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Zafferano as seen by Maurizio Galimberti
Departments
Editor’s Note p. 18
Letters Invisible Roses: Never-before-published postcards from Kathy Acker to Ida Applebroog, 1975 p. 20
Antiphony
A poem by Marie Baléo in response to a work by Richard Misrach p. 24
Epitaph
Dan Fox on the appearances and apparitions of Kenneth Anger (1927–2023) p. 26
Unknown Pleasures
Born Close to the Midnight Hour: Fabiola Alondra on runes, ruins and ritual p. 32
Glitch
Plantasia: Simone Kotva in the garden of vegetal consciousness p. 36
The Keepers
Carlo McCormick visits Pete Nice and his collection of hip-hop’s founding documents p. 108
Features
The Cover
17 rue Campagne-Première:
Takesada Matsutani and Kate Van Houten on their early days in Paris, with Désirée Moorhead-Hayter, Olivier Renaud-Clément and Anders Bergstrom p. 39
Essay
Friendship as a Way of Life: Ksenia M. Soboleva on the work of the collective fierce pussy p. 54
Portfolio
Paris and Punk: Photographs by Stanley Greene (1949–2017), with a reminiscence by Eve Therond p. 60
Conversation
Retroaction: Homi K. Bhabha and Kate Fowle in conversation with Jessica Bell Brown, Kimberli Gant, Elena Ketelsen González and Xiaoyu Weng on the 1993 Whitney Biennial and its place in the present p. 68
Essay
Speak to Me About Big Things: Jessica Eisenthal on identity, mythology and Arshile Gorky p. 78
Essay
Sculpture Kills: Jillian McManemin on form and function, life and death p. 85
Score
Sound Diets: Christine Sun Kim in conversation with Melissa Dubbin p. 90
Portfolio Clang Association: New paintings by Camille Henrot, in conversation with Estelle Hoy p. 94
Profile
Woman on Wire: Barbara Pollack on the worlds of Angela Su p. 104
Some new and forthcoming titles p. 122
Site
Covered by Clouds: Alexander Scrimgeour ventures into the Furka zone, remote Swiss mountain redoubt of conceptual art p. 132
Studies
Fiction
Nineteen Photographs from Cuba: Yinka Elujoba on love and pictures p. 124
Go Tell It: Julie Baumgardner visits the Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles, with Richard Jackson, Piero Golia and Debbie Hillyerd p. 144
Material Man and Machine: Into the vacuum tank, with Larry Bell p. 148
Retrospect
Nostalghia: A previously unpublished interview with Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), by Jonathan Cott p. 155
Non Finito A poem by Barbara Chase-Riboud p. 160
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Randy Kennedy
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Alexandra Vargo
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Vol. 4, Issue no. 9: Ursula (ISSN 2639-376X) is published twice a year by Hauser & Wirth Publishers
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Front cover: Takesada Matsutani, Eyes, 2023. Part one (double-sided): Collage with photo by Matsutani, felt pen, sumi ink on burnt and cut silkscreen printed paper; part two: Silkscreen printed collage and sumi ink on cut silkscreen printed paper. Three pages: 10 x 12 in. (25.4 x 30.48 cm) each. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Contributors
FABIOLA ALONDRA was born and raised in Mexico City. She is a co-founder of Fortnight Institute in New York City, which opened in 2016. Her first job in the art world was in Alex Katz’s studio, as a cataloguer. She then worked for rare book and esoterica dealer John McWhinnie. In 2012, she started Richard Prince’s imprint and bookstore Fulton Ryder and later served as publications director for 303 Gallery. (See p. 32.)
MARIE BALÉO is a French writer, poet and editor. She is a winner of the Poetry Society’s 2020 National Poetry Competition. Her first poetry collection, Submersion (2023) was longlisted for the 2020 PANK Book Prize. Since 2017, she has been an editor of Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. (See p. 24.)
JULIE BAUMGARDNER is a writer and editor who has spent nearly fifteen years covering the arts. Her work has appeared in Bloomberg, Cultured, Financial Times, The New York Times and other publications. (See p. 144.)
LARRY BELL is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s. Known for his refined surface treatment of glass and his explorations of light, reflection and shadow, Bell embraces a practice that extends
from painting and works on paper to glass sculptures and furniture design. Since 1969, his studio has developed a high-vacuum system for coating thin metal films onto materials, creating ethereal effects of light and color. (See p. 148.)
ANDERS BERGSTROM directs the editions program at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Bergstrom is an advocate for prints and printmakers, and is an artist himself. (See p. 39.)
HOMI K. BHABHA is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the English Department and Comparative Literature Department at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous works exploring post-colonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art and cosmopolitanism. His works include The Location of Culture, which was reprinted as a Routledge Classic (2004), and the edited volume Nation and Narration (1990). (See p. 68.)
Over the course of a seven-decade career, BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD has created a revolutionary body of work known for its inventiveness, technical prowess and fearless engagement with transcultural histories. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Chase-Riboud lives and works in Paris and Rome. Parallel to her art practice, she is a critically acclaimed poet and writer of historical fiction. (See p. 160.)
JONATHAN COTT is the author and editor of more than forty books, including Dinner With Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein (2012) and Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (2013) . He has published interviews with numerous filmmakers, including Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog and Louis Malle. (See p. 155.)
MELISSA DUBBIN is a graduate of the master’s program of experimentation in art and politics (SPEAP) at Sciences Po, Paris, where she was a fellow from 2013 to 2014. Dubbin and her partner, Aaron S. Davidson, work collaboratively as artists, exploring the environment, computing, robotics and artificial life-forms. (See p. 90.)
JESSICA EISENTHAL is an art historian and curator based in Brooklyn and Saratoga Springs, New York. She earned a PhD from the Courtauld Institute in London and has conducted curatorial research projects at the Tang Museum, Sarasota Springs; the Los Angeles County Museum; and Tate Modern, London. Her most recent writing was published in Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards (2021), the first survey of Kelly’s postcard collage practice. (See p. 78.)
KATE FOWLE is the curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth. Previously, she has served as director of MoMA PS1, chief curator and artistic director of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and executive director of the New York–based Independent Curators International. (See p. 68.)
DAN FOX is a writer, filmmaker and musician living in New York. He is the author of two books, Limbo
(2018) and Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016), and his essays on art and culture have appeared in a wide variety of exhibition catalogs and anthologies. For twenty years, he was an editor and staff writer at Frieze magazine. He is the co-director of the film Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (2020). (See p. 26.)
PIERO GOLIA, born in Naples, Italy, lives and works in Los Angeles. Golia pushes the boundaries of art, blurring the margins between sculpture, installation, performance and architecture. Golia’s work has been exhibited at LACMA; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; MoMA PS1; the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and other major museums. He co-founded the Mountain School of Arts in 2005. (See p. 144.)
The practice of French artist CAMILLE HENROT moves between film, painting, drawing, bronze, sculpture and installation. Henrot draws upon literature, psychoanalysis, social media, cultural anthropology, self-help and the banality of everyday life in order to question what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan; Middleheim Musuem of Art, Antwerp and Munch Museum, Oslo. (See p. 94.)
DEBBIE HILLYERD is Hauser & Wirth’s senior director for learning, overseeing the development of education and charitable projects across the organization. Previously, she lectured at Bath Spa University in England. She writes and consults for various institutions in the education sector. (See p. 144.)
YINKA ELUJOBA is a Nigerian writer and art critic living in New York. (See p. 128.)
Photo: Balarama Heller
Photo: Jason Collin
Photo: Stephanie Mitchell
Photo: Gilda Luise Aloisi
Photo: Matthew Porter
HANGTHEPARIS REVIEW
TheParisReviewisdelightedtorevive itsprintseries,firstlaunchedin1965,with newworksbyEdRuscha,JulieMehretu, DanaSchutz,RashidJohnson, ElizabethPeyton,SharaHughes,and SamMcKinniss.Allproceedsbenefitthe ParisReviewFoundation,a501(c)(3). Weareextremelygratefultotheartists fortheirwork.PARISREVIEWPRINTS.ORG
Contributors
KATE VAN HOUTEN studied at Western College for Women in Ohio and at the Art Students League in New York before moving to Milan and later Paris. In 1967, she joined the Paris-based Atelier 17 printmaking workshop. With friends, she later set up a silkscreen studio. Her prints were first shown at the Galerie Zunini in 1968 and later alongside her paintings at the Galerie Haut-Pave. Van Houten has participated in printmaking biennales in Kraków, Poland; Brooklyn, New York; CondeBonsecours, Belgium; Bradford, England; Bhopal, India and Chamaliere, France, along with solo exhibitions in France, Japan and the U.S. Her work is represented in public and private collections throughout the world. (See p. 39.)
ESTELLE HOY is a writer and art critic based in Berlin. She is author of the critically acclaimed book, Pisti, 80 Rue de Belleville (2020). She regularly publishes in international art journals, including Spike Art, Artforum, apartmento and Frieze. She has exhibited in galleries and institutions including White Cube; Kamel Mennour, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, alongside artists including Camille Henrot, Louise Bourgeois, Anne Imhof and Sarah Lucas. Hoy is editor at large for Flash Art International. (See p. 94.)
A preeminent figure in American contemporary art since the 1970s, RICHARD JACKSON is influenced by both Abstract Expressionism and action painting. His performative process extends the potential of painting by upending its technical conventions. Jackson responds to the high-mindedness of painterly practice by repositioning painting as an everyday experience, drawing on the visual lexicon of domestic environments, basic human activities and aspects of everyday American life such as hunting and sports. (See p. 144.)
CHRISTINE SUN KIM, based in Berlin, has exhibited and performed internationally, including at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York; De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam; Berlin Biennale; Shanghai Biennale; and Sound Live Tokyo. She has been awarded a MIT Media Lab Fellowship and a TED Senior Fellowship. (See p. 90.)
SIMONE KOTVA is an Ecodisturb Research Fellow in the faculty of theology at the University of Oslo, Norway, and an affiliated lecturer in environmental theology in the faculty of divinity at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (2020) and is currently completing a book on multi-species mysticism. She frequently writes on themes such as attention, magic, vitality and the future of philosophy. (See p. 36.)
In the 1960s and 1970s, TAKESADA MATSUTANI was a key member of the second generation of the Gutai Art Association, the influential postwar Japanese art collective. Over five decades, he has developed a unique visual language, melding form and materials. After the Gutai group disbanded in 1972, Matsutani developed a radical solo practice, informed by his experience at the renowned Atelier 17 print workshop in Paris. He began creating vast expanses of metallic black graphite on mural-size sheets of paper, painstakingly built up with individual strokes. This ritualized process presents a time-based record of his gestures and is reminiscent of his artistic beginnings in Japan, though it is translated into an artistic language entirely his own. (See p. 39.)
CARLO MCCORMICK is a writer, art critic and curator based in New York City. He was a senior editor at Paper magazine for more than thirty years. He has contributed essays to more than one hundred books and was the curator of “The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984.” His next exhibition, a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the hip-hop movie Wild Style (1983), will open in November at Deitch Projects in New York. (See p. 108.)
JILLIAN MCMANEMIN is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Hyperallergic and Texte Zur Kunst, among other publications and platforms. In 2020, she founded the Toppled Monuments Archive. McManemin presented work as part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial and has contributed work to the Anthology Film Archives, The Poetry Project and other international venues. (See p. 85.)
DÉSIRÉE MOORHEAD-HAYTER was born in England in 1942. She arrived in Paris in 1962 and worked various jobs before meeting Stanley William Hayter in 1965. She helped administer Hayter’s Atelier 17 and was his assistant and collaborator until his death in 1988. She now lives between France and Ireland and is married to Francis Levy. She continues to promote Hayter’s work and preserve his legacy. (See p. 39.)
BARBARA POLLACK is a leading expert on Asian contemporary art and co-founder of the nonprofit Art at a Time Like This. She is the author of Brand-New Art from China (2018) and The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China (2010). Her recent curatorial project, “Mirror Image: A Change in Chinese Identity,” was presented at New York’s Asia Society Museum in 2022. (See p. 104.)
OLIVIER RENAUD-CLÉMENT has organized exhibitions and acted as an advisor to artists and estates in the U.S., Europe and Japan for many years. He has worked frequently with Hauser & Wirth, collaborating with the gallery on more than thirty exhibitions. He has collaborated with Takesada Matsutani and the estates of Fabio Mauri, Lygia Pape, August Sander and Mira Schendel, among others. He is based in Paris and New York. (See p. 39.)
ALEXANDER SCRIMGEOUR is an editor at Hauser & Wirth Publishers in Zurich. Previously, he was a Berlin-based freelancer editing books for MoMA; ICA Miami; the George Economou Collection, Athens and Kunsthalle Wien. Before that, he spent several years working for Spike Art Magazine and Artforum. (See p. 132.)
KSENIA M. SOBOLEVA is a New York-based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail and many other publications. She is currently co-editing the first monograph on the 1990s lesbian gallery and project space TRIAL BALLOON. Soboleva was a Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2020 and 2021 and is currently an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in gender and LGBTQ+ history at the New York Historical Society. (See p. 54.)
EVE THEROND was born in Paris and began her career as a writer in New York, focusing on rebels, radicals and visionary artists. She is a co-founder and former editor in chief of Whitewall magazine. She met the photographer Stanley Greene, the subject of a portfolio in this issue, at the International Festival of Photojournalism Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan when she was a teenager. (See p. 60.)
Photo: Valerie Sadoun
Photo: Mario de Lopez
Photo: Tatum Magnus
Photo:
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As through lines for 20th-century art go, few run the gamut quite as singularly as the painter and print pioneer Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988), who opened his atelier in Paris in 1927 just as modernism was reaching full tilt. Fleeing the war in 1940, he relocated to New York, where the studio became a crucible of Abstract Expressionism and a gauge of art’s gravitational shift from Europe to the United States (Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson and Robert Motherwell were among those who worked with him). Hayter then returned to Paris in time to watch the pendulum swing back that direction, as Conceptualism and postmodernity made the city once again a vital home for artists. In her diaries, Anaïs Nin wrote that Hayter was “like a stretched bow or a coiled spring,” the lines of his work, grounded in Surrealism and automatism, “like projectiles thrown in space.”
I n 1967, the artists Takesada Matsutani and Kate Van Houten both found themselves in Hayter’s atelier at 17 rue Campagne-Première, which by that time had become a United Nations of printmakers, a colloquy of talent from around the world. Matsutani had arrived from Osaka on a grant, and Van Houten, an American expat, had alighted from Italy in search of direction. Matsutani in particular—a second-generation member of the Gutai movement, whose principles emphasized newness, chance and radical reliance on intuition—found a philosophical home with Hayter, who hired him as an assistant. The Paris around them all was politically and philosophically humming. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle had just been published, as had Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “The Death of the Author.” Daniel Buren had just joined forces with Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni to form BMPT with the shared goal of tearing painting to the ground and rebuilding it. Godard’s La Chinoise was in theaters, and the explosive events of May 1968 were just around the corner.
For the cover story of this issue of Ursula , which focuses on Paris, Matsutani and Van Houten—a pair in art and in life who have made that city their home for more half a century now—revisit those exhilarating early years in conversation with Désirée Moorhead-Hayter, Hayter’s widow, painting a vivid portrait of a storied city as a catalyst for a group of young artists. Since Matsutani’s early days with Gutai, a constant in his work has been small artist’s books and editioned publications, sometimes in collaboration with Van Houten. When we began preparing this issue, we asked him if he would consider making a new work for our cover. Less than two weeks later, we received an iPhone video from his studio. It showed Matsutani standing at a table, leafing gingerly through the pages of not one but three new collages he had made as proposals for the cover—in essence, three separate collage booklets, each with a front cover, inside front cover and interior page. After some agonizing, we chose the second option, Eyes, which seems to function as a sly commentary on “the gaze,” creating a magazine with eyes that stare back at you as you look at it—and also, possibly, as an oblique reference, with its two incised eyeholes, to Duchamp’s Étant donnés, the 20th century’s ultimate monument to scopophilia, completed in 1966. (Every time I walk into the back room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the work is installed and lean forward to look through the peepholes in the ancient wooden door, I feel as if I’m about to be apprehended.)
James Thurber once called Paris “a post-graduate course in Everything.” I’ve always felt the same about my favorite magazines, classes for the mind and eye. I hope you find a little of your favorite everything in this issue.—Randy Kennedy
Takesada Matsutani at Café rue Daguerre, Paris, ca. 1967–1970. Courtesy Takesada Matsutani studio
Kathy Acker Writes to Ida Applebroog, 1975
In 1968, the artist Ida Applebroog—then still known by her married name, Ida Horowitz— moved with her husband to San Diego, a city she described as deeply disorienting to a native New Yorker. “I hated all that sunshine,” she said. Another New Yorker—born Karen Lehman, but by that time becoming known in feminist writing circles by her preferred rst name and her married name, Kathy Acker—had just nished a degree at the University of California, San Diego and was equally exasperated with West Coast life. “Sunny California is totally boring,” she later wrote. “There are too many blonde-assed surf jocks.”
T hrough a shared involvement with a circle of artists and writers surrounding the artist Eleanor Antin and her husband, the poet David Antin, Applebroog and Acker fell into an unlikely expat friendship. Applebroog was intensely shy and just beginning to nd her footing as an artist, while raising four young children. Acker, fteen years younger, was already establishing the reputation that would de ne her when fame arrived—brutally honest, conceptually shape-shifting, sexually fearless. She had begun to work in strip clubs and had coined the most memorable of her many pseudonyms: The Black Tarantula.
Cover of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, 1975 (New York: Vanishing Rotating Triangle Press/Viper’s Tongue Books). Cover art by Jill Kroesen
Ida Applebroog, Sometimes a Person Never Comes Back, 1977 (detail). Ink, urethane and varnish on vellum, five panels: 17 × 68 × 2 ¼ in. (43.2 × 172.7 × 5.7 cm) overall. Photo: Dennis Cowley. Courtesy the artist
Opposite page: Postcard from Kathy Acker to Ida Applebroog, ca. 1975. Courtesy the artist
LETTERS (The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, her breakthrough work, was published in 1973.)
In 1974, Applebroog left her family and moved back to New York alone. The following year, she jettisoned Horowitz and gave herself an eerily fairy-tale-like name of her own coinage, a new stage from which to explore the themes that would come to define her work—chief among them what the critic Max Kozloff once described as “family alarms and little butcheries.” Applebroog and Acker, in roughly the same span of years, began distributing work outside the circuits of the art and literary world, making their own
powerfully unsettling, modestly printed books and mailing them to lists of friends, acquaintances and strangers. (Acker’s often included a card that read: “You are on the enemy list of The Black Tarantula.” One recipient wrote back to Applebroog, saying: “Don’t you ever put that poison in my mailbox again.”)
Here, drawn from the les of Applebroog’s studio, are two never-beforepublished postcards sent to Applebroog in the mid-1970s by Acker, then living in San Francisco, as the two maintained a strong, though mostly epistolary, friendship.
Postcard from Kathy Acker to Ida Applebroog, ca. 1975.
Courtesy the artist
exhibition from 13.10.23, Paris
MIKE KELLEY at the Bourse de Commerce
Pinault Collection
Marie Baléo translation by Chris Miller:
Every night, before I knew you, a dreaming beyond words; The ineffable in dawn-light clad. Each moment climbing The slow and somber steps I now rehearse in memory!
We are free. When evening comes, our bodies are unfurled On the sun-dark sea, vessels profane and joyously serene. The wind along the shoreline soughs its knowing melody.
Richard Misrach, Diving Board, Salton Sea ,1983.
©
Richard Misrach. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Prendre le large / Marie Baléo
Youth: underfed, broke, a string of greyhound buses and tornado warnings, the unflinching vastness of a sea flecked with salt.
To be, it seems, always hesitant, uncertain what to do with all your newfound understandings, susceptible to a strange density of thought.
Sensing, all the while, how desirable it is to stand on the edge of an urge to dive in, headed for some inevitable place, the great joy of never quite arriving.
Avant de te connaître, je rêvais chaque nuit de l’indescriptible; l’indicible avait des airs d’aurore. Chaque instant passé à gravir l’escalier sombre et lent me revient à présent: je me souviens.
Nous sommes libres. Le soir venu, nous nous déployons sur la mer brûlée, vaisseaux profanes au génie bienheureux. Le vent fait bruisser le long de la côte une mélopée savante.
By the Light of the Magick Lantern
Dan Fox on the life and work of Kenneth Anger (1927–2023)
Los Angeles, 1947. Black screen, a gentle voice, heady words. “In Fireworks I released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. Inflammable desires dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness are ignited at night by the libertarian matches of sleep, and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence.” Then, our first glimpse of Kenneth Anger. A United States Navy sailor, carved from darkness by chiaroscuro lighting, cradles Anger in his arms. He’s asleep but is being carried like a dead comrade. Anger claimed to have been seventeen when he made the film, but he was twenty. He also maintained that his first screen appearance was in the 1935 Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a child actor playing a changeling prince alongside James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Mickey Rooney. This is also contested. Records state it was Sheila Brown.
Kenneth Anger sprang from Kenneth Anglemyer. His films were concerned with myth and his biography was spliced from half-truths. His art was one of adornment. “I don’t need gold if I can create the illusion of gold by artificial means,” he said. Superimposition was one of his favored editing techniques— one image partially obscuring or changing the way another looks. After Fireworks, he avoided dialogue. Music was a stronger intoxicant. Many of his films feature masks and scenes of getting dressed, of putting on jewelry, of buckling belts and boots. But “many” is a slippery word in Anger’s filmography. Fireworks wasn’t his debut work. It was his first officially complete work that has survived. Seven more predated it, going back to 1937, or 1941, depending on your source. He later destroyed them.
Other films were lost, stolen, burned, abandoned or proposed but forever condemned to storyboard purgatory. The finished works number only a dozen. Three of these were constructed from
salvaged fragments of incomplete projects: Puce Moment, Kustom Kar Kommandos and Invocation of My Demon Brother. Major works were revised multiple times. By accident or design, Anger’s art existed in flux. So just how “many” is many is hard to say. At the beginning of an oral history interview, recorded at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2003, Anger was asked politely by his interviewers to try to keep his answers on track. He laughs: “I’m the great aside artist.”
Fireworks is a gay dream fantasy, with a score borrowed from the Italian composer Respighi. The pictures tell the story like a silent-era movie. Surrealist Paris provides Fireworks its dream logic. Hollywood noir does the styling. The central character is The Dreamer, played by Anger. (Dreaming and somnambulism are common themes in early avant-garde film, serving as both a solid metaphor for cinema and a symbolic escape from the traumas of the time.) The Dreamer wakes by a fireplace in a middle-class
home. Scattered on the floor are photographs from his dream of the sailor. He dresses, throws the photos on the fire and disappears through a door hand painted with a sign reading “GENTS.” Now it’s night. Or rather, a thick black nothing, the night abstracted and implied by intercut shots of distant car headlights and flashing signs. The Dreamer visits a bar—a painted backdrop—where he watches another muscular sailor flex and pose like a bodybuilder. The man slaps and punches The Dreamer. Back in the abstract night, a menacing gang of sailors wielding chains approaches through bands of bright light and black. The Dreamer is beaten, thrown to the ground, stripped, whipped. His chest is cut open, and the viscera is peeled back to reveal a gasometer dial. Creamy liquid—you guess the meaning—pours over his face and chest. One of the sailors unzips his pants and pulls out a Roman candle, which he sets alight. Return to the quiet of the living room. The Dreamer is asleep
Above: Film still from Kenneth Anger, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, 1954. Ronald Grant Archive/ Alamy Stock Photo. Opposite page: Kenneth Anger in his apartment in New York, undated. Photographer unknown (possibly Hugh Edwards or Luis Medina). Courtesy Danny Lyon and bleakbeauty.com
Anger paints with spotlights and vivid filters. The film is luxurious—the costumes, the painted backdrops, the artfully judged superimpositions and dissolves—while seeming to wink at showbiz razzle-dazzle. It’s never easy to see where Aleister Crowley ends and Busby Berkeley begins.
by the fire. A man lies next to him now, his head consumed in a halo of electricity, scratched from the celluloid.
The sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey was so taken by Fireworks’ groundbreaking representation of gay desire that he bought one of the first prints of the film, which had divided audiences from the start. At a private screening at the Schindler House in Los Angeles soon after the film was made, John Cage took Anger and his friend Curtis Harrington— who screened his own film, Fragment of Seeking, that night—and told them, “This isn’t art.”
How wrong Cage was. With Fireworks, Anger had made a precocious, confident debut, a masterpiece of S&M surrealism that demonstrated an instinctive command of the syntax of cinema and found its spirit in material limitations. Anger made the film at his mother’s home. The camera seems to be restricted by space, the shots limited to what he could set up and shoot alone. It’s make-do make-believe, poetry cobbled together from pocket allowances and homemade props. Like all
dreams, it is made from the stuff of everyday life.
In a 1965 interview published in Film Culture, the filmmaker, mystic and song collector Harry Smith described visiting Anger in Los Angeles in the late 1940s at the suggestion of Richard Foster, who was then the co-director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “Art in Cinema” series.
“I went to his house and he was afraid his mother was going to find out that I was there,” Smith recalled. “When Kenneth sat down in something like a golden chair from Versailles of his mother’s, the chair leg fell off. He was very embarrassed. ‘My mother might hear me.’ Then in order to get the leg back on the chair he raised the Venetian blind and the cord broke and the thing fell all over the floor.”
In the slapstick, adolescent awkwardness of Smith’s story, we glimpse a recurring theme in Anger’s career: the friction between the image one wishes to create and the limitations the world insists upon. In 1951, Anger wrote an essay for Cahiers du cinema called
“Modesty and the Art of Film” in which he explained, “I had seen this drama [Fireworks] entirely on the screen of my dreams. This vision was uniquely amenable to the instrument that awaited it. With three lights, a black cloth as décor, the greatest economy of means and enormous inner concentration, Fireworks was made in three days.”
Filmmakers and critics of the period used the phrase “personal cinema” to describe such work, meaning films that were lyrical, mythopoeic and created far from the industrial movie factories— privately made and privately coded.
“Personal” might encompass desire, dreaming, ambition, vision, everything an artist longed to express. But “personal,” presumably, could also mean accident, lack of funds, technical fumbles, your family peering over your shoulder, plain embarrassment.
Los Angeles, 1954. Now Anger is Hecate, goddess of borders and crossroads. He-as-she wears heavy black robes, the face partially veiled, surrounded by white and gold drapes. Hecate offers a blue and gold amphora to Cesare the Somnabulist. This is a scene from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a complex film, part occult ritual, part masquerade. It moves at a stately and operatic pace, the music in the now-standard 1966 edit taking the form of LeoŠ Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. (The soundtrack for the original cut was music by Harry Partch.) Inauguration is, among many other things, a Symbolist party shot in sumptuous colors: fancy -dress antiquity.
In 1949, Jean Cocteau—who understood what Cage did not—had invited Anger to show Fireworks at the Festival du Film Maudit in Biarritz. Anger would spend much of the next decade in Europe. He made one more film in Los Angeles before leaving: Puce Moment, a gorgeous Technicolor bonbon, and the only scene shot for Puce Women, a
Film still from Stan Brakhage, The Dead, 1960. Courtesy the Estate of Stan Brakhage
longer film about the female stars of the silent film era that he had planned and storyboarded.
Anger made Inauguration during a return visit to Los Angeles following his mother’s death. At the time, he was immersed in the writings of Aleister Crowley and Crowley’s esoteric philosophy of Thelema, a form of modern pantheism. (In the early ’50s, Anger and Kinsey visited Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema, a grim, dilapidated farmhouse in Sicily covered with erotic-occult murals. Photographs of their visit appeared in Britain’s Picture Post magazine. Anger reportedly shot footage of the visit, which was lost soon after.) He soon fell in with a crowd of artists and poets that included writer Anaïs Nin and painter Marjorie Cameron. Cameron was similarly fascinated with Crowley. She was the widow of Jack Whiteside Parsons, a rocket scientist, founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, devoted Thelemite and close friend of L. Ron Hubbard, who died in a chemical explosion at his home in 1952. Inauguration was inspired by a costume party that Anger had attended in Los Angeles, which which resembled a dream he had experienced. Anger reworked the party into a Thelemic rite in which the celebrants share sacraments and assume the identities of deities. Cameron, Nin and other artists starred. “A convocation of enchantresses and theurgists,” as Anger described it. “I wanted to create a feeling of being carried into a world of wonder.”
Like Fireworks, the film plays out in ambiguous black space. Anger paints with spotlights and vivid filters. The film is luxurious—the costumes, the painted backdrops, the artfully judged superimpositions and dissolves—while seeming to wink at showbiz razzle-dazzle. It’s never easy to see where Aleister Crowley ends and Busby Berkeley begins. The stars ham it up. Kohl-lined eyes dart around beneath masks as if to say, “Hey Kenneth, am I doing this right?” But comic moments are synthesized with images of disturbing strangeness: a figure mimicking spasms after eating a serpent, the frightening, imperious gaze of Cameron’s Scarlet Woman. Anger makes us privy to acts we are not initiated into, secrets we shouldn’t know. The playful, the mystic and the sensual gather in the pleasure dome.
Paris, 1960. Anger’s friend, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, is visiting France. He has been shooting images that will become his film The Dead. Wanting to finish off a roll of 16mm, he casually grabs a few frames of Anger in a cafe. Later, Brakhage sees something in the footage that suits the work. He puts Anger in the opening moments of The Dead—handsome, serious, his image toggling between positive and negative, juxtaposed with shots of Gothic statuary, people strolling along the Seine and funerary sculpture in Père Lachaise cemetery.
Throughout the 1950s, projects by Anger came and went. Films were aborted, underfunded. He spent time in Paris working at the Cinémathèque Française, practicing his cutting skills on work prints of Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico! In 1953, he shot Eaux d’artifice, a hallucinatory period costume piece filmed in the terraced gardens of
the Villa D’Este near Rome. To a soundtrack of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, he cut together a montage depicting a lone figure (Carmillo Salvatorelli, a circus performer with dwarfism), dressed in a ball gown, dashing through the gardens. The camera captures water spraying from fountains, ripples and splashes patterning the surfaces of pools and basins, turning sunshine into abstract strokes of light. The images are passed through a midnight-blue filter, which creates a day-for-night effect, punctuated with a zing of color painted directly onto the celluloid. With its mysterious lead rushing back and forth as if to a secret assignation, the film has the mood of a mini-melodrama, a tone poem dedicated to old Hollywood. Anger once described the film as an homage to “a Firbank heroine in pursuit of a nightmoth.” Hollywood gripped his imagination throughout his life. He claimed that his grandmother worked in
Film still from Kenneth Anger, Fireworks, 1947. Canyon Cinema/Album Archivo and Superstock
“Magick is not a conjuring trick,” Anger says. “To me, magick is the background to all life … and it is a science and an art to cause change through will. As an artist I have chosen the cinema as my magickal weapon. The movie camera is my equivalent of the wand.”
a studio costume department during the silent era. Others have suggested that he conflated his grandmother with a colorful friend of hers known as Miss Diggy, who would tell Anger scandalous stories from her days in the film industry. Eaux d’artifice is a dream of old Europe seen from Burbank studio lots— Shakespeare’s Arden Forest remade as old Hollywood orange groves.
London, 1970, the apartment of art dealer Robert Fraser. Anger is positioned in front of violet-colored drapes, looking straight at the camera. With his rust-red satin shirt, strong features and pageboy haircut, he could pass for an understudy member of Pink Floyd. Arranged in front of him are a pair of gold dragon statues, a crystal ball, a glass wand, a Sphinx and candlesticks. He is telling us that he “wants to explain what magick is not.”
“Magick is not a conjuring trick,” Anger says. “To me, magick is the background to all life … and it is a science and an art to cause change through will. As an artist I have chosen the cinema as my magickal weapon. The movie camera is my equivalent of the wand … I invoke elementary powers such as electricity, light and color.”
Anger is reluctantly participating in a documentary for German television. He’s doing it for money to plow into the production of his beleaguered film Lucifer Rising. Inspired by Crowley’s poem “Hymn to Lucifer,” this latest project is intended to mark a new Age of Aquarius and celebrate the ancient gods of Thelema. We see Anger shooting it in a small room with an assistant. His camera sits on a short piece of track and he uses a kitchen sieve to create a gauze effect over the lens as a smoke machine blows in the corner.
The German filmmaker explains: “When being watched, Anger took care to direct himself too…. He thought it impossible to answer questions while working. He rather wanted to carefully
prepare his answers. And so he built an altar behind which he made his statements, robed as a magician and artist.” There’s that gap again: the one between the sieve over the lens and the Sphinx on the altar, between a desired image and the banal practicalities of lowbudget filmmaking.
