what it felt like David was trying to do with the show, or at least it seemed that way to me. And music overall was such a big part of the experience of working with David during the install.

Denardo Coleman (jazz drummer and son of Ornette Coleman) I don’t know quite how far David and my father went back. The first time I remember meeting David was when we had a party for my father at a good friend's house in Harlem, in one of the brownstones on Strivers’ Row. David and I reconnected in 2017 when we had an Ornette festival at Lincoln Center, which he came to. We have a mutual friend, the documentary filmmaker Manthia Diawara, and at some point Manthia contacted me and said David was going to be having an exhibition and wanted to dedicate it to Ornette and wanted to come by and talk.

There was a lot that my father and David have in common, in part both of them going to Los Angeles as young men—as opposed to going to New York. David came from Illinois, and my father from Texas. They had their own energy going on out in Los Angeles, and more space to create their own thing. David came to see me a few times here in New York, and I went to visit him in his studio. It was a long process. We got to know each other and talked about a lot of things. What my father did creatively and where he was at philosophically, it just seemed like he and David aligned. In jazz, when you’re coming up, you have a soloist and they’re soloing off of a kind of determined harmonic map.

But my father was asking: “Is the map more important or the solo?” And then

finally got it exactly where David wanted it. He was really happy and he quoted a lyric from a song: “Knock and it shall be opened / seek and you shall find / that wisdom is found in the simplest places / in the nick of time.” And I knew the line because I like reggae and we had talked a lot about both of us listening to it. That line was from Bunny Wailer’s Blackheart Man. David had this really incredible way of expressing his satisfaction with something when he got it right. He would just be like, “Phew.” Like it was lucky, like it might not have happened.

Cox In those moments, there was always a little grin.

View of a work in the 2019 show

he decided: “Let me figure out how I can just invent a map as I’m going.” And that became his thing. It’s why his music still sounds so fresh with ideas. Because for him, it’s just idea after idea.

Puusemp Installing, we were listening to a lot of Coleman, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Coltrane, and also to reggae and African music. There was a really great moment that resonated with me. We were trying to place a key piece in the gallery and

Wheeler Sometimes if we were on a tight deadline and behind schedule, he’d just say, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be OK.” There was a kind of flow mentality that he had, but the flow could also be disrupted. If he met someone he didn’t like and ended up having to talk to them, he’d have to go lie down afterward, have a glass of water. It would wear him out. He’d use the thirdeye glasses as a kind of protective device.

He’d wear them when he didn’t want to talk to someone.

Beck If you were overthinking something

or stressing out too much, he would say, “The best tailor makes the fewest cuts.” And if you got too excited about something or thought something was too funny, he’d say, “OK, alright. Bring it down a little.” It almost feels like part of the install was him coming out to educate us.

The one memory that sticks with me is a few of us going on a field trip one night to Timothy Washington’s house and studio in Leimert Park. The whole house is like a sculpture—there are objects and work everywhere. Earlier that day, David had asked me to bring in some things from home for the exhibition. I had a bunch of small bells at home that I brought to the gallery, and David put them in his pocket.

And then we get to Timothy’s, and there was a huge sculpture he had made that looked like it was part horse and part giraffe. Like a lot of Timothy’s sculptures, there were bells and other sound-making objects on it. That night, Timothy starts to play the sculpture for us and then David takes the bells out of his pocket and starts to ring them. Timothy’s like, “Who was ringing those bells?” We pointed at David. Timothy goes, “Let me see them.”

And then he said, “Wow, I’m so excited.”

David said, “I brought them for you.” And Timothy took them and there was one part of the sculpture that still looked unfinished, a hole near the midsection and he put them inside and said: “These are the bells for this hole.” Unbelievable stuff like that happened all the time.

Washington David and I have always found bizarre little things, objects and pieces, and given them back and forth to each other as gifts. That piece, Futuristic Animal, was something I worked on for many years. It has bells, rattles, a bunch of noise-making elements accessible. Each time I play it, I’m able to play it better and better. I’m sure that when Hendrix first picked up a guitar, he didn’t pick it up and play it behind his back and all that kind of stuff. I’m learning to play this sculpture like a guitar and I’m getting better at it.

Objects have always called to me, from different parts of the earth. Everything is alive, to me, in some degree, and if you bring certain objects together you have more power in your work. David and I both do that. On that particular night, he gave me his bells and I put them inside the stomach of the animal, so they could be ingested. They needed to be ingested.

Detail of Untitled (Basketball Drawing), 2014. Charcoal and dirt on paper with asphalt, 134 x 46 x 3 1/4 in.

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Berg Something that really stood out to me as David was planning the show was how carefully he designed the space.

oral history

He planned exactly how he wanted the different spaces in the gallery to work and how people would experience them. He installed a lot of walls, which he used to move you through the space in a particular way. He wanted to create intimate experiences with lots of artworks, but also to set up really complex angles and sight lines. People moved through the galleries in a way that allowed them to see things from many different perspectives. Then the courtyard really came into his thinking, and he said that it had to be part of the show.

Cox At one point, didn’t he say that he just wanted ice out there—a massive block of ice in the middle of the courtyard that would melt during the run of the show?

Berg He did, and we had to try to figure out how much water that would create and whether it would flood the galleries. But then, pretty quickly, he seemed to settle on the idea of covering the courtyard in tents, a reference to Skid Row. That was something we had to discuss with Iwan and Marc. We had to ask ourselves: “Is this OK? How are we going to contextualize this? How will it be received in a big gallery like this, so close to Skid Row?” Again, it was a moment of David challenging us, as if asking, “Are you going to say no to this?”

I think the slogan he put on the tents— “This could be u and u”—went a long way toward making it clear what he was trying to say about the precariousness of stability in everyone’s life.

Elizabeth Portanova (director, marketing and events, Hauser & Wirth) During the press preview, it was pouring rain and here were all these people taking pictures of a field of tents, and it was a very stark, weird scene. The feeling of everyone looking at the tents that day seemed reverential, almost kind of sad.

It seemed like the reaction was really about the work and about what was happening in the city, in L.A. It was pretty powerful for me.

Wheeler Before you entered the building, you encountered “Black Lives Matter” permanently carved into the exterior landscaping rocks. David was

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Top: Hammons with his work at the exhibition “Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971 Bottom: Portrait of jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, 1990

on site with the inscription “Black Lives Matter.” They sent a simple graphic and we went through different fonts and layouts. First I did a test carving, to make sure I knew how to work with the kind of stone it would be. It’s kind of funny. I did a little piece of Morse code, just to show them what the engraving would look like on that kind of rock. It’s still out there somewhere—dot dash dot, on a little rock in the garden. Then I did a sample with the real inscription and met with David a few times. He told me he wanted me to do a live carving during the opening. I actually did it in a suit, which I suggested to David.

I thought of it as a performative action, an action of service. And he liked that idea. I probably should have had a briefcase with my chisels in it, too. Getting down on your knees in the dirt in a garden and doing that—I mean, I do it all the time, because it’s my craft, but this felt like a different kind of thing. It felt good. And I love the idea that these rocks live on as artworks of his and that I was somehow involved.

Patrisse Cullors (artist, activist and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement and Crenshaw Dairy Mart art collective) We went to one of the previews, I think, before the big opening, and I’d never met David and he walked right up to me and said: “I’ve been looking for you.” And then he said, “Come here.” And we walked over to one of the carved rocks, and he said, “Do you want one of these?” Of course I said yes. And it’s right here at the Dairy Mart with us now. We’re its hosts. The whole thing was just beyond. I think it was

Top: Black Lives Matter rock carved by Nathan Hunt for the 2019 exhibition Bottom: Hammons conducting workers during installation

establishing a mood that permeated the entire space, extending beyond the exhibition walls.

was so good not only at his craft but at how he approached the whole process with David.

Berg On one of my visits to David’s studio in Yonkers, I saw that he had rocks with the Black Lives Matter statement carved into them. He sent a couple of those to L.A., but he really wanted to have someone carve it onto our rocks, the existing rocks that we have around the gallery and the courtyard. And we found this guy, Nathan Hunt, this amazing human being, who

Nathan Hunt (artist and owner of Hunt Studios, Los Angeles) I’m not quite sure how they found me. I’m a sculptor and my business is architectural carving and also art fabrication. Rock carving is a kind of rare craft, particularly in L.A. There aren’t many of us, and I guess word of mouth, or the internet, must have led them to my door. The request was to do an engraving

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Patrice Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement

oral history

also a moment when I really realized the impact of the work that we’ve been doing.

For a hero of mine to use this call to action for one of his works and then to gift it back to us—I don’t even know how you express that kind of gratitude. noé olivas (artist and co-founder of Crenshaw Dairy Mart) The rock has become like a cornerstone for us here. It’s also one those things in your life that makes you think. “OK, yeah.

I’m in the right place. Exactly where I’m supposed to be.” It’s just one of those signs. For artists, I think the Hammons show felt like one of those historical landmarks, a thing you’re going to tell your children and grandchildren about, kind of in the way, I’m sure, people of a previous generation talked about the Duchamp retrospective when it came to the Pasadena Museum in 1963.

Wheeler We didn’t know why at first, but before installation began, David insisted we order him a conductor’s wand. We quickly sourced one from a music website, but the moment he received it, he said, ‘No, it’s the wrong weight.’ Understanding the level of attention to detail even within his improvisations, we ordered a more suitable wand. And the conducting of the installation began.

