Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2024 by Gagosian Quarterly

INTRODUCING OUR FIRST SUPPLEMENT GAGOSIAN & FILM

FEATURING: SOFIA COPPOLA WHIT STILLMAN FREDERICK WISEMAN HARUKI MURAKAMI RAINER JUDD ROBERT M. RUBIN CARLOS VALLADARES ADAM DALVA JOHN KLACSMANN & RAYMOND FOYE

Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2024

Editor-in-chief Alison McDonald

Founder Larry Gagosian

Managing Editor Wyatt Allgeier

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Editor, Online and Print Gillian Jakab

Published by Gagosian Media

Text Editor David Frankel

Associate Publisher, Lifestyle Priya Nat

Executive Editor Derek Blasberg Digital and Video Production Assistant Alanis Santiago-Rodriguez Design Director Paul Neale Design Alexander Ecob Graphic Thought Facility

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries Advertising@gagosian.com Distribution David Renard Distributed by Magazine Heaven Distribution Manager Alexandra Samaras

Website Wolfram Wiedner Studio

Prepress DL Imaging

Cover Jean-Michel Basquiat

Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors Gerry Badger Lisane Basquiat Daniel Belasco Ninotchka Bennahum Olivier Berggruen Derek Blasberg Amit Chaudhuri Sofia Coppola Rachel Cusk Adam Dalva Tamra Davis Matthew Doll Fiona Duncan Frida Escobedo Raymond Foye David Frankel Mark Franko Mary Gabriel Larry Gagosian Elena Geuna Maria Grazia Chiuri Jeanine Heriveaux Fred Hoffman Delphine Huisinga Arinze Ifeakandu Gillian Jakab Rainer Judd Jamian Juliano-Villani Corey Keller Carol Kino John Klacsmann Kelsey Lu David John Marchi

Alison McDonald Myles Mellor Sabine Moritz Hans Ulrich Obrist Ashley Overbeek Clifford Prince King Robert M. Rubin Barry Schwabsky Tammy Shella Ross Simonini Whit Stillman John Szwed Putri Tan Daniel Tobin Carlos Valladares Stanley Whitney Jordan Wolfson Thanks Richard Alwyn Fisher Julia Arena Chloe Barter Jessica Beck Priya Bhatnagar Valeria Biamonti Jessica Bullock Danielle Cardoso Shaeffer Michael Cary Serena Cattaneo Adorno Joshua Chuang Vittoria Ciaraldi Sara Citarella Rosie Coleman Collier Camille Declercq

Andrew Fabricant Paatela Fraga Mark Francis Hallie Freer Brett Garde Eleanor Gibson Lauren Gioia Darlina Goldak Anna Haddelsey Camille Haus Andrew Heyward Sarah Jones Shiori Kawasaki Léa Khayata Jennifer Knox White Lauren Mahony Kelly McDaniel Quinn Rob McKeever Olivia Mull Mia O’Neill Kathy Paciello Helen Redmond Brandon Sánchez Antwaun Sargent Rusty Sena Diallo Simon-Ponte Ashley Stewart Rödder Harry Thorne Natasha Turk Lisa Turvey Louis Vaccara Timothée Viale

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Spring/Summer 2024

SPRING 2024 FROM THE EDITOR

It’s a thrill to start this year by unveiling a new look for the magazine, enhanced by the debut of a special section dedicated to film—the first in an upcoming series of stand-alone thematic supplements. In this issue we spotlight filmmakers Sofia Coppola, Whit Stillman, and Frederick Wiseman, remember Richard Sarafian’s cult classic Vanishing Point, and document the art of film restoration. A painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat appears on our cover, accompanied by a conversation about the time he spent living and working in Los Angeles in the early 1980s—a moment that proved formative for the young artist, sparking an engagement with the LA art and music scenes of the period and inspiring a prolific output of important works. Looking back at this pivotal moment prompted us to dig deeper into the history of the LA art world with an article that focuses on Larry Gagosian’s emergence as an art dealer in the mid-1970s, as he was just starting to build a business of his own. Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson have a dynamic conversation about the importance of making art for yourself, the vulnerability of putting your work into the world, and the constant struggle to remain authentic. Barry Schwabsky takes the opportunity of Jeff Wall’s retrospective in

Switzerland to reflect on the photographer’s work, while Olivier Berggruen leads us on a journey toward a performance by the artist and musician Kelsey Lu. And architect Frida Escobedo responds to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s “Questionnaire.” Celebrating groundbreaking figures who changed the conversation in their respective fields, we pay homage to the underappreciated life and work of Lisa Lyon, who elevated bodybuilding to the level of art, in part through the images she created with Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton. We discuss themes of the body, space, and architecture in the photographs of Francesca Woodman and we explore the influence of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical movement on twentiethcentury artists as we tour the Goetheanum, the extraordinary building that he designed. Our fiction writer this year is Arinze Ifeakandu, whose “Prosperity’s Long Song,” serialized beginning in this issue, is set at a Nigerian boarding school where dreams, stories, and ceremonies loom large. As we embark on our eighth year in print, we want to thank our audience for your continued support and look forward to bringing even more surprises to you throughout the year. Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

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SPRING 2024 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Los Angeles

Fashion & Art, Part 17: Maria Grazia Chiuri

Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, sisters of Jean-Michel Basquiat, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist in Los Angeles during the 1980s.

Derek Blasberg talks with Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director for Dior, about her first experiences with art and the importance of collaborating with female artists.

70 The Beginning: A Life in Art On the occasion of Made on Market Street: Curated by Fred Hoffman with Larry Gagosian, a Beverly Hills exhibition that tracks Jean-Michel Basquiat’s time in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, Delphine Huisinga and Alison McDonald chart Gagosian’s formative years on the West Coast, contextualizing the art world in the years before Basquiat’s arrival there.

82 Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Frida Escobedo For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo.

84 Jeff Wall: In the Domain of Likeness The Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, is staging a comprehensive Jeff Wall exhibition (closing April 21), including more than fifty works spanning five decades. Barry Schwabsky ponders the enduring power of and mystery in Wall’s photography.

The Art of Biography: Mary Gabriel and Carol Kino

Jamian Juliano-Villani and Jordan Wolfson

Carol Kino’s forthcoming biography of the photographers Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe charts a critical moment in the United States, bringing to the surface questions around aesthetics, technologies, and gender through the arc of the twins’ lives. Here, Kino and the award-winning biographer Mary Gabriel discuss the origins of their most recent projects, as well as the considerations that underpin the process of narrating a life.

Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.

100 Kelsey Lu Art historian and curator Olivier Berggruen reflects on his trip to Berlin to see a performance by the multihyphenate Kelsey Lu. After experiencing that performance, The Lucid, Berggruen caught up with Lu in New York, where they spoke about the visual elements of their work, the necessity of new challenges, and dreaming.

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Francesca Woodman

Duane Hanson: To Shock Ourselves

Ahead of the first Francesca Woodman exhibition at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s photography. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity in Woodman’s work.

146 Mount Fuji in Cinema: Satyajit Ray’s Woodblock Art, Part II

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Prosperity’s Long Song #1: At Lights-Out Hour

Building a Legacy: Urban Art Projects

We present the first installment of a four-part short story by Arinze Ifeakandu. Set at the Marian Boys’ Boarding School in Nigeria, “Prosperity’s Long Song” explores the country’s political upheavals through the lens of ancient mythologies and the mystical power of poetry.

112 Gagosian & Film The Quarterly debuts a new series of themed supplements with a deep dive into film. We feature filmmakers Sofia Coppola, Whit Stillman, and Frederick Wiseman; celebrate the lasting influence of Richard Sarafian’s 1971 Vanishing Point; and demystify the art of film restoration.

114 Stanley Whitney: Vibrations of the Day Stanley Whitney invited professor and musician-biographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz.

Daniel Belasco, executive director of the Al Held Foundation, meets with Daniel Tobin, cofounder of Urban Art Projects (UAP), to discuss the role that a major contemporary-art foundry plays in artists’ legacies.

122 Lisa Lyon Fiona Duncan pays homage to the unprecedented, and underappreciated, life and work of Lisa Lyon.

128 Christo Unwrapped: The Early Years Elena Geuna reflects on Christo’s first sculptural works, the subject of an exhibition she curated at 4 Princelet Street, London, in 2023.

134 Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900–1955 Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the Border Crossings exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

In the first installment of this twopart feature, published in our Winter 2023 edition, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri traced the global impacts of woodblock printing. Here, in the second installment, he focuses on the films of Satyajit Ray, demonstrating the enduring influence of the woodblock print on the formal composition of these works.

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Novelist Rachel Cusk considers the ethical and aesthetic arrangements that Duane Hanson’s sculpture initiates within the viewer.

176 Outsider Artist David Frankel recalls the life and times of the artist Jeff Perrone, setting questions of integrity and grit against the standard narrative of economic success.

188 Game Changer: Alexey Brodovitch Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

The Goetheanum: Rudolf Steiner and Contemporary Art Author and artist Ross Simonini reports on a recent trip to the world center of the anthroposophical movement, the Goetheanum in Switzerland, exploring the influence of the movement’s founder and the building’s designer Rudolf Steiner on twentieth-century artists.

160 Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Sabine Moritz’s studio in Germany to learn more about the painter’s latest series, August, exhibited in 2023 in Rome.

Front cover: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lead Plate With Hole, 1984, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 86 × 68 inches (218.4 × 172.7 cm), Collection of Jerome Dahan © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images

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Previous spread, left: Stanley Whitney, Out of the Blue, 2022 (detail), oil on linen, 80 × 80 inches (203.2 × 203.2 cm) © Stanley Whitney

Sabine Moritz: August

Wings to Fly: Art and Pain through the Lens of Psychology and Medicine Ashley Overbeek speaks with three experts in the field of arts in medicine.

Previous spread, center: Christo with an assortment of his early work, Paris, 1961 © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation Previous spread, right: JeanMichel Basquiat. Photo: B.Dub/ Brian D. Williams This page: The Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: Goetheanum/Xue Li

SPRING 2024 CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Cusk

Elena Geuna

Amit Chaudhuri

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy (2014–18), the memoirs A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath (2012), and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. A Guggenheim fellow, she lives in Paris. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz

Independent curator, author, and art advisor Elena Geuna has curated exhibitions internationally, including two on Lucio Fontana, one at the Palazzo Ducale, Genoa (2008), the other at MAMM, Moscow (2019).

Amit Chaudhuri is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn (2022). He is also a poet, essayist, short-story writer, and musician. His New and Selected Poems is scheduled to be published in 2023 in the NYRB Poets series. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and edits literaryactivism.com.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. He was previously curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell

Carlos Valladares

Fiona Duncan

Fred Hoffman

Barry Schwabsky

Carlos Valladares is a writer, critic, programmer, journalist, and video essayist from South Central Los Angeles, California. He studied film at Stanford University and began his PhD in the history of art and film and media studies at Yale University in the fall of 2019. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Film Comment, and the Criterion Collection. Photo: Jerry Schatzberg

Fiona Duncan is a CanadianAmerican author and organizer and the founder of the social literary practice Hard to Read. Duncan’s debut novel, Exquisite Mariposa (Soft Skull Press), won a 2020 Lambda Award. She is currently developing a narrative biography and critical study of the transdisciplinary American artist Pippa Garner.

Fred Hoffman’s book The Art of JeanMichel Basquiat was published in 2017 by the Enrico Navarra Gallery (New York and Paris). In 2005–06 he cocurated the artist’s last American retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, which then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation, international reviews editor for Artforum, and has recently contributed to publications on Pierre Bonnard, Issy Wood, Rose Wylie, and others. His recent books include two collections of poetry, Water from Another Source (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) and Feelings of And (Black Square Editions, 2022).

Delphine Huisinga

Corey Keller

A freelance art researcher based in New York, Delphine Huisinga has been working closely with the Gagosian publications team on a series of ongoing projects for the past five years. She was also the researcher for the fourth volume of John Richardson’s Life of Picasso. Photo: Pamela Berkovic

Corey Keller is an independent historian of photography based in Oakland, California. From 2003 to 2021, she was a photography curator at SFMOMA, where her critically acclaimed exhibitions included Dawoud Bey: An American Project (2020; co-organized with the Whitney); Signs and Wonders: The Photographs of John Beasley Greene (2019); and Francesca Woodman (2011).

Jamian Juliano-Villani Jamian Juliano-Villani was born in 1987 in Newark, New Jersey, and now lives and works in New York. Composed using images borrowed from movies, memes, stock photography, art history, and printed matter, her airbrushedacrylic canvases reflect the unpredictable pandemonium of everyday life. Her work is represented in American public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Adam Dalva

Putri Tan

Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books. The senior fiction editor of Guernica Magazine, he serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rutgers University.

Putri Tan joined Gagosian in 2006 and is a director based in New York. She manages a number of the gallery’s artists, among them, Harold Ancart, Walton Ford, Sally Mann, Spencer Sweeney, and Francesca Woodman.

John Klacsmann

Raymond Foye

Jordan Wolfson

John Klacsmann is archivist at Anthology Film Archives, New York, where he preserves experimental film and artists’ cinema. Before joining Anthology in 2012, he worked as a preservation specialist and opticalprinting technician at the film laboratory Colorlab, Maryland. He is a contributing editor to INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media and runs a tiny tape label, ZAP Cassettes.

Raymond Foye is a contributing editor to the Brooklyn Rail. His most recent publication is Harry Smith: The Naropa Lectures 1989–1991 (2023). Photo: Amy Grantham

Jordan Wolfson was born in New York in 1980 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Filtering the languages of online and broadcast media through digital and mechanical technologies, and employing an array of invented characters, he crafts enigmatic narratives that explore uncomfortable social and existential topics. Photo: Collier Schorr

John Szwed

Ross Simonini

John Szwed is the author and editor of many books, including biographies of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax. The winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, in 2005 he was awarded a Grammy for Doctor Jazz, a book included with the album Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax.

Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician. His work comprises paintings, drawings, essays, dialogues, musical compositions, performance, and fiction.

Mark Franko

Ninotchka Bennahum

Mark Franko is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance and heads the Institute of Dance Scholarship at Temple University. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics was reissued last year in a revised edition from Indiana University Press. Text as Dance: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin and Choreographies of the Baroque is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

Ninotchka Bennahum is a dance scholar and curator. She is a professor of theater and dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Antonia Mercé, “La Argentina”: Flamenco and the Spanish Avant-Garde and Carmen, a Gypsy Geography.

Sabine Moritz

Mary Gabriel

Carol Kino

Sabine Moritz’s paintings, drawings, and prints represent a succession of suspended moments, juxtaposing interpretations of her immediate surroundings and the natural world with deconstructed documentary images. Adapting and repurposing a catalogue of symbolic and abstract motifs, she ponders the mercurial dynamics of transience and decay. Her works enhance our sensitivity to the passage of time, locating personal experience within shared narratives. Photo: Leonardo Cestari

Mary Gabriel is the author of five biographies, the most recent being Madonna: A Rebel Life. Her previous book, Ninth Street Women, won the 2022 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize for Narrative Nonfiction and the 2019 Library of Virginia and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s Art in Literature Mary Lynn Kotz Award.

Carol Kino is the author of Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines (Scribner). Her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, WSJ magazine, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Town & Country, and just about every major art magazine, including Art + Auction, where she was a contributing editor.

Stanley Whitney Stanley Whitney’s vibrant abstract paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid, imbuing it with new and unexpected cadences of color, rhythm, and space. Deriving inspiration from sources as diverse as Piet Mondrian, free jazz, and American quilt-making, Whitney composes with blocks and bars that articulate a chromatic call-and-response in each canvas. Photo: Jeannette Montgomery Barron/Trunk Archive

Robert M. Rubin

Derek Blasberg

Robert M. Rubin is an essayist and cultural historian who has written about Pierre Chareau, Jean Prouvé, Alexander Calder, Buckminster Fuller, Reyner Banham, Richard Avedon, Allen Ginsberg, Glenn O’Brien, Jack Kerouac, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince. He has contributed to Bookforum, Art in America, Cahiers d’Art, Le Monde, and Libération.

Derek Blasberg is a writer, fashion editor, and New York Times bestselling author. He has been with Gagosian since 2014, and is currently the executive editor of Gagosian Quarterly.

Sofia Coppola Sofia Coppola’s eighth film, Priscilla (2023), stars Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi and is based on Priscilla Beaulieu Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me (1985). Coppola’s films include The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003; for which she won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay), Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), The Bling Ring (2013), The Beguiled (2017; for which Coppola made history as only the second woman to win the best-director prize at the Cannes Film Festival), and On the Rocks (2020).

Whit Stillman

Olivier Berggruen

Whit Stillman is the writer/director of five films: the Oscar-nominated Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), The Last Days of Disco (1998), Damsels in Distress (2011), and the Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship (2015). He started out in journalism and book publishing and has written two novels related to his movies.

Olivier Berggruen is a writer and curator based in New York. He serves as artistic adviser to the Gstaad Menuhin Festival in Switzerland and his book Formes du désir: une brève histoire de la collection d’art will be published by les presses du réel, Dijon, later this year. Photo: Nadia Zeghmouri

David J. Marchi

Gerry Badger

Kelsey Lu

David J. Marchi is an artist with acquired savant syndrome following a severe boat accident in 2015. He paints almost every day at his studio in New London, Connecticut, and at the Art Students League in New York.

Gerry Badger was born in Northampton, England, and is a photographer, architect, and photography critic. His books include Collecting Photography (2002), The Genius of Photography (2007), and The Pleasures of Good Photographs (2010; winner of the ICP Infinity Writer’s Award).

Kelsey Lu is a singer/songwriter, producer, composer, poet, performance artist, and classically trained cellist born in Charlotte, North Carolina. Their practice flows at the intersection of visual art, performance, healing, and music. Their recent projects include the score for Savanah Leaf ’s feature film Earth Mama (A24/Park Pictures), which premiered at Sundance 2023 and won the San Francisco International Film Festival Audience Award; starring in and the score for Janicza Bravo’s film House Comes With a Bird (2022), which screened at the Venice Film Festival; the installation Anthem, made in collaboration with Beverly Glenn-Copeland, commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and a sound piece featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, made in collaboration with Sophia Al-Maria. Photo: Clifford Prince King

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Daniel Belasco

Daniel Tobin

Daniel Belasco is an art historian and curator. Executive director of the Al Held Foundation since 2016, he has discussed a variety of issues pertaining to artists’ legacies in conferences, symposia, and industry meetings. He previously served as Henry J. Leir Associate Curator at the Jewish Museum, New York, and curator of exhibitions and programs at the Dorsky Museum, SUNY.

Daniel Tobin is cofounder and creative director of Urban Art Projects (UAP) and leads the Art Makers initiative, enabling artists to create ambitious new sculpture for permanent and temporary exhibition. With his brother Matthew he established UAP in Brisbane in 1993. Together they created a studio and workshop that could facilitate projects, work with artists, and realize art.

Tamara Shella

Matthew Doll

Tamara A. Shella, PhD, is a medical researcher and a registered and board-certified art therapist. Dr. Shella founded the medical art-therapy program at the Cleveland Clinic and has run the program for over twentyfive years. Her peer-reviewed research on art therapy and its impact on pain management has been published in academic journals and cited in more than fifty published research papers.

Matthew Doll, PhD, is a director at SSM Health Treffert Center, Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, the world’s leading institution in the study of acquired savant syndrome and the emergence of skills (most often in memory, music, art, or calculation) in the presence of disability in other areas or after traumatic brain injury.

Frida Escobedo

Ashley Overbeek

Gillian Jakab

Frida Escobedo established her eponymous studio in Mexico City in 2006. The studio’s reputation, initially made by a series of competition-winning projects in Mexico—including the renovation of the Hotel Boca Chica, Acapulco (2008), the El Eco Pavilion, Mexico City (2010), and the expansion of La Tallera Siqueiros, Cuernavaca (2012)—has achieved global scope since 2018, when she designed the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens, becoming the youngest architect to undertake the project to that date. Most recently she was asked to design the new Modern and Contemporary Wing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, becoming the youngest and first woman to design a building for the institution.

Ashley Overbeek is the director of strategic initiatives at Gagosian, where she has the pleasure of working with artists on Web3 and digital projects. Overbeek is also an advisory-board member of the Art and Antiquities Blockchain Consortium, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and a guest speaker on the subject of art and blockchain technology at Stanford and Columbia University.

Gillian Jakab is an editor, online and print, of Gagosian Quarterly and has served as the dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail since 2016.

Arinze Ifeakandu Arinze Ifeakandu is the author of God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, which received the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Born in Kano, Nigeria, he is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in A Public Space, One Story, The Kenyon Review, Guernica, and Isele Magazine. His story “Happy Is a Doing Word” is a winner of the 2023 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. Photo: Bec Stupak Diop

IN SEASON Gagosian Quarterly presents a selection of new releases coming this spring.

In the Bag

Louis Vuitton × Frank Gehry Following a longstanding collaboration between the architect Frank Gehry and the French fashion house Louis Vuitton, last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach saw the debut of a collection of limited-edition handbags, which brought together Gehry’s iconic explorations in forms— architectural and natural—and the maison’s celebrated Capucines bags.

Louis Vuitton × Frank Gehry. Photo: Marios Kroes, courtesy Louis Vuitton

Left: Pablo Picasso: Tête de femme pillowcase, produced by Jules Pansu in collaboration with the Picasso Administration Right: Cover of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (Fitzcarraldo Editions, Knopf Canada, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) Below: Cover of Simon Hantaï: Azzurro (Gagosian, 2024)

Literature

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries Acclaimed author Sheila Heti recorded her thoughts over a period of ten years. She alphabetized them by sentence in a playful yet poignant engagement with the form of the diary.

Art at Home

Pablo Picasso: Tête de femme Pillowcase This jacquard-weave pillowcase features Pablo Picasso’s linocut Tête de femme (1962), a striking depiction in red, green, yellow, and black of the artist’s second wife and muse, Jacqueline Roque, wearing a straw hat. Created in collaboration with the Picasso Administration, the fabric was woven on jacquard looms by a team of skilled textile artisans at Jules Pansu’s historic workshop Les Tissages de la Lys in Flanders, France.

SIMON HANTAÏ

An Artist in Italy

Simon Hantaï: Azzurro Simon Hantaï: Azzurro explores the French-Hungarian artist’s use of the color blue in the context of his travels to Italy. Curated by Anne Baldassari, the exhibition presents a chronological survey of his pliage (folded) works, including newly restored paintings and others rarely seen. This oversized, generously illustrated catalogue serves as a companion to Les blancs de la couleur, la couleur du blanc (2022), the publication that documented his previous exhibition at Gagosian New York. Simon Hantaï: Azzurro contains not only a critical essay informed by Baldassari’s latest research, but also beautifully reproduced plates and archival photos. Finally, the catalogue includes a fold-out poster that shows a large-scale blue Tabula as well as thumbnails of all the works on view.

Azzurro catalogue by Anne Baldassari

359416_GAG_Hantaï_book_21.indd 1

21/12/2023 11:30

Photo Mathias Zuppiger Zurich

Artwork Karin Schiesser Zurich

. christophegraber.com .

what could possibly go wrong, if we tell it like it is

Right: Cover of Amoako Boafo: what could possibly go wrong (Gagosian, 2024)

Amoako Boafo

Left and below: Cover and inside spread of Glenn Brown (Taschen, 2024)

Monograph

Glenn Brown

Gagosian

This limited-edition monograph, published by Taschen under the editorship of Hans Werner Holzwarth, tracks Glenn Brown’s enduring engagement with painting, drawing, and sculpture. Plates are accompanied by notes from the artist about the development of the artworks, as well as essays by John Chilver, Bice Curiger, and Dr. John Paul Stonard.

Exhibition Catalogue

Amoako Boafo: what could possibly go wrong Amoako Boafo: what could possibly go wrong is published by Gagosian to commemorate two recent exhibitions by the Accra-born painter Amoako Boafo: the first at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York; the second at dot.ateliers, an exhibition space and residency in Accra that Boafo established in 2022. This fully illustrated catalogue features poems by aja monet and Poetra Asantewa written in response to Boafo’s paintings, and an essay by DK Nnuro.

On the Slopes

Piero Golia × Bomber: All Mountain 78 Fireflyer Black Heat Skis A collaboration between Piero Golia and Bomber, these handcrafted, limited-edition skis are engineered for a responsive, dynamic, and effortless feel on a variety of terrains. The Naples-born, Los Angeles– based artist worked with the Italian Alps–based manufacturer for two years to create skis that deliver extraordinary performance at both high and low speeds, with a unique design—available in three colorways— that draws upon his sculptural and painting practices.

Left: Piero Golia × Bomber: All Mountain 78 Fireflyer Black Heat Skis, 2023 Right: Cover of Daniel Belasco’s Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions (Reaktion Books, 2024) Below: Kappo Masa: Blue Guinomi Sake Cup, produced by Masa Designs, 2022

On the Table

Kappo Masa: Blue Guinomi Sake Cup This unique stoneware 4-ounce cup is the perfect vessel for chilled sake. Designed by legendary chef Masayoshi Takayama, known as Masa, and handmade in small batches, the sake cup has a subtle blue tint and can be kept chilled in the refrigerator. Following the seven principles of shibusa—simplicity, implicitness, modesty, naturalness, imperfection, everydayness, and silence—the Masa Designs collection is crafted to improve the aesthetics of everyday life.

Art History

Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions by Daniel Belasco Reaktion Books is publishing Daniel Belasco’s chronicle of ten exhibitions that took place between 1943 and 1962. Belasco illuminates the stakes made and strides taken by remarkable female artists, curators, and critics.

IN MOTION VIDEOS FROM GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY Gagosian Quarterly highlights a varied selection of new videos, featuring studio visits, public art installations, poetry readings, conversations, and more. All videos are available at gagosian.com/quarterly.

Art in Unexpected Places

Christo: Early Works

Artists on Artists

Oscar Murillo on Franz West

Christo: Early Works, curated by Elena Geuna, is the inaugural exhibition in the Gagosian Open series of offsite projects. In this video, Geuna explores the connection between Christo’s sculptural works and their setting in the historic Georgian house at 4 Princelet Street, London.

In the Studio

Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi In conjunction with the exhibition The Painter in His Bed, at Gagosian, New York, Georg Baselitz and Richard Calvocoressi discuss the motif of the stag in the artist’s newest paintings.

In conjunction with Franz West: Papier, the gallery’s presentation of paper-based works by Franz West at Frieze Masters 2023, artist Oscar Murillo and arts writer, critic, and broadcaster Ben Luke sat down to discuss Murillo’s collaboration in selecting the works on view, as well as his personal experiences meeting the late artist in London.

In Conversation

Mary Weatherford and Chrissie Iles

Performance

Adelaide Damoah, Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures In this video, artist Adelaide Damoah performs Arachne: Rebirthing Dislocated Cultures inside the Rites of Passage exhibition at Gagosian, Britannia Street, London. The audiovisual journey, which features an original sound piece by Damoah and composer Liz Gre, interrogates the history of colonialism with the intention of unlocking new modes of understanding.

Join Mary Weatherford and Chrissie Iles, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, inside Sea and Space, the artist’s exhibition of new paintings and works on paper at Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. Dominated by the color green, Weatherford’s paintings make visual reference to arboreal and aquatic environments, as well as outer space.

Public Art

Urs Fischer: Wave Urs Fischer elaborates on the creative process behind his public installation Wave, at Place Vendôme, Paris.

Watch all the videos online at gagosian.com/quarterly

ON SCREEN TITUS KAPHAR AND DEREK CIANFRANCE Titus Kaphar joins director Derek Cianfrance in a conversation about ceding control to the muses, the catharsis of personal art, and the unpredictable magic of filmmaking. To read the full interview, visit gagosian.com/quarterly.

Kaphar and Cianfrance spoke on the opening night of Titus Kaphar Selects, a film program curated by the artist as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the spring of 2023. The evening included screenings of Kaphar’s short films Shut Up and Paint (2022), an Oscar-shortlisted work in which he looks to the medium of film in the face of an insatiable art market seeking to silence his activism, and I Hold Your Love (2022), a New Yorker documentary that explores the joys and injustices of Black motherhood. The pair discussed their respective practices, including Cianfrance’s film Blue Valentine (2010) and Kaphar’s film Exhibiting Forgiveness (2023), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2024. DEREK CIANFRANCE As a visual artist,

what’s drawn you to make films?

TITUS KAPHAR I’m a painter. But I’ve

realized that the world of painting is really disconnected from the world I grew up in. And I think my short film Shut Up and Paint speaks to that. My other film, I Hold Your Love, is a dedication to motherhood in general, and specifically Black motherhood, and even more specifically, my mother. DC I’m curious about your process. As a painter, do you feel in control of the paint? TK I know where you’re going with this. I’m a little bit of a control freak. And yes, in the studio I feel like I have control of that universe to a degree. In the process of making art, you can take complete control of something, but in doing that, you can inhibit your ability to create a masterpiece by controlling every variable. I always say you don’t sit 54

Titus Kaphar and Derek Cianfrance on the set of Exhibiting Forgiveness, 2023. Photo: Sarah Schatz

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down and make a plan to make a masterpiece. That’s not how it works. You make a plan, but at some point, the muses show up and they say, Yeah, your plan, fuck your plan, we’re going this way. Right? And you have a choice. In that moment, you can say, No, this is my plan—I’m sticking with it. But when you do that, the muses say, Peace, right? They leave. So, I’ve come to a place in my practice where I’m no longer nervous about that moment. It’s just like, Ah, y’all are here again. You’re about to turn everything up—okay. All right, which way you want to go? What you want to do, let me know. I’m comfortable with that. DC And creating a film is part of a

larger collaboration, so you need to work in different ways, perhaps ceding even more control? TK Making a film is just different [laughs]. There are a lot of other people and they’re all bringing stuff to it as well. As I was choosing my team to make this new film, I wanted people who understood that we’re going to plan, we’re going to have a backup for our plan, and then when we get into the process, we’re going to listen to the muses. When it’s time to go left because they say go left, we’re going to try left. We just have to. If there’s any possibility of us making something special, it’s going to be because of that, not because we follow the plan by the book ...

CROSSWORD Gagosian Quarterly’s debut crossword. This customized puzzle, written by Myles Mellor, brings together clues from the worlds of art, dance, music, poetry, film, and beyond.

Across He worked under the pseudonym SAMO 5 First name of a great poet portrayed in a dance by 33 across 9 Have being 10 Comic shriek cliché 11 Sculptor who created Three Way Ring (first name) 13 Late artist who loved hats and painted Cold Mountain 15 Sofia Coppola biopic adapted from the biography by Antonia 1

34 Othello’s “green-eyed monster”

Fraser (two words)

19 Relaxation facility

38 Modern as a prefix

20 Painter of WIDW, HELIOS (7058)

39 ____ at the Feet of Achilles,

21 Costar of Shelley Duvall in 3

painting by Jérôme-Martin Langlois 42 Genuine article (two words) 43 In the ___ of Promise, Castle Garden, painting by Charles Ulrich 44 Fabergé’s favorite shapes 45 Writer of Lady Susan, on which the film Love & Friendship was based

Women (first name) 22 “Rocket Man” singer 24 Mesh together 26 ____ Sremmurd, hip-hop duo from Tupelo 27 Hot fragment in the fire 29 Fake 31 Manuscript, for short 33 Hailed by Time as “The Dancer of the Century” (goes with 24 down)

Down

“Nonsense!” Field of conflict or endeavor 3 VIP on the Hill: abbr. 4 Creator of African-American dance Revelations (two words) 6 Yacht’s docking site 7 Photographer friend of Picasso (first name) 8 Japanese currency 12 Paris-born Surrealist Tanguy 13 Emotional states 14 Poet who wrote The Cow and Coeur de Lion, Ariana ____ 15 ____-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s lover 16 Polish 17 Church section 18 Thunder god 23 Overdo (a role, for example) 24 See 33 across 25 Director of Love & Friendship, Whit _____ 28 Film based on a famous story by Haruki Murakami 30 It’s a Wonderful Life star 32 Having an immediate impact 33 Light hard wood 35 Website ranking technology, abbr. 36 Cellist Ma 37 Die ___ ohne Schatten, Strauss opera 40 Fast-moving piano piece 41 Commercial art images 1

Solution

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT LOS ANGELES Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, met with filmmaker Tamra Davis, art dealer Larry Gagosian, and author and curator Fred Hoffman to reflect on their experiences with the artist during the 1980s in Los Angeles.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983, acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 84 ⅛ × 84 inches (213.5 × 213.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Douglas S. Cramer. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY

LISANE BASQUIAT Between 1982 and 1984, JeanMichel Basquiat enjoyed frequent trips to Los Angeles, staying for months at a time. He loved to work and live in LA. He made lots of friends and appreciated the respite from New York and the opportunity to really focus on his art here. Between 1982 and 1986, he had three solo exhibitions at the Larry Gagosian Gallery. He maintained a studio space in Venice that Fred Hoffman found for him and created a suite of prints with Hoffman. Tamra Davis was a film student at the Los Angeles City College and a gallery assistant who drove Jean-Michel around LA. We were all very close with Jean-Michel— we knew him as friends and family. That’s part of why Jeanine and I were excited for the opportunity to talk about him and share stories. We are just as excited to hear some of these stories as you are. JEANINE HERIVEAUX Let’s start with you, Larry, since you met Jean-Michel first, I believe. You were the first person to invite him to Los Angeles, and he went out there in 1982 to live with you and work on paintings. How did you first meet? LARRY GAGOSIAN I met him in 1981, if my memory serves me, at Annina Nosei’s gallery in SoHo. It’s kind of an interesting story because a friend of mine, Barbara Kruger, was in a group show at Annina’s and called me up. I had a loft on West Broadway a few blocks from Annina’s gallery. And she said, Larry, what are you doing? I said, I’m not doing anything. She said, Well, why don’t you come over? So I walked over to Prince Street to Annina’s gallery, and there were, as I recall, three exhibition rooms in the gallery. When I walked into the third room, which was the last room in the gallery, I saw five or six paintings and—they just stopped me cold in my tracks. I mean, my hair stood on end. I was just transfixed by these paintings and how powerful and original they were. Annina walked over to greet me—her office was just behind that final room where Basquiat’s paintings were hanging. And she said, Larry, do you like these? And I said, Like them? I mean, they’re insanely powerful and brilliant. Are any of them available? [Laughs] And she said, These three I haven’t sold yet. I said, Well, how much are

they? And I think she said they were $3,500 each. So I bought all three of them. Sadly, I no longer own these paintings, which is a somewhat painful topic. [Laughter] And then she asked if I would like to meet the artist and I said, Yeah, sure. So she walked me into her office. I had no idea who Jean-Michel Basquiat was at that time. I’d never seen a reproduction of his work, I’d never heard his name. I had zero awareness, as virgin as you could be in that situation. And there’s Jean-Michel with his trademark hair sitting there smoking a joint, and he had on white painter’s overalls that were covered in paint. And I asked him if I could, you know, smoke a little with him. Apparently, that was the right way to start the conversation. [Laughter] JH What was your first impression of him? LG That he was extremely intelligent. I could see that immediately, just the way he handled himself. He was young—twenty or twenty-one years old—but poised. A couple of days later, Annina and JeanMichel invited me to his studio, which was in a space beneath her gallery. And it was full of paintings. They were all unbelievable, so I pitched him the idea of doing a show in my gallery in LA, in West Hollywood, and he was totally up for it. And Annina was very gracious about it. She gave it the green light, and that’s how he ended up coming to LA. FRED HOFFMAN And that was one of Jean-Michel’s first gallery exhibitions. Larry opened that solo show of his work in LA in April of 1982. Almost simultaneously, Annina opened an exhibition in New York in March of 1982, which was his first official solo presentation in the United States. JH Fred, what is your first recollection? FH I did not meet Jean-Michel when he came to do that first show on North Almont Drive, Larry’s original West Hollywood gallery, but I saw it two or three times and was blown away by it. Larry called me a little later in the year, in November of 1982. I was living in Venice and had just started a print publishing business called New City Editions. I was doing prints with some local artists and had also started working with Frank Gehry on what became known as the Fish Lamps. And

Larry said that he was there with Jean-Michel, whom he had invited back to LA. The plan was that Jean-Michel would both work and reside at Larry’s new house on Market Street in Venice. Jean-Michel had moved into the ground floor— it was completely separate from Larry’s residence above. It was actually built as an art gallery and had separate living quarters. Anyway, Larry asked if I’d like to meet with Jean-Michel to talk about making a silkscreen print, an edition. I said, Absolutely. I came over, I think the next night after dinner, and Jean-Michel and Larry and I started talking. Jean-Michel presented to me an idea that we started working on right away. It was called Tuxedo [1983], a very important, large, ambitious silkscreen work. The completed work is 8 ½ feet tall by 5 feet wide, and it took months to make. Jean-Michel and I connected right from the beginning, and I had a clear sense of how to bring it along, who to bring in. We had ten different assistants working on it at different phases. LG Just to add one little footnote, I named Tuxedo. It’s a black-and-white piece—there is writing and drawing with a white crown on the top. And when I saw it, I said, You’ve got to call that “Tuxedo.” And Jean-Michel wasn’t the easiest guy to convince about anything. [Laughter] I’m very proud that I named that piece. And Fred of course realized it and made it into a very significant work. LB Tamra, how did you meet Jean-Michel? TAMRA DAVIS We met when he was coming to do the show at Larry’s gallery. I was good friends with Matt Dike, who worked for Larry at the time. I was going to film school, and my day job was working at another gallery down the street. Matt and I were kind of assigned to help JeanMichel with anything he needed while he was in LA. He didn’t really know anybody, and we knew what was fun to do, so Larry asked us to drive him places, take care of him, and bring him to clubs. I got assigned to pick him up at the airport, but I had no idea what he looked like. And I see this guy—he’s so gorgeous, but like no one you’ve ever seen before, and I was like, Oh my God, I think that’s him. And I don’t think he had any luggage, or if he did, it was just a carry-on.

Previous spread: Jean-Michel Basquiat in his studio at 21 Market Street, Venice, California, spring 1984. Photo: Brad Branson This page: Installation view of JeanMichel Basquiat: New Paintings, Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, March 8–April 2, 1983 © 1983 Douglas M. Parker Studio Following page: Jean-Michel Basquiat and two unidentified people in his studio at 21 Market Street, Venice, California, spring 1984. Photo: Brian Williams

LB He probably didn’t.

TD I remember coming back over to the studio and—was Matt living there? There was a little house in West Hollywood— LG He was driving because I’d lost my license— TD Remember that little house on that back street? LG On Nemo, that house, yeah. TD I brought him over to that little house on Nemo. He made a big splash when he first came to town, for sure. LB I’d love to hear more from each of you about what your relationship was like with Jean-Michel. Jean-Michel was always very clear about what he wanted, what he didn’t want. But what were your interactions like? LG He was making paintings and living in my house. He had his own living area and he painted downstairs in the studio, which turned out to be an ideal place for him to work. And I was selling his paintings and we were also becoming friends—we were hanging out a lot, going out a lot, having a lot of fun. It was kind of a golden moment. JH Tell us about that. LG We’d go shopping. We’d go to restaurants. We’d drive around town. I don’t remember everything, but I remember that it was very enjoyable and that I had an absolute genius working in my house, so I got access to his work, and we became genuinely good friends. I really loved the guy. He was a hard worker, but when he wanted to have a good time— LB Work hard, play hard. LG He knew how to do it. FH Just adding to what Larry said, as it got late at night, Larry and I probably backed off and went home. But Jean-Michel would basically just be getting started, hanging out with the people of his generation in the clubs. I don’t know when he slept. He was basically working from the middle of the day into the night and then out every night. My relationship was, in a way, two professional relationships. I have a PhD in the history of art, so we shared a lot about art history. For instance, I had very engaging conversations with Jean-Michel about Leonardo da Vinci. I had an extensive library of books on da Vinci, which I would bring over to the studio, and we’d riffle through them. I would bring over other art history books as well, and he could go through a book in twenty minutes. And then I had a professional relationship with Jean-Michel as the producer of what turned out to be, except for one print that Annina made with him, the only editioned works he made during his short lifetime. We produced six editions. Beyond Tuxedo, we made another very ambitious piece called Untitled [1983]. We made Back of the Neck [1983]. We made this five-panel work, Untitled (from Leonardo) [1983], and two single prints [both 1983] with Leonardo-derived images. Beyond that, after this first engagement in Venice at Larry’s house, Jean-Michel decided he wanted to come back to LA and have his own studio, which I found for him. It was only three doors down from Larry’s house, also on Market Street. Jean-Michel worked there, but he lived at the L’Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood. His second foray in LA started in the fall of 1983 and went through June of 1984, during which time we worked together on a series of silkscreen prints. For those, he used images derived from original

drawings that were turned into silkscreens and then screened onto canvases. I also helped him on a famous series of paintings, large works that were quite unusual because they were painted on wood slat fencing material. There was a fence on the backside of Jean-Michel’s studio. One night he went out into this little back courtyard and tripped over a homeless person who had wedged themself between two slats. It completely freaked him out, so when I came in the next day I said, Well, there are a few options. We can rebuild it, or we can take down the wood fencing material and you just don’t go out into the courtyard. You don’t need to go out onto Speedway Avenue at two in the morning. Maybe just play it safe. He said, Yeah, we’ll go for that. So we started taking down the fencing material, and I went to get a dumpster so we could throw the slats away. But he said, No, no, bring it all inside, so we started carrying all of these wooden slats into the studio and stacking them up. I left. The next day I came back and he’s got a crew of people assembling these slats into picture supports. One turned out to be a great piece, in the Broad Collection, called Gold Griot [1984]—one of the greatest works in Jean-Michel’s oeuvre. And there was another great work, the companion piece, Flexible [1984], which he kept for himself. LB Tamra, you all were clearly having fun. What was going on? TD I loved hanging out with Jean-Michel. Matt Dike and I were best friends, and Matt kind of ran the LA music scene. If you wanted to go to clubs in LA, you wanted to hang out with Matt Dike. And my favorite memories are of JeanMichel and Matt playing records together. At the time, Matt was just about to start his label, Delicious Vinyl. Jean-Michel would be in his studio above Santa Monica Boulevard all the time, and Tone Loc would be there, and I was making music videos in those early days and made “Wild Thing” for Tone Loc and “Bust a Move” for Young MC. Those guys were coming in and out of the studio and it was really fun to see Jean-Michel interacting with the LA music and rap scene. There was this New York/LA hip-hop scene, and Jean-Michel really loved being close to that. He identified with that; it felt really familiar for him.

Whenever he came to LA, we would spend time in the clubs and talk about what was going on in the LA music scene. I was really involved in the film world, because I was going to film school and I wanted to see all these cool old movies, so we would constantly go see films. If Jean-Michel wasn’t an artist, he would have been a filmmaker. LB We think the same. TD He was always wanting to talk to me about filmmaking and films. In a way, I may have represented that aspect of his life, at least whenever he came to LA, which was exciting. And as you said, he really engaged. When you met him, he wasn’t just hanging out; he drilled you with questions and he wanted to go deeper and know things. But there were also times hanging out with him when it felt like something crazy could happen. There was always a risk or an element of danger and excitement, like anything could happen at any moment. LB That might be a New York thing. TD Is it? I don’t know, I’d just be like, Oh my God, we’re going to get in trouble. So that was kind of fun. JH How did you go about interviewing and filming him? TD Well, I had a camera in my hand all the time. I’d carry a Super 8 or a Bolex. And he said that I should make a documentary about him because he was going to be a really big, famous artist [laughs]. We joked about it, but he was also really serious. A lot of times he would call to say he was in town, we’ve got to do some filming. And I would say, Sure —I never knew what it would turn into. He always felt confident that we were doing something important, like we were really making a film together. FH What about the interviewing part? TD We actually did the interviewing later. We filmed a lot of stuff before that. He just wanted to go out and film all the time. Sometimes we would just go out and film for an afternoon, like we’d go to the racetrack or a flea market and film. But the documentary part came later, when he was at the hotel. JH Was that the L’Ermitage— TD Yeah. We had filmed and filmed and we were getting more serious because he was actually getting famous and he wanted to document it. It

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gold Griot, 1984, acrylic and oil stick on wood, 117 × 73 inches (297.2 × 185.4 cm), The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, California. Photo: courtesy The Broad Art Foundation

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Horn Players, 1983, acrylic and oil stick on canvas mounted on wood supports, in 3 parts, 96 × 75 inches (244 × 190.5 cm), The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, California. Photo: courtesy The Broad Art Foundation

was really important to him. That’s when Becky [Johnson], who was another one of my best friends and his friend, came and did it. FH I think Jean-Michel had already had a couple of interview experiences that didn’t go so well, and he felt so comfortable with Tammy and Becky—it was so fluid and really the best documentation of Jean-Michel on camera. LB For sure. In curating the King Pleasure exhibition, one thing Jeanine and I wanted was to give people insight into the man behind the work. For us, it was an opportunity to really round out and share more about who Jean-Michel actually was as a person, because we think that adds to the work and it’s what audiences seem most interested in. Larry, you made some important introductions for Jean-Michel while he was in LA, including to

collectors such as the Broads. Would you talk about the clients that you introduced to JeanMichel or to his work? LG Well, the parties I got invited to were not necessarily the parties Jean-Michel wanted to attend. [Laughter] LB Tell us more about that. LG I would push him sometimes. I’d say, Come on, you can do it. It’s a Beverly Hills crowd, you know? I remember one time Marcia Weisman was having a birthday party for her brother, Norton Simon, at her home on Angelo, and I said, Let’s go. He said, I don’t want to go. It’s going to be boring. And I said, Well, if it is, then we can leave. So we went and— LB That’s the part of the story we want to hear [laughs]. LG Of course, Jean-Michel walked in smoking a joint, which made quite an impression on Marcia Weisman and that crowd. He ultimately ended up in one of the bedrooms with some gal from the party. So he was able to adapt very quickly. He had more fun at that party than I did, let me put it that way. [Laughter] And another great story: He was living in the house with me, he’s making paintings, we’re really getting to know each other and getting into a fair amount of trouble every now and then. He said, My girlfriend’s going to move in. And I’m hesitating, you know; sometimes too many eggs can spoil an omelet. But he insisted that she was somebody he really cared about. So I said, Okay, what’s her name? And he said, Her name is Madonna. I said, What kind of a fucking name is Madonna? [Laughter] I really didn’t know who she was. And I’ll tell you how prescient and attuned to culture he was. He said, She’s going to be the biggest pop star in the world. And he was right. She moved in and was quite easy to be with, so we had a lot

of fun and it turned out not to be a bummer. She was a good sport. She lived there for a couple of months. FH One story should probably be told. Larry called me one day and said, Can you take JeanMichel and Madonna to the commissary at Twentieth Century Fox for lunch? Larry, probably through [producer] Doug Cramer, had arranged for the three of us to go, and we sat at this raised area that was sort of overlooking where the general population would eat. It was like a separate box. I sat behind the two of them; they were in the front. And Madonna looked out over this audience of probably five hundred people and pointed her finger and said, Someday everybody in this room is going to know who I am. Jean-Michel, all he could do was blush. LB The importance of being clear about what you want and stating it. JH Tamra, we spoke a bit about how you drove him around a lot. Do you have any stories about that, or about just hanging out with him? TD It was a great time in LA, and I feel like that time hasn’t really been documented so well. There was a fun music and club scene, and people were all getting along really well. One of my favorite things was to just go out dancing with Jean-Michel; he was one of the best dancers ever. Everywhere you went with him, it was like you were the center of attention. He would create a scene everywhere you went. Sometimes it wasn’t a good scene. Sometimes we realized that people were staring at us. They thought we didn’t have money or we didn’t belong there. I think he liked to shock people as well. He liked to see what kind of an impression he was going to make on people to see who they were. JH Fred, can you share a little bit more about your relationship with him? FH We shared a lot and he had such a great

Above: Larry Gagosian and JeanMichel Basquiat, New York, 1982 Right: William Wilson, review of Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings at Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1982

Left: Advertisement in the February 1983 issue of Art in America for Jean-Michel Basquiat: New Paintings at Larry Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles, March 8–April 2, 1983 Below: Jean-Michel Basquiat in the studio at Larry Gagosian’s residence and gallery, 51 Market Street, Venice, California, winter 1983. Photo: Brian Williams

understanding of the history of art. He understood exactly how he saw himself in the lineage of great artists. When he was in his second studio, working on some silkscreen paintings, he would basically take a silkscreen, apply it to a painting, and then paint over it. There was a group of guys who would be holding these different screens. Ultimately, he made like forty different paintings, but he was working on several at once. And as he started working, it became clear that he had a deep understanding of the practice of the great masters, and especially a strong understanding about the work of someone like Robert Rauschenberg. I was very close to [noted Los Angeles collectors and philanthropists] the Grinsteins, so one day I called up Stanley [a founder of Gemini G.E.L.] and asked if Bob Rauschenberg was in town working with them. He said yes. So I asked if I could bring over a young artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat to meet Rauschenberg? And he said sure. So after dinner one night, I picked up Jean-Michel and took him to Gemini G.E.L. on Melrose. I basically introduced him to Bob and left. They spent an hour in the print shop area together and had a complete connection. Jean-Michel went back a couple of times after that, once with me and also on his own. I think we really understood each other—I provided certain skills that he could use to push his work further. For example, it was clear right from the time I first met him that collaging unique drawings onto his canvases and painting over them was not really a sustainable method of operation. Over a lifetime, you just couldn’t make enough drawings to keep up, and also the drawings obviously have value themselves. So he started making photocopies of original drawings and collaging those into paintings. And then it became clear to him, after we made Tuxedo, that he could use silkscreen and not need to do so much photocopying. Photocopies weren’t the most sustainable medium to use anyway. So we started integrating silkscreened images into the paintings. I understood where he wanted to go, and I could help get him there quickly. LB I think Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the greatest painters of all time. He was a painter, he was a poet, he loved film, he loved music. He established himself firmly within popular culture. Emerging artists still look to him for inspiration. My question to each of you is, What do you think it was about Jean-Michel that makes him the phenomenon he is today?