The 1960s marked a new phase for Anger. He returned to the States to find them transformed by rock’n’roll and reigned over by youth. In 1963, he made his most significant work, Scorpio Rising. It is hard to think of another underground film that has had such an impact. It’s both a homoerotic classic in tune with a harder macho sexuality and the avantgarde invention of the music video: thirteen bubblegum pop songs tracking thirteen episodes in the life of a biker gang. It’s also a retooling of European symbolism for America. People continue as before to dress up and wear jewelry, but now it’s leather jackets, greasy boots, denim and chains. Amphoras and sacraments are swapped out for bikes and cocaine. Scorpio Rising is carefully staged but certain moments—a biker clubhouse party, a ritual hazing, the desecration of a church—are given a handheld, verité quality, suggesting a disturbing connection between ritual and real-world violence. Death and transformation were important ideas to him. It is as if Anger, fresh from Europe, now in his mid-thirties, is seeing America anew. He finds irony in his country’s pop subconscious and, with the help of Bobby Vinton and the Crystals, applies a camp ambivalence to its culture of machismo, materialism and violence. Scorpio Rising was a hit, a major influence on David Lynch, Martin Scorcese, John Waters and many others. Lucifer Rising was a catalogue of disasters. Anger began the project in 1966. In the role of Lucifer, he cast a young musician named Bobby Beausoleil, who, Anger maintained, absconded with his footage after an event in San Francisco. (What was left of the material Anger cut into the short and frenzied Invocation of My
Demon Brother.) Beausoleil later became ensnared by the Manson Family and received a death sentence (later commuted to life in prison) for a gruesome murder committed on Manson’s orders. Anger relocated to London, where he found himself among the city’s art and rock celebrities. He cast Mick Jagger, a fair-weather Mephistopheles, as his next Lucifer, and Jagger agreed to compose an electronic soundtrack for the film. But Anger unsettled Jagger and he backed out. Volatility was a central part of the Anger lore—countless stories of temper, caprice, stubbornness, exploitation of friends, hexings, a malevolent reputation underlined by his statements. “I have always considered movies evil…. My reason for filming has nothing to do with cinema at all; it’s a transparent excuse for capturing people.”
Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page—who met Anger at a Sotheby’s auction of Crowleyana—then agreed to do the soundtrack. Eventually Page too would back away, although, along with Marianne Faithfull, he would appear in
Portrait of Kenneth Anger in 1971, taken on the set of Lucifer Rising (completed in 1981). Photo: Alain Le Garsmeur. Alamy Stock Photo
the finished film. Beausoleil would write the score from prison.
Anger completed Lucifer Rising in 1981. The central role went to an unknown, Leslie Huggins. Shooting took place in Egypt, Germany, Iceland and Britain. Anger captured vivid images of erupting volcanoes and brooding oceans, of the Pyramids and Stonehenge. These elemental evocations of fire and water, light and dark, sites of ancient mystery, are beautiful. But they are contrasted with scenes from the dress-up box. Critic Parker Tyler once wrote that “Anger has simply never had the material means to develop … his poetic style.” Money problems were a constant subplot, in part because Anger was an artist unable to get out of his own
way, with the result that he was frequently left isolated, bitter and broke.
At the end of the German documentary, the crew follows him to the Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire, England. Traffic sounds from a nearby main road can be heard as Huggins struggles to change into a robe embroidered with sigils and glyphs. Bleating sheep wander in and out of the shot. Anger, dressed in a sheepskin coat, looks like a 1970s football manager as he tries to direct Lucifer despite the English wind and cold. There is an almost tragic bathos to the scene. “I want to be independent, I want to show things my way,” he says in the documentary. “And that has, up until now, meant working on a small budget. But I am free.”
Los Angeles, 1991. Anger, dressed in a black tuxedo, sits in a vintage hearse. A BBC documentary is recounting the story of his career and his notorious cult book Hollywood Babylon. Anger visits mausoleums holding the remains of dead film stars. Like an underground Norma Desmond, he visits the Tower Theater picture palace and watches old movies repeating personal legends of childhood stardom and his grandmother’s days as wardrobe mistress. We meet a woman who is still mourning Rudolph Valentino. A pair of elderly embalmers, Jim and Henry, describe the celebrities whose corpses they have preserved: Hedda Hopper, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe.
The film historian P. Adams Sitney described Hollywood Babylon as “a slander catalogue.” Anger began it in the 1950s while living in France. It was originally a series of articles about the scandals of golden age Hollywood. Each spread is packed like a movie fan’s scrapbook: old publicity stills, headshots, lurid newspaper clippings, crime scene photos. The tone is breathless and bitchy. Anger gossips about affairs, addictions, murder, rape, tragic suicides, gruesome accidents and the lengths gone to by the film industry to cover them up. Hollywood Babylon speaks to its readers with a make-believe intimacy borrowed from the cutting-room floor. Much of it is fiction.
The stars in Hollywood Babylon loomed large in Anger’s imaginary. Hardly known today, they might as well all be fiction. The same goes for the songs in Scorpio Rising, and soon—if not already—1960s rock aristocracy itself. Time eventually runs each popular face out of town. Anger was, uniquely, a child of the silent era fascinated with both the deities of ancient myth and the American jukebox. In a sense, we’ve returned to the era of the “personal” and modest film from which he emerged: Millions are now posted and seen around the world every day. But they’re not the kind of expression that Anger’s generation dreamed as the usher of a new age; banality, commerce and diaristic intimacy carry the day. Someone, go wake the Somnabulists, start The Dreamers rising again.
Cover of Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon, 2nd ed. (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1981)
LABYRINTH OF KNOWING
by Fabiola Alondra
I was born at night during a waxing crescent moon at 10:40 p.m. in Tenochtitlán, in the eastern neighborhood of Agrícola Pantitlán. Names in Mexico are often derived from the Náhuatl language: the word “Pantitlán” means between flags (pantli [flag] and tlan [place]). In this area, once part of Lake Texcoco, water eddies and currents were so substantial that canoes were carried away with force and, as a result, stretches of water were marked with flag posts to warn navigators of the dangers ahead. The Mexica (known as the Aztecs) settled and established the city of Tenochtitlán on the western part of this natural lake in the Valley of Mexico. Today, Pantitlán is loud, heavy with traffic, unsafe and near the airport. My grandmother, aunt and cousins still live in the same apartment I lived in when I was born, in the Orwellian year of 1984, twelve months before the catastrophic 8.0 earthquake that shook the city.
Growing up in my abuela’s apartment, the only art I remember was a framed painted reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper that still hangs by the dining room table. Below it, on a credenza, sits an arrangement of candles, tequila and mezcal bottles, replicas of Aztec figurines in erotic embrace, rosaries, photos of deceased family members and rompope, an eggnoglike liqueur with a label of a beautiful 17th-century nun holding an open book. What was she reading, I wondered? Not the Bible, I hoped.
In our Catholic household, during Christmastime, preparing the Nativity scene felt like a tremendous creative act for a child, a tableau vivant in which modest objects stood in for the birth of a god. We would go to a tianguis (an outdoor market popular since pre-Hispanic times) to buy clothes for baby Jesus and the almostinfant-size figures made of painted ceramic with glass eyes. We would use natural hay in the manger and form a meandering river from papier-mâché. What I looked forward to far more than Christmas, however, happened in early November: Día de los Muertos, a ritual with roots that some believe stretch back more than 3,000 years. Mictēcacihuātl, whose name is Náhuatl for “Lady of the Dead,” an Aztec deity and goddess, queen of Mictāl (the underworld), and her husband, the god of the dead, Mictlāntēcutli, presided over the realm of spirits, the afterlife and the
deceased. Mictēcacihuātl served as guardian of the dead and was ordained to oversee the ancient celebrations and rituals of the dead. (Let’s not forget that Christmas has deep connections to the pagan past as well, but that’s another story from another continent.)
During Día de los Muertos, I loved organizing the altar, which included a poetic presentation of photos of departed loved ones, cempasúchil flowers, candles, papel picado (colorful tissue paper cut with elaborate designs), copal (aromatic tree resin used ceremonially since pre-Columbian times), multicolored skulls made of sugar, papier-mâché skeletons, beverages, fruits and pan de muerto (a symbolic sweet bread made of dough shaped to represent bones with the taste of anise and orange blossom). These were offerings to the ancestors and souls visiting from the spirit world. In Mexico, death is not a taboo but part of daily life. You grow up not to fear it but to accept it, to celebrate the cycles of life and its transitory existence. I have been fascinated by representations of mortality and death for as long as I can remember.
Apart from home rituals, I remember trips to the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacán, northeast of the city. I’d climb the steep, timeworn, volcanic-rock steps to the top of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, imagining what so many before me had witnessed there, enraptured by the energy such a place contains and of my body occupying space within it. I was always grateful to live in a place where I didn’t even need to venture beyond the city limits to see archeological marvels, like the Centro Histórico, which my family and I visited regularly, walking by the Templo Mayor (the remains of the revered center of Tenochtitlán.) I remember asking my mother why these buildings were in ruins and why a colossal cathedral had been built atop the destruction of the something so sacred. (Hernan Cortés and his Spanish army, along with Indigenous allies, arrived in Tenochtitlán in 1519). Why was the cathedral more prominent than anything else around it? Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral was begun in 1573, inspired by the Gothic cathedrals of Spain. It is believed that the stones used to build it and other buildings around the Zócalo were taken from the ravaged temple of Huītzilōpōchtli, a principal Aztec god of the sun and war. All
around me as my sense of the world took shape was history layered like vellum, a city formed by what seemed to be a swinging pendulum of creation and destruction, both mythologically and materially. The intricate histories of the pre-Hispanic and the colonial were physically manifested almost wherever my eye could land, through archeological fragments and their post-conquest incorporation. The builders, having had to use the destroyed stones of their temples to make the cathedral, found veiled ways to preserve their beliefs. An example I love is that of a builder said to have taken a rock with the face of an Aztec deity from a fallen temple and covertly fused it into the structure of the cathedral, the very symbol of colonization and spiritual conquest.
Nurtured in a place brimming with myth, folklore, symbolism, magic and everyday surrealism, I end up tracing extremely serpentine paths from my childhood into the world of contemporary art that I inhabit now as an adult. Having been born close to the midnight hour, in the symbolic realm of night, my spirit seems somehow to belong there, to a primordial past when the moon and natural signs guided daily life, when much about the workings of the world was clouded in mystery and the sacred infused everything, a land of the unknown, the uncanny, the mysterious, the ancient, the symbolic and the mythic. If you were to see my book collection, my bedside book pile, my travel itineraries and notebooks, or if you were to follow me on Instagram, it would likely come as a surprise that I run an art gallery in Manhattan, Fortnight Institute, which I co-founded in the East Village seven years ago. As I sit in the gallery some days looking through the front windows onto the East Third Street of the 21st century, my head might be somewhere deep in the 6th century BCE in a history of the Eleusinian Mysteries, or I might be learning about ancient psychedelic plants or the medieval symbolism of the body or death rituals, the history of salt, the history of night in centuries past, the Black Death, the mummification process of the Chinchorro people of the Atacama desert in Chile and Peru. I’m very often lost in a maze of my own making, seeking in my thinking and reading to constellate divergent things until they feel naturally conjoined, at the
Last night I walked by the Templo Mayor and around the cathedral; every step felt as if it released a pulse of energy from a world below my feet.
very least in the realm of images, following models like those of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, the Dutch scholar and spiritualist, and Aby Warburg, the founder of the wholly unclassifiable Warburg Institute in London. (As Warburg wisely told us: “God is in the details.”) In addition to my obsessive image collection, I keep many small notebooks of lists, definitions, quotations and phrases, fragments shored against my ruins, as Eliot put it. Below are some examples:
Oreibaia
Possession trance
Ritual of Inversion
Orpheotelestae
Teratology
Tolle Lege!
Disciple of Experience
Psithurism
Querent
William Blake’s Twofold Vision
Catenation of Ideas
Medieval Synthesis
The Yawanawa
The Gateless Gate
The Cosmic Tree
To Untie the Wine Skin
Ocote
Hecate
The Ancient Chullpa of Peru
Teonanacatl
Lapidaries
Hierophany
As disparate as my worlds can feel, I usually see only a thin, delicate veil separating them, which now and again blows ritualistically to the side at the slightest whisper or murmuring wind. At its best, art accomplishes what the most esoteric knowledge does, prolonging arrival at resolved meaning as a way of perpetuating wonder and curiosity in a world that can often feel devoid of the sacred and the mysterious. In the end, I suppose, I am simply drawn to images and objects, old or new, that keep us on the borderlands of the rational.
The title of this essay refers to a book that left a profound mark on me when I was in my twenties, Labyrinths, the collection of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges
that operates as a kind of encyclopedia of imaginary places in which the divisions between reality and fiction remain ambiguous and often intertwined. My mind often wanders like a character would in a Borgesian world, perhaps the character of an archeologist mapping a lost city. If I hadn’t wandered into the professional world of art publication and art galleries as a young woman, I almost certainly would have become an archeologist, in order to absorb the energy that historical objects, archeological complexes and the art of the past radiate. That we can see, smell and sometimes even touch these pieces of the past is still astonishing to me, a chance to understand how transient we are, how long art and the objects of our past outlive us. As Mexican historian Alfredo López Austin says: “Some people come to history by way of aesthetic emotion. A word, a sculpture, or a pattern can be the igniting spark.”
Last night I walked by the Templo Mayor and around the cathedral; every step felt as if it released a pulse of energy from a world below my feet. The closer I came to the ruins of the temple, the stronger the power grew. Surrounded by volcanic stones like tezontle and tuff rocks, which were used to build Tenochtitlán, I thought about the myths of Mexico’s volcanoes. As I write this, back again for a while in Mexico City, I can see in the distance and sense in my bones the omnipotent presence of Popocatépetl (the Smoking Mountain), the volcano overlooking the Valley of Mexico, its breath actively painting the skies with smoke. Near Popocatépetl lies another volcano, Iztaccíhuatl, or as I grew up knowing it, La Mujer Dormida. Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl were lovers in Aztec mythology. When Iztaccíhuatl was falsely informed that Popocatépetl had died, she died as well, of grief, and upon his return, the gods covered the pair in snow and turned them into mountains. Today, Popocatépetl is a dangerously active volcano, still bringing fire to Earth as he mourns his beloved, keeping myth and magic, life and death, in our presence and in the present.
Page 32, clockwise from top:
Micrographic design in the shape of a spiral, ca. early 17th century. Pen and black and brown ink, 6 3/4 × 11 1/16 in. (17.1 × 28.1 cm). Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art Skull necklace, ca. 1200–1521. Polished and carved shell with incisions. Courtesy Museo Amparo
Film still of Sergei Parajanov, Hakob Hovnatanyan, 1967
Claudio de Domenico Celentano di Valle Nove, segment of Allegory of Distillation, ca. early 17th century. Courtesy The Getty Research Institute
Václav Zykmund, Portrét, 1944. Courtesy Moravian Gallery
Page 34, clockwise from top:
The Influence of the Moon on the Head Women (L’influence de la lune sur la tête des femmes). Estampe. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. PWB Images/ Alamy Stock Photo
Cupisnique artist, Whistle, 1200–500 BCE. Ceramic. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ritual implements, Talaga, Cirebon district, West Java province, 16th–18th century, Indonesia, Isidore Kinsbergen, 1863–1864. Courtesy Rijksmuseum
Bromide print in the postVictorian vernacular style, ca. 1910s. Artist unknown
Andreas Embirikos, Untitled, ca. 1920s
Plate from Maurice Bigot, Les coiffes Bretonnes: 100 modèles différents (Saint-Brieuc: Aubert, 1928)
Meister Hans Talhofers, Alte Armatur und Ringkunst, 1459. Courtesy Royal Danish Library
Having been born close to the midnight hour, in the symbolic realm of night, my spirit seems somehow to belong there, to a primordial past when the moon and natural signs guided daily life, when much about the workings of the world was clouded in mystery.
A philosopher’s travels in the garden of vegetal consciousness Plantasia By Simone Kotva
Recently, I’ve been having experiences that have made me question the chasm so often assumed to exist between plants and humans. These experiences have grown gradually out of a meditation exercise I’ve practiced daily for the past six years. The exercise is similar to mindfulness, but it is directed at plants and involves an altered state of consciousness. At rst, I wasn’t sure what to call
these altered states. Now I refer to them as “the enjoyment,” a description I came across while studying the history of Christian mysticism, and it stuck. Traditionally speaking, “the enjoyment” is an inexplicable sensation that arrives and, for a brief period, completely overpowers a person’s ability to speak or even think in words, images and concepts, including the idea of self. When I experience “the enjoyment”
during meditation, the sensation lasts for maybe four or ve heartbeats at most, but they are long, drawn-out heartbeats. Its e ects can be compared to orgasm, except that it is neither sexual nor arousing.
During these experiences, my awareness is located in my skin, which becomes hypersensitive. This is stable but di used, dispersed over the whole surface of my body. Although I write “I” and “mine,” the feeling is one in which subjectivity is not focused in a single place, but extended. My self is my skin, in touch with the environment, touching the environment. It is a deeply pleasurable but also profoundly disorienting experience.
Six years ago, when I began the regular meditation practice that led to these experiences, I was knee-deep in a new research project. The project was about mysticism—and plants. Initially, I was interested in the way mystics favored plants, and how, in turn, plants appeared to mystics in visions. The Buddha famously experienced enlightenment while seated under the Bodhi Tree, a Ficus religiosa, or sacred g tree. Many gures in Western Christian mysticism also received inspiration in vegetal milieus, such as gardens. Alternatively, mystical visions were delivered as vegetal allegories. Religious history is lled with examples of spiritual doctrines as represented by the anatomy of plants. The medieval mystic Mechthild of Hackeborn, for instance, once witnessed a magnificent tree erupting into her church, on which every fruit represented a di erent type of virtue and every leaf an aspect of Christ’s life. Here, too, an analogy can be drawn to Buddhism, in which spiritual teachings often are represented by plants, or conveyed in diagrams based on plant shapes, mostly lotus blossoms.
My experiences with meditation led me to another way in which plants featured in mysticism. This took a while to understand because not much has been written about it, and my interest was piqued when I read that certain Indian spiritual traditions call for a yogin
Georgia O’Keeffe, Untitled (Abstraction Green Lines and Red Circle), 1970s. Watercolor on paper, 15 1/2 × 11 in. (39.4 × 28 cm). Artworks © 2023 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
My favorite mystic … is the 17th-century Catholic Jeanne Guyon, who writes that God is best enjoyed by imitating the activity of a potted plant positioned on a windowsill, taking in the sun.
to assimilate to a plant, especially in the deeper states of meditation. Intriguingly, this process was seen as perfecting rather than diminishing the yogin’s humanness. Rereading my Christian mystics, I discovered a similar theme in Western mysticism, which speci cally advises readers to become like plants when attempting fruitio Deo, the “enjoyment of God” that is the aim of contemplation—occasionally alternating this instruction with exhortations to imitate the elements (water, re, air, earth), animals and infants, sometimes all of these in the same passage. My favorite mystic in this regard is the 17th-century Catholic Jeanne Guyon, who writes that God is best enjoyed by imitating the activity of a potted plant positioned on a windowsill, taking in the sun. (Incidentally, fruitio, the Latin word for “enjoyment,” is related to the word for fruit, making God, in this type of mysticism, indistinguishable from the world’s wild growth.)
This image of mysticism as a kind of vegetal enjoyment fascinated me, and it quickly became the focus of my research. It was a new direction I had not seen before in the context of Western Christian mysticism, and it also spoke to my own experiences with meditation. I had thought that plants were important to mystics as visual objects and allegories. Now, another possibility entirely presented itself to me: plants as role models for mystics to imitate.
This concept is quite di erent from the examples I rst mentioned, in which a spiritual doctrine is delivered in a garden or illustrated by means of a tree or a ower. While allegory is signi cant, it remains secondary to the spiritual message symbolized by plants. The instruction to participate in vegetal life foregrounds plants’ experience of the world. And, as I would soon come to discover, the way in which mystics de ne the enjoyment of God bears more than a passing resemblance to the way in which scientists who study plant behavior have begun to describe their understanding of plant intelligence.
According to one in uential narrative, plants lack consciousness because they lack brains. This was one of the conclusions drawn from the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel made the thenprogressive argument that animals other than humans were conscious, but left it at that. Bats were “alien” enough, Nagel contended. Plants were simply not on the radar; anything so far down the phylogenetic tree was not worth including in a philosophical discussion about consciousness. But over the years since Nagel’s
argument, a distinct turn to the vegetal has taken place across several disciplines. The shift has been inspired by pioneers in the study of plant behavior, among them Anthony Trewavas, emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, who has fought an uphill battle in his e orts to rede ne intelligence. Trewavas’s position, which has slowly gained acceptance, rests on a radical turn away from the brain. His research, and that of numerous fellow scientists, shows that plants forage for food, communicate with other plants and organisms, sense the world, make choices and remember what has happened to
them. In other words, they ful ll the criteria of intelligent behavior as it is understood by humans. For Trewavas, this suggests that brains are not necessary for “intelligent” behavior, and that thoughtful responses are not exclusive to mammals with brains but reach all the way down the structure of living matter.
Moreover, plants’ lack of a brain may have certain unexpected advantages, epistemologically speaking. As biologist Daniel Chamovitz argues in What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses of Your Garden And Beyond, brainless consciousness can do things that brains cannot. Unlike animals, plants lack a nervous system with which to interpret environmental stimuli. This means that while plants sense the world, they do not process it; they possess the hardware, as it were, but lack the software to interface with what they sense through images, concepts, language and ideas. This is a drawback if you want to write poetry about, say, a summer’s day. But it is an advantage if you want to directly experience that summer’s day, unmediated by conceptual representations. Plant awareness, though more simple in terms of its construction than mammalian perception, is, for that very reason, more directly in touch with the elements. As Chamovitz puts it, evocatively, plants are free from subjective constraints.
Several philosophers—among them Emanuele Coccia, Luce Irigaray, Michael Marder and Elaine P. Miller—have labored scrupulously to put into philosophical language what might be meant by the idea of plants freed from the constraints of subjectivity, as well as from images and representations. What would it be like to experience the world without a self to bear witness to the experience?
At rst glance, the notion seems as alien to human consciousness as Nagel’s contentions about bat intelligence appeared to the average philosopher in the 1970s. Yet, as Marder and others point out, the language that plant scientists use when talking about plant intelligence nds close parallels elsewhere in literature
Georgia O’Keeffe, Untitled (Abstraction Pink Curve and Circles), 1970s. Watercolor on paper, 30 1/2 × 22 in. (77.4 × 55.8 cm)
GLITCH In the West, we are only now beginning to catch up to a profound understanding of plants, not simply as food but as knowledge-holders.
and culture. Chamovitz’s expression, for example, mirrors that of a mystic’s awareness of the world, often described as a process of un-sel ng, one typically lacking in images and concepts. For Irigaray and Marder, mindfulness and contemplation have become ways of describing not only how humans think when they practice spiritual exercises but also how plants think. Marder, in particular, argues that when we contemplate plants, we may also be learning how to be attentive in the manner of plants. When focusing intently on plants we are “shuttling,” he writes in Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives, between “vegetal mindfulness” and “human mindfulness.”
This is possible, he adds, because humans, while not plants, participate (like all animals) in plant-like activities simply by virtue of the fact that they are embodied. For Marder, vegetal mindfulness is characterized by a continuous attention to the elements—air, moisture, temperature and sunlight among them—while human mindfulness is discontinuous and braindependent. Plenty of non-brain-dependent activities occur in the bodies of humans and other animals. Skin, for instance, experiences a similar, incessant awareness of the world. When we look at plants contemplatively, Marder maintains, the resonance and sympathy so often felt by practitioners of mindfulness is not merely metaphorical. Rather, it is a kind of call and response between the plant’s continuous attention and the vegetal mindfulness that sustains our embodied existence.
I nd that my own experiences speak directly to Marder’s description of a contemplative “shuttling,” as attention shifts from brain-dependent to involuntary activities. For me, skin has been a key factor. When meditating on plants, I feel myself becoming skin and thus leaf-like, taking in the world as a breathing surface. I wouldn’t say, though (nor would Marder), that my altered state of consciousness is for this reason the same as a plant’s way of knowing the world. To argue that it is possible to tune into shared vegetal ways in our embodied existence does not arrogate to humans the minds of plants. Instead, I think, it opens a highly generative zone
of contact between humans and plants, a space in which entanglement may happen.
Both my experiences and the concept of plant intelligence could be seen as complementary examples of non-conceptual, or “anoetic,” thinking. The term was coined recently by Augustine Casiday, a scholar of Christian mysticism, and, in a scintillating coincidence, Chamovitz, in What a Plant Knows, uses a similar term, “anoetic consciousness.” Derived from the Greek anoesis, “anoetic” means without ideations or concepts (noemata).
Chamovitz contends that consciousness exists in di erent forms and that plants’ “anoetic consciousness” makes it possible for them to be aware of the world without “seeing” it in pictures or ideas. While Chamovitz is not involved in discussions about mysticism, the term “anoetic” has a signi cant history in Christian spirituality. Casiday writes about the mystical practice of “anoetic prayer,” referring to the ancient Christian ideal of contemplation beyond words, images and sense of selfhood. His coinage draws from the 5th- and 6thcentury mystical theologian Dionysius
the Areopagite, who held that in its higher states, prayer is anoesia, a form of knowing beyond intellect. In Dionysius’s telling, the praying person moves toward this state by way of negating everything that could be expressed in words and concepts about the world and about God, arriving at last in an ine able mystical union. This via negativa, or “way of negation,” as it came to be known, represents one of the principal ways in which certain Christian mystics understand the path to the enjoyment of God.
In a felicitous turn of phrase, Marder has played with the idea that the via negativa of Christian mysticism may also be a via vegetativa, a “way of vegetation.” He re ects on the ways in which vegetal imagery performs a dual function in mysticism—as allegory and symbol but also as a teacher of spiritual practices. In much of mysticism, it accomplishes both. In Indian traditions of spirituality and also in Indigenous communities the world over, a common awareness of these functions has been shared for millennia, as discussed in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scienti c Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. In the West, we are only now beginning to catch up to a profound understanding of plants, not simply as food but as knowledge-holders.
My meditative experiences have left me vividly alert to vegetal life, both in the sense of plants and in the sense of the vegetal activities that sustain other organisms. Whether this feeling is similar to that experienced by historical mystics, I can never know. But the preponderance of plants in mysticism suggests that it well might be, which interests me in part because mysticism holds such a rich store of practical know-how, with strong bearing on the current planetary emergency. Marder often points out that amid so much writing about plants (their virtues, properties and endangered state), little is said about how to think with plants, even as plants. For me, mysticism practiced as well as studied helps me make that shift, from writing about plants to possessing a multi-species ethic rooted in vegetal life.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Untitled (Abstraction Blue Wave and Three Red Circles), 1970s. Watercolor on paper, 29 7/8 × 22 3/8 in. (75.9 × 56.8 cm)
LIFE TO MATTER
LIFE TO MATTER
Takesada Matsutani and Kate Van Houten on their early days as artists in Paris, with Désirée Moorhead-Hayter, Olivier RenaudClément and Anders Bergstrom
OLIVIER RENAUD-CLÉMENT
Good morning. It’s fabulous to see you all. I’m going to start with some very short questions. I’m going to be very indiscreet, so you don’t have to answer if you don’t feel like answering. [Laughs.] Then we’ll go into more of a conversation. Here with us in the studio is Anders Bergstrom, who works at Hauser & Wirth and is a veteran specialist in prints, in addition to being a specialist in the art of Philip Guston, so I think Anders has come from New York bearing a long list of questions for you, Matsutani and Kate, about your deep involvement over the years with printmaking here in Paris. Désirée Moorhead-Hayter is also joining us virtually. Désirée is the widow of the artist and legendary printer Stanley William Hayter, in whose studio, Atelier 17, Kate and Matsutani met. Just to situate us in time and space, we’re at Matsutani’s studio at rue Faidherbe in Paris on June 21, 2023. Matsutani, where were you born and when?
TAKESADA MATSUTANI
I was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1937, January 1.
ORC And you, Kate?
KATE VAN HOUTEN
I was born in New Jersey, U.S.A., November 11, 1940.
ORC Désirée, when and where were you born?
DÉSIRÉE MOORHEAD-HAYTER
I was born in Surrey, in England, the 12th of February, 1942.
ORC Matsutani, when did you first hear about the Gutai Art Association, the avant-garde Japanese movement of which you became a part?
TM I think I was fifteen, sixteen years old. It was in 1953 or 1954, just as Gutai started.
ORC Did you see an exhibition or read about it in the newspaper? What actually sparked your interest?
TM At that time I was doing a lot of painting in oil. Also drawing. And when I first learned about Gutai, I thought, “This is not art.”
ORC That’s interesting.
TM I was so young. Then my mind changed. I’ll tell you about that later.
ORC At some point you decided to go meet Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai’s principal founder, right?
TM Yes, I’d found out about him. When I was young, I spent almost eight years in bed basically, only reading. I couldn’t go to school. My head was so full it wanted to explode.
ORC You were confined to bed because of tuberculosis, right?
TM Yes. When I was better, around twenty-two years old, just at the end of the ’50s, I went to meet Yoshihara.
ORC I understand that when you met him, he told you that you were not good enough for Gutai.
TM He did, but I learned lots of creative ideas from him. I was trying to understand what my imagination wanted from art. I was doing a lot of reading, and Gutai and Yoshihara were part of that reading. Something that he said struck me. Yoshihara said that you must do new things. That’s why he so interested me. I was looking for a new kind of beauty.
ORC And then you become included in the Gutai group, part of its so-called second generation, and shortly after in the mid-’60s you are selected for a grant to visit France?
TM It was a competition that I won. In Kyoto, I saw a pamphlet for a competition that would give you the prize of a six-month scholarship in Paris, sponsored by the French government. I showed my paintings at the time and my dossier, and I won the prize in 1966, that summer. They said, “Come right now.” So at the end of year, I left for Paris, in November of 1966.
ORC Did you have any preconceptions about Paris? Were you interested in coming mostly to see the art, or did you just want to escape Japan?
TM Well, before France, I had never been to a foreign country. I really wanted to have the feeling of losing myself in another place. I decided to use the opportunity to do a little traveling, through Egypt, Greece and Italy. It was a three-week trip I took with Shinya Nakamura, a sculptor who was in my French language class. I wanted to see Europe and other places with my own eyes. Then I stayed in Paris and slowly became established. I began to be able to stand on my own.
ORC Désirée, when did you first come to Paris and why?
DMH In 1962. I had left England to go to school in Ireland. I spent a year in Spain, and then I went back to Ireland, and Ireland at the end of the 1950s was a pretty awful place. I’d always wanted to go to France anyway, so I just came over.
ORC Were you trained as an artist?
DMH I was trained in absolutely nothing!
ORC That’s the best training, most of the time.
DMH I got a job, eventually, in a gallery and spent two years there and met a lot of artists, and then I met Bill afterward.
ORC Kate, when do you get to Paris and why?
KVH I came in 1965, after having spent three years studying in Italy. Which was too bad, but it was time to leave Italy. I took a train here. I thought,“I’ll come and see Paris before I return to New York.” That was my idea, anyway. But I had no money, so I had to go to work.
ORC What did you practice and study in your formative years?
KVH In university I’d studied history, but I always painted. And then I just decided to be an artist. I decided I was committed to being an artist. I went to Italy because it was cheaper and easier to live there than New York. I was at the Accademia di Brera in Milan for three years studying—well, sort of studying—sculpture.
ORC So you all came here around the same time, in the ’60s, Matsutani a little later.
TM Yes, and there’s one thing I want to remember to say. When I was ill, I read a lot of art books, and I knew about Stanley William Hayter’s studio in Paris before the war and all the artists who had worked with him—Picasso, Giacometti, Miró, Ernst, so many. After I came to Paris, I remembered Hayter, also because I saw a work by him at the Second International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in 1960, where he won first prize. I never forgot his name.
ORC It’s interesting because today we’re gathered here in part to talk about Bill Hayter and his place in your lives as artists and also about the importance of the practice of printing, whether it’s serigraphs or gravure or etching or many other forms. When you came to Paris, Matsutani, did you look for a print studio right away? Or was it Hayter specifically who drew you into printing?
TM After I returned from Egypt and Greece, I came back to Paris. I had a Japanese friend, the artist Go Yayanagi, who was already working at Hayter’s Atelier 17 print studio. I asked him to introduce me. Just after the New Year, we went to the atelier. Hayter was there. He said, “Okay. Welcome. You can do what you want.”
ORC The first to meet Bill Hayter in this conversation obviously is Désirée. That was around 1964, if I understand correctly.
DMH 1965.
ORC You made his acquaintance for professional reasons, in the art world?
DMH No. I met him at La Coupole over a drink!
ORC That’s a very good reason. That predates the internet. [Laughs.] Did you get interested in his work, in his atelier? You obviously knew a lot of artists already.
DM I didn’t know his work at all until he brought me back to the studio. He was working on a great, great big painting at the time, which was very exciting. Then the relationship just took off from there, and I became very familiar with his work and really liked it. We became romantically involved, and while we had no intention of getting married, he was having a bit of trouble with his ex-wife, as it were, so we decided to get married after all, in 1972, and that was that.
ORC Who of Matsutani and Kate meets Hayter first?
KVH I did. The conditions for me to work in Paris weren’t good. I was having too much fun. What I did mostly was go to jazz clubs and movies. At one jazz club I met a guy, an American, and we kibitzed and he said, “You have no place to work? You have to come over to the Atelier 17. Come and do etching. At least you’ll have a place to work.” I didn’t even know what he was talking about. I had no idea about the print world. But I thought: “There’s a good idea. Bon.” I went to the atelier with a small portfolio of drawings under my arm, which Hayter didn’t care to look at. He just spoke to me and explained very briefly that this was an experimental community of artists and said, “Come. Come and work.” That was how it happened.
ORC When did you go, Matsutani?
TM Early ’67.
ORC And Kate is there already.
TM Yeah, but I didn’t know her.
KVH We were introduced, darling.
TM Yeah? I can’t remember.
KVH I remember very clearly! [Laughs.]
TM When I was there, slowly, through my eyes, I began to see how completely different Europe was from Japan, our history, everything. And what I figured out that I wanted to do in the studio was explore flatness. I was making three-dimensional paintings already in Japan—not paintings, really, but more like kinds of objects—but I did not have the space for this in Paris. I wanted to figure out about flatness through the engraving, how to make images that I thought of as flat.
ORC What was the crowd of artists like around Hayter’s studio in those days and the circles of artists you all knew?
TM A very interesting mixture.