Puusemp He carried the baton throughout the install and exhibition. Numerous times during the install, he was moving through the space with it in his hand, like a conductor.

Salmon The day that the Black Lives Matter rock was scheduled to be installed, there was some kind of corporate brunch in the garden at Manuela [the restaurant located at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles], a bunch of tables of importantlooking people sitting outside right near the courtyard. And when David saw them, he said: “Get the crane. Let’s do the rock now.” So there were all these people moving the rock and David with his conductor’s wand. And all the brunch people were looking over, like, “What the hell is happening here?”

I was just bowled over with joy. I thought a lot about the conductor’s baton. In 2021, in the same courtyard at the gallery, we staged a re-envisioning of David’s famed performance work Global Fax Festival, which he had originally done in Madrid in 2000, a piece dedicated to the composer and conductor Butch Morris.

And I think David’s use of the wand had things to do with both Ornette Coleman

The artist Timothy Washington in his studio with Futuristic Animal

and Butch Morris, who pioneered a style of improvisational musical performance that he called Conduction.

The conductor’s baton just seemed like the perfect tool for David.

Berg We all sort of forgot about it, and then all of a sudden, when works were being installed, the wand would appear.

Wheeler He always had it in his pocket, I swear.

Berg I remember during the placing of the Black Lives Matter rock, there was this very dramatic moment. The rock was so big and heavy, and it needed multiple people to lift it, to get the placement just right. And while all of that was going on, we saw David near the rock, with the wand, conducting the whole procedure.

Cox He leaned over to me and whispered, “Get my picture.” So I documented the whole process. Later he had me print one of the photographs and he placed it in a vitrine with some other photos and objects.

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Silk suit worn by Ornette Coleman, on view in the 2019 exhibition

me that a man named David Hammons had come around and met some folks and had done some good things for some of the people there. So I went to the gallery to see if I could meet him.

For fourteen years, I lived on the street near the gallery, in a cardboard box and later in a tent. I’ve had an apartment now for fifteen years, but I still like to come over here and ask if I can sweep or wash windows or do any other help to earn some money. One afternoon I went in and asked if David Hammons was there and they pointed to him, and I walked straight up to the table and introduced myself. And he talked to me and hugged me and we just kind of spent time together. Sometimes the people that come in to give a show at the gallery, they’re very private. They don’t even like to be around the people that they invited.

But I took the chance to just go in there and meet David Hammons myself, just to see what kind of person he really was. And later he had them take a picture with me, and when I went into the show after it was open, there was the picture of the two of us, taped on the wall! I went to the show a few times and took my time in there walking around. A lot of my dreams were in there, things that I never could accomplish. I saw a lot of my own life in that show, with my naked eye.

Berg I remember at the opening David saw Fannie and took her around with him and told someone to get them glasses of champagne.

what he wanted for lunch. And he said “No, I’m buying lunch. Go tell Manuela.

Get the dining room ready.” It was like twenty of us, on one of the restaurant’s busiest days. And we all sat down and had this long, leisurely, wonderful lunch.

It was really special for all the people on the team who were working with him to be acknowledged that way.

Payot It’s difficult with David to really know how much he enjoys something, or what he enjoys. The day before the opening, we asked him if he would come to the opening in person, something he normally doesn’t do. He’s legendary for not appearing in those situations. He said: “I don’t know.

I’ll think about it.” We told him that if we wanted to be there, we could set aside a private dining room at Manuela where he could stay and receive friends and not have to be out in the crowd. He gave us a whole list of people he wanted us to invite. But then when he arrived, he never went into the private space. He was out in the courtyard all night talking to friends, meeting people, showing people around, being very public. There’s a wonderful picture of him and Betye Saar together that night, holding hands.

Fannie Mayfield (longtime Downtown Los Angeles resident) Some people I know on Skid Row told

Berg Right before the show opened, I remember David saying that the gallery

Views from the 2019 exhibition

Puusemp By a certain point into the installation, I feel like he had kind of picked his people, the people he wanted around him. A group of us just sort of formed, and we were the Hammons people. It was a long install, and there were lots of long days.

There were periods when we had crews here to do certain things, move certain things. We were working through the weekends, and we would try to cater lunch for everyone when we were doing a weekend install. One day I asked David

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shop right off the courtyard bothered him.

It was a store with high-end goods and design objects, and he said the energy bothered him. He talked for a while about turning it into a healing center. As usual, we were open to anything. We were ready to say, “OK, we need to do that.”

But it all kind of settled down into, “The energy is just off, and we need to set it right,” and he asked us to find a psychic healer to do a cleansing of the space.

It was a monthlong process, vetting people, presenting them to him, finding different types of healers. And we finally found a woman who specializes in this kind of thing, cleansing space. We gave her information and history about the buildings, and I was on the phone with her, moving around the spaces here, and she was clearing them for us. She said the basement was particularly dark, that it had some stuck energy.

White Does David believe in things like that?

Let me put it this way. We’ve all seen that conventional wizardry doesn’t work. Otherwise, the world would be different, wouldn’t it? So David likes to try unconventional wizardry.

Bien-Aime Energy was a big thing for him, having the right energy around him. I realized I had to spend time a lot of time with him and with the work to understand it. And fairness was also a big deal. He wanted everyone treated fairly. He knows how big this gallery is and what it can do and how everybody should be treated.

Cox David continued to change things throughout the show. He would come by the gallery and then we would notice that things would be moved or new things would appear, like Kool-Aid packets and crumpled-up dollar bills.

Wheeler We had to keep getting new photography inside the galleries because that would always happen. The show was never stable. With the stuff on the floor, you couldn’t tell what was what. We’d ask each other: “Did some kid drop this stuff?

Did David put it here?” He kept messing with the question of whether something was art or not.

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Nahmias The confusion is part of his work. It’s not like there are no rules. There are rules, but you have work to uncover them. It’s something that you learn while spending time with his work or spending time with him. You gain a deeper understanding of it. It’s certainly not the norm when you’re dealing with artists and artwork that’s incredibly precious. Usually, you don't really want any confusion. But I think he enjoys it.

Puusemp We started making notes about where he dropped the money and telling the guards that it was not supposed to be moved, that it was part of the exhibition. And then David found out, so we had to tell the guards not to stop people from picking up the money. He wanted to see if people were picking up the bills and taking them home. It was a whole thing.

This oral history comprises interviews conducted in person or by phone between December 2023 and May 2024. Responses have been edited for clarity and concision.

"Concerto in Black and Blue," a new presentation of a 2002–03 exhibition by David Hammons, remains on view at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles through June 1.

In May 2025, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release David Hammons, a postexhibition catalogue devoted to the artist's 2019 show at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles. Created entirely under the artist’s direction, the book documents the most expansive exhibition of Hammons's work to date.

Berg The guards told us that some people left their own money, too, like an offering.

The whole show was an evolving blend of activity, like a performance. David was here for a lot of it. And there were people who came back again and again and saw it change.

Puusemp He wanted to be here for the majority of the deinstall as well, which is pretty rare.

Most artists don’t do that, but he was very present for it. I had a sense that he had such a personal connection to the objects in the show that he wanted to see them moving through the world, being installed and also being packed up. He had a camp chair out under a tree in the courtyard. He’d just sit there, reading, watching people, watching things go from the gallery back into the trucks.

Berg David really poured his whole self into this show. It was the closest thing to a retrospective that he’ll probably ever want to do. And I think it was deeply personal for him. None of us will ever forget it.

Contributors Autumn Beck is an art doula and collection manager based in Los Angeles Stacen Berg is a partner and executive director at Hauser & Wirth Alex Bien-Aime is a senior project manager at Hauser & Wirth Collection Services

noé olivas is an artist and a co-founder of Crenshaw Dairy Mart Marc Payot is a president of Hauser & Wirth Elizabeth Portanova is the director of marketing and events at Hauser & Wirth

Ephraim Puusemp is Denardo Coleman is a a senior technician at jazz drummer and son of Hauser & Wirth Los Ornette Coleman Angeles Maisey Cox is a former senior artist liaison at Hauser & Wirth Patrisse Cullors is an artist and abolitionist born and raised in Los Angeles

Russell Salmon is the director of public programs and events at Hauser & Wirth Timothy Washington is a Los Angeles-based artist and spirit-driven creator

Nathan Hunt is an artist and the founder of Hunt Emma Wheeler is an Studios, Los Angeles associate director of Karma Fannie Mayfield is a longtime Downtown C. Ian White is an artist, Los Angeles resident educator and advocate Tamar Nahmias is the director of registration at Hauser & Wirth Collection Services

essay

This is Our Childhood Jonathan Cott on the spirit world of the Lascaux cave

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In the heart of the Lascaux cave, located near the village of Montignac in the department of the Dordogne in southwestern France, is a sanctuary called the Shaft, whose walls are adorned with one of the few narrative scenes in all of Paleolithic art. This approximately 17,000-year-old painting—in plain earth pigments of red and yellow ochres and black manganese and charcoal—depicts a stick-figured, bird-masked man with outflung arms, bird’s-foot-like hands and an erect phallus hovering above a bird poised on an upright staff, a barbed stick beside his feet. The man is falling backward, or is in the throes of an ecstatic trance, or is lying supine, dead, beside an eviscerated bison, a spear piercing its flank, its entrails streaming out, hair raised, tail flipped forward lashing the air, while a rhinoceros, tail turned backward and six black dots issuing

from its anus, nonchalantly strolls away. The Bird Man is the only human figure portrayed in the cave, and one of the few in all of prehistoric Western cave art, and the bird on the stick is the only bird depicted in the cave.