LG Do you mind if I try to answer that? Well, he was just a genius. He had more raw talent than any artist I’ve ever encountered, or, for that matter, that anybody’s encountered. He was just a natural. I remember talking to him about a painting. He said, People ask me why do I put the blue here or the green here? And he said, I just know. He had an incredible instinct and an amazing energy. And everything just came together. He was something of a miracle, in a certain way— he had the ability to draw, he understood scale, he spent a lot of time looking at books on works by other artists, such as da Vinci, but also someone like Cy Twombly, who he also studied rather closely. But above all, he just had something that doesn’t come along but once in a lifetime—it’s hard to qualify what that is. And he knew he was good—and he just loved making art. LB In all forms. LG He’d make something and then say, Wow, this doesn’t suck, I’ll make another. In a sadly short life, he made a lot of great work. JH And he didn’t only come here to work and create exhibitions with you. He came back and forth all the time. What do you think was the appeal of LA? LG Change of scenery, friends he’d made, the climate. Getting out of New York is not such a bad

idea every now and then. FH By the time he came here to produce the second show for Larry, he was already conflicted about how he was being received in New York. There were certain people in the New York art world who just weren’t willing to engage JeanMichel’s work and I think that hurt him a lot. He became even more introspective, and LA provided a relief valve where he didn’t have to be under that intense pressure of making it in New York. He could just come out here and enjoy himself and get a lot of work done. It’s impressive to consider just how much work Jean-Michel produced in LA—at least a hundred canvases over eighteen months. So LA provided a counterpoint to New York. He had a couple of periods where he was here for two or three months, but he went back and forth to New York a lot. And then eventually he discovered Hawaii, which was an even greater relief valve. LG I rented a house in Kapalua, and it was basically two houses—I had one house and JeanMichel had the other. I was only there for about a month. He went back several times and produced a handful of paintings. He didn’t really work that much there. He just enjoyed being in Hawaii. And it was also a way to get him away from drugs, to mellow him out—the Hawaiian vibe suited him. We had a lot of fun in Hawaii. You’re right, Fred, it was another distance from New York. And let’s not overlook the fact that there was a fair amount of racism— LB Thank you for going there. Let’s talk about some of those challenges in New York. A lot of artists today are dealing with some of the same issues. LG Well, now, thank God, we’re at a time where many of those railings have been identified and hopefully will start being removed and— FH Most, but not all. LG Well, no, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done, and serious recognition of Black artists is way overdue. Jean-Michel was really kind of a pioneer in that. He didn’t want to be a pioneer, but it turned out that that was a role that he took on. But I can describe instances of very pointed

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1983, oil, acrylic, oil stick, graphite, and pen on paper collage on wood with metal attachments, in 2 parts: left panel: 79 ⅝ × 29 ¾ × 5 ½ inches (202.2 × 75.6 × 14 cm); right panel: 96 ¾ × 34 × 2 inches (245.7 × 86.4 × 5.1 cm). Photo: © 2023 Phillips Auctioneers LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), 1983, acrylic, oil stick, and paper collage on canvas, 83 ¾ × 83 ¾ inches (212.7 × 212.7 cm) All artwork © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

Jean-Michel Basquiat with Untitled (1983), New City Editions, Venice, California, 1983. Still from Jean-Michel Basqiuat: The Radiant Child (2010), directed by Tamra Davis

racism that would be shocking if you heard them today. I’ll give you one example, because examples are more interesting than generalities. There was a pretty good artist who I’m not going to name, who had a good career with a big gallery. He had gone to a dinner party at a very important collector’s house, which I was dying to go to because I heard they had some really good art and I’d never been invited. I asked him, What’s the collection like? What do they have? He said, They have a lot of great things, but they fucked it up because they’ve got a Basquiat. And he was dead serious. Another one: there was a restaurant everyone in the art world used to go to, downtown on Fifth Avenue. I had dinner one night with two very talented artists. And it was a bit of a strange conversation. They said, Larry, you seem to know the art market pretty well. You seem to know what you’re doing. We’d like to invest in art. They were asking me what they should buy, and I said, You can’t do any better than owning a Basquiat. And they said, Come on, no, seriously. So, there was always a subcurrent like that. LB They regret that today. FH Not to mention the critics and the museums. LG The Whitney [Museum of American Art] included Jean-Michel in the 1983 Biennial, but other institutions in New York would actually not even accept gifts of his work. I tried to give a painting, a major painting, as a gift to an important New York museum, and they wouldn’t even accept it—it seems unbelievable now, but it’s a true story. JH Well, they regret that decision today. TD Jean-Michel was so ahead of his time. When he came out, it was at a time when it almost seemed like there was a crack opening in culture for him to emerge. In the club scenes everyone mixed openly together. We were all dancing together, we were all hanging out. But then you’d get on the street and it wasn’t like that at all. That was so frustrating and I felt it too, being

a woman who was trying to be a filmmaker. The walls seemed so high for us. It was like there was no way I could succeed in being a female director, there was no way he was going to be a successful Black artist. But in the club culture starting to break through, anything was possible. We could feel that shift and that kind of hopefulness in what was happening with hip-hop music becoming popular. We were all starting to emerge. It felt like it was the natural next step. But he would get so sad when people weren’t ready for him yet— LG Well, the Broads were ready. TD Some people were definitely ready. Thank God people saw it. LG I remember taking Jean-Michel over to Eli and Edye [Broad]’s—they were cool with JeanMichel; I think they were kind of amused and fascinated by him. They had a good rapport. And they were among the earliest collectors of JeanMichel’s art, which is a great compliment to Eli and Edye. LB Absolutely. It blows us away how people have supported Jean-Michel and ensured that others could see the work and witness the legacy of this incredible artist. It means a lot to us. Do each of you have any advice for emerging artists or people who are creators, whatever the art is— FH Network with other like-minded souls. LG Actually, I’m asked that question all the time. Just get to know other artists and see if they dig what you’re doing. That’s probably the best path. That’s often how I hear about artists—it’s usually from other artists, so you’ve got to get into a community of artists. And of course, you’ve got to be talented. LB That helps. LG You can’t just do it with strategy. Right now it’s a very interesting time to be an artist. Still, careerism can creep in, and that cuts both ways. Why shouldn’t artists make a good living? But exceptional talent is something else, and that

doesn’t come along every day. LB I love that advice. A lot of times people go to others who are very successful and want those folks to help them, which is wonderful. But when you network with other people who have overlapping interests, that’s how you get to hone your craft and learn more about what’s happening out there, versus everyone going to a few people expecting them to help out. TD I would just add that you have to put in the work—that’s what Jean-Michel did. He wasn’t just saying, I’m going to be the greatest artist, or, People are going to help me out—he worked day and night. He made it so. And that’s true for my career as well. I was filming constantly, making films, showing them. If you’re going to do it, you hope that you get discovered one day and networking is very helpful, but it’s not going to happen just because you made one or two great paintings or one film. You have to just keep doing the work, keep putting things out there. JH Is there anything else about his time in Venice Beach and that era that you can speak about? LG He was very self-reliant and he knew how to figure things out on his own. I never saw anybody get the best of him. If you tried to outwit him, you paid a price. And he could have a wicked sense of humor. Henry Geldzahler interviewed Jean-Michel for Interview magazine. It was a good interview and Jean-Michel took it seriously. The last question that Geldzahler asked was, Your art deals with a lot of the struggles that you’ve gone through and your heritage. There’s some anger that runs through a lot of your art, but there’s also humor. And Basquiat had the best answer. He said, Well, you know, sometimes people laugh when you fall on your ass. [Laughter] LB Exactly. Simple. LG That was how quick he was. LB He was turned on. He was awake. LG He was a genius.

THE Delphine Huisinga and Alison McDonald chart Larry Gagosian’s formative years on the West Coast and contextualize the Los Angeles art scene in the mid-1970s. 70

Larry Gagosian has played a fundamental role in shaping the art world of our time. Much has been made of his ambition, instincts, and perseverance right from the beginning of his career: he took risks, always worked with the best artists he could, and established connections between important East Coast artists and West Coast collectors; and he supported performance art, Conceptual art, and photography, all three of which were having pivotal moments in the 1970s, when he started out. This essay shines new light on some of the key moments of his early career, specifically between 1972 and 1977. The date most often given as the beginning of Larry’s career as an art dealer is 1980, when he opened the Larry Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. As early as 1972, though, he had been working to find ways to support creatives and to build a business of his own. Early on he was presenting exhibitions and works by artists who had or would have outstanding careers, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Chris Burden, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Lee Friedlander, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, and others. He was selling art to some of the most important collectors on the West Coast before he turned thirty. Larry spent his childhood in downtown Los Angeles and his teenage years in the Valley. His father was a municipal accountant who later trained to be a stockbroker; his mother was an actress. He spent little to no time in museums as a child and had no training in art history. He graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a degree in English literature. After graduation he took various jobs, including working as the assistant manager in a record store, boxing groceries in a supermarket, and taking the midnight shift at a gas station. For over a year he worked in an entry-level role at the William Morris Agency for $90 a week, supervised briefly by Michael Ovitz, though he also worked for Stan Kamen, reading manuscripts and answering phones. Larry recently recalled, “Kamen was

an agent with one of the best client lists in Hollywood at the time. He represented Warren Beatty, Elliott Gould, Steve McQueen, and others. It was a lot of fun to work with him because I was able to meet really cool people.”1 He left that job to work as a parking attendant in Westwood, which paid more money. The part of the story that is less well-known starts in 1972, when he opened the Patio (also called the Open Gallery), an outdoor market in a lovely old Spanish building in the center of Westwood Village, where movie theaters and ice cream parlors brought the neighborhood to life. The building had an L-shaped courtyard running from one street to another, and Larry rented this open-air patio space for $75 a month—which he borrowed from his mother—so that he could offer artisans a place to sell their goods. He even took out a restaurant license so that his sister could sell apricots there. Larry recently mentioned that he showed watercolors by Henry Miller at the Patio: “I found out that Henry Miller lived in Santa Monica Canyon and he was a literary hero of mine. It wasn’t necessarily the most impressive art that I had ever seen, but I was fascinated by writers who made art as well.”2 The Los Angeles Times dedicated an article to the Patio: Every night this month and on weekends for the rest of the year about 25 craftsmen have been paying Gagosian $6 plus 10% of their gross to shiver and sell to the shopping traffic born of Westwood theaters, restaurants, and college shops. . . . Besides its obvious commercial value, the gallery seems to function on other levels as well. Gagosian believes it has replaced the old Free Press bookstore as the last place in Westwood for hanging out without buying anything. . . . They had Anthony Marks’ paintings on mirror (he did a one man show in London) and Ron Cobb (the cartoonist for the Free Press) has exhibited here.3 Even at this earliest moment we can see traces of Larry’s business acumen and his affinity for the visual arts. And he must have been onto something: he got a write-up in a major newspaper. At the Patio, Larry noticed vendors selling posters: they were buying the posters for a couple of dollars each, framing them, and selling them for fifteen or twenty dollars each. He could see that they were making good money, so he went into the business and started making a couple of hundred dollars a night, plus bringing in rent from the spaces on the Patio. As Dodie Kazanjian would write in Vogue over fifteen years later, “He was living in the same eighty-dollar a month apartment,

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a stone’s throw from the beach in Venice. He was reading all the time (‘I was very, very deep into literature and music’), enjoying the beach, ‘hanging out,’ playing tournament chess, and talking about writers until two in the morning in coffee shops. (‘I sound like a beatnik. I wasn’t.’)” 4 To better understand the art scene that Gagosian entered in Los Angeles in the 1970s, we might want to go back briefly to the mid-1950s. In 1955, Los Angeles had plenty of homegrown artists, but few galleries and no museum dedicated to contemporary art. The prosperity of the time, combined with the ever expanding entertainment industry in the city, would grow the cultural economy. In 1957, Walter Hopps and the artist Ed Kienholz opened the Ferus gallery; the following year, Irving Blum moved from New York and purchased Kienholz’s share of the business. The Ferus scene nurtured LA-based artists including John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses, and Ken Price. In 1959, Virginia Dwan—later an early champion of Conceptual art, Minimalism, and Earthworks—opened her first gallery, finding space in Westwood. She would show plenty of work by local artists while also introducing artists from New York and Europe to LA. In the 1960s the West Coast scene fostered a whole generation of artists, including Chicago, Celmins, Nauman, Ruscha, John Baldessari, David Hockney, and so many more. At the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, Hopps organized the first-ever group show of Pop art in the United States, New Painting of Common Objects. By the middle of the decade the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art had divided into two institutions, one of them the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1965, Artforum magazine moved down from San Francisco into an office above the Ferus Gallery. Even while the arts community flourished, it was a challenging time in the city. The Vietnam War was tearing the country apart; young men were being drafted against the backdrop of antiwar protests. The Manson-family murders and random acts of violence heightened the looming sense of fear that haunted residents. During this period, the Watts neighborhood in southern Los Angeles was home to a vibrant Black community and to a number of Black artists working in assemblage who would later prove hugely influential, including Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar. But the devastation caused by the Watts rebellion of 1965—which witnessed brutal violence, widespread looting, arson, over thirty deaths, and more than $40 million in property damage—left a calamitous mark

on the community. When asked about the rioting, Larry has said, “In 1965 I was at UCLA, and the Watts riots [made a deep impression] on me. The intensity and scope of it was beyond anything that I had ever seen or experienced. I’ll never forget it.”5 This was also a time of community building in the Latino community. In the East Los Angeles Walkouts (or Chicano Blowouts) of March 1968, 15,000 students protested unequal educational opportunities in high schools, ultimately presenting a list of demands to the city’s Board of Education. The first Chicano art gallery, established in East Los Angeles in 1969, actively promoted the growing movement, celebrating artists whose works responded to social protest and community empowerment. The LA gallery scene changed in the early 1970s as the country went into an economic recession. Many of the galleries that had helped to develop the city’s reputation as a cultural center closed, or moved to New York or Europe; these included Ferus, Rolf Nelson, Virginia Dwan, Felix Landau, and Eugenia Butler. This shift likely played a role in opening up more opportunities for younger dealers to make their mark. Describing the hard turn taken by the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1970s, the West Coast art critic Peter Plagens wrote, “The West Coast hit the late sixties with some optimism: Los Angeles had established itself as the ‘second city’ of American art and expected to provide for the coming art-and-technology boom. But a funny thing happened on the way to the pantheon: The West Coast art scene hit the skids—not collapsing, but flattening out. The most noticeable leveling took place in Los Angeles, where hopes were raised highest.”6 By December of 1974, Larry had opened a small indoor gallery in the same building complex as the Patio, at 1017 Broxton Avenue. Prints on Broxton was advertised as “selling contemporary prints, custom frames, and original graphics, by a wide range of artists, including Hundertwasser, [Frank] Stella, [Victor] Vasarely, [Joe] Goode, [Paul] Wunderlich, and Chicago.”7 By that point the business focused on making custom frames and selling signed lithographs for several hundred dollars each. Kim Gordon, who would cofound the iconic band Sonic Youth a few years later, was one of the framers. She remembered this period in her memoir Girl in a Band: “Frame after frame—I must have assembled thousands of those things, and the dimensions twentyfour by thirty-six are still carved in my brain.”8 In 1975, Larry turned thirty years old. His energy for business was expanding, his taste in art was growing more sophisticated, and he

Even when he only had one wall to show on, he did it well. —Doug Cramer

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started paying close attention to art magazines. One day he was flipping through Art in America or Artforum and saw photographs by Ralph Gibson. The images made an impression on him and he felt they would make a beautiful exhibition in Westwood Village. Gibson lived in New York so Larry gave him a call, they had a great conversation, and Gibson invited him to make a studio visit. Larry had not been to New York more than once but he made the trip, went to Gibson’s loft on West Broadway, and left with an Agfa box filled with photographs. He brought these back to Los Angeles, had them framed, mounted the exhibition Ralph Gibson: New Directions, and brought Gibson out for the opening. A few of the images were a bit risqué, which shocked the landlord, who almost shut the show down before it opened; but Larry convinced him that the work was in museum collections, which impressed him enough to leave it alone. Robert Mautner at Artweek reviewed the show: “Although a few of the better known images from the books have been included in his show at ‘Prints on Broxton’ in Westwood village, the most exciting aspect of the exhibit is the new work which is being presented for the first time in this area. . . . the exhibit is a must for Los Angeles viewers.”9 That is a remarkable review for the first serious exhibition that Larry put together. And he sold all of the prints. It turned out that Gibson was repped by Castelli Graphics, the dedicated prints and photography gallery of Leo Castelli. This was fortuitous for Larry because the introduction to Castelli led to a long and prosperous working relationship between the dealers. To broaden the reach of his gallery’s artists beyond New York, Castelli had collaborated with West Coast galleries since the 1960s, most significantly with Blum of Ferus. By the time he met Larry there was a precedent in place for a working relationship that would allow Larry to present Castelli’s artists to Los Angeles audiences, creating new market opportunities for them, although this wouldn’t begin until the 1980s. In that same year of 1975, Larry hired Constance Lewallen, who had worked for Klaus Kertess at the legendary Bykert Gallery in New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1972. She had taught a few art-history classes at Santa Monica College and was working at Cirrus Editions, which published prints with some of the best artists in Southern California. Larry persuaded her to leave Cirrus and come to work for him, helping to put her on a path to becoming an influential bicoastal curator of contemporary art. At Prints on Broxton, she organized the exhibitions while he took care of the business side: “He

didn’t know much,” she would remember, “but he sure learned fast. He had good instincts before he had the knowledge and that intensity was always there. He read and read and read. He had enormous energy and extraordinary ambition. Once he set his mind to something, there was no stopping him.”10 It was a bold move for a young businessman who had run a gallery for less than a year to hire a budding young curator. Lewallen “had good ideas,” Michael Auping writes, “and Gagosian, who was at an early point in his own career, embraced them. He had offered her a big raise (a whopping $25 more a week, which was a lot back then) to leave her previous job and she remembered that time fondly, even sometimes recalling, ‘He let me bring my kids to work when they weren’t in school and I couldn’t get a babysitter.’ In those early years, Connie’s expertise was influential in shaping the gallery’s burgeoning program, which spanned between classic modernism and the new avant-garde.”11 Looking back over Larry’s career, one can see that he has always sought guidance and advice from people he respects, particularly by hiring museum-level curators. This pattern has continued into the present day, with some of the most sophisticated scholars and curators of our time joining his gallery over the years. In July of 1975, Larry put together a summer group show of drawings, paintings, and assemblage that marked the first time he showed work by Burden, Nauman, and Ruscha, among others. By that point Burden had already developed a reputation for his unnerving performance art. Auping, then a local grad student in art history, remembers, Along came Chris, who woke us all up from our meditations. You could not ignore his drama and I have no doubt that he was conscious of constituting an assault on Light and Space as a term and a phenomenon. . . . [Robert] Irwin taught on and off at the University of California, Irvine, when Chris was getting his masters there. It’s easy for me to see now that his grueling masters show—which consisted of Five Day Locker Piece [1971], in which he locked himself in one of the school’s small portfolio lockers for five days—was a twisted reaction to Irwin’s and James Turrell’s use of a nasa anechoic chamber to sensitize themselves to space and light.12 Lewallen once recalled the early days of working with Burden: “I remember one day Chris Burden came and wanted to air a TV ‘commercial’ where he’d say, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Chris Burden!’ He sat at my little desk at the Gagosian Gallery after it moved to La Cienega Boulevard, and together we called TV stations and bought ad slots. You could get a 2:00 am slot for $50 or something.”13 In August of 1975, Prints on Broxton became Broxton Gallery, marking both the success of Larry’s first year in the space and a notable shift in his approach to the business. Larry says, “I had started showing and selling more high-end works of art. The business was shifting away from prints and editions, and though there were plenty of shows of photography, they were more serious exhibitions.”14 Broxton Gallery’s first show was Duane Michals: Photographs. Michals had enjoyed a solo exhibition at New

He had enormous energy and extraordinary ambition. Once he set his mind to something, there was no stopping him. —Constance Lewallen

York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) just a few years earlier. A few months later Larry brought together the complete lithographic works of Vija Celmins, an exhibition that many years later he would remember as pivotal: “My first show that wasn’t photographic was Vija Celmins. I really loved Vija Celmins’s work, and I was able to assemble her entire oeuvre of graphic work.”15 Lewallen recalled meeting Larry for the first time when she was working at Cirrus Editions: [Cirrus] was printing artists like Ed Ruscha and Vija Celmins at the time as well as lots of younger LA artists. . . . that’s when I met Larry Gagosian, who nobody knew then. He had a poster gallery in Westwood and wanted to buy Vija Celmins’s long ocean lithograph from Cirrus. It’s a beautiful print. The edition had sold out but he would call all the time wanting to buy it, and I’d say, “You know, I have to tell you, we just don’t have any available.” He was relentless. And finally I told Jean Milant, who was the Cirrus’s founder and director, “This guy is driving me crazy. Can’t you find a proof or something?” And he did. He actually found an artist’s proof. So one day Larry called and I said, “You’re not going to

exhibitions. When he opened a Friedlander show in 1976, an Artweek reviewer observed, “The Friedlander exhibit at Broxton Gallery provides a rare opportunity for west coast viewers to experience the rare depth and insight of this wellknown east coast artist.”18 At this point Friedlander had an established reputation in New York; along with Arbus and Garry Winogrand, he had been the subject of John Szarkowski’s groundbreaking New Documents exhibition at MoMA in 1967, endorsed as one of a new generation of photographers focused less on documenting “truths” than on examining their own perceptions of and interactions with the world. With shows like this one, Larry was leaning into his presence on the West Coast as a way to attract East Coast artists with solid reputations and followings, expanding their audience reach and connecting them with a serious new client base. Larry first encountered Avedon’s murals in New York’s Marlborough Gallery in 1975, in the photographer’s first major show at a commercial gallery. Each of the four murals on view depicted a row of larger-than-life figures lined up side-byside, towering over the observer. One of them showed eleven members of the Mission Council, a group of generals, diplomats, and other officials responsible for running the Vietnam

LIFE believe this, but we actually do have a print to sell you.” So then he had the gall to say, “Will you deliver it to me?” . . . It turns out that I was living close to his shop, so I agreed. And the funny part is that [after he hired me] there was one month he couldn’t pay me, and he gave me that print.16

He started collecting more seriously, acquiring Joseph Beuys’s Felt Suit (1970), for instance, and he was careful to deal with artists whose work captured his attention, excited him, and pushed at the edges: “Something that I’ve always paid attention to is to work with the most important artist that I could.”17 He didn’t shy away from challenges and his enthusiasm for ambitious artists such as Burden began to push them to think bigger. He also found ways to cultivate the collections of clients. As early as 1976, he started selling to David Geffen, whom he met through Kamen, one of his former bosses at William Morris. He also grabbed the attention of Barry Lowen, a television executive who spotted the Beuys suit in the window of his gallery. Lowen in turn made the introduction to Doug Cramer. And Steve Martin was active on the scene as well, often stopping by the gallery to see the shows, discuss the art, and get to know Larry. The gallery was getting traction in the media, with reviews coming in for most of Larry’s

War. This work was shown alongside a mural of the Chicago Seven, a group of men who had protested that war and had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to incite riot. The show captured the tension of the era and participated in the evolution of photography as an accepted medium of fine art. Larry wanted to bring it to Los Angeles, as he had successfully done with other exhibitions: Stunned by their scale and audacity, I made immediate inquiries about bringing the exhibition to the West Coast, where I was based at the time. My first gallery in Los Angeles was diminutive, far too small to accommodate these photographs of unprecedented scale, but I managed to negotiate for the exhibition to travel to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where it opened in the spring of 1976, before continuing on to Seattle, Tokyo, and Montreal. At the same time, I presented an exhibition of smaller, related works in my gallery, some of which remain cornerstones of my personal collection to this day.19 The attention won by these and the Marlborough shows helped to propel the institutional recognition of an overtly political body of work. They came at a critical moment in Avedon’s career, solidifying his reputation beyond the

Larry was leaning into his presence on the West Coast as a way to attract East Coast artists with solid reputations and followings, expanding their audience reach and connecting them with a serious new client base. —Alison McDonald 73

One day Chris Burden came and wanted to air a TV commercial. …He sat at my little desk at Gagosian and together we called TV stations and bought ad slots. —Constance Lewallen 74

fashion photography that had catapulted him to early success. Larry was well positioned in the south-California art scene and saw a role he could play for the artist at that moment: he was attuned to the acclaim and audience reach that Avedon had achieved in other aspects of his career, he understood the region’s institutional dynamics, he embraced Avedon’s powerful imagery, and he recognized the potential for all involved. In March of 1976, around the time of the Pasadena exhibition, he ran an ad in the Los Angeles Times: “Broxton Gallery is the exclusive southern California representative of Richard Avedon.”20 Larry’s interest in photography persisted throughout the 1970s. In May of 1976 he hosted Broxton Sequences: Sequential Imagery in Photography, which presented eighteen photographers, including celebrated figures such as Michals, Lynda Benglis, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Walker Evans, and more. That July he showed works by Bill Brandt, Jo Ann Callis, and Abigail Perlmutter; and in 1977 he exhibited color photographs by William Christenberry, William Eggleston, John Gossage, Joel Meyerowitz, Nicholas Nixon, and Stephen Shore. Between 1975 and 1977 he hosted fifteen photography exhibitions, including solo presentations by Bevan Davies, Larry Fink, Steve Kahn, André Kertész, and, twice, Elyn Zimmerman. In 1976 Larry opened Robert Wilhite: Telephone performance OR Attendance by telephone only, a performance-based work that could only be viewed in the form of verbal descriptions spoken by the artist to callers on the telephone—the space’s windows were blocked out, no two callers got the same description, and half the callers received a sound work created for the event. Wilhite had attended UCLA and had been a student of Bell, Irwin, and Moses; in 1977, when Burden curated a show of performance art at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art titled Live from L.A., he invited Wilhite to participate. Even this early in Larry’s career, we witness his embrace of performance and conceptual works, which are often set outside commercial parameters and produce no physical objects that can be sold. His desire to support artists working in this way clearly laid the groundwork for future interactions with artists such as Walter De Maria, whom Larry would champion in the future. Brice Marden was represented in a group show at the gallery, alongside Ruscha and other artists, as early as 1976. Curated by Lewallen and titled Works on Paper: East and West Coast Artists, the show brought together an impressive selection of artists working across styles, ranging from expressionist abstraction to sharpfocused realism. A review describes it as presenting “a pluralist panorama of what drawing is and dares to be these days.”21 Larry had shown work by Ruscha in a group show as early as 1975, then again in Lewallen’s exhibition in 1976. Originally from Oklahoma, by the 1970s Ruscha was a fixture in the Los Angeles art community. He had met Castelli in 1961, had had his first solo show at Ferus in 1963, had enjoyed success at a young age, and his reputation was still on the rise. While riffing on Pop art and other art-historical references, his work was entirely unique. Blum recalls, “Ed Ruscha came to my attention in 1963. He was doing fascinating work. Those are the years of the big Twentieth Century Fox logo, the mural-size Standard-station paintings,

the large painting of the L.A. County Museum on fire.”22 In the 1970s, Ruscha was exhibiting with Castelli in New York and at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, but he started working with Larry in small ways, such as group exhibitions. The seeds of that relationship would grow into a dynamic partnership that would continue for the next five decades. By August of 1976, the Broxton Gallery had moved into a space at 669 North La Cienega Boulevard that had previously been occupied by the well-known Mizuno Gallery. In September of that year it hosted Chris Burden: Relics, a pivotal exhibition showcasing artifacts from the artist’s early performances. Around this time, Larry acquired the padlock to the locker in which Burden had confined himself during Five Day Locker Piece, arguably his first mature work, for a price of $500. A review of the show by William Wilson in the Los Angeles Times read, “Chris Burden, widely noted for perpetrating scary acts some allege to be artworks, shows relics of his escapades. We see pushpins he instructed a volunteer to insert in his body, a knife with which he threatened to slit the throat of a collaborator, live electric wires he jabbed into his chest before a group of onlookers. . . . There are any number of ways to interpret Burden’s acts, few of which have to do with aesthetics.”23 Burden responded to the review later that month: “I found William Wilson’s review of my show at the Broxton Gallery to be misinformed, extraneous, and irresponsible. My work almost invariably suffers at the hands of the popular media, which have preconceived notions about what art can or cannot be.”24 The exhibition that followed Relics, in October of that year, was Christo: Drawings, Collages, Photo-documentation, which celebrated Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence project and was presented simultaneously with an exhibition on the work at the Pasadena City College Art Gallery. Running Fence was an enormously ambitious undertaking, developed after the artists’ influential 1971 orange Valley Curtain near Rifle, Colorado. Installation of the fence had been a massive endeavor, completed on September 10 of 1976; the work consisted of 200,000 square meters of heavy white nylon fabric hung from steel cables, eighteen feet high and over twenty-five miles long, stretching from Petaluma, California, to the Pacific Ocean. The project was the culmination of 3 ½ years of planning, negotiation, and collaboration, and was financed entirely by the artists through sales of preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, and lithographs—the kinds of materials in Larry’s exhibition. In response to the Broxton show, Henry J. Seldis wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “For those who missed Christo [and

I moved fast because I didn’t perceive what the boundaries were. There’s a benefit in not having any kind of preconceptions about structure or hierarchy. —Larry Gagosian

Jeanne-Claude]’s actual Running Fence up in Sonoma and Marin Counties, some excellent renderings of [their] concepts are also being shown. They reveal Christo [and Jeanne-Claude] to be first-rate drafts[people] as well as environmental conceptualists.”25 The following month, the Broxton Gallery presented twenty color photographs by David Hockney and photographic portraits of artists by Hans Namuth. The Los Angeles Times again reviewed the show: “Back-to-back solo shows of photographs by a painter and photographs of painters. The latter are by Hans Namuth who seems to play it fairly straight with his subjects. . . . The painter showing photographs is David Hockney, heir-apparent to the unofficial title of Britain’s best pictorial artist. Hockney’s photos are entirely in his familiar style. . . . his photographs are richly, almost uncomfortably, sensuous in, for example, images of a young male nude. This quality is suppressed in Hockney’s paintings and drawings objectified in urbane detachment.”26 When asked about other dealers he was paying attention to during these years, Larry said, “Nick Wilding had a gallery at the time and I visited frequently. He was showing Hockney and others. I remember a show of Cy Twombly blackboard paintings that knocked me out. Nick and I became fast friends and he let me spend time in his back room, looking for works that I could sell. He was an established dealer and a very good ally.”27 Exhibitions at the Broxton Gallery continued until April of 1977, after which Larry started working from his house in Westwood. (He lived in a historic modernist complex, designed in 1937 by the renowned architect Richard Neutra.) Cramer recalls, Barry [Lowen] told me there was a former William Morris agent who was in the business of buying and selling contemporary art, operating out of a little apartment in Westwood. Barry thought he had a great eye and wonderful contacts with this young new group, and he said he was someone I should know and work with. He took me to see him in a little one-room apartment with a sort of loft in it. It was neat and clean—as all of his offices and galleries since have been. Even when he only had one wall to show on, he did it well.28 Larry expanded his own collection as well: “I’d started buying some small works and drawings. I’d bought a Brice Marden piece. I’d bought a Sol LeWitt drawing. I was still kind of drawn to minimal art. It was more accessible at the time— by which I mean less expensive.”29 By 1978 he was traveling more and gaining visibility in New

York. He was on the verge of the next step in his career: “I was a hard worker in California, but you can only do so much there. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to leave. I could always make a nice living and go to the beach every day and bodysurf and hang out, or I could come to New York and kind of ruin my life. I decided to come to New York.”30

1. Larry Gagosian, in conversation with Alison McDonald, November 20, 2023. 2. Ibid. 3. Beth Ann Krier, “A Gallery of Folkloric Oddities,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1972. 4. Dodie Kazanjian, “Going Places,” Vogue, November 1989, 415. 5. Gagosian, in “In Conversation: Mike Milken and Larry Gagosian,” Gagosian Quarterly, July 7, 2020. Available online at https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/07/07/mike-milken-larrygagosian-in-conversation/ (accessed November 15, 2023.) 6. Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 155. 7. Prints on Broxton, advertisement in Los Angeles Times, December 15, 1974. 8. Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 65. 9. Robert Mautner, “Ralph Gibson: New Directions,” Artweek 6, no. 23 (June 14, 1975): 13. 10. Constance Lewallen, quoted in Suzanne Muchnic, “Art Smart,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1995. 11. Michael Auping, “Game Changer: Constance Lewallen,” Gagosian Quarterly, Fall 2022, 186. 12. Auping, in Alison McDonald, “At the Edge. Chris Burden: Prelude to a Performance,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022, 85–86. 13. Lewallen, in Dena Beard and Lewallen, “Making It Live: Dena Beard and Constance M. Lewallen in Conversation,” The View from Here no. 4 (October 11, 2016). Available online at https:// openspace.sfmoma.org/2016/10/making-it-live-dena-beard-andconnie-lewallen-in-conversation (accessed November 15, 2023). 14. Gagosian, in conversation with McDonald. 15. Gagosian, in Peter M. Brant, “Larry Gagosian,” Interview, November 27, 2012. Available online at www.interviewmagazine. com/art/larry-gagosian (accessed December 2, 2023). 16. Lewallen, in Beard and Lewallen, “Making It Live.” 17. Gagosian, in Negar Azimi, “Larry Gagosian,” Bidoun 28 (Spring 2013). Available online at https://archive.bidoun.org/ magazine/28-interviews/larry-gagosian-with-negar-azimi/ (accessed December 2, 2023). 18. Robert Mautner, “Insight into Friedlander,” ArtWeek 7, no. 2 (January 18, 1976): 13. 19. Gagosian, Foreword, in Mary Panzer, Louis Menand, Bob Rubin, et al., Avedon: Murals and Portraits, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2012), 7. 20. Gagosian advertisement, Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1976. 21. Sandy Ballatore, “Directions in Drawing,” Artweek 7, no. 15 (April 10, 1976), 5. 22. Irving Blum, in Roberta Bernstein, “An Interview with Irving Blum,” in Ferus, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2002), 33. 23. William Wilson, “Art Walk: A Critical Guide to Galleries,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1976. 24. Chris Burden, “An Artist Replies,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1976. 25. Henry J. Seldis, “La Cienega Area,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1976. 26. William Wilson, “Art Walk: A Critical Guide to the Galleries,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1976. 27. Gagosian, in conversation with McDonald. 28. Doug Cramer, quoted in Charles Kaiser, “The Art of the Dealer,” Interview Magazine, July 1989, 56. 29. Gagosian, in Brant, “Larry Gagosian.” 30. Gagosian, quoted in Kazanjian, “Going Places,” 462.

ART

FASHION AND ART PART 17:

Maria Grazia Chiuri has been the creative director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections at Dior since 2016. Beyond overseeing the fashion collections of the French house, she has produced a series of global collaborations with artists such as Judy Chicago, Mickalene Thomas, Penny Slinger, and more. Here she speaks with the Quarterly’s Derek Blasberg about her childhood in Rome, the energy she derives from her interactions and conversations with artists, the viral “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt, and her belief in the role of creativity in a fulfilled and healthy life.

MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI

DEREK BLASBERG: Let’s make it easy and start at the very beginning. When you were young, was art a big part of your life? MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI: I was born in Rome, where art is everywhere, so it would be impossible for me not to be interested in it. In Italy we start to study art in primary school; it’s part of our public program. And not only would we study the history of art but we’d spend hours making it—we also used to sketch every day in class. Immediately from when I was a child, I liked to draw, and after I grew up, that became more mature and evolved into design. Also, in secondary school I had very good teachers who organized Saturday visits to the museums and galleries, which helped me build this passion. DB: In Rome, art feels historic– MGC: Sometimes too much so! DB: It’s called the Eternal City for a reason, I guess. MGC: Because we were surrounded by so many different artists, and their histories are so grand, it’s possible to think that you can’t be an artist. It can be a limit because the past is so present. DB: And so big! MGC: So big that you think that it’s probably impossible to create something new and interesting. Going to New York for the first time, in the 1980s, helped me to discover Pop art and modern art, which really helped show me art from a different point of view. It opened my eyes to the contemporary world. That was interesting, because later in my career I was lucky to meet contemporary artists in Rome, who we didn’t promote so much—we didn’t have much space in the museums and galleries because, of course, the very famous artists are all artists from the past. I began to think, How do we support new names in this world at a time when there are so many huge names from our history? DB: The relationship between Dior and Previous spread: Maria Grazia Chiuri. Photo: © Maripol Above: Installation view, Judy Chicago: Herstory, New Museum, New York, October 12, 2023–March 3, 2024. Photo: Reed Young contemporary art is not new: before he was a designer, Christian Dior was an art dealer and worked with artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. When you try to contact her, I was a little bit scared, especially at the beginning, about started at Dior and looked at the codes of the house, did you know there’d what she should think of working with a fashion brand. There is this idea that be such a link with art? fashion is more marketing, and I was worried about the artist getting upset if MGC: I was surprised—and very happy—to discover that Christian Dior had they thought we only wanted to collaborate with them as a marketing excuse. a gallery. His family didn’t want the name “Dior” on the gallery, because they DB: You wanted them to understand it was about supporting their work, not found work in art inappropriate, but I found in the archives images of him legitimizing your industry. I get it. with famous artists, the ones you mention and also Alberto Giacometti and MGC: I was super happy when she decided to come to Paris and see the Salvador Dalí. I was fascinated by this aspect of him and I was very happy to show that we worked on with the artist Penny Slinger, and to see what we did continue with this incredible background of the history of Dior through my with art in our space on the avenue Montaigne. She understood that my idea personal point of view. I decided to work more with women artists, because was to utilize the space like a gallery and produce exhibitions. And that’s it. I discovered, when I was young, that the women artists weren’t always given We wanted to promote female artists, I was very honored to have her with big opportunities, not only in Italy but around the world. I was honored to be me, and it was a beautiful show. Same thing with Mickalene Thomas: I went able to say we could share this incredible opportunity in Dior. to her studio in New York, I saw her work, I explained to her that we would DB: As we know, this is when you sought out artists like Judy Chicago and like to collaborate. It’s something very personal when you can build a strong Mickalene Thomas. relationship with an artist. MGC: One of my favorite museums is the Brooklyn Museum, and I remem- DB: Is it inspiring to work with these artists? ber the first time I went there I was fascinated by [Chicago’s] The Dinner Party MGC: I think it’s another kind of work. It feels like my passion, actually. I know [1974–79]. At the time, I never in my life imagined there could be a time when what my work at Dior is, but in many ways [working with artists feels] more I could collaborate with her. And I remember the first time I asked if we could my passion, not real work.

DB: The artists are the fantasy. MGC: Yes, and the hard work is the collection. The art part is my pleasure. DB: Last year Dior hosted the opening of Judy’s exhibition at the New Museum in New York. I thought it was incredible to see many of the banners that she created for Dior in the show. How did it feel to see work that you had helped inspire in a museum context? MGC: I was so happy for Judy! I am very honored that they made a big retrospective on her work. For me, the goal is to promote women artists. Judy is well known in the United States, but hopefully our platform promotes her in Europe, and puts this different art in conversation there. I really like this community that we now have around all these artists who know each other. Some of these artists meet at the show, speak about their work. This is very good energy to me, personally, for my pleasure, but also for what it creates in the world in general. DB: You were the first woman to hold the top job at Dior in the seventy years since its founding. That was a very big deal in 2016. Do you still think about that now, when you’re eight years into the job? And, as you support female artists, are you aware of your own role as a boundary-breaking female? MGC: When I went to Dior, everybody was so surprised that there was a woman there and nobody spoke about my previous career. I was not so young when I arrived at Dior: I’d worked twelve years at Fendi, seventeen years at Valentino, but nobody spoke about that. It was like I was an up-and-coming designer! We have to recognize that we often associate creativity with male figures. The “genius” is normally a man. That idea was probably stronger in 2016 than now, but if I remember the art history that I studied in school, not many females were included. [The seventeenth-century painter] Artemisia Gentileschi is very well-known now, but the first exhibition of her work in Italy was in 1978, because nobody promoted her. There has been this problem in the art world—in many industries, by the way, but here we are only talking about fashion and art—and we have to recognize it. DB: Famously, in your debut collection for Dior you showed T-shirts that said “We should all be feminists,” which became such a big deal, a huge talking point not only in the fashion press. Did you know that was going to happen? MGC: Absolutely not! DB: I saw those shirts everywhere. MGC: I never imagined that Dior was so well-known around the world. Of course it’s a brand that you know, that the fashion world knows, and that’s my comfort zone. But I had no idea how much more famous the brand was, how very well-known all around the world. When I came to Dior my approach was very easy: I did what was in my heart. I didn’t realize that the Dior audience is really huge, really international. So it was shocking for me to see the reaction. I think it was a strong message for the time, but I also think that it was so strong because it was Dior. I really love the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who published an essay with that title. DB: Did you reach out to her before the show? MGC: Yes, and when I tried to contact her, she at first said no, because she has no idea about fashion. The second time I said, Okay, I want to write a letter, and it was very fun with the press office because I said I wanted to write

a letter to explain to her because I wanted to have her involved in some way. And after the letter she said yes. She never went to a fashion show before that, she didn’t know anything about fashion. She had no idea—“I don’t want to come to Paris.” Which of course we laugh about now, and we’ve become very good friends. DB: Now she knows more about your world? MGC: I think she appreciated it, and she also understood the fashion world more. A lot of people don’t know our industry and probably have a superficial vision of our industry. This is normal. Because now everybody’s interested in art, you know, in fashion, in literature. But it was really a special, special moment for me. DB: With ready-to-wear, couture, resort shows, travel, collaborations, you’re a busy woman. When do you find time now to look for new art or new artists? Above: “We Should All Be Feminists” shirt at the Dior ready-to-wear, Spring/Summer 2017 show MGC: Like fashion, art is a real part of my life. On a work trip Below: Mickalene Thomas and Maria Grazia Chiuri at the Dior Spring/Summer 2023 Haute Couture show. I make a personal choice to go see a gallery or make a stuPhoto: © Pierre Mouton dio visit. When I started this job, I never imagined that my personal hobby and passion could be so fundamental to my work. Tomorrow, when I leave Paris and go back to Rome, I will make a studio visit with a friend. Of course in some places, like Italy or France, it’s simpler for me, but the last big trip I took was for a holiday at Christmastime and I went to Thailand, where I went to see an artist I was interested in and discovered there was a biennale there. So I immediately changed my plans and went to check the biennale in Thailand. I said, Oh cool, we can go there. DB: Do you find that when you meet artists and go to studios or biennales, it has a direct impact on the way you work? How does it affect your design process? MGC: The most important artists who influenced my work were artists I discovered many years ago, like Frida Kahlo, who is very famous, of course, because she speaks about the body, selfrepresentation, and the relationship with the body. That is the argument for why I work in fashion. Now, as I’ve become more mature in my work, art for me is something that speaks to me about myself and also—because it speaks about my body—in some ways speaks of the way I want to give back in my work, making other women feel well with their body. It’s very personal. It’s not because I want to use an artwork for a pattern or a print,

Opposite: Dior ready-to-wear Pre-Fall 2023 show in Mumbai, India. Photo: © Gupta Niveditaa Above: Dior Lady Art #8 by Mickalene Thomas, 2023 Below: The Chanakya School of Craft, Mumbai, India. Photo: © Sahiba Chawdary All photos courtesy Dior

it’s more because it speaks to me about something that I feel is part of my personal history. And probably that helped me to translate it in my work, giving back what it gives me. DB: That’s an important distinction. When people ask how an artist affects fashion, they often assume that the artist makes a painting, it becomes a print, and the collaboration ends there. For many designers it’s not as literal as that. It’s more complex. MGC: Yes! I sometimes spend time with the artist, I speak with the artist, because there’s an analogy with the analyst. DB: It’s like therapy. MGC: Yes, the conversation with an artist can be like seeing an analyst. It’s a pleasure for me to reflect about life, our life, and what we’re doing. They give me a point of view where I immediately say, Oh, I never thought about that—and of course I translate that. Probably that influenced me in my work too. DB: I know this can be a tricky question but we ask everyone: do you think fashion can be art, and can art ever be fashion? MGC: I don’t know if it’s possible to define fashion as art. I think there are moments with some fashion designers where they made art, from my point of view. With Alexander McQueen, honestly, some shows are performance art. But not all fashion is art, for sure. Fashion is done to be sold, to be worn, to be consumed. It’s an industry. DB: When you started in 2016, Dior started the Lady Dior art project, which I think is an interesting way to meld the worlds of fashion and art. This is where you invite artists to design their own version of the iconic Lady Dior handbag. MGC: That ’s a really big project because it’s a way to be in

conversation with artists, and to ask them to realize their point of view in a completely independent way. That’s also what I do for the setup of the show: I say, “I want to give you a giant room and all I need is a runway where the model can walk.” Ha! Then they can decide what they want to realize. I think that when you collaborate with an artist, you try to realize what they want from their point of view. This is another important aspect for me. I think it helps us to have good relationships with artists, because we always show them the process step by step—each single moment in realizing the idea, they are to approve. They check the mockup. It’s not that they give us a drawing and that’s it. No, it’s really a production for artists. DB: I guess, in many ways, it’s like when Mr. Dior had a gallery and invited artists to fill it. MGC: Exactly. I remember with Judy Chicago, we went to her studio in Santa Fe. We met her, she showed us the prototype. She asked us to make a specific jacquard fabric, so we made it. We were quick and responsive. Often, for an artist who works by herself, to have the big machine that is Dior behind them is a change. It’s really like a factory. We’re a big team and we want to execute their vision. For Judy Chicago, when she made The Dinner Party, to realize all the embroidery was a nightmare because she didn’t have one atelier, she had different embroideries around the world. So it was very difficult for her to coordinate that. For us— DB: It took ten minutes. MGC: Snap! That’s normal. To realize the different brocades, we can do it. We work in a very short time all the time. Our reaction is completely different. That’s the idea, to be in the service of art. DB: So if any other female contemporary artists need tapestry or embroidery, they’ll call you. That’s the takeaway. MGC: Absolutely. In India we are doing this collaboration with a school there, the Chanakya School of Craft, [Mumbai,] which focuses on hand embroidery and helps train women in the crafts. That is magnificent. The women at the school now understand that they can use their capacity and their creativity, and this is something that can inspire them not only to be very good embroiderers for fashion but to become artists too. I think probably that is the big project, bigger than I ever imagined could be possible. DB: I was in India and saw that show. It was marvelous. MGC: It was a very special moment, especially for those women to see their hard work displayed at a venue like that. It was a very big deal in the city. I really like the idea of community art, and it’s validating in my work. Working together gives me energy—it’s beautiful that everyone feels part of the creativity inside this big project. I think that’s very, very important. DB: Maybe you need a new shirt that says “We should all be female artists.” MGC: Yes! I think everybody can be an artist. I don’t mean everyone can be famous, I mean they can create and express their creativity. To me, that’s what you need to be a healthy person.

Hans

Ulrich

Obrist’s Questionnaire

Frida Escobedo 82

In this ongoing series, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2024, we are honored to present the architect Frida Escobedo .

What is your most recent work?

A curtain, a library, a restaurant, and a museum.

What keeps you coming back to the studio?

Curiosity.

16.

Your favorite color?

The inky neon blue of the sky just after the sun has set, and the red in magnolia flowers’ stamen scars.

22. A:

What role does chance play?

Chance is the manifestation of resonance.

14.

Do you write poems?

No, the poet in the family is my youngest sister, María.

19.

What have you forgotten?

All my past lives.

What is your unrealized project?

A garden.

15.

How would you like to die?

Abruptly.

20.

What ought to change?

Our priorities.

33.

What couldn’t you live without?

Love. And curiosity.

Do you have rituals? Sitting with my dog on the living room couch to watch the sunrise. 31.

What music are you listening to?

Brian Eno’s “Golden Hours,” Air’s “Radian,” Porno for Pyros’ “Kimberly Austin.”

Jeff Wall

In the Domain of Likeness

The Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, will stage a comprehensive Jeff Wall exhibition from January 28 to April 21, 2024, including more than fifty works spanning five decades. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening, Barry Schwabsky reflects on the enduring power of and mystery in Wall’s photography. Jeff Wall has been making the work he recognizes as his since 1978, and it has drawn widespread international attention since 1981, with countless gallery and museum exhibitions as well as important publications. Many of his photographs are now familiar to lovers of contemporary art. He himself has often had occasion to reencounter them—probably, come to think of it, more than anyone else has. So it’s meaningful that when asked recently what he’s most proud of about his work, Wall replied (after pointedly substituting the humbler word “satisfied” for the more arrogant “proud”—clearly success has not deprived him of the stereotypical Canadian modesty), “I feel there’s a liveliness to the pictures for the most part; they don’t seem to have grown old. They feel like things I’d still like to make.” That’s a true artist talking: when something is good, he doesn’t just want to see it, he wants to make it. And that’s true even if he has already made it. Why not make it again? Like Henri Matisse, who once said, ”I do not repudiate any of my paintings, but there is not one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo.” Although Matisse often made several versions of a painting as part of a single effort, he didn’t really go back and make new versions of his old works, as some artists have, among them Giorgio de Chirico and Edvard Munch, who painted The Sick Child six times between 1885 and 1925. With only two exceptions that I know of—more about one of them later—Wall has never redone one of his old pictures. And yet as often as one may have seen them, they still look new, or rather more than new—one might almost say, unsettled, open-ended, still to be made. As I write this, in December 2023, Wall’s latest retrospective has yet to open at the Fondation Beyeler, near Basel, Switzerland, where it will be on view through April 21. Curated by Martin Schwander, it comprises fifty-four works made from 1982 onward, which is to say more than a quarter of the artist’s mature oeuvre. Since it still lies in my future, I can’t say—can’t predict—in what ways the pictures there will look different to me, should I be lucky enough to get to the show. But I can tell something, I think, about how Wall himself is seeing his work differently, thanks to his contribution to its catalogue: unusually, he has contributed a commentary on each of the works displayed, often explaining something about what inspired them and about the circumstances under which they were made. We come to understand, among many other things, that his synthesis of memory and imagination often calls for him to find a place similar to the one in which he witnessed a certain occurrence, and then also to find 86

Previous spread: Jeff Wall, In the Legion, 2022, inkjet print, 63 ¾ × 80 inches (162 × 203 cm) This spread: Jeff Wall, Maquette for a monument to the contemplation of the possibility of mending a hole in a sock, 2023, inkjet print, 55 ½ × 55 ⅛ inches (141 × 140 cm)

a person who resembles the one he’d seen. This is more than just a purely pragmatic requirement; sometimes the idea whose germ lay in a passing observation can be more vividly or deeply developed by a certain shift. Or at least that’s how I interpret Wall’s remark that his 2021 photograph Event, which shows a somewhat mysterious confrontation between two similarly dressed bearded men, needed a completely different setting. “That transfer would not only be physical, geographical,” he explains, “but social as well. I assumed the freedom to discover another circumstance that would somehow disclose what I felt about what I’d seen, even though it would not tell us anything about the original situation.” Although we often feel that photography’s truth is in its resemblance to the fact, Wall locates it in its resemblance to a feeling about a fact. In this way, Wall’s practice plunges him into the paradoxes of the similar: anything can be like anything else in some way or another, but equally things can all be seen as unlike. Intuition is the sole judge. In likeness, writes the philosopher Paul North, “The world gets edited, a gap gets spliced out, one character shimmies up to another. A thing, distant in space from another thing, overlaps with the other thing in one or more of its qualities.” No wonder Wall’s realistic fictions 88

provoke us to wonder where the border between real and fictive is to be found in them. His work is nourished by observation just as much as that of photographers such as Robert Frank or Garry Winogrand, for whom he expresses the greatest admiration. But observation comes into it in an oblique way, as it might for a writer of stories, for instance, who doesn’t merely record something seen, as a journalist or diarist might, but finds in it clues to something unseen, and then transmutes the observed fact in such a way as to find a specifically artistic sense for it. That’s something that can’t be predetermined. Wall has often spoken of some of his photographs as being “near documentary,” a phrase in which I hear the echo of Walker Evans’s “documentary style.” For both of them there has been a sort of approach-avoidance ambivalence to the idea of the document. They want what the poet Marianne Moore called “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”—or is it the other way round: real gardens with imaginary toads? The garden, in any case, is the veritable emblem of the intertwining of culture—of cultivation—with nature. And there’s as much artifice involved in maintaining an English garden, with its fiction of wildness and informality, as a French garden, with its decorous rectilinear layout. Gardens have been

Above: Jeff Wall, A woman with a covered tray, 2003, transparency in lightbox, 64 ½ × 82 inches (164 × 208.5 cm) Opposite: Jeff Wall, Fallen rider, 2022, inkjet print, 74 ¾ × 98 ¾ inches (190 × 251 cm) All artwork © Jeff Wall

an occasionally recurrent theme for Wall, most explicitly with the triptych I Giardini/The Gardens (2017), his largest work so far. The orderly garden becomes the setting for conflict, and in the triptych’s last panel it appears that those who believed they were in control are somehow both trapped within it and evicted from it. Another work set in a garden is A woman with a covered tray (2003), which Wall has characterized as exemplifying his idea of “urban pastoral.” In a paradoxical way, this picture makes a point of withholding its point. A path cuts diagonally through the scene’s impressive greenery—from bottom right to upper left, which is perhaps to say (since we read left to right and not right to left) into the past. A young woman walks this path into the distance, perhaps toward a building of which we see only the roof tiles, her back to the camera as she carries a tray entirely covered by a white cloth. The sky is overcast, the ground damp. We learn from Wall’s commentary that the setting is “a walkway between two buildings of a large residential facility for the elderly,” but I don’t think that specificity is necessary for the viewer to perceive the sense of care, almost of ceremony, embodied by the traybearer—especially since this is another work in which Wall chose a setting different from that of his initial observation. But who she is, where she is

going, and what she is carrying remain unknown. Perhaps this is allegory for the mysterious and elusive role of “content” in the work of art. I mentioned before that Wall had just twice remade a work. One of them now bears the title An Eviction and the dates 1988/2004. (In its first form it was titled Eviction Struggle; the current version was made as a digital montage using material photographed during the original shoot, in 1988.) Its subject can be thought of as counterpointing the expulsion that concludes I Giardini/The Gardens. It is anything but a pastoral. Far from depicting a hortus conclusus, it encompasses a vast space: here it’s not a footpath but a road, again running from bottom right to upper left, through what appears to be a working-class suburb (though one house on the street is rather grander in scale than the others) and leading diagonally into the distance. Behind the houses runs an elevated rapid-transit track, and beyond that one can see a city sprawling toward the far horizon. One notices first the nearest house, on the right: it is the only one with the pride of a picket fence around its front yard. But the tiny man and tricycle-riding boy in front of it are not caught up in the eviction mentioned in the title; like the foreground figures in Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560), they have their own thoughts to attend to.

The brouhaha, the struggle, is taking place among a group of even tinier figures at the picture’s midpoint: two men grab the arms of a third as a woman comes running up, her arms outstretched, her pose like something out of a Baroque painting. And yet what counts more is precisely the stance of the people who are not involved: the most significant change that Wall made to this composition—at least as far as I can tell from comparing the present work with a thumbnail of its original state—was precisely to add the indifferent figures in the foreground while removing one who was more evidently observing the eviction. I think it’s clear that on purely compositional grounds, An Eviction is a stronger picture than Eviction Struggle, but does the change also create a different meaning? Not so much different as sharper. What might be called the secondariness of the nominally (and compositionally) central narrative takes on an even more pointedly ironic significance. That this is so makes it even more intriguing that Wall has only once made such a “correction” again, with Trân Dúc Ván (1988/2003; not in the Beyeler exhibition). Perhaps that’s because, in the domain of likeness where Wall’s pictures live, things can always be otherwise, and perhaps improved, but there is no criterion of correctness—only the truth of feeling. 89

Carol Kino’s forthcoming biography of Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe, the identical twin sisters who blazed new trails in the world of photography—Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines—charts a critical moment in the United States, bringing to the surface questions around aesthetics, technologies, and gender through the arc of the twins’ lives. Here, Kino meets with award-winning biographer Mary Gabriel, whose 2023 publication Madonna: A Rebel Life described the unparalleled significance of the musician’s life and career, to discuss the origins of their most recent projects, as well as the specific considerations that underpin the process of narrating a life.