KVH It was very mixed internationally and with people of
“I went to the atelier with a small portfolio of drawings under my arm, which [Stanley William] Hayter didn't care to look at. He just spoke to me and explained very briefly that this was an experimental community of artists and said, ‘Come. Come and work.’ That was how it happened.”—Kate Van Houten
all ages. We ourselves were all quite young, but not everyone in the studio was young. The only stipulation Bill had for involvement was that you had to have the serious intention of being a professional artist. And the only other rule he had, probably because this was the late 1960s in Paris and we all know what came along by 1968, was: No politics. The internationality of the studio was really extraordinary and there were many women involved, which you couldn’t say about other parts of the art world in those days, especially the United States.
ORC How old was Hayter when you met him, Désirée? I understand there was a bit of an age difference.
DMH He was sixty-three and I was twenty-three.
ORC Good for you. And good for him. Who did you meet through him and through the studio?
DMH There was nobody overtly famous in the studio at that time, but there were a lot of very good artists at work. There was Jean Lodge, a wonderful painter and printmaker expat from the Midwest.
TM Gail Singer, originally from Texas, was there, too. Very good artist.
DMH There was a Chilean friend of ours there, Eugenio Tellez.
TM And Yayanagi, who was working on great animation style at that time.
ORC It seems to me, based on the feeling that you’re communicating, that the studio was a bit like a commune, like you were all together all the time.
DMH It was like being back in school. It was one big sort of family, and we spent a lot of time in the back offices of the workshop, and people got together on weekends, and Bill would give about two big parties a year. There was just a very open, very good atmosphere.
KVH Bill had a lot of “tea” parties. [Laughter.] Bill introduced me to Matsutani himself. I looked up and saw a young man with a crew cut and a button-down shirt and I thought, “Ah, a Japanese artist from California.” But then I realized he didn’t speak very much English, and less French. He came in every morning and he always sat in the same corner. Nobody had designated seating. We had our boxes stored on shelves. We took them off, and we grabbed whatever place was open. But Matsutani took his box, and he always put it on the left-hand corner of the first table as you came in, and nobody ever sat there, because it was Matsutani’s place. I was very impressed by the way he concentrated on whatever he was learning, whatever he was doing. And his curiosity about the images. What he was doing was totally different from anyone else, and that made me curious. How did he come up with these images?
ORC Matsutani, was there a point at which you began to concentrate on Kate? [Laughs.]
TM Well, I couldn’t really speak well, in English or French. I knew a lot of foreigners but it was hard to talk, so I just worked and worked. Every day I went to the studio at the same time and I went home at the same time.
ORC Just as you do today. You’re a very rigorous person.
TM I was already married at this time, also, and I had a son back in Japan. It was very hard to know what to do. They
were so far away. It was very confusing to me, love and art. What do you choose? What’s your answer? Family or art or Kate? But I decided not to go back home, to stay in Paris. And that was my answer.
ORC Désirée, what were your feelings about your relationship with Bill and making a life in Paris?
DMH I had no conflicted feelings whatsoever. I was fascinated by the whole thing. It was a whole new world. He introduced me to science and mathematics and art, all sorts of wonderful things. He was an absolute fountain of information and an extremely vivacious and lively person. It was wonderful.
KVH There was a discipline in the thinking and the execution of things at the atelier. It was a wonderful space for me. At that time I did not have much discipline, and I had a lot of indecision in my life. With printmaking, if you have a copper plate or a zinc plate and you’re working with the acid or burin, whatever your tool, it’s permanent. That’s it. You can’t go back. Hayter always seemed to be distant, not particularly interested in any of us. And then one day he would come over when he would see you were at a moment of indecision and he’d say something simple to help you figure out what you wanted. And I’d realize how exceptional he was. He watched people. He knew what they were doing.
ANDERS BERGSTROM
I wanted to jump in here if I might. Matsutani, I wanted to ask about the Gutai and its philosophy that, to be part of the group, you really had to try to find something new. There are lines in the Gutai manifesto that speak of a “daring advance into the unknown world” and of goals that seem almost mystical: “Gutai Art does not alter matter. Gutai Art imparts life to matter.” But then here in Paris, at Atelier 17, it seems like it was a very different feeling, a more collaborative, open environment.
TM Yes, it was very different. Gutai was so much about intuition, about trying to find a way around logic and to just do something that felt like a big jump. It was the mentality of the movement, about daring. The other artists were very honest with you about whether they thought you were worthy. With Hayter it was more open. But coming from Gutai gave me courage to do my own thing. At the atelier, everyone wanted to work with color, because Hayter had pioneered viscosity printing, which gave you the ability to get multiple colors from a single plate.
AB And if I’m not mistaken, you didn’t really want to learn viscosity, because at that time you were very interested in the uses of black.
KVH When we were first at the atelier, everyone was using viscosity.
TM And often the work ended up looking the same. So I wanted to go another way. I wanted to see what I could get from black.
AB You made the black etchings for the series that you called Propagations.
TM That’s right.
DMH There were other people who were not using color at that
p. 39
Stanley William Hayter and Takesada Matsutani, ca. 1970s p. 40
Top: Kate Van Houten and Matsutani in his studio, Paris, July 2023. Photo: Laura Stevens. Bottom (left to right): Irene Whittome, Isolde Von Gart, Claire Crossley, Matsutani, Van
Houten, Jean Lodge, unidentified person, Dupak Benargis, ca. 1968 p. 42
Top: Takesada Matsutani, La Propagation-K, 1967. Etching, burin and aquatint on BFK paper (ed. 30), 19 1/2 × 25 1/2 in. (49.4 × 64.8 cm).
Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich.
Bottom: Takesada Matsutani,
La Propagation-M, 1967–69. Etching, burin and aquatint on BFK paper (ed. 30), 19 3/4 × 25 3/8 in. (50.2 × 64.6 cm).
Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Artworks courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth p. 44
Page from one of Matsutani’s notebooks with list of La Propagation works, 1967.
Photo: Benoît Fougeirol
p. 46
Matsutani in his studio, July 2023. Photo: Laura Stevens p. 47
Clockwise from top: Takesada Matsutani and Kate Van Houten, Untitled, 1969. Silkscreen on offset paper, 4 × 6 in. (10 × 15 cm).
Courtesy the artists; Hector Saunier and Matsutani using the hot plate for inking
intaglio plates at Atelier 17, 1968; Matsutani pulling the last color for the silkscreen work Sun Rise, 1971, at Van Houten’s studio in the 14th arrondissement.
Archival photos courtesy Takesada Matsutani studio. Photographers unknown
time, even though it was very popular to do. Bill didn’t want people to use color just to make a pretty image or focus on color. He wanted something definitive. He would get pretty upset when people were producing something and when people saw it they would immediately say, “Oh, that’s an Atelier 17 color.” He thought it gave the studio a bad name. I remember thinking immediately that Matsutani’s black-and-white engravings were beautiful. I bought one at the time.
AB I know that there are some color etchings from Matsutani around this time, along with the black and white, so you were doing some experimenting with color. How would this all work on the press?
KVH There were a lot of us. You had to schedule time on the press. Usually, there would be two people working on the big press on a given day. So let’s say Matsutani is working with Gail Singer. Gail used color, so she would choose her colors. She might ask: “Do you want some of my color, Matsutani?” You had an option. You weren’t obliged, but often you would experiment with different colors. Experimenting was important. We’ve found in Matsutani’s notebook that he actually kept clear notes about this and with whom he was working on the press.
DMH Gail Singer always knew exactly what she wanted with her colors. She never made a mistake.
TM She had a very powerful sense of originality.
AB Then at a certain point, both you and Kate began exploring screen printing, correct?
TM Well, there was a point at which I started to get impatient and wanted more time on press. I thought, “I must have another studio, but I’ve no money.” And then Kate got her own studio.
KVH What happened was that, with a friend, I had left Bill Hayter’s studio, because I got interested in the very rich quality of silkscreen colors. For the work that I was hoping to do then, silkscreen suited me. A Canadian artist, Carl Heywood, introduced me to it, using Versatex inks. Lorna Taylor, a South African artist who was a friend of mine, wanted to get into silkscreen for the very kinetic imagery she was doing, and I said yes. We already had a funny little place in the 14th arrondissement, which had a studio on the ground floor. Originally it had been a bake shop, and we turned it into a studio. She and I worked there for more than a year. Matsutani and I were together, getting very close. And he said one day, “Show me how you do all of this.” And he came into the studio. But he remained very involved with Hayter, who loved Matsutani and made him an assistant, which helped a little with money at that time.
ORC On that subject, I’d love to ask about the economics of the time for a minute. Is anyone around you making any money? How does this whole existence sustain itself?
KVH None of us were making any money. Hayter kept the costs for us as low as possible. There was his rent, things that had to be covered—utilities, the acids, the materials. There were certain materials that were provided with the participation fees we paid. Sometimes people’s parents would come and visit, and they’d buy a few prints from us, and that always helped. Most of us were on very tight leashes financially. Everyone had a different solution or had an odd job to make ends meet. There was one woman who had some money, and she was very shy about being able to afford things. We said, “Stop being embarrassed. Buy us a coffee.”
AB I have another very print-specific question. You had access to the two shops, Kate’s and Hayter’s, and at some point you start doing etchings on top of screen prints, right? Which was probably a pretty radical idea at the time, mixing mediums on the same sheet.
TM Right. I wanted to try new kinds of ideas. Technically, that’s why I did it. For the silkscreen, the paper had to be dry. And for etching it had to be humid. I made a screen print first at Kate’s; then at Hayter’s I would soak it and do the etching on top.
KVH It was radical, very experimental.
TM It was difficult. I couldn’t print many.
AB The great printmaker and teacher Krishna Reddy was also in Paris at this time, correct? He was the other pioneer of viscosity printing, along with Hayter.
KVH Reddy and Bill worked together, actually, though Reddy had a different technique for making the viscosity prints, a dot technique. Krishna came in 1951, and so he was in Paris over a very long stretch and we kept in touch with him and his wife, Judy Blum, for many years afterward, after they moved to New York.
AB I love prints, if you couldn’t tell [ laughs ], and I’ve always thought that artists who work in printmaking understand other parts of their practice in ways that nonprintmakers don’t, that there’s a lot of value in it besides just the works. Matsutani, was printmaking important to you in figuring out what you wanted to do more broadly?
TM I think so. But just being in Hayter’s studio, with so many people, was also valuable to me. I listen to people. If what they say or do seems important, I take it and I think about what I could do with it. It’s the same was walking down the street. You keep your eyes open. You see so many different things. Sometimes you take things from here and things from there and it makes you a great soup. See?
“I looked up and saw a young man with a crew cut and a button-down shirt and I thought, ‘Ah, a Japanese artist from California.’ But then I realized he didn't speak very much English, and less French.… What he was doing was totally different from anyone else, and that made me curious. Where did he come up with these images?”—Van Houten
ORC I always notice, Matsutani, that when we go to exhibitions together, before you look deeply at a picture, you seem to look to understand the technique. Is that correct?
TM It is. But I also want to see whether the technique feels honest for the work, does that make sense? Honesty is what I think about. Not whether something is good or bad. I never think in those terms.
ORC When does the Hayter studio ultimately close? Did it continue to exist after the passing of Bill? Tell us a little bit about that, Désirée.
DMH Bill died in 1988, and the studio was handed over to Juan Valladares and Hector Saunier and the name was changed to Atelier Contrepoint. So you can say that Atelier 17 itself went from 1927 until 1988, first in Paris and then in New York during the war, and back in Paris.
ORC It’s an extraordinarily long run. And Matsutani and Kate, you continued to work with him up to the 1970s, correct? When did you stop and why did you stop?
KVH The nature of projects changes and ultimately you just move away a little. But we were always close with him and Désirée.
ORC Then there’s a point not much after this time in which the two of you, Matsutani and Kate, really began to collaborate with each other, yes? With making books of poetry and work together?
TM Yes. You know, we’re very different. American and
Japanese, from very different backgrounds, sometimes like oil and water. That’s why it’s always been so interesting with this lady. I’ve learned a lot from her. I don’t know if she’s learned a lot from me. But maybe she has. We’ve been together a lot of years.
KVH We must have exchanged something. [Laughs.]
TM Sometimes, I’m sure she’s also very fed up with me. [Laughs.]
DMH It’s really lovely to sit here talking together today, the three of us. We’ve known each other for a long time. In those early days at the atelier, they were each in their own way quite exceptional. Kate would listen to Hayter and she really understood what he was trying to do. And Matsutani was always an incredible worker, very, very respectful of Hayter. They had something different from the other people in the workshop. They were very professional, even at that age. But you know, we were all young and we also had a lot of fun. Paris was such a great place for it, for parties together and good times together. I remember a party at Bill’s when I obviously had too much to drink and I ended up jumping up and down on the bed and fell down and broke two front teeth! Matsutani and Kate have been very good to me. And I love them both.
KVH And we still have lovely times together. We just don’t jump up and down on the bed as much anymore. The knees won’t take it!
p. 49
Top: Takesada Matsutani, Grand Palais-B, 1974. Silkscreen on offset paper, 25 3/8 × 19 3/4 in. (65 × 50 cm). Photo: Benoît Fougeirol. Courtesy the artist.
Bottom: Takesada Matsutani, 8, rue de la Ferronnerie, Paris 1er Arrondissement, 1979. Washi paper and photo by Matsutani on cardboard mounted on plywood, 11.8 x 18.9 in. (30 × 48 cm). Photo: Benoît Fougeirol. Collection of the artist p. 50
Takesada Matsutani, La propagation-ronde, 1967. Etching on paper (ed. 40), 19 5/8 x 25 1/2 in. (50 × 65 cm). © Takesada Matsutani. Photo: Stefan Altenburger. Collection Art Institute of Chicago.
p. 51
Top: Takesada Matsutani, Copperplate for La Propagation-5, 1967.
Photo: Kenneth Adlard. Courtesy the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Bottom: Takesada Matsutani, La Propagation-5, 1967. Etching and burin on BFK paper (ed. 50), 19 5/8 × 25 5/8 in. (50 x 65 cm). © Takesada Matsutani. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Collection Art Institute of Chicago p. 52
Matsutani in front of a new canvas in his studio, July 2023. Photo: Laura Stevens p. 53
Matsutani at his studio door, July 2023.
Photo: Laura Stevens
“Gutai was so much about intuition, about trying to find a way around logic.… The other artists were very honest with you about whether they thought you were worthy. With Hayter it was all more open. But coming from Gutai gave me courage to do my own thing.”—Takesada Matsutani
FRIENDSHIP AS A WAY OF LIFE
A consideration of the collective and individual work of fierce pussy
By Ksenia M. Soboleva
In 1981, the same year that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first official report about the disease that was later to become known as AIDS, a quietly profound interview with Michel Foucault appeared in the French magazine Gai Pied. In the article, titled “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Foucault suggests that homosexuality— though today he likely would have used the term “queerness”—is not so much the sexual identity of an individual but rather the network of relations that emerges from a queer way of life. “The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex,” Foucault says, “but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.” These relationships are the real threat that queerness poses to heteronormative society, he continues: “To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another—there’s the problem.”
The AIDS crisis gave rise to an unprecedented multiplicity of queer relationships, broader and more complex than those that formed around the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. Queer people across the gender spectrum came together like never before to fight misinformation and spread awareness about the epidemic. ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), founded in 1987, became the largest organization to draw attention to the political nature of the health crisis. While not without its flaws, it provided a particularly effective platform for activists to establish connections, fueled by friendship and a common cause. The floor of ACT UP was a space of exhilaration and exhaustion, desperation and desire, crying and cruising.
Various smaller collectives surfaced around ACT UP, usually dedicated to issues not sufficiently addressed by the larger coalition. The collective fierce pussy connected in 1991 as a group of lesbian artists dedicated to advocating for greater lesbian visibility. Its founding members—Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard and Carrie Yamaoka—constituted part of a larger assembly that gathered through an open call on the floor of ACT UP. Despite experiencing the increased homophobia, government neglect and mental health complications brought about by the crisis,
Opposite: Views of “arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: erce pussy ampli ed, Chapter 7” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2023. Photos: Benoît Fougeirol (top); Aurélien Mole (bottom). Courtesy the artists Carrie Yamaoka, Skin, 2021. Flexible urethane resin and white pigment, 18 × 13 × 4 in. (45.7 × 33 × 10.2 cm). Photo: Carrie Yamaoka. Courtesy the artist, Commonwealth & Council and Ulterior
lesbians were long left out of activist discussions and media coverage of the epidemic, due largely to the misconception that lesbians were immune to HIV infection (a fallacy rooted in the desexualization of lesbian identity in general and ignorance surrounding risk practices pursued by some lesbians, including intravenous drug use.) In his seminal 1987 essay “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” Douglas Crimp astutely proposed that the question gay men should be asking is not “What are lesbians doing to help us,” but rather “What are we doing to help lesbians?”
Zoe Leonard, Two Oranges, 1992. Two oranges, thread, wax. Dimensions variable. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Gisela Capitain
The first fierce pussy meeting took place at the Lower East Side apartment of Zoe Leonard, who was also part of a group that collectively wrote the Women, AIDS, and Activism handbook, published by South End Press in 1990. The fierce pussy collective decided to bring lesbian identity directly to the streets and came up with a series of “list posters” as its inaugural project. Taking possession of derogative and stigmatized terms such as “butch,” “dyke” and “bulldagger,” fierce pussy set out to reclaim language that had been weaponized to injure. Listing words in a column and placing “I AM” at the top and “PROUD” at the bottom, the collective transformed slurs into powerful affirmations of collective identity and sexual being, wheat-pasted throughout New York City—embodying a dynamic described by Judith Butler in reference to queer activism of the 1990s: “Performing excessive lesbian sexuality and iconography that effectively counters the desexualization of the lesbian.” The collective collaborated on projects until 1994, developing a distinct low-tech aesthetic that frequently paired image and text. Despite a connection to Condé Nast (Episalla and Yamaoka both held day jobs at the publishing company), fierce pussy notably rejected the agit-prop appropriation of glossy advertising imagery that became popular with some collectives of the period, resisting a culture of celebrity and media that would give rise to “lesbian chic” in the early 1990s. The collective’s view of the phenomenon was not
equivocal. Many of their posters were printed surreptitiously on a Condé Nast copy machine; one poster declared: “LESBIAN CHIC MY ASS. Fuck 15 minutes of fame. We demand our civil rights. Now.”
Alongside their collaborative projects, fierce pussy’s members maintained individual studios and active lives outside the collective. They shared and diverged, grew together and apart, fell in love, fell down and often fell back onto each other. Amid the emotional exhaustion that caught up with many activists by the mid-1990s, fierce pussy went on a hiatus in 1994, though various members continued to collaborate on activist projects, primarily antiBush campaigns. The group officially reunited in 2008 when invited to participate in a “semi-retrospective” hosted by Printed Matter, and the four founding members have been making collaborative work under the fierce pussy banner ever since.
In a pivotal piece of queer scholarship in 2003, Ann Cvetkovich uses the phrase “archives of feelings” to discuss trauma, sexuality and lesbian public cultures. I decided to write a dissertation about art, AIDS and lesbian identity in large part because I wanted to apply this phrase to artworks, being possessed of a sentimental self-interest (possibly jump-started by heavy doses of Russian poetry at an early age) in wanting to know what it felt like to be a lesbian at a specific time and in a specific place.
When I first interviewed the fierce pussy members for a paper I was to deliver at a conference on “constellations, clusters and networks” at Concordia University in Montreal in 2015, I frankly had trouble containing my nerves. Fresh to New York from Amsterdam, with little sense of queer community beyond myself, I was awed and intimidated by the group’s embodiment of collectivity. Episalla mentioned that the group had just been approached by artist and curator Jo-ey Tang, who was interested in finding ways to put the members’ individual works in conversation with each other and with the work of the collective, neither of which had been done before. An open-ended dialogue with Tang led eventually to “arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified,” an exhibition and publication project that has unfolded over multiple “chapters”—to use Tang’s terminology— since 2018. The alliteration of the project title is drawn from a piece by Yamaoka titled A is for Angel (1991), for which she plucked four “a” words from correction ribbons she had sourced from friends’ typewriters.
Resisting any static tendencies of exhibition-making and also art history’s instinctive fetishization of chronology, Tang envisioned a structure nonlinear in concept and presentation: Artworks from the late 1980s to the present were installed in varying iterations, with pieces reappearing in different chapters like unexpected but
erce pussy, For the Record, 2013–23. Newsprint wheatpasted to windows at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2023. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artists 56
welcome guests. The first four chapters took shape over four months in late 2018 and early 2019 at the Beeler Gallery at the Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio. In the first chapter, Brody, Episalla, Leonard and Yamaoka each had a room to themselves. A fifth was reserved for a fifth “artist,” fierce pussy itself, and contained ephemera and archival materials from the collective’s projects. While a dedicated archive room for fierce pussy was retained for the next three chapters, the other rooms presented a tangible dialogue between the four members. In the fall of 2019, a fifth chapter was realized at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, in keeping with the queer rules of the first four. Chapter six, to take the form of a book published in collaboration with Dancing Foxes Press, remains in the works.
The first four chapters of the project were gone before they even reached my awareness, stuck as I was in the bubble of graduate school. When chapter five took place in Philadelphia in 2019, I was in Paris for a research residency and unable to make the trip to see it. When I discovered that chapter seven would unfold at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, as part of the “Exposé·es” exhibition inspired by Elisabeth Lebovici’s book Ce que le sida m’a fait [What Aids Has Done to Me] (2017), I decided there was no way I would miss it. Thinking about the project’s nonlinear premise, I felt that perhaps it was fitting that the seventh chapter would be my first, and so I traveled to Paris in March 2023.
I’d met Lebovici a few years prior during the research residency in Paris. With Google Translate supplementing my mediocre French, I’d made my
way through her book, which discusses the ways in which everything and everyone has been affected by the AIDS crisis. Her chapters, like those of Tang’s, adhere to no linear narrative; they can be read out of order, from end to beginning. I had been particularly struck by Lebovici’s observation that “it is in the oral—and not written—archives of the fight against AIDS that we have seen that lesbians have been there since the beginning, that they have accompanied the mourning and the struggles.”
This sentiment strongly informed my dissertation project, to write about the lesbian experience of the AIDS crisis. Yet I still remember Lebovici telling me, as we shared an afternoon coffee, that for many years she had felt as if she were not allowed to write a book about her experience of the AIDS crisis because she had survived it. The guilt
of survival is one the most complex emotions simmering in the aftermath of collective trauma. Cvetkovich writes that one “outcome of AIDS activism for lesbians is that they have a legacy; they have the privilege of moving on because they have remained alive.” When I read this early on in my dissertation research, the comment made perfect sense to me. Yet the more I spoke to artists who had lived through the epidemic, the more the equation between remaining alive and moving on didn’t sit quite right. Eventually, I found this discomfort articulated in an essay by David Deitcher, titled “What Does Silence Equal Now?” Building on ideas put forth by the psychologist Walt Odets about the “deification of survival,” Deitcher writes that “survival must mean something more than just staying alive; it must include the capacity for love, intimacy, and a sexual expression of such feelings.”
When I enter the Palais de Tokyo, I encounter a calculus of survival in countless manifestations, first as a large window installation of fierce pussy’s For the Record (2013–23), a project that explores the process of mourning as an ongoing and lifelong experience. Executed in black font are sentences that describe daily activities and quiet observations of mourning, such as: “if he were alive today, he’d be standing next to you” and “if they were alive today they’d know exactly what to say.” Interspersed between these conditional clauses are reminders that the person in question would “still be living with AIDS,” an ongoing epidemic. The word “AIDS” is executed in red, demanding attention. Translated into French by Lebovici’s partner, the writer Catherine Facerias, the bilingual iteration at the Palais de Tokyo (which stands in for the fierce pussy archival room seen in other chapters) is somewhat more difficult to decipher than previous iterations of this project, from which I’ve built a collection of postcards and posters over the years. In Paris, the text is continuously interrupted by the window structure, which disrupts the process of reading. Yet I find myself captivated by this disruption—it underscores the painful fact that we don’t know what the subjects of these sentences would be doing if they were alive today. The only thing we can know for certain is that they’d still be living with AIDS. The rest is purely speculative.
Nancy Brooks Brody, left: Opening Body, 1991 (detail). Pencil and ink on paper. Photo: Jenny Gorman. Courtesy the artist; right: Cubes,2022. Wire and tape, 12 × 12 × 12 in. (30.5 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm.)
Courtesy the artist
Making my way through the expansive exhibition over the course of five hours, I save the arms ache avid aeon gallery for last, the same way I’ve saved it for last in this piece of writing. As I step into the room I feel a palpable shift in my body, a renewed awareness. Sunshine filters through the skylight, casting shadows that follow my movements. To my right, a drawing by Brody depicts a figure tearing open its torso to expose a gaping void (Opening Body, 1991). “Here it is,” I think to myself, “here is my archive of feelings.”
Brody is the first artist I ever interviewed about her experience of the AIDS crisis, in 2014. She told me that the “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993,” an exhibition organized by Helen Molesworth and Claire Grace in 2010, was the first moment when the four fierce pussy members realized they had never taken the time to mourn their own losses. Many activists have noted a seeming absence of grief within the AIDS movement, in part because grief was equated with taking time when there wasn’t any to waste. I look to my left at four intricate cubes seemingly floating off the wall, Brody’s Cubes (2022), installed vertically and consisting solely of wire and tape, and I see an outline of both absence and volume. Elsewhere, she has literally filled the architectural structure with a new presence. Spanning a corner of the gallery, where two walls meet, is a twentyfoot horizontal metal line carved out and embedded into the wall (20 Foot Line, 2018–23), functioning like a stitch that holds the space together.
The notion of the body emptied and stitched back together runs through the chapters and
Carrie Yamaoka, A is for Angel, 1991 (detail). Letraset and rubber cement on vellum.
Photo: Stephen Takacs. Courtesy the artist, Commonwealth & Council and Ulterior
Joy Episalla, foldtogram (35'-2.5" × 44"August, iteration 7), 2018–ongoing (detail). Silver gelatin object/ photogram on RC paper. Photo: Benoît Fougeirol. Courtesy the artist and Tibor de Nagy
resumes at the Palais de Tokyo. Leonard’s Two Oranges (1992), which formed the beginning of her larger, well-known piece Strange Fruit (1992–97), rests in a display case off to the side of the room. After the death of her friend David Wojnarowicz in 1992, Leonard began sewing back together scraps of discarded fruit peels, a process both reparative and futile. The piece became an homage to Wojnarowicz, recalling his sculpture of a loaf broken in half and sewn back together with red thread (Bread Sculpture, 1988–89), as well as the iconic image of the artist with his lips sewn shut (A Fire in My Belly, 1986–87). The shriveled and deformed fruit (notably embodying a term that is also a slur for “queer”) conjures the decaying body, the thread suggesting an effort to hold on.
On the gallery’s south-facing wall, subject to a particularly striking shadow pattern as I walk toward it, stretches a passage from Leonard’s recent Al río / To the River (2016–22) project. A poetic investigation of the ways in which a river is used to perform a political function, the photographs explore the Rio Grande (called the Río Bravo in Mexico) as both a border and an entity that abides no borders. The nine photographs on view show the river whirling and swirling, the surface wrinkles reminiscent of skin. I cannot help but see clitoral shapes in these photographs, possibly because elsewhere in the exhibition Leonard has showcased archival materials from an installation she created for Documenta IX, in 1992, in which she famously juxtaposed 18th-century portraits of women from the permanent collection of the Neue Galerie in Kassel, Germany, with nineteen close-up shots of her friends’ vulvas. A new series of these pussy prints, created specially for “Exposé·es” and hung throughout the exhibition (Untitled, Palais de Tokyo [for Elisabeth]), 2023), both activates and seals this history.
If history is a scab, Yamaoka is determined to scratch it. Intrigued by what happens when one doesn’t follow a medium’s technical protocols, she experiments continuously with the unpredictable nature of material behavior, rubbing and peeling reflective surfaces, reinterpreting spaces of presumed error as spaces of serendipitous potential. She often returns to older pieces and reworks them, challenging the idea that artworks are fixed in time. Elsewhere in the gallery, a thin sheet of white urethane resin, Skin (2021), hangs like a mask freshly peeled off a face, the body implied by its absence.
Episalla’s foldtogram (2018–ongoing) unrolls into the space like an eager tongue, revealing a landscape of cracks across a surface of silver gelatin. Reappearing in different iterations in all the chapters thus far, like Brody’s 20 Foot Line, the piece both archives and resumes the chapters. Episalla creates these colossal prints in the darkroom without the use of a camera, to explore
Zoe Leonard, Al río / To the River, 2016–22, Gelatin silver prints, C-prints and inkjet prints. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Gisela Capitain
photography’s sculptural quality and also to closely study traces of touch. A smaller, adjacent room houses a projection of Episalla’s new film, As long as there’s you, As long as there’s me (2023). The film consists of footage Episalla shot over eighteen years, documenting both people and animals performing without realizing that anyone is watching—a non-performative performance.
erce pussy, AND SO ARE YOU, 2018–19. Freely distributed posters. Courtesy the artists
The scholar Sara Ahmed once wrote that “individual struggle does matter; a collective movement depends upon it.” If the collective practice of fierce pussy is direct and explicit, the individual works of Brody, Episalla, Leonard and Yamaoka are subtle and quiet, offering a different kind of lesbian visibility, one that escapes bodily representation and instead manifests itself through friendship as form in proximity and dialogue. Much of the work suggests that there’s a limit to what the body, punctured by loss, can contain before it cracks open and grief inevitably seeps in. Yet the process of cracking by definition gives rise to a multiplicity. Though I am the only person in the gallery, I can feel another presence—that of time as a body—softly breathing down my neck, a sense of time expanding and collapsing simultaneously. An empty crate whose purpose I can’t decipher sits uncomfortably in the room with me. I later learn that it’s supposed to hold a stack of list posters, all taken for the day, and I’m overcome by a kind of sweet disappointment, having lost something I didn’t have—missing the opportunity to take away a tangible record of my presence and having to rely on the embodied memory alone.
CREPUSCULE WITH STANLEY
A portfolio of little-seen work by the photographer
(1949–2017)
All photographs © Estate of Stanley Greene
Stanley Greene
Ginger Coyote (editor and publisher of Punk Globe magazine) at On Broadway, San Francisco, 1984
D.H. Peligro (drummer of the Dead Kennedys) and Ginger Coyote backstage at Mabuhay Gardens, San Francisco
Nina Hagen at North Beach, San Francisco, 1983
Nico at On Broadway, 1985
Bonnie Hayes under Paul Zahl’s drums following a performance by the Yanks, Mabuhay Gardens, 1984; right: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 1984
Last night of Earl’s, San Francisco
Black and White Ball, Paris, 1986
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 1986
Paris, 1988
Paris, 2006
Paris, 1988
Paris, 1990
74 rue Mazarine, Paris, 1990
Photographer
Colette Valli, 1977
Paris, 1990
Musée d’Orsay, 1986
Musée d’Orsay, 1986
There’s a time at night when dusk and dawn can seem suspended in the abyss of darkness’s depth. Reality bends and shivers. Dreams grow wild and menacing, holding the morning hostage. Such is the essence of Stanley Greene’s photographs.
Like the witching hour, Greene’s photographs have the power to stir demons from their slumber. In his work, the inanimate world comes to life. Spectral figures are unleashed. Bodies are caught in war-torn landscapes. Artificial light floods a concert stage or a lustered Paris street and beauty suddenly shoots forth.
Greene once told me I was a cat. “Cats can see in the dark, Stanley,” I told him. His images need to be looked at with a cat’s dilated pupils, necessary for the worlds he photographed to fully reveal their cryptic truths.
At the end of his career, Greene was known primarily for his powerful, lyrical, unsettling work in Chechnya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Rwanda, Sudan and numerous other places. Kathy Ryan, the longtime photo editor of The New York Times Magazine, who hired Greene for assignments, once called him “the epitome of the poetic photojournalist.”
Armed with his camera, Greene traversed the dark corners of humanity, unafraid to confront the evils that lurked in the shadows. From deserted landscapes to seedy back rooms, he captured despair as well as flickering glimmers of hope.
But for many years before his war photography work and for periods throughout it, Greene dove obsessively into other worlds, like the Bay Area punk scene in the mid-1970s and 1980s— the Mutants, the Lewd, Flipper, the Dead Kennedys—while attending the San Francisco Art Institute and, later, the backstage and on-the-pavement
fashion circles of Paris, where he lived for most of his life.
Tall, stylish and magnetic, Greene typically wore a black beret on his head, scarves coiled around his neck, black leather and dark shades. He never owned an apartment or a car. All he had were his cameras and a pair of cowboy boots. Born in Brooklyn on Valentine’s Day in 1949 to actor parents, he landed bit parts in television commercials as a child and seemed destined to become an actor. But a Kodak Brownie given to him by his father when he was eleven eventually set his course. In his early twenties, while studying to be a painter, he befriended the photographer W. Eugene Smith, who encouraged him to become serious with a camera. By that time, Greene was also active in the Black Panther Party and the anti-war movement.
Throughout his life, he seemed to use his camera instinctively to limn disparate worlds as a means of making sense of them for himself. He recalled: “I started to shoot the music in 1975. I mean, what do you do on a Saturday night? Instead of watching whatever is on the tube, you grab your camera, and you go out and take pictures. And that's what happened. I would go out every night taking photographs of the punk scene. Everyone thought that I should be photographing my own culture because I was Black. I was not interested. The punk movement was so alien to the world I came from. This white noise, it just grabbed me and wouldn’t let me loose. I had to follow it.”
To the very end, in 2017, Greene moved through his own world like a noir hero, a living embodiment of grit, elegance and poetry. When I miss him, I’m watching the film of his life over and over again in my memory, catching his ghost somewhere in the distance with my cat’s eyes.