The earliest explanation of cave paintings was that they were simply decorations. Later scholars suggested that the paintings were magical, religious symbols, or had their origins in the idea of clan-totemism.

But why were many of the painted animals shown to be wounded?

Perhaps, it was surmised, the images functioned as a kind of “sympathetic magic,” the representation of an animal being a way of dominating it. But as the French paleontologist Jean Clottes, co-author of the pathbreaking book The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves, said, “Imagine those people coming this far inside

the earth with their flickering grease lamps and torches of pine wood that didn’t cast much light. The place is wet and dank. It’s dangerous. They walked more than a mile. They had to have a very strong reason for coming here. Perhaps they came in order to get as close to the spirits as possible. The cave paintings do not represent real animals that are hunted for food in an actual landscape; rather they are visions drawn from the subterranean world of spirits because of their supernatural powers and ability to help the shamans.”

According to historian of religion Mircea Eliade, shamans are men or women who “journey” in an altered state of consciousness to upper and lower worlds; shamanism is a system of beliefs that includes healing techniques, rituals designed to affect events and the elements, prophecy, witchcraft and the

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possibility of communicating with spirits; and in the shamanic world, boundaries between the animal and the human are permeable and constantly blurring.

To psychologist Stanley Krippner, shamans were “the world’s first diagnosticians, first psychotherapists, first religious functionaries, first magicians, first performing artists and first storytellers,” and trances, which can be produced in various ways, are the means used by shamans to take on their powers. To Joseph Campbell, among others, the figure of the Bird Man of Lascaux was not that of a hunter slain by an animal but, rather, a representation of a prehistoric shaman with his ceremonial birdheaded shaman stick on a tranceinduced journey to other worlds.

But couldn’t one also see this scene as the dream of the Bird Man himself?

Over the years, this painting has been interpreted in a myriad of ways. Dr. Michael Rappenglueck of the University of Munich has even suggested that the Shaft painting is a sky map on which the eyes of the bison, bird man and the bird on his shaman staff represent the three prominent stars Vega, Deneb and Altair, known as the Summer Triangle. He also posited that the cave’s spectacular Hall of Bulls, which has been called “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory,” with its procession of bulls, equines, aurochs, ibexes and a mysterious unicorn-like creature—a spectacle

Georges Bataille referred to as a “dance of the mind”—is a star map of the Pleiades and Taurus. “It’s a map of the prehistoric cosmos,” Rappenglueck proposed. “It was their sky, full of animals and spirit guides.” And although this story is probably apocryphal, one that might be thought of as what Martin Buber called “legendary reality,” Picasso, having visited the cave after World War II, reportedly said to his terrestrial guide, “In 15,000 years, we have invented nothing.”

The cave was discovered one late September afternoon in 1940 when four teenage boys climbed up the side of a hill searching for buried treasure and Marcel Ravidat’s dog, Robot, chasing a rabbit, stumbled into a hole in a thicket. The boys went home, but four days later, Marcel made a makeshift lamp using a cotton wick from an automobile’s oil pump and returned to the site with his three friends. They widened the hole with sticks and Marcel’s large homemade knife, and Marcel squeezed through a small vertical shaft headfirst, landing safely on the floor of the cave. He urged his three friends to join him, and they descended, making their way gingerly through a passageway that turned into a narrow corridor. When Marcel raised his lamp, his friend Jacques Marsal looked up, shouted out to his companions to lift up their eyes, and for the first time in some 17,000 years human beings saw in the faint, almost quivering, light, the Great Black Bull, the Galloping Horse and the Falling Cow in what is now known as the Axial Gallery.

They returned once again the following day, bearing several other lamps and some ropes and, again, it was Marcel who took the lead. After they all slid down, they discovered another hallway which led to the edge of a hole. The other boys held the rope, and after Marcel descended into the fathomless depths, he shouted up to his friends to say he had landed safely. Walking through a short passage and raising his lamp above his head, he found himself

facing a painting that seemed to show the figure of a bird-headed man, lying on his back, with a speared bison hovering over him.

It might seem surprising that it is children who have made momentous discoveries in prehistoric caves. In 1879, the archeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, accompanied by his eight-year-old daughter Maria, was exploring the cave of Altamira in Santander, Spain. Absorbed in the laborious process of sifting through the fint-filled clay layers on the floor of the Hall of the Bison, he failed to notice, unlike his inquisitive daughter, that there were a large number of animals painted on the ceiling. “Look, Daddy, bulls!” was what Maria supposedly exclaimed to her incredulous father who, on his own, would never have discovered the haunting assembly of sixteen bison—the models, in part, for Picasso’s Guernica—rendered so magnificently in red ochre and black manganese some 15,000 years ago.

As Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi once said: “Children see everything in nothing, adults nothing in everything.”

On July 14, 1948, the Lascaux cave complex was opened to the public, but in 1963 it was closed down because the contamination brought in on visitors’ shoes and the condensation caused by thousands of tourists was affecting the paintings, allowing algae, lichens and crystals to grow on the walls and speed up the process of calcite deposits. However, the demand to visit the cave was so great that in the early 1970s, painters, sculptors and their assistants, working with sketchbook drawings and threedimensional computer maps, constructed a lifelike recreation of the original two halls—the stupendous frieze in the Hall of Bulls and the smaller Axial Gallery.

In 2016, another replica of the cave reconstituted the original one almost in its entirety. Called Lascaux IV, it was developed by means of the most advanced 3D-printing

I remember becoming transfixed by the sight of ancient handprints … and of ancient footprints, heel marks of barefoot children … deeply imprinted in the mud and preserved in the hard surfaces of frozen time. Noticing the wrinkled patterns of those small feet, I thought: “This is my childhood.”

And then: “This is our childhood—the childhood of the human race.”

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techniques, laser imaging and digital photography technology. Painted and engraved murals and drawings are reproduced to the millimeter; sounds are muffled and lights flicker just as the animal-fat lamps of Paleolithic times did. (What was called Lascaux III was not a replica but rather a traveling exhibition, created in 2010, with five fully movable facsimiles that have been shown in thirteen countries.)

Lascaux II is not a real cave, and Lascaux IV is still a facsimile.

I never had the opportunity to visit the original Lascaux cave, but I wanted to enter and experience an original prehistoric one, so in 1987, I visited the even older cave of Pech Merle in the Lot Valley of southwestern France—not far from the Dordogne—most of whose paintings date from 16,000 to 29,000 B.C. The cave was discovered in 1922 and is still open to the public. I was led down into the depths by the French film director Louis Malle and his then-seven-year-old daughter, who boldly led the way. Noticing that I was edging myself extremely slowly and anxiously down the

narrow stairway, whose view of the cavern below was giving me a sudden and severe case of claustrophobia, she blurted out: “If I can do this, so can you!” Louis warned me that I shouldn’t convey any sense of anxiety to his daughter, and said: “You’re going down!”

I will always be grateful to him and his daughter for shaming me into entering, flashlight in hand, a pale ivory sanctuary where, half in trance, I saw white stalactites hanging from the ceilings and golden stalagmites rising from the ground. As I listened to an eerie underworld silence punctuated by the dripping pings of water, I had the uncanny sensation that the animals pictured on the cave walls—floating deer, prancing horses, retreating bison, charging bulls—were actually moving and shimmering in the flickering, shadowy light.

That day at Pech Merle, I remember becoming transfixed by the sight of ancient handprints— originally stamped or airbrushed, using the mouth to blow pigment, on the walls—and of ancient footprints, heel marks of barefoot children,

probably not much older than my friend’s daughter, deeply imprinted in the mud and preserved in the hard surfaces of frozen time. Noticing the wrinkled patterns of those small feet, I thought: “This is my childhood.”

And then: “This is our childhood— the childhood of the human race.”

In his fascinating book The Nature of the Paleolithic the zoologist and paleobiologist R. Dale Guthrie proposes that some of the graffiti adorning cave walls might have been created by paleoadolescents. “I am not concluding,” he explains, “that all Paleolithic art is children’s art, only that works by young people constitute both a disproportionate and largely unrecognized fraction of preserved Paleolithic art.”

Entering an Upper Paleolithic cave today, we rediscover the childhood of our dreams, and these dreams begin in the underworld of the psyche. As Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers: “Whatever the inward darkness may have been to which the shamans of those caves descended in their trances, the same must lie within ourselves, nightly visited in sleep,” and he added: “The caves are dangerous and absolutely dark. And the pictures on the rocky walls are never at the entrances but begin where the light of day is lost and unfold, then, deep within.

The painted animals, living there forever in that darkness beyond the tick of time, are the germinal, deathless herds of the cosmic night, from which zone those on earth—which appear and disappear in continuous renewal—proceed, and back to which they return.” As Jean Clottes has suggested: “I think that prehistoric people came down to the caves to get into a different world, the spirit world. Perhaps the wall of the cave was a veil between themselves and another reality.” But as Hans Peter Duerr observed in his book Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundaries between Wilderness and Civilization: “[There] is not the experience of another reality, but rather the experience of another part of the reality.”