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY MARY GABRIEL So Carol, tell me, where are you at

this moment with your book? CAROL KINO Oh, the book is pretty much finished; they’re not letting me make any more changes. MG I find it so terrifying at that stage, because it’s impossible to write a book and not make mistakes or see places where you’d like to add or subtract a word, if not a paragraph. Given your history as an art journalist, where did this idea come from? CK Well, I wrote a couple of small stories about a show by one of the McLaughlin twins and her husband, the Harper’s Bazaar photographer Leslie Gill, and through that I got interested in the entire family, because the other twin had also married a photographer, whose father had been a really famous photographer in the Jazz Age. Then my agent and I were trying to come up with a good subject for a book and I knew that I wanted to focus on midcentury America in some fashion. I was intrigued by this idea that there had been many female photographers in midcentury who had successful lives and careers, in contrast to the painters—as you know [laughter]. I’d written so many stories about painters of that period who were downtrodden and struggled for success, and I didn’t want to write that story again. The original proposal was to write about a group of women during this period, and the editor who acquired it said “Write about the twins.” MG I think that makes a lot of sense. You pay homage to their birth and their early family in the book, but really the gist of the story is the ’40s and ’50s. Why did you decide to do that? CK [Laughs.] This is going to sound terrible, but I really didn’t set out to write a full biography. I love writing profiles and illuminating cultural scenes, but I’m less entranced by the idea of defining an entire life. I’m sorry to have to admit that in this discussion! MG No, I think it really works, because so often people feel obliged to continue a person’s story well past the time when they’re actually doing anything. I think what people want to know about is the person in their heyday. I do admire biographers who write what I call soup-to-nuts biographies, which contain every important date, every scholarly detail, but I think for the kind of book you wrote—because it isn’t just a biography of two women, it’s a cultural history—you needed to limit 90

the focus to their lives in that period. CK And there wasn’t a massive amount of information about their lives anyway, because they were focused on taking pictures and that’s where much of the biographical information came from. I spent a lot of time looking at the pictures they took, and at the notes on the back of the pictures, and piecing the story together that way. There were threads I could follow and build on from a few interviews with them, but they were discreet about their personal lives. So the book became sort of a cultural history wedded to the shape of their lives. I’m so c ur ious about what you d id w it h Madonna. I’m reading the book now and I’m interested in your technique, and how you managed to make it seem as though you were interviewing her, and yet you didn’t. How did you do that? Did you read every single interview and look at every single video? MG When I write a book, I—and it drives everyone in my life crazy, I mean, truly crazy—I just literally give up my life and live that person’s life full-time. In Madonna’s case it’s no exaggeration to say six to nine hours a day, seven days a week for five years. In that time, I read and listened to every interview with her I could come across. I read every interview that her colleagues and family and compatriots gave. I watched all of her performances; I listened to all of her music. I mean, there was so much information that it wasn’t a matter of trying to piece together tenuous threads; it was almost having too much. I wasn’t able to interview Madonna myself, despite five years of trying, but I think the book works anyway. What I did was treat her as a historical figure, which I think actually makes sense because she exists so far out of our normal day-to-day life, on a plane apart. So I just pretended that she was out there on another planet and I’m telling the story that I can access: a historical story as a cultural historian. What I tried to do, and I hope it works, is that when I’m writing about her in 1983, at the start of her career, for example, I quote an interview from that moment, so that a reader hears a young Madonna talking, not Madonna at the age of sixty remembering what she was like at twenty-three. Also, in all my books, I want to try to immerse the reader in the person’s life as much as I possibly can. So I try to remain out of it completely, and

just have the characters talk to the reader and set a scene in the way maybe a novelist might. Unfortunately, as a result, my books are always huge, because, as you know, you can’t tell a life story with all the context around it without adding pages and pages and pages. I always opt for the book I want to write as opposed to the book I should write, which is a saleable 400 pages. I just let it rip and remain poor [laughter]. CK That’s what’s so interesting about your books: as a reader you feel you’re walking through the world you’ve captured—it’s the fullness that pulls you in. I couldn’t read Ninth Street Women [Gabriel’s book from 2018 on the lives of artists Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler] when I was working on my book because I just— MG There was so much overlap. CK Yes, and when I finally read it, I realized there was even more overlap than I’d initially thought! Occasionally I’d look at it to do something like check a detail about Mary Abbott, who also appears in my book; the twins knew her as Mary Lee. But I didn’t realize that Wilfrid and Elisabeth Zogbaum appeared so often in Ninth Street Women, too. MG And Hans Namuth; so many names came up in both stories. CK Your book was so intimidating whenever I looked into it, because you painted this massively full picture of everything going on at the time. I had to keep reminding myself that your book was much longer than mine would be. But once I’d finished mine, I was able to sit back and appreciate yours. MG It’s just a different approach. Though in reading your book, in the Depression and war-years sections especially, I still got the feeling that without going into the excessive detail that I did, you gave the reader the sense of what it was like to be living at that time. Also, that unbelievable period during the war years when women found their voice because men just weren’t there—the kind of photographs that your characters were taking during the ’40s were incredibly advanced for that time. CK I think so. MG They would still be considered innovative today. And then I realized, well, women were speaking artistically in the ’40s because they were

Frances McLaughlin-Gill and Kathryn Abbe, Montauk, New York, c. 1944. Photo: James Abbe Jr.

MARY GABRIEL AND CAROL KINO given a platform. Then that platform more or less disappeared for thirty, forty, fifty years, and now it’s back. There’s this nice return of those images, I find. CK Looking through the magazines, there was this year, 1947, when everything changed: the men started coming back, and they got the credit for all the advances women had made. Women were just supposed to— MG —go back to the home. CK Exactly, and look up to the men like these great saviors. Of all the innovations women photographers made, the most striking to me was the blurry action snapshot photograph. Men got the credit for dreaming that up after the war, but that had already been done by women for a few years, by Franny in particular, who had been hired by Alexander Liberman almost out of art school precisely for her ability to capture movement in a still shot. Same with other fields: Cipe Pineles, the visionary young art director of Glamour, championed this new naturalistic photography and was the first woman to be inducted into the Art Directors Club, but when Liberman arrives, she’s just disappeared from Condé Nast and he doesn’t even remember that she’s been there. MG If you look at women in this time, the ’40s, they were in power, and in the ’50s they were just pissed [laughter]. This actually leads to Madonna: part of the reason I wrote that book was that I wanted to do another art book, and she chronologically is the daughter of that period of women from Ninth Street, and you know, we are too. The women in the ’40s tasted power, and in the ’50s most of them had to relinquish it. But they gave birth to this generation of daughters whom they—what’s the word?—not subconsciously but surreptitiously imbued with a sense of the power they’d lost. In other words, they gave them lessons in empowerment that society wouldn’t have. Madonna got the message at a moment before it was entirely corrupted. In the ’60s and early ’70s, she was just a kid and she heard the message, “You can be powerful, you can do what you want. You can be what you want. You’re as good as your brothers.” And she believed it. You said you started with an idea of maybe a group of women and then you narrowed it down to the twins. When you’d done that, did you have 91

a clear picture of what the book was going to be? CK I did and I didn’t. I always wanted it to end with them marrying, in this sort of ironic way, because that’s the way many novels about women end, with the marriage. I was also thinking of The Makioka Sisters, Jun’ichiro� Tanizaki’s novel about postwar Japan. I haven’t read it since I was in college, but it’s about a family’s efforts to marry off the eldest daughter so that her younger sisters can be married. The book ends with her marriage, which is presented as a triumph but in reality is not ideal. So in my book I wanted to present the twins’ respective marriages as the ending, yet not an idyllic ending, and not the end, because they still had to resolve their careers, which went on long past their husbands’ deaths. And of course their lives and careers had very different trajectories because of the men they married. MG So you knew how it was going to end, but I often find I don’t know the shape of the book or I don’t really understand the story until I’ve finished and then I go through and read it. Did you have that experience? CK Yes. I would say I had this vague idea of the shape it would take, but getting it to tie up neatly in a bow and having it feel right didn’t happen until it had all been written. There were so many threads I was dealing with, starting with the twins and their relationship with each other, which was very difficult to navigate, and their complicated relationship with Jimmy Abbe, the photographer with whom they were both involved before he married Kathryn. Were they competitive? Were they loving? How much of what they said about each other, and what their family and friends said, was true? That was so difficult to figure out. There was so much intricate reporting needed to define all of that before I got to the end. And then there were a lot of threads about what had happened, in society and how America had changed, that I was also trying to work out, with way more original reporting than I’d expected. I took pains to make it read lightly and amusingly, but there are many deeper layers all the way through. How do you decide on a new project? MG Okay, well, what interests me in a biography is taking a person or a period of history that we think we know everything about and telling a new story. So for example, let’s talk about Karl Marx. I was living in London and I came across a magazine article about Marx’s two daughters. He had three daughters and two of them committed suicide and I thought, Whoa, that’s an interesting story. So I started looking around for something about them, and I realized that in the extensive material about Marx—the books on him could easily fill a library, and a sizeable one—no one had really bothered to talk about Marx the man. Who was this guy and who was his family? Every person of significance, whether it’s an artist, a philosopher, a warrior, a revolutionary—if they have a family, that family impacts them. And with Marx in particular, in Victorian times your community was very small and it was largely made up of the people directly around you. Marx had been depicted from the head up, I like to say; he was all brain. But I wanted to tell the rest of him, Marx the body, Marx the man. And to do that I had to tell the story of his family. So I just shifted the narrative a bit. Here’s a guy who everyone in the world knows by name, but how much do we really know? And if you just look at him slightly differently, it changes everything. Then with Ninth Street Women I did the same thing. With the Abstract Expressionist era, even if 92

you don’t know anything about art you know about Jackson Pollock, you know about drip paintings, or can at least picture what they look like. But that was such a narrow and limited portrait of that time. So many years ago when I met Grace Hartigan, one of the painters I wrote about, she told me this unbelievable story of what actually happened then and how women were a big part of it. CK What was the story she told you? MG She just talked about her life during those times, and that it was this great party, basically— this convergence of poets, painters, composers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, everybody living in Manhattan or as far away as Long Island and creating in response to what had been happening around them and to the war, which had also, unbelievably, been left out of the Abstract Expressionists’ story. By the time we started learning about the movement, it was Clement Greenberg’s version of that history and it was entirely theoretical. He eliminated the fact that these artists had just watched the world be destroyed, both in war and by the atomic bomb. Where do you go from there as a painter? What’s the subject? So the subject became themselves. Grace also talked about a lot of women who had been completely left out of the telling of that era. And as I’ve said, at the moment of the most revolutionary period in American art history, women were essential. Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning were some of the prime forces in that movement, and for a long time no one paid attention to them. I decided to take a moment in art history, in cultural history, and make it come alive in a new way by looking at it from a different perspective. And with Madonna it was the same thing. Like Marx, everyone knows Madonna, and everyone has an opinion. CK That’s what’s so interesting. MG And I mean, what’s it based on? It’s based on insane headlines that have nothing to do with her. So once again, I said, Okay, well, let me just go back to the start, which is what I do with all these people. I go back as far as I can to the source material and start from scratch, and I try not to be influenced by what’s been said about them. I just want to read and study and learn about what their contemporaries said at the time and who they were at various points in their lives. I think the person who emerges from this book is surprising even to some of her superfans, because I’m not treating her as a celebrity, which is the Madonna we all know, I’m treating her as basically a performance artist and a cultural revolutionary. Very few artists can actually say they’ve changed the world and I think she can really lay claim to that. I remember when I wrote my Marx book, I was living in Italy and a lady down the road, she was so great, this old British lady, I told her what I was doing and she said, “Oh god, does the world need another book on Karl Marx?” And it was a good question. But with biographies, when I hear a comment like that, I think of a Cézanne still life. Cézanne will paint an orange one way and Van Gogh will paint an orange a completely different way and Picasso will paint an orange a third way. Each biography is that way too. It’s a mind meld, a meld of the person doing the writing and the person they’re writing about. So it’s not really a biography at all, it’s a portrait. You and I could have the same source material and we’d come up with entirely different stories about the same person. I think that’s why I always bridle when people say a book is a definitive biography, because that

just doesn’t exist: it’s just my interpretation or your interpretation, and some are more accurate than others, some are more interesting than others, but they’re all valuable. We have this tendency to think of a biography as something cold and factual, but there’s a human behind the pen—although maybe when AI starts writing biographies, that will no longer be the case. CK That will be the definitive biography [laughter]. But to your point, there have been two biographies of Condé Nast and they’re very different from each other and explore different aspects of his life and personality, I think depending on what the biographer was interested in. The Caroline Seebohm biography of Condé Nast, which is the earlier one, went much more into Glamour as the magazine he created from scratch, and that was of course very interesting to me because I was writing about that time from the perspective of young women. Nobody had treated these magazines for young women really seriously before because they were regarded as beneath contempt, which they shouldn’t be because young women control many aspects of our society. I was writing about the moment when marketers and powerful people began to realize that. That moment should not be disregarded, as anyone who has a teenage daughter must know, I think. MG You know, that’s what really surprised me in your book: I’d never considered for a moment that there was a fashion-magazine industry during the Depression. I mean, that just seems unbelievable. But in fact it was thriving. CK During the war, too. The magazines were using their paper rations to create more and more magazines for young women because that was the thriving market. I really had a hard time in the beginning getting photographers to take my project seriously, because of the fashion and young-women’s-magazine aspect of it, which really pissed me off. MG Really? I’m surprised. CK Early on, I tried to get in touch with photographers to find out how these old cameras worked. It’s surprising how many books or stories one reads where they don’t explain to you how something really works. I wanted to explain how these cameras function and how they changed throughout the period—not in muddy language but in really clear language. And at the beginning, I could not find guys who operated these old cameras and were willing to explain them to me, because they thought, “She’s writing about these dumb wealthy women who were fashion photographers who didn’t have a brain in their heads,” which was totally not true when it came to the twins—they excelled academically to the point where their achievements always made the papers, and they had to work because their mother lost everything in the Crash. It kind of infuriates me to think about it now. It took so long to have this taken seriously as a project, even when I had a [New York Public Library] Cullman Fellowship [laughs]. MG Well, welcome to Madonna’s world. CK Oh yeah, I’m sure. MG Even as the biggest pop star on the planet, she still wasn’t taken seriously. CK And she still isn’t now. MG Exactly. How many years does it take? Apparently forty isn’t enough. What do you hope a reader walks away with? CK How all the achievements we associate with the rise of feminism in the United States in the ’70s were actually going on in the ’30s and ’40s, and

Madonna, New York, 1984. Photo: Patrick McMullan/ Getty Images

then got squashed completely—even though people issued warnings at the time about there being a war on women. And now we’re seeing exactly the same thing happen again. I was also shocked to find in my research that women during this time were far more sexually free and sophisticated than I would have imagined—or at least a certain type of urban woman was leading a fairly free life in the late ’30s and in the ’40s. Maybe they continued leading it in the ’50s, but they didn’t talk about it, and it was all hidden beneath this propagandistic veil of the nuclear family. Then we had to really fight like hell to get it all back in the 1970s and now it’s being squashed again. I really hope the reader sees that and doesn’t just think the book is only about fashion [laughs]. What about you? MG When I did Ninth Street I had a specific person in mind I was writing it for, and I wanted a specific reaction: I was writing it for young, mostly women painters, but male painters too if they were interested, and I wanted them to see themselves, because before that you couldn’t look at the history of art and see someone who looked like you as a painter and think, “Well, how did they do it?” Not, “I’m going to paint like that person,” but “How did they manage their lives?” I wanted that reader to come out of the book thinking, “Okay, here are some cool-as-hell women who I can take courage from, and I can see what they did and the mistakes they made and how they navigated being a woman with the idea of motherhood and husbands and patriarchal society.” Then for Madonna, I aimed for a broader audience, because I want people, first of all, to react on the level of, Wow, what a story, because it’s unbelievable. You couldn’t make it up. And I also want them to develop an appreciation for her if they didn’t have one, and if they were already fans to come away having learned something. The Madonna we know about from the press is a media-created character; Madonna the artist and social revolutionary is so much more complex and so much more interesting. More broadly, I kind of use people as avatars through periods of history and she for me is my avatar for modern US history. So ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, 2000s—how did our world change? It’s changed massively. Was it always for the better? No. Is it better now? No. Are there ebbs and flows? Yes. And how does Madonna affect that? Where are we now? And what can you learn from her life about where we are now? I’d like people to take a look at Madonna’s life as a kind of guide through modern history to see where we’ve come from, where we are today, and to have the strength that she had to make sure that we don’t go backward. It’s a cautionary tale. And I mean, if I learned one thing from her it’s, My god, you have to have courage in this life because if you don’t, you’re not going to get anywhere and you’re not going to change anything. You’ve got one life—maybe, unless you believe in reincarnation—so you’d better make the best of it, and that’s what she’s done. I think readers might get a little dose of that inspiration. So Carol, I expect you to be a dancer and a singer by the time you finish the book [laughter].

JAMIAN JULIANOVILLANI Ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in New York, Jamian Juliano-Villani speaks with Jordan Wolfson about her approach to painting and what she has learned from running her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s.

& JORDAN WOLFSON

JAMIAN JULIANO-VILLANI Thank you for doing this. I

know you’re so busy, dude. JORDAN WOLFSON I’m not. I’m just with my dad, and we’re on vacation together, so he’s by the pool. But let’s talk about your work. You sent me a Google Drive with a bunch of images from the last eight years. JJV It’s all over the place. JW So how has your art changed in that time? Are you working differently now? JJV Jesus. At first I did what I wanted. Then I gave the people what they wanted, and it’s back and forth for almost a decade now. Now I’m doing what I want again, and the paintings are happening as they need to. JW Yes, I’m the same. I remember in college I was doing the work I wanted to do; then I got out of school and I was doing the work I thought I should be doing to become successful. Then I hated myself and started making the work I wanted to again. Then I got nervous and for a second didn’t do the work at all. Now I’m back doing the work I want to do again. JJV Ultimately I have a responsibility to make paintings. I have a responsibility to myself and to the work. I view myself as an idea orphanage. JW When you think about a painting, what do you think about? In terms of the total experience of what painting is, can you unpack that process for me? I know there’s content. I know there’s scale, there’s color, and there’s technique. How does it work for you? JJV At first I see an image, or a dream, and then I see a shape. The shape is usually formal. Usually one color. It functions as a TV screen at that point. You have the image or the formal “thing,” e.g., a piece of black construction paper or whatever. Then it needs to have some kind of vibration. Then after it has that vibration, you need to throw a stick in the mud. After that it needs to calm down, breathe, sweat a little bit. At that point I look at it—that’s where the reflection comes in—and then

there’s the personal touch at the end. It’s like making a minimovie. JW Let me break it down a little bit and tell me if I understand. First there’s this idea, or this image— I’m going to pretend I’m you. Don’t take offense, it’s not supposed to be a parody— JJV I’ll roll with it. JW So there’s a hand reaching into a toilet. Then the toilet has teeth and eyes, and then the toilet is somehow floating on an image of the Maharishi or some type of enlightened person. Then there’s a watch on the wrist of the hand going in the toilet. Then the watch on the wrist has a certain time. Then maybe there’s potentially slime around the edges or something. JJV I mean, kind of [laughter]. I told you I wouldn’t take it personally, but I’m like . . . Let me put it this way: there are so many different ways you can enter something that’s flat. For me, when I look at other people’s work, I want someone to force me into a direction. I want to be forced to be in that zone. It’s like being in a room with someone you don’t want to be in the room with. When I make paintings, I want to dictate someone’s reality for a moment, and then they can forget about it if they want. There are so many passive paintings, I can’t stand it. I started painting because I wasn’t seeing the paintings I wanted to see. I’m like, “You know what, I’m going to make them,” and I did. They evolved over time because I just kept on doing the things I liked. I put on horse blinders the whole time and just did what I wanted to do. Somehow that got me my very first show. If anyone made those paintings now, that shit would totally not fly. Remember, I did this like fifteen years ago. Growing up in a silk-screen factory and coming from where I came from and seeing T-shirts being made— JW I want to stop you right there. Basically you’re saying that you grew up in this very “high and low” environment; you grew up in “low” because your parents were producing merch for the Catholic

church and all sorts of stuff. When you first looked at these “low” images that were being produced, what was your relationship to them as a kid or an adolescent? You saw a strangeness? Can you talk about that? JJV No, I never saw a strangeness in them at all. They just were always there, from day one. It’s like being born blind. JW Cheap, ugly, low, fast. JJV No, not low. JW No, but I mean low, like quickly produced. JJV Oh yes. Definitely quickly produced. I never realized how much my parents’ business would influence me. I tried to distance myself from it completely but I think it’s just in my blood. If you look at videos of my dad selling his merchandise for the pope, we’re like the same person. JW Are those videos online? JJV Oh my God, I have to send them to you. You will die. JW Let me ask you another question and then we’ll come back to this. What’s your relationship to scale in your paintings? JJV It’s so important. I started with things that I could actually lift and hold myself, because that’s what space allowed. I’m five feet two, and when I go up to a painting, I like to be trumped by it a little bit. I want it to function like a monument. It should look back. JW Do you know Barnett Newman’s quote about scale? He says, “In the end, size doesn’t count, whether a painting is small or big is not the issue. It’s scale that counts. It’s human scale that counts. The only way you can achieve human scale is content.” JJV Yes, totally. That’s exactly what it is. JW What’s your relationship to craft? JJV I try to avoid it but it always gets in there. The problem is I’m incredibly specific when I paint. For me, painting has always been a means to an end, so I know every trick there is. I can tell when someone cheaps out, and when I say “cheap out,” I mean spiritually. Previous spread: Jamian Juliano-Villani, Self-Portrait, 2023, oil on canvas, 102 × 76 ½ inches (259.1 × 194.3 cm) This page: Jamian Juliano-Villani, Spaghettios, 2023, oil on canvas, 73 × 83 ½ inches (185.4 × 212.1 cm) Opposite: Jamian Juliano-Villani, Samantha, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 inches (121.9 × 152.4 cm)

Who are the artists you worked for? I worked for Dana Schutz, Jules de Balincourt, Jessica Dickinson. I worked for the Leo Koenig gallery. I worked for Erik Parker, Marc Handelman. The list goes on. JW Out of all those artists you worked for, who do you think was the most interesting? JJV All of them. Everyone has their own unique set of problems and you’re a broker for it, you’re the middleman. It’s like helping a beaver build its dam and every beaver does it different. JW How long does it take you to make a painting on average? JJV Honestly, the shortest time for a painting that was successful, it’s probably two and a half hours. The longest one, six months. Like most artists, I’ve spent hundreds of hours on works that have never seen the light of day. I think it’s important to get these things out of your system. I usually like to do something last minute, too, to see if I still have it in me. I don’t understand these artists who are done at the opening, it blows my mind—I’m usually there blow-drying a painting dry. I always think, “This is the last goddamn time . . . ” JW Yes. I work past the opening, and for me— JJV Yes, dude, just lock the door. It’s my show. You know what I mean? People that are done on time, I’m like, “How lazy are you?” JW I don’t think it’s really laziness, it’s just that— JW

JJV

JJV I know, but, like, push it. Let’s go. I wish a show could just keep moving, you know what I mean? JW Though at a certain point, I don’t want to touch an artwork anymore. It gets to a— JJV Yes, there’s a shelf life on it, for sure. The second you’re like “Fuck it, I like it,” stop. Even if it doesn’t “look” finished, to me it is. Then it depends on the audience, like is the audience stupid or is the audience smart? JW It’s important to trust that the audience is always the smartest audience. You need to believe that the audience will understand you in an unconditional way, even though that might not be real or consistently true. JJV That’s the best way to make work. Yes, for sure. JW Who’s the best artist in the past generation? Not your generation, the generation before you, or two generations back. JJV Mike Kelley. All my answers are everyone else’s answers, I’m sure. I’m not going to give you anything crazy. Robert Gober. It’s funny, my taste versus what I make looks so misaligned, but it’s not. Richard Artschwager. JW Did you ever talk to Ashley Bickerton about your work? Did you guys ever talk about the things you made? JJV I tried not to, because I was working with him as a gallerist [at O’Flaherty’s, the New York

This page: Jamian Juliano-Villani, Self-Portrait in Greece, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 48 inches (122 × 122 cm) Opposite: Jamian Juliano-Villani, Aggression of Green Square, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 52 × 90 inches (132 × 228.6 cm) All artwork © Jamian Juliano-Villani

gallery that Juliano-Villani founded with Billy Grant and Ruby Zarsky]. I’m in a unique position with what I’m doing with the gallery; I try to keep my ego out of it because I want to learn from the artists. I’m hoarding information here. With every show I do with someone, I’m blown away because I learn something completely new. It’s like I’m gathering all these little merit badges of information. JW What did you learn from Ashley? JJV A lot. Passion and freedom. And how words really matter, how being present really matters. Also, I learned how to have emotional connections with other artists, instead of just looking at them as object-making people. JW You looked at an artist as a thing or an idea? JJV In a way—in any case not as a person. Then he made them personal, he made them people for me. JW Why are you committed to the practice of painting? Some of the artists you mention made

paintings, but they had really expansive practices and are generally better-known for sculpture. JJV I like the system of it. It’s self-contained in ways I am not. JW Can you talk about that? If you’re an expansive-practice person, and at the same time you’re committed to the act of painting, why is that? JJV Obviously there are things that physically cannot be translated into painting—such as real movement, et cetera. There’s no way around it, and if the idea needs to go elsewhere, it will. The history and structure around painting gives me access to my intuition and something to parkour off of. Whatever vehicle translates my idea the fastest. JW Would you classify making art as difficult? JJV I don’t think it’s controllable; I think artists just do it. I think it really depends on your attitude, too. JW Do you feel like people still have high standards for art? Or do you feel like standards have gone down?

I think there’ll always be high standards for art. Success, however, means a variety of different things to different people. JW What’s your version? JJV Seeing something happen that hasn’t happened before. JW I get that [laughter]. But I think your paintings function in a classical way. They’re at their best when they’re ambiguous. There’s a kind of release and a kind of restraint. How much do you look at contemporary image-making in entertainment, because a lot of these— JJV Honestly, the most stressful thing in my life right now is that my Optimum cable isn’t working. JW But I’m thinking more about your use of brand iconography, like Marni, or Scott toilet paper. What’s the appeal of that? JJV It debases the painting, and the elegance of where I am. It’s a dose of reality. JW Why do you intuitively find that interesting? I think I’m a little older than you. It’s like your generation has a tendency to do it. JJV We’re consumers. It doesn’t have a reason in itself, but it’s part of what I’m trying to express. JW It’s interesting because if you look at the ’90s generation, they were affirming that cinema was a representation of the collective unconscious. Then Pop art was also related to the collective unconscious. But this feels different now, it’s not about a collective— JJV No, it’s about identity. JW Identifying as a type of consumer? JJV Yes. It’s like someone made that decision to get that specific thing instead of another thing. JW Like, “Oh, I’m a health-food person. I’m drinking almond milk,” or “I’m— JJV Exac t ly. T hey’re sig n i f iers. It’s about subjectivity. JW “Oh, that type of person does that thing. Oh, this type of person has a TD Bank card. That type of person has a Bank of America card.” JJV Exactly. JW I made an artwork years ago where I made an animation with Diet Coke bottles and I filled them with milk and they walked around the city. It was called Con Leche [2009]. I guess it’s a similar thing, but I wasn’t trying to talk about a specific person or identity. Diet Coke is a total-gestalt idea of a full type of social hollowness, or a type of— JJV

Exactly. That’s what these are. For the same reason, there are so many things I won’t put in my paintings because they’re such low-hanging fruit— like flowers and cigarettes and liquor. I have a natural aversion to certain things. JW What’s your relationship to or resistance to the paranoid censorship that’s going on today? Can you talk about that at all? JJV I’m just ignoring all of that completely. Someone who’s been appropriating for years, someone who actually left their New York gallery because I was being censored—to think about that as something to even consider while making art is an abomination. The whole reason why we make art is because it doesn’t have to even be real. I’m more afraid of being dragged into a boring conversation about censorship because it really doesn’t make any sense to me. JW How did it feel to be censored? JJV It felt like I was being strangled. I started making art because it was what I wanted to do. Someone doesn’t have to like it, and I’ve said this so many times—you don’t have to like it, you don’t have to show it. JW You don’t have to look at it. JJV Yes, but you can’t tell me what I can and cannot make. I think art is the one last place where people are actually allowed to let their freak flag fly. If that’s taken away, it’s over. JW I have to say I feel really good about my new piece Body Sculpture. I bring that up because there’s nothing I held back from the piece. Even if that alienates certain collectors or curators or critics or whomever else, I know that I stayed fully true to myself, and that’s more worthwhile, that has more value to me than any type of success. I can’t express how that feels to me, within my person and spiritually that I was just true, that I was true and I wasn’t fearless, but I moved through fear. I have a huge sense of relief in my conscience that I did that. JJV Yeah, I know, it’s a self-actualizing kind of stress. Learning to trust your instinct and accepting the reception of your ideas for better or worse. JW I’ve had an internal f ight to stay true to myself. I think what people and artists don’t realize is that even if you become a known artist and have a professional career, like you and I do, there’s a huge struggle to stay true, to stay legitimate, to the fundamentals of the practice, for whatever that JJV

means. When you see artists losing track, and you see artists decline in their work, it’s because they didn’t fight the good fight to survive, but if you’re constantly in that confrontation with yourself, it seems to be a path to a kind of self-legitimacy. JJV I’ve been on all sides of this. It’s why I started the gallery, too. If I couldn’t make the work I needed to make, I wanted to facilitate others’ visions in the meantime. JW I couldn’t do it, but at the same time, I believe the times change. I’m not opposed to changing with the times as long as I’m able to stay true to myself. I believe that all of us change. I believe all our work changes. I believe the authentic relationship to the audience requires it; the audience wants to witness us change. JJV 100 percent. JW When I see another artist who’s still making the same work, it’s hard for me to be engaged with them any longer because I’ve changed. JJV Because you already know what to expect. JW If Stanley Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange [1971] or Barry Lyndon [1975] or 2001 [1968] over and over again, it would be boring, but every time he took on a new genre and he changed. JJV You want to see an artist respond. JW What’s your relationship to male painters who emulate your work as a woman? JJV I don’t identify with any of the aesthetics I use to make my work, they’re just a vehicle I’m using at the moment. If someone else can use them too, good for them. JW What’s your relationship to commercial galleries? JJV I like them. Sure they run on money, but they provide a few services for the public. JW Are there par ticular galleries that you respect? Galleries that have an arc, or— JJV Any fucking gallery I respect, dude. This job is fucking hard. JW [Laughs.] JJV Literally, I respect all galleries because this shit is not easy. Artists have egos. It’s hard. At O’Flaherty’s, for one show I was unpacking catfood cans out of a crate and I was thinking, “How the fuck am I going to sell this?!” And I really tried. That’s fucking crazy.

100

Kelsey Lu

Art historian and curator Olivier Berggruen reflects on his trip to Berlin to see a performance by the multihyphenate Kelsey Lu. Following his experience of that performance, “The Lucid,” Berggruen caught up with Lu in New York, where they spoke about the visual elements of their work, dreaming, and the necessity of new challenges. Photos: Clifford Prince King. 101

The Lucid: Transfigured Night It was getting late, but I thought I had just enough time to make my way to a musical performance in East Berlin, somewhere past Alexanderplatz along the Spree River. As I passed u nder a c er u lea n sk y of si lver y clouds, Google Maps proved inaccurate; eventually, on a side door in an industrial area, I found a small sign announcing the venue, a new performance space called Reethaus. I walked through the front entrance of a nondescript building, exited the building through a facing door on the other side, and then followed a narrow wooden path toward what looked like a ziggurat-shaped mound. On the far side I could see the Spree. It was chilly, with the sun emitting its last rays of light. No one was there; I had miscalculated my arrival time. When I checked in, I was asked to leave my phone in a locker and to don my shoes for felt slippers. Once I reached a terrace overlooking the river, a waiter who looked like a secular monk offered me some delicious hibiscus/cacao juice, which was refreshing. People started gathering. After a long day of travel, I found myself in a haze, as I saw a crowd of ghostly silhouettes flickering in space and bits of skin or jewelry or nylon clothing shining in random choreography. My friend Annette came up. I had seen her a few days earlier at a music recital in a baroque palazzo in Venice; although I knew she lived in Berlin, she seemed out of place here— she is a classical violinist, and I could not imagine her in a temple of experimental music. An intrepid venue for music, she said. But isn’t that what Berlin is about?, I thought to myself. Was this place trying to be too edgy? I wondered. We waited for some time; I talked to Klaus and a few other curators and artists I knew vaguely. Then at dusk Lu appeared, silently walking in our midst, as if sleepwalking, in a diaphanous white dress and white platform boots, with cropped hair dyed blonde, their eyes lifted hypnotically toward the sky. Slowly I started paying attention, opening myself to what was unfolding before me. The Lucid: A Dream Portal to Awakening, by Kelsey Lu It was all so quiet. We followed Lu into a zenlike temple, the inner room of the Reethaus—a monastic space with various tiers of seats, each seat filled with its own cushion. I sat on the floor on the edge of the stage. Lu reclined on a bed, or rather a white mattress covered in sheets and a duvet. The gentle murmur of cicadas was relentless and layered with electronic sounds. Lu then reached out for their cello, played a forlorn melody over the cluster of sounds, and started singing. 102

Only the stage was lit, and as the music unfolded, long layered chord progressions created vast loops of sounds within a space of unfathomable dreams. It had intonations of dronel ike ea ster n raga s, cla ssical cello, and Black churches in the American South. Yet it had its own distinct pitch. Lu moved slowly, haltingly. The reconf iguration of the body’s language into seemingly natural but vertiginous directions provided a sense of exhilaration as I observed their movements, while realizing that this unfolding was a natural choreography in which time could seemingly be suspended and space conquered. They started crying, wailing, the paroxysm of recalling that space is a void, yet it felt alive, caught between dreams and the realization of being caught in the prison of oneself. But not entirely: the shouts were a call to the unknown, a shared sigh that resonated with a night of veiled stars, yet enough to create seismic waves. A cry from the savage heart. And then the wailing slowly gave way to a reverie ending with the sounds of cicadas, and then silence, like a child returning to her mother’s womb. In Stillness We Dream T he lights came on, followed by applause, though I was still in a dreamy state, like someone floating in a sea of salt, ecstatic and in disbelief. Lu’s friends MJ Harper and Kandis Williams came onstage, quietly starting a conversation that led to a gentle interplay of three friends moving around the beautifully disheveled bed, their bodies in sync, at times interlaced, playful, enveloped in the afterglow of the performance. They then treated us to a cup of sweet sake. As we returned to the terrace, Lu mingled with the audience, glowing in their white dress, friends gathering around them, hugging them, teasing them, laughing. I chatted with them briefly, telling them about waking up to the sound of cowbells before coming to the shores of the Spree. The skies were faintly illuminated by distant stars, the moon barely visible behind hesitant clouds. It was a perfect day. —Olivier Berggruen With thanks to Kia Corthron and Mebrak Tareke for their comments. OLIVIER BERGGRUEN Lu, after your per-

formance in Berlin, I found myself thinking about how a sudden silence leads to something, and how all the different layers between transparency, opacity, and various complexities build up in your music. Could you speak about the process, and how silence plays into your work? KELSEY LU Well, even though I’m from a city in the South [Charlotte, North

Carolina], the South is still the South and the fabric of time and of sound are unique there. Sitting in silence and listening to my thoughts was a big part of my childhood, just being in the backyard, being within dirt, digging into dirt. OB W h ich t ie s i nto t he v isua l aspects in many of your works. With This Is a Test, shown at the Shed, New York, in 2021, for example, there was this mound around which you were performing. KL T he roots. Yes, a nd for my recent performance at the [Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York], I flew home to North Carolina and went to my childhood backyard and I dug a hole and collected dirt to bring with me for that piece. OB One of the things that struck me was the sense of ritual in your practice. Do you distinguish between the profane and the sacred? What you’re doing may not be religious in the traditional sense, but nonetheless there is a very strong spiritual dimension. KL Well, thank you [laughs]. Music is spiritual. There’s spiritualism in making music, in creating a space where people all come together, all listening to the same thing. We’re applying the meaning of what we’re experiencing in different ways. For me, music has always been the constant; even as I questioned or departed from the religious notions I was raised to believe, my faith in music hasn’t gone away. I clung to it so hard, it became my religion. OB When I first heard your work, on your albums Church [2016] and Blood [2019], I thought of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane. Do you see their work as part of a particular lineage that you relate to? KL Did you know John Coltrane is from North Carolina as well? But yes, beyond that geographical relationship, I believe that there’s also a lineage of vessels, where I, as a vessel, also fit in. By saying that, I’m referring to a magic that moves through us, that we hold for a time—when we can pull something off in a particular moment in a way that may never happen again. I have rituals and practices in my dayto-day life that tether me to an existence on this plane, and allow me to be able to do what I do. OB Do you w r ite dow n your dreams? KL I do. Not always, but I’m drawn to the practice: I feel like you’re stepping into your subconscious in a way, or you’re accessing memories of the past, present, and future—or even of you in this lifetime, or maybe in a past lifetime. I also think there’s collective dreaming. To not think that we’re affected by the myriad of people around us is pretty limiting. Just as I’m able to send an email to somebody on the other side of the world, I

think we’re able to access each other’s memories in some ways. OB Absolutely. There’s this Platonic dialogue called the Meno [402 bc] that speaks about anamnesis, or the recollection of events from past lives, or at least prelife. In Plato it’s a kind of oddity, but this very wonderful and beautiful dialogue seeks to understand why certain things that are so familiar to us are. We have certain knowledge of or affinity for certain things because our correspondence to them predates our birth. KL I believe that. OB You integrate so many different elements in your practice. Whether it’s visual, auditory, tactile . . . you’re able to embody something like a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk. Somehow the old division or separation between the arts is something that I f ind a lot of younger artists don’t believe in anymore; likewise, I think the old parameters of genre are being abandoned. While you do utilize tradition—musical notation, your preferred instrument of the cello—it doesn’t seem like you ever limit yourself to an orthodox manner of engaging those elements: you find ways of plucking the strings that may not be integral to the European tradition, or you have ways of playing the piano as Thelonious Monk did, in a completely novel way. KL A not her Nor t h Ca rol i n ia n [laughter]. Well, yes, I feel a strong urge to challenge what ever yone seems to be going along with. I’ll admit I have a rebellious streak; not going with the flow of what I’m told is my way to go about something. But this isn’t just resistance for the sake of resistance—I like challenging myself. I like challenging an idea of what one person is capable of. I think we’re capable of so much, while also being ants—we’re all tiny little ants on this planet, but ants are capable of holding a lot of weight. I think a lot of people are insecure with themselves. And I think that can come from being told how you should be or what you should be doing. It can be scary when you’re thinking for yourself creatively. I know that when I was in college, I was like, “I want to take all the classes. I want to take dance class. I want to take acting. There’s so much I want to do.” And many people around me really shunned that aspiration, shunned the idea of someone being capable of more than one thing: you should just focus on the one thing and that’s what you should be doing so you can master that one thing. And I understand that, but I just can’t do it. OB How did the project in Berlin, The Lucid, come about? KL I dreamt it. But the journey of the music itself was part of a larger piece, an eight-hour-long piece that I

made last winter. I composed it originally for a sound installation in Sydney, Australia. I never got to experience it, because at the time I was working on the f ilm Earth Mama [2023]. OB Which I haven’t seen. KL You can stream it. OB All right, I will. KL So both of those things were colliding at the same time; I was working on this film composition and this sound installation simultaneously. And it was interesting how they were feeding into one another, in a way. Working on the soundtrack for the film, and seeing, continuously seeing, the same scenes over and over and over again about motherhood, the womb, healing, grief, and loss, while also working on this eight-hour-long lucid-dreaming piece was impactful—all of this while I was also practicing lucid dreaming. Birth and loss and grieving were a big part of my dreamscape. OB I understand that the particular iteration for Berlin—at MJ Harper’s invitation—came together quickly. Was that a source of stress? KL I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to make something in such a short amount of time. Definitely. But as I was practicing over the summer, going and sifting through darkness, I was able to accept and trust my process in a way that felt right. It takes a lot of trial and error for a person to understand what their process is, especially if it doesn’t look anything like anyone else’s. OB It’s forever. I just turned sixty and I’m still struggling with issues to do with my writing. This process never ends. KL It doesn’t. But for this performance, an important moment carried me along: I traveled to Marseille for a friend’s birthday, and while I was there I was meditating on the roof and then I opened my eyes and I was looking out at the sea, and it dawned on me what I needed to do. This word kept coming up in my meditation: “Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest, rest.” OB I worked for many, many years on the work of Yves Klein for a retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao; it took him considerable time to arrive at a new project and it wasn’t always a conscious process, it was something that needed to be decanted like a wine over time. But once the idea was there, the implementation of what he envisaged was easy and painless. It’s like a lifetime of experience that’s concentrated in a drop of water. KL Exactly. When I realized what I needed to do for the performance, I realized that I already knew it. I realized that it was already there, it had been there. 103

Prosperity’S LONg Song LON

ARINZE IFEAKANDU

I was playing Frisbee on the football field when Soludo finished from his meeting with the principal. It was nothing bad, he was not in trouble or anything like that—sometimes our principal, Sir Mellitus Obinweke, liked to sit on his lawn with the cricket players, at other times with the choristers, drinking malt, eating chin chin, and talking things. That evening it was the turn of the cricketers. I tried to dodge, to hide from him, but already his eyes caught my eyes and he’d done his face like so: eyes narrowed into thin, knowing slits, as though reading my mind and saying, I dare you. I enjoyed spending time with Soludo. It was my second month there, at Marian Boys’ Boarding School, and I could say with my full chest that he was probably my closest friend. But I knew what he wanted today. I had been promising to tell him some more stories; now, he had that look on his face that said No more excuses—but I was not in the mood, it was Free Time, the two hours before supper and night prep when we could be wherever we wanted and do whatever we pleased. That evening I chose to play Frisbee with my classmates. I was the goalkeeper, standing in front of the net, watching my friends like a hawk as they chased one another in the half-field, the other half occupied by some JSS 2 students (Soludo’s classmates) playing set. They ran and ran in circles in their blue day wear, my classmates, laughing, dodging their opponents, flinging the yellow ice cream–plate cover into the air and then chasing it as it curved and curved in the breeze, catching it midair, dodging some more, while each team tried to find the perfect moment to curve the Frisbee at me, aiming to get it in the net. I stood at the center of the net, alert as my friend Samson had once shown me, ready to dive in either direction. I felt light as a breeze whenever I did this, sometimes catching the Frisbee midair, causing a groan from one team and cheers from another. I liked to fall on the prickly grass, nursing my catch, like a goalie who had saved a risky shot, but sometimes I surprised them by throwing back the Frisbee immediately, as high and as far as I could, watching it curve and curve in the air, watching them run in circles, arms outstretched. Soludo was walking with two boys, and because my classmates were still chasing each other around, throwing the Frisbee from one team member to another, I turned briefly, holding the net like a prisoner behind bars, and made a reluctant face, frowning, pouting my lips. Soludo smiled and shook his head, like he could not believe this boy. His friends Collins and Kachi split as they got closer to the field, Kachi headed onward toward his dormitory, Awka House, Collins headed to the Dining to see whether the cooks were done with supper—he was assistant bell ringer, the only senior in SS 1 among the now separated trio. Soon he would be scrapping and banging an iron rod against the rusty rim of an old tire—the handbell was for Classroom Block only, not the dormitories—the metallic tune going “Marian Boys, Marian Boys, come and eat, eat, eat!” Soludo pointed his V fingers at his eyes, then at me, like, I see you, before jumping onto the corridor and disappearing into the dark mouth of Waddington House.

I turned around, returning to our game, and there it was: a wave of blue tumbling my way. The Frisbee spiraled toward me, fast and beautiful. “Watch!” someone yelled, and before you could say Jack Robinson, the ice cream–plate cover was in the net. “Goal!!!” they shouted, four, five boys high-fiving each other, another five grumbling and looking pissed at me: “You weren’t looking!” “Sorry, sorry,” I said, picking up the Frisbee. My friend Samson was on the losing team, and his face was squeezed in anger. Samson hated to lose. “No, replay,” he said, walking to the other team. “Ifeanyi wasn’t looking.” “Our luck,” said Osita, the leader of the other team, approaching Samson. Osita was lanky and light skinned, looking not like a fighter at all, with the faintest sprinkle of black hair on his upper lip, where he told us his mustache would be growing soon. When he walked, it was as if he had neither time nor energy for anything or anybody, his long arms swinging, his torso tilted slightly backward and sideways, like a tree vaguely askew. “That’s not fair.” Samson was turning to his team members, turning to the other team, looking for supporters. His lips were pursed, making his face appear ratlike—this is not to say that he looked like a rat, no, he simply had a thin, scowling face, and whenever he put on his fighting look, well, that was when he appeared ratlike. He was wearing a darker shade of blue—his parents, like some others and unlike mine (who had simply followed the rules laid down in the admissions bulletin), had sewn a pair of day wear instead of buying from the school’s tailors, which made sense, they fit him perfectly, unlike mine, which were closer to sky blue and a little oversized. In our second week at the school, Sir Mellitus Obinweke had ordered the prefects to fish out everyone wearing the wrong shade of blue and Uncle Maths had given them each six strokes of the cane on the buttocks, in front of all the boys gathered outside Awka House for the impromptu assembly that afternoon. “Would you say the same thing had you been the ones that scored?” Osita queried. Both teams were now in a face-off and I was walking toward them, ready to mediate, to say, My fault, my fault. The sky was ashy blue, the air cool, which meant maybe it would rain later that night. (“Watch the clouds, the way they move,” Soludo had once said, though there were really no clouds today, only the ashen sky and a soft gentle breeze.) Everyone was now talking all at once, speaking rapid Igbo, making hunger pass through my stomach and my head, like I might collapse; I couldn’t stand them fighting in Igbo, it made me somewhat afraid of them, like they were more grown-up than me. Only adults quarreled in Igbo where I came from, which was Sabon Gari, Kano. We, the children, fought in pidgin, saying things like, Your father left yansh like burnt bread! “This is all your fault,” Samson said, turning to me. “Why weren’t you looking?” “It was a mistake, sorry,” I said, in English. “Why don’t we keep playing? I will give Samson’s team one allowance.” “No,” Samson said. “We will cancel this goal, count it as an offside.”

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Osita smirked, amused, looking from person to person, as though to confirm that he alone was not hearing that ridiculous proposition. “Please repeat yourself.” “We would have to count this as an offside.” I held the Frisbee behind my back, ready to run—soon they’d be fighting over it. Samson and Osita stood in front of each other as though they were about to kiss, but those angry eyes told a different story, Osita glaring down at Samson, looking all smug and ready, Samson glowering up at him, making me think of David and Goliath: one small boy against a mountain man. I didn’t see Osita as a mountain, though, he was more of a wiry tree, and I imagined his long-long hands stretching out to slap Samson stupid. There would be no space for Samson to slap back—we’d all seen Osita fight before and it had been a whir of hands on the other boy’s face. Not a fair fight at all. Glancing toward the Staff Quarters, which were to the right of the Classroom Blocks, we noticed that the parking space bordering the Staff Quarters and the Executive Block was empty; usually two cars were parked there, Uncle Art’s gray Peugeot and Uncle Maths’s red Mercedes-Benz, old cars spelling trouble. Earlier we’d seen Chaplain drive out, his silver sedan, the only new car in the entire school (except from when a parent visited, then the tiny lawn by the Staff Quarters would feature a shiny new car), going vroom, all speed. Chaplain often drove fast, blowing his horn right from the Executive Quarters, where he lived with his wife in the flat below the principal’s, turning slowly into the long driveway bordered by Ixora and salamander hedges and accelerating near the pine trees by Classroom Block that bowed when it rained, like saints at worship. When he drove off earlier, we’d waved, chanting, Chaplain, Chaplain, and then we’d rejoiced, feeling free. Now I wished his car were there, any car at all, something to spell trouble, something I could point at and say, Think twice. I hated being in fights, and though I was not the one about to start tussling in the grass, I was in the middle of it, my name would be called when the trouble exploded and scattered everywhere. My other classmate Ejiofor, whom we sometimes call

OBJ, because he looked like the president, Obasanjo, with his big stomach and fat cheeks and long pursed lips—he stood between them, saying “Hey, hey!” He was spreading his arms and legs, one hand facing Samson, the other Osita, and—because they kept approaching—putting two fingers in his mouth and declaring a foul with the whistle of his mouth, like a referee. Two shrill whistles, piiim, piiim. “Stop this nonsense!” he said, almost screaming, like they were about to punch him. Samson turned to me. “Give me the Frisbee,” he said, scowling. “We’ll cancel the goal but settle this with penalty throws.” “What?” Osita almost died laughing. “Unu a-na a-fukwa this boy? You must think you’re the boss around here.” “That is what we will do,” Samson said, hand outstretched. “Give me the Frisbee, Ifeanyi.” Osita was rushing to grab it from me, the both of them were. I ran—back toward the net, then zigzagging away from it, like I was about to cross our half of field into the other half, where one of Soludo’s classmates was dribbling a football. They were hot on my back, both boys chasing, the other boys joining them, Samson saying, Ifeanyi, Ifeanyi, like he would fight me if I didn’t stop, the other boys saying, Ifeanyi, Ifeanyi, with laughter in their voices. When I got to the white line demarcating the field, I stepped on the circle of the midfield, then, turning back to face Samson and the boys, flung the ice cream plate high to my right, where Ejiofor was waiting, and it sailed and sailed in the air, and I watched two crows flying leisurely across the turquoise sky, and then the other boys rushing toward the Frisbee, arms outstretched. Ejiofor caught it. “Kenneth!” he called, flinging it at a boy in Samson’s team (Ejiofor was in Osita’s), and it became clear to me that this had turned from a simple game of Frisbee to a game of catch, and that Samson and Osita were “it,” the ones to run around in the middle of the wide circle our friends had now formed, trying to catch the Frisbee. And with this new game, nobody had time to keep scores: you were simply “it,” or you were not.

I was not happy with Ifeanyi, but I went, after lights-out, to Soludo’s corner to hear him tell his story. He titled this one “A Bird’s View of Everything.” I had no idea where he got his titles. One story he told often was called “The Night the Minstrels Came,” and another one was “What Happens When We Go to Sleep?” It was my favorite, it reminded me of Nko’s style, with talking animals and benign and malignant spirits. Ifeanyi had admitted that he modeled the story after one of Nko’s, “Njakili,” a story set in the evil forest of Nko’s iku nne—before the missionaries came and broke the land, as Nko put it. His newest story, “A Bird’s View of Everything,” was about Prosperity, the ghost that sometimes sang in the toilets of Block B, or so he said. She was often bent over a bucket, washing and washing, whistling nonstop. On those nights when she did her

rounds, nobody dared approach the toilet after lights-out, the sound coming out of that place was eerie and frightening, alternating between the dry cackle of an old demented woman and the warm, syrupy voice of a child. She laughed and sang all night long: sad, languid songs; mocking laughter. We did dare to approach the doors, tumbling out of our dormitories and standing at the entrance, and we saw her hunched-over shadow, her pointing chuku like the head of Medusa. She often washed as she sang, we could tell from the motion of her hands, the hands of her shadows on the wall. She would throw her head back and then her shadow would be gone. We fled then, rushing into our bunk beds and those of our friends, hearts pounding with fright and excitement. Sometimes she paced around, her shadow crawling on the walls like a giant spider, climbing, climbing. But

the silence after her song was like a grace bestowed—she sang until four am, when we’d done our business elsewhere and, tired out, were sound asleep, breeze blowing in through the many open windows, I in Nko’s bed, his legs draped over mine. Nko slept like it was wartime somewhere there in his dreamworld, turning and turning, holding you, letting you go. Now, Ifeanyi told Soludo, Bobby, and me that he’d dreamed of Prosperity. He knew it was going to happen when he read the poem on the wall of Block B’s stairwell that night, the new poem everyone was talking of that week, about the Opam’s pallbearers. We didn’t know who wrote those poems. In the dream he stood on Milking Hill, watching a war unfold. He had a sense of déjà vu, like he had been there before, but many centuries ago—everything below was strange yet familiar. It was the same rolling green hills and the same red-brown earth, but in this previous life before the dream the landscape was dense, thicker with tenuous trees. From his perch on the hill, he could only see the clustering head of the forest, a few clearings scattered in-between, from which the smoke of daily life billowed. There was a

village down there and it was peaceful. Drums sounded in the distance, birds rising and fluttering, hawks gliding, everything as it should be—their beautiful flight, the syncopated sound of the lives below. That was in an earlier life. The vegetation of the dream was thinner, littered with aluminum-roof bungalows and red-clay huts, their roofs thatched. He was on that hill for days, watchfully waiting, he felt a responsibility to tarry, to accompany—for what reason he could not tell, except that the nights were heavy with the weight of things to come; he noticed movements in the bushes at night, car headlights flashing timidly on their hurried errand from house to house. Secret flights, he thought. There was peace below in the village otherwise, or a semblance of normalcy: children walked to the stream at the foot of the hill in the mornings, and then to school with their slates, singing all the way, and women cooked at their hearths, and goats and chickens milled around, pecking at the ground. He began to feel like a bird caught in the rain, wings laden with premonition.