—Eve Therond
On the 1993 Whitney Biennial and its place in the present
Homi K. Bhabha and Kate Fowle in conversation with Jessica Bell Brown, K imberli Gant, Elena Ketelsen González and Xiaoyu Weng
Charles Ray, Fire Truck, 1992–93, in the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Charles Ray
Photos pp. 69–70, 72, 74 (bottom), 75-77: Geoffrey Clements. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art
Randy Kennedy
Before we start in earnest, I wanted to ask each of the curators here: When did you become aware of the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the reactions to it? It’s interesting to think about where you all are in your careers and how early on that exhibition might have established some terms in your mindset.
Kimberli Gant
I always think about the fact that I never had the chance to see it in person. I’ve only ever understood it as a thought exercise, basically, or as a way of understanding how the art world shifted in the ’90s. A lot of people really only understand that biennial through the criticism of it, which makes it hard to form your own conclusions. I was thirteen years old when it happened, after all, and I think the earliest I became aware of it was in graduate school.
Jessica Bell Brown
For me, it has this kind of recursive presence in my understanding of what museum practice looks like, in a vulnerable way, if that makes sense. As Kimberli said, the criticism of the 1993 Biennial has become an object in and of itself. I didn’t really get to spend time with its impact until grad school, either. Then many years later, when I was teaching a course at Bard on the relationship between museums and societal discord, we had a one-week seminar that focused on the 1993 Biennial and also on “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art,” the rst group show that Thelma Golden organized at the Whitney, which opened the next year. For me, the 1993 Biennial has always been a true watershed. It’s B.C./A.D. of contemporary art in America, you know, before the 1993 Biennial and after it, in terms of how the art world functioned.
Xiaoyu Weng
I didn’t come to the United States until I was twenty-two, for graduate school, so before that there was a void of a very particular kind of American art history for me. The 1993 Biennial for me was mostly present through Daniel Martinez’s metal museum buttons reading, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be white,” which created a huge stir. That work made a very big impression on me. I guess because of my background as an international student, the show made sense in terms of its world-historical moment, that it came only two years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the perception from outside the U.S. of the country’s apprehended and contested
idea of multiculturalism, which had undertones of the fear towards socialism that had de ned the Cold War. I read the show through those kinds of contexts.
Elena Ketelsen González
I remember reading, as an undergrad, the essay that Homi wrote for the 1993 Biennial catalogue. My degree was in philosophy, and I was really focused on critical theory and aesthetics. I read his piece not so much in the context of the exhibition but more within the kinds of theoretical conversations about postcolonialism going on with thinkers like Homi and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. I hadn’t really spent time in New York, so I wasn’t yet totally aware of a lot of the artists in the show.
In 1993, I was only three years old, which I think is fun to note. I was still in Costa Rica. It was before my family migrated, and it was a time in the wake of the treaties being negotiated around the wars in Central America, as well as new trade agreements. An interesting coda for me was that I worked at the Whitney as an assistant for a few years around the time of the 2017 Biennial, which also had a big public moment partly around Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till and the reaction to it. All of that helped me to better understand the collective fears of all of those people who worked on the biennial back then.
Homi K. Bhabha
Just listening to you all, I’m trying to think my way back into that moment, and you’re quite right that there was a fear of this thing called multiculturalism,
which is always a leopard with many spots, always only what people want it to mean. A little parenthesis: I’m using that word now because it was in currency back then, but for me the problem was never the “multi-ness” of multiculturalism. Xenophobic fear, or patriotic paranoia, doesn’t come from the fact that there are multiple cultures in play at any given time. The anxiety that leads to social aggression and racial violence has two origins. First, the claims to power, rights and representation on the part of minorities and migrants that unsettles the majoritarian assumption of political sovereignty and culturalracial supremacism. And secondly, the rage against racial miscegenation and cultural hybridity that has its modern roots in slavery and colonization. The desire here is to protect the cultural “purity” of the population—an impossible and implausible project—furthered by ethno-nationalists globally, and by American “exceptionalists” locally. This leads to a massive cultural and political “projection” on minorities—racial, sexual, cultural, the disabled—that plays out in perverse and persecutory forms of violence. As Claudia Rankine puts it in a veiled reference to police violence: “Because white men can't/ police their imagination/ black men are dying.” Thinking speci cally about museums and cultural institutions, one has to consider the role of ideologies of national sovereignty in de ning who belongs to “the public,” whose rights are respected, whose security is assured,
Daniel J. Martinez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con Claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993, in the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art. © Daniel J. Martinez
whose interests are best served and whose bodies are protected from phantasms of violent racial projection. In short, as Justice Sotomayor once put it, law and politics must protect those who are increasingly part of a growing body of “carceral citizens.” When we think about outreach, when we think about education, when we think about curation, when we think about artists making work, I always feel that it’s not simply about representing a minority as a minority. It’s about representing minorities within the larger context of how agency and personhood is de ned, in the larger context of: Who are “the people?”
To me, the important thing is: How is a particular group of people or particular forms of di erential identity heard? What are the institutions that do that? Who gives a platform? The state controls people through identitarianism, as we all know. You sit in your little island as a Parsi from Bombay. The people in power say:
“We will fund you on your little island.” You sit on your African American island. As long as you keep to your island, you will nd an architecture of what is, in fact, assimilation. I was never in favor of that, so I was unpopular for many years. It made everybody feel very good and comfortable to think about diversity and plurality. Well, plurality is not actually the problem. The problem is how do people who’ve been dehumanized—I don’t use the word “marginalized” because they’re not marginal; they’re absolutely central to the description of cultural industries, of cultural institutions, at all educational levels—how do people who’ve been dehumanized gain autonomy and authority—public standing—within the idea of a public? We have to think beyond identitarian clichés towards di erential and diverse structures of a liation and solidarity. That was the aspiration of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, and it remains a work-in-progress to this day.
Fowle
Homi, when you saw the show, were you shocked by any of it? Can you talk a bit about your response to the works?
Bhabha
I can’t recall my feelings in every detail, but I talked with Elisabeth Sussman— one of the show’s curators and a close friend—quite a lot at the time. I had a sense of what she and the other curators wanted to do. When I walked through the show, what struck me was that it was a very dynamic, even dialectical, environment. The art was not distinct from the critique of curation—curation
and creativity, theory and performativity, were sister arts. But the underlying emphasis of the exhibition and the writing in the catalogue ru ed so many feathers. There was the now well-known roundtable discussion published in October, focusing on how the discourse around much of the art in the show was ignoring the signi er—the work itself—having become concerned only with the signi ed—the ideas and the political import or impact of the work as delineated in speci c, sometimes very overdetermined ways. In other words, there was more attention, as they saw it, to message than to materiality.
My view was: Here was a show that did not hide either the conceptual creativity of the artist or the critical perspective of the curator, which I found very exciting. The curatorial team repeatedly looked back at its decisions from the perspective of an as-yetto-be convened audience—and that is the gesture of alterity and hospitality so crucial today. I can only properly welcome you to cross the threshold if I try to understand, ethically and existentially, what it might mean to be a stranger standing at the gates of the gallery. That kind of creativity for the 1993 exhibition,
which was curated in a spirit of alterity, I found adventurous and exciting. Things weren’t always coherent, because the materials and techniques were complex in themselves. But there was a triangular dynamic—or dialectic—at play across the exhibition: the work, the curatorial framework and the critics themselves, who were being forced to evolve a kind of new language for what was happening.
Fowle
I didn’t see the show as I was living in the U.K., but I was aware of the way it was being received via the press. One of the most important aspects to me was that it appeared to usher in a new curatorial approach that enabled viewers to experience research in action. It wasn’t about curators presenting a singular thesis. Instead, they created the conditions that allowed for experiencing something open-ended. Neither the critics nor academics knew quite what to do with it all. October, to your point, Homi, got Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss and Silvia Kolbowski and Miwon Kwon and Benjamin Buchloh to discuss it “out loud” together in a panel discussion that was then transcribed, which was a di erent and more experimental way to frame or write about the show at the time.
Film still from Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Fourth Dimension, 2001. © Moongift Films. Courtesy the artist
But it ended up sounding judgmental and out of touch, whereas the exhibition itself was far more exploratory, with lots of room for slippage and shifting meanings.
Bhabha
Exactly. The show was not built for that kind of exemplary applicative criticism. You had to give yourself to it. You were to be battered by it. You were to be torn by it. That’s at least the space from which I tried to write about it, conceptually and critically.
Gant
Reading about the 1993 Biennial has always made me think about the format of the biennial or triennial and the expectation of how the works should relate to a thesis. Yet none of these kinds of shows actually have a thesis in which you can tightly t work within, while they seem to get critiqued on how well all the work related to one. Or they get critiqued for the thesis being too broad or too fuzzy. And so there is an aspect of them being set up from the start to fail, at least in how they operate in the world.
Fowle
The biennial as a format really proliferated in the 1990s, which
expanded discourses and opportunities internationally but also to your point, Kimberli, came at a time when curatorial themes were getting much looser. I once tried to count up how many began in that decade and got to thirty-two, which included Dak’art in Senegal in 1992; the Asia-Paci c Triennial in Queensland in 1993; Bamako Encounters in Mali in 1994; the Gwangju and Johannesburg biennials in 1995; and then Shanghai, Mercosul, and then the Manifesta biennials all began in 1996. As the art world opened up, I think it was both the biennial format—which is more like a festival than a traditional museum show—and the de-centering of the art world that started to change who was invited and what was being explored. That’s when biennials were crucial insofar as they ushered in the potential for curatorial experimentation and new networks of a nity between artists.
Weng
It’s really interesting to see what sometimes feels like parallel conversations between the 1993 Biennial and Documenta 15 just last year in terms of how so much of the vocabulary hasn’t
changed. Of course, there were other issues involved in Documenta 15, because of the inclusion of imagery that was seen as anti-Semitic and antiIsrael, but the overall feedback was: This is bad art. Where’s the quality? The same kind of language was used in the October roundtable back in 1993. So, it’s still the question of: who’s de nition of quality are we talking about? The kind of universalism that’s been pushed since High Modernism has never really gone away. It’s still there. It’s embedded in so-called aesthetic judgment. It’s this very arrogant and comfortable position that the Western mainstream art world upholds.
Brown
I wanted to return to your comment, Kimberli, about precision and the idea of a curatorial thesis. I think Elisabeth Sussman and her team for the 1993 Biennial put their framework out front and center, which was simply to take stock of art practices across America that challenged dominant ideas about class, race, gender, and power structures. That biennial said, “We all have to confront this and take our time with it and there are no
Gary Simmons, Wall of Eyes, 1993, in the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Gary Simmons
easy answers here. There’s no reprieve.”
That was the mission.
It’s interesting to think about the allergy to biography that we see in that October roundtable. I think part of their sense of recoil had to do with a fear of confronting the realities that di erent kinds of publics were facing. The 1993 Biennial held up a mirror that made that confrontation inescapable. Interestingly enough, I think that with “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Culture”—the pivotal show that artist Charles Gaines organized that same year at U.C. Irvine—we can see him already parsing the reactions to identitarian politics at the very moment they are aring up around the Whitney.
Bhabha
Can I add something here? I like very much the questions we’re asking about modernity, universality, the notion of things not being containable, appropriable. I think one of the really important issues at that time and that continues today is the question of risk. For those who want to look deeply at the signi cations of modernism and its formal structures, what we often overlook is the risk that modernism took. We have absorbed, or appropriated, that risk. In the early ’90s, the risk to life represented by AIDS threw its shadow over the production of art and its institutional arrangements. At the same time, the risk to living with, and within, a pandemic was a central issue in de ning what citizenship and community meant to all of us whether, we were personally threatened or not. AIDS Lives Matter is resonant with Black Lives Matter, because, for me at least, it poses questions about the life and death of political community and cultural solidarity. To own risk, to lean into risk, is critical in seeing the link between political equality and cultural equity (and they are not the same thing!) My argument here is resonant with James Baldwin’s belief that ethical risk is essential to the pursuit of art and freedom—or freedom-as-art.
Fowle
Perhaps we can think together about another notion you have been working through Homi—that of “the now,” or “nowness.” It feels proximate to your concept of unpreparedness and of risk in relation to interpretation. In part, the “now” has to do with the question of “what is history?” but it’s also an attempt to understand the contextualization of art in the present: It’s impossible to see an
artwork that directly speaks to the time in which it was made, say in 1993—or 1963 or 1983—in the same way today. What does it mean to re-present works out of the context of their time, if they are so much a part of their time?
Brown I nd myself thinking a lot about the space of the museum as one that’s always about making something crystallized, knowable, ascertainable. And artists are quite often working against that. So we as curators are engaged in an enterprise that has deep inherent tensions built in. I think the success of many shows that end up having a transgressive e ect are shows that try to get closer to where artists are. Museums are constitutionally averse to that kind of open-endedness, partly, I think, because they operate as public trusts. You have to be careful about saying “always,” but the best artists are always trying to imagine or articulate a possibility—or maybe you would call it an a rmation—of an experience. And the source of acknowledgment of the experience remains somehow outside of the making of the object. Time becomes the conduit for the connection to be rebuilt.
Sometimes the acknowledgment happens close to the moment of creation when a piece is rst displayed. But sometimes it takes many, many years to be able to see something in a way that’s aligned with how the artist imagined it. History is always subject to revision and restoration. For the show “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” Ryan N. Dennis, my co-curator, and I worked very hard to put aside what we thought we knew about the Great Migration and to go where the artists wanted to go with it. I wonder what it would have been like to have been in the room with Elisabeth Sussman and Thelma Golden and the curatorial team in 1993, because something special had to have happened in those discussions and also with the artists. You don’t get a show as transgressive as the 1993 Biennial without being committed to setting the museological soft architecture aside for a second and being as close to artists’ visions as possible.
Weng
In terms of 1993 and the question of talking about it now, about re-presenting work, I do feel that we have new vocabularies today that didn’t exist in the same way thirty years ago, to articulate some things and give the public ways to
ed.)
think about work that weren’t possible in 1993, because the work was so close at that time. And I feel optimistic about that, in terms of what we can do. I like to think about speci c examples of artists and artwork. One artist who’s been getting a lot of traction and recognition lately is Trinh T. Minh-ha. A lot of her lms and works were made in the late ’80s and ’90s and are only starting to be seen for what they are now. Her intersectional and postcolonial perspective is so important, as are the theories she was putting forward, like the idea of looking with instead of looking at, establishing a horizontal relationship with her subject matter. It’s nally being widely discussed today and coming into the so-called mainstream. It does usually take that kind of delay of, I don’t know, maybe thirty years, for some artists to be caught up to or for their work to be understood clearly.
Fowle
When we think about people seeing a work for the rst time, what do you all think about interpretation? How much does it matter? Can we see it from the now without needing to know where it’s from?
Gant
It kind of goes back to the October conversation, because part of that was asking what audiences are expected to know. What are they coming with? What are we assuming they know? What are the artists thinking about and assuming publics know? On Jessica’s point about
Cover of Paulo Freire’s Pedgogy of the Oppressed (New York: Penguin Random House, 1974
the space of the museum, when you get the opportunity to go along with the artist, saying, “Let’s take the risk,” as a curator, we still have to convince those higher up to go along as well. Then on top of that, there’s the expectation, not only within the institution but I think also from the audiences, that you will explain things to them in certainties, even if you don’t think it’s a good idea. There are the hard realities of the regular eighty-word wall label and the limitations that get placed on you when a work that contains so much, but as the curator, you’re limited
to these eighty words in which to try to say something about it. And then your educational colleagues have their input. Maybe they want more conciseness. And both you and the artist say: “Hey, that’s not the only explanation. That’s not the only way to interpret this.” So then you hope that the viewer will take more away from it by using their own experience. You hope they’ll say, “This is what they’re telling me but I’m not accepting just that. I’m going to add on other layers of understanding because of where I’m coming from and who I am.”
Weng
I’d say the limitations of an eightyword wall label are a fairly American institutional tradition, because of all the di erent stakeholders in the institution. And sometimes that interpretation ends up being more of a diplomatic act than a creative or educational one. The history of museum pedagogy plays into it, in terms of the politics of interpretation.
Bhabha
Right, but I would add something to that, ask you a question, perhaps. Isn’t it also true that, as great and adventurous curators work to get closer to the artist— the charisma of the artist, the enigma of the artist—the artists themselves, in my experience, are living productively in the world of conceptual charismas and the theoretical enigmas that preoccupy critics and curators? There is a dialogical relationship, a shared quest, among artists, curators and critics that allows for a dialogue of reverberation rather than a discourse that is rebarbative. This is not collusion. It is more like con ictresolution, which always fails, but as Samuel Beckett said, we learn to fail better—together! And the best curators, like yourselves, are able to listen for that unspoken word in the work. I think that’s something that happened very much in 1993, the catching of something that was not said. And yet the incompletion of the not-saying was so stimulating— not only in one work but in the way in which the echo of the un-worked-out, as it were, reverberated through all the works in the show.
Ketelsen González
I also think now we’re in a position now in which we—and audiences—question the authority of institutions much more than ever before. I think even thirty years ago, it was much more of a given that whatever was on the label, whatever the museum said about a work, was seen as the primary truth, the meaning. And now there’s a wider understanding of multiplicity of meanings and many more ways that audiences are given to engage with a show.
I recently tried to nd anything that had been written about how the education department at the Whitney dealt with the show in 1993. I found a mention in The Los Angeles Times that quoted a curator of education talking about many programs to make the exhibition “comprehensible” to a wide audience. And I can only imagine what that meant, because educational practice at museums has changed so much. In
View of the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From left: Charles Ray, Family Romance, 1992–93; Peter Cain, EP 110, 1993 and Peter Cain, Pathfinder, 1992–93. Artworks © the artists
View of “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,” 1993, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine. From left: David Hammons, African American Flag, 1990; Pat Ward Williams, 32 Hours in a Box ... and Still Counting, 1988; Adrian Piper, Free #2, 1989 and Sandra Rowe, The Slave Series, 1992. Artworks © the artists; David Hammons © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Catherine Opie. Courtesy UCI, University Art Gallery
Glenn Ligon, Notes on the Margin of the Black Book , 1991–93 (detail), in the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Crousel, Paris
Courtesy the artist; Hauser & Wirth; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Galerie
Chantal
the ’90s, there was still a lot of what Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher and educator, called the “banking method” of education: Oppressed people came to a classroom and knowledge was deposited in them, as he said. There was no exchange between student and the educator, no path to critical thinking, no questioning of the knowledge. In the October conversation, there were a lot of assumptions around what the audience brought to the 1993 show.
People now talk about “community,” which is often code for Black and brown and Indigenous people, people of color, working-class people. And there’s often the question: How do you make something comprehensible to these communities? But the question should be framed di erently, to ask what those people are bringing to the work. In some cases, I’m sure they’re the people who brought the moxst to many of the works in the 1993 show. I think about Lorna Simpson’s Hypothetical? (1992), with its wall of gridded mouthpieces for horns and the sounds of breathing presented alongside a newspaper clipping quoting
Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. A lot of white critics at the time wrote about the inscrutability of the piece, its frustrating ambiguity. But I’m sure many people of color saw it, brought their own experiences to it, and took away profound meaning.
In the writing around the 1993 show, there’s often something at odds that seems linguistic. For example, a lot of work in the show has been framed as decolonial. I don’t think you can decolonize a museum that was founded on principles of settler colonialism, and many people would agree with that now. But it is possible to engage in anti-colonial work within these spaces. The same thing goes for the notion of multiculturalism, which came out of 1980s pedagogical practice. Now we talk about anti-racist pedagogy, which is a very di erent practice. It is a language of liberation that I don’t think was part of the reception or discussion of the show back then. As a curator, I would now frame a lot of this work looking through those lenses.
Brown
One thing I wanted to touch on brie y about the 1993 Biennial is that it has always had this reputation as being a loud, in-your-face set of declarations and provocations. However, there was also a lot of quietude and irreducibility, which are things I’m very interested in. Charles Ray’s Family Romance (1993), the fourpart sculpture of the denuded white nuclear family, got so much attention for its shock factor. But the sculpture he had outside, in front of the museum, Firetruck (1993), the larger-than-life-size toy re truck—which on the face of it wasn’t shocking at all, just an enlarged child’s toy—I think signaled the anticipatory sensibility that we’ve been talking about, around museums being in a state of emergency. Our world is in a state of emergency.
That sculpture felt like a kind of Trojan horse, a container for what was to come for museums and public institutions and culture in these thickets of con ict and tension, shaped by both global and national forces. I think it’s important to put a nger on that kind of space—a
Ida Applebroog in the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. From left: Marginalia series, 1992; Jack F: Forced to Eat His Own Excrement, 1992; Kathy W.: Is Told That If She Tells Mommy Will Get Sick and Die, 1992. © Ida Applebroog
space of irresolve, if you will—and to hope for an art world and a museum infrastructure that can hold space for both the loud pronouncements and the quiet ones, too. It was very much a part of what the 1993 Biennial did, making space for autonomy and self-possession, space for artists to work out their bad attachments, their bad objects.
Bhabha
Very much so. And there needs to be more room in the way that institutions conceive of their voices and their approach to their audiences. I think a lot about the wall label and what kinds of history we are producing by labels. Much of it depends not on who we think the “people” are, singular, but the “peoples.” And it’s not only the history of “then” and the history
of “now,” or the criticism then and the criticism now. Each is more complex. I think what you’ve got to do is make room for work that hasn’t been given authority to speak, to spit, to dream and desire. And that’s not just in relation to identity. I always say: Isn’t it amazing that those who were denied identity for so long, whatever identity may mean, are now being told by white institutions: “Give us your identity. Tell us your history. Tell us your stories. We welcome you now!” In response, of course, we say, “Hang on, hang on. You know, my story may be so much a part of the story you don’t want to tell about yourself that you really should think, self-re exively, about yourselves, through the questions you’re asking me.” Now we’re ready to
talk. You’re not going to be able to do this in a way that makes everyone happy and feel good and reconciled. But it’s that complex psychic ambivalence, that political ambivalence that is useful. I’m interested in that tension—a real tension—being created in the “now.” And whenever we invoke the time-signature “now,” whether it is to talk about the “present moment” of the Whitney Biennial in 1993 in the past, or the” future moment” yet to come, we have to come to terms with the peculiar temporality of “now.” As we use it to signify the present moment of our re ections and actions, “now” is really a temporal threshold. Retrospectives require a con dence in the pinnacle of the present as the summit from which a career or an idea is best surveyed. But what if the curatorial “present” is a time of aesthetic uncertainty and institutional turmoil— retroaction instead of retrospection— and the curator-critic takes her stand on uneven and striated grounds? As the passage of time marches across a threshold—back and forth, entering and exiting, iterative and interruptive—we see the present moment—the now— emerging before our very eyes as a double gure of time: the past-in-the present, 1993-in-2023, and vice versa.
Jessica Bell Brown is the curator and department head for contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Kimberli Gant is the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum. She has written art historical scholarship for catalogues, academic journals, and book chapters.
Elena Ketelsen González is an assistant curator at MoMA PS1, New York, where she works with artists, activists, and organizations to create programs and exhibitions.
Xiaoyu Weng is a curator and writer based in New York. Her practice focuses on the impact of globalization, decolonization frameworks, and the intersection of art and technology.
An exhibition about the 1993 Biennial, developed in collaboration with Homi K. Bhabha, opens November 16 at Hauser & Wirth New York’s 69th Street location.
Mike Kelley, Untitled (Pasolini), 1990–93, in the 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © 2023 Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All rights reserved/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
ARSHILE GORKY: A Study with
Titles
By Jessica Eisenthal
Arshile Gorky with Maro Gorky shortly before his operation for cancer, Washington Square, New York, early 1946.
Photo: Agnes Magruder Gorky. © Estate of Agnes Fielding, courtesy the Arshile Gorky Foundation
Composition
Organization
Still Life Objects
Painting
Self Portrait
The Artist and His Mother Image in Khorkom Xhorkom
Head Composition
My Sister, Ahko Garden in Sochi
In the spring of 1924, Vosdanig Manuk Adoian signed his pseudonym, Arshile Gorky, to a painting for the first time. That May, Congress passed an immigration act with ethnic quotas that would cut off large-scale immigration for decades, restricting entry from southern and eastern Europe, through which Gorky had arrived four years prior.
In the century since the artist fashioned his name, many details of his biography have been revealed and obscured, almost in equal measure. Magnetic, histrionic and remarkably earnest, Gorky was an active participant—the main accomplice—in his own mythmaking.
Art history, like all history, is filled with hagiography masquerading as biography. Just as Van Gogh’s severed ear or Jackson Pollock’s alcoholic machismo have been swept up in the pull of sacrifices to modernism, so the tragic end to Gorky’s life in 1948 further mythologized the existing layers of his biographical mystery.
The New York art world of the mid-1920s, as Gorky found it on his arrival, was still busy looking to the historical canon of European masters. “The greatest barrier to recognition of important young artists in America is the American craze for antiques,” he told a reporter for the New York Evening Post in 1926. “In Paris and in Germany, a painting done this year is exhibited this year. There are museums and exhibitions given over to the progress of the living, modern, growing art, but in America you ask ‘How old is it?’ or ‘Do I know the name who signed it?’ before it has a chance.”
The truth of Gorky’s observations would, in large part, persist into the 1930s, with interest in American abstract art slow to gain traction. In addition to airing Gorky’s disappointment over the general indifference to living modern artists in the U.S., the Post article is among the first to have widely circulated his fictions of Russian heritage and relation to the Russian-born writer Maxim Gorky. The ubiquity of these falsehoods would follow the artist to his grave. As late as the 1950s, Gorky’s sister had to petition the staff of the Museum of Modern Art in New York to change the artist’s nationality from Russian to Armenian on a wall label. (The complexity of identity attribution endures. In February 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would revise the wall text for three Ukrainian artists formerly attributed as Russian, yet within days of the announcement, one of the three was identified as Armenian, not Ukrainian.)
Gorky’s year of birth has most often been cited, by him and others, as 1904, yet recent scholarship suggests that 1902 may be more plausible. Born in Khorkom, a village in eastern Anatolia, at a moment and place of relative calm during the decades-long persecution of ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Gorky not only survived the Genocide himself, but he was also the child of survivors.
While all accounts point to his having had a contented childhood of rural adventure, surrounded by extended family and steeped in tradition, he was also born into profound intergenerational trauma. His parents, both of whose first spouses had been killed in the Hamidian massacres of 1896, had an unhappy arranged marriage. By 1908, his father had left the family to immigrate to the United States and live with the children from his previous marriage. Among Gorky’s best-known paintings, The Artist and His Mother (1926–36; 1926–42) derive from a photograph of the two that his mother commissioned and sent to his father in America as a reminder of the family he had left behind and promised to help. Years later, Gorky found the picture, which had by that point taken on a Barthesian quality, stuffed in a drawer in his father’s house.
G orky and his sister Vartush arrived in the United States through Ellis Island in 1920, a year after their mother died from starvation as a result of the Genocide. Gorky’s first years in the country were spent with family as part of the sizeable Armenian communities in Watertown, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island. While familiar, this was also alienating to him, and he ultimately refused a life of factory jobs and insular cultural trappings, causing irreconcilable conflict and estrangement from his father. To avoid being considered a “starving Armenian,” as Armenian refugees were commonly viewed at the time, and above all driven by a strong desire to be an artist, Gorky buried his origins and began to construct a new reality and idea of himself.
For several years, he experimented with the spelling of his chosen name (Archele, Archel or Arshile), toying with Achilles from Greek mythology and Archie Gunn or Archie Colt, names possibly concocted from his love of Westerns. Gorky took his surname from Maxim Gorky, who was revered among Armenians for his work with the Armenian Relief Organization and translations of Armenian poetry. Unbeknownst to many—including his wife, Agnes, who learned his real name only after reading a 1957 biography by a mutual friend—Gorky kept his given name legally for his entire life.
Over the years, he alternately claimed to have been born in Nizhni-Novgorod, in Kazan or in Tiflis, most often in 1903 or 1904, on October 25, or on April 15, and said that he had come to the U.S. in 1911, 1920 or 1921. Sometimes he said he had studied engineering at Brown University or with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky or in Paris under Albert Paul Laurens. Gorky wrote to curator Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942: “My biography is very short and in fact I would prefer to omit the references to Paris and Mr. Kandinsky as such brief periods that mention
Top to bottom: Arshile Gorky, Image in Khorkom, ca. 1934–36. Oil on canvas, 33 × 43 in. (83.8 × 109.2 cm). Private collection. Photo: Peter Schälchli. © The Arshile Gorky Foundation
Arshile Gorky, Xhorkom, 1936. Oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm). Collection Bu alo AKG Art Museum. Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund and Partial Gift of David K. Anderson to the Martha Jackson Collection at the Bu alo AKG Art Museum, 1999 (1999:8). © The Arshile Gorky Foundation
Arshile Gorky, Painting, ca. 1937–38. Oil on canvas, 40 × 52 in. (101.6 × 132.1 cm). Private collection. © The Arshile Gorky Foundation p. 83
Arshile Gorky, How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life, 1944. Oil on canvas, 40 × 45 1/16 in. (101.6 × 114.5 cm). Seattle Art Museum. Gift of the Virginia Bagley Wright Collection (74.40). © The Arshile Gorky Foundation p. 84
Arshile Gorky and his mother, Shushan Der Marderosian Adoian, Van, Ottoman Empire, ca. 1912. Unknown photographer (likely Hovhannes Avedaghayan). Courtesy Dr. Bruce Berberian and the Arshile Gorky Foundation.
of them is out of proportion to the actuality. I was born in Tiflis, Caucasus, South Russia, October 25, 1904.” Since his early days in the U.S., Gorky was known to say he was Russian, and when called out for not speaking the language, he would claim to be Georgian.
Yet amid such fictionalizing, there are many indications that complete rejection of his background was not his goal either— numerous anecdotes tell of Gorky performing traditional Armenian dances and songs at parties. Much of what we know of his private life before 1941, when he met and married Agnes Magruder (or “Mougouch,” as he called her, an Armenian term of affection), is from the prolific correspondence between him and his sister, which continued until his death. Here, we learn that Gorky took Mougouch to an Armenian restaurant on their first date, and that once they were married, he boasted of Mougouch’s progress learning phrases in Armenian. But Gorky’s omissions and outright untruths indelibly shaped his story, both for the public and for his own family. As Mougouch said: “I was a beautiful blank book that he could write anything he wanted in.” When asked by her granddaughter, Cosima Spender, why her grandfather had to invent so many stories about himself, Agnes replied poignantly, “What was the point of telling people about a place they had no idea existed?”
As an artist in New York City of the 1930s and 1940s, having fled violence and persecution abroad, Gorky was far from alone. While these exoduses and arrivals can be described in broad strokes, essential differences marked the immigration stories of this generation and the experiences, education and degrees of privilege and trauma they brought with them. Many endured the displacement of successive relocations on the way to the U.S., including Jews who fled antisemitism and arrived well before World War II, Americanizing their names (Mark Rothko, b. Marcus Rothkowitz; Louise Nevelson, b. Leah Berliawsky; Milton Resnick, b. Rachmiel Resnick). There were those who fled Nazi-occupied Europe (Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Piet Mondrian, Kurt Seligmann, Andre Bréton), some of whom were World War I veterans (Max Ernst, André Masson, Fernand Léger) and were scarred by their time in the service. The exiled Ukrainian-Polish aristocrat John Graham immigrated to New York in 1920 and changed his name from Ivan Dombrowski. De Kooning also came in the 1920s, like Gorky, Graham and those born in America (often, like Isamu Noguchi, Lee Krasner and William Baziotes, to immigrant parents). What they lacked in firsthand knowledge of the avant-garde movements in Europe they made up for in studiousness and curiosity.
For some of these artists, including Gorky, arrival in the United States was quickly followed by the Great Depression and then World War II, complicating cultural perceptions of the specific ordeals they had suffered previously. In a special issue of the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, a collection of interviews with eleven émigré artists reveals both a distinctly heterogeneous experience of exile and an indication of the societal imperative to adapt. Several spoke freely about their mythic notions of America; few said much
regarding personal hardship, at most describing a general sense of cultural out-of-placeness.
In the 1930s, as Gorky was working out compositional strategies, his titling practices did not rigidly follow pictorial concerns. For iterations of related imagery during this period, Gorky experimented with both titles that referenced specific places (Khorkom, Sochi) and those that conformed to the modernist agnosticism of broad association. Titles such as Composition (1936–37), Painting (1936–37) and Organization No.2 (1936–37) aligned him with the latter and with those whom he had studied carefully, including Miró, Kandinsky and Mondrian.
The nearly identical compositions of Image in Khorkom (1934–36), Xhorkom (1936) and Painting (1937–38) tempt connotation through titling, elusively. Garden in Sochi (1941) purposely transplants the location of his father’s garden in Khorkom, which, as Gorky wrote in a description for the Museum of Modern Art shortly after the institution acquired the painting in 1942, contained old apple trees, wild carrots and nesting porcupines. The work stands in as an apt analogy for Gorky’s modes of abstraction and figuration, of the autonomy of image and title, of his refusal to illustrate while at the same time inviting association. If there were ever an Armenian subject explicitly referenced, it is in Gorky’s titles.
Gorky was not included in exhibitions of exiled or European artists, defined as such; rather, he was often identified as an American artist, even before he was naturalized in 1939. Yet his influences and knowledge suggested a more expansive picture. His desire to be recognized as an American painter would later be undermined by his connection to the Surrealists in New York, leading critics like Clement Greenberg to refer to Gorky’s “French-ness.”