The outer shell of the replica of the cave, Lascaux II, during construction in the 1970s

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As I listened to an eerie underworld silence punctuated by the dripping pings of water, I had the uncanny sensation that the animals pictured on the cave walls . . . were actually moving.

books

New and forthcoming books

Twist Colum McCann (Random House)

The Honditsch Cross Ingeborg Bachmann (New Directions)

Six Sermons for Bob Dylan Lucy Sante (Tenement Press)

Colum McCann has long been interested in the idea of convergence. His 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, follows eleven seemingly unrelated people in 1970s New York whose lives are intertwined in wondrous and tragic ways.

His eighth novel, Twist, propels the idea of connection into a mesmerizing, presentday nautical tale. Anthony Fennell, a fortyeight-year-old Irish writer drifting into obscurity, accepts a journalistic assignment in Cape Town. A fiber-optic cable along the ocean floor has ruptured, leaving banks, hospitals, businesses and residents in West Africa without internet. Fennell joins the crew of a repair vessel to report on the mission and its mysterious leader, John Conway.

Fennell and Conway both battle the undertow of alcohol and family estrangement. Fennell’s narration charts the men’s physical and mental descent, as well as Fennell’s desire to repair himself.

Conway, an obsessive freediver, boasts that his heart rate can drop to ten beats a minute underwater. McCann’s storytelling rhythm likewise shifts deftly from slow pulse to rapid pounding; in passages of unflinching honesty, he tells a story as meditative and harrowing as the ocean itself.

—Alexandra Vargo

On one of my shelves is a university library copy of Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971). When a friend and favorite poet of mine (her words are like hats to reach into for rabbits) told me it was her favorite, I found it in the stacks and never returned it. I fell in love with Bachmann’s use of language from the novel’s first lines (a “pathological agitation” with the word “today”), the way she lifted words from their utility and gave them a way out, a subtler body to “word” in. It’s the kind of writing that changes the way you want to read. When I saw that New Directions was publishing a translation of a novella she wrote when she was only eighteen, I was curious to read it, in part to understand the development of her writing and her mind. The Honditsch Cross, set in her native Austria in 1813, takes up the life of a young theology student facing war while “everything . . . shouted: life!” While the book’s linguistic approach is more immediate, my joy in reading it lay in recognizing the author, still: in her intelligence and patient intensity and her take on intimacy, resistance and the female experience within boundaryless war.

—Jana Horn

Lucy Sante has been one of my favorite writers ever since I picked up Low Life, her classic history of the New York demimonde, published in 1991, the year I moved to the city. Little did I know that in the ensuing years, as she was turning out other great books, Sante was also a secret copywriter for Bob Dylan, taking on assignments as varied as speeches, press kits and a Buick commercial. (A Buick commercial!) Then in 2016 she received a truly Dylanesque request: a series of sermons to accompany a film focused on Dylan’s gospel years, 1979 and 1980, during his brief conversion to born-again Christianity. Sante, no churchgoer she, gulped. But she signed on and we’re all sanctified as a result. Inspired by sermons recorded in Black churches in the 1920s and 1930s, Sante’s are soul poems for 21st-century uncertainty. On the topic of prudence, she evangelizes with holy sight: “… sometimes fools succeed. They go over the falls and come back alive. When that happens, we forget that they are fools and call them heroes.”

—Randy Kennedy

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From Hauser & Wirth Publishers

In The Studio: Jack Whitten

Francis Picabia: Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning

David Hammons

More than an introduction to Jack Whitten, In the Studio takes us on a granular, subjective journey through six decades of his life and work. Yinka Elujoba’s essay—neither exclusively biographical nor exhibition-based, and accompanied by archival studio shots, installation views and portraits—cleverly informs and entertains, providing glimpses into the places Whitten studied, the people he met, the music he listened to and the convictions he formed about the act of painting.

“I just want a slab of paint,” the artist once said.

We come to understand him through the ways in which his studio life intertwined with his daily life—his navigation of macho abstract painting in the 1960s, his work in wood, the sculpture he made in Greece, his love of jazz and its influences on his thinking, from art to race, gender and survival itself.—Debbie Hillyerd

Francis Picabia was outlived by many of his fellow avant-gardists: Duchamp, Arp, Tzara and Picasso, whose lives stretched into the newly coherent art world of the 1960s.

Picabia, by contrast and by virtue of being the first major modernist to pass away in the postwar fragmentation of the early 1950s, died before careful framing could situate his legacy. The effect was a strange disjuncture: Picabia’s late career, which lasted until shortly before his death in 1953, remained terra nova. This “Christopher Columbus of art”—as Arp termed Picabia—had arrived somewhere, but the where and what of this new world remained unclear.

Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning, a timely survey of the artist’s late work and an accompaniment to two forthcoming exhibitions this spring, helps establish some coordinates. The book opens with a gorgeous facsimile of “Album Picabia,” Olga Mohler Picabia’s scrapbook turned artist’s archive, as well as new writing by Arnauld Pierre and Candace Clements. As if mirroring the “Album Picabia,” Pierre gives rich texture to the artistic milieu of the postwar period, placing Picabia in relation to Informel artists of the late 1940s.

Clements goes further, offering a reading of the artist’s so-called repaints—a necessary and overdue intervention, and a model for paths into Picabia’s yet underexplored world.—Jonathan Odden

David Hammons’s ascent to the pinnacle of the contemporary art world over the past three decades has coincided with his gradual absenting of himself from that world. “The less I do, the more of an artist I am,” he once said slyly. You might not guess this by looking at a shelf of books devoted to his work—more than twenty by my count and another thirty-some in which he plays a major role. But he’s had little involvement in many of these, and indeed some seem to have been published over his objections. This new volume, documenting his vast 2019 exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, would be momentous if only for the fact that Hammons oversaw it. But it’s a real standout for another reason: Like the show itself, the book functions as a covert performance. During the exhibition’s run, Hammons unexpectedly spent considerable time in Los Angeles making subtle, ongoing changes to the look and feel of the galleries. This book plays conceptual adjunct to that evanescent presence, a show in its own right.—Randy Kennedy

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Christoph Schifferli (1950–2024)

Christoph Schifferli, the internationally admired Zurich-based book collector, seemed to come by bibliophilia almost genetically. His father, Peter, at the age of only twenty-three, founded Arche Verlag, the prominent Swiss literary publishing house that went on to publish translations of William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein and to acquire the German-language rights to The Little Prince. Schifferli’s son, Teo, has continued in the family book tradition as a highly regarded graphic designer.

Schifferli found his true vocation as a collector and scholar of art books in the 1980s after studying sinology and economic history in Paris. He began with photography books and then switched to artists’ books of the 1960s and ‘70s. At its peak, his collection encompassed nearly 20,000 volumes, many of which not only crowded the shelves of his sunny Zurich apartment but climbed the stairs as well.

In 2011 in New York, the Swiss Institute organized “Books on Books,” a show about his collecting and his philosophy of the art book “as memory

or documentation, as an image of itself, and as a representation of artwork.” The show included publications—which one was allowed, crucially, to touch—by great book-making artists including, to name just a few, Darren Bader, Maria Eichhorn, Wade Guyton, Sherrie Levine, Nick Mauss, Rosalind Nashashibi, Allen Ruppersberg and Oscar Tuazon.

In Zurich in 2017, Schifferli set up ARCHIV, a space he described with characteristic good humor as “the playground of a few addicted collectors.”

The space became a vector for his infectious enthusiasms, many of which were vividly evoked at a memorial service for Schifferli this past December in Zurich. One speaker, Austrian historian and writer Valentin Groebner, has kindly allowed us to publish a portion of his eulogy: I got to know Christoph in Zurich twenty years ago and still today I am fascinated by how much he lived in a world that was full of surprising, beautiful things.

He was this world, and this is also how he spoke about it—as abundance.

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There are people who always have too little, who carry within themselves their lack or their neediness and who become collectors for that reason. Christoph was the complete opposite: As soon as he started talking, there was suddenly enough of everything; he found beautiful things everywhere, or they found him. That’s why he became a collector: He was this abundance, an abundance of new and surprising possibilities, and it didn’t matter whether he was talking about books, photography, digital technology, Japanese museums and hot baths, the wondrous world of Chinese written characters, cool 1970s paperbacks or the densely forested mountains of subtropical Taiwan.

All stories about collecting are love stories: The collector is in love, and when you are in love, you are enthusiastic. Beauty is everywhere.

Christoph’s world is still there: the abundance, the books and the pictures, the things that don’t seem so special at first glance but that carry within them the secret of the beautiful, of enchantment.

“The law must be enforced and strengthened in order to protect what we have always taken for granted: the creatures, plants, and people on which the future of the planet relies. I am delighted to be supporting ClientEarth in all its tenacious, vital work.”