-– – – — – — - – – – — — – — - — – – — — – - — — – — — It was as sudden as my confusion: my desire to fly. I had been a bird all along and did not know it. What kind of bird? you ask. I cannot say exactly. On some days I felt like a sparrow joyriding above the clouds, at other times I was a hovering hawk. I was never a crow, though—and yet crows were all I saw there. All the regular birds were gone, the sky empty of pigeons and colorful swi-swi birds. At evening, crows congregated on the branches of the great oak tree under which I sometimes sat, covering every inch of it, looking eerie in their clustering, having made the greens disappear so that the tree was in tatters of blackness. Their cawing was like a million voices prattling in my head, like a hundred conversations going on at the same time, as though my mind were a great meeting hall of everyone everywhere. At that time, I’d been on Milking Hill for seven days. You know how time expands in a dream, how elastic everything becomes, so that a century’s event is packed into five short-lived minutes? How a mere twenty frightening seconds of a nightmare can seem to last forever? Exactly. I felt the complete exhaustion of my long, idle wait, and something in me said Fly, so I spread my wings, which I did not even know I had, and did just that, fly. I can’t describe the sensation except that it’s pure rapture. First, the ticklish feeling in your sides, like you’re in love with danger itself. You feel heavy, like you might plummet, and if you look down, you see clearly the lay of the land, the pixelated outlines of trees and houses, depending on how high you go. After that, you feel light as air, trusting that the wind, no matter how weak, will carry you safely. I flew far and wide, traversing the sky from Coal City to Udi, perching on palm trees in Nsukka, where I saw the carnage that had begun brewing, fumes clogging the sky, and the rat-tat-tat of gunfire. My entire body was seized by convulsions of remembrance—I’d been there before. I fluttered from a mango tree across a row of pretty bungalows onto the

roof of one of the houses. It was a ghost town down there, the deserted streets littered with evidences of forced exodus (I knew this instinctively and did not question my knowledge, which felt timeless and deeply etched in my tiny bird brain), wheelbarrows and jerrycans abandoned in the middle of streets, charred cars with their doors flung wide open. When I landed on one, I felt deeply the terror of its long-gone occupants, smoldering, their sorrow burned my talons; saw clearly a vision of their last moments, hostile soldiers dragging father and mother and children out of their blue Mercedes. Wawa, said one of the soldiers, in his thick Northern accent, headbutting the father with his gun. He cackled, standing over the man who, paralyzed by terror, was struggling to stand on his feet. The man had a gentle Igbo face, like my uncle Okey, with his thick sideburns. The Colonel put his feet on the man’s chest, booting him back down, forcing him to his knees. He began to undo his belt. The other soldiers stood there, sniggering and shaking their heads, which meant he had done this before. His penis was like a snake, a long black cobra, his piss like smelly green venom all over the man’s face. His wife was holding their two kids, who seemed somewhere between ten and eleven years old, burying their faces in her bosom, shielding them from their father’s humiliation. She shut her eyes, too, looking away. The Colonel halted his pee, commanding his men, who gripped the woman’s shoulder, prying her from her children—their wailing, too heart-wrenching, little girl crying Daddy, little boy crying Mummy, woman weeping—making them watch. Nyamiri! The Colonel barked, mean and fearsome. Open your mouth. The cries and screams ringing across town were as hollow that cavernous morning as they had been centuries before, when a neighboring town attacked before dawn, with their ten-man

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cavalry and infantry of thirty, torching people’s huts, slaying the men who, surprised out of sleep, came out with their spears and machetes, their bows and arrows. Humans, when confronted with terror as unimaginable as this, scream all the way to the other side, their wailing ringing with grief and unbelief, baffled

denial to the very bitter end: it could not be true that the world had picked them for such senseless violence, such heartbreaking end. No person, hero or villain, has ever sat still in the face of such devastation. I fluttered away.

-– – – — – — - – – – — — – — - — – – — — – - — — – — —

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“You haven’t told us how you saw Prosperity,” I said. I enjoyed listening to Ifeanyi’s stories, but unlike Nko, he tended to digress a lot, which wasn’t entirely bad, because everything he said he made super clear and entertaining, especially the way he demonstrated, crouching up on his knees in Soludo’s bed earlier as he described, in animated whispers, his first dream flight, flapping his wing arms and then sailing his cupped palm through the air, showing us how the sparrow traveled. “Be patient,” Bobby said, glancing at Soludo, as if he expected a cookie from him for speaking up. “He’ll get there.” Soludo nodded, absent-minded, smug as always. “Prosperity is the little girl,” Ifeanyi said. “How do you know this?” “Because she told me. She did not tell me-tell me but following her I kept hearing the poem in my head: The pallbearers from Opam’s arrive / In their shapeless shoes. It was like a chorus in my head: Hoisting your casket. / Step to the left, step to the right— / One, two, three, they go, / Shoulders stooped with the weight of you.” It was chilling, the way Ifeanyi recited the poem, deadpan, slow, his eyes eerily reflecting the moonlight. His voice cracked halfway through, as though something were caught in his throat. Deadpan shifted to fire, his voice and eyes animated, a coldness descending in Soludo’s corner by the dormitory’s wide, wide windows. We all lay there on our stomachs, Soludo, Bobby, Osita, and me, silent as night. He was backing the window, Ifeanyi, and the corridor’s lights illuminated him vaguely, aglow behind him, shadowing his face. It was an uncanny transfigu-

ration, this was the Ifeanyi we all knew, harmless, the scarediest cat in our class, with his gentle voice and Nwa-Mummy face, now looking momentarily fearsome. That was exactly how incantations worked, exactly how people fell into trances: the poem injecting its essence into the cantor’s soul, bringing him close to divinity. My late great-grandfather Ichie Obejeri had been a powerful dibia in his lifetime. My mother used to tell us stories about him, that he could create and dispel rain, calling forth thunderstorms to disrupt the gatherings of his enemies, holding the rain for his clients so that the sky grumbled all day long but dared not weep until the end of the event. He lived to be 112, and I sometimes imagined him with my eyes closed, hearing his quivering voice in the darkness of my mind, how he would go from tender to crazily otherworldly, all because of a few poetic words said over and over, how he would dance in circles for hours, rattling his metallic ofor. That was the sort of thing I believed Ifeanyi was playing with. Nobody knew how the poem had found itself in the stairwell of Block B, for all we knew it might have been inscribed there by the hands of an evil ghost, and there was Ifeanyi casually reciting its incantations, making himself a willing vessel. “Six feet into the ground you go,” he said, completing the poem after a short pause, his go coming out like he was saying boo. “Jesus, Ifeanyi,” I said. “Be very careful with this story.” Soludo snapped at me. “Bia this boy, you can leave if the story is too much for you. Ifukwa? Don’t be disturbing somebody.”

I followed her scent, the little girl. Hers was the only one containing pungency, which I came to understand was the universal scent of life. It is a musk, each person’s unique, some containing more odor than sweetness (and vice versa), depending on how much atrocities you accumulate, the Idi Amins of this world oozing—as their essence passes our nostrils—pure bile. Remember what Uncle Social Studies told us about him, that he refrigerated the flesh of the people he murdered? I perceived that stench on the Colonel, too, and wherever he went the scent of the girl went with him, though I could not see her, not even when I perched in the soldiers’ camp, hopping from tent to tent. I was invisible to them but they felt my presence, it seemed, because they always looked directly at me, puzzlement scattered all over their faces, at first it startled me right out, their piercing

gaze; but it was my dream, a good dream in spite of its painful contents, and I knew I was safe. The soldiers rolled their armored tanks through towns and villages, shooting down everything in their path. They stayed in the compounds they sacked, making small campfires over which they roasted their spoil, goats bleating plaintively, even they were not spared the soldiers’ cruelty, made to run like prey around a circle of hooting soldiers. It negated everything I knew about Muslims and their treatment of animals—slice the ram’s throat, one clean cut, make it quick, show mercy. Perhaps that was the injunction for Salah alone, you never know with humans, their partial rules created to entrench hierarchies, to allow exactly this: coldhearted men who, in order to forget the fact of their nothingness, must make a sport of death.

TEXT ©

2024

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Gagosian &, the first in a series of stand-alone themed supplements, begins with a look at the world of film. Future editions will focus on music, architecture, dance, literature, theater, and more. 113

Gagosian&

Film

Adaptability

Adam Dalva looks to recent films born from short stories by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and asks, What makes a great adaptation? He considers how the beloved surrealist’s prose particularly lends itself to cinematic interpretation.

Opposite: Still from Drive My Car (2021), directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Photo: courtesy Sideshow/ Janus Films

Years ago I was in Hollywood, pitching an adaptation of a book I loved. “But where,” an indignant executive pleaded, glasses up against his glittering eyes, “is the soap?” “Soap,” for this man, meant froth, attractiveness, pleasingly arced linearity. Soap is not always a detriment to artmaking—any reader of Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” (1997) would have been surprised to see Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal frolicking on the plain in Ang Lee’s excellent 2005 adaptation—but it is normalizing, moving toward societal expectations of beauty and narrative. Miscalibration of soap is why, for every adaptation that goes well— Martin Scorsese’s of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Steven Spielberg’s of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (both 1993)—there are countless disappointments. A film can either be too faithful to the original and thus made uncinematic, or it can radically contort a literary masterwork into something that dully reflects the sudsy obligations of mainstream media. Two of my favorite recent films, Burning (2018) and Drive My Car (2021), are adaptations of short stories by Haruki Murakami. The Susan Lucci of the Nobels, Murakami became hugely popular after his realist 1987 novel Norwegian Wood, after which he pivoted toward surrealism. Of his books, I particularly like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95) and Underground (1997), but I have read all of them, all in one delirious, delicious summer that permanently altered my dreams: fourteen novels in

translation, plus five short-story collections. Murakami plots, I learned that summer, usually feature listless men thrust into intense scenarios on a sliding scale of irreality. They often involve an oversexualized, frank-yetsecretive woman, a cat who might at some point speak, some jazz records, and pasta. What makes Murakami adaptable? His halfbaked men offer audiences the ability to project, and one can write a Murakami lead without the additional struggle of translating excess interiority into externally visible modes. Both Drive My Car and Burning add an extra layer of sex, but sex is already present in the stories. Both movies start differently from their source material, setting a lurid scene instead of moving directly into the storytelling, but there is already dynamic action in both short stories. Each film also beefs up the supporting characters and the setting, creating fuller worlds. Because the stories are constrained and minimal, these changes are not acts of erasure, as they can sometimes be with adaptations, but instead are canny amplifications of preexisting narrative elements. Burning, by the South Korean director Lee Chang-dong, adapts Murakami’s finest story, “Barn Burning” (1983), which has a simple but insane premise: a listless older writer, with a wife who never appears, strikes up a random, asexual, though potentially lusty friendship with a younger woman who has some magic pixie elements, like an affection for pantomime. He pays for her to make a trip to Africa, where she meets and bonds with a younger man who is both affluent and affectless. Upon

This page: Still from Burning (2018), directed by Lee Chang-dong. Photo: Album/Alamy Stock Photo

the duo’s return to Japan, they spend an afternoon drinking with the writer and the younger man confesses to him that he likes to burn barns, and that he’s soon going to burn one nearby. The protagonist stops hearing from his female friend. Later, he runs into the younger man and says he never found the burned barn. The younger man replies that the writer has missed something crucial, that he is too close to it to see it. The astute reader realizes that we are dealing with a serial killer, but the writer (and many readers) miss it. Burning takes these undertones, sprinkles

in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and creates a slow-burning thriller (with Steven Yeun a particular highlight as Ben, the barn burner). The action is shifted to South Korea, where the lead character, Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), in this telling a young man, grew up in a farming town. Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), the woman who will end up as Ben’s victim, was his neighbor. North Korean propaganda plays in the background, the sudden financial boom in Seoul (“There are so many Gatsbys in Korea”) helps establish the setting, and Donald Trump is seen on television as US president. This kind

Still from Drive My Car (2021), directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Photo: BFA/Alamy Stock Photo

of spatiotemporal triangulation is more of an obligation in cinema than in prose, and Lee Chang-dong uses it well: what was a blank space in Murakami’s story is here infused with dread. We also need, in a film, to better know who the lead is, so in Burning he is switched from a successful but vaguely described novelist to a lonely young man whose attempts to write define him. He reads William Faulkner (Faulkner’s 1939 story “Barn Burning” inspired Murakami’s) and his father is in jail. Because he is lonely, we understand the particular appeal of his long-lost next-door neighbor. “I had plastic surgery, I got pretty, right?” Hae-mi asks Jong-su when they reconnect, and what, on the page, was hypothetical desire becomes something clear, culminating in a sex scene before she leaves for Africa. All this gives Lee Jong-su motivation. The Murakami story relies on coincidence and monomania after the victim disappears, but it doesn’t directly answer any questions; though such unreliability is possible in film, the pointsof-telling, the camera and microphone, are usually trustworthy. They only miss what they cannot see or hear. In the story, Ben’s menace is simply nested in his long fingers, but in the film he says that he has never cried. The psych majors in my writing classes always perk up at this detail, even before he adds that he has “superior DNA.” In addition to romantic complication, the shift of triangulation in Burning allows for

an economic structure that boosts audience identification with Lee Jong-su. We may understand why he doesn’t fight to keep Hae-mi away from the wealthy Ben—a crucial moment of Murakamian passivity. In narrative terms, identifying with Lee Jong-su makes us accountable, a demand of soap, where passivity can only go so far. Though Ben’s barn-burning confession is the same, in the movie there is a second one: Lee Jong-su tells Ben that he’s in love with Hae-mi, and then says a very hateful thing to her as she leaves with Ben. This provides guilt, a further motivation as Lee Jong-su begins to directly investigate Hae-mi’s disappearance, using a cat—very Murakami—as crucial evidence. In the film, it’s clearer that the protagonist is in denial about what has happened, and the ending of Burning—well, I won’t spoil it, but let’s say it’s completely determined. Murakami once said that people who are conclusive about morality tend not to make good novelists—that novelists should question everything. This moral ambiguity is less useful in a thriller like Burning, where violence begets violence. Drive My Car, made by the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi—my favorite director in the world today (apologies to Jia Zhangke, Mia Hansen-Løve, Bi Gan, and Paul Thomas Anderson)—is an adaptation of one of Murakami’s more underwhelming short stories. Although Hamaguchi’s interpretation takes many more liberties than Lee does

Still from Tony Takitani (2004), directed by Jun Ichikawa. Photo: Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo

in Burning, the result feels closer to Murakami. The film is a complex, layered masterpiece. I saw Drive My Car for the first time at a little theater in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Forty minutes in, the opening credits rolled, and I shimmered in ecstasy. That night I bought Eiko Ishibashi’s beautiful soundtrack. And the next day—how could this be possible? But it was—I found out that my younger brother had died. In my early days of utter misery, I listened to the soundtrack dozens of times. I was unable to think, to read, but I was somehow able to watch, in those early days, all of Hamaguchi’s other films—in my grief, I found something magic in him. (This paragraph is what the Hollywood executive would have called “soap.”) Drive My Car centers on a nonadapted element: the story of a widower, Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima ), who is staging a Chekhov play in Hiroshima, where he casts his beloved late wife’s exlover, the famous, younger actor Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), to play the lead. The original short story, which is too long, has similarities to the film—in both, Kafuku slowly opens up to a younger woman, Misaki (Tôko Miura), who chauffeurs him around while he rehearses the play’s lines to a recording of his wife—but Drive My Car takes these core elements and radically transmutes them. The wife in the story has died slowly of uterine cancer; in the film, she has a cerebral hemorrhage. (This sort of death is easier to film; the former is easier to write—the temporal

shock of sudden death is difficult to capture in prose, where immediacy is often flattening, but the pain caused by a wasting death that one becomes habituated to is often too overwhelming for a film.) As in Burning, the structure is altered to make an imbalanced love triangle, with everyone different ages instead of, as in Murakami’s story, the same. As Burning cites the Faulkner story, the film emphasizes its source text, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1897; “That woman’s fidelity is a lie through and through”). It also mixes two more Murakami stories, “Scheherazade” and “Kino” (both 2014), into the forty-minute prologue, in which Oto (Reika Kirishima), Kafuku’s wife, tells him a serialized, surreal narrative after they have sex; we also see Kafuku, who is suffering from macular degeneration in his left eye, crash his spectacular red 1987 Saab 900 Turbo. The prologue lets us understand Oto’s affair with Kōji in a soapier way, and as with Burning, there’s added accountability, because Kafuku blames himself for avoiding his wife on the day she dies, once again using the passivity of a Murakami male to add dramatic shame. For the main action, Drive My Car shifts locations to Hiroshima two years later. The movie was filmed during covid—a scene with face masks and plastic partitions in a grocery store at the end of the movie provides a clear real-world time stamp. But we don’t see the city’s famous Peace Memorial, just rolling countryside and an incinerator plant, as the skeptical Kafuku is forced to let Misaki

chauffeur him in his repaired Saab due to a pleasingly ridiculous narrative contrivance: the residency in Hiroshima requires all its directors to be driven. The dramaturgical aspects of the film make it unforgettable. Kafuku’s radical directorial idea is one of translation. Echoing Murakami’s globalism, most people in the play speak different languages, including a mute woman who can only communicate by sign, and Kafuku directs in Japanese and English. All the while, a skeptical Misaki ferries him back and forth from rehearsal to his house an hour away as he practices Vanya in tandem with his dead wife’s voice. In any other movie, my favorite scene would be a dinner party with the mute woman and her husband, a preposterously charming administrator played by Jin Dae-yeon, who asks about Misaki’s driving. “It’s fabulous. . . . I’ve experienced many people’s driving, but it’s never been so pleasant,” Kafuku says, and the movie takes on the surreal causal logic of a superhero movie, or a Murakami story, complete with an origin story that explains her prowess. Their relationship deepens during one of the most extraordinary scenes I know of in any recent movie. Kōji, who has struggled with the part of Vanya, has secretly committed an unforgivable act, and so, in the back seat of the Saab, he is briefly honest with Kafuku. In a long unbroken shot, the audience, always aware that Misaki is driving, eavesdrops with her as Kōji talks with Kafuku about the affair.

“May I tell you a story she told me?” he asks, and at first it’s the same postsex narrative from the film’s prologue, but then the story continues, and we realize that Kafuku’s guilt is misplaced: that the young actor was with Oto the day she died; that she had a dream of stabbing a man in the left eye; that she was going to leave Kafuku. Afterward, in a moment of transcendence, Kafuku sits in the car’s front passenger seat for the first time and he and Misaki break his no-smoking-in-the-car rule and hold their lit cigarettes out the sunroof, their bond formed by the story that they— and we—have received. It’s not just a thrilling visual, though it is one; the script’s focus on systems and boundaries gives the moment a transgressive force. I recently watched a third movie based on a Murakami story, Tony Takitani (2004), an interesting little film by Jun Ichikawa with an excellent soundtrack by Ryuichi Sakamoto. It takes the question of adaptation more literally than any script I know: nearly every line in the Murakami story is narrated in voiceover by Hidetoshi Nishijima (the lead in Drive My Car), and there is almost no diegetic dialogue. This is somewhat deadening—the minimalism I so admire in the stories doesn’t have quite enough juice on the screen. The most precise adaptation possible, it turns out, feels less true to both the demands of cinema and the ethos of Murakami’s vision—a mirror image is perfect, and on certain days even beautiful, but it is only ever predictable.

Not Running

Robert M. Rubin’s Vanishing Point Forever (RideWithBob/ Film Desk Books) explores the production, reception, and lasting influence of Richard Sarafian’s 1971 film. In this excerpt, Rubin discusses the pseudonymous screenwriter Guillermo Cain (Guillermo Cabrera Infante), the famous Kowalski car, and how a nude hippie biker chick became the Lady Godiva of the internal combustion engine.

Just Going HITCH-HIKER: What makes you run? KOWALSKI: I’m not running, I’m just going. HITCH-HIKER: [ironical] But you kind of going fast! KOWALSKI: Speed is a relative thing.

A man in the employ of a Denver garage drives other people’s cars to various cities. He bets his drug dealer that he can make the trip to San Francisco in under fifteen hours, although typically it takes double to triple that if you eat, sleep, and observe speed limits. The stakes: double or nothing on a packet of bennies. Despite being high on speed the entire movie, our hero, played by Barry Newman, is a man of few words. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn he is a decorated Vietnam War vet, a former motorcycle and car racer of some talent, and a dishonorably discharged cop. Kowalski—we never learn his first name in the film, though in the script we’re told it’s Krzysztof—is pursued by increasingly large contingents of cops across various state lines. He evades them all in a series of thrilling car chases. In so doing, he becomes a celebrity fugitive thanks to the on-air rapping of Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind Black DJ. The two men appear to be able to connect telepathically as well. Kowalski detours into the desert, where he meets a grizzled but helpful snake hunter (Dean Jagger) and a weird, hostile faith-healer named J. Hovah (Severn Darden). He picks up a gay

couple hitchhiking (Anthony James and Arthur Malet) who try and fail to rob him. A biker named Angel (Timothy Scott) and his naked girlfriend (Gilda Texter) replenish his supply of bennies and help him get through the next roadblock by fabricating a police siren and lights out of, among other things, a minibike. He picks up a mysterious hitchhiker in black who may represent Death (Charlotte Rampling). She smokes a joint. He demurs but gets a contact high. They have sex. He falls asleep and wakes up to find her gone. Soon after, he intentionally kills himself at speed rather than surrender. Or, he dies believing against all odds he can pierce the last roadblock, made of two massive bulldozers, and make it to the coast. Take your pick. His only violation of the law has been exceeding the speed limit, if you don’t count popping bennies without a prescription or resisting arrest, but he goes out with a bang. This, in a nutshell, is the story of the 1971 movie Vanishing Point. But how do you describe what the movie is, exactly? A goodbye kiss to the ’60s? Along with Two-Lane Blacktop, its döppelganger from the same year, it is the cream of the Easy Rider crop (1969). The ultimate analogue car-chase movie? It’s on everyone’s top-ten list, along with Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971), and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974). A hundred minutes of extended Chrysler product-placement? The Dodge Challenger R/T 440—a.k.a. the Kowalski car—is the iconic movie muscle car (R/T stands for “Road/Track”). Dystopian allegory? Vanishing Point anticipates the surveillance-society determinism of films like The Parallax View and The Conversation (both 1974), yet celebrates Kowalski as “the last American Hero,” a modern cowboy trying to outrun the future. With great car chases. Vanishing Point, Nicholas Godfrey writes, is a film “in conflict with itself.” 1 What’s a Vanishing Point, Anyway? First conceived by Renaissance architects, a vanishing point is the point at which receding

parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge. It has also come to mean the moment when something that has been growing smaller or increasingly faint disappears off the horizon. It’s a cool title for a movie, but Richard Sarafian, the film’s director, likened Kowalski’s trajectory to something more akin to an ellipse or a Möbius strip: a singular surface with no boundaries and no end. At one point in the movie Kowalski realizes he has driven over his own tracks. To escape the Möbius strip you have to make yourself vanish. But Vanishing Point didn’t vanish. It’s had a rich afterlife. After filling out the bottom half of drive-in double bills with The French Connection and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry for several years, the film rattled around in grindhouse theaters and on television behind the Iron Curtain, along with other New Hollywood films that were snuck in as ostensible critiques of capitalist society. It was shown once on network television, in 1976, and was remade into a very bad TV movie in 1997, with Viggo Mortensen as Kowalski (with a disclosed first name this time: Jimmy). The original film was restored and revived at Cannes in 2005, along with Two-Lane Blacktop. After decades of below-the-radar status when you had to chase down worn VHS tapes, there is now a two-disc Blu-ray version with lots of extras. For one thing, the package brings back the movie’s enigmatic phantom, Charlotte Rampling, whose excision from the film has been fetishized into the missing link (see, for example, “Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point”). 2 Rampling’s seven-minute scene as a mysterious hitchhiker whom Kowalski picks up near the end was cut from the American release of the film and became legendary “lost” footage until found in the British version, which is now part of that deluxe Blu-ray set (Region 2). If you can’t get your hands on or play that and have to make do with the Japanese Blu-ray or the regular old DVD, the cut footage is now viewable on

Above: Lobby card for the US release of Vanishing Point (1971). Night scene with Barry Newman in the Challenger R/T

Previous spread, right: Guillermo Cabrera Infante at Great Salt Lake near Salt Lake City, Utah, taken during his location scouting trip, March 5, 1970. Photo: unknown, courtesy Miriam Gómez

Opposite: Publicity still for the Japanese release of Vanishing Point (1971). Pictured: Gilda Texter

the web. Just pause your DVD at 1:29:42, Google “Charlotte Rampling Vanishing Point,” watch the clip, and then resume the DVD. A generation after its initial release, the film is routinely appropriated by artists across multiple media. Worshiped by gearheads, French post-structuralists, and hardcore cineastes alike, the movie is mentioned as often in musclecar magazines as it is in Film Comment or Cahiers du cinéma. It has an equally extensive bibliography, running the gamut of commentators from Alberto Moravia to Quentin Tarantino. As Sarafian summed it up in 2008 on the DVD’s bonus featurette, Built for Speed, “The movie wouldn’t die . . . it’s still not dead.”3 It’s as present as ever. As for Rampling, she joined Abe Vigoda and Dick Miller in Cutaways (2013), a remarkable bit of metacinema in which the three reprised their

deleted characters from Vanishing Point, The Conversation (Vigoda was Harry Caul’s lawyer), and Pulp Fiction (Miller was Monster Joe).

Who Is Guillermo Cain? Barely mentioned in all the ghost stories is the remarkable screenplay by one Guillermo Cain—the screenwriting nom de plume of Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929–2005). Indeed, one commentator, the indie director Alex Cox, has gone so far as to suggest that Cabrera Infante didn’t really write it, claiming the screen credit and the paycheck were a payoff for Cabrera Infante’s alleged work for the CIA. 4 We can certainly put that theory out of its misery and situate Cabrera Infante in his rightful place in the history of Vanishing Point. Without getting into a whole Orson Welles/Herman Mankiewicz auteur theory discourse, suffice it to say that the film owes its brilliance to the collective, if not always cohesive visions of producer Richard Zanuck, Sarafian, Cabrera Infante, cinematographer John A. Alonzo, and stuntman Carey Loftin (with a little help from vehicle wrangler Max “The Surgeon” Balchowsky).5 Not to mention the cast: Newman, Little, Rampling, and, in his final onscreen role, Jagger. Up until now, Cain, like his biblical forebear, got no respect. But he—not Rampling—is the missing link. Whole chunks of the final shooting script were jettisoned along the way. Much of what was kept was stripped of its nuance. But what was left of Cabrera Infante’s original vision is what makes the film more than just a Bullitt for the open road, or Dirty Mary Crazy Larry without Mary. (If you want to see what the film might have looked like without the hand of Cain, tape your eyelids open and force yourself to watch the TV remake, which removes everything from the original that was original.) In the final script, Cabrera Infante was careful to throw in a commercially critical mass of bikers and hippies ingesting drugs and having casual sex. But he also crafted a magical realist road movie around those exploitation motifs,

describing, for example, the white of the car as “fatally Melvillean.”6 (The crew would say white was right because it showed up the best against a desert backdrop.) Cain’s script is populated with fantastical characters on the margins of a hollowed-out America, sprinkled with metacinematic references and montage flashbacks intercut with scenes pulled from classic westerns and Keystone comedies, and highlighted by plans for a pioneering soundtrack of ahead-of-their time samplings. Cabrera Infante reached deep into his cinematic trick bag, overflowing with ideas from his formative years as a film critic in Havana (writing under the name G. Caín). A half century later, with everything that’s transpired around and been appropriated from the film, the final shooting script is well worth a close reading, if only to see what its author had in mind before being mugged by Hollywood. The Car’s the Star Like Vanishing Point to the ’60s, the Dodge Challenger was late to the pony car party. The term “pony car” derives from the Ford Mustang, which started it all in 1964, and is somewhat interchangeable with the term “muscle car.” In general, muscle cars are bigger, powered-up versions of regular pony cars. The Challenger straddles both categories. It’s a close cousin of the Plymouth Barracuda, an early Chrysler riposte to the Mustang, and is often confused with its sister car, the Dodge Charger. The Charger emerged in 1966 and was sexed up in a 1968 redesign. The Challenger debuted in 1970 and is essentially the same car, offering the same gamut of engine choices, a bit lighter and faster. Even Quentin Tarantino couldn’t get it straight at first: the early draft screenplay for his vehicular slasher film Death Proof (2007) refers to a Dodge Charger (you can find it on the Internet). He fixed it by the time he shot the film (and it’s corrected in the published screenplay). The premise: a pair of stuntwomen working on a cheerleader film in rural Tennessee find

a pristine white Challenger identical to Kowalski’s for sale to “test drive.” If you want a Kowalski Challenger, here is precisely what you need in the way of a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T: – 440 CID V8 “U” code – 4bbl carburetor – 4-Speed manual transmission – “A-833”4.10:1 Sure-Grip differential – Pistol grip shifter – Alpine white exterior – Black vinyl interior – Bucket seats – Heavy-duty shocks – Rallye wheels In other words, not a Hemi and not a “six pack,” the maximum engine and carburetor

setups available for the Challenger. And despite Super Soul’s reference to the car being supercharged, the Kowalski cars were not. According to Sarafian, the bulk of the film’s cost overruns were to pay sound engineers to enhance the car noise in postproduction and “give the car the personality I couldn’t.” 7 They all weren’t white to start, either. If you look closely, you can see colors coming through white overpaint as the cars were progressively banged up during production. Girl Next Door on a Motorcycle Cabrera Infante would undoubtedly have seen Girl on a Motorcycle, as it was one of the top UK box office hits of 1968. In the writer’s freely associative mind, removing Marianne Faithfull’s leather jumpsuit was not a big leap. The image of a naked hippie chick on a

motorcycle became the iconic representation of the film, at least as far as the European marketing department was concerned. (In a classic bait and switch, the campaigns also featured Charlotte Rampling even though she had been cut from the movie.) The image appears in a recurring disc shape in the Italian Fotobusta poster series, and also as the centerfold of Carole, the French film-fan magazine. The trope of the naked girl on a motorcycle (which dates back to Lady Godiva, astride the precursor of the internal combustion engine) entered the pop-cultural mainstream via Vanishing Point. Richard Prince’s obsession with muscle cars in general and Kowalski in particular is wellknown, but there is another link between his work and Vanishing Point hiding in plain sight: the girl on the motorcycle is the foremother of Prince’s Girlfriends series. The important thing here is she looks like the girl next door. (Before Easyriders magazine, naked girls on motorcycles were limited to porn and fetish mags.) No sexy lingerie for our Gilda, who wasn’t even an actress/model/ whatever when she showed up on set in 1970 (her IMDb page indicates she would go on to have a long, successful career as a Hollywood costume designer). She sports a healthy allover tan, blond hair, blue eyes, and a smile full of sunshine. Driving around aimlessly, she’s part of the scenery until summoned by Angel to verify Super Soul’s voice on the radio, then left for Kowalski to have his way with (which he politely declines). In any event, the sex on offer is casual, innocent. Lust is not in the air. She is merely the perfect hippie hostess. Texter was the girlfriend of actor Paul Koslo, who played one of the cops. Sarafian conscripted her for the part. You could say that she was offered up, just like in the movie. They didn’t even give her character a name (she’s Nude Rider in the credits). But on the strength of her drive-by, she would go on to act in the biker film Angels Hard as They Come (1971) and would follow that up with another minor exploitation film,

Above: Cover of Vanishing Point Forever (RideWithBob/Film Desk Books, 2024) Opposite: Still from Vanishing Point (1971), directed by Richard C. Sarafian © 1971 20th Century Studios, Inc. All rights reserved

Runaway, Runaway (1971). By 1972, her career as an actress had ended as abruptly as it began. In June 1971, the inaugural issue of Easyriders magazine appeared—a major step in the mainstreaming of the biker cult on the heels of the film whose name the magazine appropriated (or rather reappropriated—Dennis Hopper took it from an old blues lyric). Initially the magazine ran posed, risqué photos of chicks on bikes. Maybe they weren’t Playboy-bunnygrade beautiful but they met a certain standard of attractiveness. By the end of the decade, the magazine had inaugurated the practice of having readers send in photographs of their bikes adorned by their actual girlfriends in various states of undress. Known as the “Ol’ Ladies in Action Photo Contest,” it offered the winners modest cash prizes but, more important, exposure—as much for the bike as for the girlfriend. Prince recently described them to me as “the real girl next door.” Over time, crotches would be shorn of pubic hair, and the magazine’s awkwardly posed, sent-in biker girls would yield the pages back to pro models in slicker, shinier, two-wheeled tableaux vivants. The pro models on bikes were now being art-directed into idealized versions of the sent-in pix of the original girls next door. Gilda Texter is Girlfriend Zero.

1. Nicholas Godfrey, The Limits of Auteurism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 102. 2. Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Missing in Action: The Lost Version of Vanishing Point,” in Dark Humor in Films of the 1960s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 3. Richard Sarafian, director’s commentary, Vanishing Point, special ed. Blu-ray (Los Angeles: Fox Home Entertainment), 2009. 4. Alex Cox cites as evidence the fact that Guillermo Cain’s native language was not even English—though that didn’t prevent the author from translating James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) into Spanish. Cox, “Vanishing Point,” AlexCox.com, August 11, 2015. Available online at https://alexcoxfilms .wordpress.com/2015/08/11/vanishing-point/ (accessed December 12, 2023). 5. See, for instance, Godfrey’s Limits of Auteurism for one of the better commentaries on the film. 6. Final shooting script, p. 7, shot 67. 7. Sarafian, director’s commentary, Vanishing Point special ed. Blu-ray.

Whit Stillman

Coiled and tender, a measured yet barbed looniness to suggest comedies from the straight-backed nephew of Preston Sturges, surrounded by the sparkles of Ernst Lubitsch: to describe the comic temper of Whit Stillman is a tall order. Important: it is not wit (no “wit/ Whit” jokes please), nor do his films propose anything as stuffy as a philosophy—unless one sees a dance craze as the basis of a system of life. Maybe Nietzsche should have made like the coeds in Stillman’s Damsels in Distress (2011) and done the Sambola. I still don’t know why I so adore his films. In Metropolitan

(1990), Stillman’s debut, a plucky bourgeois striver sees a pack of elegant Easterners— from the Upper East, you could say—emerging from the Plaza. December: the debutante ball season, always to be attended each year, is swinging. What do I, the Angeleno, know about deb balls? Nil. But I know a thing or two about the strive, the yearn. I know what it is to not know, to be an amateur. And this is the joy of Stillman’s universe: his films take up the gaze of the curious amateur, the innocent abroad (a Westerner in the East), the slight outsider peering ever so slightly in and gaining

might—a might of vision, a mighty heart. But what fuels the striving of these doomed bourgeois in love, these boogying disco dukestwice-removed, these American gentlemen in Spain? It would be vulgarly on the nose and just plain wrong to equate Stillman with his characters; naturally, though, they don’t materialize out of thin air. And when I speak to Stillman in a noisy Paris bistro across from the Musée Picasso, I am not surprised to find a lovely precision in his conversation, which, who knows, could form the seeds of his next work: new installments of The Cosmopolitans (the Amazon show for which, in 2014, he made the pilot) on lonely Americans in Paris? The occasion of my talk with Stillman was the publication, by Fireflies Press, of a book on the director, Whit Stillman: Not So Long Ago, with essays by Serge Bozon, Beatrice Loayza, Nick Pinkerton, and others, as well as a comprehensive career-spanning interview with Stillman that I highly recommend. Given that in mind, I figured that our conversation could entertain another angle into his work: the question of influence. (Though with no Harold Bloom-ian anxiety!) We talked about the influences of his early life, his first experiences with the cinema, how he got his start in the Spanish film industry, his literary inspirations, and how he cultivates his ear for dialogue. —Carlos Valladares CARLOS VALLADARES Do you remember the first film you saw in a cinema? WHIT STILLMAN Well, maybe this is a

recovered memory, but I think my first memory was when I was about six, seeing Bambi [1942]. I believe it was Bambi but I remember also seeing westerns. I was born in 1952 but I think there was a sort of 1957, 1958 rerelease of Bambi, so it would have been then. And we had a decent cinema in our town. I think it was called the Storm King Cinema because we were just below Storm King Mountain, in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. The theater had twenty-five-cent children’s admission, seventy-five-cent adult admission, and the best thing of all, a real treat for us was the Saturday before Christmas: they would do a matinee program only of cartoons, and all the kids in town would go to this. It was a madhouse of people screaming. I actually wrote about it for the Guardian. My parents didn’t seem to care for it, but for us it was a great experience. All cartoons. CV And related to that, I notice a lot—I mean, just to jump ahead to Damsels in Distress, I notice a very heavy Looney Tunes-ian, almost Frank Tashlin-esque influence to that film, a playful elasticity that’s somewhat in the earlier films but really jumps out with Damsels. WS That’s interesting. No one’s mentioned that, but I think it’s true. We really loved that and we read about Tashlin; he was in the pantheon of [the film critic] Andrew Sarris, who wrote about him quite kindly. I have one funny story about seeing a French film on one of these independent New York stations, it was probably dubbed, and there was an absolutely beautiful woman in the

In celebration of the monograph Whit Stillman: Not So Long Ago, Carlos Valladares chats with the filmmaker about his early life and influences.

film. A period film. I wanted to look at the credits to see who she was; I looked at the names and I decided that the beautiful woman must be called “Alain Delon.” So I was in love with Alain Delon for a long time! And in retrospect I think it must have been that Alain Delon, Romy Schneider film set in Vienna in period [Christine, 1958], and it was really Romy Schneider I had fallen for. The cinephile in our family, I suppose, was my mother. In those days she’d take us to the “well-thought-of” British films. Both of my parents were very much into Ealing-type

comedies. My mother took us to see Genevieve [1953], my father took us to see The Mouse That Roared [1959]. There was a British comedy about stealing mink coats, Make Mine Mink [1960], with Terry-Thomas and a great cast. I remember my mother took us to The General [1926] by Buster Keaton with friends of mine, and we just adored it. It was great to see a silent film. And then I remember Marriage Italian Style [1964]—which, I mean, I was really a prudish, priggish kid, I’m surprised that went over well with me. The big cinema experience was Saturday

This spread: Stills from Metropolitan (1990), directed by Whit Stillman. Photos: Maximum Film/ Cinematic/Alamy Stock Photo

afternoons with my father, seeing the big war films: The Longest Day [1962], Zulu [1964], 55 Days at Peking [1963]. But then things sort of turned south for me in cinema. I kind of didn’t like what happened in cinema in the 1960s. My tenth birthday party was the long version of Lawrence of Arabia [1962], in its road show presentation, and we died of thirst during the film. My friends and I were by the water fountain almost the whole time. We were psychologically oppressed by the desert scenes. And we kind of hated the film, because the psychological weirdness was not for tenyear-old boys of that era. I remember seeing, with my father, [Alfred] Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain [1966], and there was a really disturbing trailer for some semiporn Swedish film beforehand, and it really bothered and upset me. So I started getting a little skittish about cinema. CV Was yours an environment in which great cinema and great literature went together, no distinction between the two? WS I suppose the good-book influence on me was my elder sister. It was my elder sister who turned me on to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jane Austen. That’s pretty important. And then at Harvard we had a very good teacher, Walter Jackson Bate, who was a specialist in eighteenth-century British literature and Samuel Johnson. He was very influential and popular, a brilliant lecturer. I took his course, I’m not sure if it was history of criticism or criticism— he published a wonderful anthology, Criticism: The Major Texts [1952]. So from that I loved the early critics, [William] Hazlitt, people like that.

And over time, I guess I fixated on the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century as sort of my affinity periods. CV One of the best scenes of Metropolitan, of course, is Tom’s explanation that he prefers reading the introductions to Jane Austen novels to reading the actual novel. It’s presented as a satirical jab, and it never fails to get a big laugh from audiences who watch Metropolitan in cinemas, though I wonder whether you yourself would sign off on the preference. WS I’m totally that way. I love reading criticism about things. For instance, most Dickens I find off-putting. I mean, I think Great Expectations is still a great book, but I guess—did Henry James call them baggy monsters? CV [Laughs] He did, yes. WS Trollope’s baggy monsters I’ve gotten to love, but Dickens’s baggy monsters I don’t. But I love reading criticism of Dickens because I love reading about the characters and the comic world. There’s something aesthetically undisciplined about [Dickens’s novels] now. But with a lot of things, it’s not like you can really fault them, it’s just there are other things you’d prefer to read, you know? If I have to read, I prefer to read Trollope or Austen or George Eliot. And I think there’s a hugely reactionary tendency for people to think that one has to have some particular orientation to writers of your own sex or background or whatever. Because the living writer I most admired—and whom, when I got out of college and was trying to be a writer, I got a chance to meet—was

Below: Still from Damsels in Distress (2011), directed by Whit Stillman. Photo: Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo

Opposite: Still from Last Days of Disco (1998), directed by Whit Stillman. Photo: RGR Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

Isaac Bashevis Singer. I wrote a magazine cover story on him as the world’s greatest living writer when he was still alive. Shortly after that, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, so it made me look good to the magazine. I don’t have a huge overlap with Isaac Bashevis Singer in some ways, yet I have a huge overlap in other ways. The same with Jane Austen, and George Eliot too. I mean, all this thing of women writers, male writers— CV That thinking may be precisely the reason why I think your films have such cross-appeal in terms of gender and race and class lines and so forth: your characters are precisely imagined yet expansive. And with Dickens, you have the reliance on the stock type, perhaps, which isn’t really what your cinema is interested in. WS On a sense of human fairness and fair play, of looking at the characters at eye level, it sort of bothers me, that kind of New Yorker fiction of a certain period where they’d write stories about inarticulate working-class types, then pat themselves on the back for their subject matter, when, I don’t know, they weren’t really entering into those worlds at our level. It’s a kind of implicit looking-down-upon. CV The logic and look of musicals clearly hold a privileged place in your work. WS I love musicals! I love musicals, and I felt I was following in a family path because my father also loved musicals—it’s part of our family schtick, we would go to musicals. We got to go to Europe when I was ten, and in London we saw the original production of Oliver!,

which was fantastic, and it had a wonderful performance by Davy Jones, who then became one of the Monkees. And then he came over to New York and was in it, and we saw it again. Our favorite show was about [New York] Mayor [Fiorello] La Guardia. My father was in politics and we liked Mayor La Guardia, and there was a show called Fiorello! [1959] based on the memoirs of one of my father’s friends, Ernest Cuneo, who had worked for La Guardia. After I graduated from college, our favorite uncle, Ted Riley, took us to see Top Hat [1935], with Fred Astaire, at Radio City Music Hall. A beautiful showing. But then there was a New York Times article about the Fred Astaire movies of that period, which said that people don’t wear white tie and tails anymore. I got upset at this because I knew that at the debutante parties they sometimes did. So I wrote a letter of protest to the Times, and I appointed myself the executive director of the New York Committee to Save the White Tie. And that got published. It was a funny letter. CV Did you see yourself, maybe in your Harvard years, as a filmmaker who was adding to the canon of American arts and letters by way of the image? WS I think the ambition came when I had so much trouble writing fiction in college. I was really struggling with it, and I hated being alone. I hated the idea of the writer’s life. And I guess I was maybe too much immersed in all Fitzgerald’s struggles. And there was a wonderful group of television situation comedies in that period; they were really humanistic and

delightful. One of the things that sort of bound us together at the clubs at Harvard—we didn’t call them fraternities; actually Damsels in Distress has a sort of reference to this—was whatever the big night was for sitcoms on NBC or whatever channel. We would watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show. What became my favorite was Sanford and Son, with Redd Foxx. Did you ever hear of that? CV I loved Sanford and Son! WS It was really funny. I didn’t really like Archie Bunker [All in the Family]. It’s sort of too critical

and too obvious. But Rob Reiner, one of the spark plugs of that show, became the guiding spark for Castle Rock, the company that was so crucial for me. Around this time, two things were happening. John Sayles came along with Return of the Secaucus 7 [1979], which showed it could be done: someone could essentially write a short story and get it on screen and have it distributed. And at the same time, I got my break into cinema through the Spanish cinema industry in 1980. They had an indie comedy scene

going in Madrid, with Fernando Colomo and Fernando Trueba and other filmmakers, and I got into their cinema world. It was way ahead of where we were, and they were just directly channeling the comedy side of the French New Wave. I was really liberated by what Sayles did in terms of production, but except for Brother from Another Planet [1984], which is more comic, his cinema is not in my area. CV Meanwhile, you’ve said in the past how much you admire Jim Jarmusch. WS What I so admire about what Jim Jarmusch did was that Stranger than Paradise [1984] is an absolutely minimalist film in terms of means and elements, and yet it’s really delightful, really funny. And that’s remarkable; it’s incredibly helpful. I mean, there are probably people who make a lot of films that you feel very close to, but to see a person who brilliantly solves a problem and in doing so helps everyone else—Oh, this lock has been cracked, there’s a way to open this door. Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It [1986] was one of those doors too. I felt he got a raw deal on School Daze [1988], which I really liked, and I think that in a way, Damsels in Distress is an answer film to School Daze. CV Where did you cultivate your precise ear for dialogue? WS I have no idea. I remember a really key time, trying to write the script for a Hasty Pudding show at Harvard. There was a book on the Marx Brothers films called Why a Duck?: Visual and Verbal Gems from the Marx Brothers Movies

[1971]. And I think it’s their pun on “viaduct”— someone’s talking about a viaduct and they start asking “Why a duck?” It’s all about the dialogue in Marx Brothers movies. Then I think the other person who influences everyone is Oscar Wilde. CV I like what you write in this new book on your work, when you’re reviewing the collection of Preston Sturges’s screenplays and you describe them as $20 film schools, you can learn so much through just reading them, rather than spending so much going through the system professionalizing as one does now. WS Yeah. For me, one thing that was super helpful was somebody published the screenplay for The Big Chill [1983] in facsimile format. I had no idea what a screenplay should look like. So I had this facsimile, and The Big Chill is sort of related to Metropolitan. It’s the idea of a group of people sort of stuck together— CV Right. The Secaucus 7 is also that kind of the ensemble getting together, and things aren’t the same as they were but we’re trying to make a go of it. WS You know, the legendary story that Damsels in Distress is based on has to do with a group of girls at Harvard after my time, I never knew them. They were called the Shalimar Six. CV The Shalimar Six? WS Yeah, because they were wearing Shalimar perfume—they were dressing up, wearing pearls and Shalimar, and giving really fun parties. And Harvard was so grim and depressing and political in my day, and apparently these girls really made everything fun. But our film is

lower budget; there are only four girls, not six. If I’d done The Secaucus 7, it would have been The Secaucus 3. CV Ha! That’s good. Well, Martin Amis has this collection of essays with a fantastic title, The War against Cliché [2001]. And I would say that your screenplays are engaged in that same word-polemic. Is there anything that you do in your writing process to avoid falling into the habits of cliché? Are you conscious if you tap into something that you recognize as an alsoran turn of phrase? WS Yeah, it’s a terrible trap. Terrible. I mean,

it’s sort of by accident that you develop a style or an approach and then are kind of trapped in that. My own career went awry because I didn’t follow the typical plan for indie filmmakers, I didn’t particularly want to write scripts; I just wanted to direct films like everyone else. I just wrote Metropolitan to have a script that I could direct cheaply. I’d already tried to write Barcelona [1994] as a script to direct. The thing to do, if you want a career in the film industry, is do your indie film, get it liked by someone, then follow it up by doing something that’s not personal. That’s key.

Sofia Coppola

Archive

MACK books recently published Sofia Coppola: Archive 1999–2023, the first publication to chronicle Coppola’s entire bodyof-work in cinema. Comprised of the filmmaker’s personal photographs, developmental materials, drafted and annotated scripts, collages, and unseen behind-the-scenes photography from all of her films, the monographic publication brings readers an intimate look into the process behind these films.