Much emphasis has been placed on the ways in which Gorky’s early stylistic imitations hindered his advancement in the New York art world. It took Julien Levy, who would become Gorky’s dealer in late 1944, more than ten years to agree to represent him. In fact, it was only at André Breton’s insistence that Levy eventually drafted a contract, stipulating that Breton was required to write an introduction for the catalogue to his first solo show with the gallery in March 1945.
Gorky did not downplay his affinities. In Elaine de Kooning’s words, he “picked freely (and without covering up his tracks).” Indeed, the thread of influence from Cezanne to Picasso (via Ingres) to Léger, Miró and Matta is evident throughout Gorky’s work. At a certain point, though, it begins to feel as if each influence is elbowing out the other for space on his studied canvases and also as if his attitude toward influence itself, namely a skepticism regarding the ideal of originality, anticipates essential aspects of postmodernism.
Levy and others were right to view the mid-1940s as the period in which Gorky began to embody his most personal idiom, but they were wrong that his earlier paintings contained nothing of the personal. Such misjudgments left his work in an awkward relationship vis-à-vis modernism’s
narrow core values, and the assumption of self-effacement in the early paintings muddied the way in which Gorky, who shared only some of those values, was seen.
In 1940, more than one reference given in support of Gorky’s proposal to study “sources of American cultural traditions” for a Guggenheim Fellowship spoke of him as an important abstract painter but one prone to imitation, in need of liberation from “foreign influences.” (“He needs Americanization,” as one reference bluntly put it.) Gorky’s application does mention freedom from “foreign influences,” yet he did not mean this for himself personally and did not ascribe to the essentially xenophobic phrasing above. Instead, he believed it was a common necessity for the advancement of American abstract art.
Anatomical Blackboard
The Horns of the Landscape
One Year the Milkweed
The Liver is the Coxcomb
The Leaf of the Artichoke is an Owl
They Will Take My Island
The Sun, the Dervish in the Tree
The Love of a New Gun
Water of the Flowery Mill
How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life
Diary of a Seducer
Good Hope Road
In July 1941, Gorky, Agnes and Isamu Noguchi drove across the country to San Francisco, where Gorky was scheduled to prepare his first solo museum exhibition. Agnes recalls:
We went to see the Grand Canyon and Isamu and Gorky both turned their backs unimpressed, saying it looked like a postcard. In Santa Fe we … visited the Navajo on their reservations … the round breast-like ovens where they cooked their bread reminded him [Gorky] of home…. We drove up to Big Sur. It was all so beautiful, but he wasn’t stunned—he only liked things he could get close to; he liked hills he could walk over. The mountains were not as big as those in the Caucasus and the people and their houses had no relationship with the landscape.
As much as the trip seemed to underwhelm Gorky, it moved him upon his return to New York that fall to undertake a number of paintings inspired by the landscape of the West, sparked by associations he found with the environment of his childhood. The work visibly began to negotiate a feeling of suspension between worlds. The following summer, Gorky began spending time in rural Connecticut and the year after that in Virginia at Mougouch’s family farm. By mid-decade, the effect of his extended immersion in nature and his friendships with the Surrealists in New York—namely, Breton and Matta—would be magnified many times over in his work.
As the urban-grounded Gorky of the 1930s gave way to the nature-grounded Gorky of the 1940s, his trajectory intersected with Surrealist interest in the natural and
metaphysical worlds, as seen in the biomorphic abstractions and fantastical landscapes of Ernst, Masson and Matta, of which Gorky was well aware. “The country was a great inspiration to G,” his wife remembered. “He was again a small child…. He was able to discover himself and what he has done is to create a world of his own but a world equal to nature with the infinite complexities of nature….” The notion of constructing a personal universe through nature but not of it chimed with the mythic idea of American rebirth that the group of exiled Surrealist artists sought.
Encouraged to experiment with Surrealism’s automatic practices, Gorky indulged in a process that brought him closer to his earliest longings and recollections. During a visit in February 1943, Léger prompted Gorky to talk about aspects of his childhood that had compelled him to paint. The next year, Breton inquired about Gorky’s origins and family mythology as a way to jump-start a collaboration on the titling of Gorky’s paintings. Both intuitively and cautiously, Gorky allowed Surrealism’s influence to expand his previous commitments to other forms of abstraction. Frederick Kiesler was the first to point out that his paintings may appear to be abstractions but are never abstract. This was never truer than in 1944.
To read Surrealism in Gorky is to understand that, more than anything, it freed him to explore the relationship between internal and external, between his innermost self and his canvases. Years later, Julien Levy described Gorky’s engagement with automatism as a “redemption,” suggesting that his repressed emotions were central to his creative drive. Whether or not it would have been true, it is appealing to think that, as Mougouch believed, he “would have found what he needed in the Surrealists whether they were in New York or not.”
Between visits and dinners at Gorky’s studio and in the Connecticut countryside, Breton and Gorky titled the canvases that were included in the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Julien Levy Gallery in 1945. Theirs was a process of free association and translation in which Gorky would stare at his paintings and ramble off a train of thought in English while his wife translated into French for Breton. Breton would then choose a phrase from Agnes’s translation, which she would then translate back into English for Gorky. This stacked rupture of non-native languages represented a kind of Surrealist game in itself, in which words were a site for estrangement, play and formation all at once. The result of these collaborative exercises are titles that function not as descriptions but as evocations of memory and perception. A “hybrid,” as Breton referred to it, of you and it , of direct observation and access to past impressions. The titles compose absurdist analogies (The Leaf of the Artichoke is an Owl ; The Liver is the Coxcomb); personify nature (The Horns of the Landscape); and stem from word play (Water of the Flowery Mill—flour/flower) and reminiscence (One Year the Milkweed ; How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life). This last title summons Gorky’s early childhood memories of his face pressed to his mother’s apron, and of the patterned frock
captured in the photograph of the two, which he omitted from his painted portraits.
In the mid-1940s, his work became more improvisational, both in his titling and the ways in which he grew less constrained by multilayered painting and the laborious routine of transferring well-developed preparatory drawings to canvas. It was a recurring joke that Gorky would dare visitors to his studio to lift his canvases, which were impossibly heavy with paint. As part of the paperwork for MoMA’s acquisition of his painting Argula (1938), he defined his technique as “hundreds and hundreds of layers of paint to obtain the weight of reality.” The sheer quantity of expensive material required to support his impasto technique in the depths of his personal poverty during the Depression was a source of both wonder and worry to many of those around him.
Gorky’s layering seemed motivated in part, paradoxically, by a fear that the war would cut off his art supplies from Europe, as well as by a seemingly pathological need to make the object more real. Perhaps the shift from impasto to diluted paint washes in the mid-1940s signaled a process of release. In any event, the loosening of technique and approach had astonishing confluences with the events that unraveled during the last two years of Gorky’s life.
Charred Beloved
Delicate Game
The Calendars
The Plow and the Song
The Limit
The Beginning Agony
The Orator
The Betrothal
4 P.M.
The Opaque
Soft Night
Myths beget myths, and Gorky was a magnet for them. Even his final painting—the canvas on his easel the day he committed suicide—is a source of debate. Julien Levy maintained that it was Last Painting (1948), whereas the friends who found him reported that the painting on the easel had a slash through it, which Last Painting never did.
Posthumously titled, this piece has also been referred to as Last Painting (The Black Monk) , as it is thought to have been inspired by Anton Chekhov’s 1894 short story of that name. In his memoir, Levy quotes the final lines of the story, which the art historian and Gorky scholar Harry Rand later understood as a suicide note: “[T]he Black Monk whispered
to him that he was a genius, and he died only because his feeble, mortal body had lost its balance, and could no longer serve as the covering of genius.”
G orky’s suicide was preceded by two grueling years that added up to a perfect storm of misfortune and heartbreak: A fire in his studio destroyed many of his paintings; cancer treatment necessitated a colostomy; his father died; his wife had an affair with Roberto Matta and a drunk-driving accident with Julien Levy left Gorky injured and unable to paint.
Amid all this, Gorky’s work edged toward psychological interiority in 1946 and 1947, with his titles following suit. Delicate Game, The Calendars , The Limit , The Beginning, Agony and The Opaque are mysterious and foreboding, marking time and internal space in vague, poetic terms but also suggesting specific events such as the studio fire, in Charred Beloved , or a retreat to childhood memory, in The Plow and the Song.
Often referred to as “the last Surrealist and the first Abstract Expressionist,” Gorky evaded neat categorization both in his lifetime and after his death. Breton’s perceptive use of the word “hybrid” in 1945 foreshadowed the terms of Gorky’s canonization—split between worlds, identities, names, movements and continents. Gorky’s proximity to Surrealism clashed with AbEx’s demands for pure abstraction, and the foregrounding of his personal iconography similarly went against modernism’s disdain for the biographical—an enduring tangle reflected throughout the writing about his work.
In the 1970s and 1980s, that literature was disrupted when Gorky’s nephew, Karlen Mooradian (named for Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin), published fabricated letters from Gorky to Vartush, Mooradian’s mother. Karlen claimed to have translated the correspondence himself and never allowed the letters to be seen in their original language during his lifetime. As elsewhere in the Gorky story, much is revealed only posthumously. After Karlen’s death in 1990, writers Nouritza Matossian and Matthew Spender (Gorky’s
son-in-law, whom he never met) were finally able to compare his translations to the original cache of letters safeguarded by his mother and confirm their suspicions of inauthenticity.
Mooradian’s embellished correspondence contained falsely illuminating details not only about Gorky’s aesthetic philosophies but also about Armenian nationalism and the importance of heritage to his work. On neither of the latter subjects was Gorky known to be demonstrative. Yet the forgeries were readily accepted and seemed to whet an appetite among critics and historians to read Gorky’s work in terms of a consistent biographical imperative, set against traumatic beginnings, displacement and the Genocide. Rand wrote that the paintings not only “came to resemble a diary” but functioned as a “secretive editorialism.” Hilton Kramer agreed, “The congruence of image and experience is traced with breathtaking precision.”
After Gorky’s death, his fictions were peeled away and he became known as ethnically Armenian and a survivor of the Genocide. But Mooradian’s correspondence once again clouded the biography with fabrication, incorrectly portraying Gorky as a nationalist and sowing mistruths about his Armenian identity as essentialist. While it is tempting to condemn Mooradian, he, like many secondgeneration survivors, was left in the complicated situation of needing to reconcile one generation’s choices of erasure and silence with a succeeding generation’s feelings of pride, anguish, anger and guilt. What was for Gorky an affirmation of existence, even a method of survival, was perceived by Mooradian as an act of denial and injustice. It’s perhaps possible only now, so many years later—through and even because of Mooradian’s obfuscations and Gorky’s own—to see the true depths of Gorky’s complexity in relief: a man seeking equilibrium for a divided self and as an artist performing both authenticity and masquerade with remarkable dexterity.
I n a moving film made by Cosima Spender in 2011, three generations of family drama plays out in and around Gorky. After thumbing through a photo album and squabbling with her mother, Agnes, over dates, names and places, Gorky’s daughter Maro says: “It’s far worse not to remember than to remember…. Knowledge is healing. The worst thing is not knowing.”
Maro turns to her own daughter and says: “You’ve stirred the muddy waters.”
A version of Jessica Eisenthal’s essay with citations can be obtained by contacting Ursula’s editorial offices. A complete compendium of Gorky ’s titles can be found in the Arshile Gorky Catalogue Raisonné (ed. Eileen Costello, 2021), available on the Arshile Gorky Foundation website.
An excerpt from a forthcoming book about art and death, form and function
SCULPTURE KILLS
By Jillian McManemin
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Umbrellas, Japan–USA, 1984–91. Photo: Wolfgang Volz © 1991. Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation
October 9, 1991: Morning sunlight falls over 1,340 largescale cobalt-blue umbrellas arranged across twelve miles of muddy hills in the Ibaraki prefecture of Japan, an area seventy- ve miles from Tokyo. That same morning, across the Paci c, the sun rises over California to greet 1,760 large-scale yellow umbrellas erected along an eighteenmile stretch of the Tejon Pass north of Los Angeles, linking the southern part of the state to the Central Valley. The Umbrellas, Joint Project for Japan and U.S.A., the newest work by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude has nally opened. “Blooming” is the word the artists use to describe the moment the umbrella sculptures, each standing nineteen feet tall and weighing more than 450 pounds, unfurl via a winch designed to be operated by a single person of average build—Jeanne-Claude has tested the mechanisms herself and jokes that if she can do it, anyone easily can. The process of opening a single umbrella takes around forty- ve seconds. Opening all 3,100 that day takes 2,600 workers. It is crucial to the artists that the bloom happens in their presence, which involves precise timing both in Japan and California. In the leadup to the unfurling, the weather in Japan has turned; heavy rains pound the umbrellas on the Japanese hillsides. A diary of the project kept by Christo and Jeanne-Claude reads:
10.06.1991—Typhoon #21 is approaching Japan
10.08.1991—Waiting for the rain to stop, workers and monitors clean up along the roads in the project area in Ibaraki and California
The diary includes bullet-point notes on advancements and setbacks for the Umbrellas project, as well as brief notes about who’s coming on board to work. Sometimes there are notes about the artists’ travel and whom they
have had dinner with. As I read the entries, I’m intrigued about the diary but unclear how it is kept. Is it an open book maintained by both members of the couple or the journaling habit of one, double-checked by the other, perhaps highly edited? I somehow think it’s mostly the work of Jeanne-Claude, though I have no basis to make such a claim. My friend Sonya says the diary should be considered through the same lens as reality TV; I believe she actually cited VH1’s Behind the Music
To decide which company would manufacture the various parts of the umbrella sculptures, the project’s contractor organized a competition. Prototypes were taken to a eld in Cheyenne, Wyoming, considered to be among the windiest places in the United States. In addition to eld testing, four wind machines were also employed to gauge the wind forces that the sculptures could safely withstand, and the prototype eventually chosen, made by an American company, was further tested in the largest wind tunnel in the world, in Ottawa, Canada, pushing the sculptural form to its limits and determining it could endure wind speed up to 64.6 m.p.h. when open and 100 m.p.h. when closed.
In Japan at 5:50 a.m. on October 9, seventy-four teams of ten people open the blue umbrellas. Then Christo ies to California and, with the time di erence, is present on the same morning for the same process halfway across the globe, arriving at LAX at 8 a.m. and watching the yellow umbrellas begin to unfurl until early afternoon.
10.09.1991—We see the Blooming of the Blue Umbrellas in Ibaraki that morning. Then Christo, Wol and Masa y to California and see the Blooming of the Yellow Umbrellas on that same morning. Jeanne-Claude, Sylvie, Simone, Anna Marÿke, Harriet and Vladimir stay in Japan. Most of the subcontractors go home; the monitors remain.
Film still from John Carpenter, Christine, 1983. TCD/Prod. DB/Alamy Stock Photo
After “blooming day,” the piece is retitled The Umbrellas, Japan–USA,1984–91. Crowds ock to both sites, strolling by, gazing up at the umbrellas, picnicking beneath them, taking photos. A wedding ceremony takes place under one in California. At certain points, both locations meet a highway. In California, the installation is viewed easily from a stretch of Interstate 5. In Japan, the umbrellas are spread around Route 349, alongside and even into the Sato River, installed in owing water, placed to follow the natural patterns of the rice paddies and arranged closely to re ect the shadowy, wet mood of the valley. The umbrellas in California are placed farther apart across the mountains, their golden color echoing the dry blonde grasses, the sunshine and the cinematic, gleaming idea of the West that undergirds American identity. The two coastlines were chosen because of their geographic similarity as inland valleys. The artists saw the two vast umbrella-pocked spaces as a diptych, separate but completing each other.
By the end of October the installation is being visited heavily in both locations and has become a media phenomenon, especially in California, where the yellow umbrellas seem to be the perfect complement to the fall light. But then late on the afternoon of Saturday October 27, it suddenly all curdles, sours, comes undone. A shawl of fog ows into the valley, its purple tint illuminated by jagged lightning. Rain follows. The form of the sculptures slides slowly back into their function. Within a few minutes, a storm rips through the canyon, engul ng everything, consuming it. Evacuation orders are issued. Workers rush to close the umbrellas near the highway as the storm leaves half of Bakers eld without power.
Visitors run to safety as the entire installation becomes a sight of calamity. Dust kicks up and it’s hard to see more than a few feet in some places. Lori Keevil-Mathews, a thirty-two-year-old insurance agent from Camarillo, visiting the installation with her husband that afternoon, is walking along Digier Road, a winding trail not far from Interstate 5, and is trying to leave, shield her eyes from the kicked-up dust. I imagine dirt being in her mouth and her hair whipping around her face. Her husband is trying to pull her from the road. The gust rips three umbrellas completely apart. A fourth, a bit farther back, is uprooted and it, along with its heavy concrete base, ies across road, catching Keevil-Mathews and crushing her to death against a boulder.
The general contractor for the installation, Augie Huber, calls Christo and Jeanne-Claude with the news of the toppled umbrella and the death. Despite all the engineering planning and wind tests, Huber says, the elements were simply too powerful. “It was like a black wall, like nothing I had ever seen in my life,” he said. “It was moving so fast, it was unbelievable.”
The project, in both parts of the world, ends abruptly, on orders from Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Suddenly, the two sites are swarmed with crew members in a panic to deinstall. In the shadowy wet valley at the Japanese site, workers wade into water to remove umbrellas with cranes, uprooting them from their submerged steel bases. When the boom of one crane removing sculptures accidentally touches a 65,000watt power cord hanging near the ground, the jolt fatally electrocutes a worker named Masaaki Nakamura. When the artists hear of this news, so soon after the tragedy in California, they immediately y to Japan to be with the project’s other workers. This is the last journal entry published for the project:
10.31.1991 Accident during the removal in Japan. We y to Japan.
Meant to last for three weeks the Umbrellas remained on view for eighteen days, and was viewed by an estimated three million people.
My journal reads:
01.12.2020 The start of the new year began with images of people eeing to the ocean wearing respirators. The sea and sky were brick red, matte, and opaque, the world glowing from the inside out. The start of the new year began with Australia on re. Billions of animals are dying. It feels like we are going to war. The adrenaline of my last bout of housing drama has left me. I moved into my new place on the 2nd. I’m nally settled all the way at the end of Greenpoint Ave. on a dead-end cul-de-sac in a nondescript building behind Greenpoint Storage Plus, next to the bridge on the Newtown Creek that connects Greenpoint to Long Island City. The
Clipping from The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 3, 1970.
creek is dark, silty and the sound of trucks rises from all directions. There are RVs on this block, a small sailboat someone lives on. I’m supposed to befriend him for boat rides in the summer, according to the other artists here. There’s a trucker parking lot right outside of my window. It’s an ecosystem, and I’m the new creature. It’s not legal to live here but it’s been occupied by artists for the last 15 years. I took over my friend Tin’s space, all the way in the back. Tin built the loft, which has all these little trap doors and secret spaces for storage and a closet that folds into itself. The idea was that you could completely live here but sort of conceal that you did at the same time, for studio visits and to create a clean workspace, both physically and psychologically. It’s painted all white, the oor, walls, and ceiling. I put a fresh coat of Rustoleum enamel on the oors and ended up with a headache. That was on New Year’s Eve. Then I went out all night. I remember when I was twenty-three with Tin, coming down o ecstasy after we had gone out dancing. I had glitter on my eyes. Tin had stretched plastic all over the loft and kept a space heater by his bed. It felt like a terrarium. It wasn’t entirely safe. I wonder if it’s safe here now. I’m always worried about res, especially after the one at the last place where I lived, in Bushwick.
In 1951, David Smith made a sculpture titled Australia, which I learned about while working for his estate in 2019. Smith photographed the piece in the elds of Bolton Landing in upstate New York with the camera titled up so that the sculpture took up a broad expanse of the winter sky. Sculpture as far as the eye could see. Sculpture over the hills and valleys. Sculpture perched at the edge of a cli . Australia stands in a playful gesture of alarm, reaching out so far from its base with prongs and curves of metal. It looks as if it should teeter over.
The Umbrellas, Japan–USA,1984–91 was the rst instance I’d ever read about in which a sculpture causes the death of a person. The image of a ying deadly umbrella ashed in my mind over a number of years, daring me to looked at art di erently, inserting calamity into the realm of the possible, positing an extreme and omnipresent potential for contradiction, a space in which art acts in de ance of expectation and of its creator’s intentions. The idea of writing a book about sculpture and human fatality gradually became an obsession, and I began to collect stories of other such instances: the installation of a Calder sculpture in Princeton, N.J.,
in 1970 in which a crane accident killed two workers, Robert J. Fuccello and Edwin Dillon; Richard Serra’s Sculpture No. 3 , two ve-ton steel plates balanced against each other, which killed a rigger named Raymond Johnson at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1971 when one of the plates fell on him; Luis Jiménez’s Blue Mustang, a towering equestrian sculpture, a portion of which fell on Jiménez in his studio in 2006 and fatally severed an artery in his leg.
One winter day in 2020, I skipped going into the Smith estate o ce and worked instead in the Art and Architecture Room at the New York Public Library, digging up an essay titled “Sculpture and the Weapon,” written by an artist named John Stephan. Originally published in the art journal Tiger’s Eye in 1948, it came to my attention through a discussion in Robert Slifkin’s 2019 book The New Monuments and the End of Man . In one page, Stephan’s essay attempts to reorient the history of abstract sculpture, drawing a line between it and humankind’s development of weapons. When we began to make objects to use as weapons, we placed an intermediary between us and our opponents, lending to killing a more premeditated, calculated aspect, a skill, even an art. The making of abstract sculptural shapes whose function was to heighten the e ciency of killing, battle, hunting, defense predates the making of sculptural reproductions of the body. Abstract sculpture is, in a sense, a return to an origin story. We imbued abstract objects with our murderous intentions, animating them for violence. The book I envisioned would delve not just into the history of abstract sculpture but into the history of how we make and use objects in general, the ways in which the history of tools is bloodsoaked, the idea that sculpture was born splashing around in it. Incidents like the Christo and Jeanne-Claude accidents assume mythic proportions in part because of our ideas about sculpture in general. If it has a function, that function is to remain still, to stay forever in a position to be looked at, to accept the gaze. I started fantasizing about sculptural sentience. Maybe a sculpture didn’t want to be viewed. Maybe it minded being left in the scorching sun, on display and opened like a ower. Did the umbrella know it was only temporary? That people could view it for only three weeks and that its life was uncertain after? That it would live only in reproduction? A bridge collapse, an architectural accident, a failure of urban design, a car crash—none of these create the implications and feelings of art accidents. Such incidents, strewn across the 20th and 21st centuries,
The making of abstract sculptural shapes whose function was to heighten the efficiency of killing, battle, hunting, defense predates the making of sculptural reproductions of the body. Abstract sculpture is, in a sense, a return to an origin story. We imbued abstract objects with our murderous intentions, animating them for violence.
fracture and reorient what a sculpture is meant to be and what a sculpture is. They exist as a sinister wink in the direction of all the movements and theory that sought to bring sculpture and material closer together.
My journal reads:
02.15.2020 It’s the four-year anniversary of the re. I called Robert, for two reasons: He has the type of memory that makes him able to recall events and even things I’ve said at 2 a.m. at parties with an accuracy that is both useful and unnerving, and the second was that I wasn’t home when the re started. He was, and he was the one who saw it happen. I was in the East Village. I left early that morning to take care of Steve Cannon, a poet, jazz musician, curator, and founder of A Gathering of The Tribes—a nonpro t art and literary magazine. Steve called himself “The Blind Guy.” His assistant was out of town. I was going to ll in, and I had to be there around 9 a.m. with co ee and The New
York Times, so I could read it to him. I’d hang out for the day and send emails that he’d dictate to me, make sure he was all set with food and keep him company. Because Steve was blind, and because I enjoyed his company so much, as soon as I arrived at his apartment, I shut my phone o and put it in my bag. Steve chain smoked as I read the news. I didn’t smoke because I never smoke in the morning. Antonin Scalia died, and politicians were scrambling to replace his seat in the Supreme Court. I also told Steve self-e acing stories about the semi-famous painter I used to work for, who I slept with. Steve was laughing, sprinkling ash all over himself and the couch.
Robert told me he heard a “crackling” that morning, very loud, loud enough to wake him from a boozy slumber. He rushed from his room to nd a small re by my bedroom door, then he ran to the kitchen in a panic to get a pot of water. By the time he got back, the wall was fully ablaze. He thought I was asleep in my room, so he ran in, past the ames, through black smoke, frantically pawing my mattress to nd me. When I went to a Chinese takeout place on Avenue D to get Steve something to eat, I turned my phone back on to an explosion of missed calls, voicemails and texts telling me that my loft was on re. After I received the news, I still went to get Steve his lunch and then to get him cigarettes. As I walked, my mind shu ed through all the objects in my life that I was attached to. I texted Robert: How bad is it? He told me to get back immediately and that it was not good, but that no one was hurt. Even Ruin, my little black cat of almost a decade, was ne.
The remen pulled down the bookshelf in my room and ripped the wall open to reveal a metal door that I never knew was there. They busted out all the windows and the skylights. They sprayed water everywhere and since it was so cold many of the clothes in my closet were frozen with icicles. I lost only the really unwieldly pieces of art: a six-foot-wide video still of me jerking o on the oor in American ag panties that my girlfriend took when I was twenty-two. I was in her kitchen, anked by cakes, writhing around in a gesture vaguely queer and political. Even though no one was injured in the re, it really scared me. I remember the smell. I can smell it now if I concentrate. Some of the books I have still smell faintly of it, their pages tinted darker. I thought the re was the culmination of my precarious life and a terrible warning that I could have died or could have been killed not just in a re but in myriad other ways. When I had rst moved into the loft, I’d made a photocopied black-and-white zine called HOUSE ON FIRE , which featured stills from all the lms I could think of that had scenes of houses on re, like Firestarter and Gone with the Wind . We had open studios and an enormous party. I still have some of those zines, and shortly after the re I remembered that little project and was hit with a sick feeling, as if I’d known what was coming as soon as I arrived.
Luis Jiménez, Blue Mustang, 2008. Photo: Jillian McManemin
CONSUMING SOUND
In anticipation of the birth of her first child, the sound artist Christine Sun Kim enlisted the help of seven collaborators to create A Week of Lullabies for Roux (2018), an installation featuring wordless soundtracks of various tones, all made in adherence with a score written by Kim that revolved around the concept of a “sound diet” of low frequencies for her infant daughter, Roux. In 2020, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired the installation and another of Kim’s works, Close Readings (2015), the first sound installations ever to enter the institution’s collection. On the occasion of the Smithsonian’s inclusion of Lullabies in the exhibition “Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies,” which remains on view through January 29, 2024, Kim and one of her seven collaborators, the artist Melissa Dubbin, recently met virtually—Kim in Berlin and Dubbin in Arcata, California—to talk about the piece and about their shared interests in sound in the contemporary art world.
Christine Sun Kim and Melissa Dubbin in conversation about sound politics, scale and creating space
View of “Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2023–24. Photo: Albert Ting. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum
MD
How did the sound diet emerge as an important part of your work? I would love to hear the origin of that concept.
CSK
The idea came to me before I had my first child, Roux. I was thinking about several things: I’m a Deaf person. I use sign language. And, assuming my daughter would be born hearing, I was about to be outnumbered by two hearing family members. My partner [Thomas Mader] is also a hearing person. I was thinking how in the outside world there’s so much noise. Radio, TV, internet, music, birds. I found myself kind of taking on the role of a doctor, feeling like I could prescribe different amounts of sound for a healthy baby.
MD
It’s interesting to me that you thought about this before you became a parent. The concept of a sound diet seems very relatable now, because we’re all thinking about what we consume.
CSK
In the beginning, I was thinking of many different scenarios in my
head. How much should sound be available for watching Netflix, or how many sound toys should my child be able to play with?
MD
And then two projects emerged from the sound diet, right? A series of drawings and One Week of Lullabies for Roux.
CSK
Yes. Every drawing in that series basically embodies a full day’s worth of sound from the start of the day to the end of the day. Of course, this wasn’t something I literally did for my child. It’s more about encouraging a healthy balance between spoken languages and sign languages. The drawings led me to the second part of the sound diet, which became the lullabies for Roux.
MD
Did that project also begin before Roux was born?
CSK
It started when I got our baby monitor. I did some research and knew I wanted something with vibrations and features that I could access as a Deaf parent, but I also wanted one with a German electric
plug because I am based in Berlin. I didn’t have a lot of success! So I tried the U.S. market, but I discovered that almost all monitors have preloaded songs that can be played when the baby cries or to help the baby sleep. I didn’t really grow up with music and I have a different sense of it, if you will. I found myself uncomfortable with the idea of playing a song that I didn’t know or didn’t really care for to soothe my baby. My partner and I agreed not to use the lullaby feature, and from that I developed the idea of seven lullabies from seven different contributors, hence one week’s worth.
MD
It takes a lot of trust in the composers to write lullabies for your infant daughter. Were all of the contributors close friends of yours?
CSK
Actually, no, I wasn’t close friends with some of them. Some were just people I am fond of and trust enough to follow my score. I came up with a list of parameters—no lyrics, low frequencies, something that could be played on repeat. And as long each piece was accompanied by a written audio description that I could access, I felt satisfied. Can you tell me more about how the composition for your piece developed?
MD
I have a long-term artistic collaboration with my partner, Aaron S. Davidson. We became parents in 2015, so the idea of a sound diet resonated with us. Our practice has always incorporated music and sound, and a few years ago we worked on Volumes for Sound, a series of sculptures that can amplify and modify sound. They’re encountered first as silent sculptural forms, and then they’re activated throughout the duration of an exhibition by performances by various artists. It became a platform for collaboration. At that time, we had regular recording sessions for our own
“I have a personal rule with my work: I don’t want any of my sound files available online. To me, they are something that must be experienced sonically, in person.”—Christine Sun Kim
View of Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, Volumes for Sound, 2010–17, at Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 2012. Photo: Aaron S. Davidson. Courtesy the artists
performances related to this project, and there was a particular piece we wrote with Shawn Onsgard in our trio Three Planes of Silver that functioned as a bridge for the listener between two pieces of sound. Aaron and I felt it was something we could contribute as a lullaby, a bridge between waking and sleep. And so we made a special edit of it specifically for Roux.
CSK
I remember not long after I received all seven files and audio descriptions, the work was shown at Art Basel. I was trying to figure out how to play the pieces in that setting and decided on headsets that people could put on and listen to while sitting on a cushioned square bench, which I thought was nice, like a home environment.
MD
That makes sense because you created this work to play lullabies for Roux at bedtime, but you also present it in your shows. How do you think this work functions in public as opposed to the private space of a home? I’m particularly curious about its use of color, which is rare in your work.
CSK
Normally I don’t use color in my work at all. Part of that is my fear of picking the wrong color! But it hit me that the baby monitor with the preloaded lullabies also has a color system. They are wireless and turn a very specific red when out of range, then purple when they reconnect. I was reminded of those colorful weeklong pill boxes and wanted to emulate that using a color gradient. I had Monday, the first cushion, start red and then gradually move to Sunday, the last cushion, as the most purple.
MD
The idea of a prescription for a diet really comes through with the format of the pill box.
CSK
Yes! And each headset lists the names of each contributor. I have a personal rule with my work: I don’t
want any of my sound files available online. To me, they are something that must be experienced sonically, in person.
MD
I feel like you’ve made choices that allow you to stay true to your work in any platform available. You’ve also defined a unique relationship between ASL and music. Your drawings often incorporate or borrow symbols used in musical notation in a way that upends their traditional cultural format. Could you talk about your choice to use these symbols in your work?
CSK
Lately, it seems like ASL has been gaining popularity and cultural cachet. I think this is partly because of recent movies and more Deaf representation in entertainment. And yet there is still a disconnect because ASL doesn’t have any sound to it as a language. I’ve always thought that if ASL had some kind of sound aspect to it, it would have a stronger standing for hearing people. I try to accomplish this through connecting ASL to music. Music has centuries of power behind it, and ASL is a more recent language that has been around for only two hundred years or so. It’s
still a minority language. I think it’s important to emphasize that connection, that collaboration between music and ASL, to put ASL on a larger stage. It’s an important part of my practice and my work.
MD
In previous talks you’ve mentioned that when you first encountered sound art in galleries and museums, you were working in painting and you worried that sound art might further distance you from the art world. But instead, you realized you had to unlearn what you had been taught about sound and create new sonic rules.
CSK
Regarding sound art, I don’t necessarily feel disempowered. I think I take it more literally—like, sound is how the world runs. I had sound exploration in mind when I lived in New York, and I was trying to figure out how to incorporate it in my practice. I noticed that sound art started to become a little hot. Like you said, I found myself with opportunities beyond sound art. I think it’s because I had never thought about sound critically, as a Deaf person. I started applying for grants and people had a strong response to that, which was
“I was thinking how in the outside world there’s so much noise. Radio, TV, internet, music, birds. I found myself kind of taking on the role of a doctor, feeling like I could prescribe different amounts of sound for a healthy baby.”—Christine Sun Kim
Christine Sun Kim, Too Much Future, 2018. Billboard. Courtesy the artist
illuminating for me. It helped me understand that people would have a response to me in sound art and the sound art that I made. Then I got the TED fellowship and was invited to the first group exhibition of sound art at MoMA.
MD
It’s interesting because artists have been using sound for a long time now, and institutions have adapted and become more equipped to present these works. It seems as if the art market is also becoming more interested or accepting, which allows for the kind of visibility you’re talking about.