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fiction

RUMINATIONS

Writings from 2020–22

By Lynne Tillman

Film still from The Refusal of Time, 2012. 5-channel video installation, William Kentridge with Philip Miller, Catherine Meyburgh, Dada Masilo and Peter Galison

Twilight, Cat Basie raced out of the yard—the gate hadn’t been shut—pursuing a small black cat, and, for over an hour, he tormented us, hiding in fat bushes at the edge of the forest, wouldn’t return and, when at last he did, walking home casually, entering the yard, Basie flopped down on the cool grass, cats don’t care. *

I set three echinacea plants into the soil, orange, red, yellow, escaping my futility, and, after an hour of gardening, I looked at the plants and thought they looked really happy, anthropomorphizing plants, deciding they were happy struck me as hilarious, but still I felt I had accomplished something, which I rarely feel, and this must be why people love gardening. *

No rude awakenings over three days except the realization, or fact, that I’ve sent apologies to three people whom I hurt years ago, who will never forgive me, yet I did it, but nothing changes that ugliness for which I had my reasons though I was wrong, so I have been wondering about the place of human beings in the natural world, so-called, and that people are not considered part of Nature, and some would argue we have none in us, but since Homo sapiens descended from apes and other creatures, also came from the ocean onto land i

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(someone told me that’s why people like salty chips), I’m wondering about our exclusion from it, but humans named Nature, maybe to be separate from it, so as to propose themselves better than animals, and is it because I can apologize, though I know people who exist outside the reality of others’ reality, in worlds of their own, and they do not feel they owe anyone an apology, nothing touches them, they forget quickly, and is that natural or unnatural to human beings, and how can I avoid forgetting in the future. *

The anniversary of my father’s death, and naturally or not I’m thinking about his loss, because I loved him, and also thinking about when I love an object very much, like a ring I had fashioned from a 14-karat gold crown once in my mouth, placed there by a London dentist — Mr. Price — I often lose it, and I remember vividly that ring and its loss, remember exactly how it happened, when, after having had three glasses of red wine at my favorite café, I wanted a massage, walked toward the Chinese parlor I liked, and, as I was walking took off a necklace, which one I don’t remember, then my precious ring, knowing that it was tricky to do that while walking, knowing that I shouldn’t, and still did it, when halfway down the block, I realized I didn’t have my ring and ran back to the place I took it off, but it was already gone, and searched and searched, then went for the massage, disconsolate, feeling like an idiot, which I was, and now think often about that brief moment in time, wondering if I had loved the ring too much and threw it away, unconsciously, because I didn’t think I should love it, because I object to American materialism, though that’s too rational, and sometimes I hope to recall losses I don’t remember, because they may have been important, since over the years many things I loved have disappeared. *

It’s time to be more honest in friendships, I tell myself, to say what I feel and think, since usually I don’t when people say harsh things to me, in anger, and it’s also not the time because everyone feels threatened or suspicious, but hope to stay honest in writing, even though being honest in writing is complicated by an author’s ego; subject matter; style, and what I mean by this kind of honesty is writing not only to write and by not protecting yourself as the writer, though that’s hard to explain except I’d suggest necessity functions profoundly in style and content in work, say, by Denis Johnson, Natalia Ginzburg, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Kafka, and more, whose material was essential to them, essential to write, not manufactured only to write a book, and I suppose I’m being harsh in harsh times, but honest and frank for what it’s worth, though probably not worthy, so little is. *

Reading about squirrels, I learned there are 200 species, they don’t live in groups except sometimes when it’s very cold, have one or two pregnancies a year, gestation of 22–46 weeks, and, after two months or so, their babies, called kittens, leave the nest, never see their mother again, so then I considered us humans, who have simple and complex needs, mostly live indoors, don’t gather ii

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in groups because of the cold, except when there’s no electricity and a neighbor has a generator, because humans are, to a degree, flexible, especially when it’s in their self-interest, have varieties of living arrangements, single, in couples, extended families, as roommates, sharing or not sharing food, which acknowledges the shift in families after the second women’s movement, though shade is still thrown at single people, especially females, even with so much divorce, so the nuclear family holds sway, reinforced in all media, especially Christmas movies, when the desire to get home overwhelms everyone, in which the family always comes first, though people complain incessantly about their families who damage them, so it should be plain by now that, for one, the capacity to love and be loved is hindered by early experiences in families, and that being related by blood is overrated. *

John Lewis has died, what a terrible summer, no relief in sight. *

I once was sure I owned a painting by Giorgio Morandi, somehow it had come into my possession, maybe given or even stolen when I lived those seven years in Europe, but I’d misplaced it, moving around so much, so I believed the Morandi must be somewhere and was positive that, one day, when I sorted through all my stuff, I’d find it tucked away; it was my secret, I’d think if only I could find it, it must be somewhere, and though I might tell myself the Morandi had only appeared in a particularly vivid dream, or it was a fantasy, sometimes I see the painting, four bottles of different shapes, grays and browns, though now it’s rolled up, not in a tube, so I worry it’s been damaged, and have other subterranean thoughts of things that must be somewhere, that don’t surface, or are more like torn pictures, a past I can’t put together. *

Blue jays go shopping in their manner, not like people, and some people like shopping, I dislike it, comparing this with that, wanting to find some thing that will... what? Make them feel better about themselves, and when I put out a row of peanuts on a ledge, a blue jay will take one in its mouth and seem to judge it, hop to the next, put the next nut in its mouth, testing it, then hops to all the peanuts, doing the same until the bird makes a decision and hops back to the one it liked best, and I’m supposing it’s the weight of the nut that determines choice, but I don’t know, though now I know that the bird is discerning, as squirrels are, also, but maybe they are like people, because when people shop for fruit, say, they hold an orange in the hand and weigh it, since smart fruit shoppers have learned that a thick skin can mean scant fruit, and I think this may be a metaphor. *

Is facing reality a kind of progress? Because, for that I’m told, I have to get dressed. * 96

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It’s the day that will live in infamy, though it doesn’t seem to be living, there’s too much infamy around, but it garnered a brief mention on the news, and don’t know why inattention to the past and grave historical events bothers me, though maybe it intimates, since I’m not of historical importance, most everyone I know is not, what will come, that we will all be forgotten sooner than later, that amnesia about the past allows future lives to live without conscience, because what is conscience without memory, is it possible. *

The post office is never crowded, just four clerks on rotation, usually only one behind the glass, but someone must have complained because the postal workers are wearing masks, I hadn’t said anything, didn’t want to cause trouble, I value mail and like going to the post office, especially when there are no long lines, though many friends hate having to mail a letter, and I don’t get it, and hate writing checks, but on this day I could see that one of the two women postal clerks was harried, so I said, It must be hard working now, then she looked at me and said, It is, I’m so tired when I get home, I just want to sleep, and I worry about getting it, so I said, I’m sure you do, you work with the public, then she said, I’ve never mentioned that to anyone before, it makes me feel better to say it, and I said, I’m glad, then I wondered why she had never mentioned it to anyone before, and still do. *

Last summer, I wrote her that I was sorry for what had happened many years before, what I said or didn’t say over lunch — everyone suddenly discovered they had been abused, everyone — and now I have found out she died a little while ago, but in her last years suffered from Alzheimer’s, was not herself, so even if she had been willing to forgive me, she probably couldn’t have, might not have remembered the incident or me, might not have received my apology, and I will always regret my brash incredulousness; this past quietly tumultuous year with its enforced changes may be teaching me something, though I’m not sure what or if it is, and when this is all over, which is what we say, though I’m never sure of what will be over, or returned to me, when it’s all over. . . . but it’s Valentine’s Day again, and I’d like to love you. *

I hope to get out of bed earlier, do the writing I’ve agreed to do, but don’t know if I’ll succeed, so I’m wondering how others handle this attenuation of regular life as it’s often called, though the irregular is also regular, and time can feel like a long, narrow tunnel — days and nights unbroken and repetitive—and though there is as much as time as there was, and experientially relative, now it is also negligible. *

March marches in like a lion, wind gusting, a dark gray sky appears furious, the air wet and cold, and that phrase has been embedded in memory since I was a child, and what else has been, the Ides of March, which I do beware, iv

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thinking about Julius Caesar and Oedipus and others who have been warned to beware something in the future, not just death, but also death, and most beliefs contain elements of irrationality, although to believe that something can or will kill you, so there is a need to take care, to take precautions, may be your only defense against Thanatos who will come when it wants, anyway. *

It’s raining, it will rain all day, and the blue jays are particularly agitated, flying around, sitting on wet, black branches of the big tree in the yard, also flying onto the small balcony outside the bedroom where I’m writing, still on the bed, reluctant to start the day, though the day has started without me, time being its own god, and I’m writing and watching blue jays swoop for peanuts, and one has performed something unusual, at least I’ve never seen it done; because it’s raining hard, instead of placing peanuts on the railing as I usually do, I am throwing them onto the floor of the balcony, and just now a blue jay flew onto the railing, saw there were no peanuts on it, then swooped down to the floor, chose a peanut, after doing a bit of shopping, weighing two in his beak, selecting one, then flew to the railing and set that peanut on it, and flew away, which was generous and thoughtful, leaving it for another bird to eat, otherwise I don’t know why the bird did it, and I have mentioned this small event, because Lydia once suggested to me that, when I feel empty of ideas, I have fewer compunctions about what I write and write about whatever interests me, and the way, I’m thinking, birds have no compunctions about shopping, though I do. *