Art making, and in Sofia’s case specifically film making, exists largely outside the realm of words. The work she creates comes into being by harnessing a kind of visual intuition with a rhythm and form that is mysterious and undulating, even tidal. With each film, she conjures a magical world that is both complex and quiet. In the process, she finds her own language that is separate from the dominant strain, in harmony with the imagery. This book is a peek into Sofia’s instrument at work. —Rainer Judd

Cover: Photo: Sofia Coppola, from Archive (MACK, 2023). Courtesy the artist and MACK Opening spread, left and right: Photos: Sofia Coppola, from Archive (MACK, 2023). Courtesy the artist and MACK Previous spread, left and right: Photos: Sofia Coppola, from Archive (MACK, 2023). Courtesy the artist and MACK Opposite and this page: Photos: Andrew Durham, from Archive (MACK, 2023). Courtesy the artist and MACK

On Frederick Wiseman

By Carlos Valladares

“The measure of social change is if in a hundred years my films become comedies.” At this remark from Frederick Wiseman— for me, the finest and most important working filmmaker of our time—the audience at the American Library in Paris breaks out in laughs. Ahead of our conversation, we shared what we were both reading. Fred was in the middle of In Memory of Memory (2021), by Maria Stepanova, who had spoken at the American Library the night before. I told him I’d just finished Sodom and Gomorrah (1921), the fourth of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel À la recherche du temps perdu. “Ahhhh . . . Proust!” cried Fred, with a sigh of delight. “What else is there to read after that?” He read it ages ago—around the time he was at Yale Law School, well before he made his documentary feature debut, Titicut Follies, the watershed 1967 exposé of the cruel and appalling conditions suffered by mental patients in the Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts. The shocking film, whose exhibition was banned in Massachusetts for twenty-four years, announced Wiseman as a major voice in documentary cinema. But Follies bears little of the style that has marked his subsequent works, which are less sensational, quieter, and certainly much, much longer. All for the better. Since 1967, Wiseman has made absorbing documentary after absorbing documentary in a cycle worthy of La recherche. It has

no official name but could justly be called the Institutions series. The structural conceit behind these films has not changed: Wiseman (who records his own sound), a cinematographer (usually John Davey), and an assistant to the cinematographer record the day-to-day tasks of the workers and citizens inside an institution—usually American, usually places that provide a specific public service. In a 2020 profile, the New York Times considered the idea that Wiseman may be the true author of the great American novel. Indeed, to watch Wiseman’s forty-five films (I’ve only seen twenty-five of them) is to understand the history of the United States and of the transition of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, to know how we organize ourselves into these strange collectives we call “societies,” to feel the weight of the full complex range of human emotion and behavior. Welfare centers, zoos, hospices, domestic-violence clinics, shopping malls, juvenile courts, high schools, libraries, army training camps, neighborhoods such as Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, cities in the West such as Boise and Aspen, cities in the Midwest such as Monrovia, cities in the East such as Boston, European institutions such as London’s National Gallery and Paris’s Comédie Française—Wiseman has been to these all. Wiseman’s Institutions series is neither stuffy nor tedious; these are engrossing movies. He charges town hall meetings with the energy and tension of football overtime

Previous spread, left: Still from Titicut Follies (1967), directed by Frederick Wiseman. Photo: RGR Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo Previous spread, top right: Still from A Couple (2022), directed by Frederick Wiseman. Photo: © Meteore Films, courtesy Everett Collection

Previous spread, bottom right, and this spread: Stills from MenusPlaisirs—Les Troisgros (2023), directed by Frederick Wiseman. Photos: courtesy Zipporah Films

kicks, though you wouldn’t know that from the descriptions provided by his production company, Zipporah Films, named after his late wife. Here’s how they sell his latest documentary, Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros (2023), our main topic of conversation at the American Library: The MENUS-PLAISIRS is a film about the Troisgros family and their three restaurants, Troisgros, Le Central and Colline, located in three neighboring locations in central France. Troisgros, a restaurant founded 93 years ago, has had three Michelin stars for 55 years and in 2020 was awarded a Michelin green star for exemplary sustainable practices. Much of the film takes place at Troisgros. The present chef, Cesar Troisgros, is the fourth generation of the family to be in charge at Troisgros. The film shows the dayto-day operations involving the purchase, preparation and service at this restaurant.1 All good and right, but this overly neutral description doesn’t begin to convey the hypnotic thrill of one of the film’s early montages, a ten-minute stretch of various appetizers, mains, and desserts being prepped by the chefs in a cavernous kitchen as silent as a monastery: dessert plates dotted with chocolate and strawberries and glazed honey, crayfish,

eels with the spines broken, lamb cutlets with two bones jutting tantalizingly out. Still later, we observe the Troisgros father and son talk with their suppliers to ensure they’re getting the best, most sustainable produce possible—we see them check in with the owners of vineyards where grapes are picked, with farmers who use an ominous pumping machine to milk twenty goats at a time, and with the owners of pastures where cows eat grass and chew their cud in calm. No, we don’t visit an abattoir, though perhaps if we remember Wiseman’s 1976 documentary Meat, which “traces the process through which cattle and sheep become consumer goods,” we won’t have to strain too much to imagine how the cow turns into beef Wellington. The great comic set piece in Menus-Plaisirs—there’s always one—is when Michel Troisgros, the stalwart patriarch of the Troisgros family, taste-tests a main that for his palette is far too spicy. He complains every other sentence about the dish’s pepperiness, but he can’t stop scarfing it down! He loves the passion fruit, he loves the meat, but it’s too spicy. Yet he can’t stop eating. He finishes every last bit of the culprit, its spicy sauce packed with sriracha, practically licking it off the plate. In moments like this, Michel’s care and love for his cuisine peek out. He doesn’t work to maintain the quality abstractly projected onto him by a few Michelin stars (though the stars certainly sparkle), nor does he consciously work

1. “Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros,” 2023, description on the website of Zipporah Films. Available online at http://www. zipporah.com/films/34 (accessed January 11, 2024).

to maintain a slavish devotion to the family tradition (though surely he wants to honor the memory of his fathers and grandfathers). He cooks for the here and now, for the pure love of cooking. And he cooks because he has to. Proust, too, wrote because he had no other alternative. Wiseman, too, films because he must. For my money, to talk with and be in the presence of Wiseman—even for that brief night in Paris—is something like standing in the company of Proust. And the two are quite linked: both are involved in intricately well-proportioned projects of longueur. “What is time, memory, love?” asks Proust. “What is society, how do I relate to a group, why do we act in the way we do?” asks Wiseman. Much of both artists’ strength is caught up in their serene, sharp, slow-tango pace. Sure, we might question, at times, their length. A naive—let’s say, unhabituated—newcomer to Wiseman’s work might very well ask, to paraphrase an editor who infamously rejected The Way by Swann’s (1913) for publication, “I fail to understand why a man needs ten minutes to show how a farm feeds a cow.” Well, sure. From one angle, it may be excessive. But that is the life of a man, one particular man, this farmer, who exists independent of the fine-dining drama that has initially enticed us to observe. A sommelier, extolling the qualities of a wine to a customer, describes the process of winemaking as “comme l’écriture”—just like writing. There is a “progression” in how it is grown, the sommelier

says, there is “an order, a tradition, that must be passed down.” This is no mere sales prattle. What does the sommelier describe if not the very act of creation—whether writing a novel, fermenting a cheese, painting a portrait, or filming a documentary? Wiseman, like Proust, has an elastic delight with his chosen medium; he is enamored with it; and the scenes he captures (momentarily) today will reverberate with scenes across all his movies, creating lyrical rhymes, returns, repetitions across his work. There are the ubiquitous meetings where we seem to spend ages of time, the conversations hammering out the minutiae of how to run a French strip club or whether undocumented immigrants will be able to get driver’s licenses in the state of Idaho. But Wiseman never follows his subjects back to their homes to watch them cook or make love or watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Just as Proust can never know what Swann or Gilberte or Albertine are really thinking, Wiseman knows that he can never uncover the whole truth—only bits, the bits that he finds interesting, the bits that I might have been tempted to dismiss as banal and irrelevant to a story. What we see in a Wiseman documentary has only the illusion of feeling comprehensive, then, but the more you watch, the more you realize that he can’t be here and elsewhere. One is here, others are there. He is a subject in a web of other subjects. He is fated to biases. The goal is to see and hear as far as

one can muster. And oh, can Wiseman muster. When I asked how he edits his films, Wiseman replied, “The greatest film-editing textbook I have come across is the correspondence between Gustave Flaubert and George Sand.” And it is in A Couple (2022)—Wiseman’s strangest film of all, a sixty-three-minute dramatization of Sophia Tolstoy reading aloud the letters that she wrote to her husband, the famous Count Leo—that we might find something of a skeleton key, a tuned fork or a madeleine, into a Wiseman view of the world. A Couple was made soon after the death of Wiseman’s longtime wife, Zipporah. I don’t presume to know the specifics of any given relationship, even the ones that my friends tell me about in deep detail—let alone Wiseman’s. But it seems to me that in A Couple he has made a film that can be a stand-in for what he wants to say in all of his other films. The root of a relationship, a relationship of any kind, is talk. Not always literal talk, but gaps and breaks and the gestures of communication. Why do we communicate in a different way with the people in our lives than we do when we consciously create for public consumption, whether a bit for our friends at a bar or a magnum opus like War and Peace or La recherche? Our lives are built around conversations, the bread and butter of all Wiseman’s films. A Couple—which is a confession, a prayer, an unsent love letter, an apology, an appeal, an elegy, a wish, a farewell, a welcome, an outtake, a hope—asks the central question

that implicitly haunts Wiseman’s Institutions series: how can we talk more clearly? How can we understand that the math teacher’s simple appeal for more “information” on a pencil-sketched graph also doubles as a compact line of cinematic poetry? How can we filter the endless information that fries our tiny brains? In what ways do our words have consequences, whether for a woman at the welfare center asking for more money to feed her children in a loveless capitalist system, or for the person we wake up next to every day and ask ourselves “How deeply do I love you today”? I don’t have answers, Wiseman doesn’t pretend to either. But these are the questions that should keep us up at night. Clearly, Wiseman’s interests are not limited exclusively to film. He takes a passionate interest in the world around him, its literature, its examples of how to organize a society, how to love. What goes on behind the librarian’s desk, the Dantean depths of an American public hospital, the hospital room of a terminally ill grandmother who’s about to say “I love you” for the last time? Wiseman’s questions are those of the most passionately interested dilettante in the world, the most intensely involved amateur, and I mean this as the highest compliment, not the bastardized negative connotations that words like “amateur” suggest. After all, the base of the word “amateur” is “amour”: love.

You Don’t Buy Poetry at the Airport: Since 2012, John Klacsmann has held the role of archivist at Anthology Film Archives, where he oversees the preservation and restoration of experimental films. Here he speaks with Raymond Foye about the technical necessities, the threats to the craft, and the soul of analogue film. RAYMOND FOYE Tell me about your background? If somebody wants to become a film restorer, how do they go about doing it? JOHN KLACSMANN My undergraduate degree, from Washington University in Saint Louis, is in computer science. I got into film preservation and film archiving at the end of my college studies; I worked in the film archive there as a student. The appeal for me at that moment was the analogue aspect of the work, but I quickly realized that my knowledge of computing was going to be useful in the field too. From there I went to the George Eastman House [in Rochester, New York], now the George Eastman Museum, which has the oldest film-preservation program in the world: the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. RF This program only started in the ’90s, right? JK Yes, as a professional field, film preservation

and archiving is quite new. Not that there weren’t film archivists before—there were some very good film archivists before the ’90s—but they were self-taught or they picked it up on the job. There wasn’t a place you could go to study how to be a film archivist back then. RF Were there legendary figures in the old days of Hollywood, or in Paris, who are revered in the field? JK Oh yeah, sure—someone like Henri Langlois, who founded the Cinémathèque française in Paris in the 1930s. Coming a little later, I immediately think of someone like Jonas Mekas, obviously, but there are many others too. Jonas was a critic and a filmmaker but he also preserved a lot of films. I remember asking him some esoteric technical questions about film once and he followed it all. I had to remember, “Oh yeah, Jonas is actually a very skilled and experienced filmmaker, so of course he can follow this.” RF Is that true of most filmmakers you’ve worked with? JK It varies. RF Do you think Harry Smith was a good technician? JK I would suspect so, but you don’t see it so much in Harry’s films if you inspect one of his originals, for example. As an animator, there’s a lot going on, and a lot of his skill would have been in in-camera techniques and on an animation stand. In any case, he clearly knew what he was doing and at a pretty high level, especially considering whatever equipment he would have had access to, which would

probably have been pretty DIY or homemade. RF How many people graduate from the Eastman program every year? What are some of the other programs in addition to this one? JK Eastman graduates around ten. There are some other graduate programs, one at UCLA and one at NYU. The UCLA one is more library science–based, or at least it used to be, and the NYU program, while they do study film, I think puts more emphasis on video and digital media, whereas the Eastman Museum program is very film-based because that’s what they primarily do there: archive and preserve celluloid films. Not that you don’t learn about digital or video at the Eastman Museum—you have to now—but the history of that program is really in celluloid film. And of course the Eastman Museum is one of the older film archives in the world. They’ve been collecting film longer than most. RF When you think about your peers, people out there like you who are doing what you do, how many of them are there? JK Well, fewer and fewer. RF Really? JK I think so, yes. In the work I do, even if it incorporates digital technology at times, I still believe in making archival film elements and film prints. That’s becoming increasingly fringe, even at the largest, most well-funded national film archives in Europe. Then when you talk about people who specialize in avantgarde film preservation, it’s really just a handful of people. And I know them all [laughs].

RF So with these new Hollis Frampton restorations you’ve done, they’re referred to as photochemical restorations. That’s a film restoration, precisely the opposite of digital, right? JK I think you can have a film restoration that incorporates digital technology, and I can explain that, but the Hollis Frampton restorations were all done photochemically, meaning digital was not involved. They were all done with photo-printing and chemistry—exposing film, processing, making contact prints. RF Color timing. JK Yeah, color timing too. So it’s a very direct way to preserve a film by going back to the original elements and duplicating them in a purely analogue way. RF Taking the Hollis Frampton restorations as the example, what’s your toolkit? JK Well, if you’re sticking to analogue and not incorporating digital tools and technology, a lot of the restoration process is about repairing the best surviving film materials—so physically going over the splices, using tape to fix any tears or perforations. That can be very labor-intensive. Then it goes off to a film lab and your tools there are really cleaning; film labs have special machines that can clean film, and you have liquid gate printing, which is an analogue technique to keep scratches from getting printed into the new film elements that you’re producing. Very few labs do this but there’s also a technique called rewashing, where you basically run the film element you’re trying to preserve through the wash portion of a film processor, which happens near the end

John Klacsmann and Raymond Foye

of a processing machine. That can help to actually physically remove scratches. RF You wash it first, or do you wash it at the end as well? JK No, you wash it before you print it, before you copy it. And of course you dry it after washing it. That can basically help fuse very light emulsion scratches: the emulsion gets wet, it swells, and the scratches fuse back together. That can be a very useful tool if you’re working with something fairly scratched, which happens quite often. But that’s about it when it comes to analogue tools. And then of course color timing, and that’s a craft, where you’re programming the colored light in the printer to change the color and the density of each shot in the film. That’s a tool too, although there are limits to it, but if you’re working with a technician who’s particularly skilled at that process in the film lab, that can make a big difference in the quality of the restoration. With the Frampton films we were lucky to be able to avail ourselves of the services of Bill Brand of BB Optics, who had been Hollis’s assistant. RF You didn’t grow up in the analogue age, did you? By the time you came of age, everything was digital already, right? JK I grew up going to the movie theater and seeing 35mm prints. On the other hand, I started using a computer when I was nine. So I don’t know—it depends how you define it. RF There are a lot of parallels to printing an art book: learning the camera and film technology for the transparencies and color separations; what type of screen you’re using; learning how the presses work. Then you’re on press, making these little adjustments with this big machine, to tease out little nuances all the time. And if you have a press-person who’s sympathetic, you can do a lot. If you get one who doesn’t care, you’re really screwed. JK Exactly the same with film. Especially when you’re dealing with experimental films. Some labs aren’t really familiar with experimental films, might not even care about experimental

films, so they don’t put in that extra effort that’s required. RF Or they may see something they think is a mistake when it’s not, it’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be. JK Absolutely. So you have to know who to send what to. Some labs are better than others at certain aspects of preservation. RF How many labs are left that are doing this work, say in the US? JK Very few. In the US there are really only three or four: Colorlab, which is in Maryland. I used to work there before I worked here at Anthology. Then there’s FotoKem, in LA—the biggest lab in the country now. Cinema Arts, in rural Pennsylvania, is a film lab that focused on preservation work relatively early on. Cineric here in New York City is very good, although they’re mostly digital now and don’t have film processors on-site. They’re what we call a dry lab. RF If you could improve a film in a restoration and make it look better than the original, would you do that, or would you consider it a step too far? JK I try not to, but I think sometimes there are opportunities to fix mistakes. I don’t mean when the filmmaker didn’t do something correctly, I mean when an original got scratched accidentally, say. But I think the area where I take more liberties in improving the work is in soundtracks. You can do a lot in sound restoration now that can really improve the quality of the audio. RF That you couldn’t do in the old days. JK That you couldn’t do in analogue at all. RF Why, because of Dolby? JK Because of digital technology, yes, you’re able to clean up or excise certain parts of the track. 16mm sound in particular is quite bad, so if you can bring out the soundtrack and make it a little bit more legible in the restoration, I think that’s generally admissible. You don’t want to go too far, it can’t be sparkly clean, but if it makes it more intelligible I think that’s a good thing. What I’ve always really wanted to do is

make a Dolby digital track on a 16-to-35mm blowup so that the sound that was carefully restored can be played back digitally on a 35mm film print. The problem with that is you have to pay something like a $5,000 licensing fee to Dolby to even print one of those tracks. So I never do that, because I’m only making three or four prints. It’s not really economical to make a digital track on the film print, which is unfortunate because that technology is pretty good and you could still make a Dolby digital track that’s mono, like the original. But the audio would be very clear. RF Are there any other proprietary technologies that you encounter in your work like that? JK That’s the biggest one I can think of. Especially when it comes to working with film. That’s the good thing about analogue, it’s— RF —free. JK —it’s kind of hard to lock down. RF Interesting. You worked on the restoration of Michael Snow’s Wavelength [1967]. That must have been a really exciting experience. JK It’s still in progress. We need to finish the sound restoration, which is actually quite complicated for Wavelength. It might even be more complicated than the picture restoration, which is basically done. Yeah, it’s thrilling to work on Wavelength. But do you know what led to me restoring it? Michael was in town in 2019, and they were showing Wavelength at the Museum of Modern Art. I went to the screening because Michael was going to be there, and as I was watching the 16mm print I was thinking, “Oh fuck, I have to restore this. Now I have to deal with this. This is my problem.” Not because the print they were showing looked bad or anything, but just because it was a film that was badly in need of preservation. RF It’s so important. JK Exactly, and the original’s not in bad condition but it’s just a film that really hasn’t ever been restored. There are negatives, Michael made negatives, but he also made lots of prints from them. So there’s not really a good archival

Previous spread: Harry Smith, Film No. 16 (Oz: The Tin Woodman’s Dream), c. 1967 (2023 restoration), 15 minutes; restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation © 2024 Anthology Film Archives Opposite: Michael Snow, two stills from Wavelength, 1967 © 2024 Estate of Michael Snow

negative of that film. Watching it in 2019, I had just finished restoring his 1969 film <—> (Back and Forth). I realized, I’m now going to have to restore Wavelength, and it’s just a lot of responsibility, and it’s daunting. That’s what I was thinking—this is a lot of responsibility, this is a difficult task, and it has to be done well. A lot of people are going to see this restoration. RF A lot of work and a big headache. JK A headache, but also an honor to work on. Just the responsibility of restoring what I consider to be the best film ever made. RF Same here. JK I don’t take it lightly. Handling the original A and B rolls was very fascinating. I got to map out the entire film. Every splice I logged and every film stock I logged. I made this map that breaks down Wavelength in a way that maybe doesn’t exist anywhere else, except for maybe with Michael, I guess. It’s fascinating because he used so many different film stocks, like every film stock went into it. It has color reversal, it has black-and-white reversal, it has color positive, color negative, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Kodak, Agfa, DuPont, Ansco . . . all these different stocks and manufacturers. So when you inspect the original A and B rolls where the superpositions aren’t there, you’re seeing both sides of what he double-exposed later in printing. RF And often using film contrary to a way it’s supposed to be used, using an outdoor film indoors and vice versa. JK Yes. And also cutting color negative into the film so onscreen it appears as a negative, so it’s sort of an orange-based flipped section of the film. So yeah, he was doing a lot of unusual and interesting things. It’s a really fantastic thing to try and unpack, and it’s all very impressive. I have even more respect for the kind of editing work that went into it now. Because Wavelength is often thought of as one single slow zoom, which it isn’t. It has so much careful editing in it. RF I want to ask you about the Harry Smith restorations. What was that like to work on, and

how many of those films did you actually have original elements for? JK Working on Harry’s films was a dream come true. It’s hard for me to even believe that I had any part in his films surviving, because they were really the first experimental films I ever saw and appreciated. To handle them and restore them is an honor. Since the 1970s, Anthology has had almost all of Harry’s original film elements. And when he was working on films through the ’70s and into the ’80s, they were deposited here immediately. So contrary to popular belief, the originals of most of Harry’s films survived, certainly the later ones. RF But not the actual painted ones, do they? JK Well, Early Abstractions [1946–57] is kind of all over the place; it’s really seven short films that he put together [around 1964] years after he had made them. So when he put together the compilation, for some of them he used the camera original, for some of them he just used a print. It varies across the compilation. In the first three films, which are the hand-painted ones, what’s cut into Harry’s compilation is actually the 16mm Kodachrome reductions that he made from his hand-painted originals. RF Which were on 35mm. JK Which were 35, and don’t survive. I consider those 16mm Kodachrome reductions the originals because as far as I know, Harry never showed those early painted films on 35mm. They were immediately reduced to 16. You can look in [SFMOMA’s] Art and Cinema program notes, where they first showed, and it’s mentioned in one of them that he was waiting for the reductions to come back from the lab before they could be screened in the series. So I’m fairly certain that those are the original 1940s reductions he cut together in the Early Abstractions compilation. The thing that I realized when I handled Early Abstractions and preserved it is that there are splices within those reductions too, so they’re edited. Throughout the films, Harry often painted over the cement splices to hide them. So he’d

rephotographed the painted animations but then he was painting on the copies too, which you don’t really realize when watching because they blend in so naturally. I had no clue until I inspected it and I realized, Oh, there’s painting on this physical film that I’m handling, it’s not just printed in. So that actually limited what we could do photochemically: no cleaning, no rewashing, no liquid gate printing. Because we couldn’t remove the paint that Harry put on those physical 16mm Kodachrome reductions we were working from. RF That’s just a given as a preservationist, you cannot do that. JK Well, you could, but if you did, the paint would come off before you duplicated it . . . and that would be bad. So the Early Abstractions restoration is a little scratchier than I would like. But that’s the way it is, since we couldn’t use any of those analogue techniques to take the scratches out because of the paint that Harry put on the film to hide his splices. RF That’s always a given in art conservation: you don’t do anything that cannot be redone later on. JK It’s similar in film preservation, although the difference is, film preservation is all about making duplicates. We’re working with the original object but the goal is actually to copy it, whereas in art conservation you’re actually painting on the painting, the original object. We’re not doing that. But yes, you wouldn’t want to use a technique that would be destructive, and dealing with painted film is a great example. That comes up all the time in experimental film. You have to be really aware of what the film is, and that’s really only revealed by handling the film and inspecting it carefully. RF In art conservation, if you have a watercolor, you don’t put it on a wall where it’s going to get lightstruck. Do you have that problem with film, where it’s going through a projector and you’ve got light coming at it? Does that ultimately affect the film?

JK Well, in film preservation we’re almost always projecting new copies. So if something got damaged or it faded, we either have another print or we could make a new one, at least right now we still could. So there’s a little bit less risk. But a film really won’t fade in a projector because each frame is not really exposed to the projector’s lamp for long. Theoretically it could cause fading, it’s getting a lot of light from the projector lamp, and if you left a filmstrip outside in the sun it would fade pretty quickly. But in the projector it doesn’t really happen. It’s going to fade naturally over time more than it will via projection. And when film’s not being shown, it’s stored in a can in the dark. RF That’s a big part of preservation, proper storage, right? JK Huge part. In film archiving we’ll refer to that as conservation, because you’re conserving the original object or master. The storage environment is critical. Besides duplication, that’s how you make film survive. RF Do you feel like you’re in a race against time with your profession? JK Yes [laughs]. RF So you know while you sit here that things are actively degrading and falling apart, very important things. JK Yes, and I also know that we’re not going to be able to make new film elements of every film in Anthology’s collection. There’s not enough time or money to do that. And that’s the case with most archives, even the ones that are the best funded. RF So you have to make decisions about what you save and what you don’t. JK You have to make decisions about what you duplicate and what you don’t. In the future, scanning every film in a collection is a goal that I think will be doable, with enough time. Whereas preserving film in a traditional sense eventually won’t be possible anymore. They’ll stop making film before we get to all of them. For that reason I’ve been trying to focus more on that

aspect: producing new polyester-based film elements. My approach is to do as much of it as we can, right now, to preserve films on film. Many other archives don’t take this approach anymore, but I think we should, because now it’s possible and eventually it won’t be. RF Because you foresee the day when Eastman Kodak will just cease to exist. JK They’ll stop making film. There’ll be no labs to do the work. There’ll be no lab technicians who know these processes. RF When do you think that will happen? JK It could be ten years, it could be twenty years, it could be tomorrow. I focus a lot more on film preservation than mass digitization. I feel like we have from now until forever to digitize while we have a much more limited window to make film copies, so let’s do that now while we still can. We won’t be able to preserve all the films we have on film, but the more we can, the better. The preserved films will become even more valued and cherished once it isn’t possible to make new film elements anymore. RF In recent years have you noticed more of a sensitivity on the part of young people to analogue media? JK I think so. I think especially since covid. At Anthology’s screenings, especially of avantgarde classics and preserved films, the attendance has never been higher. It’s not exclusively young people, but there are a lot more young people than there used to be. And I think that’s because more and more there’s a lack of film prints being shown in cinemas. I mean we’re very lucky in New York City, because actually quite a few repertory cinemas still project film here. But I think people appreciate it because they realize it’s special and increasingly rare. And if you come to Anthology and you see new restorations, you’re essentially seeing brand new film prints. So they’ll never look better. It’s a real opportunity. RF I believe that digital actually blocks a lot of the metaphysical and spiritual content of the work. I think there’s this physicality, but then

Opposite: Harry Smith, stills from Film No. 11 (Mirror Animations), c. 1957 (2018 restoration), 3 minutes 30 seconds; restored by Anthology Film Archives. © 2024 Anthology Film Archives This page: Taylor Mead in Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, 1963 (2018 restoration still), 109 minutes; restored by Anthology Film Archives and The Film Foundation with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation © 2024 Anthology Film Archives

there’s something else, which is presence. I think digital blocks a lot of those vibes. JK I 100 percent agree. When you’re doing a photochemical preservation, there’s a really direct connection to the original object, literally. It’s been physically duplicated, reproduced. There’s a lineage, and it goes right back to the original. And if you’ve done it well, it’s representative of the earliest times that work was shown. To a dedicated group of people, this is essential to experiencing the work. One time when I was walking around Anthology with Jonas, he was being interviewed by a German journalist, who asked him, “How do people know to come here? Don’t you want to reach more people with these films? You’re only getting a small number of people here.” And Jonas said, “Well, you don’t buy poetry at the airport.” I always think about that. Not everybody’s going to appreciate avant-garde film, but the work is still important and has a place. RF Yeah, you have to be fine with a small audience when you work in these kinds of fields. How many copies of the Tractatus did Wittgenstein sell? Something like eleven. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, all their first books were self-published in editions of forty, fifty, seventy-five copies, and they didn’t sell many at all. So there’s nothing wrong with a small audience. JK When you’re archiving and preserving, you know that you’re doing it for the future, really. It’s about the present to some degree, but really it’s about the future. So there’s some hope that this stuff will survive and people will still have access to it, and will still be interested in it, many years from now. RF Do you have personal or sentimental favorites among the films that you’ve restored? JK Maybe some of Ron Rice’s films: Chumlum [1963], The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man [1963], and Senseless [1962]. The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man restoration is a great example of the amount of

money it costs to restore a film, and how many times more it costs to restore a film than what it cost the filmmaker to make the film originally. It costs far more to restore than the film has made and ever will make at a box office. So when you get the opportunity to preserve a film like that, you really do feel good about it. There’s no commercial incentive for this work to survive, whereas in Hollywood-film preservation, there is. And that’s why preservation gets done in Hollywood: they duplicate and preserve their films so that they can continue to make money off them; the films are seen as a financial asset. Ron Rice’s films are assets but not financial ones, they’re cultural. I have a lot of respect and gratitude for Martin Scorsese’s foundation the Film Foundation, and for the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, which supported the restoration of a long film like The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, which is just a bonkers insane Beat experimental film

that’s brilliant but, you know, just taking care of it is a financial burden for the archive. The film will never make any money back in its entire life, restored or otherwise. It isn’t about making money anyways. RF And this is just because those filmmakers, Scorsese and [George] Lucas, saw these films when they were young and were inspired by them. JK Absolutely. They understand the cultural importance of experimental cinema—that it’s not only Hollywood, it’s not only narrative film. It’s like poetry: there are novels and there are poems; we’re preserving the poems, and great filmmakers understand that, having been inspired by them.

Please consider becoming a Preservation Donor or otherwise supporting Anthology Film Archives via their website: anthologyfilmarchives.org

STANLEY WHITNEY VIBRATIONS OF THE DAY

Stanley Whitney invited professor and musicianbiographer John Szwed to his studio in Long Island as he prepared for an upcoming survey at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum to discuss the resonances between painting and jazz. There is a hidden history of jazz and painting, one that suggests an affinity between the two arts deeper and older than we might think. In 1928, Dr. Albert Barnes, the collector who created the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, was lecturing on the parallels between Pablo Picasso’s paintings and Black religious music, one of the roots of early jazz. Jean Cocteau, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and the composer Darius Milhaud all took up jazz drumming. In the early 1940s, pianist Thelonious Monk and Piet Mondrian met at Minton’s, the after-hours musicians’ bar in Harlem, and discussed the similarities between their different arts. There was talk of multiple perspectives in both Cubist paintings and the collective improvising of jazz bands. By the 1950s, and with the ascendency of bebop, the music that the artist Jordan Belson called “simply the most radical thing at the time” was bringing Manhattan artists and musicians together at the Five Spot or to the sound of the jukeboxes at the Cedar Tavern or Stanley’s. Jazz was referred to in the work of Franz Kline, Frank Stella, Norman Lewis, and both Willem and Elaine de

Kooning, some of whom titled paintings after those musical dive bars or the names of favorite recordings. Many others, including Robert Ryman, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner, were inspired by the music and used it to accompany them as they worked, as Stanley Whitney has throughout his career. —John Szwed JOHN SZWED I was surprised to learn that at least sixty-

five well-known jazz musicians were painters. They weren’t necessarily widely known as painters but their work was shown and sold. STANLEY WHITNEY I knew that Ornette Coleman painted. JS The earliest I know was George Wettling, a successful drummer in the 1930s and ’40s who traded drum lessons for painting lessons with Stuart Davis, and whose paintings showed Davis’s influence. By the 1960s he was considered an oldschool musician, and once, when told he should play in a more modern style, said, “I don’t need this, I’m getting more from my paintings than I’m getting from my music anyway.” SW Maybe he thought painting could be more lucrative? Even Stuart Davis wasn’t making much money in the ’30s, but I guess they had something they could sell, whereas if you’re a musician you’ve got nothing you can sell, just gigs. JS Why do you think Miles Davis got into painting? He was one of the most highly paid musicians in his later years. SW Miles did it because of [Jean-Michel] Basquiat. Because Miles was not okay with letting anyone get past him [laughter]. Miles thought he could do everything. Basquiat really wanted to be, and wanted to be around, famous people; when he went to LA, he wanted to meet all the musicians, but

especially Miles. Miles went to his show, looked at his work, and thought, “Oh, well, I could do this.” He was really someone who always wanted to be front and center. He was always moving forward and trying to be the hippest guy there was. JS You could make the argument that some kinds of painting and some forms of music are improvised, whatever “improvised” might mean to different people. I don’t think an audience can always tell the difference. There are people who write music that sounds improvised; some play with physical gestures that look like they’re improvising. Do you think of yourself as an improvising painter? SW Well, I don’t start off with any kind of color idea in my head. I never know. That’s why I use the same format; I can live off of it. Once I put a color down, that color will let me know the next color. Similar to music, you know, how a player can play and then they’ll inform the other player and then they’ll come in. They’ll see space and they’ll think, “Okay, I can come into this space.” It’s a conversation. For me, it really is a color conversation. JS It seems to me that it might be difficult to know how people perceive color. I assume that all people can see the difference between colors, but the way they group or relate to those colors may differ. I worked with an anthropologist at Yale who’d spent much of his life among isolated people in the highlands of the Philippines. They only spoke of four colors, and included all the different colors they saw within those four. There’s something similar in music: some studies of musical sound in the United States show that many people hear an ascending line of music as descending. SW Probably so. I don’t think I have g reat ears. Or maybe I do have great ears because I do Previous spread: Stanley Whitney, New York, 2023. Photo: Aundre Larrow This page: Stanley Whitney, Do Be U, 2023, oil on linen, 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm). Photo: Rob McKeever Opposite: Stanley Whitney’s studio, New York, 2023. Photo: Aundre Larrow

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everything by sound. I think a lot of Afro-Americans think about sound in a central way. I think it really comes out of Africa, where sound functions as language. If you think about the talking drum in Africa, it’s language, but the Europeans couldn’t hear it outside of their preexisting ideas about sound and music. JS Don’t some people speak of certain colors in terms of volume? Like red? SW Yeah, that’s what you would say. “Oh, you can’t wear that, that’s too loud.” JS Or they speak of a color as being softer, say “a muted green.” So, colors do, in the way we speak, have sound and volume. SW When I paint, I want to have that sound. The sound informs me, though I don’t think about it that way. Early on in my career, I lived in one place and painted someplace else. I would get up, I would look at art books, Cézanne or something, and think about that work. Then I’d listen to music for an hour or so and then I’d go paint. When I got to the studio, I had a little tape and I’d hit the tape and have music on. I often paint to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew [1969]; it’s very important to me. I’ve always been open about that, but I remember that David Hammons told me, “Don’t tell people that. Don’t let out your trade secrets” [laughter]. But it doesn’t make any difference. JS Artist Adam Pendleton said that you “know how to break down visual order to imbue it with music.” SW That’s probably true. These are things I probably do that I don’t really think about. JS Jazz and painting are in other ways analogous: in the twentieth century, new forms of jazz appeared about every eleven years. There was

ragtime, boogie-woogie, swing, Latin, bebop, cool, and so on. These continual evolutions were followed by arguments between their advocates. Bebop was maybe the most disruptive of musical innovations because it broke a number of jazz rules and a lot of people hated it. There’s a certain analogy there in painting, where you have the same kind of generational thing. Some people hate it, some others like it, and critics try to pick out the winners. SW Yes, I think that’s true. Because America was so into trying to keep this country lily white that artists, musicians—those people were really, really radical people. Whether they were white or Black, they were radical people. And radicality requires exploration, change, experiment— JS And these innovators dressed to show they were different, dressed as artistes: berets, hornrimmed glasses, large flowing bow ties. SW Absolutely. And those forms and styles came about—you know, like Billie Holiday, they came out of brothels. They didn’t come out of where they should come from, you know what I mean? They weren’t legit. If you were socially correct you were listening to gospel music. This music was really coming out of all the wrong places, and it was total freedom. The thing about that music is total freedom: to think and be and discuss things that you couldn’t discuss in words. There’s something there that I look to. I think Herbie Hancock said one time that he was playing with Miles, and he played the wrong note, and Miles looked at him, but without any worry; he just adjusted immediately. There aren’t any wrong notes. I was realizing when I was painting, there aren’t any bad days. A bad day is a good day

because you’re trying to get to another level, you’re trying to get to something else. I heard Ornette Coleman once in San Francisco, and all these people came out, and when Ornette started playing, he was there immediately. There wasn’t an introduction, it was like, noise—woom! And people fled, people just left. Because there was no buildup to it, it was immediate, and it was just “wow.” I think it’s like abstract painting. You have to bring a lot to it; there aren’t words or a conventional story. There’s a story, but it’s a much more open, complicated path to the story. That’s a big thing about it. JS Jordan Belson said of his painting, “It’s not nonobjective, I just don’t know what it is right now.” SW That’s the whole thing. Can you handle that you don’t know what it is? But we don’t really know what anything is, so that’s okay. JS When it came to what was called free jazz in the 1960s, some musicians began to play without concern for many of the rules of the music, raising the question of whether anything is ever completely free, free to do anything. I mean, is such a thing possible? SW I think it is to a certain extent—I mean, the last of the John Coltrane albums are hard. Even for me, Ornette’s record Free Jazz [1961] is difficult to listen to. Some of it, I think, is more for musicians. Likewise, there are such things as painters’ painters. JS I recall free players in the 1970s saying, “It’s easy to get started, it’s hard to stop. You don’t know where to stop and how to stop.” SW I would think that’s true. I would think that’s true writing a book [laughs]. You write a novel, it’s 117

hard to figure out how to maintain that flow, that rhythm, all the way to the end. You have to know when to stop. If you’re playing music, it’s communication. There’s that one concert where Coltrane goes on and on and on and on, and the audience is clapping and whistling and going crazy, and Miles is like, “When is this guy going to stop? Get that goddamn horn out of your mouth.” JS You’ve said, “Getting the rhythm of a painting is really important to me. There’s no beginning and no end, and I can shift around in it from any spot.” SW That’s true, because if I tell people before they encounter the work, “There’s no beginning and no end to these paintings, you can go anywhere in the paintings,” they have more sustained interactions, they allow the rhythm to work naturally. I always wanted to make paintings that would be something you would always come to and they’d be different all the time, you could live with them. JS You’re having a large exhibition at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Can I ask about the title, How High the Moon? SW When they asked me for a title for the show, that’s what I came up with. I don’t know how I got to that but I thought it was wide open. I think about that recording of Ella Fitzgerald in Berlin where she forgets the words and just goes off. She goes, “There’s a song / Could be wrong / But how high,” and then she’s just scatting. And then she talks and says, “Well, they probably don’t know what I’m saying, but I guess it doesn’t make any difference,” and it just goes on and on and on. It’s just perfect—to go from the clear song to just scatting, and she stays in rhythm the whole time. I just love the total freedom of that. 118

Do you think she really forgot the words, because they’re pretty simple? SW She says she did. Or maybe she says she got them wrong or whatever. And the thing about it was, that record was one of my mother’s favorite records. As a kid, I used to love it. When I thought about this show, it’s sort of . . . how high the moon, how far I want to get out there. Still trying to get out there. JS When you title paintings, do you intend people to get a meaning from the title? SW I think titles are a way of figuring out who I am or where I come from, what my concerns are. It’s like an opening. JS So when you don’t title— SW No, I always title. JS You always do? SW Always. JS W hy do some of you r c at a log ue s say “Untitled”? SW Well, the early ones I couldn’t title, because I didn’t know what they were. So, the early paintings aren’t titled. Titles started in the ’80s. JS Do you remember why you started doing them? SW Early on, I wasn’t showing that much, so it didn’t make any difference whether they had titles or not. I was moving from painting to painting pretty quickly. I’d paint a painting, put it on the wall, paint a painting, put it on the wall. No one was really seeing them so they weren’t brought out. But once they started going out into the world, I wanted to have them have names. It’s a real burden, to tell you the truth [laughs]. JS You once said that some of your favorite painters were Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko, and JS

Jackson Pollock. They were all three very interested in music. SW Probably so. I guess they probably were. Because they were part of that downtown bohemian world. JS Composer and musician David Amram told me that Joan Mitchell had a collection of African records back when you couldn’t find African music in the United States. SW Probably so. I mean, she was a wild woman. That milieu, they might do other stuff, but by the end of the day, they would end up at Slugs’ or the Five Spot or something like that. They were really adventurous people. Their work shows how adventurous they were and how willing they were to stretch out and not be classified as this or that or the other. I mean, they were my kind of people. I could come out of that tradition. JS You’ve spoken before about your interest in quilts, be they Amish, kente cloth, or the quilts of the women of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. It seems to me that Black quilters improvise like crazy. SW Oh yes, and that scares people, because you get to Barnett Newman and all these people clearing things out, abstraction, Minimalism, and then you have these women in these little shanty houses in Mississippi making unbelievable quilts, and you think, “Damn, that’s better than a Barnett Newman,” and how’d they do that? Is it a mistake, or is it just . . . audiences have a hard time thinking of them as intellectuals. JS One collector of quilts asked some of the makers why on some pieces everything seems to be of the same length, and then suddenly, one of the strips is longer. One quilter said if they were the same length, it wouldn’t look good. Another

person said, “I don’t measure it because that’s not fun.” SW Yes. I would say there are a lot of things they do that intellectually they don’t have the words to express what it is, or what the theory is. I would think that if someone came to talk to them, they wouldn’t tell them anything anyway. I think of my mother: she wouldn’t tell people much. She wouldn’t trust people. If someone white came to the house, she wouldn’t trust them. She might know but she wouldn’t share. JS What surprised me about kente cloth was seeing that the craftspeople would sometimes weave words and letters into them. SW They say, during slavery in the US, if someone put a certain fabric on the window or hung it over the line, that indicated that it was time you were going to escape. There were messages. So it’s a whole kind of language, just like jazz or some painting. And again, people have a hard time believing that they’re intellectual simply because it’s not spelled out in the typical way. JS To return to the question of free jazz, many of those musicians were actually resorting to old techniques, like riffing—repeated musical figures behind a soloist’s melody—and call and response, so the freedom was often more about discovering older patterns and using them in new ways rather than breaking rules. But there are those artists who believe that the more restrictions on the work, the better the art. For you, that would be the grid, right? The grid will make the painting work? SW Well, I respect the grid, and I think about the ancient world’s use and artistry with it. But I don’t see my paintings as grids. Other people do. Really, I just stack the color. It’s good drama to

have the color that shouldn’t behave in this kind of setup actually behave. It’s almost like having black and white, warm and cool—these things are really where the action is. And it’s endless. It’s like numbers. So that’s how I see it, but it works for me. Luckily, I had time to develop this manner of working, because for a long time no one paid attention to me. I had a lot of freedom to dream. I always say now with the young painters, they don’t have dream time. I’m really enjoying your Billie Holiday book right now [Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, 2015], but I’m excited to get to Miles [So What: The Life of Miles Davis, 2002]. Then I’m going to round it off with Sun Ra [Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, 1997]. JS You could use some of Sun Ra’s stuff as a painter. SW Oh, I did. I did a painting called The Vibrations of the Day [2022]. JS Really? SW Yes, from Sun Ra. I was quoting from somewhere—he was asked about the work and he said, “Well, it’s the vibrations of the day.”

Opposite: Stanley Whitney’s studio, New York, 2023. Photo: Aundre Larrow This page: Stanley Whitney, The Vibrations of the Day, 2022, oil on linen, 96 × 96 inches (243.8 × 243.8 cm). Photo: Rob McKeever All artwork © Stanley Whitney

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Building a Legacy: Urban Art Projects This ongoing series features conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment, Daniel Belasco, the executive director of the Al Held Foundation, meets with Daniel Tobin, the cofounder of Urban Art Projects (UAP), to discuss the role that a major contemporary-art foundry plays in artists’ legacies. DANIEL BELASCO In today’s art world, the growing

sophistication of the marketplace has raised awareness that there are often many hands involved in the making of ambitious art. The romantic myth of the male artist genius creating masterpieces alone in his studio has given way to a more nuanced appreciation of the collaborations involved in the planning, design, fabrication, and maintenance of art, especially in public places. At the Al Held Foundation, we now consider Held’s employment of assistants to paint his huge canvases, which was an open secret in the 1980s, as a conceptual practice inspired by the Renaissance workshop. In sculpture, artists partner with foundries to render models and ideas in metal and other robust media to realize their desires for material and temporal permanence, but the expense, complexity, and communal nature of casting and fabrication presents institutional challenges to the maintenance of intellectual property. Few people are better positioned to share their insights about these issues than Daniel Tobin. Thirty years ago, he and his brother Matthew founded Urban Art Projects (UAP), in Brisbane, Australia. Since that time, they have worked with hundreds of artists and expanded their facilities to China and the United States, pioneering new technologies along the way. Cofounder of UAP, Tobin oversees a large and talented staff of craftspeople ranging from engineers and designers to casters, finishers, and painters. This conversation will explore the role a major contemporary art foundry plays in artists’ legacy. UAP is especially well-suited to this conversation because of its leading position internationally, solidified through its acquisition of the legendary Hudson Valley foundry Polich Tallix (PTX) in 2019. How can we learn about some of the larger issues facing artists and their stakeholders through the discussion of the legacy of a foundry? Let’s begin with the beginning. Can you please speak about how and why you and your brother started Urban Artists, now UAP, in the early ’90s? DANIEL TOBIN Thank you for that introduction. We were both at art school in the late ’80s. There was a small local art-based foundry nearby and both Matthew and I started working there as students. The largest castings that we did at that foundry were no bigger than twelve inches long and normally just one cast. We used a lost-wax-and-ceramicshell casting method. That’s where we started, in a very basic way, to explore the craft of making in the foundry environment. To jump forward to the early ’90s, we’d both graduated from art school and the local foundry 120

moved offshore to Asia, so we had the opportunity to set up our own place. We bought a steelworks in Brisbane, a very small place, and made our own furnace and started to make work for our artist friends and others. The first substantial commission we won was working with First Nations artist Judy Watson, creating a cast-metal series for her Koori Floor [1994] at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Sydney. And we still make work for her today, thirty years later. One of the things we’re very committed to is understanding the artist’s creative intent and their project needs and delivering on those needs— actually exceeding the artist’s expectations. The craft of making is an extraordinary space to work in, to explore and understand the nuances of an artist’s practice and then bring that work into reality. DB I like the idea of exceeding expectations. From the beginning, you’ve said that your mission is to work with artists in public space, which always has additional complexities of dealing with local municipalities and anticipating public response, both positive and negative. Once an artwork is installed, what are some of the challenges and responsibilities of the foundry to maintain the work’s integrity as the environment in which the work is installed evolves, as it inevitably does? DT There are multiple challenges and multiple responsibilities. When we create a work, we work with the artist and commissioner to identify the most appropriate and robust materiality for its purpose, considering both the artist’s aesthetic needs and the siting of the work. Once the work is installed, we provide a maintenance manual to the commissioner and to the artist so that they understand the needs of the work as it settles into the environment in which it’s placed. The commissioner is responsible for that maintenance, but UAP offers services for each work that’s installed. So many factors come into play when thinking about the long-term installation of art outdoors. Is it in a public space or a private space? Are there seasonal changes? In Australia, the climate is fairly temperate, so there aren’t huge changes in temperature or precipitation. In the northern hemisphere there are the seasons to contend with, and issues of how often you repatinate or rewax a work. Those choices in the end belong to the final owner or commissioner of the work. DB How do you elicit requirements from artists? Do you ask them to submit a statement, or do you interpret what they communicate to you during the course of development and production? DT Genera lly, t he ma intena nce ma nua l is

technical, and just describes the steps required from a manufacturing point of view. In terms of the artist’s intent, that would usually be provided to the commissioner through the gallery or from the artists themselves. The works that we deliver are mostly cast bronze and cast stainless steel, and they’re going to last for hundreds of years. So that legacy will continue long after we’re gone and long after the artist is gone. It’s an interesting question— there’s no right or wrong answer to maintenance. It depends on how long you’re looking into the future, I suppose. DB I’m interested in this direction. In a private space, a building can be sold and the new owner can decide to remodel and find a new home for the artwork. In public space, the work may be damaged, or the environment may change around it. Are artists realistic in their expectations about what’s going to happen to the work once it’s installed? Or do some insist that the integrity of the work must be respected and the environment needs to adapt to the work, rather than the work adapting to the environment? DT Yes [laughs], I think it’s all of the above. I think some artists are ambitious and push what’s really possible, and that’s exciting to be around, but we’re also very careful to walk through the process and any risks involved. Mirror-polished bronze, for one thing, is a finish that’s difficult to preserve, in both the short and the long term. Bronze is a living material so it’s always oxidizing, it’s always responding to the environment. In outdoor spaces it changes very quickly, so it certainly is not something we would recommend with just a wax coating. For one artist we’re investigating a ceramic surface treatment that would protect the bronze for a longer period of time. We’re always communicating the maintenance requirement of the work, whether it requires maintenance regularly, multiple times a year, or whether it’s something that can be treated less often. It just depends on the work itself. DB I want to shift gears and talk about UAP’s recent acquisition of PTX, the legendary foundry started by Dick Polich in the Hudson Valley, which has made innovative work for everyone from Louise Bourgeois to Jeff Koons. PTX has continued in its Rock Tavern location under UAP’s ownership and even, I understand, expanded its productivity. You’re in an unusual position where you’re dealing both with individual artists and their legacies and also with a foundry itself, Polich Tallix, that has its own history. What attracted you to the merger, and how are you working to continue the legacy of PTX

and its founder, Dick Polich? DT That’s a great question and it’s been a humbling experience to take over the reins of PTX from Dick, who as you say was an amazing man and a visionary in terms of the foundry space. He grew the foundry from humble beginnings and turned it into one of the largest art foundries in the world. An MIT-trained metallurgist, he was a wizard and changed techniques in the foundry space. PTX/ UAP now has the facility to make some of the largest lost-wax and sand castings in the world, including for artists Charles Ray and Yayoi Kusama, thanks to Dick’s unique commitment to the artists he was working with. So yeah, it’s humbling to become part of the PTX legacy. The makers on the floor are a huge part of that, some of them having worked there for decades. We have an amazing group of very experienced technicians, craftspeople, and makers who have worked with art luminaries including Isamu Noguchi, Nancy Graves, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella. So that legacy is extraordinary. The two businesses are both family owned, and we both love that interchange between maker and artist. Dick invited artists into the working space as we did in Australia in our space. There were so many synergies, and as we look to the future, we want to retain and celebrate Dick and his greater team’s legacy and propel that for the next fifty years. DB Part of the acquisition brought in new relationships with legacy artists, such as Lichtenstein, who started working with Dick in 1976. I could be wrong, but the foundry probably accumulated a whole warehouse full of models and molds over the decades, some of which might be lost property that the artist abandoned, others that were left in the conservatorship of the foundry for future editions. The process of creating metal sculpture through casting does require the production of intermediate objects, such as maquettes, models, and molds. Often they’re used to create new pieces in an edition. How does the foundry handle the materials—process pieces, drawings, models, engineering designs, molds—left behind? Of course, with the transition to three-dimensional digital design and manufacturing, they may only exist as computer files rather than as traditional large rubber and ceramic molds. DT Mostly all the material that’s created in the delivery of a work is owned by the artist. Molds that will be used for editions moving forward we retain at our workshop. Dick had a large storage facility nearby; we’ve recently extended our space here and brought all those models back onsite to our expanded workshop. We’ve had some models for decades, so we’ve been undergoing an auditing process with works that have fallen into disuse. We have an established archiving process for artists and molds of works that are currently still in edition. Every year we reach out to artists to check whether they’d like to have those molds returned and held in their studios. With the drawing sets and engineering, most of that is in a digital archive, and all the project and delivery information is kept there as well. And all of that can be shared with the artist and is regularly shared with the artist’s studio as per requested. DB As there’s more awareness of the need for archiving to properly attend to artistic legacy, do you find that more of your time is now devoted to stewarding the molds and communicating with artists about their status? DT Yes. In Australia we have quite a large collection of maquettes, samples, and models that were created during works’ production. We hold those

in perpetuity with the artists’ consent, or they’re returned to artists upon request. Here in the United States, a lot of the models we work with come from the artists’ studios, or if they’re produced at the foundry the artists are given the option to retain them in their studios. So it varies from artist to artist and studio to studio. I think more and more, the artist is interested in the processes of making that go into works of art, and we’re seeing more of those remnants of the making process being shown in exhibitions or in classes or held as part of museum collections. And that’s a fantastic thing as well. DB That nicely illustrates the point I was making about the sophistication of today’s art audiences: they understand the distinctions among the model, the mold, and the final work, and can appreciate them all on their own terms. But what about issues of posthumous casting? Perhaps you’ve dealt with this at UAP but certainly it’s an issue with PTX. What are some of the ethical guidelines or principles that you follow to ensure that posthumous castings respect the original artist’s intentions and maintain authenticity? DT In terms of the intellectual property of the artist from the foundry perspective, we only work with the artist’s estate that has been given custodianship of those works. So we work with either a member of the family, a member of the studio, or the foundation itself, or all three depending on the setup. With Lichtenstein’s sculpture, we’ve been working closely with his foundation and also with a member of his original studio, who does final painting on the works. It’s wonderful to see these great artists and their practices be sustained posthumously, and to see the foundry being part of that ongoing legacy. We’ve formalized a preservation team within UAP at Rock Tavern and appointed a conservator, Sylvia Jeffries, with great experience to run that implementation. I think an earlier question implied that the project doesn’t stop once the work is made; the finished work has an extended life and will have an impact on audiences for a very long time, so the nurturing and sustenance of that piece is just as important, or more important even, than the making of it. DB Yeah, that also opens up questions about conser vation. To what extent does the f irm’s activities include restoring works created by the foundry, or perhaps even much older pieces? One of my favorite stories from Dick Polich was how the sculpture Alma Mater at Columbia University [by Daniel Chester French, 1903], which had been bombed during the student protests in the 1960s, was floated upriver to Peekskill several years later and his foundry restored it. DT Sculpture in the great outdoors certainly needs to be robust. When we first merged with PTX, artist Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull [1989] on Wall Street was damaged, requiring our team to fix its broken horn. A symbol of a surging stock market, the bull had been targeted multiple times over the years. As well as looking after works postfabrication, our preservation team also sits with artists at the start of a project, understanding the intent of the work and the material choices, explaining maintenance issues, exploring paint finishes and sacrificial coatings that go on the cast metal, and helping the artist to make informed decisions about what they want to create and how the work will age and change over its life cycle. Preservation is about prevention as well as remediation and refurbishment. DB It sounds like UAP’s getting out in front of some of these issues around preservation and legacy for the artists you work with. I was interested to

learn that there’s a new staff member dedicated to these issues. What prompted the establishment of that role? DT Before having a conservator on staff, our experienced team members would treat works that came in for refurbishment or advise clients on solutions for preservation. We decided to formalize that. The preservation department is dedicated to extending the legacy of artists by informing material decisions during design and production, along with providing ongoing care, conservation strategies, maintenance, and restoration services. UAP sees this as a natural extension of its production services, and as a way of building on the integrated approach Polich Tallix took to working with artists directly to ensure that their concerns and legacy were always front of mind during the fabrication process. Our team has been working with numerous artists, including Yayoi Kusama, Joel Shapiro, Lynda Benglis, Yoshitomo Nara, and the estates of Roy Lichtenstein and Franz West. DB It sounds like you’re taking on an educational role by operating in this nexus of galleries, museums, artists’ studios, estates, foundations, and universities. We’re almost out of the time, so I wanted to offer you an opportunity to mention any other issues you’re dealing with around legacy, copyright, and future-proofing. DT I think we’ve covered almost everything. What we’ve also been doing alongside our preservation team is upgrading our facilities in the foundry itself. We’ve installed a paint facility that allows us to control the quality of paint, whether with wet-sprayed or hand-painted works. We’ve been investing in AR [augmented reality] and we have an ongoing partnership with two universities in Australia to design robotic technologies for mass customization. With every new piece of equipment, we don’t lose employees, we add to our staff. Each artwork is different and we’re engaging new technologies to assist our makers through that, like helping Jeffrey Gibson create work for the Venice Biennale this year. He’s been engaging in AR and creating work here for production. We’ve also set up studios within the foundry that allow artists to make work onsite and interact with our technicians and makers directly, which we’re really excited by. Raven Halfmoon just finished a residency at our workshop space, and the Australian artist Lindy Lee has been in twice in the last year. We’re starting a partnership with Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based not-for-profit that works with artists around the country to instigate twenty-first-century memorials. DB I think that’s great. We’ve been very thorough here; one thing that’s missing is, can you provide some data points about UAP? How many employees, how many locations, how many works of art are you creating at any given location? DT Yes. Here in the United States, we have a team of 115 (designers, project managers, and makers) working on 213 active projects. We recently opened an office in Los Angeles to support the growing need of artists on the West Coast. Globally we have a team of 300 plus working on projects around the world, including Australia, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. DB Thanks. Now the reader really understands the scale and the scope of UAP.