CSK
Yes. I didn’t want to be too much in the art world or too much in the mainstream. I think what I navigated was not so much strategy but more a search for balance and trying to find ways to do that. Fortunately, my experience from TED was so positive. That was during a time when I felt people were starting to be more understanding and allowing of arts crossovers, whether it was art and food or art and fashion, lots of things. I did feel like the art world was just so mean, which is maybe why I felt like I needed a balance. I found that it was full of bullies. Racism was there, ableism was there, and I felt like: Why should I continue in this space? Then I got the TED
fellowship, and it was really a positive thing. It helped sustain me in the art world. I almost quit, but this way, I didn’t have to.
MD
I am so glad you didn’t! The Smithsonian show will include Lullabies for Roux. This installation takes up space, and it has scale. I’m interested in the varieties of scale in your work in relation to language. You have works on paper of various sizes, large murals, billboards and, in the case of your project in Manchester, an entire city. Can you talk about your relationship with text and image or text and space and also scale in your work?
CSK
It all started around 2017 or 2018, when the Whitney asked me to do the Too Much Future billboard at the beginning of the High Line on Gansevoort Street. When they asked me to do that originally, I had just had Roux, and I wasn’t sure what to do exactly. I looked at some drawings that I had at home and found one and thought, “I wonder if this can go bigger.” I had never done that. I had done small projects that stayed to the size of paper and never really went off scale, if you will. I scanned it and sent it over. It blew up in the office. The museum was really excited about it. And then they blew it up on the billboard and that got me excited. Then I asked myself, “Why
do I stay at the scale where I’ve been?” It made me think about how to go bigger. With the Whitney, I was like, “That’s all you got?” I wanted to do more. And then when Manchester reached out to me, I was like, “How about captioning the city?” It was my pitch. I didn’t think they’d say yes. So, when they did, I was like, “Ah. I say yes as well.”
MD
It’s something I hope to experience more of in person. Looking at the images of billboards within urban landscapes or planes pulling subtitles through the sky, I’ve been struck by the transformation of the physical environment. It is a form of subtitling reality at scale within the landscape, and in spaces in buildings where you’re amplifying and creating an environment with language.
CSK
The practice of scale also works with my personality. I just love to be around people. I like to be in people’s faces, too. It probably is annoying for some, or obtrusive, but I like to get in there. And I think part of it’s because, subconsciously, I don’t want people to forget that I’m here because they don’t hear me. I think that being in people’s face visually is different. Being a part of a visual language sometimes allows people to make decisions without me because I don’t hear the decisions being made in spoken language. Scale becomes kind of a survival skill, one of my tools to be in people’s faces. And you know what? It seems like people like it.
Beth Staehle provided ASL interpretation for this interview.
Christine Sun Kim, Captioning the City, 2021. Photo: Lee Baxter. Courtesy Factory International
Camille Henrot and writer Estelle Hoy on the chimerical architecture of bridging mediums
Clang Association
On the occasion of “Jus d’Orange,” a collaborative exhibition by Henrot and Hoy on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Milan, through November 25, Ursula presents a conversation between the artist and the writer, accompanied by a portfolio of new paintings made for the show by Henrot.
Randy Kennedy
You two have known each other and have done pieces reacting to each other’s work for several years now. Since you live on separate continents and both travel quite a lot, I’m wondering how you keep up the connection and the conversation.
Estelle Hoy
Camille and I have quite divergent approaches to thinking about art, but despite working across di erent mediums, we share a similar working style. We are constantly communicating about various ideas and artistic propositions, yet our conversations are intertwined with bizarre facts and very random threads. Quite easily, we’ll begin a phone exchange about our collaborative project, Jus d’Orange, that evolves (or devolves) in numerous other directions, pulling in a lot of seemingly unrelated subjects: the behavior of sloths, the secret life of rats, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic literature, Hélène Cixous’ writing, environmental injustice, an acerbic TV series that we’re writing together about the art world. It’s almost like clang associations, when words go together purely because of sound, not meaning. [Laughter.] It’s all mostly done with urgency, as though if we slow down, something might slip through the cracks. We started working together when Camille was still based in Berlin before moving back to New York City, which has its own secret rat life. The nature of our work frequently takes us to di erent countries, which is why much of our creative bandying is mediated by technology. I like how mishaps in language or lapses of intelligibility become starting points of their own, and I think we both enjoy auto-corrects, double-entendres, and their hilarious rami cations. For example, I recently told Camille about an Instagram post I’d
made about my latest work, which had been published in the same literary publication alongside a writer who had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I meant to write “with the great such-and-such,” but in crazy jet lag, I wrote, “the late, great.” By the time I was back on Instagram, I’d started an international rumor that this famous person had died! A total disaster. I think we both nd these types of linguistic tumbles humorous.
Camille Henrot
Before we met in person, I had read Estelle’s essay “Ça m’est égal: The Involution of Desire” in Mousse Magazine. I was very troubled and intrigued by it. I felt a great intimacy with the tone of the writing, the idea and even the main image that went along with it (a painting of a fox running in the snow). It felt like it had been written by a sister from unknown parents, as if another Camille had written it. A bit like in Marcel Aymé’s book Les Sabines, in which the main character can’t make decisions in her life, and every time she is forced to make a decision, she separates into another person. I even used Estelle’s phrase as a title for one of my drawings. She and I come from di erent cultures, and we don’t always agree on things, but we share a similar disregard for hierarchy and lters. We both operate in a rhizomatic manner that may seem scattered from the outside, but isn’t. The connections operate underground; some of them we make visible and others we don’t. Our conversations were often happening through di erent channels (Instagram, WhatsApp, email, phone, voice messages, shared Google Docs), which ts our multiple personalities. “I contain multitudes.” Who said that? Whitman, I think. We both have a strong “resistance to permanence, order, closure” (a great phrase about New York City written by the late Janet Malcolm in a 2014 pro le of David Salle for The New Yorker, discussed in Brian Dillon’s book Suppose a Sentence). Estelle and I meet and converge, sometimes through telepathic serendipity.
RK
There’s a level of existential angst that moves through “Jus d’Orange” that’s almost palpable and de nitely chaotic. At the same time, there is a dryness of humor that creates some reprieve. How important was humor in the development of the exhibition?
CH When I met Estelle it felt like dry earth meeting the rain. She was using words I didn’t understand, jumping from one topic to another in a way that totally made sense to me and helped me make sense of myself. Our mother tongues are di erent, and we
PORTFOLIO both think faster than we type, so sometimes our exchanges lead to brilliant nonsense and hilarious misunderstandings. This was during the pandemic in Berlin when everything was closed. I had broken my wrist. The city was very un-sunny. The feelings of powerlessness and impotence at that time were overwhelming. It was in this context that our conversation started. An orange is sweet and sour, like humor, and also a symbol for the sun, the South, our longing for the sun in the endless Berlin winters, among other things.
EH
There is a need to approach tender, depressing topics and existential matters with a level of humor. One of the unraveling sections in the book component of the exhibition includes the text we worked on together for a show at Kamel Mennour, Paris, in 2022. Camille developed fantastic, hilarious paintings about etiquette, manners and slippages of language. In response, I cooked up some words presented in a humor- lled way:
Roland Barthes—a man of the cloth— reminded me that some things are simply unviable, and all annulments can be substituted with art. I tend to believe people.
Ugh. My Psychic Promised I’d Be Dead By Now
When I look at Camille’s work for “Jus d’Orange,” I see the same cynical tonguein-cheek essence that brings deathly somnolence to life. One artwork depicts a Nietzsche-in uenced Dracula-woman dressed in a tuxedo with a kind of lobster claw for a hand. [Laughs.] Camille presents a kind of annulment of complex/painful topics by underscoring them with hilarity. The Dracula-woman in the accompanying text is an existentially defeated, uneasy character, but Camille’s iteration nulli es fangs and dead gods through visual absurdity.
RK
Do you use chaos and discombobulation in the work as a way of annulling feeling?
EH
I’m all about annulling feelings. I don’t know if I’d agree that the chaos serves this purpose speci cally, but I certainly think our aesthetic disconnection is a way of calculating a space where there’s a failure of control or coherency. I was recently reading the artist Amy Sillman’s book Faux Pas (2022) about her interest in the underdog, the dropout, the annulled. She talks about the weight of colors (literally) and how some colors are accessible only to the rich; cadmium red, she points out, costs the same amount as an ounce of the best caviar.
She also references Benjamin, who argued that color is the very essence of childhood imagination, a form of innocence that can subvert the logic of capitalism. Camille’s paintings honor these questions about weight through the tones of orange. Each work appears to weigh a di erent amount; shades unravel in light and heavy variations of a single color: vinegary orange juice; blood navel oranges; spiraling, washed-out sa ron, and golden marmalade.
CH
I think the shades came from your description of an aperitif cocktail in your essay “Venetian Waters of Jus d’Orange,” Estelle. My favorite cocktail is the Aperol spritz. It’s really the only alcohol I’ve been drinking for the last two years because I don’t like the taste of wine anymore. Orange is usually a color that is opaque—construction uniforms, road signs. It is unsubtle, like red. Colors like these are ones we think of as undiluted, literally “absolutes.” Absolute hell, maybe. The fact that blue exists in an in nite number of shades is easier for us to appreciate because of the sky and water. In painting, I have always disliked and secretly adored orange. Acid colors bring an element of disgust. It is like a bite. In the text and the paintings there are a lot of beings who are shadows of themselves—ghosts, vampires, disembodied, yes, but longing for esh. The pandemic brought me a newly found awareness of the inside of my body. Also of my age. I see my veins popping out from under my skin more and more. Like a map. I like seeing the veins, I realize, because they represent the idea of juice, vitality, uidity, energy, a force of nature contouring the obstacles (the bones) and irrigating the muscles.
RK
Despite the heaviness of some of the themes—existential ennui, social injustice, meaninglessness—there appears to be a slow-burning aesthetic charge toward hope in the show, or at the very least, the desire to approach it. Is that a misread?
CH
Hope is an abstract idea. It’s very intangible. I don’t think we would have the word “hope” if there was no reason to despair. Georges de la Tour’s painting The Repentant Madgalen (c. 1635/1640) is an apt representation of the concept, I think. The one source of light in the image (the candle) illuminates the whole scene. Like hope, a ame is intangible and fragile. It can be seen clearly only in surroundings of darkness. I think you can only talk about hope in a meaningful way if you are prepared to accept despair in your life, almost to domesticate it, the same way you’d accept
PORTFOLIO a stray cat in your garden. You have to live alongside it in order to understand what it is. I think that there’s a form of perversity in hope. It can sometimes be dangerous. Within activist circles, it’s a tool to spark change, but it is also used as a conduit for control by authorities who prey on our weaknesses. It’s a powerful tool for both the oppressed and the oppressor. Estelle and I are inquisitive and combative by nature, I think. We are both porous to the darker aspects of contemporary existence, but alongside that deep empathy, we both have strategies of deviation or distraction in order to cope and compartmentalize. It’s like when you feel an intense emotion and fall asleep in reaction to it, from exhaustion. That disconnect is playful, I would say.
EH
Hope is such a charged word, which makes me love it even more. It’s like a measure on earth, something outside of the conventional sphere, and there’s an unconscious collective understanding around it, I think. It con rms the necessity of our being in this insane theatre of life. But having said that I feel as if I’ve said nothing. Let’s try again … Put simply, yes, there is a movement towards hope in “Jus d’Orange,” but it occurs concurrently with the inexistence we sometimes/always feel.
Peeling away the notion of singularity as it pertains to melancholia and hope opens new possibilities of interpretation, new esh, new pulp of meaning. Or as Cixous said, or maybe it was Camille: “Toute orange est originaire.” [“Every orange originates.”] If that’s not hopeful, I don’t know what is.
RK
You’ve talked about your feelings about the color, but I’d maybe ask again, about this collaboration: Why oranges?
CH
Orange is both infernal— re, pain, an almost intolerable intensity—and energizing—the sun, summertime, vitamin C. The acrylic pigment I used for the paintings in the exhibition is called “Hell.” I only noticed this late in the process of painting for this show. The orange is also a shape, not just a color. It’s the round shape of the fruit. Estelle writes about the nal scene in my lm Grosse Fatigue (2013), where a hand is rolling an orange on a table surface. Her text made me wonder why I had used an orange in my lm, and I think for me it represented the world. When I was young there was a children’s book called Le Monde est comme une orange, Lola! [The world is like an orange, Lola!], which I really loved. It was absurd. Two wild mice were peeling an orange in the book. The orange was a big container for many words and things. For some reason, this
image and phrase imprinted on me at the time, in that distorted way you encounter things in childhood. The round shape also assumes some kind of totality, I suppose. It makes me think again of Cixous, who I read a lot of while in Berlin around the time I met Estelle. Cixous has this capacity to t very large ideas into simple objects. In Vivre l’orange, she writes: “And to all of the women whose voices are like hands that come to meet our souls when we are searching for the secret, we have needed, vitally, to leave to search for what is most secret in our being, I dedicate the gift of the orange.” The “gift of the orange” really speaks to me—it comes from a childhood memory of being told that in the past, children would only receive an orange for Christmas. This was told to us to illustrate how spoiled we were as children. The orange (the fruit) was a luxury. It was the sun in the dark. It was something that, like hope, was almost an abstraction, a representation of something larger. It was the promise of something.
p. 94
Un croissant, 2022. Watercolor, ink and acrylic on canvas, 31 1/2 in. × 23 5/8 in. (80 × 60 cm). Photo: Marlene Burz p. 96
Clockwise from top: Cool Nights, 2022. Watercolor, ink and acrylic on canvas, 31 1/2 in. × 47 1/4 (80 × 120 cm).
Photo: Marlene Burz; Citrus Vapor, 2022. Watercolor, acrylic and oil on prepared canvas with gesso, 24 1/8 × 18 1/8 in. (61 × 46 cm).
Photo: Marlene Burz; All Hat, No Cattle, 2023. Watercolor, ink and acrylic on canvas on wood panel, 24 × 18 in. (61 × 45.8 cm). Photo: Thomas Barratt p. 97
The Ingenious Sea, 2023. Watercolor and acrylic on canvas, 30 × 24 in. (76.2 × 61 cm). Photo: Thomas Barratt p. 98
Clockwise from top left: My Gums Bleed Daily, 2023. Watercolor and ink on raw canvas, 66 7/8 × 53 1/8 in. (170 × 135 cm). Photo: Camille Henrot Studio; A Distant Child, 2023.
Watercolor and ink on raw canvas, 66 7/8 × 53 1/8 in. (170 × 135 cm). Photo: Thomas Barratt; Estella Amica, 2023. Watercolor, ink and acrylic on canvas on wood panel, 24 × 18 in. (61 x 45.8 cm). Photo: Thomas Barratt pp. 100–101
From left: With the Help of a Love Filter, 2023. Watercolor and acrylic on canvas, 70 7/8 × 55 1/8 in. (180 × 140 cm). Photo: Thomas Barratt; A Blood Constellation, 2023. Watercolor and acrylic on canvas, 24 × 18 1/8 in. (61 × 46 cm). Photo: Thomas Barratt; The Middle Child, 2022. Watercolor, ink and acrylic on canvas, 31 1/2 in. × 23 5/8 in. (80 × 60 cm).
Photo: Marlene Burz p. 103
A Mountain of Oranges, 2023. Watercolor, ink and acrylic on canvas on wood panel, 31 × 24 1/4 in. (78.7 × 61.6 cm). Photo: Thomas Barratt
All artwork © Camille Henrot. Courtesy the artist, Mennour (Paris) and Hauser & Wirth
SUSPENSION OF BELIEF
Angela Su’s alter-egos and acts of defiance
By Barbara Pollack
“Hellraiser was a key influence,” says the artist Angela Su, only half joking when she recalls a B-movie monster with a head full of pins. For Su, who lives and works in Hong Kong, horror and science fiction expand history’s repository of body imagery and should be taken as seriously as Leonardo’s studies in anatomy or 21st-century microscopy. All of these references can be spotted in Su’s body of work—intricate drawings inspired by medical illustrations, embroideries of human hair and hypnotic videos that spin faux histories from found footage. “For me, opening up the human body and staring inside is like watching pornography,” Su says, somehow without seeming too perverse.
Su’s personal style—a combination of Goth and nerd—reflects her long-standing feeling as an outsider in a city where pink Birkin bags and strappy heels are favored over Doc Martens. But she is now having to adjust to being celebrated in her hometown. In June, the museum M+ exhibited “Angela Su Proudly Presents: Lauren O—The Greatest Levitator in the Polyhedric Cosmos of
Time,” a pseudo-history about levitation as told through the biography of a fictional heroine. The installation continues Su’s interest in levitation as a form of cultural or political resistance, a theme she also explored in Arise: Hong Kong in Venice, created for the Hong Kong pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
“In Venice, I felt a responsibility to talk about Hong Kong—I thought it was important to talk about how the world had changed,” she said, adding that she found this possible despite increasing censorship in Hong Kong because “some leeway, some cracks” still exist. Instead of directly pointing fingers, she said, she spoke obliquely through themes like levitation, circus acts and subcultures. The goal was to capture the precarious state of living in Hong Kong without succumbing to didacticism or sentimentality. For Su, a sense of hopelessness—an experience shared by her peers—becomes like a puzzle to be solved rather than a cause for depression.
At the opening of the Hong Kong Pavilion in April 2022, I barely recognized Su, who was
sporting closely cropped pink hair and dressed in leather with a chain choker. She was in the middle of telling a journalist, “To walk that line, you really have to guess what is dangerous and what is safe.” Was she talking about China’s influence over Hong Kong and the new levels of censorship? Could her title, Arise, be a call to action or a provocation? If so, how was she going to get away with such public declarations? Once inside the four-chamber pavilion, I got my answer. She was not talking about politics but was instead describing the act of walking a tightrope blindfolded, as shown in archival footage of highwire performers and aerial
acrobats. Presented on fifteen monitors hanging from the ceiling, these balancing acts functioned as incisive metaphors for the situation in Hong Kong, without ever mentioning quarantines or arrests, headlines or current events.
The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O. was the cinematic centerpiece of Arise. A pseudodocumentary, it tells the story of a character named Lauren O. and, through her, a history of elevating bodies in the air. Lauren was inspired in part by Lauren Oya Olamina, the hero of Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. The film also includes stories of psychics and psychedelics, CIA agents and scientists, all derived from found footage and ninety percent factual. Few people may remember that Jerry
Rubin and 50,000 Yippies showed up to levitate the Pentagon on October 21, 1967, a story the film retells by attributing the episode to a fictional counterculture group called the Laden Ravens. The only non-altered moment in the film is documentation of Su herself as aerialist, bound and hoisted in the air with fabric dripping from her costume. This ravishing performance took a full day to film, with Su rigged in a harness and hoisted fifteen meters in the air for only a few minutes at a time, the most her body could bear. Traumatic and erotic, the performance becomes a symbol of bravery and defiance within the imaginary history laid out in the film. As I watched the conclusion, I felt goose bumps, realizing that if a yellow umbrella or a blank piece of paper can serve as a form of protest, so too can levitation.
The 1970s feminist battle cry “The personal is political” is central to Su’s methodology, though her investigation of the body is about the body politic, not gender dynamics. She explains that Hong Kong artists “cannot avoid channeling the feelings and experience of recent history,” but she typically avoids references to her own life, saying that it is not “relevant to her practice.” When I try to pin her down, Su responds by playing with the facts, just as she edits and re-edits sequences in her films. She has, for example, changed the year of her birth several times over the course of her career, now stating only that she “grew up in Hong Kong in the 1970s.” Without specifying a year, she recounts traveling alone at the age of sixteen to attend boarding school in Canada and earning a degree in biochemistry at University of Toronto in 1990. She then left science behind and followed her dream of becoming an artist, attending the Ontario College of Art and Design, from which she graduated in 1994. Five years later, she returned to Hong Kong, and her work and career have grown gradually ever since, coinciding with Hong Kong’s meteoric rise to international art capital. A parallel history informs Su’s practice as well. When she first returned to Hong Kong in 1999, the territory had only recently been released from British rule and ceremonially returned to China in the handover of 1997. The terms of the agreement guaranteed that Hong Kong would retain self-governance for another fifty years, until 2047, but over the last three
“For me, opening up the human body and staring inside is like watching pornography,” Su says, somehow without seeming too perverse.
Above: Film still of Angela Su, The Magni cent Levitation Act of Lauren O, 2022. Single-channel video, 15 minutes. Courtesy the artist and M+, Hong Kong
Opposite: Film still of Angela Su, Cosmic Call, 2019. Singlechannel video, 12 minutes. Image courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery
years, China has very publicly lost patience with the arrangement. Mass protests and resistance have not prevented increased control by Beijing over elections, laws, press, public debate and prosecutions. While the art market is still vibrant and exhibitions continue, a constant guessing game is now played within it: Where are the lines drawn? What might cause trouble?
The stress of living with uncertainty cannot be cured by medicine. But in the history of medicine, a story of centuries of deadly mistakes and revisions, Su found another door for her work. Combining Foucault’s critique of the “medical gaze” with the horror-gynecology of David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers, Su created eerie anatomical illustrations, sometimes in ink and sometimes embroidered in human hair. In Paracelsus’ Garden (2007), she offered a zoology of insects and reptiles, part alchemy, part biology. More recently, in a series based on Rorschach tests, she created perfectly symmetrical renditions of the inner organs and genitalia of cyborgs and simulants, intricate and seductive enough to compel viewers to overcome their repulsion and stare.
Video has served as the medium most liberating for Su, freeing her from personal and societal notions about which subject matter should or should not be “permissible” for an Asian woman artist. In one of her first videos, The Hartford Girl and Other Stories (2012), Su subjects herself to an inkless tattoo, her skin punctured with a needle that inscribes thirty-nine Catholic prayers (a reference to Christ’s thirty-
nine lashes) across her back. The film, almost painful to watch, shows her body becoming bloodied over the course of eleven minutes.
Curator Valerie Doran, a key supporter of Su’s first exhibitions, worried for her safety and sanity. In 2014, in an interview for an online series titled “Methods of Art,” filmed at the Asian Art Archive, where Su worked as a researcher, she comes off as earnest and idealistic, happily answering questions. But a year later, she released a video of her own also titled Methods of Art (2015), a kind of dark-matter version of the same process. In it, she is shown bound and gagged, dragged by a man in a panda mask to a dirty shed. Speaking through the silver duct tape across her mouth, she says to the camera, “I apologize for all the uninteresting art I have made and all the bullshit I have said”—offering a bondagesubmission version of John Baldessari’s famous 1971 pronouncement, “I will not make any more boring art.”
Since then, Su has developed a pseudodocumentary approach aimed at expanding viewers’ imaginations and belief systems. Often, a remembrance of a dream or a fleeting picture in her mind begins a two-to-three-month research project through film archives and databases. As she gathers images and information, she finds themes and drafts story boards. Serendipitous moments of early cinema—from Fleischer cartoons to Metropolis—are transformed into seemingly real instances of evidence or proof.
With The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers (2017), only two years after her performance videos, her work moved rapidly into more complex forms of narrative. Creating the illusion of a case study, the film follows a woman’s transformation through hallucinogens, schizophrenia and participation in a so-called Socialist Patients’ Collective. Rosy, the
The 1970s feminist battle cry “The personal is political” is central to Su’s methodology, though her investigation of the body is about the body politic, not gender dynamics.
Top to bottom:
Film still of Angela Su, Methods of Art, 2015. Single-channel video, 57 seconds. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery
Film still of Angela Su, The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers, 2017. Single-channel video, 14 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery
Four lm stills of Angela Su, The Hartford Girl and Other Stories, 2012. Video, 11 minutes. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery
protagonist, ultimately takes control of her life and escapes molestation by a man (again dressed in a panda suit) by entering cyberspace and living as an avatar. Incorporating film clips that range from Marcel Duchamp’s roto-reliefs to scenes from Felix the Cat cartoons, the film functions as equal parts medical report and road movie, and also a kind of homage to the use of art as a means of escape. Is it a coincidence that Rosy Leavers was created on the twentieth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover? Su says that the timing wasn’t planned, but the connection is evident.
In her film Cosmic Call, originally commissioned in 2018 by the Wellcome Trust to mark the centenary of the so-called Spanish flu, Su’s subject matter becomes uncannily prescient. Inspired by her experience with the SARS epidemic in 2003, she created a faux lecture in which she argues that comets are the source of infective bacteria, drawing on sources from the 2nd-century BCE, the Enlightenment, 19th-century medical practices and recent science-fiction films. Slipped into a steady stream of fictional, entertaining images are some very serious assertions from the World Health Organization about contagious diseases in overpopulated cities, like Hong Kong, and about the passage of Article 23, the precedent for more oppressive national security laws. Cosmic Call premiered just months before the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. “I thought, ‘Wow! What a coincidence,’” says Su, when she heard the news, adding: “Cosmic Call is certainly foreboding, but I can’t claim credit for predicting a pandemic.”
Su was in New York City in January 2020 when she heard the first news reports about Covid-19. “There was a lot of sadness in Hong Kong and a lot of polarization, and I couldn’t talk to my friends about it because I was too emotional,” she recalls. She had come to New York to support an exhibition titled “AFTERBEFORE,” a survey of work by Hong Kong artists and documentary filmmakers presented at Chinatown Soup, an alternative space and café. Instead of returning home, she went to Malaysia, where she began working on one of her most moving films, Lacrima, which took more than a year to finish and premiered at the Helsinki Biennial in 2021. “I wanted to bring things to
justice,” she says of the film. “I wanted to know why people, when confronted with the truth, refuse to see it.”
Overlaid with an aura of mythology, Lacrima is a twenty-minute speculation on the fate of the population of an imaginary island enclosed in fog, an island that looks remarkably like Hong Kong. Conditions in Lacrima cause people to disappear, among them a pseudo-Angela Su character, on the eve of the opening of an important exhibition. This meta-Su is studying the life of a psychic named Nina Palladino, or “Nin,” a fictional love child of 19th-century spiritualist Eusapia Palladino and criminologist Cesare Lombroso (actual historic figures). Nin has the powers to transmit messages from the dead and missing, providing answers to the mystery of disappearances. Lacrima tells this fictional story with remarkable clarity, in part through the use of nonfictional voice-over and film clips by Georges Méliès, Hans Richter, Luis Buñuel, Fritz Lang and Busby Berkeley, as well as archival footage of 1930s Paris, Communist rallies, Harry Houdini and Nikola Tesla. Just when the account appears to spin out of control and lose all connection to reality, a chilling announcement interrupts:
“In 2021, The International Court of Justice recognized the unlawful deaths of 20,000 Lacrimians. Nin’s original messages were provided by family members of the victims and were accepted by the court as witness statements of bioweapons.”
This message, presented like a title card in a silent movie, prompts the viewer to rethink the narrative and search back through it for unstated connections with present-day politics. In the final scene, Su appears as a diva, wrapped in fur, lip-synching an aria drawn from Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage.” Using the poet’s words, she pours out her desire, “To love at leisure, love and die in that land that resembles you!” In response to her singing, she is shot and pulled off screen as the music continues to play.
“I don’t think any of my works are political—they are just my personal sentiments about what is happening around me,” Su tells me, though she adds that she is always somewhat concerned about how Western critics interpret her works. Her installation at M+, she points out, has not, at least yet, run into any controversy or criticism, and she stresses that empathy is far more important than politics in understanding her meaning. “I am not a political artist,” she repeats, “but I don’t think anyone can be immune from the political situation.”
Angela Su’s solo exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, opens February 2, 2024.
Angela Su, Thalia, 2009, Ink on drafting lm, 47 1/4 × 29 1/2 in. (120 × 75 cm).
Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery
Hip-Hop’s Dead Sea Scrolls
keepers If hip-hop—perhaps the last great cultural movement of the 20th century, a source of constant innovation and continuous reinvention—did not have a resident fanatic and self-appointed scholar like Pete Nice, it would surely have had to invent him.
As a boy growing up in Brooklyn and Queens, Nice (born Peter J. Nash and known during his own hip-hop career as Prime Minister
Carlo McCormick in conversation with Pete Nice about the birth of a musical movement and its founding documents
Pete Nice) had some lucky exposure to the nascent sounds of early hip-hop. He became a passionate fan, one with deep-seated packrat tendencies from an early age, focusing on both musical and baseball ephemera. Next, he transformed himself into a successful and credible MC as part of the seminal white rap group Third Bass. And then, in a kind of second act, he became a devoted collector, researcher and self-taught historian, one who now serves the curator of the Universal Hip Hop Museum, a vast collection of rare memorabilia scheduled to open to the public in 2024. Over the years, Nice has tended to the legacy of hip-hop as something like a gardener, forever digging in the weeds, saving heirloom seeds whenever he finds them. Along with Paradise Gray—a fellow historian who managed the Latin Quarter, the legendary Midtown club that became a mecca for hip-hop in the 1980s—Nice has been working with a wider community of collectors to try to build a definitive archive of hip-hop flyers and posters.
A relatively humble authority, Nice comes off as confident but curious, obsessed, like all serious collectors, in finding things but ultimately more interested in making sense of what he has. He brings a remarkable eye to the iconography and coded messages of flyers, cards and invitations, locating adjacent components of music, dance and art that converged to form the movement’s distinctive brand of DIY advertising and promotion— explicating, for example, the foundational role that early graffiti artists like Phase 2 and Riff 170 played in making flyers for hip-hop artists, as well as highlighting the significant contributions of other artists like Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Eric Haze, Cey Adams and Keith Haring. Nice can point to rare documents that show how and when sneakerpimp culture formed around local club events. “All these things became billion-dollar industries,” he says. “And in the end all you have left are some sneakers, flyers and drawings to collect.” I asked him about the worldwide celebration now occurring for hip-hop’s fiftieth anniversary, suggesting to him that the definitive founding year seems like a corporate concoction, basically pulled out of someone’s ass to better monetize the history. Nice, a baseball-history fanatic, agreed and reminded me how the centennial of baseball’s founding, celebrated in 1939, was purely a marketing invention, driven by Cooperstown, the Spalding company and the whole-cloth myth of Abner Doubleday’s “invention” of the game. The founding year of 1973 for hip-hop, he says, is as much of a fanciful fabrication, based on an invitation for a Kool Herc “Back to School Jam” on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx that some believe might not have happened at all. As he was saying this, he showed me an invitation on a filing card for another Kool Herc party—in 1972. Like most great cultural movements, hip-hop germinated and grew organically, making it next to impossible to pin down origin stories or fixed dates. By the same token, you could also say that it has no expiration date.—Carlo McCormick
Carlo McCormick
You have a long history with hip-hop, but let’s begin by just talking about you as a collector. You also were a big sports memorabilia collector before this.
Pete Nice
My family was originally from Brooklyn. I lived there when I was really young and then we moved to Queens. As a kid, you collect baseball cards, comic books, you know, and there was this little spot on a corner near where I lived, behind a bar called Woody’s, where an old guy had coins, baseball cards and stamps, and I would go there every week with my allowance. We’d also go on family vacations to the east end of Long Island, and my mother was into collecting stu , and I would go with her to antique places out there. That’s how I got into it, and it got to a point where I would collect anything as long as it was old. Then I got a bit more obsessed with sports, particularly baseball, and I would write to old-time players when I was nine and ten years old. One of the guys I became pen pals with was the pitcher Waite Hoyt, who was on the 1927 Yankees along with Babe Ruth. It was Hoyt and a lot of other eighty-year-old men who taught me my early history. Then I became really interested in Negro League players and joined the Society for American Baseball Research. I was maybe twelve years old and here I was on a committee to advocate for Black players being included in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Part of all that was also about collecting autographs.
I’m curious about this connection between your collecting obsessions as a kid and this remarkable archive you’ve built as an adult. Getting to the pathology here, is it about the stories these objects tell for you or more a kind of physical fetish?
My dad grew up right by Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and I just always had a romanticism for the old days. Once you track down a whole bunch of baseball cards from the ’50s, you go: “Oh wow, how about the ’40s?” And you keep going back and back. It becomes an H.G. Wells time machine, and I appreciate that aspect of it now more, being older. But as far as hip-hop went, there really seemed to be nothing out there to collect. Back then, I was too young to be going up to jams up in the Bronx to get yers. Probably the rst yers I came across were from 1985 and 1986, and those were the rst ones I saved. A friend of mine and I rode our bikes up to a club on Jamaica Avenue called the Encore. We didn’t get in. It was like a ten-dollar cover. But we got the yer. It was a Rush Productions show, with Kurtis Blow and a bunch of other great acts.
You have a really early Rush Productions yer in your collection, and it’s remarkable to see how Russell Simmons was pretty much killing it right out of the gate. Weren’t you also on Russell’s label Def Jam?
Yeah. I got signed by Russell as a solo around 1988. Dante Ross brought him my demo tape. MC Serch was also there, but we were doing our own solo projects, and it was a good year or two before we started working together. Sam Sever, who had worked with Beastie Boys and produced a lot of great tracks, was working with both of us individually, and he and Dante saw these two white solo artists who weren’t doing all that well, and they had the idea to put us together. And then they tried to sell us to a major label, but everyone wanted us to be the next Beastie Boys, another rock/rap fusion. Of course, a lot of people didn’t want to get anywhere near us. There just weren’t a whole lot of white MCs, DJs, dancers or the like in hip-hop back then. We were as rare as the dodo bird.
As a collector, how did you get back to the earlier days of hip-hop, the way you were able to do with baseball? These yers were hardly mass-produced the way baseball cards are.
A lot of it came about because I played basketball in high school. My dad had been a coach at Stevenson High School up in Soundview in the Bronx, and he worked for the Big Apple Games rec league, where I worked as a ball boy. I was able to connect to a lot of schools where some of the rst jams and parties took place. I even had a summer job working at welfare hotels like the Brooklyn Arms and the Harlem Hotel. I just knew a lot of di erent people. That’s where I would rst hear the music. It wasn’t about records then. It was people playing mixtapes, so you wouldn’t know exactly what you were hearing, but in retrospect I can still remember the breaks from Bob James’s jazz hit “Nautilus,” one of the most sampled songs in history, and hearing the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, who were rst called the L Brothers. I remember songs like Cerrone’s “Rocket in the Pocket” on tapes I heard in the ’70s. That’s how I got into the music— going to the jams in the parks, not in the clubs, because in 1979 I was twelve years old, and then Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” hit and boom. It’s all over the place, everywhere
Were the yers up in record stores?