I don’t throw out much, I also keep my dead friends close, but of daily life’s clutter, hardly anything leaves my life, or room, I keep scraps, postcards, letters, clippings, photos, manuscripts, luckily, there’s an archive for their housing, since I believe many objects are precious, not worth money, but they hold thoughts, histories or stories, the same thing; yet many friends tear things up easily, rip rip, it’s all clutter, and wish I could, no, wish I had rooms and rooms and an archivist living in one of them who would disinterestedly figure out what should or should not be kept, who would discipline my flagrant ways, would make a file for every piece of paper on the floor, and make sense of everything I keep or want to keep, and that person would also stand at the gates of this massive palace of memories, keeping from it malevolent spirits who would hurt it and me, so I’m composing a fairy tale, who can forget them. I wish I could contact a dead friend, and while I don’t believe it’s possible, still I hope to hear her voice, I miss that voice and mind; Houdini and his wife tried, failed, and, in all things, I want to live differently, think differently, I suppose, and though trying to make up my mind, a newer mind, defeats what life is, provisional, accidental, unplanned, unruly, like new diseases, maybe I’ll use time differently, because I have been doing that, learning from involuntariness, which I found exciting in a way, suddenly to be acted upon, no choice but to obey the science as it came along, though many Americans believe in a misguided idea of freedom, without responsibility to others, and that gnaws at me, but putting that aside, v

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as well as the use of guns and automatic weapons that destroy human organs, along with domestic terrorists’ mass shootings — I wonder how much anyone can think entirely differently. *

Charlie Watts died today, and I once read he punched Jagger in the face after Jagger referred to him as “his drummer,” when Watts told Jagger, “I’m not your drummer. You’re my singer,” and this equation, that kind of subjectivity, when the king is displaced by the commoner, is a more equitable distribution of ego. *

Another 9/11, another clear, blue sky, and I listened to the victims’ families read the names, some spoke about their pain and loss, and a writer is at a loss to describe loss, to find words, but grief isn’t words, so we’re stuck in approximations, and, as usual I’ve been thinking about language, what word, why this one, that one, is the diminishment of vocabulary, slimmer than a slim book, a grave problem, do speakers of American English lose in imagination by this diminishment, fewer words to describe the world, and with 9/11 the word “appall” came to mind, some never use it, too fancy, and then came pall and pallbearer, which I’d never put together before. *

I can understand not wanting to be a man, as culturally defined, and not wanting to be a woman, as culturally defined, and I’m supposed to be a woman, while faithfully resisting and uninterested in proscribed roles, so neutrality of gender seems the way, though the older you become, the more neutral or neutered you become, since no one cares what you are if you’re not sexually attractive, an older woman often isn’t, men, the wealthy and famous, are sexy for that alone, old men regularly support their younger wives, though that is changing, reversing, too slowly, and it can be disconcerting when suddenly your neutering starts, no darts of lust sent your way, but also a new freedom since your body doesn’t define you, though it starts to cause more pain, which is unfair, and, yes, life is unfair, grotesquely unfair, and a little pain is nothing, not really worth noting. *

Dreams, Freud wrote, register not only psychological issues but also the social and political events in anyone’s day, and while I don’t use my dreams anymore in my writing, I want to be in touch with you after a long while of no contact, and offer my most salient unconscious message in which the young Marlon Brando of his Streetcar Named Desire days loves me passionately, he’s holding me close to his chest, his body hard and massive against my smaller one, while he tells me, over my dream-time, about his psychological problems, and while holding me tight, I feel wonderful in his arms, and forget what he’s said his problems are, so to retrieve some of it without letting him know I haven’t been listening, I ask, “But what do you think is your biggest problem,” and Brando says, without hesitation, “Totalitarianism.” vi

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Cos mi cP

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s n o i t r o p o r

A new era for Charles Jencks’s postmodern landmark in London

By Charlotte Jansen

Jencks saw the house as “one giant symbol” whose references range from ancient Egyptian cosmology to Hindu temples, the Italian Baroque, Orphic mythology and ad-hocism.

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I had noticed the 19th-century, stuccofronted villa on occasion while walking through the neighborhood, among the leafy mid-Victorian streets north of Holland Park. From the front, it looked like any of the other grand, imposing houses on the street, apart from one strange detail—a ziggurat-pyramidal motif encircling the doorbell, with an arched typeface that reads, “The Cosmic House.”

Behind its traditional edifice, the Cosmic House boasts one of the most radical interiors in England, or anywhere in the world, for that matter. An extraordinary paragon of postmodern architecture and design, the house was a private residence for almost forty years and opened to the public as a museum in 2021. But it has remained one of London’s best-kept secrets, in part because it is almost impossible to get inside—it is open only three days a week for visits, which must be pre-booked, and when tickets are released they sell out in under two minutes. Once I visited, I understood why.

The Cosmic House was the family residence of American architectural historian Charles Jencks—known as a pioneer of postmodern architecture—his wife, Scottish writer, artist and garden designer Maggie Keswick Jencks, and their two children. The newly wedded couple purchased 19 Lansdowne Walk in 1978 as their home but also as an “experiment on ourselves,” as Charles Jencks put it, a real-world tryout of ideas from his best-selling 1977 manifesto, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture.

Over five years, he transformed the four-story 1840s mansion beyond recognition, making it into an ambitious, sublimely eccentric and at times farcical feat of imagination.

Wanting to reestablish the importance of art in architecture, Jencks saw the house as “one giant symbol” whose references range from ancient Egyptian cosmology to Hindu temples, the Italian Baroque, Orphic mythology and ad-hocism.

Every detail of the home was planned and constructed to carry symbolic meaning—rooms for each season; a spiraling “Solar Stair” with fifty-two steps for the weeks of the year; a crescent-shaped, mirrored “moonwell”; custom furniture; a spectacular sunken bathroom, the tiles bearing the same stepped design as the typeface on the door.

A journey into this Jencksian fantasia begins in the cocooning embrace of the “Cosmic Oval,” where I briefly had the impression that I was taking part in a cult initiation.

The mystic egg-shaped entryway references a polyphony of narratives about the origins of the universe and civilization, emphasizing Jencks’s conviction that “Post-Modern first of all means pluralism.” The ovular floor beneath my feet was inlaid with a pattern that echoed the Piedmontese Baroque designs of Italian architect and philosopher Guarino Guarini, famed for the dome of San Lorenzo in Turin, whose intricate geometry, Guarini said, was intended to evoke the “terror of the human soul.” Gazing up, you encounter a William Stok frieze depicting a kind of cosmic Last Supper—I spotted Erasmus, Hadrian, John Donne, Hannah Arendt and Thomas Jefferson, an unlikely crew. This confluence of cultural figures from across history represents mankind’s millennia-long

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struggle for meaning, and the presence of figures such as Imhotep and Prince Hirohito points to Jencks’s belief in postmodernism as the end of Western cultural domination.

The next room I encountered, as I hung up my coat, was smaller but equally as theatrical: Behind mirrored doors lay the “Cosmic Loo”—a more playful and bodily center from which to contemplate the origins of existence. Under a glass pyramid ceiling, the walls were adorned not with a frieze but instead with totems of a more personal kind, postcards collected from travels. The toilet has two levers, but only one works. It seemed like a scene from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain; I wouldn’t have been surprised if the toilet had been able to turn excrement into gold. Such moments of levity, I discovered, are another of Jencks’s signatures. Throughout the house, pairs and doubles appear continually —handles, sinks, even soap dishes—tropes meant partially to reflect the imperfect symmetry of the human body. But doubling also functions as a kind of subterfuge, making the visitor feel somehow wrongfooted around almost every corner.

“Why put two front-door knobs on if you’re not going to be provocative?” architect Piers Gough said of Jencks’s work.

“He was always flummoxing people and making them feel they didn’t really know what was going on.” Elsewhere in the house, cheap MDF wallboard is hand painted to look like expensive polychromatic marble. Stately columns preposterously hold up nothing (“like the UK economy,” my tour guide quipped).

The home is packed with replicas and imitations: the triglyphs of the Parthenon; a jacuzzi in the form of an upside-down imitation of a Renaissance dome by Francesco Borromini. The effect is destabilizing. Nothing is quite what it seems.

This quirky introduction sets the stage, and the house’s treasures begin to spool out through the ground floor’s interconnected living spaces. The four rooms designed to represent the seasons are positioned around the central Solar Stair. The first room is Winter, a dark and somber space dominated by an imposing bust of Hephaestus, the god of fire, made by sculptor Celia Scott, who arranged sittings with Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi and modeled the bust on his head. The bust presides over a Michael Graves-designed fireplace, around which sit a cluster of Gongshi, or Chinese scholar’s rocks. The Cosmic House boasts an impressive collection of these karstic limestone pieces, a feature of Chinese gardens on which Maggie Jencks was an expert.

Her 1978 book, The Chinese Garden, was the first significant publication on the subject in English.

The mood shifts abruptly to Spring in the bright adjoining living space, framed by teal drapes. Three busts loom over another Graves fireplace, representing the three months of spring and the three ages of Venus. Rem Koolhaas and artist Madelon Vriesendorp, who was at the time Koolhaas’s wife, submitted designs to Jencks for this room, but they were rejected for not being “symbolic enough.” The couple nonetheless remained close friends of the family, and Vriesendorp continued to collaborate with Charles.

It was on the curving yellow sofa of the Spring room, with a sunken sundial seat bathed in natural light from an enormous south-facing window, that I found the Cosmic

It is architecture as self-portrait, a time capsule of ideas, the diary of a voracious intellect.