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LISA

L ON 123

Fiona Duncan pays homage to the unprecedented, and underappreciated, life and work of Lisa Lyon.

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The copy of Arthur C. Danto’s Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe I was reading came from the New York Public Library. Published in 1996 following a moral panic about a publicly funded Mapplethorpe show, Danto’s survey is preoccupied with this context; he’s building a case for the work as art in defense against conservative (homophobic) accusations of child pornography and obscenity. What I was looking for was any information about the bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, Mapplethorpe’s collaborator and the subject of his first art book, from 1983. With no index to shorten my search, I started reading cover to cover. By page 111, I still hadn’t found Lyon but I did notice something: a faint gray rectangle crossing fourteen lines of text across the page from Mapplethorpe’s gorgeous photograph of a man in a three-piece suit with his cock out. I kept reading. A few spreads later the

same rectangle appeared, this time darker. I flipped the page and there it was again, darker still. One more turn of the page and the rectangle became a scratch on the surface of the paper. The page after held my answer: the same jagged rectangle was now completely cut out, severing this line at the bottom: . . . men were, with perhaps t-- ---eption of Lisa Lyon, a woman who played. . . . I turned the page and gasped. Within a photograph showing a square of rippling water was a coffinlike cavity where, I realized, a body should be. Lisa Lyon, the image caption read, 1980. The only reason I’d taken this book out from the library was to find Lyon, so to find her missing—well, it didn’t surprise me.

Lisa Lyon, a bodybuilding pioneer and muse to Robert Mapplethorpe, died on September 8, 2023, in Westlake, California, at the age of seventy from cancer or stomach cancer. Lyon first came to minor or demi-celebrity in 1979 after winning the first Women’s World Pro Bodybuilding Championship. Five foot three or four and 105 pounds at the time, she was photographed lifting Arnold Schwarzenegger on her shoulders. Of Lyon, Schwarzenegger said: “She’s the best, I adore her.” Lyon posed for Playboy in 1980. That same year, she met Robert Mapplethorpe. They would go on to collaborate, or he took dozens/hundreds of photographs of her, or she posed for him. His or their photographs came together as a book, Lady: Lisa Lyon (1983). She was also photographed by Helmut Newton, Marcus Leatherdale, and Marcia Resnick. Lyon saw herself as a performance artist or artist. She challenged ideals of femininity. Her physique inspired Frank Miller’s depiction of Elektra, a Marvel Comics assassin. In 2000, she was inducted into the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federal Hall of Fame. That, roughly, is how almost all of Lyon’s obituaries read. Two longer ones in the New York Times and the Washington Post came closer to doing her justice, quoting her on her childhood (“dark”), on what women’s bodybuilding represented (“an image of strength and survival”), on what she wanted to look like (“a sleek, feline animal”), and on the ultimate compliment (“if someone asked, ‘What planet did she come from?’”). From an obit of a public figure, though, one would hope to branch, to find more. But online, Lyon, with her plucked dawn-of-Hollywood eyebrows, is like a silent movie star. In photographs she is portrayed in black and white when she is not wearing red or, once, blue. It is 1979 to 1983 and she is f lexing in a gym, on stage, at the beach, or in an artist’s studio. There is a harmony between her face and body, both being chiseled and supple. Her broad shoulders are to her narrow waist what her jaw is to her nose, while the dimple in her chin recalls the ridges of her abs. Her breasts and lips are pillowy, as is her hair—her curls could fill a pillow. As for her arms: whether lifted in victory pose, archer pose, or bicep pose, framing her hips in a battle stance, forearm at her waist in side chest pose, lifting dumbbells, or supporting her own body weight as she leans in a Grecian dress, Lisa Lyon’s arms are a knockout. I had once heard and once read that Lyon was intelligent, “a genius” even. This was easy for me to believe because those who innovate—she inaugurated women’s bodybuilding and a new aesthetic for women—rarely do so by accident. The first people to do anything usually come to that thing through a Rube Goldberg–machine-type sequence of life events and intelligent reactions to them. They have theories and reasons that redirect the movement of things, charting a new course of events for themself, leading into new possibilities and sometimes a new standard for others. What did it mean to Lyon to be an artist? What was “dark” about her childhood and how did that inform her? Did she have cats or did she just perceive herself to be one? And what happened? Why did she disappear from the public eye—her last press appearance was in 1991—after being so embraced by it? About a year ago, I had a friend and former private investigator look Lyon up in her detective databases. She found some things of use but only outof-date addresses for the woman herself. Then Lyon

Previous spread, left: Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982 Previous spread, right: Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982 Opposite: Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982 This page: Still from Joel Fletcher’s footage of Lisa Lyon, 1979

died and it was too late. She couldn’t answer my questions. Neither could the Internet. So I turned to the old Internet: people and printed matter. Leonard Koren, creator of the California-cool Wet magazine—which was published from 1976 to 1981, a similar timeframe to Lyon’s fame, and which featured her in its July/August 1979 “Outlaws” issue (with cover star Debbie Harry)—said that he and Lyon came from the same “milieu, middle class West Los Angeles.” She was “a petite intellectual girl” whose conscious practice of building her body could be considered “conceptual,” and “like a conceptual artist, maybe she didn’t have a lot to show for it” in the end (I had asked about her legacy). In her Q&A with Wet, Lyon responded to a question about her legacy, stating, “I’d like to be a proponent of social change and a representative of a new artistic standard.” Will that be through bodybuilding? She wasn’t sure. Bodybuilding “doesn’t have this ultimate kind of importance attached to it,” she admitted, “it’s a kind of a low-life thing to do,” and “that makes it almost ridiculous to talk of it as ultimate achievement or pure art.” But she liked the “humor” of the practice and beyond the “inane side,” she said, there was “the serious side.” That same year, 1979—the year Lyon put both women’s bodybuilding and herself on the map by winning the first ever formal women’s bodybuilding competition—Eve Babitz profiled her for Esquire. “Lisa and I know all the same people in the movie business and the art world and even in jazz,” Babitz reported, using Lyon’s first name because they knew each other as well. On the record with Eve, Lisa explains that she started bodybuilding in 1977 after meeting Schwarzenegger; before then, she had “studied dance and kendo—that’s Japanese fencing—” and before that she had been an art student pursuing medical illustration. Of Lisa’s student days, Babitz recalls that “she was very political and studied criticism in [UCLA’s] graduate film school, which, as everyone knows, is where in L.A. Karl Marx resides, at least in spirit.” Lyon’s father, we learn, was an oral surgeon, her mother an interior designer. Eve shadows her from the floor of the original Venice Beach Gold’s Gym—then the mecca of bodybuilding, where no women practiced, reportedly, until Lyon broke the seal—to its changing room and then to lunch, over which Lisa tells Eve that, thanks to bodybuilding, “I’m happy all the time.” She flexes her phallic arms and states, “It’s art. It’s living sculpture.” Lyon would push this idea further. Her 1980 debut in Artforum—a portfolio of photos of her by Mapplethorpe—introduced her as “a performance artist.” And she did perform. Painter Nancy Reese

recalls seeing Lyon perform naked and covered in graphite circa 1979–80 in Venice, California: “She used sand and stones,” Reese remembers, “like the ones in the Kyoto temple gardens as her stage set. The audience was rapt, mesmerized, as she slowly and powerfully moved around the small stage assuming various archaic poses. It was like seeing some sort of zen version of Nijinsky dancing in Afternoon of a Faun. I can’t recall if there was music or total silence. The performance seems to me now not as an actual event but the memory of a dream.” This performance was not, as far as I could discover, documented. One can find photographs of another performance from 1979–80 at the University of California, Irvine. On the website of the artist Susan Kaiser Vogel, the work is attributed to her. “Peach pastel blocks, lead bricks, drawings on paper, human body, graphite, sound,” reads Vogel’s materials list. The body belonged to Lyon, who had herself painted in graphite again (it was her thing). The work, titled Point Conception, Lead Barrier Reef and Leadwall/Wishing Well, involved Lyon posing in front of a peach brick-wall, performing a similar sequence of flexes as she had in her 1979 International Federation of Bodybuilding winning debut. The conceptual artist Pippa Garner, known until 1992 as Philip Garner, happened to go to that competition, “an obscure fringy event,” as her ex-wife, the Reese from above, remembers it, “in rat-infested Skid Row.” An amateur bodybuilder themself, Garner came home totally wowed by Lyon’s androgynous power: “she was definitely,” Garner says, “an avant-garde artist.” Inspired by Lyon and Chris Burden, Terence McKenna, and the Plasmatics’ Wendy O. Williams, Garner started gender-hacking in 1986. Like Lyon, she positioned the willful transformation of her body as art. This was dismissed by her peers in the LA art world as a lark taken too far. Little did they know, a generation who would embrace Garner’s prophetic genius was just being born. Once introduced, will they love Lyon as well? Garner wasn’t the only androgyne inspired by Lyon. Author Kathy Acker briefly trained with her during her celebrity heyday. Acker kept the practice up and in 1993 published a brilliant essay on bodybuilding, “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,” in which she heralded the practice as “about nothing but failure.” Because you lift until you can no longer, that’s how muscles grow. You tear your muscles by pushing yourself just past the point where you want to quit, then you quit, and it’s then, while repairing, that your muscles grow. They grow so that next time they can meet your challenge. For Acker, bodybuilding was a quadruple fail because it was impossible to relate 125

in words and because it brought one in contact with the body, which decays and dies, so you’re working against language, physics, time, and the West’s fear of death. I wonder if Lyon ever came to a similar conclusion. Her writing on bodybuilding in her commercial self-help guide Lisa Lyon’s Body Magic (1981) talks more about success than about failure, although that may be the genre speaking. Body Magic boasts about “the spiral of success” wherein mind, body, and spirit are connected, not unlike the chakra system. Everything in your life, the book promises, will benefit from physical movement. One look at Lyon’s 1979 winning competition performance and it’s obvious how important movement was to her practice. She moves with the grace of a cat, a dancer, a tai chi master. Joel Fletcher, a Hollywood animator, happened to film her 1979 stage act on his Super 8 camera. He was at the back, though, and it wasn’t until computer tools allowed him, in 2013, to stabilize his shaky handheld footage that Lyon’s debut became accessible. 1 In this footage Lyon looks supernatural, like an animated cartoon come to life. But remember, she studied anatomy, martial arts, and art itself, not to mention show business—she was from Los Angeles. She wasn’t some magical apparition but a studious human whose backgrounds coalesced into this one outstanding performance that would never be repeated in the same context. After inaugurating the sport for women, Lyon refused to compete as a bodybuilder, and to this day none of her successors have done it like her, focusing more on musculature than on her synthesis of movement, spirit, entertainment, and site-specific sculpture. “Musclée mais douce” (Muscular but soft), an Elle France feature from 1981 repeated, in awe of her balance. Lyon was careful not to build her muscles to an even potential; she tore, grew, toned, and left alone what she wanted to, honing a total package. From bodybuilding, Lyon pivoted back to art, but stayed on stage and camera. She was photographed and filmed by Mapplethorpe and, later, by the artist Tadanori Yokoo in Japan. She also appeared in a few films. In the trashy horror Vamp (1986), starring

Grace Jones, Lyon plays a guard in a leather harness and pasties. When the guy she’s guarding is attacked, she turns into a zombie-vampire-demon out for the kill who’s impaled almost instantly and improbably by a high heel that’s not even a stiletto, it’s stacked. In Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983) Lyon wears pasties again, two sets of them during a striptease. Before this she’s seen dancing on a cabaret stage in a bikini, introduced by a man’s voice-over as “the femme fatale, the woman who does what she wants.” When this man asks to be alone with her, she replies, “Art is solitude.” It’s a French film and Lyon is either speaking French or she’s been dubbed. To date, in all my research, I’ve yet to hear Lyon’s voice in her native tongue. But by all accounts, she talked a lot. Journalist John Lombardi said so in his Spy Magazine profile in October 1991: “Lisa is a big-time monologuist,” he wrote, “in the awesome league of Neal Cassady and Robin Williams. There is a Formula One quality to her sentences, as if she were afraid the phrase behind might skid and blow out its syntax if she paused.” Travel journalist and novelist Bruce Chatwin echoed this in his introduction to Lady: Lisa Lyon: Lisa is not inclined—ever—to be tongue-tied; and in any snatch of conversation, you’d be as likely as not to hear her dilating on the principles of Taoism, the future of the planet, her old friend Henry Miller, or the percussion cap needed for her Remington shotgun: “I like weapons. They are a part of my reality.” Or she might explain her concept of the prototype of woman of the eighties: her concept of a woman’s body (“neither masculine nor feminine but feline”), her concept of body building as ritual, and her concept of ritual as Art. When men write that Lyon talked a lot, they tend to summarize her, as above. Her speech is gestured to in their frame. Did she have a Southern California accent? Dimitri Levas, a collaborator and close friend of Mapplethorpe’s, now a vice-president of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, can’t remember what Lyon’s voice sounded like. Then he says, “She could be pushy, domineering.” This page: Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982 Opposite: Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982 All Robert Mapplethorpe artwork © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission.

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Levas has wonderful takes on Mapplethorpe’s side of his collaboration with Lyon. He believes, for example, that Mapplethorpe probably dedicated Lady: Lisa Lyon to Patti Smith because he was planning on doing a similar book with her—a blockbuster photo book of one iconic woman—but when Smith was unavailable, having married MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith and moved to Detroit, Mapplethorpe turned to Lyon, another androgynous model who embodied an ideal he’d pored over in his youth. “When Mapplethorpe was a young man,” Levas explains, “he had a number of big art tomes that he loved and one of them was of Michelangelo. If you look at Michelangelo’s women, they’re basically men’s bodies with women’s faces and boobs.” Lyon and Mapplethorpe came together to make hundreds of photographs that would end up in Artforum, in a book, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, and in 1982’s Documenta 7 exhibition in Kassel, West Germany. Spy’s Lombardi claimed it was Mapplethorpe’s exboyfriend and studio manager Marcus Leatherdale, also a photographer, who introduced Mapplethorpe to Lyon. Chatwin wrote that Lyon was already “on the lookout for the right photographer to document” her “ephemeral” art as “a sculptor whose raw material was her own body.” Like Lee Miller shot by Man Ray, authorship of Lyon × Mapplethorpe’s photographs is obviously shared. She posed, he shot. Their aesthetics were similar: Lyon was already wearing black leather when they met. She was even wearing a veil on their first meeting, just like on the cover of their book. “The pictures are a little hard,” Lyon remarked, “like us.” If only by didn’t imply authorship. Their work was always titled like this, Lyon by Mapplethorpe, which bothered some feminist critics who felt it undermined the work’s collaborative nature. The root of by in Old English, though, also means around, about, near. And Lyon was a radical intellectual—she dedicated Lady: Lisa Lyon to Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panthers—so maybe she knew and didn’t mind being by others in the original sense of the term. She was by others often. In Helmut Newton’s frame, she swings on a trapeze and pulls a steel chain. In Yokoo’s, she wields both chalice and blade. By Leatherdale, she wears a veil. By Resnick, she’s all rippling back. According to Lombardi, Huey Newton and Mapplethorpe were Lyon’s lovers, as were Yokoo, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and others. Lombardi’s Spy article is the most comprehensive look into her life and work, answering one of my questions: Lyon did have a cat, named D. D. Puss. Lombardi’s article is riveting, salacious, and undoubtedly unfair. Remember how Tonya Harding, Anita Hill, Pamela Anderson, Ilona Staller, and Monica Lewinsky were treated in the press; the ’90s could be cruel to their female athletes, political femmes, and sexpots. Was Lyon a PCP-huffing muse who, as Lombardi portrays her, got lost in the sauce after mind-melding with psychonaut John C. Lilly? Maybe. Unlike the gentle McKenna, who advocated once-a-year psilocybin trips, Lilly sought transcendence through ketamine doses that were just short of deadly. The inventor of the isolation tank, celebrated for his CIA and/or selffunded experiments with dolphins, Lilly inspired two Hollywood films and multiple generations of young men desperate to reenact California’s patriarchal hippie counterculture. It’s hard not to look back on his work and see anything but animal abuse, bestiality, the exploitation of his young female employees, and a colonial relationship to nature (he trapped dolphins in a house full of pools and tried to teach them English as if this would prove their

intelligence, not to mention that a pretty twentysomething employee had to routinely relieve a teenage male dolphin sexually.) Lyon and Lilly met in 1986, following her two years in Japan, where she was a big star, recalling perhaps for Japanese audiences the celebrity author and kendo�ka, karate-ka, and boxer Yukio Mishima. (Acker’s bodybuilding essay is a Western mirror of Mishima’s 1968 Sun and Steel.) I trust Spy’s Lombardi as much as I do Lilly, so I’ll be generous and say that what Lyon entered into with Lilly remains a mystery. Drugs? Love? God? Lyon herself said, back in 1982, while speaking of her new (and ultimately short-lived) marriage to the French musician Bernard Lavilliers, “I need a collaborative reality.” She seems to have satisfied that need throughout her life, with Gold’s Gym; with Mapplethorpe, Leatherdale, Resnick, and co.; with Lavilliers; with Yokoo; and, not ultimately, with Lilly. As far as collaborative realities go, the one with Lilly must have been a trip; we’re talking astral travel, aliens, psychic communication, transhumanism, and enough money to pursue these things without limits. He was seventy-six to Lyon’s thirty-eight when Spy quoted her saying that the body, once her prized medium, had come to seem “increasingly irrelevant.” Lyon wasn’t the first of Lilly’s former lovers to be adopted by him as a daughter, and she wouldn’t have been the first to lose herself, if temporarily, in druggie hippie dropout culture. Lilly died in 2001. Lyon married actor Alan Deglin in 2009. He died in 2020. She passed

away three years later. Rare late-life photos of Lyon found in the comments section of her Legacy.com obituary show her looking fierce, fit, and happy with gray hair, black Wayfarers, and leopard print, always, somewhere on her body. I was wondering out loud about Lyon’s disappearing act when Wet’s Koren suggested that “she was almost too smart to be famous. She understood the game and may have lost interest in the self-aggrandizement part of things.” I liked this explanation better than my feeling that the game wasn’t in her favor. If Lyon encountered failure in bodybuilding, it wasn’t the failure Acker described in her essay, although it was a failure Acker experienced in her youth: the failure for her work to be considered art. That’s what Lyon seems to have wanted. She didn’t want to open a chain of gyms in her name, because she was an artist. She may have agreed to a commercial book but Body Magic turned out strange, mixing self-help clichés with illustrated exercise demos, microbios of historic strong women, and intellectual concepts. (An excerpt: “Changing your body goes beyond just changing your outward appearance; it can have a significant influence on everything in your life. As Freud said, ‘The body is the ego.’”) Like a twentieth-century artist, Lyon did tons of drugs, had lots of sex, and innovated an expressive aesthetic following a troubled childhood marked by compulsive behavior. She socialized with artists and collaborated with them as an equal. She didn’t make

objects of her own, though, and that’s a requisite for artist status in the West, where the fiction of the individual hero and the fact of something sellable are more creatively valuable than practicing within the truths of interconnection or our ephemeral human nature. Had Lyon taken her own photographs like Francesca Woodman or Lee Miller, had she packaged her concepts in cool Chris Burden–like documents, would her obits have called her an artist rather than saying “she saw herself” as one? Maybe. The image of Lyon that was cut out of Danto’s Playing with the Edge wasn’t, as I first feared, one of bulging veins and muscles; a queer threat. It’s a picture of her emerging patient-predator-like from the sea, as languid as she was ever pictured. Baywatch before Baywatch, it’s easy to imagine who took it and why. And as banal as masturbation is, that cutout may be a clue. To this day the art world has little room for hot young femmes, just as the status of art is rarely bestowed on representations of them unless they’re debased, exploring feminine abjection and grotesquerie, or captured by another artist, ideally male. I’ve no doubt this bias had something to do with why Lyon left the art world and pop culture in 1986, at the same age at which Jesus died “for somebody’s sins,” as Smith sings, “but not mine.”

1. You can find it on Fletcher’s website; https://www.joelfletcher. com/creative-process/?post=bodybuilder-sculpture-zane (accessed December 16, 2023).

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Through the lens of Christo’s biography and early influences, Elena Geuna reflects on his first sculptures, the subjects of an exhibition she curated through the Gagosian Open program in London in 2023. I was l’étranger, the foreigner, I was a refugee, I was stateless. I felt I was all the time l’étranger, and still today in New York I am l’étranger. —Christo, Cahiers d’Art, 2020 Christo, a name synonymous with innovation and audacious creativity, stands as a towering figure in the landscape of artistic expression. Christo’s first experiment with appropriating objects as art aligned with his arrival in Paris, in March 1958, after two years of peregrinate wandering around Europe. Having left his native Bulgaria in the autumn of 1956, where he had been enrolled at the National Academy of Art in Sofia, he had managed to enter Prague to visit with relatives. In early 1957 he had escaped to Vienna, where he gave up his Bulgarian passport and applied for political asylum. A few months later, benefiting from a temporary visa, he managed to enter Switzerland and settled in Geneva, where he stayed until he was able to move to Paris. There, Christo absorbed the city’s dynamic art scene of the time, establishing relationships with artists and art dealers and inhaling the Parisian air of artistic renewal. He also filled in the gaps in his formative years, where he had been completely excluded from modernist language. Christo’s talent for the avant-garde was immediately focused toward three-dimensionality, which he initially experimented with in a series of highly tactile wall works, Surfaces d’Empaquetage (Packing surfaces), composed of crumpled fabric or paper and covered with thin layers of lacquer and sand. The discontinuities and interruptions visible on the surfaces of these works testify to the fervor of the production process, while the lacquer lends an almost painterly quality to the materials. In an interview in 1982, Christo explained how he was influenced by the artistic context of that place and time, and how crucial to him were the experiences of the artists then engaged in connoting painting with materiality: “There was an interest about the surface of paintings. The two key figures were [Antoni] Tàpies and [Alberto] Burri whose works were linked to [Jean] Dubuffet, who was powerfully building up the surface interest.”1 Lucio Fontana, whom Christo met at an exhibition in Germany during these years, was also exploring new pictorial forms, as evidenced by his Barocchi (Baroques, 1954–57) and Gessi (Chalks, 1954–58) series, characterized by vigorous material movements and recognizable by their rounded configurations and irregular shapes, occasionally applied in collage. When Christo arrived in Paris, the prevailing artistic trends there were primarily abstract, whether gestural, geometric, or material. Dubuffet in particular greatly influenced the young artist’s aesthetic language. Christo first encountered Dubuffet’s works in 1957, when he visited museums in Geneva, Zurich, Basel, Lucerne, and Lausanne. It was the Paris art dealer Daniel Cordier who introduced him to the material-driven approach to painting for which Dubuffet was known; he 130

Previous spread: Christo, Package on a Table, 1961 (detail), wood table, fabric (three types), twine, rope, lacquer, and a can, 59 ⅞ × 15 ⅜ × 15 ⅜ inches (152 × 39 × 39 cm). Photo: Lucy Dawkins This spread: Installation view, Christo: Early Works | Curated by Elena Geuna, Gagosian Open, 4 Princelet Street, London, October 6–22, 2023. Photo: Lucy Dawkins

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embraced this approach, and Dubuffet’s solo exhibition Célébration du Sol (Celebration of the soil), at the Galerie Daniel Cordier in 1959, sparked his series Cratères (Craters, 1959–60). This group of bas-reliefs, created by superimposing layers of paint, sand, and glue, includes the Cratère of 1959 that welcomed the visitor to the ground floor at 4 Princelet Street. The concern with surface here, and the qualities of the materials, suggest a primordial landscape, evocative of lunar craters; the work was made in the year of the release of the first photographs of the moon’s surface, and also of Earth, seen from space. While conceiving these wall reliefs, Christo also began to experiment with three-dimensional objects: “I began wrapping objects in 1958. . . . I couldn’t explain why,” he would later recall. 2 He initially focused on ordinary things he had to hand, such as bottles and the empty paint cans in his studio. Wrapped in fabric, tied with rope, then coated with resin to harden the material, the objects in works such as Wrapped Bottle and Cans (1958–60) take on the status and artistic meaning of sculpture. Arranged in compositions featuring cans and bottles of various sizes, they demonstrate that Christo’s interest no longer lay exclusively in the three-dimensional qualities and materiality of the surface; he had shifted toward the appropriation, concealment, and transformation of the everyday object. Christo: Early Works, the inaugural presentation in the Gagosian Open series of off-site projects, brought his remarkable legacy to life in the truly unique setting of 4 Princelet Street, a Georgian town house in the Spitalfields district of East London, its interiors preserved in all their historicity. Within the walls of this building, early works by 132

Christo found their home across four floors, forging a silent yet explicit dialogue between past and present, between the Wrapped Objects series (1958–69) and the character of the house. The works selected for the Princelet Street exhibition display a direct, physical, yet deeply pragmatic relationship with everyday life. At their core are common, easily available, and relatively small objects in which the artist decisively intervened. Christo’s interest in the object as a form, rather than something with symbolic or representational values alone, gives these works a sense of custodianship: the artist preserves the objects for posterity, exactly as they are, in all their integrity, while simultaneously conveying a feeling of transition and temporariness, as if they were ready to depart or remain, quietly occupying a corner of an empty house. Through his method of enveloping everyday objects in fabric or polyethylene and securing them with meticulously latticed ligatures, Christo altered their contours and surfaces and played with form and texture, both revealing and concealing the “real” identity of the original object. Package on a Table (1961), a small square table vertically loaded with objects wrapped in fabric and cloth and tied with string, is a perfect example. The sculpture prompts the viewer to question the identity and function of this mysterious assemblage of objects hidden by fabric. Christo created five versions of Package on a Table, each with its own distinctive characteristics. Christo’s primary interest lay not in the concealment of content or the mystification of the object but in capturing the object in its original state, as if in an attempt to preserve it for perpetuity. The viewer’s attention thus focuses on the qualities of form,

Above: Christo with an assortment of his early works, Paris, 1963. Photo: Shunk-Kender © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and J. Paul Getty Trust Opposite: Installation view, Christo: Early Works | Curated by Elena Geuna, with Wrapped Perambulator (1962). Photo: Lucy Dawkins All artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation

1. Christo, 1983, quoted in Matthias Koddenberg, Christo and JeanneClaude: Early Works 1958–64 (Bönen, Germany: Kettler Verlag, 2010), 20. 2. Christo, quoted in Olivier Kaeppelin, Christo et Jeanne-Claude. Barils = Barrels, exh. cat. (Saint-Paul de Vence, France: Fondation Maeght, 2016), 125. 3. Christo, quoted in Koddenberg, Early Works 1958–64, 38.

surface, and material, and on the visual possibilities of volume, textile, string, and plastic. As the artist explained, “The packing material is not ordinary fabric. It was a special fabric. How the fabric was arranged, the strings, that was pictorial. Added to that was the idea of transformation.”3 The wefts, the tones, the curling of the fabric held by the tension of the string, and the play of ordinary, unsophisticated knots testify to the conceptual significance of these works, which goes beyond the mere appropriation of the object by depriving it of its constitutive function. Characterized by a bundle shape, Package (1961) transforms the use of fabric, a material that covers, conceals, and protects. The material of travelers, it is quick to fold and easy to transport, and present in many of Christo’s works from this period. The works exhibited at 4 Princelet Street echo Christo’s personal experience: the repeated, painful relocations in which he continually left homes, objects, and personal affections behind. The economic difficulties he faced on his arrival in Paris, and the sense of precariousness and rootlessness embedded in his status as a stateless person—a condition that would last for seventeen years—determined the spirit in which his early works were created. Representing ideas of motion and transience, works such as Dolly (1964), which welcomed viewers on the ground floor, and Package on a Luggage Rack (1962) refer to transportation, moving home, and migration. Between the works and the space that contained them, the show palpably emanated a human, personal dimension, a sensation amplified by the familiarity of the objects Christo chose. The most intimate objects appeared in the private rooms on the upper floors of the house. One sage-gray room displayed four works packed in

transparent polyethylene sheets that left the contents visible. All of these were personal objects, which Christo had wrapped with the obsession of a fetishist: a wrapped portrait, a wrapped wall sconce, and wrapped shoes, one pair belonging to his wife and artist partner Jeanne-Claude, the other to Christo’s friend Harrison. Made of personal-use items of the artist and those close to him, these works suggest and evoke a sense of intimacy, reinforced by their small scale. In many inter v iews, Chr isto emphasized how during the early years of his career, he used ever y t h i ng t hat c a me h is way for h is “empaquetages,” from household objects to street finds to cheap flea market purchases. The exhibition included Wrapped Perambulator (1962), the plastic-wrapped stroller of the couple’s son Cyril, and J-C’s Wrapped Shoes (1962), “J-C” being JeanneClaude: once when she was at a loss to find her shoes, Christo admitted that he had wrapped them. Shoes recur a number of times in the artist’s work, but J-C’s Wrapped Shoes is the only one in which he not only took possession of the object as something belonging to his wife, but also used its title to dedicate it, now transformed into an artwork, to her. Christo considered the object, now deprived of its original function, to be the very subject of the artwork, acquiring new characteristics and narrating a new story. The relationship between him and the objects he almost compulsively wrapped up is apparent from his early exhibitions, in which he often crafted works directly on site and sourced the objects locally. The mysterious Applique Empaquetée (Packaged wall lamp, 1963–81) was most likely begun in Venice in 1963, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Galleria del Leone there. A note in the artist’s archive reveals that

the gallery was “surprised when Christo arrived with only a few finished pieces and a bag of tools; they were dumbfounded when he turned their gallery into a workshop.” One of the gallery partners recalled, “I was very confused. His bag contained a chisel, hammer, nails, all the things a workman uses—no art materials. He and I went to buy clear plastic, books, canvas, furniture, and other items. He tied magazines in clear plastic, then he wrapped a metal wall sconce and put it into a large black oval frame we found. Christo did all of the work on our gallery floor.” Wrapped Magazines (1972–73) was installed in one of the house’s two attic rooms, concluding the exhibition on the top floor, along with Package (1963). This deliberate arrangement drew a compelling parallel between the loftiness of ideas—symbolized by the wrapped typewriter and the towering pile of magazines—with the highest floor in the building, emphasizing an inescapable connection between creativity and elevation in the continuous quest for inspiration and truth. Christo transformed the way viewers perceive objects, and with this exhibition he gifted the simple yet storied spaces of 4 Princelet Street, which have witnessed a continuous cycle of departures and arrivals, with a new identity. The Wrapped Objects sometimes hide their content, inducing a sense of distance and separation from the object, their mere presence evoking an absence, a state of transience. Positioned in the intimate and hidden ambience of the town house, these objects skillfully intertwined identities and fragments of life, inviting contemplation of the meaning of belonging and identity while retaining the mysterious fascination of ordinary objects transformed into works of art.

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CROSSINGS Dance scholars Mark Franko and Ninotchka Bennahum join the Quarterly’s Gillian Jakab in a conversation about the exhibition Border Crossings at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Cocurated by Bennahum and Bruce Robertson, the show reexamines twentieth-century modern dance in the context of war, exile, and injustice. An accompanying catalogue, coedited by Bennahum and Rena Heinrich and published earlier this year, bridges the New York presentation with its West Coast counterpart at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

MARK FRANKO Could you say a little about how you got the idea for Border Crossings? NINOTCHKA BENNAHUM The title changed over time. The exhibition offers histories of modern dance seen through the lens of the exiled, marginalized, and refugee artists whose border crossings are the result of geopolitical conflict—war, revolution— and structural racism. Exile, an exilic modernism, became the spine of the exhibition thanks to my research on another project. For many years I worked as the dance historian for the American Ballet Theatre. When I joined the faculty of the University of California, I began thinking seriously about a critical and historical examination of the company. Ballet Theatre, as it was known at its genesis, was founded at a bad time in history, on the eve of World War II, which coincided with virulent racism in the United States and the coming international conflagration of world war. As I pored over letters, diaries, contracts, and production notes, the relationships between neoclassicism, modernism, and the trauma of the twentieth century coalesced. This came out of our discussions with one another, Mark. You were my last teacher at New York University’s Department of Performance Studies. I gained so much from your seminar on dance modernism, including discovering the roots of exiled and marginalized artists. These vital discussions led me to the title for my book now in manuscript, Exile and Modernity: American Ballet Theatre in the Shadow of War, and also to many aspects of this show. Also my mom, Judith ChazinBennahum, in her book on René Blum, focused on the traumas of the twentieth century woven into the onstage ethos of contemporary dance.1 GILLIAN JAKAB What’s particular about dance in relationship to these themes of modernism and exile? NB In the exhibition, I wanted to explore the notion of modern dance as containing urgency, as having a momentum distinct from technique, distinct from the aesthetic properties that critics such as Clement Greenberg characterized as self-reflexive. Although modern dance defended its autonomy from the other arts to assert its own unique identity, this became confused with aesthetic

Katherine Dunham at Villa I Tatti, Florence, Italy, c. 1949

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autonomy tout court. The idea that modern art takes itself as its own subject matter became a sort of tyranny, which still governs quite a bit of how we analyze “the modern” in visual art, literature, and music. But what’s missing from that definition when you have an embodied form, like dance? Where dance is concerned, what can autonomous art and self-referential form mean? One answer, for me, comes from the “exilic presence” within modern dance, which to my mind was triggered by the rise of fascism in Europe, the formation of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade—an American volunteer battalion that fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War—and the militarized street mob (which we’re seeing again now in the United States). These gave rise to a clear radical consciousness, in this context among the 1930s dance artists you wrote about, Mark, in your book on dance and the labor movement: Edna Ocko, Jane Dudley, Anna Sokolow, Eve Gentry, Lily Mehlman, Syvilla Fort, Si-lan Chen (a committed Marxist-Leninist).2 This group was attuned to the dangers of the world and many had relatives in Europe. From General Franco’s invasion of Spain from Morocco, triggering the Spanish Civil War, to the aerial bombings of Guernica (April 26, 1937), to Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938—all this triggered a refugee crisis, a maelstrom of geopolitics and human displacement that brought about the loss of lives. The story of danger and the refugee body, of the asylum seeker in the United States and in the world of modern art, is not new. But what is new in relation to dance modernism is that it is not just obedient to the ideology of self-reflexivity but constitutes a corporeal language of the modern in an existential sense: the lingua franca of movement in crisis, its ethos, its drive, it becomes the language of the radicalized political body. And the political body displaces the primacy of the avantgarde, because its radicalism is no longer limited to the strictly aesthetic or formally innovative. Then there are the artists exiled within the United States, in a sense: the Black, brown, and Indigenous people. There are multiple vectors: the physical transfer of ideas from Europe to the United States in the bodies of asylum seekers, but also the exclusive forces within the United States, beginning with the complete failure of Reconstruction in the later nineteenth century. After Nellie Cornish, founder of the Cornish School in Seattle, advocated that the Black dancer Syvilla Fort be admitted, she was asked to leave the board. Fort went on to choreograph with Merce Cunningham in 1939. In addition, she commissioned a composition for prepared piano, Bacchanale, from John Cage, who was teaching at Cornish. Bacchanale is in the exhibit. These two white men go off to great fame, but very few people have heard of Syvilla Fort. In fact, we have not a single record of her dancing and only a rare and wonderful film of her teaching in the Phillips-Fort studio. These are the archival gaps we attempted to resolve. MF You’re doing something very interesting in this exhibition. I love the phrase you use, “internal exile.” We move from the geopolitical forces that send people moving across the globe to the individual dancer, their career trajectory, their struggles in their milieu—it’s very biographical. Could you say a little more about that—how you came to the realization that by pulling those two threads, the global and the individual, they would merge? NB I was thinking about the scholar Saidiya Hartman’s phrase “if inequality structures the world.” The question was, could we show the 136

marginalized and underrepresented artists of modern dance as exiled from its history, while also foregrounding the history of modern dance as itself founded on exile? An artist like Pearl Primus, for example, brought the vocabulary of modern dance together with US southern labor songs and Afro-diasporic dances and mobilized them toward social justice, toward the New Dance Group’s political manifesto “Dance as a weapon for social change.” GJ You mentioned that the exhibition came to be through many conversations with Mark. There’s also a catalogue in the works with contributions from twenty different dance historians. Could you speak a little about how you engaged with the work of other scholars for the project? NB Well, Mark trained me, fellow dance scholar André Lepecki, and many others, and he’s maintained an ongoing conversation with his students since then. It’s a lineage. The field has blossomed in the last few decades—very exciting. It was a gift to have that mentorship, pedagogy, and insight. In addition, we thought the show should have a book as both representative of the exhibition and an extension of it. It’s an opportunity to bring in other scholarly perspectives and to enable graduate student research. We wanted to identify certain artists who are not written about enough, like

Si-lan Chen. If we put forth more comprehensive intellectual information, perhaps someone will write a biography. The exhibition catalogue was curated carefully to represent the exhibition on both coasts, to represent different stages of scholarly engagement, interdisciplinarity, and also to bring in the most central parts: colorism, racism, radical pedagogy, border crossings, the trauma of two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, revolutions, et cetera, as a methodology for understanding the language of asylum as it becomes corporealized. MF You completely avoided New York–centrism. I was very impressed. In the exhibition, we meet the California-born dancer Yuriko Kikuchi, who was forced with her family into an internment camp during World War II because her parents were of Japanese ancestry. We see her through photographs from Martha Graham’s work. One is a beautiful image of her in Canticle for Innocent Comedians in 1952. There’s a double layering—the movement of exile opens into individual biographies as well as shared movement philosophies. Graham choreographed by working with Yuriko’s body, a body that contained a history. If I could imagine seeing Canticle today with Yuriko, I wouldn’t be thinking directly about her personal vision of choreography, necessarily, or what she’s bringing to this as a Japanese

“WE WILL HAVE TO SPEAK OF THE ‘NEGRO DANCER’ UNTIL PEOPLE ARE FINALLY CONSIDERED ONLY ON THE GROUNDS OF THEIR TALENT AND MERIT.”

American, but it would still come through the work of someone else. To me that’s part of what you’re saying here: that a dancer can embody and transform roles and spaces. While there were certainly racist barriers in modern dance at the time, as a young observer of dance in the 1950s I felt the power of diverse perspectives. Dance scholarship hasn’t encompassed this range of identity; we don’t see the full history. We have many brilliant monographs on different artists, different companies, like Alvin Ailey, so that’s filling in gaps, yet despite progress over the last twenty years, it’s still compartmentalized. This exhibition is the first time I’ve seen the expansive vision that I had immediately when I saw modern dance as a child. NB Thank you. That was the goal and you are the first person to articulate it. The historical context is striking to me as a way of seeing Yuriko’s relationship with Graham. She comes to Graham, released from internment, and says, “I am Yuriko. I have just spent eighteen months in an Arizona concentration camp. Hire me.” She makes it clear that having been interned, having been arrested, having been rendered stateless like everyone on a Nansen passport—a passport document issued by the League of Nations

in the interwar years to help refugees who had lost their national identity—forms the perspective from which she will perform Canticle. The egregious nature of these internal physical borders— the racial cartography of the internment—and the carving up of the nation into citizens and “noncitizens” suddenly stripped people of their legal status under Executive Order 9066. Yuriko, Graham’s first nonwhite dancer, danced Canticle, as did the great African American dancer Mary Hinkson, who joined the Graham company after Yuriko in 1951. By the 1960s you witness a jazz-inspired freedom in the body, an improvisational élan, in that wonderful art film On the Sound [1962], with Hinkson, Matt Turney, and Donald McKayle—that’s the transition. Brown v. Board of Education is in 1954, and this echoes Beat culture and foreshadows the arrival of hippie counterculture, and the conversation changes. The exhibition ends there. GJ Yes, I was curious about the decision to end the exhibition in 1955. NB Well, in addition to this political shift, it specifically stopped in 1955 with Anna Halprin and the California beginnings of postmodernism in dance. That was the creation by Lawrence Halprin of Halprin’s dance deck and the construction

Mary Hinkson, Dance Magazine, 1966

Opposite: Jane Dudley in Song of Protest, 1937 This page: José Limón in “Revalucionario” from Danzas Mexicanas, 1946. Photo: John Lindquist © Houghton Library, Harvard University

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of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop among the madrone trees of Marin County. MF Modern dance may have ended in 1955? NB Halprin said it had to end. She said, “This is a postwar moment. I’m done.” We understood that Anna broke with Martha Graham to make room for postmodernism; modern dance had to end. Still, we have to acknowledge that of course it didn’t end, because it was the medium through which the border crossing had occurred. Major BIPOC choreographers emerged. There was a multiracial and multigenerational presence in dance from the civil rights era through the ’80s: Anna Sokolow, Donald McKayle, Eleo Pomare, Paul Sanasardo, Pina Bausch, Bill T. Jones, et cetera. Carmen de Lavallade—who danced with Carmelita Maracci, Lester Horton, Alvin Ailey, and Geoffrey Holder— is still alive and I wanted to include more of her story; she didn’t get the kind of historical credit I think she deserves. She has an artistic vision that circulates and permeates New York City. So many women, women of color particularly, are not credited with creative innovation as national momentum. De Lavallade and Hinkson became important curators of modern dance in the 1950s and ’60s. GJ You’re even crossing the borders of time periods in this show! There are geographic borders, the social borders of race segregation, and borders of artistic genre and academic discipline. MF The borders of aesthetics versus history— NB In terms of geopolitical borders, modern dance can be seen as an exchange between Europe and the United States, with its roots in Mary Wigman’s German expressionist dance of the 1920s. With the rise of fascism in this time, dancers often found themselves on either side of a divide. The American dance educator Margaret H’Doubler, for example, sent her modern-dance students at the University of Wisconsin to Wigman’s school in the early 1930s and went to Dresden to see Wigman in 1937. It is unfortunately a fact that H’Doubler’s students appeared in Wigman’s and Rudolf Laban’s choreographies for the Berlin games in 1936. The moral dilemma that emerges from this research is endlessly complex. MF They used this in the Nazi Olympic Games? NB Exactly. MF So that’s kind of a counterpart to Graham refusing Joseph Goebbels’s invitation to appear there. NB Right, that signaled the tension. Graham was crystal clear on her antifascist stance. But Wigman Aryanized her school before the racial laws of 1935. In some of Wigman’s choreography one senses the rise of fascism within the body, following the coopting of modern dance by nationalist aesthetics and guidelines at these Nazi spectacles. MF Regarding genre, choreographer Dianne McIntyre said, “What’s a border? Well, my training happens to be classical so when I deal with the racial issues that I do in my choreography, that are more common in experimental dance, I’m crossing a border.” She breaks from the restrictive conventions and expectations. NB Another related border you brought up is discipline—the interdisciplinarity of these artistic and political laboratories, these physical studio spaces and the dancers that modern dance choreographers were sharing. Nobody had any money. The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York became a very important intellectual hub for immigrant children and dancers in the first half of the twentieth century. There were crossovers between theater and dance, with figures like the dancer and actor 138

Benjamin Zemach, who was close with Graham. And when Graham dancer Jane Dudley retired from the stage, the audience, her students, witnessed a political acumen, an ability to articulate definitions of dance modernism and what concerned the modern dance artist.3 For this reason she can be linked to Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. Modernity is a state of anxiety, a state of existential angst. The language of modernism and exile is so clear in German literature, in Thomas Mann, for example. Why don’t we embed philosophical ideas of the body in dance and its scholarship as much? MF That’s what this exhibition transmits in many different ways. GJ In terms of transmission, Crossing Borders ends with a video of contemporary dance artists, in a sense connecting what has been inherited from history with the future. NB Yes, at the end we highlight important next-gen, post-1955 artists, like Tina Ramírez, the founder of Ballet Hispánico, which today is vital to the city of New York. One of the things we wanted to do on New York soil was pay homage to artists whose dancers are going to walk through the exhibition, to honor them and invite contemporary artists to live in, to inhabit, this critical

This page: Si-lan Chen. Photo: Eliot Elisofon Opposite: Janet Collins in Chain Gang, 1949. Photo: Walter E. Owen All photos: courtesy Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

inquiry. Kyle Abraham plays a central role in contemporary dance in discussing structural racism and communities under siege. I’ve also spoken with choreographer Ralph Lemon about the whiteness of postmodernism: how is it that, if the legacy of modernism is rich and diverse, postmodernism turns its back on multiraciality? It becomes even more egregious and striking in the latter half of the twentieth century. Not that there weren’t pitfalls to modernism’s impulse toward multiculturalism; we have a section in the exhibition titled “Trespassing and Cultural Appropriation,” critiquing white artists’ vision of exoticism in the 1920s. There we display a 1930 quote by Martha Graham critiquing her teachers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn [collectively referred to as Denishawn]’s “weakling exoticism of a transplanted orientalism.” For Latiné artists in particular—dance educators Michelle Manzanales and Kiri Avelar articulate this in the exhibition—the US/Mexico border is real. Avelar comes from borderlands, from El Paso, where the border wall is a painful and continuous space. MF It makes me think of Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization [1961], the idea that confinement can either be within or without. And Jacques Derrida worked with the notion of the crypt of

the outside within the inside, working around otherness. NB You’re lugging it behind you or around you or inside your body your entire life. Si-lan Chen, whose father was Chinese and whose mother was Trinidadian/French Creole of African descent, didn’t experience the racism of Jim Crow until she came to the United States and had to deal with immigration. So one’s encounter with the border as a periphery separating madness from reason comes in different moments, in different ways, at different times. There’s no single border, no single imprisonment; they’re all individuated. The choreographer Antony Tudor represented this beautifully in 1942 in Pillar of Fire. There’s a psychic wall between the character Hagar’s repression and the man in the “House Opposite.” The physical geography of the stage is separated into many mental spaces and psychic breaks. It’s a panopticon of madness and suffering and love. GJ In a somewhat similar sense, I was curious about the physical space of the exhibition—we have to move our bodies through it and have some agency over how long to stay in front of something, when to go back, and which direction to take. How were the design decisions made? NB Caitlin Whittington, the library’s wonderful exhibition designer, asked former Guggenheim

designer Christine Rung to join their team and Christine was just incredible. We met every Friday for two years with our design team. They did a beautiful job. We made slides with proposals like “This film here,” “These photographs hung this way.” It was a collaboration. We wanted the space as open and unmediated as possible. GJ Mark and I ended up starting at different ends of the exhibition and met in the middle. MF That space is strange because you can enter on either side— GJ —and take your own journey.

1. Judith Chazin-Bennahum, René Blum and the Ballets Russes: In Search of a Lost Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2. See Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), and Mark Franko, “Bodies of Radical Will,” in Dancing Modernism/ Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023). 3. Jane Dudley in Dancing: The Individual and Tradition, Dance Group Films, American Dance Guild (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1993), VHS video. © 1993. See also her interviews in Mark Franko, The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).

“THESE BORDER CROSSINGS. YOU CAN’T GET AWAY FROM THEM.” Dianne McIntyre, 2023

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PUTRI TAN Corey, the exhibition you curated at

SFMOMA in 2011, Francesca Woodman, provided a broad retrospective view of her work, which was necessary because a great number of those photographs hadn’t been widely seen in the United States for about twenty-five years. Many of your selections were lesser-known works that offered new insight into Francesca’s art and interests. I wonder if today you feel there are still overlooked areas of Woodman’s work, or whether there’s a specific focus you would explore if you were to curate an exhibition anew? COREY KELLER At the time of that exhibition, Francesca hadn’t had a major survey in the United States. Nonetheless, a whole mytholog y had already attached to her work. The way it was talked about was not only defined by a body of scholarship but was also deeply informed by her biography. I felt like I had a responsibility to try to complicate those readings a little bit and to take a more expansive look at her practice. She was such a young artist, it was hard to decide where her “serious” work began. I chose not to include the work she did when she was still a high school student in Colorado, although I did write about it in the catalogue essay. I started with her time as an undergraduate at RISD, which is probably her best-known work. But I wanted to give a sense of the scope of her photography, not just the incredible work that she did in college and in Italy but also her artist’s books and videos and the incredible diazotypes she made in New York, work that didn’t necessarily immediately come to mind when we thought of Francesca Woodman. So I tried to show the expansiveness of her practice, the complexity of it, and also that just before she died, it was moving in a direction quite different from where she had started. The other thing that felt very important to me was to remember just how young she was, and to remind viewers that most of this work was done while she was a student. That’s not meant to be disparaging. Many writers have struggled to characterize her work, and the scholarship is conflicting: she’s a feminist, she’s not a feminist, she’s a surrealist, she’s not a surrealist. . . . and I think the

reason we can’t quite pin her down is that she was still finding her way as an artist. She was an artist in formation, and artists in formation are exploring; they’re trying things out. So I wanted to make room to appreciate that kind of youthful play, that self-exploration, which I felt hadn’t been admitted into the picture of Woodman yet. PT You touched on her interest in making work serially. The SFMOMA exhibition included groups of related works and existing series, as does our Gagosian show. How do you think the serial aspect of the work informs our general understanding of what she was thinking about in her photography? CK In a journal, or maybe a letter, Francesca wrote about making work the way she learned to play piano, in that you start with a theme and then learn the variations on the theme. The composer begins with a simple theme and then elaborates on that theme over many variations, embellishing the melody and exploring it at different tempos and in different keys. The angel is a theme that appears over and over and in various manifestations across Francesca’s work, even arguably in her very earliest work from high school, where she posed nude in the cemetery against the gravestones. From the very beginning, she’s clearly thinking about the body, and death, and the figure of the angel. The imagery is not consistent but the ideas she’s exploring are. She tended to work out a problem over time, in different contexts, and to return to themes many times from different angles. She did do a few pictures that are sequential—they’re obviously meant to go one, two, three, four, in an order. But in general her approach to sequence is more like a tangled web of relationships than like a string of pearls on a necklace. PT Is there a particular body of work or an image to which you return often? CK I’d say the thesis installation, referred to as Swan Song [1978], that she did at RISD. It’s much less known than her other work, because it was an actual physical installation and had to be experienced in person. I don’t think she ever showed it again, but I often work with undergraduates and

Ahead of the first exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photographs at Gagosian, director Putri Tan speaks with historian and curator Corey Keller about new insights into the artist’s work. The two unravel themes of the body, space, architecture, and ambiguity.