That didn’t start happening until the late ’80s, early ’90s. Phase 2 told me that the early yers were mostly handed out to people. The promoter Van Silk started out handing out yers for Kool DJ AJ. Though I noticed it then, I didn’t really think about how sometimes there was a blue yer and sometimes a pink yer, and Van told me the pink ones were handed out at girls’ schools and the blue ones at boys’ schools. There was a guy up in Mount Vernon who did a lot of the o set printing for them, with colors and all sorts of stu . A lot of the early promoters of disco were doing shows at Madison Square Garden with Grandmaster Flowers and Brooklyn DJs, and the disco promoters already knew the poster game, so the knowledge got passed on. For the kids up in the Bronx doing shows in the parks, posters weren’t initially a big thing and didn’t come in there until later. Clubs like
Harlem World, on 116th Street, did posters, but not many of them survived.
There’s a surprising narrative that you can read through your collection, which is that it seems like disco basically turns into hip-hop.
If you look at the flyers, you can see how early on, hip-hop is referred to as disco, or maybe they were talking more about disco as a place, not the type of music. The term “MC” doesn’t get memorialized on a flyer until 1978, so that’s the year of the MC, when Grandmaster Flash had three MCs—Cowboy, Kid Creole and Melle Mel—and that’s when guys were actually rhyming on the beat, the way we know it today. It was a significant change from earlier, when DJs were saying lines. You see flyers from back as early as 1976 saying “Battle of the Rappers.” But that’s more like guys on the radio saying their slick lines. There were guys like DJ Hollywood—and if you ever tell anyone he’s not hip-hop, Doug E. Fresh will school you for an hour. You can see what Hollywood was doing from what’s on the flyers and tickets. He would have a whole crowd in the palm of his hand, doing four or five spots a night and making $500 at each spot. He would go in, do his routine for half an hour or forty-five minutes. He would do call-and-response and he would also do his rhymes. But it would be over disco records, not over hard-break beats or scratching. There are so many controversies and disputes about this. That’s why the flyers are cool, because they give some sort of evidence of what was actually happening.
Did Kool Herc have flyers for his earliest shows?
There are Herc flyers, but at the beginning there were just index cards that he and his sister, or the girlfriend of the guy throwing the party, would write out with basic information and hand out to people. There were house parties, rec-center parties. There’s a flyer for Herc, done with offset printing, for a party he did at a spot on Jerome Avenue called the Twilight Zone, and that’s 1974. So they did move on to flyers early. Riff 170 was doing flyers for Herc around 1975, and that’s even
before Phase 2, who told me about a guy named Kareem who was doing flyers even before that. Coke La Rock, who was part of Herc’s Herculoids back in 1973, talks about Riff making a flyer that showed him standing on a building like Godzilla and that Riff went into Coke’s bedroom and painted the image on the walls with DayGlo paint so that you could see it when the lights were turned off.
When you deal with these early histories, there are obviously lots of conflicting narratives over who did what first, and it can get pretty contentious, with a lot of beefs. How are you going to deal with that as a curator?
It’s never easy history to sort out. Most of those guys who hung out at the Latin Quarter, who you might think were tough guys, you know, thirty years or forty years later they’re fathers, uncles, grandfathers, just regular guys with lives and families, if they made it. Others, like the Fort Greene Mission Posse, the original 50 Cent, they’re all gone. They got murdered or sent away for a very long time. A lot of the history wasn’t recorded and has been lost. But the flyers do tell you a lot, and people who are still around can read them in ways I can’t. I look at a flyer from the Mitchell Gym on Alexander Avenue in the Bronx, and I wasn’t there. But Easy AD from the Cold Crush Brothers will look at it and go, “Oh Pete, you know that if you went to that Cool DJ AJ show back then, you’d better have gone with four people because if you went alone you were getting robbed. You were losing your sneakers, you were losing your jacket.” There are all these clues on the flyers—where it was, whose party it was—that would tell you how you had to handle yourself, or if you could even go. That’s why it’s cool that the flyers exist. They preserve a narrative.
Is that narrative going to be incorporated in the museum along with other fetish objects that people love from hip-hop—so-and-so’s jacket, the microphone from that cat, someone else’s gold records, all the rest?
It will, and it all makes sense together. Easy AD, who will have his jackets and his suits in the museum, calls the flyers the “Dead Sea Scrolls of Hip-Hop,” which they really are. A dream situation would also be to have the tape of the party playing along with the flyer. We’re just getting started with this, so maybe we’ll get there eventually. You know, things get uncovered every day.
Pete Nice was a founding member of the Def Jam Recordings group 3rd Bass and released two gold albums for the label from 1989 to 1992. His career in hip-hop began in 1985 as a solo MC, and in 1987 he established the first hip-hop radio show with DJ Clark Kent at Columbia University, New York. He is currently working with Paradise Gray on the forthcoming book The Golden Age of Hip Hop 1983–1992: An Illustrative History .
Park jam in the Bronx, New York, early 1980s.
Photo: Henry Chalfant/Art Resource, NY
The exhibition is generously supported by
Terra Foundation for American Art Image: Rashid Johnson, Black and Blue, 2021, film still © Rashid Johnson
THOMAS
London Until May 2024
Thomas J Price, Signals, 2021. Bronze
185 x 38 x 37 cm / 72 7/8 x 15 x 14 5/8 in.
Photo: Damian Griffiths
New and forthcoming books
Jim Goldberg, Coming and Going (Mack Books)
The artist Jim Goldberg has always worked from within subjects, not so much documenting them as building powerful records of inhabiting them: poverty and class schism in San Francisco in the 1970s (the book Rich and Poor); West Coast street kids in the 1980s and 1990s (his classic Raised by Wolves); human trafficking and refugee crises (Open See, published in 2009).
For years now, he’s seemed to be building toward a big book about his own life, compassed with the same unflinching honesty that has made his other work so revered. Last Son (2015) mined his archives to tell of his development as a photographer and his bittersweet relationship with his chronically ill father. Candy (2017) focused on New Haven, where Goldberg was raised, the disaffected child of a family that ran a struggling confectionery business.
Coming and Going has now arrived as Goldberg’s full-fledged autobiography—told elliptically through pictures, letters, family snapshots, funerary documents, X-rays and shards of what seems like every personal document that has ever passed through his hands. Essentially a 183-page collage, the book is profoundly life-affirming and also, by turns, gut-wrenching in its depiction of life’s contingencies. A partially redacted letter from his first wife as their marriage crumbled begins: “I am crying again. It seems I am crying all the time these days”; a photograph of his father at the moment of his passing shows the precise time, displayed on his son’s digital wristwatch.
Fusing Goldberg’s lives as son, husband, father, artist and activist in ways that make it clear he has never been able to separate the public from the private, sometimes to his anguish, the book is an indelible portrait of an American artist’s life and of contemporary American life itself.—Randy Kennedy
Edited by LAN — Local Architecture Network; photography by Cyrille Weiner (Park Books)
In 1925, a handful of German intellectuals visited Naples, among them Walter Benjamin and the actress and theater director Asja Lacis. The city proved to be fertile ground for psychogeographic riffing: In the essay “Neapel” (“Naples”) co-written by Benjamin and Lacis, they declared: “Naples is not the opposite of cold modernity. It is, in fact, its finest illustration,” a “febrile city” whose complexity is rivaled only by Paris. They noted the city’s porosity, embodied not only by its constant intertwining of private and public but also by the vast underground tunnels, caves and cisterns winding beneath the streets and the
Gianluigi Freda, Andrea Maglio, Umberto Napolitano and Manuel Orazi, Napoli Super Modern
Jim Goldberg, from Coming and Going (MACK, 2023). Courtesy the artist and MACK
palimpsests of Greek and Roman ruins. Napoli Super Modern revisits these morphological premises and combines them with an exploration of the city’s embrace of nature and history to propose a uniquely Neapolitan brand of modernism, one Robert Smithson undoubtedly would have appreciated. The city’s hilly topography, for example, engenders “groundscrapers.” The term was coined by the historian Renato Fusco in 1988 and is aptly illustrated by the transversal section of the midcentury Palazzo della Morte condominium, which sprawls downward rather than toward the sky.
This book is a dream for architecture aficionados, not least because it includes eighteen case studies, with re-drawings, of innovative projects, among them the refurbishment of Piazza Monteoliveto (1933–37), a controversial insertion of modern structures into a dense Gothic accumulation, and Sirio Giametta’s Clinica Mediterranea (1940–52), wedged between a double-hairpin curve on one side and the bay on the other.
The book doesn’t aim to be an exhaustive guide to modernism around the city but rather an occasion to look well beyond the stereotypical postcard views of pizza parlors and laundry draped across streets. Even if you’re a Naples adept, you come to appreciate that while the city has always been modern, by its nature, the addition of modernist architecture has made it something altogether extraordinary: super modern. —Maria Elena Garzoni
In 2011, Teju Cole published his first novel, the celebrated Open City, a free-flowing, richly textured story of a flâneurnarrator’s physical and meditative wanderings through New York City.
Over the past decade, Cole has taken productive detours into journalism, photography, criticism and art history. In his return to fiction with his second novel, Tremor, he invites readers into the life and mind of Tunde, a forty-something art professor at Harvard (where Cole, 48, has taught creative writing since 2019).
Tunde’s life reverberates with quiet tensions: The casual racism he encounters as a Black man in America, the artifice of what constitutes an “authentic” work of art, the deflated state of his marriage. Tremor uses Tunde’s bounded academic existence to enfold three continents and hundreds of years of history. Sifting through generations of systemic violence and injustices of power, Cole poses the endemic philosophical question: How can one live a meaningful and morally accountable life amid persistent atrocity?
Though conflicted, Tunde never falls into despair, and he finds particular joy and solace in music. In rousing passages, Cole offers readers wondrous dives into contemporary Malian singers, Nigerian pop, Bach and other loves. The collective voices in Tremor, like those in the best of songs, linger long in the mind.––Alexandra Vargo
Holly Melgard, Read Me: Selected Works (Ugly Duckling Presse)
The poet and artist Holly Melgard’s newest collection is an exercise in playful absurdity. With a self-aware structure that— endearingly, maybe strategically—never seems to take itself too seriously, her work liberates reading, reminding us that joy and mischief are important even in the most dire of contexts.
Melgard—whose 2021 collection Fetal Position, included a poem composed of sounds transcribed from YouTube videos of women reenacting labor (Arrrrrrrrrrrr/ Asshole/Ayahhhh/Aye)—abstracts poetry, activating senses well beyond the verbal; we not only read her words but also become highly aware of their visual and aural textures. Pieces like “Colors For Baby” and “Shapes For Baby” combine basic, repetitive visuals—frames, circles and lines—with words. While the images remain the same, the words below each change, toying with our readings of the images. “Black Friday” consists of five pages almost entirely coated in black ink—a deadpan Ad Reinhardt commentary on hyper-consumerism, and “Reimbur$ement” presents copies of the poet’s lottery tickets from the past six years, readymades of repetitive late-capitalist disappointment. Through textual and visual acrobatics, Melgard continually challenges us to rethink the personal, the sensual and the political.—Rachel Adler
Teju Cole, Tremor (Random House)
Nineteen Photographs From Cuba
By Yinka Elujoba
She sent me nineteen photographs from Cuba. ey ltered in, over the summer, as though they were dispatches. Was it two photographs a month? I do not remember.
One evening, before she left New York, we were sitting on a bench somewhere in the backside of Brooklyn, where the trees go on waving. e day felt like a footnote to a passing summer. It was in the air—the aura of a thousand things in motion: the day, the decaying sun, the wind, the sea of leaves around our feet, the apparatus that binds lovers.
“I will send you photographs,” she said to me.
I didn’t know what to make of it. A photograph signi es absence as much as it signi es presence. What one doesn’t own is elucidated, and in all photographs what is lost as well as what remains take on another kind of material form.
“What will they function as then?” I asked. “A memorial?”
She shook her head as if in pity. We are all so untoward when we fall in love.
“Nothing ever so fancy,” she said. “Just something for you to think about.”
When I got the rst photograph I examined it at night, under a yellow light. e heat from the lamp on my ngers tracing the scenes in the picture, every portion of it emerging in a sequence, as if it were my own personal dark room. Vilem Flusser, that philosopher. He had claimed that every photograph contained a continuing scene. e photograph then as an interminable instant: always emerging, unraveling, unfolding. Can I say that with every glance, I was developing the photograph?
I wonder now why the rst photograph she chose to send me was the image of a chair. e scene is immediately familiar to me: a washed-out blue wall in front of a doorstep, facing a street. To the left of the photograph, a dark hole leading into a room. e oor of the doorstep is broken and, in fact, nothing in the photograph seems to be in good shape. e chair, proud, uncertain, a cheap version of royalty. It has ower-shaped rings around the backrest and bottom portions. e rings almost make the chair beautiful. e oor is patchy with spots, and one might even be deceived into thinking of it as a kind of design. ere is, to the right, a closed door with its paint peeling o . e atness of this door contrasts with the depth of the dark room to the left of the image. e chair seems suspended. Nothing is at rest when one longs for a lover.
i
Photos: Claire McIntyre, Cuba, 2019. Courtesy the artist
In the Yoruba tradition there is a messaging system known as the aroko. Built on a complex web of symbols, songs, proverbs, riddles from childhood, sound notes, puns and images, the most potent arokos are those encrypted so that only someone with a speci c experience or sense of being can decode the embedded message. Most arokos were designed to travel distance, as if displacement itself were a semiotic entity.
When I began to receive her photographs I thought of them as arokos, containing something hidden in the frame. Not that she had claimed to embed any such hefty notations in the photographs, my concerns were simply a rumination birthed from private anxieties. Unable to contain myself, I wrote her to ask if there was, now that she had spent some time in Cuba, something she would like the photographs to tell me.
Her answer, when it came, was short, unequivocal—embodying the traits that had made me fall in love with her in the rst place:
“No.”
∞
To recognize a beautiful woman you must begin from her knees. en, the shape of her spine. e resilience of her jaw. Whether her lips tremble when she whistles. Her suprasternal notch where your dreams might reside. at silent curve above her hips…
∞
What returns to me, when each of these photographs arrives in my inbox, is watching her take a photograph for the rst time. I remember clearly: We were walking in Red Hook, not far from the water in Brooklyn, exhausted from a long talk at a FOAM event.
“ e colors!” she screamed suddenly. “My God, the colors!”
She pointed at the buildings.
“Look! Nowhere else in New York is this colorful. Was it orchestrated? Did everyone on this street agree to do this?”
She was bringing out her camera as she spoke. I stepped back and watched her. She arranged herself: legs closed tight together, her back straight, her slender arms folded in front of her, the camera swallowing her face. When she moved, it was her neck only, slanting, searching for a perfect angle within her frame.
I memorized her stance and, perhaps, it was in that moment that I fell in love.
On our second meeting we had a ght. I’d complained about the exceptionalism thinkers attribute to photography in their criticism or attempt to establish it as an art form. I complained about how people spoke of the camera as though it were an autonomous equipment, making images only as it wills. I denounced the idea of the camera as a “black box,” because it meant that what happens within it may be construed to be unknown, and its innards considered uncharted territory. I agreed with her that claims needed to be made to carve out a space for photography as a medium to be taken seriously. I however pointed out that although there is the human tendency to embrace anything that posits a mysti cation around an art form—since this implies that such an art form occurs at some elevated plane— we know of course that the camera is a machine manufactured by humans themselves. I posited that this meant every camera’s method of responding to light (and therefore darkness) is designed to speci cations those same humans deem t. My aim was not to dismiss the sophistication of what happens inside the camera, the camera after all requires more technicalities than the pen for example. Yet, just as it is ridiculous to be entirely shocked at the outcome of any processes by some arti cial intelligence, I thought it was also delusional to expect whatever image the camera makes to be something entirely unprecedented. When I had nished with my rant she simply drank her co ee and said: “Nice.”
What is the di erence between a memory embedded in a word and one embedded in a photograph?
e word, fromage, French for “cheese.”
“ e ‘r’ has to sound right, has to sound French,” she said to me, both of her index ngers on my lips.
Were we at the Punjabi deli on Bergen and Bond when she felt the sudden need for me to memorize the word? She had burst out in French to the big man behind the counter.
“Où est votre étagère pour le fromage?”
e man, confused but composing himself, waved his hands unknowingly.
“What are you saying to me? I don’t speak French!”
She realized that for a minute she had forgotten she was in New York and not Paris.
“I’m so sorry. I was asking where to nd cheese.”
e man pointed, a slight twitch on his nose—he was still unconvinced that she hadn’t been playing a prank on him.
“Fromage.”
A word that means nothing by itself, yet now interwoven with the memory of watching her demonstrate the O shape one’s mouth must make to successfully pronounce the “fro” part of the word.
“ e O is not a complete O,” she said. “It is an O that points forward, an ellipse, not a circle.”
I tried again, but I never got past the “r.”
Fromage.
When, nally, she sends me a picture with someone in it, I recognize, not the man but the shape of his mouth. It is also then that I recognize that to pronounce “fromage” correctly one must pretend to be blowing out smoke, as if from inhaling a cigarette.
One night, in the fall, we were locked in each other’s arms, hiding under a quilt she had stolen from her grandmother in Paris. e night seemed hollow, holding promises but delivering none. rough the window, we watched snow gather over everything on the street.
“Did I ever tell you my grandmother was a teenager during the Great War?” she asked. e Great War was how many from that time referred to the Second World War. Her grandmother, a teenager at the time her village was attacked by the Germans, had hidden under a pile of quilts when the raid began. She was so shocked at the staccato of guns she passed out for days.
“I still tease my grandmother for being such a sissy.”
When the teenage girl nally awoke the village had been destroyed and deserted. She was lucky the German troops had decided only to destroy and not to occupy.
“You’d probably be under someone else’s quilt right now if my grandmother had been found.”
e teenage girl, saved by quilts, became obsessed with them. She worked on quilts every day after the war until her hands bled. en a French soldier who had lost his left arm
in the war returned and married her.
“Now that I think about it, perhaps I inherited my grandmother’s taste in men. He was tall and rough in a handsome way. And of course, he couldn’t carry my grandmother in any of their wedding pictures!”
e one-armed soldier, although weak physically, had a strong mind. He made his wife’s obsession into a business. Finishing a quilt is taxing not just on the mind but also on the body. At rst they sold only one quilt a month. en he bought her a machine.
Production grew. e business grew.
He thought it was necessary to expand. He employed people to work with her. He incorporated a company in her name. People with other skills joined the business. e company began to sell quilts and blankets and other types of beddings.
“Now there is my grandmother’s signature in several beds. Including yours.”
“I have no great war stories to tell,” I said.
“Isn’t loving me war enough?”
I felt my body become warm under the quilt and decided Ondaatje was right: one’s body is used in love as it is in war.
She wrote to me and said, “Do you remember our last morning together? I spent time studying your eyes. ey’re quiet. Stable. ey never give anything away.” At the bottom of the message she appended a photograph.
Who has left?
Or who has returned?
ere is no one accustomed to leaving who does not accompany it with a ritual. For me it was, for a long time, the sudden getting up from beside her before sunrise, a hurried bath, then returning to her bedside, wearing my cu links, her eyes peeking out from under the blanket, watching me.
“Don’t go,” she said once, without rising from the bed, without opening her eyes. I watched the fan whirl across the room for a while. en I removed my shirt and returned to her side.
Placing words beside a photograph is precarious business. Captions are, unfortunately, too potent, too believable. Words immediately limit the existence and therefore meaning of images. e boundaries of interpretation for images are less nite than they are for words. is is why those in the enterprise of such meaning-making must recognize how often their work is subsumed in failure. True, one of the easiest ways to create a ect is to set up
a relationship between words and images. But how close have such associations come to ending up simply as postcards?
Imagine a photograph showing a partially visible room. An empty bed, made of three mattresses arranged on each other. On the wall, a framed image of a boy with ve di erent gestures. Is this room dark? Is this room small? A towel, neatly folded, sits on the bed. Such invitation, I am certain, can only be for an arrival. Every day a new postcard, yet every day my love remains an open door.
She wrote to me and said, “I have been looking at the men in the area where I live now, here in Cuba. ey are mostly kind, happy, diverse racially, but they think of themselves as one. ey ght amongst themselves all the time they but treat me with respect. Something else that binds them all, I think, is that they’re always pausing for a smoke.”
I would like to declare that I wasn’t jealous. Not of the beautiful man standing in the center of this photograph, smiling, his beard full, his eyes dim. Not of his beautiful shirt, half-tucked in. Not of the beautiful tattoo on his thick chest. Not of his skin, so glorious in what seems like a beautiful night. Not of the fact that when this photograph was made he was happily beholding her presence, the embodiment of every beautiful thing that might never again be mine.
One morning, after what seemed like eternal moments of longing, I phoned her, if perhaps I might at least recover what it meant to hear her voice. She was never an early riser; she always began her day only when it was past 11 a.m.
“Nothing beautiful ever happens before eleven a.m.,” she said once, turning down an invitation to breakfast with a famous artist. It was around 5 a.m. when I called. e phone rang and rang and rang. But on the other end there was no response.
Tattered, desperate, I continued to call, fueling the cracks in my heart, the muddy waters of desire.
∞
What is the most beautiful memory I have of her? Is it not a question too weighty for a photograph to answer? Surely all photographs, by nature, are perfunctory documents. But sometimes a photograph might be the site of an encounter. Like a woman’s leg, in sudden view, from inside a shadow. Intensi ed by the absence of anyone else on the street, the leg becomes even more beautiful. is is how I remember that evening when she came in from the rain, hair wet, soft, lavender-like; the dog-earth crease around her eyes; her lips immediately on mine. Desire, if delayed, is not desire.
In 1851, the King of Ijebu sent an aroko to Oba Akitoye, King of Lagos. It was on the occasion of Akitoye’s restoration, after the British had nally succeeded in deposing Oba Kosoko, who had been a formidable enemy. e aroko arrived in Lagos days after it was sent: a string holding carefully arranged cowries, shells, seeds and kernels.
Ten years after, the British who had helped Akitoye regain the throne annexed Lagos, entirely crushing the king’s power. irty-six years after, the aroko itself was stashed away in a corner at Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Placed on a red background, the aroko was said to have been a “peace and goodwill message.”
I was thinking about these things when she wrote me again.
“Do not think that I cannot speak. When I arrived here I knew I was loved by the people around me but they made some lines clear: I was an outsider and must constitute myself as such. Centuries after their ancestors were plucked from their land, they have become a wall. I understand now the wariness of those from whom things have been taken away. And I respect their right to remain mysterious. Do you not know these things? Why do you go on searching? Love gives but it gives less than it takes away. You know about leaving more than I do, so embrace my displacement. ere are things about me that must remain unknown to you: I made acquaintance with opacity to protect myself. Peace to you, and a photograph.”
Now has my heart become a place of instant electricity, I bow to the miracle of affection. I carry myself through limpid days, through tired streets. I search for the color of love. I visit the river often. I watch ferries come and go. e water remains constant. I protest the dislocation of my love. I know the weight of dismembered res. How could I not? ere is no hell where my name is not mentioned.
∞
Come to me love. Come to me.
Come to me when all I am left with is a woman’s name.
Even now I believe, like photographs, all beautiful things exist in an in nite dimension. Still, I am but a man of small desires. Can I help it if, after all this while, all I long for is just one photograph?
By Alexander Scrimgeour
Covered by Clouds A Journey Into the Furka Zone
Photos by Frederik van den Berg
Around half an hour’s walk from Switzerland’s Furka Pass, in a wild Alpine region some 8,000 feet above sea level, the words IMPARALECOSEDAZERO have been carved into a boulder near a spumy mountain stream: “Learn things from scratch.” This is one of twelve Jenny Holzer Truisms incised into rocks in 1991 as part of her contribution to Furk’art, an unusual, starstudded, somewhat Delphic project for which artists were invited to engage with the awe-inspiring and often harsh landscape surrounding the country’s third-highest mountain pass, open to traffic for only three to four months each summer. Between 1983 and 1999, the Swiss gallerist Marc Hostettler invited some sixty artists to participate in Furk’art, among them Marina Abramović and Ulay, Joseph Beuys, Max Bill, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, Gretchen Faust, Richard Long, Olivier Mosset, Panamarenko, Steven Parrino and Roman Signer. Some intervened directly in the Hotel Furkablick (Furka View)—the home of the project, where the artists stayed—while others staged performances in the landscape or found other ways to relate to it. None made Land art in the American sense: Only a few made enduring works, and almost all of those that remain are discreet or at least anti-monumental.
More than a century before the project was initiated, the Furka Pass had been visited by an illustrious traveler without whose presence the Hotel Furkablick might never have been built: Queen Victoria, who stayed at its no-longer-extant bigger brother, the Hotel Furka, in the summer of 1868 on her way to see the nearby Rhône glacier. Although she had a wretched time and reported feeling miserably cold, her stay and its resonance in Britain marked a turning point in the history of Swiss tourism: The Alps became fashionable for a demographic far larger than gentlemen mountaineers and British aristocrats on Grand Tours, and numerous hotels were built, some with hundreds of rooms. But the vogue ran its course, and by the middle of the 20th century, the end of an era of high-end, long-stay, short-haul travel meant many of the hotels became unviable and closed. In 1982, the Hotel Furka was given over to the nearby military base for artillery practice. On its site today is nothing but a huge parking lot, hosting travelers overnighting in RVs and a hot-dog stand with a pay-to-go Porta-Potty: one franc for customers, two for guests.
On the other side of the road stands a seemingly unoccupied building with the word DÉPENDANCE painted on it, the hotel’s former staff quarters. Its gables are decorated with arrows pointing in various directions—Richard Long’s Wind Line Over the Furkapass (1989), a record of the shifting wind during one of his walks. To the southeast, four polished granite blocks sit on the ground, arranged in a square to function as a fire pit—a 1994 work by Max Bill. Across from it rises Per Kirkeby’s Furkapasshöhe (1986), a suburban or utilitarian-seeming ten-foot-high red-brick chimney stack, with a narrow slit through which the wind was swirling above potato-chip packets and a half-crushed beer can on the day I peered into it this past July. There are no labels anywhere proclaiming it as a work of art; some people have mistaken it for a ventilation shaft for an underground tunnel. The everydayness of the structure and its materials are strikingly at odds with the vista beyond: On a clear summer’s day, you can see for miles down a valley whose steep sides are scratched with the lines of waterfalls and dappled with patches of snow, the Hotel Furkablick nestled conspicuously half a mile away on the side of the pass road.
The hotel, a veritable landmark, has been perched here since 1893. Its distinctive striped shutters, a work by Daniel Buren, were hand-painted on-site between 1986 and 1988, during the project’s early years. The building is also home to the only design by Rem Koolhaas in Switzerland, commissioned by Hostettler after his acquisition of the hotel and completed in 1992. The design’s distinguishing features are an aluminum entrance vestibule and a frequently windy terrace overlooking the valley. A 1997 project portfolio by Koolhaas’s firm OMA ascribes the draw of the site, in part, to “the mixture of tourists and artists— sweaty cyclists and ‘poets.’” While many of the former may be oblivious of the esteem in which the likes of Buren and Koolhaas are held today, even cognoscenti might overlook an artwork nestling against the building’s southern face: Alix Lambert’s Trash Bags with Concrete (1993), which could well outlast everything here. The plastic has almost entirely disintegrated, but the concrete continues to carry its form.
This interplay of renown and anonymity, knowledge and ignorance, public and private, runs through the history of the project, which has never sought to become a Swiss Marfa. Aufdi Aufdermauer, who contributed to Furk’art in multiple capacities, especially from 1984 to 1991—and has become the de facto spokesperson for Hostettler, who has long declined to speak publicly about the project—emphasizes that the art world was not nearly as “financialized” then as it is now. Art tourism and the VIP circuit were not the phenomena they would later become. While Furk’art made overtures to the public, Hostettler typically focused more on the artists than on the audience, once describing the project as offering “the opportunity to confront creative people from the city with an extreme, hard and very interesting landscape. The point of Furk’art is to let such people work up here for a certain span of time in confrontation with this environment and in connection with other artists.”
While geography was among the factors that lent the project both a literal and metaphorical distance from the expanding significance of art as a middle-class leisure activity, Furk’art was, as well, always entwined with its own mythopoesis. This was apparent even in the moment of its birth, courtesy of the gold-loving mystic James Lee Byars, whose 1983 mountainside performance A Drop of Black Perfume ended when a sudden storm forced all the spectators and the artist himself to run for cover.
Many of the artists made temporary or ephemeral works or staged performances that left few if any of what Hostettler called “sediments.” Dorothee von Windheim’s FurkapassAktion (1991) consisted of the artist taking a walk with the audience and playing Brahms’s Piano Sonata no. 1 before
announcing, “Here is a blue flower I wanted to show you,” and brutally stamping on this object of Romantic admiration. In 1984, for Nightsea Crossing, Abramović and Ulay sat across from each other for seven hours in the Hotel Furkablick’s wonderfully preserved Belle Époque dining room as summer snow started to fall outside. Six years later Mark Luyten applied words by Paul Celan to the windows in this elegant space and in several bedrooms. Among other artists who intervened in the Hotel Furkablick itself was Lawrence Weiner, who added the words COVEREDBYCLOUDS to the circular room-key rings.
In 2004, some five years after the project ended, hastened by unforgiving economics, the Alfred Richterich Foundation—whose wealth derives from Ricola herbal lozenges—took responsibility for the legacy of Furk’art, with the intention, Richterich told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung at the time, of allowing the hotel and restaurant to “become an artwork, by means of their normal functioning, much in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp.” The successor to Furk’art and the keeper of its archives, the Furkablick Institute, headed by Janis Osolin, indeed functions with a kind Duchampian inscrutability; part-readymade, part bachelor machine, part riddle. Although the restaurant remains operational, the hotel is not readily accessible to the public and no longer has rooms for paying guests. (In the early years, because the hotel was open to anyone who booked a room, unsuspecting guests would often fall into conversation with artists over dinner.) Now, the hotel is primarily devoted to archiving and preservation and hosts a limited residency program. Most rooms are in various states of time-capsule-like preservation or archival-work-inprogress; the wainscoted dining room is more full than when Abramović and Ulay had it emptied for their performance but is otherwise unchanged.
Osolin developed a strategy he calls “mise en valeur ” for the curatorial handling of almost everything. The term, literally “brought into value,” refers to various ways “to give respect and dignity” to the objects in question. One example is a presentation of Olivier Mosset’s 2 août 1987 that puts the interlinked pink crosses of one of Mosset’s Furk’art canvases in dialogue with the extravagantly floral patterning of a Victorian wallpapered room. Illuminating the thinking behind such an approach, Osolin says: “It’s all about context.”
Many activities of the institute challenge aesthetic hierarchies entirely: One room is filled with the bowls and jugs used, given the paucity of plumbing, in place of sinks; another contains heaped mattresses; another displays a few small sculptures by Kim Jones on a sideboard along with a book about his work. Elsewhere, an unopened packet of mothballs is kept for a future generation for whom, Osolin speculates, their smell will likely no longer invoke a madeleine moment. Among a handful of discreet interventions of Osolin’s own is the gold leaf applied to the metalwork of one of the balcony balustrades in 2021 as a twinkling tip of the hat to Byars and the artist’s love of all things golden.
Aufdermauer emphasizes that the Furkablick Institute is a different kind of project than Furk’art, with its own distinct agenda. He remembers the Furk’art era as more isolated than glamorous. A single telephone line connected the hotel to the outside world, and there were no regular newspaper deliveries. Especially when the weather closed in and the place was enveloped in clouds, he says, “A lot of people found it hard.” Some artists—they were mostly men, he notes, acknowledging one of the project’s shortcomings—were invited for extended
stays; some accepted and developed work during their visit; others mailed instructions. Surprise guests dropped in from time to time. Aufdermauer recalled one late-night knock at the window by Jan Hoet, who had been recently announced as the curator of Documenta 9, leading to an all-night conversation. Currently occupying the Hotel Furkablick’s own dépendance is a project that seems to echo the site’s unconventional art history. Begun by Jan de Vylder of the ETH architecture school in Zurich and run by David Moser and Alessia Bertini, it is called in:dépendance, a bare-bones residency program. At any given time, about a dozen people can be found living on site, working on projects and sharing ideas over impromptu dinners, getting by without heat or hot showers (as Queen Victoria knew, one must suffer in the Alps).
I arrived this past summer at the same time as Georges Descombes, a charismatic landscape architect from Geneva who was briefly passing through to talk to De Vylder about an exhibition he was planning about glaciers, scheduled to open in 2025. Descombes ranted about the Disneyfied ice grotto that has been constructed on the Rhône Glacier every winter since the 1870s. At present, the glacier is rapidly receding and the grotto is covered with white cloth that slows the melt above it while also polluting the Rhône with microplastics. For his exhibition, Descombes plans to include sketches of the future ruins of the grotto’s welcome center.
The profit-oriented, mass-tourist spectacle of the grotto functions as something of an antithesis to the history of Furk’art and the present character of both the Furkablick Institute and in:dépendance. The institute and the residency program are invested in different ways of negotiating hermeticism and accessibility; both have something monastic about them, although the former is largely based in processes, materials and a deep engagement with the site itself, and the latter is a temporary site of sociability, community and experimentation. De Vylder likes that the dépendance was long overlooked as a functional, peripheral building, and that it exists on a pass: a transitory, in-between space allowing for a nonhierarchical exchange of ideas. As he puts it: “Ping-pong happens horizontally. We never ping-pong vertically.”