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House’s director, Eszter Steierhoffer.

Formerly a senior curator at London’s Design Museum, she recalled being just as blown away as I was the first time she visited the house, as a student at the Royal College of Art. As both a property of special national architectural interest and a fragile domestic space in a residential area, the Cosmic House presents unique challenges as a museum.

Three days a week, it accepts two or three groups of up to fifteen people. Tickets (priced at £8) are released on the third Friday of every month. “We deal with a number of limitations as a Grade–I listed building, and it is hard to accommodate everyone wanting to get in,” Steierhoffer said. “We aim to be more inclusive through our exhibition and learning programs that expand beyond the physical boundaries of the building.”

Yet those who do manage to visit are invited to meander through almost all of the rooms and to use the space actively, unusual freedoms for a house museum. “Gentle knocking is encouraged,” Steierhoffer says.

The house is not intended to be a “mausoleum to Charles” but instead a “generative archive” to keep his “ideas and attitudes alive, and keep the space as convivial as possible.”

As I made my way around, I noticed how distinct the atmosphere was from that of most house museums I’d visited.

Staff members were at work on laptops at the dining table, making tea in the kitchen and answering emails from an upstairs bedroom.

I continued my tour with Steierhoffer, who described her job as challenging the ideas contained in the house as

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much as preserving them. An entire generation after Jencks, she acknowledged, “took issue with his aesthetic.” And the house—as well as the ideas that built it—contains flaws and failures. Jencks's opposition to Western cultural hegemony, for example, didn’t always go the distance. The kitchen, representing autumn, reductively turns “Indian architecture into Indian summer,” as Steierhoffer described it. Some visitors may find the appropriation of architectural aspects of Hindu temples, such as the classical triglyphs fashioned onto salad spoons, especially distasteful. Jencks had a favorite quip for such judgments: “If you can’t take the kitsch—get out of the kitchen.”

“The house is the product of a certain moment in history,” Steierhoffer told me. “Our program aims to reengage with Charles’s ideas and debate them in the contemporary discourse.” Steierhoffer has kept the ideas vibrating in part by inviting contemporary artists, writers, researchers and residents from different disciplines to respond to them.

The house also hosts salon discussions whose participants are invited to sleep in the former nanny’s room. In 2023, Vriesendorp installed pieces throughout the house for an exhibition cheekily titled “Cosmic Housework.” A furniture commission by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, a table and chairs in searing blue, temporarily occupied Maggie’s study. Tai Shani, a Turner-Prize-winning artist, created an eerie installation for the house’s basement gallery in 2024, composed of fleshy and surreal paintings and hybrid sculptures that responded to Jencks’s anthropomorphic architecture.

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The house’s transcendent and transportive nature makes Jencks feel eerily present during a visit. One of the most popular rooms in the house is his study, where his architecture library is housed in bookcases that are shaped like buildings, visual representations of the books they hold. The filing cabinets—which Jencks, always a fan of a good pun, called “slidescrapers”—are covered and painted to look like wood. Vestiges of Jencks’s daily life are more prominent here: Books are stuffed into shelves, annotated with notes and mementos; a picture of Zaha Hadid peeks out from the pages of one volume. One of the slidescraper drawers contains some of the confections Jencks used to enjoy.

Writer Edwin Heathcote, who holds the wonderfully exalted title of Keeper of Meaning for the Cosmic House and serves as the chair of its steering group, first came to the house while working on a book with Charles. “For me,” he said, “the library is the most entrancing room in the house—the idea that the bookshelves could become a kind of architecture reflecting the subject matter of the volumes stored on them. It’s poetic, provocative and excessive . . . which pretty much captures the house for me.”

Surveying the house’s jagged geometries, cast-concrete stairwells and dense, ornate decor, it’s hard to imagine the Jencks family moving in with children who were three and five at the time. Cosmic House residence was not for the pusillanimous; after even an hour, it becomes dizzying.

Admitting that he sometimes went “too far in over-designing certain rooms” and that the house was “ugly and overdone” in

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parts, Jencks once said in an interview: “We wanted to see how we could push it—where symbolism would break down.”

There are hints at a rebellion against the regime: Maggie’s study is a simple, spartan room, and the only part of the house that is not listed Grade I. The symbolism, she once told Charles, “stops at my door.” As Heathcote says, “It absolutely wasn’t to everyone’s taste.” But it’s nonetheless impossible not to be awestruck by the house’s sheer audacity and by Jencks’s commitment to manifest in brick and mortar the “intense delight in his own mind,” as Gough puts it. It is architecture as selfportrait, a time capsule of ideas, the diary of a voracious intellect.

As I left this redoubt of the postmodern and stepped back out into the grayish uniformity of the Victorian terraced houses that surround it, my eyes scanned instinctively for symbols embedded in their surfaces. But the buildings only stared back blankly. I wondered what could be behind their doors, and I felt briefly disoriented. I couldn’t help but agree with Jencks: “Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is— certain, even dogmatic—until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.”

Photography by Dunja Opalko In 2025, the Cosmic House will launch a new events program to invite active dialogue among its supporters while furthering its work as an educational charity.

For more information, visit the Jencks Foundation at jencksfoundation.org.

Olga Mohler Picabia and Beverley Calté at “Francis Picabia: Das Spätwerk, 1933–1953,” Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 1997

AVeritable Voyage

retrospect

Beverley Calté on the life of Olga Picabia (1905–2002)

Pierre Calté and Olga in Rubigen, Switzerland, 1979

On the occasion of a major Francis Picabia exhibition currently on view at Hauser & Wirth Paris, Ursula spoke with Beverley Calté, a curator of the show and president of the Comité Picabia, who shared her memories of Olga Mohler Picabia, the artist’s last wife.

Born into a modest family in Rubigen, Switzerland, in 1905, Olga Mohler studied to be a kindergarten teacher. At the age of twenty, she found a position in Mougins as governess for Lorenzo, the five-year-old son of Picabia and Germaine Everling.

In the home they called the Château de Mai, Olga became an indispensable part of their household, not only for young Lorenzo but for his father as well. Among her many jobs, she cleaned Picabia’s paintbrushes, stretched his canvases, tended to his wardrobe and soon became his constant, compassionate travel companion. Following a visit to Barcelona in 1927, an amorous liaison began.

While artistic expression was Picabia’s vital necessity, he also had a particular passion for automobiles and a singular attraction to women. He married Gabrielle Buffet in 1909. They parted ways in 1919, after Germaine came into his life. She was his companion until their rupture in 1933, but both Gabrielle and Germaine continued to play important roles for Picabia.

Olga became Picabia’s protégé and succeeded in living up to her mentor’s great expectations. At first, she existed somewhat in the shadow of the artist’s world that evolved through Picabia’s

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invaluable friendship with Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude and Alice adored Olga, and she loved to visit them at their home in Billignin, France. In her native Switzerland, her relationship with Meret Oppenheim was also very important to her. On the other hand, she was afraid of Picasso, saying he had a look that could burn a hole in your skin!

Before leaving the Château de Mai, Olga collected every memento she could find from the drawers in the house and studio.

In 1936, four years before her marriage to Picabia, she began work on an album in a rented flat on the Bois de Boulogne during one of their trips to Paris. The album expanded, with innumerable letters, drawings, press clippings, exhibition invitations and photographs, including some from Picabia’s childhood. She accentuated these with personal annotations, which Picabia described as her “grandiose book of poems.”

Olga stopped work on the album in late 1952, eight years after she and Picabia returned to his Paris atelier. When he had difficulty walking, she helped him to sit in front of the terrace windows and read him excerpts from books by his “alter ego,” Nietzsche.

Picabia once said, “My paintings are a reflection of my life.” The album exists as a remarkable reflection of Olga’s dedication to Picabia. Her life was a veritable voyage. Her dauntless devotion to Picabia is somewhat comparable to his constant, undaunted change of artistic direction. After his death in 1953, she spent the rest of her life working to preserve his legacy.

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Studio photograph of Olga with Le brave (The Brave) and her album, 1990s

Francis Picabia, Le brave (The Brave), 1947. Oil on cardboard, 39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.

In 1979, I met Olga with my late husband, Pierre Calté. That year, we had the chance to organize a Picabia exhibition at the Palais des Congrès in Paris, and through the introduction of a friend, we went to visit her in Rubigen. Olga was a programmatic Swiss woman who took to Pierre immediately. There was something about his spirit of freedom and adventure that reminded her of Picabia. She said, “Oh, you’ll never be able to do an exhibition in three months,” but we did it! For the next ten years, we traveled all over the world with her. She was seventy-five then, and we were like family. She and Pierre used to play chess together whenever we were traveling.

In Paris, Olga retained many works that Picabia painted after 1945, especially the nonfigurative paintings that were present on the walls of his atelier. It was on the fourth floor of the familyowned building where he was born and where they had returned in 1945. After inheriting the building, Picabia had to sell it during the war, but he managed to keep the atelier, and Olga continued to occupy it after his death. In 1990, Olga, along with Pierre and myself, established the nonprofit Comité Picabia in the atelier, a stone’s throw from the Place Vendôme.

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Until the very end, Olga talked about Picabia as though she had seen him just that morning. She called him a prince and one of the world’s truly original artists. Since her death in 2002, the Comité has had the honor of continuing to occupy this space, whose history remains forever present.