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Francesca Woodman, Blueprint for a Temple (II), 1980, diazotype collage with gelatin silver prints, 171 ½ × 125 inches (435.6 × 317.5 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

what they choose to present for their BFA thesis shows is important, right? It signifies where they see themselves at the end of a four-year education and where they’re hoping to go. Francesca took herself very seriously—far more seriously than a typical undergraduate, I’d say—so I think we have to take her final work as a student seriously, too. The exhibition combines her interest in the body in space, the expressions of presence and ethereality, with a new experiment in scale. The prints are much larger than anything she’d printed up until that point: before those works, she never printed anything larger than 8 by 8 inches and these are more like 40 by 40 inches, maybe larger. She installed them in the architectural space of the gallery, not in frames but pinned to the wall, mostly in pairs, in a corner of the gallery, all the way up at the ceiling or down at the baseboard. And she included a mirror, so that the space of the gallery was also incorporated into the experience of seeing the work. The installation illuminates the issues that became increasingly important to her, that you then start to see elaborated in the diazotype work she did later in New York. Because so few people 142

saw that installation, it probably hasn’t had that much of an impact on how people have viewed her work, but to me it marks the beginning of a shift in her thinking. Even the way she took those pictures is significant: she drilled a hole in the ceiling of her studio and the camera is positioned above, looking down through it, so there’s both a kind of voyeurism and an omniscience to the point of view. It’s a sophisticated way of thinking about looking, about being seen, about the body in space, and the way space affects our encounter with artwork. PT Right, not only does she consider space within the photographs but she also asks us to experience the space around her work within its presentation. Could you elaborate a little on how you think the space around Francesca’s body operates in her images? CK I would say for starters that it really demonstrates the level of ambition she had. I think that’s one of the most striking things about her as an artist. I don’t know if you remember yourself when you were twenty years old— PT Oh god, I try not to remember. CK [Laughter] Yeah, I would really hate for anybody to spend the kind of time thinking about what

I did as a twenty-year-old that people have spent thinking about what she did as a twenty-year-old, right? I think she’s imagining something for herself, a kind of place in the world. I feel like she’s thinking about taking up more space, in a sense. She shifted from intimate small-scale photographs to a practice that forces the viewer to think not only about bodies in space but about their own body in space as a viewer. PT At the time of the retrospective, you were one of the very few curators able to see all the work that Francesca held on to in her lifetime, and that passed on to her parents after her death, as well as a limited number of her personal archival materials. Given that Gagosian and the Woodman Family Foundation now have the ability to share more of this material for study, I wonder if you think there are new possibilities for scholarship and interpretation and how you see that changing the landscape around her work. CK I think there’s a huge opportunity. I was just thinking, When can I write the next book? For a while, her parents, the artists George and Betty Woodman, were understandably sensitive about letting people look at Francesca’s journals, because they felt her words had been misinterpreted or exploited in the past. But with thoughtful scholarship I think there’s a great deal to be learned. For starters, Woodman wrote in her journals about exhibitions she saw. She has invitations and announcements and clippings tucked in there. It becomes really exciting to look at her work in the context of what she herself was looking at, because she was a voracious art-looker—she’d grown up going to museums with her family her entire life, and she read and looked at everything. You can’t think of her as this isolated genius who sprang into the world completely and fully formed; she’s deeply, deeply enmeshed in a larger world of art. I would personally love to explore more deeply the web of artworks and artists Francesca was interested in. When I was working on the SFMOMA exhibition, for instance, I wanted to know if Ralph Eugene Meatyard was somebody she was looking at. Katarina [Jerinic, the Woodman Family Foundation’s collections curator] sure enough found a clipping of a quite obscure article about Meatyard in an Opposite: Francesca Woodman, From Space² or Space², from the Space² series, 1976, gelatin silver print, 5 ⅜ × 5 ⅜ inches (13.7 × 13.5 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

issue of Criss-Cross Art Communications, a publication with which Francesca’s father, George Woodman, was heavily involved through the University of Colorado. She would likely have encountered it there. That’s fascinating to me because Meatyard’s work was not as widely known then as perhaps it is now. So it suggests a real awareness of what other photographers were doing, but also makes me want to look more closely at the particular artists she had an affinity for. There’s tons of research to be done on connections like that. I think there are themes in the work that could be explored further. For the retrospective I organized the work chronologically, to give viewers a sense of how it developed over time. When you group the work thematically instead, you start to see connections across pictures that you might have missed otherwise. And in fact I think the selection for your show illustrates that in beautiful ways. The pedestal, for example: there are plinths in many of the works, from different groupings, that when you see them individually read like abstract shapes, but when you see the same pictures next to other works, the shapes are clearly pedestals. So now I see in one of those works not a figure lying on the floor next to a rectangular box but a figure who has fallen off a pedestal. Putting work you know in new combinations makes you view the same photographs through a totally different perspective. It’s exciting to shuffle it all up and see what new through lines emerge. PT I love that you brought up that group of works, because for me, viewing them together for the first time was a revelation. The pedestals echo the frame of light falling on the floor. She uses light as a formal object in these images, mimicking the pedestal, an actual object. CK I think I hadn’t fully realized until now just how important the pair of Blueprint for a Temple [1980] works are in her body of work. I think because she made them toward the end of her career, so shortly before her death, they almost don’t get digested like the rest of her work. They aren’t part of the Woodman mythology in the same way; it seems like a thing apart. And what the grouping in this show makes so clear to me is that all her work was moving toward this, that the Temple was sort of a climax rather than an outlier.

I think that’s true. I mean, it’s remarkable that she makes these two monumental temple works in 1980 and finds an incredible delivery for all of these ideas—remarkable because of their scale, but also because the ideas are so fully formed. As you’ve said, everything in these individual images is extracted and distilled in such a profound way, literally using her body as architecture, forming a temple. CK I love its monumentality—I mean, what could be more solid and majestic than a Greek temple? She wrote in her journals that she was tired of making small work, and here she certainly goes in a different direction. The piece evokes the epitome of classical perfection and it’s also hilarious, because all the different parts are pieces of her bathroom: bathtub claw feet, the pedestal for her sink—anyone who’s lived in a New York rental apartment recognizes that Greek key tile pattern. In a smaller diazotype mounted on the right of the larger work, she writes about the bathroom as a modern temple, this place of respite from the chaos of the world. She could be kind of a little imp. Which I think doesn’t always get appreciated about her as well. She was very funny. PT Yes, very funny. And you said this earlier: she had so much experience of the world at such a young age. I mean, her parents were artists and they traveled and she was taken to world-class museums. She was consuming the world around her. That’s rare. We were taken to places as young kids, but we weren’t always engaged—“we” meaning me, I’m speaking for myself. Woodman not only absorbed the art in the museums but she also looked at ordinary things like the bathroom tile and saw an opportunity to make art. CK She had a visual appetite that was just voracious. I mean, it must have been difficult to grow up with two successful artists as parents. How do you position yourself in that world? She was driven to look by professional ambition but also by a deep curiosity. I was laughing because I took my kids to the Vatican a couple of years ago and my kids, who were about nine and thirteen, declared it the most boring place in the entire world. Francesca was going to those places and she wasn’t telling her parents it was the most boring place in the world. She was probably all over it. Her parents used to send PT

This page: Installation view, Francesca Woodman Photographs at Woods-Gerry Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, 1978, Woodman Family Foundation Archive © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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her and her brother Charlie off with sketchbooks so that they themselves could look at the art in peace. And my kids were like, “Where’s the gelato and can we get out of here?” PT You can’t fault them for that—gelato’s delicious. But I do think it’s remarkable how tuned in and fed Woodman was by the world around her. Do you think there are specific elements of her work that we need to reexamine as a contemporary audience, given the passage of time? CK I think it’s worth reevaluating the context for her work, what was going on around her artistically. I’m particularly interested in looking at her work in relationship to the Pattern and Decoration movement, because that was in part a response to the cold, machined masculinity of Minimalism. Pattern and Decoration celebrated the feminine, craft, the handmade (which I think is also interesting in relationship to some of the stuff going on now), and it was a sensibility to which her father ascribed, as did some of the other artists she was personally close to. I think every time the machine looms large, this countercurrent springs up to meet it: an embrace of the tender and the intimate and the detail. But Pattern and Decoration never became a major mainstream movement, and it often gets downplayed as a sidenote. I think those sidenotes often give us a richer, more nuanced picture of what was going on at a particular moment. When I was writing my essay for the exhibition catalogue, I was reminded that she was making these intimate self-portraits at the same time that the famous landscape-photography exhibition New Topographics [1975] was organized as a kind of summary of photography’s dominant mood. You couldn’t find two bodies of work more diametrically opposed. But art history tends to stick to certain narratives. If you say “1975” to a historian of photography, they reflexively respond with “New Topographics.” That’s the model we have of what’s happening in 1970s photography. But in fact it’s only a part of the picture. You could also think about her work in relationship to Cindy Sherman’s film stills, which she started making in ’76? Nominally there’s a comparison to be drawn between two women making photographs in which their own bodies appear, but Sherman is deeply engaged with popular culture and the media machine and Woodman couldn’t

care less about any of that. There’s no irony in Woodman’s work, no social commentary, no archness. She and Sherman are coming from two very different places and using the camera in entirely different ways. One of the lessons to be drawn from Woodman’s work is that a far more interesting story can be told about photography, and maybe especially photography by women, during that time. PT A motif that strikes me in Francesca’s work is the body collapsing into the environment, or into architecture—there’s a lot of classical imagery, ruins. CK From the very, very beginning, even from her high school work, there’s a sense in her pictures of the body either emerging from or being consumed by architecture, it’s never entirely clear which. Is she coming out of wallpaper in that room or is the wallpaper eating her? There’s a series where she’s in her studio and she’s moving in and around this big sheet of plastic wrap—there’s a formal elegance to the shapes, but also one can’t tell whether she’s being devoured or enveloped, revealed or concealed. It’s a wonderful ambiguity. I was also looking at the picture Space 2 [1976] again, with the door that’s propped at that impossible angle and a body underneath it. I had always seen it as a dreamlike picture, where the door is almost floating gently, almost magically, in space. Look again and it’s a guillotine, it’s crushing, it’s dangerous. Her pictures remind me sometimes of Greek mythology: she looks almost like a beast, like the Minotaur in the labyrinth. There’s both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, and you don’t quite know whether they’re trapped or liberated. That’s a remarkable achievement. PT In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that, as you said, is the body. I’m never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she’s holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it. CK I think what’s interesting about the work is it’s never quite only about the space and it’s never quite only about the body, but it’s about the psychological spark that ignites when those two things intersect. In terms of form, I think her choice of the square-format camera is really important. We’re so used to seeing things in rectangles—on a screen,

for example—we don’t even notice how artificial a square is. When you photograph with a square format you have four corners and you have a center, but the relationship between the center and the edges is very different in a square from in a rectangle. For other photographers—Diane Arbus, for example—their work completely transforms when they trade in their 35mm camera for a medium format. The proportions of the negative change the relationship of the subject to the frame. I feel that Woodman doubles down on that relationship of subject to space, not just in what she chooses to photograph but also in how she chooses to frame it within the square format. In the very few pictures that she made with a 35mm camera, the impact of the square format of her work becomes very evident. PT That’s a good point. There are visual tensions in the work she made in the square medium-format negative, and then it gets totally blown out when she starts making these caryatids and she’s free. CK The frame is gone. PT It’s gone. CK I think that’s part of the power of Swan Song as well. The frame becomes not the photographic frame but the architectural frame. And with Temple, the frame is made of the edges of the wall on which it’s hung. It’s that kind of relationship, rather than the subject, that becomes, in all her pictures, the most important. PT The relationship to the viewer? CK To the viewer, yes, but also between the elements within the photographs. Even in the pictures that seem to be of a single subject, there’s always something else in the frame. There’s that wonderful picture, it’s the back of a chair with that beaded object, it might be a collar but she wears it around her waist in a number of her pictures. It’s draped over the back of the chair in the foreground. Nominally we could say that’s the subject of the picture, but then, in the left background, you have Woodman posed, almost like a caryatid. She’s in soft focus, and I think her head’s cut off by the frame. So what is actually the subject of that picture? It’s 100 percent the tension created by having those two elements within the frame. It’s not about that belt thing on the chair and it’s not about the figure in the background. It’s about the invisible electric lines that connect the two. This page: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, c. 1979–80, gelatin silver print, 6 × 6 ⅛ inches (15.4 × 15.6 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Opposite, clockwise: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, c. 1977–78, gelatin silver print, 8 × 7 ⅜ inches (20.3 × 18.7 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Francesca Woodman, Untitled, c. 1977–78, gelatin silver print, 8 × 7 ⅜ inches (20.3 × 18.7 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Francesca Woodman, Untitled, c. 1977–78, gelatin silver print, 8 × 7 ⅜ inches (20.3 × 18.7 cm) © Woodman Family Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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MOUNT FUJI IN CINEMA SATYAJIT RAY’S WOODBLOCK ART PART II

In the first installment of this two-part feature, published in our Winter 2023 edition, novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri traced the global impacts of woodblock printing. Here, in the second installment, he focuses on the films of Satyajit Ray, demonstrating the enduring influence of the woodblock print on the formal composition of these works.

Satyajit Ray’s grandfather Upendrakishore was a writer (notably of children’s stories, like Abanindranath Tagore), an artist and illustrator, an amateur musician, the founder of the children’s magazine Sandesh, and a pioneer in block-print technology. Ray’s father, Sukumar Ray (who died when Satyajit was two), studied photo engraving and lithography in London and was the author and illustrator of an extraordinary corpus of nonsense verse and other writings. These artists share a backdrop of certain philosophical traditions (the Tagore family was specifically interested in the Upanishads and the idea expressed in those texts of ananda, bliss, or, in India’s rasa aesthetics, the taste of bliss), Indian classical, court and folk art, Chinese art, and Japanese woodcuts, and this context makes possible constant forays into children’s genres and artistic styles inappropriate to “proper”—that is, neoclassical, realist, and academic—painting. In three generations of Rays— Upendrakishore, Sukumar, and Satyajit—it induces a commitment to the stewardship of Sandesh, but

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also, as the name indicates (sandesh means both “message” or “news” and a sweet made of milk curd), to the idea of blissful tasting. Sukumar Ray had a club for nonsense-related creative activity, socially relevant discussion, and periodic feasting that he called both the Monday Club and the Manda Club, manda being a Bengali word for “sweetmeat,” continuing the theme of savoring. It is in these contexts—rather than in art house or neorealist cinema alone, or in what Salman Rushdie has admiringly termed Satyajit’s “lyrical realism”— that we must place scenes in many of Ray’s films. Ray started out as both an artist and an aficionado of film. In 1940, when he was eighteen, his family sent him off to study at Visva Bharati, the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan. There he studied art under, among others, Nandalal Bose (another experimenter with Japanese pictorial innovations). Ray’s apprentice work from that period includes paintings in the Japanese style, where the Bengali letters of his signature appear in the hieroglyphic manner introduced by

Okakura Kakuzo and Abanindranath Tagore. Ray, in some ways, chose the artist Benode Behari Mukherjee as his mentor. For Mukherjee, the Buddhist frescoes in the caves of Ajanta (many of them deliberately left unfinished), dating from as far back as the second century bc, had been revelatory; they taught him that painting should be provisional, and achieved on rudimentary surfaces, like the walls of the unlit caves. So Mukherjee painted on available surfaces himself: the walls and ceilings in Santiniketan’s art school, Kala Bhavan. Here, again, the frame and the idea of gallery space, which give distance and control to the viewer, are done away with; the viewers are brought in, they cannot stand outside. Afternoons spent gazing on walls at home in Kolkata had already prepared Ray for the thought that art—and, later, cinema—was not so much a window onto reality as a surface constituting its own reality: when rays of light entered through the shutters of the wooden windows, “like magic, the traffic in the street outside could be seen inside the closed room; and one could make out clearly cars, rickshaws, cycles, pedestrians and other things. I do not know how many years I spent lying and watching this free Bioscope.” The analogy with the Bioscope, a film camera, comes from a filmmaker’s retrospective knowledge, but this memory also comes from one who had studied art, engraving, and woodcut-making with Mukherjee and Bose in Santiniketan. In the 1950s, Mukherjee began to go blind, but continued making art well into his blindness. This moved and engrossed Ray, and he later made a documentary, The Inner Eye (1972), on his former teacher’s journey from sight to sightlessness. Ray was concerned with the constraints of seeing, and was speculating on ways in which the artwork might become free of the artist. As Roland Barthes, quoting Guy de Maupassant, had said, “The only place in Paris where [you] don’t have to see [the Eiffel Tower]” is when you’re in it. Ray encountered Pather Panchali, Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay’s 1928 novel about Apu and his family in the fictional Bengali village of Nischindipur, in 1945, when he was commissioned, at the age of twenty-three, to make woodcut-style images to illustrate a version of the book that had been abridged for children. Ray first read Bandhopadhyay’s novel in this version, in his capacity as illustrator; at this point he was not even a filmmaker manqué. The idea for making the film probably came to him in 1950. What had happened between Santiniketan (where he didn’t complete his course) and this moment? In 1943 he had become a commercial artist in an advertising company, and before long was a force in the appreciation of cinema, helping to create a film society, India’s second, in 1947. He had spent time with Jean Renoir (whom he admired) when the French filmmaker came to Bengal to make The River (1951); his encounter with Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) (1948) and Italian neorealism had revealed to him that improvising within limited means was a bonus to a filmmaker; he was a devotee of John Ford’s westerns; and he was an illustrator. That fact and its relation to the aesthetic of Bengali children’s literature, of opting for play and economy in artmaking, are part of the mix that brings Ray’s version of Pather Panchali and his oeuvre into being. Paying tribute to Ford in 1973, he gently interrogates whether Ford ever thought “of himself as an artist” (Ford “said filming for him was a job which he enjoyed for its own sake”) and emphasizes, as one would with a craftsman or, in light of Hokusai, a woodblock printmaker, his

Previous spread: Still from The World of Apu (1959), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photo: courtesy Everett Collection Opposite: Polish poster of Pather Panchali (1955), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photo: courtesy Everett Collection This page: Stills from Pather Panchali (1955), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photos: courtesy Everett Collection

apprenticeship to a motif: “Like [Pablo] Picasso’s obsession with the bull, [Paul] Cézanne’s with the apple, Bach’s with the fugue, and the Hindu miniaturists’ with the theme of Krishna, John Ford had a lifelong affair with the western.” None of the figures to whom Ray compares Ford belong to the Renaissance; they’re all situated in complex histories or moments that are at an angle to that Renaissance legacy of “great art.” Here we must place Ray (and the personnel who contribute to his visual language: the cinematographers Subrata Mitra and Soumendu Roy; the art director Bansi Chandragupta): at an angle to the “great art” lineage that privileges the viewer’s vantage point outside the artwork. Two separate series of shots in the first half hour of Pather Panchali “transgress . . . this separation . . . of seeing and being seen” (Barthes again, on the Eiffel Tower—clearly thinking of Hokusai’s Mount Fuji). Right at the start, Apu’s older sister, Durga, still a

child, is hiding, for no ostensible reason, behind a kochu (arum) leaf to spy on her mother passing by. Not so much perspective as layers characterize the scene: the path, the large leaf, the face. In the next shot we see the back of Durga’s head, then the leaf, then the woman. Once home, Durga first takes the lid (a handheld fan) off a pot to take out bananas, replaces the lid, peers into another vessel to scoop out a bowl of milk, then bends down to inspect something inside a large disused clay pot. Now, from inside this pot, we look up at Durga’s face, hovering above and smiling. Next moment we’re outside the pot, looking at her while she retrieves kittens from its depths to give them milk. This is the first series of shots repositioning the viewer. In the next fifteen minutes a few years pass. Durga becomes a teenager. Apu is now a boy; he’s about to make his entrance. She goes into a room and stirs her brother, who’s pretending to be asleep. She keeps lifting a tiny bit of the covering he’s lying under, as if exploring a tear, and then prises open his eye with both thumbs so that we suddenly glimpse pupil and eyeball. Now Apu rises, exuberant, like a great wave. This is the second series of repositioning shots. Collapsing distance, they refer us back to Hokusai’s way of noticing, and being noticed by, Mount Fuji. You conceal or hide yourself not by being at a distance from the work but precisely by entering what Barthes calls its “blind point.” This “blind point,” with which both Hokusai and Ray replace the vantage point, can be anything: the inside of a pot; the eye, hidden but wakeful under the eyelid. Given his precursors in the visual arts—Mukherjee, the muralist; Bose, who left his imprint on the world of Bengali children through his linocuts for Rabindranath Tagore’s primer Sahaj Path (Easy learning, 1930); his writer/printer/illustrator grandfather and writer/illustrator father; and also Gaganendranath Tagore, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, the Belgian comic book artist Hergé, and, of course, Hokusai—Ray is interested not in heavy strokes, deep backgrounds, and vanishing points but in cursive flows, transverse lines. This preference is evident in the opening credits of Pather Panchali: Bengali longhand on writing paper. The film’s most renowned scene—in which the children

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This page, top: Still from The World of Apu (1959), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photo: © Cinephile Media, courtesy Everett Collection This page, bottom: Still from Samapti (1961), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photo: Internet Archive Opposite: Still from The World of Apu (1959), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photo: courtesy Everett Collection

run toward train tracks through a field of kaash blossoms to marvel at a passing train—begins with Apu and Durga puzzling over the telegraph wires near the tracks. The wires are humming strangely, but their crisscross is absorbing to Ray because the lines form a grid or block: not itself a picture, but the basis of one. The kaash—stalks and feathery blossoms—bend right as the children, curious but also indifferent, move forward, stop, move forward. The white of black-and-white films is generally the bits that are lit, empty, or reflecting the light; the white smudges of the kaash are an extra print-white. Although the children are running forward, they also stray desultorily right or left. Hollywood movies and Renaissance paintings tell us that waves move toward us; Hokusai sees them moving across. This inflects how the train appears. In Ray’s woodcuts for the children’s book, he imagines this in conventional cinematic terms, the train moving

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frontally toward the reader, very much as it does in L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The arrival of a train at La Ciotat station), the Lumière brothers’ foundational bit of filming from 1896. It’s in his film that Ray taps into the delicate woodblock possibilities of the image. First you see the black smoke—a horizontal black line going right, more black than the shadow that forms the black of black-and-white. The train beneath it is a dark strip going left. Then the train is studied close up, as swift blotches, and, just as it vanishes, the children rise up, reaching the tracks from the opposite side; we are no longer following them—we face Apu as he arrives. We are Mount Fuji, or have gone inside the Eiffel Tower. Ray is not a “painterly” filmmaker. When we use that word, we think, even without being aware of it, of a Renaissance painting. Ray is working with possibilities of design, angle, and line created by the woodblock, fonts, and print. He doesn’t distinguish between poster or book cover (he designed the jackets of the books he wrote for children) and “actual story.” Cover art and content are interchangeable for him. The short film Samapti (Ending, 1961) is based on a short story by Rabindranath Tagore about a tomboy, Mrinmoyee (her pet name is Pagli or “madcap”), who finds herself, to her chagrin, married to a young Kolkata bhadralok (the Bengali word for the bourgeois, meaning, literally, “polite person”), Amulya. The film begins with a close-up of the sails, covered in patterns, of a boat approaching a riverbank. The expanse of the sails merges into the expanse of the bank, their worlds continuous with each other. Ray, as filmmaker/woodblock artist, is drawn to river and riverbank. The flatness and faint horizontal lines, the near-indistinguishability of bank and river, mesmerize him. They have a lightness that he wants to situate at the interface of woodblock and film. Not for him, then, Canaletto’s canals, organized by, and proceeding toward, a vanishing point; the lateral line interests Ray. You see this in the first scene of Samapti. The riverbank is a place of arrival, transition, and congregation across a surface characterized by intermittent detail: the abandoned front of a boat in which Mrinmoyee stores things; a large tree to sit under; a swing that Mrinmoyee occupies at moments of abandon and

Afternoons spent gazing on walls at home in Kolkata had already prepared Ray for the thought that art—and, later, cinema—was not so much a window onto reality as a surface constituting its own reality.

anxiety. Ray’s woodblock-printer instincts are at their most attuned in Samapti. He repeatedly revisits the riverbank motif. The human figure occasionally takes center stage in the frame, but we’re more often presented with layers. Many of the most effective backgrounds have Mrinmoyee in them, glimpsed through a window, trying to climb a tree, falling back, momentarily disrupting the foreground. There’s a simultaneity of motion in front and back layers that you see in Hokusai. Ray introduces Barthes/Maupassant’s “blind spot,” the entering of the Eiffel Tower, soon after we see Mrinmoyee watching at a window while Amulya, inside, is introduced to a prospective girl-bride who’s singing a song with a harmonium. The squirrel Mrinmoyee is holding darts into the room and she goes chasing after it, throwing the occasion into disarray; the squirrel (no longer visible) plunges into the clutter under a bed, and from beneath the bed we see Mrinmoyee bending low, straining to recover it. The below-the-bed clutter constitutes Samapti’s Mount Fuji location. Ray had discovered the lateral possibilities of the riverbank in Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956), the second film in the Apu trilogy, where, following Apu’s family, he shifted location to Banaras. The horizontal lines of the ghats presented his woodblock-artist instincts with an opportunity. It’s in the trilogy’s final installment, though—Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959)—that he makes his first sustained attempt at the woodblock sublime. One third of our way into the film, we find Apu accompanying a friend to his ancestral village

for the friend’s cousin’s wedding. While wedding preparations are underway in the family house and the young bride is being adorned, Apu is daydreaming—reading, playing a flute—on the upper reaches of the bank of the river by which they had arrived earlier. The wedding procession, straggly but long, is advancing on the lower bank, a line of men in white dhotis and a palanquin (with the groom inside) moving left to right. Apu is no more aware of them than he’s aware of the fact that he’ll have to marry the bride—the groom will turn out to have a mental disorder; Apu’s friend will plead with him to become the groom. The woodblock sublime, then, contains a prescience of the unknown, just as Hokusai’s prints are about chance, hinted at by the movement of light, wind, and water, so that even Mount Fuji lacks fixity. The long line of men with the palanquin gradually outpaces a boat being rowed with giant but futile strokes by a boatman. Apu begins to doze; he lies down. All lines move sideways, seemingly reposeful but actually animated. The scene reworks Hokusai. It reminds us that lines that go, and things that bend, one way or another are bending toward the unknown. Such an image is not meant to be studied for its verisimilitude. Ray’s contributions to a lineage that includes Monet and Matisse, and of which he is the last great artist, are too numerous to go into here. I’ll mention only a few luminous instances post-Samapti. In Charulata (1964), the protagonist Amal’s arrival at the scene of the subsequent action—a North Kolkata mansion—coincides with a monsoon storm.

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What Matisse does with a carpet or rug Ray does with the verandah. What Matisse does with the carpet’s patterns Ray does with shadow. The source for both is the block print.

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A sideways-moving wind and rain spray briefly envelop the verandah. Women run in the haze, collecting things—clothes, a bird in a cage. Papers (it’s a newspaperman’s house) fly about. The chaos of the scene—its fine, unruly lines—is embedded in the tale as a tribute to the woodcuts that engaged Upendrakishore. The gust of wind that troubles the travelers in Hokusai’s Ejiri in Suruga Province (c. 1830–32) unsettles a North Kolkata house. It was while watching and rediscovering Ray’s work outside his so-called art house oeuvre—films based on Bengali detective stories, or about his own fictional detective, Feluda (da is an affectionate Bengali suffix meaning “older brother”)—that I began noticing these woodblock proclivities. In the first of his Feluda films, Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress, 1974), Feluda and his team, the teenager Topshe and the detective novelist Jatayu, arrive in Rajasthan to rescue the child Mukul from kidnappers. They check into the Jodhpur Circuit House. Ray spends a few moments with the long verandah adjoining the rooms, crossed with horizontal lines of shadow in the late-morning winter sun. What

Matisse does with a carpet or rug Ray does with the verandah. What Matisse does with the carpet’s patterns Ray does with shadow. The source for both is the block print. Ray’s last great work—his final statement—in this aesthetic is Joi Baba Felunath (The elephant god, 1979). We’re back in Banaras, this time with Feluda, who’s there to investigate a robbery and murder. Certain scenes in the film are energized by Ray’s desire to be a different kind of artist; this yearning for transformation, to escape one form, genre, or self into another, is important, as it’s what introduces disruptive tonalities to the genre the artist has chosen to work with. Arriving in a house from which a golden figurine of the elephant god Ganesha has gone missing, Feluda, Topshe, and Jatayu are transfixed by the ancient opulence of the building. At one point Feluda picks something up from a table: an old-fashioned animation book, whose characters race through the story if you flick through the pages. This booklet is related to the child in the house, Ruku, but it also hints at Ray’s excitement about his own hybrid artistic lineage. At least two sites—Ruku’s room on the roof (or, as Ruku calls it, “Captain Spark’s room”) and Banaras’s ghats and alleys—are key to the mystery’s unraveling. They also contain multiple references to the film’s creative provenances. Topshe, Feluda, and Jatayu always move across Ruku’s room, and, in another transverse movement, encounter his reading spread out on the bed. These are mostly comic books: three Phantom comics, one half-concealed Tarzan, and Hergé’s Black Island (1937–38; Ray loved Tintin comics for their visual liveliness, and Hergé, it should be added, pays homage to Hokusai in his drawing of a wave about to submerge Tintin’s boat in The Blue Lotus of 1936). There is also Ruku’s own colored-pencil drawing of the Phantom and a stamp album with London Bridge on the cover. Topshe also holds up a Bengali book about Captain Spark; more sketches by Ruku of the Phantom and other characters are stuck to the wall. As with the sails with stitched motifs at the start of Samapti, Ray refuses to separate one image (of Topshe, Jatayu, and Feluda in the room) from another (the jacket of The Black Island ). Film is becoming drawing is becoming woodcut and vice versa, while it’s sharing with us the transition from material to artifact and artifact to material. The

Opposite, top: Still from Charulata (1964), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photo: courtesy Everett Collection Opposite, bottom: Satyajit Ray on the set of Sonar Kella, Calcutta, 1974. Photo: Nik Wheeler/Sygma via Getty Images This page: Still from Joi Baba Felunath (1979), directed by Satyajit Ray. Photo: Album/Alamy Stock Photo

books are splayed out; the vision has to flow over and past them. In the room, the camera sometimes descends to the level of Ruku’s head, while Jatayu and, behind him, Feluda, and, suddenly, Topshe on the left create layers of presence, not unlike Durga hiding behind the kochu leaf in Pather Panchali. Human bodies (Topshe, Jatayu, Feluda), by making configurations inside the room while standing larger than life before Ruku, destroy Renaissance-type proportions to do with foreground and background. The other sequence I have in mind is yet another echo of the pot in which Durga kept her kittens, or the underneath of the bed to which Mrinmoyee’s squirrel escaped: “It’s the only place in Paris where I don’t have to see it.“ The sequence begins with pure lateral movement: Feluda is shadowing a suspicious character who’s just gone from the ghats up some steps into an alley. Usually, chases and stalking scenes follow the pursuer or the pursued; Ray’s camera, for a long time, moves sideways as Feluda walks across the upper ghats to reach the steps to the alley. His background is giant Hindi lettering advertising the Banarasi Rink Milk House, then more Hindi—political graffiti about poverty and hunger. “Background” isn’t the right word: again, Ray is fashioning an interchangeability between the human figure and lettering. All are of equal interest. The incredible potential of the flat, sideways shots (rather than close-ups, perspectives, or panoramas) that Ray has explored throughout his work comes to fruition in these eleven seconds. Then Feluda climbs up the steps into the alley and, following the man, enters an immense, beautiful haveli (a North Indian mansion). The man disappears. Feluda explores the mysterious spaces of the haveli, finds a gun and false hair among the man’s possessions, and, when he hears him returning, hides behind decrepit, abandoned furniture, something like a broken bit of a rattan bed. Through an untidy rent in the rattan, Feluda spies on the man up close. This again—like Durga’s pot and the

clutter under the bed in Samapti—is a Mount Fuji moment, and one of Ray’s most eloquent observations that (in contrast to the assumptions underlying the Renaissance painting) we can’t be external to language or idiom; we must disappear into it. The film that Ray devotes wholly to this matter of doing away with “standing outside” may be his shrewdest and most delicate work: the 1962 color film Kanchenjungha. The eponymous peak overlooks Darjeeling, where holidaying Bengali bourgeois families, bygone aristocrats, and a petit bourgeois schoolteacher have all gathered and are wandering about, running into, or breaking away from each other in real time over 1 ½ hours. Part of Ray’s framework comes from Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939): the possibility of estrangement, comedy, and class observation arising from the bourgeois’ transposition from their natural habitat to a place that combines natural beauty with the weight of history—in Renoir’s film, a country manor and its grounds; in Ray’s, Darjeeling, a hill town once favored by the British as an escape from the summers at lower altitudes. The other prompting for Ray, besides Renoir, is Mount Fuji. While reviewing their lives, the visitors are hoping to catch a glimpse of Kanchenjunga, which is reputed for capriciousness and staying hidden behind mist and cloud. Spotting Kanchenjunga, or being disappointed by its nonappearance, is evidently as much a bhadralok ritual as any of the other ones shown here are: wearing a sari, riding a pony, discussing the failure of one’s marriage. Of course, it’s difficult to see Mount Fuji in Hokusai; the cone is often a wave or an outline. It will not be spectacle, nor will it be sole observer. Toward the end of the film, the atmosphere clears; the golden peaks become visible. The aristocratic patriarch who has briefly lost his way doesn’t notice. Made two years before Barthes wrote his Eiffel Tower essay, Kanchenjungha stands with it as a remarkable meditation on the way in which art draws the viewer in without their necessarily knowing it. 153

hen I started believing in contemporary art, I found my “I know that, from [Steiner], a mission was given to me to imagination possessed by the work of Joseph Beuys. gradually remove people’s alienation and mistrust toward Author It was the kind of totalizing obsession that hapthe supersensible through my means. In political thinkpened often in the highly receptive time of ing—the field I have to be working on daily—it is a matand artist ter of realizing the Threefold Social Order as quickly youth, sending me into a frenzy of new Ross Simonini thoughts and compulsory artmaking. The most generative of as possible.”1 Beuys’s blackboard drawings charting reports on a recent these infatuations were the artists who served as portals into this theory are direct homages to Steiner’s very sima knowledge beyond art, and Beuys proved especially trip to the world center ilar blackboard diagrams of cosmic, pastel fireworks. useful in this way, pointing toward concepts and figOver the last century, many artists engaged with of the anthroposophical ures I had never before encountered, from Tatar Steiner’s work. Some of the Bauhaus artists (Vasily shamanism to Celtic mythology to a remarkable movement, the Goetheanum Kandinsky, etc.) attended his lectures and closely man named Rudolf Steiner. studied his ideas, as did writers from Franz Kafka to in Switzerland, exploring the Like many Americans, I was unfamiliar Saul Bellow. The architect Marion Mahony Griffin influence of the movement’s with Steiner, though I was intimately familiar (one of the world’s first licensed female architects), with the fruits of his work: I had eaten his food, founder and building’s designer the famed conductor Bruno Walter, the novelist rubbed his salves on my body, and known many Selma Lagerlöf (the first woman to win the Nobel Rudolf Steiner on twentieth- Prize), the Symbolist painter Hermann Linde, and friends to attend his schools. Steiner was a polymath and his work took many, many forms: agriculture, the Swiss physician Hans Jenny were all official century artists. education, medicine, philosophy, mysticism, politics, anthroposophists. This is a group of innovators. architecture, dance, design, sculpture, and painting. Early in his career, Steiner was associated with theosophy, He invented biodynamic farming, Waldorf schooling, a religion principally founded by Madame Helena Blavatsky in New York the Camphill Movement (for children with developmental disabilities), Weleda in 1875. He lectured for almost a decade in theosophical centers and led naturopathic products (Skin Food, Salt Toothpaste, and my personal favorite the religion’s Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. Theosophy is an deodorant), eurythmy (a kind of dance), and anthroposophy, the all-encomindisputably essential part of modern art, directly inspiring such artists passing philosophy that serves as the foundation for all of Steiner’s work. as Max Beckmann, František Kupka, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, It’s an almost inhuman spectrum of accomplishment from a man who and Kandinsky—the last three of whom have been variously credited with believed there was no boundary to human knowledge. But what’s espethe birth of abstract art. Kandinsky’s book Concerning the Spiritual in Art cially surprising about Steiner’s work is how it continues to broadly (1912) is basically a theosophical study of form, color, and composition. In affect culture now, a century after his death. The sheer magnitude of an interview last fall on the podcast The Art Angle, the artist Carol Bove what he produced seems to allow an ongoing study of his thought: remarked, “The early twentieth century needed theosophy to become abstract, his collected works comprise 422 volumes, including his many but when abstraction developed again after World War II, artists didn’t books, essays, plays, lectures (6,000+), and 80 volumes on his need it anymore.”2 artistic work, all completed by his early death, at the age of The influence of theosophy on the early avant-garde is well docsixty-four. umented but not always accepted, probably because of a general Previous spread: suspicion of esotericism across culture: religious believers may see it Steiner’s influence in art has also been potent, though Interior of Goetheanum, he is only rarely included in the canon of modern art. as heretical, atheist materialists see it as incongruous with science, Dornach, Switzerland. Beuys, for example, saw his own work as a way to transand art historians usually favor the analytic precision of formalPhoto: Goetheanum/ Macarena Kralj mit Steiner’s theory of “social threefolding,” which aims ism over the murkiness of spirituality. to balance the three spheres of society—political, ecoIn recent years, however, the apotheosis of the Swedish This page: Stained glass inside Goetheanum, nomic, and cultural—and to avoid the dangerous sys- painter and mystic Hilma af Klint as a prophet of abstraction Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: tems that emerge when one sphere dominates, such (mostly due to the 2018–19 show at New York’s Guggenheim Goetheanum/Xue Li as communism, capitalism, and religion. Beuys said, Museum) has compelled critics to reckon with the esotericism Opposite: at the foundation of Exterior of Goetheanum, Dornach, modernism. Af Klint Switzerland. Photo: Goetheanum/ Xue Li studied theosophy but never joined the Following spread, left: Interior of Goetheanum, T heosoph ica l SociDornach, Switzerland. Photo: ety, and when Steiner Goetheanum/Xue Li left the faith to create the Following spread, right: anthroposophical moveInterior of Goetheanum, ment, in 1912, she quickly Dornach, Switzerland. Photo: Ross Simonini became an anthroposophist. From then on she maintained a lifelong interest in Steiner’s work and several times asked him for advice on her paintings, which he gave.3 Indeed, a decade after Steiner’s death, in 1925, af Klint was still lecturing to the Anthroposophical Society about the harmony between her work and his ideas, and she often spent long retreats at the society’s headquarters in Switzerland, a singular biomorphic edifice known as the Goetheanum. I recently traveled to Zurich for an exhibition of my paintings and drawings at suns.works, a show held in a former bank office at the top of a skyscraper downtown. While there I planned to visit the Goetheanum, about an hour away in the village of Dornach, which in turn is about twenty minutes from Basel and another twenty from some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. To arrive at this architectural wonder, designed by Steiner himself, my wife and I walked through the village, up a hill, and crossed a grand esplanade to the Goetheanum’s front doors, heavy and thick, with unexpected, asymmetrical handles. The building’s facade is gray and brutalist, but its 156

curved, alien forms appear soft, almost viscous. Its manifestation of a very fastidious philosophy. Every wall is painted in soothIn other architecture is often called expressionist and recalls ing sponge-painted pastels, and even the inconspicuous radiator in the words, Antoni Gaudí in its organic freedom. It has been praised corner is a pleasant matte periwinkle. Light fixtures, architraves, materialism by architects as disparate as Frank Lloyd Wright and Zaha chairs, window frames, and doors are all molded with the same Hadid and is described as foreshadowing the work of Buckdimples and rivulets as the building’s exterior. The sculptor and spirituality minster Fuller. 4 Like these designers, Steiner took his prinEdith Maryon, who lived and taught at the Goetheanum, together comprise ciples from the natural world, so there are almost no right helped to design the building, and you can feel this aesangles in the Goetheanum. Steiner believed that hard lines thetic intention in every subtle choice. true reality. This imprison the mind, which is why so much anthroposophical My wife, Kate, had an instant knee-jerk reaction kind of thinking has art expresses the fluid energy of a wave. against the place. The slightest whiff of cult repulses clear applications in Inside, a statue of a celestial-looking being greets visitors, her, and the Goetheanum seems to wear its beliefs its face oddly convex, as if its awareness were pointed totally as proudly as any church, but anthroposophy is not art, which, for many inward. The building is open to the public daily, and when I a system of belief. Nobody is worshipping Steiner, of us, is a practice of was there, on a Wednesday afternoon, a few international trav- as they might do with a guru or charismatic leader. elers were wandering through the grounds. The Goetheanum Steiner despised ideology, which is by nature limtransforming matter World Conference was held a few days later and various rooms ited to its own doctrine, and this is partly why he into something more were being prepared for the event. This is in fact the second rejected theosophy. John Bloom, general secretary of than the sum of its Goetheanum, and the new construction is in some way a rein- the Anthroposophical Society in America, describes vention of the original. The first, built a decade before this anthroposophy as “a path of inquiry, a way of being parts, something one, was mostly made of curved wooden boat panels and in the world, and of service to the world.”5 The noveltranscendent burned to the ground on New Year’s Eve, 1922. Anthrop- ist and podcaster Conner Habib calls it his non-excluand essentially osophists claim that the fire was arson, set by enemy eso- sive “spiritual headquarters” from which he leaves to tericists who resented Steiner’s revelations of secret occult explore other ideas.6 The visionary Russian filmmaker nonmaterial. knowledge to the world. To remedy this problem, the new Andrei Tarkovsky said, “Steiner offers us a worldview Goetheanum was made from concrete. that explains everything—or almost everything—and I’d been told by a German friend that the staff didn’t provides human development with an appropriate place have the most welcoming manner, and this immedi- in the spiritual domain.”7 ately seemed true. The attendant at the front desk barely The word “anthroposophy,” derived from the Greek, answered my questions and a grumpy barista in the café means “human wisdom,” and the philosophy is both a would not meet my eyes as he served me a whole-grain practical set of principles for living in society and a vast, croissant, which, like most of the menu, had been bioimpossibly abstract cosmology for attaining mystical wisdynamically produced. There was a mystery here, dom. Steiner called his work “spiritual science,” which and no one seemed interested in explaining, let alone points to the kind of polarities he was attempting to reconcile. His desire, as Tarkovsky said, was to understand proselytizing. Yet even for a visitor with no knowledge of everything. Steiner’s ideas, someone who accidentally stumbles Among Steiner’s central beliefs was the idea that “matupon the building, the Goetheanum is clearly the ter cannot exist and operate without spirit, nor spirit without 157

matter.”8 In other words, material- Krishnamurti, the son of a clerk at their international headquarters in ism and spirituality together com- Adyar, India, would grow up to play the spiritual role of “World Teacher”— prise true reality. This kind of think- and so did Krishnamurti himself, though he did go on to become one of ing has clear applications in art, the great sages of the twentieth century and, like Steiner, a lucid voice which, for many of us, is a practice of against ideology. transforming matter into something Among the Germanic principles that Steiner drew on was the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a term popularized by Richard Wagner to more than the sum of its parts, something transcendent and essentially nondescribe a total work of art, which calls upon many art forms and material. Steiner saw beauty and art as the evokes art in its every aspect. For Wagner the Gesamtkunstwerk was opera, combining music, literature, theater, and visual specmost effective ways of bringing the spiritual into material form, and he did this even in tacle, and perhaps this is why theater is centrally important to anthroposophy. At the Goetheanum, the great hall is literhis writing. In researching this essay, I read his classic book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds ally the central room in the building, taking up most of its and Its Attainment (1904), which, despite soundcapacious square footage, containing its most ambitious ing like a how-to spiritual guide, felt like art, like artworks, and staging many performances, including a mystery without resolution. What I have read by Steiner’s own “mystery plays.” Steiner rarely provides clarity but often activates the Following the way of the Gesamtkunstwerk, unknown within me. Steiner wanted every component of his campus Still, like my wife, I have some resistance to Steiner. I to be simultaneously formal and functional. grew up Catholic, and anthroposophy often uses ChristiThe towering boiler room, for instance, which anity as the vocabulary of its mythology—though any doglooks like a flame licking the sky, is on full matic Christian would be appalled by Steiner’s mystical display in its own building rather than hidden in a basement. (Steiner also did not interpretations and dark, ancient gods. Nevertheless, this Christ-y language sometimes makes it hard for me to experiwant its hum to disturb the artists.) Even ence the philosophy without the clutter of my own childhood the knobs on the doors to the artist stuprejudice. dios require a curious, unexpected There’s also a whiff of the 1800s German idealist movement in motion to open, which was Steiner’s For Steiner, colors became anthroposophy—Hegel, Kant, etc.—which, after Nazism, can feel way of reminding artists to refresh metaphors. “If one releases like an aesthetic turnoff. But Steiner was an adamant enemy of their thinking before starting work. color from objects and lives the Nazis. He attacked imperialism and anti-Semitism (the White All of the buildings on the camRose, famed anti-Nazi group, was highly influenced by his work). pus toget her c reate a n a l most with color,” he wrote, “then In return, the Nazis called him a traitor and Hitler actually declared self-sufficient society, with book“war against Steiner.” Ultimately, like many spiritual thinkers, he stores, a school, a biodynamic café, it begins to reveal profound emphasized the unseen life force of humanity, rather than the daycare, a grocery store, administration secrets, and the entire superficial levels of bodily identity. offices, a puppet theater, a power station, world becomes a That said, Steiner’s ideas were fundamentally European: he and a farm supplied with livestock. These flooding, surging sea disliked theosophy’s appropriation of Eastern ideas and instead buildings are of an aesthetic piece with the focused on the philosophical traditions of European culture. He Goetheanum, as are the surrounding neighof color.” also rejected the theosophists’ belief that the young boy Jiddu borhoods, where over 180 buildings were built 158

using the same organic principles. This whole village becomes an extension of Steiner’s total work of art.

In fact, the whole Goetheanum campus felt as familiar of h is w i fe, t he ac t re ss M a r ie as my childhood in Northern California, another landSteiner–von Sivers, Steiner came to scape of health food stores, organic farms, and craft see art as primary to anthroposophy. He fairs. The protohippy moment that occurred in Europe spoke of how art, science, and religion were Steiner was an artist but history rarely regards in the early twentieth century, with its back-to-theonce unified and have since become specialized him as one, as he lived before the great interand separated by academia. Anthroposophical art, land Lebensreform (Life reform) movement and the disciplinar y age we are now entering. by contrast, has no boundaries, but a sensibility that communes of Monte Verità, Switzerland—this all echoed into America, through tie-dye psychedelia moves toward a total experience of nature. He was a decent draftsman and handdesigned much of the graphic work In 1922, the painter Henni Geck asked Steiner to teach in the 1960s, New Age culture in the 1970s, and the her how the spiritual laws could be demonstrated through environmentalism that will likely characterize the for t he a nt h rop o s oph ic a l m ove ment’s books, magazines, and prodpainting. In response, Steiner created nine pastel “training” next era of humanity. (Rachel Carson, the catalyst ucts (including Weleda’s mysterious sketches that are now used in most introductory anthropos- of so much ecological philosophy, was highly influlogo, looking out from Whole Foods ophical art classes. The drawings were scraggly motifs of the enced by Steiner.) shelves everywhere). Behind this cultural transformation was a peculiar natural world—“nature moods,” he called them—and depicted His primary talent, though, was the sunrise and sunset, the moon and the trees. Geck studied German man wearing an ascot. His lifetime, a bright as a visionary. As with many art- and mimicked these sketches and eventually taught them to burst of energy, changed culture, but in a subtle enough ists—Bosch, Michelangelo, Rubens, her own students, including the artist Gerard Wagner, who way that few of us have ever heard the word “anthroposoBove, Jef f Koons, Jorda n Wol f- described them as organisms: “They do not portray, they phy” pronounced aloud (anne-throw-paw-sif-ee). son—Steiner’s art was his ability to live.” To work on them, she said, was to “unite with their But this obscurity is not a failure. In fact, the more I sketch out ideas, communicate their inner essence” and go inward, into moral and cosmic expe- learn about Steiner’s life, the more I think that his hidpower, and then harness the talent rience. This was a way of training the artist to experience den ubiquity might be his greatest work of all, as if his of craftspeople to create something what Wagner called “pure, controlled will activity.”9 true ambition were to dissolve the memory of his physical beyond skill. He worked with the For Steiner, the drawings’ purpose was to show how form form and transmute himself into pure historic momentum. artist Assya Turgenieff, for example, arises naturally out of color, and the quintessential example to fill the building with monochro- of this principle appears in the work of Wagner, who painted 1. Joseph Beuys, in Volker Harlan, What Is Art?: Conversations with Joseph matic stained-glass windows, each the vast mural on the ceiling of the great hall: wraiths in a Beuys (West Hoathly, Sussex: Clairview Books, 2004). Carol Bove, in “Artist Carol Bove on Curating Legendary Polymath chronicling a spiritual quest. One vivid heavenly whirlpool—a masterpiece of anthroposoph- 2.Harry Smith,” The Art Angle, September 21, 2023. The remark appears in of these striking windows, in blood ical art. a discussion of the recent Harry Smith exhibition, Fragments of a Faith Steiner’s entire spiritual/scientific/artistic worldview Forgotten, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which Bove red, depicts the Archangel Michael, cocurated. Available online in various places, including https://news a central figure in the anthroposoph- derives from a particular forebear, the Goetheanum’s name.artnet.com/multimedia/the-art-angle-podcast-artist-carol-bove -on-curating-legendary-polymath-harry-smith-2365920 (accessed ical mythos, and produces a haunting sake: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whom many consider November 26, 2023). glow like no other stained glass I have the greatest German writer of all time. Like Steiner, though, 3. Lasse Hallström’s biopic Hilma (2023) suggests that Rudolf ever seen. Likewise, Steiner collab- Goethe was as much polymath as poet, working across natural Steiner somehow discouraged the artist, but this seems to be spurious—the Hilma af Klint Foundation claims that Steiner orated with Maryon to carve the tow- science, the literary arts, and political thought—Steiner said that actually convinced her not to destroy her work. ering wooden summation of his ideas, Goethe “sought the path from artist to knower and found it.”10 4. See Reinhold Johann Fäth, “Rudolf Steiner Design: Spiritueller Funktionalismus Kunst,” PhD diss., Universität The Representative of Humanity between In his role as empirical scientist, Goethe developed a color theKonstanz, 2004. Lucifer and Ahriman (1917–25), which is ory that resisted the Newtonian idea of color as a purely optical 5. John Bloom (by Tess Harper), “From the General housed in its own room in the Goethea- event and emphasized its psycho-experiential aspects. In the hisSecretary,” Anthroposophical Society in America website, August 25, 2023. Available online at https:// num, where you are encouraged to sit and tory of science, Newton’s physics won out, but many thinkers have anthroposophy.org/from-the-general-secretary-15 enjoy a long slow viewing. continued to study Goethean science, including the philosophers / (accessed December 10, 2023). Over time, thanks partly to the influence Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the physicist 6. Conner Habib, in “Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, and Esoteric Christianity with Laura Scappaticci,” Werner Heisenberg. Against Everyone with Conner Habib, no. 225, June Steiner adapted Goethe’s color 13, 2023. Available onine at https://www.patreon .com/posts/84500445 (accessed December 10, theory to his own approach, which 2023). is more open than Goethe’s: for 7. Andrei Tarkovsky, in “On Steiner and Steiner, colors became metaphors. Anthroposophy: Nathan Federovsky Interviews Andrei Tarkovsky,” in What Is “If one releases color from objects Happening in the Anthroposophical Society, and lives with color,” he wrote, “then it July/August 1985. Available online at http://www.nostalghia.com/TheTopics begins to reveal profound secrets, and the /On_Steiner.html (accessed December entire world becomes a flooding, surging 10, 2023). 11 sea of color.” 8. Steiner, The Spiritual-Scientific Basis of Goethe’s Work, 1906. At the Goetheanum, the walls are painted Available online at https://wn. with gentle-colored natural dyes made from rudolfsteinerelib.org/Articles /SSBoGW_index.html (accessed plants in the garden—copper beech, knapDecember 10, 2023). weed, coreopsis—as is Wagner’s ceiling mural. A 9. Gerard Wagner, “The descriptive sign at the center reads, “These forms Painter’s Notes,” in Steiner and Wagner, The Art of and colours that are not static but change over time Colour and the Human Form: because they are alive.” Seven Motif Sketches of Waldorf schools, their pedagogy based on Stein- Rudolf Steiner: Studies by Wagner, ed. Peter er’s educational philosophy, have colored walls Gerard Stebbing (Great Barrington, intended as representations of universal forces, MA: SteinerBooks, 2018). such as good and evil or yin and yang. In class, chil- Available online at www .rudolf-steiner-malschule dren illustrate stories about colors using nontoxic .ch/wp-content/ uploads/2015/10 watercolors. /AutobiographicalFragmentThough I never attended any Steiner-inflected Gerard-Wagner.pdf (accessed school, more than one person who did has told December 15, 2023). 10. Steiner, quoted in David me that the gentle palette of my paintings Adams, “The Goetheanum Cupola reminds them of their days in Waldorf eduReliefs,” being human, Summer 2013. A review of Stebbing, ed. and trans., cation. I think this is a fair observation. The Goetheanum Cupola Reliefs of Rudolf Although I only learned of Steiner in Steiner: Paintings by Gerard Wagner (Great my twenties, he was always present Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2011). Available online at https://issuu.com/anthrousa in the atmosphere around me, /docs /bh9-final-web/ s/13111088 (accessed influencing how I formed my December 11, 2023). worldview. 11. Ibid. 159

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SABINE MORITZ

AUGUST

Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Sabine Moritz’s studio in Germany to learn more about the painter’s latest series, August, exhibited in 2023 in Rome. The pair discuss the development of the series, the relationship between coincidence and control, and the importance of trees. HANS ULRICH OBRIST The exhibition in Rome started

with four large-sized two-by-three-meter paintings, right? The canvases had been sitting in the studio for some years, just waiting . . . or did you wait for them? Can this perhaps be read in both directions? SABINE MORITZ They are the largest and also the most difficult pieces of the exhibition. But perhaps it only seems that way to me because it’s the first time I’ve worked in this format. HUO Were all of them created this summer? SM Yes, all of them were created over the course of the summer, between mid-June and quite precisely at the end of August. Only microcorrections of additions were made during the early days of September. HUO You once told me the original title of these works. It was very somber. SM The original working title was gloomy: The Dying World. It was good as a working title, but finally it was too narrow. HUO You’ve said that your exhibitions evolve one from the other: groups, series, and cycles continue, finding their sequels in the next exhibition. The Pilar Corrias Gallery in London hosted a dual exhibition during the spring. Do the pieces in Rome reference these works, or even earlier ones? SM Let me think about this for a moment. As you said, there are paintings that continue a series or a group, and this holds true for this exhibition. But this group, which has now finally received the title Ferragosto [an annual public holiday on August 15 in Italy], is completely new. And it may even be a cohesive group all by itself, I’m not sure yet. HUO Ferragosto is in fact a moment when Italy’s cities are suddenly totally empty. SM Yes, this usually hot day signals the turn of summer in Italy. But the Ferragosto is also an important Catholic holiday, commemorating the Assumption of Mary into Heaven. It was originally a day of celebration of the conquest of Egypt by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Only later did it become a Christian holiday. HUO The light in the paintings in the Rome exhibition is different from in the previous ones, but in fact you were already getting ready for this in the spring. T. S. Eliot said “April is the cruelest month,” and these twelve paper works were created in April, in diverse colors: red, yellow, and blue. Were they the precursors? SM Perhaps subconsciously. Back then, I was working on many paintings simultaneously, mostly for the exhibition in London. I also created the paintings referencing February, a precursor to the four August pieces in Rome. Both are a continuation of the series with the names of months as their titles, each comprising four pieces measuring one by one meter. The different groups and exhibitions are therefore always linked to each other. 161