After a good night’s sleep under thick Swiss blankets bequeathed by the Hotel Furka, I meet Osolin as he is installing a light bulb in a space housing Stefan Sulzer’s Requiem Aeternam (2009), one of a handful of full-fledged contemporary artworks that the Furkablick Institute has added to those from the Furk’art era. He unlocks the door to a long, windowless shed—once a storeroom for the military, whose former
barracks are nearby. Inside the shed, a twelve-track sound piece is installed, featuring a funeral requiem sung by monks from the Einsiedeln monastery in central Switzerland. “The finiteness of life, the proximity of death in the Furka Zone, is the reason that all of this exists here,” Osolin observes. People often die in the mountains, in avalanches or in accidents, most often on the roads. “It’s not quite true,” he adds, “but every year somebody dies up here.”
The light bulb takes some time to install, and the timer triggering the requiem needs to be reset after a recent power outage. While elucidating various details of the space and the work within it, Osolin shares his annoyance about what he describes as the instrumentalization of art and the proliferation of Alpine art biennials; I think again of the glacier grotto, which I’d never seen and now won’t. Osolin emphasizes that the Furka Institute is not a museum but a place primarily invested in the curatorial activity of care (curare) , rejecting the all-too-common justification of art through footfall—the history of tourism offers ample evidence that more is not merrier. There are no signs, for example, showing you how to get to the Jenny Holzer Truisms ; to do so, you must talk to a living person and ask for a map of the works in the landscape. Along with a chronological checklist, the map features several quotations, including one from Proust: “Les choses ont autant de vie que les hommes” (“Things have as much life as people”).
In the spirit of this motto, the institute engages in painstaking research into the material histories and conservation needs of the works on the site. Which paint is most appropriate for renovating the Buren stripes? What kind of ink was used to apply Celan’s words on glass? But with almost equal dedication, it questions its own function. What does it mean to preserve a legacy and work with an archive in a place like this? What is the value of site-specificity and the relationship between art, context and setting?
T he institute’s work is organizational, taxonomic and bureaucratic, but also sometimes Pynchonesque. The cataloguing system includes not only the works in and around the hotel and the ephemera associated with them but also, at least theoretically, all of the objects that are also here with and near them. The storeroom may contain a model of Rem Koolhaas’s extension and a flat file holds several of Kim Jones’s War Drawings , but the tablecloths and bed linens have been logged and preserved just as carefully. Downstairs is a vitrine— Cristina Consuegra’s at · tend · ing (2018)—filled with handmade cheeses decomposing extremely slowly due to the high-Alpine climate. On adjacent tables are door handles and spoons from the old Hotel Furka, as well as a single shoe, found nearby, labeled, tongue-in-cheek, “Victoria’s shoe,” and a block of asphalt once salvaged from repair works on the street outside. Everything has, or might one day have, some kind of value.
All of this labor toward saving, preserving and recording is, however, pervaded by the sense of an ending—and not just because of the climate of doom in which we live. “Furka has a long history of failure,” Osolin says, adding, of the ambitious projects that the pass has been home to, “All approaches and attempts in the Furka Zone lead somewhere, but never to the intended goal.” The specter of death, but also its deferral, even its abeyance, infuses the remnants and remainders frozen in time around the hotel and the landscape. At lunch in the Furkablick restaurant with Liliana Sánchez, an artist who has returned to the hotel numerous times to make work, Osolin briefly disappears and returns with a glass jar containing the
remains of a roadkill fox from 2019; what is left of it—a few bones, some fur—has been catalogued and labeled according to the same system as everything else at the site.
T he future of the Furkablick archive, site and legacy is unclear. Richterich’s heirs would like to sell it and the accompanying dépendance soon. Osolin takes this prospect philosophically. He has been working to assemble a commission that would include representatives of the two cantons connected by the Furka Pass and others with an interest in protecting all that is encompassed by his notion of the Furka Zone. The monicker keeps returning me to the “zone” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and its parallels to the intense experiences of questioning, unlearning and recalibration that here come with remoteness, history, geology and altitude.
The desire that brought me to the pass—to see some great art by big names and shout home about it—begins to feel hokey as my mind adjusts to the Furka Zone’s conditions. Rather than writing about the zone, I find myself wanting a first-person voice in order to write from it, in a way that allows for naivete, for feeling the effects of objects, remnants, weather and geology, for an openness to whatever might or might not fill the space left by the all the stuff that doesn’t really matter: city stuff, lowland projections, fantasies. In the Furka Zone, questions are framed repeatedly by memento mori. I think about Anna Tsing’s 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins and about
what forms of living-with can flourish in the ruins we have made. One evening, leaning out into the night air, I feel the mountains and my life spill into another dimension.
The institute has established a cemetery on the pass that Osolin and Sánchez tell me is a sort of navel, fulcrum or pivot within the zone. On its grounds is a memorial plaque to the curator Leigh Markopoulos (1968–2017) that reads: ONLY (TRY TO) CONNECT . . . INLIFEIT ’SALLABOUTOBSERVING, EVEN WHENPARTICIPATING. By this point, I’ve been on the pass long enough that I receive the words as a kind of revelation. Observing—a reward of growing older—is often a larger, harder task than taking part.
The next morning is departure day—to Zurich, downhill all the way. Osolin comes over with some parting words before I’m back in flatland. As I remember it, he said, “When you asked me yesterday how much it is my life’s work, how attached I am to the Furka Zone, to the Hotel Furkablick, I went and thought some more about it, and I wanted to add that even if in the coming years it is abandoned and falling down and I maybe drive past once a year, I’m fine with that. It’s all about observing—whatever happens.” He adds, to the photographer Frederik van den Berg, whose work appears in these pages, “You saw the bird, right? You got a picture of that?” At the top of the staircase in the hotel hangs a jay—a beautiful Eichelhäher—found dead among the rocks and now suspended from the topmost ceiling by a piece of string, refusing to decay.
The author would like to thank Aufdi Aufdermauer, Alessia Bertini, Georges Descombes, David Moser, Janis Osolin, Liliana Sánchez and Jan de Vylder for their time, openness and generosity in sharing ideas and opinions for this article, and to acknowledge a debt to Jürgen Grath’s invaluable book Furk’art: Spuren des Ephemeren (Munich: Utz Verlag, 2012).
p. 132
The Urseren valley as seen from the Furka Pass p.
133
The entrance to the dining room of the Hotel Furkablick p. 134
Top: View of Olivier Mosset, 2 août 1987, 1987 (mise en valeur 2011).
Bottom: View of Günther Förg, Deux reliefs, 1989, and John Nixon, Orange + Black, 1992. Förg: © Estate Günther Förg, Suisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2023 p. 135
Top: Objects arranged on a table in the basement of the Hotel Furkablick. Bottom: Lukas Baumann with Constance Leroy, part of Architekturstudie Dépendance Furkablick, 2014–16 p. 136
Top: View of Royden Rabinowitch, Three rolled conic surfaces applied to a region of curvature maintaining local and somatic descriptions, 1987.
Bottom: View of Per Kirkeby, Furkapasshöhe, 1986
p. 137
Top: View of Max Bill, vier gleichgrosse quader, 1994. Wassen granite. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zurich. Bottom: View of Mario Merz, Passo della Furka, 1994 p. 138
View of Lawrence Weiner, Covered by Clouds, 1990 p. 139
Dinner at the in:dépendance residency program pp. 140–41
Facade of the Hotel Furkablick, featuring Daniel Buren, Sans titre, 1987–89 (mise en valeur 2013) p. 142
The jay at the top of the stairs in the Hotel Furkablick p. 143
View of a section of Mark Luyten, L’orangerie VI, 1990
STUDIES Go Tell It on the Mountain
Jorge Pardo, Untitled (The Mountain Bar Installation) , 2009. Plexiglass, MDF, vinyl, uorescent lights. 79 x 175 x 90 inches (200.7 x 444.5 x 228.6 cm).
Courtesy the artist and Petzel Gallery, New York
A conversation about art education, professionalization and the unorthodox history of Los Angeles’s Mountain School of Arts
If, as The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight once observed, “modern art began as an assault on the academy but post-modern art might be described as a return to the academy,” then Los Angeles has long been one of the world’s most important incubators of art, along with Dusseldorf and London. While the art world in New York is propelled primarily by the market and powerful museums, Los Angeles has provided an intellectual home and source of teaching income for generations of artists at schools like Otis, Chouinard, CalArts, Pomona and ArtCenter—attractive in large part as havens of experimentation, dialogue and determined nonconformism. In 2005, the artists Piero Golia and Eric Wesley began to discuss their mutual feeling that this great art-school undergirding of Los Angeles was showing signs of erosion and that graduate art programs in particular had veered too far toward professional training, career planning and conventional pedagogy. Looking to free-spirit historical models of art education like the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, the shortlived modernist hothouse in Asheville, N.C., the two artists founded the Mountain School of Arts (named because its first classes were held on the second floor of the artist-founded, nowdefunct Mountain Bar, in Chinatown) as a radical alternative, or maybe just adjunct, to an institutional art education.
With no permanent location, no tuition, no paid faculty and an ambitious, highly unpredictable curriculum, the school has functioned for eighteen years now as something like a floating seminar and a permanent field trip, offering an ongoing, on-theground critique of both the art world and the idea of art education itself. Over the years, it has brought together students and thinkers from numerous fields, as well as established artists like Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Henry Taylor, Simone Forti, Paul McCarthy, Richard Jackson, Tacita Dean and Myriam Ben Salah. (A book published on the school’s fifth anniversary, in 2010, provides a clear sense of both its approach and its irreverent personality; alphabetically organized by topic, the book, under the letter “T,” includes a fictive table of contents with headings like “Happy Hour Hermeneutics: The (Mountain) Bar as Classroom” and “Reflexivity and its Discontents: Breaking the Art-About-Art Cycle.”)
Recently, Golia sat down in the Los Angeles studio of Richard Jackson, one of the Mountain School’s earliest and most active teachers, and Debbie Hillyerd, the senior director for learning at Hauser & Wirth, to talk about the history of the school and the ever-evolving notion of what constitutes an art education. These are edited excerpts of their conversation, moderated by Julie Baumgardner.
“We have an advantage. You didn’t give us any money. You don’t have any debt from us. And I think this puts you in a condition of freedom. The magician knows who is the real magician; the artist knows who is a good artist.”—Piero Golia
JULIE BAUMGARDNER
You two have been good friends for more than twenty years, and working artists in Los Angeles. Where does community fit into being an artist? What does an actual artist community look like in the 21st century, especially here in Los Angeles?
RICHARD JACKSON
It’s hard to have art friendships in Los Angeles. Because, look, I live out in Sierra Madre. Artists are all over the place here. If you want to visit a friend, you have to get in the car. Yeah, so it's a little difficult, but people do go to openings.
PIERO GOLIA
I always thought the magic of L.A. was exactly this. When I arrived here, L.A. was completely unevolved, socially. All galleries would do an opening, but it would be only the artist's friends. There were so few artists, so you could go to all your friends’ openings. Sadly, it’s not like this anymore.
RJ
It’s really hard. Here’s the whole thing about it. The art world is saturated with money—the only thing that seems to matter now. But we created the Mountain School and have kept it going despite that fact. Nobody gets paid. Good people are involved. The students don’t pay anything. And maybe they also don’t get what they pay for, which is nothing!
PG
You can’t complain and say, “I want my money back!”
RJ
I asked John Mason one time, “How are you doing?” Johnny says, “I’m doing okay.” I said, “You don’t make any money.” And he said, “Yeah, but I can’t be fired.” I said, “Well sure, but you can’t be promoted either.” The thing is for me, when you look at it: People go to school in kindergarten, and they get out when they’re twenty-nine in serious debt with a master’s degree. And their experiences are highly similar. They get out of school to find a world that’s unstructured. They’ve never been taught how to structure the world and go on without something like school around them. So they’re looking for things like the Mountain School. What we’re trying to do
is show them other kinds of experiences, experiences they haven’t had in “regular” school. By the way, most of the people who give their time to the Mountain School average about seventy years old. They’re bringing a lot of experience and life and perspective.
PG
The people we invite to teach are all really good at what they do; they are people who have dedicated their lives to what they do. And I will say that in eighteen years, I’ve only gotten two hard no’s from people I’ve asked to teach.
JB
Have you had any other difficulty bringing in talent, convincing people that the school is absolutely serious?
PG
Well, Dan Graham would teach every time we asked him. But on one condition: The only pay for Dan was mandatory architectural trips, meaning that every time, we had to take him to see a new architecturally important home. At one moment, he was in a John Lautner
period. I remember that I was so desperate, because I had burned all my Lautner connections. So I call Richard. I'm like, “Richard, how do we get Dan to fucking do this?” He’s like, “Go call Dagny Corcoran, the great Los Angeles bookseller. She knows everyone in town.” So I call Dagny. And I’m like, “Dagny, please, do you know a good John Lautner house?” And of course she got us in with Jim Goldstein, whose Lautner house is so great that it’s going to the collection of LACMA when he dies, though I don’t think he will ever die. And that’s how Dan Graham kept being a professor.
DEBBIE HILLYERD
What do you feel is important to impart to students at the Mountain School? I don’t want to use the word “teach” because I don’t think it is about teaching, as commonly understood. It seems to be more about sharing, guiding.
RJ
Number one: You have to tell them about content. Art is a serious matter and there’s content. It’s not just splashing around making something pretty. So you give them a little bit of history. So you show them work and you tell them about the content. You tell them to challenge authority. The whole art community is like what Ed Kienholz told me once: “It’s a balloon and you’re on the outside, pushing, trying to get in. Next thing you know, you’re inside pushing to get out.” I didn’t go to school. The reason was because I realized the people who were teachers weren’t really artists. I try to make the best work that’s possible for
Simone Forti (right) supporting a group of huddled students, ca. 2000s. Courtesy Mountain School of Arts
Paul McCarthy (left) with students at The Mountain Bar (constructed by Jorge Pardo), 2011. Courtesy Mountain School of Arts
Dan Graham (left) and students, 2010. Courtesy Mountain School of Arts
art’s DNA. And I want to be known for that. I don’t want to be known for how I blew warm milk up everybody’s ass and they bought my work. I think you have to challenge authority. Things are screwed up. And you have to confront them. I mean, the thing that I’m afraid of is people coming to Los Angeles by the thousands with master’s degrees. They want to be here for the same reason people want to be here to get into the movies or the music industry, same damn thing. And this is the place that washes them out.
PG
It is very complicated. The concept of school is usually: You go to Harvard Law School. You come out. You pass the bar. You are a lawyer, officially. You go to court. If your client goes to jail at the end of the day, it’s very clear you lost. If the guy is out robbing another bank, you won. You are a good lawyer. Right? But art is something different. There is no way to know if what you do is right, there is no winning or losing. Art is about the experience you create for people. Doing Mountain School is about always trying to do something that we’ve never done before. Every time starting from scratch with a full new experience, a new format, a new building, a new story. We do things because they need to be done. We try to bring incredible people together and build something that people will never forget. Something that will stay forever. I don’t think you’re going to get something like that at Harvard.
RJ
There are a lot of parents now who think it’s all right for their children to go into the art world, a place very few parents would have once thought of a responsible field, a good vocation, a normal thing to do. A guy who worked for me told me: “Well, it’s a big industry.” I never thought of art as an industry, but now it is. And there are a lot of jobs that revolve around it. And you can see these normal fucking people creeping in now, polluting it. But then again, that’s what’s good about those people— they give you something to push against, you know what I mean? Normalcy. And not only that, they support me. I mean, somebody has to make the money.
PG
Every artist who doesn’t do highly commercial work needs at least one very expensive painter to pay for the gallery … like to pay for all my Fedex. [Laughing.]
DH
You can’t teach students to become the big blue-chip artist or to become the artist who wants to work under the radar, either, I don’t think. You can only make
them aware of those contexts; which part of the art world they aspire to be part of. And, as you say, it’s now a massive industry.
JB
The school has been around long enough now that people do talk about it as making a kind of magic against the backdrop of this growing industry.
PG
Don’t give away the secret! Everyone will try to copy us.
JB
What kind of criteria do you use to determine who you let into each year’s classes?
RJ
Number one: Do they really want to do it?
PG
There’s been a change in expectations. Capitalism has established a mentality:
“Here is what you need. You have to pay for it.” If you paid $200,000 for the education, you expect to make at least $200,000 a year from it or you feel like it failed out. We have an advantage. You didn’t give us any money. You don’t have any debt from us. And I think this puts you in a condition of freedom. The magician knows who is the real magician; the artist knows who is a good artist. How do we find students? Maybe we don’t find them. Maybe people are meant to find each other.
JB
And what about the students? How do you want them to contribute?
DH
Can I interject with a question? Do you call them students?
PG
Yes. Very much. And maybe they don’t like
Pierre Huyghe poster, 2007. Courtesy Mountain School of Arts
“People go to school in kindergarten, and they get out when they’re twenty-nine in serious debt with a master’s degree. And their experiences are highly similar. They get out of school to nd a world that’s unstructured.… What we’re trying to do is show them other kinds of experiences, experiences they haven’t had in ‘regular’ school.”—Richard Jackson
it. If you want to be loved, you call them artists, you invite them to join as artists, not students—but then you are baiting. It’s the Instagram thing: If you post the cat pictures, you get more likes. At the end of the day, here, they are students.
RJ
We have fifty people with very different backgrounds, and we put them all together, and they kind of inspire and push each other and give each other something, learn from each other. I’m only one person. I only have so much I can teach. And I end up learning, too. The students I once had at UCLA, they didn’t know how to make anything. They grew up in families that had libraries and were very, very smart, but they couldn’t make anything. Everything looked like shit. They had great ideas, maybe, poorly executed. But in retrospect, maybe that was better. Because now in art school you get these really shiny, nice-looking things coming out of those programs—things that look like they’re polished up and ready for the market.
JB
When you started the school, did you feel that graduate art programs were
becoming too much about career, about professionalization? Were you pushing against that system?
PG
We’re not just about reacting against a system. But at the same time, we do not wear ties. We do not have a website, or least we don’t have a good one. We don’t give you a degree. We don’t give you a studio. We don’t give you any money. It is a completely new universe with no model, no structure. This gives you the chance to create something that is a human experience for students. For me, art is about the future. You can learn it only from those people who can see things that other humans cannot see yet. Artists belong to the category of encyclopedia, meaning: You have to know the world to be able to build the future. When I think about the Mountain School, I also think about the difference between a model and a platform. In a model, you have an organization, and people are obliged to follow that organization. A platform, instead, is like an open landing field. I invite you to do what you believe you’re very excited to do. So there is no model, because I don’t know what is going to
happen—and I always assume that everybody knows that. That’s part of it. You should be doing it for free. Because it’s part of what you choose to do in life. You are here for other people.
RJ
That’s why they call it the humanities.
PG
It’s a big misconception if people think of this school as a kind of hippie thing. I’m an ’80s kid. I believe in hard work. I wake up at four-thirty in the morning and work. I think probably that’s why Richard and I are friends. We call each other at fivethirty, six in the morning and have long conversations while everybody else is sleeping. Education, at the end of the day, is work. And also, what you really learn from school is: You make friends.
RJ
I’m a perfect example. You know what my school was? I’m Bruce Nauman’s friend. I was Kienholz's friend. I’m Paul McCarthy’s friend…
PG
The grumpy motherfuckers’ club! [Laughing.] I don’t want to be the waiter coming to that table!
Richard Jackson (middle) and students installing the Mountain School of Arts tent on the beach during Art Basel Miami Beach, ca. 2003. Courtesy Mountain School of Arts
Mountain School anniversary poster, ca. 2000s. Courtesy Mountain School of Arts
Larry Bell on more than half a century of experimentation
Larry Bell looking into the stainless-steel vacuum tank in his studio in Taos, New Mexico. Photos: Kalen Goodluck, June 2023
Machine
with vacuum tanks to create the ethereal surfaces of his work
Vacuum tank control panel in Bell’s studio.
Outside Bell’s studio. Left: Larry Bell, Fourth of July in Venice Fog, 2018. Sea Salt and Red Poppy laminated glass. Eight panels. Four panels: 72 x 96 in. (182.9 x 243.8 cm) each; four panels: 72 x 48 in. (182.9 x 121.9 cm) each. Courtesy the artist. Right: Bernar Venet, Arc 5, 2002. Core steel. Two pieces: 161 1/2 x 161 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. (410 x 410 x 90 cm) and 163 1/4 x 162 1/4 x 36 1/4 in. (412 x 412 x 92 cm). Courtesy the artist
Film still from Larry Bell: Glass (2023), showing raw aluminum that will be vaporized and deposited on materials inside the vacuum tank. Photo: Shaandiin Tome
Colored glass sheets in the studio.
My work with glass began very simply, as far as methods went. I was making pieces that required a mirror, and I was buying little mirrors from the Thrifty Drug store around the corner from my studio for a buck and a half. Then I would mask off the back of the mirror into a pattern that I wanted and scrape away the mirroring. It was very arduous. And what I really wanted was a piece of glass that was a mirror on both sides, glass that both transmitted light and reflected light.
Somebody mentioned something to me called a front-surface mirror, which was used in photography, in cameras. And so I went to the yellow pages of the Los Angeles phone book and found a guy in Burbank who made front-surface mirrors. I went out to his little shop said, “Can you make a piece of glass reflective on both sides?” He reached under the counter and put a four-inch-square piece of glass down, and I picked it up, and it was exactly what I wanted. His business was basically making optical devices for the film industry. His main client was Disney Studios, but he was willing to do the things that I wanted and he was curious about where I was coming from, what I was up to. I was all of twenty-three or twenty-four at the time, just operating on instinct.
I ended up doing a whole series of work for a show at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1965. And in the adventure of getting things shipped to New York, several pieces broke in transit. We had plenty of time before the show opened, and it occurred to me we might be able to fix some of the work if we could find fabricators who dealt with glass the way the guy in L.A. did. And so I went right back to the yellow pages and found Benjamin Koenig in the Bronx, on Longfellow Avenue. He used exactly the same process but for completely different ends. He was a decorative metallizer. He made stuff like Christmas tree ornaments and toy cap pistols, plating the plastic to look like chrome. And what was funny was that the name of his company—which did all this very commercial work on low-end consumer items like Christmas tree ornaments
and toy cap pistols—was Ionic Research Labs. Koenig had been a professor teaching spectroscopy in New York but at some point he quit academia and went into the commerical industry. He was a lovely guy, very kind to me. He said at one point: “I can’t imagine how much you’re paying your guy in L.A. to do this kind of work. You know, you should do it yourself and save money and be able to experiment.”
Well, I knew nothing about mechanics or electronics or machinery. I can’t remember ever even holding a wrench in my hand. But I thought about it. The Pace show was extremely successful. I mentioned to the gallery that this man recommended getting my own equipment and had a used vacuum tank that he said he would sell me for not very much money. The gallery said yes, and I bought the tank and found a little place on the Lower East Side. Koenig came when they delivered the tank. I remember there was a big blizzard in New York that day, and I said, “Okay, when do I get my first lesson on how to use this thing?” In his thick German accent, he said: “Right now.” And he reached into his overcoat and pulled out a book called Vacuum Deposition of Thin Films and stuck it in my gut and said, “You start on page one.” And then he left. So here I am with this book that I had no idea what it meant and this piece of equipment that I had no idea what to do with. Koenig called me two days later saying, “Don’t be mad at me. It’s just that New York can be very hard on people who are as positive as you and I thought you needed a lesson. I’ve got a guy who has worked for me for years. He’s going to come and show you how it all works.” And that was my beginning of my work with tanks.
I became hooked. I was just enchanted by it all. It was a whole other world of things I’d never known anything about. I started to learn about chemistry and physics and optics. It was wonderful. It was incredible. The fellow who came to teach me was an outpatient from a tuberculosis sanitarium, not in very good shape. But he was very good at what he did, and he came twice a week to teach me. The early tank
was totally mechanical. All the valves had to be opened and closed by hand according to a procedure that you had to follow religiously or it didn’t work. The ritual was absolutely riveting. The machine was the Fountain of Youth for me, the Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Around that time, a couple of things happened that made it impossible for me to stay in New York. One was the blackout in 1965 and the other was the blizzard of 1966. As much as I loved hanging out in New York, I realized: I’m not a New Yorker. I can’t take weather like this, conditions like this. All I could think of was getting out and getting back to Venice Beach and so I went back to California.
Eventually, with the process, I wanted to make bigger things, and I knew I would need a bigger tank. I started writing to companies. By that time, I knew a little bit of the jargon, how to request information, how to be taken seriously, but it was still difficult, as an artist, to deal with people who really only spoke to other industrial people. Finally, I located a company in England called Edwards High Vacuum. I wrote to them about what I wanted. They wrote me back a very nice letter saying, “We’re sure Edwards can build anything you want. But you have to be able to explain exactly what you want the potential of the equipment to be.”
Basically the entire system of doing what I do is using a bottle that we can pull all the air out of. There are things that can be done with metals and surfaces inside an environment that contains no air that cannot be done in the presence of air. Simple as that. I was very clear with the company how versatile a tank had to be for my purposes, and they came up with a proposal and a price. Essentially, the parts of the tank couldn’t be wider than I could reach and couldn’t be taller than I could jump and touch because I needed to be able to work with the materials myself. The tank was built to a size that related to my body. They made me a tank from stainless steel because I was working in Venice Beach, and I didn’t want the tank to rust. The system cost me $68,000 plus another
“My stuff had to function only visually, whereas industries usually needed more robust kinds of coating. All I cared about was: What does it look like? And ultimately, that’s still all I care about. I wanted to use materials that were readily available everywhere, and I wanted to use them improbably.” — Larry Bell
This article was produced with an accompanying Ursula short film, Larry Bell: Glass (2023), available on the Ursula website.
$12,000 to move it from where it was manufactured, in upstate New York, near Buffalo, to California and set it up. It had the ability to pump down to 1/100th of one micron of air. At those low pressures, it allows us to evaporate metals at high temperatures so that they keep their natural crystalline structure and coat surfaces as a thin film that provides optical qualities. It’s possible to change those optical qualities by both layering various films together and doing the plating in various reactive gases that change the molecular structure of the material. I first started using aluminum and silicon monoxide, which is one atom of oxygen short of being quartz. The materials became very important to me because I could manipulate them to interfere with light at various wavelengths and get color out them. I’d get the metals the same way a manufacturer would get them, from companies like Union Carbide.
My stuff had to function only visually, whereas industries usually needed more robust kinds of coating. All I cared about was: What does it look like? And ultimately, that’s still all I care about. I wanted to use materials that were readily available everywhere, and I wanted to use them improbably. Glass, for example, is everywhere. You can’t be in a place that doesn’t have some glass in it somewhere. So you can get it everywhere. And it’s not terribly expensive. So it’s a perfect material for the kind of stuff that I’m interested in exploring. The thing I love about glass is that it reflects light, transmits light and absorbs light, all at the same time. And you can play with those three little things very subtly and change things and makes surfaces improbable. It’s not a boxing match with materials. I’m just looking for a flow of energy transference. The energy that makes me work has to flow out and create evidence of that flow.
My old tank is now fifty-three years old, and it’s operating as if it was new. In 1975, when I started spending a lot of time in Taos, we moved it out here and built the studio around it. And since then we’ve been constantly renovating it to make it more efficient and make it do new things. It’s a great piece of machinery. I have a lot of affection for it. But at the end of the day it’s just a tool. And what I ultimately want to get from it is something ineffable. I count on spontaneity. I count on improvisation. I count on intuition. It’s not so different from somebody who’s working with oil paint or video or sculptural materials or any other kind of medium. The key is trust. You have to trust where you’re going and where you’re coming from. And if you do that, your intuition and your spontaneity and your improvisation will do the rest. —as told to Randy Kennedy in Taos, New Mexico, June 27, 2023
“I said, ‘Okay, when do I get my first lesson on how to use this thing?’ In his thick German accent, he said: ‘Right now.’ And he reached into his overcoat and pulled out a book called Vacuum Deposition of Thin Films and stuck it in my gut and said, ‘You start on page one.’ And then he left.”— Bell
Bell in front of the open vacuum tank.
The Beginning of Poetry
A Lost Interview with Andrei Tarkovsky
By Jonathan Cott
Andrei Tarkovsky. Photographer unknown. HIP/Art Resource, NY
On the fortieth anniversary of the premiere of Nostalghia, the penultimate and perhaps least understood of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986,)
Ursula presents a never-before-published conversation with the director. Conducted by Jonathan Cott—a longtime contributing editor of Rolling Stone and one of the most wide-ranging interviewers of his time (Susan Sontag, Federico Fellini, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Henry Miller, Chinua Achebe)—the brief exchange touches on Tarkovsky’s deeply poetic approach to cinema, an aesthetic bearing he described as “sculpting in time.”
Film stills from Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia , 1983. AJ Pics/Alamy Stock
Photo
In September 1983, when Andrei Tarkovsky was being honored at the Telluride Film Festival, he agreed to answer a few questions from me for an article I was writing about his newest film, Nostalghia. I was calling him from New York City. I posed my questions on the phone to the Polish film director Krzyzstof Zanussi, who translated the questions into Russian and then relayed Tarkovsky’s answers back to me in English. According to Zanussi, “Tarkovsky and I were standing together behind the front desk of a small Telluride hotel, and people were coming and going in front of us. Through the doorway there was a stream of water going by with an enormous mountain vista in front of us … and here we were talking about poetry and fire and air and earth and water. The whole thing was so strange, and strangely beautiful.”—Jonathan Cott
Cott
The American poet Robert Duncan once wrote: Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart. . . .
To me, your films somehow seem to be imbued with the spirit of these lines.
Tarkovsky
I thank you for your right understanding. It pleases me because these lines say something about the preservation of individual personality, which is the basic value and sign of the freedom of man.
Cott
I often feel in your movies that, aside from the human characters who appear, the truly significant presences are the four elements— fire, water, earth, and air.
Tarkovsky
In making my last two films, I noticed that things have turned out as you’ve said. But from the very beginning that wasn’t really conscious or intended. On reflection, I think that these four elements are just a way for me to suggest, cinematographically, my notion of time.
Cott
I felt that the first image in Nostalghia—that of a hill and a horse—conveyed a haunting sense of timelessness, as if it might have been both a beginning or an ending; and, in fact, that very image is, in fact, both the first and last thing one sees in your film.
Tarkovsky
At its conclusion, you become aware that the film begins with the ending—the image belongs to the end. It is at the conclusion of the film that the protagonist understands that he cannot carry on with his life as he had anymore. And everything that happens in Nostalghia, between its beginning and its end, is like an explanation of what brought the protagonist to such a conclusion.
Cott
I also felt that you were suggesting that beginnings and endings not only imply each other but, at their root, have a depth to them that transcends time—as if you were saying something about the nature of beginnings and endings.
Tarkovsky
Yes, that too.
Cott
In Nostalghia, there’s a moment when the protagonist sees a little girl who’s sitting by the water, and he says to her, “Are you content with life?” And she looks up and tells him that she is. You have children in almost all of your movies, and they all seem to be content with life, whereas the adults are often shown to be living a life that is filled with pain.
Tarkovsky
Exactly. Because for me, childhood was always the basis for all my future feelings, a cradling for all my hopes and expectations.
Cott
The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote that “certain ideas and images of things that are fantastic and impossible and strange delight us in our imagination because they recall to us our most remote memories—those of our childhood.”
Tarkovsky
I think that all poets have that same feeling. It’s something very basic to them.
Cott
Leopardi stated that childhood means poetry.
Tarkovsky
No. The loss of childhood is the beginning of poetry.
Cott
If someone says, “We must go back to point where we took the wrong turn,” was that where the wrong turn occurred?
Tarkovsky
When man started to think that he was a social being instead of recognizing that he is part of nature, that’s when we made the wrong turn.
Movie poster for Nostalghia’s release in Russia. Artist: Igor Markovich Maystrovsky. Collection Russian State Library, Moscow. HIP/Art Resource, NY
UNTITLED
What made me take this path when there are so many others?
Pale gravel on the left from the Orangerie to the Louvre
Though October promises the winter I want, the sun shines
Spotlighting ower beds that ring as false as stagecraft. Even we ring false, possessed of everything except
Some ragged piece of puzzle we cannot read:
A blank gray space shaped rather like Italy’s boot
Obscures our view.
But would you lie to me?
Suddenly the last doubt vanishes
The last trembling disbelief is gone. You turn to me and say, “How lucky we are.”
Ah yes, I think, I could be blind, you could be dead, And Paris could be burning.
The artist, poet and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, born in Phildelphia, first went abroad in 1957 on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome. In 1961, she settled in Paris, establishing a studio on rue Dutot near Montparnasse and developing an international reputation as a sculptor. Over the past six decades, Chase-Riboud has traveled extensively, to Egypt, China, Mongolia, and elsewhere, but she has always returned to Paris, the city she calls home. In 2022, she published a memoir, I Always Knew (Princeton University Press), as told through four decades of intimate letters to her mother.
Here, Chase-Riboud shares with Ursula a poem that offers a poignant glimpse into the pursuit of a life of art in the City of Light.
Barbara Chase-Riboud’s solo exhibition “The Three Josephines” opens in November at Hauser & Wirth New York’s Wooster Street location.
Barbara Chase-Riboud at her atelier on rue Dutot, Paris, 1973.
Photo: Marc Riboud. Courtesy the artist
PORTÉ PAR LA NATURE, FAÇONNÉ PAR LE TEMPS
DOM RUINART, LE BLANC DE BLANCS PAR EXCELLENCE