My wish is to digitize our extensive archives and make them accessible to the public so that when I’m off to see Olga and Pierre playing chess somewhere in this vast universe, the Picabia atelier will carry on as a place of study. —As told to Alexandra Vargo

“Francis Picabia: Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning,” curated by Beverley Calté and Arnauld Pierre, is on view at Hauser & Wirth Paris through March 12. The exhibition will travel to Hauser & Wirth New York’s 22nd Street location from May 1 through July 25.

Francis Picabia: Éternel recommencement / Eternal Beginning is now available from Hauser & Wirth Publishers. This dual-language catalogue includes texts by Beverley Calté, Arnauld Pierre and Candace Clements, plus a selection of pages from Olga Picabia’s album.

Page from an album devoted to Francis Picabia’s life and work, compiled by Olga Mohler Picabia

Photo: Lewis Ronald

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Patricia Urquiola, Milan In this edition of The Radar—Ursula magazine’s uncommon cultural recommendations from our friends and colleagues around the world—the designer Patricia Urquiola takes us to one of her favorite neighborhoods in Milan ahead of its 2025 Design Week.

The cupola dome above the Cassina showroom on Via Durini

Bar Basso on Via Plinio

I chose Milan at a time when moving to another country wasn’t such a common decision, and experienced what could be called a pre-Erasmus foreign student exchange. I was born and raised in Spain and was studying architecture in Madrid, but I felt a strong need to step out of my comfort zone.

In Milan, I fell in love with design, a love shaped by the courses I took with Achille Castiglioni and by my first job at De Padova, where I had the opportunity to work with Vico Magistretti.

Since then, the city has changed immensely.

What used to be the Milan of the masters—the architects and designers whom I got to know inside and outside the university—has evolved into a global hub for design.

The area between Porta Venezia and Città Studi holds a special place in my heart. It’s where I’ve always lived and have almost always worked since moving from Madrid. Some of my favorite places are:

Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano

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• Bao House: A microsized Taiwanese restaurant that I adore. It features a small sidewalk patio, which is perfect for spring lunch breaks. The classic bao and the spinach are my favorites from the menu.

• Books Import: This is a great spot for international books, especially for rare photography and architecture titles.

• Civiconove: I love this clothing store. Over the years, Paolo and Luca, the owners, have become friends of mine. They also showcase small artworks, design pieces and photographs.

• Poporoya: The first Japanese restaurant to open in Milan. It’s authentic and unpretentious.

• Bar Basso: The go-to spot for an aperitivo— especially during Milan Design Week—and an integral part of the neighborhood’s charm.

• Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano: A collection of 20th-century Italian art displayed in the owner’s Art Deco apartment. The building was designed by Piero Portaluppi in the 1920s.

Elsewhere in the city, I recommend a stop at the Cassina Showroom on Via Durini. It is one of the first mono-brand design stores in Milan, and an early site of Fuorisalone, the popular event series during Milan Design Week. Renowned designers like Mario Bellini, Vico Magistretti, Clino Trini Castelli, Achille Castiglioni, Giancarlo Tintori and Piero Lissoni have all left their mark there over the years. I was lucky enough to redesign and double this space for Cassina’s fiftieth anniversary.

AT T H E C R O S S R OA D S O F A R T I S T I C I N S I G H T AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE, WE FIND THE EDGE O F R E A S O N — A N I N T I M AT E P O D C A S T F E AT U R I N G GROUNDBREAKING ARTISTS AND THINKERS AS T H E Y E X P L O R E T H E D E E P LY P E R S O N A L A N D U N I V E R S A L LY R E S O N A N T T H E M E S T H AT S H A P E THEIR WORK. Produced with Atlantic Re:think, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic.

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credits

Artists and authors retain copyright to their work, except where noted.

Images courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, except where noted. p. 16 Firelei Báez: Christopher Garcia Valle; Linda Goode Bryant: Oresti Tsonopoulos; Barbara Chase-Riboud: Virginia Harold; Philip Cozzolino: Jen Fariello; Ike Edeani: Sasha Arutyunova; Ekow Eshun: Zeinab Batchelor; Rashid Johnson: Joshua Woods p. 18 William Kentridge: Norbert Miguletz; Ben Okri: Mat Bray; Dunja Opalko: Anthony Burrill; Lynne Tillman: James Welling; Ambera Wellmann: Christian DeFonte. Courtesy Company Gallery and Hauser & Wirth p. 22 Photo: Dawoud Bey. Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in. MoMA PS1 Archives, II.A.794. The Museum of Modern Art Archives. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY p. 24 © Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent p. 25 Photo: Giancarlo BOTTI/ Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images p. 26 © Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent pp. 32-33 Photos: Elisabeth Bernstein pp. 34-35 Photo: Mats Nordman

pp. 36-38 Photos: Kathryn Holstrom pp. 40-45 © 2025 Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts p. 42 Photo: Brian Forrest p. 43 (bottom left) Photo: Fredrik Nilsen p. 45 Photo: Fredrik Nilsen p. 46 Photo: Gonzalo Machado pp. 48-49, 50, 51 Photos: Ike Edeani pp. 52-54 Courtesy the artist p. 56 Photo: Ike Edeani p. 58 (left) Courtesy the artist p. 58 (right) Courtesy Apollo Editions, New York pp. 61-67 Photos: Matthew Hollow pp. 68-85 David Hammons © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York p. 68 View of David Hammons’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, 2019. p. 69 Still from David Hammons, Phat Free, 1995/99. Singlechannel digital video, transferred from video tape, color, sound, 5 min., 4 sec. p. 70 View of David Hammons’s exhibition, “Concerto in Black and Blue,” Ace Gallery, New York, 2002–03 p. 72 From David Hammons: Give Me a Moment (George Economou Collection, 2016).

Photo: Natalia Tsoukala p. 73 Excerpt from Ben Okri, A Fire in My Head (London:

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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Head of Zeus, 2021) p. 74 Photo of David Hammons creating a basketball drawing, on view at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, 2019.

Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke p. 75 Photo: Tamar Nahmias p. 76 Photo: Fredrik Nilsen p. 77 Photo: Fredrik Nilsen p. 78 (left) Photo: Tamar Nahmias p. 78 (right) Photo: Mario de Lopez pp. 79, 80 (top) Photo: Randy Kennedy p. 80 (bottom) Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke p. 81 (top) Hammons archival image: Digital Image © Museum Associates / LACMA. Licensed by Art Resource, NY p. 81 (bottom) Photo: Elena Carminati p. 82 (top) Photo: Tamar Nahmias p. 82 (middle) Photo: Ephraim Puusemp p. 82 (bottom) Photo: Noé Montes p. 83 (bottom) Photo: Mario de Lopez p. 84 (top) Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke p. 84 (bottom) Photo: Fredrik Nilsen pp. 86-87 From The Birth of Art by Georges Bataille (NY: Skira,1955). Courtesy Skira, New York. Photo: Hans Hinz p. 88 © Ministère de la Culture/ Centre National de la Préhistoire/Norbert Aujoulat pp. 90-91 Book covers courtesy publishers p. 92 Courtesy Swiss Institute, New York

p. 94 Courtesy the artist pp. 100–108 Photos: Dunja Opalko.

Courtesy the Cosmic House pp. 108, 109 Courtesy Archives Comité Picabia, Paris p. 110 Francis Picabia © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Courtesy Archives Comité Picabia, Paris p. 111 Courtesy Archives Comité Picabia, Paris. A selection of pages from the original album is published in Olga Mohler Picabia, Album Picabia, ed.

Beverley Calté (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2016) p. 117 (top) Paolo Reda – REDA &CO / Alamy Stock Photo p. 117 (middle) Courtesy Cassina Store Milano p. 117 (bottom) Photo: Natalie Kennedy p. 120 Private collection © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed

by Artestar, New York Back cover Photo: Linda Goode Bryant Every effort has been made to trace copyright ownership and to obtain reproduction permissions. Corrections brought to the magazine’s attention will be incorporated in future reprints or online versions of articles.

non finito

Magic Mountain Jean-Michel Basquiat in the Engadin

On the occasion of “JeanMichel Basquiat. Engadin,” an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz continuing through March 29, we leave you with a rare, poetically understated Basquiat landscape painted during one of the artist’s many visits in the 1980s to the Engadin region of Switzerland, an Alpine aerie for his imaginarium.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, See (Lake), 1983. Oil on canvas. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

Courtesy private collection

“ . . . Often one thought that a cottage clinging to the steep abyss like a bird’s nest must be the last; but then one still higher would suddenly be discovered. In summer-time it was delightful to run down the green pastures or race about in the soaring wind, but in winter the snow lay so deep about the huts here that the biggest men could hardly wade through it, not to speak of little children . . . just now it was summertime and the evening sun was shining down on the green meadows. In one of the cottages highest up the mountain the door stood so wide open that the bright rays fell into the smoky kitchen where a woman stood at her small stove, stirring the yellow cornmeal about with vigorous arms. A tired wanderer, leading a little girl by the hand, was climbing up very slowly from below, and now she reached the cottage.”

—from The Fairy of Intra by Johanna Spyri (1925)

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Drink responsibly

Hauser &Wirth Spring 2025

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David Hammons, Concerto in Black and Blue, 2002–03

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