It’s a relational field where everything refers to everything else. SM Yes. At times, a general idea emerges suggesting, say, a play with something more two dimensional, or something more elegiac, or a particular color tonality. But in those instances the act of painting generally takes on a life of its own and morphs into something totally different. HUO You said once it was like having a conversation with a painting. Does this mean that at the end of the day, we’re seeing the beginning of a conversation that’s been captured inside a frame? SM I always intend to make a more complicated or perhaps a more complex statement within a painting—seemingly as if I actually know what I’m searching for, but can’t describe it. I then keep on working until I reach the point when I sense that the piece has somehow taken on a life of its own. HUO That’s when the painting is completed? SM That’s when I stop. HUO It’s also a matter of time, isn’t it? You say that you always reflect on the meaning of time. The studio also has a lot to do with time. You waited long until you were ready for the large canvases; that’s time, indeed. The most varied aspects of time are important to you: the freezing, expanding, and passing of time, in part also the suspension of time. SM It’s as if the chronology of time inside the studio followed different conventions. A synchronicity emerges, also between older and current paintings. Some works take me a lot longer to finish; this is also when they strike me as being much younger. Others, in contrast, are completed more quickly. It’s also important to note that while I’m painting I forget time. It can expand indefinitely. And I can lose myself in it. HUO

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Often you don’t consider a painting unfinished because something is still missing. Correct? Something is missing. SM Yes, something’s always missing. For me, a painting must have density, cross-references, or complexity. I often sit here in my studio studying the paintings through observation, even while I’m speaking, reading, or entertaining company. Many believe the paintings are complete: [pointing to one painting] an arc topped by a strange triangle, two green sections, and below, a spot that’s been scratched open . . . possibly evoking associations with water. But that wouldn’t be enough for me, nor would I like letting go of the piece at this stage. HUO From inside the studio, you have a view to the outside, over to a tree in the courtyard below. Agnès Varda said that any day without seeing a tree is a wasted day indeed. SM I would agree. HUO This quote could be from you, couldn’t it? SM Yes, perhaps. I’ve always given tremendous attention to trees—they’re very important. HUO In this context there’s a remarkable piece, an early abstract work from 2015. In Heaven the picture is basically visible through a tree, similar to the view we have from the studio, of the neighbor’s house through that tree. In fact, this is how the abstract pieces initially came about in the first place. Back then I gave a talk in your exhibition at Pilar Corrias. It was a representational exhibition except for this not-very-large abstract piece. It was like a clearing. Perusing the new August pieces, isn’t it as if the act of painting becomes frozen in a clearing? While the actual paintings never become frozen themselves—again and again, the observer detects HUO

other things as well. Even though I already see a clearing in the second painting now. The idea still persists, doesn’t it? SM Perhaps it’s because the piece frees itself from the idea of depicting an existing state in nature. Every painting should allow permeability, or offer the possibility of sensing the same—as if the observer were being afforded the possibility of breathing through it. HUO This first abstract piece was created in the context of the Harvest cycle, which depicts a crop scene in Ukraine after World War II. Painted from photographs by Robert Capa, the pieces have now acquired a totally different urgency through the ongoing war in Ukraine. SM Yes, there always exists the hope that people will find escape routes, even from horrific situations. Even though they’re unable to leave in body, they can travel in spirit and transport themselves to other worlds. I came to imagine that this playing, bored child, appearing in different paintings, still too small to help with chores or exempted from helping with the work, nonetheless appears a bit lost trying to have a good time. Meaning: playing. HUO So, nature and trees have been an important theme for you throughout. SM If the tree at my window no longer existed, I would lose the joy of spending time at the window. HUO Does this mean working here would be difficult for you? SM Yes. It always consoles me when I can’t be outside because I’m working. HUO In an interview with Etel Adnan in 2016, on the occasion of the exhibition Storm at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, you note that you had a view of a tree on a mountain top from your

Previous spread: Sabine Moritz, Gagosian, Rome, 2023. Photo: Leonardo Cestari Opposite: Sabine Moritz, Ferragosto III, 2023, oil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 118 ⅛ inches (200 × 300 cm). Photo: Georgios Michaloudis, farbanalyse, Cologne, Germany Above: Sabine Moritz, Ferragosto IV, 2023, oil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 118 ⅛ inches (200 × 300 cm). Photo: Georgios Michaloudis, farbanalyse, Cologne, Germany

childhood room, just as you do here. SM It was my fixed point. I always let my eyes wander along the mountain chain when I was quietly sitting and looking out the window . . . and a tree was still standing there, erect. This was always my anchor. HUO But you couldn’t find it on the mountain itself? SM No. The paths didn’t extend along that location. I always wondered what it would be like knowing this particular tree—I mean, knowing which one of the trees along the mountain chain it actually was. It was a European black pine, same as all the trees up there. HUO I recently arrived from Düsseldorf, where an exhibition featuring some of your early pieces is currently open. It’s about the Lobeda series [1992–93]— drawings of your childhood environment and home town, made from memory, now acquired by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. The presentation is actually a precise reversal of the Rome show because the Düsseldorf venue has primarily representational works on view, and almost entirely drawings. There’s just a single abstract painting, Family. In Rome, on the other hand, the only representational piece features skulls and the series of the three red roses; otherwise, the works are abstract. So, an exact reversal, in two exhibitions running simultaneously. This is very interesting, no? SM Each offers a window into different levels or different spheres of my work, like a counterpoint in perpetual opposition. The Düsseldorf exhibition is very important to me. All the works on view, except for the one abstract piece, are over thirty years old. HUO In fact, you and I have also known each another for almost thirty years. This means that

this interview is our anniversary interview! We met briefly in Hamburg in the fall of 1993, at the premiere of the Zerbrochenen Spiegel (Broken mirror) exhibition, with Kasper König and Gerhard Richter. SM This calls for a celebration, later today! HUO The skull painting in Rome had a precursor at the exhibition in London. Isn’t that correct? SM Yes, I painted the new picture as recently as early September. HUO Very quickly? SM Very quickly. The other paintings always take a lot of time. What I wanted to do here was something that took less time and was more immediate. HUO Does it have a title? SM Meeting, like the still life in London, because three skulls are visible. HUO A posthumous meeting indeed! SM It’s a typical vanitas image or memento mori, as is its precursor. Here you see what I mentioned earlier, these threads extending throughout the exhibition. The groups are carried along, refined, and continued. HUO It’s incredible that the piece was created in a single day, and that you found the experience recreational. SM Yes, suddenly you’re given a different guideline or nexus, a different kind of freedom, so to speak. The main painting was created in a single day. Afterward I kept making small changes; ultimately I’m not at all sure whether it qualifies as a real painted work or remains a sketch. I’ll have to study it some more. HUO How important is studying a picture through observation? SM It’s very important. But I don’t spend much extra time on it. Studying through observation is 163

This page: Sabine Moritz, The three sisters 5/5/2023, 2023, oil on lithography, 16 ⅝ × 11 ¾ inches (42.1 × 29.7 cm). Photo: Georgios Michaloudis, farbanalyse, Cologne, Germany Opposite: Installation view, Sabine Moritz: August, Gagosian, Rome, September 22– November 18, 2023. Photo: Matteo D’Eletto, M3 Studio Artwork © Sabine Moritz

always done incidentally. It’s not a separate task. HUO In the new pieces, the largest you’ve ever painted, you create the impression that studying a piece close-up, compared to studying it from a distance, results in differences in how it’s experienced. How important is this for the painting process? SM You move around a lot, coming closer, stepping back farther. That’s also due to color changes: I often hold brushes with different colors in my hand, in different sizes, or different paint containers. A lot of movement indeed. HUO Your 2016 exchange with Etel Adnan is interesting: she said that she never made corrections, nor did she correct her poems. She applied the paint directly from the tube to the canvas and then was done with it. You responded at the time that you always make changes—you wipe, you modify, you try again. Was that true for these pieces as well? SM My “conversation” with the paintings is always built on statements and replies. The result is a grown texture. It’s mostly an addition, always paint layer upon paint layer, but at times it’s simultaneously an act of obliteration, of making something disappear and then recapturing it. Yes, correcting is important for me. Sometimes it’s exploration with an artistic eye. When is a piece a painting? When is it a drawing? Does it work to apply dry paint to dry paint, wet paint to dry paint, leave empty spaces, render paint completely opaque? Is it possible to draw with paint? There are often many 164

contradictory steps in the painting process. HUO Drawing with paint? SM Yes, it happens. T h is is a n interest ing difference. HUO The interview also contains this exciting passage where you remark, “In life, you need a compass.” Etel comments that in fact we have a compass but that we often extinguish it so as to keep control. What about these large Ferragosto paintings? What’s the relationship here between coincidence and control? SM It has quite a lot to do with intuition, something not directed by consciousness. Many things are happenstance to which we respond. In the beginning, a piece can be casually beautiful, but then we must still labor tediously through ugliness, which is always a fine line. Recently I was told that it’s a fine line that separates kitsch from an ugly painting. I thought that was food for thought. HUO And this ugliness, this process of working through it, is that documented? Do you take photos of the states that the painting goes through? SM Yes, it’s the idea of fractured beauty. It’s important. I believe that beauty is one of the most complicated things. HUO What were your sources of inspiration for the exhibition in Rome? We had record heat this summer, a climate catastrophe. SM It was simply summer in and by itself that inspired me. The paintings took shape very quickly,

which is why the inspiration was actually the present, a response to the present at large. HUO In abstract works, the obser ver always looks for representational elements: flowers, figures, sometimes faces. But the paintings never freeze completely. You say that this is actually unavoidable. SM Yes, abstraction touches the imagination of every person differently and is experienced differently by different people. I remember from my childhood that when I was sent to bed early while it was still light outside, and I was bored, I would inspect the marks in the wood of the cabinets and the wardrobe and would find figures, animals, shapes I was very familiar with after a while. Many people probably had similar experiences. In my painting I usually try to avoid any such associations completely, but right now I’m intentionally experimenting with combining configurations and abstractions inside the same painting. In still lifes, for example, this is always already in place, as a close look at the background will demonstrate. But I’m not there yet. I look forward to continuing at this point. HUO Well, this is the next step. We haven’t talked about the works on paper on display in Rome. Let’s return to the series of twelve abstract works in oil on paper. They were created in the spring. Would it be correct to view them as an antecedent, perhaps on a subconscious level?

Yes, because I always work on several projects simultaneously. You learn from one what you can apply to the other, ranging from paper to canvas, from canvas back to paper. Every task comes with other challenges. I’m still missing a title for this group. I’m envisioning a poem that formally harmonizes with the pieces, a poem of twelve lines—three verses with each verse having four lines. I may have an idea, but I must first check it out. . . . I’ve reflected on this one often [hands over a book]: HUO [reads] “To the Fates.” Could that be the title? SM Grant me a single summer, ye mighty ones! Grant me an autumn’s ripeness of melody, That less reluctant, being sated with the sweet Playing, my heart may perish! SM

Souls, if denied their sacred inheritance in life, Are unquiet too in the underworld; I, though, achieved ere now the holy Poetry, close to my heart, the poem Then be you welcome, stillness and shadow world! I’ll be content, no less, should my minstrelsy Not guide me down: time was, when I have Lived like the gods: nothing more is needed. HUO You know it by heart! SM Friedrich Hölderlin. “To the Fates” [1799].

They are the goddesses of destiny. Perhaps this is a beautiful arc. Exactly three verses, each with four lines. Each sheet can be given a line of the poem. I had the poem in my head all the time and wanted to incorporate it. It matches the small series and thereby remains a bit more apropos. HUO Is it true that these cycles actually also address repetition and difference? SM It’s always about the paradox of repetition and renewal, a contradiction by its very nature. On the other hand, it also comes from practice, as the new is always achieved by working with the same old hands, eyes, brushes, paints, canvas or paper. HUO This can also be seen in the rose series on view: prints of three charcoal drawings are the foundation that you paint over again and again in sets of three, as triptychs. They are similar, belong together like a family, but still differ from each other. SM The title is The Three Sisters because they resemble each other, like the members of a family. HUO Roses are strong, Etel thought. This again is a paradox: they are strong while also being fragile. The fragrance is strong but delicate. SM Yes, some people hate roses with a passion because they’re associated with the most tiresome platitudes. But at the same time, they’re always a challenge. The rose simply functions as a tremendously strong symbol. It can function as a metaphor for so many things.

I have one more question in relation to the pieces in Rome. From our last interview I remember one sentence that I didn’t understand: what is “the texture that the picture seemingly wants to have”? SM Looks like I expressed myself once again very hypothetically. I look at the piece and I see this texture. I respond to it and try to create or reveal it. Sometimes I have a different idea beforehand. For example, two of the Ferragosto paintings gave me the idea that they form a group together; I thought the other two were more a kind of drawing. But it didn’t work out that way and turned into something else. HUO The four pieces belong together. SM Yes, four pieces that are similar yet different. It’s ultimately up to the observer. HUO The four pieces could actually be a single work. SM It’s also an idea I often have, namely that the paintings converse with each other. HUO Not only the dialogue you have with the paintings, but the dialogue of the pictures with each other. SM Like people in a group. Everybody makes a different contribution. The painting is a contention, and more of them are more contentions. Naturally there is also the possibility that one contention eliminates another contention. HUO

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ART AND PAIN THROUGH THE LENS “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?” asked Frida Kahlo, whose tremendous artistic career was shaped by a life of profound physical challenges. Twelve years after surviving a polio infection at the age of six, which left her with a stunted and weak right leg, Kahlo was caught in a horrific bus crash in Mexico City. The impact caused fractures in her spine, collarbone, ribs, and pelvis, and a handrail from the bus impaled her abdomen, leading to further complications and surgeries. This event would mark the beginning of a long and arduous journey of physical pain and medical procedures. Through her art, Kahlo found a powerful outlet for her suffering, allowing her to confront it and transform it into emotionally charged artworks that continue to inspire generations of artists across disciplines. While this type of creative catharsis—the idea that art can help us manage pain—may seem intuitive, a growing body of medical research supports the concept from an empirical perspective. Below I join three experts in the field of arts in medicine— Tammy Shella, PhD, director of the art therapy program at the Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland; Dr. Matthew Doll, PhD, a director at the SSM Health Treffert Studios in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the world’s leading institution in the study of acquired savant syndrome (the emergence of unusual skills after traumatic brain injury); and artist David John Marchi—to discuss the measurable psychological and physiological impact of art on our experience of physical trauma. —Ashley Overbeek ASHLEY OVERBEEK It’s exciting to get so many brilliant

minds together in one place. I wanted to start with understanding how each of you has seen art used as a tool to confront physical pain. What examples have you seen in your lives and practices? TAMMY SHELLA I’ve been working at Cleveland Clinic for more than twenty-five years. I started 166

in behavioral health, and then about fifteen years ago I started working with the Arts & Medicine department, creating the medical art-therapy program. Arts & Medicine is more than just art therapy, though; people are creative in a lot of different ways. From a medical perspective, art therapy often addresses anxiety and mood, both of which can impact pain. So we look at those as a group and try to work on, “Can we improve your mood, can we lessen your anxiety, and hopefully then lessen the pain?” And one of the ways artmaking can do that is getting the person into flow state. Flow state is a theory of the positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who talked about it as a state of optimal attention, being mindfully immersed in what you’re doing. That immersion, that mindfulness, is part of why making art helps. The other part of it is, art becomes a visual way to discuss things that maybe you don’t have the words for. MATTHEW DOLL I love your answer, Tammy. And I think there are individual differences, right? We all have different sensory issues, we all have different types of anxiety, physical pain, emotional pain. I’ve seen it with art therapists working with Vietnam vets and the intervention was asking them to create masks, because many of them feel they wear a mask, having to hide their emotional pain or their posttraumatic symptoms or even physical pain. Some feel they need to be tough for the family, or have other reasons they can’t show or talk about the pain they experience. It seemed to be one of the functions of the task that through the arts, they were able to express things without necessarily having to be verbal about it. Our brains store pain information, trauma, in a different way, and depending on how we were impacted and what state we were in when we were harmed, we have these different access points. Some of them are really unconscious, stored in our bodies, even nonverbal. Art is often able to tap into that, so that we can express unvoiced or unvoiceable emotions, feelings, and thoughts.

Then there’s the sensory nature of things, being able to use your hands to smear things or to create in any tactile way, and I’ve seen that be very, very helpful for folks, because it gets them out of their head in a way that’s not their thinking brain but their creative brain. That really frees them up and gives them a sense of accomplishment and success. It’s curative for all of us to be in relationship, and many of us feel isolated or absent in relationship. So art is also a way of connecting, individually creating and then sharing work. That cohesion, that sense of belonging, is another way to manage both physical and emotional pain. AO So art can be a pathway of communicating and connecting nonverbally with each other. MD Yes, but also internally, for ourselves, because we can sometimes create things that we weren’t aware of. DAVID J. MARCHI I was never really good in art class; stick figures were about as far as I could go. I was very creative, however, so conceptually I could come up with ideas, but I couldn’t translate them into something visual. Then in 2015 I was in a severe boat accident that led to the onset of acquired savant syndrome, which is the emergence of skills after an individual suffers a traumatic injury. These are usually in art, music, math, calendar calculating, and spatial skills. After the accident, I began dreaming every night in structured images. In my mind I was mixing, blending, creating new colors, and eventually seeing complete or near complete paintings. I found the ability to take those ideas from memory and put them down on something—canvas, paper, a wall. So as far as what art has done to me and for me, and what I’ve been through—well, I have chronic pain every single day. I’ve had chronic pain with over eight surgeries since the accident in 2015. I tell people, I don’t know what a day is like without pain. I don’t take pain pills but the moment I get into my studio, and it’s hard to explain this, but in my studio

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Previous spread: Frida Kahlo, Without Hope (Sin esperanza), 1945, oil on canvas on Masonite, 11 × 14 ⅛ inches (28 × 36 cm) © Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Schalkwijk/Art Resource, New York

I feel no pain. I can reach high, I can get on the floor and move around, and so it’s definitely something that is now in me. And it’s almost uncontrollable at this point. I remember a conversation early on with Dr. Darold Treffert, who diagnosed my condition. I said to him, “It’s almost like I’m going crazy. There’s so much in my head and in my mind, and I can’t compartmentalize it. It’s just coming out.” And he said, “This is part of it. You need to try to figure out how to manage it and control it; it’s now part of you and not going away.” I think I’ve done that, but I don’t think there’s a night that’s gone by that I don’t dream of the completion of a painting or the creation of a new one. Ashley, you saw my studio: my mind doesn’t show small images. The dreams are so visual and so large, I just finished a twenty-eight-foot painting. Most of my paintings are six, eight, and ten feet, but I’m now very comfortable painting sixty by forty inches. What’s interesting is, the larger the painting, the more time I have where I’m kind of inside the painting looking out, which allows me to subconsciously prepare for night, because I’ll dream about the next step on the painting. And it’s frustrating, because, for example, I was in the studio this morning at 4:30 am because I had to put “it” down, and it’s a twenty-minute drive; I was in my pajamas and went to the studio and did it. But it’s been a pretty dramatic thing in my life. I tell people, I think it saved me mentally, and also got me through all the surgeries and rehabilitation so far. MD There can be a sense of compulsion, this sense of needing to do something, and then it sort of goes into its own world, hours go by, and people aren’t aware of it. I think the similarity of that pattern is pretty striking and consistent across the folks we’ve talked to that have acquired savant syndrome. TS A nd beyond t he c ompu l sion to do it , everything you were describing is flow state—the loss of time, the loss of need, bodily sensations, not feeling thirst, hunger, pain. Those kind of go away to the side and you realize hours later, “Oh, I haven’t had anything to eat, I should stop and have something to eat.” What you were just describing is that mindful immersion. If we could get all patients to just kind of pick the colors and go with them and not overthink it, not be self-conscious—because loss of self-consciousness is part of flow as well—that would be wonderful. A lot of times, people overthink, and that’s one of the obstacles to getting them to engage in art therapy or artmaking: the fear of the wrong. DJM To that point, once again, when I come into 168

my studio, it’s almost like everything shuts off. Not only is my phone off, but everything shuts off, the sounds around me shut off, and it brings me to a mental space that is totally safe, with no boundaries. I paint on average six hours a day, sometimes twelve hours a day, and I paint every single day. I forget to eat. And yes, it’s this state of—I don’t know, it’s a pleasant state, because once I leave my studio I feel like everything explodes. It’s a blessing for me, to experience that type of peace when I’m here. AO That mindfulness, the flow state you describe, David, I feel like there are so many ways to describe that feeling of everything else falling away. Matt, in an earlier conversation we had, you used the phrase “releasing the tyranny of the left side of the brain.” Is that related to this feeling of everything falling away? Could you speak a little bit more about what that means? MD I think of it in relation to what Tammy was talking about in terms of that self-consciousness, self-awareness, the limits we put on ourselves. We’ve all experienced the anxiety of not being able to recall something we know, or find something that’s right in front of us—different processes, but accessing information that we have can change based on our emotional state or situation. We’ve seen that with individuals gaining access to skills that they didn’t have access to prior to traumatic brain injury. It appears that in some cases, if particular areas of the brain that have restricting effects on other areas of the brain are damaged, access to formerly restricted areas becomes possible. In some forms of dementia, and in some individuals who have had a brain injury impacting the left anterior temporal lobe, you may see increased artistic skills that were not evident before the disease or injury. The theory is that our left hemisphere may suppress other areas of the brain, potentially for efficiency’s sake, but once damaged, that suppression is removed, and you may see a shift from a left- to right-hemisphere mode of functioning. There are a great many variables and individual differences to consider, of course, but that process in general is the “tyranny” that Dr. Treffert would talk about: we don’t have access because our left hemisphere is rational and we’re thinking about things logically, whereas if it’s altered, we may now have access to our more creative side, which is typically associated with the right side of the brain. There have also been studies, with varied results, looking at trying to suppress left-hemisphere areas artificially so as to allow greater access to right-hemisphere areas. AO How do you give people the tools to continue using art for healing even after they finish

treatment? How do you ensure that art is something they can engage with forever? DJM For context, I started teaching an art class for fourteen-year-olds at the new SSM Health Treffert Studios, which opened recently in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. This new addition has expanded the services of the Treffert Center to focus on the strengths and neurodiversity of young adults. It provides the space and facilities to create and perform, whether in the form of visual art, music, videos, video-game streaming, talk shows, or other art forms. My biggest mission is to spread the word on how I believe art heals at certain levels, and it’s not on the quantitative or qualitative level but from my own personal level, where I can talk with some degree of credibility. And I felt that participating with these kids would give me the opportunity to start the process with people who are young and might experience this and be inspired in some way. The inspiration for starting this class with Dr. Doll and his team was meeting Max, the son of one of my neighbors, who has autism. Max had never painted before. I asked his dad if I could come over and paint with him and his brother Sam. It took almost forty-five minutes for him to pick up a brush and start putting paint on the canvas. It was the most rewarding thing I experienced in my “art world,” more rewarding than selling a painting or being in a show. Max’s family ended up moving, but his father called me a month later to thank me and said, “I need to tell you that Max has not stopped painting since you were at our house. Every day when he comes home, he pulls out his paints.” So for me, if one person can carry that on. . . . I’ll be curious if any of the students in my class do the same thing. TS One of the issues with medical art therapy is that it’s brief. We’re at a huge hospital, so we’ve got 1,000 inpatient adult beds, 250 pediatric beds, and very few art therapists to serve all those people. Patients are consulted for an art-therapy session based on a need. We’re working on the crisis of hospitalization. So we really try to introduce art that the patients can take home. The sad part is, we don’t always know if they do. We may see a person once and never see them again. Many times we see patients who come back every other month—they’re here for another reason, like treatments for transplant issues or cancer. So as I was listening to David speak, I thought, I wish I knew. And I love that an art therapist who works with outpatients has that opportunity to see the art that the patient made when they first came in and the art made months later. We don’t get to see that. You come in to work in the hospital knowing that you’re going to do what

OUR BRAINS STORE PAIN INFORMATION, TRAUMA, IN A DIFFERENT WAY . . . ART IS OFTEN ABLE TO TAP INTO THAT, SO THAT WE CAN EXPRESS UNVOICED OR UNVOICEABLE EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, AND THOUGHTS. –Matthew Doll you can with this person in the maybe one time you see them. We had a young cancer patient who was already interested in art and began creating these fantastical pieces. He was worried he was going to be forgotten when he died, because he was going to die young. And because of that, we were inspired to do an art show with him and with other patients. So sometimes those things happen within our environment to show how the art is helping, to hopefully let other people see it, and hopefully we’re engaging people with art that is easy enough for them to pick up when they go home and continue in some way. But unfortunately we don’t always know. MD As we mentioned earlier, art connects people, and it’s a universal language, being both personal and interpersonal. So when you think about healing, medicine, and art, it’s not just in that singular person; healing happens in relationship. And yes, it’s the flow state, and it helps us heal and it helps us express emotions that we otherwise couldn’t, but there’s a lot of emerging research that says we actually coregulate each other. Our heart rates go into sync, and we have oxytocin [hormone] levels that influence each other. So art must do that for people too, right? We’re all internally connected in unique ways based on individual differences, and yet we are also interconnected with each other. One of the things we miss at times, being focused on individual access to skills and our measurement of outcomes on an individual basis, is really that collective connection and the influence we have on each other. Art speaks many languages. I think we have these silos in our brains and in our society that say “Art isn’t medicine, relationship isn’t medicine,” but the emerging evidence is, “Oh, relationship is very much medicine.” Art connects us in a unique way. TS I think that arts and medicine is broadening as a concept. The Arts & Medicine program at Cleveland Clinic started fifteen years ago, which is not long, that’s pretty emerging. But now I’m seeing more and more hospitals have it. We just went to the National Organization for Arts in Health conference here in Cleveland. So we’re seeing more awareness of it, and then social prescribing, which started in the United Kingdom before the pandemic, where it’s basically prescribing arts activities for patients, a lot of it to lessen loneliness, to add to people’s lives. And we know that it does. We know that one of the interesting things that happened during the pandemic was that people who had hobbies that got them into flow state did better than people who didn’t. Toward the end of the pandemic there was a whole issue of languishing, where people had no energy, they just lost it. But if you were already

doing a flow-state activity—art, music, dance, whatever you liked to do—your wellbeing was probably better than someone who was not engaging in those kinds of things. So that kind of information is interesting, and the fact that people are studying it—it’s going to keep growing. DJM When I went to the Helen Frankenthaler exhibition at Gagosian in Chelsea last spring, it was one of the most emotional exhibitions I’d been to, and I don’t know what it was—I mean, I love her, she’s a huge influence on my work, but a couple of paintings brought tears to my eyes and I couldn’t figure out why I became emotionally attached to them. Then when I was looking around, I saw I wasn’t the only one—a few people were emotional, and one person was staring in front of a painting called Western Roadmap [1991]. They were there from the time we got there to the time we left. AO Where do we go next? What’s the frontier, Tammy, for art therapy? What do you want to research, study, expand upon in your program? David, Matt, what’s next for you? How do we continue to push the envelope in thinking about art and medicine? TS I think continuing research, looking at different things. Sometimes newer research surprises you. Along with art therapist Sarah Brown, I did a research study looking at how patients with epilepsy and nonepileptic seizures would make a head sculpture to represent their seizures. These patients created their sculptures in vastly different and unexpected ways. The people who had epilepsy did this electronic kind of stuff; the patients who had conversion disorder, which is basically taking one’s traumas and converting it into what looks like a seizure but is not actually a seizure, all of their sculptures were turned in toward the head. All patients were given the same directions and materials to work with; the only difference was their diagnosis. These remarkable differences in the art they created were an exciting find, and we’re going to do more research on that. So I really think it’s just doing research. Art therapists didn’t do enough of it in the past, and we need to do more to show the impact even in small areas. DJM The opportunity for the academic side should be the first point of inflection and exposure. As a member of the Art Students League in New York, I’ve had meaningful discussions with Executive Director Michael Hall and President Robin Frank on this subject and the potential impact for the League. I’ve also spoken with Eric Shiner, president of Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, about getting involved in the intersection of art and medicine, as Powerhouse focuses on an artist’s complete

journey. Everyone is very receptive and wants to learn more. The opportunity for galleries and museums is to take the first step, start the conversation, and develop a strategic roadmap. Think how many of the artists whom curators select or critics critique have had some type of mental or physical trauma in their lives. By virtue of who they are and what they do, they’re surrounded every single day with art and this healing phenomenon. I think change starts with education, communication, and credibility. Dr. Doll, Dr. Shella, and I know about the powerful benefits of engaging art because we’ve each experienced them on certain levels, with people we work with, the research we do on them, and what we create from them. I think there’s a responsibility for the art world to look at this in a very, very serious way and understand what impact it could really have. Many well-known and often exhibited artists had severe mental and physical disabilities: Vasily Kandinsky, Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and on and on. The galleries already have a huge advantage because the art is on their walls and in their halls. They can be the catalyst to create, educate, and inform the public quicker than anyone else. MD For us, it’s helping individuals across the globe, and also research. We have a lot of information about individuals who have come forward, such as David, and shared their experiences very generously with us. We have so much to learn; the brain is such a fascinating organ, and is tied to our other organs in ways we have only begun to understand. Our heart sends more information to our brain than our brain sends to our heart. We’re also using electroencephalograms to better understand the connections in different parts of our brains, and how different brain waves are tied to brain states such as “being in the zone.” We also continue to provide connection to individuals across the globe who have been born with or acquire unique abilities. I want to share a story about a primarily nonverbal eighteen-year-old boy who visits the Treffert Center from a different country. He starts drawing his horses and a group of preschool children join him, also drawing horses. A little girl goes up and gets in his space, and for the first time outside of his family, he begins to share attention with another person; his mother is brought to tears. He’s looking at her, they’re making eye contact, they’re looking at the drawings together. It’s that connectivity, I think, that is really what we want to magnify and elevate. How do we have art heal through relationships, through the obvious chemical interactions we all share, to heal ourselves and each other? 169

DUANE HANSON

On the occasion of an exhibition at Fondation Beyeler, novelist Rachel Cusk considers the ethical and aesthetic arrangements that Duane Hanson’s sculpture initiates within the viewer.

TO SHOCK OURSELVES

hy are Duane Hanson’s figures so shocking? How does their pedestrian reality attain such a power of disturbance? P l a c e d b e s i d e a C l a ud e Monet or a Mark Rothko, that power is only increased, becomes something against which the morality of art is helpless: the power of indifference. Yet the figures are not exactly indifferent; it is more that they don’t want to be—cannot be—improved. We know this not only because they are finished objects but also because in their human autonomy they question the very notion of improvement by looking at art. It is their double existence, as objects in themselves and as aliens to the concepts of art, that is disturbing. Yet the fact is that they—and by extension we— are also art. The curious proposition of hyperrealism, whereby assiduous, excessive attention is paid to things that don’t seem—beneath the dubious scrutiny of artistic values—to warrant it, is the reverse of a challenge to aesthetic convention. Its radicality lies in its utter submission to the mechanics of making. The hyperrealist object, by presenting itself as a simulacrum, is exposed not to an artistic or specialized scrutiny but to a universal one: any child could decide whether or not it is convincing. Looking at one of Hanson’s figures, one is instantly overwhelmed, almost embarrassed, by its intimate familiarity. Where usually the experience of looking at art

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is accompanied by the effort to understand and decode, to penetrate the image and discern the artist’s intentions, here one already knows and recognizes what is being presented. The process of looking is reversed: it is our own intentions that are being scrutinized, for these figures and the existing knowledge they arouse do not elevate us into art-lovers or aesthetes but instead return us to the plane of common humanity, filled with social judgment and division. The figures are more than representations, they are painstaking reproductions of something we generally hold to be unreproducible: human individuality. It would be easier to look at them if they were representational: we would be looking at something the artist was seeing. Instead, it is we who see them and judge them and decide what they are. The question of attention is central to Hanson’s work, to the extent that his work constitutes a moral question about making and looking at art. An artwork is evidence of an act of attention—the artist’s—which then demands a further act of attention from those who look at it. This secondary attention, the attention of the viewer, presupposes a certain humility, or at least a suspension of judgment in which our own possible ignorance and failure to understand are in play. The image eludes us, is not self-explanatory; our acceptance or rejection of it is not essential to its existence, for it may be that we have no idea what we are looking at. Since the image is indifferent to us, by paying it attention we are entering a state of selflessness that feels like a moral and spiritual improvement on our habitual condition.

Previous spread: Installation view, Jubiläumsausstellung— Special Guest Duane Hanson, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 30, 2022– January 8, 2023. Duane Hanson artwork © The Estate of Duane Hanson/2022, ProLitteris, Zurich. Helen Frankenthaler artwork © 2024 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Below: Installation view, Jubiläumsausstellung— Special Guest Duane Hanson, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 30, 2022– January 8, 2023. Duane Hanson artwork © The Estate of Duane Hanson/2022, ProLitteris, Zurich. Anselm Kiefer artwork © Anselm Kiefer Opposite: Installation view, Jubiläumsausstellung— Special Guest Duane Hanson, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 30, 2022– January 8, 2023. Duane Hanson artwork © The Estate of Duane Hanson/2022, ProLitteris, Zurich. Alberto Giacometti artwork © 2023 Alberto Giacometti Estate/ Licensed by VAGA and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The hyperrealist reverses this situation by producing a nonelusive work that presents the artist’s attention-state as a form of quotidian labor. The hyperrealist object is, among other things, the evidence of painstaking, repetitive work in which the artist—far from escaping into selfexpression—is chained to concrete reality. One of the chief consequences of this reversal applies to the status of the artist himself: he exchanges authorial grandeur for artisanal practicality. This time, initially, it is he, not the viewer, who wears the mantle of humility. Hanson carries this humility further by his selection of socially and economically marginal subjects who stand adjacent—if not opposed—to the bourgeois values of art. The history of art, like that of literature, is of course filled with such portrayals: what might be called the instinctive elitism of aesthetics strains to incorporate what is other to itself by a process of pure representation. Yet representation can rarely bridge the problem of appropriation of identity, for the artist is essentially a privileged figure who must increasingly produce evidence of shared identity to legitimize their perception of the world. Interestingly, the difference in hyperrealism may lie in the autonomy granted to the hyperrealist object not merely by its material character but by the subjection of the artist to its manufacture. The artist’s instinct for beauty, his privileges not just of interpretation but of a more neutral looking and noticing—noticing light, color, juxtaposition— are absent. His goal lies beyond verisimilitude in an exacting re-creation that is at once pedestrian and godlike. Re-creation—as with the statues from antiquity that attempted to defy death and loss—is a challenge to mortality. Hanson’s figures do not die; he is not expressing their ephemerality but rather

concretizing them in a doubtful eternity. Their actual ephemerality—as in Man on a Mower (1995) or Woman with Child in Stroller (1985)—becomes a kind of curse or bondage: trapped by the material prop or object that delimits their daily existence, they seem marooned in time, forever barred from self-realization. Hanson’s remarks about his practice are gently provocative: the discipline of love, he suggests, is what motivates him to create these laborious memorials to the possibility of meaninglessness. It is a possibility from which we strain to separate ourselves, our presence in an art gallery itself being one way of doing so. Some of Hanson’s people are conspicuously not art-lovers; they are looking away, unaided in the search for meaning. His Old Couple on a Bench (1994) slump vacantly beside one another, t hei r c ompa n ion sh ip bot h i mpr i son ment and miracle. Hanson’s attention—his love—is so vastly in excess of what he presents as his subjects’ (in)significance that it becomes a challenge to the very notion of self-belief. Importantly, it forces us to give them our attention too, and to submit ourselves to what might almost be described as the trauma of empathy. It is not just Hanson’s technique but his power of selection that lays the ground for this process. Why has he chosen these people? What does it mean to be chosen? Our fear that we have not been—will not be—chosen starts to come to light. The deep and structural divisions between ourselves and other humans emerge and gain clarity, then begin to give way to the sense of something shared. How can we share, when we ourselves have to survive? Hanson artfully alludes to hardship and the difficulty of living as plainly besetting his people, but his devotion to them has the effect of increasing our sense of our own pitiable vulnerability and difficulty. What

would it mean to receive this devotion ourselves, to be studied and re-created in this way? Hanson described himself as an outsider and a populist, a disclaimer intended to distance him not just from art’s elitism but from the egotistical basis of perception itself. Self-Portrait with Model (1979) shows him sharing space with one of his creations yet evidently distinct from her: with her self-absorption and her downcast eyes, she seems barely aware of him. He is gazing away, at something we can’t see—like a traveler, someone passing through. His various studies of the forms of workmen, with their tools, their exposed bodies, their paint-spattered or sawn-off clothing, stand in contrast to this gentle, dreaming figure in his clean jeans and shirt. Children Playing Game (1979) (whose models were Hanson’s own offspring) likewise suggests something halfway between innocence and knowledge: the children’s young, unused bodies, bent to a game that is not quite play but rather a sort of preparation for the pointless, repetitive tasks of adulthood, emanate constraint and docility; their dreamy, almost listless expressions seem to query this predicament— life—in which they find themselves. “In the quiet moments in which you observe my work, maybe you will recognize the universality of all people,” Hanson said. Yet the question of violence—the violence of injustice and inequality—is interwoven with this universality to such a degree that we ourselves must begin to take responsibility for it. Are we oppressors or victims? Do we identify with the fleshy, slack American on his mower or with the Monet painting, with its leap toward the sublime, installed behind him? High School Student (1990)—Hanson’s portrait of his son, Duane Jr.—suggests something more complex, for here the artist’s subjectivity itself is in play. Tentative rather than marginal, the young 173

man seems to stand at the threshold of something: his future, which perhaps he is attempting to steer by means of the book in his hand, or the obligation to live itself, which he seems in his young adulthood to be on the brink of intuiting. There is a special sadness—a pity—in this portrait that perhaps arises from the artist’s actual fathering of its model: knowing the difficulty of living, we yet engender new beings, new fates. The portrait of Duane Jr. also raises the question of time in Hanson’s work: while his other figures attain an immortal ephemerality, here we seem also to see a labor of memory, the tragic knowledge of love. Seeing is different from knowing: while Hanson’s oeuvre might constitute an attempt to minimize that difference, our capacity for universality will always be hampered by the particularity of love. The special pathos of the portrait of Duane Jr. lies in the work’s admission that the autonomy and separateness of the body mark love’s limit; it is the task—or the curse—of memory to amass knowledge around this limit. By binding his figures to a moment in time, while giving radical measures of his own time to re-create that moment, Hanson is trying to break down the loneliness of autonomy. This is the reverse of the photograph or snapshot, the footprint left in the vacated instant. In photography it is the moment, not the individual, that survives. The survival of Hanson’s figures is intimately connected to the share of his own mortality that he has accorded them. To return to the question of shock: it is the special function of art to confront habits of perception and to demolish the illusions that steadily amass and obstruct truth in the human regard of the world. The hyperrealist project goes farther in removing or radicalizing the space around the art object, with its possibilities for comfort and privilege. The human regard is forced into a more direct meeting—a clash—with the object. In his early work, Hanson interpreted this clash as an opportunity for bare shock by representing scenes of quotidian violence (a motorcycle crash, a war scene, police aggression). Yet his move into social portraiture and a greater subtlety is more shocking still: the offer of art, which is an offer of improvement and elevation, is given a rare ambiguity in these works, to the extent that it is the notion of art itself that becomes shocking. The elements of extremity in American normality that Hanson found in his Floridian landscape are not presented to us in the style of a freak show; they are merely examples of the process of perceptual rejection by which individual consciousness sustains itself. It isn’t difficult to find the equivalent process in any societal milieu, and it is generally only hindsight or history that reveals to us the extent of subjective blindness that experience entails. The notion that art itself could be incorporated into subjectivity, that its shocks could become gratuitous or artificial, is always open to interrogation. To question what is seen and not seen constitutes the raw edge of any artistic practice. In hyperrealism, the reliance is on making seeing unavoidable, by removing the veil of interpretation and presenting what is already known and recognized to be real. Hanson makes of this both a philosophical occasion and an opportunity for intimate contact between artist and viewer. It is this intimacy, which extends to an intimacy with the object itself, that is so surprising. It is Hanson’s nonviolent method of teaching us to shock ourselves. 174

Installation view, Jubiläumsausstellung— Special Guest Duane Hanson, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 30, 2022– January 8, 2023. Artwork © The Estate of Duane Hanson/2022, ProLitteris, Zurich Photos: Lucia Hunziker/LLH Productions

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OUTSIDER ARTIST David Frankel considers the life and work of Jeff Perrone, an artist who rejected every standard of success, and reflects on what defines an existence devoted to art.

So many of the artists we read about in the art magazines, let alone the glossies, are doing fine in the market. They are established or at least up and coming; in gambling language (an undercurrent in a certain sort of art talk), they are favorites, contenders, front runners, picked to win. If they’re in the upper tiers of success, we may find ourselves reading about their houses in lovely parts of the world, or about their studios, somehow both stylish and elaborately functional. And needless to say, we wish them joy in these things. But for every front runner there is the rest of the field; for every leader of the pack, a pack. I first met Jeff Perrone in about 1988, through my then partner the artist Elaine Reichek. The two were dear friends, having bonded during the New York aids crisis, when both had shepherded people all too close to them through the last days of their lives. Elaine told me Jeff’s story before I met him: the son of wealthy parents, his father a real estate developer, he had grown up in part in San Francisco, but because he suffered from asthma, the family had installed him alone except for a housekeeper and a chauffeur in a second home in Stinson Beach, a

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seaside town in Marin County. There the air was cleaner than in the city and his health was safer; the family would visit, but Elaine had the sense that they were happy to have a reason to be free of him. When I eventually met Jeff, I could oh so easily imagine him as a difficult kid, a condition for which isolation and exile are not necessarily solutions, but they had actually turned out well for him: he loved Stinson Beach, loved his support staff, and was happy to take on the job of bringing himself up by himself. And he did it well, too: ferociously smart, he eventually studied linguistics at Berkeley, by his early twenties was writing for Artforum and other magazines, and was soon on staff at Arts, producing essays and reviews that would eventually get him described in Artforum as “a founding figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement” of the 1970s. Professional writing and editing, though, did not satisfy him, and in time he largely gave them up to make art. After Jeff’s unexpected death, in the spring of last year, it fell to Elaine to find and contact his family in California, and in the process she discovered that much of this story was fiction: he was actually the son of a US

Air Force colonel, the family comfortable but not rich, and though he did love Stinson Beach, having visited it often as a child, he had never lived there and had grown up conventionally at home. For something over four decades, long-term friends including Elaine, the artist Jimmy Wright, the critic Max Kozloff, the artist Joyce Kozloff, and others—not a large group; many in Jeff’s community had died during the aids years— had accepted his fantasy biography, or variations on it, having no reason to doubt it. Why the tall tale? I can’t say. Many come to New York to reinvent themselves, but where most devote those efforts to their futures, Jeff went whole hog and threw in his past. He did not invent his intelligence and insight, though, which are there in his published writing for everyone to see. The first time I met Jeff, over dinner at a barbecue place on West 72nd Street, he sat more or less with his back to me, as far as the table shape allowed it, and monopolized the conversation, talking only to Elaine and ignoring everything I said. A few years later, when I’d gotten over that, I was having lunch with him once across the street from the offices of Artforum, where I was on staff, when the magazine’s then editor, Jack Bankowsky, walked in; thinking it could be helpful to Jeff and Jeff’s career to meet Jack, I waved him over, introduced him, and Jeff snubbed him just as he’d earlier snubbed me. (Jack took it in stride; if anything he was amused.) On another occasion I saw Jeff be equally rude to Betsy Baker, then the editor of Art in America. When I worked in the publications department at the Museum of Modern Art, I would sometimes hire Jeff as a proofreader to get him some income; his work was fine but infuriating, because he would fill the margins of the pages with derogatory comments about the writing when all I wanted to know was whether it had typos. Jeff’s authority issues went way

back. In a letter from 1977 generously shared with me by a longtime former boyfriend, Craig Monson, Jeff wrote of a lunch among well-known artists, photographers, and editors, “I admitted that I thought anyone could do photography. I also expressed the opinion that dance and theater and opera were stupid, which did not sit well with everyone.” It certainly wouldn’t have, and I doubt it was true—according to his family, Jeff had loved music as a teenager, playing the piano, and the organ at church on Sundays, and actually composing music—but I’m sure the outrage amused him. As time went by, though, his desire to offend seems to have grown less playful and more entrenched, for reasons I never fully understood but speculate came from the acute difficulty for him of reconciling confident, even arrogant belief in himself with the infantilizing effects of many artists’ lives. In the struggle to get their work shown, seen, and understood—professional tasks quite separate from the struggle to produce art—proud people may end up feeling like supplicants: they need someone (a dealer, a critic, a curator) to give them something (representation, attention, inclusion in a show) and can’t make it happen by themselves. All they can do by themselves is make their work. As an artist, Jeff was a distance from unknown, but an equal or greater distance from earning enough to live on. He lived in a comically grimy tenement apartment above Yonah Schimmel’s, the ancient knishery on Houston Street. He had worked for some time in clay, making ceramic sculptures and tiles, and forcing his tiny life/work space to accommodate a kiln; in those years a layer of clay dust had added to the level of unvacuumedness. Although he was HIV-positive and immunocompromised—he barely survived the ’80s before a drug cocktail emerged to save him—he nevertheless smoked heavily, so much so that the Chicago gallery that staged

Opposite: Installation view, Jeff Perrone: Let 10,000 Tires Burn: Work 2008–2018, Marinaro, New York, May 24–June 24, 2018 Below: Jeff Perrone, Form Fuck Function, 2017, mud cloth, buttons, and thread on canvas, 20 × 16 inches (50.8 × 40.6 cm) Artwork © Jeff Perrone Photos: courtesy Marinaro, New York

his final show, which opened a few weeks after his death, came to smell of cigarettes, a perfume imported from Houston Street along with the art. So—in many ways a role model for no one, a man with advanced skills at shooting himself in the foot. But I completely respected and enjoyed him. Thinking about him now, I remember the critic and painter Manny Farber’s famous distinction between white elephant art and termite art, the former “an expensive hunk of well-regulated area,” the latter art that “goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and . . . leaves nothing in its path.” The termite artist tunnels blindly ahead until the house comes down, working best “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” That sounds like Jeff, in his cantankerousness, his concentration on what he was doing, and his willingness to alienate those who could help him. If few would want totally to emulate him, there should be, must be, a place in the world for artists of his kind. Jeff died in inexpressibly sad circumstances, of a heart attack when he was home alone. A few days went by before anyone realized he hadn’t recently checked in. Elaine found and cold-called his next of kin and she and Jimmy ended up acting as the family’s unofficial agents in New York, working to clean out the apartment above Yonah Schimmel’s and to prepare for the settling of the estate. The process was familiar to them: both had had to handle this task for other late friends during the aids crisis. And as of this writing that’s where things stand, except, I haven’t said much about Jeff’s work. But it isn’t really the subject here, and I’ve written about it elsewhere in the past; so I will say only that I loved it.

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The Nasher Sculpture Center’s 2024 exhibitions are made possible by leading support from Frost Bank. Sarah Sze is made possible by leading support from Gagosian. Generous support is provided by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation and the Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District (DTPID). Additional support is provided by Betty Regard and Jenny and Richard Mullen. Sarah Sze, Times Zero (detail), 2023. © Sarah Sze

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Graham Little Untitled (Sunflower Head), 2022 (detail) Gouache on paper, framed with linen 15 1/8 x 24 inches (38.5 x 61 cm) Courtesy Alison Jacques, London

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GAME CHANGER ALEXEY BRODOVITCH

This page: Alexey Brodovitch, publicity photograph released in connection with the exhibition New Lamps, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 27–June 3, 1951. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

Gerry Badger reflects on the persistent influence of the graphic designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitch, the subject of an upcoming exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

Alexey Brodovitch was a significant if now somewhat disregarded influence on the culture of American graphic design. Born in Russia in 1898, after the revolution he was exiled to Paris, where he was exposed to avant-garde art and worked as a freelance designer. In 1930 he arrived in the United States to teach design in Philadelphia, but his innovative work was noticed by Carmel Snow, editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who appointed him art director of the magazine in 1934. At Harper’s he shook up the worlds of graphic design, typography, art direction, and photography, introducing a freer, more playful European sensibility into the relatively conservative world of American graphic design. Drawing on his exposure to Surrealism in Paris, Brodovitch applied

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the movement’s unconventionality to the magazine’s pages. He contrasted groups of small images with larger ones, printed photographs showing torn edges, found creative uses for the white space around image and text, and deployed contemporary fonts. Everything was done to stimulate readers and agreeably jolt their expectations. As Brodovitch said, “The public is being spoiled by good-technical-quality photographs . . . and they have become bored.” As well as hiring out-of-left-field figures (in fashion photographers’ eyes) such as Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, and Lisette Model, Brodovitch nurtured the careers of fashion greats Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. His Design Laboratory classes, begun when he was still in Philadelphia

and continued in New York, brought together an eclectic mélange of photographers, established and not, to argue about and push the medium’s boundaries—photographers including Avedon, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Art Kane, and Garry Winogrand. The eclecticism of these meetings and their long-term impact, lasting decades, may be his most enduring legacy. As Penn once put it, “All designers, all photographers, all art directors, whether they know it or not, are students of Alexey Brodovitch.” If Brodovitch’s great legacy lies in his own design practice and in his teaching—in other words, in facilitating the work of others—he also made a direct contribution with artwork of his own. Between 1935 and 1939, he photographed the rehearsals and performances of ballet companies visiting New York, including the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, which he’d known in Paris when it was Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Devising a radical method, he used a hand-held 35mm camera in dim interior light, necessitating exposures as slow as 1/5th of a second that produced blurred, grainy, contrasty images. The strategy was typical of his restless, exploratory nature—his whole creative persona was about pushing boundaries and breaking rules. Ballet, published by the New York publisher J. J. Augustin in 1945, contains 104 images and is divided into eleven “chapters,” each describing one ballet. The book’s layout and design are as radical as Brodovitch’s photographs: because each image is bled across a single horizontal page, each section becomes a continuous photographic strip, with double-page spreads made to look like a single panoramic image and the whole section configured like a strip of movie film. The wide horizontal format, somewhat unusual, symbolizes the ballet audience’s view of the stage, giving the book a vibrancy and a fluidity that perfectly

Opposite: Alexey Brodovitch, Choreartium, c. 1935 (detail), from Ballet (1945)

capture the movement of the dance. Indeed, Ballet is a consummate example of the suggestion of motion in photography, and one of the most dynamic and cinematic of all photo books. It is also a forerunner of the “stream of consciousness” feeling of the postwar existential movement in the arts, showing almost-documentary photography meeting Abstract Expressionism. Now, two forthcoming events allow us to reevaluate this important but somewhat neglected figure by today’s photographic generation. First, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia is presenting an exhibition in the spring, curated by Katy Wan of Tate Modern and entitled Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me. The exhibition concentrates on Brodovitch’s legacy and examines his collaborations with many major twentieth-century photographers. It will prove a most welcome addition to our knowledge and understanding of Brodovitch. Second, Little Steidl of Göttingen, Germany, is about to publish a new edition of Ballet. Photo-book enthusiasts will surely welcome the publication since Ballet is one of the rarest of photo books, more often talked about than seen: it was printed in a very small edition, and even here Brodovitch’s penchant for rule-breaking is evident in that he challenged accepted practices in the very making of the book. Careful research by Nina Holland and Joshua Chuang found unexpected anomalies in the printing, the typography, even the page trimming, indeed almost everywhere they looked. Given Brodovitch’s vast experience, Little Steidl concluded that these departures may have been deliberate, and that the book’s flaws only served to make it more perfect. Ballet—the only book its author made of his own work over a revolutionary and prodigious four-decade career—may prove as elusive as was Brodovitch himself.

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